Preface
inb4 "why are there two threads for the same story?"
Well, I decided I wanted to give back something to the group of buffoons giving me a neat title and a thing that costs them real money, so I condensed the posts into one post and edited them. I think the story is just a little bit better now as a result of a few tweaks and fixes. I even have a version written in black ink in a spoiler under the purple master text.
Silence of the Cicadas wrote:Eight years had passed since their tanks and bombs had annihilated the armies of our world. 416 weeks since their ships pockmarked our planet with craters and buried it in piles of rubble and ruined cities. 1825 days since their troops marched against our people, scorching our world, burning our homes, driving us into the ground, forever tormented by their talent for-
-genocide.
My parents talked about the Gathering - or was it Gatherings? - in whispered tones. Columns of my people taken prisoner and marching to the Camps, never to be seen again. Clean white ships with sharp lines could be seen rising from these camps long after the people vanish and into the stars...
Those same stars we had stared at for so long, dreaming of conquest of faraway lands of milk and honey, or endless knowledge. Anything we could have wanted, we presumed, waited in those stars, gleaming forever like the specks of light upon the surface of the water. Once those stars that had watched our civilizations blend into one and our people grow and expand over our world. They were hope at one point; hope for the future. After that Midnight, the Midnight of The Arrival, few looked at those stars. Those who did only did so in tears, weeping over a dead dream of a future in those stars. Their tears, the collective waters of our collective souls, stopped flowing when metal darts fired from an Offworlder gun broke the dam of flesh and replaced those tears with the fine red wine of the body and heart that some evil god doubtless drank somewhere in the cosmos.
I know not why they came then, 70080 hours ago, to our peaceful ball of rock. We were never worthy of their strange words and thus reasoning(s). We were only worthy of their malice, beatings, cruel and painful "experiments." Monsters hidden in grey armor and black visors from the skies to punish us for our deeds. Always was there room for more brutal suffering for them to lay upon out tired and broken bodies. Some of the older folk believed to be the demons that ancient prophecies spoke of. Maybe - just maybe, we should have written them down somewhere. Should we have listened? What had we done to provoke this suffering?
I was probably eight when They came. I remember it though it were yester year...
The sound of hundreds, maybe thousands, of cicadas filled the night air, like every other night before it, just as they had for ever and ever, no matter what fortunes befell the land or the people. The cicadas would never fill the night with their soothing sound again.
That sea of insectoid life in the trees and the shrubs and the bushes and the grasses filling the night sky with their calls...
...fell silent when louder, equally hidden cicadas made of metal and of awesome size filled the air with the sound of their own rattling, rumbling devices. They must have had some sort of arcane knowledge, for those insects that had previously made every night before so orthodox, took to flight immediately and noiselessly save for the fluttering of untold scores of wings at the very sound of the new wings. Few made it from the earth before the newcomers began spitting balls of fire, lines of light, and explosions into the forests, the grasslands, our homes and our streets; even the quay that harbored our fishing boats.
The earth cracked and cratered, and the intense firestorm cracked and buckled the roads, and cast the buildings and their inhabitants into the chasms. Dragons. The metal cicadas became Dragons. From their bellies they birthed eggs, and from those eggs the yellow skinned Star Men came, shouting in their odd tongue and dressed in grey armor. They spread throughout the town, spitting gunfire into all living creatures. They did not force themselves upon our riches nor our women, preferring instead to ignore our trinkets and shoot the women who came to submit to them. Great white machines were lowered to the earth from the great bodies these Space Men came from, and they razed the town. The Spacegoers then brought great chests, and indescribably beautiful people to the surface. I don't remember more than that. We ran into the woods.
"Là! Ces sauvages sont en cours d'exécution!" they shouted. The dirt would be littered with bullets that missed their targets, the skeletons of the people some of those bullets hit, and deserted shell casings. In future years, trails used by my people to run from the Space men would be called the "Lead Trails."
Even miles away from the city, there was no soothing rattle from the Cicadas, nor any presence of them. What corpses of them there remained were devoured by the flames.
The days following were bathed in a sea of our blood. Some of the invaders fell at our hand. Some. It was not enough. Not even close.
The weeks that followed were roasted by fire. They razed our dwellings from the sky, the Beyond, and upon the ground. Hope escaped the box and was replaced by the corpses of millions.
The months that followed were soaked in the tears unlucky enough to not die. The Lead Trails would be discovered, routed, and made anew. From all corners of our world, we were mustered like cattle and forced to march. No one ever saw the Marchers again. They were to suffer cruelly for our maleful occupiers as we all learned in time.
The years following were crafted by cracked, dry hands, covered in dust and dirt. Working hands. Unwilling. When the outworlders dressed in gray failed to gather up the rest of my people, new outsiders arrived. Bounty hunters. Money talked, and it brokered by the amount of living heads gathered and brought before the Gray ones. My life of "freedom" came to an end at around this time.
We were hiding in the ruins of a great city. I don't remember the name, for the Gray Ones made a point of erasing anything that was before their arrival. We sought refuge in some kind of ruined tenement, and we were ambushed. Our caravan leader was obliterated by a landmine. The rest of the caravan spooked, then scattered. Bullets forced us back into each other's loving arms. I endured long hours, days, and weeks marching to what used to be a golf field on the shore of the lake by my home town. It had changed.
There was no more wide open green pastures. The entire lake shore had become a single, enormous plantation. The ruins of my former home had vanished, replaced by a gleaming white diamond overlooking the plantation. I felt nothing. We were dropped off at the entrance facility while our captors went to claim their prize. The change was quick. Too quick.
The Gray space men ordered us into lines and columns. "Stand dans une ligne! Pas de bavardage!" I didn't understand the tongues. I understood the beatings and the shootings. I stood in a line, obeying like mindless cattle. The joy of life was burned from me.
"Toi! Hé toi!" I looked up. A unnaturally beautiful woman wearing a buttoned white uniform walked up to our formation. She was wearing her long, blonde hair in a ponytail down her back. Her burning, marble-like emerald eyes scanned through my element, eagerly looking for something. She pointed in my vicinity. "Oui toi! Hors de la formation, maintenant! Je ne ai pas de patience pour la pêche racaille comme vous, la saleté!" It wasn't for me, but for a boy child standing next to me. Couldn't have been older than 14. He did not speak. He shuffled out of formation after a guard waved him over, and stood in front of the woman. She coolly looked him over, then smirked. The smirk blossomed into a full smile. She told the guard that had summoned the boy with his arcane gesture to lead him back to her facility.
"Prenez ce dégénéré à mon laboratoire. Je cherche un remplaçant pour mes expériences pharmaceutiques." She held the clipboard close, smiling. She clipped her lavish, gold and platinum pen to the board. Behind her, orderlies dressed in similar uniforms dumped a deformed, glowing corpse into a ditch. They stood over it and their covered faces. One of them blankly stared at his geiger counter. The commander of our formation barked orders to continue moving.
Our brisk pace ended at processing. There, we were split by gender, age, etc. Though I never saw them again, I suspect the Grey Ones had something for them, too. For whatever reason, our captors despised the sight of our bare skin. Mercs forced us to strip out of our rags, and then handed us full body gray uniforms. They were completely blank, except for the "SITE 19" scrawled across our backs. The torrent of fresh slaves billowed from the processing compound and into the fields. The view now was much clearer: the entire shore of the lake alive with moving, laboring, suffering grey bodies. I could not make them out from under the millions of cotton plants, grape vines, orchards, and various grains. I knew at once this is what was left of my people. There were sobs in the crowd around me. Only a single tear escaped me.
Days, weeks, months passed. They are all the same: painful, hot, dry days carefully plucking cotton and fruits and harvesting various crops. Little if any food was issued. It was typically the very fruits and grains we harvested.
The constant and repeated actions of the day hardened my hands. The constant battle for food, space, and clothes hardened my body.The constant hunger, death, suffering, and primal greed hardened my eyes. They were blue once, like a deep pond. Dark. But they had a spark or light in them. It was Willpower, according to my dead father. That light faded. They had become blue gems, imbedded in my skull. I wondered how long into my oppressors tore them out to embed in a necklace. They had taken others very like me to places unknown. My guess was the various scientific facilities scattered around Site 19.
My first year transformed me from an emotionless wanderer and into a monster. I watched entire armies die, and seized their assets. It seemed that my antics pleased my masters. Bottles of the wine that the grapes my fingers extracted from their protective guardians made exchanged hands often in my presence. I desired a taste of that wine; the literal fruit of my labor. I wonder it was naturally that red.
* * *
The summers around that lake were brutal. The monotonous tasks of the years spent at Site 19 erased from my mind all memories. I lived only for the present. I was an animal.
The only shade to be had was in the orchards. I would sit there when I had some time to myself and watch the yachts flying black banners with a single white stripe down the middle float around the lake. I would bite into the succulent flesh of the green apples given to us for consumption while I watched that flag fluttered. Those moments were both rare and fleeting.
"Toi! Lève-toi ou je te tue!"
I was with my unit of "workers" picking grapes. I heard the shouting. I tried to find it's origin; a guard had a gun sighted on an adolescent girl not far from me who had collapsed and was struggling to get to her feet again. Her efforts, hindered by exhaustion and dehydration, resulted in her falling over again.
"Dernier avertissement!" The guard shouted. The blue axehead fixed to the front of his weapon flickered. The girl tried to use the fence post to pull herself to her feet. Her weight broke it. The gun fired. He missed. I tasted iron. The gun barked again, striking the girl in the neck. She choked. The ground her grew moist. I turned to resume work and fell over. Three holes decorated the right side of my abdomen, each surrounded by a large dark ring. The taste of iron intensified. I looked over at the dead girl. Her eyes had already rolled back into her head. Few other eyes would match mine. Those that did saw those dull blue gems fade to black. But even those who did look could not hear what I heard. Heartbeats. Heartbeats that sped up, transforming into wings. Many wings, wings attached to thousands of cicadas. As the lifeblood left me, the cicadas fell silent. The guard manipulated his radio.
* * *
The sliding glass doors into the massive white blemish on nature's beauty also known as a "supermarket" opened and closed continuously for the seemingly endless hordes of USA shoppers. Towards the back of the building, near the frozen aisle, stacked in a large white block were several hundred neat white boxes stamped by the Universal Wines Inspection Agency - the luxurious wines and spirits of the Trattorian Wine Distribution Company. In gold text near the packaging information on each box was written "brewed by the finest of Trattoria's workforce on Neu-186b!"
"Fuck." A man in black standing next to his other half uttered. His hand came up to his ear. "Yeah, Agent Gaspard here. We've got an intelligence breach."
Painted in large, blood red letters was wrought "DISTILLED FROM BLOOD AND TEARS"
El Fin
Spoiler
Show
Ha! You get to read the purple text like everyone else you crybaby.
