Ty whines and moans as he regains consciousness, his jaw hanging loosely, either fully dislocated or broken, or both. I help him up, the two of them having issues merely walking. They drag themselves along as I help Calyx stay on her feet.
“At least now you’ll shut up for a while,” she smiles. Ty laughs involuntarily, his attempt only making the pain worse. He cringes.
“And you?” I ask Calyx. “You ok?”
“I’ve no idea where he took him, how can they vanish like that?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “Do you have any ideas where we might start looking?”
“Uie?” Ty asks. I know he meant “We?”
“There’s some sort of town not far from here,” she grunts. “If nothing else, I think we might at least find someone who can help Ty.”
The man tries to say something, slurs, then gives up, his eyes tearing from the pain.
We scavenge what we can, storing three plasma carbines in Ty’s backpack and head back out.
We talk little on our way, and I find myself reminiscing over an event brought forth by the look of foreboding and loss in the eyes and expression of Calyx.
I remember when I held my father, his head resting in my arms, watching him die knowing my life would change forever. I was thirteen then. His last, warm breath hit my face and his soul shot straight into The White. That’s what he called it anyway. He told me he had died, or at least thought he had, before. They somehow managed to bring him back then, however. But he said he can still remember The White. A place where the sun never sets upon your face and a music encompassing every note ever conceived or imagined plays – comes together in a symphony beautiful beyond description. He said his whole outlook on what life is and what is consciousness changed back then. He told me he had, in that place, seen his death, his real death and had because of this never feared it – knew it would happen in the arms of someone he most cherished. Before it happened, I had always thought that to be my mother. I asked him before he died, curious and full of hope of what the answer might be, I asked, “What is consciousness?” He said, “It’s a tune. A tune following a specific pattern pleasing to the ear.”
I have to admit that, back then, the whole concept didn’t make much sense to me. But the more I thought about it over the years, the more it began to shape itself into a strange sort of meaning. And what my father’s dying mind had conjured up back then, made me smile in the Now, in a moment of quiet inside the tunnel system.
The voice of Calyx hurls me back out of my mind and into the full expanse of current reality. I don’t like it, this filthy, dark place, but her face brings me a small bit of comfort. It’s the type of face that finds you in your dreams. “How did you do it, Nomad?” she asks me. “How did it not hurt to punch him, or break any of your bones? Those punches of his must have been near supersonic.”
“I don’t know,” I tell her, and I truly have no idea, but have since grown all the more eager to find out. I know the truth is often an elusive bitch, yet my mother had once told me a nugget of truth, ‘Three things cannot forever remain hidden, the sun, the moon, and the truth.’ I know I’ll find out soon enough.
We continue in silence the rest of the way, with Ty moaning from the pain when he forgets himself and steps a bit too hard, vibrating his jaw.
Night had fallen outside, and we greet it thirsty, hungry and battered. That is to say, not at all in the right state of mind to face what is waiting for us. I cannot understand Ty properly, but upon exiting the hangar and looking upon the group of men waiting for us, I’m reasonably certain he said, “Merde.”
“My words exactly,” I mumble.
The nebulous atmosphere has a sheen to it, suggesting it isn’t quite night yet, it is either that, or some explosions are taking place in the sky. I find the twilight scenario much more likely, although I have since discovered not to rule out anything.
The men stand ten meters away in a straight firing line.
“Friend’s of yours?” I ask Calyx, assuming she has at least some idea of who the men might be.
There are twenty of them, covered in garbs and combat suits, their faces governed by brownish gasmasks. The one in the middle steps closer and points his energy rifle at me, it must be because I’m the tallest – a tubular device which might as well have been pulled out of some steam engine’s asshole. But I recognize the design, a standard disruptor rifle – a pulse-gun firing high frequency waves that turn your body into a small pond. The weapon is only useful in short ranges and has another setting which super-excites particles to a point where the target spontaneously combusts. Although calling such an event spontaneous is bit redundant, I think.
The men follow his lead and hefted their guns at us.
“By order of Malkard himself, I demand you relinquish your weapons and accompany us to the HQ. You will answer for you crimes. They include,” he shuffles through his pocked and pulls out what looks like a semi-wet piece of parchment, “theft of valuable explosives, the death of two guardsmen, three diggers, and one supervising personnel.”
“If by supervising personal you mean slaver, then yes, I suppose those would be my charges,” I tell him.
“That is irrelevant,” the man barks back, his voice muffled by the heavy filtration mask. “You will surrender now, or be fired upon.”
In the corner of my eye, I see Calyx fiddling with her wrist device, pressing buttons in the most stealthily manner she can muster.
“In three seconds,” she whispers, “huddle close to me.”
“I said drop your fucking weapons!” the man shouts.
I hear an electric whirl within her suit and see the two exposed batteries upon her back glow momentarily. With a sound like electricity, a pulse is set free – a bubble shoots out a field of charged lighting that races out in all directions. An electric feel shoots through me. The men are hit before they even realize what happened. I hear clicks as they press the triggers of their guns, but none would fire. They look at each other stupidly, confused. I saw something where the bubble had travelled, I’m sure of it. A landscape revealed, familiar shapes looking back, seeing me, cocking their wide-brimmed heads and floating, breathing as one.
“The fuck was that?” I ask.
“EMD,” she says, as though I was supposed to know what it means. She smiles at me, sees I have no clue what she had just said, “Electromagnetic Discharge. Their weapons won’t be bothering us. If you two were close enough, you should be fine. Now, if you would be so kind as to kill them, that would be great.” She said the last part quietly.
Her thoughtfulness pays off almost immediately. “Bitch!” grunts the leader and motions for his squad to rush us.
Ty fires first, from the hip, incinerating the shouting man and punching a head-sized hole through the chest of the one behind him. It makes the others pause, but by then me and Calyx had already added to the hail of fray. I feel nothing for them as they are mauled down. They burn and screech in agony, some even try to run. It is strange to watch men burn, for you would think that flesh, being mostly water, would not burn with such ferocity. One manages to escape, sprinting so fast he nearly trips over with every step. Ty kneels down in his signature, sniper-pose and ends him with s single shot to the back of the head that throws him forward, feet kicking back as he lands on his shoulders.
“Who did I just help kill?” Calyx asks. “Who’s this Malkard?”
“He’s a slaver,” I say, having ran into his ilk before. “Ty, you could have told me the place we demolished and the bombs you stole belonged to him.”
He shrugs as though expecting something like this might happen and not caring.
“I’ll take it he’ll not like what just happened here and send more of his men?” she asks.
“That’s a reasonable assumption,” I nod. “I’m having issues figuring out how they managed to track us.”
“Bjggnn,” Ty mumbles.
“What?”
He says it again, but neither of us can tell what th
e hell he’s trying to say. “We really need to get you to a medic, fast,” she remarks.
“How far is this town you mentioned?”
“About thirty miles that way.” She points to our right. East.
“Let’s go,” I urge them. She nods, but turns and walks to the gate instead.
“Where to?” I ask her.
“One moment,” she bids and picks up her previously discarded minigun. She expertly flips it about in her hands and places it on her back. The magnetic clamps engage with a soft, metallic cling and we head out to meet the impatient Ty standing near the fort’s exit.
“I’ll find some ammo for this, somewhere,” she claims while Ty produces what could have been a laugh.
We trek by the dried riverbed for a few hours and catch sight of an elevated outcrop.
“I assume a gorge lays hidden within,” I tell them and we head up the slight incline. My assumption is proven right and we gather a bit of dry wood and set it in a pile. I fire a burst from my plasma rifle to try and set it ablate, but the wood flies about in all directions as if hit by a heavy wind, the ground beneath smolders. We laugh, especially Ty, whose expression then shifts as he begins to moan from the pain, his eyes watering.
“That’s right, you bastard. Laugh it up!” I smile back. The two of them laugh even harder, Ty chuckling even through the pain. She shows me a setting on the left of the gun to adjust the plasma’s stream and after we gather up the wood again, I manage to make the flame come to life.
“I’ll take the first watch,” I say, eager to have a bit of alone time and perhaps survey our surroundings from a vantage point I had noticed above the gorge.
“Wake me up in about three hours then,” says Calyx, “I’ll take the next one,” she smiles. I nod and offer her the last few drops from my water bottle. She drinks eagerly. I watch her as she lies down then head around the gorge and up the hill. I feel my mind wander and find my thoughts centering upon how warm it must be to lie beside her.
From nearly the top of the hill I can see the bonfire and the two of them below. They look like black markers over the rock – hunkered down on their makeshift beds. I wonder if their dreams haunt them. I on the other hand am not feeling tired at all. It’s like some energy is flowing through me, revitalizing my mind and limbs, forcing me to push up the hill. I allow the feeling to sweep me along and in no time, I’m at the top, looking down upon the grim and dark landscape. My eyes had adjusted enough by then and I begin to see well enough to spot movement in the distance – surrounding the base where we had left all the bodies. People carrying torches move about, apparently pilling the carcasses. After a few minutes of this they throw in the torches. They must have poured it with something flammable as the thing takes off like a fireball. I look around and see the outlines of hills in the distance. Visibility is slowly beginning to lessen, however, and a fog begins to claim the curvatures and hillsides. It looks and moves like something milky pouring into clear water. I can just barely spot a semblance of light in the valley to the East. I figure this must be the town Calyx had mentioned. It looks active. The valley where the town sits rest below a hillside on its right upon which I can see a shadow, some sort of a structure whose outlines are lost in the haze and darkness of the night. My thoughts then trail to my mother for some reason. The thought feels like an intrusion. I remember the techniques she had thought me to clear my mind and ease my compulsions. I sit down, cross my legs and take off my wide-brimmed hat. The smell of it reminds me of Ty and I smile at the thought of him. I can’t help it. Somehow in the short time we had spent together the crude son a bitch had grown on me.
I exhale, open my mind to the energies around me, see the night not as a radiation infested shithole, but a place where new life can thrive and succeed. I think about the men we have killed that day and a pang of remorse wiggles into its place in my gut. I know the men did it all for the promise of Creditcards, did what needed to be done to feed themselves and/or their families. Yet I also know what would happen to us, what could still happen, should we be apprehended and brought before Malkard. The prospect of slavery wasn’t appealing at all.
I look around a bit, see no one approach the place where we had set camp for the night. I close my eyes. I reach out with my mind and find a fragment of hope in the blandness of existence. I feel elevated, above it all, yet a part of it at the same time. All is me. And I am all. Existence and energy intertwine and dance before me, transforming my limbs and body into a blue-red haze which pulses and convulses in visual radiance, shooting out through the blackness surrounding my ethereal body. I forget myself and the time in which I move, I see only my subtle self, pulsing with life and an unending force of creation. I forget I am breathing. Forget I’m sitting. I forget I even exist at all. A thread appears before me, extends outwards from my chest and ahead, through the darkness. It’s composed of many white, wiggly lines which intertwine, braid, danced and shift. I look upon it. I move my energetic limbs to touch it and instantly, I am somewhere else. Specks of light swim and flicker within the darkness, held aloft by the promise of eternity. The void encompasses me and the thread I had just moments before been watching now appears before me and is curved downward, extending below me, down into the depths, seemingly going on forever. I feel like I’m standing upon some immense precipice, elevated beyond all possibility. I can sense that I’m not dreaming all of this, that I’m somehow here, in the embrace of eternity, yet also there, back where I had sat down. But there appears to be no duality in this, I felt myself in both places at once, in both spots equally myself, yet in each wholly different.
I notice a man standing in the distance. How I’m sure it’s a man I cannot tell, yet the more I think about it, the more I realize this entity has no sex. It stands as neither man nor woman, it’s humanity in its pure form. I do not understand how I didn’t see him before. Like mine, his body too pulses outward from a white, energetic center, sending ripples of the most beautiful blue and white I could possibly imagine. As he turns around, I notice his form only bares a semblance of a man, just enough so I can tell that it some kind of a humanoid, or the subtle form of one, that stands in the near distance. He doesn’t speak, his face white and featureless, shooting out expanding auras of vecotrized explosions. For some reason, a thought comes to me, I say to him, “I wish to see your face.”
He looks at me for a moment, or appears to look, then, in a voice that’s both soothing and toneless, answers, “Why do you need my face?”
I instantly understand the meaning of his words. I feel his face as irrelevant, a mask, and that this pure energy, this form I am gazing upon is his true self, his All – just like mine. Yet for some reason, I insist. I say, or rather, will, “But I wish to see it anyway.”
As though anticipating my answer, his whole being is instantly before me, his white face centimeters before mine. Features form and lines coalesce, yet when it seems like a mouth, eyes, or a nose might reach a state of semblance, or begins to properly take shape, half-form, the expression is gone, non-existent. I watch this for a while. He then turns and begins to walk, or rather float away, and to me it seems natural that he should, that he can. As I watch him go, the scene about me transforms and I am instantly teleported somewhere else.
I stand at a crossroads. The ground beneath me gives the impression like it’s made of metal, yet everything, from the road that goes on and forks to the left and right, to the wall that extends to the right and prevents me from seeing ahead, all are made out of strange, stalactite formations. Everything moves and wavers, and I have trouble telling where the lines of one thing ends and something else begins. Everything is endowed with an inner light. A blue with pink lining running through the ever-shifting edges. I see forms moving from the left to right of the walkway ahead. At first none of them notice me, and I discover that I am standing in a very peculiar way, naked. I stand only on my right leg, the other crossed, my left hand over my heart as thought I praying. I have no clue why and I find it slightly
humorous.
Only when the forms near the fork in the road, do I notice how strange they look. They’re like jellyfish, or mushrooms, moving about with such elegance and smoothness of form it nearly brings me to tears. But emotions aren’t really there at all. It’s like everything is just so. Just me and my experience. Nothing to tether me or make me fearful. The only emotion that’s somewhat present is the sense of humor.
They are all breathing, the beings, expanding their mushroom-like heads simultaneously, as one. A group of five passes ahead of me and moves forward along the road, I can see them through the almost transparent wall. For some reason, one of them stops. The others then stop as well, almost as though wondering and looking why the first had halted. He looks at me. Sees me. Moves towards me.
He is at least two heads smaller than me, but what I figure to be his head is wide-reaching and mildly transparent. Tendrils of energy race around him, out of all of them, like gentle smoke rising. I feel his words in my head, somehow understood them as he says, “How are you?”
The question seems odd, but doesn’t surprise me. My answer, however, does. I say, “Fantastic!”
More of them begin to gather around me, like they’ve somehow found out I’m here by some nonlocal means of communication. They came in numbers and look at me, marvel at the strangeness of my form. They leave after a span of time I cannot fathom, and only the person that I had initially seen stays behind. I sense his words as mental projections. Shapes of wavy circles drew themselves upon my mind and I cannot understand what he is trying to tell me. I try to answer, but all that comes out of me are rigid forms, squares and triangles. I get a distinct sense he cannot even comprehend sharp edges. I thus make my own shapes resemble his, curl them and make them undulate in my thought. He seems to understand, but simply stands there. Time suddenly starts to move forward with incredible rapidity. I cannot see the timelapse of days, but rather, feel like they are whirling by at an incredible speed, day, night, day, night, week, month, year, century, millennia, eon. At some point while this is happening, he disappears or goes somewhere else, but when time as I perceive it slows down again, he comes back. I have no idea why I can tell this is the same entity – or even a he – I simply do. He asks me then, “Why are you still here? Why don’t you move about? Come.”
I ask myself the same question as I followed him to the fork ahead. We go to the right, the walls wavering around us, glowing. We go on. We reach an edge where the wall to my left ends and I note that we stand atop a balcony. We are so high up, so elevated, that an entire city lays open before us, its tallest spires no more than one tenth of the high of where we are. Much like the walls themselves, the city is in a constant state of movement, as if I am looking at it submerged in water. Somehow, however, I can still see every detail of it, every street and every white structure.
The cityscape itself sits within an enormous mushroom-shaped dome. Cauls of some kind run over the membrane above and, in short successions, turn night into day. This is like clockwork. The ceiling lightens and then grows dark again, smoothly as though breathing. But the light itself never wanes within the dome, for the buildings and the surface draw it in and somehow trap it within their surfaces, use it to illuminate everything around me in a beautiful, white brilliance. I gawk at the sight of this for a while, when the entity beside me begins to fly. It drifts forward and up, stopping a small distance ahead. I hear him as, feel him, “Can you fly?”
I smile. I don’t even have to think about it, nor do I drift towards him, I am simply there, next to him. We drift above the city, his head expanding and contracting. Again I am reminded of a jellyfish, a creature I had once seen in a book my father had kept and tried to keep intact.
At one point in our journey, I look at the being on my right and realize something. I project a question. “How can you even see anything?”
“I do not need my eye to see. I perceive with my inner eye.”
“But you have them? Eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see them?”
In response, above the being’s head, the organ draws its gaze. A wave expands from below and encompasses the whole eye, ending behind it. I’m not even sure the thing is attached to its body. What the opening of it reveals, is the ugliest eye I had ever seen. It’s completely black, like the eye of some nocturnal creature, with an eyelash that seems a part of the thing and made to cast a frown of the most terrifying proportions. I avert my gaze from it.
“I’m sorry,” I will, “but I can’t bear to look at it. It is too frightening.”
But then he says, “I have not yet opened it.”
“Then do it,” I tell him.
Again, like before, an eyelid opens from below the eye and runs to its back, leaving behind what looks like a perfectly round mirror. I cannot see my reflection within it, yet could tell it was either a mirror or perhaps glass. It shifts its point of view so I can only ever see one side of it, as though it isn’t even possible to see it in three dimensions, even when I can tell it exists in three dimensional reality.
Then, for some reason, I am overcome with a compulsion to run my hand through it. I do this quickly. My fingers pass right through it. I can feel a strong current shooting through my extremities as I do so, hurting my hand a bit. I get an immediate impression this hurt the being badly, and we are instantly on the ground. We didn’t fall or descend, but shot straight to the streets below us. Others begin to gather round, looking at what has happened, a sense of concern permeating out of their bodies. The entity I had hurt looks shriveled, as if he had been left to dry in the sun and half cooked by its heat. He moves lazily, in agony. But I’m worried. A feeling of omnipotence endows my every sense and I lift my hands in front of me, form a triangle by touching my thumbs and index fingers. Waves of creation pass through me, remake the being by reforming its body in triangular patterns and lines, while the others stand back. When I do this, however, I begin to feel a sense like I need to go. As though something is calling me back, urging me to return. I feel nothing else but this need.
I open my eyes and realize I need to take the biggest piss in my life.
CHAPTER 10