Isaic was the first to notice that the eyes became vivified and their light was piercing through the hollow. The water started filling up beyond the channel, and now their only way out was through the waterfall.
Drake’s body must have plugged the hole going down. Why else would the room be filling up with water? Zon thought. He sent the Valedictorian-in-the-running nerd down first since he was the skinniest and least athletic, body-wise. Aftab obliged as he plugged his nose and took the plunge. Along the way, he had fun until reaching the bloated, dead body of Drake.
“Yep, you sure are going to find Farrah now.” With a forceful kick from his one-hundred-and-thirty pound frame, and the force of the water pushing him along, Aftab, equipped with his lantern-bag of firebugs, loosened Drake’s body as both continued down the chute. Crumbles of limestone widened the hole for the others to get through. An obliterating drain eddied in a downward spiral as each person, fully clothed, jumped down into the crevice. Their only hope for survival, this hole was going to lead them to the depths of the unknown. What difference would it have made? They weren’t going to be able to fight off the re-birthing Pasties. Their numbers were way too few, even though those who had died really didn’t have any intentions of battling anyway.
The path down was a twisting one. The walls came in and went out, smoothly chuting everyone along their way. Drake’s body was met up with as the force from the group of people at tail made him cannonball out the bottom where another huge room opened into a pool of seven-feet-deep water. After getting spit out from the hole in the far side of the ceiling, everyone tucked their legs and hit the water. Boulders of limestone collapsed around them, splashing water all over while raising its level another foot. Some had to use the non-dissolved clumps as steps to keep their head above the bright blue/red water again. They were careful not to ingest any of it. The dinoflagellates were more numerous down here than in the upper chamber. A look across this room revealed a shelf of a walkway that entered into pitch-black. The head football players banded together with Lexie in the middle to protect her and paddled their way through the currents over to the side. Once there, they got out of the underground river and dripped dry. Their clothes, now weighing them down something fierce, created more grogginess than anything.
A flicker of light pierced through a peephole in what appeared to be a wall. Lexie looked over and said, “It looks like daylight shining in.”
The ray of vivid red light lit up a circle of water where the dinoflagellates were turning belly up. It was like the light was burning them. Zon took a jab at the wall as more light entered through the hole he created. He monkey-punched more soft limestone as the others joined in like they were playing the Punch-A-Bunch game on The Price is Right. Each fist-mark enabled more light, turning the water more blue than red. The light must have been cooking the microscopic Pastie plankton. Once the entire wall was demolished, the wrecking crew shook the excess dust build up from their knuckles and commenced to the next room. All the while, they looked around, wondering what was creating this array of light.
Zon, being the only one brave enough to dare the disintegrating light, stepped from out of the shadows and crossed over the knee-high shelf of rock that separated the two rooms and into the corresponding room. The rest of his group of high school peers unashamedly followed. They all approached a globule of quartz embedded in the middle of the room that had light shining through the middle of it, casting in all directions like a disco ball. That meant either more dinoflagellates trapped in the center of each crystal of quartz were stuck in the on position, or there was another room below this one. Whatever the case, the light showed another exit in the back; this one was as dark as the room they first entered. They all followed Zon again as he entered the portal with Aftab’s back of a seat mesh firebug bag in hand.
This room was different from any they had seen before. This room was full of slug-looking Pasties that had the same minerals for eyes, but they didn’t have any appendages. They were all apods, limbless, alike in the fact that not one of them had anything to hold them together, like a spine. They were loose blobs of jelly that scaled the walls sideways and diagonally. They had the same projections, yet their gem lights were shined on the floor. There were several projections banding together to make the image true color per pixel. Their lights refracted what none of the students wanted to see.
The entire time that they were down there was being recorded by the Pasties: from the time that they entered the disappearing staircase to the rooms they entered, even the battle that took many of the Pastie’s lives but not souls. The souls were banding together, sometimes up to three within the same body; they were sharing for the sake of making each other savagely stronger. Needless to say, they were extremely angry. Zon was depicted the heart of the team, the main one they would have to target in order to overcome the rest. Lexie came into view again as the broadcast showed her running, in slow motion, for her life while steadily watching behind her. Into the dark, she disappeared as a man-bot emerged from deep within the rock, leaving a large hole in the tunnel. It had a drill at head with a light in the middle of it that enabled it to see its way while piercing through the cave’s bottom. Once within the three-hundred-foot-high hollow, it stood a half of the way up from the ground to the canopy as a doorway slid open on the backside of its metal ankle. Lexie was the first to enter, and the others followed. They were soon up the elevator shaft and into the base near the robot’s mid-section, where the disintegration chamber was located. This chamber was the same place where, on the outside, the lighting of the cave was created by the light shining from the man-bot’s belly button. Their route was brightened for sake of the others to see once the dilator glasses were lowered.
A big kid with a huge head was standing in the back of the walkway as the teenagers entered the room from the top of the elevator. He was like a Hari Krishna with his head shorn and a string of hair braided and growing from the center of the scalp. He was handing out fliers that depicted the end was nigh. In a cellophane white suit, he beckoned for them to believe him; their lives depended upon it.
His lips moved slowly so all could translate. “You are going to be tested one final time. You will be tricked into believing that there is a magistrate, who was once your friend, but who is now a decider to everyone’s fate. He will ask that you believe in him and that you enter a room, one at a time, for he will be casting you back to Earth, which is now heaven, for all of those who are worthy or who just want to go back. He will tell you that he is the judge, the one who was anointed and appointed the king of the lessened, the one to help everyone else see their way back to the bright side, the beacon to those who were caught up in storms of dark spots. He is the guide for the weakened ones who were too feeble to decide the difference between right and wrong.”
In the reflection of the window the robot had for eyes was a clear picture of Brody and Treach teamed up to make the swirl of knowledge necessary to man the machine; a man, who was trapped in a glass tube behind them, had a smile etched on his face as if he were enjoying the ordeal. Brody, vanilla colored, and his reflection, Treach, chocolate colored, divided their differences by swirling, putting their differences to the side, as they combined to share responsibilities, their chosen-ness portrayed through the smirks on their faces as they maneuvered the robot through the driest of areas in this tunnel. The side sandstone walkway was wide enough and dry enough for them to seek the reason why they came here in the first place. They went around, looking for more humans. In the meantime, they continued zapping Pasties like kids frying ants with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk. Their Pastie bodies were disintegrating upon the laser piercing them, similar to a knife through melting butter.
In the midst, there were lit eyes cowering from sight, each pair closing the closer the robot got to them, never to reopen. It didn’t matter, Brody merely slid down the dilator robot eye shield that hid Treach and him from view, which enabled
them total perception of those closed eyes and the bodies that they possessed. Aiming the beam at the lot of these lesser animal Pasties, Treach made short work of his target practice, moving up in level to the real thing: more Pasties. Saving the lives of those who were just like him, he summoned up the mesmerized adolescents and told them to go down to the bottom to pick up the gems of eyes from the Pasties and bring them into their metal savior. Each did as asked, and soon, there was another sacred vault full of lust, dust, and gemstones, his room having been the whips and chains, erotica room, set to the side for pleasure’s sake. Both Chester and Bonnie had it designed especially for them. Never having gotten around to doing what Treach and Brody just did, overcoming a lot of Pasties in the tunnels of Freeland, the room was merely a lust chamber, now improved into the emerald den. Light was refracted from the swivel of this room, turning it into somewhat of a disco room. The lights casting prismatic colors on the wall in speckled areas gave the darkness emphasis on such a cylindrical quarter. A dressing section with costumes hung up on rods was viewed, and adult toys of all shapes and sizes were scattered in piles about the floor in another part of the cylinder. Light and dark colored wigs, with glow tip strips highlighting the ends, lit up through the darkness. There was even a swing hanging from the middle, where the lights shined the brightest, like it was center stage amid the floor to ceiling poles.
Now that a majority of the Pasties were out of the way, a series of mirages had been set up. Each consisted of some part of the tunnel system that would collapse beneath the metal feet of the oversized machine man, leaving it flailing aimlessly down some wide, dark hollow until crashing to the bottom, lifeless. These feats, having already been seen, were merely a way for Satan to try to reach the minds of the weakened. Yet the ways of the treatment facility were to strengthen those within so Satan couldn’t get to them so readily. His casting of dark spots and dark webs of sin—put in position to entice the sinners—were all viewed through the dilatory glasses the robot had covering its robot eyes. As real as the rock holding the caves of Freeland together, these dark spots became all the more noticeable with the help of these evanescent glasses. The dark spots were almost infrared, or thermal, to the sight. The transition of those who could see the quickly stirring sinadoes compared to those who couldn’t see them should walk at tail of the robot if they wanted to evade the strength of the sin spots. Once subdued, the dark spots would envelope the sinning being and cast him into evermore, an eternal-dry ice-riddled, bottomless hell that could never be filled with enough souls. To the majority already overcome by the dinoflagellates from the waterfall up above, they were helpless as of now. They were on their way to the far outreaches of Nostradama, and no one could do anything about it. The reason why was between them and the decider.
The robot moved one foot forward at a time. He, being controlled by the dreams of Brody, was getting easier to direct the longer he was manned. Treach and Brody took turns blasting the Pasties like they were playing some mutant underground alien game on an Xbox. The oversized screen was lit up with all these little infrared blobs that radiated the most heat from their eye sockets. The target split down the middle every time with a roving cross-hair, Treach tried to steady his joystick (pilot’s steering stick) as the cross-hair was slowed enough to blast the opponent. Pieces exploded on the screen as Brody gave him a high five after freeing his closest hand for the time being. They celebrated the deaths of the wicked and continued on. The further down the cave they went, the more they started to understand their purpose in Freeland. Once his friends were secured, and more Pasties were sought out to destroy them, Brody pieced together his dreams to come to a conclusion.
Harvey fell asleep during the movie as he was reclined against a sidewall. His body spasmodically jostled mid-dream as a crumble of rocks slid into the nearby water, creating vibrations and stopping the Pasties from their concentration.
Nevertheless, enough had been viewed, everything that was being projected. The teenagers could see things like windows into the future in these slug Pasties’ cinematic broadcasts.
“Were these the seers to what future events would come?” Isaic thought out loud. The football players, plus Lexie and Aftab, huddled together to come to a conclusion to the outcome.
“What do you think this means?” Cruze looked to Mariot, who in turn looked to a younger star player, Marc Rivers. “Do you think that Brody is still our friend? Do we deserve to be on the same playing field as him, as many of us who have doubted his ability ever since the wreck?”
Marc spoke, “You have all always underestimated Brody’s capabilities. Now you have seen, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is the chosen. He is in the Pasties’ sights because he is in a treatment facility that is surrounded by tons of suicidal people, those who were once like us but failed in their secrecy and got caught. We are all down here for a reason, and it isn’t because we are afraid of getting sent to face our reviews by Trendago’s magistrates, those, being the chosen, who were put here to keep the sinners in line and try to help them through this second life.” It was unlike Marc to express any sort of sympathy; he was always the laid back one who didn’t seem to want to get too involved in anything anyone else was doing, or going through. He was a social force but only enough to be around the circle, never wanting to enter it for sake of personal gain. On the other hand, Zon, according to a rumor started by most of the football players who spoke the loudest in secret, supposedly thought that he was the glue that kept the circle solid because of the money his dad had. The Rumor Mill word on the street was Zon wasn’t really a natural born leader; he was just a big guy and used his intimidation, money, and brawn, to get his way with the others. This was enough for him to get what he wanted with the majority, but Brody always saw through him, never falling prey to his cover up of wealth and muscularity. He liked him and admired his confidence, let alone brilliance. On the inside of this gargantuan youth, there was a sea of self-doubt riddled with an obscure need for attention from anyone and everyone. When he talked, it was for the sake that he hoped someone would listen and buy into his denial. A lot of the RMHS kids were like that, though. Zon was just an outsider from another place working his way in.
Marc sloughed his shoulders as Zon took over the conversation, “You see guys, and gal, it isn’t enough that the review depicted Brody again. He is out there somewhere. Why does he keep coming up from the inside of this robot thing? Why does he look so different, yet distinguishable from when we last saw him? It has only been two months. I hate to admit it, but he looks sure of himself. I thought he was nothing more than a manager for our football team. I had no idea that he might be capable of saving our world from despair.”
“That’s because none of you took the time to really get to know him.” Lexie stepped forth and educated them. “He is one of the smartest, friendliest kids at our school. He cares so much about everyone else. You know he doesn’t have the best home life, never has. He doesn’t get along with his mom, and he thinks his real dad is some old man dying in a far away land from some kind of lung cancer. He needs us right now, just as we need him. Now, he has done at least one good thing for every one of us. If you take the time to think about it, you will find out that I am right. He saved my life. Unlike any of you, he was there for me through the most trying times in my life when both my parents died a year apart from each other. His love has saved my life.”
“He doesn’t even love you, Lexie,” Tynan stepped up and argued. “He is just using you, like he has used a majority of the girls he has gone out with since he was sent here. I bet that is why he is in Trendago, anyway.”
“So, at least he is in the right place to get help, which is more than I can say for you, Tynan!”
Tynan realized he was just as guilty as Brody, with the girls and all. “Heck, there was a time when we would play a little game called three Fs: Find ‘em, Frisk ‘em, and Forget ‘em. Let the others have the seconds.” Crude and shrewd,
Lexie was right. Tynan was just as guilty as Brody, but under the circumstances, he hadn’t gotten caught like Brody. So was he better off? Not so much. He was worse off; without Brody to help him, he would be lost. This, the gift of non-judgment, was just one of the many Brody had offered that were taken for granted even though he had every right to keep the gift for himself and not share it with anyone. He wasn’t selfish and loved his brother, one as much as the next, and this was the main reason why Lexie was saving her heart for him.
“I still don’t believe he is the chosen, but look where we are at. If he comes right now in that robot thing and saves us from down here, I will kiss his feet in front of everyone.” Zon gave way to a promise, but didn’t believe it was going to be necessary to fulfill. He didn’t believe in robots.
“Well, you better prepare yourself for that, then. I believe in him whole-heartedly. That is the benefit I get from being a virgin, and I know that is what I will be sacrificing when the time comes for me to give it away, but as of now, my virginity enables me to see things others can’t, like Brody being a magistrate.”
None of the other football players could contest her claim of virginity. Cole was dead, lost his life at the waterfall room, and Reagan Shaw wouldn’t say either way. One of the two still living cheerleaders who had left the party at the Love Shack early, besides Waylon’s daughter Madison Meane, another cheerleader Crea Stone, spoke truth about Lexie not being a virgin but had ruined it by only telling Brody sometime back. Crea took a vow of silence after Lexie found out she had been betrayed. Aftab, on the other hand, supported Lexie to the fullest. He had known her since grade school, when they used to ride the bus together as kids. He spoke. “Yeah, I firmly believe that Brody is the chosen one. After further review, I have discovered that I have had my doubts about him as well. He was somewhat of a heathen in the way he acted when he wasn’t around people. He would steal your girl if she wasn’t chained to you, without even thinking twice about it. He is like a fox in a hen house when it comes to girls, but according to the girls, he was contagious. His addiction to getting attention from the opposite sex was a come-on for them, or so they claimed. The addiction was like some aphrodisiac, or pheromone, that seduced them into his control. He was a Jekyll and Hyde case if I ever saw one. One minute, he was as friendly as can be, the next, he was dark; so dark, you could see Nostradama in his eyes. He didn’t seem to care about anyone or anything. I hope he is getting treated for his strange addiction.”
Good and Evil : Freeland - Part Two (9781628547375) Page 14