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I wasn’t even sure I lost the monster in the chase, but I had to stop, it felt like needles in my chest.
I breathed in heavy.
My back against the wall. The smell of ash in the air, a familiar taint. The cacophony in the air, one blurted scream of war; canons and screams. The blur of the monster, it waved by. In and out of houses. I shimmied my body around the corner of the building to see it break glass and slip into the house opposite. Here in this neighborhood, if there was such a thing. This crowded sect of homes. Something next to me dripped. I hadn’t even realized it, not in the thrill of it all, that the house I had entered was occupied.
I turned my head, the dripping sound like a faucet. This two story house, with the wooden set of stairs half destroyed, so near to the Westside Wall. Here, on the brink of the poor - here where it should have been domicile to those half-way wealthy people. Even here the danger was palpable.
Blood dripped down the balustrades. A man was impaled on the wall adjacent, a top the destroyed steps of the stairway. The wound in his chest congealed, blackened. Raw.
I bit down on my hand to stop the scream. And it was as if, by seeing this body, that all those terrible sensations of death finally became present in me. The sound of gurgling blood. The vision of fine, pale flesh. The scent.
Jesus Christ, the scent.
I slipped out, started running and the minute I did a wall exploded behind me. Maybe I went too hard in my step, but the thing shot at me. Black spikes that flew past my face, cutting my cheeks. I rolled and ducked and ran. The knife still in my hand, I was proud of that.
Around a corner. In a building. Slipped behind a back alley stand, the tarp enveloped on me like a curtain.
It was there. I could hear it. It’s slick slapping noises as it’s wet webbed limbs suckled the floor.
And how it’s tail whipped and scraped against the glass and brick and wood laying scarred on the floor. A heavy wind blew past me, I tried gripping the tarp but it slipped.
We looked at each other. No fear in him, only the empty yellow eyes of innocent violence. Almost empty.
I ran, pivoting, pushing myself off the walls. The wind broke behind me. Running far past crying babies and men shielding their family as this thing followed me down like a crazed meth-head. Up and down the street, looking around at the patchwork of planks lining each window and door frame. And the tools; the hammers and the nails and all that laying about on top of scaffolds.
Scaffolds. Maybe that’s how I got the plan in the first place. I came to an open street, having ran further away from the West Side Wall, having come to a section of the city where the construction work for barricades had been in mid production before the attack. I ran for the scaffolds on the sides of the multi-storied buildings. Taverns, homing complexes, churches, those types of things. I saw one such thing, a wooden construct wobbling and crooked, with the multi-layered wooden steps. I ran to it, threw my body right on top and slid across one of the wood steps. My leg thrashed against a bucket of nails, the pain shot up my body but it didn’t matter. Surviving mattered, and this was the only way.
I remained still, bent over and on my knees behind the scaffold. My foot hooked against one of the wobbling legs, my palm ready to grip. So I waited, looking down at this sleek black blur like a nightmare, this darker than black, formless creature rushing at me. It came; slick, slick, slick.
It reared its head forward, its tail ready to shoot or stab or whatever torture it’d devised in its simple mind. And it’s head came up, above the scaffold. It climbed. The wooden stand bent under it’s weight. I snapped. I kicked the leg off, pushed my shoulder into it. The three layered scaffold collapsed. It burst inward, then out. The creature screeched, trapped underneath wood, flailing its body about like lizards do in sudden amputation. My hands shook, I could barely raise my knife.
I had to though. I walked two steps forward, both hands on the knife and the point aimed at the black creatures chest, the thin flesh and the jelly bones that wiggled in its cavity. The basilisk, breathing heavy into its thin body, the flesh widening out so much that light showed through, like putting a candle behind a thin balloon. All the veins, the ligaments, deformities in black and blue and green fleshy new-light.
I stopped, my feet placed in between the creature. My arms shook.
Blood struck my face. I heard the thump of it’s limp body fall. A knife was stuck in it’s body, embedded into it’s skull like Excalibur.
It wasn’t mine.
“What are you doing here?” Sylas asked. “I thought you left.”
“What are you doing here?” I was trying to speak low, it all came out like a shout though.
“I’m cleaning up what came through.”
“Came through?” I hunched over, my hand against my stomach as I sucked in air.
When I looked up, he was already stepping down from a building, jumping off balconies and the combusted sides of a building.
I opened my mouth. Something exploded. Canon? Building? Was it even near? Was danger really close? Some, sure. But not the real danger.
The wall blew up behind Sylas. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. Even as the shrapnel jumped on the floor besides him.
“What in the nine hells are you doing here, Virgil?” He asked.
“Saving people.” I breathed. “Mother. Horse. Needed it.” I said.
“What?”
“I gave. The horse. Away.” The words exhausted me more than the running.
“You could have found another.”
He was right. I stayed quiet, my lips tucked inside my mouth like how I’d done it as a child when I was caught. Whimper. Play fool. Breath heavy. Breath.
Yes, I could have found another. Yet I didn’t. Or rather, didn’t even waste my time looking.
Maybe he figured I was an idiot. Sylas shook his head and looked both ways.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here and I don’t know where you can go. There are more basilisks than we thought, they all broke out.” He said. “Climbed the cliffs to the rear.”
“Behind the big wall?” I said.
“Yes. They went around it, who would have figured?” He spat.
“So they’re in the West side burrows?”
“Inside? That's where they're coming from, youngblood. Didn’t I just say that?”
Cold traveled up my neck, a death grip.
“We need to go over that wall.” I said.
“You’re damn right. Those cliffs are a problem.”
“No. No. I mean, I need to get over that wall.” I said.
He looked at me, eyes narrowed and arms to his hips.
“Explain yourself.” He said.
I breathed in heavy and looked down slope, wiping the sweat from my brown and removing my hand to see the blood in my palms. Canons roared and small men the size of ants spun and ran and played in circles, black dots speckled against pale sand growing redder and redder.
“We need to save whoever survived.” I said. “And we’ll need more help.”
