Chapter 21: Freaking, Sobbing, and Fraking

When: Some time ago…

Where: …inside the white cube.

I bolted upright, my heart pounding fit to burst. The first thing I saw was white, just white light bouncing off of my eyes. I blinked fast, waiting for my vision to clear, my eyelids feeling like 40 grit sandpaper. They scraped and scraped, failing to leave any moisture behind.

Was there anything besides the white? Was I blind? Dead?

“Book! Wake up man, come on!”

I knew the voice, but I couldn’t place it. It was too loud, echoing in my head. “Shut up,” I muttered, my voice hoarse with gravel. “Please, be quiet. Just, quiet, OK? It hurts.” I felt completely leached of moisture, a dried-out husk.

“Get with it, already!”

“OK, OK,” I mumbled. “Give me a second…who, who’s there?” I couldn’t think, my brain belonged in a desiccated mummy.

“Would you get it together!”

A meaty hand clapped my shoulder, flesh on flesh. The slap! sound was unmistakable. The touch elicited a rash of chill bumps sprouting over my exposed skin. Which I soon noticed was all of it! What a thing for my vision to return to. The next thing I noticed was the cold, damn! I was freezing! The cold emanated from underneath me, all along my body. I saw that I was laying on a bare steel—metal, at least—slab. It looked disturbingly like a coroner’s table. It even had a drain at my feet.

I hurried to get up and put some air between me and the heat-sucking material. My wits worked in slow motion as my eyes tried to make sense of my surroundings. I was in a white box, with three walls, a floor, and a ceiling. The fourth wall was a light haze of green-tinged silver, and I could see a wide hallway beyond it. There were no discernible light sources that I could see, but it was bright enough for the need to squint. Suddenly, I remembered someone had touched me, and I spun in place, looking for threats. The motion was too much for my struggling consciousness, and I almost went down. A pair of hands hooked on to me, one under my armpit and the other grabbing the top of my shoulder. They were the only things keeping me on my feet. My instinctual response was to pull away, but then I recognized the person holding me up.

“Steve?” His face was blurry, the white light creating a halo effect around his head. So, I was dead. I hadn’t exactly expected to see Tess’s boyfriend in the afterlife.

“Yeah, Book. It’s me. Now wake up, I need your smarts.” The big jock gave me a gentle shake, enough to get the neurons firing again.

“Where are we?” I asked, my words a touch slurred. Was I still drunk from trivia night at the bar?

“I don’t know!”

A note of panic flavored his words. That wasn’t good. The big guy wasn’t afraid of anything, even when he should be. The room had stopped spinning, so I tried to pry his fingers from my flesh gently. It felt like my collarbone was grating against the shoulder blade behind it.

“OK, Steve. You gotta let me go before you break something.”

“Huh…oh, sorry. It’s just…” He released my shoulder and made a sweeping gesture, encompassing everything. I patted his bulging bicep, in total agreement. Glancing at the naked man, I could see every individual muscle stood out in stark relief, his whole body tensed and ready for action. He looked like one of the spartans from the movie '300.'

Aside from the two autopsy tables, the room we were in was devoid of anything. This led me in the one direction that gave me hope. I headed for the hazy section of wall, fully intent on dashing through and craning my head in both directions. Preferably at the same time. Electricity gabbed me in its taloned grip, vibrating my bones and locking my joints and muscles. I toppled over backward, landing flat on the floor.

I lay there, twitching uncontrollably as every cell in my being tried to spasm all at once. I bit my tongue, tasting blood.

“Whoa, buddy, I already tried that,” Steve told me. Too late.

He reached down to pull me up, and I snagged his wrist as soon as I had mastery over my muscles again. I let him yank me to my feet, and I ran a hand over the wetness covering my chin. I looked at the fluids on my fingers, and, sure enough, they were covered in blood. It was a lot of blood. I felt around in my mouth, feeling a slice going all the way through one side. I was lucky I had not bit completely through the width and severed the tip. Ouch! Dammit, that hurt. I felt like I had dipped my tongue in lava, with the taste of microwaved pennies and salt tainting my mouth. I snatched the expanse of bare metal in front of me, hung my head, and spat a glob of blood down the drain on the table I’d woken up on. It swirled around, clotting the tiny holes perforating the cover.

“Cou’ba sai’b somb’tha,” I couldn’t talk straight, with all of the swelling and bloody saliva. I spat a couple of more times, trying to clear my mouth out. “Aaagh. Fub me, it hurb’s…hurts.” I had to spit again. And again, before I could speak legibly. My thoughts spun back to the last thing I remembered before waking up here.

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“Stebe, what about the obers? Are they here, too?”

“I think so. I can see…ulp…bodies on the tables in the room across the hall.”

I walked back to the opening of our cell. What else could the cube be? I was careful not to let any part of my body touch it this time. I knew (now!) that the fourth wall was made of a force screen or similar. I had too much science fiction running through my veins to consider otherwise. Objects were murky, peering across the double energy fields. I could make out a pair of silver tables, like the ones in the cell with Steve and I. Laying on them, were two individual forms, both unmistakably female in their nakedness.

“That has got to be Tess, and…and,” Crap I couldn’t remember the other girl’s name, the one Carmen had picked up at the bar. “Carmen’s new friend.”

“Yeah, I think so too,” Steve agreed.

I wrenched my neck one way, then the other, and tried to peer down the hallway for other cells. “I don’t see Carmen. Did you?”

“Nah, man, I can’t tell.” Steve joined me, and both of us did our best to look around while avoiding getting shocked.

“I’m over here, guys.” The voice came from our left, one we both instantly recognized as Carmen’s.

“Carmen,” I yelled, relieved to hear them. “You OK?” What a stupid question. None of us were OK.

“Freezing, and bare to the world, but yeah. I think so, anyway.” The usual, chipper lilt to their words was absent. “You guys think that is the others? Tess and Christi?” It was easy enough to imagine a vague hand gesturing across the way and down.

“Has to be, right?” Steve answered.

“I hope so,” this from me. I saw one of the forms stir, and then try to sit up.

"It's me," a voice floated across the hall.

"Thank god," Steve cried, true concern in his words.

“Take it slow, Tess,” I advised. I could tell from the voice and the milk chocolate skin that it was her. “And don’t try to rush over!” I cast a baleful glance at Steve, the jock giving me a sheepish shrug in return.

“Dude, no worries there,” she advised me back. “What the fuck happened to us? Where are we?”

“We are asking the same questions, baby girl.”

Tess usually hated it when Steve called her that. Now, she didn’t seem to notice, and who could blame her? I would answer to ‘sweet petunia’ at the moment. I could tell my thoughts were starting to rally, my natural sarcasm creeping back in.

“Check on Ricki, would you?” Carmen asked from the side.

Tess hopped off the table with more grace than I had shown, shielding her eyes with one hand. “Would someone turn down the lights,” she demanded of the air. They stayed the same, of course.

Surely, someone is listening, I thought. I glanced around the cube, giving it a better once-over than I had before. I looked for any obvious…probes or whatever. Anything that could hint that we were being watched. I could not believe that we weren’t.

I could see Tess shaking the other girl, and none too gently. Steve had shown me more care, but then he knew me. The girl—Niki?—was relatively unknown to us.

“She’s breathing,” Tess told the group. “And her eyes are open but blank, just staring off at nothing.”

Ricki!” Carmen called out loudly, trying to elicit a shock.

It worked. Across from me, the figure sat bolt upright and clutched both hands to her breast. Her head whipped back and forth, long hair flipping wildly about. “Aaaaaahh!” she screamed, her whole body in full panic mode. Seeing Tess standing over her, Ricki flopped off the table and into Tess’s arms, taking both of them to the floor.

“Dude, chill! Chill, already!” Tess’s tone held little patience in it. She got to her knees, half holding Ricki and half pushing her away. It made for an awkward embrace. For some reason, my mind focused on the grapevine tattoo crawling up—Nicki’s?—upper arm and shoulder. I had always wanted to get a tattoo (really, you’re thinking that now?).

Tess tried to stand, but the sobbing girl clung to her like a second skin. I could see the moment Tess caved in, relaxing back to the floor and giving in to the embrace.

“Guys, seriously, what the fu…,” Tess cut off at the sound of heavy footsteps. The sound of clomping boots reverberated, coming closer and closer. It looked like we were about to confront one of our captors for the first time.

We saw the shadow of a large figure extending towards us in an elongated nightmare. That told me a new light source had appeared, probably from a door opening, directly behind the person moving inexorably our way. One heavy footfall fell after the other, with all the available time in the world marking the strides. When our captor came even with Steve’s and my cell, it pivoted on one heel and faced us directly.

A shiny, silver coverall that fit so tightly it looked painted on covered most of it. And I mean ‘It’; this creature was no human. Mottled green skin was exposed at the hands and from the neck up. Those hands had to be two (three!) sizes out of proportion to the rest of the body. There was purple hair bristling from the knuckles. The lumpy, bald head had oversized and pointed ears, with a notch missing from the right one, and fat lips. The bottom lip was thrust out, courtesy of two tusks (tusks?!) that curled up under its potato of a nose. A single, long purple hair grew out of the wart clinging to the tip of said nose.

Don’t say it, do not even think it!

It had a webbed belt wrapped around its thick waist, one side holding what looked like a tablet of sorts, the other with a handgun, sans holster. The weapon just hung there, with no visible attachment. It was a large pistol, sized for the creature's ridiculous hand, with a typically standard grip, and trigger assembly. The long barrel tapered down before suddenly flaring out into a cone on the end, and three, progressively smaller, concentric rings floated around it. Again, nothing visible connected the rings to the barrel.

Nope, nope, nope.

The thing opened its mouth and barked a series of grunts in our direction. The tusks garbled the sounds even more than they already were. ‘How do they keep from piercing their bulbous lips with those things’, I thought and clapped one hand against the side of my cheek. My bit-through tongue pulsed in my mouth.

It added gestures to the torrent of noise as if that would help us understand what it was saying any better. It barked one last grunt, made one last shooing gesture with its Hulk hands, then reached for the tablet at its side, and pressed a button.

Arcs of green lightning struck out from the force screens imprisoning us, one seeking and finding each person dead center in our sternum. I managed to stick my tongue to the roof of my mouth and out of the way before the seizure hit me. We all fell to the ground, convulsing like a demon in church.

Try as I might, I could not stop one last thought from crossing my mind.

Freaking Space Orcs! With Fraking Ray-guns!