Meila's Story - Segment #3

Dear readers,

I must apologize for the long delay in this post. I've been under the weather and simply have not had the energy to write. But as I've been feeling a little bit more like myself the last few days, I decided to tackle segment 3 of Meila's Story. I hope you like the result! 

Sincerely,

Lillian

Meila's Story - Segment #3, with a brief lead-in from Segment #2 (or read from the beginning)

She looked out at the others, that now smaller group of strangers who still watched her, expressionless. She had no sense from the looks on their faces whether or not they’d anticipated her successful defense. There was nothing in them to indicate what they intended to do now: no intent, no surprise.

Except…

There. A man near the fireplace. Standing with the others, but slack-jawed. Staring at her not with flat nothingness, but with disbelief. When she met his eyes, she felt a jolt, as if some part of her recognized him. She later realized that what she recognized was another sentient being.

Another non-member of this savagely apathetic Collective.

As four more members of the group broke away and began to make their way toward her, the man glanced at them and then back at her. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then, as the new four took another step toward her, he nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement.

He said, “This way!”

And he slid, feet first, toward the fireplace.

She watched, stunned, as his feet disappeared into the black hole at the bottom of that four-sided pillar.

And then his legs.

And then his torso.

And then his head, and he was gone.

She’d expected him to come flying out the other side, to slide through the thing instead of somehow into it, just as she’d done with the door. But he didn’t. And she realized that it wasn’t a fireplace at all, but a portal of some sort, an exit, a doorway.

The only one that mattered in this room.

Some of the people who’d stood near him seemed momentarily distracted by his break-from-the-group movements, but the moment he’d disappeared down the fireplace, they turned back to her. She was reminded of how they hadn’t noticed her at all until the moment her feet had touched this floor, and she wondered if their odd and singular attention was limited to only the contents of this room. And in almost the same moment, she realized that she didn’t care.

He’d shown her how to escape, and she was damn well going to follow him.

There was a lamp in each corner of the room, colorless, somehow shapeless, sitting on utterly interchangeable side tables. She dove for the nearest one, reaching it just as the new four changed direction toward her. She swung the thing into her new attackers, relishing the crack! of metal on flesh, cherishing the sing of the impact up her arms.

The blow was enough to knock the first two down, but she’d lost the momentum with the second two. She switched the lamp around in her hands, so that the heavy glass base would make contact next, and then she jabbed it into the stomach of the nearest attacker, and then up into his jaw. He crumpled into the legs of the fourth man, and she seized the moment of his distraction.

With every ounce of strength she had, she dug her feet into the ground, propelled herself with strong thighs and stronger will through the thinning throng.

And she slid into the fireplace.

*          *          *

He’d thought it would be like sliding into first. The quick, bright whip of pain as the body slammed into the ground, the friction of hip-thigh-calf against dirt, the rush of satisfaction as you slip past the ball and pop up, safe and ready for action.

Instead, it was the shocking agony of an  ice bath, breaking the delirium of a fever you hadn’t even known had you in its grip.

The cold rippled along his body from toe to scalp, a rush of frost that left him shivering even as he dropped into the warmth of a summer day. It was so pervasive, that cold, that it took him a moment to realize that the source of it was nowhere in sight. Even then, it didn’t fully register until he saw the woman begin to materialize above him. Out of thin air, four feet above his head, she emerged: Toes, feet, pajama-clad legs, slim torso, a pair of truly excellent breasts – he was lost, bewildered, and completely freaked out, but he wasn’t dead – and then her face.

And then he realized she was going to land right on top of him, and he rolled over just in time.

Of course, that meant that she landed hard on her side next to him, and judging by the whoosh of air that pushed toward him, got the breath knocked out of her for her efforts.

He winced in sympathy, mentally called himself an idiot – although, if he was fair, there probably wasn’t any way for him to have caught her without injuring both of them – and crawled over to her.

“It’s ok,” he said softly, not entirely sure that they were alone. “You’re going to be ok.”

Her hair was in her face, strands of it stuck to blood that was still flowing freely, and when she didn’t move in response to his voice, he wondered if she was unconscious. Concerned, he gently moved her hair to check her pupils – only to find her eyes open on his.

And then, before he could smile reassuringly, her fist shot out and caught him in the balls.

“What the-” His voice petered out on a wheeze before he could finish the question, and he bowled over as she jumped up on bare feet, ready – he was sure – to kick him while he was down. He held up a hand in defense, the other still cupped protectively around his sac, and watched with a mix of relief and supreme irritation as her polish-free toes backed slowly out of his view.

For a moment, he just hunched there, willing the grey at the edges of his vision to recede. When he was finally able to stand, he did so slowly, cautiously, one hand still guarding his balls. But she was already several feet away, her back to him, studying their surroundings as she moved in what seemed to be a steadily growing circle. He realized he could just barely see her underwear through her pajamas, but any male interest that might have arisen from such a sight had been firmly squashed – he winced at the poor choice of words – by one well-placed punch.

“You know I’m on your side, right?”

Meila didn’t jump at the question, but it was close. Her whole body seemed to twitch constantly, the jittery aftermath of a fight that had caught her by surprise combined with her body’s inability to understand if it had won. By the looks of what she saw, it hadn’t. Not yet.

“Did you hear me? I just saved your ass back there.”

She turned and waited for the irritation in his voice to spike her nerves. When it didn’t, when she found her shoulders straightening instead under that brilliantly green – and clearly angry – stare, she allowed herself one small breath of relief.

“First of all,” she said, “no, you didn’t. I saved my own ass. Second, I don’t know that you’re on my side. You were with them. For all I know, this is just part of their creepy little plan to lure me to who-the-hell-knows-what. Third, I barely touched you. I could have done much worse. Fourth…”

She trailed off for a moment. Reason was starting to kick in, and with it, an analysis of the events of the past few minutes that reminded her that he had indeed saved her ass. It was a miracle that she’d taken out eight people with the meager level of amateur training she had. There was no way she’d have been able to battle the entire room.

And even if she had, would she have figured out how to escape?

“It was instinct. If you weren’t trying to hurt me,” she added grudgingly, “I owe you an apology.”

He just stared at her in silence, uncharacteristic annoyance still simmering inside him. When she began to squirm under that stare, he said, “You owe me an apology.”

She opened her mouth to argue – actually, to say that she’d just apologized – and then she realized how petty that would be. She let out a sigh of frustration, shook her head at herself, and said, “I’m sorry. It really was instinct. I didn’t even recognize you; I just reacted.”

The honesty didn’t cost her as much as she’d expected. Remembering that it used to simply be her way, she decided that it could be again. Resolute, she thrust out her hand and walked toward him. “I’m Meila. And I’m scared shitless right now.”

She surprised a snort out of him, and he found himself taking her hand with less reluctance than he might have expected. “Aden. And believe it or not, I’m a hell of a lot less scared than I was before I saw you kick ass back there. Where did you learn all that stuff?”

Instead of answering his question, she asked, “What was that place?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t you hear them? It’s the Joining Room. Jesus.” He rubbed a hand over his hair, shook his head. “I never saw it before I woke up there, and I didn’t see anything else until I slipped down the garbage chute.”

He frowned and looked around. They were in a small clearing, he saw now, in the middle of a forest that grew so high and thick he could barely see the pale, cloudless blue of the sky through the trees.

And there wasn’t a soul – dead or alive – in sight.

“Come to think of it,” he said, almost to himself, “where are all the bodies?”

“Bodies?” Meila grabbed his arm as he started to turn away from her. “Why would there be bodies?”

Before he could explain, they heard the sound of an engine thrumming in the distance. It was a strange sound, somehow eerily familiar, with a ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE…ONE-two-three sound that was accompanied by a rhythmic swish of air and displaced leaves.

He realized that the source of that almost recognizable sound was getting closer, and he suddenly understood why there were no bodies here.

“Shit. We have to go.” He grabbed her arm and began to pull her toward the trees.

Meila’s heart lurched in time with the touch of his hand, and she found herself rooted to the ground, staring at those wide, blunt-tipped fingers wrapped so easily around the thin flesh of her forearm. She wondered when she’d last allowed a man who wasn’t family to touch her, but of course she immediately knew the answer: before Alec. Any touch from a man other than family was pre-Alec – other than the assholes who’d tried to hurt her minutes ago.

And the old, sick fear trickled in like venom, winding its way through the sensitive skin near her elbow. She imagined it slithering into her veins, coursing through her body, until she was paralyzed with it. The pride she’d felt at staring down an angry man dissipated, and she wondered if she would ever really be herself again.

Then he said, “Lady, come on! Meila!”

And the paralysis broke, and she was running with him into the strange deep green of the forest.

But only seconds after they started to run, a shrill, ear-splitting tone rang out, like a siren or an alarm. Meila prepared to bolt, suddenly finding reserves of strength she hadn’t known she possessed, when Aden yanked her down to the ground. She looked up at him in shock, terrified that she’d been wrong to trust him. He put a finger over his lips to signal silence and then gestured with his head back toward the clearing.

Meila turned slowly, carefully, as sure now as she’d been in the Joining Room that the slightest movement might call attention to her. But she needn’t have worried.

One glance at the thing that hovered in the clearing, and she knew there was nothing living inside of it.

It was round, about seven feet in diameter, and translucent. The skin of the thing – for she could think of no word that better described the material of the hull than skin – glowed a thin, bluish-white light that pulsed brighter in time with the sound of the engine.

Only, she could see through the thing, clear to the trees on the other side, and there was no engine visible.

Just bodies.

Five of them, as far as she could tell, stacked in a layered pattern with their feet toward the circumference of the vessel so that their heads were staggered atop one another in a grotesque pattern that reminded her, horribly, of shoe laces. The pristine blue-white glow of the vessel was marred where the bodies rested by blood and other fluids she preferred never to identify.

The thing let out that alarm-sound again, and then, through no mechanism that she could see, the bodies within it rose until they appeared to be floating inside the container. The bottom of the thing opened, and the sound grew exponentially louder: ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE, with accompanying gusts of air that, on the down beat, actually fluttered Meila’s hair from her face.

And with that small, seemingly inconsequential push of air, dread filled her. It wasn’t the dread of the unknown, or even of the possibility of danger.

This was the fear of a threat both imminent and horribly familiar.

When Aden’s grip tightened on her arm, she knew without looking at him that he felt it, too. She shuddered, and neither of them moved until long after the vessel flew away.

*          *          *

They decided to walk in the direction the vessel had seemed to go. When they first heard the thing, Aden had intended to run in the opposite direction – and to stop only when salvation was found. After that chilling surge of familiarity, he’d known that simply running away wasn’t an option.

He had the feeling – which only grew the farther they walked – that salvation would have to be taken, not found.

Meila ignored the roots that bruised her feet, the pine needles that dug in and stung. There was no point in wishing for shoes. Even if the guy – Aden – had chivalrously tried to give her his, they wouldn’t have fit. He had to be over six feet tall. No way that was meshing with her five-three.

And that was yet another small victory. Her therapist would have been thrilled. After all, when was the last time she’d stood this close to a man that big and not had to fight the urge to shrink away? Of course, she knew the answer right away. It was always the same.

Still. Kudos to her for not being such a damn pansy.

She sighed and slid a glance at him. She needed to find out what he knew, if she was going to have any chance of getting out of this. But he obviously wasn’t up for talking. The moment they’d felt that sense of familiarity – and she knew he’d felt it, too – he’d gone ashen. He’d gotten all still and quiet, and the impression he’d given before that he wanted to understand this as much as she had simply disappeared. She had to snap him out of it.

“Please tell me that wasn’t a flying saucer.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in, and then he just stopped and stared at her. At first, she thought it wouldn’t work. But then he threw back his head and laughed, and she felt a trickle of relief.

“God, I hope not.”

He started walking again, but now his gait was different. Looser, and a little more natural. She took it as a sign that he was ready to talk.

“How did you know there would be bodies?”

He looked down and over at her at the question. She was pretty, in a petite, delicate sort of way, even with her jaw swelling and darkening on one side and the tree of blood drying on her face like a macabre tattoo. Her build was small and slim, her features gentle – almost fragile. Except for her eyes. She had these dark, exotic, and somehow haunted eyes that hinted at depths the surface denied. He imagined that if he’d met her anywhere else, he wouldn’t have taken the time to look into those eyes. The rest of the package would have fooled him, and he would have lost interest immediately. He would have assumed her weak, someone who needed to be taken care of. He wondered if that was how others saw her.

Out in the real world.

“Before you got there, I saw them kill three people. Each time, they threw them down the chute. Or…not down, I guess. There was no hole. They’d just slide them along the floor there, under that thing that looked like a fireplace, and the people would disappear.”

“Why didn’t you go through it before?”

He shrugged. “For all I knew, it sent them to an incinerator.”

“So you sent me down there?”

He held up a hand and took a deep breath. “Maybe I’d better start from the beginning. If my guess is accurate, four nights ago I fell asleep on my cousin’s couch. Next morning, I woke up in one of those rooms.”

“Four nights ago.” Meila shuddered. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. Two other people got there same time as me: a man and a woman. They touched the woman first. Just walked toward her, all creepy like they did you, and touched her arm. And she changed instantly. It was like flipping a switch. One second she looked totally freaked, ready to make a run for it. The next second, she was flat. Eyes glazed over, face blank, body all stiff and slow. And when they turned toward the man, she did, too. They didn’t have to tell her what to do, explain anything. She was just…one of them.

“The guy started to panic. Yelling, demanding to be told what was happening, eyes bugging out like you wouldn’t believe. You could see the sweat pop out on his forehead, all at once, like a…” Guilt reared up at the unflattering analogy that sprang to mind. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, he told himself. Shaking his head, he continued. “Anyway, when they touched him, I thought he would change, too. But instead, he just…flipped out. Pushed them, started screaming. Spit flying everywhere. He tried to force his way through the crowd, and one of them hit him in the back of the skull. Right there.”

He turned his head away and gestured toward the spot where the spine met the brain stem. When he turned back to her, his eyes were haunted. “That was it. He died, right then. One guy brought him down with one hit. I did what you did: tried to run back the way I’d come. You know how that worked out. And that’s when I knew. I wasn’t getting out of there. So when the touched me, and I didn’t feel any different, I decided to pretend.”

“For three days. How did you keep them from seeing that you were still…you?”

He shook his head, shrugged. “It actually wasn’t that hard. Once they think they have you, they stop looking at you. I just watched them out of the corner of my eye, did what they did. They took my clothes, my watch, gave me these.” He plucked at the colorless garments he word with distaste. “So I even started to look like them. Every once in a while, food would materialize. They eat like robots. Like they don’t taste anything. At night – or what I assumed was night – the lights would shut off. The first night, I thought that was my chance. I was going to try to escape. And then I heard this hissing sound, and suddenly all I wanted to do was lay down. Next thing I knew, it was bright again.”

“They drugged you.”

“Someone…” He remembered the disc in the clearing, and he shook his head. “Something drugged all of us. Every day was the same. People would show up; they’d either change or die. Food would be there when we needed it. At the end of the day, the lights would go out and we’d sleep. The only time I saw anyone leave was when they sent bodies down the chute. By the time you got there, I’d already decided it was my only way out. I was just waiting for a distraction.”

He looked down at her, clearly impressed. “And then you did what you did, and I thought you had a chance to make it. I knew I couldn’t just leave you behind.”

“Thank you.” The moment the words left her lips, she realized how inadequate they were. And how late. “I should have said it right away.”

“Well, you did in your own way.”

His eyes were twinkling, and she realized he was teasing her for hitting him. She laughed, surprising herself with a sound that had somehow become so wholly alien. Then she brushed her hands together, as if dusting them off, and said, “We do what we can.”

He stopped again, and this time the humor faded from his face. Under the force of that gaze, she was struck by how darkly green his eyes were in the shade. “Those people are trapped in there, Meila. And they’re not in control. Something’s got them in there. It’s making them do those horrible things. And I think it’s… collecting people.”

“But why?”

“Hell if I know.”

“How do we-”

They heard it at the same time, that tell-tale rhythmic thrumming, and they both dropped to the ground. The disc flew by them, not ten feet from where they crouched in the undergrowth, sending out its awful light-air push as it passed. This one was different from the one they’d seen before, which they knew only because it was empty and free of the blood that had painted the interior of the other. They watched it disappear into the trees ahead, heard it continue on its path – and then they heard something else.

Something big.

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.