Chapter 26 #2
I came to with my head on my chest again.
I forced myself to breathe and tried hard not to pull any air in through my nose.
The man who’d struck me stood next to the table, looking down at the broken pieces of the exoskeleton.
He heard me shift. He picked up one of the pieces, turned, and held up the bit of broken metal.
He said something. Quietly at first. Then repeated it, his tone sharpening.
I shook my head, dull and distant. My entire face throbbed. My nose was a pulsing, fleshy appendage hanging over my lips, radiating agony.
He grasped my hair and rammed my head back against the chair. He thrust the piece of metal in front of me again and shook it. It rattled like the carcass of a dead insect. He said something. Said it again, the volume of his voice rising.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re saying,” I mumbled up at him. My lips felt thick and heavy, my tongue swollen and too large for my mouth.
He bent toward me, shouting, shaking the piece of metal again.
I was totally unprepared for this. I wasn’t a Special Forces soldier or CIA operative, trained in ways to counteract torture.
I wasn’t the hero of an action movie, able to take ridiculous amounts of pain and keep resisting.
I was a mid-level computer programmer. A middle-class suburbanite, centuries out of my own time.
The day before, I’d helped a robotic dog blow up a tank, but that didn’t mean a damn thing.
If I could speak this man’s language, I’d tell him anything.
No hesitation. If it ended this, got me away from him, I’d give him whatever he wanted.
But I didn’t speak his language.
He wasn’t going to accept that. He was going to keep torturing me. I could see it behind his hard eyes. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to do more than hurt me.
It wasn’t hard to see where this was going.
I thought about Lyle and his Word. Lyle, dead and gone.
I thought about Amy, long since passed. About Severine and Sophie, the two best friends I’d ever had, that I’d never see again.
I thought about Miri and Lily and Jennifer and Xavier the goddamned Unbeliever, the only one who had it right. All dead and gone.
I stared up at him. I had nothing left. No defiance. No moment of clairvoyance that would give me the words that would satisfy him. This man was going to kill me.
I was going to die. This was how I died. I’d come all this way. Three hundred and sixty years from my time. Just to fall into the wrong village at the wrong time. Just to have these men capture me, bind me to a chair, and execute me.
The Traveler. Some great messiah I was.
I met his eyes. I didn’t look away. His arm trembled as he held my head pressed back by my hair, his jaw locked tight, the tendons in his neck and veins in his forehead gorging out.
I don’t know what he saw on my face, but in one flowing movement, he let go, spun around, and threw the piece of exoskeleton against the wall.
He snatched something from the table. It was a grainy photograph.
He shoved it into my face. The photo was of a man in one of the coal-miner shirts, his back straight as he stared without expression toward the camera.
“Vye-ayato!” the man shouted, leaning his face in close to mine. “Vye!”
He leaned back and raised his right hand.
It took me half a second to realize he held the SD-4.
My pistol. Lyle’s pistol. The man’s eyes were wide, raging, and his hand shook so hard he had to step closer and press the cool barrel against my forehead to steady it.
I let my head settle back against the chair.
The smooth metal circle of the barrel pressed into my skin.
I felt the other man’s trembling fury transmitted down the length of the pistol from his arm.
Every round in the magazine alternated. High explosive, then armor piercing, back again.
If they hadn’t fired it since our fight on the road, the pistol would shoot an explosive round with the next pull of the trigger.
I’d blown a man’s body apart with one of those bullets.
If this man shot me now, I wouldn’t feel anything.
It’d take my head and the top of my chest off. Maybe even his arm, too.
I slid my eyes up. Met his. Our stares locked again. Tears ran down my cheeks. I was tired. I was exhausted. Everything hurt.
I was done.
“Just—just fucking do it,” I whispered.
He pressed the barrel hard against my forehead.
Then he peeled his lips back and jerked the pistol away. He stalked to the table and slammed the pistol down hard enough to send half the exoskeleton pieces to the floor. He took one last look at me, then went to the door and knocked. It opened and he stepped through it, out to a stone hallway.
I heard three voices, including that of my torturer. He did the most talking, while the other two listened and murmured in what I took for assent. The voices ended, and echoing footsteps receded from the door.
Two new men stepped into the room. The second one inside shut the door. They stood and regarded me. Two hulking, muscular figures in dark blue uniforms, brows knit. Their eyes hidden in dark pools of shadow.
Then, as one, they moved.
It took me some time to realize they were trying to get the suit off.
At first, I thought they were torturing me just to torture me. Neither man asked any questions. They grunted at one another or communicated with a flick of a wrist or nod of a head. They ignored my shouts, my screams, my cries. My begging.
They tried a pair of industrial-grade scissors first. They were rusted, but the edges gleamed.
The skinsuit defeated them. They couldn’t get the point of the scissors under the edge of the suit, despite numerous attempts.
They sliced me around the jawline, scoring long lines in my skin, sending my blood coursing over my chest in a sheet.
It took interminable ages of pain and cold, slashing lines like blades of ice carving through my flesh, before they gave up.
A circulating saw came next. I screamed and jerked against the restraints as they brought it over, and they grinned as they approached.
Here was something I believed would work.
They brought it down on the upper part of my right arm, the blade spinning up with a grating whine.
The razor teeth on the saw blade hit my arm and kicked, making my arm spasm under the straps.
But the saw failed, groaning and shaking in their hands before shattering, the teeth spinning through the air and banging off the walls. They cursed and backed away.
A drill came next. The men applied it with their full weight to my left forearm. I think I screamed. My own voice was raw and alien. The drill bit couldn’t find a purchase, and they only succeeded in badly bruising my arm.
Their final effort was the worst. They started the blowtorch by opening a valve on the side of the torch and lighting the gas with a squeeze-style flint that sent sparks skittering across the stone floor.
One of the men held me down as I fought against the restraints.
The other held the torch on my right forearm.
I screamed until I ran out of air. The terrible heat scorched the skin beneath the suit.
Blowback from the flames burned the top of my right hand through the thinner, more flexible material of the suit glove.
I could smell and taste my own burning flesh as the smoke stuck in the back of my throat.
They stopped after a crawling eternity of agony, stepping back and muttering. They stood together over the table and spoke in hushed voices.
My right forearm screamed in pain.
My right hand was completely numb.
The two men turned back to me. They stared under furrowed brows. Then the first one hit me, a closed fist across the jaw that rocked me in the chair. The second one punched me in the chest as the first one followed up with another blow to my face. Both shouted, wordless, furious.
A lucky blow struck my nose, and I passed out again.
I swam to a fuzzed, painful consciousness sometime later.
I cracked open my eyes. Both were swollen and the skin around them was tight.
I made out a dimly lit stone room. I lay on something hard and uncomfortable two feet off a filthy, stained floor.
There was a drain in the center of the room, covered by a rusting metal grate, and my eyes were drawn to it.
I lay there, staring, unable to form a coherent thought.
I swam in and out of consciousness. I saw things.
My old house as a child. My grandparents’ Labrador, already old and white around the muzzle when I was still a boy, gamely trying to keep up with me in the backyard.
Lyle and Amy making waffles for me on Father’s Day, waking me with their half-contained giggles, the early-morning sunlight streaming through clouds of flour drifting in the kitchen.
Grandmother Miriam’s eyes, her hands, her gray hair tied back as she bent over her flower garden. Miri’s eyes above her facial wrap.
Lyle, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, gazing from somewhere in the distance. Watching me dispassionately.
I dragged my head up on aching neck muscles and looked around, fighting against nausea, dizziness, and pain.
The room was a dark jail cell. High on one wall was a narrow, barred window, the bars rusty.
I could see a sliver of night sky past the bars, passing clouds lit by the hazy, pale light of the moon.
One wall held a dented metal door with a slot mid-bottom and a barred viewport near the top.
There were ancient stains below the slot.
Food. That’s where they’d shove the food.
On the opposite side of the square room—less than six feet away—there was a wooden bucket, lit in slanted lines by the moonlight coming in through the window.
A bucket, the wooden bench, and me. The entire contents of my room.
The suit was still attached. All their attempts to dislodge it had failed.
And thanks to its mechanical loyalty I was warm, except for the exposed skin of my face.
But everything hurt. Every breath sent ice picks into my ribs and chest. Worse was my right arm, site of the blowtorch.
It throbbed with a terrible, persistent pain no amount of moving or shifting could reduce.
The back of my hand remained numb. The nerves there had been destroyed.
Burned away. And my nose, now reduced to an angry lump of flesh hanging on my face, flared despite my attempts to breathe through my mouth.
But the little disk was still there, against my heart.
A win. A small win, but a win.
I tried to think, to form a plan. Any ideas skittered away, sparks across a stone floor, out of reach, leaving me nothing but shifting, formless memories.
For some reason I saw my father’s stern and unyielding face, his perpetually disappointed eyes.
I heard his voice as if in the cell with me.
He repeated the two short words that had plagued me for decades, words coming down from his great height as I ran off the soccer field crying over the loss of yet another game. “A waste,” he said, shaking his head.
A waste of what? A waste of talent? Unlikely, since I had none.
A waste of his genetic material? At the time, I knew he was disappointed, and his disappointment spread far beyond this meaningless little soccer game on a frosty Saturday morning.
Even now, I couldn’t fathom what arbitrary metric he’d had in place, what measure I’d failed to reach.
My father’s face shifted and became Lyle’s face.
Fifty-one-year-old Lyle, not the ancient, unwell Lyle I’d seen in the bunker.
He stared at me from my father’s height, eyes cold and hard, regarding me with the same expression.
“A waste.” I moaned and tried to roll away, but pain lanced from torn and bruised muscles.
Hot tears came again and I was falling back into the darkness, purple and black spots closing on either side of my eyes and enveloping me.
As I fell, I heard Lyle say it again, a final time. Whispering. “A waste.”
I woke when the world slipped. My torturers lost their prisoner.
I fell, flailing my arms. I dropped perhaps four feet and hit the ground.
My bruised ribs and back exploded in screaming agony.
I lay a moment, gasping. I dragged my eyes open.
The sky was dark with only a hint of predawn light.
I’d fallen into a small, grassy clearing in the middle of a forest. Evergreen trees surrounded me, pine-needled limbs arching overhead.
Shadowy towers pointing at glittering stars.
Footsteps behind me.
I thrashed, panicked. I tried to stand and run but staggered and fell back to the grass. I’d never felt more helpless.
The footsteps came to a stop, and I heard a rustle of cloth as whoever it was knelt. A hand fell on my shoulder, the touch light. “Scott Treder?” a female voice asked.
I turned my head, forcing it through the pain, and saw a young, white-haired woman kneeling over me.
She wore a sleeved toga, cinched tight at her waist by a bronze belt.
At first, I thought it was Jennifer Hayward, my granddaughter, somehow there to rescue me.
But as her face swam before my eyes, I understood it had to be someone else.
“The Traveler?” she asked, leaning toward me, her blue eyes very large, her brow furrowed.
The crawling fingers of purple and black gathered at the edges of my vision again, tunneling. I tried to bring my arm up, to touch her face and reassure myself she was real, but the tunnel collapsed, and she was gone.