The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey (40 page)

Tearing through Sofia’s pant leg, Maryanne exposed the extensiveness of her wounds. Placing a thick, gauze padding upon the gaping holes, she moved Sofia’s hands upon the thick pile of absorbent, encouraging her to keep the pressure needed to help alleviate the flow.

“I need to go help Stephen, okay? I’ll be right back,” Maryanne said, removing her hands from tending to the sites where John’s bullet had entered and passed through.

“Maryanne, go get John for me, please,” Sofia wept. “I need him by my side.”

“I’m sure you do, dear, but not right now. You just keep the pressure on your leg, okay?” she whispered, as she unzipped the top of her sack, anxiously looking over her shoulder at the murderer standing behind her. Maryanne knew all too well what these men were capable of. Whether or not this man was actually Sofia’s lost mate made no difference to her. She wanted nothing to do with him.

With her trembling hands, Maryanne apprehensively gathered up the medical supplies necessary to attend to Stephen’s wounds. Avoiding any hint of eye contact with the agent, she stood up. Staring at the ground, she began walking towards her comrade.

As she was about to pass by the courtyard’s entryway, three men entered through with their guns drawn. Their visors reflected the terror of her expression. Dropping her provisions, Maryanne stood motionless in the firing line of the surviving agents of John’s Sweeper team.

“Sit down,” one of the men whispered the command, motioning for her to move away from him.

Maryanne immediately obeyed, stepping back and lowering herself back down beside Sofia.

The second agent, seeing John standing with his face to the sky, bleeding from his torn skin and lacerated forehead, kept his sights on Stephen as he moved towards his team leader.

“Is everything alright, John?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” John stuttered, lowering his head towards his three captives.

Touching the torn skin of his ear, John felt the coagulated thickness of his liquid life dripping from his wounds. Wiping his hand across his shirt, the blood smeared, settling upon the creases of its fabric.

“I’m wounded,” he said, as his eyes met Sofia’s once again.

“Are we going to eliminate them, or are we going to drag them along with us?” the agent asked, unconcerned about his Sergeant’s trauma.

Writhing and suffering, Steven’s contorted image reflected off of the blued metal of John’s pistol as he raised it up from beside his thigh. John could feel the rising burn of anger and hate filling his mind, running through his veins, drawing out from the pores of his skin.

A fool had once called him a god, yet he had not done the deeds of a god. He had not created anything. He had only taken away. What kind of god does that make him? He had been deceived. A god could never be deceived. Sofia was alive. They knew it all along. The flames filled his eyes. They all knew it.

The cause of all her sufferings of the past: that is what I am, John thought. Sofia’s bleeding out of a wound caused by my hands. What have I done to cause others to want me to suffer so much? “What had
she
done?” he whispered

Like a thunder’s roaring riding upon the tails of lightening, the searing scorn of a decade of destruction poured through him. Three shots fired, three men fell… just like they taught him.

Before the last agent’s hollowed corpse could hit the ground, John’s pistol landed at his feet.

Staggering over to Sofia, he reached down, tearing the medic’s kit from the body of one of his dead comrades as he passed him by. Kneeling down beside her wounded, leg John unzipped the satchel. Removing the rapid-clot material from its paper shell, he placed it into the openings of her wounds. After wrapping a dressing around her injured extremity, he looked into her eyes, worn and tired. There were no words exchanged. Sofia just smiled, watery-eyed and pale. The soothing blanket of her embrace was the first step in a long run leading to the healing of his soul.

Maryanne was not quite as forgiving and accepting of John’s presence as Stephen and Sofia. As he took the helm of their vehicle, racing it through the city streets of the ruins, speeding and weaving wildly through the debris, John’s rough handling of the transporter reminded her of the carelessness of the Security personnel that she used to see blazing their deadly paths through the streets of Basket Town. Having been several years since dealing with those awful experiences, the jarring drive was bringing back all the painful memories of her past.

Struggling to keep the threaded needle steady under the rugged conditions, Maryanne pulled the sharp tip through Stephen’s skin as she unevenly sutured close the stab wounds inflicted by John. Although her mate’s years of experience under Raw’s Security had, up to this time, seemingly purged his mind of reacting to painful stimuli, Maryanne was left feeling a sense of cold nausea with each piercing of the jag. For the first time in their lives together, he was writhing with discomfort.

Lying across one of the side seats with his mate kneeling beside him on the floor, Stephen was cognizant, despite his misery, of the presence of John and Sofia. He was making a conscience effort to maintain control of his outward suffering to the best of his
ability.

As John cornered the vehicle around the edge of a fallen building, Maryanne slid across the puddles of Stephen’s blood, leaving a smeared track in her wake as she slammed into the opposing side of the transporter. Glaring over her shoulder, she pulled herself back to Stephen’s side. The intensity of John’s demeanor, not to mention his Agency history, was giving her cause for the increasing suspicion she was beginning to hold regarding his motives in helping them. Seeing Sofia sitting beside him was effecting a burning in her gut. He was obviously experienced behind the wheel, swerving between the waste, running it at top speed while constantly looking back to be sure that they were not being followed… but he was still a Sweeper. The hatred in his eyes bore witness to
it.

Exiting the ruins and entering the red sands of the desert, John spied out several air transporters rising high into the atmosphere. The burning blue-white lights of their glow were like shimmering stars visible in the afternoon sky. Following close behind, the billowing smoke of another group of transporters preparing for lift-off was filling the valley just over the peaks, leading John to their point of arrival.

“Where are all those tranporters headed?” John yelled over the rumbling of their engine as he leaned over the steering wheel, gazing up at the thick white contrails.

“Each one’s heading towards one of the asteroids that exists on the other side of Raw,” Stephen returned answer, cringing under Maryanne’s handiwork. “Central’s been working on this plan for years. We’re finally getting our chance to change things to our
advantage.”

“But, why the asteroids? Why are they going there?” John asked.

With an expression of disapproval on her face, Maryanne shook her head at Stephen’s revealing statements, discreetly mouthing the word
No
in his direction. Shrugging off her concerns, he gave into John’s inquisitiveness, grasping in his mind the importance of having a hardened Sweeper on their side.

“Central believes that Golden Planet may exist on one of them. Before the failed uprising on Raw, intelligence was gathered about several military operations taking place in the belt. They think Golden’s hidden in there somewhere, tucked away in the crevices of one of those giant rocks.”

As the glowing tails of the rising pillars disappeared into the bluish-green of the heavens, John could not help but think back to the day when he and Sofia had entered into the transporter on Labor, completely unaware of the future events that their actions would bring upon them. But the thoughts did not bring back feelings of peacefulness and innocence. Instead, just as he was conditioned to, the images of his mind brought frustration and murderous anger.

“Is there a base over those hills?” he asked, trying to ignore the mental pictures of his past.

“No. Central programmed several stolen airships from Raw, engineering them to land there. Each one is a one-way ticket once it takes off.”

“So there’s no way to bring them back?”

“It’s not that,” Stephen paused. “We’re anticipating that Golden’s forces will prevent most of us from coming home.”

“So, you’re going there to die?” John asked with amazement at the foolishness of the plan.

“We’re going there to reconnoiter. We need specific data concerning Golden’s leaders and their primary governing order. It’s the only way to defeat them. Every one of us volunteered for these missions, John. We’re well aware of the dangers.”

Finding it hard to believe that Sofia could get caught up in such a venture, as she was so passive and mindful of the living, he asked her, “Were you going with them?”

It was John’s first words to her. Speaking with him for the first time since their last meaningful discourse on that dreadful street in Basket Town, she found it was difficult to express her thoughts verbally. After so many years apart it felt like a dream. It seemed as if at any moment Maryanne’s voice would pull her from the world of sleep, back into the violently convulsing reality from which she had known for too long.

“No, John. They were helping me escape. They’ve arranged a special transporter for me… for us, now. Can you believe it? It’s going to take us back home.”

Home. John could hardly remember what the word meant on a conceptual level, let alone on an existential one.

“Back to Labor?” he asked.

“Yes. That’s where I was headed. I was going to go to our old home in the woods, knowing that, when you were able to, you would go there to find me.”

Long lost feelings of sadness and love, emotions of which John had not known for years, attempted to touch him anew. But the cold, unforgiving transformation that had held him captive for so long would not allow it. Ignoring her involvement of him in her plans to return to Labor, he instead delineated the conversation into the obscure.

“I have so many questions, Sofia. I don’t even know where to begin,” he said.

“I have just as many questions for you, too,” she said. “But, for now, I just want you to pay attention to me, okay? Just keep driving, but listen.”

Nodding in the affirmative, John was about to add a condition to his agreement, but Sofia cut him off mid-sentence.

“Please, promise me you won’t say a word until I’m finished.”

Agreeing to her plea with another nod of his head, John felt the gnawing pain of seeing her so aged, not having been by her side during the passing of so long a time. Her youthful beauty was still there… but then again, it was not. He wanted to reach his arm out to her, to hold… the burning anger of converted weakness was filling his mind. Like a well-programmed machine, he returned to his driving.

Knotting off the last bit of thread and cutting it short with her teeth, Maryanne listened to the driver’s side conversation from over her shoulder. She wiped the blood from Stephen’s body with a damp cloth. Feeling the attention to his wounds waning, Stephen lifted his head as John was nodding to Sofia. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but he was doing nothing to alleviate them.

“I never gave up the hope that you were alive.” Sofia whispered to him. “The days were so hot, and the nights were so cold and lonely, but you were always by my side. We may have been apart for many years, but the Savior allowed me to have you near… near in the person of our son.”

Opening his mouth, John was about to ask her if he understood her statement correctly. But Sofia quickly touched a trembling finger to his lips, shaking her head in disapproval. As promised, he returned his eyes to the rolling hills of flowing red sand, keeping the vehicle in its straight path, and remained silent.

Sitting back in her seat, Sofia continued, “It’s true. We had a son, John. His eyes were blue, like mine, but his lips and chin were yours. While I carried him within me, you were there. Every time I would look at him after he was born, I was, in some way, looking at you. I even named him after you.”

Maryanne realized that Stephen was watching her. He had caught her eavesdropping, and her watery eyes were revealing the anguish of her heart as she listened to her friend explaining the all-to-familiar tragedy of losing a child. Pulling Maryanne close to him, she laid her head down upon his chest. Together they listened to Sofia as she spoke so intimately from her heart.

“He was so beautiful, dear.”

A faint smile formed at the corner of her mouth.

“I wish you could have seen him. He had such a radiant smile. He almost never cried.”

A blade of the Savior’s light slipped through the window, splashing across the dashboard and spilling onto the steering wheel, crossing John’s fingers. Sofia watched it changing the shapes of the shadows that surrounded it, casting a sharply defined edge across its path.

“So many people believed that he was actually the One that would change the world. It’s so odd to think that anybody would… Strange events took place around him, even while he was in my womb, in the days when we had no idea that he was there.”

Sofia paused, contemplating upon the moments with her child. But after a moment she realized that she had not finished her story, and so she continued.

“He’s gone now,” she said. “But, he never died.”

Listening with a subtle hint of disbelief touching him at the back of his mind, John was feeling a growing sense of morbid sadness at their loss. He thought he felt that love that he once had, but again, the wall of fire, the mental restructuring that his mind had been forced through, took control, allowing it to last for only a brief moment before burning up into
oblivion.

Sofia sat in silence. Her mind was caught in the moment of the time long past of which she was speaking of.

“What happened to him, Sofia?” John asked, for some reason of which he himself did not understand.

Maybe it was to make more sense out of the violence, or the search for something deeper regarding the strange events that surrounded the child. Either way, it was another life ruined by the strands of time of which he had threaded.

“He just disappeared one day,” she replied.

Looking out through her reflection on the passenger side window, Sofia stared at the passing hills and open desert.

“It was such a wild morning. Maryanne and I went into hiding after his birth. Something terribly bizarre happened in the room that day. It was just so odd and frightening.”

She was speaking too vaguely for John to fully appreciate the situation of which she was recalling, to comprehend the depth of her story. But even if she had the ability to detail the events more clearly, John’s heart was far too concealed under its cloak of blackness to be reached on any emotive level.

“There was so much blood,” she continued. “The men that… I’m not really certain what happened that morning. But, it had been several years after his birth when the people began to riot. The battles with Raw’s Security forces were taking place on a daily basis. They were making their raids in the housing district when we were found in the hidden place that Stephen had built for
Maryanne.”

Speaking in stuttering, seemingly disorganized statements, Sofia found it virtually impossible to explain with words the events that had transpired on that fateful day. She tried her best, but only Maryanne and Stephen, as witnesses to the events, could appreciate what she was describing.

“They came into the room for him. He was nearly a young man at the time. There was so much shouting and screaming everywhere. I tried to grab his hand. I tried to pull him away, but… it was so… odd. The brightest light I’ve ever seen filled the room, but we were safe to look into it. It blinded the Security agents, John, but it didn’t harm Mary or me. It was… odd, so odd. When the light disappeared, all the agents fell down dead… and he was gone. Just like that… gone.”

Her lips were trembling like the finger that she had placed upon his mouth just moments earlier.

“He was so golden, John. So beautiful.”

Trying to reconcile in his mind the hatred that had built up inside of him with that desire to make everything right regarding his past mistakes, John could not help but feel the aches of hopelessness. There was nothing he could do to change what had already been done. He had a son that he would never meet… but the wall of indignation built up in his heart would not allow him beyond that objective fact.

As the light of the Savior bent through the window, it reflected off the glass in such a way that it caught John at the edge of his eye. Piercing through his pupil, it touched the nerves at the back of the orb. He was golden, John thought.
Golden
.

Jamming his foot into the brake, the transporter slid sideways, skidding through the sand. Throwing her hands on the metal bar mounted to the dash in front of her, Sofia braced herself against the sudden change in the vehicle’s motion. She could feel the dull thud of Maryanne’s body ramming into the rear of her seat. Grinding to an abrupt stop far from their destination, the vehicle became engulfed within its trailing red tail of dust.

“What’s going on?” Stephen shouted from the bench.

Looking over the seat, John’s expression was difficult to interpret as he unbuckled himself and began to rise. Maryanne crawled away from him, huddling close to Stephen, believing that the Sweeper was about to show his true deadly nature.

“Golden,” John said, climbing into the back of the transporter. “I know where you can find it. Those ships are heading to the wrong place. Is there any way to notify Central?”

“Well, yes,” Stephen stuttered, sensing the dread that was consuming his companion. “I have a com-system in my rucksack. What’s going on, John.”

“Those men and women are being sent to their deaths. They’re not going to find anything of worth on those asteroids. There’s nothing but soldier farms there.”