Belly Of The Beast

Belly Of The Beast [1st Draft - No Edit/No Conclusion]

         The child was playing on the cold marble floor when the bowl came crashing down, shards of glass flying in every direction. The bowl had been dropped by a woman, not old, not particularly young, but beautiful. She was shaking and crying, she couldn’t control her movements as she stumbled barefoot across the kitchen floor, glass cutting into the tender flesh of her feet. She didn’t feel it, she couldn’t feel a thing, her body was completely numb as she crumbled to the floor in front of the child. The glass was digging into her knees and her hands as she tried to hold herself up, but another bout of tears and cries brought her down again. Her hands came to her face to wipe her eyes, as she did so the glass cut into her face, she couldn’t feel the cuts on her forehead and cheeks but she could taste the blood. She knew what she had done but she could not bring herself to face it. She lay on the floor, tears mixing with blood as they both ran down her face. It was almost beautiful as the sun shone through the window, reflecting off the glass, throwing rainbows onto the wall. The small child saws these rainbows and laughed while the mother lay motionless in the kitchen. Her cries had stopped, and the bleeding stopped soon after. Unknowing and innocent, the child played with his toys on the cold marble floor.

         He awoke in a sweat, he had dreamt that scene before. The dull roar of the train and lulled him into sleep and he had no idea what time it was. At first he forgot where he was, why he was encased in 4 rusting metal walls that shook dangerously every so often. He had forgotten why the chains hanging from the ceiling rattled in unison with in human consistency, but it was slowly returning to him. The quarters he was sleeping in were directly under the gear forest that consumed the second through 6 floor of the massive train. The walls shook because the left wall was a mere 15 feet from the wheels that moved this beast along the track, and the right wall was dangerously close to one of the sixteen coal furnaces that generated the heat to power the lumbering beast. The small room was made even smaller by the bunk that had been forced in to turn this spare room into extra quarters. Only the best for me, thought the young man as he swung his feet of the top bunk of the bed. The train shook again, nearly throwing him from his perch atop the bed. He stared up at the chains, their rattling reminding him of some distant memory that he couldn’t quite get ahold of, like a dream that was fading in your memory. A knock on the thick door broke him from his trance and reminded him of his job.

         Shoveling coal wasn’t the most glorious job. The rank smell of the burning coal and sweat, the heat of the furnace making it almost unbearable and the hot metal walls providing no space to relax, the grinding of the gears to the left and right, above and underneath. One slip could bring you face to face with a machine that would catch hold of a thick metal pipe and not even flinch before crushing it in its metal jaws. The young man worked, as he always did, harder than most. Methodically digging the shovel into a seemingly endless pile of coal, throwing into what could only be described as the belly of Hell. He grunted with every thrust of his shovel, the howl of metal and coal colliding yet, the roar of fire as coal was thrown into the never ending inferno. His hand slipped off the handle of the shovel, his body lurched forward and he lost his footing. As he fell his only thoughts were that his death was imminent. He slammed into the floor, landing half in a pile of coal half on burning hot ground. He could feel the heat of the floor through his sweats and as he pushed himself up from the ground the coal cut his hands. He stood and stared, the blood rushing to the open wounds as if it had been yearning to escape for years. Someone asked if he was okay but he did not acknowledge them, he was entranced with the cuts on his hands, and all he could hear was the innocent laughter of a child.

         Soon after the young mans hands were bandaged he went back to his quarters and began to replace the grip tape on his shovel. His name was Arthur Tinpenny, the son of one of the most famous Steam-Knights, Sir Calvin Tinpenny. His father had died in battle when he was a small child, and he had no memories of his father. He was a honorable man with a fierce reputation. It was said there wasn’t a single battle he was in that he didn’t win. He was made the face of Order, being touted as the “Man Who Single-Handedly Killed The Rebellion”. While this may have been true at the time, it wasn’t very long before he faltered. He and his battalion were making the final push towards the rebel base camp when they were ambushed by several rebels. Calvins men struggled and attempted to fight off the ambush, while Calvin attempted to run. Nobody is sure why he tried to run, he made a point of letting it be know that he was afraid of death. As he ran he lost his footing and tumbled down a hill. The rebels found him, defenseless and on his back. The first hit that connected was to his gut, the second was to his shin, shattering the bone, and the third was to his skull, cracking it open and killing him instantly.

         To say that he died in battle is a stretch but it would be bad for the Order to say that their most prominent knight and the “Man Who Single-Handedly Killed The Rebellion” died trying to run from a fright, defenseless, and at the hands of rank-less rebels. But Arthur knew none of this, all he knew was that he was expected to live up to his fathers glorious, and slightly faked, career. Several months after his fathers death, his mother, Carol, was said to have had an emotional break down. She had been talking to a psychiatrist, she said that after Calvin's death she hadn't been able to feel a thing, her entire body had gone numb as if she had lost a part of herself when she lost Calvin. When she died it was said that she had an accident with the stairs, the dignity of the Tinpenny household would be kept at all costs, only a few people knew about how she had really died, and they tried to keep it from Arthur, but recently he had been having dreams, nightmares. They were about his mother, about how she died. How she had killed herself.

         Arthur finished the grip on his shovel and was putting it away as the train started to slow. From here it would be another hour before the train came to its station and he could finally see daylight and breath in fresh air again after 3 weeks of being stuck in the belly of this monster. He was working here as a summer job, just as his father had done before him, to prove he had the determination to move up and become like his father. He had been working here for 2 months and he only had one more train stop to work to before he would be set free and re-enter civilization. He made his way out of his quarters and towards his work station, the furnace had been shut but the heat was still sweltering, and even though the engine had been shut off the gears still turned with eager force. Arthur picked up his ripped gloves, examining the blood stains his own hands had left. He pocketed the gloves and continued to clean his station. He was piling the excess coal when the alarms started to go off.

         The alarm was a blaring klaxon, designed to be loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine while it was at full capacity, but the engine was off and the klaxon was just as loud. The sound was disorienting and over the scream of the klaxon Arthur could hear the workers near him screaming to get somewhere safe, out of the gear forest. Arthur knew what was happening and what he should do but he couldn’t move, the sound wasn’t only deafening it was crippling. When the first explosions came he wasn’t sure where they were, how far away the holes they were tearing in the outer shell were. The second explosion were much closer, the shockwave of them sending Arthur flying backwards off of his platform. As he spun through the air he saw where he was going to land, there was a platform coming close, very quickly. He smacked into the platform and he heard his arm breaking before he felt it, in fact he wasn’t even sure he could feel his broken arm. He stood and tried to gather his bearings while the klaxon clogged his senses. He started running until he came to an open area, wall on his right and gear forest on his left. As he began to cross the room the wall to his right exploded, the shrapnel flying towards Arthur at a high velocity.

         The shockwave from the explosion sent him flying. He landed and slid several feet to a stop, his broken left arm limp at his side. He had felt it that time, the shrapnel had dug into the right side of his face, and the blood was warm on his neck. With a broken arm and half of his face missing he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it far and as he stood an explosion rocked the room and he lost his footing again. He tried to grab something to hold onto with his broken arm and pain shot through his entire body. As he collapsed his hand did catch hold of something.

The gears started with his finger, crushing the bones inside them to pieces knuckle by knuckle. His hand had been caught in the jaws of an insatiable beast and he could do nothing to stop it. The gear made its way up his hand, crushing each bone into a powder on its way, passing the wrist with ease. Halfway up his forearm Arthur started to feel the pain. Tears flowed freely and they stung his face as he cried. His elbow didn’t present the slightest of problems to the gears, who chewed its way through it without a pause, flattening his entire arm like a press.

         Finally his arm started to tear, pulling the bone out of its socket in the shoulder. The gears, the foul demons in the belly of this beast, had taken their prey, swallowed it whole, and offered no mercy. The klaxon continued to blare, so loud that he couldn’t hear his own screams of pain, all he could hear was the klaxon blaring. As he lost consciousness his vision faded in and out and he lost his hearing. He was completely blind, he could feel the metal of the floor pressed against his face and as he finally fell out of consciousness he heard glass, shattering across a cold marble floor.



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The room is dark, dark and quiet. It’s as if nothing is alive, nothing moves for fear of breaking the silence. Then the I.V. drips, the EKG beeps, the sound of the pumps can be heard straining to continue the drip, and the room falls silent again. Anything with life has died once again into the silence of the night. The clouds move and the moon creeps into the room, greeted by a drip, and beep, and the struggle of the old pumps to work. The room is deathly quiet, the moon has once again fallen behind the clouds and the room is dark once again, nothing moves. The lack of life is only exaggerated by the dimensions of the room, how filled it is, how little space to breath. Drip, beep, pump, silence. A small table a two chairs in the corner for any guests who might happen to visit, on the other side of the room was a wide door, just wide enough for a bed. The door was old, almost as old as the rest of the building. The sound of the I.V., the incessant beeping of an EKG, the gasping pump, the deafening silence. The room had a small bathroom, barely big enough for a person, but it was a working bathroom. All of this around the center of the room, the bed with makeshift wheels, barely able to hold itself up under the weight of its occupant. The moon managed to peek in one last time, illuminating the patients face. It was scarred and burnt, as if his face had been exposed to a flaming hot knife. The moon finally slipped away for the last time, there was a drip, a beep, and the wheezing sound of a dying pump.