“There you are, my beautiful baby boy.” A brunette in her mid-30s whispered to her newborn son. He was comfortably swaddled in a baby blue onesie and cradled by a handwoven bassinet. She swept him into her arms. “My precious Caleb.”

  Caleb’s mother shifted open the balcony window and tip-toed into the night. The wind whipped baby Caleb in the face, so she pulled the hood of the onesie over his eyes. The ocean lapped at the beach underneath. Summer ebbed away with the sunset, and a few dog-walkers made the most of the coolest part of the day.

  “The sea calls to us, Caleb.” she whispered, breathing in the light newborn fragrance. “But its call is a siren song. We can swim for a while, though…”

  Caleb’s mother gripped the balcony rail in one hand and slithered over it. She held onto her baby, nothing between life and oblivion. She breathed deeply, holding the deep sea air in her lungs before exhaling. Caleb drifted off to sleep, lulled by the rhythm of her respiration and the steady lap of the tide against the shore.

  She fixed her gaze on the horizon, at that seam in the universe where the glow of the sun kisses the deep blue sea.

  In pensive moments like these, moments in which others would say she was being reckless, angels appeared. They didn’t warn her to change her ways or even get any closer than the horizon, but they stood on the horizon and watched. Wherever it was, however impossible, they stood and they watched.

  She stared back. Occasionally she would wave, or hold up little Caleb to see, and one of them might lean over to whisper something into another’s ear. But whose were the angel’s secrets, told only by them and told only to them…

  As Caleb got older, the angels came to visit less and less. There were less calm times of course, less quiet moments to sit and soak in the dark and the still.

  She would watch the horizon anyway, sipping a cup of coffee as the sun went down, her feet kicking into the ether as she sat, perfectly safe and secure, miles above the cold hard ground.

  She never heard Caleb’s little feet as he padded up to her, confused as to where she had gone, not quite as asleep as he had made out when the storybook closed and she kissed his forehead goodnight. He rubbed his bleary eyes, wanting to get back to sleep but not alone. Never alone.

  “Mommy…?” he said, tugging at the edge of her night shirt draped over the balcony.

  And she slipped away.

  Caleb woke up when several hands pulled him up through the dirt. His eyes snapped open and he vomited mounds of dirt. A calm hand rubbed his back as he worked the mud from his nostrils and ears. He panted, desperate to get clean air back into his system.

  “Oh, thank God...” Kayleigh said. “We were worried you might be dead.’

  Caleb cleared the last of the mud from his eyes to see friendly faces. Kayleigh rubbed his back, while Johnson shook the dirt from his fingernails. Oliver watched over a heap of bloodied bodies with a pitchfork at the ready. Dave flicked steaming entrails from his claws.

  “These guys are really persistent.” Dave said, his voice modulation wavering wildly as he spoke. “And they really didn’t want to tell us where they were keeping you.”

  Caleb shook some feeling back into his hands. “Did they do stuff to you? The green tonic? The church? The chamber?”

  “They didn’t get a chance.” Johnson said. “Dave had our backs the moment we saw them take you.” He doffed his cap to Caleb. “Sorry about that, by the way. It won’t happen again.”

  “You saved me, that’s the main thing.”

  “I just hope we got here in time…”

  “Oh, we did. Just in time, in fact. If he’d been growing any longer, we’d have twice as much of a problem on our hands. Which reminds me, Dave, go churn up the space they buried him in. He wasn’t under long, but I want to make sure the seed didn’t take root in the soil.”

  That’s it.

  “Enough, Johnson.” Caleb said, his voice rising in a ball of angry momentum. “You know too much. I can’t trust you.”

  “You can’t trust me?” Johnson repeated. He hocked a loogie at his feet.

  “Caleb, you don’t mean that…” Kayleigh brushed his arm.

  “Oh, I do. You know why? Because I talked to the undead freaks here…”

  “Now, wait just a second, son…”

  “And you know what they told me?”

  Caleb waited. Johnson shrunk back.

  Oliver drummed a beat on his thigh.

  ”They told you what?”

  “They told me that nobody is born here. Ravenswood village doesn’t just renew itself every once in a while. It’s totally new. Every single person who lives here, who dies here and keeps on truckin’, is a transplant. And you know what that means?” Caleb thrust a finger out to Johnson in accusation.

  Kayleigh clicked her fingers. “They recruited him here.”

  Caleb nodded like Poirot at the reveal of the murderer. “They recruited him here.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Johnson back-pedalled as Dave looked up from the mud he was currently kicking the shit out of. “What the hell did you say? That can’t be true.”

  “Belker is a complex man.” Johnson said. “You civvies don’t understand what the military is like. You don’t always know who you’re serving, apart from the fact that you’re all flying the same flag.”

  “Fuck!” Caleb screamed. “Why is everything so goddamn unclear? Why does it always have to be subterfuge, and hidden agendas? Just tell us if you’re a fucking bad guy.”

  “You’d love it to be that simple, wouldn’t you, kid? Just another bad guy you can point your robot best friend at? Huh?”

  Dave lurched out of the burial plot. “Mind your words, Johnson.”

  “Don’t you understand what’s happened in the past few hours? Belker has sown the Progenitor Spores. That means it’s not just Ravensbrook Village anymore. By now, for all we know, it might be the whole goddamn world.”

  Oliver muttered. “It’s not like any of us has a smartphone to check the news or anything.”

  Johnson spat again. “What in the blue blazes is a smartphone? You wanna watch the news, you turn on the damn TV.”

  Caleb turned his eye to the dismembered corpse pile. “Are we safe?”

  Oliver nodded. “Yeah. If you pull enough pieces off, they… Well, they don’t stop moving, but at least they’re no danger to anyone.”

  Kayleigh chimed in. “We get Dave to crush their heads. Otherwise they get really mad and just scream and scream.”

  Caleb gasped. “Sorry I asked.”

  Kayleigh shrugged. “I guess this place is desensitizing me.”

  “So what’s the plan? Kill everyone and just walk out of here alone?”

  “You got a better plan?” Dave whirred his wrist around, turning his fingers into the business end of a blender.

  I didn’t even know he could do that.

  A neon green hand burst from the soil. Dave reactively stomped on it, but the hand continued to claw its way out - unharmed.

  “We left you in there too long. You’re a Progenitor now.”

  Caleb pulled at his hair. “What does that even mean?!”

  Another sickly viridescent hand pulled itself out of the mire, followed by a face that was much too recognizable for comfort.

  Caleb looked into his own eyes. “No way.”

  He realized that all the power he felt earlier had gone. All that strength stood in front of him, embodied by a whole new Caleb.

  Johnson clapped his hands over Caleb’s eyes. “Don’t even look at it.”

  “Dave, kill that thing!”

  “Don’t kill me. Please.” Caleb heard his own voice across the room. As a kid, he sometimes set his walky-talky across the room and spoke into it, marvelling at the projection of his own voice. He was reminded of those innocent moments now.

  “That’s too freaky.”

  New Caleb stood tall, his entire body pulsing with that green.

  “What’s he even made of?” Oliver rubbed his eyes, barely able to believe what he was seeing.

  “Caleb grew him while he was in the dirt.” Johnson said. “If you must know. We can’t dwell on it.”

  “Please don’t kill me.” New Caleb said.

  “Remember my Squish Burger interview, Oliver?”

  Oliver nodded.

  “You asked me to give you an example of good customer service. And I couldn’t. So I told you about taking my grandmother to the store for her weekly groceries.”

  “You did.”

  Johnson spat again. “For fuck’s sake Oliver, don’t talk to the damn thing. And remember, it is a thing.”

  New Caleb smiled at Kayleigh now. “Remember the first time we met? When I asked you how to make a Chicken Smash Special? And you rolled your eyes and just pointed to the QPIG on the wall?”

  New Caleb laughed. “It was so obvious. I felt like such an idiot.”

  Caleb’s stomach rolled.

  It's true. That did make me feel like an idiot.

  Johnson moaned. “Stop listening to it. Dave, kill the fuckin’ thing!”

  New Caleb chuckled again, shaking his head in memory of the good times. “Remember when we met, Dave?”

  “In the break room…” Dave muttered.

  “I spilled water all over my top. I didn’t expect it to just spurt everywhere. Remember what you said?”

  New Caleb waited. Dave’s eyes welled up.

  I guess the memory hits harder now that he’s… well, what he is.

  “You told me I wasn’t allowed to piss myself in the break room. Then you said,” Dave and New Caleb completed the thought in unison. “There’s a knack to that machine.”

  New Caleb clapped his hands. “And then you showed me how to use it! ‘Cause that’s what life at Squish Burger was about. Beyond the abusive boss and the gaslighting customers and the probably cancer-inducing fumes, beyond that horrible stony-faced mascot… We were a team. Let’s be a team.”

  “Goddamnit…” Johnson realized he was losing the battle.

  “Besides, I’m not just Caleb…”

  You’re not helping yourself, you disgusting funhouse mirror creature…

  “After all, I was born here. I know this place. I know its layout. I know who everyone is and how they operate. And besides…’ New Caleb waggled a thumb in Johnson’s direction. “... This guy doesn’t seem to be telling you anything.”

  All eyes turned to Johnson. “How did you get out anyway?” Oliver said. “It doesn’t seem like these clvtists would take kindly to defectors.”

  “You idiots don’t know what you’re talking about.” Johnson said, casting his eyes to the floor. “Influence. That’s what all this is about. There are citizens of Ravensbrook scattered across the globe. It has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  Kayleigh scrunched her face up in confusion. “None of this makes sense! You were trying to assassinate Belker, right? So we assumed that this village was neutral at best and terrorized victims at worst. And then it turns out everyone here is mutated by Belker’s poison?”

  “We all have free will, little missy. My squad, we were defectors. But obviously we can’t let the brainwashed folk know that. We had to move quietly. A civil war is brewing down here. Some people live like this place is all that they’ve ever known. But others… Others remember.”

  New Caleb stamped the floor for attention. “Alright then, folks. Now that we’ve straightened that out, I believe we have one mission: get out of this place alive.”

  Johnson scoffed. “Why the hell would you let them do that?” He addressed the rest of the group. “He can’t leave. Powers fade without regular doses of the Progenitor Fluid- that’s why ordinary folk are so compliant. They feel like they’re superhumans, so they get sloppy. They get injured. They get so injured, they know they’d be dead without Belker’s help. It ties them here. Enslaves them to him. But this guy?” Johnson focused on New Caleb. “He’s pure fluid. Without a source, he’ll simply melt away. He won’t last a week outside.”

  Johnson got up real close to New Caleb. “So what’s your angle here, friend?”

  “I want to help you.” His lime green eyes flitted to Kayleigh. “I want to help you all.”

  I don’t know if it’s desperation or just the sound of my own voice, thought Caleb. but I believe him.