Sak · Maps

Escape 01:11 Discovery

02.15.09 19:10
Section: Maps
Filed Under: Copyright - CC, Series

Samara walked through the large, empty house for several minutes before she found Robert sitting on the edge of a king-sized bed in the master bedroom. He was slumped over, his elbows on his knees, with his head down. She walked in and crossed the room, standing by a massive picture-window that looked out onto the lake. “You okay?” she said.

Robert lifted his head up and slid back on the mattress. “Yeah, I guess. Food was good…really helped.” He looked over at her by the window, the failing light tracing an outline of her body against the world outside. “Thanks a bunch for your help today.”

“I should be thanking you,” she said. “We wouldn’t have even had a meal if you didn’t have that sniper rifle back there.” She smiled at him, “I guess we worked out pretty well.”

“Yeah,” he said softly, then set his rifle against a nightstand at the head of the bed and crawled up to rest himself against the headboard, stretching out his legs in front of him. “How’d you end up in all this, anyway. You don’t really seem the type.”

“I guess I’m not,” she said, turning to look out on the lake. “I was actually studying, once, to be a doctor. In my fourth year of medical school, I started trying to deal with the stresses of my studies by going to the gym to workout. Eventually I found myself spending more time at the gym than I was doing my studies, and so I ended up failing my classes. I dropped medical school and decided to get a degree as a nutritional and physical therapist. After college, a girlfriend and I decided to move to Miami and I took a job at a sports medicine clinic there. She used to travel up here to the Pacific Northwest for vacations, and one year she was hired to model for a sporting goods company that’s based here in Seattle. She drug me along to see if I could model too, but they said that my body-type was just a little too stocky and muscular. You know, they like the taller, slender types for modeling.

“Anyway, I went with her out to one shoot, just to see some of the wilderness around here and stuff. We were up at someplace called Cougar Mountain, and so I wandered off onto some trails to look around, and boom, it all happened. Next thing I know I’m all alone out there, and lost. By the time I found my way back to the road, no one was around. The photographers, the vans, my friend, everybody was gone. After I hiked half way to the freeway, I came across Dane Davis and his control post for The Watchers. He fed me and took me back over to The Davis Group and they taught me how to drive the raiment. Apparently I was the right body type for that type of work: small and fit.”

The room was silent for a minute when Samara looked over to Robert. He had slid down the headboard as she was talking and was flat out on his back, sound asleep. She walked over and stood next to the bed, watching him sleep, then reached out and gently touched one of the brier cuts on his hand, still greasy from the ointment. Walking around to the other side of the bed, she crawled onto the mattress, lay down, and closed her eyes.

As Samara lay there, she watched as little points of light formed and started moving around on the inside of her eyelids. Opening her eyes, they disappeared and her pupils adjusted to the room once more. She let out a deep breath, crossed her hands over her stomach, and closing her eyes the little specks gradually appeared again and began swimming around. They danced like little fireflies at a distance; glimmering pinpricks spinning maddeningly in a perfect blackness. As she focused, she found two that had started moving around each other, circling and bouncing off one another periodically as they moved around in the depths. Eventually the two moved so close to each other that they seemed to merge, forming a light brighter than any of the others that were whirling around in the darkness alone. Their meeting appeared random, yet finding one another also brought a greater purpose and strength. When Samara looked really close, she could see that they were still two distinct little lights, but they were together now and more powerful because of the unity that they had stumbled upon.

Samara woke up several hours later. She had felt Robert stirring and found herself curled up on her side next to him, her arms wrapped around his left arm, and her leg laying over his legs. She slowly slid off, and away from him. Sitting for a moment on the edge of the mattress, she rubbed her neck and then glanced back over her shoulder to see that he was still sleeping. As she stood, her attention was quickly drawn to the crackling sounds of a skirmish somewhere out on the lake. She walked over to the window, and a burst of orange light emerged from somewhere south of the house they were hiding in, the thunder of the explosion startled her out of the lingering slumber. Looking up toward the Cascades, she saw a faint reddish glow beginning to outline the black peaks. The sun would crest those mountains within another couple hours and they’d need to get on their way again soon.

She slipped out of the room and crept downstairs to look around the house, listening to the crackling outside. Lifting her right arm above her head, she slid her hand to the upper middle of her back, and reaching up with her left arm she grabbed her hand in the center of her back and pulled down. She then performed the same maneuver with the other arm. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she lifted and snatched her right toes and pulled her foot up behind her, stood for a few seconds like this, and then switched legs. After she’d finished stretching and shaking off the sleep, she walked through the kitchen into the garage to get some water and more food from the raiment. Flipping the switch inside the raiment’s control center, the garage filled with a blue glow as the suit’s systems began running its power-up diagnostic. As she walked around to the back of the raiment, and popped open the supply unit, she suddenly heard voices outside, then someone yelling on the other side of the garage door. “In here! Found someone!” Peering around the side of the raiment, she could make out the shape of a man’s head in the little window of the garage. He then stepped back away from the garage door, disappearing, and gunfire began blazing through the thin plywood and glass.

Samara curled up in a ball behind the raiment, her arms over her head, while bullets slammed into the raiment and the walls of the garage around her. When the shooting stopped, she bolted for the door to the kitchen, and darted around another wall that separated the foyer, the living room, and the hallway that led toward the stairs to the upper level of the house. Just as she reached the base of the stairs, she called out for Robert, but all that she could hear was a windy, rumbling noise that came from the back part of the upper house where the master bedroom was. She raced up the stairs, and reaching the door to the bedroom Robert was gone.

A powerful, rhythmic thudding at the front door of the house spun her back around, and the door crashed open and troops flooded into the house. Samara ran over to the window and looked down at more troops running around in the yard below. As she stepped away from the window, she turned around to face the door, to face a familiar sinking sensation that was rising up in her chest. She smiled when she heard the troops starting up the stairs, yelling, their shouts growing fainter as she watched the straight angles of the walls and the door frame become wavy and then distant. “I hope I find you again,” she said, her voice sounding out more in her head than in any air around her.

In a few seconds, a soldier stepped into the master bedroom of the house, calling out, “All clear here, too. There’s no one here. They must have abandoned the raiment.” From behind him another voice shouted from somewhere in the empty house, “I saw someone in the garage, I swear it.”

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This is a work of fiction. None of the characters are real, including myself. Any similarities between what is depicted in the story and what exists in the real world are intentional coincidences.