by Chris Turner
I’d have to bring down Mong if it was the last thing I did.
Chapter 24
I must have floated there a lab rat for hours, days. Who knew in this artificial, freaked-out world?
When Balt next removed me from my tank, Blest was out of his watery prison. He sat trussed like a wet hog, his back tied to a square wooden post. Zan twirled in my place hung from the beams, his shaved head lolling on his chest.
“Time to dry for a bit,” Mong remarked, rubbing his chin in earnest thought. He motioned to Balt. “See that they’re taken care of. I have tasks that require attention offworld. Blest’s punishment will be less severe than Rusco’s, so he’ll need time to dry out some more.”
Blest’s leg had turned a deep green from shin down, a source of amusement for Mong. He studied the strange creature, the flap of leaf wrapped around Blest’s shin and tsked his tongue. “Old Greenie seems to be still latched on for good, Blest. Aren’t you a lucky one? He’s taken a liking to you. Pretty soon we’ll have to start calling you Mr. Greenfoot, or ‘Jolly Green Giant’. Or how about Plant Toe?”
Blest moaned.
Balt gave a chortling laugh.
“Let’s leave our sleeping beauties for the time being, Balt. They need to catch up on some well-needed rest.”
Before Mong left, he turned and raised his hand. As I blinked, thinking to hear a sound behind me, he whacked me in the solar plexus again, hard with the flat of his palm, that magical palm that sent me spinning into a world of oblivion. Some new universe, some new dimension of pain, horror, and illumination.
Maybe it was angels I saw, or consummate devils. Winged beings, half anthropoid, half alien, with voices croaking like frogs, breathing sighs of wind, whispering horror in my ears. They hissed macabre tales of the universes we know not of, both unseen and the seen. I protested in a voiceless murmur, wishing their voices would leave my mind, but they did not. Only laughed and carried me far away to realms unheard of, places beyond the sphere of time and space that defined the witchery of the amalgo. Call me a liar, Jet Rusco, but this was real! Perhaps it was the same place where the filthy locusts built their diseased technology. I wished for no reminder of that terrifying world, that other world that Mong brought me to again and again.
I died another time, and I knew the power of Mong’s devils. His depraved gods. And I wished to hell I hadn’t.
* * *
My waterlogged brain woke again, struggling to drive sense back into the flaccid cells. Mong and his minion were gone. Only Blest and Zan remained where I’d last seen them. I guessed this would be one of the last times we would all be together in any conversable ring, so we’d have to take full advantage of the situation.
I hissed at Blest who lolled about eight feet away. “Pst…can you hear me, Blest? Are you still conscious?”
He moaned. “Go away whoever you are…”
“Blest, dammit!” I cried. “Look at me.”
He stirred. His eyes blinked and gained focus. “Oh, Rusco. I must have died and gone to heaven. It’s you. Are we back in Bantam yet?”
“Bantam?—you idiot. The ship’s dead. Remember?”
“Oh, right. Where are we then? Oh, I’d better not ask. Why are you tied up like that? Wait, I’m tied up too.” He shook his head, struggling to make sense of the physical evidence, as if he were an amnesiac, his eyes goggling every which way.
I gave a wretched sigh.
“Rusco, you wouldn’t believe it,” Blest said in an excited cackle. “The funniest, damnedest memory. Me and my buddy Rog were out cruising at Pegri’s tavern. We’d just come off training shift, wanted to let loose, hit the pubs, and we had this bet, see who could get laid first…old Rog, braggartly bastard sicced himself on this quiet, solemn-type sitting in the dimness o’er by the window. Real killer broad. Turns out she was a robot, can you believe it—”
“Shut the fuck up! You’re rambling, Blest! Focus! Can you reach your bonds? Twiddle them with your fingers?”
“Don’t rightly think I can, Jet. Why, you want a hand job? Ha ha.”
“Would you knock of the hillbilly shit?” I gave a sigh of impatience.
Blest started to slip back into his delirium. Drool dripped from his lips. His head lolled.
“Snap out of it! For Christ sake, Blest. No time to die yet.”
“Wh-what?” he grunted. “Go away. Fuck off, Jet, I want to sleep.”
“Plenty of time to sleep in your damn tank, dumbo. Listen to me—”
“I told you to bug the fuck off, Rusco.”
“Listen!” In a fit of sudden anger I focused the brunt of my frustration at him and there came a sudden zing, like an instrument popping strings. Blest’s head jerked back then he snapped alert with a sharp cry. “What the hell was that? Rusco, you don’t have to get sore. Stop chucking things my way.”
As my eyes darted around, I was as startled as he. I shook my head. This chamber was booby-trapped, beyond a house of horrors.
I turned my focus toward Zan, who seem to have roused from his painful hangman’s hell. He hung up in the rafters, dangling from the beam. “Zan, talk to me,” I hissed.
As Zan twirled, his one skewed eye bulged my way, blasted me with a look of despair. “D-did I ever tell you how I made it to Othwan, Jet?”
“Think you did.”
“Nah, the real story.” He winced and took bite-sized breaths as he hung from those cords knitted in his back. I empathized with such pain, like a pork loin dangling from a butcher’s hook.
“We were on an attack ship. Mong ordered me to blast the small ship that my mother and father were escaping on.”
I closed my eyes and looked away.
“Yeah, that bad, Rusco…Well, Mong—basically, he killed my family, my brother and sister. The man has means…technology, influence, black magic.”
Zan was preaching to the choir. I’d witnessed too many bouts of Mong’s black magic. But I needed to keep Zan talking, engaged in the present, if he were to be of any use, which at the moment, didn’t look likely. “How’d you get that scar under your eye, Zan? What happened?”
Zan snorted, grimacing. “Mong’s guards cut me to make an example of me.”
“What’d they do that for?”
“I violated the bell rules.”
“Really?”
“When the bell rings…we’re all supposed to…assemble for teachings. I was a little slow.”
“Got us all jumping like trained seals.”
“Seems so.” Zan’s face curled in anguish. “What about you, Blest?” Zan croaked. “Seems you’ve dropped out of the—conversation. Nothing more to say about Rog and his sexy robot?”
“Forget Blest,” I grunted. “He’s out of—”
“Quiet. Someone’s coming,” Zan hissed.
There came a clinking at the door. Hinges creaked and Balt, the sick fuck, came in, carrying a large bowl, which might have held food.
“Dinner anyone?” Balt called, sauntering forth with a breezy chuckle. “Oh, I see you’re occupied. I’ll just leave these fine treats here on the bug tank. Fresh owl gizzards, chicken liver, raw snail. Mmm-mmm. Whole bowl of it. Prepared raw for maximum protein.”
“Why don’t you try some yourself, Balt?” I suggested. “Mong’s prayer circle always emphasizes sharing and goodwill.”
“That’s true and mighty kind of you, Rusco, but I’ll pass on the victuals. My stomach’s a little off today. I’ll stop by for a little chat though.”
“Mighty neighborly of you.”
Balt frowned. “Those thongs look infected, Vulder. Think the skin on your back can handle it? Might rip off more of your shoulder.”
“We’re all getting used to it by now, Zan included,” I broke in, hoping to cut Zan off and stop Balt from getting riled up.
Balt huffed out a grunt. “No fun here, Rusco, this is boring. Think I’ll be on my way now. Good luck, kiddos.”
He left, closing the portal behind him with a loud thud.
“Fucker
.” I pinched my eyes shut with a sigh. “Where were we?”
“Ready to die, Rusco, what else?” Zan gave a horrible groan. “Let’s lay off the chatty Cathy stuff. I’m dying over here.”
“Listen, we can defeat this Star Barf. We have to—”
“What? Scream a little louder?”
“Listen, Zan. Blest, you too. Dammit. Let’s dig in our heels here. We can beat this fucker if we cooperate. But if we whine and grouse about it we’re toast. There’s three of us, plus these ugly bugs in the tanks, that makes five.”
“Now you’re—the one’s sounding—like a lunatic,” Zan croaked.
I gave a hiss of exasperation. “Blest, are you with me? Blest?”
Blest had slipped off into some lotus land. His head jerked up with a jolt.
“Rusco, I had the most brutal, fucked up dream.”
“Another?”
“They come at me a mile a minute.”
“Lucky you. Must be the fluid in the tanks.”
“You think? This one was of me drowning in a swimming pool. Bugs—fishes—they all were nibbling at my toes, eyes, arms, legs, taking bites out of my ribs…except it was no dream, Rusco, it was real, and my buddy Rog and the rest of them were all bagged up in that tin can of a space capsule on a training mission. They’d crashed-landed. There was nothing whole left of them when the rescue unit came after they’d washed up on the shore, capsule and all, Rusco. In the middle of nowhere. Damn it, that really happened! Rusco, are you listening? Don’t look at me like that. They all died in that crash. It’s in the report. They found the ship crumpled up on Maelstrom’s beach. Rog, Ven, Peri and Noose. Should have been me. Earlier when our ship was cracking up, we drew straws to see who’d live. I got the lucky straw, took the single chute, there was only one left after the explosion.
He shook and shivered like a man suffering from dengue fever.
“Not much left of Peri and Rog after they got eaten up by those fishes. They nibbled at them, man—those fishes ate them like corn meal! Damnedest thing. But here’s the weirdest part. This time I was the one who got all chewed up and Peri was the one who escaped…as if the scene played a million times over in my head in every possible combination of survivors and losers.” Blest convulsed again, and this time his eyes rolled back in his sockets, his mouth agape, showing white teeth and drool spilling down his chin.
I grimaced, remembering the glimpses of past-lives flashbacks during my own time in the tank, much less with Mong’s whacks to my belly, and I didn’t doubt that what Blest was saying was real. Each scenario a new alternate reality in some dimension somewhere. Blest’s tragic tale was as close as I’d ever get to the real Blest and any clear understanding of his haunted past.
When Blest slipped off into unconsciousness, I heard the recurring moans and cries of a woman in a chamber somewhere down the line, possibly through an upper air vent. Perhaps they were Volia’s or perhaps other pleasure victims of the Orpheum.
Chapter 25
Mong had gotten a tad more creative lately and rigged an interesting variation of the hook and hang punishment. This one had me hanging from my toes, with my back to a pole, strapped at the waist. He claimed it would make me smarter, in a crude way, all that blood flowing to my head, plus seeing the world upside down. Did a man a world of good, he said. A party bag of laughs, Mong was. Hadruk had done the tying, not Balk who was the designated rope man. One of the rawhide knots ultimately slipped while Mong was out on errands, the one on my big toe, which allowed me to thrash with one freed-up foot against the knots of the first.
A significant breakthrough. With that foot I scraped a hell of a lot of skin off the other toes in the process, but after a painful amount of cursing and grinding, I managed to get the other foot free.
So, I was swinging ass over end, trying to worm my way free with waist still tied to the post while Zan was cheering me on in his hoarse way, practically dying up there in his hangman’s noose. While I was practically choking from being bent over double at the middle, my hips like a pivot with my spine still stuck to the pole. I did manage to squirm out of that hold with the extra leeway I had with my legs free.
I was squatting on the ground now like a pinched toad, panting, with only my arms bound behind my back. Not too bad for an old timer. I staggered up painfully, pushed my back to the post, rubbed the leather cords against the corner of the wood, all drenched in a feverish sweat, knowing that this would be the only chance I’d get to get the fuck out of this mess. Snap, snap. Enough friction to cut one of the cords then the other. Freedom!
Not too shabby. Some torn flesh, scraped toes and wrists, nothing I couldn’t handle. My ears perked to a fumbling at the door. I ducked, swearing as the iron frame groaned inwards. I hobbled the best I could behind the nearest Mentera tank, dreading the proximity to that vampirish creature and hoped whoever was coming hadn’t seen me.
It was Balt and his eyes flicked to the vacant post. Up came his rifle. “Rusco? Where are you? Come out, wherever you are.” The torturer grinned, aimed his rifle at the posts, peering crosswise.
I clenched my prosthetic fist, trying to stay hidden behind the hunched form of the locust suspended in the tank. Whether I got shot up or I didn’t, old Balt was in for a bit of rough and tumble.
This Redemption Hall went back quite a ways into darkness. I didn’t know what was back there. Didn’t want to find out either. That was Balt’s business and his first guess as to where I’d fled. He probed the silence, squinting into the dim shadows with a bulldog’s scowl on his face. “The more games we play here, Mr. Rusco, the more painful it gets for you. Big Mong’s not here to protect your silly ass. He gave me full license to use excessive force should there be civil disobedience.”
Good for you, Balt, you smug fucker. You can call ‘civil disobedience’ on me all you want. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings. I came scuttling back like a land crab from behind Blest’s tank, hoping to get closer to Zan who hung like a bug on flypaper.
Balt must have heard that scuffle of movement because he came beetling back like a scarab, clutching the end of his gun and using it as a club to take a big whack at me. He missed. I ducked the butt end of the rifle that came smashing full into Blest’s tank.
The glass splintered and water spilled out in a tidal rush. A whole side of the tank fell outward and Blest came sloshing out on his knees, gasping, choking and spewing putrid green water out of his gullet.
Balt charged me with a deep-throated roar. His full weight caught me head on, and I grunted, bowled over, croaking, smacking my metal fist in his face, jamming fingers in his nose, his eyes. The man was not human to have a grappling force like that. Any other strike would have split a man’s skull. I struggled with him. The man’s ape strength was enough to make me crumple and I could feel my backbone starting to give. I saw Blest out of the corner of my eye, staggering woozily to his feet while I fought on with less and less hope.
“Kill him!” I wheezed. Blest suddenly came stumbling like a straw puppet with the feeding bowl clutched in a fist. He clocked Balt on the back of the head.
Balt grunted. I felt his grip slacken. It gave me time to get my fingers into his eyes again. He roared, grabbing my wrist. I chopped him in the throat. Blest smacked Balt again with the bowl just above the ear. Balt went raging maniac and charged Blest, rolling on him like a bear. The alien plant leaf which had up till this time been stable, suddenly unfurled, doubling in size, whipping out like a serpent. It latched onto Balt’s midsection like a cincture, squeezing the breath out of him. He writhed and howled, clawing at the thing, only to get more wind sucked out of his lungs.
I kicked at his head. Blest stayed well back from the constricting force that had plagued him for so long. The sudden intrusion on its stable habitat had pushed the plant parasite to violence.
While Balt twisted and howled, I hissed out a vindictive laugh. “Never forgave you for busting up my fingers, Balt. Not too smug now are you, you fucking bitch-ape? What’s th
at, can’t hear you?” I ground my boot heel into his flailing hand, stepping on it so hard I heard it crunch. He grimaced in agony while struggling in the wet glass.
I motioned to Blest. “Here, help me drag this fuck over to the tanks.” Zan watched the battle out of the corner of his eye in a groggy haze.
We dragged Balt by his heels, taking care not to touch the alien plant. Under no circumstance did I want it to leapfrog to either of us. We upended Balt into the tank formerly occupied by me. He sputtered foul brine and splashed like a fish but he slipped under water, having no more will to fight, clutching feebly at the constricting leaf robbing him of further strength. Before the lieutenant sank to the bottom, his lungs filled with water and he stared out of his glassy cage with lips parted in an O like one of those black bugs in the vessel beside him. Oh, how Balt glared out from behind that glass! If I could only snapshot that scene.
We crouched on our haunches, panting. I reached over and patted Blest on the back. “Good work, friend. You came through as I knew you would. We were always a team.”
Blest babbled an incoherent word. “This is fucking madness, Rusco. Where are we?”
I slapped him on the back. “Madness or not, seems your vine critter came in handy after all.”
I gathered up my boots, then snatched up Balt’s weapon, gripping it in a sweaty palm with an air of triumph. There’d be some serious payback for old Mong now.
Blest stared at me with suspicion glinting in his eyes then at Balt’s twitching form in the tank. “Why put him in there? Let’s kill the fucker and get out of here.” He grimaced as Balt convulsed in his watery prison.
“He’s already dead, Blest. No way to change that.”
“Don’t like him swimming in there, Rusco. He ain’t dead, and you know it.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Let’s not mess with things that aren’t broken.”
Blest shivered, as if recalling an odious memory of his own tank experience. “That damn plant thing constricted me like a bitch, Rusco. The green devil water gave it more strength.”