Escape From Asylonia, page 5
part #1 of The New War Series
Beneath it, the figures 05/10/12 were drawn in neat, italic letters, and it was this last piece of the design which troubled Noah the most in his lucid moments. May 10th, 2112, that was the day the real war was declared over. That was the day he had thrown down the bottle and slayed his drunken Demon with a resolve to get sober.
Eight years later, the Demon was back. A different planet, a different time, the mess and madness of his life now somehow worse than it had been before The Final war. Regardless, it was definitely the same Demon.
A nightmare sailed through Noah’s mind on a raging river of whiskey, swamped his senses and willed his arm forward, knocking the severed hand of Enosh Lavia from its resting place on a metallic coffee table. The hand flew across the room, clipped the corner of a disabled visiscreen, slid down the wall behind it, and landed with a gentle thumping noise on a steel shelf, littered with the discarded scraps of broken machinery that Noah had collected whenever and wherever he could.
Calibrators lay beside scraps of engines, pilfered from the collisions of freight crafts, broken clocks neighboured beaten up biometric displays, and an assortment of screws lay scattered about.
One day, when the horror of The New World granted him a respite from his inner-madness, and the hope returned to his sodden heart that there was a chance he could make it back home - even if that meant propelling himself through space like the stealth warriors of Attillia - he would put all these components to use. He would get himself back to Earth. Maybe, hopefully, even back to the serenity of sobriety.
But not anytime soon, and especially not on this wet and humid Asylonian summer morning, as an overplayed night terror brought him out in a freezing sweat and made his whole body convulse.
*
Noah saw himself charging through space. The brown, beige and mint green camouflage of his uniform adhered to the peaks and valleys of his muscles, all slick and soaked with sweat. He carried a trench knife, concealed in a pocket at the hip, and a Slayer Rifle - swiped from the grip of a Temüjin warrior in an earlier battle - slung over his shoulder in its holster. The cockpit surrounding him blinked with a vivid array of lights, signals, signs and displays.
Oxygen levels were running low, his fuel supplies were rapidly running out, and emergency backups were non-existent. Yet General Fallon remained calm, it was the only way he would overcome this latest challenge.
The ship’s stern swarmed in the bright white heart of a flame. The stench of the fire flooded the cockpit, kindling his retinas and aggravating his broken nose.
Noah commanded the ship as carefully and as diligently as he could in the circumstances. The burly mass of his biceps ached as one sturdy hand clenched the yoke, and the other prodded at an open wound in the side of his neck, stemming the persistent flow of blood. An American accent, Noah guessed from somewhere around the Midwest, came through the craft's radio.
'Meteor. Five hundred miles and approaching. Over.'
Gritting his teeth, an icy chill creeping up in his belly, General Fallon switched to the visiscreen on his right.
'Don't you worry Lieutenant, we’ve survived a hell of a lot bigger than this. Over,' he said calmly.
'Sir, I'm over one hundred miles ahead of you. Requesting your instruction. Over.'
Noah wiped the blood from his throat. He regretted sending the Lieutenant on ahead while he, Noah, took care of a small fault with his onboard computer.
'Stay calm, Lieutenant. Ascend two hundred and get the hell out of the way. I've got this. Over.'
The radio fell silent. Noah cast his ship into a two-hundred mile dive and sped forward. With the jarring of his boot against the deck, he dropped anchor and yanked the yoke to the left. The ship went skidding through the atmosphere, the anchor streamed behind it and latched on to the debris of a defeated UEF ship, floating by like a grim cloud of mangled machinery. He would knock that thing into oblivion before it nailed the back-up fleet trailing several hundred miles behind them.
'You OK, Lieutenant? Over.' Adrenaline teetered on the brink of his outwardly calm approach.
'Some difficulty, Sir. Will have it any moment. Over,' replied Lieutenant Maponos. The curt tone which crackled through Noah's radio failed to disguise the fear which engulfed the young Lieutenant.
'Well you'd better shift your arse, Lieutenant. A hungry old girl like that will eat you alive and come back for seconds. Over.’
Without a word more, he stamped down on the thrusters and turned the ship to the left, the deafening whip of wind stinging his ears as the ship spun in a violent three-sixty, winding the broken craft above it like a cowboy gearing up a lasso.
'Damnit Lieutenant, move! Now! Now! Now!'
With a stiff lurch, Noah weighed anchor and continued in a wicked spin, launching the abandoned space ship through the atmosphere as though he were an intergalactic shot putter aiming for a moving target.
'Sir! Fire on deck, Sir!’ Moponos cried. ‘Oh my jeezus, this is bad. Jezus this is very, very bad,’ he continued, no longer addressing The General.
Noah grimaced as the shot put spaceship chased after the ravenous meteor, and the meteor itself blitzed a path in pursuit of the Lieutenant’s doomed vessel. The dead ship missed its target, failed to intercept the meteor, and pulverized the piloted UEF craft.
His craft, his suit, his limbs all ablaze, Lieutenant Manopos was unwillfully evicted from his vessel, and sent headlong through space. His eyes bulged from their sockets, then exploded. Tiny particles of eyeball and blood drifted, swirling through space in a whirlwind. Nerve-endings shot out in bunches through the chasms were his eyes had been. Asphyxiation turned the Lieutenant's throat red, then blue, then an ugly, bruised purple. His arm was wrenched from his shoulder and flapped about him like a windsock.
Noah steered his ship to the right, tilted it back on its axis, and flew it forward like a kid pulling a dramatic wheelie on a pushbike. Maponos’ body landed on the bow with a crunch. Intestines burst out from his midsection and coiled around the external camera that Noah had been relying on to witness the annihilation of his colleague.
The General retched, then swallowed hard to push the rising vomit back into his stomach, grabbed his mask and fastened it securely around his face. He took hold of his fuel pack, its supplies of oxygen and energy running hazardously low, and strapped it against his muscular back before leaving the cockpit. The air inside his mask sucked the blood from the side of his throat and eased the sting of sulphur on his eyes as he wrestled his way out of the ship.
With a sturdy leg bent at the knee, body hunched low into his hips, and arms out in front of him, Noah surfed on top of his ship. He reached forward, gripping the dislocated wrist of the lieutenant and lumbered the weightless, lifeless body into the ship.
A rogue piece of space flotsam careered towards him, narrowly missing his skull. He fell backwards through the hatch and landed with his neck and shoulders against the pilot seat. The blood-stained corpse of the Lieutenant, heavier now than it had been in space, crashed on top of him. In a rare moment of panic, Noah pressed his boots into the exposed guts of his comrade and pushed him forward. Maponos' back cracked against the yoke and sent the ship spiralling. Noah jockeyed into an upright position, kicking again at the dead man, clearing him from the control deck and clutching frantically at the yoke, but the weight of the corpse against the deck had caused a malfunction and instead, he, the dead lieutenant and the ship, all nosedived at unimaginable speeds towards the scrapyard of a Temüjin battle station.
Impact approached. Noah fought with his own ship until it surrendered to his will and gave him manual control,. He piloted what was now a colossal glider plane into base position, skimming his way across the floor of the scrapyard, and finally colliding uncontrollably into the side of an old Temüjin ship.
VII.
Silence. A callous chill filled Noah's veins. Cut off from the rest of his men, he could only pray that they were smart enough not to follow him, that they had been able to get themselves to safety and avoid meeting with the same fate as the Lieutenant.
Noah pulled his suit from shoulder to waist. His ripped muscles glistened in the darkness. Sweat leaked from his pores, trickling over an eagle tattoo with just two names inscribed beneath its mighty wings. He hooked his arms beneath those of Lieutenant Maponos, and carted him into the pilot seat. Finding a packet of cigarettes hiding in the Lieutenant’s pocket, he brought one it slowly to his lips and lit it, inhaling deeply ,and exhaling with a satisfied sigh as the fire filled his lungs. His eyes followed the flow of smoke, wafting and weaving around the corpse. Black chasms ripped through the skull in the place where eyes once sat. Shredded nerve-endings peered out over the brim of the sockets like visceral eyelashes. Blood oozed from the mangled remains of Maponos’ stomach. Noah had never known the Lieutenant all that well - this had only been their first mission together - but he knew him to be a young man. From the vigor of his once unspoiled, now forever charred, skin, and the smooth sheer of his fresh, blonde hair, now disintegrated to a black and red scalp, he guessed Maponos to be no older than twenty five. Still, the fact that he had barely known his Lieutenant was not as important to Noah as the somber fact that he never would. He had lost an ally. Earth had lost a defender. Somewhere, a family had lost a son, a brother, a husband, a father.
Wiping a tear with one hand and drawing deeply on his cigarette with the other, Noah surveyed his damaged ship.
His eyes fixed on a fire blanket. He tore it from its packaging and draped it gently Maponos' lap. Another tear stained his cheek. This time he let it lie there, leaning forward to press a delicate kiss against the scarred forehead of his fallen ally.
'Don't worry, buddy,' he whispered. 'We'll get you home safe. Give you the best damn send off The Motherland ever saw.'
His left arm throbbed with a heavy ache and he pressed at it with his right hand. From the memory of his UEF medical training, Noah knew it to be broken in at least two places. Tucking the shattered limb against his side, he struck up a second cigarette with his free hand and held it between his lips, taking short puffs from it as he slithered almost silently across the yard on his belly. A wall of damaged spacecrafts confronted him, cutting off his path. There was no climbing over it, not with one arm, and no going around it. Instead, Noah reached for his trench knife. He carved a hole in the side-panel of a ship sat atop two others, took a few steps back, and charged forward. Wedging himself through the narrow gap, Noah worked his way through the ship, taking care to protect his broken arm, and rolled out the other side like a scuba diver taking off the edge of his boat, only instead of cool, calm water, he landed on cruel, stone-covered ground that drilled pain into his coccyx.
From out of the silence, Noah felt something cold and intense seize the back of his neck. Bitter experience told him he was being choked well before his bulging eyes could fully register the image of a Temüjin whip, squeezing at the throbbing muscles of his throat. Sat with his back against the outer wall of the scrapyard, the flesh of his pulsing face and limbs boiling with seething shades of scarlet, Noah’s eyes closed and his teeth ground together. His muscles cramped, and his arms shot upwards above his trembling head. The Temüjin whip seared the rough skin of his palms as he grasped at it. Summoning every ounce of strength, adrenaline, and desire to live which roared within him, he tugged vigorously on the whip.
The Temüjin guard at the other end of it staggered, yet did not fall. Noah pulled harder still. This time, the guard was divorced from his post and fell forward, the sick smack of his spine against the ground pierced Noah's ears. The General leapt to his feet, freed himself from the noose, and stole the whip from the guard's hand. Sliding his thumb against its switch, the thong of the whip made a whispering shhhhhapp sound as it retracted back into its handle.
The guard squirmed about the ground, reaching for his Slayer Rifle. Instinctively, The General took hold of his pistol and blasted the weapon from the hand of his opponent, then stood over him, with the mouth of his gun aimed into one of the murky brown craters of the guard’s face.
He contemplated a kill. In his mind’s eye, he saw he amphibious beast exploding in a volley of gunfire, and heard the shot ring out through the still of the night. It was enough to make him loosen his hold on the trigger. Attracting attention to himself was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead, he hoisted the guard to his feet by the gaunt, slippery skin of his bald head, flung him against the yard wall and charged forward, but was grabbed from behind in the unmistakable, skeletal grip of two more Temüjin guards. Pistol still in hand, he forced the barrel into the rubbery belly of the first one, and barely flinched as a single bullet pregnated the creature's spleen. The remaining guard released his hold. Noah cocked his fist backwards and smashed sharp knuckles into brittle lips. His stomach curdled as the dirty brown slime of Temüjin blood dripped from his fingers.
The General leaned forward, throwing his foot back and clocking the guard with a swift savate kick to the chest, catching the Temüjin in a painful headlock as he wavered about. Squashing the enemy’s face between his bicep and forearm, a demented grin flashed about Noah’s face. He looked to the sky in silent prayer, trusting whatever forces were at work in the universe that Lieutenant Manopos had made it up to The Great Beyond.
'This one's for you, buddy,' he said, as he dug the pistol into the guard's skull and blew his head open.
The putrid stench of exploding flesh and brain matter, like stale sewage rotting in a baking sun, turned his stomach, and it was all Noah could do to stop himself from puking. The one remaining guard sprung up from his position against the scrapyard wall. Noah fell backwards, pushed the rigid soles of his boots into the ribs of the charging guard, and used the guard’s own momentum against him by lifting him up off his feet and kicking him over Noah’s own head. The guard again landed on his back and Noah heard the distinct crack of vertebrae. The gravelly surface grazed his skin as he pounced, wrapping a forearm around the blubbery throat of his prey and holding a threatening, clenched fist inches from the guard’s potholed face.
'Alright. Don't you dare move, scumbag. You so much as blink the wrong way and I’ll carve out your insides and mail them to your mother to put on her mantelpiece.’
Using the guard’s own whip against him, Noah released the thong again and bound his victim’s knotted wrists with it.
Frisking both the one living guard and his two dead colleagues, he rifled through their damp pockets and unlatched their utility belts, studying each weapon, each tool and each batch of ammunition, and choosing what to keep.
With his own pockets now heavy with the weight of a newly acquired whip, machete knife and additional ammo for his stolen Slayer Rifle, The General returned to his captured prey.
'Now, you listen to me,’ he scowled. ‘A man died today in defending my planet, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let his death be in vain. So you’re gonna cooperate with me, or else I’m gonna call up your mother and have her clear some space on that damn mantlepiece. So I’m gonna ask you nicely just this once.
‘How...do...I...get...in...there?’
He pointed at the towering mass of the Temüjin battle station. Its walls were the texture and appearance of Earth wood. Water dripped from every tiny splinter. A plant Noah recognised as some kind of poison ivy poured from the spiralled roof. It was guarded by a red metal gate at least fifty metres tall and just as wide.
The guard arched his neck backwards, and spat a filthy, evil smelling blob of dark green phlegm in Noah's eye. Flinching, Noah wiped it away with the back of his hand, then clenched a fist and smashed it into the eyeball of his prey.
'I'll ask you one...more...time,' he grunted slowly, punctuating every word with an elbow in the guard's temple. 'How...do... I... get...in...there?'
Still the guard said nothing, only spat more rancid phlegm in his captor's eyes. Again, Noah wiped himself clean and pummelled his foe with a brutal fist to the throat.
This was hopeless. Time was running short and Noah needed to act fast. He grabbed his pistol and snugly tucked his gun in the Temüjin’s guts to muffle the ungodly roar of death.
Leaving a trail of corpses behind him, he sprinted to the colossal gate and, scanning the blockage for a way in, glanced a biometric lock on the gigantic post supporting the right side of the gate. The idea seemed to fall upon him from some divine muse. He started back to one of the dead Temüjin. Lugging the corpse towards the lock, Noah grabbed creature’s wrist, and slapped a lifeless webbed palm against the screen. The gate made a resounding whomp. Noah hurried forward. Through the shadows, he saw two more Temüjin guards stalking the main doorway of the battle station. Hiding behind a nearby rock, he gave out two shots, both connecting with the temples of the unsuspecting guards and killing them quietly.
On the move again, Noah picked up his pace, breaking another biometric lock with another slippery palm of another dead Temüjin. The doorway bolted open with a low groan, and he pushed on into the heart of darkness.
The cold struck him first. A damp chill crept out from moist, mahogany walls. In the depths of his nightmare, the walls began to close in on him as he raced through endless corridors, every twist and turn morphing into slobbering jowls and swallowing him whole.
Finally, he fell into a clearing. The rasp of enclosing walls and the snapping of imagined jaws gave way to the haunting melody of a mandolin, lovingly teased by skilled fingers. Ducking behind a large column of smooth bark, as clammy and cool as everything in the station, Noah's fingers rested cautiously on the trigger of the Slayer Rifle as he watched the scene play out before him.
