2025 Chapter Hidey-hole

Hidey Hole

An abandoned super highway ends at the base of an ancient mountain. Broken pavement is clotted with military vehicles and equipment. Several American Abrams tanks bristle with cannon, heavy caliber machine guns and more mysterious weaponry. Troop transports and shipping containers are jammed together haphazardly.

Animated advertisements and vague propaganda slogans blaze across every manufactured surface. "God Bless this Mess" and "My Empire Right or Wrong" flashes alternately on one tank, "REMAIN CALM" scrolls across another, followed by an incongruous "PLEASE..." From the side of a shipping container, a grim Uncle Sam seems to quip, "UR BOYS, MY TOYS." Further away, an advertisement for synthetic pork contrasts with the more military themed messages. Skeletons in sagging camo uniforms are draped over vehicles and sprawled in awkward tangles. Aside from the insistent mediatronic animations, there is no motion save the clouds overhead and the lazy back and forth of a flexible aerial swaying in the breeze.

Some of the vehicles are damaged and scorched, and their arrangement is more like a concentric scattering than a purposeful deployment, as if all the machines were pushed back by an intense force radiating outward from a catastrophic center. At the hub, massive vault doors have been blown partially from their mounts, exposing twisted hydraulics and the yawning blackness of a tunnel entrance. Ten meters above the tunnel, several .50 caliber emplacements are just visible in the shadowy slot of a concrete embrasure.

The scene is so cluttered with death and the promise of death that it almost seems a little over the top, as if someone with a sizable cinema budget got a little carried away.  The entire milieu has a haunted or cursed castle feel, as if events too terrible to imagine hang in the air, and unspeakable horrors lie in the shadows, napping.

The tunnel dives down into the roots of the mountain, opening out into a vast underground complex. In a dim, cavernous chamber, Joe stands gazing into his iStone, jostling the interface, pulling up menus and submenus. Above and around him, huge suspended screens mirror the iStones display.

• Daughter of God > team > current trans > Uncle Eiji and Uncle Phil

"Your penis is small" etc. [recover and document all dialogue]

• Daughter of God > Daughters > Athena, Lila, Christina >

• Christina > Big Boat Perimeter, mess, head, engine room, Gerry's cabin, Christina's cabin, other

• Christina's cabin > door, bunk, desk, floor, port window

Surveillance footage of Christina seated, dressed in a sparkle dress staring vacantly into space and popping bubble wrap. She is humming distractedly. The iStone interface closed captioning displays "plastic bubbles breaking, low singing..." After a moment or two, the interface identifies the tune.

"The song is 'Veronique', a Cathar song commemorating the life of Veronica who mopped Jesus's face during the crucifixion with her shawl. Veronica's shawl became a relic rumored to have potent healing powers and capable of temporal distortions. Supposedly passed from Templar Knights to Cathar allies, and then lost during Albisinian Cruscades, battle of..."

Joe toggles a new display.

• Gerry's cabin > bed, desk, door, head

A stubble faced man in a thick overcoat is asleep on a bed. He wakes with a start and then drifts back to sleep.

Joe puts the iStone in this pocket.

From deep underground Joe accelerates upwards, blurry markers to the approaching surface flicker by like glowing graffiti. A bright light up ahead getting closer, closer until the daylight explodes with simultaneous thunder claps.

In the defenders slot three stories above the tunnel entrance, sand bags surround the tripod of a rust speckeld .50 caliber, it's vented barrel skewed crazily toward the sky. A coffee mug sporting "Soma FM" is perched atop the sandbags, miraculously intact despite the constellation of bullet holes in and around the sandbags. On the chaos strewn highway below, a bicycle emerges into the sun, the rider expertly swerving through the obstacles as if on rails. He runs over the humerus of one skeleton, wrenching it from the shoulder socket with an audible snap, and continues riding, turning just in time to avoid a gout of flame from a nearby crater. The jingle of pumping pedals and spinning chain fades as Joe weaves out of sight.

A faint breeze whispers across the scene, rustling a tattered flag. The returning ambient rhythms are suddenly  interrupted by the zany whirring of an electric motor accompanied by a gentle scraping sound, as a thin cable reels the dislocated humerus back into it's shoulder socket.