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Episode 082 |
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“Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we’re born.” Gary Mark Gilmore I fall down onto the hard dirt and pant. In all my life, I’ve never run that hard. My lungs feel like they’re inhaling molten lava. I can smell blood and I can taste it too. I don’t know what time it is, but its dark and I feel like I’m going to pass out. To add insult to injury, Slate’s standing over me. She’s barely breathing hard. I always considered myself a pretty good athlete, but Jesus. Does anything tire this woman out? She flops down onto the ground across from me, watching the darkness back the way we came. Even with me hanging on her shoulder for the first little bit, she was real determined to not deviate from a straight path. “Alright,” she says, turning around to me. “Here’s the deal. We’ve got those bastards,” she says, thumbing back over her shoulder. “We’ve got Morcean back in the city. And then we’ve got the zombies. So where does that leave us?” “There are three other bio-domes, right?” I say. I wince in anticipation for the pain that should come when she smacks me. To my sheer and utter delight, nothing comes. “Toren said something about them,” Slate says, picking at the dirt before looking over her shoulder again back into the darkness. “They couldn’t tell what happened or something, but they lost contact or something.” I struggle to slow my breathing. “Then I say we try for them.” Slate looks up at me, her eyes shining in the night. “That or we try to get the hell out of here.” She sighs, then stretches her legs out and falls onto her back. “Look, Sam,” she says, a strange tone in her voice. “I don’t know what’s going on, and I know you don’t know much, but, but can you tell me anything about that big guy? Anything at all?” Why now? Well, I guess, why not. I breathe out and flop back as well. That was a mistake. Already my eyes are threatening to close. “He’s using me,” I say, finding it harder and harder to keep my eyes open. “He told me he had some type of path set up for me, that I need to follow. And he’s looking for some people, that I’m supposed to lead him to them.” I hear Slate sit up. I look over my chest at her. She’s staring at me. “So we’re just supposed to help him find them?” I blink at her. “You want to tell him no?” She stares for a moment longer, then lays back down. I stare up at the featureless sky, breathing out again. “I wish,” I start to say. I can tell my voice is drifting. Its no use resisting. “I wish we had some water,” I mumble. She sits down in front of Sam. Dressed only in a bath towel, she lays back on the bed, letting the towel fall away. Sam moves over to the bed, lying carefully down on top of her. He looks into her eyes, smiling gently as he strokes her face behind the strands of her blonde hair. But her face twitches a bit. Sam draws back as she starts to cry. A single tear falls down her cheek, her eyes filled with sorrow and regret and hurt. Sam draws back father, uncertain. And the woman’s eyes turn into wells of tears. She begins to cry, her shoulders shuddering as she convulses with the tears of remorse. And then Sam hears the pinch. He looks down at her tears, to see one tear crawl back up along her face, towards her eye. Sam looks close, her crying lost on him. And he sees a tiny, golden scorpion on her face. It snaps its pinchers, drawing back its tail. Sam jerks back as all the tears turn into scorpions. From tiny, almost transparent scorpions not even the size of a sesame seed to giant emperor scorpions that are as big as his hand. And still more are coming as the woman cries. Sam moves to get away from her and the bed full of the tiny beasts. But as he tries to move, her hand jerks out, catching his arm. His attention twists from the scorpions to the woman, to see her large eyes staring at him. And then he sees her rotten flesh pulled back taut against the bones and decaying muscles of her face. Her lifeless eyes lock onto his and she opens her mouth, her sharp, rotten teeth hiding a nest of scorpions, their pinches and tails flailing out like tentacles from some rotten octopus. He tries to pull away, but the woman yanks him violently to her, grabbing his head, lunging forward for one single kiss. I sit up with a start. I throw my hands in front of my face, trying to knock the scorpion’s tails and pinchers away from me. But I feel nothing but the warming air of the early morning. I try to swallow, but my parched mouth feels like it’s got sand in it. I breathe out, feeling myself for any scorpions that might have followed me over from the dream world. Then, with one last sigh, I open my eyes fully and look across at Slate. There’s
a man standing over her, the gun in his hand aimed at me. |
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