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I don’t know who first called them demons. It’s a church word, so it must have come from the enclaves, but the demons I’ve seen don’t have forked tails or devilish grins. They aren’t even red, save for their eyes.
People start to talk, and once they’ve talked long enough, they act. They pull the child from her father’s arms. They rip the man’s shirt from his back. They haul the woman down to the river in broad daylight.
If they’re quick enough, they take care of the demon themselves. It doesn’t matter who the demon once was—neighbor, lover, son—they don’t hesitate. They barely even mourn.
She said they lived like kings of old—in great walled compounds that glittered blackly, covered in solar panels, defended by minefields and moats—but that we needn’t fear them, because they were too obsessed with the past to think much of the future.
They spoke a dead language and worshipped a dead god, a man suspended gruesomely on two sticks.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
We marry young; we die young. The wheel turns.
“Forgive an old knight. It’s only—thou art twenty? Two and twenty?” Barely seventeen; grief ages you.
We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
Very gently, the knight said, “She is not thy wife any longer.” “So long as we both shall live—isn’t that what your priests say? I’m not dead yet, and neither is she.”
She knew me then, at the beginning of ourselves, and she knew me now, here at the end, when she did not even know herself.
“The missions started six months after the first confirmed sighting. Priests, to call them demons, and knights, to slay them. The Bible and the gun—an old formula, well proved. But we’ve failed. Every year there are more of them, and fewer of us, and now the outlands are full of our failures: demons that survived and escaped and made their homes in the wastes and wild places.
So the kings wait behind their walls, for now. But if they knew how to kill a demon before it was born—if they knew a blood test or a cheek swab could tell them which of you would turn . . . Come with us, they might say, for chemotherapy in our fair city! I doubt they’d even bother to send back ashes.”
Finch always said every good tale repeats itself at least once; it made them easier to remember.
Year after year, town after town—with his wife fettered and hooded—he chased down demons, and he asked them all the same question: How?
“And how many other demons did you kill, while you looked for your answer? Even though you knew they weren’t sent up from hell—knew they could reason and speak and—”
Demon is a church word; we’ll have to come up with a name of our own.
For centuries the enclaves have taught us to mourn the old world and fear the new one. They told us Bible stories and demon tales, sent out knights and priests. There’s nothing more dangerous, they said, than change.
A single Secretary in the ass end of the outlands won’t undo all that—but I can pick at the seams, tell different stories. I can tell them of the shrike, who changed because she had to, and the sick bride, who did the same. I can tell them to mistrust the church and to leave their offerings in the hills, instead, for the strange new creatures that live there. If the kings come with their armies, we will have something better than hammers on our side.
