by Jack Lance
He watched for a long time as the close orb of the planet sunk downward and the rest of the moons changed positions in ways that felt right but couldn’t be fathomed to look at.
The skies began to dim as evening approached and for the first time Bailey felt a coldness move through him.
How can we work such a bleak and smelly place?
Ignoring the coldness Bailey stood up and slung a small pebble out through the wide gap and watched it arc through the air toward the planets above.
“I’m not very good company, am I?” Bailey said as he walked around the enormous, encased feet of the thing.
Outside a storm suddenly engulfed the prison, with the winds knocking Bailey forward slightly before steadying himself and huddling in the huge jacket.
“That won’t do. You must get out of here quickly.” it said, and already Bailey could feel the cold grasping at his flesh through the layers.
Suddenly he was startled by the sound of the door below opening and footsteps walking up the long stair.
Bailey walked backward toward the Grey as men poured into the room from the metal stairwell hut. They were the ‘cattle’ he had met earlier, only now they had brought all of their friends, that made up a large contingent of this tiny unit. They looked vacant and prejudiced, and didn’t seem worried about the icy drafts.
“How about we finish what we started sweet cheeks.” the man that fitted Pokey’s voice said while rubbing a deep scar along his chin. They were all glaring at him with a strange sort of amusement.
Now is the time to kill. The cattle deserve to die. Feel that?
Bailey looked at the alien over his shoulder and said “I’m sorry you had to see this.”
He then turned to the crowd and began bobbing on his feet while slapping his hands together.
Behind the crucified alien the razors of the snow blizzard were misting into the room, threatening to kill them all if it grew any more freezing.
The crowd moved at him calmly at first, and Bailey met the first, tugging at their shoulder with one hand while planting his fist through their face with the other. The next he elbowed on the soft crown of the head, and then the next and the next were dispatched until he was so surrounded that he had to use the fallen as shields, kicking them into some of the crowd to divide them into more easily manageable groups.
Eventually he had killed them all but two. Pokey had retreated to the back with a particularly tall and muscular man. He growled and ran at Bailey without any sense or fear, with his huge friend at his side.
Bailey waited until they were close, and then dived down while twisting the back of his calves to strike Pokey’s legs. Pokey tripped and fell through the air, bouncing once on the ice before sliding up to the base of the crucifix. The tall man, a little disorientated stopped and watched with Bailey as the long, thin claws of the creatures feet burst out of the ice and wrapped around Pokey’s face. He screamed and grabbed at the toes as they squeezed tighter around his skull. The pressure built until the blood burst from his head.
The taller, shaking man lunged at Bailey, who caught him and twisted him around in his own momentum. He stumbled across the blood soaked ice on the floor, and was making to get back up when Bailey ran and kicked him hard on the butt, throwing him forward toward the freezing blizzards beyond the gaps. He tripped and stumbled through one of the openings and immediately froze as the cold winds found him. The freezing liquids within him expanded causing his body to bust out and grow like a tree from the outer ledge.
Bailey stepped back in horror at the strange sight, and began panting uncontrollably.
“Was that you in my head? How did I?” Bailey’s voice quivered as his fearful eyes flicked here and there. “No. It wasn’t you. What the hell am I thinking?”
“You have to get out of here, Bailey.” it said while looking at him with a sadness.
“How could you have survived this torture?” Bailey said, looking at the harsh storms that it must have suffered countless times. “Oh God! The Lantis are doomed, aren’t we?”
“It’s not just your species, Mr Bailey.” it said as Bailey stood panting, looking over what he seemed to have done. “I was a spy. I have seen many planets, and all are the same. Bloody dramas without an audience. You want to do some good in this universe?”
Bailey looked at the once majestic Grey alien hanging above it all, and stood up straight. It was looking at him with those sad, knowing eyes.
“Now me.” it said, and cocked its head slightly, revealing its emaciated neck.
Bailey walked closer to it crouching hard against the storm. He placed the frozen laddering at its side and then climbed up until he was at its head height, and then reached across to its throat.
It was panting thick fog into the cold air, and seemed to grow more exited as the moment of its death drew near. Bailey sank his fingers into its leathery hide and twisted hard on its spine. His strength was immense for his size, being enough to snap the huge spinal column, killing it instantly. Its head flopped aside onto his wrist, and he slowly pulled his hand away.
He left it hanging there with the litter of dead cattle around the floor at its feet, and then solemnly made his way back down to the cells.
He stood and waited in his cord jeans and t shirt until night fell, and then it was time.
My time.
Bailey could hear the voices of Zep Teppi and his two goons somewhere, in another corridor.
They don’t live in these cells, you moron.
“Lockdown in 5, 4, 3…” Bailey listened to it and then casually stepped outside of his cell.
The plate slid up covering the door and then the window slit. He stood outside of the barricaded cells in the corridor, and then turned and made his way to the top of the stairwell. The voices of the three men were approaching from the next corridor over, and so he quickly crept down to the bottom level.
He took the stairs down to the basement level and tried what he believed to be the default manufacturers code for that keypad system. It returned an electronic groan as the code failed and so Bailey made a decision.
Hide. Watch. Wait.
Carefully navigating the wooden floor boards, he sat in the far back corner beside the tank containing the lime stained pond. He balanced where he crouched on a plank of wood over the dark precipice, near where the excess of the pond was drained out in a series of sluices, each dropping away into the darkness below.
Bailey crouched just outside of the green glow and waited.
Eventually he saw the backwash of the flickering lights from Zep Teppi’s head reflecting over the stairs. Then the two goons came down into sight, and walked across to the keypad, not seeing Bailey in the shadows. The lights of the brain of Zep the robot faded, as he walked away into his unit.
The rat faced goon entered a key code as Bailey watched, then both men entered the doorway. It then slid forcefully shut, and the keypad reset to its dim green glow.
12, 14, 2, 19, 20, 2, 14, 8, 18, 18, 6
“I know. I don’t know how I could have seen that but I know.” Bailey said out aloud.
He walked to the door and pushed his fingers through a grating near the top. There was warm air moving over his fingers beyond the door.
Do it now.
“I mustn’t!” Bailey cried out as he reached up to input the code.
The door slid aside and Bailey found himself looking into the eyes of both officers, standing at the far side of a warmly lit corridor before an open doorway to what looked like a much larger cavern. There was a hollow echoing of what had to be a pretty huge place beyond.
The old amber strip lighting overhead flickered and buzzed, as Bailey looked over the eyes of each of the goons. Nobody said a word as they stared at one another in the dusty corridor. Just that buzzing, that almost seemed to swallow up the other more natural sounds.
They both then walked toward him side by side, flexing their fists for what would only be a harsh manhandling back to his cell.
; A tear escaped Bailey’s eye as the two men drew close enough to touch, and then they stopped and looked at one another for a moment.
The smaller man filled with energy and swung a punch toward him, but somehow Bailey grabbed it, and twisted his whole body around in its own massive momentum. An arrowed hand found a pressure point on his neck sending him back and out of the way, giving Bailey just enough time to finish the job with the other.
The big man grinned and loomed toward the smaller balding figure of Aaron Bailey. By the time the other had righted himself, the big man’s head was a battered mess. Bailey looked shaking and shivering at his hands covered in the man’s blood.
The last officer saw that he wasn’t going to be able to control the situation and leapt to press a punch button on the wall. A strange bell suddenly started to ring outside in the big cavern, and the heavy, rusted door to the outside slowly began to slide down over.
Bailey ran for it, landing a punch on the cowering rat faced officer as he passed. He hit the floor, dead behind him as he sprinted for the slowly lessening gap between the floor and the door.
The corridor seemed like treacle to run through, and the buzzing of the warm light dragged his psyche back.
He leaped feet first, skidding in sand through the door, and out, where he slid to a stop on the concrete beyond. The door moved down into its locking position with a heavy slam.
Straight away in the silence of the new place he heard that strange, off-tone chime of a large bell.
You will see. Look.
Bailey sucked cool, dusty air into his lungs and turned around to look up at the outer wall of the place he had just escaped from.
There was a text painted in massive lettering on the wall space between the cold concrete expanse he lay upon and the old beamed ceiling high above.
It read “Red Sector: Psycho Wing” just below the huge rocking bell, rusted and old, chiming out into the cavern.
Panicking Bailey kicked and scrambled to get away from the place. He ran blindly out into the dark cavern along the expansive concrete flooring, before coming to piles of coal and soot which he would have to climb over if he wanted to continue in this way.
High above him a flock of seagulls began complaining loudly in their way, as they circled in the low light looking for something to scavenge.
A dome. A lie. This huge cave could swallow that unit twenty times or more, and must be the first of many in this geographical imprisonment. Where in hell are you?
He began to stagger between the gullies in between the piles, careful not to breathe in when one of the many gusts of strange wind in the giant cavern kicked up enough of the dust that lay over them.
Time passed slowly and he walked far through them in a direction he judged to be away from that door. He gradually felt the moisture seep out of him and without any water in sight in the cold dark place he had no option to push on despite it. He staggered onward, eventually catching sight of the far side, and a relatively small light high in its wall.
As he grew nearer to it he found it to be a wide opening with a balcony looking out over the expanse from which he had come. Two flights of steel steps squarely spiralled down to the cavern floor.
Bailey dizzily walked away from the last of the soot piles toward the leftmost stairwell. It sat in the ground a meter or so away from the huge bricks that made up the outer wall and ceiling of the gigantic cave.
Ahead, the huge wall of the cavern stretched away into the darkness to either side and above with only the small rectangle of light half way up. Behind him now, the low moan of the circulating air over dusty desert steadily rattled the ancient metal pillars that held aloft the roof of the place here and there.
He could hear low voices travel on the wind from up on the balcony, although looking he could only see the backs of a group leaning against the balcony wall.
Bailey walked up the steps trying not to make a great deal of noise, and alarm whoever it was.
Once at the top he found a group of younger men and women, all painted heavily on their bare arms, legs and face. They had a similar vacant look to the cattle gang he had faced off in Red Sector, but he doubted fate would be so unkind after such a tiring marathon.
Skate punks. Insult them.
Bailey stood staring at them, as one of them noticed and gestured curiously to the rest. Others looked at him, with one of the girls smiling a kind smile.
I brought you this far.
“Um…” Bailey said in confusion as he stepped across the balcony before them, and then through the gap in the mighty wall to the cavern on the other side, where a similar balcony looked out into a slightly better lit place. His eyes were sore as they adjusted to the change of luminance, and slowly he found more and more of those shapes the alien had heard.
Chimneys of factories could be seen immediately, and in the closest street below, Bailey saw a bus pull away from a stop, hissing with an archaic engine that seemed juxtaposed to the high tech nature of the colony itself.
Within the overall dome it was another large cavern that hummed with machinery of industry, and distant fairground music.
At the height of the balcony in its wall, the fairground and its four enormous merry go rounds could be seen beyond two industrial units, that billowed smoke up to a haze at the stone ceiling far above. From there at the top of a hillside where the true colony no doubt began, the whole cavern was packed tightly with factory units separated by narrow, badly kept roads, and two dry river beds running from storm drainage sluices at the top of the slope. They led to the main storm drainage river below the platform, which was dry enough to cross at this time of year. The steps to the balcony hung down into where the waters would have been, providing a meagre access to the soot fields and the psycho wing deeper in the dome shell.
On looking closer Bailey saw that same design of robot as his former jailor, Zep Teppi. He cringed against the balcony rail, realizing that the place before him was full of these things.
Standard, archaic design of service droid. Wirelessly networked, sadly. If they catch us, they’ll kill us. Or worse, send us back into that nowhere place. I can help, but you must do as I say.
Behind, he heard crazy, piercing laughter from the punks.
I said, insult them. I want you to trust me. Mind, body and soul. Unquestioningly.
“Who the hell…” Bailey panted uncontrollably as he turned away from the colony to look back at the gang of tattooed yobs.
“He… Ur… Hey!” Bailey started. “You look like a paint and decorating accident.”
No more lies. Now it’s my turn to drive.
The gang looked at each other calmly before pushing from the balcony ledge and approaching him, the men walking ahead of the girls.
How can we work such a world? These bleak and smelly lives worth so little even to themselves. How can you win? We’ll see.
Bailey chuckled hopelessly and said “Okay. I’ll trust y…”
He was halted as one of the gang, smiling, hit him over the head with a thin steel rod that he had seemingly produced out of nowhere.
All of the gang had a chance to take out their aggression on Bailey’s unconscious body, until eventually they stole what little was in his pockets and stripped him of his shirt and pants.
They then lifted his naked body to the balcony edge, and onto its thin stone wall. The noise of metal liquor crates sliding to and fro in bulk echoed in the cold air, as the gang threw Bailey’s naked body over the side. It fell down alongside the web of scaffolding that propped up the platform from the river.
They watched, morbidly hoping to see it impact on the concrete, but some of the rusty scaffold was reaching out a little from the rest. Bailey’s naked body dropped into these, and slumped over one of the poles, where he hung unconscious over this outer city district
“Meow.” one of the girls said and looked at the others.
From the Depths, From The Dust…
“C’mon Spunkers! Let’s make it! Oh yeah!” a
young man skated fast along a pipe in the storm drainage system below the colony He was wearing oil stained work pants, shirt and bracers, and his head was encased in the gaseous haze of a hologram mask, with its mess of spinning infograms and commercials flickering in the low light. “The path is there and it’s meant to be shared!”
He skated swiftly around each curved turn in the pipe, eventually finding a ramp leading up through a wide doorway into one of the huge caverns. He flew up it, leaping out high over a yard full of storm drain service robotics, and with enough momentum over the yard wall and down into the fairground opposite. The wheels of his rollerblades landed hard on its wet wooden circle, slowly spinning. It was one of a couple in the lame, mainly unused fairground. They had been turning slowly in their way since they were created along with the colony, long before it had been converted into a prison.
The young man slid off the edge through one of the gaps in the wood walls, and landed on the gentle slope between it and the mainly empty ribbons leading to the gateway to a rollercoaster. The coaster swung by on its robotically timed journey as he passed.
With a short kick to the concrete he accelerated toward the large arched gateway leading out of the fairground, atop a sloping bank, that led down to the outermost wall of the prison city.
“Spunkers! Spunkers! Don’t care anymore!” he sang loud as he went. The robot attendant within the ghosttrain shed glanced at him as he passed, and left the place. The droid was much the same as Zep Teppi, but with a much reduced role, here selling tickets in a fairground.
The skater launched out with speed onto the main road and then into a small parking lot opposite.
With a few more kicks to the concrete he had built up enough speed to jump onto the front of one of the parked automobiles and launch up from the cracked windscreen over the fence at the end of the lot. He landed hard on the steep slope of a dry river bed, that would be fed at times by a grated hole from the storm drainage system. He rolled fast down the smooth concrete, which skaters such as himself used regularly to build up enormous amounts of speed. It led for a long way, and after a dangerous few moments of speeding he reached the bottom, where the river ran in tributary to the main emergency storm drainage river.
