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

darts used, it provided no cushion of disorientation. She looked at her feet, noticed her arms over her head, and began to squirm.

“Marta!”

She froze, eyes wide.

“Marta, it’s me!”

“Will?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s happening? Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

Marta’s stomach heaved. She had not yet noticed the wires in her skin.

In rapid succession, Derek and Anna woke and gasped, fought against their bonds, and cried out in fear. When they saw their friends, fear became confusion. They chattered and wept and yelled.

Then they fell silent just as quick, and their echoes clapped throughout the chamber much too long, as if the walls were aware of their plight and saw fit to play back their hysteria.

For long moments, no one spoke. The girls were crying. So was Derek.

“Okay, guys, we have to get out of here,” Will said.

“How?” Marta asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where are

we, even?” Derek wondered. “Look at this place. There aren’t any doors or anything.”

Anna, who was weeping so hard that she could barely form words, said, “Forget about that

and look at these fucking wires sticking in our bodies! It’s like we’re one big circuit. Where...do they go? How are they so precise?”

“She’s right,” Marta said. “I can...I can feel them inside me. The wires. It’s like they’re balled up in my chest or something.”

Derek blew out his breath. “Yes, I can feel it too. Oh shit, oh Jesus, you guys, what are we supposed to do?”

“We have to stay calm,” Will said, although his heart felt ready to leap out of his mouth.

Anna screamed, “Calm? Calm

? We’re in a goddamn cave

, with wires

sticking out of our bodies, our hands tied up, and you want me to be fucking calm

?”

“Yes, damn it!” Will screamed back. When Anna was in a mood, only equally vehement words would get to her. “Because if we aren’t calm, we’re going to stay like this until we either die or someone comes for us, and I sure as hell don’t want to be around when anyone shows up!”

“But—”

“But nothing! Now stop screaming and start thinking of a way out of this!”

She glared at Will, her body quivering, but then collapsed into mostly-silent sobs.

Derek said, “Was it those guys? The ones we saw by that dirt-thing?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “I never got a look. Those darts put me out in seconds.”

“Same here.”

Marta said, “These bonds are strong as hell. It’s some kind of rope, but it’s like...sticky. I can’t budge it.”

When their voices’ shifting echoes faded, the chamber fell into silence that rivaled the vacuum of space.

Without warning, the yellow light from the hole darkened into a deep gold, but the ambience was not so much gilded as it was diseased. The chamber, previously without shadows, suddenly erupted in them: they jumped around as the light faded in and out, in and out, and Will could barely see his friends.

One instant, the light disappeared and everything was black. Then the original, steady glow returned.

There was a man standing in the middle of the room. He was tall, well over six feet, and his bronze skin flared with oversized muscles. Black hair to his waist, ornamental jewelry around his arms and neck, nude body: this was one of the men who had been in the prairie. He held a machete, a menacing shape about three feet long, with painted white stripes on its blade.

The girls screamed. Derek cursed, but Will bit his tongue to stay composed. The man was staring at him. A strange pride born of mortal terror made Will meet the man’s gaze.

His face was wide, his lips thick, and his eyes abnormally far apart. His skin had a sheen to it, as if he had been oiled for effect—though no effect could rival his immediate appearance in a room without a visible exit. Looking at his scowl was like looking at a rabid animal.

The man turned, shuffling his bare feet over the dirt, straddling the hole, and faced Anna, who was crying so hard that she probably couldn’t see him at all.

“Insalla

,” the man said. It was almost a whisper, yet it carried across the chamber as would a deep-throated yell.

The tribesman turned again and faced Marta, who at least tried to meet his gaze.

“Insalla

.”

He shifted to Derek, who raised his chin and spat on the man’s feet.

Without reacting, the man said, “Insalla, sai

.”

While the man was occupied with Derek, Will glanced at the band that stretched across a massive bicep. It was brown, perhaps leather, and small objects dangled from it. At first he couldn’t make out what they were—they looked a little like guitar picks—but when the guy turned to face him, one twirled and caught the light.

They were fingernails. They varied in size, but all were grey and rimmed in brown, as if they had been on his body for years and were moldering. They hung from his neck, rattled on his wrists, and one even swayed from a leather string that pierced his ear.

“What the hell are you?” he asked. “What have you done to us?”

As soon as he said it, Will knew he’d made a mistake. This man was not going to sit down and have a nice talk—if he even spoke their language.

“What’s he doing?” Marta called. “Will, what’s he doing?”

“He’s just...staring at me. Glaring.”

“Guys, do you see those fingernails?” Derek asked.

“Yeah, I see them,” Will replied.

Anna, through sobs, said, “Just make him go away. Make all this go away, please, oh God, it can’t be real, can’t be, just make him go away...”

Marta said, “Anna, we’re here. We’re with you. I know it’s hard, but you have to try and pull it together.”

The man whirled and faced Anna.

The machete was in his right hand. The tribesman stepped forward, swung it, and sliced Anna’s jugular.

At the same time, the light went out.

The blackness was so thick it almost had weight; Will felt squeezed by the air around him, although he knew it was only his terror.

Derek and Marta were screaming, yelling, crying. If he’d had anything in his stomach, Will would have vomited.

A sudden awareness of danger drew the strength from him, and he bit his lip. In the pitch-black void of the chamber, they were helpless against attacks. The tribesman could be six inches from his face and he wouldn’t perceive that presence until the killing stroke pierced him. Even the quietude, which should have allowed him to hear movement, was drowned out by an ocean-like roar in his ears.

The previous black had lasted but a minute. This darkness remained, and Will feared that the light might never return.

No one could speak to the horror they’d witnessed.

“Guys?” he told the darkness. No one answered, but he dared not say anything else. It was irrational, insane

, but he worried that by opening his mouth he would invite this cloying black into his body, as though they no longer breathed air but the purposeful breath of some alien entity that infested living hosts.

Derek, his voice pinched, said, “Uh...I think something’s happening. I...I feel weird...”

“Me too,” Marta said. “Will?”

He didn’t answer.

Louder, more desperate: “Will!”

But Derek was right: something was

happening. The wires in his stomach, previously docile, began to feel hot. He could feel the exact insertion points as the heat grew, and he looked down, expecting to see the wires aglow. They were not.

It felt like red-hot needles were impaled within him, because now the hotness was not just on the surface but inside as well. From stomach to throat, his muscles twitched and seized. His abdominals flexed of their own accord. His heart, previously hammering, fell into a frightening kind of slow thump-thump

. Every breath burned.

“No!” Derek yelled. “No, no, no, stop!”

Will didn’t know if his cries stemmed from a similar burning sensation or because the tribesman was attacking.

The wires at his belly button suddenly pulsed. The feeling was so disturbing that for the first time, Will lost his composure and screamed.

They pulsed again. It felt like something was moving inside

them, into him, something that was too large and expanded the circumference, just as a snake’s tubular form swells to digest uneaten animals. Gobbets of terrible design were being fed into him, bit-by-bit, and he was powerless to fight. He rattled his arms, kicked his legs, but all he could do was grit his teeth and endure it.

Pulse.

He screamed and screamed. Vaguely, he heard the others shrieking as well.

Pulse

.

This one was larger, and it felt like his skin tore.

Pulse. Pulse. Pulse

.

Faster now, the energy or chemicals or...or whatever the hell they were. But, for God’s sake, what could travel through wires so small?

Pulsepulsepulsepulsepulse

.

And as the wires fed into him, the pain began to fade. In its place was vertigo, relief—and an alarming amount of physical strength. He felt stronger, knew

he was stronger.

He didn’t know how it could be or what it meant, but just as the pulses stopped, Will fisted his hands and tugged on the bonds. He expected nothing more than the clink

of metal like before, but this time the ropes tore, went flying, and the momentum slammed his arms down onto his groin. He yelped.

Without support, his body fell sideways.

The pain was gone. The pulsing, at least, had ceased.

His hands trembled as he touched the thin outline of the wires. They felt like rubber, perfectly embedded in the skin, warm to the touch. When he wiggled one, something under his flesh moved as well, and he jerked his hand back in revulsion.

Something warm and slimy crawled down his chin. He brought his hands up and knew it was blood.

Derek and Marta were quiet.

Will drew deep breaths, trying to slow his thoughts. Don’t focus on the wires

, he told himself. Think about something else, anything else...

Before he could do that, light showered up from the hole.

4

Although he had half-anticipated the lights’ return, Will was not prepared for such an abrupt ascension from darkness. He winced but sat up.

Marta and Derek, though they must have tried, had not been able to break their bonds. Both were semi-conscious and moaned under their breath. Like him, blood was trickling—but thankfully not gushing—from their noses, from the corners of their mouths, and from the wires’ insertion points. They were otherwise unharmed.

The tribesman had vanished as inexplicably as he appeared. It would be easy to think that he had never really been there at all—except that he had left footprints in the pale dirt. His presence had all the qualities of a hallucination, but the tracks raised more questions than answers: if he was not an apparition, was in fact flesh and bone, then how had he gotten in

?

He drew in his feet and untied the rope, tossed it aside. He noticed that the wire on his left side, which had led into Anna’s body, was severed halfway between them.

Anna. He dared not look yet.

His mind was in