AilAid (VayneLine)

by E. A. Szabelski

  “Dix,” I warned softly. I leaned back and smiled; her shocked face made me feel joy - joy at both my own covetousness, and her own terror of wondering what I was in her eyes. It was so enjoyable to watch their fear at my actions even if misplaced.

  “Bray, I do not even need to turn around to know you are pointing that weapon at me. Would you really pull the trigger and chance killing her? I know you would not. I can see every path you would shoot me on and avoid them. So…” I dodged to the side, stepping inwards, lifting his barrel up to the ceiling before he even knew I moved. “Do not even try.” His face was so handsome in its surprise, he was so rooted in life it was such an aphrodisiac that was nearly uncontrollable. Bray! I wanted him so badly.

  Something triggered in both of their minds and the possibilities of them attacking me fell away. “So if you two are done thinking you would stand a chance at taking me out, we need to get back and clear our room.” They probably thought I was indeed a highly trained government agent. It was okay; I would let them think that. In a very crude way it was perhaps a bit right.

  Both of their faces reflected a deep surprise at the rapid reversal of my persona. Though the word ‘reversal’ is harsh, perhaps more of an uncovering. It was a personality that was concerned with events far beyond these trifling matters.

  I stood there looking at the two of them in the dark Comm room, and though my body perceived them my (mind?) was conscious of its dissolution of what it was perceiving. It would not be long before I had forgotten again what I had just uncovered. I could see that with a certainty, and we had to move fast to take advantage while it lasted.

  “Let’s go, I’ll lead.” I ran out of the room before they could argue. I partly hated them for their ready-betrayal, but I also loved them and would carry them to safety.

  In a way my physical sight was actually the most confusing, it was so stagnant. Linear. It was very hard to pick out of the other scenes I was witnessing. These others were so easy to follow; they were so much more natural for me.

  It was paths of time that were clear to me. Like the way that I would slightly lean back right here, the way the alien slashed, its claw cutting slightly into my armor just enough to bring its head into the perfect firing path to hit both it and the one behind it. The paths that these creatures might be normally fair adversaries on, really stood no chance against me, as I would know their locations they were hiding in ambush from failed paths of their own future.

  Lifting my pistol, as soon as I turned the corner I squeezed a round, and at the far end of the hall an emerging alien took it straight through the tip of its head. The empty face of the maligned female gave no indication it was now dead, impossible to be surprised by the omniscient knowledge that ended it. One path out of seven thousand, two hundred and three. So clear. Easy.

  An alien launched up from a grate in the floor. My boot was crashing downwards through its face. It was not dead until I shoved my fist through the same hole, squeezing the trigger of my pistol within it.

  To the side another of these malignant creatures came. I backhanded hard, with a force this body was not designed to produce normally, or to handle. Its head tilted at an unfriendly angle as it froze from what might have been a broken neck. Because I knew it was not yet dead I shoved my fist through where its heart would be, already seeing something was wrong with my hand from the earlier hit. As my fist was going inwards, I felt a shifting within my own hand to a more permanent degree.

  I pulled my fist out and it fell limp, a large spurt of blood dripping out of my own hand, slowly slipping to the floor below. My forearm terminated in a bright white bone with my hand hanging on by literal threads.

  Was this pain? The sensation was hard enough to describe, but it literally was foreign to me. I knew I should have been experiencing it; it was the ‘right’ thing to feel, but it was a linear feeling that I was not subject to. I stared at my bleeding, broken hand a bit more, embracing the transcendence over linearity. In some ways this bone was more useful as I could stab more easily with it.

  At this point I needed my other hand to shoot the weapon as this one was connected only by some tendons and skin on one side. I lifted up the broken appendage, blood spurting out to the floor to look at the curious vulnerability of physical beings. Maybe was I not different than these creatures, both of us with broken bodies that would not stop until we had been purged from existence.

  No. I was different.

  I leaned my head to the side, the former location being slashed by an alien whose excess momentum carried it into an emerging other one. I did not turn around, still more caught up on the strange thought of trying to figure out exactly what pain should feel like while I unloaded an already-witnessed burst of three rounds, the minimum on this path to slay the two of them. I witnessed the shots in a different realm, but on this one I did not even turn in the direction I was firing the gun. A few crystals off their back crashed sadly to the ground like broken panes of glass.

  I had but moments left. I dashed forward joyfully, blood flowing out of my hand freely, raining down celestial pain to these creatures that were so vile and would never prevail as long as we could keep fighting. Never.

  We had finally started to realize the true nature of these manifestations, and with that the tide would start to change. We had become smarter, tougher.

  “Goodbye. Your darkness is over,” I said to one of them that really had no clue to the grander scheme of reality as its body was rended apart by the flechettes. I hardly felt any pity for it; it served the darkness and that was crime enough to justify its annihilation.

  It was around the next corner. I had plenty of time. I dropped to the ground, ejecting the empty clip, pushing the new one in against my boot that was holding the gun. I stood up calmly, and when the alien entered my physical field of view, it was terminated joyfully soon after.

  I took a step and seized, my arm cringing into my torso. I was on the precipice of this vast loneliness.

  Do not leave me! Don’t make me suffer this loneliness for another lifetime!

  Goodbye, for now.

  “No!” I yelled to it.

  I shook my head, trying to keep my connection alive, but it was so close to gone. I had known I could not sustain it, and knew the certainty in which it would end. I looked evenly at Dix. “You had better lead.” My eyes flashed around rapidly, my hand squeezing as many final rounds out as it could.

  I fell to the ground, blacking out for a moment. The next thing I knew I was being pulled up by Bray. He was yelling about how we had to keep moving, the aliens were surrounding us. My hand was hurting bad, I looked at it and almost threw up seeing it hanging there nearly broken off.

  “My hand! My hand!” I yelled again. My blood was streaming out of it, as it was slowed by nanities only. When did that even happen? I felt nauseous and dizzy. My hand looked destroyed…

  “Keep running, we have to make it back!” I was mostly dragged by Bray. I pulled my other hand that held my pistol up to my mouth , trying to restrain a gag over the bloody scene of my own body. The pain and sight of the blood was extremely nauseating.

  Behind us was a wreck of corpses. Had we shot through them all? It seemed like it would have been such a monumental feat.

  “Keep fighting!” He yelled to me. I lifted my pistol with my other hand and shot a pack of scattered rounds, a few hitting a creature and spinning it to the ground. Bray hit it with the Plaz-Shot, the bright energy bolts roasting it away.

  We turned and pressed forward into the room we had called home. Dix slammed the door behind us and bolted it closed. Now was the search to ensure that this room was safe. I followed them, staggering from my own weakness as we swept through the rooms. Every corner could be an elusive hiding alien.

  “Well, looks like we made it,” Bray was saying behind me as I looked up in suspicious corners. “Now we just need to wait…” He seemed to have dropped his sentence.

  We stepped forward a bit more. I prompted him, “To wait…
?”

  He didn’t respond.

  I turned back and saw the black arm of an alien dripping with blood, a spray of the red liquid across the ground and its strange claw cleaved through Bray’s chest. How did it get through the armor and his shield!?

  “Bray!” I yelled, Dix’s yell soon after mine. I aimed the flechette gun trying to not hit him. My spike rounds and Dix’s rifle rounds slammed into the alien, dismembering it and sending it out of this reality. Any missed shots that would hit Bray triggered the typical response of the shield diffusing in a brilliant ray of sparks of light. Without the supporting alien he was leaning into, Bray’s body fell to the ground.

  We ran up to him, but I could see he was already dead.

  So fast.

  So unfair.

  “Oh my…” I mumbled, my eyes watering.

  “Bray! Brayyyy!” Dix grabbed his shoulders and shook him, his blood spilling on her and the floor. I felt dizzy and sat down, trying to concentrate on if there were any more aliens, but more concerned that my friend was literally just here and was no more. My hand was almost broken off somehow during the battle, and now Bray was dead…

  I turned and started retching, my eyes watering; I was feeling way too overloaded. If there was another alien here I knew I would be killed but could not stop the torrent of feelings. I tried to hold my own face, and when I touched my cheek with the bone of my wrist I nearly passed out.

  Dix’s hysterical voice eventually turned sober and melancholic. “We were both supposed to retire after this. We were supposed to spend the rest of our life together. We already had that reserved spot on Sama-3, the one with the nice beach? Bray, remember? Remember?” She whimpered a bit. “That tree we carved our name in?”

  I bit my tongue, trying to get the tears to end. Was that it? Was he really gone? While it was true near the end here we hit a rough part in our relationship, he had shown me nothing but kindness. He was a good friend; whether it was all an act I would never know. It felt like a universal tragedy that his caring qualities were forever gone, consumed in an instant by forces beyond our control.

  “Bray…” I mumbled.

  “You!” Dix’s voice turned hostile. She threw his bloody body down, and dashed upwards, grabbing my armor and pushing my kneeling form to the ground. “This is your fault, you killed him!”

  My heart jumped a few pace faster. Why was she attacking me!? There was no way I could take her.

  “Dix, I didn’t do anything…!”

  “I have no idea what the hell you are, but stay away from me!” Her angry eyebrows cut into my soul, her overall misplaced aggression wounding me more deeply than any attack. She walked off into one of the three rooms we had. I looked down at what was once a friend, now painted in red and walked into the other room. I guess that really was it. Life was so strange.

  I picked up the stump of my hand; thankfully the broken wrist had coagulated along with nanite assistance. If I held my hand to it and splinted it in place the nanites should be able to at least loosely reattach my hand and keep it alive long enough to get actual help.

  I wrapped up my hand, gritting my teeth as I cinched the wrap down. The loss of blood was perhaps far more mentally taxing on me and eventually I passed out.

  ***

  The next few cycles were a very sad, slow existence. If Dix and I were ever in the same room, such as for food, she would stare at me silently, her eyes saying more than words. I meekly looked away from the domineering woman.

  Neither of us did anything with the bodies in the room. Dix often cried at his body, I left the room and tried to stay away out of respect.

  Our rescue would probably be at least a few cycles out. It was obvious that this set of rooms were indeed not easily breached by our prior stay here, and it was of the greatest misfortune that in that short time to place the rescue call, the room was compromised by a single creature.

  I tried writing a note to Dix, trying to get her to talk to me. I ended the letter with a weird sentence that came to me. I told her to not worry because she would probably meet a part of Bray again. It seemed true on some level, but I didn’t know what exactly.

  I knew we both were so lonely, and having the only other alive person not talking to me made it worse. The next meal I saw my letter with a knife stabbed through it. I caught the reflection of my now pure-white hair in the blade. I frowned at both implications. At least my body felt good, even if we were running low on food. My hand was still messed up though. I had repositioned it into the correct location and splinted it. Hopefully my nanities could keep it alive and it looked like it was so far, but if we lived I would have to go get it checked out given the nature of the injury.

  The rescue call mission proved to be a distraction to the monotony of sitting in a small room awaiting rescue. In general this survival situation was nothing but pure boredom. It was temporarily punctuated by the extreme action of the fight and the emotion of losing Bray. The ‘high’ made the low of the boredom even worse. For a long time it was just a dull pain in my wrist and my own dark thoughts keeping me company. Eventually my mind adjusted to the far slower pace, taking this near-prison existence as the standard.

  The new ascetic existence slowly became the norm. The vitality of a new day disappearing into a blur of always being hungry from diminished food supplies, a slow pulsing pain, and time never changing in these dark rooms.

  I had been hearing Dix mumble things at night for a while, usually Bray’s name. It eventually took me a while to realize I was occasionally uttering things as well.

  The walls were gray, but they had always been that way. In small moments of awareness I would realize my thoughts were slowly becoming that dull color as well before I would fall back into a sick, hungry daze.

  I heard a single rifle shot once. I hobbled over to where I thought it came from. Dix’s body lay next to the remains of Bray. A single shot through her heart as her bleeding body lay slumped across Bray’s. Her eyes looked sad and empty, hoping for something that was long gone.

  I stood there looking at her. My mind was working very slowly at this point. I know I had cared about her. Was she gone, or was she just sleeping? Just sleeping…

  In the next moment I became more aware, and in a flash of disturbing insight I realized what the death was outside of the daze I was in. Dix was gone, forever. I fell down somewhere and cried until I was no longer aware of where I was anymore. We had ended so badly, and it never should have been that way. We were friends for so long before a few fateful incidents. I had considered Dix a very close friend until our hostile ending ruined its immaculateness.

  I was crying, moaning somewhere. The food had run out at some point. Was I on the floor? The coldness of everything was pervading my very fiber. The tragic ending of my friends and my colony crushed any thoughts beyond the bare facts. I was the lone survivor, dying a painful death in this dark room, my two friends hating and distrusting me up until their final moments. I was just a casualty from some massive universal event with this blue energy and these monsters. My eyes could no longer see, but they still burned, long past the point of tears. Maybe I needed to blink? How did one go about blinking?

  Strange thoughts came to me in my delusion. I wondered if I was crying for Bray and Dix, or perhaps for my broken self. Sometimes I would feel strange moments of joy and ease. Often I would be somewhat conscious during these times periods, noting darkly the slide into some sort of psychological condition. Then these moments would end, and I would cry harder because the darkness was so much worse than the delusional joy.

  Insanity became somewhat expected. Ever since this whole thing had begun I had started hearing voices and vague visions of things I had never had before in my life. Considering the dire strait I was now in, the soft line between what I assumed was reality in this small gray set of rooms and the visions and voices around me was blurred beyond recognition.

  “As…” my typical repetitive mumble would start.

  “…In…” was the
typical middle word.

  “…Life…” was how it ended. Did it mean something? Maybe to somebody it might have. To me it was only a random utterance of a poor girl near death. Some string of sounds that might have given some unconscious feeling of increasing the chance of a miracle salvation. There was no one here to hear me, there never would be. I guess there really wasn’t anything beyond life. Typical I suppose. I’d die and that’d be it. At least I wouldn’t know I was dead.

  Somewhere I had fallen on my side. What was a side, and how could I have fallen on it? Apparently it was too difficult to change this position and the unchanging room crept onwards from its sideways view.

  “…Anyone here?” a muffled voice called. This one was different. Strange.

  An explosion as a door was blasted in.

  “Oh man…more of the same. There is no one alive anywhere here either. Distress call must have been sent too late. Must have been automatic. Well let’s check a bit more and pack it in. With this as overran as it is, no way anyone is alive. I don’t want to lose any of you to these things.”

  “Yo man, is it me, or is that girl there actually breathing?”

  “Nah, look at the eyes, you can always tell. Glazed over.”

  “Hmm, yeah not blinking, maybe you’re right. Wait! No look, she is alive.”

  Objects wrapped around something, (me?). Another voice asked, “Are you okay?”

  What was I seeing? What was even reality? Something pressing compelled me to summon my strength to give this reality something important, compunction needed to make my presence solid in this fragmenting reality.

  I said something, but nothing came out, my mouth was so dry.

  I swallowed. “As …in life…” I mumbled, my thoughts incoherent and scattered.

  “Hey, stay with us! You are going to be okay!”

  “What is she saying? What’s that even mean?”

  “I don’t know what’s she saying, she’s delusional. Don’t listen.”

  “…In life…” I continued to mumble as I felt the strong arms take me away. My remaining world went black as my head bounced erratically.