The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey (30 page)

“Listen here, little dog,” Michaels said, as he bent over and whispered in John’s ear. “You aren’t going to do anything unless we tell you to. Got it?”

Still reeling under the shock of the blow, John was about to answer him when a sudden pulse of electricity ripped through his body, dropping him back to the floor.

“This is nothing compared to the pain that we will put you through if you do not listen to us,” Crawford screamed into his ear.

“Thirty-six weeks, John,” Michaels laughed. “We’ve got you for thirty-six weeks. Every day is going to be a living hell for you.”

The electrical activity had ceased. Being hoisted up to his feet gave him a flashback to the beatings that the Monster used to dish out. The cruelty of the men was too similar: they behaved in the same manner as the Monster. They cursed in the same manner. They yelled and screamed in the same manner. They even held to the same wicked expressions as the
Monster.

“Take the weapon and shoot the targets,” Crawford said as he set the rifle down upon the table. “We know that you already know how to do
that.”

“Do not charge that bolt until we’re clear, do you understand?” Michaels screamed.

“Yes, sir,” John moaned in reply.

The two men started towards the exit when Michaels turned back and said, “Remember, John, we’ll always be watching you. You can’t get away from us.”

He could hear the door slam shut behind him, followed by the initiation of its lock. It was not long before the static from an overhead speaker began to crackle throughout the room, followed by Michaels’ voice, loud and clear.

“Get up, now. Charge your weapon… and have fun shooting,” His laughter barely drowned out the hysterical burst from Crawford. “And, John, make sure you
kill
every target out there, or you’ll feel the
pain.”

Dragging himself to the table, John lifted the rifle from its sterile surface. It was the same type of weapon he had used for shooting practice back on Labor. Pulling back the charging handle, he chambered the first round of the magazine. Taking aim at the hundred-yard silhouette, its blackness contrasted heavily against the bright sterility of the room, John took in a deep breath. Squeezing the trigger, he fired off a single shot. As the bullet bore a hole through the target’s “chest”, John let the rifle’s sights drop, startled at the red, misty cloud that exploded out the back of the cardboard
image.

“Pretend that these are the men that killed Sofia, John. What would you like to do to them?” Crawford’s voice echoed. “Don’t stop shooting. Kill the targets, John.”

Shouldering the weapon once again, he took aim at the fifty-yard silhouette and fired off another round. As the bullet impacted the targets “head”, an audibly hollow crack resounded throughout the room with the accompaniment of tissue and bone and a similar blood spray blowing out the back. He looked at the receiver of the rifle, dropping the magazine to inspect the cartridges inside. Seeing nothing askew, he replaced it, bringing the weapon back to his shoulder.

“You should have seen Sofia drowning in her own blood that day, John. It was so, so terrible. I wish you could have been there.”

John fired another shot towards one of the two hundred-yard targets followed by a similar result.

“She cried so hard, ‘John, John. Help me.’”

John fired off several more rounds with the resultant blood and tissue littering the floor of the range.

“She blamed you for her ills, John. You know it was your fault. Remember when she pointed you out as the reason for her
suffering?”

He fired more rapidly, tearing into the “flesh” of the targets, gutting them thoroughly, until the rifle’s bolt locked open and the magazine was empty.

“Now, have a walk to the wall on the other side,” Crawford demanded.

John took a moment to lower the weapon’s sights from his eyes.

“Go ahead, have a look at your
kills
,” Michaels arrantly goaded him.

The walls and ceiling around the targets were splattered with crimson droplets and clotted tissue. The floor was a thick stew of bloody meat and bone. Dangling the rifle across the front of his thighs, John began the hazy, dream-like trek towards the carnage.

Growing steadily closer, he could see that the gore was spread across the entire range. The fifty-yard silhouette was just within reach. The paper target itself was beginning to saturate around its “head”, dripping down its “body”.

As he pulled up alongside the ranged milestone, he felt that near-blackness of the mind approaching as he took in the sight of the dead men and women strapped to the frames behind the targets. Bound hand-and-foot and taped across their mouths, their bullet-destroyed bodies leaked their life sustaining fluids upon the floor.

“Keep walking to the back wall, murderer, then look back and revel at your great accomplishment,” the cruel voice of Michaels belched out.

The rifle’s forearm slid from his hand, held up by the pistol grip of the other as John fell to his knees. In his disobedience, he brought the electrical bolt of insubordination branching through his brain and the nerves of his spinal cord, dropping him cold and motionless upon the floor.

“Let’s try that again. Get up and walk,” Michaels’ voice boomed through the speaker.

Pulling himself up by the metal bars of the target beside him, John stood upon his feet, his legs jittery and weak. Dragging the barrel of his rifle through the coagulating pools as he obeyed their command, he instinctively vomited on the front of his shirt. A tingle of electricity ran up his spine. They were toying with him. Ignoring the laughter dripping through the speakers, he kept moving. He had to, or else the pain would come
again.

His objective was the opposing wall, and that was where he set his eyes. In his periphery were the dead. He couldn’t escape them. He walked the path of death between his victims. Hollow and lifeless, John was no different than the empty corpses strung up around him.

Upon reaching the wall, he stretched forth his hand, touching its speckled, cold surface. The effects of his blood-soaked shooting spree were behind him. Placing his sweat-beaded head upon it, the fumes of its fresh coat of paint helped to subdue the iron smell at his back.

“Turn around, John,” Michaels demanded.

Wiping his forehead across his outstretched arm, he refused to look back. The violence that he had caused was innocently initiated, he thought. He would never have committed such an atrocity had he not been tricked into it. But all the philosophical musings in the world could not alleviate the fact of the matter: they died by his hands.

“Turn around, now!”

“I can’t,” he whispered.

The sudden jolt of a thousand needles burrowed into his brain as he once again fell, convulsing uncontrollably, to the floor.

“No, you can… and you will,” Michaels screamed through the speakers.

As the electricity abated, John scooped up his rifle by the sling and struggled to his feet. Turning to face his audience, the loud speakers began to fill the room with the music of the brass horns and stringed instruments, similar to that of which he and Sofia used to listen to back in their home on Labor. The torn and broken bodies of the dead stared back at him as if he were on trial.

“Look upon this man, women of Basket Town and men of the mines,” Crawford laughed through the loudspeaker. “This is your god. Some of you were witnesses to his powers of life, now behold, death is in his hands.”

The tenderness of Sofia’s chest made the sponge bath less inviting. She was sweaty and uncomfortably coated with the usual thick layers of dust that had seeped through her clothes and onto her skin throughout the course of the day. After allowing the water to dribble down her body, picking up bits of debris on its way into the tin pan in which she stood, it was not long before she felt at least a little more refreshed.

Her stomach was empty, but she was not in the mood for the consumption of anything. She awoke this morning with a burning nausea that had only grown more intense with each passing hour, but began to settle out by midday. A few crackers and a little water, that was the extent of Sofia’s intake since arriving home. After clothing herself in a freshly, Savior-dried skirt and top, she fell upon her cot, rubbing the aching muscles of her legs.

The fieldwork seemed more fatiguing than it had been in the recent past. Sleep was continually on her mind during the entirety of the day. Instead of breaking for lunches, Sofia was spending her mealtimes in the shade of the fruit trees, napping away. She would fall asleep the moment her head touched the grassy ground. Oftentimes, the last thing she would remember seeing before being woken up by Maryanne, were the multitudes of thin streaks crossing the sky above.

It had been three weeks since her last contact with John. Her female companion had not received any more news about his health, mentally or physically. After questioning Maryanne as to how she had obtained the information about him in the first place, Sofia was met with a curiously blank stare. For some reason she knew that Maryanne would eventually tell her about her
source
, and that more news of John would be incoming. But it was the anticipation regarding her love that was the most difficult aspect of living at all.

“Here, take this,” Michaels shouted, handing John a new rifle.

It was unlike the one that he had been using. Shorter in length, it was unusually light, even for a weapon of its size.

“You’d better shoot fast,” Crawford sneered. “Who knows, these may have been the ones that killed Sofia.”

With their usual laughter, the men hastened out of the room with Michaels closing the heavy, steel door behind them. The radial latch was turned on its center, engaging the locking hubs. John was left all alone in the kill house.

After a minute of waiting, the soldier’s voice blared through the overhead speaker, “You’ve got ninety seconds to eliminate all of them. If there’s more than one left, the gas goes on, and every one of you will be coughing your lungs out.”

The overhead lights at the mid-way point in the room flashed on, revealing once again the piles of both fresh and decayed bodies that John had been forced to use as targets over the past several weeks. The once clean walls and floors were now pockmarked with bullet holes and splattered with layers of dried blood and fleshy fragments. Each hour he had to remove the men and women from the target-frames and dump them wherever he saw fit. Then he had to endure the pain of watching more innocent victims, crying and vomiting their way onto the range, strapped into place by their escorting captors, left alone like worthless meat for him to devour. At night he slept among the dead. They were his constant companions. Death never left his side.

The paper target coverings for his victims were no longer used. That was part of the conditioning of the soul that was necessary in the beginning. He now had to look them in their eyes while he pulled the trigger. Their mouths were no longer taped shut, drowning out their screams. That was required to help ease him into the savage beast that he was becoming. Death came fast and furious once the shooting began. Acquiring and eliminating his targets was now a rote maneuver: ten targets, ten shots, seven seconds, twenty targets, twenty shots, fifteen seconds. There was no longer any thought required by him, he could practically perform the task of ending a man’s life in his sleep.

The screaming men and women that hung before him were no different than the last set, or the set that preceded them. After hundreds upon hundreds of kills, they were becoming merely sacks of fluids with sounds emanating from them. John had to force his mind to accept that they were non-human, otherwise there was no way he could endure what he was doing.

The smell of rotting carcasses heavily engulfed the stale air of the range, but John had grown accustomed to it. It no longer bothered him. Suicide was ruled out as an option from the very start, as the electricity would flow the moment he attempted to place the barrel of his firearm anywhere near his head.

The new day had brought with it an unusual test from Crawford and Michaels: ninety seconds, four targets to eliminate, a feat that seemed laughably simple. Ninety seconds. That’s a long time, John thought, lifting the rifle to his shoulder. As he began to take aim, the volume of angst among his prey began to rise. After placing the front sight of his weapon upon the first target, he was ready to commence with the test. As he began to place tension upon the trigger, he could hear what sounded like the door at the back of the range bursting open followed by shouts of various inflections. Several soldiers were rushing inside, taking cover behind the bodies of the
dead.

With the crack of a pistol, a bullet whizzed past John’s head, flattening out like a lead pancake against the thick steel door behind him before falling to the concrete floor. John’s instincts took over and he began running towards the nearest pile of corpses. Leaning into the bodies, he could feel the vibrations against his shoulder as several bullets burrowed deep into the thick of his fleshy cover. Peering around the corners of the decaying and crumbling heads, he could make out the movement of four soldiers, two of which were moving towards his flank. Their weapons were drawn and their eyes appeared unnaturally fearful. Another shot tore into the skull of his cover, sending brain matter and bony fragments splashing into his face.

Wiping the blood from his eyes, John dropped his weapon’s magazine into his hand. Michaels had left him only three rounds. He thought the firearm felt too light. That rotten, little… John thought, as he locked it back into the receiver’s well. Pulling the charging handle, he chambered one of the few cartridges available to him.

“Thirty seconds passed, John. You’d better move fast,” Crawford mocked.

The shouting of his enemies was intense, drowning out the screams of the living targets that hung across the range. The actions and the unusual terms that these so-called soldiers were using in their amateurish communications were a dead giveaway that they were miners and Basket Town women fighting for their lives, not formally trained individuals as their uniforms were made to imply. It helped him that they were unintentionally revealing their locations. Every scream, every shot, was an invisible path that John would use to lead him to the kill.

Raising the rifle up to his cheek John listened to the footsteps of the lead man as he cautiously approached his position. Some of the hanging targets were urging the miner to move faster, cautioning him as to John’s whereabouts. The enemy was in close range now, perhaps within three meters or less, he thought.

“Thirty seconds to gas,” the voice blared through the
loudspeaker.

John silently peered over his rifle’s sights. Strafing out of his cover and firing in a single swift motion, the shot tore into the man’s head, dropping his body to the ground. Lifeless and bathing in his pooling gore, his death sent the hanging targets into a wave of terrified howling.

Attempting to run for cover, the other “soldiers” fled in a disorderly display of wild commotion, blindly firing their handguns towards John’s general direction. Wildly spraying throughout the room, their bullets unintentionally pierced the walls, the dead piles and the living targets.

Taking careful aim, a second man fell in tune with the echoing report of John’s rifle. Then the third, a woman, flipped head over heals after the bullet’s impact, another addition to the rotting mess that surrounded her body.

Running towards his first fallen victim, John threw his rifle down and slid through the blood. Scooping up the man’s pistol, he controllably blew off cover-fire while attempting to reach another pile of death for safety.

As he checked the magazine’s cartridge quantity, he heard a single shot fired from the enemy’s direction, but there was no discernable impact of the bullet anywhere near him.

As more than thirty seconds passed, John waited in accepted anticipation for the incoming gas of doom to fill his lungs. He was ready to suffer… but his time did not come.

“I guess you scared her to death, John,” Crawford’s voice belched out in disgust. “That’s too bad. Now finish off the rest of the targets so we can get onto the next phase in your training.”

Pulling himself up by the arm of one of the corpses piled in front of him, John could see the last remaining “soldier” lying between the stacks of destroyed lives. The self-inflicted wound at the side of the woman’s head was evidence that she never intended to do him any harm. He tried to remain emotionless, but he found it difficult to hide his feelings when his soul, his essence of being
John
, was so close to being lost.

The moisture was building up at the inner corners of his eyes as he gathered up the pistols of the Planet’s fallen citizens. Ignoring the pleading cries of his “targets”, he wiped away the tears for the last time and walked over to the bench, dropping the weapons down upon it.

“Hurry up. We don’t have all day,” Michaels urged him with sadistic anticipation.

Dropping the magazine of one of the pistols, he checked its cartridge count and placed it back into the receiver. As he lifted the weapon, placing his sights on the first of several targets, the screaming and wailing heightened. With a moment of inaction on his part, John knew the electrical shock would soon be upon him. He would eventually give in to their torturous methods and take the lives of these innocents. It was one of the one few things in his life that he could be sure of. But as he stood there, a conductor of the symphony of pain, the orchestra of screams should have been deafening, but he couldn’t hear a sound.

The reddened tenderness caused by the acne that had grown upon Sofia’s fair skin was rather disturbing at first sight. Maryanne had told her that it was a normal part of the pregnancy and that it would probably clear up some time in the near future, before the baby was born. Not the type of person possessing a characteristic vanity, Sofia still wanted to be attractive to John, even on the aesthetic level. Her breasts were sore and swollen, as well. And, although there was very little she could do to contain it, she felt the pangs of hunger almost every second of the
day.

Checking the tick-marks that she had scraped onto one of the hidden bars underneath the mattress of her cot, Sofia counted out seventy-seven days without her love. Other than the original news that Maryanne had given to her several weeks earlier, there was nothing more that her
contact
could tell her about John’s condition or
whereabouts.

Depression was difficult to fight against, and crying herself to sleep was more and more becoming the only way she could obtain the rest that her body required of her. The fieldwork was also becoming stale and repetitive. And the frequent urination that she was beginning to experience was making it difficult to keep her mind busy at the tasks that she was assigned to.

Maryanne seemed to notice that Sofia was going further under the weather with each passing day. Sofia had heard her whispering on several occasions during the night meetings with her
contact
, stating to him that it was imperative that he find something out about John’s present condition in order to soothe Sofia’s heart and mind. And while the agent was agreeable as to Maryanne’s request, his frequent nighttime visits were of little value in that
regard.

Fearful of losing her to the darkness of overwhelming grief, one night Maryanne confided in Sofia about her involvement with several members of the Security, especially her contact and dedicated mate, Stephen, and the secretive organization that was networking throughout the various levels of the planet’s governing agencies. She explained to her that, within the currently governing command pyramids, there were hundreds of men and women working to overthrow the powers-that-be from the top down.