As there was a tie in the last segment's vote, I decided to let my husband break the tie this time. I think he chose well. I hope you enjoy Segment #4! Fair warning: it's a little gruesome. Also, since my segments on this story seem to be much longer than they were on Sarah's story, I'm giving you longer to vote on the next plot line. Instead of a 1 week voting limit, I'll set the limit for 2 weeks.
Read here for Segment #4 with a brief lead-in from Segment #3 (or read from the beginning):
Without
a word, they crept forward, dreading what they would find but unable to resist
the inescapable and purely human need to know.
And then they saw it, and all they could do was stare. It was a wall, probably
five stories tall and made of the same stuff that comprised the vessel they’d
seen.
And
on the other side was a city.
A
city of great, shimmering buildings that stretched toward the sky. There was an
odd, subtle ripple of movement among them, and after a moment of disbelief,
Meila realized what they were seeing. Some of the buildings were hovering in
the air. Some of them rose slowly for some unknown purpose; others sank
carefully. Still others stayed in place, but they almost seemed to bob gently,
as does a boat when the water is lightly disturbed.
Flying
discs filled with bodies and other various things zipped between the buildings
and all along the interior of the wall, stopping occasionally to retrieve or
dispose of cargo. Meila could see no people, no living creatures of any kind,
but the city hummed with life nevertheless. Every inch of it pulsed with
purpose, vibrated with the energy borne of conscious thought.
She
realized that whatever they’d been thrust into, it was far stranger and more
complex than she ever would have guessed. And suddenly, she was so very
grateful not to be alone.
She
didn’t know how long they stayed there, crouched in the undergrowth while disc
after disc flew by them and into the wall. Most of them came down the path to
their right, some along the wall before them. Each of them seemed to go to the
same spot in the wall – although the wall was so uniform in looks that it was
nearly impossible to tell – and then they just…pushed their way in. The wall,
which otherwise looked solid, became gelatinous with the pressure of the
vessels. There must have been some resistance; the vessels slowed upon
entrance. But the structural integrity of the wall seemed undisturbed by the
process, instantly regaining its former shape and smoothness.
The
vessels, they could see through the wall, went on into the city to parts
unknown.
Just
as Meila was starting to worry that they’d stayed here too long, Aden let out a
sigh of resignation. “So, do we go in or stay out here?”
She
turned to him in horror. “Go in?”
“Look,
I don’t know what you want right now, but my main goal is to get home.” After
an odd moment of hesitation, she nodded in agreement. He nodded back. “All
right then. What’s the best way to do that? The only option I see right now is
to go in and try to look for answers. Maybe we’ll figure out where we are.
Meila, maybe we’ll find a way home.”
She
looked back at the wall and shuddered. Her first instinct was to say no. Or,
rather, hell no. But she realized
that was just fear, dictating her actions as she’d sworn she’d never again
allow. So she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to think logically.
“If
we go in there, we’ll be walking right into the enemy’s home. We still don’t even know who’s really behind this.”
She thought about what he’d said on the way here, and she corrected, “Or what.
And we have no way to know that we’ll find any answers in there. Aden, we might
get in there and never find our way out.”
He
frowned at the wall, even as another vessel began its viscous entrance. He
sighed and turned back to Meila. “Wherever we do it, our first step should
probably be to figure out where we are.”
“Agreed.”
“Can
we do that out here?”
She
looked around and shrugged. “I think so. We could just pick a direction and
start walking.”
“So
for right now, we’re avoiding the city?”
“I
really think it’s the safest option.”
“Agreed,”
he said, mimicking her answer and coaxing a wan smile out of her.
They
heard it at the same time, that somehow awful rhythm that signaled the approach
of another vessel. Only, this one didn’t run down the path to their right or
along the wall before them.
Instead,
it headed right for them.
Aden
didn’t think; he just acted. He pushed Meila down into the undergrowth and
spread out atop her, so that her entire body was covered with his. His back to
the vessel, he prayed that the odd, nondescript clothing they’d given him would
somehow be undetectable by the thing that even now was slowing down above them.
Below
him, Meila didn’t move a muscle. She couldn’t; utter shock had her frozen. She
knew he was trying to protect her, knew he was blocking her from being seen by
that thing, but she didn’t feel safe. Instead she felt trapped. Entombed.
Helpless.
The
old panic started to seep in again, but this time it built quickly. In seconds,
the broad chest that pressed against her face seemed designed not to protect,
but to suffocate. The firm body seemed not a barrier against harm, but a cage.
Her heart began to pound, her breath to thin and quicken. The memories poured
in, a barrage of horror that she’d sworn a thousand times she’d forget. She
squeezed her eyes shut, but that only made it worse. The visions burned
brightly against the backs of her lids, seared her lungs, filled her mind so
that she no longer heard the vessel above them, no longer remembered the
unknown threat that had put her here in the first place.
Aden is not Alec,
she told herself desperately. Aden is not
Alec. He’s different.
But
the mantra didn’t help, because she suddenly realized that she didn’t know that Aden wasn’t like Alec. She
didn’t really know anything about him, except that in this moment, he was
holding her down, and she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t
breathe.
She
couldn’t breathe.
“Get
off.” Her voice was muffled against his chest, her arms weak from the panic.
She tried to push him off, but he didn’t budge. That only spiked her fear, and her
voice grew frantic and shrill. “Get off. Get off!”
She
gave another furious shrug, and this one moved him enough that she could
wriggle free.
The
moment she was out from under him, clarity returned with a snap. The vessel was
still above them, hovering there as if, for some reason, it couldn’t quite see
Aden but could tell that something was there. Its engine throbbed in time with
a pulse of air that blasted her face, and with it came the stench of whatever
the vessel had held before this moment.
She
turned to Aden in horror only to find him staring at her, the confusion on his
face shifting to stunned disbelief at her expression. Then, before either of
them could say a word, the vessel opened up and sucked Meila inside.
And
then it flew away toward the city wall.
* * *
For
a moment, Aden could only lay there, shock robbing him of conscious thought.
Then another vessel flew by, this one several feet away, and the noise broke
him out of his stupor. The reality of his situation slammed into him, and he
understood with surprising speed that he now only had two options.
One:
follow their original plan. Pick a spot in the distance and just start walking,
away from the city, away from the insanity that was the last few days. They
couldn’t see him – what had just happened had proven that. He suspected it had
something to do with the clothes they’d given him. Perhaps the vessels were
trained to recognize the clothing given to the Collective, or perhaps somehow the
vessel hadn’t been able to detect the odd color of his clothing. Whatever the
reason, he was now reasonably sure he could successfully escape.
Or
he could go with option number two.
He
could go after Meila.
Why
had she pushed away from him? For a moment, he’d thought she had a plan. That
maybe she was even trying to get caught. But when she’d looked up at the thing
above them, her eyes had been glazed at first. Unseeing. And then they’d
focused on the vessel, and the emptiness had been replaced by bone chilling
terror.
She
hadn’t meant to be caught. And he wondered now if, somehow, she hadn’t even
really meant to pull away from him.
He
looked out at the forest, at that beckoning promise of escape. He took off his
shirt and tied it around his waist so that he wouldn’t lose it. If it did what
he thought it did, he’d want it in the near future.
Then
he walked over to the path where the vessels flew, and he lay down and waited
to be taken.
* * *
Meila
could barely breathe. It wasn’t the smell; although, despite the emptiness of
the vessel, the smell was horrific.
It
was fury, pure and simple.
How
could she have let that happen? How could she have fallen into the same old
fears so quickly? She told herself every day that she wasn’t a victim, swore to herself that she would never
again give someone else power over her. And she’d believed it, too…until the
moment she hadn’t.
How
could she have lost herself so completely, when she’d been fighting so hard to
get herself back?
At
least Aden had escaped. She’d never have forgiven herself if she’d gotten him
captured, too.
She
couldn’t tell where she was. The vessel was as opaque from the inside as it had
been translucent from the outside. All she could do was try to pay attention to
the turns, but even that was disorienting. If she’d been sitting like she would
have in a car, it might have been different. But she was laying on her back,
and despite there being absolutely nothing on top of her, she couldn’t seem to
sit up. There was nothing there, but something
was holding her down.
It
might have been enough to bring that oh-so-infuriating panic back, but the vessel
jerked to a stop before the fear could take hold. Meila had a second to wonder
what new hell awaited her, and then the vessel opened beneath her to a room
utterly black. For some reason, though she suddenly felt nothing under her, she
didn’t fall. Instead, she hovered there with the vessel, wondering how far up
she was. She tried to turn over, to see what was below the vessel, but she
couldn’t move.
And
then the thing let her go, and she began to fall.
There
was nothing quite so disorienting as falling in the black, with no idea of how
far she had left to go. She thought impassively that perhaps it was a blessing
not to see her impending death rise up to meet her, and then she landed
gracelessly on something not quite hard, but not quite soft.
As
her weight displaced whatever she lay upon, the thing shifted and then split in
two. She put a hand out to steady herself, and it landed on something horribly
familiar.
A
face.
Meila
let out a low-pitched, gurgling scream and tried to back away, but then she
felt a foot. A leg, a hand, another face.
Bodies.
She’d landed on a pile of dead bodies, and she had no idea how far this pool of
rot stretched.
She
stood to run, but her foot sunk into something. Even as she screamed again,
even as an image of a body grabbing her leg and pulling her into the morass or –
somehow worse – her foot sinking into the bloated and distended bowels of a
corpse flashed before her eyes, she realized her foot had simply slipped
between two bodies to sink below the surface.
But
even that was intolerable. She fell to her hands and knees to distribute her
weight more evenly, mewled in terror and disgust as she scrambled across waves
of unseeing eyes, hapless hands, still hearts within unmoving chests. Her own
traitorous body began to retch, threatening to add to the ghastly array beneath
her, and then…
And
then her hand hit open air.
She
was moving too fast to stop – and, truth be told, she might have gladly jumped
off of a cliff to escape this nightmare. Her head surged over the edge of the
dead, and her body quickly followed suit, until she was tumbling down the
horribly lumped waterfall of flesh.
She
landed hard on something solid and appallingly sticky. With low, keening sound,
she scrambled away until her hands touched ground that was dry and faintly
gritty. And then she just sat there for a moment and waited for the jarring full-body
shivers that were chattering her teeth to subside.
But
it seemed that she’d no sooner found dry ground than a glow began to shine
overhead. She glanced in that direction and watched as another vessel emerged
through the wall. No door opened to let it in – it just sort of…appeared. It
was too far away for the glow to reach her, and it didn’t take a genius to
figure out the thing’s cargo, so she didn’t even try to hide. She just watched
it dully, wondering if the bodies it contained would fall on her.
Wondering
how the hell she was ever going to get out of here, especially now that she was
alone.
And
then she saw the lowest body in the vessel move, and her heart lurched and then
began to pound.
* * *
Aden
was on the verge of losing it – he could literally think of no better term to
describe the storm building within him – when the vessel simply opened up
beneath him. His mind barely registered the sight of black beyond the glow,
barely noticed the instinctive gulp of air as yet untainted by the bodies piled
atop him, before he was plummeting into the dark.
He
knew what he was going to land on, had discerned and then dreaded it from the
moment he’d been sucked into a vessel already full of the dead, but knowledge
was in no way preparation for the feeling of slamming blind into a pile of
rotting corpses. He let out an odd, gurgling cry and scrambled backward, even
as four more bodies landed on top of him, searching for a bit of floor that
wasn’t ridden with bodies. When his feet slipped over a drop-off, he followed
the plunge gladly, thinking even broken bones would be preferable to this. Then
an image flashed before him as he fell – or more of a nightmare, really, of the
kind where you can’t see all the details but you know them just the same – of himself
breaking his leg upon landing and then lying there amidst the dead until the
shock took his own life.
And
then he was safely on the ground and he heard, after the muffled thump of ass hitting floor, a whispered,
“Aden!”
It
took him a moment. He had to wipe the horror of the last few minutes from his
mind, had to force himself to remember why he was in this hell in the first
place, and then it hit him.
“Meila,”
he whispered back, though he was reasonably sure no one but her could hear him
in this room.
A
rustle sounded to his left, and he had to remind himself forcefully that it
wasn’t a dead body that moved, but a live one. He called her name again, and
she his, and they moved steadily toward the sounds until they met in the
middle. The moment he found her, put his hands on her shoulders and felt the
warmth of her skin, the rushed push of her pulse, he wanted to grab her to him
and never let go. In that moment, she was the most precious thing he’d ever
encountered. But he remembered how she’d reacted when he’d covered her body
with his, and he managed to hold himself back.
“Are
you okay?” he whispered.
“Yes.
No. I’m not hurt, but I’m so sorry they took you.”
“You
didn’t put me in this situation, Meila; they did. Well,” he reconsidered,
feeling much more like himself now that he wasn’t alone in this nightmare, “I
guess you put me in this situation.
But thinking big picture, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t your fault.”
He
felt her take a deep breath, felt the sweet rush of it on his skin. How had he
never realized before that exhalation alone could be such wonderful
confirmation of life?
“You
followed me in here, didn’t you?”
He
shrugged, though she couldn’t see him. “I figured we’re better off if we stick
together. Now what do you say we stick together away from this graveyard?”
At
her fervent agreement, he took her hand and began to feel his way toward a
wall.
For
the first time in a long time, Meila was grateful for the feel of a large hand
grabbing her own. It anchored her, somehow, reminded her that, though she could
see no one else, she wasn’t alone. And the calm that came with that knowledge
allowed her to begin to think again.
“It
doesn’t smell.”
“What?”
Distracted by a body strewn across their narrow walkway, Aden tugged Meila’s
hand to guide her over it.
“There
have to be hundreds of bodies in here. Maybe thousands. But it doesn’t smell.
So there’s some sort of ventilation system, right?”
“Yeah,
I guess.” He thought about it for a moment. “Are you thinking that might be a
way out?”
“Well,
if we can find it. Yeah, I think it’s worth a shot.”
He
nodded in the dark, thought a little more. Then, “What if it’s the walls?”
“What
do you mean?”
“You
know how those things just merged into the city wall? What if all the walls in
this place are like the outer wall? And things can just kind of slide through
them if they find the right spot?”
She
paused, and he stopped with her. “Aden, if that’s the case, we’re trapped in
here. I saw you come in through that wall. It was way too high for us to reach.”
“Meila,”
he said on a sigh, “I hate to say it, but we can build stairs.”
“How
– oh.” And then, as the full ramifications of that hit her, “Ew.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
It
took hours. First they had to wait for another vessel to enter the room so they
would know where to build. Then they had to work through their aversion to
touching the bodies, something that took longer for Aden – perhaps because he’d
been trapped with them on his way here.
But
it was the actual stacking that took the longest. Meila wasn’t physically
strong enough to pick up the bodies, so she had to roll them on top of one
another, which slowed them down considerably. To speed things up, Aden tried to
pick up the slack by carrying bodies over for her to stack. It was a gruesome,
arduous task for both of them. By the time they’d stacked enough bodies so that
they could climb to the entrance, all they wanted was sleep.
But
not here. By tacit agreement, they both worked through the exhaustion without
complaint to get themselves as far away from this place as possible before they
stopped to rest.
Twelve
vessels came through the wall while they worked. When they were done, they waited,
crouched near the top, for one more to make its way through. Though there didn’t
seem to be a pattern to their entrance, they figured their chances of being
surprised by one were lower if another had just dropped off its cargo.
At
the top, Meila felt her hair flutter around her face, and her heart began to
trip again. “There’s definitely air,” she said. “This might work.”
“It
has to.” Aden looked behind them, though he could see nothing, and he imagined
the horrors that lay there. The thought of spending another minute in this mass
grave was suddenly intolerable. He gave Meila the shirt he’d tied around his
waist to provide her some camouflage. Then he secured the makeshift rope they’d
made out of clothes pillaged from the bodies and tied it around his waist and
Meila’s.
“Hang
on to me,” he told her. “Whatever happens, we stick together. Okay?”
She
took a deep breath and nodded in the dark. “Okay.”
They
grabbed onto each other, and then each put a free hand out toward the wall.
When Meila touched it, the gentle trickle of air became a cool rush. When she
pressed on the wall, it gave way like some sort of porous gel, and she realized
that she could push her way through. But even when her fingertips broke the
surface on the other side, she could see nothing.
“I
think we’re going to have to just look through,” Aden said.
“I
was just thinking the same thing.” She took a deep breath. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
They
both leaned forward and pushed their faces through the wall.
