Furnace (18 page)

Why, though?

It wasn’t that I doubted his bloodlust or even his desire to watch me bleed after eluding his grasp in the corpse fields, but the lengths to which he’d gone to find me contrasted with my initial perception of the Watchmen. I’d thought they were mindless brutes who delighted in the capture and torture of innocent creatures. They still were, I supposed, but if one of them was willing to follow me into the city, he must have served some sort of guard function as well.  A shepherd, if you will, although with a much more heinous agenda. The notion of an agenda at all was terrifying, just like it had been in the corpse fields. The demons near the lava lakes had been ruthless savages and that was at least comforting in its predictability. The Watchmen in the corpse fields as a whole were ruthless savages with some measure of group coordination, but still seemed more like animals than sentient creatures with complex thoughts and desires.

But the appearance of the Watchman calmly regarding me from the shadows across the way changed all of that. He’d transcended the apparent uniformity of his rank and developed a specific role. A personality. One which valued some catches over others.

It was an unsettling notion, indeed. If I was valuable enough to the demons that this lead Watchman had followed me across the hellacious tundra and sought me out in a gutter on the verge of death, I shuddered to think what they had in store for me once I was caught.

And I
was
caught, I knew. I’d been frozen in place by the sight of the creature. At least he wasn’t rushing me. That would have made it difficult to draw the SX in time, assuming he afforded me the opportunity. For the moment, I was too stunned by the frankness of his approach to do anything at all.

“What?” I said weakly.

It still amazes me how easily I’d forgotten the magnitude of his presence over the course of a few hours. Now that he stood before me again, I shrank beneath his massive form. The heat from his breath seared the venom-ravaged flaps of skin along my cheek and lips. I felt like vomiting from the stench, but I didn’t have enough in my stomach to upchuck.

“What do you want from me?” I wheezed. By the time he was close enough that I would have trusted my aim with the SX, I’d fallen to my knees and reached out a trembling hand in supplication. “Why?”

I was broken. Utterly broken. Even now, I’m ashamed by it. By how close I came to giving up in that moment. I hadn’t bowed before the scorpion-bug, after all. Or the horde of demons that swarmed me on the rooftops. I’d even managed to get away from the corpse fields without succumbing to despair and collapsing in the dust. So why now, I wondered? What was so damned paralyzing about seeing an alien—even a
demon
alien in a red mask with a penchant for torture—walking calmly toward me? I could have run. It would have hurt like a bitch, and he probably would have caught me, but I at least could have tried. I didn’t, though. And as I tried to shift my weight again at the last moment, I wondered if
he
had something to do with my paralysis. Not just through his imposing presence, but some other dark power channeled from his lord and king.

When I dropped to my knees before the cathedral steps, I was certain of it. The Watchman had control of my body. That’s why he wasn’t running. I was merely a passenger.

Keep your head up
, I thought.

It was hard not to plead for my life, but I hadn’t done it when I was a POW during the Kalak War and I wasn’t about to start. Furnace may have broken me and I may have been close to giving up altogether, but I still had
some
pride. If I was going to allow myself to die at the hands of the red-masked demon, I would at least hold onto that.

“KUURUKA NARYEH,” the creature growled.

His voice made me recoil, shuffling six-inches backward even through his mental hold. My body convulsed. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Hollow and distant, like it was happening to someone else. When he placed his massive, coal-black hands on either side of my head and spat burning saliva in my eyes, I screamed and tried to rise once again. It was no use, though. His dark magic had me locked in place. Not even my overwhelming revulsion could break the trance now that we were in direct contact.

“DEEBAK SCHEN TSCHARIA,” he said, then drew back and hawked another thick, black string of phlegm into my eyes.

The burn forced my eyelids shut, which only made things worse. The acidic spit was trapped now and slathered itself over my eyeballs like a living thing. It probably was.

“OPEN YOUR EYES,” the creature commanded.

I blinked involuntarily, more because I was startled that I suddenly understood him than I wanted to obey his orders. Three and a half years in the fleet plus the academy have made obedience a knee-jerk reaction for me on most occasions, but I’ve also learned resistance. I don’t cave easily under pressure, no matter what conclusions you may draw from Furnace. Considering it was the worst of all worst-case-scenarios, I’m hoping you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.

Once the burn of the Watchman’s saliva began to recede, I took a deep breath and drank in the world around me. I couldn’t gulp it all down in one swallow, though. It was the psychological equivalent of having the whole Pacific Ocean dropped on me at once and trying to catch it between my lips. My mind was drowned by incomprehension. I felt my brain swell until I thought my skull was about to burst, and then everything came into focus again. That didn’t mean there was much clarity as to
what
I was seeing, but my perception had at least been altered to the point where my surroundings were more than just a blinding white curtain with a migraine buzz in the background.

Out of all the crazy shit I saw on Furnace, this was the only instance in which I’m thoroughly convinced I hallucinated, although maybe ‘hallucinated’ isn’t the right term, either. It was a message specifically targeted at my brain by the Watchman, so I guess it was more of a vision than anything. He dug into my head and left me all kinds of ugly surprises and trap-doors, some of which I suspect were implanted so he could access them at a later date. I find more of them every day. Sound paranoid? Maybe to you, but you weren’t there. You didn’t feel his burning hands against your temples. You didn’t feel the sudden, violent teleportation into a nightmare world created specifically for you.

“Wherever you go,” a voice whispered beside me. “I’ll find you.”

Objects began to fill in around me and I realized I was kneeling in the prison cell where the Kalak had once tortured me within an inch of death. I wasn’t strapped to the oversized bed where I’d spent several weeks without moving, but I could feel the sting of a recent interrogation session from my throat to my hips. The Kalak are big on using vipers from their native rainforests whenever they want to make someone bleed without killing them. The bites hurt like hell but centuries of exposure to radiation has diluted their venom just enough to be non-fatal to human physiology, making them valuable assets in interrogation.

By the familiar, pulsing burns beneath my combat-suit, I could tell it had been less than an hour since I’d had a visit from the goon squad. Probably General Kraat had overseen the session himself. He was the worst of the overgrown lizards who’d somehow managed to sweep a dozen human colonies right out from under fleet protection. If it had been less than an hour, that usually meant I had at least three hours before they settled on a more succinct method for information extraction than the vipers. Not a lot of time, but plenty to get my head together.

I was just glad to be off of Furnace, even for a few moments and even when it meant being dropped into another shitty situation.

Am I really here, though?
I wondered.
Has the last year and a half been a dream? A new method of torture the Kalak have devised to watch us suffer? Some way to study human psychology?

I considered the idea as carefully as my fragile mental state would allow, but eventually decided it was impossible. The Kalak were fearsome warriors and they loved developing new ways to inflict pain, but they weren’t exactly experts in holographic projection. They were color-blind, for one thing, and I was confident that particular handicap would manifest in some way with any virtual world they built. Maybe that’s naïve, since it assumes that no human would ever consider aiding the enemy for a price or to protest the Crown government, but I fail to see the point of such an involved deception. I’m not a general. I’m not a commander. I have no real secrets their spies couldn’t uncover on their own.

The alternative, of course, was that my body still was on Furnace and the Watchman had isolated this particular near-memory for a reason. Why? I’m still not sure. Being a POW for weeks on a Kalak station was traumatizing, no doubt, but no more remarkable than being on Furnace or in the trenches of most other operations I’d run in the infantry. Maybe it was the connection of torture alone, which seemed to be a sweet spot for the demons in and around the city. The Watchman could have searched for a specific brand of agony when he tapped into my neural synapses and decided that my POW days was the best place to lay anchor. It would have been natural and recognizable for him, I guess.

Either way, I knew I was in deep shit. Even if the Watchman had locked my consciousness in a memory while my body remained on Furnace, it still meant I would likely miss my window for escape and survival. I had to figure out a way to break free quickly or else either the
Hummel
would leave without me or a wandering demon would swoop in and devour me while I knelt motionless before the cathedral steps.

And how do you plan on breaking out of this?

I scanned the cell for any obvious escape routes, but as I’d verified about thirteen thousand times during my captivity, there was no such salvation hidden along the sterile, steel walls. For a moment, I’d held out hope that the walls themselves were an illusion and if I reached out with my hand I’d discover they were nothing but air. That wasn’t the case, however, and I jammed my thumb testing the theory. You’d think I would have been numb to such minor injuries by then, but I spent the next thirty seconds or so shaking my hand vigorously.

If he didn’t want you to escape, why wouldn’t he have just killed you? Why the theatrics?

On cue, the voice of the clown demon drifted out from the vents in a puff of white smoke. “You will be my vessel,” he hissed.

I rose groggily to my feet and backed away from the fumes. Hearing his voice wasn’t exactly comforting, but it confirmed to my satisfaction that the intent was not for me to die in the Kalak prison. At the very least, he had something to show me, and I didn’t think it was the close walls of the cell or the surveillance pod mounted high above the door. There was still a chance that he was toying with me—in fact, there was a damned good probability of it—but the prospect of invincibility, or really just a safety net, helped convince me to get moving. What did I have to lose? If a Kalak guard gunned me down for attempting escape, so be it. For all I knew, the trick to breaking through the nightmare was simply having the courage to open the door and step into the hallway.

Only one way to find out.

It took all of one step to realize that every single injury I’d accumulated on Furnace had made the jump with me, which made me wonder if I’d miscalculated the amount of time since my last interrogation and whether or not the vipers had been used at all.

Doesn’t matter
, I decided.
At least I can move.

Before pain could convince me otherwise, I limped across the room and waved my hand in front of the door controls. If I’d had Kalak blood, the reinforced steel would have gasped open and I would have been home free (more or less). I didn’t, of course, and even in this distant memory conjured by the Watchman, I couldn’t override the lizards’ security protocols simply by willing the door open.

“Great,” I muttered, surprised at the sound of my own voice. Now that the physical world had filled in around me, I was startled by how concrete everything seemed. Just like when I’d awoken beneath the bone chandelier in the clown demon’s city hideaway. And just like when I’d barely eluded the clown thing’s grasp and wound up in the wastelands, I was hoping for a miracle.

I scanned the room frantically.  My combat-instincts wanted me to keep moving, like I knew deep down the horrors that would follow, but it was no use. The Watchman had brought me back there for a reason and he meant to see his plan to fruition before I found a way out. I’m convinced that even if I’d somehow managed to break free of my cell and stagger into the main corridor, I wouldn’t have gotten far. Either the universe beyond the four walls of my cell would have been completely blank or there would have been an entire platoon of Kalak runners waiting to put me down. Maybe not kill me, but beat me well enough to be sure I wouldn’t attempt escape again without some very serious soul-searching. They’d done it to me before and it had worked well enough. For a while, anyway.

I turned back to the oversized bed (which had been converted from a Kalak medical gurney into a crude vehicle for torture and restraint) determined to utilize my lone asset for a grand—and so far undetermined—escape plan. I didn’t get far before I heard the clack of boots echoing through the outer corridor. It was a safe bet they were coming for me, whoever ‘they’ were.

I reached for the SX pistol but there was nothing in the holster and the rest of my utility belt was still missing. I should have expected as much, but my brain was still overloaded with conflicting information. I was a little slower on the uptake with some things than others.