by Ben Stevens
A hollow crack echoed through the night as Jon’s hammer crashed into the savage’s skull. The hammer cleared and returned to a chambered position as Jon shifted his hips. The savage flew back, groaned, and folded over onto the ground.
Jon stood triumphantly over the fallen enemy, his chest rising and falling, eyes wide, still buzzing with adrenaline. He heard a commotion from the camp and raised his weapon above his head so that his body would not obscure its glow. He saw Carbine stepping out of the lean-to, pistol in hand.
“What’s going on?” Carbine asked. Jon could see Maya behind him, peering over his shoulder.
“Some kind of wild-man. Possessed, I think. I don’t…” Jon’s voice trailed off as he lowered the hammer and examined the body. He leaned in and held the hammer out like a lantern to get a closer look. His blow had completely caved in the side of the wild-man’s skull; the long, greasy, tangled mess of hair was dry, though. Jon squinted and focused his eyes, trying to will them to see better in the dim light, yet still found no evidence of blood.
What the…? Jon’s eyes narrowed even further as the caved-in skull began to un-cave like a balloon inflating.
“Carbine!” Jon shouted, raising his hammer for another strike. He didn’t wait for the savage’s regeneration to finish before raining blow after blow down upon the thing’s head.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Before Carbine could trot up to his friend, Jon had pounded the savage’s head flat and fully into the ground with his hammer. Still no blood. And again, it began to slowly re-inflate and repair itself.
“Jon, what in the actual—?” Carbine’s words were arrested in his throat by the sound of more growls in the night.
Jon tore his gaze from the regenerating man-creature at his feet and turned to look out into the desert. A swarm of glowing red eyes stared back at him.
From out of the edge of darkness and into the glow of the hammer stepped a pack of savages similar to the first— ragged, dirty, drooling upright beasts of men. Their mouths hung open, showing off extremely large canine teeth that seemed to shine when the hammer-light struck them. They came out of the shadows, forming a loose half-circle around the camp.
Jon looked from one to another as they approached like wolves on the hunt. It occurred to him that their appearance was somewhat wolf-like, these beast men. He shuddered. The goddess and her guardians were in over their heads.
Jon began to step backward slowly, and Carbine followed his lead. They were too exposed and, besides, they needed to protect the goddess first and foremost. Unfortunately, giving ground encouraged the hunters, and they began to tighten their noose around Jon, Carbine, Ratt, and Maya both more quickly and with more brazenness. Jon knew the tipping point was coming, and it was coming fast.
6
The little boy pulled the cupboard door shut behind him and crouched in the dark, cramped space. His breathing sounded as loud to him as the winds of a spring tornado. He gulped a few big gulps and tried to slow his racing heart and heaving chest. He surfed the razor's edge between the fear of being caught and the thrill of the night’s adventure to come. He had come into the Paramount earlier when it was open and milled around with the other patrons until the moment was just right. Once old man Allen was occupied, he’d stolen away into the upstairs offices. He’d helped himself inside and found a large cupboard that was mostly empty, certainly empty enough for him to hide inside until past closing, so he could have the ancient theater to himself.
He had wanted to get inside the Paramount for years, but the place had been locked up and protected. He had heard the grownups talk of “preservation” and “time-capsule,” but he didn’t understand what that meant. He only knew that it was a sanctum of magic, a place that contained all the treasures of the past, of Earth-That-Was. Everything that got him high, that glittered, that brought a touch of the sublime to his otherwise utilitarian, pointless life, was hidden in the Paramount’s treasure trove. Ever since he’d seen his first relic, Ratt had been fascinated with the past.
Blessed and cursed with a genius-level IQ, the child found little satisfaction in the company of others, and as he grew, he withdrew more and more into his own little world. That world was a fantasy pieced together with scraps from the past. He consumed anything pre-Storm with the ravenous ferocity of a starving animal. Literature in any shape or form, whether it be a pulp novel or a masterful work of literature or even a takeout menu from a long-gone Thai restaurant mattered not. He read it; read it and treasured it.
Pre-Storm clothes, gadgets, knick-knacks, and anything else under the sun was as gold to him. He daydreamed entire days away, pondering the nature of things he had read references to but couldn’t imagine. What were these smartphones that so many people in Earth-That-Was wrote about? What was Tiger Cry beef? Mostly, he wondered what a “TV show” and “movie” looked like. He had read enough bits and pieces to understand what they were—moving pictures—but he had never seen one. Tonight, he would satisfy that burning curiosity. He had learned by listening to the grownups that a vast store of “movies,” as well as something called a projector, had been found in the basement of a pre-storm building called The Paramount.
By some wild stroke of luck, this building had survived the Great Storm, the Scrappers recently discovering it while out on one of their missions—an expedition into the thick, dense ruins of what had once been the City Center.
After the Storm, people in the crowded parts of Austin-That-Was suffered the greatest. Food riots, fighting, collapsing and burning buildings, and other forms of brutal savagery had taken care of the majority of the population. Those who had fled and made it out, along with the more self-sufficient residents of the outskirts, had become the survivors. Generations had gone by before the survivors became organized enough to try to reclaim the city.
Two weeks ago, a Scrapper party had come back to report a find of note: a veritable vault of pre-Storm “movies.” Ratt had overheard the grownups talking about it and decided to tag along with the older boys who were accompanying the men to the “unveiling” of the find. And so he had, and now sat, trying his hardest not to let the pain of his cramping back overcome him. He could still hear people downstairs; it wouldn’t be too much longer.
He awoke suddenly and quickly realized that his butt was numb, his neck was stiff, there was drool smeared all over his hand and left cheek, and he had to pee something fierce.
He looked around and couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. No light shone through the cracks outlining the cupboard door. He held his breath and listened as hard as he could, but there was only silence.
Ever cautious, he apprehensively pushed open the hinged wooden door panel. Pitch black. He crawled out and tried to stand up. Pins and needles ran from his ass to his toes. He stumbled like an amateur circus performer trying out stilt-walking for the first time. He careened this way and that on club-like feet, able to tell that something he was dragging was touching the floor, but unable to truly feel it. His right foot came down slightly sideways and rolled, and he lurched forward in a fall, his hands reaching out into the dark in a desperate attempt to find something to cling to.
He felt something and grabbed it, trying to prevent the fall. Whatever it was, it wasn’t tied down and came tumbling down with him, showering his fallen form and the floor around him with a volley of unknown objects. The subsequent crashing sounds were so loud, Ratt could have sworn that an Artillery Unit was shelling the theater.
After bouncing his face off the floor, Ratt lay perfectly still. He fought back the urge to cry out or even bring his hands to the bleeding lip his tooth had torn. Like a wild rabbit watching the hunter from under the branches of a tree not five yards away, he was motionless, listening for a reaction to his disastrous attempt at stealth.
With bated breath, he anticipated the raising of the alarm, but it never came. He allowed himself a sigh of relief but remained on high alert. He wiped the blood from his lip. It was swollen, and he could feel th
e troubled flesh on the inside of his mouth with his tongue. It was bumpy and gross. He slowly stood up and quietly brushed himself off. Although he still couldn’t see squat, his eyes were coming around and adjusting slightly. He could now differentiate darker shapes of black in the ambient darkness of the room, allowing him to navigate between the furniture in the office without any more bumps and crashes.
By the time he had crossed the room and reached the office door, feeling had fully returned to his extremities. Itching had replaced numbness, but Ratt ignored the urge and felt out for the door handle. Ratt felt around clumsily until he found the latch. He slowly turned it and pulled the door open. It let out a long creak, causing Ratt to wish he had yanked instead. Again he froze and waited to hear the “Polo!” to his “Marco!”, but only silence answered back.
On the other side of the door, he was relieved to find a tad bit of ambient light. The mezzanine here was exposed to the outdoors, a small portion of the far corner having fallen away. Ratt could smell the outside air and hear the cooing of doves in the middle distance. He turned toward the nearest wall, opened his fly, and relieved himself. Next, he made his way to the large fake plant in the corner near the open door. Feeling around behind it, he found the backpack he had stashed there earlier.
Satisfied with the convergence of his plan, he smiled giddily and plopped the bottom of the frame on the floor. He untied the bits of stringy leather that laced the pack's main cavity closed and reached his slender arm inside, feeling around for the torch he knew was there. He was frustrated, for it had settled to the bottom and he was having a heck of a time finding it; he should have taken it out before he even got there and stored it someplace more practical, like his hoodie pouch.
“Yes!” The boy’s tiny fingers found the torch and withdrew it from the pack. A flick of his thumb, and the musty theater became semi-illuminated, the torch’s cone of light waving through the air. The multitude of dust motes now visible looked like snowflakes in the torch’s beam, and Ratt felt like a kid on Christmas morning about to open his presents without first waking his parents.
Able to see where he was going now, he easily made his way down the broad, sweeping stairs to the main theater room. He gazed over the long-abandoned chairs that poked their rectangular stubby frames up into the room like tombstones in an indoor graveyard. His imagination was on fire with questions as he took it all in. With the throng of people now absent, he could see the theater for what it was in all its haunted, anachronistic glory.
He floated down the sloping grade of the auditorium floor to the base of the stage at the forefront of the room. Running his free hand along the edge, he followed the curve to the end, where floor met wall, under an old sign that read “EXIT.” A short series of five steps led from the rotten carpet and concrete floor of the auditorium to the warped wooden-slat floor of the stage. Trotting up them with ease, his gaze following the mouldering remains of a thick, heavy black curtain that reached nearly from floor to ceiling, and noticed for the first time the catwalks and the lights.
His gaze lingered on the lights, and he moved the beam of his torch from one to another, pausing for several moments on each one. Every one was a smooth black tube with a square mouth, no, a frame of some kind, fastened to the outside diameter of the tube. This frame, he could see, was designed to hold a sheet of transparent, colored material, for some of them still did. Ratt quickly surmised that the function of these lights, which in many ways resembled large, fixed and mounted versions of the very torch he held, was to shed different shades of colored light down onto the stage. He imagined how much fun it would be to work up in those lofty stations, pointing the focus of the beam here and there—a subtle but important part of the show.
“We all have our part to play in the illusion,” he said to himself, and smiled a musing smile.
As it was in most adventures, he found the real goods behind the curtain. The “Management Only” sign was hanging askew by one rivet, but it still marked the staircase leading down into the basement. Ratt re-shouldered the sagging, heavy pack and made his way downstairs.
He was the proverbial kid in a candy store. The basement storage room was a virtual Library of Alexandria of pre-Storm cinema. And there, on a simple table that to Ratt now looked like an ancient temple’s pedestal holding a priceless relic of the past, was the film projector. He had overheard the grownups speak of the tragedy earlier; of what a shame it was that the projector no longer worked, and how wonderful it would be if it did; what secrets they might have gleaned from the past, etcetera, etcetera.
When he had tried to speak up and offer to take a look at it, they hadn’t even heard him. He was a child, after all; what could he possibly have of value to offer to the discourse? Well, he would show them. That was when he had hatched his plan to sneak in and fix the damned thing. Then he could learn the secrets of the ancients, and they would respect him and title him a man.
The child went right to setting up shop, taking off his pack and dumping its contents onto the table. He plucked a cloth-wrapped morsel of salted meat, grinding it into a lump along with dried fruit and grain powder. Thoughtfully munching away on it, he walked in a slow circle around the projector, examining and scrutinizing it as if he were a pre-Storm consumer considering the purchase of a car.
By the time he had finished his snack, he knew how to proceed. Ratt went to work, sifting through the bits he had dumped out on the table; he played nurse as well as surgeon, trading one tool for another with fevered intensity. A screwdriver here, a 6-inch adjustable wrench there, and then his fingers mashed up some quick-dry epoxy like teeth to chewing gum.
Pausing only occasionally to wipe the beads of sweat from his furrowed brow, Ratt worked for no less than an hour before he finally stopped, stepped back, and brushed his grubby hands on his pants legs. He crossed his arms and looked his work over.
“Well, I think that’ll do her.”
He made his way over to the steel racks that ran from floor to ceiling around the perimeter of the room and began to browse through the reels of film.
Where do I even begin? he wondered as he stared at the thousands of titles, completely overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of choice.
“Huh.” Ratt stopped when he saw a title that reminded him of his current situation as if it were a meaningful synchronicity.
From Dusk till Dawn, the sticker on the film canister read in old English.
Ratt pulled the canister down from the shelf and brought it over to the table. Like a seasoned professional, he set it up and then produced an object from his pack’s pile. It was what was called a power pack—a cell of energy, common to and smuggled out of the war-mongering “Human Republic” of the north. Ratt, being the antique aficionado that he was, had converted it to take pre-Storm, North American 110.
Ratt plugged the antiquated device into the energy cell, pointed it at a blank wall, and hopped a squat on the floor, ready to unlock the secrets of the ancients.
When the film ended, Ratt sat transfixed until the reel ran its course, sending the screen into blackness and making a flap flap flap sound as it spun around and around, slapping its loose end against the body of the projector.
Ratt moved to stand and switch the machine off, his thoughts still hypnotized by the cinematographic marvel he had just witnessed, when the room grew dark. Darker than it should be, darker than he remembered.
Remembered? Wait? This isn’t happening, this is a memory.
“This is happening, Ratt,” said a disembodied voice.
Ratt couldn’t argue for once. He recognized his infiltration of the theater and movie viewing as a memory; he also realized that his current situation was not part of that memory.
“Who’s there?” The child stood up, glancing furtively about, only to realize that he was no longer a child, but the man-boy he currently was. He was here, in this dreamworld, while also, somehow, distantly aware of his body lying on the sandy ground of a desert, at the feet of the goddess he served.
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The dark theater continued to darken until no shapes or distances could be perceived. A second longer and Ratt was in a perfect void of black, yet still able to see his own body as clear as day.
“What’s going on? Who are you?” Ratt demanded.
“I’m waiting for you, Ratt. I need you to finish what I’ve started. To help my old friend.” The voice came from all around, as if it were a loudspeaker in his skull, making its location in the void impossible to discern. But Ratt was beginning to suspect there wasn’t a “body” to this voice anyway. This place, this vision, was outside the pale of a normal Earth-and-physics-bound encounter.
“You cannot perish now. I’ve pulled this memory from your mind to show you your adversary. It is old, and has been on Earth before. Enki was not the only prisoner kept in Hell, after all.”
“Enki? What are you talking about? Why don’t you show yourself?”
“I won’t be able to maintain a connection with you much longer. Awaken, share your knowledge. Survive. Enter the Labyrinth inside the Engine. My old friend needs your help.”
“Wait!” Ratt shrieked, throwing his open hands up in a pleading gesture. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about!”
“You will, Ratt. You will.”
7
“To your right!” Carbine shouted out, and Jon reacted with his hammer before his eyes, swinging the glowing head into a savage that charged in to test the waters while Jon was tangling with another.
The blow sent the foe tumbling into the dust. A moment later, it stood back up, snarling.
Two flat shots rang out from Carbine’s pistol, and Jon watched the exit wounds blossom open on the savage’s chest. Only the concussive force caused the man-beast to stumble; otherwise, it did not seem hurt at all.
