Story #148: What Lies Beneath the Surface

Story #148: What Lies Beneath the Surface (Content Tags: Grim setting, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi with some horror, diapers, messing, wetting, worldbuilding) People would sometimes speak of a time before the 'fog'. A time when the air was pure and sun broke the grey oppression of the sky. Nobody alive had witnessed what that might have been like firsthand, they could only pass down stories of a bygone era. The fog had been a way of life for hundreds of years now; it was difficult to imagine a time without it. A time where a person was given the chance to dream of a better tomorrow; a time where a child didn't have to fight tooth and nail to have a dignified future. The truth of the present was grim, but it had become an omnipresent familiarity. Generation after generation. When someone is born into a system, no matter how nightmarish, it becomes routine. If there exists no outside notions, then it becomes just another one of Plato's many caves. Harkening back to a mythological golden age, which may not have even ever existed, was but the fleeting fantasy of drifting dreamers who'd lost the will to fight for a better spot within this societal prison. Leaf was one of those dreamers. A runty lad in a litter of eight, who struggled each day to get by, and who'd nearly given up hope that he'd be one of the fortunate ones. The city was a machine, and each citizen a gear in it, but not all gears were made equal. A tale as old as time, that there always had to be an underclass, and that was his current trajectory. Out of his litter, he'd received a very poor amount of brain pellets or growth pellets. Some days, he could hardly get his dosage of the 'bulb'. If he couldn't improve himself, then he'd linger further behind, and he'd be taken by the fog. Once that happened, he'd then be taken to the 'fuel pit', and-- Well, it wasn't something he liked to think too hard about. That's why he was a dreamer, and why he preferred the tender touch of escapism. It was all he could do to not completely crumble and resign himself to his fate. Today was particularly important though. His output had been bad all week, and if he didn't return with something substantial, then he might be going to the pit more quickly than he'd anticipated. He had no real skills to make use of, and he was a tiny thing, so he spent his days as a scavenger. His job was to travel into the wastes and find resources, while avoiding the ruins. The wastelands hadn't been kind of him though. His diaper was heavier than his bag, and he was getting nowhere. Desperation set in, panic, from the knowledge of what would happen next. He had to earn his keep. He was extremely fortunate to even get a chance at a better life! He'd seen the 'welfare' families, where the children fought like animals to take all the 'government issued' pellets for themselves, like gerbils in a cage. A runt like him could never survive that kind of rat race. This way, he could at least only blame himself for the results that he saw. Rugged individualism and a luxury of liberty that not everyone got a chance for. With that mindset, he had no choice but to enter the ruins. He'd long seen them from afar, but he'd been warned against entering them. But now here he was, on the streets of a long fallen kingdom that time had forgotten, with little to protect him except his gas mask, his pea-shooter, and his saber. The fog collected more densely in the derelict cityscape; the purple haze, dazzling to the eyes, wasn't immediately fatal at these amounts, but was ten times as potent as what he normally had to breathe in. Without his respirator and a properly functioning filter, he wouldn't last more than an hour. He'd have to keep an eye on it. More concerning than the air quality was the presence of 'them'. The creatures might have been human at one point, a very long time ago, but now they were just a forgotten footnote in the chronicles of mankind's failures. This had been their city, their planet really, but then the third great cataclysm happened. Life as a drone in the fuel pit was actually preferable, to a vast degree; there was nothing else, not even necessarily death, that could get that same distinction. It was a blessing really, that most of the creatures resembled their original form very little. They hadn't been even remotely human for over a couple hundred years, but he wasn't sure he would have been able to pull the trigger so easily if they had those sad human eyes. Ideally, he wouldn't have to pull the trigger at all; running into them and engaging them was a danger he was hardly cut out for. His strategy was stealth and reconnaissance. He was quiet, he was patient, and he was vigilant. Just one of those things could kill him if he wasn't careful, and it could take only a single wrong move to lose his life; just a poor split-second reaction... He'd never even had to fight one before. He'd just heard stories around the fire, and bluster from bigger kids who had most certainly never seen them either. They came in different shapes and sizes; the 'mourners' were the ones most visible and the least dangerous, since they hardly moved from their gloomy, slumped posture. He'd already seen a few of those in the streets, but as long as he didn't rattle them, then they were effectively harmless. The 'nomads' were a little more dangerous, since they were actively mobile, but they shambled like zombies, and they lost their flesh in disgustingly similar ways. They could only attack prey by getting lucky or by exploiting their own vast numbers. The only surface-dwelling ones that he had to worry about, that he'd almost certainly soil his 'waste receptacle' in fear over, were the 'Fog-horns' and the 'Oozers'. The most dangerous ones, besides those two, lived either below the ruins or closer to the crater of the cataclysm, and he had no desire to go anywhere close to that, so he just needed to keep an eye out for the other two. A 'Fog-horn' was speckled in thousands of tiny holes, deep holes, like a living hive, and they could let out a deafening noise from those holes, like their body was an instrument that air flowed through. That noise would cause all sorts of unpleasant things to gather; even the stuff from below. 'Oozers' on the other hand were like wandering mutagenic bombs; a living biohazard that could spew forth a sludge that would change genetic code in rapid, volatile ways. Those heavy hitters were allegedly a lot more rare, and he'd never personally seen either of them, except in crude drawings. Leaf didn't really want to personally see them either, since he wasn't sure that he'd survive an encounter with one. Unfortunately, things didn't always go according to plan. After an hour of carefully scouting out a promising spot to scavenge, he'd begun to sift through the relics and personal effects of a long-gone time. It was impossible to tell exactly what the building had once been used for, but it looked important, and like it might have some rarities. Lost technology and lost knowledge, no matter how insignificant, were the big-ticket items. Resources like scrap metal or plastic were fine, but he'd have to haul a lot of it to catch up on all of his necessary pellets. He needed something light and extremely valuable to have made this journey worthwhile. He'd thought he found something like that, a gizmo that looked busted but rare, but when he'd gone to take it, he had realized that he wasn't as alone in the building as he'd thought. It was an oozer, and a particularly disgusting looking one. It had no human features left to speak of; its body, gangly and grotesque, looked partially dissolved, with the sallow, sagging flesh having become like a dripping putty. There was no head to speak of, just a gaping hole that was a terrifying valley of mismatched teeth and that was loudly gurgling as it spewed forth a neon-colored fluid. It moved along the ground like an animal, but with its freakishly long limbs and inverted joints, it was like no animal that he'd seen. Leaf had been shaken. More than that, he'd been frozen by his terror. The creature didn't seem to have eyes to see him, but it was almost 'sniffing' at the ground of the room, getting closer, while the colorful sludge poured from its front. Leaf stopped his breathing, only able to hear his own heart beating like a drum in his chest. As it got closer, it became more obvious how very small he was in comparison to the creature; the oozer could swallow him whole, through that disgusting facsimile of a mouth that it had. Closer and closer it came, Leaf's body uncontrollably shaking. And then, when it was only a foot or two away from him, a large, hot lump of dung suddenly and audibly plopped itself right into his soggy diaper. Of all the times to lose what poor control he had over his bowels...! The monster let forth a guttural shriek and Leaf knew that he had to get out. Now. With his bowels still helplessly evacuating, heavily at that, Leaf made sure to do the same; the boy quickly pivoted on his feet and made a mad dash for the nearest doorway. The mobile maw made chase, blindly bumping into rubble along the way, but hardly being slowed by it. The thing was shockingly quick for how it looked, and very strong too, since it destroyed whatever got in its way. Leaf didn't know where he was running, not really. Corridor after corridor, he fled as fast as his little feet could take him, without any idea of a final destination. He wasn't sure if the monster had heard him, or if it had smelled him, but the distinction didn't matter much at this point; if he couldn't shake this thing somehow, then he was going to die in these forsaken ruins. Or worse, he'd join as a new resident. A left, and then a right, and then another left, and then-- CRASH! The bellowing beast burst right through a wall and collided sloppily with the one that was directly in front of Leaf's path. The boy stumbled backwards, falling onto his mucky bottom with a sickening squelch, and then the floor gave out beneath him. There were scant seconds that he knew what was happening, and his mind couldn't keep up. One moment the filth in his diaper was smearing grossly across his buttocks, and the next he was falling into an inky abyss. Everything went black. Leaf would wake to a dull hum, a blue glow, and an aching everything. He was disoriented and he didn't remember anything at first, but as he rolled onto his side and winced at the pain from his ribs, it all came back. The fall must have knocked him out, but for how long? Time was a pressing concern. He checked his watch and saw it'd been over an hour; that wasn't ideal, but it also wasn't an insurmountable challenge. The real challenge, he quickly pondered, was finding his way back up. He'd been on the street-level floor when the floor had collapsed, which meant he was somewhere underground now; that also meant the risk was much, much higher. The oozer would haunt his dreams for months, and now he might be in the den of something far more gruesome. Leaf began to explore the room where he'd fallen. The hum of a machine was mystifying for him; the barbaric machinery of the city he called home was loud and abrasive. Following the gentle sound deeper in, as well as the faint blue glow, something surprising came into view: It was a little boy in some sort of pod. He hung freely in a translucent orange liquid, curled up in a fetal position. He looked different than anyone that Leaf had ever seen: unblemished by the cruel wastes and their toxins. Leaf himself was fortunate enough to have avoided much in terms of defects from the poison world he was born into, but not everyone was so lucky. This boy on the other hand looked almost divine in his appearance. Leaf was captivated and he was curious. The mysterious boy looked to be dead and crudely preserved in some kind of formaldehyde sarcophagus. Looking closer though, it almost looked like he was somehow breathing in there; he bobbed up and down, so it was hard to tell, but that couldn't have been possible, right? A person couldn't usually breathe underwater, at least not without some gross mutated neck grooves. Leaf turned his head to the rest of the enigmatic machine. Whatever this thing was, it looked completely alien to the grim aesthetic he was accustomed to, like something out of a dream. Leaf had worked in the factories before, and nothing inside of them had the sleekness that this stuff had. It reignited his fantasies about what the supposed golden era must have been like, for them to have lived with stuff like this. Leaf was functionally illiterate, so looking at the words on the machine wasn't really an option, and that was assuming it wasn't some kind of long-dead language anyway. He curiously prodded at a button, and then a couple of more, which resulted in some bemusing little beeps from the machinery. "Okay, okay, just one more...And then I need to find an exit." He murmured to himself, looking for whichever button looked the biggest. There was a flashing light and the dull sound of an alarm that had weakened from centuries of neglect. Leaf stumbled back, but kept his balance; the pod began to drain of the orange fluid, leaving the mysterious child at the bottom. The pod then let out a loud hiss of steam, and it began to fully open. Leaf wondered if he'd just effectively disturbed the eternal resting ground of this poor soul, but out of morbid curiosity, he approached the glass sphere. "...Ugghh...Five more minutes..." Came a groggy whine from inside the pod. Leaf's jaw dropped and he froze in his tracks; how was this kid alive? And why was he even here? "Uhhh...Hello? Are you okay? I found you floating an' I thought you were dead..." Leaf finally peered right into the pod and saw the kid inside stirring and sitting up with a yawn. He rubbed his eyes, "...Dead? I'm not dead. Well, maybe dead tired." The boy finally looked up to see the face of the one talking to him and woke up completely at what he saw. He let out a shriek and toppled backwards at the eerie sight of the gas mask that was leering out at him, "G-get away! Get back!" "H-hey, it's okay, I'm not going to hurt you! Honest..." He tried to assuage, before quickly realizing what was spooking the boy. It wouldn't hurt to take it off briefly, since the toxin levels were so low in this room, so Leaf slipped the gas mask down and showed that he was just a fellow kid too. That looked to help and Leaf offered his hand to help the boy get out of the strange glass pod. As he got out, the mysterious child looked bashful at his less than dignified state. His free hand went down to cover his front, and Leaf felt similarly embarrassed to be in such an awkward position. "Uh, I'm Leaf. What's your name?" "Azrael, but you can just call me Az..." He was already looking around for something to cover himself up with and had to settle for a clipboard that was hanging near the machine. "Good to meet you...But, umm, why were you in that glass thing? And how are you alive at all? Nobody's been down here for a really, really long time..." Az pondered the questions briefly, but then his nose began to wrinkle. "I-uh...umm... What's that awful smell?" "O-oh, I guess that's me. I was on an expedition and I knew it'd be dangerous, so I wore a waste receptacle..." That was a more sterile term that sometimes got used when referring to the drones; it was devoid of emotion, but it also didn't carry the same immediate stigma as a more informal term might. Az looked confused, "A waste receptacle? What's that supposed to mean?" "Well, it's something you wear under your clothes and it catches, umm, waste.." "Waste? Like poop? Are you telling me that you're wearing a diaper under that? You're almost as big as me!" "...Yeah, kind of, I guess." It was undeniably a diaper, and Leaf was giving himself more credit than he deserved on how much he really needed it. "You're just a big, stupid baby then. Where's everyone else, I need to talk to someone about getting some underwear or something; I'd settle for a towel at this point..." Leaf cleared his throat, "There isn't really anyone else. Not here, at least. People haven't lived outside the irons for like, hundreds of years... And you probably don't want it, but I have a couple of extra diapers in my bag. It'd at least be better than being naked. Either way, I need to go ahead and change." Az cringed and let out a sigh, "...Yeah, I guess I'll wear one. Too flippin' cold down here to be running around with a bare butt." Leaf pulled the last two diapers from his bag and nodded. He started to get undressed, until he was down to just the sagging garment around his waist. "It'd be easiest if we helped each other out. You change me and I'll change you; that's fair, isn't it?" "Ugh...I guess so...You're lucky I had to watch those data-dookers a few times. You can start telling me about what's going on too; I'm having a hard time remembering some stuff..." In a world covered by fog, where mankind had lost his history, there was about to be a beacon on the hill.