By Simon Drax
October 27, 2009
* * *
“Alive,” Trista breathed under a black sky filled with indifferent stars. “She’s alive, alive, alive…”
There came the roar of an engine. Trista lifted her battered face to the flash of harsh beams in the dark. Brakes, doors, shadows. And scuffled moments later, Trista was wincing as Frost and Billy hauled her up from the looped sprays of blood glistening on the desert sand.
Trista swayed in the glare of the car’s lights, groggy as a boxer bludgeoned into near oblivion but still standing. With torn knuckles she batted at Frost and Billy as if the robot and boy were not her friends but her opponents. “Mori’s alive, alive!”
Billy gaped, blinked. “But how do you—?”
“Because we’re all still here, you idiot,” Trista growled, clutching the gore of her midsection. She bled from a dozen wounds. “The Nox Golgoth will not dare harm Mori for fear of initiating the Exit Vector. If Mori dies at the wrong time, in the wrong place, then… we all die. Everybody dies. She’s alive!”
Frost scanned the area. “But not here,” she said, her sensors ticking and humming with quiet yet mounting alarm. There was a wheep! and Frost turned. “Not anywhere! The Nox Golgoth must have taken her to the—”
“—the Shift Eldritch, yes,” Trista hissed. “The lair between life and death. Oh, the stupid, reeking pile of feces and foul unsacred seed! I’ll—oh, oh, yarghgh! Billy! Bandages! Anything! Now, boy!”
“The car, Billy. Quickly.”
“The Nox Golgoth thinks I won’t follow it there,” Trista said as Billy returned with a bag and Trista urgently began dressing her wounds. “It thinks it won’t leave a path through the Life/Death field a mile wide! It thinks—ARGHGH!”
The veins in Trista’s neck bulged as she wound a long strip of cloth around her stomach. She pulled the knot tight.
Previous Page Page 1 of 5 Next page