Grey days no more

As each day greyed into one, Vashtin wondered how long it had been since his capture. Since he’d screamed Run and Hide to the naïve Guardian. Days had stretched interminably since then. Boredom punctuated only by violence and interrogation but little more. Nothing of what made life worth living.

If he had paper and pen, he would have been able to make some sense of what had happened to him. What was still happening to him. Anything would be better than being stuck in limbo, waiting to be killed or tortured. Vashtin had long since given up all hope of rescue; all hope of ever seeing one of his kind alive again.

Vashtin was being held in a dingy grey cell in what had to be an underground bunker. There was no natural light. The only lights he saw were those used by the Venator to flood his cell as part of their sensory deprivation and flooding programme. When they left, so did the light – unless they wanted to keep him sleep-deprived to prolong their torture.

Aeons seemed to pass on days when the darkness went unrelieved; when no jailor brought food and no interrogator visited. The darkness swallowed Vashtin convincing him that he had gone blind. When shafts of light returned, Vashtin screwed up his eyes against the splitting pain as coloured spots shot through his vision in dizzying arrays.

Food and drink arrived occasionally on a metal tray. There was no pattern. Nothing to help Vashtin mark the days. Yet Vashtin was convinced that days and sometimes whole weeks passed without fresh food or drink so he now hoarded some of each delivery in case none came later. He eked out his supplies even as his frame lost its rounded plumpness and became skeletally thin.

Sometimes several drinks or lots of food arrived at once. Normally this was porridge or soup in a cup or finger foods like sandwiches, pizza, chips or sausage rolls. Drinks were mainly water and the occasional fruit juice. If he had spilled a tasty morsel of information to his captors, he was rewarded with a piece of fruit. Apples, oranges and bananas became his guilty pleasures. A stolen sweetness with a bitter after taste.

Vashtin’s jailors provided nothing that would help him mark the days or make any kind of sense of his life. Everything in his cell was locked down. His bed was welded to the floor. No cutlery arrived with the food. There was nothing to use to mark the wall or to count time as it ebbed away from him in the gloom of near perpetual darkness. Nothing to give him back a sense of control or purpose. Nothing that spoke of destiny.

On days like this one, Vashtin’s stomach growled and became sore as his hoarded food and drink ran out. His lips cracked and bled as his mouth dried and his tongue swelled. Swallowing became difficult. Was he forgotten and abandoned? Left to rot and die alone. Why had the Cloaken never come for him? Did his family think him dead?

Miserable beggars. What gave the Venator the right to torture and maim, to ambush and kill? Vashtin had escaped the first ambush with Ellie-Grace, the new Guardian in tow. She had been useless at fighting but then it was her first exposure to his world. Vashtin had been her Cloaken Liaison Officer, an ambassador. He had not known he would be her bodyguard, her protector. Had she escaped? Had Vashtin’s sacrifice mattered? Not knowing almost killed him.

How had the Venator tracked Vashtin so easily? It shouldn’t have been possible. Someone had betrayed him. No matter how many times he beat his left fist on the mattress, no answers came. Who was the traitor and why? Were there more than one? No answers came this day, nor had they the day before, the week before or the month before that. Vashtin knew his days fled from him like dirty water spilling down a drain.

His right arm twinged in an agony that alternated between excruciating pain that burrowed like hornets into his skin and pins and needles. When Vashtin could no longer hold it in, he used to scream out his pain. Too often though that had invited the wrong kind of attention. Orev would turn up to extract information on the Cloaken knowing that Vashtin was in no fit state to refuse. Vashtin had learned to share only what was meaningless. Now Vashtin bit back his screams of pain, not reminding his captors of his existence.

Itching was worse than pain. The itching started where Vashtin's right hand and wrist used to be and crawled up his arm like fire ants until it felt like his whole body was aflame. On a bad day, like today, the pain even flipped to his good arm. Vashtin rolled up his empty right sleeve with a practiced movement. He gathered the sleeve into a cuff as he tried to distract himself from the phantom pain.

Vashtin’s arm had never recovered from being shot multiple times. The Venator had thrown him into their getaway van at the park and sped off with him. He’d had received little to no medical attention. Not until it was too late to save his arm. Instead, Galden and Orev had amused themselves by pressing on his bullet holes as part of their interrogation. They hadn’t expected him to survive and seemed indifferent to his suffering.

Only when his arm boiled with heat and became smelly and gangrenous had the Venator called one of their medics in to amputate it. The stump itched again as if it had become a wormery of wriggling worms. Vashtin sighed and tentatively scratched the stump. His nail bitten fingers encountered puckered flesh. The burning itch continued unabated. He rubbed at it but was careful not to make it bleed. He couldn’t afford for it to become infected. Vashtin was tempted to bang his head against the brick wall, anything to stop the pain, but he refused to give his enemies the satisfaction.

Vashtin’s thoughts circled back to the first ambush. He must have been tagged as he went through portal. He had heard a gun discharge but hadn’t known he’d been hit. There had been no bullet wound. When he’d collapsed on the bed at the safe house, he’d assumed it was from the energy he’d used to lasso and kill the Venator or from taking an untrained person with him through a series of portals. It had been draining, but maybe the Venator had tranquilised him too. Maybe the Guardian wasn’t the only one who had been naïve.

Why had he ever agreed to take the mission? If only he had refused when the Cloaken elders had asked him to meet with Ellie-Grace, their new Guardian. Then Vashtin could have avoided all of this and been safely tucked up in bed at home, unharmed, with his family.

How many birthdays he had missed? Elenya, his wife, had her birthday in May, a month after his capture. Vashtin was sure he had missed that. His twin boys, Caleb and Colin, turned five in September, he was sure that had come and gone.

Had he missed Christmas too? It pained Vashtin that he didn’t know. Did it even matter? Would he ever escape and see his people? Would he ever see family again? Would he ever strut the streets of the Cloaken capital shielded by their distortion spell? Would he ever….? He couldn’t think like that. He would mark time like he tried to most days.

Vashtin stood and rolled his shoulders, each in turn. It still felt weird when he rolled his right one with its empty socket. He stretched his left arm up into the air as if reaching for the ceiling and then bent down to his toes. He rose and stretched his left arm as far up his back as he could. Vashtin then did a series of jumping jacks – counting in a rhythm until he got to ten then twenty and then right up to fifty.

He would have done more but his frame was becoming emaciated, and he knew he lacked the calories. Vashtin’s breath jerked in and out in hurried gasps. Vashtin felt faint and dizzy as heat flushed his body. When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember. Vashtin reached for a bottle of water hidden under his pillow. Almost gone. He wet his cracked, bleeding lips and cursed his jailors for their casual cruelty.

Vashtin lay back on the thin mattress that covered his metal bedframe. He tried to summon a face from home. His mind remained stubbornly blank before sliding to an image of Galden, one of his tormentors. Maybe Galden would remember him and bring food and water. Sit and talk to him a while. Vashtin curled on his side, stung by the shame of a desperate loneliness.

When Vashtin woke, he was somewhere new. Glass doors separated his cell from a well-lit, narrow corridor. A forcefield hummed and buzzed in front of the door. Still a prisoner then. Why had he been moved? Vashtin glanced around. To the left of his bed was a barred window and for the first time in months, Vashtin saw sky. Tears trickled unnoticed from his sore, gritty eyes.

A ham sandwich, banana and a water bottle stood on the scratched metal shelf next to his bed. Ignoring them, Vashtin slid off the bed and moved to look outside. Vashtin stared at the sparse landscape. Scattered clumps of trees dotted the mud-green fields along with semi-derelict farm buildings to his left. Ploughed earthen rows were interspersed with fields of green in front and to the right.

Further away from him, a flooded corner of a field formed a natural bird bath and gathering point for the few birds who had not yet escaped the winter by migrating south. Dark grey clouds scudded across the sky, propelled by a fierce wind, that rattled the windows and caught the edge of a loose shingle that threatened to skitter off the roof.

Compared to the dingy bunker this was heaven but why was he here? Did the Venator hope to find the artefact Vashtin had told Galden about? If they did, they were in for a rude awakening. While he’d told Galden that they would need to dig for it along Hadrian’s Wall, it had been successfully recovered decades earlier. Who would have the last laugh now?

Vashtin forced himself to nibble the banana, savouring each bite as it slid around his mouth and then down to his tight throat. He sipped the water. Only when it was gone did he realise he’d eaten the sandwich too, not saving any for another day. He sat wearily on his bed. Grateful he’d been saved from starvation and hopelessness even if he was still imprisoned.

Maybe, just maybe, his people would find him here. He flicked his fingers and for the first time in forever, blue light sparked. Vashtin lay on the bed and sent his thoughts towards home. He saw the faces of Elenya and little Colin and Caleb. I’ll be home soon. Something brushed his consciousness. We’re coming for you. A smile curved his lips as he fell into a deep sleep.

Vashtin: A supporting character in Unwrapped – A Fated Realms Novel by M J Sherlock - available on Amazon