Thursday, October 27th, 7:04 P.M. (Part 3)
Last night, when Ushtar, Grace, Rinoa, and I had
lunch and conversation, the are we were sitting in was marvelous. The location had beautiful architecture, full
leafy trees, well manicured shrubbery, recreations of classical sculpture, and
an absolutely serene atmosphere. That
doesn't exist anymore. The architecture,
once beautiful, now lies in pieces strewn about the general area. The leafy trees have been knocked down and
trampled underfoot. The blood of the
dead feed the now disheveled shrubbery.
Water flowed, instead of into the ponds and other specified receptacles,
into the street where it collected the dirt and the grime typical of city
streets as well as the blood of the dead as it made its way to the
stormdrain. The formerly serene place
had been obliterated by the advancing verbrecher forces, leaving many, many
dead in their wake.
The obliteration of this serenity served to help me
in getting to The Redford, as unfortunate as that might be. The dead, the many unfortunate dead opfers,
served as cover for me as I made my way through the more open areas of
Vierdestad. Whenever verbrechers, armed
and bloodthirsty, would come near, I would imitate the dead. My open and trickling headwound helped with
this illusion. It's not good to say that
a situation this bad thing helped me, whether that help was a large amount or
even the tiniest little bit, but that's what happened.
After slowly inching my way through the Vierdestad
city streets, I finally got to the loading area in the rear of The
Redford. It was dark, mostly due to
power being cut to the building. There
was nobody in this area, so I quickly made my way through the loading dock,
into the restaurant area, up to the door leading to the lobby. Slowly, I opened the door, efforting not to
make a sound as I did so. When I opened
the door a crack and peered into the lobby of the hotel I did see someone. Two verbrechers holding high powered assault
rifled looking very menacing. They were
standing at the entrance to The Redford looking out. Always looking out. In fact, during the time it took me to walk
across the lobby over to the flight of stairs, without making a sound, they
never once looked into the lobby.
Verbrechers are stupid.
I didn't want to make a sound as I climbed the
stairs up to the floor where I knew Rinoa was.
That turned out to be a good strategy because that place echoed and
amplified every sound that entered it.
As I walked down the hallway toward the hotel room, I noticed that it
looked like every door in the hallway
had been kicked in, including the door I was looking for.
I slowly approached the room Rinoa and I shared,
afraid of what I would find inside. When
I looked inside I didn't see Rinoa.
Except for the door, the room looked perfectly in place. The bed was made, my clothes were where I had
left them, Rinoa's skirt and shoes carefully laid out on the table, nothing
looked wrong, except for the fact that Rinoa wasn't there. I was in a panic. In my panic I yelled out for the woman I
love.
"Rinoa!
Rinoa! Rinoa!"
A still small voice called out to me, saying,
"Will you shut the fuck up? They'll
hear you."
I looked around for the source of the voice. I saw a hand emerging from under the bed
waving me to crawl underneath.
Underneath the bed, among the dust, random bits of trash, and an
appalling amount of empty condom wrappers, was Rinoa. Lying prone on the concrete carpet next to
her, I said, "Are you okay?"
"Yes, now shut up. They might come back."
"Who?"
Rinoa didn't answer my question. The sound of bootsteps echoing up the stairs
did. Closer and closer they came untill
I could hear them in the hallway. Soon
these bootsteps were accompanied by voices.
"I thought we cleared this floor out."
"We did."
"Then what was that voice?"
"What voice?
I didn't hear anything."
"Were you listening for anything or just
thinking about pussy?"
In the doorway I saw two sets of boots stop, point
toward the room, then continued traveling down the hall.
"What the fuck do you think?"
"I think if you didn't think about pussy, you
wouldn't think."
"You say that like it's a bad thing. The male mind thinks about sex one every six
minutes. I'm just above average. Furthermore..."
The men continued with their sexist conversation as
they continued walking down the hallway.
Once their voices were out of earshot, I tried talking to Rinoa again in
hushed tones.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah.
Are you?"
"Yeah.
How long have you been under this bed?"
"I don't know.
I don't have a watch on. They
started kicking in doors not long after you called. I've been down here a while. What took you so long?"
"I had to slowly crawl along the streets in
order not to get spotted. That's why I
smell like blood and death."
"Yeah, that's what that smell is."
The voices from the hallway started getting louder
so we shut up.
"I swear I heard something."
"You were just hearing things."
"No, I wasn't.
I swear I heard someone yelling up here."
"It was probably just the sound of the
explosions coming in through a window or something."
"Yeah, I guess."
"You know what you need? Pussy."
"Yeah, I guess.
I think I'll go down and fuck one of those freton bitches we've taken
prisoner."
"Yuk!
That's like fucking garbage."
"True.
Also, like garbage, you can burn a freton when you're done with
it."
The men continued laughing as their voices again
faded away along down the hall. Only
when their voices were too soft to hear did I feel comfortable enough to speak.
"Okay.
Let's go." I started to
crawl out from under the bed when Rinoa grabbed my arm to stop me.
"Wait.
What if they come back?"
I turned toward Rinoa and looked her in her
beautiful eyes. "They're not going
to get you. I will not allow that to
happen. We're going to Velas and we're
doing it together. But, if we're going
to do this, I need you to trust me."
I could see the confidence beginning to build on
Rinoa's face. "Okay. I trust you."
I took Rinoa's hand and said, "Good. Now, let's go."
We emerged from under the bed and ran down the hall
away from the elevators and the stairs I had climbed earlier. My assumption that there would be a flight of
stairs to be used in case of a fire was proved correct. This flight of stairs also echoed and
amplified every noise that entered it.
If Rinoa had been wearing her heels when we left, we would have been
toast.
At the bottom of the evacuation stairs was a door
leading to a hallway. At one end of the
hallway was a door. At the other end of
the hallway was the main lobby of The Redford.
Not knowing where the door would lead us, I chose to head toward the
lobby. The darkness of the hallway
coupled with the darkness of Rinoa and I's skin gave us plenty of cover.
When we got to the lobby, the two verbrechers who
were guarding the door were nowhere in sight.
Rinoa wanted to run for the restaurant but I, thinking that the two
might go back to their post, wanted to wait.
After a couple of minutes of waiting, Rinoa ran for the door to the
restaurant. She wasn't spotted. I cautiously followed after her, looking out
for the guards along the way. They
weren't there and Rinoa took that as a license that we were home free.
Rinoa ran through the restaurant toward the loading
area. When she got there she stopped
cold and took cover behind a wall. When
I joined her, I saw why Rinoa had stopped cold.
The guards, the two verbrechers holding high powered assault rifles I
had seen earlier, were standing in the loading area facing outward. If they had been facing inward, we would be
dead. As we stood behind the wall, we
listened to them and learned why they were facing outward.
"How come we have to do this out here? Why can't we do this out front?"
"Other than we'd be doing it in front of
everyone?"
"Yeah."
"There are corpses out front, dead verbrechers
as well as fretons. Major Nicholas made
it clear to us that we are not to piss on the dead."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"Why can't we piss on the dead? Not that I think fretons are worthy of
dignity, but we fuck their corpses.
What's the differences between defiling them one way and defiling them
another way?"
"Major Nicholas said urinating on people is a
form of torture and torture is more effective on the living because they can
then go tell others of the horrors of their torture. When we fuck we're just satisfying a
biological need."
"But we're not torturing someone right
now. We're pissing because we have to
piss."
"Look, the Major said don't piss on
corpuses. That's the order and that's
where it stops for me. Hey, what's
that?"
"Oh, that looks like one of those armored
military vehicles."
"Huh. I
guess the base must have fallen. I
wonder what they're doing here?"
"And why they're coming so fast."
"Shit!"
There was a large crash after both of the guards
yelled shit. Silence followed this, a
silence broken by a horn blaring and a man yelling. "Hato!
Rinoa! Hato!" Rinoa and I poked our heads out to see what
was going on. In the loading dock sat a
large armored military vehicle with Ushtar sitting in the front seat blowing
the horn and yelling out the window.
"There you are! I thought I
was going to have to come in there to get you."
Rinoa ran across to the armored vehicle first. When I got in, Ushtar told me to take the
wheel while he took the giant gun on top of the vehicle. Ushtar had a lot of faith in me to drive that
vehicle, especially since most of my driving experience involves a video game.