Shadow Moses [Fransykes]

Chapter 26

By the time morning dawned I felt like I could die. My muscles ached while the wounds on my skin burned more with each step. The Phylumins kept us walking all night. I was barely keeping my eyes open as exhaustion swayed through my body, yet we were still walking.

They haven't harmed us, just tied us to one another, making us pace in the middle of their column as they squawked around us. Their screams were victorious and their laughter hysteric. They didn't seem capable of holding normal conversations. 

The chains clattered around my sore wrists, seeming heavier than my own bones as I struggled to keep my shoulders straight. 

I didn't want to show weakness in front of these people. I was fairly certain they were just waiting for one of us to collapse and I tried my best to be the flame of this group now when we needed the fire the most.

I listened to the Phylumins talk. I tried to gather as much information about them as I could. Information that would help us escape.

"You see, I only had a knife," a man near us spoke to the women surrounding him. "And the wolf was a slayer. His teeth pointed and bloody from an animal I watched him shred a minute before he turned to me - his next victim. He jumped on top of me, throwing me into the mud. I protected my face, but he bit my hand. I would've lost that hand if I hadn't shoved the cutter up his stomach. I opened him up and ripped the guts out the beast while it was still alive."

A wide smile stood on the man's face as he showed the shiny scars on his arm to the women.

"It was a bloody battle but worth it. I survived on its meat for days after."

I shivered, shaking my head to get rid of the images his words implanted in my mind.

The women cheered on his words before they laughed. 

"That sounds like nothing." A woman from ahead of them joined their group. "Try fighting a whole pack of those slayers. I stood hours buried in the mud waiting for them to leave but the beasts got my scent." 

"How did you survive?" One of the younger looking girls asked her.

"You aim for their feet. Once they can't move, you skin the fuckers alive." The woman laughed. "It sure was fun to watch their blood soak the mud."

I turned my head away from them, trying to ignore their hysteric laughter as I shut my eyes. When I opened them, one of them was walking in line with us. 

She was blond, her hair falling to her hips in dreadlocks. It was the girl whose dog ran out to the grass towards us when we first witnessed this clan.

"You wanna hear how I got my scars?" She pointed to the scars on her belly. "I don't even know what the animal was but it had the longest fangs you've ever seen. It didn't got me though, I got these falling off a mounting while I was running from it."

"I don't believe you," Vic said, "in fact, I don't believe any of those braggers either. Those scars you got there are pretty long, you must've bled a shit ton, so how did you survive that?"

The Phylumin girl turned to him with a smirk. "You see, I'm a tough girl." She put her hands to her swinging hips. "My brother was with me. Dang it, the fucker didn't even survive the fall. That's how weak he was. This world has no place for the weak. I found the right plants, covered my wounds then sew myself shut."

"Yeah," Vic scoffed, "sew yourself shut? With what?"

"You gotta know the nature boy." Like the one of the rest of the Phylumins, her accent was strange as she prolonged the last syllable of almost every word she spoke. "You gotta know the plants, you gotta know the lands, the stone... You gotta know the air, and you'll know what to use."