Resurrection (The Inherited War) (12 page)

“Hey sport, what do you have planned for today?” His father asked as he sat next to Cole at the bar.  He sat just as his Mom set down a plate of pancakes in front of his Dad.  “Mmmm, cakes again for breakfast huh?  Well no one can ever say you’re spoiled champ.”  He reached over and ruffled young Cole’s hair.

Cole looked up at his dad and mom and just stared at them.   His knew this man was his father and the lady was his mom, he recognized them and felt love for them but something was wrong.  His head started to hurt.  He clutched at his head and whimpered.  He heard the pan his mom was holding slam into the sink.

“What's wrong, baby?”  She rushed around the counter and took his head in her hands.  She raised his face and looked into his eyes.  “Baby, you’re worrying me.  Don’t you feel well?”

He looked at this women who was his mom then to the man that was his father.  In his high pitched voice he finally spoke.

“This is wrong.”  He shoved against his mom as hard as he could.  It wasn’t much but she took a step back.

“Son now…”

“No!”  Cole shouted as he jumped down from the stool.  “This is wrong.  You were my parents but you didn’t raise me.  My childhood was horrible and never like this.”  Cole turned to run out of the room.  He felt a strong hand latch onto his elbow and it stopped him in his tracks. He was spun around and was staring into the face of his father.

“That was just a bad dream, son, you must have had another nightmare.  Come back to breakfast and eat something.”  His father never let go of him as he spoke and started to drag him back to the counter.  Cole struggled as best as he could.

“No God damn it.”  He shouted and lunged with all of his might away from his dad.  He squirmed as only a small child could, and broke free.  He pumped his small legs as fast as he could and raced back upstairs.  He ran past his room and into his parents.  He knew his real dad was a policeman, so he assumed he also had a gun.  He burst into their room and slammed the door shut behind him.  He grabbed the chair in front of his mom’s writing desk and wedged it under the door handle.  He knew he only had a few moments before his dad would break down the door.

He turned and began searching the room.  He rushed to his father’s side of the bed and opened the first drawer of his nightstand.  Nada, empty. He slammed that drawer shut and opened the top one, bingo.  Laing on the bottom of the drawer in its holster was his dad’s service pistol.  As he reached his tiny hands in to remove the weapon, he heard banging on the door and muffled shouts.

“Cole, open this door this instant.”  His father shouted and banged his fist repeatedly on the door.  He heard the tearful cries of his mother mixed in with the banging and shouting of his father.  Cole finally
succeeded in removing the gun from the drawer.  He fumbled with the strap that held it in the holster.  He drew the gun just as his father crashed through the door shoulder first.  The chair went flying, and Cole had to dive out of the way to avoid it.  His dad sailed into the room and crashed into the bed.

“Oh my God, he has your gun.”  His mother screeched as she ran through the wreckage of the doorway.  Her hands flew to her face and she let out a frightened whimper.  Cole got to his feet just as his dad untangled himself from the bedding.

“Now listen to me son,” he started to say but Cole cut him off.

“No listen to me.  This is not real, I didn’t grow up with my biological parents.  You are fucking with my mind and I don’t like it.”  He raised the gun and waved it back and forth at his parents.  “I am on the Esii homeworld and this is some new torture.  Go to hell.”  He turned the gun and pointed it at his own head.  Just as his dad lunged and his mom let out a wail of anguish, Cole, using both hands, pulled the trigger.  He closed his eyes as the gun fired and heat and sparks flashed out from the barrel.  He held his breath and waited for either death or release.  Neither came.  Slowly he opened his eyes and immediately saw the bullet hanging frozen in time, perfectly centered between his eyes.  Off to the left his dad was frozen mid jump with both arms stretched out for his son.  His mom was frozen with her arms stretched towards her baby and a scream of horror frozen to her face.  Cole stepped to the side and out of the path of the bullet.

He closed his eyes and calmed his racing heart.  He formed the image of himself as he really was in his mind and forced the boy’s body into it.  When he opened his eyes his perspective had changed.  He was no longer the small boy that he had started the day as, he was himself again.  One more time he closed his eyes and stripped away the illusion of a happy home and replaced it with the cell he currently inhabited.  He added the five Esii he knew would be in the room administering the torture.

He opened his eyes and saw things as they really were, he was standing in the middle of the room he had been tortured in for the past weeks and was facing the Pyndingum that had been his tortured.

“We are impressed, we would like to know where you learned to take control of your subconscious?  You couldn’t have learned that alone.”  As always Cole couldn’t tell which one of them was speaking but he felt the mental presence of all five.

“Pound sand.  I haven’t told you anything yet, why would I start now?”  Cole heard a faint noise from above him and he looked up in time to see the ceiling extending itself towards him.  They were trying to chain him up in his head as well as in real life.  “You bastards will never learn.”  Cole concentrated for a brief moment and stopped the slowly growing tendrils from advancing any closer to him.  He opened his eyes and grinned at his tormentors.  “I wonder if you can leave if you are held in my mind.”  As he spoke the floor swam up the legs of the Pyndingum holding them fast to the floor.

“Again, very impressive.  Whoever taught you did a good job.  Now release us.”  It wasn’t just an order, Cole felt the minds of all five beings slam their full conscious effort into making Cole obey.

“Yes, I learned that in my own mind, I have the power.”  He took a faltering step forward and pushed against the mental resistance he was receiving from the five.  “You are in much deeper than Dayja ever went.  I wonder, if you’re in this deep and you die, does your physical body die as well?  Let’s find out.”  He moved faster than humanly possible, shattering the mental chains they were trying to force on him and he was on the nearest one in a flash. 

Cole got his arms around the torturer’s neck and twisted and pulled like he had on the Esii that had captured him.  He got the same result, the head detached from the rest of the body.  The Pyndingum collapsed to the floor.  Cole dropped the bodiless head to bounce and roll away on the floor.  He wasted no more time on the others.  He simply snapped their necks one by one until all five were dead.

He knelt in the small pool of blood, or whatever the Esii used, and closed his eyes.  “Wake up,” he whispered.  “Wake up.” A little louder.  “WAKE UP!”  He screamed.

Cole was suddenly blind and falling to the floor.  He hit knees, ass, back and finally his head.  His old airborne instructors would be mad at his failed landing. His hands flew to his face and he felt the goggles screwed over his eyes.  “Shit, shit, shit,” he mumbled as he rolled on to his hands and knees and started to crawl over the floor.

“If you are real and are here can you help me please?”  He said hoping that the other human had been real and not a ploy used by his captors.  He didn’t get a response.  He cursed silently again as he continued crawling on the floor.  He wasn't sure what he was looking for but anything at this point would do.  He cursed himself for believing the lies they had told him.  He, for a shining moment hadn’t been alone in the galaxy.  There were other humans and they were close.  Another lie, a trick to get him to talk.

He stopped suddenly as his hands found the first body.  He searched around the first one and found five more.  He erupted in wild hysterical laughter.  He had done it, he had killed some of his captors.  “Cole five, Esii zero.”  He shouted to no one and started to methodically search the bodies.  The third one had the device used to remove his goggles.  It was hard to find the right place to attach the weird screw driver.  “Damn aliens, never heard of a Phillips screw before.”  He finally got one and the other three came off easier.

The goggles fell off his face and clattered to the floor.  The dim light of the room burned into his eyes.  They felt like they were on fire and instantly began to water.  They whole thing had been a lie.  He had just had the goggles off, or so he thought, the other day.  It didn’t bother him when they tortured him so the tortures had to have been in his mind.  That’s how they got around his nanites, they affected his brain directly not giving them a chance to stop the pain.  In fact his nanites were reporting that he was in near perfect health.  He was low on a few minor minerals and nutrients but otherwise in good shape.

It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the lights and stop watering.  He stared at the five dead Esii on the floor.  He spit at the nearest one.  “Try and torture me again, I won’t fall for it twice.”  Now another thought struck him.  Where were the guards?  Why hadn’t anyone come rushing in to subdue him yet?  Was it possible that they had been completely trapped in his mind and unable to even call for help?   He shoved the bodies over to the far wall and stacked them up.  He spit again and went to the far corner and hunkered down to try and think.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?  Five of his tormenters were dead but he knew there were more out there.  Eventually they would check on the dead torturers and realize something was wrong when they didn’t get an answer.  Or no one would ever realize they were dead and Cole would starve to death or dehydrate whichever came first.

He was naked and all he had was a portable screwdriver.  He saw his Second Skin lying on the floor where it had fallen off him.  That had actually happened it seemed.  He felt nauseous just looking at it.  He stared at it for a good long time before finally working up the nerve to go over to it.

If he got it back on and got captured again, they would put him back in that box.  He shivered at the thought.  Could he go through that again?  He didn’t know but he had to try.  He stepped into the hardened mass of Second Skin and waited with his breath held.  Nothing happened. He looked down at the solid mass on the floor and kicked at it with his foot.  It must have dried out after it lost power and stuck to the floor.

Cole shrugged and walked away, oh well, he thought to himself, I would rather be naked than put that on again.  He hunkered down in the corner he thought was closest to the door and waited.  He inspected the tool he had used to remove the goggles, it offered no other uses but as a power screwdriver.  Still, he could bludgeon the hell out of someone with it and take their weapon.

It was about twenty minutes later that Cole felt the first probing of an Esii mind.  They must be wondering where their pals have gone, Cole thought.  He rose to his feet and prepared to attack when they came in.  The presence seemed to probe the room for quite some time before it disappeared.  Cole tensed, reading himself for violence.

The door Cole was near silently melted and disappeared into the floor.  He brought the power tool up over his head and waited to strike.  He heard the hissing voice of an Esii.  “Don’t be hasty to attack, you have a visitor.”  Cole didn’t recognize the voice but he recognized who came through the door first.  Dayja, except she was confused looking and scared.  He hesitated.  “I no longer inhabit the body of this woman, killing her doesn’t kill me.”

Cole moved out from his corner and into the center of the room.  He saw that the human women had her hands bound behind her back and a female Esii was behind her with a gun to her head.  The astronaut looked up and in a moment of pure joy tried to shuffle forward to the only other human in the galaxy besides her.  She was jerked violently backwards and fell to her butt.  Cole started forward but stopped as he heard the whine of a plasma pistol charging up.  “Back against the far wall.”

Cole knew she was talking to him and did what she said.  Dayja grabbed her prisoner by the hair and pulled her further into the room.  She never wavered her gun from the woman’s head.  “The Pyndingum never had a chance to understand you, Cole.  They tried too hard to turn you into one of them.  They refused any of my help and went at it alone.  I could have told them that you would never be broken by torture.  Well by torturing you.  The key to making you talk is by hurting the ones you care about.”  Dayja grabbed the human by her hair again and tugged her head back exposing her throat.  She rammed the gun up into the bottom of her chin.  She looked at Cole and smiled.

“If you hadn’t of killed those five they would have died today anyway.  They ran out of time. The Keisarinn gave them one month to do the job, they failed.  Now you are mine.  I have significantly less time than they did,” she nodded her head toward the dead Esii on stacked on the wall, “but I will get results.”  She hauled the human to her feet and shoved her towards Cole.  “Get to know her, build a relationship with her.  My gift to you for surviving so long without breaking.  Then she gets the torture and we see how long you can hold out when it is someone else feeling the pain.”  She walked backwards to the door and stepped out into the hall way.  “I give you one chance to answer my questions when I come back.  After that I make her scream.”  The door flowed back up from the floor and sealed the two in the room together.

Cole ignored his nakedness and rushed forward to help the woman sit up.  He got her upright and pushed her matted dirty hair out of her face.  She looked him in the eyes and openly wept.  She cried tears of joy mixed with tears of fear.  She sobbed as long as her body would let her and Cole just held her close.  He hated them for doing this.  He had to comfort her but by doing so got closer to her.  Dayja was right, this was the one thing he didn’t think he could hold up to.  If they made him watch this poor woman get tortured, he would break for sure.