Pathways - Jeri Taylor [155]
This litany of horror droned on, but Neelix tuned it out. He couldn’t listen. If he refused to hear it, it would be robbed of validity. What one doesn’t hear cannot have happened.
But once again his determination was thwarted. Lixxisa kept on, and on. “Massive fireballs . . . the atmosphere nearly consumed . . . no one’s ever heard of anything like this . . . what kind of animals are they who’d develop a weapon like that?”
Aghast, Neelix stared upward at his home. Now, through the dark clouds, streaks of light were visible. Orange flickers, licking at the darkness. Flames. Massive fireballs.
Rinax had been attacked with weaponry so strong that the smoke from the explosions had completely obscured it. And now the fireballs were blazing. If they could be seen from Talax, they must be immense. No one could possibly survive.
Pictures of his beloved family seared his mind. His father and mother, entwined in each other’s arms as they were incinerated. His sisters, writhing in agony as flames burned the flesh from their bones. Sweet Alixia screaming and screaming and screaming . . .
He could smell the odor of burned flesh.
A hot coal formed in his belly. He couldn’t identify it; it was completely foreign to him. It hurt, and yet it was somehow satisfying. It grew steadily, burning him from within, taking him over completely, overwhelming, igniting his brain, boiling his heart.
It was rage.
Rage sustained him for weeks after the disaster. The war had ended summarily, with Talax surrendering immediately and becoming in essence a Haakonian outpost. The weapon, they learned, was called the Metreon Cascade, and had been developed in order to bring the war to a swift and certain conclusion.
Neelix volunteered to be part of a rescue mission to Rinax, and was among the first to set foot on the devastated landscape. Fires still burned there, and the smell was something that would haunt his dreams for years: the same odor of roasted flesh that had permeated his hut after he had found the tortured man. Clouds of rancid smoke and dust billowed placidly, like a meadow of dark flowers, their gentle swaying a grotesque counterpart to the horror they manifested.
No one could be alive in this place.
He and his friends forced themselves forward, steeling themselves to the awful sights, breathing through moistened handkerchiefs to quench the noxious odor. They soon realized this search would not be lengthy, because almost nothing was left of Rinax.
His house was gone. Not even the foundation was left, just a large black spot indicating that something had burned. Vaxi’s house, too, was obliterated, and the pond the children had frolicked in was nothing more than a dry pit in the ground.
Someone observed that they must be very near a “ground zero” point—where the weapon had made its initial contact. That was the first heartening news Neelix had heard in days. That meant it was very likely that his family had been annihilated on the spot, instantly vaporized and suffering no pain. They would now be united in the afterlife, where one day he would join them. He tried to remind himself of this faintly comforting fact as they continued to prowl the smoldering ruins.
It was he who first detected the faint sound that emanated from the undulating clouds of smoke. At first he thought it might be a bird, and wondered how a bird had survived this devastation.
Then he saw figures moving toward them with maddening sluggishness, each step taken as though through heavy mud.
They were monsters.
Charred skin, the color of shale, hung from their torsos and extremities. The pulpy flesh underneath, swollen to bursting, dripped with watery fluids. The monsters had no faces, just a mask of spongy tissue, swirled as though someone had stirred a thick batch of red and black pudding.
Vague orifices emerged from the pudding, distorted beyond any identification as eyes or mouth. Yet somehow from the misshapen gullets a sound emanated, a keening, a bestial moaning, that made the tufts on Neelix