Still nothing.
Shaking her head Katya glanced at Oliver “Can’t find anything, sure she can’t move forward more?” Before he could answer though, alarm bells sounded in her mind. The feeling beneath her fingers wasn’t right.
Glancing back to focus more on what felt so wrong, she pressed her fingers around where the tubes became one with the skin. She was used to the muscle around them feeling a little like jello, but this time it went further. It was spreading out further and wider until…
“Oh god…” Katya mumbled as it clicked.
“What is it?” Oliver asked.
“Her spine…” she gulped, looking at Oliver with dread moving over her face “parts of it are like jello…”
Behind the slight black fringe, Oliver’s face mirrored her dread. “You mean…?”
“I mean it’s not going to function. Just like the people with back muscles missing, parts of the spine have been… assimilated” Katya explained in a quiet voice, not wanting those over with Leonora to hear her. “At best if we get her off this thing it’s paralysis; if the tubes have already got a hold of the spinal cord though, we pull her off and that probably get ripped out in a very very painful death”
“Which is most likely?”
“The latter…”
The two looked at each other for a moment, what kind of call was this for them to make?!
“Hey, what’s taking you?” They both jumped at Leonora’s voice. Turning to glance at her, Katya motioned for her to come over, so they could tell her what was up.
“Bloody hell.” Leonora cursed multiple times once she was up to speed. “And pulling them out won’t work? Sure?”
“I seriously doubt it” Katya commented “We can try, but it’s going to be even more painful for them to witness” she motioned to the three already free.
Leonora glanced over to them, they were all looking overlooking terrified. They had to get them out of here. “Ok, leave her for now, get the men off their ones and when we get these guys out, you two get her off and then get her safe?”
Well, it was a plan. Though Katya felt like her stomach was suddenly filled with lead. This was going to be a very long shot.
Fortunately, the woman was the only to be that far along. The men were removed from the machines and by the time Axel and Seth came back, Leonora was inventing an excuse that the woman left was just a bit tangled, so they wanted to get those off the machines to safety rather than have them all wait where it could be dangerous.
They bought it. Fear was at least useful in getting people to listen to them, thinking they had some big plan and were part of a much bigger operation.
At last, it was just Katya and Oliver left with the one woman. Both hesitated.
“If it’s going to be worse, what do we do? We can hardly tell her the whole story, right?” Oliver asked; clearly unsure about telling a woman that she was likely just going to be in a load of pain, only not to survive it.
Katya was thinking the same. What kind of options were they really, death or paralysis in an apocalypse? She knew which she would choose. But there might be a slim chance they could save her.
“We just do it, you do as you’ve done with everyone else. Tell her we are trying to save her, tell her we need to get her off the machine, and that it’s all going to be ok” Katya decided after a shuddering sigh as she absently sharpened her flip knife further.
With one final nod, they moved to the woman and did the usual. She screamed, by god did she scream. Katya was having to move her blade so much slower, trying to be as careful as she could around the spinal cord. One slip and she’d make the whole situation even worse than it already was. But that slow speed made this seem more like torture than a rescue.
The removal of this woman seemed to take about five times as long as usual. The flip knife was not delicate enough for this. Oliver could only keep the woman still to an extent.
By the time Katya had gone all the way around all eight of the attachments, the woman had passed out. Her youthful face stained with tears, sweat and blood where she had bitten down hard on her lip. Oliver still stroked her auburn curled hair as though desperate to soothe her. His own eyes had dripped tears down his cheeks as he watched Katya, praying for her to be done.
Katya, however, couldn’t afford to cry. She needed to see in every detail. Every time they had blurred with tears, she paused to blink away the salty liquid from her blue hues. Gulping back the urge to cry still, Katya finally looked back at Oliver.
“I’ve gone as far as I can without doing more damage” she explained in a croaked voice, “We’ll have to pull her down and hope for the best.”
Silently, Oliver nodded. The red-head was pretty sure he didn’t dare speak through his tears lest he not be able to go any further.
“Ok. Now” Katya instructed as she moved around so she could support the woman’s left side while Oliver shifted to support the right. Carefully, they moved their weight and used cautious strength to start prying the female body from the machine. There was the occasional rip of muscle sinew away from what was still attached. Blood dripped to the floor at an increasingly rapid rate causing Katya to bite her lip. The woman was going to bleed out if they didn’t get her down soon.
Perhaps Oliver had realised the same thing, as they both put more strength into the pull at a similar time. They seemed stuck at a point, holding them leaning a little, holding desperately onto the woman.
Then… RIIIP!
With a stumble, the pair fell to the ground with the body. Both groaned and quickly made to get up to treat the wound. Though the moment they did, the sight they were faced with caused Oliver to vomit immediately beside the body of the female.
Her back was torn open. There was no way she was still alive. Her spine was still attached to the machine, dripping a mix of blood from its surface and spinal fluid from the bottom.
Neither moved from the floor, Oliver retching up the last of his stomach contents while tears flowed freely down his face. Katya was more stunned, the tears finally falling as she stared up at the spine.
All that torturous pain for the woman only for them to kill her in their attempt. His eyes moved to the female face, relaxed but stained. She was so young, probably only a couple of years older than Katya and Oliver. To die like that…
Guilt spread through Katya in a way that might seem illogical. Was there anything else she could have done? If she had had a blade that could have acted like a scalpel would she had pulled it off? If someone who had experience in something other than dissections had done it would they have succeeded?
Cursing loudly, she pushed herself to her feet and with pure frustrated pain she clenched a fist and punched it straight into the machine by the spine. She had just torturously killed a poor innocent victim!!
“Should have just put her out of her misery” she growled to no one. Her eyes dancing over the spine, seeing the tendrils which had laced themselves into it from both sides and from all the tubes.
“Kat... we didn’t know…” Oliver croaked as he slowly pushed himself to his feet looking very green in colour. “We had to try…” He couldn’t look at her, not because of what had happened, but because looking at her meant basically looking at the spine and he had nothing more but stomach lining to bring up.
Instead, he walked closer and forcefully pulled Katya away from the machine and into a hug, as much needed by him as it was needed by her. “We had to try…” he repeated in a whisper.
Katya took a moment but soon crumbled, nodding and clinging to her best friend. She knew he was right, but the screams still rang in her ears and the smell of the woman was more than Katya could ever describe.
“Not again… please” She whispered back into his shoulder.
“No. Not again. Lesson well and truly learned” Pulling away, Oliver picked up his backpack and took hold of Katya’s hand. Sure, it wasn’t ideal if they came across an alien, but they both needed the emotional support as they made their way out
of the factory.
The words ‘never again’ was mumbled by them both many times once they were out of the factory. First, they took a detour for new clothes, their current ones covered in the blood of that woman and only increase their disgusted feeling of guilt that they were carrying with them.
The change of clothes at least helped them clear their heads and Katya made plans to make sure they never did that again.
“We need to get to an armoury or replica shop…” Oliver cast her a strange look, as though wondering what else she needed in her arsenal. “I want a stiletto dagger; it’ll be a very quick and accurate way to put any more like that out of their misery without having to torture them like that again” She explained without looking at him. She would much rather give them a much more humane death than do anything that caused that much pain again.
Oliver merely nodded before checking the map with the vault entrance marked for anything that might be useful to them.
When they finally reached the entrance to the vault, Katya had a replica of a late 17th-century stiletto dagger which she had placed inside her backpack, and both had dried the tears from their faces and fallen into deadly silence.
There was nothing they could talk about to distract them right now.
Chapter 13
No one took the news of what had happened well. It took both Katya and Oliver to explain, and they gave them as vague an explanation as they could. Neither of them was able to explain in detail exactly what had happened. Neither of them slept either, the screams still echoed in their ears and the sight of that spine seemed to be burned onto Katya’s retinas.
Oliver was more talkative, being sat with Kit and Turi for a lot of the night until Kit fell asleep mid-sentence. But he was calmed by that, by the warmth of Turi curled against their backs, and the way Kit’s long-haired head flopped onto this shoulder. Katya knew her best friend glanced over to her many times, she knew that if it had only been one of them who had seen it, she would be where Kit was.
Right now, though, she felt dirty. She felt like she couldn’t touch those she cared for, like she was just going to do something else that brought on more of those screams. Mishka was her silent comfort that night, laid with her head on Katya’s lap as the red-head stared into nothingness. She listened to the sounds of people in that safe vault, the sounds of people crying because they couldn’t find their loved ones and crying because they had found someone.
This nightmare… Katya didn’t want to do it anymore.
She stared down the main road of the vault town, looking at the clear water that reflected the flicker of lantern light on the streets. If only she could have her family here, and just stay here until the end of time.
No more aliens. No more tanks filled with corroding people.
None of it.
Unfortunately, that was not going to happen. Katya may have dozed off for an hour before she was awoken by a hand gently shaking her shoulder. With a huffed exhale, she glanced up at Leonora who was looking at her with masked concern.
“We need to keep going,” The female said gently to her.
For the next few days, Katya barely spoke to anyone. Oliver seemed to be able to cover the fear and disgust of what had happened. He and Kit tried to convince Katya that they had to have tried, Axel and Zen tried to tell her that it wasn’t her fault and wasn’t something she should carry with her.
How could she not?
Her attacks against the aliens had become a little more reckless that day, her eyes cold to them as she moved with agile purpose, just wanting to see them dead. More than once in those days, Oliver lectured her about not straining herself past what her medication could handle.
He was probably right. But she couldn’t calm herself as the miles went by, the journeys back and forth to underground terrain towns was frustrating to her. It was a waste of time. The longer they took, the more chance she had of having to kill someone she knew on one of those machines.
As they travelled towards Leicester, there had been more of those cases. More people unable to be saved, and despite the obvious effect it was having on her, Katya refused to let any of the others take that stiletto dagger and use it to end human life. She knew the quickest and most humane way to do it, through the indent in the back of the neck where spine met the skull. It was smooth and simple to do but walking away from a body on those machines having killed them herself made her feel like she was leaving a little bit of her soul behind each time.
Each person she travelled with tried to give her some kind of comfort. Even Seth had come over to her a couple of nights and made attempts at helping, hoping he would at least be able to understand to some extent. Each time though, Katya didn’t brighten in mood. She wasn’t sleeping and was almost running on fumes. It amazed them how she could still fight, but it came down to desperation and adrenaline they figured.
“Katya, please wait outside this time” Oliver begged her, continuously growing worried about the toll this would be taking on her already adrenaline deficient body.
His words were met with a look that stubbornly told him that he was being stupid, but before she could speak Seth had walked over and yanked her backpack off her roughly.
“Hey!” She snapped defensively, making to grab at it before pulling one of her short swords from her back and holding it to his neck as he opened the bag and put his hand inside. She trembled as though she was about to lose something precious. Seth paused as he glanced into the bag.
Slowly, he pulled the stiletto dagger out of the bag before holding her precious backpack to her; unphased by the sword that touched his neck. “Cool off, firecracker, I just want the dagger.” He commented, perhaps having seen what had caused her to be defensive among the other things in her back pack. Katya snatched the bag back looking furious, holding it tight to her chest with a shuttering breath.
“Oliver is right. You stay here. Let someone else take the brunt of the pressure for once” Seth stated while moving to walk past her, pausing awkwardly beside her as though debating something. Quickly, and oddly, he placed a hand on her head to ruffle it slightly in the same way he had seen Axel do many times.
Seth was trying to comfort her again? Too bad all it received was a slightly vicious smack from the red-haired girl who glared up at him.
“I don’t need to sit this out!” She protested.
“You barely sleep, Kat. We got this, stay out with Kit” Zen insisted in a softer voice, moving over to place a hand on her cheek to get her to look up into his insanely gentle eyes. How was he still as calm and patient as the day she had met him?? He had supported so many of the strangers, helped organise the now sub-terrain people to make sure they could continue to survive while they waited this apocalypse out… he saw all the tears and had so many people rant to him.
His kindness made Katya’s chest knot uncomfortably.
She stared at the growing peppered coloured beard on him, trimmed awkwardly with a blunt razor he had carried for the last few days. Her frustration still sizzled there, but she couldn’t find it in her to argue with Zen.
Instead, she huffed in defeat. Zen smiled lightly as he leant in to place a gentle and fatherly kiss onto her forehead, an act she didn’t bat away. Zen had a real ability in making her feel like a child at times like she was a bratty kid who was being told they couldn’t take part in the big-kid games. He didn’t overuse this ability, which is likely what made it so effective when it came to times like this.
Restless, Katya stood with Kit and the dogs outside the factory. What if they realised, she was wrong about the room downstairs and they realised what was really going on there?? Who was going to do the killing if any of those people couldn’t be taken off the machine??
She didn’t want that on other people.
Mishka nudged her hand lightly as Katya glared absently at the entrance to the factory. Blinking out of those thoughts, she looked down at the gentle and fluffy face of the dog, a small smile pulling on her lips.
“H
ey sweetie, I’m ok” she whispered to the dog, not seeing the small smile on Kit’s lips as she did so. Running her hands over the dog’s ear, Katya allowed the soft innocence of the animal to calm her slightly.
Minutes ticked by, then after what seemed like an age, there was movement.
“Ok, let’s go” Kit commented, motioning for Turi to follow him while leaving Mishka to follow Katya.
It was Axel and Seth which came to the entrance, apparently Zen had been the one to take her place on helping people down off those machines. As usual, Kit took to leading the people through the town in a route as direct as possible. Katya kept the group together from behind as Zen would normally do and then take post not far from the vault to make sure that the other’s got there safe and that no aliens were turning up to ruin the plan.
Above all else, they knew they couldn’t let a Nerushi or Hiko witness the entrance to even one of these underground safe places. If they did, they were bound to tear every town and city apart until they found the rest of them.
Silence of the Apocalypse- Journey Home Page 11
