A Vomitorium for Terrasites

The Chain Links

this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).

Your Will wavers as you tremble exposed on the shore, facing the river. The border of no return assembles 20 meters behind you and Sis, Quions vacillating vicariously in a makeshift squall line of desperate desiderata. You can smell the need here; the thick seawind at your back carries the decay into your nose like a heavy rotten club hewn from old driftwood.

“Weekin do this, right, Sis? Manta ‘ll carry us ‘cross.”

Xenia seems confident as ever.  ”She’s there, I can sense ‘er. Canchoo feel ‘er Ter?”

You cannot.  You never can until it’s too late to matter. These last few Transitions have been worse and worse, there’s little room left for hope.  Devendra, be my umbra. Tesla, bear me true…

You bolt for the waves.

“TERR! Wait UP!”

A primal roar wriggles up into your throat with the sharp garbage-juice taste of bile.  You sprint with heavy, desperate steps through the coarse mucky sand.  Your shoes get sucked off before your roar has stopped echoing off the ship containers lining the shore like dilapidated effigies of Caribbean beachfront tourist trap hotels. Your socks go with the next successive steps. Tesla tunes in to alert you of an impending drowning danger.  You hop and teeter as you run, tearing off your baggy plasto-burlap pajamas. It’s immediately obvious that those rags would drown you if used as a bathing suit.  The air holds a November chill that accentuates your terror with a jolt of exhilaration.  Every hair stands on end, like you are running inside of a human-sized plasma globe with your flailing limbs as the static-charged anemone tentacles teasing the inner glass surface.  An electrified Sonic the Hedgehog in the raw and altogether barreling toward the dark cellophane waves.

As you near them, the waves appear as a jagged undulating blanket of obsidian. A nauseating clumpy churgling sound follows you into the white noise static of the waves; Xenia’s frantic paces belch and gurgle like a line cook angrily fisting a five gallon jar of mayonnaise. You take it as a sure given that Xenia has followed your unsuiting.

“STAY LEFT, Xen! Follow the MOON!” you holler back.

The moon bobs low and huge, a cosmo-sized radioactive medallion looming over the horizon. Its reflection is diced into shards on the razor waves, highlighting the thin crests and nothing else.  This is really going to hurt…

Tromping into the wading zone you plan a dive in three…two…one, but your feet are swept into the swift current and out from under you before you can take another step. Falling hard and helplessly on your left side, the ocean cushions your headlong takedown with astonishing grace. Before you can reorient or fathom that last step, you are borne out to sea.  Stretch as you might there is no longer sand beneath your toes.

Just as you locate the looming moon a battering ram slams into your back, whiplash and wind out-knocking ensue as a bony clasp grabs a hunk of flesh stretched over your ribcage.  ”Fuckin’ shit Sis, let GO!” is what you would say if you weren’t hacking up a lungful of acrid seawater.  It tastes like burning, like a kerosene martini, three olives, extra dirty.  You and Xen had plenty of nautical survival training, but that all goes to Davy Jones’ Locker when you’re tossed into a wretched mess like this. Even the great Terras Nikola Liddell falls apart and claws for his dear life when floundering in the unknown Deep.  Even Xenia Curie Liddell, once hailed as the new evolution of Transitors, loses composure in the lightless surf of an apocalyptic abyss. You manage to pry Xenia’s talons out of your flank, wriggling out of a certain loss of flesh.

“SWIM for Dev’s ::sputter:: sake!”

“The TIDE ::gurgle : cough:: it’s so STRONG!”

You roll into your survival sidestroke, navigating the aqueous hills and dales with as little wasted energy as possible.  Who knows how far you may have to swim tonight? The water feels either deceptively warm or you feel fortuitously numb. Xenia putters along on your starboard aft, taking to the breaststroke it seems.  The two of you struggle for every inch of progress as the waves toss you hither and thither at will and whim, but you possess no gauge for measuring your success.  The moon haunts from the infinite horizon.  Until your portside flipper hits an unexpected obstacle.

Immediate recoil. Protective fetal ball position. Choking and gasping, you dribble against a ribbon-thin metal mesh screen as the current pulls you.  A chain-link fence!? In the middle of the mouth of a seaward river?! What are they keeping in? Or are they keeping something out? With sharp ribbony chain-link?

“XEN, watch ::pfffft:: watch for the fence!”

“WHAAAT?  ::gurgle:: something’s got me!”

As Xenia sputters to a gain a painful grasp on the fence to your left, a leaden luminescence below fluxes up to a murky glow, exposing your four legs as limp shadowy tendrils below you. Milky beams cleave through the obsidian surface like misty sabres waving in the unimpressed night. Warmth from the searchlights wipes across the soles of your feet and your undercarriage. Ex nihilo a disconcerting wave of familiarity crashes over you. But between the fence slicing your hands into lunchmeat, the dumpster village, the cruel black water, and this enormous glow below, there is no where else to go.  Xenia ducks her head under to peep out the source of this encroaching light.

You follow suit only to catch the last shadowy wisp of your sister’s hair as it whips beyond your threshold of vision, into the gray milk underfoot. As you weigh your options — stay and cling until the fence has carved all the clenching muscles from your paws, or dive after her, fully commit to peril, give yourself over to Devendra’s umbra — the choice is torn from you as your fingers are filleted on the palmside. A wrist-thick cable has pythoned about your leg, knee to ankle, and snatched you abyssward, like a child would yank its teddybear on an aimless, tottering sprint.

Air is not a concern or a possibility. The glow overtakes you and burns through your eyelids, trading in the gray murk for boiling blood red. Pain sometimes defeats itself; this is one of those times.  And like Jonah the harpooner, you suddenly realize that sometimes you eat the whale. And sometimes, well, the whale eats you. You are face to enormous face with Manta herself…

And then…