by Travis Smith
He closed his eyes from the horror unfolding, but not seeing did not make the torture any less agonizing. He was paralyzed. Helpless. He screamed again until he thought his throat may burst, providing another scrumptious dish for his slayers. The sound of growling and hissing and gnashing teeth underlined the sounds of flesh popping and claws digging at unbroken skin. The morbid drums continued to pound in what may as well have been another world.
At last a dense buzzing filled The Stranger’s head, and he could feel the blissful realm of unconscious encroaching.
“GROTTA!” a voice commanded, dwarfing the deafening sounds already coalescing in the cavern. At once all sounds ceased. All biting and scratching and clamoring atop The Stranger’s body stopped.
The leader of the Hyd-Stumpa tribe stood high on a rock, towering above his people, all of whom had fallen silent. They cast their gaze upward to their leader, and a wave of disappointed acceptance seemed to pass through the horde.
The Stranger’s wounds throbbed and pulsed. He shivered atop the metal cart, and all the hands that held him down were slowly lifted.
The cannibal leader with his great tusks began to speak in a thunderous, guttural growl to the rest of the creatures. Before The Stranger could catch his breath, the leader was silenced by a familiar series of rapid explosions.
Frightened shrieks echoed throughout the silent cavern, and the Hyd shrank away from the center of the cavern as a single unit, like a large group of ants working in unison to construct their underground home. The group tightened against the cavern walls, and many of them disappeared into the dark tunnels sprouting off in every direction from the cavern. Several of the ones still standing around The Stranger collapsed to the floor in a spray of blood and bone and brain matter as tiny holes exploded through their heads.
The Stranger shielded his eyes as another mist of blood drifted down on his face. When he opened them, he welcomed the strangest of sensations of relief at seeing Zazo and Boss standing before him holding torches and their strange weapons.
22
“What have we told ya ’bout stealin’ our bodies?” Boss called at the cannibal leader.
He stood in defiant silence. His horde could easily storm the two guards where they stood, but the rest of the creatures seemed deeply terrified of the new weaponry.
Boss approached The Stranger as he cowered atop his cart and inspected his wounds with a snarl. “Now ’e’s gonna catch fever ’n’ die.”
“No disease,” the cannibal repeated with great effort.
“I don’t care!” Boss screamed like a petulant child. “We paid fifteen paga fer ’im, ’n’ if ’e dies, we comin’ back fer you!” He motioned for Zazo to grab the cart. Zazo obliged. “If any o’ y’all follow us, we comin’ back fer you!”
Boss backed out of the cavern following Zazo, who struggled pushing the heavy cart uphill. When they were deep enough into the tunnel, he dropped his weapon to his side and grabbed the cart to help push.
They gained momentum and allowed it to build and help carry them through all the dark, underground twists and turns and back out into the moonlight.
“Get ’im on this track to Fanxel,” Boss said, raising his weapon and pointing it at the cave exit. “We ain’t stoppin’ again.”
Zazo hoisted The Stranger upright. “Come on, Bitch, over here.”
The Stranger winced and did his best to follow as he was led across a short patch of desert and tossed upon another cart.
The guards pushed their prisoner through the night, each taking turns after a while to take a seat and ride the cart’s momentum for short breaks. The Stranger shivered until he fell into an uneasy, fevered sleep.
Eventually the guards had to stop for rest, but The Stranger never fully woke enough to make an escape. His entire body ached, and his head swam in and out of pools of delirium. Days faded together as he cycled between sleeping and gazing uncomprehendingly at the horizon.
When the cart reached the end of the track, the city of Lexen could be seen in the distance. The guards hoisted their haggard prisoner to his feet and led him across the remaining desert in silence. He glanced around with idle interest as they passed through the slummy outskirts of what once must have been a bustling and prosperous city.
The world had changed. Allegiances had shifted. The balance between good and evil had not been tipped, but the scales completely knocked off the table. The punishers had abandoned their troth, and evil had nothing left to which it had to answer. The criminals were out of the prisons and in positions of power, and the former leaders were cast to confinement with the weak and handicapped. Atrocities previously unfathomable were free to ascend from their underground lairs and let loose their depravity from nation to nation. Outcasts, oppressors, and abominations unfit for the most scathing of nightmares stepped forth from the shadows and gradually seized control of township after township until nothing of honor remained.
The Stranger observed through a fevered haze as he was marched through the Fanxel prison. Even his muddled mind revolted at the nightmares laid out before him. Two long buildings sat opposite one another, separated by a desolate courtyard. Each structure contained no fewer than twenty small cells with steel cage doors. Guards strolled up and down the courtyard, each carrying one of the strange, powerful weapons. Wretched screams of pain echoed from various cells and drowned out incomprehensible babble and calls from crazed faces pressed against the steel bars of their cells. One pair of guards was busy forcing an elderly man out of his cell. The man clung with frail arms to the bars and sobbed openly, babbling and pleading with the guards not to put him in the box. Other prisoners sat alone in their cells and stared blankly. Some of them wore grotesque contraptions around their necks with several sharp, metal spikes protruding upward in front of their faces and curling over their heads. One man sat alone in the dirt and picked at a gaping wound he’d dug in his own thigh. He retrieved two blood-dripping fingers from the gash and slowly brought them to the clay wall before him, where an expansive red masterpiece was growing.
When the guards stopped and retrieved a set of keys to unlock The Stranger’s cell door, a man who was facing the corner turned and looked at them with lunatic eyes. His thick, black hair stood out in every direction in long tufts, and a cracked pair of old spectacles balanced lamely on his nose. He turned his attention back to the dirt and continued drawing an obsessive series of alternating circles. Another much older man sat in the corner wearing a carefree smile as though he were watching the sun set over the Great Sea.
Boss opened the door, and Zazo shoved The Stranger inside.
“Play nice, ’n’ ye’ll lose the chains,” Boss sneered, slamming the cell door and locking it back.
The Stranger collapsed against the bars and closed his eyes, too weak and too ill to weep. Hot pulses of agony throbbed from his wounds on his toe, arms, torso, and thighs. A cloud of dry dirt puffed up from beneath him as he came down. The dirt settled on his sweaty, sticky eyelids and hardened the already dried blood that coated his head, neck, and chest.
“Not from ’round here,” the man with the mad black hair said, not bothering to turn from his symbols that were scrawled in the dirt and etched all over the cell’s clay walls. His voice was high pitched and frantic.
“Not from dis world at all,” the old man in the opposite corner replied in a hoarse, elderly voice that sounded garbled as though his tongue were constantly curled back inside his mouth. He continued staring at nothing and smiling about it all the while. He may very well have been talking to no one within earshot of himself.
The Stranger opened his eyes and peered once more around the ghastly prison outside his cell. Across the courtyard, perched atop the opposite row of cells, impossibly far from its usual domain, was a great, brownish-grey albatross, staring directly into The Stranger’s eyes.
23
Another set of eyes watched The Stranger from across the Fanxel courtyard. The familiar stranger was staring intently at what appeared t
o be a cluster of nothing sat atop the prison.
The man clutched a bucket of unsavory cuisine tightly to his chest as his dry, cracked lips spread into a wicked grin. His tongue flicked across a crusty sore oozing from the corner of his mouth, and he disappeared into the shadows.
Chapter 2:
Olivia
1
A knock upon the door startled Resin Eldig from his thoughts. The burly man glanced up from the kitchen table and gazed at the door through narrowed eyes. The others knew better than to come ’round when they still had debts, and most of the town regulars hadn’t yet settled up.
Resin grumbled and set off toward the door. “Verillius, if ’at’s you, ya slimy old pervert.”
He opened the door to a surprise. It was a child who stood no taller than Resin’s own breast. His distrust doubled. “What do ye want?” he growled.
“Is Olivia home?” the boy with a mop of light brown hair asked.
Resin scowled and planted a large, heavy hand on the boy’s chest to push him backwards away from the door. “Fuck off,” he demanded, “before ya find a whole mess o’ trouble.”
The boy stepped forward with great reflex and planted his booted foot in front of the door before Resin could slam it in his face.
The brute lunged forward and snatched the child up off his feet by the collar of his shirt. “What’re ya playin’ at, ya little louse? Yer liable t’ get yer head plucked righ’ off ’f ye step at me like that!”
Just then another boy stepped around from the side of his dwelling. This one wore the greenish shade of healing cuts and bruises on his familiar face.
“You,” Resin growled, eyes widening in surprise. He dropped the other boy back onto his feet.
“Lower your voice if ye want to see tomorrow, ya big ogre.” The boy wielded a large machine gun, which he jammed painfully into Resin’s chest.
The murder in Resin’s eyes made his previous scowl look almost approachable. Unadulterated contempt seeped from his pores as he held his breath, clearly struggling not to explode into a whirlwind of brutality that would surely get at least one person killed before the boy could pull the trigger. “I knew we should ’ave killed you,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “Ye think ye’ll see my mercy again? Should’ve learned yer lesson ’n’ stayed down.”
“Carry on, Patrick,” the boy said, ignoring Resin’s threat. “Go check the bedrooms for her.”
“Right,” Patrick replied. “Jake, Philip, let’s go,” he called around the corner in a harsh whisper.
2
“He’ll surely take any measure to see us dead before we can even set foot in the house,” Brandon had told his three companions the evening before. “We have to catch him off guard. Patrick, he won’t recognize you, so ye’ll knock and make sure there ain’t a gathering goin’ on inside.”
Patrick had nodded in solemn agreement. He’d escaped his own nightmare in Onton only to join a band of troubled kids armed with weaponry more powerful than anything any of them had previously beheld. They had already traveled farther than Patrick had ever dreamt of doing, south of Onton and through the mountains toward cities unknown. Now the first town they would enter—the first group of people Patrick would see since the incident, other than these three—they were planning to threaten and raid for some girl Patrick had never met.
“Patrick, these are bad guys. Trust me,” Brandon said.
“I understand.” He had enacted atrocities beyond description in his time after the incident, so he should be able to handle this. But after all he’d seen, after coming to accept that the rest of the world had not collapsed into ruin as his home town had, how could he condone more cruelty and violence among the few lucky enough to still be living?
“The world’s changed, and if you never left your town to see it, I can guarantee ya it ain’t much prettier the way things’re headed,” Brandon continued.
Patrick nodded again.
“No one gets hurt. No one dies. If this guy calls for his compatriots, or if anyone else gets wind of our presence or what we’re doin’, things’re gonna get a lot more ugly.”
“No shots fired,” Philip reiterated.
As if to emphasize this point, the much older and larger Jake cracked his knuckles and nodded serenely.
3
Patrick Oliphant pulled a smaller gun from the back of his trousers and set off cautiously into the back of the man’s home with Philip by his side. Jake stayed back with Brandon and pulled a length of rope from his satchel.
Brandon stepped fully inside and closed the door behind him. “One word an’ I will remove yer tongue with a couple o’ hot bullets.”
“I’ll deliver a fate worse than death to you, ya sniveling swine.”
“What did I just say?” Brandon asked, thumping Resin in the side of the head with the barrel of his weapon.
Jake grinned through his patchy young man’s beard as he tied Resin’s hands behind his back and shoved him to his knees.
Philip nodded toward the kitchen to signal that he and Patrick should split up. Patrick nodded and turned the other way at the end of the hall. The man’s kitchen was in an unsettling state of disarray. Glass containers filled with various colored liquids lined the counters, and empty ones lay on their sides or broken on the floor below. The stench was potent, but admittedly not so bad as that which he’d suffered during his last few days in Onton. A pungent metallic odor filled the room and seemed to coat many of the glasses in a black, sooty grease.
There was nowhere in the kitchen for the girl to be hidden, but Patrick was captivated by the unnatural setup. He picked up an odd-shaped glass container of thick purple liquid only to find that it wasn’t liquid at all. The substance was somewhere between congealed and gelatinous. He sniffed it, and the aroma of death and decay caused him to step back in shock. He dropped the glass, which shattered at his feet, and the purple goo inside slowly spread into a thick puddle. Thin wisps of black smoke puffed out of the substance as it softened and separated. Patrick brought his arm up to cover his nose and mouth as he stepped to the side.
What he saw next made whatever noxious odor was filling the kitchen irrelevant. His arm dropped back to his side, and he swayed dangerously on his feet. Breath hitched in his chest. His heart pounded waves of blood straight into his head that caused his vision to blur in pulses.
On the wooden table stood a familiar glass tube, balanced on four curved black prongs. He stiffly lifted legs that each felt like it weighed as much as a boar’s carcass. Bitter tears stung his eyes in an instant as he approached the fiendish talisman in a daze. He lifted it with one rubbery arm and clenched the small gun in his other fist. He already knew what he would find on the underside of the vial. And there it was. The double-circle symbol that embodied the end of his innocence.
“I found ’er!” Philip called from the bedroom. “Let’s get outta here!”
But his voice may as well have been coming from underwater, on the other side of the Great Sea.
A red haze clouded Patrick’s mind. He turned and stormed back toward the den near the house’s front door.
“What the fuck is this?” he screamed, his newly deepening voice cracked backward into the high pitch of youth.
Brandon and Jake both jumped and recoiled from Patrick’s path.
“Quiet!” Brandon warned in a forced whisper, but it did no good.
Patrick approached Resin, lying on his stomach with his hands and feet bound behind his back, and thrust a heavy boot straight into the brawny man’s bearded face.
The small boy’s wrath wiped Resin’s face of all hostility and replaced it with an instinctual terror.
Before the man could reply, Patrick brought the back of his small hand—carrying the black gun—across his face. “Where did you get this?” he screamed in a blind fury.
Brandon dropped his weapon and put his hands on Patrick’s shoulders, but Patrick ripped himself out of his companion’s grasp.
After the initial insult,
Resin’s face again grew dark, and he sneered menacingly at the boy but said nothing.
Philip brought Olivia into the room, and the young girl looked on in horror at the unfamiliar tyrant.
Brandon locked eyes and touched her arm before turning back to Patrick. “Whoa, now,” he said in his best attempt to be soothing. “Leave it, Patrick. We have to go ’fore the others find out we’re here.”
Hot tears of rage stung Patrick’s eyes and streamed down his quivering cheeks. His entire body shook with furious helplessness.
Resin adopted a slow, wicked grin as he looked up, blood streaming from one nostril. “Betta watch yer boy ’ere,” he said to Brandon. “He’s gon’ be the death o’ ye all.”
“Fuck you,” Brandon growled.
But Patrick released a heavy sob through gritted teeth as he lifted his leg and brought his boot down onto Resin’s craned head. Brandon touched his shoulder again to calm his new friend, but once wasn’t enough. Patrick raised his boot again and again and stomped the man until he stopped moving. And when that no longer satisfied the boy, he dropped the ominous empty vial and clutched his gun in both fists and brought that down upon Resin’s unprotected head.