Chapter Eight: Devastation
Mario had automatically at the last second put his arms around his brother and turned his back to the bomb, as if shielding Luigi's body with his own would be effective against an explosion. And the explosion came, loud and excruciatingly painful, and Mario was glad that at least, at least the woman in blue had done Luigi a courtesy in knocking him unconscious before throwing him in to die; at least Luigi wouldn't feel it. It was painful, so painful…but, something was wrong.
It shouldn't be painful for this long; surely he should be blown to pieces at this point. Come to think of it, only his back was in pain. It was searing hot, and felt like it had been shredded by shrapnel. Yet, beyond the smell of burning flesh—his own, he thought, sickened—he could smell something else, something that made him open the eyes that he had squeezed shut, in spite of himself.
His eyes widened, and he took a big whiff, unable to comprehend what he was seeing and smelling. But it was true, though he didn't know how it was possible. He was smelling fresh air, and somehow, somehow, they were outside the garage. Yes, they had caught the brunt of the explosion, but from just outside the door.
Mario straightened up with difficulty, feeling splintered metal shift against his spine. Gritting his teeth against the agony, he turned to face the wreckage. Tall flames licked the air, and Mario squinted as his eyes burned and watered, both from the brightness and the intense heat. The garage was folding in on itself, and the cars—those once-perfect specimens of automobile—gave ugly groans, squeaks, and screeches of protest as they burned and fell apart.
Beside him, Toad was standing up, his chest and stomach bloody from shrapnel and his face mangled—but he was, impossibly, alive. Daisy stood too, trembling. The explosion had destroyed her clothes, but there was no thought of modesty from anyone. Her dress clung to her savagely wounded back in tattered shreds, soaking more and more by the minute with her blood.
"Well, we're not dead," Daisy finally said wryly, choking on the thick, hot air. "That would hurt way less."
Mario was surprised to hear her. The ringing in his ears wasn't any less painful, but it appeared he was adapting to it. It seemed surreal to hear a human voice clearly again. For one crazy second, Mario thought that he would have preferred it had he never regained his hearing and gone permanently deaf, but he shook his head. That couldn't be truly what he desired. He was a fighter, and he heavily relied on utilizing all five senses.
He was interrupted in his musing by Toad promptly doubling over and vomiting.
Well, I suppose someone has to do it, Mario thought, detached, watching Toad almost clinically. Since Luigi's out, someone has to take his role.
Daisy supported Toad's back as best she could with hands that shook, and Mario once again slung Luigi's arm over his shoulder. Once Toad had finished being sick, the wounded company turned to look at the main castle, which had fared no better than the garage. The mighty stone had been demolished, the gold dulled by soot, the jewels crushed. The palace was crumpling even as they watched, the pillars reduced to nothing but dust. Everywhere, there was the fire, consuming everything, sparing nothing.
Daisy's eyes filled with horrified tears that coursed down her cheeks as the implication of this sight fully set in. "Mom! Dad!" What was meant to be an anguished shout came out as a hoarse, raspy whisper. Daisy staggered toward the burning castle, determination making her disregard the pain.
Mario reached out and placed his hand on her shoulder to stop her. His touch was gentle, and she could have easily escaped from his grasp, but she froze in her tracks, bowing her head, now devoid of the golden circlet that marked her as royalty.
"It's too dangerous," he told her quietly. "If they got caught in the blast, there's no way they could have survived….I'm sorry."
Daisy turned her stricken face up to Mario, and her eyes spoke of an inability to comprehend the fathoms of pain coursing through her. An eerie hollowness haunted the province princess. Mario felt something like a lance through his gut as he looked down at her.
"I have to at least look," she whispered brokenly.
"There's no point," Mario said, more roughly than he intended.
"I have to see," Daisy insisted, and then Mario understood. Closure. She had to see the remains—if there were any to be seen. He had been the same way, with his parents, and in a way, he supposed, he had been lucky. At least he had known there would be bodies, and proper funerals…
"Let's go," Mario agreed quietly. "Wait here," he added to Toad, handing Luigi to the guard. Toad wordlessly took Luigi, and Mario and Daisy supported each other to the main castle. Just outside the doors lay two guards who had been standing watch. Mario knelt down and checked their pulses and was surprised to feel hammering beneath his fingertips. Then he spotted the culprit of their unconsciousness: a very familiar little sphere.
Mario picked up the gas sphere and rolled it in his fingers. The woman—Blue Assassin, he had dubbed her in his mind—had only incapacitated the guards, but she had deliberately left them alive. Meaning…what? That there were only specific people she wanted to kill, and she didn't kill anyone unnecessarily? He supposed there was a certain perverse honor in that.
It was a struggle to push past the guards and into the burning building. For one, every single instinct he had was trying to pull him away from the danger, and screaming in protest at his sheer stupidity in defying their efforts of preservation. Secondly, the overwhelming heat was like a physical presence, like a protective barrier. It felt like they were stepping into a furnace, and salty sweat immediately fell, stinging into his eyes and down his chin, giving him the odd impression that his face was melting off like plastic in a fire.
Mario pulled his shirt over his mouth and nose to preserve what little fresh air supply he possessed, motioning Daisy to do the same. After she obeyed, they journeyed further into the once-mighty castle that was falling down in flaming pieces around them. The inside was possibly more devastated than the outside. Charred, melted, or smashed into unrecognizable oblivion, everything that had made this place a majestic sight had been forcibly stripped down to its bare foundations and exposed as nothing more than dust. Mario thought, still somehow detached, that it had been a pity that Luigi hadn't stopped to appreciate the proud, noble magnificence of the castle while he'd had the chance.
They passed the place where the fountain had been. A dark, wet, ugly patch of earth was all that marked its place. Yet a few yards away lay the marble head of the cherub who had graced the fountain, still remarkably recognizable, despite cracks and chars. The child's head gazed with pupil-less eyes, an incongruous beauty in the midst of chaos and destruction. Something inside Mario made him want to burst into tears, and take the head in his arms and cradle it, but he quickly shook off that bizarre fantasy and went deeper into the castle.
Daisy's pace quickened and she began to lead the way. They were met with fiery obstacles that they had to jump over, go around, or backtrack until they found an alternate corridor. These delays bought them time before they had to face—
Daisy stopped and, even though she knew better, dropped her hands limply to her sides, letting the collar of her tattered dress slip off of her nose. She made a little squeaking sound, too weary to be a cry, her eyes wide and fixed on what lay before her.
Mario stared impassively. He had to. He couldn't afford to break. He couldn't afford to care about what happened to everyone in the entire world, or his sanity would take leave of his mind. He especially couldn't care about the severed arms and legs, the organs displayed in gory prominence, the headless bodies and the bodiless heads. He caught sight of one poor maid's half a head, which was particularly gruesome, but even with one sightless eye and half a gaping mouth, the expression of terror and despair filling the young maid's face was unmistakable. Other faces, those belonging to the servants who had taken the brunt of the explosion, had melted unrecognizably into the bone. Still others had expressions frozen in a state of dutiful work or animated conversation, unaware that this would be their very last moment, frozen in a grotesque snapshot in time forever. If someone had told them five minutes prior to their deaths that they would soon meet a grisly end because of a bomb, they would have laughed at the improbability and continued their work and conversations, same as they had without forewarning. Death claims us all, but nobody ever really expects it to come for him—and then it does. And now the servants lay in pieces, scattered across the floor like so much debris.
Had Mario thought that the Blue Assassin had any honor in her for keeping those two guards alive? Looking at the servants, young and old, man and woman alike, who had been slaughtered indiscriminately despite harming no one, Mario clenched his fist. The high concentration of blood in this indescribable heat and the burning flesh created a thick stench of death that rocked through Mario's body and nauseated him, but he was sickened more by the Blue Assassin's ruthlessness and cruelty than by the smell she'd left behind in her blazing trail of destruction. Despite his resolution not to care, he felt the anger inside him building up and threatening to erupt, but all he did was reach over and pull Daisy's bodice back up over her nose.
Daisy reached up and held it there unsteadily. She had managed to pull up her eyes from the carnage and look straight forward, but Mario could tell she would not so easily erase the horror from her mind. They bore on, taking great pains not to trip over or disturb the bodies of the servants. It seemed disrespectful, somehow. They deserved to be left untouched.
Mario steeled himself with the realization, We're going to find Antonio and Sophie in the same state. He had thought it before they had even entered the castle, of course—but after seeing firsthand how devastating the bombs had been, how they had ripped through human bodies like tissue paper, he came to a new understanding of the condition in which the province king and queen's royal corpses would be found. He imagined Daisy would collapse in grief at the sight. She might even faint, which would be easier—postpone by way of temporary oblivion having to think about her regal father and noble mother in bloody pieces. He'd catch her and take her out of this house of death, and gladly leave it far behind.
They reached the throne room and Daisy unhesitatingly threw the doors wide, wincing at the heat. They faced a wall of fire that leveled abruptly at a pocket of air on top of it.
"We can't get through," Mario told Daisy, looking at her with regret. "Let's continue. Maybe we can check their bedroom."
"They wouldn't be there at this time of day. They'd be here. I know it!" Daisy looked up at the narrow pocket of air above the wall of fire. "Mario, throw me over the fire!"
Mario was already shaking his head before Daisy had finished her order. "Are you crazy? Even if I managed to aim that precisely, how would you get back out?" He was feeling light-headed from the smoke and dizzily, he remembered reading somewhere that most victims of house fires perished from smoke inhalation rather than burning to death. He felt like he was going to do both. The heat was insanely intense.
"We'll figure it out! Mario, please, I have to see my parents!" Daisy begged. "I just—I have to know!"
You already know. The thought came to Mario with such clarity that he was surprised to find he hadn't spoken aloud. She had said she had to see her parents—not "save," not "see if they were all right," but simply see. And she knew as well as Mario did that if he tried to toss her over the fire, there was a large chance she would fall into the fire and burn, and even if she didn't, there was no way back out. Either way…
"Please, Mario," Daisy pleaded, looking at him with clear, dry eyes. "Help me."
And he knew what she wanted help with, really.
He wrestled with his conscience. Did he have any right to insist she stay in this world that permitted such atrocities to happen? Her palace lay in smoldering ruins, her parents' mangled remains only a few feet away. He couldn't deny that sometimes he had considered throwing in the towel and calling it quits, and who was he to deny anyone that choice? He swallowed, placing his hands on her waist and looking her dead in the eyes.
"I'll reunite you with your parents," he told her roughly, giving her a final chance to change her mind and leave with him. Making the consequence of her choice clear and unambiguous.
Daisy relaxed into Mario's arms and managed a small smile. "Thank you," she sighed.
Mario lifted her, surprised by her lightness, and heaved her over the wall of fire. He could see the hem of her dress catch a spark as she went over, but the thud on the other side of the throne room confirmed that she had made it over alive, without falling into flames.
He heard Daisy shuffle across the floor, as if she was crawling and then suddenly stop.
"They're here," she said, her voice muffled.
Mario closed his eyes. Daisy had seen with her own eyes that her family truly was gone, eradicated from the earth except for her. He couldn't imagine the pain, the sorrow she must be feeling—
"They…they're in one piece," Daisy said, her voice colored with surprise. "They must've gotten lucky, and—" There was a pregnant pause, and then, Mario could hear the overjoyed smile in her voice as she exclaimed, "They're alive! They're both alive! Mario, are you still there? My parents are alive!"
Mario nearly fell down in shock. Both the king and queen had survived the blast? But how? Well, he reprimanded himself firmly, now was not the time for questions. After all, it seemed just as unlikely that he had survived, and yet here he was. Now was the time for action. He had to get the province royalty out of the throne room and out of the castle, which was threatening to choke them all at any second.
"Daisy," Mario coughed, "cover your parents' noses. I'm coming to get you."
He heard Daisy in the other room moving from one parent to the next, following his orders without question. He wondered how he would follow his own orders and retrieve her. There was no time to think of a plan, no time to get any kind of help. There was only one thing to do.
Mario charged into the fire, running through the flames. He screamed as soon as the searing heat touched his flesh. Fire rushed into the wounds on his back, which had finally begun to coagulate, reopening them with blistering savageness and exacerbating the pain. He emerged within seconds but the damage to his body had been done. Daisy yelped and rushed over to pat the flames out of Mario's skin and clothes. Mario fell to one knee, barely feeling her soothing hands through the waves of agony racking his body. His nerves were frayed, making every sensation feel like a new, horrible pain.
He forced himself to look over at where King Antonio and Queen Sophie were lying on the floor, their shirts pulled up over their noses. As much as he wanted to curl up and wallow in his pain, he knew he still had work to do. Getting into the room had only been half the battle, and the easier half at that. The question now was getting everyone out.
Mario struggled back to his feet and picked up Daisy, though she now seemed much heavier than before. "I'll throw you back over," he rasped in explanation, "and then your mother. Then I'll bring your father out."
"You're going to walk back through?" Daisy gasped, looking at him in concern.
His mouth quirked in what turned out to be a grimace but was supposed to be a smile. "No choice."
That said, he hoisted Daisy over the fire. She screamed as her leg was singed this time. His aim was not as precise as before. But he spent no time regretting that and instead picked up the unconscious Queen Sophie, sending her flying over the wall as well. He heard Daisy moving about on the other side as he supported King Antonio, bending a bit under the king's dead weight, and charging once more through the fire. He couldn't help crying out, his eyes watering from the sheer pain of his burns.
Daisy, carefully holding her mother with one arm, used the other hand to quickly pat out the fire both on Mario and her father. Because the bottom of her dress had been burnt off, the angry red welt on her leg was plainly visible, but she still managed to walk relatively quickly toward the exit. Mario, despite his burns, was not far behind her.
Soon they were past the corpses, outside the ruins, and breathing fresh air. Daisy stopped as they reached the two unconscious guards at the entrance, but Mario hurried on. "We can't help them," he told her impatiently. "They're safe there. Leave them."
"They're hurt," Daisy protested, not budging.
"Not as badly as we are," Mario pointed out. "Right now, your parents need immediate care. We'll go into the city and send some help back for them. Come on, time is of the essence here."
Regretfully, Daisy turned from the guards and followed Mario. They reunited with Toad, who was still holding an unconscious Luigi and started the walk to Arrow City, never looking behind them.
