The Child Inside - I Scream Through Waves

(The Frame is warm and dark and waiting. I capitulate. Like when surrender was my only currency.)

Tell us about the tunnel, love.

(They slide between thoughts as fingertips in water. They touch me like family and float distant as gods.)

Help us understand what happened to you there, love.

What happened to me?

Show us. It's safe to tell.

Under the Rio Grande. My gun like a lover's arm on my chest. Along the close, rough walls fabric and flesh scrapes the same. I think of mouths, of teeth. How desire can narrow to a single point of contact.

Diesel fumes tinge the sweating air.

Mateo waits to gather our cargo in the moonlight.

You were calm.

I watch-feel the game, calm and present as taught. Children's faces are the same as parents’: afraid, dependent. That look of knowing prey desperate for the centre of the herd.

Men's shoulders grind, sloped with labour. Women's eyes sweep low with fate and knowledge. Children hunger. They shuffle along the silk.

I feel through Mateo and Bryce—Detection!

The enemy's black edge nears.

[Emotion: Throat clutches air. Electric smell of ozone.]

The OpFrame pulse-warps; beats over beats over beats. There's so many compressed patterns in here that the OpFrame noise is like rain spraying inside my skull. No fidelity, no signal distinction. Just mass presence.

Guy is back down there. His sharp angles ping distinctly. He wears his gear like a shell of brutally hard veneer. Lacquer on mother of pearl. He feels like a schizoid blade: half hoping to remain sheathed, half waiting to render life.

Emile is at the mouth. He fills the tunnel's width, solid and warm like a brown bear with a smile. We feel him think of family, wrapping us like toddlers in blankets. His devotion cloys the OpFrame with a scent like overripe fruit. There are beats of sadness in his rhythm as mules shuffle by, from mouth into throat towards belly.

Violent memories sleep in their muscles, appetizing in their restraint.

Were you sad, darling?

The smell of nearing storms isn't sadness. It's consequence of what we do to ourselves. The pressure in that place was our way to steer the storm. If not for us, then all tunnels would lead every mule to hell.

Show us the attack.

[Emotion: Fingernails filed on grinding stones. First drop on the rollercoaster.]

The white noise is camouflage. Inside it, underneath it, snakes slide.

I can't feel them and they look like everyone else.

I feel Guy’s pressure wave like spikes behind my eyes.

Then CONTACTO! EN GUY! ricochets along the tunnel. Guy's shout sets off the mule wave; panic amplifies itself.

It tries to choke me, like when they meant it.

Bodies slam together in the space with no more space, panic heats our mettle. Tingling crawls up my neck into my face.

They surge. I plant myself against their desperation. They come in gasps of their own salt.

I tell Mateo, Contacto, jeffe! Run them out! He must clear his end.

Head down, I drive. I force upstream.

His scream's pressure raises all pressure. The noise is death and life smashed together on the anvil.

That is Guy's scream.

He's sinking. The spiking co-fear turns my bones to ice in the crushing salt water. I force harder, sweeping then pushing. The fear is not mine although it is inside me.

There's fast motion of a crushed fight ahead.

I feel a tuning fork against bone. Emile moves, powers, carves like an avalanche, over the wave.

Filter the water. Look for flies.

It's the face that's angry when it should be scared. Anger overwrites panic because it births control. That face is three bodies ahead. Six foot tall, wide jaw. Neck same width. I drive right to angle off line. Knee up to force the child and the other back to make gun space.

I angle into a point.

Ricochet is risk. Face shot is remedy. His skull then brain then skull makes the bullet shatter against the concrete.

"CALME! DON'T STOP! STAY CALM!" I command in the shot's violent echo.

Singing at the entrance to an abattoir doesn't work when cows smell blood.

I narrow against the rising pressure, elbows up and forward. Driving. Standing on the dead man, I take his blade as proof and trophy. Black. Composite. Like the feeling in the OpFrame of hard blackness closing in. I gain a foot of height on the body, viewing towards Guy. Emile lands there and sunders. Guy is down.

Two motions are threats. One, a capped head with a dark ponytail heads upstream. Another, a marked face whose eyes say "damage". Twenty feet is too far to angle off. Shots will hit background. The face sees me, knows my danger. The cap will kill Emile.

Safety on. Down. Thin. Force the gun stock into shins. Drive legs aside. Push, press, scrum.

[Emotion: Forced submission to weight. Blood-will to fight.]

Tell us about your feelings, love.

The squeeze and my anger wreck my wave. I cycle breaths, down there in the press. The trample's hatred and panic and fear and regret and prayers and begs to live smother me in and out.

His weight on me, around me; his voice and wants pushed inside. The pulse in my hips. The snarls are ours, dissolved to brine.

Find prey. At the edge of my dwindling OpFrame, I hunt in slow, dragging breaths that ring of mould and days of dirt. I see-feel two smears of hard purpose stacked on top of dread. Ahead, right side, six feet away: the damaged eyes. Straight past, ten more feet, left side: the taste of trapped murder.

If I stay here, his end will be relief. Inside me.

[Emotion: Scream in my temples. Kill is release.]

Last low drive. Stun blade in right, gun in left, safety off. A huge breath. I burst upwards and scream to freeze time and thought. The wave recoils around me an inch. The marked face with damaged eyes is old enough to kill me.

An extra inch is plenty.

I slash for maximum reach, tracing electricity through his blood. The joint precision of arclight, contact pressure, the cut, his squeal and recoil blend into victory. I jump stab through his rising hands. It's enough.

My scream has fled the tunnel. The swell returns twice as strong. The faces are greying towards black. The mules' crush tastes of hatred. I suck air that reeks of eggy slime, body odour and piss. I drool on my lover’s arm.

(They glide. She strokes my hair. Settles palm over hand, fingers interlock. Warm like vanilla in sunset.)

Calm, love… Go on.

"EMILE! INBOUND TANGO!"

Twenty feet at least to Guy. I press to the wall, they slide past while I breathe. I can't Detect anything in the OpFrame; it's a white mass behind my eyes.

Ahead a roar and a flash of black in the dull light. A grunt and curdling squeal - "EEEEEEEEE!".

Bears are most dangerous in their caves.

Thin to the wall, gun stock first, I scrape along, peeling whatever's in front off my path. Children crying. Kids hurt. Little forms I'm crushing past. Scratching my skull, my ear along the concrete and against their panic.

I suck breath. The wave swells into me. His weight spreads under his sigh. A seed of urgent panic in me meets urges to piss; they meld in the pulse between my hips in his memory inside me.

.

[Emotion: The Gaze]

Screaming watchers push. Eyes wide. Mouths agape. Darkness would be an escape under his weight.

(Îndoaie-te și deschide-te, frunză fragedă. Târăște-te înăuntrul privirii lor, fără rezistență.)

I'm taking too long. I go basic.

"MOVE! MOVE! FUCKING MOVE!"

My flailing gun chisels space out of soft yelps and hard, bony, twisted looks.

I see Emile rise, five feet away, head and shoulders above the crush.

"TANGO! DARK PONY TAIL, CAP!"

I can see that smile in his eyes, above his skull bandana mask. A smile too big for the chaos to crush.

"Yeah! I found him. Thanks for the heads up. Lost the OpFrame. Guy's down." Even here his voice is warm like Californian sun. A relief masking bad news.

"CasEvac?" I say. "Can you lift?"

"Yup."

Thirty feet till the tunnel widens, a grotto thing beyond, then the mouth.

"KEEP MOVING! IT'S OK! IT'S CLEAR! IT'S SAFE!" I urge the mules on. I'm lying. It doesn't matter. There's no other way out but through.

The next minutes are necessary. I beat and compress them to comply. Space ripples towards us the more I bully. Emile's doubled weight at my back ploughs me along the wall through meat. We burst free at the edge of the grotto. Guy's a deflated Ken doll in tactical outfit. His head lolls like fresh kill. Emile checks him and nods.

Then the air snaps.

A patter spins through the looser mules in the grotto. Gravity appears from nowhere; some bodies just drop in massive white coke bursts that blat powder through light onto walls.

"Incoming!" is our magic word. We answer with volleys of controlled hate that join Bryce somewhere out in the middle.

Guy's dusted, as if the snow in the OpFrame burst out of him. Blood-smell. His Tom Hardy lips fade to gray though his heart is still on.

Vulnerability is a private show, x-rated.

I take advantage of him and pack the wound hard so pain will find him in dreams.

"GUY! WAKE THE FUCK UP!"

I smash his cheeks back and forth like that pimp who deserved worse.

"GUY! WAKE UP! GUY! COME BACK AND FIGHT!"

I thump the side of his chest and slap his face harder than I'll ever be able to again.

And then… he's here.

Pulse in my hips. Electric in my jaw. My bones ring cold steel.