Bring out Your Dead

By Terry Ryan

Thousands of years ago, a spontaneous mutation resulted in a new species of mankind; more powerful, far more intelligent, and more capable than ourselves. Imbued with physical characteristics that set them apart from everyone else on earth, the Otherswere viewed as demons or evil. The offspring of parents carrying the mutant genes, the Otherswere feared, despised, and ultimately hunted by a powerful, secretive organization called the Venice Protectorate, the sole purpose of which was to kill all of the Others as soon as they were born. Over centuries, the Protectorate succeeded in destroying virtually all who carried the mutant genes. The time of the Others is over until a brilliant young geneticist, Jane Becker, finds evidence of the Others and locates a source of pure mutant DNA. Now Dr. Becker must decide whether to genetically reengineer the Others or let them die out before the Protectorate finds her. The fate of the world hangs in the balance as Bring Out Your Dead races to its thrilling conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467850261

Terry Ryan

Terry Ryan, the sixth of Evelyn Ryan's ten children, was a consultant on the film adaptation of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. She lives in San Francisco, California.

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Chapter 1. 

Autumnal Equinox, 9,334 BC - Central Europe:

The doe jerked her head, nostrils flaring as she caught, too late, the scent of danger. The heavy spear drove into her shoulder, slicing through a lung. The doe leaped at the shock, dislodging the spear, but blood filled her chest. She tried to run, faltering as she gasped for breath. Then, as if in acceptance, she sank to her knees and slowly crumpled forward.

The hunter sprang from his hide, ignoring muscles cramped from hours of motionless waiting. He went first to his spear. It was undamaged and he wiped away the blood. Quickly, he gutted the deer with a sharp flint knife, punctured the skin between the femurs and the hamstrings and threaded a leather thong, tying the deer’s legs together. In five minutes, the deer was draped on the thick shoulders of the hunter as he headed back to the camp.

He hurried. The hunt had taken longer than he expected and night was falling. Low clouds brought the chill of the coming winter. It was not good to remain away from the camp and the fire at night. Man was not the only predator about and the deer’s blood dripped an invitation to others who hungered this day.

His woman was with child and the pains had come off and on for the past two days. She had carried the child much longer than was natural. The Shaman had said the baby would not come and the woman would die but now the baby was coming. The hunter had made three other children; two had died at birth and the girl-child, born to his first woman who died in childbirth, still lived but was flawed, ugly. Perhaps this time a man-child. Perhaps.

He walked for thirty minutes as shadows stretched across the rolling steppes that were his tribe’s home. At last, the loom of the camp’s fire glowed ahead. The camp was makeshift; two long houses made of skins laced to a frame of poles were the only shelter for the thirty people of the tribe. The tribe was moving. Down from the mountain slopes that, in the summer, provided game. Down to the valleys and refuge from the coming winter. Tonight and for the past three days the tribe had rested in camp but it would be moving soon, after the baby was born.

The hunter came into the light of the camp’s fire expecting the greeting usually given to a returning hunter but the camp was still. Something was wrong. The child. The hunter draped the carcass of the deer over a suspended pole by the fire away from the half-wild and always hungry wolf-dogs that slunk in the shadows. He pulled back the roughly tanned hide that served as the door to one of the long houses and entered.

The smoke from the poorly ventilated cooking fire stung his eyes in the dim light. A small group of women, crouched by the fire, stared at him for a moment then lowered their eyes. Pushing aside sewn deerskins that divided the interior, he saw his woman lying on a bed of pine branches, tears staining her face. She clutched a small bundle. No one came forward with words of congratulation. Could another baby be dead? No one would meet his gaze except the Shaman.

The toothless medicine man stood in the shadows, wreathed by smoke from the dying fire. He wore the skin of a white stag and a necklace of cave lion’s teeth. On a leather thong around his waist, the Shaman carried small pouches of herbs and medicinal plants. He dispensed his potions and, with them, the myths and fables that ruled the tribe’s spiritual world. He knew the ways of the gods that gave success in the hunt if appeased and brought disease and death if aroused. He was part myth himself, older, by far, than any of the tribe.

The hunter knew there were some things not of this world; some things no spear could harm. The unknown, the unnamed, the forces that hovered beyond the feeble glow of the tribe’s fire. The Shaman knew of these things and the hunter was careful not to offend him.

Now the Shaman’s eyes were bitter. It wasn’t that the baby was dead. That happened all too often in childbirth. No, the hunter thought, it must be worse. He stood over his woman who clutched the tiny bundle, her face imploring him. He pulled at the rabbit fur that wrapped the child and the woman resisted at first, unwilling to give her baby even to its father, but she had little fight left and the Hunter pulled the bundle free. He turned back the fur and saw what he feared. The baby’s eyes were green, bright, radiant, green. Even the whites were tinted a pale shade of green. So unlike his own brown eyes and those of all the other tribesmen many of whose eyes were almost black. He knew the exceptions. His woman, taken as a slave in a raid on another tribe, also had eyes that were green.

There was another with those otherworldly eyes. His own daughter, now eight years old, had eyes almost as green. The girl had shown herself far brighter than the other children, learning quickly and asking questions incessantly. Now another child was born with the unnatural mark. Then the hunter looked closer and knew this was different. The baby had pulled its hand free of the rabbit skin blanket and raised it before his face.

The shock was electric. The baby had only three fingers on his tiny hand. This was no child that stared at him with cold green eyes. It was a demon taken human form. The baby didn’t cry but gazed at the hunter with eyes that held no passion. The hunter thrust the child out to arms’ length and turned to the Shaman.

From beneath his cape, the Shaman drew a flint knife. His message wasn’t lost on the woman who screamed her protest, imploring her mate not to give over her baby. But the hunter passed the tiny bundle to the Shaman who laid the baby on the dirt floor of the small room and, without hesitation, plunged the knife into its chest.

The child shook with anguish, the hideous eyes bulging as small hands clutched at the knife buried in its chest. The baby went limp. The hunter gasped a breath then turned and looked long at his sobbing woman. The hunter knew what must be done. She was the demon-mother, the well of evil. She had borne this monster. She was cursed and would curse the tribe.

Again, the hunter met the old Shaman’s eyes. Both knew what must be done. The hunter looked away and the Shaman turned to the woman to complete his work. The woman’s anguish melted in an instant of realization and her cries ended in a moan as her life drained from her.

In a corner, beyond the dying fire, unnoticed under the skin of a stag, the hunter’s only living child watched even as her father could not. And she watched through green eyes that blazed.

Chapter 2. 

Feast of Sothis, 1500 BC - Thebes, Egypt

The priest hurried down the long stone corridor. The passage was narrow with massive sandstone slabs close on either side, the ceiling only a few inches above his head. A slave, half-running before him to avoid being trampled, carried a torch that was their only light. It cast grotesque shadows ahead as they went down a long ramp that took them under the desert and into the pyramid. The Gods of Old Egypt, carved into the stone walls, emerged glowing from the darkness as they watched the priest pass, then shrank back into the shadows, leering but keeping their silence. The priest carried a small bundle. A royal child. Son of Pharaoh, Living God on Earth, and it was, the priest believed, evil incarnate.

The baby was barely two hours old. The priest had known this birth would be different, that something would be wrong. It was Pharaoh’s wife who had raised his fears. The daughter of a Persian king, it was a politically expedient marriage for Egypt. But it was not politics that had enthralled Pharaoh. It was her beauty. Her eyes. Green, luminously green, eyes that looked into your heart. To the priest they were eyes of the spirit world. Unknown. Unknowable. But no objection to the marriage was raised. None dared tell Pharaoh his chosen bore the mark of the underworld.

The wedding had proceeded, grand and lush. Five thousand servants served two thousand guests and the celebration lasted five days. In time, Pharaoh’s bride was with child.

The pregnancy had continued far too long. For days, the midwives had listened with growing concern to the unborn baby’s heartbeat. Had it faltered, the baby would have been taken by Cesarean section even though the mother would surely die. The baby was a royal child, an heir.

At last, the child had been born and at an auspicious time: the Feast of Sothis, the New Year. Yet the priest had watched the birth with fears that were quickly confirmed. The baby was a monster. The boy had eyes that transcended his mother’s. They were green; presciently green with no white at all. But it was the hands, hands that bore only three fingers, that screamed abomination. And the priest knew this was evil.

Pharaoh had looked at the boy and had shaken with despair. It would be as the priest suggested. An announcement would be made: the baby had been stillborn. The child’s body would be placed in the pyramid that would eventually be Pharaoh’s tomb.

The priest descended for almost twenty minutes into the passages that led beneath Pharaoh’s pyramid. In the lowest level, he reached a small chamber that held six tiny sarcophagi. Hewn from the limestone of which the pyramid was built, each small coffin bore the royal seal in gold. Its lid, carefully shaped to precisely fit, was sealed with an airtight leather gasket. The coffins stood in a semicircle curving away from the doorway. Above them Anubis, the God of the Underworld, stood guard, ready to escort the dead across the void. The priest laid the baby in the closest coffin.

The slave stood in the doorway holding the torch which threw shadows that danced on the walls of the tomb as the priest invoked his gods. He prayed fervently to the jackal-headed statue of Anubis to deliver Pharaoh from this incarnation of evil but he could not resist looking down into the coffin. The baby raised its hands, those hideous hands, out of the coffin. It was staring at him and the eyes said that it understood. His prayers stuck in his throat, the priest stared back but only for a second.

His hands shaking, the priest lifted the coffin lid. It was surprisingly heavy. He stood over the child and pressed the lid onto the coffin. The coffin didn’t close. He pushed again. The priest’s breath came in sobs as he pressed harder, leaning his weight on the lid but still it did not close. Beneath the priest, the child groaned as his tiny hands fought the weight. The slave, eyes bulging in fear, watched for only a few seconds before panic seized him. He turned and ran back up the corridor taking the torch with him. The room was instantly plunged into darkness. The priest’s fear exploded through him; his heart raced with adrenaline. If he did not close the coffin, the monster would be loosed. In the darkness of the tomb, the last thing, the only thing, he would see would be the glowing eyes of the demon. The priest placed all his weight on the lid. It grated into place.

The priest did not move for two hours. Long after the scratching inside the coffin stopped, he held the lid with every ounce of his strength. When others came, they eased the sobbing priest away. The door to the chamber was sealed and disguised to foil grave robbers. All Egypt mourned the death of its prince. And neither Pharaoh nor the priests, no one, looked inside the coffin.

Chapter 3. 

Ring around the roses,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down!

- Ancient nursery rhyme

June 18, 1349 Wurtzburg, Germany

For Bruno Schmidt business was good. Each day he pushed a charnel cart through the winding streets of Wurtzburg and collected the bodies of those wretched persons killed the night before by bubonic plague. Bruno carted the corpses through the gates of the medieval walled city and dumped them into common graves. The bodies - children, women, rich, poor, educated or ignorant, the Black Death knew no class - were covered with lime, buried and forgotten. For this, Bruno was paid a small sum per body - grisly piecework. Bruno made ends meet by robbing the corpses of rings, jewelry, sometimes even purses left behind by those who, from fear or revulsion, could not or would not touch the bodies. Business was good.

Bruno pushed his cart down a narrow cobbled street flanked by two and three story stone buildings built side-by-side and hard by the curb. He gave his chant, Bring out your dead, and smiled as eyes regarded him with fearful disgust from behind shuttered windows. You’re next, he thought as if he could will the disease into them. Bruno didn’t fall ill despite his constant contact with the plague. He attributed his resistance to the beer he consumed at night. Paid for by the dead.

Occasionally, he would be beckoned from a doorway and a red faced, teary woman would lead him to a bedroom to find the body of a husband or child, grotesquely blackened with pustules, the sheets stained with blood and urine. Bruno would mutter sympathies, scoop up the body, still oozing, and lug it to his cart.

Rarely, Bruno would find an entire family dead, entwined in a horrible embrace. There would be none to pay his fee but much to plunder. Bruno was careful to note where death had struck on his travels in the past and he gave his cry with extra fervor when passing those houses, carefully noting the response or lack of it. He had a sense of these things. No activity in the streets, no sounds of children from within, no smells of cooking, no chimney smoke. That warranted a knock on the door.

So it was that Bruno found himself on a small alley off the Keonigstrasse, reading the signs that said all was not well in the small brick house with blue curtains on the leaded front window.

Bring out your dead, he cried. Nothing.

He peered in the window but the gloom was too deep to fathom. He knocked. No response. The latch yielded and, when he cracked the door, he knew he had come to the right house. The stench of death rolled out into the alley, a tangible horror. A thing of fear to most, it was Bruno’s invitation. He entered, knowing he was welcome.

The house had two rooms. The one in which Bruno stood served as the kitchen and living area. The fireplace was long since cold. He saw little of value. Perhaps in the backroom where he knew he would also find what was left of the family who, judging by the smell, were a week dead.

Bruno tried the door but it resisted. He gave it a heave and it squished open. The body of what might have been a young girl, now stiffened and bloated, blocked the door. Bruno stepped over the body and stood in a dim room lit only by a small window to his left. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light, he saw a second body, larger; a woman sprawled on the floor near a bed. The mother he supposed. The stench was overwhelming. Even Bruno had to stifle a gag.

He was about to quickly search the room before getting his hooks to drag the two women to his cart when his gaze fell on a small shape near the center of the room next to the leg of the mother. It was tiny and unmoving but looked like the shape of a small child. No, more like a baby. It was dressed in a black, hooded cloak and sat with its back to Bruno. It was just a mound on the floor but, unmistakably, it was a baby.

Bruno was a superstitious man. Like all in the German States dominated by the Roman Church, he lived in fear of the evils that threatened his mortal soul. Now in this Tottenhaus, he stared at the back of what he thought was a child. But a child couldn’t have survived. Perhaps, Bruno thought, it was a doll mistaken in the dim light. Then the doll moved.

It slowly turned its head to look at Bruno.

"Gott in Himmel." Bruno stepped back tripping over the dead girl’s ankles and crashed to the floor his face only inches from the sightless, clouded eyes of the corpse. She seemed to smile at him and a bloody drool of pus seeped from her mouth. Bruno was frozen. The blackened face of the girl was between him and the baby. Slowly, he raised his head and looked.

The baby had turned its attention to his mother. Almost idly, it reached out and plucked at the dead woman’s leg. There was a large wound in her thigh and the baby pulled at its edges with a small hand, finally loosening a strip of skin that came away from the body with a tearing sound. For a second, the baby contemplated its mother’s flesh, then placed it in his mouth.

Bruno lurched backward, his head slamming hard into the doorframe. Bruno again had the baby’s attention. It turned to face him. In the dim light of the room, the child’s eyes caught and reflected the light like some animal at night. They were green. Glowing green, as if lit from within.

Bruno flung himself through the door, scrabbling across the floor of the kitchen. With legs too jellied by terror to support him, he fell out to the street, tears streaming down his face.

And then he ran. It was over a mile to the cathedral and Bruno ran, ran for the first time in years, until he fell sobbing at the door of the church. It was a long time before he could tell the priest anything except, "Es ist der Teufel."

It is the Devil.

Chapter 4. 

July 20, 1349 – Wurtzburg, Germany

If there are no atheists on a falling airplane, it is because of the fear of God. In Europe in the year 1349, there were no atheists because of the fear of the Inquisition.

Based upon Bruno’s report, the local burgermeister immediately had the child taken into custody. Initially a civil matter, the confirmation of cannibalism and the appearance of the child quickly changed things. The Church became involved. It was a matter for the Inquisition. An indictment was returned charging the baby with blasphemy, heresy, murder by demonic means of his mother and sister, and, almost unspeakably, cannibalism.

The