Fractured Refuge

by Annabelle McInnes

  Idiot. He was a fucking idiot.

  Kira’s cries for his help were lost to the wind as the men mobilised. Through the broken leaves that hindered Nick’s vision, Lily broke from the hold of the man she had welcomed. Holding his wild stare, she nodded once in silent affirmation. She made no sound as multiple men passed her in their track back toward the cliff. No one looked, no one touched. No voices were raised in the mayhem or in caterwauls made in chauvinistic pride at their prize. The lap of the nearby lake against a pebbled shore was still audible over the stamping footsteps. Lily let go of the hand that held hers and followed the pack into the trees. She did not glance back.

  Nick felt a strange reverence pierce the moment. The silence shifted from reserved to poignant. It unsettled him. Made him wary. The soil was cold. The leaves cracked under his cheek. He tasted blood. ‘Let me up.’

  Everything was falling apart. Euan was missing, Kira was captured. Lily had asked for trust but he was unsure of her motives. Even as he told himself to man up, he clenched his fists to still the tremor in his fingers.

  The powerhouse was before him. His shoulders were so broad they blocked out the sun. His boots were shiny despite the mud. He pulled Nick to his feet with only a hand on his nape. He wrenched himself from the man’s hold and took a step towards Kira’s retreating form. Her platinum-blonde hair was still visible through the wall of green fatigues. He might make it if he could avoid the capture of the men who surrounded him.

  ‘She’s safe.’ The deep tone had Nick snap his head towards it.

  He sneered.

  The man smirked back. ‘They’re both safer than you. You better start talking. Or you’ll never see either of them again.’

  Nick heard the truth in his tone. He turned from the white-blonde hair in the distance to his surroundings. He was alone with three men in the forest. Their fatigues were crisp, clean. Only the man who had held Nick at bay showed any evidence of humanity. His knees were wet with mud from holding Nick down in the earth. He risked one final glance towards where Kira had now disappeared in the trees. He took a step in that direction.

  ‘Ten seconds, then you’re dead.’

  It was the click of the primer that had Nick’s focus returning to the leader of this pack. His broad shoulders were relaxed as he held the revolver high. The silver barrel that met his gaze made Nick swallow. He had no reason now to hesitate. He was likely dead either way.

  ‘We believe Death and the Reaper have Euan McKay and your man John Smith.’

  ‘McKay’s the boxer?’

  Nick firmed his lips, nodded.

  Black eyes as hard as granite studied him. Nick’s pulse slowed under the scrutiny.

  Feeling returned to his fingers. The men around him shifted. Their boots crushed the brittle leaves under his feet.

  The powerhouse lowered his weapon. ‘I want twelve men with me. We’ll go the hunting cabin. That’s where they’ll take him. Tell Mickey-O his daughter is back.’ Black eyes held green. ‘Look after her friend as if she were the queen herself.’

  Chapter 24

  The agony was excruciating. It consumed his thinking, drove battering rams though his rationality. He was an animal, a primal creature. Nothing but instinct, pain and breath.

  His breath laboured. Breath that struggled through a scorched throat. Ragged gasps and rattling coughs.

  All he could taste was blood.

  All he could smell was his burning flesh.

  All he could see were shadows and smoke.

  ‘Tell me where he is.’

  The voice came to him through a dark tunnel, muffled and warped. It took time for his brain to identify the words, to register and comprehend what they were and then to decipher what they meant.

  In the end, when they did finally slot into place, it didn’t matter. Their significance was irrelevant. They would never be answered, and they only announced more agony.

  Euan uttered the reply that was the ballad to his heart, his only tether to sanity. He’d die here, but he’d die with the secrets inside his soul. ‘Never,’ he rasped.

  To his right, a boy screamed. The grievous wail was in a tone torn from body, not from mind. Tortured together, the other suffered the repercussions of answers the first concealed. He begged for their captors to take their perversions out on him, but it had only ensured Ben’s continued torment.

  Hours, days, weeks. It felt like eternity. It was eternity. Time had no meaning, measured only by the inhalations and exhalations, and the moment in between where the sweetness of a quiet death was sought.

  It all accumulated into a fusion between detachment and keen sensitivity. Where his internal suffering was only eclipsed by the torment to his body. He’d failed on so many fronts, in this, he would hold.

  He would hold.

  He would hold …

  The flames about his feet grew in intensity. He bit his tongue because his screams would turn into words.

  He swallowed the blood that pooled in his mouth.

  The heat did not relent. But his focus was forced to shift. In the darkness, through the midnight pestilence and swirls of horrific mutations of illusions that threatened his nightmares, artic eyes reached through the blackness to meet his. Bloodshot and wan, in a face that had been burned beyond comprehension, where melted skin and exposed bone had lost all familiarity.

  But Euan recognised him, and his single eye wept.

  This mountain of suffering lay solely on his shoulders.

  He may not have held the blade, the flame, the fist. But the responsibility of the mutated body before him was his alone to bear.

  Even though his own lips were ruined, he begged, ‘Please …’

  ‘Tell me,’ Rodgers crooned in reply. ‘Or I’ll make you watch.’

  The silence that followed was its own torture. The reply that would never come was a weight of infinite mass that burdened his own skeletal structure, as though it were his shoulders supporting the weight of the tin roof. His chest expanded, contracted. The walls conveyed the shift as Euan took the two breaths needed. The men in the room waited.

  When Ben gave Euan a nod, it was a nod of solidarity, a nod of acknowledgement and forgiveness. The explosion inside Euan’s chest incinerated what was left of his humanity. Monster, man, it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered. Death would be a blessing. It was an absolution that Ben was about to be graced with.

  It was cruel, and it was terrible. But before him stood one man who truly could have turned this forsaken orb of water and earth on its axis and saved the human race. His compassion and empathy a trait now lost to the world.

  Euan lifted his chin in a silent affirmation. He hoped Benjamin David Wright, a man known to him as John Smith, left on the wings of angels to the golden gates of heaven. A boy turned man who deserved to sit at the right-hand side of God.

  As Euan watched, Rodgers plunged the same blade that had taken his eye into Smith’s gut. There was a final wail, a howl to announce the ending. It was the encore for the dying and Euan’s soul cried.

  There was no air. He was in a vortex of trauma. As Smith stuttered through his last breaths, Euan was doing the same. He’d die now. But there would be no herald from God to take him from this suffering. Too much blood marred his purple palms. His mistakes, his errors and faults meant that his place was beside the devil in the torments of Hell.

  He would endure this eternal pain gladly as he witnessed the blue light drain from those artic depths.

  Forgiveness was irrelevant. The meaning of life naught but a concept for men with too much time.

  For Euan, there now was no time.

  He took his final breath as Ben’s broken and burned body crumpled to the ground.

  Tiny reverberations in the room saw those nearby move. Euan was too lost to the physical world to comprehend the retreat of the men who had hovered by while he’d bled. Rodgers stood before him, with Ben’s body between their feet, and a terrible grin split across the man’s face.

  ‘O
h, how I am going to enjoy this.’

  They were Rodgers’ last words.

  An angel crashed through the only door. Blond hair and the muzzle of a revolver consumed Euan’s limited vision.

  Rodgers’ face exploded, a single bullet in the back of his skull detonated and the entire forehead splattered Euan with gore. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. But one single thought reverberated through his traumatised skull.

  Why didn’t Nick have wings?

  His last heartbeats were to the sound of Nick’s voice as twisted features and a lean body pushed his way through the chaos, the smoke, the vileness that surrounded him.

  As blackness took him, Euan met green eyes. Gladness filled his dying heart. They were going to be the last thing he saw in this life.

  Chapter 25

  There was light and there was sound. But there was no sense to either.

  There were vibrations under his body. They shook limbs that were listless and unresponsive. His head lolled and cool hands touched his burning flesh.

  There were voices. Deep ones and soft ones, masculine and feminine. They further added to his confusion. Did angels talk so aggressively? Did the minions of the damned cry?

  A shout was made and his body jerked. The force of the machine that bore him jostled his languishing form. There were curse words from both sexes. More hands as the vibrations shuddered and slowed. Finally, everything came to a resounding halt. It included what felt like his heart.

  Then the darkness enveloped him again, and he was lost to the void.

  ***

  He was enveloped in blackness. A darkness so pure, so complete, that there was no concept of light, no perception of illumination, or temptation of its existence. He was weightless, carried by emptiness. Hot nor cold, sad nor happy. He was non-existent, just a mass that floated in a sea of nothingness.

  Thoughts were lost to him, so was perception. If he had a concept of self, it was gone, forever unobtainable. His consciousness indistinctive and mute.

  He drifted without direction, let the weightlessness of forever envelop him. After so much suffering, it was good to no longer feel fear.

  To no longer suffer …

  He had suffered. There were memories now that ticked his awareness. Initially, they were simply concepts. Then the impressions solidified. The feathers sharpened. The soft barbule that had coaxed his cognisance transformed into the claws of torment. The fangs of destruction. The blades of anarchy. They forced his comprehension into the present.

  The flash of images burned the retina of his mind’s eye …

  Bloated, diseased bodies that lay in orderly rows outside an abandoned hospital.

  A refugee camp that suffered under the weight of hopelessness and death.

  A derelict weatherboard farmhouse that sat ominously on top of a grassy hill.

  A fighting pit where macabre paintings of blood and refuse coloured the walls.

  A hunting cabin where icy blue eyes lost their light.

  The serrated blade of reality was impossible to fight. The strength behind the weapon was effervescent. It was wheeled by an invisible harbour of mayhem and cruelty. He struggled under the weight of its materiality. He was no longer able to battle eternity and was blinded by the confrontation of his existence.

  His name was Euan James McKay.

  And he loved his mother.

  A pinprick of light gradually grew in strength. The pull towards it was undeniable. But the gravitational hold to stay was equally determined. The blackness had receded and in its place the wet suction of crimson enveloped him. To stay meant to be forever stained by agony. The images of loss would be permanently branded into his body, his heart, his soul. No cleansing fluid could wash the taint away. To remain meant to accept.

  The light expanded. Its temptation was undeniable. Purity was there. So was absolution. He could find peace. True, unfathomable quiet from the thumping that beat inside his skull. To be embraced was to be free.

  And he longed for freedom.

  So his senses morphed, and his being shifted from the emptiness to the corporal. He headed toward the light, as he would head towards those that he loved.

  Nick.

  Kira.

  The reverberation of their names created an explosion inside the box of emptiness. The vortex of weightlessness and an illusion of self-detonation. The pulverising concept threw the last tendrils of illusion from his surroundings. Blackness was still there, but it was physical, the light receded and he celebrated the loss.

  Because Nick and Kira were not behind the glimmering shine. They were in the world of realism. A sphere washed in blood and pain, but one he could endure if they were by his side.

  He fought. He fought with everything his imaginings could create. Weapons of war new and old, of past and present. Armament and ammunition that were both fantasy and destructively real. To remain in this blackness was to remain lost.

  He had to seek their forgiveness before he passed into the light.

  In that, there were no other alternatives.

  ***

  It was the tingle in the tips of his fingers that brought him out the darkness. He felt it, before he sensed anything else. As the concept of what was around him slowly seeped into his consciousness, it was that tingle that kept his focus.

  Exhaustion was closely followed by pain. But he didn’t lament it. Agony meant life, thirst meant entity, hunger meant vitality.

  His tingling finger twitched.

  ‘Nicky, I think he just moved.’

  That voice. So beautiful, so pure, so perfect and wonderful. She lived. She was whole. She was talking and breathing and …

  Touching him. Yes. Those were her hands brushing over his skin. Her soft hand clasped in his.

  Thank you, God.

  ‘He’s probably just dreaming again, Pix. You know how the nightmares are.’

  If Euan could have, he would have cried out with elation. He would have whooped with gratitude and delight. His Nicky, the courageous, brave and determined man of honour. The two of them were his sanctuary, his home, his refuge.

  ‘No, seriously.’ A perfect hand caressed his jaw. ‘Euan, are you awake?’

  He pushed past his lethargy. He forced his body to respond, to heed the words uttered by a goddess who wished for her subject to perform.

  He squeezed her hand.

  Kira gasped, squeezed back. ‘He’s awake! Nick, he’s really awake! He just squeezed my hand!’

  ‘Big man? You awake?’

  There was the glorious warmth of a body his side. Heat emanated through whatever fabric covered him. Masculine fingers clasped his other hand and he squeezed in answer to the questioning grip.

  ‘Thank fuck,’ came the choked response.

  There were noises he couldn’t discern. Rustles and footsteps. He tried to open his eyes but found it impossible. An achingly familiar pressure pressed against his lax lips and he answered by firming them under the delicate, tender onslaught.

  ‘We missed you.’ Kira’s breath cooled the residue wetness.

  Words were beyond him. A grunt was her reply. Pain was slowly sleeping back into his consciousness, a remainder of the thunder that vibrated within his broken body.

  ‘You’re going to be okay now,’ her soft, beautiful voice whispered in his ear. ‘Sleep. We’ll be right here beside you.’

  He obeyed. How could he not. The darkness that consumed him was laced with grey. The light that threaded through the back was created by memories of sunshine and blond hair. He slipped back into the embrace of slumber. Soon he would awake, and soon he would hold both Nick and Kira in his arms again.

  Chapter 26

  ‘Tell me,’ Nick rasped.

  The hoarse request pulled Euan from blood-soaked dreams. His eyelids were heavy, weighed down by painkillers and nightmares that tightened their grip as he dragged himself from their embrace.

  His single working eye opened. Lily hovered over him. The snake of her tightly braided dark hair
slipped over her shoulder as she bent down towards to his reclined body. She tended to the stitches that held the stab wound closed at his shoulder. Her face was pinched with concentration. The air around him was warm, the air-filtration system working at full capacity. The beige steel hull was a familiar and welcoming sight. It encased him in both comfort and safety.

  His mouth was dry. His muscles were unresponsive. A dull ache throbbed through his feet. He pushed his thick tongue through the gaps in his teeth. Only an insignificant sting accompanied Lily’s prodding. It was the pain in his heart that produced the greatest discomfort. Nick’s rasping voice was caused by lack of sleep, of worry, of fear and concern for him. The knowledge of it tormented him as effectively as the nightmares and fever-induced hallucinations.

  Lily moved out of his line of vision and Euan closed his eye. Christ, he was tired. A bone-deep exhaustion caused by a body healing from torture. Fighting infection, combating post-traumatic stress, regenerating bone and muscle. His mind and his physique were still at war with the after-effects of his confinement with Rodgers and his followers.

  It was likely they would be for the rest of his life.

  Lily’s voice, when she spoke, sounded strained. Tired. Her presence at his bedside had been as constant as both Nick and Kira. Euan’s eye remained closed. ‘I was forced to perform a transpalpebral enucleation. I removed the optic nerve and the muscles attached as well as the surrounding layer of fascia. Essentially, the eyelids, conjunctiva and extraocular muscles along with the eyeball. We don’t have an implant to use as an artificial eye, so the reclusive muscle was sutured. I’ve closed the wound but the scarring will be significant.’

  Euan’s fingertips tingled. The weight of the air changed. He remembered the fire in Nick’s eyes when he crashed through the hunting cabin’s chipboard door. And then their utter despair when he discovered what was inside.