Project Aspire

Chapter 42 - The Red Man (Written by Penegrin Shaw)

I came back through and I knew that he had finally retired his game. Simon didn’t care anymore and although he had royally cut my plan into tiny shreds, I didn’t blame him for his revenge and I had to make a decision.

Simon had shown me a blueprint and my dream of conquering Earth was over and out, but I couldn’t let Tiamat win. I couldn’t go to my shallow grave (then elevator down to the inferno no doubt) without trying to take him with me.

As my vision came back, I saw it instantly. The girl called Amanda, stood back from the rest of her group. As they glared at me in unison with hate filled eyes, she jittered and stirred behind them as the spirit of Tiamat threw himself upon her like a blanket being laid across the coldest of shoulders. As if having a nightmare, she tried to shake him off to no avail.  None of her friends could see. He wasn’t invisible, he was stealth. He was smoke and mirrors. Her body moved in unnatural ways and I tried to draw her friend’s attention to her plight, yet they would not take their eyes from me and they argued with each other.

One of them struck me and I threw him across the room instinctively. Two leapt upon me and one grabbed my maxillaries with both of his hands so I could not bite him.

“The ship!” I yelled as best I could, “It sustains him! You must let me rip out the core!”

We wrestled upon the floor amongst the creatures that had slithered in to see if it was true and that Tiamat had fallen.

Those I fought with ignored me and one of them, the warrior, ripped out my teeth so I appeared just a scorched human and nothing more.

I watched Amanda stand and the way she smirked, the way she looked at me, I knew it was him! Tiamat was not defeated! Tiamat still lived!

“He is inside her!” I shrieked with a mouth full of my own blood and they kicked me, cursing me over and over like I deserved.

I thought of all the things I had done. All the horrors, all the perversions and pain I had indulged in and inflicted. I regretted none of it. It was, in the end, just what it was. As they struck out, I felt my mind alter, the way that Simon’s had when he gave in. I still fought them with my elbows and feet and hands, but inside, the fight was leaving me.

“Tiaa-maat!” I called to him, although I was looking in the eyes of the girl, “You have not won! Your army will die.” But the girl called Amanda laughed.

“He is crazy,” she said plainly to her friends, “We can’t take him with us to Earth and we can’t trust him on this ship as we journey there.”

I realised his plan right then. He would lose the army he had prepared, but Tiamat still had the ark he had built. He could get to Earth in a new manifestation and he could, in time do what he wanted. I had seen what his games with genetics had done. Tiamat played the long game.

“What do you mean, take him to Earth?” the warrior asked.

“We seal the control room and cut ourselves off from the rest of the ship as they tear each other apart. We don’t have to go back to that planet. We can go back to Earth.”

Before they could answer, Amanda pushed a blade through my throat, more to their shock than my own. To be ended by her of all people had a certain poetry to it.

In the background, somewhere in one of the rooms in my shared mind, I could hear a Wurlitzer jukebox playing a very old song on an imagined 45rpm vinyl record. I felt Simon call out to me and I let myself go to the music. I was certain that even the true devil, he who created Tiamat perhaps, would let me enjoy one song before he dragged me into the fires.