Escape From Asylonia, page 22
part #1 of The New War Series
She dove from her seat at the front of the coach and darted along the narrow gangway. The palms of her smooth, pale hands stroked the rows of soft, leather seats. Her bare feet, with their strong bones beneath creamy, delicate flesh, and each toenail painted in smooth strokes of mango-orange, pressed into the coarse fur of the gangway carpet. Above her, two thin strips of light illuminated the path.
She grabbed at his wrists. The General resisted. His fingers were latched into his eye sockets, tugging, tearing. She thought that if she left him to it he might just succeed in tearing his own face from his skull.
‘General, let go. Let GO!’
She released one hand from him, drew it back, and snapped it down across his face.
‘I said let go! LET GO!’
Noah let go. His head snapped towards her. His hands broke free from her restraint and took hold of her. His eyes were wide, looking directly at her without seeing her.
Rochelle choked back the lump in her throat. A heavy dread consumed her. She stared into the wide, vacant eyes of Beelzebub, looking to find General Noah Fallon hidden somewhere within them. He was gone, gone completely, though she hoped not permanently.
The Devil Himself flashed rotten fangs at the doctor. He breathed deliberate, protracted breaths that washed right over her face, sweeping away any hope of employing the assertive bedside manner she thought might work.
‘N...Now, now Noah, it’s me, The... The Doctor,’ she stuttered. ‘Doctor Rochelle, r-remember me?’
*
Noah snarled at the image of Medusa in his grip, watching a tangled web of serpents slide their rough, brown and green skins together above her forehead. He saw that their eyes were the same colour as hers, a bright, demonic red with vast pupils, blacker than black. Sucking saliva into the back of his throat, he squeezed strongly on her wrists, the sound of madness drowning out her squeals of pain. He regarded her soft white skin, her terrified heart pounding, her breath short, her breasts rising and falling quickly. And he did. He remembered.
At least, he thought he remembered. He certainly remembered something. He looked closer at the Gorgon, beyond her woven hair of dancing snakes, and deeper, beyond the image of hell’s great inferno in her eyes. There, he saw something. He saw a doctor, and he remembered a doctor, though he did not remember why he remembered a doctor.
The beating of his heart came like a hammer, walloping his chest. His veins tore at his skin. His bloodshot eyes rolled into the back of his head, where, in the gloomy void, he swore he saw his own veins mangling themselves into knots, shedding their adventitia, the way Medusa’s serpents shed their skin before him. He felt those knotted veins piercing through the barrier of his sweat-soaked skin, the way tree roots rip through soil. The roots took his hands from around Medusa and lay them by his sides.
*
Rochelle controlled her breathing until it came in long, calm gasps. Her hands steady, she went back to work undeterred. Slowly, so as not to startle him, she pressed the flat of her palms lightly against his shoulders and leaned in to hold him.
‘There, there,’ she said softly. ‘Everything’s going to be OK. I’ve got you now, Noah. I’ve got you.’
Her voice was mild and loving, that of a doting mother comforting an infant in the wake of a nightmare.
*
To Noah, it was a sinister, callous voice which spoke to him. A voice which cackled and mocked and was evil. It said:
‘I’ve got you now, Noah. I’ve got you, and you’re screwed.’
It laughed a full, malicious laugh. The arms of Medusa brought him to her bosom and began to squeeze.
*
Rochelle held firm as The Devil writhed and thrashed in her arms. She felt him tense his muscles, pushing them outwards against hers in a break for freedom. She held on with a strength and determination fuelled by the compassion thriving in her heart.
*
Noah cried out as Medusa screamed. She flashed her fangs and her serpents followed suit. Hell fire and lightning swarmed around them. Thunder roared.
*
Rain and wind beat against all sides of the jetcoach. Rochelle arched her head back, mouth agape, an involuntary reaction to the expended effort taken to restrain The Devil.
*
The Gorgon spat. She slapped her hands at the sides of his face. She was going to make him look, look directly at her, into the depths of hell where most mortals had eyes. She was going to stare, and turn him into stone.
*
Rochelle kept one arm wrapped as firmly around him as she could, raising the other to sooth The Devil by stroking his cheek. She would calm him, she would comfort him, she would help him to rest. She would be his nurse....
*
....And he would be her Perseus.
*
He cried out. She shrieked. Thunder roared. The rain drummed on the rooftop. The mountains caved in on them. The leather seats stood solidly as they wrestled against them. Medusa caught him in his grip again. The Devil broke free and raised his fist. Medusa held up an arm to stop him. Noah Fallon landed a fist against the bridge of Rochelle Asa’s nose, and knocked her unconscious with one punch.
LIX.
David moved down the corridor with the barrel of a gun at his kidneys and terror booming in his chest. His knees were weak. His hands sat flat atop his head with his arms bent into triangles. His left elbow knocked against the arm of the heavy-set Samoan walking beside him. He looked at Sol out of the corner of his eye, the look of a boy whose bluff has been called, a look which said everything without him saying a word.
Look, I did warn you the plan wasn’t exactly flawless, man.
His eyes shifted nervously to his feet as they hit the concrete floor, one heavy step after another. They moved back to Sol, apologetically, expecting either a look of damnation or defeat. In the glossy browns of Sol’s eyes, he expected to see something, to feel something, to hear something, a voice perhaps. The voice, he assumed, would have said something like:
Damn right it wasn't flawless, moron. Look what kind of mess you've put us in, Davey. These assholes would sooner put bullets in our backs then help us out. You want directions, brah? Only directions they'll give us are gonna take us right to some damn jail cell. You know what they’ll do when we get there, Davey? They’ll leave us to rot, that’s what. They’ll leave us to rot in a cell, crawling with rat shit and God knows what else. Oh, they’ll come back every now and again, sure, but only to taunt us by waving a sheet of paper in our faces. Just when that paper gets close enough so that we can see the directions printed on it, these creeps will snatch it away from us and spit their toxic gunk at us. Then they’ll turn on their heels and split, but not before they toss us a pathetic slab of grey meat, covered in scuzz. We’ll have to fight over that meat to survive, brah, and you bet your life I’ll kick your ass for it. Yep, that's what instore for us Davey Boy, that's what you've lead us too'.
Instead, those eyes looked back at him with something else entirely. They looked at him with hope, with trust. If those eyes could speak, he thought he would hear them say It's all good, brah. Just think of something quick, will ya?
Their captors hurried them onwards, the red-grey bricks of the corridor walls slapped haphazardly on top of one another, and held together with crumbling cement. The low ceiling drooped and dripped with pockets of damp and peeling paint. Somewhere above it, pipes throbbed and gargled, spat and hissed. Meeting with the slapping of feet against concrete, it created a rough, uneasy soundscape, interrupted here and there by assorted noises;, like the banging of a door, slamming to somewhere in the building, the howl of the wind, tearing up the elements outside, and the drumming of the rain, pounding down at an unseen window. David's nose twitched at a pungent, earthy aroma. Sol recognised it as the smell of marijuana, or something like it, and ignored it.
The corridor took them round a corner and continued, the passageway barricaded at either side by more stonewall blemished in illegible graffiti, with fuzzy, green mold frothing between the bricks. Balzor and Zangor barked at them to keep moving, turning their guns at the handle so that the barrells pinched their skin and twisted it round. David and Sol glanced back at one another, rolling their eyes at the sound of the two revolting Askarians snickering behind them, like two small kids who had found the secret trove of Christmas presents a week early.
Zangor laughed the loudest. David suspected that this was the most action the beast had ever seen in his countless years guarding the building. Drunk on the sudden opportunity to use his idle authority, Zangor had swung into it gung-ho, full of excitement and nervous energy. Here he was, with his buddy, Balzor, and they were really doing it! Finally, the thing they had always talked about, yet secretly never thought would happen, had happened. Today was the day they had gone out and bagged themselves a couple of prisoners. They got to march them about the place, this way and that, and show them just who was boss around here. Those punks had listened up good too. They had to, or else he and Balzor would have blown their kidneys to smithereens, no messing, laddy.
For his part, Balzor laughed the same awkward laugh of the perpetually confused that David remembered from his first trip to Askaria. He was busy thinking that the idiot would probably break into hysterics if somebody giggled, whilst breaking the news that he was about to lose a testicle, when Balzor’s tone changed, from sinister stupidity to dauntless dominance.
‘Alright, stays where yers is, oomans,’ he commanded.
They did as they were told, knees bending to steady themselves, preventing an unwelcome flight down a sheer drop into total blackness.
It was a redundant gesture.
Balzor and Zangor withdrew their guns from the backs of their victims. David and Sol shot each other a look that was no longer discreet. Their necks turned, their eyes met. Behind them, Balzor and Zangor mocked the gesture. Balzor lifted his leg, pressed the sole of his boot into Sol's spine, and pushed forward. Zangor followed suit, adding an extra flourish by leaping up off one leg, and dropkicking David with the other.
David fell over the edge of the stairs face first, his arms flapping overhead as though attempting flight. His legs flailed behind him like two dead weights loosely latched to his torso. Sol went down on his back, the edge of each step snapping at his shoulder blades, biting at his calves, lashing at his ankles.
They fell, a tangled mess of arms and legs, tumbling, rolling. David's body slid over Sol. He felt the two big trunks of the Samoan's thighs clamp down at his sides. Sol’s bulging arms wrapped around him, trapping air in his chest. The utter blackness consumed them. In the distance, the sound of Zangor and Balzor, cackling and howling, rang out like sirens. In the fall, David’s eyes met Sol’s. Neither man saw anything in the other, no hidden fear, no surprise, just the deads of each others eyes. The rush carried them down, step after step, until there were no more steps, and there was nothing else digging, stabbing, biting at them, nothing else banging at the backs of their skulls, and battering their ankles. Still locked helplessly in Sol's involuntary grasp, David felt the wrestler skid underneath him. Something tall and immovable got in their way. Sol met it with the top of his head. His limbs went limp and were no longer restraints holding David in place. Only the shock did that. David held on to the man beneath him, his body frozen. He turned to look behind him and up the steps. There, through the darkness, he could just make out Zangor and Balzor.
Zangor slid his fingers through the bars of a large iron gate. He unhooked the latch, and with a degenerate grin, slammed it shut.
David looked back at Sol, at the slow throbbing of his broad chest which told him he was still alive, and at the closed eyes which told him he was knocked out cold.
‘Hey!’
David cursed such a flippant word as soon as it fell out of his lips, as though it had stolen the place of any word which might actually be effective. He heard it echo up the stairs. It irritated him, went right through him. Without realising he was doing it, David balled his fist and punched the air, his face taut and scrunched up as though attacked by a nauseating odor.
‘Hey! You sons of bitches!'
The words kept falling, only angry, frustrated curses, nothing that actually made any sense, or could possibly make their captors take notice. He turned and lashed out at a wall with his fist. The wall got the upperhand and wrapped David's knuckles in a sheet of intense pain. The pain ran down from his fingers and over the wrist, then tapered off at the elbow, where a dull ache, caused by the flight down the stairs, took over.
A lousy feeling polluted his stomach. It reminded him just how badly everything had gone. It tried to explain to him just far above his head this whole situation was, though David suspected that even the feeling in his belly could not quite comprehend the magnitude of it all.
He kicked out at nothing, sweeping his foot as though casually booting a soccer ball. He growled, an angry, red-raw, growl that rumbled in his guts. His toes curled in his boots, and his fingers clawed at nothing. His bones felt swollen beneath his skin. The enormity of everything consumed him. It seemed to reach up from the floor, grabbing him by the wrists and ankles. It dragged him down, making him sit with his back against the wall, his heavy knees tucked into his chest, and his arms wrapped around them, like he was trying to stop them from escaping, from tearing up to the top of the stairs, where nothing but an iron gate and frustration would be there to meet him.
Two thoughts raced within him, both running parallel to one another and occasionally meeting. There was the situation itself, that he should find himself, full of pain and anger, locked in a cellar by two ugly, pink monsters, with only an unconscious Samoan for company.
It played heavy on him, but not as heavy as the struggle to comprehend that this situation should be happening to him at all, that he really was here, on the planet of Asylonia, not only with a big sleeping giant, but with General Fallon, and Doctor Asa. It had been one thing to fly off in his ship and go spinning around space, daunted but excited. At that point, he could have turned back if he had really, desperately wanted to. He could have had himself picked up some UEF ship and pleaded... pleaded what? Insanity? Curiosity? Compulsion? Something intangible, something that swam through blood of the Attreus clan and made him do it?
He was in too deep for that now. There would be no talking his way out of it. There would be no opportunity to just throw his hands up and say ‘OK, I messed up,’ then to sit back and let someone in charge take care of things. Now there was nobody in charge. Now there was no going back, just as there was no going forward.
LX.
The Doctor lay in the gangway with one arm above her head, pointing back towards the cockpit of the jetcoach. The other arm lay contorted across her stomach, fingers bent and splayed, as though clutching at something beneath the wrinkles of her halter top.
Her left leg hung over the armrest of a nearby seat. Her right leg pointed out in front of her towards Noah, who sat shivering on the back seat.
In his eyes, she no longer bore any resemblance to the Gorgon, Medusa. That particular she-demon had vanished the moment he struck her. She had neither exploded, nor crumbled into dust, nor burst into flames as he thought she might. Rather, she had simply ceased to be, as though she had never actually existed at all.
Yet she had, and Noah knew it. He had grappled with Medusa and slain her cold dead, and now in her place was this young girl, like an angel, there and yet not there.
Though reality would place their struggle only seconds into the past, to him, it felt like the longest time since this unconscious young girl had just come into being, in much the same way that Medusa had ceased to be at all. The girl had not so much appeared, as she had finally revealed herself, the way a flower suddenly emerges from the chaos of a magic eye painting, having been there the whole time, unnoticed. His thoughts battled among themselves. It was as though the girl had always been there yet had never been there, as though Medusa had never been there yet had always been there. God, it was confusing. Worse than confusing, it was Goddamn scary. What the hell was his mind doing to him now? Had he really seen demon eyes in the backs of the jetcoach seats, which were now definitely seats and no longer mountains, caves, or cliff-faces?
He was not sure whether he had been awake and hallucinating, or asleep and trapped in the latest of a long series of night terrors. Either way, it scared him. Was this it? Was he definitely going insane this time? Really insane, and not just pseudo-insane like last time, when they had pumped him full of librium, and magically made the spiders stop from falling out of his mouth?
What was with the girl? The sleeping angel with the bruised face. There was something about her. He knew her, or rather, knew of her. There was something about the girl, something above and beyond the dream-that-was-not-a-dream about the Gorgon with snakes for hair. It was something that told him she was an important part of a story, if not his own story, then a story that in someway involved him, though the why and the how remained as much a mystery as the who. Who was she? Where had she come from besides having always been there? And why was she here with him, in this dark coach, in the kind of cold which slid up alongside you, pressed its fingers into your shoulders, and pinched at the back of your neck.
Noah yawned and shivered, hugged himself, then yawned again and hunched forward. He sat with his feet pressed against his buttocks on the edge of the seat, spine bent, knees at right-angles tucked into his gut, rocking the slow, endless rock of the insane. The terror of knowing that he had just cause to be scared was not as strong as the terror of not knowing what that cause was.
He heard his own voice say 'God, I need a drink,' and he could not tell if he had said it out loud or not. Still, he knew he had said it, and he knew he had meant it. He would have done a deal with The Devil right there and then, one weary soul for a bottle of gin. Unscrew the cap, tilt, drown the senses, flood the veins, take away the itch. The itch was strong tonight, probably stronger than ever. It made his veins ache, his fingers hurt, and his toes curl. As they curled, Noah felt his skin curl too, shrivelling up the way a single sheet of paper does when struck by a flame. And it itched, by God it itched. As his skin shriveled and curled on the outside, the veins inside throbbed, grew swollen, became heavy. His muscles pulsed, hurt, wanted to jump out of his skin. He pressed his spine against the seat. It felt as though something were pushing against him, grabbing him around the biceps and squeezing them. The pressure of the squeeze rushed all the way through his body and made his kneecaps want to explode. He clawed his fingers into the imaginary weight and tried to pull it away, puncturing the illusion of nothingness and turning it into water Belligerent, bright blue waves with frothy white lips snarled and hissed as they crashed over him.
