Beneath The Alpha

Please note: this is a dark romance novel. There will be triggering and reoccuring themes that will not settle well with certain audiences i.e abuse, battlefield violence, ongoing aspects of torture, graphic sexual content and profanity. 

Reader's discretion is advised.

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enjoy!

One Century Ago

It would rain tonight. 

Reeves Gerfast did not need to glance over his shoulder to know the sky was darkening behind him as black clouds drew in from the East, with a gait made ponderous by the weight of precipitation bellying at their core. 

He could smell it— the thick, earthy  petrichor. It threaded through the air and billowed past the curtains to curl along the sensitive nape of his neck, stirring the fine hairs with the familiar touch of a lover. Its cooling presence offered reprieve from the day’s humidity, which had left the intoxicating smell of chemicals and embalming preservatives to settle in a soupy mirage.

Gerfast exhaled deeply as the bunched yet frail muscles lining his back and shoulders began to soften under the lull of the receding afternoon heat. Rays of light began to ebb from the walls and floor on silent feet, slinking over misplaced furniture, large jars teeming with body parts, and two bodies with a dark sheet drawn over them. 

The accruing darkness did little to draw his attention away from the cadaver set before him on his work surface. 

She had been a female overseer with a sunken face and a perpetual look of disdain, even in death, that served to frighten the slaves into servitude. From the golden band still hammered on her right bicep, Gerfast knew her rank was formidable within the lower side of the colony.

Her scarred body spoke of a ruthless life as an overseer. The lengths of her forearms were marked by slices of skin ripped from the nails of slaves, possibly mothers, who fought and failed to save their children during auction separations.

Patches of fur still remained half-meshed in her skin from an incomplete shift. Her tailbone which had splintered through the skin of her lower back now lay discarded in the corner alongside the mortician’s saw.

The sight was nothing new to him. 

While she lay dying in the throes of absolute agony, her wolf had tried and failed to take form. Perhaps it was instinctual– to comfort one’s other half in their final breath. Perhaps she had cried out to the animal in a terrible bout of insanity, or maybe… just maybe, the wolf was attempting to escape the mortal body that had failed her so early in life.

For whatever reason, Gerfast did not give a damn.

Her life of opulence, ruthlessness and cruelty had been reduced to nothing but a cadaver in a mortician’s shop for the lowly.

“Death don’t discriminate… no, it don’t,” he muttered while reaching into his chest pocket for a kerchief. A sheen of perspiration surfaced on his forehead despite the lowering of temperatures. “Come nightfall and them body collectors do their rounds, you’ll be with the same people you loathed.” 

He swore her scowl deepened at the bitter irony of his words.

Sinking his fingers into the obscene dark of her cavernous thorax, he gripped the ribs and spread them wide, relishing the crunch and snap of bone: a delicacy not only to an undertaker’s ears. He took his time pointing each rib to the ceiling in a parody of jagged mountain tops. 

The amalgam of rotted viscera which lay within her had been removed at dawn while the temperatures were still cool enough to prevent the stench of it multiplying. Face screwed in disgust, Gerfast had stepped back as her swollen belly spilled contents cradled within, onto the floor in wet sucking sounds. The foetid odour that permeated from her insides set his nostrils quivering with a burn-like sensation starting at the back of his eyes. 

The disease had eaten her through and through and left it dark. 

Whatever life still harboured within this corpse creeped and crawled and dove into holes in flesh as they scrambled away to escape the light. 

A feeling like loss echoed in his chest as he nudged aside bits of pieces of guts while searching for parts that had been untouched. There were none.

“Goddamn you woman.” If she was angered by the degradation of her body, this must be her revenge. 

Crouching low he reached for her femur only for the bone to shatter within the clutch of his grasp and form a chalky paste as he rubbed the contents between his fingers. 

Along his periphery he saw movement– an infinitesimal shift of the heart which lay a few centimetres from the table. He watched it struggle to move across the floor like some wounded animal, the sight of it half-perplexing and comical enough to elicit a wheezing breath of laughter through the mortician’s nose.

The sound died at the sight of a handful of maggots resurfacing and curving downwards as they languorously feasted on the thick muscle of her left ventricle.

He threw away the guts bitterly.

Now sitting before the body in the dying light with a forehead furrowed deep enough to pocket a dime, Gerfast considered the ribs with a short stubby liver-spotted finger. Their surface was not as brittle as the rest of the bones in her body. His hand curled around one length tentatively and gave it a gentle squeeze. A relieved sigh escaping him at the feel of it still whole in his palm, he pulled and watched its point of attachment to the decayed spine easily give way.

I can sell it. He thought while lifting the rib for inspection in the dim light of his workshop which smoothed any visible flaws, my rapport might drop but they will pay me.

Should they choose to overlook the flaws and still purchase the bones, for a price he was certain would only keep him alive for another day or two, Gerfast knew that they would fall apart along transportation to the North.

Anyhow, it would be of no use by the time they return for him. 

His shop would be closed alongside thousands of others affected by the rot. It had become increasingly evident that the affliction devoured the body from the inside, and for people like Gerfast who relied on selling body parts to the Elites in exchange for money, this would be the forked road by which his career and him would part ways. 

“Needed to retire anyhow.” A humourless smile graced his lips amidst the sound of breaking bones. He laid them side by side on an open cloth spread beside her hip and continued plucking the bones like delicate lilies in a garden of black, until all were carefully wrapped and ready for transportation the next day. 

Tucking her sternum back in, Gerfast began to sew her shut whilst muttering to himself incoherently and unaware of the figure that loomed by the gaping window watching him.

A disruptive knock on the window nearly led the needle astray and into the calloused flesh of his finger. 

A flare of irritation sharply rose to his jaw, throbbing there like an erratic heartbeat. 

“Goddamnit I told ‘em not to bother me while working— what?” 

“Howdy.” The stench reached him before the boy did, like dairy left to sour in the sun for a prolonged period of time it pervaded the room without remorse, leaving the mortician's nostrils quavering in utter revulsion.  

To mask the disgust that twisted his face– for it could be a potential customer– Gerfast withdrew his kerchief and carefully dabbed at the beaded sweat along his upper lip, holding the cloth there in a dull attempt at barricading the smell from him.

He paused and took a few deep breaths to reign in the ire in his voice.

Slowly and with what seemed great effort, the mortician dragged his gaze from the cadaver across the room and to the figure outlined by the dying sun. 

The distance did little to conceal the layers of grime that caked the boy’s skin where scars from a pox outbreak could not. His unimpressed stare wandered up the waif’s whippet-thin body hidden beneath a scrawny piece of material that was once a servant’s tunic.

Gerfast could only think of the boy’s foolishness for standing by his window just outside the market. He must be blocking the path for people.

Foolish…

and young. 

The skin along his scalp was pink compared to the splotchy brownness of his cheeks, pale blue eyes peered at him affably from within the defined collared cups of his skull.

Gerfast looked at him long enough for the boy to shift his weight onto his other foot and lick at the iridescent sweat along his upper lip in apparent shyness. 

The mortician turned back to the cadaver and resumed his hunched position over it, stitching away at the hollow gut.

“How are you?” The boy asked.

“I ain’t worth shit. You?”

“Tolerable thank ye.” In the silence that lapsed between, he felt the stranger’s gaze wandering around the room in wary curiosity— flickering from metallic tables laid upon with surgical instruments to the wooden buckets of arsenic brimming with guts and viscera. Those blue eyes fell upon his back with a hesitant touch, “I take it ye the bossman?”

“You see someone else here?”

“What?”

Gerfast scowled at the corpse.

Had he looked back he would have seen the boy squinting into the room as if expecting an apparition of the boss to appear from nothingness. “I been meaning to ask…” a pause. “I been meaning to ask… ye aint got nary work ‘bout here I could do?”

“Who sent you?” Sealing the chest closed Gerfast tied a knot on the string and leaned down to secure the extra length between his incisors, a delicate shiver winding down his spine the cold dead flesh brushed the tip of his nose, and cut it. 

“Pardon?”

“Tell them sons of bitches I don’t need no help, if I needed one I’d of bought a slave.”

“None sent me, I jus’ come on my own.” The boy shuffled on his feet at the first rumble of thunder in the distance: a sound so deep Gerfast felt it reverberate from the foundation and up his arthritic limbs. 

Both swivelled to watch the darkness bleed across the face of the city like some heliotropic plague that eclipsed the sun and threatened to plunge the world in a cocoon of near blackness.

People had began to close up shop, wooden boards drawn over stall windows, cart fulls of produce drawn away by severely whipped donkeys, mothers amok snatching their babes while orphans frolicked out in the open fields naked as day with tongues lolling out of their mouths waiting for the free shower.

The slaves were the only unstirred of the lowly. Backs bent like warping branches over the stalks of sugarcane and cotton, they worked hollow-eyed and with quiet apathy as overseers stood in the distance beneath umbrellas suspended by servants while thumbing long leather whips holstered at the hip.

“You ain’t said.” Gerfast blinked in confusion at the sight of the boy still standing by the window with an open look of expectation. 

“What?”

“If you needed help.”

“I need no kind of help.” He bid him away with a wave of his hand, “get on gone.”

“Know anywhere that needs work?”

The fabric of his patience had worn to a final thread that gerfast believed the boy was toying with. 

“I don’t,” the boy’s lips parted to speak when he interrupted, “reckon you can find work down the road.”

“Where?”

“Down. Don’t know where down is?”

The length of which the boy stared at him was enough to raise a sliver of doubt within the mortician. Was he deaf? Toying with him?

But then the youth pivoted, the movement so simple yet made awkward with his off gaite. Slowly he swivelled left and right like a guard at watch, pale blue eyes circumventing the expanse of city and people before returning to Gerfast. “Thata’way?”

He nodded.

“Thank ye,” the boy said, “much obliged.”

Gerfast gave him one last half-contemptuous look and turned back to the corpse, already reaching for another set of needle and thread to sew up the hole on its abdomen when the boy stopped and returned back to the window.

“Hey,” he said.

The mortician looked at him in irascible amazement. 

“What’s that name again?”

 “What?”

“You ain’t tell me ‘bout the place down there, reckon it got a name?”

“Roger’s..” It was the first and only name to conjure in the fog of his worn mind.

The boy’s lips parted to speak then hesitated at the anger that flashed swift as a passing shadow over the mortician’s face. “Well I thank ye.” He donned the cap again and used his reflection on the window to adjust it with the propriety of one might a silk scarf.

Satisfied with the result the youth raised a hand slightly in farewell. 

Gerfast stared vacantly until the boy was near out of sight then rose and made his way to the window for confirmation of something dull that niddled the back of his mind. With hands braced on the sill for balance, the man leaned out and gazed at the boy’s slender back marked with thin whip-marks that resembled capillaries networking across the expanse.

Pedestrians that crossed the boy’s path stepped sideways creating breadth to avoid him, and Gerfast finally understood why.

“Goddamn…” The skin of his left leg had peeled off to reveal flesh so dark it juxtaposed against the paleness. Blood and maggots and rot in that blighted limb. Yet the boy moved with a deceptive air of health and smiles, nodding at passersby and halting occasionally to stare through an open window.

Gerfast spat onto the sidewalk and turned his attention to the black pall swallowing the final light of the sun, plunging the city in a quietness that split only when the clouds parted as a skein of rain misted over the rooftops and roads. 

The scorched earth was drenched in a flood that gathered swiftly down the alleyways and gutters, washing out the bodies of the plagued that chose to die in the shadows between dawn and dusk. Lightning streaked white and hot across the blackened sky. The body of a child bobbed and floated along the gutter with its belly torn open by rodents, hollow eyes gazing up in slack wonder at the gods.

He spat on it just as it passed beneath his window and wiped the rainwater from his face.

Reaching for the window’s seal, Gerfast pulled it shut just as a gust of wind sprayed water about his floor. The corners of his lips twisted in a scowl at the resistance, deepening further when the window fought against his grip as he struggled to pull it shut.

“Damnyou–” He wrestled with it briefly, a torrent of invectives sputtering from his wet mouth and dying in the roaring downpour. Releasing the window in anger, he stepped back and watched it bang against the wall then sway towards him and back again. 

Slam. 

Sway. 

Slam. 

Sway. 

Slam.

Several hundred miles beyond the rooftop silhouettes of the impoverished side stood mansions and buildings where the wealthy lived. The golden lights that spilled from their windows and roads were bright enough to be seen from thousands of miles away yet the derelict side of town remained plunged in a darkness that could not be remedied.

Wiping rainwater from his forehead with the back of his hand, Gerfast used his waning strength to shut the window and draw the curtains, plunging the room in a formless dark that robbed him of all basic senses.

“Damn fool of a boy,” he muttered with arms out held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. “Damn bodies…” despite having worked in the same room for thirty years, he still could not familiarise himself with the darkness. 

“Damn disease…” Arms oaring about for landmarks, he felt along the table and hesitated — nearly leaping back in fright— at the subtle touch of frozen flesh.

That’s right old fool, you forgot about the body. 

Now conscious of its presence, Gerfast marched into the dark with an unreasonable fear that somehow, someway, the body might rise on the table and brush its cold lips on his freckled neck but relief briefly soothed the flare of panic in his chest as his fingers brushed along a handle. 

Drawing it open he pushed aside instruments and reached for the candle. The matchbox followed in its wake and, shaking the box to confirm a match still remained, drew it out and struck it against the side. 

A flare of rich sulphurous light erupted across the room. 

“Damn blinding light.” Lips pinched at the corners in irritation despite the cool wash of relief through his tight chest, Gerfast cupped a palm around the tentative flame and lowered it to the candle. 

Damn the kid for ruining my day.

Damn this goddamn corpses always stinking up the place 

The darkness be damned as well.

Perhaps the plague’s appearance was well-timed. A cleansing of filth. A baptism of the damned. 

 He cupped a palm around the tentative flame and lowered it to the candle. Once light was restored to the room, so did his confidence return with its trademark scowl and furrowed lines along his forehead.

The room is as it was: the body respectfully dead on the table. 

Setting the candle down beside her head, the mortician continued to work in that circle of light, semi-conscious of the shadowy figures that leaped and darted along the walls just beyond the light’s reach.

Pulling taut the final stitch shut, he tied and cut it then stood to wheel the body towards an open coffin already halfway across the room when a knock disrupted his movement.

The sound was delicate, barely perceptible in the roaring storm beyond the walls of his safe haven. Yet Gerfast heard it. He halted at the centre of the room with his head drooping to the side as his ears strained to capture the sound once more and confirm that it was not his own depleting sanity.

The knock came again— a rasp of knuckles on wood.

The mortician glanced at the clock overhead then back at the door. 

8.30PM, who in the gods' bloodied teeth could be knocking at a death parlour in this hour? 

The boy, he reasoned. The foolish pup must have realised the lie and returned for something.” The cart halted halfway to the coffin. Gerfast stared at the door, willing for the knock to return and when he did he grunted. “We’re closed!” 

The knock returned with more urgency.

“I said we closed! Come back in the morning.”

Dumping the body into the wooden box, he shut it and pushed the tray aside, a low growl echoing at the back of his throat as the knocking grew incessant. Grabbing the nearest item, which happened to be a poker lying against the wall, he took unsteady long strides towards the door driven by enough anger to momentarily numb the aches in his bones.

Gripping the handle Gerfast yanked it open and thrust his face into the utter void, wild-eyed and breathing harsh. 

Nothing.

With hands braced on either side of the door frame he leaned into the night and craned his head side-to-side, searching through the perpetual film of rain that bleared and weaved the landscape. 

No one was around.

I am losing it, he thought while relaxing in the slightest. Was this a sign of the plague?

His grip relaxing around the poker, Gerfast began to step back when something reached through the darkness and snagged at the wet cuff of his trousers. A sound like terror tore through his throat as he stumbled back, tripping on his feet and catapulting to the floor with a mute thud. Pain shot up his tailbone briefly concealing the state of fear as he groaned and reached behind with a trembling hand to nurse the ache which he was sure to form a blueblack bruise come dawn.

“Damnit–” His lips moved in silent agony, stopping short at the sight before him.  

A slave, no older than seventeen, lay halfway inside his shop. Her lower half still sprawled out in the night. She was drenched, strands of curly hair sleek on her forehead and cheeks which seemed gaunt and chalky beneath the brown tone. Dark sunken eyes watched him pleadingly, her mouth trembling as lips parted and shut, struggling to string coherent words together.

Gerfast watched in dumb amazement. His mind could not comprehend the sight just yet, and so he sat half propped on the heels of his hands and stared at the slave weeping and groaning and begging in a language he could only surmise to be Spanish– slave language.

She tried to speak again then stopped, her breath coming quickly forcing her to pant for air as she hunched sideways into a C with one hand resting on her midsection. Gerfast finally understood what was happening.

The bitch was birthing at his doorstep.

Outrage pumped through his veins as he began to rise, “No!” A snarl curled past his lips as he strode towards the door, “This ain’t no midwife home, get out–” His foot had drawn back reflexively, already aiming for the centre of her head, when the girl’s hand slid back into the light’s circle– a small fist unfurling like a flower to reveal a single copper coin.

Two week’s worth of wages presented before him.

Had it been any other day, one where the worries of money did not constantly plague his mind, Gerfast would be affronted by the gesture. He would have done so much more than hurt her to soothe his ego. But it was not any other day and his income was running dangerously low. 

The mortician lowered his foot and shifted his weight onto it, eyeing the girl with the cold appraisal of an auctioneer. She shivered violently as a low mourn sounded from her. Gerfast scowled and glanced up and down the street ensuring that no one was watching. Crouching low, he plucked the coin from her hand and deposited it into the front pocket of his shirt then stepped back, gesturing for the slave to enter.

“Hurry it up, I ain’t got all day.”

She crawled like a wounded animal. Scrawny arms braced on the floor, the bulge of her belly strained beneath her tunic, her legs trailing behind like an afterthought. Every movement only twisted her face into something obscene as she whimpered and sobbed and bucked beneath the unendurable agony that wrapped around her abdomen, tentacles of pain rippling down her back and thighs.

Gerfast watched cooly. He pointed to the corner of his store. “Get on to the corner there, don’t need no mess in my workshop.” In truth, he had no idea how to handle childbirth. This was an undertaker’s shop. The home of death. Not life. 

The coin soaked through his shirt, a cold print over his nipple.

Turning from the sight of her he crossed the room and pulled the cover draped over one of the corpses, shifting it onto his forearm while the other gathered materials he could only assume a midwife used.

The girl’s whimpers had trailed off to a soft keening as she gently rolled onto her back and sank back down like a wounded bird, a shiver trailing up and down the length of her legs as her abdomen drew taut with another wave of contractions.

“Best keep it quiet,” he warned, picking the candle and crossing the room towards her. “Don’t want no nosy neighbours hearing you this late.” Setting the materials beside, Gerfast knelt and stared, unknowing of how to continue from here. Her shut eyes opened and their gazes met across the still air which wavered as the flame wickered sharply.

Fourteen, he judged, from the fairness of her youth still glowing beneath those sunken cheeks and ashen skin. An overseer must have impregnated her. It was not rare and she was not ugly by any means.

The slave broke contact first as another contraction strangled her. She lifted a hand and blindly sought for an anchor of some sort, her fingers curled around the edge of a low table and seized it tight using it as leverage to slowly lift herself up then forward in a taut bow-shape with her moaning voice breathless in his ears.

Gerfast knocked at her ankles awkwardly, “Spread them legs.” 

He did not know how to handle the bringing of life, only the taking. Dead bodies did not require much attention or delicate touches, they were cold, lifeless and indifferent to their handling. 

The slave struggled to spread her legs as she leaned far back. Her wet tunic rode up with the help of the mortician who gingerly peeled it from her skin then leaned back to examine the state of her womanhood. He had no inkling as to how close she was to giving birth. So he waited kneeling between her legs and sitting back on his heels, watching closely her face as myriads of expressions crossed like fleeting shadows.

Half an hour passed. The candle melted to a stub the size of his thumb.

She moaned and prayed in Spanish, begging for relief… from who? The gods? Which god would accept a bastard slave-child?

Gerfast leaned close and peered at the dilation of her womanhood, the small appearance of a dark head forcing its way as an insidious tear ripped downwards. Her scream nearly earned her a sharp smack across the mouth. “Quiet!” He snapped, “and push that goddamn thing outta ya.” 

The first push tore a line down her vulva. A splatter of blood leaked onto the floor, pooling about her dress and soaking into his knees. Gerfast had not noticed all this. “Push.” he demanded of her, eager to have the bastard out, eager to have the girl gone. 

The dark head broke through in an alarming welter of blood. She sobbed weakly.

“Damn you woman, push!” He did not want to touch it, afraid that its colour was a sign of the plague, but when it became increasingly apparent that her reservoir of energy was rapidly depleting to weak surges that could hardly press the child past its shoulders, Gerfast gingerly clasped the back of its neck and brought it free.

The child was hot to the touch. Its scrawny body covered in a thin film of slime which he pinched from its face. He leaned over its half-formed visage and waited on the cry but none came. Without preamble, the mortician sealed his lips over the babe’s nose and sucked hard, a sludge of mucus filling his mouth as the liquid emptied from the child’s lungs only to be replaced with a rush of bitter cold air.

Only then did it wail.

The mortician turned and spat on the floor then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I ain’t got no time left,” he said with the babe outstretched in his hand to the mother. Gerfast turned when she didn’t take it, unaware of the utter silence save for the child’s keening.

Lifeless eyes gazed back at him as the girl lay slain in her blood without remedy.

He had noticed her death during childbirth.

The child remained suspended between them both, still crying and shifting naked in his grip slippery as an eel. Gerfast set it down and leaned forward to place an index finger just beneath her jawline in search of a pulse.

There was none.

He acted quick and without hesitation: reaching for the bundled blanket which he unrolled hastily, watching the butcher knife appear gleaming wickedly sharp with a light of its own. He cut open her belly and replaced the butcher knife with a small hunting knife, carefully cutting out each prized organ; her kidneys, her heart, her liver, her spleen… pillaging from her body what had been denied of him by the others. 

When all was packaged for transportation at dawn and what remained of her was the dilapidated outer shell, Gerfast bundled the baby in a frayed blanket and tucked it into his jacket cradling it close to his heartbeat. Grabbing her ankle, he dragged the body across the room towards the open door.

A streak of watery blood and amniotic fluids trailed from the ropey placenta still attached to her uterus. He made a mental note to clean it up at dawn.

Out in the heart of darkness he disposed of her body by the side for the death cart to collect during their nightly ventures and took the shortest path into the outskirts of the town, bypassing alleyways ridden with figures huddled in corners, peering out at him idly from malnourished skulls. 

The warm rain hit the sidewalk and steamed back up, forming little eddies of mist around Gerfast’s ankles. He felt the babe shift within his jacket, its little arms flailing and its mouth turning reflexively in search of a nipple. Steam boats hoot and trudge past through the black river all alight like little cities adrift.

Halting at the farthest alley from his home, the mortician steps into the foetid darkness with one hand cupped over his nose and removes the child from his jacket, setting it inside a large garbage bin. He stepped back and watched dumbly as cold rain fell on its naked form while it howled red-gummed at the night and the stars and the gods that did not listen. The blanket fell away from its frail form, short legs pedalling in the air viciously, small hands beating at death knocking on its door.

“You ain’t for this world,” he muttered with a sad shake of his head, “you ain’t gon’ survive anyhow… I'm doing you a favour… you see.” Still it cried. Hitching up the lapels of his coat to ward off the sharp gusts of cold, the mortician turned and lumbered away without looking back.

Come dawn the child will be dead. Someone might find it before the rats do. They might bury it or stuff it beneath bags of trash, regardless, it would be dead and that is all that mattered.

But it will not die.

Someone will find the whimpering babe in all its frailness and hand it in. 

It will live through the plague and see the mortician’s body among those dead by the streets in its early years, but the kid will not know the connection.

Neither will it know the significance of its life and the prophecy that marked its path until the very end.

For the second its life began in blood, so too shall it end in blood