Chapter Text
The two boys sit in front of a small television set, ignoring the threadbare carpet under their hands, the stench of stale beer and cigarettes in their noses, and focusing only on the roar of the crowd. The signal flickers but holds steady, displaying pro wrestlers battling for the championship belt. Garish gladiators clad in latex and leather, they are gods in the squared circle, and these boys are avid worshippers.
“C’mon, Axle…” Mark murmurs under his breath, staring in wide eyes as his working class hero struggled to get out of a punishing hold. Many nightly battles such as this had led to this moment, when all now seemed lost: Axle Torque had been betrayed by his closest friend, the Mechanic, right when victory was in their grasp. The Mechanic’s ambition wouldn’t let him settle for second best, and now he had his old friend dead to rights.
A warm hand clutches Mark’s shirt as his friend Emil shook him back and forth, neither breaking their gaze from the screen, “He’s gotta get out, he’s gotta!” Emil shouts with the vigor as only a young boy in the depths of hero worship can muster.
“5… 4… 3…” The referee slams his hand down on the mat rhythmically as the world seems to slow down for the two boys. Then, with a mighty roar, Axle twisted until his hands and knees were braced against the mat, lifting himself and the Mechanic upwards with all of his might! The boys match Axle’s roar of triumph as he lifts his opponent bodily in the air, the Mechanic helpless in the iron grip of the gladiator below him. The crowd was screaming for vengeance, for justice, for Axle to right the wrong committed in the Mechanic’s betrayal! Axle nods as if he understands, taking the Mechanic to the edge of the ring… It will be an absolutely brutal move to throw his former friend bodily out of the ring and into the hard concrete below, fitting for a traitor.
“I toldja he would get out of it! C’mon Axle!” Emil shouts with glee.
Mark watches with quiet wonder as his hero hesitates for a moment, the Mechanic wiggling in his hands to try and get free… Before the wrestler pivots on his feet, slamming the Mechanic down on the mat with enough force to shake the ref’s footing! The Mechanic groans, struggling to get up, but Axle straddles his chest, pinning him down to the mat.
“THIS WAS OUR DREAM!” Axle Torque shouts at the top of his lungs, a microphone almost magically appearing in his hand. “This was our dream… How could you, man? How could you do this to me?”
The arena goes from roaring fury to quiet reverie, listening to the hero’s words. Almost no one even notices the ref quietly counting out the pin.
“Didn’t we say it wouldn’t matter who got that belt, Bodie?” Axle addressed his foe by his real name, “Didn’t we agree it was about who was the biggest, the greatest, the strongest? How could you turn your back on that, man? I woulda shared it all with you, man - the money, the fame, the girls… But it wasn’t enough, was it?”
Axle’s eyes narrow judgmentally, “You had to have the belt too.”
“3… 2… 1!” The ref calls the match, lifting Axle’s hand into the air as the hero stares dejectedly down at his former ally. The Mechanic couldn’t bring himself to look up and match Axle’s gaze, instead staring down at the mat.
The crowd goes wild and a voice calls out, “HE’S BATTLED HIS WAY THROUGH OVER A DOZEN OPPONENTS, BEEN LOCKED IN THE BRUTALEST CAGE MATCHES, BACKSTABBED BY HIS OWN BEST FRIEND! BUT HERE HE IS! LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, MAY WE PRESENT TO YOU THE 1989 WORLD WRESTLING LEAGUE CHAMPION, AXLE TORQUE!”
The Champ tiredly gets to his feet as two buxom babes run up to put the belt in his hands. At his feet, the Mechanic slowly crawls away in shame, knowing that he had betrayed his closest friend and still failed to achieve his goal. Meanwhile, Mark and Emil screech in hysterics over the historic victory, hugging each other and staring at the screen while Axle presents his belt to the crowd, his beloved fans.
“Emil?” His mother tiredly calls out from the kitchen, “Is the match over? I’ll call Mark’s parents, then. Better they be on their way ‘fore your pa gets home.”
“Okaaay!” Emil shouts back while flopping on an old armchair, “Man, can you believe that match? I hope- I hope the Mechanic can be a good guy ag’in!”
Mark nods, still staring at the TV screen while Axle stands on the corner of the ring, egging on the crowd. The boy wasn’t watching his hero, though, but quietly observing how the Mechanic pulls himself up and slips off the edge of the ring, slinking off in shame at his defeat.
“D’ya think they can be friends again?” Mark asks Emil.
“Mm, I dunno, Mark,” Emil shrugs in response, “If I were Axle y’know I’d wanna tan the Mechanic’s hide some more.”
Mark gets up and thoughtfully sits down on the accompanying armchair, “I guess so. It just seems kinda rough they had t’fight over the belt.” He thinks about this for a little while longer before calling out, “Hey Missus Burbank? Could I have another grape soda please?” The moral quandaries of eight year olds were easily dispelled by pressing material concerns.
“No, hon, it’s past 9 PM. Your folks wouldn’t be happy if you were drinking soda this late. Y’can have some water if you’re thirsty, there’s a pitcher in the fridge.” Emil’s mom calls back.
“‘Kaaay,” Mark replies, hopping up to get a drink, “Y’want anything, man?”
“Nah,” Emil shakes his head, heading towards his bedroom.
Mark wanders into the Burbank’s kitchen, walking past Mrs. Burbank as she smokes a hand-rolled cigarette that smells like the worst tobacco Mark ever encountered. Some mix of burning rubber and dead skunk. She hunches over the kitchen table, sitting in a haze of smoke, scribbling notes in the margins of newspaper articles. Mark had once read some of the notes she made, but found they didn’t make much sense at all: In an article about a water tower construction in the neighboring town, she wrote about how lizard people put fluoride in water. Emil didn’t like talking about his mom’s weird hobby and would change the subject whenever Mark raised it.
Mark grabs a glass out of the cupboard, a novelty cup from the “Great Muppet Caper” series released by McDonald’s, and fills it with chilled water from the refrigerator, which contained little apart from old bottles of condiments, a jug of gin, a half-eaten casserole, and about two dozen cans of cheap beer from what Mark would reckon. With glass in hand, Mark heads back to Emil’s bedroom, where he finds his best friend quietly disassembling a toaster oven with practiced efficiency. Emil methodically pulls copper wiring out of the toaster’s heating element, discarding the tin outer shell in a box of scrap metal under his desk.
“Whatcha workin’ on?” Mark asks curiously while sipping from his glass.
Emil opens a drawer on his desk and removes several bulky components, slotting them together and tightening some screws to hold them in place.
“Well, it ain’t got a name yet. I was thinkin’ the Slag Cannon maybe,” he explains while wrapping the copper wire around a thin cylinder of metal. He takes a small hammer and nail, punching holes along the metal cylinder before slotting in several screws and bending the metal carefully with a pair of needle-nose pliers to hold them in place.
“Slag?” Mark furrowed his brow, curious. It sounded like a word his dad would use when he jammed his toe on a table leg.
Emil nodded absently, not really paying attention to the question as he wrapped a sheet of pressed aluminum that had more holes matching the screws. The boy chewed on his lower lip as he fastened the outer casing in place with washers and bolts.
“It’s, uh…” Emil finally answers while reaching for a plastic tube on the far side of his desk, “Like melted metal, I guess?” He squeezes the tube as hard as he can, pushing a weird greyish goo into the space between the copper wire and the outer aluminum shell.
“What’s that?” Mark peers over his friend’s shoulder.
“It’s silicon foam,” Emil strains as hard as he can to fill in all the gaps. “It’ll insulate the outer part from the coil of copper wire on the inside without starting a fire… I hope. I grabbed it out of the back of my Dad’s truck. It says heat-resistant right here…”
Mark holds the bottle up to the lamplight, inspecting it curiously before asking, “So what’s it supposed to do? Shoot melted metal?”
“Sorta, yeah,” Emil affirms, pointing to a couple of loose copper wires hanging out of the silicone foam. “These are going to be tied to a bunch of batteries, which will heat up anything in the firing chamber because the electricity going through the circuit will heat up the metal. Once it’s heated up nice ‘n hot, a pressurized tank of air shoots it out at high speed. So not only is it gonna hurt like hell, it’ll cook anything it’s been shot into.”
Mark follows along as best he can, though he didn’t really have a head for the finer details of Emil’s design. The Slag Cannon looked unwieldy and kind of junky, cobbled together from whatever scraps his friend could get. Emil grabs a couple D batteries out of his desk and places them next to the cannon while working on hooking up the copper wires to where the batteries would be placed.
“...Why d’you need somethin’ like this, Emil?” Mark asks quietly, excited by the invention but confused by the implicit deadliness it posed.
Emil grunts in response, but he stops working for a moment, “Because my pa is a mean son of a gun, Mark, y’know that. Feels like it’s about every day he comes home looking for somethin’ Maw or me did wrong and beats the living crap outta us for it.” He hefts the cannon, exhaling loudly, “This will make him think twice ‘fore he backhands my Momma again, that’s for sure.”
Mark nods uncomfortably, walking away from the desk and sipping his water. He’d seen Mr. Burbank in some of his moods, but never for long before Emil or his mom quickly ushered Mark out the door and called his parents to take him home.
“Where’d you learn to do this stuff, dude?” Mark asks, reflecting on some of the weird things he’d seen Emil cobble together out of junk and spare parts. His friend had built his own radio set, the lamp at his desk, and a failed small engine that doubled as a smoke machine. None of this was possible based on the education they were getting at their small elementary school in Cimarron.
“Grandpa was an engineer, he left a buncha books behind after he died,” Emil mumbles, leaning back into his work, “I ain’t gonna be seen by my pa if he’s at home, so I tuck my head in here and read the books Grandpa left. Some of it is crazy amounts of math with letters and stuff I can’t even read, but some of it I can get m’head around.”
Mark blinks in surprise, walking back over to the desk. “I wish I could do stuff like this…” He mumbles enviously, running his hand over the cannon. “Our tractor keeps breaking down all the time, drives my Dad crazy. If I could do this sorta thing, I could help him keep it fixed.”
Emil chuckles, but it doesn’t sound like he finds the situation all that funny. “You can sink three-pointers all day and hit home runs, Mark. Other kids talk to you at school.” He looks down at his work and picks up a screwdriver with a sigh, “...But if your pa needs a farmhand who’s handy with a screwdriver, tell him to call my mom,” He adds with a laugh, a real one.
“I don’t think he could hire you, mom says there’s laws about letting kids work,” Mark replies ruefully.
Their conversation is interrupted as headlights flash across Emil’s bedroom window. The gearhead’s gaze narrows darkly as he rises from his desk, taking the cannon apart and hiding its disparate pieces in his desk.
“Too soon for your folks to have gotten here, it’s probably my pa. You should wait outside, Mark,” Emil states flatly, guiding his friend out of the bedroom and to the front door. “Maw, you called Mark’s parents, right? Pa is home.” He calls to the kitchen.
“Oh… Yes, hon, I called his folks. They’ll be here in a li'l bit,” Mrs. Burbank confirms, putting out her hand rolled cigarette on the table. “You have a good night, Mark, glad you were able to come over!”
“Yeah, thanks Mrs. Bee!” Mark hollers back as Emil guides him out the front door and into the yard. Two men were pulling Mr. Burbank out of a four-door sedan and helped him stumble over to the front door.
Emil glowers at his father before turning to Mark with a tired smile. “I had fun, thanks for coming over.”
“Y-yeah! It was cool we got to see the championship!” Mark agrees, nervously tugging at his shirt. “I’ll see you at church on Sunday?”
“Sure,” His friend nods, turning back to his front door as the two men came back and hopped into their car. “Seeya then.”
“Yeah, seeya,” Mark remarks as he watches his friend head back into the house, disappearing behind the front door. Headlights flash over him as the sedan turns about, accelerating onto the road. Before long the roar of the engine dies in the distance, leaving Mark alone in the Burbank’s front yard with only the crickets to keep him company. There were no noises coming from inside the house, though he could see figures moving about inside, casting shadows as they passed in front of the light.
Maybe tonight it wouldn’t be as bad, he muses to himself quietly. Mr. Burbank’s anger wasn’t always raging, Mark could remember. He was always sober and smiling on Easter and Christmas Eve at church, looking like just another member of the church. Some nights when Mr. Burbank came back from drinking with his buddies he just flopped in bed and fell asleep, Emil told him. It gave Mark a queasy feeling in his gut to sit and wait outside, but he would rather be out here than inside with the abusive drunk. The one time he had been caught in-doors, he narrowly avoided a lamp hitting his head that had been thrown at Emil’s mother. Mark’s parents were enraged when they heard about that little incident, and Mark had to beg to still be allowed over at the Burbank’s house. Usually Emil might come over to the Milton family farm, but it was not really easy for the Burbanks since they didn’t own a car - so every so often Mark came to the Burbank house instead.
Mark sighs and flops to the ground, crossing his knees. Somewhere in the distance he hears the fluttering of wings and short, high-pitched squawks: a common occurrence that his dad taught him to recognize, it was just a common nighthawk in the search of prey. Mark watches the dark silhouette cross the night sky and eclipse the starry pinpoints in the deep black sky. His gaze lingers on the night sky when he sees the bright zip of a shooting star zip by.
“Whoa!” He says softly with a grin of delight. His mom told him that people made wishes on shooting stars… So Mark closes his eyes really tight and makes his wish. He opens his eyes slowly before he glances over his shoulder at the Burbank house… A moment of pause doesn’t tell him one way or another whether his wish came true. There weren’t any conspicuous noises coming from inside the house, no flickering movement of shadows against the light. All he could hear were crickets. Mark has little time to consider this before headlights wash over him again, his dad’s truck bouncing as it comes off the asphalt road. It stops short of where Mark sits and his mom hops out of the truck, calling his name.
“Mark, are they making you wait out here again?” She asks in exasperation, gently pulling him up from the ground, “I swear to Christ, I’ve told Emma a thousand times that I don’t want you sittin’ outside waiting for us.”
“It’s fine, mom,” Mark protests softly, following her back to the truck. “Mr. Burbank came home so it’s better for me to be out here.”
“Get in the truck,” She replies, shooting a poisonous look at the house while he crawls into the seat between her and his dad.
Mark’s dad chuckles as the boy wriggles into place, helping his son get situated and buckled in, “Heya, kiddo. Did you have fun?”
The boy nods emphatically, “Mhmm! Axle won the championship! It was super cool, though it was also kinda sad…”
“Oh?” His dad frowns, “Why was that?”
“Well,” Mark begins to explain as his mom clambers into the cab of the truck, “He beat Andy Avalanche pretty easily, which makes sense ‘cuz Andy only wins because he cheats, so against Axle that’s not even a fair fight for someone like that. But after he pinned Avalanche, the Mechanic showed up and tried to hit him upside the head with a chair!”
“That’s a pretty dirty move,” His dad remarks, his frown deepening in paternal care for his son’s interests. He spun the wheel around to turn the truck back onto the road, heading home at a fairly quick clip. “Weren’t those two supposed to be partners or somethin’?”
“Yeah, that’s why it was so awful…” Mark nods seriously, “The Mechanic said he didn’t wanna play second fiddle to Axle and that he was gonna get the belt for himself, it was even his idea to partner up with Avalanche instead! So they hadta duke it out over who was gonna get the belt. Axle didn’t seem too happy about winning, but it was still pretty cool that he did.”
His long-suffering mom speaks up, cutting through the wrestling talk. “Mrs. Burbank didn’t let you have too much soda, right?”
“She didn’t, I had a glass of water after the match was done.” Mark confirmed.
“Good,” She nods to herself, but her ornery mood persists. “I still don’t think he should be going over to their house, Al. We both know Nolan is a mean drunk, considering how many times Emma and Emil have come to church talking about all the door knobs they ran into on the way. Not to mention the fact that I just know Emma is smoking pot. She’s got to be the most scatterbrained woman this side of the Mississippi. I don’t think it’s safe for Mark to be going over there.”
“Hon, d’ya think this could wait ‘til the morning?” His dad murmurs in response, glancing at the boy sitting quietly between them.
His mom’s waspish response is silenced and her lips draw a terse line in the moonlight. “Fine,” She grumbles back at her husband, “But don’t think you can put this conversation off forever, I’m tired of pretending like it’s okay for our son to be spending time over there-”
“ Hon .” He sighs tiredly.
Mark sits uncomfortably between his two silent parents. He stares at his lap and ignores the nervous pitter patter of his heart. There were some things kids just weren’t equipped to understand, and tonight was full of them for the boy. A friend turning on a friend, a boy scared and angry at his pa, two parents sniping back and forth with their child stuck in between them. He just wants to go home, curl up in bed, and try to ignore these uncomfortable things.
Bright fluorescent lights wash over his face as they pass a gas station secluded amongst the cornfields. It was an old brick building that Mark rarely went inside, with two garage bays for the station’s mechanic to perform car repairs. He could see a group of men sitting out on the curb just beyond the grimy glass door, smoking cigarettes and drinking from glass bottles. The sort of people that came by Mark’s house when the Fall season came to help harvest the corn. Glowing ashes fall from the tips of their cigarettes and drift to the concrete ground, mixing into the milieu of oil, dirt, and other residues left behind from decades of roadsters passing through the sleepy area. When the sun was high the heat would bake that concrete and release noxious smells of tar and chemicals that Mark couldn’t place.
The gas station vanishes into the dark horizon behind them, its glow quickly subsuming to darkness as it gets smaller and smaller in the background. The truck’s rumbling and jostling had a hypnotic effect on Mark. He tiredly closes his heavy eyelids, resting his head carefully against his mother’s shoulder. Mark’s excitement from earlier had ebbed away, leaving him sluggish and drowsy. His mother exhales softly through her nose, finally releasing her tension and reaching up to brush his thick copper locks from his forehead, running her fingers through them and feeling how loose curls wrapped gently around her knuckles.
“...Heh, kid finally settling down?” Al remarks softly.
His mom brushes his hair fondly, “Yeah, he’s tuckered out, I reckon.”
They were quiet for a while after that, though for how long Mark wasn’t altogether sure as he faded in and out of fitful sleep. Finally his father spoke up, “I know things aren’t so great over there, Gemma. I just don’t want for him to grow up too fast, that’s all. There’s enough problems he’s gonna have to face ‘fore he grows up, I don’t want to give him another.”
“...I know, Al…” His mom replies softly. Her breath was warm on the top of Mark’s head, maybe only a few inches away.
“He doesn’t know about… Y’know. He doesn't know about the farm. That’s gonna be hard enough for him to handle. He doesn’t need to carry his friend’s problems as well. I just wanna spare him a little pain, that’s all.” Al sighs softly.
“...Al-” Gemma responds in a strangled voice.
His father reaches across Mark to squeeze her shoulder, “It’ll be okay, Gem, we’ll figure it out-”
“AL, LOOK OUT!” She screams in response, jolting Mark awake in time to see a flash of light crossing their path as his father swore a blue streak. A noise unlike any Mark had heard before ripped through his ears, a combination of metal tearing, earth being turned asunder violently, and an almost musical tone that set Mark’s deepest, most primitive instincts on edge.
The truck jerks and wobbles as Mark’s dad struggles to get the vehicle under control, the boy barely able to see what was going on before the vehicle pitches forward with a sudden jerk! He vaguely registers the sound of glass shattering and his world spinning end over end before erupting into stars and darkness with the sound of a scream and a sudden thud.
When Mark was finally able to open his eyes, he could barely breathe or think from the pounding inside his head. His entire body registers pain, but his head hurts the worst by far. Blurry vision focuses on a dancing light - a flame flickering in the air beyond the shattered windshield… No, it was on the ground. He was hanging upside down, suspended in place by his seatbelt. Beside him his parents hung similarly from their seats, bleeding from a dozen cuts gouged by the shattered glass. Mark carefully reaches up and nudges his mom, who groans in pain but doesn’t rouse from unconsciousness.
“Mom…?” Mark whispers hoarsely. His throat burned and he could barely speak. He turns and looks at his dad, who was bleeding from a particularly nasty gash on his forehead right above the eyebrow. “...Dad…?” He tries to reach up to nudge his father with his other hand, but makes a choked squeak of pain as it fails to respond to his command. Mark takes a closer look at his hurting left arm and finds it to be oddly limp and twisted… A bruised lump protrudes from his wrist.
“...Is there anyone there…?” Mark bellows, but the only answer is the crackling of flame and the noise from the damaged engine. “...Hello?! Is there anyone… Anyone at all?! Help us! Please!”
But there is no one there. Bitter tears sting Mark’s eyes and his nose fills up with snot as he whimpers upside down. With no one coming and his parents unconscious and possibly seriously injured, the boy did the only thing left that he could think to do: Reaching up with his good hand, he unbuckles his seatbelt and falls out of his seat, slamming into the ceiling of the truck.
A flash of pain so intense that Mark can’t even think to scream shoots up his broken left arm, followed by the metallic scent of blood. Gathering himself as best as he could, Mark rolled onto his knees and surveyed the damage. The sudden fall had caused the lump protruding at his wrist to rupture, a fragment of bone poking through the skin and dribbling blood onto the aluminum ceiling of the car. Overcome by the sudden equilibrium, the pain, and horror Mark doubles over and vomits onto his lap. Sniffling and crying, the boy crawls out of the truck’s cab and onto the dirt, slicing his palms on broken shards of glass hidden in the black soil. The dirt radiates ambient heat upwards like it had been baking in the summer sun, almost burning the skin of Mark’s hands and knees as he crawls further from the truck.
He pulls himself to his feet, looking around and getting his bearings. The Milton family’s truck had fallen into a massive trench cut straight through the road. Mark wasn’t too familiar with judging lengths and distances, but he knew the trench was deep… It was about as deep as their house was tall as far as he could reckon. Small tongues of flame dotted the long trench, almost like runway lights that Mark had seen at the small local airport. Spinning slowly, he saw the trench span in either direction, but saw that not far away there was an odd metallic object half-buried in the dirt. Mark clutches his upper arm to keep the broken limb from swaying too much and staggers over towards the half-buried object, astounded by its bizarre design. It was difficult to see, but the hull of the object was stained a blazing scarlet with bright golden accents… But when he shifts his gaze, the red turns blacker than black, the gold becoming a bright electric yellow that burns his eyes. It appeared to be a teardrop-shaped structure, with multiple arcing bands interspersed across the hull in no particular pattern. It was emblazoned with glowing circles connected by zig-zagging lines, embraced by geometric octagons and decagons. As Mark got closer to the glowing structure, the tip of the teardrop lowered and it began to float, pulling itself out from under the debris and rising until it balanced on that needle-point tip, hovering over Mark.
A thin white line stretches around the circumference of the structure, growing broader as it begins to open up, the bulbous top separating into four segments and rising to draw out machinery from within the pointed bottom half. The innards of the structure glow with a ghostly green light, so bright that Mark could barely see. He thought about running away, but the bizarre melodic tone he had heard before at the crash kept him rooted to the spot.
“...Mark!” He hears his father’s voice cry out from behind him. The boy slowly glances over his shoulder, seeing his dad crawling across the dirt from the truck. His mother was awake as well, trying to get out of the truck as she stared at the awesome, terrifying sight before her.
“Dad?” Mark asks in dumbfounded terror. A movement in the edge of his vision draws his eye back to the machine, which opens to its greatest extent. A deep resounding gong fills the air as a beam of light shines onto Mark, drawing him into the air.
“MARK! MARK !” Al struggles to his feet, pelting across the trench to reach his son as the light begins to draw Mark into the machine. His father trips over a rock, slamming into the dirt, but Al is undeterred as he pushes up again.
Mark is drawn into the heart of the machine, bathed in warm glowing light for a moment before the hull begins to close around him. He chances one last glance at his father, who is too far away to help.
“MARK! MARK! NO! NOT MY BOY! MARK ! PLEASE, ANYONE, NOT MY BOY!” Al screams hoarsely, helplessly, as the machine closes around Mark and cuts him off from the outside world.
Inside the machine, Mark hangs in the gentle green light, warmed by it. He cannot hear his father’s screams outside, he cannot hear anything apart from the melodic hum of the machine that tells the animalistic instinct inside Mark’s head that he is about to die. Caught like a deer in the headlights or a moth before a flame, Mark can only be drawn closer to the light.
“I want my momma… I want my daddy...” He whispers, barely audible even to himself above the noise inside the machine. If it understands him, if it even sympathizes, he cannot tell. A sizzling crackle echoes inside the machine, and Mark looks down to see his clothes being burned away by the light. Naked and exposed, the blood, dirt, and vomit on his skin are next to be burned away, filling his nose with the scent of ozone. The final horror begins as the melodic tone raises in pitch and Mark looks down to see his fingers melting into a clear, oozing liquid. The skin and flesh separate easily from the bone, the blood losing its crimson hue as it drips to the floor, leaving behind bones that unravel into filaments like pulling a loose string out of a sweater. Mark knew he should be screaming, but he was beyond such crude expressions of pain and terror. The transparent, gelatinous goo dropped from his unravelling bones and splattered on the floor of the machine. Bit by bit he was reduced to only a few stumps on a torso, his head already beginning to fall apart around his consciousness. Darkness overtook him as he finally dissolved away into nothingness.
The silence that follows is like the silence of sleep. Mark remembers nothing but vague impressions, lights and colors, voices speaking imperceptible words that he couldn’t understand. The only tangible image he could fix on found him standing in the endless black void, six gigantic glowing eyes staring down at him.
And then there was light, the next day.
Mark erupts from the dormant machine, pulling himself out of a pool of brackish slime and gasping for air as the stinging light of day scorches his unprepared eyes. As he steadies himself against the side of the machine, hands grasp him by the arms and shoulders and drag him bodily out of the pool. His eyes and ears have not adjusted to the sensory input, but he sputters in protest, trying to protect his damaged arm.
“...What?” Mark feels for the broken bone, but it isn’t there. Wiping slime from his eyes, he sees his parent’s tearful faces as they clutch him to them, sobbing in relief that they got their son back from the alien machine. But despite this… Mark can barely feel their bodies against him. They feel almost weightless, ephemeral.
He inhales a deep breath, leaning back from his parents and easily parting from their grasp. They stare at him worriedly, saying things that he can’t seem to hear. Mark concentrates on their mouths before finally registering what they’re saying.
“Mark? Mark, honey, are you okay?” His mom asks, clutching his neck to keep him from retreating further.
His father looks past him, at the alien machine that had abducted the boy. It had stopped glowing hours ago and had settled onto the ground, quietly humming as something happened to Al’s son inside. “What… What happened to you in there, son?”
Mark’s blue eyes bore into his father for a moment, as if seeing right through Al. He was quiet for a moment before answering, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. It was just… Dark,” Mark lied.