Another Way Out

The air around TR2 always tasted like copper and old rain. Mason sat on the edge of her unmade bed in the cramped trailer, the flickering light of her laptop casting a pale, sickly glow across her features. She didn't move much. She rarely did. To anyone else, she looked like a statue carved from apathy, but inside, her stomach was currently performing a slow, wet somersault.

She had been scrolling mindlessly at her computer—the only place where she could talk to outsiders, the only place she could allow herself to say more than a couple of words. She saw the post from Kel. It wasn't a message to her, not directly at least. It was just one of the many posts he made on a day to day basis, a digital footprint left by the man who lived in the belly of the Dunkeltaler forest at the main observatory.

He talked about how his own Kerfur was shut down, laying on a pile of meat outside, how the meat was trying to crawl inside its ports.

Mason knew that meat. She had seen it when she opened the hull of that abandoned, rusted-out Kerfur. She had seen it twitch—a rhythmic, sickening contraction like a dying heart. She had thought it was just a remnant, a biological anomaly trapped in a machine.

But Kel's post changed things. He hadn't just found it. He'd found it at his observatory. It had migrated. It had traveled from the rusted shell all the way to the center of the woods. It didn't just twitch. It moved. It sought.

Mason closed the laptop with a sharp clack.

The nausea hit her then, a hot wave of bile rising in her throat. The thought of that wet, skinless mass dragging itself across the pine needles, leaving a trail of translucent slime and copper-scalloped rot, made her vision swim.

"Gross," she whispered. Her voice was scratchy, unused.

She stood up, her joints popping in the silence of the trailer. She needed to breathe. She needed to not be inside.

She grabbed her jacket, shoved a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter into her pocket, and stepped out into the night.

The forest was a wall of black needles and silver fog. Mason lit her first cigarette before she even cleared the gravel of the trailer park. The smoke was acrid and harsh, hitting the back of her throat and grounding her. She took a deep drag, holding it until her lungs burned, then exhaled a long, gray ribbon into the cold air.

Step. Inhale. Step. Exhale.

She started walking toward the tree line, heading instinctively away from TR2 and toward the deeper, more shadowed paths. The nausea was still there, a heavy stone in her gut. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the meat—the way it looked like it was made of a thousand tiny, sightless eyes all pressed together.

She finished the first cigarette and immediately lit a second. The orange cherry at the end was the only light in the world.

She had been walking for twenty minutes when she heard it.

Squelch.

It was faint. It was the sound of a heavy sponge being dropped onto wet mud. Mason stopped. She didn't turn her head; she just shifted her eyes to the periphery. The forest was silent, save for the distant hum of the satellites.

She took another step.

Squelch-thud.

It was behind her. Mason's heart, usually a slow and steady machine, kicked against her ribs. She took a deep draw of her cigarette and turned around.

Ten feet back, resting on a patch of dead ferns, was a chunk of it. It was the size of a fist, a raw, quivering knot of muscle. It wasn't moving now, but it looked moist, as if it had just been coughed up by the earth itself. As she watched, a small vein on its surface pulsed.

Mason felt the bile rise again. She spat on the ground, the cigarette dangling precariously from her lip.

"Ma che cazzo..." she muttered to the dark.

She turned and walked faster. She didn't want to look back, but she could hear it. More of them. Small, wet impacts hitting the forest floor behind her. They weren't chasing her—not exactly. They were just appearing.

She broke into a jog. Her boots crunched over dry twigs, a frantic rhythm that masked the wet sounds for a moment. She lit a third cigarette with trembling hands, the smoke stinging her eyes as she ran. The trees began to thin, and the familiar, rusted chain-link fence of the restricted zone near Tango appeared through the fog.

There were signs—yellow, peeling, warning of electromagnetic interference and "unstable terrain." Mason didn't care. She reached the fence, shoved her cigarette into the corner of her mouth, and hauled herself up. The cold metal bit into her palms. She tumbled over the top, landing hard on the other side in a patch of tall, yellowed grass.

She scrambled to her feet, glancing back at the fence. On the other side, several more chunks of the meat had gathered against the base of the wire. They were pressing into the diamond-shaped holes, trying to squeeze through.

Mason turned and ran into the restricted zone.

She ran until her lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. The landscape here was different. The trees were stunted, twisted by whatever strange energies leaked from the area. And then, the land stopped for a tall wall.

She slowed to a halt, gasping for air, her fourth cigarette long since dropped and forgotten.

She was standing at the edge of an abandoned village. It wasn't on any of the standard maps Kel had shared. The houses were skeletal, their wooden frames bleached white like the bones of giant animals. In the center of the clearing stood a stone structure, sturdier than the rest. A church.

The nausea had faded, replaced by a cold, hollow ringing in her ears. Mason walked toward the church, her footsteps silent on the moss-covered dirt. The air here felt heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and ancient dust.

She approached the arched doorway. The doors were gone, leaving a gaping black mouth. She stepped inside.

The roof had partially collapsed, allowing the moonlight to spill down in long, heavenly shafts. And there, at the far end of the nave, where an altar should have been, stood the statue.

Mason froze. Her hand went to her pocket for a cigarette, but her fingers remained frozen on the pack.

It wasn't a saint. It was a tall, curved figure carved from stone. It wore a coat, white arrows etched on it. Its belly was adorned by drawings of planets. Its face had a beak, six eyes and horns, and it wore a flower crown, the red flowers standing out like blood on the ground.

Stolas.

The name echoed in her mind before she could stop it. The ringing in her ears grew deafening.

Mason's eyes glazed over. The stone floor beneath her boots seemed to dissolve, replaced by the plush, wine-red carpet of a different room.

She was six years old.

The room smelled of incense and unwashed bodies. Her mother was there, kneeling so hard her kneecaps bruised the floor. Her mother didn't look at her. Her mother never looked at her when they were in the Presence. They were in the basement of a house in a city Mason couldn't remember the name of. In the center of the room was a statue just like this one, only smaller. Or maybe Mason was just smaller then.

"Look at Him, ▇▇▇," her mother whispered, her voice thick with a terrifying, ecstatic love. "He sees the stars we cannot. He knows the paths through the void. He is more than your father. He is more than you."

Mason remembered looking up. The statue's stone eyes felt like they were boring into her skull, looking through her ribcage to see the small, frightened heart beating inside. She had reached out to touch her mother's hand, seeking some shred of warmth, some acknowledgment that she existed. Her mother had slapped her hand away without looking, her eyes fixed on the stone owl-god.

"Don't interrupt the communion," her mother hissed.

The memory shifted, blurring like oil on water.

She was fifteen.

The anger had finally replaced the fear. It was a cold, hard thing, like a diamond lodged in her throat. Her mother had spent the month's rent on "offerings"—rare oils, silver trinkets to lay at the feet of the Prince. They were going to be evicted. They were eating cold beans from a can.

Mason walked into the ritual room. She was carrying a heavy aluminum baseball bat she'd stolen from the school's equipment shed. Her mother was chanting, a low, rhythmic drone that made Mason want to scream.

"He loves you," her mother said, sensing her presence. "He has a place for you in the hierarchy, ▇▇▇. You just have to submit."

"He's a fucking rock," Mason said. Her voice was flat, the apathy she grew to inhabit as a shield finally fully formed.

"He is EVERYTHING!" her mother shrieked, finally turning to look at her daughter, her face contorted with a rage she never showed to the idol.

Mason didn't respond. She just walked to the statue and swung. She swung with every ounce of resentment, every hungry night, every forgotten birthday, every time she had been second place to a piece of carved stone.

The bat connected with the statue's head. The sound was a sickening crack. A chunk of the mask flew off, hitting the wall. She swung again. And again. Shards of dark stone sliced into her arms, but she didn't feel it. She was crying, but there was no sound to it—just hot salt on her cheeks. She smashed the limbs. She beat the torso until the bat dented.

Then came the hands. The members of the circle, her mother included, swarmed her. They dragged her away, their fingers digging into her skin like talons. Her mother's face was a mask of horror, not for her daughter, but for the broken stone on the floor.

"SACRILEGE!" they screamed. "HERETIC!"

Her mother didn't look at her when they threw her out into the rain. Her mother was on her knees, trying to glue the pieces of a god back together.

Mason blinked.

The white moonlight returned. The abandoned church was silent.

Mason was standing in front of the statue, her hand outstretched. Her fingers were touching the cold, rough stone of the statue's thigh.

She looked up. This statue was whole. It was perfect. It loomed over her, indifferent and ancient.

A sob broke from her chest—a raw, jagged sound that tore through the silence of the village. Mason hated it. She hated the sound, she hated the feeling, she hated that after all these years, after all the miles she'd put between herself and that basement, she was still standing in the shadow of the same god.

"I hate you," she choked out.

She fell to her knees. The apathy was gone, stripped away by the sheer weight of the memory. She wasn't the stoic engineer anymore. She was the little girl who wasn't as important as an owl.

She began to cry—truly cry. It wasn't the quiet, dignified weeping of a film. It was the messy, snot-nosed, body-shaking grief of someone who had been holding their breath for a decade. She leaned her forehead against the cold stone of the statue's pedestal and let it pour out of her.

"I hate you— I HATE YOU!!"

She cried for the meat that moved. She cried for Kel's lonely observatory. She cried for the mother who had chosen a religion over a child.

After a long time, the sobbing tapered off into shuddering breaths. Mason wiped her face with her sleeve, her skin raw and stinging. She felt empty. Hollowed out.

She couldn't stay here. The statue felt like it was watching her again, waiting for her to break further.

She stood up, her legs feeling like lead. She didn't look back at the church as she stumbled out into the night. She didn't look for the meat chunks. She didn't care if they caught her.

She hopped the fence, walked aimlessly for a while, her mind a static-filled void, until she saw the Ariral treehouse in the distance—the strange structure built into the trees. It was a place of outsiders. A place where things didn't make sense, but at least it wasn't her past.

She dragged herself toward it, her vision blurring with exhaustion. She reached the base of the treehouse, tiredly going up the ladder and laying onto one of the beds in it. She hoped they didn't mind. She would leave a gift for them for the inconvenience.

The air was nice here, smelling of crushed mint and something sweet. Mason curled into a ball, her head resting on her arm.

"I hope Kel and Zap are okay."

The last thing she smelled was the faint lingering scent of tobacco on her jacket before her eyes drifted shut and she passed out into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Get a FREE hit counter!
Not affiliated with EternityDev or VOTV. Designed by Furbland