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Evalon
By KNRY
The words were always repeated.
“Where are we...now?”
The earth, for the rest who could still feel it underneath their covered backsides, could only feel their spine as a numb, wire coat-hanger creaking underneath their skin. Icicles shivered above dangerously, and the cold wind would unceasingly sweep in through window-slits above; the cracks, crevices that stayed beyond sight in the darkness of a crumbling wooden box on wheels. Bags swinging above, lumps and satchels sliding on the wooden floors, turned themselves into sheets of slippery ice.
Among the bags and ice, all around were huddled the few. The few that could still feel their insides. It was a good thing. To feel your soul. It was there to reassure you that you were still alive.
Vincent White slowly took the chance of turning his head. Over his shoulder, there were statues of children lying against the molded walls and corners. Still as ice, all with their eyes closed. He turned his head back to the center of the group, closing his own eyes, but trying to keep his now slowly shivering body from going rigid. Words played across his freezing eyes in the darkness of the shaking hold.
Rigor mortis, rigor mortis-NO!
His eyes shot open, and, cracking his breath through burning windpipes, shifted his lips barely open to suck in another ice-dagger of oxygen. If they could have moved a bit more, with each quickening breath, the want to scream "Shut-up!" over and over again would have come from them. Those eyes of his suddenly began to grow colder, and it was as if he could feel the snow outside, somehow, slowly seeping into his body now. The only comfort was the wordless whispers of a dream that would stagger through this winter like a scavenger from a nightmare.
And then the nightmare had come. With his greatest fear, he had closed his eyes.
With a shuffle of feet and a kick of snow, he was awake. The ground was parallel to his sight, and there were dirt-ridden brown clothes moving with dark shoes passed him. Some without shoes; their blackened feet. The boys were moving out.
“Get the fuck up you damn sow!” A kick in the face, and the soft, white-lands became a haze sprinkled atop brightly with his own blood. It all fell dark as his head hit the earth, with the hope that he would pass out into that kind darkness. But a hand pulled him out of the frost, his eyes lolling upward and back into the beauty declaring herself the sky. She's not dressed properly though, he thought. Oh no. Gray is not a color that suits us lowly ones down here, my dear.
If I could feel my nose, said the rational part of his mind, the one that was feeling and watching his haggard and wet body dragged behind him, it would at least be warm. Or maybe it's just the blood that is cold. Just just like his. He couldn't see the man dragging him if he tried, and Vincent's plow through the snow had stopped. The man lifted him up to his feet with great stregnth and was roughly shoved forward into the line of marching dogs.
The walk was not a long one. Through the wind picking up her deadly speed, he closed his eyes; lest the moisture in them prevent him from ever shutting them again. The ascent onto a limb of the half-made road felt like a haze to him through squinting, tired eyes and a blood-crusted mouth that felt like a rusted jaw in the cold. Through the pain in his pounding head that he bore, he noticed the road showing tire-tracks through the snow along the side. It was then that he noticed how silent everything was. It was as if the dogs had suddenly all sensed a threat at the same time, like when a stranger enters their home. It was silent.
Except for one sound.
Now…just...one...horrible sound.
It was screaming ahead, Vincent heard. Akin to with crackling flames.
Chapter I
Vincent erupted from his dream, sitting up and bashing his forehead into the corner of a green decaying shelf above. Fuck. He winced as pieces of broken, moldy wood fell onto his chest and into his mouth. He sputtered, spitting it out as he grabbed his head. There was sweat slipping down his chest and on the inside of his shirt; his face felt cold with the perspiration and fear. Even though the closet was lightly cramped, the heat within had died down considerably. That would only mean that night had already fallen outside, which explained the room's cool temperature. A big 2:11 was visible upon the enlarged monitor on the highest part of the shelf, depicting the time and the hazy reality that was Vincent’s blurry vision. It illuminated the small closet, and Vincent tried to see the door under his feet in the darkness. The pain within his head was ridiculous in throbbing, his eye-squinting pain and remorse keeping him still again. He rested his head under the wooden board lining the base where the wall met the floor.
Eleven minutes I've wasted sleeping. Javo's going to kick my ass. From between the fingers that held his head and covered his face, Vincent saw his feet pressed up against the closet door. Found you, he smiled. He then proceeded to move them. They didn't move.
He couldn’t feel them. That was bad.
Ordering his brain to tell his toes to move, one wiggled from beneath the corded, black leather boots. A bright smirk slid its way on up his mouth from under a shade of light-brown hair, and the numbness within his arm was spreading continously.
That’s one.
Suddenly the floorboards erupted into sound. Pounding his ears like nails where being pounded into the drums of them. They died faintly, just as quickly as they had come in passing the metal-bolted door he had touching with his feet within the closet. He sighed.
If that benefactor guy had caught him in the state that he was in now, he knew that the tall, tan-skinned Klevin man would take his scalp, or some other crazy trophy that had to do with his appendages. In this state, Vincent would be dead before he even would have time to react.
Vincent propped up a urine smelling pillow that he had found on the side underneath a black trash bag covered in dirt, dust, and chipped plaster. He put his wounded shoulder into it, keeping his grunt of pain low. It was a shitty job. The quick stitching of the wound was crooked; one he had made quickly and then thus passed out from. But it kept the wound more closed than what it had been an hour ago, and although it didn't bleeding had stopped, it still almost made him lose conscience when he put it to the pillow. Maliciously, nerves shot up his shoulder-blades and spine with different sizes in pain. Cursing again, because now his hand was starting to shake, raising it to hold his arm, he went completely silent and listened from the dark corner for anymore sounds of the footsteps return. Watching the door with double vision was telling him that he was totally losing it. That damn numbness was slowly creeping up and over his shoulder now, and it was because of that large chunk of flesh that had been missing from it.
There was a small window just above him, and he looked up to notice it now because there was a cool air billowing in. Pale and green siding, shutters with the dark wooden slits open to let in the frosty wind. The wind was moldy from years of stranded junkie’s who wandered in here for a hit, and, vomiting up their innards from out the hanging frame. Flash freezes, and years of wind torrent had busted it up and worn it down, yet it had still survived. Easily, outside, could be heard the wind's sharp howl and hate. They displayed their courtesy in white drops.
Some floated upon foamy mounds of green that fell from the sill, and rose up by passing movements in the green sea. It was always a figment within the awe. The sea. It’s great, massive movement; almost as if it were alive. For his own reasons, Vincent had always thought that the ocean, and fire, seemed to be the mystic parts of life that held a man sane. Ocean, holding water, that gave life to all, and fire that gave heat to that life. They where beautiful perceptions to him, and yet they could take lives away as well, if too much mass of both would become simply increased. It was so simple, he thought. And yet in their simplicities he found from where he was sitting that it was enough to keep his mind at temporary peace.
That green ocean, he thought. I’d give up life for your peace...
The Benefactor was furious as his pounding footsteps made in the steel factory’s hull an echoed hollow tone reverberating his malice. No, he was not furious. He was downright pissed like a dog heated for hunger in a funeral home. Where in the fuck was that intern? He was supposed to have been watching the damned target escape! Seventeen days, and he finally screws up for the final time. The fresh fag was going to lose eyes for sure this time, when he had gotten a hold of him. Then let us see him "running off to see" anything ever again, the Benefactor thought in a smile.
He touched the handmade knife behind his belt. Sharp and yet rusted, as it should have been for so long in the years it had been used. They’d had nearly twelve years together, and probably more time carving than any chef around Altair 2. It would still cut, and finish that cut through materials or organic within its own precision. That was why he had never sold it, because it stood for how he got things done. He was "the Benefactor", and all knew his name along with the dark reputation. With that dark reputaion, they must have as well known his dark skin. The Klevintai were no race to be fucked with, even if he was only half of a Klevin, his parents having left the dying planet years ago.
Any day would rue if a target ever got through his eyes, let alone some un-weaned piglet like that damn intern. That damn intern, he thought again, clenching and un-clenching his rough grip on the knife behind him.
Swearing again, the tall Kleventai swiftly rounded another corner, expecting that weirdo in boots to pull another cocky surprise move on him as he rounded. None of that shit is gonna get me again, he thought. No damn way. That fag was fast, but no where near as his handy Reverse 79 was. That’s what had put old boots out of commission after, and lastly, his shoulder for that quick matter. Should have anticipated the most rare weapon on the market; Reverse 79 Standard Clover shotgun, attached to his back with a conditioned steel clip, hidden underneath his tattered black coat.
He had been lucky, he thought. Even if he moved away quickly enough like last time, there was no way he was going to miss again.
The Benefactor advanced the small corridor, again, for the third time. The left side of his torn up cloak flapped behind a broken plastered corner as his aguish rose, accompanied with the furious strides he took. A manic grin appeared under short cropped, white hair.
“I’m gonna blow his copper head to the meatball fan,” he whispered with gleeful reprise.
“I’ll never take Snow ever again, ever…I fucking swear to…”
"I HEAR YOU BOOTS!!! COME OUT AND PLAY WITH THE NEIGHBOR'S DOG!!!" The Klevintai's voice echoed throughout the factory.
With nimble, weak fingers, he quickly plucked the syringe out of his arm and winced. Being a junkie before, the name of his blood had remembered the taste and sucked up the remaining white powder mixed with water dry. Vincent had quit two years ago, and the trick to quitting addiction was not to enjoy it. Vincent had to restrain himself from smashing the shit out of the place, and that would have given away his position. Spasm shook his body silently, and he bit off the tip of his tongue without control; the blood was trickling from dry lips and down his unshaven chin.
Vincent’s mind was on fire, as well as his vocal cords, which would not register or translate the pain that was sickening and living within. Coursing thoughts and flashes rained upon his little head, like daggers falling with iron balls that had been frozen completley in the cold. Adrenaline finally released, and his eyes shot open wide as if they found this light strange and new to their unborn brightness.
Footsteps countered near the door, quickening in step and the sound of Vincent's struggling was uncaring about the noise that it was making, now that his conscience knew. Those pounding notes that trotted on top of daggers that still continued to rain down from above his sanity, and the fire that had started from arm to neck, told him to arise in a brightening blaze throughout his mind. It turned his entire vision to red.
Like a bad dream...
That was a woman, her voice speaking out to him amid the fire. But not right now, no not now said a child calmly inside, who was incredibly louder, as if inside his own mind, he could hear the voice of a child as if an ear where too the child's throat. Loudly, yet calmly, that little boy spoke.
The door broke off its hinges in an explosion of splinters, and crimson flames engulfed the womans words completey. The other voice...just whispered one.
In his sight, there was only a dark figure in the doorway, smiling with an upper set of gold teeth and a Reverse 79 gripped in his vigilant hands.
“Well look at the fucking cunt savoring his rest. I guess I should suppose you’re all done for with prayin' and pissin' yer pants now.” The voice was sharp, yet far, far away in some long tunnel that only echoed but would never appear. Vincent squinted, and brightly bit back to the wall from the light of the door...and a bit from the bright red that seemed to be beating from inside the man. Then, adjusting his sights, a pleasant feeling fell up his shivering body, and he no longer felt the wound. With wine-red eyes, he watched the Benefactor lower the weapon, and advance, blasting his head hard to the side with the end of the shotgun.
“Let’s have some fun with ya before…”
Quick. Too quick for reaction and even thoughts. The Benefactor’s look still had that idiot smile on his face, when he had never noticed that half of his hand was already seperated from within the mouth of his predecessor. Vincent’s muscles hadn’t even literally tried to bite down, but nonetheless, he ripped right through and apart easily the flesh and tendons-stuck-to-bone with his teeth, as if it were cheese. A tearing, crunching sound, and a large spot of blood sprayed over Vincent’s completley calm face as he twisted his mouth around and cut straight through the wrist.
The Benefactor screamed, loud through and clear in Vincent's hollow tunnel.
That was something that was never heard. The Benefactor was screaming. That intern, the one outside who had run out of the building, already having high-tailing it out of the lift and through the double doors, had now heard the screaming himself. Now, running even faster than he thought was internally possible, into some bustling and random broken up town along the edge of the bridge that connected to the abandoned junkie hideout, he stopped and panted. He didn’t want to get shot, and that, from the beggining was why he had ditched his partner in the first place.
But if the boss was screaming, that had to have been something bad.
Really fucking bad.