No Turning Back

Chapter Fourty-Two: Drowning

The night time air snaked its way through the ruins whilst Richtofen sat alone in his makeshift office. He hummed softly to himself as his mind ticked over at a million miles per second. The generator was now repaired which it led to the next conundrum. How was he going to transport it to Gersch?

But the action of the day had taken its toll as sleep hovered over him. It was the same routine each night as the feelings of fatigue immediately invoked dread and despair. Whenever the darkness of the night loomed over the earth; Richtofen would feel his chest constrict and his throat tighten. Something he had become all too familiar with.

More recently, however, he had been plagued with a different kind of feeling. Each night Richtofen would find himself laying awake into the wee hours of the morning. And in a twisted turn of fate, he would find himself begging for sleep to numb him and carry his mind away from these feelings.

At first he could not diagnose the cause. The symptoms themselves had been confounding enough. But slowly, the more he became acquainted with these feelings the more he gleamed about their origins. And it was not long before he untangled the twisted thorns which had grown around the root.

Richtofen's heart welled up with crippling guilt as it felt like it would burst at any moment. The guilt of his past and the many people he had wronged had begun to haunt him like a evil omen. The faces, each face of every man, woman and child who he had harmed would flash before his mind's eye. His face twisted with anguish as he recounted their contorted expressions and guttural cries of agony before he stole their life.

Something was changing within Richtofen. He no longer derived the same pleasure from the suffering he inflicted - which was no easy feat as he went to great lengths to try. The demons that dwelled within him had opened the flood gates when they left. More specifically, that which had restrained his conscience all these years. This was his punishment.
Richtofen trembled on the makeshift bed of chairs. He began to sweat profusely within the thick cocoon of the cosmonaut suit. With each bead of perspiration that fell down his face; his discomfort quickly turned to feverishness.

The ensuing delirium slowly began to warp and distort his sense of reality. The walls of his office began to fall away as the room swam in a seedy haze of faded vision. Richtofen's body flushed with a wave of shivers as it switched to and fro between clamy sweats and unrelenting heat. Every hair on his body began to prick up as his skin tightened under the sea of goosebumps.

And then, his vision suddenly refocused. The walls of the office reappeared intact as the room reassembled itself back to normality. Richtofen looked around as he felt a wave of relief come over him. The shivers had ceased causing his tense muscles to immediately relax. Even the stream of sweat trailing down his brow had stopped.

But in the middle of any storm, there is always a fleeting moment of calm. Richtofen's respite was short-lived as he began to feel a weight pressing against his body. When he looked down, he saw beneath him an abyss which had opened up to reveal many pairs of decaying hands reaching up towards him. He then realised the floor itself had turned to glass; which was all that prevented him from tumbling down to meet this terrible fate. Richtofen gasped he watched a fine web of cracks begin to radiate out from beneath each chair leg.

The discoloured hands and broken fingernails of the deceased scraped and tapped against the cracking glass as they rose up from the murky depths. The abyss seemed to tunnel deep into the earth as if it led straight to Hades itself. Through the darkness he could make out a distant fiery glow. His bones chattered together as he wondered what awaited him.

Frozen in terror, Richtofen grimaced as he waited for the moment that the floor would shatter beneath him. But it never came. Instead, he was forced to gaze down in limbo as he watched the deep veins of splintering glass branch out into smaller capillaries. And then he heard it.