Chapter IV:Break

Break

The World didn’t want to end humanity for want of a reason.Epochs, Trillinia, entire families of plant and animals had come about, lived, prospered and died leaving behind nothing but bones turned to rock. Through all those history from a world of fire and thunder to a green and blue one only the world survived. Then came man and ended everything. However nothing ends in totality.things find a way out. The pile was just like the severed hand or part of Hydroid like a star fish or a jelly fish left on its own to grow back. Even encephalitic brains are smarter than the rest in a world reduced to surviving subsurface. The pile was an anthill of human leftovers. The land around it wished it gone. To be finally free from the infestation that had destroyed most of it. There were recuperating waters evolving fauna and supporting flora.the only unwanted which took without contributing was the pile. The debris, the contaminated snow, the small bud on dead branches everything listened and waited. The ground shifted under the piles weight. There was something that had merged with the land and waters there was no form just a consciousness. Something had survived beyond the pile, a lingering will to live. That something, with the understandable rage of the violated and mutilated, sought only one thing from the Pile and its inhabitants. It lingered in hungry wait, immune to the outside unlike the Pile people having evolved to radiation. It was there all around and it waited.

Sky had been in bed a rag doll fed clothed bathed involuntarily. She was limp flexible to be changed into new fresh clothes, bathed, groomed to perfection.

The workers were literally in awe no one had broken out or tried. There were now two pairs of eyes in constant watch. There was some assurance that when the time comes they could replace the queen with better breeding ones. Now, after what had happened it was simply undeniable that there was a new threat. the assurance might just run away. The hunt for the blue eyed man had yielded nothing. The queen’s productivity both in quality and quantity was dwindling. The collective conscious was in an overdrive it kept alive everyone to the fact that the virgins can and will escape if they are given the chance.

The pile was at it as lowest whatever that was outside that had killed Meg and sad was still out there. The workers still ventured out but in lower numbers simply because it was thought higher number will lead to larger loss. This had limited the food supply to its worse in many winters. The workers stayed indoors tried to move the farms nearer incorporate them into the pile, build walls around them, and build tunnels to reach them. The outside has just evolved better to finish what it had always tried and the pile had to solidify and build to contain it.

While that was going on there was another new crop being raised around the virgin queens? While the collective conscious had at first simply sought to chain all three of them that had however changed at the last bit the pile didn’t have a small enough shackle for them. Then there were the workers that cleaned, groomed the virgin queens they wouldn’t have any of this, their work mustn’t be destroyed by soon to be compost and bone char. For now Air and the third little virgin queen could pace about at their wish without any restrictions. However they were not free. Every pair of eyes watched them every hour. The collective conscious wouldn’t allow another near escape. It could not. The virgin queens remained on their eyes, wherever they were,  whether it was building cells from whatever materials available, whether it was building underwater passages to the subterranean drains to crawl through in near total darkness just a small fire at the end of the long tunnel near the source, whether it was grooming the virgin queens, running from the claws of the Queen while she had to be unchained, cleaned and re-enchained. Every day from day to night from realization to death the workers were glued through the collective consciousness to channel Sky, Air and the unnamed one. They were what they thought when they opened their eyes and when they closed their eyes. It was as if what anyone saw was nothing but them. Everyone was watching. The collective eased a little. Their assurances of future could never escape.

The cramped quarters were more congested with two attendants instead of one, the younger more inward than the older. They could have moved around earlier when Meg was there. That could hardly happen now without bumping into a human appendage. However the conscious were the real bars on their cage. Every eye watched every move every small movement.

Air had waited for Sky to say something. Anything at all. She never imagined Meg to be so important for Sky. Air s nurse mate was outside the door and came in regularly to groom her and she was just glad that what happened to Meg hadn’t happened to her. She dreaded the thought though because she knew what had happened and how they got the supplies. She dreaded the time when her Geiger cranker nursery mate would have to go outside as well.

Inside her cell Sky lay still remembering the bloated meat Balloons words. She didn’t quite feel using the word queen because somehow in her limited uneducated view of the world the Balloon was not the queen. Neither was she. there was no Queen. The word meant nothing. It was not what they had been led to believe from the very day they had the ability to understand. It was just a word, a story, all drama and nothing else. Like everything in this cage of hers. She was held down to the ground naked under the gaze of the entire pile. this was her reality. Nothing escaped their combined gaze. First there was only Meg but she had known Meg since before she knew anything and that was kind of ok then. she was ignorant of most things just like Air is. Now things were intolerable the new Tadpole and the one behind the door they were often joined by a third. Unremarkable frog head in her tattered cloak.Maddening, infernal cranking away at those Geiger’s. The constant whee……………. that resonated inside her cranium nerves like a constant irritation. An itch you could never scratch at.

“Doesn’t matter. This is not real. This is not how. Your Dad had survived he is out there?”

That was what the manacled Balloon told her. She kept on reminding herself that she was a progeny of a man who had not been held back by the walls. The walls will not hold her back. The blue eyed man was out there. Her father. She didn’t really understand the entire concept of a father. This much she did. the worker s or her jailers, the Balloon had referred to them as the parasite, could not hold him back. they could not possibly hold her down.

Then how? How was she to keep from going to become the new balloon? She had one last contact at least. All her childhood she had heard the scream of the so called Queen, in agony of births and anger. It was incomprehensible thunder till the day she met her and now she could tell the words in the screams apart.

It had been loud gibberish till she had met her but Sky could decipher words now. It was not easy. The words had to pass through walls and a corridor and her speech was not very coherent. It was more like the gravelly grunt of some massive animal rather than a voice in itself. She remembered a very recent announcement.

“That’s it motherfuckers……you are all dead ……………………………you hear me I am the last piece of flesh you get to colonise in ……there wont be no more……. they are not gonna stay ………………………………………………………….”