The One Who Endures - Patrick Spiker (top novels .txt) 📗

1

“Insalla.”

He spoke the name without inflection, his voice an ax grinding along the stone wheel of Death...and so too did Death spark from it...

2

When morning slid into afternoon, a fierce storm cloaked the southern horizon. Lightning cracked that dark wall, and thunder swept the world with a sound like stampeding horses in a vast and bloodthirsty army.

On a shallow prairie hill, surrounded by miles of wilted sagebrush and weeds, William Norris gave the tempest little mind. He’d packed sweaters and hats should they encounter inclement weather. Besides, he had spent enough time in these lands to know that the storm would be spent when it reached them. A few raindrops, maybe some brisk winds.

His companions—Anna, Marta, and Derek—were not so casual. Upon seeing the saturated veil, they kept chatting about tornadoes and fretting over the chance of being caught in a deadly squall. They were from big cities, and did not yet comprehend that this northwestern land was an asylum from extreme weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes were as rare as seeing escaped zoo elephants crossing a highway.

They had been hiking since daybreak, and had travelled about four miles. Their vehicles, safely locked and parked off the road, were long out of view. The heat-smeared prairie was the only sight.

“Come on,” Will said. “Don’t worry about the storm.”

His friends didn’t argue—but didn’t seem reassured, either.

He had known Derek since first grade. Marta and Anna he’d met in college two years ago, and the four had formed a close friendship not built on sexual desires. The girls were

attractive, of course—Marta had the toned body of a swimsuit model, and Anna’s eyes were a luminous shade of green—but aside from mere observations, they had never muddied their relationships by hopping into bed.

In this world, where children were indoctrinated with sex and dating at birth, these four friends were a welcome antithesis.

They were hunting arrowheads and looking for snakes to shoot. Will had his .22 Remington revolver, which was strapped in a waist holster. Each person carried a backpack with food, water, and extra clothes, and Derek was also packing the tent, because they intended to spend the night in the wilderness.

Chugging thunder rode the air. A breeze began whistling through the sagebrush.

“I think we should get ready for rain,” Marta said. She was wearing a long-sleeve plaid shirt over a white tank top, and dubiously looked down at herself. “I’m not dressed for rain.”

“There won’t be any rain,” Will assured her, “and even if there is, it won’t be as much as you think. Really, I could use some rain about now.”

Walking beside him, Derek said, “I’m with you, buddy. It’s hot as hell out here.”

Although the girls were red-faced and sweating, they kept glancing at the southern horizon and seemed ready to argue again.

Will said, “Girls, I’m serious. Don’t worry.”

“I stink,” Anna announced after a while, a ploy to distract herself from anxiety.

“We all do,” Marta said. “But I wonder what Arthur would think of you now, Anna, all sweaty and stinky.”

Arthur was Anna’s most recent ex-boyfriend.

“Arthur,” Anna replied, “is a pig, and I couldn’t care less what he would think of me.”

“A few weeks ago, you couldn’t stop talking about him.”

“A few weeks ago, I was an idiot.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m an idiot who doesn’t have to put up with Arthur’s shit.”

Glancing back, Will asked, “Why haven’t I heard much about this Arthur?”

“Because he’s a pig,” Anna said.

“He called her ‘Daffodil’ and had chapped lips,” Marta explained.

Will said, “He sounds charming.”

“When we kissed, his lips would shed. You

kiss someone like that.”

“Your lips aren’t the model of moist right now, I have to say.”

“That’s because we’re hiking through the first desert of Hell,” Anna said, retrieving a bottle of lip balm from her pocket.

“And he would drool during sex,” Marta said.

“Marta

!” Anna exclaimed. “Can we not? I told you that in private.”

“And I’m telling Will in private.”

“Drooling, huh?” Will said.

Anna scowled. “Yes.”

“Sounds charming.”

“Oh, yes, extremely.”

“So...why were you dating him?”

“I really don’t know. He had a nice ass.”

“Very high standards.”

“He’s old news,” Anna said, “and I don’t want to ruin our trip by thinking of him. Marta

should never have brought it up.”

“You got it, Daffodil.”

“Yeah, fuck you, Will.”

Will laughed and walked backward so he could wink at the girls. Anna gave him the finger.

Derek, who had been predictably silent during this exchange, stopped. He pointed to something up ahead. “What is that?”

Will looked and his humor withered. About two hundred yards away, silhouetted by spiny sagebrush, was a mound of pale dirt, about eight or ten feet high, crudely shaped in the form of a pyramid. Its edges had been painted with haphazard strokes of vibrant colors: red, green, purple, yellow, blue, and white. Standing around it, like the cardinal points of a compass, were four men with long black hair.

Will and his friends gaped at it. They blinked, looked again.

It was not a mirage.

“What the hell?” Marta whispered.

Will didn’t answer. He was certain the anomaly hadn’t been here minutes before. Without cover of hill or valley, the landscape provided no spaces in which to hide. Even a distracted hiker with poor vision would have spotted this sharp protrusion.

Which meant that it had formed in seconds.

But that was impossible. It made no sense.

The men were bronze from the sun. They appeared to be naked except for dark jewelry around their necks and arms.

The day suddenly felt hotter. The hairs on his arms and neck became rigid as needles, and Will’s breath caught in his throat. When he brought a hand to his brow to shade the sun, it was shaking.

The wind no longer blew. No thunder echoed. A supernatural blanket seemed to have settled over the prairie, pressing upon it, smothering every living creature within ten miles.

Heart thundering, he was about to call out when something stung his chest.

He looked down. There was a small dart plunged through his shirt, a three-inch black shaft with a tuft of red fuzz on its end.

The girls gasped in unison. Will turned to see identical darts in their bodies: Marta had been pricked in her right thigh, and Anna had a dart sticking from the side of her neck. Derek, though he had not cried out, glared at one in his stomach.

Before he could see who had fired the darts, as he thought about pulling his out, Will became dizzy. The world blurred and jittered; thick smoke seemed to fill his vision. A strange sound, like the harried chatter of crickets, arose somewhere nearby. Then he was falling, and had time to hope that he didn’t land in a cactus plant before everything faded to black.

3

With none of the often-portrayed grace of movie heroes, Will Norris woke in a fit of coughing. Unlike rising from sleep, he was alert instantly, and groaned as he remembered the dart in his chest and the alacrity with which he’d gone out. For a moment, he kept his eyes shut, trying to understand what had happened.

Something was wrong. It was too cold. The sun should be shining, or maybe a few raindrops falling...He tried to wipe his face, and that was when he realized he couldn’t move his arms.

Now

Will opened his eyes, and he looked upon a nightmare.

He sat with his feet outstretched, and his ankles were joined with some kind of white rope. His back was against a rough stone wall, his arms pinned above him, wrists tied together and affixed to the wall itself, rendering him helpless. He could wiggle his hands and elbows, but the strange bonds could not be broken.

He was in a rectangular chamber about twenty feet in diameter and ten feet high. The walls and ceiling were dull stone, pitted and jagged as if carved by hand chisels and hammers. The floor upon which he sat was a flat layer of dirt that was neither marked by footprints nor heaped and disheveled by the elements. In the middle of the room, a foot-wide hole had been bored through the dirt and into the earth. That hole tossed pale yellow light into the chamber, as though it tunneled so far down that it reflected the magma of the earth’s core.

Spaced around the room at ninety-degree intervals were his friends, Anna and Marta and Derek. Their wrists had been tied together and secured to thick metal chain links in the stone above their heads, and everyone’s ankles were bound with the same white rope.

No one else was awake. Their heads lolled. Every few seconds someone would moan or grunt.

Will and Derek had been stripped to their boxers; the girls had on bras and panties, nothing else.

He felt something odd now, a pricking sensation in his stomach. He looked down and cried out.

On either side of his belly button, thin black wires pierced his flesh like IV lines. The one on his left led away from his body and across the ground, where the other end plunged into Anna’s stomach. Likewise, the wire on his right fed into Derek’s body. From their

flesh came two more strands that connected them to Marta, on the opposite wall from Will. The wires were too thin to be tubes of medicine, and besides, no medicine was ever administered like this. Worse, his skin seemed to have grafted around the wires, as though they had been there since birth.

The bloodless wounds did not hurt. Crazy as it was, though, he could feel

the thin cables. His entire chest felt tight and each breath was constricted, and he had the illogical impression that somehow they were wound around his internal organs, perhaps surfaced with barbs that gouged the tender flesh every time he moved.

A surge of panic raced through his veins. He tugged on the bonds that held his hands, tugged and tugged, but the sturdy metal link never even creaked.

The walls, though lumpy, were seamless. He could see no door or crawlspace. There was no way out.

Just the hole, which spouted light that never flickered or wavered, crafting its own sulfurous firmament across the ceiling: a fake atmosphere.

That led to the ultimate question: how had they gotten here if no exit existed?

“Derek!” Will whispered. Then, louder: “Derek!”

His friend did not move.

“Come on, man, wake up. Someone, wake up, please!”

No one moved.

He could not even stand up, because his arms were pinned above him. The most he could do was roll his legs side-to-side and rise to a semi-crouch, although he did none of these things. He was too worried about moving and pulling the wire from his body as it sheared his innards.

Then Marta jerked her head up, smacked the wall, and was awake at once. Whatever sedative the