Traitor: A Prescott Story

The following short story contains spoilers for The Forgotten Colony, taking place from the perspective of a guard during the chaos following Zach’s exodus from Prescott as a child. You have been warned.

Resupply was supposed to arrive in a few weeks, but Mitchell didn’t think they were going to make it that long.

How could they when the dropship with the healthy colonists was still in the air, and chaos had already broken out? The night had been so peaceful before. Mitchell thought that everyone else who’d stayed behind was on the same page. If the uninfected wanted to leave and go back to Earth, they could. If they wanted to stay in Prescott with their friends and family members, colony leadership wouldn’t stop them.

Mitchell thought it was a fair arrangement and had long come to terms with the risk associated with staying beside his sickly wife. But he couldn’t have foreseen that the real risk would come from his fellow colonists, rather than the Red Plague.

“What’s… going on?” his wife slurred, her raven hair shimmering with sweat. A bead of blood clung to the corner of her eye, like a child refusing to leave its mother’s leg.

Mitchell peeked out the window of their hab unit and grimaced. Most of the colony was built with nonflammable materials, but the rioters had found other ways to wreak havoc. Some actively dismantled vital infrastructure—oxygen generators, hydrofarms, homes. Others brawled in the regolith streets, dripping blood all over each other.

Something told Mitchell that it wasn’t all from their wounds. That was how the Red Plague worked. Red poured from every orifice possible. He glanced back at his wife, finding that the crimson orb had finally cascaded down her face, leaving a rusted streak behind.

“You’re safe in here,” Mitchell said in a soothing voice.

“You’re shaking…”

“I’m fine.”

Mitchell wasn’t. He’d heard the gunshots shortly before the launch. Dozens of them, each sound echoing off the glass dome that surrounded Prescott. That meant people were dying. Civilians. More importantly, it meant that the guards were so afraid for their lives that they were willing to open fire.

They were friends of his, probably. People he’d trained with back on Earth, preparing for all sorts of low-gravity combat and policing. He’d always thought it a little unnecessary to send soldiers to a Martian mining colony. But he now understood how quickly things could fall apart. He understood how—

Across the street, the sickly rioters threw open the door to his neighbor’s hab unit and dragged the man and woman who lived there outside. Mitchell knew them well. Before the Red Plague, he’d had Elliot and Violet over for dinner.

Tonight, Elliot wore a typical blue-and-black guard uniform, his shoulder pad emblazoned with the P insignia. Violet wore nothing but a nightgown, indicative of the fact that she wasn’t a guard. She was just a biologist.

A mob quickly formed around Elliot, kicking and shoving him as his wife looked on in terror. A female engineer in the mob then punched Violet in the cheek. The biologist tumbled to the ground and received two sharp kicks before she managed to stumble away.

Elliot was not so lucky.

As Mitchell watched the crowd beat his friend senseless, a man made eye contact with him through the window.

“Hey, that’s a guard’s hab unit too!”

Mitchell’s stomach sank. He looked back at his wife once more, knowing he had to protect her, and threw open the front door. Plunging into the Martian night, Mitchell sprinted perpendicular to the mob, only to find that there was a similar group a few units down.

He just had to draw them away, so they’d ignore his wife.

But where could he go? He was trapped under a glass dome with hundreds of desperate people. Unsure where else to turn, Mitchell ran for the Slabs, a section of the colony beyond the town itself that was riddled with rocky overhangs. With any luck, he could hide in one of the small alcoves and wait for the dust to settle.

That was his plan, at least.

He hadn’t gotten more than a hundred feet away before three strong men grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. Mitchell readied himself for a flurry of attacks, but none immediately came.

“You saw what they’re doing over by the canteen?” one the men asked another rioter.

A cloud of dust wafting from the street told Mitchell that several more people had arrived to hurt him.

“Yeah, they get what they fucking deserve,” another colonist said in a gravelly voice, then spat on Mitchell’s back.

“Help me bring this monster over there,” the first one said. “And grab the other guy too—before he’s too dead to realize what he’s done.”

What was happening? Where were they taking him? In a flash, Mitchell was back on his feet with two men clamped onto his arms. They dragged him fast enough that he couldn’t fully stand. Instead, his feet dragged as men he’d probably passed on the street every day led him elsewhere in the colony.

“Please,” Mitchell said.

“Shut up!” The man clutching his left bicep used a free hand to punch Mitchell in the stomach.

The wind immediately went out of him.

Soon, they passed the schoolhouse and the canteen, both of which were heavily damaged. As the pain in his stomach mounted, Mitchell looked at the passing dirt. What were they going to do to him? He hadn’t done anything wrong.

Yes, he was a guard. And yes, some guards in the colony had clearly opened fire in the chaos of the exodus. But he wasn’t one of those. He was at home with his wife, hanging onto the last few days he’d get with her before the Red Plague claimed her life.

The men who dragged him didn’t seem to care.

Eventually, they stopped in front of another colonist with a bucket of white paint. The man—an engineer, maybe?—immediately drew something on Mitchell’s fatigues. No, he wrote something. Words. But what?

Still angled at the ground, Mitchell glanced to the side, where a quartet of men were carrying a damaged Elliot. The man with the paint brush promptly walked over to him with a sneer and made the same scrawling on his chest.

When the man moved out of the way, Mitchell saw what it said: TRAITOR.

At that moment, Mitchell looked up, finding a mostly destroyed building in front of him, its aluminum frame collapsed on one side. A crossbeam that must have originally been part of its roof jutted from the structure.

Three bodies hung from it with metal nooses around their necks, each one a guard and each one with the same message: TRAITOR.

Mitchell had barely processed what was about to happen when they slipped a cord around his neck.