A Freak (Short Story 8) Part 8

Worker [In Progree]

Ross Halimer stood in the doorway that led to Yves’ room. He’d been staring at her small and defeated frame for a handful of minutes and was not sure why. Of course he’d had his way with her, that was the only purpose she was going to serve, but it wasn’t anything he’d gab about later. She was a fucking mess, Jenny – oh Jenny you dumb bastard – had beaten the shitting life out of her and just looking at her while he lay on top was like having sex with someone who wore a hamburger mask, meaning it was unpleasant.

Beyond that, she wouldn’t stop crying. Ross wasn’t going to beat or threaten her like Jenny did, but did this girl have energy. Did this girl have tears. This was another of his conundrums: the girl had been down here for four days without food or water and she still was crying, she was still struggling and fighting without so much as asking for a crumb. How could she put up such a fight? Ross was no stranger to hunger – no one out this far was – but after four days without water he would be down and dying.

So he watched her bloody face, mused at her broken wrist and grimaced every time she cried out. He couldn’t keep Jenny from his mind either and this was at the top of Mt. Distraction, here. Jenny was dead. He shot himself. The man Yves called Faceless had brought her back here and worked her over on day one. Day two they left her alone, knowing that Jenny took it farther than he should have. Day three is when he started to freak. Jenny had been complaining of groin pain, of feeling like he was kicked in his zone. Ross brushed it off, calling him a little girl and the usual that went between them. Normally Jenny would have gotten flustered and given as good as he got, but he absolutely flipped. He about slugged Ross in the nose and went off on a screaming fit the likes of which Ross had never seen. Before he could calm Jenny down, he pulled out his .38 and put it to his melted face. Boom. Gone.

Jenny had never been pretty to begin with, compete facial scarring due to burns may have made him look better than he had, but all of it was angelic compared to the way his mug was punched in by the bullet. His head practically imploded and spewed out the back, a messy red splatter on the concrete walls.

The light flickered over Ross’ head, plunging him into the darkness for a thin moment. One light, not so much of a gift after all. He remembered being given the light, being shown the bunker and nearly wetting his pants with excitement. Having such a secure place, especially with the kind of business he and Jenny tracked – had tracked – in would be a godsend. The man who showed them the light had given no instructions on how to turn it off, on or repair it. Ross knew that one day it would go off and that would be the end of it. It was amazing how having the single electric bulb made the rest of the day seem so dark, even when he had a torch or campfire it was always a candle to the flame of the pale white fluorescent.

The girl moaned again, “Please! Someone! Let me go!”

Ross turned to leave and rolled his eyes so hard that he almost fell over, shut up, freak.   

He stopped mid-stride as if hitting a wall, was the girl a Freak? Was that why she could go without food or water for so long? What could she do? Was she dangerous?

He didn’t think she was dangerous, if she could have harmed him she would have, but if she was a Freak…

I would not have fucked a Freak, no way, no how. I would have known. Like the way home or where north is. Right?  No one answered.

“Let me go!”

The shrill cry partnered up with Ross’ panic. What had she done to him? He patted himself up and down, making sure all his parts were still intact. Ten fingers. Toes. Running his digits through his hair, none of it came out in clumps. His hands met over his crotch and he suffered a stunned paralysis again. Jenny.

Fucking Jenny, talking about his junk. Shit. Was he in pain? Was his discomfort entirely in his head or had he been feeling sick all along? He definitely wanted to throw up now, though. Ross undid the button at his crotch and pulled his pants down, turning his body to face the light. What he saw was horrifying. Ross’ genitals were monstrous and engorged versions of themselves. His entire crotch was covered in boils and sores, it looked like it was melting from the inside. A dark bruise was spreading out from the base of his penis and when his pants opened a dead smell rose up from beneath the buttons.

Oh my god, I’m rotting. My dick is rotting off! “Fuck.”  He paced back and forth, staring at his Lifelong Friend and neglected to pull his pants up off the ground. He waddled like a penguin to and fro the lit room then into the darkness and back. What was happening?

Jenny. Right. He pulled his pants up, not bothering to button them again, he simply hung on. Ross stumbled down the hall to where he and Jenny had their final debate and found the gas lantern that hung securely in the darkness. After fiddling with some matches, Ross set the blazing cylinder down aside Jenny’s feet, casting a tall shadow from his boots up over his head. Never having thought this was something he would be doing, Ross opened up Jenny’s faded denim pants.

The odor that leapt out was like a brick to the face. Ross fell backwards and nearly knocked over the lantern. Not only did it seem that Jenny had soiled himself when he went, but his Combat Zone was just that, it was a bloody and horrid mess. Ross didn’t look for long, but he could have studied it for hours and not been able to identify what had been what.

He sat against the wall, tangled in the darkness, his breathing ragged and fast, heart pounding like a drum. Rational thought was drifting away, Looks like Jenny knew what was up. Ross scrambled for Jenny’s .38.

A Freak (Short Story 8) Part 7

This is what the Stick is for. A swift grip and a single knock on a glass pane set into the door, Cale could reach his arm in and find the stubborn lock. Ignoring the slicing of the remaining glass, he twisted the ancient lock and maneuvered around the opening door.

The men who controlled this sat here, he knew this even in the dark. One or two men at a time, he thought, and even under such careful care they would still let them crash. Gently riding metal trains would take curves too fast and collide into smoldering twists of metal that ended hundreds of lives at a time. How easy was it to pilot these machines? Certainly if one or two men could handle the job it wasn’t something so complicated that they should be willing to sacrifice men and women on a whim. Every reminder of the Old Ones’ blunders is a blessing – teach us not their ways.

Cale had seen Old One machinery before, most of those alive today could name and describe cars and televisions, but had no idea about the extent of the Old Ones’ power. Every time a man or woman was born who knew how to turn on the machines Cale saw the world change. Their coming usually heralded a blackened age, where thousands would perish and the face of society scarred. These people were not Freaks, not quite, but were almost always up to no good. Cale had witnessed the rise of emperors on the backs of the dead machinery and was always caught in the middle of the disasters. He did not want to call himself an assassin, but these people did have to be dealt with by someone. But then there were others, often women, who had the affinity that traded in humanism and dealt good fates to others. The last child to turn on power was a small girl.

The girl, her name had been Paige, lived along the ocean on Manh Island, a narrow landmass in the northern regions of the East.  She was fortunate in that her family lived on the outskirts of the Sleepless City, so she could be hidden from the populace of the area. Even the rumors of such children were enough to unify the frightened and panicky into small mobs that wanted to punish these little ones for crimes they had not yet committed. They were simply scared. Paige, while sheltered from the outside, scavenged anything that was still in working order, any of the trinkets left behind.  Her family could wash clothes in solar-powered machines, they could keep in touch with hand-held radio devices and they could stay safe with stun guns. Paige kept searching though, knowing that none of these things were helping anyone aside from her family. It was always harder for her, looking in places that were ever more and more overgrown. Places shrouded in a recovering woodland and unrelenting forest.

Paige found a crumbling building, darkened by a canopy from species of trees that hadn’t lived on the island for centuries. She couldn’t read it, but the fading signs marked it as South Hampton Hospital. Within the hospital was very little hope, most of the hallways and rooms were crushed and collapsing under the weight of time, but in the basement is where Paige found a treasure trove. There were devices that could restart a stopped heart, machines that could see a man’s insides and almost all of them were portable. Paige had the ability to set up a makeshift hospital in the heart of her small town.

She was a saint to those who came to her for help, a girl of ten who could practically bring back the dead or reverse the spread of ever-present cancers. Paige, though, encountered the same problem that every other child in her shoes did: she couldn’t teach the others. Even when she spoke in the clearest of instructions and made pamphlets and booklets on how to turn things on – how to keep them running – it always came out like gibberish, mandates spoken in tongues to a directionless flock. So she was the only one who could help. Aside from basic first-aid, her nurses were of little value.

So, when men finally came for her, there was no one to help. Every good deed she performed was not enough to convince these gangsters that she would not become a tyrant, that she would not find a cache of bombs and bring Manh Island to its knees. They shot her and while she lay bleeding and dying on a crisp white paper-covered table her heart stopped and no one could bring it back. She died at twelve years old.

Cale could not turn on machines, his knowing what the train did and how it functioned was simply something bestowed upon him for a purpose yet unforeseen.

The skeletons persisted. Bang. Louder now, as if they were being thrown by a great fist instead of charging in on their own. He was running out of time. Cale stretched his hand out and tapped on the glass that he knew was at the nose of the train, it was of average thickness and was done no favors by time. Glass like this always slipped downward like an extremely viscous honey, so the top of the pane was marginally thinner than its base. Bang. Bang. Faster now too.

Moving back to his original car, Cale brought the matches out and struck two sticks with a fast flick of his wrist. Both sulfur heads flared to life and hung on against the wind of his movement. Not needing the small orange glow they provided, he threw the matches down onto the pile of defeated undead. Like before, the pile of ashes and bone blazed into life, battling between the natural orange of the fire and the lime green that breathed out of the risen dead.

Suddenly the train car was fully lit, the smoke beginning to crowd the ceiling, desperate to find a way into the open air. Cale turned from the fire, he moved to the front car. His back against the wall, he grasped the metal cylinder in his right hand, ready to let it go.

Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bangbang. Bangbangbang.

The metal doors flew inwards, shards of bone and skull perforating the air, small whistles that fell onto the green fire. Cale was ready. He pulled the pin and threw the -

(Grenade!)

 -around the corner. It struck the ground and bounced once, flying into the empty space of the train car. Through the doors came a black flood, a living oil spill that spread through the air. “JOHHH-“

Cale crouched and covered his ears as the grenade exploded.  It was a deafening fireball that devoured the living darkness of the speaker and wrapped him in the soft glove of a blacksmith, a warm and rough embrace. The windshield of his train car blew outwards from the pressure spraying tiny glass knives out onto the empty track – no monsters outside, not yet. In the fractured seconds after the explosion, Cale leapt out the window, never looking back to see if the fire would be enough.