740. About monsters, 1
(Temee)
The other secret about me, it appeared plainly to us many years later, when I was already tall.
Though even before that, it didn’t take a genius to understand all the anomalies around us where linked together.
And thus in extension, that if I was alive, it meant I was adapted. And by that I mean, contaminated by a culture broth, like my sister.
A small part of the poison coming from the southern valley surely flows in my veins.
Diluted enough so I can survive it, but real enough to explain this other secret later.
It happened at the same time as another odd event, the same year.
One day, something fell from the sky in flames. A kind of shooting star in plain day, crashed into the mountain.
With my father and his flamethrower, we went to look. Other objects had fallen in the wider area of the old country.
The first human cadaver I witnessed in my life, it was a few years before my departure and the surrounding tragedy.
That day, what we found was a charred and shred corpse of a human, with two hard outgrowths on its lower back hard to explain.
The smell made me vomit beside, while my father examined carefully the thing.
He extracted carefully something from the flesh and broken skull.
Two iron bullets.
Me, I was feeling too awful to understand, discovering death for the first time.
My father, him, he gazed at the empty sky with worry.
What he understood was that our country, while well isolated from the rest of the world with its boundaries darkening, it was not the last.
There were other humans remaining, elsewhere, very far from here. And some dire things were happening by them too, that he couldn’t even imagine.
He burnt the cadaver without hesitating. As the flesh rot fast, the monsters were going to feast on it just as fast. Everything must burn before a miasma rises from it, or that a monster feeds from it.
My mother, he had buried her.
A few days later as he went back to her grave, all he found was a wide hole and leftovers of shredded flesh. A scavenger had come by and fed there. What was left was rotting.
He had to do a fire to allow her to resume going in peace, unbeknownst to him this ritual would require to generalise itself.
Human corpses could even rise again.
Not like in the stories of old of vampires or zombies. But really as vehicles for culture broth uncontrolled, bursting poisons, or as starving monsters.
In any case, all that was biological and not meant to be eaten, it was a better call to burn it while it was dead.
The few angels fallen from the sky, or their pieces, they were burnt or studied through the country. We supposed it came from a plane or spacecraft accident, but truly nobody knew what happened.
It was just like finding one day the corpse of a monster against a hillside. We could understand a little what it was and what to do, but figuring out how that thing came to be and why it died there, we just couldn’t...
We had nothing to find out.
Nothing but the worry of what they announced for later...
Because monsters with essentially human body, apparently it existed.
We had maybe burnt one, that someone else had shot aboard a plane.
The following day, I had returned to inspect the ashes the wind was blowing.
The skeleton looked like the ones in the books, but darkened by soot. The bones broke down below the tip of my sword. Ashes flew away. A few scavenging animals in the undergrowth were looking at me, ready to come check whatever edible thing I might leave behind when I go away. There won’t be anything.
Something among the bones caught my attention. I unearthed it from the torso, thinking I had found another bullet.
I overcame my nausea and plucked out a small crystal the fire had unearthed from the ground there. It was something between calcite and stibnite.
My father didn’t know any better than I what it was, and it was left on a shelf afterward for its pretty colour.
~
As for the typical diseases, the contamination routes direst were through injection and ingestion, including through scratches and wounds.
And the monster we found collapsed against hillside I spoke of before, I truly found one day.
A beast with shapes and colours evoking already death and rot, but also nightmare and deformity. Its sight made a speechless unease rise inside of me.
I called my father that day. I scream for help only in the worst of dangers. He heard me and came running with the flamethrower.
Even he was scared. The beast was the incredibly huge size of an elephant. It was not a monster the size of a dog or a human, not even a horse.
That thing with deformed face was much bigger than the usual monster people might face.
It was impossible to understand what cadavers or corpses that thing had formed itself upon, nor how nor why it came to die there unnoticed.
My father just began burning the mountain of tissues and fluids releasing their stench.
Something began inflating under the heat of the blaze, and burst.
He wasn’t touched. Me, I was inhaling at that moment, and I felt a droplet burning my throat.
I coughed, I spat. But I also swallowed by reflex.
I was in tears, scared for my life, begging for him to reassure me; but he only looked at me with terror over his face.
I had just been contaminated by a culture broth of the worst poisons of our time. The broth from the poisonous valley, that can turn any flesh into monster.
Death is assured at least as much as if we’re a pregnant woman...
My father eventually helped me stand up and go away. He hesitated between me and the bonefire. I was crying, convinced I was soon going to die that day.
~
My father finished the work of burning the monster without me.
And I, my sorrow passed with my cough.
And obviously, I did not die.
I didn’t even get sick.
I - Temee... You’re immune...
Very cautiously, we confirmed this later on.
The scents from the valley don’t do anything special on me.
As far as we know, I’m the only one able to survive the poisons of our time. And particularly the worst broths.
With all this implied, of marvellous and ominous, we had that knowledge from there on.
I could survive if the worst came to happen...
~
