Eutopia - Apocalypse

Chapter 6

It was the light dusting of powder that roused Eutopia as she sat, half-dreaming, in her corner. She had no clue as to how long it had been since the Commander had left her dry-lipped and wanting with the stoppered flask still right-way up at her side; tantalizingly close but entirely inaccessible. Her nose tickled with the dust that had settled on her face and she turned to rub it on her shoulder to satisfy the itch, aware that her fingers were cold, tingling at the restriction of circulation now.

‘Dust?’ she wondered, quietly, to herself. ‘Where’s that coming from?’ Eutopia shifted position, her head tilted up further to rake her eyes over the ceiling above and she couldn’t help but grin when she noticed the darker patch she had previously taken for the spreading fingers of damp. After all it was an extremely old building and she hadn’t given much attention to anything but the door she had assumed to be her only way out. But the very fine sprinkling of dust that was sifting down now proved otherwise. It was a hole.

Eutopia could barely contain herself as she practically leapt to her feet, arching her back and straightening her shoulders as much as she could to shake off the tension caused by sitting for too long in the same position. Her muscles were slow to respond, unmindful of the excited bounding of her heart. Her captured wrists, still fastened behind her, were a problem but not one that Eutopia would worry too much about. She stooped low and leant back against the wall behind, her lithe frame stretched as taut as a bowstring as she dropped her shoulders back and thrust her rear end out for balance as she carefully hopped one foot through the loop formed by her bound wrists, and then the other. Now her hands were in front but the altered position caused the thin wire around them to dig even further into her tortured flesh. Eutopia could see red rings around both wrists, a sliver of dried blood circling them both.

But now she had an escape route the pain mattered little to her. Phoibe could patch her up easily, once she returned home. The look of relief she knew she would see on that old, nutbrown face made her smile. She turned on the spot as she assessed the hole above, her long dark hair spilling over her shoulders and into her eyes which she flicked away with an annoyed toss of her head. Eutopia nibbled her lip. The ceiling was high. She judged the distance from floor to hole by eye, it was at least twelve foot up.

‘Pffft,’ she muttered, more to settle her own nerves than for any show of bravado. ‘Easy.’ Indeed it was. Eutopia had grown up on Horace and Phoibe’s vegetable farm with all the other village children of the Wolds. When they weren’t digging new trenches to plant crop, or turfing up the old crop come harvest time, the children of the Wolds could be found scaling trees. Their little bare feet, made tough by the rough farm-ground, could see them fly from root to tip of the tallest trees that made up so much of their backdrop in little under a few seconds. As a child, Eutopia had been perhaps the most daring. Often she had felt the need to prove herself to Mike, and she had relished in being the creator of the look of utter disbelief on the older boy’s face as she crowed from the crown of an old yew tree that he had been to chicken to climb himself. But her skill had mainly sprung from the many mistakes she had made along the way. Every winter, when the snow settled, her right arm still ached from the break Phoibe’d had to set when she’d fallen backwards from her favourite branch in the oak tree outside their little cottage, when she was six.

But she had never climbed without the full use of her hands before. She knew it wouldn’t be as easy as she wished it could be.

 The light that had been clawing its way through the small window had darkened outside to a dusky blue, letting shadows slip easily through the gap that had so steadily denied the sunlight. But she wouldn’t need her eyes. She was thankful in fact for the coming of darkness because it had drawn out whatever night time creature that had disturbed the dust above her and the movement of an owl, rat or whatever it was, had sent the powder-fine sprinkling through the hole.