Stars Rain Down (31 page)

The shock wave struck him like a wrecking ball, driving him another ten meters across the smooth floor, where he slammed into a wall and stopped.

Bruised, bloodied and disoriented, he wobblingly tried to stand, but only slipped and fell back down. The cool ground felt so nice against his face that he couldn't imagine standing ever again. In his dizzy head, he drifted between the blue alien city and the memory of a terrible hang-over, when he'd lain on a cool smooth bathroom floor for hours.

He thought he heard rhino troopers grunting during one of his fits of consciousness, and when he opened his eyes and looked around, the ugly bastards were standing over him in a circle. They spoke back and forth, probably trying to decide what to feed him to.

Everything was dim, and Jack realized he didn't have long. He couldn't think straight. He numbly pawed at his chest and found what he thought was a gun, pulled the weapon out of its holster, fumbled at the hammer until it clicked, then aimed upward and fired. With a thump, a bright red-orange flare arced into the sky.

"Damn," he said. It wasn't the first time he mistook the flare gun for a weapon. After a moment, his frustration disappeared and he slipped into heavy darkness. None of the dreams he found there were pleasant.

Jack was confused when he woke up. Really confused. He'd been confused before, like when he hit the analogy section of his college entrance exams and couldn't figure out how
dispatch
might relate to
sluggishness.
This was worse. If anything, he was roughly as confused as the time his roommate gave him a funny mushroom, and he spent the rest of the day trying to determine how walls worked.

The most confusing part was that he was still alive.

His whole body hurt, and it felt like someone was trying to pull his arms out of their sockets. Worse, the room around him didn't make a lick of sense. The walls were in the wrong place and made of green webs. There was something oddly like a door nearby, but it was attached to the ceiling. Everything was completely wrong in ways he couldn't understand.

Jack wanted to throw up, but the empty pit in his stomach told him that might be uneventful.

He couldn't move. Cold shackles had every part of him pinned, and struggling against them was useless. He didn't bother to call for help, for fear some terrible thing might actually respond.

So he lay there, breathing and aching, waiting for whatever the hell came next. Time melted away without any way to measure it, and he might have lain there for hours, days, or weeks for all he knew. It was all the same. A single, unending moment, punctuated only by a procession of mangled memories, and whatever short fits of sleep interrupted them.

He thought back over the strange journey that brought him to that room. He remembered the life he used to have, all of the weird and wonderful places he'd seen, and the grateful faces he'd helped along the way.

That life existed once upon a time in a storybook that had since been burnt to ash and scattered to the wind. Instead, his life had been replaced by a world he hardly recognized; one which had been crushed, eviscerated and torn limb from limb.

In its smouldering remains, Jack had changed as well. He became someone different, who killed efficiently and without remorse, over and over without ever filling the cold hollow in his heart. It couldn't ever heal that wound, or quiet his mourning for a lifetime left behind.

Of this new life, which had suddenly hit a dead-end in a screwy alien prison, Jack knew only one thing: whatever changes might come from this point forward would be for the worse.

And after an eternity alone with his thoughts, Jack's prediction came true.

The strange door in the ceiling opened like denim unraveling, revealing a blinding light behind it, then three silhouettes walked through the portal and continued down the opposite wall. Jack stared at the visual puzzle for a few seconds until his head straightened itself out, then he had it: he'd been hanging from the ceiling all along, and his captors were on the floor beneath him.

Two rhinos stood with their massive autocannons at the ready, on either side of a new kind of alien. His species was much more human-like, but built in gangly funhouse proportions. He wore a form fitting uniform that covered from head to toe, made from some slick material in midnight-blue and slate grey.

The double-breasted jacket reminded Jack of fascist armies, and the leathery mask looked like something from a kinky sex shop. A white crescent crossed one eye.

The fascist alien's movements were pin-point specific, and fluid without excess. He stepped to the center of the room and stopped beneath Jack, then looked up at the prisoner and carefully examined him. Apparently satisfied, he tapped commands into some kind of computer on his wrist.

He looked back up at Jack and began to speak. The sounds were familiar, and Jack realized the alien was speaking a human language. It was a form of Arabic, one of the hundred languages that Jack hardly understood.

"I don't speak Arabic, asshole," he said.

The alien looked back to his computer and entered some more commands. Jack couldn't see the display very well, but he caught streams of text flying by in a rainbow of colors.

"Subject language identification English. Understand does you thing I say?"

"Yeah, sure. Fuck off. You understand that?"

"Dialect North American. Variety Midwestern?" The alien's sentence structure left much to be desired, but his accent was good and improving with every word. He had only a hint of something awkward in his pacing, like an autistic child reading a book report.

"Pacific States Alliance," Jack said.

"Thanking you." He tapped some information into his computer, and then turned his full attention back to Jack. "Now we is capable to understand each's other. I will to construct questions, and you are retrieving answer."

"And if I don't feel much like
retrieving answer
?"

The response was one word. "Pain."

The alien's sharp eyes studied Jack intently, analyzing every movement, twitch, and wayward glance. He felt like he was being vivisected.

"You is comprehension? Good. We process questions. What name is?"

"Go to fucking Hell."

The alien shook his head, then removed a short baton from his belt. He made sure Jack got a good look at the weapon, then he thrust it into Jack's armpit with the speed of a cobra strike. Jack's whole side exploded in strobing, lightning flashes of pain that streaked out across his chest and arm.

Jack gritted his teeth and grunted. His whole face twisted into a knot.

"I was studied species acutely, and I having found many fifty productive nerve intersections. It is introduction. Pain will to increase from resistance. You is comprehension?"

"Yes."

"Good. I repeating... what name is?"

"Pretty sure I told you to go to Hell."

The baton struck in the exact same spot, but the pain was worse. It was an unstoppable flood that made his arm spasm.

When it passed, Jack was struck by a memory of his karate teacher showing the kids pressure points, talking about how effective they could be when used properly.

"You is display challenge. Is soldier yes? Screaming not, but will to scream soon. I to begin new nerve package, and true pain inception."

Jack was drooling, but he couldn't do a thing about it.

"Personal name immaterial, Nefrem. Reveal location is battle fleet."

Jack's chest was twitching, and he was having trouble speaking. "I don't... don't think that... made it through the translator."

"Where location battle fleet is!? Nefrem fleet must to return. When is return?"

"What are you talking about?"

The alien reached up and grabbed Jack's throat. "When?" it demanded.

"I don't understand," he gurgled.

A deep, throaty growl came out of the alien, and his grip on Jack's throat tightened. "When?" the alien kept saying over and over again, until Jack slipped back into a darkness where more twisted dreams awaited him.

Jack's life took on a peculiar sort of rhythm: they left him completely alone in his cell to stew for long stretches, until such time as the fascist alien bastard came back to question and torture him. He was pushed up to and past his threshold for pain during each session, finding some temporary measure of peace when he passed out, only to awaken and repeat the process from the beginning.

Jack felt like Prometheus chained to his rock.

His resolve only lasted so long, and he started to answer questions, mingling truth and lies, and sometimes losing track of where one began and the other ended.

He made a game of giving the most ridiculous answers possible, speaking at length about a secret army called the
Lost Boys
who had a base hidden in
Never Never Land,
or the terrorist leader
Christopher Robin
and the suicide missions he was planning to launch from the
100 Acre Wood.
When he ran out of kids' books, he turned to movies, spinning stories about British super spies, flying Chinese monks, and space police with lenses on their hands.

The interrogator listened intently but never bought a word of it, and Jack discovered that the quality of his story telling had zero effect on the amount of torture he received.

He had no clue how much time passed or was passing, and he lost count of how many sessions he endured. The only change from one day to the next was the interrogator's grasp of English, which improved at a startling rate but remained oddly stilted.

Throughout it all, Jack somehow refused to divulge his name despite whatever pain he was subjected to; it was his alone, and he wouldn't let them have that piece of him. The interrogator addressed him only as Nefrem, and whenever Jack asked about the word, he was introduced to yet another pressure point, offering its own unique flavor of agony. The interrogator thought Jack was playing dumb, and no amount of arguing could convince him otherwise.

Their relationship was a tense one, yet they eventually grew oddly comfortable with one another. Jack spent more time howling and slobbering than he ever could have imagined, but the interrogator didn't relish the work; he performed it clinically, without joy or satisfaction. He even displayed mercy on occasion, and Jack thought it might be possible to forgive the interrogator. But those times didn't come often.

Whenever Jack was left alone, he prayed. It was something he hadn't done since he was a child, and it came awkwardly at first. He started out formal, complete with all the
holy father
s,
art
s and
thou
s he could remember, but soon he was talking to God like an old friend returned from a long trip.

He bargained when his prayers went unanswered, in hopes that smaller requests might succeed where larger ones were ignored, but that went nowhere quickly. Finally, the prayers disappeared and he just talked to himself... because unlike God, he was polite enough to reply.

Facing a future that promised nothing but pain, Jack started to wish for it all to just end, and he momentarily considered sharing this fact with the interrogator. He wasn't sure if the masked alien might grant his wish, or if that submission was exactly what they'd been working toward all along.

Jack never revealed his desire to die though, and the torture continued unabated. When reality grew unbearable, he retreated into ever more complex fantasies, and managed to sometimes convince himself the whole ordeal was just a terrible dream... that he'd wake up back in sunny San Jose at any moment, lying in his king-size bed with Jess snoring beside him. Then he'd sneak out to read the newspaper over a glass of orange juice with the morning light breaking through the trees outside his window.

The simple, prosaic details had the most gravity. They pulled him down into the dream and made it feel more real.

He could just about taste the tangy-sweet orange juice and feel its squishy pulp on his tongue when a surprising jolt of pain thrust him back into
real
reality. He was back in his cell, strapped to the ceiling like a modern art exhibit, while the interrogator stared up at him from below.

"You drifted away for a moment, Nefrem."

"So sorry about that," Jack said through gritted teeth, "What was the question?"

"I don't believe I asked one," the interrogator replied. "Tell me, though... where did you go?"

"Dunno know what you mean."

"When you were off just now. Where did you go?"

"Home," Jack said. The word evoked feelings that were strange and out of place. They were the phantom feelings of an amputated life.

The interrogator took a seat on the floor. That was a first. He was acting particularly strange this session, and Jack thought he should be on guard for trickery, but he didn't have the energy to be on guard against anything. His constant state of half-starved delirium made anything more complex than basic sarcasm impossible.

"That's the first question you've answered truthfully."

"No one's perfect," Jack groaned.

The interrogator was deep in thought. Jack considered spitting on him, but doubted he could muster the saliva.

"I have determined after rigorous experimentation that we are in a deadlock. An impasse. You cannot be broken by pain alone, and for that, I commend you."

"Thanks... I guess."

"I suspect that you have already resigned yourself to death. Perhaps you consider yourself dead already, and your body nothing but an empty shell."

"Naw. I just like the pain."

The interrogator let out a queer laugh like an excitable monkey. "Possible but unlikely. Your psychological state has deteroriated, and you've shown no signs of sexual arousal during our sessions... I suspect that you might fold were I to mutilate you, but I find that option unsavory."

"Don't have the balls to cut me?"

"I have employed mutilation before, but only in dire circumstances. I find such tactics dishonorable and morally reprehensible. They are not to be considered lightly."