Lucky Nick

[MalReynolds]

They call me “The Saint of Young Men.”


Before perverted thoughts race through your mind, I should tell you that I come from a place that is very unlike your place.

It was more than a plague that wiped out my world, it destroyed all livestock, and made the bodies harmful to ingest. People were dying of starvation; people were dying of the plague… It wasn’t good.

I was one man apart. They say “no man is an island,” but I disagree. I made a good life wandering around the burned out countryside, staying at inns for cheap labor or intercourse. Life was different, but life was good. Survival was a challenge. More than once, I arrived in a town before a pack of plague rats and left when they spread the infection.

Lucky Nick was my name. Few people passing had heard of me, more assumed I was spreading the plague, sending the rats to fester in the towns I deemed unworthy. My name was hushed in religious cities as people hid in the hollow shells of their sanctuaries, abandoned by everything but each other.

I came into a small hamlet, a town simply known as “Freyence.” Virtually unpronounceable, making it even harder to find when everyone you ask for directions can’t say the name of the damned place.

Freyence was a shell, with a functioning inn and a hut that belonged to a downtrodden sooth-sayer. The rest of the place was empty; the inn was almost self-serve. I didn’t have to pay to stay, the man behind the desk seemed glad to have the company. I sat with him at dinner, consisting of little more than dried weeds and scalding water. He went on about his wife; I didn’t pay attention. I was tired. My backpack was heavy.

In the middle of the night, standing over me, the sooth-sayer dropped a package beside the bed. I awoke to find the sooth-sayer in the corner, dead. His body was already festering. I opened the package and found a black box with no markings. I tried to open it, but it remained sealed. I placed it in my backpack and left before the rats came to claim the body.

I wandered for several days, looking for another place to stay, when I came across “Italleye.” The inn was more descript, the town livelier. Women walked around in poofy dresses that I had never seen, men in strange suits. When I approached the inn, I was met with a scent I had almost forgotten.

Meat.

I ran inside, to the bar, and took a seat against the crowded counter. Before I could open my mouth, a plate was dropped in front of me, with three large portions of meat. I devoured them hungrily, and dropped coin on the counter and received a room-key.

I was torn from a dreamless sleep by the sound of a woman outside my window crying. Her words were unintelligible, mixed with varied curses from people on other floors trying to sleep. Unable to stand it, I went to the street, bringing the woman to my room. Tears streamed her face.

“Please, please help.”

“What is it.”

“My sons are missing.”

“What? The plague probably got them –“

“If it was the plague, I would be happy. No, I think… Something else.”

I grabbed a lantern from the wall, and buckled my belt. I climbed down the stairs, and stole behind the counter to a trap door in the floor. I pried it open, and stepped down.

Inside, the innkeeper sat over a butcher’s table, slowly, methodically carving the leg of a young boy. I stared past him to the other two mutilated bodies, decapitated and missing various limbs.

I grabbed a knife hanging on the wall, and drove it into the back of the man. I turned to leave, to tell the woman the news, when the strap on my backpack broke and the black box fell. It broke upon the ground, and several thousand small, black bugs poured forth. They moved with a speed unseen to the bodies on the ground, working with invisible strings to bring the bodies together. I stood, knife in hand, as the bodies were sewn together, and the youngest began to cough.

The bugs moved back to the man on the table, and began to stitch his back up. Dissatisfied with the rebirth of this monster, I stabbed him again, but the bugs went to work. With each new breath, I brought the knife down until I could no longer move my arm. I could only hope that he could feel it each time.

Hand in hand, I brought the children upstairs to the mother, who was overjoyed to see her children again. She asked what I did, and how I did it, but I could not explain what I had seen.

She ran through the streets, screaming to the sky that I had saved her children.

People didn’t believe, until the innkeeper was questioned. He was jailed immediately after, and an aura surrounded me, a perpetual glow given from the towns-people and received by me.

I no longer pay to stay in inns.

I’m Lucky Nick, the Saint of Young Boys.