MARKIV

(Serial Flash Fiction)

Episode 1: Jailbreak

“You broke your silence but I’m keeping my promise. King Vikram! You spoke, so here I go!”
Vikram woke up with a jolt as the footsteps approached and the strange chills returned to his body. He tried to hold it but coughed. His cellmates were in a worse condition. One sickly mother with a starving babe. It suckled on her teat like a blind calf. She let it be as it would keep the babe busy. She didn’t have anything to cover herself so Vikram averted his eyes.
They had been kept prisoners for a long time. The woman was shivering. Vikram had no idea why she was kept alive.
In a flash, she – Kala – appeared in the dim moonlight and her sharp white teeth glistened as she smirked.
He feared her no more. He just wanted her to get over with it. He nudged himself forward against the cell. Kala, with her towering figure, crouched on the cold floor, drumming her pointed nails on it.
“So, You will not tell anything?” Zed, her protégé, came forward and said as Kala was unable to speak.
“Haven’t I made myself clear enough?” Vikram wheezed. Kala snarled and got up. Her half-woman, half-buck form was already intimidating. Yet, her striped face and bloody antlers glared with rage. She looked across the hall, reached for the axe and retrieved it from the wall. With quick paces, she returned to the cell and signalled it to be opened. Two humanoid dwarves rushed out of the shadows and opened the cell. Kala dragged them out one by one and swung the axe.
The agonizing cry of the woman startled Zed too. Kala licked the blood squirting from the chopped-off leg and smiled. Kala didn’t even care and left without a glance. Her bizarre behaviour had started to get into his head. It had happened twice now. She would place an innocent and radiant person with him in his cell, and when Vikram would get familiar with them and start caring for them, she would kill them in front of him.

“Why don’t you tell her what you know,” Basu -Zed’s 10-year-old daughter- said to Vikram while wrapping a bandage on the severed leg of the woman. Everyone had left. Zed and Kala were her parents. Kala was a hermaphrodite. She had created Basu using her genes and dark forces. She had used Zed’s womb for it. Despite her parentage, Basu had a caring nature. She looked human, just like her mother, with small antlers on her head, Like Kala. It was Basu who had kept Vikram alive after all these months. Basu continued, “She might let you go to your people.”
Vikram scoffed, “You know her better, child. I am breathing as long as I don’t tell her.” His smile faded and he looked down, “Although I don’t care if she kills me or not, I do care about my people. If she finds out how I was able to cross realities, she’s going to wreak havoc on my Earth, my people and my friends.” After that Vikram went silent.
Basu broke the quiet moment. She came closer and whispered, “Then there’s only one way.”
“What?” He whispered back.
“Be ready. I am going to help you escape.”