“You good, Bror?” Karo asks, bushy hair covering her face. Behind her swirling pillars of black smoke rise into the sky – signaling the fall of yet another thing-dumb.

I nod. “How is Baby Götze?”

Karo lifts the bundle tied across her chest closer to her face. “Baby Götze sleeps,” she says.

Good thing then, we don’t want Baby Götze awake for what is coming next. For you see, the fall of a thing-dumb brings about two things, and one of them is stalking the dying forest on either side of the dust-trodden road.

Karo nods briefly as our eyes meet. “I sense them too,” she whispers. “Fugiis? More-others?”

“Can’t tell,” I say. “Think we can outrun them?”

“I’d like to see you try,” a deep voice booms from behind. Before I have the chance to turn around, I find myself incapacitated in a chokehold. In my periphery I see lanky figures, wrapped in skin, cloaked in flesh, reeking of human filth and self-destruct, emerging from the shadows.

More-others. Self-feeders. Scum of the earth, drawn here by the desperation of the fugiis, by the scent of weakness and despair.

Karo kicks and elbows and curses and spits, but even she knows the struggle is futile. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen what happens next. And it is not pretty.

“Scrawny bone-bag,” one of the more-others laughs. “Calm down, girl. Waste not what little flesh is left on your mangy frame.”

“Look-y here!” a foul-faced more-other yells, ripping the bundle from Karo’s desperate grasp. “It’s a plump-y meat babe!”

“Give that here,” the deep-voiced one growls, grabbing Baby Götze by the feet, the cloth bundle now coming all but undone.

“Now this is a meal,” he snickers, licking his dry-scarred lips. His flesh-hungry gaze immediately turns to one of bewilderment though, when his plague-holed brain computates what is off about Baby Götzes appearance.

“What’s with the mask?” he asks rhetorically. Rhetorically, because he will never get an answer.

His greasy mitten grabs onto the bronze mask covering Baby Götzes face, and pulls it off with a violent yank.

Karo and I lie completely still, covering our eyes and ears as best we can, but the screams still penetrate every pore, and the suffering can be felt like barbed wire-whispers creeping under our skin.

When we rise again, there is little left of the more-others. A pair of eyes dangle from a tree a little ways down the road, and in them I see the question that so many have asked us post-life again and again.

Why don’t you kill him?

Karo bundles up Baby Götze, and carefully arranges his face-parts in the mask once more.

The answer is easy. Baby Götze may be everything they say. World-Eater. Anti-Life. End-of-Times. He may leave a trail of sickness and devastation and death wherever he goes. But it’s like this, and it will always be like this;

He is our brother.

And wherever he wants to go, we go together.

As a Family.