He ran with a field of green beneath him.
He knew the grass wasn't natural, and yet he felt pure exhilaration with every leap and bound over the verdant plants and fauna in the lab garden.
"Jespar!" she called. "Dinner time!"
His ears perked up, and he felt his stomach growl menacingly. He followed his nose to the scent of his favorite dish: she had made him fresh noodles with meatballs. The good stuff.
He came through the door flap, and the little electronic buzzer chimed that announced his entry like the fanfare of a king coming home to his castle. He nosed some meatballs around on his dish, savoring their smell, before he sat down to chew.
Damn, he thought. Didn't realize I was this hungry.
He felt her hand caress the small of his back, and a shiver went down his spine. If any other scientists in the bunker had interrupted his meal time, he'd have snapped off a piece of them and added it to his feast. But not with her. She'd always been there.
He looked up with a face slathered in sauce and meat.
"Hey, Nicole," he said.
She giggled, her blonde curls dangling down over her lab coat. Those turquoise eyes, with the little dark bags under them - the first thing he ever saw in this world – those eyes beamed down at him, full of love and complete trust in who he was. In what he was.
"Welcome home, Jespar," she said.
...
The sky was streaked with crimson.
Not the same crimson that sometimes painted the twilight canvas of sky above the Deadlands – these were the smeared red of bloodied tears, freshly wept.
Rain-Born lay in a pool of these red tears, floating in an ever-flowing sea of vermillion. She could feel it seep into her hair and skin and stain the vibrant chalk white of her sacred tattoos.
She rose with a start and clawed at her arms to remove the liquid that slowly corrupted her entire being. But it was a futile effort – her hands merely came away from her skin covered in more of the pumping fluid that crawled up her body like a spreading infection.
She found herself at the base of a hill surrounded by this vile body of fluid. Gestating waves flowed unnaturally upwards as though goading her to climb the slope. And there was someone up there, waiting for her. Though she did not know how she knew they were there – a shadow beckoning to her in the ancient tongue of the Hanakh.
Something soft and sticky hampered her movement, and at her attempts to wade through the shallow pool of blood, she felt her feet sink into something heavy. It took a pained effort to draw her legs across these obstructions and scale the hill. She grunted as she broke through each object, anchoring her down till she hit something recognizable. And she froze.
She felt long, sinuous fingers grab her ankle.
And the blood-red liquid began to drain away, swallowed by the earth itself.
And she saw a sight that made her knees shake and her heart race. She felt it pound like a war drum in her throat, and her breaths were reduced to ragged, asthmatic bursts.
The blood slowly sunk beneath the parched land and revealed hairless skulls, eyes sunken and empty, broken bones and limbless bodies, toothless mouths open and infested with maggots and torsos punctured by spears and arrows or charred by flame.
The dark, barren earth beneath her was littered with the corpses of Hanakh and Guthra - warriors, shamans, mothers, and babes. They clung to each other with screaming maws, bowed their heads in prayer, or reached out their skeletal, eviscerated hands to Rain-Born in final desperate cries for aid. Rain-Born saw children whose scalps had been torn from their heads, brain matter oozing into their ears, and melted eyes dangling from their sockets. The buzzards of the wastes had fed on the innards of those who had fallen – for she saw the long strings of the intestines that trailed away from the open cavities cut into the stomachs of the dead. The scent of desiccated corpses clung to the air and strangled Rain-Born's senses until she felt faint and dropped to her knees before the sight. They were all dead. Mutilated and beaten, chewed and buried under the sea formed from the quivering tears wept by their own severed veins. Everyone she had ever known – friend and foe.
On the crimson horizon, the Elders of the tribes towered over them all. They had been impaled on polearms that sank into the earth, raised above the ground, arms outstretched and nailed apart, with dried scars of scarlet streaming from their eyes and down their broken, shriveled bodies. They looked burned or flayed – their skin stripped away to reveal only muscle that clung loosely to ashen bones. The sacrilegious sight made Rain-Born turn from the horror, fresh tears staining her face. She wept openly to see the tribes massacred like this. This scene did not sing of glorious conquest or the triumph of noble warriors over their rival clan – this was the aftermath of a slaughter of butchery and barbarity inflicted on a scale the tribes could never envision, punctuated by the laughter of evil, thirsting Gods.
Then something struck her – someone was missing from the spectacle of suffering that had been so cruelly unfurled here: Father-Mother was absent from the line of strung-up Elders.
She turned towards the hill and looked at the shimmering figure obscured against the sky with trained eyes. And, sure enough, as her eyes blinked through the tears of her pain and sorrow, the image resolved itself into the old, wrinkled form of Father-Mother, staring down at her.
And slowly, Rain-Born rose to meet them.
...
Jespar kicked playfully against the generous belly rubs he was receiving, sniggering and jumping up at Nicole whenever she tried to resume typing on her laptop or check some stupid result spewed from the bulbous machine in the corner.
"Those panda eyes are getting worse by the day, baby," he chuckled. "I've told you you're working too hard. It's playtime."
She sighed at him, taking a liberal sip of her morning coffee and wiping his spittle off her lab coat. "Honestly, Jespar, I don't know where you get your attitude from. If I had wanted a wise-cracking hustler, I'd have made that quite clear in my specifications."
He stuck his nose in the air and sauntered over to his bed with an audible "hmpf" Then he kicked his leg in the air and licked at his scrotum.
"Oh, Jespar!" she wailed, peeping down at him judgmentally through her dark-rimmed glasses. "Really?"
"What?" he asked her, mid-lick. "I'm a dog, ain't I? That's what you wanted."
She put down her mug and a recently plucked ream of paper that she was about to sit and study for some ungodly period. Then she walked over to him and bent down, and her lingering fingernail found his scruffy neck. She stroked there playfully, and, as usual, he found himself entranced.
"I know the last few weeks have been hard on you," she said. "But I promise you'll get a break soon."
"I'm sick of this," he said, and he found himself speaking the truth for once. "The tests, the orders, the drills – fuck it all. I've told you we should up and leave, but noooo. Fancy scientist lady doesn't want to listen to –"
"Now," she said, holding up her other finger like she was making some critical diagnosis. "First of all: language. Secondly: We've had this discussion. But if you want to do this, fine. Question one: How would we get out?"
"Nicole, come on, I just-"
"Second question," she interrupted. "Where would we go?"
"Look, I dunno, I'd figure it out."
"And, dun-dun-dun-dun, third question: how would we survive out there?"
This time he kept his mouth shut. Then he realized she was expecting an answer. She was staring at him with those long-lashed eyes that bore the happiest memories he had ever had. He couldn't possibly ignore them.
"I don't know."
"Exactly," she said with a sad giggle, stroking his chin again. "You don't think, Jespar. You just do things. You say what's on your mind and confidently say it. That's what I like about you. It isn't what I had in mind, but somehow it's what I needed you to be."
He cast a sidelong glance at her face and saw again the young girl she'd once been. He saw the child playing with her beakers and vials, and who knows what kind of chemicals were way too advanced for her age. He saw himself licking away her tears when she cried and feeling the warmness of her hugs when she held him close like a blanket on a rainy afternoon.
"So," she said, reliving the same old memories. "Leave the thinking to me. We'll get out of here – I'm telling you we will – but I just need you to bear it a little longer for now. Don't cause trouble for them. Just – be a good boy?"
He looked at her with rage in his beady eyes, and she laughed uncontrollably.
"You know I hate that," he whispered out the side of his mouth.
"I know! I know!" she said. "That's why it's fun. But seriously, for me, can you keep going?"
She took his front paw in her hands and looked at him intently. How could he refuse? No man could, no dog could, hell, no creature on this earth could refuse that damn look.
"For you," he said. "Not for them. For you."
She smiled. "Now, I have to get back to work, and you've got a long day tomorrow. But," she added as she headed back to her desk. "You're welcome to snuggle in my lap. It's almost your bedtime."
He hopped up onto her knees before she even sat down.
"Alright," he said, pawing at her skirt and making himself comfortable. "If you insist, I'll keep you company. But I'm not sleepy. And I don't have a bedtime. If you're gonna stay up all night, the least I can do is stay up with you."
Half an hour later, Jespar was fast asleep. And yet, somehow, his consciousness still floated above his dreaming form, and he watched Nicole as she worked through the night in silence, the only sounds being the stuttering lights of their cell in the bunker and the occasional thud of heavy footsteps that came from above. Footsteps that belonged to the garrison soldiers. She could hear their frustration as they clambered down into the bowels of the base. They'd been more agitated than usual recently.
He saw her frown, and he knew why: she was wondering what they'd brought back this time. She was afraid. She always had been.
And he was a fool to have never seen it.