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  BARREN: Blood Moon

  By J. Thorn

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  BARREN: Blood Moon

  First Edition

  Copyright © 2017 by J. Thorn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, places, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by:

  Eve Paludan

  For more information:

  http://www.jthorn.net

  [email protected]

  Acknowledgments

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  BLOOD MOON

  THE BLOOD MOON hung over the ruins, thin clouds forming a widow’s veil that brushed against the horizon. Hado looked out over the lake from the concrete platform of a parking garage, one of the few structures still safe enough to climb. She had set her spear against the bumper of a truck, the safety glass of the windshield at her feet sparkling with the light of fading stars.

  “What are you looking at?” Sunji asked.

  “I’m looking for something, not at something. There is nothing out there but toxic water.”

  Sunji waited, hoping to get an answer, regardless of the question.

  The warriors had left their masks on the ledge, dangling stories above the street where the wind echoed through the artificial canyons. Fires flickered in several places where the Venganza clan members had set up camp for the night. Hado preferred the security of height versus cover. She liked to be able to gaze upon the ruins and mix her vague memories with new imaginings.

  “Something different. That is what I seek,” said Hado.

  “People?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure.”

  Sunji huffed and walked over, standing next to her friend. She slid her hand inside of Hado’s.

  “Well, you won’t see them on the water, and Kolton would like nothing more than to exterminate Los Muertos. They’re not exactly worth looking for.”

  Hado smiled at her friend. “No, they are not. Venganza isn’t safe with the roaming gangs.”

  “Shall we spar?” Sunji asked. She ripped her hand from Hado’s, spun around and brought her fists up to a ready position.

  “It’s dark. And late,” said Hado.

  “You’re scared. I get it.” Sunji giggled.

  Hado brought her left leg around and slapped Sunji’s shin with her heel. Sunji stumbled back and winked at Hado.

  The two warriors slowly circulated clockwise, maintaining a three-foot buffer between them. Sunji ripped a decorative ribbon from her hair and dropped it on top of a massive steel box sitting on the roof. Hado removed a beaded bracelet and tucked a charm beneath her vest.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, my dear.”

  “You’re so thoughtful,” said Sunji, grinning. “Please be gentle.”

  She swung at Hado’s face, but the woman ducked and came with a blow to Sunji’s stomach, knocking her backward. Hado ran forward and wrapped her arms around Sunji. She smelled the pine needles in the woman’s dreadlocked hair and felt the woman’s breasts push against her own. They looked into each other’s eyes for a split second before Sunji raised her arms up and inside of Hado’s, slamming her elbows down and breaking her sparring partner’s hold.

  “You should know by now. I’m not that easy, darling.”

  Hado took a step back and looked at Sunji. “I would hope not.”

  Sunji leaped at Hado, faking a strike to the head and then using her right leg to sweep the warrior’s legs out from underneath her. Hado fell onto her back, and Sunji jumped on top of her.

  Hado could feel Sunji’s breath on her cheek, the woman’s lips brushing against hers. “I need to tell you something.”

  “When we’re done sparring.”

  “No,” Hado said, turning her hips to the left and tossing Sunji into the access door in the middle of the roof. “I’m serious.”

  Sunji stood and brushed the old, brittle tar from her vest. She held up her hands and then let her palms come down and slap the side of her thighs.

  “You sure know how to get a girl excited.”

  Hado stood and walked to the ledge. She sat next to their masks, her feet dangling over the edge and a hundred feet above the remnants of Cleveland, Ohio. Hado tapped the smooth, brick surface, inviting Sunji to sit next to her.

  Sunji lumbered over and sat beside Hado with an exaggerated sigh.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” said Hado.

  “You can’t see them.”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.”

  “What?” Sunji asked.

  “The Water Whisperer—”

  “Is dead,” said Sunji, interrupting. “We have his daughter. She is young, but she has the same gift as her father. Kolton has assured us of that.”

  “And if Kolton is wrong? Then what? The water becomes more polluted and foul with each passing day.”

  “The Council knows about it. They sanctioned Kolton’s decision. Nobody in the clan is going to challenge…oh, honey. Don’t tell me—“

  “Do you know how I got to Erehwon?” Hado asked, interrupting Sunji. “Do you know how Kolton took me in?”

  “She has killed the last three challengers, Hado. She is strong. Too strong.”

  “Kolton killed my aunt. My pregnant aunt.”

  “Before she knew the sex of the baby?”

  Hado nodded.

  “I’m sure she had good reason. The Council—”

  “The Council governs many clans. They can’t be bothered with the issues of individual ones.”

  “But Kolton has raised you. Trained you into the warrior you’ve become.”

  “And I appreciate that,” Hado said. “But every leader will eventually be challenged by a prodigy. That is the way of the Venganza.”

  Sunji looked out over the desolate city. Most of the tallest buildings remained, although no one with an ounce of sanity would attempt to enter them. Lunatics lived among the concrete towers that nature reclaimed with poison ivy and feral creatures. She sighed and turned back to Hado.

  “You could die.”

  “I could step on a rusty nail atop this very roof and die from infection tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am part of this clan,” said Hado, ignoring her question. “I respect the civilization that Kolton and The Council have rebuilt since the world went to shit. But she is making decisions now that could end it all.”

  “Jiker. Animee. Sato. Why can’t one of them challenge Kolton?”

  Hado laughed and shook her head. She grabbed a flask from her hip and took a swig of the concoction the old women of the clan brewed in rust-stained bathtubs. The alcoholic liquid burned her throat. She closed her eyes and let the flame spread through her chest—too much of the potion would put her to sleep, but a sip would help clear the mind.

  She looked into Sunji’s dark, almond-shaped eyes. The moonlight glistened off the sweat on the woman’s smooth, ebony skin. Hado looked at the scar running from Sunji’s left eye to her chin and thought that someday, she’d get the story of that from her. But not here. Not tonight.

  “You know it must be me who challenges Kolton, Sunji.”

  Sunj
i leaned over and placed her head on Hado’s shoulder. “I know better than trying to convince your stubborn ass otherwise.”

  For a moment, Hado thought of her real mother, the woman who occupied the deepest and clouded corners of her mind. She wondered if that woman had been as determined, as driven.

  “If I don’t challenge Kolton, we will be led down a path from which we cannot return.”

  Hado felt Sunji’s head nod on her shoulder.

  “When?” Sunji asked.

  “The Blood Moon is up. We have a Ceremony two nights from tonight. I would not want to interrupt those gaining their False Faces.”

  Hado reached over and picked up her mask, remembering the way Kolton had placed it over her face during her own False Face Ceremony. She didn’t feel right about robbing another warrior of her rite of passage.

  Sunji waited, her hand sliding back into Hado’s as they sat gazing upon the lake. The Blood Moon had risen higher, casting a red hue upon the calm water.

  “Three nights from tonight, I will challenge Kolton for the Red Mask.”

  “And then what?” Sunji asked.

  “Then The Council will either recognize me as the new leader of Venganza, or they will throw my corpse in the lake.”

  ***

  Hado followed Kolton through the village and to the building that had once been a community elementary school. She sometimes had light and wistful memories of school, but they always faded away with the tobacco ash floating from the warriors’ pipes. Hado had been young when everything collapsed. She remembered playgrounds, and ice cream, and walks along the beach at Edgewater State Park. But with each passing year, her old life felt more like a dream. She had been too young to bear the scars of the old civilization, and for that she was thankful. Hado had buried some Venganza warriors over the years. She had dug the graves of women who had taken their own lives in a final act of defiance against what the world had become—those who couldn’t reconcile their own light and wistful memories.

  Sunji walked behind Hado. Several of Kolton’s most loyal women brought up the rear of the parade. They all wore their masks, Kolton donning the Red Mask of the clan chief. Despite how Hado felt about the woman now, there was no denying all that she had done for Venganza.

  “That woman over there,” said Kolton to Hado from beneath the Red Mask. “She is ill.”

  The respectful parade followed Kolton, blowing smoke into the homes of those with illness in order to banish the demons of disease and evil spirits. The Venganza shaman collected tobacco ash from the warriors’ pipes and blew it over the sick and dying.

  The parade wound between the last two huts before entering the communal house through the double doors. Kolton took her seat on the floor, at the head of one side of the oval while the other Venganza warriors sat around her, leaving space in the middle for the dancers. Hado watched as several girls pranced into the oval and spun with coordinated grace and colorful ribbons. She recognized two of the girls from their moves, despite not being able to see their faces. Sunji stared at Hado from across the oval, the large black eyes painted on Sunji’s mask appearing like hunks of obsidian embedded in the side of a volcano.

  Even as the girls danced, the elderly women carried an iron pot of corn mush around the outside of the oval, doling out ladles to those who had come to the False Face Ceremony on the heels of the Blood Moon, which also happened to be two days before the first day of spring.

  Kolton stood, and the girls finished dancing. The old crones took their iron pots of corn mush and faded back into the darkness. The warriors on each side of Kolton lit wall torches as the sun’s last rays retreated to the western horizon.

  “We gather to give thanks to Venganza. We remind ourselves of our sacred duty and the importance of the warrior mask.”

  The women slammed their fists on the hardwood floor, thumping with their leader and in agreement.

  “The sick need treatment, which we offer today with our smoke.”

  Hado noticed that only the warriors had remained. Whatever sick women had been in the building for the offering of ceremonial smoke, had now left.

  “And as the season of birth is upon us, it is again time to raid the ruins and ensure the survival of the Venganza clan and our way of life.”

  More floor thumping.

  “I conclude this ceremony with a hunt. Those who have earned their mask must stay. The rest should go and tend to the fires and the children.”

  Sunji stayed, but the women behind her in the line stood and left. Hado crossed the space where the girls had danced as the oval broke apart. Warriors slid up their masks as they spoke to each other, no longer bound by the customs of the False Face Ceremony.

  “A hunt?” Sunji asked, appearing next to Hado. “Why tonight? I was looking forward to a few drinks.”

  Hado didn’t answer. She didn’t know either. Kolton had always kept her best warriors on edge, training them to be ready for anything. Calling for a hunt instead of a social gathering after the False Face Ceremony seemed like yet another test.

  “Who?” someone yelled out. “Which village?”

  “Los Muertos. Of course,” said Kolton. “And I want their settlement burned to the ground.”

  ***

  She didn’t much care for the act, but Hado knew it was necessary. She understood Kolton’s rationale and The Council’s edict—unsanctioned births could bring it all down again. And now that the future of the species sat on the razor’s edge of existence, even a few renegades could send ripples far beyond the reach of Kolton.

  The villagers had to understand how things would be. They had been warned—no, forbidden—to have babies, and yet, they continued doing so.

  Venganza wasn’t heartless. They had strict laws on procreation for the renegades living in the ruins, and if those animals chose to disobey them, then they would deal with the consequences.

  Kolton had stressed the need for male babies. It wasn’t as if they had waged a gender war without logic. Erehwon needed males to procreate, but they also needed them to function as a society, a tribe. The males would be raised according to the mores of Venganza, not of the Old World that had brought this apocalypse on through aggression and bravado. Kolton would not let the tribe make that mistake again, and neither would Hado.

  “It is over the next rise.”

  Hado looked at Kolton’s red mask, not remembering when the leader had fallen in stride next to her. The raiding party had walked down the middle of the old highway with their torches held high, not feeling a need to disguise the deed they were about to do. The survivors knew what was coming, and if they hadn’t been insubordinate, they wouldn’t be facing the consequences of those actions now.

  “They all look the same to me.”

  “The ruins or the survivors?” Kolton asked.

  “Both.”

  The clan leader chuckled and pushed up her mask onto the top of her head. “This should not be easy. Ever. What we’re doing must be done if our children are to rebuild this rotten world. But it should cause you pain, right here.”

  Kolton tapped her fingers on Hado’s breastplate, the spot right above her heart.

  “How many raids have you ordered?” Hado asked.

  “As many as have been needed.”

  As a little girl, Hado enjoyed making masks for the tribe. The work had felt artistic and detached, not the same raw brutality that she had experienced on her first raid. Killing infants was not natural, and as Kolton had said, should not be easy.

  “Erehwon will crumble if we do not manage the animals scavenging in the ruins. If someone does not manage population control, we all die,” said Kolton.

  “And what of the water?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Water Whisperer…”

  Kolton waved a hand at Hado, keeping the other upright with a torch in her fist. “He was a sham. A fake. He was no more a Whisperer than you are.”

  “But he found clean water sources.”

  “A
nd I can thrust my hand into the soil and pull up an earthworm. Does it mean I’m a Worm Whisperer?”

  Hado chuckled even though she didn’t want to. “And his daughter?”

  “Ah. Now she is different. I believe the girl’s father used some scientific relic or observed a pattern that resulted in a fairly decent success rate. But the girl, she has a natural sense of the water. She feels it.”

  The moonlight bathed the industrial wreckage of burnt-out cars and downed electrical wire, long since plundered by Venganza and survivors alike. A wolf howled in the distance, but the rest of the land sat bathed in silence. Even the ripples of the lake kissed the shore silently.

  Hado watched as the warriors at the head of the raiding party angled to the left and walked down the off-ramp toward a cluster of two-story buildings lining what was left of the main avenue running through a dead neighborhood. The survivors had no doubt seen Venganza torches by now and had subsequently extinguished all of their campfires. It would not save them.

  “We are almost here.”

  “Wait,” Hado said. “There is something I need to say to you.”

  “Quiet, girl. Do you think I don’t know what is on your mind?”

  Hado stood as several warriors passed by with their torches crackling in the cool, late-winter air. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? Maybe blind?”

  “No.”

  Kolton grinned and tilted her head to the side, the red mask still perched atop her head. “And yet, you think I don’t know what you’re going to say to me.”

  She stood, her shoulders back and her head down. Hado wasn’t quite sure what she was going to say now, even though her heart had already made the decision.

  “Speak up, Hado.”

  “I was wondering how The Council will choose the head of the Venganza clan in Toledo.”

  “Right,” Kolton said, a wide grin on her face. “You want to know how a warrior comes to lead a clan. That happens only one of two ways—The Council appoints a leader, or a warrior challenges the current leader and defeats her. Is that what you wanted to ask me?”

  Hado shivered. She looked off into the distance towards the lake, and then back to Kolton. The woman had slid her red mask down over her face.