by Casey Herzog
“Oh dear, sounds like trouble,” a voice said from nearby, and Callum turned angrily towards one of his two fellow prisoners.
“I’m trying to listen, please friend.”
A soft chuckle burst from the mouth of the other man.
“It’s not your boy, soldier, don’t you worry.”
Callum went cold as he heard the words. How did this prisoner know about Dante or what was going on upstairs?
Before he could ask anything, a guard came running down the steps with a set of keys in his hands.
“The captain wishes to interrogate you, soldier. Please cooperate and your situation may greatly improve,” the scarred soldier said. He was the same soldier who had welcomed them into the base and threatened Callum with death for Ted’s unfortunate attack. Now, he looked less confident and much more desperate than before. “Let’s put our baggage aside, yes?”
Callum stared into the man’s eyes for the longest time — finally thankful that someone had taken their helmet off before realizing it was probably a ploy to earn his trust — but finally he nodded.
“Open up and let’s go.”
The guard pushed a key into the gate’s keyhole and turned it. Callum stepped out past him and immediately turned to the occupied cells to see who it was that had spoken to him earlier. To his dismay, he saw that both prisoners were deeply asleep. A chill ran down his spine, but there was no time to dwell on superstitious doubts.
“Follow me,” the man said and began to climb the steps back up. He didn’t even bother to cuff Callum or keep him in sight. They don’t seem to distrust me, even after trying to kill me. Strange.
At the very top, he was directed into the corridor that led to Captain Fillmore’s office. The officer was pacing from one side to another in front of his door, whispering under his breath and seeming to analyze information in his mind. Only then did Callum notice the device attached to his ear and wonder just how bad things were.
“Captain,” he said coldly. He wasn’t a man to hold grudges, but this border patrol force of sorts had almost killed him for a ridiculous reason; he wasn’t forgetting that for a while. “Why have you freed me from my cell? I was starting to feel comfortable.”
Fillmore shook his head and waved him inside his office. There were already rifles, pistols and explosives on the desk and two troops inside. One was male, the other a tall female. Callum recognized the latter as the same one who had alerted the captain and saved his life to begin with.
“Already going somewhere then,” Callum remarked, taking a long look at one of the pistols in an attempt to make his captors nervous. None of them even reacted.
“Our men were attacked out there. It was savage: an assault so efficient that it took out half of them and left them a vehicle short. They were investigating a previous raid on a bridge checkpoint we controlled.”
“Controlled?” Callum asked.
“Yes. Apparently, a man covered in enhancements blew the thing apart and killed everyone inside it. He—” Fillmore had seen Callum’s face. It carried a look of horror. “Oh, it doesn’t end there, soldier. My men would have dealt with him if not for sudden arrivals that caused all of the mayhem — a group of bikers who surrounded my force and tore it to pieces before they could react. Your face says all I need to know about whether you know the identity of the attackers or not. Now, spill the beans and maybe we can do something about your captivity.”
Callum took a deep breath.
“Covered in enhancements, you say? Surely, it could be anyone…the bikers, though…” He fought to cope with what he was hearing. It was more a sense of denial than anything else.
The female guard spoke up.
“He had a metal hand, Callum. Half of his skull seemed to be bionic as well. It is who you’re thinking.” Despite the fact that he hadn’t given them his name, it didn’t matter at all. All that mattered was what he’d just been told.
“It’s him,” Callum thought with shock. His heart beat faster and he fought to gather himself from the crushing truth. “Lord Russell of Lawlessness. He’s alive, and he’s got his best soldiers with him.”
Captain Fillmore stepped forward, placing his hand on a kit of uniform and a rifle. He pushed it slowly across the table towards Callum and looked the soldier in the eyes.
“Do you want to finish what you started at Ayia, or are you going to leave it to us?”
Callum’s mouth tightened, and he looked at each of the occupants of the room in turn. His hand stretched out and he grabbed both items off the table and stood.
“He’s mine.”
He recognized all of their faces, knew all of their names. How couldn’t he? After all, they had all been his to command just a fortnight ago.
Now, however, he stood facing them all with their firearms pointed at his head, assuring that if he moved he was a dead man.
Russell finally reacted to the Whisperer’s claim. A burst of laughter escaped his lips, and a grin stretched across his face.
“Really?” His voice was ugly and distorted thanks to the wound to his throat.
The blue-eyed mercenary didn’t even blink. There was so much certainty in his demeanor that the Lord of Ayia actually began to doubt he could get out of this situation without taking a volley of lead into his body.
“Really.”
It infuriated Russ to see how the tables had turned. It hadn’t just been any of his soldiers who had captured him like this; it had been the one closest to becoming his rival. It felt like some sort of cosmic justice was grabbing ahold of him and forcing him to see what happened to those who flew too close to the sun. Russell’s finger edged closer to the trigger.
The Whisperer shook his head and laughed softly.
“You never learn.”
The signal was quick and discrete. Russell never saw it coming. A pair of sharp conductors shot into the back of his neck, and a powerful current ran straight into his body through the wire connecting them to a weapon in the hands of one of the mercenaries. Despite his enhancements, it was enough to put him down — the shock could have knocked a horse out, if necessary. The final image in his eyes as he lost consciousness was the stern face of the Whisperer looking down at him in victory.
It was a crushing thing for Russell to see, but he knew that times had changed.
He stretched his hand out and growled uselessly, but then everything became darkness.
The boy watched the ice forming along the metal ceiling of the truck’s compartment and sighed. He knew that the dark skies and lack of sun only made the cold worse and wondered how hostile his new environment was going to be once the journey ended. Dante felt more depressed and alone with each passing minute. Sitting in the back of a truck for the past day had been stressful, his only distraction coming from the energy bars he had taken from the hatch in the wall.
“I’m sick of this,” he said out loud. “Let me see what’s outside!” He banged on the wall separating him from the crew in front and someone cleared their throat, the sound coming through the speaker above him.
“What exactly do you want? Do you need to get out?” They had allowed him to go to the bathroom a couple of times since leaving, but it been in a portable toilet that slipped out of one of the walls of the truck’s cargo. “We’re getting close. You don’t really need to get desperate this far into the journey—“
“Let me see something, for crying out loud! I’m going to tear my eyes out if you don’t!”
Silence followed. Dante smashed his fist into the speaker in frustration and fury, but it was useless. He suddenly understood why those people he had met on his travels who had been captive for long periods seemed stranger and more unsettled than everyone else. This kind of thing makes you go insane eventually, he knew.
Suddenly, something happened to the walls of the truck.
At first, he only heard the whirring of mechanisms and the clicking of gears, but eventually a layer of the walls themselves seemed to shift and slide to one side. Dante imme
diately pressed his face into one of the windows that became visible, his eyes widening and his jaw dropping slowly.
“Wow…” he breathed. The view made him forget everything that had been occupying his mind, his eyes growing moist as he finally caught sight of everything in front and to the sides of the truck, near and far. He had never seen anything like it.
An enormous structure seemed to divide the world itself in two parts; such was its scale. It was a tall metal wall that stretched it was composed of seemed strong enough to withstand a powerful blast, and it was too tall and smooth for even the most capable climber to scale without a very tall ladder. Dante frowned as he realized they were heading straight towards it. It could only mean that the wall had been their destination all along, probably a defense mechanism for the lands of the University.
“What does this wall protect, exactly?” he asked dismissively, as if he was uninterested. In truth, he had never seen anything like it before. A thought passed through his mind, one that he had never considered before. How far are these men taking me? Will I even make it safely to the front door of wherever I’m going or will I be forced off the truck before we reach it?
The speaker activated again and the man who had spoken before seemed to make a decision to confide in him.
“Ahead of us is the second barrier that protects the University — our patrol forces are typically the first. The Border Wall stretches all around the precious campus of our University and it is protected by some of the most efficient security systems. Nobody should ever get close to the University unless they’ve been invited; that’s the motto.”
Far beyond the wall and the lands ahead of him, Dante couldn’t help but stare in longing at the blue sky that hung over the earth in beauty. It was the second thing that caught his eye, but not the least important.
“How and why does the sky look like that out there?” The wall, the University…it was as if all of these defenses seemed to be protecting more than just land or facilities. “A place where the sky is actually blue and the wind blows without the smells of contaminants and clouds of dust on the air? It’s a paradise on earth…I’m guessing that’s why it’s so protected, right?”
“Among other reasons,” the voice answered simply. The truck slowed down and Dante’s nerves hit him in full force. They had arrived at the wall, a large gate standing before them. The healer tried his hardest to peek forward at what stood ahead of them, but it was difficult from the angle at which he sat.
“You might regret having asked us to let you see what was outside,” the voice said with a strange tone. Whoever the man was, he sounded worried for Dante.
“Why?” he asked, but nobody answered. A long screech reached their ears from the gate ahead, the noise of the huge metal structure opening outwards. Dante bit his lip and strained his neck to see what was going on as the truck slowly slipping its way into the confines of the wall. There seemed to be a noise scratching at the edges of his hearing. It was like the breathing of a massive beast, its chest sucking the air from around it and exhaling softly once more. He ran over to the other side of the truck and saw nothing but the inner metal surface of the wall. It was polished and clean, the seams that separated one panel from another clearly having been made in an eerily perfect manner.
As much as he tried to deny it to himself in his head, the whole place screamed of Outsider design. He had seen the alien’s creations before — they carried a sense of technological grandeur, just like this wall.
The noise began to get louder and louder, as well as more jagged and disruptive. The previous harmony of the sounds beyond his view turned into something much more chaotic and violent. Dante could only wait to see what was happening ahead.
“You’ll see soon enough,” the mysterious man at the front of the vehicle whispered into the microphone.
The sounds were more and more individual now, and Dante felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising and his pulse beginning to race.
“What—” he began, but then something threw itself at him from a few feet away and screamed at his face through the glass separating them.
The creature scratched at the air just inches from the window, its eyes bloodshot and its mouth launching lines of spit with each furious roar. The deformed sub-human seemed furious at its inability to grab hold of the boy it could see through the window, the mutant’s simple mind keeping it from understanding that it had no chance to harm its would-be victim.
“A tall piece of thick composite metal that stretched from one side of the horizon to another would have been an already sufficient defense, but we didn’t just need okay. We needed something that only the bravest enemy would ever consider scaling and pushing through. We have it now, thanks to our mutant friends.”
Another couple of sub-humans strained against whatever leashes were holding them and screamed at Dante. “They’re penned in by some sort of field kept invisible to dissuade any idiots from getting this far or any further. Anyone who comes in sees them like this, as if they could really be standing just inches away from you. That isn’t to say that they cannot be released from their invisible cages if the enemy gets too far…”
Dante couldn’t help but feel sorry for the creatures. To come so far as a human being and end up becoming a mutated and deformed sub-human, a hated mutant seen as disposable cattle to be herded within this wall to scare potential intruders off; it was one of the worst things he had ever seen in this new hell that humans still called their home, somehow.
His eyes locked on a female sub-human’s gaze, and he saw the woman stop her growling for a moment, long enough for him to look past the hunger in her eyes and see something there. Something intelligent.
“I wish I could save you all,” he managed to say out loud before finally, they were past the wall and the sub-humans became more scarce and less violent. Here, they shuffled along the land freely and seemed to be a final line of defense. They seemed horribly off to Dante. “What’s special about these; why are they left to walk on their own?”
“Their minds have been taken care of,” the voice said cruelly, as if he was describing something trivial such as the color of their hair. “They are also faster and more capable.”
Dante shook his head and suddenly began to wonder.
If this is what they do to sub-humans, what will they be willing to do to me considering that I’m a stranger and my powers might make them afraid of what I’m capable of? Dante swallowed hard.
To his dismay, he didn’t feel as excited about the University or learning about his origins anymore.
Whatever these people did or were, they were ruthless…and he was about to walk into the mouth of the beast with no protection or back-up at all.
Things were about to get much more dangerous than he’d expected them to be.
CHAPTER TEN
~Night Terrors~
They slapped him awake, and he threw himself forward immediately at his captor, the man in front of him flinching and stumbling back in shock.
“Damn, that was quick!” the biker cried, chuckling nervously as he recovered from the moment of danger. “I hadn’t been expecting you to wake so suddenly, Russ.”
Russell strained again on the ropes tying his body up and keeping him held in place in a tight grip. It was typical ‘Angel’ workmanship, their bounty-hunting nature having adapted them to situations like this in which they needed to keep someone bound and harmless. The warlord was again left frustrated by the fact that he had put himself into this situation by mismanaging the mercenary group with intimidation instead of earning their loyalty.
I rarely made mistakes, he said, but this might have been the biggest one of them all. What a different story it would have been if the Whisperer and his men had still been loyal to him when they’d encountered him at the bridge — perhaps they would have defected to his cause immediately after killing and scaring off the armored soldiers who attacked his position.
“Guess who is still out there, putting up a good
fight against this sick world and constantly escaping death?” the man who had woken him asked. Cross is his name, Russell recalled. The medic had been a wonderful addition to his army, a doctor not afraid to pick up a gun and shoot anybody who posed a threat to his enemies. I really should find a way to get one of these men back on my side, Russell knew. After all, he only needed to get rid of their leader. When that was done, the bikers would surely come back under his wing like they had enjoyed being before the tower had collapsed.
“Who?”