Doubletake

23

I had a teacher once.…I know. I had many, and many of them had tasted so good that I wondered if it was the meals I liked more than the learning. But one of my teachers had read a quote to his students by a human not as weak-minded as the others. I thought of it when I thought of my brother and the pain and burn of the bullet wounds in my chest. They would heal as all my wounds did and it was worth it to see what I’d seen. To hear what I’d heard. This long-dead human whose words were repeated to us should have met Caliban in the grass and fire, explosions and blood. Those words were something close to, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” That human would’ve known, seeing the face of Caliban, the flecks of red in the gray of his eyes, that his words had come far too late.

I smiled to myself, sitting on the ledge of the desert cavern, the full moon directly over the entrance turning the inside to winter. White walls, white floor, a huge mass of white slithering amongst one another, clawing and biting, snarling and playing the hunt, longing for the real thing. There were over a thousand of them. It was a start. I planned on hundreds of thousands. One day a million. But numbers didn’t matter. I already had an unstoppable army. I had a way to go yet, but a brother who was my equal, perhaps more than, and soon would be as much a part of the Second Coming as we all were here. He would take convincing that the Auphe were gone beyond resurrection and that he was above them, as were the Bae, but I’d had all those teachers. Why couldn’t I teach myself? I thought that, given a cage, a fiery poker, and a bucket of acid, he’d learn my lessons soon enough. See the light, or rather the dark. And then things would change.

The world would change.

Caliban thought the Second Coming was the future, thought there was time to stop it. He was wrong.

The Second Coming was here.

The Second Coming was now.

Those who remained would be something new, something old, something one day to be like everything on this earth.

Everyone the same as the next and the next and the next…

Bae.

And not a human to be found anywhere.

Now who was the failure?