The Sole Survivors' Club

Chapter 22

The sun was slipping past the horizon when Laura chose a place to rest. Once the jinniyah had taught Monica to move faster, there had been no chance to read any of the highway signs they passed. Everything in the human world blurred by too fast to make out, so Monica had no idea where they were. It was a pasture, and that was all she knew.

Laura told Monica to wait in the pasture before she turned back toward the road and flickered. One instant, she was standing beside Monica, and the next she was gone. Up until then, Monica thought she had been moving fast.

She turned to watch a group of the smaller simian jinn walk across the pasture, and she chose to follow them until they shrank in size and dropped into a hole in the ground. Monica waited for their return, but instead of the jinn, a rabbit sprang up. It saw Monica and veered away from her.

One of the smaller jinn emerged from the hole. It flew in front of the rabbit before its face distorted. The dried lips curled up to reveal black pointed teeth that were getting longer and sharper. The lower jaw popped as it extended to accommodate the growing teeth. Its cheeks stretched, and then tore at the corners of the mouth before the flesh split all the way back to the jaw.

The rabbit turned to escape, and another jinn dropped in front of it to begin the same frightening transformation.

Monica watched the rabbit run in circles to look for an escape route, and each time, another jinn blocked its path.

In this way, the jinn were able to frighten the animal to death. Their distorted faces forced her to look away, but when the rabbit screamed, she couldn’t stop herself from glancing back.

Then the jinn looked nothing like dried corpses. With their taloned hands and wide mouths filled with jagged black teeth, they looked more like demons.

The rabbit was still twitching when the jinn began to feed, and what was left of the body afterward resembled crumpled skin with only a skeleton left inside.

The thought occurred to Monica how if she found a similar body in a field, she would assume it died long before and had withered away in the heat of the sun.

Somewhere behind her, she heard another rabbit scream. She sat down, staring at the rabbit’s body while she contemplated the possibility of dying from fright.

The field became darker as the sun set, but the white light above her never moved. Long after the sun set, she couldn’t find any stars.

The few jinn she could see in the field were still visible, while the field had slipped into a shaded obscurity.

Monica looked up, wondering what the “holy fire” really was. She felt sure the jinn made up their own ideas about how the world worked, and they created a myth as an explanation for why they remained earthbound. In that way, they were still more primitive than humans.

Humans could craft a sealed environment, creating a pocket of spartan hospitality that allowed a few select humans the privilege of gazing back down on the planet.

The humans were still bound to the Earth, however, and the jinn didn’t understand that. They didn’t understand the dangers of long term exposure to a zero G environment, or grasp the idea of other planets existing beyond the atmosphere. Such concepts were part of Monica’s basic education in science, but to the jinn, the light in the sky was holy fire, and just above it was heaven.

Monica felt certain the light in the sky wasn’t holy fire. It could be radiation from the ozone layer, which was somehow brighter in the fire plane. If the radiation didn’t kill a living jinn trying to ascend, the vacuum of space surely would. Even living fire needed air to breathe.