Harbinger

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Wow… we walked far.”

  He leaned forward, arms at his sides, and flew toward the PAC, grinning with eagerness at the prospect of soon finding his mother and getting the heck out of the Beneath. She’d told him enough about it down there to make it sound like an astral sensitive didn’t have much to worry about. Plenty of spirits roamed the abandoned under-city who were willing to look out for a lost kid. However, his friends had no ability to see ghosts, nor had they heard his mother describe living down there for two years.

  Then again, she also said something really bad happened that made her run to the surface to get away, but wouldn’t tell him exactly what. He figured someone crazy tried to kill her.

  All the time he’d spent flying around out here with his mother in astral form allowed him to easily recognize the layout of the PAC complex and dive in the window nearest her squad room. He cruised down an immaculate white hallway, slaloming between people even though he didn’t really have to. More than half of them paused to look around, sensing his energy but lacking any ability to see him.

  Evan’s heart sank when he found her desk empty. Only Captain Eze remained in his office, as usual, working on his terminal. He flew in anyway, hovering over the desk, and shouted, “Captain Ezzeh?”

  The man didn’t look up from the screen. “Hello, Sergeant Marsh… if that’s you. If not, hello whoever you are.”

  “You can sense I’m here but can’t see me.” Evan sighed. “Where’s Mom?”

  Captain Eze didn’t react.

  Evan floated back to his mother’s desk and waved at her terminal, but the screens ignored him. The wall clock announced the time as 6:08 p.m., so she must’ve gotten stuck on a case. She should’ve been off work by now. He didn’t think she went home, since she wouldn’t have left him at the school.

  She could be out there looking for me already. If she tried to call me, it would’ve gone right to vidmail.

  He raced out of the squad room, checking door after door on the way down the hall. More offices, a cube farm, and a shower area all showed no sign of his mother. He spotted Nicole in an autoshower and floated up to her. Of course, she couldn’t see him and continued singing to herself while the machine covered her in soap foam.

  Sighing, Evan glided into the wall and went up two floors to the combat simulation and training room. Sometimes, his mother went there to learn fighting stuff. He stuck his head out of the wall, peering around at the various cushioned beds and giant neural interface rigs for people without M3 implants. Still, no sign of Mom.

  Gotta be an emergency.

  A faint sense of danger rose up, the same sort of nagging worry he used to experience all the time when he projected to avoid Mick’s beating. The man had usually been so drunk he kept on hitting him anyway despite his body appearing dead. If not for his Accelerated Healing ability, the man might well have killed him. At the time, he didn’t really understand why he got better so fast, but the Division 0 techs had explained he could make his body repair itself thousands of times faster than normal. His mother always cried whenever someone implied having that power is the only reason he’d survived Asshole’s beatings.

  Evan smirked. Walt or Shawn are probably messing with me.

  Disregarding the notion that someone tampered with his body, he glided back to the shower room and floated up to Nicole’s tube.

  “Hey!” He waved both hands. “Do you know where my mom went?”

  A woman and three guys started looking around, no doubt reacting to the sense of paranormal energy in the air. They didn’t look at him, and Nicole didn’t react at all, lost to her singing. Evan stuck his finger into the plastic cylinder and wrote ‘help’ in the fog, but Nicole didn’t notice it. Thinking of Theodore, he narrowed his eyes and reached an arm into the shower, attempting to tickle the woman’s side.

  Nicole screamed like someone poured ice down her back, and spun. “Which one of you assholes did that?”

  Everyone else in the room looked at her with varying degrees of confusion. Nicole glared at them, probably checking surface thoughts. She relaxed, went from angry to confused, and rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, one of Kirsten’s ghosties is playing with me I bet. Is that you, Theodore? That’s the one who messes with people in the shower, right?”

  He poked his finger into the tube again to try writing in the fog, but the feeling that his meat body was in serious danger grew stronger than it had ever been. Worried, Evan grabbed the silver thread emerging from between his eyes and concentrated on the want to go back right away.

  The world blurred into a smear of color along with a sensation of falling backward at high speed.

  He landed hard on his back, as if he’d fallen a few stories and came down on a big padded mattress. Grit and wood bits crunched beneath him, poking into his skin. A breeze washing over his front told him all his clothes were missing. An awful smell somewhere between burnt meat and roadkill surrounded him.

  Something had gone really wrong.

  At a whiff of strong alcohol, Evan opened his eyes, staring up at an older man in a grungy olive-drab coat poised to pour the contents of a giant red can onto him. He locked stares with the man, who froze statue still, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  Evan lifted his head, gazing down at his naked body laid upon a bed of kindling and ash inside a large black metal tub. Rough edges around the rim suggested it had once been a tank someone cut in half, big enough for a grown man to lay down in. He looked back to the old man and peeked at his thoughts. The elder wept over what he assumed to be a dead little boy, and prepared to pour ethanol over the body so they could cremate him. Oh, crap. They think I’m dead!

  He sat up fast, waving his arms. “Stop! I’m not dead! Don’t burn me!”

  “Yeaaargh!” screamed the man. He staggered backward and collapsed, clutching his chest.

  The big can hit the ground with a slosh, clear liquid gurgling out of it.

  “Uh oh.” Evan grabbed the rim of the metal tub and jumped out, rushing over to pull the huge can upright before too much of the flammable stuff splashed out of it.

  The older man gawped at him, clutching his chest, then passed out.

  “Ugh. This is nasty.” Evan brushed at the white ash coating him while looking around at the fenced-in backyard of a decaying house. Tiny bits of wood stuck to his back, butt, and legs.

  A handful of LED bricks hanging from a wire overhead illuminated the yard in wobbling light. Firewood had been stacked into a sizable pile near the fence opposite the rear wall of the former home. No grass remained alive, reducing the yard to a simple dirt lot littered with broken patio furniture. He’d climbed out of a large tank of quarter-inch-thick metal, blackened by frequent fire. It gave off a strong sense of residual energy due to its role with the dead, though no spirits lingered anywhere in sight. Beside the burn vessel stood a beat up picnic table. Smears in the dust coating it suggested where he’d been set on top of it. A plastic bag nearby appeared to hold all his stuff. He figured the old man didn’t want to waste useful clothing by burning it along with a dead kid.

  I’m not dead… and crap! Those people found us!

  Evan bit his lip, trying not to panic. That feeling of someone messing with his body hadn’t been his friends doing dumb stuff. It must’ve come from these people poking and prodding him to ‘make sure’ he was dead, or carrying him back to the settlement, or maybe the old man peeling him out of his clothes. Not until the guy prepared to cover him in alcohol and light him on fire did the ‘alarm’ really go off.

  “Hank? You okay?” shouted a man inside the house.

  Crap!

  Evan darted to the table, grabbed the plastic bag containing his stuff, and sprinted for the fence. He climb-jumped over it mere seconds before several adults entered the yard, likely having heard the man scream. The suburban street behind the property looked deserted—and dark—but it made sense that the place where the primitive settlers burned bodies would be isolated from the rest of the tow
n.

  After activating Darksight, he streaked for a block and a half before running up a hilly front yard, brittle dead grass crackling under his feet. He jumped an ancient lawn mower and raced around the side of the house. No one had yelled at him, so he felt reasonably confident he’d escaped without being seen. About midway down the length of the house, he ducked behind an old central air machine and sat on the dirt, cringing at the layer of oily ash all over his body. Despite it being October, the Beneath remained warm enough that he didn’t shiver despite wearing only a layer of ash. Or maybe adrenaline kept him warm.

  “Eww. I’m covered in dead guy.”

  He stood again, brushing and swatting at himself for a few minutes until he got the last of the wood fragments, then pulled his clothes out of the bag and got dressed. The older guy who’d prepared him for cremation hadn’t stolen anything… even his NetMini remained. He smirked at it.

  “That guy wouldn’t even know what this is.”

  Since the device still showed a ‘no signal’ error, he stuffed it in his pocket.

  Mom’s out on a call. She’ll go back to the squad room. Or, she’ll try to find me and freak out. “I can’t just sit here… The others probably got captured.”

  Evan stood. “I gotta help them escape first.”

  He crept to the end of the wall and peered out. People swarmed around a house in the distance that appeared focused and in color as opposed to the wavering sepia-toned everything else. He figured it for the place he’d been taken for burning. No one looked in his direction at least, but they had to realize he hadn’t died. It didn’t seem likely they’d insist on burning him alive—people just didn’t do that sort of thing to other people, especially little kids—so he didn’t fear being caught as much as he considered it potentially annoying.

  Of course, other than running the risk of being mistaken for dead again, he could always project and go searching for his mother even if captured. Jeff, the ghost, didn’t think the settlers would hurt them. Any reasonable adult wouldn’t let nine-year-olds run around a dangerous area alone. Then again, ‘reasonable’ adults also didn’t think they rode on a giant spaceship after Earth had been destroyed.

  He raced across the street, went down two blocks, and turned left, heading back in the general direction of where he woke up. As soon as he entered an area awash in color, he turned off Darksight. Glowing eyes would definitely give him away as odd. In the dim light, old cars, dead bushes, and trash cans offered convenient hiding places that allowed him to explore the settlement without drawing too much attention to himself. Not like the real world worked the same way as video games—the town didn’t have a bunch of ‘guards’ who all somehow magically knew he’d done something wrong and would come after him on sight.

  A few people spotted him, though other than curious stares at his clean (ish) modern clothing, they regarded him as just some kid running around playing. He moved from hiding spot to hiding spot, pausing after crawling under a centuries-old pickup truck to wait for an opening. The street ahead had too many people at the moment, and he feared someone would grab him.

  No one here wore anything even remotely similar to his clothing. The few other kids he noticed didn’t have much beyond scraps of material hanging like loincloths from belts of old electrical cords. Some of the adults wore similar garments, ponchos made from tarps, or togas that had probably once been bed sheets. A few settlers of varying ages wore nothing more than dirt. It reminded him of the way his doser of a birth mom would lay around the house all the time naked. When she hadn’t been passed out, she’d been too lazy to do anything more than sit there inhaling chems—and she’d sold most of their clothes for extra credits to get high. She once tried to sell off some of Mick’s stuff, and he’d slapped the hell out of her for it.

  At the time his real mom found him, the entirety of his possessions consisted of the single pair of briefs he’d had on. Safely hidden on his belly under an old pickup truck, Evan lost a few minutes crying. Back then, barely eating, barely having clothes, freezing every night, living in the constant fear that Mick would hit him just a little too hard one time had been life. It hadn’t seemed all that bad until his new mom showed him how it was supposed to be. If he didn’t project that night and play with the dog in that cyberware shop, he never would’ve met his mom.

  Fair chance he might not even still be alive.

  Wanting to hug her, but being trapped down here made his tears worse, though he dared not make a sound for fear of being caught. These people would probably come over to check on a crying kid, see his modern clothes, and realize he didn’t belong.

  I gotta get us out of here.

  He tried his best to put aside his need for his mother by telling himself over and over that these people, though primitive and ignorant, wouldn’t hurt him. The worst they’d do is keep him here and not let him leave. But… that couldn’t stop his astral form. First, though, he needed to find his friends.

  When the street cleared of people, he crawled out from under the truck and ran to the next ancient vehicle, a smallish car. Its tires had rotted, making the space underneath too narrow for him to crawl in, so he hid behind it. Dull, repetitive clacking drew his attention to the right. He pushed off the car and crept up to a wooden fence. Brighter than average light glowed on the other side from two big LED lamps. Evan figured they had somehow tapped into a power line from the city overhead, mistaking it for the ‘space ship.’ The intermittent clacking continued, so he grabbed the top of the fence and pulled himself up enough to peek over.

  Two pale boys a little older than him, one wearing a skirt of blue plastic tarp, the other nothing, engaged in a sword fight with wooden blades. Three other kids, a small boy, and two pale tween girls, all clad in wire belts with dangling scraps of plastic or metal for loincloths, watched intently from nearby while an adult man in a pink tarp toga with a frizzy tan beard scooted around the combatants like a referee during a fight in Gee-ball. Only, he didn’t try to break it up, rather shouted tips and pointers. The girl with lighter hair also had a bloody nose, though she didn’t appear bothered by it. She’d even drawn ‘war paint’ lines on her chest in her own blood.

  The two boys swinging at each other circled, measuring their attacks and defenses. Neither appeared angry, more like students learning how to fight.

  A dented hubcap on the ground nearby with some wires hanging off it suggested the boy with nothing on had lost his ‘loincloth’ to a low blow. Evan squirmed in discomfort at the idea of wearing a hubcap. He also had no interest in watching sword training.

  He dropped down and ran onward.

  Not long after the clonk, clonk, clonk of practice swords striking each other faded into the distance, Maela’s shout of “You’re not listening!” caught his ear.

  Evan squeezed past a gap in another broken wooden fence three houses away from the combat school and stopped short, waving his arms for balance while teetering at the edge of a drained swimming pool he almost didn’t notice in the dark. Falling eight feet into a dry concrete pit full of junk would suck. He skirted around it and headed for the gap between houses.

  Walter yelled something he couldn’t quite make out, but the sound led him one yard left to a lit window with bars. He couldn’t tell if the current settlers had bolted a cage around the outside of the window or if it had been there from long ago… however, someone had turned a bedroom into a jail. Then again, all the ground-floor windows of the house had them, so maybe whoever lived here centuries ago wanted to keep people out.

  He crept up to the window, which had no glass left, grasped the lowest horizontal bar, and pulled himself up, bracing his left foot on a central air unit, his right against a dead bush. His friends occupied a small room, its plain white door closed and probably locked. One small light bulb hung from an exposed wire near the middle of the ceiling, clearly added by unskilled hands more recently. Shawn reclined on a cot along the right side of the room while Maela paced around in the middle. Walter sat on the ed
ge of another cot on the left, looking glum.

  “Guys,” said Evan. “What happened?”

  “Shit!” Maela ran to the window. “They thought you were dead. They didn’t believe us!”

  “Yeah. They almost burned me.”

  Shawn got up and walked over. “What’s all that white crap on your face?”

  “Umm… ashes. Probably dead people. Why are you guys in jail?”

  “Eww.” Maela squirmed.

  “We tried to get away,” said Shawn. “Almost made it.”

  “They found us in the van.” Walter tapped his sneakers together. “They don’t want us running off alone, so they locked us in here until they figure out what family we join.”

  “This place is so backward.” Maela grabbed her head in both hands. “Like some of them aren’t even wearing clothes.”

  “Yeah.” Shawn laughed. “They keep looking at us like we’re from outer space because we’re wearing ‘alien uniforms.’”

  Evan rolled his eyes. “Yeah… they really think the Earth blew up.”

  “Is your mom coming?” asked Shawn. “Did you find her?”

  “Not yet. I think she’s out on a call. I had to come back fast ’cause some guy was about to light me on fire.” He looked at the bars, a ‘cage’ that had been bolted into the house from outside. “I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  “How?” Maela reached out and wiped her hand at his face. “Eww. I can’t believe I’m touching dead person, but you’re filthy. And the door is locked. You’re not gonna be able to steal the key or convince them to let us go. You’re just a kid, too. You’ll wind up in here with us.”

  “So?” asked Evan. “Even if they catch me, I can still project and get Mom.”

  “They’ll think you died again.” Walter shook his head. “You should go hide somewhere they won’t find you. That way you can fly around as long as it takes to find her.”