I was watching the news again, though it isn’t very good for my health, most likely. It never calms me; I always get in a huff about what’s going on, and I dislike ads. I want to, when possible, make my own choices. And I do, most of the time; I haven’t changed my clothing style in years. I live life simply and in the way I want.
Though living life might not be much of an opportunity these days.
The news was on the Children, as it often was these days. Always the Children, such a fuss about the Children, such a fuss about life.
They are heralds of disaster, so I can see why everyone is so worried.
They are human; that’s what the doctors all say. They did blood tests, and X-rays, and checked the DNA; homo sapiens all the way through. They don’t much look it, however; they have the flesh of a human, but are bent, twisted, and altogether unnaturally shaped. The worst part is the wheels. They all have at least one; a bony, skin-covered spur with a wheel attached, made out of flesh and blood like the rest of them. The scientists aren’t sure how the wheels happen, or why; they do know that the wheels are connected (somewhat loosely, to allow for rolling) to the body and get their food that way, through nutrients carried in the blood; they are not an anatomical impossibility. They don’t use them for rolling; those that can move walk or crawl normally.
They would not look nearly so horrifying, I think, if they didn’t have the wheels. They would look like strange humans otherwise; but something about a wheel is too unnatural, too artificial to be on a human being, especially in such an unnatural form.
I pity them, and even more the couples that bore them. They are a bit larger than normal babies, as if giving birth to something with a wheel wasn’t bad enough, and they are unusually bent, making it all the harder. I saw a broadcast on one that was born headless; it just had a wheel sprouting from its neck. It survived unusually long without food, so eventually they just decided to euthanize it.
Most are able to think just fine, at least according to the doctor’s estimates; we haven’t had them long enough for any proper gauge; they just started appearing a week ago.
At first doctors were as hysterical as the others, before deciding that it was likely due to some kind of engineered virus. This was a new and different kind of hysteria, with much finger pointing and ranting about how man was either not supposed to meddle with nature, or else political tirades advocating war.
They were not only monstrous in themselves (it is a rude term, but sadly enough a rather accurate one); they bring monstrous events. After the first appearance, it took roughly three days for statisticians to realize that the cities that the Children were in suffered from greater than normal earthquakes and more wildfires and house fires than usual. For most, that had been the final straw; there was little thought of any natural or artificial cause anymore. Some claimed aliens; some claimed other similarly preposterous things, like fairies and long-lost peoples and nephilim. Many turned to religion, and an equal number turned away. There was some talk of demons; honestly, there was much talk of demons, even though no demon that I had ever heard anyone talking about had wheels.
Most called them the Children; that would be an interesting name if they lived to adulthood, or if they turned on us, though right now they can do little that other babies cannot. Others called them the Intruders, even though they couldn’t really help being born where they were. It was, sadly enough, a name picking up steam. “Children” was a mark of pity; “Intruders” was a cause for extermination.
These were, to put it briefly, interesting times. And I was rather near the middle of them, being well acquainted with a couple who had borne one of them; it was an unusually wretched looking one, with two wheels along the spine and one replacing what would have otherwise been a small nub of an elbow.
They were rather attached to it, having named it “John”. Before it was born, with all the horror that entailed, they were going to give it the middle name Wheeler, after her grandfather, but that had been left by the wayside because of fairly obvious reasons; if it grew up to be an almost normal child, it would be a rather cruel joke of a name. I have seen it twice, so far; both times I had to put on a good face, so as not to insult them. I am sure that they saw through it, but they were still grateful for the attempt, sadly enough; I would have liked it much better if my reaction was the worst one. I’m not the best of people, but I do enjoy seeing goodness in others.
It was due to a worn-out sense of duty that I decided I ought to visit the couple again; and their child, but that was unavoidable. I should have liked to stay as far away from that thing as possible, or to move; but most towns had them now, and the towns that didn’t had skyrocketing property values due to high demand. Those towns that had them had understandably low prices, due to the risk of houses catching on fire, and earthquakes and whatnot. I don’t quite understand why people worry about those things, though, when they live in places like Houston; it was hardly any more risky living here and maybe getting your house caught on fire than living there and almost certainly getting flooded. I think it’s due to the novelty of it; if this was how things always were, I doubt anyone would care. You would hear conversations like “Hey, did you know Emily had a baby with wheels? I know, such a shame, another mouth to feed” and whatnot. As it was, people did care, and there was talk of rounding them up and removing them from civilization. There were debates, of course; did the parents have the right to keep their children with them, even if it caused harm? There were almost as many ethical discussions as there were theories about origins; it seemed every crackpot was getting plucked off the street for his theory about how they were a direct result of the Kennedy assassination.
I had managed to walk halfway to their house before I heard the cracking of wood and saw the pillar of smoke that showed where another fire was starting. I hurried over to see a stranger’s house in a roaring inferno, with glass windows cracked and the paint peeling from the few boards that weren’t burning. An injured, somewhat burnt man was sprawled on the grass, and was being picked up by his neighbors for medical care, while a woman was sobbing hysterically, something about a baby. The roaring of the flames grew louder. It would be a heartbreaking sight if I hadn’t been seeing it all the time on the news and in the paper.
This time, it was different, however. The atmosphere of tragedy, of fear, had departed; all that was left was anger at an intruder, an inhuman wheeled usurper of earth, a child that didn’t belong to their mother in species or form.
I could sense a mob forming; there was a crackle in the air, almost; a sharp metaphorical smell, the smell of democracy gone horribly wrong. I wanted nothing of it; but while I did try to distance myself from the crowd, I didn’t realize that we were going to the same place until it was a bit too late. I had thought they would have marched to a place of government, or, barring that, angrily set buildings on fire; but they had a specific target, and a vulnerable one at that: a child, or rather a Child, named John.
I had been hurrying over to talk, not in any real urgency; maybe with a warning of the anger that everyone was feeling (not that they didn’t know that). By the time I neared their house, I could see the marching mob, and I was soon swallowed up, or rather driven on; I managed to stay near the front, near to what seemed to be either the leader or the figurehead of the mob, that same ash-coated woman who I had seen before, marching to kill a baby. A mother’s love, indeed.
The mob swept ever closer, carrying me with it, like a hateful wave ready to crash down on its victim. I tried to move aside before I got to the house, but there were people on all sides who likely would not take my attempt at leaving kindly; I tried running ahead, but that only seemed to make them run towards the house faster. The smell of a hundred people pressed up close behind me, as we rushed through the carefully mowed lawn in front and crushed the flowers that had been planted on the indirect path that led up to the door; soon I was up against the door, which had been locked, thankfully. That should buy them a little bit of time. A huge man wearing a barbecue apron, evidently joining the mob while in the middle of cooking, pushed me aside and started trying to batter the door down with a large brick that had been lying to the side of the lawn, where the father of the Child had been intending to build a flower bed. After two minutes of loud thumps and the cracking of wood, while I was pressed against the wall of the house by the push of people clamoring to see this man break down the door. A maternal-looking old woman, rather grandmotherly in appearance, was cheering him on loudly, though you could hardly hear it in the roar of the crowd. At any other time, I would have handed her a baby, had she asked to see it, happily, and without much worry; but now she, like all the rest in the crowd, was begging for the death of another.
The door broke, with a loud crack, and as the huge man, tired and weary, stepped away, as I was swept even further into the house. We found the family cowering in a corner on the second floor; the father had a gun, but so did several of the attackers, and he soon fell to the ground, quiet and unmoving.
I winced, and tried to move away, backing myself into a corner near the open window. Outside I could see a pool, with a large, sagging tarp over it, as it wasn’t being used, right next to the heavy hedge which separated their backyard from the neighbors; I could hear police sirens in the distance, as either one of the Child’s parents or an active bystander had called.
I could see the mother, a few feet away from me, holding on tightly to the baby; it was swaddled up in clothes, which looked a bit strange; when swaddled, very few babies have large bumps in the wrapping caused by wheels.
Suddenly, despair in her eyes, the mother threw the baby at me. Normally, baby tossing is a bad idea, but when it is likely to die anyway, it makes little difference. As it was, I nearly fumbled it; I scrambled to hold it, bumpy with wheels as it was. John was heavy, as much as it was oddly-shaped. The Child had large and unusually expressive eyes on an asymmetrical face, though whatever cuteness the eyes might have caused was inverted by their inhuman setting on the warped face.
Outside I could see the tarp, and the sirens were louder, right outside the house; if I could delay the mob for a minute more, the police would be here, and there would be a bit of hope for the Child's survival.
The tarp looked reasonably soft; he would probably live. Probably.
One of the mob members who had a gun advanced. He likely thought I was a mob member, but was wondering why I wasn’t killing the Child.
I could hear the screams of the mother; she was being hauled away by some of the mob, the mother of the now-burnt child among them.
I looked at the child, looked at the tarp, looked at the gun.
He would, I thought, very likely shoot me if I tried to save the child.
Very carefully, and very guiltily, I placed the child down.
I averted my eyes as another person stomped it; there was a crunch, and a short, swiftly-ending cry; I heard more stomps, and there was another crunching noise, wetter and softer this time.
I felt something touch my foot; I looked at it, hesitantly, to see that it was a bloody and detached wheel that had rolled up to my foot.
My stomach churned.
The next few minutes were slow, and I don’t remember much more than angry yelling and policemen arresting most of the mob members. I was also pulled aside and arrested; I didn’t protest.
I knew that there would be witnesses enough; plenty of people would see what I had done. I didn’t care much; I had an argument, and if it didn’t work and I went to jail anyway, well, I probably deserved it.
The next day, roused from my cell, I was prepared for a hearing. A guard unlocked the door, and it creaked slightly as he opened it. It seemed to be a little-used cell, which made sense; an entire mob had been arrested the day before. With my heart heavy, and my mind preparing my many justifications, I was unprepared for an already-passed sentence.
“You're free to go,” the guard said somewhat gruffly. “The supreme court said that you all get amnesty, except the actual killer.”
And that was it.
Every night, I feel a little bit guilty. A little bit. I’m not a very good person, as I said before; besides, I had my reasons for doing it, even if they were justifications after the fact. One of us was very likely going to die, whatever I did.
But the worst part of it all was that I was let free, scott free. I should feel thankful, but instead I worry about the Children. We don’t know anything about them; maybe they are good, maybe they are evil, and maybe they aren’t anything either way. Things are changing, things are speeding up. The wheel turns.