Priests of 2122

Priests of 2122 will be EPISODIC

Episode 1

Rotted

Deacon reached inside of the wet sack at the order of the head priest. The smell was equally repulsive and pleasant, the sensation sickening. Mangoes and peaches only partially rotted in their burlap prison. Deacon dug his fingers deeper into the pliable flesh of the fruits, seeking.

Frank had been assigned to the “pantry” this moon cycle. It was the full moon tonight, the last night of his shift. Several of the priests had been setting up a fire in the first yawn of twilight. When they smelled with suspicion the tell tale notes of molding fruit, they passed an eye roll around the group. Frank was a repeat offender at negligence.

The head priest immediately singled Deacon out, the most rookie member currently in sight. He demanded a thorough investigation of the food wagon. Within minutes of Deacon blindly spilling around the unlit wagon in the burgeoning darkness, Ted (the head priest) joined him. Not to help, but to ‘supervise’ apparently. He stood at the back of the wagon, on the other side of its tied cloth curtain. He gave unhelpful intermittent instruction on Deacon’s search process.

It only took a couple of minutes to identify the primary scent offenders. The burlap sack of fruit was expediently removed from the rest of the food. After additional investigation into the salted meat and finding it to be un-perished, Ted instructed Deacon to “investigate” the fruit sack.

Now that Deacon was elbow deep in a mixture of edible fruit and rotten mash he finally had the thought, where is Frank? The insectoid of resentment crawled up his neck as the hairs stood on end in the face of molded exploration.

“Yeah. They’re rotted.” Deacon said hotly.

“Shame…” Ted trailed off.

“We’ll have to throw them all out.” Deacon lamented. Ted looked at him like leaking garbage.

“We’ll wash the ones that look okay. This isn’t the suburbs anymore, boy.” Ted chastised.

“Right.” Deacon responded simply. And those will be rotten in two days. Deacon started the process of gently removing each fruit and organizing them on a large adjacent stone within the wagon circle they had created.

“Who’s shift was this?” Ted finally asked. There were only 12 ‘priests’ in the troupe, he was perfectly aware of the answer.

“Frank.” Deacon responded, not looking away from his work.

A blood-seizing human howl echoed out of the near woods. It ended in a disturbing gurgle. Another howl, like a desperate threat, rang out. They all looked to the West in the direction of the noise. Deacon’s spine locked up and his face fell. Sounds demonic, he thought. Flashbacks to the years of surviving alone played in his mind.

“Get the flashlights out of the storage wagon.” Ted instructed Deacon, not taking his gaze from the woods. Deacon dropped what he was doing and ran to his task.

The remaining priests who had been establishing the campfire scattered like roaches to acquire their exorcism gear. Within a couple of minutes they were all surrounding Ted who still stood at the back of the food wagon. They waited, decked out in crucifixes, rosaries, and rosemary soaked collars. They each clung to their own journals and writings. The holy word of remaining humans carried the greatest spiritual weight in these days.

Some writing was bound by leather strips, holes made by hand in pages bound together by amateur knots. Others had requisitioned real notebooks. Spirals, binders, planners, but the most important aspect was that they each carried something that reflected their existence, their memory, or their will. The older priests carried fewer tools but their writings were of greater length.

The cultural notion in 2122 was that the longer the ‘book’ the more holy the word. It was equally correlated with the nearness to death for the wielder. Some demons seemed to smell holy words. Especially the older ones. Nobody’s book ever reached biblical length. Not in these days. Once a person had to use two hands to carry it, they were never long for the world.

As Deacon rounded the wagon returning to the central group, the nearest trees to them shook violently. The younger priests gasped at this development.

It’s right there! Deacon thought in horror. His mind replayed his solitary years. He had seen demons but had been holed up in an only partially destroyed book store, so they were never able to approach closely.

Suddenly, from the border of the wooded area a large grey thigh manifested. Glowing red eyes followed, floating out of the forest’s shadow. It was indeed a monster. A mutant. A chimeric demon.

Not enough humans survived this long to research the cause. Some people got infected. Sometimes, after decades of apparent immunity. There were theories spread around the diminishing world, but no consistent communication to develop theory into experimental fact-seeking.

The infection caused a hideous merging of human and animal. The psychosis could set in within hours or as long as weeks. Through no discernible cause outside of proximity or maybe water vapor inhalation, animal cells now infected certain humans. Beginning in the brain, the competing immune systems turned much of the brain’s advanced sub-regions into a bloody mush. Once the brain was fried via infection and overheating the mutation sought out the stem cells present in the body. Teeth, organs, bones, all susceptible. The body started to convince itself, in its manic decay, that it was a nightmarish hybrid of species. Horizontal gene transfer likened to a morning glory vine, spreading across the genome of any unlucky individual.

In the first years, many blamed a recent medication to storm the world. It included horizontal gene transfer as a mechanism to fight off the most recent novel impairment to humans. Nobody remembered those rumors anymore. Now that the world was over, the TV couldn’t help you think.

Ted was already holding his good book open. He dared not look away from this demon though, it looked to be a wolf infection. It appeared capable of running.

“Start reading boys.” Ted ordered, his eyes were blurring from the nerves. They hadn’t been attacked in the middle of the night in a long while. Not since he had taken the lead.

“I told her I loved her! She acted as if I had not spoken at all!” Brother Jeffrey with a heavy weapon to initiate the conflict.

He ran his finger across the written words he read aloud. Writing them somehow stored their energy. This wasn’t an apocalyptic development. The written word has always carried the energy it was carved with. It wasn’t acknowledged in the old world because they were too numb to know where their own toes were.

The demon, only 40 feet away at this point, curled its clawed hands and snarled. Blood immediately began flowing freely from its nose.

“It’s weak to love!” Ted shouted. He closed his book with a sharp finality, he didn’t have any of that.

Ted moved and got behind brother Jeffrey, who had a lot of that.

“Go ahead, brother.” He grabbed Jeffrey’s shoulder in encouragement.

“I- I leaned in, only halfway, seeking a kiss. It would have been my first. She-” Jeffrey gurgled in panic as the visibly shaken demon charged them at a full sprint, claws outreached.

“SHE STRUCK ME WHILE THEY ALL WATCHED!” Jeffrey bleated out.

The demon collapsed at speed, crashing into the closest wagon. Blood leaked from every orifice. The sack of fruits Deacon had been tending was thrown with the impact. The soil greedily clung to the spilled fruits. The oranges rolled across the ground for longer than the creature moved. It fell nearly instantly into stillness. The mechanism by which the disease responded to human emotion was as unknown as the traits for susceptibility to the disease.

It didn’t magically turn back into a human. It softened over the next few hours. It bypassed rigor mortis completely and simply diluted into a fuzzy rot until only an infectious fruiting viscera remained.

When the “Boys” finished catching their breath they all moved to inspect it under flashlight. Flashlights were a rare treat nobody was too keen to put out once they were near to it.

The demon wore one of their habits. Short torn black things only mildly reminiscent of Abrahamic cults of yester-century.

“Frank.” Deacon announced first. They had arrived to the priest troupe together. Two years ago their fair city had flooded and evacuation was necessary. They hadn’t been exposed to other humans in probably a decade, so the shock and paranoia of seeing each other at the city border had been a core memory for both. Now one.

Demonic mutation wasn’t acutely contagious as far as the remnants of humanity had observed, so there was no cause to change camp. They just let it rot there and went back to building the campfire. Deacon looked between them and the fruiting corpse, clinging to his writing.

“I need to write this down.” He thought, a vision of a flaming sword imagined as the emotional potency of this event.

“You need to finish them fruits.” Ted said from over his shoulder. A single pat as companionship.

Deacon gently placed his book next to the burlap sack on the back of the food wagon and went about his duty.