Corrosion: Terminal Horizon (The Portal Arcane Series - Book III)

by J. Thorn

  Jack walked around and Alex spun, keeping his eyes locked on the young man. Jack sat on the third step and leaned back on to his elbows. He looked around the foyer and winked at Alex.

  “Love it. Old, musty, flabby. Just your style.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Like I said, we weren’t done.”

  Alex looked at the glass on the floor and then back to Jack.

  “You told me I had to protect Lindsay. That was all I needed to hear.”

  “How old are you, dude? Forty? Fifty?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Alex said.

  “I think it does. How old was Lindsay when you knew her, back before you put the noose around your neck.”

  “Old enough,” Alex said.

  “Doubt it or else you woulda answered my question. You some kind of creeper, a pedophile?”

  Alex swung his right arm in a lazy arc and Jack moved his head to the side, easily dodging the lame excuse for a punch.

  “Please stop doing that. It’s embarrassing. Sit down.”

  Alex put aside his manufactured indignity and sat next to Jack. He did not have a good reason to dislike the kid other than the taunts.

  “Before you took a header through that portal, we were talking about destiny, karma. All that cosmic hippy bullshit.”

  Alex nodded but said nothing.

  “I got you through and I coulda been released but the Great Cycle showed me one more thing I could do if I wanted. And when I saw that vision, I was like, ‘A-fucking-men, brother.’ You see, I get to eat one last meal here in this reversion. You know what it is?”

  Alex shook his head and sighed. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Don’t get all pissy with me, dude.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I think you are. Listen. I get one last meal. It’s revenge. You ever had that dish?”

  Alex sat forward and leaned closer to Jack. He was losing interest in the old brownstone and forgot about his earlier plan to explore the second floor.

  “Kole is in charge and I’d love to fuck his day up, but he’s king shit now. Probably got that Reaper fuck helping out too. That’s cool and all, cause ya know why? I’ll tell ya. I got my sights set on Samuel. That’s the fucker I want.”

  “Why?” Alex asked. He had no idea who these people were. All that mattered was Lindsay.

  “He gave me up to the spider crabs and that shit hurt. You ever been eaten by spider crabs? I doubt it. Let me tell you, it ain’t something you ever wanna feel.”

  “You going to tell me who these people are?” Alex asked.

  “Yep. Starting with Samuel. He’s the one fucking your Lindsay,” Jack said.

  ***

  Alex was not sure if he would be able to sleep in the same house with Jack. He tried placing his back on the wall so he was facing the young man, but Alex could not keep his eyes open.

  After the sun set on the reversion, darkness came fast, cloaking the city in a black velvet fog. The ambient light that allowed Jack and Alex to investigate the second floor was gone. The two explored the upstairs bedrooms and found the remnants of mattresses and stuffed animals. The toys resembled the horde, the fabric in varying states of decay and many missing their plastic eyeballs. The springs in the mattresses poked through the dry rotted cotton and looked like rusted coils in a futuristic flying carpet. Each room had its share of discarded furniture and sand piled in the corners, although it appeared as though it was only time that destroyed the pieces, not violence. The dust was not as thick inside the house as outside, but the broken windows allowed it to filter inside. Alex and Jack coughed as their lungs adjusted to the air and sand. Alex looked out of the window several times and saw nothing but black. He welcomed the night and was glad to not have to look up at the advancing cloud coming from the west.

  He thought Jack was snoring but he couldn’t see the young man’s face. They quit talking hours ago and Alex gave up trying to will himself to sleep. He was exhausted, yet all he could think about was her. His Lindsay.

  “You awake.”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “Been thinking,” Alex said.

  “Me too. Been thinking about that fine ass on Lindsay.”

  Alex ignored the provocation. “Where you from?”

  “Pittsburgh,” Jack said.

  “So am I. So is Lindsay. I think Mara and Tommy are too.”

  “Pretty sure Mara grew up in Detroit. Maybe Cleveland.”

  “What about Samuel?” Alex asked.

  “Raised in Monroeville. Near Pittsburgh. But he lived in Detroit.”

  Jack coughed and Alex pressed on.

  “Seems like everyone in this reversion came from some of the same places.”

  “Rust Belt,” Alex said.

  “What?”

  “Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo. They call all those cities the Rust Belt.”

  “So,” Jack said. He took a step towards Alex’s voice in the darkened room.

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence we’re all from the same geographic region? Maybe there’s something too that and—”

  “And maybe it doesn’t make one shit of difference,” Jack said.

  “I think it does.”

  “Can we sleep now?” Jack asked. “You can sit there and run circles in your head but I’d like to sleep. We’re probably going to have to fight our way through the horde to get to them. You ready for that?”

  “Right,” Alex said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Alex closed his eyes and opened them and the room was still in total darkness. He preferred death over sleep. It was so hard to get rest in the reversion.

  ***

  In the booming industrial economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several areas of the United States became prominent. Manufacturing flourished in the region and cities close to the Great Lakes waterways thrived. Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Cleveland became the center of the industrial infrastructure, fueled by iron ore found in Upper Michigan and coal from the Appalachian Mountains. Several generations of eastern European immigrants flooded the cities looking for work and a new life. They came from Austria-Hungary, Poland, Russia, Germany and Slovakia amongst others.

  The cities of the Rust Belt boomed in the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, but when the steel industry started to decline so did the future of those running it. Manufacturing moved to the American southeast and trade policies changed. Globalization made it difficult for the corporate owners of these industries to compete. As a result, the factories and the jobs went overseas. “Outsourcing” became synonymous with unemployment and that’s when things became even worse.

  People migrated and some cities, like Detroit, lost more than a fourth of its population in less than ten years. The drain on the tax revenue meant fewer community resources, which led to crime, illegal drugs, welfare expenditures and massive deficit spending.

  Some cities, like Pittsburgh, fought desperately to remake themselves once the mills closed and the problems remained. Biotech industries flourished and the vacant, overgrown yards where the steel mills once stood became corporate offices, casinos and tourism destinations. However, other cities like Cleveland and Detroit never recovered. Flint, Michigan, near Detroit was one of the most violent and decimated American cities. Emergency services refused to even enter certain sections of the city.

  Although some fared better than others, people from the Rust Belt all share a common history. Alex, Lindsay, Mara, Tommy, Kole and even Samuel tried to survive in a region hardest hit by the manufacturing fall out of the mid-twentieth century. The desperation and depression on the land seeped into its people like a toxic chemical in the water supply. Those people, buried deep in their subconscious, were ripe for the reversion. Whether they came through the suicide forest or found themselves in the reversion by another means, they shared a common heritage. It was desperation that sat inside them like the hardened steel shaped in the region, and it
was the hopeless feelings in them pulled to the reversion like steel to a magnet.

  The reversion would draw those souls closest to the edge of existence and many of the folks on that edge would slip over it and come to grips with a new kind of entropy. They would face the inevitable destruction of the world after their corporal one, and it would feel much the same to their tired bones.

  Chapter 9

  The cloud parted as if a silent lightning bolt split the sky. The reversion stopped the steady march of the cloud to the east and remained hanging over the wasteland, awaiting its newest arrivals. The ghostly city sat in the distance across miles of windswept sand and ribbons of buried asphalt. A low groan came from the center of the metropolis and moved across the ground with subsonic speed.

  Shallna stood on the rocky outcrop and pointed his staff to the heavens.

  “Do they always arrive this way?” Kole asked.

  “I do not know,” Shallna said. “Deva taught me what I needed to know, not always with the explanations I desired.”

  The horde arrived in some reversions, but not all of them. The Great Cycle placed the mass of destroyed humanity and then directed the lord of the reversion to move them like troops on a battlefield. The frequency and numbers of the horde were never known, not even to the Great Cycle itself.

  “How long does it take?”

  “Watch,” Shallna said.

  Kole spread his feet shoulder-length apart and looked into the sky. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the black birds swirling around the peaks of the tallest skyscrapers. He felt a tug, the cauldron pulling at him like a powerful magnet. Kole shook his head and looked back at Shallna. He was bringing a new horde into the reversion and Kole thought he should watch it and perhaps learn how to do it himself. He sometimes forgot he was the new lord with duties and responsibilities.

  A dull light appeared directly overhead and became the chasm between the parted cloud. It grew and a faint buzzing filled Kole’s ears. He saw feet first and then legs. They were in motion, much like people walking on a treadmill. Their legs were moving but they were stationary in space as an unseen power lowered them toward the surface. It took several moments until the first of the bodies descended to the rocky outcrop, where Kole could see their faces.

  Most were disfigured. Kole saw women without arms and men missing both limbs from one side of their body. Those were the fortunate ones. More floated down toward the dusty earth without faces and some without heads. Smaller creatures, those Kole assumed to be dead children, descended too. Some were charred, their skin blackened as if left to die on a spit. Several bodies came within an arm’s reach of Kole. They turned their blank, dead eyes at him. He felt a flicker of life deep inside them masked by pure pain. Most of the eyes were white and others black. They moved their jaws up and down as if trying to speak.

  Kole broke his gaze on those nearest to him and looked past Shallna at the city. Thousands of bodies descended, obscuring the city like a massive human pestilence. The diseased flesh filled the sky and Kole tried to estimate how many were joining the horde already here.

  “Twenty thousand?”

  “More like thirty,” Shallna said.

  Kole could not look away. He felt the suffering of each soul and a pain blossomed in his chest. He sat down on the edge of the outcrop and drew a deep breath.

  “You are cosmically tied to them in ways beyond our knowing. Some descensions would force Deva to lie still for days until he regained enough energy to stand. It will also take a toll on your physical body in the multiverse.”

  He looked up at Shallna with a grimace. Kole used his right hand to massage his chest. He felt short of breath and his heart lurched.

  “What kind of toll?”

  The undead continued to fall like a horrific rain.

  “Aging mostly.”

  Kole sighed and dropped his chin. He never thought about Deva’s appearance or the timescale of the reversion. It all seemed to be beyond his comprehension, like trying to measure gravity. He knew it existed and it affected him, but not how or why. Deva looked old, ancient. That thought made Kole raise his head and speak again although even his jaw was becoming heavy and tired.

  “How many?”

  “I think thirty—”

  “No,” Kole said, interrupting him. “How many of these did Deva do?”

  “Descensions?”

  Kole waved his hand and twirled it in the air.

  “Yes. I don’t care what the fuck you call them. How many?”

  “Countless.”

  “Goddammit, Shallna. How many fucking times?”

  Shallna turned and looked down at Kole sitting on the rock. The man had his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.

  “At least a hundred. Probably several hundred.”

  Kole groaned and rocked back, closing his eyes and running his hands through his hair. He hugged himself and used the palms of his hands to rub the tattoos on his arms as if trying to warm himself.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You’ll do whatever is demanded of you by the Great Cycle.”

  “Fuck you and fuck the Cycle.”

  Shallna turned away and back toward the sky filled with dead bodies. He watched them like a foreman at a construction site.

  “Where are they coming from?” Kole asked.

  “Dying worlds. Places where humanity chose to use the best of its knowledge and science in order to build the most heinous weapons. Some are casualties of war while others were themselves direct targets. The Great Cycle favors the massive numbers. Overrunning the land with a swelling of the horde is more effective than replenishing it in smaller doses.”

  “Why?”

  “It makes it more difficult for those in the reversion to move. It is easier to keep them immobile if they are held in place by sheer numbers.”

  Kole tried to stand up and was met with a wave of vertigo. He stumbled and Shallna grabbed his arm to steady him on the outcrop. They stood a hundred feet above the highway and the rocky ground beneath it. Kole felt Shallna’s icy grip and shuddered.

  “I’m good,” he said, breaking their contact.

  “Where is this one coming from?”

  Shallna paused and looked upward into the sky as if the answer was inside the cloud.

  “The place you know as Colorado. 1988.”

  “What happened there?”

  “It is of no consequence to us. We must make sure the descension is complete and then wait for the cloud to fuse back together,” Shallna said.

  “I want to know.”

  “Then ask,” Shallna said.

  Kole laughed and turned in a tight circle. The aching in his head intensified to the point that he thought it might split open like a cracked egg. His vision blurred and then doubled and the thought of multiplying the horde made him laugh yet again.

  “Don’t play mind games with me. What the fuck happened to these people in Colorado in 1988?”

  “These souls are coming from one Colorado in 1988. There are thousands, probably millions of Colorados in 1988. That is the nature of the multiverse, the infinite number of universes.”

  Kole sighed. He remembered his talks with Major, Mara and Samuel at the Barrens. He understood the general concept. Each and every action by every being split their existence into two universes as a result of that action. This happened every time, for every decision. Kole remembered getting to second base with Susie Marcher behind the bleachers on a warm August night. In one universe, he touched her boob. In another, she slapped him for trying. His existence split at that moment as did hers. The implications of what that meant and the number of Koles in the multiverse was not something he could fathom, certainly not with his head pounding and the bodies filling the reversion.

  “What. Happened?”

  Shallna waved his staff in the air and turned in a circle. He had to obey his master.

  “Nuclear war.”

  “No it didn’t. I was there,” Kole said.

&
nbsp; “Not in this 1988.”

  Kole waited for the explanation. He knew what Shallna meant but wanted to hear everything he thought was being held back.

  “These souls are coming from Colorado Springs.”

  “NORAD,” Kole said. “Right. NORAD is there. I’ll bet the Communists wanted to take that out.”

  “Yes,” Shallna said. “A strategic military target which also led to the annihilation of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins. Gorbachev knew destroying NORAD would be key to disabling the military response of the United States.”

  For the first time since climbing the rocky outcrop, Kole’s attention was drawn away from the mid-air zombie parade and to his servant. He marveled at Shallna’s language. It was as if he was a national news anchor reading lines off a teleprompter.

  “Nobody is sure which side struck first and it didn’t matter. Missiles carrying nuclear warheads were in the air within minutes of the first launch. Most citizens of the United States had no idea until the first detonations and by then it was too late. The same held true for the inhabitants of Moscow, St. Petersburg and the other major cities of the U.S.S.R. That 1988, the one you never knew, is delivering souls to the reversion. The multiverse is contracting, cleansing itself through the self-destruction of its inhabitants.”

  “What was the tipping point? What decision zigged when my universe zagged? I obviously lived through a 1988 without nuclear war.”

  Shallna contemplated the question as the undead continued to descend to the barren wasteland below.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “I don’t,” Shallna said. “The situation could have been as minor as a single heart attack or a misfiled memo.”

  “Are you saying that the survival of the world depends on something as stupid as some dude’s heart attack? Somebody puts the wrong document in the paper shredder and the shit hits the fan?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. Have you heard the story of the butterfly in the Amazon that—”

  “Stop,” Kole said, laughing. “Don’t go playing Deva on me, handing me some stupid parable I’ve heard a thousand times. Yes, the butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and it creates a hurricane in South Carolina, or something like that. I think they even called it the Butterfly Effect.”