What Torments Me
Keesha - Sep 2008
Borrowed characters from FOX, had a great play date and returned with no harm.
The deep, strobe-like, droning shook the post-apocalyptic sky. With tremendous effort, the dark-haired man partially raised himself off the floor. Although every fiber in his body was screaming for mercy, he proceeded to push himself even higher so he could track the progress of the white light that was creeping into the room. The droning grew increasingly louder and he would have covered his ears with his hands, if one hand had not been holding him up and the other one shackled to the floor. The beam of light moved steadily across the rough wooden floor, bathing those it came across in its intense eerie beam. He cringed in horror when it was his turn to bear the illumination and have his sins exposed. As the beam engulfed him, he collapsed to the floor, burying his scruffy face in his arms. The sheer terror of the probing glow made him want to scream and maybe he was screaming. He was too disorientated to know. All his senses were being assaulted; his mind felt like it was on the verge of exploding.
Though it felt like the torture went on for hours, in reality it was merely a fraction of a second before the beam moved past him on its way out of the house. The light left a path of broken men and women in its wake, he being one of them. He lay upon the floor trembling, silent sobs racking his battered frame.
Out of nowhere, something dropped from the air and landed with a soggy plop on the floor.
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
Afraid to look, he kept his head buried until something landed on the floor within inches of his face. Unable to ignore whatever was happening anymore, he slowly raised his head. His eyes struggled to adjust, to focus on the objects that were falling from the air and littering the floor.
A deep, primordial sound emerged from his mouth. Mutilated, bloody, body parts rained down around him. Limbs, ripped from their torsos. Heads with faces disfigured by plasma burns. He squinted in the dim light and a sick feeling grew in the pit of his stomach. He knew these people; from the tunnels. The people he had sworn to defend, to protect.
The upper body of a child bounced off his chest and rolled to the floor. The face, contorted in horror, stared up at him. The child. The one from the tunnel with the teddy bear. Dead. Murdered by the metals. Murdered, because he, Derek Reese, had given the metals the location of the tunnels during his session in the basement. He had tried to be strong but in the end, beaten, battered, broken, he had divulged the position of the secret entryway.
Revolted, he tried to scramble away from the body of the dead child and nearly fell out of bed as his mind released him from the ghoulish nightmare. His sheets and pillows were strewn about the bed, his matted hair and t-shirt bathed in sweat.
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he sat there trembling violently as he tried to banish the images from his mind. He swore the smell of death and destruction lingered in the room even though the events of his dream had occurred 20 years in the future, in a world that did not exist yet.
His ragged breaths sounded harsh in the quiet of the night and he forced himself to take deep, slow breaths to calm down. When he thought he had gained some semblance of control, he pushed himself to his feet. Glancing out the door, it seemed his night escapades had not woken anyone else in the household. His screaming must have been silent after all but that did not alter the fact that his throat felt like sandpaper had been used on it.
He wound his way thru the still house to the kitchen. Peering out the window, he noted the light of pre-dawn creeping across the horizon. Moving to the refrigerator, he opened the door and reached for the carton of OJ. The cool air of the fridge brushed against his sweat soaked skin causing him to start shaking again. Slamming the door shut, he leaned heavily against the counter. When the shivering subsided, he lifted the carton of OJ to his parched lips only to pause when the voice of Sarah drifted through his mind saying 'we use glasses in this house'. Scowling, he placed the juice carton on the counter and reached into the overhead cabinet. As his right hand reached for the glass, his eye was drawn the tattoo on his forearm; the tattoo that the metals had burned into his skin in the house of horrors.
The images of his nightmare came flooding back into his mind like a tidal wave, swamping him. The bloody little girl's face was there, accusing him of being a traitor. Reeling under the onslaught of revulsion, he dropped the glass and it shattered into pieces. His eyes, however, remained rivted on the tattoo, the tattoo that marked him as a traitor to his people.
The nightmarish images would not release him from their vile grasp and self-proclaimed accusations rang thru his head. HE was the man who was caught by the metals and HE was the man who sold out his fellow humans. HE was weak; HE had caved; and HE had told.
His mind was on the south side of rational as he seized a piece of jagged glass off the counter. That tattoo, that damn tattoo. The reminder he lived with every day of his life. The bar coded numbers that formed the word 'traitor'. It had to go; he had to remove it, now. He took the glass and slashed it across his forearm, determined to cut the offensive material from his skin. He made a jagged score down one side of the bar code and was starting on the next side when a nearly monotone voice inquired, "What are you doing?"
Spinning around, he faced the speaker, still clutching the glass shard. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped onto the floor.
The metal. His tormentor.
Music played faintly in the background of his mind and he was unable to determine what was real, as images flashed across his mind. Music. A room. Torture. Unbearable pain. Someone. In the darkness. A shadow. A metal. A face he could but couldn't remember.
He dropped the glass piece he'd been using as a knife and it burst into smaller fragments upon the floor. As if drawn to her by some invisible bond, he took three steps towards Cameron then halted. She didn't blink but stood there staring, almost inquisitively at him. Silence weighed heavy in the air as they remained there locked in their staring contest.
Finally, Derek broke the spell, averting his eyes as he dragged a hand through his hair. "Was it you?"
Cameron took a step towards him and he instinctively stepped back. She halted, the deadpan expression on her face never wavering.
"No. This isn't right. This isn't real." Stumbling out the kitchen door, he fell down the four wooden stairs that lead into the backyard. He lay there for a moment on the ground to catch his breath before pushing himself up on one arm and looking back over his shoulder at the kitchen door. In the dim light he could see it, her, standing there, watching. Always watching. His body started trembling again. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered to the far corner of the yard where he dropped into one of the lawn chairs surrounding the fire pit.
The figure in the kitchen door was suddenly illuminated with a bright, white light. Derek's heart caught in his throat until he realized that someone had turned the light on in the kitchen and it was not the light of the metal's flying machine.
Closing his eyes wearily, he let his head drop against the back of the chair. He pressed his bleeding arm against his body to staunch the blood and let his mind go numb, exhausted.
With her hand still resting on the light switch, Sarah surveyed the mess. "What happened here?" she asked Cameron.
Cameron turned slowly from the door to face her. "He dropped a glass and cut himself, with a glass," she answered matter-of-factly.
Carefully avoiding the broken fragments, Sarah moved to the kitchen door and peered into the backyard. In the early morning light she could just barely make out that someone was sitting by the fire pit, in the far end of the yard. She pushed open the screen door and slipped her lithe body out the opening. Cautiously, she crossed the yard.
As she grew closer she was surprised to note that Derek did not acknowledge her presence. An eerie feeling crept up her spine. Something was wrong here. Though she had only known this man for a short time, she knew he always paid attention to what went on around him. Where he came from, in the future, to be caught unaware was to soon be dead.
A slight breeze twisted its' way thru the yard, caressing her long, dark, hair. She came to a halt in front of him. He did not acknowledge her presence.
"Are you alright?" she asked as she sat down on the edge of the brick fire pit.
Her eyes traveled from his bare feet, up his sweat pants, to his forearm which was pressed awkwardly against his stomach. It was his right arm, the one with the tattoo, a bar code which signified who he was or more precisely who he was to be. It said more about the man than anything else in his persona. In the growing light she noted that a dark stain was slowly seeping across the front of his t-shirt.
"You're hurt." she voiced with genuine concern.
Without opening his eyes, he slowly, rotated the limb in question to reveal a ragged three inch gash. Blood-welled freely from the wound, trailing in rich, red, rivulets artistically down his arm.
"That does not look good, Reese," her voice gruff in dismay at what she knew was a self-inflicted injury.
Derek gave the slightest of shrugs as he rotated and pressed the arm against his abdomen to staunch the bleeding.
"Why?" she asked.
Time stretched, like an over-used rubber band and Sarah waited breathlessly for it to snap. She had seen him quiet before, but this was different. Time continued to stretch. She was at the edge of the ledge, about to scream at him, to hit him, to try to get some sort of response from him when he finally broke the silence.
"You see me as a killer; something no better those hunks of metal."
"No, I," but Reese cut ruthlessly across her denial.
"You do. You would not even meet my eyes after I killed Sarkissian. I saved John, you looked at me like I was the monster."
Sarah would not, could not deny it. It had shocked her to see someone so quickly, so coldly kill another man. "Would you have killed that little girl, had she been that man's daughter? "
Derek finally opened his eyes and stared at her with a steely gaze. "If I thought the odds were good that it would have help, then yes."
"If you thought the odds?" she echoed hollowly.
"If I thought the odds, of killing one little girl, would somehow lead to saving all of mankind then absolutely. Without hesitation."
"Are you really that hard?"
Derek dropped his gaze and did not answer for a long time. His voice was rough with emotion when he broke the silence. "If this mission fails, I have nothing and no one left to live for." His eyes flickered across the wound on his arm. "I have a chance, now, to save Kyle. A chance to save all those people, the people I have," his voice trailed off.
"I know," Sarah said.
"Know what?" he shot back suspiciously, wondering how she could know his deepest, darkest secret.
"I know you have terrible nightmares. I hear you thrashing about, crying out. Screaming."
Derek's shoulders sagged in relief as he rubbed his hand across his weary face to hide his emotions.
"Would it help? To talk? I can be a good listener."
Derek snorted. "Yeah, let me bare my soul to you, the woman who thinks my methods for saving her son are too 'hard'."
The solider of the future leaned forward, capturing her green eyes with his own. "You want to know what torments me at night? What haunts my dreams? This world. This world torments me because I know if I screw up this will all go away. I have seen the hell that will replace it. The world that kills my parents, slaughters my friends and family, and rips my only brother away from me. I have no idea how I am supposed to do it, but I know I have to save this world and lady, that torments me."
He drew a ragged breath before continuing. "And I find myself here, with you, and the great John Connor, savior of man-kind. And you know what? We live under the same roof with a metal, a machine that you have named, that you treat as if it is human. The enemy. And I have to ask myself what the hell are you doing and why am I letting you do it? I should go in there and blast that SOB back to damnation where it belongs. But no, I let a sixteen-year old boy and his deranged mother tell me it is OK to live with a metal. You tell me that when I kill the man that invents the Turk, THAT when I kill the man that has the savior of mankind at gun point, THAT I am being too 'hard'." Exhausted by his tirade, Derek slumped back in his chair. "Sarah," he said wearily, "you're too humane."
"How can a human be too humane? Isn't that what sets us apart from them? The metals."
"You keep playing by your 'humane' rules and we are all going to die.
"Look, I don't like your methods and John is STILL my son and I am going to raise him the way I see fit."
"Even if it gets us all killed? And by all I mean the whole world, not just you, me and kid."
"Reese, I do not have to explain myself to you. However," she said softening her voice, "the offer stands. If you ever need to talk, I am here for you."
"Even if I am a hard, cold-blooded killer?"
"Well, your methods do scare me," she tried to joke lightly.
"Hell, they scare me too. But they are," he paused, searching for the right word, "necessary. I do not want to kill, but I also don't want the future I know to happen. To avoid that future, I have to kill in the present. Otherwise, we do not succeed.
Sarah remained quiet, unwilling to agree or disagree.
"I'm not going to change Sarah. This is who I must be now. As they say, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree and move forward. You and John need me and," he finished softly, " I think I need you and John too."
Sarah nodded briefly, as much to acknowledge his concession as to reassure herself. "Come inside. Let me bandage that cut."
"I don't think it's necessary," Derek protested.
"Listen mister. If I have to put up with you shooting people, I want to be damn sure your shooting arm is perfect. You never know when," she drew a deep breath, "you may have to shoot someone to save John's life again. Thank you."
The smallest hint of a smile crept across Derek's face as he acknowledged her words. He rose and they walked in silence back to the house. The sun poked its' head over the horizon, warming the yard with its golden rays. Derek stopped briefly to bask in the moment. "God, I love the sunrise. " Sarah nodded and they continued to the house.
Avoiding the glass in the kitchen, they made their way to the bathroom where Derek perched on the edge of the bathtub while Sarah rounded up the medical supplies. Settling on the toilet lid, she reached over and stretched out his arm. Holding his wrist captive, she looked over at him. "I don't know what you were trying to prove here," she said tapping his arm, "but I don't think it would have solved anything."
Derek stared down at the tattoo, knowing she was right. He could carve it out of his arm, but it would always be burned in his heart. He did not need a tattoo to remind him of what he had done. He knew he had spilled his guts in that room in the basement. Whether any man could have held out under that torture, or whether he, Derek Reese, was a coward he could not say. The only thing that was certain was he had a mission to save this world and he would die, if that's what it took, to make this mission a success.