by Wayne Hill
Tommy continues his stocktake and finds a small silver packet of food, which is awful, but has in it all the things the body requires. A medical bag is attached to the outside of the pack, the symbol of the USA on the front, glimmering in the light. He scowls at it, cursing under his breath, swearing to never use their things to heal himself — even if his arm is hanging off. He unzips the pack to look at what is in there. There is a jar of unguent to treat minor scrapes. He pops the top off it and pettily empties it on to the floor, throwing the jar away for good measure. As he moves aside various bandages, tucked away, under various other medical survival equipment, he finds a letter clearly written in his mother’s scrupulous hand.
Tommy stares, swallowing hard and choking back a sob, as he firmly zips the letter back into the bag. He gulps down the last of the water from his flask, then he lodges it in the roof of the shelter to capture some more water for his long journey to the other side of the Island. He sucks at his fingers, rubbing the remnants of the sticky jam away on the legs of his cadet uniform pants. Grimacing, he paints the troubled look of a person many years his senior onto his face, eyes transfixed on the bag. He imagines what horrors lie in wait in those Goddamned words.
Tommy points the joining rods towards the fire, from the opening of his den, and releases another fireball into the boat campfire. He darts out into the rain and throws several large logs on the fire, with accompanying hissing, as if the flames get have an opinion on this.
“I’m reading it! Fuck it! I don’t care!” Tommy says to the stoic, non-judgmental flames. He springs back into the den and feverously fishes out his mother’s letter. Drenched now from the bitter storm, but not cold, Tommy reads the letter, and his head begins to pound and heat up. The embarrassment and shame he felt in the court overwhelms him once more. He remembers again, with heart-rending detail, his mother crying in court. She is the one person in this world who has his back, the one person who he trusts — and she is heartbroken by his actions.
Still reading, his shame is soon turned to self-pity, as Mary Salem proclaims her unconditional love for Tommy, but that she does not know how to deal with the loss of her son, her only child. He pauses, his heart screaming for his mother’s pain. Her loss. His loss!
During this pause he notices that there is writing on the other side. Thinking it might be more from his mum, he flips the page over, but the hand there is clearly the severe, angled copperplate of his father. As he reads, he notes the tone is altogether dissimilar to that used by his mother. His father writes in a dismissive, emotionless, tone. Practical to the point of inanity, insulting his son’s prodigious intellect. There were warnings of the dangers of the forest and, beyond that, the Lanes, and the surrounding areas of the coast. After that, the letter becomes an attack on his behaviour. His father said Tommy’s vast intelligence and creative genius in many fields of invention, which had opened doors to golden opportunities, were sabotaged by his ‘unpredictable, destructive tendencies combined with unfathomable hubris.’ Instead of love, his father was telling him things he already knew and committing an assassination of his character.
The EPC starts to make a Vrrrrrr noise. Tommy clasps the letter harder than he has squeezed anything before. He squeezes until his knuckles crack and whiten. He grasps it as if the words might fuse with his flesh, like the liquid integrated circuits that are coursing through him, but the words remain inert and alien. He crushes the letter, as if somehow this would change his father’s harsh words into something better — but ... no. This message is the final push. Despite all of Tommy’s intellect and subtlety of mind, the last word is always with the father. The final tipping of Tommy’s ill-balanced mental state, the final judgement of his character, he lets his anger better his sense as he springs out of his den. He moves as if in a dream.
“Hubris?” he shouts at the nearest tree, as he projects his hurt emotions upon a wooden version of his father. CerebroTech stymied by this non-command, his arm shudders in confusion of what is being asked.
“I’ll show you fucking hubris!” A ball of violet energy blasts out, and the tree explodes.
He rubs at his throbbing head with his left hand. His eyes clamp shut as the rain bombards his upturned face. The storm cooling his mood for a little while, he tries to calm himself. But the words keep coming. Words of hurt come spewing into his head, from his father, words of mourning, seemingly unending, pour into his mind from his mother’s broken heart. These words are a tempest in Tommy’s head — a maelstrom of the mind — and they cause his mental well-being to topple into the furnace flames at the core of him. There, a fiery face looks deep into his soul, reading those painful, burning words ... and smiles.
4
Tommy’s primal scream is so loud it feels like a bomb going off in his head. His MechVision, acting on his unspoken, mental commands, chooses a target — an arborary representation of his father. Glowing violet orbs of raw energy streak from his arm and reduce the tree to flying shards. Another target is selected and instantly destroyed, consumed in a flash of raw, uncontrollable, violet lightning: the mighty power of his Eternal Power Clamp.
Trees fragment in all directions. Some embed themselves in Tommy, but he is numb. His fierce rage keeps him standing despite the mounting injuries he is sustaining. Peppered by pieces of tree, he turns in a semi-circle, spreading oblivion in his wake, rain lashing across his face. Tasting his own blood but unable — unwilling — to stop, Tommy spins, screaming and firing. Trees die. Animals and insects sheltering in the trees are vaporised. His elemental fury is the channelled despair of the memory of every night he had spent in the facility’s shadow: carrying out their commands, witnessing their atrocities. All this hate — this division — flows through his conflicted self to the contrapuntally-named ‘joining tool’ on his arm.
He levels everything in sight, at the centre of an expanding sphere of destructive violet light, and this chaos unfurls to the sound of laughter.
An ancient and evil laugh, welling from deep within him.
Tommy never feels the blow to the back of his head. There is a hollow noise of impact and a strong vibration that shakes his eyeballs in their sockets and expels the air from his lungs. Then there is just the welcome embrace of darkness. Release from thought, from feeling —from pain. Then ...
...dragging...
...weightlessness...
...blurred images of trees passing at high speed.
Warm blood is coursing from his skull, stinging his eyes. His battered body aches with the pain of a thousand shrapnel wounds as the adrenaline leaves his bloodstream.
His breathing slows and he is in a state of confusion — clearly concussed and in shock. He is only vaguely aware of his jerky movement through the forest canopy.
Tommy is being thrown over branches and caught as if his weight is nothing! Being upside down, slumped over the right shoulder of the speedy fiend who assaulted him, the blood flows down to — and out of! — his head. His head pounding, Tommy alternates between consciousness and the dark place that no one escapes from for long.
Sometimes he hears his heart thumping away in his temples, rhythmically pumping away his lifeblood from his head wounds. Sometimes, somehow, he hears the powerful and steady beat of his captor’s alien heart through his hard, scaly back. Scaly? Maybe he was hallucinating?
Blood loss, and the building pressure in Tommy’s skull, becomes too much for him. Darkness creeps in on him once more, and this time he does not wake for a long time.
Tommy’s consciousness edged towards him as timorously as a mouse. Senses recognised things piecemeal, as if putting together a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle. The soothing pulse of waves on rock. The harsh shrieks of distant seagulls. The strong iodine tang of seaweed in his nostrils.
He struggles to open both eyes. Only one of his eyes obeys, revealing the warring collage of dark, green grey, flecked with white, of the storm-tossed sea as it smashes on the rocks far below him. It is jerkily getting nearer. He is in a m
akeshift sling, slick with rain, and is slowly being winched down a cliff face. Struck with confusion and fear, he tries to look round to see the person responsible. Halfway down the cliff faces, a powerful man swings him outwards, toward the sea. Too weak to scream, Tommy lets out a startled whimper as the sling that is carrying him streaks out and then, suddenly, turns and heads back, pendulum-like. Arms and legs bound, he knows that he is going to be smashed head-first into the cliff-face, but he cannot prevent it.
Tommy braces himself as he sees the cold, unfeeling wall of the cliff approaching at speed, and then ... warmth. No impact. No bone-grinding collision. No more rain. Only gentle hands holding him. Shadows dance in the cave’s firelight and Tommy notices bustling figures speaking in a foreign tongue. He flails, helplessly. Too weak. Fading fast. His brain hazily notes an unwanted damage report from his MechVision, and he sinks once more into the painless oblivion of unconsciousness.
For days he seesaws back and forth in consciousness, like a witch on a ducking stool. Fragments of memory. Thoughts too hard to organise. Many missing items. On the fourth day, Tommy opens his eyes and thankfully finds he can keep them open. But he cannot move. He finds himself upright, bound in a cross shape with both arms and legs outstretched. A cold object is placed delicately to Tommy’s throat and he feels a sharp tugging at his skin. Is someone stitching his neck? His eyes take in the dimly lit cave.
“You’re from the facility, yes?” a low, gravel-filled voice says in Tommy’s right ear. Not really a question. His head flinches away from the warm, stale-smelling breath. It smells of clay, of blood and sulphur.
Tommy’s joining tool whirs and charges with power as his panic and fear convinces him to fight.
“Ah, ah, ah,” says the voice, as a cold, sharp blade threatens to open his throat.
“W-, wh-, what, d-, d-, do you, w-, want with me!” Tommy says, shaking with dread.
For a while there is silence.
Somehow, he can sense the eyes of his fiend-like captor watching him. He imagines the creature smirking in the dark, contemplating which part of Tommy he will eat first. Tommy’s futility burst forth as rage.
“Untie me, you bastard! I’ll blast you to pieces!” Tommy’s arm glows and the rods begin to fizz with violet energy.
The blade at Tommy’s throat loosens. “Listen to me!” the voice booms. “I will let you fly. I will. I will let you go. But you have to promise me that you will not use this ...contraption —” here the blade was moved from his throat to tap on his metal arm “— around my family.” Even in the low light of the cave, Tommy sees the knife, tapping on the joining tools of his right arm. The edge looks over ten inches. It is dark, curved, razor sharp, and the perfect shape for slicing a throat. Tommy blinks several times. The sweat on his brow runs into his eyes. Strangely, he feels mild relief that this butchers-tool belongs to a family-oriented person.
“I promise,” says Tommy in a steady voice that belied his nerves. “I assure you I will not use it. Why would I hurt you, or your family? I don’t even know you.”
He pauses, thinking.
“Anyway, you’re the one who attacked me! You knocked me out, and kidnapped me, and brought me to this dark hovel!” The blade instantly comes back to Tommy’s throat, the pressure redoubled.
“This ...hovel...” His captor says carefully, as if the word is distasteful, “is my family’s home. It has been this way for hundreds of years. And, furthermore, I saved you. I saved you from yourself. I brought you to my home and let my daughter heal your broken body. That saved you from death. So, since you have made your promise to me, I will make one to you. If I feel, at any time, that you — or this device attached to you — is a threat to my family, or my home, I will kill you. This I promise. I will rip you apart. Piece by piece. Slowly.”
Tommy does well to supress a shudder. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” says Tommy. “The arm is a tool. It’s not designed to hurt,” continues Tommy, moving his altered arm in its leather restraints. The blade falls into view again, swishing close to Tommy’s eyes. He involuntarily arches his head back away from the cruel edge. The voice in the dark speaks again.
“And this is my tool. It, too, is not intended to hurt. But it can be used to devastating effect. Especially on people who threaten the safety of my clan. I don’t want a repeat of the behaviour I saw in the forest; I don’t want to have to kill you.”
The blade drops from Tommy’s vision.
“I understand, I understand. Honestly, I’m not dangerous. I just... I...” Tommy flicks his head from left to right, trying to put a face to the voice in the darkness, trying to see behind him — but to no avail. All he succeeds in doing is making his head throb even more.
“Please, show yourself. Let’s talk this through, face to face.”
The voice speaks again, but softly this time.
“I shall show myself to you, but I will warn you. I ...do not look ...as others do. Try not to be scared, young Tommy. I am not your enemy.”
Tommy is intrigued by the words, but a sudden realisation hits him. “How do you know my name?”
“I read your letter.”
“That’s private!” Tommy snaps, seeming to forget his precarious position.
“It’s a wonderful letter. It’s possibly what saved your life. That ... and your arm. Although, I must admit, I had thought about chopping it off. Then again, I’m no monster...”
Tommy’s mysterious captor steps into view and Tommy’s eyes widen in horror.
Standing in front of him was a horned demon.
“What the Hell are you?”
“I’m not sure how to take those words. Particularly, coming from a kid who’s covered in wood and glowing stuff,” The being — the man? — smiles. Instead of teeth, the grin reveals a serrated sheet of bone, broken in places.
“My name is Talon.”
Talon moves backwards and more of this apparition is visible to Tommy.
Great, Tommy thinks, a loincloth-wearing freak-of-nature...
“It’s dark in here for a reason, young Tommy. My appearance in full light can ...” Whilst talking, the individual known as Talon takes a moment to light a pre-made fire in the centre of the cavern. Smoke swirls up through a tunnel-vent in the roof. Tommy does not see Talon move, but his voice seems to come from the left of him, and then from the right, as he lights two wall torches, and then the devil appears again right in front of him. As the light in the cave brightens, Talon finishes his sentence, “...instil a strange feeling of disgust in people of a weaker disposition. This is an understandable reaction.”
With the greater illumination, the features of Talon’s skin are revealed. Bedazzling and frightening at the same time. Mystical runes cover the entirety of his dark, leather-like skin. His horned face is a thing from nightmares. Still smiling his serrated smile, his cavernous eyes seem to study Tommy’s glowing arm.
Tommy stares at Talon’s body and notices further terrifying features. On his arms, bony structures protrude out of his flesh at each of his elbows, forming lethal-looking scimitars over a foot in length. Talon’s knees are formed into curved hook-like horns, five-inch-wide at the base. His knee-horns seem to compliment, at least in shape, the two thinner, shorter horns at his temple. His cheekbones also have clusters of spikes that protrude through his skin, like weaponised warts. The larger spikes are in the centre of his cheek and these get smaller and smaller, leading to barnacle-size carbuncles at the outermost edges of Talon’s face. His powerful jaw and heavily spiked chin form a most violent beard.
At the end of Talon’s arms Tommy receives another shock.
“Those are your fingers!” says Tommy, as he realises what was held to his throat seconds ago. Talon’s hands end in long, bone-bladed, ebony fingers.
He quietly appraises the deadly blades of the grinning monster.
“You’re sure you’re not going to kill me, aren’t you?” Tommy says, nervously. Afterall, what else do horned monsters from nightmares do aside from killin
g and eating people?
“You’d taste bad with all that ...stuff ...inside you. Besides which, I’m all out of garlic,” Talon jokes, guessing Tommy’s thoughts from the rictus of his face.
“I would have killed you in the woods, had I wanted to, yes?”
Shocked out of a response which would make any sense, Tommy just stares. Things too fast to identify shoot past Tommy, to his outstretched arms, slicing through the ties that bind him to the cross.
“I can see why you’re called Talon,” Tommy says, as he rubs feeling back into his wrists. He tries to test his legs with a few uneasy and painful steps, but this proves too much for Tommy in his weakened state. Talon helps him over to a rabbit pelt-covered bed, behind the makeshift cross.
“Here, here. Sit, now, or lay down. You need rest. To heal,” Talon says lowering him to the comfortable bed.
“What’s wrong with me? Everything hurts when I move. Did you do all this damage to me?”
Tommy is now aware of the stitches, one row after another, like caterpillars, causing tightness on his legs, upper arms and across his chest. He touches his face to find stitches over his forehead and left cheek.
“What’s happened? Did you do this to me! Are you making me into a monster like you?”
“RELAX!” Talon booms back. The volume of Talon’s stentorian outburst causes Tommy’s ears to ring, and the noise echoes around the cave. It almost seems to silence the tide outside.
