Shattered Ladder 1-4

Chapter 4: Run, Boy, Run

All Ken could hear was the tearing of his own breath as air forced its way in and out, a rough file scraping its way into his ears. In-out. In-in-out. Even now, the breathing technique was still instinct, his body doing what his mind couldn’t manage. 

At his feet, Joric’s body was still there.

Broken.

Broken worse than he was.

Legs kicked in a dance with no rhythm, a machine with its wires crossed. No more insults came from him, the only sound from the bigger boy’s throat a wet gurgle like sludge in a pipe to choked for anything else to make it out.

Blood trailed from his fingers, slick and warm and sick.

A single heavy drop hit the waste-dirt right in front of him with a soft splat.

He stared, head empty. Nothing more than a clean white space, nothing else inside.

Something inside him was screaming, the part of him that remembered another life, before all this. A world with laws and soft hands and clean water. 

The sound was far away, muffled; a tiny noise from the very bottom of a deep, dark well. He could hear it, though. He wished he didn’t. He wished he couldn’t.

But he could hear it.

Finally, he heard something else.

A gasp.

The sharp inhale of air, thin and high, like a needle through stretched rubber.

Ken’s head went up, eyes wide, and all the noise of the world flooded back as if it had never even left. All the people—the other boys who had been Joric’s friends, the younger kids who had just been watching for the fun of it, the few grown-ups who had seen the whole thing from a distance and done nothing—gasped and neared him and Joric from the edge of the village. 

Another kid shrieked, the sound no different than an animal caught in a scrapper’s wire-trap, and Ken saw all the eyes turn his way.

All of them.

Up and away from the still-twitching, still-bleeding heap on the ground, to him.

The looks, hot with shock just a second ago, turned cold all of a sudden, each one hardening as they found his eyes. It was like the sssss of hot steel in a junker’s dirty water, a small army of faces solid, sharp and dangerous.

A hand just as cold, the feel of scrap-metal left out overnight, closed tight around his lungs. Tell ‘em. Accident. Say it. Say it now.

His mouth fell open, suddenly dry, and his tongue a thick, useless root that he could barely move. “…d-didn’t… h-he…”  As much as he tried, the words just came out wrong, rough and heavy as they fell from his lips. 

“Chief’s boy.” 

“Bleedin’ bad. Head’s all… wrong.”

“Gods, the freak did it.” His words may have been rough and pointless, but all of theirs were hard and jagged, thrown his way like the same stones he was used to, Ken flinching with each one. “Freak killed ‘im.“

Tam stepped forward slow, Joric’s cousin breaking free of the small crowd, each boot-fall a heavy promise on the crunching waste-dirt. There was no laugh in his eyes now, no smile on his face, just a mouth too big for his face pulled into something ugly and sure.

Tam didn’t shout. “Gonna kill you.”

He didn’t need to.

Ken heard the words loud and clear, the small boy doing the only thing that his body knew to do. 

He twisted on a bare foot, the motion clumsy, as the waste-dirt—that powder of rust and glass and dead things—puffed up in gritty clouds around his ankles. He took off without a thought, the heel of his foot connecting with the rock. The bloody one. 

The Joric-rock. 

A dull thump sounded off in his ears as it landed somewhere behind him, a sound swallowed whole by the new noise.

The world erupted in a roar of sound.

Not one voice, but at least a dozen, all the villagers behind him mashed together into a single, hungry sound, a united roar of hate. It wasn’t just anger in the sound, not anymore. This was different, a howl of the hunt.

His legs were already moving, pumping, tearing him away from the semi-circle of rust-bucket walls that was the only home he had known in this life. 

Home, the word was a joke though. It hadn’t been a home for at least a year.

Nothing in that place felt like home.

He’d have slept outside, even in the forests or in the junk, if he didn’t have to worry about waking up surrounded by rust-rats and beasts of all kinds. Still, he knew his way around the forests — both wire and wood — the junk-mountains, and the husk-hills. He’d spent enough time navigating back and forth, figuring out which direction to go.

This time, Ken didn’t bother figuring out anything.. 

He only had one way to go. The Wall. 

With all that hate he could feel chasing after him, all he had in front of him was that black, unfeeling line of perfect nothing cutting the forever-gray sky in half.

It didn’t move. It didn’t change. It didn’t have to or need to.

It was the only thing in this whole broken world that was reliable and it was the only place he knew to run to, instead of just away. They won’t go that far. They can’t go that far.

…right?

Even if the villagers did go that far outside the village, they’d be too scared of the god of the Great Wall to do anything in the first place… he hoped.

All he had was hopes and desperation right now, all his brainpower focused less on thinking and more on running.

A noise, a bark of air, almost escaped his throat. It felt like it could have been a laugh, something sharp and wild and brittle that would have shattered the air. Just like him. I’m running, he gasped in a mouthful of air. 

My Dad. The word barely even made sense, especially not now, not something he ever used or bothered to even think about. 

But somehow in the cold panic, it came to mind. They were both leaving. 

Leaving the village. 

Leaving a body behind. 

It was a joke written in blood and rust. Almost funny. 

He choked the feeling down either way. Not funny. Not funny.

Shaking his head against the thought, he risked it, an impulse driving him to just check with his neck already turning. A single, stupid glance over his shoulder, eyes straining to see through the gloom. The path back was gone. 

Not empty, but blocked off. 

He could see them in the gloom as night crept closer, almost a dozen shadows. Each one was a black cutout against the distant, dirty-orange glow of the cooking fires still visible in the village from here. 

To the east, the sludge river shimmered like a dying rainbow, a barrier of poison that offered no path and a bitter burning death. To the west, the wire-trees, those skeletal ghosts of the Old Time, watched him with their thousands of fluttering plastic-bag eyes. 

The hunt was on and everything was cutting off every other path but one: straight ahead. 

Deeper into the wastes. Into the guts of the dead world.

A wall of rusted-out husks loomed ahead, a solid cliff of decay. The skeletal remains of machines from before the world broke. He didn’t know the names of all the vehicles, some of them nothing he recognized.

He didn’t slow to think as he pushed forward, only focused on freedom and staying alive long enough to think another day. He saw a gap, an opening just big enough for him to grab onto, a side panel had rusted away from a larger hunk of metal.

Whether it was a truck, a forklift, or a hunk of a dead plane, it didn’t matter.

It was all half-forgotten and half-crumbling anyway, chewed up by rust and thrown away to crumble to nothing who knows how long ago. Ken clawed his way up, sharp edges of old red-rimmed metal tearing at the thin fabric of his shirt. He felt it rip open, tired patches giving way as the cold air met the sweat-slick skin of his back. 

His fingers, thin and shaking, found a higher handhold and Ken felt the metal crumble under his grip, eyes widening all of a sudden. A line of pure, white-hot fire shot from his palm up his arm, a nerve screaming its protest. 

He ignored it. 

His mind wasn’t in his arms. All he had up there was a single word, repeated over and over, a chant of motion. Climb. Climb. Climb.

Thok!

Something hit him hard, like a solid fist between his shoulder blades; almost enough to make him stumble as he flinched mid-step.

A rock.

They were throwing rocks.

His body curled tight, a reflexive ball of flesh as he crested the top of the junk-pile.

No other option in front of him, Ken dropped, falling hard to the ground below.

His feet hit the waste-dirt on the other side with a jarring thud that shot up his legs and rattled his teeth. D-damnnit! 

Gritting those rattling teeth, Ken rounded a corner only to finally pause for a single instant as he saw it—a massive, wobbling piece of machinery, some kind of engine husk maybe, balanced shakily on a heap of smaller scrap. …oh.

He moved on instinct, idea already forming.

Rushing up to the shaky pillar, Ken slammed his shoulder into the standing block of metal and scrap. For a second, nothing happened. 

Then, with a sound like a low groan, the weight of all that junk began to shift. 

It tilted. It scraped. 

And then, all at once, it fell. 

With a long drawn-out shriek of tortured metal, it finally fell. 

A furious, frustrated yell from behind the new barrier and a smile, unforced and wide, spread across his face. That was a good sound. It meant he was still ahead. It meant he had bought himself a few more seconds of life.

He started running and a few seconds later, a narrow ditch cut across his path, filled with a substance that wasn’t mud. 

It was shiny, black and thick, running slower than tree sap and dragging hunks of dirt and metal along with it. The smell hit first, chemical rot mixed with something sweet and sickening. Please don’t be poison. Please please please.

Even if it was, he didn’t hesitate. 

He slid down the steep bank, the cold, thick sludge sucking at his legs, a hungry mouth trying to pull him under. It clung to his skin, a foul second skin of poison. He used his hands and knees to claw his way up the other side, his lower body coated in the stinking paste, his lungs heaving.

Don’t look back. Don’t look. Just run. The thought wasn’t a thought anymore. 

Every instinct screamed at him to glance over his shoulder, to check just how far they were behind, to see the faces of the hunters. He fought hard to not give in as he kept his eyes forward, focusing on the next junk-pile, the next gap, the next step. 

Looking back cost time. Looking back cost hope. Both of those were all he had.

He dodged and weaved, his body a blur of panic and motion, still pumping his arms and legs, only for his eyes to widen again as he tore into a field of what the village kids called “glass-grass.” 

A place where the waste-dirt was seeded with the remnants of a million broken bottles, jagged necks and sharp edges sticking out of the ground. 

During the day, when the sun was at the highest, they looked magical.

Even still, they’d taken more toes than the villagers could count.

Literally.

He didn’t need to look down, didn’t dare, when he felt something dig into his foot.

Not when something on his sole tore.

Not even when he felt the hot liquid under his feet. 

He couldn’t stop. 

He couldn’t afford to.

Ken just kept on running, leaving a fresh trail; a dotted line of red-black drops on the gray ground. The fire in his lungs was no longer a burn. It was an inferno, a roaring forge in his chest. The muscles in his legs, which had felt impossibly strong just minutes ago, the borrowed strength of his rage and terror, were dissolving. The borrowed fuel was burning out. Both legs were turning to water, to jelly, to nothing, leaving only a deep, familiar ache and the profound, bone-deep weakness he knew so well. 

Soon enough, it started.

The shakes.

His hands went first. 

That same ugly trembling that began in his fingertips and snaked its way up his arms. Ken felt himself stumble, arms windmilling, the boy doing his best to catch himself just before he pitched face-first into the dirt. 

Then his legs. 

They began to feel wobbly, disconnected, the signals from his brain getting lost somewhere in the failing meat.

His stupid, weak, useless meat. It was going to stop working, right here, in the middle of this gray, empty hell, and it was going to let them catch him.

The shouting behind him was closer now. He could hear their feet. Not just a general roar, but individual sounds. The steady, heavy, confident crunch-crunch-crunch of their boots on the waste-dirt. 

They weren’t shaking. 

Their legs weren’t turning to water. 

Ken pushed harder as tears of frustration and terror burned tracks through the dirt and grime on his cheeks. He had to find a place. A hole. 

A crack somewhere for him to vanish into. 

He had to disappear.