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

tatters. He wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor and let panic-fueled memories fade this place away. Memories of college, of friends, of carefree nights driving on the highway, screaming song lyrics out the window. He would remember kissing a girl for the first time. Yes, he could recall it even now. Her name was Allison, and at the end of their second date, standing on her porch, hands linked, they had kissed; she had just applied lipstick, and the rich texture of her skin was amazing. Everything had been perfect until the door opened and her little brother giggled at them. Her cheeks had flushed, she had laughed, but she did not unwrap her hands from his neck. That was what he remembered most, all these years later: even with the embarrassing interruption, Allison refused to let go. In a way, that moment was more profound than the kiss itself.

For a few minutes, Will recalled those times. He closed his eyes, forgot about his half-naked friends chained to the wall, and fell into satisfying peace.

Then he squinted, and saw Anna.

Her skin had badly wrinkled. Mottled brown and grey, her body curled in upon itself; her arms and legs and chest were half their normal size, as thin as twigs in winter. Her eye sockets were empty. A few strands of hair still clung to a bare scalp, but most had fallen to the ground. Will was reminded of a documentary he’d seen of Egyptian mummies, how the corpses had looked when unwrapped. It was similar to Anna’s decay here: the same withered body, the same dryness, as if everything liquid had been squeezed from her.

There were dark swatches of blood on the wall and on the ground from the tribesman’s fatal swing. But that didn’t explain the rapid decay of her tissues.

He stared at the remains too long. This time, he couldn’t stop the vomit, although all that came up was acid laced with blood.

Marta groaned, and it was a welcome distraction. With considerable effort, he tore his gaze from Anna and looked at his friend. She was working her mouth, trying and failing to form words.

He crawled on his hands and knees through the dirt, over the hole without looking in it, and knelt beside her. The wires scooted along with him, and he tried to ignore the way they squirmed with every movement, how it felt like fingers rammed inside him.

He took Marta’s face in his hands. Forced her chin up. Looked in her eyes.

“Will?”

“Yeah. It’s me. You’re all right.”

“How—”

“I broke my ropes. I don’t know how.”

The blood from her mouth and nose had stopped flowing and was already dry. When she spoke, the rivulets cracked. “What...happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She stiffened. “That man...!”

“He’s gone. The lights went out, and he was gone. Okay, I’ve got to get you free.”

He fumbled with her bonds and found that a simple knot was all that held them. He untied it and then did the same with her ankles.

Like Will, her first instinct was to grab at the wires, but he took her wrists and stopped her.

“Don’t,” he said. “They’re deep. We can’t pull them out.”

“This one’s broken,” she said, pointing to the one on her right, the one that had led to Anna. It was severed, as Will’s had been, because there was nothing left to which it could connect. Anna was gone.

He tried to stop Marta from looking, but he was too slow.

Marta stared. Gasped. Pinched her eyebrows. Choked back a sob.

Will knelt in front of her, blocking her line of sight, and wrapped her in a hug. It was not a full hug, because he was careful not to crush the wires, but her head was on his chest and her arms were around his back and they were sobbing together. He felt her tears trail along his skin, felt her mouth as it opened and closed. He stroked her hair and told her that they would find a way out. She held onto him so fiercely that her fingernails dug into his skin.

They stayed that way for a long time. When at last Marta was calm enough to sit on her own, Will wiped away as much of the dried blood from her face as possible. There were still stains along her cheeks, but she looked better.

As one, they turned to Derek. He had fallen unconscious, and the blood from his mouth still dribbled.

They scooted-crawled-shuffled the short distance, mindful of the wires, and set to work untying him. Will lightly slapped his face, but nothing happened.

“Will,” Marta whispered, “how did you break your ropes? I tried, but I couldn’t.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It happened so fast. The wires were...were burning...”

“...like all your organs were being scorched...”

“...and there were these...these pulses of something being fed into my body...”

“...like energy pulses, right! They came faster and faster...”

“...and that was when I broke the ropes. I felt strong, almost superhuman strong, and I just pulled.”

Marta exhaled slowly. “The same thing happened to me. I guess I still wasn’t strong enough, though. God, Will, what are these wires? Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Anna...!”

“Don’t think about it. Don’t look over there. Just focus on me, all right? On Derek. Right now we have to find a way out of here.”

“There isn’t a way!”

“There has to be. That man came and went. He was real, look—footprints.”

But Marta wouldn’t face the center of the room, probably because doing so would have certainly led to another glance at Anna’s remains.

“Why won’t Derek wake up?” she asked.

As if on cue, their friend fluttered his eyes and jerked awake; as before, there was no drowsiness. He was alert in seconds.

“Guys? Is that you? How...?”

“Will broke his bonds. He freed me.”

Derek looked down at his freed hands, at his bleeding puncture wounds, and groaned. “Where’s Anna? Is she okay?”

Marta was ready with an excuse, but Will silenced her with a touch. They could not keep Derek from seeing her body in such a confined space, and if they prolonged his hope, it would only make the moment worse when at last he saw. So they parted, and Marta pointed across the room where Anna curled up as if made from dried corn husks.

They said nothing during his cries and curses. All they could do was pat his back, hug him, and try to remain steady themselves.

As Derek finally calmed, Will glanced up and was struck by a delayed sense of embarrassment. They were all in their underwear, exposed, and Marta’s bra was so thin and soaked with sweat that her breasts might as well have been nude. Her bare legs, while streaked with blood and dirt, were still firm and toned, and when she turned to prop herself against the wall, her panties shifted and exposed the top of her ass.

He felt like gagging, and turned away. One of them was dead, they had wires inside them, no way of escape, and he was thinking about sex? It was impossible. He had always known of Marta’s beauty, but those feelings were akin to acknowledging the beauty of a close sibling. Never had he considered acting on the strong physical attraction because, in all important aspects, they were

like siblings. But now his body revolted. At the sight of such horror, perhaps he was responding with primal urges that were always present but dormant. Confronted with unimaginable pain and the prospect of death, maybe anyone’s mind would crack. Nevertheless, he felt less than a man. A scoundrel.

At some point, Derek sniffed and was quiet. The chamber once more had the preternatural silence of an airless void.

“Is this real?” Marta asked. “I mean, look at us. Is this possible?”

Derek said, “Oh, it’s real. It’s real and we can’t waste time thinking about how it’s possible, because right now it just is

. Right? They say that if you can touch something, smell it, feel it, then it’s real. What we need to focus on is how to get out of here.”

“But Anna! Look at her! How is that possible?”

Will shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Derek, however, seemed to have an answer. “The wires. It’s these fucking tubes that made her like that.”

“How do you mean?” Marta asked.

“Didn’t you guys feel it? When everything was burning, and things were pushing through the wires...I felt something. It was weird, like being more than I am. It sounds stupid now, but I felt like I was stronger and smarter than I’d ever been.”

Will shivered.

“Since reality as we know it is fucked anyway, it makes sense. Anna was dead. The wires connected us. Something was being fed through those wires...” he shrugged.

Marta’s mouth fell open. “Are you saying that we

did that to Anna? That somehow we took her...her what, her life?”

“No, she was already dead. But maybe the wires sucked out her...her energy or something. Look at that corpse, will you? It’s decayed, eaten away, like her energy was stripped from her body

. It was the wires.”

“No,” Marta said. “No way. No.”

Derek turned to Will. “You said you broke your ropes, right? Because you were stronger than normal. Because you took some of Anna’s strength.”

“No, stop saying that! Stop it, just don’t!” Marta looked stricken.

Will understood her denial. Losing Anna was bad enough, but now Derek was proposing that they were responsible for her degradation. Even though the tribesman had killed her, and even though she was gone in seconds, it was nauseating to think that somehow they had benefited from her death. And if the wires were indeed a conduit through which energy flowed, they had not just sailed into the unknown but had rocketed toward the flimsy edges of sanity.

What made it worse was that Derek’s answer seemed logical, or, at least, logical in this

hell.

“Okay, we can’t prove anything,” he said. “Right now, let’s just think about getting out of here before that tribesman comes back.”

Derek frowned. “ ‘Tribesman?’ ”

“Yeah. Did you see how he was dressed? Those fingernails were like ornaments, and his black hair, tanned skin...it was like an Indian.”

“Craziest fucking Indian I’ve ever seen,” Derek said, and managed a halfhearted smile.

“So. We have to work together. If there’s a way out, we’ll find it.”

“Okay. Marta, you with us?”

They turned to look. She was facing away and hunched over. Will heard sounds that were at once disturbing. A sticky slurping. Throttled moans of pain.

He rushed forward, knowing what he would find, but was still aghast when he saw Marta leaning over herself, pulling at the severed wire. She gripped it with both hands, white-knuckle tight, but instead of yanking, eased it inch-by-inch, pausing every few seconds to take a deep breath and grit her teeth.

She had managed to pull out five or so inches by the time Will saw her. Where it had been inside her, the wire was no longer black but covered in glistening brown and red mucus. Blood trickled from the wound and down into her panties, soaking through and even staining