BACK   

= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 2.

Chapter 1

Two orderlies wheeled a deeply sedated female prisoner down long, shadowy corridors within the bowels of West Gotha Military Hospital No. 325.

The young woman was blonde, with thick wavy hair framing a thin face that was as much shadowy as it possessed a bruised attractiveness.

The two air force corpsmen's shoes squeaked on the clean, waxed floors. The gurney's wheels rolled with a faint smacking of grease like chewing gum in its wheel hubs. Each corpsman wore off-white scrubs of a faintly gray discoloration, spattered with tiny droplets of blood and body fluids that might be new from today, or baked in from years of endless laundering in the hospital’s gray, steaming basement laundries. Under his tunic, each hospital technician wore a wide, black leather belt from which dangled a small 35 mm automatic in a triangular licorice snap holster. Trained and alert as they were, ready for hand to hand combat or a gun battle if necessary (not unusual in the divided world of West Gotha and East Gotha), the two men could not be aware of a fourth figure who shadowed them.

Following through an endless series of gloomy archways, through long tunnels black as night, was a man in dark camouflage: the spy, Alton Hedrock, Tedda’s lover. Neither of the two orderlies could possibly know that.

If Tedda knew, it was only dimly so. They had knocked her out with mephisterol, veritol, and other powerful drugs designed not to kill her or make her unconscious. They filled her blood stream, permeated her meat and brain, and saturated her neural kelp. They had been injected by cold and cruel experts to make her thoughts and memories an open book for the Inquisitor who was about to probe into her crimes and conspiracies.

Tedda was dimly aware of being a disembodied soul inside the contained ocean of who she was, inside her skin, a floating sentience in a dark evening sea. She was the sea.

By a parallel metaphor—permitted only within the house of mirrors of mephisterol, where logic and illogic were mirror images—she was the hospital. The tunnels and halls through which she rolled or floated were not brick or concrete, but sinews and bones, arteries and pulsing neural networks within her own body. She was remotely aware of the endless war and nightmare enveloping all life in the two Gothas.

The two corpsmen were part of her dream state as much as they were part of their own waking reality. With pounding regularity, as the gurney rolled past passed rain-streaked windows hemmed in by tight steel-mesh, a bluish-gray light from outside would illuminate the prisoner's battered figure with a kind of chrome, underwater light.

With similar manic predictability, enemy streakers droned in from high up, some from orbit, and exploded on the city's force shields, seeking a weak spot. The prisoner’s wan and slack features would flicker with lightning reflected upon her bones and eye hollows.

West Gotha was in a perpetual state of war with her twin sister state, East Gotha. The two nations, in fact, shared a divided capital. A high wall, topped by barbed wire, ran down the center of the City of Gotha, capital of the nation and the world. Stationary mines, starving dogs, and all-seeing videobots on tank treads patrolled the no man’s land. The dead zone was a 100 meter wide strip, on either side of the brooding, rain-damp wall. Frightened and armed guards, with orders to shoot and kill intruders on sight (or be shot by a military police firing squad) patrolled on foot, on motorcycles with sidecars, and in armored cars. This was the world in which Tedda hovered between a drug-induced coma and fitful consciousness. Chained to the gurney, wheeled by combat-trained orderlies, she was dimly aware of distant explosions in the night.

Each detonation outside, following constant enemy provocations, was nearly soundless, felt only as a dim and distant shudder; that meant the incoming rocket had not chanced upon a momentary server-down somewhere on the invisible dome. The occasional hit that got through could devastate an entire factory or neighborhood, and the East Gotha side had been getting a similar drubbing day and night for as long as anyone could remember. Meanwhile, the force fields did not prevent rain and wind from slipping through—there were other filters to sift out chemical, biological, and radioactive weaponry. The world was so beaten down with all the poisons of war, however, that both sides had by necessity retreated to the use of still potent but cleaner weapons.

The patient was a prisoner. She had committed a crime of passion. Time and again, she saw motion-blurred images of herself astride her victim: two naked persons, one astride the other and holding that person’s hair while raising a huge kitchen carving knife. It was a scene so horrid that she always blanked it out in her mind when the knife reached the top of its arc of travel and started descending for the final lunging stab deep into pulsating red flesh awash with fresh blood.

The patient wore a flimsy gown with microscopic flower patterns whose attempt to convey warmth and femininity failed amid the sour smell and rips in the worn cotton fabric. She had a grayish sheet draped over her thin, sprawled legs. The soles of her feet looked orange-dirty, and her ankles looked knobby in proportion with the starved thinness of her calves. The gurney's back was cranked up, permitting her to sit, with her wrists manacled to the dull iron rails on either side. The woman's head was slightly raised, her mouth slightly open, her eyes staring straight ahead as if in alarm. A whitish, dried trail of drool fanned out from each corner of her mouth, running into the dimple of her chin. Under her left eye was a purple, puffy bruise with green and yellow underscores.

They stopped before a door marked simply in brown, painted-over numerals, 909. While both men awkwardly turned the long gurney with its huge, chipped-white wheels, one of them knocked on the door.

"Come in," said a man's oddly caressing, cruel voice.

TOP  |  MAIN

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.