I cleaned the blood off the severed hand as much as I could. There were no markings on any of the computer consoles. The screens were all off. When I placed the hand on one of the scanners, all of the consoles lit up. I could see video feeds from all around the Freedom Tower. Mr. Plunder and Christine were in his office, drinking and laughing, surely at my expense. There was a video feed from Paul’s cell as well. Before, I couldn’t see the wall the door was on. It looked like there was writing all over that wall and the door. I still couldn’t make out what the writing said. The resolution of the video was too low. I looked at the other consoles, trying to figure out what it was they were for, exactly. It seemed like these consoles controlled all of the security features of the Freedom Tower. Considering no one else was down there, it must have been some sort of override system only Megalomerate had access to. I eventually found a console that would display a schematic of each floor of the building. I navigated down to the basement floor I was on, and saw a bunch of padlock symbols in the room I assumed I was in. I started touching the padlock symbols on the screen, and the cell doors began to open. Paul’s cell door opened, and I rushed toward him.
Paul was sitting on the floor, head pointed up toward the ceiling, when I entered his cell. I knelt down in front of him and looked at his face. The skin that wasn’t covered in bandages was burnt to hell. The flesh looked like it was falling off him. Based solely on physical appearance, there would have been no way I would have recognized this man as Paul. It had to be him, though. Who else could it be? I imagined they weren’t doing much to treat his wounds while he was being held there. It looked like they just wrapped him up with gauze and then stuck him in a cell. I doubt the bastards gave him anything for the pain, either. They wanted him to sit there in complete solitude, with nothing but the excruciating pain of his burns to keep him company, all as a final mockery to me. He must have been driven half mad, explaining his complete lack of response to me. That, or he was on the edge of death, completely unable to respond in any manner.
“Paul, it’s me, Pete. Can you hear me? God dammit, Paul, give me a sign that it’s really you!”
His head moved downward. His eyes stared at me unblinking. The poor bastard’s eyelids more than likely burned off in the ‘accident’.
“You look good, kid.”
“Oh, Paul, you stupid son of a bitch! Look what you’ve gotten us into now.” I leaned over and began to hug him. As soon as I touched him he screamed out in pain.
“Sorry about that, Paul. I couldn’t help myself.”
“No worries, kid. I appreciate it.”
“What have those sick assholes been doing with you down here?”
“Not much. Just doing the bare minimum to keep me alive. I can’t imagine I have much longer to go.”
“How did you even survive in the first place? I saw your body engulfed by that explosion. I was sure you were dead, or I never would have left you.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, kid. I would have done the same to you. I don’t honestly know how I was able to survive that fire. The last thing I remember from that day was you yelling toward me before the explosion. Next, I find myself in this cell. I woke up strapped to a hospital gurney. Oh, how I wish for such comforts again.”
“Don’t worry about that any more, Paul. I’m getting you out of here. I’m sure Mr. Plunder thinks I’m dead or at least locked up at this point. We should be able to get the hell out of here before anyone notices.”
“What’s your plan after that, kid? Stay on the run with some third degree burn victim who’s likely to come down with some nasty infection at any moment? They kept the air sterile in this cell. It was the only reason I’m still alive. As soon as you opened those doors, I was as good as dead. It won’t be more than a day before they figure out you're gone, either. They’ll send someone after you, they’ll find you, and they’ll kill you.”
“Then what do you suggest I do, Paul? I don’t see many other options for us.”
“I don’t know, kid. We’ll have to find some way to end all this now. How? I have no idea, but if we leave this building without finishing what my brother started, we’re dead men. And then you, me, and my brother, will have all died for nothing. This shit machine Megalomerate has created will keep on running, ruining more and more good and innocent lives.”
“You’re getting pretty heated, Paul, throwing out curse words like that.”
“I’m all burned up, kid.”
“Ok, let me help you up and we can start getting out of here. We have to pass through a few doors that are locked. There’s, uh, something over by those computer consoles we need to get to be able to move through them.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see when we get over there. I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
With Paul’s arm draped over my shoulder, we were able to shuffle our way over to the computer consoles. The hand was sitting on the scanner where I left it, now sitting in a small pool of blood. Paul gave out an audible ‘ugh’ when he saw it, and then I grabbed it and placed it in my jacket pocket. I began to make our slow exit toward the door. It was going to take a while, but we’d get out of that hellhole soon enough. Before we cleared all the terminals, Paul looked up toward me and says.
“Hold on a second, let me see that hand.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just hand it over and let me get on this computer.”
I handed the hand to Paul, unsure of what he planned to accomplish on those computers. While he was fiddling around with the computer consoles, I put the hand back in my pocket and went to look out the door to the room.
“Paul, hurry up with whatever it is you’re doing. I think we’re about to have company.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s someone walking down the hall toward us.”
“Is it Mr. Plunder?”
Making his way down the hall toward us was a very tall, burly looking man with long, scraggly black hair. Just watching the man walk was terrifying. He was wearing a beaten leather jacket, fatigue pants, and combat boots. He was about twenty five feet from the server room when I first saw him. I looked back at Paul and responded, “I have no idea who that is, and I don’t think he’s coming down here just to say Hello.”
Chapter 13
Whoever the guy walking down the hall toward us was, he didn’t look like he was there to deliver roses. Paul and I didn’t have much of a plan, just the hope that we might be able to hide in one of the cells well enough that he couldn’t find us. Hopefully he would give up his search easily, and then walk back out the door. If he had the work ethic of someone like me, it wouldn’t be too difficult for us to accomplish. Based on the way the guy looked, though, we would have to metamorphose into stone statues before he gave up on the hunt. He didn’t look that smart. He seemed like the archetypical big, dumb brute sent to bash our skulls in. I was sure my original idea to disguise ourselves as the guards would have worked. Paul shot that idea down rather quick. ‘How are we going to explain their two bodies?’, ‘He’ll be here in 60 seconds, we don’t have time to put on their uniforms’, ‘He doesn’t look like he gives a hoot who he finds in here, he’s capturing or killing them regardless’. Whatever, Paul. Have it your way. We would hide, then, and hope for the best. I know putting my faith in ‘hope’ had always worked well for me in the past.
Paul scurried off back to his cell and closed the door, but kept it unlocked. There wasn’t a whole lot in the room beside the cells. The best hiding spot I was able to find was back behind the last row of the server stacks. The man out there was bound to look back there eventually, but I hoped it would be the last place he checked. Maybe when he was busy searching through one of the various cells I could sneak past him and slip out. Paul was going to have a rougher time sneaking out of there, but he insisted that we be separate. Better for one of us to be caught while the other escaped than for both of us to have our skulls knocked together.
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br /> There he was, the tall, muscular, mystery man walked through the door. He wasn’t going for stealth. His boots made a thundering thud with every step. Our impending doom brought upon by the thunder god himself. He didn’t breathe so much as snarl. He sounded like he was constantly trying to hock up a loogie. ‘Wheezing’, I think that’s the word I’m looking for. It wasn’t the high pitched, squealing wheezing of some asthmatic little kid, but a low pitched drone that would more appropriately be made by an idling tractor engine than a human being.
He didn’t enter very far into the room, only a few steps. He just stood there, moving his gaze throughout the room. He looked to be scanning every inch of the room that he could see from that vantage point, like he was going to methodically move throughout the room a few steps at a time, make a scan, and then decide a course of action based on this new reconnaissance data. I could mistake him for some sort of rudimentary robot – a robot designed to search and destroy any and all human life.
I observed him from around the corner of the server stack I was behind. The only lights in the room were in front of the doors to the cells. It was pitch black back where I was, so I wasn’t in any danger of being spotted. The man walked by the cell doors, and slid open the viewing window to see if anything was inside. There were five cells in the room, all lined up alongside one wall, and Paul’s was in the middle. The man wasn’t just making fleeting glances inside the cell, he was making sure to take everything in. There was nothing in those cells except bare concrete walls, but still, he would stare into the viewing window without averting his gaze for a full thirty seconds before he moved on from the first, to the second, and then to Paul’s cell.
As he was about to open the viewing window, I tried to make my way up to the row of computer consoles in front of me. I’m not sure what it was I was trying to accomplish with the new forward position. I hope it was so I can spring into action to help Paul out even quicker when that man opened his cell door, but I can’t help thinking that as soon as shit went down, I was going to bolt out of there, leaving behind Paul and a trail of my urine.
The man quickly closed the viewing window after seeing what was inside. He threw open the cell door with such force it nearly came off its hinges. Even if Paul had locked the door, I don’t think it would have stopped the man. The man bent down to look at Paul’s face, who was sitting on the ground. After just staring for a few seconds, the man said, “Where is he?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play games, old man. Where is Pete?”
“He ran off. You must have missed him on your way in.”
“Don’t lie to me, old man. Where is he?”
“Gone, long gone. I hope you like driving, because it’s going to be another road trip for you.”
The man grabbed Paul by the throat, and lifted him up in the air, pinning his back against the wall. The man was holding Paul with his arm straight out, Paul’s feet dangled a foot above the ground. The man’s eyes narrowed and his mouth began to quiver, like he was trying to stop from baring his teeth and growling at Paul like some sort of mad dog. I could see the muscles in his forearm tensing, veins bulging, and Paul’s mouth opened to scream, but the only sound that escaped was a desperate gasp for breath.
It was time for me to act. Paul was having the life squeezed out of him by some malevolent giant who appeared to only want to know of my location, so he could then squeeze the life out of me. I could run, and forever live with the shame of knowing I let Paul die holding onto the secret of my whereabouts. I doubt I would live with that shame for long, as I’m sure that man would hunt me down and splatter my brains across the walls before I made it past the first set of doors.
I saw Paul struggling at the end of his life. He clawed at the man’s hand, kicked his legs at him in a futile attempt to break free from the man’s iron grip. I made my way from the computer consoles toward Paul’s cell. I passed by the fire axe on my way there and grabbed it. I approached the man, who still appeared to be unaware of my presence. I lifted the axe above my head. I prepared to strike him in the back. I swung down and prayed that the blow would sever his spinal cord or split open his head or something that would put a quick end to him.
Quicker than I was able to perceive with my eyes, the man dropped Paul, and was able to parry my axe swing with his arm. He knocked the axe out of my hands. It wasn’t a complete miss. The blow left a deep gash in his forearm. The man was unfazed by the axe wound. He walked toward me at a deliberate, terrifying pace. I started to back away until I backed up against the computer consoles. I scrambled to try and get myself around them. The thought of my face caving in if the man was able to catch up to me ran through my mind as I scurried across the floor. As I tried to make my way around the console, his hand grabbed me around the shoulder. I felt like I was just caught in a vice grip. The bones in my shoulder were about to give way at any moment. Before I even had time to scream, the man tossed me across the room towardd the door as though I was nothing more than some child’s toy.
I laid there dazed, momentarily unaware of anything that was happening. I came to, and saw the man approach me again. Now, moving backwards and shimmying across the floor on all fours, I tried to make my way toward the door. In abject desperation I tried to climb up to the hand scan, pulling the severed hand out of my jacket pocket to get the door open. I open the door, and when I looked behind me, all I saw was the man’s fist flying toward my face. The blow hit me with such force I was knocked off my feet. I slid across the ground on my stomach all the way to the next set of doors. I turned over onto my back, and saw the man standing above me. Honor and dignity didn’t matter nor even really exist at that point. It was life or death for me. All gentlemen’s rules of fighting had gone out the window. I channeled all of the strength I had into an upward kick to the man’s groin. I hoped the steroids he had taken to obtain his size hadn’t shrunken his testicles to non-existence. My last remaining hope was he is at least anatomically a human, and that my foot would hit his balls with enough force to incapacitate him for a brief moment.
My foot struck true, and struck what felt like an iron wall. My foot felt like it shattered upon impact with his iron balls. Either the man really was a semi-autonomous killing machine, or he was simply smart enough to wear protection when he knew he would be fighting someone to their death. Staring back at him in disbelief I think I made out what looked like the slightest grin of satisfaction. You were welcome buddy, you could now kill me while achieving some level of happiness. I’m sure he didn’t get to experience that feeling very often. It was the first time I had ever brought someone happiness before, and it was as they were about to crush the life out of me.
The man raised both his hands above his end, readying them into a meaty sledge hammer to be swung down and obliterate my face. It was my time. I could accept that it was my time to die, the time I kept telling myself that I had been waiting for my whole life. I was staring death in the face, and I wished it was a little different than it was. I was prepared for a slow suicide through alcohol and tobacco consumption, not the brutal demise at the hands of some monstrous force of destruction. There was no hope of having an open casket viewing for my pretty dead face. Not that anyone would show up to my funeral, nor would there be any chance someone would waste a perfectly good casket on a poor schmuck like me. My fate was to have my skull turned into a pancake, my remains destroyed, and then discarded into a city dumpster. My existence would never to be acknowledged again. It was the end to my life I earned through my horrendous attempt at living.
Out of nowhere, Paul crashed into the man’s side before he had the chance to smash my face into nothingness. Paul knocked the man off balance, sending him stumbling into the wall, but still on his feet. I got up as quickly as I could, and sent a wild haymaker at the man’s head. Another mistake. My right hand throbbed in pain as I broke all twenty seven bones in it. I hit the man across his cheekbone, and I had some proof that he was a man after
all. A thin trickle of blood seeped out of the small scrap my punch gave him.
The man straightened himself up, let out a grunt, and Paul and I both instinctively started to back away in opposite directions. He looked toward both of us one at a time, and then rushed toward Paul. He swung his arm wildly at Paul’s chest, knocking him off his feet and flying into the wall behind him. The man then turned to me, his approach slow. When he was close enough, I threw another punch at him, but he grabbed my fist in mid-air and squeezed and rotated my arm until I squealed like a stuck pig. He let go of my fist, and then with his other hand grabbed a hold of my head and smashed it against the glass of the door behind me. I couldn’t tell if the cracking sound I heard came from the glass or my skull, or more than likely both. With my head still in his hand, he started to squeeze harder and harder. In a few moments his hand would be covered in my brains and blood and teeth and bits of my skull.
The man let go of my head. He arched his head back and screamed like nothing I had ever heard. He turned around, and I could see an axe sticking out his back.
Set Me Alight Page 13
