Page 22 of Taken
The sound of my breath sawing in and out of my lungs is louder than the sound of their movements behind me…for a little while. But after five, maybe ten minutes?—who knows! My goddamn Pam watch doesn’t actually tell time!—theclickingbehind me grows loud enough to drown out my breath, my thoughts.
“Pam?” I gasp into my wristwatch, the flat gray face just a piece of plastic with some sensors built around the edges and a speaker built into the top. “Do you think the roaches eat people?” The clicking sounds get louder in the pause. “Pam?” I squeal.
“I am calculating whether answering you truthfully will help increase your speed and ensure the longevity of the mission, or if I should rather obfuscate my response.”
“Pam, are you shitting me?”I’m crying out right now.
She doesn’t respond.
Pam doesn’t fucking respond.
“Am I gonna die?”
“The rocks are incoming. It appears you will reach them before the creatures reach you.”
“But they’re still coming toward me?”
“Yes…Rhen,” she says just as the small rocky protrusion—like a tooth poking out of the earth, one that belonged to the carcass of an immense beast—gets near enough to touch. “You have approximately three minutes before they overtake you. I suggest you seek higher ground, quickly.”
I hit the rock, my palms slapping against the cool, almost cold surface. My hands roam all over it, seeking purchase anywhere, but find nothing.
“Pam, what makes you think they can’t climb?” Pam doesn’t answer with the same speed she usually does and I know in that moment, in that brief pause, that I’m going to die. “Pam!”
“At their size, given the sheer ascent, it is unlikely they will be able to scale the stone…”
“ICAN’T SCALE THE FUCKING STONE, PAMELA!” I can’t get up the rock. My heart is pounding. The boulders are smooth all the way up. I don’t have a weapon. I didn’t even bring my water pitcher this time. I slap the rock with my palms, circling around the boulders again, but find them just as smooth all the way around as I did the first time. I have no options left.
I turn my back to the stone and take these gasping breaths that hurt my lungs. Each inhale makes the rope tied around my body strain against my skin. I want to explode in every direction. Because the first rays of that damning sun glint over the horizon and cascade over the backs of way more than eighty roaches. There are a hundred—hundreds—of cockroaches the height of my knee and as big around as Pam said they’d be.
The closest one to me is a soccer pitch away and I’m shaking so badly I can taste my thoughts. One is louder than the rest. I voice it, given that this will be my last chance. “I’m sorry, Pam. I didn’t mean to yell at you. It’s been really…good knowing you,” I say to my wristwatch between ugly, wet wails.
My nose is running and my eyes are leaking and my spit has the texture of molasses. I’d have thrown myself to the ground and begged the roaches to knock me out first before they start devouring me if I thought they’d understand but I don’t think they would. I don’t think they think much of anything what with their tiny fugly heads and their disgusting little mouths and their black shiny carapaces and HOLY FUCKING CANNOLI, I HATE ROACHES.
I swear half the reason I ended up joining the Sucere Project—aside from the obvious “help humanity” and “my parents are already dead blah blah”—was the silence of the Chamber when they brought me to it. No more bombs. No more hurting or watching people hurt. And no more roaches crawling under my bed as I was fighting for a few moments of peace every night.
Some people ate roaches by choice. Some people ate them out of desperation. I’d have rather starved. And now, I’m going to be torn apart by the little fuckers.
The big fuckers.
I hug my arms around myself tight as they close the distance between us by half, by half again…until they’re less than five paces away—human paces. I close my eyes, brace for carnage…
A loudTHUDshakes the earth and I fall into the stone behind me, my skull knocking against rock. I remain plastered to it, my scraped-up palms shielding my eyes from impending death. I relish the darkness. The scent of the dry sand and soil beneath it. The encroaching warmth from the sun that has yet to chase away the chill. The sound of the horde of roaches overtaking me. The shuddering breath that leaves my lungs and lets me know I’m still breathing.
And then the horrific screech that lets me know why.
I open my eyes.
Lacchus is spread out before me in his largest shape. One of his clawed feet is sunken through the back of a roach, its split-in-half body still wiggling around his enormous scaled leg. He reaches underneath his armpits to two slits in his scaled skin along either side of his ribs. From them, he withdraws twin blades. They look like daggers on him, but for my size they would be swords.
He cuts at the next roach that launches itself at him, splitting it in two halfway down. It falls to the side, reduced to a smattering of clear and brown goo that leaks all over the place. I slap my hand over my mouth to contain my shriek, but Lacchus still flinches and looks over his shoulder at me.
I point. “Watch out!”
He turns a second too late and one of the roaches stabs its pincers into his side. Wait—do roaches evenhavepincers? These seem to. And those pincers cut like knives. He lifts his knee up into its tiny head and stabs underneath the shell of the creature, into its thorax.
He cuts and cuts and cuts until the creature falls to the side and then he keeps cutting and fighting until six, seven, a dozen more of the creatures are dead and the rest finally release these shrill titters and clack away, splitting around us and the useless goddamn rock, disappearing behind it and then reappearing toward the southern skyline.
Lacchus steps forward, moving like he’ll chase after them, but stops. He lowers his body into a crouch and emits three shrieking sounds, each one layered atop the next, but with varying intonations. When he’s done, he waits for a few bated breaths until eventually, someone far, far away shrieks back.
