Shattered Ladder 1-5

Chapter 5: Free or Not?

C’mon. There was apparently a thing called runner’s high.

He remembered people talking about it before, way back when he lived in a world where people talked about stuff that wasmore than just about fighting, food and fixing things. He even remembered looking it up on the internet, just because… C’mon…

Apparently, runner’s high was when you ran so long and so hard that your brain made you feel really really good, so good you wanted to keep going even when you were dead tired.

Ken hadn’t thought a lot of it back, then. Kids with asthma didn’t do much running anyway, but he figured it had to make sense. Why else would people be talking about it all the time?

C’mon! He’d never run this much, not in this life or the last, but he was pretty sure anything anyone had ever said about runner’s high was just a hunk of rat-shit.

Everything was a gray mess swimming through his eyes, a messy blur of breath and water in his eyes and blood running down his feet. He kept himself on his feet, running past the shakes, with them somehow, adrenaline and fear and everything else in his body keeping him going no matter how much he wanted to turtle up.

His lungs felt packed full of hot sand, broken glass grinding against each other every time he tried to pull air in. In-out. In-out. Still doing the breathing thing even when everything else was falling apart.

Good.

Each breath was a fight.

More than that, a no-holds barred money in the bank wrestling match with his own chest that he was losing so bad it had to be rigged. His legs had never been this numb, so disconnected they felt like they belonged to somebody else, just stumbling forward with a rhythm that seemed more like the longest attempt at not-falling-over there ever was. Bad meat giving up.

Then he saw it.

A dark spot in the side of a junk-mountain, a shadow darker than all the other shadows. A hole. A place to disappear.

Not a real cave, just a space where huge metal things (the skeletal hulks of old haulers maybe, or pieces of a fallen building from before the world broke) had collapsed way back, their massive rusted frames leaning against each other like tired old men trying to stay upright. It left a hollow spot inside, a dark waiting mouth in the mountain of trash.

There.

No room for thinking anymore. Just the need, a single desperate all-eating need burning in his gut. He scrambled for it, his weak legs finding one last burst of strength from somewhere, probably the same place where the shakes lived.

The opening was a tight squeeze, the jagged toothy grin on the side of the junk-pile chewing at him as punishment for going where he shouldn’t. It would have to bite down harder to stop him, though.

Not that it didn’t try.

Sharp rusty edges of torn metal scraped his back and his shoulders, tearing at the already ragged and barely-there fabric of his green shirt. He could feel it giving way, cold air hitting the sweat-slick skin underneath.

He wriggled through anyway, the metal catching and pulling, Ken not caring as it scraped at his clothes and his skin underneath. Almost there.

He fell.

Eyes went wide in the darkness, hands grasping at nothing and a scream dying in his throat as the ground vanished beneath him. NOOO-”Ooof!”

Thankfully, the fall didn’t last long. Barely a few feet down from where he’d been crawling, it was short for any fall, but far enough and unexpected enough to knock the little bit of air still inside all the way out of his lungs.

Definitely enough to force a groan out of his lips as he landed back first in a pile of scrap. I… I don’t even care anymore. The lying thought popped up in his head as he groaned on his side, both eyes closed as he held his ribs tight.

He knew it was a lie as much as he knew he very much cared about staying alive, but today was… Today…

He didn’t have words for today.

One eye finally creeped open as Ken let out a low hiss of pain, finding himself staring at nothing but blackness all around him.

Not just dim. Not just shadowed.

Black.

A perfect light-eating darkness so complete he couldn’t see his own hands held right in front of his face. Oh… grea-

His thoughts flew sideways as his throat seized up, a sound like a dying animal leaving him as something invaded his nostrils. **Like a fist to the face, his head snapped back and Ken felt a mouthful of nothing try to claw its way up from his stomach. Wh-what is that…

Whatever it was, the smell was thick and rank, the sort of stench that forced its way down your nose and coated your tongue like it was its job and it was very very dutiful. Old and wet and sour and rotten and…

He ran out of words before he even slammed a hand over his mouth and nose, but it didn’t help much. His palm was already damp with sweat and blood anyway.

Safe, though.

Maybe. Prolly. For now.

Rank as it was, the dark was good. The dark meant hidden. The dark meant they couldn’t see him even if they found the hole, and it meant they definitely couldn’t drag him out easy. They would have to crawl in after him, one at a time, and that gave him chances.

…chances for what, though? He blinked slowly, nothing in his vision changing as it went from black to black again. Can’t fight back.

The thought sat there in his head, small and cold. What was he gonna do, hide in this stinking metal cave forever? Wait till they got bored and went home? Wait till he starved?

Don’t think about it.

Yeah, thinking about it was a waste of energy, energy he didn’t even have to spare in the first place. All I gotta do is just… just…

He nodded slow. All he had to do was stay quiet, stay hidden, and stay alive long enough to figure out what came next.

His heart still rushed, a constant th-thumpth-thumpth-thump, and to make things worse, the shakes were getting worse now that he’d stopped moving. He knew what this was too, Ken blinking as he held one hand still with the other. He knew it the same way he knew ‘runner’s high’. Adrenaline crash. His legs trembled where they pressed against the rough and cold metal floor, whole body still vibrating with exhaustion and fear and everything else.

Fire wit’ no wood. Feed it slow or it eats you.

But there wasn’t anything left to feed it with. Just him, sitting in the dark, breathing rank poison air and trying not to fall apart completely.

He lay there for a moment on the cold damp ground, his mind buzzing like a nest of sludge-wasps somebody had kicked too hard. Get up. Gotta get up. Trembling arms fought for control as he pushed himself up but Ken wasn’t going to give in now, not after everything. He crawled forward on hands and knees, pushing past the dizziness as he kept on moving forward and th-”…what the hell?”

The words left his mouth in a gasp of breath as his palms sunk into something soft and just the slightest bit slimy. What is that?

He reached out, palms gripping into the ground again, fingers closing tight around a patch of something cool, rubbery, and slimy just like he remembered. Moss. The word jumped into his head, Gram’s soft voice with it.

‘Grey-fur moss, Kenshi. The stuff, he knew that stuff. It was the major kind that grew all around the junk-fields. Good friend. Eats the rot. Stops the bleedin’.’

His Gram didn’t have the exact words for it, but Ken had figured it out long ago. It was pretty much a homemade antiseptic, an antibacterial moss. Thank you, Gram.

He pushed himself up again, sitting up in the darkness. He didn’t have to fumble again this time, his hands going right to his feet. Tired shaky fingers found the gashes on the bottom of his feet, gifts from the glass-grass field. Least I still got my toes.

Silver linings aside, his feet were still dripping with blood, legs still so numb from all that running he barely felt the warm stickiness against his skin. Not good, he knew that in his heart and head both. Could bleed out like that and not even know.

Grunting, Ken tore a clump of the strange slick moss from the ground and crammed it into the wound, the coolness of it shocking as it quickly spread through the pain like ice on a burn.

Better.

Not good, but better. The glass-shard pain dulled to something he could ignore if he had to, the moss both an antibacterial and good at getting blood to stop flowing. Wish I had more of it, though.

It always came in handy, but it took some real hard looking to find the stuff. Only grows in the real dark spots. Ken almost laughed, but regretted it a second later as that same stench crawled up his nose. I… I gotta move…

One hand went back to his nose as Ken held the other out in front of him, grasping out in front of him as he looked for— There.

His palm found it, pressing flat against exactly what he’d been searching for. A wall.

A wall was good, a wall meant something to help him. Ughh. Even a wall that smelled like something rotting was still a wall.

Doing like his palm, Ken pressed his whole left side against the wall. It felt wet and lumpy, a strange uneven surface of decaying things he didn’t want to think about too hard. His back pressed against what might have been old fabric, or old skin, or something else that used to be soft before it got pressed into this wall of trash.

One side firmly attached to the wall, he started moving, something solid to press up against keeping the shakes from hitting too hard.

Just enough to let him keep going as he kept himself on the move.

One foot after the other.

One foot.

Other foot.

One.

Two.

He kept moving for as long as he could, and eventually — like he expected — the darkness began to ease up.

An exit.

Exit, entrance, whatever, he could see light, a rough circle where the bright silver of moonlight was poking its way though.

His heart was still going too fast, but at least the shakes were settling down a little. Not gone, never gone, but not the earthquake they’d been when he was running.

Then he heard them.

“…see ‘im?”

The shouts were farther away now but they were still there, faint angry noises drifting on the wind like smoke from a bad fire. They were still looking. They weren’t giving up.

Of course they’re not giving up.

The voices were muffled by all the tons of garbage between them, but he could make out the flat ugly junk-talk, the words landing like stones in his gut.

“…went this way… saw the little freak run past the old pipe-fall…”

Freak. Always freak. Even when he wasn’t there to hear it.

“…can’t be far… bleedin’ like he was…”

They were close and the running was already over.

The borrowed strength from fear and rage was gone, burned away like the fuel inside him and not even ashes left for the cook-fire. His legs felt like they were gonna fall off. The cuts on his foot may have stopped bleeding but they were still stinging even with the moss. And the shakes…

Oh no.

They were back. Worse than they’d ever been before.

His teeth chattered so hard his jaw ached, the sound echoing in the small space like rattling dice in a tin cup. Everything vibrated like an earthquake just inside him, the tremors starting deep in his bones and spreading out till his whole body was a single shuddering mess.

Stupid body. Useless meat.

He couldn’t make it stop. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t do anything but shake and try not to make noise that would give him away.

The emptiness comes… you breathe.

He closed his eyes. One, two—Nggh! One, tw… two…twoooo, oNE! His hand went to his heart, the pain there too much, the squeezing in his lungs taking all his focus. The breathing exercises, he was trying them, trying as hard as he could to keep them going, but his chest just refused to keep the pace.

The shaking was too strong, control slipping from his fingers with everything else Gram had taught him, all the breathing and the calm and the feeding the hunger slow, it was all falling apart.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But the fire was eating everything now.

The emptiness inside him, the thing she told him to feed, it felt huge now. A big black gnawing hole that was swallowing him from the inside out, eating everything that used to be him. I can’t do it, Gram. I’m sorry.

So sorry.

He was gonna die here. They were gonna find him, twitching in the dark like Joric was, or he was just gonna shake himself apart, come undone like old cloth finally giving up.

His body was giving up. The fight was too much. The running, the hiding, the terror, and now this war inside himself, all of it pressing down on his chest like a mountain of scrap. Over.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But the fire had eaten all the wood. Had eaten him.

The darkness tightened like the grip on his chest, the exercises and techniques doing nothing even as he tried to keep them going. They only pushed the black at the edge of his vision closer, every breath he tried and failed to take squeezing it smaller and smaller. The shouts from outside had already vanished with everything else, the hunters and his heart all fading together into a low buzz that drowned out everything else.

Tired.

The thought was quiet surrender, white flag made of exhaustion and fear. Just stop. He just wanted it to stop, to not have to breathe so hard anymore, to not have to shake and hurt and be afraid.

Sleep sounds good.

Ken’s eyes started to drift closed, everything about to go completely black, when the small gray circle of light from the cave’s entrance disappeared.

Something was blocking it.

What?

A shape. From where he lay on the ground, drool pouring from his mouth as his head stayed stuck to the side like a broken doll, it looked kinda like a person. It was too dark couldn’t see a face, couldn’t see any details at all, just the shape of a man standing in the mouth of his garbage cave.

One of them?

It was probably one of the hunters from the village but they weren’t screaming or holding a weapon or making a move or anything. Not like it mattered now, anyway. Not like his broken brain could figure it out, connections barely working anymore. Don’t care.

He didn’t have the energy to care.

The shakes were slowing down now, not because they were getting better but because everything was shutting down, his body finally giving up the fight it was never gonna win anyway. Bad meat.

Always bad meat.

The world blurred, shifted, fading into the edges of black, but the figure remained where he was. Silent, dark, and perfectly still, just watching him in the gloom.

It didn’t matter.

They could do whatever they wanted with his body.

Sorry, Gram.

Then nothing.