He kept his body spread out across the smooth metal surface, hoping the friction from his flightsuit would slow the fall. It worked better than it should have, as he almost seemed to float to the ground, sliding through the air as if it were fluid. When he hit the deck, however, his knees still buckled from the height of the fall. Cole rolled with the impact, pushed up into a crouch, and looked around, wondering where to run to, which small metal building to hide inside of, when the men from above came raining down around him with uncanny slowness.
Cole dashed between two of them before they could get to their feet, and several other fighters across the deck noticed him. One of them pointed, and the rest gave chase. Cole sprinted into one of the alleys created by the squat structures, angling toward the port side of the deck. As he got away from the mast, everyone started to move at the same rate of time again—and most of them in his direction.
Fleeing through the haphazard twists and turns of the tight alleys reminded Cole of his nefarious Portuguese childhood. He felt right at home as he changed directions repeatedly, snaking his way aft.
Skirting the wide clearing from earlier, he tried to get his bearings, to locate the room they’d kept him and Riggs in. Several times, he found himself dodging hellish scenes of gore littered across the deck. Dead bodies—some clad in so much fur they looked like roadkill—lay in hacked up pieces amid large pools of blood. They weren’t the only dead; the other figures that had shown up lay here and there in white combat gear turned grisly shades of pink by the time Cole ran past.
When he came to a wider area with less cover, Cole glanced back to find several pursuers gaining on him. He looked ahead again just in time to dodge around another puddle of death; he ran past the nastiness while searching for an alley to dodge down.
Checking over his shoulder, Cole saw that two pursuers had attempted to cut him off. They slipped in the puddle of gore and fell, covered in blood. Cole darted behind one of the low buildings, then changed direction and ran directly aft, hopefully keeping the building between himself and those chasing after. Once he crossed the open area, he ran around the next shack and hugged the back, pausing to catch his breath. He knew he couldn’t keep up such a pace forever, especially not with his heart and adrenaline going full-bore.
He slowly made his way to the far side of the small shack, sucking in deep gulps of oxygen as he went. When he got to the corner, he peeked around and saw a cluster of men running toward an adjacent structure; they were following along in the last direction they’d seen him running. Cole looked forward, toward the bow of the moving village, and didn’t see any threats heading his way. He did, however, notice something familiar. The tall mast—the size of it from that distance and the buildings blocking the view of its base—it all looked identical to the first time he’d noticed it. He had to be close to the room he and Riggs had been held in.