Deadworld

by Bryan Smith

  Emily’s body tensed as she psyched herself up to do what she had to do. Then she let out a breath, stepped forward, and began to bring the knife down.

  “STOP!”

  Emily’s arm continued its downward arc, but the abrupt intrusion of the stentorian voice—coupled with a change-of-plans command issued by her brain in the last possible nanosecond—sent the knife veering of course. The blade sliced a crimson line down the length of a thigh before it went flying out of Emily’s hand.

  The creature cried out in pain as its eyes snapped open. Emily staggered backward as the thing whirled to face the intruder. Her legs met the edge of the sofa and she fell backward, sending a cloud of dust into the air as her rear end landed hard on a cushion. She made no effort to get up. She sensed that whatever was about to happen next was out of her hands, and she felt strangely like a movie theater patron sitting in her seat and waiting for the lights to go down and the show to begin. Zeke sat up and turned slightly in her direction, blinking slowly at her, some dim hint of awareness finally dawning in his bleary eyes. Then his gaze went to the apartment’s front door.

  A man neither of them had ever seen before stood just inside the front door. He was an affable-looking and slightly heavyset man in his mid-to-late thirties. He was wearing what Emily assumed was a mechanic’s uniform. A patch sewn on a front breast pocket showed his name to be Jeff. He was a shade over six feet tall, and his electric blue eyes were his most distinctive feature. They were piercing, movie idol eyes. And right now they were riveted on the Warren-thing.

  The creature seemed temporarily disconcerted by the man’s sudden appearance. Emily had a feeling it wasn’t used to situations in which it didn’t perfectly control every aspect of what was happening. But it recovered quickly, snarling, curling its hands into fists as it bore down on the mechanic. Emily cringed, knowing in a moment she’d see the mechanic, Jeff, be torn apart.

  But the creature never got within six feet of the man, who never flinched, never retreated even an inch.

  “That’s far enough.”

  The thing stopped dead and let out a startled whuff of breath, as though he’d walked straight into an invisible wall. Its face contorted wildly, the facial muscles seeming to want to twitch in several different directions at once. A vein stood out in stark relief on its temple and its eyes filled with red. Emily was sure it would’ve stroked out if its rage level had increased even the slightest increment in the next moment. Instead, its rage gave way to confusion, and perhaps even the first hint of fear.

  It inhaled and exhaled deeply several times, calming itself. Then it said, “Who are you?”

  The man smiled. The expression made him look handsomer, seemed to enhance the sparkle of his sky-blue eyes. “I am Captain Flash Wheeler. And I’ve come to put a stop to your shit. Right fucking now, asshole.”

  The creature laughed. “I see. And how do you propose to do this? You are only a man, and no mere man can hope to vanquish me.”

  The man—Jeff, Flash…whatever—was still smiling. Emily stared at him in amazement. There wasn’t the least indication of fear in either his posture or expression. She didn’t want to allow herself to hope. She could imagine nothing crueler than the extinguishing of a revitalized sense of hope. But the feeling was there anyway. Some instinct told her this man, Flash, might really be able to do what he promised. But that was crazy. The logical thing to conclude about his lack of fear was an attendant lack of knowledge. He couldn’t possibly know what kind of unfathomable evil was residing in Warren’s body. He saw a man, not an ancient, amorphous monster.

  But Flash’s reply provided a deeper level of astonishment: “It’s true. I’m a man. One of the last living members of the species you’ve nearly exterminated. But I am also more than a man. Dwelling within me now is the essence of your oldest surviving adversary, an entity you believed dead long ago. I am his vessel. Through me his vengeance will be unleashed. Your reign of darkness has come to an end.”

  The creature’s face blanched. “No.” It shook its head vigorously. “It can’t be.” It ventured another laugh, but this time the sound was hollow, humorless, its fear bleeding through in the form of a slight quaver. “I don’t believe it. You’re a pretender. You caught me off-guard, stopping me with a bit of flimsy magic. But now that I know the truth, I’ll break your puny spell, step through this wall as easily as I’d move through a layer of mist.”

  Flash didn’t say anything. He kept smiling.

  The creature tried again to move toward him—and again met resistance. It flailed against the invisible wall for a moment, then stumbled backward, an expression of uncomprehending fear and confusion dawning on its face.

  “This is impossible.”

  Flash slowly shook his head. “No. For time beyond calculation, you’ve terrorized and murdered those weaker than you. You’ve wiped out entire civilizations. Did you think there’d never be a price to pay?”

  Something in the tenor of Flash’s voice had changed. He was speaking with greater authority. Emily figured the “adversary” he’d alluded to before had assumed control of his body. There was a visible difference in his posture and in the way he phrased his pronouncements. She wondered if Flash, or Jeff, might already be gone forever, his role in this great drama finished now.

  The Adversary smiled again. “Of course that’s what you thought. Your boundless arrogance wouldn’t have allowed room for any other possibility. But here is the truth you are about to face—your time of reckoning has come round at last.”

  The Dark One ceased its retreat. It exuded a calm that made Emily nervous. “Enough. I’m leaving this place. I’ll deal with you another day.”

  It closed its eyes, screwed its face up in concentration for a long moment…then opened its eyes again. This time its eyes gleamed with genuine terror. A visible shudder rippled through its nude body. “No. This can’t be happening. This isn’t possible.”

  The Adversary nodded. “But it is possible. And it is happening. You see, when you believed I was defeated, that I was dead, I wasn’t simply hiding. I was at work, biding my time, putting together the means to destroy you. I’ve accomplished that. What I’m about to unleash is the most powerful destructive force ever conceived. Already you can feel its power thrumming in this room, boxing you in, containing you. Prepare yourself to face the sum psychic total of all the suffering and anguish you’ve caused over the entire course of your existence. It’s time to face the Storm of Souls.”

  The Dark One screamed. It tore at its hair, ripping bloody hanks of it out as it thrashed helplessly about in the invisible containment box. Emily finally realized what was happening. It was trapped inside Warren, unable to discorporealize itself. It raged like a cornered, rabid animal.

  The Adversary’s mouth opened wide and a sound like a rising, howling storm wind began to issue from it. The mouth opened still wider, stretching farther than any human mouth should have. The skin took on an elastic, stretched-out appearance, and the shape of Jeff Wheeler’s head began to change, inflating to the size of a pumpkin. Then a black mist emerged from the mouth, a swirling, amorphous cloud that rose to the ceiling and spread out across the apartment. Emily shivered and scooted to the far end of the sofa. The temperature in the room dropped drastically, plunging to well below freezing level. A wind rose up, buffeting bits of paper and debris across the room. More than anything, Emily wanted to flee the apartment, but so great was her awe at this astounding sight that she simply couldn’t bring herself to leave. She had to see what was about to happen.

  The howling sound grew louder still and the wind’s fury increased to nearly that of a tropical storm. Emily held fast to the sofa, fearing she might be whipped into the air at any moment. But the wind seemed focused on the center of the room, and now it rushed upward in a tremendous blast and blew the roof of the building into the sky. Emily screamed. Zeke’s mouth hung open in slack-jawed awe. The black mist coalesced to a fine point and shot toward Warren’s body, entering through his
open mouth and driving him up against the dining room’s far wall. For a moment the mouths of the Adversary and the Dark One appeared tethered together by a black rope.

  Then Emily detected flecks of white in the swirling blackness and saw that the dark stream was still rushing at the Dark One. Its body was being driven up the wall. It appeared to still be conscious, but just barely—its head lolled and its arms and legs hung limp, as useless as those of a rag doll.

  The wind howled again and Warren’s body flew into the air, rising through the space formerly occupied by the building’s roof then high above the building, receding to a distant point in the sky. The black tether seemed to stretch forever. Emily realized something in a flash, a thing that made her gasp. The white flecks. Every once in a while she could almost make out a shape. They were faces. She was suddenly sure of it. The ‘Storm of Souls’ alluded to by the Adversary was a literal term. This was the unleashing of every soul ever taken by the Dark One. Including those billions of humans killed in this world as well as all the countless victims from that other world.

  The great Storm seemed to go on forever, but in truth the unleashing happened at a speed beyond her comprehension. The pent-up energy of all those lost souls came ripping out of Jeff Wheeler’s mouth in less than ten minutes. Then the tether seemed to separate from his mouth and rise rapidly into the sky, disappearing forever within the space of an eye blink.

  Jeff Wheeler’s body fell dead to the floor, landing with a heavy thump.

  Emily sat there in stunned stillness and silence for a long time, barely daring to breathe, scarcely able to comprehend the full magnitude of what she’d witnessed. Her gaze moved slowly over the living room, taking in her own nude and bloody body, Zeke Johnson’s ruined hand…

  So much blood.

  So much death.

  She found it difficult to believe there was anything else in the world anymore, and at last she began to cry, the tears cascading down her cheeks like water from a fountain.

  One can understand how Emily felt the way she did, surrounded by so much evidence of carnage and loss.

  I certainly can.

  But Emily was wrong.

  Epilogue

  My name is Warren Daniel Hatcher, and I have been the narrator of this tale.

  But how can that be? you ask.

  When last you saw me, dear reader, my body had been driven high into the sky by the Storm of Souls. I couldn’t possibly have survived that, right?

  Wrong.

  I can’t pretend to understand completely everything that happened to me, but I’ll tell you what I can. My last conscious memory during my time as a prisoner in my own body is from shortly after the beginning of that skyward ascent. I remember looking down at the receding apartment. I saw Emily curled up on that couch. My last thought before unconsciousness took me was of my love for her. I suppose I might have sent out a wish that she be safe, but I don’t know, because that was when my time in the dark began.

  When I returned to myself—and I mean that in the most literal way—I woke up sprawled on my back in the middle of 21st Ave. I thought at first that I was dead and that I was in hell now. But then I sat up and surveyed my surroundings. This wasn’t hell, but it sure wasn’t heaven, either. It was my own dead world. And I was immediately able to ascertain that I wasn’t far from the building where the big Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark, showdown went down. The Mayflower apartment building was maybe a block down the road.

  Somehow, I’d been returned to earth essentially unharmed. My scalp was bleeding from where the Dark One had torn out some of my hair and I had a number of scratches all over my body, but otherwise I seemed in fair health. Not only that, but I was in true and sole possession of my own faculties again. The monster that had used my body to do so many terrible things was gone. How this had transpired without blowing my physical shell into a thousand pieces, I didn’t know.

  Nor did I much care when my thoughts came back to Emily. Forgetting the mystery of my bizarre and inexplicable salvation for the moment, I leaped to my feet and ran on my bare and bleeding feet toward the Mayflower. Through the courtyard and into the building, pounding breathlessly up the stairs. Then into the apartment, where Emily saw me through a veils of tears and let out a scream loud enough to shatter glass.

  She thought the Dark One had come back, a natural assumption. Quite a bit of convincing was required to make her see the truth. I couldn’t blame her, really. In her place, I guess I would’ve thought the same. She wanted to get far away from me. None of my earnest beseeching was working. So I finally let her leave the apartment, telling her I’d wait there for her for a few days, should she change her mind. She took off like something shot from a cannon, and believe me, I was pretty much out of faith by that point. I was sure I’d never see her again…

  I was kind of okay with that. Not happy about it, mind you, but okay with it.

  Days went by, but true to my word, I waited, hoping against hope, praying she might return. Later on that first day, Jasmine ventured into the apartment. She looked frightened at first, but then she looked into my eyes and seemed to relax.

  She said, “You’re back. It’s really you, Warren.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  And she said the last thing she ever said to me, “Okay.”

  Then she did something astonishing, a thing that haunts me almost more than anything else. She picked up a knife from the floor and stabbed herself through the heart. She toppled dead to the floor before I could so much as gasp. What caused her to take her own life in that moment is a mystery to me, one I can’t begin to fathom. She’d survived, had endured so much, and yet, with the worst remaining threat removed from the world, she made the decision to die. Perhaps she figured it was time to go meet her husband in the afterlife. Or maybe her death was the final consequence of the Dark One’s tinkering with her mind. I’m hoping for the former, of course.

  Emily came back on the third day. The last time I’d seen her she’d been a mess, naked and smeared with dirt and gore. A broken thing. But in the intervening time she’d managed to clean and clothe herself.

  We made eye contact, a gaze that was held for several minutes.

  Then she let out a big breath and shook her head. “How?”

  I knew what she meant, of course. I shook my head, too. “I don’t know. I think it was part of that other one’s plan somehow. It wanted me to survive. Why, I don’t know. And how it pulled it off I don’t know.”

  Emily nodded, then she sighed again. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re back.”

  I smiled. We hugged. It was hard for her in the beginning, but over time she learned to trust me again and we have managed to reclaim much of what we once had. And I’m grateful for that. Without Emily, I’m sure I could not have gone on. Without her, I would not be writing this. The prospect of being alone in this empty world is more than I could bear.

  It truly is empty. I suppose there may be scattered other survivors elsewhere on the planet, but it’s a big world and we may live out the rest of our lives without ever encountering them. And it’s just the two of us now. Zeke slipped away one night while we were sleeping, never to be seen again. It’s just as well, really. He was a damaged thing, a husk of the man he’d been, with no hope of recovery. I suspect what happened with him is similar to when ailing or elderly pack animals go off on their own to die. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s still out there somewhere. But I don’t think so.

  In less depressing news, the world seems to be healing itself. The once numerous black rifts in the fabric of reality are disappearing. We encounter them rarely, and when we do I like to watch them for a time. I can almost see them growing smaller, the fabric of existence knitting itself back together around the edges of the blackness. And the rot long ago relinquished its grip on the land. We can grow things, drink untainted water from a stream. I can only theorize that whatever supernatural energy was used to cause these things in the first place began to burn itself out o
ver a period of time, deprived as it was of its source.

  Just about done here. I’m not really sure why I wrote all this down. I know I said at the beginning that I hoped it’d serve as a cautionary tale. But what I have to wonder is, a cautionary tale for who? Who will ever read this? Probably no one. Emily’s made it clear she has no interest. In the end, I guess I’ve done it as a way to fill the time, to give me something to do. What I’ll do when I’ve written the last word on this last page, I don’t know. I could make up some stories, I guess. Become a writer of fiction again. But what’s the point of that? Other than entertaining myself with fairy tales of a world unmarred by all this destruction.

  One last thing. You (the theoretical, nonexistent you—hah-hah) are probably wondering how I could tell the stories of the other people I’ve written about in these pages. Well, that one’s actually pretty simple. I was a prisoner of the Dark One. And when it touched their minds and absorbed the totality of their knowledge, thoughts, and emotions…well, so did I. And somehow I absorbed everything Flash Wheeler knew, probably a side-effect of the Storm of Souls. Which is kind of a creepy thing, I guess, but that’s another of the many things I can do nothing about. They’re all gone now, those poor bastards, but I thought I at least owed it to them to give them temporary life again on these pages. But now I’ve done my duty by them and it’s time to move on.

  I hope the future brings good things, I really do.

  It doesn’t seem likely.

  But, yeah, I hope.

  Why not?

  What else is there?

  THE END