Girl with all the Pain

by Michael Herman

  “Impossible. It’s happening too fast,” someone argues.

  Then a second column of grey smoke bursts through another part of the mound, shooting upward to fill the air. Moments later, the two columns join and suddenly the bottoms of them turn red.

  “Magma!” someone yells. “It’s become a volcanic fissure.”

  Sparks of red shoot out of the linear crack in the earth, dappling the grey smoke in color. Moments later, the sparks become a shower of brilliant red.

  “I’ll be damned. We’re looking at the birth of a shield volcano.”

  “Wonderful,” someone adds sarcastically. “But we need to put as much distance as we can between it and us. Can you drive any faster?”

  “I’m driving as fast as this thing will go!” Rafa yells. “You want to get out and run, you’re welcome to.” Sweat is pouring down his brow and dripping off his nose.

  Another column of heated smoke breaks the surface of the growing mound, shooting skyward, adding to the developing cloud of smoke above the newborn fissure. As they watch, the size of the column doubles and widens until red sparks appear at its base.

  “More magma,” someone reports. “Those two join and we have serious magma flow.”

  Magma is rolling down the side of the mound like fiery red goo. Two of the passengers have their cell phones out recording the distant scene. Suddenly the mound lifts, the area of the fissure splits wide then like a bomb dropped, the fissure explodes outward, shooting debris and pyroclastic heated air into the atmosphere. The mound lifts again and the vent explodes deadly red magma outwards and up.

  “How far you think we are from that?” one person asks.

  “Four, five miles?”

  “If that thing really lets loose, we’ll never outrun the pyroclastic cloud.”

  “Then we need to start praying,” someone else says.

  Rafa glances in his rearview mirror and curses under his breath. Suddenly he sees what appears to be the connecting road in the distance. He can only hope that it’s what he thinks it is.

  They drive past the squat mostly one-story buildings of Toconao with little incident. Past the town, it’s back to flat wide open landscape. Finally, they come to a “T” intersection with a green road sign that reads, “Salar de Atacama.” Beyond it is another that reads, “Lagina Chaxa 24.”

  “That’s it!” Tom yells. “We’re here. We hit that and follow it west.”

  Behind them, the sky, filling with the combined ash of all the volcanic venting, grows darker as the ash clouds cut off their sunlight.

  When Rafa turns onto the westbound road, they cheer and laugh in nervousness. Now to their right and north of them, the active vent and mound continue to grow while the red magma and grey smoke expand in density as the pressures beneath the mound mount steadily.

  Everyone is silent; watching out of the north-facing windows, only the whirr of the huge tires’ knobs on the paving fills the cabin. When Twizzle lays her hand on Rafa’s shoulder, she feels taut muscles beneath. Attempting to lighten the moment, she asks, “So, you enjoying your new toy?”

  He snorts a laugh, shakes his head and mutters, “Damn good thing we had this. We’d be back there somewhere stuck in that damn rental right now.”

  “Yeah,” she agrees gravely, contemplating the ones left behind, “yeah.” She can only hope that others still trying to make their way from the operations center are okay. She looks towards where they came from and sees ash clouds above. Hopefully, those people back there will be just inconvenienced and not harmed.

  “Think we’re safe?” someone asks Tom.

  He stares out the window for a long pregnant pause and then says with gravity, “Yeah. We made it...but I don’t want to think about the others.”

  Chapter 42

  Day 5

  Santiago, Chile

  Isabel is suddenly back in time to the turbulent 1970’s, back in memory to when her people were under attack, being tracked down, rounded up, taken to detention centers, tortured and then ultimately made to disappear.

  She hears their screams, feels their agony, and suffers as their lives are snuffed out. After the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, that ousted president Salvador Allende, the military junta regime forces fanned out across the countryside arresting opponents. Insidiously, her people were included in the roundup. Once arrested, they were tortured to force them to reveal the names of others like them. A special unit of the junta hunted them exclusively. They were very efficient at seeking them out. After torture, they were mercilessly destroyed–men, women and children. It had been an excruciating time for her. Almost all of her people died during that era.

  As the distant memory fades, the relived agony restores a measure of resolve for her, to protect her people.

  With warmth, she senses all the new ones who have replaced her people and are thriving; the ones who call themselves the “Habladas Silencio.” As a mother would embrace her loved ones, she reaches out to them and cradles them in her mind. Like a parent finding lost children, she rejoices.

  Memory-time shifts again away from the present, taking her back in time to May 24, 1960, when she was underground at the Puyehue-Cordon-Caulle volcanic edifices that form the major mountain massif in Puyehue National Park. Beneath the surface of the Earth, she is the ancient Chilean Gi safely nestled in. Underground passageways connect her physically to humans whom she is psychically linked to.

  Then the land shifts and she is caught up in the irregular tectonic natural shifting of the Earth’s plates. As the ground moves, 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit magma from far below is released to flow upwards while 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit gases escape into the atmosphere, scalding, burning and suffocating everything in their path.

  The caverns where she resides begin to fill with magma that streams in to burn her alive. As the end nears for her, in desperation she mimics a child she is familiar with, one of her people who has just been killed by a pyroclastic cloud blowing out of one of the vents. She creates an avatar of the child. Quickly, she escapes to the child avatar just as her underground body is consumed and lost forever, but the transition is filled with pain and errors. By the time her ash-covered avatar child-self is found, she is a lost entity inside the child; wounded and without memory. Only a boy, one of her people, who rescued the avatar-child is aware of what the child is, but he is damaged from birth and only able to help in limited ways.

  As memory-time shifts once more for Isabel, she sees herself bouncing in and out of homelessness for years, never growing older, never consciously recovering her memory and always shadowed by the boy who grows to become her huge friend known as Ángel.

  Finally, memory-time changes to the present and she feels the presence of the panthers within the safe orb she is surrounded by. Though she is a solitary animal by nature, their proximity brings comfort. She realizes they act as a safeguarding mediation between her and two very powerful entities next to her that are both reaching out to her. Fortunately, the panther’s presence allows her to step back and assess the ones who are trying to bring her into them, to make her one with them.

  Yet her exploration of the two tells her they are wrong. She is an entity unto herself. The others are less than her and want to absorb her. So she rejects them, pushing them away, throwing up protective walls between them and her. The panthers, which could drop out and leave her open to the two, remain and pressure her to allow the two to join her, never abandoning her, just protecting and persuading.

  But the two are determined and reach through the panthers to embrace her. She struggles against their attempt to be with her, to swallow her, to assimilate her into them. When she feels her defenses cracking, she beckons to the Panthers, but they are so diminished by the powers of the two that their help is minimal. The two entities are unrelenting. Each time she manages to block them, they find a new avenue to get to her. When they touch her, she cuts them, detaching their will from her. They advance, again and again, until she feels herself becoming overwhelmed b
y their combined wills. Failing to stop them, she realizes her absorption is imminent.

  In panic and desperation, fear and frustration, she lets loose with a long mighty scream that, rather than drive them away, surprisingly further cements them to her. Mad with terror, something opens up inside her, wider and wider, pushing out against everything that is not her. She knows that her survival is dangling at the end of the thinnest piece of string.

  Thump, thump. She hears the heartbeats of the humans, the ones inside the snake Gi-created orbs.

  Thump, thump. All of them, so close to her, trying to help her. All of them, offering their meager life forces to her, to help her, to add their wills to her will. But it is Sister Mary’s life force and the lingering remnant of Isabel’s love towards Sister Mary that pushes her over the edge. She must survive!

  With all her might, she fills the scream with every fiber of her being until she is no longer alone against the two, but alone with the two.

  She has absorbed them, made them hers; swallowed them completely rather than the reverse. She and they are now one and their sacrifice dawns on her. They gave themselves to her to create a new transformed terrible power. It was their goal. They knew that if they didn’t sacrifice for the cause they wanted, the cause they wanted would be sacrificed.

  Stunned by their selflessness, she stops to assess inside the snake Gi container that holds the others whose hearts beat so loudly, the snake Gi container formed by the demon serpent holdover from the African Serpent Gi that her humans transported from Africa and carried down into the mine shaft. She explores the new her, sensing her new abilities and realizing the profound power she is now vested with by the combination of the two and herself.

  Inside the Gi container, she gathers her entity around the power of the Panthers and absorbs all, finishing the infusion of the two African Gis within her.

  The new powers have augmented everything about her. Like neutrons striking the nucleus of an atom of the isotope uranium-235, their presence releases what has been held inside her for so long. She is made anew to be something enormously stronger than her previous Chilean Gi state. She is cataclysmic energy released.

  Reborn and ready to act, she now senses the one to the north as it flexes its might against the humans she loves and protects. She feels its intent to destroy as well as its hate for her, as it suddenly becomes aware of the frightful transformed new her.

  Thump, thump. She hears the heartbeats of the ones around her, still alive, still with her, still human and vulnerable within the snake Gi container. She must act now to protect them.

  In a flash, she explodes out through the snake Gi container, through the bedrock mountain, towards her knowing adversary. She surfaces with explosive force on the other side of the mountain in a show of thunderous lightning bolts; writhing and arcing about as an electric airborne current traveling along negative and positive particles, and shooting northward to make physical contact with her enemy. As she travels closer, she senses its sensing her and feels its animal fear. Alternately soaring and hopscotching over land, she locates one of its many underworld tendrils. She plunges down into the earth, homing in on one of its many physical extensions and attaching herself to it.

  The moment she makes contact, its many eyes, in the form of psychically linked human followers, are suddenly revealed to her. These humans are the ones who tracked the development of the array in the Atacama Desert. They are the ones who alerted it to the moment of testing. They are the ones who allowed it to know the precise moment to strike, and more importantly, some of them are the ones responsible for killing her people ages ago. These are the human side of the beast they call the Beloved of the Ocean and the Earth that she must deal with, a side that she has never directly touched before–but all that is about to change.

  Now that she has everything she needs, she fans out following the Beloved’s tendrils to every aspect of it, tracing them to their ends and then ultimately to its source, deep out along the edge where the Pacific oceanic plate meets the South American continental plate.

  While she tracks down every alien aspect of it, another part of her shifts to a different realm, one of the human psychic links. She spreads out to every person connected to the Beloved, tracing each link to the attached human and covering them with herself. As she finishes with the human aspect of her foe, she surrounds it with her powerful entity, coiling and squeezing, knotting herself deeper and deeper into it and then, as it struggles like a fish caught in a net, in one massive burst, she screams a scream charged by all three of her combined life forms.

  Inside the scream, the trapped entity writhes in abject horror and failure. Its purpose on Earth has been thwarted. It claws at the earth and rock around it, pulling away from her with desperate tendrils, but it is too little too late. It is fundamentally too weak and no match for the combined Gis.

  And then it happens.

  Where the enemy was, there is only emptiness. Where the humans were, there is only the quick sucking sound of vacuums being filled. Every aspect of it and them is transported away; just as the boys on the roof were transported; just as the boys in the warehouse were transported; and just as the people on the street were transported. The alien and its human servants are transported out of the reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and gravity along with her.

  She whipsaws and slings it and her combined selves, across the heavens towards the center of the solar system, where all will eventually reach a place of certain death: The Sun. Their final destination shall be a moment of fiery fusion and then they will be no more. It is her sacrifice to save the humanity she is pledged to helping and protecting. Only the remnant of her, left behind in the form of the snake Gi container, will remain to grow and flourish as the new Gi in times to come. The part of her that is fused with the two African Gis will die to ensure the arrival of her enemy into the Sun.

  Wherever the alien existed under the earth producing pressure to shift the ground, those places, vacant of its pressure, collapse back to their prior state until all its achievements are reversed and the earth falls back into place.

  Equilibrium is achieved, and only the Earth’s natural forces continue without further alien intervention.

  Chapter 43

  Day 10

  Santiago, Chile

  When Zed rolls over, the early morning rays of sunlight fall slanting through the bedroom window onto his passive face. Moments later, his closed eyes blink open and he stares at the wood plank-and-beam ceiling above. A long yawn makes him grimace as his mouth stretches wide and his bare chest expands under the wool blankets. He rolls over onto his side and sees his friend’s clothes still hanging from the wooden chair next to the bed. He twists back to find her still sound asleep with the covers pulled up over her shoulders. Carefully, he peels the blanket from his naked body and cautiously rolls out of bed, creating the least amount of noise and bed movement he can. He doesn’t want to wake her. Once he separates his body from the bed, he picks up his loose clothes from the wood floor and carries them into the bathroom, where he slowly closes the door. After relieving his bladder, he dresses, slips quietly out of the bathroom, into the dim hallway and then out into the main room of his small bungalow.

  Through the windows, he sees clear skies promising that today may be another beautiful warm sunny day just like yesterday. He unlocks the entry door and steps out into crisp morning air where bird songs dapple the cozy courtyard atmosphere around him. Exiting the rustic patio, he winds his way along a flagstone path towards a small outdoor eating area under a vine-covered trellis. Sitting at one of the tables, Rafa and Twizzle sip steaming tea and hot coffee, and engage in casual conversation. He waves to them and Twizzle waves back. When he pulls out a chair and joins them, Twizzle asks, “So everything end well for you last night?”

  He yawns, stretches, and scratches his stomach. “She is more than I could have ever hoped for. Not only does she feel me, but she is a gifted Habladas Silencio. Who would have thought it could happen so
fast? I mean, she’s just what I’ve been looking for.”

  “I think Sonnet is jealous and hurt by being replaced as your comrade in arms.”

  Zed laughs. “If you mean ‘hurt and jealous’ as in ‘relieved and glad to be rid of me,’ yes, I believe that. Sonnet told me that it was about freaking time I settled down to someone.”

  “Sofia will make a nice addition to the family, Zed,” Twizzle tells him.

  Rafa interjects, “That is if you can keep up with her. I mean, soccer queen and all; she is hardcore energy.”

  “Not unlike your grandmother, you think, Zed?”

  He shakes his head. “We were too young. All I know is what you and Uncle Forbes tell me about her and my mom. You guys always talk about how much they were like each other.”

  “Sofia sure ran rings around Twizzle yesterday,” Rafa teases.

  Twizzle punches him in the arm. “I beg to differ. I kept up my end of the game. It was you that let the team down by letting everybody score against us.”

  Rafa grins and nods in agreement.

  One of the Habladas Silencio who works in the farm’s kitchen approaches the table with a tray of fresh food that he sets in the center of the round wooden table. He places plates and silverware all around and asks if Sofia will be joining them for breakfast. When Zed shrugs and says in Spanish, “Maybe,” the man sets a place for her anyway.

  Glancing beyond the table, Zed sees little Isabel leaving the room where she and Sister Mary are staying. She stops at a colorful collection of bright flowers, picks a few and then skips along the stone path towards them.

  “Here comes trouble,” Zed says facetiously, nodding in her direction. Twizzle turns, sees her, waves, and then turns back to Rafa. “You set everything up for her and Sister Mary?”

  “I’m still working on it. The bureaucracy is like all bureaucracies, slow and labyrinthine. Between the church and the state and the courts, it’s all going to take a long time. It’s a work in progress.”