"Am I dreaming?" Aida squinted to be sure it was him.
He sighed and walked towards her. "I wish I were."
"What do you want?" Aida squirmed back towards the wall and drew herself up. Her pictures fell off the blankets, glass shattering as they struck the floor. "Stay away from me."
"Might that be an order?" He stopped, head tilting. "If you would do me a favor of utmost kindness, order my departure and I shall most happily comply."
"A favor? Who the hell are you? Why should I do you a favor?" Fear and excitement rushed through her, feelings sprung from wells long thought dry.
He stepped closer, a thin beard outlining the fine line of his jaw. Another sigh. "I am Fallon. I would be your Seneschal should you demean my family's proud history by accepting me as such. Gift me release from this woeful duty and I shall grant you welcome solitude."
A quick search for signs of dreaming: aches, pains still sharp, constant. Acid roughness biting the base of her throat. Sweat trickling between her breasts. The usual tremble of her hands. Four corners to the room. All as usual except the man standing beside her bed.
"Just say the words and I shall trouble you no further." Fallon's voice sank to seductive whisper. "Simply utter 'I order you released' and I shall leave you alone."
Her voice came out a croak. "I'm tired of being alone! No one came to visit even as sick as I've been, curled up at death's door. They all left me here to die."
A long pause. A long sigh. "Very well."
He examined her. "You sweat. Good."
Without warning, he plunged a hand into the neckline of her nightgown. Cold, rigid metal scraped the top of her sternum up to her neck. He stepped away before she could react, something clinking faintly in his hands that her mind's eye associated with an eyedropper bottle.
"Get your hands off of me, you filthy rascal!" she exclaimed too late.
Mixed feelings of violation and anger. And a pulse of excitement, a feeling she thought dead and buried years ago. Scents of man, spice, and something like ozone when he'd leaned in. The first man she'd smelled in far too long who didn't reek of gingivitis, mothballs, or disinfectant.
She clutched her arms to her chest while the tinking continued in Fallon's hands. A spoon striking porcelain? He turned away, speaking a mellifluous language unlike any Aida had ever heard.
"What language is that and who are you talking-"
A woman stepped into the room. Between the darkness and Fallon blocking her view, Aida made out only impressions. Compact. Wiry. Muscled. Close-shorn red hair. Long leather coat. Overlapping strips of hard leather for a skirt.
"That some type of armor? Those knives she's got on her belt? Who are you? What is this?"
The woman sipped something. Fallon muttered. Aida leaned to see what they were doing. No such luck.
Fallon spoke more in the strange language, asking a question calmly then again with frustration or annoyance. Grunts and a flurry of rapid hand gestures in reply.
He turned back to Aida. "Confirmed again, then. Nothing works here. I had hoped it was merely my strings, but at least my ill-treatment before our departure makes some sense now. All the more reason for haste."
"Who's she? Ill-treatment? Departure from where? Haste in what? What strings? What the hell are you talking about?" If he insisted on breaking into her life, the man would damn well treat her like a person. Enough of being old, unimportant, and ignorable.
"Our Feral here will carry you away that we may soon place this drudge work behind us." Fallon gestured the woman forward.
"Feral? What sort of name is that? And carry me where? What? This is kidnapping!"
Aida squirmed back as Feral approached, pressing hard against the wall when the woman's face became clear. Below the nose and cheekbones, Feral's face transitioned seamlessly from pale flesh into the ivory curve of bone marred only by the thinnest of horizontal slashes where the mouth should be. A painfully tight-fitted mask out of some horror movie.
Ignoring Aida's feeble resistance, the woman hefted Aida over her shoulder like a grain sack. While she struggled, some part of her brain questioned her resistance. Surely better to die living again than live dying, yes?
Too stubborn to listen even to herself, Aida groaned and flailed fists against the hard surface of whatever armor Feral wore under the long coat. Fallon fell in behind the woman, shaking his head. In the fluorescent light of the hallway, a faint glint of gold gleamed in Fallon's left ear. "Your tantrum merely adds challenge to distaste. Order us to leave or come in silence."
Aida quieted as Feral carried her down the darkened hall, but after only a few steps she croaked, "stop, I can't go yet!"
Fallon turned to her, assuming a mien of long-suffering patience. "Yet? Forget something?"
"Yes, my toiletries. A wise man once said never go anywhere without a towel. I hold the same opinion about TP."
He blinked.
"Take me back to the bathroom."
Apparently rolling your eyes was also a thing wherever he came from.
Once seated on the toilet to pack her toothbrush and other essentials into a dusty floral carrying bag she hadn't used in a decade, a more conservative, rational part of her upbraided the choice to go along with and encouraging... whatever this was. However, with action and novelty suddenly returned to her life she dismissed the voice. Repressing that rational bit was a familiar choice that had packed her memories with adventure and misadventure.
When done, Aida assembled struggled to zip the small toiletry bag while directing Fallon to gather her shawl and a great-grandniece-gifted pink baseball cap emblazoned with "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History". With shawl and cap in place plus toiletry bag clutched in her arms, she allowed Feral to scoop her up again to carry her into the nursing home proper. She wanted to change into something more suitable for going out, but Fallon's impatience prevailed. A nightgown would have to do.
"I have a wheelchair you know." Aida tried to adjust herself so each step didn't dig Feral's shoulder into her ribs.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
"Wheels would not suffice where we would go," Fallon said as they walked quickly down the hallway. "Even were we to take it, you would not find such a device needful long once we got there."
"There where? Won't need it? Why? What are you going to do to me?"
A voice called out from the aid station, spiking with concern: Gloria.
"Hey, put her down! Who are you? What are you doing with her? Aida, what's going on?"
"Remove yourself from our path, menial, by order of the 100th Dynasty," Fallon barked, stepping forward.
Aida almost laughed at the absurdity: Fallon's commanding posture, his unplaceable accent and English-gentry-phrasing, arms clasped regally behind. This while wearing scarf-and-scrubs beside Feral in a getup somewhere between 20's gangster, ancient Roman Legionary, and horror movie villain.
"100th what?" Gloria took half-a-step backwards, glancing at Aida. "They family of yours or something?"
Aida's mouth flapped open and closed as she struggled to find words that would make sense even to herself.
Feral casually dropped Aida into Fallon's arms. He caught her with a surprised grunt. Fallon hurled something with the inflection of a cutting remark at Feral's back as she walked away, then muttered in English. "I will be tortured and she doomed if you die before you have partaken and the damned woman throws you at me."
"I may be old, but I'm not made of glass." In spite of her brave words, Aida clung to Fallon with all her feeble might. She knew from seeing too many others fall that her old bones made glass look like steel. "Partaken in what?"
Gloria looked from Feral to Aida.
"What's going on? Who are these-" She backed away as Feral strode towards her aggressively. "Stay back or I'll call Tim and-"
Feral's foot thudded square in the middle of Gloria's chest. The air rushed from Gloria's lungs in a strangled whoosh as she sailed backwards and crashed into the aid station. Clipboards clattered, charts flew, the computer monitor flipped over the desk and cracked on the floor. A bronze knife appeared in Feral's hand as she advanced towards the fallen, groaning Gloria.
"What are you doing! Stop! Don't hurt her!" Aida gasped, stunned at the sudden violence.
Feral stopped instantly at her tone, glancing at her before turning dark eyes towards Fallon.
He shifted Aida's weight in his arms as he looked at her. "I doubt I could care less for the fate of this jailer of yours, but if you will come more easily should we let her to live, so be it."
On Fallon's imperious command in the other language, Feral returned, but not without a glance at Gloria and resentful glower at Aida.
Fallon spoke softly, reasonably. "Surely you want no truck with such strange and violent folk as we? There remains time to choose differently."
The hope in Fallon's voice triggered a long-dormant urge to rebel. Aida shook her head to spite him even as her heart ached at Gloria's whimpers. "Sorry, girl, didn't think anything like this would happen. Story of my life: every time I make a choice I hurt someone."
Fallon shifted his hold on Aida as he issued a curt command. Feral made a big production of sheathing blade at hip, glared at them both, and held out her arms.
Fallon breathed deeply in relief as the woman slung Aida back over a hard shoulder.
Aida glanced back at the aid station as they passed. Seeing Gloria lying curled in the fetal position flooded Aida with guilt and doubt. As Feral carried her away, frustration added to the mix.
"I may be changing my mind. Where the hell are you taking me?"
They turned down a hallway terminating at a green-lit EXIT sign over glass doors. Beyond, a flickering streetlamp cast the parking lot in a forbidding light.
"We are taking you as far as we can possibly walk from here." Fallon smiled mysteriously at her. "To perhaps find a place in the Immortal-"
Feral stopped abruptly. Fallon and Aida whipped their heads forward.
"Where's everybody goin'?" Frank growled, emerging from his room a little ways ahead of them, walker thrust forward like a weapon. He smiled cruelly. "This a lynching?"
Fallon glanced at Aida and spoke softly. "I saw your distress with this fellow prisoner earlier in the food hall and here he obstructs us. Do you wish him to die?"
Feral shifted beneath her and Fallon reached to take Aida again.
"Fellow prisoner?" Aida echoed. Mind awhirl, she clung to Feral for a moment before the woman pried her free and pushed her into Fallon's arms. Aida's chest constricted, breath caught in her throat. "Die?"
"Got a lasso from my rodeo days right here if there's a rope shortage." Frank grinned viciously, bobbing his head towards his room. His unbuttoned flannel night shirt hung open to reveal wiry white chest hair over a faded, wrinkled swastika. "Gonna' be a short lynching though since you got the only blackie in the joint."
Feral glanced at Aida, one hand resting on the hilt of a long knife.
Fallon nodded towards Frank. "Decide with haste before more are drawn by our commotion and may seek to impede us."
Aida shook her head. "Just murder him? What about the law?"
"Travel will take us immanently far beyond the reach of whichever Verser Lord governs here. Do you wish this miscreant to die or no?" Fallon shifted her weight in his arms as Feral stared at her, impatient.
Struggling to breathe, Aida's vision blurred in a haze of memory.
Frank's shriveled, mean remnant stood before them yet she'd held him as a chortling baby gripping her fingers and burbling. Later, an unhappy boy from a hard-drinking home grew into a Neo-Nazi bouncing between hate rallies and prison. Here also the man who struggled to hide tears when his only son drove away and abandoned him here over a decade ago, never to return.
"Decide or your Feral will. I think you might guess where her predilection lies." Fallon nodded towards Frank. Feral tilted her head in something like a bow and walked purposefully towards the old misanthrope, long knife slipping silently free behind her back.
"Stop!" Aida shouted as Feral closed to striking distance. "Don't kill him!"
Fallon's command echoed Aida's cry, too late.
A gasp stuck in Aida's throat as Feral lashed out, kicking the walker out from under the octogenarian. With a yelp, clatter, and thud, Frank landed in a crumpled heap atop it. Feral stared down at him for a moment, then slowly turned and walked away. The woman's eyes gleamed, cheeks lifting as though a smile hid under the mask. Aida cringed away from Feral's calloused touch as Fallon shifted Aida back to the woman.
"I told you not to kill him!" Aida slapped at Feral's chest as the woman held her cradled like a lover carried over the threshold. They passed a weakly-stirring Frank in a few quick strides.
Feral rolled her eyes and tilted her head back towards him, as if to say "he's still alive, see?"
A last glance back at Frank entangled with his walker and groaning in pain filled Aida with a welter of conflicting feelings: anger, pity, vengeance, good Christian guilt even though she'd never been that good a Christian, and a remorse-tinged feeling of power.
Cool summer air washed over them as they pushed through the glass doors, the breeze rich with the smell of growth. Irrigation sprinklers watering fields all about the nursing home filled the air with hissing sibilance.
"She's brutal," Aida whispered to Fallon as they walked across the parking lot towards the nearest field.
"Of course. Her only purpose is violence in your service." Fallon pointed ahead. "We have a ways to journey this night yet to reach our destination, perhaps you might spare us your inane observations and questions until we arrive."
"Inane observations? She could have killed him!" Aida gestured back towards the nursing home. "And what do you mean 'my service?'"
"Coming here for you cost me quite enough as it is, the full extent of which I am only gradually discovering yet you add annoyance to difficulty with your prattle." Fallon exhaled his patented weary sigh. "If our company proves disagreeable then I say again: but utter the word and we shall return you with great pleasure and haste."
Aida stared back at the decrepit nursing home she'd been banished to all these years, her mind racing over a churn of conflicted emotions. Could she really go with these crazily violent strangers? If not, could she really go back now? Would they throw her in prison? Did she want to go back? What was left for her now with Nancy gone?
The exit behind them burst open as Tim, the facility's maintenance man, ran out under the flickering light waving a long screwdriver.
"Cops are coming you evil bastards," he shouted. "Put 'er down and you might have time to run."
"Don't kill him!" Aida shouted.
Fallon barked something. A thrumming twang immediately answered.
"Goddamn!" Tim shouted as he fell backwards, an arrow caroming off the asphalt in front of him. He looked about wildly, scrambled to his feet, and hustled back to the door.
"Hold on, Aida," he shouted over his back. "They won't get you far. 911's on it's way!"
"You make things harder," Fallon muttered, shaking his head. "If you would let us just kill those pathetic guards we would not have to run now."
Another shouted order, loud enough to include whoever fired the arrow from the darkness. Feral grunted and began to jog. Aida's discomfort rapidly transformed to pain.
As they raced into the nearest field of shoulder-high corn Aida looked back at the nursing home. Sirens wailed as a police cruiser, lights flashing, skidded to a halt in the parking lot.
"What the hell am I doing?" she said to herself, wincing as she jostled about on Feral's shoulder.
Then the corn closed about them and her entire world for the last two decades passed out of sight.