The Order of Nexsis

Trayrock, A few days after the storm

Lyric muted the alarms that triggered as the 4WD picked it’s way through the fields, finding the tracks worn into the grasses, pausing so one of the men could get out to open the gates. Their arrival was inevitable.

She needed to keep them out of the cottage. The room of monitors would start questions that she didn’t want to answer, and she had a merman in her bathtub.

“Fucking hell,” she opened the draw and took out the handgun within it, checking that it was loaded although she knew that it was, before putting the safety on and hooking it into the back of her jeans.

She grabbed the shotgun by the front door as she stepped out onto the porch, setting it into the bushes near the steps where she could retrieve it if she needed but it wouldn’t be immediately in sight. She began to pick garbage blown in by the storm out of the garden, creating a pile weighted beneath a broken brick, trying to ignore her racing heart.

The sound of the engine broke through the backdrop sounds of river and birds, and she placed the last piece of rubbish under the brick before straightening to stand with one hand shading her eyes as the 4WD pulled up and the two men got out.

It was the militia officer from the checkpoint, she thought grimly. That casual pat on the roof that she’d taken as him indicating that she could pull away had been him adhering a tag. She hadn’t even thought to check. Stupid mistake.

“Hello,” the militia officer exchanged a smirk with his partner as they strolled towards her. “This is a secretive little hideaway that you have.”

“How so?” She replied evasively.

“Off the beaten trail would be an understatement,” the second man commented.

“Are you alone here?” The first man asked.

“What’s it to you?” She replied, frowning at him.

“She’s alone,” the second man was smugly superior. “If she wasn’t, she would answer the question.”

“Does anyone know that you live out here?” The first man looked at the roof of the cottage. “Solar power and a generator, Chris. Rainwater tanks. Greenhouse and an orchard. Pretty self-sufficient here, aren’t you?” He said to her.

“What are you thinking, Lee? Hippy or prepper?” Chris speculated.

“I’m thinking hippy,” Lee decided. “We could check her armpits for hair, and that would answer the question for us.”

“What do you want?” Lyric demanded defensively as they came uncomfortably close. “Why are you here?”

“Our job,” Lee told her reaching out to touch her hair.

“Well, I don’t need the NES,” she pulled her head back, dragging her hair out of his hand. “I have everything here under control. You can go now.”

“She’s not one of them,” Chris held a device in his hand and stuck it back into his pocket.

“So. Safe,” Lee said, and they stepped closer together, pinning her between them. “We thought you might like some company,” he stroked her hair back from her face. “Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t be out in the middle of nowhere all alone.”

“Holy fuck,” Chris’ jaw dropped, his eyes on the porch. “She’s not fucking alone.”

“What the fuck?” Lee echoed as he turned and saw the very, very naked, and wet merman standing with one hand braced on the doorframe. “What the actual fuck?”

“Look, man,” Chris stepped back, palms out. “We didn’t know that she wasn’t alone.”

“And that makes it okay?” Lyric snapped at him.

“Is his… hair green?” Lee’s hand went to his weapon. “Test him, Chris. I think he’s one of them! Step away from the house and put your hands up - ” He cried out as Lyric kicked out with the heel of her foot, his knee buckling. She shot Chris in the stomach with Lee’s weapon, a messier shot than Arthur would have approved of, but it was more important to disable him whilst she took care of Lee than to kill him cleanly.

She shot Lee in the head, and he collapsed face forward onto the pile of rubbish in a mess of brain matter.

“Please,” Chris was on his back, his bloodied hands over the wound in his stomach, and his eyes pleading. “Please…”

The bullet made a neat hole between his eyebrows, and his face relaxed, his eyes losing their spark.

She sighed heavily and put the safety onto Lee’s gun. “You should return to the bath,” she told the Merman as she searched the bodies for anything useful. “This is going to take some cleaning up.”

Lee had a tattoo on his shoulder. A symbol that she recognized, of a God’s Eye held within the layered letters of a V and H. “Shit,” she whispered. She had seen that symbol many times in Arthur’s research notes. Not just any militia, she corrected herself absently as she searched Chris for the same tattoo, finding it on his hip. The Order of Nexsis militia. Had what Arthur always feared actually come to pass, and were they enacting their plan for domination?

“I will help,” the Merman said, reminding her of his presence.

She glanced up and raised an eyebrow. “You can barely stand,” she pointed out. “Don’t worry. This is not my first time disposing of bodies. I’ll drag them to the midden hole and cover it over. I’ll have to dig a new one, but that’s a problem for another day. We will have to move today.”

There was no other option but to retreat to the bunker and wait for whatever was going to happen, she decided.

“Move?”

“Yes,” she stripped off Lee’s trousers and boots and carried them over to where the merman still stood in the doorway. He was looking better, she thought as she stepped up to him. “See if these fit. You will need clothes and Arthur wasn’t as big as you.”

“Arthur?” He held the clothing pinned against him with one arm, his head tilted to the side.

“Arthur was… Well,” she sighed heavily. “He was my father. He got sick six months ago and died.” He had refused to go see a doctor, dismissing the illness as a bad cold. One morning he had not gotten up, and when she had gone to check on him, he had passed in his sleep during the night.

“I am sorry for your loss,” the Merman said softly.

“Thank you,” she turned away. “Go back to the bath. There isn’t one in the bunker so if it is helping, you might as well soak for as long as possible. I will dispose of the bodies and then begin moving from the cottage. It’s possible that someone will come looking for these guys, and we don’t want to be here if they come this far.”

She really did not want The Order of Nexsis looking too closely at the property. Hopefully, if they came, they would think it was abandoned. She would give it six months or a year in the bunker, before returning to the cottage, and improve the alarms around the property, maybe add a few traps. Arthur had taught her how to make them but had preferred not to use them because they were perilous to the wildlife, and unmistakable if discovered – which would raise the question in the mind of the discoverer as to why the traps had been made and what they protected.

She grabbed Lee by the heels and dragged him around the house and between the trees. Traditionally a midden was a mound of rubbish, but Arthur being Arthur, he had preferred to dig a deep hole and dispose of household waste down it – not that there was ever much wasted, but what there was went into the hole and dirt was added over top to stop scavengers and pests from being attracted to it.

She had dug this midden the month before, and it was still nice and deep. She shoved the half-dressed corpse in before returning for Chris. It took a while to fill in the hole after, and she was sweating and filthy by the time she was done.

She erased the trail of blood and gore by pouring water over it. It wasn’t perfect, but it wouldn’t attract wildlife, and might not be noticed if anyone traced the men to the cottage.

She removed the tag off the roof of her Ute, crushing it to pieces between two stones before considering the problem of the 4WD. She doubted that Mermen could drive, and so wherever she dumped the 4WD it would have to be within walking distance.

She needed to shower, first, she decided, and that meant using the bathroom. “Shit,” she grumbled. The shower was separate from the bath, but it still meant being naked in the same room as the already-naked Merman.

Well, it couldn’t be helped, and she didn’t want to handle the food from the kitchen with blood and brains combined with mud into a paste on her skin. She left her shoes on the porch and padded into the bathroom. The Merman had followed her advice and had returned to the bath. 

“I cannot move with you,” he said, opening his eyes as she entered. “I need to trace down the source of the water contamination and understand its nature. I fear for my people what prolonged exposure to the toxins will mean. Although it will dilute in the great seas, we have learned from the many chemicals that humans put within the water that the delicate ecosystems of our waters can suffer extreme damage from even just a little poison.”

“I understand,” she said. “However, you can barely stand, let alone walk. I do not think that you want to return to the river in order to continue swimming upstream, or you’ll end up far worse than you already are. And you probably can’t drive, even were the roads not blocked. So, you don’t really have much choice.”

She turned on the shower water. “Do not look as I wash,” she told him sternly.

He closed his eyes again, and she waited a moment to make sure he would not peek before beginning to undress. “Something is happening that is very dangerous,” she continued. “There is a religious order whose goal is to control the world and convert everyone to their religion. The two men who came here are members of that order. My father always feared that this day would come. He spent my entire life preparing me for it.”

She stepped under the spray and closed her eyes as the water flowed over her. She had become skeptical, she admitted to herself. She had begun to wonder if Arthur had been wrong. Well, he had been vindicated by the tattoos on the two soldiers, and she would do as he had always directed her and go to the bunker.

The merman would have to come with her. If The Order of Nexsis came to the cottage in search of their missing men and found him there, they would kill him. “There is a dam just outside of Havermouth which burst during the flood,” she raised her voice over the hiss of the spray. “It’s very likely that the contamination originated from there. But you cannot walk the distance as sick as you are. Come to the bunker with me. I will show you how to drive. You can take the 4WD that the men brought here. It might get you past any checkpoints.”

“I cannot wait.”

She gasped at the closeness of his voice and opened her eyes to find that he had left the bath and entered the shower with her, standing looking down at her. “You…” She covered herself with her hands. “You should not be in here!”

“I cannot wait,” he repeated ignoring her modest outrage. “I must leave today for this Havermouth. You will need to help me.”