A Shrouded World (Book 7): Hvergelmir

by Tufo, Mark

  Suddenly the rock gave way—or my shoulder did; either way, the top half of my body was now hanging down between the rock face and machine. It was quite possible that I would get free of the cave only to be stuck tight between the wall and the device. Wouldn’t that be something if it was a water dispenser? Is that irony or poetic justice? My head, which had already felt like a heavy-metal drummer was using it for practice, was ramped up as I was forcing blood down and into it—causing an even worse percussion. I could reach just far enough with my right hand to grab the far lip of the machine; it would give me the leverage I needed to pull my body free from both the hole and from behind the machine, if necessary. It ended up being the opposite, I guess. I pulled my body out and plummeted straight for the floor, headfirst. I had to grip the side of the machine like a netless trapeze artist. No matter how much damage I had done to my head over the years from just plain stupid shit and drugs and survived, a twenty-foot drop onto my dome would spell the end.

  One hand on the side and one pressed into the back of the machine wasn’t quite giving me the stopping power I demanded, but it was twisting my body around so that I would land on a less vital spot. Although a broken hip under these conditions would have the same outcome. My hands were making a loud, squelching sound from the friction and slickness of my blood. It was like my palms were screaming as I sanded away the little unblemished skin that remained. It was a form of luck that saved me from further injury. Engineering luck, I guess, as the bottom of the machine flared out and brought me to a literal screeching halt a foot from the ground. I was out. I was gloriously out of the hole and not stuck. Now the question became where was I out to.

  I slowly pulled myself around, doing the best to look around from my angle. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how angry I’d be if I stepped out and into a barrage of staple-gun wielding whistlers. Nothing, nothing living, anyway. The room—wait, couldn’t call it that, a room implied a known size; this place was enormous. Endless to the point I couldn’t see the far side. It was indeed a factory of some sort, but there were no Model Ts rolling off an assembly line. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at; misshapen lumps of off-color Play-Doh was the closest description. I moved farther away from the machine I was next to in order to get a better view. Off to my right, where this particular belt started, was a large glass hopper which appeared to be filled with the same stuff they’d been feeding us. I had to imagine that at least part of the function of this place was filling the canisters.

  There was some good and bad in that. The meal, yes, loosely used term, provided protein and hydration; that was the good. The bad was I had to go and eat some. Even in my fuzzy, desperate state of mind, this was not an attractive proposal, but it was a necessary evil. Sort of like a colonoscopy. If you’ve had one, you know what I mean. And I’m not even talking about the invasive probe up your wazoo; there's the bonus of having your ass attached to a toilet for twenty-four straight hours.

  “Move on, Talbot.” My voice was hoarse. Eating normally with the mask was going to be a problem. I needed to remove the device; the way things were at the moment I was not in any need of translation. Bob and Church weren’t here and most likely never would be. That thought bummed me out more than I expected; some of it was due to my weakened state, but, at least in Bob’s case, I considered him a friend. I probed the bottom part with my fingers and pulled, my feet involuntarily going onto their tiptoes to stop the pain of me trying to force the mask up. A jolt of panic ratcheted through my body. It was like that first moment when you realize you’ve superglued your finger to your eyelid. I pulled again, this time with a much harder, steadier yank. I could feel my skin being stretched; it did not want to yield its prize. I felt like I could remove the piece, but at what cost? If I ripped off my lips and a fair portion of my cheeks, not only would the disfigurement be unbearable, but I’d most likely die from sepsis. Can’t really run around with exposed tissue and not expect an infection.

  As luck would have it, it was the desire to never shave again, after leaving the Corps the first time, that took the brunt of the removal. My goatee and mustache hadn't been shaved when the mask was applied, unlike my head. I found a small finger-hold under my jaw and slowly pried up. The pain was intense. Slow bikini waxing with duct tape intense. I would have pulled hard and fast, but I was still worried about giving myself an extreme facial. It was a slow process, ripping hairs out by the half dozen. I wanted a whistler to show up so that I could beat some of my frustration out on it. I’d got the entire bottom half of my jaw free. With my hand still placed under there, I took a break. I was breathing rhythmically before going to phase two.

  The pain ramped up as I got to the small soul patch directly under my lower lip. One was never supposed to pluck this tender area.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, walking around in circles until the pain subsided. “Absolute horseshit!” This time I went for the band-aid removal technique, tearing it off fast. I managed to get halfway up my mustache before involuntary tears of pain erupted from my tear ducts. I was breathing heavily and had gone down to my knees. Pain flared from my damaged joints. I was in for a dime, in for a dollar; I yanked again.

  There was a string of congratulatory curses as the mask came free from my face. I’d mistakenly thought the worst of it was over until I tried to toss it aside and felt a tugging deep down in my stomach. At this point, I’m sure I would have retched if there were anything of note to toss up. I was back on my recently familiar pose of hands and knees as my back arched in a series of dry heaves. If one can break a spleen, that was what I was feeling.

  “How am I going to do this?” I was determined but also feeling sorry for myself. I hurried to the wall so my back was against it as I sat up. “Okay, okay.” I was ready. I gave a slow and steady tug; the sensation was altogether alien and uncomfortable. I felt like I was pulling free a giant tapeworm I’d picked up in the Peruvian jungle. I was coughing and gagging, drool, bile, and phlegm was falling from my outstretched tongue. My throat so raw the tube felt like a dried stick used for starting fires out in the wild. The mask was on the ground, and I had a small coil of black tubing between my splayed legs. I could not believe the damned thing was this long, and still, I pulled. I wanted to shut my eyes for when, invariably, I pulled my stomach and intestines out through my mouth.

  I expected trumpets blaring and angels singing when I finally got it free. Instead, I was panting like an overtaxed dog, and there was a pile of gooey stomach syrup in my lap—hardly the fanfare I was looking for. My throat felt like Smaug, menace of Middle-earth. If my throat felt like it was burning, it stood to reason I could breathe fire. If I had a mirror, it was doubtful I would have recognized the pale, mangy looking face in the mirror. By the looks of the mask on the ground, it now contained more of my facial hair than I did. My body was still depleted, even more so now. As unsavory as it was, I needed to eat the sludge on the factory belt.

  “It never gets better,” I said as I slowly stood. But it did, somewhat. What I had not realized then was that when I took off the mask, I was not gasping for air. When we’d first come to this planet, none of us had been able to get enough air; there was the panic of taking deep breaths and not getting fulfilled. Airus-interruptus, although, instead of blue balls, it was blue lungs. I know it doesn’t make sense, just roll with it. It had been the mask that had relieved me from gasping like a fish out of water. Right now, though, it was like being in an oxygen-rich casino. I didn’t take note of the change because there was nothing to take note of; I was breathing fine. It’s like you don’t notice your eyelids blinking until, for some unfathomable reason, you can’t blink. That kind of thing. I’ll attribute it to acclimatization.

  I was on to a more pressing need. Looking at the individual piles as they headed off to packaging didn’t make them any more appealing; I tentatively reached up to grab a handful.

  “What if it’s supposed to pasteurized first or something?” Had to figure the whistlers didn't much go for maki
ng their food healthy. I went back to the band-aid trick, grabbed it quickly, opened my mouth as wide as I could, and shoveled it in. My instinct for survival was kicking in and bypassing the repulsion I was feeling. My hands were a blur as I swallowed fistfuls whole. It wasn’t good, and the beauty of the feeding tube had been I didn’t have to taste the slop. It wasn’t until I was just about sated that I realized that there was a high probability that there was zombie meat in this. Or had been.

  “Don’t, man. Don’t do that to yourself.” I had both hands on the lip of the conveyor, and my head was hanging down. I was doing my best to hold on to my hard-fought food. Even if my mind was reeling from the possibilities of what I'd consumed, my body was telling it to shut up and be grateful. The pounding in my head had eased. My body was quickly turning the nutrients into healing agents, pushing sharp pebbles out from under my skin and onto the floor where they clattered like pennies from heaven or more like kidney stones. I didn’t want to, but I needed to continue. My body was quickly draining away all I’d eaten to fix the variety of things wrong. I again started eating, this time with less vigor. When my headache had evaporated entirely, I called it.

  It was time to figure out where I was and what I could do to stop the machine, so to speak. I followed the floating conveyor I’d fed from, taking note that it was indeed filling canisters. That would become important to my psychological well-being soon enough. I looked at the drones as they were fitted into a slot and filled up before deployment. I wondered what it would take to fashion a few of them into a flying device suitable to carry me around. Twinkling lights off in the distance captured my attention. It looked something like a hot summer’s night lightning storm. It seemed as logical a place to investigate as any. Much like the pyramid had been from the holes, the sparkling lights were much farther off than I’d imagined. It didn’t matter, as, soon enough, my full attention would be diverted elsewhere.

  When I’d first started moving, I was overly cautious, waiting for platoons of whistlers to come storming from every direction. But it was entirely possible they weren’t even looking for me. Seriously, how would they even know I'd escaped? Maybe my feeding pod would report that I hadn’t eaten, but more than likely, they would chalk that up to the fact that I’d died. Maybe I’d be reported missing when and if they did a body removal; that could be days, and I didn’t plan on being here, wherever this was. I was coming up on some more belts, at first mistakenly believing they were more feeding set-ups. Couldn’t have been any more wrong. First off, there was way more activity, more hoppers, more machine arms manipulating things, and then there was the dread that was starting to form in my stomach and my head.

  “What the fuck am I looking at?” By now, the curiosity that burned in me had completely wiped away any caution I had about traveling through the cavernous area. I’d mistakenly thought I was looking at a graveyard of sorts; there were strange shaped, dark gray skeletons, hundreds, thousands of them, streaming past, and another hopper in the distance appeared to be filled with the same stuff I’d eaten. I had a gut-punching idea where this was headed, but went to investigate anyway.

  I must have repeated the word no a hundred times, maybe more, as it seemed to be in sync with my footfalls. Clumps of the grey matter were being timed to drop directly onto the strange skeleton with the backward-facing joints and giant egg-shaped skull. It was like watching a disgusting candy bar being made. I’d watched enough How Food Is Made to justify that assumption.

  “This is Frankenstein’s lab, in high gear and on crack.” I knew now that whistlers weren’t made in the traditional manner, but rather were created. This made it worse as there was seemingly no limit to how many could be made. All they needed was the substance of other life forms, and, if this pyramid had taught me anything, it was that there was an unlimited supply of that out there. But this wasn’t the entire truth; I knew about their weird little drum-circle where they’d popped out a carnivorous brat pack. None of this made sense. Had the whistlers worked out a way to become free from their creator, or was it something built into their DNA here? Would they want a self-replicating monster? I knew before the z-poc hit that scientists were working on nanotech that could not only repair itself but make new copies; I mean, what could go wrong?

  “If this is Frankenstein’s monster, who the hell is Frankenstein?” And a better question was, did I even want to know. It stood to reason that there would be some similarity between creation and creator. Apparently, we’d been made in God’s image; if that was not something you believed in, then you only needed to look at the sex robots people were trying to make. I was looking off to the lightning show in the distance.

  “Fuck me. It is just like Mary Shelley envisioned.” And now, I had a good idea of where that power was coming from. The friggen’ jackhammer we’d all been using—it didn’t produce the shock…it took it from the slaves using them. Slowly draining them of their life source to power this. No wonder they needed a constant supply of fresh bodies. How long could one rip threads from their soul before it was bare?

  Then it hit me. If I destroyed this factory, I could put a dent in the plans of whoever ran this place. Now the question was, how did I go about doing that without a variety of explosive devices? I supposed I could pull skeletons off the belt and let the goo fall onto nothing; I was vaguely curious to see what would happen to a whistler without bone structure. Then I decided that was way too disturbing. And seriously, how long could I keep that up, and where would I stack all the bones? There had to be an off button, right? A “stop making monsters” switch? But just because this place was automated didn’t mean there weren’t personnel that monitored it. How was I going to prevent them from turning it back on?

  There were those questions. There was also the fact that if I stayed here for a prolonged period of time, the gray shit I’d come to rely on to sustain my life would be all I ever ate. And, if I stopped the machine, how long would that crap even stay viable? I was already surprised the stuff didn’t wriggle around.

  “Think, Mike...you can wreck shit with the best of them.” That was a truth, but at the very minimum, I usually had a hammer. I can’t even begin to tell you how many home projects I fixed with a hammer. It was either fixed or damaged so severely as to need replacement by a professional. Either way, the job was done, and I could go about enjoying my weekend again. I was going to have to go and check out the entirety of this facility, see if there was a weak spot, something I could exploit, but there were risks involved. The possibility was high that I would pass by a security camera, maintenance personnel, something like that.

  And even if they did not have those things here, whistlers were still being made, and once they were jolted with the life-juice of aliens, what happened to them? Did they then get off the belt and go into active service? If that was the case, there could be thousands of these things just milling about on the far side. Sure, they had no real-life experience yet, but whistler younglings were ravenous little fucks the moment they were born. Stood to reason the adolescents would be twice as bad. And I was most definitely different enough to stand out among the crowd.

  This was akin to being in a porn movie and having erectile dysfunction, although, thinking upon it, that was probably worse. Would suck to have an audience to your impotence. The two women that showed up at your door with a pizza, the cameraman who just so happened to be in your living room, the fluffer that had been tirelessly working on your flaccidness. The boom operator who had bravely volunteered to step in.

  “Yeah, it’s just like that, Talbot. Dumbass.” It was easy to see how whistlers were threatening the entire universe. A whistler in making passed by me every second, if this thing ran twenty hours a day, the same amount as the mining, that meant somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-thousand of these things were made every damn day. How could any opposing army deal with that never-ending influx? Simple enough; they couldn’t. That’s why the whistlers, or whoever was making them, were threatening the entire known galaxy
and every alternate timeline, if Trip was to be believed. Seeing this how could I doubt him? Jack and I were from very similar worlds, but our homes were suffering very different fates.

  Rome, at one time during Earth’s history, had conquered most of the known world. They’d had one of the largest empires known to man. The whistlers, if they laughed, would have scoffed at that minuscule achievement. An argument could be made that the zombies had usurped the Romans’ title, but even that didn’t equate to a drop in the bucket comparatively. And still, there was seemingly no point to it. They destroyed; they did not conquer and subjugate, promising a better life under their rule. They just flat-out destroyed. Could there indeed be a being that had no interest in power over others? Just the mere thrill of ruining worlds because they could? This was like a virus that killed its host. To what purpose? Without the host, the virus died as well.

  It could be said that viruses didn’t care that they did what they did because that’s just what they were, having no more thought than a stale Twinkie that sat upon a countertop. But these beings, they thought, they planned. For fuck's sake, they put this place together. They knew what they were doing. Did the why of it matter? It did to me, but the odds were against us ever seeing eye to eye on it. I’d walked a fair amount of the area, steering well clear of the life-giving bolts of juice, and I’d not seen anything that would lead me to believe I could have any lasting impact to shutting this place down. I was getting hungry again when I finally sat.