“Not clean, I know. It might stop the bleeding. It hasn’t really touched the blood or anything nasty from my mouth. Just the filthy water that’s dripping everywhere.” He looked up at the roof, or what seemed to be a roof but was really just ascending brickwork and a seam of silver light bleeding through from somewhere outside of this Hell.
“Thank you.” Jane tied the bandana tightly around her waist, wrapping it snugly around the entry and exit wound. A stomach spasm made her knees buckle and she toppled over onto the Captain’s chest.
“You okay?”
“I dunno. Think that horn clipped my intestines, maybe? I feel all this weird tugging up inside of me… It’ll be alright. The worst thing that could happen is I’ll bleed out and then the nightmare’s over for me, huh?” She smiled. He ran a shaky hand through her short blonde hair.
“Your turn…” She reached to haul him off the wall.
“Leaf first. Please, close his eyes. Just in case we get busted before I get free. I’ll make a lot more noise then you did. These walls are chewing on my bones, no joke.” He smiled as blood rolled over his bottom lip. She nodded and looked in the direction that he tilted his head.
The silver light bled in a moonbeam over Leaf’s head, bouncing off the brickwork until it lit up his face. It was far too slender now and many shades of blue as he was beginning to decay. She felt her heart jump as she drew closer to him. Flies were swarming where his eyes were, making the whites yellow. Now that she looked into them she could see that the irises were once the color of cedar needles. She imagined the life and mischief that might have once danced in them. The love they’d held and days they’d witnessed.
Disgusted, Jane raised her palms and let the cold, oily water splash onto them. She cupped them over Leaf’s clammy face, washing away the flies and the filth. It took several palms full before he was figuratively clean. Now he looked human again, although his eyes were still foggy with the disease and decay of laying here dead for days on end.
She studied his face. His mouth hung open. His last breath must have been excruciating. His tongue was swollen and black in his head. Small insects were crawling in his teeth having gotten there from the brackish water dripping down his face. She reached a gentle palm under his chin and closed his mouth.
She ran a hand over his wild and filthy hair smoothing it up off his cheeks and back down into its proper place. It was chestnut-brown and had grown to almost his shoulders in their captivity. She felt worms crawling that had fallen there along with the water. Her throat closed and she felt tears streaming free.
“Derek’s right,” she said. “Your eyes were beautiful. It’s a shame about the flies. Thank you for your service, soldier. I hope you’ve found peace now.” She gracefully brushed her fingertips over his eyelids. Eyes closed now, only the blue patches that darkened his cheeks, the loud bruises of rottenness, broke the illusion that he was sleeping.
Jane turned to Derek, weeping. They were both crying now unable to control their tears.
“Whatever happens, he’s safe now,” said Derek. Jane nodded, trying to reassure him, even though she didn’t believe that. There was no such thing as safe here.
“Let’s go.” Jane went to Derek and started the laborious task of plucking him free of the wall.
He shrieked and cried like she was ripping him in half. His ribs snapped in twenty different places each, the gargoyle’s teeth ripping him up under his arms. Eventually he pulled free and leaned against her, gasping in her arms. She held him close and ran her hand up the back of his hair, letting him cry from pure agony until the strength returned to his knocking knees. She was surprised they weren’t atrophied, but then he’d had to stretch himself up daily to reach the water that had kept him purposelessly alive. Survival was mandatory even when it was inexplicable.
“Want to get out of here now? Even if it’s just to see that light one more time?” Jane swallowed. Derek turned and waded over to Leaf.
Bending over him, he hugged his corpse close. Pulling him away from the wall was the easiest. He was dead, limp and light from his starvation. Derek clutched him to his chest, sobbing into his filthy hair, ignoring the fact that he was beginning to rot. Jane pressed a hand between Derek’s shoulders and let him cry until he had control of himself.
“Don’t sweat it, you punk. I’m taking us home.” He smiled. That phrase obviously had a personal meaning for them while they both lived. Derek smoothed Leaf’s hair back off his darkened cheeks and raised him over his shoulder. Jane picked up his blood- soaked feet, trying to ignore the fact that his shoes had warped with rot from the parasites the blood attracted. Together, the Captain and the Nurse began to carry the fallen soldier up from the belly of the earth.
They wandered in the darkness, tripping over the discarded limbs that littered the floor of the blood pool, for what seemed like hours. At last, somewhere deep beneath what from the alcoholic stench that wafted out seemed to be an ancient distillery, they found a spiral staircase. They began their ascent and barely made it to that silvery light that shone under the heavy iron double doors when they heard wicked, familiar laughter.
The doors burst open. In strode Leona, dressed in a bridal gown that was dribbled in blood. In her hand was a small vial of serum.
“Oh! Wonderful! Now I don’t have to pull on my rain boots. It’s admirable you would carry your friend up from prison. Kudos, children. I’m amazed you honestly even considered escape.” Leona flipped her long red hair over her shoulder and nodded.
“Well, I suppose we should get started now. Rest assured, that young man died very well. He’ll live to be even better. Matter of fact, you all will. This is going to be newsworthy, to put it mildly!”
A shadowy figure crept up behind them, and Jane and Derek were knocked cold to the floor, Leaf’s body tumbling off their shoulders. Jane felt herself screaming as a bag knotted with chains was thrust down over her head. Like a horse on a lead rope, she was tugged up toward what, she feared, could only make her previous damnation feel like a happy place. She sucked her teeth, praying the wound on her belly would open and bleed out before they reached wherever Leona was taking them. But she began to despair as she remembered how death hadn’t been an escape for Harrison.
*****
Chapter 3
The bags were torn from their heads and they hit their knees in the center of a room that was reminiscent of a Spanish Inquisition torture chamber.
Right in front of them was Leaf’s cadaver, suspended in the center of an Iron Maiden. His death-blackened tongue had been slid down inside of a sleeve with electric wires running back to several different high-powered LED batteries. There was a metallic headband pressed down on his forehead. He had catheters affixed to either side of his neck, a v-shaped tube connected to his brachiocephalic vein, and an oxygen tube affixed to his nostrils. There were needles with electrodes clipped to them pierced into the carpal and tarsal tunnels of his wrists and his ankles.
“What are you doing? He’s dead. What could you possibly want with him now?” Derek beat the floor with his open palm.
“Oh, darling! You seem not to read the papers. I’ve chemically generated living death before. I can do it again.” Leona stepped around her hostages. She was tapping a syringe filled to the brim with the clear, mysterious Andromeda Extract.
“You sick..” Jane felt herself at a nauseating loss for words. Leona turned to her smiling like a teenager.
“Oh, Jane. You’ve seen my artwork before, and yet you’ve failed to recognize its beauty.” She turned on her heel to face Leaf’s corpse.
“It will be so much more beautiful this time. Last time was purely incidental. This time—” She spun on her heel, eyes shining with maniacal glee.
“This time, I will do it deliberately. I will be his teacher, his mother, his god. He will live again as my sword and my shield. Not just a walking dead man, but a weapon. It’s why I needed a soldier.” She inserted the Andromeda Extract syringe’s nozzle into the v-shaped
tube that ran through Leaf’s still chest. She squeezed it.
“Tap the gas.” She winked at one of her grim, black-clad guards.
There was a breathless moment of disbelief. With a dizzying mix of anticipation and dread, every soul in the room looked on as one of Leona’s henchmen opened a breaker box that was inconspicuous in the stone walls and pulled down a switch. Electricity flowed through a series of plastic covered, LED lit wires that looked like cellular device chargers and powered the batteries. Leaf’s body began to convulse as the electrical impulses returned to his nervous system.
Leona continued her frenzied preaching. “What is life? How long will a human body lay before it ceases to be a human and can be considered clay again? I think your friend is in that awkward stage between animation and slipping away into the sand. I hope he is more clay than man so that I can mold him. The touch of human blood and flesh fills me with vigor!” She ran her hands through his hair as his mouth began to foam with the chemicals she’d injected.
There was shell-shocked silence as they waited. Something had changed in the corpse. The pallor was beginning to glow with a translucence that possessed no discernable color and yet began to contrast his shade. The eye sockets began to rupture blood vessels, oozing purple-blue blood that hadn’t been touched by oxygen in days.
His eyes opened.
They collectively drew back. Derek grew hopeful and drew himself up to a greater height.
“Leaf? Can you hear me, man?” He coughed, nervous. Then he desperately crawled forward, unhindered by Leona’s guards, a hand extended.
Leaf’s eyes closed and opened again. The dark blood wept from his eyes as they steamed and crackled with electricity.
“Leaf?”
The machines began to hum and wail. Leaf twisted, feeling again. He breathed, but not that raptured breath of life. He was choking on the smoke of his reanimated corpse. He wheezed as his steaming nervous system began to emit smoke that rose to his nostrils.
“Leaf, hey. It’s me. It’s Derek!” Derek crawled forward and clutched at the tops of Leaf’s feet. The corpse-man thrashed and looked down at the man that had once been his friend. He uttered a sound like wind through rotten trees, hollow, soft, ominous.
Steam began to flow out of his eyes as the increased speed in electrification was evaporating the remainder of the water in his body.
“Derek…” he croaked. His larynx was evaporating too, constricting as he wilted with the chemical heat that moved within him outside of those defined laws of physics science had determined so far. It was a harsh, hollow sound, human only because of the syllable of a name.
He threw back his head, shrieking. Thrashing with psycho-generated, electro-magnetically endowed might beyond a man’s natural capacity, he leaned his head into his chest and tried to tear his flesh with his teeth. To no avail. He leaned back and screamed at the ceiling, pleading wordlessly, his lips shriveling before their eyes.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Jane was quaking. Derek knelt wide-eyed incapable of utterance. He clutched at Leaf’s feet until they scalded his hands. Flinching, he slid to the floor in silent tears.
Leaf began to convulse, his whole body rising and falling in violent spasms. He thrashed at increasing speeds until his body appeared to them as a gray blur, bones rattling like a viper’s tail. He continued to scream like a wild cat, hands thrashing out and tearing at the apparatus to no avail, electric shocks buzzing like a thousand hornets converging on a single prey. His violent thrashing splattered blood across their faces. Derek wailed.
The mix of friction and high voltage finally became combustible. Leaf burst into flame.
“For the love of God, stop it! Stop it, please! This is worse than killing him!” Jane dove forward despite all the weapons trained on her. She snatched the cords out of the wall but there was no discernable change in the patient. It was obvious nothing could be done to reverse this now.
“There is no point in trying, bold young Jane. It’s the Andromeda Extract. A chemical with the power of the heavenly hosts.” Leona dabbed tears away from her face.
“How beautiful this creature I have made! Look at him!” Leona ushered in a photographer who began to snap rapid shots of Leaf’s transformation from rotting corpse to chemically-transformed golem.
“Behold, ladies and gentlemen! Prometheus, the instrument by which I will pass this fire to the whole human race. The first of the god-like creatures I have created to be loyal subjects of my prototype Empire! For I am a jealous god, and I must have others like me to walk my Earth and drink deeply of youth’s fountain along with me! I shall raise up the demigods. I shall be the colonizer of impossible creations! Preserver of the living and recycler of the dead! Behold, the first citizen of the new world I will create!”
Jane saw that two of Leona’s henchmen were holding not guns but a camera and microphone. Leona’s speech was broadcast as a live newsfeed, her megalomaniac ravings going out the whole world.
It was pure mockery. There was no life in his flame-effusing eyes. His hair became a candle’s wick and his skin began to bubble and shrink like melting wax.
Derek had watched all he could bear. He looked from Jane to Leaf and back to Jane. She felt fear ignite her spinal column realizing what he was about to do.
“Don’t!” She shook her head. Not him too. Please, God.
“Jane, run!” Derek’s voice split through the room, rending the atmosphere from top to bottom. He dove forward, rolling head over heels, swinging his arms into the back of three guard’s knees. They fell forward and, assault rifles firing at random as they lost control of their trigger fingers.
“Run!” Derek sat up and swung his arm, grasping at a stray pistol. The scene in the room became pure chaos.
Jane slipped out the door again. Her head reeled. She’d been led here blindfolded. Which way could she run?
In the end, she could only stumble blindly down a spiraling staircase. She was under the impression that this laboratory was in an antique castle-like building, possibly an old mission hospital. She craned her neck to look around at all of it, even as she tripped over her toes.
Her heels slipped out from under her. She hit her knees and rolled with an echoing shriek as she cartwheeled down a spiraling staircase.
There was a bookend’s crack in the walls at the end of the stairs. Jane held her breath. Some of her teeth were broken and blood slid down her throat and oozed over her lips and hands making it impossible for her to grip a new threshold.
She tumbled through the wall’s crack and landed in hot sand. For a moment she lay in the silence, blood oozing around her, sticking her hair to the back of her neck.
There was a sound like bird’s chirping in the dark. Her blood went cold. A thousand cigarette lighters effaced the darkness. From under those miniature lamps appeared the patchwork faces of Leona’s horribly mutilated Living Dolls.
They pressed closer, carving utensils in their hands and silver platters. There was a hungry growl as they slid the knives together.
Jane understood as she eased herself to sitting. They hadn’t eaten in God only knew how long, trapped in such a pit as this. She was the first living healthy thing they’d laid eyes on in an eternity. To them, Jane was raw meat thrown to wolves.
She scrambled backward where the darkness was deeper and prayed with everything left in her that there were enough shadows left to hide in. It was hopeless anyway. These poor souls were natives of the dark.
*****
Chapter 4
“That’s not possible!” Dexter pounded the desk. His hair was standing on ends and he was drenched in sweat. Ivy tried to pull him back with spaghetti noodle limp arms.
The sunlight dripped like blood down the walls of the Hot News Channel 16 headquarters building outside of D.C., where Jane’s friends had taken refuge.
Kendra Reagan smiled at him with tender eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know how much she means to you.”
Dexter drilled his fist i
nto the desk, knuckles cracking and smashing against the wood.
“No! How?! It’s not possible! She was guarded by 15 SWAT teams in a football arena that was surrounded by 3 Marine battalions!” Dexter spun on his heel, tearing at his hair.
“Leona dropped in via helicopter. I’m so sorry, Dex. Jane’s been taken. There are no leads.” Kendra hung her head. There were tears now. Her heart was broken for him. She’d seen what had become of those soldiers and could only imagine the terrible ending Leona had cooked up for Jane Lewis.
He screamed unintelligibly and stormed from Kendra’s small office room.
“Dexter!” Lindsey rushed to his side.
Ivy stood crying into her hands. Dr. Joseph Kingsley rose from the corner, eyes wide as an owl’s with terror, hands spreading at a loss for words.
“So, what, that’s it? They’ve just given that kid up for dead? After everything…” He swallowed. He’d been there the night she’d been injected with the super poison. If that had only been playing around on Leona’s part, then what would a systematic execution look like?
“What do you mean? What are they going to do to her?” Ivy’s mascara was bleeding down her face.
“God only knows what they’re going to do,” Kendra gasped. “But as the legislation surrounding the Andromeda Act works out, the U.S. military is prohibited from attempting to track Leona Kelley. Our government has decided to play full defense and leave offense well, to her. She was supposed to be the peace offering between the legislative body and this monster to appease her, so Leona wouldn’t come after the civilians. Though Jane defended it to the end, I feel that it was cowardice on the part of the United States.” She cried into her hand.
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 14
