by Alan Baxter
The earth beneath them rumbled and they whirled to see the heavy door begin descending again.
“No!” bellowed Ledger and he pelted toward the cavern. The others ran with him, and Tom outran them all. He was twice as fast as the older men and he reached the cavern well before them.
But not in time.
The door closed with a boom that echoed off the rocky walls of the canyon.
There was a keypad outside, but none of them knew the code. Everyone who did was either dead, or inside the mountain.
“It was Pisani,” gasped Tom. “I saw her. She bent down to look out as the door closed. It was her.”
A moment later all of the electric lights in the camp went out.
The four men and the survivors spent a full day trying to find another way in. By the end of that day Bunny saw smoke rising from a hidden vent. It was black, oily smoke and it poured out with fury and funneled high into the sky.
No one ever managed to get inside, and after a while they stopped trying. The smoke told them what they would find.
They stayed with the survivors for a week, helping them organize, advising them, giving each of them some training.
Then the four men left Oro Valley. They came to a crossroads. A real one, though the metaphor was not lost on any of them.
“I’ve got to get home,” said Tom. “My brother’s back in Mountainside, and I’ve been away too long.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ledger. “My dogs are there.”
“What’s with you and dogs?” asked Bunny. “You were always about dogs.”
“I trust dogs,” said Ledger.
Bunny thought about that. Nodded.
Tom said, “Do you and Top want to come with us? There’s plenty of room and we could always use a couple of fighters.”
Top ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. He glanced down the road that led northwest. “I heard there was something maybe starting in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said. “Big refugee camp there and some folks making a stab at building something new. Maybe a new government.”
“Or maybe something as bad as this,” said Ledger.
“Maybe,” said Top. “But… I kind of feel we have to go look.”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, “if there’s even a chance it’s for real, then they’re going to need guys like us.”
“We could use you in our town,” said Tom.
“They got you, kid,” said Top. “And you handle yourself pretty good.”
Ledger felt like his heart was being torn out of his chest. He needed to go with Tom. He needed to go with his friends.
The moment stretched and they stood there in the heat of a cloudless morning.
Finally Top grinned at Bunny and said, “You know, Farm Boy, I’m not at all sure Captain Ledger ought to be left all on his own like that. Who knows what trouble he’d get hisself into.”
“You think we need to hold his hand and keep him from wiping his ass with poison ivy?” asked Bunny.
“Hey,” said Ledger. They ignored him.
“He’s as likely to get his dick bite off by a zombie as he is to walk off a cliff,” said Top. “How many times we have to drag his broken ass out of some firefight and carry him all the way to intensive care?”
“I can’t count that high,” Bunny said, nodding sagely.
“You guys are hilarious,” said Ledger.
“I’m missing the joke,” said Tom. “What are you saying?”
Top adjusted the straps on his pack, but Bunny answered. “What the old man’s saying is that we’ll make sure you kids get home safe from the prom. Then we’ll go see what kind of trouble we can get into down south. Sound like a plan?”
They smiled at each other. The four big men. The four killers.
They nodded to one another and turned northwest, walking slowly, without hurry away from the death at Oro Valley, leaving their footprints behind them in the dust of the great rot and ruin.
THE WAKING DRAGON
R.P.L. Johnson
He was in the meadow again. He hated the meadow: hated it for what came next. Knee-high grass stalks stretched away in all directions, bending against the breeze, pulling texture out of the wind in patterns that reminded Ringo of the nap on the surface of a hard-used snooker table. Standing swells in the grass hinted at rolling hillocks of earth beneath like the curves of a woman under silk. To his left, at the limit of the virtuality’s resolution was a darker smudge that could have been a copse of trees. If he’d been allowed to turn his head, the simulation may have drawn in more detail, but he wasn’t and so a smudge it remained.
It seemed real enough, as real as any dream during the act of dreaming, but it wasn’t. It was just a computer simulation planted in his mind. It was fake. Only the pain was real.
The flames started at his feet and spread quickly as if his skin was nothing more than dry paper. He had a second to smell his own flesh burning before the pain started: first the kind that made you angry, then the kind that made you scared.
Ringo was no stranger to pain. Seven years in the Regiment and another four before that in the infantry had given him plenty of opportunity to test his resistance to pain. It was part of his training. He knew the physiology of pain, learned how to deal with it, learned that pain was just a message from the body, a damage report that could be acted upon or ignored.
Pain in the meadow was different. There was no reason for it. He had no body in this place, no flesh to bruise, no bones to break and yet the pain was real and unending. His body produced no adrenaline, no endorphins to dull the edge of it because he had no body. He would not pass out from the attentions of an over-eager torturer because even his consciousness was theirs to control in this place. He wasn't even allowed the release of a scream. He stood in the meadow, a human pillar of fire alone on an endless sea of gently waving grass.
He tried to take himself away from the meadow, away from the pain. He pictured himself in his daughter's room, sitting on the side of her thin bed with the Liverpool Football Club quilt set and the poster of Philippe Couthino above the headboard.
Dad, I'm scared, she said.
It's alright, love, he said to her. The monsters aren't real. And if they're not real, they can't hurt you.
It didn’t work, it never worked, but he tried anyway. What else could he do?
“This can end so easily,” came the voice. The dragon uncoiled from the sky: long, golden loops of serpentine muscle spooling around Ringo, oblivious to the flames that still licked across his flesh. He caught a flash of a thin, fish-like tail with scales that glittered like a butterfly’s wings, then powerful legs with claws of diamond and the endless rope of the creature’s body. The dragon’s head appeared before him, long jaws open and rimmed with teeth as long as crooked fingers.
“Tell us why you are here and the pain will end,” the dragon said. It was speaking Chinese, Ringo could hear the many-toned language of his parents through whatever subroutine played the part of his ears in this place, but the words in his head were English. “Your government has abandoned you, Sergeant. They have denied all knowledge of you and your friends. Why do you protect them when they have failed to protect you?”
Ringo remembered the mission and felt a moment’s pang of guilt as if even drawing on that knowledge was some kind of surrender, but they couldn’t read his thoughts, not even here. If they could, then there would be no need for the torture at all. They could play with his senses, they could intercept and re-interpret and amplify the signals sent by his nerves. They could block his optic nerve and give him visions of anything they chose – the meadow, the dragon – but they couldn’t pluck thoughts from his mind, and so he sought refuge in the past.
It was meant to be a simple snatch and grab. The target was a Chinese scientist, some boffin from one of the government’s military labs. The government ran those places
like prison camps. The scientists who worked there never left the complex. They ate in communal refectories and slept in their assigned apartments. It was a place dedicated to work and secrecy but someone had wanted out. He had managed to get a signal to GCHQ in the UK and not just any signal. The boffin had provided a new solution to something called the Navier-Stokes equation. They had tried to explain to Ringo what that meant, but all he had remembered was that it was something to do with turbulence and that finding new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky could lead to radical new designs for fighter planes, drones, silent sub propellers and all manner of other hardware that had the brass pissing themselves in a mixture of fear and excitement.
Nobody had thought the Chinese could be so advanced and it looked like the sleeping dragon was showing the west a clean pair of heels in a new arms race most countries didn’t even know had begun.
That knowledge had prompted British military intelligence to take an enormous risk, staging an exfiltration with a military team from inside Chinese territory. It was an act of war, the stakes were that high.
It had been one of the truly great failures. Two of his team had been killed before they even realised they were under attack. He had lost another three in the ensuing firefight. Only he and two of his men had survived. After weeks of interrogation in the meadow, he wasn't sure that had been a good move.
The dragon tightened its coils around him, contracting until its golden scales pressed against his flesh. This was something new. In all his sessions in the meadow, the dragon had never done anything more than taunt him; now it wrapped its body around his and squeezed.
If Ringo had still needed to breathe, the creature would have crushed that breath from him. He felt his bones creak as the pressure built. His legs pressed together, knee pressing against knee with crushing force, the pain magnified by the amped-up sensitivity of the simulation. He felt his pelvis crack as the thing tightened around his hips and he would have collapsed except the dragon was holding him now. From chest to ankles he was enveloped in loops of ever-contracting, golden sinew.
He was sure that, if this was the real world, he would have been dead by now, a pulped mass of broken bones and burst organs, but still the creature squeezed. He felt its flesh becoming part of his, like balls of clay squeezed together by a fist until they became one.
Pressure built inside his skull, an invading darkness outlined with gold like the scales of the dragon. At that moment he was sure he was going to die and the only emotion he felt was relief.
He had been wrong.
The monsters were real.
* * *
Ringo woke in his cell, coming to his senses violently as if assaulted by smelling salts. Given the stench in the tiny room, the effect was similar. The worst of the smell came from a concrete pipe about thirty centimetres in diameter that ran across the cell at knee height against the back wall. The pipe was the cell’s only concession to the necessities of sanitation. It was a sewer pipe with a jagged hole smashed in its crown that was the closest the cell came to a toilet and that hole was the source of most of the stench.
The hole was also Ringo’s only connection to his team-mates. He dragged himself over to the pipe and lowered his face into the foetid space, trying to ignore the dark water flowing inches from his lips.
“Custard! Custard! You there, mate?”
Ringo waited a few seconds and took the opportunity to grab a breath from the relatively fresher air away from the pipe. He was about to call out again when he heard Custard’s reply.
“’Course I’m still ‘ere. It’s fucking lovely. I’m thinking of making a booking for the Bank Holiday weekend.”
“I thought you might be in the meadow.”
“Nah. Norris's turn. They came for him about an hour ago.”
Norris occupied the cell opposite Custard. Being on the other side of the corridor he wasn’t on the shit-pipe telegraph, but he and Custard had managed to communicate through the little barred window in their cell doors. As comms networks went it was pretty rough, even considering their situation, but it worked and as the old saying went: if an idea is stupid, but works then it isn’t stupid.
“You all right?” Ringo asked down the pipe.
“Peachy,” Custard replied. “You?”
The advantage of the virtual torture was that after it was done you were still relatively intact. The agony was total, but temporary. Ringo was still nursing a broken tooth and some bruises that he’d caught during their capture, but apart from that he was relatively unscathed.
“I could murder a fry-up, but apart from that… yeah… peachy.”
He sat there for a while, resting against the cleaner side of the pipe talking about food. Ringo was from Liverpool. He had been brought up in the flat above his parent's restaurant in Chinatown. Custard’s tastes were simpler. He claimed the best meal he’d ever eaten was at the Welcome Break service station on the M4. He was, however, supremely knowledgeable about beer and could talk for hours about the relative merits of the various pubs in Hereford and other watering holes from Cyprus to Thailand to the Northern Territory of Australia.
Suddenly, Custard stopped talking. Ringo could hear the sound of a cell door opening and shouted voices in Chinese.
“All right, you cunts,” Custard said in a cheery voice. “Let’s go play some video games.”
* * *
The little luxuries mean the world in captivity so when Ringo woke alone in his cell he allowed himself to savour the moment. For the past weeks his waking had either been a sudden bursting from the catatonia that followed a session in the meadow or the equally violent wakefulness that came from his cell door bursting open in the middle of the night. He had no idea what time it was but his bladder was telling him it was morning. Eventually he rose from the nest he had made from rags and scraps of stained foam that might once have been a mattress and relieved himself into the pipe.
“You’re slipping, lads,” he said to the empty cell. “No discipline… that’s the problem with the modern soldier—“
His throat tightened. It was so unexpected he hadn’t seen it at first and he cursed himself for his lack of awareness. The door to his cell was hanging open. He quickly tied the drawstring on his dirty, prison-issue sweatpants and forced himself to wait for a full minute, doing nothing but listening for noises from outside. Was this a test? If he approached the door, would he be beaten or shot for trying to escape. The open door tugged at him as if it was a hole in the floor and all he had to do was let go and fall through it, but he forced himself to stop and think. Finally when he had stood for three hundred heartbeats without hearing so much as a breath or a scuffed boot from outside, he crept towards the opening.
The door was a heavy affair of thick planks and black iron bands but the lock was gleaming modern and magnetic. Outside the corridor flickered in red emergency lighting. Power failure? Surely their captors wouldn’t be dumb enough to let their batteries run down. Further down the corridor he could see more doors edged in darkness. He crept along in the direction of Custard’s cell. It was open and so was the cell opposite, which Ringo judged to be Norris’s.
He tried Custard’s cell first. The door hung open about a hand’s breadth away from its frame. Ringo didn’t know the state of the hinges and rather than risk the tell-tale squeak of old iron he crouched outside and whispered into the darkness.
“Custard! Holiday’s over. Stand to!”
Custard appeared in the opening. He’d been hiding behind the door jamb, just inches away. In one fist he held a shiv made from a shard of broken concrete wrapped in rags. It was a primitive weapon with no edge worth the name, but the point looked wicked. God knew how long it had taken him to grind it down.
“I’m with you, Sarge. This place was getting boring anyway. What’s the plan?”
“Get Norris, then get fucked off out of here.”
“Works for me.”
Custard crept out of his cell. Even on full rations Custard looked like a wire rope with knots in it. After weeks in captivity he looked like and extra from The Walking Dead, but when he moved it was with silent precision. Ringo noticed his right hand was missing the ring and little fingers along with a chunk of the blade of his palm. Ringo remembered the injury from their first contact, back when everything had turned to shit.
“How’s the hand?” Ringo asked
“Smaller,” Custard replied. “But it still does the job,” he said and made an obscene gesture with his deformed hand.
Custard’s vulgarity was legendary throughout the Regiment. This in itself was impressive. Soldiering was not a profession known for its delicacy. Custard took pride in living up to his nickname, which was a contraction of the two words most frequently used to describe him.
Ringo stayed on watch outside Norris’s door while Custard poked his head inside to wake their team-mate.
“Wake up, you nugget,” Custard hissed. “You’re going to sleep through your own escape!”
He crept inside and emerged a couple of seconds later. “Not home,” he said. “Must still be at the meadow.”
They had always been blindfolded when they had been taken for interrogation, but Ringo knew the route well: along the corridor to the spiral stair, fifteen steps up then another corridor, a breath of cool air but not enough to be outside then another staircase, dog-leg this time not spiral and into an area that smelled of piss sluiced away with not quite enough antiseptic.
He needn't have bothered memorising the route. Every exit off the corridor was sealed with automatic doors that looked strong enough to hold off a tank. They made their way along the corridor and up the stair by the blood-red emergency lighting. The whole base seemed to be shut down by whatever emergency had triggered the lights and automatic doors, and yet their cells had sprung open and the route through the lab to the exit was unaffected.