Empty Vessels – part six of eleven
by Eildon Rhymer
Yes, the story has grown. Deep down, I knew all along that the ending was a little rushed, so I spent last night expanding it, and the story has now gained a chapter. Chapter seven is coming in around half an hour.
"We have, too," he heard the shorter man say, and then there was nothing but screaming.
He reached instinctively for his weapon, but its touch brought vivid memories - burnt flesh; a man struggling to stand for the pain; fear in that same man's eyes, as he talked about something dragging him into the darkness.
"No!" he heard the smaller man shout. "Don't! You've got it wrong!" Then the sound of scuffling, and a cry of pain, and, through it all, that screaming, barely human.
The woman pushed past him. He edged forward, and there was just enough light to see the outline of the shapes, but everyone was moving so fast, and he didn't know their silhouettes well enough to recognise them.
He touched his weapon again, and this time his hand closed round it. His thumb found a switch on the side, but he had no idea what it did, and no idea if it was safe to touch.
The screaming continued. A body impacted against the wall, crumpled to the floor, and sprang up again, pushing itself up with its hands. Something struck the wall near his head, and he heard splintering wood. Someone howled in pain, but he didn't know who it was.
Burnt flesh. Pain-filled eyes. He had done wrong. He had done something so terribly, utterly, completely wrong. And he hadn't known; he hadn't known at first.
"We don't want to hurt you," he said, moving forward, holding his left hand up, palm outwards. "You're scared, but so are we. We don't want to hurt you. Don't make us do this."
He saw a face, a flat grey mask in the faint light. Its mouth was a gaping hole. It howled and came towards him, and he reacted, his body moving despite himself. He struck his attacker's wrist away, then twisted to avoid the splintered rod that was coming down on his shoulder. Not enough, though. It struck hard, sending pain all the way down to his fingers.
He raised his gun; lowered it again. He didn't know what to do.
"Stop them!" someone was screaming, but he didn't know these people well enough to recognise their voices in the extremity of panic or anger. "Somebody stop--" It ended in a yelp of pain.
He tried to move towards the voice, but the man attacking him wrenched the stick upwards again, and whirled it straight down towards his head. He ducked, dodged, and dragged the man's foot away from underneath him, hooking it with his own leg. Simultaneously, someone else smashed the man across the shoulder with the barrel of a gun. The man fell, and he went down with him. "I don't want to hurt you," he said, but he was kneeling on top of the man, pinning him with his knees, and a shadow behind him told him that the woman was there, too.
It was too dark to see the man's eyes. The smell of him was bad, like rotten, decaying things that never saw the light of day. The man's mouth opened, and sound spewed out, but there were no words in it, just noise.
"Surrender," he said. He showed the man his weapon. "Talk. Please. I don't want to hurt you."
The woman ended it, smashing the man across the temple with the side of her gun. The man lay still, his head lolling to one side.
He turned towards her. "You shouldn't --"
"There's no time!" She sounded almost gleeful as she darted away. He didn't follow her, but remained kneeling over the fallen man for a short moment. There was blood on his fingertips.
The other attacker was still screaming. Someone fired a gun, light flashing in the twilight of the tunnel, and the high wordless screaming turned into a torrent of sound. He heard snapped words - "Don't!" and "Stop!" - and as the attacker paused for breath, he heard a faint whimper of pain.
He pushed himself to his feet, just as the shorter man fired his gun again, giving a flashed image of his face, lips pressed together, cheek specked with blood. In the darkness that followed he was almost blind, but he could hear the sound of bodies tussling, and breathing, surely louder than breathing could ever be.
Then stillness. He blinked; saw a second body on the floor; crouched beside it, but the shape of it was already enough to tell him that it was their second attacker, even before the foul smell hit him.
"Is he dead?" His hand found the man's neck, and felt one faint stuttering pulse, and then nothing. He touched the man's lips, but they were still. "He's dead," he said.
"You shot him." He recognised the voice of the man he had injured.
"He attacked me!" the shorter man protested. "I'm bleeding! Besides, he was going after you. I was protecting you."
"Yeah." The injured man took a step backwards, struck the wall, and slid down it in a way that looked close to collapse. "But I saved your life first."
"No, you didn't," the other man protested. "I had it under control."
"Didn't."
"Well, okay, maybe you helped. But you're in no condition to fight."
"Tell that to the crazy people who threw themselves on top of us, despite your 'we mean you no harm' talk." The injured man seemed to lose the energy for it half way through, until the final few words were barely audible at all.
Removing his hand from the dead man, he stood up. "You shouldn't have killed him."
"I didn't have a choice!" the shorter man protested. The woman was standing beside him now, her stance showing that she sided with him. "He was trying to kill us."
"That one's still alive." He gestured with his thumb at the man the woman had knocked out. "We should tie him up. When he wakes up, we can talk to him."
"Yes, because they really showed themselves ready and willing to talk." The man let out a breath. "Okay, okay, we talk. Explain the misunderstanding, or do the 'take us to your leader' thing if he's an enemy." He gasped, and bent down to snatch up his device, clearly dropped in the struggle. "Still works," he said with relief. "No more dots. That's something, at least."
Unable to stop himself, he took a step towards the shorter man. His gun talked to him of the human cost - of a moment's loss of control, and the regret that followed it. He wanted this man to feel the same as he did. He felt a spark of fury, almost of hatred, at this man for standing here so casually, as if it was nothing at all. "You just killed somebody," he snarled.
"I'm a soldier; we do it all the time," the man said. He paused; cleared his throat. "I didn't have a choice."
He saw the other man glance down at the place where the injured man sat slumped against the wall, hands at his side, looking barely conscious. His breathing was audible, hitching with pain. I was protecting you, the shorter man had said. Everything had been too chaotic and too dark, with glimpses of struggling bodies, but nothing more. He'd heard the soft cries of pain, though. Perhaps it was true. He had fired a rash shot without thinking and had injured someone who might have been a friend, but perhaps this man was a better man than he was. Perhaps this man had shot only because it was necessary, to save a companion.
"But I'd rather you didn't kill the other one," he said to this man, their leader, and their leader nodded, and said, "Okay," his voice suddenly quiet.
He'd killed a man.
His attacker had been screaming, screaming so loudly and so constantly, and he just would not be quiet, and it was dark, and the man had hit him, for God's sake - gouged him across the face with his long nails, then come at him with an honest-to-god stone axe, or something like that -and he hadn't wanted to kill him, just get him to go away, because it was dark - so dark in that side room, so dark - and everyone was looking to him as their leader, and he'd gotten them into this mess by wanting to talk to these people, and everything had gone to hell in a handbasket, and now he was fighting for his life, being clawed in the face - and who knew what germs were there, under the nails? and the stench of the man…
He'd remembered his own fear upon waking and how awful it felt not to know who you were, and he had tried to talk to them - honest, he'd tried to talk - but they'd thrown his words right back at him. Well, answered him with screams, to be more accurate, and the small matter of a stone axe that had almost hit him between the eyes, except that Jet had intercepted it, and had drawn the attacker off, and had dragged the axe from the man's hand and reversed it - this he had seen only in flashes - but then had been struck on the injured side, and grabbed around the chest, and…
Go away! He had just wanted to get rid of the creature. Go away! Be quiet! I can't hear myself think! And Jet's quiet moans of pain, and his fractured breathing… Don't hurt him! Don't hurt him!
He hadn't meant to kill the man. He'd raised his gun in terror, sure that Jet was going to die, but it shouldn't have been like that. He should have felt icy certainty. He should have raised the gun, taken aim, and killed because he had to kill. He was a leader, for God's sake - an officer. He must have killed people before. Not that that made a difference right now, did it, because this was the first one he remembered, so it felt like the first one.
He couldn't let it really be like the first one, though. He was the leader of this small group of people, and they depended on him. He had to act as if this was nothing. It had to become nothing. People like him did what was necessary, and didn't look back. At least not until their people were all safely back home, and they could fall apart the quiet of their own little room.
"Who…" He swallowed. "Any clues about who they are?" Were, his mind added, because he'd killed one, and the darkness in the side room looked at him, and he had to look away, to turn his back on it, to focus on saying what had to be said.
"They smell different from us," the big man said. He'd removed some pendant thing from around his neck, and was using the cord to tie the unconscious man's hands behind his back.
"They smell like the darkness," the woman said.
"What about their clothes?" He remembered how Jet had operated the lights, and walked towards the side door - come, whispered the darkness - and groped around until he found a raised section. The familiar white light appeared at the top of the wall, but the darkness in the side room only looked all the more deep.
He turned his back on that, but that only showed him the blood. God, there was so much blood. He turned away from that the only way he could, and saw Jet looking at him, his eyes slightly glazed, and his breathing very visible.
Enough, he told himself. A leader didn't go to pieces. A leader didn't show fear. Pull yourself together. He concentrated on studying their attackers. The corpse was dressed a little like the big man, though the clothes were much dirtier and looked as if he had been wearing them underground for weeks. The other man was wearing clothes that looked as if they had once been very fancy, all dark red and gold, but if anything they were even more soiled and torn than the dead man's.
"They have been living here for a long time," the woman said, standing over the unconscious man. Despite her small size, she looked quite threatening. "I do not think they were ever our friends."
"He's waking up," the big man said sharply.
He wanted to shy away, but he clenched his fists tightly, and walked forward. Their prisoner was safely bound, lying on his side with his hands tied behind his back, and the big man was holding his ankles.
He went down on one knee a pace away from the prisoner's face. His heart was beating audibly in his ears. "Who are you?" he asked, careful to articulate every word. "Why did you attack us?"
The man's eyes darted from side to side. They landed on him, but only for the briefest of moments before they were flickering away again, the pupils huge.
His face was throbbing, and he could feel blood trickling sluggishly down his cheek. He fought the urge to wipe it away. "We won't hurt you," he said. "You attacked us first. Who are you? Why did you attack us? We don't mean any harm."
The man made a low sound in the back of his throat.
"Did he just growl at us?" He looked at Jet. Jet's faint smile was like a grimace, but perhaps there was a rebuke in there, too, for looking away from the interrogation. He turned back to his prisoner. "Do you live here? Did you think we were invading your home? We weren't. We… uh… don't remember why we came here. We'd get out if we could find the way. So be a nice savage native and show us the way out, won't you? Then we'll just run along, and no hard feelings."
The man bared his teeth, and hissed like a cat.
"Or you can just do the feral thing." He pressed his lips together, then tried again. "Do you have a leader we can talk to? Believe me, we don't want to be here, and… well, I'm not one to make personal comments, but maybe you might want to consider a change of scene yourself."
The man opened his mouth and sound poured out, high and shrill and jagged. There were recognisable vowels and consonants, and sometimes half-echoes of words that could have been English, but the whole thing made no sense.
It was just a foreign language, he told himself, but his mind knew that it was not. This was sound with no sense. This was sound with no brain behind it.
"Dark," the man said, the word as loud as a sudden blare of trumpets in the garbled sounds that surrounded it.
His head snapped up. "Did you…?"
The man's voice rose higher and higher, the individual sounds dissolving into a scream.
He turned to the others. "Did you hear…?"
"We have to get out of here." Jet's face was as pale as the lights on the wall, his brow beaded with sweat. "We have to get out of here now."
His side felt as if it had dissolved into liquid fire, and the flames had already spread throughout his body, but with every breath he fought not fire but darkness. His head wanted to loll, and his hand wanted to relax. His body wanted to sleep. No, his body wanted to stay awake, and was fighting tooth and nail to stay awake, but something else was trying to drag him into the darkness.
He saw things in flashes. "They smell different," the big man had said, and then there had been a period of nothing. He had had emerged from that to find Hero looking at him. "Did he just growl at us?" He had no knowledge of what had come before, but, startled, he had tried to smile. Then the prisoner had started babbling, incoherent sound mixed with screaming.
Before that, he remembered hiding in a dark room. He remembered fighting. He remembered hauling at a man's arms, dragging his weapon away from Hero's face. He remembered pain, and the smell of darkness, and some time before that - hours, days, weeks? - a flash of red from a strange weapon, and the ground swift and hard beneath him.
"Dark." The word stepped forward from a faceless crowd. He listened for it again, but heard only the sound of madness.
Someone else said something. He heard the sounds - "did you hear" - but for a moment, he could not begin to put meaning to them.
"We have to get out of here." His own words, at least, still came easily. "We have to get out of here now."
Hero moved towards him, but it was a woman's voice that he heard, appearing to issue from Hero's mouth, as if everyone was a shell of pretence, stuffed with lies and madness. "We are trying," Hero said, in that woman's voice. Then he moved his head, and saw that the woman, too, had taken up position by his side, and that she was the one who had spoken.
I should have known that, he thought.
"No." He snagged at her arm. "We need to go now. Forget anything else. Go now."
"Why?" This time it was Hero who spoke, although Jet was looking at the woman. Even voices told lies. "I mean, yes, of course, this isn't the most desirable of places, but…"
"They've…" The next word didn't want to come. He dug his nails into his palms, and plundered the darkness for it. "They've been here longer than we have. Look at them. Listen."
The screaming had fallen to a low babbling, full of anguish and despair. It made him want to scream himself.
"I don't understand," the man said. He had a name, didn't he? No, not a real name; a pretend name. Meant as a joke, but perhaps not so silly after all. He'd remember it in a minute.
"They smell like the darkness," he managed to say. "They've lost their language. They…"
Someone was touching his shoulder. He saw their faces crowded around him, all three of them, now. The prisoner was almost silent, whispering madness under his breath. He didn't need them to tell him that he had lost time again.
He looked up at the lights; saw the corona of darkness there. "What if they were once like us? What if that's how we'll become?"
The shorter man frowned. "That's a pretty big assumption."
"Yeah." He tried to laugh it off, he really did, but the doorway glowered above their hunched heads, overflowing with darkness. "But what if it's true?" he said. "We'll turn into them - crazed brainless… killers - and I… I don't think I've got very long. I think… I think it's happening already."
He met the prisoner's dark-drenched eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.
"Please," he whispered. "Help me get out."
end of part six