Time Walker: Episode 2 of The Walker Saga

by Shannan Sinclair

  Blake looked at Aislen’s crumpled body. “She saved my dad.”

  Raziel looked at her, seeing her chest rise and fall with Sigmund Lange’s first breath. His heart shattered into a million pieces. “Yes, she did. She saved all of us.”

  Her body moaned, and her limbs started twitching. Sigmund’s frequency was finding its way into the nerve endings of her muscles and overtaking her cells. Aislen would still have to be in there in some way to keep the body alive for him. But she wouldn’t have any control. Raziel couldn’t bear to watch the rest of the transformation.

  He looked back at Blake, who was watching Aislen’s body with growing unease.

  “Do you want to come with me?” Raze asked.

  Blake looked at him and back at Aislen’s twitching body. After a moment, he looked at Raze, resolute. “I want to go home.”

  Raze nodded. There were no good options. Running with Raze into the unknown wasn’t any better than Blake taking his chances with Ichiban.

  “You are going to be okay, Blake. Just remember who you really are. Don’t be like me. Don’t let them take that away from you. I became an evil person, and I know there is no way I can make anything up to you, but I’m sorry for everything I have done to you and your family.”

  Raze walked over to Aislen’s body. It was shuddering now. In a few moments, she would seize up as Sigmund squelched the last fire of her into a small fraction of who she once was. Raze knelt down at her head and bent over, kissing her one last time on her forehead. He reached out to the last remnant of energy that would be left in this shell and whispered.

  I will always love you, Aislen. Nothing ever changes that.

  He picked up the map that had fallen in the dirt beside the gun, stood up and turned his back to her as the seizure fully overtook her. He got into his four-wheel drive and drove off into the barren unknown.

  Forty-Six

  Aislen struggled in the dark recesses of herself, fighting glacial ice with her own white-hot fire. With every embedding whip Sigmund battered her with, Aislen responded with an incinerating lash of her own.

  As he tried to take over her logic centers, she pummeled him with voltage. As he seared through her flesh into her muscles, she put up barriers to block his access. When he was left with no other options, Sigmund went supersonic, fragmenting his energy in a million particles and embedding simultaneously into each cell in her body. He was an insidious force of evil. He knew by doing this he would be splintered, but there would be no way for her to get all of him out, and he could reintegrate later.

  She could feel her flesh and bones tremble against the surface of the earth as deep inside her body Sigmund Lange’s putrid soul bore itself into her biology. If she didn’t do something, he would win and she would lose herself forever.

  Aislen thought about following his lead, fragmenting her energy so she could resist his invasion of her cells one on one. But if she succeeded, if she pushed him out of her body, he would only jump back into an easy vessel, and Blake wasn’t an option. Aislen was going to make sure of that.

  She wasn’t going to let Sigmund out. He was right, after all: he had created her. She was everything she was because of him…all his experiments, all his perversions, all his evil manipulations. Now there was hell to pay, and rage was on her side. It trumped his desire for revenge.

  Instead of detonating her energy with nuclear fury and ejecting him, Aislen did the opposite: she opened up her energy, and with a dark, electromagnetic pulse, she reached out, grabbed hold of Sigmund’s scattered atoms and sucked his frequency in deeper.

  She could hear him wail and shriek as he was pulled into the vortex of her energy. As he flailed against the undertow, Aislen flagellated him with every ounce of fury she had, lassoing him with hot galvanic cords and reeling him in.

  Sigmund squealed, begging for mercy, but Aislen wouldn’t let up beating the living shit out of him until her revenge was satisfied. If he was going to be inside her, he was going to be her bitch.

  His voltage started to wane, worn down by the power of Aislen Walker. As his energy submitted, Aislen gathered all the remnant strands of his frequency, flattened them out, then carefully began folding him up into a little box like origami. Once she had him contained, she shoved him down into the abyss, somewhere in the recesses of her reptilian brain.

  She could feel residual slivers of Sigmund wriggling in the hidden crevasses of her brain. She would have to deal with that later. She needed to refocus her energy now on her body before it died from lack of lifeforce. She would never be rid of him: he was a part of her now until the day she died. But she would do everything in her power to contain him, except when she needed him. She was going to use this mother fucker for all he was worth.

  Once she had him where she wanted him, she allowed herself to unfold again, back into her body, her rightful vehicle. As she started surfacing into consciousness, she could hear Raziel’s voice in the distance.

  I will always love you, Aislen. Nothing ever changes that.

  Good to know, she thought to herself. She hoped it was true. Because she was counting on that. Someday she would need him.

  Aislen hydrated her cells with her essences again, feeling her flesh and bones and cells in a way she had never felt them before. Her whole body tingled with energy. She could feel it radiating, vibrant with life. How funny. That sensation had always been there, but it had become white noise with familiarity. She vowed she was never going to forget what life felt like again.

  She opened her eyes into the blazing sunlight and took a deep breath of the scorching air. It felt like nectar, this breath, this oxygen, full of grit and dust and perfection.

  She slowly pushed herself up and saw Blake kneeling on the ground a few feet away from her. He looked petrified.

  “Hello, Blake,” she said, her own voice coming out of her mouth.

  Relief washed over his face, and it looked like he had just taken his own first breath, too.

  “Hello, Ashlyn,” Blake said.

  “My name is Aislen,” she said. “Sigmund Lange didn’t know who I am.”

  Blake smiled. “Good. Hello, Aislen.”

  Aislen got up off the ground and walked over to Blake. Troy’s lifeless body lay in the dirt, a shitbag in a black suit in a black pool of blood. Aislen felt no remorse. She would never feel remorse again. Because she had plans. And there would be more bodies.

  She turned and looked down the long, dirt road. The barest thread of dust rose up in a column against blue sky; Raziel on the run.

  “He was really sad,” Blake said from beside her.

  “I know,” she said, watching the dust cloud extinguish on the horizon. “But it’s destiny.”

  GOSPEL OF A TIME WALKER

  Dig Down ~ Muse

  Epilogue

  Raze drove through the Outback for three days. If he’d taken the main highway, it might have only taken him one, but he couldn’t risk taking the roads where any of The 8’s mercenaries could find him. The 8 wouldn’t rely solely on Troy to assassinate him. They would have deployed their sleeper cells in the area just in case.

  There were millions of people around the world on standby, ready to do their bidding at the flip of a switch. Cultivated through Demesne, the media, and frequency manipulation, they could be turned on and activated with the single intention of hunting and destroying Raziel Tanis.

  Blind, preprogrammed sheeple who thought they were their own independent individuals but who were really sleeping Manchurian candidates. Legions of them existed, completely unaware of the powers that held their strings.

  Raze shifted frequencies every five minutes but stopped using humans. There were too few out here. A human frequency would stand out; even if it wasn’t his, it would be suspect. Instead, he took on the landscape around him. At first scan, there wasn’t a lot of diversity to choose from: a rock or a shrub, a roo or a lizard. But the more he tuned in, the more intricacies he found, and he was able to blend in with spiders, a camel, a d
ingo, a mineral or any genus of plant life.

  If he wasn’t careful, the Outback could have bitten him, sucked him up into its endless mirage and miles and miles of cloned shrubs. At times he thought that maybe he was really just caught up in a computer simulation. Maybe he’d never made it out of Demesne or The Stratum. Maybe this was all just a dream. He would have loved to wake up in The Womb right now and start the week over. But then he would run out of gas, be forced to get out and stretch his legs and remind himself he was of the living.

  Thankfully, he’d packed enough gas, food, and most importantly water to survive this trek. Even though he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to take it. He’d thought he would have been dead, killed while protecting Aislen, and Aislen would have been the one making this journey. But the further he drove, the more he realized that Aislen was never meant for this journey. He was.

  Raze had Preston’s map. Though he didn’t have the amulet to guide him with its constant resonance, he had an atlas that he’d bought at the airport. He’d matched the two up as he filled the tank with gas and rested on his first night. Uluru was the purple spiral on the drawing. Where he found Aislen was the diamond in the middle of nowhere. The place he was headed was in the midst of the MacDonnell Ranges, the strangest mountain range he had ever seen.

  On the atlas map, the mountain range consisted of two parallel ridges with a large meteoric crater in the middle. To Raziel’s eye, it resembled the Eye of Horus, with the ridges forming the outer eye socket and the crater forming the iris.

  Most people saw the Eye of Horus as an Egyptian symbol of protection and good health. Raziel understood it as something more. It was a map of its own: a map of human consciousness, a map that, when followed, took one to the portal that allowed consciousness to Travel out of its three-dimensional limitations of the brain into the realities and infinite worlds beyond comprehension.

  Preston Reed, at five years old, had mapped the natural pineal gland of the earth, something humans had tried to recreate with pyramids and temples across the globe, always forgetting it was right inside their brains all along. This would be the last place Reed actually went. Raze hoped he would find him there, hoped he could beg his forgiveness for failing his daughter and would help him find his own way to cope.

  Raze was taking the long way, but the exact spot was only 600 kilometers northeast of where he’d left Aislen and Blake.

  Sigmund and Blake, he reminded himself. She wasn’t Aislen anymore. He had to remember that. He didn’t know what to consider her. Was she even a person anymore? Or did the monster who possessed her completely extinguish her? Raze tried not to think about it. The pain was too raw, and it clouded what limited capabilities he had right now. The only way he could justify leaving her behind, the only way he could live with himself, was by remembering that Aislen no longer existed.

  He focused on the road ahead. He was almost there. He could not afford to get side-tracked by his grief. Night was falling fast, and if he didn’t get there soon, he’d be lost.

  Raze saw movement on the horizon. He squinted, trying to see through the wet emotion in his eyes and the evening summer radiating off the rusted earth. But there was nothing there. Outback fever was setting in, and his imagination was being fueled by dehydration.

  No. There it was again, bigger now and moving toward him.

  Raze stopped the car and got out, trying to get his awareness straight. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again. Still there was something moving toward him. He watched as the phantom continued approaching. It wasn’t until it was a hundred yards away that Raze could make out what it was.

  A man. He was nearly naked, a pattern of white dots and yellow streaks painted on skin black as night. He looked like a night sky, filled with stars and meteors and blended into the landscape around him like he was actually a part of it, an ancient mediary between the heavens and the earth.

  Raze reached out to him, feeling for a frequency. Was he friend or foe? But there wasn’t one. He was as still and silent as a void.

  Cool trick, Raziel thought.

  The man spoke. Raziel couldn’t understand what he was saying. There were no words in the midst of the clicks, clucks, and buzzes that emitted from the man’s mouth. It sounded like pure vibration, not language. He could feel it in his chest but could not decipher it in his brain.

  Raze shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  The man gave him a look, one that Raze could read: a look that said something like, “Come on now, yes you do.”

  The man walked up to Raziel and put his palm on his chest, then spoke again.

  We’ve been waiting for you Raziel. You are right on time. The man handed him a hollowed-out gourd of water. Follow me.

  They walked in silence for another hour along the sandy, dried-up riverbed that snaked through a range of plateaus. Raziel hadn’t brought anything with him from the car, and by the time he realized it, night had fallen completely. He could only see his guide by following the stars painted on his body.

  They trekked off the riverbed pathway and into a grassland clearing. Embedded in the earth they walked across was a crop circle: rings within rings, concentric circles nested deeper and deeper within each other, arranged side by side in an array of sacred geometry. They looked like Raziel’s original structure outline for programming Demesne: six Octaves, one nested within the other. In 3D they would look like a step ladder as you moved up through the Octaves until you reached The Stratum. Here, his outline of the gaming system was scorched into the earth, not just one but hundreds, maybe thousands side by side.

  They crossed the meadow of worlds and into a thicket of trees. The ghosted gum trees were white beings all their own, blinding sentries in the darkness. He walked through them feeling as though they were watching him with eyes more ancient than humanity.

  It was then he realized the gourd he was drinking from was not filled with water. His vision began to swim. Reality began to morph. The ghosted trees appeared to part before them, clearing a path before him and his guide, opening into another glade.

  A wall of black granite rose up in front of them 200 feet high, stretching a long distance to the north and south. In the center of the towering wall was an entirely unnatural indent: a perfect rectangle 100 feet tall and 50 feet wide, a solid rock doorway that led a few yards into another solid rock wall. The surreal stone portal was in no way man-made. Primitive man would not have the means to create such a seamless and enormous carving. Even with machinery, it would have been impossible to engineer such a trench.

  Lined up in front of the black rock wall was another blockade…this one of men. Each one was black as midnight, and each was painted like Raziel’s guide, a galaxy all their own. They stood in a half-circle facing him, like The 8, yet a hundred strong. Together, they fanned out across the darkness like a galaxy.

  Raze felt light-headed but reached out his energy to feel for their intent. Like the guide, they were empty: no judgment, no demands, no frequency.

  Each of them stood beside a lit torch staked into the ground to ward off the night.

  His guide directed him to a cushion in the middle of the semicircle.

  Please, sit, the guide said.

  Raze grew uncomfortable. Was this some type of judgment day? Was he about to be a human sacrifice? He looked at his guide, the wall of men behind him and the wall of mountain behind them. If he wanted to run, the only way out was back through the ghosted forest and into the sea of wilderness. Even if he made it, he wouldn’t survive.

  Raziel sighed. If this was his final judgment, so be it. After everything Raze had done in his life, he deserved whatever was coming. He sat down.

  Another man came forward carrying a bowl and knelt before him, extending it toward Raze.

  Eat this, he communicated. His face was shiny and cherubic. It radiated joy as if serving Raziel his last meal was an honor.

  Raze realized he was starving and took the bowl. He sniffed it. It smelled di
sgusting, a mixture of sulfur and acetone. It had to be poison. He pushed it back, but the man just smiled.

  It’s okay. Eat. He nodded his head and somehow made Raze believe it was actually all right.

  Fuck it, he thought to himself. He had nothing to lose. If it was poison and painful…again, he deserved it.

  He scooped his fingers into the warm mash and swallowed as much as he could in one bite. It tasted as bad as it smelled, and his stomach tried to revolt. But he pushed it back down into his gut. He was already in this deep. He wasn’t getting out. He might as well go this way rather than face death any other way.

  A didgeridoo began to play. A droning and warbling bass snaked in and circled through the crowd, spiraling its way toward Raze. He felt it tickle his skin first, the hairs on his body standing up on end. It encircled his head, causing him to swoon...or maybe that was the poison, or possibly a combination of both.

  The melody caressed down his spine, relaxing him instantly, and then unexpectedly slammed into his body with a powerful punch. The drone pulsed through his inner core with purpose, on its very own search and destroy mission. Raziel felt his stomach lurch violently, and he crumpled into a ball in the dirt.

  The wood trumpet warbled lower, and Raze could feel it twisting through his guts. He curled into the fetal position, trying to protect himself, but it was no use. The sound started finding pieces of him that he had long forgotten.

  His dad was dredged up first: all the times they had played together, throwing a ball, riding a bike, raking leaves in the yard. Then the drone found his mother: her sadness, her grief washing through him like it was his own. Raziel felt her sorrow, felt the love for a son whom she had grown within her body, given life to and lost forever. Raze felt a longing of his own in return, for her unconditional adoration. It was a yearning he’d buried so deep he’d obliterated it.