growth A new kind of power source: Part 4

[goremeridian]

Thank you so much for the likes and comments, guys. knowing that somebody out there likes this stuff means a massive deal to me. It's not great literature by any stretch of the imagination - but I just needed to get a macro story out there! Two more parts to come after this...

 

A new kind of power source
Part 4

 

It was difficult to say what gave it away.

 

My miraculous survival?

 

My strange bouts of memory loss?

 

The generic army officers in their clichéd basement with their stilted dialogue?

 

Hmm.

 

Probably a bit of all three.

 

Like I had all the time in the world, I casually slipped the colander onto my head. I’ll admit, after some twenty minutes of little more than the army officer’s monotone and my own voice echoing tinnily off the grey walls of the bunker, the orchestra of crackling and humming offered by the wondrous device was a welcome sound indeed. I had almost missed it.

 

As always, my desire was there, ready and raring to go.

 

900 feet, the officer had said. Man, Tim would be pissed off about staying so small for so long. I’d have to make it up to him big-time.

 

Grow, I willed my absent friend, feeling the static about my head sizzle as it responded to my thoughts. Grow ten times bigger. A hundred times. Muscle on muscle on muscle on muscle. And don’t ever stop.

 

…

 

Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I fancied I felt a faint reply coming back through the thought-waves. It tickled across my scalp and spine and caused my balls to twitch with excitement.

 

About fucking time you put the damn device back on, it went.

 

Heh.

 

*

 

Other than rattling his rifle, the officer had done very little in the way of following up on his threat to shoot me. The fact that I was powering a device that would very soon end the world as we knew it surely gave him motive enough enough to put a bullet or two through my head.

 

And yet, nothing.

 

I wanted him to try, at least. Just so he would finally realise, as I had, that he, like me, like everything around us, was in the control of a higher power.

 

I was on the verge of explaining myself to him – after all, it’s not every day you discover something about, oh, YOUR ENTIRE SPHERE OF REALITY – when a familiar tremble shook the scene.

 

I had heard it several times before. It started with a noise like fingers playing up and down the walls and ceiling. Then came – yes, there it was, right on cue – the light rain of concrete dust. The last time this had happened, the concrete of the ceiling had torn open like a cheap whore’s blouse and dumped a good tonne of dustcloud into the room (certainly enough for six lungfuls, if our coughing fits had been anything to go by, with enough to spare to create a pleasant zone of eye-stinging general blindness.)

 

This time, it was as though the sound couldn’t be bothered pussy-footing around. Just as I was preparing myself for another session of hacking coughs by taking in great gulps of the somewhat stale but comparatively clean air of the bunker, the resonance shook the entire room. Were I not a bit of a pro by now at keeping my footing I would surely have been hurled to the floor.

 

Soldier boy over by the door didn’t have my experience. The poor lad. He had only just recovered from that last bout of dust-choking – not to mention having his rifle snatched away from him by his commanding officer – when he found himself tossed to the ground like a child’s doll in a tantrum.

 

I swear, he actually bounced. At least twice.

 

Enough times, anyway, to guarantee that his head smacked against the concrete floor of the bunker and – in short – put him out of the picture on what was sure to be a long-term basis. The small trickle of blood from some wound on his right temple merely served to confirm this fact.

 

Grunty officer man – for want of a better appellation – fared a little better. When the ground shook he executed what appeared to be a peculiar little dance, bending his knees, thrusting one leg behind him and generally waving his arms about. Whatever; it kept him on his feet. More surprising than his impromptu one-man waltz was the fact that he managed to retain his grip on the rifle.

 

The end wasn’t pointed at me, and wouldn’t be until the bunker – and by extension the officer – steadied itself, but it was an eventuality I would have to take measures to prepare myself for.

 

I was getting pretty good at preparation by now. Lungs filled to capacity with oxygen, cheeks puffed out like a tetraodontida, I rode out the rumble and awaited the dusty, dirty nebula that inevitably accompanied it.

 

This time, however, an itsy cloud of concrete dust was the least of our problems.

 

The narrow cracks in the ceiling of the bunker ripped asunder and tons upon tons of loose earth and rock poured into the room. My companion screamed as mangled debris smashed down on him, burying him alive.

 

It was like one of those gruesome, fast-paced bits in a horror film that you have to rewind back through and watch again in slow motion to fully appreciate. Within seconds I couldn’t even see his form struggling through the dense maelstrom of dirt and concrete.

 

It was as though he had never existed at all.

 

By this stage of the rumble we would usually be in the -ble part of the sound FX, enjoying the unthreatening hiccups of the last few receding tremors. It was clear that this time we had only just begun.

*

 

The walls were next.

 

You’d think, with little in the way of a ceiling, the room would fill with debris from above. But the crack that had ripped wide open at the beginning of this last rumble was clearly not done with its stab at interior decoration. It quickly split off into smaller and smaller cracks, like river tributaries, that spider-webbed across the room with lightning alacrity.

 

The scum and soil and rocks rushing in through the ruined ceiling were joined by their behind-the-walls-residing counterparts as the concrete on all sides of me crumbled away. The deadly rivers of spinning concrete slabs and spiralling earth, roaring as though the elements themselves were in pain, surged into the narrowing space.

 

One by one the lights crackled and went out.

 

I remained calm, nonchalant even, as the last electric glow faded. After all, I had never died like this, so I knew I wouldn’t now. Earth pooled around my feet. Occasionally it surged up to my knees. Once or twice my shins were scraped by pieces of rock. My little toe on my left foot was twisted around and broken in a dense slurry of mud and dust. Flesh wounds and minor injuries, to add a bit of colour. But I knew that no serious harm would come to me until the world ended.

 

When Tim destroyed the Earth.

 

*

 

It was some time after the room about me stopped moving and the last earthy grumble had faded to a whisper that a thin sliver of morning sunshine peeped down from above. I was dozing, rather than sleeping, having slipped into one of my – as I called them now – “blanks” whilst waiting for the next scene to begin. A mattress of cold, lumpy and sharp debris and a blanket of underground darkness made for an uncomfortable bed. So it was with some relief that I saw things were moving on.

 

The sliver became a shard, the shard a column, and – with a welcome rumble and a flash of pale flesh – a tower of light was thrown into my little tomb.

 

An eye, like a small moon, lowered itself to the gap, practically shutting off the nascent illumination completely.

 

“SO THERE YOU ARE!” Came Tim’s voice. It sounded like him, only his voice wasn’t just aural now, it was physical, each syllable throbbing through the bedrock. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?”

 

I folded my arms across my chest.

 

“Waiting for you, big guy. You know, you kept me waiting all night! I thought you’d be here sooner…” I tried to keep the tone of recrimination from my voice – but after all, being trapped in a collapsed bunker underground overnight with nothing but two corpses and several hundred tonnes of mud for company was just boring, and I wanted him to feel bad. “You’re usually quicker to catch on that I’ve been captured by the army in our RPs.”

 

“YOU THINK I KEPT YOU WAITING?” He laughed. The sound reverberated through every atom of my body. His eye withdrew from the gap, letting the sunlight flood back in. “WHEN I SUDDENLY STOPPED GROWING, I WAS PISSED. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE THIS SMALL? MAN, I TOOK OUT MOST OF THE REST OF SWINDON, I WAS SO ANGRY WITH YOU.” He paused. I gave a small cough as a cloud of dust went up my nostrils. The little noise sounded frightfully pathetic beside Tim’s monster voice. “I WAS JUST GRINDING THE STADIUM UNDERFOOT WHEN I FELT MY MUSCLES GROWING AGAIN.” A finger the size of a Boeing 747 poked into the hole, tearing great chunks of concrete and streams of loose soil from the sides. For a split-second I thought he was going to squash me. “NOT FAST ENOUGH THOUGH,” he added almost as an afterthought.

 

The tip of the finger stopped inches away from me.

 

“YOU GONNA HOP ON? ‘CAUSE I’VE GOT SOME GROWING TO DO – AND IT’S NOT GONNA BE SAFE AT GROUND LEVEL FOR MUCH LONGER.”

 

If what Tim had told me about his rampage through Swindon was true, it probably hadn’t been safe at ground level – indeed, at any level under 900 feet – for quite some time. But who was I to quibble?

 

"Um. Sure," I replied.

 

Using the piles of debris in the bunker, I clambered up, up, onto the spongy flesh of Tim’s massive finger. No sooner had I settled on the tip when the finger withdrew. There was a horrible sense of vertigo as I was brought up from the bunker and into the brilliant sunshine. Somewhere around me I had the sense of titanic limbs unbending, vast muscles stretching, steel tendons straining, valley-like joints creaking as Tim came to his feet, but in my ascent I couldn’t make out any details.

 

It was only when I was brought up to his megalithic face, handsome features twisted in a cocky expression, that I realised just how high up I was.

 

I had been in planes this high, of course. But being out in the open air, with nothing but the rough flesh of a giant’s index finger below you, was quite a different experience.

 

I actually felt cold. And my lungs had to so a little more work to fill up, the air was just that bit thinner.

 

The best part though?

 

I glanced down from my fleshy perch at my giant friend’s enormous musculature, pumped more grotesquely huge than a muscle morpher’s most fevered dream.

 

Tim’s muscle growth seemed to be speeding up.

[Bear]

This is great! I love the perspective that the character has! Good story, than you for writing it!