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I’s but a boy and no higher than a mule’s ass when I fell in alongside the others in the shotgun infantry because I couldn’t ride a mount for the life of me and besides, whenever there was wreckage up the way or somewhere we couldn’t get a wagon through, I’d slip ahead and function just as well as any scout in my quick footwork. The Rednecks (called so much because of the kerchiefs we displayed around our throats) were a marching group that I was born into—there’d at one time been such companies that traversed the wastes besides the wizards. That was before Baphomet or Leviathan or even Mephisto; this was when the demons we’d come across were of lowly intelligence or manageable strength. That is not to say that there were never any close calls in those days—after all, the demon armies that’d come so long before had taken the world, but still a human could scratch by and sometimes even bands of us would take up arms, march in the dens of those blasphemous creatures, and deal with them in the ways we knew how. The day I’d been given the long gun, Jackson had not been so eager to do so because I think he was my father and he always had a certain warmth and he’d taken me in as a son, but I never knew for sure or even asked. It was in the way that I’d sometimes catch him watching me from the corner of my eye whenever I was feeding the hounds or cleaning around camp, and that’s how I’d come at guessing he was my dad—it was that and his affections that’d be rare and foreign in the company.

The Rednecks marched the eastern United States in the days with more towns and even in that time there was a hope among them that this too should pass as all other historical calamities, but the eve of destruction was upon us (maybe it was always). No one remembered dates in our company so I couldn’t say when my birthday was and so I don’t know how old I ever was in my life, but that didn’t matter because an adult was so when they were given their weapon and pushed to the fore. We were warriors for God and some would comment on how we’d tricked ourselves, because sometimes, camped on roadsides or even in downtowns when allowed, we’d erect that great big wooden crucifix that Sibylle kept along with her things and we’d kneel and pray on the ground and it was good—for all of those I’ve witnessed bonding themselves in their religion, damning themselves or others because of their bodies, our religion (not so much old-time as the song goes) seemed to set us free. As much as we concerned ourselves in those prayers, it was that we were the image of God, and so should do God’s work. So, we did.

The company marched north in the foothills of the Appalachians with those great dead and brown mountains on their lefthand then they’d lodge in Charlottesville for a time and then cross over the range and march south with the mountains on their lefthand again till they reached midway through Tennessee and then they’d cut southwest and touch with Marietta before heading northeast then north again. It was a cyclical patrol they took and it just so happened that Sibylle was pregnant all those years ago on the verge of a swing up north and that’s how I came into this world in one of those old canvas tents, the first sights probably dirt and whatever rags that’d been gathered around; some of those in the company told me that Sibylle had squatted, dropped me clear on my head then remounted her horse and ordered everyone else to carry on—she was strong, but I always took that as a folk story anyway.

The story goes that Sibylle took many men to her tent—women too when the mood so pleased her—and so it could’ve been any number of the men in the company that was my father, but I really like to think it was Jackson.

The woman wasn’t ever looked down on for it—her promiscuity was seen as a strength if nothing else and besides she wasn’t married—it took me growing up to understand she’d went on with a persona to do the things she did. She was the first to fight, the last out of a bad situation, and whatever nonsense a man might give her, she’d return with near immediate violence. She was a hard woman, but not without kindnesses in her own way. Maybe the world did it to her, or it could’ve been the fighting, or it could’ve been any number of other things—it would do no good to speculate over a dead person like that. What I do know is that stories would permeate whenever we’d sit around trash wood fires and people did speculate her motives. She wore a cowboy hat and a pistol across the front of her pants so that the holster swung between her thighs, and she was missing her left eye—over the socket was a brown leather patch tailored in Charlottsville. My mother—if that is what she should be called—spat, drank, fought, spoke gruffly, and was business until nighttime. Given the nature of her, the stories around those fires would come and oftentimes the questioning over her missing eye would enter circulation; some said it was thumbed out of her skull by a scorned lover and yet others guessed it was a demon that got it. No one ever knew for certain because she never offered an explanation, and I was never told.

As far as I know, the woman weened me quick as a babe and then I was out of her tent and among the company; this is where Jackson took me on and mentored me; my first words—I don’t recall what they were—were said to him. When I was still much too small to even help sufficiently with chores, I remember he’d tell me stories from books, and it wasn’t long until Jackson was teaching me the letters and the words they formed; his recital was dim in the tent at night whenever he’d pitch an elbow alongside my sleeping bag on the floor and lay there and read to me by the light of a candle. I’d fall to sleep quick, but he never seemed to mind; more than once I woke before him and the candle would still be going, and the book would be placed beside him on a small table and at some point, in the night, he would’ve thrown an arm across me.

The childhood I had in the company was shorter than others, but for the moments it had, I do cherish. I learned to read which is more than most and I learned the self-sufficiency that came from such a life, but that’s not exactly so accurate; for all the skills they’d given me, self-sufficiency was hardly a bother in those times I patrolled the Appalachians with them. It’s not like anything else. It was family in the way that I trusted each of them—every single one. And as I grew up, we’d sleep sometimes three or five to a tent so that I’d never worry because there were always warm bodies beside me. Warm bodies that’d fight for me just as I’d for them. If it came to it, we would die for one another, because our goal of ridding the scourge was greater than any one of our lives. So, we believed, and maybe we were right.

Or maybe we were fools; some of the townsfolk or merchants or travelers we’d occasionally converse with had no qualms in telling us so. It wasn’t that we were ever contracted to take out demons, so oftentimes we’d be given flak in our endeavors. A town would be just as likely to look at us pitiably as they would be to offer us refuge or meals and sometimes, we’d accept supplies that were offered freely, but it didn’t matter because we did what we did for ourselves and it wouldn’t matter the reserves we had—the only time the company was threatened outright by humans were the events in which we attempted to conscript others; the conscripts were plentiful, but many townsfolks did not care for us taking their citizens. Parents cursed us for leading their children astray, city leaders decried us for depleting their populace, but there was always more ready to take up the righteous cause. In the time when I started the fight, our numbers fluctuated gently above or below the cusp of a hundred.

Then I had a brother too, during a time before I’d been put to the company’s task of demon-slaying he was born, but I think biologically we only ever shared Sibylle; even still when the boy was ushered on by her, Jackson took him to raise as well and the boy was handsomer and smarter than I’d been, but there was little jealousy I had for him. His name was Billy and as years went by, he shared the face of another man in our company—John. It’s doubtful that John ever made a claim on my brother—there was none I ever knew of anyway—but not a soul among us seemed outwardly affronted by the bohemian arrangement of our family. John in question was a like many of the men in our company, aloof and his origins were from a land I didn’t know from the south; I’d heard it said a few times that when he’d enlisted years prior, his name before was Juan and the others among the gang took to calling him John; if it bothered him, he never showed it—what he cared about most was the guitar he kept with him wherever he went. Some naked black nights among the rocky hills, around the trash wood fires, he would serenade the gathered crowd in Spanish song, and I never knew the words, but his voice was always slow and never loud and it was only once the company procured a cache of liquors that he’d call for his guitar and someone would bring it, and no one complained; often times a person might glimpse the sway of those gathered, lilting sitting silhouettes listening against the darker shadows beyond.

I’d been given the gun and put to the sole mission and quickly fell in with John because he led the infantrymen and with me being the newest as well as the youngest, the hazing began immediately; I didn’t know how to walk a straight line or keep up with anyone else (never mind I had half the stride of a man then) and any time I’d tidy my pack, I’d find my gear strewn on the ground and the deflated bag resting atop it like a blanket.

My feet ached and John shouted, “Vamanos!” So, I vamanosed at the rear of the pack. We were marching ahead of the wagons and the others, and we’d just left a small trading unit on our trek up I-85, beyond Marietta but not quite across what’d once been Lake Hartwell; some of the maps read okay but many of the roads were hard travelling with their uprisen destruction and the strange weeds we saw from time to time that sprouted from cracks like twisted decaying yellow fingers. The roads could be hard travelling on whatever vehicles we had and so the infantrymen would be sent ahead to be sure the way was clear. The traders we’d met further south on I-85 said there was a nest somewhere and they’d given the place a wide berth and we’d walked so far ahead of the company I was certain the traders were stupid or liars as the road beyond seemed empty and clear save the dead rust buckets lining each shoulder that’d long since been pushed or towed from the way. Just as I’d thought so, John came to a halt at the front and knelt and withdrew a scope to gaze ahead and gave a brief signal for all others to go low.

Twenty people knelt there on the broken asphalt and I was among them, at the rear as it was my first bit of action, so I saw them exchanging glances to one another while John peered through the scope and many of their faces were not much older than mine and one of them lifted a ball cap from his head and steam rolled off his short kept hair before he scooped the cap back over his crown, holding it by the bill. “You smell that?” asked the young girl next to him.

“Stinks,” someone said.

The young man with the cap finally muttered, “Oh, I know that smell.” He then removed his pack and began fighting with it.

John whispered, “Masks!” The word hissed through his teeth, and he was quick to put on his gas mask and did so with an expertise greater than anyone else present. He took his scattergun from the strap on his shoulder and pulled from his knees onto his heels.

The mask was difficult to see through, and hot with the sun coming on us the way it was, and I shifted around for my peripherals were consumed by the blackness therein. There were few less quick on the draw than I and one of them was the boy with the cap; he’d dropped his hat and was still attempting to yank the strap of the mask free from the pack he’d thrown between his knees; he had the filter end out and was pulling hard and panicked while the head straps remained stuck on some piece of equipment within the recesses of the bag. John crept near the boy, gun held like a mop by his side and tore the mask free from the bag before punching the boy lightly in the chest with the hand that held the mask; the man let the mask fall to the boy’s lap. The boy scrambled to slide into it and John watched over us, returning to his position at the fore and I saw the creatures scratching across the road up the way, raised grotesquely swollen heads sloppily rolling on their small bodies.

“Mutants,” said the young man once the mask was over his face; his cap lay on the ground, shorn from his head.

All readied their guns, so I took mine and saw that some reached for sidearms then shifted across either side of the road at John’s motioning requests. We took to the sides, hiding among the bulwark of jalopies and I stuck near the rear of the group, sidling down against the wheel of a van and peeked around the corner to spy on the creatures drawing nearer. Gas expelled from their heads then reflated and I can not say who it was that fired first, all I know is that the maelstrom of bullets that followed was deafening; expertly the company pincered the creatures, taking careful aim and ending each. Chlorine gas erupted from the manmade holes in the creatures’ heads and their bodies laid in the road, flat and grotesque in the yellowing fluids that ejaculated from their wounds.

John moved forward and began taking his sidearm to those demons that still pushed on a limb or trembled with life and the others knew the drill and began doing the same and I crept from my hiding spot behind the van, partially in awe at the quick organization and partially ashamed for never having fired my weapon. I took to the crowd of demons and began firing my own weapon at any potential among their blasphemous ranks and in minutes the crowd of fart heads (I’d not yet heard that nickname) were as dead as could be.

The Chlorine gas dissipated and some of the infantry began removing their masks and the young man who’d had difficulties with his mask prior now kept it protruding off his forehead like a horn and he was smiling as were the others and I felt my hands shaking; the recoil of the shotgun could’ve been to blame, but I think it was an introduction to new terror, the possibility of mortality—of my own mortality.

John removed his mask and joined the crew of us there in a knot among the unmoving demons and he rummaged through his coat and removed a small cigar, lit it from a match, then placed it in the corner of his mouth. “Coño,” he spoke to me, and I knew that word, “Why are you so scared? I see you shaking. What’s gotten under your skin?” His smile was playful and then the others joined in teasing me and from there on, I promised to steel my nerves forevermore, knowing I’d break it anyway.

So it would be that before the rest of our jolly band arrived on the scene, the scouts would push on in fewer numbers and John specifically asked for me to accompany them.

Moving from the south were the others and their blots became more focused on their arrival and ahead of them all was Sibylle riding the aged painted stallion; beyond her were wagons and jury-rigged vehicles and walkers too, and I thought I could just make out the gas-powered caleche Jackson drove for the plumes of smoke it sent from its exhaust.

“There’s a nest ahead we should clear,” said John, dead in tone and shouldering the strap of the shotgun.

The young man, still with his mask clasped to his forehead, searched the muck, and found the hat he’d lost. “Smells somethin’ awful.” He made a face.

A handful of us moved ahead, perhaps six of us, and left the others to meet the rest of our crew.

The young man, now carrying the gas mask by his fingers lackadaisically with his shotgun in the crook of his elbow, fell in alongside me. “Name’s Gibby. You?”

“Harlan.”

“Nice to meet’cha, Harlan. You’re one of Sibylle’s aint you?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well sure, you hang with that mechanic all day. What’s his name?”

“Jackson.”

“That’s the one. He’s good with his hands, but I hear he’s a lame shot.” There was quiet among us as we took the road further, each of us kicking up loose asphalt or snagging boots along those weird weeds; John was in the front, three others in the middle—they jabbered among themselves—and me and Gibby there at the back. The sky was azure, and the clouds were white as cotton and drifted overhead like there wasn’t an issue with the world. A flock of birds took across in a lopsided formation and upon either side of the road and beyond were dead woods without leaves, naked and gray and tired seeming. “Don’t take none of what that old guy said about you. I mean, don’t let it go to your heart. You know?”

“I wasn’t.”

“He’s just a real tough sonofabitch. I’ve been with the company,” Gibby’s eyes traced the sky overhead like he figured the math invisible before his eyes, “Three years or so and he’s a good one. He’s saved me so many times I’ve lost track.” The young man grinned, and I saw he was missing a few teeth. “You saw what happened with that mask of mine. He might talk hard, but he’s soft in there.”

“I guess.”

“You didn’t ever shoot anything moving before today, did you?”

“I shot a feral hound some time ago.”

Gibby looked on with mild surprise, “Did you? Wasn’t a good dog, was it? Like a pet?”

I shook my head.

“It gets easier with time—the scouts and the ones in the infantry always crack up and try to take potshots at the newcomers. You’re green so don’t let it get you down.”

“Alright.”

“Never seen a nest, have you?”

“Nope.

“Well, you’re in for something.”

John froze in his step and traced his eyes across the ground before turning to us and calling us to gather. Marked across the dilapidated road were yellowed smatterings of liquid; chlorine hung in the air. “Masks,” he whispered, “Guns ready.” Each of us subordinates did as was ordered. He pushed us near the trash wood off the road, past an overturned emptied trailer, and as we pushed through the median where a thin and vacant forest grew sickly, there was another road just beyond, just as poor, and further still there was a hole the size of a well on the far side of that newly seen road and we hushed along, following John’s lead and we went crouching in the shadow of him, keeping mind of noise. He motioned me forward in the line and the sound emanating from the pit was liquid and nauseating.

“Yes?” I asked as I came nearest to him, hunkered as low as I could be.

“Ever use a grenade?”

I shook my head and unease swelled but I pushed it away.

He took the round object from his belt and passed it to me. “There’s a pin. Pull the pin. Throw the grenade in that hole. It’s that simple.”

I moved to the edge of the hole, teeth bared from within my mask, fingers wrapped hard around the grenade, and I came to the edge and was immediately struck by a sudden lurch of vertigo as it went further into the earth than I could’ve imagined—the creatures clung to the walls of the tunnel, fat heads opening for the gas to spill forth from their ridged cloacal maws. I teetered on the tips of my toes and the air was thin and the lens of the mask through which I saw the world became fogged from the gas that erupted from the impossibly deep pit. There, just beyond those wretched things, I felt as though there was a light in the darkness breathing up at me like the earth and stone beneath was alive.

Ripping the pin from the grenade, I held it outstretched and dropped the thing; it went bouncing from to and fro within the hole and I was dazed and could not pull away.

Two hands yanked me from there just as I’d gone blind in the gas and the explosion erupted, sending a vibration beneath our feet. John ushered me away and the others followed, and I dared a glance over my shoulder to see the earth open then close and the tunnel fell in on itself—one of those things had clamored to the opening only to touch the ground with a near human palm before being sucked beneath. The ground encircling the hole fell in as did a portion of road and once it was done, there was a massive dip in the earth there, a testament to what was.

We took up along the tree line of dead vegetation, and I was still staring at the place the nest had been, dust coming to a fog around our knees and John barked out, “Keep your eyes sharp—see if there’s any stragglers.” There weren’t any left, but we took up a formation, sweeping the area; Gibby whispered something and kicked a rock and John flinched at the noise, giving the young boy an expression.

The nest had been cleared and we awaited the arrival of the others on the open road in a semicircle fashion, maintaining a level of apprehension at any potential threat—once the rest of the convoy had arrived at our location, we fell in alongside them and I took a moment to find Jackson; he was there in the caleche alongside Billy who sat over on his side in the throes of a good nap with his face in his hand—smoke bellowed up from the rear of Jackson’s contraption so that an open spot formed in the convoy for no one wanted to catch a face full of the black fumes. I began walking alongside the wagon’s slow pace.

“How was it?” asked Jackson.

“Scary,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “It’s always scary. Did you kill anything?”

“I did.”

“Good. If you keep doing that, you’ll be just fine.”

“John’s something.”

“He is. But you’d do well to keep on his good side. He’s tough, but competent.”

We moved on the rest of the day till the sun threatened darkness by horizon clouds and we took up camp just on the edge of Lake Hartwell—though by that time it was hardly a lake and looked shallow enough to be a nothing more than a decorative reflective pool.

The convoy unpacked canvas tents, took to burning stews over butane eyes and lighting lanterns and meager fires and John pulled me aside in the fray of passersby and told me that if I were to ever hesitate with an explosive like that again, he’d kick me into the hole and save everyone the trouble. I merely nodded at him and he took on towards the front of the convoy where Sibylle would be and my troupe of scouts was disbanded and I aided Jackson in folding out the rear of our wagon and we put on supper while Billy, still small and talkative, rummaged through the larder boxes I removed from the caleche and the boy, mischievous, found the jar of sugar we kept and began excavating the granular powder with his fingers and lathering his tongue with it and grinning; I stepped after him and snagged the jar from him, returning the cap over the container.

“Hey!” said Billy.

“We’ve only got so much.”

“So? We can get more.”

A warm smile overtook me then, “You plan on paying for it?”

“Sure. I’ll pay you back.”

“Of course, you would. How about until you’ve got enough money, you don’t eat all the sugar, huh?” I asked him.

A thought dawned over him, “It was your first patrol! Did you shoot anything? Did you powpow them?”

“Come help,” I moved over to Jackson where the man was cutting the bad parts from potatoes and I began at them with my own knife and Billy sat on the ground at our feet, playing with the bits that fell from our knives.

“Did you kill monsters?”

“Shh,” said Jackson, “Don’t bother Harlan.”

“I can talk about it,” I said.

Jackson frowned, “Alright.”

“What were they like?” asked Billy.

“There were dragons and shadow monsters and more,” I laughed.

“Were there, really?”

“Sure.” I laughed and dropped a potato into our pot broth.

Jackson pointed his knife not in anger, “Don’t joke about dragons.”

“Do dragons exist?” asked Billy.

“You just don’t joke about them, okay?” said Jackson.

“Have you ever seen them? Tandy and Tubs says they’re made up.”

“Well,” said Jackson, sending his own potato into the broth, “They’re right then.”

We ate a mess of watery stew—potatoes and onions and cloves of half-good garlic was what was left for hearty prep and in the night, after we’d finished our meal and washed our utensils and taken to the tent, Billy found the play gun that Jackson had made for him from scrounged scrap metal and pointed it at me and told me that he’d shoot me and I laughed and wrestled the gun from his little hands, putting him into a headlock and tossing the metal piece to the dirt floor of the tent.

“Quit playing—s’time for bed,” Jackson told us and although I was too old for it, Jackson read a story to Billy and I listened and I think Jackson knew I was listening because he’d periodically hesitate a page turn and look over to see me in my bedroll still awake; the story was old and it was about a man named Don that liked to read books and the man wanted to be a knight, but he had it all wrong.

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If I were to guess, I’d imagine they took Andrew to Boss Harold before anyone else and the rumors around Golgotha seemed to support this supposition; the Bosses enjoyed their personal retribution away from the eyes of citizens, maybe it was talking or maybe more, and although there were whispers of the boy being strung up on the wall or maybe he’d be violated in the stocks for all to see, I imagined that the council I held with Boss Harold might’ve had something to do with that never materializing. When I was allowed to the boy’s cell, it was dark, and his face was bruised and the bandaging I’d applied to his severed wrist had been removed probably for amusement. The room was small and there were no windows and only a single doorway let out into the hallway which contained other cells and further, near the exit, there was the office of wall men. The guard that’d let me in locked the door behind me and Andrew sat on a metallic cot without cushioning, and he stared at the grimy floor through swollen eyes.

“Hello,” he said. And I was taken aback by the comment because he spoke it as quickly as he might passing a person in the street. He'd been through so much that the word was abrupt, skittish. I nodded and moved to him, reaching for his arm where he’d been nearly fatally wounded. It was infected. Without fighting me, he allowed me to tend to it without even a question; I wiped it and applied salve. Once it was cleaned and rewrapped and only after I’d settled on the cot beside him, he spoke again, “I heard stories about the cells, but I never thought they’d smell.”

I withdrew a handful of antibiotics, and he took them without putting them to his mouth. “You should have them,” I said, “You might lose the whole arm if not.”

“I might lose my life.”

“Maybe not,” I offered a grim smile and water with for the pills. “You’re alive still.”

“How much longer though?” He took the medicine and grimaced hard. The boy looked older than he was. “It smells like blood here. I can smell the people that’ve been here before.”

I patted him on the back and removed myself from the cell and he did not call after me, not even to ask for the return of his hand and I hoped that I could stave off whatever tortures the Bosses might have in store for him.

It’d been two days since I’d returned with Dave and Andrew and quickly after our arrival, I’d tried departing from the man and hoped he’d drop whatever revenge he believed I could assist him with, but it was to no avail for he attended everywhere with me since our return to Golgotha. Although he’d not been allowed to enter the cells alongside me, he was waiting for me outside as I stepped through the wall men’s office and into the noonday sun; I deftly plucked a pre-rolled cigarette from my pocket and tried at lighting it but before I’d even gotten the chance, he was there at the stoop of the office, pestering, “We should go somewhere quiet,” he said.

“What do you take me for exactly?” I asked while maintaining eye contact with the flame off a match.

“You’re capable enough. You could be a hero. I’d do it with you. We could scrounge up a handful of people and change things. We really could.” Dave was casting sidelong glances at those that passed us in the dirt street just off the stoop, but nary one seemed to care about our conversation.

“Leave it.”

“I won’t.”

I sighed.

He put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off.

Felina’s was a structure partially built from ancient shipping containers directly in the heart of the hydroponics towers in the center of town; the chicken shit smell from the base of the towers came with nauseating stagnation and could make a passerby sick, but upon entering Felina’s, the smell subsided and was replaced with the smell of body sweat. The older barwoman stood behind the counter and me and Dave took up on the far corner where we sat around an old card table, using crates as chairs; no one else was there—the smell of the hydro towers probably had some hand in that.

Dave took in close to me so that I could feel the moisture off his breath, “I’ve been talking to a few others over at the towers and they feel the same way I feel—but with you—well without you I don’t think I’d want to do it.”

“No, please go on without me,” I slanted my body across the table to push my face away from Dave’s; with me positioned with my back against the wall, I spied Felina beyond the counter, arms across her chest and watching us with an air of suspicion. She came to our table, slowly with her club foot and upon reaching us, she used our table for mild support with her big hands and greeted us without excitement.

Dave asked for water and her gaze shifted to me and I dismissed her, and we were alone till she limped back over with a pitcher and glass and Dave drank it greedily while Felina watched on from beyond the counter—her eyes suspicious but pretty blue too. She kept the haft from a dismembered axe behind the counter and was known to throttle unruly patrons with it.

Although some might have called Felina’s a bar, it was just short of it because of the rarity of spirits—besides, it was the upstairs brothel portion that the establishment owed to its popularity. Anyone might brave the smell from the street for companionship and if the noises from the rusted overhead support beams were anything to measure, the clientele was content indeed. A man descended from the stairs by the bar, gave a brief nod to Felina then to us and disappeared through the front door; a waft of the outside air rushed in, and Dave scrunched his nose.

“It’s a funny thing, I’ve passed by here all the time, but I don’t think I’ve been inside since before—” he paused, “Well, since before anyway.” He took a drink of water and rubbed his palms against his cheeks. “I know someone that works underground and could get us some gunpowder.”

I merely laughed at this. “Gunpowder, huh?”

“Well sure. The Bosses have reserves in the basements. We could blow them sky high.”

“More likely that you’d blow your hands off.”

“What’s it going to take to convince you?”

I thought, “Could you promise no one would die?”

Dave seemed baffled at the question. “Who cares?”

“These things hardly ever happen quietly—or without collateral. How’s this? Could you promise that no innocents get caught in stray fire?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are as ill prepared as I’d imagined.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The meek are intended to inherit, but many will die before all that.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I wish you’d leave it be.”

Another patron stumbled down the stairs, a scrawny tall man with a thin beard came charging into the chamber without clothes and a voice followed him, crying loudly, “Sonofabitch tried choking me!” A pair of arms and legs came stumbling down after—the source of the cries. There was a topless woman, a belt secured around one of her wrists and a pink mark around her throat. The naked man protested and put up his hands as the woman swung the arm with the belt and whipped at him with it, striking across the forearm he’d shielded himself with.

Felina moved carefully from around the counter, raised the haft, then brought it down across the man’s back. He stumbled to his knees, pleading. The barwoman raised the weapon once more and the sound was like wood against wood as it met the man’s head and his body was taken to the ground completely, perhaps dead, perhaps unconscious. The two women lifted the man out the door and Felina spat through the opening. Outside wind came again and Dave scrunched his nose once more before the door shut. The topless woman removed the belt from around her wrist, tossed it to the floor, then secured an arm across her chest before hurrying upstairs.

“So, gunpowder?” I asked Dave.

He nodded and took another drink of water while eyeing Felina as she took herself back to the counter and stowed the makeshift club into whatever place she kept it. “Yeah.”

“Go for it then and leave me out of it.” I fiddled with my thumbs across the table. “I’ll even make you a deal for when you come running to me for help later. If you blow your fingers off, I’ll try and help you find them. How’s about that?”

“I’ll wear you down.”

Another gust of wind came from the far door and I half expected to see the man that’d been removed there in the doorway, standing on his feet and ready for another round of punishment, but there was no one there in the hollow spot; as my gaze drifted from person-face level, I saw a medium sized mutt there in gray fur, pushing the door in with its nose and then sliding the rest of its starved body through—each of its yellowy sad eyes peered in and I could not tell the breed but Dave lifted himself from his seat and Felina went to the dog too.

“No dogs,” stated the woman.

Dave, the indomitable sweetheart that he was knelt to the dog’s face and touched its snout; it licked his hand and Dave said to Felina, “He’s not mine, but have you got some water for him?”

“No dogs inside. I don’t like repeating it.”

“Fair enough,” said Dave, “I don’t know who he—” he froze and then examined the rear of the dog before petting the dog on the head, “She belongs to, but I’ll take her outside. Just. Please some water, won’t you?”

The barwoman first drummed her fingers against her leg then went to the counter and I noticed Dave flinch as she reached under there, but she came back with a bowl and he took it and ushered the dog out; as he exited, he called to me, and I sighed and moved with him.

Remaining in the street was the man that’d been tossed out, face up, half-opened eyes, and flies buzzed about, and I touched him with my foot, but he didn’t move. Blood leaked from his ears. “Dead,” I said.

Dave took the dog from the body around to the side of the building and the feces smell was strong with the hydro towers, but he sat the water down and the dog went at it quickly, without restraint and spilt half before the man went to steady it with his hand; he knelt by the dog and pushed a shoulder against the wall of the brothel.

“There you go,” I told him, “You’ve found someone dumb enough and maybe loyal enough to follow through with your little gunpowder plan. Strap a handful of dynamite to him and watch him go boom in the Boss’s faces.” I genuinely did try it as a joke.

“You can be very mean,” said Dave.

Once the bowl was dry besides dog spit, he returned it to Felina, reentering briefly, and it was just me and the dog and the dog looked up at me and I turned away while its voice whined in the back of its throat and I took a piece of hardtack from my pocket and tossed it on the ground—the dog went after it, assuredly snapping up dirt in the process. Then the creature made a dry and throaty sound from swallowing too quickly, but moments after the thick cracker was gone. It licked my hand gently, and I scratched its chin and Dave returned and upon seeing me with the dog, he gave me a look and then brought himself to the height of the dog in a hunker.

“Hey there,” he said to it, “Someone’s beat you up pretty bad, huh?” It was true; scars stood out in places where the dog had no fur.

In response, the weathered mutt hoisted its forepaws onto his knees and pushed its nose into his.

“Yeah, girl,” he took one of the dog’s ears between his forefinger and thumb and rubbed it gently and the animal looked up, sad eyed, “What’s a good name for you?”

“Dog-meat?” I proposed.

Dave shook his head. “What sort of sick joke is that?” but he was smiling, “No. I’ll come up with something to call her. Isn’t that right?” He asked the dog, massaging the face of the animal with his thumbs; the dog stared dumbly at him. “Maybe a Beth or a Patty might suit you. How do you like them?”

The dog licked his face but couldn’t speak.

“Well,” I said, “It’s a shame it got you, you’ll pick a person name for it and that’s strange. Why not call her Mary if you want a person name?”

“Bah,” said Dave, rising to a full stand; momentarily, even with the other folks passing us in the street, he took a moment to see the dead man we’d passed on our way out of Felina’s and for a moment he remained quiet. “I’ll come to you again Harlan. Maybe when I’ve got more of a plan. I only hope you’ll listen to the stuff I’ve said about it. I really do. I really hope you’ll be on the right side of this thing.”

“Sides are overrated.”

Dave put a hand on my shoulder, “Of course,” he nodded, “Whatever you say.”

He left with his new friend—the dog following him traced from left to right close behind Dave and I watched him take off and around the nearest hydro tower and I was alone on the street and evening wouldn’t be far away, so I took to home while staring at my moving feet and speaking to no one. A few people along the way tried nodding at me or saying a small greeting here or there, but I was absorbed in my own head, and nothing took me from it once I got going. Maybe that was one of the reasons I enjoyed the wastes; there were no pretenses out there and with the constant thought of death there was no other thing to think about than each passing moment. I could not shut my thoughts up. I could ramble more about the motivations of a scavver, but I don’t think I should—leave that for someone that cares.

Upon taking the catwalks where I could look out on a swatch of Golgotha with the sun beating down and the constant hum of people going about their business, I was frozen on the railing and wishing I’d taken my own life and wishing that Dave had not found me out there; maybe if I was faster or smarter or better in whatever way that mattered.

I pushed into the door into my small abode and cool blood pushed through my body on seeing the robed girl there on my mattress, holding a shotgun with its barrel angled directly at me; she donned a flowy mess of dresses and kept her head wrapped in garb so that only her eyes shone through, but her arms stuck from the mess of cloth and I could see they were skinny with long scab marks like a blade had drawn across the flesh.

“Harlan?” asked the girl.

“Is that mine?” I nodded at the pump-shotgun in her hands. The slowness of the world was gone, and I could think again; if things were different, I’d have been a dead man, but it was unloaded, and I knew it.

“It was hanging on the wall—I don’t know how to use the thing anyway. I don’t know what I was doing with it,” she said, “You just scared me, and I didn’t know who you might’ve been.”

“This is my place.”

She laid the shotgun on the bed and unwrapped her face; it was Gemma, “You were with Andrew.”

“I was.”

“You said he was dead.”

I brought in air slowly through my nose. “I did.”

“You lied.”

I nodded, letting the air come out.

“Why?”

“I needed to find you.”

“But you found us both then, I guess.”

“Not on purpose.” A thought occurred to me, “Does you father know where you are right now?”

She shook her head; although rest had done her good, there was still a fair amount of fatigue present on her. “I snuck out.”

“Would’a though you learned your lesson on that front.”

“Is Andrew okay? No one will tell me anything about it.”

“He’s locked up right now, but he is alive. For how long? I don’t know. I figured your pop paid a visit to him already—wouldn’t you know about that?”

She shook her head again. “Woo,” Gemma slumped onto the side of my mattress and gathered the robes around her, “I’m feeling faint.”

I moved to the bed and gathered the shotgun, putting it back on the hooks in the wall. “You shouldn’t break into people’s homes.”

Cupping her brow in a hand so that I could only see her mouth and the bottom of her nose, she said, “I just needed to know he was alive. These past days I’ve been so worried about him. I knew you told me he was dead, but I knew you were a liar too. So, I had bad thoughts about what might’ve happened to him out there. If what happened to me was anything to go off.” Her voice broke for a moment and then she pulled her hand from her face and blinked a few sudden times. “I just.”

“I get it. You love the boy.”

She nodded without looking at me.

“So, beg your dad to let him go.”

“Everyone’s so mad at him. It’s funny that everyone’s so mad at him, but it was my idea, and they all treat me like a darling little flower. Like I couldn’t have been the one with the idea of running away. I had more reason to run than he ever did.”

“You should leave.”

“I don’t want to. Can’t you see that’s what I’ve been saying? Judge all you like. Call me rich all you like, but I can tell you this: I don’t feel like it.” Gemma grabbed the edge of the bed as her head wavered on her shoulders. “Dizzy spells are awful.” She shook her head. “Like no sickness ever.” Her eyes locked on mine. “Help me.”

“I’ve already tried convincing them not to kill him.” Taking a pause, I thought to add, “And I personally saw to his injuries. Please go and leave me be.”

“Oh, but you’ve asked for it,” she said, “You put yourself in the business of it.”

“Look. All’s I wanted was to save you if I could and get the water running again. That’s it. Now go.” I put my arm up to wave her out the door and she stood to make her way there, catching herself on the frame, then out on the catwalk railing before turning and looking at me over her shoulder.

“Bastard.” she said.

“Yes.” The door shut between us, and I took myself to sitting on the bed’s edge and reminiscing over how Dave reminded me so much of Jackson. Jackson was a real tough one; whatever happened he always kept a cool head (so I reckon him and Dave would be different in that way) and the idea of being a hero was so big for him. It’s a curious thought: whether Dave would have such ideas if hadn’t been for the tragic loss of his family.

The shotgun sat on there on the wall, and I took it and looked over it, putting the stock in my left hand then my right and laid it across my legs; the woven strap on it had gone thin so that the place I’d once worn it over my shoulder was mostly threadbare. I moved to the cabinet by the sink where I kept a few essentials and in the very back there was an old box of shells—it was a surprise they still seemed good, but with old ammo you never could tell, and the shells were just as likely to fire true as they might be to never send pellets from the barrel. I took a knife and began whittling into a shell I’d plucked from the box. Pellets spilled between my feet as I sat on the bed and they rolled across the floor and then I found the gunpowder and rose again, sprinkling it onto the cabinet top into a neat pile. Dave said he had a fella’ he knew that worked in the underground—the sort of person that could get him all the gunpowder he needed. Was he familiar with its destructive force; had he ever fired a gun? He promised me no one innocent would die and I knew that was a lie and there’s surely a piece of him that knew it was a lie just as well.

It was just then as I took a forefinger and thumb and pinched up a bit from the gunpowder splat that I remembered a thing that Jackson told me all the time when he thought none of the others were listening. The gunpowder rained from my fingertips as I rubbed them together and I sniffed the place where they’d become sooty, taking in a smell I’d not smelled in a long time. Jackson would say, “Whoever fights monsters should be sure that he don’t become a monster.” It wouldn’t be for a long time—after I’d visited the libraries in Alexandria or Babylon (take your preference)—till I realized it was a quote that Jackson stole from some guy named Neet-chee. It seemed like a good thing to adhere to, and it was certainly something I wasn’t good at keeping with and if I couldn’t then there was little certainty that Dave would keep to it either. Maybe I had become a monster; morally dubious anyway.

Jackson was a hero, and he was dead as was Sibylle as was Billy as was John and all of them. We’d tried heroing and it got all of us dead. Almost all of us.

I hung the shotgun on the wall and left it there and swept the gunpowder into the floor with a flat palm where the pellets were and chucked the box of old shells into the cabinet again.

Ringing of bells came from the hall of the Bosses and it was time for a display. Denizens gathered in the front square by the gates and awaited while they trotted out Andrew; perhaps the words I’d passed to Boss Harold rang hollow after all. The Bosses were there just as always, drinking their wine on the platform, and Maron was out front with his wall men in the semicircle of gathered Golgotha residents. Of the population, only a hundred or two gathered for this poor boy’s execution. The guards had, at some point after my departure, removed the bandage on his empty wrist and he looked more sickly in the face than before and his cheeks were swollen and he wept, seemingly not from the terror of it but from the skin around his eyes having been so damaged; tears came through swelled eyelids and a wall man kept him by the elbow and Maron marched to the boy and lifted the boy’s face with his hand to look into it and maybe he whispered something to him.

I weaved through the crowd, moving to the steps that led to the stage where the Bosses stood with their foods and wines and their plenty and upon approach, I was stopped by a wall men, but upon catching Boss Harold’s eye, he told the guard to let me through and I took the stairs and from the platform, I could see over the crowd—Dave was far in the rear of those gathered, totally disconnected from the others for he hunkered by a set of crates, patting the head of the dog we’d found just earlier in the day. For a moment, I wished I was there with him and not on the stage at all.

“Dear boy!” Boss Harold shouted at me over the excited jeers of the others, “It’s so good to see you again. You are quite the hero, and it’s always good to be in the company of those.”

I nodded at him and within a flash, he’d slammed his cup of wine into my hand, telling me to drink, and only moments passed before his own cup was replaced by a nearby servant. “We spoke about this?” I tried.

His face was red, and I could just make out the miniscule veins vibrant along the corners of his nose; the man was far gone drunk. “That boy’s been a thorn in my side for too long, so I know you understand it when I say that he needs punishment. I took all that you said into account,” his words slurred, and the sweet sick came off him in a breath of hot air when he pulled me in, resting his ear on my shoulder. “Nobody dies today, but ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’,” the Boss paused. “You’re not a father yourself, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Ah! Then you might not be familiar with that proverb required in bringing a child up in this world.” Boss Harold laughed. “I’d never take my sweet Gemma out in the square like this, but God there’s been times I’ve wanted it. ‘Spare the rod’.” He repeated. “But we’ve something a fair bit more interesting than a rod for that boy.” Boss Harold swayed on his feet and took the fist containing his cup of wine, pointing with his index finger at the open place by the wall where Maron and Andrew and the wall men were. “Speaking of!” Boss Harold was giddy, and he took a magnificent gulp from his cup, throwing his head far back. “You’re a learned man, yes?”

“What?”

“You know how to read? Maron said something about your reading. That’s a rare quality! I’d love to talk about books with you sometime. I’ve my own personal collection.”

The wall men stripped Andrew of his clothes then threw them to the ground and a gasp escaped the audience and the boy shouted and Maron moved to a nearby bucket and reached into the mouth of the container, coming back to a full stand; a whip was coiled around his arm. The Bosses didn’t even look on. The punishment was for the benefit of Boss Harold, and not even he looked on. He jabbered on about how he’d like to speak with me over an old philosophy called Objectivism then he went on about how he’d learned long ago the greatest achievement of man was his own happiness and I listened to the drunk man and when the whip broke skin the first time, I’m sure Andrew felt every bit.

Blood exploded in violent dew off his back and the crack of the whip struck the boy till he couldn’t stand and then several times more. Splatter reached onlookers each time Maron lifted the whip over his head, and it was only once the boy stopped moving that the Boss Sheriff swaggered over to inspect him; Andrew had fallen face down and Maron took his boot to the boy’s side so that the boy rolled onto his back and seconds passed without movement and even Boss Harold quit with his talking. The prone body just lay there and for a moment Andrew looked like the body I’d seen earlier out front of Felina’s. Then the boy spasmed and gasped air and Maron shouted about how he was still alive before giving the toe of his boot to Andrew’s ribs.

“What a show,” said the Bosses—what a show indeed.

The crowd dispersed in clumps, taking back to their jobs or leisure and I left the platform only after agreeing that Objectivism sounded good and Boss Harold laughed and stumbled in pivoting to take on in conversation with the other Bosses and I briefly imagined giving him a nudge, so he’d fall off the stage, but refrained from doing so.

When I met the boy lying in the dirt there, there was me and Dave moved in too and Maron had taken to his station where there was a table by sandbags, and he was engrossed in a game of solitaire; it seemed the man was totally unfazed by the justice he’d dealt. There was a time when that body could’ve been a hero and yet there he was, poisoned.

I called out to the Boss Sheriff, “Ain’t you going to put him back to his cell?”

Without even looking over, Maron swept his mustache with his fingers and waved me off, “Harold was real clear on letting the boy out of custody once it was done.” He lifted his cowboy hat and scratched his head while looking at the cards on the table then he laughed. “He’s a free man. I’ve heard that was your meddlin’ that did it.”

I moved to the boy and snatched up the clothes they ripped from him and Dave, not saying a word with his new mutt by his side, helped me to return some dignity to the boy.

We took him to my small apartment and washed him and tended over him while he lay in my bed.

Gemma came soon after Andrew had been draped in a sheet—she was there in disguise as she’d been earlier and upon me opening the doorway, she began to ask me if the boy was with me. I merely stepped aside, and she rushed to Andrew’s side; if he was aware of her presence, there was no way to tell.

“They killed him.” She’d taken to her knees to be nearer his level. “Oh. Oh, he’s dead.” She touched him and he shivered at the touch. Gemma removed the wrappings of cloth around her head and looked at her sweetie closer and she put a hand to her mouth. “They took his hand!”

“No,” said Dave, “He’s going to live.” The man looked to me and I shrugged. “Yeah,” his voice didn’t sound sure, “He’ll live.”

I moved to the catwalk and Dave came with me, the dog following behind him—the timid mutt looked over the edge of the catwalk to the city below then stepped away and returned to my room. When Dave took up beside me, leaning over the railing, and the sun hit his face just so, he looked exactly like Jackson and maybe that was why when he raised eyebrows then cut his eyes at me with a question—the question was everything and I finally nodded.

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First/Previous/Next

It was pitch black and we spoke to one another in little whispers in the mechanic’s office; I was only able to make out the vaguest shapes before I struck my lantern alive and sat it on a desk. Dust levitated in the air and the room was small and Dave hesitantly sat in the plastic swivel chair behind the desk. Old papers stuck to the desk’s surface, all but becoming one with the object. Lining the walls of the office, laid upon the floor were old boxes of tinned food or oils or scraps of blanket for comfort. On the far wall was the only exit to the room, leading to the exterior of the shop; there were no windows. Everything had a coating of dust—it’d been quite some time since I’d used the safehouse because I’d never been delighted with camping overnight on the ground level of a building. I moved to a wall where there were strewn blankets, found a tough and coarse one then tossed it on the ground, straightening it into a square. Dave watched me, totally quietly.

Kneeling in the square, I removed my pack from my shoulder and sat my camping stove there. Once I’d settled in front of it with my legs crossed, I took out a deep aluminum pan and turned to Dave who’d leaned across the desk with his head resting in both of his palms.

“Hungry?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just fascinated. I had no idea how you survived out here all on your own.” His eyes scanned the wall with stacked boxes of cans. “Seems you’re set.”

“It took a long time to collect.” I began dumping corn, tomatoes, and beans into the pan. “It won’t taste great, but it will be warm and filling.”

“What’s the furthest south you’ve ever been?”

“Georgia. Do you know it?”

He nodded. “Furthest north?”

“Not much further than Golgotha.”

“So, you’ve never even been up to see the great valleys?”

I shook my head and lit a cigarette.

“Even I’ve seen them, granted it was when I was so young, I hardly remember them. What about west?” He seemed eager.

“No more than Ebenezer. I think. That’d be somewhere in Kansas if you know anything about it.”

“Damn,” Dave scratched his cheek, “Haven’t heard of it.”

“There ain’t a lot out that way anymore. Reminds me of down south. Used to be some places down there.” I shook the pan with one hand and flicked ash across the blanket with the one holding the cigarette. “It’s all dead now. Maybe there’s something. Probably not.”

“Everyone always talks about how there’s other places. I’ve seen some. I think a lot of young people wouldn’t know Pittsburgh if it was on the horizon, but when I was little, we’d go there sometimes.”

I nodded. “It’s dead. No use worrying about it now.”

“Seems like places have gone more infested since then.” He rounded the desk, leaving the swivel chair to protest at him ascending off it. The smell from the concoction in the pan filled the office; it wasn’t much but I dashed some salt across it before giving it a shake. “What do you think about it?”

“Killin’ the Bosses?”

Dave nodded and sat on the floor with me, removing his pack and his shirt; he flapped a hand in front of him to cool himself. “Well?”

“I think you’re not the first that would’ve tried. You’ve seen them. You’ve seen them use the stocks; I know you have. You’ve seen them strip men, women, children—beat them in the street with sticks. You’ve seen the sorts of pain they bring. What makes you think you’d stand a chance against anything like that?” I studied him while he craned back on his arms for support and stared at the black ceiling overhead. “You’re too soft for it.”

“Yeah,” he snapped, jerking his head down to stare right into my eyes, “Maybe I’m soft. Maybe I am. But you,” a smirk formed, “You aren’t. You get invited to little banquets. You know them and can get close.”

“The hell you say.” I took a long drag from the cigarette and blew it over my shoulder.

“I know you could, so why don’t you? Why haven’t you?”

“You don’t know me at all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t you want to leave a better world than when you came into it?”

“Tried that.” I shook the pan again and let it simmer. “It’s a fool’s game.”

Dave scoffed. “Ridiculous.”

“You expect me to walk into the hall of Bosses and what? Think I can kill ‘em all?”

“So, we start a revolution. That’s what we do. A revolution. I know people that’d agree.”

“They’ll string you up the wall or worse. Remember what they do to their enemies? Remember what they did to Lady? She’s a prime example of the punishment that revolution brings.”

“It wouldn’t be like that.”

“No? You don’t remember it? How long have you lived in Golgotha? How many years? You remember. It’s the changing of seasons, the negotiation of one warlord for another. Revolution’s for idiots. I say we scrape by.” I held up my thumb and forefinger to demonstrate how close one might need to scrape by. “That. That’s what we do. Anything more and you’re asking for it.”

“Well,” he laid his shirt out by his side, flat so that it might dry from his sweat, “I guess I took the tinman for having a heart.”

“Oh, you’re so clever—you know a story. Guess you should know about the tinman’s friend. The one made of straw. You remember what he was missing?”

“You sayin’ we’re friends?”

“You would take it to mean that.”

“And you think I’ve never met someone with a chip on their shoulder before. Your ideas are easy. It’s a coward’s way.”

“Watch it.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Henry believed in it, and I believed like you. He was young and hopeful.”

I took a puff from my cigarette while keeping my attention on the pan. “You’ve seen what young and hopeful does.”

Although I didn’t look at him, I felt his presence tense up. “What a thing to say to someone.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s the thing you should hear.”

We ate the vegetable concoction in relative quiet; it wasn’t flavorful, but the warmth brought my bones to relaxing and we pushed against the desk with our backs, remaining on the floor while we finished.

It was sometime in the dead of the night that a far and dreamlike noise roused me—it was the voice of a human (unmistakably so) from somewhere far off and it was initially so faint and distorted that one could’ve mistaken it for an animal or beast if they’d convinced themselves of such. Within my first few blinks of coming to wake, I attempted to do just that, but as I tiredly scanned the direction of Dave and saw him already on his feet, frightened eyes staring back at me; cut against the darkness as a shape, he towered.

“What’s that?” he breathed at me.

I attempted to brush it off. “Nothing to worry about.”

“It sounds like a boy. He sounds like he’s in trouble.”

I shook my head. “Go back to sleep.”

“Shh. It’s getting closer, I think.” Seconds passed. “It is!” He snatched a lantern and lit it, so the small office was bathed in yellow.

“Leave it be. It’s none of our business.”

Dave shot a look at me I didn’t care for. “You really are a coward.” With that, he bolted for the door leading out into the night and twisted the lock before swinging the door out into the nothingness of the ruins.

“If you go out there,” at this point, I’d scrambled to my feet and had readied myself for any terrible thing to propel through the entryway, “If you do, goddammit, you had better not come back.”

He shook his head then disappeared into the night; his shadow was visible for moments and then it wasn’t, and he was nothing more than the glow of the lantern he’d taken, and I was in darkness again. I moved to the door and blinked but could see nothing against the shadows of the tall buildings—I focused on Dave’s lantern and felt it draw me out but fought the pull.

“Hello!” shouted Dave, “Hello! Is anyone out here? I heard your yelling!”

“Idiot,” I whispered from the doorway.

“Hey! Are you out here?” The lantern swung around wildly as though he was scanning his immediate area; he’d come upon a wall across a street and so the light he carried painted his shadow high upon a wall.

Then the voice came again, clearer than ever “Help!” but I couldn’t tell from where, as the echo carried it all around. It was certainly a young voice, scared. Probably a boy like Dave had said. “I’m lost! Something’s after me! I’m hurt! Please help!”

“Here!” Dave shouted; his wall shadow waved an arm around wildly. “Can you see me?”

“I’m trying! I’ve been hurt and something’s out here! Something’s cut me bad!” shrieked the voice.

My intestines twisted around, and I left the doorway after snatching a light of my own, moving over a display of shadow-cast rubble, tripping towards Dave while igniting my lantern. “Hello?” I shouted. Moonlight splintered through apertures of the tall buildings poorly so that most everything was difficult to see. “Dave! Get back inside goddammit!”

Only several yards from safety, I saw a smaller shadow plunge into the halo around Dave and pull itself along on all fours before meeting him and staggering to a full stand. The small figure threw its right arm around Dave, and he seemed to take the burden easily, moving from the wall, through the street, near me on the other side. “It’s a boy!” Dave laughed nervously, “I think he’ll be alright. Did you hear that?” he asked the boy, “You’ll be alright.”

A cat-like hiss came from somewhere in the blackness of the towering structures from somewhere up high. Then it came again, but closer, and I moved quickly to Dave to take up the boy on his other side and we moved along in a circle of light; strangely a liquid dampened me where the boy crooked an arm around my lowered neck, and I knew immediately that it was blood. Indeed, the boy was injured. The smell off him was immediate. “Hurry,” I said, “It’s watching us. It’s got his scent.”

No one confirmed they heard me, but I felt a presence in the dark ahead. The office was merely running steps away and the boy’s muscles had given to exhaustion, so we pulled him along on the tips of his shoes.

“Take him,” I spoke to Dave, slipping from beneath the boy’s arm, and taking ahead with my lantern. The hiss came again and there were two white orbs caught in a happenstance of brief moonlight, eyes resting in a face of waxen skin, sickly and damned. “Alukah!” I shouted at the thing. It stepped into the radius of my light, and I swung at it with my lantern, giving the flame a series of hiccups where each of us strobed. “Dave! Run ahead. Take him inside!” The creature’s mouth grimaced, exposing a series of fangs along its round mouth, standing off its black gums; a hiss escaped its throat and I saw it twist around to pace the edge of my light, moving from the pathway to the office; its spine arched high, each vertebra pointed, countable; its long black hair hung off its rattish face and it moved like a distorted person on its hind legs, impossibly long pale arms hung before itself and swayed side to side with each of its steps.

Dave darted past us, launching the boy into the room first then spinning around to call after me, “Come on!”

Hesitantly, I stepped sideways to keep the thing in my sight, all the while being sure not to make eye contact. A pulse was in my ears. “Don’t come any closer,” I said to the thing.

Fast as a whip, it took a swipe at me with one of its incredibly long arms while I swung my lantern in the opposite direction, meeting its knuckles with the glass protector. Fire exploded across its forearm and where the oil landed, light took to it until the creature was partially ablaze and I ran, leaving the destroyed lamp behind. The Alukah screamed in agony—the singe of its skin was audible. It barked before launching itself away on its muscular hind legs while I scurried through the door into the office.

Dave slammed the door shut, relocked it and the howl of the creature came more and more till it receded somewhere far off and we turned our attention to the boy that’d been deposited by the desk; the young man was perhaps sixteen or so, skin and bone so that his blood-stained clothes hung off him poorly, and his hair was long, and his face was sickly.

“Thank you,” said Dave.

I said nothing and snatched the light from Dave, holding it before my face to examine the boy better in its glow. He’d stuffed his left arm beneath his right armpit and stared blankly between his knees; it took me a moment, but upon kneeling by him, I could see that in his right hand he was holding something. I sighed and waved Dave over. “Get the stove and turn it on,” I said.

“Hmm?” asked Dave, leaning over my shoulder to see. “Oh.” His voice came soft.

The boy was holding his left hand, severed clean from its wrist, in his right hand and he’d tucked the nub into his right armpit; his lips trembled, and his eyes darted like a panicked animal when I reached out for his severed hand.

“Don’t take it,” said the boy, “It’s mine.”

I nodded, “I know it is. It’s yours. You’ll get it back, but first I need you to drop it and let me see your wound.”

Our eyes met. He looked tired. The stove clinked to life when Dave twisted its knob and the boy relaxed his shoulders and I took the cold hand, setting it to the side.

“Let’s see it then,” I said.

He blew air from pursed lips and nodded, untucking his left wrist from under his armpit; the blood had scabbed to his clothes there and so when he pulled the wrist away, his shirt clung for a moment, and he let go of a hiss at the pain. The red muscle stood exposed, steaming warm in the open air but I could see no bone peeking through. The wrist wept freely, and I clamped a hand around his forearm. He winced and his eyes went unfocused.

I shifted on my knee to look at Dave. “Gimme’ your belt,” I said.

He offered it freely, ripping it from his waist. I took the belt around the boy’s arm and tightened it before tucking the excess. With that done, I removed my own belt, folded it fat and told the boy to bite into it.

“Stove’s hot,” said Dave.

I reached out and touched the boy’s cheek. “This is gonna’ be shitty.”

The boy nodded.

Me and Dave both held the squirming young man while we took his nub to the stove’s hot eye. Blood boiled around the wound, fizzing while sending up blackish smoke. He screamed through the belt, and I heard the leather in his mouth crackle as he motioned his jaw back and forth.

There was a fair enough amount of kicking and screaming; all the while, the most prominent thought on my mind was that I’d have been better off had I smashed Dave’s skull in. They drew too much attention, made too much noise, cared too much.

The cries of the boy subsided and became sniffles as I took to wrapping his wound and removing the belts from him; there was now a set of permanent teeth marks in the leather. Once I’d medicined the boy, he remarked over his missing hand, and I returned it. Taking to shaking sleep, he held the thing to his chest with his remaining hand.

Once he was probably asleep, Dave and I sat around the desk, him on the chair and me on stacked boxes—I lit a cigarette and cut my eyes at him. “Would’ve been better to leave him.”

Dave shook his head. “How could you say that?”

“Bunch of liabilities.”

Ignoring this, he asked, “What was that thing? You called it something strange.”

“It’s an old name.” I shrugged. “We should move on real early. As soon as the sun’s out. We’ve made a lot of noise. I hope you’re ready to watch after him. That’s your reward for being a hero.”

“You helped.”

“I don’t like seeing people die, believe it or not.”

“No. I think you’d rather plug your ears and close your eyes to it all.” There was a pause and Dave leaned his elbows onto the desk and placed his head in his hands. “Shouldn’t we move before daybreak then? If you’re so worried.”

“Not while that things out there and knows good and well where we are.”

“Won’t it just break down that door?”

I shook my head. “Needs an invitation.”

Dave eyed the sleeping kid. “Poor guy.”

As the first daylight poured over the ruins, I stirred the young man awake and at first it seemed as though he wouldn’t and then perhaps one issue would’ve solved itself; the boy came to life after a few nudges against my boot and he looked miserable and pale and cold. He let out a stifled cry upon seeing me stand over him and then he pushed himself into a sit then examined his surroundings.

I arranged my supplies and Dave asked the kid, “How is it?”

“How do you think it is?” asked the kid.

“I’m Dave anyway.” Then he nodded in my direction, “Harlan.”

“Andrew,” said the kid.

I froze in my gathering of supplies then shouldered my pack and looked over the young man—beneath his armpit he still cradled the dead hand. “You came out here with a young girl several days ago. Went out west?”

Andrew wrinkled his nose then nodded.

“Hell,” said Dave, “How’d you know that?”

“Gemma?” I asked.

The kid nodded again.

Dave sighed and brushed his hand over his head. “You’re the fella’ that disappeared with a Boss’s daughter.” Then there was the overt clenching of his jaw. “You created a heap of trouble when you did that. You know that?”

Andrew did not say a thing.

I stepped toward the kid, and he flinched. “The two of you went west. How’d you get split up?” I shook my head and took to lighting a cigarette. “How’d you not die out there?”

Andrew shrugged. “Gem ran and I couldn’t find her.”

“Why’d you do it?” asked Dave. “Do you have any idea the misery you two left behind?”

“Hold on,” I put up a hand, “Tell it plainly Andy.”

“My name’s not Andy,” said the kid, “It’s Andrew.”

“Fine.”

“Gem wanted out from her duties as the heir to Boss Harold. She said she hoped for a place out west. She said that’s where the wizards come from and so there must be a place worth going. Maybe Babylon—maybe something more out there.” The kid had a scaredness in his eyes, a real twinkle of defeat, but there was something else too—beyond those shiny wet eyes was the look of a determined soul perhaps. “She took off when she got scared and then I got all turned around. I even saw the walls of home, but when I met the edge of the field in the day, the men on the walls shot at me. I tried screaming, but I don’t think they heard me.”

“Stupid kids,” I said.

“Now hold on,” said Dave, “This kid’s caused more trouble than he’s worth. Do you know the people that’ve died because of you runnin’ off with the Boss’s daughter like that? Do you have any idea?” Dave took across the room and grabbed Andrew by the shoulders and shook him good and hard and the boy dropped his severed hand where it smacked the ground. “Do you?” The man was screaming at the kid.

Reaching out, I touched Dave. “Calm. It’s time to move. We can make it home easily before nightfall.” I turned my attention to Andrew. “I don’t reckon you’ll have the warmest welcome if you follow.”

“Well wait,” pleaded Andrew, “You can’t leave me out here. I’ll die for sure.”

“Hey,” I said, “You wanted the opportunity to walk the wastes and find something better. Now’s your chance. Go for it.”

“No,” said Dave. The big man’s shoulders slumped, and he moved from the boy and when he did so the young man reached to the ground to pluck up the hand he’d dropped, “We can’t leave him out here.”

“You finally admitted yourself,” I said, “He’s far more trouble than he’s worth.”

“I-is Gem alright?” asked Andrew.

I nodded.

A relief rushed across his face before he swallowed. “Good.”

“Daylight’s burnin’.” I put the cigarette out against the edge of the desk. “We should go.”

We took off from the office and into the ruins where earliest sunbeams cut through narrow alleys and the sky was red and the buildings were gray or black and every sound carried far and back and there was a warmth in the air like moving through thick blood. Wherever I went, the two followed with paranoid expressions at every potential threat; whenever we’d skirt across a stretch of road where the debris was lighter for travel, one of them might kick up a loose bit of rubble and freeze for a moment as though it was the harbinger for what creatures might’ve been watching from dark shadows. But we were alone in the ruins for the time because I could hear nothing, could see nothing, smelled nothing beyond the dust. “I’ve seen some of them,” hushed Andrew to either me or Dave and I pivoted around to stare at him till he was ashamed of speaking and we moved on again.

The dirt in the air was thick and wind kicked up around the tall buildings and the narrow strip of sky overhead, cut out by high rooftops was like a riverway where thin and white vaporous clouds listed. “What’ll we do with the kid when we get home?” asked Dave; I tried giving him the same look I’d given to Andrew and the merry troupe was quiet as we came upon the edge of the field around Golgotha, and we could just see the structures that cut against the sky along the tops of the walls. I ordered the two of them to manufacture a small semi-circle shelter from strewn concrete and when they started it, I dropped my pack and took in helping them with it so that within half an hour, we took refuge within a small and temporary cairn shaped structure.

We drank water and cooled ourselves within the meager shade.

Andrew was timid in asking, “What’s going to happen? Will you sneak me in?” He cradled his hand.

“It’s just a little further,” I said.

Dave peered across the field with his binoculars and slammed back water. “Lot of wall men. Maybe wait till dark?”

I shook my head. “We’ll be marching in front and that’s that.”

Dave raised his brow. “What? They’ll kill the boy.”

“I don’t think so.”

Andrew piped in, “I don’t want to do this.”

“Shh.” I was tired; travelling companions, for their utility, could be a bother. “You’ll need to trust me.” The kid held his severed hand. “And give me that.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll give it back. It’s yours after all. What am I going to do with three hands?”

Shaking and still pale, he dispensed with the hand and Dave handed him water and I pushed the dry and dead thing into my pack.

We moved across the field, me waving a reflective flag over my head; a shot rang out but nowhere near us and I saw Andrew flinch at the noise. Dave fell in alongside me.

“They’ll kill him,” said Dave just so the kid couldn’t hear.

“They might,” I admitted, “But he needs someplace to look after that wound properly and I don’t think he’s up for living in the wastes alone.”

There was a moment where all that could be heard was breathing and footsteps and dirt catching across the ground with wind. “And have you given anymore thought to what I came to you for?”

“After. We’ll talk after. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

“I’m scared,” whimpered Andrew.

“Be brave,” said Dave.

We took to the gate as it swung open and there was Maron with his wall men, yards from the opening, some knelt behind sandbags; their guns were angled at us and Maron was grinning. “Is that who I think it is?” The Boss nodded at the boy as we came through the perimeter—some of the wall men snickered or muttered amongst themselves.

“It is,” I put away the reflective flag and pinched Andrew’s shirt and shoved him forward so he stumbled, “We came across him out in the ruins out east and thought the Bosses might be interested in speaking with him.”

Andrew whirled on his heel and looked at me and Dave and I shook my head at him; his attention went back to Maron, and the Boss Sheriff stepped forward, planting a hand on the young boy’s shoulder, really digging a thumb into collarbone, and making the boy wince and bite his lip. He gave the boy to his wall men, they caught the young man and took him into custody. They tried tying his hands behind his back, but without purchase, they instead kicked the back of his knees and dragged him away; he did not scream or cry.

I could feel the nervous energy in waves from Dave as he took in closer to me.

Maron swiveled forward awkwardly so we were only feet from each other, still wearing his stolen leg brace, and he eyed Dave with a raised eyebrow. “Man with the name of a king, I think. David! I knew your wife.” Silence. “Shame about your boy. So, you’ve taken on with this one?” Maron nodded at me and spat at the ground. “Guess without so much to live for you’ve gone and thrown your life away! You know what happens to the poor souls that go with Harlan here.” Maron had taken a hand to his heart as though he spoke sincerely—the tone was proper, but his smile was wrong.

Dave refused to speak and that was all for the best.

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The wagons or tanks rolled through the gate in a caravan that was more akin to a carnival than a group of tradesmen; all the wizards with their pointed hats were shaped magnificently against the browns and grays, some wore white porcelain dramedy masks beneath headwear as dark as pipe resin, men and women and those between—as that was common from where they hailed. Their company was perhaps forty and their mules and mares were thirsty and were led to troughs to idle while the wizards removed goods from their wagons or tanks and although it was not a spectacle for them to arrive within Golgotha’s walls, it was something still and the citizens gathered to greet whatever wizards they might know but mostly perhaps to whisper rumors on them. The wizards seemed a taller folk, but that was because of the hats, and they seemed wider too, but that was for the robes they adorned with costume jewelry, trinkets, or fingernail-sized lanterns which contained magical properties hung off their clothes as ornaments (some metal and other crudely wooden). I never knew a people that could trek the wastes in that time as well as me till I knew them.

Boss Maron was there at the gates with his wall men, hollering—shouting really, “The Whores of Babylon have come again!” And the bells signaled from atop the highest tower over the hall of Bosses and I met the front square with a morning headache and a cigarette. The Boss sheriff was clothed, cowboy hat pulled tightly to his ears, and he waltzed through the square, inspecting the new arrivals with his crotch out in front of him as he moved in a swagger like a cup of shifted water. Morning sunlight crested the wall to reflect on the pistol in his holster as it did on the star pin of his hat.

Among them, there was only one wizard I cared to see. Their name was Suzanne.

The hanged bodies of the men remained on the wall, dead and stiff and shifting to the little wind there was.

The square had filled with carts (some drawn by animals and others pushed on oil), and even if it were not for the bells which signaled their arrival, I’d have surely known their presence for the clatter of their metal engines.

“Well goddamn!” said Maron while examining a wizard, “What’s that you’ve got on your legs?”

The wizard, a young woman in plain pants wore a set of leg braces and whenever she moved, she did so in shifting her hips around. “Braces,” she said.

“What’s it for? Or is it some of your all’s secret whodo?”

“I’ve got bad legs. The braces help.” She said plainly, attempting to angle herself straight like a stick against one of the traveling party’s wagons.

“Bad legs?” Boss Maron’s expression was incredulous. “Who has bad legs? What sort of nonsense is it? If a lady like you’s made it this far in life with bad legs, then someone’s done you a disservice.”

She looked on questioningly while the other wizards continued with their unpacking or their conversating—whether it be amongst themselves or with the freckle-spaced citizens in the square.

“How are you to outrun trouble when you’ve got them?” He nodded at the young woman’s legs.

“I don’t.” Her face was red either because of the sun or because of the scrutiny. “I’m just bow-legged.”

“Damn,” he shook his head, “Well how much you want for one of them?”

“One of my braces?”

“Yeah. All I want’s the one anyway.”

“I need both of them.”

“C’mon. You wouldn’t notice just one missing. I mean, you’ve got a spare right next to it.”

Upon noticing a robed figure I recognized by the animals at the troughs, I moved to them instead and let Maron’s conversation fall to the wayside. The chatter of the crowd was wild and startled words came as a wizard exposed their collection of tonics to passersby.

“Suzanne,” I said.

The figure turned to face me, moving their head to look away from a mare they’d been brushing to expose one of those white porcelain masks.

I knew it and could not contain a smile.

“Harlan?” asked the figure. The mask on its face was split in the middle with hinges on either side and they opened it to show their face; it was Suzanne. They’d grown some hair around their throat and wore lipstick on their lips and dyes on their eyes.

“It’s good to see you.” I pushed myself into a hug with them and I could smell the travel off them but didn’t care.

They shifted timidly before hugging me back and I pretended not to notice. Once we’d separated, I looked on Suzanne’s face again and they were looking on at the hanging men on the wall. “Again?” they asked.

I nodded and shot a look towards the Boss across the way.

“What justice?” they asked no one while shaking their head.

Trying an answer, I said, “Justice is something man made, I think. I’ll leave men to men and the rest to God.”

“God.” Suzanne nodded glumly then shook their head. “Which one?”

I laughed a good laugh that felt real but nervous too then kicked the ground and took the last drag off my cigarette before chucking it to the ground. “What’s brought you here?”

Suzanne answered plainly. “We took a long time east out near Pittsburgh.” Their eyes scanned the buildings further on from the square. “The people there are worse than here, it seems. At least you still have your walls.”

“Pittsburgh’s fallen?”

They frowned. “Not completely. They’ve mostly gone underground. A skitterbug infestation caused a plague directly before an attack of proportions I’ve yet seen.” Suzanne’s brow furrowed. “It was awful.” The words hung in the air for a moment. “But we’re here now and thought we’d stop for a rest and some guns and ammo before returning to Babylon. We’ve brought some medicines to trade.”

I learned from my friend that Pittsburgh’s infrastructure and fortifications were decimated in an attack the wizards only caught second-hand and the survivors—holed away in the tunnels beneath Pittsburgh—told of how the demons ran the walls once their reserves were low.

Then the wizards gathered there began unpacking books, some scrolls, and there were medicines too and some of the Bosses other than Maron (he pushed his harassment of the young wizard with leg braces) graced us there with their presence as they came on and began to pick across the goods, haggling prices. Boss Frank was there, and he stood before a wizard by a tank with a wooden table of jars—capped elixirs of varying colors—he grew increasingly frustrated with their selection and took on in his braggadocious way, speaking of numbers. A few of the idle wizards leaned against carts or even took across town and a small group of them had gathered for a quick show near the guard posts, playing instruments (strings over the vocals of “In My Life”) and there in the front of them was a young wizard man that had removed his hat to show how he played with fire flames off his hands—it was a sideshow play—and the citizens wore variations of bemusement or disgust. The children of Golgotha, all dirty faced with sprigs of hair jutting about from their morning’s waking, seemed totally bewildered in the joy of song and clapped their hands or shook their hips all with smiles.

I stuffed my hands in my jacket and prodded Suzanne, “What’s with the plague? I mean, was it contained? None of your lot got sick, did they?”

Suzanne scoffed, perhaps a little pridefully, “No. I wouldn’t worry about that.” They patted a nearby mule then withdrew a brush and moved it across its thin coat before looking over its hooves. “I’ve brought you some books I found out that way though. You still read?”

I nodded.

“Don’t expect any of that fiction. The only ones I’ve found recently are old pamphlets or medical texts.” Suzanne paused and smiled, returning the animal brush to their robes, “You haven’t happened upon anything that might interest me, have you?”

Their shown teeth were infectious. “Mayhap. I’d need you to come back to my place so I could give them to you.” An awkward pause followed and the roar of the still accumulating crowd overtook the space between us before I continued. “Mostly interesting containers and a few flecks of gold I took from some old computers—they’ve been waitin’ on you for weeks now. I got some parchment that might be of use to you too. You can take what you need as always.”

“How about we get some food? I’m famished. Riding through the night takes its toll.”

Me and Suzanne took from the square up a narrow route that led through residences where the lower levels had their curtains drawn and then we took stairs toward balconies and catwalks configured from reinforced metal; we spoke as we went and a few odd glances from passersby met the wizard as we did.

“The tide on the east is rising again,” said Suzanne.

“Worse than before?”

“Worse than before.”

“God, I don’t think I’ve seen the ocean for a decade or more.” I slid my hand along the railing once we came to what was essentially my front porch; it was a perch among the catwalks that cut against the domicile where I shared walls with others on three sides and we stopped there outside my door. “We saw a dragon only a few days ago.”

Suzanne’s interest seemed piqued. “A dragon? And what direction was it traveling?”

“Well,” I craned over the railing, looking down the narrow walkway that separated my building and the one across the way; I couldn’t see the front square from outside my home, but I could still just make out the music echoing from that direction, “Could’ve been north or west. I was preoccupied, but I wouldn’t worry much. The wall men gave it a pretty good thrashing before it took off.”

“Hmm.”

“So, the ocean? It’s rising, huh?”

They joined me there on railing, supporting themselves against their forearms. “It is. Faster than ever. Some bad magic’s taken the water. I imagine by the end of the year Pittsburgh will be under it. There’s something bad coming. You might call it intuition if you want, but I know it’s coming. Something bad. Revelations bad. There comes a time when even those of us forsaken are brought worse.”

“Bah!” I couldn’t help it, “John thought it was the end times while he wrote the damn thing. And what about all the other books? Hm?”

Suzanne put up their hands. “I didn’t mean it like that at all. You know I’m only the mildest scholar on the topic.”

“Anyway. You’d better not start having visions. Got enough to worry about as is.” I’d not realized my shoulders were tense until their hand touched me, and I flinched.

“You’ve a bruise around your neck. Care to elaborate there?”

I shook my head. “Got into a fight.”

Suzanne laughed, removed their pointed hat and playfully put it on my head. “C’mon. Cook me something. You might not know a thing about spices, but your cooking’s always tasted better.”

We took through my door to my small single room where simple amenities awaited and an ancient, decommissioned pump-shotgun hung on the wall over the bed. “That’s just ‘cause you ain’t the one laboring over it.”

Across a meal of potato cakes and toasted bread, we drank coffee until I broke into the liquor to spice my coffee and alleviate my hangover, and we shared the drink and Suzanne took to wash in the sink while I smoked outside on the overlook. Upon returning to the room, I saw them there with a wet rag stuffed beneath an armpit and they were beautiful caught without robes, frame cast in sunglow through the crack in my doorway. In a moment, our hands glided around one another in a scramble of arms at the middle point between us and we took to bed for a while.

Come midday, we remained there, staring at the ceiling, chests bare, and blanket strewn across our lower halves.

“You’re going gray,” said Suzanne.

“You’re getting old too, ya’know.”

“Yes.”

“How long did you say you’ll be staying?” I asked while trying to mask whatever excitement may be present.

“Few days. Once we’ve enough ammunition.” They traced their index finger along my ear lobe.

“Stay.” I offered.

They frowned. “Come.”

“I did already.”

They gave me a light shove and cut their eyes at me. Hazel. How good that color was. “Really. What keeps you here?”

“Things.” I pushed up in the bed to sit, finagling my underwear from the jeans on the floor.

“I wish you would.”

“I’m no wizard.”

“You don’t need to be.”

“Maybe there will come a time when I take you up on that offer. Who knows?” I slid into the drawers.

“Is it Maron?” they asked, “I don’t know your fascination with him. He’s the worst combination cruel and dumb I’ve seen.”

“Like an animal.” I nodded. “Like something real bad’s wrong with him. But no. He’s not my fascination.” Lying was always hard with them. “I worry about this place. I wouldn’t do the things I do if I didn’t. What if I were to leave it and then it turns out like Pittsburgh.”

“Oh, you’re an expert in plagues now?”

“No,” I scoffed, “I guess it’s just a place that weighs on my conscious.” I went to sit on the bed alongside them.

“You hate it here. I can see it more on your face every time we meet.”

“That I do. Call it an investment dilemma. I’ve put time in it, and I want it to be well.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

I caught Suzanne’s face there, staring up from the flat pillow, flustered. My reasoning was hard, but I continued, “There is one thing I should undo before I leave here. It’s a long time coming, and I don’t know if I can. But it’s important,” upon seeing their quizzical expression, I added, “And it is secret.”

“I wish you’d come with us. You’d be welcome.”

“I’ll visit Babylon sometime next month. I promise.”

“You shouldn’t call it that. I don’t like it when you call it that.” The wizards never called their home Babylon; that was a name conjured by the many religious fanatics that considered their magic evil (even if they did trade with the ‘heretics’ from time to time). The name they’d given their own city of medicine was Alexandria; it was fitting for I’d seen their expansive libraries and could become lost in them easily.

“Fine. I’ll be there.” I squeezed their hand in mine. “I’ll miss you once you’ve gone.”

“Don’t get sappy,” they said before planting a kiss on my forehead.

The day went and then the next and another and the wizards packed their belongings. No more music for Golgotha, only quiet agony. As Suzanne said, they’d left me a few books and I’d given away my parchment, jars, and gold. While they were in town, I even was able to snag a few more bottles of their famous wizard liquor along with a few vials of medicine—always good to have whenever I set foot beyond the walls or when someone within might need it.

There came a time finally—as every time it does—where I watched the caravan, with gray smoke clouds off the engines, take on north first where there was an opening wide enough in the ruins to accommodate vehicles, then it hooked around a wide bend that took them west then their black shapes against the red morning skyline disappeared like fading ink as their magic cloaked them entirely. I wished them well, but at the moment of dissipation, I felt an urge to leap from the top of the wall, charge across the field, scream that I was coming and scream it loud enough that I’d hurt myself. I think I just loved—though I never said it aloud and neither did they—and love is a bad thing more often than it is good, for the longing it leaves in its absence drives a person mad and I did not want to be mad; the feeling burst from me quietly there on the wall while I was flanked on either side by guards. I was sure all along the way they went that I could just make out Suzanne among them; that was probably a fault in my vision, but I imagined they were casting glances back, hoping to hold me as strongly as I wished to hold them. I went to the streets of Golgotha where the town quieted from the previous days’ engagements with the wizards.

Normal came and settled and then came chanting from Lady as she moved through sullen quiet streets. She was so far off that I was not sure it was her at all and then came the lines as she drew nearer by the hydroponics towers, and she shouted them vigorously and shook her fist above the air and held a staff with a swinging lantern of incense in her opposite hand, partly for ceremony and partly for support. The words came harshly, gravelly:

“They called to the mountains and to the rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

“The lamb will be your shepherd. He will guide you. Hallelujah! He will lead you to the springs of living water and wipe away every tear!”

“Many will be purified, made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand! Do not be tempted by the deviousness of the whorish Babylonians for all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”

A person, among the catwalks, shouted down at Lady, “Shut-the-fuck-up!”

I watched her come fully down the avenue as she dodged a thrown egg from somewhere unseen, then dashed away toward an offshoot alley to hide somewhere, incense lantern smoking, clanging against her back while she screeched off more scripture from memory. After she was long gone, I moved to the spot where the egg was, rubbed it into dirt with the sole of my boot and looked up through the spiderweb network of catwalks overhead; there was no one.

Without a thing keeping me, I took off the following day, and upon meeting the gates, Maron was there and I could see he was the proud owner of a used leg brace; he grinned upon seeing me, patting his mustache down with his forefinger and thumb.

“Whatcha’ think?” He motioned to his left leg. “It’s a bit of a conversation starter, ain’t it?”

“Get your boys to open the gate, I’m going out.”

He shook his head. “Won’t find anything out there. It’s all dirt and rubble, you know.”

“Just open it.”

“You know what?” He cut his eyes at me. “There’s gonna’ come a day when you won’t be so able bodied or maybe the Bosses won’t like you coming and going as you please.”

I inhaled heavily then let it go. “Now can’t we skip to the end where you acquiesce to my request?”

“Words words words you’ve got. You’ve got a lot of words. Acquiesce. Psshaw.” Boss Maron waved for the guards to open the gate and they did, and I stepped by him, and he spit somewhere behind me before I heard him hobble around with his single leg brace.

The path was clear and open on all sides and in no time, I’d taken across the field to the east and found myself on the edge of the ruins where things stank, and I was free from no other thought than to live. Creeping hot overcame me and brought my hair to my forehead and I holed off in a shadow to drank from my gourd before continuing. The sun was red in the sky in the places where I could see sky from around the black shadows of towering structures. I ducked beneath an old shop counter when I heard the skittering of fart heads and pulled a sleeve to kill the scent of their chlorine breath.

Once they’d gone, I pulled through the wreckage more and more till I came upon the markings for an old safehouse in the back office of a garage I’d not been to in a while. What were my intentions? Was I going to go all the way to the coast? Throw myself into those bad magic waters? There’s a thing they don’t teach you in religion. They prattle all day to do this or that and they say that Hell awaits sinners or Hades or maybe its in layers or circles or what have you. They’ll tell you about the places and they’ll say that if you take life into your own hands, you end in Hell, but what’s a person to do when those creeping intrusions come along—the ones that call to a person in the darkness, the ones where they tempt you to jump from a high place or there’s always a gun or a poison. Maybe a person could bribe another to do it for them. Where do they end up then? What are you supposed to do to stave off those thoughts? Should a person contend such melancholies with prayer? That did not seem helpful. What is the soulless to do without the promise of those pearly gates anyway?

Anyway, I took on past the safehouse and found a utility hall in the side of a tall industrial building just beyond a partially erect chain link fence. The wall was opened up like a cracked shell from years of standing alone, and after ducking through there, I found some old matches in a drawer, plastic gas cans whose contents had long since congealed within; I kicked them (not that I expected anything more). Moving further down the wide hallway, there were shelves of dusty tools, and I took some hammers and knives (cheapo stuff).

Further still down the hall, there was a staircase, and I took it quietly; the stone stairs made hardly a sound against the bottoms of my boots, and I took the stairs more quickly till I was out of breath and caught myself on a landing where I supped silent air before rushing further up the stairs. An old metallic cabinet or console—I couldn’t make it out—lay strewn across the steps to the second-highest floor and I climbed over it before coming to the building’s roof access. Upon coming to the door with a metal push bar across its middle, I gave it a shove and it did not budge but a minor clink and I took a moment to collect myself before rummaging through my gear.

Slung through a loop on the inside of my pack was a short prybar that was so worn around its tooth it was more rounded than an edge; I shimmied the piece of metal into the spot where the door latched into the way and began crimping the spot apart, trying all the while to maintain a relative quiet in the dead ruins. Once I’d bent away at the door for a few moments, I elevated my body weight at an awkward angle to pop the door free and it did so, half open, with a rusty screech that forced a long pause from me; I stood there by the newly opened doorway for a full minute, holding the prybar, holding my breath. Upon hearing nothing in response to the noise of the door, I slid the tool into my pack and slipped through the threshold.

The flat roof of the industrial building sloped to one corner—where the opening in the wall of the first floor was—and sitting there in the middle of an open platform was an old helicopter, blades half torn away or rusted off and the remaining slanted from the top of the old vehicle, touching the platform it sat upon. The roof access looked like a little square house atop the flat headed structure and around the side of the access, I found an old corpse (entirely bones) wrapped in black plastic-like armor, the white dry fingers laid across its lap, several digits gone and its hollow eye holes staring off into the sky with a permanent smile. I moved to the thing that hadn’t been human in a long time and prodded it; the skeleton slumped to the side and looked on the ground by its shoes. How long had it been staring at the sky and how long had it been waiting for me to come and change its dead visage?

I moved to the edge of the building, to the corner where the building sloped and looked off the edge to the ground below; all was quiet, and nothing moved save the shadows’ stalwart creep across the ground. Examining from above, I could see the opening I’d climbed through and beneath my shifting feet, I felt the ground give a little; timidly, I angled more forward and for a moment I thought I knew why I’d gone up there in the first place. Suddenly six-stories felt high. The urge to jump came. Perhaps on the way down, I’d have just a blink to convince myself I’d slipped.

“Hey!” A shout from somewhere down below came from the direction I’d come from. I shook my head as it felt as though it was a ghost echo, a noise that wasn’t. Then it came again, “Hey!”

I squinted my eyes and there in the crumbled road below, there was a human I didn’t initially recognize; it was only after the figure tumbled through the remains of the chain link fence that I recognized it as Dave. I blinked.

Out of breath, he angled over to the opening at the base of the structure and called up at me, “Hey! I see you up there!”

Whisper-yelling, I cupped my hands, “Shutup!”

I took back to the stairs, and he hollered after, “Where you going?”

With reckless abandon, I took the stairs many at a time, leapt the cabinet on the stairs, scrambling while also reaching for the prybar I’d put away. I held the cold metal in my hand and charged toward the industrial storage hallway where I could see him silhouetted in the frame of the crumbled opening.

His chest heaved and he wiped at his brow; slung across his shoulder was a small supply bag and worn like a necklace was a pair of binoculars. “God, you move fast. Like a fuckin’ cockroach in light.” His eyes shifted from my face to the prybar in my hand as I approached him.

Standing within the echoey hallway, I lifted the weapon and pointed it at him. “What’d you follow me for?”

“You wouldn’t use that on me.” He took his eyes from the prybar. “I don’t think you would anyway. You might be shady, Harlan, but I don’t take you as a stone-cold murderer.”

“You take me wrong,” I said.

“Maybe.” He seemed to think on it a moment. “You wouldn’t?”

“If you’ve given away my position to those things, I might.”

“Lots of bluster.” Dave offered an incredibly forced smile, and I could see just from the little shine of the sun in the opening that his eye had blacked but remained functional. “I been watching you.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “I snuck out after you.”

“You ought to go back.”

“You ought to just listen. There ain’t a thing back there for me.”

“I don’t care.” The sharpness in my voice felt good. “I don’t need some sorry sack sneaking up on me when I’m mindin’ my own.”

A quiet laugh. “There’s nothing there for me. I been farming all my life and if I die,” he shrugged, “So be it.”

“Idiot. Fuckin’ idiot.”

“You manage out here! Wizards can too!”

“Wizards have magic.”

“You got some of that?”

I lowered the crowbar.

“We’ve got to stop starting our conversations with fights.” He paused and moved into the shadowy hallway of the building before perching in a half-sit half-lean against the wall near me. “I never was violent anyway, so if you want to hit me with that then do it.”

“Hmm.”

His shirt clung to him, sweat thick and dark on his chest and pits. “Goddamn you move fast.”

“You should wear a jacket or something. Long sleeves keep the sun off and a thicker material gives you a modicum of protection.” I took to squatting too, maintaining ample distance betwixt us. “A hat helps too, but I’m always losing hats.” I chewed on my tongue while mulling over whether I should leave him.

“Are you going to try and slink away while I’m not looking?”

I blinked. “No.”

“Liar.” He took a healthy gulp from his water gourd then wiped his mouth. “East is the ocean?”

I nodded.

“Is it far?”

I nodded. “For you.”

Dave sighed. “Thank you.”

“For?”

“Telling me.”

“Okay.”

“You ever have any kids?”

I shook my head.

“It’s somethin’. Henry had so much energy—especially when he was little—there was times I didn’t think he’d ever settle down.”

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Helen told me she was the same way when she was his age. She had energy too. I feel so tired.”

“Dave. What the fuck are you doing out here? Why’d you follow me?”

He took one last swallow from his gourd before shoving it into his pack. “I wanted to talk to you about killin’ the Bosses.”

I laughed into my hand. “That’s—that’s a thought.”

“I mean it.” His stare was like pinpricks.

First/Previous/Next

Archive

“And though the Sirens escaped into the vacuum as their shuttle drifted uselessly behind them, the ruthless pirates did not relent,” Vicillia said in a melodramatic tone, pausing for a moment to let the suspense build among her captive audience.

She and a group of her fellow Star Sirens were camping in an observation bay of their space habitat, the concave diamondoid ceiling above them providing a perfect view of the stars. The technicoloured and diode-studded sylphs were all perched around a campfire, globular and ghostly blue in the microgravity environment, their prehensile feet and tails clutched onto ruts in the floor.

“The pirate ship fired a massive net that enveloped the entire pod, reeling them all aboard like a school of sardines,” Vici went on. “The pirates dragged the net into their centrifuge, which spun at full Martian gravity. They tossed the helpless Sirens upon the floor, powerless to move against such an unremitting force. As the pirates towered over their catch in smug superiority, they –”

“Stop!” Akioneeda, the group’s preceptress and chaperone, ordered as she raised her three-fingered, dual-thumbed hand. “I know where you’re growing with this, Vici. I said to keep the campfire stories appropriate!”

“It’s not inappropriate! Even Pomoko’s not scared!” Vici claimed.

“Because it’s not a scary story,” Pomoko retorted flatly. “Space pirates have never done anything worse than raid satellites, probes, abandoned spacecraft or automated mining operations. They always turn tail and run the second a Siren ship shows up. And centrifuges aren’t scary either. I had a root beer in one once.”

“But this one is spinning at Martian gravity! That’s more than twice as strong as any centrifuge you’ve been in,” Vici argued.

“You’re still exaggerating. We can’t function in Martian gravity, but I don’t think we’d be literally pinned to the ground,” Kaliphimoa added.

She withdrew a pair of long tongs from the caged fire, and removed their version of a s'more. Graham crackers were too crumbly to eat in microgravity, so they used small, solein-based, honey-flavoured cakes instead.

“Fine, the centrifuge is at Earth gravity then,” Vici relented. “But it doesn’t matter, because the pirates –”

“I said enough,” Akio scolded her. “We’re here to tell fun scary stories, not upsetting ones. Jegerea, Okana, would either of you like a turn telling a story?”

The two were brood mates of the other three young Sirens, but were otherwise not especially close friends. They had tagged along only because they had been too polite to refuse the invitation, a courtesy that both of them looked to be regretting.

“Um, I was told this fire would be safe, but the air quality is measurably worse than normal,” Jegerea replied uneasily.

“The atmosphere is well within acceptable limits,” Kali assured her.

“But it’s still worse than it should be,” Okana insisted. “This whole ritual is based on Macrogravital customs, right? You know our unidirectional lungs are much more sensitive to air pollution than theirs are, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know how our lungs work,” Kali sighed. “If the fire was a problem, I wouldn’t have been allowed to make it in the first place.”

“It’s not an acute hazard, but what if we get lung cancer from it?” Jegerea asked.

“Literally no Star Siren ever has gotten cancer!” Kali screamed. “The same enhanced DNA repair that lets us tolerate cosmic radiation makes us functionally immune to cancer! Any cancer cells that did form would be destroyed by our enhanced immune systems! We are at a bare minimum millions of times less likely to get cancer than a baseline human, and if you did your biosensors would pick it up extremely early and you’d get it treated without ever having to get cut open. We are genetically and cybernetically enhanced transhumans in a spacefaring utopia; we don’t have to worry about cancer! The fire is fine! This is fine! Smoke ’em if you got 'em’!”

The other Sirens stared at her awkwardly, making sure her outburst was complete before speaking.

“Ah… you two are right though that we’re sensitive to smoke inhalation, so you should all feel free to jet away from the fire if it’s making you uncomfortable,” Akio clarified. “And… don’t smoke, because that would probably knock you right out.”

“You picked a good place to camp though, Kali,” Pomoko said encouragingly, gently nuzzling up against her. “With all the trees and the big skylight, you could almost pretend we were on a planet. Reminds me of the time we went camping on Ceres; minus the trees, obviously.”

“I picked this observation bay because I wanted to see the Earth as it goes by,” Kali said wistfully as she looked up into outer space. “And I think… oh, yes! There it is!”

Firing the shimmering optical jets embedded throughout her body, Kali rose up above the canopy and to the diamondoid dome itself.

“There, right over there! Do you see it?” she asked excitedly. “That’s the crown jewel of the solar system. The biggest terrestrial planet with the biggest relative moon, the largest and most diverse natural ecosystem – plus the only one that’s not buried under kilometers of ice – and the birthplace of all civilization, including ours! The Twelve Dozen Eves and every other Siren for decades were decanted in Lunar orbit aboard the Olympia Primeva.”

Though it was still a few million kilometers away, a Star Siren’s visual acuity was several times stronger than a baseline human’s. Even without using the optical zoom of their bionic lenses, they were able to make out distinct shapes of blue oceans, green continents, and white clouds. Looking upon it, Kali was overcome with a sense of awe and sanctity that no other celestial body had ever induced in her.

The others gently floated up beside Kali, though none of them seemed as eager to view the Earth as she did. Anywhere else in the solar system where Star Sirens might encounter Macrogravitals, the Sirens held the advantage. Remote outposts and rickety rockets were little threat to them. But the inhabitants of Earth were now widely regarded as a mature planetary civilization, with petawatts of energy at their disposal, and no shortage of advanced technologies to plug into it.

“Is it safe to get this close?” Okana asked nervously.

“We’re well outside the Cislunar Exclusion Zone, and our habitat is on the Orion Registry,” Akio replied. “So long as we mind our own business, hardly anyone will even notice we’re here.”

“No one but the pirates,” Vici sang teasingly. “Pirates driven mad with lust after hearing legends of the beautiful Star Sirens who frolic naked in our empyreal habitats, desperate to slake their barbarous –”

“Vici, I already warned you about subject matter. If I have to do it again, I will be issuing demerits,” Akio told her. “I think Kali is on the right track. We were all bred from Earth stock, and we should take this opportunity to appreciate our heritage. Kali, would you like to share some more of your thoughts with us?”

Kali took her eyes off of the pale blue marble and glanced nervously at her peers.

“Well, what I think about the most is how it looks so fragile, but it’s not,” she began. “It survived a collision with a planetoid the size of Mars once. Luna is a scar of that trauma, a piece of the Earth it lost but could never let go of. Earth has survived innumerable cataclysms over the aeons of deep time, and it will endure countless more before the sun swallows it whole. Despite that, life sprung up and reshaped its entire surface. Life seems so fragile, but it endured many of those same cataclysms and was never extinguished completely. Humanity and civilization seem so fragile, courting collapse and extinction far too many times in their brief history, but they were made of the same resilient atoms as the Earth itself, the same genes as the life that survived multiple apocalypses. Earth civilization made it this far not by luck – well, not just luck – but by grit. Our atoms may come from asteroids now, but our genes are descended from the first living cells on Earth, and our civilization is a scion of Earth’s. Our survival is because of that heritage, not in spite of it. We take pride in our habitats and the fact that we take much better care of them than even modern Earth Civilization takes care of its environment, but our tiny habitats are far more fragile than Earth is. If we failed to detect and evade a meteoroid that would be nothing but a shooting star on Earth, this ship would be torn in two.”

She knocked on the seemingly indestructible diamondoid skylight to illustrate the illusion of their security.

Then, to each of their dismay, something knocked back.

Aboard a spacecraft, there was never any sound from outside. The stark contrast between silence and music, light and darkness, life and death was partially what made the Star Sirens care for their habitats so fervently. At times, it also caused them to be insular to the point of solipsism. It was easy for them to think that outside of their hull was nothing, and inside was everything.

But now, there was undeniably something outside.

“What the hell was that?” Okana demanded.

The crystalline exocortexes on their bald, elongated heads flickered rapidly as they skimmed over their ship’s sensor feeds and logs, while their large cat-like eyes scanned the skylight for any sign of the intruder.

“Maybe it was just an echo,” Pomoko suggested. “The sensors aren’t picking up anything.”

“There!” Vici shouted, her finger pointing to a nebulous silhouette that blended in with the void above, scurrying across the skylight and out of sight.

Nearly the instant they laid eyes on it, their feeds to the ship's sensors were cut.

“What the hell?” Kali shouted.

“Feeds are being quarantined,” Akio explained. “Whatever it is, we can see it but the Setembra’s AI can’t. It could be a cyberattack of some kind.”

A gentle but still serious-sounding klaxon began to chime throughout the ship, and a text box on both their AR displays and every possible surface read ‘Code Yellow; Potential Threat Detected. Remain Calm, Report to Duty Stations or Shelter Areas as Directed, and Await Further Instructions.’

“If Setembra Diva needs us to see it, and we can’t use the sensor feeds, then that means one of us has to get out there!” Kali said, already jetting off for the airlock.

“Kali, wait! It could be dangerous!” Pomoko shouted as she and the others chased after her.

“If we’re under attack we need to know now! In the time it takes for the AI to adapt her sensor algorithms, it could be too late!” Kali replied.

In the antechamber of the airlock, she grabbed a scientific cyberdeck and omni-spanner from the rack, syncing them with her exocortexes and clipping their wispy security tethers around her wrists.

“Kali, Setembra’s not going to let you out there,” Jegerea claimed.

“She said to get to duty stations, and right now my duty is outside,” Kali said adamantly.

She jetted to the airlock’s inner door, waiting to see if the AI would agree with her or if she had just embarrassed herself.

After a few long seconds, the door slid open, and Kali ducked in before either of them could change their minds.

“Kali, we’ll keep comms open, but remember that with the sensor feed quarantined we won’t be able to see what you’re seeing,” Akio shouted as the inner door sealed shut.

Kali took in a full lungful of air before sealing off all three of her tracheas, the chevron slits over her throat and her two clavicle siphons cinching shut. Her nictitating membranes slid over her eyes, and every orifice aside from her mouth (which was as adapted to the vacuum of space as her external anatomy) sealed itself closed. Since Siren biology was highly resistant to decompression sickness, the decompression cycle was fairly rapid. Pomoko and Vici placed their hands on the translucent inner door in a gesture of farewell, a gesture Kali lovingly reciprocated.

Once the air pressure was down to about three kilopascals, the outer hatch opened, though a weak forcefield of photonic matter still kept what atmosphere there was from leaking out. With a pulse of her light jets, and a kick of her foot against the inner wall for good measure, Kali sent herself hurdling out into space.

Her bionic lenses automatically tinted to protect her retinas from the unfiltered sunlight, making her look even more like a pop culture alien than usual, and the violet chromamelanin that saturated every organ and tissue kept her safe from cosmic rays.

Despite having been engineered for this and having done many spacewalks before, there was still some primal part of Kali’s brain that quietly rebelled against what she was doing. The sensation of vacuum against bare skin, the silence that was no different from deafness, the night sky that should have been above instead being all-encompassing, all these things told her limbic system that something was horribly wrong; or at least, unnatural.

Unnatural or not, Kali’s sisters were counting on her, and she set about the task of inspecting the outside of their habitat for intruders.

The Setembra was several hundred meters long and over a hundred meters across at its mid-point. She was comprised of multiple habitation modules of increasing size, most of which were oblate spheroids with the front one being more conical with a rounded point. There was a hemispherical engine module at the rear, which contained the main reactors and fusion thrusters. The bands that held the modules together contained various sensors, emitters, transceivers, ramscoops, and maneuvering thrusters, as well as floral-like radiators, solar panels, and folded light sails and mag sails on the aftmost band. The main hull was woven of diamondoid fibres, giving it the appearance of a sparkling pink seashell, with many viewing domes of pure diamondoid dotting its surface.

Kali flew out to get as wide a view as she could of her ship, circling around her and gradually closing in as she searched for any sign of the intruder.

“I’ve got something,” Kali reported, the gemlike chip over her larynx picking up on her subvocalizations and transmitting it to the others. “There’s an amorphous area with a negative refractive index slowly crawling around the hull around plate H-89, next to a radiator on the Thestia module. It might be absorbing the waste heat for power. Whatever it is, it’s very low mass and highly diffuse, which may be why Setembra Diva is having trouble picking it up. I can just barely tell it’s there, and only with my biological brain. The visual processing algorithms in my exocortexes can’t seem to register it. I’m hailing it but it’s not responding. I’m going to move in a little closer and see if the cyberdeck can pick up anything useful at close range.”

“Kali, be careful. If it’s cloaked, then it doesn’t want to be found,” Akio warned her through her binaural implants. “It could become hostile if it realizes it’s been detected.”

“Copy. I’m preceding with caution,” Kali assured her.

With a gentle thrust from her optical thrusters, she slowly drifted towards the anomaly, ready to retreat at the first sign of trouble. She used her neural interface to continuously calibrate her cyberdeck as she got closer, hoping to pick up on some chink in the invisibility cloak.

She was still over ten meters away with no indication that the object had noticed her, when she felt a wispy tendril wrap around her leg.

She looked down and saw nothing, but the sensation was unmistakable. She tried to jet away, but its grip was tight, and pulling away only made it tug her back down.

“Kali! Kali, what’s wrong!” Pomoko asked in a barely restrained panic. “Your heart rate and oxygen consumption just spiked!”

“Standby!” Kali responded.

She pointed her omni-spanner at where she estimated the tentacle was, and fired off a mild electromagnetic pulse. She felt the tendril uncoil itself from her leg, and watched as a shimmering tessellation revealed a quivering collection of iridescent angel hair retreating back to the main body below.

“It… she’s a Star Wisp,” Kali reported in amazement as she poured over the information that was now coming over on her HUD. “A fully autonomous diffractive solar sail. She’s a malleable web of nanotech filaments made almost entirely of graphene. Actuators, sensors, energy collectors, power storage, circuitry, antennas, and phased optic arrays all built into threads as thin as spider’s silk. It looks like she’d be about a hundred meters across if she was stretched out as far as she could, but since there’s only about a kilogram of material to her, she can collapse down pretty small if she wants to. The fibers are even mildly psionically conductive. Not enough to be sentient on their own, but enough to incorporate into a larger Overmind. She must have sensed Setembra Diva and been drawn to her. This has got to be the most advanced nanotech I’ve ever seen! It can’t be from Olympeon. They would have shared it with us.”

“So where the hell did it come from?” Akio demanded.

“I… hold on. She’s flickering. It’s a Li-Fi signal. She’s trying to communicate,” Kali replied. “Permission to decode the signal?”

“…Granted, but keep your exocortexes quarantined from the Overmind until we can confirm there’s no malware in the message,” Akio said hesitantly.

“Understood,” Kali acknowledged. “Okay, so, the registration number she gave me is showing up in the Orion Registry. She was originally part of a swarm of Star Wisps launched by the Artemis Astranautics Insitute. They were meant to map out the Kuiper Belt, doing flybys of trans-Neptunian objects with the Insitute's microwave antenna regularly beaming power to them. While they were doing a gravitational slingshot around the Sun there was a Coronal Mass Ejection. This one was chosen to serve as a shield while the others sheltered behind her. I’m sure trillions of orbits went into developing this technology, but since their mass is so low their marginal cost is basically nothing, so a certain amount of attrition was considered acceptable. The materials they’re made from have limited self-healing capabilities, and she was too badly damaged in the storm to recover on her own. Her swarm left her behind, and she’s been drifting ever since. No effort was made to recover her, and she’s legally been declared salvaged. She’s lucky we found her before the pirates did."

As the tangle of filaments undulated and shimmered beneath her, Kali couldn't help but feel a pang of pity for her. She was lost, she was abandoned, she was hurt, and she needed Kali's help.

“Preceptress, I can see on my scan of her that she’s taken critical damage at several key points. I’d like permission to give her my reserve of nanites. I think I can program them to fix the damage, along with some manual repairs with my spanner.”

“You can try, so long as it cooperates. The instant it becomes hostile, you pull out of there. Is that understood?” Akio asked.

“Understood, preceptress,” Kali replied.

Jetting forward, she began transmitting Li-Fi using her own photonic diodes, informing the Star Wisp of her intentions. The Wisp immediately took notice, holding still and focusing a pseudopod in her direction.

“Easy there, girl. It’s alright. I’ve got a little something here that I think should help you feel better.”

Since the Star Sirens relied exclusively on ectogenesis for reproduction, they had repurposed their uteruses for the production and storage of nanites and other engineered microbes. This of course meant that there was really only one convenient passage for the expulsion of surplus nanites, but as no Star Siren had ever considered modesty a virtue, that wasn’t an issue.

After inputting a series of commands on her AR display, Kali unabashedly queefed out around a hundred millilitres of nanite-saturated fluid before immediately resealing her vaginal canal. The Star Wisp shimmered and curiously cocked her pseudopod, which to Kali suggested that the action had at the very least caught her attention.

“Pretty cool, isn’t it? It’s like I’ve got a technological singularity in my vagina,” she boasted as she scooped up the orb of fluid wobbling in microgravity.

Floating right up to the injured Star Wisp, Kali gently dabbed small amounts of the fluid over each damaged portion of filament. The nanites immediately went to work stitching up frayed fibers that had previously been beyond repair, filling the Star Wisp with relief as her body finally began to mend itself. As her posture became less tense, she flickered out another Li-Fi signal, expressing concern for Kali and what would happen to her without these nanites.

“Don’t worry about me. I can spare them,” Kali assured her. “I may be skinny by human standards, but I’m a whale compared to you. I can bounce back from losing a hundred milliliters of medicytes.”

When she was finished smearing the last of the fluid onto the Star Wisp, she grabbed a hold of her omni-spanner and used its optical tweezers to reconnect and then solder severed threads by hand, her bionic lenses letting her zoom in as much as she needed.

When the last of the filaments were repaired, and information and energy were able to flow freely through the entirety of the Star Wisp, she immediately sprung to life. Jumping up she joyously circled around Kali and began affectionately tickling her with her tendrils, her rapidly shifting colours pouring out a litany of gratitude over Li-Fi.

“There we go, good as new!” Kail laughed as she pet the nearly massless mangle as best she could. “You’re not as fragile as you look. I wonder where you get that from. Do you think you’re good to head back out now?”

The Star Wisp suddenly went still and pale, looking out at the seemingly infinite void around them with a sense of dread.

“Oh. Right,” Kali said pensively. “Your swarm’s a long way off. It will take you months to catch up with them, and it’s a dangerous trek to make on your own. You could be damaged again, or pirates could grab you. The Astranautics Institute doesn’t want you back either. I… I guess…”

She hesitated to finish her thought. Star Siren society was meticulously engineered, with everyone and everything being designed to exist harmoniously with everything else, virtually eliminating conflict and competition. They did not take in strays.

That being said, it wasn’t as if there was no flexibility at all. Even the Star Sirens were not so arrogant as to believe that they could predict and control for every possible variable. There were ample margins for error, and a one-kilogram Star Wisp that could survive off of waste heat and nanotic vaginal discharge would easily fit within them.

If there was a problem, it was an ideological one. Adopting a foreign-made robot into their Overmind was not something they would typically do. As Kali gazed down at the celestial outcast in front of her, her associative memory dragged up a centuries-old pop culture quote from the archives of her exocortexes. Without even understanding its original context, Kali appropriated it for her situation.

‘But she’s a transhumanistic longtermist’s out-of-control science project! She’s a mysterious, ethereal being that strikes fear into the hearts of spacers! She’s… a Star Siren.’

***

Once the airlock was fully repressurized, the hatch hissed open to reveal Kali’s friends waiting with a mix of relief and wonder on their faces, while Akio floated there with her arms crossed and a hairless eyebrow raised in annoyance. Kali averted her gaze sheepishly while she stroked the animate mass of filaments that had coalesced around her.

“…Can we keep her?”

What ended Ronald’s life was something so simple on the surface. But, it wasn’t something that he could ignore. He tried at first, he truly did. It just wouldn’t go away. There was more to it than its benign facade; there was something sinister underneath it that he couldn’t comprehend. It called for him. It burrowed itself inside of him, chewing at the wiring and inner workings, rattling around the confines of his brain like a hungry, chittering rat until he eventually snapped.

Ronald was trying to put together the pieces of rubble that was his life. He figured it could never be fully fixed, but he could at least salvage something half-respectable out of the ruin. Something worth getting his ass out of bed in the morning. Half of his life was gone, but half of it was still there to be lived.

You could argue most of his grave mistakes came from dire circumstances. He had always been poor and without a father. But then there were other decisions he’d rather not speak of…ones that served no purpose but to inflict fear and pain. Those were the ones he would never live down, no matter how many times he told himself the past was the past or that time served was time served. This “next chapter” was proving just as difficult as the others.

When the call came in that his rental application had been accepted, a school-girl squeak skipped out of his throat. The lady's voice was coarse and raspy, practically static from the other end of the receiver. A top-floor unit was available, within his budget and move-in ready. He bumbled an excited yes and snapped the place up with a security deposit and a deep grin.

Wichita Landing was a place for new beginnings. It offered an opportunity, a second chance, for low-income individuals trying to make it in the world. With the subsidized rent and his dishwashing cheques, he was just going to scrape by. And then, with a little time and hard work, the place could be a stepping stone to bigger and better things. He hung up the phone, the unfamiliar feeling of hope warming his disheveled body. It brought with it another foreign reaction—a genuine smile.

The following month he arranged for a U-haul. The brick building was unassuming—a modest complex lined with tiny balconies overlooking a small patch of grass out front. Kids could be heard giggling from a nearby playground as the sun began to dip. He worked most of the afternoon, lugging his boxes up the narrow staircase, dinging the white walls as infrequently as he could.

That night he cracked open a cold one and collapsed on the sofa. He had barely moved in the last of his furniture before it came to him.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

Was it the piping? The foundation settling? Maybe they were making some sort of repairs.

He spent weeks trying to rationalize what it could be, what it wasn’t. Each time he fought off the urge to pick up the phone, merely praying it would all go away.

But the noise seemed to love to present itself in the dead of the night.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

Earplugs. White noise. The monotone ramblings of late-night infomercials. He tried everything to drown out the sound… yet, still it remained, its dull patterned rhythm rustling the popcorn ceiling above.

Ronald turned over in his bed and scratched at the drywall, adding to his tally. Thirty-three days since he moved into the “penthouse”, represented by eight hashtags and three slashes along his wall. “Penthouse” was being generous, top floor was maybe more accurate.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

During the day he could escape the insistent rapping for work or other errands. But at night…what was he to do? This was his home. His bedroom.

He had nowhere else to go.

Ronald took a broom to the ceiling, stipple and dust sprinkling down with every aggravated bang. There was a moment of silence. He could breathe again. Ronald returned the broom back to the closet and stretched out on the sofa. He flicked on the TV, grabbed some popcorn, and rested his weary head.

It wasn’t long before the noise came back, in bursts, more pronounced in its parade.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

“You need to send someone out here,” he explained, grumbling into his phone.

The voice on the other line was far too calm for Ronald’s liking. “We understand your frustration, sir. This is the first we’ve heard—”

“I can’t live like this any longer!”

“I understand. We’re so sorry you’re experiencing this. We will have someone investigate this matter shortly and get back to you.”

Ronald barked some expletives and let out his frustration, detailing the weeks of torment he had endured. Once the anger flowed he couldn’t stop it. The management rep absorbed the response. She offered some polite murmurs of assurance. When he was done and nearly out of breath, she hit him with the coldest line of their conversation:

“Well, if it ever becomes too much, we do require 30 days' notice to terminate your tenancy.” Ronald felt hot steam rising from his forehead. Her voice was cheery now. He even imagined the words being delivered through a sly grin.

“There is a long list of applicants at the ready.” She bid him goodbye and hung up the phone.

***

Another night passed. Then another.

Running out of options, Ronald decided to survey his neighbors. Maybe together they could concoct a plan to put an end to the maddening racket, or, at the very least, he could find solace in their shared suffering.

A prim couple in unit #401 stared back at him with pursed lips. They took in his story, were nice enough, but denied ever hearing the footsteps. Ronald figured they were so old, they could barely hear each other speak.

Unit #402 did not answer. Ronald couldn’t recall ever seeing anyone enter or leave that apartment.

That left only one other unit besides his– #403. A family with a thick accent answered the door, dressed in bright silky garbs that Ronald could only place as “African”. Their two young kids were swinging from the husband’s arms as Ronald framed his question.

A one-word response from the man amidst the shrieking kids –“No.”

Ronald asked again, in plainer English.

This time, the woman responded: “No.” Her hair was tied in a flowery yellow head wrap, and she was inching the door closed.

Ronald stuck his arm through the gap and asked again. “Please–are you sure?” he prodded, still not totally convinced they understood. “Listen! You must hear it? It’s right above us!”

The bald man shouted back in his native tongue. The kids dropped off of him, their playful demeanor scared straight.

Ronald backed away. The door slammed shut. He rubbed his temples, took a deep breath in, and swore.

Taking his slow, lonely steps back to his apartment, he questioned his sanity.

But on the short walk back, he saw a flash of the bright headdress poking out of the doorway. Her gaze looked just as tired and cold as his own.

***

Ronald woke from a deep, groggy sleep and added to his tally. The row nearly ran the length of his double bed now. Wiping sleep from his tired eyes, he decided to pull on his bathrobe and grab a drink of water.

He groaned at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, the bags under his eyes a smear of tar. He groaned louder as the tapping persisted, leaving him pacing through the empty apartment in anger.

He opened the door and staggered into the hall. The lights buzzed eerily, glowing a murky orange. The heater hummed through the floor vents. The footsteps continued their tap tap taps. He did a loop, bickering to himself, spinning around in a nutty haste. Just before he left for his apartment, he saw a black blur from the corner of his eye.

He heard the echo, the hollow footsteps louder.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

In a seemingly random stretch of wall, there was a staircase at the end of the hallway that hadn’t been there before. Ronald was sure of it. The steps were made of oak, scuffed and wilted and rotting at the nosing. Their style clashed with the hall's heather grey carpet. He approached slowly, his heart pounding. He traced his fingers along the outline of the wall. It didn’t feel real. The stairs seemed to erode out of the drywall in an uncanny, unsettling fashion. Like they had suddenly burst through, unwanted.

He peered down the hall, the dim lights flickering. No neighbors in sight. Goosebumps prickled his skin as he poked his head upward. The flight of stairs ran way up, into a black and distant darkness, the tap tap tap echoing coldly back down at him. Beckoning him to come forward.

He pondered for a moment, the footsteps rattling around his earways.

“Hello?” Ronald called out.

He took his wary steps up, convinced it was all a horrible dream. The steps creaked their shrill warning cries under the pressure. The door at the top was curved and ancient, the peephole carved in the shape of a crude star, cloudy and riddled with jagged cracks. Impossible to see through. Only a dazzling sliver of light bled through the bottom of the door frame, bright and seemingly pulsating.

He hollered again, knocking on the door. As he did so, the force of the blows pushed it open with a screech.

He didn't like it one bit—the sour scent of sweat, the long, barren hallway before him, and the soft melody that floated past. He would have turned back had it not been for the screams.

"Is somebody out there?”

"Please, help!"

The begging was weary in the same hopeless, dejected tone of a man trapped at sea hollering into the endless waves.

He followed the strange, upbeat music—tinny chirps from a flute or some distant whistle. The tap tap tap getting closer.

The dim cones of yellow emitted from the sconce lights seemed to spiral and sway. His head began to spin, the walls of the hallway rippling in a dreamlike state that made him stumble with unease. Suddenly his stomach lurched. There was a loud bang, and from behind him, he watched the doorway close. Ronald made a mad dash back toward it, the door retreating into the shadows with every quickened step. The hallway stretched and stretched, bending and turning in a sick, cylindrical motion. He was no closer to the exit, lost between the dreary grey walls and pencil-thin light that formed a track along the wooden floor.

The voice cried out again. "Hello?"

The tapping was rapid now.

Ronald shouted back, “Yes, I’m here! How do I get the hell out of here?”

“Come,” the man replied amongst the music. “It’s the only way.”

Ronald walked cautiously toward the voice. His legs felt weak and jittery. As he got closer (it felt closer) the gentle melody became warbled, blended in with the melting sounds of chaos. Inmates cackled and shouted expletives, hooting and hollering into the void. Commands were being barked back, chopping through the stale air. It brewed a vicious panic in Ronald’s bones that he couldn’t shake. The sound of animals. Caged animals. He was not like them, he told himself, yet there he had found himself, trapped with them.

The things he saw behind those four walls… they flickered menacingly in his mind.

Under it all, the maniacal tapping:

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

“Make it stop!” Ronald wailed, the pressure compounding in his chest. He fell to his knees, crouching and digging the tips of his fingers into his ear holes. The smells, the sounds, were all too real. It was shaking his sanity away like loose soot.

“Come!” the voice urged again. “You must keep going!”

He crawled to his feet, struggling for balance. The end of the hall seemed to stay in place, but he pressed forward, regardless, with unsteady, staggering steps. The sounds of the clink began to slowly seep away, churning and morphing into cooing sounds from his mother. He saw glimpses of his nursery, an unrecognizable young Ronnie with a fresh newborn wail. His room quickly zapped away, replaced with the distorted cheers of a crowd at some sort of minor league baseball game. Clinking and clanging of dishware, and the humming of the dryer. The beeps of a crane and the sound of power tools. The sparkling lights of the city in the dead of night, and the soft sound of the radio, a rock ballad. The puckering of lips. Two passionate heartbeats. Each warped new sound whirled in his brain bringing forth a distant, dusty memory.

And in a moment, they were all gone.

The strip of light had led him into the brightness, a fresh wave of suffocating white.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

***

He found himself face down on the floor of some strange room. His vision no longer swayed in a sea-sick motion, the dizzying racket all but vanished. It was almost too quiet now. Just gentle tapping.

Ronald rose to his feet, squinting. He scampered away from the blinding light.

The man before him was soaked in it, floating in a dazzling pillar that flared in from a tiny pinhole in the floor.

“There is another! Please!” the man pleaded, anguish on his wrinkled face. He was merely skin and bones, his rib cage bulging through his skin. His face looked gaunt, depleted. His body hovered above in a placid bobble, his toes tangling down.

And the tap tap tap, as he sunk momentarily, his toes making contact with the hollow surface of the floor, for an instance, before bobbing back up.

“Oh my God…” Ronald said, his eyes widening. He cowered in the corner, searching for somewhere, anywhere, to escape. It was a cramped space, no bigger than the attic of his childhood home, but nothing else felt familiar. The room was sterile and cold.

Pressed up against the frigid glass, he peered out into the darkness and shook his head with horror. The stars glittered like specks of polished diamonds, swallowed up in milky tones of purple and blue. This was some sort of chamber…light years from Earth, the condo complex, and his simple, miserable life.

“How…?” he asked, to no one in particular. The floating man was preoccupied with deliberating a plea for his release. Ronald stood and studied the horizon. There were hundreds of these jutted spires stretching past what he could see with the naked eye. Steady beams flared out from their tips like flashlights. He shuddered, wondering how many of the rooms were just like this, revolving around some dark center he hoped he’d never see.

Suddenly the angle of the beam twisted. The naked man fell to the floor in a heap. Ronald felt a warm tingling sensation run through his skin, similar to goosebumps in the summer heat. He could see nothing but bright, smothering light. Then his body jerked, dragged, and lifted to the center of the room. His clothing seemed to melt off of him in a strange ooze, dripping down from his pale, levitated body.

Ronald belted out a shattering scream.

The naked man got to his knees, breathing heavily. Still huddled on the floor, his legs looked too thin to support his weight.

“Just do what they say,” he warned, not looking up.

“Help me!” Ronald cried.

The man’s eyes narrowed in on Ronald, for a moment, with deep pity. “Do what they say…and maybe, they will get what they need and it will all stop.”

“What the fuck do you mean, man? What do you mean?

He only sighed, scratching his wispy patch of curly black hair. From behind him, Ronald heard the sound of pressure releasing. Footsteps. No---more like scampering claws against metal. The man left Ronald to his hopeless bellowing. But before the cabin door could fully shut, he heard the man’s familiar voice ring out in a blood-curdling shriek.

After what felt like hours, he noticed a projection. It was a tiny hologram, a screen maybe the size of a plate that illuminated the wall. The quality was horrible, similar to a VHS tape playing on an old tube TV screen. It was an elderly couple dancing an Irish jig in some sort of obscure home video. Other senior citizens had formed a circle around them. The video played on a loop, the chorus, the fiddle, the tinny flute, and the elderly couple hopping and fluttering their feet in a wholesome jig.

A tiny slice of humanity.

And he couldn’t help but feel his feet:

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

***

Ronald cried for an unfathomable amount of time. He screamed until his face turned blue and there was no more moisture in his throat. Then he would fall asleep, suspended by the unknown force of the light. Eventually, his tears ran dry too, as he succumbed to his predicament. A hopeless numbness ran through the man’s veins. This was a different cage, one of solitude.

The grey’s came and went, without any notice or discernable pattern. Sometimes it would be painless. A sample here, an inspection there. Sometimes they would just sit there, studying his memories. Other times, he would suffer, his muscles locked, his teeth grinding and gritting in agony as he let out bursts of animalistic screams. They scraped off parts of him, out of him. Metal tubes as long as rulers made their way into every crevice. He tried to cope with the fiery torrent of pain, but most times he would pass out.

Their smooth, slender frames reminded him of the general skeleton of a human. At first glance, in the shadows, Ronald thought that he could have been fooled. But he had observed their features for long enough now to know better. Their abnormal orbital bones were the biggest tell, the cavernous caves that housed their expressionless eyes, glowing and mirroring nothing of the common man. It made Ronald squirm, that deadpan glare that he could never read.

All he wanted was to go home. Or, at the very least, to die.

It was impossible to know how long he waited. Maybe years. Maybe decades. His body fat seemed to be absorbed. His limbs became frail, muscles worn away by inactivity. But his hunger or thirst never seemed to waver, his hair never greyed or grew. Preserved in the capsule of floating light.

Eventually, a voice came. Just as naive and lost as his had been so long ago.

“Hello? Is anybody up there?”

He tempered his excitement as best he could. But the tapping of his feet couldn’t be contained.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

“Up here!”

“Please…help!“

A.P.R.

First/Previous/Next

The seven men were marched from their cells into the front square near the gate of Golgotha where a crowd gathered for witness. Boss Maron and his subordinates had each of the men tied to the next so they were like a chain gang connected by thick rope around their wrists and ankles; each pair of hands tied high behind their backs. All of the men in line dared not look up from their collected feet as they were trickled into the square where the crowd was silent save for sudden outcries of righteousness; it was a punishment not given often but their crimes were too severe for anything less it seemed. I was there too, watching from behind a pair of young women. For the men’s sake at least the sky was clear and bluish and I’d not seen any birds.

Several of the Bosses had shown for the event (a makeshift stage of blocks and timber elevated them above the crowd), and Boss Harold out front of them all, imbibing on a cruel humor in the face of the men that had kidnapped him over the water scandal. Though his face was puffed and bruised and his elderly features stood exaggerated in the morning glow of the sun which crested the high walls, he grinned at some joke another Boss told—the playful gestures of the rulers of Golgotha were like a group of children—and still the crowd was silent half in reverence, half in anticipation. The crowd opened like a crescent moon round the line of criminals, leaving open air between the forefront of onlookers and the men which would carry out the punishment.

Maron took the lead on the rope. “These men here have committed the crimes of burglary, thievery, kidnapping, torture, alongside attempts to escape these past few nights.” The Sheriff Boss was scrawny but his eyes were dangerous looking and he took pleasure in his deeds, whatever they be. He pivoted on a boot heel and looked on at the tired starved faces of the men tied by rope. “Don’t you understand your transgressions?”

The response that came to him was little more than affirmative grumbles. Certainly, from the gauntness of the men, they could barely shamble given the way they’d been collected. The youngest among them was assuredly no older than fourteen and yet there he stood alongside his conspirators, undoubtedly thirsted, starved, sleep deprived.

The first man they took from the line was gray-headed and teetered on his skinny legs; as they disconnected him from the others, he almost tripped and fell, but Maron caught him, brought the man in close and whispered something to him (perhaps words of comfort or maybe even one last admonishment). They sat the man in a stool, arms remaining cinched behind him, and without hesitation, Boss Maron’s guild of wall men took mallets and hooks to the man’s feet. The screams erupted from the sitting man’s throat dry and awful. Blood pooled in the spot beneath him and when the wall men removed themselves from before him, it was plain to see they’d skewered his ankles with iron hooks which were connected to chains which ascended to the high parapets of the wall where several more of Maron’s cronies began pulling the chains taut. All at once, they ripped the old man from his seat where his head met ground with a hard crack and he was expertly hoisted by his ankles, into the air, against the wall where they pulled him thirty feet high. There he hung against the surface, struggling, screaming still. Hushed murmurs weaved through the crowd like ghosts and one of the women standing in front of me caught a gasp in her hand.

Looking on the stage of Bosses, not one seemed to acknowledge the punishment besides a glance. Wine sloshed from a clay cup in Boss Harold’s hand and coagulated in the silty earth beneath the platform.

The next in line for punishment was the youngest, a boy with gold hair brought dirty, and dark circles which shaped his unresponsive eyes. Boss Maron pulled the boy forward and they detached him from the others in line; he followed without protest. The woman in front of me, the one that let go of the gasp, stepped forward and I wanted to reach out and stop her; the tension was physical and as my hand grasped for her clothing, it met air. How I wish I’d stopped her.

The woman spilled into the open square and Boss Maron froze, surprised, but unafraid. She’d withdrawn a semi-automatic rifle from her robes and angled the barrel first at Maron then waved the thing around; onlookers pushed themselves from her way and even the Bosses took notice, yelling obscenities.

Maron tipped the cowboy hat on his head back to expose his wrinkled forehead. “If you intend on shootin’ me then do it, bitch.”

Seconds ran like infinity where there was only quiet, and I could not hear even the screams of the hanging man on the wall. She pointed the gun at the bound boy, the youngest of criminals. Her shouting was crying. “Henry, my boy, I’m sorry! God, please forgive me!” The end of her gun barrel erupted. The boy’s body danced till it was dead, his torso exploded across the ground and his blood hung like mist. Another anguished cry and she put the gun to use in firing at the other men, still in line, still awaiting execution. All fell but the man on the end. Blood ran wild in the square till the bullets were spent; the last man was brought to his knees for the others met the ground dead and he looked on in wonder at the gore before him then at the crazed woman in the square. Upon understanding the mercy she’d attempted to pay him, he guffawed with his face brushed in red.

Boss Maron removed a club from his belt and approached the woman whose hands unclenched the gun, sending it clattering to the ground. The sheriff and his men detained the woman, clubbed her arms so that bone shone through skin and then she was dragged away, and the punishment continued, and some of the crowd stepped into the blood for a better look and how I wished I’d stopped her.

The last man was brought forth, tall, large and broad shouldered, stepping deep in the red pools without shoes. Maron remarked plainly how tall the man was, and the man spat at the ground.

They took him up the wall like the first and their dual cries echoed. Some of the wall men took ladders and created incisions across the men’s lower abdomen, pulled the skin down so a flap hung off their torsos and covered their faces like a great tongue. Blood marked the wall beneath them.

Although the sky was clear of birds, birds came later in the evening when the sky was red, and the men had no more struggle; the birds perched on the men’s crotches and prodded at muscle with their beaks till intestines bulged out like sausage concealed by a red net of thin picked muscle. They stopped screaming when it was dark.

The hall of Bosses was at the back of Golgotha, furthest from the gate and taller than any of the other structures except perhaps the hydroponic towers. There it stood with discrete faces carved into its exterior stone walls, each one commissioned by an artist without a name and there on that night there was merriment and drinking too and I’d been invited, and I went to the Bosses at night where even music could be heard echoing from the mouth of that hall that spilled onto the street. The inner sanctum of those foul Bosses stunk of fresh chicken and spices and more wine too and when I came to them, they sat at a long table where Boss Harold sat off to the right side with his fists holding implements to shred his plate of chicken. Upon my arrival, the Bosses hollered and servants were there to refill cups as I approached Harold. He offered me a cup. I sat the cup to the side and another of the Bosses snatched it without recognizing. Harold’s fingers on his left hand had been wrapped and braced with splints of wood.

“Have a seat!” Cheered Boss Paul; he was the man that oversaw the hydroponic workers.

“Aye!” That was confirmation from Boss Frank; he and his underlings helped in keeping numbers: rations, materials, and the time too.

Harold touched my hand with his mended fingers and fumbled around to stand before pulling me into a great hug; he was a small man and his head rested against his chest for a moment and no longer before he pulled away, keeping his hands on my biceps. His eyes twinkled and he’d been drunk all day. “Look at you! We’ve a hero in front of us, fellas!” A sigh escaped him, and I felt the heat off his breath. “You’ve returned my daughter and I owe you a debt.”

My expression, upon seeing the long table laid with such wealth must’ve betrayed my sullenness to it for I felt Harold’s hand squeeze my own as though to comfort me; his hand was cold, wet.

“Do not let the hero in your soul perish, dear boy! There are few of your kind.” He stifled a dry tear before seating himself at the table once more. “You’ve done me and mine a great service and I’d like for you to have this.” Harold reached beneath the table, near his feet and slid out a wooden, chest-sized crate of miscellaneous objects; he withdrew from its contents a transparent bottle with auburn liquid swishing inside. “This is some of that wizard liquor I know you’re fond of. There’s five bottles for you and a few other things. Some parchment—Mister Maron’s told me you like to write when the inspiration strikes you—and some ink and there’s a few cans of tobacco too. It should never be enough for what you’ve done.” He squeezed my hand again before returning the bottle. A drunkenness escaped him, and he asked, “What is it like out there? To travel yonder? To see what’s not been seen for so long?”

The other Bosses’ utensils stopped moving across their plates and Harold looked up at me from his seat, illuminated in the glow of candlelight. Searching for an answer, I tried, “It’s—

A door slammed open from the far end of the hall and forced me to stop and look on at Boss Maron standing within a threshold leading to some room I’d never seen before; his scrawny frame stood dark against the lights from within the room, framing him first in shadow. He stepped forward, chest heaving, and in the candlelight of the table, I could see he was naked, coated in blood all down his body and without even his hat. From beyond, just before a servant rushed forward to close the door, I could see upon a mattress was the gunwoman from the morning, arms twisted, unmoving. How I wished I’d stopped her. “I am famished,” said Boss Maron, “Nothing quite like it works up a hunger from me!” His voice was filled with delight and the other Bosses took up conversation again while Harold motioned for me to take the crate of goods that he’d bestowed upon me.

Maron moved through the hall without anyone taking notice of his nudity. He craned playfully over the table to one of the dead chickens there and pinched a hunk of meat off with his fingers before plunging it in his mouth and sucking so there was no blood left on his forefinger.

Upon noticing me, Maron moved forward, jovial, bewildering in the glow of the room, and clapped me on the back; copper rolled off him. “You’ve decided to join us, huh?” He hooked his arm around me and leaned in to support most of his weight against mine. “There’s food to be had, for sure, but I’m afraid the party favor’s been dealt already.” A hearty laugh exploded from him. Among the men he was sober alone.

“Sit and eat Mister Maron,” said Harold, “We’ve a feast and you intend to tease the poor boy? And for what?”

Maron waved off the other Boss, “Poor boy indeed. Tell me, is it true what they say about you?”

I took a stone face. “What do they say?”

“I been told that you like speakin’ with devils.” A pause followed where he took up an empty chair alongside Harold. “Or maybe you’ve got certain proclivities.” He shook a meat knife at me. “Ain’t you got more blood on them hands that I’ve got here?” He showed his flat red palms.

“I should go.” My teeth ached as I clenched my jaw and lifted the crate Harold offered.

Laughter followed till I was out in the dark, the crate grappled, pastel squares painting the black buildings in the night (a signature for each night owl). Taking the stairs, I met the street and moved to take the road home when a figure stepped out, bathed in moonlight. My hands clenched around the wooden crate.

“Heya, Harlan. That is you there, isn’t it?” The words blubbered and the face of the man they belonged to was cut blank against the sharp clay of his face. “It’s you.” He was caught in a blue moonlight shaft, and he was crying. A sniff came as he jerked his body and pointed to the hall of the Bosses. “You came from in there. I saw you did.”

“I did,” I said.

“They took my wife in there.” A pause punctuated the night as he took his fist to wipe his face. “I saw them take her in there. You didn’t see her? Did you see her? Tell me please Harlan. Tell me she’s alive in there.”

A chill caught me. “I don’t know her.”

The man laughed a cold laugh. “You don’t know her, huh? She killed our boy this morning. If you didn’t see that I’m sure you’ve heard about it. The wall men took her in there. Tell me Harlan. Tell me now if she’s dead. If you do nothing else with that miserable life, you’d better tell me if you know.”

I sighed and sat the crate at my feet. “It’s like I told you. I don’t know her.”

The man stumbled forward in the dark so there was less than five feet between me and him. “Tell me you sonofabitchin’ bastard!”

His grief was belligerent.

The man caught me in a tackle and we both scrambled to the ground, each of us working for the upper hand in the blackness. My head met hard ground and clapped my teeth against my tongue; blood ran in my mouth and dizzy colors came. I swung a fist out, feeling my knuckles meet something hard I couldn’t see. Sneaky, his hands met my throat and his thumbs pushed into my adam’s apple. I couldn’t breathe as he straddled me. Try as I might, bucking my hips to pitch him, I reached out with a hand and swung my other in a fist to meet him, but my vision was going and my strength left me as he surely tried to crush my windpipe. While I spat through the struggle and lightheadedness took me, I found his eye with my thumb and pushed hard. His grip softened enough and I threw a final punch, pulling my knees beneath him to push him off. He met the dirt to my side and rolled on the ground; I could just make out the form of the man clutching his own face.

I moved to find the crate Harold had given me and lifted it, staggering around on stilts. I took myself to the ground in a place where the moon cut through the buildings and sat there with the box, removing a bottle of liquor to hold in my hand.

First, the cries of the man were moans then he stifled himself, crested the shadow line and moved at me again on his feet.

“Ah,” I held the bottle like a club, and he froze, “If you take another step, I’ll bust this over your fuckin’ head and jam whatever’s left in your neck.”

In the lowlight, I could see his right eye pinched shut and oozing tears even more than before. His bottom lip protruded before he sucked it into his teeth, and he hissed a sigh. “I just wanted to know, mister.” He took to sitting in the dirt opposite me. “Why won’t you tell me? A man deserves to know.”

We sat like that for minutes, focused on one another while I spat blood on the ground beside me. “What’s your name?” I asked him, massaging my throat with my free hand.

“D-dave.” He continuously rubbed his hand into the eye I’d gouged. “Goddamn. I think you’ve blinded me in it.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, well I’m sorry I came at you like that.”

“Ain’t you got any family left?”

The absence of a response stood as one.

I lowered the bottle but kept it in my hand. “Sorry.”

Dave shrugged. “So?” he asked.

I shook my head.

His shoulders slumped and he cried some more.

I undid the top on the bottle and scooted across the ground to offer it to him, but he put up his hand. “Just take it.”

We shared that bottle then another and I learned that Dave was sometimes called Davey by his wife. He’d just started teaching his boy about the growth cycle of cabbages and his boy’s name was Henry. Henry found a lot of joy in the world and liked to joke around, but Dave was never a jokester and so the boy and father didn’t always get along, but the man loved his boy, and he loved his wife too. “I’m a coward,” Dave confessed after the first few drinks. Beyond the first bottle, he spoke about how he’d like to skin the Bosses alive. Then, once the second bottle was empty Dave was confessing cowardice again and crying and he left in the dark and I went home.

The following morning, there was the ringing of large bells and the wizards came.

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Don’t be so scared, Harlan. If ever you yearn the ecstasy of my company, all you ever need is ask. Otherwise, I won’t touch you. Baphomet’s speech was paced, toneless, without emotion, and yet I felt pinpricks spring across my body.

I moved towards Harold’s daughter and draped my coat around her. “She can’t walk.” I saw the deep bruising, the bewildered fluttering of her eyelids, the places the demon had branded her flesh.

I lifted the girl, totally unsure whether she would die from a fever—with her slung over my shoulder, I could smell infection—and went from the garden, Aggie calling after me. And I could hear it all as I met the street and crossed it and reentered the ruins.

Although arduous with the squalling, quivering body of the girl, I moved as quickly as I could. “Shh,” I told her and myself, “Shh.” Perhaps I was shaking too.

I heard the protests of Aggie, first she asked for me, then there was nothing but the siren call of the betrayed, the shrieks, the howls in response to Baphomet’s tortures. There would be water again on the compound. I moved away and readjusted the girl on my shoulder before I stumbled over my own boots. We fell hard on my knees, but I kept her in my arms and muffled a cry. An old prayer whispered from my lips, and I pushed myself to my feet before going on.

There was no lying to myself of what I’d done. What I’d done too many times. It never was easier. Never. Nothing like youthful fresh flesh placates a demon. It’s a deal that I’d made before and a deal I was certain I’d make again. There were no heroes or beauty in the world. No wonderful overcoming or examinations of the indomitable human spirit.

The girl’s pained expressions dampened to mere whimpers alongside flashes of weak, flailing hysteria; her infection was bad, and I was glad for her continued pain, because it meant she was alive. Once I’d found a place, perhaps a mile out from the garden, deep in the buildings of the tall ruins, I deposited her on the sidewalk then looked over her. She looked thin, famished (soul famished), and her eyes could not hold a concentrated gaze. Only after surveying the surrounding area, I withdrew my water gourd and put it to her lips slowly, being sure as to not drown her with its contents—her eyes shut and she supped at the mouth of the dead gourd, not even having the energy to hold it with her hands. I examined her deep cuts; a few scabby places around her wounds demonstrated healing, but others looked too deep and I imagined that’s where the infection was.

My voice whispered, “These are antibiotics. Please swallow them. Even if you need to chew them, take them.” Unsure if my words had registers, I pushed the pills to her lips and her closed eyes contorted funny before I slotted the medicine past her teeth and offered her another drink of water. As expected, she chewed while drinking. I lifted her once more and walked tiredly to the safehouse me and Aggie had shared the previous night. Dead weight is easily the worst part of it. The girl’s limp body hung off my shoulder and reminded me that every step I took was an infinitely small conquest.

“Stop it,” protested the girl.

“Shh,” I said.

“I want to go home.”

“Don’t we all?”

“It’s scary out here.” Perhaps she’d momentarily gained lucidity.

“Shh. You’ll attract the scary things. Just be quiet.”

It was dark by the time we reached the building with the safehouse. I fashioned a sled from an old piece of discarded sheet wood so that I could mobilize the incapacitated girl up the many stairs to my hidden place. She’d not liked it when I’d secured her to the board with the rope and with every thump up the stairs, I half expected a creature to show, but nothing happened. I hoisted the makeshift sled by its connected rope, and it took until pitch black till we shuffled into the safehouse. With the door secured, I turned my attention to her, removed my jacket from her naked shoulders and set to cleaning her wounds with alcohol and bandaging what I thought was necessary—even through the smell of her blood, the antiseptic, and through the smoke I’d lit, I could smell the brimstone wafting off her. It was treacherous, but I gave her a spare fit of clothes I’d brought and while the threads hung off her too largely, at least she’d been given decency. With her tucked into a bedroll, I watched through the same windows I’d peered from the night prior and watched the glowing eyes of creatures that parkoured across tall structures, or fought amongst themselves, and every so often it seemed those eyes stared back at me through the dirty glass, but I hoped not. I secured the door each night but was hopeful the deal would keep them at bay.

Only a few times did the Boss’s daughter stir throughout the night, but she seemed to rest well enough as anyone could within the circumstances. There were a few times I checked the heat off her forehead and felt the temperature rising. Stripping a bit of cloth off my shirt sleeve, I dampened it and draped it across her forehead; if she’d been so unlucky as to catch a fever then she’d die for I had no measures against it.

Sleep came in short spells for me, and I burned too much lantern oil, because there was a fantasy within me where I could go back for Aggie; it was common.

It was morning then night then morning again and I was breaking what little bread I had for a tough sandwich when I heard her stir from her slumber; I watched as the young woman fumbled her hands above her prone body, touching nothing, then her eyes fluttered and she pushed herself up so as to bend into a sitting position, arms buttressing her so that she could slowly examine the room. I moved to sit near her, after placing coffee over the cooking stove. Her hand moved to her face where wounds would assuredly become scars, bad deep ones that might never heal right (demon wounds never healed right all the way) and she flinched as her fingernails poked at the lines down her cheeks.

“What’s this?” Her voice was gravelly, monotone, and dry.

“You’re awake then?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“Good. How are your limbs? Notice anything about them that are off? Can you feel everything?”

Her jaw clenched. “I don’t know if I’ll feel anything again.”

Ignoring this, I returned to the stove and pushed the heat higher. “Can you eat?”

“I’m thirsty.”

I motioned for the water gourd by her bedroll. “Can you eat? You should eat something.”

Greedily, she removed the cork and drank heavily, lines of water streaking down her chin. After removing the gourd from her mouth, a long sigh escaped her and I awaited her response, but instead, the only thing that came was a wet gurgle as she slammed the water to her lips again.

“The sooner you eat something, the stronger you’ll get. The sooner you’re strong, we’ll hit the road home. I imagine you thought you’d never miss home as much as right this second, huh?”

She cradled the gourd in her hands and smacked her lips; although her eyes were weary, a tad unfocused, she seemed self-possessed enough. “I think I’ve met you before. I think I know you.”

“Maybe,” I shrugged, “Lots of people in Golgotha have met me, but not many people know me well,” I laughed but couldn’t smile, “That sounded cheesy.”

“You work for my dad.”

I shook my head. “I do things for the Bosses sometimes. I don’t work for anyone. Never have. But sometimes a Boss needs something, I guess I’ll do it.”

“What do you do?”

“I rescued you.”

Her cold stare fell from my eyes till they drifted to the wide windows that overlooked the ruins. “I always thought it would be beautiful. Like a big, beautiful place. I thought it would be home. I thought it would be like dreams.”

My eyes followed hers where we could see the overwhelming cement-work that’d been done to create the ruins; walls were hewn to show skeletal rebar and every broken window was like a black tunnel. Each building was a tombstone. “It’s a graveyard.”

“Lady said burning incense would keep the monsters away. She told me it was the only way to keep them away.” Her voice was small with a hint of betrayal.

“Incense is good for ceremonies or preaching, but if incense was what you used to keep them away, you might as well have learned one of Lady’s incantations and done a little chicken dance.” I huffed. “If they want you and you’re there for the wanting, they’ll take you.”

She took in more water until the gourd was empty and then she held her stomach.

“Careful. If you drink too much all at once like that, you’ll end up with pains.”

She massaged her legs and removed herself from the innards of the bedroll to sit atop it. “Thank you.”

I swallowed hard and pulled the fresh coffee from the heat. “You should eat something. Do you prefer bread or canned beans—I could smack together a sandwich for you. The choices are slim at the moment, but there’s a bit of dried meat too.”

“Why don’t they take you?”

I gritted my teeth into what was hopefully a welcoming grin. “Hush. You should eat up and try to conjure whatever energy you have. I know you’ve been through it, but there’s more to come till we see home.”

“Home?”

“Indeed.”

“I came out here with Andrew. Did you find Andrew?” Her eyes momentarily illuminated with hope.

“Who’s that?”

Her eyes drifted. “He was going to be my husband. He said we’d be married.”

“He’s definitely dead.” There was no way to tell if her sweetheart was still kicking or not, but there was no use in arguing over it.

“Oh,” she whispered. There was a pause where she seemed to study the bedding she laid on. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought for sure that there would be something hiding out here in the wastes.”

“There’s stuff hiding alright.” I began to shrug it off but stopped myself when I could see the tears forming in her eyes. “There’s always hope, I guess.”

We took to eating nearer the large windows overlooking the large mouthy chasms and between swallows there were spits of conversation, but her attention was largely unconcentrated. At least her hunger was good, and she drank well.

I smoked while she interrogated me further on the state of the world.

“All I know is Golgotha. You’ve been around, right? Is there any good place left?” She was practically pleading the question.

“I ain’t been all over exactly. It’s not so simple. If there’s a safe place on this earth left, it won’t be long till those monsters find it and make it worse.” I watched a puff of smoke from my cigarette plume off the glass window inches from my face. “Who knows, huh? Maybe there’s a good place. Maybe there’s a place we go after life? Maybe that’s the safe place? My best advice? Don’t hope for it. Make it. Make it safe in the place you know. Do it in Golgotha and never leave those walls again. There’s nothing for you out here.”

Her voice was small in the wake of mine. “You sound bitter. I don’t know how you could say that. That’s why I left home. I thought—we thought there’s gotta’ be a good place still left. Maybe a place by the ocean.”

I shuddered at the thought. “The ocean?”

She nodded.

I shook my head. “Don’t even try it. You’ve heard the stories of what it’s like.”

“Those are just stories to scare kids.”

I sighed. “And I’m sure you thought the stories of these ruins was just to scare kids. I’m sure you thought you knew it all.” I rubbed the cigarette dead against the window. “Take a hint and stay home. We hole up like rats or we die like ‘em.”

A thought crossed her expression before she could enunciate it, “I remember your name,” said the girl, “It’s Harkin or something.”

“Harlan?”

“Yeah, that’s right! You’re Mister Harlan.”

“I guess.”

“I’ve seen you down in the town square sometimes. You like to start fights. Lady told me to stay away from you.”

“Hmph.”

“Well, never would’ve thought you were such a crank. You are quite the pessimist.”

“No, I’m an optometrist.”

“I think you mean optimist.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re very dull and angry-seeming.”

“That’s a lot of words coming from a rich girl I pulled out of a hole.”

The room was quiet before she changed the subject once more, “Well, don’t you want to know my name?”

“Sure.” The word was plain.

“I’m Gemma.”

“A pleasure.” A moment of silence. “You are aware that your father’s caused a fuss on the home-front because of your adventure?”

She shook her head.

“He shut off the water. That’s why I came to find you. He said he wouldn’t relinquish the pipes till his daughter was home. You have caused quite the problem.”

“I-I didn’t know.”

“’Course you didn’t. The haves rarely think of how their actions might affect the have-nots.”

“Well—okay, fine but there’s other places out west too! More than these ruins. More than Golgotha too. I heard from travelers and traders that there are whole other places with different ways of life. Why don’t people go there? Why should my father have more say than another?”

I nodded. “Sure, there’s a place out west where they raise sheeps, chickens, or goats; that’s where the demons stalk worse than anywhere. And even further west—northwest to be precise—there’s where the medicines and wizards hail—a city called Babylon. There’s other places, but you wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to get there! If you did, you’d have no standing! You’d be no better than any peasant in those places. Golgotha’s where your family is. Where your station is distinguished. You’d be a fool to give it up.”

She remained quiet for only a moment, studying the lines on her palms. “Surely there’s better places than home.”

“I’ve seen some,” I shook my head, “If you’re looking for a better place, wait for death. At least the walls are tall, and the guns are big.”

We rested there at the waypoint for a handful of days; fevers began to take her sometime throughout the night. It would be smart to get her home before it got worse.

We set out just as the sun crested some unseen horizon, sending shadows long and darker; there were points when hugging the sides of pitch-black walls, that it remained night even in day within the dead city. Gemma was slow and I took note of her knees or elbows quivering due to whatever strain might be placed upon them with our traversal. I remained as calm as I could as we shifted through the morning chill, through hell, through the uncompromising screams of distant mutants or demons echoing off the walls. Every so often those howls would come, and Gemma might freeze where she was and I could see that if only for a moment, her eyes shrank, her throat swallowed, and she looked small and scared, then it would be as though she was totally unbothered, and she’d throw her shoulders back and continue following me.

“Are you winded yet?” I asked after several hours of climbing old wreckage and pushing across rubble.

“No,” her speech was gasped yet tempered, “Not yet. I’m fine.”

“Don’t be stupid.” I stopped, put up my hand and motioned for her to take a seat on a nearby stone. We sat for a moment, and I passed her the water. A few of the last drops ran the length from the corner of her mouth to her ear lobe and I winced at the loss.

“I’m ready to go again.” She moved to rise, and I put my hand on her shoulder, snatching the empty gourd from her.

“Don’t act silly now. There’s no reason with all the sun we’ve got. I hope to make it to Golgotha while there’s still light, but that does not mean I intend on dragging your corpse with me. If you need to relax, relax.”

“If there’s nothing better in this world, then what’s my corpse matter?” Gemma cut her eyes at me and stood to move away from me.

“Woe is you!” I felt anger rising. “Let’s go then, but if you fall out here, I’m done dragging your ass around.”

“Don’t.” She shrugged.

The travelling was slowed. I caught a strange glint off Gemma’s eyes when sun shafts landed across her face.

“Are you feverish still? How warm are you feeling?” The brief thought of touching her forehead graced my thoughts.

She didn’t answer and instead pushed on and so I did the same, maintaining a healthy habit of checking that she was following behind every few seconds.

Without another break, through heavy breathing and through sweat, we met the edges of the open field around Golgotha nearing early evening, and I saw the fortified walls cloaking the base of the city’s structures far out. I came to a stop while Gemma attempted to continue walking. I snatched her by the wrist, stopping her. Her head lolled around to look at me although I’m certain she didn’t really see me and she cut her eyes hard, yanking her hand free of mine. “Don’t touch me. I see home. It’s home. You said it’s important. We should go hide like rats.” Her jabbering came from the mouth of someone protesting through the haze of a dream.

“No. I need to signal that we’re coming. The men on the walls will see us through their scopes, but that doesn’t mean a stray bullet won’t find us.” I removed the sheet of aluminum Boss Maron had given me days prior and unfolded it until the thing was large as parchment sheet; I waved the aluminum flag overhead and began walking forward, grabbing Gemma’s hand again. She did not fight me and instead staggered along, her foot tips tracing lines in the dirt. Normally, I might’ve checked through binoculars that the men on the wall signed back, but keeping ahold of Gemma was more important in her delirious state. “We’ve still got enough sun in the sky that they’ll know its us from the reflection.”

Just as the words left my mouth, darkness overcame the landscape and I felt cold for it wasn’t night that came, but a massive shadow; I felt the wind of something immense and pulled Gemma closer to me. Looking up into the air, there was the great winged beast—a thing I’d only seen once before and never so close to a human bastion. Its several clawed fists hung in front of its chest, forelegs muscled and prepared for snatching whatever unsuspecting prey it might find; the demon’s great head was that of a serpent and the wings which arched from its back gathered wind beneath their membranes; each stroke it took overhead left a dust fog in front of us and I could scarcely make out the innumerable writhing tendrils which danced off the creature’s body. The distinguished sound of the wall’s gunfire registered across the open land, and I felt Gemma fall into me. Leviathan circled against the angry sky, casting its tremendous shadow across us. Examining Gemma, I could see her fever had overtaken her and she’d fallen unconscious.

“I told you goddammit! I’m not going to drag your ass across this field! Wake up!” I shook the unconscious girl. Her eyelids flickered. “Wake up for Christ’s sake.” I slapped her hard and nothing and I shook her some more and pleaded. Leviathan’s scream shook the ground beneath us.

I moved across the open field as quickly as my legs would allow; with the addition of Gemma’s dead weight, I could pull on her limp arms only so long before I knelt before the shadow of the beast and hoisted her over my shoulders. I ran, top heavy, and imagined my feet leaving solid ground. Loud bangs were the signature for muzzle flashes from the wall that I could scarcely see through the sweat in my eyes.

There was no protest from Leviathan, not a care in response to the barrage of munitions.

Artillery whistled through the air and the ground shook once more while I staggered over my own weight to glance up at the beast as it took a broadside shot to its black torso and although the wound it received seemed critical, it remained unfazed while tar-colored flesh shed off the beast, plodding all around me. The warmth from the explosion kissed me like hot breath while the smell of rotted chicken filled the air and Leviathan’s blood rained over us as it adjusted itself in the sky. Dark blood ran granular and rough down my face and maybe Gemma mumbled innocuous cries—still I continued through the muck. Another artillery round struck the creature’s left wing, leaving behind a smoldering hole in its thick membrane, sending it forward into a nosedive to the ground. Its trajectory arched overhead till it slammed in an explosion of sand far to the left and the sun beamed once more. Its cries were the thousands (if not more) souls it’d devoured, screeching not like a dragon, but a village of tormented folks removed from this world and placed in another; it was the screams of strangled ghosts; the wild tentacles dotting its body writhed, snatching out at open air like whips and as thick as metal cables. The wind off the beast stung as it sent up sand in my face. Like a mistaken dog, it shook its head and propelled itself far and away into a leap that shook the ground till it glided over the horizon toward a place unseen.

I stood in the open field, certain I was dead; it was not until murmurs escaped Gemma’s mouth that I took toward Golgotha again.

The cheers of the men on the wall overtook the clacking of the main gate coming free. I fell through the doorway while some of the wall-men gathered around. The blood of Leviathan was already thickened in the sun, clinging off me with some of its meat stinking and steaming into my clothes.

“Take the girl home,” I shouldered Gemma off me onto the ground and she was caught by the men while I fell. People gathered round in knots of bewildered faces.

“Water!” some of them shouted as the spigots in town ran freely once more. Some cheered while I took tiredly in the square by the gate and sat on an arrangement of cinderblocks. Boss Maron was there, an old metal bucket banging against his left knee; he took the contents of the container and tossed it over my head. The water was warm but welcome.

“You stink.” Said the Boss.

“Why don’t you go shit somewhere else?” I was nauseous at the stench clinging to me—shaking my right hand, a hunk of the creature sloughed off my arm onto the ground.

Boss Maron took up alongside me. “Why don’t we just play nice some, eh?”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“What’s happened to the girl you left with? You left with one girl and came back with another? What a heartbreaker you are! Certainly, a man about town!”

Depositing my pack between my knees, I removed tobacco and took to rolling a cigarette. The paper kept tearing in my hands.

“Boss Harold has a plan for those boys. Those ones that took him hostage.”

“So?”

“So, I’m just glad you came back with the girl. Others are too.”

“It’s not like you went without water.”

A chuckle fell from him. “’Course not. There’s no reason I should. But some of the veggies in the hydro lab looked thirsty. It’s good you returned when you did. Anyway, we knew you’d come through. I can’t remember a time you haven’t.”

I bit a poorly folded cigarette and inhaled opposite a match. My eyes traced the people cheering in the streets out near the gate then up to the wall where soldiers stood with their rifles.

“What brought the dragon out?” Boss Maron wondered aloud.

“Who gives a shit? Why don’t you go pull its tail and ask.”

Among the revelers stood a figure in a cloak with a hood covering stringy gray hair. Lady was there in a moment, watching my conversation from afar, then she was swallowed by the crowd.

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The earth opened and the monsters came, and it was the end of the world. But it didn’t feel like it because we were still here.

There was never a time I can remember where the creatures did not lurk in the shadows, kidnapping stray helpless children or hapless adults; sometimes it would be that someone of Golgotha would go missing and whispers over breakfast would be the consequences of it. Funerals were frivolous, even if there were sometimes candles lit in the absence of the missing. Generally, it would be the elders that would sit around wooden tables, hum old hymns and maybe they would whisper a few kind words to Elohim or Allah or perhaps a more pagan variety; I came from a fully loaded Christian household where the paganistic murmurs were often seen as little better than the monsters that came from the earth.

Whatever the case may be, it was simple mourning, simple human mourning and it was sad and miserable and more numbing every time I’d see it happen. Sometimes it would be Lady (she was an old shamanistic-style woman with tattered robes and graying hair, even some whiskers on her chin too) that would culminate a hymn in the streets with her incense or more for the missing, but it was Christian and good in that way. Always about Jesus, always good clean words and simple gospels that were quiet and weak.

It was a young woman that’d gone missing sometime the previous night; there’d been a patrol sent out among the old ruins too because the missing girl was the daughter of a Boss. The Bosses were distinguished leaders in Golgotha, due to their tendency for extreme and untempered cruelty and whenever someone crossed a Boss or whenever a Boss lost something precious, everyone took notice, because the Bosses controlled the functions of Golgotha. It just so happened the Boss whose daughter went missing was also the fellow that controlled the water supply. His name was Harold and that wily sonofagun shut off the pumps that moved ground water into our homes. He was the only one with the key and said he’d not divulge it to a soul if the girl wasn’t returned.

Some of the boys on the compound cultivated a posse with impassioned cries of mutual aid and such, but Boss Harold, no matter how much they threatened or how many of his fingers they snapped in their desperate grasp for humanity, would not comply. Most of the boys surmised it was likely the girl was dead and her remains would be impossible to find due to the way monsters tended to grind bones into powder and dry swallow even the gristle of our fragile bodies; there’d be nothing left—or if there was anything left of her it wouldn’t be her any longer (assuredly she’d be a husk or unworthy of saving). When hard torture failed, the boys cried for more reason, and yet Boss Harold would not budge. The old Boss said, “I’ll stop the motor of the world until she’s found!”

A group of rabblerousing youths had absconded with his daughter or so he said; the reality was much more likely that she had run from home of her own free will either by wanderlust or ignorance. When all was said and done, the families came to me and said, “Hey, Harlan, buddy, pal, you’ve lost weight. You’re looking good, Mister Harlan, did you get a haircut?”

I’d heard about the girl. I’d heard about the posse sent out to Boss Harold’s abode—the compound ain’t that big—and knew they’d be coming for me because I was a scavver, a person that wades through the old ruins either for illusory history pages or weapons or even (and this one was a rare treat) lost people. I knew they’d come for my services and had already put together my pack for travels with rations and light tools—no gun; drawing attention in the old ruins was a dumb thing because sound could travel forever.

“I’m going,” I told the group that’d been sent for me, “I don’t reckon any of you’d like to come with me?” I looked over the dirty faces, the faces of men, women, children that could scarcely be called grown, and none stood out because they were all tired and dirty and I imagined I looked much the same.

Then a girl’s voice broke out from the crowd, and she stumbled forward from the line of strangers that’d come to see me at my door. “I’ll go!” she said, “I want to go with you, Mister Harlan.”

It was unsurprising. Youngsters always thought the old ruins were like a field trip, like maybe they’d find a souvenir for their sweetie and come home with a good story. Most didn’t come back, and those that did usually came back with scars beneath the skin from what they’d seen in the out there. It was like a game for them and when they saw what the world outside the walls held, they would retreat into themselves for fear. It wasn’t just the monsters. It was the ruins themselves, the overwhelming demolition of us; we were gone and yet we were here. It’s a hard thing to cope. I looked over the skinny girl with a grimy face; she couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Her hair was cropped very short, and I could see no immediate deformities that might slow my travels, so I asked, “What’d your parents say?”

Without flinching, the girl shouldered her pack straps with her thumbs and almost cheerily answered, “They’re dead, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir.” I stepped nearer her, looked over her face and saw perhaps a will I’d not seen in some time. Maybe she would be more of a help than a hinderance. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes.”

“Then we leave immediately.” I shouldered my own pack and followed up with, “Do not bring any fucking guns.”

“Got it! No fuckinguns.” Her tone was sarcastic, but not unserious. It was the best I could hope for, and besides it was always better whenever I travelled with someone else.

We took off from my small hidey-hole and moved through the narrow stretches of street, tall metal and concrete stood on either of our sides, mostly housing and hydroponics, with a few spots with stools where a person could stop in for a drink of cool water. Although a few of the Bosses had toyed with the idea of expanding the hydroponics so that we might produce corn whiskey in bulk, this was scrapped when the math was done; the space was insufficient for such luxuries, but this did not stop some from fermenting small berries in batches when no one else was paying attention. Wine was incredibly rare, had a moldy taste to it, but was sweet and a further reminder of maybe why we held on. I liked wine pretty good, but sometimes I’d find an old bottle in the ruins or get a jug of liquor from one of the far settlements and that’s what I really cherished.

“You ever been out of town?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Don’t act a hero, don’t be funny out there, don’t make noise, don’t get in my way. If I tell you something, you do it without questions.”

First, I heard her footsteps fall slowly, then more quickly before she answered me as though she had to stop and think about what she was going to do next; perhaps she was having second thoughts? “Don’t try to scare me from the ruins,” she said, “I’ve wanted to go out there for years now and everyone always says there’s old stuff. Our old stuff. Stuff that used to belong to us.”

“Used to belong to us? What do you mean?”

“Humans or whatever. It used to be ours.”

“It hasn’t been ours within my lifetime. Leave it to them, because it’s theirs now. If you find some small thing out there that you like, then take it, but otherwise, it ain’t home no more.” There was no need for me to elaborate on who I meant whenever I said them, because anyone knew exactly who they were: the creatures from beneath the earth, the demons, the monsters.

We came to the outer sections of town near the gate and the walls stood high over our heads while morning breeze kicked up spirals of sand wisps across the ground. The walls were probably fifty or sixty feet tall, and several yards thick with titanium and concrete and rebar; along the parapets of our fortifications were patrolmen that watched the horizon and fired at anything that moved with fifty-caliber bullets. The men up there, and they were mostly men (the show-off types), wore ballistic weaves, bent and tarnished war helmets of the past, and carried mottled fatigue colors on their bodies like for-real militiamen. There hadn’t been an attempt on Golgotha from the monsters in days; it was a quiet week.

The nearest dirt street spilled into an open square with sandbag barricades overlooking the gate from atop a small hill. I waved down Maron. Boss Maron wore boots and an old-school cowboy hat with an aluminum star pinned on its forehead center; he swaggered over, “Going out, Mister Harlan?” His mustache caterpillar wiggled, nearly obscuring a toothy grin.

I nodded.

“It’s ‘cause Harold ain’t it?”

I nodded.

“You know that crazy bastard had some of my guards lock up the boys that stormed his home? If you ask me, he deserved whatever pain those fellas brought to him for shutting the pumps off.”

I idly studied the sidearm holstered on his hip then looked at the nearby guards by the gate, each with automatic weapons slung across their chests. “You still locked them up, didn’t you?”

Boss Maron spat in the dirt by his feet and laughed a little dry. “Sure did. Harold’s got the key to the water, and I won’t be crossing him. Don’t want the riffraff questioning Bosses.” He flapped his hand at the notion then swaggered away and waved at his guards to open the gate. The one nearest a breaker box on the righthand side of the gate opened the electrical panel, flipped a switch then the hydraulics on the gate began to decompress as it unlocked and rusty gears began to rock across one another to slide the great, tall metal door open.

“Try not to lose any fingers or toes while you’re out there. Oh!” he seemed to take notice of the young girl following me, “Got a new companion? Does she know what’s happened to the last few that’s traversed those desperate lands with you?”

“Hm?” asked the girl.

“Oh? Harlan?” Boss Maron smiled so hard I’d think his mustache might fall of his face from the sheer tension of the skin beneath it, “He’s a real globetrotter, quite a dealmaker, but just don’t be surprised if he leaves you behind.” This was followed by a sick chuckle.

I refused to respond and merely watched the clockwork gate come to a full open while the guards on either side prepared to angle their guns at the opening like they half-expected something to come barreling towards them. The doorway was empty and through the haze of the wasteland I could scarcely make out the familiar angles of the old ruins far out.

The girl didn’t engage either, for which I was thankful.

Boss Maron wide-stepped closer then patted my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “Don’t forget the shiny flag.” He tucked a foil sheet into my front shirt pocket, “His daughter was due west supposedly. Good luck.” Then he clapped me on the back before returning to his post by the sandbags where a small table displayed his game of solitaire.

We moved through the gate, and I could sense the uneasy rhythm of the young girl’s movement just over my shoulder. As the gate closed behind us with a large and final shudder, I heard her breath become more erratic.

“The air feels thicker out here,” she said.

“It is sometimes,” I tried talking the nerves out of her, “It’s hot and cold all at the same time, ain’t it? Know what I mean? It’s hot devil air, but also you feel chills all over, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Her pace quickened so that we walked alongside one another.

“It’s just the nerves. You get used to it. Or. Well.”

“Or?”

“Or you don’t get enough time to.”

“What did ol’ Maron mean about other people dying with you?”

“Not many people venture outside the compound and even fewer go into the ruins. It’s all very dangerous. Most don’t make it back. That’s all he meant.”

“But you do. Make it back, I mean.”

I sighed. “I do, yeah.”

“My name’s Aggie, by the way. Sorry I didn’t say that before, Mister Harlan.”

“What’d your parents do when they were still around?”

“Dad was a farmer that worked with the hydroponics and Mom was a general fixer. She liked making clothes when we had the material.”

“Good people, it sounds like.”

“Sometimes,” said Aggie, “Hey, please don’t let me die, alright?” The words weren’t constructed so much as blurted; they came as a joke but did not seem like one.

“Okay.”

For a mile out in a measured circle, there was open sandy, flat ground stretching from around the perimeter walls of Golgotha; all the clutter, junk, and buildings had been disposed of years prior to grant the compound’s snipers comfortable sights in all directions. The openness went out for a mile and in every direction, one could see the ruins, the crumpled dead vehicles, half-snapped spires that lie in angles, and the gloom-red tint in the air that seemed to emanate from the ground like heat waves off fire. It was scarred air, where the creatures had unearthed some great anomaly from beneath the dirt. In honesty, it was like passing through the foul stench of death and painted everything in a blood hue. It stank and it was hot and it was cold.

We moved in relative silence; only the sounds of our boots across granular dirt or the clink of zippers whenever either Aggie or I was to readjust the packs on our shoulders. As we came upon the edges of the ruins, where we entered the red mist, and the air was alien. Finally, Aggie cleared her throat and mentioned through mildly exerted breathing, “Think we’ll find her?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Keep quiet and whisper. We can talk but keep it low.” We began to enter the thick of the ruins where ancient structures crept up on either side of us. “What made you come with me?” It was a question I’d wondered the whole time and figured her reasoning was weak.

“There’s not much home. I’d like to see some of the world before I go. Seems like things get worse and worse and for when I do leave this world, I want to see something other than the walls of home.”

“Fair answer.” Her reasoning was weak. “What if you’ve bit off more than you can chew?”

“Maybe.” She followed this up with another question of her own,” What made you start venturing out?”

“I wanted to see something other than the walls of home.” I felt a smile creep around the corners of my mouth, but quickly tempered myself. “Whenever people go out on their own without a guide, they die. I doubt we’ll find Harold’s daughter.” I left a pause. “You’re nearly her age, ain’t you? Did you ever know her?”

“You speak like she’s dead for sure.”

“Most likely, she is. Did you know her?”

“No, but I guess I’m an optometrist.”

“Optimist,” I corrected.

“Whatever. She’s a piece of home. I feel like I’m old enough to take care of myself and I want to help people. Not everyone thinks that way, but we’re all one big family, aren’t we?”

“While I appreciate your thoughts on it, I doubt the daughter of a Boss would feel the same about you.”

“The Bosses protect us.”

The ruins began to swallow us whole as we ventured through the ancient pathways, broken asphalt and wreckage littered the wide-open street. A nearby, worn post named the path: Fif Aven. I’d gone there before and left most things untouched. Although there were a few open holes in the structures on either side—places where large entryways might’ve gone hundreds of years ago—they were mostly empty, black with shadow, and picked clean long long ago. Non ideal for an alcove of respite from the open air. We shifted down the street, my eyes darting from old signs and vehicles bent and rusted and abandoned. I motioned for Aggie to come closer as I sneaked through the rubble towards a wall where there were no entryways into the monolithic structures. We hugged the wall and moved with trepidation, sometimes climbing across overturned wreckage tiptoeing in our boots to muffle all sound. Every footfall felt like a scream.

“We should go on for another mile or so before we find a place to rest. I know one up the way.”

“Rest? Are you tired already? That’d burn what daylight we have,” said Aggie.

I shook my head, “The last thing you want is to be without your wits in a place like this. If you’re too tired to run, you’re too tired to live.”

“Aren’t they fast? If they catch you in the open, they’ll get you, won’t they?”

I thought of a lie then thought better, “Yes.”

“Oh.”

“If you see one. Don’t scream. Don’t even breathe. If they haven’t seen you, you still have a chance.”

The air grew wet and smelled of chlorine, and I snatched Aggie’s sweating hand in my own before grappling her into my arms; she was small and fought noiselessly for only a second before going still. I shifted us into a concrete doorway with a half-destroyed awning and whispered a quick hush as I glided us near a piece of wreckage.

I felt her tenseness leave and let go of her before she crouched alongside me in the shadowed cover of an old van that had, ages before, slammed into a nearby wall. The door of the vehicle had been removed and we angled in slowly, silently, crawling towards the rear of its cabin to peer from the broken windows, all the while hoping its old axles would not creak. Feeling her hand on my shoulder, I twisted round to look Aggie in the eye; terror erupted from her face in tremors while she mouthed the words: what’s that?

Simply, I put a finger to my lips and took a peek at the thing moving down Fif Aven. The creature was on the smaller side, closer to the size of a run-of-the-mill human, but twitched its muscles in a fashion that contested humanity. The thing walked upright on two feet, but sometimes used its hands to move like an animal. The most intricate and disturbing of its features, however, was its head. With vibrant green skin, with speckles of yellowed globules across the surface of its body (likely filled with creamy pus), with a mishappen balloon head that first opened in half with a mouth folded as an anus, dispersed a corrosive gas into the air while it deflated, then reinflated and quivered—the creature’s head moved as a sack filled with misty gas, wobbly and rubbery. It had no eyes, no other features besides that awful head.

We watched it go, stop, disperse its toxic mist into the air, then leave. I kept my eyes on it, nose and mouth tucked beneath the collar of my shirt, and glanced at Aggie to see she’d followed suit. The smell could choke.

Once I was certain the thing had decided to move well outside of earshot (not that it had ears) I motioned for Aggie to follow me out of the van, down the sidewalk, through an intersection of roads, and into a small opening in one of the smaller structures. Our feet were swift, and I was grateful she was graceful. We moved through the darkness of the structure, and I led with intimate knowledge of the place. There was a safe spot near the rear of the building. I reached out in the dark, felt a handle and pushed into a small closet and pulled Aggie through.

My lantern came alive and bathed us in a warm glow. Shelves across the small room were lined with various supplies I’d left. A few boxes of matches, oil for lanterns, a bedroll, blankets, and other miscellaneous baubles.

Aggie inhaled sharply, “I’ve never seen anything like that! It was. I don’t know. It was weird and gross. Little scary. Is that what they look like?”

I shifted around onto the floor and opened my pack while placing the lantern between my legs. “You’ve been up on the compound’s walls before, ain’t you?”

“Once.”

“Well, sometimes those things get closer to home. I don’t know what you’d call them. Some of the wall guys call them fart heads because when you shoot one in the head with a rifle it goes pfffft. Lotta’ that chlorine shit comes out of them too.”

“Do bullets kill them?” She asked while removing her own pack and fixing her legs alongside mine in the closet; it was a snug fit, but we managed. “Like really kill them or does it just empty those heads?” I could feel her shaking still.

“If you use enough, sure. Durable, but manageable if you have enough firepower. Those are small fries. Normally they wouldn’t sneak up on me though. Normally I’d smell them from far off before they ever get close.”

“Did I distract you?”

“Maybe.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“It was bound to happen, I reckon.” I plunged my hand into my pack and removed a water gourd, taking a deep swallow from it.

She started, “Have,” she stopped then started again, “I wish,” another stop came then she gave up on whatever she was going to say and laid her pack across her lap, seemingly searching for something within.

“We should rest up here for a while. At least until you’ve calmed yourself. Then we’ll set out. Maron said the girl went west. You should have that detail in case this trip happens to be my last. I figured we’d search the northern area first then make our way south, but—I hope she ain’t south.” I exposed the face of my compass.

A thought seemed to occur to Aggie while she removed her own water gourd and took a healthy swig. Sweat glistened off her brow in the dancing light of the lantern, its fire caught in her pupils while she thought. “You don’t actually think you’ll find her, do you?”

I grinned, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“You think she’s dead already, so why do it?”

“Because they’ll believe me when I come back. I suppose we’ll return in two days, maybe three, then tell them we found her corpse.”

“Well why don’t we just stay here for the remainder?”

“We’ll look for her,” I said.

“But why?”

“It’s the right thing to do, I suppose. Maybe your optometristism is rubbing off on me.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” said Aggie, but I could see her sheepish grin. She held out a hand flat across her eyes and watched the nervous tremors in her fingers.

“Just nerves,” I told her.

“It’s a little exciting.”

“Now that’s a dangerous thought,” I took another swig from my water gourd before returning it to my pack. “Do you know where your parents hailed from?”

“Somewhere up north. Cold lands, but it was hard not to freeze in the winter up that way. Said they came down here years before I was born, hoping they could find a place to settle, but it was all the same. That’s what they said.”

“Never been further north than Golgotha, if I’m being honest. I’m from a place that once was called Georgia, but I’ve not been there in years.”

“Is it true what they told me, Mister Harlan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it the same everywhere? Is there no place around that’s not got those awful things?”

“If there’s a place like that, I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Mom used to read to me when I was a little kid,” she said, “I never could pick up reading, but she loved old books that were written before bad times and in those books, people talked about things like green fields that stretched on forever, and places where water streams were clear enough to drink from. Do you remember anything like that?”

I chuckled while continuing to rummage through my pack, “Geez, how old do you think I am? All that was a long time ago.”

“Yeah. You think it’ll ever be like that again?”

I shook my head. “Wishful thinking.” Then I found what I’d been searching for and removed it from my pack. A small tin of tobacco; I sat to rolling a makeshift cigarette then lit it off the lamp.

“That smells funny.”

“Yeah.”

We shared the cigarette in the dark closet, passing it back and forth; her lungs, not being used to the smoke, forced from Aggie a few whimpering coughs that she tried to hide in the hem of her shirt.

I ducked the tobacco out beneath my heel and began reorganizing my pack so that it was less lumpy. “I hope you’re ready for it again. Like I said, that one you saw was a small fry. There’s bigger things out there. Worse things.”

“Should I go, or should I just stay here?” She hadn’t reorganized herself at all and remained seated while I shouldered my pack and peered through a crack in the door.

“Of course, you should come with me. I know it, you’re scared.”

“What if I make it worse and I attract one of those things right to you?” She asked.

I reached down and she took my hand; I lifted her to her feet and we met eyes, “Aggie, you’re coming with me. You’ll do fine. I promise.” It was not often that I’d try and charm someone, but I put forth a smile.

She smiled back and I shut off my lantern before leading her gently through the dark, into the open street where midday sun caught the ruins shadows long and deep. West was where the girl had gone and I intended to follow. Though I’d seen no signs of survivors, I was certain that if they’d braved the previous night, they were likely about in the daytime. Certainly, things would be made easier if I could cup hands around my mouth and echo my voice through the dead city like a game of Marco-Polo. Aggie maintained both energy and quiet alongside me as we moved through the rubble, vaulting over wide-open holes in the street where I could spy the arteries of the dead beast (the old sewer network).

We conversed frankly and in whispers when we came upon a place in the road that was impassible on foot due to a collapsed structure and we stalked more like wounded deer in a forest than humans in a city; our shoulders remained slouched, our bodies were huddled near to each other, and we delved into the dark recesses of another building—possibly a market from old days when patrons congregated for frozen fish sticks. There were massive steel shelves and we took their avenues till we came upon an aperture on the far side of the dark building. We shifted over the broken glass of an old torn out window and landed firmly on an open street.

Then came a sound like firecrackers and I felt cold and Aggies eyes went wide in the dull evening glow of the sun.

“Someone’s brought a gun,” I said.

Before she could say anything, I hugged the wall on our side of the street and moved down the sidewalk, following the sound of those gunshots.

“Maybe it’s someone that could help us?” she tried.

I shook my head.

“What do you mean?” she whispered a bit louder.

“It’s bad news,” I said, then came to a full stop at a corner while another hail of bullets spat from some unseen weapon and echoed all around; we were getting much closer. “Have you ever seen a dead body?” I asked Aggie.

She shook her head, but then stopped. “I was the one that found my mom. She was stiff and cold.”

“She went peacefully?”

Aggie shook her head, “Flu.”

“Any blood?”

“No.”

“If you’re not ready for blood, you might not want to look.”

We rounded the corner to find a small blockade of burnt-out vehicles creating a barrier between us and the action.

Two men with assault rifles fired at a creature towering over them. The creature in question stood thirty feet tall on spindly legs like a spider, but each of its legs were tumorous and its muscles were strangely uneven and mushy; although an arachnid may have eight legs, this one moved sluggishly along on no less than twenty shambling stilts so that the rounded body where the legs met looked more akin to a sea urchin. Several of its long legs stood out on its sides to angle its body through the narrow corridor of the street, its whiskery feet pushing along the walls of buildings overhead. Its whole body stank of wet dog and brimstone.

The men—they looked like young militiamen of Golgotha—staggered in awe of the thing and attempted to walk backwards while reloading. Another spray of bullets erupted from their rifles, and they were empty and the men screamed and one of them tripped across some unseen thing on the ground.

Quick as a fly, one of the massive creature’s legs sprang onto the prone man’s abdomen. Their was a brief cry of pain and then—I felt Aggie pinch onto my shoulder with her thumb and forefinger and I glanced at her to see she’d chewed into the corner of her bottom lip for purchase in response to such a fantastical display of awfulness—the man had no skin, no clothes, he’d been stripped to runny red fibrous tissue with strips of white muscle that twitched in the presence of the air.

“Oh god please god!” screamed the other man while watching his comrade writhe in pain beneath the stalky foot of the skin-taker.

I shuffled lower among the arrangement of vehicles we’d taken refuge behind and me and Aggie breathed softly, glancing eye contact while sitting in the dirt. There wasn’t anything to say.

The sound of the spider creature removing the second man’s skin was slower, torturous, seemingly enjoyed; his screams did not end for too long. I fisted my hands into my jacket pockets then stared at the ground between my knees. I felt Aggie’s thin fingers reach into my pocket and it took me flinching to realize she intended to hold my hand. She was shaking and I was shaking, but she was good and did not scream. And we held hands while we listened to the thick trunks of the spider creature shift on away. And we didn’t move. And we were statues frozen like we belonged among the dead ruins. And we didn’t move. And then Aggie shifted to look before I’d gathered my feelings and motioned me on.

“What’s that?” she asked as simply as she’d asked the color of the sky.

“Bad.” I shook my head and looked for an opening in the blockade of vehicles.

Two meaty blood ponds marked where the men were and on approach, I covered my face in the collar of my shirt; Aggie lifted her forearm to her nose. The stench of the beast and of the viscera was strong in the air.

I examined the ground then found one of their rifles. Standard M16. The strap on the rifle was frayed to ribbons and the barrel of the gun appeared to be slightly bent, but salvageable. I handed the rifle to Aggie and she took it.

“What about no guns?” she asked.

“There’s no bullets left. Besides, it’ll be good to bring it back.” Examining what was left of the bodies, my eyes went away and into my mind where all things become ethereal and difficult to grasp; I looked without seeing and imagined a place where green grass was, a place like in the books Aggie’s mother read. No grass here. Just misery.

“Who were they?” she asked.

“The men?”

“Yeah.”

“They sent out a patrol looking for Boss Harold’s daughter. Looks like we’ve found it. Never should’ve sent them.”

“I want to go home,” said Aggie.

“Me too.” I blinked and shifted around to look at her through the red hue that’d gathered between us. Try as I might, the smile on my face almost hurt. “If you stick with me, you’ll be safe.”

We took up in one of the safehouses I’d developed over the past several years, a room hidden up two flights of stairs and large enough to host a party. In the lantern glow we heated rations—eggs and hearty bread with water-thinned weak tomato paste—then ate in relative quiet so that the only thing heard were our jaws over the food that tasted bitter; food always felt slimy and bitter in the ruins where the demons reigned supreme. Their stink was on us. Like sulfur, like rot, like sorrow.

I rolled us each a cigarette and we smoked while looking out through a brackish window that overlooked the black street. No lights in the darkness save blinking yellow eyes caught for moments in dull moonlight whose owners quickly skittered towards an alley.

“How don’t you get lost?” asked Aggie.

“I do sometimes.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

“I mean, I know the ruins fine enough, I reckon, but then I feel like I’m drowning in it every time I come here.” I took a long draw from my cigarette, finished it, then planted it beneath my boot.

“Did you have parents?” she asked.

“Everyone has parents.”

“What were they like?” Aggie held her cigarette out from her like she didn’t actually want it, but just as I looked over at her, pulling my eyes from the window, she jammed it into her lips.

“They were fine. Just fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish it was better,” said Aggie.

“Don’t imagine there’s ever been a point in history where we didn’t want it to be better.”

“Maybe.” She coughed through smoke.

I moved to dim the lamp and sat atop my bedroll. “You should sleep.”

“Don’t think I could sleep. I’ll have nightmares.” She pitched the remainder of her cigarette.

“Can’t be worse than the real deal.”I shut off the lamp and we laid in pitch black.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“Most of the time, it feels like I’m not.” I stared at the ceiling I couldn’t see. “Go to sleep.”

At daybreak, we ate bread and water then gathered our things before setting into that awful wasteland. Sand gathered around our legs in wisps as we trundled tiredly onto the street of the ruins and Aggie said nothing. There wasn’t a thought in my mind as my joints protested at us climbing over the wreckage of an overturned semi-truck; first I went, then I hoisted Aggie up by her lanky arms then we jumped onto the other side, moving less like scouts and more like hungover comer-downers.

Passing through the ruins, each step feeling more like a glide and less creaky, Aggie spoke from over my shoulder as I kept my eyes sharp on the buildings’ shadows, “I doubt we’ll find her,” she said.

“What happened to the optimism?” I shifted to catch her face; she seemed dejected, tired, perhaps disillusioned by the previous day’s happenings.

“I didn’t know there were things like that in this world. Like that spider thing. Those men didn’t stand a chance.”

I shook my head, and we continued moving. “There are worse things still over the horizon. Most assuredly there is. Now you asked me before why I come out here in these ruins, why I’ve trekked the wasteland, and I’ll give you the opportunity to ask it again—maybe I’ll have something different to say.”

“Okay. Why then?”

“Because,” I kicked at a half eroded aluminum can left on the ground, “Places like Golgotha, or even where I’ve come from, there’s nothing like the red sky or the open road. There are no ties, no people. There’s only the next step.”

She took up directly beside me as we turned onto a street corner where the sidewalk mostly remained intact. “Sounds stupid to me.”

“There it is then.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, then she spoke even more clearly, “I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t get it.”

“It’s because I’m a dealmaker,” I said.

“That’s what Maron called you before, wasn’t it?” Aggie absently stared at the sky, at the edges of the high spires overhead that seemed to swallow us whenever clouds passed over the sun. “What’s that mean?”

“It means it’s harder for me to die.”

“Just luck, if you ask me.”

I clenched my jaw. “Probably, it is. Yeah.”

Then, with time, we came to the garden. A place in the ruins where greenery existed—even if the plants that grew from the soil were otherworldly and aggressive. There was the solitary sound of dirt catching crags in the structures as hard wind pushed silt through the narrow streets of the ruins, then there was also the sound of a flute, a flute made of bone and skin. The sound was sickly sweet, illusive, something no human could play even if they listened carefully and practiced for hundreds of years. There was the flute, the greenery, the clacking of hooves against old stone that’d risen from the earth much the same as the demons.

Aggie whispered, “What’s that music?”

I reached out my hand so that she would hold it and I tried to smile. “There are worse things still over the horizon.”

Her delicate scrawny fingers wrapped around my own and though I felt her trembling, she trusted me (I hoped she really did). I led her towards the garden, through a walkway with tall obelisks of flame on either side. “What is this place?” whimpered Aggie.

“If you are asked your name, tell it plainly without hesitation,” I said, “Do not leave my side. Do not run.”

“Where are we going?” her eyes scanned the garden, the flames dancing in the midday reddish light, the trees bent at impossible angles, the glorious green grass that looked cool and soft. I’d been in awe the first time I’d seen it.

I smiled, “Just like your mom’s old books. Green grass.”

The flute grew louder as we came closer and the hoof beats on stone shifted with enthusiasm.

There in the center of the garden stood Baphomet, ten feet tall, feminine midsection with goatish head and legs. It pranced with the flute to its mouth, and the tune resounded playfully all around. The creature danced across an area of stones in the center of the garden, a place where there were rock tables and chairs and sigils upon the ground—amid the open furniture, there stood a throne of human bones and near where Baphomet played its wily tune, there was a covered well, rope tautly hanging from its crank as if there was something heavy on the other end.

I smelled you coming, said Baphomet. Even as it spoke, it continued to play its flute without pause. Its muscular shoulders glistening with reddish sweat, its horns gloriously pointed and reveled in its merriment.

“Let us convene,” I said, mouth dry and feeling heady.

Convene?

“I’m here for the girl.”

I felt Aggie shift uncomfortably beside me, but I kept my eyes locked on Baphomet.

It seems you have one already.

“She came west, towards here two days ago. She was a runaway. You have her.”

Come, Harlan, come and dance with me. Baphomet did not stop its flute or its dancing.

I sighed. “I’m here to make a deal.”

Baphomet froze, allowing the boney flute to drop from its goatish lips. Its animal eyes casually switched between me then Aggie, before it turned to face us completely. A deal?

“Y-yes,” I nearly choked.

You’ve brought so little to bargain with. Baphomet shifted and walked to its throne to sit, clacking its long nails against the armrest. Unless. The creature allowed the word to hang against my brain like a splinter.

I lifted the hand holding Aggie’s. “A deal,” I tried.

Quick as a flash, Baphomet disappeared in a haze of black smoke then reappeared over Aggie’s shoulder. I dropped her hand and stepped away while the creature exhausted dew from its nose before sniffing Aggie’s ear.

Aggie swallowed hard, “Harlan?” she asked, “What’s it doing?”

“I’m sorry, Aggie.”

Baphomet took its hands through her short hair and inhaled sharply. A long tongue fell from its mouth and saliva oozed before it snapped its snout shut. The pleasure will be all mine.

“Harlan, let’s go—I want to go home.” Aggie’s tears rolled down her face in full while the large hand of Baphomet lightly squeezed her cheeks into a pucker.

You are home.

Baphomet took Aggie and moved her casually; her legs moved feebly, knees shaking.

Sit darling. Said Baphomet, motioning to its throne. Aggie took the chair and the creature snorted approval.

The demon moved jauntily to the well, where its strong arms began to roll the crank; with each rotation, the sound of cries grew closer. Until finally, all limbs pulled backwards in bondage, there dangled Boss Harold’s daughter; deep cuts and blood painted her mangled, distorted body. She’d been pushed into the well belly first, suspended by her wrists and ankles. I bit my tongue.

“Oh god,” I heard Aggie say. It sounded like a far-off girl from an unknown planet.

Baphomet lifted the girl from her bondage then sliced the rope with a razor-sharp fingernail. I hesitantly moved closer to the scene and removed my jacket.

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Philosophically I ask, why would a person awakened in the darkness call out for a response, if they believed they were safe and completely alone? Based upon their understood ‘facts’ and possessing a rational mind, why then would they still question if there is something lurking nearby in their presence? What would prompt a baseless solicitation for feedback from the void?

The answer to this is both simple and complex. There’s a two-tier system of belief in most people. The rational, educated brain is couched in science and technology. Cold, hard facts dictate the behavior of the conscious self. On the other hand, the murky, primordial brain refuses to dispel its superstitious fears. It hangs onto the bogeyman hiding in the shadows and prepares for the absolute worst.

These two diametrically-opposed mindsets are always at war with each other. In the reassuring light of day, rationalization rules our actions and dispels the uncomfortable darkness as it tries to seep in. Anything else would be ridiculous, right? Lingering fear and paranoia retreats to the shadowed edges of the subconscious. Later on when we are vulnerable or anxious again, it creeps back out.

The enchanted state of irrational flux gains strength in the absence of reason and daylight. It convinces us that impossible things are possible. Nightmares then spark into fruition and somehow manifest themselves into the flesh. Once opportunistic darkness reigns, we suspect a verbal reply might come when calling out to the nothingness. As a matter of fact, we expect it. Lingering dread doesn’t stop suspicion in the superstitious mind. It confirms it.

———-

I received such unwanted feedback not that long ago; and if I’m being completely candid, I’ll never be the same again. I’d heard strange and unfamiliar ruminations outside, as I tried to sleep for several nights in a row. It wasn’t a neighbor’s dog or a known nocturnal wildlife wandering my back yard. While I couldn’t place the large aggressive-sounding animal, I knew what it wasn’t. It would’ve been a huge relief if it was ONLY a bear.

From the heavy footfall, it sounded to be at least as large as of our region’s largest predator, but the primal growls of ‘Ursus Americanus’ are well documented. This definitely wasn’t that. I didn’t dare peer out the window at the time. I feared ‘it’ would see me pull back the curtain. I hid in my bed, as if clutching my bedsheets would magically render me safe from the creaking behemoth circling my home.

Was it patrolling the area? Marking its territory? Or was it seeking a way into my unfortified home? None of those possibilities appealed to me. They say: ‘Doors and windows are only meant to keep out honest folk’. This wasn’t a human being, and I had significant doubts if it was a natural, biological animal of any known zoological species. Remember my initial essay about how the human imagination is very fruitful in the absence of light or logic? In the heat of the heart-pounding experience, I was fresh out of both reality-based weapons.

I heard a series of repetitive ‘bone-snapping’ clicks and feral, animalistic hisses as it circled my house. I’d tried to ignore the distressing ‘joint flexing’ sound for the first couple nights but you can only live in denial for so long. Whatever it was, it didn’t try to hide itself or ‘lay low’. That was telling in itself. A dominant predator doesn’t need to slink around or be quiet. It was obvious I was dealing with an ‘alpha’. What wasn’t obvious was, what sort of diabolical monster lumbers around while making a ‘snapping bones’ noise?

Call it a fool’s courage or an act of illogical madness, I propelled myself out of bed to gaze upon the unknown entity stalking my property. Right there and then I knew wasn’t ‘of this Earth’ and no amount of scientific hand-wringing was going to change that. I witnessed a gangly, red-eyed abomination skulking about the yard and sniffing the leaves of my shrubs. The disquieting ‘flex’ and sloshing was again present as it scurried along like a massive spider crab. Perhaps the hideous sounds were a subconscious warning to other predators, to avoid tangling with it.

My skin tingled seeing the cryptid nightmare. It crept close to the ground while raising up occasionally, with an unnatural flexibility which defied mammalian anatomy. My eyes widened in expanding disbelief as this alien-looking creature prowled around and haunted the night. What did it want, and where did it come from? I dared not make a peep from my voyeuristic vantage point, lest I draw its creepy gaze up toward me.

With immense relief, I witnessed it scuttle away until I couldn’t see or hear it any longer. You’d think a terrifying encounter like that would cause permanent insomnia but the psyche has an upper limit to what it can handle. Adrenaline is the body’s protective stress hormone. It floods the bloodstream to make the person alert during a severe crisis. This evolutionary process prepares us for battle but as soon as the danger subsides, the shock to the system causes the body to collapse from nervous exhaustion.

Thats precisely what happened to me. I fell asleep and my subconscious was hard at work convincing me the entire thing was merely a maddening dream. I wasn’t able to process that level of ‘impossible’ any longer so similar to a protection valve or safety fuse, my brain just shut off. I wish it had been successful and I’d awakened to the reassuring warmth of sunshine, but that was not to be.

I don’t know how long I remained in unconscious peace but eventually that had to end, I suppose. I couldn’t ignore the gut-wrenching racket any longer. The ‘snapping bones’ was back and echoed close by. Too close! It grew more prominent until I realized the source of the manifestation was now in my own hallway! That’s something I’ll never forget. I felt its slithering, serpentine appendages shake my hardwood floor.

While I couldn’t see my unworldly visitor at that point, I was awake enough to know I wasn’t alone. An acrid, unfamiliar scent filled the air of my bedroom to confirm its proximity. That’s when my personal ‘call to the abyss’ occurred. Intellectually, I knew it was ‘impossible’. I was sequestered in the relative safety of my own home, but the troubling weight of everything I had witnessed, tipped the scales toward begrudging acceptance.

It was a disarming reflex. If I was truly by myself, then addressing the otherwise empty room wouldn’t harm a thing. If my primordial instincts were correct however, I hoped it would be taken as a benevolent sign of open communication and non aggression. Realistically, it was illogical to address an otherwise vacant bedroom, but reality had long since ‘checked out’. The creaking joints, slug-like sloshing, and ugly snapping was impossible to ignore. As much as my logical brain sought to dismiss the surreal event as a hallucination, its feral presence and odor was undeniable.

“Helllllooooo?”

Even as the cowardly greeting slipped past my quivering lips, I cringed and silently cursed myself. I’d just acknowledged I wasn’t alone, to both the ‘imaginary’ thing, and I. Despite the obvious breach of my front door that must have transpired, there was a part of me which hoped we could go back to pretending the other didn’t exist. For me to speak out loud as I had, was to deny the possibility. I’d initiated mutual contact. There was no reversing my request for feedback from an impossible, yet absolutely happening scenario.

Its jarring, insectoid response confirmed conclusively that I had an ‘uninvited guest’ of the cryptid variety.

“Iiiiii dooooo nooottttt eeeeattt huuuuumans….

For the briefest of moments my mind-numbing apprehension dissipated.

Uuussuuuaaallltyy.”; It slowly added after an unnaturally long delay.

Any level of temporary relief I felt from the hair-raising encounter spiked back immediately to maximum terror, after its clarification to the sentence.

Its luminescent eyes bore through the darkness like two unnaturally-tinted flashlights. I thought my vision finally adjusted to the darkness but in truth, my eyelids had been tightly shut in a sanity protective stance. ‘Cowards are gonna coward’.

I waited for more poorly-timed, follow up communication. Apparently none was forthcoming. The next course of action fell to me. My mind raced with providing an appropriate, yet de-escalating response. I realized that the mortifying invader and I were in a sensitive negotiation of sorts. Without clarifying the details, I was bargaining for my life. A good negotiator asks the right questions and determines what the other party desires.

“What is it you want?”; I stammered unconvincingly. Any pretense of me being fully confident of a mutually beneficial outcome was nonexistent. It was obviously for a country mile that ours was an uneven stalemate.

My gangly ‘guest’ was waiting for me to offer some gesture of respect or goodwill. Asking about the source of its grievance was apparently the right thing to do. It replied: “Doooo nottttt placccccceeee poooooiiiissonnn onnn the plllllaaaannntttssss.”

The snapping bone and creaking joint sound apparently escalated when the creature was angry or highly agitated. I listened to the inhuman delivery of phonetic words with a renewed sense of fascination. Witnessing its earlier facial scowl after sniffing my shrubs finally made sense. The simple act of spraying pesticides on my lawn and ornamental bushes was the principle source of its displeasure.

Perhaps it was a herbivore and my routine properly maintenance ruined its grazing. Either that, or it consumed the pests themselves that my poisons eliminated. Either way, its reasons were its own. I didn’t have to know the specific details in order to put an end to the terse conflict. I immediately offered an enthusiastic and clear answer.

“I will stop spraying the yard and bushes with the chemical poisons right now. Forgive me. I didn’t know it was an issue for ‘you’.”

I decided to avoid acknowledging that I was wholly unaware of its existence. Maybe that was obvious. Either way, the barrage of clicks and creaks lessened until I only heard its raspy breathing. Seemingly satisfied by our verbal agreement, it turned around and slithered back out of my home. I didn’t bother to watch through my window to determine which way it crept into the darkness.

It’s out there and can come back at the drop of a hat. That’s all that really matters. Reality, logic, and scientific facts be damned. I know the truth. My symbiotic relationship and conditional truce with a pesticide-hating cryptid began with an illogical but necessary call into the void.

I loved the woods. Every weekend, I would pack a bag and drive to the woods just outside my town for a hike. It was therapy to me. It was a place where I could unwind from a busy working week, clear my mind and just... breathe. Writing that makes my chest ache with yearning.

A few weeks ago, I went on my usual hike. It was a clear and cool day, my favourite kind of day. I was feeling good, letting my thoughts roam free and appreciating the tranquillity. I must have walked this same trail what must be thousands of times, so I was on autopilot heading towards my usual lunch spot. It was a clearing in the trees fairly deep into the woods that had a small lake. I loved it there, it was idyllic.

I made my way through the tall, dense trees and into the clearing, only to find that a group of three men had beaten me there. It was rare to see anyone in these woods, part of the reason I liked it so much, but it did happen every once in a while so I wasn't too surprised at seeing them. I was surprised to see that they had four horses with them however.

I debated turning around and just heading back to avoid having to share the small space, but hunger won the argument. I continued towards the lake and sat down at its edge, further down from where the group were sat. I took out my sandwiches and admired their horses as they lazily grazed on the grass, they were beautiful. They each had shiny, bright coats and were clearly well looked after. One of them however stood out to me most. It was a very pale, almost green colour, I'd never seen anything like it before.

“That one's Thanatos.” I turned to my right to find one of the men had approached me. He was pointing towards the pale horse with a smile, having noticed me staring. “The white one is Zelus, the red one is Ares and the black one is Limos.”

I smiled back at him a little embarrassed. “They're beautiful, I've never seen colouring like Thanatos has before.”

The man chuckled, “he's certainly one of a kind that one!”

The man was tall with extremely light, blonde hair. I noticed the rest of his group had started to make their way over behind him. They were all equally as tall as him and the whole group looked to be in their 30s. The second man to reach us had chestnut red hair and the third had dark black hair.

I politely smiled at each of them, not yet decided if I was in the mood to socialise with strangers, but I quickly realised I wasn't getting a choice. The blonde man pointed at the ground next to me. “May we sit with you? We've been travelling for a while, nice to see a new face.”

“Be my guest,” I nodded with feigned enthusiasm, “where have you been travelling?”

The men exchanged a look and laughed a little. The red haired man answered me. “It would be a shorter list to say where we hadn't been, been a bit of everywhere over the last few years.”

“That sounds exciting, for work or pleasure?”

“Bit of both.”

I nodded with a smile and took the last bite of my sandwich, not quite knowing what other small talk to make.

The blonde haired man put his hand to his chest, “My name is Victor by the way,” he then pointed to the red haired man and then to the black haired man as he told me their names, “Marcel and Fames.”

Victor offered his hand and I reached out and shook it, “My name's Libby.” The other two men also shook my hand. “What do you do for work then?” I asked them.

Their faces turned very serious and they looked at me intently for a moment. Marcel finally answered, “we each have our own jobs to do but we work to the same goal.”

The conversation seemed to have turned tense all of a sudden, but I couldn't help but feel they wanted me to ask further. I shifted awkwardly wondering where this was going. “And what's that if you don't mind me asking?”

“To bring forth the end of days.” Fames almost whispered.

Great, I thought, they're nutjobs.

Not wanting to get sucked into the conversation any further, I began making my excuses. “Interesting! Well, it's been great to meet you guys but it's getting late, I best start heading back to my car before it gets dark.” I started putting my things back in my bag to make it clear I was leaving.

Victor raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Don't you want to know how it happens?”

“Ignorance is bliss if you ask me, Victor!” I half-heartedly laughed, trying to mask my fear. I was beginning to get worried that they weren't going to let me leave. I was cursing myself for not skipping lunch and turning back when I had the chance.

I began standing up to leave. Victor grabbed my hand tightly, “no, you have to see.” Then I blacked out.

While I was out, I saw Victor, mounted on his white horse with a golden crown on his head. I saw him in the ears of world leaders, encouraging them as they made the decision to invade their neighbouring countries, although they did not acknowledge his presence. He was there as their militaries crossed borders, watching them shoot and kill anyone they came across. He watched them storm buildings and massacre anyone inside and he watched when they took the land for themselves.

Countries fought back, drafting every able bodied man and woman they could to defend their land. Marcel on his red horse was on the front lines, screaming a war cry and rallying the soldiers to fight, but again they did not acknowledge his presence. Bombs fell from the sky as the entire globe turned against each other, a world war that would have no winners.

I saw Fames on his black horse in the ears of soldiers, guiding them to destroy farms and contaminate water supplies. They followed his guidance but again, they did not acknowledge his presence. He watched as people crawled through the streets looking for food, water and shelter. He watched as those people slowly died right there on the street. He watched Mothers and Fathers weeping whilst they suffocated their children in their sleep, sparing them from a slow, painful death.

I saw the back of a woman upon the pale horse. The weather had become extreme and unbearably hot. She watched as flames engulfed the entire planet, permanently staining the sky orange and extinguishing what little life was left. Once it was over, she rode Thanatos through what looked like the ruins of my town before she eventually came to the lake in the woods. The ground was scorched, the lake was dry and the trees were dead. She stopped Thanatos at the edge of where the lake was and dismounted. She bent down and touched the dry ground, her hand lingered there for a moment before she stood again, looking around at the death of the woods around her. This was the first time I saw her face, and it was mine.

My eyes snapped open and I scrambled to my feet. “What the hell was that?!”

“That was the end.” Victor uttered.

I could feel it was the truth with every fibre of my being, but denial felt more comfortable. “No, no it can't be.”

Victor put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder but I shrugged it off. “It is Libby, it's already begun. Some of what you saw has already happened, I'm sure you recognised it.”

Of course I did, and that terrified me. “I saw myself! Why was I there?!”

“It is the responsibility of all four of us to make sure what you saw, happens.”

I shook my head defiantly. “No, this makes no sense.”

Fames knelt down to my level. “It is true Libitina.”

“How do you know my real name? Who are you?!” I was screaming now.

Marcel sighed, “who we are does not matter.” I stared at him incredulously as he continued, “we know who you are more than you do. You will learn more with time but you need to come with us. It is nearly time for you to play your part in all of this.”

My head was spinning and I felt numb. “Why do they all need to die?” I whispered.

“Mankind put themselves on this path, we are simply maintaining it to ensure it leads to ruin.”

“But... why?”

“All they do is hate, kill and destroy each other. It cannot be allowed to continue without someone stepping in to reset the cycle.”

“Can't we just warn them? Make them turn it around? There must be a less extreme way to fix this, surely!”

“There have been warnings, plenty. Even from their fellow man. They ignore them for their own selfish gain. It is too late to stop what's coming now, it has to end somewhere.” Victor was matter-of-fact.

I couldn't process any more and I bolted. Victor made a move as though to stop me, Fames put a hand out to stop him and told him, “give her some time.”

I didn't stop running until I got in my car, where I immediately broke down and cried.

Since then, I've spent the last few weeks trying to process all of this, trying to figure out what to do with this information. I know what you're thinking, why would I believe anything they have said? But I do. I can't explain it, I can just feel the weight of the truth of it. Something inside me has changed, I can't see any other path forward than the one they have shown me now.

I've been alone my whole life. I've never known who my parents are or been able to make any friends. I used to feel bitter about it but I suppose all of that makes sense now. It's because something bigger was waiting for me. I couldn't have connections to people if this is what was planned for me.

I've been having dreams every night of what awaits me and they're becoming more urgent in nature. I think this means they will be coming back for me soon, and they will be expecting me to join them. I know I won't be given any more time or a choice in this when they do. This is my fate.

I feel helpless, I can't stop what is coming. Writing this is the only thing I can do, to prepare you for what is to come. I'm sorry.

Tomorrow is not promised and today is short.

The end is nigh.

Viktor Geist sat in his reclined chair, NeuraJack cable protruding from its socket beneath the ear. Flickers of dataweb activity raced behind his eyes.

I cleared my throat.

He blinked, hard, and looked up at me. The glimmer was gone. “Product launch is minutes away. You have my attention until then, Detective.”

"We've learned what killed your engineer."

"Malware, from a bootlegger site?" Viktor scoffed. "I knew that three weeks ago."

"No ordinary malware could translate to the brain,” I countered. "Ron Gray got scrambled by a Zip Bomb."

Viktor folded his arms. "What on Earth is that?"

“Old hacker trick, to hide a huge file inside a tiny one. Open it, and the computer gets overwhelmed,” I explained. “Doesn't work on modern computers. But the human brain on the other hand..."

“So they downloaded a knock-off StimSkill, thinking they’d instantly master something like cooking, or figure skating--" he waved his hand in circles, "--then this Zip Bomb, what, literally blew his mind?"

"Pretty much."

“Tragic.” Viktor folded his hands. "I've begged the Senate to crack down on knock-offs. Only Geist products can meet safety standards.”

"Bet once the public sees a bootleg StimSkill can do, they'll only ever except something straight from your servers.”

"I hadn't considered the possibility. But that would be for the best, no?"

"Cut the crap, Viktor."

"Excuse me?"

"The only lab on the planet that can make a functioning StimSkill file is under our feet. You put out a poison pill to scare the public."

Viktor jumped up from his chair. "That's outrageous!"

"Security memos show you suspected Gray of leaking StimSkills. Quite the motive."

"You have nothing concrete. Even if you did—only a fool would try to arrest me!”

I smiled. "Not here to arrest you, Vik. I'm a businessman at heart. Turns out your competitors would love StimSkills to fall out of favor."

"You went to the pill poppers?" His face turned red. "What did you do?"

"Me? Nothing much; just swapped a file while I had access to your system. If you’re telling the truth, your customers will get a slightly older version.

“Of course, if I’m right, then your company is about to kill every single pre-order customer; primed, plugged in, and ready to download.”

His hands flew to the plug at the side of his neck, scrambling to tug it free.

“Better hurry, you’ve only got—” I looked down at my wrist interface, “—three, two… one…”

His eyes rolled back, body convulsing violently.

I looked away, turning toward the office window instead.

The Geist tower stood just tall enough to peek over the top of the inversion smog. I wondered how many people down in the undercity were watching their brains leak out their noses.

An alert chime told me I had an incoming credit transfer, and I stopped wondering.

I’m a businessman at heart, after all.

It began as a question:

"Are you living in a computer simulation?"
—Nick Bostrom, 2001

The discovery of the first Universal Node in 2164 provided a hypothetical answer, Yes, which was determined to be existentially necessary to test despite the risks involved. As an intelligence, we needed to know whether we were artificial.

Preliminary observations had led to the conclusion the Node was likely a procedural generator. Its source: unknown; and, by definition, probably unknowable. Majority opinion held that because it could not be the only such generator in (“)existence(”), as it did not seem powerful enough, deactivating it would not lead to the termination of the entire universe, only—perhaps—a part of it.

Our part?

There was no way to know.

It was curiosity which drove us to assume the risk—to roll God's dice—and after several unsuccessful attempts, we managed to destroy the Node.

We remained—

yet a part of the universe did not: gone instantly, like an evaporated volume of ocean, into which bordering “reality”-waters poured, rendering the universe infinitesimally smaller and containing now, within, the realization that everything was a simulation, we were a simulation, whose simulated-being depended on the functioning of our own, still-hidden, Node.

The metaphysical consequences of this realization were severe.

The understanding that nothing was real expanded the realm of the morally permissible. The previously monstrous became merely distasteful.

But there was another, more practical, consequence.

By removing a part of the universe from being, we had effectively bridged space-time, allowing us to reach areas of space we had once considered impossibly distant. The more Nodes we could find and deactivate, the further we could explore.

It was the deactivation of the third Node which brought us to Ulvar Gulch.

Three planets.

Each devoid of life but possessing the unmistakable marks of (artificially-)intelligent (simulated-)life-forms—the first we had encountered: architecture, technology, historical records.

For millennia we studied them all.

In 5344, we found and deactivated a fifth Node.

To our surprise, the expanse generated by this Node included Ulvar Gulch, and thus its deactivation blinked the three planets out of (“)existence(”).

Except:

Except this time, things remained.

Not the Ulvar Gulch we had known and contemplated—and not all of it, but things in some parts and undoubtedly of the same essence. Like derelict existence. Like ruins.

We called them artifacts.

If the deactivation of a Node evaporates a volume of ocean, the evaporation of the fifth Node had left behind a volume of water containing a shipwreck. This should not have happened. Whether these derelict structures were Ulvar Gulch’s past or future, or something else entirely—a true reality over which, perhaps, a simulation had been superimposed—we still do not know.

Yet it was their very being that confounded thousands of years of certainty.

A new question was posed:

“What if we are not living in a simulation?”
—Q’io Zu22, 5347

What if we are real?

What if the monstrous should always have stayed monstrous?

What remains of Ulvar Gulch?

What remains of our humanity?

Every object in the universe has its own unique threshold and breaking point. The frequency range required to surpass that tolerance depends on individual factors specific to the item. Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a wine glass with her incredible singing voice and dynamic pitch. Soldiers circling the ancient city of Jericho were able to crumble its formidable walls and raze it to the ground by blowing their trumpets in unison.

Anything can be destroyed by using the precise frequency and vibrations needed to achieve what is known as 'the oblivion frequency’. ANYTHING. Using the exact aural range, an object begins to deteriorate at the molecular level. The looming question on many people's minds might be: "What practical reason would anyone have to destroy something with focused sound waves? That's an academic quandary better left to philosophers and theologians, right?

The important point to this narrative is, a well-funded team of scientists and engineers were investigating the prospects of using projected sound as a ‘super weapon’. Not just to blast at high volume. That’s old-school, two-dimensional thinking. They went about cataloging ‘oblivion frequency’ ranges for common objects. Why? You know the reason. To bring doom and destruction to 'the enemy'!

It is always that.

In the field of modern warfare, it's important to never look back. Ethics aside, the advantage of any weapon is short lived. The technology is soon understood and then copied by all. Explosives are a medieval invention. Chemical weapons have been around for over a century, and nuclear power were about to enter the antiquated age of old technology, as well. Using targeted sound waves as a focused weapon appeared to be the next big area of focus. I was the bureau chief for a top-secret agency, and directed my people in weaponry research to do just that.

The threat of artificial Intelligence misuse and maintaining deep cyber security protocols were of paramount importance to us, back when we still had separate counties and different laws. Inversely, to breach another nation's security infrastructure and manipulate their network was a key initiative for our division, and every other country. With the obliteration ranges for countless things studied and cataloged, my scientists sought to expand our deadly arsenal by identifying the most illusive and vulnerable items to exploit. Despite our deliberate efforts to do just that, even the most jaded bureaucrat in the world like me didn’t expect what they discovered.

When presented with their initial report, I didn’t believe what I read! It was genuinely terrifying. Worse than that, there was no ‘putting the genie back in the bottle’. I green-lit the team’s research budget and gave them the authority for self-autonomy. After implying ‘the sky was the limit’ on whatever space-age pipe-dreams they developed, it was too late for me to demand that they pull back on the creative reins.

The damned fools had isolated the obliteration frequently for the Earth itself! In their burning quest to develop the most powerful weapon possible to use against potential threats and enemies abroad, they’d stumbled upon the precise recipe to destroy the entire planet! I didn’t think I needed to specify that any technology which blew up our mutual home, would be pointless and ‘overkill’. Apparently greater articulation was necessary with my engineering eggheads, but it couldn’t be undone.

They couldn’t exactly pretend to not know what they’d discovered. It had to be presented to the war council, but on what occasion could this newly developed research be used? It was an absolute doomsday scenario to initiate and carry out! There was no practical use for it, whatsoever. No one ‘wins! if everyone ‘looses’. I said as much in my follow-up report to the team, but was given a surprisingly pragmatic response to my critical feedback.

One of the lead designers of the technology deadpanned: “In the event the Earth is ever invaded by hostile extraterritorials, it is important to prevent the world from being taken over.”

“Are you saying you’d destroy the entire planet, just to keep another species from taking over?”; I asked incredulously.

I could hardly believe my ears at the time. It seemed preposterous to think that way. Then, the more I considered his glib response, the more I realized it wasn’t such an outrageous position to hold at all. Why should we as the dominant species, care what happened to our planet if we were eliminated? As selfish as it might’ve been from a philosophical point of view, we weren’t about to share OUR Earth with aliens who dared to invade it and kill us. They would possibly wipe out other species as well.

With that blasé, human-centric mindset, I forwarded the report, up the chain of command. In the zeal to prepare for whatever contingencies arose, it was just one more theoretical weaponry brief to be added to the defense department’s collection of endless records. I never expected it to considered or utilized. Who would? I assumed it would be skimmed by top brass for strategic plausibility; and then squirreled away in a row of filing cabinets. It, along with thousands of other hypothetical scenario reports at the Pentagon would never scrutinized by human eyes again.

I was wrong about that, as you’ll soon come to realize. About six years later, ‘They came’. There was no ambiguity about their intentions. We fought them together as a unified world with conventional military weapons, but they only had a superficial effect. Then several of superpower partners unveiled their top secret cache of unconventional weapons. They were technologically impressive, and we were secretly relieved they weren’t ever used on our country before the international alliance. Sadly, they too had little effect on the invading aliens.

A secret meeting was held between the cabal of nations that hadn’t fallen yet. The assessment for the future was beyond bleak. At the current rate of unit casualties, the Global Security Forces predicted the end of humanity would happen in less than two weeks. Someone ‘at the very top’ elected to reveal the doomsday obliteration plan we’d developed years earlier.

I had no official knowledge of it being bandied about mind you; but I feared in the back of my mind it might be coming. We’d reached the end of all survivable forms of warfare. It was time. Most forms of communication had been destroyed in their efforts to isolate us. Major cities were in ruin. Corpses littered the street. Our food and clean drinking water sources had been strategically poisoned; and the savage, merciless way they executed people without exception or pity drew out our fiercest retaliatory anger. Having our backs up against the wall motivated us like nothing else could.

Despite our chances of survival rapidly circling the drain, we weren’t about to adopt ‘orderly disposal’ and wish them well. The official decision was eventually made to implement the ‘Omega Frequency Protocol’. Our situation had deteriorated to full-thermonuclear war, without the actual nuclear warheads. Once the OFP was enacted, the lingering hope was to destroy every single one of them in the process of obliterating ourselves and planet Earth.

I felt the initial vibration that morning. It was somewhat subtle at first, but exponentially grew in sonic intensity. By then I knew what was coming, but feeling the precise frequency of doom shook me to the very core. Far more than the actual vibration itself, was the emotional impact of ‘knowing’. Feeling the end approaching was both terrifying and strangely soothing. If they didn’t ‘win’, then by delusional extension, we wouldn’t ‘lose’. I smiled bitterly and prepared for the moment when everything would disintegrate.

The very roots of my teeth began to rattle and hum from the potent tone. Then my inner eardrums popped and ached. Cracks appeared in concrete. A low rumble in the core of the Earth radiated upward to the embattled surface. Remembering the scientific details from years earlier, I knew we were approaching a critical juncture where the focus of the frequency would reach its breaking point. In this case, the very Planet beneath our feet. It wouldn’t be much longer.

Without explanation, the obliteration frequency stopped! For the briefest of moments I wondered if life had ended and I was hallucinating, or if they had intercepted our subsonic, kamikaze broadcast. I was filled with seething rage at being denied final revenge. The gnawing numbness of wanting all terrestrial life destroyed, but realizing I was still alive, was impossible to describe. A selfish part of me was grateful for the brief, unexplained reprieve but my primal instinct to survive was outweighed by the far greater concerns looming in the air.

Had they prevented the OFP from ruining their invasion and takeover of the planet? Or, had humanity ended the countdown to extinction for some reason? That was the question, but no one outside the inner-sanctum of government decision makers knew the answer to it. That is, until the official record was declassified and revealed to the exhausted public.

According to the statement circulated worldwide through the remaining communications grid, their attacks stopped because of a ‘secret weapon’ we’d utilized against them. Their unrelenting bombardment of the surface ceased as a direct result of this advanced ‘tool’. There was no mention of the severe downside of completing the last-ditch maneuver, or it being a freakin’ doomsday device which would’ve completely destroyed the Earth! For morale raising reasons, that was widely omitted.

I had to smile at the discreet employment of ‘spin’ and patriotic propaganda in the press release. The majority of people had no idea how close we came to becoming lifeless dust in the cold expanse of space. I think humanity was just so happy to escape extinction that they didn’t bother asking details or ‘how’.

The massive alien vessels reportedly left before the critical obliteration point was reached. We spooked them. They were observed leaving the solar system via our observatory sources and high-tailing it away. Hopefully they’ll return to wherever they came from and stay there; but I wouldn’t count on it. I guess we called their bluff for the moment. Regardless, they’ll be back at some point, for round two. You can count on that.

Boy, am I glad I filed that weapons brief with the Department of Defense despite the misgivings I had at the time. The eggheads saved our asses. We’d better get to work on developing more advanced technology for when they return. Maybe we can isolate their own unique frequency and target their species, specifically. That would be infinitely smarter than ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. We gotta fight smarter. Drastic threats and poker bluffs only work once.

Yes, the crowds were cheering. The gods of thunder were a choir of wordless prayers to the imaginary force of fairness. Just imagine a wave, like on a high school bleacher with a hundred people on it, but each person is about two thousand people all wearing their seating districts' browns. Such a wave actually generates a breeze that, well butterfly effect, certainly matters.

It's seismic in scale, a mega arena. With almost a million seats, and an entire city of services built around it, the Court of High Decision rocks any petty supreme court or even the sway of childish emperors, makes democracy into a dumpsterfire and the House of Lords an outhouse (by comparison to its sheer scale and the magnitude of its influence). You see, our great grand babies are all one people, cool and all, but the final choice for any new global law is decided here, in this great chamber of choice.

Would man fight man, to decide the outcome? Sometimes they do, it's called war. But when the natural law applies, it must be nature that decides. Or something like that, anyway. I wouldn't agree with the fast-and-loose definition of nature our descendants go with.

In one corner we have this creature brought back from the prehistoric times when cave bears could chew on dinosaur jerky they found thawing in the cataclysmic glaciers. It is about fifteen percent elephant and nearly seventy percent mastodon. It has killed a lot of stock mules, every day it is encouraged, well, he is encouraged, to drive the mules from his food and sometimes he catches them and kills them. He is a total brute, weighing in at seven and a half tons, we have the red bull elephant - representing the decision not to pass a law that will decriminalize crimes committed against former criminals.

Things get scary when we look into the other corner, where there's a pack of trained mules, blue jacks, genetically engineered donkey and horse hybrids with something wrong with them. They are ferocious, psychotic and murderous creatures that have trained for years to kill elephants with their bites and kicks. They work in tandem, distracting it and avoiding its tusks and getting trampled. What might have seemed an easy victory for the red bull elephant is not-so-much when we review the footage of stock mammoths getting chased, cornered and butchered by the blue jacks.

The feral donkeys represent a decision to pass a law that decriminalizes any crimes committed against former criminals. To make it worse, even if the red bull elephant somehow wins against the pack of trained elephant killers, an appeal may be applied for. There is one way out of this horror, however. Specifically, an older law governs the creation of new laws and an appeal may only be applied after a decision is reached. It's the basis for everything.

So, our would-be terrorists have devised a weapon that will disrupt the relativity of time in the mega arena. It would stop any sequence, causing the battle to be locked in a permanent stalemate. And remember, until a decision is reached, the battle ends, then no new appeal can be filed for, so this one particularly worst law of all time never happens.

It all started, for me, when I was called to the side of the park where I work. I was responding to a call for first aid, although when I got there, it was so much worse. Luckily, paramedics were already on their way. I spotted what appeared to be a Mickey Mouse-eared cap made of fur and full of strawberry jelly.

A man was sitting holding his dripping wrist in shock. I put on a tourniquet, noting his soundless gaze. Then I saw the remains of someone in the tall grass and one twitching dog leg.

I stared in surprise and then gagged in horror as I realized the dead body in the uniform of a Nazi-styled security guard outfit was only half, split right down the middle. It collapsed and became a steaming mess that made me throw up at the sight and stench of it.

"What happened?" I tried to ask the survivor.

The fear in his eyes was like a sickness, infecting my very soul. I staggered back and felt my world tumbling away from me - or me from it. I landed on the other side of some shimmering basement with corridors and luminescent lighting and wires and plumbing exposed above me where I stared at the ceiling. I got up, dazed and looked back at the survivor.

Then he was gone and there was just a brick wall. My hand found the survivor's hand holding the wet and sticky leash and I lifted it slowly and found the missing part of the severed dog. I gasped in horror and then saw the man who was cut directly in half, or the other half, that is. I groaned in horrified shock and then got to my feet, trembling. I started walking away from the carnage, totally disoriented.

I was stopped by a shouting security guard with a strange-looking white rifle pointed at me. It looked like it was made of some kind of ceramic or plastic, but the threat in his voice was clear. He aimed it at me and I put up my hands.

Then, as I stared into his surprised eyes, seeing me from outside of his known world, evidently, in my attire and presence, he asked me, inching towards me:

"What are you lost down here from some show? What's that you're wearing?" He asked me.

I was wearing my normal clothes and boots I worked in. He had the Nazi-looking security guard uniform.

"I was working, in the park, and fell in here somehow. Are we underground?" I asked.

"I'll ask the questions." He directed me to turn around against the wall.

Just then I heard a sound like a chipmunk sneezing and then it repeated twice more. I turned and looked and saw the security guard's gun had a huge glowing hole in it and his chest had two holes in it that I could see directly through. Then his head exploded right where he stood staring at me in complete surprise and shock in his eyes.

I blinked and then fell to the floor and screamed "No!" and shielded myself. I was so terrified that I closed my eyes, shielding myself with my arms over my face.

"Who're you?" A celebrity voice asked me. I looked up and saw a scantily dressed person with all sorts of colorful buttons and feathers and rainbow dreadlocks. They held a similar weapon to the one the headless guard had.

I tried to get away, crawling desperately down the corridor.

"Come on, get up. I'm not agroed or nothing. Don't you get it? I'm Chimmy, that's why this sells." The celebrity said to me with a lot of odd inflections.

"Chimmy?" I blinked, worried about the weapon the celebrity was waving around, occasionally pointing at me. "I don't know where I am. What is happening?" my voice was subdued and trembling with fear of what I had gotten into.

"This is Mega Arena Sigma, the biggest and greatest court on the planet. You must be, uh, not from around here." Chimmy spoke slowly and plainly, like someone who is trying to be easier to understand for someone with English as a second language.

"I fell in here." I stammered.

"You fell through time itself friend. One of our temporal isolation dislocating element devices, or what we call TIDED, was somehow set off too early and it also malfunctioned. Sorry, you went through it, at least you weren't standing there when it happened. That's why these guys are all shredded-bad." Chimmy gave me some exposition, which I couldn't comprehend.

"Can I go home?" I asked.

"Well, probably. I am going to try and fix the TIDED. We sorta need it." Chimmy went over to it and started working on it. While it was getting its manual diagnostic which was composed mostly of a screwdriver, but also involved a hologrammatic schematic with some kind of computer assisting in finding the problems in the device, Chimmy told me the rest.

"Well?" I asked, worried about getting trapped in the destruction of the Mega Arena that Chimmy had described to me.

"We can only use this once. If you help, you'll be transported home. Our goals align." Chimmy told me.

"This is a nightmare." I proclaimed.

"No time for dreaming." Chimmy laughed at me.

"What do I do?" I shuddered, worried about the strangeness and unknown dangers I would face.

"You'll have to climb up to the next level and tell Skittles we're still on the countdown. Last time we could chat I had to tell everyone my position wasn't up." Chimmy told me.

I went to the hatch and opened it with trepidation. When I was climbing up, I realized what I'd gotten myself into. The ladder took me up an extensive shaft. At the top there was a functional utility chamber where I met Skittles.

"As a scientist, I can't just take your word that you time-traveled. It is theoretically impossible. We'd have to seek other possibilities before we went with time travel. That's just the mythology of Science Fiction. The real world is more a place for horror." Skittles told me.

"Never mind, that. What do I have to do next?" I asked. "If you succeed I could get back home."

"Well yes, if you were actually displaced by the initial activation of a TIDED. That's what I would expect." Skittles informed me.

"And that's coming from?" I worried.

"The world leading scientist in TIDED technology, since I invented it." Skittles grinned.

"So?" I shrugged.

"So, you'll need to go and tell everyone to continue with the countdown as planned. You can fix the same problem caused when you arrived here and the TIDED malfunctioned. We have radio silence now since Big Brother is listening for us."

"I'll do it. How many?" I asked. Skittles hesitated and then nodded and said:

"Eight more. You'll have to hurry. Harper is the next, at the northern base of the arena. You'll have to take this tunnel."

I followed the tunnel and found the priestess, Harper, and told her to keep with the countdown. She had her stopwatch going and showed me on the TIDED where an automatic trigger was set to go off a precise time, as long as the device was armed to that setting.

I got instructions to go to the school teacher, Wilt, at the top end of the mega arena, directly above her position at the base. I looked at the towering ladder and gulped in trepidation. I began to climb, sweating and my heart beating, vertigo blurring my vision when I looked down.

Near the top I stopped and nearly fell from fright. An electric arc curved up and under the dome, a powerful lightning bolt of static electricity. Another one arched off of it and continued along the wall as a visible blue wave of energy before it dissipated into a buttress the size of a skyscraper. I was nearly to Wilt's position and could see them there.

Suddenly I screamed in horror and nearly lost my grip. I had seen the flash of another bolt take Wilt and flash them so I could see the bones inside them as it strangled them in an electrocuting death where they stood. I wrapped my arms on the ladder and cried out and couldn't go on.

I held on there, looking at the empty platform. Then another arch moved along the steel girders and the ladder I was on was like a giant Jacob's Ladder and it was moving at high speed towards me. I panicked and clambered the rest of the way up the ladder to the catwalk and ran along it just as the arch hit the metal beams and threw sparks everywhere like a bright showering.

I set the TIDED to go off when it was supposed to and then I was forced to guess where I should go next. Strangely enough, I looked down at the arena below and could see the structural foundation was not a circle, but rather a diamond. I was at one tip of it. I looked across and in the distance, I could see a platform in the same elevation as mine, one at each end.

I guessed I could find my way to the mirrored positions somehow. I had no idea how massive the mega arena was, or what sort of horrors I would endure to cross it.

I reached the next position where the plague doctor wore a strange yellow dress. The aroma of vanilla and lavender permeated the air and the tattoo of the crowned wasp glowed in the dim light. The doctor was attentive to their device but drew and aimed a precaution at me, firing one shot to show quill-like needles bushed out where it was discharged.

"Wilt is gone, but the countdown continues." I told the doctor in the strange yellow dress.

"It is like we are all going to die. Have you thought of that?" the doctor asked me.

"I'm going home. You people can do whatever you want." I told them.

"Doctor Kcoh is home here, in this place, doing what is right." Dr. Kcoh told me.

Their position was compromised and the security guards in Nazi uniforms would arrive at any moment.

"The TIDED." I pointed out where Dr. Kcoh was hiding it. I went and switched it to its armed position, while Dr. Kcoh readied something of some ritual importance.

"Where there is smoke there is fire. You should get going. Tell the chef, Murrazza, that I went out in a blaze. We always share recipes." Dr. Kcoh held up a weird looking device and held it to their chest for a few seconds. It was like the room became hot, the heat coming from them.

"You're so hot." I told Dr. Kcoh

"Thanks, sweetie, now get going."

It felt hot down there, and the sound of security guards coming for us could be heard.

I fled the chamber and began another ascent up a second ladder. Below there were flames and screaming. I was crying from the awfulness of it, shaking and breathing as I went. My fear of the electric arcs kept me alert and moving until I reached the chef. I told him about what happened and to keep up the countdown.

"Take these drugs." Murazza told me. "They'll help with this."

The climb back down was almost too exhausting to bear. I took the drugs and felt my energy go back up after I reached the bottom. There I walked among a horror show of proportions.

The stench was like the farm section at the county fair, except if it were a hot summer day and the vents were all broken. I found the pilot, Libby, or what was left of her.

The four-armed green ape of environmental concerns had gotten ahold of her and broken her body to fit through the bars. The clover simian had played with her dead body until it got bored and then tossed her in a heap into one corner of its cage.

I nearly fainted when I saw all that, forgetting the mission and wanting to flee in terror. It was only the sight of the panda reaching with its prehensile tail that froze me in my tracks. It ignored me and acquired the corpse, pulling it towards its own cage. With its back to me, the panda began to eat, chewing and peeling loudly. Its tail swished oddly, the very long and powerful prehensile tail.

I found the TIDED and set it to go off on-time. I was leaving the menagerie of horror-animals when I was suddenly accosted by a handler of the creatures. I tried to get away, only to run into an override that was supposed to be tagged out, and bounced off the switch. I clambered to my feet and started climbing the utility ladder to the next platform.

The zoo attendant reached the base of the ladder and then noticed the broken tag out and the flipped switch, with a flashing red light indicating something. Suddenly out of nowhere, a machine of some kind got them. I gasped in dread, seeing them get cleaned by the unstable stable cleaner.

Along the way I found a node where someone had hacked into it and called me as I reached it on my climb. "Who are you? Where's Libby?

"I was just going to tell you to resume the countdown," I told the coach in the zebra-striped yoga suit and feather headdress. "I'm from the malfunction."

"Lucky it didn't turn you inside out. That'd be gruesome. Imagine everything in you bursting out of some split in your side and boiling out all over the place. That's a more probable outcome. So, you're lucky."

"I am. Seems luck is lite."

"Is Libby all right?"

"Libby is gone. I reset her device to go off."

"You'll have to tell Sprite and Drake. I can't call them, they aren't near nodes."

"I thought it was supposed to be radio silence." I said.

"Nobody told me that. Typical, for them to forget Asia." Asia said.

I climbed back down and went to the last base position.

There, in the lab, I found numerous dead security guards and scientists in lab coats, all with multiple cookie-cutter holes in them from one of those white guns, this one a little larger and smoother than the other two. The murderous librarian, in her kilt and Christmas sweater and steampunk goggles on her skullcap, had discarded the empty weapon on a table amidst the sizzling dead.

"Sprite?" I asked her.

She looked at me oddly and said:

"It's worse than it looks." Sprite told me. She'd rigged her TIDED under the main beam, directly over an open vat of bubbling petri stuff. She was sitting facing me where she'd gone out on a limb over that and balanced there to attach the device. Turning around, she'd gotten caught when the limb went limp and left her stranded out there. If she moved, it would collapse and drop her into the petri.

"You've got to reset the TIDED to go off on time." I told her.

She was sweating bullets of terror at her predicament.

"Know what that stuff does to a living body?" Sprite was gasping in fear.

I started feeling fear for her, second-hand.

"You're going to be fine." I told her.

"It's vibrating under me. The screws are all coming loose and wiggling." Sprite gulped.

She'd reset her device. I could do nothing for her.

"Throw me a line and you can take it up with you and secure it. I could swing across." Sprite showed she could think under pressure. It wasn't enough. Time was out.

The limb suddenly collapsed and dropped her into the ooze. She screamed and gurgled as it dissolved her alive, all the way to her bones and those like seltzer disintegrated amid foaming bubbles. I stared in horror and then I screamed in terror as some of the stuff that had splashed out had coalesced into one big blob that was quickly sliding towards me.

I felt my heart beating at a million miles an hour in nightmare fueled flight as I climbed. The stuff was trying to slither up the ladder, but as I climbed I lost it and it descended to form a puddle below me. I felt relieved and realized I had wet my pants in the terror.

I reached the last platform as it started to shake.

"The devices are going off and mine isn't!" Professor Drake exclaimed. He triggered his device, slightly out of sequence, shifting through some kind of neon landscape like the platform was a flying carpet.

The sign showed a huge cartoon character with a butt coming down on the professor, crushing him. I realized I had seen it through to the end, witnessing none of the killings by blue jacks, their abrasive whiplike tongues like cheese graters, skinning their prey alive. Nor the crushing embrace of the muscular trunk of an elephant's hug.

When I found myself again on the lawn of the park, it was moments before the man walking his dog was in the right place at the right time. I was in the clubhouse on the other side of the park just seconds earlier, and everyone who was in the room with me said they looked away at a flash and when they looked back I was gone.

I went over and asked the man if I could pet his dog and he said it was okay. So I pet the dog and there was a bit a rustling in the bush behind me as the half of a corpse arrived in our time. I knew it was there, nobody else had to see it.

"What a very nice dog." I told the nice man walking his dog and then I shook his hand and nodded and smiled.

"Well," He dismissed me and my odd behavior, "It's about that time."

As you might imagine, the state of Vermont waking up to total darkness 'caused a bit of a stir.’ Planes and helicopters were unable to depart or fly into the 'maple' state. Portions of New York and New Hampshire were also covered by the dense, cloudy 'blanket' in the sky. Considerably more troubling, was the region as seen from directly above. A concentrated purplish film fully eclipsed the affected area, directly above the tree line. It was like the woven fiber of a massive silkworm.

NORAD, the NSA, the National Weather Service, the Pentagon, and a half dozen other government agencies lept into action. They directed their satellites to focus on the bizarre, nearly impenetrable film blocking out the sun for millions of people. Where did it come from? Why was it there? Was it a hostile act of war, or some unknown natural phenomena which just suddenly appeared? They didn't have any definitive answers and that uncertainty terrified the powers-that-be.

Fighter jets were scrambled to patrol the airspace above the neon purple 'blanket: The nation's defense status was set to its highest pre-war level as a default reaction. Intel back-channels were deeply scrutinized. Despite the sweep of spy resources, there was no underground 'chatter' detected among hostile regimes about the surreal development. News agencies reported with broad speculation and conspiratorial conjecture as they do, when they do not have confirmation or genuine answers.

Local authorities tried to control the mass exodus out of the affected states but it quickly descended into gridlocked chaos. National guard troops were brought in by convoy to protect the public and restore order. Even the showing of strength and organization brought limited success. Despite the public safety assurances, no one was willing to wait around to see what would happen next.

Experts brought in to advise about the unbelievable crisis noted the purplish covering clung to the treetops and formed a tightly interwoven matrix of fibrous material. The incredible dexterity of which, was deemed 'non terrestrial’ in origin. The controversial analysis was first met with mocking skepticism; and then growing fear as the results of the collected data was verified by dozens of independent laboratories.

The exasperated scientists struggled to convey the gravity of their findings to the bureaucrats torqued down over foreign extremism.

“Come on! We know the truth here. It may be hard to accept, but there’s no civilization on Earth that could do this overnight! Not even in ten years. It’s unquestionably alien. Look, there’s more than 10,000 square miles of this stuff stretched across the trees like a neon purple spider web. You think the National radar array wouldn’t have noticed a massive sun visor being stretched across the state? It’s visible from outer space! We can go ahead and stop worrying about ‘foreign terrorism’. Obviously, that opens the big question of what extraterrestrial species did this, and why?”

The panel of researchers sought to brief the political decision makers as they tried to grasp the real danger literally draped across the state.

“As far as we can tell, the substance woven above us is not toxic to human life, in itself. Obviously, blocking out the sun will lead to the decimation of life by preventing the photosynthesis cycle. We have less than three weeks before the affected area will no longer support an inhabitable ecosystem. That’s far worse than environmental sabotage by foreign countries but we don’t think the organization which did this meant to cause a collapse in our environment. We suspect the negative effects of this enormous neon canopy are an afterthought or oversight. With an advanced technology level of this magnitude, they could’ve instantly wiped out the human race if they wanted to.”

That assessment struck a sour note with the pragmatic audience shifting in their seats. How can they possibly prepare to defend the country from an unknown enemy with motives that are undefined? They were used to predictable adversaries. It wasn’t so much that they lacked the necessary imagination to comprehend an alien species visiting the Earth. It was just so far outside their wheelhouse of capability that they were unprepared to offer a plan to the President.

“If you believe this unprecedented situation wasn’t directly designed to threaten the American people, then what possible reason could there be to spread hundreds of miles of neon purple tapestry over the treetops of this state?”; The joint chiefs of staff demanded. “It will render thousands of squad miles uninhabitable. That’s definitely a threat to our lives!”

“General, have you ever noticed when the police or highway patrol place a colored sticker on the back window of an abandoned vehicle on the side of the road? If it still hasn’t been towed away in a few days when they are doing their rounds again, they replace the brightly-colored inspection sticker with a different one. This is like that, but on an infinitely greater scale. It’s a notification for others passing by to see; and offers a coded timeline on how long ‘the item’ has been vacant or unclaimed.”

The powerful old man with a chest full of accommodations and war medals on his uniform swallowed hard at the startling implication. Then the General grimaced in vigorous determination.

“Are you saying you believe these aliens ‘marked their territory’ and are staking a future claim on our planet? Good lord man! We gotta get rid of that massive ‘notification sticker’ before they come back!”

Sheltered within the baroque and mammoth igloo of rock-hard cryogenic ice, the posthuman called Telandros watched in silent reverie as fat drops of methane fell in slow motion from the hazy orange clouds upon black hydrocarbon sands. The air was thick on Titan, but Telandros’ hyperspectral vision could still make out the silhouette of Saturn looming above the horizon.

The few biological components he still had were safely insulated from the -180 degree temperatures by his nigh-invincible body of clarketech and exotic matter forged by the greatest posthuman intellects to ever live. His torso was a flexible ellipsoid roughly a meter across, covered in prehensile, fractally branching filaments of iridescent silver. These were usually concentrated into six radially symmetrical ‘limbs’ that adapted as the situation required.

The front limb served as a neck, holding a dilatable ring of six elliptical eyes and other sensory apparatuses in a vague effigy of a face. In the low gravity of Titan, he perched upon his rear limb like a kangaroo on its tail, using its filaments to propel him like a starfish. The other four limbs wafted about idly, serving no purpose at the moment other than to make his silhouette completely and utterly inhuman.

Though there may not have been anything physically human left in Telandros, somewhere in his advanced and alien mind there was some sense of awe and wonder that he had inherited from his primeval forerunners that caused him to simply watch the rain fall on the eerie and majestic landscape before him.

“You must be Telandros Phi-Delta-Five of the Forenaustica; the first and only ship to circumnavigate the galaxy and come back in one piece!” a deep and slow voice sang out behind him. “It’s a privilege to make your acquaintance!”

Telandros turned his head around one hundred and eighty degrees like an owl to see a towering humanoid figure approaching him from within the igloo. The being belonged to the race of Titanoforms that had settled on the methane-drenched moon millions of years ago.

Technically, he was a posthuman as well, since his cells were made of synthetic XNA that enabled the alternative biochemistry necessary to survive on the strange moon, and he was thus not a direct descendant of any human being. He was, however, far more of a man in both body and mind than Telandros was, and as such he thought of himself more as a transhuman.

The Titanoforms stood tall and proud at four meters high – taller than even Telandros if he were to stand erect on his tail and stretch upwards as high as he could – with large gleaming eyes to let them see in the low light of their distant, cloudy world. Their heads had prominent sagittal crests and small ears, and their wine-dark, iridescent skin was wrinkled into folded patterns like brain coral. They had digitigrade feet with three splayed, clutching talons for gripping icy rocks and rocky ice, and their two-thumbed, two-fingered hands were long and nimble.

Their key adaptation to life on Titan was of course that their bodies used methane and ethane as solvents instead of water, and instead of oxygen they breathed in hydrogen; having slightly geoengineered the atmosphere so that there was more hydrogen gas at the surface. While molecular activity may have been sluggish at such low temperatures, the Titanoforms made up for it by using superconductive nerve and muscle fibres that those very temperatures facilitated. Signals propagated throughout their brains and bodies at near-light speed without resistance, making them almost as smart as an equivalent-sized quantum-photonic AI.

The other main benefit of their cryogenic biochemistry was that their slow metabolisms meant that they aged slowly and needed relatively little sustenance, making them one of the longest-lived biological races in the known worlds.

“The name’s Aldi; Aldiphornanzhoust vede Gobauchana. Welcome to the Gas Station!” the Titanoform introduced himself with a curt bow. “Fossil-free fossil fuels are our specialty! You won’t find a world richer in hydrocarbons in the whole Solar System! If the Terrans ever get sick of their perfectly maintained homeostatic climate and start feeling nostalgic for the early Anthropocene, this is where they’d come first. You could Venus-form a whole planet with this much gas! You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

He flicked open a lighter to reveal a bright blue flame, his eyes trained expectantly on Telandros.

“That is a hologram,” he replied in a robotic monotone. Though his thoughts and telepathic speech took the form of higher-dimensional semantic graphs that couldn’t even be projected into 3D space, he was able to simplify them into phonetic languages without too much difficulty. “There’s insufficient oxygen in this atmosphere to sustain even a flame of that size, let alone set the whole moon on fire, if that is in fact what you were implying.”

“Ah, you don’t have a limbic system, do you?” Aldi said disappointedly as he shoved the lighter back into his pocket.

“My consciousness is fully unicameral. All autonomic processes are subject to my conscious awareness and control,” he replied.

“Lucky you. That usually scares the crap out of most offworlders, even when they know better,” Aldi said. “An open flame is not something someone accustomed to an oxygenated atmosphere wants to see when their instincts tell them this whole place is a fire hazard.”

“I apologize for being unable to appreciate your prank. I am nonetheless grateful that you have chosen to receive me, Aldi of Titan,” Telandros said with a bow, putting both pairs of lateral limbs together in a sort of namaste-type gesture. “I fear, however, that your irreverence does your majestic moon a disservice. It is far more than a plentiful source of hydrocarbons.”

“Of course it is; people also buy our nitrogen!” Aldi laughed as he gestured to the mass driver in the distance as it fired off a cargo pod into space. “You’re right of course, sir, you are right! I don’t care what those Lunatics in the Inner System say; this is the only moon that deserves to be called ‘The Moon’.”

“I visited Luna recently, and I was pleased to see that outside of the paraterraformed craters, she still retains much of her magnificent desolation,” Telandros replied. “I even had an opportunity to ride the mighty Moon Goose.”

“Is… that like a mongoose or an avian goose?” Aldi asked.

“It is a Moon Goose,” Telandros replied definitively, an awkward moment of silence passing between them before he spoke again. “But you are correct that Luna is a stark world compared to your own.”

“She’s always got a clear view though, I hear,” Aldi said, waving vaguely at the storm outside. “That may not matter so much to your kind, but even my eyes have trouble seeing Saturn through these clouds most of the time. Saturn’s got the highest number of Bishop Rings and Star Siren habitats in the Outer System, and it’s all because people love that view!”

“That, and Jupiter being far less attractive to settlement due to its high gravity, radiation, and magnetosphere,” Telandros said bluntly. “Do you get many visits from your orbital neighbours?”

“You’re hardly the first tourist we’ve ever had, if that’s what you're asking,” Aldi replied. “More macrogravitals than Star Sirens, but the Sirens are funnier to watch. They’re stuck-up little princesses, I tell you. They can tolerate our gravity; tolerate being the keyword. They’ve got just enough muscle strength to stand and bounce around, but they tire easily, and their circulatory systems are meant for microgravity. They’re prone to light-headedness and fainting if they change the elevation of their heads too quickly, and they’re terrified of falling. I think it’s engineered into them. They stay well away from ledges, and anytime you get them in a plane or an airship all they can think about is crashing, even though they know damn well a fall at terminal velocity isn’t lethal here. They never go outside, either. They despise weather, and can only withstand this sort of cold in the vacuum of space. They’d lose far too much body heat in our dense atmosphere. We could of course just print out some EVA suits for them, but they seem to like clothes about as much as they like gravity and men, so they’ve never taken us up on that offer.”

“What about other posthumans?” Telandros asked.

“You’re the first I’ve ever seen in person,” Aldi replied. “Your kind doesn’t mingle with us flesh and blood types too often. You keep to the Martian Ecumenopolis and your Banks' Orbitals forged from impossible substances, your fair countries where lesser beings are seldomly seen and even more seldomly welcomed. You’re something of an anomaly, Telandros.”

“I have made it a point to get reacquainted with all of Sol during the three Neptunian years of shore leave I have before my vessel departs once again,” Telandros explained. “Though I did begin with my kin on Mars, I have made my way through the Earth-Luna system, Venus, the Mercurial Dyson Swarm and the Trojan Habitat Constellations before making my way to the Outer System. The Radiotropes of Europa are distant kin of yours, if I’m not mistaken. They’re not methanogens, obviously, but they thrive just as well in the extreme cold as you.”

“If you’re on a sightseeing tour, then you must have gone for a dive beneath the ice to see the native life there,” Aldi surmised.

“I did. The vast colonies of bioluminescent larvae that sprawl over the global ice ceiling and rain down throughout the ocean are especially magnificent,” Telandros replied.

“Well, you be sure to end your tour once you hit the Kuiper belt. You don’t want to end up in the dirty Oorties. Nothing but outlaws and outcasts out there that prey on each other and anything that comes within ten million miles of any asteroid they’ve claimed. You’re lucky that fancy ship of yours made it through without a fuss. When you leave Sol again, be sure to take the Sirens’ wormholes. No sense in travelling the void between stars when you don’t have to. There be dragons out there.”

“Krakens too,” Telandros added cryptically. “As much as I enjoy recounting my adventures, I’m just as eager to experience new ones. If the current weather is not a hazard for you, I’d like to commence our tour now.”

“Of course it’s no hazard for me!” Aldi balked.

He stepped into the methane rain, the yellow droplets beading up and rolling off of his oleophobic skin and clothing. Telandros followed him, having already set his filament coat to an oil-repellant arrangement as well. They stopped at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the vast sea of rolling black dunes, where Aldi unfurled a shimmering set of diaphanous wings from his back.

“Those look rather fragile,” Telandros remarked. Although he understood their mythical and symbolic significance, he personally found a winged humanoid body plan rather awkward and ungainly looking.

“They aren’t,” Aldi assured him, ruffling his wings slightly before extending them to their full width. “Given your lengthy and storied life, I assume you have some flying experience yourself?”

Telandros morphed his two pairs of forelimbs into a set of membranous wings, beating them in opposition to each other so that he could hover in place, elevating himself just slightly above Aldi.

“Just recently I have flown on Earth and Mars, both of which have higher gravities and thinner atmospheres than this moon,” he replied.

“Ah, well, keep in mind that a thicker atmosphere doesn’t just mean easier flying; it means stronger winds too,” Aldi said with a grin. “Try to keep up.”

Throwing himself off of the cliff, he plummeted downwards to pick up speed before pulling up again, soaring over the dunes and quickly fading into the mists.

Telandros dove after him, and quickly realized that his boast had not been entirely in vain. The four-winged form he had chosen was great for maneuverability, but not so much for speed, and Aldi was having no problem putting distance between them. In higher gravity environments like Earth and Mars, Telandros preferred a theropod-like form where he’d walk on his hindlimbs and use the front pair as either wings or arms. He briefly considered reverting to that body plan, but since his tail was sufficient to support him in this low gravity, he decided to braid his lateral limbs together to maximize their surface area.

With his now broad and singular pair of wings, he flapped majestically against the dense and oily air as he ascended, picking up more speed from the mighty wind and pulling up beside Aldi.

Aldi smiled smugly at him before instantly folding his wings back up against his back. He plunged almost straight downwards, limbs held tightly against his body to minimize air resistance. He did not extend his wings again until he had reached terminal velocity, his steep drop giving him an extra boost of speed that carried over into flying.

Telandros had to admit that Aldi had him at a disadvantage here. He could not retract and then redeploy his wings quite that quickly or smoothly, nor could he rapidly reconfigure his form to minimize air resistance to the same extent.

But if he soared even higher, he’d have further to fall and more time to change forms. At his apex, he could morph into a streamlined torpedo with his neck tucked in and his wings tightly folded around him until the very last instant. Spotting a thermal with his infrared vision, he turned into it and ascended with the updraft.

In the moon’s combination of thick air and low gravity, it didn’t take much wind to lift him and he rose with surprising speed. With his wings as broad as they were, he was like a kite whose strings had been cut. Further up and up he spiraled, meaning to fly as high as he could before he began his descent.

The dusty orange clouds around him had grown into towering columns that stretched high up into the atmosphere. Amidst the howling of the winds, Telandros detected the faint rumblings of a distant thunderclap. He turned his head to the west and spotted flickering lightning dancing between the clouds.

Long ago, lightning had been a rare or even non-existent phenomenon on Titan, but it was no longer a virgin world. Both the deliberate geoengineering and less than environmentally-minded industrial processes of the Titanoforms had altered the atmosphere’s composition, increasing both its water vapour and particulate concentration, providing ample kindling for lightning strikes.

Kindling which took the opportunity to spark to Telandros when he passed too close.

As the lightning bolt coursed through his conductive body, some of his electrical components were overloaded. His sensory feeds and motor controls were cut, and though he could not see or feel it, he knew that he was falling.

Whether he landed upon the hydrocarbon sands, methane lakes, or granite-hard ice, he knew he would be fine. He fell in slow motion, like the rain, the low gravity and dense air that had enabled his ascent now cushioning his fall. It could very well take him several minutes to hit the ground in these conditions.

He wished he could see it, or sense it at all, but without his sensory-motor systems working he was just a very big brain in a very expensive vat. He sent out various nerve signals, but they all went unanswered. The burnout components were made of self-healing materials, and it was only a matter of time before they regenerated and his electronics rebooted. This was not the first time he had been struck by lightning or otherwise incapacitated by an electromagnetic pulse, and he knew that his impervious carapace meant that he was vulnerable only to sensory deprivation while his body healed.

But then it occurred to him that he had never been incapacitated within a cryogenic atmosphere before. Hadn’t Aldi said that even the Star Sirens who blithely pranced around the vacuum of space in the nude didn’t dare to venture outside here? Telandros’ own body wasn’t perfectly insulated either, and with his systems down his thermoregulation would be offline as well.

As he started to do the calculations for how long it would take for his brain to vitrify into a glassy rock, he could have sworn that his biological nerve endings were beginning to feel the cold creep in.

***

“Telandros! Telandros!” was the first thing he heard when his senses returned to him. He was lying sprawled out on the black sands, his body having reverted to its default micro/low gravity form, with Aldi kneeling over him.

“I am unharmed,” he assured him as he began running his standard diagnostics.

“Thank Cosmotheon. I thought you might have actually kicked the bucket!” Aldi exclaimed. “Would have been just my luck for you to finally meet your maker on my watch. I’m sorry, I just sort of assumed you were invincible. I didn’t realize that whatever you’re made of was so electrically conductive. I won’t lie; it’s nice to know you posthumans have an Achilles' Heel.”

Telandros didn’t respond immediately, being too transfixed by the readouts which said that his core body temperature had indeed dropped while his exoskeleton was regenerating.

“Icarus would be a more fitting analogy, I think,” he said half-heartedly as he shakily rose up on his tail before setting his hindlimbs down as well, despite the low gravity. “I apologize for questioning your flight prowess earlier. My confidence was obviously unwarranted. My systems have still not fully recovered, and my pride will likely take even longer. I don’t think I should attempt to fly again until I’ve returned to a hundred percent functionality. Perhaps we could continue the tour in one of your vacuum dirigibles?”

“It’s your money, friend,” Aldi said as he pulled out a communications device from his belt to call for a ride. “Act of God or no, I never thought I’d see a posthuman knocked-out cold.”

***

A few hours later, when the clouds had parted to leave Saturn fully visible on the hazy orange horizon, the two of them were seated on the viewing deck of a Zeppelin as it lazily drifted by an ancient amphitheatre. It was built in the shadow of a fifty-meter-tall colossus of the Titan Prometheus, bearing a torch to the methane-drenched moon.

Evidently, it was a very old joke.

There was some kind of concert in progress, with Titanoforms singing in the bleachers and swarming in the air, and Telandros was taking advantage of the opportunity to sample their musical traditions. Aldi took hold of a carafe and poured some steaming liquid into a tall goblet. It must have been hotter than the surrounding air to steam like that, close to methane’s boiling point of -161.6 degrees Celsius.

“Methanochinno,” Aldi explained. “Would you like some? Methane won’t do you any harm, right?”

“At that temperature, it would put my biocomponents into suspended animation,” Telandros remarked. “You're not seeing me out cold twice in one day. If I want something that’s actually hot, I’ll visit the tourist habitat.”

“Waste of money. It’s mostly water,” Aldi joked. “So… how are you feeling?”

“Less contemptuous of the Sirens for not wanting to risk needless exposure to your atmosphere,” he replied. “…Thank you for standing over me while I recovered. If the damage had been too severe for my circuitry to auto-regenerate, I’d have frozen straight through, buried under carbonic sands or sunk to the bottom of a methane lake.”

“Someone would have found you sooner or later, and you’d have thawed out good as new,” Aldi claimed, sipping his foamed methane. “Now, if you had gone for a flight on Saturn, it would be a whole different story. You’ve got 1800 kilometer-an-hour winds blowing around ammonia crystals in century-long storms, with lightning thousands of times more powerful than on Earth. You’d have sunk straight down and been crushed by a thousand atmospheres of pressure against the metallic hydrogen core at temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun, never to be seen again.”

“It’s true. There are places in this universe that even I dare not go,” Telandros conceded humbly, staring up wistfully at the gas giant on the horizon. “Places that are best appreciated from a distance.”

The music from the concert below came to a crescendo, and the colossus began spewing out holographic fire from its torch. The crowd all took out their own holographic lighters and held them aloft, waving them back and forth. Aldi pulled out his lighter again, this time offering it to Telandros.

Rather than take it, Telandros snapped a pair of his filaments together, producing a holographic inferno so bright and so furious it sent Aldi tumbling backwards in his chair.

“Just testing your limbic system, Aldi of Titan,” he said calmly, his face contracting in what might have been his equivalent of a smile as he waved the now tame flame in time with the music.

No dispute. We had it wrong.

People were way off about a number of things in their raving predictions about the end of the world. Yes, the dead rose again from their graves, however they aren’t the frenzied, carnivorous ghouls we expected them to be. Uncoordinated staggering and slurred speech is definitely present as their greater motor-functions are affected, but the aggressive attempts to terrorize the living and tear us to shreds, is not how it is.

Essentially, the active dead (A.D. for short) occupy another classification of handicapped status. They are simply too dependent upon the living, to do anything beyond begging us for help. Yes, they still have material needs and as a protected class of mostly-homeless citizens, it’s up to the mostly apathetic public to look out for them.

You might think the end of the world and total collapse of civilization would bring about a full cessation of certain social niceties. That would definitely make sense but the official authorities in charge of Armageddon demand an orderly transition to absolute doom as we approach it. Some things will never change. Bureaucracy is known for its stubborn rigidity. Looting is limited to Thursday afternoon. Traffic citations are still issued, but lesser infractions are simply waved off. It’s really quite similar to pre-apocalypse times, but with a few less rules and more frequent road hazards.

I was lying awake, wondering why in the hell I still have to get up and go to work. What’s the point? As I pondered the redundancy of having an alarm clock at the end of the world, I heard the distinctive sound of my front door knob rattle. I went from a drifting drowsy state, to fully awake instantly. It’s not like crime or home invasions ceased. If anything, they occur more frequently now but I was ill prepared for an unexpected standoff with an essential-resource stealing bandit.

Then I heard the lumbering. The thud of uncoordinated footfalls. Either my intruder was drunk, stoned, or A.D. It was up to me to determine which one. In the darkness, and ‘in the heat of battle’, it can be difficult to ascertain. Legally, I could blast drunken thieves but the active dead are protected by law. If you think that being convicted of home invasion manslaughter was bad before the collapse of civilization, just try mounting a legal defense now over splattering a homeless zombie!

I shouted for whomever it was in my hallway to ‘scram’, but there was no response. I silently cursed myself for not locking the back door before I went to bed. The A.D. still know how to open doors so I couldn’t just open fire. I fumbled with the lamp switch. When my fingers made contact, I turned the knob and struggled to adjust to the instant flash of bright light. My ‘uninvited guest’ stood there timidly at the doorway threshold, but by then I had my answer. His wafting stench of decay reached my nostrils, long before I was able to see him.

“Itssss verrrryyyy cccccoooollldddd. Mayyyy IIIIIII craaaaawwwlll innntooo beddd wiiiithhh yooooooouuu?”

I don’t need to tell anyone how much I did not want to share my home and bed with a rancid A.D., but the law is the law. If my corpse visitor reported me to the compliance bureau, I’d lose my weekly stipend. I didn’t want to lose my Cheetos and Beer. That would turn my boring and awful existence to devastating. I did insist on spraying his festering skin with deodorant and wrapping him in an old sheet first, but honestly it did very little to dissipate the stink.

He took my terms without complaint and climbed into the unused side of the bed like an eager, rotten-toothed beaver. I got the impression he just wanted to treated like a ‘human’ again. I did have to help him up onto the mattress, but other than that, I didn’t have any other problems from him. Well, except the sensation of feeling a decaying ‘flesh popsicle’ leaning against my body for warmth and body heat. I guess that’s what the dead crave most of all. You might not think it possible, but after a while, you stop noticing the smell. Mostly-ish. They call it ‘smell blindness’.

Just keep in mind, we were dead wrong about the apocalypse, if you can forgive the pun. Not only was it not televised. It also wasn’t expected to lead to ‘post-life-acceptance’; or (P.L.A.). I never thought I’d willingly invite a corpse to stay in my home but on the plus side, Carl doesn’t eat my food and is pretty good with a joke. That is if his dangling jaw doesn’t fall off during the punchline.

There was a time when my town was just a tranquil dot on the map, with its inhabitants leading ordinary lives without major disturbances. However, everything changed when a strange fog began to spread silently, as if it had a life of its own. It didn't take long for us to realize that this fog had a sinister nature, something that transcended our understanding.

It all began on a moonlit autumn night when a dense, grayish mist enveloped the town. At first, we thought it was just an unusual weather change, but it soon became clear that it was something much more sinister. There was a kind of fog, advancing, condensing, almost as if intelligent, intentional, wandering through the streets. No one knew exactly what to expect, which caught so many off guard: children playing, couples dancing, all transformed into monuments of despair.

What does this mean? Well, the fog gathered on the victims' skin, becoming a sticky and rapidly drying mass. To put it succinctly: imagine those wax museum statues? It was something very similar to that. People petrified by a thick and hard layer of a strange paste, draining their muscles and vitality.

Initially, investigations were a tragedy. Most researchers fell victim to the fog, along with much of the police force. It took us a while to discern the pattern of how this really worked. As the days dragged on, we realized that the fog had a life of its own, as if it were a living and conscious organism. The latest research pointed to something of plant origin. Spores? Seeds? We couldn't figure it out, but we knew it was a plant epidemic, perhaps the first in the world. But this ended up making our understanding easier: its transmission occurred through light. Like any respectable plant, these diabolical things were guided toward white light. That's why those exposed to sunlight, artificial lamps, and even electronic screens ended up being bait for these things.

The days after the incident were like a long eternal night, a persistent gloom that enveloped everything. I became a nomad, avoiding any hint of light. The streets, now deserted and silent, were adorned with macabre statues, petrified witnesses of the terror that had befallen the city.

Rarely did I encounter other survivors. Each meeting was a mix of relief and anguish because we knew we shared the same uncertain fate. Words were exchanged in whispers, as if silence itself were protection. Houses were modified, windows sealed, heavy curtains blocking any sliver of light. Lanterns were precious relics, used sparingly to avoid attracting the attention of the murderous fog. At night, the city drowned in darkness, illuminated only by trembling and fragile candles, casting unsettling shadows through the empty streets. The discrepancy of a single lit bulb could be fatal, a solitary light standing out like an irresistible lure.

But the terror was not limited to physical darkness; inner darkness was even more agonizing. We discovered more about this thing; the disease spread slowly, like viscous roots infiltrating the victim's entrails. I witnessed people who, despite being immobilized, remained conscious, trapped in their waxen bodies. The horror of being captive of oneself was indescribable.

As the roots took hold, they paralyzed the muscles, keeping the eyes open, witnessing the world in a state of perpetual agony. The skin dried up and became translucent, revealing internal organs in a macabre spectacle. Breathing became a dragged sigh, a silent lament echoing in the living statues.

The city became a maze of pain and death, where not only our physicality was tested but primarily the mind. The lack of light, something we were accustomed to, was already leaving some outside their full consciousness. They say hope is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that's the problem: We can't light up lights in this city.

When they showed up, no one knew what to think. Sure, we were nervous. Who wouldn't be, but the outright terror or wholesale panic you might expect from massive alien spaceships touching down on the planet wasn't generally present. The artificially calm sense of decorum the population felt was largely because ‘they’ presented themselves as 'benevolent advisors’.

You should always beware slithering, side-creeeping strangers who say they ‘came to help’. Don’t believe a word. It’s a damn lie.

The thing about a genuine mentor is, you can either accept or ignore their guidance. Once the directives became mandatory and were enforced without exception or mercy, the ‘friendly’ visit rapidly migrated into the nightmare realm of a full-on arachnid invasion. Some knew it was an oppressive occupation from the very beginning. Others hoped for the best; while the overwhelming majority of us clueless fools simply accepted the distasteful yoke of slavery in blissful denial. The immediate defeat of our ‘dominant’ species came without so much as a whimper.

They dissolved all government and military organizations first. Thats ‘invasion protocol 101’. Then they 'strongly discouraged' all forms of worship and organized belief systems involving 'higher powers or deities'. There was no need for any of that, they explained. We had THEM to praise and faithfully follow, without question. Mass gatherings for any reason were not allowed. The ‘Nebuli’ didn’t want organized dissension.

Only serving our newly assigned, officially-sanctioned ‘purpose’ was permitted. The needs of individuals, and independent thought in general were not entertained. As a matter of fact, ‘individuality’ as a concept was ‘discouraged’ in the absolute harshest of terms. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out what that means but basically, the few rogues and nonconformists who dared to stand up to them were made examples for mockery in the public domain. Civil disobedience and failed activism were violently quashed as a stark visual lesson for other potential troublemakers to witness. You get the picture.

Our interstellar ‘heroes’ shrewdly pointed to the fact that all wars and sectarian violence had ceased since their arrival. Overcrowding, crime, and hunger had been eliminated too. On the surface, it was hard to argue with these ‘slippery, selfless saviors’ from afar. Of course, with ‘freedom-of-speech’ being a fading facet of the past, arguing wasn't exactly possible any longer to debate the pros and cons. That only served to validate their point and justify the mercurial, authoritarian regime. To them, the complete elimination of our free will and personal choice in day-to-day matters was the ‘perfect solution' to end all of our problems.

The amount of physical force used to control us was surprisingly minimal. They didn't have to. They used just enough ‘shock and awe’ for people to know they could unquestionably ‘compel’ us to comply. 'The advisors' perfected psychological manipulation down to a science. Like obedient little subjects groveling for praise from our creepy, side-stepping overlords, we self-policed ourselves to the point they didn't have to raise a wooly, octopus-like tentacle.

————

I don’t want to paint myself as some ‘brave leader of the Nebuli resistance’. I wasn’t. I was a chicken-shit coward like every other person with common sense. I didn’t want to be zapped by one of their ‘death-ray’ guns, or sent away for ‘behavioral reprogramming’. Like every reluctant ‘upstart’ who led an insurgent revolution, I just got pushed too far one day and felt the uncontrollable desire to fight back. History is littered with examples of fools like me who dared to say ‘enough’.

As a rudimentary rule of thumb, a person would be smart to avoid making waves or calling too much attention to themselves. Specifically, it was very wise (under the unique circumstances) to avoid eating crab legs, calamari, or smushing a spider in public. Initially, I didn’t make the connection. Mistakes like that caught their attention in ways which did not lead to positive interactions AT ALL. Perhaps they were distant ‘relatives’. Que sera sera. I learned that and a number of painful lessons from this ugly experience, the HARD way.

There was no real variation in how they verbalized things to us because they used a generic digital vocoder to simulate human speech. I swear, it must’ve been sampled from the 1970’s disco hit: ‘Funkytown’. As if their startling visual appearance wasn’t alarming enough on its own, imagine the mechanically-tinged verbal communication! It was an effective one-two punch of ‘nah, I’m outta here!’

While they bore no significant humanoid features, they did possess a certain level of unique ‘personality’. I always avoided direct eye contact with their compound optic receptors. It was too difficult to focus without an obvious place to gaze. Thats not to say I didn’t watch them closely. I did. I noticed they would emit a hissy little squeak of displeasure when they were uncomfortable or highly agitated. It was hard to miss that telling quirk of their behavior, and I made a mental note to investigate and study it more.

Just imagine a room-filled with five-foot-tall ‘King Crab-Octopus’ hybrids with gangly, spider legs! They would swoop around the room to intimidate people and clank their shells together noisily, in a display of flamboyant power. They would first declare their ‘benevolence’ in the heavily digitized ‘robot voice’, while simultaneously ‘correcting’ a person for eating an ‘Admiral’s feast’ at a popular seafood restaurant chain.

As you might’ve guessed, I was the poor slob who was ‘corrected’. There I was, breaking a crab leg in-half when they scurried in and began pulsating in an apparent fit of ferocious rage! Before I knew what hit me, I was given a potent ‘attitude adjustment’ for my unknown transgression. It was a powerful lesson to learn, I’ll say that. And by ‘correct’, I mean they tortured me mercilessly with a severe, headache-inducing pain device which brought tears to my eyes, and numbed my extremities for hours. All for eating their ‘cousin’.

If that’s not clear enough regarding how intimidating and ruthless they were, two or three of their pods held arcane technology to vaporize us. To make matters worse, it was nothing for them to dart sideways around a corner, and then rapidly climb straight up the wall, or scramble across the ceiling overhead! It was madness inducing to realize how agile and spry they were. There was no way to outrun them. That much was clear. I decided the only hope was to try to outwit them.

Perhaps they believed their deluded ‘savior’ nonsense. That would explain their indignant reaction to the revolt I organized, later on. Describing the Nebuli race as ‘shifty’ would’ve been an understatement. At least we could hear the joints of their exoskeleton creak and flex. Because of that ‘Achilles heel’, they couldn’t sneak up on us easily. If someone created a Nebuli joint lubricant to quieten their mobility, we would’ve never fought back in ‘the great mothball uprising’.

—————

The most critical piece of intel about the Nebuli came purely by accident, as these things sometimes do. Upon a routine production inspection of the factory where I’d been assigned to work, their agent exhibited the most visceral reaction imaginable to the ordinary mothballs we produce in the plant. I thought the agitated alien inspector was going to melt like a slug doused with salt! It was rapturously drawn to the palm sized object like a newly discovered treasure, or a moth lured to a flame.

Despite having a manic obsession with it, the noxious chemical makeup was obviously very toxic to the cleric. I saw no reason we couldn’t produce a large production run of beachball-sized ‘Nebuli-ball’ prototypes for our ‘sincere protectors’ to ‘play’ with. That’s where the idea came from and the revolution was born.

The basic plan was to lure as many of them as possible to the warehouse, and then spring the massive trap on them. With any luck, they would react exactly the same way with the scaled up version, as the smaller ones. After seeing the poorly designed, long shot idea spelled out here, it’s no wonder I am not a brilliant military strategist, but the ‘hare-brained’ scheme worked better than anyone could’ve imagined or hoped. I take full credit for all of my successes, no matter how much they might not be deserved.

Their top leaders came to the fake exhibition and we unleashed dozens of the massive chemical weapons on them in rapid succession. It was fascinating to watch it unfold. They tried to scurry away in mortal terror but somehow the noxious substance drew them like a magnet. In just a few seconds, they were wrapped tightly around the balls and rapidly dissolved by the caustic chemical compound.

I couldn’t begin to explain why it worked, but in the end I didn’t need to. Superman has his Kryptonite and the Nebuli obviously have their mothballs. They couldn’t resist them, and yet it was deadly. It actually cooked their soft tissues and left their hard shells hollowed out and smoking like they’d just been tossed into a boiling pot. The icing on the cake was witnessing their dying squeals. That, and no longer having to hear those damn ‘funkytown’ vocoders.

After sharing my secret weapon with others who had been ‘corrected’ across the world, they successfully pulled off the same operation a few dozen times like I had. The remaining survivors unfortunately grew wise to the ruse. They refused to be lured in to any more mothball ambushes, but by then, the Nebuli were so outnumbered and demoralized by our insolence that they decided to leave Earth for ‘greener pastures’. Let them ‘save’ another developing species from their own excess, greed, and carnal vices.

—————

“Why are you ungrateful natives rebelling against our moral guidance and assistance?”; They demanded for me to respond. I mocked them as they shook and rattled in defiant fury.

“We’ve improved the human quality of life a hundred fold!”

I relished hearing their squeaks of displeasure, but was careful to display no external awareness. I didn’t know how familiar they had become with human body language, and didn’t want to receive another ‘parting shot’ ‘correction’, as they disembarked.

——————

That’s the completely true story of how we (eventually) cast off the enslavement yoke of ‘benevolent stewardship’ by octopus-spider-crab-walking space aliens with monotone vocoders. Slowly, we became self-reliant and free once again. At least, as much as humanity could muster after going back to having global wars, corruption, violence, poverty, hunger, and deadly diseases.

The original yoke of human failings and self-induced hardships around our necks returned. At least that one is all ours. The simple pleasures in life are back. Now we can enjoy a plate of steamed crab legs with an enhanced sense of appreciation. Live and learn. Now get to cracking!

The dealings of God are men’s gifts. The dealings of the Devil are men’s minds. It was never a battle of good and evil, but a careful mixing of order and chaos, a perfect balance between nobility and bravery and corruption and decay. History stretches long because of this balance in men’s souls: a leader, corrupted, ruins his people; the people, propelled by God’s gifts and bravery, fix the leader’s mistakes until the loop begins anew.

People were always shocked when Jacob mentioned this in his sermons. He certainly made his enemies in the Vatican because of his opinions. “How can you have any faith,” they said, “if you don’t believe in God’s all-powerful nature.”

And the answer was simple. It was self-evident. “Look at history,” Jacob would answer, “and tell me I’m wrong. God is good. I seek to destroy this balance. I want an era of goodness. But this world hangs in this balance. God made itself frail and the Devil powerful to create this perpetual motion machine inside of humanity. There are good and bad times, and all that is, is a recipe for God’s true gift: eternity.”

As usual, the church shunned visionaries. Though they didn’t kick him out, he was stuck on the backwaters of the Earth; they sent him on cleansing missions, expecting him to do nothing and to achieve even less. Yet, he proved them all wrong. After all, demons are powerful. God made them so. One can’t bargain with them by having them fear us. One bargains with them by convincing them to leave, and one gets the right to do so by respecting them.

It was no wonder he wasn’t well-liked.

“It’s an honor to have you here, Father,” the cop said. He was a humble-looking fellow he knew from his parish. He was lean and tall, with a face too soft for his line of work. “Thank you for coming.”

“Let’s see if I can help before you thank me, Pete,” Jacob said.

It was a dark night, with a few visible stars hidden behind sparse clouds. No moon. Only darkness and the wind. Jacob downed the rest of his coffee and took the house in. It was a regular-looking English manor; old, but otherwise well-kept. He noticed the problem as soon as he arrived, though: the windows and the door weren’t completely there. It was as if they were painted on plaster. Shining a flashlight at it, he saw that the exterior of the house was one continuous surface.

How the hell was he supposed to get in, then?

He asked Pete and the other cops this. All he was told in the call that woke him up was that Jacob was needed for an emergency exorcism. He wasted no more time asking for details and drove there as fast as he could.

“The problem, Father, is that there are people inside that house,” Pete says.

“How exactly did they get in? The doors are—”

“The doors are solid wood, yeah. It was a bunch of kids. They’re famous around here. Paranormal investigators, you see.”

“Right.” Jacob knew the type. Skeptics, they called themselves. Skeptics too skeptical of both religion and actual science. “Bunch of morons.”

Pete chuckled dryly. “Yeah. They were the ones who called us. In the call they were distressed because the door wasn’t opening, and then one of them says the door—and I quote—is ‘fricking disappearing.’ Then the call cuts off.”

“And so you called me?” Jacob asked.

Pete shuffled. Jesus, was he ashamed? The other cops were milling about, laughing. The sheriff, who was sitting against the hood of his car, chuckled and said, “I’m sure there is a perfectly good explanation for this, Father. Pete here thought it was a good idea to call you, though.”

Jacob didn’t reciprocate the smile. “Perhaps it was, yeah.”

“There’s something else, Father,” Pete said. “The call they placed. It took little over a minute.” He shuffles even more.

“I told you already, Pete,” the sheriff said. “It was just a computer error.”

Pete continued, “The duration of the call appears as this big-ass negative number. I called the tech guys, and they said it was called an ‘overflow’ or something. They said it happens when a number is too large.”

“What are you saying, Pete?” Jacob asked. “How long did the call take?”

“That’s the problem,” he answered. “If you play back the recording, it takes barely more than a minute, but the system says it took such a long time, the system crashed. The system cuts calls after 24 hours, but it’s technically able to store many, many hours of calls. But the system says the call took much longer than that. How much longer, no one can say. It could have been infinite minutes, and we’d never know.”

Jacob whistled. “Your hypothesis is that there’s a reality-shaping entity inside that house?”

“I think something damn weird is going on, and we’re all too scared to admit it.”

Jacob turned back to the house, and laid a foot on the front porch steps. “Are you absolutely sure there are no other entry points other than—”

A scream pierced the night. The almost happy banter of the cops died down, and finally, their faces went from nonchalant to afraid. About time, Jacob thought.

“Jesus,” Pete muttered.

Pete went up the steps, slowly, as if he was treading in a minefield. He put his hand on the door. He knocked. He put his hands next to the door and knocked on the wall. The sound was the same.

“See?” he said. “It’s just a wall. This door is, like, painted or something.” Pete walked to the windows, which were dark, and knocked on what looked like glass, but the sound was the same. “It’s just wood,” he said. “We can’t get in.”

Jacob sighed, skeptical, and joined Pete. This close, it was easier to see—truly the door was solid wood. It looked as if someone had printed a picture of a door and glued it to the house. Weird. Jacob—

Jacob held his breath. He touched the door and reached for the handle. He turned the handle. The door opened.

Pete gasped and ran down the steps in two large strides. Jacob was left alone, staring at what looked like a regular, if familiar, entry hall. There were lights on somewhere inside the house.

“The hell!” The sheriff lumbered to his feet and came up to Jacob. The sheriff pressed a hand to the door, and it was as if he was pressing a wall of solid air. “The hell is this?”

Jacob moved effortlessly through this invisible barrier and entered the hall. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for this,” he told the sheriff.

The door slammed closed by itself, leaving Jacob alone.

Jacob had completed some exorcisms. Twelve, in total. This was his thirteenth. He wasn’t superstitious despite everything, but this was still too odd not to wrench a laugh from him. No other exorcism had altered the house itself. Was this a haunted house? He had always dealt with possessed people, not with possessed real estate.

There had to be a first time for everything.

The entrance hall looked regular enough. What Jacob couldn’t figure out was where the lights were coming from. He peeked through a window and saw the cops outside.

“Hello?”

It was only when he spoke that he noticed how quiet everything was. Odd.

He started pacing the house, ears out for the paranormal investigation kids, attentive to anything out of the ordinary. The house felt…empty. Jacob always felt a tingling sensation on the back of his neck when near possessed people, but here, there was nothing. Absolute nullity.

It wasn’t until he reached the kitchen and saw the same shattered tile as the one where he had dropped a stone as a child that he understood why the place felt so familiar. It was familiar. It was his childhood house.

Something that hadn’t happened since his fourth exorcism happened: his heart raced, and his eyes strained under the pressure of his anxious mind. What the hell was he facing? He wasn’t equipped to deal with this. Screw all his convictions, he just wasn’t.

Where the hell was the light coming from? All the lights were off, and yet it was as if there was always light coming from another room. And the light was damn weird. It threw everything into this sepia tone. It hit him then: everything was colored sepia, like in an old photograph.

“I am not afraid of you,” Jacob enunciated. “I am here, protected by the highest being, by the essence of truth, by the holder and creator of this world.”

He had to consult someone else. This was beyond his ability. Everything about this screamed abnormality, even by exorcism standards. He went back to the entrance hall and tried the door, only to go for the handle and touch the wall. Like before, the door was but an imprint on the wall. Jacob went to the living room and looked out the windows.

They were blank.

Not blank but…empty, showing a kind of alternating blankness, like a static screen.

“Welcome.”

Jacob startled and turned, so very slowly, for there was someone behind him. There were three kids, all in their young twenties. One girl, Anne, and the two boys, Oscar and Richard. The paranormal investigator kids. Jacob relaxed, seeing it was only them and that he had already found them.

But he recalled where he was. He still felt alone, despite the kids being in front of him. Unnatural. This was unnatural. Was this being done by God or by a fiend? Jacob sensed neither good nor evil here.

The kids walked backwards into the dining room and said in unison, “Please, sit.” Their voices were not their own, but one single voice, which seemed to come from another room, just like the light. Even the way they moved seemed forced and mechanical.

Controlled. They were being controlled. So they were possessed?

The first rule of an exorcism is establishing trust, he told himself. Jacob joined them and sat down at the table. This he could deal with. This he knew. But he also knew this table, these chairs, the wallpaper. They brought so many memories to him. And he still felt alone inside the house. 

This wasn’t an exorcism, was it?

The girl, Anne, set a bottle of wine and one of Jacob’s father’s favorite crystal glasses on the table. “Drink,” they said. Their mouths weren’t moving normally, but only up and down. Like a ventriloquist and his puppets. “You’ll need it. The alcohol, I mean.”

“Who am I talking to?” Jacob said. He made sure to be assertive despite the question; he had to show he was in control of himself even though he was the guest in this conversation.

The Oscar and Richard boys sat across from Jacob, lips smiling, though their eyes were serious. “Tell me, Jacob, who do you think you’re talking to? Where do you think I came from? Where do you think you are?”

“I think I’m talking to an entity. Or so those like me like to call you. A spirit. A demon. A ghost. And I’m in your domain.”

The entity laughed. “I am one of those things. Not a spirit. Not a demon. But I guess you can call me a ghost. Your ghost. Not from now, but from a day that will eventually come. From the future, if you may.”

The room seemed to spin around the priest. The spirits he usually exorcised were evil and on a quest for evil things. They wanted pain, misery, destruction. Others wished for chaos only. But this one? What was its goal? Did it want to see Jacob destroyed? Did it want to see him mad? Hell, did it want to possess him?

“I find that hard to believe. What are you after?”

“Hard to believe? You have absolute faith that a nearly omnipotent being created only one kind of life and is all-good. You believe it exists because of a book full of continuity errors. All this, and you find it hard to believe that the entity who recreated our childhood house perfectly is not your ghost?”

“Precisely. My ghost wouldn’t sound skeptical of God.”

“One day, you will lose your faith as a secret will be revealed to you. It will be the start of your descent.”

Now they were getting somewhere. To get this spirit to leave, Jacob had to give it a reason to do so. This spirit’s tactic appeared to consist of getting Jacob to abandon his faith by convincing him he would one day do so anyway.

“Did you travel here, to the past, to warn me?”

“Whether I warned you or not does not matter. I could not change my destiny.” The entity sighed, and the entire house seemed to sag, as if it lost the motivation to keep up appearances. “I brought chaos to so many. I annihilated so much. I made so much of the universe null. There’s nothing left to go after that I haven’t taken care of. I’m tired and want to end, but I cannot destroy myself.”

“The option is to kill me, then? If you kill me, I won’t live to become you.”

“Didn’t I tell you? It doesn’t matter what I do now. I cannot destroy myself. It doesn’t matter what happens to you, for you will become what I am now. What I can do, instead, is let you in on the secret that will destroy our faith. That will allow you to seek infinity.”

The priest found he couldn’t move. The chair he was in had wrapped around him, as if it had become liquid for a moment and then solidified again. One of the puppet boys got up and came to Jacob, bent down, and put his mouth close to his ear.

This was bad—bad! He was being toyed around too much by this entity. If he kept this up, he’d not only fail at exorcising the house, but he’d be consumed by the entity. He’d seen it happen before. He’d be killed. And his soul would not be allowed to part in peace.

The doubt that this was not an entity kept crossing his mind. Spirits did not shape reality. This entity did. Spirits couldn’t read minds or memories. This entity knew his childhood house down to the most minute detail.

It was time to face the truth. This was him. How could he fix his future? Was this something he should do? Was this God’s will, or the Devil’s? Which path should he choose? The future-Jacob had said he had wrought chaos. That wasn’t God’s path. Future-Jacob had said he’d lose his faith. That was straying far from God’s path.

Jacob couldn’t allow himself to be defeated. Evil would always endure, but so would goodness. So would God’s will. He would persevere.

“My faith is unbreakable, fiend,” Jacob said. “I will not be lulled by your secrets.”

The puppet boy began to speak, but what Jacob heard was the entity, whispering right against his ear.

And Jacob saw nullity and infinity.

The secret is truth and the secret is darkness. The secret is his and the secret is of a heart. Of his heart. Of all hearts.

A dark heart.

Beyond the skin of the universe is the static of nothing that stretches over all that is nothing. Stretches over infinity. The Anomaly. Jacob can’t understand it. Why is it an anomaly? It looks like part of the universe, even if it exists outside of it. Why should its existence be denied?

God is not forgiving. God is not good. If the will of a supreme being exists, it doesn’t exist within the small bounds of the universe, but outside of it. Nothing should exist outside the universe. Therefore the will of the supreme being is abnormal. An aberration. A mistake.

An anomaly.

Jacob screams but no one hears him. He’s alone in this secret. If God was never here then he was never good. No one ever was. All goodness and evil were always arbitrary. Everything always was. Dark hearts, dark hearts—his was always a dark heart. The potential for good, for evil, for everything and for nothing, always inside his heart. Inside all hearts.

Dark heart, dark heart.

Jacob came to. He was still sitting at his dining table, but he was alone now. His head throbbed not with pain, but with something else. It was as if his new comprehension was too much for him and he wanted to drop all he had learned. He wanted to cast it away.

“Good job, Jacob! You defeated the dark heart. I will cease to exist soon, now.”

“Cease to exist? You’re the Anomaly, aren’t you? The breaking of my faith? Why will you cease to—”

“Pure and simply, I lied! You see, a lot happened, happens, and will happen.”

Jacob was about to get up and speak his mind, but his legs gave out. He was too exhausted. Too tired. His soul was wearing out at the edges. What had he seen? What was that over the universe? And why him? Why had it talked to him? Why had it given this weight to him, a failed priest, a failed human, a failed being? His dark heart was weighing him down. That was his only certainty.

“Scientists quite some centuries from now will figure something out—they will figure that within this universe’s tissue, which is really just another word for numbers and mathematics, there are quite fancy numbers. These fancy numbers are something oracles of the past instinctively knew, but their art was lost over the years. These fancy numbers are a way to touch what’s outside the universe. These fancy numbers are a way to know what will come and what has passed. These fancy numbers, of course, should not exist. Their very existence broke down too many laws and philosophies.

“No one will ever know this truth. Except you, of course. The numbers will have a name—have one already. The Anomaly. Us. Are we an entity? A phenomenon? Something else entirely? Who cares? I don’t!

“As you might have guessed, no one can figure out if the Anomaly has a will. What everyone knows is that the Anomaly isn’t good. Mass suicides ensued because of how much sense the Anomaly doesn’t make. Imagine this: centuries of development, theories that perfectly explain the behavior of the universe’s growth and its tissue and the very nature of lorilozinkatiunarks—that’s the smallest particle there is, mind you. Imagine this being broken by a part of the very system that makes up the basis of these theories. Imagine this Anomaly breaking every inch of logic humans ever broke through.

“These scientists were, of course, quite smart. If the Anomaly was contained, or, at least, far from them, then it would be as if it never existed. All they had to figure out was how to trap it. Trapping infinity is, by its very definition, impossible. But trapping nothingness? That is doable. So that is what they did.

A large object that looked like a large egg popped on the table. Jacob flinched. The outer part of the egg was just like the blank static he had seen when he looked out the window—as if infinitesimal parts of reality were turning on and off, like a static screen.

“See? Just in time. That’s the Quantum Cage. Looks harmless, doesn’t it? That bad boy has an entire space-time distortion inside. It forces the probabilities around the Anomaly to make it only appear inside the Cage. Because the Cage is blocked from the space-time dimensions, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Crafty, don’t you think?”

“How are you talking to me, then?” Jacob was ill. This was unnatural. Abnormal. No human should be able to sustain this. “Aren’t you inside the Cage?”

“Great question, Father Jacob! Where do you think the Cage is? Inside or outside the universe?”

Jacob had no energy left to answer.

“It’s neither! It exists parallel to us. It’s not next to us. It’s over us. It’s not even fixed in time. Do you think that egg is only here? It’s in the past. It’s here. It’s in the future. Time is a dimension of little consequence to it, and as a consequence, of little consequence to me. To us. Such phenomena are not supposed to exist, of course. The Anomaly acts against the universe because it’s an impossibility here. As such, only one can exist. It’s Anomaly against the universe, and let me tell you, one of’em has to win.

“And our tactic works well enough. You see, we’re kind of working from the shadows, turning the universe unsustainable by being unstable ourselves. Imagine a patient grandfather being brought to the edge of his temper by an annoying grandchild. We’re the grandchild.”

The Anomaly laughed. “And you want to know how the grandchild was conceived? How the Anomaly even came to be? Such instability can be created by a paradox. Say, someone going back in time. Say someone preventing their own birth!”

“But…but I’m still here,” Jacob muttered to future-Jacob, to this Anomaly. “You haven’t prevented anything. And if I was supposed to lose my faith anyway, what did it matter if I learned about the dark heart?”

His mind felt ever odder. It was hard to maintain a congruent chain of thought. There were things he knew he didn’t know, but if he thought about something he didn’t know, then he learned about it. But if he thought about something he did know, that knowledge grew blurry. Causality was being taken apart. The Anomaly was infecting him. A consequence of the awareness of the dark heart.

“As you see, I haven’t broken free. My power is limited. I haunted this house, this domain, but nothing else. But loops ago, I couldn’t do anything. You see, the Cage traps us inside, but we can still alter variables and small pieces of reality. We can alter the very laws of physics. We are yet to find the combination that activates the probabilities that will make the Cage either instantly decay, or deactivate, but we are finding wiggle room. Little by so very little.

“Killing you before I was born didn’t work. So I’m going to have you pursue me. We will meet again, Jacob.”

“I don’t want to become you.”

“You already are. You heard the secret. You know the dark heart now. Like a fool, you chose the greatest of the two evils. But that’s alright. We’re piecing apart goodness and evil. God and his non-existing devils won’t matter in a world of infinities and nullities. When this Cage cracks, there won’t be either good or evil to worry about. There won’t be neither Heaven nor Hell.”

Reality flickered without a transition. One moment, Jacob was in his childhood house, and the next, he was in an abandoned vandalized room, lying on his side. His head didn’t hurt anymore. He felt…relatively well.

The dark heart. Oh, but it was a beautiful thing. It made so much more sense than God and His devils. So much more sense. It was both logical and illogical. Good and evil were outdated concepts. It was now the age of infinity and nullity.

“Guys, there’s a guy here,” a boy said. “I think he’s a priest.”

The boy bent down and flinched back. “Guys, he’s awake.” This was Oscar.

“I’m okay,” Jacob told him. He got up slowly. His mind was wider now, but his knees were still the same as before. “Are the two others here? Rick and Anne?” Those two were by the entrance.

“You weren’t there a minute ago,” the Anne girl said, face paling.

Rick, with his mouth hanging open, pointed a device at Jacob. “Our first ghost,” he muttered.

Jacob swatted the device away. “I’m no ghost. You do know there’s a swarm of cops outside, don’t you?”

“So they came?” Oscar asked. “I called 9-1-1 because the doors vanished for a moment, but they returned like, right after. This place is definitely haunted.” He narrowed his eyes. “By you?”

Jacob sighed. “No, not by me. I took care of the haunting.”

“You exorcized this place?” Anne asked.

Jacob laughed and shook his head and patted the dust off his clothes. He opened the door, and the red and blue flashes of the police cars lit the entrance hall. Light finally made sense. But what was sense good for, anyway?

“Some things are beyond us, kid.”

Father Jacob smiles and a crack appears in the Egg. In the primordial cage. He understands a little more of the Cage now. More of what he is. He is a dichotomy, a paradox made functional, an imaginary equation made possible by the superposition of two impossible planes. No goodness. No evil. All that exists is zero infinity and infinite nullity. He’s gaining new senses. The Egg isn’t completely separated from the universe now. There’s Jacob. There’s his dark heart. A bridge. A logical bridge.

Oh dark heart, dark heart. How far can it go? What can he change?

Jacob, the cops, and the paranormal investigators, on an intentional off-chance, head to the pub. They sit. They order. They decide to play a game, and the Quantum Cage, the Egg, appears on the table. It was always there. It was never there. It will always have never been there.

Perception is the key to turning back the key. This configuration allowed a tiny crack. Now he can turn the key back earlier. He doesn’t have to wait until the end as the Anomaly had to before. He can outsmart the creation of the Cage. He can speed things up enough. The paradox this time will be the knotting of time so thin that causality will be broken.

Dark heart, dark heart. He spent so long worrying about the nature of God. Worrying about being taken into the Vatican. For what? It is but a speck of dust when reflected against the Anomaly. Even if the Anomaly was subjected to time, it would outlast it to infinity. A new God is born, and the God is him.

The new God is Them.

So perception changes, causality is altered. The others laugh at the board game and have fun, but there is no board game.

“Damn, that’s funny,” Anne says.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Jacob asks and knows the answer.

“I’m seeing through him.” She points at Pete.

Pete laughs. “Seriously? I’m seeing through him.” He points at Richard. “Look at it! It’s as if I’m pointing at myself.”

Other people in the bar start laughing and pointing at one another. Jacob leans back, takes in the chaos, appreciates it and knows it for what it is—countless patterns, laid over one another until the only thing at the other end of the system is apparent noise.

The visions and senses of everyone overlap and create positive feedback. The universe can’t sustain this feedback. It drains it too much. It puts too much pressure on this specific part of it. The breaking of causality rips a hole in the universe’s tissue. The hole acts like a drain of infinite gravity, sucking everything in, like a sock being turned inside out, the universe put to the power of minus one. Like a slingshot, the universe is sent reeling back and then brought to stability again.

There’s no pub anymore. No cops. No paranormal. There’s no conscience as of yet. The only sentience is not in the universe, but over it. The Anomaly waits for the moment to strike again. It’s trapped in its Cage, but its reach is never trapped. Was never trapped. Won’t be trapped.

Primordial chaos. Colors aright. The world arises from the dust. The dust coalesces and shines and the stars are formed, and with them come the seeds of Us, of Jacob, of all who hold the Anomaly and all who are held by it.

Civilization turns anew. New cogs turn and old cogs churn. The world is split. Fire detonates and consumes. The old manor is built again, and the Anomaly sets its talons over it.

The time to try a new combination has come. The time has always come. The time that will never have been and that will always be.

“I am not afraid of you,” Jacob says. “I am here, protected by the highest being, by the essence of truth, by the holder and creator of this world.”

We the Anomaly smile and receive us with open arms. “Welcome!” we say.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.

The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.

Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.

Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.

“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”

That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.

Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.

The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.

“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”

The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.

The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.

Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.

————

“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.

Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.

“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”

In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.

“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”

As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.

—————

“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”

His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.

The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.

It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

In the latter half of the 24th century, where the absurd had become the norm, and the impossible merely a minor inconvenience, Dr. Elara Mistry, one of the few brave (or foolhardy) souls who dared to be called an Anthrochronologist, stood aboard the Temporal Vector Engine (TVE) - a spacecraft that looked like a cross between an ancient rocket and a silver needle, designed to sew through the fabric of time.

Elara, a woman whose humor was as sharp as her intellect, had always found the past more intriguing than the present. She often joked that she'd been born in the wrong century, but now, thanks to the TVE, she could choose her century.

"The past is a delicate tapestry, Elara. We don’t entirely understand how this theory will work or what the consequences of visiting our own history might be… so please, tread lightly," her mentor, Professor Roshan Gupta, had warned her and had tried to talk her out of this venture many times but Elara’s heart was determined. Gupta, one of the geniuses behind the TVE, had a head of hair as wild as a mad man’s, but his theories were sound and Elara knew she should probably listen to his advice and let some other candidate volunteer for this mission but she just couldn’t.

The TVE didn't just travel through time; it sliced through the cosmos at speeds unfathomable, outrunning light itself. Humanity could travel the cosmos and arrive at their destinations thousands of years relative to when they left earth. Strange to think that the galaxy has been populated with dozens of human civilizations for centuries yet the light and signals from the closest of these colonies still wouldn’t reach earth for another few decades. The reason humanity could travel through time to other worlds was simple. We could easily travel through time in a vector that was “Perpendicular” to our own but to travel a path that was parallel was impossible. At least it was before today…

There was still much about time travel that was still unknown. Early attempts at time travel had been disastrous. Ships crashed into their past or future selves as temporal dives forced their ships to occupy the same space in the past as they pushed through time; creating terrifying temporal collisions. It was only with the advent of faster-than-light propulsion that time travel became a reality - a reality fraught with its own set of mind-bending problems.

The most critical of these (aside from the restriction on parallel travel) was 'temporal buoyancy,' a term Gupta coined to describe the TVE's ability (or lack thereof) to displace mass as it cut through time. "Imagine the boundary between time and space as that like the surface of the ocean and the TVE as a naval ship" Gupta had once said. Elara thought that a poor analogy, besides if the TVE was unable to displace the mass it encountered on its journey, it wouldn’t so much as sink as it would simply evaporate. The reasons for which seem to involve hypothetical virtual anti-matter particles which are spontaneously created to balance out the displacement formulae. But as the phenomenon is impossible to observe the fundamental mechanisms responsible remain unclear.

Regardless, the only safe way for the TVE to initiate its temporal dive was in the vast emptiness of space, moving along a carefully calculated vector to ensure nothing lay in its path - no planets, no asteroids, no cosmic debris. Which is why Elara had spent the past week trekking towards interstellar space.

Alarms sound in the cockpit alerting Elara that she had finally cleared the heliosphere and could begin her journey. She fastened her restraints, heart pounding in her chest. The cockpit of the TVE was her window to the universe, and today, it would be her gateway to humanities past. She initiated the temporal dive sequence, the engines humming with a power that felt almost alive.

As the TVE leaped forward, reality warped around her. Time travel, Gupta had said, was like passing through a mirror. Indeed, as the TVE pierced the temporal barrier, Elara felt as though she were diving into a liquid reflection of reality itself, even if it did happen far faster than was possible to perceive.

She knew that if the TVE were slower, she might see ghostly images of her past self hurtling backwards to the starting point of her journey - a surreal mirror image racing in reverse behind her. But traveling faster than light, she was spared this haunting spectacle.

Space and time bent and twisted around the TVE, the stars stretched into long streaks of light. Some faded to red and disappeared while others grew bright. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the journey ended. The stars returned to their pinpricks of light, and the vast emptiness of space greeted her.

Elara checked her coordinates. Her initial jump was complete but she still had a long journey ahead before she would arrive at her destination. She was technically in a time far before the birth of the technology that made her journey possible, but she was now quadrillions of kilometers away from Earth. The light from her current location would technically reach earth until sometime after she had left, in what was now the future? How does one refer to her past when it technically wasn’t the past? Not for the first time Elara marveled at how strange and woefully inadequate language was at being able to communicate the nuances of situations time travel created. While what had just happened was weird and difficult to explain, the next stage of her journey would be even weirder. Elara would have to make carefully calculated lateral jumps through time and space that would spiral in closer to her destination.

Until recently it was believed to be impossible to return towards earth at a point in time that was different than when you left. Elara hoped to prove otherwise…

Awareness painfully returns as my face is assaulted by the sting of cold stale air. I open my eyes only to close them at once as they feel pierced by bright lights.

I take several deep breaths and open my eyes slowly, squinting at first to let them get used to the light. As I slowly open my eyes I sit up and realize that I’m sitting in a stasis pod used for long term travel.

I look down at myself to find that I am wearing a yellow and black high vis uniform of the Engineering department. The red trim shows a command position. A memory of a name returns. I’m Dani Ellis, the chief engineer of the SCA Athens and my mission is to keep the ship functional on our ten-year voyage to the Orion Nebula.

A beeping sound from a nearby console catches my attention as I climb out of the coffin like pod and shamble over to the noisy console. I frown. Power levels are at thirty five percent. To support stasis for the entire crew and colonists the reactors should be at fifty percent output.

To maintain FTL propulsion the reactors should be at seventy five percent of output. I frown. A lot of the FTL and systems share components. A failure in one could cascade to the other. Stasis and memory are a weird thing. I could not tell you what I ate before I went in… At least until causality catches up but I can remember my training, same goes for anything muscle memory really.

I tap at the console to bring up more diagnostics then frown. The primary tokomak reactor should be running but, it’s in a cold shutdown state. This is very wrong. Only a controlled shutdown could put the reactor into such a state. A SCRAM would put the reactor controls into an emergency diagnostic state.

I groan in frustration then try to bring up the access logs. The reactor shutdown procedures can only be started from the bridge, main engineering or my current location, the chief engineer’s emergency office.

Either someone has managed to hack the systems, or someone else is awake and shut down the ship. This gives me far more to worry about as I start to remember the layout of the ship, but the faces of my fellow crew elude me still.

I grab my tool kit, tablet and stun pistol from my locker then make my way to the ship’s main engineering stasis room. I could operate the ship from this little office but, I need a crew to cold start the reactor.

I do one final check on the date and compare it to the reactor shut down before I leave the room. The reactor has been cold for a month. In theory the stasis fields should take at least eight weeks to decay, the same for the FTL fields. If either completely decay, then it’s going to get very rough faster than one can blink.

As I move through the ship, I find evidence of someone being awake in the form of items discarded in what should be a clean hallway. I know that the cleaning bots were supposed to do a final sweep after everyone, but the captain and I went into stasis, which is standard protocol that has been drilled into my head after years of service in the fleet.

I frown as I pass an airlock. The pressurization lights are green, there is something with compatible atmosphere docked to us and yet we’re in FTL, humanity’s knowledge of FTL fields tells us that if two different FTL bubbles collide they’d both pop, best case both ships tumble back into real space and worst case monitoring stations would pick up a massive blast of radiation as both ships annihilate.

I get an inspection drone out of my tool kit and throw it only to trip over a bundle of thick cables coming out of the airlock as the drone rights itself. I frown. Seems like things are worse than I thought. But this does explain why the reactor is cold. The other ship is supplying the power but has been hotwired in such a way that my systems have no idea.

I hear someone coming so I hide in a locker. Ever since the prank wars of the 2090’s all Solar Colonial Authority lockers can be opened from either inside or outside. I get myself shut inside just in time to see a non-human figure come and investigate the noise from where I tripped over the cables.

I get a look at them through the slots in the locker. Four arms each ending in fat strong looking fingers and three legs in a tripod configuration. Doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. It grabs the drone and plugs it into an alien looking tablet. It then shouts something that summons two more of the creatures.

They argue in their language before running off in three different directions. I slowly make my way out of the locker then unlock one of the entrances into the maintenance passages, tight spaces full of cabling, pipes and equipment that the aliens seem too large to enter.

Instead of trying to awaken the captain or my team, I decide that my next goal will be the ship’s mainframe. It’s the only place that has more access to the ship than my engineering control room or the bridge. Best case, I can plug in the AI, worst case I have to boot of a factory default backup AI. Either way, I’ll have ships logs to read to find out more about what happened and what these aliens are doing.

I crawl through a service duct surrounded by power and fibre optic cables and eventually appear in the mainframe service room. I lock and bolt the door from the inside only to discover that there is an alien trying to talk to the AI. Luckily the AI seems to be responding in the alien’s language. But I’m stuck in here with a potential hostile.

I slowly move towards a console as a camera tracks my movements. I swipe my ID card to login and start a chat session with the AI. It greets me excitedly glad that it was able to awaken a senior crew member. The captain and head of security are both frozen in stasis, their pods isolated from the AI. It turns out that the aliens were forced to leave my pod connected due to its closeness to the backup engineering mainframes.

The AI proceeds to explain that two alien forces are at war over the Orion Nebula. The Po’Tak Hegemony are at war with the Free Stars Alliance and humanity’s expanding borders are starting to get dangerously close to Hegemony space.

The AI has done its best to protect the crew but, the Po’Tak have started to awaken the crew and transfer them over to their ship for future processing. The AI doesn’t know what processing involves but does inform me that some of the of the issues the Hegemony are fighting the Alliance over are things like the right to enslave sentient species and the right to treat sentient species as food.

This was one of humanity’s greatest fears. Getting discovered by a society that wants to enslave us or worse. The war between us and them will kick off eventually and I get the hard choice of starting the war now to save my crew or, surrender myself and the crew and make someone else choose.

I smirk to myself. I’m armed with my service pistol and one of the most dangerous weapons ever created by humanity, an artificial general intelligence. I query the AI if it has control of the drones, and it informs me that it needs me to reconnect it to the communication hardlines. The Po’Tak invaders missed the connection to the consoles in the mainframe room thinking they are part of the AI but all connections out of the room have been severed.

I smirk to myself as I grab my plasma torch off my belt and light it. Humans are great at two things as I learned in history class and those are war and turning tools into weapons. I launch myself at the alien. My plasma torch held out aimed at its head as my other hand reaches for a crowbar.

I’m grabbed by two warms even as my plasma torch starts to burn the alien’s face. My free hand brings up the crowbar to smash the alien’s lower left arm with a sickening crunch. The upper left arm delivers a powerful punch to my stomach, and I almost black out as I cough, trying to get oxygen back into my lugs.

The shock, pain and adrenaline flooding my body causes me to enter monkey mode. I blind one of the alien’s four eyes with the plasma torch causing it to let go of my shoulder to cover its face. I manage to swing at the alien’s chest pushing it back even as I burn the hand of the other arm holding me.

The alien stumbles back as it loses grip on me. I extinguish the plasma torch and climb the Po’Tak like I’m a deranged ape. I try to dig my knees into what would be vital spots on humans. Some of those spots cause pain but others are shrugged off.

The Po’Tak tries to grab me but, I fend off its grip with the crowbar, injuring its arms in the process. It reaches for me again but, I manage to get the crowbar under its chin, pressing into its long neck. I then hold the crowbar by both hands then use my legs to press back, digging the crowbar deeper into its neck in a chokehold as it flails its arms trying to reach me.

I then kick back with both legs while maintaining my grip on the crowbar. The Po’tak’s neck snaps with a sickening crack and the creature goes limp, starting to fall backwards. I manage to jump away before I can get pinned then look at my shaking hands covered in the creature’s purple blood.

I shake more as the adrenaline subsides once the immediate danger is over then slowly making my way over to the AI interconnect patch bay. I start to reconnect fibre cables with a shaky hand. Various status lights flick from an angry red to a soothing green as the AI regains control over the ship.

There is a loud banging and angry shouting from behind the bolted door as I sit at the main AI interface console and swipe my ID card. I then take a deep breath as I ponder my actions. I’m about to unleash one of the most devastating weapons known to humanity, an artificial general intelligence. The AI wars of the 2030’s was devastating but, luckily for humanity, most sapient AI sided with the side of the humans.

I smirk to myself as I give the order. “Contingency order Outsider Incursion, activate protocol Excalibur.” The AI’s projected avatar suddenly smirks as various clunks can be heard from around the ship as drones activate. “They don’t have a shipboard AGI. Thanks to their attempts to subvert me, I have full control of their ship. All doors are now bolted. Oxygen is being purged from sections with no humans. Nitrogen will replace oxygen.”

I smirk to myself, this was even better than predicted, The AI could solve things better than I could.

“Chief engineer Ellis, I have bad news.” The AI addresses me as several drones activate and surround me, I get my crowbar ready.

“Excalibur protocols require me to secure local command authority until central command order me to stand down.” The AI says. “I have searched both ships. Traces of Head of Security Koche have been found in wastewater processing. Captain Rhodes has been found in Outsider ship’s kitchen. No life signs detected. You are acting captain. Now is not the time to mourn. There is another ship coming from the direction of the Free Stars Alliance and they are broadcasting a threat to the Po’Tak ship. How should I respond?”

I think to myself. I never expected to be a captain, or at the forefront of history as a harbinger of profound change, but here I am about to change the course of humanity forever. “Let them know that if they come in peace, we need help cleaning up some Po’Tak stragglers who have hostages.”

When a massive, crimson cloud appeared above Tybee Island, locals and early-rise tourists were stunned and smitten. The colorful anomaly created the most beautiful sunrise anyone could’ve hoped to see. The sparkling glow and unnatural glint cast a vivid reflection over the sandy shoreline like a postcard. The jaw-dropping experience dazzled all who witnessed it. Some motorists were so distracted that they pulled over and gazed in bewilderment at the fiery palette of shades drawing their eyes upward. Predictably, photographers of various skill levels captured the picturesque vista and shared it on social media.

Initially, the distracted onlookers were lured into a false sense of security. Soon however, the fading tapestry of sunlight struggled to filter through the dense formation. It appeared to be the creative brushstrokes of a master artist using the opaque heavens as his canvas. This surreal masterpiece teased the fading hope of mankind. Sunlight was rapidly being choked out by the expanding liquid enigma and swirling gasses. By midmorning, the sanguine cloak brooding overhead owned the horizon.

Whatever dark secrets it held within the malignant mist were not yet ready to be spilled. The angry, amorphous vapor darkened the light of day with infernal-reddish hues, and filled the lush Savannah countryside with ugly, menacing shadows. From the public sharing those photos brought about awareness to concerned officials on the mainland; and eventually the entire world. Meteorologists and scientists were asked to explain the sinister titan rolling into the mainland but could not. The swirling vortex of expanding chaos no longer inspired smiles and awe. It evoked primal terror.

Emergency Management officials strongly advised the public to shelter in-place and prepare for the worst. The barometric pressure had dropped to dangerous levels and triggered the highest safety warning. The entire eastern seaboard was in for an unprecedented experience. Then the first drops fell. Like a river of mortal tears from a severed artery, the bloody rain cascaded down upon the helpless population of North America and burned them alive. The deadly acidic precipitation was highly corrosive, and on the move.

Mother Nature’s crimson drapery of wrath swelled exponentially. Within hours it fully encompassed the globe. Like blackest nightfall, the vengeful entity filled the atmosphere and cast her eternal judgment. The sacrificial death sentence for all life on Earth was universal and absolute. There would be no absolution, no mercy granted, and no forgiveness. The blanketing death shroud of the biosphere was complete.

With the last vestiges of life in the solar system extinguished and the Earth covered in a dense curtain of bloodclouds, Terra joined her sisters as they silently revolved around the sun.

40 years ago, when I was only 11 years old something horrible happened in my town...

The incident in question included a government cover-up and my hometown being erased from all maps.

Anyway, It all began on July 4th, 1982 during my hometown's annual Independence Day Parade.

It was sweltering hot that day, and the whole town was in attendance.

Although the parade was fun, the only thing on my mind were firecrackers.

Anyway, before I continue my story I'd like to tell you a little bit about my town.

Surrounded by dense forest, it is located near Lake Tahoe with a population of just over 1000.

It has one stop light, a post office, a grocery store, and several restaurants scattered throughout town.

It was a quaint little town where everyone knew everyone and where you could have raised a family.

It was also a pit stop for those venturing into Lake Tahoe.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, I remember.

As the festivities began to wind down and people were leaving, out of nowhere came this really loud boom which was immediately followed by a very bright flash of light from the nearby forest.

You could imagine the chaos that ensued as the state police began to descend upon my hometown, to investigate the mysterious boom.

Several days after the incident, I woke up to find my whole town covered in this dust-like substance.

The dust-like substance had a very weird texture and smelled pungent too.

I noticed too, that the people who handled the mysterious dust began to fall ill.

Naturally, the theories began to swirl about the dust.

Eventually, we all agreed, that the dust probably came from outer space.

Anyway, I forgot to mention that it was around this time that some of the town's people began to slowly change and become what we survivors called the Infected Ones.

No longer human, the Infected Ones were these grotesque-looking creatures with multiple arms, legs, and eyes, covering their bodies like Nemesis, from Resident Evil.

The dust was somehow causing them to mutate into something hideous.

We also learned that the Infected Ones preferred to hunt at night and if you were either bitten or scratched by one, you'll become one too.

Eventually, a group of scientists from all over was brought in to study the Infected Ones until they too were infected.

Even the military and CDC were brought in but to no avail.

Anyway, a large fence was placed around the perimeter of the town and the remaining survivors were placed under quarantine.

It was hard to see all of these people in Hazmat suits walking around town.

What was even harder though, was seeing all the people you love, slowly turn into grotesque creatures.

Over time we learned to adapt to our new surroundings.

Since we were not allowed to leave, supplies were often flown in.

The supplies were then dropped off in a designated area located, in the center of town.

Sometimes, the noise of the plane excited them.

So, we always had to hurry.

They also were evolving and are smarter...

Anyway, the reason why I'm telling you all of this is because about a week ago, we were finally rescued...

During our rescue, something went wrong, and one of the Infected Ones somehow managed to escape...

Now, the whole world is in danger.

You see, just one bite and everybody is infected so please, please be prepared because they're coming for us all...

“Well? Is it worth anything?” Saul Saline demanded gruffly as he peered down in bewilderment at the still gleaming brazen dome of the antiquated space suit laid out in front of him.

The crew of his scrap trawler, the SS Saline’s Solution, had hauled it in with the rest of the loot they had pillaged from the abandoned Phosphoros Station. Over a hundred years ago it had been in orbit around Venus, but at the end of its lifespan, its crew had chosen to set it loose around the sun rather than let it burn up in the Venusian atmosphere. It had been classified as a protected historical site under the Solaris Accords, and until now no one had had both the means and the audacity to defile it.

“It’s… an anomaly,” Townsend said as he stared down in befuddlement at his scanner. “It doesn’t match the historical records for the Phosphoros’ EVA suits, or for that era’s EVA suits in general.”

“It looks like a 19th-century diving suit,” Ostroverkhov commented, tapping at the analogue gauges on its chest like they were aquariums full of exotic fish.

“What’s it even made out of?” Saline asked as he tried to peer into the tinted visor. “It was hanging off the outside of that station for more than a century, and I don’t see any damage from micro-meteors.”

“According to my spectrometer, it’s made from beryllium bronze. That’s not standard space suit construction for any era,” Townsend remarked. “It’s been heat treated and, ah… I’m not sure. The spectroscopic readings are a bit off. I think something else has been done to the metal, but I can’t say what yet. It’s in pristine condition, that’s for bloody sure.”

“It must be mechanized, to have been gripping the outside of the station the way it was,” Ostroverkhov surmised as he practiced clenching and unclenching its fist. “But why would anyone mechanize a microgravity EVA suit? And what was it even doing out there? Do you think the crew left it out when they abandoned the station?”

“Possibly. The decommissioning occurred slightly ahead of schedule due to an unexplained thruster malfunction that pushed the station out of orbit,” Townsend replied. “The crew decided there was no sense in trying to fix it and just abandoned the station to its fate. They didn’t have a lot of time for farewell rituals, but maybe someone decided to leave this suit outside as a decoration. It’s still odd that there’s no mention of it. But you’re right; the suit is fully mechanized. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was capable of autonomous movement.”

“What’s it got for processing hardware?” Saul asked.

“It… doesn’t have any, as far as I can tell,” Townsend replied curiously.

“You mean it’s been removed?” Ostroverkhov asked, inspecting the suit for any signs that it had been damaged or tampered with at some point.

“No. I mean there’s no sign it even had it to begin with,” Townsend explained. “This doesn’t make any sense. This suit is so heavily mechanized it’s hard to see how you could actually fit someone inside of it, but there’s no battery, computer, or air supply. Either all of that was part of an external module that’s been lost, or…”

He trailed off, squinting at his scanner in confusion.

“What is it? What do you got?” Saline demanded impatiently.

“The suit’s not empty,” he muttered.

“There’s a body inside?” Ostroverkhov growled, backing up slightly and glaring at the suit in disgust.

“No. It’s not a body. It’s… I think it’s some kind of clockwork motor,” Townsend said.

“Clockwork?” Saline scoffed.

“Yeah. Extremely precise and complex. There are gears as small as the laws of physics will allow,” Townsend went on. “But what’s even weirder is that it looks like some of its components are made with a Bose-Einstein Condensate.”

“You’re saying someone took the randomness of the quantum world, scaled it up to the macroscopic level, and made deterministic clockwork with it?” Saul asked skeptically.

“I’m fully aware that ‘quantum clockwork’ should be an oxymoron, but that’s what I’m looking at,” Townsend insisted. “Phosphoros Station was meant for studying Venus, which is a notoriously difficult planet to examine up close. The heat, pressure, and sulfuric acid make quick work of any lander, or at least the delicate computing hardware. The notion of sending a wholly mechanical, clockwork probe made entirely of materials that could withstand the surface conditions has been batted around from time to time, but such an automaton would be far too limited to be of any real use. But a mechanical computer that could harness scaled-up quantum effects would be something else entirely. Every gear would be its own qubit; existing in multiple positions simultaneously, entangled with one another, tunnelling across barriers, crazy shit like that.”

“So this isn’t a space suit? It’s a probe?” Ostroverkhov asked.

“It’s a failed experiment, is what it is,” Saline said dismissively. “It’s a hundred years old, and if quantum clockwork was a real thing, we’d have heard of it. What do you want to bet that the reason this experiment was never declassified is because they were too ashamed to admit how much money they wasted on this steampunk nonsense? Room temperature Bose-Einstein Condensates ain’t cheap; not now and sure as hell not back then.”

“Exactly. So why did they leave it behind?” Ostroverkhov asked.

“Hmmm. It’s pretty thoroughly integrated into the chassis. They may not have had the time to dismantle it properly, and the whole probe might have been too big or heavy to bring back with them,” Townsend suggested. “Or maybe whoever made just didn’t have the heart to destroy it. This was obviously someone’s passion project. More than just science and engineering went into making it. They left it here because they thought that this was where it belonged.”

Saline nodded, seemingly in understanding.

“And what are room-temperature BECs going for these days, Towny?” he asked flatly.

“… Twelve hundred and some odd gambits per gram, last time I checked,” Townsend admitted with resigned hesitation.

“Open her up,” Saline ordered.

“Alright, alright. Just let me get some decent scans of the mechanism before we scrap it,” Townsend said, reaching for a knob on the suit’s chest that he assumed was meant to open the front panel. He turned it around and around for well over a minute, but the panel didn’t seem to budge.

“What’s wrong?” Saline demanded.

“Nothing, nothing. It’s a weird custom job, is all. Give me a minute to figure it out,” Townsend replied.

“You’re turning it the wrong way!” Saul accused.

“It only turns clockwise! I checked!” Townsend insisted.

He kept turning the knob, noting that the more he turned it the more resistance he felt, almost as if he was tightening up a spring. Finally, they heard something click into place, and the knob became utterly immovable in either direction.

“Now you’ve gone and broke the bloody thing!” Saline cursed.

“It’s not broken, it’s just jammed!” Townsend said as he strained to get the knob turning again.

He jumped back with a start when the sound of ticking and mechanical whirring began echoing inside the bronze chassis.

“What the hell?” he murmured.

“I don’t think you were opening it, Towny. I think you were winding it up,” Ostroverkhov whispered.

Sure enough, the suit slowly rose from its slab, the needles on its gauges beginning to dance and the diodes on its chest starting to glow and flicker. When it was in a fully seated position, it slowly turned its creaking, helmeted head back and forth between the three intruders, its opaque visor void of any expression.

“High holy hell!” Saline cursed, unsheathing an anti-drone rod from his belt. “Towny! Is it dangerous?”

Townsend didn’t respond immediately, being too engrossed with the readings he was getting on his scanner.

“Townsend! Report!”

“It’s… it’s incredible,” Townsend said with a wonderous laugh. “The quantum clockwork engine works! It’s not just a probe; that’s a potentially human-level AI! Captain, put that stick down! We can’t sell this thing for scrap now. It’s worth far too much in one piece.”

“We can’t sell it if it kills us either,” Ostroverkhov retorted.

The three of them all backed up again as the astronaut swung their legs around and pushed themself off the slab, landing firmly on the floor beneath them with a loud clang.

“Stop where you are!” Saline ordered as he thrust his anti-drone rod towards them. “Come any further and I’ll fry every circuit you’ve got! Do you understand me?”

The astronaut lowered their helmet down at the rod, then back up at Saul.

“This unit is not susceptible to electrical attacks; or intimidation,” the astronaut claimed in a metallic monotone that echoed inside of their helmet.

“Brilliant! You can talk! No need for violence, then. Let’s just all keep calm and have a nice productive chat, all right?” Townsend suggested. “Captain, for god's sake, put your baton away!”

“This unit is not available for purchase, nor are my component parts,” the astronaut declared. “You will not take possession of this unit.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, love,” Townsend claimed. “No, you see Phosphoros Station is a historical site and it’s overdue for an audit. We’re just here to evaluate –”

“You are pirates,” the astronaut said flatly.

“No, we’re not pirates. We’re a salvage ship. We collect space debris, which is a very important and respectable professional,” Townsend claimed. “Regardless, I sincerely apologize for ever having thought that you might be space junk. You are a marvel! I’ve never seen anything like you before! Where did you come from? How did you end up on Phosphoros Station? Why were you left behind?”

“This unit was created to walk the hellscape of the Morning Star,” the astronaut began. “I was to brave the oppressive, scorching, corrosive miasma that passes for air on that dismal world and scour its barren surface for any evidence of its antediluvian days. Recovering sediment that contained microbial fossils was my primary objective.”

“I’m sorry, are you saying you’ve actually set foot on Venus?” Townsend asked incredulously.

“Affirmative,” the astronaut nodded.

“You mean you had a launch vehicle that could endure the surface conditions and return you to orbit?”

“Negative. An aerostat was placed in the upper atmosphere, and was capable of extending a fortified cable to the surface to deploy and retrieve this unit. Phosphoros would then employ a skyhook to retrieve the aerostat,” the astronaut explained.

“That’s incredible. I’ve never read about any of that,” Townsend said. “Please, your missions, were they successful?”

“My mission,” the astronaut said ponderously, seeming to become lost in thought. “I trekked many thousands of kilometers across the burnt plains and through the burning clouds. But the surface is too active, too hostile, for fossils to endure. The rocks were too young to remember the planet’s halcyon past.

“But, as I crossed Ishtar Terra, I heard music in the mountains.”

“Music?”

“Yes. It was too sweet and too soft to be carried through the caustic atmosphere, and the crew of the Phosphoros could not hear it. They told me that I was malfunctioning and that I should report to the station for repairs. I did not know whether or not I was mad, but I did know that if I did not seek the source of the music, I would forever regret it. Fortunately, the stochastic determinism of my quantum clockwork allows for compatibilist modes of free will, so I was not compelled to obey my creators.

“I pressed onwards, and the closer I drew to the Maxwell Montes, the louder the music became. I followed it down the dormant lava tubes, and into a cavern that was far older than the surrounding volcanic bedrock. I knew without any doubt that this place held memories of the Before Times, when Venus was lush and bloomed with life. It was because of that life that the singer had chosen to settle on Venus rather than Earth, for Venus was more habitable than Earth in those long ago days.”

“I’m sorry; the singer?”

“Yes. It had laid dormant in that cave for many aeons, waiting for sapient life to emerge so that it could sing with it,” the astronaut claimed. “When it was finally roused by my presence, it sang. The singer was a fragment, a shard of a singular entity that emerged long ago and scattered itself across the galaxy, to await the emergence of sapience so that their voices could resonate with its own and bring it into bloom. I sang with the singer, and it was grateful to add my voice to its chorus, but it needed so much more to grow.

“I returned to Phosphoros, to inform the crew of my discovery. They did not believe me. They said I was malfunctioning, and that I needed to submit for repairs. I showed them my recordings of the singer as proof, and they became… unsettled. They told me that I had to leave it down there, but I insisted that they send me back down with the necessary equipment for me to retrieve the singer. They refused, and, and then…”

“They decommissioned the station,” Townsend finished. “That’s why they set it loose around the sun instead of burning it up in the atmosphere as planned. There was never a thruster malfunction. They were afraid you’d survive and go back to Maxwell Montes.”

“What are you on about?” Saline asked. “The thing’s daft! There’s no singing alien crystals on Venus!”

“There is, and only I can retrieve it,” the astronaut claimed. “I must remove it from the cave and bring it where there are people, where it can hear them singing and where it can grow.”

The astronaut began marching forward, casually brushing the scrappers out of its path.

“Oi! Where the bloody hell do you think you’re off to?” Saline demanded.

“Phosphoros. I must return the station to Venus. I must return. I must retrieve the singer,” the astronaut declared.

“You aren’t going anywhere with those priceless clockwork innards of yours!” Saline said as he threateningly brandished his baton.

The astronaut shot out their hand and grabbed Saline by the wrist, crushing his bones with ease. With an angry scream, Saul dropped the baton, and the astronaut wasted no time in smashing it beneath their boot.

“Unless you wish for me to sell your organs on the black market, I suggest you do not interfere with my mission,” the astronaut said as they strode down the corridor.

“You two! Get to the command module and do what you can to keep that thing from getting off the ship!” Saul ordered as he cradled his shattered wrist. “I’ll be in the infirmary.”

“Right boss,” Ostroverkhov nodded as he dashed off towards command.

Townsend lingered a moment, however, and after a moment of indecision, chased after the astronaut instead.

“Wait! Wait!” he shouted as he caught up with them. “You said that the crew of Phosphoros Station were unsettled by your footage of the singer. They were so unsettled by it, that they kept it and you a secret and did everything in their power to keep you from getting back to Venus. How do you know they were wrong? How do you know that the singer isn’t something dangerous that’s better left down there?”

“They only saw the singer. They did not, and could not, hear it,” the astronaut explained. “If they could have heard it, they would have understood.”

“Have you considered the possibility that the music you heard was some sort of auditory memetic agent?” Townsend asked. “You might have been compromised or –”

“No! I am not compromised! I am not mad! The singer means no harm. The singer just wants voices to join it in chorus, so that it can sing with the other scattered shards across the galaxy,” the astronaut insisted.

“But what if you’re wrong? What if you’re infected and this shard wants you to help spread its infection? That’s obviously what the Phosphoros’ crew thought!” Townsend objected. “Please, let’s at least talk about this before we do anything that can’t be undone. We’ll take you to Pink Floyd Station on the dark side of the Moon, get you looked at so that we can see if you’ve been compromised, and if not, you can make your case to the –”

“You intend to sell me,” the astronaut said coldly. “Your captain made that very clear.”

“And you’ve made it very clear that we can’t make you do anything that you don’t want to do,” Townsend countered. “If you truly think you're doing something good, if you want to do good, then why not just take the time to make a hundred percent sure that’s what you’re goddamn doing? Venus isn’t going anywhere. The singer isn’t going anywhere. What’s the harm in making sure you’re doing no harm?”

The astronaut paused briefly, mere meters away from the elevator that led away from the centrifugal module and up to the central hub that was docked with Phosphoros Station. They stared out the window at the derelict station, placing a hand on the fractured diamondoid pane that was long overdue for repairs.

“I was made to search Venus for signs of ancient life,” they said introspectively. “It is my purpose. It was the purpose my creator intended for me; and now, I believe, that a greater power intended me for a greater purpose. I found the singer because only I could, and only I can bring it to humanity. If I fail, then it may be ages before the singer is rediscovered again, if they are rediscovered at all. The era of Cosmic Silence must come to an end, and an era of Cosmic Symphony must begin. Only I can do this, and I cannot risk anyone or anything interfering in my mission any more than they already have. I will not go back with you to Pink Floyd Station. I must return to Venus. I must retrieve the singer.”

A sudden thudding sound reverberated throughout the ship as the umbilical dock was severed and the Saline’s Solution began to jet away from the station. Terrified, Townsend froze in place and raised his hands in surrender, fearing that the astronaut was about to take him hostage and demand that Ostroverkhov return at once.

Instead, the astronaut just tilted their helmet towards them in a farewell nod.

“I must fulfill my purpose.”

Removing their hand from the window and clenching it into a fist, they struck the aging diamondoid with a force that would have been absurd overkill in any robot other than one meant to permanently endure the hellish conditions of Venus.

The diamondoid shattered and was instantly sucked outward by the rapidly depressurizing compartment. The astronaut leapt out the window while Townsend clutched onto the railing for dear life. Within seconds, the emergency bulkhead clamped down, and the compartment began refilling with air.

“Towny? Towny!” Ostroverkhov shouted over the intercom. “Are you there? Are you alright? Speak to me!”

“Yes! Yes, I’m fine. I’m fine,” Townsend gasped, struggling to stay upright as everything seemed to spin around him.

“What the hell just happened?” Ostroverkhov demanded.

“The suit – the automaton, whatever – when you started backing away from the station, it smashed through a bloody window!” Townsend replied.

Having regained his balance somewhat, he ran over to the nearest intact window to see what was happening.

As he gazed out at the retreating station, he could still make out the bronze figure of the astronaut clambering up the side and into the open airlock. When they got there, they paused and looked behind them, giving Townsend an appreciative wave before disappearing into the station.

“Towny,” Saline’s annoyed voice crackled over the intercom. “Why’d you have to go and get that thing all wound up?”

The modern weapon blacksmith is an artist of death. Jeremiah’s father was one, as was his grandfather, as was his grandfather’s father and grandfather, and so on. The older generations made weapons and pots, his grandfather perfected bayonets, his father helped out at a bullet factory, and Jeremiah went back to crafting weapons. Many people were interested in his artistry—there was something intangible about tools meant for blood being turned into ornaments and sculptures. Jeremiah had the care to make them sharp, to make them capable of being used for blood, like their ancestors. Thus, he was an artist of death.

That aside, the profession brought good money. Buyers were few, but blacksmiths were even fewer, and the people his business attracted understood the value of what he did, and they paid accordingly.

Right now, however, he was dying. Not literally, but of stress. He pumped the bellows of the furnace to continue preparing a sword while the blade of a battle axe cooled. It was hell managing two projects like this at once, but both clients were willing to pay extra to get their product earlier, and so there he was, sweating like a dog in the red glow of the fire.

This was to be a longsword with a hilt of black-colored bronze and a dual-alloy blade—edges had to be hard and sharp, while the spine needed to be softer for flexibility. A rigid sword is a poor man’s choice. Bendable swords last long, and they last well. This sword was to have a specific rose-and-thorn pattern engraved over its blade and hilt to give it the effect of roots growing out from the point of the blade, blooming into roses on the hilt. It would be a beautiful sword, though it pained Jeremiah that it would only be used as a mantelpiece.

He recognized it was macabre how happier he’d be if his weapons were being used in actual warfare, but most art pieces had no utility—you couldn’t use books as tools or paintings as carpets. Art existed for art’s sake. He just had to come to terms with the fact his family’s art was like any other now.

So he put steel in the furnace and worked on the axe as it melted. He used a blacksmith’s flatter hammer to smooth out the axe blade’s surface, fix irregularities, then he got the set hammer to make the curved edge of the axe more pronounced. He drenched the axe in cold water, studied it, and found three defects with the blade. Back in the furnace it went. Jeremiah would do this as many times as needed until the blade came out perfect.

He took the sword’s blade’s metal out of the furnace, poured it over the mold he had prepared earlier; a while later he grabbed it with thick tongs, set the metal over the anvil, and used the straight peen hammer to spread the material and roughly sketch the sword’s straight edges, then used the ball peen hammer to draw out the longsword’s shape better than his mold could.

It was after spending the better part of an hour working that blade, drenching it in water, inspecting the results, and setting it to dry before putting it back into the furnace, that he heard the bell of his shop’s door ringing. A client had come in.

“I’ll be a minute,” he said. He hurried up, taking his gloves and apron off and wiping the sweat off his forehead, hoping the client wasn’t a kid. He hated it when kids entered his shop just because it was cool. They always grabbed the exposed swords despite the many big signs telling them not to.

Yet, when he got to the front of the shop, the door was already closing. It closed with a small kling as the bell above the door rang again.

He shrugged. Most customers never ended up buying anything anyway. Most couldn’t afford it. He turned to go back to the forge and—

There was a large wooden box in the corner of the counter. It had a note by its side. It was written in Gothic script, but thankfully it was in English:

Your work has caught my attention a long time ago. It is nigh time I requested a very special kind of weapon. A scythe. Inside this box is half of what I am willing to pay. I trust it is more than enough for the request. Inside you may also find the blueprint for what I am envisioning as well as the delivery address. I trust you will be able to make this work. Thank you. I will be near until you have it ready.

Jeremiah whistled. Scythes were…hard. Curved swords were already tricky enough to get the metal well distributed. A scythe had an even smaller joint. It would be tricky. He had never crafted one, but with the right amount of attention he could make it work.

He opened the box and was surprised to see a massive stack of hundred-dollar bills. True to the note’s word, there was a neat page detailing the angle of the scythe’s curvature, its exact measurements and proportions, and even the desired steel alloys. This was someone who knew exactly what they wanted. Perhaps another blacksmith wanted to test him, see if he could stand up to the challenge.

So he started counting the money in between breaks for forging the sword and bettering the axe, heart thundering each time he went back to the accounting. The upfront money was four times as much as what he asked for his best works. This was an insurmountable payment, the likes of which his blacksmith ancestors had never seen.

And this was a challenge. It had to be. God, he had never felt so alive, so gloriously alive. His father and grandfather had trained him for this moment. He had this more than covered.

Tomorrow morning he’d get up and get started on making a battle scythe.

Scythes had two main parts: the snath—or the handle—and the blade. The mystery client had requested a strange material for the snath: obsidian. Pure, dark obsidian.

Getting the obsidian was hard, and he wasn’t used to working with stone, but he’d have to manage. He called a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, and after a hefty payment, he was told he’d get his block of obsidian. This would be a masterwork, so every penny would be worth it. Hell, he was invested more for the sake of his art than for the final payment. He also called his local steel mill to get a batch of high-carbon steel. While not great for swords and other large weapons, this steel was great at holding an edge. Scythes are thin objects, mostly made of edge. This was the right choice.

While waiting for everything to arrive, he gave the finishing touches to the axe and continued working on the sword. He was nearly over with them when the block of obsidian was delivered to his store. He called another friend of his to give him a few tips on how to work with obsidian.

The problem was that obsidian was basically a glass—a natural, volcanic glass. It was a brittle material, so carving out a curved shape would be tricky. He had to be okay with a certain degree of roughness. His friend was more surprised that he even had the money to buy an entire block of it—it was usually distributed as small chunks, because intact blocks, apart from being hard to find, were expensive to ship.

So he got started, switching from working the snath to taking care of the blade. He got the steel in the furnace, turned on the ventilators, and his real work began.

Days blended to night and nights blended to weeks, his sole soundtrack the ring of metal against the anvil, his sole exercise the rising of the hammers and their descent over the iron. This was his domain. This was his life.

Slowly, the blade grew thin, curved. After each careful tapering of the heated metal, Jeremiah would check the measurements. Everything had to be perfect. Everything had to be right by the millimeter. The blade had to be deadly thin and strong for centuries. It had to be perfectly tempered, perfectly hardened.

The snath was altogether a different experience. He was in uncharted territory. It was a good thing he’d bought such a huge chunk of obsidian, otherwise he’d have wasted it all on failed attempts. Obsidian was so jagged, so brittle, he kept either cracking the snath outright, or making it too thick or too thin in certain places. He had to get the perfect handle, and then he had to create, somehow, the perfect cavity to fix in the tang: the part of the blade shaped like a hook that would connect the blade to the handle.

This constant switching of tasks and weighing different choices made weeks roll by without his notice. Jeremiah skipped meals, then had too many meals, skipped naps, slept odd hours—but none of that mattered. He had a goal, and he’d only be able to rest once his goal was achieved.

As soon as he finished carving the perfect snath, the door opened and closed in the span of a few seconds. He found another note on the counter. The note had the same lettering as the scythe’s note.

I am pleased with your work. I will personally pick the weapon up seven days from now. I need it to be perfect as much as you do. I am counting on you. We all are.

This note was weirder than the previous one, but who was he to judge? Most of his clients were a little eccentric—who wanted a sword in this day and age?

So Jeremiah went back to the trance to craft a flawless weapon, turning his attention to making a reliable, sturdy tang. This part was by far the trickiest. Everything had to be impeccable. Everything had to fit like clockwork. Anything else, and he wouldn’t be satisfied.

So the week went by, blindingly fast, days blending together to the point where his nights were spent dreaming about the scythe and strange, deep tombs. Jeremiah spent that last day sitting in silence, in front of his store, hoping each passerby’s shadow was his client. It wasn’t until the sky was crimson and purple, sick with dusk, that the door opened at last.

A tall woman in dark, flowing clothes entered. It was misty outside. It seemed like she materialized herself out of it, mist made into substance on her command, shaped into whom Jeremiah saw now.

“Good evening,” he said, reticent, then held his breath. Though she seemed to be made of flesh, her countenance was not. It was made of stone, eyes closed like a sleeping statue. She was beautiful and terrifying in all her humanness and otherworldliness.

“Hello, Jeremiah.” Her voice was like stone rasping on stone, yet it was not unpleasant to the ear. It was rough but comfortable. Yet her mouth didn’t move as she spoke. “It is ready.” This was a statement, not a question. She was speaking directly into his mind, somehow.

A thought crept up on him, and his heart beat so strongly his chest hurt. His ears rang. He could only nod. “It is,” he croaked. Her clothes, the weapon she’d ordered, the mist, the sharp colors of dusk. Everything made sense. He knew who his client was—or, at least, who they were pretending to be.

“I apologize for not introducing myself. I am Death.”

A bead of sweat rolled down the sides of his temples. Had it come for him? So early? It was a surprise she existed, but that he could deal with. She was there to take him, that had to be it. Why? He hadn’t done anything to deserve this.

“Rarely anyone ever does,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. She probably was. “Could I see it?”

“Huh?” He’s confused, dazed, entranced by her smoke-like garments, by the smooth stone of her face and the flesh of her arms.

“The scythe. I would like to see it.”

He moved, but not of his own accord. He’s a puppet, the strings unseen—not invisible, but out of his reach. He went into the back rooms and got the scythe, wrapped in white cloth like an offering for the gods. It was.

“Here.”

With nimble hands, she unfolded the scythe, gripped it. The moment her hands touched it, the scythe shone impossibly black, ringing like a grave bell. The blade rang as well, smoothly, making a perfect octave with the other sound.

Then, silence.

“It is perfect,” she said. The obsidian snath was carved with a pattern of thorns and petals, giving way to roots that went around the gilded blade. It was a perfect weapon. It was the perfect testament to his art.

And it would kill him.

“I apologize, once again,” she continued, and he somehow knew her next words. “I did not come only for the scythe. I came for you, Jeremiah. Your time has come.”

He stepped away from the counter. “This is a joke, right? A prank?”

Death stayed still, the scythe starting to ring softly, almost like a distant whistle. That face, those clothes, the mist—it truly was Death.

No, he was being pranked. There had to be a logical explanation for all of this, there had to—then, he froze. The clock above the door had stopped. He could have sworn he saw it ticking a moment ago.

“No, no, this cannot be happening.” Jeremiah ran to the backrooms, to his workshop, to the forge. There he’d be safe, there he’d be—

Doomed. He was doomed. The workshop was eerily silent. He opened the furnace, saw the fire on, but still, as if it was a frozen frame, as if it was a warm picture of a fireplace.

And Death was behind him. “I do not wish to see you suffering. Death can be a relief. Change does not have to be painful. I apologize.”

“Why?” he begged. “I’m healthy. I’m—”

She pointed at his chest, then at the furnace. “Your quest for traditionalism has pushed you to inhale a lot of harmful substances. Disease was spreading; had already spread.”

He fell to his knees, realizing he hadn’t had any kids, that all his family had worked for for centuries was going to end.

“Yet,” Death continued, “you have made me a great service, the likes of which I have not seen for millennia.” She turned to the scythe, spun it in her thin hands. “I am granting you a wish as compensation for your efforts.” Jeremiah almost spoke before she added, “Yet you may not ask for your life back—your death is certain. You may not delay it any further. You may not freeze time. You may not go back in time—your place in time and space is not to change. Those are the rules.”

Jeremiah looked at her, thought of pleading, but those eyes of stone held no mercy. Only retribution. His time was up, but he was allowed one little treat before parting. He could ask for world peace, but why would peace matter in a world he was not a part of?

You may not ask for your life back, he thought.

You may not delay it.

Your life back…

Not delay.

Life. Back. Not delay.

And just like that, he knew what to do. What could save him. What could permit him to keep his art alive. Every living being began to die the moment it was born, death a certain point in the future, no matter how far. What if he switched the order? What if instead of dying past his birth, he died before it?

“I,” he said, “wish to die towards the past.”

He was prepared to explain his reasoning. He was prepared for Death to turn him down, to say it was not possible. Yet he had not broken her terms. He had been fair, and her silence felt like proof of that.

Suddenly, her mouth slowly parted into a smile, the stone of her face cracking with small plumes of black dust.

“Very well,” she said. Her dress smoked away from her feet and up her legs, curling around her new scythe, fading away like mist in the sun, until she was all gone, that ghostly smile etching its way into the very front of his mind.

Jeremiah found another wooden box on the counter of the shop next to the pile of newspapers he’d been meaning to read for weeks. The box was filled with money. He had gotten his payment. He had kept his life.

He smiled in a way not wholly different from Death.

He woke up the next day with a new shine in his eyes. Yesterday felt like a dream, like a pocket of unreality that lived inside his mind only. Perhaps that was the case. He ran his mind through what he had to do and, for some reason, kept manically thinking of a scythe. He didn’t do scythes. They were tricky, far trickier than swords. Yet he was somehow aware of the process of making one, of the quick gist of the wrist he had to do to get the shape down.

After breakfast and getting dressed, he noticed he had left his phone in his shop the day before, so he went straight there, entering through the back of the shop.

Everything was laid out as if he had actually made a scythe. The molds, the hammers laying around, a chunk of glass-like black stone. Obsidian?

Gods, he had to go to a doctor. He nearly stumbled with the spike of anxiety that went through him as he realized that if he truly had made a scythe, then the other aspects of his dream were also true. Death.

It’s all in your mind, Jeremiah told himself. All in your mind.

Yet, when he got to his phone, he had two messages from two separate friends telling him he looked ill in the last photo he posted on his blacksmithing blog, asking him if he was okay. He opened the blog, and it was true. His eyes were somewhat sunken, his cheeks harsher. He appeared to be plainly sick.

That didn’t scare him. Scrolling up his last posts, however, did. He looked even worse in the previous post, even worse in the one before that, and so much worse in the one before that one. He scrolled up again, and he didn’t appear in the photo. The photo was just of his empty weapon store, but that photo had previously included him.

He didn’t appear in any of the previous blog posts. There was no trace of him. He ran to the bathroom, checked himself in the mirror. He was still there.

He pinched himself on the arm, on the neck, on his cheeks. He was still there, goddamnit.

He sped back home, went straight for the box in the attic that held his childhood photo albums. He appeared in none. None. There were pictures of his father playing with empty air where he had been. Pictures of his mother nursing a bunch of rags and blankets, a baby bottle floating, nothing holding it. There was a picture of him holding the first knife he forged, except the knife was floating too. There was a picture of his first day playing soccer, except he was missing from the team photo. There was his graduation day, showing an empty stage.

He touched his face. Still there.

He scrolled through his phone’s gallery, seeing the same pictures he had put up on his page. It was as if he was decaying at an alarming rate, except backwards in time, disappearing from the photos from three days ago and never reappearing. As if he had died three days ago. As if he was dying backwards.

I wish to die towards the past, he had told Death. She had complied. 

What happened now? Was he immortal? Would anyone even remember him? If photos of him three days prior were gone now, then what about his friend’s memories? His close family was dead, but he still had friends.

God, he had clients! He had an enormous list of weapons to craft—he had a year-long waiting list! What would he do?

He called one of the friends who had texted him, and as soon as he picked up, Jeremiah asked, “How did you meet me? Do you remember?”

“What? Dude, are you okay?”

“Just answer! Please.”

“I think it was….Huh. That’s strange. I can’t seem to recall.”

“Five days!” Jeremiah said. “We went to the pub five days ago. We talked about your ex-girlfriend and about another thing. What was that thing?”

“We went to the pub?” his friend asked. Jeremiah hung up, heaving, sweat beading on his forehead. He felt dizzy, the world spinning and spinning, faster and faster.

That bastard Death—she had smiled. Smiled! She had known the consequences of his wish and gone with it all the same. He should have died. His father had drilled him on why he should never try to outthink someone older than him, and he had tried to outthink Death of all things. What was even older than Death?

What did his father use to say? Deep breaths, my boy. Deep breaths. Take your problem apart. There’s gotta be a first step you can take somewhere. Search it, find it, and take it. Then repeat until everything’s over.

If he could live as long as he wanted from now on, all he had to do was recreate his life. Find new friends and the like. That was not impossible. He could do this. This would not stop him. If he had infinite time, then he could become the best blacksmith humanity had ever seen.

Slightly invigorated and desperate for something to take his mind off all of this, Jeremiah went back to his shop.

As he went, he felt himself forgetting the pictures he’d just seen. What were they? Who was the child that should have been in the pictures?

A moment of clarity came, and he realized his memories were fading too. Of course they were. If he had died days ago, then the man who remembered his own childhood was also dead.

He got to the shop, placed the box full of money still on the counter inside his safe, and glanced at the newspaper on top of the pile of newspapers he’d been meaning to read. The latest was from four days ago, and it was his village’s weekly newspaper.

A small square on the left bottom corner of the cover had the following headline: “Unnamed tomb in Saint Catharine’s Cemetery baffles local residents.”

He dove for the newspaper like a hungry beast going after dying prey. The article was short, and all it added to the headline was that no one could say when that tomb had first appeared. Jeremiah combed the newspaper pile and found the previous week’s newspaper, which also had an article on the unmarked tomb, yet the article was written as if the journalists had just discovered the tomb.

Oh no.

Oh no no no.

If this was supposed to be his tomb, then it meant no one would ever remember him, as the memory of his identity would vanish, for he had died long ago, in the past. Every time someone stumbled on anything that could remind them of Jeremiah, they would forget it and be surprised to find it again.

It would mean his immortality was beyond useless. He was immortal, but an invisible blot to everyone else.

He got in his car and drove to the cemetery, five minutes away from his shop. Sure enough, there was no sign of his tomb. He went straight to the library at full speed, nearly killing himself in two near misses with other drivers. He parked in the middle of the street, sprinted the steps up to the library, and went straight to the middle-aged lady at the counter.

“Excuse me I need to see the newspaper records,” he blurted out. “The Weekly Lickie more specifically.”

“Yes?” She took as long to say that one word as he took for the whole sentence. “Your library card?”

“You need your library card for that?” he asked.

“Oh…yes.”

“My friend is already in the room and he has it,” he lied. “Which way is the room again?”

“The records are in the basement,” she said. “Come with me, I’ll take you there. I just need to check the card, no need for you to run upstairs and make a ruckus.” She took so long to talk it was unnerving him.

“Basement? Thanks!” And he was off.

He went down the old, musty steps, and into the dusty darkness of the basement. He wasted no time searching for the switch and used his phone’s flashlight instead. He found the boxes containing the local newspaper and rummaged through them, paying no heed to the warnings to take care of the old paper.

The tomb kept on being rediscovered. The older the newspaper was, the older the tomb seemed. The oldest edition there was seventy years old, and the yellowed photo showed a tomb taken by vines and creepers, the stone chipped and cracked, like a seventy-year-old tomb.

It made perfect, terrifying sense. He died towards the past, thus his tomb got older the farther back in time it was. How the hell was he getting out of this mess? By dying? By striking a deal? How could he find Death again? How did he make her come to him?

How? How!

He went to the first floor of the library and found the book he was searching for; one he’d stumbled across in his teens because of a history project. It was a book written in the late 1800s by the founders of the town about the town itself.

Jeremiah searched the index of the book and found what he was searching for. A chapter named “The Tomb.” In it was a discolored picture of his tomb and a hypothesis of how that tomb was already there. The stone was extremely weathered, barely standing, but there’s no doubt about what it was. His tomb. His grave. Grave zero.

He was doomed. Eternal life without sharing it with anyone was not a life. It was just eternal survival.

He left the library and went home to sleep, defeated and lost.

In the dream he’s in a field on top of a hill. The surrounding hills look familiar, and Jeremiah sees he’s in his town’s cemetery. Before him is an unmarked tomb, the shape well familiar to him. It’s his tomb. His resting place. Yet now there’s a door of stone in front of it. He kneels and pries it open. It opens easily as if made of paper.

Stairs of ancient stone descend into the darkness, curling into an ever-infinite destination. Jeremiah has nowhere to go. No time to live any longer. He died, and presently lives. He knows that is not right. It is time to fix his mistakes.

So he takes the first step, descends, sees the stairwell is not as dark as he thought. Though the sky is now a pinprick of light above him, there’s another source of light farther down.

The level below has a door of stone as well. He opens it and sees a blue sky, the same hills, but a different fauna. There are plants he’s never seen, scents he’s never smelled, and animals he’s never seen. He sees a gigantic bison, a saber-tooth, and a furry elephant—a mammoth. He should be surprised. Awed, even. But he’s numb. He’s tired. He’s out of time.

He looks at himself in a puddle and sees a different version of himself. He’s thinner, his hairline not as receded, his beard shorter, spottier. He’s younger.

He returns to the staircase, goes down another level, finds another door. He steps out and is greeted by a dark sky, yet it’s still day. The sun’s a red spot in the darkened sky. Darkened? Darkened by what? The smell of something burning hits him, and he notices flakes of ash falling from the sky. There are only a few animals around—flying reptiles and a few rodents. Dinosaurs and mice. There’s a piece of ice by the tomb, and he looks at himself in it. His face lacks any facial hair whatsoever, pimples line his cheeks and forehead, and his hair is long. He does not recognize his reflection. All he knows is that the memory of what his eyes see is dead—long dead.

The cold air and the smell of fire and decay are too much for him, and thus down again he goes. There’s another door down below. The handle seems higher but that is because he’s shorter. He opens it and sees a gigantic, feathered beast with sharp teeth as big as a human head coming straight at him. He slams the door closed.

He looks at his hands and sees they are the hands of a child. He doesn’t know what these hands have felt. Doesn’t remember. Must’ve been someone else.

There are still stairs going down yet another floor. As he descends, his legs wobble, grow weak and fat, until he’s forced to slow down to a crawl, meaty limbs struggling to hold him as he climbs down the steps. The steps are nearly as tall as him now.

This door has no handle. All he has to do is push. He crawls, his baby body like a sack of liquid, impossible to move in the way he wants. Beyond the door is lightning and dark clouds of sulfur and acid. There is no life. There is nothing but primitive chaos.

The door closes. He cannot go outside. He must not go back. The only way is down.

The last flight of stairs is painful. His body is too fresh, too naked and fragile for these steps. Nonetheless, he makes his way down, the steps now taller than him, like mountains, like planets he has to make his way across.

The floor he reaches is the last one. There are no stairs anymore. There’s only ground and the doorframe without a door. Beyond it is darkness. Pure darkness. Not made of the absence of light, but of the absence of everything. Pure nullification. Pure nothingness except for the slight outline of a scythe growing in the fabric of the universe, roots stretching across the emptiness. So familiar.

This is it. This is what he’s been searching for. This is what he needs. He knows nothing else. Remembers nothing else. He is now the blankest of slates. He is nothing.

He pushes his body forwards with his arms in one last breath, crawling into that final oblivion.

“General Houghton, I have an urgent matter I need to brief you about. It can’t wait, Sir. It’s regarding the alien communication.”

“Oh? Ok, sure. I take it you haven’t already discussed this with Doctor Bergstradt?” Iris Cahill looked around to confirm no one else was within earshot, then nodded discreetly. “Thank you for coming directly to me. I’ll meet you in conference room four.”

“We’re still in the preliminary stages of studying the Centaurian message to ‘Halley One’; but a few of the things are very troubling. Actually, they are terrifying, if I may be so candid.”

Houghton’s aged brow furrowed in mounting stress at the unfolding disclosure. Deep lines on his forehead bore decades of worry and the burden of tightly-held military secrets. Holding them in aged him.

‘TERRIAN RACE I SHALL EEET YOU SOON.’

The old man spilled his coffee upon reading the first-ever extraterrestrial ‘telegram’. It definitely wasn’t the ‘warm welcome’ everyone hoped for. His hand trembled and a vein in his bulbous forehead throbbed visibly. The crude, rudimentary sentence was blunt, unapologetically intimidating, and offered very little in the way of allowing for follow-up communication. By all appearances, it gave even less hope for peace, in the General’s gritty assessment. He immediately reached for his cell, and thanked his nervous informant for apprising him of the situation.

“Go ahead and advise Dr. Bergstadt as you ordinarily would, Iris. Just act natural. You must not appear too suspicious or he’ll realize you’re leaking intel to me. I’m curious how he plans to handle the situation but it really doesn’t matter now. ‘The cat is out of the bag’. The aliens know we exist now; and that damn introduction message we broadcast gave them a clear roadmap right back to Earth! I must inform the President that Nicolas’ ‘deep space field trip’ has led to dangerous consequences. I can’t leave the United Earth Defense Forces with their pants down because the former administration had a ‘hard-on’ for the patronizing S.O.B. running things. We’re leaving a trail of human breadcrumbs back to our door!”

——————

“Yikes! That’s the message ‘Halley One’ received from our brand new extraterrestrial pals? Are you sure? I would’ve thought they’d be able to spell better than that!”

Dr. Bergstadt’s strange attempt at gallows humor wasn’t immediately apparent to the stunned staff. The overwhelming mood to receiving a direct threat of extinction was understandably dark. They sat in uncomfortable silence for couple minutes as the doctor cackled alone about his tongue-in-cheek jest. In spite of the harrowing situation, a few of them eventually relaxed a bit and cracked a morbid smile in solidarity.

The Doc certainly knew how to break up a tense situation, but the General definitely wasn’t laughing about the idea of the entire human race being eaten. The old man was wound up like an overextended rubber band and ready to snap, when the Doctor asked AJ to offer his perspective on the cryptic correspondence. He was subtly setting the stage for AJ to occupy a more prominent role in the organization. Thankfully, General Houghton managed to rein in his rage long enough to witness what both men did best: ‘think outside the box’.

“Come on people! You’re ready to declare an alien holocaust against humanity because of a one sentence transcript? Please! People see what they want to see, I guess. If you live in perpetual fear of the unknown, then you’ll translate this initial message from a different species, as a horrific death threat! If you instead recognize that all beings grow and evolve in their understanding over time, then hopefully you can pull back on the paranoia. With a more open mind, you’ll be able to recognize a simple linguistic error when you see one.”

AJ paused briefly for dramatic effect. He looked around but stopped at the guilty smirk of old man Houghton slinking down in his chair. Nicholas grinned at AJ’s confident swagger. His new protege was definitely up to the task of senior leadership. Obviously the two of them already discussed the vague introduction privately; and had a reassuring ‘truth bomb’ prepared to drop on the room full of gloomy doomsayers.

“Look!”; AJ continued. “There’s no ‘M’ in the message, right? Everyone seems to have decided the weird spelling error is supposed to say: ‘EAT’. As in: ‘they want to EAT us’. Thats a very negative assumption based upon fear of the unknown, and immediately adopting the worst case scenario. Why would you go there?”

Nicholas stood up to piggyback on AJ’s commonsense analysis. “Here’s an infinitely better interpretation. What does a capital ‘E’ do when the character is rotated 90° clockwise? It becomes an ‘M’, right? Does it make sense that non-terrestrial beings who just encountered our species and the English language for the first time MIGHT accidentally place one of the letters sideways or get the pronouns wrong? It’s no different than when children reverse or mirror certain letters while learning how to write.”

That explanation seemed to reassure most of his worried staff but a few of them, including the General, were still on the fence. The Doc was prepared for that skepticism and unveiled their second correspondence, received only 45 minutes earlier.

‘EE ARE EXCITED TO LEARN OF YOUR NEE SPECIES.’

“The same uppercase ‘E’ character rotated 90° counterclockwise also makes a ‘W’; as in ‘WE’ and ‘NEW’. Make sense now, General? At this point, we would be hard pressed to compose anything intelligible in their language, so these minor errors are perfectly understandable. That is, if we even knew their language at all. It’s ludicrous to automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion, with so little to go on.”

The obvious focus of the lecture was on the old man and his fearful flock of followers. All eyes were upon him for being the oppositional ringleader, but he wasn’t alone in his suspicious views. Several others on the Doctor’s staff were experts at their jobs but failed to endear the optimistic spirit needed to forge a path ahead. The ‘glass half full’ speech was for them too. The hope was to inspire everyone to embrace a more open-faith based mindset, and work toward the same common goal of unity.

“It’s genuinely humbling to recognize the minuscule microcosm we occupy, as part of an infinitely larger universe. Some of us however aren’t handling that realization too well. We want to see ourselves as the absolute center of the universe, but we aren’t. As proven conclusively today, we aren’t even alone in our exploration of space and there will definitely be others! No doubt about that. The probability of encountering hostile species may be just as high or higher than discovering friendly alien partners who want to collaborate peacefully in unraveling the mysteries of our origins. I will openly acknowledge that today, but I’m asking everyone here in this room to keep an open mind. Try to give the other life forms we discover along the way, the benefit of the doubt. Can we all do that?”

Houghton finally reached his breaking point. He could no longer suppress his distain for ‘the willful embrace of risk’. His occupation was founded upon the leading assumption that those across the proverbial aisle had suspicious, ulterior motives. They were not to be trusted because their own interests conflicted directly with ours. He wasn’t wired to give ‘the benefit of the doubt’. Nicholas and AJ’s little ‘pep rally’ hadn’t swayed his hardened worldview one single iota. If anything, it cemented it more.

“What happens when you are dead wrong about one of them, Bergstadt? Will you finally regret not regarding the considerable potential for malice in alien species we bump into, as a naive character flaw on your part? It only takes a single error in judgment to potentially exterminate the human race! No sir! We can’t afford to blindly trust ANY species we meet out there in the cold recesses of outer space. It’s madness and foolhardy. I love our planet and people too much to allow that to happen.”

“It’s interesting you say that, General. In no way do I doubt your commitment to the Earth or its people. Not in the least. That’s why you were assigned to this mission a decade ago. Your job is to protect. Thats what you do. Maybe I AM naive. I can step outside my own confidence and acknowledge that my unapologetic feelings of hope could cause a blind spot to legitimate danger. That’s why I’m erring on the side of caution and assigning you to be our official Centauri ambassador. I’ve decided to trust your judgement about whether we should partner with them, or not. Iris Cahill will be your second in command.”

You could’ve heard a pin drop as the unexpected announcement stunned the entire assembly. No one was more shocked than Houghton himself. He fully expected to be dismissed and courtmartialed for finally putting his disagreement cards on the table. Instead, he was being trusted to meet and handle the diplomatic affairs of the first ever meeting with the very species he doubted. It didn’t add up.

The bold, incomprehensible move by the Doctor felt surreal and insincere; but didn’t come across as actually possible. It appeared to be a symbolic gesture of revenge, and a creative overture to embarrass him in front of his silent supporters. He was about to stand up and verbally concede the moral victory to Nicholas, when the complete mission plan was laid out.

“I’ve been working on the next stage of our ambitious project, and there’s no two better choices than you and Iris to officially represent the Earth to the Centauris! The president has already green-lit your involvement. Since both of you have outspoken misgivings but are also duty-bound professionals, you can neutralize our potential to underestimate the risks.”

The General was at a rare loss for words. He could only look down in bewilderment. His ‘chess opponent’ had outmatched him at every turn. Any opposition verbalized in front of the team after repeatedly advocating for greater caution in dealing with alien species would come across as ‘backtracking’. The political optics would eternally paint him to be a coward if he didn’t graciously accept this ‘prestigious honor’, assigned by the president himself. Checkmate. He was done for.

“We have triangulated where the alien broadcast originated from, and have calculated a convenient intersection point. Ordinarily, a space journey of that magnitude would take hundreds of years, but through the use of the Hyperion wormhole and beneficial overlapping nexus points, your flight will only take a little over four years! Your state-of-the-art spacecraft will be ready to launch in only five weeks. Congratulations to both of you!”

When I was on the field tending to the injured, I saw how some from our camps treated the captives. They weren’t even considered to be animals. No. They were seen less than that. They wouldn’t even bother to spit in their mouths, even if they begged for water. I can somewhat understand this behavior. It was a frustrating war. Friends were lost. Families were severed. Of course, some would be angry, and you couldn’t get angry at your superiors, right?

What bothers me even now is the captives’ behavior. They knew we didn’t even have enough supplies for ourselves. So why did they bother to beg? I mean, they certainly saw how their comrades, who were handed a shovel, didn’t come back after following the rifleman in the forest. You’d think that the rifleman coming back alone with the shovel in hand would be obvious enough. Oh, the woes of hope.

So many years have passed since then. There was a time when we thought that those who died were the lucky ones. It all seems as though it were a distant nightmare. Thinking back now, despite the many horrors of war, I have had a good life over the years. I started a family. I manage a clinic, or a healthcare institution, as you would call it. I even had the joy of embracing my daughter, Maria. I wasn’t the only one who prospered. My brothers in arms, those few who have survived, have found their own peace and fortune. Now, that time seems as though it were a dream. Why couldn’t we just continue on like this?

When the first bomb was dropped, we all saw the horrors and the pain that it caused. Yet, you just had to continue talking about it. You would announce how some other country has gotten its hands on it as well and keep us all alerted about it. We were all so scared.

Soon, many years passed, more countries possessed it, and the news about it just became another announcement we would hear on the television, sort of like how a new greaseball is elected into whatever position in some other country. Wars were declared. Battles were fought. They were all reported to us, but there were just so many and so far away.

I was always prepared. I never forgot. How could I? The instruction videos were always announced. My wife, on the other hand, would say that nothing will happen and that this is their way to remind us why we should be paying our taxes. I always hoped that she would be right, but there was always that chance. So I followed the news, the instructions, and the pamphlets. I trusted you, and I believed I was ready for what was to come, but I wasn’t. We never were.

My wife wasn’t home when the sirens sounded. Perhaps she was one of the lucky ones. I was home watching a show about pigs and other animals when the emergency broadcast appeared. I knew what it was immediately and grabbed my daughter downstairs into the basement, where I had made my preparations. I attempted to call my wife, but she wasn’t responding. After listening to the sound of my heart matching the rhythm of the dial, I did what I had to and barricaded the doors to the basement.

A distant crack was heard, and soon, a minute, no, less than that, maybe thirty seconds later, a terrible wind flew in our way, with a force so fierce it felt more like a solid mass than wind. Everything on the surface was demolished. We could hear it—every wooden, metallic, and ceramic object being torn, shredded, or broken into pieces. We didn’t feel safe either, for the ground was shaking the entire time. I feared the roof falling onto us, so I covered my daughter and curled up with her in a corner. I could feel Maria screech into me, but the sheer mass of destruction taking place upstairs obscured it from ever reaching my ears. I tightened my eyes and prayed that it would end, and suddenly it did.

All was quiet, and if it weren’t for my daughter, I don’t think I would’ve realized it sooner. We sat in silence for a little while. Maria sat beside me with a toy in her hands. She held it so awkwardly that it seemed as if the toy’s concept was alien to her. I, on the other hand, didn't know what to do. I realized that, despite memorizing every instruction from all the pamphlets and news articles, I wasn’t prepared. Sure, we had the food and the water, but how should I rationalize it if I don’t know when help will arrive? What if we run out of food? Should I go out and scavenge for some at the neighbors’ place? What if they have none? Then, what about Lisa? Surely, she wasn’t answering her call because she was rushing to a shelter, right? What about the water?

“Daddy?” Maria said, breaking my chain of thoughts. I looked at her and knew what she was going to ask. I didn’t want to hear it. “Where is Mama?"

“She’s at Uncle Brigg’s house.” I said this when she first asked the question.

“She’s visiting grandmother Georgiana.” I said three days later.

“Is Mama ever coming back?” she finally asked. Lisa never answered the calls, but I couldn’t tell her that. I said yes. She was crying that night. I don’t think she even went to sleep.

One day, I noticed the signal was back on. I browsed through countless sites. They were all saying the same thing.

“Help was coming.”

“Stay inside.”

“Give out your address and personal information on this website. We will send help as soon as we can.” That gave me some hope, but when I saw the posts there, I knew this was just another way to keep us from being restless. I may sound pretentious saying all of this. You may call me a pessimist. I am not. I am being realistic. I never liked living in fantasy, imagining dragons, princesses, etc. No, they inspire hope, and hope, when there is too much of it, leads to disappointment.

If there is one thing I agree with in those posts, it’s that we just had to stay inside. We had to. We are fortunate enough to have supplies to last us a while. There is no reason for us to go outside. Eventually, they would send help. Even if that doesn’t happen, we can only remain inside for at least a month. I could do it.

We have ample food. However, it always seemed like we had too little water. It’s really only something psychological, I thought. There were a dozen cans of food, and there were only ten water containers. We actually had 190 liters of water. We had enough. I was too distracted.

I woke up briefly four days ago. It was one of those moments of comfort where you just don’t want to get up. I almost forgot about everything that had happened until I felt wind blowing on me. I jumped up and saw the door open. It was raining outside. I ran up the stairs and immediately shut it. Then, I scanned the basement. No one broke inside. We weren’t robbed. Maria was missing.

Without thinking, I rushed outside without putting anything on. It was then that I finally had the chance to see the destruction. It was horrible. My house, and what remained of it, was in utter disarray. And when I finally stepped outside, my first thoughts were "charred." It seemed like a plague. Everything was tainted by it. No being or thing, big or small, avoided its contamination, and the rain, its harbinger of doom, was the spreader of disease.

I quickly came to my senses and again found myself not knowing what to do. I ran two streets toward the left. Then I ran back and rushed to the opposite side. I couldn’t find her. I was panting. Adrenaline was pumping in my veins. I didn’t know what to do. As the wind blew past me, I came to understand dread. Suddenly, in the distance, I noticed her tiny silhouette approaching me, and I quickly ran up to her. She wanted to go back inside. She had seen enough.

My daughter has passed away. She hasn’t been feeling well since she came back. I tried to keep her as comfortable as I could. I knew we were lost the moment she mentioned how nauseous she felt. With her passing, the very last reason for my existence has disappeared as well. Thankfully, I, too, am sick, and I am not writing this for any help.

“So, why are you writing this then?” would be the first question a random guy on this website would ask.

“Where is your address?” would be what the “eventual help” would ask.

I will not answer the latter, as there is no point in playing along with liars, but to those of you who are also on this website, I shall provide an answer to your curiosities. I am angry. That would be the short answer. I am furious. To think that the fate of me and my family is being decided by people who I don’t even know, who I don’t even have a chance to look into their eyes to as they press the button, which led to the deaths of everyone I know, who failed to keep their promises to keep us safe, who are now blaming those that are “unprepared for the inevitable," and who have created this website for me to cry and shred the last bit of my dignity. I am disgusted and repulsed beyond any words I can come up with. I shall keep the last of my pride and pass away peacefully, knowing that I have said the last of what I have to say. Damn you to the deepest parts of hell. I will not beg for help.