Chapter Text
The chest appeared bountiful. Appeared bountiful, I say now, because the contents had been superficially stacked. There were no pungent slices of mouldy cake or maggoty chicken at the bottom of the chest, ready to serve our hungry, chattering mouths. As foul as our weekly menu may sound, we never cared; food was food, bloated with bacteria or not.
I had clawed through blocks of cacti and magma to uncover whatever gift was obscured. It hurt—a million prickles of aching numbness, even through my gauntlets—it hurt like hell. But their faces, so bright and hopeful for a skerrick of food, pushed me through the spikes and burns. Petra, Harper, Ivor even? Letting their weak souls down seemed impossible. They needed this. Needed me, someone able-bodied and spritely—especially after Lukas retreated from the party earlier. I gripped the side of the chest with my free hand and continued, hissing sharply through gritted teeth.
My fingers soon breached the blocks and wrapped around the treasure—tangled fibres attached to a soft bulk that warmed my calloused palms. I ran the fine strands through my fingers. Most likely a horse; oh how ‘PAMA’ it was for the machine to serve us cutlets of horse arse!
The group’s interest had been piqued by my discovery. Petra weakly inspected the surface of items, putting a hand on my shoulder while Harper held a squirming Ivor not far away. He was hunched over in her arms and heaving excitedly, hands suspended in front of him with fingers locked in malformed grasps. He spoke, running his words together like a dam bursting.
“What is it, Jesse?”
I answered him, biting back a whine from the burning magma. “I—I think I’m feeling hair. It’s pretty long… horse tail, I think?”
“Well hurry up and pull it out already,” Harper exclaimed, wide-eyed and rubbernecking like I was against a clock.
Petra said nothing and rocked on her feet. Of course she hadn’t, we wouldn’t have heard her anyways.
With one firm wrench, I twisted the mass out of the chest. Lukas’ head was limp, dangling from my fingers by the golden hair. There was no expression on his face, no signs of there ever being life, no blood, nothing indicating it was more than a sculpture… though it wasn’t. It… no, he was warm… his eyes had been moistened with the sheen of decay… and we screamed in panic. All of us. I dropped his head as though it were boiling and began to spit up bile. Petra collapsed to the floor in shock, fingers angrily screeching on the cold steel. Harper clung to Ivor as the two turned away, fighting the nausea in their stomachs that they shared with the far more faint-hearted me.
It took five minutes for Lukas to find us, at least that’s what the machine had stated. He was covered in swamp water and reeked of drain undersides. His hurried footsteps had skidded to a halt at the sight of our hysterical party; Petra, frozen in place, staring at what I had pulled from the chest; Harper, leaning against a protruding block of iron and covering her wet face; Ivor, standing board-straight beside her, focused on his battered shoes, fumbling uncaringly with his hands, murmuring to himself; and finally Jesse, hunched over several pools of vomit, disgraceful as ever. Lukas’ mouth opened. He was silenced momentarily by what had silenced us. “Oh, god,” he stammered, bleary-eyed and wan, and then he shut his working eye and disappeared again.
“A playerhead,” Harper began, voice trembling in shock as she glanced from person to person then to my gungy display, “PAMA wanted to scare us. By the looks of it, it did.”
Nobody went after Lukas. Not even me. Separation was the unwisest thing to do with PAMA; after all, you couldn’t tell if your party had been gifted your head in a box if you weren’t there.
Foolish Lukas. I hated so much to call that man a fool, but it was our nine hundred and fifty-four million, eight hundred and forty thousandth tick in the computer that night.
He should have known better.