He wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans with a thin waterproof jacket over both. He was much shorter than Andrew, closer to five foot six than five foot seven as he claimed. He was slightly overweight with an ample beer belly, his legs slightly bowing from his knees, the joints slowly giving way under his excessive weight over the years.
His father merely grunted and half turned to close the door behind him. Andrew heard the click of the door knob latch as it engaged with the door frame. Simultaneously, his father began, “You did clean like I - ,” and that was all.
It registered in his brain, from the edge of his vision, the front door was splitting down the middle. For some ungodly reason, it was cleaving in half. Scores of tiny pieces of wood were already raining down on his father. Then, the older man was violently thrown backward from the force of the impact.
Andrew watched his father hit the carpeted floor with a loud thump, his head smacking horribly into the bookcase leaning up against the wall by the entryway. When Andrew saw his eyes roll up into his head and his tongue loll grotesquely from his mouth, he knew the blow had knocked his father out cold. He only hoped he wasn’t badly hurt.
The door, now broken in two, hung upon its hinges and the clasp of the lock. The “lock” side swayed back and forth for a few moments, then it came free and fell across the legs of his father, cracking against the back of his father’s knees like a hammer upon a wedge – Knack!
Andrew was wild with fear and was about to go to him when he heard a familiar growl and froze in his tracks. Every hair on his body stood on end as he glanced back toward the ruined portal and saw Jätung standing there, glowering. The beasts’ crimson orbs burned dully in the light of the room. Massive, it blocked the entire entryway.
From behind the hulking wolf-creature stepped Nixy, an icy smirk dancing across her pale lips as she wedged herself between the bulk of her beastly Petling, entering the front room.
“The game is afoot, Andrew Ibarra. I apologize, if I misplaced your formal invitation, but nevertheless, it is time for you to accompany us to the Throne… at the behest of the Lord of the Storm, of course. The Rending is upon us, the Melding is about to be declared.”
“I-I… I d-do not know what you are t-talking a-about, little girl, but –.”
A fiercer growl from Jätung silenced him. He stood there unsure if he should see to his father or leave with the ghastly pair standing before him.
“Does it matter?” she asked, tilting her small head to the side. “Either you come now, without complaint, or my lovely pet here will carry you there, in his jaws the entire way.
“The place where the very first battles will be waged is quite a distance from here, even by way of… what you humans call motor transportation, yes? Let alone horseback. I assume the journey would be most uncomfortable for you, while gripped within the maw of my Isighünd. He might get the urge to nibble. He does that sometimes. You know, he forgets what he’s been told.”
“B-But, wha-what about my dad, he’s hurt. Can I at least check him to see if he’s -?”
“It matters not! Come now!” Nixy gestured in anger. Her face contorted into a mask of evil.
It completely shocked the boy, knowing he was powerless against her. Andrew hung his head in defeat and stepped toward them, having noticed, again, the change in her teeth, her mouth – one becoming needle-point sharp, while the other stretched impossibly wide. As he passed the terrible wolf-beast, he swore he saw Jätung’s quivering jowls pull back, grinning at his despondency.
Nixy’s cold, dry hand clasped him just above the elbow with surprising strength. This little bitch is much, much more than she appears to be, he thought as they stepped out into the cold night air.
From everywhere at once, came a forlorn gong. In the air, through the ground, vibrating the trees, the houses – the entire city was resonating with it.
It was then, Andrew saw every source of light around him – streetlights, porch lights, headlights, and starlight’s – every type, suddenly pop and expand with an ugly pea-green afterglow. A breath later, the ground began to shake as a low frequency toll grew in strength. It rattled his inner ears, seemed to turn his bones into a tuning fork. It nauseated him. He almost threw up right there on the front steps of his house. Stumbling forward, Nixy jerked him back into an upright position, dragging him behind her.
“You see, Andrew Ibarra? I told you the Rending was upon us.” She giggled, mockingly girlish as she opened the gate of the chain link fence circumventing the front yard. The demented child yanked him into the night.
Astonished, Andrew watched as structures, streets, and many, many other manufactured objects seemed to shimmer for an instant and then dissipate, blown away by some horrid wind.
From nowhere and everywhere at the same time, the lights about him popped with a putrid green color once more. Again, the indescribable drumming sounded, and like a few others that night, Andrew’s stomach twisted and he threw up.
In the back of his mind, he hoped he had splashed Nixy beautiful white dress with every drop of it, but then unconsciousness took him and there was only darkness.
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~ 33 ~
Louis Willigan
Wednesday, November 24th, the Day Before Thanksgiving,
At the Same Time…
He slung the tall, white kitchen trash bag over his shoulder as he walked out of the house. He’d come from the side door, shuffling down the wooden steps and into the driveway muttering under his breath. He felt the cold air about him the moment he stepped from the warmth of his mother’s kitchen, because he hadn’t bothered to zip up his bulky parka. He wore a pair of ancient cloth mittens, instead of the ones he wore when he and his parents went to the mountains. He’d been distracted and hadn’t realized how much the temperature had dropped over the last few hours.
It wasn’t that he was angry or hurt. Rather he was irritated. Well that, with a sprinkle of sadness for good measure. Because this sort of thing happened every time his father went out of town, not that it bothered him all that much. He merely got stuck with all the manly type of chores around the house. If that was the role his mother needed him to fill, then so be it.
No, what bugged him was taking out the ugly, smelly trash. Just the thought of the mass of decaying food and other discarded refuse, only a thin layer of plastic away from his body made him cringe in disgust, gage in revulsion.
Sure, it was a pet peeve, but it didn’t suppress the fact trash grossed him out for some reason. Not even barf is as nasty as trash!
Well, maybe that was going too far…
He sauntered across the driveway, the high-top sneakers he was wearing crunched atop the snow-covered concrete. He angled toward the trashcans along the opposite side of the driveway, grimacing and grunting, holding one hand over his nose. There wasn’t much of anything to smell, because the wind was blowing steadily from the front of the house to the back, its icy chill whiffing away all scent before it time to coalesce. He approached the black can - the one for trash - and placed the white bag of refuse on the ground, flipping up the lid. He retching when the noxious smells of within seemed to explode into his face. He grabbed the trash bag as quickly as he could and heaved it into the can with all of his strength. The weight of garbage thudded onto the bottom of the can, making the whole thing shutter. Oh, thank god! He flipped the lid back in place and was about to step away, when…
BLOOOOOOONG!!!
He felt it and heard it, at the same time, against the drums of his ears, within the marrow of his bones, through the soles of his shoes. He froze mid-step, looking around as a puke-green shimmering seemed to perspire from every solid object around him. He would’ve been amazed and shouted for his mother, exclaiming in excitement as he was wont to do in such times.
He didn’t. He couldn’t.
A wave of nausea hit him like a ton of bricks. He almost bent in two as his guts tangled and tightened within his body. He gagged and heaved before he c
ould stop himself, feeling his throat thicken, as saliva filled his mouth. He tried with every bit of his will to stop himself from being sick, grabbing at his mid-section with both hands, trying to call out, but he couldn’t. His esophagus betrayed him.
He made himself stand as erect as he could manage, trying to see through the tears filling his eyes with his efforts. He hoped he could catch a glimpse of his mother through one of the windows of the house, but only the kitchen light was on at the moment. He knew there was no way his mother could see him from where he stood. He took a tentative step forward, praying the movement wouldn’t make him feel any more sick than he was already -.
BLOOOOOOONG!!!
Again, the ground shook, his ears vibrated, and his skeleton thrummed like a tuning fork. Like before, a crushing onset of nausea followed as everything around him emanated the awful green, the color of putridity. This time, he couldn’t help himself. He threw up all over the driveway. With such force, he fell to his knees, his head spinning with vertigo he shouldn’t have felt. The gut-wrenching flips within his stomach increased. He threw up again with greater force, with less ejecta. The ferocity of his regurgitation caused white flashes to burst before his eyes.
Instinctively, he twisted to the right as he began to fall to the ground.
He never remembered hitting the ground. Though, he did recall his mother’s screams, ear-splitting, agonized wails that would’ve driven him to weeping, if he’d had the chance.
He never heard the third, god-like reverberation that made his world disappear.
He was gone to this world…
…And to his his mother as well.
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~ 34 ~
Derek Benson
Wednesday, November 24th, the Day before Thanksgiving,
At the Same Time…
BLOOOOOOONG!!!
Having heard it, felt it, watching the building shake with it, for the second time, he staggered about. It was hard not to blow chunks everywhere.
He probably would’ve done it anyway, if he hadn’t been amazed by the fact everyone walking in the mall, just beyond the threshold of the entrance to the Arcade, had suddenly froze in place. A second before the first hideous sound had resonated through his very soul, groups of friends, families, boyfriends and girlfriends had been strolling, talking, laughing, joking, arguing and explaining about things in their lives. A second after, they’d all stopped. It was TIVO on steroids. They’d halted mid-stride, in mid-sentence.
Now, they were a strange collection of macabre figures just beyond his reach. They were already beyond his ability to arouse their attention. They couldn’t hear. No, they couldn’t, because he had already yelled at them. They had remained motionless. No one turned a head. No one was inclined to even gesture in his direction.
He took a step closer, feeling as if some giant worm had taken root in his intestines and decided, out of the blue, to do the Watsui at his expense. He could barely move without a flood of discomfort overwhelming him. He reached out a hand to steady himself against one of the video games, using its solidity for both physical and metal support. He took another step, his eyes never leaving the rigid people before him. His only goal was to reach one of them, to try and shake them from their stupor, so they could help him. He was going to be sick.
BLOOOOOOONG!!!
He never made it past that last step. When the sound came, everywhere at once, within and without, and all he could do was surrender. He saw the ground rushing up toward him. There was nothing he could do to arrest his fall.
It was of little consequence. He was swimming in blackness well before he hit the carpeted floor…
…Everyone outside the Arcade ceased to exist…
…They blew away like dust before a raging sandstorm.
Truth be told, though, it wasn’t them who’d disappeared. It was him. In the blink of an eye, he was further away than any astronomer could’ve measured with the most powerful telescope in his possession.
It was Derek Benson who was no more.
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~ 35 ~
Sophie Reed
Wednesday, November 24th, the Day before Thanksgiving,
At the Same Time…
Already on the floor of the bath house, a structure built alongside the pool, in the backyard of her family’s home, she struggled for air. Puke was soaking the ground around her, wetting her hair, staining her designer clothing, still Sophie Reed writhed in pain. The very cells of her body resisting the unnatural forces forcing her from her world and into another.
From somewhere outside the pool house, she could hear her family crying out. She tried to move to help them, but found she couldn’t. She didn’t know this, but her body did, down to her very DNA. Every single bit of her humanity was fighting against the change occurring within her. What was happening was wrong, supposedly impossible and, quite possibly, unholy. Never in the annuals of time had such a thing been written, been spoken or even screamed in a nightmare.
This was an event of unconceivable audacity!
It was a Rending into something else, something unknown, unheard of. Something combined and reformed into something new.
If she could’ve seen it, Sophie Reed would’ve seen her house melt away like ash before the wind, in a single breath. The voices of her tortured family dissipated into silence. Then, her entire neighborhood dissolved next. A second later, she would’ve witnessed the greater Los Angeles area disappear in one heartbeat. She would’ve seen as the vast city was replaced by pristine wilderness in the next - miles and miles of snow-covered earth. She would’ve felt a preternatural cold settle her body, about the land, a chill that shouldn’t have existed, would grow and strengthen. She would’ve felt a winter unlike any such season experienced on earth. She would’ve seen it descend upon her new home and flourish.
If she were awake, gazing over this unwanted landscape, she would’ve wept. Her loss would’ve been beyond measure.
Yet, she had no inkling she’d been snatched out of the World of Man and placed upon the Construct.
Rather, she was unconscious, lying in a huge puddle of vomitous goo, in the middle of the pool house that a minute ago, had stood in her parents’ backyard, but was now…
…Incalculably far away.
Sophie Reed had passed out. She shifted from one world to another altogether - a place: one part known to her, another inexhaustibly evil.
Though, she didn’t know it then, when she awoke, her new home would be called, the Melded World. Unfortunately, there would be no joyous welcome for her either.
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~ Interlude ~
The World of Man
Thursday, November 25th, Thanksgiving, 6:37 am…
She walked through the double-paned, bulletproof doors of the main entrance of the Central Communications Center, serving the northeast Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. She walked into the vast parking lot that surrounded the building on three sides. Her mind was still racing. Her palms were still a little sweaty at the thought of what had happened the night before. There was still some tiny part of her unwilling to believe what happened - had happened in the first place. She had been working for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Communication Division for more than twenty years and not once – not a single time! – had she experienced a night like the one she had just endured.
Endured, by God! What a terrible, terrible night!
This was the only way she could term it, Endured with a capitol fucking “E”. She had categorized as such in order to get her mind around it, so she could comprehend what had occurred was, in fact, real and not some wild figment of her imagination. This was reality and not some program on TV.
Twenty god damned years! she fumed.
Still there had never been an ordeal as intense, as long and as mysterious as this one had been. Not once in all that time had her supervisor ever been asked to contact the FBI. Not once ha
d she had ever been liaised with the Department of Homeland Security. Never, had there been a time when she’d been ensconced within a team with the wide scope of knowledge and vast capability as the one she’d been grouped with over the course of the past hours.
It had all started with the Event had begun. That’s what they were calling it now.
The Event.
She had been grouped with the team, because she’d been the first 911 operator to take the first of those eerie, if not unbelievable, calls that had come pouring in the night before. The Government of the United States of America had requested her services for the time being, complete with the promise of a hefty restructuring of her employment contract and an ironclad confidentiality agreement, over which she fretted. She knew now, if she so much as farted a hint of what she knew, they had the right to be so far up her ass, they’d tickle her tonsils.
Denise Miller chuckled at that. She slunk her hands as deep as they could go into the pockets of her three-quarter length, wool coat, bringing them together, hoarding the warmth of her body trapped within the heavy outwear. She needed it closer to her body.
Son of bitch, it is cold out here! she thought, visibly shaking, feeling her nose beginning to chap as tears came to her smarting eyes. Immediately, the moisture pasted to the skin at the outer edges of her eyelids. She gazed up into the sky seeing the dark clouds passing sedately above her, asking silently if it was going to snow again. The only response she received was bluster of wind about her person that sucked all of the warmth from her. Damn! She shivered. Where the hell did I park? She glanced around. It had been a long night, indeed, if I can’t remember where in the hell I parked…
The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves Page 29
