Page 61 of Brighter Than Gold

Nowthere was on odour, acrid and stinging. I coughed, and my lungs felt hot and heavy, and then, they stopped. My lungs stopped moving all together. I tried to breathe, to inhale my next breath, but it never came. I reached out and grabbed Callan’s arm, panicked.

I was choking! My lungs paralyzed by the sickly black fog.

“Reyah!” Callan shouted searching my face. He must have seen the abject terror in my eyes as I clawed my throat desperately willing my lungs to move, to take in a breath.

My body begged for air. I was terrified, creeping shimmers started at the edge of my vision and the room began to blur.

Then Callan coughed, and his fingers shot to grip his chest. He felt the same laborious slowing of his lungs as I had.

That’s when he lifted his hand. He still clutched the glass bottle and the two white rags.

He tore the cork out and doused the liquid over the cloths. He squinted through the dark fog and took the first cloth and held it to my mouth and nose, his expression silently begging me to breathe.

It took a moment, but finally I felt my lungs respond to my body’s demand to fill with air. Slowly, little by little my lungs opened, and the heaviness lifted. The room around me became clear again and the shimmers receded.

Callan put my hand to the cloth and made sure I understood I needed to keep it there before he held his own to his mouth. I saw him breathe in through the cloth, his chest beginning to rise and fall steadily.

He pulled me back to him, the curling smoke had filled the bottom half of the room now, and we knew whatever liquid was keeping us alive in these cloths would soon dry up. We needed to get out.

Callan took my hand firmly and motioned towards the door. I nodded back in understanding.

The smoke pooled and eddied around our waists as we walked towards the exit. Callan was forced to drop my hand to reach out and open the door. When he did, it was like a silent, weightless waterfall crashed in around us. He quickly grabbed my hand back as the smog dampened the light beaming in from the windows. It was nearly impossible to see through the thick gas as we felt our way through the hall, and now that it surrounded us, it seemed to soak up every sound as though we were under water. The sensation was disorienting.

The general kept us against the wall, inching slowly towards the nearest exit. He stumbled into something suddenly, and I felt him take a large step over it. Then my foot hit it, something soft and heavy. It was the man who’d come running out from the kitchens. Our visibility was so impaired by the smoke I could barely see the man at my feet. I felt my way over his body and held tightly onto Callan’s hand as I stepped over him.

I tried to look ahead, but the inky black fog made it so that I could no longer see the end of my outstretched arm. The hand in front of me guided me around a corner. I knew we were entering the main bar floor, and the exit lay at the other side of the long room. Callan inched forward slowly. There were at least half a dozen tables set with chairs between where we stood and the door that led outside. Sure enough, I felt him crash into one. I saw a chair get knocked down beside me, the smoke thinning briefly, but instead of sounding like a loud knock against the floor, it was a barely audible rap, like a distant echo.

We continued on, in what I prayed was a straight line. I thought we were perhaps halfway through the room when my foot caught on something and I plummeted to the ground, my hand ripped free from Callan’s.

I caught myself on my hands and quickly replaced the cloth over my mouth. I reached out and felt a table leg that my foot had hooked onto, and used it to pull myself back up. I reached my free hand out searching through the dark air to where Callan had been just a moment ago, but he wasn’t there. I took a few small steps away from the table, groping blindly hoping to find him. Panic started to set in. He shouldn’t have been more than a few feet from me…

I continued shuffling forward slowly, reaching out desperately trying to find him. Suddenly my foot hit something soft, I plunged to the floor and felt the man’s body beneath me. I put my free hand on Callan’s chest, and I waited. He wasn’t breathing. I took a deep breath through the cloth and held it as I placed the damp rag over his mouth, desperate for him to take a breath, desperate for the fumes to get into his lungs. I don’t know how long I waited, but there was no movement, nothing at all coming from him. My fingers blindly felt their way up his neck below his chin, I pressed firmly to find a pulse, but there was none, not a single tiny flicker. As my hand rested against him though, something felt wrong. The hairs on his jaw were too thick, his neck too slender… I craned my head down closer and waved my hand to disperse a little of the blinding smoke.

A terrified shriek escaped me as I fell back in horror, this wasn’t Callan, it was one of the Rats, his eyes wholly black in the split second I saw him, his lips blue from suffocating, stretched out over his teeth. I needed a breath and to my horror, realized I had dropped my cloth. My hands felt over the dead man’s body, tugging at his clothes hoping desperately a piece of the material was the one thing keeping me alive. Nothing came loose. I groped beside him as my lungs began to sting with warning.

Further out onto the floor I swept my hands, but there was only soft wood and the occasional chair leg. I could hear the whooshing sound of my heart beating in my ears as I struggled to keep my lungs from dragging in a breath of the poisoned air. My vision crossed and blurred. I could feel myself going dizzy as I fought to keep conscious. But I was losing.

I felt my mouth open, the acidic taste of the gas stinging my tongue as my body betrayed me and my lungs pulled in a breath, and my vision darkened.

There was pain, a heavy crushing pain in my chest as my head lolled on the wood floor. I felt like I was swimming in mud, my limbs heavy and disobeying my commands. All I could do was lay there and focus on the agony. I could feel my body try to drag in more air, but my frozen lungs were unable.

Then I felt something warm, something on my lips. The pain in my lungs ebbed slightly as I felt them fill with air. They rose again, then again, and finally I had enough awareness to realize what was happening.

Callan held me in his arms as I lay sprawled on the floor. I caught glimpses of his dark eyes through the curdling smoke as he pulled in a large breath through the cloth and leaned his mouth down to mine, blowing his breath into my lungs. I reached out my hand and dragged the cloth down to my face. I pulled in tiny breaths until I felt my lungs opening again, and panicked consciousness came flooding back in.

I pushed the cloth back to Callan. He pulled me in so tightly that I could tell he was trembling.

We helped each other up and he kept his arm locked around my waist so we couldn’t be separated again. We passed the cloth back and forth carefully as we inched forward.

Finally, we hit the far wall. My hand desperately scoured up and over and across the wall, until my fingertips hit the door frame a moment later.

* * *

Callan

I followed Reyah through the door, gasping and heaving for fresh air. It was midday, and the blinding light of the sun had us stumbling and shielding our eyes until they could adjust. I held tightly onto Reyah as the black smoke dissipated slowly around us, the chilly spring air felt renewing in our lungs.

“Gods, what was that?” she panted.

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