Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2012 21:15:42 +0000
From: Michael Offutt <kavrik@hotmail.com>
Subject: Wraith Chapter Six - Gay Science Fiction

When you can, please remember to donate to the Nifty Archive to support the
free services that the website provides.  All the usual copyright stuff
applies to this novella.

Website: http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/books.html
Email: kavrik@hotmail.com
Twitter: @MichaelOffutt

Author's Note: If you visit my website, there is a picture of Jordan that I
drew myself in the gif image (website link above).  You will also find a
link to a blog post I wrote on Kolin and killsuits (with a pic of him I
drew myself). Kolin is an assassin that has been alive almost 100 years,
but he remains young-looking (in the mid-twenties) because he is addicted
to Liquid Life (a drug common on Avalon--the world in which this story
takes place. I have not explained Liquid Life in this novella, but it is
explained in the short story "The Insanity of Zero" also on the Nifty
Archive. "Wraith" uses the main characters featured in the science-fiction
novel "SLIPSTREAM", but is its own story which will be featured entirely on
Nifty.  Both of these stories are based off of the events established in
the short story, "The Insanity of Zero" (4500 words). If you haven't read
it, please check it out because it explains SO much. To those of you who
love this story and have written me and to those of you who have purchased
my book "Slipstream", I thank you for your support.


                                           *****

                                        Chapter Six

      Physical pain brought tears to Kolin's eyes, but he could make no
sound louder than a whimper.  His assailants kicked him with steel-toed
boots, the tips of which lay encased in shiny silver.  They struck him in
the ribs with clubs and despite the protective body armor of his killsuit,
he felt his own chest bones crack by the time they finished with him.

      He curled into a fetal position as the truck pulled up, and they
hauled him by the shoulders and feet, tossing his body into the metal bed
like a huge sack of potatoes.  His mouth brimmed with the taste of dust and
his own blood.

      He glanced around the truck bed and counted fourteen others, all
female.

      Each shared the role of prisoner.  But because of his injuries, Kolin
drew a sympathetic eye or two from the shackled and otherwise blank faces
of women who huddled together in the dark.

      Kolin closed his eyes and tried to summon what little strength he had
left.  Teeth clenched, he started to push his weight up using his hands,
when he realized his limbs had both been bound and immobilized with heavy
gauge wire.

      How or when that had happened, he couldn't recall.  A moment later,
someone grabbed him roughly by the blond hair on the back of his skull and
jerked him upward to a sitting position.  They fitted him with an obscenely
dirty collar, red with rust, around his bleeding neck.  He felt the corners
of the sharp metal bite into his flesh under his chin like a starving
desert coyote ripping the skin from a rabbit.

      Reflexively, he spit up blood, and he heard them laughing at him.  A
moment later, someone pressed a leather glove that smelt of engine fluid
down over his face, covering his eyes.  They immediately began to sting.

      Kolin thrashed in futility.  His feet were all but immobilized by
wire, and he only banged his head against the truck bed.  Desperately, he
clawed for air.  He turned his head to catch a breath and fiery pain in his
throat nearly plunged him into unconsciousness.  His assailant pinched off
his nose and shoved his face into the truck bed and continued to laugh as
he gasped through his mouth.  Blood pooled in the hollow of his cheek and
flowed over his swollen tongue.

      "Stop it," a voice said.  "You'll kill him.  If that's what you want
then just do it. But he's choking right now, and he'll die if you keep it
up."

      Whoever had their glove across his face removed it, and Kolin slumped
back against the cool metal of the tailgate.  He rolled onto his side so
that blood could drain from between his chapped lips.  A moment later,
drifting in and out of consciousness, he felt the truck lurch forward in
motion.

      He thought of Jordan and Kathy.  He didn't understand the emotion he
now felt, but his heart fluttered for the attractive jock.  It made him
feel dirty because the kid had been too young and beautiful for a scoundrel
like himself.  But it didn't stop him from wishing that he could have held
him just once, to sniff behind Jordan's ears and to taste his pink tongue
with his own.

      Kolin wished he could have died in their place.

      But they'd murdered him, and he had no one to blame but himself.

      Even now, he heard the peal from Ashley's rifle as if frozen in time.
It sounded over and over in his mind like a track stuck on repeat.  And try
as he might, he couldn't wipe out the image of Jordan lying lifeless on the
earth, blood matting his hair, and a pair of lifeless blue eyes drying out
in the Avalonian sun.

                                            *****

      "Where are we?" Kathy asked Jordan.  "Your eyesight has always been
better than mine.  Can you see anything?"

      Jordan rested.  Denim jeans mired in sand, eyes forward and spine
against the rough weather-beaten door of a 10' x 10' wooden shed in the
middle of a bone dry clearing.  He stared into nothingness.

      The sun in this strange place dipped like an overripe fruit in the
sky about to burst on the scrub of the world.  Two ancient trailers,
complete with flat tires and windows caked with dirt, squatted in the
earth.  A lone dirt road led off through the sagebrush desert.  Jordan
scanned the horizon, sheltering his eyes from the setting light with an
outstretched hand.  "The oil refinery lies in that direction.  I see smoke
rising from the factory chimneys so I'm thinking maybe seven or eight
miles.  I think we should go back and reclaim our bikes."

      "We can't leave him, Jordy," Kathy said.  Living exhaustion spattered
her voice and face.  "They'll kill him."

      "I know," Jordan sighed.  He had a drawn and tired face too.  Had
they been with others, they might have thought him strung out on drugs.  "I
know, and we're going after him.  Leaving him to Wraith is a fate worse
than death.  I intend to save him or die trying, but I'm afraid of the
monsters." When he said that last part, he looked helpless.  She smoothed
his dirty hair over one ear and said nothing.

      There really was nothing to say.

      Kathy's lids drooped with heavy invisible lead.  He didn't know if
this was the new face of despair.  All he did know was that his own heart
ached, even if he didn't have the strength to show it.

      Jordan had never felt this way about anyone.  His youth had focused
on hockey, on building his perfect body, and training for a rigorous sport
that demanded such perfection. He spent two years away from home with a
host family in order to play in a junior league.  He didn't have real
friends.  He had always thought he didn't date girls because he didn't have
time for them. But he knew now, things in his mind didn't set quite right
with that.  At seventeen and still a virgin, seeing Kolin's face stirred
something inside Jordan, and he wanted that feeling back.

      In his hand, he held the gun he'd recovered from the mine.

      Jordan helped his sister to her feet.  He rubbed the dirt from the
barrel of the Colt .44 with the tip of his index finger and then tucked the
pistol into the waistband of his denim jeans.  The handle pressed against
the dimple at the small of his back.

      They headed south, burning energy they didn't have, moving at a brisk
pace, keeping toward the smoke of the fuel refinery that rose above the red
rock bluffs that grew steeper and higher on the east.

      Kathy joined him on his right side, drawn and pale like a skinny
chick that stayed out of the sun.  Only this couldn't be further from the
truth.  The stress made her look like this.  He wondered how his own
outward appearance had changed. He glanced down at the veins protruding
along the skin of his lean arms and realized, he hadn't eaten a good meal
in days.

      Together they found their way through the sage-covered landscape in
the fading twilight.  The sheer rock cliff that rose hundreds of feet from
the desert floor on their left cast long shadows over the narrow gulley
where they traveled.  On the purple horizon, a large gibbous moon greeted
them along with the distant bark of wild dogs on the nocturnal prowl for
raw meat.

      "It's eerie at how similar this world is to our own," Kathy said,
lips dry and cracked.

      "I agree," he replied.  "Kolin told me that everything in this
dimension essentially had a twin on Earth with a few exceptions.  He also
stated that Avalon was several decades ahead of Earth in technology, which
explains why the cities look so similar to how we remember them despite
having been unpopulated since those first atomic tests in 1945.  I guess
the Trinity bomb over White Sands created a shockwave that tore across the
dimensions.  It destabilized the White Tower here and shortly afterward,
caused a cataclysmic explosion which killed just about everyone on Avalon.
They call it the Big Death."

      "And what of vanishings?" Kathy asked him.  "If our two worlds are
starting to overlap as Kolin had said, do you think that vanishings happen
to only unique individuals--ones that don't have a twin on this side or the
other?"

      "That's the only way it'd even seem possible," Jordan commented.
"Unless there's something at work here that he doesn't know about.  Given
the lack of information regarding the White Tower's purpose, it seems
logical that maybe overlaps between the dimensions have been happening for
centuries and that there are well-known established places on both planets
where the veil between dimensions is extremely thin."

      "Like the Bermuda Triangle," Kathy said.

      "Exactly.  Or places like it where notorious vanishings have taken
place even prior to 1945.  Of course, it's all theory because the
disappearances could just as well have occurred due to foul weather and
rogue waves."  He paused, resting his legs for a moment.  "Have you got any
water?"

      She handed him the water bottle from her pack, and he took a
mouthful.  While he slaked his thirst, she said, "I wonder, if we could
somehow charge our phones, if we could use them to dial someone on the
other side.  I mean, it seems plausible that there might still be a
connection, especially if there are areas of the world where the veil is
thin.  If we went there physically, we might be able to pick up a cell
tower on Earth."

      Jordan mulled that thought over in his mind, and then started walking
again.  "That's a lot of 'ifs'," he declared, "not to mention the roaming
charges."  He glanced over at her to see if she would chuckle, and she did
just that.

      They walked for three hours in a dark lit only by the gibbous moon
and a vibrant canopy of twinkling stars.  Up ahead lay the camp's guarded
perimeter, and they approached carefully so as to avoid being detected.
Where they could, they used sagebrush to block line of sight.  As an extra
precaution, Kathy and Jordan kept to the south side of the road that led
into the fuel refinery complex.

      The gate was well lit and patrolled by female guards carrying rifles
equipped with high- powered scopes.

      "I'm so hungry," Kathy whispered into his right ear as she crouched
next to him in the dirt.

      He squeezed her hand reassuringly.  "I am too.  I can't stop my
stomach from growling."  He paused, focusing on the task at hand.  "We
can't climb over the fence, or we'll get caught in the razor wire.  That's
bad.  Maybe there's another way around it that isn't guarded."

      "Wait," she said, tapping his shoulder with a finger.  "Look, there's
something coming toward us on the highway."

      He peered back along the road and saw headlights coming in from the
northwest.  When it got into view, he saw a covered truck painted in
U.S. Army green.

      "Good eyes, Kat," Jordan complimented her.  "When it stops, we'll
climb into the back of it and hide.  That'll get us inside.  Once in, we'll
wait for an opportunity to jump out and go and find our bikes."

      She nodded to acknowledge him, and so they waited.  The thrum of the
diesel engine grew louder as the truck approached.  Brakes squealed.  It
rolled up to the gate and stopped.  Jordan and Kathy leapt up from their
hiding spot and stepped onto the bumper.  Together, they went over the
tailgate and into the back of the truck.  They found a bed crammed with
numerous 40-gallon barrels that slid around easily enough if Jordan nudged
them with the toe of his sneaker.

      "These are empty," he whispered.  It must be a fuel truck of some
kind heading for the refinery."  Jordan spied a canvas tarp with a camo
print lying atop some of the barrels and reached over to pull it on top of
them.

      He heard the sound of boots on gravel as someone approached the rear
of the truck.  When they suddenly stopped, he thought that perhaps they'd
seen something.  Maybe his hair protruded from under the tarp or they saw
one of his shoes.

      Jordan held his breath and looked over at the wide, nervous eyes of
his sister who stared back at him unblinking.