Purgatory, 14: Oasis
22 Jan 2024Meowers
Warning: disturbing graphic descriptions.
"Our Galaxy is a big place and I believe there's room for anything and everything. Especially if people, humans, are somehow involved in that. If you can imagine it, then it does exist somewhere."
We followed the riverbank, heading in the direction of the unexpectedly discovered camp, but, with the incomplete map, we didn't really know what we might find there. Just something. Something connected to the prison camp, the experiments, or the people behind them. But that was all we knew. We could see an entranceway formed into the perimeter fence, with gates of the same type of construction to the fence itself. The gates were open, and beyond them we could see what looked like a village of variously sized, conically shaped wooden huts built within the enclosure and a few treehouses on the trees that grew within the perimeter. And people.
We kept our weapons drawn, but lowered, as we reached the gates. There were no signs of technology here. The people themselves were reminiscent of ancient human cavemen. Most barely covered their modesty with adornments of leaves and vines. A few were armed with heavy sticks, pikes, or stone-headed axes.
We did notice though that there were those amongst them that had something slightly different about them. Those looked like former camp prisoners or lab subjects, but ones that had been here for a very long time. Dressed in the rags they wore whilst being prisoners, or, at least, the remnants of those rags, now supplemented with the same leaves and vines as the others, but these people also bore the long-healed marks and scars of their imprisonment. Of the beatings they received, and of the experimentation that they were subjected to. But beyond these subtle clues, it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the rest of the population. None had any discernible language. Just the odd English sounding word occasionally punctuating the noises that they used to communicate with each other.
They showed no aggression towards us. Some were cautious, but none fearful, and, for the most part, they welcomed us in. In fact many even seemed to revere us, like gods descended to walk amongst them. They offered our wounded local remedies, primitive bandages and dressings made from the surrounding flora, and the food to our entire squad, in the form of fruit, nuts and berries gathered from the rainforest, and also the fire-roasted flesh of various indigenous animals, like small, hairless rodents, and also those predatory creatures that we encountered before. Had we not been so hungry and exhausted, we might well have declined their offer, but… needs must.
With their hospitality extended to us, a few of us decided to wander and explore a bit before the light faded. During, er, 'dinner', we had collectively devised a plan for the upcoming night, to make a camp of our own on the riverbank, a little outside of the village walls, as the air was fresher there and had less of an unpleasant smell, exact source of which we couldn't figure out yet. Maybe it was from those creatures they killed in the forest and brought here to cook and eat, it didn't seem like the local population knew how to store their food, they kept it in the open air. So, while some of us went to explore, myself included, others headed out to assemble the camp.
With so many of us wounded, only five people could explore freely, in order not to overstrain the rest of the squad with camp duties, but the place itself wasn't that big anyway. The village seemed to be a home for about a thousand inhabitants, with their huts, mostly of simple conical shapes, placed without any particular order, around an abstract point in the centre, to which, apparently, the only wavy 'street' of that village led, connecting it with the riverbank and the entryway.
As we wandered deeper into the heart of the village I began to notice more of something I would never have expected to see here, based on what else I had seen of the village when we first arrived. Metal plates. Properly manufactured and machined. Incorporated randomly as building material into the surrounding fence and other wooden structures, in a strange juxtaposition to the otherwise primitive methods and materials of their construction. As I observed a greater number of them, and looked at them more closely, I realised that they were pieces of the hull of a ship. Originally a very large ship. And a very ancient one too.
The plates were coated in a very old material designed to protect them against micrometeorite impacts, harsh environment and the heat of reentry, much like the coating of modern spaceships, but older. Materials like this one were used many centuries ago, during the very beginning of the era of faster-than-light travel, maybe even less than a century after the last of Generation Ships was built to intrepidly explore the galaxy at sub-light speeds. This coating made it impossible to determine how long it had been here. A material designed to survive so many hardships of space travel would comfortably withstand several millennia of rain on a planetary surface. And there were no real clues about how these plates got here either, other than looking to have been purposefully disassembled, as they showed no sign of impact damage.
I continued to wander through the village, heading in the general direction of its centre, and as I did so my eyes were drawn by a glimpse of something I caught through a gap between two huts. I came closer and stopped, looking at what appeared to be some kind of altar in the very centre of the settlement. The village seemed to have been built around it, vaguely radiating away from it over time as the population had expanded. The altar was tall, and made from a big, crudely polished log with several smaller sticks attached to its top, resembling a human shape. Not a tortured or crucified one, just a shape, with neck, arms and legs. And hanging from the effigy were the scraps of an ancient space suit, probably one that belonged to a crewmember of the ship, with a rusty helmet mounted on the top.
The altar seemed like a gathering place for the primitive people living here, and also a place where they performed their unexplainably weird rituals, one of which we saw with our own eyes: the villagers were so busy lashing themselves and each other with ropes made of vines, beating with sticks and bare fists, they didn't even notice us approaching. Whilst certainly being quite painful, that ritual didn't look like a punishment or an act of aggression, or even a fight at all, they enjoyed it, apparently, purposefully delivering fairly strong, sweeping strikes yet without any intention to kill or injure. Chanting strange, unrecognisable sounds, some of which distantly resembled English phrases, almost dancing in the warm, shimmering lights of the bonfires they kept under the roofs made of the same metal plates, in that weird play of half-naked bodies, shadows and eerie voices, they even looked happy.
Once a few people in the crowd noticed us, one of the villagers left the gathering and covered the distance between, making excited, energetic leaps, stopping right next to us. He observed us for a little while, as if to make sure that we were paying attention to him, and hit himself with a stick he'd been carrying, seemingly harder than they did it around the altar themselves. Recovering from a blow, he smiled and offered the stick to us, pointing the finger at himself, his hand slightly trembling in anticipation. He wanted to be beaten by the half-gods who descended to their humble place. The villager stared at us eagerly, foretasting and hoping, bonfire lights chaotically flickering in his insanely wide opened eyes, but none volunteered. Honestly, we were quite surprised. Perhaps, the lack of response had made him upset, he muttered something quietly and hit his head a few times again before making another attempt, offering the stick and locking his gaze onto us. At that moment, he seemed more frowned, maybe even disappointed in us. Unwilling to spark any conflict, any disagreement with so many people whose language and traditions we didn't understand in the slightest, I took the stick and struck him a couple of times, making strong sweeps yet slowing down right before landing the hit since I didn't want to harm him severely. Fortunately, my guess was correct: receiving such an odd blessing, the man emitted an excited shout and ran back to the altar.
Meanwhile, I noticed that the smell has become more perceptible, more repugnant and discernible. Definitely dead bodies. Marines behind me clicked their helmet visors down one after another, switching to the filtered air, and I followed their example: the smell seemed to become more intense the more huts were around us, and I couldn't resist the temptation to look inside of one while it was still possible in the last lights of the day.
Horrible stench pierced through my suit air filters as I witnessed the utterly bizarre show taking place in the hut, and I'm still not sure which part of it was more insane, the picture itself or the luridly casual, daily way in which it was unfolding. One villager, a young man, resided in the hut with two bodies of older people, presumably his parents, and both of them had been dead for a long time. The father was a disintegrating corpse on a crude wooden bed, his stomach rotten through and skin peeling off his limbs and face, his intestines turned into putrid mass, a nest for insects, and the ground under him was marked by a darker blot of dirt, soaked in dripping bodily fluids. In such a hot and humid climate, dead bodies don't dry out, they swell, bloat and rot, spreading the stench around, attracting all kinds of creatures that use them for food or laying eggs. The mother looked no less interesting, a more recently dead woman, she sat on a short wooden construction that distantly resembled a chair, leaning on the wall, with a couple of additional wooden planks stuck into the ground behind her to support her back. In front of her was what I recognised as their table: a similarly simple wooden piece of furniture, a few planks fastened by a rope made of vines, standing on several large stones. Her jaw was hanging freely on a strained decomposing skin, giving the insects free access into her mouth. Dark blotches, some of which were already opening and slowly weeping liquid, covered the entire body. And, what about their son? He, and his mother, were in the middle of a local 'dinner' with pieces of meat and local fruit placed on both sides of the crude table. Assumingly, he dragged her from another bed and made her sit there.
He'd been talking to the dead woman in the same unrecognisable language of theirs, until he noticed me staying in the entrance, and what was already a freaky show went even more sinister once he finally did. Seeing me, in the armour and helmet, with the rifle on my back, the young villager almost jumped in his seat, emitting a sound of surprise and excitement. Exalted, he darted to the corpse of his father, leaned over it and said something in a none less emotional tone, holding the corpse by the shoulder and shaking it, pointing the finger at me. Returning to his mother, he took her by the hand and pulled the lifeless, decomposing body towards the entrance, gasping for air and groaning as he had to put a significant effort to move it across the dirt floor of the hut. Reaching me, the villager turned his face to her and said something once again. Once he deemed the outcome of the conversation acceptable, he looked at me smiling so widely, showing me his brownish, crooked teeth, that I thought his dirt-covered face was about to crack in half.
What an exemplary son.
Those folks may not even realise what death actually is, may not have a very concept of it. They may be absolutely certain that their dead friends and relatives are just ill or tired, and dying is a common thing in that place, I suppose. A truly progressive society.
Once we returned to our little one night camp, we shared our new knowledge with the rest of the squad. Unsurprisingly, some even wanted to go further down the river, despite those predators still being a threat, yet the option of sleeping next to the village won. Freakish rituals or not, we were armed adequately and able to defend ourselves in case of any aggression, and the villagers seemed to be a good early warning measure, since they could possibly make a noise and chaos if Azimuth troops, predators, or anything else we'd rather meet with our guns ready, wander into the camp, so that more soldiers could rest better instead of draining their energy on a watch duty.
I swear, this place is like one of those creepy old pictures, the longer you look, the more detail you notice, the more eerie, unsettling it becomes.
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Next part: #15: Respite
Next part: #15: Respite