Botanicaust Read online

  “Doctor?”

  “The baby can wait for conversion a few days. We don’t often have a chance to study cannibal family dynamics. If we can better understand them, we might lower the reversion ratio.”

  The tech raised his brows but nodded and herded the man across the tarmac. Mo grabbed her hand and pulled her the other direction. “Can you take off, now? Let the techs handle it tonight?”

  “I have two children I really ought —”

  He halted mid-step and pulled her into his arms, seizing her mouth in a kiss. The euphoric chemicals passed into her in a rush, making her head swim and her body flush with desire. He pulled back and she looked with blurred vision into his tawny eyes. “You really are high, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Want some more?” He kissed her again, running his tongue along her gum line. She swayed in his arms. “You’re a lightweight,” he murmured against her lips.

  “Shut up and take me home.”

  Blattvolk Prison

  Haldanian Protectorate

  Levi paced the bars of his cell, inspected the automatic toilet facility again, and paused to check on the woman from the desert lying on the cot in his cage. They’d brought her in a few moments ago, her head completely shaven, her newborn at her naked breast.

  God was surely punishing him. His people had sealed the Blattvolk out along with the rest of the world in the Days of the Prophet; their green skin the undeniable Mark of the Beast. The salt trader still brought news of them, and they were not supposed to range that far north.

  He ran a hand over his bald head and face. The first thing the Blattvolk had done was strip him and put him into a stinging shower. When he emerged, he was as hairless as a newly picked apple. Even the mustache he’d allowed to grow over the course of his journey was gone, like a reminder from God of his disobedience.

  Mercifully, they’d given him a blanket with which to cover himself. The abominations wore next to nothing, their shameful display of bare skin a distraction in and of itself. The fact that they were green only added to the atrocity.

  Night and day were the same in this basement prison. The large cement-brick room held eight cages, three of which housed prisoners. Two children in the other cages slept, but the ugly fluorescent lighting hadn’t dimmed. The cages were accessible from all four sides, containing prisoners like animals on display.

  A thin, green man emerged from the hall carrying a tray with metallic cylinders. The abomination was unclothed except for a thin loop of fabric around the waist that barely covered the genitals, and a shameful amount of jewelry at the wrists and ankles. Even the man’s short hair glinted with shiny, green glass beads.

  Levi averted his eyes to a spot above the creature’s head to avoid looking at his nudity. “You have to let me go. My child is in danger.”

  The Blattvolk didn’t respond. He set a container into the cage and said a word the woman seemed to understand. Rousing from the bed, she kept a wary eye on the visitor and edged toward the cylinder.

  “Please!” Levi approached the bars and the Blattvolk shook his head and backed a few steps from the cage.

  Extending a hand holding a cylinder, the creature offered it to Levi. He said a word Levi didn’t understand.

  Levi shook his head.

  In the far corner of the cage, the woman lifted the metal container to her nose and sniffed. Before Levi could stop her, she put her lips to the edge and tipped it. “No, wait!” Too late, he saw her throat moving as she swallowed.

  The Blattvolk nodded toward her, and Levi backed to the center of the cage. Was this how they transformed their captives? Surely it couldn’t be that easy? He watched the woman with concern.

  With a sigh, the green man set Levi’s cylinder inside the cage bars. Again, he spoke some words Levi didn’t understand, turned, and placed cylinders into the other cages before disappearing down the hallway. The children in the other cells scrambled forward and drank with gusto.

  The baby started crying and the woman offered a breast. She seemed unconcerned for her nakedness. But then, she was a cannibal. To keep his eyes averted as she cared for the child, Levi picked up his own cup. Inside was a milky substance without much of a smell. His stomach rumbled, but he set the cup down unsampled.

  He didn’t want to sleep, especially caged with a cannibal. But between his travels and all the excitement of being captured, he was exhausted. If she wanted to eat him, she had nothing but her hands and teeth to do it. Sitting on the floor facing the cot, he propped himself against the bars and arranged the blanket to cover as much of his body as possible. If he remained sitting, perhaps he would not sleep. He longed for his paper and pencil. Something to help him focus his mind on anything but his fate.

  The woman approached his rejected cylinder, her focus on him shrewd. He shrugged and gestured for her to take it. She grabbed it and returned to the cot to slurp noisily. At least her belly should be full. His eyes closed, just for a moment.

  He woke to the baby crying. The woman couldn’t quiet the infant, and she frantically paced the cage. She had the child wrapped in the other blanket, leaving herself bare, and Levi couldn’t help but notice how young she was. She was barely more than a child herself. The calluses on her feet made scuffing noises along the cement as she paced.

  “Try singing,” he said. He remembered Sarah’s sweet voice as she sang to Josef in those few days she’d been alive to hold him. His heart ached.

  The mother met his gaze and he was struck by her fierce eyes. He’d never seen a full-blooded cannibal up close. The feral intellect in her stare made him aware of just how different she was from his people.

  Still, she did seem to be trying to be a good mother.

  Rising from the floor, he held out his hands. “Let me try?”

  This caused the woman to clutch the baby tighter and back against the cage, obviously assuming he meant to harm the child.

  Tone deaf himself, Levi hummed a few bars of a common lullaby. The girl showed no recognition. No surprise there. He made a rocking motion with his arms.

  She bounced the squalling baby and glared at him.

  He wondered how often cannibals ate their young.

  Shaking off the awful thought, he sat against the bars and tried not to look at the unclothed woman sharing his cage. The problem was, there wasn’t anything else to look at. His stomach rumbled loudly.

  And then the thought occurred to him; maybe he was in Hell already.

  Tula watched the little family on the monitor, fascinated by the dynamics of the couple. Normally, the baby would have been converted and moved to the infant Gardens — without her mother. But this was a rare opportunity to observe a real, live, nuclear family, untainted by the necessity of the protective Gardens. She’d stayed up most of the night searching the database for old psych evaluations on nuclear ties, hoping to understand their interactions and apply what she learned with future potential converts.

  The woman paced the cell, jostling the baby as the man watched. They seemed to distrust each other, and yet the huge man obviously wanted to care for the child. Was this normal cannibalistic parental interaction? She seldom dealt with adults, and never adults in a relationship.

  Maybe he just wants to eat the baby.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling the man on the monitor didn’t belong in the picture. Normally, she didn’t bother with the items prisoners had on them when they were captured. All items went to the incinerator, since such things only served to remind converts of a life they needed to forget if they were to properly integrate.

  As she watched the cell monitor, she flipped through the pages of the crude notebook, the paper dry and brittle between her fingers. Had the man made these drawings? The woman in the sketches looked nothing like the woman in the cell, and Tula wondered who she might be. Not even the Fosselites used paper any more, as far as she knew. Had he stolen the book from some ancient treasure trove in the wilderness?

  She watched the screen and skimmed the pages un
til it was time for the next feeding, then delivered the protein drinks to the prisoners. The children in the front cells scrambled toward her when she entered, begging for sweets.

  “How are you today, Rhomy? Did you draw something for me?” She held the treat just out of the girl’s reach, waiting for an answer.

  “Good. I’m good.” Rhomy stretched through the bars as far as she could.

  “What did you draw?” Tula pointed to the flat sheet of a child’s gamma pad on the floor of the cage. One of her exercises with potential converts was putting Haldanian words to things they drew.

  “Tula.” The girl retrieved the gamma pad and showed the crude picture of a green face to her. Rhomy had taken to color quickly, once she had learned to activate the palette, but her fine motor skills were lacking.

  “You drew me yesterday. What else can you draw?”

  The girl in the next cage produced her gamma pad as well, and clamored for attention. “I draw. I draw. Food. I draw food.”

  Tula stepped over and accepted the gamma pad. The picture clearly depicted a stylized bone with meat on it. She repressed a shudder. Training the carnivore out of the cannibal was not easy. “Can you draw sunshine?”

  The child traced a circle in the air and indicated spikes coming off it.

  “Great!” Tula handed the girl a sweet.

  Rhomy cried out, “Me!”

  “What else can you draw?”

  The girl again showed the gamma pad. “Me!” It was the same face, and Tula thought a moment.

  “Is this you?” The girl might not have many words yet, but if she was already thinking of herself in terms of a convert, she might be ready for the gift of conversion.

  Rhomy nodded, a fierce grin on her face, and held out her hand. Tula handed her a sweet. She’d have to spend some time with Rhomy, once she’d seen to the family.

  After leaving protein canisters with the children, she continued past the row of empty cages to the cell with the family. The smell of urine emanated from the cage, undoubtedly from the unswaddled baby. She’d have to get a cleanup crew in here. Why had no one thought to offer diapers? So many techs considered the prisoners animals.

  Both adults rose, the woman to the front with her hand out asking for the canister, the man back in the center of the small area. Seeing him up close instead of on a monitor reinforced how big he was, head and shoulders taller than most cannibals, who tended to be small and wiry.

  Tula handed a container to the woman and said in Haldanian, “Food.” The woman ignored her and scuttled to a far corner to set down the baby before drinking greedily. According to the techs, the man had been giving his protein drinks to the woman. Tula looked him in the eye and held up the canister. “You must be hungry.” This time she spoke Cannibal.

  He stood with arms akimbo, blanket draped over one shoulder and under the other arm to hide his body, his pale blue eyes creased into worried lines. She took a small step back at the sight of his eyes. It was like looking in a mirror. Blue eyes were rare among Haldanians, and all but non-existent among the cannibals. Mo loved her unique coloring, and for the first time she thought she understood why. Exotic. She watched the stranger’s chest rise and fall in tensely measured breaths.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. You need to eat.” She held the canister through the bars.

  The man didn’t move.

  She put the protein drink back on the tray and lifted his notebook from the surface. “You like pictures?”

  He started forward and then froze. She set the tray and the notebook on the floor outside the cage and unrolled a child’s gamma pad from the pocket of her lab coat. The device lit up when she tapped the screen. With slow, exaggerated movements, she dragged a finger over the broad surface, leaving a long curved mark. The whole time she moved, she watched the man’s face. His attention flickered between her face and her hands. Again, slowly, she lifted her finger and made circles for eyes and another larger one for a nose.

  “Would you like to try?” She brushed her palm over the screen and the lines cleared, then she lowered the sheet to the floor inside the cell.

  The female cannibal had not been interested in the activity until Tula set the gamma pad inside the cage. Now the woman dashed forward and snatched the item from the floor. Both Tula and the man watched as the woman turned it over in her hands, sniffed it, put a corner in her mouth to bite it. Luckily the nuvoplast was resistant to abuse.

  With a disgusted look at Tula the woman threw the gamma pad to the floor and approached the bars with her eye on the man’s full canister.

  “No, this is his.” Tula picked up the canister and pointed to the man.

  The woman spoke for the first time. “Hungry.”

  New prisoners felt like they were constantly hungry. The manufactured protein drinks were standard Haldanian fare - amino acids, vitamins, and minerals providing complete nutrition to a person who could create carbohydrates out of sunlight. Outsiders required many times the intake of calories, and Tula was endlessly fighting the restrictions the Conversion Department imposed on potential converts. Their theory was if the prisoner became hungry enough, they would convert. Tula maintained that a well-fed prisoner was a happy convert. The sweets she provided the prisoners came out of her own pocket money.

  The Conversion Department’s bottom line was if someone took too long to convert, they were not worth feeding.

  “What is your name?” she asked the woman.

  “Awnia. Give me.”

  “Awnia. My name is Tula.” She watched the woman’s face to see how the introduction registered.

  Focus still on the canister, the woman repeated, “Hungry.”

  On the bed, the baby started to fuss. As if remembering the child was hers, the woman backed up, lifted the infant.

  Tula turned to the man and pointed to her chest. “Tula.”

  His face flushed as his gaze wandered to her chest and then darted to the ceiling.

  “What is your name?” She couldn’t understand his excessive tension. Perhaps because he feared for the woman and child? Sticking the protein canister between the bars, Tula allowed the woman to approach and snatch it from her, but it made no difference in the man’s stance.

  She pointed to the gamma pad on the floor of the cell. “Draw.”

  The man’s blue eyes shifted to look at the gamma pad, and then as if making a decision, he pointed to his notebook.

  She considered giving him the pages. But it was against policy. Pointing to the gamma pad again, she repeated, “Draw.”

  Panting, he bent and picked up the gamma pad. Nimble fingers darted over the screen and then he turned the nuvoplast to show her. On the surface was a three-dimensionally rendered cell with a propped-open door. “Lass mich raus.”

  The language opened something within her. A fissure that ruptured and then sealed almost as quickly. Heart racing, she swallowed, throat tight. She wanted to run away, and she wasn’t sure why. The desperation of his words struck a chord in her she couldn’t ignore. She looked at the picture again. “Let you out?”

  “Aus. Frei.” He pointed to the locked door.

  “Free.” She spoke under her breath. There was no doubt now that he was the creator of the drawings in the paper notebook. I need to get him a better gamma pad.

  “Bitte. Lassen sie mich frei.”

  “You are safe in here. Safe.”

  He approached the bars and rattled off several sentences she couldn’t understand.

  At a loss, Tula looked at the woman, who was wiping the last of the protein residue from the canister with her fingers. “Awnia. What is he saying?”

  Throwing the container to the bed, Awnia put the baby to her breast and leaned back to nurse.

  “Awnia.”

  The woman focused a sleepy glare at her. “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what he’s saying?”

  Awnia shrugged and closed her eyes.

  Tula looked between the man and the woman with child. Meet
ing the prisoner’s blue-eyed visage once more, she said, “You don’t belong here at all, do you?”

  Levi sat on the edge of the bed and looked across the room to where Awnia slumped against the bars of a different cage. Her screaming had eased into dull hiccoughs, but he was sure they would begin again as soon as she recovered her strength.

  After the Blattvolk woman had tried to talk to him, more of the plant people had come and moved Awnia to another cell. And they took away her baby. He could only guess at the atrocities they were performing on the child, and he wondered if there had been something he could’ve done to keep mother and child together.

  Short of violence, he didn’t think so. Whatever happened, he had to accept God’s will. But he would never willingly accept the Mark of the Beast.

  He paced the cage, stomach knotted with hunger, head light with fatigue. How long had he been here? The lights perpetually burned, and the cylinders arrived with what he assumed was a certain regularity — once a day? More? Another untouched canister sat inside his cell. He drank the water from the small fountain in his cell, but after four feedings, he wondered how long he’d gone without food.

  In lean years in the village, everyone went on rations. Sometimes the children who were ill, who required more calories than the village could provide, passed away as emaciated skeletons. He thought of Josef. Would his son live long enough to endure a lean year again?

  Urgency gripped him. If he had any chance at escape, he would need his strength. So far, Awnia and the children down the row did not seem altered by the drink, and Levi wondered if he dared taste it.

  No, the thought was temptation by the devil. There was no escape. No physical escape. Should he keep himself alive just so the Blattvolk could perform their unholy rituals upon him? He must strive to die pure.

  Standing, he turned away from the temptation of the canister before lowering to his knees at the edge of the bed. He knew he should pray. His only hope lay in God’s salvation. But the words would not come to his lips.

  God was punishing him.

  A soft voice behind him brought him out of his reverie. He looked over his shoulder to see the green lady who had tried to talk to him before. Her long, filmy coat did nothing to hide her nakedness underneath, and the jade curve of her breasts seemed to cast a spell on his eyes.