Good and Evil : Freeland - Part Two (9781628547375)

by Pulver, William

  A slithering sound splashed through the water as a glow-in-the-dark neon green snake approached the breath-holding huddled group. It did a lap around the channel, keeping its mouth open the whole time. It never struck, or attempted to strike, anyone in its path. It simply slithered around the obstacles atop the surface water until disappearing back into where it had come. No one thought anything of it.

  The viewing from the gems was a depicted one this time; it told of souls that were supposed to be kept for the taking. The images of those before they were ripped from their set in their human state were at battle, especially the two coming from the blue set of gems. All three sets, displaying at the same time, were butted up against each other so the humans could watch like on three different TV screens. Harvey’s toes were getting cold, so he took them out of the water as his screen started to get fuzzy. Everyone yelled at him to put his feet back, like he was holding rabbit ears wrong on an old television set.

  They didn’t know the people, but Brody and everyone else at DSOH did. It was Tami and Lane. Their fight was seen in the shock zone hall where Tami out-maneuvered Lane with wrestling moves she couldn’t defend. The fight lasted a good while; it was more entertaining than anything, and something to keep the crew busy. The oddest thing happened after all was said and done. Tami got up and left the room to enter where she could shock Lane to death. When Lane died, her soul didn’t just detach from the body, it was ripped out by these dark angels. It was like a vacuum effect that made the soul deflate. The journey from there to here was reviewed, and she didn’t fight it one bit. Instead, they could see her kneeling in mid-air with hands cupped together like she was praying for forgiveness. The current was too strong to set her free, where the vertical ray of ethereal light that encroached wasn’t fast enough to catch up to this pitch-black vac. The decision had already been made; the Pasties were faster than goodness.

  When her soul was done being dragged, she stood up and felt for solid ground. None was granted. A back split open, a mineral baby withdrawn, she disappeared into the sockets just before the stalactites fell to the ground. The gems now in position, she became the thought projector. She was trapped in the mineral body, stationed there until the Third Round. Now she was incarcerated to the ceiling from behind her wedged Pastie capsule, starved of coming in and taking a human’s soul for nutrition.

  A look over at the other screen, and the other girl was seen. She had more significance when she died.

  Her soul turned into a hideous monster that looked like Mahduri from Trendago’s urban legends. He was a clay bog swallowing death-trap protector, one of Satan’s top disciples, who fought off those who denied attention to whoever he encapsulated with his main sidekick spirit, Malokai. If Malokai couldn’t get the job done, then the sword-bearer Mahduri would make a special appearance.

  Tami, having schizophrenia in reality, made her all the more susceptible to Mahduri taking over her body. The dark spots this overtaking created are the same dark spirits that come and take the soul away when someone commits suicide or dies a sinful death. It’s like the evil spirits are sticky enough to cause the person intentional death by guilt, sadness, or affliction.

  Mahduri pushed Tami out and killed her spiritually by making her think suicidal thoughts. That is when the Pasties picked her up, moments before Mahduri killed Lane. Tami really was innocent. It was Mahduri who had taken over her body, but the Pasties have no forgiveness in their mercilessness. They were being controlled by Satan, and Mahduri was the left-hand man of his most Evilness.

  The third viewing was of Harlo, his death having been viewed by all. What Bonnie had done to him was absurd within and of itself. It even made Zon cringe when he saw what she had done.

  Bonnie had black-bagged the head of Harlo and escorted him, hands tethered behind his back, down several flights of metal stairs. She opened door after door, until reaching the Torture Chamber Level. Once here, she stripped him of his earned yellow suit and brought out vices that seemed to create queasiness amongst the audience.

  “I want you to feel the pain that you have caused others you sick, twisted, demented freak. I hope this is exciting to you. You like being talked dirty to? Just think about all those little boys and girls you talked dirty to.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” His muffled voice was overpowered by the sound of a warming motor. A grinding wheel the size of a semi-truck tire started rotating as it gained speed. Bonnie brushed a piece of metal against it as the noise sent chills down Harlo’s spine. She reached over to grab a long mask to cover her face. A butcher’s neck apron was located and tied around her back after being draped down her front side. She put two elbow-length rubber gloves on and turned the dial to the defibrillator machine on full blast. Once it beeped, a green light stated it was ready. The sound of electricity crackling and the smell of burnt flesh sat Harlo up, only to make the pain worse when she forced a slender rod down into his belly button. Bonnie recharged the apparatus and again shot electricity through the conductive rod. This time, he passed out from the pain of his insides being welded. Harlo passed out.

  She grabbed a pair of pruning shears and clipped them together several times after he had awakened. The frightful noise stirred him into a gargled scream. “Please, stop this! I am sorry! I know what I have done wrong, and it will never happen again. Please, have mercy on me.”

  “Those were probably the last words of all of your victims. Did you have mercy on them? You wouldn’t be here if you had.” She hissed at him,“I can’t stand people like you! My own uncle was the same way!”

  “Are you going to leave me here?”

  “Silly boy, why would I leave you paralyzed like this? Oh, that’s right, because you left those kids paralyzed when you pinned them down with your body weight. Don’t worry; I am having mercy on you for the time being. You won’t feel a thing, but you are gonna’ watch.”

  Bonnie didn’t care. Her work was done. She lifted the soft, black felt bag the rest of the way off his forehead so he could look her in the eyes.

  Cold and empty, she stared back not saying anything that what she just did couldn’t say for her. She showed no sympathy toward his long-deserved, slow death.

  His soul was reached and sucked out of his body. The remnants were carelessly put to flame in the incinerator.

  The group of high school students looked on in total disgust having read Bonnie’s lips with every sentence she muttered. They wondered where a place like this could be, and who could get away with such a thing. Not even Isaic knew the answer.

  “Maybe they are in a prison somewhere, or maybe they are on the other side of Trendago, the dark side where stuff like this has always been fabled to happen,” Zon said.

  All three sets of gems projected simultaneous views that made it seem like one screen in panoramic, suggesting that all three Pasties were taking souls from people who lived together, or who were in the same facility. There was only one place where people were known to dress like what they last remembered seeing Brody wearing in the previous Pastie projection.

  They started playing around with the stones, mixing them up and seeing what the image projected on the wall. Like playing a cassette tape backwards, there was a message that came about from each pairing.

  The projection relayed that they needed to back away from the walls. If they had made it to a room with a neon blue lit waterfall in it, it showed that they needed to stay toward the middle of the cavern. They were to stay on the island, not go outside the channels that have been created around them. There was a reason why. A little too late, these eyes could have saved the others’ lives.

  The remaining people in the group got closer, anticipating what was to take place next. They jumbled the gems around again and shined another image on the ceiling. This one unlocked the past of the Pasties. It was a child Pastie running around through the darkened tunnels of Freeland, sensing for different pl
aces of interest. It wasn’t afraid of anything that came about, but did show the humans what more they didn’t realize existed down here. There were showy caves and crazier looking animals the farther away this child Pastie ran. More and more societies of different colored Pasties, dull colored black ones, yellow ones, multicolored blue and green swirled ones, earth-toned and water-toned Pasties, all with gems for eye sockets. They all had the same features, just different colors, like stone Fraggles gone awry.

  The waters flowed everywhere inside this cave system, some steaming, some full of mineral deposits, some acidic with white stuff collecting on the sides and bottoms, and some as thick as blood and the same color. The walls were all smooth, narrowing and widening at times, but always wide enough to host the width of a Pastie. In one sect of Pasties, there were dog-like animals that had gems for eyes, pets that were sent to scout for ill-adapting things like foreigners who don’t belong. They roamed freely about the caves as much as did the timberpines.

  The projection continued on until stopping abruptly at one of those foreign things. It was one of the largest openings in the mile-wide strip of Freeland that encircled the planet. A good hundred and seventy feet deep, it had what looked like two metal legs dangling from its ceiling. The legs were cut off at about waist-level. The Pastie that was viewing this was stuck in awe. It didn’t move for ten minutes as it stared at the structure. It did a 360 around the hollowed cave, still looking up the entire time. The legs never moved. They just sat there, suspended in time like they were meant to be there. The way back was reviewed just the same. Six more pairs of legs dangling from the ceiling were viewed about three thousand miles apart. The pasties made these trips through each other’s minds, enabling them to reach the far off sects that mysteriously encircled this planet. This little Pastie mentally made it back to its home, and the broadcast ended.

  One more shuffle, and the last review showed on the smooth ceiling. This one hit home, because it was being viewed through the eyes of one of the most notorious people in the group, the one who skydived from RM Mountain onto the football field. Treble warned Drake that he was taking life into his own hands by being risky at the time; nevertheless, Drake got attentive when he saw himself jumping off the cliff and looking around the widespread city of Rumor Mill.

  “Take them gems apart. I don’t want to know why I made it on there. I wasn’t thinking I would be committing suicide when I jumped. I was thinking about how much attention I would be getting when I landed safely on the fifty-yard line.”

  “Maybe that isn’t why you are on there.” Lexie shifted on her part of the rock and looked him in the eye while she spoke. “Maybe it was because you took the life of Brody, or at least tried to, prank or not. You cut him off with his truck.”

  “Whoa, that is a harsh reality for anyone to deal with.” Cruze chimed in, “Especially a mama’s boy like Drake. The only reason why he was so clingy to Farrah, with sex and all, is because he can’t be at home with his mama to take care of him.”

  “Shut up. That has nothing to do with why I am in love with Farrah.”

  “In love?” Tynan spoke up, “You are trying to convince us that you are in love with her? Just last week you were trying to hook up with Abby. You told me, after Brody left, that you fell in love with her after the wreck. How can you expect us to believe you are in love with Farrah a week later?”

  “I just am. I have always had a thing for her.”

  “Okay, I get it; you were still trying to get her to get with you. Listen, you didn’t have to try; she wasn’t that hard to coerce into the sack.” Chisholm spoke like he knew from experience.

  “I resent that comment!” Drake shouted.

  “You would.” Farrah’s old boyfriend Mariot spoke on everyone else’s defense. “I heard Farrah and you got together every day of the week since you had been going out. This person said you bragged that it was sometimes up to three times a day and that you said she was nothing more than a tramp. Easy come, easy go.”

  “That’s enough; I won’t have you talking about my baby’s mama like that.” Drake got huffy and puffy trying to push out his lower jaw, which only revealed his severe overbite. “She’s dead, for Nostradama’s sake! Have some respect.”

  “My only question is, who in this room has been with Farrah?” Tynan looked around the room for raised arms. Every football player except Buster Feldman raised his hand. Aftab was the only other non-athletic person who didn’t raise his hand. “There you have it.” Tynan winked at everyone, knowing that none of this was true. He was only trying to get back at Drake because he didn’t like him.

  Drake began to cry as his short, semi-feathered dark brown hair covered his sad brown eyes. He placed his face in his hands and wept aloud. “Why does it matter what she did in her private time? It is no one else’s business. God, she’s dead.” Drake got up and walked away from the group toward the end of the long hollow near the waterfall. He got too close to the wall, forgetting about the gems’ forewarning. He spoke, “I didn’t swerve into Brody, either. He swerved into me as he was trying to pass me on the right side down a narrow street. The wreck was his fault.”

  Chapter 8

  Treach-orous Terrain

  Treach looked over at Lars and said, “Man, this floor can’t be all that is down here. When we looked down after you pulled the light on, there were at least four more floors below. Maybe we should keep looking around. I wonder if there is a flashlight anywhere around here.”

  Lars opened up any cabinet he could find, touching them first to make sure no buzzers would sound. He found a lantern that lit up by way of a neon gas after being twisted on the knob at the bottom. He held it up and told Treach to follow by way of his six-fingered hand. He was a polydactyl with an uneven number of toes and fingers. There were six toes on the right foot and seven on the left, seven fingers on the right hand and six on the left. The littlest of fingers on the right hand was a dangler. It didn’t have a bone and there was no fingernail, it just stemmed off the second to the last regular shaped finger. The two extra thumbs, both with bone and nails at the tips, gave him all the more grip when he handled things normal people couldn’t. Having been dry and constantly scaly, his inner thumb was the ultimate gripper. This was beneficial because the condensation that was building up on the railings going down the stairs to the next level made Treach almost slide all the way down. Lars grabbed him and stopped the sliding by holding onto the side railing for him.

  They reached the bottom of the next level down and entered a room with another door like the one with the liquid sepulcher. Behind its rotating valve-having door was a haven of everything they would need for their nutrition. This was the food storage level, a place where only Bonnie had access if the food locating machines malfunctioned. Inside this walk-in icebox, the food had bar codes on the boxes of each one. The lunchroom ladies punched the picture of the food into their computer—whatever was on the menu for that day—and the machines below would hoist the box from the stack to the transporter capsule. Come to find out, this blast of air to push the product from downstairs up was merely the alarm clock to tell the two what time it was during the day. They could tell days apart by how many times the goods were transported.

  It must have been lunchtime because a big box of inflata-pizzas and another box of inflata-burgers were being relocated while the two boys were in the room. Lars had to duck as the long, thick metal arm barely missed his head. It swung from one side of the room to the other. Then, like clockwork, it easily lifted the box up while swinging it toward an open, knee-high hole in the far wall. A clear, plexi-glass window, like at a bank drive-thru, shut as the box was sucked upwards and disappeared into the chute. They thought nothing of that; instead, they took another box out of the room and hid it in the control panel room. This was a box of hardboiled, lab-created, protein-rich inflata-eggs they could eat any time they wanted, as long as they could poke a probe into
it. Lucky for them, another door across the hall was slightly ajar where there were several gadgets hanging from hooks on the walls all around. There were extra prongs for the inflata-food, many more plastic bags of yellow-suit-making ingredients, and mood swing badge chemicals that looked like unformed sea monkeys in see-through boxes. The badge material looked like hardened corduroy silly putty that could be melted once applied to the yellow-suit-wearing person’s chest.

  Back in the control-panel room, there was a mini-fridge in the corner below the instrument panel; they located it and stored the food in it for the time being.

  They departed, after hiding their stash, leaving a couple of baggies of the condensed soluble egg pills out for the near future. They went down another room of complicated gadgets and buttons with plastic see-through red button protectors. There was a light above the floor to ceiling wall of instrument panels, like an epicenter of wirings and clusters of meaningful gauges. This was Lars’s room. He knew exactly the purpose of every knob, button, and lever in this super brain central. This was the heart protection room that would keep the whole facility under control in case of an external/internal attack. With his extra fingers, he was able to reach more buttons simultaneously that were necessary to keep DSOH in tune from the inside out. Right now, it was in dormancy mode, and somehow, Lars knew why.

  Treach had to translate as Lars spoke. “This is the room I have been having dreams about every night when I go to sleep. It is the part of our escape that is going to have to be manned by someone who knows how to control it. It is called The Computerized Protection Against Aircrafts, Land Attacks, and Basically Just Blowing Things up Level. This is the room that will save us if we come under attack from an external raid.”

  There were signs that depicted what armament was within the rest of the place. Two arms that branched down to the side of what seemed to be a robot man had several types of artillery within. The flat tabletop screen showed the silhouette of the figure and the function of each part. They saw the same thing Brody had predicted in his dreams, so now he wasn’t the only one who knew what to expect of why they were all placed in their positions.