Riley Unfinished...

The whirring white noise drone of the evaporator units began slowly to seep into his consciousness. As he opened his eyes, his mind was met with a lightning storm of fluorescence from the battered and broken light fixture hanging above him. One fluorescent tube was still madly flickering away, vainly attempting to bring forth the world from darkness.

Riley felt about the floor around him, groping for something but uncertain even to himself what that thing was. His mind too began to reach out, groping also for some memory or recollection of the series of events that had brought him to this avenue. To this dimly lit checkered linoleum floor upon which he was now realizing he'd been placed by a person or thing with an incredibly powerful swing and a deft enough targeting system as to be able to squarely deck the be-jesus out of him.

The thought to check his lip for blood popped into his head. He imagined seeing himself lying in a room, sitting up and in the manner of a old rough and tumbled western movie character, swabbing the corner of his lip with the back of his hand as he stood up to do whatever it was he was planning to do after he stood up. Fortunately just as his mind was coming to the sticking point of his imagined lip checking sequence, (that event that he was going to do after standing up), his still groping hand grazed against something very cold.

The synapses in his head controlling those aspects of his mind that concerned themselves with curiosity immediately took full control of his consciousness at the touch of the cold, cold object. Which it seems, was for the best as those portions of Riley's brain that had been busy creating his bloody lip checking fantasy sequence were at a stand still with regard to what was going to happen after Riley stood up.

The synapses had broken up into two separate groups. One group felt strongly that the dream sequence should entail Riley standing and then immediately pulling his gun from his holster and running out into the street to fire away at his enemies. The second group of synapses, being the more grounded and a tad more realistic group, argued that such a fantasy sequence would be ill advised seeing as how they were pretty sure Riley had never owned a gun or holster, was definitely not wearing one now, and as far as they'd been told, Riley didn't live in the old west. Talks between the two groups had broken down and they'd resorted to throwing donuts from the complimentary food table at one another.

Riley pushed the cold object away from his hand and rolled over on to his chest. He pushed himself up off of the floor just as the fluorescent bulb flickered its last. He paused while his eyes adjusted. Slowly a shadowy image of the checkered floor he'd been laying on made itself visible. He could tell there'd been a struggle. Smashed bits of furniture lay about the corners of the room. His memory started coming back just as the pain flooded into the back of his head.

From this perspective he could clearly see that the cold object had been a sword. His sword apparently. He gathered up the blade as he rose to his feet. The slumped body of one of his would be assassins was slowly seeping molasses into a large puddle on the floor. Riley staggered as the pain from his head collided with the realization of what the molasses was.

Exit. He looked around to see a door with it's knob hanging by the twisted broken links of the latch. While his mind was starting to divulge vague visions of the battle that he'd apparently been part of it still refused to give up how he'd gotten to this place nor who his most recent victim had been. A swift kick to the door trying to unhinge it resulted in little more than to serve as a reminder that his attackers had hit him hard on the head. The kick did have the fortunate side effect of knocking the latch to the side just enough for the door to swing inward inflicting on Riley the most painful eye piercing he had ever experienced. The daylight burned through his eye sockets leaving a permanent ghost vision on his soul.

The streaking white pains stabbing into his eyes began slowly to morph and change. What was moments before a searing hot claw scraping away several layers of his retina was darkening into a rocky brown terain. He moved hesitantly out of the doorway into the light.

A cursory survey of his surroundings divulged brown. Large brown boulders were all around him. The terrain had the look of a landscape from a poorly funded science fiction movie. Each boulder and rock seemed too much like a boulder or rock. They were too rocky. No flora or fauna was visible anywhere. In fact as he looked around at the landscape he saw nothing that would interest anyone other than an overly uninteresting geologist. It was like Wyoming in late summer... after a drought... and a wild fire.

Riley was standing on the top of a rise outside of what seemed to be some kind of bunker or perhaps prison area. The doorway he'd walked through opened on to the end of a dirt path or road which doubled back on itself a couple of times as it slithered down the hill on which he was standing. At the bottom the path came to something that caused Riley's stomach to sink a little as the synapses in his brain stopped their food fight long enough to register and analyze the possible ramifications of what he saw. It was a gate and a very tall fence. The fence was some fifteen or twenty feet tall. Next to the pathway and slightly in front of the gate there was a small building. Four walls and a roof really. Riley had the disturbing notion that the building looked a great deal like a guard house which wasn't surprising since that is exactly what it was.

"Am I a convict?" Chimed one of Riley's more insecure inner voices. He struggled for a moment to recall any evil deeds he may have done in his past. Thinking, he realized that in the area of his memory where there should be long drawn out memories of possibly criminal acts there was nothing. In fact, now that he focused on it, he had to admit he didn't have many memories at all. Besides his intimate knowledge of what lay inside the door from which he'd just come everything else was pretty much blank. Of course he knew who he was, he was... No, apparently he didn't know who he was. In fact he was increasingly begining to realize he had no significant memory at all.

The rising panic and almost uncontrollable flight instinct one might expect to feel upon discovering that a bout of amnesia was upon you, a presumably escaping criminal who seemed to have just killed at least one of his captors before blacking out, would have been exactly the way to describe the mental state in which Riley now found himself.

"They're behind you!!" The most terrified of the numerous voices in his head singing out suggestions of what to do next  bellowed above all the others.

Riley spun round. The gaping maw of the doorway appeared before him. He quickly brought the sword in his hand up to some position he thought of as being a good defensive way to hold a sword and assumed a crouching stance. Eyes narrowing he leaned forward toward the door expecting to be overrun by battalions of machine gun wielding guards just as the terrified voice in his head had told him he would. Nothing moved. No hoards came streaming out of the doorway. He blinked. A small green and yellow caterpillar crawled slowly down the doorsill.

"What the Hell are you going to do with a sword against an army of machine gun toting soldiers?" A sarcastic voice that was completely fed up with the smarmy pillow-pants wearing voices that had up until now controlled Riley's inner conversation sniggered.

"There's someone at the guardhouse!!" The terrified voice yelped in response to the sarcastic voice's attempt to inject some semblance of logic into the maelstrom of fear, panic, and synaptic food fights taking place in Riley's head.

Riley spun again. This time the voice was right. There were two figures stepping from the guard house. Riley froze.

"Running away is likely the best possible choice right now," the sarcastic voice quipped, realizing that the terrified voices had nipped off to play a game of table tennis when they were most needed.

Ignoring his inner sarcasm, Riley stood with his shoulders front in a stance that he assumed was the proper way that a lone swordsman would fend off an attacking horde of enemies. His mind raced as he tried to work out when and if he'd ever learned anything about sword fighting.  Again his memories let him down. "No worries," he thought, "I'm sure it's like riding a bicycle... And I did have it with me when I awoke. I must be at least proficient with it to have killed that man in the bunker."

His body shivered at the memory of the body as he struggled to come to terms with the idea that he was a murderer. Surely there must be some logical explanation that didn't include him being a menace to society.

Fear overtook Riley and he looked to his left for some available form of escape. Glare from looking into the late afternoon sun made visibility poor. He could only see fifty feet or so in front of him. Riley looked to his right. Glare from looking into the mid-morning sun made visibility poor... Wait... Riley looked to his left. Late afternoon Sun. Riley looked to his right. Mid-morning Sun. Left... Sun... Right... Sun....

Had anyone been standing within a few feet of Riley they'd have heard the audible snap of the last synapse letting go of sanity at that moment. "Oh. Clearly I've gone insane. That makes perfect sense." His inner thoughts decided that it was wholly best to ignore the possible ramifications of the two suns and did their best to ignore the subject by filing the incident away in the 'insanity' bin and pretending not to notice.

Prepared for the worst, Riley looked down on his invading horde. Two quizzical looking guardsmen who were slowly walking up the hill chatting to themselves and wondering how they'd managed to miss the tall odd looking character wielding a queer looking sword in a fashion that clearly suggested that the individual had never before picked up a sword in his life.

"Arrrrghh!" Riley yelled as the distance between his advancing horde and himself narrowed to a point that looked as if a blood curdling scream might do his side some good. Tragically, Riley was unaware of the fact that he was wholly incapable of appearing threatening when delivering a blood curdling scream until that  very moment. He was clued into this rather embarrassing fact when instead of being kowtowed and thoroughly concerned by their impending battle with Riley, the two guards paused and looked about as if expecting to see some interesting spectacle like the planned implosion of  Las Vegas casino which they were missing because they had to go ask the weird dude with the steak knife where he'd come from and who was his commanding officer.

"Attack when they least expect it!" A voice in Riley's head screamed out. His synapses had betrayed him. Since the food fight they'd been rather bored and had collectively decided that it might be fun to see what was the stupidest thing they could get the body to do. This of course was a game they'd been playing for years. The dyed blue hair at prom, skinny dipping in February, that horrible period where they'd convinced him he could sing, not to mention the vast array of inopportune erections and choosing horrendously bad moments to say exactly the wrong most thing to his dates. The last two of these had finally been banned as being 'too easy' after he reached puberty.

Unfortunately for Riley (or perhaps fortunately) his amnesia rendered all the aforementioned memories inaccessible and required him to rely fully on the snickering synapses who were even now planning one last awkward erection for old time sake.

Riley charged at the advancing guards.

"Oi! You'll put someone's eye out with that thing!" Cried the nearest guard as he grabbed hold of Riley's blade and yanked it with one motion out of Riley's hands. 

Completely unprepared for such an outcome, expecting only seconds before to be even now in the midst of a heated battle, Riley could only stand and stare, mouth agape, eyes entranced with the hand of the guard that was still holding the blade by the pointed end like it was some toy that he'd taken away from a child.

"Just what the bloody hell do you think you're doin'!" The guard, oddly enough, spoke like a parent that had taken away a child's toy because he'd been inexplicably smashing it into the head of a rather annoyed family pet.  "What are ya'? Bloody loopy?"

"No... I..." Stammered Riley as his eyes focused for the first time on the guards faces. "You're...you're not..."

"Whose your commander?" The second guard asked.

"What?"

"Your commander. Who is he?"

"I don't... What? I just came from that bunker you see?" At that moment Riley realized that whatever he was now, he couldn't possibly have been a criminal before the amnesia since at his first run in with authority the first words out of his mouth placed him directly at the scene of the crime.

The two guards looked at each other. "You came from there?" Said the first pointing at the bunker."

"Uhhh..." Riley's body knew that words were supposed to be coming out but unfortunately the voice box hadn't received any information before it started.

"Does Dr. Stiles know you were in there? Are you part of the project?"

Lying seemed to be the best option at that moment. "Yes. Yes I'm part of the project. The doctor asked me to come down and... And get some... Get some coffee."

"With a scimitar?" Queried the first guard still obviously in 'angry parent' mode.

"Uhhhh..."

"Answer me. How the bloody hell do you get coffee by running down the hill waving a shinny scimitar around over your head?"

Riley was beginning to think he'd never been very good at lying. "I don't know..." Eyes cast down, looking every bit like he was sure he was going to be grounded.

"You'd better come explain yourself to Dr. Stiles."

Riley looked up to the bunker with dread deep in his stomach. The two guards were going to walk up to the bunker with him and discover the body, Riley believed, of the now deceased Dr. Stiles and he was going to be brought up on charges and live the rest of his life in a very small cube.

The two guards began walking down the hill. One looked back as he realized Riley was still looking up at the bunker. "Come on, let's not make this take any longer than it has to."

Riley turned to follow, not really quite realizing that they weren't going to the bunker. "But... Are..." He mumbled, pointing back at the bunker, as he began to take a few steps down the hill. His mind was still interpreting the situation and was not fully in control of his feet. One foot caught on the ground and sent him tumbling down into one of the guards. Both men lay sprawled one on top of the other for just a moment as they both worked out what had happened.

"Hey! What the...! Get off me ya perv!", yelped the guard and pushed Riley off himself. "Just get goin'!"  Riley's faced turned multiple shades of red at the inexplicable pressure that had exhibited itself in his crotch. His synapses couldn't stop laughing.