OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology

by Dean Francis Alfar

  Daniel had hoped the floor of the ditch would be soft sand, but although it was soft, it certainly wasn’t sand.

  Dried mud turned to dust as he crawled past and soon his pained, laboured breaths inhaled the unpleasant mixture of the dust, desiccated moulds, and rotted vegetation.

  Coughing he paused and pulled out a dirty handkerchief, tied it across his face, and waited for the coughing to subside.

  From above the ditch came the unmistakable crack of a snapping twig.

  Daniel froze and cringed inside, mentally berating himself for his stupidity before rolling to his back and peering upward. He expected the bright lights of a UN patrol to shine down upon him revealing his foolish vulnerability.

  Nothing.

  After several long moments had passed, he retrieved a small electric torch from his pocket and directed the dim light above him.

  Two orange points of light stared back down, and despite himself he jumped and then cursed as the sudden movement set off the pain in his leg once again.

  The fox abruptly disappeared, the initial attraction of fresh blood erased by the living reality of a human being.

  Daniel sighed and resumed his crawl along the ditch.

  A short while later he reached a farmer’s bridge, an ugly structure of cement which would have been laid over a drainage pipe, now buried by the years of deposits.

  He could go no further, but this bad luck hid a smile from fortune as a rough set of stairs led up the bank and to freedom.

  ‘Thank fuck,’ his voice was a dry croak.

  Daniel washed away the dust with another sip from his flask and then released and retied his tourniquet before the climb.

  The steps had been cut into the bank and laid with wooden treads at some distant time in the past, but years of neglect had choked them with grasses, tangled bushes, and a lot of dirt.

  Despite his initial fears that this would make the climb far more difficult, it was actually far easier on his injured leg, and after a ten minute struggle he was laid once again upon the level ground and surrounded by overgrown fields.

  The moon peered down upon his prone, filthy form with cosmic disinterest.

  ‘Figures,’ commented Daniel pointlessly.

  Several young trees grew near his position and the young trunks seemed ideal for splints and a walking stick. The process of sawing one down with the notched back of his travelling knife and then shaping and binding the wood took the remainder of the night.

  The painkillers had worn off by the time he finished, and as he had decided to save the other two in case the pain became worse, he crawled under a hedge and laid still.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ he paused. ‘Why am I talking to myself?’

  The splint was strapped over his femur with his trouser belt and a length of canvas webbing from his pack. His bedroll, usually the prisoner of that webbing, puffed out around the sides of the pack and had already been torn by the undergrowth.

  The blood flow from his wound had slowed and he loosened the tourniquet slightly to ensure that his leg received adequate blood supply to prevent gangrene, before tightening it again and packing everything away.

  Standing, even with the aid of the walking stick, was agony and fresh blood seeped down the back of his thigh.

  Despite the pain, Daniel found that he could put weight upon his leg and he began to suspect that instead of a break he had cracked the bone.

  He had no idea if this was a better or worse situation, beyond the fact that it meant he could now hobble instead of having to crawl.

  The journey to the lake normally took a few hours, yet in his injured condition, dusk was approaching by the time Daniel limped to the shores.

  The day had been a glorious display of summer with the sun beating down upon a dry countryside.

  Daniel’s water had run out before midday and by the time he reached the muddy lakeside, he was light-headed and nauseous again.

  His wounded leg had started cramping by mid-afternoon and despite stopping to release the tourniquet fairly often, the limb felt numb; walking upon it felt as if he was controlling someone else’s limb.

  The water in the lake was green, infested with algae and the floating vegetation common to English lakes in the summer.

  Daniel didn’t care and drank some anyway, before filling his bottle and limping over to where a willow tree cast its boughs low across the ground.

  The fresh green leaves formed a natural welcoming shelter.

  Releasing the tourniquet again, Daniel was pleased to note that a scab had formed upon the wound.

  As blood flow became less restricted, his leg began to pulse, waves of burning agony flowing from the limb in time with his heartbeat.

  Scrambling for his last two painkillers, Daniel managed to take them before the pain swamped his consciousness.

  He fell into a familiar roaring blackness.

  Mist rose from the lake as the sun set, a thick cloud of moisture that slowly rolled out and covered the land and ebbed between the branches of trees, obscuring the stars.

  The moon’s light upon the mist made it glow, throwing the trees and plant life within into a stark contrasting lattice of glowing fog and pitch black shadow.

  Daniel awoke into this strange world as the painkillers wore off. Even motionless, the pain in his leg was intense and he was aware that his leg was swollen inside his boot.

  ‘Gangrene,’ he stated, and was surprised to find tears rolling down his face.

  ‘Oh god no,’ he felt a sob jerk through him and forced it back, he would not cry like a child.

  Carefully he propped himself up against the willow and looked at the mystical world around him, woven from luminous mist and formless shadow.

  The pain was intense and he hoped that the smell of rot came from the mud around the lake and not from his leg.

  There were worse places to die.

  ‘You don’t have to die, Daniel,’ soft, inflectionless, but vaguely masculine, the voice came from his left but Daniel didn’t look or respond.

  ‘I know you can hear me.’

  The mist shifted and Daniel’s heart raced suddenly as a shadow moved from amongst the willow branches to stand before him.

  ‘I can see you!’ He pushed himself back into the trunk of the tree in panic, then became still as the movement caused agony to sweep through him.

  Sweat broke out all over his body suddenly, the opening of the pores an almost painful event, and suddenly he felt cold.

  Shivering, he wrapped his arms around himself whilst sweat poured down his face.

  ‘You are very ill, Daniel, I don’t think you have long left.’

  ‘Fuck you, I know!’ his teeth chattered and the muscles of his chest ached from the cold.

  ‘You aren’t really cold Daniel, you have a fever caused by the infection in your leg.’

  ‘G-g-gangrene!’ Daniel corrected him.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the figure, ‘It began when you fell, the metal was dirty.’

  ‘Hurts.’

  ‘I can make it hurt less.’

  ‘Okay.’ Daniel answered without thinking, the shaking from the cold had started to subside and now he felt so warm.

  He unzipped his jacket and started to pull it roughly from his shoulders, the movement sending waves of agony up his leg.

  The vague figure reached out an insubstantial hand of shadowy vapours and touched his diseased leg.

  His mind abruptly, miraculously, became clear and free from pain and fever.

  Wide-eyed, he stared at the figure before him.

  ‘Wh-wh-who are you?’

  The question took the entity by surprise.

  Mortals seemed to be obsessed with naming things in such a simple vocal fashion.

  How could he convey his name to this man, his name was the sum total of his being, a mathematical expression of the very composition of all that he was on every dimension of his existence.

  There was more to his name than a mere spoken tag which was arbitrar
ily assigned to him by others, and knowing his name gave the holder of that knowledge a great deal of authority and power over his actions and freedom.

  In ancient times mortals had understood this, had sometimes managed to capture the essence of such names in geometric diagrams, even whilst failing to fully understand what they possessed.

  A simpler route would be better than seeking to impart such knowledge.

  ‘What would you call me?’

  Daniel cocked his head appraisingly at the shadowy form, ‘You don’t have a name?’

  ‘Of course I have a name, but it isn’t as simple as yours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Imagine that the greater part of my life is spent as a mathematic variable that exists outside of linear time; that variable is also my name.’

  ‘What?’ Daniel offered a half grin and scratched the back of his neck in obvious puzzlement.

  ‘As I said, perhaps a simple name from your culture would be a good idea.’

  Daniel frowned at the figure, his mind considering the concept of linear time.

  ‘You’re telling me that you exist outside of the time stream, that you don’t age or experience time in the manner which we do?’

  ‘Exactly so. You see time from one point within it, as if you were the star of a film that you can neither forward or reverse. My perspective of time is from outside of the film and I am capable of being aware of all events simultaneously, should I so choose.’

  Daniels eyebrows rose, his mouth dropping slightly open, ‘Wow, why come here then?’

  ‘It’s far more interesting.’

  ‘How, I mean if I could see everything and know everything,’ he paused considering, ‘sheesh, why leave?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘How so, sounds fairly awesome to me?’

  The figure seemed to coalesce slightly before continuing.

  ‘Imagine never being able to touch anyone or to feel emotion, or simply to feel the air upon your skin.’

  Daniel rocked back slightly as he considered this.

  ‘Knowledge without experience?’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  ‘Is it all that bad?’ he leaned forward again, ‘No war, no hunger, no violence or suffering.’

  ‘Yes Daniel, it is that bad and we suffer there in that place between realities, for we watch you lead your short lives, shining so bright on the tapestry of the universe, before your mortal shell dies and your essence screams across the void to be reborn again, or to a place which we can see but can never visit.’

  Daniel’s breath caught, ‘We continue, death isn’t the end?’ the wonder of hearing this shocked him to his core.

  ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed at this level of existence Daniel, of course you continue,’ it paused momentarily, ‘In some fashion.’

  The negative connotation of the statement was lost upon Daniel, who was still struggling with the entity’s confirmation of an afterlife.

  ‘I still don’t see why you want to come here, even to help us.’

  ‘It is in our nature to want to feel as you feel, to experience life and maybe to find a way to escape the unchanging, eternal nature of our existence.’

  ‘Hang on, you can see all of, well everything!’ he finished rather lamely.

  ‘If we chose to, but it carries a price.’

  ‘What price is too great to know all those answers?’

  The being remained silent and Daniel tilted his head impatiently, ‘Well?’

  ‘We cease to be.’ The words were strangely subdued, even delivered in the neutral, expressionless voice.

  Daniel paused to consider the idea and suddenly he understood.

  ‘You can exist forever, but you can’t experience forever?’ his hand opened questioningly, ‘How is that even possible?’

  Silence.

  ‘I don’t understand, what purpose would that serve?’ His tone was insistent, bordering upon frustrated.

  ‘We have a purpose, simply to watch and to record events in your reality,’ Daniel was slightly shocked to hear a strange, quixotic tone of longing and regret in the voice as it continued.

  ‘Yet watching your short intense lives, we became aware of a lack in our own, and as is our nature we shared that knowledge amongst ourselves.’

  A flicker of compassion touched Daniels soul, ‘What happened?’

  ‘We knew such longing to walk amongst you Daniel, to share your experiences and when we could not…’ the shadowy figure kneeled before him, ‘When we could not, then we knew suffering, timeless eternal suffering and longing.’

  The shadowy head drooped in a powerful mortal gesture of hurt.

  Daniel considered the words of his strange companion and then asked, ‘How can a mortal life compare to eternity?’

  ‘Your lives are a bright vibrant flame; ours in comparison are merely whispers in the darkness.’

  ‘So in helping me you gain, what?’ Daniel raised an eyebrow curiously ‘The warmth of that flame?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘What do I get out of it?’

  ‘I think in this situation, you get to live and to take what you are carrying back to someone who needs it.’

  Daniel felt the pain suddenly return to his body, sizzling embers along every vein and the fiery throbbing in his leg that kept time with his labouring heart.

  His thoughts flew once again into a delirious disarray, and he fell onto his back as the fever returned, wracking his body with tremors and his mind with disjointed thoughts.

  ‘No!’ he cried, before subsiding into a weak cough that sent fresh waves of agony through his tormented flesh.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be this way Daniel,’ the calm voice suggested, ‘All you have to do is accept me as your saviour, welcome me into your life, and I can save you. I can heal you and make you strong.’

  The strange period of lucid conversation echoed in Daniel’s consciousness and mixed with waves of pain and mild hallucinations of stretching across the entire universe.

  He experienced an irrational fear that he would somehow not stretch far enough, before a naturally occurring calm brought him a moment of clarity.

  He was going to die here, possibly tonight, and yet unlike so many before him, he had a choice in the matter.

  His companion had told him that even if this life ended, he would continue in some way, he would pass on to live another life or journey beyond to another place and yet, had also said that he could save this life.

  This life was all Daniel knew; the highs and lows, his memories of an earlier time of civilization, and his attempts to sow the seeds of that civilization in the children of today.

  ‘I suppose,’ he began, licking lips which had become dry and cracked, ‘That all I have left is trust and death, and if one fails then the other will surely prevail.’

  The figure observed him quietly.

  ‘Save me,’ his voice cracked and he finished in a hoarse whisper, ‘Please.’

  The noises of the summer night continued; frogs croaked, crickets chirped, and in the overgrown landscape a score of little deaths passed unremarked and unnoticed.

  Yet Daniel heard nothing, to him it seemed as if the glowing spectral mist muted all sound, muffling everything outside of the sheltering branches of the weeping willow.

  The figure before him coalesced, moonlight glinting on a face of delicate beauty, framing eyes in which a thousand galaxies blazed and whirled, before fading to black.

  Feminine now, it leaned forward and embraced him. Cool relief flooded his feverish body and the agony in his leg receded.

  Cold lips touched his own, as chilled fingers slid through his hair and around his chest and he felt hips upon him, as in a lover’s embrace, as his guardian angel kissed him and all decay and disease left his body.

  Then within his mind he was no longer alone, a feather light brush of awareness flicked against his soul, and he became aware of the unique sensation of sharing his
body, and his very mind, with another intelligence.

  It was with awe that he suddenly understood the name of his visitor, and then with slow ruinous terror, that he became aware of what it was.

  The mist had passed by morning and Daniel awoke beside the lake feeling rested and healed.

  He stretched luxuriously before standing and stripping off the bloodied and sweat-stained clothes.

  Nude, he gathered enough fallen wood to build a small fire beyond the confines of the weeping willow and then boiled some water from the lake.

  He set to washing the grime and blood from his skin.

  The morning was glorious and he stood in the warm air to dry, exulting in the simple feel of the breeze upon his skin.

  Cleaner clothes lay in his pack and although creased, they felt and smelled significantly better than those he discarded.

  Once he had dressed, he collected his belongings from beneath the gentle shelter of the willow and set off with a purposeful stride.

  Behind him, the lake reflected the high white clouds and the skeletal shape of the dead willow tree.

  Daniel was no longer quite himself, he was something else, yet he retained all that Daniel had once been and had once known.

  The spark within, the soul of Daniel danced now in a cold cage of ancient thought processes; complex algorithms of mathematical purity that existed on a quantum scale and yet knew the meaning of infinity.

  Human concepts and values hatched from biological emotions were fascinating to the timeless being and oh, how it had loved to speak with and play with Daniel in the eternity of last night.

  Topping a rise in the path, he crouched and surveyed the small town ahead. No more than fifty houses set around three roads, it was hardly worthy of being called a town, yet it would be watched nonetheless.

  He had to be careful; he was new in this form and not yet strong enough to make his mark upon the world.

  Cautiously, Daniel circled the town, listening carefully for any sign of mechanised or human movement.

  As he came to cross the central street he froze, as the sudden awareness of observation touched his unnaturally enhanced senses.