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As the sun pulled high above the day; the minuscule of light trying to bore through the thickness of the cold grey cloud that suffocated the skyline, Donal sat with the matted dog beside him, staring and waiting still, for his father and sister. Time had passed and they should have come by now. The sun was now moving into its final passage, escaping the reign of night. He wondered for a moment if he was waiting in the right location.
It had been so long since his father had shown him these streets and these places and he could have quite easily gotten confused, especially in the absence of light and in the drunkenness of being rife with exhilaration and fear; the state he had been in escaping from the clutches of these mad scientists.
He could have entered any building and now under the guise of daylight, he could be sitting on any road and he wouldn’t be any the wiser, except for a feeling in his stomach, like a stone that kept him pinned to the ground, anticipating and expecting.
The Woman sat; held down by something heavy in her stomach or in the back of her mind; whichever it was, its command was duly accepted and so halcyon like she sat, obedient and expectant. Her ears quietened and she watched The Children running about the room, in complete detachment; an absent stare that had become her dressing room in the past days.
She tried to contain her thoughts, to avoid the conscious slippery; the type that had undone her lover, but she couldn’t contain her misdirection. She thought about what The Behemoth had said; that Marcos had planned to leave her. Everything rushed about in her mind; the coldness of his touch, the sight of his back always to her when they slept and his focus; the strength of his focus, always on an idea grander than their love. Why couldn’t he think of her in that light? Why couldn’t it be just they; the shadow of enamoured lovers embracing under the orange hue of The Forever New dawn? Why did everything have to be so ideal?
Marcos; trapped ‘in conscious’ continued his will to move, to return to the controls and stop this madness. His sight was blackened by the sheet that covered his body, but he could hear the rampant footsteps of hurried scientists rushing about following directives and the confused murmurs of White Hearts as an air of difference past through the minds of all and sundry. He writhed and wriggled and stretched and squirmed, but he couldn’t fit his soul into his body.
Instead, a moment became him where the sight of The Woman came rushing upon him. A thousand images flashing in the life of a moment; The Woman with her hands outstretched, the defiant look in her eyes and how it stilled him, brought him to desire.
The Woman; from behind, walking down a long winding street, her hesham bag over her right shoulder slipping down her arm, her books hanging tentatively and debating with gravity the height of their fall.
The Woman alone in a park; reading from a book, the lush green grass enclosing around her soft white skin.
The Woman having fallen; looking up to him and holding out her hand, seeing him for the first time.
The Woman looking over her shoulder and leading him down an alleyway smiling as her black hair bounced in the light wind and her lilac fringe swished about her hazel eyes, never seeming to bother her.
The Woman; tied to a table screaming.
The Woman; on the dark end of a poison bottle.
The Woman, like a cancer, all over him, her hand clutching and digging in, so full of emptiness until finally, The Woman; under a grey cloak, her hands bloodied and beside her, The Behemoth, faceless, concealing something in his great hands.
The image shuddered and blackened, then emptied like a kitchen sink with a great thud. He didn’t feel it but his corporal vessel had for a moment been listless, floating through the air, cast out into the night by four great hands, swung low at first then thrust upwards into the cold draft where it seemed to fly about until gravity took its orders and pulled his molecular vessel downwards, splashing into the freezing waters of the black river where the mischievous currents took it in their along the winding ring around The City, leading past the old station, along the highways that linked to the forgotten suburban sprawl and eventually channelling their way out to the Pacific like the roots of old oak bursting through the sidewalk crawling down the promenade looking for an open drink to quench its gargantuan thirst.
As his body floated light on the rapid waters, his conscious struggle continued until his vessel caught on something and the torrent of water pressured his still body, flowing up and over the black plastic sheet; the head; his conscious prison, being pushed forward by the weight of the river, tickled, and he felt it and as the plastic sheet tore away and a shiny silver blade touched the grain of his chin, he jumped into his body, his eyes opened and he gasped for air, scaring the wilful intent out of an old woman’s hand.
The Scientist sat in front of Safrine and gently started removing the hordes of tubes from her arms. The girl was groggy, still under the effect of the drugs that had been swimming in her system all morning. Her arm was bruised where the needles had been placed and when it was freed she pulled it against her body, squeezing to neutralise the pain that pulsated annoyingly. She was still bound to the sofa and seated upright; tight leather wrapped around her ankles and from it springing metal circles weaving in and out of link with one another; one, two, three, four, many links and many more, tied off somewhere out of sight, somewhere foreign to the cool breeze that swept under the door, the cool breeze that carried with it, the smell of carrion and to her, it awakened a sense of danger as the first state to address her conscious being.
She started to thrash her legs wildly and scream but with her mouth gagged, only a faint muffle made its way to the scientist labouring to remove the tubes without rupturing a vein.
In her mind, she thought of her father and was haunted by the image of his voice at first assuring and calm, then mutating in to a contorted pig squeal as his warm chest was torn from her face and catapulted into the darkness. She loved him so much. As she fought her way into negated submittal, finally collapsing from exhaustion into her shackles, The Scientist called to one of his colleagues at the other end of the room.
“The needle,” he said, pointing to the table.
The subordinate man in white brought over a large needle. The Scientist took Safrine’s free arm and gently caressed above one of her veins, flicking lightly against the skin until the blue rose from the white, past the yellowy brown bruises. He pushed the needle gently into her vein and the girl squinched, squeezing her eyes tightly before letting them go again, her body in seconds falling limp, her consciousness retreating beyond the sub-state.
“Prepare the green liquid. She must receive the injection eight hours prior to departure. I have removed the fluids from her arm. If you can, stay with her and wet her lips with that water every fifteen minutes. I will return at the fall of the sun” said The Scientist to his subordinate.
The Scientist left the room where outside the door The Behemoth waited impatiently for information on the girl, his mind raced, his veins boiled with nor adrenaline and his focus was sharper than ever. None of this came as a surprise, nor should it. The omniscience of a creator does not lend one to surprise, but that’s not to say that one doesn’t attend to the marvel of one’s own genius in the coming together, of a plan.
“Is everything in order?” he asked.
“Everything is according to the script sir” responded The Scientist.
“Then you know what you to do” replied The Behemoth.
The Scientist went in his own direction while The Behemoth walked back along the winding corridors back into the open courtyard where Women and Children frolicked about in the open sky completely oblivious to the coming storm. He took the north path up the winding steps to the office of strategy where he took from a canister sitting by the oak table, a sip of a vile concoction, brewed by the old drunk sometime during the rising fall of the age of information.
The alcohol burned his throat and stung his lips. Only a few sips were enough to settle his mind and warm his stomach. Any mor
e would have him drunk.
The Behemoth stood in front of the window in a room that sat in a tower high above the Nest that overlooked the entire City, from downtown to the outer regions, to the old bridge that crossed the black river and out into the horizon where to the west, the barren land met with the cold Pacific Ocean.
He could see in the distance that people were coming. Not some, not many but a great many, hundreds of thousands of many. People of all colours, people of all sizes, people of all descent. They all trenched along wet sludgy mud paths, cold concrete roads, cobble stone streets and gravel laced alleyways. They moved in all direction in a slow staunch unwavering rhythm. It was like watching a tidal wave gradually creep across a plain, sweeping up everything in its path, leaving only a sea of faces and the destruction to which they commit.
They came from all the rounded edges of the horizon, men with their women marching as one, marching along with hordes of raucous children, marching with hungry venom in their eyes.
In the distance, from the sea, moored thousands of boats and hundreds of ships and from them marched hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and dog. An entire ship of hounds had led the fleet, captained by an old sea scavenge, to the shallow reefs where man and beast dived into the waters and fed by their Famine, made their way like thirsty fish through the last kilometre of water to the rocky shoreline and up onto dry land where they followed the pungent stench of ideology onwards through the blistering cold and the clouded grey mask of day.
At first they marched in a group; the couples holding hand and garnishing weapons, the children; feverish, the plenitude of youth, of incredible number, volant and violent, moving through the human tide like an oil slick through the open sea.
In the distance, waves of desperate humans collided; coming together on all fronts like the joining of seas. They pushed into and trampled over one another trying to keep their direction and their pace. The groups fought and tore at each other’s skin with their nails, teeth, fists and whatever they could fashion as weapons.
Eventually, the thrashing mesh of bodies came together in a new direction, pushing forward, driven by their need to be informed. The new fluxes flowed from all points, led by a revenging pack of hounds, their pace quickened and upon the Nest they came.
Below him, The Behemoth looked down upon what had at first seemed like an inexpugnable army of men. But now in the wake of his foresight, they seemed paltry in comparison to what was about to wash up on their ill-gotten shores.
The White Hearts spread out across the entire complex and out into the distance flanking in great number, several blocks creating an external wall of protection to the complex. They had been well educated and loved for this moment. Though their numbers were many less, their readiness for war was all the more transcendent.
The men stood shoulder to shoulder, their eyes fixed at their front, their minds light, focused on their instinctive state of At War, ready to react, already a fist waiting to strike.
Inside the ring, The Behemoth’s eyes followed a team of commanders who had made their way from the complex and were out taking stock of the situation on the front.
The men shouted orders and directives amongst one another and then split, yelling these directions to the men lined up about the region. There was a sense of approaching incident in the air, a climate of immediate volatility and imminent disaster.
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