Expelled

An intense energy rush hit Mac, making his body shiver all over as he stepped firmly onto the staircase leading up to the main platform of the gallows.
As he stared coldly into the short future ahead of him, he could feel a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
He was completely fearless.
”Why are you smiling?” The Officer standing at the top of the stairs asked, in a nervous, cracking voice, desperately trying to demonstrate as much authority as he could possibly muster with such a weak and revealing voice. ”Don’t you know that you will die soon?”
”Well,” Mac said, ice cool and unfazed, ”I’ve never been hanged before, at least not as far as I can recollect. It might be a new experience.”
The remark left The Officer looking even more bewildered, trying desperately to avoid looking Mac straight back in the eye.
Two guards grabbed him by his arms and led him to the middle of the execution-device. As one of the guards secured the rope around Mac’s neck, he casually continued: ”And every new experience should be welcomed in this dire dance of mortality, don’t you agree?”
The two guards glanced swiftly at each other, then turned towards The Officer with puzzled, worried looks.
Then no one said anything for a while.
”But, you know …” Mac paused, and jacked his head slowly from side to side as to give his neck a good stretch to fit the rope. ”You are most welcome to join me on the ride, if you’d like.”
The Officer looked him in the eye with a mixture of deep hate and uncontrollable fear.
Mac totally ignored this, and continued:
”With MY looks and YOUR apparent MENTAL capacities, I’m sure we can even make HIStory together.”
The Officer was trembling with anger as he shouted his order.
The trapdoor below Mac’s feet opened.
The rope tightened, and reality shifted.
Everything was trembling and pulsating.
A reddish, flickering light was glowing from within the whole space around him. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
He could barely catch a glimpse of his surroundings in the turmoil, but found himself being hurled through a narrow passage of some sort. An illuminated tunnel that seemed to be composed of living flesh and blood.
And then, as suddenly as it had started and without any warning, it was all over.
He got up from the ground he was sitting on. The rope was gone.
He looked around, and found himself standing in the middle of a road he’d never seen before, in a strange little town with even stranger buildings.
Everything else was apparently normal. The sky, the trees, the crisp air. But all objects apart from those directly of Nature all had something unusual about them.
Surely this was also part of the magic of the House Witch!
He decided to ignore the strangeness of the place. He wouldn’t let her cheap tricks get to him and blur his judgment.
After all, he was a man on a mission. He had a simple job to do. It was to keep his focus on the task.
He collected himself, and took a deep breath.
Good.
Then he started walking down the small road.
He passed dusty little buildings with transparent front ends.
There was electricity, and electrically operated devices were all around, so this would be somewhere close to home, and not somewhere shitty down south or eastbound.
He’d actually never seen anywhere that had this much electricity before, come to think of it.
Maybe this was one of the more restricted areas in the Middle-North that he’d not been granted access to before? Shit! If this was the case it would be fantastic! Then they’d really progressed much further than what was being made publically available in the Middle-Northern cities.
But surely, if this was the case, someone from R.O.S.E. would be here to greet him soon?
If not…
Could it be that this was House of Lhasa’s secret polar location that he’d actually set out to find on this mission?
Bloody hell! How about that?
Those fuckers! This base looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. So much for the oh-we’re-so-scared-of-technology that the Traditionalists kept on blabbering about. The cheeky bastards had already built a whole city full of the stuff themselves!
Would you believe it?
Still, it looked quite shit. They had no style, even when they actually approached the future, they still got it all wrong, he concluded.

But what a scam!
It could have been that the Witch had poisoned him and first made him hallucinate and lose his senses temporarily, but that he’d then managed to overcome her, get out of the confusion, and finally made it to target.
He was a survivor, after all.
Mac decided to waste no more time, and get down to business.
He made a mental map of the surroundings within a perimeter of a couple of hundred meters. Not much to register, but just a few buildings down from where he now stood there was a place that seemed full of activity.
He ran towards the place, quickly pulled himself back up against the wall to the building next to the entrance, and waited in silence for a couple of minutes.
But no-one came out or entered, and he could see no guards or armed security.
He decided to play it head-first.
Without making any attempt at camouflaging himself he walked straight towards the building and in through the front door. Cheeky, he thought, but still a successful strategy.
The room was filled with low tables surrounded by chairs, and the walls were covered with meaningless, ugly paintings. To the left of the entrance was a long, tall counter. A few heads turned lazily as he entered, but nobody seemed to react to him being a stranger here at the base. He obviously was playing it right, maybe there were too many faces here to keep track.
After all he hadn’t been able to see any traces of the ice in any direction when he was outside, so the whole place must have been enormous.
He walked over to the counter, and stood himself in front of it as casually as he could, as if to ready himself for something.
He opened his bag and pulled out the memo-box, carefully hiding it in his palm.
He flicked through the pictures on the device, and opened the info-sheet on the target object drawing.
“I’ll be damned!” he whispered to himself below hearing level.
At least half the tables had people leaning over and operating devices exactly like the one that R.O.S.E. had set him out on his mission to secure.
Major problem.
How the hell would he play this now?
From the mission briefing he knew that what they were looking for was of very high priority, and crucial for gathering exclusive knowledge of the past, pre-catastrophic era. Mr. Sykes at R.O.S.E. even used the words “A possible key to unlock the future”.
So what did this information actually tell him?
Probably that something very, very special was contained within the target device.
And what happened to people when they owned something of high value and importance?
They started acting weird. And probably a little paranoid, too.
He’d have to just rush in on this one.
Behind the counter a man was busy preparing the strange black brew they seemed to drink in this place. Mac pretended to be studying the board on the wall.
Why the hell couldn’t they write in Global, and not some fucked up language? He couldn’t read a word.
The man approached him. It was now or never.
“So…” Mac said. “All is good?”
The man stared blankly at him.
Shit! These people were trained. Was his cover about to blow? Mac could feel his pulse accelerate.
“I mean, nothing unusual taking place? No problems?”
“Sorry mate, I really can’t follow you. You gotta speak more slowly. What are you saying? Did you say problem? You have a problem? You Russian, mate? You sound a bit Russian to me.”
Mac considered to rush for the door. This could blow any minute.
The man then gestured to someone sitting by one of the tables.
“Hey Boris! Come over here. This bloke don’t speak any language I know, but he sounds a bit Russian. Can you try to translate?”
A thin bearded man got up and approached them. Probably a guard. Mac thought through his possible moves to disarm him, five he could think of, but just as he was about to place a blow at the side of his neck and run for it the man said, in some strange old tongue: “Help you why come here?”
Mac decided to see if he could talk through this and slowly opened his tightened fist.
“I just wanted to ask whether everything was OK, you know. How things were going with our friend here and his business in general.”
The thin bearded man turned to the man behind the counter.
“He’s definitely not from any part of Russia that was known when I left back in ‘73, but from what I can make out he’s wondering if everything is OK with you and the coffee-shop.”
“If everything’s OK?” the man behind the counter answered. “As if it ever was. Why’s he asking?”
The beard turned to Mac, and in his ancient version of Middle-Northern asked: “He wonder why ask.”
Mac felt that he was gaining back some control over the situation, and decided to continue his pursuit: “Well you know. These days you get a lot of strange people just hanging around all over the place. Suspicious individuals. Up to all sorts of mischief. Anyone like that trespassing these premises?”
The man, whose name he now understood was Boris, spoke back to the counter-man, who answered him:
"Haha! That’s a good one. This guy a stray survivor from the Cold War or something? Suspicious people, eh? I wish something as exciting would happen in this sleepy old town. The only weird attractions we’ve got is Old Miss George and that crazy old raver boy that comes down here every Sunday, and they’re not much of a catch neither of them. One is a toothless and harmless old queen virgin, and the other one’s more of an acid casualty than anything the KGB would have sent to peep behind the Iron Curtain. All he ever does is sit alone at the usual window table drinking coffee, talking to himself for hours before walking around the park talking to the trees and then leaving town again. Not much more to him, really. Come to think of it I haven't seen him for a while, though."
The bearded man named Boris laughed out loud for a while and exchanged some more words with the counter-man, and finally said: “No. Not suspicions here.”
Mac felt defeated and clueless. Then he smiled goofily to the two men, and hastily left the place.
“What now?” Mac thought. “A Mission failed report?”.
It wasn’t like him. Not like him at all.
As he walked around the little town, carefully considering alternative approaches, he gradually started to notice the details of the place. Whatever his next move would be, maybe he should take some time to breathe. This place didn’t seem too bad, and after such a long time in the ice and then all the struggles with the Voodoo of the House Witch in the cave, maybe he needed a little rest and restoration before moving further?
It wasn’t as if anyone here had any suspicions towards him anyway, in fact, he suddenly felt very much at ease here in the little strange village.
Mac walked around the town for a while, and after a stroll by the bank of a nice little stream, he turned around and went back to the place with all the people inside.
After entering the door, he walked straight over to the counter, and without thinking he said to the man behind the counter: "Could I have something to drink, please?"
For some strange reason this time the man seemed to understand perfectly what he was saying.
"The usual?" the man behind the counter answered.
"Please." Mac answered, curious about what the usual was.
The man gave him a cup with a steaming hot, dark liquid. It looked nothing he was used to, but as this was his usual he decided to give it a try.
He walked across the room and sat down by a window table.
Leaning back in the chair, he tasted the hot black substance, being careful not to burn his lips. It tasted completely new, but had the same vague familiar feeling about it that the whole town now seemed to have. He quite liked it.
"This was the strangest of days", Mac thought.
Then he looked out into the fresh autumn air.
He felt calm. Far removed from all the usual alertness and mission-related frustrations.
This was a good place to be, he thought.
Maybe he would just stay here for a while?
At least until he’d figured out his next move.