Knights of Cydonia

[Ford Prefect]

I haven't posted anything in a long while. This is the first thing I've completed in the same period of time, and i thought some people might be interested. This is set in the same fictional universe as Shroomy's DINO EATER fic, as well as an earlier story I've posted here, Things Might Get Trippy.




In the middle of a steaming jungle Jack Fawcett, also known as super rock star The Wayward Son, was stopping an ethnic cleansing through a beautifully played power ballad. He did not know the local language, and the locals did not know his language, yet the incensed men had dropped their machetes and knives, their clubs and bludgeons. Some had fallen to the dirt, and others had started swaying to the sound of Fawcett’s incredible guitar work. Across hundreds and hundreds of miles of wet, endless jungle, thousands of men had dropped their arms, and in the local capital, grey-clad metahuman soldiers burst through the palace of yet another despot.

Elsewhere, Patrick Peck, known as the Awesome Archwind to the world, stood watch over an escalating conflict in the Middle East. He was a ghost of a return on radar that had cold sweats breaking out across dozens, if not hundreds of necks. Preparations for war were grinding to a halt, missiles cooling in their silos. A harried president kept going over and over a letter signed by the Arab League, which on another day he would never have even glanced at. Every time he glanced over his shoulder he could see a silhouette against the glow of the moon and could feel eyes upon the back of his head.

In England, Harold Quartermass, greatest scientific mind of this age or any other, was penning the latest in his revealing discourses on the nature of science and the universe. Across the globe, Anthony Andrews, world’s richest man and one of its foremost engineers, toiled away with colleagues at planning for the world’s first orbital elevator. In another plane of existence, Daniel Stephensen, Great Sage and supreme among sorcerers, was mediating the return of thousands of souls stolen from their rightful place in death.

In ice-bitten wastes, Dimitri Zaitseva - the Communist Manifester - dragged hundreds of tons of supplies to small towns on the verge of cold death. Eric Dearfield, chosen by the earth as the Tellurian, floated across the span of South America, supervising the regrowth of once lost forest. In Africa, the super-mercenary unit ACID toppled rebel groups and returned tenuous peace to war-torn countries. Across the globe, the hungry were fed. The homeless were sheltered. Dictators were torn from their thrones. Terrifying overlords at home and from the depths of space were repelled, defeated and sent running like dogs. One day stretched into another for the titans of the world, heroes that worked every day to bring a little more justice into global society.

This is not their story.

Rather, it is the story of Justin Thorn.


Knights of Cydonia

A Scathing Indictment of the Bewildered Children of Pleasure....Riding the Gilded Juggernaut of Jazz

Chapter One


The Cydonia Mountains ranged about like a billion tons of drunk, viridian rock. Across their length, from rifts and ridges, buildings erupted through the trees in cancerous expressions of Art Deco. Roads snaked in and out of the open, emerging almost at random from the forested slopes, sometimes in tandem with archaic railways that raced across open gaps with kilometre drops atop graceful and fragile seeming suspension bridges. In all, Chasm City was a slice of architecture right out of a para-noir 1920s, dark yet simultaneously colourful, with more sunbursts than any other city in the world. Scattered haphazardly across the mountain range, it was perhaps unique; a true metropolis precariously perched atop the world.

A motorcycle thrust itself into the morning light, its black carapace thrumming almost soundlessly across the tarmac of a gossamer bridge. Death waited eight hundred metres below, but the be-goggled rider in his vivid leathers paid it no heed. His tattered silk scarf snapped and boiled in the wind as the rider and his bike sunk back into the greenish twilight of the forest. Justin Thorn was alone on the road, as he usually was. There was no real planning to his home city, just a highly determined corps of professionals connecting every ‘suburb’ regardless of location, prominence or population. Chasm City was a chain of urban islands atop the waves of the Cydonia Mountains. When he was much younger, the senseless web of roads and bridges and the random placement of important locations left him confused and lost.

Today was a school day, and he knew the way to Cydonia Academy like it was etched into his eyeballs. There was no way to count the number of rides he had taken to the Academy from almost every conceivable position in Chasm City; his swerve around a particularly wild bend was taken without him even glancing at it. Leaning over the handlebars, he let his instinct take him to school, and let his mind waft away with the jetstream, eyes half-lidded.

Cydonia Academy was constructed by the same addled mind that had conceived of Chasm City. The school was built along – and in – the slopes of two separate mountains. As Justin rounded a curve cut out of the rock, he spotted the school and its million different windows and metallic fixtures blazing in the early light. Now there were other vehicles, a trickle of streamlined cars and bikes like his spiralling upwards and lancing across to the Academy. Justin sat up in the saddle and firmed up his hands. His lips moved in a silent countdown as scenery zipped past. Gritting his teeth at zero, his lane merged with another, and placed him side-by-side with another vehicle.

Both were black and almost mirror polished. Both carried the badge of the Bavarian Motor Works. Justin’s bike, however, was a fraction of the size of the two-door car to his left. For a few seconds he made eye contact with the other driver through the transparent carbon of his goggles and the car windows. They seemed to coast by in slow motion.

Justin’s hand twitched. The driver’s eyes darted downwards then swept back to the road. Grinning triumphantly, Justin ripped back on the throttle, throwing himself into one of the cities many, many bridges.

It would have been more impressive if they ran on internal combustion engines, and so could fill the world with the primal roaring of exploding fuel. No bystander could experience the sensation of acceleration clawing away at Justin’s body, trying to drag him off the bike and deposit him on the ground at a hundred kilometres per hour. Within his gloves, his knuckles were white as he attempted to pull the throttle back even further, as though sheer determination would somehow improve the bike’s performance. The BMW M6 was going to rapidly overcome its deficit in acceleration with its sheer size. He pulled out in front of it with the breadth of a hand to spare. The car swerved to the right, and Justin went with it, almost swiping out one of its headlights. The other driver yanked hard on the wheel and screeched across to the left. They were coming off the bridge and into the sharp turn leading up; Justin realised too late that he’d been cut off. He pulled away to avoid being sideswiped in the car’s turn, and thus maimed or killed. Probably both

Justin tried to push himself through the frame of his bike as the second and final bend approach. The car was ahead, and that lead was only growing.

Only one choice.

The bike not roaring like a beast, Justin flung himself headlong away from his opponent. His helmeted head almost ploughed directly into the irregular rock wall, his armoured knee skimmed the tarmac and left a handful of sparks dancing in his wake. He could just about feel an impending impact shooting down his spine with fragments of his skull. The tough polymer of the wheels was squealing in protest. Unyielding stone flashed by millimetres from his forehead at lethal speed. Like a bone stuck in his throat coming free, making the turn alive was a release; right up until bike almost collided with car.

There was screeching, a rancid smell and yelled expletives. The BMW M6 rolled calmly into a space marked ‘reserved’.

The driver’s side door swung open and the brown haired figure of Klaus von Rottingham III hung himself over it. He peered down at the limply sprawled face down, and then glanced over at the bike, which was sitting on its side more than ten metres away. “You alright Thorn?”

After a short silence, Justin rolled on to his back, sat up and removed his helmet and goggles in one swift movement. “It would take,” he began, tugging off one of his gloves with his teeth. He ran his fingers through his short, sky-blue wavy hair. “More than something like that to kill me, Klaus.”

“You still lost though.” Klaus yawned, leaning back into his car to retrieve his bag. “Just like you lost yesterday and the day before that, just as you will loose tomorrow. You can’t beat me. The difference in the power level of our engines is just too massive. It’s impossible.”

“Don’t ever tell me something is impossible.” Justin replied, wiping at the trickle of blood running from his nose. He began to walk towards the car park entrance. “Unless you want to be proven wrong.”

Klaus cocked an eyebrow. “The other way, Thorn.”

“Right, right, totally.”

*

Soft fingertips held one of Justin’s eyes open. The blinking light made his pupil swell till it almost engulfed the violet of his iris. “I think I’m rather disappointed that you weren’t seriously hurt.” She said, rearing up and tapping her cheek with the little penlight. “At least then you might be convinced to stop doing something so stupid.”

“You wound me, Nurse Hart.”

Crossing her arms across her ample bosom, Medusa Hart stared down her nose at Justin, who was grinning. “One day you will die, and I will not care.” The corner of her mouth twitched as she spoke, and she quite firmly pushed the tiny torch into the centre of his forehead. “I will know the joy of silence and peace.”

Standing up, and placing his eyes levels with those of the nurse, Justin shrugged. “Please, I make life exciting for you and all those around me.” Smiling, he stepped past, but Nurse Hart’s deft right hand caught a hold of one of Justin’s trailing fingers. He let his head roll around; the nurse was frowning. He sighed and fully turned towards her, placing his hands on her shoulders. “If it will make you feel better, then I promise you that I will avoid getting myself killed.”

Her arms coiled around him. “That’s not the sort of reassurance I was after, you know.”

Someone cleared their throat, and the two sprang apart as though on springs and automatically slipped into the process of feigning innocence. Justin turned his attention to the voice’s owner, who was a positively tiny specimen of boyhood in glasses. He had a lightboard under one arm, and a particularly disinterested look layered over his face. Justin frowned. He could have at least had smug condescension oozing out of every poor so that he could use ‘hypocrite’ in a sentence. “Wes! What’s happening, brother?”

The small boy held up the board. “Business.”

The two boys walked down the centre of the hall with no concern from the parting mass of students in every category of age. Justin wasn’t even watching where he was going, instead viewing reports on Wesley’s tablet laser screen. “You can tell the Dean of Science to bite me. I am not letting him test anything involving the words ‘high-energy’, ‘accelerator’ or ‘positron’. I actually had to go speak with Ryan Atlas about that last accident, in an official meeting involving the Headmaster and the Consul.”

“You can’t stop almost all their high-end physics experiments purely because of a personal distaste for explaining yourself to people.” Wesley sighed as they passed into an open courtyard. They stopped before a darkly brass statue of a muscular man. The words ‘WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE THE STABILITY OF THY TIMES’ were carved into his stone pedestal.

“Wesley!” Justin exclaimed, jabbing his finger upwards. Wesley followed the line of his arm, and found himself looking a patch of mountain which was treeless and discoloured.

“I will admit that there was some laxity in terms of safety, and Klaus won’t shut up about how much the repairs are costing the school, yet at the same time, what you’re doing with Nurse Hart is wrong.”

Justin blinked several times. “I’m not doing anything with her.” Wesley’s brow curved in an intriguing way. Justin narrowed his eyes. “Though, I suppose you know one’s onions. You…” Justin paused, lifting his face to savour the next word. “Hypocrite.”

The diagonal along which their eyes met seemed to shimmer with heat. “I don’t …” Wesley shook his head.

“Don’t what?” diffuse clusters of students began to linger or outright stop, as though about to witness a spectacle of one-sided violence. Wesley showed his palms.

“There’s no point trying to explain myself to you. Are we still going to go hiking this afternoon?”

Still staring down the bridge of his nose, Justin’s face was harder than that of the statue to his left. Wesley’s eyebrows began to waver at their ends, shrivelling above his eyes. The visage broke and a smile smeared across the blue-haired boy’s face. One of his arms lashed out and snagged Wesley around the neck, dragging him in. “Of course we are.” Hauling him out of the courtyard with his toes just scraping the ground, Justin whispered conspiratorially. “Now tell me about this ‘dating older women’ thing. It sounds exciting and illegal.

“As if there’s any difference.”

*

“I’m telling you, all the kids in the big clubs around the world are going crazy for this shit, ‘Resa!” Michael Yeats watched as the auburn haired girl nodded her head, one hand on the enormous set of headphones covering her ears. “Cross-synch memetic resonance. It’s moving through the electro world like a storm.”

Theresa Golightly removed the headphones and proffered them to their owner. “You slay me sometimes, Mike. That just sounds like a complex, and lame, way of saying ‘acid house’. And no matter how popular it is in Ibiza or London or Tokyo, you know it’s never going to catch on here.”

“And how.” Michael replied with a sigh, dropping down on to the step, hooking his ‘phones around his neck. “Well, I can dream. And when I’m older, I can buy myself a club which doesn’t have anything to do with jazz. And where are they? They said the Student Council meeting wouldn’t take long.”

They both shrugged and sighed, and leant back against their packs. The sun was still high and hot in the sky above the Cydonia Mountains. The Academy was still more or less teeming with students, even with the shortened day. Footsteps thudded down the steps above them, and they craned their heads back to look at a dark-skinned boy with a soccer ball in hand. “Well, look who it is. How are you kids?”

“Peachy keen, James.” Theresa replied, wiggling one of her hands. “Just waiting for Justin and Wesley to make an appearance.”

“I’d have liked to have tagged along, but you know how things can be at home.” James said, taking a few further steps down. Michael nodded slowly, eyes closed. “Mind you don’t get lost in a cave or something stupid like that.” He winked, then cocked his head with a raise of his eyebrows. “And I do believe I hear our man coming.”

There was no way to describe the approaching noise except ‘two people attempting to talk louder than the other’. It wasn’t really shouting, though after a few moments it was possible to make out the individual words. A female voice was saying ‘You’re going to kill all our academic credibility if you don’t let them start work again!’ and a male voice was replying ‘Blah blah blah blah blah blah blaaaah!’. Both Michael and Theresa turned around to watch three students emerge from beneath an arch. One was Wesley, strapped to a pack which looked enormous on him and trailing by a few steps, his eyes almost rolling out of his skull. The second was Justin, like Wesley in boots, though he held his bag in one hand. The third was a girl with blonde hair that shimmered like ice in the sun beneath her cloche hat.

Her name was Susan Golightly. If you stood Theresa next to her, then you would have to come to the conclusion that they were related. At a cursory glance, the only difference was their hair; however, Susan’s figure was fuller, she stood taller and walked with such an airy grace that it was as if her feet did not touch the ground. As she jabbed Justin in the chest with one finger, it was both with considerable annoyance, distaste and poise. “Don’t think that because you’re going gallivanting off through the mountains you can get away from this. Phillip might seem to think you can do no wrong, somehow, but that is why I exist.”

“That is also why you aren’t the Consul, and he is.” Justin replied, before turning away. He instantly spotted James, and their hands crashed together with a bulging of sixteen year old biceps. “Atlas! You son of a bitch!”

“Heh, Thorn, I heard you died this morning.” James replied as they began to have an aerial arm wrestle.

Snorting, Justin tossed his head around like a bull. He appeared to be attempting to crush James’ bones into dust. “It takes more than a car crash to kill me.”

“Unfortunately.” The Golightly sisters, and Wesley, chorused. Theresa stood up and shouldered her pack. “Can we go now? I really don’t think I can stand the sexual tension.” As if on cue, the boy let go of each other and punched each other in the fist with the popping of knuckles. Justin swung his bag onto his back and snapped his fingers, pointing.

“Let’s roll.”

*

“You’re currently trying to work out how to say to the Dean of Science ‘I was wrong, you can keep on with your experiments’, without actually saying that you’re wrong. Aren’t you.”

“Oh for crying out loud!”

“Speak easy ‘Resa.” Justin said from the head of their little procession, clambering easily onto a massive chunk of stone. He glanced down past both Theresa and Michael, to glare at Wesley. The small boy just smiled and pushed his glasses up his nose; they caught the light went opaque with flame. “Let’s just enjoy this. The quiet of the wilderness.” A train sounded its horn. Michael slid past Theresa and sat against the edge of Justin’s rock.

He stared out across the open air, at the peaks and crevasses, and the bits of city emerging like reefs of urban coral and smiled. “This is Jake. I’ve seen this view a million times from my house, but this is different. Do you do this much?”

“Used to.” He said, before continuing on the rough track. Michael blinked at his back, then scrambled across the rock.

Like all hikers, they moved like they had a purpose, despite the fact that they weren’t really going anywhere in particular. Over the hill and back again sufficed to keep them moving; except for every so often when Justin and Theresa would stand, tapping their feet as their companions struggled to keep up. At one such interval, Theresa took the time to apply sunscreen to her legs, and Wesley took the opportunity to drop onto his backside. He moaned loudly. “Why did I agree to do this?”

Justin turned away from his examination of Theresa’s hand’s sweeping smoothly up the length of her legs, and shrugged. “You’ll get used to it.”

“My feet are probably harbouring the intent to bump me off.” Justin rolled his eyes and jumped over. Crouching down, he grabbed one of Wesley’s boots and pulled, dragging the small boy through the dirt. Wesley yelped and Justin showed all his teeth, flapping one hand and using the other to easily slip the boot off, as though it had been pre-oiled. The sock came off even faster. Justin held the foot in his hands for a moment, as though about to play podiatrist. He suddenly dropped it and got to his feet. Wesley with his eyes wide as Justin loomed over him, then climbed above his head. He twisted around and watched his friend find purchase in the pitted wall and easily slip out of sight. “Hey, where are you going?” he asked.

As he spoke, Theresa stepped over his head then moved up the wall even faster than Justin. Wesley blinked and turned back to his removed shoe.

When he and Michael managed to reach the other two, they found Justin and Theresa standing in front of a yawning cavern. "It looks like a cave entrance." Kevin noted.

"It is a cave entrance, you onion." Justin said, moving closer. It was like a wall of pitch, but the handy application of Wesley’s LED torch alleviated some of that. After looking as closely as possible from the entrance, bending over and stretching out his arm, he scratched his forehead. “Funny. I don’t think this is on any of the Academy maps. I’ll have to mark it as a potential danger. Let’s go inside.”

He walked inside, waving the torch around. There was a pause and Theresa’s shoulders slumped. “Wait here.” Both boys nodded and immediately sat down. Theresa stepped carefully inside, and shouted. “Thorn! Get your ass back here.” The torch whipped around at her, catching her in the eyes. How did her sister keep him under control? Shaking her head, and watching her feet, she moved in closer, grabbing him by the backpack. “What is it with you?” He was still moving forward.

“I don’t know.” He replied vaguely, still walking. Theresa gave him a tug. The torch jumped to light up their faces. “I really don’t know. Let’s go.” He turned further into the cave and started walking. Stunned, Theresa pulled with all her strength, making Justin stumble. Then trip. Their screams bounced round the rock and slapped straight into Michael and Wesley. They glanced at each other, the colour dripping from their faces.

They were sliding, a fact Justin realised after he had ground his face into the rock slope. Tumbling and crumpling and bouncing, both Justin and Theresa cried and howled and continued to lacerate, bruise and fracture themselves. It was a mercy when it ended, only they were holding station many, many metres in the air. Still screaming, they plunged directly into a pool of water and began thrashing around. Justin’s brain was attempting to guess how cold it was, but neurons were freezing in mid-fire. When he managed to drag himself out on to the bare rock, he was numb. Hearing a small cry for help, he rolled over and tried to get his fingers to close around Theresa’s wrists, but it was proving to be difficult.

After forcing his limbs to actually work, they were able to haul her lower body out of the water. She knelt before him, her hair slicked down her face and neck, shivering. It seemed like didn’t know where to wrap her arms; in the summer sun, short-shorts and a bare midriff seemed like a good idea. Not now that her perpetual pout was blue. Justin helped her remove her pack, then removed his own. He could have stored meat down here. At least he could see, despite having lost the torch. A pale light was being emitted from all corners of the cave. At roughly the same time, their heads turned. Blended noise droned from the tunnel they had emerged from.

Wesley and Michael, in a tangled mass of limbs, made the eighteen metre drop into the liquid blackness. Weakly, Justin and Theresa dragged themselves to the edge and waited to drag their sputtering friends onto the safe shore. Together, they made an irregular squarish shape and let their teeth chatter. Justin spent the better part of ten minutes opening his back pack and extracting a small cube. When he finally had it, he gave it a shake and it expanded into a black sheet; mercifully dry, for Justin’s pack, like the others, was waterproof. The group huddled within it.

It was mostly silent for some time.

“Are we going to die?” Wesley asked very softly.

“Not a chance.” Justin replied. “I left a plan of our trip with the SES, and we didn’t stray very far from it. Even if it takes them a week to find us, we have enough water to last us three times that. This is a blackbody blanket as well – we won’t be able to freeze.”

“If we’re not going to die,” Theresa began, staring at Justin with no particular expression, “Does this mean I can beat the crap out of you for running getting us stuck down here? What the hell was that?”

Scratching his nose, Justin shrugged, frowning. “I … was on automatic.”

With a cry, Theresa leapt upon him, and the disappeared beneath the blackbody blanket. There was a series of muffled thuds and laughing shouts. When Justin surfaced, Theresa was attached to his ear, with her teeth. “This really hurts, get her off me.” Before Michael could reach over and lever apart her jaws, Theresa released him and returned to huddling like a normal person. Rubbing his ear, Justin continued. “There’s no point trying to explain. I don’t know how to.” He suddenly stood up, releasing the stored body heat within the blanket, and stepped away. The remaining three gathered it around them desperately.

With every step he became more an indistinct silhouette in the blue light of luminous lichen. He spread his arms and twirled. “And now here I am, and I’m not satisfied.” He kept walking.

“Hey, hold up a second!” Michael shouted before slapping his face. “That idiot!”

They could not help but follow. When they caught up, they found Justin standing before a wall. It was smooth and dark and glassy; when Justin touched it, silvery lines inscribed a circle about a metre in diameter. A second smaller circle, which as Wesley looked closer appeared to be writing of some kind, appeared within the first. The four of them stood in silence, a mixture of shock and awe across their faces. “I’m satisfied.” Justin said after a moment. He traced a finger around a small circle within the larger one, before driving his fist directly into it; whatever the substance was, it shattered. Justin pulled, and the area inscribed by the circle of writing silently emerged from the wall by less than an inch. Then, as though on oiled rails, Justin pulled a cylinder almost three metres long from the wall, effortless twisted it by ninety degrees and pushed it back into place.

“I didn’t think you were that strong.” Wesley said.

“I’m not.” Justin replied, as a ripple ran through the material of the wall. The group took a few steps back as surface undulated, then became solid once more, only blacker and colder than before. It was as though the wall no longer existed, and had instead been replaced by an absence of everything. Justin reached out to the negative space, and before protests could become more than indistinct noises, had placed his hand into it. As one, the other three seized his arm. Despite this, he dragged them through.

Theresa screamed, thrusting Justin’s back into a wall and planting a fist directly into his face. She straddled him and attempted to pound everything of him from the chest up into dust. “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! You fucking fucking fucking idiot!” her caught her by the wrists, blood seeping down both cheeks. He could see tears on hers. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, he whispered, and she wiped at her face with aching hands. She stood up abruptly and bumped her head into Michael’s. They both cried out and stumbled away, clutching their heads, as Justin and Wesley stared in disbelief. Theresa and Michael were standing on different surfaces. To Justin, it seemed as though Michael and Wesley were standing on a wall. The opposite was true of Wesley. Blinking very heavily, Justin finally took in his surroundings.

A white corridor lit by diffuse light.

No sign of the door through which they entered.

No end in sight.

He achieved a stunning clarity of his situation, and the situation of his friends.

They were all going to die.

[Shroom Man 777]

I really can't wait for more. It starts off as a weirdo bizzaro highschool dramady and ends up now as a grueling yet even more bizzaro cave survival scenario - with Lovecraftian incomprehensabilities and with a strange yet seemingly unnatural force compelling Justin Thorn, our hero, to be an utter idiot.

I cannot wait till we get back to the weird bizzaro highschool dramady that will, by virtue of the results of this bizzaro cave survival scenario (;)), become even MOAR bizzaro!

Teen Social Issues! Pregnancy! Homosexuality! Racism! Drugs! Nerdrage!

Also:

I'm scared Wesley.

Bullshit. You ain't afraid of no man.

There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man.

And:

Don't forget to check out DINO EATER.