by Platt, Sean
“Oh God! Oh God!”
She couldn’t believe she killed Charlie. The boy she’d come to love. The boy who had risked his life to save her. The sad, but sweet boy who she passed notes with just one night before. Now he was dead, his body motionless, lying on the floor.
Callie jumped as a deafening hum belched from the globe.
She looked up and saw the light’s brightness grow even more intense, surging from dim to bright to blinding white, as if it were somehow aware of her. The hum grew louder, beckoning her toward the globe.
“Come. Open it,” a voice whispered in her mind. Not her internal thoughts, but an external thought, from someone — something — else.
Callie looked over.
Did it just talk to me?
“Yes. Come. Open me. I will save you all.”
Callie inched toward the globe.
No, no, wait for Boricio and Luca. Wait.
“No, Callie. You. Come. Open me.”
Callie stepped closer and looked down at the vial, glowing bright white, so bright she couldn’t see its shape through the light. It was as if someone had just flicked on a million watts in the room. The light was so bright, and so beautiful despite its intensity, Callie nearly missed the darkness gathering form beside her — the Darkness pouring from Charlie and up toward her.
“Let me in,” the Darkness whispered in her head.
Callie turned to turn and run, but couldn’t. She was rooted to the spot as It crept closer. The smokey entrails slithered around her, bringing Its icy slaughter.
“Let me in,” it repeated, snaking toward her mouth as it spread her lips wide.
Callie cried out, but her throat made no sound and her feet refused to move.
Her eyes found Charlie’s corpse on the floor and her heart shattered again.
I love you.
The gun trembled in her hand and she lifted it fast, before she could change her mind. As the Darkness rushed inside her throat, drowning her with its form, it began to sift through her memories, tossing them everywhere in an attempt to keep her from doing what she had to do.
Callie saw her mom.
“Hi, Baby,” her mother said. “Don’t do that, okay? Put the gun down, Callie.”
Tears streamed down Callie’s cheeks. She chewed the salt from her lip as she felt the Darkness burrow deeper into her mind.
Callie said, “Sorry, Mommy,” then pulled the trigger.
* * * *
CHAPTER 13 — Boricio Wolfe Part 2
Black Island, New York
April 2012
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…
The aliens had all retreated, leaving Team Boricio free to make their final trek to Will’s house. They were 100 feet or so from the front porch when two gunshots raged, one right after the other.
The team froze, trading glances in the black as icy rain began to fall and the wind began to rattle the trees.
“Callie!” Boricio screamed.
The wind’s howl accompanied his anguished cry, or maybe mocked it.
The group slowly approached the house, guns drawn with the last of the ammunition from the trucks. Boricio and Pirate Boricio ran point as Mary, Paola, Will, and Luca followed. Bringing up the rear were Ryan and Sullivan.
Boricio looked up at the house, wondering who shot who, and waiting for someone, either Charlie or Callie to step into view in the brightly lit second story window.
Another gunshot.
Both Boricios ran toward the house as Ryan screamed, “They’re coming!”
“Who?” Boricio said, spinning around.
As he turned, he saw a horde of aliens breaking through the tree line — too many to count.
“Jesus, how many more of these motherfuckers are there?” he said as two of the aliens raced ahead of the others, running on all fours as fast as Cheetahs, roaring toward Sullivan and Ryan.
Ryan leaned down and raced toward one of the creatures. The two collided in midair, then rolled to the ground in a blur of black and blood. Sullivan fired his M-16 at the second alien as it bore down on him. His shots hit, but didn’t stop the alien as it barreled forward.
Boricio leveled his pistol and fired three shots in rapid fire succession, sending the alien into an eternity of quiet.
Mary took aim at Ryan and the alien as they tumbled, clawing and tearing at one another. She couldn’t get a clear shot, so she instead fired at the closest aliens. Sullivan fired into the horde again, taking a couple more down before he had to stop and reload a clip.
Boricio looked back toward the house and saw Pirate Boricio standing at the back porch of the house, his gun aimed into the horde. He didn’t fire, but yelled, “Come on, Luca!” instead. “We’ve gotta get to the vial.”
Will and Luca stumbled forward with Mary and Paola as Boricio and Sullivan fired, picking off as many of the aliens as they could.
No way in hell we’re gonna be able to kill them all. I hope to Fuck that Luca’s magical potion is there and it works!
Ryan stood, and was immediately pounced upon by a mutated dog, as large and ugly as the mangy fucker Paola had shot the other morning. Ryan flipped the beast, then gripped its hind legs as he spun the dog on its back, tearing the legs from the dog’s body as it howled and fell to the ground dying.
“Fuck yeah!” Boricio shouted as he turned and headed into the house.
Boricio raced up the stairs to find Pirate Boricio, Will, Luca, Mary, and Paola, all standing around the glowing globe, staring inside it as if hypnotized. On the floor, he saw Charlie and Callie both dead, shot in the head.
His stomach turned, but they didn’t have time for mourning the dead. The aliens were galloping towards the house and nothing short of a miracle would save the day.
“What the fuck y’all waiting for?” Boricio said, stepping toward the others.
As he drew closer to the globe, he was suddenly frozen, like the others, imprisoned by the glowing beauty before him.
“Oh God,” he said, using an expression he didn’t think he’d ever used in his life. “It’s . . . stunning.”
Boricio felt the light’s warmth spreading through his body like drugs from the rich fucker’s house, but with none of the murky, trippy confusion.
The opposite of confusion flooded his mind.
Clarity.
Inside that clarity and impossible light, Boricio could feel the others’ thoughts, hundreds of random memories coursing in a current through them all — from Luca petting his cat, to Mary giving birth, to the first time Will danced with a girl — and later, with a man. In those shared memories, Boricio felt something he’d never felt before — love for these strangers — as if they were all bonding through some communal drawing into a well of eternal light.
Until something dark circled the rim.
At first, it was a nebulous haze Boricio saw floating around them as they sat transfixed by the light. He could feel its contempt, its hate, but he was unable to break from the beauty of the light.
It circled them.
It looked down upon them.
It judged.
Then it entered Pirate Boricio’s mouth.
Boricio couldn’t tell if the others could see what was happening, or if it were only him. Suddenly other emotions and memories started seeping into the light, many from Boricio’s personal scrapbook of pain — the time his step-dad killed Boricio’s four week old kitten, the time his step-dad punched him so hard they had to keep him home from school with “pneumonia” for a week, the times his step-dad made him—
Boricio looked up, glaring at the light.
Why are you pulling this out of me?
Why are you sharing this?
As memories spilled like red paint onto a freshly varnished floor, the light grew dimmer.
The beautiful light was turning black.
No!
Another dark memory swallowed the light — this one from Pirate Boricio, sitting helplessly in the cell while Will ordered the execution of Rose.
>
They all saw — and felt Boricio Bishop’s pain — as the fire engulfed the cell and destroyed everything.
The vial was turning black.
Soon, the Darkness in Pirate Boricio would fulfill its mission.
Soon, it would corrupt the light.
Boricio wanted to reach out, but they were all still transfixed, now in anguish as the Darkness unleashed a torrent of miseries upon them, hundreds of thousands of murders from the moment it was first unleashed, as it murdered the world’s men, women, children, and animals, engulfing and ingesting all into Itself.
“Stop it!” Mary cried out.
Will was shaking violently.
Luca sobbed, squeezing his eyes tight, as if he could dim, or unsee, the horrors in his head.
He couldn’t.
Boricio wanted to seize the vial, take it, and use it to do whatever would destroy the Darkness across from him, smiling from behind Boricio Bishop’s mask.
Only Luca can touch it.
Only Luca is pure enough.
Boricio wasn’t sure where the thoughts were coming from, until he realized they were bleeding from both Will and Luca; a shared dream or thought, where Luca was the rightful heir to the vial — the child who smothered the Darkness.
But Luca isn’t touching it!
He’s frozen like me!
Then, Boricio knew.
He had to go into Luca’s head.
**
Boricio was no longer in Other Luca’s bedroom.
He had no idea where he was, but it looked like a forest of Tim Burton’s nightmares, with crooked trees and giant worms pushing their mottled bodies through rows of bloody soil.
Between the two rows of fat, crooked trunks with long and gnarled roots, and thousand-fingered branches braided above Boricio’s head, Luca lay sprawled across the forest floor, crying.
Luca was no longer old.
He was young, so young he seemed almost tiny.
As Boricio ran through the forest toward Luca, branches clawed at him from both sides, trying to pull him back into the black.
“Luca!” Boricio screamed, trying to get the boy’s attention.
Luca didn’t answer, he only made his crumpled figure smaller, huddled and crying and sobbing in a pile, begging for help.
The darkness from the forest was creeping into Boricio’s lungs like a thousand pounds of smoke. Boricio ran faster and harder, pumping his legs until he finally reached Luca, where he dropped to his knees and pulled the boy into his arms.
“You gotta wake up, Kid. It’s time.”
Luca shook his head, still sobbing. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t fight when the Terrible Scary is everywhere.”
“The Terrible Scary?”
“Yes, The Terrible Scary,” Luca nodded. “The Black Pieces. The end of everything.” He looked up at Boricio, then fell back on his palms and scooted back, gasping. “The other one of you!”
“No,” Boricio shook his head. “That’s not me.”
Boricio could feel the horror on the other side of reality, ready to end everything as his friends stood frozen.
He stood, then held his outstretched hand to Luca. “You can’t be scared of the Terrible Scary.” He shook his head. “Not now or ever again.”
Luca lay on the ground, cowering and unconvinced, as worms began to erupt from the soil, inching their slick segmented plump bodies toward him, trying to drive him away.
Boricio snarled another order at Luca but the boy still laid there.
So Boricio roared:
“The Terrible Scary is nothing!” he yelled as the black started whistling around them. Boricio could feel the Darkness growing in power, shaking the trees around him in the world in Luca’s head, and dimming the light in the real world his body still stood in.
The Darkness would soon swallow them both if Luca wouldn’t stand and fight. “Do you remember when you went inside my head back when you were being held in that dungeon? How I huffed and puffed and tried to blow your house down? But you stood up to me. You found the part of me that was broken, and you . . . fixed me, Luca. You fixed ME, a monster! Don’t be afraid of this. It’s nothing, unless you let it be.”
Luca nodded, and said, “I’m scared.”
“The Terrible Scary tries to hold you down, bury you inside your deepest fears, because it can smell your power, Luca. It burns with black, and that makes It terrified of your light. If you let it win, you will never see your family again. Your daddy, your mommy, your sister, you’ll never see them again. Ever. Stay scared, Luca, and you ruin the world. Stand now to save us all.”
Boricio held his hand out to Luca, hoping the boy would take it.
He did, then the world around them went white.
The gnarled trees on either side of the Terrible Scary straightened as the road paved itself with a row of freshly laid brick, neatly trimmed with rich green grass. The sky went from oil to azure and the clouds from coal to milk.
Once the Terrible Scary was entirely gone, they found themselves back in Other Luca’s room, now flooded with a light so white it was as though no other color existed.
Luca blinked his eyes, though Boricio could barely see him.
Boricio screamed, “You know what to do?” and was sure Luca nodded, even though he couldn’t see.
Boricio stepped into the brilliance as Luca’s fingers curled around the vial. The man-kid flickered; a skeleton, then a child, then, for the thinnest slice of a second, nothing but light.
The Darkness swallowed Boricio Bishop, as Luca was born from the Light.
The room began to shake, wind howling through the shattered window, as the light dimmed from blinding to bright. In a voice that no longer belonged to Luca, but to eternity itself, Luca thundered:
“Go! Run!”
What was left of Team Boricio bolted out of the bedroom, but the Darkness reached out with a knotted spear of sable, goring Will through the back, then bursting through his chest as he was inches from the door. Will’s body was yanked back into the room, then into the vortex of swirling Darkness, as it spun Will’s body, sucking his blood and guts into its center, then spewed them across the room.
The poor old fucker couldn't even scream.
The house shook violently around them as the wind raged outside. Luca, now nothing but a brilliant orb of growing light, thundered again, his voice now a hundred souls speaking from the inside of a single scream:
“GO! GO!”
Every window shattered at once as wind, rain, and debris swarmed through the house, as if the foundation were birthing a tornado.
Mary should have been running, but she stood rooted beside Paola, both fixed to the floor in horror, unable to move.
Boricio grabbed two arms, one from each girl, and shoved them both out the door, then down the stairs and through the swirling chaos. They made it outside just as the house collapsed and was siphoned into the two swelling, swirling tornadoes — one as wretchedly black as an infinite night, the other as white as Siberian snow, both of them spitting debris to the sky like the heavens were starving.
Sullivan and Ryan were still battling a couple dozen aliens on the ground. Boricio was shocked to see them still standing.
The white tornado suddenly spit sparks of bright light from the gaping mouth in its center, disintegrating the remaining aliens.
“Holy shit!” Boricio shouted.“Let’s get the fuck outta here!”
Mary ran to meet her mutant husband, dragging their daughter behind her. Halfway there, a piece of the black reached out and grabbed Ryan like a twig, then plucked him into the air screaming into its widening vortex.
Mary lost her voice in an anguished bellow as the Darkness turned toward her, swirling its hungry tendrils and grabbed her too.
“No!” Boricio and Paola both screamed.
The white tornado sent a swirl of bright crackling light into the heart of Darkness, pulled Mary from its horrible depths, then dropped her gently on the ground next to her daughter. Mar
y stood up, wet and scratched to hell, and picked Paola up and began to run away.
Boricio heard Luca’s voice inside in his head, “Use the orange ball!”
“What?” Boricio screamed at the bright tornado that was once the man-kid Luca, or the vial, maybe both.
“The orange ball,” it bellowed. “Tell Sullivan to use it.”
Boricio shouted to Sullivan, “He said use the orange ball!”
“Who?!”
“That!” Boricio said, pointing at the Light tornado snaking around the Dark one.
“We’ll all die!” Sullivan screamed.
The pair of vortexes started to yank surrounding trees, dirt, rocks, and debris into themselves, gathering mass so fast, that every one of them were sure to be pulled into the swirling chaos in a matter of seconds.
Sullivan held the glowing orange sphere in his palm.
He squeezed the ball hard and the orange light grew brighter and brighter, until it started screaming red.
Everything vanished in a blaze of impossible light.
* * * *
CHAPTER 14 — Luca Bishop
Black Island, New York
April 2012
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…
Keep swimming!
Luca kept going, faster than he’d ever swam in his life, trying to find a way back to the other world, where he’d been safe and sound in the other Luca’s bed.
But he could never return if he was unable to concentrate.
Luca swam for what felt like forever, until his entire body was aching, his limbs turning to rubber. He could float no longer, though he was finally a safe distance from the falling stuff.
He saw the source of the falling stuff in the distance — the two largest tornadoes Luca had ever seen. While Luca had only seen tornadoes on TV, he was sure they didn’t usually have balls of lightning and fire swirling from their middle.
Luca couldn’t tell how far away the tornadoes were from each other, but they seemed inches from collision. He had also never seen two tornadoes at once, even in movies. It was like they were fighting to see which could gather and spit the most terrible stuff into the sky as they continued to drift closer and closer.
