|
WHY THE RED DRAGON WILL ROAR FOREVER MORE
* 7 *
Dove felt her head falling forward again and jerks herself awake again. Her long lashes obstruct the view as seen from her soul’s dark-golden windows a few times as she shakes her curly red hair out of her eyes. She adjusts her crudely made eyeglasses and yearns again for contacts in this world to cover up her bizarre eye color.
Being teased since childhood is not an easy thing to endure -- how can such cruelty come out of such innocence? They would press hard into her freckled skin yelling, “Connect the dots!” They would run their fingers though her hair looking for a cut scalp to explain her oddly red hair, and they would call her a freak because of her dark-golden eyes. Being in her mid-twenties, she thought it would get easier, but only a little. Now, she doesn’t know what people think. They are so ultra polite that they stopped saying things out loud. The only person she even halfway trusts is her fellow crewmate Mage; but she worries about his lust for her. She has been through THAT before!
She tries to use her imagination to see what is happening outside The Nephilim.
Sphinx grabs at his head in agony. No, that couldn’t have just happened. That HAD to be his imagination. He tries to call out for the captain using his mind, but it hurts too much. Something about that scream must have bruised his brain! He activates the squawk box, just static. Damn thing is probably on the fritz again. Hell, they hardly use it, anyway!
Duty tells him to stay at his post. This is what he really SHOULD do. He is risking ostracism or being placed into an ossuary! He sits there, debating with himself, cursing himself. Finally he can’t stand it any longer and unlocks himself from his chair and makes for the cockpit.
Walking through the pristine halls, he eventually makes it to the cockpit door. Faced with the light-pad lock, he hesitates as he attempts to recall the call sign for entry. It was really simple, too. It wasn’t the Star of David because that was for the supply closet. Was it the alchemical sign for mercury? No, that was for his washroom. Was it a careful reconstruction of Chartres cathedral? No, that was for the door to open to the outside. Hmmm … oh yeah! It is the Egyptian hieroglyph for light! He traces a circle on the pad and then jams his finger into the middle of the circle creating a dot.
The door slides up and Sphinx walks through shaking his head at himself. Too soon the horrific truth reveals itself to him. ‘Oh no! No no no no no no!!”
Why does the otherwise intelligent human brain make us do this? It told his legs to carry him TOWARDS the carnage instead of away from it. It was obvious by their strange poses in the chairs that both the Captain and Key were dead, but he just HAD to run to them anyway, didn’t he!
He saw Key-Master first. That was enough to make him shudder and feel his knees unhinge a little. Then, he turns to see the captain. There is a sudden sickening slowness in his movements, as if he were trying to turn around in a dream to face the pursuing monster. He suddenly feels his every joint and it feels like he has a mass around his voice box. It is an image he would never get out of his mind. It was as if he were suddenly in a cheap horror movie that nevertheless had enough money to spend on great special effects that made all the deaths way too realistic. If the body had not been in the captain’s chair, he would not have even known what to call it.
It almost looked like an open flower on an alien planet. Pieces of red flaps fell over the stalk of his neck in five uneven pieces. Only a little bit of blood was still squirting from the arteries there. White jagged missiles of all different sizes that must have been his skull had gone everywhere. Some pierced through to the back of the headrest, others had flown over the left and right (including some that had taken out poor K-M and his controls. The rest had destroyed the captain’s controls almost completely. Sparks and smoke rose slightly as if the suddenness of the event made SOMETHING in the cockpit want to seem alive.
Sphinx tries to turn around and run out, but he just falls over himself and throws up right there. Then he curls into a ball and shudders.
Mage is talking to himself again. “Come on, are we gonna blast this ship into confetti or what? This is BULLshit!” He shakes his head and slams his fist blindly on his control panel. He is about to call the captain to ask the status of the mission when suddenly he feels very relaxed. A voice that is not his own is in his head. It soothes him into submission. It lightly rubs at his brain like a silk handkerchief. Soon, it assumes a voice it finds there that will more conducive to its orders. It speaks in the tongue of Dove. The words flutter in his brain and rain down to his muscles like fluffy white feathers.
“OK, Dove.”
The huge round double-chinned head rolls around on a neck that is almost not visible. The green eyes roll back into his head as a couple drops of blood come out of his ear. “I love you, too.” His thin lips part in a very wide smile revealing teeth that look as if God lost a bet with the Devil when it came to arranging them.
“What was that?”
“What was what, Enigma?”
“You didn’t hear something, Pandora?”
“Hear what? We are trapped in this near-sound-proof and almost thought-proof sphere.”
“I don’t know. I thought I heard a … never mind.”
“What?”
“Just forget it, OK?”
“OK, sorry! Why are you so grumpy all of the sudden? Are you mad because I started to doze off a little?”
“No, but that did piss me off a little bit. You KNOW I am tired as well.”
“Sorry, love. So, you don’t want to talk about it?”
“No, I was just checking to see if you –“
But her words are stopped in shock as there is a muffled explosion and the ship rocks a bit.
“OK, you heard that, right Pandora?”
“Uh-huh. Did we shoot first? That felt really solid for Zion ammo to hit us with our shield in place.”
“I know.”
“I’m too warn out from the effort to get past this shielding to contact the Captain, can you do it?”
“Uh, no. I, uh, am too tired from giving the report, too, uh, Pandora. I feel as if I have a headache. It also feels like I, like I – “
“Don’t worry about it, Enigma, just try the squawk box if you want to.”
“Um, OK.” She looks around for the s-b and finally locates it. “Captain, what happened?”
KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHT
“Captain, do you copy? What just hit us?”
KSHHHHHHT
“Just static.”
Next>>
|
|