Chapter 13: Blood Trails, Force Screens, and Backpacks

Today was new robe day. Yippee. I hadn’t been able to take off early, like I hoped. Master Alric has taken my education seriously, of late. He had always been serious about it, honestly. It was my newfound drive that has changed. Not that I hadn't applied myself diligently, of course, I had been. It was just that some of the initial fear had rubbed off. The routine had left me a little complacent, I admit. I wasn’t trying only to survive, anymore. At first, yes. That is why I had tried my hand—legs!—working at “J&T”’s with Tess.

I could remember it all, including the fear. Materializing on the planet’s surface, both of us were naked, blood-drenched, and shaking from the violence. It had been lucky that Tess had the forethought to grab a pair of the packs stored close to the departure platform. I had only still been on my feet through sheer adrenaline. I had stumbled after Tess until she took a wrong turn.

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“Tess, wait!” her fleeting form easily outpaced me. If I lost her, there were wet, red footprints painting the way she fled. The problem was, she zigged left when she should have zagged right. “That’s the wrong way!”

She tried to stop short but was moving too fast. She slid past the door she’d been aiming for, thank god! She turned to look back at me, her chest heaving in great gasps. There was a trail of red left behind her, like skate tracks on ice.

“That’s the trash compactor room. We need to go right. Right!” There was no time for a Star Wars reference then.

“What?!” Her eyes were wild, trying to dart in every direction all at once. I couldn’t blame her for being confused and turned around. The ship was a maze of stainless steel floors and white walls. It was all lit bright, but no lights or lamps could be seen. Our captors would have no trouble at all following our trail. Unless we could find one of the little, saucer-shaped cleaning bots. Commandeer it to hide our tracks. They were great at mopping the shiny floors free of pools of blood.

“Over here,” I gestured manically. I took the chance to play leader and hurried down the corridor leading to a possible escape. I had gotten a look at the ship’s blueprints when one of my jailers had left a holo-screen turned on. Whatever the bastard had stuck in my head helped me recall them, showing me a snapshot of what I’d seen... I had tried to lay it out for Tess, while we clung to each other in the aftermath of a group attempt to overpower our brutish guards. I had trouble thinking of them as Orcs, despite me being the one to say it first. It had been an easy quip from behind my cell’s force screen. Not as much when their tusks tried to rip into your face and their spittle splashed your eyes.

I had trouble keeping my feet under me for the first dozen steps. The freezing floor slicked generously with the blood leaking from my razed neck. If Steve hadn’t clocked the brute in the head from behind, and those tusks a fraction of an inch longer, I wouldn’t be here. I owed my life to Tess’s oversized boyfriend. I couldn’t even thank him, as he hauled off the floor and shoved me in her wake. We split, as per the plan.

I was supposed to be fleeing with Carmen, and Tess with Steve. It didn’t work out that way in the moment. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Tess did a double-take when she turned and saw it was me, and not Steve, who was laboring behind her. To her credit, she didn’t say anything or even scowl. She just waved me after and continued to run.

Now she was following me. I kept up my best pace, feeling her ragged breath on my shoulders. According to the blueprints I’d gleaned, we had two more cross corridors to pass before reaching our target. Clearly marked, the wire-framed layout in my memory showed a room labeled matter-transmitter array. It was our best, frankly only, hope of survival. That is what my translation called it; Matter-transmitter Array. I inferred its purpose, so many hours of print and film only confirmed my thought process. What else could it be, but a transporter?

The split had meant to divide our inevitable pursuers, the map showing two converging paths to the hoped-for transporter. I prayed the others would meet us there.

We made it past the first intersection, only to run across a pair of Orcs patrolling the next. I bowled into one, taking us both down. I had the momentary advantage over the surprised Orc, with me on top of my much larger opponent. I couldn’t hesitate, not and live. My panicked hay-makers connected with the soft tissues of the throat under me. I kept swinging and swinging, breathless in fear. The guard started gurgling, red froth bubbling at his mouth.

I tried to get up, slipped, and landed heavily on my right knee. Dammit! Using one hand to brace myself on the floor, I looked around for Tess. I needn’t have worried, she was much more suited to fighting than me. The green-skinned jaw of her opponent hung loose, a broken tusk lying on the floor. I hadn’t seen it, but I could imagine it. Tess coming in full blast, a half-step behind. Only a flying kick could account for the damage I saw. Now she kneeled, both joints pressed tight against the broken-jawed Orc’s neck. She was the one who had told me to literally go for the throat. It was the only weak point we could see on the Orcs, so it had been our target from the beginning.

Our eyes met, equally shocked. She helped me to my feet, and we limped together to the opaque force screen blocking us from our goal, leaving the corpses in our path.

“FUCK!” I screamed, the vibration tearing at my throat. I hardly ever cursed, but if there was a situation that called for it, it was this one. “Why didn’t I think of this?”

“It’s OK, OK. What do we do now, Book? Come on, you’ve got it. You’re the smart one.”

It was nice to hear, but I disagreed completely. If I was so smart, why didn’t I realize there’d be a force screen and not a door we could just push through? Our cells hadn’t had physical doors, and none of us had seen anything but more of the same. Not that we’d been given a guided tour of the spaceship. Just what we could see when we were taken to the various experimentation rooms.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Before I could clear my mind, and try to think of a solution, the unseen lights started pulsing a sickly orange. The strobes were accompanied by a blaring klaxon, signaling our escape attempt, no doubt. There was no time, no time!

The dark force screen flicked out of existence.

“Go! Go!”

What had just happened?

Tess must have seen the hesitation born of my confusion and grabbed me by the hand.

When I resisted—I have no idea why, other than shock—she put her face less than an inch from mine and locked eyes with me. Then she screamed.

“Book! Listen to me, we have to move! Now!”

I couldn’t move.

“Book,” Tess tried again. “Book…Jasper!”

That got through.

I nodded, cracking my forehead against hers. When mine started to bounce off, she wrapped both her hands around the back of my head and pulled me close. Our heads rested together, the contact giving me courage. I blinked rapidly, before breaking the connection. I tried to calm my heart, only to find it beating slower than it should have, considering.

I went over to a console dominating the center of the space, while Tess prowled the edges of the circular room. She looked in every shadowed corner and tried opening anything she could. The orange glow of the alarm clashed with the green text of what I assumed was the control panel. I read what I could as fast as I could. Please be idiot-proof!

“Where are they? Come on, Steve! Carmen! Please…please,” Tess stood at an opening mirroring the one we’d come in through. In theory, Carmen and Steve should be barreling in at any moment.

“Controls, controls,” I muttered as I scanned. We knew the ship we were in was orbiting a planet. We’d pieced it together, adding up everything and anything the five…four…of us had garnered. I had even seen some still photos from the surface. What I saw could only be summed up one way; Elves. Orcs and Elves, flying saucers, and matter transporters. Had I died all those weeks ago? Was any of this real, or a delusion brought on by neurons firing off in the throes of death? I’d heard that was the basis for the saying, ‘I saw my life passing before my eyes.’

I couldn’t have more than moments to figure out how to get us to the surface of the planet. I found a sub-folder several steps down in the directives. Opening it, an image of an Earth-like world poped up, with lots of green and blue. When I focused in on it, a hologram started spinning above the console. I didn’t have time to read the full list of the attributes displayed, but I did catch the coordinates of a few major population centers that had been mapped out. There was also a header labeling the world Planet EH-103, in bold type.

While I was fiddling with the controls, Tess found a collection of large packs stored in the room. She dragged four of them over to a raised platform, placed against the wall and midway between the open doorways. And she called me smart.

I started punching numbers into a display, the coordinates of the biggest city marked on the planet below. I changed the latitude marker by one degree. I didn’t want to plop us down smack dab in the city’s center. Desperately playing the virtual keyboard like a virtuoso, I looked for a timed delay option. Finding what I thought was everything needed to disassemble us here and reassemble us there, I limped to the platform holding the packs.

“Tess,” I called out, my voice croaking from the damage.

“They’re not here, Book! Where are they?”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry.” I dreaded it, but said it anyway. “Tess, we’re out of time.”

“No, no, no…no.”

“Tess, we have to…we all agreed to go, no matter what happened to the others. No matter!”

“God dammit, Book, I know that! I’m the one that made us all promise it.”

I could see the timer countdown, the alien numbers clear steadily marching to zero. I had left it to hover in the air, see-able from anywhere in the small room. I knew Tess could see it, and read it. We all knew the text, instantly translating in our mind’s eye.

“Tess.” All I did was say her name. Quiet, but firm. I didn’t beg, and I did not demand. Just spoke. She hung her head.

Tess slumped her shoulders, hunching forward like an old lady on her last legs. She shuffled my way. I wanted to scream at her to hurry but restrained the urge. How could they have not caught up to us, yet, I didn’t know. Either the Orcs or our friends should have found us by now.

I watched the numbers tick down. Tess placed one foot in front of the other. I didn’t know which would win out.

Tess made it by one second.

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I stiffed the scream wanting to escape my grasp. My throat hurt too much to let it out. A warm trickle that I could only assume was blood trickled its way to my stomach. Puking it back up terrified me. I knew it was coming, there was no getting over it.

Tess riffled through the packs. Our first priority was something to wear. Neither of us cared about the nudity, at least not yet. We were cold and wet with blood; our friends’, our enemies’—Orc blood was a surprisingly appealing lavender—and our own. I would even take one of the silver skin-suits at this point.

“Ha, found something,” she called out. I was supposed to be on sentry, but without some adrenaline flooding my system, I was dead on my feet.

I limped over to see what treasure she had found. Clothes! They were rough but clean. For some reason, they were sized to fit us. Or the ‘us’ we had become. I was a good four to five inches taller, topping six feet with room to spare. Tess, as well. And she might have been fit before, but I sure had not been. I had never been this toned. I even had visible abs for the first time.

Not wanting to soil our new clothes with blood, we ripped one of the shirts into rags. There were a couple of skins filled with water, so we used a sparing amount to wash down. We didn’t know how far we were from…anything. Frugal was the watchword.

We both seemed to notice we were bare-assed at the same time. Facing away into the darkness of the night, we quickly scrambled to get dressed. There was nothing new to see. We had not had any clothes since we crossed that damn field. Our captors cared nothing for the nakedness of their subjects. Made it easier to check the healing of surgical incisions. We’d been too scared to care much, ourselves. Once we’d escaped and set foot on solid ground, that seemed to change.

It was all perspective. Being covered now gave a sense of comfort, a return to some form of normality. How could things ever be normal for us, again?

Clad in our new outfits, we waited for dawn to break, bracing to face what came next.

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The bell above the front door to “Harmsson & Tak; *enchanted tailors*” had a different tone than the one over “Papers & Powers.” Just a random observation, on my part. The only thing that mattered was the attention it got from the clerk manning the service counter. She was red-haired and pale-skinned.

“Uh, Book, right?” She asked, with her flirt back on. A consummate professional.

“Yup, that’s me. How are things?” So smooth.

When she frowned there was a cute little crease between her eyes. I seemed to revert to Earth slang around her, for some reason.

“Things…are good?” A half question, half statement. I was here on business, after all.

“Any movement on the bulletin boards?”

“Yes, they turn over regularly.” She took it literally. “Let me go to the back, and I’ll get your new robes for you, OK?”

“Sounds good.”

When she came out from the back, I was going to ask if she knew of any adventure teams needing basic scrolls.

Oh, yeah. Her name, too.