A/N
I think this particular chapter warrants a warning. Heads up, dear readers, for cannibalistic themes. It isn't a wasteland without a bunch of those psychos, after all.
}!{
"Life feeds on life. Death is an act of giving." - Joseph Campbell
.::.
In the early hours of the morn, Mr. Vincent Cognellier, steward of the Dolarhyde manor, greeted the new addition to the household staff with a modicum of high-class propriety that barely hid his air of condescension. The old butler was tall and spindly, a skeleton with just about enough skin and meat to pass as human. Behind the large round spectacles that crested his long crooked nose, his tiny blue eyes peered with judging scrutiny at the assembled group of young ladies passing up for inspection.
They were the new maids, plucked from each of the four towns surrounding Salvación. Molly Wes received the new set of clothes she was required to wear, the traditional maid attire with a few embellishments- the usual low-cuts and short skirts. Having grown accustomed to catering to the desires of the opposite sex, Molly donned the dress and stockings without protest.
"You." The butler pointed a steady but bony finger at Molly, spider-fingers more like. His words were articulate, measured and commanding as a steward's voice should be. "You will be assigned to the upper floor. Go to the kitchens, the cooks have prepared breakfast. You will take it up to the bedrooms by trolley, and you will..." The rest of his sentences was a blurry string of orders that stretched into a big list which hardly fit inside Molly's overwhelmed mind. Still, she tried her best to remember her duties for the morning, as well as for the afternoon and evening.
She would be a servant, not that far off from her job in the Nest, but she would be a well-paid servant. The Dolarhyde's were reputed to be generous to those who served well, which was ample enough incentive for even the lowliest maid to try.
Molly went about her business, serving food to the many rooms of the manor, taking out chamber-pots to be washed, and rugs to be beaten. In the short time she'd been at the Dolarhyde ancestral home she came to know a great deal about the clan. It was told in the oil paintings decorating the walls of the long hallway leading in guests from the main entrance, in the marble statues carved by Maestro Lockheed Dolarhyde, and in the snippets of stories passed on through every maid or manservant she met along the way.
It filled in the blanks of what she already knew. They were an old and proud clan whose roots spread deep in the Texan earth, going back as far as the 1800's. They were there long before Four Seasons, or even Salvación, sprouted from the ashes of the Old World. They were part of the elite, the rich and powerful, of the Commonwealth. But apparently, they were neither rich nor powerful enough to be part of the New World Order rising in the heart of America, and so they were doomed to suffer nuclear annihilation.
They suffered, but they didn't fade. They forged onwards, just like everyone else, and prospered.
Molly was in awe, she felt it was a great honor to serve such a distinguished house, even if it meant doing the humblest of tasks for them. It was a foolish and naive way of looking at things. Bright-eyed Molly, like many young girls who entered the golden gates of Salvación, saw too much goodness in the world when none was truly there. A careful, seasoned and suspicious eye would have seen past the glamorous facade of the manor. Molly did not have that kind of eye.
That evening, after working up a good sweat with all her tasks, the maid prepared to retire along with the other girls. It had been a long day, for Molly arrived just as the Dolarhyde household and staff were preparing a great feast for the entire clan and their many guests. Molly had been setting up tables, arranging silverware and plates, carrying out pans and dishes to be served and whatnot. Those girls with her were among the lucky few, they'd live to serve for a few more months. Molly, however, caught the attention of her masters. It wasn't the part where she was new to the place, or the fact that she kept wandering into parts of the manor she wasn't supposed to be in. It was all written in the telegram sent by Reese the whore-peddler days in advance of sending Molly over. They were watching her for an entirely different reason other than initiating a young maid into service.
'Good stock. Well bred. Healthy. Deflowered. Recent sexual relations- within acceptable limits. No clan relations, no expected retaliations post-mortem. Recommended specially for Junior's personal deviancies.'
Vincent glanced up from the strip of paper he received from the Nest telegraph and inspected Molly from the seclusion of the upper floor. She was indeed a lovely thing, just like all the other girls who had the misfortune of catching his master's eye. She didn't fit quite well with the lot, she would be in better company with the Forresters. Hard-working girls like her, baling hay and milking cows all day long. Good honest work that paid good honest caps. It was almost a shame. Nevertheless, he had a job to do. The old butler sighed quietly as he began making preparations for what was soon to be a long night, for him and many other manservants of House Dolarhyde.
"Molly Wes?" He called to the maid before she got to wash up with the other girls. "Come here for a second."
Wide-eyed, Molly trotted over to Vincent. She was afraid she'd done something wrong on her first day on the job, and that she was about to get kicked out of the manor. If only that were the case, she would've been so lucky. "Yes Mr. Cognellier?"
"Walk with me. Mr. Dolarhyde would like to see you."
"Oh my gosh, did I do something wrong? Mr. Cognellier, I'm so sorry-"
"No no, calm yourself young missy." The old butler interrupted the girl before the tears started flowing prematurely. "You didn't do anything. The man-of-the-house simply wishes to speak with you, that's all."
"Oh thank heavens!" Molly let out a breath of relief, "Forget what I said, then."
Vincent led the maid upstairs, past the hallway of trophies where almost every kind of wasteland creature had been hung up on the wall to boast about the Dolarhyde family's excellent marksmanship. Every man born to the clan was expected to have some measure of skill with a gun, as old Texan tradition dictated. The results were evidence enough of that tradition's usefulness. Roaches, giant geckos, bloodbugs, radstags, yao guai bear pelts, and deathclaws. Even the heads of feral ghouls adorned the wooden shields nailed to the hallway.
Molly stared at each one as she passed them, noticing each one preceding the other posed a bigger challenge in the hunt than the last. Vincent brought her deeper into the heart of the manor, to the private study of Bennett Dolarhyde's son- Bennett Barnabas Leighloch Dolarhyde Junior.
There were two men standing at the door leading into the study, Junior's bodyguards. They wore thick lapelled overcoats that covered their golden-buttoned waistcoats, and their gloved hands clutched heavily customized shooting irons. Bright silver, etched with beautiful depictions of angels and demons alike, adorned the stocks of their rifles while golden livery covered the toe and heel caps of their shoes. Their wide-brimmed hats were also capped with some precious metals, and when they grinned at Molly they showed that even their teeth were capped in gold.
The bodyguards scared the maid, but not enough to send her running for the hills. At Vincent's behest, she entered the room and the two men closed the heavy oak door behind her.
Junior's study looked every bit like a prestigious gentleman's sanctum, but it was dark, shadowy and foreboding. The fancy fireplace, its stone hearth and mantle shaped in the form of damned souls roasting in hell, barely lit up the room and none of the lamps were alight. The room was also filled with trophies, hand-carved statuettes and unfinished oil paintings. A lone figure sat on the large leather lounge chair half-facing the fireplace. From the look of things in the dim glow of the flames, the figure was a young man not much older than eighteen. Upon hearing them enter, he turned around and set aside the little leather-bound ledger he'd been reading.
He was a portly fellow, short and stocky with the constitution of an unwashed hog. The overpowering scent of a dozen different perfumes gave the impression that Junior had a congenital defect concerning body odor, and therefore required a daily bombardment of scented products. The tight scarlet waistcoat holding his upper body together, coupled with a number of white silken frills, only served to accentuate his rotund physique, giving him the appearance of a gussied-up avocado. His face was the worst part of all, for when he smiled it seemed as though the muscles on his head pulled back his nostrils and pushed out the fat of his cheeks, and Junior smiled a lot. When he spoke, it was an unpleasant high-pitched squeal. It was incredibly difficult for anyone not to compare him to a pig in human skin, "Well well, what do we have here?"
"Sir, the offering." Vincent bowed his head and took a step back.
"Indeed, indeed!" Junior croaked, "Good on Reese to deliver such a delicate little flower to me. Go ahead, Vincent. Do the honors."
Vincent opened a nearby drawer and drew out a knife. His shoes made a sort of squeaking noise, causing Molly to glance down at the floor. For the first time, she noticed the large sheet of plastic stretched out across the floor like a great white carpet. The moment he referred to her as 'offering', the young woman knew that she made a mistake following the old butler.
His hands slipped over her neck so suddenly, so quickly, that Molly couldn't react until it was too late. She opened her mouth to scream, but no words would come. The sharp pain in her throat, the coolness of the air touching the severed flesh, and the warm wetness of her blood overwhelmed her senses. Molly clung desperately to the fraying strands of her life, and she fell to her knees. Slowly but surely, she drowned in her own blood and collapsed to the floor.
A faint hiss escaped her lips just before her vision darkened, "John..."
The fat aristocrat knelt before the dying woman and reached out to brush away the stray strands of her blonde locks. Junior watched with wicked fascination as the light left her eyes, and his ugly face softened upon realizing just how beautiful she was in death as she was in life.
"The night is still young, shall I proceed with the preparations?" Vincent inquired as he wiped the blade of his knife with a white handkerchief.
"By all means, Vincent. But wait..." Junior beckoned for him to hand over the blade. "This woman intrigues me. Her head shall serve better here than on the banquet table. She deserves... better."
"Of course, sir." The old butler knocked on the door to summon the bodyguards, "You two out there, help me take this one to the kitchens."
The three men waited until after Junior finished with his work on the body before picking up the ends of the plastic sheet and carrying Molly's headless corpse to the manor kitchens. Junior stayed at his study, leaving the rest of the job to the family chefs so he could work on his latest project of utter depravity.
For such a clumsy looking man, Junior was good with the blade. With surgical perfection, and a simple carving knife, he separated the head from the neck without leaving the stray strands of flesh in between. Skin, muscles and bone parted with ease under every stroke of the blade. Junior took the head to the washroom and drained it of its blood, like he had done to so many of his recent pieces. With almost tender care, he washed Molly's hair and dried it under a large hand-drier.
He took out his kit of little cutters and embalming equipment, then opened a secure cabinet to select from his collection of animal parts the additional accoutrements he'd decorate the head with. He chose a pair of dried antlers, from a young stag he shot in the manor woods out back some weeks before. Then, he opened a drawer filled with all manner of glass eyeballs. He didn't appreciate Molly's natural eye color, so he decided it was best to replace it with something he found to his liking. With all his tools in place, Junior once again set about to work. He set up the woman's lovely head on a wooden work pedestal, then put on some latex gloves. His tiny but deft fingers picked up a spoon excavator, then a long-bladed scalpel. With some wires, he pried open the eyelids and took out her eyes, then replaced them with glass proxies. The hair, he cut and braided to resemble a crown. The antlers, he hammered deep into her skull with practiced precision, then he sat back to admire his work.
Molly looked like a mythical dryad, destined to decorate the deviant's bedroom, where dozens of other victims adorned his walls like the animals that lined his house's halls. The final touch was a preservative-wash of his own design, with the same liquid used to medically preserve robo-brain central processors. Once dried, her head will never rot and remain eternally beautiful. With his depraved art finished, Junior prepared to take the head back to his room, but not before sodomizing the dead flesh to satisfy his mad urges.
Meanwhile, in the kitchens, Vincent Cognellier met up with the head chef Monsieur Alain De Gaulle. The seemingly illustrious name wasn't the one he was given at birth, but the chef was a devoted Francophile and his service to the Dolarhyde clan earned him enough prestige to be held above such questions. His name wasn't as important as the type of work he did in the dark recesses of the manor kitchens.
"Bonjour, Monsieur Cognellier." He spoke in that same unflattering French accent as he usually did, "What 'ave you brought for me tonight?"
Vincent didn't answer. He opened the sheet bundle and stretched out the fresh corpse on the metal pull-table. The body was still warm, and the bodyguards had done away with the clothes. De Gaulle frowned upon seeing the missing head but said nothing of it, having grown accustomed to Junior's particular deviancies. The body was good of form, perfect for the many dishes he had in mind.
The chef twisted the long hairs of his twirling moustache, "Hmm, ze breasts are full and she has a plump rump, no? Zis won't take long."
De Gaulle donned a porcelain half-mask and summoned his help, all of them wearing full masks of ceramic and white marble. After washing it thoroughly, the chefs went to work on the body, hooking it up half-way by the ankles to a longhorn hook. With a butcher's knife, De Gaulle carefully stabbed the body and let gravity pull the organs down upon the table. Hands eagerly reached inside for everything else, leaving a hollowed out flesh pit. The head chef detached the longhorn hook and stretched out the body on the table once the organs had been cleared and disposed of. Again, they washed the body and pumped a concoction of juices filled with sweet and salty mixtures into its veins and arteries. A large metal spike was brought in, and with this De Gaulle impaled the corpse from the bottom up. He had the other chefs pull the limbs together and place the body in a cross-legged sitting position.
Finally, he placed a special pastry mixture designed for puff bread into the hollowed out belly and sealed it with several sheepgut sutures. A great steel electrical oven was prepped and preheated. The body, so carefully and even artistically prepared, was placed inside and cooked for the great feast at hand. The chefs paused in their work and watched the entire process, like an evil ritual of some wasteland cult. Hours passed, and the oven cooked the corpse to perfection- whatever that meant to the degenerates that called themselves men.
Her beautiful fair skin turned tan, though not too tan that it looked like true roasted meat. When De Gaulle tested the meat, his eyes widened with mad joy, for he found that it was practically falling off the bone. The juices he had pumped into the body were oozing out of every pore and orifice. It smelled so good, so divine like roast pig, that De Gaulle shed a tear. The puff bread did its work so well, it puffed so large that Molly's belly swelled like a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy.
Vincent watched with grim fascination as the chefs rejoiced over their work. De Gaulle named this depraved masterpiece 'Terre Mère' or 'Mother Earth', and announced that dinner was about to be served. Molly's remains had yet to suffer one final indignity.
The banquet had already started upstairs in the rear courtyard of the manor. The guests were pouring in from the doors and filling the many seats prepared in advance for them. Salvación was alive once more, and the Dolarhyde patriarch himself welcomed the distinguished elite into his home to celebrate his daughter's birthday.
Bennett Barnabas Leighloch Dolarhyde Senior, a silver-haired gentleman in a suit of purest white, held up a tall glass of sparkling wine as he addressed the people who formed the upper echelons of Four Seasons. Folks in Salvación called him 'Godfather', on account of his generosity to the people of the city. Most of the money that propped up Four Seasons' economy was thanks to him, so it wasn't that far off to say that the clan was worth its weight in gold.
"Welcome welcome, honored guests of Salvación!" His charming voice, tinged with the coarseness of years of drinking and smoking, arrested idle tongues and pulled on every ear. "My lovely daughter, Lily, has just turned to the ripe age of eighteen. And we all know what that means."
Lily Marrie Dolarhyde, a tiny sapling of a girl with a pomped-up sky-blue dress, shrank back in her seat as all eyes were suddenly drawn to her. She was a shy little flower in a world of grasping brambles and thorns. The young woman smiled politely as her father heaped empty praises to exaggerate her value, though truly wishing to disappear in the relative seclusion of her bedroom. She knew what he was doing, advertising his little girl to the ambitious and greedy men among the guests.
She also knew what was about to happen. As was the tradition in her household, when a member of the family reached the age of eighteen they were to be served on their birthday party the supposed peak of wasteland cuisine- the forbidden flesh of man.
In the past, the Dolarhydes used cannibalism as a punishment for the worst lawbreakers in Four Seasons. Murderers, thieves and rapists were condemned to the roasting pits and served up to be eaten by the clansmen. It didn't take long for the maddening dependence to take hold on the generations that followed. Eventually, cannibalism became the norm, though it was usually reserved for the elite of Salvación.
Though, not everyone shared the same enthusiasm. Lily saw what the cursed meat did to her brother Junior, whom she remembered as a sweet little boy who wouldn't hurt a fly. Being the heir apparent of House Dolarhyde, Godfather taught him how to be a proper Dolarhyde in the only way he knew how- by becoming a predator. He wasn't so much a sweet little boy after that. She saw what it was doing to people, how it drove some of them into an incurable madness. Even among the upper echelons, who had access to the best medicines money could buy in all of Four Seasons, the cursed meat claimed its due.
Soon, her own tainted offering was wheeled into the center of the courtyard. De Gaulle proudly presented his work to the guests, and he received a thunderous applause at the sight of the thing. Everything went by in a flash for Lily. The cutting of the meat, the dish sliding across her table, the braying laughter of drunken visitants. She tasted the forbidden feast and struggled hard to keep herself from throwing up. She didn't know who it was, that poor girl who had to be served up like a butchered pig on her birthday. Funny thing it was, that her own father would honor the day of her birth with the death of another.
Lily longed to be free of it, the flair of the high-life and the grisly murders, all of it. But in the mean time, while she was still under her father's roof, she will just have to steel herself and wait for the right moment to slip away.
Once the party was over, the birthday girl ran upstairs to the seclusion of her room. Lily braced herself against the white porcelain rims of her bathroom sink, stuck some of her fingers down her throat and vomited out everything she'd eaten.
Then, she sank back into the cool tiled floor and cried.
"En el monte Calvario..." Padre Jonorario Ramirez sang for the little caravan of liberated captives as they rode back to the mission.
In spite of his grating smoker's rasp of a voice, the women and children have come to know him well and found some measure of comfort in his attempts to reassure them. Soon, they all joined in with singing 'Old Rugged Cross' with the old priest. The familiar dirt road led them all the way to the walls of the church, where the Dominion expedition had already set up its first outpost.
Worker drones were moving back and forth, carrying supplies to be stored in the large tent erected within the front yard. Several steel beams were stuck through the hard ground to act as reinforcers for the armored wall the engineers were hoping to put up around the mission. In the mean time, a razor-wire fence would have to suffice. Machine-gun nests were dug deep among slit-trenches in a wide perimeter circle around the church, housing several heavy-duty 20mm cannons. A watchtower prefab, made out of several wooden planks and rebar, was built into the church belfry tower. There, a sniper team was deployed to make use of its high vantage point. They were the ones who spotted the priest's caravan first, and all of a sudden the work in the outpost paused.
Aegis soldiers moved into their trenches and manned the big guns, while the Judge Kitty Reyncourt coordinated the defense from behind the church walls. When it became clear that the caravan was none other than the rustler captives coming home, the judge ordered her men to stand down and let Padre Jonorario pass through.
"Watch it, civilians coming through!" A soldier announced as he pulled the gates open.
The priest wasn't at all happy with the changes done to the holy place. As soon as he was inside the walls, and the women and children with him, he stormed inside the church and confronted Kitty.
"This is a house of God! Do you not hold anything sacred?" He roared, startling the staff bent over a table with a holo-map of the local area. The ghoul's eyes were ablaze as he took in the sight of unbelievers so callously setting up inside the aisles and altar. Even the apse, where the hallowed objects of the mission once were, was now a storage compartment for all the miscellaneous items of the Dominion expedition.
It was one thing to bring firearms into the mission, considering the all-around dangers of the wasteland. It was entirely another for the strangers to treat the holy sanctum as anything but. It was simply too much for the priest to bear, "Out! Out, I say!"
Kitty walked up to the priest and stood there with her arms crossed over her chest. Nobody was moving anything, not without her say-so. "Oi, tone it down a notch, padre! Last I checked, your relics have been cleaned out. Ain't nothing sacred about this place anymore, it's Dominion property now."
Jonorario looked like he was about to explode. But before he could say anything else, the next ranking officer of the expedition stepped in to defuse the situation. "Belay all that, Your Honor. Show some respect for the Old World Faith, yeah?"
Kitty's brow arched at Lieutenant Nobby Hynes, then stepped aside to let him handle the fuming padre. Jonorario threw a sidewards glance at Nobby but didn't turn away from the judge. He still had some choice words to say to the irreverent woman, but he allowed the lieutenant to be the face of the Dominion for the mean time.
Nobby Hynes was a middle-aged man of Danish and Irish descent, a veteran of the Dominion-Brotherhood War. He sustained an injury in the battle of Riverside where he lost a leg and an arm to an enemy grenade, which also got him discharged from the Army. Upon volunteering for an experimental cybernetics project, Nobby was given his augmentations and earned a new lease in life. It wasn't long before he joined up with Aegis to put his experience in the war to use.
His mechanical right arm shot forward, with fingers outstretched. "Welcome, father. I'm Lieutenant Nobby Hynes, representing Aegis and this expedition. You must forgive Judge Reyncourt over here for her... callousness. She's very pragmatic about things, but she means right well."
"Jonorario Ramirez." The old priest replied curtly, though refusing to shake the man's hand. It annoyed him to hear the strangers welcome him like a guest, in his own church. "Regardless, I must insist that you move your people out of this building. You are more than welcome to use the outer grounds, but this sanctum must not be used as some military base."
"That is doable, father." Nobby said with a nod, "We'll be moving soon."
There was an audible click every time the lieutenant made a step with his right leg as he walked away, leaving Jonorario alone to begin sweeping up the mess left from the battle against the rustlers. Some of the soldiers volunteered to help the priest clean up but, as expected, he refused. The nuns were all the help he needed and wanted. Together, they set upright the upended pews and swept out the dust and debris blown up by pipe-bombs. The few holy relics that the priest managed to recover from the rustlers, each one more ancient than the last, were put back in their rightful place at the apse. When they finished, the next thing Jonorario did was call for the whole mission to come for prayer.
Despite the tense exchange between the two parties, Dr. Nancy Reyncourt opted to smoothen things out by offering her medical services free of charge. It was here that the old priest gave his reluctant blessing and allowed the children first to walk up to her Centaur. Nancy treated the usual scrapes and bruises, administered vaccines and anti-parasitic chems for the more sickly kids, then some sweets for the youngest among them.
With the caravan safely stowed, Aegis resumed their work at building up their defenses.
Jonorario, true to his word, didn't stop them from putting up the steel barriers and walled up their fortress in the desert. Their convoy had just enough material to construct one outpost, and set up a forward communications network to contact their far-away allies in the mainland. It was going to be the start of an invasion, the old priest had seen it before and he knew that Four Seasons was about to change.
Though for the better, he wasn't entirely certain.
"Hello again, father." Nobby greeted the priest at sundown. By then, the first layer of defenses had been completed. The desert had been walled off in a tight symmetrical square of Dominion steel. Compared to the ramshackle defenses of most villages and towns in Four Seasons, the Dominion's outpost was a fortress in its own right. "How are you holding up?"
"To be honest, I was feeling a lot better before seeing all this." The ghoul sighed, "Now, I think I will have to move my people away from here... before this whole thing starts up again."
"What do you mean? The worst is over, you're safe now."
The old priest didn't have the heart nor the patience to tell him his life's story, even if it was respectfully from one former soldier to another. Jonorario was around when Canada was brutally annexed by the Commonwealth, he was there with all the other grunts marching through the streets of Anchorage and putting down resistance fighters. He knew when the first fingers of a grasping power clutched at distant territories, war would follow and many lives would be swept away in the coming battles. He didn't want his flock to be caught in the middle. He'd built them up, put too much work in raising the orphans, to let people like the Dominion make a mess of it.
"No, my son. The worst is yet to come."
}!{