A Shrouded World | Book 8 | Asgard

by Tufo, Mark

  I couldn’t truly gauge distance, and if we had an altimeter, it had died with Stuckie. All I could use was the building roof as a reference. What had once looked like a heated red needle, ready to pry a splinter free, now looked like a giant redwood we were going to impale ourselves upon. Vlad the Impaler would have been so proud. The area below us was carpeted in transports; I didn’t think what would be left of us from the collision would do much, if anything, as we rained down upon the building like metal and flesh precipitation.

  Might have been on my four-hundred-and-eighty-second time of saying “fuck” when Bob clipped the corner of a whistler-packed vehicle. This sent us into a sideways spin that, unfortunately, launched Church’s lunch into the air. What was worse was he was using a free hand to scoop the bigger chunks and shove them back into his mouth. I was angry that this was going to be my dying sight. The only decent thing about the sideways spin was that there was a fifty-percent chance I would not see when we hit. In this instance, I felt it would be better to be blindly obliterated. To each their own, right? As lack of lady luck would have it, I was staring straight at the roof as my side made contact. I thought this might be for the best, as my head was pressed against the glass, it was unlikely I would feel much of anything as my skull was blown out. And then nothing. Not the deafening crunch of material, no rupture of my head sending my eyeballs hurtling into the atmosphere. No spine shattering, teeth chattering, blood spattering, anti-mattering. It might not make complete sense but sounds good.

  I can’t really describe the events; we were slowing, but there was no apparent reason as to why, no net, sponges, ball pit, nothing. The walls of red we were passing now as we decelerated were pulsing, much like the worlds Jack and I had been on as they were going through a change. Sometimes we went back to better days, but more often than not, to worsening conditions. Could this blistering thorn be the origin point for all of that?

  When my thought process finally caught up to the fact that either we weren’t dead or we were and I’d missed the cross over point, I looked at Bob.

  “Um.”

  The points on his shoulders started forming.

  “Don’t even! Are we dead?”

  “Kill,” Church said around a mouthful of regurgitated food. He smacked his hands wetly together.

  “Did you know this was going to happen?” I asked, trying to figure out what was going on.

  “You may not like the answer, Milk.”

  “My heart feels like it was directly injected with coke. I think I can take it.”

  “How could I know?”

  I was stunned into momentary silence. His plan all along had been to make us a giant rocket. Punching him felt like about the most normal thing I could do at that point.

  “Do you think maybe you could have told us you were going to use our ballast to blast a hole in the evil lair? You know, maybe we could have disembarked and watched from a safe distance, that kind of thing.”

  “Kill, stay,” Church said. That basically secured my answer. Bob was on a mission; Church would have stayed with him, and out of some crazed notion of loyalty, I would have as well, even as we headed into the jaws of oblivion. But just the option, that was all I was asking for.

  From the craziness of the last few minutes to whatever was happening now, we were slowly spinning, suspended in a gravitational field of sorts. Couldn’t be entirely sure, but by looking up, it seemed that we were midway in the structure, caught in an invisible spider web. Near as I could tell, we hadn’t succeeded in much of anything. Unless we were like a piece of sand inside a pearl-making oyster, at least in a little while, we’d come out all shiny and pretty before being mounted on a necklace. No alarms were blaring, no armed guards were racing to our position, no harried receptionist telling us we couldn’t be there, nothing.

  “Don’t mean to be a downer, Bob, but do you have any other suggestions? Preferably ones that don’t end in us being obliterated?”

  He opened the door to look down. “Something is not right,” he said before pulling the top part of him back in.

  You think? was at the tip of my tongue; I was proud of myself when I kept it there.

  “They should be here…” He was thinking.

  “No thing, kill?”

  “Yeah, Church, nothing to kill,” I offered in solace.

  He looked sad.

  “But, hey, we’re still alive,” I told him. Didn’t cheer him up nearly as much as you would have thought it should.

  “We are not here.” Bob dropped what I figured was a philosophical nugget.

  My head still hadn’t come back from the near-extinction event, and when my entire system is working in overdrive under stressful loads, I shoot straight for sarcasm, but I again somehow refrained from saying anything caustic. Maybe it was the exhaustion creeping in. When you pump that much adrenaline through your system, you’re definitely going to crash. No wonder the Nazis were pumping their troops with meth—the closest thing to a super soldier at the time. Almost surprising we didn’t end up with some sort of zombie invasion back then. When in doubt, shut your mouth. BT would be thrilled if that became my new mantra, because that would mean I was quickly heading down the path to mutism.

  Then as my head started to let go of the fact that we’d nearly died, I began to mull over Bob’s words. “Where are we then?”

  His eyes swiveled upwards so they were staring straight out of the top of his head. He moved the cap down like a flopped over hoodie so his vision wasn’t obstructed. I followed suit.

  “Oh, no,” I said as I saw the ripple that started at the top and was quickly approaching our location. Except for the brilliant purple-blue arcing of a Tesla coil, it looked very similar. Could see the air vibrating and shimmering; I was wondering what this shock wave was going to do to us. Got the answer soon enough, and as one would expect, it sucked the ass of a diarrhea-laden donkey subsisting entirely on a diet of Boston Baked Beans.

  The initial wash of the wave crashed over the roof of our transport and pushed it violently to the wall, where the rear end scraped loudly as we were forced down like an extra-large turd in an oversized toilet by a competent plunger operator. Like I said, stressful situations send me back to my baseline. We were picking up speed. We dipped down so that the entire bottom of the transport was scraping against the wall. I lifted my feet. By the looks of the shower of sparks trailing us, it wasn’t going to be long until the entire bottom was sanded away. I refused to be planed to death.

  There must have been an irregularity in the wall; we were jostled so hard my entire body hurt, felt like every joint in me was popped. There was a moment where we were heading to the ground, roof first, until the flip was completed, and now the top of the transport was receiving an extreme buffing. Hearing anything beyond the screaming in my mind was impossible, as was being able to see anything due to the sparks flying all around us. Then, you know, because why not, the dashboard erupted in flame, and this wasn’t some cigarette lighter gone bad flame—this was the entire wiring harness had gone up at the same time, type of fire. It was blowing out of there like some heat setting from Hell. Sure, my wife would have liked it, I wasn’t a fan. Of all the shit going on, the one thing I noticed was, it didn’t matter where you were, burning plastic all smells the same.

  Ever been to an amusement park and you ride this terrifying roller coaster and then it comes to a stop and you’re like, thank god, I lived! And then the unthinkable happens? It begins to go in reverse, and now you realize you’re going to have to do the entire circuit backward and blind to any dangers lurking. This was like that. As the transport rotated, we were plummeting to the ground ass first. I suppose it’s better not to see it. I was tensed up so tightly I felt that if a ball-peen hammer struck me in the correct spot, I would shatter like an absolute zero frozen banana. As we neared the bottom, the ring wave followed the contour of the building and began to push in on the transport. We were forced away from the wall, which seemed like a good thing at the time, until
the transport began to compress under the pressures being exerted. The grinding noise was quickly filled in by the pops and creaks of the metals being wrinkled, the dash fire had spread to the floorboards.

  “Out!” Bob bellowed.

  I wasn’t sure why he was in such a rush to leave the burning beer can that was slowly being crushed. He waited to leave until Church and myself had dragged ourselves out. The three of us were being battered by the wind as we surfed down on our ever-shrinking platform. Whatever was smashing the car was, as of yet, not exerting pressure on us. I would like to say it was because the transport was inorganic and we were organic, but I wasn’t under that impression, not at all. Once the pressure wave was forced smaller, we would be like the last remnants of toothpaste squeezed through the narrow opening. We kept shifting our feet and bodies the further down we traveled. We’d gone from acquaintances to near intimate partners in the span of a hundred vertical feet.

  “ON!” Bob bellowed, hoisting Church up before the horned creature could even react. Church grabbed me as he was on the way. He tossed me atop his shoulders like a professional cheerleader. I was thinking this was going to make one of the oddest totem poles, as we stood like that. The transport had been crushed down to something the size of a large boulder. Bob was elongating himself, pushing Church and myself higher up. He could do that all day, but soon he would be covered in our blood as we were juiced for all we were worth. Bob was roughly half his diameter, and Church began to grunt as his massive chest was starting to have a force exerted against it.

  I felt bad for him and was terrified of going out this way. That scene in Star Wars where Luke and company are nearly crushed by the trash compactor had left me mildly scarred; I knew dying that way would be beyond painful, I just didn’t think it was all that likely to happen. I didn’t know too many places that had a walk-in compactor. And yet, here it was, happening. I heard what sounded like a shotgun blast; the way Church sagged, I had to wonder if it was his ribs cracking. The boulder was now not much bigger than a standard military footlocker. I could feel a slight pressure squeezing in on my shoulders, I pulled them forward in an effort to elude death’s iron tight grasp.

  Church was yelling, as was I. Death seems more dramatic if accompanied by the screams of the damned. There was an intense whoosh of air being moved past us, then nothing. Absolute silence, I thought perhaps my eardrums had been ruptured again and destroyed for good. Bob began to widen out and slowly let us down like a released hydraulic jack. When we were close to the floor, I jumped so Church didn’t need to make any unnecessary movements. As one that had suffered through a few cracked ribs in my time, I knew just breathing was a painful thing; lifting something heavy off your head was an impossibility, I mean, unless you had the correct cocktail of narcotics.

  We were now all down on the narrow floor of the building, and, by narrow I mean comparatively narrow; it was twenty feet across. Church raised his hands over his head, yelled something unintelligible while twisting his body from side to side. The cracking of his rib had nothing on the sound it made as he slid it back into place. Dry teeth being dragged across a chalkboard would have been more welcome, or maybe the eardrum rupturing. He did seem much better after the self-alignment. Who knew you could perform chiropractic services on yourself?

  Desperately wanted to ask Bob: What now? But by the way he was looking about, we were all equally stupefied.

  Church groaned as he pointed to the far wall, the entire perimeter actually. The coloring seemed off, opaquer than the deep red of the rest. The rippling edges reminded me of the now marble-sized custodian inside the transport. It was a doorway of sorts. It looked much like what the relic had produced, the colors the only thing different, that, and we couldn’t see through it, so, almost like the other one. Plus, it was horizontal as opposed to vertical, which made it more like a hole than a doorway.

  “It’s a door, kind of,” I said flatly, figured I had a right not to be too enthusiastic about what I was seeing, considering the last time I’d walked through one. “I think I know what’s going on, which, considering the source, is about as unbelievable as what I think is happening here.” I couldn’t keep my eyes off the shimmering edge.

  “Milk?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.” I gave him a quick rundown of the relic we’d found and what I’d done with it. He seemed pretty excited about the gateway opening tool, but that cooled quickly when there was no chance I had it hidden anywhere, even my prison purse. But this wasn’t quite that; this was the world-altering reset button. If I had to take a guess, this was the point of origin for them. Our ship, in a twist of fate, had corked up the spewing volcano and had forced the lava, so to speak, back into the mantle. We’d somehow not only stopped a transforming event, but we’d shoved it back down from whence it came. I didn’t, I couldn’t, know what that meant or what the result would be. I knew if a bullet got blocked in the barrel of a rifle, bad things happened; I suspected this was much like the same thing, in principle. We were going to find out soon enough, as the glimmering began to expand from the ring around the perimeter toward the middle, like a bathtub being drained, it was pulling in from all sides. The floor was becoming more opaque as it did so, like maybe the burst was corrosive and eating through everything it touched. It had that effect on the worlds it touched, so there was a logic to that notion. I was relating all of this to Bob as quickly as I could in the hopes that maybe he could think of something to do, because there was no other avenue of escape that I could see from the encroaching danger. The totem pole trick wasn’t going to work; it would just mean I was third through the hole, and none of us were in too great of a rush to see what the outside world had to offer. And if the dynamics of the building held up, the new doorway was some hundred feet in the air.

  I, for one, did not want to pull any sort of cartoon stunt by hanging in the air for a few moments before holding up a “Bye” sign then plummeting. Anything that Bob was thinking was immediately halted when the ground near him had a hole blown through it. I looked up to see five armed transports barreling straight down toward us. The ground so far, luckily, was the only thing getting bombarded, creating fist-sized pockmarks, the edges curling up as if they had taken a mini meteorite strike. Looked like it was the door to the unknown or an evaporated head. Door number one it was, as we all came to the hastily made decision.

  Church, despite his size and injury, was the quickest to the ring and, subsequently, first through. Knowing the brute as I did, it wasn’t to be the first to escape the battle we were in. but rather the first to enter into the unknown. He was a brave idiot, and I was happy to be fighting alongside my own kind, no matter the species. As he stepped into the hole, it looked much like a low budget television show’s enactment of a portal. One moment he was right there in front of us, the next, the camera stopped rolling, he left the scene, then the camera started up again, all with that slight hiccup you used to see in Bewitched whenever any one of Samantha’s relatives came to visit. Now that I’m thinking about it, the “trick” was most likely pulled off in the editing room and not on the set. Not that it made a difference right then, or ever.

  I was debating the merits of falling ten stories or being shot; what kind of pros and cons list do you make for that when they both end in death? And that’s if it even was a doorway, who knew for sure? I moved to follow Church; a hole ripped into the ground I’d just vacated. As soon as I was in, I realized this wasn’t like the relic gateway. There was no feeling of elongating throughout infinity, and it wasn’t like the changing wave that washed over everyone and everything, erasing time, memories, people and monsters alike. But it had similarities in both. The difference, though, was how jarring it had been on my senses. The brightness was blinding, the rushing in my ears enough to drown out all other sounds. I was simultaneously hot and shivering from cold, perhaps every single part of this was a fever dream. That would be a great notion, but I doubt my subconscious could possibly come up with everything that’s been hap
pening.

  I saw Church in the distance, but the perspective was off; parts of him looked more prominent than they should, like I was zooming in on half and out on the other. Sometimes his head swelled then shrank, or it was a leg or arm, sometimes both. The light was still bright enough that it white-washed everything around him, much like when an older video camera was initially turned on. I could tell there was more beyond the light, but could make none of it out. Church did not appear to be moving…let me rephrase that: he had a slight spin as if he were in zero gravity, but besides his entire body moving, he was not. Could have been a statue tossed into orbit, and still that crazy in and out effect continued. My brain felt as if it were blistering as I kept…what was I doing? Drifting? I wasn’t walking, thankfully, not falling. Time was a fluid entity here. There were times Church was lazily turning, other times he was spinning like a top, it was maddening as I tried to get my bearings. I tried to see if Bob was following, but I felt like I was trying to see the dark side of the moon from earth; there was no possible way to do this. I tried to yell out, hoping Church might hear and respond; I felt my vocal cords move, yet no sound emerged. I knew I wasn’t in a vacuum without air to vibrate sound waves, because I was breathing fine. I had no logical explanation, though I’m pretty sure there was nothing logical about this.

  Then it was over like I’d awakened from a vivid dream, and the after-effects lingered. I felt as though I was lying down, but I felt no pressure points on my back to indicate that. Ever so agonizingly slow, the world, or this place, anyway, began to fade in. I could not tell if I had a corporeal self; I could not feel anything. For all I knew, I could have been upside down. I held my hands up just to make sure they were still there— even touched my face to realize there was, indeed, sensation.