Episode 4 - Cold Fusion

  Chapter 32 - Operation: Erratic Possibility (2)

  The explosion goes off louder than a gunshot, a visible shockwave reverberating through the empty air of the warehouse and over the settlement ponds.

  I lean on the railing, my attention trained like every other worker on the back corner, past pipes and water tanks towering towards the warehouse roof. A cloud of white steam rises to the ceiling, spreading across the surface, and ominously gathering in the moments before it will cool and drop down to smother the workers.

  “Get out!” I scream as far as my voice will carry. “Get out now!”

  The workers on the floor seem too stunned to react, heads turning from looking up at me to looking over again at the cloud of billowing white.

  I can feel Pooka; feral, mad joy bubbling gleefully as he arches his back and bristles his black fur while sublimating into ephemeral black fog. He dissolves into the white, cackling and snarling, his massless mist refusing to mix with the super-heated steam. As he breathes in the white chemical fog, I can feel our connection flow, threatening to fully dissolve our edges even as I fight the pull to sink into our collective consciousness. I can’t see where Everett went.

  Shion grabs my hand, pulling me away from the railing and out towards the entrance up by the headworks. “What have you done?” she demands, her eyes wide as she looks at the looming white mist that begins to drop on hundreds of workers and symbionts alike.

  “Let me go!” I yelp, snatching my hand back from her. Pooka howls through my mouth, “We have rattled the chains, freed them to know what it is they truly do!”

  “You did this!?” she hisses, incredulous. “I thought you didn’t want to drug anyone. You’ll send them all mad. This is too much! We calculated the dose. No one was going to get hurt if you just followed the plan!”

  “They will see,” Pooka says through my mouth again. “They will see and know and die with regret!”

  “We have to get out of here!” says Shion, grabbing my hand again and pulling me after her.

  I can’t tell her that Pooka was nearly ready to blow us all to nothing if this wasn’t the alternative offered to him. I don’t know if I could untangle his reasoning from my own anymore. He’s lived multiple lives now seeing no pathway forward except suicidally throwing himself and his host each time against the uncaring void. But I know his ability to process complexity differs from mine. There is almost an innocence to how he understands and processes emotions, a brutal inability to feel anything except his raw state. He is crushed beneath the weight of love, terror, rage, and memory. An ancient being that is barely more than a child, remembering a youth he feels stolen from him. That was stolen from him.

  This isn’t his nature.

  In his early memories he lived at peace, this is not what he always was. I have felt the personality that lies below, joyful, excited by simple beauty, amused by strange jokes. That personality can live again. I have to be at Pooka’s side, show him that maybe this time we can do something different. Earn the trust he’s started giving me.

  “Everett is down there. Let me go!” I yell, tugging against Shion, using the excuse I hope she will listen to. She holds my wrist, far stronger than me, almost bruising me as a struggle against her.

  “Rhett can take care of himself, if he’s not crazed already,” replies Shion, raising her voice. She drags me back through a doorway off the catwalks into closed walls again. “And if he is, there is no saving him. You read the brief, these men will turn like mad creatures released from a cage! I’m not armed, I can’t protect you.”

  “No, let me go!” I scream. I jam my foot against the door frame as Shion pulls me through, tugging against her. “I have to go, I have to go down there!”

  I don’t know what aspect of my desperation is my own and what is Pooka’s. But I have to be down there with him, I have to stop Pooka from fully unraveling into mad killing. If he explodes… I’ve seen it in those memories, he’ll be gone forever. And, if there is a chance any of those men once dosed understand what it is they are feeling, they deserve a chance to live, to repent, to… something. I need to stop him if I can. And we’ll find out if Everett is one of them.

  I can feel myself tugged in a million directions by all the contradicting things I want, and time slipping from my fingers as the white mist begins to descend. So I focus on the things I can do right now - save lives, get to Pooka, and then maybe get to Everett. I grasp at Shion’s grip on me, prying her fingers one handed as I pull with all my might against her. “Please,” I beg, “I’m the only one who can do anything about this.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Fine!” she screams. “Don’t fucking die!”

  I fall to my behind on the metal grating of the catwalk with a thump. Then without looking back, I scramble to my feet and bolt down the walkway towards the stairs.

  The steam is beginning to fall as I leap down from landing to landing, bracing myself with hands on each railing. I can hear a crazed wail, almost like a scream of grief or terror from somewhere in the white. Several of the Cygnus begin a trumpeting chorus, crying out with their own confusion at what is happening as they too breath the descending white.

  I catch a flash of red blood and taste metal on a tongue that isn’t mine. I grasp desperately to my own mind so I don’t dissolve into Pooka yet. Each breath of white blurs the line between us, but not completely out of my control. We know what this feels like, I tell myself, I know how to control this. I grit my teeth and rally my bravado as my visibility drops until I can barely see my hands in front of me. I reach the bottom of the stairs, plunging into a world of white fog and indistinct towering metal structures and pipes, and begin a run across the floor.

  Hands grab me from the pale. A man with tears streaming down his face and bloodshot eyes wails as he drags me out of my frantic run, spinning me off track into one of the water tanks. I yelp with a start and brace just in time to prevent my head from cracking against the metal walls of the tank as I crash into it.

  The man wails and grabs at me with clawing hands, his fingernails cutting my skin and dragging open scratches as I pull out of his grasp. I can feel a growing panic in my chest as I realize he’s incoherently babbling. I ball my fist and throw a punch at his chin to try and get him off me, and yelp with pain as my knuckles make contact with his jaw bone, splitting my skin and smearing him with a streak of my own blood. He reels, stumbles, but does not go down, and cracks his neck as he looks back at me, hunching his shoulders.

  Pooka! Come get me! Me! Focus on me!

  Pooka’s awareness snaps to me, dragged away from the taste of precious blood between his teeth.

  My own vision blurs between my own eyes and his. He leaps over several pipes and when he lands, hooves instead of paws clatter against the concrete. With an equine scream he tosses his head, his mane billowing behind him, and comes charging for me. He tramples one man down, and kicks out his hind legs at another. Then his shoulders bunch, and he gallops round the tanks towards me, sensing my presence despite the blinding white between us.

  I scramble away from my attacker, blindly groping till I find a heavy wrench sitting next to one of the control valves. I grab it up and swing it around with all my strength at the mad man clawing after me, it crashes into the side of his arm then torso. I can hear the crack of breaking bones.

  The pain of the blow doesn’t stop my attacker, and he stumbles then lifts his head, jaw hanging slack with a wet groan. I scramble away from his arms. These people must have no practice controlling their bonds, the unidirectional nature of it never required them to learn after manifestation. Instead they’ve dissolved into the wild fury that lurks in Pooka’s heart, funneled directly into their heads by their crazed symbionts.

  I scream a warning as he takes another step towards me, holding my improvised weapon in front of me. His eyes are glazed, paying no specific attention to me. He seems more intent on just breaking, flailing, destroying; his body or the world, it doesn’t matter any more. As he steps towards me again I swing my wrench, cracking the heavy metal jaws into the side of his skull with a wet ‘thunk’. I let go of the wrench in my shock as the man falls limp instantly.

  I can hear more of them. Crying, screaming in the white - the voices of men and beast. Whether it's the cries of tormented men, or the screams of their symbionts suddenly speaking through their voices after years of solitary torment, or something else entirely, mutated and brought about by the super-heated Erratic, I have no idea. But, the sound is haunting.

  I steel myself, and brace one foot against the body of the man I’ve downed, pulling free my wrench to turn into the steam to find Pooka.

  I see his eyes first, emerging from the white as two glowing coals. Then he canters up to me, dancing with restless energy as he comes to a halt. I lift a hand to touch his nose, and he screams, shying away from me, eyes flashing.

  “I’m here,” I say aloud, dropping my weapon and stretching for his nose to try and touch him. He tosses his head, nostrils flaring, and my hand touches the quivering velvet of his muzzle.

  He does not calm instantly. His boiling rage unravels as I rub my hand up his nose, brushing towards his forehead and pushing his mane out of his eyes and over his ear. He’s so tall in this shape I cannot fully reach him, but he lowers his head into me, letting me get closer. Human touch reassures us both, him feeling hands that love, me feeling emotions for us both. Then he butts his mouth against my shoulder, his lips grabbing my coveralls and nickering against my shoulder as the last of his wild madness dissipates.

  “I’m here now,” I say. “We have to go find Everett.”

  He flicks his tail, stamping one broad hoof impatiently.

  “I know you don’t want to, but we need to find him, and save him if we can.”

  And what about the rest of these men?

  “I don’t know. I’ll work it out.”

  I clamber up some nearby pipes to mount Pooka, tucking my hands into his mane and leaning into his neck. His broad shoulders roll beneath me, rippling with muscles and barely contained energy. He spins, hooves clattering hollowly beneath us on the concrete, and flattens his ears against his skull as he turns us both back into the white.