“I can’t wait to see how he performs in the main arena.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After being tied up and dragged from the pit, Cal had found himself surrounded by jeering Zertex soldiers. As one, the crowd had escorted him away from the pit, still shouting and hollering and laughing in his face.
After a few minutes of this, the mob had thinned enough for Cal to see four semi-naked, colorfully painted tribespeople surrounding him, the tips of their spears all pointed at different parts of his anatomy – and some of his favorite parts, at that.
He had been blindfolded, although it wasn’t very effective, as one side of his head was a completely different shape and size to the other. Through the gap at the bottom, he could see his own feet. His right ankle now looked borderline elephant-sized, and his foot throbbed painfully inside his boot.
Through the gap at the top of the blindfold, he could see a sky filled with unfamiliar stars. Once, when he turned, he caught a glimpse of the tear in space the Shatner had flown through. It seemed worryingly close, although his limited grasp of space travel meant he couldn’t even begin to guess how far away it actually was. Ten miles? Ten light years? He had no idea.
He had been bundled onto some sort of metal platform. The tribesmen had climbed on beside him, and the whole thing had glided across the sand, whining gently.
With the men so close, Cal had briefly entertained the notion of launching a surprise attack, knocking them all off the platform, then steering it to freedom, but as he couldn’t see, could barely stand and was increasingly resembling a semi-inflated version of the Elephant Man, he decided to give it a miss.
Several minutes of gliding later, Cal had been bundled off the platform again. He heard hinges creaking. A spear had been pressed against his lower back and then a hand had shoved him. He sprawled onto the dirt, then the gate slammed closed behind him again.
“Nice to meet you,” he called after them.
Cal rolled onto his humped back. It hurt, but then it had already been hurting, and pretty much everything else hurt, too, so there was no point making special allowances for it.
Another gate opened somewhere ahead of him. Words were barked, possibly at him, possibly at someone else. He couldn’t understand them, either way.
Clawing hands grabbed him under the arms. “Hey,” he protested, as he was dragged across the rocky sand.
He was dropped again. He heard footsteps, then the metallic slam of the gate closing. Another voice came, and this one he did understand.
“Cal?”
He blinked as his blindfold was pulled free. Loren gaped down at him, a patina of dried blood across her pale blue skin. “Oh. Wow. What happened to you?”
“Holy shizz, look at his face!” said another familiar voice. Mech clanked into view, his eyes darting all over Cal’s body. “And, oh man, his hand! Check out the size of his hand!”
“Does it hurt?” asked Loren.
Cal swiveled a bulbous, bulging eye towards her. “Guess,” he croaked.
“Aw man, I think I might throw up,” said Mech. “And I don’t even have a stomach.”
“Mech, get Tullok,” Loren said.
Mech retched. “Look at his fonking leg!”
“Mech. Tullok. Now!” Loren barked.
“Who’s Tullok?” Cal whispered, as Mech hurriedly stomped off.
Loren gingerly touched the lump on Cal’s forehead. Pain ricocheted through him, but he was too exhausted to acknowledge it. “He’s a native. But a prisoner, like us. He helped you after we took out the arrow.”
Cal searched his fractured memory. Most of the recent parts were taken up by a wasp and Tobey Maguire, but there was a faint whiff of someone else in there, too. Someone new.
“Little guy? Skinny?”
“Uh, yeah. More or less,” said Loren.
Cal tried to raise his uninjured hand to Loren’s cheek, but the shoulder was too deformed, so he had to settle for lifting the bloated one instead. He wasn’t yet used to the size of it, and rather than gently brushing against her cheek, he thumped her on the ear instead. “Shizz, sorry!” he said. He traced the blood on her face with his hot dog fingers. “What happened?”
Loren smiled grimly. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
The effort of keeping his hand up proved too much. Cal let it flop down to his side. “Where’s Miz?” he wheezed.
Loren’s face seemed to grow thinner. “We don’t know. No-one will tell us.”
“She was in a cage. I saw her. Vajazzle showed me,” Cal said, heaving himself up onto his elbows.
“What are you doing?” said Loren, placing a hand on his chest. “You shouldn’t move.”
“We have to find her,” Cal mumbled, gritting his teeth as his brain became a spinning-top inside his head. “She needs us.”
“You can’t do anything for her. Not like this,” said Loren. “Wait for Tullok.”
Cal sunk back onto the ground, the sky swirling and twirling above him. He saw the colorful space-rip swooshing past and tried to focus on it, but everything was moving too quickly and so he screwed his eyes shut and swallowed down his nausea instead.
“They’ve been here for years,” he said.
“We know,” Loren replied. “Mech thinks time moves differently here, wherever this actually is. Either that, or the vortex sent them back in time, somehow.”
Half of Cal’s brow furrowed as he tried to process this. “Then wouldn’t it send us back in time, too?”
“Maybe it did,” Loren said, sounding almost excited by the idea. “Maybe it sent them further back, because they went through earlier, then when we went through we travelled back to a date sometime between their arrival and the present time – by which I mean the time we initially went through…”
Cal held up his fat hand. “Please stop. My head’s already in danger of blowing up. This isn’t helping.”
Loren kept her hand on Cal’s chest, making sure he didn’t move again. “Did you find him? Did you find Splurt?”
Cal hesitated, remembering the cold, dead eyes of the dino-creature. “No,” he said. “No, not yet.”
There was a squeaking from nearby. Cal twisted his neck enough to see a frail figure pushing himself towards him on a rickety-looking wheelchair. It was the same man he remembered coming gliding towards him out of the darkness after the arrow incident.
His arms were like withered sticks, the olive skin hanging off them like rags. His head was a parchment-covered skull, but there was a twinkle in his piercing blue eyes that took a full decade off him.
He wore a sort of sleeveless one-piece jumpsuit made of orange and green dyed animal hide. It stopped just below his knees which, coincidentally, was roughly where his legs stopped, too.
“That Tullok?” Cal asked.
Loren nodded. “He’s on our side. We think. He can make you better.”
“You think he can make me better, or you think he’s on our side?”
“Both,” said Mech, pacing slowly behind the old man’s wheelchair.
Tullok heaved the chair across the rough ground, then stopped when he drew close. With a sudden jerk he shot forwards and flopped, face-first, onto the ground.
“Jesus, Mech, did you just tip that guy out of his wheelchair?” Cal slurred.
“What? No! Of course I didn’t! He tipped himself out.”
With some effort, Cal managed to turn his head enough so he could see Tullok crawling towards him. With his shriveled skull and bone-like limbs, he looked exactly like a zombie, and Cal had to fight the urge to grab for a rock and smash the old man’s head in.
“Tullok!” chirped the man, raising himself up on one arm and tapping his chest with the other hand. “Moinsa Tullok.”
His voice had a light, floaty quality. It sounded like a child’s laughter, and made Cal feel a little better all on its own.
“Cal,” said Cal, flapping his fat hand against his own chest. “Cal Carver.”
“Eh! Toinsa Cal-Cal,” giggled
Tullok, his mouth curving into a gummy grin that revealed precisely one-and-a-half teeth.
“No, not Cal-Cal, just… Ah, forget it,” said Cal. He offered back the best smile he could muster, and what was possibly the largest thumbs-up in the whole of human history.
Tullok brought one hand to his mouth and extended his tongue. He began to lick his palm, smearing his saliva into every wrinkled nook and cranny. His tongue worked between his fingers, coating the front and back all the way past his arthritic knuckles and across his cracked, dirty nails.
“Man, you’re really getting stuck in there, aren’t you?” Cal mumbled. He shot a glance at Loren. “What’s he doing?”
“Relax,” Loren urged. “It’s part of the process.”
“What process? What’s he going to do? He’s not going to lick me better, is he?” Cal asked, then he gasped as Tullok slapped the spit-slicked hand onto his bare chest, and warm syrup filled him up from the inside.
Joy. That was what it felt like. It was opening his eyes on Christmas morning. It was first love. A first kiss in the moonlight. His daughter’s first smile, first word, first steps. It was every perfect moment he’d ever had – every perfect moment he ever would have - flooding through him in a tidal wave of bliss.
It ebbed away again almost immediately. Cal felt a flutter of panic – he wanted so desperately to cling onto the feeling – but then that feeling, too, faded, leaving nothing but serenity. He exhaled slowly as the last of the pain drained out through some invisible hole in his back, then opened his eyes.
He could no longer see his forehead. That was encouraging. He raised both hands without any effort and studied them, back and front. They were perfect mirror images of each other, neither one bloated or swollen.
There was no pain. There was the opposite of pain, in fact. Cal felt great again, just like he had when he’d woken up in the cell. Better than that, even.
He sat up just as Loren and Mech helped Tullok back into his chair. The old man was still smiling, but it was strained now, like the act of healing Cal had taken a toll. The bottoms of his legs, where the flesh ended in stumps, was gray and withered. Had they been like that before? Cal couldn’t remember.
“Thank you,” Cal said, jumping to his feet in one big bound, just for the thrill of it. “This is…” He flexed his arms and swiveled his head so his chin brushed against his bare chest. “It’s amazing. What you’ve done. It’s incredible!”
“You know he don’t understand a word you’re saying, right?” grunted Mech.
“Parammie, Cal-Cal,” said Tullok, his cheerful voiced tainted just at the edges by tiredness. “Parammie-mok.”
With a nod, Tullok wheeled himself backwards. Loren moved to help, but a violent flap of his hand waved her away.
“Well, he seemed like a kindly older gentleman,” said Cal, giving Tullok a wave as the old man creaked his chair around and wheeled himself in the direction of a darkened doorway. “We should totally recruit him to the crew.”
For the first time since the blindfold had been removed, Cal looked around at his surroundings. He, Loren and Mech were fenced in on all sides by a welded patchwork of metal walls. Each fence panel stood between twelve and sixteen feet high, Cal estimated, and all appeared to have been salvaged from elsewhere, then assembled around them like a flat-pack prison.
A couple of doorways led off from the area they stood in, neither one boasting a door. The gate Cal had been dragged through was another cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of a thing, put together from half a dozen different-sized metal panels. There was no handle on the inside, Cal noted, and no gap at the bottom. It was a gate designed with the sole purpose of keeping people on one side of it.
In the center of it all stood a rickety-looking tower. It wasn’t particularly tall – barely higher than the walls, in fact – but was positioned well away from any of them, making leaping to freedom impossible. A ladder ran up one side of it to a narrow platform at the top.
“So, I’m assuming we have an escape plan?” Cal said, once he’d finished looking around.
“Not yet,” said Loren, dropping her voice to just above a whisper.
Cal tutted. “Well, I’m very disappointed in you both,” he said. “I mean, look at this place. Mech can punch through any one of these walls, we’ll kick shizz out of any guards we come across, then storm Vajazzle’s HQ and grab Splurt.”
“You saw him?” asked Mech.
Cal blinked. “What? Oh, no. I mean, we’d have to find him first, obviously. Then we’d grab him.” He shrugged. “There. Wasn’t so hard, was it? We’ll call that ‘Plan A.’”
Mech and Loren exchanged a glance, then Mech beckoned Cal with a mechanical finger. “Come here. There’s something you need to see.”
* * *
A few minutes later, Cal stood in front of Mech on the narrow platform at the top of the tower, gazing out over the wilderness. The tower was as pieced-together as everything else in the prison, and Cal had been amazed that the ladder had taken his weight, and then had a minor panic attack when Mech had climbed up behind him.
While it was too far from the walls to offer an escape route, it did provide an uninterrupted view of the area, and Cal spent several long minutes just staring out in silence.
Dirt and desert stretched out for miles in every direction, bordered by the beginnings of a forest over in what Cal decided was the east, but was actually nothing of the sort.
Dozens of those miles were taken up by a mind-bogglingly enormous spaceship. It lay partially-buried in the rock and sand, like the ground was trying to claim the technology for itself. “That’s the Zertex ship,” Cal realized. “The big one. The one Vajazzle was on. Is on,” he corrected. “So they did crash.”
“Sure looks that way,” said Mech. “Even Loren’s landings ain’t that bad.”
“I heard that!” called Loren from below.
Midway between the prison and the crashed ship were half a dozen holes in the ground. Some were barely a few feet across, while others looked large enough to park a bus in. One of them – the largest - was surrounded by tiered seating. Cal tried to figure out which one of them he’d been in, but couldn’t.
“So what’s the problem?” he asked. “Through the wall, up to the ship, blast our way in. Simple, like I said.”
Mech pointed past him. “See that?”
Cal cupped a hand above his eyes, shielding them from the sun. A lumpy, misshapen person-sized mound lay on the sand a few feet from something that looked like a silver mailbox. He was barely a five second dash away from the nearest wall. “Yeah. What am I looking at?”
“Last dude who tried to escape,” said Mech. “Watch.”
Cal jumped as a bolt of laser fire screamed from Mech’s wrist blaster. It struck the side of the box, but rather than explode, the box just shuddered with the impact.
A fraction of a second later, the air around it was filled with the same oily black wasps Cal had fought in the pit. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, swarming angrily around, hunting for whoever had disturbed them.
“Pressure plates,” said Mech, gesturing in a sweeping motion with his hand. Cal noticed forty or more of the same silver boxes scattered around the outside of the prison. “All over the place. Step on one, those things come out to play.”
“Then we don’t step on the pressure plates,” Cal suggested.
“Yeah. Makes sense,” agreed Mech. “Except we don’t know where they are, and also…”
He fired another blast, at the ground this time, a little further away. The sand shifted, and something a bit like a Venus fly-trap, only several hundred times the size and with unsettlingly human-looking teeth, erupted from beneath the surface and snapped shut with an audible clack.
“OK, so we don’t step on those things either,” said Cal. He whistled softly. “What the Hell are those things, anyway?”
“Hungry,” said Mech. “They’re hungry. Trust me. That guy down there? He ain’t the only one wh
o tried to make a run for it. He’s just the only one there’s anything left of.”
Cal thought for a moment, then clicked his fingers and pointed at Mech. “Rocket boots.”
“Say what?”
“Your rocket boots. You can fly us over all that stuff.”
Mech’s brow furrowed into deep grooves. Cal sighed. “Come on, rocket boots. Remember? You use them all the time.”
“Yeah, in outer space,” said Mech. “Where there ain’t no gravity. Here, they wouldn’t even get me off the ground.”
Cal nodded slowly. “What if I wore them?”
“Wore what?”
“Your rocket boots!”
Mech looked down. “They ain’t boots. They’re my feet. You ain’t wearing my feet.”
“But--”
“You ain’t wearing my feet, man. You ain’t wearing them.”
“I know, but--”
Mech started climbing down the ladder. “I ain’t listening. You ain’t wearing my feet.
Cal leaned over the railing and shouted after him. “Spoilsport.”
Once Mech was clear, Cal slid down the ladder, declared himself, “the boss,” for doing so, then turned and looked at the two doorways leading off from where he, Mech and Loren all stood.
“So, apart from Tullok, anyone else here?” he asked.
Loren and Mech exchanged another glance. “Uh, yes,” said Loren. “One or two.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cal stood in another, much larger area, watching twenty or more tribespeople, who were in turn watching two others pummel the shizz out of each other with wooden swords. Around forty blankets lay on the ground along the two longest walls, a few occupied by sleeping bodies, but most of them empty.
In one corner, a stocky native with paint markings daubed across his face and bare chest cooked something on the most home-made looking barbecue Cal had ever seen. He wasn’t sure it actually qualified as a barbecue, even. ‘Some junk over a fire’ was about as generous a description as it deserved.
Still, it seemed to be doing the job, and the smell of whatever the man was cooking reminded Cal that he hadn’t eaten in… well, he wasn’t really sure, but the rumbling from his stomach told him it wasn’t recently.
Space Team: The Search for Splurt Page 10