Lilijoy walked purposefully down the hall through the blinding light and oppressive noise. Her pillowcase dress flapped against her knees and her bare feet slapped on the metal floor. She was too proud to let the pain from the cuts on her feet slow her pace, and the cacophonous environment kept her from hearing Marcus call out as she walked straight into a pair of legs wrapped in a vibrant red cloth.
The legs were quite skinny, and attached to a tall man who blinked down at her in surprise as she looked up in alarm. His expression reworked itself into a delighted smile. He was by far the tallest person Lilijoy had seen, a record that was being broken so regularly that she wondered if she would be running into peoples knees or ankles in coming days. She had to squint to make out any details of his face beyond his big white teeth and dark skin; the ring of bright light around his head showcased a perfectly smooth dome with protruding, oddly shaped ears on the sides. Craning her head back caused her to lose her balance and fall back onto her bottom.
Suddenly the noise diminished and Lilijoy felt her ears pop. The vibrations from the floor continued unabated.
“Good to see you back on your feet Lilijoy! At least until a moment ago,” he said, in a sonorous voice full of humor. He reached down and offered a hand the size of her head. She looked at it for a moment, grabbed a finger and pulled herself up.
“How do you know name?” She kept her hand wrapped around his index finger, forgetting to let go.
“Oh, Marcus told me all about you when he asked me to come. My name is Anda, and the last time we met you were not doing nearly as well.”
Marcus broke in, “Sorry to interrupt your reunion, but the clock is ticking and we need to move!”
He addressed Anda. “Did you get the car? And stop the sonic dampening, it's too easy to track.”
“Yes. It is in the dirt level back port cargo bay. It’s a bit of a hike.”
Anda looked down at Lilijoy. “How would you like a ride?” he asked.
Ignoring the beginnings of her answer, he picked her up and cradled her in a seated position in the crook of one arm. With a whoosh, the sounds of the factory returned to batter her eardrums, and then they were moving down the hallway at full speed.
Not back to cattail fluff again! she thought, but decided the best option was to relax and enjoy the ride. Besides, she liked the way Anda smelled, like earth and rain.
What followed was a whirlwind of stairs and hallways, as they made their way through the structure of the vast machine. After descending five flights of stairs, they reached hallways where the lights were comfortable for her, and the sound had diminished enough for speech. Ducts and cables covered the walls and ceilings, and at times Anda had to duck under pipes that crossed overhead.
“We’re taking the maintenance halls. Hopefully we won’t meet anyone down here.” Anda spoke in a loud voice, just above the ambient sounds. “Marcus told me about what happened with Mo and his vampire friend. He also told me that you have a bug that scared the living daylights out of him. I have known Marcus a long time, though lately we have been avoiding each other, and I have never known him to be alarmed for no good reason.”
“When did you talk to Marcus?” Lilijoy asked. “He never left the room for even a second.”
“You have so much to learn, Lilijoy. I almost envy you all the miracles you will discover when this situation clears up. To answer your question, our bugs let us send messages with our thoughts when we are near to each other, or when we are connected to a network, like that which exists in this machine.” He gestured with his other arm to encompass their surroundings. “We can talk like we are talking now, but usually we just send words for each other to read.”
“Where are we going?”
“First, we are going to the very farthest and lowest corner of this place. I left a hovercraft there for us, which will allow us to get..” He ducked under a pipe “..get far away from here. We can talk more once we are on our way. Even down here there may be ears.”
Alarmed, Lilijoy looked around for ears, but didn’t see any. Of course, she realized, they are probably very small ears, and hard to see.
Another thought occurred to her. “Anda, why does Mo call me a ‘Gob’? That sounds like a mean name, but I’ve never heard it before.”
Anda thought for a moment as he made his way through the corridor. “Please allow me to choose my words carefully. Gob is short for Goblin. There is a place we can go, called the Inside, which is similar to this world in many ways. Goblins are creatures that live there. They look like small people with no hair, greenish skin, big pointy ears and lots of sharp teeth. Thoughtless people in our world, the Outside, call people like you, who are small and have been harmed by the environment ‘Gobs’ because they think you are less than human, like the goblins on the Inside.”
This created many more questions for Lilijoy and over the rest of their trek, Anda taught her about the Inside, the Outside and the ‘environment’. She had never realized that the place she had lived was poison to her, making her hair thin and brittle, her teeth weak, and worst of all, warping and limiting her growth. She learned about the separate world of the Inside, where humans could learn and grow without harming the environment or threatening the Earth. A place of wonders and terror where no death or injury was permanent and where anyone could become wise and powerful. Many humans spent all of their time Inside, escaping from the wreckage of their first home.
Before she knew it, they entered a large open space with countless crates stacked in huge piles, and strange contraptions like giant arms dangling from the ceiling on interwoven tracks. A huge door was open to the outside, well above the ground, and through it she could see the Piles stretching off to the horizon. Now she understood why they called it the Line. It was all a matter of perspective.
In the middle of the bay was a large oval structure, twenty feet long and ten feet wide, the top covered in a transparent, faceted dome. It looked to Lilijoy like a giant, shiny roach. Through the dome she could see seats. The lower part of what she assumed must be the hovercraft was a dark, hazy material, slightly translucent to the light from the door behind it.
“Here we are!” proclaimed Anda. The facets on the side of the dome began to rotate behind one another in a circular pattern, forming an opening and the vehicle smoothly rose several inches from the floor.
As they approached it, Lilijoy felt Anda stumble and his lanky body begin to fold. Without warning she found herself falling and rolling on the hard floor. A sharp popping noise echoed through the bay. Stunned, she looked behind her, only to see Marcus diving to the floor as another pop rang out. Two figures moved swiftly toward her, one clomping noisily, the other almost gliding.
The smooth moving person gently vaulted Anda’s prone form and reached her before she could react. He held a device of some kind in one hand, and he bent over her and brought it toward her head, his smooth white face expressionless with no sign of exertion from sprinting across the bay almost faster than she could process. Behind him, she could see Anda’s face.
Oddly, he had a tiny smile as he met her eyes, and then a thunderous roaring sound pressed her body to the floor. She felt hot pressure from a powerful curtain of air and heard a resonant thump as a shadow passed over her, resolving into the other side of the hovercraft. It moved across the bay and slammed into a pile of crates, before rebounding back towards her. The smooth moving man was revealed sprawled over and among the falling boxes, knocked there by the vehicle.
As he pulled in his limbs and somehow pushed himself off the floor into the air back towards her, she felt Anda scoop her up and throw himself backwards into the moving hovercraft as it followed its new trajectory.
She caught a glimpse of the other man where he stood over Marcus, squat and powerfully built, mouth agape and wide eyed as he watched the scene unfold, and then she was falling again, the hovercraft leaving the bay and dropping ten feet or so to crunch into the ground. Anda kept her from flying around the interior, and then they were gliding, moving away from the vast monolithic presence of the factory mine. She caught a last glimpse of the freight bay door, framing the smooth man as he stood passively watching them recede.
“What about Marcus? Is he going to be alright?” Lilijoy asked in a panic.
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“I’m talking to him now,” said Anda. “He’s tougher than he looks, and he has powerful allies. I don’t think they will mess with him too much.”
“But what about the vampire guy? Won’t he steal his bugs? Can’t you go back and save him?”
Lilijoy felt terrible about abandoning Marcus. After all, he had helped her, and then she had somehow ruined his special bugs.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Anda. Something about the tone of his voice made her look over at him more carefully. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his face was drawn. Then she saw blood dripping from his seat onto the floor.
“Oh no. Anda! What do I do?”
“Don’t worry about me, I should be okay in a bit. Maybe you can help me stop the bleeding? He shot me with something nasty, and I’m fighting it as best I can. Normally, my med bugs would have stopped the bleeding already, but they’re busy fighting off some bad bugs in my bloodstream that are trying to get into my head. I need to focus now...”
He tailed off and his eyes closed. The hovercraft slowed to a walking pace, and Anda slumped out of his chair and on to the floor, almost purposefully. She could see the blood was coming from the back of his left thigh, welling out in a gentle rhythm. Already a new pool was forming where he lay. She gathered up some of the red cloth he wore and pressed it onto the wound with all her weight.
How nice that the cloth won’t show the stain, she thought randomly.
She knelt, leaning on Anda’s leg, and looked around the craft for a better solution. Six seats flowed out of the deck material, translucent gray and firm yet oddly squishy. There was no obvious way to steer, and no other compartments...wait...there was a sunken spot in the deck that might be a handle.
She left Anda’s side and dashed over to the spot, grasping it and hauling upwards with her one good arm. After a moment’s reluctance, a hatch opened with a ‘foop’ and she was looking into a compartment holding a variety of boxes secured with straps. She figured out that the straps were stretchy, and with a small effort, she was able to remove the boxes and toss them over to where Anda lay. She noted that blood was beginning to flow from underneath her improvised bandage again.
Running back over, she pressed down on his wound with one a foot, while sorting through the boxes. Some of them had no obvious latches or buttons, and she tossed those to the side. She found one that contained wrapped food bars, and another that held metal implements with a variety of shapes and sizes. She set aside a few of the more interesting ones for later perusal. A white box with a picture of a letter of some kind, surrounded by red zig-zag shapes looked exciting, but she couldn’t open it with one hand, so she moved on to the next one, again white with a large red cross shape and one large latch.
After some struggle (she had to hold it down with a foot while trying to pry up the latch, still keeping pressure on Anda’s leg with her other foot), the latch finally popped. Jackpot! Bandages and strange canisters and some sharp metal things.
She was beginning to try to figure out how to attach the bandages, using her arm as a model, when Anda resurfaced for a moment, with a groan. He gestured for her to bring over the container, and then retrieved a canister, popping off the top with his thumb. He showed Lilijoy how to press the button that caused a spray to come out of a little nozzle. Then without a word his head slumped and he went back to whatever internal process was occupying him.
Lilijoy reached over to get the canister from his limp fingers. She just hoped she was supposed to spray it on his wound and not in his mouth or something! As she moved back to his lower half, she saw movement through the canopy of the hovercraft.
For the first second, she thought nothing of it, as the craft was still in motion itself, but a second take showed her the unfortunate truth. Somebody was outside the hovercraft, chasing after it and they were gaining fast on the slow moving vehicle.
With no time to lose she pulled the cloth from the wound and sprayed for all she was worth.
“Wake up, Anda! There’s someone chasing us. We need to go fast again!” she yelled, but he remained unresponsive.
Looking back, she saw that the figure was close enough to identify. The vampire ran smoothly, without a trace of effort on his face until he noticed her looking out from the canopy, when he displayed a wry smile of greeting. Somehow, that scared her much more than an expression of anger or threat. The expression vanished without a trace and he burst forward with a new level of speed. His short blond hair and puffy cheeks gave him an impression of youthful good nature that was very much at odds with his behavior to this point.
“Please, Anda,” she begged, as she looked at the metal things she had set aside.
There were a few candidates for self defense: A very heavy club-like thing with a hooked end she could barely lift one-handed; she dropped that idea. A smaller club with a t-shaped head, one side blunt, the other pointy, was still heavy, but she was out of time, as there was a tremendous thud and the entire hovercraft slewed.
The vampire was clinging to the canopy, looking down at her with a gleeful expression. He had the device from before clutched in one hand as he splayed out, trying to find purchase on the faceted dome. His face took on a disappointed expression as he started to slide down, his empty hand making a squealing noise. He dropped off and disappeared for a moment, then was up and walking quickly alongside her, considering the situation.
She watched as he put the device away somewhere in the heavy open shirt he wore over another shirt, gave her a quick wave with his now free hand, and began to bang on the canopy experimentally. The canopy proved to be quite resilient to his blows, so she tried again to wake Anda.
“Anda, the vampire guy is here!”
She went up to his face and yelled in his ear while shaking his shoulder. “I SAID THE VAMPIRE GUY IS HERE!”
The vampire guy in question looked in at her and gestured to himself with an innocent expression, as if to say ‘Who, me?’ then shrugged and ran off. He came back with a fist sized rock, and began hammering on the joint between two facets.
Lilijoy gave up on Anda, and began pounding the latch of an unopened container with her club, as much to do something, anything, other than sit and watch the creepy sight of the vampire guy’s open smile as he hammered viciously. The white container was not overly committed to staying closed, and it opened with a crack, flipped over and began emitting a whining noise.
At the same time, the panel under the vampire’s care gave a crack of its own and fell into the hovercraft, still hanging from a lower edge. The vampire tossed the rock aside and leapt for the opening, getting a hand and his head through, just as Lilijoy ran over swinging with all her one-armed might.
He tried to grab at the club, but his arm was not all the way in, and he just missed intercepting the blow to his head. The shock of the hit ran down Lilijoy’s arm, and his head was knocked into the edge of the clear panel. His eyes lost focus for a moment, and he gave Lilijoy a less friendly smile and quickly withdrew from the opening, dropping down to jog alongside once more.
Blood welled up from a gash where his head had hit the edge of the panel, and then stopped, disappearing back into the open cut. The mark on his temple from the club faded. He gave her a finger wag, and then ran off again.
Soon he was back with an even larger rock, which he wielded effortlessly, smashing at the next panel over from the opening. Lilijoy tried throwing some of the metal objects out the opening, but even when they hit him, he showed no concern and continued to slam the rock savagely into the pane, which was already buckling. Lilijoy gave up on throwing things and prepared to fend off another assault once the pane broke.
Her arm trembled from the weight of the club, sweat ran down her face and back, and the cuts on her feet and knees were open and bleeding again from scrambling around the craft. Her body ached and her injured arm was also bleeding again, soaking the white bandages. As she waited, she had an idea.
“Ouch,” she said, also thinking at her bugs. “Ouch, ouch ouch, ouch.” She figured more ‘ouches’ wouldn’t hurt! A wave of relief came over her, followed by a pleasant, light headed feeling. The voice from the bugs came into her head.
“Extreme levels of cortisol and adrenaline detected. If you would like to be unconscious, please think ‘sleep’ three times. If sleep is not advisable, you may do nothing. If you are in an active emergency situation and require more strength or energy, please think ‘boost’ three times.”
She hadn’t noticed that the little picture was full! It had actually gone down a bit after the debacle with Marcus, and she had been too distracted to notice it since then. Then the words of the voice actually sunk in. It said ‘boost!’
As quickly as she could, she thought it, boost!, boost!, boost!
The hammering of the vampire seemed to slow and fade. Her vision focused, like she was looking through a tunnel and explosive energy filled her body, just as the final blow to the panel sent it winging across the hovercraft. She readied her hammer and swung at the vampire, but underestimated his speed. He smoothly arced his body through the enlarged hole and she missed him entirely, spinning in a circle and falling on her back next to Anda, the club flying from her hand to careen off the panels on the opposite side of the vehicle.
Her back and shoulders landed on a container awkwardly, but she felt no pain. The vampire gained his feet and reached into his jacket for the device, then seemed to change his mind. A single stride took him over to where she lay. She saw a black stick rolling out from under her and grabbed it, as the vampire planted his foot firmly in the pool of blood next to Anda’s thigh wound.
The foot kept going, slipping in the blood and pulling the vampire into a split over her, just as she brought the stick up and jammed it into his crotch. There was a sharp crackling noise and the vampire jumped in place, body arcing. He collapsed on to her, but she wriggled free between his legs before his weight could pin her down and turned to see him struggling to his feet. She thrust the stick as hard as she could into the back of his head, and he made a coughing, choking sound and fell onto his front.
The next few minutes were a blur of activity, as she beat him repeatedly with the stick, and when that broke, she picked up her club and beat him until fatigue hit her like a ton of rocks. She collapsed onto his still body, and listened to the voice in her head.
“This message will repeat until acknowledged: Please be aware that emergency strength and energy boosts can result in damage to muscles and ligaments. Expect periods of extreme fatigue and lethargy for twenty four to thirty six hours. Do not operate a vehicle or heavy machinery when boosted, and avoid strenuous activity for at least twelve hours after. Please acknowledge. Repeating. This message will repeat until...”
“Yes, yes, yes I get it,” she moaned. Then she had an even better idea.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, she thought, and she was out.