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Chapter 53 - Deal With the Devil
🕑 Added 2023-09-12 19:16:27 +0000 UTCChapter 53
Deal With the Devil
The phone rang.
Ethan groaned himself out of sleep and reached toward the nightstand, grabbing it. The first thing he noticed was that it was 3 A.M., and the second was the caller–Elijah. Quickly muting the sound, he shuffled out of bed carefully so as to not wake Layla up and quickly left the lodge. Despite the fact that the night was quite chilly and that he only wore boxers and a simple tank top, he felt perfectly comfortable. Answering the phone, the voice on the other end confirmed his suspicions.
“Hello,” it wasn’t Elijah–it was the General he had last spoken to. It had been about ten days since with no contact.
“Odd hours to be working at, General,” Ethan said, yawning.
“Apologies for waking you up.”
“... wow. That bad, huh?” Ethan frowned. Something went awry–the General was being too subservient from the onset. “What happened?”
“... Elijah tells me you are not a good person,” the man skirted the question. “But that you have noble goals. Is it true?”
“...” Ethan remained silent for a moment. Something was really off. “A lot of the most evil men in our history had noble goals, General. It doesn’t mean much.”
“I’ll take it,” the man said, exhaling deeply. It was clear from his voice that he was extremely uncomfortable with this–and Ethan hardly blamed him. “I need your help.”
“... you?” Ethan frowned at the framing of the request. It wasn’t we–it was I.
“Yes. This is a personal request.”
“So, that explains the 3 A.M. call,” Ethan said, running his fingers through his hair as he leaned back onto the lodge’s wall. “What could the mighty General of the U.S. Army possibly need my tiny self for?”
“Protection,” the man said heavily. “I need you to protect me.”
“...” Ethan caught himself before he could blurt anything out unconsciously. He was now astronomically curious as to what precisely went wrong in the short span of ten days. “Yeah. I’m gonna need more than that.”
"... I'm old," the man said. "Ancient relic to some, I suppose. And I'm cautious. From the onset, I erred on the side of caution, progress be damned. And I was right–I've read numerous reports of other military cities being thrust into complete chaos because the men and women in charge of them began aggressive recruitment of the Awakened into their ranks, eventually being overrun and swallowed if not outright dying in a civil war. More and more I've been feeling the push of others to loosen the binds I hold. In my good conscience, I can't. I know these people. I know what they would do with unchained hands."
“That’s a lot of masturbatory claims, General,” Ethan said. “Careful. I might just start thinking you love tooting your own horn.”
“I’m not claiming I’m the dam holding the flooding river,” the man said. “But I am the head of the force that could be a flooding river.”
“And thus, you turn to me.” Ethan mumbled. “Wouldn’t a chaotic city rife with crime and corruption be far better for me than a unified force that could, at any point, choose to hunt me down?”
“Name your price,” the man said. “I know you have it. However, I cannot in good conscience give you access to live feed. I can personally scrub it for whatever information you want and give it to you.”
"I only have two requests," Ethan said simply. Protecting the General was a very vague notion–it could mean shadowing the man for a few months and making sure he was alive… or simply curb-stomping the group that wants him dead so violently that no other group ever dreams of doing the same. "I'll need you to locate one person for me. I do not know her name, her address, or anything too substantial–just that she is twelve, lives somewhere in the city with both her parents and her general appearance."
“...” the General remained silent for a moment, mulling over why a grown-ass man was looking for a twelve-year-old girl. “Why?” he asked, unable to simply move past it.
“The second request,” Ethan ignored the question, moving on. “Is even simpler: there’s a woman in your ranks, Sarah McLock.”
“What about her?” the General’s tone turned somewhat aggressive. Hm? Ethan mulled over, realising it won’t be easy.
“It’s simple: if you want me to keep you alive… she’s the price.” Ethan’s words were thundering, yet spoken in an apathetic tone befitting a man who didn’t see a worth in life. In fact, that was better than the rage-laden tone he could have taken.
“Impossible.” the General replied immediately. “She’s one of the few people I trust beyond words. Why could you possibly want her dead?”
“...” Why? Ethan couldn’t say. His true reasons were likely months removed from occurring. “Think back to how Elijah described me, General,” Ethan said. “I’m not a good man… but my intentions are noble. Those are my two requests. They are both non-negotiable. If I don’t hear a reply from you in the next three days, I’ll come to the city and take Elijah back with me, sever any and all ties with it and watch it slowly burn to the ground from a distance. It’s your choice. Good luck.”
Ethan hung up the phone and stretched lazily. It was a win-win situation for him, in the end. Truthfully, he didn’t wish to get entangled in the power struggle within the military ranks. While he enjoyed the fact that they were responsible for keeping the large population afloat, he didn’t want anything to do with them directly as they were a barrel of uranium with an attached fuse that could go off at any point, for any reason. Most of the people in charge were the old guard, just like the man he’d spoken to, and though he semi-agreed with him about keeping the military requirements tight, the chances were that he and Ethan had fundamentally opposing views on the current state of world affairs.
The General likely wanted to maintain the status quo, hoarding Tunnels and events for the military and empowering it under the guise of ‘keeping law and order and safety’. And just like Ethan’s noble intentions, his were similarly a double-edged sword. Events like these aren’t new things–they’ve occurred before. A politician is elected, promising the world and even delivering on it when given enough legislative power. But then that politician is replaced by another, one with far less of a noble heart and far more greed. Those same legislative powers are still there, ripe for exploitation.
For a world of the Awakened, the concept of the military–a hivemind unified behind a banner of a nation–was unfitting. Most of the groups that would come to power in the future were either like Ten Beasts–where several to several dozen Awakened of similar strength had a loose relationship that didn't impose anything on anyone and was simply a 'pact' of sorts–while the others were prominently cults, centred around a singular person with enough strength to govern it. While one could argue a military as a type of cult, it was nominally different in the sense that modern militaries wouldn't collapse just because their head was assassinated. There wouldn't be a power vacuum left that would result in an absolute scourge.
All of it, for now, though was irrelevant. Whether the man was simply fearful for his life out of selfish desires and reached out to Ethan as a last resort, or he truly had that nobility in him that ascertained that his death would lead to the death of hundreds of thousands… Ethan didn’t care. If the General accepted his conditions, he’d get rid of Sarah–for whatever it was worth–and, far more importantly, find Delilah long before she blossoms into a nigh-perfect Awakened.
And if the General refused… that would be it. He’d have to stalk the city streets on his own looking for her. Which was also why he told the General that he didn’t know her name–there likely weren’t more than a few hundred, at the absolute most, Delilahs in the entire city within that age range, and that was him being beyond optimistic. Ruling out everyone not of Caucasian race and everyone without both parents likely shortened that number to a few dozen. And with the description, that number would fall down to 3-4 candidates. It would probably take the military a day to locate her if he’d given the General a name but he wanted to be able to keep track of their investigation so he could have an advantage in locating her first. He hardly trusted the man to just ‘hand over’ the child, after all.
Rather than going back to sleep, he went on for a walk, lumbering about between the tall trees. They were in deep Autumn now, with the greenery slowly waning in hue and saturation, and the chilly winds howling the coming of the winter. Ethan never quite cared for the falls–they tended to be wet and colourless and joyless. But there was something about the air and something about nature slowly singing its goodbyes that spurred him. Though it was still wet and cold, equipped with the ability to not be bothered by it, he could finally see the beauty of the falling leaves and the dying of the blooming flowers and the lengthening of the nights.
He came upon the cliff edge that overlooked a deep fall into a ravine. The moon hung lonely in the sky, only a few of the brightest stars ever so slightly visible on the canopy above. It shone brightly upon the cloudless night, its rays bouncing across the world and illuminating the blindingly dark night just enough to see it all. Just then, a pack of wolves began to howl in the distance, their song loud and long. It was these things, the tiniest of things that few ever took notice of any more, that humanity would miss the most in the future.
The world in the future… was different. So much so that should a person from now be plucked out of this reality and put twenty years into the future, they’d think they were on an entirely different planet. Though Ethan summarised it well enough for the kids as it being ‘hell within a hell’, words could hardly capture even the small part of it. Some things, simply, had to be lived. And he had no intention of living through them once again… and especially allowing Layla to experience even the modicum of suffering that the entire world had to suffer. For that, no sacrifice was too large and no compromise too immoral.
