“I’m in,” Ricky said.
“Me, too,” said Flower.
“I’m not staying behind.” Almira giggled. “Let’s go mess up some Shadows!”
Thus, the war began. And soon after, ended.
It was swift, deadly to the Shadows, but ultimately ineffective.
After that, all four disappeared, off to put an end to the Crusade of Death.
They each stopped a Shadow at the moment it was about to take a life or many lives. After saving the potential victims, they then destroyed the Shadow.
As they fought now as a team, for some reason they found themselves always reconvening at the area near the original rip, the opening between the dimensions.
“This is going well, don’t you think?” Conner asked, as the team met up again. He felt exhausted but excited.
“Not really, man,” Ricky Martin said, taking a deep breath, hands on his knees. “This isn’t scalable. There’s thousands of them; we just can’t keep up. The odds are against us, anyway. One of us is going to die if we keep doing these little Shadow assassinations. Maybe all of us.”
“You could be right,” Conner said.
“Yeah, I agree with Ricky.” Flower sat on the grass and folded her legs. “We’re just carrying sand off the beach, one palmful at a time.”
“Well, does anyone have a better plan?” Almira asked. “Any plan at all? I’m not giving up.”
The friends all sat on the grass now, in silence. A gloom descending over them, seeping into their souls.
The battle had been lost almost before it started.
Then, in a way none of them could have predicted, the solution presented itself.
Frustrated at the sniping by the humans, at being picked off, at having their fun thwarted, the collective psyche of the Shadows came to a decision.
They determined the only reasonable course of action was to counterattack. To go after the four teens and destroy them. The Shadows had brought the battle to the four friends.
The Shadows of Death arrived at the tear in the dimensions now by the tens, by the hundreds, appearing instantly in the skies all around the four.
Conner, Flower, Almira, and Ricky were hidden in darkness. As if the biggest storm in human history had gathered right over their heads. They gazed up to see what had happened to the sun and saw the sky saturated with not rain clouds, but Shadows of Death. Thousands of angry, hunting Reapers .
They sat unable to speak, unable to look away. Then Ricky Martin spoke, in a quiet, broken voice.
“Run,” he said. “Run your asses off.”
The four stood up with a collective “Fu-u-ck!” and sprinted toward the woods. Flower interrupted the insane flight, however, with words of wisdom.
“What the hell are we doing? Let’s vanish, you know?”
“Yes, right,” Almira said. “Let’s go!”
“No, wait,” Ricky Martin shouted, still running along with the rest of the group. “I just thought of something.”
“What?” Conner said.
“It’s huge!”
“What is?” Conner asked as he struggled to sprint and talk at the same time.
“They couldn’t harm us for some reason.” Puff-puff. “Right?” Puff. “When we were in their dark place, right?” Ricky gasped for air, and chose running over talking for the moment.
“Yes, that’s true,” Conner shouted, excited now, even though the Shadows had begun to swoop down at them from the stratosphere.
Flower searched the skies. “Here they come!”
The others gazed up, too, and increased their speed as the shadows covering them grew and darkened.
“They’ll kill us in this plane of existence in no time, probably two seconds from now,” Ricky hollered, continuing to explain his thought. “So let’s go back where they can’t hurt us!”
“How?” Conner asked. “We don’t know how to ’jump’ to another dimension.”
“We can just will it, can’t we?” Almira asked.
“Yeah,” said Ricky. “We know where it is, right? I mean— ” Puff. “We’re the ones that found it.” Puff-puff. “We know what it looks like.”
“We can picture it in our heads, so we can just go there,” Flower chimed in. “Right?”
“Right or wrong,” Ricky Martin said, wheezing, “it’s the best option we have right now.” Puff.
“It’s the only option,” Conner said.
As the Shadows descended—content in the knowledge that the four pathetic, arrogant humans would soon be wiped from the face of the Earth—the four pathetic, arrogant humans disappeared into time and space itself.
The Shadows hovered, a swarm of giant killer bees in the sky. The held their positions, waiting, communicating to each other through the silence.
Then the Shadows left the Earthly plane, too. Somehow knowing where the four humans had retreated to—to a place the Shadows knew well. A place they dominated and, unlike the humans, existed comfortably within.
The Shadows vanished from the sky, returning to their own Sphere of Death, back through the tear between dimensions, in a single flicker of time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Be with the People You Love
“I—I think we did it.” It was Flower’s voice, soft and scared in the blackness.
“I think so, too.” Conner’s voice. “Are we all here?”
“I’m here.” Almira’s voice. “It’s sooo black. I can’t see a thing.”
“None of us can.” Ricky Martin’s voice. “I’m here, too.”
The four friends said nothing for a moment. Then Flower spoke up.
“Now what?” she squeaked.
Before anyone had a chance to answer, thunder and gale-force winds filled the dimension they were in. The walls, or whatever made the passageways through the bleak hive, shuddered.
Everyone grabbed at their ears to try to stop the piercing pain from the noise. It was as if they had all been plunged under water to an extraordinary depth, where your eardrums feel sharp ache from the pressure.
Their ears bled, although they did not know it.
Then the screaming began.
Not the four friends screaming. They were in too much agony to try to cry out, having fallen to the floor and curled up into tight balls.
No, the screaming came from the Shadows. A hideous, high-pitched screech. A thousand crows being burned alive. A million souls in agony.
Then, silence.
Not just silence, but the complete absence of sound.
Nothing to see but blackness so deep it rivaled the deepest darkness of the coldest corner of space.
No noise, not even the sound of their own breathing or their own hearts beating. An utter void of sound. Not a pleasant silence, rather a fearful vacuum.
The air as cold as death, as chilled as the coldest place on Earth, the loneliest location in the galaxy. Not just a freezing temperature, which affects your body. But a soul-numbing frost. A freeze that could stop your soul and leave it forever encased in ice and in time.
The four friends couldn’t move, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see.
But they could feel the black icicles of death crackling through their bodies, shutting their arteries and lungs and brains down. Bringing their lives to a dark and early end.
The pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but it left the four laying in the dark, unable to move.
The Shadows had little patience, and could not wait for the teenagers to die this way. Too slow, even though in less than ten minutes they would be dead.
Instead, the Reapers woke the humans by withdrawing the cold and returning the four to a dark world that was slightly warmer, with a hint of light—enough so it would be like looking through a thick fog in a starless night. And noise. Nothing more than a mysterious wind, but at least it was a sound, something to focus on.
In a minute, the friends were awake. In another minute, they were on their feet, peering at each other’s hazy faces through the gloom.
/> “My God,” Ricky Martin said, his voice cracking and almost inaudible, “we are still alive . . . ”
Flower had tears in her eyes and, without anything else to use, blew her nose on her sleeve. “I think I’m dying, Ricky . . . I, I don’t feel good at all.”
She collapsed to the ground and lay there, still as a corpse.
Ricky dropped to her side and felt for her wrist and then for her pulse. It was there, weak, but still pulsing. He gazed up to where he guessed the others’ faces were.
“We have to get out of here,” he said, tears in his own eyes now. “This was a terrible, terrible idea.” He leaned down and pressed his head against Flower’s breast and cried.
“Ricky’s right,” Almira said. “We don’t have a chance here. We’ve lost before we’ve even begun. These Reapers have powers we can’t hope to match.” She sighed. “Let alone overcome.”
Conner peered to where Almira’s voice had come from, where here fuzzy outline stood out, just barely, from the whirling fog of loneliness that filled the space they occupied.
“We can’t give up,” he said, more to himself than to anyone who might have been listening and cared to hear his opinion. “We are the only ones who have any chance of doing anything— ”
Before Conner could finish his motivational speech, a swift and gigantic black shadow knocked him off his feet and further into the space they were in. His head hit hard into whatever material made up this place—it had a coal quality, but sharper—and he slid into a wall of it.
Conner had the wind knocked out of him, but he was still conscious. And furious.
“Not cricket!” he yelled. “Not sporting at all.”
Conner crawled to his full height, using the wall to help himself get back up.
“I don’t expect you Reapers to play fair,” he said, blood dripping from a cut on his chin. “But I would think you’d want to at least make this a contest.”
“A contest?” A voice like a hundred wolves howling answered Conner. Laughter filled the whole area. A sick, evil laughter that was accompanied by blast-furnace heat, musty and dry and smelling of dirty feet.
Conner was stunned. These things had never spoken. Maybe he’d pushed their emotional buttons. Wait, they have emotions? Or maybe they could only talk once a millennium or something like that. And this was that moment.
But fact was, they’d talked, they’d replied. Maybe for the last time ever. Either way, Conner intended to use it to his advantage.
“Let us see you,” Conner said. The words came out matter-of-fact, as if he wasn’t addressing giant Reapers. “Come out in the open. Lift the darkness.” Conner gulped, not at all sure what he was doing. Or more to the point, suddenly sure he was doing something quite foolish. “Show yourselves.”
The power in his voice ebbed by the time he reached the last syllable, ending in a mousey squeak. Not because he was weak or winded, which he was but that wasn’t the reason. The reason had more to do with the towering specters floating in the air above of him, their very presence a threat.
Twenty feet tall, caped and cowled, the faces of these Reapers were somewhere in a deep void of nothingness.
Reaper after Reaper after Reaper, as far as Conner could see, circled menacingly around him. Now that the Shadows had revealed themselves and lifted the veil of darkness, Conner was stunned by how many there were. He estimated at least five thousand of the things. He would have rather not known. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
He was just thinking that now the four of them were well and truly screwed when a piercing scream ripped through the air.
Conner turned his head just in time to see Flower being lifted from the ground and dangled above the faceless void in the cowl of an especially vicious-looking Reaper.
Conner was a military statue in the middle of a park, poised for action but unable to move. As he stared at Flower dropping through the gray air to her certain death, he next witnessed the Reaper sliced in half, vanishing in two separate wisps of smoke.
Ricky Martin materialized and caught Flower before she hit the hard surface. Well, not so much caught her as broke her fall by her crashing into him instead of the sharp material lining the ground in this alternate dimension.
Ricky was knocked unconscious and Flower rendered hysterical, her back arched in an odd way across Ricky’s stomach. Conner was at last able to move, and he ran toward Almira who still lay curled up on the ground. When he reached her, he gathered her up in his arms and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead.
Almira opened her eyes and smiled. She lifted her head just a bit, and Conner lowered his. They kissed like their lives depended on it. A long series of arguments and misunderstandings vanished into the miasma around them and, for a brief moment, they were truly happy.
The roar of the Reapers put an end to that.
The creatures swooped down on Conner and Almira, reaching into their souls. The Reapers were unable to kill them in this way, like they could on the other side, on the living side. Here, they couldn’t simply stop Conner’s heart or give Almira a brain tumor. They had to instead tear each human apart, just as Ricky had done to the Reapers on the other side—and here as well.
Conner felt the pain of something ripping at him from inside, like he was being pulled in four directions at once. Drawn and quartered by beings with no substance at all.
Conner screamed.
Almira managed to get onto her knees and crawl toward Conner. But before she could reach him, help him, she felt as if her guts were being ripped out of her body through her skin. She fell back down, writhing and screaming, in a pain so deep it made her see blazing white in the land of no light.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her nose dripped as she rolled in agony only a few feet from Conner who was doing the same. The only difference was that blood, not tears, ran from Conner’s eyes.
Ricky was conscious again, and he and Flower raced toward their hurt friends.
Unfortunately, it was Flower’s turn next. She doubled over when the torment began, as if kicked in the groin. She fell hard to her knees, cutting them sharply. Then she, too, collapsed, holding her stomach and wailing.
The last to be hit was Ricky Martin, but he knew it was coming. Before it had a chance to take him down, he turned back into the smoke substance again and vanished. When he became himself again, he was in a secluded section of this dark dimension, no idea whether he was north or south, high or low. He could not hear any sounds at all. No screams, no growls. Nothing.
Ricky stood still in the gloom and loneliness of his new location and let the silence fill his ears. He strained to hear anything that might give him a clue as to his location. He gave up, returned to nothingness, and willed himself back to where his friends were.
When he returned, he sliced through as many Reapers as he could. He could just see them, like he was swimming in dirty water without his glasses on. They were giant, wiggly, gray blobs in the middle distance. He just aimed at the shapes and powered on.
Ricky Martin cut as many Reapers as he could, but at last, he ran out of steam and collapsed onto the ground, rolling hard, coming to a stop near his friends. His friends, meanwhile, lay deathly still. No longer flailing about tortured by the Reapers, but still as stones.
Ricky tried to raise himself back up. To fight on. To find a way to defeat this vile swarm of wickedness. But he was finished. He had fought bravely, using the last of his strength to take out as many Reapers as he could. Now he felt the pain begin, like worms gnawing at his heart.
He dropped to the ground; the only sound he heard now were his own screams.
He was dying.
His friends might already be dead. The battle was over; they had failed. It was stupid to come here, but what else could they have done? Ricky felt sick; the whole place was spinning. A metallic taste in his mouth indicated he was bleeding. His eyes seemed sticky, but not with tears.
Ricky didn’t think it was possible, but the place was growing blacker still.
With his last dying breath, he reached over to where he knew Flower was and ran his fingers across her soft forearm.
“I-love-you,” he said, the sentiment garbled by the blood oozing from his mouth.
The four friends lay slain in the gloom of the land of Death. Departed from this life without ever having had the chance to say goodbye, to tell each other how they really felt. Not in a silly way, nor a scared way. But in a life matters, this-is-real way.
Now they were gone, passed on, dead.
And a whole world of humans just like them would soon share their fate.
The Reapers swirled about in the gloom like giant witches on broomsticks, shrieking and howling and calling out with strange grunts and other noises not of this earth.
Then, the celebration came to end without an apparent reason.
First, the circling slowed; next the Reapers came to a complete stop. The screams and grunts muted, then died out altogether. Finally, the Reapers drifted to the surface and stayed there as if tethered to stones.
Something was different. Something had changed. The air itself had become colder, the darkness darker.
The dead humans and the Reapers were no longer the only ones within the walls of the dimension of Death.
A new being had arrived. A darker thing, smaller than the Reapers, but more powerful. But not evil, like the Reapers.
This one could think.
This one had a heart.
This one had a mission given to it by a higher power.
Death Itself had arrived.
A figure swooped into the dark space, lighting it as if carrying a torch, but only its face was lit, glowing from the inside. There was no fire, no other light.
The Reapers cringed and recoiled into the blackness, shrieking and then silent again.
The figure, whose huge black wings, like angel wings, with long black feathers that extended almost to the ground, alighted next to the four dead friends.
SHADOWS OF DEATH: Death Comes with Fury (and Dark Humor) To a Small Town South of Chicago Page 19
