Alien Lament

The blood gushing from his split eyebrow made it difficult for Dylon to see the desperate people running on the levee in front of him. Moments after the hungry crowd had broken into three container crates sitting atop a garbage barge, truncheon-wielding deputies of the Pecunia Police Department charged out of two dock warehouses. They flailed away at the startled Food-for-All Unionists with gleeful abandon.

Several looters had managed to snatch bags of salted fish and unmilled grain. Now the extra weight of that stolen food was slowing their retreat, and deputies were closing in on laggards at the rear of the fleeing mob.

Running west into the dusk’s fading gray light, Dylon saw Solan stumble and crash onto the tidal levee’s gravel-topped road. He stopped and grabbed the woman by the armpit to help her gain her feet. Instead of standing, she leaned down to gather the food spilled from the bag she’d been lugging.

“Leave it!” Dylon shouted. “We’ve got to go!”

A viciously swung baton glanced off Dylon’s shoulder and smashed into Solan’s face. The blow landed with such force it crushed the woman’s nose and eye orbit. She crumpled. Upon hearing the sickening crunch of shattering bones, the deputy momentarily froze. Dylon knew this would likely be his only opportunity to escape.

He wanted nothing so much as to beat the deputy into unconsciousness or worse, but with blood obscuring his vision and his right eye rapidly swelling shut, standing in to fight was not an option. When Solan moaned, Dylon looked at her improbably contorted body. All he could do was hope she would receive attention from the emergency medical technicians he’d seen arrive in ambulances moments before this hellishness broke out. He turned and ran.

Another deputy, a man named Seere, prided himself on being the fastest runner on the Pecunia Police Force. As he sprinted ahead of the hard-charging phalanx of deputies chasing the fleeing looters, Seere’s ego ran out ahead of his common sense. This insight came too late.

When Seere caught up with a group of eight rough-looking young men, they suddenly stopped running. Three of them circled around behind the deputy. With a jumble of boulders on the left side of the levee that fell away into the bay’s water, and impenetrable tangles of thorny red-berry bushes on the right side, Seere had nowhere to run.

One of the looters slammed a bag of stolen fish into the side of Seere’s head. He staggered and fell. Several of the young men aimed kicks at the deputy’s head and body. Five or six landed solidly before the other chasing deputies unholstered their handheld solid-projectile weapons and began firing.

Dozens of people were falling all around Dylon as he resumed his terrified retreat. How he managed to thread his way through the barrage of lethal projectiles was a mystery. With morbid amusement, he thought, If I were a cultist, I’d be thanking the gods for their deific intervention.

A projectile ripping through the flesh on the inside of his left thigh put an end to his blasphemous musings. He tumbled but pushed himself back to his feet within a second. The wound was superficial; painful, certainly, but not incapacitating. Flight, rather than fight, was still Dylon’s only option.