Escape from Paradise

Chapter 13: Strangers In A Strange World

With a corner of his eye, Larry saw Jessie's silhouette dimming, stepping into the colorless crowd, her eyes still pressuring him, her accusing words still ringing in his head. The pink monster emerged out of its lair. When faced head-on, it appeared grand and powerful: not some slim worm but an angry, bulky whale that was about to flatten him. The train screamed. People on the platform backed away. People on the train covered their ears. Jessie watched him intensely, her eyes were not those of a murderer but of a curious spectator about to witness a special moment.

Never before felt fear surged from Larry's chest and spread through his entire body, locking it, shivering it, blanking his mind and activating ancient instincts that took over. Larry extended his hand at the train, a light flashed in his eyes followed by a momentary unfathomable surge of power during which space in between him and the train rippled and the giant monster stopped in its tracks.

It did not matter if people in the train were holding their ears or support beams, were sitting or standing, they all flew forward as pebbles -- bouncing, ricocheting against the seats, the beams and one another. Abrupt screams of surprise were followed by moans and sounds of broken bones. A pile of entwined, entangled, deformed humans lay in the front fifth of the train, some of them unconscious with twisted necks and limbs, others in great pain, a few of them at the end of the pile calmly inspected their broken legs or arms.

The strange power vanished as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared turning into an almost alien obscure memory, too strange to be true, too short to be analyzed. Larry searched for Jessie but all he saw were dumb stares of the crowd as if the thing they had just witnessed would have been nothing more but a show of hallucinogenic dazzling lights. This image of the colorless silent flock stuck into his mind as a definition of everything wrong with Paradise: all of them stood there clueless, with no capability to interpret anything that fell out of the context of their simple dull lives which contained only eating, drinking, watching, playing, partying and having sex. They were not living, they have never been truly alive and aware. They watched movies only for their moving images. They read books but noticed only shallow, simple themes. They drank to quench their thirst and not to taste the drink. Whatever they did, they did it in a superficial, dull way. Were Larry and Jessie the only ones awake in the world of sleepers?

Once he crawled on the platform, Larry turned around searching for Jessie, for any movement, listening for any odd sound, but there was none, not even that of distant steps. He wished to learn what she knew about the mysteries of this world, about him, about the lies and the truth behind the lies. Evidently, she threw him on the rails willing to prove to him or to herself that he was no ordinary man, that he was not what he seemed. She succeeded in that but the hate she expressed, that natural, immeasurable hate bothered Larry. What terrible things could he have done to deserve it? Why did she speak in riddles instead of telling his sins plainly? Strangely, Larry felt no grudge towards her because of what she had done instead, he experienced a strange profound admiration for another truly living person of this world. A villain had appeared in his quest for truth and the adventure became less lonely.

A hundred doctors buzzed in through the tunnels, stairways, and rooftop holes. The sides of the train opened up and the pile of human flesh spilled to the sides. The scene reminded Larry of the incident in front of the Palace only here he got to see the broken humans being flown away from up close, only now the spectacle was not magical or mysterious but had a strange sour taste of ugly reality. There was something hideous about the way the machines handled the bodies. The robots swarmed the victims in a chaotic frenzy, wrapping their tentacles about their waists, legs or arms, lifting them up in awry, askew positions, carrying them away; steel wingless flies holding a lesser pray in their drooped claws. Five minutes after the incident all evidence had disappeared without a trace including the eerie silence which surrounded the place during the clean-up.