Broken Worlds: A Sea Of Tears

I could see that Wayne was getting anxious. We had been in the BlackTech Labor camp for several weeks now, and I could tell that imprisonment was beginning to affect his sanity. He was slacking off on his work, mocking the guards and almost inviting them to attack him, and starting fights with some of the other prisoners. If it hadn’t been for me, Joseph, and Tess getting him to back down and fall in line, he probably would have already been seriously hurt, or worse.

“I don’t need your help,” he said plainly as he stared ahead. We were in the yard outside the prison, waiting to be called back inside. He was sitting on the ground with his back pressed against the wall, while I stood in front of him. “I’ve made it on my own for eight months; I don’t need some talking horse to come along and act like my guardian angel.”

I rolled my eyes; I cared about the human, but his stubbornness was almost unbearable at times. “We just don’t want you get hurt,” I explained gently. “The Resistance has to stay together, right?”

Wayne glanced up at me, his lip slightly curled in a sarcastic grin. “‘The Resistance’? The Resistance is dead, G.B.” he snapped. “We have no leader, and I’ll bet you anything some BlackTech soldiers followed our trail back to the base and massacred everyone inside.” He sighed and continued staring into the distance. “Even if the Resistance had a snowball’s chance in hell of carrying on after this, it wouldn’t matter to me; as soon as we get out of this place, I’m heading for New Phoenix to accomplish what I had set out to do before I got caught up in all this insanity.”

“‘Insanity’?” I heard Joseph’s voice behind me as he approached, “You call a dream of two species living in peace ‘insanity’?”

Wayne looked up at him for a moment, an uncaring look crossing his face. “I call a ragtag group of misfits who think they can stand up to BlackTech on their own ‘insanity’,” he shot back.

Joseph let out an empty laugh. “Oh, and you’d do any better striking out on your own?” he challenged.

Wayne leaped to his feet and stared Joseph down with his dark, furious eyes. “Your plan was to weaken them; attack little factories and labor camps like this one until they were weak enough to mount an all-out assault,” he replied. “What would that have taken? Five more years, at least? This war has already lasted four. If you would just storm the castle and take out the king, it would be over in a heartbeat.”

I tried to force myself between the two arguing humans. “Come on, guys, we’ve gotta stick together!” I pleaded. “How can we have any hope of getting out of here if we’re too busy fighting each other?”

I saw Wayne’s and Joseph’s hands tighten into fists. “I’m not backing down,” Wayne growled.

Joseph nodded. “You take first swing, then,” he invited.

It all happened in a flash. Wayne swung a fist for Joseph’s head as his opponent ducked, and responded with a low sweep at Wayne’s legs. Wayne quickly rolled to the side moments before Joseph could plant a foot on his chest, and quickly rose to his feet as he took a readied stance.

“Nice try,” Wayne growled, and began to jab at Joseph with his fists, starting out slowly until it escalated into a flurry of punches. Joseph raised his hands to block the swift strikes, but it seemed like even that wouldn’t stop Wayne’s insistence on winning; he began to move forward, pushing his defending opponent backward as he showed no sign of slowing his assault.

I glanced to my side to see Tess standing next to me. “You might as well let them burn off their steam,” she sighed. “They’ll be on good terms again when they’re done.”

Suddenly, Wayne stopped his furious punching and thrust his right foot forward, striking Joseph in the stomach and knocking him back several feet. He landed on the ground, holding his stomach and gasping for breath.

Wayne watched and waited for his opponent to stand, and Joseph stared at him uncertainly as he took a defensive stance. “You ready to give up yet?” he called as Joseph wiped a bit of blood from the corner of his mouth.

Joseph cracked his knuckles and tightened his fists. “You wish,” he growled, and the two charged at each other, screaming, fists raised, as they knuckles met with a loud “crack”.

~-~-~-~-~

“That always looks so cool when it happens in movies!” Joseph complained as he stared at his bandaged fingers. Apparently they had punched so hard that the impact against each others knuckles had broken their hands. They had just gotten out of the infirmary after being rushed there by a pair of guards; they didn’t want to risk losing two perfectly good workers just because of some broken knuckles.

Wayne shrugged. “It was still pretty cool,” he pointed out. “It just looked really stupid when we fell to the ground, screaming and holding our hands in pain.”

Joseph chuckled as we began to walk down the hallway toward the labor room. “Look, I’m sorry for starting that shit back there,” he apologized. “It’s just… you can be kind of an asshole sometimes.”

Wayne laughed. “Well, you’re right about that,” he agreed. “I’m sorry for saying the Resistance was pointless; you know I think you’ve got a great operation going on. It’s just hard to believe there’s any chance of being able to make a difference now.”

Joseph nodded as we entered the room, where the other prisoners were already hard at work. “I’ve got a plan,” he said, lowering his voice. “Some of the others are planning a break out tonight; they said we could tag along as long as we moved quickly.”

I gasped. “We’re getting out?” I asked disbelievingly.

Joseph shushed me gently. “Yes, but we can’t talk about it right now; I’ll wake you three up when the plan is being put into action, and you just follow my lead.” He said nothing more as he and Tess headed off in the direction of their wheel, and a guard fastened their shackles. Another did the same to me and Wayne when we reached our wheel, and he stared as the guard left. “I told you we’d get out of here,” he said quietly.

I looked over at him worriedly. “Did you really mean what you said, about leaving when we got out?” I asked sadly.

Wayne glanced at me. “Yes,” he said flatly. “I can’t have friends; they just hold me back, slow me down. I can’t have any extra baggage when I go to take down BlackTech.”

I stared at my hooves as I marched in a circle. “I was hoping you’d rethink your decision,” I mumbled.

I heard the human boy sigh. “I’m sorry, but it’s not just best for me, but for your and the others as well, if I stay away from you all. I… I can’t have friends,” he explained. “Maybe once, long ago, but not after what I put myself through to survive. My mind is focused on my own survival, and anybody around me is expendable. That’s my survival instinct now.”

I gave him a confused look as he stared ahead, his face showing as little emotion as possible. “Why would you torture yourself like that?” I inquired, and I suddenly caught a glimpse of his hands; he usually wore gloves or kept them in his pockets back at the base, but now I could see them in full view; his knuckles were pitted and scarred, as if he had punched a brick wall day after day.

He glanced over and saw me staring at his hand. “The last thing my uncle told me was to look out for myself and never let anything hurt me,” he said simply. “So I broke myself and built myself back up, getting stronger every time. I guess every time I toughened up, I started to lose more and more of my humanity.”

I watched his eyes as he said this. “I don’t believe that,” I said cheerfully. “If you had really lost your good nature, then you wouldn’t feel bad about losing it. There’s still a part of you that cares about others; you just need to find it again.”

He smirked as we continued pushing the wheel around. “We’ll see about that,” he replied smoothly, and didn’t say another word until it was time for bed.

~-~-~-~-~

“Gentle Blade!” A stern voice whispered my name as a strong hand shook me awake. I snapped my eyes open to see Joseph standing over me. “We have to go, now!” he explained, and I wasted no time in leaping off of my bed and following him to the edge of the room, where Wayne and Tess were waiting. I saw the pair of guards that stood watch by the doorway were lying unconscious on the ground, and Joseph motioned for us to follow him into the hall.

“Two of the other prisoners has been cooking up this plan for some time,” he explained quietly as we rushed down the hall. “They were able to make some kind of EMP that would take out the guards’ electronics for a little while, and said they would take care of the guards; anybody who could get out before they woke up or before the jammer ran out of power was free to join.”

As we reached an intersection in the hallway, Wayne suddenly turned a corner and headed away from us. “I’ll catch up,” he called behind him, grabbing a stun stick from a guard lying in the middle of the hall. “There’s some things I need to find.”

I looked up at Joseph, who shrugged. “We can’t risk waiting for him,” he said quickly, and we continued our escape. A few of the guards had come to, but their exo-suits weren’t back on yet, causing them to stumble around awkwardly with the cumbersome metal framework weighing them down and restricting their movement. Joseph lifted a rifle from one of them and stayed in the lead, shooting any guards who tried to get in our way.

We eventually made it out of the prison, emerging into the crisp night air. I let out a sigh of relief, but my brief moment of hope was dashed by the sound of a BlackTech chopper’s whipping blades.

“ATTENTION PRISONERS: RETURN TO THE FACTORY, OR YOU WILL BE NEUTRALIZED,” a soldier commanded over the loudspeaker. I saw a pair of rotating machine guns on the front of of the helicopter and took a tense step back. There was no way I was going back inside with freedom so close, but I didn’t want to risk having to outrun those guns.

Just then, I heard another voice on a loudspeaker behind us. I saw Wayne standing there, a megaphone in one hand, a pair of pistols strapped to his sides, and a large firearm strapped to his back. He had retrieved the clothing he wore before we had been imprisoned, and his face was now concealed by his goggles and skull bandana. “Attention BlackTech assholes: go fuck yourselves!” he replied, dropping the megaphone and pulling the strange object from his back. It hummed loudly as the front sparked with magnetic energy, and it hurled a metal projectile at the helicopter, punching a hole in the center of the cockpit and sending it spinning into the nearby forest.

“Great shot!” Joseph cried as he motioned for the rest of us to follow, and we made our way into the woods. Just before I passed the treeline, I glanced behind me and saw Wayne staring after us; was he considering following? My heart sank as I watched him turn and run in the opposite direction, leaving the cumbersome railgun behind.

“You’re not getting away that easy,” I mumbled, and rushed after my human friend.