THE LONG HACK TO FREE-DOM

THE LONG HACK TO FREE-DOM

July 2018

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The Decapitation of Soltan

Scenario – a car speeding through the Jordanian desert transporting Dom from a prison to a place of “much deeper interrogation” – Dom is plasticuffed to a metal bar and has been taunted by his guards about his fate.

Now, read on…

The sun beat through the windows, burning my already damaged skin and heating the inside of the car like a sauna, a sauna made damp by the sweat of the three of us.

In the distance, the sun reflected from an object and as time passed, it was clear that the object was moving toward us. That wasn’t unexpected, after all, we were on the only road in the area and I didn’t remember seeing a car since we left the city, mile after mile of road had unwound itself beneath our wheels and nothing had appeared, nothing that is until this intrusion into our very dreary journey.

Well, I say our dreary journey, for my minders – Spitty and The Other One, it may have been dreary, but for me, this was massively exciting. I probably needn’t remind you that I am just a simple computer programmer, husband and dad. There’s nothing like this in the normal course of my life – the driving through a vast desert landscape-ness of it all seemed massively exciting, well, that and the prospect of having my brain chemically altered at the end of the journey.

All of that stuff was unusual, but meeting a car coming the other way, even two cars as the glints had separated and now revealed themselves to be, that was all very normal.

My companions were less sanguine at the prospect of meeting other traffic, but I’m guessing they had never tried the North Circular at rush hour, or any hour; traffic was just a fact of life and nothing to get excited about.

Of course, swerving at the last moment and hitting our car pretty much head on at a combined speed of about 80mph was unusual and probably would have been something to get excited about, had I been awake to think about it, but as the car bounced around from the impact, I guess I must have hit my head on something pretty hard, maybe the bar placed in front of me, in pretty-much direct contradiction of acceptable Health and Safety practices. That may have had something to do with it, but when I awoke some minutes following the impact, laying on what had previously been the roof, the car having turned over during the impact, the new blood on my face just joined the old and all seemed pretty normal.

The wheels still spinning a bit, the sky where the ground should have been, the sand everywhere and the view obscured by dust; all pretty normal.

The groans from the guards; pretty normal

The strong smell of petrol and the sound of liquid dripping at a fast rate; that was a worry.

I decided that it was probably best to get out of the wreck of the car, just in case it all went horribly pear-shaped in the very near future. Luckily, the seats had been pretty much wrecked in the collision, so the removal of the bar from the back of the seat was easy, I just found it harder to remove my hands from around the bar, as the cable-tie held it all very securely. I tried to twist my way out but the pain this caused and the ever-increasing likelihood of immolation convinced me that trying to remove the bar outside of the car may be a much better idea. 

Ignoring the pain in my ribs and my head, the bruises covering most of my body and the strong smell of petrol, I added deep-scratches from broken glass to the catalogue of wounds about which I would need to do something fairly soon.

Bleeding, aching, in pain and really not sure what was going on here, I stood next to the wreckage of the two cars. The third car, the black one containing Soltan was also damaged – the front end had obviously been hit by something, possibly either the car I had been riding in, or the one which has struck us – it sat there with broken windows and steam rising from what remained of the bonnet.

I wondered what to do next; walking was inadvisable, but staying seemed pure folly.

With a small cry of pain, the decision was taken from my hands – a gun barrel appeared from the wreckage of one of the front doors and a loose round missed taking my ear off by a matter of inches. I decided to run, but as I turned a hand grasped me by the ankle and jerked me off-balance, spinning toward the floor.

With no free hands with which to break my fall I landed squarely on my abused face, the pain giving me clarity as the hand began to pull my ankle, even from the position of a broken man in a broken car there was strength in the grip and, I felt the ground slipping beneath me.

I did the only thing I could – I swung out with both of my plasticuffed hands, which met flesh. I swung and I swung, and I only stopped when the hands let go.

Amazed, I looked at my hands. I’d never been a fighting type, never having the strength or guile to concoct and deliver a truly satisfactory winning strategy in these kinds of situations. 

Against a school bully, I had no chance, so how had I just bested a genuinely hard bodyguard – a trained killer?

In reality, I’m guessing the blood-stained hunk of metal, formerly attached to the seat in front of me, now still attached to my hands may have had something to do with it, but given the day I was having, I would take my luck where I could get it.

I had no idea if I’d killed the guard, or just knocked him out, but having seen numerous films, I wasn’t about to leave him with a weapon, oh no – I’d seen far too many heroes offed in that way, so I edged my way forward and slowly pulled the rifle from his grip.

Try as I might, I couldn’t help looking at his bleeding and broken face, the deep rips and the stumps where his teeth had been. I convinced myself that it was all damage from the accident, but couldn’t help feeling that I, along with my formerly-imprisoning-now-enabling-steel-bar may have had something to do with it.

As I looked, I noticed the other guard, the spitty one who had been driving, begin to stir – our eyes locked over the slumped and broken body of his colleague and with a scream of pain and fury, he bought his gun up into an aiming position, pointing directly at me.

I pulled my trigger first. Luckily the gun was pointing in roughly the right direction as a burst of several rounds left the barrel, tracing a line across his body, culminating in a large part of his skull disappearing in a pink mist of destruction.

There may have been some doubt in my mind as to the wellbeing of the first guard, but I was pretty sure that I had just killed Spitty.

I stumbled away from the car and vomited into the dust at the side of the road just as the car disappeared into a massive fireball as the fuel from the tank was ignited by either something electrical or perhaps a spark from my bullets. I convinced myself that it was an electrical issue.

At that exact moment, there was movement in the black car – of course, I’d forgotten all about Soltan. The door slowly opened and I trained my still-hot gun on it, waiting for my torturer to step out.

I saw his head first and as I aimed, I noticed something very odd. The eyes were glassy, peering through the greasy hair, which was also at a very odd angle, and the neck, well, the neck simply wasn’t there.

The missing neck was matched, it transpired, by the missing torso, arms and just about all of the rest of the body. Soltan really wasn’t looking as if he was having a good day. The fact that his head was hovering a good foot above the roof of the car, swinging in the breeze and with much of the hair which wasn’t covering the face sticking straight up wasn’t doing much for my day either.

Then it spoke. If there was one thing I really didn’t need to complete my kidnapped and tortured, car-wrecked and killing-people day, it was the disembodied head of my former antagonist chatting to me from a foot above a gently steaming car in the middle of a desert.

I wish I could say that Mother told me there’d be days like these, but if I’m being absolutely honest, and I feel I must, I’m pretty sure that this was outside of the scope of her warning system. I didn’t even have clean underwear on, which she would have found disappointing.

“You are OK, yes?” The former-head-of-Soltan enquired

I responded by depositing what was left of my breakfast on the side of the road

“Hello, are you hurt? I am coming out now” continued the disembodied head

How was it doing that? I wondered to myself.  I mean, the brain is obviously intact and appears to be functioning and I guess that’s technically possible, for a brain to live on for a short time after the rest of the body has disappeared and all. I know my knowledge of biology is sketchy to say the least, but I’m sure that a brain has some contingency for survival, for however short a time, post-removal of, well, everything else.

The realisation of the removal caused further stomach heaves, blessedly there was nothing left to vacate.

The big mystery to me was the voice, how was it talking? There were no lungs or, indeed, vocal chords, so just how was it doing that? Oh, and the hovering thing, that was an issue too, logically speaking, and I was a pretty logical guy, I reasoned.

“Mr. Power, I am coming out now, please lower your weapon”

I was disinclined to do so. I justified the odd behaviour of the floating head as being nothing more than demonic possession. OK, I had never believed in anything supernatural but, given that pretty much the past few months had been nothing more than stance-altering on a variety of subjects, why not this one? Maybe there were ghosts and demons out there in the world, maybe there was a God. Maybe, just maybe, if He got me out of this in one piece, with my soul un-demon ravaged, I’d start taking Him a little more seriously. Was now a good time to pray? Did this road, this desert road upon which I found myself lead, in fact, to Damascus?

Maybe I should ask the demon

“Does this road lead to Damascus?” I enquired

“What? No; Damascus is in Syria, we are in Jordan”

OK, so the partial-corpse before me had a good grasp on Geography and appeared to be helpful, that was something positive at least.

“Why are you asking about Damascus? Are you unaware of the seriousness of the situation?” The corpse continued

“Seriousness? Really? It absolutely hadn’t occurred to me that there was any seriousness in my situation” It appeared that I had recovered enough to practise sarcasm at a recently de-bodied head.

“Mr. Power, I am coming out, please do not shoot me, I am unarmed”

“Unarmed? I can see you’re unarmed. You’re also un-shouldered and un-necked”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, I am about to emerge”

The last thing I needed was a demon sucking my soul and I felt no embarrassment in telling him this

“Listen, demon, I’ve had a really bad day and the last thing I need is you sucking my soul, so if you’re going to “emerge”, which I’m guessing is Demon-Speak for growing a new body in preparation for wreaking havoc upon the world, then I’d just be jolly careful. I’ve got a gun you know!”

“I am aware of your gun, I witnessed you using it on one of my former colleagues, this is why I am asking you to please avoid shooting me”

He was a particularly polite demon, maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

“OK, please emerge, but please do it away from me. If I’m being honest I’ve no idea how effective this rifle will be against a demonic skull, but I’m willing to find out if you are, so I’d ask you, respectfully” I figured that good manners may help here “I’d ask you to please spare me when you take over the world in your demonic way”

“I am about to emerge” The head twitched and began to move toward me “But I have to say, you Christians have some very strange ideas about we Muslims”

The head continued to slide through the air toward the back of the car, and when it emerged, just beneath it was Mus, his arm hidden by the long greasy hair of Soltan.

“Stay right where you are, my gun is pointing exactly at your head”

This wasn’t true. Firstly, I was still a little confused about which head to point the gun toward, and secondly, my aim was probably quite poor

“Mr. Power, if you pull the trigger now, you will only succeed in shooting crows, you aren’t even pointing the gun toward me, please put it down before you hurt all of us”

“How do I know you aren’t going to capture and kill me?”

“I am on your side, Mr. Power, I have removed your torturer from the situation and am holding his head as proof of my intentions toward you”

“Again, how do I know that is the truth?” I shouted across the void between us

“Why would I kill an ally to capture you? Surely we would have been more able to best you as a team?”

He had a point

“OK, put down the head and come out slowly with your arms raised”

The head finally travelled toward the ground, hitting it with a soft, wet thud which caused me a further moment or two of ineffectual heaving, and finally Mus emerged from behind the car with both of his arms raised above his own head. Things were beginning to make a lot more sense now.

“If you look behind you, Mr. Power, you will see other friends willing to help”

I didn’t want to fall for that old trick, but as Mus was still a good 10 feet away from me, I figured I could risk a glance. There was light blue Mercedes saloon, not a new one, the kind of thing that Taxi drivers the world over are keen on. It flashed its headlights.

“He is asking if he can approach” said Mus

I motioned that he could with a nod of my head, Mus waved at the car and slowly approached me, taking the rifle from my hands with soothing words.

By the time Lemta opened the driver’s door of the car and stepped out I was sitting on the ground, my back against a rock, my head in my hands trying to not be sick again, the madness of the previous few minutes running through my head at high-speed, in hyper-real high-definition 3d, with full surround sound. The pink mist of the second bodyguards head, the look on Soltans recently decapitated face, the sound of gunfire, the smell of cordite and blood and death.

Lemta crouched by me, uttering soothing words, but with an urgency

“Come on Dominic, we need to go, there will be trackers on these cars, there will be sensors which will have detected the impact, there will be other guards heading this way, we cannot afford to be here when they arrive and we’ve wasted too much time already.

The only thing I had wasted was two guards, I thought to myself, grimly.