Segment 5 (concluded)

The long arduous trek across the foriegn land had me biting down hard on my own words.

"What will you do when you find it and what exactly will you do with it?"

Will I merely recalibrate the settings to discover exactly where the contraption faltered? Or will I inevitably buy into the fully laid out and deployed arrangements.

"We're losing the sun skipper, pick it up" an agitated voice calls out.

The device speaks to me as we near the end of our trip. It's distant cry has become a vaporous cloak cast along the thick smog dying the fog the same distinct color as itself. Red drapes strung along as far as the eye can see. Past the ferns, shrubs and roaming hills all leading me, taunting me... Dragging me forward.

It's hand is cold to mine, freezing the skin it contacts a sickly death brown.

"I told you to pick it up Jerry!"

The breath spewed from the lips of death is an atrocious mixing of fecal matter and rotten flesh each of which is carefully strewn together as not to disrupt either delicate fetor.

But most of all I can feel the heartbeat I once lost. A synthetic throbbing of mechanical gears and rotating cylinders... A sense of attachment, adornment, and empty hollowed passages that flutter aimlessly through my head.

Something... No...

Someone has awoken it. I can feel the pace rapidly increase in speed, and then decrease in volume. A cycle of mass that is in constant fluctuation but most importantly never ceasing.

Something is wrong.

The deeply woven thicket finally wore thin by the time we arrived to a clearing paved through nature's backwoods with all but the last lingering rays from the sun's final lapse at our backs. The ghastly fog on the other hand never surrendered an inch as the ankle high cloud spread past our feet sweeping across the esplanade all the way to the nearest asphalt road.

"Come Jerry, I wish to show you something before day's end"

At the very end of our maze we trotted past the lost silence that still crept along the vines and branches entrenched within the marsh. Alfred's swift feet thrust back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, faster and faster and faster until the surreal vision of a man was engulfed by the darkness.

"Alfred? I can't see a bloody thing!" my cries fell unto deaf ears.

"Stop playing and help me ya damn fucker"

But the vision nor the voice ever reverberated back towards me. With just a click of a finger, light and leader dissolved into an ever bending, ever falling, and ever twisting abyss of shadows and unilluminating wonder.

I was stuck back down there... I was stuck back down there, under the earth, buried and blinded by the never ending tunnels. In every direction I swam I began to drown.

But a life preserver did finally come. A circular tube... No a oblong cylinder. An egg like bulb, florescent, energetic and lit like a match.

Light peered down at me from atop the ceilings, past my shackles and through the bleak wounded areas.

With it I was healed.

"Jerry?" A hand tightly grasped my left shoulder-blade. "I thought I lost you my friend. Come, it's right over here"

Around the green bends light had been repelling the coats of darkness and illuminating the crevices dug through the ground.

"Why are you showing me this Al?"

"No not this. There" with a finger and a smirk the man drew my sight towards a small hill of ragged corpses waiting for the undertaker's shovel. "Do you see that Jerry? Now take a closer look. Do you see that?"

It was not possible. It was not plausible. It was not... It was not... No...

There they lay, thrown off from the carrier's shoulder and stacked neatly in order. All of which now were nothing more then lifeless vessels, molding from the humid winds.

But that did not disturb me so.

It was their hands that did startle my consciously broken mind.

"You're awfully quiet nowadays Jerry. I remember it like yesterday. I remember you being so full of confidence. I remember you comprehending the situation like it had been trained for." spoke Alfred.

"What's wrong Jerry? Where's that guy who knew what it all meant? Where'd he go?"

"He's dead you sick son of a bitch." I dropped my head in anguished failure, leering past the ribbons of gauze tied tightly around my palm.  "He's fucking dead"