“If that’s true, well, who wouldn’t be? I’d think I’d be angry too, if I was on his side.”
Frowning slightly, Sam glances at her sleeping companions before joining Seymour up in the cockpit. She slides into the passenger’s seat, begins fiddling with the purple claw necklace hanging from her throat, keeping her eyes averting from Seymour as he concentrates on the lifeless canvas stretched out around their craft.
“… It was all really sudden.. As soon as we started crossing the bridge, he became a totally different person..”
“Hm..”
Without taking his eyes off of the windshield, Seymour reaches down below the seat, pulls out a small ration bar from the emergency kit, and wordlessly hands it to Sam. She ignores it for a moment before deciding to put her pride aside, pulls the wrapper off, and starts to snack on the hard crackers in silence. As soon as she eats the last bite, Seymour suddenly breaks the tense hush by asking curiously –
“So, why exactly were you crossing the bridge?”
“… Adrian and I were running away from you.. I was planning to hide in the Kunai Rebels’ stronghold until Adrian could, um.. deal with you.”
“I see.. Well, all that’s important is that you’re back with me. And I’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah.. I guess you win.. again..”
A few minutes pass with neither of them saying anything, each mired in their own thoughts, when Sam suddenly interjects –
“Well, Seymour.. Y’know, you say that you care about me, but if you really do, you’ll kill me.”
“… I will. But I need a favor done first.”
“… I know. You want me to help you kill off mankind, right?”
“That would be correct.”
Seymour reaches down again and pulls out another pack of military rations; he offers it to Sam, but this time, she bats it out of his hand, and says steadfastly –
“Forget it, Seymour. I’m not helping you.”
“You’re not really in a position to argue, Sam. This is what needs to be done.”
“Right, it’s always about what you want… You’re just like Adrian.”
“Hah.. Where would you get a ridiculous idea like that?”
“Oh, nowhere in particular. Just the fact that both of you are insensitive, manipulative, overzealous narcissists?”
He smiles slightly at Sam’s heated declaration, then rumples her tangled hair and says quietly –
“Look, just.. go back to sleep. We’ll be back at Santuc soon enough.”
“… Perfect.. Where are we even going when we get there?”
“We’ll discuss it when everyone is awake.”
Suddenly, a can of rations whips past Seymour’s head and hits the windshield, taking him by surprise. He looks into the back to find an irate Trace staring at him, another ration tin loaded in his hand.
“Yeah, awake? God forbid we ever get some rest with you two jabbering away like idiots..”
“Oh, heheh.. Sorry, Trace.”
Feeling as though she has been dismissed, Sam rises from her seat, and slips back into the passenger’s area. She seizes a blanket off of the ground, wraps herself up in it, lies down on the seat opposite Elena, and reluctantly closes her eyes, letting Seymour’s white hair be the last thing she sees before she falls back asleep.
~The Realm of Free States (Former U.S.A): Near Santuc~
Another few hours of flying later, with the other inhabitants of the helicopter at rest, Seymour sails over the canvas of decimated infrastructure lying lifelessly beneath the dreary, leaden clouds, hoping to catch a glimpse of the TerraDome’s colossal carbide steel shell. He lowers the craft low enough so that he can see every empty window frame in the moldering skyscraper, when a shrill beeping noise suddenly fills up the helicopter. Searching frantically for the source of the noise, Seymour spots a flashing red light on the console just under the words “FUEL EMPTY”. As he distractedly focuses on the flashing light with dread, he looks back out of the windshield, and in his momentary lapse of concentration, he let the copter get too close to the side of a precariously leaning high-rise, and is only seconds away from smashing straight into it. Reacting swiftly, he wrenches the cyclic to the left, trying to steer the helicopter away from a head-on collision, when the tail of the craft strikes the building, and smashes into pieces, sending the copter spiraling towards the city ruins below. The crash wakes up everyone within the copter, and as the craft spins out of control, shuddering dangerously, Seymour hurries back into the passenger area, gathering together as many emergency supplies as he can.
“Seymour! What’s going on?!”
“Oh nothing.. We’re just about to die, is all.”
“What?!”
“Again?! Oh, great job flying, kid! I should never let you operate a vehicle when we’re in it!”
“Shut it, Trace. I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
Hoisting the huge military backpack onto his back, Seymour slides the helicopter door open with difficulty, to find their surroundings swirling around them, as if they were caught in a tornado. He turns to face his petrified companions, and yells above the wind –
“When we pass by an open window, try to jump into it!”
“Seriously?! That’s your plan?!”
“Just fucking do it, Trace!”
All together, Seymour and the others dive from the spinning aircraft, and fly through the air towards the building, the wind whipping painfully against their faces. Elena, Data and Sam successfully make it through one of the open window frames and hit the ground hard, rolling on impact. However, Seymour and Trace miss their mark by a few feet, and hit the wall of the high-rise. Seymour desperately reaches out, and seizes the edge of the window just below him, while Trace grasps Seymour’s leg tightly, trying not to slip free. The helicopter slams into the ground below them and explodes in a hellish fireball that causes a massive plume of black smoke to rise up to where Seymour and Trace remain hanging out over the edge. With the combined weight of Trace and the hefty military backpack, Seymour tries to keep his grip on the window ledge, but it starts to slip as he screams down to Trace through the rising smoke –
“Trace, climb up! Get up to the ledge above me!”
“N-no, Seymour! I-I’m gonna drop down! I’ll catch the next ledge!”
“Are you crazy?!”
“Well, duh!”
Trace relinquishes his grip on Seymour’s leg and lets himself fall about twenty feet before he seizes the next window ledge and hurriedly scrambles inside, choking from the smoke. He looks back out at Seymour, who is still dangling on the side of the building in the plume of smoke, and yells up to him –
“Drop down, kid! I’ll catch you!”
Finally, Seymour’s arms give out, and he lets himself fall down to the ledge where Trace waits. He manages to catch him by his wrist as he flies by, however, the weight of his body and the backpack make him unable to pull Seymour inside. Struggling desperately, beads of sweat pouring down his face, Trace screams down to Seymour –
“Drop the damn backpack, Seymour! I can’t pull you up!”
“But, Trace, we’ll-!”
“You wanna die, kid?! DROP THE FUCKING BAG!”
Reluctantly, his lungs burning from the smoke inhalation, Seymour lets the backpack slip off of his back, where it plummets into the raging fires below. Finally, the extra weight alleviated, and with strength far outstripping his geriatric form, Trace drags him inside the building. Coughing painfully between gasps of air, Seymour shakes his partially singed hair out of his face, and glares irately at Trace, who rubs his shoulder with a grimace of pain.
“Good job, Trace. Now we have no food or water, and who knows how far away from Santuc we are?”
“Well, whose fucking fault is that?! Why the fuck do you feel the need to try and kill us every so often? Hm?”
“It wasn’t my fault! We ran out of fuel! What do you expect? We were flying for nearly a week straight!”
&nbs
p; “Well, what the hell are we gonna do now?!”
At that moment, Elena, Data and Sam appear at the threshold of a partially collapsed stairway; all three wear stark, windblown visages. Elena hurries forward, seizes Seymour by the shoulders, and yells desperately, her eyes sparkling with tears –
“What the hell is wrong with you, Seymour?! You almost killed us!”
“Yeah.. What was that all about, Seymour?”
Seymour pushes Elena away gently while she continues to fret, stands, regaining his composure as he takes a deep breath, and declares penitently –
“Look.. We ran out of fuel, and I just got distracted, is all.. I’m sorry, guys...”
“Damn, kid. You might wanna get checked out for ADD or something.. That is, if we make it back alive.”
“Oh, shut up, Trace! Seriously!”
“Hey, blondie! I’m just saying that he needs to keep his damn eyes open at times like this!”
“But Trace, I-”
“Everybody, just shut up! What are we gonna do now? How are we gonna get back to Santuc?”
Falling into angered silence, the group ponders as to where they could go, while the smoke continues to rise lazily beside the open window, when Sam quietly says –
“… I guess we have no choice but to keep walking.”
“Hm.. Seems so. I doubt we could find a working vehicle out here. They’ve probably all been incinerated.”
Suddenly, all eyes turn to Seymour, who meets their gazes guiltily. A cold breeze wends its way through the precariously leaning skyscraper as the drizzle quickly strengthens, somewhat quelling the inferno below. Running his fingers through his hair nervously, Seymour approaches the edge of the window, and looks out over the horizon. He can see nothing but steely grey storm clouds; Santuc appears to be nowhere in sight. He pulls out his tracer and activates the screen, however, the display remains clouded by interference, other than the small map compass that appears in the top right corner, which currently points southwest. Gripping his tracer tightly, Seymour sighs wearily, turns back to his companions, and utters in a resigned tone –
“Okay, it looks like we’re at least a couple day’s walk from Santuc.. Could be longer, but I’m not entirely sure where we are, exactly…”
“Well, if we were heading west towards Santuc, we’d hit Dystas first..”
“Huh. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Hey, the Dystas transit tunnel is still open; we took it on the way to the PRIME headquarters, remember? We should head there instead and just follow the tunnel. Sound good?”
“Yeah, but, we don’t have any supplies.. How are we gonna walk what could be, like, a hundred miles without any food or water?”
“We’ll just have to make due. Maybe we can find some supplies on the way or something.”
While an air of hopelessness hangs tepidly over Seymour and his companions, Elena bites what remains of her nails anxiously, Sam fiddles with her necklace quietly, and Data taps his lips with his thumb, lost in thought. Trace grinds his heel into the flaky concrete, his side-long gaze fixed angrily on Seymour, who, trying to find an adequate apology for getting all of them into this situation, finally says despondently, his voice nearly lost in the ensuing downpour –
“… Let’s get going then.”
The group carefully wend their way down what remains of the collapsed stairwell, trying to get to ground-level, making sure to not tread on any of the weak-looking steps. Occasionally, they pass by what remains of dehydrated corpses; their brittle, blackened flesh clings to their exposed skeletons overtop a thick blanket of bone ash. They seem to be frozen in the act of scrambling up the stairs, before they were struck by the wall of lethal heat. Their faces, if they have them, remain petrified in expressions of immeasurable agony, and seem to have shrunken upon their skulls, as the water and blood in their bodies boiled and evaporated before their flesh turned to ash. Seymour and the others do their best to avoid touching the haunting relics as they descend, however, Elena and Sam’s visages seem to grow whiter and whiter with fear with each step they take. Finally, they all make it out to the lobby of the building, which appears to have been a hotel before the diffusion struck. The entire right side of the lobby is a wall of debris, which has fallen from the floor above, and appears to have crushed several people under its weight before the heat hit their bodies. While Trace, Data and Elena tread carefully through the lobby of death, Sam remains rooted to the spot on the concrete floor, which still manages to have a few scraps of un-burned red carpet sticking to it. Seymour holds out his hand to her, but she keeps her wide, terrified eyes fixed on the bodies crushed in the wall of rubble, shaking her head disbelievingly.
“What’s wrong, Sam?”
“D-did we… did we do this..? This is what the diffusion did..?”
Seymour seizes Sam’s wrist, his expression set and serious, and declares forcefully –
“Sam, all this is my doing. I’m the one who made the diffusion happen. I’ve taken all the responsibility for this, so you don’t have to blame yourself.”
“B-but I.. I didn’t do anything to stop you… I could’ve.. stopped this..”
From the crushed entryway, while Data and Trace work to clear enough rubble out the way to make an opening, Elena looks back at Seymour and Sam curiously, and hurries over to them, clouds of ash rising with each footfall. Elena stares at Sam’s teary, ghostly-white face pityingly, knowing exactly why she cries, puts a hand on her trembling shoulder, and nods to Seymour seriously, wordlessly dismissing him. He nods in understanding, and joins Trace and Data at the entryway. Elena takes a deep breath, grips Sam’s shoulder, and says softly –
“Sam.. I know what we all did is horrible.. I also had my hand in it, so I know how you feel, but I’m telling you that Seymour didn’t just do this because he felt like it.. He had a good reason.”
“What possible reason could there have been to do something like this?!”
Elena grinds her teeth anxiously, wondering exactly how much she should say. She tightens her grip on Sam’s shoulder, and asks quietly –
“Well, Sam.. Before the diffusion, did you trust Seymour?”
“I… I did. He was my hero. I listened to his every word.. obeyed his every order… But when I saw what he was doing to everyone.. with that horrible DAmIn-8 stuff… And then, when he asked me to help with his diffusion.. All he keeps doing is hurting people so pointlessly… So.. I just can’t trust him anymore.”
“Yeah, but, you were the only one he didn’t use that stuff on, right? That means that, unlike me, Sakura, and that other kid, he cared about you so much, he couldn’t bear to strip your free will away. He wanted you to be the same as you always were with him, because you were the only he truly cared about. Right?”
Sam mulls over Elena’s declaration for a time, her focus slipping from the crushed bodies to Seymour and the others, as they feverishly work to clear away the rubble. She plays with her necklace absently, and says to Elena without looking at her –
“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Elena. He doesn’t care about me. He’s just using us, and you know that too.”
“Uh-”
“But for now, I guess… I’ll go along with him. I’d rather not starve to death out in this place…”
Finally, Data manages to kick out a big enough hole in the rubble to allow them all to awkwardly slide through and out into the deserted streets. Seymour and the others gaze up into the dreary, rainy skyline, which is framed by a morbid procession of crumbling high-rise; warped at their foundations, they seem as if they are bowing in defeat. Not a single pane of glass remains in their window frames – most of the glass has fused with the concrete from the immense heat, making patches of the road look like glassy, iridescent puddles. The black, skeletal remains of cars litter the sides of the roads, their twisted chassis melted right into the ground. The structures creak and moan despondently under the pattering rain and the stale wind, sounding as if they are whispering hatefully to the drenched
party as they traverse the desolate barrenness to the east, speaking little until the iron-grey clouds give way to an inky night. The solemn rain finally lets up as Seymour and the others stop to rest for the night in the middle of the cracked road, though only now does the sheer emptiness of their surroundings come down upon them in full force as they lie on the twisted earth, trying fruitlessly to beckon sleep.
Sitting against the side of a partially collapsed building, his arms wrapped around his knees, Seymour watches the others as they sleep, his insides squirming with guilt and fear. He wraps his coat around his body more tightly as a chilled wind snakes its way through the empty thoroughfare, and bows his head in silence, playing over the whole wretched day in his mind while his stomach growls from hunger. Trying to ignore his fatigue, he gets to his feet, and starts down the road alone, the hem of his coat waving in the wind as he stares up at the stars that glimmer through the remaining clouds that drift indifferently above his head. He mindlessly climbs to the highest part of a nearby mountain of twisted debris that lies still and silent on the side of the street, his burning eyes scanning the world around him. There is simply nobody there. All that remains is desolation and emptiness, brought about by his own machinations. He can feel the guilt pressing against his heart, and he tries to suppress the hot prickling at the sides of his eyes with difficulty.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?”
Nearly losing his footing on the hill of rubble for his shock, Seymour regains his balance to find himself face to face with a very familiar-looking man wearing a tattered black robe. His face is still hidden under his hood, but Seymour can see his pale lips curved into a slight smile. Completely stunned, Seymour tries to choke out through his disillusionment –
Paradox: The Last Day - Seymour's Story Page 27
