The Golden Hope

by Elliot Bowers

Chapter 4

They kept on driving through the night. Or rather, Gally kept driving. The dark-haired cyborg-girl required less sleep since it was only her brain that required the rest. That was also true of Kyrie, her body being of synthetic skin and myogel muscle tissues over titanium skeleton and created components—the princess getting by only on naps. As for big, meat-bodied humans like Padraig, he had to rest up totally. He slept on one of the absolutely strange sofas in the main area of this odd, futuristic mobile home on strange wheels.

It was mid-morning when Padraig awoke—feeling as physically refreshed as a shower, a shave, and a teeth-scrubbing, the same as what happened any time he napped since coming to this world. He could tell it was mid-morning by the way that moderate sunlight shone through the tinted plastic dome set in the ceiling of this vehicle—the rumbling sound of the engine and wheels making for a steady hum as it drove along the sandy, scrub-grass landscape.

Then he remembered that this vehicle's engine was smoothly quiet before. It ought not make anynoise. Now it was getting to sound as noisy and as inefficient as any vehicle he had known. He sat up on the sofa, put dark-shod feet to the floor. Yes, he slept in his shoes as he always did, in case he had to wake up running. Thank goodness there was no running this morning. Not yet, at least. He then crossed the hard, vibrating floor in getting to the driver's cabin of this vehicle.

Gally was still driving this vehicle along, Padraig at the far left, Princess Kyrie in the center seat that was bigger than herself… Every so often, Kyrie would gently tilt her head somewhat to one side or another, her eyes seeming to go out of focus. Gally would take quick glances at the princess. "We must make an ever-so-slight change in direction," said the princess, "a change of merely a few degrees to the right if this vehicle remains capable such minute adjustments."

He greeted the females. "Top o' the morning to you, Princess Kyrie… And Gally, o' course," he said. "So ye know of something mayhaps goin' askew with this vehicle? It didn't make any noise before. Now, 'tis grumbling like a bear's belly in the depths o' winter."

Kyrie did not know what a bear was exactly, but it was likely a creature from Padraig's world. Without looking in his direction, the princess answered. Saying, "We came to know of such a diagnosis by way of this vehicle's control panel. It has begun to take on a reddish color. Such is likely a reflection of the vehicle's viability."

He looked. Indeed, the plastic casing of the vehicle's slanted dashboard truly was a reddish color. There were no dials or gauges that color. No, it really was the dashboard itself that seemed to have changed color to indicate the mechanical viability of the vehicle. Between the color of the dashboard and the nasty sounds being made by the vehicle's engine and drive-train components, this big ugly retro-futristic spacemobile was not going to be mobile much longer.

As for what exactly was going wrong with the vehicle, there was no way to tell. There ought to have been something as simple and easy-to-read as dials or gauges for engine temperature, fuel level, battery output, oil pressure, radiator integrity, speed, RPMs, seat belt, all of those lights and widgets that people liked to look at when not looking at the road. Every other vehicle Padraig had ever seen had all of that sort of analog Tomfoolery and such to indicate the condition of major systems.

Then again, he remembered that this vehicle was probably not fashioned by human hands. Those large-headed dead beings they threw out of this vehicle probably understood their system as being perfectly normal. That, and there was the ever-more-noticeable grumbling of the vehicle's once-quiet engines, not normal for it. And if this vehicle did not hold out, they would be going it on foot until they could reach the next place as indicated by Kyrie's senses.

A low glow emanated from the vehicle's control panel flickered just before this vehicle lurched. There was a sound of the vehicle's wheels skidding along the hard ground before going ahead again, Gally's boots going th-thump in bracing herself, keeping herself from flinging forward. Princess Kyrie looked as if doing a quick but violent forward-shake of her head, long slim lengths of her pale-blonde hair fluttering forward to obscure her face. Padraig was flopped chest-first into the back of the center seat—then flopping backwards, clutching his midsection.

Running slim fingers through moonsilk hair and with a look of reified dignity on her delicate face, Kyrie said, "Such is an agreeable understanding of this unforeseen circumstance. We shall therefore abandon this means of transportation at the next place we come across. Such is the way of found things in this fading land, perhaps—all the more reason for us to continue our quest…" A blink of those big green eyes of hers, looking forward, and the princess gestured ahead. "We are not especially far from a place."

Looking through this vehicle's windshield, squinting to look farther off into the distance and the weak sunlight, he did see something. This wasted landscape was as generally flat as usual. As boring as it could be, it at least allowed a person an unobstructed view for quite some distance around. And some distance ahead was some kind of wide building set behind a platform and a wide cut in the ground. Now he saw something like that before. He had an idea as to what it was. Yet such a thing out here would make no sense.

With beautiful Gally controlling this ugly vehicle, they were getting closer still. Now that place in the distance was getting ever more clearly into view. It also looked less sensible. Said Padraig aloud, "Erm… Is that what I think it to be? If so, 'twould make painfully little sense"

Gally responded, "Who is to say what should be sensible and what is not? You and I are not of this world. We would therefore be in a less advantageous position to make declarations regarding what constitutes sensibility."

Padraig pressed his lips together, not saying anything. It was as if every other thing Gally said sometimes got through his patience. Of course that place they were approaching ought not make sense. It ought not make sense at all, not even to someone who just smoked several bricks of marijuana or consumed any other severely mind-altering substance. That particular facility of mass transportation belonged in a city, not in the middle of some scrubby wasteland of pathetic grass and sandy dirt.

Ah, but the rules of this land are different—different land, different rules. Malarkey, came Padraig's responding thought. Things were going from tolerably bizarre to outright head-smashingly insane in a hurry. Now they were approaching a damned subway station out in the middle of this nowhere land. It still made no sense.

…

Gally parked this vehicle not too far from the building in front of the pit in the ground. It was not a choice on her part. The vehicle just stopped working when it came too close to the building. Wheels locked up, lights flickered, and the whole thing quit. "I suspect a degree of increased radiation is to blame," said the metal-bodied cyborg-girl. "However, the hard radiation is not the sole cause of this vehicle ceasing to function. It would therefore be partially caused by the transition." She tilted her head and turned it, regarding Padraig. "I can feel the slight levels of ionizing radiation upon the metal surfaces of my body. It would not be very dangerous to you if exposed to it if such exposure is limited to several hours."

Increased radiation, thought Padraig. Ionizing radiation… Yes, Gally knew what she was talking about—likely because she was a sort of governmental super-spy where she came from. She therefore knew a lot about what was dangerous. When Gally explained that several hours' exposure would be fine, it still made Padraig take on a clenching feeling of tight coldness inside, and that was not having run gut-first into a seat when this vehicle stopped.

Ionizing radiation, that was the kind of radiation that led to all kinds of bad news for a human being. A person could not see, feel or hear most kinds of ionizing radiation, the bad kind that made human bodies play roulette with possibilities of developing all kinds of cancer. Maybe a little bit of it would increase the chances of developing cancer and shortening your lifespan by ten years or so. Maybe a little bit more would maybe get the average human person to feel a tad bit sick as the soft tissues of the body begin to break down, bleeding intestines, coughing up blood, the teeth and hair falling out, radiation sickness. Padraig thought about nightmarish scenarios he read about in history books, about how nuclear attacks were launched against two cities full of people—the only two cities in human history to have been hit with nuclear weapons. Many people in those cities died outright. But worse still, the nuclear attacks kept killing people, the ionizing radiation having contaminated the ground and water. And even decades into the future, people died due to all kinds of cancers and complications. Ionizing radiation is like a killer out of nightmares: invisible, stealthy, and slow in painfully killing its victims.

Gally was still staring, those big dark eyes of hers waiting to see his reaction. I'm not afraid, he forced himself to think—though he was. He then said aloud, "If the way forward would be through the likes o' that strange station and its radiation, then I still say carry on." He said this though neither Gally nor Kyrie had to worry too much. Gally's body was made of alloys permeated with dense radiation-blocking metallic compounds, and the synthetic flesh of Kyrie's body was more resistant than several layers of hazardous materials suits.

And right now, Padraig would not mind any sort of hazardous materials suit, no matter how damnably ugly it was—a nice, big shiny sort of getup with a big goofy sort of helmet and thick material designed to let a person walk through the happy water that flows hot and fresh from a nuclear reactor. Then he thought of those shiny shirts worn by those little big-headed guys—those little guys who were now just dead corpses and not in need of any sort of protection. Then he remembered, of course, that the little shirts of those big-headed little men could not ever fit a full-sized human man. Oh, but he would have found a way to use them. He would wrap the silvery material around him like blankets if he could. Now everyone was getting out of this vehicle—a vehicle that was now useless in addition to being ugly.

The doors out did not work because there was no electrical power. Gally had to use those metal fingers of hers to grip into the once electrically powered sliding door. She used her body's electromechanical strength to then open it out, allowing the princess to step out.

When there was nothing separating himself from the radioactive outside, Padraig felt a warm tingling sensation on his skin as if the ionizing radiation was getting him already. But knew that it was just his imagination. No one would really be able to feel the effects of ionizing radiation, at least no one being a fleshie human. Out there was ionizing radiation coming from that abandoned subway station in the middle of nowhere—enough radiation for Gally's electromechanical body to detect through the protective windshield of this strange vehicle. Yet again the last of their party to leave a location, stepping out into a place that could slowly give him killing cancer just by being here. Damn it, at this point, he hoped that he would not have to be here long—that they found the way to the next place.

…

2.

…

Gally and the princess were just calmly walking along and approaching that big dark gray-concrete train station, or subway station, or whatever the Hell it was. Padraig felt a bit weak and shaky in approaching the strange place set before a house-sized rectangular pit in the earth—low-glowing sunlight overhead. He had the fleeting idea that maybe this was not the way forward, that there was hopefully another means of transportation, any better place. What if they took too long in finding the vehicle hidden here? Or what if Gally was wrong about the intensity of the radiation? Right now, the radioactivity was permeating his skin, his muscles and internal organs—invisible and unfelt energy that was no doubt shortening his lifespan, however long he would live in this world. "A few hours, ye say?" he asked.

"I assure you," began the dark-haired cyborg-girl, "the dosage of ionizing radiation is not of such a level as to be immediately lethal. Exposure to harmful radiation is more of a cumulative and chronic consideration rather than an immediately dangerous one."

Gally was simply restating what Padraig already knew, just as he knew that several hours' time would be what he could seemingly safely take. Cumulative, indeed, he mused as they approached the big metal swinging doors that went into the subway station… Funny, he thought the doors were made of wood. They actually were just made out of a cold, lightweight brown metal that just looked wooden from a distance. It was not painted metal; the metal itself was somehow wood-colored. He let Gally touch and open the door to get in. In fact, he was going to try avoid touching most everything here, likely contaminated.

…

The inside of this subway station was one large space that was much like every other public space that Padraig had seen. Or it would have looked that way other than the fact that this place was falling apart. Much of this place was just illuminated with the sunlight shining through windows high up. There was a hard, tiled sort of floor. Some low and crumbled piles of ceiling tiles were in places. A view up showed that parts of the ceiling high up had actually fallen down. Also visible were the tops of handrails—parts of a very wide staircase going down. So down they went, boots and shoes going down the hard stairs and into the dimly lit basement area.

And the basement area was likely where the real business of this abandoned place must have been done—a place of a wide floor and low ceiling. Just in looking down made for a view of the wide basement area, some illumination down there with some lights going wink-flicker. Padraig was surprised that this place in the middle of a nowhere prairie had any sort of electrical power at all—likely having an independent power source.

There were ticket windows to the right, a small ticket office back there with bits of paper and junk on desks in there… Flick-flicker! Some lights in there flickered on, went out again. "I highly suspect the presence of transportation nearby," said Kyrie. "Yet first comes the necessity of seeking the means of summoning or locating it—likely a sort of train on tracks. The necessity of purchasing passage is likely defrayed due to the lack of personnel."

"Aye, I'll purchase a ticket from the imaginary ticket seller," announced Padraig just before he stumbled. Flick-flicker…! Feeling dizzy and lost, he looked down and tried to stay on his feet—which he could see through. The rest of him was also see-through. He looked at his hands and saw the floor through it… Blink-flicker! As everything…became weak, he saw the princess looking at him. Gally was shouting something. She was reaching for him, her metal hands out of trenchcoat sleeves. But she was just so far away.

Flick-flicker! "Padraig!" came Gally's shout, also the hard feeling of her electromechanical hands on his elbows and hurting. If the cyborg-girl gripped any harder, she would probably break bones. "Stay with us! Do not break our party of three!"

"What…?" he asked as he began to feel solid again. That feeling of feeling lost and disconnected was gone. What it left was a spinning and dizzy sort of feel. "What was that? I'm feeling more than a wee bit flushed about now."

The princess nodded. "Such is an after-effect of the War, that which made the fabric of this universe weak in places. The very fact that this station and other objects have appeared is symptomatic of other realities seeping into this one. Likewise true is how one may come upon places in which the contrary holds temporarily true: one slipping or fading out of this reality rather than aspects of other realities slipping into this one."

The War, thought Padraig. Then he began to feel sick. "I would much appreciate usage of a restroom right about now," he mumbled, staggering in the direction of the ticket booths. To the right of the ticket booths were two metal doors with rusty signs on them—likely indicating restrooms. Before anyone could say anything to him, he began slow-walking towards there.

…

Inside this restroom, the lights seemed to be in even worse shape—florescent light fixtures buzzing and barely producing much illumination. Blinkety flick-flicker, went the lights in here.Padraig made his dizzy and sick-feeling way for the toilet stalls, swaying and staggering. Feeling the way he was, he was not sure if stuff was going to come out of his mouth or out the other end. In either case, being next to a toilet would be a good course of action. So he pulled open the gritty, rusty door of the toilet stall.

There was a dead, bald-headed corpse of something sitting sideways on the toilet, its strange face stuck in death pains. The thing was generally human-shaped, even if the face was not—a face with little tentacles reaching out sideways from both sides of the too-strange face. And the clothes were the strangest that Padraig had ever seen. And the hands were web-skinned between the fingers. Yes, the corpse was generally human shaped, two arms and two legs on a man-shaped torso, a head at the top. But that did not mean that it had to be human.

Occupied stall, thought Padraig, doing his best to quietly and calmly close the bathroom stall door as if to not awaken the strange being, doing his best even if he was feeling sick. He instead turned to the bathroom sinks and approached them. There, he gave a twist of the faucet which he half-expected to produce water… Yes, water actually did come out. A bit of it did. But where did the water come from? The pipes of this place were probably not really connected to anything but dirt. He was going to splash some on his face when he noticed that the water had a definite rusty tone to it. So he turned it off. It was bad enough that he was being exposed to radiation that would kill him if he stayed here too long. He did not want to add toxins to the list of bad exposures.

Flick-flicker went the florescent lights over the bathroom sinks. "Excuse me," said a woman's voice to his right, followed by the breeze of someone brushing past behind him. Padraig nodded and edged himself forward to let the female stranger pass. It would have been rude of him to just stand in the way of someone else's business.

Two realizations struck. First, what was a woman doing in this bathroom? Secondly but even more importantly, what the Hell was a stranger doing here? This place looked abandoned since close to forever. How could anyone else be here other than Gally and Kyrie?

He whipped himself around, that swirling dizziness getting worse. That voice… He heard it before. Yes, he heard it back at that previous settlement, when he went for Gally's trenchcoat. Now the source of the voice was here as well and nowhere to be seen.

There was someone here. They could not simply have left as soon as they arrived. There was also that very definite feeling of somebody being here. It was that feeling a person took on whenever there was someone else in a room. But he could not see anyone.

"Who are ye!" shouted Padraig. "This malarkey cannot go on indefinitely. Ye cannot hide from sight forever. Are ye afraid? Ye need not be afraid unless ye would be against that which my party seeks."

"Oh, all right! Dumbass," complained the female voice. Flick-flicker… Suddenly, there was a pale, darkly clad to the right of the bathroom door—leaning suggestively against the wall. She really did come out of nowhere. There was no way that the woman could have come through the door without moving it.

And, oh yes, Padraig saw that she was most certainly a woman. Shapely legs were exposed to well up to mid-thigh, where a soft leather skirt covered a firm set of hips beneath a half-unuttoned white blouse that exposed the inner halves of round breasts over a flat abdomen. The view was only partially obscured by the open black-leather jacket that matched the color of her deliciously tight leather skirt. Of course, her face was beautiful—deceptively so, a roundly beautiful face of black lipstick on lips and supermodel's cheeks with dark eyes, her face framed with shiny and silky hair.

"Are you happy now, you dumb fuck?" said the woman. "From the way you're agog at my breasts, I'd say you were!" She straightened up to begin walking away from the wall, her high-heeled bootlets clicking on the bathroom floor. The air chilled, so much so that frost formed on the mirror. Raising her arms, long-fingered hands forward, she called to him. "Come to me! And I do mean come."

Carnally, he wanted to ravish that image of womanhood. Yet being close to her made him feel very sick. "Embrace ye? The Hell I will!" yelled Padraig, backing off. He drew two of his three blades. The warmth of the first one began to fill him and keep away some of the chill. "Back away, Hellish strumpet! Ye are not normal! Ye are cold."

"Like, whatever!" said the too-beautiful female. "I'm more normal that you are. I'm the most normal thing in this world—or the world you came from. Don't you want what's normal? Aren't you tired of running with those short doll-girls and doing nothing?"

"Back away, I say!" he said. But what was it, exactly, that was wrong with this female figure? Just looking at her beauty would be enough for any attracted to women. But that would be looking without seeing details. Staring, now he began to realize aspects of the too-beautiful female in front of him. As voluptuously attractive as the woman was, it was all too much beauty. Things were wrong.

Her creamy skin was not the smooth beauty of goddesses depicted as marble statues. No, her skin was the alabaster color of death, colored with that grayish tone that even darker-skinned people took on when no longer alive. Her dark eyes were not just dark… They were eyes that swallow light itself. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a void out of this universe—an infinite universe of darkness.

"Yes, my darling… Now you're being less of a dumb fuck and more of a smart fuck," she said. Her dark fingertips stroked her own firm hips and thighs in soft, tight leather. "Too bad. It would've been a lot easier for us both if you just gave up now."

Padraig closed his eyes, shook his head even if it made the dizziness even worse. Yes, the ravishing image of beauty before him was not really a woman. It was something else. It could also have appeared to him like a rich man in a business suit, money overflowing from his pockets and making promises of prosperity. Or it could have been an elderly relative with wine and smooth talk of comfort and old times. But all of those were trying to do the same thing, trying to lure him into giving up.

The too-beautiful woman-thing smile, lips of dark lipstick spreading. "Or maybe not!" she said. "I sort of like it when you slaughter people by the dozens. That's good too, even if you won't come to me. But you can't keep winning forever! One of these days, you're gonna get in so-o-o much trouble that your party is gonna get broken in a real hurry. Then you'll belong to me. Like, totally."

"Begon with ye!" yelled Padraig. He swung with the right-hand blade, an arc of intensely bright green flaring out. Just a sliver of a second before being struck by the blast, the female thing disappeared. There was then a bright blast of light and heat, followed by shattered wall-tiles and smoke everywhere in this bathroom. Worse still was how some of the lights were broken.

…

He got out, bursting from the bathroom and to where Gally and Princess Kyrie were standing. Gally was the first to stand up, looking surprised at this outburst. "'Twas a temptation!" shouted Padraig…before coughing. "Something from somewhere else! Soemwhere…terrible!" He began coughing some more as Gally tried helping him away from the smoky bathroom.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Gally. Helping him over to the metal benches. "We did not hear much of anything. There was simply you entering the bathrooms. This, of course was followed by you suddenly emerging from the bathroom almost at the very second that you went in."

Padraig wanted to say that it was not true, but he was too busy coughing. It must have been at least a few minutes when he went in there. When he was in there, there was time enough to see the corpses, turn on a faucet, and hold a conversation with someone who simply appeared there. He was in there for at least a little bit of time. Yet it only seemed to have been time just for him.