by Travis Smith
The Stranger collapsed in the dirt and lay on his side, exhausted. The guards inspected the food options they had retrieved from their outpost. It looked to be mostly spoiling fruits after a lengthy import and small jars of various meats. One of the guards tossed a brown apple at The Stranger, who didn’t make a move to sit up or retrieve it. His hands were still behind his back, and he would rather starve to death miserably than continue living in this condition.
“Better eat up,” the man said. “Gonna be a long night fer you.”
The Stranger closed his eyes and longed for a sleep to come from which he would not wake.
16
Shortly before nightfall, the lone guard who had gone into the cavern returned, struggling even harder to push the metal cart. Water condensate coated the outside of it.
The Stranger opened his eyes when he heard the squeaky, rusted wheels approaching out of the darkness. Before he had any idea what was happening, a heavy hand fell upon his head, and coarse, dirty fingers coiled through his tangled hair.
“Yer gonna listen to me now, Bitch,” Boss growled, his lips close enough to blow hot breath that smelled of decay into The Stranger’s ear. Boss’s greasy black goatee scraped brusquely against The Stranger’s cheek. “Not walkin’ on yer own, not eatin’, not thinkin’ you gon’ live a long and healthy life devoted to The Barony …”
He pulled The Stranger upright by his hair and grabbed the back of his neck while the other guards leered. The Stranger winced but did not call out as he was marched toward the metal cart. The man who’d gone into the cavern grinned a malicious grin that lacked all four upper front teeth. He reached forward with his scrawny arms and grunted while he pulled the heavy lid off the cart.
As The Stranger got closer, he saw what was inside—mounds of jagged ice pointing in every direction, like chunks of broken glass. He braced himself for what he knew was about to happen. He resolved to go in silently and without a fight. These were the type of men who thrived on conflict and fueled themselves with thoughts of begging victims, and The Stranger would not give them that satisfaction on this day.
When Boss shoved him face-first into the box on wheels, however, shards of sawtooth ice mangled his cheek and caused him to yelp. His body was bent painfully over the edge of the cart until Boss leaned down to grab his ankles and toss him wholly into the basin. The Stranger’s legs were flung over his head. He screamed as his neck was cranked to the side beneath his body weight and his face was pressed harder against the sharp ice. His legs thumped against the other rim of the cart, but the pain this created was masked by the agony upon which he now lay. He had to curl his knees toward his chest to fit inside his new bed.
The guard slammed the heavy lid back atop the cart, delivering The Stranger to an icy darkness as absolute as any torment he’d ever suffered. The guards cackled loudly and began slamming their fists and weapons down upon the lid and shouting insults and abuse at their wretched prisoner. Once the initial stinging of the fresh cuts began to subside, a deeper, harsher ache settled into The Stranger’s bones. He shivered and closed his eyes against silent tears. The unwavering cold lay heavy upon him like a wet blanket. It took his breath away, each inhale catching several times as his chest hitched and he struggled not to move against his frozen bed of nails.
After a few moments, his resolve broke and a hoarse sob escaped his throat. This sent the guards into another frenzy outside. They danced and hollered into the desert sky until The Stranger’s breathing grew shallow and his consciousness faded.
17
The Stranger snapped back to wakefulness and mortal torment when the cart’s lid was abruptly removed. He opened his eyes, but his vision was tunneled and blurred. It seemed dark outside, and a face emerged over the rim of the cart.
“Mornin’, boy,” Zazo jibed through a halted cough. He leaned in and blew another lungful of ogras smoke into The Stranger’s face before slamming the lid closed again.
The Stranger choked and retched as the smell of dead, rotting animals pervaded his tiny confinement. The guards outside laughed uproariously at his anguish.
“Please,” he struggled. His voice was nonexistent. He continued shivering against the melting ice beneath him. All volition was gone, both vocal and physical. He could not move, could not speak, could not think. His mind already felt like the rippling surface of a lake after a rock is thrown within. As the smoke filled his lungs and entered his bloodstream, his thoughts grew even more hazy. He coughed weakly and convulsed until his heart rate slowed and he again faded to black.
He did not wake again until the dead of night when all the guards had gone to sleep, one lying atop The Stranger’s cage. A deafening clang echoed through the tiny cart as something heavy and metal slammed against the lid. The Stranger jumped back to life and banged his head against the wall of the cart.
A soft dragging sound followed, succeeded by a thud in the dirt. The lid immediately opened, and The Stranger found himself staring at the face of a demon from another world.
The demon had black ink and markings all over its scarred face. It wore only a tuft of black hair no bigger than a fist directly in the middle of its bald head. The rest of its face looked charred black and covered in soot. Long black tusks rose from its upper jaw and curled their way toward its eyes. It reached in with one heavy hand and withdrew The Stranger’s battered body with ease. As it drew The Stranger toward its face and sniffed him heavily, its eyes widened in human surprise before it dropped its prey to the earth.
The Stranger landed next to the guard’s corpse, pickaxe sticking out of his shattered skull. Before he could comprehend what was happening around him, the corpse began to move. He looked up to see another man-creature—this one with no tusks—tugging on the handle of the pickaxe in an effort to remove it from the dead guard.
“Ay!” another guard yelled, finally waking enough to see what was going on. “Ay! Fuggoff!”
The rest of the guards were stirring and reaching for their weapons to defend against what must have been ten or more hunched creatures.
“Hakk toor!” the largest one with tusks called back in a heart-stopping, guttural roar.
A tiny explosion erupted from the barrel of one of the small black guns. The confused beast holding it dropped it to the ground, and its companions all shrieked and started to scatter into the darkness. The ball had to have been fired from the weapon at impossible speed, for The Stranger watched as one of the guards standing in its way was blown backwards by a tiny hole that ripped its way through his chest and out his back in an instant.
The creatures, which stood hunched over on two legs, stopped screaming and settled back in around their prey in the ensuing silence. The one who had been struggling with the pickaxe returned and bent over The Stranger. It rubbed a mangled hand across The Stranger’s cheek and growled to its companions with what sounded like wonder: “Croolaagg!”
The Stranger saw a guard standing behind the creature holding one of the strange longer guns. As he watched, a series of impossible explosions rang out from the barrel, and the beast standing above him fell atop him. Before it came down, though, no fewer than fifteen holes erupted from its chest, and blood and gore and fragments of bone rained down upon The Stranger.
The mayhem that ensued was crippling. The creatures shrieked and howled and chanted incoherently as they began stampeding all around the small campsite. The Stranger was trampled by at least three of the beasts when they were set off and charged at the guard with the weapon. The leader with the tusks silently vanished into the dark cavern behind him as countless more explosions rang out. Bright flashes of light emanated from the barrel of the gun. Several creatures fell, and then more fell atop their fallen clansmen. Eventually the horde reached the unfortunate guard and buried him under their masses, weapon still sending off rapid successions of explosions.
The Stranger rolled himself toward the cart he was just trapped inside and managed to pull himself up to his knees. Arms still shackled behind hi
s back, he stood unsteadily to his feet and bumbled off into the darkness, shrieking and gunfire still echoing across the desert from behind him.
18
The Stranger stumbled around a tall rock face and found himself barreling down a steep cliff into a dark canyon between mountains. He fell to his knees and slid across the dry gravel, but his limbs and skin were still numb from his time in the ice cart, and he would not feel these insults until sometime later.
He plopped onto his stomach and allowed his momentum to carry him unceremoniously deeper down into the canyon and farther away from the chaos behind him. Gunshots still rang out and drowned the horrifying calls and husky dialogue from the cave-creatures.
At last the canyon flattened out, and The Stranger stopped rolling through gravel and small boulders. He sat upright and leaned against a large rock, still shivering and breathing irregularly. Sitting up, he tucked his bound hands under his backside and drew his legs in so as to put his arms back out in front of him.
A full moon sat motionless in the dark sky, a silent, docile observer of the uproar below. The Stranger continued panting and sobbing dry chokes of dismay against the rock. He wondered if this were even real, or if it were an act put on by the dark souls the ogras smoke had introduced to his mind. Nonetheless, he had to get away, and his window of opportunity would surely be brief.
A small avalanche fell a short distance deeper into the canyon. He peered over the rock into darkness. Something was there—that much he could feel—but what lay behind him was surely much worse. His heart, which may have moments before been motionless, pounded in his chest, struggling to send warm blood into his arms and legs.
When he felt he had started to catch his breath and he could almost keep his shivering under control, The Stranger set off into the canyon, his own blood mixing with the blood from that creature and drying on his pale skin.
19
The sun sprang into the sky and bullied the hesitant moon back down over the opposite horizon.
The Stranger had walked along the uneven cliffs and hills through the entire night. In the light of a new day, he cast a delirious gaze at his shackled hands as he walked. He would never be able to break free of the steel chains, but in his daze, he did not care. His only goal was to get as far from this place as possible. His mind was so rattled, he took not the time to notice that he was walking back south along the Klippa Mountain range.
Hot sun beat down on his dehydrated and malnourished body. He walked and mumbled to himself about nothing in particular until the sky faded to a purple evening. Before the sun disappeared altogether, he heard a sound that sent a visceral shock throughout his body. Like smelling the unique scent of a loved one after a lifetime apart, the sound filled The Stranger with nostalgia and a sick, bittersweet pang of hope. It was a soft singing.
He snapped out of his prolonged daze and hurried toward the source of the song. How long had it been since he’d heard music? It must have been since celebrating his union with Laura …
He stumbled around a rock face and crawled his way out of a moderately steep canyon. At the top, he found himself back at the edge of the mountains and staring into the interminable desert. The soft voice was carrying along the wooden tracks that ran alongside the mountains, and The Stranger glanced down to see a young man singing by himself in a distant rail yard. He sat upon an abandoned train car, his head bowed. His voice was a wavering baritone that flowed smoothly across the sands like a morning fog rolling down out of the hills. The Stranger could not make out the words, but the voice conveyed a melancholy so profound that it nearly brought him to his knees. He closed his eyes and let the music’s effect wash over him.
After a moment his trance was broken by a clatter from behind him. He turned to see an abomination lurking there. A short man with a horribly hunched back was peering around a small boulder. The man stood in the entryway to a small cave that couldn’t have been taller than The Stranger’s waist. His physical afflictions allowed him to shuffle through the tunnel on his hands and knees. His spine arched sharply above his craned head. His chin was pinned to his chest, and his head torqued to the right, allowing his one good eye to see things that stood above. His other eye appeared to be missing, the eyelid closed permanently by a glob of sloppy scar tissue. His head was misshapen, and his skin was a diseased shade of milky white, likely from living underground.
At some point the singing had stopped. The Stranger held his shackled hands in front of him lamely. “Stay where you are!” he warned.
The hunched man hissed a coarse exhale. He opened his mouth to reveal no more than three scattered teeth, all browned and jagged. He pointed one withered hand toward the tunnel.
“Stay back, you foul pig,” The Stranger growled. He turned back toward the train car, but no one was there. No one was singing, and the day was silent, save for the crippled swine struggling to crawl out of his tiny cave.
The Stranger made a short run in the direction of the young man he had seen moments before. He cast a few glances back over his shoulder to ensure that the hunchback wasn’t following him. When he got to the rail yard, no one was to be found. The morose melody he’d heard was already fading from his memory, along with the emotions it had summoned.
He sighed and looked back in the direction he’d come. Satisfied that the hunchback was indeed not following him, he turned to set off again on his way when a heavy hand fell over his mouth from behind.
20
“Oooh, tasty,” a deep, gruff voice rasped in The Stranger’s ear. Hot, rancid breath flowed around his face like a green miasma of noxious swamp gas.
The Stranger struggled at first, but the thing’s grasp on him was too strong.
The leader of the horrific cave people stepped in front of his captive. He cocked his head to the side and effortlessly drew what was left of The Stranger’s tattered smock off his torso. His jaw clenched, and the implanted tusks protruding from poorly healed holes in his upper lip quivered, making him look more like an animal than ever. His protruding eyes looked The Stranger up and down, savoring the sweaty skin. When the beast spoke, it was through husky, hog-like exhalations from his nostrils. “No,” he growled with apparent difficulty, “disease.” He leaned in and licked The Stranger’s cheek, sampling the dirt and sweat and blood of his slain companion. “Gohr lokah!” he exclaimed to an excited uproar from a horde of other creatures behind The Stranger.
The Stranger recalled tales of a tribe of cave-dwelling, humanoid cannibals called Hyd-Stumpa. The tribesmen mutilated their skin and limbs with the bones and flesh of their prey.
The one holding him cackled giddy laughter into his ear and stepped aside. Before he could even register his lack of restraint, a loop of rope dropped over his head and fell to his ankles. Someone pulled the rope tight, and the noose closed around his feet, which were promptly pulled out from underneath him. The Stranger fell onto his side as the horde set off at an impossible pace, dragging their prey behind.
21
The Stranger struggled at first, but the burly cave dwellers were moving too quickly. Waves of sand sprayed around The Stranger and rendered him blind and disoriented. After a short trip, the Hyd stopped, and The Stranger felt himself being lifted from the earth and dropped atop a hard solid surface. Several strong hands pinned him down to the top of another cart.
“Stop this, please!” he yelled, but the creatures, who fell somewhere between man and beast, were still in an excited uproar, and his voice was drowned out.
They set off again, this time pushing the cart along tracks that wound deeper and deeper into the caverns. Before long, the evening light shining through the cave’s entryway was no longer visible, and the party found themselves in devastating darkness. The cannibals must have adapted to such conditions, for their pace never slowed.
The Stranger’s head spun as they careened around unseen curves in the track, plummeted down steep slopes, and twisted to the left and to the right until direction lost all meaning.
&
nbsp; A deep, rhythmic sound emanated from the depths of the caves. The drumming sound pulsated and echoed throughout the tunnels and soon grew to be audible even over the exhilarated calls of the cannibals and the shrieking of rusty wheels upon the steel track.
Eventually The Stranger found that he could make out the shapes of the creatures pushing his cart along and pinning his body down. Before long he could again make out details on their haggard faces—the strange ink painted onto their skin, the unnatural distribution of hair standing out in long tufts atop mostly bald heads, the scars from modifications they’d made by sticking bones through their ears and cheeks.
His heart sank anew when they whipped around a bend into a much larger cavern with hundreds of others standing in wait. The Hyd in this cavern were holding torches, and several at the back were banging upon enormous drums made from what looked like human skin.
The cart came to a halt, and The Stranger screamed out as he felt a knife sink into his flesh and pass through the two bones in his forearm. He tried to pull away, but he couldn’t move. He looked down to find that it wasn’t a blade at all—it was a large talon or claw from some unspeakable beast. The cannibal holding it looked up at The Stranger. One eye was completely clouded over; the other danced crazily in the flickering flames of the torches spread throughout the space. He withdrew the claw from The Stranger’s arm and licked it clean of his blood. His good eye rolled back, and he began murmuring in a strange language.
At that moment The Stranger felt countless hands clawing their way to touch his skin from every direction. He squirmed helplessly under the weight of all the creatures holding him down and screamed as a set of jagged teeth clamped down around his big toe. He felt hundreds of dirty fingernails clawing at his slick skin, trying to tear it from his bones, but this was drowned by the pain in his toe. The beast chewed to the bone while The Stranger kicked and twisted his body. Once the teeth could sink no deeper, the Hyd gnawed and pulled, trying to tear the entire toe off his foot. The one who had stabbed The Stranger with a claw leaned back to the puncture wound and drew a long draught from the bleeding hole. He slurped and savored every drop of blood that he could suck forth. A number of other creatures began nibbling and licking at The Stranger’s left arm, where blood was streaming from the wound and dripping from the one cannibal’s mouth. Another starburst of lightning pain erupted from the right side of his stomach, where one had sunk sharp teeth in and easily removed a bite-sized chunk of flesh and muscle. The Stranger felt his flesh torn from his body in agonizing detail. He screamed again as several tendrils of skin ripped and popped from where it had been intact moments before.