Heaven Without, Hell Within

Author's Note: This is a short story based off my "Penny Venal" novel (currently in development).

The jade eyes of Sam Underland swept over the magnanimous hull of dark steel and darker intentions. Were it a living thing, it could have swallowed his own speeder boat and still have room inside for half the vessels at almost any Navy shipyard. The belly, though, would not be one that completely destroys its victims; no, it did something far worse.

He knew. He was once inside such a vessel.

This barge, though, was found adrift by Nessie's people just ninety miles from the shore of Australia, specifically off of their half of the continent known forever as the Australian Eastern Front (AEF). It exceeded his former prison by about a hundred feet, yet it carried the unmistakable reforging by the same hands that forged weapons and medical practices that would have violated every word of the Geneva Convention if it was still around. Unfortunately, the Third World War saw all manner of tools and practices that amounted a total of about two billion dead before the guns were silenced once more. This was the perfect cover for the Ripper Family, the current "owners" of the barge before him. This transportation of products that once traversed the great waters and pulled through violent storms and sea swells could not survive the hands of the organization consisting of rogue doctors and their experiments that, too, suffered under their scalpels.

He looked up at his friend, partner, and fellow survivor. Nessie scanned the barge with harsh-yellow eyes for any automatic weapons or detection equipment while her ears strained for sounds not belonging to nature or physics. Nothing new greeted her senses, so she started issuing her orders to the current crew: "Grappling hooks! Pull us in!" It was barely a roar, but it was followed immediately as the men hurried around both the boy and the orange-scaled woman standing a little over seven feet tall, her algae-green hair waving from the air currents of passers-by. She gritted her sharpened teeth, her hyper-muscular frame becoming more tense as the boat drew closer. Her right hand, completed with dark nails that could extend into claws sharp enough and strong enough to rip into bank vaults, gently fell behind Sam's short blonde hair and across the back of Sam's neck. The gesture was twofold; assurance to calm the boy, but also a readiness to throw him to the deck in case something did happen. She was basically bullet-proof, whereas his own vest wouldn't be enough for what could be lingering onboard. "Steady", she hissed, more so for Sam than for the crew, but either would listen regardless.

Nothing. No guns turning towards them. No alarms. Not even the cry of a seagull was heard upon the beast, as if they were afraid to even think of nesting upon it. The only sounds were the waters tickling from below and the haunting creaks from above.

Nessie waved her left hand. Two personnel climbed up the ropes of the now-secured hooks, moving quickly to the cap rails. For a brief three seconds, they weren't seen again, then they both waved to the speeder boat. One unloaded a folding ladder from his pack, made specifically from bridge cables (as Nessie was heavy with muscle, given how she was recreated), to which the matron gripped and climbed up with caution. Reaching the top, she scanned the deck with recognition before turning back and waving to Sam. The boy checked his pistol, his vest, and his hat and gloves before ascending. Like Nessie, he moved at a steady pace, checking his left and right as he continued upwards. Reaching the height, his personal angel took him in one arm and carried him over the bulwark, setting him down gently not upon a golden street, but upon a rusted landscape.

Even with his boots, he could feel just how cold this place truly was. Sadly, it was a feeling that he never forgot, although his mind was made to remember every good memory as well as every endured nightmare.

Four men stayed behind while eleven travelled with the little human and the super-human towards the foreboding cabin. Sam felt an urge to not go back inside, even though this was not the barge from whence he came. Nessie stopped, as did the eleven. She stared down at Sam, who avoided her concerned visage and focused upon the ocean. The vast sight that lied before them almost calmed his nerves, and he could have sworn that he felt every touch of the soft waves upon the hardened transport even through his footwear. A strong but gentle sensation gripped upon his hand and he finally looked at Nessie. She was not angry or disappointed but held a composure of understanding. "We can leave anytime you want, Sam", she stated, not moving from her spot. Sam stared into the eyes of someone who had suffered in ways that he had only scratched upon in his ten years of life. He nodded and indicated towards the door. Nessie smiled and forced open the door.

Both had expected traps, as the Ripper Family wasn't one to just relinquish one of their personal floating labs. Instead, they were greeted with darkness and its musty smell from nearly two decades of ostensible abandonment. Sam's nose wrinkled with slight disgust, both for the current stench and the recollection of a different ship with a similar tone. Nessie chose to breathe through her mouth to save herself the trouble of managing the deeper levels. Both said nothing as they and their little group moved deeper into the bowels of the man-made abyss, stepping cautiously down the stairs and across the grating. One by one, each door was opened with care, expectations of horrible mechanisms giving way to a silent reality; the ship was abandoned of life.

Something about this barge was bothering Nessie. Sam could tell when he looked at her demeanor every time a new space was discovered.

Nessie and Sam finally walked down what could only be described as the main corridor. Ahead were a set of double-doors like those found inside of a hospital, unusual for any ordinary barge. What added to the strange sight was that one of the doors appeared to be falling off its hinges, but not from the wear and tear of time coupled with the actions of the ocean. The Ripper Family took great strides to make their barges as unsinkable as possible, putting in untold millions for their technologies. No, the one door seemed to have been nearly ripped off by a force that happened from within the ship. This time, Nessie had Sam get behind her as the men prepared for the worst. She took a few steps and reached out towards the door. She flinched and gasped, almost stepping back. The men immediately leveled their weapons, and Sam even went for his semiauto holstered across his chest, but Nessie held up her other hand. "I'm fine!" she explained. "I'm just... a bit overwhelmed. All of this, it feels familiar to me." All of them knew that she had been a prisoner of the Ripper Family just like Sam was, but no one ever dared to pry in how terrible her life had truly been. This barge affected both her and the boy, but she was clearly compromised despite eventually pushing forward into the room.

Sam stepped trepidatiously behind her. Whatever lights that they had carried with them could barely illuminate this cavern that poised to swallow them into oblivion. Sam strained to see in the dark, managing to make out Nessie on his left. She had been holding her position, frozen in a time and a place that could only be found in memories. Then she struck something behind her left side. Immediately, the belly of the beast filled to the brim with brightness, causing all others to shield their eyes. For those brief moments, all Sam could discern were the forms of his great guardian and each soldier that answered to her. As adjustment arrived inside of their eyes, the room itself bloomed as images out of a developing photo; outlines of recognized shapes soon gave way to electronic towers and machines of metal and giant glass cylinders with tubes of either wires or air where something else crawled through, and a line of computers unrolling before the stairs that they looked over from the top. This was, indeed, different from the barge that Sam came from, as there was no line of computers from his unforgettable mind.

Nessie, too, seemed to acknowledge this place all too well.

The giantess climbed down each step, observing all that was now open to the light. Sam followed behind by about five feet, close enough to stay protected and yet far enough to give her necessary space. Once at the bottom, Nessie separated from the group and went to the left while Sam and the eleven stayed on the right. From his side, Sam could see papers upon desks of corroding metal accompanied by chairs of rotting wood. Screens were shattered as if the glass was trying to escape what used to live in this room. There was something else; he started detecting a small noise, something in repetition that sounded like static and... something alive. It was coming from the very end of the line. He looked over at Nessie, her towering form moving in step with his as she gazed in the direction of the noise.

Nessie stopped, her eyes widening with notice of a structure that she had hoped to never see again. Twisting her neck, she beheld the cage of heavy bars like those found in old Western movies. Unlike the films, no special effects were used to bend or even snap the bars from within, unclean in ferocity and spread out from a force of anger. She lingered upon that cage, her nightmares coming back and unburying her trauma: her small frame swimming in water and navigating the tubes jammed into her body, great needles stabbing repeatedly into different muscles and even bones and organs, gloved hands that grabbed her and threw her when there was no tool to strike her...

Touching the line of computers led her back to the present. She awoke before reaching that moment that truly changed her life. The sound that she heard before the distraction called her over to the last machine on this row where those same gloved hands once furiously typed with fervor for enforced progress. She saw Sam at the modem, staring attentively at the image that erupted again and again upon the screen. She couldn't see the image from where she stood, but she didn't need to.

"GrrrrrrrghAAAAH!"

Sam could see the being that stood in front of the former cage that now sat unused and rendered useless. The repeating image showed the bodies of Ripper orderlies, nurses, and even a doctor or two piled around the small girl with familiar algae-green hair and orange-scaled skin, with pieces of their bodies upon her clawed hands while blood fell from her enraged maw. The whole video lasted about five seconds before it repeated; this was happening on the only working computer in this sequence of failures. But then Sam tilted his eyes to the fully-grown Nessie that stayed on the other side. No blood, no guts upon her hands, yet there was still that fierceness, that bitter picture seeking to end the lives of those that ruined hers. The irony was that these were the people that gave her life in the first place.

Nessie averted his gaze, shame overtaking her. She had finally come home, but she never wanted her friend to see what she had willingly forgotten.

Sam didn't allow this to bother him. Far from it, he was relieved to see this. While there was still so much that he didn't know about his partner, he wanted to show how much she meant to him, how he appreciated her not for what she was, but for what he saw her become. Walking around the glowing modem, he stood in front of her. Those yellow eyes still stayed away from his jade gaze, but there was one thing she couldn't ignore. He reached up and gripped her hand in his own strength and gentleness. Nessie's eyes darted back to his and widened at the sudden smile that he gave her. There was no judgement from seeing her past, just a child's love of the person who once saved him from a similar fate. She smiled back. One tug from the boy, and she willingly went with him and left the eleven men behind; unbeknownst to all of them, she was also leaving behind the potential bodies of her previous victims once more.

Back upon the deck, both stared over the rails at the ocean and the sun that did for the outside what the lab lights failed to do on the inside. Sam was still holding Nessie's hand, neither admitting that they were adding to the salty waters with tears of their own. Here, she had a wonderful thought born through the terrible visions; he was her own little angel, pulling her out of that hell into a wonderful and potential paradise.