Page 6 of Juniper Unraveling

More aggressive than our Mediators.

They seek out the Ragers, hunt them down, and keep marauders from breaching our community from the outside. If the Mediators are our defense, then Legion is offense. Sometimes they bring back survivors who somehow managed to avoid infection, but mostly, they kill. Dressed in black uniforms with facemasks, they don’t look human, at all.

They have no identity. No personality.

It’s rare to see them, as they live on the other side of the wall, but on occasions, when they’ve marched through, I’ve gotten enough of a glimpse to keep my distance.

I tip my chin to the sky, toward where the leaves of the sycamore looming above me reach out to the surrounding trees. The forest isn’t as dense here, and the extensive gap, filled in by bracken and forest vegetation, tells me the tree stood long before the wall was built.

Setting my foot against the bark, I hop up to a grab hold of a branch, and pull myself. Climbing is natural to me, and there are a number of rock hills within the community to test my endurance each day. A part of me feels as if I’m preparing for something, as if Papa is preparing me, the way he insists that I know as much about the landscape as possible. We even do occasional survival drills, but he has yet to take me out with him beyond the wall, into the Deadlands. He says I’m not ready yet.

Of course, I’ll never be entirely ready until I’ve gone beyond that wall.

The scent of burning meat assaults my nose, hitting the back of my throat with the urge to gag. I hoist myself onto a thick and sturdy branch to catch my breath, and turn toward the top of the wall that sits at eye-level. One more branch up, and I can see over the edge of the barrier.

Click click click draws my attention downward, and the air stalls in my lungs. I tighten my hold of the branch to keep from falling, while my heart drums against my ribs.

I’ve never seen so many up close, perhaps three, or four, dozen, pacing back and forth, twitching and jerking as they’re known to do.

Ragers.

Corralled into some sort of pen.

A ragged black object hangs from the barbs, and studying it brings forth the realization that one of them has burned to a char—perhaps the source of the smell earlier. Between the sun beating down on it, and what is obviously an electric fence with all of the warning signs, it no longer looks like it might’ve once been human.

Rough bark scrapes against my skin with my trembling.

Ragers are humans so infected with the Dredge, their brains basically look like sponges. Laymen call it a virus, but Papa says its what’s known as a prion that invades the brain.

Usually, a prion only causes infection if a person happens to be a cannibal and makes a meal out of some poor sap’s brain. Not exactly a risk factor for the kind of decimation that wiped out most of the globe. But I guess some evil group of scientists somehow fused it with a virus, which made the disease easy to spread from one person to another, like the flu. And voila. A worldwide shit-storm that annihilated over half of the population.

Their twitching is one of the many symptoms, along with the chattering teeth, violent attacks and mottled skin. Papa says it takes several months for them to die, and because they’re not zombies in the true sense, they don’t always consume first. According to the journals I’ve read from the library, the early infection starts off like a mild cold, with some coughing and sneezing. Confusion sets in soon after, and progresses until the person has no connection to anyone, or anything. At that point, they become violent and psychotic. Psychopaths, with an appetite for human meat.

I read about a mom who threw two of her kids over a third story balcony because they wouldn’t stop crying. Had she waited until the final stages, she might’ve consumed them, though from what I understand, Ragers tend not to eat their own offspring. Their brains still function, but at a primitive level, driving two main objectives—to feed and breed.

One of the Ragers lifts his chin to me. His top lip is eaten away, revealing crooked, browning teeth. The final stages seem to turn their skin a strange, spotty color, and their pupils dilate so much, their eyes appear to be a soulless black. They physically look like demons, undead, even though they’re very much alive.

Lipless stumbles forward, toward me, chattering his teeth.

Although I’m a good thirty feet above them, I still cling to the branch, panic rising in my gut. The others follow him, all of them catching sight of me in the tree.

When the first reaches the wire, his body seizes from the electricity for a good ten seconds, before he’s shaken loose and backs away. Stretching his neck toward me, he clicks his teeth in a threatening stance and points. Unable to get to his food. For a brief second, my mind slips away from the scene, and I’m sitting crouched in darkness somewhere. I can’t tell if it’s a dream, or a memory, but it feels real. So real, a tight fist of dread squeezes my lungs and I screw my eyes shut.

The Ragers reach for me, but I’m tucked into some sort of hidden space, too small for them. The click click click seeps past my hands that cover my ears, and I’m praying. Praying for them to go away.

Go away. Go away. A pounding sound beats down my spine, and to the right of me, one Rager stands over the place I’ve hidden, holding a large club. He strikes against the roof of my hiding place. Over and over and over.

Stop! Stop, stop, stop!

The hard thumping that pounds in my ear stops the moment I realize it’s my fists beating against my temples, and I lower my hands.

The voices recede back into the shadows.

I open my eyes, and the scene disappears as quickly as it arrived. A dream? A memory?

A phantom ache gurgles in my stomach, and I swallow back the urge to vomit. The sting at my forearm draws my attention to the scratches I’ve gouged into my skin.

That’s the thing about zombies. Stories have everyone believing they’re these dead, mindless creatures. These ones aren’t.