Chapter 5, Into the Pipes

With a few modifications, the trucks motor blades easily mutilated the lifeless bodies of the Kcommahx soldiers. Blood and skin flew across the forest. A few blood drops landed on Aerqurlyn’s arm. She bowed her head to lick them off. Cat-like eyes glowing gold, the blood tasted good. The Liouxctawes that were left, grinded soldiers, and began to carry their fellow Primas away and into the trees. “Aer, we should stop before you bleed out,” a tall, sturdy black woman carrying two dead bodies approached Aerqurlyn. Aerqurlyn looked down at her foot; a massive gash in her leg was bleeding like a small waterfall, almost completely obscuring her bare feet. “Your cut isn’t stopping you from moving,” she noted. The black woman’s left part of her head, had been ripped and was flowing tickles of blood down the edges of her face. She narrowed her eyes and moved ahead. Aerqurlyn shrugged and shifted her grip on the bodies, and continued into the forest.

            They were a silent troop of barbarians as they walked. All the more silent, made it easier for her mind to wander.  She wasn’t crazy; she saw his body in the tank, she saw it roll into that ditch. While they were disposing of the soldiers, she and a few others had searched the rims of the path to check for run-aways. No one was found. The boy had once existed in her world, they had once been very close friends. They hunted, they plotted, they ate, slept, and never left each others side. Two years after their first meeting, the forest and sand once more began their fierce battle. Sand flooded the forests and the roots desperately broke from the ground and reached miles into the sky to bar the sand from entering. The trees crashed to the ground and roots flailed wildly. Animals scattered and Primas were murdered. He had the best instincts. Him and her were fleeing their old base ten minutes after the world began to shake. They ran, they jumped and weaved between trees; they knew they would survive. Fifteen minutes later, they stopped to breath at a calm section of the forest. The boy had looked up at her with wide, purple eyes. Within seconds he had pushed her off the large root on which they stood. Her last clear vision of him was as she plummeted to the ground below. She watched in pain as his silver hair fell across his face when the large, sharp root intended for her spliced through his frail body. Blood splurged everywhere and the root lifted his body above the trees and out of sight.

            She lay on the ground for twenty minutes, her back had been broken. Eventually, as the chaotic world around her began to drown, she was able to walk until she reached a small group of Primas. If only�"Sticky. Her thoughts were interrupted when she realized how sticky her foot was. All of the blood that still remained, dried and congealed and mixed with the muddy earth made her foot feel weak, grotesque and heavy. It wasn’t long before they reached their current base. “B.R.Y.S.O.N!” a voice shouted. BAM! A hit to the head and she was down.

            Aerqurlyn woke up in her room eight hours later. Her eyes were sticky, her hair was matted and her neck ached. Her room, at the moment, was plain as a jail cell. It was a medium size, damp, concrete slab room. A small ragged cot lay in the far left former of the room, by the broken door. On the right blank wall, a lonely table and rickety chair. One short, rectangle fluorescent light was there to constantly light the room. Aerqurlyn heard a small tick-tick-tick; she shot up from her bed, leaned over by the door and grasped her sword. She looked around but saw no intruder. She noticed a small, dirty glass jar sitting on the table. She walked forward and bent down to view the small creature inside. Tick-tick it went as it crawled in zig-zags and tried to fly out of the jar. It was a short, spindly insect, black, brown and gooey all over. It had six legs, front back and the middle. The two middle legs dangled lifelessly, it was all a genetic mistake. The tiny insect opened its ant like mouth in attempt to bite through the jar. “Silly creature,” she said as she moved to the chair to watch him. “The glass is laced in Syllirion, you’ll never bite through it, even with your special teeth.” Teeth. She leaned in closer to observe the creature’s mouth. One of his many fangs was missing. With wide eyes, she clasped her hand over her neck where she felt a small, painful hole that crunched and squished when her finger ran over it. She threw open her door leading to the catacombs, which served as living cells for the majority of Primas in that District. She turned to the right and rushed down the hallway. Left, right, down the hallway and turn at the corner; Aerqurlyn burst into the washroom and looked herself in the mirror.

            Ghostly pale, emerald eyes, short choppy red hair, with a prominent bone structure. Everything was normal in the front. She turned around and looked back. A red, black, bloody and crusted hole breathed quietly near the right of her neck. “Merde!” she slammed her hand against the wall. She checked the wound again. The hole seemed less then an inch from breaching inside of her. She had been so distracted by her thoughts of seeing her old friend again that she let her guard down. The wound had small green stains around the rim of it; someone had treated her. She was furious, how sick was she? How could she have thought nothing of it when she found a captivated B.R.Y.S.O.N. in her room? She breathed heavily and leaned over the sink; she put her hand around her neck, and jabbed her finger inside of the hole. It burned, it crunched and grotesque ripping and squishing sounds emitted. Aer hunched over and screamed in agony. Deeper her finger dug. Soon it reached a small patch of skin that had re-grown. She ripped through it and blood burst from it like a popped balloon. Aer’s screams grew to painful groans and gasps. She stumbled to the door and down through the hallways; finger still inside the wound. She stumbled into her open room. The creature smelled the rotten blood pouring from her neck and went berserk. He thrashed around in the jar, desperately trying to escape. Aerqurlyn hunched over on the table, breathing heavily and with a crush and a liquid squish, Aer removed her finger. It was crusted, bloody and covered in green globs. She placed the finger in her mouth and sucked until all the globs and crust were gone. Eyes glowing gold, she bent over the jar. She pressed her face to the lid of the jar and pressed until her chin went through. Minutes later her nose and mouth had moved through the lid and into the jar. The creature cowered on the other side of the jar. “I will do to you, what your will would have done to me,” she said. She breathed softly into the jar and green gas emerged, heading for the creature. She removed her face and fell back into her chair. The creature squealed and twisted itself into unnatural positions as the poisonous gas began to rip and stretch the inside of the insect’s body.

            B.R.Y.S.O.N’s only knew one job, the next Liousctawes they see, head for the neck and burrow deep inside until they can release their poison and rip their body from the inside out.  For any new B.R.Y.S.O.N. keepers, who must follow their specific B.R.Y.S.O.N. to their destruction site, it is always a quite frightening experience. After seeing the tiny, gooey creatures rip into the neck skin, and squirm inside with blood pouring; the new keepers spend a few minutes throwing up and then are often a tad bit afraid to attempt to recapture their creature once the job is done.

            Aer hadn’t used up all of the poison she attained from the wound in her neck, she had swallowed a small portion of it so as to use for later. “Il était idiot de moi pour faire cela. Je suis si insensé” she thought to herself. “We try to convince everyone that we are no different from humans,” she crossed her arms and leaned on the table to view the very last twitching breaths from the broken insect. “And then I do something so grotesquely animal like that,” She sighed and spun the jar around lightly with her finger.

“Stop talking to yourself,” a brown hand came from nowhere and took the jar, then thrust it to the ground. Aer stood up abruptly. “Guiysaer,” she said bowing her head slightly. The insect on the ground began to disintegrate. “Boo-hoo you got attacked,” Guiysaer said coldly. Aer looked away sheepishly; instead of milling around, when she woke up she should have gone straight to report to her commanding officer. “Get going animal, we need you out,” he said sharply as he turned to walk out. Aer followed closely behind, too ashamed to feel the pain of the glass on the ground cutting into her bare feet. Into the catacombs they proceeded.  Rooms and rooms they passed until they reached a wall with twenty or so large holes in it. Eight holes to the right, and up four. Guiysaer hoisted himself up into the hole with Aer coming up behind. They crouched and ran throughout the various tunnels that had once served as a large sewer. Three minutes later and they reached the light at the end of the tunnel, it was a small room with animal skin laying in the corners. A rickety and broken ladder climbed up the wall and seemed to never end. This time Aer went first. She climbed like a frog up the ladder until she came to three split footholds. She leaned over and pressed her hand against the wall until that section glowed, and a portion of the wall slid back to reveal a square walkway. She and Guiysaer hoisted themselves up and continued down the walkway. It was a light blue hallway, with rows of glowing white circles that formed the walls, floor and ceiling of the walkway.

“Took you long enough! If I have to keep sending Guiysaer down there just to get you to go on with life, next time I might just leave you dead in the forest” a chubby, middle aged man with the pungent smell of rotting pumpkin and wet dirt stood behind a makeshift desk. “I apologize” Aer walked to the front of the desk and bowed her head respectively. “Restez silencieux ! !” Guiysaer snapped.  Aer flinched slightly. “Alright… I, uhm, I need ya’ll…” the man behind the desk blubbered and swayed from side to side. Aer squinted and sniffed, today there was another scent added to the man’s stench. Aer glanced up at Guiysaer, he was making odd faces as he attempted to restrain his laugh. Guiysaer may have been a harsh commander, but on occasion one would be able to see the rare, child like aspect to him. “Excuse me, blah!” the chubby man shook his head and smacked his cheeks to wake himself up. “Alright, I need you to take your platoon and make your way to Kcommahx, check out what’s going on in there,” he sat down at his desk. “Why?” Aer questioned. Guiysaer and the chubby man looked sharply at her. Questioning ones orders was not taken lightly. “Excuse me?” the man’s eyes narrowed. “We checked it out a few weeks ago, and we couldn’t really get inside, so we only saw what happened on the outside, not much could have changed in these short weeks,” his unknown answer worried her. “Because vous freak, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they have more patrol workers out, and are clearing districts faster then usual. M’kay? Is that good enough for you?” he said flatly. “Yes that was fine,” Aer replied sarcastically. She walked away to assemble her team before the man could reply.  Aer strapped on what little armor she had, and pulled on a pair of troop boots. “So, how did Aureihst get so, tipsy?” Aer looked at Guiysaer skeptically. He chuckled lightly, “I don’t know.”

            He pulled on a jacket and grabbed a sheath. Four more Primas joined the platoon, all four scarred and beaten, with ferocious, animal like qualities. They took a series of pipes deep underground, and then navigated through a series of smaller tunnels until they reached a hatchet. They thrust open the hatchet and climbed out. They smelled the air until they all agreed on a direction that smelled the most like toxins. They ran full speed, approximately three times faster then the world’s last Olympic winner. They ran until the forest began to thin. The third platoon member, a thin boy with dreadlocks and three large scars running across his face picked up a recent scent. They followed the scent until they heard the factory noise. With a wave of their hand across their legs, the footing of their boots hissed and melted away into the rest of the boot to form leg armor. Their bare feet hardly made a sound on the green earth as they crept throughout the wilderness. Soon they came to the edge of the trees. Each member hid behind a tree and dove down to blend with the earth. Aer peered out from the leaves of a bush. Everything was running as normal-until. The Primas steadied themselves as the ground began to shudder. A loud buzz rang out and a group of Kcommahx workers cleared a large rectangular path in front of a large loading dock. Another shudder from the earth and a massive, rustic tank with a drill burst from the ground and rolled to a loud stop. Steam blew from various holes in the tank, and a large platform with a barred inside lowered and hit the ground with a clank. A rugged, stout man emerged from the tank, and stood firm as he looked back as if waiting for someone. Aer narrowed her eyes to see a long, pale hand with spider like fingers and multicolored nails grasp the side of the tank. Then came the image of a leather shoulder, and then the arm stopped. It paused and jerked back inside of the tank.

            She had to know who it was. She escaped from her perfect spying place, and ran on the very brink of the forest to get another look. “No! Stop it come back!” the other Primas cried out in hoarse whispers. Aer ignored them and pranced about lightly. She was almost there, almost to the other side of the circular clearing. Almost, almost, she was there. She slipped slightly when she stopped and flailed wildly for a branch to grab. Her hands clawed into a plant and she thrust herself up and behind a tree before anyone saw. She dropped to the ground and looked out from behind to the tree to view the person emerging. A hooded figure wearing a long black cloak walked carefully out of the machine. Aer observed the man suspiciously. The person seemed to take extra care in keeping the cloak wound tightly, so nothing of the body could be seen. She checked the faces of the onlookers, they seemed confused, and the man who had emerged first walked away, seemingly annoyed. The cloaked figure hurried into the loading dock, and seemed to drop his cloak the moment the loading door snapped shut. “Le mystérieux… who are you?” she muttered to herself. The other workers went back to business as usual and towed the tank into a different loading area.

            Aer frowned and returned to her platoon. “What is wrong with you?” Guiysaer slapped Aer straight across the face. “I was curious,” she replied smoothly, hair twitching slightly. “What did you see?” another member asked. “Nothing, just a tall man in a long black cloak, it seemed as if he knew we were watching. “That’s what we saw, well, we should head back then,” they trooped off to leave Aer staring blankly at the large building, looking as if nothing had ever disturbed it.