by J. Thorn
“I want to get Lindsay from Samuel. That prick stole her from me. You said I’d get a shot.”
Kole leaned back and rested his head on the wall. The bag holding the orb sat within arm’s reach on his right side.
“That’s what I said, Jack. But things change. I need you for something else now.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m going to conduct an experiment and I need your help. If you do that, you’ll be hurting Samuel. You want to hurt him, don’t you, Jack?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I want to take him down.”
“That’s what I thought. I’m glad we want the same thing.”
Jack waited as Kole leaned over and unzipped the bag. A red glow came from inside and quickly eclipsed the sour, yellow light of their fire. The aura illuminated Kole’s face and Jack thought he looked much older than in the vision. But then again, Jack was not sure how much of that was dream versus reality. Maybe Kole had always been this age.
“Have you ever gotten stitches?”
“No. Why?”
“Well,” Kole said as the glow intensified. “It hurts like a son of a bitch until they shoot you up with the painkiller and then you don’t feel no more. The doc is running a needle and thread through your skin and you can’t even feel it.”
“What’s that have to do with me?” Jack asked.
“I need to test this on you, Jack. I think it’ll probably hurt a whole helluva lot but only for a moment and then you won’t feel anything.”
“And then what? I get Lindsay?”
“Something even better. You get released from this shithole, from the Great Cycle. You get to move beyond and rest forever.”
Kole had his hand beneath the orb and lifted it out of the bag. He sat it in his lap, resting on both palms. Kole leered inside it like a demented fortuneteller. The red and orange flashes inside seemed to move in coordination with his eyes.
“I’ve gotta pee,” Jack said. He stood up and took a step toward the door.
Shallna stepped from the shadows and blocked the door. Kole’s eyes locked with Jack’s.
“Sit down, Jack.”
The young man obeyed, a cold sensation creeping up his back. He shivered and shook his head back and forth.
“You don’t have to hurt me, Kole. I’ll do whatever it is you need.”
“I know you will and that’s what I have planned. I promise it’ll only pinch for a second and then you won’t feel anything. I need to make sure my weapons work before battle. You’re going to help me destroy Samuel.”
Jack’s face contorted and he whimpered.
“But I—”
“I know you’re confused, conflicted. My bowling ball here, it’s gonna help me banish that fucker. He’s coming to destroy the cauldron, destroy me. I can’t let that happen or I’ll never get out. You understand?”
“No.”
“Well it doesn’t matter. This is how it’s going to be.”
Shallna walked out and turned his gaze back to the skyscrapers downtown. He saw enough of the orb’s powers to know what was coming next and he preferred not to see it yet again.
***
Fuck him.
Tommy was not quite sure exactly what that word meant, but he heard it used enough times in his house that he deduced the meaning from context. In his head he heard, “Fuck you and fuck her. I don’t care how many times she’s filled up the gas tank. It’s my car.” Or “Mara can go fuck herself. She’s part of this family and she’ll take care of Tommy and get him to hockey practice.” Or “Tommy isn’t a fucking retard, he’s slow. There’s a difference.”
It was not good and people used it in anger.
Yeah, fuck, he thought.
Tommy enjoyed having that word bouncing around inside his skull while Samuel and Lindsay spoke to each other in forced whispers. Maybe they were hiding their voices from more bad people coming to get them or maybe they didn’t want Tommy to overhear part of their “adult” conversation. He did not really care. Tommy knew Samuel was now preoccupied with an external threat and he would be vulnerable to an internal one. Of course Tommy didn’t think of it in those terms. He had other thoughts.
Fuck.
***
Lindsay held his hand as she followed Samuel into a building a block off of the main roadway. They had not ventured this far off the city’s main artery and with good reason. The main path would bring them right to where they needed to be. Samuel planned on getting back on it as soon as he could, but with another attack possible, and with it most likely being Jack, he wanted time to think, to plan. He shivered and stepped over a steel door cocked at an angle, attached by a single hinge at the top.
“In here.”
He stepped inside what was once a warehouse. The wind peeled back the steel roofing over the decades, allowing rays of green light to penetrate to the floor and illuminate floating dust and sand in the air. From the sky, the warehouse would have looked like the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, long gashes in the roof as if ripped open by the talons of a mythical beast. Steel shelving extended from the floor to the roof, towering twenty feet above their heads. A forklift sat in one corner with a pile of sand covering the seat. The shelves were empty although piles of cardboard lay scattered about the floor, their contents stolen or dissolved in the distant past.
Samuel saw a glass window in a wall to his right with a door to the left of the window. He walked toward the office and between the shafts of light coming through the roof. His steps echoed where they struck bare concrete and he heard the rhythm of Lindsay’s and Tommy’s behind him. Samuel doubted anyone or anything was inside the warehouse but he did not have time to do a thorough search. He couldn’t feel Jack nearby and that hunch would have to suffice.
“What are we going to do?” Lindsay asked.
Tommy started humming a random melody again and this time Samuel reached down and shoved his cupped hand over the kid’s mouth.
“Shut it. Not now. I need to think.”
Samuel left it there until Tommy nodded.
“Let’s go into the office. The darkness might give us some cover.”
Lindsay dragged Tommy through the open doorway and Samuel followed, pulling it shut behind them. Although he could not see the size of the office, he could feel the walls nearby and his lungs tightened. Samuel closed his eyes and visualized a wide open field on a bright, sunny afternoon. He pictured a landscape computer companies would often load as the default wallpaper on a new tablet.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Samuel said. “It’s—”
“Tight spaces. I know.”
Lindsay smiled and even the muted darkness of the reversion could not damper her glow. Samuel smiled back, momentarily forgetting where they were. He touched the side of her face and forced himself back to reality.
“Jack is rogue and the reversion doesn’t want us getting to the peak, to the cauldron.”
“Right,” Lindsay said.
“I have to get there and you have to come with me.”
The omission of Tommy’s purpose in the grand scheme of the Great Cycle was as obvious as the cloud eating the sky.
“Let’s just get back on the road and high-tail it downtown.”
“What if Jack is waiting for us? What if he knows you’ve got a bow and he’s going to ambush us first?”
“What’s our alternative?” Lindsay asked.
“We snake through the side streets and alleys. It’ll take longer but we’ll be less vulnerable.”
“Unless the zombies eat us,” Tommy said. He smiled as if he was hoping it would happen.
“He’s right,” Lindsay said. “We have no idea where the horde is or what they’re doing.”
“They don’t chase, Linds. They try to keep us immobile. I think I’d rather outrun them than get picked off by Jack. What if the kid found a rifle?”
Lindsay leaned back on the wall. She looked through the greasy window and out on to the floor
of the warehouse. Her imagination kicked in and she thought of a supervisor from another time and place sharing the same view. Lindsay blinked and chalked it up to the reversion. It would try to slow them down in any way possible, even with daydreams.
“We haven’t seen that yet, but I guess it’s possible. Now that I think of it, I haven’t even seen a reflection of a gun let alone a real one.”
“That doesn’t mean we can assume Jack won’t find something. I’ll deal with him when the time comes, but my gut is telling me to get to the cauldron and then our fate will be in the hands of the Gods.”
“Since when do the Gods have anything to do with this? We’re not in ancient Greece getting ready to storm Mount Olympus,” she said.
“Somebody was paying attention in sixth-grade English.”
“Fuck you, Samuel,” Lindsay said.
Tommy shook at the sound of that word as it triggered a cellular response inside. He felt his muscles tighten and a dull ball of pain blossoming in his stomach.
Samuel laughed and looked down at Tommy.
“You look greener than the air outside. You okay?”
Tommy nodded and swallowed hard.
“Maybe we should see what we can find in here. Who knows what kind of tools or weapons might be in this warehouse,” Lindsay said.
“You and Tommy stick together and scream if you’re in danger. Let’s meet back in the office in fifteen minutes and then we’ll head out.”
“Got it,” Lindsay said.
Tommy followed her. He looked back over his shoulder at Samuel and flipped him the middle finger. Samuel waved to him, unable to see the obscene gesture in the low light of the warehouse.
***
Kole’s eyes grew as the power inside the orb manifested into brilliant flashes of red pulsing from the center. His fingers massaged the top of it, drawing lines of energy like a plasma ball. Kole’s mouth tightened and his tongue felt like a wad of cotton. His stomach clenched and his hands shook.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Jack said.
“I just can’t have you fucking everything up,” Kole said. “Your asshole partner almost did that, so I’m letting the orb handle you. Besides, I’m dying to know what this puppy can do.”
Jack tried to stand up but his legs would not obey. It felt as though he had concrete blocks tied to his feet. His hands were glued to his thighs by the incredible power of the orb. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing Kole with a stupid smile. Jack shuddered. He now understood what it must be like for a paraplegic, the brain unable to command flesh.
The orb pulsed and a low drone surrounded them. The glass left hanging in the window frames began to burst. Sharp pops like gunfire filled the air as the energy blew the glass into nothing but dust. Jack felt the same thing happen to his eardrums. Like a one-two punch from a championship heavyweight boxer, his ears burst, yet he could not release the pain with a scream. Jack’s face remained still, the smile plastered on it as if painted. He winced inside and the room became silent. Jack’s head swam and he felt the warm trickle of blood coming out of his ear canal. It landed on the tops of his hands but he could not feel it. Everything below Jack’s neck was paralyzed.
A pressure grew inside of his skull, pushing the gray matter into the bone. Jack thought someone put his head inside a shop vise and was cranking it tight.
Kole chuckled, his face never leaving the orb. He watched Jack imploding one cell at a time.
Jack felt the blood pouring from his nose and running off his lips. Some of it trickled inside his mouth. The coppery taste would be one of the last sensations he would ever experience. His eyes swelled and Kole, the orb and the room began to fade in a painful blanket of black. Jack’s eyeballs burst a moment later and his soul was happy he would not be able to see or hear his own demise. There would be pain and then there would be nothing. At least that’s what Jack’s dying brain told him.
The pressure inside his head continued to grow and Jack started to feel his flesh releasing, giving way to the orb and allowing it to destroy the tissue. A pinpoint of light opened in Jack’s internal vision but it didn’t turn into a tunnel and nobody was calling him forth. He was not surprised those stories of the afterlife were bullshit.
The sounds, the sights and the taste of his own blood ceased. Jack’s head swam in a mix of pain and fatigue and he felt the end. It was then he heard her voice. At first, Jack thought it was the same echo of reality as the “light at the end of the tunnel” from all of those paranormal reality shows. But then the words formed and he knew it had to be Gran.
“Let go, Jacky. It’s time.”
“But Gran, I can’t. The orb, it’s in control. Kole is killing me with it.”
“Nobody can do that, Grandson. Only you can ultimately release yourself from existence.”
“What about the Great Cycle, my redemption?” Jack asked.
“You can only ask for release and let your master soul find its way. It is all you can do. Stop fighting.”
“I love you, Gran. This place made me a monster. I’ve done things here I’m not proud of. Things I never would have done in real life.”
“I know. The multiverse knows. You’ll either gain your salvation and be released or you’ll come through again to earn it. There is no judgment in the Great Cycle, only experience and salvation. You’re either learning or you’ve learned.”
“I feel resistance. I can fight.”
“There is no point,” she said. “Let go and accept what your soul needs next.”
Jack nodded mentally and part of him hoped it would not be the last time he spoke to his gran. He missed her even after all of these years. If the Great Cycle had any compassion, it would cosmically link them again. Maybe they would be brother and sister or husband and wife. In the end, those labels didn’t matter and that was Jack’s enlightenment. At the moment of his soul’s transition, Jack realized his existence was about relationships and, whether his soul would create them again or not, he would move beyond the realm of life with that knowledge.
The orb went dark as Jack’s head exploded. Kole wiped the remains of Jack’s brain from his face. The young man’s headless body collapsed to the floor while gooey lines of blood and gray matter rolled down the wall behind him.
Kole placed the orb back into the bag, turned towards the door and left Jack’s corpse to the cloud or the sand, whichever would claim it first.
***
Shallna turned to face Kole as he walked out of the building and stood on the sidewalk. Kole looked up into the sky and then at the front of the building. The name carved into the stone above the entrance was worn smooth by the blowing sand and the numbers printed on the street signs faded away. Kole sighed and shuffled on to the road. Shallna followed.
Shallna and Kole walked in silence. They arrived in the center of the city that looked much the same as the rest. There were bigger and more piles of automobiles on corners and stacked along the roads, but the city looked as dead and desolate as the outer suburbs. Sand drifts as tall as men covered many of the doorways and buried the remaining artifacts. Kole shook his head and turned back to Shallna.
“Just like on the mountain. This one happens to be made of steel instead of granite,” Kole said.
Shallna used his staff to point to the entryway.
“We will need to climb the stairs to the peak.”
Kole watched as Shallna entered. As he took a step inside, Kole let out a bellowing laugh.
“I know this ain’t Chi-town, but I’ve been in this building before.”
Shallna reappeared, realizing Kole was not ready to climb yet.
“This is the old Sears Tower. It ain’t on Lake Michigan and this ain’t Chicago, but this is the Tower. I recognize it.”
Shallna waited.
“Yep. This ain’t Wacker Street but these planters here, they used to be filled with small trees and flowers. I was here once although I’m having a hard time remembering when.”
“The descensions deter
iorate memory as much as flesh.”
“Great,” Kole said. “Zombie rain makes me old and senile.”
“There were revolving doors here but it looks like big holes now.”
Kole strolled down the block. He could not tell whether the dead city was Chicago or if the building was an exact replica of the old Sears Tower. The wasteland did not look like Illinois but then again, the reversion altered everything.
“They finished it in 1973. It was the tallest building in the world at that time. If we’re heading up to the observation deck, if that’s where the cauldron is located, you’d better have your good shoes on.”
Shallna turned and walked back inside.
“Holy shit,” Kole said. He shook his head and chuckled. “Fucking Sears Tower. Once I get to the observation deck I should be able to tell.”
He walked through the opening and into an expansive lobby. The ceiling reflected what was left of the natural light coming from the outside. The green tint gave the grid a ghostly luminescence and Kole wondered if some kind of algae had taken root there. The spaces above where the revolving doors used to be were empty, mounds of broken glass lying scattered at the bottom of the wall. Kole’s feet landed on the marble floor. Fissures ran through the floor which was once the pride of Italian quarries. He heard a flapping noise and saw several of the black birds in the corner where a nest was lodged. The birds circling the skyscrapers were roosting in the lobby of this one.
“Crows?” he asked Shallna.
“I don’t know.”
“Great fucking help you are, Grimmy.”
Shallna ignored the pejorative and walked toward the elevator shafts. His robe floated over the marble and sand and he disappeared into the darkness. Kole followed. He stopped at a desk in the middle of the lobby. It was backed against a wall and he could almost see building security sitting behind it, a man with thick glasses and a thicker Midwestern accent slouched over a grainy monitor.
“This is creepy,” Kole said.
He pulled the bowling ball bag closer to his side and kept walking, following the footsteps left by Shallna. Kole could tell Shallna was wearing something on his feet but his footwear did not leave distinguishable tracks.
