Asylonia

5. Salvage

V.

David Attreus threw the bed covers from him like they were on fire, and capsized into the shallow blue of his frayed bedroom carpet. Struggling to come to terms with both consciousness and regular breathing, the palpitations of his heart rammed so painfully against his chest that the words cardiac arrest began to arrange themselves on the outskirts of his thoughts. He quarantined them off there before they took precedence over a much more fully-formed question. Had the terrible thing that had shocked him out of troubled sleep been part of the nightmare? Or, worse, part of a reality he was not yet ready to deal with? Had it been both? Some evil noise stealing out his surroundings and penetrating his sleep, the way the sound of his alarm clock sometimes caused sirens to ring out in his dreams? He could not tell for sure. All he knew was that, wherever it came from, it brought with it an anxiety that chafed at his very core and splintered outwards to assault every part of him. Rubbing his eyes, he replayed the awful sound in his mind, a discordance of screams, and of some unknown thing torn asunder.

'Aw man, you're kidding me,' he mumbled as he saw the display on his alarm clock through half-closed eyes. It was two thirty in the morning.

'Dammit,' he mumbled again.

Picking up where she had left off before David's nightmare took over, his mother manifested herself in his brain, only now she was not the woman he had known growing up; broad without being outright fat, rigid in posture, always dressed in a knee-length dress and dark brown stockings, with a charm and finesse about her character reserved for everybody but David himself. Instead, she was the way he had last seen her, as a slouch, pale-skinned woman in a white dressing gown, with unkempt blonde hair and a face full of confusion. What if she was out there? What if she had been wandering the marshes all this time, keeping herself hidden from him without really meaning to? What if whatever was out there had struck her down? As unlikely as it was, the idea both disturbed David and yet gave him hope.

Hauling his exhausted body upright, he stumbled towards the window and prized the curtains open. His eyes drifted to the streak of silvery Temüjin gunk stuck to the window like the secreted mucus of a snail's trail. His mother's image vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the screaming jaws of a severed head flying towards the window. Beyond that window, beyond a mountain of fallen oak trees, a dark, muddy-green beam shot through crackling sheets of orange and ginger, waning against the backdrop of a pre-dawn sky.

'The hell?' David yawned.

Though his body took its sweet time to get a grip on the art of being awake, his mind was already racing away. Whatever it was he was looking at, he doubted strongly that it had anything to do with the battles between the UEF and the Temüjin that sometimes spilled out onto the marshes. When the Temüjin attacked, a barrage of horror, gunfire, and bloodshed polluted the marshes for weeks.

There was none of that tonight. No terror in the air nor panic in the streets. No rattling of guns nor tremors of bombs. Nothing. Calm. An almost eerie tranquillity upset only by the suspicious blaze and a distant projector beam.

David shut the curtains. Prodding at the cold flesh of his cheeks, a new idea struck him. Quickly, he fumbled his way into a pair of oversized black denim jeans and slipped a featureless, navy blue hooded top over his Superman t-shirt. Stamping his size eleven feet into camo-print boots, he lugged a canvas tool belt from the shelf above his computer station and fastened it snugly against the blubber of his waist.

Drawing a deep breath, David ran his fingers along the belt to ensure everything was in place.

Flashlight. Telephone. A black-handled, double-edged trench knife and a 21st-century Phazzer Enforcer 4.5 million volt stun gun. Two photographs, one of his mother, the other of his father, both tucked into the side pocket. All present, correct and accounted for. Fighting his way into a black and red flannel jacket, David hopped out of the bedroom door with a nimbleness that defied his large frame.