NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/pub/dragons/4455

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-23 | 9.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!igor.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!kjc
From: [e-mail] (Kelly J. Cooper)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: Jameson W. Walker, still going and going and going and ...
Keywords: death, blood, death, eyes, death, blood, eyes, Death
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Dec 92 08:15:40 GMT
Organization: LCSR @ Rutgers University
Lines: 170


"When I saw you, you looked so surprised
 the oceans flowed in your blue-grey eyes.
 We stood and gazed through hot summer days,
 so tell me, how does it feel?" - Spacemen 3

"If red were blue, would we bleed the color of sky?"
            -Brenda Kahn


Jameson W. Walker, Part 6 (mostly)
___________________________________

     The world snapped almost audibly into place.  One time (mostly),
one dimension (mostly).  But still, the vision of dead eyes floated
before Jameson's mind.

     Jameson was remembering the last time she had died.

     It had been a boy.  The colonists weren't the standard humans she
usually ran into.  They were darker, their blood was brown and they
generally tended to be taller than the average red-blood human.  Mazn
was still a boy, though, for all the handspan in height he had over
her.

     She was in the most Southern of the developed areas on this
planet, playing Medic to a small community of farmers.  Mazn and
Jameson had just finished burying the last of the Qentals: one elder,
two adults, and three young had been lost, and they buried the last
adult on a hill with the rest of his family.  No one escaped
unscathed, and many families were completely extinct.  Mazn had lost
all his elders and one adult to the Wasting disease.  He still had a
younger sister, Shar, and one adult, Lann, left to his family.

     As they approached Mazn's house, they both looked curiously at
the front door, hanging open.  It wasn't until they had crossed the
threshold that the smell hit.  Mazn bolted down the hall to the
community room in the back of the house, Jameson hard upon his heels.

     Mazn slammed into the doorway and stopped.  The room was coated
with blood.  Lann had apparently taken an axe to the child and his own
lower limbs and was very nearly dead of blood loss.  His eyes blinked
sightlessly as he took quick, shallow breaths.  Mazn's face was a
frozen mask of shock and horror.  He whimpered softly.  Lann rolled
his head around at the noise to looked up.  He focused his eyes,
squinting hard, his breath coming with more difficulty, and grinned
weakly.  Saliva and blood dribbled out the corners of his mouth,
leaked from his nose.

     "Couldn't stand the ... the wait ..." he muttered wetly.  Mazn
moved slowly, as if in a dream, and collapsed into a kneeling position
beside his adult.  The material of his clothes soaked up the blood,
turning his dirty knee-protector pads a deeper brown.  He bowed his
head and raised his clasped hands.  He held them there for a moment,
knuckles whitened and quivering slightly.  The only sound in the room
was Lann's rasping breath.  Moving abruptly and putting all of his
strength into it, Mazn brought his clenched fist down hard on the
adult's throat.  Lann gargled and choked; his eyes opened very wide,
then he was still.  Mazn reached forward and almost indifferently
picked up the axe.  Jameson bolted.

     She could hear each thud in slow counter-point to her running
steps as she raced up the stairs.  She went to the room where she had
been guesting while staying in the area.  As she grabbed her pack, she
noticed the noise downstairs had stopped.  The house was silent a
moment.  She left the room as quickly as possible and ran into the
hallway.  Mazn was at the bottom of the steps.  He looked up at her
and she could see his face with complete clarity.  His eyes were dead.
Like a weary farmer, he walked up the stairs slowly.  There was life
in his face, in his left hand hanging loosely beside him, in his right
hand tightly gripping the axe, in his legs as they took the steps up
toward her.  But there was nothing in his eyes.  Nothing.

      Jameson waited at the top.  Each step settled heavily beneath
the boy as he climbed.  He wiped his hand across his forehead, pushing
sweaty hair from his eyes and leaving a dark blood smear on his face.
When he was within striking distance, he lifted the axe with both
hands and swung at her.  Jameson stepped away from the swing and the
momentum carried Mazn off-balance.  He began to fall sideways, his
right hand flailing, but lurched forward instead and made a grab at
Jameson.  He missed her, but caught the edge of her cloak before
falling backwards, pulling her off balance.  She dropped her bag as
they both tumbled down the steps.  There was the sound of wings.

     When she came to, it was cold.  Mazn was long dead, whether
killed by the fall or the axe he had landed upon, she did not stop to
check.  Her muscles were stiff and she was caked with dried blood.
His, it seemed.  She sat up slowly, holding her head as gently as she
could.  She hated concussions.  Lightly fingering her bruises, she
decided her neck had been broken.  Her body had completed most of the
major reconstruction and allowed her a brief rest.  Standing
carefully, she walked slowly back up the steps, cleaned herself as
well as she could and left the house, bag over her shoulder.

     Jameson went to the ten or so houses that still had people in
them, gathering children into the hover car at each stop.  She took
them back to the Medical station in Center City.  There was no one to
protest.  When she arrived, anyone who thought to complain looked at
her dishevelled face, her blood-stained clothing, and found themselves
unable to speak.  She left terse instructions for the few adults and
adolescents she had left behind to be picked up.  Then she left the
colony.  She had tended hundreds of people, the majority of which had
died.  The Wasting had taken tens of thousands, on several worlds.
There was nothing more she could do, and having discharged any
responsibility she felt toward these people and it became time to move
on.  With patience born of a kind of mental blindness, she sat through
her quarantine then got off-planet as quickly as she could.

     In the vast, antiseptic StreamLiner where she'd booked passage,
she often found herself scrubbing her skin raw, trying to rid it of
the impossible blood specks her mind insisted upon imagining.  It
wasn't until the night she looked up into the mirror and saw Mazn's
dead eyes staring back at her from her own face that she realized what
was going on.  With the unwilling movement akin to stretching cramped
muscle, she allowed herself to feel the emotional impact, allowed the
tears to fall and the tremors to rule her body.  And, rocking slowly
back and forth, holding herself, and breathing deeply, she cried.

     Dozing, exhausted, she remembered the sympathetic smile of the
dark-haired woman she had seen so often these past months.

     "Jameson, don't look ..." it was too late.  Jameson looked down
at her twisted body.  But, in the dream, her body had the calm, vacant
face of Mazn's corpse.  She wished she had hands to close his eyes.
Her eyes.  But she was a whisper, a soul, nothing solid to speak of
and unable to take a step because she was too tightly connected to
this body that did not die.  Jameson looked up.  The woman was
speaking to someone, her hand comfortably on the small of the figure's
back.  The image blurred as light seemed to explode in through the
opened front door.  The front hallway was blurred and glowing.
Swallowed by light, the woman disappeared for a moment, then stepped
back inside and leaned against the door jam.  She was almost
unrecognizable because of the brightness back-lighting her.  Jameson
could only faintly see that she seemed weary.  Her posture, her face.
She smiled when she met Jameson's eyes and pulled her fist from her
jeans' pocket.  She held it out to Jameson.  "I brought you a
present."  The words echoed, and floated.  The woman opened her hand
and Jameson saw, resting on her palm, a chrysalis with a split down
one side.  It opened farther and a butterfly drew itself out to
stumble forward and rest on the woman's fingertips.  It fanned its
wings, drying them, and Jameson felt her whole self tracing the whorls
of color as the wings moved first slowly, back and forth, then more
quickly to launch itself.  In a dizzying moment, Jameson saw through
its eyes then tumbled back to fall slowly, slowly into the body
beneath her.  The butterfly was suffused with light, then gone and the
last thing Jameson could see was the smile of the woman, bright
against her shadowed skin.

     When she came to, it was cold.  She looked down for the blood and
found cobblestones.  Everything shimmered as her mind searched for
context while her fingertips wonderingly explored the texture of the
each stone.  There was a close moment when she brushed by something
that had not yet happened to her, but which was located back farther
in the slipstream than her current reality.  There was a slight
wrench, and a chunk of time-reality-massless-energy was lost, then
everything snapped (finally) into one reality (mostly).

     Jameson looked up into the snow, the muffling whiteness all
around, more beautiful than a television tuned to a dead channel, and
smiled.  Picking herself up very carefully, she regarded this reality
with a bit more ... care, perhaps, than she normally noted such
things.  Shaking the soreness from her cold muscles, she turned and
pushed open the door to the inn.


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Kelly J. Cooper         \     Bubbles float to the surface...
Tragically Hip Waif      \      Comments appreciated.
...individual at large... \       [e-mail]
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