The Commander

        This isn’t a normal apocalyptic scenario. We spent years preparing for zombies, robots, aliens etc. We don’t even know what this is though. Every so often, we see a mass of people, mostly teenagers and young adults with very view older people, just walking in straight lines. They have no expression on their face. No intent. They appeared to be in a trance. Some skip, some run, some walk backwards, but always in a straight line, never turning. When they reach a building or structure that blocks their way, a piece of it disappears, just big enough to let them walk through without trouble. People and living things don’t disappear in such a way, but the zaxes – as we named the mysterious walkers, after the Dr. Seuss book about a pair of creatures that can each only go one direction – kill people in their way manually.

               We’ve tried every method we could think of to fight them – guns, knives, bats, poison darts, and even biological weapons out of desperation. However, they appear to be indestructible. They wear a variety of different clothing styles, but all have a yellow band – looking almost like measuring tape – tied around their wrists. We couldn’t stop them, so we had to adapt. We made a fort such that the weight of each bottom layer was gradually heavier than those above it, and formed a sort-of bowl shape so that we can see farther from the top. When the zaxes come, we all evacuate to the top, since the zaxes aren’t known to climb. The bottom gets destroyed, and the upper layers fall down to become the new bottom, and then when they are gone, we fortify the new bottom and build more on the top. Our buildings are mostly on the upper levels.

               We have a king – since we fear needing to make speedy decisions, which a democratic government can’t make. The current king was actually the engineer who designed this genius fort we have, and it’s worked well so far. Once it was done, he appointed me as a Watcher – I stand at the south corner of the square structure, at the top, and watch for the zaxes. When I see them coming, I begin alerting everyone on the ground. Then, I go outside and scout for anyone outside of the fort. We advise them not to go out there, but many people like the outside for some reason, or want to take it upon themselves to be lookouts.

               I went out, and saw a single young boy out there. He didn’t seem to notice the zax headed right for him. The zax was a young girl, about fourteen years old with a white polo shirt and a blue denim jumper dress, blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. The boy had darker skin, black hair, and was wearing dark jeans and a white shirt. I tried shouting to him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I ran up, tapped on his shoulder, and told him, “Get inside, go find your parents,” which he didn’t seem to understand. He must’ve been Deaf. I pointed to the fort, and now he understood. He ran there, but the girl was upon me. She grabbed at my neck. No hatred in her, no intent, just going through the motions of trying to kill me. I blocked her hands, took out my knife, and tried to cut her in self-defense. It was a nervous reaction, as hundreds had died trying to defend against the zaxes. If I’d had my wits about me, I’d have never tried it. I’d have just run.

The knife glided across her skin, not cutting her, but as it caught her armband (on her left hand), I noticed a flash of fear in her eyes that turned back into the usual monotony. I immediately concluded as to her weakness. She came at me with curled fingers on her left hand, as if she intended to cut me with her long, painted fingernails. Blocking the attacking hand with one of my hand, I grabbed at the armband with my other, and her monotonous expression turned to fear as she tried to pull away, shouting, “No! Don’t!” As I cut the armband, she fell down, but her expression immediately changed to happiness. She moved her hand in front of her face, opening and closing it as if a demon were getting used to a body it’d possessed, and whispered, “I’m free.” She got up and excitedly yelled, “I’m free!”

 She reached for me, and as I was about to defend myself again, I realized that she was reaching out to hug me. She sounded like she was crying as she said, “Thank you! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” When she let go, she had tears in her eyes. She said again, “I’m so sorry. I had no control. I tried to stop.” Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help be sympathetic to her. Was it really that simple? Did she turn from bad to good so easily? We’d been trying to kill them and hid from them for however many years. However, this new development seemed to bring us closer to an answer than we’d ever been concerning the zaxes. I said, “It’s okay. Take my hand and we’ll go inside and try to figure out what happened.” She reluctantly took my hand. I kept a close eye as we hurried inside, and I brought her to the upper levels.

I had no idea where to bring her – police? The king? The other watchers? While I was trying to figure it out, I ran into a policeman who recognized me. There weren’t many watchers, so it was normal for a person to know all of them by face.

He said, “Watcher Smith? How’s it been? I didn’t know you had a little girl.”

I told him she wasn’t mine, and that if he could spare a moment, I would tell him more in private. I explained that while the information was important to share, I couldn’t risk it causing a panic amongst the town. How would you react to finding out that a zombie was inside your house, if it was a zombie apocalypse?

He seemed to understand the concern, and we went to the police station, into one of the interrogation rooms, where he said that we wouldn’t be interrupted. I explained to him what’d happened, as I’d explained to you, and he was shocked. He said, “So this young lady is a zax? You brought a zax in here?”

“She WAS a zax. Now, she seems like a normal teenaged girl. She walks normally, doesn’t destroy things, she expresses emotions, and she even waved at a few boys on her way up here.” She blushed a little at that. “You should’ve seen the mix of joy, thankfulness and sorrow when I cut the band off.”

“She feigned emotion, you mean?”

“We haven’t seen any zax faking emotion, have we?”

“We haven’t had a zax turn into a normal person either, have we? By Occam’s Razor, the former seems more probable.”

The girl spoke up, saying, “Guys, I swear. I didn’t want to do what I did. I as being controlled.”

“By who?”

“Uh, a man who called himself the Commander. I don’t know much else about him.”

“And how do we know that the Commander won’t take control again, Sweetie?”

The girl was stumped, and the policeman turned to me, “We can’t trust her around our people. She must be kept imprisoned and under observation until we find out more.”

               I knew that he was right, as much as it would kill me to have this poor girl imprisoned. Who knows that horrors she’d already been through. I let her be locked away, though. She may have a few more ahead of her.

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I visited the girl in her cell. I asked her questions to find out her side of the story. The girl, named Hannah, had first encountered the Commander in the middle of the night, a few hours after running away from home. Hannah had run up her mother’s credit cards and was desperate to find a way to pay it off before she found out.

The man appeared to her, wearing ragged pants and a black hoodie, similar to a drug dealer. She was afraid, but he told her, out of nowhere, “I can help you.”

She asked, “How.”

“I can pay off the credit cards. Your mom will never see the bill.”

Hannah hadn’t told him about the credit cards. She was desperate, though, so she agreed without asking what was in it for him.

He then added, “You will owe me a favor in exchange.”

She nodded, “Yes, whatever.”

He took out a gold band and tied it elegantly around her wrist, as she stood there, too afraid to jerk away.

“Just a little keepsake, so you remember my favor.”

With that, he seemed to fade away into the night.

She found her way back home by around 1am. It’s strange how vivid Hannah’s memory of these events was, as they’d happened years ago.

Her mother was as afraid as she had been, asking, “Where have you been? I had the police after you and everything.”

The girl said that she’d been out with some friends, and apologized.

Her mother scolded, “You know better than to be out this late! Go straight to bed and don’t you dare give me trouble about getting up in the morning.”

She did, and then the next day of school went as normal aside from her tiredness.

That afternoon, she went home and collapsed on her bed before even thinking about homework. She heard the man’s voice in her head then, saying, “sit up.”

She sat up. Her body seemed to do it on her own, without her telling it to. Just as she was thinking, “What was that?” the voice returned, “You owe me a favor. I control you now.”

She looked down at the wristband, and tried to take it off. As soon as she touched it, she was overcome with sudden, irrational fear. She let go and gasped. As she looked to the door to make sure it was closed, the voice said, ”Stand up.”

A blank expression went across her face, despite her trying to force it back into worry, as her body stood up. The voice said, “Do jumping jacks,” and she did them, continuing to stare blankly on the outside while screaming on the inside. She couldn’t stop.

He then made her moonwalk (a dance move she’d never learned) and even levitate. He was testing his power over her. Finally, he said, “I’ll let you go for the night.” She regained control. Nervously, she did her homework just in time to meet her parents for supper.

Over the next week, he did this every day. Telling her to do various things as if to prove that his power over her, and she could only watch in terror as her body did them.

That Saturday, she heard the voice again, saying, “Come to my Kingdom.”

Without even needing to know where that was, the blank expression on her face returned, and her body stood up and walked miles to a place deep in the woods.

A few other teens were there, wearing wristbands like hers.

The man appeared before them, this time in a black cloak akin to a knockoff Palpatine, and a white mask concealing his face.

She asked, when she got control of her mouth, “Who are you?”

“I am the commander. Now, stop talking.”

She went mute. She went to take her wristband off again, but the fear returned, and she couldn’t take it off.

The Commander gave the others commands to build him a village to rule over from the surrounding trees. They began somehow chopping down the trees with their bare hands. Then he commanded Hannah to go and find Billy Davidson. Hannah didn’t even know the older teenaged boy, but her autonomous body found him, in his father’s truck, with a girl, looking out onto a river. Hannah was told to wreck the truck, and she did by kicking in the hood, breaking the engine and shattering part of the windshield, which made cuts into the poor woman inside. Before she could show sympathy for the, the Commander told Hannah to run away. She ran until she was behind bushes. As she ran, she heard the girl scream and Billy shout, “My dad’s truck!” After she stopped, she turned around to see the Commander appear in his cloak to the couple, saying, “I can help.”

After making his dirty deal, the Commander commanded Hannah to go and build with the others. The new recruits were then sent to commit similar acts, to push people into desperation, so that he can grow his army.

As they worked, they fell off of ladders sometimes, sometimes things fell. The builders got injured. He’d tell them to heal and they’d heal, but soon he got annoyed at that and said, “Stop getting injured! Stop hurting yourselves! Be indestructible! You know what? While I’m at it, stop aging too!”

From then on, they were indestructible and didn’t age. That’s the only reason that the girl sitting in front of me in the prison cell was still physically 13 instead of 30.

After a few weeks they got a miniature town up for the Commander to rule, which he called his kingdom, and then he became obsessed with conquering the rest of the world, or at least destroying it to demonstrate his power, and that’s when he started setting them to destroy. Simply saying to “kill” or to “destroy” things was too easy, though. Those words would trigger an alarm in their brain and be overridden. Instead, he set them to face a city, and then told them to walk until he said to stop.

They did. If something was blocking their way, they couldn’t stop, so the thing would disappear to allow it. The rest is history.

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The policeman came in, and said, “I thought I’d find you here. Did you get information out of her?”

               I told him the jist of her story, and he seemed surprised. He said, “I established a radio signal, briefly, with another settlement. They immediately informed me that they’d found the zaxes’ weakness: cutting off the bracelets. I asked if the zaxes turned normal after that, they said they didn’t know, because they just killed them right after and didn’t take any chances.”

“So, what are we going to do?”

“We need more data points. Go out and rescue more of them. Maybe we’ll be able to track down the commander.”

               “And what will we do with them? Pile them up in this cell?”

               “I’ll have a psychologist evaluate her, and determine if she’s safe to integrate amongst the other children. If not, she’ll be left here until the jail ends up at the bottom and gets destroyed by zaxes.”

With that, I figured I would need reinforcements to not risk killing myself in this endeavor. I went to the other watchers, Watcher Monroe, Watcher Harrison and Watcher Ferguson, who were at their posts at the other corners, and explained our new objective.