The Adventures of Andrew Doran: Box Set

by Matthew Davenport

  It was the trick of insanity that I had learned all too well. Insanity creeps into the cracks of your brain, so fill them with something else. It isn't a cure or a permanent fix, but it slows the oncoming darkness that will one day consume my entire being.

  I hope that it does, anyway.

  I reopened my eyes and began the search that I had told Sebastian was already underway. The city was so tightly packed, though, and I wasn't seeing any roadway or spacing that would provide the necessary length of runway to account for our momentum.

  That led me to my second concern. While the buildings were all composed of stones that I was sure only looked like obsidian, I wasn't willing to bet against how sharp they would be when we hit them. Obsidian is sharper than the most freshly sharpened scalpels. If we were destined to crash through any of those structures, it was more than likely that the debris would slice us to ribbons.

  "Do you see anything useful?" Sebastian asked, breaking me from my thoughts of imminent demise.

  I shook my head and pulled my eyes away from the city again, choosing to focus on Sebastian while I spoke to him. "There are plenty of places to land, but none in which we would probably survive."

  Sebastian nodded. I was sure that he had already come to a similar conclusion. A series of loud popping noises ran along our fuselage. Holes tore through my small window and the ceiling of the small cockpit. Sebastian pulled hard on the yoke and changed our direction with more speed than I was sure that the small collapsible plane was meant to endure.

  "We've been spotted!" Sebastian was shouting.

  Instead of shouting confirmation, I braved the cold air and looked through my broken window and back down upon the city. More loud pops filled our starboard wing with more holes, but instead of flinching, I watched for the flash of the large caliber gun that was being aimed at us.

  There.

  I saw the flash of the gunfire amid the buildings at the northern edge of the basin.

  The dogs had long since sensed the panic that Sebastian and I were filled with and had begun whining. I had no doubt that they also felt trapped and the combination was making them bounce about.

  I forgot my sore arm, and winced when I grabbed Sebastian's arm. In pain, I growled as I shouted, "Bring us down!"

  "It's funny that you think I have a choice," Sebastian said.

  I ignored him and added, "Wait until we get hit again and then bring us down fast." I added in hindsight, "Try not to kill us."

  Sebastian's eyes were filled with incredulity as he asked me, "Where am I supposed to do this? Into the city or the side of a mountain?"

  I shrugged because I really didn't know. This wasn't a plan, it was a reaction. I was dealing with the Nazi guns and not thinking much further than that. I doubted we had anything that was much further than that.

  "If we succeed in destroying the city, we're probably going to die anyway. We might as well get it over with."

  Fishing for any sanity that I might have left, Sebastian begged, "What about the dogs?"

  "They're why I asked you to try and not kill us."

  We didn't have long to wait. The gunner the Nazis were using was very skilled in his aerial combat skills. Machine gunfire tore through more of the plane and I heard one of the dogs let out a yelp, but they all stayed standing.

  That was when Sebastian pushed the nose of the plane toward the city, and the first time that Sebastian laid his eyes upon such an alien sight.

  Through heredity, Sebastian was more or less a creature from beyond the void, but heredity didn't carry much weight when your entire family shunned you from the education that should have been your birthright. He was raised as a one hundred percent human being, and his mental state was equivalent to it. It was one thing to worship and pray to beings on higher planes, but something else entirely to see something from that higher plane. It was beyond anything his mind could grasp.

  His eyes went wide before they were suddenly absent of any recognizable facet of Sebastian. His brain had said goodbye to his body. Fear gripped my heart and I made a lunge for the yoke.

  With a shudder and a shake of his head, Sebastian was slapping my hand away. "I'm not gone yet, old friend. At least let me crash the plane before you go taking things from me." He had a smile on his face, but it didn't reach all of the way to his eyes. His eyes were filled with soul again, but it was damaged and shaky. I had seen men who had more fortitude than Sebastian be taken down by a much smaller glance than he had just had.

  The yoke tore from Sebastian's grasp and the plane shuddered worse than before as it twisted down toward the city.

  Sebastian wrestled with the yoke as he attempted to bring the plane back under his control.

  Through gritted teeth, he said, "I don't think that crashing the plane will be that difficult." He shot me a quick glance. "That last shot killed us. I couldn't keep this plane in the air if I wanted to."

  I figured as much, but hearing it was disheartening.

  "I would like to add," Sebastian said, "that I very much want to."

  Despite our situation, I laughed before shouting, "Let's ride this beast directly into Hell then!"

  "Damn you, Andrew Doran!"

  I spared a look at my friend. I was frustrated because I couldn't do anything to help this situation. To be fair, it didn't look like Sebastian could do much either.

  That was when I noticed the hole in Sebastian's jacket and the red oozing from it and over his seat.

  I didn't say anything. We were most likely going to be dead in only moments, and letting him know that he had a potentially fatal wound was completely unnecessary. It wasn't going to be a gunshot that killed Sebastian Eliott.

  Deciding on a new tactic, Sebastian pushed the yoke forward and the nose of the plane followed. I braced myself by grabbing the walls of the too-small cockpit and forced myself not to think about the still panic-filled dog breath that was hitting the side of my face.

  As the nose dropped the madly configured city filled the front view. I could make out one lengthy bit of road that Sebastian seemed to be dragging the yoke toward, but I wasn't sure that the road was long enough to handle the speed that we were coming in at.

  All of the roads were basically bridges that spanned the path between the buildings and overlapped in an almost spiderweb fashion. I couldn't see the bottom of the bowl that the mountains formed and hoped that I never would.

  The plane's port side wing clipped one of those bridges that crossed over the road that we were aiming for. The plane went into a spin and our fate was no longer being directed by Sebastian's hands.

  We spun with such a speed that I didn't see the impact at all. I certainly felt it though. The jolt rammed up my spine and brought my head down and into what that tiny plane had for an instrument panel. Another jolt told me that we bounced. I braced myself enough by the second time to avoid another slam into the instrument panel.

  Stars wracked my vision and I tried to focus but the inertia from the spin wasn't letting me do much of anything as it pressed me to the edge of the plane. I could only make out more and more black out of the window and assumed that it had to be the roadway we had landed on or an incoming wall.

  The instrument panel crumpled inward. I didn't see it, but I felt it as it crashed into my legs and drove me into my seat and the dogs. My head snapped forward and hit the edges of the instrument panel again.

  The noise was like nothing that I had ever heard before. It was the tearing a metal and the shattering of glass-like stone. It was as if a train whistle was exploding in my head as metal sheared off in all directions.

  The wall that we had hit stopped most of our spin and I could see well enough to see that our windows were all gone. The plane was still moving and was accompanied with the continuous rending of the metal as our plane slid across whatever the floors of this building were made of.

  I knew that we had slid to a stop from the dogs leaping across my lap out of the plane more than from any sort of cessation of movement.
The dogs yipped and disappeared quicker than I would have expected such terrified creatures to do.

  Blood filled my vision and I touched my forehead to find that the instrument panel had sliced my brow. I mopped away as much of the blood out of my eyes as I could and tried to take in my foreign surroundings.

  The nose of the plane face away from any visible walls and only into the vast darkness that the dogs had disappeared into. Aside from that, I couldn't see much around the plane and what I could see was dark.

  I tried to shift, but the impact with the other-worldly buildings had pushed the instrument panel further into the plane and pinned my legs. There was no pain in my legs and I felt around as much of them as I could reach before deciding that they were not broken, only pinned.

  Wiping my forehead again, I turned to Sebastian who was unconscious and not moving.

  "Sebastian! Wake up!" I was shouting as I reached over and shook him. When he didn't respond, I felt for a pulse in his neck. Although it was weak, he was still alive despite the crash and the gunshot wound.

  I reached behind me and felt blindly for the scabbard that held my magical sword. After a moment of patting where the dogs had squeezed in behind us, my groping fingers finally located it.

  Bringing it forward, I wedged it between my legs and used my right thigh as a fulcrum to bend the instrument panel away. I was hoping to free my legs, but was interrupted before I could even make the first attempt.

  "I saved you from freezing to death and you're just going to leave me here...to die?" His voice was weak, but it startled me from my work.

  "Sebastian!" I replied, excited that he was conscious and not really taking note of his words. "Thank God! We need to get out of here."

  He sneered at me. "This is what you do, isn't it? You use people to get where you need to go and then you discard them." He coughed and blood sprayed. Sebastian didn't bother to cover his mouth and it covered the yoke. "We are just trash to be thrown away by the great Dr. Andrew Doran."

  What was he saying? Those words cut directly into my soul. I never saw my friends as a means to an end, but that doesn't mean that they weren't that by proxy. I feared every day that I was only using my friends to further my own crusade. I liked to think that I was nobler than that, but how does someone so noble manage to continue on with such a wake of death behind him?

  Why else would I have allowed Nancy to accompany me? Her only value was in waking her father, and yet I didn't make her stay on the boat once that was accomplished. Was my subconscious such a horrible bastard that I had strung her along for an as-of-yet undetermined sacrifice?

  How was I any better than the beasts that I put down?

  Sebastian's words were my secret fear and they cut me so deeply that I was suddenly paralyzed with self-doubt...

  ...except, in this case the real lie was that I was sitting in the most alien city on Earth to destroy it.

  The only priority in my heart was to save my companions. Everything else is secondary, including the destruction of the terrible city in those frozen mountains. I had decided this the moment that I woke up on the Arkatonic with that damned hole in my shoulder.

  For another thing, those words of Sebastian's cut a little too well. It was as if he knew exactly the words that swam in my soul.

  "Olivia."

  Sebastian's possessed lips smiled at me. "Got it in one. I almost had you fooled."

  I nodded, but answered, "Sebastian believes in me. He wouldn't expect the worst. Only my tumors pester me so incessantly."

  "He's dying," she drawled. "I can feel his life draining away." Olivia reached around and poked at the hole in his side. "Another so-called friend that you've betrayed."

  Anger filled my face, and it made me warm to see Olivia flinch at the sight. "You were not my friend." I twisted as much as my pinned legs would let me, turning to face the beast the resided in my friend's body. "You were using me. You never helped me, only yourself." I used the rage I gathered and applied pressure to the scabbard. My shoulder shouted at me and stars floated in my vision from the pain. The instrument panel shifted only marginally.

  "Perhaps you’re right," was Olivia's reply. "I owe you, so let me help you this time."

  From somewhere on Sebastian's body, Olivia pulled a knife. "This time a friend's death will not be your fault."

  Olivia plunged the knife into Sebastian's chest. The blade slid through coat and cloth as if they weren't there, and he smile wavered as the pain of the blade plunged into the chest she had borrowed.

  She wheezed and her eyes were suddenly a flutter. In that flutter, I saw the return of Sebastian to his body. His smile transformed into a look of shock and surprise as more blood poured from his mouth. He looked down at his hand and saw it still holding the handle of the knife that protruded from his chest.

  Sebastian's eyes spun to me and he tried to speak the confusion that had obviously filled every corner of his dying mind.

  I was in shock and couldn't move. I only watched as he tried to ask what had happened. Finally, understanding filled his eyes and he very clearly mouthed the word, "Olivia."

  Her name spurred me into action and I pried harder at the instrument panel to get it off of my legs. I was frantic and the panel began to shift, but I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Sebastian was waving his hands about.

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at my dying friend. He was smiling and gently moving his hand, palm toward me, in a calming gesture. He wheezed, "It...is...alright."

  His hand fell, and Sebastian died.

  I howled and howled ignoring the dangers of broadcasting my language in this ancient city. The horrors of the dark be damned, my howls would guide my friend back to the living, or crush the already far away Olivia, or destroy this whole damned world.

  It took only a few moments before I was able to bring myself back to any semblance of rational thought.

  I did my best to ignore the fact that my friend was dead only inches from myself and poured my attention into moving the instrument panel off of my legs. The stars returned to my eyes as my shoulder pain surged to the forefront of my mind. I didn't let it stop me and I could feel my shoulder tearing, but I didn't let it stop me. I needed to get out of that plane.

  One more push and my legs were free enough for me to slide up in the seat and climb out through the non-existent window that the dogs had also escaped from. Before leaving the plane, I grabbed my scabbard and checked my pistol to make sure the accident hadn't destroyed the belt or the gun.

  I thought about bringing the pack that I had filled before taking the sleds. In it were tools and papers regarding everything that William Dyer had described about this city.

  I decided against it. I wouldn't need any of the tools and there wasn't anything in those papers that I hadn't already memorized. If my sword and gun wasn't going to be enough in the coming trials than nothing in that pack was going to prepare me any better.

  That being said, I did take the compass, flares, and lighter from the pack.

  As my feet touched the odd glass stone that made up the entirety of the building that we had crashed into, I looked back at the still warm corpse of my friend.

  It didn't feel right leaving him there, but I didn't know what else to do. He deserved a proper burial or at least a pyre, but I had no choice but to leave him behind.

  If Strobel's men came looking for the crash site they would find it and they had no way of knowing that I'm still alive or that Sebastian wasn't alone. If I took his body, they would know to chase at least one person. Hopefully, those Nazi bastards would find Sebastian and assume the chase was over. They had no reason to think that I was still alive. Hopefully, my friend Sebastian could serve me one more time and help Strobel and his men to think that.

  That thought led, inevitably, to Olivia's words. I was again using a friend.

  I shook that thought from my mind as quickly as it entered it. The dead can't dictate the strategies of the living or we'd all start joining them.
Right at that moment, I needed to survive if I was going to reach Leo and the Dyers. Olivia be damned.

  I slid equipment around the cockpit to make it look like I hadn't been there, putting the pack that I had initially intended to bring with me in my seat as if Sebastian had placed it there.

  Once I had completed staging the scene, I took out the compass. When we were crashing there had been a lot of spinning and inability to get my bearings. I still had a general idea of where I was, though, because we had gone down at a straight angle before we had begun our spin. It wasn't exact coordinates, but I had a general idea of where I was located within the city and I could remember which direction Strobel's trigger-happy Nazis had been shooting at us from.

  If I was right, then Strobel and his men, and by proxy Leo and the Dyers, would be northwest of my current location. I turned toward the heading and decided that the dark tunnel it was aiming at would be my next step. I tore some cloth from the pack in the plane and wrapped it around my head to staunch the bleeding. All of this I did while continuing to ignore my throbbing shoulder. It wasn't easy. It felt like everything in my shoulder was raw and grinding with every movement I made.

  My shoulder and head trauma aside, I had already taken too much time in the crash and started off at a quick jog in the direction of the compass. The path continued to turn and curve at odd angles and I had to force myself to watch only the floor or ceiling, never the rest of the walls of the path.

  I had run about one hundred yards and through six different bends when I realized that none of it made any sense. The most recent turn had caused the needle of the compass to bank left ninety degrees, but that wasn't all of it. The structure of the building and the turns that I had already taken, should have taken me outside of the building and onto one of the roadways or falling to my doom about thirty yards previously.