Spare Parts
Part Two
The quiet contempt and sense of otherness he had felt his entire life served him now as it had served him growing up among his own people. People don’t respect or admire you for being first in line to do the things no one else wants to do, but people will silently nod and be thankful its not up to them while they largely ignore you and leave you be.
He was never going to be an Elder here. Or ever be known for his prowess in any one thing. He wouldn’t be a doctorman for these cultists, let them be sick and die. Screw the old oath. He wasn’t going to hunt for them or learn a trade. He wouldn’t take a wife or two or stand idly by and get close enough to anyone so that he would have to make a difficult choice like the last one he had to make. He would live with and next to these people and do the most intimate and ugly job they all avoided and so be avoided by them.
The cultists, the Believers, as they called themselves, lived in a small grass valley between two mountains. What was once a pass had long ago been fortified by landslide and earthquakes into a formidable plateau that could only normally be reached by climbing through the ruined and badly irradiated ruins of one of the vast, bunker complexes those who drank it all up built.
These cultists were no doubt the descendants of the ones who took shelter in that bunker complex during the great wars. They didn’t get many visitors that weren’t mutated monstrosities and it showed in both their culture and their breeding.
Garrett only stumbled upon these cultists by a combination of his curiosity and the unhealthy need to reach his destination as quickly as possible. Another, better known mountain pass was available and safer but it would have added weeks if not months to his journey.
He literally stumbled upon their quant community, catching them by surprise as he came over the top of the sheer cliffs that they had built their homes in the shadow of. At first, they merely subdued him, kicked at him, refused his offers of trade and pleas for hospitality. He heard the words other and diseased a lot. It took him a while to realize their uncanny shared feature and their constant mention of her.
Out of all the silly, ham fisted plots of all the old trade paperbacks he ever wasted his time skimming through, none of them prepared him for a nestled colony of technophobes living above the irradiated ruins of their ancestral core. All of them worshiping a partially burnt poster of some teen idol. Some fashionably popular music star during the time of those who drank it all up.
The burnt poster showed the young woman dressed in a nun’s habit pulled back to expose her ears. The left one had a giant hoop earring dangling from it and no doubt the right ear would have as well except for the nearly perfect hole burnt through the lobe of the ear. There was no name or date attached to the poster but some one had painted the name Heather in blood at the bottom. The blood was old, faded, nearly black. The poster had been well kept and pressed under glass but it too was withered, no doubt an aged relic fished from the irradiated bunker below.
The Heatherites, as he secretly began to consider them, were well versed in the solemn rhetoric of all brainwashed groups. Devout worship of a vague figurehead that could be interpreted in nearly anyway seen fit by the ruling class. A people haunted by the idea of being allowed to live their lives without the constant reminders of guilt and shame adorned in the ancient and deceitful concept of sin.
Every adult and child among them, even the constantly crying toddlers still pulling at the fresh bandages had their right earlobe severed. Not just cut off but removed up to the cartilage and dangerously burnt closed. No stitches, sutures, of antibiotics need apply.