Escape from the Field of Woe

  The clouds gather above, the ground below, barren and flat, seems to coil itself in anticipation without moving.

  A single drop of rain falls to the cracked dirt. Dust explodes up and out, a miniature, momentary crown lit by a strobe of light and then gone before the afterglow fades.

  With a peal of thunder, the sky opens.

  Rain pours from the heavens in waves, a once-in-a-thousand-years rain- centuries of moisture waiting for this one moment to be unleashed, all at once.

  Lightning flashes, thunder rolls, illuminating and booming across the Field of Woe – sick flowers a mile high, spread across four hundred square miles of desert. The gas-bag succubae and their hosts sway and tumble in the winds, kept from blowing to the four points of the compass only by heavy chains rooted to the ground. The parasites strain to free themselves to float to safety above the clouds. Many become tangled with each other. More than a few are vaporized by the thunderbolts flung down from Olympus.

  After three years imprisonment, Red Horne finally works his hands free from his bonds and pulls the roots of the parasite from his eye sockets, his throat, and his ears.

Bloodied, blinded, deaf, but wholly aware of everything around him, Red climbs down the chain, five thousand two hundred eighty two feet to the ground.

  A guard, a glorified gardener that barely passes for human, passes by, unaware of his doom.

  Red pounces from above, snapping the guard’s neck with a savage, ragged yell that quiets the thunder from above. He stands slowly as the rain washes down his naked body. More guards rush in- the first wave never hesitates, the second turns and runs in fear. Red flexes his bare hands and kills them all, one by one, leaving them in broken and mangled heaps.

  Red earns his name before the rain can wash the blood from his hands.

  His body is clean when he walks from the Fields an hour later; morning has come, the storm has gone, and the sun has quickly dried the land. But he is far from right.

  Far from home.

  Far from himself.

 

  Far from sane.