Contemptable Wrest - (Ch. 11): The Great Unknown Outlaw

It was all going in the right direction. My hope surged, three slow-motion slivers of light converging. Then we were plunged into undying darkness. And it was over. Not like, ‘Uuggh, I’m humiliated and my life is over.’ Drowned, not drowning. A minute ago sinking, now officially sunk.

Hook.

Line.

Sinker.

“Damn it!” I screamed into unrelenting night. “I picked the wrong one!” My words were swallowed by the blanket of black, as was I by defeat.

I dropped to my knees, plowing them against the now-invisible metal, and broke into sobs. “I should’ve picked Align!”

“It’s not on you.” my companion’s voice arose through the thick veil. “Maybe we just weren’t quick enough, or maybe we had it coming.”

We were separated from everything. Most notably, the people entrusted with the hope of our return. The darkness even cut me off from Gutterson. Hell, I felt out of touch with myself. And I just wanted another chance to wreck the plans of that hideous adversary out there.

“We let them down.” I couldn’t shout any more, physically and mentally weak. The noise had stopped anyway; you could hear the cry of a leaf if it fell to ground. “It was our only job. They’re stalling, thinking we’re coming to aid them.”

His voice was slow with disbelief. “We tried. So hard. We... we thought, we were gonna make it. In fact, I just had this theatrical feeling. We were.”

I dug into my eye sockets to drive the tears away, but it only squirted out more.

“No. No. No. We didn’t know what we were doing. Somebody lost the instructions, or maybe they didn’t like them and tried to hide ‘em so nobody would know how to play. After that, we had to wing it. But did we ever look hard enough to recover them? No. We didn’t care enough, we didn’t want to spend that time searching. We wrote our own rules, everybody wanted to play a different style, something more personally fun. The game leaders, the people in charge, adopted any rules they deemed made the game more fulfilling, and discarded the ‘lame’ ones.”

Hell, we never knew what we were playing our whole lives. And the rules seemed to be ever-changing.

I tore at my face. “Anyway, It’s no use. We screwed up. We lost.” My head turned, I could feel it, but the direction it faced was ambiguous. All I knew was that every direction might as well have been the same direction. “And I won’t sit here and rot away. There's nothing to play for. I'm not sure what I was playing for to begin with.”

I dragged myself, feeling along for the railing with blind hands.

Malibu heard my body scraping. “What are you doing?”

I couldn’t answer him. My face was leaking all over the place, but that wasn’t the reason. He shouldn’t have to know, shouldn’t have to see me like this. He shouldn’t even have to be in this mess; I fathered this mess when I opened too many portals, because I didn’t listen to him earlier.

“Wait a minute, son. Do you hear that?”

In my beleaguered state I barely heard his voice and sure as heck didn’t hear anything the crazy man thought he was hearing. In a fog of isolation, I became dead-set on the one thing that could end the loneliness, the torment of it all.

I was about to leap off the catwalk and float to my inevitable death.

My nail caught in a crack and I winced as it bent the wrong way. Shuffling along, I jammed my finger on something sturdy that budged. I brushed the pain away with a depleted thought, Oh, the flamethrower. Supposed to lift us to victory, but our attempt to retrieve it proved too greedy and its flame has consumed us instead. I laughed at the irony. I couldn’t find the strength to keep on being Robin; I went rogue, renamed myself Robber, a villain. The same reaction as any other Joker with nothing left would have: rob others, or rob the very last thing in your possession: your own breath of life, because you aren't living, if all you do is breathe. You're taking in the scant essentials of what you need. You're surviving.

My hand kept wandering, until it slipped off and dangled in empty space. The edge.

Finally there, I grappled onto the cold bars and erected myself. The bones, the flesh, they came easy. It was the flagging mind I wrestled to lift. And I beat him down, I shoved my conscience away, swapped him for deprivation's price, and planted my rocking legs on the middle rung, thighs inclined against the top one, suspended over the beckoning pit, drooped like a flag on a windless day.

Gutterson said, “Do you hear that whining sound?”

I laughed to myself. Then again a little stronger. And then another tore free from my lungs with barbs attached to it. The last one surprised me with its thirst for blood.

“Whining?” I languished. “That’s just me.” And I wailed like a tornado siren for a stretch.

“Pull yourself togeth-” the air froze on its climb out of his lungs. “Odd.” His attention had been diverted. “Do you feel that pressure in here?”

“If ‘in here’ is my head, then absolutely.” I cracked. “It says I can fly.”

He was finally catching onto the big idea. “Kevin,” he said diligently. I could picture him holding a hat over his heart. “I need you.”

A fresh pang of remorse rolled over me, but I swallowed it hot and hard. It severed the chords of my heart but I managed to say over the lump in my throat, “And you know what? I buy what it says. I’m gonna take this one-way ticket and fly into forever.”

I stabilized myself and relaxed. Except I couldn’t relax: I had no peace. I was torn between my immediate desire for relief and sticking around to give my buddy some sort of false solace unto starvation of body and soul. So I dredged up a collection of all the things that marked me a born loser, staring at the core of my worst memories so I could squash my reluctance to give up all of my eighteen years in a second. My breath backed up behind my lips, threatening to blow out my eyeballs, and all my muscles contracted until I thought I had been compacted into an air-tight can.

“Please.” Though I wished it to be imaginary, Malibu’s despairing voice was wriggling into my ear, “You’re all I’ve got left.”

I knew I was killing the both of us. But weren’t we already dead meat? Did I have a choice? Did it matter? One of my feet trickled its way upon the third and final bar between me and the easy way out, the act of which proved none too easy. Lifting my heel I came set to spring.

And my feet left the bar.

There sat a small rocking horse in the corner of a nursery. It was a distinct one from my childhood, the lone object in the room. Suddenly, there was a mighty peal of thunder and the room went pitch black. I heard the roar of a lion blast through the darkness, and my eyes darted around warily. But I was completely alone. Nothing could protect against it if it sought me. I fully expected to be ripped apart, when the warm lights popped back to normal--and I had company.

Where the rocking horse had been a second ago, stood a fluffy white cloud. It was a lamb. I heard a quiet “baah” and started to approach it.

But when it turned around I stopped dead in my tracks.

The most revolting sheep I had ever seen leered back at me. Sick yellow-grey, decaying, strips of flesh hung from its face, showing bone in some spots. Its nose was beaten in concave, a bloodied mess, crumpled into a snarl. The peeled-back lips revealed puny pink teeth. Upon closer inspection I noted teeny bumps on them, and realized each three-edged tooth was a tongue. Behind the "teeth", lay something spindly with lank tufts of black hair stained by some red paste that had been mushed around inside its mouth, paste stretching from top to bottom like great pillars of saliva.

I followed the soggy, bloody-black mess to the side of its cheek, which had been split open. It wound right on through the gutted jaw and attached at the top, to one side of its head. A foot-long, mutant black ear. That's what it was. The other ear was exactly the size and shape of your average bottle-cap, and at its summit bore a black dot the size of a pea.

Then I noticed something far worse. When I had first beheld this face that none should ever be cursed to look upon, I thought it had large black eyes. But now, as one popped, and oozed down its face like a pricked bubble of oil, I could see they were gouges that retreated deep into the skull. Already, another bubble was boobling up to take its place.

At its feet lay a furry bump. It was the corpse of some smaller animal. It had been eating it.

I took a step back. It regarded the meal beside its feet again, then cocked its head up at me. Next thing I knew, it flashed down and wrested the limp body between its teeth, shaking it viciously. The mangled lamb whipped around so fast that it became a blur and pulped what remained of the carcass, staining the walls and drenching me with blood. I looked away as liquid splattered the whites of my eyes until I could see only red. Clawing my eyes clean, I raised my hands to destroy the deformity.

But...there was only the rocking horse. I shrank back, confused, and watched it rise, as did the wall of the room it was held in, watched it become herculean in size, the walls now much like a castle, only coming to the mega-horse’s shoulders. People were coming out of it. Smoke curled around it from scattered blazes licking as high as the stallion’s wooden breast. The night was full of voices--the voices of the dead--calling out as they were slain, “This, the mighty city of Troy. It is fallen. Faaaawwlennn...”

And then another voice, reverberating, that clearly was not Gutterson, benevolently penetrated my senses from all sides saying, “You are greater than you know. Many fires burn: choose one; lend me your fire; don't let it blind you or you will feel my burn.”

The horse came to life in the midst of the chaos, pawed the ground, flared its nose twice, and the blocks of stone guarding the city were consumed as it let loose a flaming snort. Destruction done, it eyed me, and whinnied as it reared up. I could see a rider on its back, the bow he carried was twice as large as himself, and as the horse, giving a good vibe before melting the walls, charged straight through that molten rockslide, its jaw unhinged and went gnashing from side to side, lips dripping away. Again it snorted, this one into the ground, and sent jagged lumps of earth rippling towards me. The spikes were too wide to jump aside from their path, so I poised and sailed straight up into the air, but they were tall as well, and shorn me from the knees down. For the shock of blood and mad itch of agony, I never saw the arrow coming that splintered my rib cage.

And I was tugged backward through the air with an arching back, suddenly staring at coils of smoke, aware of the furious clip-clopping of hooves coming mercilessly closer.

Then my body was at rest, crowded by darkness. My chest was trying to keep up with my heart. There was something small and sturdy crammed through my breastbone, making my chest's function all that much harder. Tentatively, I slid my hand up to test how deep the thing was lodged--only to pass across my chest freely. Thaaats...good?

That's when I became aware of my lower limbs--which had apparently been numbed enough to elude my nerve endings--and flailed them around to understand where I was. Clinks and flat rattling sounds. Wait, my tailbone was getting greeted by a cylindrical object. My fingers trained over something solid and riddled with bumps.

Malibu screamed bloody murder. “For Chrissakes, don’t tell me you hurt yourself!”

Ah. I had been knocked flat on my rump, back on the catwalk, back to safety.

So what in the world was that? Did I just have an out-of-body experience?

I pondered words still floating around in my head, slammed in there like little ninja stars. Greater than I know? There is nothing great about me. I would know; I’m me. Lend you my fire? How do I get my fire? Lend it to who, let who do what with it? I might let you have it if I knew who it was I should give it to. But don't look now, I don't have anything to lend! Was someone trying to blind me? Maybe the rider of the horse was out to blind me. He had tried to...kill me! Maybe it was the voice: it was telling me I could choose, but that I should choose it. How is it a choice if it's bossing me around then? Heck, it could be any number of things. Whatever the voice had meant sure made me feel handicapped.

“Did, you...say something, Gut?” I called in a stupor.

“What’s going on up there? Are you hurt? What has gotten into you?”

I wasn’t sure what had gotten hold of me. But it wasn’t my pal. It had to be supernatural. What if this means you’re destined to become a hero! I can go for greater...Okay, insoluble narrationy voicey voice. Fire? It was trying to lead me in the right direction, I could sense that much. Hey, that’s right, you’re sitting on a log of fire.

I rolled my aching butt off of it and seized it. It felt…..like any ordinary metal object. What did you expect? To morph into a Flameborg the moment you touched it?

“Umm, I’m not sure what is happening to me.” I gave the synopsis. “One second I was trying to kill myself and the next I almost get killed by a berserk, carnivorous lamb, and someone slaps a supernatural set of headphones over my ears at full blast, complete with a virtual-reality visit to some legendary, whack-a-doo place in time.”

He grunted. “You playing games up there?”

I exclaimed, “Why would I make shit up at a time like this?”

I have not lost my mind. I know I did not imagine that.

“And somebody’s trying to tell me something.” Now that I thought about it, the words implied were going to get us out of this scratch. Why else send me such a glaring message? “It seems to be speaking about the long run.” I said more to myself than to my mate downstairs.

“What about?” he inquired as if I were a psychological patient.

“Something about…” I let off for suspense, during which I hefted the Thrower over my shoulder and pointed above my head, almost as if to signal that I had received the message, and squeezed the trigger. “ME BEING A BAD ASS!!!”

A stream of fire fit for a dragon pierced the darkness, shading color and depth back into our reality. I waved it back and forth, overjoyed by simply laying eyes on Gutterson. His eyes were saucers. I could see the fire’s reflection in them.

Gutterson pushed out a breath. “Although it is wonderful to see your face, don’t waste its gas, hothead.”

I asked, “Heh, need a light?” but I didn’t fan the flames again.

He seemed to take that phrase into account deeply. “You know, we can use that as a torch. First help me find that bag, I dropped it when I was tinkering with that son-of-a-lug-nut machine. Take a walk with me.”