The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey (21 page)

“I don’t want to die,” one of the last surviving men stuttered before a bullet was fired into his skull, bone and matter following the exiting slug. The other Security members turned their weapons on the two remaining workers. With a single shot each, the men fell in the same manner.

The gunshots coincided too perfectly with John’s disappearance from her view. As he had not returned for several minutes, Sofia was certain that a terrible event had befallen him. Although he expressly forbade her from following him, she needed to know that everything was well and that he was still with her. She put it in her mind that he would probably be walking over the hill at any moment. But if he did not return to her soon, she would go against his wishes, and seek him out on her own.

The tension gripping the muscles of Sofia’s chest with each minute that passed by was more than she could bear. It had been five, maybe even ten minutes since John walked over the ridge, but it felt like hours. Finally ignoring his demands, Sofia stood up and began to cautiously make her way up the remainder of the slope.

Nearing the hilltop, she could hear the voices of men, although indiscernible, talking amongst themselves in a non-threatening manner. John was sitting at the edge of a cliff-like formation on a northward drop. Covered in ash and nearly invisible to her visual sense, Sofia nearly walked by him, as he blended almost too perfectly into the environment.

She was hardly quiet as she closed the gap between them. John turned to her holding his hand out, signaling for her to stand still. By John’s reaction, it was quite apparent that the two of them were close to danger. Crouching down and proceeding to cover her body in the same fashion as he had done, Sofia was soon just another natural formation buried within the powdery gray world.

Leaving the blood-bathed bodies where they fell, the Labor Security officials boarded their vehicles. The lead official removed his mask before taking his seat. John was able to catch a glimpse of the man, who did not look dissimilarly to the Monster from such a distant view. As the door closed, the Security transporters turned back towards the direction of the launch area and warehouses. The dense clouds left in their wake followed them in plumes of billowing smoke.

The day was well spent, and nighttime was soon to be upon them. The automated lights of the fenced-off installation were beginning to pop on, dimly at first, and slowly brightening.

John was suspicious of his familiarity with the agent he had just seen. Could that have been his father? The man was equally heartless, taking the lives of the workers without hesitation. Perhaps, he thought, he could find the answer to that question as well, once they infiltrated the compound below.

By the time the setting of the Savior over the westerly hills was upon them, an innumerable series of transporters had come and gone. John and Sofia’s lengthy wait in the darkening land was rewarded with another inconspicuous capture of the behind-the-scenes workings of Labor’s authoritarian structure. The cone-shaped illumination of the headlights of another wheeled vehicle appeared from the direction from which the Security personnel had earlier disappeared. With a rectangular bedded trailer in tow, it was heading towards the site of the massacre. The bloody area had been long covered over with a thick layer of ash. Prepared for what it was that was awaiting them, the men that exited the newly arrived transporter, orange suited with full-face masks that connected to a case hanging upon their thighs, blew the gray, powdery layer off of the corpses with the motorized blowers that were strapped to their backs.

Dragging the bodies beside the trailer, they were soon stacked up like the warehoused crates, mere objects without any significance as human beings. It was nauseating for John to watch: working in teams to hoist them into the bed, the men held the corpses by the hands and ankles. Swinging them back and forth in a pendulum manner until there was enough momentum, the orange suited agents released their grips, throwing the dead into the awaiting
container.

With a strong metallic thud echoing in its hollow, the first few bodies made contact with the floor of the trailer. After the first layer was piled in, the remaining cadavers were landing with a grotesquely spongy bounce.

By nightfall the deceased were gone. The area around the execution site was now strictly lit up by the towering poled-lights situated throughout the compound and lining its entire perimeter. As equally bright as the noontime daylight, the brightness was reflecting off the whitened surface of the surrounding environment and the metallic warehouse structures, casting a strange aura upon the land. The beams dispersing through the dust carried a winter like glow across the base and the outlying vicinity.

Leading them back to the ruins, John was in deep thought about what exactly it was he was hoping to obtain once inside the compound. The workers, their deaths forever seared into his mind, had mentioned Golden World. Someone had to know something regarding that area. And, perhaps, some answers regarding the Red Plant would manifest if they found the time to do some in-depth investigating.

Sofia did not ask what John had seen on the other side, or what fate had befallen the drunken men. By John’s demeanor she was aware that something awful had come to them, and she was in no mood to hear the details.

The ruinous station was now their temporary base of operations. John figured that they would need to further reconnoiter the area before making a decision as to how to proceed. If time did not permit them a sufficient span, enough to accomplish all the things he wanted, they could always return back to the ruins and wait until the following night.

Sofia refrained from speaking a single word during their return. It did not feel appropriate under the circumstances. Answers to her questions would be forthcoming soon enough, whether she liked it or not.

The northerly sky was aglow over the distant hilltop as they reached the abandoned station. Recovering their packs was found to be quite the chore, as the layers of ash had built up to a significant degree since they last saw them. Finding their gear hidden in the dimness of the night was not going to be an easy
task.

Locating the general area where they had left off in pursuit of the drunkards, they crawled upon their hands and knees, pushing aside the powder until they found their belongings.

“I know you’re not going to like this,” John began to say.

Sofia was beginning to hate those words. Nothing good ever followed them. Before he had the chance to lift his hand, rudely interrupting her, she cut him off mid-sentence.

“I know what you’re about to say, and if you’re thinking of leaving me here while you go in there, you’d better think again,” she boldly announced. “If something were to happen to you, what would become of me? You’re all I have. Please, don’t leave me behind like that again.”

Her words were piercingly convicting. And John was beginning to realize how selfish he was becoming. All along he had been neglecting Sofia’s feelings for the sake of his own curiosity and self-fulfillment. She was quite correct in her words, but John was so sure that they were close to the answers he so desired. They were so close he could almost taste them. He had brought her this far, but he knew that it was being effectuated through a terrible form of deceit on his part. If he went into the base alone he would not need to keep watching her back, too. It was all about him, now. He was no longer thinking as if the two of them were one, and it frightened
him.

As John reorganized his thoughts and removed the single, objective motivator in his whole excursion from the equation, Sofia was all that was left: his best friend and companion. Her security and happiness needed to be his greatest concern, even if his desires said otherwise.

“Okay,” he said. “I won’t do that to you again.”

Crawling beside him, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, saying, “Thank-you.”

The final meals from their packs were little more than morsels of left over items that they had rationed off during the past few days. As this was hopefully to be the last night that they would need their gear, they emptied their packs of most of the necessary contents, ammunition and fire starters, and folded up and buried everything else.

The Savior had, several hours ago, fallen over the horizon when John and Sofia finally prepared themselves mentally, as well as physically, to the abandonment of the ruins, making the final journey into the launch base. Placing their rifles across their backs, they began taking their first steps towards the true
unknown.

“Before we head that way, maybe we could gather up the tools that those men left behind,” John whispered. “We might find something of use.”

“That’s a good idea,” Sofia agreed.

Their hands were groping through the thick powder, feeling around for the pile of equipment that they had seen the workers leave behind earlier in the day during their alcoholic bingeing. But it was difficult to locate with any precision the whereabouts of the gear within the dark, ash-blanketed environment.

After a minute of digging around, John was ready to give up when Sofia suddenly exclaimed, “Here. Look what I found.”

Pulling up a leather utility belt, she handed it over to him. It was quite heavy and burdened with tools. While John held it in the dimness of his cupped lamplight, inspecting its contents through what little illumination filtered from between his fingers, Sofia pulled up another item. It was a rather small, rectangular object with a dangling cable protruding from one end. Pocketing a screwdriver, John could see that Sofia had found something of potentially great importance.

“What do you have there?” he asked.

“A machine of some type, I think,” she said, holding it out for him to take.

Examining it under the light, John could see that it was the computer apparatus that the technicians had used when they were working on the mainframe security systems. Finding a switch on the side, John brought the screen to life in a blazing blue aura that he immediately covered up with his hand before powering it down to the state that they had found it in.

Placing it in his shirt pocket he said, “I think I’ll hold onto this. We might actually have some use for it later.”

“Do you know how it works?” Sofia asked in amazement.

“Well, no,” he answered. “But I’m sure we can figure it out if we need to.”

Just outside the fenced perimeter of the launch area, John and Sofia remained prone positioned and motionless, camouflaged under their ashen cloaks, their faces masked by the cloth coverings John had fashioned for them. The chain link fence, less than a meter out of their reach, appeared somewhat flimsy and poorly constructed. John was not able to recognize its quality while he was stationed on the hilltop earlier in the evening, but it was still the only thing separating them from accessing the base. Several hundred meters to the northeast, they could see that the Highway terminated at, what was probably, a heavily guarded gateway.

The compound was teeming with activity. Men and women, clad in orange suits, with hard hats, goggles and sound deadening blue ear protectors, worked like robots on an assembly line, objective and cold.

Manned, forked transporters loaded and unloaded the erectly standing, missile shaped vehicles stationed on the launch pads with incredible efficiency. Lifting and unloading the uniformly shaped, wooden boxes with effortless motions, the crate-filled forklifts were driven to one of several warehouse terminals. Their boxes, peculiarly stencil-marked
Blue
, were scanned by a technician with a handheld apparatus reminiscent of the retinal scanners from the apartments of Labor. Afterwards they were sent on their ways to various other areas of the base.

Working in opposition to the off-loading teams, other crews simultaneously reloaded the air-transporters with various sized crates, stenciled upon their sides with their respective destinations. Upon the scaffolding that was wheeled alongside the airships’ hulls, men were hastily inspecting and documenting the integrities of the fuselages, while the technicians were laboring with the welding and wiring of the internal and external systems.

With the same handheld computer of which John hid in his pocket, he and Sofia observed a technician plugging his machine into the access port just outside of the loading bay doors of the nearest pre-launch vehicle. As the man moved his gloved fingers across the screen, the metallic grind of the gears began to roll, the massive steel door began its slow descent and the engines of the airship fired-up, churning in unison with the flashing yellow lights and blaring horns that surrounded the launch pad.

As the scaffoldings were wheeled away by unseen operators, the doors and panels of the airship were sealed shut, and the roaring of the vehicle elevated, reaching an intensity that caused Sofia and John to cover their ears. The launch area was cleared. And in a flash of flames and smoke, it took to the air, riding upon its southwesterly trajectory.

For at least an hour, the couple watched dozens of launches and landings, each one identically executed as the first. As one vehicle distanced itself to a comfortable degree for them to remove their hands from their ears, another began to make its descent onto the unoccupied pad. As it touched down on the concrete slab, concealed within a billowing cloud of smoke and agitated, airborne ash, another vehicle, from the distal side of the base to the north, began its fiery ascension closely followed by a transporter that was descending to take its place.

The cloud of dust formed by the vehicle that just touched down was starting to settle out, and the grounded ship was becoming faintly visible. The bay door, already opened long before it was in view, was an important piece of data with which John was using to construct his plan. The forked vehicles were just starting to move into it: approximately sixty seconds of time from the moment the transporter made contact with the landing zone.

After several dozen exchanges with ground control and the night sky, the pattern was beginning to become quite evident as to how the base operators were organizing the ships’ landings and launches. John began to see the opportunity at hand for them to infiltrate the base.

“If we time it just right,” he whispered, “we’ll be able to climb the fence, hiding in the dust cloud. It looks like the airship’s door opens right when it lands. We have about sixty seconds before those forked transporters start moving into it. I think we can sneak in and hide inside one of the out-going crates.”

“And then what?” she asked, incredulously, overtly displaying with her tone her thoughts on the foolishness of his plan.

“Well, I don’t know just yet. We can figure it out when the time comes.”

Sofia stared at him in disbelief. She didn’t blink. She just stared.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.

“Sure. I was thinking we could-,” she began to say.

“We’re not going home yet,” John interrupted.

Looking back at the launch pad, Sofia was beginning to wonder what the purpose was. What was it that John was hoping to obtain from any of this ridiculousness, she thought.

“Alright,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s get this over with.”

As the nearest vehicle had just landed, placing it in the back of the line for lift-off, John knew it would be a few minutes before it would be prepped and ready for launch. Moving up the line of concrete pads in a northerly fashion, the missile-like structures were synchronously arriving and departing from the base with uniform precision.

As the last rocket arose to the sky, John began to crawl closer to the fence with Sofia in tow.

“Are you ready? It’s almost our turn,” he said looking back at her.

“Just give me the word,” she responded unenthusiastically.

Walking up to the bay-door, terminal port, the technician plugged his computer in and waited for the forked transporter to make its final exit.

“Get ready, girl,” he whispered.

Even in the cold, drops of sweat were trailing down John’s forehead, dripping off of his brow. The perspiration darkened the edge of the cloth, facial covering at the folded rim that crossed his cheekbones. The bizarre creation of exposed flesh, blackened with moist soot that was partially washed away by the streaming liquid, and the staggered, ashen stripes, gave John the appearance of being scarred by a claw that had once torn his face.

“I’m ready, John. Just don’t lose me in that smoke,” she said.

Making its way out the bay door, the forked vehicle rolled down the ramp and into the nearest warehouse. With the transporter cleared, the technician moved his fingers across the computer’s screen.

“As soon as I get over, I’ll wait for you. We need to keep our bearings in that smoke. Otherwise, we’re sure to get caught when the dust settles.”

The engines began to churn. The bay door was closing, its gears grinding and wailing. Feeling the grip of Sofia’s hand at the tail of his shirt, John reached back and touched her one last time before the lift off. With the vessel set to take flight, those who had been working to load and unload it began dispersing to meet the needs of the next vehicle in line.