Stars Rain Down (6 page)

They fell into a comfortable rhythm, ascent interspersed with short rests in shallow alcoves they found, and thanks to the many hand-holds, they rarely had to backtrack. At each new rest stop, they could see more of the city stretching out beneath them, and Jack was beginning to admire the view. What was foreign and deformed at first was becoming familiar, reminding him not only of Manhattan, but also of Hong Kong and Mumbai. It was a rainbow of brightly colored clothes, spicy smells and strange produce.

After nearly two hours, they came to the entry port, which was a tunnel just barely large enough for one of the flyers to squeeze through, located half-way between the colony’s floor and ceiling.

Once everyone was safely on the ledge, Jack took a good look down and the scale of it struck him with a touch of vertigo. He had a tingle at the back of his knees and a sloshy feeling in his stomach, and then it was gone.

“Hustle up,â€

The moment was over, and everything was calm again in the circular generator room. Trash had a twisted grimace on his face, but he dutifully zipped his pack up and slung it back over his shoulder. The insurrection was over.

Jack returned his handgun to its holster. At the same moment, the light in the generator room turned a deep, Cabernet red while the innermost ring of columns slid across the floor, forming a gapless barricade around the miniature sun. A low cry like a giant horn howled across the blue city. None of that seemed like good news.

“What’s going on?â€

Jack was confused when he woke up. Really confused. He’d been confused before, like when he got to the analogy section of his college entrance exams and couldn’t figure out how “dispatchâ€

Jack’s life took on a peculiar sort of rhythm. They left him alone in his cell to stew for long stretches, until such time as the fascist alien bastard came back to question and torture him some more. During each questioning session, he was pushed up to and past his threshold for pain. He would pass out and find a small measure of peace, only to awaken later and repeat the process all over again.

Jack felt like Prometheus chained to his rock.

His resolve only lasted so long, and he started to answer questions, mingling truth and lies, losing track of where one began and the other ended. Sometimes, he made a game of giving the most ridiculous answers possible, speaking at length about an army called the Lost Boys who had a base hidden in Never Never Land, or the terrorist leader Christopher Robin and the suicide missions he launched from the 100 Acre Wood. When he ran out of kids’ books, he turned to movies, spinning stories about British super spies, flying Chinese monks, and space police with lenses attached to their hands.

The interrogator listened intently but never bought a word of it, and Jack discovered that the quality of his story telling had zero effect on the amount of torture he received.

He had no idea how much time passed or was passing, and he lost count of how many sessions he endured. The only change from one day to the next was the interrogator’s grasp of English, which improved at a startling rate but remained oddly stilted.

Throughout it all, Jack somehow refused to divulge his name despite whatever pain he was subjected to; it was his alone, and he wouldn’t let them have that piece of him. The interrogator addressed him only as Nefrem, and whenever Jack asked about the word, he was introduced to yet another pressure point, offering its own unique flavor of agony. The interrogator thought Jack was playing dumb, and no amount of arguing could convince him otherwise.

Their relationship was a tense one, yet they somehow grew comfortable with one another. Jack spent more time howling and slobbering than he ever could have imagined, but the interrogator didn’t relish the work; he performed it clinically, without joy or satisfaction. He even displayed mercy on occasion, and Jack thought he might be able to forgive the interrogator. Those times didn’t come often.

Whenever Jack was left alone, he prayed. He hadn’t since he was a child, and it was awkward at first. The prayers started out formal, complete with all of the ‘holy father’s, ‘art’s and ‘thou’s he could remember, but soon he was talking to God like an old friend returned from a long trip. When his prayers went unanswered, he bargained, hoping that smaller requests might be granted where larger ones were ignored, but that went nowhere quickly. Finally, the prayers disappeared and he just talked to himself, because unlike God, he was polite enough to reply.

Facing a future that promised nothing but pain, Jack began to wish for death. He just wanted it to end, and he considered sharing this fact with the interrogator. He wasn’t sure if the masked alien might grant his wish, or if it was exactly the submission they’d been working toward all along.

Jack never revealed his desire to die, and the torture continued unabated. When reality grew unbearable, he retreated into ever more complex fantasies, managing to convince himself the whole ordeal was just a terrible dream, and that he’d wake up back in sunny San Jose at any moment. He imagined lying in his king-size bed with Jess snoring beside him, then sneaking out to read the newspaper over a glass of orange juice with the morning sun breaking through the trees outside his window.

The simple, prosaic details had the most gravity. They pulled him down into the dream, and made it feel more real.

He could just about taste the tangy-sweet orange juice and feel its squishy pulp on his tongue when a surprising jolt of pain thrust him back into real reality. Back in his cell, strapped to the ceiling like a modern art exhibit, while the interrogator stared up at him from below.

“You drifted away for a moment, Nefrem.â€

The next time Jack opened his eyes, he was on the floor of a different room, wearing rags too threadbare to hang himself with. The place was stark and empty, with flat, smooth walls in perfectly inert grey. The only noticeable details were a hole in the floor for waste, a small dish attached to one wall that was constantly full of water, and a deep slot beside it just wide enough to fit a hand inside.

This was Jack’s new world.

Stuff came out of the slot every now and again that turned out to be food. It was a curious smelling pile of lukewarm chunks that may have been meat, vegetable or neither. It came in different colors, but always tasted the same.

His first attempts at eating ended in vomiting, but it wasn’t a problem with the food. Jack had been fed intravenously for so long that his stomach wasn’t yet up to the task, but he kept at it, and by the fourth meal he kept some down. Things improved from there.

He suspected the food was dispensed on a timed interval, but he had no way to know for sure. Regardless, he used bits of each meal to mark the walls so he could have at least an idea of how much time had passed.

Otherwise, there was a perplexing sameness to his days. No one ever came to check on him, and he never heard anything outside. The cell was his own personal purgatory, and after scouring every last millimeter of it, he decided there could be no escape. He couldn’t even figure out how they got him in.

His body was a damn wreck. The time spent hanging from the ceiling had taken its toll, leaving him weak, emaciated, and covered from head to toe in deep, discolored bruises. His shoulders were especially sore from holding his weight, and it took some time before he could raise his arms without severe discomfort. A strong breeze could have blown him over, and restoring his health became a top priority.

Each ‘day’, he woke up, exercised as much as he could, then rested and ate. After his meal, he exercised to his limit again, then broke for his second meal, and returned for one last exercise session, this time only stopping when he collapsed. He was always so exhausted by then that sleep came easily.

The interrogator’s torture had altered Jack’s relationship with pain, and he found himself working straight through exhaustion and muscle fatigue, right up to the point when he literally couldn’t move anymore. As time passed, that point stretched further and further out, until he could work himself virtually non-stop.

In truth, he wasn’t just used to the pain; he craved it. Trapped in that grey box, it was the only thing he had left, and he never let it far out of his grasp. It was the last thing grounding him to reality.

His life went on like this through one-hundred and thirty seven meals, each day the same as the one before it, and then it changed. He passed out as usual in a pool of his own sweat, but when he awoke, he wasn’t alone.

The other man was huddled in a ball against the wall, shivering even though the room was stuffy and warm. He was dressed in rags like Jack’s, and was both badly bruised and malnutritioned. His gaunt physique reminded Jack of old pictures showing Jewish prisoners in German concentration camps.

The man had his knees drawn up and his head buried in them. He was sobbing, and Jack couldn’t get a look at his face.

Jack was so surprised, he didn’t know what to do. He felt like his space had been invaded and he had a powerful urge to attack, followed quickly by a sense of self-disgust that left him confused, and ultimately silent.

So Jack went about his daily business and tried to pretend nothing had changed. He stretched until he felt good and limber, then dropped to the floor and did push-ups. After working up a good sweat, he stood, spread his feet and lowered himself into a horse stance, then stood there until his quads felt like they might catch fire.

Meanwhile, the other man sat on his side of the room. He never looked up or pulled his face away from his knees. He did nothing but sob for hours on end.

Then lunch time came. The slot in the wall produced a pile of multi-colored food chunks, which Jack attacked voraciously. He stuffed his cheeks full like a chipmunk, and was piling more food in when he stopped himself. He decided to be more than just an animal in a cage.

He grabbed a handful of food-bits and carried them over to the other prisoner. “Hey,â€

â€

Kai was gone when Jack woke up the next morning. That should have told him something, but he was too busy trying not to let it get to him. He tried to take it in stride, and was partially successful. Only partially. Against his own better judgment, he’d become attached to the guy, even though either one could disappear at any moment. One of them had.

Jack found it odd that he couldn’t quite picture Kai’s face, even after spending weeks trapped together in an empty room, and it troubled him. He felt heartless for not remembering. Inhuman. He decided that Kai must have had the single most forgettable face in the world. It was the only rational explanation.

Even though Jack and God were on the outs again, he said a small prayer for his doughy-faced Finnish friend and hoped for the best. Then he went back to his routine of merciless exercise, and tried to think nothing else of it. He was partially successful in that as well. Working himself to slobbering exhaustion certainly helped.

Then, shortly after his dinner meal, the inexplicable happened. Jack was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, and the opposite wall melted away like a sheet of ice suddenly hit by a blast furnace.

The fascist alien interrogator stood in the opening.

Jack didn’t waste any time. His opportunity had come. The one he’d been training for. He propelled himself up from the ground and scrambled toward the enemy, fists swinging. His first blow landed with a loud crack and the alien’s head jerked to the side. The second fist crashed into the alien’s gut, and it felt like hitting concrete.

Even in his blind fury, Jack realized he wasn’t having any effect. The alien stood unperturbed, no more wounded than if Jack had splashed him with lukewarm water. It was the most insulting thing possible. It made Jack feel weak and powerless.

“Why won’t you fight back?â€

The interrogator directed Jack eastward and the small flyer sped over dense rainforest. Trees beneath them started orange, then turned green after a few kilometers and finally thinned out at the foot of the Virunga Mountains.

“Set down in that clearing,â€

All told, fourteen months had passed since the beginning of the invasion, and Jack had spent four of them in captivity. Four months without sunshine. One hundred and eighteen days locked in a box, tortured and left to stew in his own despair while the world outside shambled on without him.

Now he was free. His flyer sliced through the air at more than two hundred kilometers an hour, racing northward over the vibrant green jungle.

Jack and the strange vehicle were intimately connected, but at the same time separate in a way that baffled him. The feeling of sheer, unbridled speed reminded him of riding a motorcycle, but taken to an unimaginable extreme, while the play between mount and master was more like riding a horse. Not that he’d ever ridden a horse, but he’d heard stories.

As they traveled, he was taken aback by how quickly nature had reclaimed her world. Jack had always heard that the Earth abides, but the swiftness of it disturbed him. The ashen cities were already grown over with fresh vegetation, and only the twisted metal spires hinted that anything had been there at all. Human civilization had been erased and forgotten. It left him feeling like civilization hadn’t been an integral part of the world, but had rather existed in spite of it. Mankind had been bailing water from a leaky ship, and in the absence of his attention, the tides rose up and swept it all away.

Jack and his companions stopped every few hours so the flyer could rest and graze. It wasn’t like the larger cuttlefish in this regard, which were self-sufficient and capable of space travel. This flyer was a commuter, and the city was its natural habitat. It was less than ideal outside of the city, and its reliance on external energy made it essentially useless after nightfall.