The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League (7 page)

“The dragon is big and black and brown right? With big teeth?” Athan thought about the dog. “And were you defending the realm today against the dragon?” he asked hoping to skip other irrelevant questions.

“I had to protect the treasure,” young David said, wide eyes.

“What kind of treasure was it going to steal?” Athan thought this was going well so far.

“Dad can’t find out. It’s special, but he can’t find out. This is the chest, but you can’t see inside.” The boy laid a hand on the box.

Bugger
.

“Was it Dad’s? I won’t tell him. He wouldn’t be happy with me slaying the dragon either, so we’re in this together.” Athan smiled. “Just you and me, there’s nothing else out there.”

That box is the key, he thought. He needed access to the box, or at least to get the boy to tell him about its contents.

Then a sound from outside gave him an opportunity and also made him a little worried. It was the heavy padding of feet followed by a dull growl.

The dog was back.

Oh, great.

“David, I think you need to tell me about that box. The dragon is back. You can hear it. We’re both trapped here forever if you can’t tell me about that box.” Athan reached out to grab the wood and iron door and pulled it more tightly closed.

There was a loud thump and some scratching of claws on metal as the beast outside tried to get through.

This had better work
.

“Why is that dog trying to kill us David? You know why and you aren’t telling me!” Athan was starting to get a little stressed with the whole ‘trapped in a cubby house by a giant dog in a boy’s mindscape’ situation. That was too many flavours of trapped for his liking.

“You’ll kill us!” Athan urged as he crawled closer to the boy.

Athan looked around the room; the boy was panicking and thinking about his secret, a fresh clue should materialize very soon.

It always did.

His eyes settled on a cutting board and a little wooden pencil case.

This is new
, he thought,
this must be it
.

The boy stared at it with horror.

“What’s this David? Is this why I can’t tell Dad?” Athan leaned over to examine it further.

The boy was hyperventilating.

This was it.

“No, it isn’t anything,” he lied.

Athan picked up the little wooden box while the boy looked on in terror. The lid slid back coarsely, like it was hand made, maybe by the boy when he was at school. Inside there was an assortment of sharp metal objects: pins, a Stanley knife and a small pair of rusted scissors. This could have been the tool kit of a miniature serial killer.

“David, you’d better tell me what you did with these…” Athan picked up the Stanley knife and examined the blade.

“I can’t.” Young David said. Voice wavering.

“Why is the dog trying to kill us, and why do you have these things? You have to tell me, or you need to show me.”

The boy sobbed and slid the shoebox slowly across the floor towards Athan and covered his tear-streaked face.

Athan took it. He had never liked this part of memory. He pulled the lid open and peered inside.

For a moment it was black, and then a form began to materialize.

It was a puppy.

A Rottweiler puppy, and it was dissected as if someone had performed an autopsy on it. Its organs were all carefully removed and lined up at its sides and pins held the skin back to reveal the hollow chamber between its small ribs.

“Does this belong to the dog outside? Why did you do this?” Athan muttered as he gazed at the gory scene in the box.

“It was already dead!” David blurted. “It wasn’t breathing! Mr Elwood would have just buried it, and the dog didn’t care! It was laying there all day and didn’t move!” He stammered between sobs as he rubbed at his eyes, wiping wet smears over his cheeks.

The boy told Athan that he just wanted to see inside. He wanted to understand how its body worked. It turned out that when his father was invited around to see the puppies Mr Elwood found that one was missing and assumed that the mother had eaten it. Thus, the mother of the puppies was put down.

“It was
me
!” The boy began to cry uncontrollably, and things began to fade away, piece by piece.

At last.

The sound of the dog outside had gone and the cubby faded out of existence leaving Athan sitting in an emptiness of swirling colour. The boy had become the man’s waking consciousness and was gone.

It was done.

One foot after another.

Athan had to cross a sparse area that resembled a kind of desert. The ground was smooth and firm and occasionally lifted and fell like it was breathing. In places tall tubes like fleshy flagpoles erupted from the ground and pierced the fog.

It was while he was witnessing one of these strange tubes that a strange feeling came over him, like a chill, like eyes on his back.

Athan looked about him and scanned what he could see of the horizon.

Empty plains of flesh.

He picked up his pace over the skin of the desert landscape. He could sense where he needed to go, the next patient, and it was taking too long to get there. It was like walking down a dark alley in the city, you do it quickly while being filled with anticipation of danger.

After another nervous scan of his surroundings, Athan saw it.

A figure.

He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the figure standing near some ridged hills to his far left maybe four hundred or so metres away.

Athan had never seen anyone here before. The figure appeared to be man sized and dark with a pale face. Maybe this was some kind of entity that he hadn’t seen yet?

Or maybe this was a thing from the deeper plane.

The deeper plane was a place he had only seen twice before. Once he had stumbled across a door in an odd structure that had formed in the landscape.

It was a different kind of doorway in a person’s mind.

Something Athan had never seen before.

It was like an access point to a darker level of the communal subconscious. It was like a vacuum into dead space. This deeper gate had filled him with curiosity and fear because he wasn’t sure if he could enter this other plane and find a way out again. Plus he felt that there was something alive inside it. He had not seen anything, but he had felt its presence in the void.

Could this being be the one he had felt?

The figure on the ridge turned and left. It disappeared somewhere, maybe through an exit, maybe into a tunnel under the desert.

It left Athan with a chill.

He took a deep breath and tried to focus. He needed to find the next patient, Kendra Thompson.

The dark basement had an eerie bluish glow coming through the tiny dusty window.

The moonlight made the basement look like a torture chamber. It was filled with a whole range of pipes, girders and old rotten furniture. There were also reels of wire and shelves of dusty tools.

Unlike most dank and musty basements though, this one was metaphysical and went on as far as Athan could see, with all kinds of corners and alcoves.

The little girl standing in front of him was Kendra Thompson.

She looked about eight or nine, but in the physical world she was closer to fifty-eight. The woman had been in a car accident in the town of Hamilton a month before. Now she was number three on the second list of four people that Dr Enstein had provided him with.

Kendra was not hard to locate in her mindscape.

She was calling out for help from down a dark corridor in the endless basement, where she hid from her mother who hated her for letting her older sister run away with a boy.

At least this was what she had told Athan so far.

“She blames me!” Kendra wailed as she leaned against one of the dusty grey walls. “She said
you aren’t to let her go near Nathan Teely!
And I didn’t watch her! I was just looking at the shoes on the on shelf and she disappeared!”

Athan stood over the girl with his hands in his pockets like a schoolteacher at his wit’s end.

“Well,” he began calmly, “firstly your mother was not blaming you. She didn’t mean that. You are…your age and your sister was fifteen. She came home the next day Kendra, you know that, and she got in all kinds of trouble.”

The girl stared up at him blankly.

“But Mum said she can’t go near Nathan Teely!” she cried.

This was not working. There were no objects specifically that led him to any real conclusions.

No subconscious clues.

Some individuals latched onto experiences and situations rather than objects to form their memories. At least that was true according to his experiences. And so far it was proving true for this case too.

He let himself slip to the floor and leaned back against the wall beside the girl. They both stared off into the dark space in silence. The only sound was the occasional dripping of some far away pipes.

“What is up with this Nathan guy?” Athan began as he rubbed at his eyes in frustration. “Was he a douche bag or something? Why was your Mum so against your sister being near him?”

“He was okay, pretty nice actually, and cute. Mum just didn’t like us being with boys. She had my sister when she was seventeen,” she said, sounding honest and a little mature.

“Did Nathan and your sister have a relationship then?” Athan needed some clues. All he had was a name on a list.

“Yeah, sort of.” A cut off answer.

Progress.

About bloody time.

“So why did you girls see him at the mall? Was it an accident?” Athan rested his elbows on his knees.

“Kinda…” Kendra said shrugging and sitting down beside him.

Athan examined her pointed features in profile. “Your sister knew he’d be there didn’t she Kendra?”

She turned her head and looked up at him dark, knowing eyes. “We both did.”

“Both? You
knew
? Why didn’t you try to get her to walk with you to another shopping centre? She could have got distracted in another store or something…” He shrugged.

“I wanted to see him too…” Kendra’s cold blue eyes sparkled with tears.

“Pardon?”

This girl’s not holding back at all
.

She looked the same, but she was sounding more like an adult.

“I loved him too. I wanted to see him, I didn’t know he would run away with Selima!” she said through gritted teeth.

“But you said your mother was worried about him being around your sister, you knew this was going to happen.” Athan raised his eyebrows and looked baffled.

One name left after this. Come on, Come on.

Athan was quickly growing tired of trying to solve these human jigsaw puzzles. He had never really had a lot of experience with relationships, and as far as emotions went, he was the poster boy for ‘man is an island’. So his emotional isolation didn’t really give him the edge when trying to free these people from their own minds.

“I still wanted to see him! I loved him!” she said.

“You were far too young for Nathan. He couldn’t love you, you were a child!” Athan pleaded.

“I wasn’t always this young…” She said with gravity beyond her age.

The change startled Athan slightly, seeing as these coma patients were so young in mind and body when they were trapped in their subconscious, this girl was making her own fight to return. “He married Selima you know? When she was twenty one, I was 17…”

He began to put things together; this basement was here for a reason.

She was giving him clues.

The place was symbolic, that’s why there were no significant objects.

“Shall we walk, Kendra?” he suggested. “Is that ok?”

The girl nodded solemnly.

Athan pulled himself up off the dusty floor and brushed the back of his pants out of habit, even though he knew this was all metaphysical.

He held out his hand so Kendra could take it and she awkwardly got to her feet and straightened her floral dress and patted the dust off her pale grey stockings. The little girl held on to his hand as they strolled through the eerie darkness. “Kendra,” Athan said, looking at the dank surroundings. “What is this place?”

“The basement at Mum’s old house. Selima and I used to play down here sometimes when Mum was angry at us.” She smiled at the memory.

“Was she often angry?” Athan decided to ask.

It could be a clue.

“No. Well…maybe.” The girl tilted her head thoughtfully. “When we were teenagers we liked to sneak out to parties, that made her mad. And I guess the three of us just got in each other’s way when we lived together. When we got jobs and Selima moved out we got along a lot better.”

Athan nodded.

The pair kept strolling down the corridor, passing work benches, tools, power leads and water pipes. Until they came upon a place against a wall where two bottoms had been sitting in the dust.

They were back where they had started.

“Is this a special place for you Kendra?” Athan said looking back the way they had come.

“Hmmm…not really.” Kendra shrugged.

“But something must have happened here.”

Kendra wiped a tear from her cheek before sitting down on her place on the floor.

Athan sat down again with her.

“Something…” Kendra whispered.

The girl squinted as she gazed off into space.

She’s remembering.

“Is that why we’re here? What happened in the basement Kendra?” This must have been the key.

Athan felt relief; he could feel that the scenario was beginning to fit together.

“Just before they got married, he followed me down here…” she said, tilting her head again in that thoughtful way.

“What happened?”

She looked up at him innocently with tear filled eyes, and then looked at the dusty floor.

She took a deep wavering breath.

“He told me he’d always liked me, and we kissed. It was amazing.” She lifted her eyes to the wall.

A look of shame fell over her.

“After that I told Selima that he loved me and that I loved him. She got angry and hit me.” Tears ran freely down her cheeks. “Nathan denied everything and said that I had approached him and forced myself on him. Which she believed, because Nathan couldn’t do anything wrong, and she knew that I had always had a soft spot for him. I was an idiot.”