Sin-Eater - Chapter 49: Compulsion (Patreon)

“We should just go,” whispers Alleluia in a hushed whisper as she holds the two large, greasy barrels over her shoulders, staining the fabric of her dress with leaking human-fat that had been collected during likely several ‘harvesting’ processes. Canta shushes her, looking around the next corner towards the staircase.

“No. Not until we’re done here.”

“But… are you sure?” she asks. Canta doesn’t answer, gesturing for her to follow after him now that he’s identified the coming hallway as clear. He runs forward, making his way towards the upwards heading staircase. On the way, he grabs more lanterns from the wall, adding them to the collection already in his hands, plus the one he had strapped into his belt.

He’s sure.

As for his plan, it has to be up here, it’s the only thing that makes sense. He saw the mechanisms hanging above the pit from the lower balcony that he had dragged her away from with something present in his heart and eyes that wasn’t there before.

She runs after him now, the two of them making their way up the stairs of the facility, towards the highest floor. Several pipes run along the area in all manner of directions. He places his hands onto one of them, feeling nothing run through it.

“This way,” he says in a hushed voice, following the length of the pipe as it goes left, down a narrowing maintenance corridor and then, leading up to a room with a small tank filled with stagnant rainwater that has collected through the open ceiling. Nobody is around upstairs. It’s simply an open half-room on the roof. The water is filled with squiggling larvae and swimming bugs. He leans over, looking into it. He’s pretty sure there’s a dead bird down there too.

“What’s this? A bath?” asks Alleluia.

“It’s their water,” explains Canta, setting down the lanterns. “Did you see the metal disks above the pit? Hanging from the pipe on the ceiling?” he asks, looking at the dead bird. “They probably empty this out once every two or three days, to give them something to drink.”

“It’s not a lot.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” he explains. “Chuck those in here.”

“Are you really sure?” she asks. “There’s no going back from this,” says Alleluia.

“You’re right,” agrees Canta. “There isn’t,” he says, staring into her eyes. She nods, setting the barrels down, cracking them open and then pouring in the liquefied human-grease into the water tank. Canta screws open the base of the lanterns in his hands with his goblin-dagger, pouring the remaining oil into the water as well. “Once we do this, we’re making a break for the drainage room.”

“Where’s that, though?” she asks.

“Back the way we came,” he explains, already knowing the answer. “Where they carried that one kid too.”

“Why would they carry her to the drainage room?”

“To drain her,” replies Canta, simply tossing the rest of the lanterns wholesale into the pool. A mixture of stagnant-wet, oil and separated human-fat splashes out of the sides. Alleluia doesn’t respond, throwing the second barrel inside of the vat as well. Her dress is covered in a staining streak of human body-fat. “Ready?” he asks. Alleluia nods and he grabs her hand, both of their palms covered in greasy viscera. They run back down the way towards the stairs and Canta turns the only valve present on the pipes. He’s sure it’s the mechanism to start the water-flow. A second later, he feels the water rushing through it, shaking the metal.

The two of them run back down the steps to the hallway, turning down to return to the warehouse.

Something hisses, Canta and Alleluia stop on the stairs, looking at the very confused lizard-creature staring up their way, just going up in that same second. Canta’s fist clenches and he jumps down the steps, dagger in hand, slamming the blade into the quickly-lifted arm of the giant, musclebound creature. Dark blood pours out of the wound, but it seems unimpressed, glaring up at him with cold eyes a second later.

Canta lets go of the dagger, dropping down to his knees as the metal fist flies past where his head was a second ago. A sickening crack fills the air, the thing spasms, its entire body twitching and it falls over, its head not where it should be, in an ideal scenario.

His stomach turns as he sees the body flop against the ground. Not even he wants to eat this.

Alleluia grabs his hand, their fingers smearing together with the fresh blood now as well. He tears his dagger out of the thing’s arm and they keep going, running back towards the balcony where there is an odd… silence.

There aren’t any screams or cries. The wretched, flailing mass that had been screaming in eternal agony only minutes ago is now entirely silent. Canta hates them for it. The two of them reach the overlooking balcony and stare down at the thing there is to see. The hall is silent. Greasy water drips down from above, running through the sprinklers attached to the ceiling. He looks down at the things that might have once been human in generations past.

All of them sit there, naked, wretched, covered in bites and sores and all manner of mangled wounds. But they sit there quietly, entirely still, their hands cupped up towards the sky, filling with water as do their eyes, or those might just be his own, as they practice what might be the last of the human knowledge remaining for them. Prayer. Canta hates them for it. He grips the lantern on his belt, feeling the oil-slicked water wash down his body, covering his front. Every last one of them sits there, their hands cupped and filling up with overflowing oily-water, their faces are bright, as if they were receiving the greatest bounty of their time.

He hates them for it.

He wants to scream at them, to jump down and lash each and every one of them until they wake up. Canta clenches his teeth, grabbing the lantern and pulling it free from his undone belt. He wants to sink his teeth into every one of those glossy-eyed fucks until they wake up and start screaming, start lashing, start flailing. But not at each other, but rather at the threat. At the thing that has made them become what they have become.

But he can’t do that, they have to leave, now. It’s lucky they haven’t been found yet. But it’ll only be seconds, minutes before someone realizes this isn’t supposed to be happening. Oddly enough, Canta is jokingly thankful that his front is covered in human-fat. In oil. In grease and stagnant water. He arcs his arm back.

Back in the church, he had learned that they baptized every new born into this world.

He supposes that this is his.

Canta throws the lantern into the pit as hard as he can and runs, grabbing Alleluia’s hand as the two of them make their way down the long hallway, back towards the initial intersection.

He can’t really hear the eruption behind them, as the flame of the broken lantern leaps from one oil soaked body to the next. He can’t really hear any screams of those human-things being burnt alive. Whatever they might once have been, they aren’t those things any longer. Whatever he once might have been, he isn’t that thing any longer.

But he just wishes that they’d scream. He can see the light spiring up through the orange glow enveloping the hallway ahead of them, as the flames crawl along the oil-slicked walls of the pit, creeping upwards like a hand waving goodbye to them. He can smell the burning of meat. He can hear the sizzling of flesh.

But none of them scream and he hates them for it.

Canta clenches his hand around his knife, needing something to hold. He hates them for it so much.

The door to the left of the intersection, the one they had come into the slaughterhouse from, bursts open and a group of the lizard creatures make eye-contact with them.

“RUN!” shouts Canta and the two of them break ahead, going straight down the way towards the small, dead-end room at the end of the hallway from which a quiet moaning can be heard. Alleluia rips the door open and they jump inside. She runs to the grate of the drainage room, lifting it up while Canta stares at the girl hanging there above, still alive, a meat-hook pierced through her broken shoulder-blade.

She can’t talk, having grown up as a feral and having never learned of any such things as speech or verbal communication past grunts, so she simply hangs there on the hook, her body draining out through the long, vertical slits cut deeply along her legs, the blood dripping down through the grate into the drainage-channel. Alleluia lifts the grate. Canta has had enough and now screams himself, just so that somebody finally will, stabbing his dagger once into the girl’s heart.

She remains quiet.

Alleluia grabs him and pulls him down into the sewer passage, just as the door behind them breaks open.