Wanted: Intact or Vapourised

Chapter 12

"What are they doing now?" Trenken asked with a hint of sarcasm.

"I'm not certain." Yooie said.

"We'll have to wait and see."

The Quarantine cell had merely two openings and the one served merely as a tease of death. The wide dark window that faced out into the dark base of the asteroid chasm, with the cell windows twinkling in a distance too murky to be ascertained beyond it's striking greatness.

Neego often wondered about breaking that window, as though she had the strength that would allow her to.

The other opening, the door that faced the window on the opposite wall, had become a sign of danger, because these weary days and nights (though there was little difference between day and night in the quarantine room) were interrupted only by the visitations of the awful pantheon of the machines.

Neego had been waiting, hour after hour, perhaps day after day, for the Boogieman to come and take his revenge. She had bitten him, torn his eyeball out of his soft face of green machine flesh. The sour taste had dwelled on her tongue, and she had been curled in a corner waiting for him to return.

But he had stopped spying all together.

She though that perhaps his head, crawling on it's spindly legs, would creep across the dark chasm window, it's one remaining eye peering in. But that hadn't happened. Nor had it's needle like hand crept under the door to reach for her.

Such ideas were most of what she could occupy her mind with as she waited for the feeling to come back into her legs. No matter what desperation Trenken showed, there was nothing he could do to offer comfort, because she knew he was as powerless as she was. They all were. Yooie had trapped them here. She hated him. He was a crazy, stupid, irritating, chattering old man, and everyone had to pretend he was something else. Just because if she got too angry she feared Moroni the nephitian would knock her teeth out, so big and strong he was, but even he was beginning to look diminished these days of late, mindlessly tending his little garden of mould like it was a lonely shrine to a God that had forgotten it's outpost and was off at a drunken party if it had not died completely. It certainly felt like the latter, even though Neego had never believed in God. Gods, maybe, sprites and grumbling and curses that ruined the crops, once upon a time, but nothing that cared for her.

But she hated Yooie Saigon. She wondered if there might be a way to kill him. He'd trapped her here, and trapped Trenken too, and Trenken seemed to like him.

When that door began to open, she had to assume the Boogieman was coming for her, finally. The only light the chamber bore was the dingy light humming in the ceiling and it was instantly overpowered by the unbridled shine that passed across the room as the door slid open and the shadow of something in the doorframe, casting long abominable shadows that twitched and jerked along the floor and were eaten up by the dark window before they could stretch themselves to completion.

Yooie Saigon stood up, passing into the bright light and covering his eyes. Moroni's eyes turned from his garden in the corner and he trudged over to Neego, picking her up in his thick arms and carrying her. The four of them gathered together instinctively as they awaited the thing to emerge.

It did not take long for a sort of partial relief to flow over her as she realised it was not the Boogieman. But another, all too familiar shape. Stout and drum-like, a fattened segment like made of a series of tires, curled elastic muscles wrapped around many-jointed legs that clopped forward rhythmically with the gentle whining sounds of the working machinery, a whining hiss, and, surrounded by the sickly bright light, the quadrupedal Unicorn emerged into the room, it's legs quivering, it's front-facing tentacle waving silently as though it were sniffing the air. The red eye on the tip before it's prod shined a narrow cone, searching systematically across the floor and the corners of the cell, while it's body stood motionless in the middle of the dank room. It peered systematically around until inevitably it found the humans in their pitiful cluster around Moroni's garden. It's eye glanced down to see the sprouting hairs of the mould and their white flowering tips, and stared deeply at the cultivation. Neego could feel Moroni's breath catching, his chest pressed against her arm as he carried her in his. Then the hostile red cone peered at all of them, lingering on Neego especially. The cone narrowed until all it covered was her face. She squinted against that incriminating light, like she was passing into a tunnel of fire. Had it come to discipline her? Had the Boogieman sent his dog in his place? They called it the Unicorn, the headless, faceless, flayed thing made from frozen slime stretched over an abominable skeleton of twisted wire, a desecration of the name, of a creature from old Earth that was supposed to be a miracle. This thing was an evil miracle.