Dark Blue Monstropolis

Stefan couldn’t sleep. He wondered idly if he would ever sleep again.

He had never worn pain blockers before. If he closed his eyes and didn’t look, he could very well believe that he had lost his right leg from just below his hip on down. But they hadn’t taken the leg. They had merely blocked the nerves and then wired up his knee. He could be jogging again in three weeks, they had told him.
The dull ache on his forehead where the son of a bitch had smacked him with the shotgun was another story. No pain blockers could be used above the neck. And the pills did shit for him.

Sure, he could put his insomnia off on the odd feeling of not-leg that he was experiencing. He could put it off on his near-concussion.

But it was the idea of what he had done while in that temple. The meals he had had. And the things they had called upon.

Stefan didn’t believe in any of that shit, of course. And he had never seen anything like you could find in a horror story lurking in the shadows during the services. It had just been a feeling. A feeling of dread. He remembered when he had still had parents, and they had all attended that church on 10th Street. Sitting there crammed in with a bunch of fellow believers–that high feeling, of belonging, of being secure in one’s belief in a high power. Mountaintop experience, they called it.
Maybe it had been the same thing in the Lodge…just entirely in the opposite direction.

Stefan adjusted himself in his bed harness. He hated it, but it kept him reclined and his leg sticking straight out so that the macromeds outside his knee could conduct their work on the inside. They hummed on a very strange frequency.

He managed to put it out of his mind. He zoned in on the hums of the little machines doing their business, helping him. That was a comforting thought. He stopped thinking about the taste. The mess, Jesus, always a mess.

Stefan’s eyelids flickered and he had almost started to slip when…

…voices.

He had thought that having this two-person clinic room to himself was a blessing when he had regained consciousness. Now he was wishing there was someone else–even someone asleep–in the bed next to him.

How had these people gotten into the room with him? Had he fallen all the way asleep without realizing it?

“Sole survivor,” a male voice said. “Very lucky.”

“Yes,” a female voice replied, “lucky for us. He can tell us things.”

“Things we need to know,” another voice said–female, yes, but this one was quite young, by the sound of her. “We have to follow.”

Stefan could see the young girl walking softly, could make out her shape moving in the gloom, could hear the footsteps echoing around the chamber. How many were in here with him?

Then he could see the man walking in the opposite direction. Heard him speak: “Yes, he will help us stay on the trail. Won’t you, Stefan?” The man turned to look at him. Stefan’s skin goose-pimpled at the mention of his name and then went icy cold at seeing the man looking at him. In the gloom, he had no eyes. He looked wrong.

The woman’s voice again, as she walked by the window. A glow from somewhere outside illuminated a side of her face. A glimpse of scarred skin…an eyepatch. “We know you’re awake, my dear. Why don’t you tell us about your friends…the ones who left you alive.”

“They’re…they’re not my friends,” Stefan protested as the woman slipped back into the gloom. Foosteps echoing all around him, always footsteps. “We had a deal.”

“Tell us about your deal with them,” the young girl said, leaning forward at the foot of his bed. She was in her pre-teens, pretty, but with eyes that flickered cold.

“I gave them information about…about the Lodge,” Stefan blurted. He’d tell them anything, just get out of his room. He felt so crowded. Too many people. “Then they were supposed to leave me alive. Crippling me was never part of the deal.”

He looked down at the girl but she stepped into the gloom.

The woman moved past the window again and came over to his bedside. “I think there’s only one thing we need to know from Stefan. One last thing.” Her voice was so soft and soothing that it almost took Stefan’s mind off of the thing glinting in her hand–a blade. A very large blade that she was turning this way and that. Her one remaining eye was cruel and humorless. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Front?”

The woman’s features rippled, shifted and changed. A second later it was the man standing there with the evil-looking blade. The sound of footsteps had ended.

“Quite right,” Mr. Front said, then leaned in close, using the flat of the blade to reflect some light from outside into Stefan’s face.

“Do you know,” the man with the knife said, “where they were going next?”