Weekly Drabble #225: A Lure (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'not a cry for help' from Stormblessed, and with which, we're back in Horrak-Sarn with a follow-up to Emmanuel's encounter with someone who wasn't making a cry for help. Enjoy!

~

A Lure:

Nobody calls for help in the City.

That was another lesson Emmanuel had been told several times. That he’d disregarded it got him called a ‘stupid, fat fuck’ when he got back to camp. That he’d survived doing so got him called a ‘lucky,fat fuck’. The girl, he was then told, was his responsibility.

Yemima – she’d told him that was her name – clung to him like a scared Pomeranian hiding behind a St. Bernard, barely leaving his side. She was with him at every meal, worked alongside him and slept on the other cot in his small one-room hut. He didn’t know why; if it was protection she was after, there were plenty of tougher men here in the small shanty town. She didn’t talk much and he didn’t press. It had taken an entire day just to get her name. He continued with his chores, though being stupid enough to follow an unknown call for help without telling anyone, he’d been unofficially demoted back down to tasks in and around the small village.

It was a cluster of buildings between several large towers. There were no access points to the larger buildings that Emmanuel had ever seen, and if you got too close to them, the air started to feel off and there was a sensation that made your teeth ache. Manny didn’t know what they did, but they kept Watchers away. The City had a lot of empty space. You could fit many of Earth’s largest metropolii amongst the endlesss prawl of Horrak-Sarn. The towers and districts that belonged to the Masters were speckled across this urban ocean, each teeming with tens or hundreds of thousands – or even more – of slaves and servants, all of them carrying out the inscrutable whim of the City’s alien rulers.

In the empty spaces in between those cities-within-a-city, there were the survivors. Those who’d escaped the Masters and their descendants, entire generations never knowing Earth. Gangs ruled the largest blocks, providing safety in exchange for whatever they could squeeze from their inhabitants. In other regions, mutants and worse had risen from the Beneath to take whatever they could, factions raiding, fighting and even warring against one another for whatever scraps they could take. All of it under the gaze of the Masters, all of them knowing that if they grew too large or too troublesome, the aliens’ attention would turn from their own designs towards the City. Aircraft, gunships and chariots would swarm the skies, human foot soldiers and the Masters themselves would sweep through the streets and leave nothing but corpses and ash behind.

The trick was, Manny had been told, being strong enough to survive but not so strong that the Masters had cause to think you a threat. Many communities had died because they’d guessed wrong – one way or the other. In Horrak-Sarn, there were no better tomorrows. There was only living to see that next dawn, day by day and year by year. That was what this small group, the Fullerton Barrows, was doing. The same thing Manny was realizing that he was doing, too. The same thing that Yemima had done to survive.

“I was model,” she told him unprompted while they were washing the camp’s clothes. “I lived in Moscow and went to parties, meet many nice man. One day, my agent she say she have very big job for me. Very rich man, he have boat. He want pretty girls to impress his friends on cruise. She say it pay well, so I take job. Cruise ends badly. Storm comes, ship is pulled into sky. I end up here. No parties. No nice man. I work in chain gang, Boss there, he... he take liking to me. He...” she stumbled over her English. “He make me do things. One time, he pull be away from other slaves. He want to do things again, but I have shiv. I stab him and I run. I get away before other guards know. I don’t know if he live. Gabin find me. He use me, too. Then you come.”

“The others said I was stupid,” he said. “For going to find you. I was, but,” he tried to smile. It was a tired, but sympathetic grin. He’d saved someone. Despite everything else that had happened to him over the last few weeks, he’d managed to do something good. “I’m glad I did.”

Yemima put a hand on Emmanuel’s shoulder. “You save me. That is why I stay with you.”

“You don’t have to. I mean, there’s lots of other guys here. Stronger, better looking-”

She put a finger to his lips. It tasted like soap. “You nice man,” she told him. “Other people here, they are not so nice.” They were quiet for some time after that before Yemima spoke again. “I tell you how I come here. How did you?”

Manny was silent for several moments. “My friends,” he said. “There was a three-parter midnight showing of horror movies that we all wanted to see. I just wanted to stay home with some snacks and stream them, but they wanted to go. They said I needed to get out more, so I gave in. There were a few hundred people all sitting on blankets and in the grass. There was a big movie screen up, with speakers all around the park. It wasn’t too cold and there weren’t any insects out. We got through the first movie.” He licked his lips. “We never finished the second.”

“What happened?”

“The skies,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper as the horror of that day came rushing back. “They just split open, like someone took an axe and just... and just cut them. It came through. This bulbous, swollen thing. I didn’t even think it was real at first. This was all some War of the Worlds shit going on, but people started screaming, the organizers were running and I realized that this wasn’t a hoax. It was real. What happened next is all a blur. I don’t remember that much of it.” He remembered the shrieking hordes of terrified humans shoving at each other as they fled. Manny’s friends had disappeared in – and under – the crush of bodies. He hadn’t seen them since. He hoped that that was a good sign.

“Then it goes dark,” Yemima commented. “It goes dark and you wake up in...” she struggled for the next word, but couldn’t find it. “You wake up in ship,” she said instead.

Manny nodded. “In the ship,” he agreed. “It stunk like shit. Like shit and fear and wrong, didn’t it?”

She nodded. “Bad place. You look around and think you are in open room, but you are not.”

“No.” The air had felt wrong, like just before a storm. He’d found out why. Everyone was sitting in a small box, marked with glowing lines of every colour in the rainbow. One man stood up and tried to walk out. As soon as his fought passed over one of those lines there was a crack and he leapt, cursing in pain. Others tried to step past their own coloured lines with similar results. There’d been a long silence as everyone realized that those bright lines were the edges of their cells. No, not cells;cages. They were in cages.

He hadn’t had long to dwell on that. “The guards came in,” Manny continued. “They were human, all dressed in uniforms with icons on their shoulders that I’d never seen before.” The markings of the Masters they served. “They told us our lives were over,” he said. “That we were... we were property.”

“In Moscow, some models are treated like that,” Yemima said. “If you have bad agency, you are rented out like prostitute. But I think I would rather work for them than be here.”

“‘Service will be rewarded, defiance will be punished’,” Manny quoted what the head guard had said to them. “One of the other prisoners lost it at that point. He was a big black guy. I think he might have been a football player, but I don’t really know sports. He just started throwing himself into the sides of his cell.” He suppressed the sudden surge of nausea. “I remember the sound of his skin cooking. He just kept screaming at them ‘Where’s my daughter? What’d you do with my daughter’?

“The guards looked at each other. The one in charge... he reached down and touched a button on his forearm. The field around the man’s cell came down.” Manny remembered that moment. The man charged out like a linebacker who’d send the entire enemy team flying. “We started cheering... and then the head guard hit him with some baton. He just fell like a puppet with no strings, started thrashing around and foaming.”

“It is sick stick,” Yemima pointed out.

“That’s what they call it?” Manny hadn’t been a slave. He wasn’t familiar with what the Masters’ troops had.

The woman nodded. “Big man or man on drugs, he may not feel tazer or shock. So guards here will use other thing. Sick sticks always work.”

“It did this time,” he agreed. “I thought that they were going to beat him to death. Instead, two of the others pulled him to his feet. He was drooling. He couldn’t even stand on his own, but they held him up and then...” he suddenly felt cold. “Then, it came in.”

The door at the far end of the cargo bay – and that’s what they were, Manny had thought, cargo– opened and another figure entered. “It was short,” he said. “Shorter than any of the guards there. I never saw its face; it was wearing some kind of helmet, but the shape of it... the way it moved, the way it walked... it wasn’t human.”

“It was Master. A little one.”

“Is there a difference?” He hadn’t known there were different kinds. He’d never seen them before and the others here at the Barrows didn’t talk about the Masters in any detail.

“To them, maybe. Not to us.”

Emmanuel was quiet for several moments. “Do you want me to continue?”

“Please,” Yemima asked. “Tell me. It is ugly, I know. But tell me.”

“It only spoke two words,” the young man said at last. “The head guard turned to it. All of them, they were... they knew it was in charge. That’s how they were acting. The head guard turned to it and he pointed to the football player and said ‘he was the first to resist’. Then it spoke. It was just one word. ‘Yes’, but the way it sounded... I couldn’t breathe. It raised its left hand. There was... there was something on its palm.

“The man was awake. He looked at it and he asked one last time where his daughter was. It never answered. It killed him. There... you see, there was this hum and the device it had glowed. Just a little, you see? Not much. Not even as much as a nightlight. And then he screamed and... and we all screamed too. He just... he dissolved. Like he wasn’t solid. His skin just... it turned into vapour. We could all smell it, worse than when he was throwing himself into the cell.

“There was... I don’t know what it was, but there was a chain reaction. It spread from his face, down his neck and chest. His skin just kept... it just kept dissolving, like he was sugar in water. More vapour was coming out from under his clothes and he was still screaming. In a few seconds, his face was completely flayed. His muscles were next. Then his eyes. And he was still screaming. I didn’t... I didn’t think anyone could make sounds like that. He didn’t stop until his vocal cords were gone.”

He was shaking now. “I don’t know when he died. It was after he stopped screaming, but I don’t know how long. I saw... God... I saw his brain slide out of the holes in his skull. That was when the guards dropped him. That was when it looked at us. It just said one more word. ‘Obey’, like... like... fuck, like it was a museum tour guide giving directions and not like it hadn’t just killed a man in front of us. Then it left. The guards left the body on the floor.” It took several minutes before it stopped dissolving. “That’s, uh...” he was sweating and his stomach felt like it was twisting itself inside out. “That’s how I came here.”

“That is bad way,” Yemima said with a nod. “But, I think, there is no good way to come here. But you are free. You are free and because you are, I am free.”

He smiled, trying to chase off the ghosts of horrible memories. “It was stupid,” he said, repeating his earlier point. “But I’m still glad I did.”

“So am I. The only one not happy about it is Gabin and he is in belly of Watchers, so fuck him.”

“Fuck him,” Manny agreed.

“You may have been stupid,” Yemima said with a smile. “But I am glad you were. But you cannot be stupid all the time. You are nice man. I have not seen any since I have come here. The City does not like nice man. It changes them or it kills them. You must be careful and,” she put her head on his shoulder. “You must stay nice.”

“I’ll do my best,” Manny promised, his cheeks reddening.

“Good. Now, you must help this model continue to wash clothes, da?” Yemima’s smile turned playful. “Because that is what a nice man does.”

“Sure,” he agreed with a smile of his own. “That’s exactly what he does.”