Terrified, he turned to face the advancing creature. She slowly swung through the air towards him, still in the first car, suspended off of the ground and floating slowly onwards. As she passed them, the windowpanes shattered on either side of her, and the metal handrails still fixed in place bent and snapped. The wind seemed to rush around him deafeningly, and somewhere within all of the scratching, Nolan could hear a lullaby, softly sung by a cackling female voice. It was coming from the apparition, as much as the chaotic head that snapped and twisted around was grossly incapable of singing any such thing, all the time trailing a fountain of gore.
She passed into the same carriage as Nolan, immediately staining the insides around her with the same ruin as had been in the previous one. Like cancer it grew, reaching outwards.
As she drew closer Nolan realised that there was no way out of the ghastly and hateful lair, deep in the bowels of the Earth. He could not fight her, of course. He didn’t know where he would even begin. She continued her inexorable advance, an incorporeal being floating through obstructions unhindered. Nolan’s vision grew dimmer as she drew closer still, and the scratching noises threatened to overwhelm him. The lullaby was a strained death rattle in a dead throat, all malice.
He screamed, the sound lost to the surrounding vortex and the destruction fast rushing towards him. The apparition’s hair billowed around her, and the shadow she cast seemed to envelop all that she passed, the carriage behind her fading into the void.
They will not notice you so easily when you are not under the lights. If ever you want to hide from them, abandon the light and do so in the darkness. You would do well to take note of that if there is a next time.
Horrified, Nolan turned his back to her as talons reached for him, inches away. There really was only one chance.
He jumped free, free of the carriage, free of the spell and embraced the darkness of the tunnel as it swallowed him whole. He heard an inhuman banshee shriek, a long keening wail of pure malevolence that rang in his ears over and over, fading as he fell unnaturally slow, as if weightless in water.
Then he remembered no more.
With a great rasping breath, Nolan woke face down in gravel, tiny grains of sand and dirt sticking to his face and digging into the soft skin of his hands. Eyes not truly open, all that filtered across his vision was bright white, causing him to shut them again quickly lest he were blinded. Behind his eyelids, the brightness still coloured his sight. He opened them partially, slowly allowing them to adjust and feeling the stones that stuck to his skin fall off as he moved.
Surprisingly, Nolan didn’t appear to have any real injuries from the ordeal. Like all things that had happened to him in the last few hours, it was already beginning to seem impossibly hard to recall properly. Events from another lifetime maybe. If that were true, Nolan wondered how many he might have lived.
There had been a time before the time he lived in, which only came to him in vague memories. They seemed more like segments of another person’s mind though, different than anything he knew and entirely impossible to fit into any sort of context. None of them seemed real or familiar at all, as if they belonged to another person. Then the early days during and after the sundering – Nolan remembered none of them, despite the fact that he must have lived through it, to exist as he did. It was simple sequential logic. In truth, he couldn’t recall actually meeting with another person at all since the sundering, other than the stranger and the man at the subway platform.
Does that seem strange?
Nolan tried to consider the question, but he was apparently too dazed to do so, as his thoughts were sluggish and difficult. He gave up, deciding that it would be better to concentrate on his surroundings. At least he didn’t sense that he was in any danger, for all that seemed to change quickly in the place.
Where am I? He had to keep moving, had to return her to–
With a start that dislodged yet more stones, he realised that he didn’t know where the girl was.
He wondered if she had been left on the train with the apparition.
Fear overtook him, even more visceral than his own mortal terror had been. If she were still on the train, then he couldn’t protect her, with no idea how to return. Panicked, he looked up, and felt a wave of relief as her image floated into view.
A hand reached down and she stroked his hair comfortingly. He smiled at her, and she shot a triumphant grin back.
He knew then where they must be, and that everything was going to be fine.
VI. Extinction
The Apartments, the Night of the Great Sundering
He had landed in a pile of garbage, a pile of stinking black refuse sacks left outside when the bins themselves had overflowed. Head groggy and muddled, Nolan couldn’t tell how long he had lain there. He ached all over from cuts and bruises too numerous to try and count, one big lump of damaged, battered meat.
A long piece of the ladder pierced his skin underneath his ribs, sticking several inches into his flesh. When he pulled it out with hands slippery from the blood, the jagged edges caught, tearing him open inside even more. A long stream of dark, infected blood followed the sharp metal and left him gasping and doubled over, clutching himself whilst he waited for the agony to subside.
He passed out again.
When Nolan woke this time, consciousness slowly returning to him, his body felt numb rather than painful. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Nolan registered that feeling was probably a very bad thing. Pain would have been welcome, made him feel that he was still alive.
Not like Mellissa.
Her pale face swam up from his memory, screaming with eyes wide in terror. He tried to suppress it back down again, unable to stop his eyes from welling up.
I couldn’t have done anything, could I? Or is that just an excuse? If he could only have reached her ankle sooner, climbed that fraction of a second faster.
They had talked about spending their lives together, of raising a family.
Not anymore. She was gone, and the world was dying around him.
Nolan stumbled free from his sitting position, his makeshift throne of garbage. King for a day, loser for the rest of his lifetime. He didn’t think it would be a long one that he had left. The skies were still the same bloody red, staining the heavens. The rain at least had stopped for the time being. It lay in congealing puddles in the dips and recesses of the floor, running in the cracks between the paving tiles, and dripped from the guttering. The alley was like being on the inside of a hellish abattoir. All that was missing were the carcasses suspended from hooks.
At the entrance, he found the remains of the woman that he had seen dragged whilst he watched, helpless at his window. Already, he missed that fleeting sense of false safety he’d had at the start. She didn’t look much like anything anymore, just a visceral mess on the ground, a few scraps of torn flesh, hair and gristle. Nolan staggered over to the nearest wall and vomited as the horror of the situation overcame him.
Mankind would turn extinct this evening.
Wiping his mouth with the cuff of his coat, and still tasting the foul bile in the back of his throat, he tried to walk in a straight line out of the alley. Carefully, he picked his way past the gore and the bloody puddles, eyes peeled for any unusual movement. He stood just yards away from the spot where he had watched the people as they were massacred. He couldn’t resist moving closer to the main entrance, left arm instinctually still pressed to his bleeding wound.
The severed arm, still attached to the hand that was jammed stuck in the glass of the door, protruded comically and was crusted with old blood. If it hadn’t been so deadly serious, Nolan would have chuckled. As it was, he almost did, light-headed from his own blood loss. Inside he saw that the two men hadn’t made it far. Pink and red stained skeletal shapes lay, broken on the stairwell, limbs all facing the wrong directions or simply missing. Like the woman in the alley, their fate was sealed long before they gave the devils their way into the buil
ding.
The whole block of apartments was lost. The fire had consumed most of the floors above the ground level, and had spread to the next building over. Inside, he could still hear the occasional noises of the creatures moving around, cackling to themselves. Out in the grounds, the remnants of several of the tenants Nolan had called his friends were scattered around, carelessly discarded to rot beneath the skies. It was a pitiful scene. Turning away, Nolan fled, half running, half stumbling from everything he knew and into the night.
The city was no better, worse even. He wandered through the streets, in the middle of the road, his uncertain feet leading him zig-zagging from pillar to post. Through bleary eyes that stung painfully from the smoke and tears, he saw that some of the other buildings were ablaze, others just smashed open. Sparkling in the firelight, glass lay everywhere.
He didn’t see a single whole body, just odd pieces, or corpses so mutilated that he could barely identify them as human at all. Once he heard crying from one of the buildings, sounding like it could have belonged to a child. He’d started moving towards it, before it was suddenly silenced by a wet gurgle.
Whatever fate had visited itself upon them was indiscriminate and very thorough. Nothing, it seemed, was to be spared.
Nolan didn’t have any idea where he was leading himself. He definitely needed medical attention for his wound, that much was certain. Desperately thirsty for water, his throat burned and his breath stank of his own acrid puke. Some inbuilt determination kept him upright and unthinkingly walking ever onwards.
He fell to his knees at the water’s edge and lapped at the dirty liquid not meant for human consumption. It was precious, golden nectar, and he scooped it up into his cupped hands greedily like a starving man in a desert. It still tasted good, however disgusting it might have seemed once upon a time, and Nolan had already realised he was dying. There was a strange sort of relief in that, a burden lifted from him, as though he no longer needed to concern himself with trivial things anymore, such as not drinking water from a stagnant lake.
He didn’t know how he had gotten where he was. He and Mellissa had walked through the park many times before in the past, especially during their early years. They had shared their first kiss over in the pavilion, looking up at the fireworks during the 4th of July celebrations. He almost knew the layout by heart, not that it was of any importance anymore.
Mellissa. She was the one thing that stung him back into the world, a sharp spike of pain that cut through the other suffering that had rendered him immutable. Every time he told himself not to dwell on her, forced himself to think of something else, or just kept a blank mind devoid of thoughts at all. If what the priests had said was true, they’d meet again soon enough anyhow.
Losing his balance and falling backwards on the grass, Nolan looked up at the city. The park was on a natural hill overlooking many of the districts, and from where he sat he could survey much of it. It was a hellish wasteland, a broken shell of burnt and collapsed buildings, rising clouds of heavy smoke and undersides still lit by flames that licked ever higher. Strange howls and roars filled the distant air as the devils feasted upon mankind. In the skies, the black shapes with immense wings circled and dived, huge since they had gorged themselves on humanity.
Lightning still struck on the horizon, farther away since the storm moved on to devastate a new place, this one long since dead. His eyes were drawn to the grand support bridge on the city outskirts, the flashes of light illuminating the structure and revealing that the end had shorn clean off, leaving no contact with the other side.
”Why?” Nolan croaked, asking anybody that might still be listening. Even the wind neglected to reply, the air around him still, no traces of even the slightest breeze. He was utterly alone and abandoned.
There was, instead, a great rumbling as the ground beneath him shook. It had happened before as he had travelled along, tripping him over and confusing him, but from his vantage point, what was happening became evident. The earthquakes destroyed buildings as the whole world shook, structures falling in on themselves and driving great plumes of dust up into the air as fissures tore the earth apart and gouged holes in the planet.
In its aftermath there was a monstrous exhalation, a great rapture as many demonic voices rose together in savage, bestial triumph. Even from the distance, their cries made Nolan’s skin crawl.
He lay there mourning for some time, passing in and out of lucid thought. The grass prickled the palms of his hands and his eyes drooped dangerously. His blinking became laboriously slow, his breaths ragged, deep, and more measured.
He had to move at least a little before his time came, he decided.
Half crawling on his knees, half pushing himself forward with his hands, Nolan made his way to his final resting place, leaving the ravaged world lost behind him.
VII. Revelations
The Aftermath in the Ruined City, Date Unknown
Grey ash rained through the open skies overhead, tiny flakes fluttering on a gentle breeze. Where they landed on the ground, they began to pile up, coating the floor in a dusty charcoal. Nolan wondered whether it was akin to walking through a fiery building, and expected to see accompanying embers any minute.
The girl made a sound that might have been a giggle at the notion. It made Nolan’s own smile wider.
A burning white brightness remained above. It could have been the sun, although Nolan didn’t think it so. It was cold to the touch, casting no warmth where it struck. He kept walking without direction, unable to see any landmarks through the combination of the brightness and the falling ash. One foot in front of another and then again, driven by a compulsion that he was going in the right direction somehow. Nolan despaired that he couldn’t have explained his confidence, even if he’d had someone to try and share the understanding with.
There never was any landmark, the only clue to his whereabouts the soil and stony gravel under his feet. Occasional pale shadows of other figures passed Nolan by as he travelled. Some were huge, hulking creatures, quadrupeds and bipedal both, impossibly gargantuan and primordial. Others were either man sized or smaller, like dogs or cats. He could never manage more than a glimpse of any of them, the images fading into the distance if he turned his gaze directly in their direction. One had looked like a man, and Nolan had shouted to the shape across the fine ashen veil. It had been useless, his own voice reflecting back to him.
There was no concept of time. He could have walked for hours, days or years, without any appreciable value by which to measure it. Nolan’s watch had broken long since, its face cracked and hands seized in time at the moment of the timepiece’s failure. He probably should have stopped wearing it long ago. Eventually, the brightness from above began to dim, and the ash flakes lessened.
The ground underfoot was mostly all soil, dried and baked somehow, a fine layer of dusty brown dirt. There were patches of dead grass here and there, tickling his ankles when Nolan walked through it. He knew himself to be within the boundaries of the park, despite not having walked under the proud arches he remembered leading in, or past the painted signs.
Where do I go, now that I’m here?
Nolan had been so single-minded in his goal, he hadn’t given thought in the slightest about his purpose once he arrived. His uncertain and lurching gait stopped at last, and Nolan took in his surroundings in the poor light. It looked exactly as he remembered really, only the colours different than the image in his head. They were all wrong, the grass burnt and bleached by the sun, the metal gates rusted in orange tones, the still water in the lake a murky green. The same silence that had been a constant companion throughout Nolan’s journey across the city continued its dominant reign here.
The centre, where the pavilion was mounted, overlooked the playground. That was where she wanted him to lead her. Taking his bearings, Nolan started walking along one of the side paths, feet fracturing the soil beneath them.
The pavilion had collapsed in on itself
at the apex of the dome, the remnants of the curved pieces of painted wood shattered over the floorboards, along with the ash that had managed to tumble through the gap. The faces of saints painted into the faded fresco on the dome’s underside stared down incriminatingly at Nolan, the first of their number brutally decapitated, his face shattered and ruined by the fall. Without the guidance of their leader, even the divine looked lost, half of them reaching to a gaping void in the skies and beyond.
Nolan remembered how serene the complete picture had looked when he had seen it before, and couldn’t help but compare it to the sense of destitution it represented, forgotten in this corrupted and unholy place. There was likely a greater truth to it as it was now in this world than it ever could have held in the world before the sundering.
The pavilion was empty otherwise, just discoloured floorboards and ash. There wasn’t much of a view, at least not in the destructive climate. An oppressive mist surrounded the structure on all sides, only permitting ten feet or so of vision before enveloping the world, reducing it to a blank and desolate limbo. Nolan rested his hands on his hips, wondering what would happen next.
Nothing did.
The girl never came to him. He shouted her name into the descending darkness, listening to it echo in the mist, and through the high ceiling.
Head hung low, Nolan sat heavily on one of the steps, arms resting on his knees, and fingertips pointing to the earth. He was so very tired. Exhausted and incapable of standing, like a heavy weight pushed down on him, the crushing pressure kept him in place.
After Tomorrow: A CHBB Anthology Page 24
