Babylon Terminal

by Greg F. Gifune

  Despite the stench, I stepped closer and crouched down next to him. Slowly, I panned the flashlight across him. His white hair was thin and mussed, and his clothes were tattered, filthy. He wore no shoes, and his feet were scarred and diseased, the toes unkempt, filthy and mangled with arthritis.

  Until that moment, I’d only heard about his kind in ghost stories, Night Sleepers and their city of light. But it was all right here in the dark with the rest of us.

  “You know what I am?” I asked.

  “With those wounds you look like a man of violence.” He watched me with his bloodshot eyes, took a swig of booze, then belched. “Dreamcatcher, I’d imagine.”

  There had always been rumors that a secret department existed within HQ that catered exclusively to the Night Sleepers and their runners, but I’d never seen proof of any of it. It was whispers in hallways, innuendo, stories someone heard from someone else or paperwork an associate of an associate had allegedly seen.

  “Then you know I’m looking for someone.”

  “Yes, sir, I’d imagine that too.” He held the bottle out for me. “Drink?”

  Much as I needed a drink, I waved it away. “Looking for a woman.”

  “I wish I could help you, mister. But I promise you I can’t.”

  “Her name’s Julia. Did she come through here?”

  “If she did, I never saw her. You’re the only stranger I’ve seen in a long time.”

  I brought the light back up to his face. “You telling me the truth, old-timer?”

  This time he made no effort to shield his eyes. “Son, why would I lie to you?”

  I stood up and took another quick look around to make sure we were still alone. In the nearby lot I could hear rats squeaking and scurrying about in the ruins. I looked back at my car and the sky beyond the buildings on the far side of the street. Things were changing. Slowly, gradually, like always, one world dying as another was reborn. “It’ll be daytime soon,” I said.

  “You’ll want to be gone by the time the light comes,” he told me.

  “I’ll be asleep by then.”

  “Be asleep far away, son. You don’t want to be here when they wake up.”

  The night was dying, the streetlights on the next block fading. Chaos, I thought. It’s all chaos here and probably worse the farther out I go. There was supposed to be order—reason and organization, things were supposed to make sense—but the deeper I looked, the less of any of that I saw. Instead, it seemed more like a haphazard and lawless dream world where nothing made sense, no one knew what to do or how to control it, much less escape it, and that the confines of the city and nearby areas I’d existed in for so long were only constructs of fantasy and distraction. What the hell were we doing here? Why were we here in the first place, in this godforsaken wasteland of nightmares, magic and emptiness? I’d always been so certain there had to be a reason for all of it, for all of us. Now I could no longer be quite so sure.

  I pictured Lenore laughing in her filthy little sex palace…

  We are parlor tricks.

  Dead flies falling all around her…

  Rumors whispered in the rain…in darkness…

  As she opened her legs and lived out her depraved fairy tales…

  Actors performing in empty theaters…

  “If the woman I’m looking for is here, where would she—”

  “If she passed through at night, there’s a chance she’s alive,” he interrupted, battling another gurgling coughing fit. “If she was still here in the light, she’s dead.”

  A strange rumbling sound cut the silence as the city trembled beneath my feet. In the distance, through the darkness, enormous bursts of white smoke suddenly appeared from a pair of stacks several blocks away. By far the tallest pieces of architecture in the city, they towered above the streets like giant sentries come to life, growling and spitting their dreams across a city that was sure to follow.

  “The machines,” the old man said ominously, “they’re awake.”

  I took my cigarettes from my pocket, lit one and handed it to him. “Others will be coming,” I told him. “More of my kind, and they’ll be looking for me, understand?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t see nothing, friend.” Greedily drawing on the cigarette, he grimaced, then hacked out a cloud of smoke. “But go. Now, while you still can. You have no idea what they do to strangers here.”

  In the windows of what I had assumed was an abandoned building across the street, faces emerged. Faces with leathery, reptilian-like skin, hair like straw and the blackest eyes I had ever seen—no irises, only cold black orbs staring at me—they watched and waited.

  “For God’s sake, son,” the old man said. “Go.”

  With the night slowly burning away, and the legendary city of Photas coming alive all around me, I turned and hobbled for the car.

  10

  Even in fear, in danger, and in violence, the world was barren, void of what it was to be truly alive. A living world, as it were, didn’t exist here. It never had. In its place, there was only the primal, a reality in tatters. Tangled in the same webs that always imprisoned me, the same obsessions that had lorded over and driven me for as long as my memories existed, I barreled through the streets of Photas.

  As daylight continued to gradually pierce the darkness, the inhabitants of the city awakened en masse, like pieces of a larger organism, a greater single consciousness. Suddenly those hideous scaled faces were everywhere, their black eyes staring at me from windows and doorways, alleys and rooftops. Human, and yet…

  I took the next corner at high speed, pulling onto a long boulevard, tires screeching as the car skidded to the side before I was able to correct it. Once I had, I shot forward, pushing my old car harder than I had a right to as a wave of city dwellers emerged from buildings on either side of me and rushed into the street. Swerving back and forth, I managed to avoid the first several, who ran into my path without any regard for their safety, single-minded in their goal to prevent my escape, most waving about planks of wood or machetes, some even sporting rifles.

  By the time I’d reached the end of the next street there were even more of them, their leathery faces and onyx eyes coming at me through the dying night and darting out from every direction as they swarmed from buildings and alleyways, emptying into the streets like a hive of agitated insects. Beyond the thudding of my heart, I heard an eerie and horrifying high-pitched shriek, and realized it was coming from them as they rushed the car. A war cry, perhaps, or some means of communication. I couldn’t be sure which, and didn’t care. I stomped the gas and rocketed straight for the growing crowd of Night Sleepers, certain they’d save themselves and move out of the way.

  They didn’t.

  I plowed straight through them, their bodies bouncing up and over the hood. One, and then another, rolled and crashed into the windshield before falling away into what darkness still remained, while two others vanished beneath the hood, the car bouncing, tilting and shaking as I ran over their bodies, the mangled remains in my rearview sprawled in the street. I dragged another nearly a block before he finally fell free and rolled toward the gutter, swallowed by shadows as he bounced away in a cartwheel-like tumble.

  The car sputtered and coughed as I took another corner and finally found the way out. I could see the highway and the slowly changing sky awaiting me, stretched out over endless miles of wasteland.

  Speeding from the city, I hit the wipers, cleared the cracked windshield of blood and other debris, then checked my rearview again. No trace of the Night Sleepers.

  The car sputtered again, so I slowed my speed and gave the dashboard a reassuring pat. The old girl owed me nothing.

  When I’d been on the highway for several minutes, and hadn’t seen any sign of the Night Sleepers, I finally began to relax. They wanted to tear me limb from limb for crossing into their territory, but evidently not enough to venture this far beyond their beloved city of light.

  I lit a cigarette and smoked it, trying t
o purge the visions of lizard skin and black eyes from my mind. Horrific, what the light did to them. I never thought I would, but I missed the city—mine, not theirs—the comfort of its familiar darkness, its streets and alleys I knew so well, its inhabitants, the neon and blood and cum.

  Visions of the Night Sleepers were replaced by Joey the Creep vaulting backward off a roof in a spray of blood after I’d shot him in the face.

  The evil you know.

  The more daylight began to win, the better I could see. In fact, I could see for miles. The highway lay stretched out before me, the distant horizon offering nothing but empty wasteland, until something emerged from the scrub brush and otherwise flat landscape. A tree, perhaps sixty yards or so from the side of the road, it stood alone and out of place in the wilderness. Long dead, its branches were gnarled and bare and reached for the sky like the hand of a dead giant.

  I slowed the car and pulled over, leaving the highway and driving carefully over the rough terrain. Once behind the tree, I parked, and with a weary sigh, climbed out of the car.

  Exhausted, hungry and feeling sick, I gazed back down at the stretch of road from which I’d come. It remained empty, with no sign of my pursuers or anyone else.

  By the time I’d finished my smoke, the night was almost gone.

  My nerves had leveled off, so I removed my coat, climbed into the backseat of the car, locked the doors and covered myself, pulling the coat up over my face.

  Then I closed my eyes and drifted away, hopeful I could escape the daylight and sleep straight through to night without incident.

  * * *

  “What about our dreams?”

  I roll over and look into her eyes. In candlelight, she’s more beautiful than ever, lying there next to me on her side, nude, with her hair draped across her face and down along her delicate shoulders, head resting on hands set palm-to-palm and flat against the mattress.

  “What about them?” I ask.

  Rather than answer, she stays quiet. The sound of a delicate rain hitting the building and tapping the windows fills the silence of our tiny apartment, as my eyes drift past her, over her shoulder to the desk and chair on the far wall. My weapons, still in various holsters, are draped across the chair, hanging there like the discarded tools of destruction they are.

  “They don’t exist,” she says.

  “I dream.”

  “No. You don’t. And I don’t either. None of us do.”

  I think about this a moment. It doesn’t seem possible. Everyone dreams. Don’t they? I try to remember one, but can’t. Yet I feel as though I dream, as though I have.

  “It’s not possible here,” she says. “Not for us.”

  And then it comes to me…the dream about her on the beach with the others. I don’t tell her about it right away. Instead, I wait, and try to remember as much of it as I can. “I dream,” I tell her again. “I dream about you.”

  Julia smiles. “Of course you do. But it’s not real.”

  “I remember it. Doesn’t that make it real?”

  “You only think you remember it,” she says.

  “I dreamed about you on a beach, near an ocean. It had to be a dream. Those things don’t exist in the real world.”

  “Maybe they do. Maybe everything we think we know is a lie. Just like our memories, maybe it’s all bullshit.”

  I look deep into her eyes and try to see beyond the beauty that mesmerizes me. There is a soul behind them, I’m sure of it, and in that moment, I need to see that part of her, that depth. I need to know it exists, because if it exists in her, then maybe it exists in me too. “You shouldn’t say things like that,” I tell her softly. “Thinking like that and about these sorts of things only leads to trouble.”

  “Just accept,” she says, sarcastically reciting the law. “Do not question.”

  “There has to be order, Julia. Without order there’s only chaos.”

  She raises her head, looking at me as if I’m a stranger. Perhaps just then, I am. “You think this is order?”

  I lie flat on my back and stare at the ceiling, studying cracks in the plaster. From a beautifully intricate web in the corner, a black spider emerges, crawling sluggishly closer. I wonder if it knows what it is, where it is. Or does it wonder the same of us?

  In the nights just before she runs, Julia is more distant than usual. The closer I get to her, the farther away she seems, and this rainy night is no different. All I want to do is hold her and tell her how much I love her, to lose myself in her and everything she means to me. But she won’t allow it.

  “Do you remember your parents?” she asks.

  I try not to be too obvious about it, but I look over at the old framed photographs on my desk. A black-and-white version of my mother and father stare back at me, posed formally, my mother seated with my father standing behind her, hands resting gently on her shoulders. My father was a stern man and a strict disciplinarian I was never close to. My mother, Gideon, though sometimes aloof, is loving and attentive. “Of course I do,” I answer. “I remember lots of things.”

  “Like your childhood?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your puppy?”

  “You know I don’t like to talk about that.” I don’t like to think about the dog I had as a child because it upsets me. Sometimes when I’m alone, the memories even make me cry. I loved my dog and I miss him terribly. Whenever I think of him, I remember how sad his eyes looked whenever I had to leave, and how excited he was when I returned. I remember when he grew old and died in my arms.

  “Have you ever listened to the stories about the world of light?” Julia asks. “I mean really listened.”

  “No such place exists. Not for us.”

  “What if it does?”

  “It doesn’t. It’s just fairy tales.”

  “What about the others? What about their world?”

  “We’re not of that world, but this one.”

  “Maybe it’s all one world,” she says.

  The spider begins to descend on its web, dropping from the ceiling and slowly coming closer.

  I reach over to the nightstand and grab my lighter. When the spider is within reach, I spark the flame and hold it up beneath the creature. It senses the heat, immediately recoils and glides back up to the ceiling. After a moment, it slowly returns to its web in the corner, and the safety it has no choice but to believe it represents.

  And I know exactly how it feels.

  * * *

  I came awake suddenly, but remained still. Instinct told me I was no longer alone. Slowly, I peeked out from behind my coat and allowed a moment for my eyes to adjust. I couldn’t see anything beyond the windows, as night had returned, but I could hear the faint shuffling of feet outside the car, and a low murmur of whispers.

  The doors were locked, so I had the option of quickly climbing back over into the front seat, then starting the car and getting the hell out of there, but I could tell from the nearby sounds that whoever or whatever had converged on my car had not come alone. There was no way to know for sure how many were out there, so I gripped the shotgun on my leg and slowly pulled it free.

  In a single motion, I sat up, threw the coat aside and pushed open the car door. As I slid forward onto my feet and into the darkness, a flurry of movement exploded all around me, and in my peripheral vision, I saw the sparks and undulating flames from torches. I leveled the shotgun at the flames, then panned over to the shadows. Those within them scurried about, circling me.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  I nearly fired into the night, but then something small broke through the darkness, moving slowly into the light cast from the interior of the car. A little girl—no more than five or six—with a dirty face and hands, her strawberry blonde hair long and mussed, matted and in need of a thorough scrubbing, she was barefoot and clad in a worn and badly faded flowery dress. Behind the little waif I saw others, peering at me through the darkness with sad little eyes, and beyond them, others still, a bit older,
holding torches.

  I lowered the gun, but held it down against my side rather than return it to the holster. “Who are you?” I asked the little girl, my voice groggy and still escaping sleep.

  She cocked her head and looked at me as if she weren’t quite sure what to make of me. “I’m Amy,” she said in a tiny sweet voice. “What’s your name?”

  “Monk,” I said.

  “That’s a funny name. Like monkey? I’ve never seen a real monkey. I don’t know if I would like monkeys. They’re cute but kind of scary too, don’t you think?”

  More children emerged from the shadows. Their bright and flaming torches better illuminated the area and allowed me to see that deeper in the darkness behind them there were even more children. Most of the torchbearers were older, eleven or twelve, from the look. That was the cutoff. Except for when they were working, children twelve and under were segregated and kept together, while those thirteen and older were considered young adults and lived among the general population.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amy said softly. “I can’t count that high yet.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Are you lost?”

  “Not exactly, I…” I quickly wiped my eyes. “Do all of you live here?”

  “Back there,” Amy said, pointing behind her. “Down in the valley.”

  An older boy pushed through the others, his face filthy and his hair as badly matted as Amy’s. All these children looked horribly unkempt and less than healthy, but this one in particular had an air about him that made me nervous. He moved and held himself with more confidence than seemed warranted given his slight build. Worse, he had a rifle in his hands. I looked beyond him to the others, and realized he wasn’t the only one holding a gun. Christ, I thought, the little fuckers are packed.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.