Chapter Twenty-Four
During the fourth week, on the sixth day, in the middle of the night, Harry found himself inter-dimensionally present within a dream of war.
There were IDE explosions going off all around him like some cinematic ballet of death; pieces of his former comrades fading in and out of existence.
Some of them appeared like macabre ornaments hanging from the tree where Matt was previously dissected. Some of them morphed into static light, fizzling out of existence as soon as they entered his line vision.
No matter which way he turned, it seemed there were more and more people simply waiting to die.
At some point in the dream, the ground beneath his feet became unstable. Rocks began to rise of their own accord, while huge cracks formed along the ground threatening to sever the earth like a belabored fault line.
At first, he thought they were a byproduct of the explosions around him but as the cracks began to deepen, and he found himself leaping across massively forming chasms, he came to realize that the source of the cracks was not as he had surmised, but something far greater.
When one such crack revealed a dark abyss below; an abyss which seemed to continue without end, he realized he was dreaming.
His newfound awareness did not make the situation any less ominous, but it did relive the feeling of terror.
Instinctively, he let go of conceptions like gravity, and simply floated up into the air over the growing canyons of darkness.
Unfortunately those within the dream environment around him did not come into similar revelations and most of them plummeted screaming into the void below. Their horrifying wails striking at the heart of the most lucid soldier.
He tried shouting; encouraging the others to wake up, to realize that it was only a dream – that they had some semblance of control, but it was no use. The screams grew into a crescendo, and when he could not bear it any longer, he woke up.
Harry awakened, to find both Al, and Rob missing. He cursed under his breath and stumbled from the cot, throwing the blanket to the floor behind him.
The screams that he had imagined in his dream were now present within his waking reality; and they were coming from within the building.
A quick scan around the room revealed Al in the partitioned section of Rob's corner of the room.
Al's voice could be heard clearly above the screams, he was calling for Harry.
With the calmness of one who had witnessed the turmoil of war, Harry went immediately to Al's aid, without so much as pausing to assess the situation before him.
A massive hole in the wall had appeared just above Rob's cot. It was not an inconspicuous hole, and it looked as though an explosive had blasted straight through the paneling, framework and insulation that composed the side of the building.
Harry leapt through the cavity of blackened, splintered wood, and without pausing for consideration, Al followed.
A thin, spattering, trail of blood led them through the hallway, and into the kitchen. Harry was in his element, and rounded the corner of the hallway into the kitchen like a professional athlete.
Al followed a bit more clumsy, but in earnest pursuit nonetheless.
As they turned the corner, they saw a widening path of blood leading into the pantry which Rob had frequented so often during the last few weeks, to find three horribly burnt figures with various kitchen utensils, standing menacingly over Rob’s cowering form.
Everything appeared to be happening in slow motion and the waves of sound emanating from Rob's throat were unearthly; sounding like the cries of the fallen in Harry's nightmare.
To Al, they sounded like a tortured siren.
It seemed as though the burnt figures were about to butcher Rob, and hang him out to dry, but there was something subtle about the engagement.
“Why had they not simply killed him in his bed?” Harry thought to himself as he rushed in to fend off the assailants.
The pantry was not an overly-sized room, but it was large enough to accommodate three entities and a prostrate Rob.
Harry anticipated the fight being one of close combat, and his only strategy was to tackle one of the three aggressors into the other; slamming them into the sides of the of the pantry shelving.
His next hope was to use the two bodies as a cushioning shield for his own momentum, and turn around with enough time to launch a roundhouse kick or perhaps another lunge at the final attacker.
Harry's plan did not cover what Rob would do in response to the situation, or how Al would fit into the scheme.
He hoped that Rob had enough sense to get off of the floor, and make for the exit, but he did not know where Rob was bleeding, and how serious of an injury he had sustained.
Harry was also not certain how Al would respond to the flushing out of attackers as they either ran away from Harry's assault, or to recover their lost prey; should Rob have enough presence of mind to escape when the opportunity arose.
Before making contact with the first form, Harry reflected briefly on the police officer, in the incident at the dock.
A sinking feeling formed in the pit of his stomach as he remembered attempting to tackle the police officer, but sailing through the form instead.
Acting on his better judgment, Harry now opted to slide tackle the first assailant instead of his initial plan of a full-on, leaping pounce. When the figures faded into white noise and vanished, Harry breathed a sigh of relief, though the recipient of his slide tackle was Rob's prostrate form.
Rob was not happy to have been on the receiving end of Harry's boots, and though the collision was a direct hit, much of the power of the blow had already passed by the time the two prisoners came in contact with one another.
The contact was enough to knock the wind out of Rob, which resulted in a cessation of the awful screaming that had been echoing around the halls of the kitchen.
Rob gasped for air, and Harry scrambled backward a bit, feeling much clumsier than a few moments before. A brief shrug of an apology was all Harry could offer, to which Rob replied with a grimace and gasp.
Clutching his side and his stomach Rob began to rise to his feet.
“I'm not staying here,” said Rob with no small amount of anxiety. “I can't stay here any longer. It's not safe. Get out of my way.”
Harry backed off, and gave Rob some room as he came up from a crawl into a wounded limp, and moved further out onto the pantry floor. The space where his body had been was thick with a small pool of blood, and Harry observed that the wound seemed to be coming from Rob's abdomen.
Harry extended his arm to stop Rob, in an attempt to further examine the injury, but Rob responded with a coarse shout.
“GET OUT OF MY WAY!”
Rob attempted to push Harry out of his way, only to succeed in throwing himself off balance, and stumbling into the shelving on the way out of the pantry. Harry was firm on his feet, but Rob had lost every fair fight he'd had in his life.
Knowing when to call it quits, Harry pulled away, reasoning that if he Rob wanted to bleed to death from a stomach wound, that was his prerogative. Harry shrugged, hoping it was not a fatal wound – though from the amount of blood on the floor leading into the pantry, as well as the crimson soaked shirt still clutched in Rob's hands, the damage appeared serious.
Rob spit out several curses, and followed them up with a desperate, paranoid look around the kitchen.
His mind appeared to have been negatively impacted by the encounter with the three burnt victims. He looked like a schizophrenic in the midst of a particularly bad episode of hallucinatory delirium.
He glanced around the room as though he expected some apparition to burst out of the walls. There was no peace in his eyes.
“We came as quickly as we could,” Al said quietly.
Rob's hurt was evident, and it was also plain that Al wanted to make things better for him but was unable to do so.
Rob must have picked up on Al's good intentions because he came out of his scattered state long enough to provide a brief account of the events that transpired prior to the rescue effort.
He had been lying down as he had been having trouble sleeping and couldn’t nod off so he headed into the kitchen to get himself something to drink – something to take the edge off.
He had walked into the pantry to grab a bottle when he saw two faces coming out of jugs which he had brewing on the shelf there. He dropped the bottle in his hand and another face appeared in the floor and swallowed the bottle whole.
There was no way it was real, and yet one moment he was holding a bottle of wine in his hand, and the next, it had been gobbled through the floor.
Harry circled around from the backside of Rob, and stood next to Al; both stood attentively listening to Rob's story.
Rob had had delirium tremmens before, and thought, “Ok, some bad acid flashback; too much drink; not enough sleep” or something like that, but he knew that wasn't the truth - Not after they took John.
Rob looked around sporadically, and his hands clenched, as though he was looking for more drink to pacify his nerves as he continued his story.
He had gone back to the dorm and sat on the bed for a while trying to go to sleep when he started to feel a great heat, and smell gasoline.
When he glanced at the wall next to his bed, it was on fire. The bed was on fire. The wall was on fire, and he could not move.
Rob's story sounded all too familiar, and all three of them knew this was another incident in the chain of events.
Al and Harry knew that they would be next, and that this incident was not yet over.
Rob continued to describe how he was dragged through the wall by some kind of clawed demon. He showed them the marks left on his torso. The wounds were centered on his stomach, intestines and liver.
Once in the pantry, the demon had transformed into the three burn victims from the fire.
He looked at Harry with a momentary sincere expression of gratitude, but the clarity did not last long, and soon the look of hunted desperation came over Rob's features.
“I can't stay here,” he repeated as he broke eye contact, and stumbled between the two of them.
Harry attempted once more to stop his progress, but received a fist in the jaw for his efforts.
Both Harry and Al were taken aback by Rob's strike, but they had no time to respond, as he simply claimed that “they” would be back for him.
His voice echoed out down the hall towards Harry and Al as he ran toward the exit.
Al and Harry were after him shortly. They followed Rob straight into the forest, before he disappeared into the brush.
It seemed as though the forest had closed in upon itself, barring their path.
Briar patches sprang up where they previously had not been. Trees grew closer together than seemed reasonable.
The entire pursuit reached a climactic halt when a series of screams were emitted from the depths of the woods. Though they tried, there were no routes toward the cry for help.
Finally as the cries were silenced a sickening feeling formed in the stomachs of the two remaining inmates, their rescue mission had come to an end.