Project Aspire

Chapter 12 - Simon (Written by Penegrin Shaw)

I can’t describe to you what they looked like, without you thinking worse of me and mistrusting even the base truths that I speak. I wouldn’t believe half the things I say either. My lies are interwoven and it confuses me sometimes. But even just a simple attempt at describing the beasts that had me in bondage was then and remains now, to the most part, unfathomable. I didn’t know where to begin at that juncture, what features to try to make sense of… When I look back on those first moments, well…

I had the epiphany that I was doomed from before the ship had even seen its own arse. I don’t know how long I’d been out of it when they found me lying in my own filth. I’d thought it imagined; another dream. Phantoms conjured from within me. Ferocious looking with a stench worse than my own.

My lips were cracked and had bled and dried over. The process had repeated so they felt twice the size and stung like hell on holiday. The sun had burnt my skin to a crisp and I vomited from the heat; the acid of it stinging the sores in my mouth. At some point they’d poured water into it and held my head up so that I didn’t choke. I remember that, so I knew they wanted me alive for a time at least. I didn’t argue. I couldn’t escape even if my bonds were loosened. My body felt weak and my mind was drained.

These things, these barbaric, hateful things, they were giants compared to me; inhuman, but not a million species away from us. I’d seen a lot of old science fiction B-movies and hammer horrors, so I got it. I half expected it, maybe? A twisted perversion of our own kind. Something from long ago; abandoned by nature and Idols. An Un-people.

I was being stretchered on something they’d fashioned from creeping vines, branches and leaves. They marched at speed, never taking a rest, only pausing to check that I wasn’t dead by hitting me about the cranium, or pressing and holding the tips of their spears into the flesh of my limbs, until they got a reaction from me. Yet they watered me at intervals and once fed me something that wasn’t a grub, which did not make me hallucinate as I had afore. It was meat; uncooked and unseasoned. It tasted of nothing other than its own blood, but I closed my eyes as they pressed it into my mouth, enjoyed it and probed with my tongue for rogue strings of it caught in my teeth long after it was gone. I didn’t care anymore.

I counted ten of them. Warriors, or huntsmen, it didn’t matter. They were powerfully built. I couldn’t have bettered any one of them alone, even if my kit bag had been properly stocked with the essentials to kill the flying clunge out of something. They were the killers. They were monsters, or something worse perhaps.

I was ignored. None spoke. They had mouths in the usual place, but filled with uneven shark’s teeth inside and I pictured Nosferatu in black and white in my head, but it no longer seemed funny. The end was nigh. The end I deserved? Who knew then…?

The way they had me tethered, I was an animal to them. Could I be meal to them also? The thought crossed my mind, but they didn’t seem the kind to smoke their food for eight and twenty days then cook it. They would’ve stuck me where they’d found me if they wanted my entrails.

My barbarians had a Plan A for me, only I never could have imagined just what torture awaited at stage left, to be inflicted. I should have tried to run. I should have found a way to escape them, or die in a fruitless attempt of freedom. I should have found strength, focused on Amanda, or just focused on myself as usual. I should have created a diversion or feigned a fit of some kind to  get them to stop and untie me...