Nomad

by Jamie Nash

  NOMAD

  by

  Jamie Nash

  Nomad

  © 2019 Jamie Nash

  Twenty-Sider Studios

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: jamie.nash@verizon.net

  http://www.jamienash.net

  Cover Art by Greg Rebis

  Interior Layout by Scott Cole - 13visions.com

  Editing Services by Kyle Marie of Literatus Editing - literatusediting.com

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9990913-6-4

  Paperback ISBN: 9781078165686

  I’m drowning in blood.

  My brain screams. My feet sprint beneath me, but I go nowhere. I’m paddling, flailing, in a red stew that burns my eyes like an over-chlorinated YMCA pool.

  Chemicals. Fuck. I’m breathing chemicals.

  My arms slam something hard and cold. I’m inside a box, or a closet, or a cage. It’s curved and smooth. Glass. Thick glass. I’m trapped in a bowl like some stupid tropical fish in an orthodontist’s waiting room. My feet scrape against the floor. It’s grilled. A vent. Or a cheese grater.

  I scream, then gag. Something is lodged deep inside my throat. A long, leathery finger stretches past my tongue and worms deep into my airway. It’s a snake. Shit. There’s a snake in my esophagus. I claw and grab at the thing. It slithers in my hands as its rubbery body worms across my windpipe. Its head hisses and flails deep inside my lungs. I keep pulling, digging. Ten inches of rubbery hose spool out. I fling it away. It dances in the bloody murk, blowing a plume of bubbles from its tip. It’s a tube puffing air, a respirator—the very thing that’s been keeping me alive, and I just tore it out.

  Great work, genius.

  My lungs clench, begging for breath. The crimson liquid floods my mouth, coats my cheeks, clogs my nostrils. The foul liquid burns on my tongue. I wretch. It’s gasoline. I’ve siphoned it before. I remember a cousin getting me to do it. Or was it a brother?

  Everything’s fuzzy. My thoughts are like a London fog. My memories …

  My memories …

  Where the hell am I?

  I think it’s my birthday. I can picture the cake. It’s a Cookie Puss from Carvel. How many candles? Nineteen? Twenty?

  Wait. What’s my name? Who am I?

  This must be shock. It’s only been seconds since I pulled out the tube. That can’t be long enough to get brain damage. How long can I go without breathing? One minute? Two? Harry Houdini went ten minutes once. I read it in a Guinness Book of World Records. Houdini would’ve escaped by now.

  I prod forward but snag on a nest of tubes sticking out of my body. My hands smooth against my stomach. A tight, black wetsuit covers me. Not really my style. It’s wedged into my every nook and cranny like the one-piece Speedo I used to wear for swim team. This one has feet and sleeves, more scuba diver than swimmer. If only it came with a damn oxygen tank.

  I hammer the glass with my knuckles. It’s hard. Bulletproof. Like the fucking Popemobile. I’m gonna die in the Popemobile.

  I roar, but my voice is smothered by the red substance.

  Screw this. I’m dead. I let my arms fall to my sides. My head eases back. Frayed cables brush my face like tendrils. I’ve heard drowning is a good death. Peaceful. I want peace. If peace would just hurry the hell up. Who are these jack-offs to be talking about good deaths anyway? They never died.

  Fucking losers.

  I wonder if it’ll hurt. The transition. I hope there are angels, or Godly light, or harps. Heaven would be rad, but I’d take permanent sleep—nothingness. Anything to still my runaway train of a heart. Get on with it already. I want this over. Now.

  Meh.

  I don’t know who I am. But I’m no quitter. I’m the other kind. Rocky. She-Ra. Charlie’s Angels.

  I’m going out swinging.

  I flail for the loose tube floating near my knees. I grab it and jam it back down my throat. Big mistake. I gag. Wretch. My digestive system declares war on the thing. My throat swells, my stomach spasms and twitches.

  I brute force it. My gag reflex goes to Defcon 5. A warm layer of bile slimes up my tongue. I can’t force it down. The hose is as thick as a hotdog. I can’t get it past the back of my mouth. So much for my sword swallowing career.

  I fling it away in surrender. My limbs stiffen, quiver. Every organ is pulling a fire alarm as if they have seconds before we explode. I press my face against the glass and spy out. The view is clouded and blurred by the red murk. It’s all blotches of color and blurs of light. I could be staring out at a prison or a Burger King. It’s impossible to tell.

  Something hits the glass. A face smooshes against the other side. It’s freakishly distorted through the funhouse mirror of the glass and chemicals, but it’s a boy. He has dark hair, darker eyes. A college kid. Older than me, I think, but about my age. His mouth moves but I can’t hear anything except the burbling of the tank. Then, he’s gone.

  “No!” I shriek, summoning an explosion of bubbles from my lips. He just left my ass to die. Who does that? Perhaps, he was a mirage. An oxygen-deprived hallucination. Or maybe he was an angel.

  Something big slams the glass. I whip backward from the collision. Everything around me rattles. What the hell? It’s as though Nolan Ryan blasted the glass with a one-hundred-mph fastball. The next hit makes my head whip back and slam into the back of the claustrophobic cell. I shake out the stars, and this time I see him. My hero. He’s back—and he’s brought an axe. He attacks the glass with a flurry of strikes. I tuck myself to the back of the tight space. It’s about the size of a porta-potty, not much space for cowering. Would totally suck if I took an axe to the face before he could rescue my sorry butt.

  The axe blade chops. There’s an urgency to it. He knows the score. I don’t have much time. And this glass is like concrete. Hairline cracks spiderweb across the transparent surface. Leaks of water spit through. It’s working. Come on, kid, put your back into it.

  Finally, the glass shatters. The broth floods out. I surf the wave of chemicals and jagged glass and spill onto the metal floor. I gulp down air. My stomach pretzels and spews red-tinted phlegm into the grilled vent floor.

  My heaving gives way to a slight crackling sound. An intense heat seeps through my rubbery suit and gnaws at my skin. Smoke stings my eyes. The ceiling’s on fire. Out of the frying pan and into Dante’s Inferno.

  “Yoko o minai” Hero boy shakes my shoulder.

  My mind is more fucked than I thought. It must be my hearing, or I’m loopy from whatever biohazard I’ve been marinating in. I can’t even understand words anymore.

  “Yoko o minai,” he repeats.

  He’s Asian. Maybe Japanese. Not that I’m an expert. “English?” I wheeze.

  His hands caress my face. He stares into my eyes and, in a thick Japanese accent, summons words I recognize, “Straight. No side.” He squeezes my face, locking it forward, forbidding it from turning. “No side!”

  “Straight,” I say. I have no idea what his game plan is, but for now, he’s the boss. “Straight.”

  He turns and leads the way. My focus burns into his back. No side. No side. Every inch of me wants to peek. I’m the tightrope walker that insists on glancing down. Straight. Straight. He wears the same wetsuit as me. His hair drips of the red chemical. He climbed out one of these hellish cylinders. I wasn’t alone.

  From the corners of my eyes, I see what I’m not supposed to. There are more of these deathtraps. Lots more. We’re tiptoeing through a burning forest of them. We stumble down a tight walkway that splits two rows of the ten-foot-tall water-heater-shaped units. Each one imprisons a lone, wetsuited human. From what I can tell, they’re all young—teenagers, college kids—old enough to
go to war but probably not old enough to buy a Zima.

  Some of them don’t move. Others are on fire.

  Hero yanks me ahead. “Straight!” he barks. “No side.”

  Sizzling magma droplets ooze and land in a splatter in front of us. A few feet to my right, a girl pounds her cylindrical prison. The thick encasement reduces her screams to mere squeaks.

  “Wait!” I cry out, competing with the raging alarms and bellowing explosions. The boy responds by jerking me toward a tight hatchway at the far end of the corridor, its opening giving way to a curtain of smoke cast aglow by a strobing blue light. “Stop.” I dig my feet in putting on the brakes. His hand slips off my slick wrist. “We need to save them.”

  “No.” He glares, like a mom scolding her snotty rug rat.

  Hands pound the canisters behind me. I can’t ignore them and walk away, there are people in there. Human beings.

  Hero shakes his head, “Boom–explode! Boom–explode!”

  Between the thwooming hum and the near-apocalyptic atmosphere, it doesn’t take a demolitions expert to guess we have mere seconds before this place goes up like Fourth of July. But I should be dead already. I’m playing with house money. Sorry, Mom. It’s time to get bratty. I snatch his axe and rush back in. Fists beat on glass more intensely, more desperate, begging for their lives. I can’t save them all. I have to choose.

  A few of the human canisters are already smashed open—jailbroken—probably the handiwork of my new best friend. There are others, though, where the inhabitants float dead. I pick a unit engulfed in flame. My eyes squint from the searing heat. I aim for the liquefied spot where the glass is melting into hot goo and hammer the axe into it like I’m playing Whack-a-Mole at the county fair.

  “No!” Hero grabs the shaft of the axe mid-swing. His eyes assess the damage I’ve already done. The lava-like goop seeps through the clear cracked frame. The water inside bubbles. Boils. The canister’s twitching hostage sizzles like a Jimmy Dean sausage dropped in a frying pan. His screams are smothered by the chemicals and the glass.

  I turn away. It seems wrong to watch this torture. Too intimate. Too vulnerable. I just Freddy Kruegered a guy. I should stop. But if I don’t try, they’ll die anyway. I can’t turn my back. I yank the axe away from Hero and hurry to the next pod.

  I swing like Jack Nicholson trying to murder Shelly Duvall. My arms are jacked with adrenaline. The heat softens the glass. Three swings is all it takes. Glass rains down like I just pulled the bottom out of a Jenga tower. Shards spill around me, bouncing off my feet and ankles and knees, as the machine’s trapped victim spills out.

  His scorched cheek smacks the ground. Its blistering flesh bubbles like hot pizza. He convulses at my feet. I reach to help. His sweltering hand grabs my wrist. His fingers dig into me. “Look what you did!” His cheeks melt like wax, making his eyeballs go all Bugs Bunny. “LOOK AT MY FACE!” His face is so close his every word bathes me in spit. He’s gonna bite my nose off.

  Suddenly, Hero rips him away and shoves him to the ground. “Go!” Hero says. And go he does, scrambling off until the blue-tinted smoke swallows him. I’m frozen. I’m 0–2 in the hero business.

  Booooooom. The loudest sound I’ve ever heard rings through my every bone. A shockwave hurls me backward. My spine slams into the floor, or the wall, or the ceiling. Same difference. Everything goes black. Chunks of debris hit my face, chest, and arms. My lungs burn. A confetti of metal, glass, and body parts cover me.

  “Help!” I scream. Everyone’s probably dead. Or deaf. There’s a ringing in my ears I haven’t had since I snuck into an AC/DC concert in seventh grade. “Highway to Hell” indeed.

  A hand yanks me to my feet. A red dim of emergency lighting paints Hero’s face. He’s back. Again. My own personal Arnold Schwarzenegger. This dude will not be denied. A new alarm shrieks. It’s like an air raid signal, louder and shriller than the ones before. It’s an ‘okay, this time we’re fucking serious’ alarm. A near-robotic woman’s voice drones from hidden speakers. “Emergency containment initiated. Isolation protocol commencing. Stand clear of the bulkhead doors. Repeat, stand clear of the doors.” Her lack of emotion drips with irony in the face of this hellishness.

  But her words have Hero’s attention. He picks up speed, dragging me so hard my shoulder strains in its socket. Ahead, a steel bulkhead descends. It’s an Indiana Jones situation if I ever saw one. If we don’t make it through, we’ll be trapped.

  We’ll be dead.

  I pick up the pace. The Raiders of the Lost Ark theme trumpets in my head. My wet feet slap steel. My arms pump. I unleash a battle cry. We duck beneath the descending metal wall as it clangs shut behind us.

  We did it. We’re alive. I didn’t even need a fedora and a bullwhip.

  Booooooom. A second fireball explodes behind me and flings me against the wall. My face hits first. I’m tweaking on so much adrenaline I don’t feel it. I struggle to my feet, dazed, my brains shook, my teeth loose. I can’t tell which way is up, but I’ll let gravity sort it out.

  “Hero!” I actually call him that. He doesn’t come. Maybe he’s dead. He’s probably lying right next to me with his face blown off.

  “Hey! Over here,” a baritone voice calls. It’s English with a hint of Jersey. Definitely not Hero. The guy lumbers from a cloud of smoke. He’s exotic for a Jersey boy, looks of Indian descent. Sweat glistens his dark skin. He’s handsome and tall. If I worked at a carnival, I might guess he was twenty, give or take.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  His eyes drift to his feet but stop at his gut. A twelve-inch steel pipe sticks out. It’s framed by dark red blood. He looks back up. I pretend not to be affected by the gore, but I doubt my face cooperates.

  “Shaft,” he says. “Call me, Shaft.” He chuckles at his joke. I respond with the fakest of laughs. Sick sense of humor, I like. “Follow me.” He staggers back in the direction he came from.

  I glance back into the smoke. “Hero dude!” I call out. Ridiculous. I’m sinking on the deck of the Titanic, and I’m calling out for ‘Hero dude.’ The alarms and fire rage. There’s no way I’m running into that fiery hell. It would be like skinny-dipping in Mount Saint Helens. No thanks. Hero will survive somehow. Arnold Schwarzenegger always does.

  I tear after Shaft. Another bulkhead door cranes down ahead of us. This one is just starting. We have a good ten seconds to get through it. No sweat.

  “Hurry!” Shaft picks up speed, not that he can run. It’s a miracle he’s even standing.

  We comfortably duck beneath it and enter a larger room. Through the smoke, I glimpse tables with panels and large circuit boards. It’s like the control room of a nuclear power plant. Boringly high tech science by bureaucrats.

  “Hey!” A voice roars out from behind us. It’s Hero. He’s busting ass toward the closing bulkhead. The hulking metal slab hovers mere inches from the ground. Gumby couldn’t squeeze through that gap. Doesn’t matter. Hero dives, slides, his arms and shoulders clear the archway, and—

  Five tons of steel hammer down on the back of his thighs. His shriek stabs my ears. Pitch darkness swallows everything. Not even a sliver of light leaks from where the door smashed down on him. His knees, legs, bones—flatter than a penny.

  I collapse, clutching my ears, and close my eyes. I can’t stop shivering. My wetsuit is still slick with chemicals. I scrunch into a tight ball. I just need a little time-out, get my shit together.

  Hero screams for two straight minutes.

  He cries and whimpers for another three.

  Neither Shaft nor I say a word. What could we say? Suck it up, who needs legs anyway? At least you’ll save money on pants.

  I can’t see Shaft, but I hear him rustling beside me. I guess he’s just huddling there like me. Maybe yanking that nasty thing out of his gut. Maybe dying. I don’t bother asking. He might ask me to help.

  Hero finally falls quiet. His cries of agony give way to a mechanical hum underscoring the gloom. It reminds me of the drone
inside an airplane. I can’t tell if it’s running engines, or an industrial fan, or a damn air conditioner. But there’s power somewhere, so maybe there’s a light switch.

  For now, I’m not ready to go searching. All I want to do is sit here and shake and stew in terror. It’s not like I can relax. I have too many questions. Do I know Hero? Or Shaft? What is this place? What the hell is going on? My memories are jigsaw pieces—meaningless without the whole picture. I need the front of the box to figure it out.

  It’s not complete amnesia. I don’t know my name, but I know other crap. I’m a girl. I enjoy Shoney’s pizza and Pop Rocks. I’m nineteen. Or twenty. Well, twentyish. I think. I’m pretty sure I can drive, or I’ve at least driven before. I took driver’s ed, but I’m not sure I passed the stupid test. Fuck you, parallel parking.

  I had a fake ID once. I used it to sneak into bars when I was in eleventh grade. I bought it off the burnout in the faded Def Leppard concert shirt. The ID had a black girl’s picture on it. Donna somebody. Worst fifty dollars I ever spent.

  I’ve got other memories. Good ones. That time I threw up at Sesame Street on Ice. Once I got lost in the mall. I was five. An old lady there bought me an Orange Julius. I guess they found my mom. Or somebody. Or maybe I was raised by mall people. Like Tarzan with a food court.

  “Hey,” Shaft calls out from my right. I hear him grunting and shuffling closer to me. “You okay?” he asks.

  “I’ve had better days,” I say.

  “We gotta do something.” His voice wheezes, making me wonder if that metal shard has punctured a lung. “That fire might eat through the door. Or this whole place might blow up.”

  “What is this place?” I ask.

  He grunts. “My mind’s all fuzzy. I’ve lost about a gallon of blood.”

  My last morsels of hope deflate. I assumed this forgetfulness was just a ‘me’ thing—like I bumped my head or something. But if Shaft’s just as clueless as I am … damn.

  His voice trembles. “I’m sure help is on the way.”