Another Pastie approached the nearest human in their group and gave her a hug. No conversation, just a hug from a solid-brick of a being. The minerals must have calcified this Pastie because, when Lexie hesitatingly wrapped her arms around its back, she said it felt slimy and solid to the touch, not like ordinary skin but closer to the likes of a newt and solid—more solid than muscle, almost as concrete as a boulder, but softer on the tuft where they give birth.
The Pastie stepped back and its eye sockets encapsulated an iridescent blue, mineral-like feature. They glistened from the overhead light and shot out a pleasant-to-look-at array that made one feel good inside for the moment. These were truly the mineral people. They possessed no mouth, no lungs, and no need for anything other than movement. They didn’t have hearing or sight either. They did have an extra, snake-like sense. They could feel the vibrations of danger from above through the tremors by way of the drilled acoustic holes of the cave structure. Putting their heads against the walls enabled them to sense that Zon, Isaic, and the crew were approaching, giving them ample warning to do what needed to be done to protect their underworld, secret society.
Chapter 5
The Underground
The Pastie newts of Freeland were gathering for the admittance of those who were lost. Everyone knelt down in rows, sitting on their heels to face the elder Pastie. Every other Pastie had a human between them. Scattered throughout the group, there was nary a Pastie as big as the football players. The elder’s beautiful emerald eyes cast light out in SOS-flashes in a form of communicating with the other Pasties. The room shone light through many splinters of crystals placed purposely in cracks throughout the hollow. All Pasties looked through their different colored gems of eye socket fillers and flashed back thoughts that were translated through a lucid communication. It was rather mystifying to see so many rainbows of beams crossing each other to make a sweet collage of fascinating colors that lit up this part of the cave system. The refraction spelled out their plight. The conversations could be decoded by the humans.
It was like a big projector was playing on the wall, somewhat similar to the movie theater. These are walking thought-projectors that play a silent game of charades with real-life characters viewing through their literal ornamental headlights like they are thinking their communications into a visible relay, instead of speaking verbally to one another. They don’t have a mouth anyway, so this is the only form of conversing they can share beyond the warmth of a hug or some kind of physical touch. Now, they can’t feel anything other than the relay of the visual feelings they emit once viewed on the smooth walls of this underworld.
The interior walls reflected a cross of beams from several Pasties. Zon looked over at one of the sub-culture deviants a couple Pasties away and asked, “Cole, do you see that on the far wall? That image of the person? It looks like Shane.”
Cole Alder sat up a little from hearing Shane and Den-Den’s name and looked hard through the misshapen heads of the slimy creatures sitting in his view. “Yeah, that does appear to be the image of my good friend, Shane Poole, and my cousin, Den-Den Saddlesby. What are they doing in these things’ headlights?”
Zon got up and approached the front of the mass of people still sitting. He stood in front of the closest Pastie, and the projector lit up his T-shirt. “You see this person right here? He is one of us.” Slowly, he talked like they couldn’t understand his language. “Where is he? Why are you showing him to us? What are you people?”
Zon looked down at his stomach and saw a past scene of the Love Shack when the magistrate came to take them away. The taser was warming up in Shane’s hands as he started to fade in reality; both he and Den-Den were already pre-dead, of which these Pasties were already aware.
Just before the opposing dart reached their physical body, the projection showed his soul get detached and transferred to the dark spot. The same Pastie kid who pieced out the heli-bus came into view and was running toward the vaporous stretch of this Freeland with Shane and Den-Den’s souls being dragged behind in each hand.
“What is this all about?” Zon looked to his closest friends and pleaded for their answers.
“I believe these people are the Devil’s children who are the dark souls—fallen angels of the wicked. They take the souls of those on the verge of death before those same souls purposely commit to the finality of life.” Isaic got up and walked up to share his width as an extension to the screen to let others see the projections. He pointed down around his sternum and said, “See here, these slivers of light that run vertically and darken as time progresses? These are the separation of existence from time by humans, the crossover to the outer darkness. Shane and Den-Den’s souls are being transformed to the other side because they chose to take their own lives by trying to act the heroes. To go against the magistrate is suicide and suicides are a Pastie’s sole nutrition. They feed off these weaker souls and use them to make their inner-darkness clan stronger and more populated. I saw it in a nightmare that woke me up one night. Remember the smartest girl in our class, Jerah Salvy, who shaved her head, got wasted, and dared to walk the top of the Swinging Bridge and fell in under a long dome of transparent petrified rock? She was caught between the answers to freedom in life and thoughts of falling off a bridge. Her body disappeared below the windowed rock, never to be found. The waters ran out to the depths of land where it eventually cascaded off into this strip of Freeland and continued throughout the underground of this cave system. No one was around to save her since she had fallen so far down before hitting the bottom. Hopefully it was just an accident, but the events that took place prior to her falling were usual for her. It’s not that she wanted to die, she just wasn’t afraid of death. Jerah had to push the limits every chance she got; therefore she put herself in that position for death to swallow her whole. I wonder if God took her soul, or is she down here trapped inside one of these Pasties?” Isaic looked down the row of several Pastie people, noticing a smaller one that looked half-human, not all the way transformed. It looked like his remembrance of that girl, Jerah.
So, this is what happens to suicidal and homicidal people, as well as those who push life to the limit. The Pasties consist of these types of people who have been transformed from a dark soul into movable mineral-like people who thought-project other suicides before the brink of death. Mystery solved, but what about us? What is going to become of us? Are any of us that weak-minded that we are close to the brink of giving in to death? Isaic thought.
“How do you know God didn’t take Jerah’s soul, Isaic?” Lexie asked, and she patiently waited for an answer.
“You know, as well as I do, that she was atheistic. She denied God for as long as she had the chance, while she was living. Her judgment has come and gone. She was so smart, yet in this case, seeing where she went, her denying of God made her pretty dumb.”
Some of the deviants, who acted like they didn’t care if they died or not, suddenly straightened up when Isaic told them the tale about what his premonition revealed. These mineralized deviants are not so bad after all; they just wanted affection. Now that it came down to the moment of truth, I had them figured out from the beginning. Sad little attention-seekers, whose parents didn’t give them enough love, had found a tribe of similar-thinking cry babies who decided one day that anarchy was their link to something significant that would set them apart from everyone else, all for the sake of attention, Isaic whispered to himself. I just defined the Goth people, or maybe it was the Emos?
Lexie, Shana, and five others stood to walk down the semi-lit portion of the cave. Not being able to hold it any longer, they had to find the darkest place in this underground cave system to urinate. Along the way, it seemed that distant shadows were watching.
In the darkest of dugout Pastie homes, Lexie dropped her booty-tight jeans and underwear to pop a squat. She looked around impatiently for wandering eyes as the flow of pee noisily trickled down th
e walkway. She could hear it echo off the flat stone next to her. The sound invoked her to follow the trickling. The six other girls finished their duty and were onto the hollow sound of their pee running down what seemed to be a faintly lit tunnel. Curiosity got all of them wondering.
The shortest of the girls, an ex-cheerleader turned deviant, CeCe, acted like she wasn’t afraid and swiftly walked down the corridor. At its entrance, she grabbed a nearby ledge and rocks crumbled down by her feet. She picked one up and tossed it to test the depth of the hollow. It ricocheted off the semi-smooth walls and sounded back that it was not that distant. The rest of the girls shuffled hand-in-hand as a chain. They scuttled hurriedly until all were at the opening of another distant cave system. Each girl used her free hand as antennae on the side of the tunnel. One girl, using her fingertips as antennae, scraped them along some loose rocks and revealed a quartz-like group of minerals. She reached in and pulled the rocks out to use their reflectivity like a glow-stick. Handing each of the girls’ pieces of the iridescent gems, she became the hero of the moment. Now they could all see where they were going.
Darker eyes than the Pasties’ were laying low, not far from the ground. There were deep red ones and scary-looking dark green ones that would flicker with the roving of the quartz-lights throughout the hollow. The girls were getting nervous. These eyes didn’t appear inviting. They pushed back and forth from side to side as if they were looking around at an escape or looking for their dinner. One of the lights caught a silhouette encompassing a set of eerie midnight blue eyes. It looked like an albino: a straight, wire-haired animal of some sort. The shape resembled a cross between a porcupine and timber wolf. The girls collaborated on the name timberpine. None of them stuck around to find out if they would become the timberpine’s next meal.
They ran back through their relief spot and re-joined the group. Lexie tugged at several significant people, pulling them to the side to tell them what they had seen. Upon finding Cole in the dark, she did more than pull him to the side. Instead, they did foolish things in dugout pods in the cave system surrounded by the Mosh Riot Idiot dudes. Quickly, Cole and Lexie went separate ways to divert anyone’s attention that might have seen them and could eventually tell Brody. Not that it mattered; Brody and she weren’t exactly together, but she also didn’t want anyone to know that she was no longer a virgin. Only she, Cole, and God would know this lie she tried to live. The MRI guys, Perry, Holt, Orlando, and Sonny had a clue as to what the two had been doing, though they were not actually in the room with them.
The humans gathered in a giant huddle to discuss what the chances of their escape were now that the Pasties were aware of their presence. They had been taken so far into this cave system; the out was probably just as much a mirage as the strip viewed from above the surface. The leader, Zon, started the conversation.
“Who do we have here that knows anything else about this underground system of Freeland?”
Tynan sat up and said, “This is the prelude to Nostradama. This is where people get intercepted and judged to determine if they are worthy of an eternal existence as one of the Devil’s minutemen in the inner darkness. This is the go-between, or channel, to Nostradama. Depending on the depth of people’s sins against the magistrate and God himself, these underground mineral people are the deciders to a sinner’s salvation, either dark or light, good or evil, the fight between God and devil. This is either the temporary forgiveness sanctuary or the entrance to eternal damnation, where our servitude unto his most evilness will cast us into mineral bodies. Our thoughts will be the only thing we will carry with us and our communication will be just like their communication. We will sit in the valley of the shadow of death, never to look out again. If there were a way we could see out, it is through the eyes of those other sinners who are going to commit their last sin. I heard something to the effect, one time, that these mineralized beings are shadow-casters: those who provoke someone on the edge of suicide to go over the edge and into the strength of these beings’ numbers or even those who have suicidal thoughts. Their clan, ever growing, feeds upon the guilt of the weaker sinners whose conscience has totaled them out as human beings.”
“Wow, how did you come up with all of this?” Lexie suddenly caught affection for Tynan’s intelligence.
Harvey perked up and related, “He lost his older sister to the mineral people. She had a miscarriage a couple months ago and thoughts of suicide finally got her feeling so bad that she succumbed to this society. More than likely, had these Pasties seen her fit to their requirements, she might be down here somewhere among us.”
Tynan looked around anxiously, not knowing whether or not he really wanted to see her. He loved her as blood, but they were different in the reason why they were cast to Trendago in the first place. Hers was the same, but the lesson wasn’t learned, hence it happened again. His reason was being wrongfully accused. He was said to have unresolved anger and inflicted punishment on those too weak to defend themselves when they got in the way of his seeking out a self-induced mode of therapy. He had planted his foot in a guy’s face while the guy was giving up during a parking lot fight. Maiming the defenseless was by far attributable to sin at its worst, and now his fight has become internal. He got sent to Trendago to be tortured and constantly feel the pain he caused to others. Unfortunately, the real guilty parties, Boots Bailey and Caol Blake, got away with the crime, having framed Tynan because he was an innocent bystander who came to break up the fight after the damage had already been done. He was trying hard not to let the Pasties feed on these negative thoughts. If his thinking isn’t shielded, he might become prey to the inner-darkness.
“We’ve got to get out of here somehow.” Isaic looked to Zon. Zon looked to Tynan. Tynan looked to Harvey. Tynan said again, “I wonder if we can ask to join their clan? If they let us in, then maybe they will let us out—you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I see.” All four chimed in at different times.
“I wonder if these things are enticed by women, nude ones that is,” Zon offered.
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Tynan walked over to Lexie and asked her if she would take one for the team.
“Are you out of your mind? I have never shown my body to anyone, except for Brody!” Since they were stuck underground and didn’t know if they were going to get out, she decided to let out that little secret. “And that was hard for me to do, even to him! There is no way! I am not going to take my clothes off!”
“Not even if our lives depend on it? You have the nicest body of anyone down here. I tell you what, if we all promise to turn around, will you do it? We just want to see if it turns these Pasties toward us instead of against us.” Harvey tried to act as if he were more of her gay friend than someone who truthfully wanted to see her in the buff.
Shana looked out over the giant huddle of humans and forcefully whispered. “Shush, here comes a Pastie.”
The mid-chest high Pastie waddled up to the group and pointed at Lexie, who quickly forgot about everyone else around as she shed her clothes down to nothing while standing there, fearfully exposed.
Peaking out at breast level, the Pastie’s ruby eyes flickered quickly. Like a scanner at a supermarket, an infrared light shined up and down her curvaceous figure, encircling each of her private parts, and then went around to the backside. It was the same Pastie that she had given a hug to earlier. With avidity in its eye sockets, the rubies were on fire. It penguin-walked back to its tribe and relayed the scene on the rock wall. Heads began turning, and the others rotated back without care. This wasn’t enticing to them, just another empty soul who gave into sin but strong enough in the mind not to impose a threat to their needs. She hadn’t any intentions of doing any more wrong. Unfortunately for them, she was a sinless virgin. Why she was in Trendago, only she knew. It was because she went against the belief in her maker after he took both her parents by cancer a year apart from each other
. She held angry thoughts toward the chance, to her, that there might be a God and Trendago still didn’t scare her any more straight.
Everyone who was human sat gawking at her overly engaging body, as each male wished away deviant thoughts of attraction, in fear that they would get scolded by the magistrate. Cole and Orlando’s brother, Reagan Shaw, looked at each other, and then back at the naked girl. How did she dupe the Pasties? Well, everyone for that matter. They knew personally that she wasn’t a virgin.
Tynan perked up and said, “Why are we afraid? This is Freeland. Get it? Free Land! There are no magistrates down here, and they can’t reach us down here. You do realize, in order to beat this army of the devil’s advocates, we are going to have to procreate and strengthen our own army. We can’t get in trouble for having intercourse down here because sin doesn’t exist. This is a mirage that not even the Lord can see through. Do you all understand how long we are going to be down here? There is no way out. It is surreal, and probably hard for a lot of you to accept, but this is it for us: the end of the road.”
“Don’t talk like that.” Several small cliques banded together and spoke to each other with reassurance. “How can you say that? You aren’t the judge, the arbiter who determines what will happen to us. It is ludicrous for you to say that God can’t see down here; let alone, it’s sacrilegious.” One of the prissy girls spoke loudly.
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