Gary's Trilogy (Book 3): Still Myself, Still Surviving (The Retaliation)

by Marlin Grail

  He flails a smack to my face, and then another. “Wake up, stupid! I just had to myself, and I won’t be alone on this surprise!”

  Betrayed. I’ve been betrayed.

  Chapter XIX

  “Look at you.” Claw continues to be petty, focusing on my teeth that I visibly show to him with a ragged snarl. My tears have burst into drops of homicidal intent. He’s at a distance where I could reach him, if it weren’t for two soldiers forcibly holding me back. “All your need to be complete is fizzing at the mouth.”

  Trey cries out in pain when repeatedly punched and bashed all over, several soldiers ganging up on his curled-up body to the ground. Bastards. I’m lightheaded, unable to withstand the salt and pepper that’s filtered my vision.

  “You want fizz?” I faintly ask.

  Claw proceeds to have a clown-like gesture of his hand spiraling to his ear. “Can’t hear ya? What?”

  Splat!

  It goes all over the side of his cheek, the little bubbles in my saliva popping as it drips down his face. His open smile comes to a close, and his eyes want to remain calm—I can tell—until those teeth of his own revamp to fury.

  Then they show rage.

  He lodges a knee against my stomach, but it’s nowhere near as justified as I feel he thinks it is. Especially when he walks away like’s he’s a boxer, one gaining the adoration of his fans.

  Does this mean Ernie, Holcomb, and Jefald are all traitors too? Has this whole world been lying to me and my people?

  I fall under disgust, my expression forming as though I’ve eaten something rotten and horrible. I try to hide it just towards the floor, but Claw doesn’t allow it.

  “Look at me!” he intimidates, clasping my lower jaw with his whole hand. He sniffs hard, nostrils flaring while inhaling all the oxygen they can, until, like his normal self, he puts back on his calm mask. “We’re going upstairs.”

  When Trey’s attackers overhear Claw, they start pumping each other’s adrenaline further, assuming he also mentioned Trey as well.

  I had hoped, anyways.

  “Not him!” he firmly intervenes. “No. He goes outside, with the rest of them.”

  Unbeknown to me, Claw has my holders aggressively shove me onto all fours so he can pick me up by my neck. I gasp for some bodily control when his fingers drive deep and harshly to the sides of my neck, nerves being pinched to a burning chill.

  My eyes happen to skim directly over to Casey. I have no doubt it’s him. He’s the only one who continues to wear his officer uniform, unlike the rest of his unit. It’s disgraceful to the very fabric and meaning of it.

  “You were supposed to stop this!” I snap at him, the volume echoing to the very ceiling.

  Nonchalant, and, as though he has no explanation to share, his care-free hands lift to his sides. “Sorry, man. She’s just so damn convincing.”

  She? You don’t mean…

  Chapter XX

  Claw yanks me up. My whole body momentarily levitates off of the ground, as a means to encourage me to head forward. Towards the stairs.

  Claw’s strong fingers are still on me. They start letting their nails scratch my skin, as though they’re trying to barbarically carve through.

  Claw ensures with a smile, “You’re not going up there to die, Gary. I’m not dead.” As he pushes me up the stairs, having to pick me back up to my feet when I purposefully trip on them, he grabs my face again to meet his. “And, you and me? We’re one of the same. Keep going.”

  Sniveling in utter refusal still to what’s happening is “remediated”, Claw calls out to the soldiers dragging Trey across the ground. “If we don’t get up these steps in, say, five seconds, you have my approval to kill him where he grovels.”

  You have no choice, Gary.

  My last fall onto the stairs has become the final time, and I begin two stepping, then three stepping these platforms to…

  Grim.

  She stands at the last one, completely swathed in a wardrobe entirely fit for an Egyptian goddess. Her bare skin is hidden just enough by cloth in certain areas, but the ghost-white complexion is menacing, while also meant to be seductive.

  Claws observes me in my standstill, and it’s not enough I’m on the final step. “One.”

  I snatch the handrail to help me lunge upward, past Grim, to the second-level.

  How wrong of me to assume she would allow that.

  “No, no, no, no,” she lectures with a wagging finger. “You don’t disrespect me that way.” Her English accent, along with a formality in hand gestures, offsets her next statement to Claw, a middle finger pointing over the hand-railing, downward at Trey’s position. “Kill that intruder!” she growls.

  “No, please!” I beg, hand outstretched in distress. There’s no room for pride, for anger, for anything but helplessness. I brought Trey here. He had faith in me and…

  Forgive me, Trey. This is my fault.

  Her eyes grow large. I assume it’s out of rage, but then after examining her face, she grows a big smile, like the one Claw currently has. Both smiles represent two murderous joys right before me.

  “Can you say ‘please’ to me again? I like how it sounded. This time, on your knees, and hands palmed together?”

  You have no choice, Gary.

  I slowly head toward the ground on my knees, then try to rub off mucus running down my nose, but she insists I leave it. It’s a means to make my plea much more exposed to what’s going on inside me.

  “Go on, then. Say it.”

  The skin on her legs is all she allows me to look at, ghost-white, as equivalent to the complexion of my face right now. My palms face each other, my fingertips in peripheral vision, and I plea.

  “Please. Please. Please.”

  She snickers. Grim then meets me, far down to my level. “That’s better. Have you been well, darling? What about the little game we had? Wasn’t that exhilarating?”

  Game? She was the one responsible for my…hallucinations?

  I stumble to get my words out to her, of which she thinks I have other reason for an open mouth.

  “Oh, darling, you already want a kiss? Very well.”

  As she comes in, I pull back. Which, due to me already being shown her appalled face, is given to me a second time. She exhales in agitation, and blinks deliberately.

  “Gar, you know what happens when you don’t treat me well.” Her arm extends to point through the open railing-guard, down to Trey. “Let me kiss you.”

  “Why?” I genuinely ask, confused to what is driving her beyond sadism. “Why are you doing this?”

  She straightens her posture while kneeling. She draws her chin to touch her chest. “Because that’s the point. Do you not care if your little friend ends up getting beaten to death? I can very well make sure he does, if that’s what you want.”

  I wave my hand to correct her. “No. No, of course I don’t—”

  “Then, kiss me.”

  Her hands become dainty when trying to squish my shoulders in close to hers. With that being said, they still won’t accept my squirming, and it infuriates her, to where Claw reminds me he’s just as involved in ruling me as she is.

  “Fulfill her request, man, or…”

  My lips are chapped, split, and nowhere the neatest. Good.

  She doesn’t deserve the same lips and emotion I devote forever to Lissie.

  I look away, wishing that when she closes her eyes Grim doesn’t care that I closed my mouth. I reluctantly let her receive a passionless, shriveled, peck on the lips.

  “Nuh-uh,” she giggles out. “Open up.”

  I let out a faint whimper of anxiety from this. Clearly, I’m being toyed with, but she’s also toying with my emotions regarding Lissie, whom she manifested within my last hallucination.

  She surely knows about Lissie. How? I don’t know, but she does. I’m so sorry, Lissie…I’ll just put your face in my mind as I look away from her.

  I think of how much I must smell, of the sewer water drying in m
y hair, skin, and clothes. It was in my mouth. Earlier, I tamped down the revulsion rising in me knowing that the fetid water made its way into me. Now I was glad. I hope Grim choked on the disgusting taste.

  Instead, as if to spite me, she lets out little moans with each obscene brush against my stone mouth. This violation carries not even a spec of romance to me. I endure it—like I’ve had to do everything else.

  Grim’s backing away couldn’t have come sooner, but she can’t just let it go. She sounds satisfied by the end, rubbing it in afterwards. “There you go, Gar. You’ll come to appreciate them more.”

  An internal bomb drops because of that remark, but that’s all it can be at this moment. Hidden. They’ve made it apparent I can’t make the slightest distasteful expression without their involvement without consequences.

  Instantly, I become alarmed when Claw swivels his head back towards the stairs. I’m in doused fear, the liquid from my drying hair falls all around my face like dye, in the intensity of what he’ll command next.

  My gaze is glued to his face, but I can tell Grim is attached to mine just the same.

  Dammit, Gary. Had you just forced Trey to stay back, he wouldn’t be caught up in all of this. With what I know, I’m fully afraid. I can’t imagine how you feel, Trey.

  Grim has a spring in her step as she rises from her knelt position, elation smeared all over her expression. “Just look at my two husbands.” She clasps her hands to her mouth. This drills into my mind that it looks as though I’ve knelt to her in proposal—at least that’s what she’s made it look.

  What is this? What—

  “Don’t forget who your real one is,” Claw intervenes sourly.

  Her attention turns straight to his greeting arms, which she walks into. Both of them now interlock their lips for an inconsiderable amount of time.

  “My, how long it took you to figure out my trickery!” She teases Claw with playful touches to his chest. Apparently, even Grim recognizes how incredibly inappropriate this “special interaction” between them is to what’s at risk right now.

  Trey’s life hangs in the balance. It’s all dependent on their next order to those damned officers below.

  Chapter XXI

  I cringe at the invisible shackles on me, ones placed by these two in order to prevent me from getting off the ground. The two of them continue to stare me down. My florid face, blood rushing too fast and abrupt, is not granted enough time to hide my emotions.

  Claw and Grim calmly stroll past me. I then feel Grim easily guide me up with an arm under my own. “Take his friend outside,” she orders to the officers below us. “Act as though you’re willing for peace talk—just needing clarification that he’s one of them.”

  “Yes, my Queen,” one of them reverently replies.

  They know how to act, too. They could all make a damn theater act on their own seem like Broadway. I should’ve seen this coming.

  The three of us—with me forced to be part of this human chain—walk together. Claw and I are assigned the role of gentlemen as we walk Grim down this walkway, and up to the building’s front windows. I can tell several soldiers have been firing out them this entire time.

  To my right, there’s someone else. One look and it’s clear he’s here against his will.

  The unknown person has a velvet sack on his head. He’s on his knees with hands tied behind his back. He’s riled vocally at the sound of our footsteps.

  “Is that you, Clouse? Clouse!” he exclaims anxiously, voice slightly muffled behind the sack.

  I can tell Claw is momentarily taken aback, but it’s short-lived. He makes haste with untangling from Grim. Claw rushes over, and takes off the head covering.

  The man’s identity is barely known to me, but I know enough of him. I know because it wasn’t that dark at Fort Washakie for me to not see his face.

  He’s the supposed AWOL soldier.

  We have something in common. We’re the ones both being victimized here.

  “It’s you!” I viscerally call out.

  I have no control over my conscious and careful movements around Grim. I realize it right as I firmly unlink my arm from Grim’s. She yelps, verbally upset from getting physically manhandled by it.

  The AWOL soldier clearly cringes to my choice of action. Two soldiers quickly snake their arms under mine, and lock their control over my neck.

  They give me no choice but to look down.

  The ground closes in on my vision. My legs are being manipulated to bend so that I’m restrained down at my knees. I shake and test their grasp of me in an animalistic fashion, trying my hardest to break free. These two ignore my purposeful slobbering over their boots, and focuses on the well-being of their “royalty”.

  The AWOL soldier shouts and strains towards Claw in apparent hopes of grabbing back his attention. It would seem his unveiling of information is important to clear up the air as to why he seems so grateful of Claw’s presence, even under his harsh circumstance of captivity.

  “Why did you do it, Clouse? The Chief was sincere he wanted to hide what you heard us talking about!”

  He triggers an instant of understanding for me. I know now what the Chief meant to me. When he stumbled to me and fell to his knees in guilt, exclaiming that someone knew what he knew. It was Claw he was referring to.

  But what did Claw overhear the Chief and this AWOL soldier talk about?

  I listen in. Claw gives a soft-spoken, but extremely callous, answer for this matter. “You have only yourself to blame. You should’ve stopped trying to find me.”

  Claw halts himself from getting further involved in this conversation. He sees Grim make a big deal over the little force I applied against her apparently fragile body.

  Silence floats in this quiet space. The AWOL soldier stutters and pants in disbelief at Claw, but I can only make it out since there’s no more gunfire at this point.

  I know every one of those active soldiers’ eyes, meant to be smoking barrels of their own, are aimed directly towards me and the AWOL soldier. He and I probably have behaved with “insolence” towards their leaders.

  Their queen pounces on the silence. She mentions she’s more “emotionally scarred” from my aggressiveness.

  “I’m your wife, Gar! You shouldn’t dare be that mean—”

  “I’m not your damn husband!” I roar, though the words have to be spewed at the ground, since my two holders refuse to let me look elsewhere.

  Rather than the message getting across, this exclamation only rivets her with sadistic chuckling, starting at the distance she was away from me, and then ending beside my right ear.

  “As I said, you’ll learn to appreciate me more.”

  She snaps her fingers, and waves a hand to have these officers rip me off the ground. They then move me over to the broken window, closest to where the AWOL soldier is positioned near.

  I don’t need to turn towards Grim’s uncomfortably close face to know she sees something in me that’s staring at him with familiarity.

  “How do you two know each other?” she asks.

  He should be with the people that were fortunate enough to flee the Fort. Why the hell is he—

  “Speak it out, darling!” Her impatient flare leaves me empty inside.

  I might as well share. It’s not like it will fix what he’s not helping gain vengeance for.

  “He was at the fort your husband took us to.” I scrape this out in a low-key tone, doing my best to smother the memories of that horrific night.

  “Which one?” A little smile grows on her lips.

  I look at her with only disgust. “I guess Claw. This guy told me about Claw’s fake tale about an army of aggressors. He seems as though he’s just as against it as I was.” I swivel my angry attention to him. “Yet, I see you here, sounding exhilarated Claw’s here!”

  He wrinkles up his face, and his eyes close as he groans in displeasure. “I…I thought I could stop this. Stop him from following through on bringing people into this�
� I thought I could also save my friend.”

  “What are you saying?” I grit out. My glare should make it clear to him that the burning coal within is ready to replenish its heat—except this time it’ll be directed towards him.

  I’m surprised he’s even allowed to answer me, much less as much as he does.

  “I went AWOL from this place about a month into our original operation here. Shortly before then, Clouse had made his way here. At this point, Grim was making it look like we were against him. That’s wasn’t true. Part of the ‘trick’ I heard her mention over by the stairs.

  “I abandoned shortly after, in hopes I could prevent what he yelled outside this building. He was going to bring an army to help free her from our unit.”

  Here he opens his eyes, but only to shut them to control the glistening within.

  “I thought I could save both him—my Sergeant and friend—and anyone he came in contact with, but only if I could learn of his whereabouts.

  “When I found the fort, I…edited…my purpose to them with what I was doing. Yes, I lied and said I was under ‘C.’ because Clouse proudly announced before he fled that he’d call his army over. And, yes, I told them I already knew where he was. Why I said that was so it wouldn’t set them off from when I constantly traveled back and forth. They would think I was bringing back intel from him, but I started saying he wouldn’t give me anymore after a while.

  “Finally, after months of searching for him, I found his location, but I knew I couldn’t just go to him. I had to draw him out with someone else. And that someone had parents who wanted me to take him on survival training, and also learn to communicate with fellow C. followers out in his setup… You should know the rest.”

  What are you saying? That you used Alex to draw Claw to the fort, risking not only yourself, but the people as well?

  With dozens of questions flooding my mind, the perplexity in my eyes has him intuitively break it down further. More regarding why he couldn’t just go AWOL and live away from this. He leans in closer to quietly, secretively, say his next words to me.