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hypnoticwinter · 4 years ago

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 30

“God damn it,” I grunt, tugging again at the padlock. Although the paint on the door is flaking and the hinges are rusty the padlock is shiny and brand new.

“This was the big plan, huh?” Fumi says, and I cast him a venomous look.

“I don’t see you helping,” I point out. He uncrosses his arms briefly to scratch at his chin and then crosses them again, leaning against the chain-link enclosure around the shed.

“What’s in there, anyway?” he asks. “It’s a breathing hole, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Peter told me about it. It’s what he was using to – “ I cut myself off, thinking back to Elena’s reaction when I’d told her Makado and Peter had been smuggling people inside the Pit.

“Using it to what?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “It doesn’t matter. Goddam it!” I yell, slamming my fist into the door. I can feel a cold touch of panic start to creep up my throat and I swallow hard, trying to will it back down. “It’s okay,” I say, thinking out loud. “There has to be another way in, there just has to. Fumi, do you know any - ?” I stop. He’s grinning at me, like a cat that caught a canary. “What?”

He points. “You notice anything about that door?”

“What - ?” I turn, look it over once more. “What are you talking about?”

Fumi steps past me, shoves the flat of his utility knife into the exposed hinge and levers it upwards with a quick motion, and then hands me the pin. I stare at it and then back at the door. “You have to be kidding,” I say, grabbing my own knife. Fumi is working on the second one down, laughing quietly to himself.

I smack him lightly on the shoulder and then step beneath him, get down on my knees to fiddle with the bottom hinge. “How long ago did you notice the hinges were on the outside?” I ask.

“As soon as you couldn’t get the padlock open.”

“You bitch,” I laugh. “So you were just sitting there watching me tug on it for five minutes?”

“I wanted to see if you’d figure it out,” he grins. “You have that side?”

I nod and then together we slide the metal door off of its hinges and lay it against the fence behind. The shed is little more than a sheet-metal cage surrounding the orifice, obliquely angled and wetly suppurating, about eight feet high and four feet wide. I grimace. “This is going to suck,” I say. Fumi nods.

“That’s an understatement,” he tells me. “Do you have any idea where this lets out?”

I shake my head. “Peter only told me it lead to somewhere in Bronchial. I don’t know much more than that.” I let out a groan. “Just like I don’t have much of an idea where Elena might be.”

Fumi pats my back lightly. It’s supposed to be a reassuring gesture I guess but it doesn’t make me feel much better. “We’ll find her,” he tells me.

The radio at his belt crackles and belches out a string of static. It makes me jump. There’s a great leaden weight in my stomach and again even though I hate how weak it makes me feel, my hands are trembling. From fear, from anticipation, from…from dread. Dread that I might be too late.

Fumi nudges me. “You ready?” he asks. I nod quickly, swallow hard, and then Fumi is pressing aside the musty flesh of the Pit’s breathing-hole and I, choking down the rising bile, follow him inwards into the twisting folds and venous cavities of the Pit’s lungs.

* * *

“How’d you get out?” I ask him. Fumi grunts, his helmeted head inclining back towards me briefly. I push another alveolar fold out of the way, ducking my head to get beneath the dripping, swinging flap of flesh. The bronchial tissue crinkles beneath my gloved fingers and, not for the first time, a frown of disgust furrows my brow.

I hear a slow breath in my helmeted ears. Fumi had showed me how to link the radios up so we wouldn’t have to yell at each other to be heard over the Pit’s gusting, noxious breaths, but one of the downsides is that it’s a hot mic – you can’t turn it off or you have to redo it each time. Fumi had already gotten into a habit of chuckling at me whenever I let out an unwilling little grunt of disgust every time I stepped in a particularly gloppy bronchial puddle and it made me want to smack him, but so far I was managing to keep my temper in check.

Part of me wants to rush, wants to blast through the tangled and twisting passages of Bronchial like a heat-seeking missile and rip and tear my way down to wherever the hell Elena is and carry her out of here come hell or high water, but a cooler, more rational part of me also knows that this isn’t something that can be rushed, not without us getting hurt as well. If I was moving any more quickly there’ve been at least a dozen places we’ve passed so far where I know I would have fallen, maybe twisted an ankle or – god – hurt my poor broken leg even further. Whatever magic the autodoc was capable of, I don’t think it figured I would be putting in this much use so quickly, and even though I try to treat it gently there is a dull, foreboding bone-deep ache settled heavily into the middle of the bone that makes me worried, makes me wonder how much time I have before I hurt it really seriously.

“I was hoping you’d forgotten about that,” Fumi tells me, and I blink.

“What –“ I start, but he’s already sighed and moved onwards. I rush up to follow him, find him pondering a narrow y-passage.

“I think it’s this way,” he says, pointing to the leftmost one, and before I can ask him if he’s sure or if we’d better check both just in case, he pushes ahead into it leaving me to follow, shaking my head. “I’m not proud of running,” he says. “Back when those two psychos shot the Sergeant. I was almost hoping you’d forgotten that I had.”

I hadn’t forgotten but I also hadn’t really cared. I was almost glad that Fumi had gotten away when he had. Erica and Marcus – I’m not sure whether or not they had even noticed him. “I don’t want you to feel guilty,” I tell him, “because you shouldn’t. They would have shot you just like they shot the Sergeant or Elena.”

“They shot Elena?” he asks, incredulous, and I nod, briefly recounting what happened. He lets out a muffled curse and shakes his head. “Roan, kid…you know there’s a decent chance she’s already dead, right? Even if the bullet missed anything too vital it’s not a good environment down here to have a hole in you. There are some seriously nasty bacteria and -”

“Yeah,” I snap. “I’m aware of that. And don’t call me kid.”

A frosty silence settles over us

“Sorry,” he says after a moment.

“It’s okay,” I breathe, although I’m saying mostly to try and convince myself. “I just – she can’t be dead, okay? She just can’t be.”

The Pit moans again and as before the flesh around us contracts rhythmically. Fumi and I both stop, forced to wait it out.

“I’m not trying to judge,” Fumi says, “but you’ve only known her for what, a week? Tops? Is the tail really that good?”

“Oh, fuck off,” I tell him, not even bothering to hide the serration in my voice. “You know, I heard what you said on the radio that day. Back before the briefing.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“You called Elena on the radio, asking where the new girl from Admin with the tight little ass was, you couldn’t find her to tell her to get to the briefing. I think you mentioned something about how you wouldn’t mind getting her alone and –“

So I embellished a little. He was squirming and I felt like being vindictive.

“I’m not proud I said that,” Fumi says, cutting me off, and there is a softness to his voice that makes me stop. The moan croaks out to a halt and with a shudder the flesh around us draws back and opens up. He turns and looks at me; the helmet pushes his cheeks together, makes him look like a dwarf, all ruddy cheeks and thick black beard. “If it’s any defense, I didn’t know you were listening. You were with Elena?”

“Yeah.”

“Even back then?”

“She was showing me the little graveyard,” I tell him. Unwillingly my lips quirk up into a smile. “I think I would have kissed her then if you hadn’t interrupted.”

Fumi laughs. “That’s rich,” he says. “You kiss people in a graveyard?”

I roll my eyes at him, push him forward. “Well, because of you I had to wait until the party. I don’t think either of us worked our nerve up again until then.”

“I knew she was into you,” Fumi mentions, starting off again. “That’s the reason I said that in the first place, cause I was trying to tease her. I just didn’t know you’d, you know, literally be right there.”

“You knew? What, did she tell you?”

“You couldn’t tell she was into you until the party?” he asks, equally quizzical, and I feel myself blush, let that one go unanswered.

We walk onwards in silence. Well, relative silence; Bronchial is a rhythmic forest of noise, a low dull rush of wind grinding at the back of my ears even through the helmet. I’d noticed back in the shed that they roof was made of something like chicken wire but even so it was bowed inward severely. I’d initially figured it to just be the weight of the wire itself pulling downwards but now I think it was the suction of the Pit breathing in.

Ten more steps. Fumi and I start to talk at the same time, and then I laugh and tell him to go while he tries to be gallant and tells me to go. I hope he doesn’t think I hate him.

“How did you get out?” I ask him, and he waves his hand.

“Right. The Cord isn’t the only way up, just the fastest. I circled back around, took a couple of elevators, and then high-tailed it all the way up. You can make it in about a day, if you hustle. I grabbed Makado as soon as I got up and told her what had happened and she locked everything down, sent me to the barracks for ‘rest.’ I think she was just worried I’d tell everybody what I’d seen. Then…I don’t know. I guess she went down herself, hot-rodded an IAV all the way down to the place you were. The fungal zone? We’re not supposed to go down there normally, it’s…ecologically unstable.”

“It was horrible,” I murmur, thinking of Peter. Thinking, unwillingly, of Klaus.

It was a familiar feeling, that rush of panic and then of calm, of everything clicking together and smoothing out, once I’d shot him. I had stood over him, the gun clutched loosely in my hand, still trained on him even though it was empty and the slide had locked back once I’d shot that last magic bullet, one in the chamber, Marcus’s parting gift to me from beyond the grave. I had stared at Klaus until he had lain still for quite a while and then I had knelt down next to him and grabbed the magazine from the floor, slotted it back into the pistol and released the slide, and then I went outside and had a good cry.

Fumi nudges me and I realize I’ve zoned out while he was asking me something. “Why do you like Elena? Really,” he repeats. “I’m curious.”

I give him a little grunt to indicate that I’m thinking about it. “She’s kind to me,” I say finally. “She knew I wouldn’t be able to cut it down there from the very start. She tried so hard to keep me out of the Pit and then once I was in she took care of me the whole way. She has a…a very strong sense of right and wrong. She doesn’t compromise for anything.”

I glance over at Fumi. The passage has widened enough at this point that we can walk side by side. He stays silent. He wants me to keep going, of course, but I don’t see any harm in it so I oblige him. “She was the first girl I had sex with,” I tell him, studying his reaction closely. He looks over at me, holds my gaze for a moment, and then looks away.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah. The night of the party.”

“First love,” he says. I laugh.

“A new experience, maybe,” I concede.

“Is it much different?”

“Hmm?”

“From being with a man. Is it different?”

I think about it. “Very,” I tell him. He nods.

“I mean,” he grins, “you’d think it would be, but I would never know…”

I elbow him lightly and then dodge the one he throws back at me. We walk on for a while further.

“You know,” Fumi starts, and then stops.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Oh, shut up,” I growl at him. “What is it?”

“No,” he says, pushing a fold of flesh out of the way. “It really is nothing, I was going to say something but I thought better of it.”

“Just tell me.”

He looks back at me for a moment, then shrugs. “I was going to say,” he says slowly, “that in all honesty Elena and I are not on the best of terms.”

“Oh?”

“A little while before you showed up, I had to turn her down. She didn’t take it very well. Made some…colorful comments about my heritage. Which are completely untrue, I might add.”

“Turn her do – oh,” I finish. I can feel my cheeks color beneath my helmet.

“You can see why I might have thought better of telling you something like that.”

“Well, it doesn’t bother me,” I say firmly. “That’s the past and whatever decisions she made were ones she made then, not now.”

“Do you really believe that?” he asks. “I mean, really – I’m just curious. I’m not trying to make you doubt yourself if that really is true.”

“Aren’t you angry at her?” I say, sidestepping the question. “I mean, if she came on to you and then acted like a bitch about it afterwards…”

“What I’m trying to say is, that was a particularly Elena thing to do.”

I think about that for a moment and then I find myself smiling. “Fumi…are you trying to tell me Elena is a slut?”

“That’s such a harsh word,” he says. “But…yes.”

“Are you afraid I’m going to get hurt? How big brother of you.”

“Please. I just think it’s something you ought to know about. Besides, if you’re as involved as you say you are with her, I’m sure she told you herself.”

That does make me stop. “She didn’t actually,” I say. Fumi raises an eyebrow. I can just barely see it beneath the glass pane of the helmet. “She told me that there was sex, occasionally. You know, between team members, but never any sort of emotional attachment. It would, I don’t know, disrupt the group dynamic or whatever.”

“Mm,” he grunts. “That’s maybe the idealized version of it, I guess. All I can tell you is that her and Slate were pretty hot and heavy for a while but they broke it off, I don’t know, maybe a month or two ago.”

I think about that, roll it around in my mouth. I don’t much like the taste. Slate had grown on me over the short time I’d known him but not that much. I think about him and Elena, about her flashing that dazzling smile at him, about him grinning that sly, knowing, fox’s grin at her, about his hands encircling her waist, cupping her lithe, muscular ass, and I feel a little spark of jealousy flare up in my stomach. Then I take a breath, deliberately, and let it out.

The night that Slate died Elena and I had held each other tightly in our tent and she had come close to crying but hadn’t. I’d told her it was okay and that if she needed to talk about it she could, but she had just shaken her head. There was grief in her eyes but it was low and cool and detached. We had held each other and I had traced my fingers up and down her naked body but we hadn’t made love. It had been too serious for that. I wanted her to know that I cared about her, that she had more meaning to me to me than just as a series of orifices. In the morning she had kissed me awake and had smiled so brightly that for a moment I’d thought the sun was rising, right there in the belly of the Pit, and it had all been okay.

“What are you smiling about?” Fumi asks, and I laugh. I almost trip on a tumorous, fleshy nodule growing out of the floor and he catches me, puts me back upright again.

“I was thinking about Elena,” I tell him, and he shakes his head, grin sprouting amid his forest of a beard.

“I could have told you literally anything about her and you’d still be head over heels for her, huh?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “The last relationship I was in wasn’t the best.” I shrug. “I only stayed in it for as long as I did because I – because I made some bad decisions and I figured that everything I touched turned to shit. Thor – my ex-boyfriend – he didn’t. So I clung to it way, way longer than I should have.”

“His name was Thor?”

“It was a nickname. His real name was Richard.”

Fumi nods. A little more silence passes, and then he nudges me.

“At least you have some self-awareness about it,” he says.

“Oh, I didn’t for a long time. But I’ve had a lot of time to do some soul-searching recently,” I say, formalizing masses of incoherent thoughts that have been bunching behind my eyes for at least the past two days, if not longer. “And I decided I wasn’t going to fuck this one up, if I could help it. I don’t care if she’s been wild, I don’t care if she’s a slut, she’s been kind to me. That’s what matters.”

Do I mean that? Is that what my soul thinks? Am I just trying to make myself feel better after discovering the Elena isn’t a saint? I think back to that first night that I kissed her, drunk and urgent on the steps of the barracks, the crickets playing symphony and the fireflies fluttering in a spangled backdrop. I think back to the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up, to the tingling feeling in my stomach when her hand had knitted into my hair and held me closer to her.

The Pit’s lungs are interminable. Way after winding way, passage after passage. It’s only been about a half hour or so but it feels like ages. Fumi is of the opinion that we ought to head down to the Control Center and raid their armory, get some real firepower. Between the two of us we have two little .45-caliber pistols, that’s all, and even then we wouldn’t have them if Fumi hadn’t known where Crookshank had kept them stashed.

I’d accepted mine with hesitation but I knew it would have been the height of stupidity to go down here without being armed. My skin had crawled and I had felt a little like throwing up as I’d taken it from him, as the reliable weight of the pistol settled into my palm, and then I had slipped it into my holster and after a while I was able to forget that I was wearing it, that it was hanging off of my side ready to use.

But a .45 won’t do a lot to some of the things down here. That’s his argument, that he keeps repeating, while I, with mounting frustration, point out to him that the longer we wait, the more danger Elena almost certainly is in. I want to head straight down to the terminus of the Cord and look around for her. We bicker about it for a while until I, with some surprise, take a step around another alveolar fold and find my cleated boots clanking on metal grating. I let out a whoop and charge forward, pushing through another tight sphincter-like gap, and then I burst out into a long hallway, the same one Peter described to me – Jesus, just a few days ago. Or has it been a week already? I’m not sure. I don’t know what day it is, how long this misadventure has been perpetuated for. I turn back around and grin at Fumi, open my mouth to say something stupid, and then something bowls into me, sends me pitching forward. I catch myself but only just, and then something chitinous and hissing and many-legged is crawling over me and wave of white-hot revulsion floods into my stomach.

I reach back and batter at it but just from the angle I can’t do anything to it. It fixes its jaws to my shoulder, cutting through the suit like paper and I cry out in pain. I scrabble for my holster but succeed only in knocking the gun from it, sending it clattering across the metal floor. Fumi rushes forward, crying out my name, but the thing on top of me tugs hard at my shoulder and starts to drag me off. I manage to roll over onto my back and see something like an enormous louse, just inches away from my face, faceted eyes staring into mine. Its enormous mouthparts are coated in blood and my stomach flips as I realize it’s mine, leaking from my shoulder.

“Roan!” Fumi cries. He has his pistol out but he can’t get a bead on it, it’s too close to me.

“Help me!” I call out as the insect pulls me backwards another few feet. I’m too heavy for it to really manage, it’s not quite as much of a monster as an abyssal copepod is, but it feels as though it’s going to bite my arm off at the shoulder, and although I flail at it it just won’t let go –

I draw back and with all of my strength smash it in the face with one gloved fist, and to my shock it hisses and drops me. Immediately I roll out of the way, letting out a screech of pain when my shoulder makes contact with the ground and the jarring of it sends white-hot knives scurrying up my nerves, and then there is a thunderclap nearby and something thumps into the insect. The thunder roars two, three, four more times, and then Fumi is rushing to me and helping me up while my ears ring and the insect shudders quietly to itself as it dies, its head blown apart like a rotten pumpkin.

I sit there in silence as the ringing fades and Fumi washes the cut out with disinfectant, bandages my shoulder, applies an analgesic spray to it, patches me up. The cut apparently is deep but clean and didn’t, as far as he can tell from my range of motion, cause me any permanent damage. I sit there and shudder as the adrenaline gradually leaves my system, and then when he’s done he sighs heavily and sits down next to me.

“You doing okay?” he asks, me, and I nod slowly.

“What was that thing?”

“Just a lesser copepod.”

“Just?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “Not an especially big one. Like the abyssal’s smaller, dumber, higher-depth counterpart. Minus the hands.”

I bury my head in my hands. There is a thick knot of worry in my stomach and I don’t know if I can untangle it alone. Fumi clearly doesn’t know what to do about me. “Roan, are you okay?” he keeps asking. He rests his hand gently on my shoulderblade and it makes me want to cry and laugh at the same time.

“How could she still be alive?” I say. It comes out almost like a sob. “If there’s shit like this up here where everything’s – where everything’s mostly harmless, how could she be alive? Something will have gotten her by now, something will have –“

“Roan.”

“Oh god,” I say. “She’s dead because of me, because I was stupid enough to think that she wouldn’t try and attack Erica, she’s dead because –“

“Snap out of it!” Fumi barks at me.

I give him a bleak look. “We should just go back.”

“Roan,” he says, “would Elena give up on you?”

I open my mouth, and then I shut it. Fumi raises his eyebrows at me.

And so with nothing left to say I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak, and then we get up and head off down the hallway, following the signs marked Control Center.

* * *

I check my pilfered wristwatch again and shift anxiously from foot to foot. Fumi’s been inside the control room for five minutes already. I can’t hear anything over all of the claxons blaring, here outside in the fat little corridor leading up to it, up two flights of stairs and behind another one of those horrible submarine doors. Worry’s gnawing at me, somewhere deep down in the pit of my stomach; what if they know Fumi and I are in cahoots? What if something’s wrong in there, what if he ran into Makado, or the FBI, or…

I bite my lip hard. Around me the Pit quakes again and rattles the little metal pod of the Control Center like someone shaking a tin of mints. I feel like an Altoid. It’s incredible how much less safe I feel inside here, with the high-tech stabilizing arms straining hard against the Pit’s gullet. I’d rather ride this out in Bronchial any day; Bronchial was comforting, even, because whenever the Pit moaned and grunted and flexed, all of the little flaps and craggy little polyps and bulbs and what the hell ever else all flopped over and covered us like a fullbody hug and just held us there, gently, almost, like the Pit was telling us that it would be okay.

I shake my head. “I have got to get out of here,” I mutter, and then I reach over and open the door and stride in and immediately find myself in the middle of a sea of chaos.

There are a couple more nerds here than before and they’re all up to their eyeballs in flashing lights and alarms, each of them on the phone or muttering into a headset or clustered around a fancy-looking holographic unit that displays a three-dimensional image of something that looks like a fat, squat beetroot that I assume is a model of the Pit. Fumi is talking to one of the nerds, rather urgently, his helmet unclasped and hanging at his side, his fingers hooked under the rear lip of it. He glances over when the door opens and sees me and his expression darkens. He’d told me to stay outside; I had given him a rundown of what Makado had done on the way up, through Bronchial and then into the main gullet of the Pit, and he’d said it would be safer if he went in alone and did the talking, after all, at least four of the nerds had seen me with Makado, they surely would have known what I was supposed to be going down for, but I had gotten so worried –

Nobody’s paying any attention to me. Scarcely anybody even bothered to look up when the door opened, and of those that did they met my tight, anxious face with blank stares and unfamiliar visages. I slip inside, duck behind a nerd rushing past with a stack of papers under his arm and slip over to Fumi. The man he was talking to has given him a shake of the head, with finality, and moved away into a back room that I know is a briefing or conference room. The last time I saw it it had takeout containers all over the place; I wonder if they’ve done any cleaning up since.

“Why’d you come in?” he hisses, leaning close to me so we can confer. I shrug.

“Got worried. Did you get the guns?”

“That fuck,” he says, jerking his head back at the conference room, “is in charge and he won’t unlock the armory for me. Wants Makado’s permission, which I’m obviously not liable to get, even if we could reach her.”

“Goddam it,” I mutter. “Look, why don’t we bust in there and just, I don’t know, take the keys?”

There’s another lurch from the Pit and I reach out, grab Fumi’s shoulder to steady myself. “What, you want to just mug the guy?” he asks.

“We are not coming all this way and not getting any of the hardware out of it,” I hiss. “Elena is dying –“

“Yes,” he barks, and then quiets himself. “Yes,” he says, “I’m aware of our time crunch. But if we do something like that, we’re going to get someone on our ass, and I’d rather worry about the wildlife instead of people. You’re already risking everything by coming in here –“

“Fuck this,” I mutter, and then I cast a wary glance around and slip into the conference room, dodging Fumi as I do.

Inside the conference room I find, amid a nest of takeout boxes, the tall, gaunt man Fumi was talking to, speaking in a hushed tone down the throat of a bright red telephone. He glances up as I shut the door behind myself and does a double-take. “Get out,” he tells me, pointing at the door. “You aren’t allowed in there, I already told your friend that I’d need – wait a minute,” he says. There’s a flutter of butterflies in my stomach while I wait for him to recognize me, and when I does I am momentarily shocked that he pales. He slams the phone down into its cradle and points a finger at me. “You had better stay right there,” he warns me. “I know exactly who you are. I’m going to call the surface right now and get them to send a team right down to get you back into custody. You’ve got some nerve –“

“Look,” I tell him. “Just give us the keys to the armory and we’ll be out of your hair. That’s all we want. We’re trying to help,” I say, and as if to punctuate my argument, the Pit groans again.

“Stay right there,” he repeats, and picks up the phone again. I whip the pistol out of my holster and train it on him.

There’s a sensation in my stomach like I’m falling, like I’ve just taken a leap off a cliff, the same lurch you get when you miss a step in the middle of the night and your brain didn’t think it was there, that same sensation of gutless horror like you’ll fall forever and stop suddenly. The man is staring at me; his eyes are very wide.

“Give me the keys,” I tell him. “I’m not going to ask again,” I say, thinking maybe it’ll sound threatening if by some chance my voice happens not to shake while I’m spitting my one-liners.

A part of my brain is screaming at me that I haven’t thought this through, what am I going to do with this guy once I’ve gotten the keys from him, what am I going to do if he calls my bluff, what am I going to do if –

The keys plonk down on the table and slide over to me. Before I can think I reach out and take them, ball them tightly in my fist. I give the man a look and open my mouth to say something but before I can there is another roar from outside and the ground pitches to the left and knocks us both off our feet. There are yells of surprise and horror from outside in the main room and a new alarm is blaring now, one with a much more urgent tone than any of the others. The gun’s clattered to the floor as well and both I and the gaunt man know it. It’s landed just between us, sprawled in a stack of upended file cabinets, just there on the floor. The red emergency lights gleam off its sleek metal lines and make it look like it’s been drenched in blood.

We dive for it at the same time, and he puts his hand in my face and shoves me away, but not before I can fit a hand around the barrel of the gun. I can’t think, my brain has been replaced with something animal, something screaming in terror, but I can feel my lips draw back in a snarl, and even as he arches his fingers inwards to claw at my eyes, the fist I made earlier snaps outwards like it has a mind of its own and slams with all of the might I can muster square into his face and I feel his nose give beneath my balled fingers, and he shrieks and claps his hands to his face. I grab the gun and train it on him again, a little unnecessarily, getting unsteadily to my feet as the control center, clearly at a very cockeyed angle, slips a few feet further down and nearly knocks me over again.

Fumi bursts in but because of the angle the door slams on his face right after he’s pushed it open. “Roan!” he cries. Through the open door I can hear complete pandemonium outside, but through the alarms and cries and panic I hear something that punches my heart straight up into my mouth, makes time slow down to a trickle, running through my agonized brain to give me more perceived seconds to dwell on the horror: I hear the sound of buckling, groaning metal, and then a loud snapping screech as it finally starts to give.

Continue with Part 31

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#mystery flesh pit #original writing #writing #writeblr #alt lit #spilled ink #thriller #mystery #horror #caving #disaster #romance #Michael Crichton

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theliterateape · 6 years ago

Text

One Day: Repeating One of Our Nation's Biggest Atrocities

by J. L. Thurston

No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

Saying-

Leave,

Run away from me now

I don’t know what I’ve become

But I know that anywhere is safer than here.

- Warsan Shire (source: genius.com)

In a place where the land is hot, and dry, and spends all the daylight hours baking in a sun that feels two inches away, there’s a large building full of young boys. The place was once a shopping center, a big gray building made of stone. Surrounding it is a tall chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Like a prison, but it’s not.

The boys inside wear clean clothes and sometimes there’s movies on the tv. They don’t have blankets to sleep under, instead they sleep in weird foil sheets like spacemen or Martians. The sheets make loud noises when they move. It’s hard to sleep under those Martian blankets. The bathrooms are porta potties. One wall is lined with them. The boys that have to sleep nearest the porta potties have to smell it all night long. They mouth-breathe and listen to the crinkling blankets and the shhhh! of the Big Men who want them to sleep soundly like good boys.

The boys sit on long benches, shoulder to shoulder, inside wire cages that are so tall they nearly touch the exposed pipes along the ceiling. There’s Big Men that patrol the boys. Men that wear official shirts tucked into dark pants. They have their big, meaty hands on their belts and strut. Heel-toe, heel-toe, like taking a leisurely stroll. But the Big Men don’t smile, they don’t hardly look at the boys except to make sure they aren’t up to something.

The boys get to go outside sometimes. For a few hours almost every day. When they go outside and when they come back in they have to stand in a long line. At the end of the line there’s a Big Man with a scanner that flashes a red light. He scans their wristbands. The boys must always, always wear their wristbands. It holds a precious barcode that allows them to get food. The older kids know that the barcodes are to keep track of them, in case someone tries to run away. But the Big Men tell the boys that the barcodes are so they can relocate them with their families one day.

One day. That could be tomorrow, a year from now, or never. One day. The older boys know that one day is just something the Big Men say to shut them up. Like when they ask if they can get some basketballs, or if they can see their moms. “Maybe. One day,” the Big Men answer. It means, “Shut up, kid. Sit down. Don’t cause trouble.”

The little kids cry a lot. The babies are the worst. The big kids have to take care of the babies, even if they don’t know them. They change their diapers, and make sure they eat. They’re all kept together in that gray building, their wired walls keeping them pinned in, keeping them together. The Big Men say they aren’t allowed to touch the boys, even the babies. They can’t hold them when they cry, they can’t show affection. So, the big kids do it. They copy what they’ve seen their mothers do, or what they’ve seen other adults do for little ones. They repeat the lies of the Big Men. “One day, you’ll see Mommy again. One day.”

The big kids aren’t allowed to hug each other. When they first arrive to the gray building and are told the Rules, they usually scoff at that Rule. But after enough time spent sitting on a long bench, thinking of home, missing Mom and Dad, wondering where their sisters went, they break down. They think, A hug would be nice. But their new friends can’t hug them. The Big Men don’t like it. It could be a way to make trouble, somehow.

Some of the older kids who have been there long enough talk about killing themselves. They whisper about it when the Big Men aren’t close enough to hear. They wonder if they can sneak a plastic knife, let it melt outside in the sun, and then reshape it into something sharper. Something lethal. But the Big Men are always watching. It would probably never work. Some of the big kids stop eating. But the Big Men tell them that if they don’t behave and follow the Rules something terrible might happen to their parents.

Some of the older kids know a little bit of the history of this country that they were brought to. This land of opportunity that their parents were kidnapped in. They learned in school words like dehumanization and internment camps. They know the President very well because inside the big building is a mural of him on the wall. They sit under it to eat and they can see it from everywhere except inside the porta potties. He looks down on them with a smile so fake he doesn’t even show teeth. A smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He almost looks confused in the mural, as though he doesn’t even know why he’s there. One of the big kids whisper that he looks like a poop got stuck. It makes some of the other big kids laugh, but then they get scolded when it is overheard by a Big Man.

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.

-Romans 13, quoted by both Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018 and Adolf Hitler’s supporting pastor, Joachim Hossenfelder in 1933 (source: harpersbazaar.com and haaretz.com).

“I would cite you the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government, because God has ordained them for the purpose of the order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and the lawful.” -Attorney General Jeff Sessions, June 2018 on the subject of separated children from their immigrant parents. (source: USA Today)

Dear reader, I know with the lies in the media, and the blindfolding, misconceptions, and word-of-mouth alterations of truth it can be difficult to trust anything that you see or hear. But if there really are families being torn apart by our country’s authorities because they are illegal immigrants, then our authorities are MONSTERS. The more I read, the more I see, the more my heart breaks for the evil that people in power are capable of. I have never been more ashamed to be born into this country.

#Modern Dystopia #2018 Internment Camps #America The Land of Opportunity #Kidnapping #Illegal Immigration #President Trump #Melania's jacket #Jeff Sessions #Hitler

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nelsonfenceco1 · 5 years ago

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Now wrap each wire around the barbed wire. As you can see here, one strand (the one closest to the sleeve) is wrapped counterclockwise around the barbed wire. The second hair makes a loop over the first wire, protecting it in place, and then it is wrapped clockwise numerous times over the barbed wire.

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nelsonfenceco2 · 5 years ago

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Nelson Fence Company – To Repair or Replace a Fence?

Metal Fence for Dummies

The smart Trick of Metal Fence Contractors That Nobody is Talking About

All about Metal Fencing

How Metal Fencing can Save You Time, Stress, and Money.

Metal Fencing Can Be Fun For Anyone

The 5-Second Trick For Metal Fencing

Little Known Questions About Metal Fence.

The Greatest Guide To Metal Fence Contractors

You should also consult your town or city clerk to identify important fence guidelines. Use protective eye equipment when operating power tools.

Metal Fencing for Beginners

The Greatest Guide To Metal Fence Contractors

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Nelson Fence Company 13 Kellogg St, Auburn, MA 01501 774 289 6818

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The post Nelson Fence Company – To Repair or Replace a Fence? appeared first on Nelson Fence Co | The Top Rated Fencing Company in Central Massachusetts.

from https://nelsonfenceco.com/nelson-fence-company-to-repair-or-replace-a-fence/

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