“She would have been better if we could have had a funeral,” Roy said, and I could tell by the tightness of his tone he was upset, and of course he was upset. “But they made us cremate her right away. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I never got to see her eyes.” He finished with a tremble before he sucked in a breath, coughed a little. He stood and I took a step back to give him room. He licked his lips and looked to Lisanette, “What can I get you, mam’?”
“Absolutely nothing.” she said with a kind look, inclining her head, “I just need you to get some rest. You need to stay strong and healthy for Mabel and your babies. It’s going to be a tough couple of months, and they need your strength, Roy.”
Roy gave a curt nod before he sat back down on the edge of Mabel’s bed, gently stroking her cheek with the back of his knuckles. I quietly watched as he searched Mabel’s face, standing after a minute to gingerly take the flowers so Lisanette could come to fix the blankets for her. “She’ll be out for...for another ten hours or so, when they push that button.” He said, glancing at the button on the wall. “It goes to the – the needle in her leg,” He blinked away tears before he straightened, looking down at the flowers.
“If you give those to me, I’ll make sure another person here that doesn’t have such a nice husband has those, Roy,” Lisanette said, “And when you come back tomorrow and sit with your bride, I’ll go with your mother to find some other flowers for her.”
“She loves sunflowers, though...”Roy said quietly as he handed them to her with a frown.
“She’s not in her right mind right now, dear,” Lisanette said gently as she took the bouquet, “By the time sunflowers come into bloom next year, she’ll be wanting some, but perhaps not right now.”
Roy nodded and blinked hard before he stared at Mabel’s unconscious form for another minute. He nodded again, cleared his throat, and then looked to me.
We left the clinic shortly after that and roamed the streets for a while, window shopping and making idle chit chat about what gowns Mom might make for Roy’s daughters come time for the harvest festival, one of the four largest holidays in the colony, the other’s being Easter on the Summer Solstice, Christmas on the Winter Solstice, and Valentine’s Day in spring.
We actually decided to go by the children’s dress store to poke around and start pricing fabrics, and it was near there that I caught a figure dressed in all black moving swiftly in the corner of my gaze. I stiffened at the sight, grabbing my brother’s hand to pull him into the closest shop – a hat shop, where I pulled him further into the store to go back toward the counter. The clerk was chatting with a pair of older women who fell silent as we approached, giving us polite smiles, but once I dragged my finger down my throat their smile vanished.
We waited, watching out the store window.
Twenty seconds later a Novus walked by very fast, glancing into the store before he silently moved on, gone as quickly as he appeared. They were always male, always tall, and broad. I was told there were female Novus as well, but they weren’t allowed to hold the position as a peacekeeper in the colony.
I didn’t know what they looked like under the masks, and the only people in the colony that had died right after gazing upon it, but there was talk. The settlers of our colony refused to speak openly about it, but they said they were monsters, with sharp teeth like wolves and eyes like a cat, claws on their fingers, and strength and speed unrivaled by anything on the planet.
What I knew to be true of that was that they did in fact have claws, which they’d sometimes use to scratch against the brick or cement walls of the buildings, and they did have terrifying amounts of strength and they did have sharp teeth, which I had witnessed once with my own eyes.
My family had gone to a wedding over in Willow Wood when I was five years old, and at that time, there had been a population boom of boar, which were only introduced into the colony to give the Novus something to hunt and keep them from being to aggressive with the locals. They kept them out in the woods and away from the locals, but occasionally one might find a way to the farms before returning to the woods. That hadn't been a problem until a few smart pigs realized they could get drunk off fermented fruit, which I had been told only happened a day or two before the wedding.
The wedding was not going smoothly and one of the things that had gone wrong was the cake, which had been dropped and quickly jumped on by the family dogs. My father had been tasked to go to town and hunt down a particular ingredient for the icing – an extract I couldn’t recall the type of, but I remember it made the icing taste smooth and rich.
He brought Roy and myself along with him and while in town, one of the boars had gotten properly drunk on fermented apples and came racing into town so fast I swear it was flying - it was the size of a small cow and moved like a furious bull. It crashed into the store we were in and went straight to the back where we were, thrashing into the shelves between us. My Dad had thrown my brother over to where the store owner was and had tried to get around the boar to get to me, but the boar had whipped around and gone after him with beastly tusks that it used to easily break through the wooden shelves.
By the grace of God, when the boar tried to impale my dad in his thigh, he instead got it caught in his belt. It thrashed him around and tried to scrape him off while he clung to the top of its head -
I screamed, and I was told that was what alerted the Novus.
A moment later one came around the corner of the aisle and grabbed the boar by its back legs, dragging it back before he easily ripped my Dad’s belt free and shoved him toward me.
My Dad was quick to cover my eyes as he had been with Little Lawrence, but he hadn’t been quick enough then.
I watched as the Novus peeled his mask up from the bottom of his throat to reveal a muscular human-looking neck, a square jaw covered in scruff, and set of lips that when parted, revealed a terrifying set of teeth that it used to bite into the shoulder of the boar. He easily got on top of it and viciously tore into its back, ripping out a chunk of its back before it went back down to pull a shoulder blade out with a sharp snap. The screams of the boar as it thrashed under him are something I still hear sometimes, just as I see the image of the Novus sitting on the floor next to it, easily snapping the bone between its teeth to chew at it as one might chew at a stock of celery.
I didn’t see anything after that, as Dad grabbed me and covered me with his own body, but I heard the snapping, the wet sounds of the Novus noisy eating, and the dying cries of the boar.
Roy had seen it all, though.
All of it as the Novus sat there and ate a quarter of the boar right there in the middle of the store.
He did not talk about it with me, but he had a special amount of terror for the Novus and boar because of that incident.
We waited, and after a few minutes, I placed a hand on Roy’s chest, signaling for him to stay, then inching over to the door to look down the sidewalk, my gaze down as I looked for the boots, the black pants tucked into them, the distinct belts that signaled what tribe or family or group they were from. The group changed frequently. Sometimes they lasted a few months, other times as long as a year. They all had distinct behaviors, with some being far more aggressive than others, and though the group had only been here for little more than a week, it was safe to assume they were more aggressive, given what happened to Greenbelt.
But I didn’t see black, knee-high boots, or pants tucked into them, or the distinct red, blue and yellow belt the current Novus group wore.
I looked again before I glanced back to the desk at the back of the shop, nodded, and then waited until Roy joined me at the door.
We returned home then and helped with the bedtime routine, and when everyone was in bed, I sat with Roy and my father on the porch and drank a glass of wine, and after Mom was able to get the girls to sleep, she joined us as well.
Things would be back on track, now. Better, because everything was out in the open. We’d deal with it as a family, and everything would be okay.
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