It wouldn't be a day of C+C without a touching upon TWIL:

    11

  Chris had been off his guess as Alie had predicted, but
fortunately not by much. There were three white middle-aged
officers throwing cards at a table in the heart of a cylindrical area
surrounded by the cells. There was a handful of change and a
single one dollar bill in the pot.

Whoa! Big spenders.

  My bulky machine gun

sub machine gun, if I remember correctly.

had been irreparably damaged

when it saved me from a bit of lead in the spine, but there had been
one more automatic rifle in Chris's bag. It was a 9.48mm GMPG
mini gun, and I had the chain of ammo wrapped several times
around my forearm and shoulder.

Errr, regardless of what 'Predator' implied, there's no way he could walk
around with a mini gun. Besides, it's rate of ammo consumption is so
ridiculous he couldn't fire it for more than a second since it eats up that
much ammo, and then there's recoil...

  No one who had seen me here was alive, except for the
woman I tied to a chair at the top of the elevator. Though I had a
wild hunch that when Chris came through and saw that eye
witness, she would not remain so for long.

True

 Government workers

knew what they were getting themselves into when they took their
jobs, just as I did when I decided to break into Lanz Island prison
and seek out a convicted murderer. How many people down here
weren't murderers, but had been helped on down by that woman
and all her associates?

 I was trying to rationalize it,

Yeah. it does sound like it, which is good. This is a situation which one
would feel obligated to justify.

  When we walked back into the large room, I saw the faces
of prisoners watching me through the shiny bars; suspicious
though silent. Round eyes and feverish mouths drooped on every
sunken face.

  Sorry, not here for any of *you*.

Nice touch.

  I scanned the rows for Zig's cell, but did not see it. Alethea
and I jogged up the metal steps to the second level, and again
searched for and did not find him. We checked every level, looking
in each cell, and caught only blank stares. This was bad.

Try calling out his name.

  Pre-modern prison blocks were built to be high atriums,
letting every inmate view the Plexiglas and chrome execution
room. It was a reminder that anyone could be erased down here
and no one back home would ever know. Execution in the past five
hundred years has been done by exposure to toxic chemicals as a
more humane method than that of live embalming.

Blech! I'd say so.

But six years

underground had taught me otherwise. The chemical used was
called myrrh, and was a highly caustic reddish substance that
occasionally filtered out of lead pipes under the city. No one knew
where it came from, and as with everything else, they did not care.
It was poisonous even by touch, and criminals sentenced to capital
punishment were drenched in it until death. This usually only took
a minute or so.

Still a nasty way to go.

  "Time to push it all down. I know it hurts, but you're
untied." His hands didn't move. "You gonna live?"

  "...Ooh..."

  "Good, cause you don't look it."

Heh

  "I told him where you lived, that's all. He said he was from
the parole office and that he was going to help you! I thought I was
doing both of us a favor." He paused. "I admit there was also some
talk about my own legal problems. I really don't know what I was
thinking."

Me either. Almost sounds too good to be true

  "Things have changed. Wells might not be trying to kill
me," I continued, "but he'll kill anyone he finds trying to get
between us. It's just the his thing,

think you meant to drop the 'the'

  Zig fired the gun I had given him and rolled off the table. I
turned and saw Wells, draped in his distinctive black garments,
deflect the bullets upward through the glass ceiling by force of
will. I still wasn't familiar with this,

Not really surprising. Wonder if he can divide his concentration and
continue that trick, though.


 but I had a feeling Chris was. Wells leaned his head forward slightly and
Zig fell against the

back wall, dropped his gun and slumped to the floor.

  With the voice of every screaming inmate now echoing in
the room, I pulled out my Beretta knowing that he had not been
able to effectively dodge these bullets before. I started to fire, but
the trigger would not move.

Nice

 I used both hands, but I could see that

Wells was concentrating on it. He looked different, maybe even
older than the last time I had run into him, standing ten feet away
like he had been there for minutes. Thin lines of what looked like
wood smoke had gathered across his neck and chin. I wondered
what he had been through in the last two days.

Nothing pleasent, I'd wager

  Inability to pull the trigger took my gyrojets out of the
picture altogether. I dropped the weapon and with a fast fluid
motion pulled out a boot knife, lunging at him. He glanced up and
tried to blast me back with a force wave. But for some reason it
didn't work this time.

Probably has to do with the mysterious forces that have been aiding him in
his times of need.

  "Congratulations," he said. "Again I'm forced to re-
evaluate you." The blow hurt, but I remained in control and
pierced Wells' chest with the knife.

Yeah. He shouldn't have wasted his breath there.

  Then, clear and loud over all of it, I heard a rattle from the
other side of the chamber.

Chris finally, I'd bet.

  The impossible appearance of Wells straightened up and
screeched again. He dropped instantly to his knees at my feet and I
spied Chris crouching in the background.

Yep.

  Wrapping my arm around the waist, I flipped him back
onto the metal cross that Zig had been strapped to earlier in
a makeshift ugoshi. He was gasping and clutching at the air.
The myrrh valve's switch was next to the door frame,
which Chris wasted no time in hitting and
jumping out of. I followed.

Ah, so that explains your choice of methods of execution. I should have seen
it coming.

  Chris snatched up the sack and pulled out the bomb, tricked
the sensor, and reared back his right arm. I shouted "No!" and ran
toward him.

  "You'll blow the myrrh valve! Leave him, he's dead!" I
took the bomb out of his hand.

  "We have to make sure." Chris looked seriously at me.

He's prolly right

  Alethea whimpered behind me. Her arm was around Zig's
neck but my friend was not responding.

  And then Wells rose, carefully and intently. Dripping flesh-
like rust from every limb, yet still not broken. My heart sank.

He is a toughie

freeze our triggers and then start slinging the myrrh around which
was what I had wanted to avoid. I could not throw a grenade for
the same reason I was not going to let Chris use the thermite bomb.
Myrrh  dripping

extra space

  Wells had stopped his advance when the explosion had
occurred, and was looking at me too.

  "What about him?" Chris yelled back. "He has to die now!"

Maybe the Sf can take care of him.

  "Just come!"

  They stepped sideways over to me, dragging Zig behind,
and Wells turned my way too. But he never made it. I had found
the console that controlled the doors to every other cell in this
block. I pounded the main release button, and they hissed upward
revealing the surprised faces of desperate men. After a long second
of universal surprise the

surprise, the

  The idea had been to travel quickly until we found the train
station above us, where we would get aboard however possible. In
an Island-wide emergency security condition, it was likely the
sidewalks in and out of the main station would be stopped, if the
trains were even running at all.

Yeah. They might be screwed.

  We climbed through the darkness by the light of
phosphoric flares found earlier in the trunk of Wells' Ford. Zig was
fully conscious and alert now, and Alethea and I let him walk on
his own. The fourth member of our entourage remained quiet.

  Zig asked me for a cigarette, and when he took it he asked,
"What the hell happened back there? Things sure weren't looking
good from my spot on the floor."

They rarely do from that position. :)

  "Didn't say. A boss was mentioned, but if he's employed
by the state this visit was strictly pro bono. He got all the
information he needed about me elsewhere."

  It may have been a cheap shot but

shot, but

 that's what came out.

  Zig winced and turned his head. "Look, I said I was sorry
about all that. It's just that Wells had me believing Chris was the
one out to get you, and that he was trying to save you from being
another casualty in an upcoming gang war. Which

I don't know. I know you have to break up the sentence, but that doesn't
feel like the right place.

  He was obviously laboring just to move and

move, and

  "Screw," he continued, "sometimes you've reached for things and they
moved a little so that you touch them without looking."

Hmm. Interesting. I bet he didn't even realize it.

  "Damn it, you know what I mean! You don't have to deny
it to me! It has probably been since you got out of prison, stranger
things just keep happening to you. Your job, your apartment, the
way you speak. Every day its something new and you act like
nothing has changed. But it has, and not in the natural, reactionary
way."

Good point. This being a first person perspective, it's hard to see that
though.

  "What do you mean, 'but me?'"

  "You aren't a racer anymore Screw."

anymore, Screw

 Zig looked at me very

closely. "You have too much control over your life, your actions. It
just stopped being necessary a long time ago. Sometimes I think
you're becoming a machine." He gave a two second attempt at
laughing the thing off, then frowned and turned away. "Whatever
that means."

A curious statement. He doesn't come across as that to me.

  Alethea added nothing to his conclusion.

  We kept on, the four of us picking our way through the
dark, oppressive forest which probably stretched equally far in
every direction.

Dark oppressive forests always do. Wouldn't be dark and oppresive if they
didn't.'

 No surface appeared smooth enough to reflect the

yellow light from my flare, which was now less than six inches
long. I let it drop into a wide crevice and lit another.

  There was nothing to say. Had I been betrayed? It felt like
it. I did not need to say I had never noticed abnormal or alien
phenomena surrounding me.

Argh! That's hard to follow. I think it can be simplfied as 'I had never
noticed any abnormal...

At least not until Wells himself

entered the picture. And even then, the only thing that had
confused me concerning myself was my incredibly poor driving
when I raced Jarred a week ago.

  There was also the fact that I had not fallen off of his car
fighting Jarred,

But little unexplained phenomena didn't bother me as long as it was in my
favor.

  It was true. The train tunnel was visible behind a mess of
whirring fan belts less than a story overhead. It spanned more than
thirty feet in diameter, a perfectly circular steel ribbed tube, itself
rumbling with restrained energy. Like a single live artery down the
spine of an unborn. Disturbing.

I'll say.

  "Not when they're turning," I said. "Chris is right. The
loading platform will be off limits to anyone but cops, we'll never
make it aboard that way. But as the train car comes around a tight
turn, the train will slow to around twenty miles an hour. We can try
to catch it then."

Only 20. Heh.

  Alethea and I waited a second to let their car pass, and then
jumped down ourselves. We also rolled, grabbing onto a hatch
mount in the middle of the roof. My arms strained in their sockets.
The pain in my back was even worse. Alethea bit her lip.

Beats falling to your death, though.

  Still, many things felt unfinished.

As though there was a whole other book to tell.

  I thought about the prisoners back in the cell block who
would either be shot or given indefinite extensions to their
sentences for rioting, even though they had taken no part in their
own release.

Well, there was that whole 'attack anything that moves' bit that might be
weighed against them.

  "Which means the war aint

ain't

  I sighed heavily. I hadn't thought Chris would start harping
on this so soon. That same unoriginal idea all insurrectionists have,
that his actions were automatically noble in purpose, if not in deed.

If you win, you get to write the history books to reflect that, yes. :)

  "I have something better than an army. Eight long years
underground and the will of the people, the only things that were
never taken from me.

No. That is not better than an army. He can take his eight years and will,
I'll take men and guns, and we'll see who wins. :)

  I turned to see what she was looking at, and was surprised
to see a bloody hand just lying at the edge of the last train car.
Dark blood had clotted a few inches up the wrist, which was where
it appeared to be severed. It wasn't moving of course, but I knew it
had not been there a minute ago.

Heh. Figured he was still around

  I crept closer, and remained unharmed. I peeked over the
edge of the car, and saw where the hand had been cut at the wrist.
The fingers looked burnt, with thin slivers of brown gel dripping
from the nails. All five of the nails were split. How it had gotten
here I did not know. I was afraid to touch it, so I moved back to
where Chris was covering me.

  "No one's there. It's just a bloody hand."

Ohh. Thought something would be attached to it.

  I shouted in surprise, let go of my handhold and slid across
the dimpled steel to his side, internally wavering over whether or
not to panic, only in that final instant to see true fear realized.

  The hand was not severed at the wrist, it just appeared that
way because the arm was sticking out of the back wall of the train
car.

Ah. that makes sense. Wells is quite the unstoppable force.

  "What happened to just wanting to take me to your leader?"

  "To hell with him, I no longer care. I seem to have this
difficult habit of letting it get too personal and I am sick of you
running away. Too bad there aren't any flagpoles down there for
you, huh?" His head motioned off to the side.

And promptly fell off.

"I hate it when that happens," he complained.

  As Chris lay groaning behind me, thrown farther back, and
Alethea cowered next to Zig, I knew I had run out of ways to
confuse and anesthetize the situation. I hated this man. Even
without the hideous disfigurement he made my skin crawl. I
shuddered like the first time, hearing his voice over my phone. Just
like his house, Wells was not alive, merely active.

Nice way to put it.

of us had been staring for ages defying the other to make a move.
As I resisted him mentally, I did not see it, but he was twitching
around the neck. His face remained expressionless, but his red
limbs had begun to waver, and blood now blew off freely in the
wind in places it had remained only smeared before. And I was
wavering too. Someone might have called something out behind
me, I couldn't be sure. The air was just howling around us,
shimmering gray-white and crazy, and though I never stopped
trying to rise, my muscles deigned not to respond.

Hmm. Psychic standoff. But one will break soon.

  When it was done he was no more than a puddle that ran
off the roof in streaks. He had been mighty in life, but had left
nothing but a stain.

Nice. Should be left on Wells' tombstone.

  I fell deeper, accepting the changes like weather.

Hmm. Interesting bit. Seems this is only the first step for Screw. Wasn't
sure where you were taking this, but it seems interesting enough. Still a
lot more question unanswered, but you're doing well in pacing and slowly
revealing information. Like it so far. Will get to others of it in the
future.

D.B. Sommer






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