All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 7: Cast Adrift ~ Carrie Cutforth

DAVID'S POV

My body floated but felt hard, beaten and weathered. Arms swollen, stiff and blistered in the glare of the sun. My palm flattened out and pressed against the rough surface of a hot, splintered plank. I could hear gulls and smell the salt water that soaked air. The sun blinded my dry swollen eyes so I kept them squeezed tight. All I could see was my red-eyelid glow. And it wouldn’t stop with its damn blinking…

I woke up with a jerky start with a beam of light glaring in my eye. Only it was not the sun but a penlight…one of those one’s doctors use to check if you’re conscious after a blow to the head. I couldn’t make out the fuzzy form of the person wielded it beyond the blaring light, only that the hand holding it was feminine.

“How you holding up, soldier,” the doctorish -type female cackled. That voice. It was familiar but…not.

“P-P-Pepper?” I asked and blinked and tried to get my bearings.

But this time it was Atticus who snapped in his gravelly growl: “Pepper doesn’t exist—”

“—What do you mean? She doesn’t exist?” I interrupted with a yawn and turned my head where his voice had penetrated the dark. I could almost see him now, his hazy body hovering to the left of me. My eyes began to adjust but the room was quite dark with only a spastic low fluorescent light hovering above.

“I saaaaaayeeeid,” Atticus said elongating the vowels for emphasis, “that according to Pepper, you no longer exist.”

The walls of the room were beginning to become tangible around me, and I could see we were in some kind of utility or boiler or access room based on all the pipes zigzagging along the ceiling. I could then make out the gurgling sounds of a water heater and suddenly my dream of floating on an infinite sea began to make sense.

“What does she mean by that?” I asked perplexed, looking back at the female doctorish type person who was now stuffing the penlight in her pocket and turning her attention away from me towards Atticus. I couldn’t make out her features from all the blind spots still twinkling in my vision except she was slim with a wide mouth and upturned nose. Her hair was long and dark but hard to tell the shade.

“It means she thinks you are an asshat, Asshat!” the woman remarked and I blinked at her again feeling unstable as if I should know who she was but the face kept bleeding in and out of shape from my still sore vision. The woman turned to Atticus: “He’ll live,” before turning on her heel and walking out of the room.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I croaked with a whine, now getting annoyed.

Atticus’s shoulders grumbled with laughter. “Sometimes you need to take things at face value. Not everything has a double meaning, my boy,” he snickered while slapping my shoulder roughly, “You fainted. I asked for her to check in on you. That is all.”

“Hmm,” I replied, “Is that all.” I sat up and realized I had been lying on a decrepit tweed upholstered couch with tears in the fabric where the yellow foam crumbled through. Exactly the type you would expect to find in a leaky boiler room.

Atticus hobbled over to a duct-taped dark green swivel chair and then slammed into it with the violent force only the invalid can muster. “You need to eat something,” Atticus nodded towards a mottled and peeling TV tray between us where a bowl of mushy looking…mush rested in the most unappealing way under the buzz of the fluorescent light. Is there an appealing way for mush to rest?? I wondered.

“What is it?” I sniffed.

“Prison food,” Atticus replied.

“Am I a prisoner?” I asked only half-jokingly.