Corvidae (Part II)

Two traumatized young men, a boy from Cheyenne and an ex-soldier, bear witness to the depths of human depravity. Meanwhile, the true inheritors of the earth look on from afar, patient and inscrutable.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of sexual slavery and violence, involuntary mater ity and pregnancy-related death, mass murder, pandemic and disease, and religious extremism. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

Transcript

[Eerie woodwinds music]

NARRATOR

Episode Twenty-Seven: Corvidae, Part Two.

[Sounds of drizzling rain, gunshot]

NARRATOR

Barrett wakes with the same icy, tight alertness as he has every grey dawn since the Patriarchs found him, made him one of theirs. That they did not recognize him, he is unsure whether to consider fortune or bane. At first, he hoped it was because those men of the first encounter were all dead, just as they deserve, but when he looked upon the sprawling, squalid chaos that is Tabernacle City, he realized it was merely a matter of numbers, of probabilities.

Still, he has not met those men since – not as far as he knows. And he is sure he would recognize them, after what they did, that awful moment branded forever in his mind and his soul.

Those first few days, he managed to slip into the part of the camp reserved for the female captives – the Concubines, as the Patriarchs call them – to search for his mother and his two sisters. But those few who were outside, he did not recognize, and he did not dare to approach the windows and doors of the RVs and camper trailers haphazardly parked as makeshift prisons for the women and girls, knowing that the guards would shoot him without hesitation if they saw he did not yet bear the mark upon his wrist.

And he will not receive the mark, not ever. The thought of the initiation sickens him, not only because he feels no attraction to women, but because the inherent cruelty of the requisite act repulses him in every fiber of his being.

When he lies awake at night, he thinks that he must run, run before they learn what he is and stone him to death, as their Father Allgood’s Law demands. Yet even so, he knows he cannot leave until he is certain that his remaining family is not held here.

And then he begins to toss and turn in his shabby blankets, in the tent he shares with three other newcomers. He remembers the look on his father’s face as he realized what the men at their door were demanding, realized there would be no swaying them, and yet determined to resist them anyway. He remembers the blood that dribbled from the man’s mouth after the Patriarchs shot, stabbed, and crushed his body to ruin, the screams of his mother and sisters as they were seized and carried away. But most sharply of all, he remembers the helpless shame that smothered him as he lay under the porch, quivering, paralyzed by terror and disbelief. And perhaps remembers is not even the right word, for he has inhabited that shame every waking moment since, has felt it creep even into his sparse dreams.

He rises and leaves the tent, approaches the sets of mismatched tables under tattered tarp and pavilion tents that comprise the eateries of Tabernacle City. The breakfast on offer is the same as it has been for a week, thin oaten porridge spooned into a poorly washed bowl by a haggard-looking woman, deemed too old for Concubinage and serving instead as cook. As he sits and takes his first bite, Barrett pauses, detecting a subtly evil flavor in the porridge, a hint of rancidity.

He is distracted from pushing the remaining oatmeal around his bowl by the approach of an Acolyte. The man, well-fed, wearing a black cassock and sporting several rings on his fingers, sits across from Barrett, smiling a smile that never touches his eyes.

The man bids him good morning, and without even waiting for a reply, tells Barrett that he has been assigned a very important task, one which earn him favor among the faithful, a first step on the path to a lasting place among God’s sons.

Trying to keep his apprehension from coloring his voice, Barrett asks what exactly that task might be.

The Acolyte flashes that dead-eyed smile once again, and says with measured indulgence that it is best if Barrett learns to trust in the wisdom of his elders, and to listen rather than question.

Barrett apologizes, hoping it sounds sincere, hating the man more with each moment.

Good boy, the Acolyte smiles, and then points toward another young man in a camo field jacket sitting farther down the table and tells Barrett to follow him, when they have finished their breakfast. Their task, the Acolyte says, will become clear soon enough.

The other young man nods only a curt greeting when Barrett introduces himself, and then leads him out past the piecemeal fence surrounding the camp, decorated with the dangling corpses of many birds, crows and ravens, magpies and jays and cardinals, sparrows and owls and hawks.

The task proves to be digging a long ditch, along with about a dozen other younger men, none of them having earned the mark yet. Taking their assorted shovels and spades and mattocks, they gouge at the miserable earth, the soil softened by the recent rains yielding under their blows and yet mocking their efforts with wet subsidence.

As morning wears toward noon, and Barrett’s poorly nourished body begins to protest the grueling toil, the overstretched silence between the young men breaks at last. One of them, a red-haired boy named Damon who shares a tent with Barrett, asks if anyone knows what exactly they are digging.

Another, a lank-haired willowy lad from Oklahoma, answers that it looks like a latrine.

It’s a grave, the one in the field jacket, named Asher, says sullenly.

Damon laughs, and says it’s way too big for a grave.

A mass grave, Asher clarifies grimly.

The silence settles back over them, oppressive and inevitable as the collapsing buff-colored mud, and in the afternoon, a light but persistent drizzle sets in once more. As they work, wet and chilled and tasting iron in their breath, Barrett cannot help but imagine pieces of bodies peeking out of the mud, hands and toes and foreheads, and feels too nauseous to eat when they break for their supper of watery lentil and venison soup, though his aching body demands nourishment.

All through the night, the damp mist falls, and Barrett lies awake, thinking of Asher and his gloomy words, of the way his dark hair ringed wetly over his brow in the bleak afternoon rain. And Barrett wonders if the mass grave is for people like him, for those the Law of the Patriarchs deems deviant and deficient.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Barrett continues to fret over the purpose of the ditch for the next three days, three days filled with more of the laborious digging. As often as breaking new ground, they are forced to dig out anew portions of the ditch that have collapsed from the rain, and when Asher returns from speaking with the Acolyte about possibly postponing the work until the weather is more favorable, his expression is dour. Instead of telling them the result of that conversation, he simply picks up his shovel and returns to digging.

In the evenings, over the supper tables and later within the tents, whispered conversations sprout like mushrooms, growing in the damp and the dark. At first, Barrett pays them little mind as he always has, preoccupied with his own bitter thoughts, but with time they penetrate even through his disinterest.

The whispers tell of a new plague, like and unlike the first, sending subtle tendrils through the camp so overgrown that some call it a city. They say that it was inevitable that this would happen, that Tabernacle City is squalid and crowded and there is not enough food, that people were bound to get sick. All of which qualifies, of course, as blasphemy under Allgood’s Law.

Barrett does not know whether to believe it, even on the fifth day of his labors, when the cart of corpses arrives and is emptied into the completed portion of the trench. No Acolyte, no Vicar comes to speak over the dead – they are consigned to the earth like filth, unworthy of notice or of mourning.

From the distance between their first excavation and their current worksite, Barrett cannot tell if the bodies are even male or female, despite their nakedness, so thin and begrimed are they. But when they break for the day, he dares to walk a bit closer to the dead, and realizes that they are all female. He sees one with bloody thighs, another with a belly still swollen, and a third with wounds on her abdomen that make him think of a botched Caesarian.

He stumbles away from the pit and vomits thinly into the dead weeds, waves Damon away when he offers to help him up. Barrett sits and waits for the rest of the young men to leave, remains even as the sun sets and the air begins to grow cold and unpleasant, and only then does he allow the tears that he has bitten back so long to flow freely, running down into the earth along with the rain and the blood of the dishonored, defiled dead.  

[Bleak music]

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

More digging, more carts, more dead. The whispered rumors have swelled into open conversation, and grow still as the carts begin to arrive filled with dead males as well as females. Half of the digging detail is assigned to begin to cover the bodies before they putrefy any further, before they can draw more of the carrion birds that already gather like living clouds there beyond the edge of Tabernacle City. Asher and Barrett are both among these misfortunates, and when he looks up, Barrett finds the disgust and the rage that fills him mirrored in Asher’s eyes. Only now does he see the places on Asher’s jacket where a nametape and insignia were ripped away.

Some of the young men throw rocks and clumps of earth at the growing ranks of black-winged birds, but the patient opportunists only scatter momentarily and then return, always seeming a little more numerous than before, and at last even the most stubborn of the diggers abandon trying to drive them away.

They begin to work listlessly, accomplishing in a day what they used to complete within a few hours, and it seems to Barrett that something has fallen over them, a shadow too wide and too deep for any of them to fully comprehend or even perceive its source, like the looming footfall of some cosmic titan descending with infinite graduality.

Meanwhile, the carts come more and more often, sometimes overfilled. And the hellish music of men screaming with fever and pain, crying out as they shit blood every hour, swells and becomes an infernal chorus that rings throughout the holy city of tattered, filthy tents.

And now sometimes the carts are filled with bodies broken by many stones, or severed by machete blow, or with a tidy little bullet-hole in the temple or the base of the skull.

Joshua Allgood, the Father of Fathers, always eminently visible and audible, has suddenly withdrawn into his lavish white pavilion, which is now closely guarded by only the most trusted – and heavily armed – of Acolytes. His voice, filled with divine fury, has fallen silent, drowned out by the shrillest of tongues.

Dysentery, the whispers begin to say – a word that to Barrett’s ears seems archaic and foreign. And yet even so, he knows that there are few people with real medical knowledge in the camp, that many have found themselves murdered under the new Law, and that those few who remain are already overworked trying to save the people forced against all decency and reason into unwilling motherhood.

And he wonders if, when those ex-doctors and ex-nurses inevitably fail in this Sisyphean task, they too will find themselves at the bottom of a wet ditch, along with so many other unnamed dead.

[Short pause]

(Sound effect or music)

NARRATOR

The new death, red and reeking, spreads through the camp, taking male and female, preacher and murderer and innocent alike. Its touch is subtle, its taking slow, but it touches and takes inevitably.

The young men of the digging detail vanish, one at a time, are replaced, only for their replacements to also not appear one day.

The boy from Oklahoma simply gives up one day, climbs down into the ditch and lies there among the corpses, waiting to be buried. The others cannot urge him out, and only another young man from Texas tries for long, missing his supper and returning hollow-eyed and defeated to camp around midnight.

The boy from Texas is replaced by one from Missouri, who is replaced by a local boy, who is not replaced at all.

Barrett wakes one morning to find Damon, who had been beside him, shivering and sweating, when he fell asleep, no longer there, even his blankets removed.

When he and Asher shovel damp earth over a thin and red-haired corpse the next day, it neither surprises nor saddens him. And realizing this, Barrett feels emptier than he has ever felt before.

He looks over at Asher, and Asher looks back at him. After a long silence, Barrett says that he cannot do this anymore.

Asher replies that the Patriarchs would gladly kill both of them with the slightest excuse.

Fuck the Patriarchs, Barrett says wearily.

Another silence, and then Asher begins to laugh, a strong-sounding laughter, seeming strange and out of place above the long grave.

Fuck the Patriarchs, Asher nods, and throws down his shovel.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They sit and talk for about an hour, there near the mass grave, among the wheeling and feasting crows and ravens, the returning turkey vultures.

Asher tells of his time as a soldier, says that he was once proud of his choices, then confused, and finally, ashamed. When they fired upon the desperate crowds of Chicago, when he watched himself, as though from outside his own body, cut down a woman carrying an infant girl and a little boy no older than three with his M4A1, he could live with it no more. He dropped his rifle and slipped away, and either through luck or through mercy or through toxic despairing apathy, he was not stopped.

A silence falls between them like an evilly engorged shadow, replete with monstrosity. Then, slowly and harshly, he says that he should have kept the rifle, and now for the first time Barrett can hear the killer in the young man, regretting the blood that was not spilt, but that ought to have been, and Barrett thinks that the killer is only two or three years older than him, and he shivers violently in the gathering purple dusk.

Asher looks over, waiting patiently for Barrett’s own story, and, haltingly, Barrett utters the tale he has never spoken aloud, the tale of his family’s ruin, and he begins to cry without knowing it during the telling, and when he has finished he finds the ex-soldier’s hand upon his own, and he squeezes it tightly and whispers Asher’s name.

With a kind of hesitation that Asher has never shown before, he says that his tent is empty now, that all his bunkmates are gone. And, mirroring that hesitation, Barrett says that his are all new, and that none of them would miss him.

Then they hesitate no longer, and they walk together away from the place of death, through the pooling darkness, toward the empty tent.

[Peaceful, tender music]

[Long pause]

(Sound effect or music)

NARRATOR

In the grey gloom of the early dawn, whispering before the camp rouses, they decide to slip away the following night, knowing what they have risked, tired of fearing discovery and murder and disease, sick with every new horror witnessed and knowing that the bloody flux will likely sicken them too, if they remain.

But first, Barrett insists, they have to look for his mother and his sisters. He expects Asher to protest, but the older man does not – he knows too much of regret and shame, perhaps, to deny Barrett this.

When they go out to the ditch to pretend to work, to allay any possible suspicions until they can escape under the cover of nightfall, Asher shows him the long chef’s knife he somehow pilfered from the kitchen tent. There is no joy in his eyes when he shows it, only a grim sharing of information.

Half-heartedly, they toss dirt over the ever more numerous corpses in the long trench. There are three corpse carts standing alongside it now, waiting and unemptied, as though whoever has been assigned to loading and unloading them has also decided to abandon their macabre task.

Or, Barrett thinks darkly, they have died, and their replacements have died, and so on…

At last, evening falls, and they begin to make their way toward what Barrett keeps thinking of as the trailer park harem. Asher, with his training and experience, takes the lead, guiding them slowly through the mess of tents and silent, rusting vehicles. It seems to Barrett that many of the tents they pass are too silent, as though half the population of Tabernacle City is missing now, and he wonders if there were other ditches or pits being dug that he simply never knew about, on the far side of the endless camp or even further out of sight.

They have nearly reached the women’s prison when Asher raises a hand, gesturing for Barrett to be still and silent. Struggling to suppress the question that burns in his throat, Barrett complies, trusting in Asher’s judgment.

Then he, too, hears the words being borne faintly on the damp, earthen breeze, the words of the Father of Fathers. Joshua Allgood, sounding hoarser and frailer and yet more frighteningly convictional than he ever has, is saying that the Whore of Babylon walks amongst them, and that the Lord has turned away from them because they have tolerated her insidious influence.

A silence follows, and Barrett, not fully comprehending and yet intuitively apprehending some looming abomination taking shape in the night, feels sick in his stomach.

Father Allgood, prophet and lawgiver to thieves and murderers and rapists, says that the women must be purged to cleanse Tabernacle City of its moral rot.

Something red and yellow and white flowers in the darkness ahead of them, and only belatedly does Barrett realize that they are bright flames, engulfing one of the trailers. The scream that tears itself out of his throat alarms both himself and Asher, but their fear of discovery proves needless – the cry is echoed in dozens of voices around the camp, and then there are growing sounds of confusion. Someone begins to shout at Father Allgood, calling him a lunatic and a liar, and gunfire erupts, more shouts and screams and light and death.

Pulling Barrett close to him so that he can hear, Asher says that it has become too dangerous, that they must move back.

No, Barrett says simply. No.

Asher looks at him for a long moment, his eyes gleaming in the faint light of the crescent moon and of the distant fires, and almost imperceptibly, he nods once and continues forward.

They find the place where Father Allgood preached, moments before, and they know it by the ruins of an old camper trailer ablaze behind him and by the three dead men upon earth, two Acolytes and Allgood himself. There is no sign of the others – they seem to have fled whatever chaos has erupted here, abandoning their highest patriarch and his false law.

They wait a moment, to see or hear any sign of a threat in the unnatural twilight of the fire’s glow, then begin to creep forward.

Allgood stirs where he lies, coughing wetly, then drawing a long, wheezing, rattling breath.

Help me, he hisses at them. Help me.

Without need to consult with one another, Asher and Barrett continue forward, toward the next nearest trailer, leaving the wounded Father to die alone in the dark. But drawing near, they find that the door to the next trailer is already opened, and stepping cautiously inside, they find that it sits empty.

They check three more, as more and more cries and shots and sounds of breaking wood and bone break the nocturnal silence, and Barrett finds he is sweating profusely despite the cold of the night. Around the camp, he can hear the ravens and magpies, the crows and the jays, singing in the black, and he could swear there are words in the song that he is just on the edge of comprehending. The next trailer is likewise vacant, the one after that, a silent tomb of femicidal atrocity they cannot bear to look upon long, but the last has neither been emptied nor damaged.

Asher finds a partial cinder block and, abandoning all attempt at stealth, smashes at the locked door until it surrenders to them.

Within, over half a dozen women huddle, all of them gaunt and poorly clothed, all of them gazing up at Asher and Barrett with the sort of hollow-eyed, hopeless dread that comes with prolonged, inescapable abuse. 

Trying to speak very gently, Asher says that he and Barrett will not hurt them.

You are free, Barrett adds.

The women only remain crouched together at the far end of the camper, staring and tense, and Barrett wants to scream at them to run, to get away before someone comes, but he knows that they have known something still more terrible than any of the monstrous things that he has witnessed, and that he must look to them no different than the careful architects of their suffering.

Asher carefully turns on one of the battery-powered lanterns on the shelf beside him, and by its timid light Barrett sees the little butterfly tattoo on one of the women’s wrists. He looks disbelievingly at her face, knowing that it is a common tattoo, knowing that all the odds are against him. Yet, under the grime and the sweat, despite the lost weight and the dark circles under her eyes, he knows his older sister Gemma’s face.

He whispers her name, and she stares up at him, dull and uninterested for a moment, and then a hint of life creeps back into her eyes.

Barrett, she breathes, unbelieving. Barrett, she murmurs again.

Yes, he smiles, weeping. Yes, it’s me.

[Short pause]

(Sound effect or music)

NARRATOR

As they steal toward the edge of the camp, opening as many of the trailers as they come across and find still occupied, Barrett slips beside Gemma to ask her about their younger sister, Missy, and their mother.

Wearily, her voice sounding stretched beyond recognition, she tells him that she and Missy were separated when they arrived, and that their mom never made it to Tabernacle City.

She tried to fight them, Gemma says, her voice cracking now. To protect us. And the men, they…

Gemma does not finish, and Barrett tells her she does not need to, and they weep silently together, weep even as they move through the night toward the edge of camp and toward a possibility of a freedom they cannot even dare to imagine in this moment. Every bit of their mental and physical energy must be reserved for the escape.

They are taking the small group of prisoners, now numbering almost two dozen, around the corpseless end of the long ditch, Asher leading and Barrett bringing up the rear, when Barrett hears something that makes him freeze, makes it feel like frigid water is running down his spine.

It is the voice of the Acolyte, the one who first assigned him to digging. The man is calling to him, not by name, addressing him only as son. Turning, Barrett finds the Acolyte approaching, dimly silhouetted from behind by still more fires in the camp.

You are right to run, the Acolyte says. The Devil walks among us, and Tabernacle City has revealed its iniquity.

You are the iniquity, Barrett thinks, but does not say.

I will come with you, the Acolyte says. I will guide you through the wilderness, like Moses. I will feed and instruct you, as our Savior did His disciples.

Barrett says nothing, instead glances back toward the path the others have taken. He can see them no longer – they have slipped away into the dark. Though there is a jolt of fear that he might lose them, far stronger is his relief that they have gotten away.

Pray with me, the Acolyte says.

Barrett crouches and reaches down into the pit, where a discarded shovel stands planted in the sodden earth, takes the handle firmly. The Acolyte approaches, kneels before Barrett, begins to whisper words into the chill air.

Heavenly Father, guide us away from the destruction of this new Babylon, where the wicked wiles of women have once again misled the righteous…

Barrett stands, swings the shovel with all the strength his underfed body can muster. As the Acolyte’s face splits beneath the blade’s edge, a black cloud of shrieking carrion birds rises from the drowned weeds and grass and feral grain.

Run, they scream, run.

The Acolyte falls to the ground, heavy and limp, and his limbs twitch spasmodically and then are still. And Barrett does flee, running wildly through the prairie, partially blinded by tears and by a spattering of what may be mud or may be gore, following the path that the others have taken and praying internally to no one in particular that he can only find Asher and Gemma once more.

Run, the corvids cry, run. Tabernacle City burns and bleeds and devours itself, and the moon looks down, untouched and pallid.

[Eerie music with sounds of birdsong, rain, and thunder]

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]