“Here, take this,” Michaels shouted, handing John a new rifle.
It was unlike the one that he had been using. Shorter in length, it was unusually light, even for a weapon of its size.
“You’d better shoot fast,” Crawford sneered. “Who knows, these may have been the ones that killed Sofia.”
With their usual laughter, the men hastened out of the room with Michaels closing the heavy, steel door behind them. The radial latch was turned on its center, engaging the locking hubs. John was left all alone in the kill house.
After a minute of waiting, the soldier’s voice blared through the overhead speaker, “You’ve got ninety seconds to eliminate all of them. If there’s more than one left, the gas goes on, and every one of you will be coughing your lungs out.”
The overhead lights at the mid-way point in the room flashed on, revealing once again the piles of both fresh and decayed bodies that John had been forced to use as targets over the past several weeks. The once clean walls and floors were now pockmarked with bullet holes and splattered with layers of dried blood and fleshy fragments. Each hour he had to remove the men and women from the target-frames and dump them wherever he saw fit. Then he had to endure the pain of watching more innocent victims, crying and vomiting their way onto the range, strapped into place by their escorting captors, left alone like worthless meat for him to devour. At night he slept among the dead. They were his constant companions. Death never left his side.
The paper target coverings for his victims were no longer used. That was part of the conditioning of the soul that was necessary in the beginning. He now had to look them in their eyes while he pulled the trigger. Their mouths were no longer taped shut, drowning out their screams. That was required to help ease him into the savage beast that he was becoming. Death came fast and furious once the shooting began. Acquiring and eliminating his targets was now a rote maneuver: ten targets, ten shots, seven seconds, twenty targets, twenty shots, fifteen seconds. There was no longer any thought required by him, he could practically perform the task of ending a man’s life in his sleep.
The screaming men and women that hung before him were no different than the last set, or the set that preceded them. After hundreds upon hundreds of kills, they were becoming merely sacks of fluids with sounds emanating from them. John had to force his mind to accept that they were non-human, otherwise there was no way he could endure what he was doing.
The smell of rotting carcasses heavily engulfed the stale air of the range, but John had grown accustomed to it. It no longer bothered him. Suicide was ruled out as an option from the very start, as the electricity would flow the moment he attempted to place the barrel of his firearm anywhere near his head.
The new day had brought with it an unusual test from Crawford and Michaels: ninety seconds, four targets to eliminate, a feat that seemed laughably simple. Ninety seconds. That’s a long time, John thought, lifting the rifle to his shoulder. As he began to take aim, the volume of angst among his prey began to rise. After placing the front sight of his weapon upon the first target, he was ready to commence with the test. As he began to place tension upon the trigger, he could hear what sounded like the door at the back of the range bursting open followed by shouts of various inflections. Several soldiers were rushing inside, taking cover behind the bodies of the dead.
With the crack of a pistol, a bullet whizzed past John’s head, flattening out like a lead pancake against the thick steel door behind him before falling to the concrete floor. John’s instincts took over and he began running towards the nearest pile of corpses. Leaning into the bodies, he could feel the vibrations against his shoulder as several bullets burrowed deep into the thick of his fleshy cover. Peering around the corners of the decaying and crumbling heads, he could make out the movement of four soldiers, two of which were moving towards his flank. Their weapons were drawn and their eyes appeared unnaturally fearful. Another shot tore into the skull of his cover, sending brain matter and bony fragments splashing into his face.
Wiping the blood from his eyes, John dropped his weapon’s magazine into his hand. Michaels had left him only three rounds. He thought the firearm felt too light. That rotten, little… John thought, as he locked it back into the receiver’s well. Pulling the charging handle, he chambered one of the few cartridges available to him.
“Thirty seconds passed, John. You’d better move fast,” Crawford mocked.
The shouting of his enemies was intense, drowning out the screams of the living targets that hung across the range. The actions and the unusual terms that these so-called soldiers were using in their amateurish communications were a dead giveaway that they were miners and Basket Town women fighting for their lives, not formally trained individuals as their uniforms were made to imply. It helped him that they were unintentionally revealing their locations. Every scream, every shot, was an invisible path that John would use to lead him to the kill.
Raising the rifle up to his cheek John listened to the footsteps of the lead man as he cautiously approached his position. Some of the hanging targets were urging the miner to move faster, cautioning him as to John’s whereabouts. The enemy was in close range now, perhaps within three meters or less, he thought.
“Thirty seconds to gas,” the voice blared through the loudspeaker.
John silently peered over his rifle’s sights. Strafing out of his cover and firing in a single swift motion, the shot tore into the man’s head, dropping his body to the ground. Lifeless and bathing in his pooling gore, his death sent the hanging targets into a wave of terrified howling.
Attempting to run for cover, the other “soldiers” fled in a disorderly display of wild commotion, blindly firing their handguns towards John’s general direction. Wildly spraying throughout the room, their bullets unintentionally pierced the walls, the dead piles and the living targets.
Taking careful aim, a second man fell in tune with the echoing report of John’s rifle. Then the third, a woman, flipped head over heals after the bullet’s impact, another addition to the rotting mess that surrounded her body.
Running towards his first fallen victim, John threw his rifle down and slid through the blood. Scooping up the man’s pistol, he controllably blew off cover-fire while attempting to reach another pile of death for safety.
As he checked the magazine’s cartridge quantity, he heard a single shot fired from the enemy’s direction, but there was no discernable impact of the bullet anywhere near him.
As more than thirty seconds passed, John waited in accepted anticipation for the incoming gas of doom to fill his lungs. He was ready to suffer… but his time did not come.
“I guess you scared her to death, John,” Crawford’s voice belched out in disgust. “That’s too bad. Now finish off the rest of the targets so we can get onto the next phase in your training.”
Pulling himself up by the arm of one of the corpses piled in front of him, John could see the last remaining “soldier” lying between the stacks of destroyed lives. The self-inflicted wound at the side of the woman’s head was evidence that she never intended to do him any harm. He tried to remain emotionless, but he found it difficult to hide his feelings when his soul, his essence of being John, was so close to being lost.
The moisture was building up at the inner corners of his eyes as he gathered up the pistols of the Planet’s fallen citizens. Ignoring the pleading cries of his “targets”, he wiped away the tears for the last time and walked over to the bench, dropping the weapons down upon it.
“Hurry up. We don’t have all day,” Michaels urged him with sadistic anticipation.
Dropping the magazine of one of the pistols, he checked its cartridge count and placed it back into the receiver. As he lifted the weapon, placing his sights on the first of several targets, the screaming and wailing heightened. With a moment of inaction on his part, John knew the electrical shock would soon be upon him. He would eventually give in to their torturous methods and take the lives of these innocents. It was one
of the one few things in his life that he could be sure of. But as he stood there, a conductor of the symphony of pain, the orchestra of screams should have been deafening, but he couldn’t hear a sound.
The reddened tenderness caused by the acne that had grown upon Sofia’s fair skin was rather disturbing at first sight. Maryanne had told her that it was a normal part of the pregnancy and that it would probably clear up some time in the near future, before the baby was born. Not the type of person possessing a characteristic vanity, Sofia still wanted to be attractive to John, even on the aesthetic level. Her breasts were sore and swollen, as well. And, although there was very little she could do to contain it, she felt the pangs of hunger almost every second of the day.
Checking the tick-marks that she had scraped onto one of the hidden bars underneath the mattress of her cot, Sofia counted out seventy-seven days without her love. Other than the original news that Maryanne had given to her several weeks earlier, there was nothing more that her contact could tell her about John’s condition or whereabouts.
Depression was difficult to fight against, and crying herself to sleep was more and more becoming the only way she could obtain the rest that her body required of her. The fieldwork was also becoming stale and repetitive. And the frequent urination that she was beginning to experience was making it difficult to keep her mind busy at the tasks that she was assigned to.
Maryanne seemed to notice that Sofia was going further under the weather with each passing day. Sofia had heard her whispering on several occasions during the night meetings with her contact, stating to him that it was imperative that he find something out about John’s present condition in order to soothe Sofia’s heart and mind. And while the agent was agreeable as to Maryanne’s request, his frequent nighttime visits were of little value in that regard.
Fearful of losing her to the darkness of overwhelming grief, one night Maryanne confided in Sofia about her involvement with several members of the Security, especially her contact and dedicated mate, Stephen, and the secretive organization that was networking throughout the various levels of the planet’s governing agencies. She explained to her that, within the currently governing command pyramids, there were hundreds of men and women working to overthrow the powers-that-be from the top down.
“Several well-placed individuals,” Maryanne told her, “are attempting to obtain the identities and the locations of the leaders of a place called Golden World, to bring them to justice.”
Maryanne went on to explain about the workings of Basket Town. And, although it was poverty stricken and violent, “There are places far worse than here,” she said. “Where there is no light of hope.”
To live in Basket Town, Maryanne explained, a woman only needed to be fertile. Once she passed her time, she was sent to die at a place called Red. Some believe this to be another planet, some a distant part of their own world, others, a euphemism for extermination.
The Security agents were the ones that executed all the orders against the citizenry. Although they could have any woman in the town at any time they chose, their leaders enjoyed marking out certain days at random throughout the year for letting all the agents loose upon the city. The women called them Savage Days. The agents called it R&R. During these terrifying times, convoys of transporters would roll into the city, releasing thousands of agents from their iron bellies. Any woman that did not appear to be carrying was supposed to be free game. But as the years went by, most of the agents would ravage any woman they came across, whether she was carrying or not. But Stephen was among those men that refused to add to the miserable existences of the citizenry of the town.
During one of the Days of Savagery, she told Sofia, he found her while she was hidden among the refuse of an alleyway. Speaking kindly to her, he soon convinced her that he would do her no harm, and he soon became, not only her personal contact, but also her confidant, avowed husband and doorway into the secretive underworld.
As the years went by, they bore several male offspring, but there was no possible way for them to keep the children from eventually being taken during the raids.
“But these days will change,” she said. “Everything will become what it had once been, only better.”
After her short synopsis regarding the current situation, Maryanne’s tale took them back to the alleged roots of all their problems. Intrigued with her story, Sofia listened, wide-eyed, but skeptical.
Seemingly fantasy in nature and bordering on the mythological, Maryanne began by recounting the tales of the other worlds that she had become learned in through her childhood upbringing and the small details that she gathered during her encounters with Stephen: a Red Planet where war continually unfolded, and another world, called Golden, where, it was assumed, the richest of men and women were gathered. She even seemed to be mentioning Labor by the description she was giving, but she called it Blue.
Upon hearing the names Red and Golden, Sofia interrupted her, explaining that she and John had come across thousands of crates bound for these two places. She explained how they thought that they were merely cities that existed somewhere on Labor’s planet. Giving a brief account of her and John’s journey on the flying craft and their home hidden in the woods, she described the weapons of war that they had found inside the crates marked Red, and the sweet treats that she and John shared together from Golden’s boxes, one of the many luxuries of the short-lived experiences that the two of them had together.
The stories that Maryanne had been handed down were seemingly reassured in their truths by the affirmation of Sofia’s own words. She had been shown the blacked out names that had once been stenciled on the walls of their room and on the wood panels of the buildings outside. Maryanne also had Sofia’s description of the crates stored in the air transporter and of those hauled on the backs of the vehicles of Sofia’s native planet.
Seemingly relieved to know that her mother had not given her the watered-down analogical version, or the simplistic, localized account, Maryanne appeared to feel more confident in her presentation.
She continued with her narrative well into the night. According to the commonly held belief of the women of Basket Town, though, not all of them, she stressed, there was the same line of thinking regarding these other worlds: Red Planet’s wars were planned and executed under the strict terms of the ruling class so as to be perpetual in nature.
“It’s believed that it’s a method,” she said, “for keeping the population in fear, and its growth under control. It’s also a means for entertaining the blood lust of the wealthy.”
“It was said to exist with a soil of a deep burgundy hue, its waters run red, like the blood of the billions of men and women slain upon it over ages unknown.”
While layers of similar stories with varying details obscured its ancient history, Maryanne unfolded the story to Sofia according to the traditions that her own mother had taught her.
“Red Planet,” she explained, “was once a thriving world filled with peaceful cities and villages that functioned in a spiritual and economic security under the Ruler of Goodness. It was eventually overthrown by a foreign military that was motivated by power and greed.”
Taking Sofia by the hand, Maryanne walked her over to the window, pulling back its cloth covering and revealing the millions of stars twinkling in the night sky, and the thousands of wishing stars that polluted its beauty.
“They invaded from an unknown planet hidden deep within the blackness of space.”
She went on to describe “the corralling of the conquered peoples into the military’s great transporters, sending them to the planet Raw, where they were further separated according to their sexes. The women were settled into what would come to be known, after hundreds, if not thousands, of years, as Basket Town, while the men were forced deep into the underground to mine for necessary elements.”
“Raw was the name designated to the planet upon which we now live. It was so called due to the vast amounts of usable resources that exist in it
s valleys and hills. It also houses an immense water system that only flows near the soil’s surface under the flatlands, giving that area its fertility.”
“It was under this prodigious project,” Maryanne continued to explain, “that the industry of Planet Blue came into existence. The brightest, most intelligent of the peoples were sent to its walled domain to engineer the weapons for war, and oversee the construction of the tools and systems that would keep the economies functioning in their proper orders.”
“It was the workings of the laboring classes of Red, Blue and Raw that would keep the peoples of Golden World bathing in their unending luxury, oblivious to the sufferings of their subjects, wild and extravagant in their living, morally bankrupt in their souls.”
“In order to keep their materialism alive, they knew that they needed to keep their slaves’ population growing,” she continued to explain.
“The self-anointed overseers allowed for festivals several times a year, permitting the conquered men and women to unite for one week per event. As the growth of the peoples began to exceed their expectations, however, the multi-annual times of meeting were put to an end, and the ruling military was given the task of making sure that the population would remain true to their original plans.”
“As for the benevolent Ruler and his son, it was said that they fled into the burning heat of the Great Star, along with their armies. There, the Soldiers of Goodness await their orders to seize back their Ruler’s position among the heavenly bodies. The existing governing agency would continue its dominion until the time of their return: the day when the Ruler would become Savior, and would restore peace once again.”
Sofia hung on every word that Maryanne spoke. As they communed together late into the night and early into the next morning, Sofia found her stories to be almost too incredible to be true, yet they were exhilarating to her soul. A history of which she had never known, an explanation for her whole existence was being delineated to her. Her only wish was that John could be by her side, listening. These, she believed, were the answers that he had been seeking.
The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey Page 25
