Underworld Earth

by Nicholas Gagnier

  “Believe me, Harper—”

  Turning my back on him should tell the man who became Death I don’t believe him, better than words ever could. Grabbing the first piece of debris—a large concrete slab—the locket flares, granting superhuman strength to hoist aside the rubble. Tim tries to call my name, but I won’t listen. I am done tolerating higher powers with no respect for the living.

  “Harper,” Tim says. I cast him a glare that tells him to either help me or shut the fuck up. Returning to the task at hand, my disturbance rallies clouds from the rising sediment.

  Take care of my daughter, her father told me.

  I couldn’t even do that.

  “Harper!”

  Tim grabs my shoulder, trying to pull me back to reason; back to some semblance of sanity. But there is none, because it has been buried along with anything good this world had left to offer.

  “Harper, please,” he says, but I push him off. “This isn’t going to help anything!”

  Reaching behind me, I grab the suited man’s wrist. I lift it from my shoulder, but don’t let go, baring my teeth at him like a wounded animal.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why should I stop, Tim? If you... if you can tell me why you seem to think this is so fucking hopeless—because there must be a reason—I’ll stop!”

  Tim shakes his head, not drawing his arm back, no matter how hard I squeeze the wrist attached.

  “I just... I don't want to give you false hope here.”

  “False hope?” I snipe, finally letting his arm slip from my fingers. “What the fuck do you know about false hope, Tim? Apart from instilling it in others?”

  Tim chuckles, but does not argue the moral high ground. He has none to stand on. Sinking to my knees, unfathomable failure washes over me; just as it did that day in Toronto. Sobbing at the ground, my hands enclose broken plaster and rocks and dust, fumbling for a level balance. He allows me to purge the plethora of emotions I have carried too long; compounded by murderous responsibility placed on my shoulders.

  But where I expect some grand explanation, or outpouring of further bullshit, defending his actions over the last few years, there is nothing. A head shake followed by glances at the ground.

  Finally, some fucking humility.

  “You’re right,” he says. “Nothing I can say will ever make you understand, Harper. Even after everything you and I have seen... I did this. And I’m going to take responsibility for it. Not eventually. Right now.”

  I scoff.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Whether you believe it or not, I made a deal with the Council. Ramona’s freedom... for mine. I won’t lie,” he says, “I am scared. And I realize the brunt of this responsibility rests on me. I did what little I could to help you fix the error, but…”

  “The Atlas doesn’t care about your damn redemption, Tim.”

  He nods.

  “I know. That’s... not why I’m doing it.”

  In the place I thought Fiona York might be buried under all this destruction, it dawns on me. Same as it did, standing outside a coffee shop window, all those years ago.

  “You really love her, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer, but neither does he need to. “I assume we’re not going to see each other for a while.”

  Tim shakes his head, a slight smirk drawn across his face.

  “I need the seventh name, Tim.”

  “The seventh,” he repeats, searching the ground for a reason only I can give him. “Harper... just... leave it alone.”

  Turning his back to me, he looks out over all the pain and heartbreak his choices have wrought; all the judges, juries and executioners I was forced to be because of him. Climbing to my feet, I need him to see the fire in my throat, burning all the way up to its forgery into words.

  “Do you... not understand what I was forced to do, you son of a bitch? I had... to kill people... because of you! I had to take people’s lives away!”

  “Doppelgangers,” he corrects, which only drags the dagger in my stomach lining deeper.

  “People!” I counter. “People who, despite whatever bullshit circumstances your terrible personal decisions left them in, didn’t know any fucking better, Tim! Human beings, who—”

  “Charlie,” he says, no attention given to the words coming out of my mouth. If his blank disregard for human life was already a knife, hearing that name is a sword driven right through my abdomen.

  “Wha-what did you say?”

  “Your brother. Charlie. He’s the seventh name.”

  Finally, I understand why Gabriel played coy; why Tim played hard to get, like he had no idea this was the endgame, and the reason I, Harper Leigh Whitaker, would snap.

  Judging by my bunched expression and inability to form words, neither were wrong.

  “What? How? How is that possible?”

  The man who became Death raises his gaze to meet the one burning holes in his forehead. If I could inflict such a thing on him, I surely would.

  At last, I understand Tim Hawkins is not my ally after all.

  “He died at Haven, did he not? Shot by Campbell Madison. Died, right in front of my eyes. Except,” Tim says, “that in this timeline, Charlie is not dead. Lives in a cabin, with his wife Svetlana in the Yukon. Has two children, Laura and Riker. In the eyes of Atlas, he is a threat to the future of humanity, Harper.”

  Suddenly, I am staring at that coffee shop window; the one I stood in front of eleven years ago. Watching the love of my life sip chamomile tea, waiting on the person she cared about to come back from the dead; waiting for someone to notice her curvatures, her smile, her beautiful personality.

  Waiting for someone to tell her it was not all for nothing.

  But it was.

  “I never want to see you again,” I tell the man who became Death. Fiona York is driven from my mind. Any momentary peace derived from my victory over Atlas dissipates into thin air. Tim’s creation is destroyed, the living world is spoiled and Earth’s future hinges on my ability to senselessly murder one of the only remaining people who might care about me. “You have ruined my life! I should have never helped you. I should have never saved you!”

  “Harper—”

  “Fuck you, Tim.”

  Leaving him alone with all his cosmic destruction sown in the name of love, I will not help him bear this burden any longer.

  I am done.

  “Harper!”

  He calls my name, but I will not return.

  Not now. Not ever.

  “Harper!”

  I am the unhinged, and forever is my asylum.

  January twenty-fourth was the day I watched the woman from outside a coffee shop in a suburb of Toronto called Etobicoke. The year is relative now, I guess. It has gotten so crossed; the actual date matters little. It was snowing that day. At that time of year, it should have been biting cold. Dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, flakes landed in my hair. I would not have felt them, even if I wanted to.

  All that mattered was she wasn’t wearing the brooch I bought for her thirty-first birthday. It was more than I had ever spent on a gift for anyone… I thought she’d never part with it, based on her reaction when I gave it to her.

  Maybe it was too heavy to bear in my absence.

  Many years removed from that day, the night sky over Haven emits warmth in its cold, dead sky and just like that day, I don’t notice the difference. Walking through levelled streets, fields of debris are scattered everywhere. What should have been a simple exchange of bullets became a cataclysmic event, and the landscape surrounding this town will never be the same.

  Nothing will ever be the same.

  Eventually, I stumble on a warehouse in the industrial district. I’m not sure what makes me gravitate towards it at first. Passing through the door, laying eyes on the three bodies within, I understand it was instinct, above all, that led me here.

  On either side of her motionless body, Victor Quinn and the man I threw into the brush before being intercepted by Gabriel are collapsed
in bloody heaps. The latter’s face is bruised, his ankle twisted in a way that does not suggest he fared too well afterward. Victor is still bare-chested but riddled with bullets—one in the cranium, another set through his chest, and two more in the shoulder. I disregard both men, only drawn to the woman between them.

  Sinking to my knees in front of her, my thumb caresses Samantha’s swollen temple where her head hit the ground. A pile of blood is dried beneath her stomach, and there is no pulse.

  My body remains in the dark, but my heart is in another place—standing outside the high-end coffee shop. Its light green walls match the paper cup cradled in her hands; she blows at the tea’s surface, waiting for a sign from the universe to tell her everything is all right.

  We would speak, but I am a coward; nothing like the woman who knocked out some asshole in an airport bar to defend my honor all those years ago.

  So, I stand there a while, until I can build up a courage which may never come. Snowflakes build on my shoulder and saturate my hair. I don’t care for the cold but would kill to feel it on my skin again. And when I think I’ve built up the nerve to walk inside, tell her who I am—despite knowing she does not remember me—she is joined by another.

  The woman is petite, well-dressed. Her makeup is conservatively applied, and I can tell from the handbag, she does not need a man to take care of her.

  I observe how they embrace, and how Em looks at her as they take their seats, happily chatting.

  There is no longer a place for me with the person I would give anything to wake up and kiss one final time.

  I will stand outside the shop in my dreams a little while longer, having passed from mourning Em to smiling that she’s happy, even if it means I’m alone forever.

  I don’t know what will become of the man who became Death and sentenced us all to live out his twisted vision, even if it was unintentional. Our paths have finally separated, maybe for good, but I hope that he will eventually find his peace.

  I hate empathy.

  For once, I don’t feel the locket’s weight around my neck, because it no longer drags me down.

  Soon, it may be all that lifts me up.

  Sitting with Samantha’s body, holding her hand, ignoring the men who murdered her; all I know is I am the unhinged—capable of so much love, so much less.

  But the world, however, no longer has an interest in being my asylum; and for that, we might all be a little better off.

  Something Gained

  Harper

  I look through a window.

  I don’t know how long I’ve stood here, peering in through the dirty glass. The ground beyond the cabin is soaked in mounds of snow, in a place the illness that wiped out the world has trouble surviving from host to host.

  If there had been more time, I’m sure many more would have thought of making their way here.

  The temperature is so low, the cabin’s chimney pumps entrails of black smoke into the atmosphere to keep its inhabitants warm. Only months ago, people would have held one opinion or another on the merits of a coal stove in the age of global warming. I suppose the burden on the planet is relieved to the point it doesn’t matter anymore.

  Gabriel made damn sure of that.

  I don’t know how to explain myself, should anyone ever come looking for me over the Nephalim’s death. It wouldn’t matter much anyway, because I am the unhinged, and the people I love the most are lost to me. If the Atlas seeks punishment, it will be over bigger things, like what I’m currently contemplating.

  I have stood by this window for days, because I am dead, and time has no meaning. Knee-high snow and biting temperatures would be torture, if not fatal, to any mortal. My fingers feel nothing. My hair does not freeze at the ends, and the jacket is more habit than necessity.

  Resting at my collarbone, the trinket I may never be free of slumbers within its ordinary silver hues. It sustains me as I carry it where it needs to go.

  Watching the man and woman inside the cabin, along with the sounds of their young children playing nearby, I wish I could be like them. Requiring shelter from the elements; not being able to stand here for days, watching them without consequence. Needing to sleep and eat so as not to feel tired and hungry. There are, of course, things I don’t miss and things I’m stuck with that I would trade for all the things I never thought I would want back.

  Instead I am impervious, but alone.

  A lone hare trots along the tree line to the cabin’s far left side. It leaves evidence of its travels in the snow, leading back the way it came. Walking over the snowbank and up the cabin’s porch, I manifest no such tracks in the hardened powder. Pausing to appreciate the woods I’ve waited in thirty-four hours before taking these final steps—its chirping birds, the hollow wind funneling between barren trees—I raise my fist to the wooden door, rapping on its surface thrice.

  Footsteps shuffling from the cabin’s opposite end send my heart sinking in its ethereal shell. The door opens, revealing a face I thought was lost to me forever; it is the exact same as I remember him, only buried beneath an uneven mane. The plaid shirt on small shoulders makes him look larger, like a lumberjack, although his midsection’s rounder, the skin more sunken. Our locking eyes morphs the expression on his face into something resembling familiarity, yet I don’t match the ear-to-ear grin.

  “Harper?”

  The door dividing us opens, and my older brother in another life steps through the threshold. His feet sink in snow covering the porch; the screen slamming behind him, and I can barely contain my emotions. Arms wrap around me, pulling me in. Strands of hair fall over his broad frame; he knows nothing of the burden around my neck, because the locket has chosen to allow human contact between our bodies.

  And when I have collected myself, pulling reddened eyes away, the last fifteen years’ worth of emotions feel purged, and I am lighter.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, crossed arms protecting his chest. “Come on, let’s get out of the cold!”

  I reach out and touch his arm grabbing the screen door. As much joy as meeting my nephew and niece and sister-in-law might bring, I am the unhinged, and my presence would only ruin the atmosphere.

  “Can we go somewhere? There's... there's just a few things I have to tell you, Charlie. Then, I’ll be on my way.”

  “You’re leaving so soon? You came all this way! You’re honestly telling me you won’t stay for dinner?”

  It is hard not to miss the seventeen-year-old renegade my brother was. The mischievous, boyish glare still stands, ready to challenge anyone who does not agree with Charlie Whitaker’s humble worldview. But there is something else now, too. A boy grown into maturity, along with rugged good looks inherited from our father.

  “I really have to get going, Charlie. I just... wanted to see you before I left. An old friend told me where I could find you, and I thought I owed it to somebody to let them know I’m still kicking, you know?”

  Charlie grimaces, looking out at the endless tundra, stretching around the small cabin for miles.

  “All right. Wait here. I’ll show you around.”

  Disappearing into the house momentarily, my older brother returns, shimmying a thick parka down his arms, hastily zipping its disparate sides together. Climbing down the snow-packed steps of his porch, he fits hands in thick black gloves, rubbing their material together.

  “Fuckin’ cold today. You not cold?”

  I shake my head, smiling.

  “No, been building cold tolerance for a while,” I admit. “Happens, when infrastructure south of the 49th goes to shit. You learn to make do.”

  “Yeah, but that jacket? In the goddamn Yukon?” he asks as we start walking. “You always were a masochist, sis.”

  The cabin grows smaller behind us, but the landscape ahead never really grows closer. It is the same shape, an illusion of progress uncovered by established distance the farther we venture into its unforgiving span.

  “So how are the kids?” I ask.

&nb
sp; “Kids’re good,” he replies. “Won’t lie. Never really saw myself being a dad. But I guess Svetlana brings that out in me. Not many distractions left, way up here.”

  “I won’t lie. Never saw you as a dad, either.”

  “It just makes you think, you know?”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie sighs. “When you’re younger, you’re so certain your parents have considered every possible avenue to protect you. They’re privy to all the choices. Pretty easy to assume they looked at all the information at their disposal and ultimately made the worst choice.

  “And then... you’re in that seat, realizing your parents never had the answers. Just curveballs, one after the other, trying to make the best choice they could of a bad situation.

  “So,” he says, stopping in his tracks. The imprints he’s left are not matched by mine, and I wonder how long before he notices only one set of feet carved through the snow. “What really brings you out here, Harper?”

  “What? World goes to shit and I can’t come and see my big brother?”

  “Who you haven’t spoken to in years. C’mon, sis. I mean, I have nothing but respect for you, taking care of Dad and all, but really?” He gestures at the empty wilds around him. “I have everything I’ve needed since Mom died. Maybe more than I deserve. But of all things, I didn’t think I warranted a visit from you. So, don’t bullshit me, Harper.”

  There are so many things left unfinished. With Charlie. With my dad. My brother doesn’t remember taking a couple of shotgun rounds to the head in Haven, and I have no desire to remind him.

  Wishing we could make up for all the time lost, I clear my throat, hoping he doesn’t look back at the single tracks behind us before I can confess. Having arrived at the most heinous of the Atlas’s requests, I was at a crossroads.

  I am tired of this sadism.

  “There are some things I need to say,” I begin, “and the problem has always been, I didn’t know the proper person to tell it to. I had to go to a therapist when Mom died because I couldn’t tell you and Dad how I felt after finding her body. I had to come all this way to say something I should have said years ago; which is that I love you.