Religious Revolution

Five-hundred-and—

The door opened.

Rain curled, trying to melt into her coat, trying to become one of the dusty rags that had been discarded in the closet for the last five years. Leone plucked her out, grabbing the shoulders of her coat and pulling her up and away from the forlorn remnants of cleaning supplies that had been stacked beside her, side-stepping to the left to avoid walking in the starbursts of glass on the floor. Rain jerked back, resisting his stronger pull, until he became more than a silhouette, as he’d appeared from her dark corner.

“You—” she exclaimed, grasping his hand and pumping it firmly once she’d recognized him.

“Leone,” he confirmed.

“You’re alright?”

He pulled his hand away and made for the door, pushing away the jagged edges tentatively with his fingertips. He motioned her to follow and stepped through himself, kicking out a good-sized chunk with his heel as he did. “I’ll explain while we walk,” he replied, extending his hands through the remains of the door to help her across.

“Where to?” Rain asked, hesitating. Leone’s hand hung out in the open air. She bit her lip, crossed the small office, and took it. The teen stepped forward, bracing the arch of her boot on a corner of wood. As she stepped down the wood gave way and she half stumbled out of the railway office, Leone grabbing her opposite hand to help steady her on the way down. Once she was securely on her feet he released her and pointed toward the quickly darkening railway.

“The rail cars. There’s one there, next to the wall.”

“Why?”

“Because I need your help still. Are you okay with that?” Rain stopped a moment, as if thinking, and then nodded. Satisfied, Leone started jogging in the direction he’d indicated, green eyes scanning the area around the office for movement. He increased his speed. Rain followed dutifully, though her pace was a bit more uneven and her boots louder on the gravel.

“Can you walk a bit quieter?” Leone asked.

“If you walk slower.”

The older boy turned back, looking Rain up and down. She was younger than him, fifteen at the oldest. She was short for her age, but her long trench coat and boots made it hard to tell how tall she actually was. The coat would hide any injuries too.

“Are you hurt?”

Rain shook her head. “Can’t see well.” She pulled back a wisp of black hair to emphasize her point, exposing the pale almond of her right eye. The fragile skin around it was marred by a solid lightening white streak that skittered from above her blind eye to the bone of her nose.

Rain blinked. The left eye closed completely, the right did not. She let her hair fall back, the curled ends just covering the bottom eyelashes. Her lips curved up in a sheepish smile and she ruffled the short hair at the back of her own head with an irregularly clean hand, picking her way around the tracks a pace and a half behind him.

Rain suddenly ducked forward, as if she were stumbling, but recovered, the smile now gone. The older boy turned away, surveying the rail ties again, and allowed himself to slow. She caught up quickly, but still kicked up gravel from behind her boots. Leone looked back as a spray of pebbles hit a nearby rail, grimacing. She saw his look and ducked down, firmly concentrating on the ground below her feet.

“What is it exactly that you need me for?” she asked, her voice half muffled in the collar of her coat.

“This way.”

Rain looked to see Leone had veered to the left, but was now down on his hands and knees. She copied his action, dropping, and crawled to him.

“Is something out?”

Leone shook his head. “You didn’t need to crawl. We just have to go under the rail car.” At this he hunkered down, curling his shoulders as low as he could to avoid scrapping against the bottom of the carriage. The edge of his jacket caught on the metal, tearing, and he stopped to remove it. The fabric held and Rain reached forward to help.

Leone’s hand came loose and swung past Rain’s in an overzealous jerk. He shrugged. “Let’s just get inside.”

He crawled into the dark, pushing aside gravel with his hands to make a path for Rain behind him. From below he waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dark before carefully tapping at the trap door with his knuckle. Shifting sounded over his head, along with a single footstep, and then the scrape of the lock being pulled back. One of Virgin’s angular brown eyes appeared in the space.

“That you?”

“She’s waiting out there like bait. Let us in.”

The door peeled back. Leone ducked down as the sudden light engulfed him and then clambered into 14.

Gravel and dust stuck to the knees of her tights. She didn’t even try to brush it off.

“You think she can help at all?” Virgin asked the older boy. I watched them chat back and forth from the corner of 14, one of Kannon’s blankets wrapped around my shoulders. The girl looked up at Virgin, smiling, but she seemed nervous. The Hussie was pretending to be asleep at the opposite corner, but I saw one eye open, looking at the girl as well.

The older boy ignored Virgin’s further questions and walked up to me, around me, to Kannon beside me. He pulled the blanket back from his face, sighed and replaced it. I glared at him.

“What’s your name anyway?” I snapped at him.

“Leone.” He answered without looking at me, like he didn’t care at all that I was talking to him. Like he didn’t care that anyone was there but Kannon and the girl he’d brought. He turned back to her, talking over his shoulder. “Come here.”

The girl hesitated, folding her hands into her chest. She was tense, looking back and forth between all of us as if she expected us to suddenly turn on her. I squinted, looking closer at her face. Something looked off. The glare of the lantern just beside me was too bright, and as she started to move I gave up on seeing anything, her face blurred by the movement.

Her Oo’s seemed heavy on the bottom of 14 and squeaked as she leaned down toward Leone, rearranging the skirt under her dusty orange trench coat as she did. Leone turned back to the blanket, running a hand through his brown hair. A piece was missing out of the sleeve of his jacket.

“You know some medicine, don’t you?”

My eyes got all big at this, and I looked her up and down again. Very few adults even knew healing, but she was my age. Just as helpless as all of us. But she nodded. Virgin folded his arms from his side of 14, looking her up and down too.

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“The embroidery on your sleeve. You’re FATE, the religious group. I heard the founders were teaching medicine to their disciples, and no one would steal a jacket from one of them.” The girl winced. I looked her up and down again, looking for defects. Some sort of disease.

“What’s FATE?”

She turned to me, letting her mouth drop open a little. “Oh, well—”

“Later,” Leone interjected. He grabbed her sleeve, jerking it once so she’d face him. “We can all chat later. After more pressing conditions have been accessed.” As he finished his sentence he looked towards me, as if trying to make a point. I screwed up my nose, glaring at him. I hadn’t really understood what he said, but I knew whatever it was about was coming out like it was all my fault.

Leone shrugged it off and grabbed the blanket again, peeling back the cover. I looked the other way.

Yenza bit her lip. The girl had shuddered, the soft curls on the back of her head whispering along the very collar of her jacket. One hand went up to her neck, curled. Virgin cleared his throat from his side of the carriage and his companion looked up at him.

He nodded briefly.

Yenza closed her eyes.

“Can you help him?”

Kannon’s tiny chest heaved; quick shallow breaths that whistled out of his throat like wind through a broken window. His eyes were scrunched closed, his mouth partially open. He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t conscious either.

Bruises pattered down from the lining of his hair, across his cheeks and nose, and down his throat. His shirt had been removed, or he’d never had one, though Rain wasn’t sure which it was, so that the trail of marks could continue to babble down his chest, over and under the hill where the bones ended and the dip of his stomach began. Speckles of dried blood that hadn’t been completely cleaned away dotted his skin and on the left side of his chest a peculiar mutation had occurred under the skin. What should have been smooth stark ribs had suddenly roller-coastered as the bones had given way to a greater pressure than they could manage.

“His ribs are broken,” Rain ran her fingers over them as gently as she could. Kannon didn’t move. “Two at least.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” the girl beside Rain abruptly snapped. She’d pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders so that it bunched up her red hair around her neck and face, flaring out below her proud chin in a way that made her look somewhat like a dirty exotic bird. She had turned away and now angrily addressed the metal over a sleeping woman in the corner. “That doesn’t tell us what to do about it! Some healer!”

“Calm down,” Leone ordered from Rain’s opposite side. His voice was cool, but his knuckles stood out white under the skin of his hands where he held onto the boy’s blanket.

The angry girl said nothing and Rain turned her attention back to the boy. “If his bones are broken you can’t do anything but realign them and rest. You can’t really splint his ribs, but if he can be propped upright I can help you bind his them.” She paused. The train car was still silent, except for the younger boy’s wheezing.

“I’m more worried about his breathing.” Leone looked at the little boy as he spoke, watching his chest shudder. “It’s gotten sharper and more shrill since he lay him in here. We were able to get him breathing, but his fingernails are turning blue again.” He lifted one hand up to show her, pulling the curled fingers flat so she could see each iced pane.

Rain furrowed her one visible eyebrow, looking him up and down again. She reached around him, a palm flat of the floor of the carriage at each side, and lowered her ear to his chest. She backed up, looking at the broken ribs again.

“He most likely punctured his lung. Have any of you seen him cough up any blood?” Leone and the older man shook their heads and the girl remained stiff. “He could be swallowing it all. If he is it would pool in his mouth.” She reached forward, pulling his teeth apart. And stopped.

Three black X’s nestled on his tongue.

I counted them. One, two, three. Tiny little X’s, the farthest more than half way back. Three crossed buns. They were stitched in. The exact same X’s that held his home-made pockets to his clothes.

The girl in the orange jacket just stared. Leone leaned closer, trying to get a better look. For some reason I was mad.

“What are you two doing? You’re just going to gawk at him ‘cause he can’t do anything to stop you? What good are youdoing to heal him, huh?” I questioned the girl. Leone started to interject, but I got up to my feet. “Shut up! Who put you in charge? It’s your fault he’s like this anyway! If you hadn’t hit the Ferret with the pole—”

“If I hadn’t hit the Ferret it would have kept bucking until it smashed him against a train car. Then he’d be dead instead of like this!” He got up on his feet too. Virgin started over, his gross hands reaching out to separate us, when the girl Leone had brought suddenly stood up between us.

“Do you have a first aid kit?”

“What?”

She repeated herself, slowly. “I need a syringe and needle, sterile preferably.”

“What for?” I snapped. I didn’t trust her, didn’t even like her as a person. She was just too strange, too different, all questions and no answers. She wasn’t shy anymore either, staring me down. For one moment her face turned, back towards Virgin who told her we had no medical gear, and brought her hand to her ear, brushing back the hair. When she turned to face me a white eye stared back beside the blue one on the other side of her face.

She nodded towards me. “Then I need your help.”

“Mine?” I asked, my question delayed by the shock. She has an eye like a creature. I watched, half expecting it to roll loosely like theirs did.

Leone grabbed her shoulder, turning her around. “I can do whatever you need,” he said, though he was looking at me. She stepped away from his hand, towards the trap door in the train. “I need you both. I had a medical kit with me earlier today, but I think I dropped it when that Ferret showed up. I’m going to need you to help me find it in the dark.”

“And you want me to stay?” Virgin asked.

She nodded. “You’re big enough to defend two sleeping people. Leone, you’re fast, but I don’t think that’s enough.” I thought about telling her that the Hussie was only pretending to be asleep, but I decided not too. She opened the trap door. “You coming?” she asked me.

Leone opened his mouth to argue, but I was walking before he could get out a word, and hopped through the hole. Within minutes we were outside again. I was shivering, though not as hard as the girl, and Leone was gritting his teeth, trying not to. He led the way, snapping briefly that he was the only one that knew where the rail office was, which the girl said she suspected was where she’d dropped her pack, and the only one who could see it.

The girl in the orange jacket followed him closely, watching his black jacket that cut pieces out of the night sky in front of us, starless Leone chunks. I kept pace beside her, looking for the places she stumbled so I wouldn’t, though most of them seemed fairly obvious, and trying to get a glimpse of anything else moving in the dark.

“What’s FATE?” I finally asked, skipping around a rail tie the other girl had stubbed her toe on.

“Aren’t you ever quiet?” Leone hissed from ahead. He was crouched a rail car in front of us now, glaring into the night for creatures before proceeding. Satisfied, he stood, walking like he wanted to stomp his Oo’s.

The girl beside me slowed down a little, letting a slightly larger space form between us. “You think he can hear me if I whisper?” Leone’s head whipped backwards. He made some sort of motion. Looked a lot like a middle finger.

“Whatever. There’s usually not anything out in the dark anyway,” I responded, but I still crouched at the same car Leone had and checked the area before walking again. “So what was he talking about?”

She got up a little later than I did and it took a moment for her to respond. When she did she looked upward, blind eye and good one, like she was trying to find the words somewhere else. I waited patiently. I knew exactly how hard it was to explain even to ourselves what was happening anymore.

“FATE is a group of children, young men, and woman. There’s about thirty of us, or there was the last time there was a meeting. We’re all different, each with our strengths and weakness. Part of those weaknesses is our loss of a higher power. No one can seem to have the reserve to believe there’s someone up there looking out for us, or that it’s ever going to get better. Not any more, and not because of someone else. You see, the strength is to see it in man. We’ve all given up our former God. Or He just gave up on us, it seems.” She stopped, stepping over the shattered remains of a car that had apparently hurled itself off a bridge that overshadowed the north half of the railway at some point.

“The idea of it is to believe in each other, to fulfill our needs and desires in each other, until all those weakness don’t matter. Once we have enough people to fill the empty spaces, a strength to replace ever weakness, we believe we can rise above this.” She paused again, and here I looked at her quizzically. Either I was stupid or she was; whatever she’d just said didn’t make any sense to me.

“I don’t get it,” I admitted.

Leone in front of us had stopped to wait, his legs curled under him, spring-loaded, for anything that might show up with nasty teeth and fast feet. Or wings. Or something else from a nightmare. He kept his arms crossed, but one hand was separated from the black tangle, the wrist turned up. He seemed to be watching his wristwatch. By the time our conversation had petered down to confusion we’d made our way up to him, and he stood.

“What she’s trying to say is FATE collects recruits to form a religious human resistance. An army based on faith in man.”

The other girl shook her head. “Not yet. All we want now is too survive.”

“So you’re just like everyone else,” I accused.

There was a light above the rail station, though I hadn’t noticed the crooked pole in the dark until it suddenly flickered on. Somewhere a person had stumbled into a power station and had seemed to flick just the right switch. The light butterfly flickered in and out, cutting the light through our eyes, so that we all had to squint to look at it.

Leone scanned the railway. The empty space between the train car and the office was at least a hundred yards with no cover.

“We should sprint through here,” he mumbled.

The older girl didn’t seem to hear him, answering me instead. “It’s not quite like that. This isn’t ‘Survival of the fittest’. It’s survival in each other. No one can live too long out here completely alone. We’re teaching people to heal each other, and to trust one another.”

I snorted. “So you trust me?”

“Yes.”

Leone started running, the other girl half a moment behind him. I was so surprised I nearly forgot to follow. I’d expected her to shrug and say ‘Sure’. Nothing special. But instead she’d smiled at me. I saw it in just one of the right moments where the light flickered in.

I respected her for that.

And two steps after that I started wondering more, about what Leone said. He ran doubled over ahead of me, his face turned up. The girl scuttled so low she was nearly crawling. I was the only one who remained nearly erect. Leone’s voice repeated over in my head.

“No one would steal a jacket from one of them.”

I decided not to ask why. Not yet.

8