Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Samuel walks for the vehicle on the roadside and Atlas steps around Gene and follows. They slip along building’s darkest face, for the wedge of street light sliced across asphalt. Samuel doesn’t turn to acknowledge Atlas’s pursuit.

  “Truth or discomfort?” Gene shouts.

  Under wavering branches and upon resolute concrete, Atlas stares into the back of Samuel’s jacket and continues until he’s past the apartment complex.

  X

  Breaking Barriers

  “Here she is.”

  Atlas glances up and down the highway, scuffing asphalt at his stop. The sleek, black vehicle, bathed in night, sleeps a meter from him. “Who is?”

  Samuel fishes a ring of two keys from his pocket and unlocks the driver’s side. He nods to the vehicle’s fastback slope. “You blind, Attie?”

  “My eyesight functions—”

  Samuel gets in the vehicle. Atlas slides into the passenger’s side, slamming his door shut once settled on dark leather seating. Samuel glares at him.

  “Delicately.” Samuel points his temple to the passenger’s door. “Don’t bludgeon her into submission, Sideran.”

  “Person—” Atlas squints at the dashboard “—ification?”

  Ignition armed, Samuel presses the gas and revs the engine into a roar that overwhelms the crackling of seats. “Meet my other girlfriend, Eden 2.0, the one with wheels, not heels. She’s a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1. I rebuilt most of the inside but she’s still beautiful.”

  “I see.” Atlas didn’t hear a word he said.

  Samuel thrusts console’s gearstick into first shift and Atlas jolts backward as the vehicle launches forward. Two seconds and Samuel pedals the clutch and drops the stick into second, his hand gliding between wheel and shift in thoughtless dance, his eyes several horizons through his tinted windshield. On third, Samuel’s fingers flit from shift to dashboard and prod one cobalt blue button centering stereo’s faceplate. Its light swirls at Samuel’s touch; the chrome rim around button’s LED reflects it multiplied.

  Gene’s dashboard doesn’t glow, doesn’t radiate otherworldly, precisely designed workmanship like Samuel’s does.

  “This is going to be so much fun.” Samuel cycles through the stereo’s lettering. “Now, is today more of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor day, or a Mogwai day? Or should we go shoegaze?”

  Atlas stares.

  “Or maybe,” Samuel glances up, “it’s a Sigur Rós day.”

  “What, by the Imperium, are you expressing?”

  “You’re right. It’s always a Sigur Rós day.”

  Atlas clenches his fists. “Why do you feign cordiality? Cease pretending you don’t wish to kill me.”

  “Attie!” Samuel shapes his mouth into an O. “Why would I ever want to kill you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The feeling is mutual. Don’t you get it? We’re opposites on a road trip in some zany dramedy.” He veers his Mustang onto the main highway. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ooo,” he switches to another song, “Talking Heads.”

  “I can think of another experience equally as rare. Have you ever, at any time in your life,” Atlas ducks his head, “merely once, admitted to wrongdoing or acknowledged its existence?”

  “Wrongdoing? Me?” Samuel scoffs.

  “Are you incapable of kindness?”

  “Kindness, wrongdoing, blah, blah. Everything’s relative, Funny Fascist, and I do what I feel like because that’s how someone lives.” He glances to his right. “Or would you rather follow all those public rules that define wrongdoing when your definition’s wildly different?”

  Atlas squints out the windshield. “You define wrongdoing then.”

  “Your people—they look to someone else to give them meaning. Where’d that get you? You couldn’t tell me what kindness was if I asked. But me—” Samuel smirks. “I’m my god. Unrestraint, survival, gratification: three of my favorite things, though I won’t sing it from rolling Austrian hills.”

  “Kindness is the relinquishing of self.”

  “And does that settle well with you, Sideran? That kindness your superiors forced you to give until you’ve given away yourself?”

  Atlas’s eyes track the hem in his gifted jeans, cotton upon cotton too clinging. “No.”

  “Then, apart from your idiot and the black hole where your style should be, you’re like me.” Samuel stretches his fingers around the steering wheel’s leather, clicking and sticking, and leans deep into his swayback seat. “You’re selfish. Complete independence equals selfishness. It’s natural, healthy. Embrace it.”

  Glancing behind a shoulder, Atlas looks to the road they’ve traveled, to the apartment complex blocks gone, to Gene’s couch and the heavy, plush blanket patterned with simplistic snowflakes. He frowns.

  “It’s a four-hour drive to dude’s hideout so we’ll be there in three,” Samuel says.

  He floors it. The vehicle he passes blares its horn, but Samuel doesn’t turn his head; he turns up his stereo.

  Atlas cringes and yells, “How do I know you’re not simply mistaken about the Sideran?”

  “Silly.” Samuel looks at him. “You should be asking if I’m not just delivering you to Eden herself.” He takes a hand off the steering wheel and, in one violent motion, ruffles Atlas’s hair. “You’re so wacky.”

  Grimacing, Atlas scoots to the right edge of his seat. “I believe your word. I’m unsure, though, if you should believe the word that’s been given to you.”

  “Uh,” his eyelids droop, “huh. I can’t be lied to, you adorable robot baby, you.”

  “Every being can be deceived,” Atlas says. “This Sideran rebel seems, with all I’ve learned the past days, as probable as the Dissension War of the Great Cycle—when the Imperium executed the three thousand by mere stare till combustion.”

  Samuel raises an eyebrow. “He’s not the only improbable one, escapee.”

  Watching traffic lights reflect off the windshield, watching them blur by, streak their glaring stipple upon a pitch backdrop, Atlas crinkles his forehead.

  “In summary, you wish to—” he raises his voice over stereo noise, “wish to, through the rebel, discover a tear in Earth’s dimensional barrier and wage war on this world?”

  “Mostly Eden wants to. I want to keep my three favorite things as I know them. There’s been talk that the Imperium’s waiting for the right moment and information to invade and expand their empire. Meaning Earth, Elisium on said Earth, whatever.” Samuel makes a face. “Not gonna happen. The Accenda plan to catch them first—bring the war to Siderans.”

  “But Earth will lie in the middle?”

  “Attie.” Samuel sighs. “This is grown-up stuff. That’s all you need to know now, young man.”

  Atlas grasps the dashboard’s edge, twists toward Samuel, and looks him in the eye. “What will occur to Earth?”

  Samuel shakes his head and mouths to the music, synching his lips with words too distorted, too strangely sung to understand. Suppressing a groan, Atlas forces his fingers to relax, his fists to unclench. He settles into the pound of bass at his back.

  “Samuel,” he lightens his tone and shifts in his seat, “what is The Presage?”

  “A secret.”

  “Yes. Adequate. But why did Eden interrogate me about it?”

  “Because The Presage is a big, scary prophecy and a practical topic to bring up when the conversation slows. For example, it’s like car insurance.”

  “What about it is big and scary?”

  “I mean, a guy’s gotta talk about insurance every once in a while. I have to have it; Eden has to have it; everyone has to have it.”

  Atlas exhales. “What is this crucial ‘Presage’?”

  “It’s a secreeeeet.” Samuel lifts a finger to his lips and shushes Atlas.

  “Not to me. Tell me.”

  “Shh.” He holds out his finger. “Secret.”

  “Tell me or I’ll refuse to break any barrier protecting the rebel.
”

  “You’ll get me through that barrier.”

  “Is that correct?” Atlas narrows his eyes. “I’m merely your servant?”

  “You’ve been alive what—thirty years? And you’ve spent all of that in Sidera minus four days.” Samuel faces him. “Be careful trying to impress mommy, dearest, because you’ve been alive for thirty years but living for four days. You’ve got drugs in your system now. We both know living—that risky, dangerous living has you needing more and the servitude that runs in your veins is just driving it on.”

  “You know of no such thing.”

  “But you admit you do?”

  “Imperium help me. Did I express,” Atlas kneads the sides of his seat, “so, Accend?”

  “Mmhmm. Now, quiet.” Samuel increases his music’s volume until it vibrates Atlas’s spine. “More reverb and less of your voice because it gives me a headache.”

  Burying his face in his hands, Atlas bends over his ears and listens to the throb of his pulse, accelerating with Samuel’s vehicle. He smashes shut his eyes. Elbows on his knees, he imagines the racing world outside his car door: the spacious breaks between forest walls, the climb of sage hills cradling crooks that spark misted mystery, the thinning trail of cars that follow their journey in and out of towns, past countless billboards, over peaks and between valleys. Too black in reality. It’d be too black to see the individual branch or threshold that separates crops’ plains from growingly tall forest canopies. Claustrophobic black, moon shy behind thickets. He slows his breathing and, slumping deeper, alters his mind’s scene. His eyelids smooth as he imagines himself in a different vehicle, driving in daylight, passing warm slopes flooded—

  “—uhhhhmmy. Hey,” a finger prods Atlas’s arm, “dummy. Dummy, nappy time’s over.”

  Atlas moans.

  “We’re here.”

  Rolling onto his side, he squeezes his eyelids together and settles his cheek into the mound of his seat’s backrest.

  “We’re outside the booming ghost town of Spruce, West Virginia, in the middle of the Monongahela National Forest. Time to head on foot, Attie boy.”

  His accordion wince answers with protest. Samuel reaches over him and, in a second, Atlas jerks downward. He gasps sitting up and pops open his eyes, his palms raised and aimed at everything. He glances at his seat; it’s fallen, reclined against the back seat.

  Smiling, Samuel fondles the steering wheel with one hand and decelerates. He parks under the shade of two massive barriers: the forest bordering the road. If it could be called a road. The couple-meter-wide dirt pathway swaddles Samuel’s Mustang with bursts of clotted bristles that jab pockets of skylight. Tree cover devours the last of the moon.

  Samuel plucks his key out of the ignition. The headlights switch off, the music, engine, familiar creaks and bumps falling silent, and Atlas loses everything in existence. The world disappears. Heart in his throat, he blinks, but nothing returns. He pats his legs, gropes the dashboard, clutches a fist of the material clothing his chest, and tunes his overexposed ears to the sweet huff of his exhale; he’s lost his sight only. Something slams to his left—Samuel’s door. Atlas opens his and, flinching at the crunch of his own footstep in the dirt, exits the vehicle. Cool night air brushes his skin.

  He nudges closed his door and splays his palms, tremors tugging at his fingers. He whips his hands toward every possible movement, toward the faint tap of a fallen pinecone, the stir of crown leaves. His eyes don’t adjust. Squinting, he urges his power down his arms, follows a twig’s snap around the back of Samuel’s Mustang, and reaches—

  He touches something rough. He stops breathing.

  “Get your grubby fingers,” Samuel smacks Atlas’s hand, “off my face.”

  Atlas jolts and retracts his hand into himself. Frowning, he rubs it.

  Samuel opens his trunk and creates a light; one bright, circular beam sprays from his handheld device of sorts. He places the industrial torch on its side in the trunk, its glare grazing various metal instruments, carving sharp shadows. Atlas now squints for a different reason: ghosts of light’s cone imprint his averted gaze.

  “Keep your falsetto to a minimum.” Samuel sifts through the multipart devices. “Have to be quiet as pretty little mice.”

  “Why?” Atlas whispers.

  “A couple of nonhumans penetrating a war fortress? The Sideran’s bound to be jumpy.”

  “Why don’t we merely communicate—express we mean no harm?”

  “Because then we’d have to get ice cream and skip down Coney Island Boardwalk.” Samuel pinches the bridge of his silhouetted nose. “The fortress is guarded. Kill on sight: a detail we’ve got to sneak around.”

  “Kill immediately.” Atlas’s brows tense. “Is every being so hasty to come to conclusions?”

  Samuel stands up straight and holds out a long instrument. He drops it into Atlas’s hands; it drags them down. Atlas curls his fingers around a cool cylinder and discovers its grooves and appendages as he crawls his other hand across it. It’s similar to Samuel’s handgun but larger, simpler, smooth, a thick strap hanging from its barrel and grip.

  “Yes.” Samuel shines his flashlight on the weapon. “This is a sawed-off, pump-action twelve gauge. Safety,” he points to a small switch, “is here. Make sure it’s off before you shoot—”

  “Shoot? We will be shooting?”

  “Probably not. But maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  Samuel tilts his head. “Very possibly. Most Likely.” He shrugs. “Seventy percent chance we’ll have to shoot. Eighty-five, tops.”

  “Eighty-five?”

  “Ninety.” Samuel inhales. “Okay, yes. There will be shooting.”

  Atlas stares.

  He rolls his eyes. “Don’t act like you’ve never tried to shoot first and talk later, Mr. Let’s Shoot Samuel Like a Twelve-Year-Old Girl. Now,” he runs his finger along the textured attachment under the weapon’s barrel, “this is the forend. Pull it back to cock it before you shoot and, if you run out of rounds, put these,” he dumps a handful of dual-colored, thick cylinders into Atlas’s hand and points, “in there. When you squeeze the trigger, hold on for dear life. That’s it. Have fun.”

  “I,” Atlas juggles the cartridges, “feel a disclosure of safety precautions would be appropriate.”

  Samuel juts out his jaw. “Naw.”

  Pocketing a few extra rounds, Samuel slips his revolver out of his jacket, checks it, and tucks it away again. He switches the flashlight off. Its thud onto hard upholstery and subsequent bang of the trunk resonate the irrefutable end of light’s journey, universe reverting to shapeless chaos. Footsteps rustle the underbrush several paces from the car; and Samuel’s already diving into the forest without a moonlit contour to guide him. Atlas rubs his eyes, bats them, but jogs after Samuel’s rhythmic patter before his fidgets surrender to blindness. He angles his ear toward a branch’s swish, a briar’s shudder. Atlas reaches Samuel’s trail as his outstretched hands reach the scrape of bark.

  Atlas stuffs the cartridges into his jeans’ pocket and slings the 12 gauge over his shoulder. He stumbles behind Samuel, up a slight incline, over sticks and pine needles, under leafy fans and between snagging gnarls. His forehead crumples.

  “Samuel, don’t you require some larger weapon also?”

  He glances over a shoulder. “Shh. Warzone voice, Attie, and no. I have more than I need.”

  Atlas peers into Samuel’s back until he can see the slightest outline. He dodges a tree trunk after its limb swats his arm and thinks for one moment:

  He could take hold of his weapon, dig it into Samuel’s back, and pull the trigger.

  Effortless.

  Atlas’s heart jumps and head itches, but not because of the needles that tickle his scalp. Is Samuel conveying trust or arrogance?

  Watching soot-gray highlights in Samuel’s jacket shift and bob, keeping his pace identical, Atlas ducks under low-hanging foliage and hears the quietest croak. A chill scampers up his neck. He
whips his head but sees black only.

  Another croak pierces the dark. This caw descends from the opposite different direction of the last. More than one raven. Atlas forgets his projectile weapon; he raises his hands and throws the electricity behind his lungs for his breeze-hungry fingers.

  “Yes, we’re being watched,” Samuel says.

  He jumps. “The rebel?”

  “The Accenda. Keeping tabs is all.”

  “Express to your Accenda,” Atlas pushes a branch from his path and clenches his jaw, “that I don’t relish the concept of supervis—”

  Samuel stops. Atlas rams into him and Samuel rams into a spruce tree, triggering the collective croak of a dozen ravens, far and near, enough to turn the chill on Atlas’s neck to fire. Something hooks the front of his shirt.

  His voice a breath, Samuel constricts his fingers around Atlas’s shirt and leans into him. “Hey, Bella Swan, you’re not being cute.”

  “I don’t believe I was attempt—”

  “We’re being watched,” Samuel says.

  Atlas nods. “By the Accenda.”

  “No.”

  The charge under Atlas’s skin speeds his pulse and dilates his pupils to the edges of his irises. His vision clears.

  Samuel releases Atlas’s shirt and, with a forefinger, shifts a branch from their path. A light, one tiny flicker varnishing fronds into tapered existence, shines through the gap. Samuel twists to Atlas and motions to the light. Confining his inhale, Atlas angles forward and looks off the tips of Samuel’s fingers, past the branches, through the blued radiance. The light vanishes.

  Something—someone stepped in front of it. Someone that’s not Samuel.

  Atlas’s gut sinks.

  He jerks backward with Samuel’s recoil. By its strap, Atlas pulls his shotgun from back to chest, lowers his head, and slides under the branches to his right, chasing a phantom of Samuel’s figure: already leaps ahead. Atlas grips his weapon and squints for his escort’s blurred and black silhouette. He runs after it, after the crunch of pine needles, the glimpse of a hand, the whisper of a short breath and rustled rap at passing berry bushes like a swift grazing before the imminent winter. Trees rush backward. They scrape Atlas’s cheeks, scratch his exposed arms, spur him jolted at each nose-bump. He narrows his eyelids nearly closed and keeps his glances between his feet and course, but his missteps don’t miss a step; he scrambles and huffs after Samuel’s every winding dart.