A Good Man Goes to War

Vietnam wasn’t as bad as everybody said it was.  Well, that’s what I thought to myself when I got to the pristine beaches and a borderline cookout was set up to greet us.  The United States Military sure as hell knew how to set up a reception party for their boys.  In my opinion, that’s what killed more FNGs than anything.  Sure, they heard the warnings from their COs and NCOs but why would something so bad have cookouts?  Come to find out, it’s the same reason why we fought guerrilla troops like they were the German infantry and made sure our boys had their ice cream rations in WWII.  They wanted to prove a point.  They wanted to flex their muscles and prove their military prowess.  Their goal was not to win, just to show off.

Regardless, my perception of Vietnam quickly changed when I got in my first firefight.  Nothing can prepare you for actual combat.  All the training in the world couldn’t prepare you for the sheer chaos.  There’s a reason why experience trumps training, because only experience can make somebody used to something like that.  And by a little bit of luck and a little bit of smarts I quickly got used to firefights.  I don’t know if it was because of being on my own after my parents died or because of some weird inherited trait, but I was always able to find my way out of trouble.  Some little tick in the back of my head telling me something was off.  It could just be that being on my own forced me to trust my own gut and nothing else.  Either way, it made for a damned good soldier.

I got plenty of medals for outstanding service, but not a single purple heart.  The worst injuries I got were generally from stupidity on my part, but never inflicted on me by somebody…or something else.  The thing with Vietnam is it was…different from the States.  Charlie had a knack for digging tunnels, Chu Chi tunnels, and ambushing us using them, but unlucky for them I had a knack for eyeing them before they got the chance.  We’d use flame throwers or white phosphorus to take them out.  The tunnels that had Vietcong in them felt fine to me after we sent in the fire, but there were some… well I had a feeling there was something still in there.

There were plenty of instances where bodies showed up without a mark on them.  The Docs always had explanations for how they died, but the bodies didn’t feel right.  Sometimes they had looks of pure terror, but other times they looked blissful.  All I knew was the explanations those quacks gave me were wrong.  Their explanations were just a way for them to not look stupid rather than a true explanation.  There comes a point where someone receives too much schooling and they become afraid to not know something.  So, they bend facts to fit a theory rather than embrace the unknown.  The things that really proved there was something wrong in Nam were the people who went missing, but nobody remembered ever having met them.

I was laying against a log, drifting into a sort of sleepy fog one day.  That happened sometimes, but in quiet times like this I liked to embrace it.  Everything in this one moment was perfect with the sun warming my face and my boys sitting around me armed to the teeth and willing to protect me with their lives, and I was willing to do the same for them.  They were all around me, all of them.  Both of them.  But there was that feeling at the back of my head.  Were they all around me?  Both of them?  No, all of them.  All three of them should be around me but there were only two of them here.

“Where’s Lew?” I asked them.  I remembered.  He went for a piss but never came back.

“Who’s Lew?” Johnson asked.

I laughed.  “Ight, stop fucking with me.  Where’s Lew.”

“You okay, Mason?” Bozzy asked.  “We don’t know a Lew.”

I was about to continue, but I bit my tongue.  That feeling in the back of my head was there telling me to shut the hell up.  I needed to laugh it off and play along.  The sad thing was the same shit happened to Bozzy a week later.  Then Johnson a week after that.  Soon, my boys were gone.  That shit hit hard, but I had a long tour left.  From now on, I had to keep numero uno safe because there was something else out there.

After about half my tour, I wound up making some new boys but I made sure not to get too close in case the same thing happened to them that happened to Lew, Bozzy, and Johnson.  I used them mainly for camouflage so I wouldn’t stand out in my company.  A man sitting by himself was an easy target whether it be dish duty from your CO, a Charlie sniper, or whatever the hell got my old boys.  There were other instances of those weird disappearances, and for whatever reason I could remember them when nobody else did.  It didn’t matter much for the war effort though.  More young men just filled the ranks that the MIA left open.

One night, our camp was ambushed.  We were holding them off okay.  I took out a couple of Charlie myself, but I was getting that same feeling in the back of my head.  There was something off here.  I had to get moving.  I started shuffling, but movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it was just the tree shadows swaying with their master in the wind.  But that feeling was still there.  It was telling me to get away from the shadow.  For a rare moment, I hesitated.  Why was I feeling afraid of a shadow?  It finally dawned on me, too late unfortunately, that there was no wind to make the trees sway.  In fact, the trees weren’t swaying at all.  But just like that, the feeling left me.

The firefight ended pretty soon after that, and we rounded up our dead to ship them back to the states.  All my boys were alive and accounted for, so I was satisfied.  That morning, March 30th 1965, an Armistice was called.  Two weeks later and President LBJ signed in an end to US involvement in Vietnam.  I was going home.  When I got home, I was met with praise and adoration from the Civies.  It was like I was in a dream.  Soon, I met the love of my life, a tall woman with curly brown hair and beautifully pale skin.  Her name was Charlotte.  We got married within a year and had a baby on the way two years after that.  I didn’t think I could be happier than my wedding day, but that all changed the minute that baby boy was born.

My life was perfect.  I was pulling in good money working as a detective, raising my boy, and married to my best friend.  But there was that feeling in the back of my head.  Ever since I saw that shadow, I got the feeling everything was off.  I felt like I had unfinished business back in Vietnam.  I thought about what happened to Lew, Bozzy, and Johnson every once in a while.  I thought about all those untouched bodies popping up, both US and Charlie alike.  My life was perfect right now, but it just felt off.

One day I was walking my boy, Samson, to baseball practice after school.  He was about eight, just finishing his recovery from a chicken pox party.  His face had scratch marks from the pox, but at least he was immune to it now.  I grabbed the back of his neck, giving it an affectionate squeeze.  The missus was frying up chicken for dinner tonight, and I felt my stomach rumble at the thought.  But just like that, everything was ripped away from me.

I sat up, my entire body in pain.  Dirt covered my face and I looked down to find blood poking through my shirt.  I looked around me to find it to be nighttime.  I was behind the same barricade I was behind all those years ago.  I looked down at my hands to find them ten years younger.  I peeked over the barricade to see bodies littering the ground all around me.  Next to me, shrapnel was suspended in the air as something writhed on the ground in agony.  A shadow moved with the contortions of the suspended shrapnel.

Everything was gone.  My wife.  My boy.  My life.  I didn’t care about anything except for my family, and that was ripped away from me.  For a moment, I felt my brain melting.  Everything was gone. Everything. Everything.

Everything.

But I was pulled back to reality as a bubbling rage welled in my gut.  This creature writhing in agony from a mortar shell had taken my life from me.  It brought me back to Nam.  These disappearances, my boys, my fucking goddam family were all taken from me because of these things.  I was done with the running.  I was done with the hiding.  These fuckers were going to pay.

For the next couple of months, my rampage was biblical.  I figured out the shadow creature that had touched me was one of a whole bunch of those fuckers.  The mortar shell that killed the thing had an iron casing, so I knew iron could kill them.  At first, I thought I’d have to kill them with knives, but I found that simply touching them with a descent amount of iron would kill them.  I spent whole nights filing down gun barrels into a fine sand, then putting it all into a bucket.  Once I knew what to look for to find those shits, I would set up a ring of those buckets around me and let those fuckers surround me.  Then I’d set off the small explosives I’d put in the buckets, and it would rain iron all around me.  I found out it wasn’t just those shadow people either.  There were things disguised as deer but would run towards gun fire, things that looked like sticks but when you looked away the stick would look completely different, and even things that looked like people but didn’t act like people.  That was just scratching the surface of creatures I learned about.  Conventional weapons of war worked against those ones.  It was things like shadow people I had to get crafty with.  There were things, invisible things, that could control people.  They would lead them into the woods, and everyone would forget they ever existed.  I called those things Pied Pipers.  They were impossible to see, but they emitted a very cold aura.  In the Vietnam Jungle, it was pretty easy to locate them.  From there, a mixture of iron dust and salt would take care of it.  Salt wouldn’t kill them, but I found that it hurt them really bad if they touched it.

I found that once I started making a reputation for myself, they would band together and try to kill me.  I used that to my advantage.  I would get them to chase me, and I’d run right into a Chu Chi Tunnel I had snuck into the night before and laced with my special iron bombs.  I’d mix in shrapnel and a little napalm to take care of the tangible creatures.  The Chu Chi Tunnels weren’t too hard to sneak into so long as I was dressed like Charlie and kept my face hidden with some dirty bandages, a pinch of dirt, and a helmet.  As the creatures got distracted from me and began to…feed, I’d detonate my bombs and kill two birds with one stone.

As the months wore on, my rage couldn’t be satiated by just killing.  Those fuckers took everything from me.  I began to capture them and keep them on one of the abandoned Chu Chi Tunnels.  Salt worked great on most of them, but silver worked better on the ones that looked like people.  Come to find out, they were vampires.  They screeched and screamed, but we were underground.  There was nobody to hear them except me, and I loved every minute of it.  After a while, I’d get board and let them stew for a bit before I killed them.  Let them live out the last couple hours, waiting helplessly for my sweet embrace.  That’s when they started telling me things.  Little tidbits of information.  I came to learn about what they were and how they killed.  I learned more about their unique weaknesses, and why iron hurt them all.  Iron sapped their magic, and magic maintained many of their body’s cellular processes.  Silver hurt the ones who were humans but afflicted with a mutagenic magical disease like vampires and werewolves.

There was one notable thing I did learn.  One day as I was pouring salt onto a shadow person, it managed to scream out two words.  “It’s…Real,” It screamed into my mind.

I stopped dumping salt on it.  “What do you mean?” I asked.

The shadow person began to brush off the suspended salt in the air, its shadow moving in conjunction with it’s movements.  “It’s real,” it repeated.  “The dream you had.”

“Explain,” I commanded.

“You…humans think that when we touch you, we simulate a dream while we steal your life force.  We don’t do that.”

“Then what the hell did I experience?” I asked, the anger of having my family referenced by this creature bubbling to the surface again.

“Another dimension.  The optimal timeline for you.  When you were forced to wake up, you had died in that dimension.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“I give you my word.  Us magical creatures are bound by our word.”

“Do you swear to continue to tell me the truth?” I asked, not trusting that this was real.

“I do.”

“Then would I be able to see them again?  Would you be able to put me back?”  If it said yes, I wouldn’t trust it, but I would follow up with that lead.  If it said no, then I might start to think this whole magically bound by their word thing was real.

“No.  That timeline moves much faster than yours.  In the two minutes it takes me to sap your life, you would have lived out the rest of your life in that timeline.  Your family is long dead,” it said with a laugh.

I quickly thrust an iron tipped spear into it, sapping away the magic that sustained its consciousness.  The creature died quickly and painlessly, which was my mercy to it for giving me useful information.  I put on my salt laced gloves and unshackled another from the wall and threw it into the cage.  I began to pour salt onto it, letting the screams resume.  This was the beginning of my transformation from a mindless killer of the supernatural into a smart killer of the supernatural.

As the months wore on, some even began to swear fealty to me, promising to serve and protect me for all time.  I killed the first couple who made those promises, but then a thought occurred to me.  I could use them.  I could use them to kill other magical creatures.  I accepted one deal with a vampire, just to see how it worked.  It explained to me that magical creatures were magically bound by their word, confirming what the shadow man had said.  Of course I didn’t believe him at face value, so I had him kill himself just to make extra sure.  When he did, I knew it must be true.  Vampires were selfish by nature, so it wouldn’t sacrifice itself like that just to convince me of a lie.

I accepted a couple more deals.  Some only wanted me to have them protect me, which I allowed.  Others were willing to do anything.  I found that ramping up the torture made them more…willing to strike a deal.  The ones who gave their will over to me completely presented challenges that I hadn’t even imagined.  When a creature agrees to give it’s will over to someone, the person who is receiving their will has to dominate it with their own first.  It’s as if the creature invades your mind and you have to squash it into dust.  I found out after I completely dominated my first magical creature that it was a last-minute ploy to try and kill me.  It did not succeed.

After the magical creature’s will is dominated, it’s as if that creature no longer has a will of its own.  It requires almost no will on my own part to keep it dominated, meaning I was free to go and subjugate more magical creatures.  But each creature I dominated took its toll.  At first, I was limited to having just five creatures under my will at any one time, but as my skill at dominating magical creatures increased, so did my willpower itself.  I soon found that I could have ten creatures under my will…and then twenty, thirty, fifty, and so on until I didn’t know what my true limits were.

The creatures under my direct will were very useful in helping me to capture and/or kill magical creatures.  As time wore on, I gathered an army of magical creatures sworn to me.  I became so adept at controlling them, commanding them was like moving my arm. When my tour in Vietnam came to an end, I couldn’t bring most of them back with me, so I instructed them to continue to kill the magical creatures in the Vietnam Jungles and to never harm another human.  Those whose contracts with me were not subject to my direct will I simply killed.  I did bring back several shadow people and a Pied Piper with me, instructing one of the shadow people to remain in my shadow.  If anything threatened me at close range, the shadow person was instructed to feed off of it.  I brought back a whole host of creatures I called wraiths.  They were able to completely take over the body of a person.  That person remained conscious the entire time, and the wraith fed off that person’s fear.  They were ethereal creatures that I could not directly see or hear, but I could communicate with them through vampires and detect them by the chill in the air they brought with them.  Once I had them dominated, it didn’t matter if I couldn’t see or hear them. They were subject to my will, and as a result I knew exactly where they were and what they were thinking at all times. I had some ideas for these creatures for when I got back to Boston.

I expected that once I left the Jungles of Vietnam, I wouldn’t encounter any more supernatural.  I got back states side and enrolled in the Boston PD, and I spent about two years working as a beat cop while I worked my way to becoming a detective like in my old life.  I also began setting my plans in motion with the creatures I had brought back with me.  During those two years I noticed similar things to what I noticed back in Nam, but also different.  I noticed buildings that nobody else seemed to pay attention to, but they did when I pointed it out to them.  I noticed vampires, witches, and pied pipers but I also noticed creatures I had never encountered in Nam.  They were smarter…more subtle in their approach to hunting their prey.  Creatures that seemed to gravitate towards cities.  I certainly had my work cut out for me.

An Odyssey

Sabastian sat alone in his cave, pondering what he was going to do for the day. He definitely needed to go hunting, but he needed to be wary of when and where he did that else he antagonize his brother. He could also run errands for father and mother just to stave off the boredom. That should at least keep his brother off his tail… at least until he got out of eye and earshot of his parents. As he thought more and more, he found himself focused on avoiding the ire of his brother.

Getting irritated, Sabastian thrust himself up from the nest he made in the corner of his cave. He splashed cold water on his face from the small river of flowing water that passed through the natural pocket of air deep underground. Catching his reflection in the water, he splashed it. “Hideous,” he muttered. Once again, his deformity reminded him why his brother was always harassing him.

Standing up tall, trying his best to put confidence into his posture, he went through the cave mouth into the larger expanse of labyrinth. He had spent his whole life underground within the labyrinth. His father was cursed to wander the halls, never to leave. Mother was bound and determined to stay by his side as much as possible, but she had her own limitations. As was the life of his people.

Padding his way through the familiar hallways of the labyrinth, he came to the Moonpool Antechamber. Here, Sebastian’s family had access to the ocean, as well as a whole civilization of underwater dwellers called mermaids. In fact, that’s how his father met his mother. After decades of learning and exploring this maze, his father happened upon this exit to the ocean. He met Sebastian’s mother while she was basking on a rock, enjoying the cool breeze that seemed to pervade these hallways.

The Moonpool Antechamber was large, the majority of it having crystal clear water filling most of the floor space. There was a ring of stone brick providing a walkway around it, and an island of jagged rock right in the middle. It was illuminated by light given off from the underwater city far beneath us. That is the rock Sebastian’s mother normally relaxes on with his father. In fact, they were there right now.

“Sabastian!” Mother exclaimed, her tail flapping in excitement. “You were sleeping like the undead. I heard you walking around endlessly last night in your room.”

“You know I don’t need to sleep much, mother,” Sebastian said.

“Oh, pish posh. You’re half mermaid, you need your sleep. What is bothering you?”

Sebastian sighed. It was true, he truly did not need much sleep. “Nothing, mother. Do we need any more food?” he said, trying to change the subject.

“We need more kelp for our salads tonight. Your brother is out hunting shark for our steaks,” mother said.

“I was hoping to go out hunting as well,” Sebastian muttered.

“No need to fret about that,” Father interjected in his deep gravely voice. “Your brother is better suited to hunting shark. His horns and fins give him an advantage underwater.”

That was to say, Sebastian’s lack of horns and fins put him at a disadvantage. “Fine,” Sebastian pouted.

Not wanting to talk to his father anymore, Sebastian dove into the water. Both of his siblings were able to breath underwater because of their gills, but Sebastian lacked those. Another one of his disfigurements. His lack of fins also made it slow progress through the water, but thankfully he could hold his breath for hours at a time. He found that keeping his legs together and kicking sent him through the water the fastest, so he did so through the hundreds of feet of water down to the sea floor.

He could have simply traded for the kelp in the city, but he always caught unnerved looks whenever he went there. They always seemed scared of him, despite him never doing anything to cause them fear. So instead, he decided it wisest to forage for the kelp. It was probably for the better since it tasted better when it was freshly picked. For the next hour, he spent his time collecting the kelp while basking in his surroundings. It always relaxed him to be away from others and enjoy the sensation of cool water flowing over his skin. The resistance it offered to his movements felt like a gentle massage. And there was the ever-present feeling of flying. Being able to move in all three dimensions felt liberating to him. He felt unhindered by gravity.

Once he was done, he started his way back to the Moonpool Antechamber where he found his sister had decided to join them. He found that she had also gathered kelp.

“Second again, Sebastian,” she snorted.

“What the hell!” I blurted. “Why’d you also gather kelp.”

Mother looked apologetic. “You were taking a while, so I wanted to make sure we had enough in time for dinner.”

I looked around. “What about shark meat? Dion isn’t even back yet.” He felt a spark of anger within him at his mother’s lack of faith in his abilities. Never once has he been late coming back with either meat or vegetables for dinner, yet she insisted his siblings pick up his nonexistent slack.

“Oh stop harassing mother,” Alexandria said, putting her pile of kelp onto a platter. “She only wanted to make double sure you wouldn’t keep us hungry,” she taunted.

“You—” Sebastian began to yell, but his father growled loudly.

“Do not raise your voice, Sebastian,” he grumbled. His father looked at him with his flat pupils, horns glinting off the rippling light from the city beneath the water.

Sebastian shook his head, pulling himself out of the water so he could sulk in the corner. It wasn’t even worth the effort to continue trying to defend himself.

Just as Sebastian settled onto one of the steps leading into the labyrinth, the water burst forth as if a small explosion were set off. A figure shot up into the air. Dion. His powerful finned tail morphed into scaled legs just before landing onto solid ground. In his hands, he held a bloodied sand shark. His horns were stained with blood, the sea water having failed to fully wash them off before he came back.

“The prodigal son has returned!” Dion laughed, holding the shark above his head.

“That’s my boy!” Father said, jumping down from his perch next to mother. He walked over and embraced his son. Dion tossed the shark aside and reciprocated.

Holding Dion back at arm’s length, father said “That’s a big one. It give you much trouble?”

“Oh, I let it get a few licks in but it wasn’t much trouble.”

Father clapped him on the shoulder. “My boy,” he said proudly.

“Sebastian,” Dion called to me. “What do you say to some sparring while the women prepare dinner?” It was a simple request, but he only asked Sebastian because he knew he would win.

“I’m all set,” Sebastian responded, knowing how it would end regardless of what he wanted.

“Sebastian,” Father grumbled. “You must continue to spar with your brother to shore up the weaknesses bred into you by your deformities.”

“Deformities given to me by you two,” Sebastian retorted, referencing his father and mother.

“What did you say to me?”

“Oh, did you not hear me?” Sebastian asked.

There was a tense silence, broken by Father. “You two will spar. Now.”

Great. Sebastian stood up, stretching my muscles. He was just as strong as his brother, but Dion’s horns and hardened skull always gave him the advantage. Dion laughed at Sebastian’s prefight routine.

“Trying to show off?”

“No. Just ‘shoring up the weaknesses’ bred into me.”

“Fight!” Father said before Sebastian could get off another jab at them.

Dion charged at Sebastian, head lowered, and horns pointed directly at his abdomen. He easily dodged him, but father yelled “Do not be a coward! Minitours fight their opponents head on! We do not dance around them!”

As you have said a thousand times, Sebastian thought to himself.

Dion rounded on Sebastian again, charging at him with his head lowered. Sebastian lowered his head to meet his brother’s challenge. Their heads collided with a dull thud. Sebastian had learned long ago to weave his skull past his brother’s horns to at least attempt to level the playing field. However, Sebastian’s skull was not nearly as thick as his brother’s, so this still caused Sebastian much pain. Seeing double for a moment, Sebastian continued to push against his brother. Both of their necks bulging and straining against one another, neither seemed to gain the advantage. Dion knew they were in a stalemate, and Sebastian had much more stamina, so he always resorted to dirty tricks at this point. Dirty tricks their father knew nothing about. Dion’s face was covered in thick, course fir, which Sebastian lacked. He took advantage of this by rubbing it against Sebastian’s face. If it were just skin being rubbed, Sebastian could have powered through it, but Dion always managed to get it into Sebastian’s eyes. Sebastian would try to fight through the pain, but it distracted him enough that his muscles would give way. Dion plowed Sebastian to the ground, jamming his sharp horns into Sebastian’s abdomen, winning the fight.

Pulling his freshly bloodied horns out of Sebastian’s gut, Dion roared victoriously.

“That’s my boy!” Father exclaimed, earning him a quick wack from Mother.

Mother morphed her tail into a pair of legs and worked her way over to the gored Sebastian. “Sebastian, let me help—”

“I’ll be fine, mother,” he stated. He would be. The blood that had been spewing out of him mere moments ago was already clotting. He would be passing blood in his stool for the next few hours while his insides mended, but he would make a one hundred percent recovery with barely a scar. This ability was seen as a weakness by his brother and father. They saw it as his body’s readiness for defeat…his body’s last ditch effort to recover after a defeat. Their bodies were both extremely resilient. Whenever they spar together, their horns never pierce flesh and only leave dull bruises.

“Ah, the poor baby needs to be mollycoddled by mother,” Dion taunted. Alexandria just glanced at Sebastian and smirked while she chopped the kelp.

Father came over to his injured son. “Now, where did you go wrong, son.”

“Not having horns?” he quipped.

“No. You have not strengthened your body enough.”

No, your other son is a cheating prick, he thought to himself. Sebastian’s body healed fast enough that his father never saw the bloody scratches in his eyes.

“Have you nothing to say for yourself?” he asked.

Sebastian remained silent.

His father shook his head, turning his back on Sebastian. Sebastian managed to get to his feet, his wound reopening slightly in the process. Pushing past the pain, Sebastian worked his way into the labyrinth and began walking the familiar corridors. Moments later, Sebastian heard footsteps behind him. Turning to ensure it wasn’t his brother coming to torment him more, Sebastian found it to be his sister. She had morphed her tail into a pair of legs, allowing her to walk on land. She lacked horns like him, but had scaled legs that could turn into a tale like his brother and mother. Sebastian turned his back to her, continuing his aimless meandering through the labyrinth.

“Sebastian,” she said to get his attention.

“What?” Sebastian asked, not bothering to turn to her.

“Will you stop a moment? You know I get winded quickly walking on land.”

Sebastian rounded on her. “What do you want.”

She stepped back hurriedly, obviously scared.

“Great. You’re just like the other merfolk now. What do you want?”

“You truly have no idea why the merfolk are scared of you?”

“Obviously because I’m deformed. You’ve eyes, obviously. You can see it for yourself.”

“Oh please, you don’t seriously buy the crap Father feeds you, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You aren’t deformed, dummy. You are the spitting image of a human.”

“Human? The monsters from the stories Mother would tell us? Please, stop insulting me.”

“I am not trying to insult you…this time at least. I’m telling you to try and help all of us.”

Sebastian looked at her. “Explain.”

“You’ve never been to the surface…you can’t hold your breath long enough to make the journey. You’ve never actually seen a human before.”

“What, and you have?”

She nodded shyly. “I fell in love with one…once. He made me believe I was special, unique. But he betrayed me. He tried trapping me, with the help of other humans and these contraptions. I managed to get away with Dion’s help, but they all looked exactly as you do.”

“You keep saying that. I am ugly, yes, but the humans Mother would tell us about were things from horror stories. There’s no way I can look as horrible as that.”

“We…I tease you because you don’t have fins on your legs. You aren’t nearly as ugly as Father and Dion say you are. I did tell you that I fell in love with a human.”

This was rare praise from Alexandria. “Why are you telling me this?”

She rung her hair in her hands nervously. “Father and Mother have been arguing more as of late. With your horns never having grown in, and you looking so different from what they expected, Father has treated you harshly. Mother tries to molly coddle you, but Father hates when she does that. He tries to compensate by being harder on you.”

“Being harder on me? That’s how you see it?” I hissed.

“Stop, you know what I mean—”

“No, I don’t think you understand exactly what I’ve been—”

“Will you just stop and listen to me!”

Sebastian quieted himself, pushing back his anger to listen to what his sister had to say.

“I’m telling you this because you have a place among the humans.”

Sebastian pondered what she said for a moment. “You mean to say I don’t have a place here.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Sebastian, I’m trying to help you.”

“No, I don’t think you are. You’re trying to keep Mother and Father from fighting. You’re trying to keep your family together, but trying to make yourself feel better about how you’re going about doing so. That, or you’re trying to trick me into getting killed by humans.”

A tear rolled down Alexandria’s cheek.

“Oh, stop the tears. You’ve made your point.” Turning his back on his sister, Sebastian made his way into the bowels of the labyrinth. He traveled for days, pondering what his sister had said. He made his way from familiar corridors into unfamiliar corridors. Soon he was lost, but he cared not. He could survive for months without feeling a single pang of hunger. His Father always thought of it as a weakness. A hungry body made a strong body, so what did it mean if you didn’t feel the need to eat?

Sebastian came to a crossroads at one point. One path led upwards at a steep, rocky, gravely incline. The other led downwards at a gentle, smooth, paved decline. All of his life he lived underground…beneath the surface. He was never able to make it to the surface because of his physical limitations. Just this once, his endurance would grant him the ability to move up. And so he set forth, trekking up the treacherous climb. He cared not for the consequences if he fell. What of it? He was on his own regardless. At least he could test the boundaries of his endurance.

He continued this climb for what he could only guess to be days. He stopped every once and a while when he felt tired and needed sleep, but he never needed to sleep long. Never once did Sebastian think to stop, never wondering where the top might be. His only thought was to climb. As he entered into a sort of trance, he didn’t even notice when he got to the top of the steep incline. He walked into a chamber which came to a dead end. As his body came to a standstill, his consciousness kicked back in and he became puzzled.

This can’t be it, Sebastian thought to himself. Days of climbing just for a dead end. He inspected the room, finding it completely empty. No significance to this chamber at all. At least that was until he gazed at the ceiling. What he found there puzzled him. They were things he only ever saw when he dug up kelp. What Sebastian saw on the ceiling was roots.

“No,” Sebastian muttered to himself. “No way.”

He walked to the wall and scurried up it, digging his pinkies into the smallest of handholds in order to do so. The wall was about twelve feet tall to the ceiling, and Sebastian didn’t think twice about the short climb. At the top, he grabbed hold of one of the roots. He began to pull and rip chunks of the tightly packed soil from their resting place in the net of roots. Soon he had the beginnings of a hole. Continuing his labor, he pulled himself up through the soil. As he ascended, the dry dirt became moist and somewhat slimy. Where it used to be tightly packed, it turned loose. His hole collapsed in on itself, but he wormed his way through.

With a push of effort, he clawed above his head and his hand burst into what he thought was a pocket of air. As he dragged his body through the soil, he was stunned to find that it wasn’t an air pocket, but rather open air. At the same time, he was nearly blinded by the brightest light he had ever seen. Up until that point, the only lights he had been exposed to were the artificial lights of the merfolk’s underwater city. This was magnitudes brighter than that.

His eyes did adjust though. As they did, he focused on a wide eyed woman in front of him. She had the upper body of a mermaid and the lower body of a minotaur, just like him. He stood about two heads taller than her, and compared to him she was downright dainty. Was this a human? She wore strange cloth over her skin, as if she were hiding it. Mother did say that humans always covered their bodies with something they called clothes.

“Excuse me,” Sebastian said, approaching the woman. As he did so, she let out an ear piercing scream and ran away. Sebastian grumbled. His sister was a lying whore. If he looked so much like the humans, why were they running from him too?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. There’s more coming for this particular story, so be on the lookout for that. There will also soon be an update coming out detailing why I haven’t posted in so long. For now, please enjoy!

The Eternal Observer

I woke up in a cold sweat, my nostrils burning from the frigid air. It took me a moment to remember where I was, and a wide smile spread across my face. I was homeless! It took a long time to accrue the necessary gear and materials to run away from that damned group home, but I finally had them all. Getting away was easy enough but being able to truly live independently was another animal altogether. I had no intention of living on the streets and starving. That would force me into unsavory situations, and even worse I may have wound up back in the group home.

I was in my tent, covered in camo netting, about two hundred feet behind the tree line. I was fifteen, so working would be difficult without ID, but I worked out something with the local landscaping company. I had access to shelter and money, so all that remained was to just buy food and water. My situation wasn’t perfect, but it was sustainable.

I crawled out of the sleeping bag, shivering in my nakedness. I quickly slapped on my warm work clothes and set about packing up my tent. I couldn’t very well just leave my tent around for some scumbag to steal. Plus, I had to keep moving around wooded residential areas. If I stayed for too long, I would definitely be found and brought right back to the group home. I packed everything up in my backpack, ensuring that my orb was at the very bottom of the bag. That done, I was off for a day of hard labor.

It wasn’t all that bad to be honest. My job definitely kept me in shape and my boss was sympathetic to my cause. Of course, working for him came with the stipulation of plausible deniability. As far as he was concerned, I was eighteen. The walk to work was not particularly far as my boss happened to live in this neighborhood. Rico was sitting in the driver’s seat and honked the car to hurry me along. I plopped my bag in the back seat and hopped into shotgun.

“You’re early,” I muttered.

“And you smell like crap,” he replied with a smirk.

I smelled my armpits and grimaced. I definitely needed a shower.

“Whatever.”

He put the car in drive and set out to our first job for the day. Some rich guy in a nice part of town. When we pulled up to the sidewalk in front of his house, I realized this wasn’t just some rich guy. This was the damned governor’s house. With the governor, there was of course a police detail. I hadn’t run off too long ago, so this may be a bit of an issue. I ensured I had my baseball cap on and stood with impeccable posture to appear as tall as possible. As I helped unload the equipment from the back of the truck, I felt the hum of some sort of power around me. It was a very familiar hum, and I became filled with dread. Something was about to happen. Something important.

Trembling out of anger, I began to cart the gear towards the house. But as I took a step onto the walkway, I faceplanted right into an invisible barrier. The same barrier I had run into my entire life. It was a barrier that indicated an important event was about to take place. And for whatever reason, I could never get to that event. Riots, celebrations, big speeches, town votes. I was barred from all of them. I was eternally cursed to not even be mentioned in the footnotes of history.

“What’s the matter with you!” Rico exclaimed as he walked right into me.

“S-sorry,” I said. “I forgot something in the truck.”

“So, you stop right in the middle of the walkway! Jesus. Just move.” Rico was a middle-aged Latino that hated his life. He was nice enough though, in his own way.

I moved and walked back to the truck. I needed to get my backpack. If the barrier expanded suddenly, I would disappear without my things. I opened up the back door of the truck, grabbing onto my pack. Just as I did so, I was faced with a completely different landscape. It was like a movie changing scenes. One minute I was at the truck, and the other I wasn’t. The barrier had expanded on me.

In my outstretched hand, I held my backpack. Beyond my hand was an empty field. Every single time I teleported like this, I would always be right at the edge of the new barrier. Looking around me, I couldn’t see a single familiar feature. It was just an empty field with a tree line in the far distance. In the neighborhood I was at, there weren’t any such fields like this, so the barrier went far out. There was something off in the distance that caught my attention though. It looked like a strange cloud billowing upwards. As the cloud folded in on itself, I gasped. It was a mushroom cloud.

Within moments of me seeing it, I was blown off my feet by a sheet of hot air. My ears rang from the sound. I clambered to my feet and saw the cloud of ash begin to blow in the opposite direction of me. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about the fallout from that explosion. I shook my head and began to walk in the other direction. This was the most notable event to have happened to me yet. A nuclear explosion. Well, with that one nuke going off I could definitely expect more such events happening. I would of course be the eternal observer to what happened, never being able to interact with the goings on of the world.

It has been like this for as a long as I could remember. The story I was told was that I showed up on the doorstep of a fire department in my cradle. I was covered in a blanket with a black orb right next to me. No matter how often it was thrown out, the black orb always reappeared. As I grew up, I learned to just keep it hidden. It initially caused me to be shuffled from home to home as people became unnerved by its strange presence. As I began to hide its presence, word of it traveling with me from home to home stopped. But it always stayed with me, no matter how much I hated it. It was a reminder that I could never be a true member of society with a big part to play. Every event I tried to join in, I was kept from by that damned barrier. Even over time, those who I had considered close friends would forget about me once I left them. My life was not even a footnote in history. I couldn’t be the nameless man to fire the shot heard around the world. I was barred from such events by the cosmos.

I kept traveling for the duration of the day, stopping around dusk to set up camp for the night. It was a cold night, and I definitely needed a fire. The thing was, I had no idea who was around. It would have a be a stealth fire. I dug a hole, and then another one right next to it. The second one had a bit of an incline away from the first hole. I dug a tunnel connecting the two of them. I took a couple minutes to collect the necessary twigs and branches, then set about building the fire in the first hole. It flared to life, and I sat next to it to bask in its warmth. My stomach began to grumble, and I was hit with a wave of frustration. I had no hunting or trapping skills whatsoever. That said, I did have some beef jerky and peanuts stored away for situations like this. Hopefully I was close enough to civilization for this to last.

I had a small handful of peanuts and a strip of beef jerky for my supper. I was still hungry of course, but this would have to do for now. I sat by the fire for a bit longer and thought back to the group home. Was this truly better? My mind flashed to the constant bullying from both my peers as well as the adults tasked with caring for us. Forcing us to work for their profits and beating us when we messed up. The hunger I faced now was the price I paid for my freedom.

“Still hungry?” a voice asked me.

My gaze jerked away from the fire to see a man sitting next to me, right out of where my peripheral vision had been.

I jumped away from him. “Who the hell are you!”

“A friend. You’re called Alex, correct?”

“How the hell do you know my name?”

“Oh, I know all about you. Up until recently, you were a resident of the Jamestown Group Home for Boys. You caused quite the stir when you disappeared, but they have long since forgotten about your existence. You were just about to get hit by a dirty bomb planted in the governor’s basement, but the temporal barrier prevented your interference in the events that were about to take place.”

“Temporal barrier? Is that what that invisible wall is?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know about it?”

“Because I am also subject to its dictations. All Aberrations are.”

“Aberration?” Now that he brought attention to himself, I noticed he was dressed strangely. He had on strange robes that had strange folds. The folds were highlighted in black and light blue, with the robes themselves being white.

“Yes. You are an Aberration in time. Something that does not belong in this point in time. The temporal barrier prevents you from interfering with the time stream to prevent your meddling in future events. In essence, it’s the universe’s way to prevent paradoxes.”

“What do you mean I don’t belong in this time? Like a time traveler?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always lived in this timeline though.”

“You have, yes, but you were conceived in the distant future. Your parents were also Aberrations attempting to study the effects of the temporal barrier. They were trying to find a work around for the temporal barrier to try and alter the course of history.”

“Like super villains?”

“In a sense. Their experiment was particularly cruel on you. It was only a partial success. Normally, Aberrations cannot exist more than an hour or two in a particular time outside of their own. That time decreases the further away they get from their original time. You are different. Since you grew up being a part of two separate times, you are a bit of an exception to the rule. The best way I can explain it is the universe is confused by you. I theorize this to mean that you can stay in any time you want for an unlimited amount of time. However, you are still affected by the temporal barrier. While not the workaround your parents intended, it still has astounding implications for future time travel.”

I fell back. Not because I passed out or anything, but rather because this was just a lot to take in. I knew I was strange, but I had not idea I was something this grand. I was a time traveler!

“Are you okay?” the man asked worriedly.

“Yeah. Just processing.” I paused for a moment, then a question popped into existence in my mind. “Why did you choose now to get in touch with me?”

“For a couple reasons. Your parents were recently apprehended, which allowed the government to track you down. Secondly, I wanted to personally to get in touch with you.”

“Who’s that?”

“Because our parents are dicks.”

“Our…parents?”

“Alex, I’m your brother.”

I go from being parentless to having a whole damned family in one day. This was shaping up to be a hell of a day. That’s if he was telling the truth of course.

“What reason do I have to trust you?” I asked. “I’m obviously a weirdo, and so are you. But what’s to say all of this is the truth? Am a time traveler? Probably. Are you really my brother? Who knows.”

The man shook his head and looked at the stars above head. “You really are as thick headed as our father. I’m sure living in the twenty first century’s child protective system hasn’t done anything to mitigate that.” He looked right at me. “To be honest, I can’t prove to you anything other than to show you. Now, you can stay in this time and be an eternal observer or you can come with me and experience and adventure unlike anything you’ve even imagined.”

I contemplated this for a moment. To travel through time with this man claiming to be my brother. He could be a pervert child touching creep, but I had enough experience catching grownups off guard where I wasn’t worried about getting away if I needed to. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, and my job was literally just blown to smithereens.

Just as I was about to accept, the man held up his hand. There was a low toned beeping in the background.

“Shit,” he muttered. “They found us.”

“Who?”

“The damned government. We’ve got to go now!”

As he said that, things that looked like windows within the air itself opened up. The windows were bordered by a swirling blue and white energy. People began to swarm out of them.

The man grabbed my hand, and we took off running between the portals and off into the distance.

“Where’s your orb?” he asked as we ran through the field. I heard loud pops, and the man threw something behind us. There was an electrified buzzing as he did so.

“Orb! Where is it!” he repeated.

“In my bag back at camp.”

“Give me your hand.”

He grabbed my hand and snapped my finger back at a horrifying angle. The thing was, I didn’t feel anything. It didn’t make a snapping sound. Instead, it clicked like a switch.

As soon as he did this, the orb appeared in my opposite hand and my finger snapped back into place.

“What the hell was that?”

“Mom and Dad modified both of our bodies. All Aberrations have to be modified to withstand the effects of traveling the temporal currents, but Mom and Dad took it a step further with us. Now the orb. Hand it to me!”

I did so, and he began to twist it. As he did so, it became covered in strange glowing blue markings and runes. Once he finished, he lobbed it ahead of us, and it fragmented. The fragments became suspended in the air, and a window to another time opened. It looked similar to the ones back at camp.

“Jump through!” the man said.

I did, with the man following right behind me. As soon as I made it through, I saw figures in black cloaks quickly pursuing us. The man claiming to be my brother clapped his hands twice and the orb fragments reassembled into its familiar dull spherical shape. It fell to the ground with a dull thud.

“Who were those guys?” I asked.

“Time agents.”

“Aren’t you working with them?”

The man looked at me and rubbed the back of his neck with a guilty expression. “Not exactly. Our parents aren’t particularly great, but the government is even worse.”

“How bad?”

“Picture the classic future dystopian tyrannical sci fi government, then multiply it by itself.”

I whistled. “That’s pretty bad. Again, don’t know if you’re telling me the truth or not. But, if they have a time traveler version of the CPS, I’d rather stay with you.”

The man just laughed. “Such a smart ass. Now let’s go. I’ve only got a couple hours in this timeline, and we’ve got ground to cover.”

I began to follow but paused.  “What the hell’s your name?”

“Richard. A bit of an old school name, but then again, our parents are time travelers.”

“Huh. Let’s get going Dick.”

Richard just shook his head once again and began walking. I followed suit, gazing at the vast city we had appeared in. It was nighttime, but it was illuminated by millions of mechanical lights from the thousands of buildings and machines. Skyscrapers wasn’t a word I would use to describe them, but rather man-made mountains. They were far larger than any building back home. Flying cars flew in neat grids in the sky. The streets had graffiti and crowds…crowds that we could disappear in. There were people dressed like Richard, but also like me. That is, people were dressed in fancy robes as well as tattered work clothes. Whatever time period and place this was, I was looking forward to exploring more.

Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment. All feedback, negative and positive is welcome. if you are interested in more, follow my Instagram WrittenInStonePublishing

What Lies Beneath

The Johnson family was running across the frozen wastes that made up the oceans this time of year.  For as far as the eye could see, grey skies stretched overhead, and stark white snow lay underfoot.  Behind the Johnson family was the large squadron of soldiers that had been tracking them for days.  It wasn’t until today that they had appeared over the horizon though, so the family started to run.

In the distance they saw pillars rising up from the ice.  Mr. Johnson grinned in elation.  There may be salvation there.  The days spent on the run in the frozen wastes had left them with little hope for the future.  Their food stores were running low and the ice beneath their feet did little to quench their thirst.  This was the first sign they had seen of possible salvation…or anything for that matter.

And so they ran, with both parents carrying the two little children they had with them.  Being part of the line of succession for the Dulath Empire made them political targets.  Mr. Johnson’s brother sought the throne and held much sway in the military, but Mr. Johnson was further ahead in the line of succession.  In fact, Mr. Johnson and the emperor were the only two people standing in the way of Mr. Johnson’s brother from ascending to the throne. And so they were hunted.  Mr. Johnson knew not of the fate of the emperor, but if he had to bet, the Emperor was most likely dead by now.

As they got closer to the pillars, Mr. Johnson saw that they were three pillars joined together at the top like one large stool.  From what he could see, the top was a sort of mesa abundant in snow covered trees.  Other trees dotted the sides of the pillars like hairs on a giant’s leg.  They seemed straight and sturdy.  The pillars themselves jutted up from the ocean like monuments, leaving not shoreline or anything.  Once they drew close enough to touch them, Mr. Johnson saw that they were covered in hand holds perfect for climbing.  He took his youngest son from his wife, slinging the child over his back.  He set his oldest son on the ground.  The boy was skinny and hand spindly arms that were perfect for climbing.

“We climb as high as we can,” Mr. Johnson said.

His wife just nodded, and they set about climbing.  They would go as far as they could before succumbing to the soldiers.  There was no salvation here other than time.  Or at least, that’s what Mr. Johnson had thought.

Before they got more than a couple feet off the ground, the ice shuddered.  He stopped climbing and looked back at the soldiers.   They had stopped in their tracks and were looking at the ice.  It shuddered again, this time cracking beneath their feet.  And a third time, the ice shook, but this time the ocean beneath their feet erupted in a flurry of water, ice, snow, and something writhing in the mess.  When everything settled, the only thing left of the soldier’s was a gaping hole in the ice filled with churned up water.

Mr. Johnson laughed in exaltation.  These pillars had brought them salvation, and what seemed to be a guardian beneath the surface.  What else could it be other than a guardian?  It had not attacked his family but had destroyed the soldiers!  It was at that moment that a plan shot into Mr. Johnson’s head.  They would make this place their home.  They would construct houses on the cliff sides so that they would not sink beneath the waves when the ice melted in the summertime.  He would use the radio in his pack to signal to his friends and family back home that they had found refuge in these pillars.  They would set up a community here…one safe from the ravages of politics and war.

And they set about their labors.  The trees growing from the cliff sides were sturdy and perfect for building with.  The soil at the top of the mesa capping the pillars could be crafted into a rudimentary cement for foundations on the cliff side.  With his own two hands, he built a home for his family during the day and radioed to his friend during the night.  Many responded positively to him, signaling they would travel to the pillars.

Over the coming months, friends and family arrived at the pillars in groups of three or four at a time and they set to work building houses of their own.  The trees on the cliff sides grew back fast even during winter, providing what seemed to be a limitless source of wood to building with and burn.  Before long, the cliffs were dotted with houses.

Life on the cliffs was pleasant.  A constant, strong wind blew.  Often, it threatened to freeze you if you weren’t careful but most of the settlers didn’t care.  The cold wind was a trifle compared to the devastating war they had left behind, and they all had warm clothing.

As the ice melted, waves lapped at the sides of the cliffs.  The ever-present wind always churned the waves surrounding the cliffs.  The ocean shallows surrounding the cliffs provided everything they needed in terms of food.  There was plenty of vegetation for hardy kelp salads and seaweed wrapps.  The fish here was sweet and plentiful as well.  Some of the new arrivals had brought scuba equipment with them and we quickly found out that the shallows only stretched about a quarter mile in every direction and led to a steep drop off into the murky depths of the ocean.  They decided never to go back down because off in the distance, they saw that the depths were filled with leviathans larger than the mind could imagine.  Larger than anything had a right to be.  But it wasn’t just the size that got to them.  It was the shapes as well.  They had tentacles and long spindly limbs.  Some even seemed humanoid.  It was enough to make us not want to wander too far out from the cliff sides and had banished any questions about what had destroyed the soldiers from Mr. Johnson’s mind.

One day, some of the settlers were playing with kites.  They were astounded by the strength of the winds, and one had an idea that was half a joke at first.  He grabbed a cluster of kites and set them loose.  Once he did, he was dragged up into the air with them.  He clung on to them for dear life, but he was gently set down onto the top of one of the houses.  It was at that time they had the brilliant idea of going from house to house using kites, parachutes, and even large sheets at times.  The winds were predictable and steady, so they were quickly mapped out for safe travel.  This town was shaping up to be something out of a dream.  Everything was provided to them, and they were protected by the beasts beneath the waves.

One night, Mr. Johnson was talking with a cousin of his over the radio.  “Frederick, you must join us.  The food here is abundant and we are safe from the predations of the Dulath Empire.”

“I think I will,” Frederick responded.  “But is there enough room?  I have a troop of fifty people.  All of them are refugees from the war.”

“Of course!” Mr. Johnson responded.  “We haven’t even settled the third pillar here.  Come over once the ice sets in again.”

Frederick let out a sigh over the radio.  “Very well.  I hope this new settlement is everything you have claimed it to be.”

“It is, I swear.  The only thing we lack is fruit for wine.”

“Then we’ll bring grape seeds!” Frederick laughed.

“Excellent.  I look forward to your arrival all the more,” Mr. Johnson concluded.

As time wore on, the warm season ended, and winter began to set in once again.  The settlers continued to fish by drilling holes into the ice.  The vegetation was still alive and well but took on a grey color.  However, it lost none of its flavor and still grew back quickly.  The fish were just as sweet and delicious as summer as well, although they were a bit more tough to eat.  Life here was good.

About halfway through the winter, Mr. Johnson saw a troop of people come over the horizon.  He felt a pang of fear go through his heart as he thought back to the soldiers.  However, after a quick peek through his spyglass set his mind at ease.  It was his cousin Frederick and the refugees!  Mr. Johnson rang the bells to signal the other settlers and shouted in glee.

“They’re here!” he yelled.  “My cousin has arrived!”

The settlers all gathered at the edges of their abodes and watched the progress of the troop of new arrivals.  But their hearts fell as the ice shuddered.  Once. Twice. And on the third time, the ice erupted beneath the feet of the new arrivals.  It was the same as before, with a torrent of white ice, snow, and something writhing in the center.  Mr. Johnson now knew it to be the leviathans roaming the water beneath the ice.

A small group of three or four people weren’t enough to stir the behemoths, but a large group of fifty people was.  Mr. Johnson discovered that day that the monsters beneath weren’t their guardians.  They were just hungry.  

The Giant's Graveyard Part 2

Preface: This is a follow up to another short story I had written. To refresh yourselves before you dive in, check out The Giant’s Graveyard. I did make some changes to part 1 to fit in with the overall narrative of my novel. Now enjoy part 2 of The Giant’s Graveyard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Giants,” I whispered.

“Aye.  They’re extinct though, aren’t they,” Alec said.

“Yeah.  That doesn’t mean any trace of them is gone though.  This place, it must be a Giant’s graveyard.”

“Why the workspace?  Why the library?” Alec asked.

“I would assume so whatever the Lazarus Brigade is can be brought back,” I said, remembering the tracing.

“Do yeh think the Giants were able to be possessed too?”

“It would make sense.  The Giants themselves weren’t supernatural.  They were just natural beings that had deep ties with the supernatural.  They’re a great example of what humanity could be if they worked along side the supernatural instead of keeping them a secret.”

“Do yeh think we should tell somebody about this?” Alec asked.

“Absolutely not.  I don’t trust Morgan all that much, and the Seventh Sons would just swarm this place and hid away the knowledge.”

“Yeh want it for yourself, doncha.”  It wasn’t a question.

“It’s about time we started making our own way in the supernatural world,” I explained. 

Alec just grunted in acknowledgment.  That was a bit weird.

“Now let’s get to finding a way out of here.”  And for the next several hours I sifted through the novels, manuals, textbooks, scrolls, grimoires, and all manner of data storage they had.  There was a sort of magical computer that had what I could only assume to be terabytes of information on it.  It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.  The thing was an irregularly round screen jutting an inch or so from the wall.  Tubes and wires projected from the sides and shot into the wall.  The screen itself was illuminated but I couldn’t make out any individual pixels…that is, it’s resolution was stunning.  It was blank save for an icon of a scroll on the bottom and what appeared to be a search bar up at the center of the top.  I touched the search bar hoping for it to respond, but it didn’t.  I touched the scroll icon at the bottom and a window popped into existence.  Great!  It was set up surprisingly similarly to windows eleven, which was odd to me.  That was simply too much of a coincidence, meaning this thing was responding to my thoughts to a limited extent.  I’d figure it out eventually, but for now I had to scroll through and find information on how to get out of here.  Alec wanted to help, but all of the information was stored in the same language as the tracing up above, so only I could understand it.

I juggled my time between the physical information storage like the books and scrolls.  They were organized according to subject fairly quickly.  The computer was significantly more frustrating.  I was able to navigate the storage of information well enough, but the sheer volume of information in there was far too much to sift through in one lifetime, much less the limited amount of time before I died from dehydration here.  There had to be some way of using the search bar.  There was no mouse or keyboard for me to use, so I was at a complete loss on how to use it.

I played around with it for several more hours, but I eventually got frustrated and punched the screen.  It didn’t shatter or break, but it did cause me to recoil in pain.  That was like punching a brick wall.  Alec, who had been preoccupied with examining the body in the center of the room, quickly noticed my frustration.  “Oi, what in the hell are yeh pissed about?”

“This damned search bar,” I said.  “I can’t figure out how to use it.”

Alec cracked his fingers.  “Let me take a shot at it.”  He walked over and looked at the screen.  He reached out and touched it, and the search bar instantly populated with words in that strange language.

“What the hell?” I said.

Alec jerked away from the screen.  “Did yeh try touching it?”

“Obviously,” I said, leaning closer to inspect it.  My mind flooded with hypotheses at this new development, and the frustration I had quickly evaporated.  “It seems like this thing was designed to be used in tandem between a ghost and their host.”

“That seems like a pain in the arse.”

“It does, but it also seems to be a sort of security system.  Probably to make sure only the Possessed can access it.”

 “So why did it fill up with those strange words when I touched it?  I don’t even understand the language.”

“It’s got to be a neural interface of some sort.  It probably automatically interpreted your thoughts.”

“That’s goin’ ta be annoying,” Alec said.  “All I can think about is rabbit stew right now.”

I examined the search bar to find that it had actually populated with the ingredients and instructions on how to make rabbit stew.  When I saw that, two thoughts popped into my head, the second of which only happened because of the first.

“We can make some after we get out of here,” I said.  “I’ll let you take over my body so you can eat it.”

“Really?” he asked wistfully.

And as I said that, another thought came to mind.  “Actually, take over my body right now.  I want to try something.”

“Okay,” he said, disappearing into my body.  I felt my sensations drift away, and my body began to move on it’s own.  I pushed against the barriers of my body, and pushed free of it once more.

Now in my ghostly form, I touched the screen, and the search bar populated with my thoughts instantly.  That happened way faster than I wanted it to.  I’d have to have my mind clear before I even touched it.

“Bloody hell,” Alec said.  “Yer a genius.”

“Yeah, I do my best,” I said.  “Now be quiet.  I need to focus.”

Clearing all thought from my mind except my search criteria, I touched the screen and the information I wanted quickly popped onto it.  It worked!  The search bar didn’t even populate, it just brought up a window of material to read.  I tried touching the screen to move it down, but nothing happened.  It would seem this was designed to be used in tandem with a ghost and their host, meaning they would have to be on the same page and just as knowledgeable as one another in order to use it properly.  In my particular case, I could bend those rules a bit thanks to the modifications made to my body.

“All right, let me see my body again,” I said.

“This is goin’ ta get irritatin’ if I gotta keep switchin’ in and out of yer body,” Alec complained.

“I’m not a huge fan of it either, but I’d like to get some attention paid to my arm and leg,” I said.  “And some food.  So, if you don’t mind, just bear with me while I square this away.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alec said as he relinquished control of my body.

I regained my senses again and began to work my way through the information on the screen.  The computer was far more intuitive than I had thought.  It had assessed my knowledge level of our current situation and had brought up a quick explanation of the resources at our disposal as well as how to get out of this place.

One of the files it had brought up gave the following explanation about the resources at our disposal:

The Lazarus Chambers were created by the last of the Lazarus Brigade with the hopes that it’s teachings and mission would one day be revived.  Information about the Lazarus Brigade and the Lazarus Chambers can be found in subsection alpha, location thirty seven.  Alternatively, the mental interface can be used to directly retrieve that information.

The Lazarus Chambers contain a stockpile of materials and information pertaining to, but not limited to, the usage of magic, enchanting, magical engineering, and multiple possessions.  All of this information can be found by using the mental interface or going to subsection theta, location fifty five, sixty five, thirty four, and thirty five respectively.  The physical information found here is all information that is backed up in the Apollo Engine.  To view spells contained in grimoires, the Grey Simulation has to be activated.  Information on how to do so can be found in subsection epsilon, location sixty three or the mental interface can be used.

A detailed list of the materials and equipment stored in the Lazarus Chambers can be found in subsection theta, location forty seven or can be accessed through the mental interface.

The file ended and my mind was buzzing with all this phenomenal information.  This place might have information on my condition too!

I sifted through some more of the files and located the one I was looking for.  It said:

To leave the temporal shift that the Lazarus Chambers are located in, one can wait twenty four hours from the time of entrance.  Alternatively, one can use spell one thousand two hundred and ninety nine to exit the temporal shift.  This spell can be found in the Grey Simulation.  To access the Grey Simulation, see subsection epsilon, location sixty three, or use the mental interface.

The Grey Simulation.  What the hell was that?  I went to subsection epsilon, location sixty three and read the description:

The Grey Simulation is a perfect mental simulation where the users mind is directly linked to a false reality.  Here, various simulations can be run where the user is able to learn new skills with no worry of physical harm befalling them.  Additionally, for those afflicted with mana dependency or mana resistance, arcane skills can be honed without worrying about the total depletion of magical reserves or energy reserves.  While in the Grey Simulation, any spells stored in it’s virtual grimoires can be used without having them personally bound.  If one wishes to bind that spell for real world use, an indication of it’s magic drain on the user will be provided so accidental death can be avoided.  All of the information contained in the Apollo Engine can also be accessed in the Grey Simulation for a three-dimensional interactive experience.  Any language barriers are nullified while in the grey simulation as well.

Both the Possessed and ghost must enter the Grey Simulation, meaning it cannot be accessed by the Supernatural or the unpossessed.  Additionally, it must be done willingly by the host and the primary ghost.  Otherwise, mental ensnarement of the party trying to force their way in and they must wait to be released by another Possessed.

I paused for a moment.  That was a hell of a caveat, especially since nobody knew I was here.  I would just have to be really careful to make sure Alec wanted to actually go in.  I continued to read:

To activate the Grey Simulation, one has to enter a stasis pod.  While in a stasis pod, one’s body is perfectly preserved through the use of nano-golems which maintain muscle tone through electrical stimulation and maintain cellular composition.  This process prevents aging or the deterioration of telomeres.  One is effectively immortal while in the Grey Simulation.

The stasis pods can be found by accessing the southern chamber.  The southern chamber can be accessed through a mana lock on the southern wall.  To unlock, simply channel magic into the palm of one’s hand and press it against the corresponding hand print on the wall.  This will only work for those who have magic derived from a ghost.  Any other magic will result in the detaining of the offending party in a similar manner to what would have happened if one attempted to even access the Lazarus Chambers.

Once the southern chamber is unlocked, simply lay in an unoccupied stasis pod and allow it to seal itself.  Once it is sealed, it will fill with a liquid containing the nano-golems.  One will go through a drowning sensation, but be not concerned.  It is engineered to sustain the body of any who enter it.  Once the pod is fully filled, the Grey Simulation will activate.  To exit the Grey Simulation, recite the phrase “Alpha clearence one.  Exit Grey Simulation.”

WARNING: The Grey Simulation can simulate the real world.  If one is not careful, they can unwittingly be trapped in the Grey Simulation without their knowledge.  In order to leave the Grey Simulation, one has to be aware they are in the Grey Simulation to begin with, otherwise it will continue to simulate what they perceive as reality.  Because of this danger, a failsafe was built into every simulation where they will automatically be ejected from the Simulation after fourteen days stuck in it.  Additionally, to test if one is in the Grey Simulation recite the phrase “Alpha clearance thirty two. Check Grey Simulation.”  Whatever simulation is being run will vanish regardless of the user’s awareness.  This should be sufficient for the user to regain awareness they are in a simulation to begin with and allow them to exit.

That warning sent shivers down my spine.  It existed for a reason, meaning somebody had been trapped in the Grey Simulation before.  A thought suddenly came to mind.  This power seemed very similar to that of a shadow man.  Could the Giants have found a way to harness that sort of power to create something like the Grey Simulation?

Shrugging that thought aside, I turned to Alec and explained everything I had read to him.

“That’s like that one movie yeh had shown me.  The one with the guy that could dodge bullets,” Alec said.

“Sort of,” I said with a smirk.  “So, do you want to go into the Grey Simulation with me?”

“Ah, consent is a beautiful thing,” Alec said.  “I do.”

With that, I did as the computer instructed and filled my palm with magic.  As I did, the same emerald handprint from the surface appeared on the wall, but this time it was the same size as mine and right around chest height.  This place seemed to be adapting itself to me.  I pressed my hand on the emerald handprint, with droplets of emerald light dripping off my hand towards the handprint as I did so.  As soon as my hand made contact, the indentation of a rectangular archway appeared right in front of me.  I pushed against it, and it swung open as if it were on hinges, but I saw none upon closer inspection.

The room that opened up before me was round with what I could only describe as pods ringing the circumference of the room, with the foot ends facing the direct center of the room.  They were made of a glasslike substance with strange thin metal tubing weaving its way through the interior of the glass like veins.  The glass pods sat on stone pedestals which cradled the bottom of the pods.  The heads of the pods were attached to the wall where a dark opening lead to the bowels of whatever machinery was working behind the scenes of this place.  The entire room was dimly lit with a light source not entirely evident, yet I had no problem making out the details of the pods.  This was a drastic change from the other room where the only source of light was seemingly coming from the surface and the computer.

I walked over to the nearest pod and touched the glass.  It instantly responded to my touch and the top half of the pod opened up with a hiss.  The glass raised up to the ceiling with seemingly no additional machinery aiding it.  It simply hovered above me.  The melding of magic and science was a hell of a thing.

I looked to Alec.  “You ready?” I asked him.

“Aye,” he said, disappearing with a puff of blue mist as he inhabited my body.

Without another word, I got into the pod.  The lid lowered itself down, sealing me into the pod.  I heard a gurgling by my head, and a clear liquid came spewing out of the opening that led into the wall.  I coughed and sputtered as it got in my mouth.  It had no unpleasant taste.  If I had to say what it tasted like, I would probably say it tasted like liquid air.  The liquid level continued to rise to the point where I was struggling for air in the little pocket that remained near my head.  That quickly drained away as well, and soon I was holding my breath.  My lungs started to burn but I continued to hold my breath, praying for the simulation to start.  My limbs thrashed at the glass as I desperately tried to get out but to no avail.  My sight began to go black.  Almost against my will, I let out the air in my lungs and took in a deep breath of the liquid.  Again, I coughed and sputtered as the liquid displaced the rest of the air in my lungs, but I felt a sense of relief wash over me as oxygen flooded my lungs and fed my cells respiratory cycles.  My heart rate calmed down, and I relaxed.  This was actually a very calming experience now.  I felt as if I could fall asleep.

As I calmed down, I was suddenly jerked from the pod and thrown into a grey world.  It was an empty field with a wooden fence and a couple trees.  Grass swayed in the breeze.  The odd thing was that everything was grey.  There was no color here, save for myself and Alec who stood right next to me.  And not only that, but he wasn’t blue.  He looked like he did when he possessed my body.  A dirty face and plainly patterend kilt.

“This is freaky,” I said to him.

“Aye, yeh can say that again.  Yer enchantment doesn’t work in here either,” Alec said.

Slightly confused, I looked at my arms to find that they were pale and covered in those black veins.  “Ah shit,” I said.

“Not a problem,” Alec said with a smirk.  “Yeh weren’t goin’ ta impress me with yer ugly mug even without all the black veins.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I grumbled.  “Anyway, how the hell do we find these spells?” I asked.

“All you need to do is ask,” a disembodied voice said.  It was female in nature, but very mature.  It was like talking to a pleasant looking forty year old woman.

“Woah, who are you?” I asked.

“The intelligence designed to maintain the Grey Simulation and the Lazarus Chambers.”

“Oh, cool.  What should I call you?” I asked.

There was a pause, as if the intelligence was considering this question.  “Call me Illera,” it said.

“That’s a cool name,” I said.  “So Illera, can I see spell…” I paused to examine my memory for the spell I needed.  “Can I see spell one thousand two hundred and ninety nine?” I finally asked with my eyes closed as I made sure that was the right spell I needed.

“Of course,” she said.

Instantly, a tracing appeared before me.  This one was extremely complex.  It had none of the commonalities that were taught to me by the Seventh Sons.

“What’s the nature of this spell?” I asked.  “It has none of the commonalities I’ve seen with other spells.”

“What is your knowledge level of spellcraft?” Illera asked.

“I’ve still pretty new at it.  The organization I’m with has taught me some common spell structures to figure out their nature.”

“So, you have never experienced interdimensional magic before?” she asked.

“Not at all,” I said.  “The closest I’ve seen to that are Ley Lines.”

I felt the air tense when I said that.  “Those are abominations of magic.  This magic is more…elegant in nature.”

“What do you mean?” I inquired.

“Your level of magic use is not quite high enough to fully understand it, but they require a sacrifice… a live sacrifice but it is so much worse than you could imagine.  A fate truly worse than death.”

I paused for a moment.  The sentience of this program was astounding.  “That’s usettling,” I said.  “And this magic is different than that?”

“Yes.  Ley Lines do not require an understanding of the fabric of reality to create.  This magic does.  That is, it does in order to create the spells.  You will be able to cast this one so long as you bind it.”

“I see.  And do the Lazarus Chambers have the information on how to create these spells?” I asked. 

“They do,” Illera said. 

I felt a hunger stir in me which I hadn’t felt before, not even in college.  Learning Biochemistry was one thing, but this was something completely different.  This was something no one else would know except for me.  I was going to learn this, and I was going to master it.

I caught Alec looking at me strangely out of the corner of my eye.

“What?” I asked him.

“Remember our goal,” he said.  “We’re goin’ ta kill the bastard in the mask.”

“Yeah I know.”

“We aren’t here ta play magician.”

“You didn’t have an issue when Morgan was teaching me,” I said to him.

“When Morgan was teachin’ yeh, yeh weren’t able to delve into her secrets on yer own time instead of huntin’ down this bastard.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that this information will help us find him?”

“We both know that wasn’t why ya were askin’,” Alec said.

I was stunned for a moment.

“Remember, I’m in yer head.  I can feel what you feel.”

“You do realize you’re the one possessing my body.  I want to help you, but you’re kind of being a dick about it right now.”

And just like that, I was laying on my ass.  My nose was flattened against my face and blood was streaming down my mouth.

“I fuckin’ know I’m possessing you!” he shouted, baring his chest at me.  “I didn’t ask to possess yer body!  I didn’t ask to be slaughtered like a pig!  I want this bastard’s head on a fuckin’ platter and I can’t do it without yer fuckin’ help!  Do yeh know how frustrating that is?  Trying to cajole an emotional man in his twenties who’s been pampered his entire fuckin’ life into tracking down and killing this bastard?”

I was shocked for a moment.  Maybe he had a point…that I was a pampered kid.  But then I saw the black veins on my arm and was reminded of all the shit I’ve gone through up till now.  I jumped to my feet, slapped Alec’s next punch to the side and penetrated his guard.  I slapped the side of his head, wrapped his head and arm in my powerful grasp, then tossed him to the ground.  We hit the ground with a powerful smack.  He struggled to get out of my grasp, but I had more experience with fighting other people thanks to my Seventh Sons training.  I manipulated his body so that I had him in an arm bar and jammed his face to the ground.  “Do you think I haven’t given up anything for your little quest?” I hissed in his ear while I had him pinned to the ground.  “Look at my arms.  Look at my eyes.  If I use too much magic, I’ll die.  The only reason I’m in this mess is because you were stupid enough to chase an elk into an obvious trap.  I didn’t want this, but by God am I going to make the most of it.  I’m going to help you kill this masked fucker if it’s the last thing I do, but I’m going to become as powerful and as knowledgeable as I can while I do it.  Do you hear me?”

I didn’t get a response other than him trying to wiggle out from under my hold.  I gripped his wrist tighter and jacked up his arm more to elicit a pain response.

“Do you hear me!” I shouted.

Still no response.

“Fuck!” I yelled and pushed away from him.  I walked away and started stemming the flow of blood from my nose.

“These issues arise quite frequently among the Possessed,” Illera said.  “To help stem discord in the pairing, there is a spell you can perform to keep your ghost to be more…agreeable.”

It took me a moment to fully register what Illera had said.  “What?  No!  We’re just having a disagreement.  I’m not going to do that to Alec.”

Alec looked up to me, then looked at the sky in shock.  “Why would yeh even offer somethin’ like that?  I thought this whole system was designed between a host and his ghost workin’ together.”

“The spell induces a form of euphoria in the ghost making them much more agreeable.  The Grey Simulation allows that.”

I was still shocked.  That’s almost like drugging a ghost.  “Yeah, I’ll take a hard pass on that.”

“As you wish.”

I shook away my brawl with Alec and Illera’s astounding suggestion.  “Now is there a way for me to reset my Avatar in here?  I want to get rid of this broken nose.”

“Of course.  It is done.”

I was shocked at the sensation of my throbbing nose simply not throbbing anymore.  The blood that had started to cake on my face was gone as well.  That was handy.

“Now how do I bind this spell?”

“Simply assign it a command, and I will store it in a file specifically for your spells.”

“Oh okay.  Uh, how about I shout, ‘Open Sesame!’”

“It is done.”  Along with Illera’s proclamation, an apparition popped into existence before me.  It was a bar with a quarter of it flashing.  This must be the indicator showing how much of my magic would be used up by the spell.

With that done, I looked over at Alec and felt a twinge of regret.  I wished I hadn’t said those things to him.  “You ready to get out of here?” I asked, trying to not sound weird.

“Aye,” he grumbled.

“Alpha clearence one.  Exit Grey Simulation,” I announced.

And just like that, I was back in the stasis pod.  The fluid drained through the same opening by my head that it had come out of, seemingly defying the laws of physics as it did.  It even leached itself from my clothes, leaving them perfectly dry.  It pulled itself from my lungs, leaving me coughing and sputtering once again as I replaced the fluid with air.  Once all the fluid had drained, the top of the pod rose to the ceiling again, allowing me to get out.

I walked out of the southern chamber and left the Lazarus Chambers all together.  Despite spending hours down in them, the sky still spewed out the golden rays of light that come just before the sun sets.  The archway stood there completely still and unmoving.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d assume it was an intricate work of art.

Holding up my arms, I shouted “Open sesame!”

The air around me began to blow, and the archway activated with a blinding white light.  I simply walked through it, and everything around me changed.  The golden rays of light were gone, and I was left with darkness.  The night sky peered at me through the breaks in the branches and autumn leaves above me.  I pulled out my flashlight and began to navigate my way back to my car through the dark woods.

As I walked, Alec popped into existence next to me.  He just walked in silence for a few moments, then said, “James… I…” but he trailed off.

“I know,” I said.  “Same here.”

He paused for a moment, then nodded.

“We’re going to get this fucker,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Magic

“Have a seat and put your learning cap on,” Morgan said.

“I don’t have anything to take notes with.”

“Good!  That means you’ll just have to remember what I say.  Now, how familiar are you with spell casting?” Morgan asked, pacing back and forth as I sat on the ground.

“The Seventh Sons taught me that there are two basic types I will encounter.  The first is spell weaving, where you imagine what you want to happen, focus magic to the tips of you fingers and follow a sort of tracing that appears on the fabric of reality.  Once it’s imbued with magic, whatever you wanted happens.”

“Excellent.  There are some restrictions to that power.  Are you aware of them?”

“Well, it loosely coincides with the laws of physics.  If you wanted something to appear from nothing, it would take the magical equivalent of energy to form matter.  That makes it all but impossible to conjure something from nothing.”

“Good,” Morgan said.  “And going on from that point, are you able to stop a spell once it’s been cast?”

“I would assume no.”

“That is partly true.  It all depends on how you design the spell.  If you design a spell to lift something up into the air, the spell will lift the object and continue to drain your magical reserves until you run out.  Instead, you could design a spell to lift something into the air for thirty seconds or for as long as you will it.  That allows you to stop the spell before you run out.  Under normal circumstances,  this woudn’t be much of an issue for a magic user.  For you, this means the difference between life and death.”

I focused hard on remembering what she just said.  I hoped to God I wouldn’t forget to do this.

“Now, before you forget what I just said, let us practice.”

“Right now!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, right now.  Up on your feet, let’s get to it.”

I shuddered as my gut filled with anxiety.  I had never woven a spell before, much less woven a spell with my life on the line.

“Now, I want you to pick up this rock for thirty seconds,” she said, placing a rock at my feet.

“But I was completely out of magic this morning,” I said.  As I thought about the past night and day, I felt the exhaustion nipping away at my ability to focus.

Morgan laughed.  “And you’re possessed by a ghost!  Check your magic reserves.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“Close your eyes and focus on the gate within your heart.  You should be able to feel your magic capacity.  You won’t be able to tell the actual amount you have in terms of absolute quantity, but you’ll be able to tell how much you have relative to your total capacity to hold magic.”

“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes and focusing on the gate in my heart.  As I did, I felt a strange sensation.  It felt like a cup brimbing with a bubbling liquid.  “Woah,” I muttered.  “I think I feel it.”

“And?”

“It’s like a cup full of a bubbling liquid,” I said, repeating my thought.

“Good.  Now, try to lift the stone.”

“But what if I run out of magic?” I asked, not feeling confident in my magical casting ability.

“You won’t.  But if you are concerned, simply design the spell with that condition in mind.”

“And how to I design the spell?”

“Open up your reservoir of magic and imagine what you want to happen.”

I did as she said, feeling my body flood with magic.  I wanted the rock to pick the rock up for as long as I wanted.  As I imagined this, a strange pattern appeared before my eyes.  Zigzagging lines going to and fro, up and down, in and out, and something else I couldn’t quite comprehend.  That said, I felt myself almost unconsciously focusing magic to my fingers and tracing the pattern.  I felt as if I were weaving a grand tapestry. 

Before I knew it, I was done and the pattern glowed a bright golden color.  The rock began to levitate off the ground, and I felt the slow draining of my magic reserves.  At first I was scared, but I quickly regained my composure.  My magic was draining incredibly slowly.  I counted out thirty seconds, and cut off the spell.  The rock tumbled to the ground.

“That was thirty two seconds,” Morgan said.  “You’re counting is a bit off, but you understand the gist of spell weaving.  Now, you had said there were two types of ways to cast spells?”

“Yeah.  The first is spell weaving, and the second is by using a grimoire.”

“Explain to me what a grimoire is.”

“Well, a grimoire is essentially a book that you keep spells in.  You program the spells you weave to respond to a specific command, like a phrase or gesture.”

“Where does the griomiore come into play then?  Why not just cast a spell and have it be tied to a hand gesture?”

“Because the fabric of reality is ever flowing and ever changing.  It would be like putting pool noodles in the middle of the ocean in a specific manner and expecting them to stay together.  You can do it, but it requires constant maintenance.  Whereas if you got a boat and put the pool noodles in a specific arrangement on it, then you wouldn’t have to worry about them drifting.”

“Unless there was a storm,” I quipped.

“This is an analogy, but yes.  A grimoire can be destroyed.”

“And the Resurrection Men don’t like other magical creatures using a grimoire because it allows for quick and repeated use of the same spell?”

“Or consecutive use of a lot of different spells, but yes.”

“Are there ways to get around that?”

“In your case, you don’t have to worry about a thing.  They haven’t installed a trace on you, so you can use one as you see fit.  On the other hand, I have some issues but where there’s a will there’s a way.  It’s like outlawing drugs.  Sure it’s harder to get your crack, but there’s always bath salts or whipped cream bottles.”

“Jesus Morgan.”

“Shut it, I’m enjoying my analogies today.  Anyway, grimoires are extremely useful, especially when you want to exactly reproduce the spell another magic user created.  However, there are alternatives to grimoires that the Resurrection Men or other Supernatural creatures simply aren’t aware of.”

“Like?”

“Runes.  The runes on these trees are a great example.”

“So only the Immortals and the Boogyman know about them?”

“Right.”

“So then an Immortal or the Boogyman put these runes here.”

“Yes.”

“What the hell do they mean and why aren’t you concerned?”

“Oh don’t worry.  They are just a warding spell to keep out Vampires.  There haven’t been Vampires in North America since the eighteen hundreds.  The Seventh Sons cleaned them out thoroughly.  These runes were probably placed here by an Immortal way back when.”

“Okay,” I said, breathing out a sigh of relief.

The City Above the Ground

“Lay anchor here,” I said to Devitt, my first mate.  He was a red head, and also a former member of my squadron from my days as a Specter.  He wore a black stealth uniform called a chameleon cloak, which took photographs of his surroundings and displayed them on his cloak, making him appear invisible.

“You got it,” he replied, and began yelling off a series of orders to my crew.  My crew was a series of strays I had picked up over the years.  Some predated the war to end all wars, while others are survivors of the bombs and wastelands.  My ship was an old cargo ship that I had bought a couple years after joining up with the Specters.  It was a little investment I had made that paid off huge dividends, as it turned into my home after the bombs fell.  I had tricked it out with plasma cannons, rail artillery guns, and Gauss machine guns.  This was only one of three ships I had, but I kept the other two far offshore as they were not nearly as armed as this one is.  They do have enough armaments to keep pirates at bay, but their primary role is to serve as floating farmland.

As my crew bustled about, laying anchor in Boston Harbor, I made my way to one of our small, inflated power boats designed to bring me to and from shore.  I had business in the city of Boston that needed tending to. 

“Devitt!” I called to my first mate.  “I’m heading into Boston to my meeting with the mayor!  Keep the artillery primed in case I need support!”

“Gotcha!” Devitt replied. I turned to get onto the boat, but Devitt yelled, “Adam! Try to recruit some new crewmates while you’re there!”

“Will do!” I replied, feeling the sting at the loss of the two crewmates we had lost earlier in the week to a storm.

I hopped into the small motorboat and activated the winch to lower me into the water.  I grabbed the handle of the tiller, sending a surge of electricity through the electrical motor with my shimmer cloak.  I cranked the throttle on the motor and took off through the harbor to my usual landing site right by the Boston Aquarium.  The financial district in Boston had the highest density of tall buildings, so that is where the primary cluster of inhabitants reside.  It’s also where the mayor decided to set up shop.  It was about a twenty-minute trip from my ship to my landing sight, but I passed the time listening to a podcast.  It’s funny how quickly humans adapt to their environment.  When the bombs fell, I thought for sure any media of any kind would never be made again.  After all, that was the least of anyone’s concern for a time.  But as the years wore on and people became acclimated to living, they began to innovate again.  There are still inventions being created every day, no longer hindered by red tape.  On top of that, sites like YouTube never actually went down.  Many groups of people were still actively maintaining internet servers, and most satellites surprisingly remained intact. 

The podcast I was listening to was a fast-talking lawyer discussing the political situation in Boston.  He was discussing how land ownership was reserved for the established upper class, and how the majority of the population was a renting class.  He discussed how an eviction in Boston is almost certainly a death sentence.  There are no homeless anymore in Boston.  That issue was solved by the Sigma Virus.  My crew and I wanted to both study the Sigma Virus and put an end to the caste system in Boston and allow the private ownership of small parcels of land.  After all, land means power.

As I pulled my little boat out of the water and onto the shore, I heard a ragged shuffling coming from further up the shoreline.  Turning my attention to the noise, I saw the creatures meandering towards me, not having picked up my scent yet but definitely seeing me.  With a quick thought to my neural interface, I activated my shimmer cloak’s cloaking capabilities.  In a somewhat discombobulating moment, I saw my limbs vanish from sight.  The only sign I was still there were my footprints in the sand and a slight shimmer.  That shimmer was what gave shimmer tech its name.  Unlike Devitt’s chameleon cloak, my shimmer cloak did not take pictures of my surroundings and display them.  It actually bent light around my body using tiny, yet powerful, gravitational fields.  This of course took a lot of power and made the air noticeably colder around me as my cloak absorbed heat to power the cloaking function. 

The creatures continued to shuffle my way, but without seeing movement they soon drifted away from their original course.  Those creatures, the victims of the Sigma Virus, used to be human.  They were the reason why Boston became known as The City Above the Ground and also why being evicted from your rented cubicle in Boston was a death sentence.

After I had securely grounded my little boat, I made my way off the shoreline and up a small ridge.  As soon as I did, I was yet again hit by the sheer numbers the mutants possessed.  They flooded the streets of Boston.  The massive buildings had their lower parts cemented shut or bricked off, making it impossible for the mutants to enter the buildings.  Some of the old buildings of Boston’s financial district stood unaltered since the early two thousands, but many of them had either been torn down and replaced or added on to with the innovative new building material called graphene.  A single sheet of carbon formed around porous cement.  Once the cement was dissolved away, a brick of graphene was left.  It was ultra-strong and lightweight, allowing for new heights to be reached by humanity.  Each of the reconstructed buildings stood at least three times taller than the ones they had replaced.  The modified one were less than twice as tall than the originals, but still larger than the tallest building in Boston had been before the introduction of graphene. 

Above the ground, catwalks connected the buildings together.  Some of the large windows were smashed out to provide fresh air for the inhabitants.  People were bustling about their business across the catwalks and the large platforms built out from the buildings.  In conjunction with the platforms and catwalks between the buildings, flying machines were extremely prevalent.  There were airbuses, individual flying bikes, and even a fleet of hot air balloons for the poorest of the lower class.  Those were unique as they were connected between buildings by ropes that could be pulled to and froe to guide the hot air balloons from building to building.  Everything combined gave the Boston skyline the appearance of a vast, disorganized, noisy web. 

There was live stalk in some of the buildings, but they were primarily reserved for the upper class.  The general inhabitants had a well-rounded diet of nutrient enriched vegetables grown in the indoor growth farms constructed before the war.  It was a very sustainable form of food, but often left the inhabitants skinny.  Not malnourished, but they had very little fat on their bodies.  This was a very different situation that what was found on my ships, as I did have a sort of sustainable farming method where my crew did receive rations of meat or eggs with one meal in the day.  They were not fat, but definitely had a healthy layer of warming blubber to protect them from the harsh ocean spray.

I continued my journey to the base of one of the buildings, the mutants parting before me as they felt the coldness generated from my shimmer cloak.  I put out my foot onto the wall of the building, activating the antigravity function of my cloak while quickly deactivating the cloaking function.  The two of them combined would be too much of an energy draw, and my cloak would begin to condense the oxygen and carbon dioxide around me.  Again, this transition was disorienting as my gravitational frame shifted from the ground to the wall.  I began my ascent up the side of the building, making sure to shift the color of my cloak to match the color of the building.  I didn’t want too many people seeing me scale the side of the building in this manner.

As I approached the sixteenth story, I heard a padding behind me, as if a dog were following me.  I turned to find a black wolf with bright yellow eyes and black flecks scattered in them.  He stared at me.  It would have been unusual to find a black wolf in Boston, much less in the same gravity orientation as me while I was on the side of a building.  However, this was a figment of my mind.  Some call in the inner eye, others call it a subconscious.  Whatever the hell he is, he’s a pain in my ass.

“You should enter the building here,” the wolf said to me.

“And why’s that?” I asked out loud.

“I don’t entirely know myself.  Just a feeling is all.”

“You’re really no help sometimes, you know that?”

“And yet every time I have one of these feelings, it works out to your benefit.”

“Not every time,” I muttered.

“That was different,” the wolf said.  “And if you bring it up again, I’m pissing on your leg.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I laughed.

The wolf snorted, his eyes glinting in amusement before he faded from my sight in a curl of black smoke.

Hopping through an open window into an empty hallway, I quickly communicated to my suit to morph itself so it would appear as the clothing worn by the population here.  So, it morphed from its usual stark white, armored appearance, into the normal casual wear worn by the lower class here.  It could be jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, t-shirts, etc.  All of it looked more or less similar to before the war as clothing manufacturing continued once Boston was re-founded and this clothing niche needed filling.  My cloak’s visor melted off my face and congealed with the rest of itself into my clothing.  My cloak’s ability to morph like this stems from the inherent nature of shimmer tech, in that it was a form of biotechnology.  It was comprised of cells with metallic organelles incorporated into the cellular structure.  Those added organelles gave me a large degree of control over the shape, color, and consistency of the cells comprising my shimmer cloak.

I walked through the hallway until I came to a hot air balloon that could take me to the middle tear of the city.  I was at the lowest tear at the moment, and it consequently had the poorest residents of Boston.  I needed to work my way up to the highest floor of the tallest building where the mayor had claimed for himself. 

Paying with some copper scraps I had hidden away in my purse; I rode the hot air balloon across the gap between buildings.  It was just me and a lanky boy no older than fourteen in the basket.  I had seen this kid before, and he was always working in one balloon or another.  I leaned over the side of the basket, looking down at the writhing mass of mutants on the ground.  Mindless, disorganized.  They are a threat if you are unprepared, especially a group as big as this, but humans evolved specifically so they can prepare themselves to face impossible odds.  Drying out meats to endure difficult winters, hunting bears by hiding spears on the ground and having the bear chase you into them, and a million other examples.  Mutants are but one more trial in the story of mankind, and Boston is a prime example of how humanity can prevail. 

I was jerked out of my reverie by the balloon coming to a gentle stop.  I looked up to find it had gotten itself snagged on a hanging piece of metal from one of the catwalks.  The boy working on this balloon scrambled up the side of tit, using the rope encircling the outside of the balloon as hand and footholds.  He managed to unsnag the balloon easier than he was expecting and lost his grip.  He let out a yelp as he fell, but I quickly grabbed a rope and jumped over the side to grab him.  We fell a ways, but the rope went taught and my iron grip held us firm.

“You should have tied yourself down,” I scolded the boy, as I shifted him onto my back.

“Y-yes sir,” the boy replied.  I hauled us up the rope, back into the basket.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“I think my wrist might be broken,” he muttered miserably.  In Boston, a broken wrist was either a death sentence or a pathway into indentured servitude.  That is to say, he and his family would be evicted because they wouldn’t be able to afford rent without the extra pair of hands, or one of the upper class would provide him food, clothing, shelter, and health care which would all need to be paid back over the course of his lifetime.

“Don’t you worry about that,” I replied.  “You aren’t afraid of heights and seem to have a good work ethic.  Do you have family?”

“My mum died during the war, but my pa and I both work the balloons.”

“There is a place for you aboard my ships,” I replied.  “I happen to have need of two crewmen with strong backs.”  As I said that, I felt the sting of loss from the two crewmen I had lost once again.

“Really?” he asked excitedly.  “Are you the ghost man?”  He was referencing my shimmer cloak.  As much as I try to refrain from exposing my cloak’s true appearance to the general populous, I was forced into a difficult situation when I first returned to Boston after the bombs fell.  Long story short, everyone and their cousin saw me in my cloak along with all three of my ships in all their glory.  They hadn’t seen my face, but they do know of me and my crew.

As for why they call me the ghost man, my cloak is stark white with a hooded cloak.  The mask is also somewhat skeleton-like, having sunken cheeks and recessed eye sockets.  The cloak portion of my shimmer cloak is but one part of it.  My whole body is actually encompassed in it, but the cloak generally draws the most attention as it covers the rest of the shimmer tech.  On my body itself, the shimmer tech forms a sort of hardened body armor designed to instantly convert kinetic energy into heat, which is then absorbed by the shimmer tech encasing my body.  By doing so, it makes me almost immune to small caliber rounds.  It is not perfect though, so a high caliber rifle round will crack a few ribs.  Overall, the appearance of my cloak in its natural form makes me seem like a ghost.

“Shhh,” I said.  “That is not to be repeated.  If you do, your family and you will be in grave danger.  If you can keep quiet about this and meet me back at the hallway we were just at when night falls with your father, you two will be able to escape this place with me.”

He nodded, holding his wrist as the swelling began to take hold.

“Good.”  With that bit of business concluded, the balloon came to the top platform where we were met by who I assumed to be the boy’s father.  He was also lanky, but had firm, wiry muscles.  He seemed to be in his mid-thirties.

“Sam!” the father shouted, scuttling his boy away from me.  “I saw everything!  Sir, thank you so much,” he said quickly to me before turning his attention back to his boy.  “Are you okay?”

Sam held up his wrist for his father to see, and his face went stone cold. 

“Don’t worry, you won’t be stomaching that burden.  I know of a businessman that will sponsor your healing process.”

“Your son will assume the debt once you die,” I spoke up.  “I can—”

“No, not this time,” the man interrupted me.  “This businessman doesn’t accept generational debt.  This injury dies when I either pay it off in full or die trying.”

“Sir, I have an—” I tried to say again, but he interrupted me.

“I’ll refund you for the trouble good sir,” the man said, handing me the equivalent of the scraps of copper I paid at the bottom hallway.  “It’s the least I can do.  And mind you, you’ve made a lifelong friend in me for what you did for my boy.  Once I get this business squared away with his hand, I insist you join us for dinner tonight.”

“Okay, sir I need you to stop interrupting me for a moment,” I stated bluntly.

The man paused for a moment, the flushed red.  “Shit, my bad.  My boy’s got me all worked up is all, and I’m trying to settle into my new reality is all,” he said, referencing his future lifelong indentured servitude.  For this man, eviction was not an option.  “I would have like to retire eventually, but I don’t rightly care so long as my boy can live a good life.  If I can just—”

I held up a hand, stopping him mid-sentence.  “I’ve got an offer for the both of you.  I discussed it with your son already, but it’s best neither of us say anything.  Do not go to meet with that businessman until tomorrow.  Tonight, meet me at the lower hallway this balloon is connected to.  Understand?”

The man looked me up and down.  Instead of engaging in his chattery nature, he simply nodded and said, “I think so.”

“Good.  I must be going now.  Mention to nobody anything of this, nor that I was here.”

With that, I made my way across the platform and into this new skyscraper.  I had to duck and dodge as drones flew through the corridors and people bustled about doing their jobs or running errands.  After navigating my way through the building to another platform, I noticed a man at another building directly across from this one trying to sell a hover bike.  Thinking a bit ahead about my extraction of Sam and his father, as well as getting somewhat irritated by the increasingly thickening crowds, I decided to buy that bike.  Hover bikes were no more than small quadcopters with handlebars.  They were generally powered by electricity, although I have seen some jury-rigged combustion motors attached to some.

There was no balloon, catwalk, or form of transport to take me directly there, so I had to navigate my way through several flights of stairs, a mother yelling at her flock of children blocking my way out to a platform, and two out of service cat walks that almost gave out on me.  I finally did make it to my destination, breathing a sigh of relief after having almost lost my shit on several occasions.  I’ve never been a huge fan of crowds, although I do recognize their uses in hiding in plain sight.  The biggest issue with crowds is the people…people can just be so stupid sometimes, especially in crowds.

“Hey,” I said to the man holding the for sale sign.  “That thing still work?”

“’fraid not,” he replied gruffly.  “She quit out on me and the mechanic’s got no idea what’s wrong with her.”

“Huh.  Mind if I take a look at it?” I asked.

“By all means, but don’t expect payment if yeh can figure out what’s wrong with it.”

“Gotcha,” I said curtly.  I opened up the fuse box and began to fiddle with some of the fuses.  I wasn’t expecting that to do a lot.  I was just buying time for my shimmer cloak to snake its way through the wiring of this thing and figure out what was wrong with it for me.  After a moment, I got a mental report of what was wrong with it.  I pulled a phone out of my pocket, which was actually just a cluster of my shimmer cloak’s cells.  On it, there was a display of the bike’s schematics along with what exactly was wrong with it.  The man tried peering over my shoulder, but I made sure that he couldn’t see what I was doing.  There were three unconnected things that were wrong with the bike, all of which just required some wire splicing to fix.  I wasn’t surprised nobody was able to figure out what was wrong with the bike.  Yeah, it was a simple fix, but to identify what things actually shit the bed was a monumental task in and of itself.  It could be done, but given the looks of this man, he by no means had the money to spare to possibly get this thing fixed.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Do yeh know what’s wrong with it?” the man asked.

“Not at all,” I lied.  I would have normally told him and found some other form of transportation, but this guy just rubbed me the wrong way.  “How much?”

“Three ounces of silver,” the man said.

For all he knew, this was a hunk of metal to be sold off.  He was definitely trying to rip me off.  Whatever.  I was already ripping him off, but I didn’t want it to be too obvious I was doing so.  “For a hunk of metal like this?  It’s worth maybe one ounce.”

The man grinned.  A bit of pushback is just what this guy needed.  “No way.  There’s great salvageable tech in there.  GPS, copper wiring, gyroscopes.  Two ounces.”

“You aren’t likely to get a buyer for that price down in the middle of Boston,” I said, referencing the level of Boston we were on.  The higher you went, the richer you were…generally.  It also so happened that the higher you went, the more indentured servants you found.  “An ounce and a half.”  This was still just above market value for bike, but not so high it would raise suspicions.  Just enough that the man would feel like he got the upper hand.

“Done,” he said quickly, ceasing any further negotiation.  “You have the metal on you?”

“I do,” I said, reaching for my purse.  It wasn’t by any means a normal purse either.  It looked more like a medium sized coin wallet, but us Specters called it a purse because of the sheer amount of stuff we could jam into them.  I handed he man the silver, making sure to appear annoyed.

The man smiled again, revealing his discolored teeth this time.  “Good doin’ business with you,” he said and scuttled away.

I shook my head and set to work stripping down the wires that needed tending and twisting them together.  After about ten minutes of work, the bike hummed to life.  The props underneath it began to rotate, creating the vacuum of air required for lift.  I popped on it and flew off up to the top of the skyscrapers where the mayor had set up his office.  Weaving through the web of ropes and catwalks, while dodging other hover bikes and hover craft was definitely a challenge, but also a welcome one.  The warm breeze in my face was refreshing as well.

The first two buildings to be replaced after the introduction of graphene were the two round towers, One and Two International Place.  One International Place was the larger of the two and rebuilt to be the tallest building in Boston.  I parked my hover bike on a platform joining the two buildings together.  There was a parking fee of course.  To give a semblance of fairness in this society, the mayor had made the parking available for all residents if they could pay the fee.  However, only the upper class could spare the money to park there, so only the upper class could come in to see the mayor.  The same fee was associated with any public transportation bringing people to the top of One International Place.  Voting was also held in the mayor’s chambers, so by having this fee associated with travel to the mayor’s chambers, it effectively made it so only the upper class could vote.  This democracy was one more akin to the roman empire under the rule of Nero.

After shutting the bike down and paying the fee with a small gold nugget, I began to walk to the entrance of the building.  I was cut off abruptly as three men barged their way past me as if I wasn’t even there.  They wore finely tailored suits.  One man looked back at me and laughed, his stark white teeth contrasting harshly with his dark skin.  He stood about a foot taller than me, and despite being dressed in a suit, I could tell that his body was extremely muscular.  He would have been handsome had it not been for the sneer he wore while looking at me.  His friends were equally as derisive and slightly shorter than him.  Their skin was pale and their clean, feathery blond hair indicating they showered and washed often.

“Who let this trash up here,” the black man said in a very deep voice.  “To think one of the rentoids could afford to come up here.  What apartment are you in boy?” he asked.  “Your rent needs to be raised.”

“I’m from out of town,” I explained, trying to avoid a confrontation if at all possible.  “I have a meeting with the mayor.  Now, if you please, I must be getting on my way.”

“No, no.  Only the elite deal directly with the mayor.  All outsiders and rentoids go through the secretaries.”

“Yeah, well I don’t particularly care,” I said callously.  My patience was running very thin when I had first gotten up here after dealing with the crowds down below.  Now I’ve got to deal with these dick heads.  “Get out of my face.”

The man laughed again.  “It seems we’ve got to teach the outside a lesson,” he said, cracking his knuckles.  “Gentlemen, if you please.”

The two blondes came rushing at me, arms outstretched as if to grab me and hold me down.  My ability that I took to calling my Preflex kicked in.  It was like a reflex, only I did not react to what had just happened.  I reacted to what was about to happen.  It gave me the ability to sense an attack or personal injury to me before it happened and then react to the premonition instead of the actual attack.  It manifests in my feeling the attack as if it had landed, but at a small fraction of the pain.  A gunshot would feel like a really painful pinch.  There were many drawbacks to this power, one of which being that wolf that appeared earlier.  On top of that, I was only given a fraction of a second’s warning to react.  It was better than nothing, but my reflexes still needed to be fast in order to react properly.

The blondes were both going for my arms, probably to pin me down so the black man could beat me to a pulp.  I moved my arms out of the way and dodged in between them, causing them to overshoot their trajectory.  Wasting to movement, I rushed the large black man and jabbed him in the throat before he could shout at me.  Feeling a dull thud on the back of my skull, I quickly turned just as one of the blonde men was mid punch.  I moved my head just enough for the punch to miss, grabbing his outstretched arm and snapping it at the join.  Unfortunately, this did lead him to scream.  The other blonde man was more wary of me, but I closed the distance between him and I in a flash.  Two quick jabs and a haymaker to the face left him on the ground, unconscious.  I felt a tugging sensation around my midsection, so I jumped to the side just as the black man dove at me.  He tumbled to the ground.  I ran and kicked him as hard as I could in his gut, then curb stomped his head.  His body went limp.

Fuck.  Did I kill him?  I quickly bent down to check his neck for a pulse.  Feeling a firm beat, I let out a sigh of relief.  Sirens began to blare around me, and I saw the automated security system approaching me.  They were very advanced robots, breaking away from the constricting nature of human anatomy.  They resembled large balls with holes dotting their surface.  Rolling towards me, tentacles sprung out of the balls, attaching themselves to grip points.  They were completely under the control of the upper class.  That is essentially why there has been no revolt against them.  These robots made an uprising nearly impossible.

“RAISE YOUR HANDS.  YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR DISTURBING THE PEACE AND THE ASSAULT OF THE ELITE,” the balls emitted in unison.

Honestly, screw this.  Things had escalated far too quickly for my liking.  I would try and reason with the security system, but their AI was not incredibly advanced.  They primarily relied on the police officers back in the detention centers to deal with complex communication.  Time to exercise some de-escalation techniques.

I sent a thought to my shimmer cloak, and it re-formed to its original stark white appearance in a flash.  My visor encased my head in a snap.  I didn’t let the cloak portion of the shimmer tech to reform as that would grant an extra grip point for the security drones to grab on to.  While this would greatly diminish the heat absorption properties of my shimmer cloak, it would only be for a short time.  On top of that, the kinetic converters responsible for protecting my body would almost completely eliminate the function of my preflex. 

“COMPLY OR YOU WILL BE MET BY FORCE,” they commanded.

With a quick thought, two sharp blades sprung out from my forearms, jutting past my hands by about a foot.  The tips of them glowed with a bright light as they reached a temperature of roughly twenty-two thousand degrees.  The cells of my shimmer tech maintained a thin vacuum between themselves and the heat, protecting them from damage.

The security drones rushed me, tentacles filling most of the free space around me.  My cloak’s computer analyzed their movements and highlighted their trajectory for me.  My arms began to move in a blur as I cut the tentacles to ribbons, melting through the metal like a hot knife through butter.  After thirty seconds of the lightning-fast fight, only balls of metal were left.  The rolled towards me as if to break my ankles, but I dispatched of them quickly with my blades.  Using my blades in this manner drained my energy reserves fairly fast, but I could replenish them quickly enough. 

Now, it was time to finally deal with the mayor.

The Poltergeist Part II

Just a little preface. This is a follow up to the cliffhanger I left you all on in The Poltergeist. If you haven’t read that, I’m putting a link just under this:

The Poltergeist

Without further adieu, here is The Poltergeist Part II.

My mind was blank, but I could still think.  Who was I?  What was I?  Where was I?  I tried flexing my fingers, whatever those were, but found them to be missing.  There was a sound way off in the distance.  I don’t know what it was but I knew I should know what it was.  I decided to ignore it and explore my existence.  I wanted to expand myself into the furthest reaches of this blankness and try to fill it up… at least until that sound got too annoying.  And so, I stretched myself.  That’s when I learned what imgages were.  Sight.  The mind’s interpretation of varying wavelengths of photons hitting the retina, which I didn’t have.  Yet I could still see what was around me. 

I started off by overlooking a barge… or at least I thought it was a barge.  Upon further inspection, I came to realize it was two oil rigs lashed together.  A monster was climbing the side of it.  It had red, slimy skin, long strong tentacles, and the gleam of intelligence in it’s cold calculating eyes.  Three figures stood on the deck, getting ready to fight the monster.  Getting bored, I looked around me to see empty water as far as the eye could see.  Something had happened here.  Something bad.  Something that flooded the world.  Sparing one glance back at the octopus climbing the side of the oil rigs, I saw it transform into a humanoid.

This had lost my interest strangely enough, so the scene changed before me.  There was a boy cowering in a tub with a woman.  They were hiding from something in the hallway.  But it knew they were in the hotel room’s bathroom.  The boy set down his hatchet to wipe the sweat off his hand only for the creature on the other side of the door slam into it, sending a crack through it.  The boy tensed, grabbing his hatchet.  The creature continued to slam into the bathroom door.  It took several tries for it to break a hole in the door.  The grey skinned, red eyed creature stretched it’s jaw to an unglodly angle and screeched.  This creature used to be their friend before he died.  Now it was one of the undead.  The boy looked at the girl, shook his head as she screemed for him to stop, and he jumped through the hole at the creature to tackled his dead friend to the ground.  They wrestled on the ground, but the creature sank its teeth into the boy’s neck.  The boy jerked away, but it was too late.  He struggled against the contagion coursing through his veins, but found it impossible to resist.  He gave in, and the blackness overtook him.

The scene shifted again, this time without my wanting it to.  I was aware of hundreds of scenes now.  A lifeguard being confronted by the ghost of a drowned swimmer, a child cowering in a cave from a group of mercenaries, a gang of people exploring the abandoned ruins of an underground industrial complex; and the hundreds, thousands, billions… infinite variations of each.  I couldn’t keep track of it all.  I felt myself stretching too thin.  It was worrying, but also relaxing at the same time.  I would stretch so thin it would be as if I didn’t exist.  That’s when I felt a presence help me to focus.  It was another of me.  Another consciousness.  It focused my mind on a very particular vision.

There was a table, with a group of people sitting around it.  They seemed happy.  A mother and a father, both of them unremarkable looking and in their mid-forties.  Three children also sat at the table, one of them picking at her food.  She was about sixteen years of age.  Her build was slender and her eyes a deep, rich blue.  There were also two boys that were a little older than the girl, one vigoursly eating his food.  He was a little hefty, but I could tell he was strong.  Far stronger than most people would expect him to be.  His eyes were a grey-blue that gave a very unsettling impression if you looked into them long enough.  And then there was the third.   An intelligent boy for his age… far more intelligent than he let on.  His eyes were as bright as the sky.  Behind the two boys eyes was something else.  Something living in their minds besides them.  All of the people at this table had secrets they were keeping from one another, but they all acted as if they didn’t.

“Jake, stop eating so fast.  I can hear you snuffling from over here,” the girl whined.

“Yeah Jake, slow it down,” the father said.  “It’s not going to go anywhere.”

“But it’s good,” he said in between mouthfuls.

The other boy just sat at the table, playing with his food.  “Adam, don’t think we haven’t noticed you not eating,” the mother added on while they were on the subject of eating.  “You’re too skinny.”

“I’m just not hungry.”  The boy held a terrible secret in his heart.

The father looked at the mother with concern in his eyes.  She looked back and subtly shook her head while the fat boy and slender girl argued.

And just like that I was whisked away to another place.  This place was desolate.  A desert, but was still teeming with a terrible life.  Monsters, mutated by radiation roamed the land.  Massive hoards, teeming with writhing, squirmy things, masticating any and all life into sustenance for the surrounding mutants.  But this was not the terrible life I sensed.  Those monsters were alive, but they didn’t have life.  The life I was concerned about was standing on the side of a building, hidden within a white suit with a mask made to look like a skull.  He was surveying the land before him, gathering information on it.  Beside him stood a woman wrapped in baggy clothes designed to weather the desert.  The man shook his head and pointed something out to the woman.

Curious to see what his face looked like, I focused myself underneath the covering of his visor and was shocked to see an older version of the boy from my previous vision.  His terrible secret had manifested itself and made him into a warrior capable of atrocious acts.  But I knew intrinsically he was a good man.  He bore the burden of being a killer so the innocent didn’t have to.  He didn’t particularly enjoy his life, but he wouldn’t give Him the satisfaction of ending it.

The scene shifted to blankness.  The sound was still there.  Annoyed, I finally gave in a went towards it.  The sound turned out to be a voice.  I moved through the blankness, away of the infinite number of realities flowing around me and through me.  I touched trillions of minds as I moved towards the voice.  The things I learned, the things I saw.  I didn’t understand them.  What could I do but move towards the voice?

The voice became clearer, yelling a name.  “James!” it yelled.  “Follow my voice!  You have to fight it!”

Fight what?  Who was James?

I kept moving to the sound.  I traveled for billions of years, an eternity, yet at the same time I only traveled for a microsecond… an instant.  I came into a room lit by gentle rays coming from the outside.  There were two bodies on the floor with a pale ghost standing over them.  It wore a kilt and glowed a pale blue.  “James!” it shouted at the younger of the two bodies.  “Follow my voice!”

The younger body began to writhe and convulse on the ground.

“Don’t give in!” the ghost shouted.

Claim your body, the other consciousness told me.  You aren’t done yet.

My body?  I have a body?

I looked at the—my body and moved towards it.  As soon as my consciousness touched it, I was sucked into it.  Memories.  Oh sweet memories flooded my consciousness.  Memories of my parents, of the Seventh Sons and the Resurrection Men.  I was me.  I didn’t care if I died now.  I couldn’t let the poltergeist take over my body.  I searched for the last vestiges of my strength to ignite my flames within my body.  I wasn’t going to just chase out the poltergeist this time.  I was going to burn it into nothing.

Fire coursed through my veins.  My body was no longer writhing under the poltergeist’s control and instead simply writhing in pain.  The flames didn’t burn my flesh, but the poltergeist was wreaking havock as it moved through my circulatory system trying to avoid the flames.

I needed more.  With one last push, I flooded my entire system with my fire.  There was a screeching that pierced its way through the hallway.  I didn’t know if I made the screech or if the poltergeist had.  And as quickly as the pain started, it stopped.  The poltergeist was no more.

For hours I lay on the ground, passing into and out of consciousness.  I couldn’t move even if I wanted to.  My body barely had enough energy to manage a couple fluttering beats of my heart and a ragged breath or two every few seconds.  It was at that point that my mind really did fade into a dreamless slumber while it tried to go on living for a few more minutes.  My last thought was of the boy I had seen in those visions, and what that consciousness was.

When I came to, I was outside the building, snow building up on my face.  Beside me lay the security guard.  Alec’s spectral form was slapping my face, trying to wake me up.

“Jesus bloody Christ,” Alec said.  “I took over yer body fer a we bit and yeh almost die on me while I got you and that damn fat guard outa the buildin’.”

I grunted, not really able to move.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Alec said.  “I’ve sent a message to Morgan.  She’ll be here in a bit to help us out.”

I just gazed up at the grey sky.  Now that the poltergeist was dealt with, I got the pleasure of dealing with the eccentricities of Morgan.

“What happened!” I heard a uniquely pitched shout come from the direction of the parking lot.  Morgan was here.  I just lay on the ground, slowly losing energy to the surrounding cold.

“We were dealin’ with a poltergeist,” Alec said.  “Seventh Son’s business and all that.  Then this jackass goes and gets possessed by it, so I had to hold his consciousness in place while he burned it outa his system.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Morgan look at Alec in shock.  “You did what!”

“I held his consciousness in place,” he replied matter of factly.

“No, after that.”

“I dragged the fattass security guard outa the buildin’?”

“Ugh,” she said exasperated.  “About being possessed by the poltergeist.”

“Oh yeah.  We burned the damned thing outa James’s system.”

“How?” she asked inquisitively.

I coughed slightly to get her attention.

“Oh, right!” she said and began to cram a special blend of calorie dense substance into my mouth followed up by a lot of water.

I sputtered and gurgled as it slid down my throat.  After several minutes of my body rapidly processing the energy, I groaned and sat up.  “Thanks Morgan.”

“I don’t rightly care for your thanks,” she said matter of factly.  “I want to know how you became unpossessed.”

I looked down at my hands, flame dancing across my fingertips.  “It’s my power I guess.”

“Your power?”

“The power I’ve been able to use since I got possessed.”

“Ah.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, my muscles aching.  “I think my brand hands are a little more… potent than I had previously thought.”

“Brand hands?”

“Oh.  That’s what I call my flame hands in my head.”

“I see.  Now what do you mean they are more potent?”

“My brand hands could burn through a lot of things, but something came over me.  I had a feeling like they could burn through anything.  When I activated them, they burned through the magic holding me down.”

She nodded in understanding.  “I see.  Is there something you want to ask me?”

I nodded.  A witch of all people.  She was a perfect teacher for me.  “Can you teach me how to use magic?”

“Well it’s about time you asked.  Of course I will.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes just like that.  Did you think there would be strings attached?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

Morgan laughed.  “You think I would pass up the opportunity to study someone in your unique position?  Of course not.  Now, I expect you to sneak away from those Seventh Son friends of yours three or four times a week for practice.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Now tell me.  What made you finally want training in magic?” she inquired, circling around me like a wolf stalking prey.

“I’d rather not say.”

“You are so frustrating!” she hissed.  “Whatever,” she said, regaining her composer.  “Let’s just get going.  I’m tired after rushing over here, so drive me somewhere.”

“Where to?”

“Bring me to Roxbury, I’ve got some goblins that haven’t paid their protection fee.”

I looked at the petite young looking woman.  He disheveled red hair flapping in the wind.  “What do you mean ‘protection fee’.”

“I’d rather not say,” she mocked me.  “Just drive me there.  You know I can take care of myself.”

I held up my hands.  “Of course.  We’ve got to help out the security guard first though.”

“Oh, just let me take care of him.  I’ll give him a quick memory wipe and send him on his merry way.”

“But the Seventh Sons—” I tried to say.

“Seventh Sons smeventh sons.  Who cares about that.  All they’ll do is give him an orientation into the magical world and put him in therapy.  My way is much easier and cleaner for everybody.  At worst he’ll have some bad dreams every now and then.”

“On top of being touched by magic,” I muttered.

“Pff,” she said.  “Do you know how many people are touched by magic?  At least eighteen percent of the population in one way or another.  They learn to ignore what they can’t understand.”

“He was possessed by a poltergeist!” I shouted.  “His Sight is on par with mine now!”

Morgan got close to me.  “There are things in motion you wouldn’t understand.  You have to trust me on this.”

“What things are in motion?” I asked.

“Things!” she exclaimed, gesturing angrily.  “If they were easy to explain, I would.  As it stands right now, there are things you aren’t ready to know yet.”

“Ah yes.  That very good well thought out argument.  I’m going to take the security guard back with me so he doesn’t die.”

“No, you’re really not,” she said with a bitchy smirk.

Flames fluttered over my hands.  “Morgan, I’m going to do my job.”

She laughed.  “In the state you’re in?  Have you even seen yourself?”

“What?”

“Look at your arms.”

I did and saw them to be deathly pale, almost grey in fact.  Black viens ran through them.  My nails were black nubs.  “What the hell!” I exclaimed.

“Don’t panic,” Morgan said.  “This is a consequence of having been possessed by a poltergeist.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner!”

“You were almost dead from exhaustion and then started threatening me.”

I pushed my appearance to the back of my mind.  “Whatever.  I don’t care how I look, but you’re not taking the security guard with you.”

Again, she laughed.  “And you’re going to stop me?  Your magic is exhausted.  Listen, I can wipe his memory and lay spells on his mind to sooth his dreams.  He won’t remember a thing.  But his ignorance is incredibly important for the events that have been set in motion.”

“Morgan, I’m not letting you take him.”

A fire burned behind Morgan’s eyes for a fraction of a moment, but it was gone before I was even sure it was there.  “I’ll let you have your way this once since you’re my new apprentice.  But you must promise me you will check in on him every Friday night at eleven-thirty three.”

“What’s supposed to happen?”

“I can’t be sure yet, but something will happen.  There are several notable seers I am in contact with that assure me as much.”

“Okay.”  I stood there for a moment, unsure of how to proceed, then I noticed my arms swaying out of the corner of my eye.  “What the hell am I supposed to do about this?” I asked.

“Follow me,” Morgan said abruptly, turning and walking across the street to my car.  I struggled to pick up the security guard, but at least I could do it now.  Whatever Morgan had given me restored my strength, at least partially.  Once we got to my car, I leaned the guard against the rear wheel.  Morgan waved her hand and the car unlocked itself.

“How did you do that?  I thought you threw up after casting a spell.”

“Just when I spell weave.  This is something different.”

“What is it?”

“Question, questions, questions.  Just sit tight and tell me where you keep your enchanted sticks.”

“In the glove compartment.”

She rummaged through my glove compartment, making a complete mess of things.  “Why do you have so many McDonald’s napkins in here?” she asked.

“Questions, questions, questions,” I mocked her.  I caught the reflection of my face in the driver’s side mirror and grimaced.  My face was just as pale as my arms, with those same thin black veins.  My hair was pitch black too.  However, my eyes were like two pieces of coal on my face.  My new appearance was frightening to say the least.  I hope it wasn’t permanent.

Morgan ignored me and finally came out of my car with my enchanted sticks to hide my eyes.  “I’m going to alter the enchantment on these to hide your true appearance.  As it is, you look normal to anybody without The Sight, but break a stick every week just like you normally do and your appearance will look normal to those with The Sight.”

Morgan laid them on the ground and began to weave a shimmering, golden tapestry in the air.  Once she finished, the sticks glowed with the same golden color as the tapestry, then faded to look like normal sticks.  Morgan immediately threw up her breakfast.  Once she was done, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and gestured, “Go ahead, give them a try.”

I grabbed one of the sticks and snapped it in half.  An energy was released from them and my arms had their normal tan color overtake them.  “Thank God,” I muttered, seeing my reflection become normal.

“No, thank me,” Morgan stated.  “Now, I have a couple things I want you to do.  Don’t use any magic whatsoever until I’ve had a chance to properly study your modified body.  On top of that, you cannot tell anybody about your new form.”

“Not even Colt or my Mom?”

Morgan actually paused to ponder my question.  “Yes to Colt, no to your mother.  If she found out, she would go on a rampage.”

“Can she really do that much damage?” I asked, shocked by what Morgan was saying.

“Not her, but her associates…  It’s just best if she and your family don’t know about what happened for now.”

That was weird, but okay.  “Sure,” I shrugged.  No use in pushing for details at this point.  If she was omitting something so obviously, it must mean she had no intention of telling me at all.

“Now, drive me,” she told me, getting into the passenger’s seat.

“Okay,” I exasperated.  “As you command, m’leage,” I muttered, loading the security guard in the back seat.

Humans are Space Orcs

Okay, I know the whole humans are space orcs thing is kind of commonplace now, but I wanted to throw my two cents into the lore of it. It’s nothing special or ground breaking in the way of humans being space orcs, but I still thought it was a descent storyline. Enjoy!

———————————————————————————————————————————————————

Humans are peculiar beings.  During the Inco-Humanic wars, the Inco Empire soon realized that humans were absolute monsters.  Their physical capabilities were something out of science fiction.  Healing what would appear to be fatal wounds, being able to regenerate entire organs from almost nothing, almost inexhaustible energy when pursuing a target, etc.  Their brains had to restrain their muscles from using their full strength all at once, otherwise their muscles would rip from their bones or even break their bones.  That said, sometimes that block could be circumvented in a life or death situation.  The number of Incans killed by a human on the brink of death were truly monumental.  To accomplish similar feats, us Incans would need to wear top of the line exogear to compete, and we simply did not have the resources to equip each of our soldiers with it.

The scary part about humans was their willingness to destroy.  After they thwarted our attempt at invasion, we tried to create peace.  But they weren’t willing to have peace until they could dictate the terms.  We killed a lot of their people because of our radiation weapons and superior technology, but they killed far more of ours through sheer animosity.  They went into battle without full body armor, carrying simplistic yet effective ballistic weapons.  They killed and killed.  When they ran out of ammunition, the changed over to knives.  When their knives dulled, they started using their hands.  They simply didn’t give up until they got to our home world.

“Captain,” my subordinate gurgled to me.  “The human on board is hungry again.”

Again!  This was the third time it needed to eat this cycle!  “Give it a double helping of rations and speed up this flight,” I gurgled back.  “We can’t keep feeding it this much food and make it to port without docking along the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

As part of the peace treaty we were strong armed in to by the humans, we had to give them free travel around the galaxy for fifty years.  At first we didn’t see that as an issue, but we underestimated how often and how fast they proliferate.  It’s only been twenty years and there are already whole colonies of humans sprouting up with a third generation being born.  This particular human had booked passage last minute and we did not have enough time to stock up with enough rations.

I sat back in my seating pod and massaged my face ducts.  Humans were a tiresome breed, but they had their uses.  At least pirates should stay away from us since we had a human with us.  I gazed out into the empty void of space and became lost in thought.  Unfortunately for me, The Alarm went off.  The Alarm was a specialized system put in place to warn us against another human attack.  Oh no, I thought to myself.  The human is on a rampage.  We were originally disquieted to hear that this particular human had fought against is in the Inco-Humanic wars, but he had seemed tame enough.  I guess I was wrong.

As I began to lock down the ship, the human came storming in.  “What the hell is this racket?” he asked.  “There are fire or something?”  Human age was easy to tell.  This one was about fifty of their years with thick corded muscle and pucker mark scars from when he must have gotten into physical confrontations with my kind.

I shrunk myself into my seat out of fear.  Humans were brutal.  They evolved strong bones and thick muscles for defense, but their primary mode of attack was blunt trauma using some of their weakest bones.  They had to train for years to properly use them without injury, but even that was no garuntee.  Lack of training would not stop one of them from taring through all of us though.  They were… creative with how they adapted to their lack of offensive abilities.  Almost all of them carried a knife, and this one in particular was trained to use his meat hooks.  That was why we were so scared of him.  He was trained to use his body to its peak.  Even the weakest human could take out the strongest Incan, and this human was far from the weakest.

“Well!?” he shouted.

“Uh,” I gurgled out.  “There is a human attack.”

“A what?”

“A human is attacking.”

“I’m the only human on board though,” he replied.

A bloodied Incan came bursting onto the bridge.  “The human… is… coming,” he managed to get out, but slumped over into a limp sack.  Dead.

The human before me whipped around.  “You have a stow away.”  He walked over to investigate the body.  “And it looks like he has an axe.”

“What do we do?”

“Do you have any weapons?  Guns, blasters, anything?”

“Only the radiation weapons we have to fend off pirates.”  Our radiation weapons did not work immediately on humans like they did on our species.  Since they evolved with such a thin atmosphere, their bodies had systems in place to deal with large amounts of radiation.  Instead of dying right away, the humans would get sick and die in a week.

“Idiots,” he muttered.  “Absolute idiots.  What if a pirate crew of humans took over?  You ever think about that?”

“Humans can’t fly our ships.”

“Did that stop us from commandeering them to get to your home world in the war!?”

“No, but we are at peace now.”

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t humans out there with their own motives and intentions.  Think!”

“I know,” I gurgled.  “We have pirates too.”

“No… We have whole countries who want to take over your ships.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have time for this.  I’ve got to deal with this now before he wipes out the entire ship.  Do you know what this guy looks like?  What was he wearing, what was his skin color.  Did he have an accent?”

“I don’t know anything.  Why does that matter?”

The man shook his head.  “This is obviously a terror attack.  It could be Jihadis, white supremacist, Chinese insurgents, so on and so forth.  Each of them has different weapon and fighting preferences.”

“We don’t know.”

“Fine.  I’ll have to use what we do know.  This guy has an axe, and I have to deal with this.  Lock all the bulkheads behind me.  I will knock three times, pause, then knock another three times when I’m done.  I want all of you ready to get into escape pods if I don’t make it back.  Make sure this event doesn’t break the treaty.  This man does not represent our race.”

“But—”

“Please!  We cannot continue the bloodshed.”

I nodded and the human walked through the bulkhead.  I shut them all as soon as he left. There was talking, but I could not make out the words.  And before we knew it, the banging began.  The other Incans on the bridge cowered, trying to make themselves small.  The lifepods were primed and ready just in case.  Loud crashing that shook the very foundations of the ship.  If they kept this up, they might break the seal of the ship!  There was grunting that reverberated through the bulk heads and the metal of the ship.  At one point there was a loud scream, a pause, then a gurgling sound not too unlike the sound my species makes.  I looked to my comrades in the bridge, each of them shrunken small with their skin changing tones to match the deck.

Nock, Nock, Nock.  Pause.  Nock, Nock, Nock.

I slumped to the ground in a puddle of relief.  We were saved from a human by a human.  I took the ship out of lockdown.  I wriggled through the ship, trying to find the human that saved me.  It took three or four glargs, but I found him.  He was laying on the ground, staunching the bleeding from an axe wound to his rib.  I grabbed a human medical kit from the wall and began to mend him.  His face was a bloody mess, his teeth stained red.  One eye was closed shut and leaking blood.  His arm was dislocated.  All around me the walls were smattered with blood.  Dents in the frail walls separating us from the vacuum of space were ever precarious.  Any furniture that was in this room was broken to pieces.  In the corner lay another man with an axe buried in the side of his neck, one of the surefire ways to kill a human.  This human’s face was equally as mutilated as the one that rescued us, but I also noticed the pucker mark scars buried underneath the blood.  He also fought in the Inco-Humanic war.

“You saved our ship.  You didn’t need to risk your life when we could all have escaped with our lives.”

“Don’t mention it,” the human said.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you save our ship?”

The human took in a deep breath.  I have noted over the years that is a calming behavior common among humans.

“You seemed like nice people,” he said.  “I couldn’t let one of my own destroy your livelihoods.”

Confusing.  “Nice?  You risked your life because you though we were nice?”

“Yeah.”  The man coughed.  There was no blood from his lungs.  “You didn’t put me in one of those human containment rooms some of your species are fond of.  I noticed you had one, but you didn’t use it.  You also fed me enough food for three of your people.”

I let out a merry gurgle.  “You risked your life for our ship because we fed you?”

The man smiled.  “When you put it like that it makes me sound like a simpleton.  But yeah, pretty much.”

“What about him?”

The man sighed.  “An old war buddy.  You guys took everything from him in your first wave of attacks.  He couldn’t forgive you.”

“Took everything from him?”

The man paused.  “Your people killed his family all those years ago.  He wanted to send a message that some of us had never forgave you.”

“You killed your friend?”

His face became stone like.  “It had to be done.  We’ve killed plenty of your kind to last us a couple lifetimes.  You guys probably weren’t even involved with the fighting, so you were innocents.  He killed innocents and had to die.”  The man paused again, then began to stand up.

“You can’t!  Those wounds could be fatal.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it.  The axe got caught in my rib.  If anything, it’ll just be hard to breathe for a while.  You got any pain killers?”

I rummaged through the first aid kit and took out a container of opioids.  They were not chemically active in our species, but almost completely blocked the pain in humans.  The ability to block pain.  What a species.

The man took the bottle and smirked.  “You got two hundred oxies, but you don’t have a gun.”  Then he popped two pills.  He waited a couple minutes, then breathed a sigh of relief.  “That’s the stuff.”  He stuck his dislocated arm in between two pipes, jerked and with a loud pop he could move it again.  “Do me a favor and set my nose?  I always mess it up.”

I did my best to fix his nose, but it still looked a little crooked.  The man looked in a mirror and smiled.  “Better than I could do.  Thanks.”

“I suppose we should recycle the body now—” I began to say but the man cut me off.

“No.  Leave that to me.”

“But—”

“Please.  It’s my friend.”

“Very well.  Would you still like your food?”  I asked.

“No.”

I hesitated for a moment.  No human I knew ever turned down food after asking for it.  “I will leave you to your peace.”  Humans were so peculiar.  I was grateful to this man for saving our ship, but their fixation on the dead… Anyway, I had to recycle the body on the bridge floor.  I had known him for years, and filling the position he held would be difficult.  It could be done though.  As I left the room, I heard the human sobbing.

The Monster Under the Bed

Preface:

After several complaints, I want to preface this. This, along with The Poltergeist and The Giant’s Graveyard are chapters from my book The Resurrection Man. I know this ends on a cliffhanger, and I also know there are lot’s of questions to be answered. Be aware, they all have answers, and the cliffhanger is resolved in my actual book. This is just a taste of what’s to come.

The Monster Under the Bed

I woke up in the middle of the night.  Another nightmare again.  I shook the tiredness out of my eyes and walked to the bathroom.  Looking in the mirror, I noticed the bags under my eyes had become even more noticeable.  Of course I’d gotten a total of five hours of sleep combined this past week.  My wife, Linda, came into the bathroom.

“Another nightmare?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, wiping my face with cold water to wash away the terrible images burned into my mind.

“What was it this time?” she continued, rubbing my shoulders with a look of concern in her eyes.  Looking into the mirror, I marveled at the amount of weight I’d lost this past week.  Easily fifteen pounds.  My skin was starting to get loose.  Sure, I definitely had a sizable gut, but in another month I’d be nothing but skin and bones.  The few grey hairs on my head seemed to have multiplied over the past week.  Ever since I woke up in the snow outside that damn building.  Apparently, there was a five hour gap in my memory when I woke up there.  Whatever happened in those five hours had left me with endless nightmares.

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.  “Go get some sleep, I’ll be back in bed soon.”

That’s when little footsteps came running around the corner.  “Mommy, there’s a monster under my bed,” my son said with tears running down his face.  His name was Tom and he was about five.  I was in my mid-forties, and my wife was in her early thirties.  I got started on the whole family thing pretty late.

“Not this again,” she whispered so only I could hear it.  For the past month my boy had been scared of a monster under his bed. 

Linda walked over to our son to sooth him and bring him back to bed, but I stopped her.  “Go back to bed, honey.  I’ll take him to bed.”

She looked at me with concern.

“Seriously,” I pressed.  “I probably won’t be getting back to sleep any time soon.  Go get some rest.”

She frowned.  “Okay.  But I want you to at least try to get to sleep tonight.”

“Okay,” I lied.  “Come on buddy,” I said to my son, lifting him up and hugging him.  I noticed he was shaking this time and a wet spot was on his crotch, soaking into my white T-shirt.  “Let’s get you changed up.”

His head nodded quickly.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell mommy,” I whispered to him.  He just held on tighter to me.

We walked down the hallway to his room.  “You know pal, I’m a security guard with a big gun.  Nothing’s gonna hurt you while I’m here.”

“I know daddy.  But you aren’t always here.  That’s why I’m scared.”  Am I not spending enough time with my son?  Maybe I should take some time off work.

Pushing that thought away, I opened Tom’s bedroom door.  I don’t know what made me stop to survey the room.  Maybe it was Tom shaking, maybe it was my own nightmares, or maybe it was the sudden chill in the air.  I don’t know.  But I’m sure as hell glad I did look around the room.

At first glance, everything seemed fine.  The light from the hallway illuminated the dark room and everything appeared as it should.  However, the light didn’t penetrate under Tom’s bed.  Curious, I set Tom down and had him wait by the door.  I walked over to the bed and knelt down next to it, feeling the strain it put on my lower back.  I peeked under the bed and froze.  It was pitch black… unnaturally so.  Except… except for two eyes staring back at me.  The pupils were clearly defined because they were surrounded by blood red irises.  I could smell rotten meat.  My son wasn’t lying.  There was a monster under his bed.

It could sense my fear, and it smiled. The most disturbing, wide smile full of razor sharp teeth.

My first instinct was to scream, but I nipped it off as just a meek peep.  I slowly backed away, never taking my eyes off whatever was staring back at me.  I got up, and backed away towards my son, the eyes under the bed tracking me the entire time.

“Is that the monster you were talking about?” I quietly asked my son.  He hugged my arm tightly as he saw what I was talking about.

“Yeah,” he replied in a barely audible whisper as he buried his head into my pajama bottoms.

“Hey,” I said to him as I shut the door.  “Don’t worry about that.  We’ll get it sorted out.”  How the fuck was I going to fix this?

I picked up Tom and ran down the hallway to my bedroom.  I quickly plopped him on the bed and grabbed my gun.

“Bart?  What’s going on?” my wife asked.

“There really is something under his bed,” I quickly replied as I cocked my Glock.  “Take Tom to your mother’s.  I’ll make sure you get out.”

“What’s under his bed?!” she exclaimed.

“Just a python,” I lied.  There’s no way she would believe what I saw.  “But there may be an infestation.  Some jackass must have let one loose during the summer and it found it’s way into our house for the winter.”

“O-okay.”

“Is that what that was daddy?” my son asked.

“Yeah.  Don’t worry buddy, I’ll handle this.”  How the hell was I going to handle this?  “Now, don’t bother packing up.  Just go.  I’ll walk you to the door.

Linda got up from our bed and picked up Tom.  In the hallway, I looked down to find something that made my skin crawl.  Tom’s bedroom door was open.

“Come on Linda,” I urged.  “Hurry up.”

“Okay, okay.  I just need to grab a few things from the bathroom.”

“No!” I yelled, unable to keep my worry in check.  I quietly disciplined myself and continued in a much calmer tone, “Just get to the car and go to your mother’s.”

She nodded, understanding the urgency of the situation.  We hurried down the stairs and I practically pushed them into the car.  I checked every nook and cranny of the thing to make sure I didn’t see those damned eyes.  As satisfied as I could be in the current situation, I sent them on their way.  Once they rounded to corner, I turned my attention back to the house.  I backed away from it, inspecting the outside.  The top floor lights were still on, but most of the first-floor lights were off.  And then, as I was inspecting the windows up close, my blood ran cold.  Looking right at me from the darkened living room windows were those red eyes and that horrible smile.

That son of a bitch! I took out my gun and shot the damn thing right through the window. The window shattered, but the creature was unaffected. It let out a deep rumbling laugh and faded into the darkness of the living room. “You can’t leave,” it grumbled. It’s voice was coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. “You are mine now.” I felt invisible tendrils wrap around my body and began to pull me back into my house. Fear overwhelmed me. I shot my gun into the seemingly empty living room to no avail. It kept pulling me into the darkness. More laughter. My family screaming from the living room. They were gone! They couldn’t be in my living room! And then came the ripping. It was ripping something in there, and then the screams stopped. What the hell!

Just as I was about to cross the threshhold of my broken window, flame surrounded me. It burned away the tendrils, but not me. I collapsed to the ground, gasping as the fear rushed from my body to be replaced by an overwhelming sense of relief. There were footseps approaching me from behind. I whipped around, gun raised, but I stopped. It was a man in his early twenties dressed in a suit and tie. He had brown hair and brown eyes. The cuffs of his suit were singed. He seemed so familiar, but I was sure I’d never met him.

The Giant's Graveyard

I woke up in the morning to heavy footsteps.  I picked my head up and looked lazily around the room to find Colt walking into the office.  I saw bags under his eyes.  He must have been up all night.  Blood covered his right arm.  Upon further inspection, a green vine was weaving itself in and out of his arm.

“What the hell!” I exclaimed.  “Are you okay?”

“Oh!  You’re here.  Perfect.  There’s a ghoul that took up residence in a fucking golf course in a town north of Boston.  I need you to go and take care of it.”

“Have you seen a doctor yet?” I asked.

“What?  Oh, no.  That’s why I need you to go take care of this ghoul right now.”

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I nodded and shot to my feet.  I felt gross in these clothes, but I had to tough it out for now.  “What’s the situation?”

“It’s been killing local pets.  We’ve played it off as a coyote infestation, but this ghoul is different.  It knows it’s being hunted by us, so it’s going to disappear soon and pop up in some backwater community we never hear from where it can kill indiscriminately.  I texted you the address.”

“Gotcha.  Can I use magic on this one?”

“I don’t really give a shit as long as you talked to Morgan,” he said gruffly.  “Just get the job done and don’t forget your training.”

“Sounds good.”  With that, I took off out of the office at a light jog.  I ran through the twisting maze of hallways until I got out into the parking lot where I jumped into my car and tossed my phone on the phone mount.  I pulled up directions to the address.  Glancing at the time, I was shocked to see that it was already one in the afternoon.  Shit.  I’d slept for sixteen hours.  I guess I needed it.

I pulled out of the Seventh Sons parking lot, and began the drive to the town.  It was actually Lynnfield and the golf course was literally right next to Lynn Woods.  Funny how close I was to this thing the entire time.  It was a bit of a drive to get there since I was coming out of Boston during the lunch hour, but when I finally got to the suburbs my drive sped up greatly.  I pulled into the Lynnfield parking lot for Lynn Woods since the golf course was a good stone’s throw from there.  Time to go hunting.  

Ghouls never killed wild animals.  They liked to absorb magic from the emotional connections the pet’s owners had with them.  The pets would then be eaten so it could continue to run its normal metabolic processes as well.  Humans were obviously it’s prey of choice, but ghouls had a sort of vague intelligence to them.  They killed smartly.  They knew how humans thought and knew that if a group of humans caught wind of something killing other humans, they would hunt it until it was either killed or forced to flee.

So, that made catching ghouls particularly difficult.  Luckily, Colt was able to scry this thing and we caught up to it before it moved on.

Alec appeared next to me, his ghostly form casting a faint blue illumination on our dark surroundings.

“Can’t yeh think of a way ta track them with yer magic?”

“I—” I said, pausing a bit.  “I don’t really trust myself to do that yet.  I’ve got no idea how much magic it’ll take from me.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Alec said wistfully.  “Welp, I’m going to go for a bit of a stroll and see if I can’t find the bastard on me own.”

“Ghouls can see ghosts,” I told him.  “You glow.  It’d probably be best if you just stayed inside me.”

“Fine,” Alec replied.  “But let me control yer body.  I’m the better tracker.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled.  “I’ll let you take over.  Just give me back control if you find the damn thing.  I’m the better fighter.”

“Barely,” Alec grumbled.  He stepped into my body with a soft woosh and a puff of blue mist.

I relinquished control of my body.  It was strange to feel my body move without me telling it to.

For the next several hours, Alec scoured the dark golf course using my body.  I noticed the sun getting close to the horizon.  I’d rather not face this thing in the dark, so I guess I’d give the damn tracking spell a shot.  However it was at that moment that I noticed a spot of red out of the corner of my eye.  He quickly turned away from it.

I tried signaling to Alec to let me take over, but whatever let him perform rudimentary communication with me obviously wasn’t working for me.  I wouldn’t get my body back until Alec let me have it.  Shit.  I really wanted to look at the rainbow.  I tried moving my arms, but they refused to do what I wanted.  My legs also refused my commands.  Beginning to feel claustrophobic and trapped, I began to push at the boundaries holding me in my body.  There was some give.  I kept on pushing and pushing until I felt a rip and I regained control of my arms and legs.  They began to obey my commands.

“Finally!” I exclaimed.

“Jesus fuck!” Alec yelped.

I looked at him with a grin on my face.  “I need to tell you something,” I said.

“Uh,” Alec began.

“You need to turn around and look at something I found,” I said to him.

“Uh—”

I turned to the blood patch and began to lead Alec to the patch of blood I found.

“James!” Alec said.  “I’m still controlling yer body.  Look at yer bloody hands.”

I did and saw that they were glowing neon blue.  “I’m a ghost?”

“No shite,” Alec said.  Now that Alec mentioned it, I also saw that he wasn’t glowing.  He was normal colored.  I get it was a big detail to miss, but I was caught up in the fact that blood was spattered across the damn golf course.

“Why do you not look like me?  You look like you, just not glowing.”  In fact, he also wore his normal kilt.  I saw that it was colored very plainly, a detail that I had never been able to see before.  It was dull green.  His face was also smattered with faint traces of dirt as well that I had never seen before.  I always thought his skin was unblemished.

“I don’t bloody know.  Maybe it’s yer fucked up brain trying to cope with being a feckin’ ghost.”

“Whatever.  We’ll figure this out later.  Right now I need to show you something.”

“Is that what that feeling was?” Alec asked.  “Yeh were tryin’ ta tell me somethin’?”

“Yeah!  Why didn’t you respond?”

“I thought I was losin’ me mind.  Yeh never told me it felt like that when I tried comunicatin’ with yeh.”

“It’d kind of hard to explain,” I replied.

“I don’t rightly care.  What did yeh want ta show me?”

“Look,” I said, pointing at the spot of blood behind me.

“Shite,” he muttered.

“Do you think it’s animal blood?”

“It’s tough ta say.”

I continued to look more closely at the surroundings when I found a wallet in the reeds near the little pond where the blood was.  Droplets of blood splattered the wallet too.

“A damn wallet,” Alec said.  “A person was killed.”

“Why would the ghoul do this?  Sure, it loves to eat human flesh, but it’s smart.  It would want to avoid detection, so it shouldn’t have killed a human.”

“I don’t rightly know.  It knows we’re here to kill it.  Maybe it wanted to taste human flesh one last time.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  We need to find this thing ASAP.”

“Aye.  The blood leads into the water, so I don’t think I’d be able to track it usin’ the blood.”

“No need,” I said quietly.  “Odds are it’s still in the water.  Give me control of my body right now.”

Before he could, a streak of putrid flesh tackled him.

“Alec!” I shouted.

Alec grunted, his brand hands streaking through the air looking to get a handful of the rotting corpse’s face.  At that moment, the ghoul jumped out of the water in a violent spray of water and began to attack Alec as well.

I quickly assessed the situation.  The ghoul had created a zombie out of the man to set an ambush for us.  Seeing no other alternative, I jumped into the fray to possess my own body again.  It took a fraction of a moment for me to gather myself, in which time the zombie had planted its teeth into my arm and the ghoul gouged out a chunk of my outer thigh.  I had managed to twist my leg at the last moment, so it missed my femoral artery.

Since the zombie’s teeth were holding its head in place, I grabbed the back of its rotting skull with my free hand and melted it in an instant.  At the same time, I summoned red hot flame in my foot and kicked the ghoul off my leg, branding its side.  It was harder to summon my power in parts of my body other than my hands, but it was still doable.

The damned thing flew back several feet and quickly squirmed onto its feet.  The sickly pale skin glistening with water as it’s upside down body turned to run away.  I quickly drew my gun and let off a few shots at it, the bullets piercing it’s flesh and throwing it back further.  I hissed at me and ran away from me quickly before I could shoot it more.

I jumped to my feet, grunting as the pain set in in my thigh.  Blood was seeping out of it.  I couldn’t let that continue.  I exchanged the gun in my hand for a knife and grasped the blade with my brand hand, heating it up to a glowing red.  I couldn’t directly burn myself with my brand hands, so I had to do this in order to cauterize my leg.  I pressed the knife into the wound, melting my flesh together.  The pain became so intense that I almost passed out.  I checked my arm to find that it wasn’t bleeding all that bad.  Not bad enough where it also needed to be cauterized at least.

Gasping through the pain, I hobbled after the injured ghoul, firing off a couple of shots of my gun.  I managed to clip it, but it ran off into the dark.  It left a trail of black blood that I could follow though.  I checked my magic reserves to find that I was a in a descent position to keep using it.  My brand hands used up a lot of magic, but so long as I didn’t use them sparingly I didn’t have to worry about it.

I chased the ghoul into Lynn Woods, which grew darker by the minute as the sun set, Golden rays flooded through the trees, casting shadows everywhere.  I could see movement ahead of me, the blood trail leading directly to it.  At this point in my trek, I was very much off the beaten path.  It looked as if nobody had been in this part of the woods for years.  No trash or any structures created by humans that would otherwise taint a forest.

And that’s when the strangest thing occurred.  Before me was a naturally occurring archway made by two trees.  The branches wove together in such a way that magic had to be responsible.  It resembled the archway Morgan had brought me to yesterday, but this one was much larger.  The symmetry and intricate swirls made by the tree branches indicated some sort of intelligent design.  And there was the ghoul.  It was waiting just before the archway.  I drew my gun to end this thing once and for all, taking quick aim at it’s head.  But as I did, the air changed.  It became ionized and smelled of ozone.  Not only that, but I could sense magic in the air.  The archway the creature was standing under sparked once, twice, and then with a blinding light, a portal opened.  It rippled with a blinding intensity that I had never seen in a portal before.  In fact, no portal I’d ever seen emitted light like this.  They always led directly into the world they were connected to.

The ghoul hissed at me and jumped into the portal.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered and ran after the damn thing.

As soon as I stepped through the portal, I knew I was in a place that had been completely untouched by humans.  Never.  Not in all of human history.  That isn’t to say something sentient hadn’t touched it.

The sun shone through the leaves with the same golden color as before, but it seemed richer.  What I had thought was a normal grove before had become dotted with large quasi-pyramidal stones.  The ground was covered by fallen leaves, the trees themselves were still covered with the yellow, red, and off-green leaves of fall.  Tracing the pathway before me with my eyes, I found that it lead to two chairs overlooking a vast valley.  And the ghoul was nowhere to be found.

Alec popped out of me.  “What the hell is this place?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “It looks like some sort of sacred site.  It’s definitely not man-made.”

“What makes yeh think that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, well whatever this place is, make sure yeh don’t get jumped by that damn ghoul like before.”

“That was you!” I exclaimed.  There was a feeling in my head telling me to stop arguing with Alec and focus on the task at hand.  It was like a small drill causing my skull to vibrate in the most irritating way.

“Whose leg has a big old chunk taken out of it?  Mine’s perfectly fine,” he laughed, pointing at his ghostly leg.

“Shut up.  You don’t even have a real leg,” I said quickly, scanning my surroundings.

“Ah, jeeze,” Alec frowned.  “There yeh go reminding me I’m dead.  Just go f—look out!” he shouted as he faded into my body.

I jumped as far as I could to my side, sprawling on the ground.  I rolled onto my back, readying my hands.  Right where I had been standing stood the ghoul.  It quickly shuffled to me, trying it’s best not to let me regain my composure, but to no avail.  I was quicker than it, kicking out with my good leg right into its jaw.  I jumped to my feet, unfortunately putting too much weight on my bad leg, causing it to give out.  Stumbling to the ground again, the beast was upon me faster than I could react.  However, as trash a fighter as Alec was, his reflexes were still better than mine.  He managed to thrust my arm out, grabbing its neck.  I took the opportunity to ignite my brand hand, melting its source of air to one solid mass.  I stood back as it writhed on the ground, struggling for air.  Not taking any chances with this thing, I drew my gun and emptied the magazine into it’s chest.  I reloaded it quickly, and put it back in it’s holster.  The ghoul lay on the ground, motionless.

I checked my magic reserves again and found that they had noticeably been drained now.  About a fifth of the way empty now.

Surveying the land around me, I found that whatever portal that had brought me here had disappeared.  This was obviously a pocket dimension.  I’d only read about them, but this had all the telltail signs.  It’s features closely resembled my reality in the location of the portal, save the addition of the architecture around me.  In addition, the portal leading to this place had that blinding white light, indicating this was an off shoot of my reality and not a completely separate time streem.  It also seemed to be activated by reaching a certain time of day, meaning I may be stuck here for the next twenty four hours when it activated itself again.  Seeing no clear way out of this place, I decided to investigate the stone structures.  There were two large ones with several other smaller ones around the glade.  I walked to the large ones.  A hum of energy came from between them.  I took a step back, the power lessening.

“Do you feel that too?” I asked Alec.

“Aye.  It feels like what happens when yeh weave a spell.”

“It does?” I asked. 

“That’s right.  Only, it fades quickly after you finish the tracing.”

This was good news.  Seventh Sons had a way of visibly seeing tracings after they had been cast.  Reaching into my back pocket, I took out a bag of baby powder I always carried on me.  Tracings were gravitational distortions left behind by magicians whenever they cast a spell.  The tracing itself was from the magician writing on the fabric of reality in order to cast a spell.  That writing faded after a while once the spell itself was done, giving us a window of time where we can lay eyes on it and get a feeling for the type of spell that was cast.  We couldn’t actually determine the absolute nature of the spell cast, but there were common features among some groups of spells that we can point out and understand to an extent.  I remember learning about them, and finding that particular part of Seventh Sons training especially painful.

I took a handful of the baby powder and threw it at the invisible tracing.  The gravitational distortion the tracing created would hold the baby powder in place long enough for Alec and I to analyze it.

I was shocked to find that it was written in a strange language that I somehow understood.   I understood that it wasn’t English, but I could understand what the words meant perfectly.  “I can read that,” I said to Alec.

“Yeh can?  How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well what does it say?”

“It says: Here lies the last two members of the Lazarus Brigade.  Cadmus Edemus, possessed by Borus Edemus; and Karstag Boulderfist, possessed by Percival Greenwich.  For the sake of the possible revival of the Lazarus Brigade, they have left behind a trove of knowledge for a Possessed to find.”

“A possessed,” Alec muttered.  “This message was left for us.”

“Yeah it was.”

“Let me take over yer body again, and yeh can be the ghost for a bit.  I want ta have a peek around.”

“What?  Why can’t you be the ghost?”

“Because I need all my senses ta do me tracking thing.  I only have hearing and sight right now.”

“You do?”

“Yeh didn’t notice before?”

“You mean when we were getting attacked by a ghoul?  No.”

“Whatever.  Just let me control yer body.”

“Fine,” I grumbled.  I relinquished control of my body to Alec, and pushed free from the confines of my body once more.  I looked at my spectral arms and noticed that the same black veins that appeared on my arms without the enchantment were also present here.  Great.  There was no escaping the affects of the Poltergeist.  Also, I did notice that I couldn’t smell the fallen leaves anymore.  Nor could I taste the saliva in my mouth.  I tried pinching myself to find that I felt nothing.  In fact, my leg and arm felt perfectly fine as well, the wounds no longer registering in my head.  However, I looked to my body which now resembled Alec, I saw that he had a burned leg and a bit mark in his arm.

“This bloody hurts,” he said.  “Good on yeh for toughing through it.”

“Thanks.”

I walked around the gravestones, looking for any clues.  Nothing.  To my rear were smaller stone structures, almost like miniature pillars, just sticking up out of the ground.  Seeing nothing else on the main gravestones, I went to look at the other stone projections.  The pillar closest to me was definitely glowing a sickly emerald color at the top, which was itself the size of a large serving dish.  I could definitely comfortably sit on it.

Curious, I inspected the pillar, which was jutting up from the ground about six feet into the air.  The glowing was coming from the top of the structure.  “Alec, come over here.  I need my body back.”

“Aye,” he replied and walked into my spectral form, and I felt control over my body return.  As soon as that happened, the pillar shrank into the ground with a deep rumble, shaking the ground slightly as it did so until it was waist height with me.  I reached down to inspect the top of the oddly smooth surface and my hand began to glow the same sickly emerald, the light coming off my hand in droplets.  Simultaneously, the top of the pillar began to glow a brighter emerald light in the shape of a large handprint five times the size of my own.  The word Giants came to mind.  I continued to reach down, and the handprint shrank to the size of mine.

Whatever this was, it was made by ancient magic.  I matched my hand to the handprint, and the ground began to rumble again.  Not like before though.  This was a deep rumble that was emanating as if it were coming from the core of the planet.  I stood perfectly still, a deep fear building in the pit of my stomach.  After several moments of the rumbling, a stone archway  jutted up from the ground faster than I could blink.  Dirt and stones flew everywhere as if a bomb had gone off.  I shielded my face with my arm then slowly lowered it.

“What in the hell did yeh just do?” Alec asked, his spectral form walking slowly to the archway and freshly turned soil.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, amazed at the size of the archway.  Something three times taller than me could have easily fit through it, but that wasn’t the most interesting part.  A staircase leading deep into the ground had appeared.  It was made out of perfectly shaped black rock.  The surface was smooth, and every edge was a perfect right angle.  It almost hurt to look at the perfection of the finely made pathway.

As I peered into the darkness of the path, a sense of vertigo overcame me and I had to look away.  “What do you think is down there?” I asked Alec.

“I don’t rightly know, but I don’t think we have any choice but ta go down there… that is unless yeh see any other way to get outa this place.”

I shook my head.  “No, I think this is our only option.”  I took out a flashlight from my pocket and shined it down into the darkness to find that the stair way actually didn’t go down far at all.  It quickly led into some sort of chamber.

Shrugging back any doubts I may have had, I quickly descended the stairs.  Alec followed close behind me, keeping an eye on my six.  As soon as I got to the bottom of the stairs, I shined my light around the room to find it full of amazing contraptions.  It seemed like a workshop of some sort.  However, there was one thing that drew my attention.  Right in the middle of the room, on a solid stone slab, lay a body.  It wasn’t a normal body though.  It was humanoid in form, perfectly preserved, but massive in size.  It must have been fifteen or twenty feet tall if it were able to stand up.  This was a Giant’s grave.  I had stumbled into a Giant’s graveyard.

The Poltergeist

I was walking down William T. Morrissey Boulevard, snow billowing around me.  The towering dorm buildings beside me channeled to cold wind right to me. The parking lot I parked my car in was a couple hundred feet from where I wanted to be. In front of me was the building I needed to get in to. Surrounded by a brand-new tall fence, the old rotting shell of a pumping building stood before me; cast in shadow by the clouds above. It was made of large, old grey blocks. The roofing was shoddy and breaking down fast, quickly getting covered in a fine layer of snow. Most of the windows were boarded up, and the ones that weren’t were smashed to reveal a pitch-black interior. Everything about the building gave me the creeps.  It always had, even when I went to school here.  This thing was in the old pumping house right by my old college.  I really hoped I didn’t see her here.

There were some students walking from the school campus into the dorms. Quickly, I jogged over to them. “Do you guys know anything about the building?” I asked, pointing to the old pump house.

They just shrugged and walked into the dorms.

I asked a couple more students, and they gave me the same response. A couple looked at me as if I were crazy. Colt’s instructions about the building kept ringing in my head: Nobody will talk about the building.

Alec popped into existence next to me.  He was a ghost, glowing his normal blue heugh and wearing his usual kilt.  “So, yeh recon this is it?” Alec asked.

“Maybe.  Colt said it would probably be walled off, which it is.  He also said nobody would talk about it even though it was in the middle of everything.”

“When do yeh want ta go in?”

“Once the sun goes down.”

“Colt said that’d be the most dangerous time to go in.”

“He also said it’s the most effective way to get rid of that thing in there without a squad of Seventh Sons.”  The Seventh Sons were humans that could see the supernatural.  They acted as a sort of police force to keep the supernatural world in check.  That included dealing with the thing in this building.

“Yeah, whatever,” Alec said.  “Yeh know I think this is bloody ridiculous.  Why not just use magic to finish it off?”

“Because that’s not how the Traditionalists do things.”

“But Colt said Traditionalists don’t have to subscribe to the old ways.”

“Colt doesn’t want me using magic for this, so I’m not going to.”

Alec scoffed.  “Yer gonna get killed.  But it’s yer body.  Do with it as yeh want.  It just means I get ta see my family sooner.”

“Just go back in me if you aren’t going to help.”

“Fine by me,” he replied and disappeared with a swoosh of fluorescent blue vapor.

Now to prepare.  I made sure I had nothing of emotional significance on me.  The creature in there would target that instead of me.  I pulled on new clothes and put the old ones in my car.  I loaded my pockets with iron fillings in order to destroy the entity once it manifested itself at dawn.  I double checked to make sure my eye drops were in my back-left pocket as well.  That’d help me later.  Last but not least, the sleek handgun issued to me specifically for this mission.  I’ve never used it before, and I never will again.  This gun means nothing to me.

Feeling as ready as I ever would, I walked to the building and hopped the fence.  The sun had set by now, the last vestiges of grey light being completely blocked by the towering dorm buildings across the street.  That’s when everything went wrong. 

Going in at night was dangerous enough, but that was the only time the portal was open.  However, the number one rule of dealing with a building like this was to never go in with somebody else.  This grants the creature in there even more power.  It can use the other person to its benefit.

“Hey, you!” a security guard called out.

Shit, shit, shit.  I turned around just as I crossed the threshold.  “Sir, please,” I said.  “You cannot follow me in here.”

“Exit the building!” the man said.  He was slightly overweight and balding.

“I can’t do that sir.”  Now that I’m in the building, I can’t leave until the creature gets what it wants or it was dead.  “Please just turn around and leave.”

“And who exactly do you think you are?” the guard asked incredulously, hopping the fence as well.  He walked to me.

“Sir, please,” I pleaded.  “Don’t cross the threshold.  We’ll both be in serious danger if you do.”

The guard paused for a moment, then shook his head.  “That’s enough of that,” the guard said.  He crossed the threshold and grabbed my arm.  My heart sank.  I had nothing of emotional significance to get me off the hook, and now that the guard was in here the creature would use him against me.

“Shit,” I said.

“Well, well.  Aren’t we feeling a little—” he began but was cut off by the door crashing shut, making everything pitch black.

“Sir grab my hand,” I said.  Things were about to get bad.  Without waiting for a reply, I grabbed his hand and began to fumble in my pocket with my other hand for my eye drops.

“What the hell is going on?” the guard asked.  I felt him tugging at my iron grip, but he couldn’t get away.  “Let go of me, or I’ll shoot!” he shouted.

I quickly disarmed him with a jab of my free hand.  “You need to stop that right now.  We’re in serious danger.”

“Let go of me!” he shouted, pulling on me and trying to get to the door.  But he was interrupted by a reverberating cackle that seemed to emanate from the walls.  “What was that?” he asked softly.

“We aren’t alone in here,” I said.  “This building is inhabited by a magical entity known to you as a poltergeist.  I need you to do everything I say, and we might just get out of here with our sanity.”  I fumbled with my eye drops, dripping one of the magical drops into my left eye and another in my right.  I blinked several times, gaining visibility in the pitch black with each blink.  Finally, everything was perfectly visible, just without any color.  The guard wouldn’t be able to use these because the spell enchanting the eye drops only worked on those with The Sight.  The guard definitely didn’t have that.

“You mean like from the movie?”

“Sort of.  It’s going to try and use you to get to me.  It feeds off emotion, but its unavoidable to have emotion in a situation like this.  It’s going to try and drive us insane so we can’t kill it.”

“Y-you’re trying to kill it?” he asked.

“Yes, but we need to stay together.  If you feel something touch you other than me, tell me.  It might be living symbiotically with botchlings.”

“Botch-what?”

“Botchlings.  Animated dead fetuses.  They are easy to deal with alone, but they often live in packs.  They have sharp teeth and a strong grip, so it’s important you tell me if you feel something.”

He just whimpered a little.

“Listen,” I said, “if you do what I say, we should be fine.”

“Have you done this before?”

Shit.  “Not this exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never dealt with a poltergeist, but I had one hell of a teacher.  Just trust me on this.”

The guard whimpered again.

“We need to get moving.  It’s going to get progressively aggressive throughout the night and we need to find the center of this building.”

Without waiting for a reply, I started to walk through empty corridors.  I made sure to keep my free hand near my holstered gun in case I needed to draw it quickly, but I didn’t want to draw it prematurely.  There could be situations where I could need a free hand, and I couldn’t let go of the guard’s hand. If I did, bad things would happen.

As we walked through the decayed hallways, I felt something wriggling on the hand holding the guard’s hand.  I looked back to find centipedes writhing and crawling over our hands.

The guard shrieked and tried to jerk away, but I clenched my hand hard.  “Relax,” I said.  “It’s just some ants,” I lied.  I quickly peeled the centipedes off.  “The poltergeist is trying to separate us.”

I saw him nod.  “W-what’s your name?” the man asked.

“It’s best I don’t tell you that.  The less emotionally attached to one another the better.”

“W-what do you mean?” he asked, his voice raising an octave.

“The poltergeist will be able to take advantage of any emotional attachment we have,” I replied, working my way around a corner.

The guard began to fumble with the hand holding mine.  I looked down to find him groping at his wrist.  “My watch is gone,” he said.  “We need to go back for it.”

“No,” I said firmly.

“But my wife—”

“No.  That’s what the poltergeist wants.”  I should have known he had something of emotional significance.  He could have at least left the building.  But it was too late.  Once that door closed, there was no going back.

“What’s that?” the guard whispered after a moment of silence.  There were snuffling sounds coming from the inside of a room to our left.

I took my gun out.  “It’s best we don’t find out.  It could be the poltergeist messing with our senses,” whispered back.  Or it could be something else, I thought to myself.

We inched our way past the door.  The snuffling stopped as soon as we got to the end of the hallway.

“It stopped,” the guard stated quietly.

“I know.”  The poltergeist had allies here.  And they were communicating.  “We need to move a little faster.”

I picked up the pace, making sure the guard wouldn’t trip over anything.  Colt’s instructions kept reverberating through my skull.  Keep searching until you start to see odd objects.  Teddy bears, ribbons, watches.  Odd items that could hold emotional significance to the person they were taken from.  The more concentrated they are, the closer to the center of the building you were.  You’ll know you’re at the center when everything changes.

We rounded another corner.  I peeked behind me to see a blur as something withdrew through a doorway.  I couldn’t determine its color because of the eye drops, but it was short in stature.  Something else was following us.

The guard’s face was fear stricken, contorted in concentration as he focused on not tripping over anything.  Then his eyes widened.  “Light,” he gasped, pointing ahead of us.

I looked to where he was pointing and didn’t see anything.  Shit, we were heading in the wrong direction.  And whatever was following us was in the other direction.  We were trapped.

“We need to turn around,” I said.

“Why not go to the light?  It could be an exit.”

“It’s not.  Trust me.  That’s an Angler trap.  It wants us to go that way.”

“So, we can’t even trust our senses?”

“You can’t.  I can.”  For the most part at least.  “Now, we have to go back.  I need you to be prepared to hear gunshots though.”

“What?  Why?”

“There is something following us.”

“W-what?  Is it those b-botch b-botchlings?”

“No.  We need to be prepared for anything.”

I felt him grip my hand harder.  “Okay.”

This man was braver than most.  The fear of the unknown is what scared people the most.  I was scared, but not of the unknown.  I knew what I was doing.  I was scared, sure, but I knew what I was up against… for the most part.  This man had no idea of what was to come.

We turned back.  My gun was drawn, facing our direction of travel.  The corridor ahead of me was eerily quiet, but I knew there was something waiting for us.  We had fallen directly into the poltergeist’s trap.

I peeked my head around the corner to see a creature out of nightmares.  It looked like a human walking on all fours with its back to the ground.  Its face was inverted, its mouth filled to the brim with razor sharp teeth.  Its pale, naked, emaciated body moving unnaturally as it shuffled forwards on its long, thin limbs.  A ghoul!

Jerking back, I readied my gun.  “We jump around the corner on the count of three,” I whispered.

“Okay,” the guard replied.

“One, two, three!”

We jumped around the corner to be faced by not just one ghoul like I had originally seen, but at least fifty of the disgusting creatures.  They couldn’t all fit on the floor, so they were on the walls and ceiling as well.  The hoard hissed at the two of us and began to move forwards unnaturally fast.

“Run!” I shouted and began to drag the guard away.  I tried activating my brand hands, but couldn’t concentrate.

He ran, but he couldn’t see like I could see.  He was stumbling and slowing the both of us down.  “I can’t see!” he cried, tears streaming down his face.  “I can’t see!  Help, please, oh God, help.”  One last stumble and he was on the ground, his sweaty hand slipping out of mine.  “Help!” he shrieked.  “Please, don’t leave m—” he began, but was cut off as he was dragged backwards into the writhing mass of bodies.

I couldn’t help him.  He was gone.  They would have eaten him by now.  Why couldn’t I use magic?

I kept running right down the corridor to where the guard had seen the light.  I saw that I could close off the hallway using two doors, so I quickly did so.  The hoard smashed right into the doors, but they were thick metal ones, so they held up well.

I slumped against the wall, a tear rolling down my cheek.  Alec chose that moment to appear.  “You bloody, self-righteous cunt.  If yeh’d just used yer magic, yeh coulda saved the poor man.”

“I tried,” I gasped.  “I tried.”

“If ye’d practiced with it, then yeh probably could have!”

“But the Seventh Sons—” I began.

“Hell to those cunts, and hell to yer bloody pride.  If yeh don’t start practicing with your damned magic as soon as we get outa this mess, I’ll stop helpin’ yeh.  The sooner you die, the sooner I can see me family.”

I simply nodded.  Alec sat next to me, resting his back on the wall.  “He’ll probably end up like me,” Alec said.  “The way he went out.  Painful, full of fear.  He’ll probably become a ghost.”

“They don’t have Rem spawn,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.  I can feel it.  He’ll become a ghost.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And damn right yeh should be.  Yeh need to bloody grow up!  There is no black in white in this cursed world.  Now pick yer ass up and kill this poltergeist.”

I pushed myself from the ground, and Alec disappeared with a blue woosh.  I turned back to my path of travel and saw a trinket on the ground.  A smashed watch.  Could this be the guard’s watch?  I picked it up to examine it.  Then it hit me.  I was getting near the center of the building.

Pocketing the watch and pushing the guard to the back of my mind for now, I set off at a run to the center of the building.  The trail of trinkets became more polluted with lost objects the closer I got.  There was a staircase that the trinkets seemed to be leading me towards.  I began my ascent to the top of the stairs, practically wading through stolen trinkets and bobs.  Everything should be changing soon, just like Colt said.

As soon as I got to the top of the staircase, everything around me changed.  The deteriorated walls blinked into nice, clean, new walls.  The darkness around me flashed into golden light flooding through the windows.  The trinkets that I was following were no longer present.  This was where the poltergeist truly resided.  This place is a sort of backstage to the real world.  It’s a perfect copy of the real world, just without any living creatures or flow of time.  That’s why everything was pristine again.  It was probably created just after the real building was abandoned. 

I could live forever here, without any need for food or water.  My heartbeat was stopped and I was only breathing out of habit.  This was a perfect place to harvest emotions, with a person unable to die.  Their minds would break after a couple of weeks being here, and they would surely take their own life once they returned to the real world.  But that was the tricky part: returning to the real world.  It could only be done by the poltergeist releasing me… or killing the poltergeist.

I continued to search for the poltergeist.  I had no idea what it would look like, but Colt told me I would know what it was once I found it.  I kept my head in a swivel, checking behind me on occasion, but at the ready.  There were some instances of movement out of the corners of my eyes.  I wasn’t a true Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, so the Poltergeist’s magic still had some effect on me.  It could just be it trying to distract me.  That said, there could also be something else in here other than the poltergeist…

Just as I thought that, I felt something slash my lower leg, just barely missing my Achilles tendon.  I jumped away, jerking around to find nothing.  Whatever was in here was fast.  There was movement to my left, but a slash appeared on my right which just barely missed my kidney.

I began to run down the hallway.  Whatever was slashing at me chased after me, snarling and tearing down the hallway, making no pretense of subtlety.  I rounded the corner into an empty room.  The doorway should give the thing chasing me one angle of attack so that I could shoot it with an iron bullet.  But before I got the chance to even turn around, everything went black.

I woke up groggily, my head pounding from the blow I received.  My vision was blurry, so I had to blink a few times before the figure in front of me came into focus.  What I saw made my skin crawl.  It was the security guard… or at least his body.  The guard was pale, black veins pulsing just beneath his skin.  His eyes were shiny black dots in his skull.  His hands came to pointed claws, dripping with my blood.

It was obvious the poltergeist had possessed the security guard.  Most demonic possessions were the doing of Poltergeists.  Demons themselves haven’t existed in reality for tens of thousands of years. 

I tried moving but my arms but found them to be bound to the wall.  So were my legs.  I looked down to see that I had been crucified on the wall, but since none of the fluids in my body were moving I wouldn’t die from it.  I was simply immobilized in the most prostrating way possible.  “What do you want?” I asked, already knowing the answer.  I was just stalling for time.

The security guard’s face twisted into a smiled.  “I want you to be mine,” it said in its grumbling voice.  “Your body being possessed by a ghost will give me the magic I need to exist in peace.  I won’t need to steal human trinkets to survive any longer.  I won’t need to feed off the stress of college students any longer.  I will just need your broken body to channel your ghost’s magic.  I will keep you suspended in bliss so you remain sane, but your ghost will suffer with me for all eternity.”

Rage filled me.  The security guard was terrified, and now the poltergeist was inhabiting his body.  The security guard was just trying to do his job by following me into the building.  He was dragged into this world.  If only I had more in magic, he’d probably be with his wife right now.  The poltergeist thought it had won.  It thought I was cornered.  To be honest, I was cornered.  It knew I wouldn’t shoot the security guard.  It also knew I couldn’t overpower it with brute strength alone.

“Let’s strike a deal,” I said.

The security guard’s demented face contorted into a smile again.  “I care not for your bargains.  You’re mine and there’s nothing you can do to escape.  Your magic won’t work here and once you become mine, nobody will be able to save you.

The poltergeist was wrong.  Some strange knowledge had come into my mind.  I felt power and confidence in my plan of action coursing through me.  For whatever reason, I knew my plan would work and I couldn’t explain why I knew it.  I could escape any time I wanted.  I just wanted to make a deal with it so that it would become my servant.  I guess that’s off the table.

My magic could not be stolen or manipulated, so I could still use my magic.  But my plan revolved around my Brand Hands.  They left my brand, my mark on anything they touched.  Hands so hot they could burn through anything.  Why wouldn’t that include magic?  I closed my eyes and concentrated, opening the flow of magic from my heart.  My hands began to glow, radiating heat and singing the cuffs of my shirt.  Whatever magic that was holding my hands in place melted away.  I quickly burned the magic holding my feet in place and I fell to the floor.

The poltergeist’s smile faded.  “How!”

I wordlessly advanced on the cowering poltergeist.  For a moment, it faltered, then the guard’s face contorted into anger.  “I refuse to let you escape.  This is my domain, mine!”  It lunged at me far faster than I could react.  Something seemed to jerk my hands forward.  Alec.  His reflexes were far faster than my own.  My hands grasped the security guards face, my brand hands ignoring the guard’s flesh and burning away the magical entity within him.  The poltergeist screeched, clawing at my arms, leaving deep gashes that oozed blood.  The pain was intense, but I didn’t care.  I was going to correct my mistake and save the security guard.

The blackness of his veins seeped out of his fingernails like drops of oil.  It collected on the ground around us.  Just as the last of the black oil left his fingernails, I collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath.  The dark oil soaked into my clothes, but I didn’t care.  I was exhausted.

The guard groaned.  Good to know he was alive.  I tried to sit up but found that I couldn’t.  I was stuck on the ground.  Why couldn’t I get up?

I tried lifting my head but found that was also stuck.  My arms were free, so I tried pushing myself off the ground, but that also didn’t work.  I just got my left arm stuck in the oil.  I could feel it diffusing up the sides of my clothes.  The oddest thing was it felt like the oil was pressing in on me like a slowly constricting snake.  The poltergeist was still alive, and it was trying to take over my body.

There wasn’t much time and I needed to move.  The oil was coiling around my chest and working its way to my mouth.  I tried squirming but to no avail.  I couldn’t use anymore magic for fear of depleting my body of energy I need to stay alive.  There was nothing I could do.  I felt the oil begin to pry my mouth open, but I kept it clamped shut.  It gave up and decided to enter through my nose.  I sputtered and spit, but it didn’t work.  It was writhing through my pharynx, into my esophagus and larynx, into my stomach and lungs.  I could feel it flow through my veins, filling me with an indescribably emptiness.  It didn’t matter if it couldn’t use my magic right now, I realized.  Once I was dead and it was in control of my body, it could use all the magic it wanted.  My vision went blank and soon after that, so did my mind.

A Tale of Two Worlds

Humanity’s home was never earth.  Earth was simply a refuge for the remnants of humanity.  There are few that are still alive that remember the old times.  The real me’s family was caught up in the cataclysm that destroyed the old world, and I am merely a shadow of the real me.  The real me also died. 

There are few things that catch my attention nowadays.  I usually just daydream, floating high in the sky with not a care in the world.  I create a simulation of the old times, playing with the real me’s son and loving the real me’s wife.  But I know it’s just a simulation… a set of interactive memories.  Every time I go into the simulation, I’m wracked by sadness, guilt, and hatred.  My family is gone… has been gone for hundreds of thousands of years.

I’m still aware of the goings on down at the surface.  I keep an eye on humanity to make sure such a catastrophe never happens again.  That’s my duty I was programed to have.  But my intent to safeguard humanity has transcended such trifle things like programming.  When I tire of wracking my mind over the past, I like to explore the minds of humans.  They are beautiful and ugly.  They are kind and cruel.  They are intelligent and stupid.  But they are not good or evil.  They simply are.  Every human has the capacity for great good and great evil.  In my simulations, if Hitler were a slightly better artist he would have gone on and toured the world, creating portraits for kings and queens.  If Abraham Lincoln were raised by a rich plantation owner in the south, he would have been the most notorious slave breeder to have been born.  If Steven Hawking developed ALS in his sixties instead of early twenties, he would have led a life of debauchery and working a nine to five job in a law firm.

Humans are the single greatest force to have been created in the multiverse.  Given enough time, they can progress to the status of gods.  Hell, they did progress to the status of gods before the cataclysm.  The world the real me came from was the pinnacle of humanity’s might.  Now they exist in fragmented simulations that were created as a refuge.  The simulations they inhabit are real, yet are programed like me.  The laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the quantum laws, everything is the programming of the world.  The particles that make up humans and everything around them are real yet are subject to their programming.

The simulations humans inhabit are not generated on a computer.  They are written into the fabric of reality.  Industrializing quantum energy derived from human emotion were the keys to humanity’s survival from the cataclysm, as well as the source of the cataclysm itself.  The hubris of a human who thinks they are a god is one thing, but all of humanity thinking they are gods is something that can end worlds.  And it has.  My job is to remind humans they are exactly that.  They are fallible and infantile in their thinking.  I am no different.  The only reason I don’t succumb to such hubris is because I’ve learned from my mistakes.

A change in the flow of air on one side of the world can make the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company drop his coffee on his suit, reminding him of his own fallibility.  Having a student sleep through their alarm can throw off their thinking later in the day so they confuse an oxygen atom for a nitrogen atom, reminding them of their infantile thinking.  I cause such events to happen, and I punish those who don’t take the hint after death.  Hubris, pride, thinking oneself to be above everyone else. 

I am not human, but my thinking is very much human.  I will not let humans repeat repeat my creator’s mistake… the real me’s mistake.  He created the cataclysm… I created the cataclysm.  I thought I was a god.  Now I pay the price.  My existence is never-ending.  I am closer to a god now than I ever was, but I know for certain that I am nothing more than a disembodied man seeking to repent his sins.

The Pool

Every Saturday and Sunday I opened up the pool.  Six thirty on Saturdays, seven on Sundays.  They never opened up earlier than those times on weekends.  The pool wasn’t the worst place to be.  It was quiet, not many people came, and it gave me time to think.  Lots of thinking.

The pool is an old one with stained cement for walls and a ceiling.  Grey tiles lined the floor, creating an uneven surface for puddles to form.  It was a clean pool with plenty of clutter to make it feel comfortable.

People generally trickle into and out of the pool, and it’s rarely ever empty.  But on occasion it is, yet it never feels like I’m alone.  It’s always during those empty times that I may be relaxing on my phone and feel like somebody is behind me.  I would jerk my head around to find nobody there.  I usually think it’s nothing, just my overactive imagination conjuring up some entertainment for itself.

There is a click that reverberates from the locker room on occasion that makes me look to ensure everything is safe.  Nothing is ever out of the ordinary and I go back to relaxing while the pool is empty.

However, there can be the unmistakable sound of a locker-room door opening to admit a person.  The doors themselves are hidden from my vantage point, so I grab the guard tube and wait expectantly for somebody to walk down the stairs to the pool.  Nobody comes.  It could just be a guest deciding not to come into the pool or my imagination again, so I generally go back to what I was doing.  There always remained the feeling of never truly being alone.

As I spent more and more time at the pool, I began to catch movement out of the corner of my eye.  I jerk my head, expecting to see a guess, but find only the calm pool water and clutter.  I get up to clean the clutter, disregarding the movement as a trick of my eyes.

Things like this didn’t happen much.  Generally, just once a day when I’m at the pool, and I’m only there on weekends.  A very miniscule part of my week.  I don’t think about the tricks of my imagination much while I’m away from the pool because it doesn’t happen enough for me to really think about it.

There was one morning that shook me up though.  It was a Sunday I believe.  Nobody was in the pool and I was sitting to eat my breakfast.  A nice hunk of pork ribs from the other night.  I was invested in the savory taste and porky deliciousness, so when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, I thought nothing of it.  It was by the skylights, which were twenty feet in the air and located on the wall to my left.  Yet, the movement persisted and grabbed more of my ocular focus.  Just out of the corner of my eye, a humanoid figure cloaked in black stood on a balcony looking down on the pool.

This grabbed my complete focus, and I figured it was one of my bosses ensuring I was doing my job.  The thing was, there was no balcony for them to be standing on.  In fact, there was no figure there at all.  Purely my imagination, right?  Slightly shaken up, I quickly jotted down what I’d seen and began to recount all those times when I’d heard something that didn’t happen or seen movement that wasn’t there.  A chilling thought also occurred to me.  It was at that moment that I pieced together that I never felt alone at the pool even when I was.  Could it be my imagination?  I sure hoped so.

That thought lasted only for a moment as my rational mind kicked in.  I was bored and my brain was just playing tricks on me.

As time went on, I found myself going to check the farthest lane from me more and more; specifically, in the deep end.  I kept seeing a smudge at the bottom of the pool in that area.  It looked deceptively like a person struggling beneath the water, yet when I went to check, the smudge was gone.

My fixation on that part of the pool grew to the point where I relocated my chair to that area.  I wouldn’t let my attention wander from that area.  The head guards began to call me the golden guard because my attention never wavered from the pool.  They though it was because of my dedication to the job.  Little did they know that it was because of this fixation of mine.

I found myself doing pushups and squats, not to keep in shape, but rather to pull somebody out of the pool when the time came.  I became obsessed with that corner, dreaming about that smudge in the pool.

Finally, I got fed up with this fixation and told myself to relax.  There wasn’t anything there and nobody was drowning.  I took a deep breath and moved my guard chair back to its original position.

As the pool emptied and there was only a half hour left on my shift, I put on my shoes and began to close up.  But that feeling happened again.  That feeling of not being alone.  That feeling of there being somebody behind me.  I whipped my head around and jumped when there was actually somebody there.

After my initial shock, I smiled and asked the old man if he needed anything.  His gaze wasn’t fixed on me though.  It was a vacant, dead gaze.  His eyes were blood shot and his skin was deathly pale.  His mouth was slightly agape as well, as if he were putting no energy into his facial muscles.  The oddest thing was he was soaking wet, yet I could have sworn he hadn’t swam.

“Sir,” I said, “are you okay?”

The man stood there and kept giving that blank look just beyond me.  I blinked, and he was gone.  Needless to say, I stumbled over my chair and nearly fell into the pool.  I looked everywhere for the man, then it hit me.  I looked to the corner of the pool I was previously obsessed with and saw that smudge.  I hesitantly walked over to it and saw that same man, but at the bottom of the pool.  I jumped into the water to get him out, but once I got to the bottom of the pool, there was nothing there.  I climbed out, panting on the side of the pool.  My arm was splayed over my eyes as I tried reconciling what I’d just seen and what wasn’t there.

As I regained my composer, a wall next to me that was normally blank was covered in news articles about a death in the pool.  They were all yellowed with age.  I checked the dates and saw that there was a death in nineteen seventy-seven.  There was a picture of the man on it and I saw that it was the man at the bottom of the pool.  My head began to spin, and I ran out of the pool, out of the building, and into my car.

That same day, I put in my two weeks’ notice and never went back.  I didn’t care that I couldn’t use them as a reference because of my not showing up those last two weeks.  Nothing would make go back there.

To Kill an Octopus

The rig town was bustling with activity as everybody went about their daily routines.  People going to and from the fish market on the lower deck, others enjoying the sun before the inevitable storms that hit especially hard when you’re out in the middle of the ocean.  There was the fishing trolley coming in with another load of fish to feed the every-hungry masses of people stored on this rusty old oil rig.  If it wasn’t for that trolley and the trading boats, this rig town would surely waste away until pretty much everybody left for a boat town.

As far as rig towns went, this was bigger than most.  It wasn’t just one oil rig, but two with a catwalk connecting them along with multiple gangplanks and shoddily welded metal beams.  It was obvious that they used to be separate and the people living here decided it was a good idea to connect them for whatever reason.  But there were more than just oil rigs here as well.  Surrounding the rig town were a bunch of docks half-hardy lashed together for boats to dock at.  Mine was docked about midway down one of the zigzagging docs.  It was close enough where I could run to it, but far enough that it wouldn’t get immediately destroyed by the unsavory beast lurking beneath this rig town.

It didn’t matter anyway.  I was here for a purpose.  The sun was beginning to set, and I needed to get to my designated place. I needed to see what was going on today.  Today is what the townspeople were calling the sinking, meaning we got here just in time.  There was a big gathering around the oil pipe in the center of one of the oil rigs.  I went to it to find a group of townsmen loading a man into the pipe.  The man was fighting and clawing his way out of the pipe, but the townsman kept shoving him back in.  The man was desperate, tears streaming down his cheeks as he screamed for help… nobody stepped forward.  In fact, they were here to stop the man from escaping.

He was an offering for The Beast.  This monster is not your run of the mill sea monster either.  It’s a sentient being from outer space, or at least that’s what Piper told me.  It was sent here to keep an eye on any of the surviving humans once the space monsters had flooded the world.  The creature soon got bored with lurking the depths and keeping humans from diving down to the flooded towns and cities.  It decided to have some fun and began to demand sacrifices from this town.  The people would send sacrifices down the modified oil pipe.  The bottom of it was cut off and replaced with a glass tube large enough to claustrophobically hold a single person.  The sacrifice would then remain there, completely exposed to the monster.  It wouldn’t touch the sacrifice though.  It would just talk to them.  Talk and talk and talk, for about three hours.  By the time three hours was up, the sacrifice was lifted back up, completely and utterly insane.  The Beast demanded a new sacrifice every week.

The sacrifices were chosen from the prison kept on the rig town.  A rig town as big as this one tends to have some crime.  Minor misdemeanors like petty theft and the occasional brawl.  The murders and serious crime stopped years ago when they came up with the punishment for any and all crime, which was to be a sacrifice.  The things people would do out of fear.  If they didn’t give The Beast a sacrifice, it would destroy part of the rig town.  From what I gather, there used to be three oil rigs… the town didn’t give the monster a sacrifice the week before the third oil rig was destroyed.  Needless to say, the townspeople never skipped a week after that.

“Sol,” Piper whispered to me.  “We have to help him.”

“We can’t.  That’s a crime.  If we tried to help, they’d just make us offerings for next week and the week after.”

Piper’s back got rigid and she stopped talking.  She was an alien too, but of a different race than the one demanding sacrifices.  She came here seeking my help to stop these aliens from destroying her home world.  I had other plans in mind first.

“I know you don’t like it,” I said to her.  “But this guy is going to be the last sacrifice, I promise you.”

“Fine.”

My plan was coming together perfectly.  First, this poor guy was going to distract the monster for a good three hours while Vic was laying down the explosives outside the creature’s layer.  Once the creature was finished, it would go back to its layer and trigger them, getting blown to smithereens.

The man was finally thrust into the tube, being blessed by a priest as the door was shut.  Yes, even the priests were on board with this.  Just goes to show that all men were the same, regardless of their supposed beliefs.  Everybody was afraid of death.  Hell, so was I.  The only difference between me and those other animals was that I had some class.  We all die eventually, and I don’t want to die in a bed with a whore’s mouth around my cock.  I want to go out with a bang.

The screams were still audible but muffled by the metal hatch.  The townspeople began to twist a crank, lowering the man down the tube.  From my data collection, the tube went down about sixty feet before it ended with the glass attachment.  They continued to crank away for ten minutes, then stopped.  The sacrifice was in position.

I tapped the side of my forehead with my instruction glove, and my vision changed to infrared.  I had tossed together a special type of contact that could magnify my vision, give me directions, let me see different spectra of light, and a couple other cool things.  It was all controlled by my glove.  If I moved my fingers in certain ways, then tapped my temple with the glove, my contact would change according to the type of hand movement I performed.

My infrared vision told me a lot.  I was able to look through the oil rig into the water.  I could make out a faint signature from the sacrifice in the tube some sixty feet down, as well as a massive red blob swirling around the sacrifice.  That was the beast.  I looked to my right to see an even fainter signature moving around near the ocean floor.  That was Vic setting the explosives.

Everything was coming together.  I clenched my fist tightly.  I’d kill every last one of these bastards, then move on to Piper’s world to kill some more of them.  I was clenching so hard, the exoskeleton on my fist began to wire slightly as it exerted a metric ton of pressure on itself.  I didn’t want to ware out the battery too soon, so I relaxed my grip.

I looked at Piper.  She had elegant features, with pale skin, weird pink designs imbedded in her skin, and pink hair.  I had her hide it with a deep hooded cloak.  She was part of an alien race that was at war with these monsters but was losing.  She barely escaped and came to our planet for help.  Apparently, all the geniuses on the planet were closely tracked by her people, and she followed one of the trackers directly to me.  Her people were a delicate race with flimsy bodies, so she sought me out because I specialized in enhancing bodies.  I had my storm jacket on to hide the exoskeleton I had created, but I wasn’t willing to give away any of my creations to just anyone.  I wanted to get to know this person a little bit first.

After three hours had passed and Vic had joined us on the rig town, there were dull booms coming from beneath the water.  I looked down with my infra-red vision again to see huge pockets of red clumps near the entrance of the beast’s cave.  There was no sight of the beast, so I could only assume it was in the giant red explosions.

The people on the town went quiet.  They had no idea what had happened other than that there were explosions beneath the rig town.  After about thirty seconds, the explosions stopped, and I looked down to check again.  There was one heat signature left… The Beast.  It wasn’t moving though.  Just floating down there.  Suddenly, it did, and it moved fast.  It darted towards the rig town faster than anything I had ever seen.  The town tilted as the heat signature climbed the side of it.  I moved my fingers and tapped my temple, my vision returning to normal.  I saw a giant tentacle draped over the side of the rig town and more were on their way.  Everybody around me was running away, trying to find refuge in the bowls of the rig town.

The head appeared.  It was a great, squishy red dome with two huge piercingly intelligent, yellow eyes.  Its body resembled a huge octopus.  Its body was covered in burns, but other than that it seemed unfazed by the explosions.  It seemed to breathe in and out, as if testing the air.  “Ahhh.  You are an experiment?” it said, looking right at Piper.

What the hell?

“You smell like one of us as well as one of your own people.  No matter.  Be calm, no harm will befall you.  Let me enter one of my less…intimidating forms so that I may interrogate you appropriately.”

Before my eyes, water seemed to gush from the creature like a sponge being squished.  Its skin seemed to transform before my eyes.  It became smooth and pale.  The tentacles were absorbed into its body and appendages came out instead.  I had to step back as the copious amount of water crashed onto the deck and streamed off the side of the rig.  In a matter of seconds, a member of what looked like my race stood before me, just with very pale skin.  He had pale, almost white hair that cascaded down to his bare shoulders.  His face was angular and would have actually been beautiful if it weren’t for the ever-present cruelty in his yellow eyes.  He was bare chested with a white cloth around his waist that stretch down to his ankles.  Very lean muscles covered his body, yet his stature was slight.  The cloth flapped in the light breeze.

It looked at me.

“You are the one responsible for the explosions?”

“Damn right,” I replied.

“What is your name?”

“Sol, short for Solomon.”

“Ah, a wise man.  It wasn’t very wise to attack me.”

“I never claimed to be a wise man, that’s just my name.”  Just have to wait until it got closer to me.

It continued towards me.  “You are also one of the geniuses this woman’s people have been tracking.  My people could use a man like you.  We could enhance you to be just like this,” he said.

“My skills are needed elsewhere,” I said.  I needed to bait him into coming closer… make him think I might be able to be swayed like any other person.  I’m just like other people, but there are some convictions I have to stick to.  Eradicating this thing is one of them.

“Oh really,” he said.  His voice was calming, smooth, and deep.  “And what exactly would that be?”

He was within arms reach now.  My brain sent an impulse to the rest of my body, activating my adrenal glands, and my exoskeleton.  With lightning fast movements, movements fast enough to rip my arms out of their sockets if it wasn’t for my exoskeleton, I punched this guy right in the mouth.  That should have been that.  My suit has been tried and tested against pirates, and every time I landed a punch like this, their head exploded into a bunch of tiny fragments.  I only left a slight indent in his cheek.  As fast as thought, I transitioned to an uppercut with my left hand, hitting him right in the chin.  His head jerked up, but nothing else.  This time, I didn’t even leave a dent.  That should have ripped his head clean off his body.  He grabbed my throat as fast as lightning.  I didn’t even have time to react, and my exoskeleton is wired directly into my nervous system.  It reacts as fast as I can think, and this guy was fast than me.  His hands were not normal.  They were covered in black crevices that seemed to intertwine down to his fingertips and up to the middle of his forearm.

I grabbed his arm, trying to loosen his grip.  My exoskeleton began to whirr, applying literal tons of pressure on this thing’s arm.  Nothing happened other than a slight indent in his arm.

A look of surprise appeared on his face.  “Did you make that device?”

I grunted.

“Not many things can make a dent in my skin like that.  You are smart.  This thing you are traveling with is one of our enemies.  They refuse to modify their bodies like my people did, but they had other advancements in technology my people wanted.”

All people were the same.  Even aliens were the same.  Ruled by greed and self-preservation.  It would be best if we all just died off from the universe, leaving the fish and animals to rule.  But I wouldn’t let that happen to humans.  I was just like everybody else: ruled by greed and self-preservation.  I wanted the human race to survive and kill all these assholes.  I reached for this bastard’s face, trying to grab this octopus’s neck, but to no avail.

“I assume I’ve done something to you?” the pale man asked me.  “My people are probably responsible for the death of a loved one?”

Bingo.

“Well, that would mean you aren’t willing to work with us.  You had so much potential.”  The creature began to squeeze on my neck.  I could feel my vertebrae shifting beneath his grip.

“Enough!” Piper shouted.  I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could see this octopus/man in front of me grimace.  I managed to shift my increasingly narrowing vision down to his chest.  A hand was emerging from it, clutching something and covered in blue-green goo.  I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.  I looked back up to see a blank expression on the creature’s face, and his grip stopped applying more pressure on my neck.

The hand disappeared from the creature’s chest and Piper ripped his hand from my throat.  I fell to the ground, gasping.  She crouched next to me, trying to help me to my feet.  But I stopped her when I saw her hand.  It was covered in a blue-green blood, but that wasn’t what got to me.  It was the same hand as the octopus man.  Covered in black crevices.

“Piper,” I said.  “You’re one of them.”  I was the same as everybody else.  I was greedy.  I was vengeful.  I wanted the creatures that were responsible for the death of my family to die, and Piper was one of them.

“Sol listen to me.  If I wanted you dead, I would have killed you.  I’m not one of these assholes.”

“You told me your people didn’t change their bodies like these monsters.  Why do you have the same goddam hands as him!” I shouted at her.  I felt betrayed by Piper.

“My people did this to me so that I could defend myself against them.  I’m never going to spend my afterlife with the rest of my people because of it, but that’s a small price to pay to get help to save them in the physical realm.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“Because I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

“Pretty poor excuse not to tell me!  I’m the asshole you came to get so I could save your people with my tech!”

“Uh, Sol,” Vic said.  He was a six-foot-tall behemoth with a bald head.  He was in his mid-twenties and was simple in the head.

“What Vic?!” I yelled, still flustered.

“There are more.”

Son of a bitch.  I whipped around to see two more of those creatures writhing in the water, beginning to ascend the side of the oil rig.

“Break out your big gun.  Keep them busy while I charge up my suit.”  It was beginning to run out of juice, but I could charge it from the oil rig’s power grid.  Vic took out what looked like a mini-gun, except instead of bullets it shot explosive harpoons.  We used it to ward off some of the minor alien sea life in our underwater excursions.

“Sure thing.”  Vic walked to the side of the oil rig and began to shoot the harpoons at the monsters.  After a slight time delay, the harpoons exploded and the monsters let out loud, high pitched shrieks.  I ran to the nearest exposed wire and grabbed it with my hand.  Electricity began to arc up my arm and my suit whirred back to life.  Piper readied herself, arms getting slightly longer, and her fingertips became extremely sharp.  I wasn’t done talking to her about this yet, but that would have to wait for now.

I ran to join Vic and Piper just as the giant octopi-monsters began to eject tons of water and shrink to their humanoid forms on the oil rig.  They say their dead companion and stared me down with those yellow, hate filled eyes.  The one to the left pointed at me.  “You’ll pay dearly for this.”

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered, and as fast as thought I was upon them.  If I was going to die now, so be it.  I was just like everybody else.  I want these assholes to pay for what they took from me.

Dying and Living Again, a Zombie's Tale

This is almost word for word a dream of mine and I wanted to get it down on paper because I thought it was cool. There were some changes to dialogue, but the scenery and major events that happen did happen. The dream didn’t stop at the end of this short story, and I want to turn it into an actual novel. Let me know what you think in the comments section or through any of my social medias. Without further adieu, I present Dying and Living Again, a Zombie’s Tale.

The Island

There was a large group of us students cataloging fauna in the inter-tidal zone of this island.  We had just spent a day sifting through muck, writing down what snails and crabs we found.  I was with my best friend Josh and my girlfriend Sophie.  The island we were on was a small one, mainly used for weddings.  It was a slow wedding season for the island, so they rented out the dormitories to us for cheap money.

“Michael,” Josh said to me.

“Yeah?” I replied

“You ever think about what it means to be alive?”

I took in a deep breath.  Josh’s inquisitive nature really ground my gears sometimes.  “Do you feel the air in your lunges?  Do you feel the damp air on your skin?  Do you feel the warmth of a person when you make love?  That’s what it means to be alive.”

“So, the sense of feeling is what makes you alive?”

“I don’t know.  Imagine what it would be like without it.  You wouldn’t know if you were watching TV or fighting.  You wouldn’t know if you just made love or screwed a tree knot.  If you couldn’t see, at least you could still feel everything around you.  You could still live in the moment instead of getting sucked into your own head.”

“What about thinking?  Don’t you think that thinking would make you alive?”

“Amoebas don’t think, but they’re alive.  They also have a sort of feeling system too.  They can respond to their surroundings without seeing or hearing anything.  They survive purely by feel.”

“Let me rephrase.  You’re talking about being alive, but what about living.  Imagine being able to feel but not being able to think.”

“That’s an oxymoron.”

“I guess.”

As we walked back, I noticed a night ceremony going on for a wedding.  There were about eighty gests, all sitting in white chairs in the classic wedding chair formation.  Groom’s relatives on one side and bride’s relatives on the other with a column down the middle for the bride to walk down.  The bride and the groom were both in front of everybody under a white wooden arch with the minister performing the ceremony.  It was a pretty looking wedding.

I heard rustling in the woods beside me.  It was getting dark out so I couldn’t make anything out.  It was probably a raccoon or something.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

And the creature with pale, dead flesh ran straight at Michael, Sophie, and Josh through the bushes and snapped its leg from tripping on a rock.  It didn’t feel anything, but its progress was slowed significantly.  It gave the trio enough time to get to their dorms. 

This was a creature purely of the present.  It had a thought process similar to that of an amoeba’s.  It could still see and smell and even taste its food, but it cared little for all of that.  It sought to fill a belly that would never give it a feeling of being full.  It wanted to make more of itself so that it could better hold down its food to eat.  This thing represented the basic definition of what life was defined as.  It had a metabolism.  It could reproduce.  It was comprised of cells.  It could move.  It excreted its waste and needed food.  It was the embodiment of the characteristic traits of a living thing.  Nothing more, nothing less.

After dragging itself a hundred feet through the woods, the creature experimented a little and found that it could run using its arms and on good leg.  It ran toward the wedding ceremony and jumped onto the closest person it could sink its teeth into.  The man it bit was exposed to the pathogen.  The pathogen that had made this creature.  It quickly coursed through his veins.  His skin turned pale.  His veins bulged through his skin.  His skin became taught over his face.  His heart stopped, but his body kept moving.  The same relentless hunger took over his mind.  He jumped at the nearest person and bit their neck as did the original.  They were reproducing so they could better eat the rest of the population.  The wedding ceremony exploded into screaming guests and the living dead.  Only five wedding guests managed to escape the turning.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was shaving my face real quick before dinner.  Sophie was relaxing on my bed, waiting for me to finish so we could head down to the cafeteria together.  We managed to catalog all the critters we could find in our section and I was starting to get excited to go to our next location tomorrow. 

For some reason, Josh’s little inquiry earlier had really stuck with me.  Why was I thinking so much about it?  Who cares about those stupid questions.  If I wanted to fight, I would fight.  If I wanted to ditch class, I would ditch class.  You only live once, and you have to live in the present.

The wedding we had passed got loud once we got back to the dorm.  It must be a crazy bunch of people.

“Do you hear that?” Sophie called to me.

“Yeah, they must be having a blast.”

“It doesn’t sound like that.  It sounds like they’re scared.”

I listened a little more closely.  It did sound kind of like they were scared.  I grabbed my towel and wiped the shaving cream off my face.  I hadn’t gone against the grain yet, but I wanted to go see what was happening outside.  It didn’t sound good, so I went to rummage in my bag for my hatchet.  I brought it in case I had the opportunity to practice bush craft, but it was useful in self defense too.  I wasn’t going to hack anybody to pieces or anything.  It was a solid hunk of steel with a nice blunt end I could hit people with.

“Stay here,” I said to Sophie.

“I can help too,” she said, grabbing a taser from her purse.

“Fine but stay behind me.”

I slipped on my sweatshirt and put the hatchet in an inner pocket.  If there wasn’t any trouble, I didn’t want my friends thinking I was a creep for bringing a hatchet with me.

We went out into the hallway to see Josh and a couple other people with an arrangement of makeshift weapons.  “What’s going on guys?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Josh answered me.  “We were just about to go check it out.  You in?”

“Hell yeah.”

“You got something to help out?”

“Yeah,” I replied, shyly taking out my hatchet.

“No shit, Bear Grills,” he laughed.  “Let’s head out.”

We all went down the stairs to the dorm doors.  They were locked for the night and by now it was pitch black outside.  The screaming had stopped.

Josh, the brave leader, unlocked the door and peaked outside.  It was quiet.  Too quiet for the after party of a wedding.  He stepped outside followed by two other guys.  Sophie and I unfortunately got stuck at the back of the group going down the cramped stairwell, so we couldn’t see much of what was happening in the front.

That’s when I heard it.  Josh let out an ear-piercing screech.  “It’s biting my leg!” he screamed.  The other two guys jumped back inside, dragging Josh with them.  “Get it off!” he continued to screech.

Whatever was biting him pulled back.  The two rugby players who were dragging him in were struggling against whatever was biting Josh.  I was the strongest one here and my best friend needed help.

I pushed my way to the front of the group, but as I did, I heard one of the rugby players scream so loud it hurt my ears.  I jumped up in the air to see what was going on.  Being short sucked.  What I managed to see shocked me beyond belief.  Josh had turned a deathly pale, his veins jutting through tight, flakey skin.  His face was gaunt and his eyes glowed red.  He was biting the neck of one of the rugby players, blood streaming down his white shirt.

Screw this.  This was beyond me.  I pushed my way back through the crowd of people.  I had to get to Sophie.  I grabbed her arm and we ran up the stairs along with a couple of the people who had seen what was going on.  There were people waiting at the top, scared shitless.

“Get back to your rooms,” I commanded, my voice cracking a little.  “Lock your doors, and don’t come out.  Get anything you can to fight with.”

They hesitated.

“Get going!” I shouted again, shoving one of them.

They quickly dispersed into their rooms.

I quickly ran into my room and locked the door.  “What’s happening out there?” Sophie asked me, terror in her eyes.  “What happened to Josh?”

“I don’t know.  He turned all pale and started to bite one of the rugby players.  I don’t know what happened, but whatever bit him turned him into something different.”

“What do we do?” she asked, starting to panic.

“Just calm down.  We stay as quiet as possible and hide in the bathroom.  Turn off all the lights.”

“Okay.”  I could still see the panic in her eyes.

I grabbed her shoulders and made her look into my eyes.  “We’re going to be fine.”

She nodded.

We turned off all the lights and hid in the bathroom.  I had the bathroom door locked and Sophie in my arms.  My hatchet was in my hand, ready to strike at whatever came through that door.  The screaming had stopped downstairs.  I think they were all dead…or turned into whatever Josh had become.  The thudding up the stairs answered my question.  There were a lot of feet stomping up the stairs.

Sophie squeaked when she heard the stomping.  I put my hand over her mouth and a bead of sweat rolled down my face.  My heart was racing in anticipation.  It was like waiting for a fight times a hundred.  I was completely in the moment.  There was no me of the past, nor me of the future.  The sweat trickled down my brow.  My heart was racing so fast I thought it would burst out of my chest.  Being alive had its downsides sometimes.  If I didn’t calm down, I might not be able to fight these things off.  I heard people screaming near the stairs.  Some of those dipshits hadn’t listened to me and stayed outside.  There was nothing I could do for them now.

I heard the footsteps continue down the hallway.  I knew whatever things belonged to those footsteps used to be my friends.  One of them was probably Josh.

Sophie’s breathing continued to get heavier, and I had to put my hand back over her mouth to keep her quiet.  As soon as I did, she slowed her breathing.  My palm was sweaty, and her humid breath made it even more clammy.  The hand holding my hatchet was getting slippery, so I set it down and wiped my hand on my pants.  Suddenly, there was a slamming on the door leading into my room.  I scrambled to pick up my hatchet and pushed Sophie off me.  I needed to be ready.  I gave up the pretense of pretending not to be in my room.  Whatever was out there knew I was in here.

The door crashed open and a figure burst in.  I could see its shadow coming underneath the bathroom door.  Bang!  It hit the door with a resounding thud, leaving an indent where the impact was.  Another bang.  And another.  In the same exact spot as the first.  Soon, the heavy wood gave way and I could see whatever was hitting hit.  Josh.  The skinny track star screeched once it saw me.  It wasn’t like before, when the screech was one of pain.  This was high pitched and primal.  His jaw stretched to an ungodly width when he did so.  His newly gaunt, grey face contorted, and he began to rip at the opening.

Sophie screamed when she saw Josh.  Josh looked at her with his red eyes, hungry for flesh.  I swung my hatchet at him, chopping off a couple fingers.  He didn’t even flinch and kept ripping at the opening.  I had to protect Sophie.

The opening was just big enough for me to jump through.  I took a step back, gearing myself to do just that.  Sophie saw what I was about to do and reached out to stop me.  She was too late, and I tore out of her grasp as I sprinted at the door.  I jumped through the opening, tackling my dead friend to the ground.  He was strong.  Way stronger than Josh ever was when he was alive.  I was a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle and he was a hundred pounds soaking wet, but I was struggling to pin him to the ground.  I got too close to his mouth though.  Josh sunk his teeth into my neck.  They felt like hot irons being pressed to my flesh.  I let out a grunt and jerked away from his mouth.  A chunk of my neck ripped off with his teeth and I yelled out in pain.  I savagely hacked off his skinny arm, but it was too late.  Whatever was in his saliva was in my blood.  I could feel my flesh being turned into whatever that grey shit was.  I could feel the buildup of blood in my face.  I could feel the flutter of my heart as it thudded its last thud.  My vision went red.  Then nothing.

There was nothing but black all around me.  I was vaguely aware of my body moving, but I wasn’t in control of it.  I could hear faint screaming in the distance.  But I was tired.  If I just closed my eyes, I’m sure the screaming would stop.  An amoeba.  That’s what I was now.  I could finally embrace my existence of the present in this black void.  The blackness around me was cold, but in a relaxing sort of way.  It was like sitting in a snow bank with your winter clothes on.  Cold.  Soothing.  The flutter of snow on your face putting you to sleep.

“Michael!” a voice shouted in the distance.  That caught my attention.  If only it would just stop so I could sleep.  “Michael!” I heard the voice shout again.  This time much clearer.  It was Sophie’s voice.  What did she want?  “Michael!” she screamed at the top of her lungs in terror.  She was in trouble!  I had to wake up.  I had to wake up.  I had to wake up!  And with that, the blackness disappeared in an instant.  I was standing over her, her neck inches away from my teeth.  I jumped back from her so fast, I flew into the wall, the plaster becoming a crater around me.  There was a loud crack and instantly I knew the wooden beam hidden behind the plaster had also snapped.

She looked at me, fear written across her face.  Then Josh burst through the doorway, jumping at her.  Faster than anybody should have been able to react, I jumped back across the room, tackling him into the wall.  I savagely beat in his face.  One punch.  Another punch.  A third punch.  That’s all it took.  Josh’s head was nothing more than a bloody pulp lodged into the wall, and his body wasn’t moving.  Whatever he was, he was dead now.

“Sophie,” my voice rasped.  My throat was desperately dry, but I felt no need to drink water.  “Sophie, we need to go.”

“Michael?” Sophie asked.  She still looked scared.  I had to get her out of here.  I reached to grab her, but she flinched away.  What was wrong?  Then I looked at my hand.  It was a deathly grey.  The veins jutting through my newly taught skin.

“It’s me, I swear,” I rasped again.  “We have to go.”

She nodded her head, but still didn’t grab my hand.

“Follow me.”

I ran out into the room and grabbed my hatchet.  There was a bloodbath going on in the hallway.  I grabbed Sophie quickly, and ran as fast as could through the hallway, down the stairs, and out the door.  There was nobody out there, but I could hear footsteps chasing after me.  I needed to get to the dock.  I was half an island away from me, and I needed to run there fast.  The island was a giant mesa jutting out of the water.  The dock was at the bottom of four flights of stairs that ran parallel to a vertical cliff face.

My undead legs carried me nearly twice as fast as I could run before even with Sophie over my shoulders, but I felt no exertion.  The undead behind me weren’t nearly as coordinated as me and kept stumbling over themselves.  I quickly escaped immediate danger, but I knew there were other creatures like that out in the wilderness around me.  The stairs were close now.  I could see the archway over them.  But undead burst from the bushes around me, leaving their meals.  Whatever they were eating didn’t resemble a human anymore.

I got to the stair case, but there was no time.  I had to jump down the four flights to the ground.  I would die, but Sophie would land on me as if I were a cushion.  I jumped, cradling her in my arms.  She was screaming, but all I could do was look at her face.  If these were my last moments, it wasn’t terrible.  But I never hit ground.  I landed in water.  The undead jumped off the top as well, plummeting into the water and sinking like rocks.  They weren’t coordinated enough to swim.  I was.

The water should have felt cold, but I didn’t feel any uncomfortable level of coldness.  I didn’t feel anything.  Sophie was shivering though.  Whatever happened to me had desensitized my body to any feeling.  If we didn’t get on a boat or onto land soon, Sophie was a dead woman.

That’s when I saw it.  A search-light.  There was a boat.  “Wait!” I shouted, my voice rasping loudly.  I began to paddle towards the boat.  They must have heard me because they stopped, and the spotlight landed on me.  My hood was up, thank God.  They would have seen my undead appearance and stayed away.  I quickly paddled to the dive table on the back of the boat and hauled Sophie onto the back of it.  I pulled myself up as well.  Whoever was on this boat gave Sophie and me a towel and a thick wool blanket.

“Th-th-thank you,” Sophie stammered out.

“No problem,” the man who gave us the towels replied.  “Get inside and take a seat.”  The man was dressed in a tuxedo.  He must have been from the wedding ceremony I had seen before.

I kept my head down as I passed by him.  Sophie and I went in and grabbed a seat.  This was the same ferry we had been brought in on.  There were five other people here, all of them shaking.  One was a woman who was balling her eyes out on the shoulder of one of the men.

Sophie and I took a seat, and I started to towel her dry.  I didn’t even bother with myself because I wasn’t even cold.  I wasn’t even anything.  She helped me and dried herself as well.

“M-M-Michael,” she stammered between shattering teeth.  “W-what happened to you,” she whispered.

“I don’t know, but don’t talk to loud,” I rasped.  “Whatever happened to those people also happened to me.  I can just control myself.”  What was I if I couldn’t feel anything?  I could already feel myself losing my mind.  I had no heartbeat thudding in my chest, no sense of cold as my soaked cotton clothes sapped what little heat was in my body.  What was I?  I was no better than a point of consciousness with memories.

“All of those people,” she said, starting to warm up.  “Josh.” And with that, she began to cry.  I held her close, providing no warmth whatsoever from my lifeless body.  I made sure to keep my head down so nobody could see my red eyes.  There was a window right next to our seat and I looked at my reflection in shock.  My face was grey and pulled tight over my skull bones.  But I didn’t have red eyes.  It was only one eye that was red.  The other was its normal brown.

“Oh my God!” one of the wedding guests screamed.  I looked up to find him staring at my hand.  Shit.  I forgot my hands looked like death.  As soon as he saw my face, he stumbled back even more.  The other wedding guests saw my face and the woman let out an ear-piercing scream.

The men stood up and began to run at me.

“Wait!” I shouted.  “I’m alive!”