Page 13 of Taken to Kor
Steel wraps around the sides of each case, but a thick glass panel in the front reveals bodies that are each one hundred percent human. I shake my head, reach my hand towards one of the glass panels then quickly snatch it back, afraid. “What are y’all doing here?”
I glance to the left and to the right, but I don’t see anything. Just more hallway that ends in black as soon as it can escape the grip of these luminous crates, which far outshine my torch. I turn back to the human beings.
All three of them seem totally frozen even though it looks like there’s liquid underneath the glass. They seem to be frozen by it, instead of swimming in it. Grey clothes stick to every bit of their skin and, even though all three of them are bald and have no hair I can still clearly tell that two of them are men and one’s a woman. Tubes feed into their backs and their mouths are distended in shapeless Os. It looks freaky. Like they’re screaming with their eyes open.
I rap my knuckles on the glass. It clonks loudly, but doesn’t echo. “How do I get you out of here?” How doIget out of here? That’s the answer I really want, but the former seems more plausible. Then what? I have less poop-bars for myself? Maybe, instead of sharing, I can squirrel away the bars and just give them all the black juice. As much as they can drink!
My mouth is too dry to laugh, so I swallow over and over while I search the floor-to-ceiling length tubes for some sort of control panel, but the glass ends in metal and the metal stretches all the way around to the sides and around the sides…wait a jiffy! The tanks…they kind of wobble… It’s like there’s something behind the tanks. Maybe…
My fingers search the place where the edge of one tank meets the wall behind it — ornotwall. What if this isn’t a wall at all, but a hall? Heh. See what I did there?
I finger the seam where the tank meets the wall and suddenly, the tank jerks forward, almost as if it were being tugged from the front by an invisible thread.Or pushed.A splash of darkness confirms my theory. I lurch back, eyeing the tank like it’s gonna bite me. It’s wobbling dangerously…oh my shrov! Is it…is it going to? No no no nononononon. Shrov!
I squeal and run down the hall away from the tank just as it starts to totter…and then fall…and then crash! Smash smash smash. That’s the sound of the tank hitting the ground. Bing bang bash. That’s the sound of my pulse driving me to the brink of insanity and back.
Because the thing hits the ground and the blue light goes out and all that’s left is my wrist torch, which is dinky by comparison. From where I am, its farthest rays only barely reach the glass-covered intersection, but I can still see…I can still see them when they come. White blobs. Carpets. They come crawling by the handful. No. By the dozens.
These aren’t Oosa, like the sex maniac blobs Rhork described to me. These things have backs and arms and legs, heads and faces. But they don’t have faces like humans have faces. They have faces like humans have faces if humans had faces that had been partially erased.
Where eyes should be, there’s just a well for eye sockets covered by skin. Where ears should be there are huge holes covered in twitchy flaps. Where a nose should be are only flat slits. Where a mouth should be is a mouth and from the mouth come screams that wreck me.
No nononononononno. No. Nope. Nope! I’m out. Out out out. FUCK THIS SHIT!
The carpets with the clawed hands and the mouths that scream dive out of the hallway and descend on the shattered tanks. They push the other two over and all twenty of them start working in frightening coordination to turn the tanks over and rip through the glass panels. They pull the bodies —the shaking, shivering bodies…the people…no nonononononono!— out of the tanks and onto the glass and blue goo-covered floor, and those people? The ones in the tanks? They’re breathing.
No. They aren’t breathing, but they’re tryingto. The man that they have now in their grip is gasping for breath, chest convulsing. His dark skin is the same color as mine and I swear I imagine him looking at me as the first of the carpet-people shoves its hand through his stomach, pulls his intestines out through his belly button and starts to feast.
Fear catapults me to my feet. I turn and start to run. I think of Svera. She’d have probably thrown herself into the fray and tried to fight them with her damn Tri-God beads. But I’m no saint like Svera.
I want tolive.
I’m not going to fight thirty carpets with razor blades for mouths and screams that make me wanna poo my pants. Another shriek goes off like a siren — more than one — and I know that it’s coming after me. One of them. Atleastone. Tears jerk into my lungs and try to drown me, but drowning means stopping and I can’t stop because I’mnotgoing to die here. Not like this.Not without seeing the ocean.
Shekurr. Yeah. Shekurr sounds real good. Just thirty cocks. No big deal, right? What was I even fucking worried about? If Rhork wants, I’ll even grow them out of my shroving eye sockets!
The sound of pounding behind me gets louder and I don’t know where I am. I marked my path and I lost it just as fast. I pass the mouth of an open tunnel and a carpet person lunges at me and I scream. I scream a bloodcurdling scream. I scream and it takesall of meto scream.
I throw my hands out at it and it shrieks and recoils away from me, but not like it’s afraid. No. Not afraid. How could it be afraid of me when I’m alone and it has friends by the bloodthirsty dozen? It screams like it’shurt. It lifts its arms to ward away the threat, but what…what is the shroving threat? I don’t have anything on me except for the man pants I’m wearing, my too small tee shirt and…
Ohhh…
The light. That’s all I’ve got on me right now. That must be what’s freaking these things out. I wave my wrist around wildly and jump at it like a bug. “Take that!” I shriek, spotting another one behind it. Another thing. A skeleton with white, translucent skin stretched too thin over its frame.
There’s scuttering behind me. I turn around and there’s another one of those things and it’s about three feet away.
“Fuck! Ahhhhh!”
I don’t think. There’s just moving, running, getting away. I fly down hallway after hallway, seeing the things sometimes, but not always. They’re everywhere, burrowed in deep like sand mites in the sheets back in our squat, adobe colony homes, back before Mathilda upgraded me to a high-tech cage underground. A cage underground sounds pretty good right about now.
I’m running practically blind. The torch on my wrist only shows me the world right before I step into it. I can’t look around. I can’t find any goop. I don’t see anymore tanks. I can’t find the escape pod. I don’t think these things are Oosa and I don’t really care. I just need to stop running. I need a place where I can take a breath. I can’t…my lungs…they catch…keep running. No, I need to hide. I need to hide.
There!
A grate in one wall practically shouts my name. I turn to it and yank my dagger out of my back pocket, nearly splitting my face open with it when I jerkily free it from its sheath. I whittle the dagger around the edges of the grate and pull it free. I hear things moving around all behind me — so shroving many of them! — but when I glance around, waving my wrist torch wildly, I don’t see anyone. Anything.
I get the grate open but I’m shaking so badly it’s a miracle that I don’t bang it around on the green-grit covered floor below. I bite my lower lip so hard I think it might be bleeding. Shit. I am bleeding. I lick my bottom lip and taste metal. It helps ground me which, at this stage, I don’t know that I appreciate. Without the taste of copper and salt zinging through my mouth, I might have convinced myself that this was just an oxygen-deprived hallucination and that I’ve gone insane. Maybe even, that I was insane from the start.
I hear another loud wail from the hallway behind me and the grate falls from my fingers and lands hard on the rotten tiles below. My shoulders are jerking like I’m doing a dance never seen on the colony before. This one isallshoulders.
