Paintshark Part 20

"Yep, Big Man's prisoners travel in style! Only he can afford to fly us from Olympia to Gommerstall."

Elias lifted his head and held it still like cat hearing an unfamiliar sound. "Us? How many flew from Olympia?"

"I wouldn't say it was a planned holiday, nor that flew first cla.s.s, but everyone from Big Man's prison was s.h.i.+fted out, the gang's all here, sir."

Elias rubbed his face and felt the stubble on his chin, rubbing again for some sort of security. "How many prisoners are kept here then?"

Felsey's tongue eased out of the corner of his mouth in deep concentration.

"Loads, much more than I could count, a hundred maybe?"

"And how long have we been here?" Elias pressed. "How long have I been out?"

Felcey gritted his teeth as a beetle moved around his stomach again. "Quite a while now."

Elias's eyes widened slowly in shock. "How long is a while? A couple of days? A week?"

Before Felcey could answer, Jago, Farris and Aubrey were led in by another man through the only over door in the hospital room and he spoke to Jago. "You've got ten minutes."

He flashed all of the digits on both his hands to indicate the message again before nodding an acknowledgement to Elias. Aubrey sat on the edge of the bed with a bunch of grapes which he had intended to give to Elias but the patient would have to wait as they were so juicy and he wouldn't miss a few, they tumbled from his mouth as he spoke.

"So you're awake then, eh? Good show! I must say hard cheese about your horse drag, old boy."

Jago gave him a gentle slap on his insensitivity.

"Forgive him my friend; he's just excited you're awake, as am I."

The old man smiled broadly looking at his companions. "We all are."

Elias returned the smile with interest, but remembered what Aubrey had just said. "How am I here? What happened to me?"

He shook his head gently as if there was a tiny man inside on a tightrope and the slightest movement would dislodge him. "I can remember the beetles and the start of me being dragged around that stadium, but after that, it's gone."

The teacher's voice was very soft and easy on the ears, and Jago had missed it greatly.

He stopped to take a deep breath and strained. "I have to get back home and see my daughter, she's all alone." The more he thought about her, the greater the determination was to get out of bed. Gritting his teeth he pulled himself up with his elbows and swung his legs out up from the covers and around to the side of the bed.

Everybody looked to the ground or somewhere else, unable to look Elias in the eyes, something he picked up on. "What's wrong with everyone?" Jago tried to dissuade him. "You don't have to return to Olympia straight away, you should stay here for a while and recuperate."

Elias seemed hurt that Jago would suggest such a thing, not to encourage him to return home.

"What do you mean *stay here for a while'? Why should I? I have to get out of this Gommerstall place, and get back home to my daughter."

"Gommerstall is a prison; you can't just walk out the door."

"Try and stop me, I have to get back to my little girl."

"By the time you leave here, she's going to be a big girl," said Faris.

Elias spun him a confused look and then back to Jago. "What did he mean by that?"

A voice unrecognisable to Elias boomed into the room and the conversation.

"He meant that should you ever leave our humble little establishment and return to Olympia, your daughter would not be the same way you left her."

All heads rose and spun to see a black man with a huge frame enter. His face was hairless but scars ran amok from the right side of his forehead and seemed to continue all the way down to his back. These were the scars he received from his former employers when they caught him by the lake trying to escape with Kimberley. He wore the standard prison uniform, his brown eyes had knowledge of everyone in the room as he scanned the ward. The prisoners had come to respect him as a sort of councillor and resentful leader, within a few short strides he was at the bedside and offered his hand to the still confused Elias.

"Good Morning, Mr Glaucas, it's a pleasure to finally meet you a you've been asleep for some time now, my name is Nayan, and I guess now you're awake we can give you an explanation."

Elias shook his hand. "Thank you."

Nayan sat on the end of the bed. "This is Gommerstall Prison, brother, a maximum security facility just on the borders of Maremkos, split in to three units this is section one.

Many men are here because they were moved from various prisons in the inner regions, Olympia included. It used to be a base for a mining colony many years ago until there was no more Jezel rock in the area and it was left abandoned by the Balentyne Mining Corporation. Then, when the prisons in the inner regions began to get overrun they transferred this faculty in Gommerstall to a prison, which wouldn't be that hard to walk out the door of if we weren't perched on mile high stilts plus with the vicious sandstorms outside and the vines to contend with, this would be an open prison, but with those factors thrown in, hardly anybody leaves Gommerstall, unless it's in a box."

"What do you mean vines?" asked Elias.

That question had been asked by everybody who woke up from their sleep that day and as yet, Nayan wasn't bored with revealing what they were.

"When I first heard about stories of man-eating vines I believed it to be a joke, it took me back to when I was a child and my mum told me tales of fantasy creatures as a bedtime story to send my brother and me asleep, and I told the same story to my own kids."

He paused as if mentioning his family would bring back some unwanted memories which he chose to keep under lock and key, he took out a mobile phone from his pocket and thumbed the keys slowly.

"But underneath this facility, all of the rooms, including the kitchen, the gym, the entertainment complex.... there are vines deep in the ground, underground a what they are connected to I don't know, n.o.body does but if you set foot on the ground for too long they will grab you and they will drag you, tear you apart and suck out your insides. I'm not sure if they're genetically engineered or not, all I know is they're spreading but only on ground level, hence the stilts below us, the ground belongs to them and they are welcome to it, you'll be given an escort when you've fully recovered to show you where you can and can't go.

"And how long have you been here, Nayan?" asked Elias.

"Not long, but the question isn't how long have I been here, it's how long you're going to be here. Elias s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably at the side of the bed.

"I'm not sure how long I've been here, and my memory is kind of hazy, I can remember being told about the horses in some sort of hospital and then just before the transport came I fell asleep and now I'm here, how long did that take, as Felcey seems to think I was asleep for ages."

For a long moment the room remained silent, until Nayan broke it. "You were asleep for a while."

Elias finally snapped. "CAN EVERYBODY STOP SAYING THAT!"

Nayan looked over to Jago who nodded back to him; it was Nayan who spoke next. "Do you know what the name *Gommerstall' means, Elias? You don't mind me calling you Elias do you?" Elias shook his head and Nayan continued. "In the old language of the Jezelians who frequented this dirt pool long before our arrival, the term Gommerstall meant *Peace' and how do people usually find peace, Elias?"

Elias shrugged his shoulders and gave a terse answer, "Death?"

"Which you would eventually find at this prison, but that's not the answer...anything else?

"Nope."

"Gommerstall means to sleep, people find peace in their sleep."

"Even though it's in the middle of nowhere Gommerstall have the best stasis systems in the inner and outer regions, it's like this, you can either choose to serve out your time normally or go down the stasis route and be suspended in a holding tube for the duration of you sentence.

All of a sudden Elias's mind began to kick in with a flurry of backlog information from his studies at university.

"Stasis? Isn't that like sleeping?"

Nayan wasn't surprised that the teacher knew what it meant. "Yes, and most of the other prisoners have been in stasis since your arrival, some of them were awakened recently before you to acclimatise themselves to their new surroundings and to welcome you, show you a friendly face."

Elias's stomach started to churn slowly; he pressed his left hand into his gut to subside the awkward feeling that had appeared, his right hand rubbed his knee pressing against the cloth that was his nightgown his head bent down antic.i.p.ating bad news, his voice was sharp and devoid of any emotion when he spoke next.

"So how long have I been asleep for, Nayan?"

Nayan stood up quickly and walked over to Jago rested his hand on his shoulder and pressed hard, he replied to Elias without looking at him.

"A year, you've been asleep for one year."

An emotional punch to the stomach reeled Elias followed by a sudden trapdoor of panic, his guts twisting around and now both hands held tight to his stomach, trembling as if his body had a mini earthquake inside.

"That can't be true, that's impossible, I can remember yesterday," he began to stammer. "Or the day before, one of the two, but I can remember!"

Nayan was quick to dismiss this.

"Stasis depuration is what you're having now, your memories from the time you went into stasis are slowly coming back to you. The depuration has cleansed the aging process so you look exactly the same as you did when you went in anda"

Elias had had enough. "Cleanse? I don't want to be *cleansed' and I didn't *go in' somebody put me in."

He turned to the other prisoners. "You were in on this too, were you?"

Jago stepped forward, but Nayan continued. "We were s.h.i.+pped in from the prison just before the destruction of Big Man's arena. Do you remember the prisoner guard, Dandridge? Well our prison was directly under the *The Arena', if he had not moved us we would have surely had been crushed to death when the stadium came down. We had no idea what was happening to us and then found out that we were being transferred to Gommerstall. We too were in stasis, some longer than others, I've had a few months in stasis and the other months I remained here as a caretaker, watching over you and the rest of our friends."

"So why didn't you go back to Olympia when you'd finished your sentence?" Elias's voice grew in anger. "Are you married? Do you have children?"

Nayan nodded. Elias wiped his hair back. "Then why not go back home to see your wife, go back home to see your beloved kids?"

"Steady on old boy," Aubrey had noticed the tension festering. Nayan motioned his hand to say *It was ok'.

Elias was still shaking on hearing this breaking news about the lost year of his life. "Why didn't you get me out of stasis sooner? You could have done something, you could have stopped this."

Nayan continued, "To bring somebody prematurely out of a deep sleep in stasis isn't recommended, emotional trauma whilst sleeping is acceptable, physical trauma isn't a there could be disastrous side effects, stomach ulcers with bleeding or perforation, heart attacks, wasting of the bones or advanced ageing...if we'd brought you out too soon it could have rapidly aged you and you could have been looking twice the age you are now, only if your R.E.M is affecting the process and you are in the early stages of sleepwalking which could damage you or your stasis pod, would we consider bringing you out early.

Nayan stopped for a breath. "I think that just about covers it." It looked like Elias hadn't taken any of this in. He began to jabber away under his breath, his eyes wide as they studied the ward floor.

"I've got find something, I've got to get someone, where are my clothes? Where are my shoes?" And then at great speed launched himself over to Jago and gripped his shoulder.

"WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?"

Jago tried to shrug his hand away, but even for a man just out from deep stasis his grip was too tight, Nayan pulled him of off the old man. "This behaviour is getting you nowhere, Mr Glaucas."

Elias hissed back. "I'm in prison, I'm already nowhere."

His mumblings complete; Elias looked Nayan in the eye, with tears forming in his own. "You...Nayan? You're going to have to help me; I've to get out of this place and find my daughter."

Elias was crying now, wiping back tear after tear from his eyes, all but Nayan and Jago turned away.

"She's so trusting with people, we said never to talk to strangers and always hold my hand when you cross the road, G.o.d...I left her in summer camp."

Wiping the tears he kept his eyes on Nayan. "WHO'S LOOKING AFTER HER? WHO'S GOT MY LITTLE GIRL?"

At this time, Nayan thought this was a good enough time for all visitors to take their leave.

As the ward of guests emptied the room, only Felcey remained, stricken on his bed, his eyes now transfixed on Elias and laying in complete agony of the Hustle beetles wriggling inside him, he thought concentrating on Elias would be a distraction from the pain, he was wrong in his a.s.sumption and closed his eyes and finally hoped to die, not even registering the screams of a broken man next to him that lingered on the ward.

Prisoner Tettlow had earlier had an urge, a sudden urge to bake a cake a a birthday cake to himself. His wife usually made him a cake on his birthday, but as he wouldn't be seeing her for a while he'd have to do it himself, which he was more than capable of, having watched his wife and his mother before her make him a cake on his birthday.

He'd already had a good morning, beating his friend Breyner at table tennis and finally catching up with the rest of his comic subscriptions from the supply s.h.i.+p, everything was looking like the makings of a good day which were few and far between in his current abode, he was a prisoner in Section Two of the prison, not all prisoners had come to Gommerstall in stasis, and Tettlow and his companions were no exception, they were teachers from Olympia too but had defied Big Man to keep teaching their students long before Elias had.

But they were deemed too dull to go onto Big Man's game shows so they were s.h.i.+pped to Gommerstall without stasis.

And it was some of these same teachers who had come with him on his quest for cooking ingredients and broken into one of the of the supply containers.

Tettlow eagerly baked two chocolate sponge cakes and had intended to share them with the other prisoners on his block as a surprise, to let them all revel in his birthday secret.

Tettlow was a shy and nervous type but was an exceptionally good teacher, secondary school kids loved his nerd-like qualities when it came to explaining something difficult and technical but today was different, he really wanted to make this cake and for once it was him who had roped in two of his friends in a spot of night crime.

The similarly thin build of Breyner walked next to Tettlow, holding one of the chocolate cakes, his finger had wiped away most of the icing from the top, and in front walked the slightly bigger build of his other friend Leedon, a prisoner with the amazing ability to see what most couldn't in the dark, this ability made him a brilliant lookout man against security guards and a great teacher for night schools.

But like Tettlow, his trustfulness and choice of a.s.sociates was his downfall, being made a scapegoat from them and an example by the Network.

He held back, allowing the others to pa.s.s him. Holding his other birthday cake and resisting the temptation to swipe icing from the top Tettlow asked what was wrong. Leedon stopped completely and murmured, "There's something following us, I'm sure of it."

Breyner put his chocolate flavoured tongue back in his mouth and looked around nervously behind them. All three of the men were walking in a brightly lit tunnel connecting two platforms fifty feet from the ground. The platforms were built onto a rock face, which was part of the old Katarium Mountain range of Gommerstall, long worn away and used as miners dug deeper for their search for Jezel rocks.

There was another platform twenty feet higher wedged in the rocks above, like half a giant dinner sticking out from the rock face, and this was were the trio were heading, their prison block was built in to the rocks and all they wanted to do was to get back into their wing and share some cake with their fellow inmates. Even Leedon wished he had tasted a slice for himself at the kitchen, but he thought he'd wait until they were back safely in their bunks to enjoy the smooth taste of the chocolate sponge, although now he was doubtful that was ever going to happen as the strange sounds grew louder.

As they quickly exited the tunnel to the platform, Leedon pointed to the ground far below. "Something is down there, I know it."

Tettlow could feel the security of his bed calling him and dismissed Leedon's fears.

"Yeah of course there's stuff down there, there are vines down there...look I'll show you."

Tettlow carefully placed his cake on the ground and picked up one of the industrial candles. He showed the sparkling implement a little to close to Leedon's eyes before flinging it over the platform, all three heads looked over the platform edge to see the candle seem to hang in the air for ages until finally coming to rest on the ground below, only Leedon could see in the dark as the ground opened up and a low sucking sound could barely be heard as huge monstrous green vines came up and gathered the candle and pulled it back into the earth, as Tettlow expected.

"See? It's only vines down there and if we stay high above the ground then we'll be fine, nothing to worry about...now can we please, please, please get back so I can enjoy my birthday with the others? Please?"

Leedon stood silent for a moment and then squatted on the soles of his boots, rubbing the ground beneath them.

"Yeah, we can go, it must be my imagination."

Leedon's smile was as good as any birthday present Tettlow was going to get, and he gave a thank you smile back. Breyner was about to join in with the smiling but instead of a smile a look of confusion shot across his face, he looked down and saw a thin like vine crawling up his leg, they had obviously failed to spot it when they had looked over before. Panic and realisation hit him and with a sudden violent tug to his leg. The birthday cake fell to the ground as Breyner was being dragged off the platform, through desperation and pain he screamed for help, but by the time Leedon had recovered from the initial shock and raced over to the edge to the grab him, it was too late, the only thing that remained of Breyner was his one scream heading closer to the sea of vines ama.s.sed at the bottom.

Tettlow still clutched his birthday cake and stood rooted to the spot, his eyes blinking madly in the night, Leedon made a grab at him, his voice dripped in urgency. "COME ON, TETTLOW, MOVE!!"

They sprinted to the bottom of the rock face between the half-platform and started to climb up the ladders fixed to the rocks to reach home, Tettlow lagged behind has he held his birthday cake in one arm. Leedon climbed ahead and roared over his shoulder to Tettlow, "DROP IT! DROP THE CAKE AND MOVE IT!"