#as if such a shallow understanding can even scratch the SURFACE of what deserts do & are

[untitledgoosegay]

Deserts feed forests, true, but they are also carbon sinks in their own ways! Ways that are as yet poorly-understood -- but we know that, for example, the roots of mesquite trees can penetrate hundreds of feet deep in search of water. In doing so, they transport carbon deep underground, where it reacts with calcium to form caliche, deposits of calcium carbonate. In this mineral form it can remain buried practically indefinitely -- in contrast to the biological carbon sinks of forests, which cycle carbon back into the atmosphere on a much shorter (though still long) time-frame. When desert plants convert atmospheric carbon into sugars, that carbon too is buried in dense reserves among the symbiotic fungal networks of their roots; this glomalin, while not unique to deserts, stores a full third of the world's soil carbon

But --

Why must deserts serve forests to be worthwhile?

Why must deserts be carbon sinks at all to be valued?

Deserts are beautiful, rich and unique ecosystems, with communities and histories all their own

The fact that they appear sparse, that -- in technical terms -- they have a lower density of biomass than other habitats, does not mean that they are empty of life. The plants and animals of the world's deserts are hardy, clever, and resilient; like tundra and mountains, their communities grow slowly, with many plants growing only fractions of an inch per year, for thousands of years -- damage is catastrophic. Others, and many animals, flourish in the rare moments when water is plenty, erupting into a frenzy of life and activity before retreating to dormancy

Without the camel, or the sidewinder snake, or the hairy scorpion; the African lungfish, and the constellated diversity of Tanganyika cichlids; without the saguaro or the Joshua tree or strange, ancient Welsitschia; the Syntrichia moss that draws water directly from the air; the dense, bulbous Ilareta shrub --

Without the painted mountains of Peru; without the stone forests of Tsingy de Bemahara; without the singing sands of the Namib, and Gobi, and Taklamakan; the high salt flats of the Atacama where flamingoes raise their young --

Our world would be so much poorer.

Over the millennia of human existence countless peoples have made their homes with deserts. On every continent save Antarctica, human cultures and histories have molded & been molded by desert homes; have lived with them, and loved them, and managed them, and been part of them

The camel, llama, and alpaca; the lion, crocodile, and and sacred vulture; even our beloved housecats -- we owe them all to deserts

The pigeon! Our everyday, ubiquitous Columba livia! Heroes of world wars, foundational to the theory of evolution, prized friends and companions (and, yes, livestock) to humanity for five thousand years! Whose ability to find home across hundreds of miles originated (we believe) to bring them back to their cliffside roosts after foraging faraway sources of food and water across the Mediterranean deserts of their origin!

The Nazca lines survive only because their desert environment is dry enough to preserve them; the Pueblo peoples carved homes into cliff faces; Uluru (map by Tony Tjamiwa) is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara people

And the thoughtless colonial erasure -- "greening" -- of these deserts is the genocide of their peoples, packaged as environmentalism, appealing to Euro-centric aesthetics and ideals of "nature." The label of "wasteland" is historically inextricable from genocide -- literally, labelling a land and the people who live there "waste" to discard and obliterate

We see this today in Palestine, where olive groves are razed for pine forests planted over the ruins of Palestinian towns whose people were slaughtered and exiled in the founding of the state of Israel, to hide that they were ever there, that any atrocity was committed -- an ongoing genocide that has continued for some 70 years, a proud slogan upheld by the Israeli occupation! "Making the Desert Bloom" ... in a manner economically productive for European industrial agriculture, fertile on the bodies of Palestine's people, on the eradication of the "empty" "wasteland" the first Zionist settlers "found"

Whether deserts serve as carbon sinks; how they compare as carbon sinks to other habitats; whether they feed forests -- all of these questions are important, true, but none of them matter as to whether deserts are worthwhile. Whether deserts get to exist.

Deserts get to exist because they are alive, and dynamic, and historied. Deserts get to exist because they have been homes for people and cultures since time immemorial. Deserts get to exist because each of them is unique, and to lose any of them would be a tragic, irreparable atrocity

[thanks to @rainbowobsidianbutterfly for talking over thoughts + providing examples]

[flying-elliska]

Elu feelings

I cope by writing meta, so expect a lot of it this weekend. I think I’m going to be processing s3 for a long time tbh.  I feel like all ships have a few core emotions they run on, you know ? 

The first one I can think for Eliott and Lucas is relief. Like look at them after their first kiss, hugging and laughing. It’s like this big stormcloud of tension that has just broken into rain over their heads and is now watering their crops. Relief because they’ve both been lonely for a long time and they just found each other and it’s downright miraculous.

 It’s that corniest of corny tropes, love at first sight, except for them it really works, because they show us time and time again how perfectly they fit together. They both want something committed and deep, they’ve got artistic sensibilities, they’ve been hurt a lot by life but still want to believe, they’re both so passionate. Eliott’s romantic playfulness manages to reach beyond Lucas’ walls, Lucas’ fierce devotion is able to reach through Eliott’s pessimism and self-hate. They can be themselves together after a lifetime of hiding. Eliott gives Lucas signs that it’s okay to be goofy, and Lucas shows appreciation for it. During the piano scene, Eliott looks at Lucas like water in the desert. And Lucas just blossoms as soon as he doesn’t have to bother with shallow, bullshit pretend relationships anymore. I don’t like the ‘we complete each other trope��� usually, but those two, they really do. They went on their own journey but it’s really like something wasn’t right with the universe until they got together. And look at how relieved they are to see each other again after being pulled apart. The minute by minute becomes that too in the end, as does the parallel universe metaphor - there could be so many ways and so much time for them to be apart, and they’re going to make damn sure they never have to be apart again. It’s fragile and it’s beautiful and it’s the most right thing ever. They just fit. 

The second one is...probably yearning, working along with the first one. They’re both just so needy. Eliott is in general ‘a lover of all things’ (like Maxence said) - and as shown through the Polaris video, he desperately wants a true soul connection, something that goes beyond appearances, beyond fears. He puts that film out in the world like a message in a bottle. He doesn’t get funding, but it does reach the one person it needed to. The story could be hella sappy and it would fit the whole artsy teenager with too many feelings thing, but it’s just so earnest. He’s terrified of ‘the dark’ (ie his issues with mental illness) and what it would do to people around him, and yet he’s still willing to take his deepest, most desperate desire and put it into the palm of the world. There’s something so brave about that. And Lucas ?  He starts out as disconnected and adrift, pretends to be tough and a player but scratch the surface even once and wow. The way he clings to his mask speaks of his fear of being left alone. And the way he just opens up to Eliott so fast - he’s been looking for that forever, really. Someone to really see him, and see that need. The way things went in his family probably hurt him so deeply because under his grumpy façade, Lucas strikes me as someone incredibly loyal and caring, and what his father did probably shook a lot of his core beliefs. Because of this and his internalized homophobia, he took on a ‘feelings make you weak’ demeanour. So it’s so important that him and Eliott made it through - it allows him to believe in love again, that he is worthy of being loved, it’s some deeply existential shit. (even though the part with his friends was also crucial.) And it’s why it never seems rushed that they move so quickly. It’s really like a spark comes and starts a wildfire in a few moments because everything was ready for it already. I would buy them moving in together, for real. Obviously they might have issues down the road because of this. Lucas’ abandonment issues and Eliott’s troubled self-image and issues linked to bipolar are not going to just vanish overnight. They just care and want this so much they might rush into things. But you really believe they’re going to pull through and spend the rest of their lives together, anyway. 

I’m also thinking of faith. That’s the whole point of the Remember montage. The beginning of their relationship is really messy. Eliott cheats on his gf and bails on him and sends him all sorts of mixed signals, Lucas says some really ignorant things about mental illness and pretends to be into girls and uses Chloé and says mean things about him to his friends. Lucas is forcibly outed, then there’s the whole houseboat which might have been very traumatic for the both of them - someone else in their shoes might have said, this is too much for me, and they might not have been entirely unjustified. I feel one important aspect of this pairing is that you’re never entirely sure they’re going to end up together. Sure, they’re perfect for each other, but their issues interact in ways that mean they’re uniquely suited to hurt each other as well. When you look at Lucas’ past, Eliott on paper really isn’t an ideal partner. Lucas too can be sharp and mean and reckless, or he can go overboard when he cares about something. They’re both very aware as it develops that this could end up being dangerous for them, that they could wreck each other. This version of the story just has so much more tension and uncertainty than the other remakes, for some reason - maybe because Lucas is more isolated, or Eliott is less cool on the surface than Even, or maybe it’s down to technical choices too. The amount of feelings between is overwhelming right from the start, it’s like, it could easily become too much. And then there’s the whole stigma from society thing. And of course, love, between anyone, remains one of the most terrifying things in life, because of the trust and openness and vulnerability it demands. So faith is important, because it implies making a bet that things will turn out alright in the end. It’s about compassion and moving on from the past but also learning from it. And choosing to put the positive possibilities above the negatives. They choose to have faith in themselves, too, when they choose the relationship. That they’re going to figure it out, be better at communicating. The church montage makes a lot of parallels between religious faith and love, as being a refuge in times of sorrow, something true and sure when everything is uncertain.  It should be the meaning of ‘christ-like’ love. And this is not about Lucas being some sort of savior figure for Eliott in spite of his ‘flaw’ - it’s for himself too, that compassion and that faith. That he can be better than his father. That he recognizes the faith Eliott put in him by telling him about Polaris - now he probably understand fully what it means, that Eliott was telling him he was stuck in that darkness too, that he gave Lucas this key because he had faith in Lucas’ capacity to love. It’s about people’s faith deserving to be rewarded in kind.  It’s so beautiful, I want to cry.

And last but not least - tenderness. If I had to pick only one, it would be this one. And it’s not (only) about them being so cuddly and prone to PDA as soon as they get together, it’s a much deeper thing. It’s like they look at each other and go ‘hello, your soul is beautiful and belongs with mine, let me make some room for you’. It’s in the way they approach each other - Lucas makes the first move, then Eliott shows his interest in a way that is ‘chelou’ enough to signal something more is going on - repeats his name only for him - but never pushy. It’s the entirety of the piano scene, and the way they keep unveiling little bits of who they truly are to each other - Eliott’s wacky music and moves are incredibly important for that, and so is Lucas’ playing - it’s them creating a space for each other saying, look you’re safe with me, I am weird and intense and passionate and artistic and I know you are too. It’s that conversation as they walk home, the carefully worded sentences where they’re pushing each other towards the conclusion of ‘not necessarily a girl’. And it’s of course the first kiss - Eliott pushing at Lucas enough to show him how much he cares and get past his walls, but letting him do the first move. And Lucas letting Eliott know he has seen Polaris. And obviously the entirety of Samedi 9 : 17. Lucas knowing what to say to reach Eliott, his emotional intelligence. Eliott’s little drawings, and his romantic gestures that show Lucas he deserves a grand love story. Lucas taking care of Eliott after his episode, the croissants and the flowers and the meals. The playfulness, the care, the attention. They want to help each other be as free and happy as they could be, they care so much about each other’s developpment ? The way they’re constantly checking in with each other - minute by minute, and the reciprocity of the bus stop scene - Eliott knowing how to use it to soothe Lucas’ fears as well, showing the truth of the concept that they both will have difficult moments. They’ve bruised each other’s hearts, it’s heavy, but they also handle it as a privilege - it’s so much better than not being in each other’s lives. When they’re together, it has the carefree vibe of young first love, joyful and clumsy and rowdy ; but you catch glimpses of them as old souls, too, with a maturity and selflessness and depth of love that is just awe inspiring. It’s love as sanctuary and refuge, and love that opens the doors to the world. 

I’m never going to be over it tbh. 

[kkruml]

SIRUN ‘AJNABIUN// THE FOREIGNER’S SECRET Chapter 5

Thank you to everyone who has followed this story!

It started out as a fun/silly response to a prompt from the @thelallybrochlibrary April Prompt Exchange. 

@smoakingwaffles and @missclairebelle I love ye both. Ye saw me through another story and haven’t ghosted me yet.

  @cantrixgrisea This artwork continues to stun me.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

AO3

Previously

Shock.

She took two shallow breaths and then she felt large warm arms around her.

Jamie took her into his embrace and held her close. “A Dhia, yer as cold as ice.”

“Frank is gone.” Her voice felt detached from her body, and she breathed in the warmth and safety of Jamie’s form. “Dougal…”

“It’s alright lass.” His voice was calm and he took to whispering Gaelic in her ear to comfort her. “Yer alright.”

“Jamie-“Her voice was empty and cracked as she whispered his name. “…What do we do now?”

“The tablet- it’s likely in… the auto.” He paused before continuing, “There’s only one thing we can do or this is all for naught…we need to find the treasure.”

The journey back to the dig site had been quiet. Jamie gripped the steering wheel with one hand, the other encompassed Claire’s hand completely as his thumb softly drew circles against her skin. Her eyes were unfocused as her mind replayed the dreadful scene just minutes before.

His eyes shifted to her face for a brief moment, seeing her lower lip firmly tucked between her teeth. “Are ye alright?”

“I just can’t be-” she paused, shaking her head. She cleared her throat, her eyebrows pulled together and chin dimpled as she struggled to compose herself. “I can’t believe they’re both… gone.”

“I’m sae sorry, lass.” His fingers tightened around her hand gently. His voice was calm, as if he was trying to sooth a timid creature from startling, “Dougal wasna such a good man… but he was a kinsman.”

Her eyes shifted to his face, seeing his mouth drawn in a hard line, lips pressed together.  Dougal was family to him, the thought cut through her and she whispered, “I’m sorry Jamie.”

She hoped her words had resonated, and the squeeze of her hand was enough to quiet them both as they made their way back to the site. Her eyes drifted down to their fingers, still intertwined, and she felt a small wave of relief wash over her. Neither of them was alone in this. They had each other. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the hot air wash over her as she felt small circles continue against her skin.

She caught the familiar silhouette of Uncle Lamb’s Panama hat as the auto pulled up next to the tent.

“Did you get the tablet?” He looked around anxiously. Seeing the empty seat, he asked, “Where’s Dougal… and Frank?”

“There was… an accident.” Her voice was detached, but steady. “They’re gone.”

“Claire, why don’t you take the tablet and find Ned. He will likely want to analyze it wi’ ye.” He gave a gentle nod to the tent behind her and she turned without a word, holding the ancient slab to her chest.

Jamie turned back to Lamb, running one hand through his hair; his voice was low and filled with regret.

“This text here- Shedet- refers to Faiyum… we’re but a few kilometers from the Oasis.” Ned’s voice was a pitch too high, he was restraining his excitement as he looked out of the tent opening. “If we travel this evening we could reach it before the heat of the sun holds us hostage in the morning.”

“Shedet. Yes that’s what Jamie and I thought last night,” her voice shook but strengthened with each word. “I think we should pack camp, water the horses, and make way as soon as possible.”

Ned looked at her, a smile pulling across his lips. “I think we may be onto something.”

“I think…” she started, taking a deep sigh before continuing, “I think this may be Hawara.”

“The supposed underground labyrinth? That expedition was well over fifty years ago.” Ned’s eyes scanned the documents, one hand scratching the stubble on his chin. “… Not a one of them has been seen since.” His voice was steady but she heard the undercurrent of doubt.

“All the more reason I think this has to be the answer.” She felt her heartbeat quicken, her mind flashing to a newspaper clipping she’d seen back in London from years earlier. “One worker who claimed to be there- he spoke of a foreign statue, hidden doors, and chiseled passageways.”

He eyed her speculatively, shuffling the papers as he muttered to himself. “Aye, though they said he’d gone mad with dehydration- hallucinated… though I suppose…”

She squared her shoulders, as a firm edge of conviction filled her voice, “We need to move camp, now.”

His eyes met hers, nodding as he answered, “As ye say, Mistress Beauchamp.”

She smiled at the title; she had always been plain Claire Beauchamp to the Scots. This was a sign- he trusted her. Now she needed to prove she was worth of it.

The road to Hawara was filled with anticipation.

Uncle Lamb and Ned had taken the auto in an effort to scout the site before the rest of the camp arrived. The number of ridable horses had dwindled with the heat.

Without a word, Jamie saddled his horse and reached for Claire. His hands were firm on her leg as she stepped into the saddle. In a move perfected by time, one foot slid into the stirrup as one hand grabbed the horse’s mane, and he shifted onto the horse’s back. He settled himself firmly against her. His hand deftly took the reins; strong arms pressed against her. His chest was solid against her back and his warmth encompassed her in the desert darkness. An aroma of worn leather, linen and sandalwood circled them.

Her hand found Jamie’s- a silent, unspoken understanding. His eyes did not waiver from the road, but his fingers laced within hers in a natural movement. Her heart leapt at the touch, the feeling of his skin against hers both invigorated and relaxed her.  

As they reached the site, she felt a grunt hum in his throat, his eyes lowering to their hands as he reluctantly pulled his hand away from her.  She nodded slightly; a small smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes answered him.

Time to find the treasure.

Hidden in plain sight.

To an unassuming onlooker, it was just a sand dune, a temporary pile of sand that would be scattered with a gust of wind. But she knew better. The mound was expertly hidden amongst the landscape of rolling dunes and desert sand.

“Right.” She straightened the linen of her shirt as she nodded to the waiting men in front of her. This was her dig. It was time to get to work. “According to the text, we should start on the west side, facing towards the sun as we dig.”

The workers set up the equipment and as the sun rose over the horizon she took a deep breath, her hands clutching the tablet close to her chest.

A face foreign to Pharaoh’s eyes.

Isis.

Hamara.

Ra.

This had to be the place.

With the equipment in place and workers sectioning out the area to dig, Claire hovered within a hair’s breadth of the mound.

“What are ye waitin’ for, Sassenach?” His voice was low, just loud enough for her to hear.

She turned to look at him, a look of peril hinted with excitement crossed over her face.

“So much research, so many dead ends. The endless debate about ancient clues and deceptions. But this…“ She pressed her hand against the mound. “This is real. This is it.”

“Aye. We wouldna found it wi’out ye,” a smile spread across his face as he continued. “This is your treasure, Claire.”

A light rosy blush spread across her cheeks as she smiled. “Our treasure.”

Early sunrise was creeping across the sky, a pale purple mixed with a warm orange, lighting the sand in a pool of glowing light that caught Claire’s eye. A small sliver of hard surface broke the stream of color, and she felt her heart race.

“Uncle!” She could barely breathe, her eyes locked on the hard object visible in the sea of sand.  “I’ve found something!”

A flurry of excitement ensued. Workers focused on the narrow set of carved stone that came to resemble a steep staircase. A handful of steps formed and they found themselves staring at a large boulder.  

“I’ve seen this before. ‘Tis a bit difficult, but there’s a trick to gettin’ it to move,” Jamie’s words came fast, not waiting for Claire’s recognition before he knelt, his arm snaking into a small crevice  between the staircase and the stone. After a few grunts, he exclaimed, “Got it!”

The boulder shifted just enough for Claire to make her way through the gap.

“Wait!” Jamie’s voice was filled with panic. He attempted to steady himself, adding, “I’ve go’ a torch, ye’ll be needin’ a bit o’ light down there.”

After securing the boulder and ensuring steady air flow to the chamber, Jamie moved quickly forward, searching for her.

She stood in the silence, imagining the last souls to breathe in this chamber. Ancient Egyptians.

Who were they? What secrets did they hold?  Why did they find need to hide this place?

She saw the light come towards her, his red hair glowing against the flame of the torch. The chamber was quiet, save the sound of his feet as they found her. They would find the secret together.

His hand found hers as their eyes met. She turned towards the darkness but she felt his hand squeeze hers and his arm stiffened, pulling her back to him. Their lips met in a soft, content kiss. As she opened her eyes she saw he was already looking at her, his blue eyes glowing in the firelight.

He nodded silently, his head gesturing towards the narrow hallway. Hand in hand, they navigated two corners and found themselves at a crossroads. The labyrinth of passageways unfolded in front of them, flickers of light reflecting off the walls.

“Which way, Sassenach?” His voice was slightly unsteady, and she caught the subtle attempt to clear it.

She turned to her right, pointing a long, slim finger towards the darkness. “East is this way, that’s towards Ra.”

Jamie blinked hard, his eyes focused on the ground. “Aye, we turned right then left again. If we go down this path, we should stay towards the sunrise.”

Each step was met with anticipation; their breaths were shallow as they took note of each turn and deviation from their desired direction.  

After taking a sharp right turn, Jamie paused, “Sassenach, are we goin’ uphill?”

“It’s hard to say, but yes… I think so.”

A loud snap cut through the air and they both froze, hands squeezing each other tightly. A slow hum intensified as the torchlight reflected off of a boulder rolling down the incline towards them.

“Jamie!” Claire’s voice echoed through the passageway as she grabbed his arm, pulling him into a small alcove against the wall. The stone narrowly passed them and Claire felt the cold, rough surface against her shoulder as it passed.

“Ye… ye saved me, Claire.” His voice was suspended in disbelief. In the darkness of the passageway, he had trusted her completely. Her embrace had saved him.

“Well I… I..” she paused, throwing a hand to the darkness as she stumbled, her voice a mix of exasperation and humor, “I don’t think I can bloody well do this alone, now can I?”

He laughed, the torchlight catching the hint of a smirk as he nodded. “Aye. Now lead the way.”

The next two turns lead them to an impasse- a wooden door.

“Best as I can tell, it’s a diversion. Wood would not be a truly sufficient barrier for a treasure room…” she trailed off, thinking.

“Aye- but it would be tempting enough for a treasure seeker.” His voice had a hint of humor in it as he tried for a wink.

The light from the torch caught a small inscription in the wood. She grabbed his hand, pulling both his arm and the torch towards the door.

“Isis. It’s faded and the wood is degraded… but I’d recognize it anywhere.”

He cocked his head as he asked, “Ye sure?”

Her eyes shot to his, matching his gaze. “Bet my life on it.”

He nodded, his eyes darting back to the marking. “Okay then, where to?”

Her eyes scanned the doorway, pausing as she looked to the wall. A cross with what looked like a loop at the top stared back at her.

“Ankh.”

The symbol of life and immortality.

Orisis. Isis. They flooded the Nile every year- giving it life.

She had thought of Orisis and Set’s trickery that killed him- burying him in that very river.

She had again overlooked Isis- a face foreign to Pharaoh’s eyes.

She had been distracted that night with Jamie. But perhaps this was all for a reason. Without Jamie, she would never have discovered Isis as the foreigner. Without working together, he would not have found the tablet.

Was she meant to unite with Jamie to find this place… would they, too, make life together?

She pressed her fingers into the hieroglyphic, cold and firm against her skin, and a false wall opened. Behind the door was a hidden chamber, and they came face to face with a circle of statues.

The glow of the torch lit a faint path on the ground, and as Jamie raised it, they both saw a symbol scrawled across the floor- encompassing the statues.

“Zaman.”

Time.

His voice is low, almost a whisper as he steps closer into the ring. “The statue in the center…”

She nodded, matching the awe in his voice as she answered his question, “That symbol is a mix of Mustaqbal and almadi… future and past.”

Past.

Future.

Immortality.

“Jamie, this isn’t ancient treasure.” She felt her heartbeat quicken and her breathing shallowed. “I think I know what happened to those archaeologists. I don’t think they died here… I think they left here.”

Jamie nodded- a flicker of realization on his face. “The symbol Ankh means immortal life- but doesna note when that life is.”

Her eyes scanned the circle of statues, her gaze resting on the figure at the center. “Is this… a portal of some kind?”

She felt his fingers graze her, softly but firmly grasping them.

Her senses dulled as a nauseating feeling crept under her skin. “Do you hear that buzzing sound?”

His voice cut through the sound and echoed in her ears, “Aye.”

[markmceachran]

Everything Goes Wrong / Killing Spree

Angel’s head was once again in agony. It was like the concussion had revisited the worst pain upon him. His head was cloudy, vision blurry and he couldn’t move. Breaths were difficult and painful to take, ribs had been broken. He started to move a little, but couldn’t pull his arms out in front of him. Something had then bound behind his back. Through his blurry vision he could make out shapes, maybe people, in front of him, but it was dark. What light there was flickered and moved around. It was torches. The floor was cold and damp, his face pressed down against it. Legs were stretched out before him, bound to one another. Dry air scratched down his throat with every breath, and pressed out against his ribs. He kept is breaths shallow. His nose was clogged, full of blood and snot and possibly broken. Angel couldn’t be sure, his mind was not all there.

Visions of what had happened started to form inside his head. He remembered taking off from the Tevatron. He retraced his path from the Hanger in reverse, dangling the hunk of metal and rare-earth elements below. The expectation was that The Dragon would be spotted somewhere along the way. They had damaged the helicopter, after all, which left it spewing a smoke trail. It should have been easy to track.

There was no sign of them: no footprints, no burned out buildings, nothing. Even as they hovered over the hanger they could see nothing that suggested that The Dragon were even there. The dead were gone. The smattering of tracks around the hangar, nonexistent. Only a helicopter-sized hole in the top of the hangar showed them evidence that what they had experience over the last three days was real.

Three passengers in the helicopter left the scene baffled, and terrified. Their plan was to head back to Jim’s building, drop off the magnet, get it connected to the cooling system, and fire up the laser. It was predicated on the idea that their would-be assassins would be in the middle of the desert between the city and the Tevatron. They should have followed.

“They should have followed,” Jim said into his headset.

“They didn’t follow,” Angel replied. “Why didn’t they follow, Jim?”

“Maybe they gave up.”

“They walked all the way from the outskirts of Toronto to get here, Jim. They had us surrounded. They should be ravenous, not deterred.”

Jim grumbled something into the mic that stuck out like a twig from the hard-shelled audio ear-muffs and shook his head.

Angel passed over the rail yard to see the earlier battlefield. The demolished train car was there, as was Jim’s working train, parked right where they left it. None of it made any sense. The Dragon had a train. They had a really good vector on where the helicopter was going. They had options, and it looked as if they took none of them. It was as if they had vanished from the Earth.

“What now?” Angel said.

“We carry on. We don’t have enough information to do anything else.”

Up they soared ever so gently, Angel was still suffering quite a bit. The blades chirped away from the outside, overwhelmed by the engine noise on the inside. They were heading straight to Jim’s building.

* * *

“Angel, Hope?” Jim was regaining conciousness as well. His body faired better than Angel’s. A head-bleed that had already clotted, a broken arm, and a slight puncture wound in his abdomin that left a stain of dried blood on his plaid shirt.

“Hey Jim,” Angel said, still laying on the floor. “I think we have company.”

“Yeah. They were waiting for us.”

“I still think this is a terrible plan.”

“Lookin’ that way, bud.”

The Dragon were waiting for them at the building. As the helicopter hovered over the top floor, it gently set the magnet down. Hope slipped out to cut the cargo loose with her blade. It wasn’t the best way to drop the load, but without someone on the ground it was the only way they could do it. She clung to the landing rail and swung her nimble body so that she could reach the loosened cargo strap and cut through it. Just as the tether feathered its way toward the top of the building a beam of light slid across the bottom of the bird, carving a surface scar into the metal. It reached a spot within the radius of the propeller and stabilized on the blades as they spun about. They were sheared by a third, flinging the outer edges toward another nearby tower. The projectile metal swords stabbed into the building in a cluster, as if thrown by a dart champion.

Without the tips of its wings, the machine lost most of its loft. At first it fell slowly. Angel and Jim gasped for air while hope clung for dear life to the bottom of the machine. With the little control Angel had he tried to get to the edge of the building as not to land the whole machine on top of Hope. She managed to let go and drop onto the roof of the building as the machine slid through the air, down below the top floor. It was practically flying sideways, Angel was trying to save what little he had left of the blades and get some distance between the machine and the building before attempting to correct the flight profile.

Chirping blade sounds were replaced with an engine that was overrevving and a high-pitched whine caused by the uneven edges cutting through the air. With a little luck the machine moved away from the building and Angel leveled it out, but could do nothing to prevent the eventual meeting with the ground. He held the stick far over to one side to slow the increasing rotation speed of the machine. Without the full torque of the blades, the counter-rotation gearing to the rear rotor could only compensate so much.

There was no time to talk to Jim about how to crash in a helicopter, no time to regret not having parachutes, not that there was time to put them on. They only had time to fall, and for Angel to do his best to control the machine and coax whatever loft he could out of their shortened blades. Angel hoped that the sand was still soft, that it would absorb some of the force that was about to drop down on it. The storm wasn’t but a few days prior. The sand doesn’t completely settle. It’ll be alright, he thought.

* * *

The moving, flickering light was emitting some murmurs and whispers now. One of the whispers was a word Angel could just barely make out, “Hope.” He tried to look over at Jim, he tried to pull himself up. He could do neither. Every part of his body hurt, and what parts didn’t hurt very much were just numb from him laying on them.

“How long, Jim?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Could have been awhile. I’ve got dried blood on me already.”

“We crashed.”

“Wasn’t your fault. Or maybe it was. I blame you for my survival,” Jim joked, because what else could he do. He was bound on the floor just like Angel. They tied his hands in front of him to account for his broken arm, but they tethered them to his legs to prevent him from trying to hop away like an idiot. Joking was the only pleasure he had, and he needed some with all the pain he was in. His old body was bruised and sore.

Angel’s head was clearing and his eyesight grew sharper. He could make out figures of men with torches, and singed bar, half-burned curtains in front of a dented metal door. It was Jim’s bar. This was poetic for Angel, in a way. Hope and Cindy were sitting at the bar just as things started to go sideways. Maybe it wasn’t their fault, he thought. Of course it wasn’t their fault. They’re not maurading maniacs bent on destroying what’s left of humanity. Those two are just a couple of girls who fell in with the wrong crowd. He had heard the real history of how they got tangled up with The Dragon, but liked his shorthand version to be more playful.

He was beginning to understand how Hope initially worked her way into the good graces of The Dragon. She can be gentle when she wants to be, and probably when she has to be. Cindy’s involvement was obvious, why would you ever cast off a doctor. Medical care had gone way downhill since the fall of society.

Not that any of this understanding would likely matter. Angel was ready to accept his fate. This one-eyed Dragon was going to clobber him in the head again and put an end to his life. He’ll leave the face intact so that he can bring my severed head back to Tynon and show him how he killed the betrayer. Fair enough. I wonder if I’d be enough. Maybe if I tell him that I killed those men in Buffalo, and I shot the laser through the two at the hangar, would that be enough, would he leave Hope and Cindy and Jim alone? Or at the very least just kill me and Jim and call it a day?

Angel had nothing to lose. He was bound, bloodied and broken, fated to die under almost any circumstance. Perhaps going out in some noble fashion would help the world a little bit, help Hope and help Cindy and the women at the Tevatron. Put that out of your head, Angel. Don’t give up anything about the Tevatron and what’s going on there.

“Derrrrng!” the elevator shattered the quiet and mumbling in the bar. The doors did not open.

After a minute the slow, uneven grind of the doors on the tracks revealed that it was more than just a glitch. “Blerrasshhhhhhhhhhhhhhck!” said the garbled, deteriorated voice that matched the condition of its owner.

“Remind me to disconnect that,” Jim said. “She used to have such a lovely voice, but now she’s just some kind of mutant hiding in the speakerbox.”

Shuffling feet emerged from the elevator box. It was not the sharp clicking that one would expect to accompany evil, it was quiet, measured, and slow. Once the feet came to a halt the clicking actually did start up. It was not footstep, though. It was the sound of a skilled killer tapping on the ground. Not the man, but his club. It had seen blood, and bone, and muscle, and brain. It was a devious device put to devious purposes, weilded by a one-eyed maniac who was getting better and better at weilding it.

The torches and the mumbling in the background were silenced by the entry of this new person. They gathered close to Angel and Jim on the ground putting more light into the area allowing Angel to see clearly their adversary, the one-eyed man who bashed him on the head at the hangar.

“That’s the one, Jim. That’s the guy that got me,” Angel said.

“Ah, yeah. He’s only got the one eye, unless he’s just trying to be a pirate.”

Angel laughed, and whinced in pain from his ribs.

Neither Jim nor Angel had been tortured before. They didn’t know what kind of pain the one-eyed Dragon was thinking about inflicting upon them. The laughter they were experiencing would likely be the last bit of pleasure they would extract from the situation. As the room brightened with the torchlight, their chances of survival dimmed. This man was like no adversary they had ever even heard of. Their experience with The Dragon had been relatively benign compared to what was about to happen. They rightfully did not expect a sadist to be standing before them, so they joked.

They joked.

* * *

Hope watched it go down. She managed to swing from the bottom of the propellered machine and land on the roof of the building. It was one of those things that she had imagined she might be able to do in a dream, if she repeated the dream over and over again until she got it right. She hadn’t dreamed about this. She didn’t even think about this. Pure instict drove her to escape the falling machine even if it meant a mid-air swing hundreds of feet in the air. With subconcious confidence in her own body’s ability her instincts pushed her, like a father pushing a daughter in a swing. There was no choice, her body just did it.

Landing on the roof hurt. She was fortunate to be left with only scrapes and bruises given the awkward way she hit. It knocked the wind out of her lungs, leaving her gasping as she moved to the edge. She had to see the machine go down, to know if they made it.

It was all in slow motion. Tragedies often unfold at what seems like half-speed. She knew the machine would hit the ground; she was expecting it. As she watched Angel’s fantastic maneuvers that righted the bird during its descent, she didn’t realize that she couldn’t hear it, or anything. She was watching in silent as her mind shut out everything else except the vision of the helicopter falling out of the sky. A gasp of air, a dropped jaw, eyes welling up with tears, she lay there on the roof, head peeking over the side.

With a puff of sand and scattered metal, it hit the ground. What was left of the propeller continued to spin, but at an odd angle, as if it had become dislodged from the rest of the machine somehow. The tail was touching the ground and the booms were sticking up at odd angles.

For awhile there was no movement, nothing from the bird, nothing from the area around it. The sound of the quiet wind slowly emerged from the background and filled Hope’s ears once again. Then the voices came, not from the roof, but from the ground. The Dragon came, some from across the bridge and others from the building below. She waited and watched. Short of jumping from the building and having enough luck to land on one of them, she could do nothing for Angel and Jim at the moment, so she watched.

They dragged two limp bodies out of the machine and laid them on the sand. One of them purched over each body, examining them. She couldn’t make out any words, just the noises of men’s voices. As they dragged the bodies toward the building she had no idea if they were dead or alive, but in that moment she decided that she was going to find out.

A familiar rage awoke in Hope. It was the same feeling she felt when she killed the two Dragon in the helicopter so many weeks ago, rooted in her anguish from when they raided the medical camp, killing so many, but it was more complicated than that. She was angry at them, and angry at herself. She became the lover of the man who ordered the raid, the man who ordered her own capture. Her heart was burning with fire on both sides. The flames her chest and burned across her body, extending all the way to her fingertips. On her right she held the despise of the wicked men who have caused so much pain, on the left the grief and self loathing that accompanied the powerlessness of her situation, and how she found enough power in selfishness and self preservation that ultimately resulted in the betrayal of all those around her.

She was disgusted, angry, resentful, despised, rotten inside, and the rot was now burning out the puss and stink of her soul. Arms shaking, palms sweaty, she was ready. The fire in her heart energized her body. She had the strength of two men running through her, and the cunning of the finest killer The Dragon could bring forth. A rampage was coming like these killers had never seen.

Her mind filled with visions of killing them one by one. She imagined sneaking up on one from behind and stabbing him in the throat, holding his limbs until his brain drained of blood. An impaled skull awaited the next one, and the one after that would take a few kicks to the groin before she dispatched him by twisting his head around. Hope had all sorts of colorful ways to kill these men, and she was going to try each one.

Kills 1 & 2

Two Dragon stared out the blown out window of the garden, keeping watch over the activity by the helicopter. If they spotted anything unusual it was one man’s job to call the elevator and deliver the message to Jacko. The other man stayed behind to keep watch and relay the information to the messenger upon his return, and repeat the process. Jacko’s plan appeared to be working to that point, so there was for the men to do except watch.

They didn’t hear Hope slip through the stairwell door. The howling wind across the open windows kept them from hearing her tie off the cargo strap to the drain pipe behind them. Enamored by the vision of the shattered flying machine below, they didn’t notice her sneaking up behind them.

It wasn’t until the first man was noosed and kicked out the window that they noticed her at all. He fell 30 feet before the tether was taught and the noose tightened around his neck. It wasn’t as satisfying a kill as she had hoped. She didn’t hear the neck snap or any screams from him, just a grunt when she kicked him in the back and some scuffling of his feet on the ground when he tried to regain his balance. She enjoyed imagining his last thoughts, his terror and panic at the thought of the ground rising up to meet him, and the sadness at the sound of his own snapping neck. Would he know he was dead, or would it all just go dark? This idea gave her some pleasure, some relief from the burning in her heart. His death, however, was but a drop of water, a splash onto the fire. It reignited quickly.

The second man gave her a close kill. He saw his friend fly out the window followed by a slack, yellow cargo strap that chased him from behind. His eyes traced the strap’s route backward and met the vision of a woman with her leg slowly retracted from its forceful kick. He felt fear, and Hope could see it on his face, and he could see the rage on hers. She was not tall, but in that momen she was taller than he. His body grew small and week in the face of her impending slaughter. There was no fight in this man, he was paralyzed.

Hope imagined another version of herself taking pity on this man. He would see her softening and soften himself, dropping his club, dropping his guard. She would bind him to the drain pipe with the cargo strap and come back for him later. He would become her prisoner and, after awhile, she would free him after she felt he had served his sentence. They would go on living, never becoming friends, but not staying enemies either. He would live.

Someday she wondered if that version of her would ever replace the killer. Years from now, when the world begins to right itself, maybe, but not today. This Hope gave him no mercy. His throat was slashed before the noose tightened around the other man’s neck. The gasping of air, the choking on blood, these sounds gave her more satisfaction. Her fire cooled for a moment. She closed her eyes to feel it and inhaled deeply, growing strong in the process.

As the heat returned she clenched her fists and tightened her jaw. She had more work to do before this fire would go out. It might not even be completely extinguished when she finished. She would be satisfied to leave it smoldering, even if only for awhile.

Kill 3

“Dinnnnnnnnnnnck,” went the bell on the 35th floor. The door opened on the opposite side of the elevator shaft. Whoever was on it couldn’t see how Hope had desecrated the two scouts. He would not suspect.

She slinked up to the rear of the elevator’s column and listened. The man called out to his friends, but recieved no answer. He walked around one side, she moved to the corner and waited. He called out again, still no answer. The fool, he arrived at the corner of the shaft where she was waiting, and he looked away. This fool of a man was looking the other way, unlike any other normal human. It was as if he didn’t want to see her. A fleeting sensation of dismay brushed across Hope’s mind as he finally turned his idiot head the other way and saw her, arms outstretched grabbing for his head.

The idiot would be looking the other way for the rest of his short life as she twisted his skull around to make it so. Cracking neck bones and the snapping spine gave her the sick sensation of pleasure for much longer this time. Her body cooled with the beading sweat that was developing across her skin, and the dousing of the flame from this kill. This poor, dumb man who had managed to survive in a killing community, how could he be so bad at staying alive?

Kills 4 & 5

She knew better than to take the elevator, there was no telling what she might encounter when the doors opened, if they opened. For all she knew the machine would finally give up and leave her stranded in the metal box to burn from the inside out.

The dangling man inched his way up the side of the building, Hope thought she might need the cargo strap again and she didn’t see any point in announcing her presence to the rest of The Dragon just yet. She also grabbed one of their clubs. The malet felt heavy in her hands, not just in weight but in what it had done and what it represented. It was their chosen killing machine, and this one had the weight of one that had taken a lot of lives. Stained brown with dried blood and heavily dented, she wondered how many souls this filthy beast had freed from the earth. How many skulls shattered, bones broken, muscles destroyed along with their owners had been left in its wake?

Her eyes shifted focus from the club to the man she had pulled it from and whatever pity she had for any of them evaporated, leaving her like a possesing spirit giving up on its host. Like Jim, she saw only one way for this to end, and she wanted to bring it about. They all have to die, all of The Dragon. They will kill and maime and destroy until there’s nothing left of humanity, and if that means that Hope had to give up her own, she would make that sacrifice. She would become a killer, just as they are. No more flourishes of pity, or remorse would ever make their way into her heart for any other Dragon’s death. Her hardened heart could burn forever so long as she was putting an end to them.

Floor by floor she made her way down from the 35th using the stairwell near the elevator shaft at the center of the building. Most levels had some desks, a lot of wheeled chairs, and the higher ones still had many windows intact. For all the damage the structure had endured, it was in surprisingly good shape looking at it form the inside. Hope wasn’t there for a tour, though. She painstakingly stalked through each and every floor looking for an opportunity to sneak up behind another Dragon bastard and gut him.

34 – nothing. 33 – nothing. 32 – nothing. She spent 10 minutes on each floor, and that was too much time. She had seen them dragging Angel and Jim into the building. She didn’t know which floor they were on, but she knew where they weren’t. Alive or dead, she was committed to finding them and and creating a trail of bloody bodies along the way, but which would it be: alive, or dead?

If they’re dead, they were already dead, she thought. And if they wanted them dead they would have killed them right in the helicopter. They wouldn’t have bothered dragging them around. If they were already dead, then they’re already dead. She wasn’t sure if her logic was sound, but it gave her comfort to think that Angel and Jim were still alive. It gave her rage a noble purpose, and this made her feel better. Her bloodlust was in-line with what she thought was the higher objective of saving them. With so many floors to clear, she had quit a lot of time to reconcile her feelings on the matter.

More than three hours had passed since she started down the stairs. When she go to the tenth floor she noted that, while the desks and scattered cubical walls still provided a maze of hiding places for potential assassins, most of the chairs were missing. Nine, eight, seven, none of them had chairs at all. Another hour had ticked by when she arrived at the fifth floor where the mystery was solved.

Jim had thrown all the chairs down the stairwell. Nine office building floors worth of wheeled chairs were clogging up the stairs below the fifth floor, like hair in a shower drain. There was no climbing over, or around, or through he mesh of five-pointed star legs, hydrolic pressure plungers, cushioned and mesh seats and backs, and adjustable arms. If it went all the way down to the ground level, Hope imagined that it would take her several days to clear them all. Burning them would be simpler, if they would burn. In all likelihood the materials would melt into a solid brick of stair-well molded plastic blocking the first and second floors.

Like the floors between 35 and six, floor five offered no satisfying kills. The Sun was getting low in the sky now, and Hope was feeling the fatigue of her long day. Her muscles ached. She walked to one side of the office and propped herself up on a desk. Closing her eyes for a moment, she enjoyed the sound of the wind across the hollow of the window panes. Breathing became slow and heavy. While her body rested, her mind was still imagining more killing. Three was not enough, she wanted more. More, she whispered to herself, and she thought she heard something whisper in return. Her head cocked sideways instinctively to give her ear a better angle on the sound. More whispers, she heard, but they weren’t whispers, just a faint conversation.

Down below her were two Dragon standing on the train platform. They didn’t see her, they weren’t looking for someone from up above. These two men were standing guard at the train platform in case Jim’s train showed up looking for trouble.

Hope’s body re-energized with a new rush of adrenaline and her mind assigned each of the men a specific way to die. She was eager to kill, and her brain was on automatic as it sorted out how to get down to them. Over on a side of the building, just out of view of her prey, she tied off the cargo strap to a heavy desk and lowered it down. These men were on the third floor and after she used a little bit of the strap to fashion a sling for the club, she had just enough to get down to them.

She had never repelled before, so her descent was awkward. Wisely she chose to do this out of view of the two men, as they would have surely noticed her lack of stealth on the way down if she tried to drop in directly behind them. She found her way in to the building and set up the kill.

Her luck continued as they were assigned to look out for a train, not look behind them for someone sneaking up. Excitement filled her as she was about to inflict some new damage with the club. A smile spread across her face as she approached the two men standing at the edge of the platform.

The first man would have to wait his turn. A little push was all he needed to fall down onto the tracks. It was an odd landing for him, hitting his head on one of the rails. By the time he pulled himself up it would be too late for his partner.

Swinging low and wildly with her new weapon, she struck the second Dragon on the front of the knee, buckling his leg in the opposite direction of its normal operation. He screamed at the sight of his retreating shin and thigh and fell to the ground grabbing at the demolished joint. Hope was swift and more precise with her next swing. The man stopped screaming when the club came down on his head. She was beginning to understand the appeal of these bloody mallots. Cracking sounds of bone and tendon were very satisfying.

As she wound up for her third swing, which she wasn’t entirely sure was necessary, but was going to take anyway, a pair of hands wrapped around her ankles and yanked them out from under her. The man down on the tracks had recovered a little more quickly than she expected. Her body came down with a heavy thud and the man started to drag her down onto the tracks.

Hope was nimble, and her mind was sharp. She had lost her club, but not her wits. Using her arms, she popped her body up off the platform, putting all her mass into the air, and shoving herself right into the chest of the man below. He crashed down on the tracks once more, dropping his club, as Hope had dropped hers just seconds before. Her landing was soft, and had the added benefit of pressing all the air out of her adversary’s lungs. When a man can’t breath, his first priority is to breath. This gave Hope the advantage becasue her priority was still to kill the man. As he struggled to push her off, now quite disoriented from two falls on the train tracks, she grabbed his club and started to bash him in the face with the narrow end. This was an interesting experience for her. To this point she had snuck up on all of her victims and dispatched them before they really understood what was happening. This man that she was sitting on was fully aware of her, and that he was about to die. His armed flailed about as he tried to block the club’s hilt between each blow. Blood flowed into his eyes giving him no chance at any meaningful counter move.

With panicked lungs, no vision and a face that had been turned into a ball of beaten meat, he started to choke on the blood that was running from his nose down his throat. He gasped and flailed more slowly as she continued to bash his face. As his efforts became more futile and weak, Hope smiled again. More than any of the others, she enjoyed killing this man. His suffering doused the flame in her heart for a good while.

Kills 6 & 7

Hope worried that the scream of the first man might have alerted others to her presence, but after several minutes no one came to the third floor looking for trouble. She lurked around the third floor, wiping her bloody hands on the walls, desks and any other thing she felt like. Outside of the bloody trail, she scouted the floor just like the others, but it was just a habit at this point. She was just going though the motions. If she really wanted to complete the job she would have gone up to the fourth floor and checked it out. She was no longer interested in clearing the building so much as she was interested in finding another Dragon to kill.

Jim had done a great job of blocking off the main stairwell with chairs, and that would do well to keep people below the fifth floor, but there were a set of escalators that went between the third and ground floors. They were well beyond functional as time had broken almost everything, but a broken escalator is not really broken, it just becomes stairs. With her favorite club and two holstered blades, she crept slowly down the escalator stairs. Stealth had been her best ally so far, and she wasn’t about to give it up by clumsily swooping down to the ground floor.

The ground floor was not at all like the ones above. It was an open, spacious lobby with decorative marble and massive desks. In the dim light of the setting sun it reminded her of the old bank she used to hide out in before those bastards took it from her, before the beat her to within an inch of her life. That brutal memory lodged in her head as she skulked around each corner of the lobby, looking for Dragon. She was binding it with her time as Gannon’s concubine, with the attack at the medical camp, the death of her friends, her betrayal of the rest, the killing of the men in the helicopter, at the hangar, and all those she killed at Jim’s building. All of the pain she inflicted, and that was visited upon her hardened into a lump in her chest at the center of her burning heart. It invigorated her.

When she spotted the two Dragon standing guard at the top of the stairs to the bar, she didn’t bother with stealth. It was casual, the way she walked up to them with her club. One of them had set his on fire to cast light in the area, the fool. He was so close to the flame that he could barely see how she bashed his friend to the ground. He thought he was good at killing, and maybe he was, but he wasn’t ready to kill in that moment. This little woman walking up and crushing his friends skull like an egg was not what he expected. Nor did he foresee her smashing his hand with her club, breaking his fingers and knocking his torch away.

The fire flickered in the darkened city, half buried in the sand. Protected from the wind, and with no rain to douse it, the fire would keep burning into the night, until the weapon was consumed by it.

The post Everything Goes Wrong / Killing Spree appeared first on Mark McEachran.

https://j.mp/3d36FU1 November 23, 2017 at 08:30AM

[eternitywander]

Afterward Preamble

CHAPTER 1: afterward preamble

Void. A realm of absolute nothing, of only negative space. Not a sight nor a sound were welcome, nor but a thought. What was experienced could not accurately be described as an expanse of black, nor of white, nor of gray, as one’s immediate intuition may lead them to picture. There were no ridges, no curves, no forms to be discerned for the world was the epitome of absence, a plane where not one’s own self could manifest. The concept of time and the concept of space were distant, unfamiliar. Morality, life, love… this realm knew not of those concepts. Nobody could tell you how long their essence resided in the limbo, and they could not tell you where it existed. At some point, however,

It ended.

The curtains that gatekept reality cracked open and allowed a smidgen of light to filter through the boy’s pupils. For a while, he lay unmoving as if still in the abstract purgatory. Thoughts inched slowly into his head like a spider crawling ignorantly into one’s mouth while the individual slept, or like a lousy rallentando offset from the rest of the choir’s harmony. Letters collected into words, and words strung together to form one coherent sentence: I am dead. This one declarative was the only truth for which the boy could be utmost confident. With that basis in mind, his fingers began to twitch as if reflexively, surveying the qualia of the surface upon which he rested. This rudimentary application of the scientific method unfortunately lends no tangible results. Was the material dirt? Was it mud? Sand? Sensory data, of which is used by all to ground their reality proved, in this instance, inconclusive. There was more to understand now than there was in the Void, yet the results are thus far longingly unsatisfactory to the young man. 

The energy of life seeped into the boy like a dose of cold water down the throat and after some time a spark returned to him, shocking him into his new reality. He rose, his eyes darting around and ingesting shades of gray, brown, and red. The colors shifted and merged like a sloppy collage viewed in a daze and the boy struggled to etch in his mind a decisive mold of the land and sky before him. All he could discern is that its appearance was somewhat familiar to his conception of a desert, possibly a landscape reminiscent of one without engendering each of the qualities defining land as a desert. The temperature was likewise ambiguous. His youthful curiosity rekindled, questions begin to spin around his head: Where am I? How did I get here? What happened? While an element of fright and desperation underpinned his thoughts, the texture was that of genuine intrigue. So many questions, and only one answer:

I am dead.

The boy planted his feet firmly into the ground and threw himself up, dizzying in the process like a schoolkid throwing himself out of his cherry-colored bed as to not be late for the first day of school. His limbs felt like electrocuted spaghetti and a migraine seized his head. As if doing so would steady the turvy world, he places his left hand against the side of his face with his ring finger rested on his round lips, his middle finger on his small nose, and his index finger through a curl of thick white hair against his forehead. As thoughts collided and jumbled inside of his head, his hand remained; and unbeknownst to the boy, a dark smoke began to rise between the crevice between hand and face. Soon a shot of pain, odd and indescribable as the feeling of being shocked by an outlet, found its way into his hand and he quickly removed it as if peeling off a bandage. Now brought to his senses and completely focused, the boy stared at his hand in awe. A wave of thick black smoke unraveled in his palm and wisped away into the air above. What was that? the boy thought, puzzled. The left side of my face . . . is there something on it? He placed a hand on the right side of his face, confirming that it was only the west flank that caused that strange feeling. He closes his right eye to examine the left side of his nose. It is then that he discovered a clue: the left side of his nose is pure black. Is the whole left side of my face like that? he pondered. Questions continued to be made note of, the growing pile of inquiry daunting yet inexplicably exciting. 

A flash of color slashed through every concurrent thought, a streak of candy red striking in its vibrance. As contrasted to the backdrop, the spray appeared surreal. An intense pain tore through the boy’s arm, catching him and allowing him to realize the urgency of this sudden occurrence. He stumbled and grasped his aching appendage, his vision blurring. A shine calls his attention to a long, thin sabre and its carrier, a dark humanoid figure of ugly moth-like wings and crimson irises. The desaturated pink of the being’s tongue made contact with the bright red fluid and claimed a portion. Although a harsh ringing pervaded the boy’s hearing, the assailant’s practiced musings shot crisply through: “A Newdead? Fresh meat.”

An instinctual backwards duck saved the boy from a slit stomach, the silver flying across his vision like a screen wipe. He staggered to regain bipedal balance before the next slice cut the air. The violence of the wind preceding the blade’s following hack startled the boy forward and onto his running feet. A roar of playful malice bellowed behind him - something to the likes of “get back here!” - but the boy was too entranced on the ground ducking under his feet to distinguish the phonetic intricacies as he fled. A gust of wind crashes against the child’s spine, throwing him tumbling to his solar plexus, to his spine, to his chest, and then once more to his spine. A turn of his eyes reveals the moth man laughing almost cartoonishly as he sauntered over in glee. “It’s been a while since I’ve been allowed to take out my frustration on something,” he chuckled. “These past few Turns have been bliss.” He readied his sword while the boy rose meekly yet determined to escape. A one second survey of left and right granted the boy the knowledge of the red expanse leftward and jagged wall of stone roughly twenty meters rightward and thirty forward. Crystalline tree-like structures of shimmering violet gems and unearthly branches of unsaturated purple dot the land, the nearest one in jumping range. The boy took the offer and put it between him and his attacker. An expected horizontal slice tore a few crystals from their branches and the glimmering projectiles crashed into the ground, the kid’s heart racing as he shielded himself with his arms in an X-formation. Luckily the worst he suffered was a scratch to his right arm, so he pulls himself together with all his will and claims a pointed gem, thrusting it into the space in front of him with not quite the precision required for a direct hit but enough to force the gray foe to expend half a second reacting. “You think you’re smart, huh?” the moth man bellowed, now audibly annoyed. “Master tactician, huh? Well, I’ll show you just how far your Newdead brain can get you!”

Like a falcon diving to claim its prey, a form descended from the cliff-wall and collides with the moth man’s back. A piercing light penetrates his lower torso, iridescent spines encapsulating gray claws following a wave of dirty blood. Behind the appalled face of the winged being was that of a girl with dark, unkempt hair with wolf-like ears of the same color resting upon it and skin enshrouded by short, light gray fur. Her eyes were small moons, dutifully reflecting the light of the sun to relay a message to the boy: “get out of here.”As if predicting the motion, the wolf-like girl removed her claws from the moth man’s torso before he forced his blade through the hole in an effort to stab her through the hand, which ultimately failed when the girl, whom had prepared and already dislodged, forced a boot into the ground and pushed away from the sheen. She clamped down on the blade at either side with her claws, encompassed by the sharp aura. There was a speedy crack and then the tip shattered. Its shrapnel scattered about, ornamenting the shallow red. 

“Damn it!” the moth man shouted as he violently and frustratedly removed the remaining length of his sabre from his body. As if trying to catch a fly, he turned on his heel and vigorously sliced at a diagonal angle, but facing a practiced one-pace retreat it was no match for the wolf-girl’s agility. He clasped both hands and conjured a thunderous gust of wind with a flap of his mangled and disgusting wings which caught the girl off guard and made her stumble, though she quickly regained her balance. The Newdead, on the other hand, was not so lucky. Even taking the margin of the wind blast, his insufficient weight gave out and he slammed into the ground. The moth man positioned himself atop the crag and continued firing waves of pressure that crashed against the girl’s body, collapsing her movement and constricting her lungs. The boy attempted to lift the weight of the air on his shoulders, but it was no use; he crumbled to his belly. His eyes locked on the suffering fighter and he inched forward, left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg, the force of the wind against his back growing tougher and challenging the rhythm of his heartbeat as the mysterious assailant laughs mockingly. His vision blurring because of the water being forced from his sockets, he reached out meekly yet determined to the girl. He was going to help her. Or at least he wanted to believe he could. The girl, finally noticing the boy’s actions, shoots him a sharp glare. In her eyes were not desperation, nor contempt; they were the eyes of a stern parent or teacher after their kid decorates the walls with phallic hieroglyphics. She scowled briefly but did stretch her pointed fingers to meet his small hand. The moth man took notice of this. “You think you can get away with something like that? Well, I guess I’ve had my fun anyway. Dog bitch, let’s see how you like it!” He held his sword above him, preparing to descend and pierce her chest. 

But what fell instead was a wing painted with dirty blood, followed by the sabre, clattering harmlessly to the ground. The squall dissipated, leaving the two teens holding hands. The girl’s eye twitched and then she quickly withdrew from the handshake and swerved to look at their attacker. He was nowhere to be seen, but from the cliff peeked a long, friendly but hardened and unusually light face. Straight gold-blond hair framed it, cut mid-length with long sideburns almost as pronounced as the sharp canines that studded his grin. He waved dopily to the young wolf woman who stood up and brushed off her jacket made of a leather-like material which has unusual short sleeves that evaded her shoulders in favor of settling on the sides of her crossed arms. Her posture was firm, as if what she had just experienced was no more than being hit in the crossfire of a snowball fight. Her legs, which manifested aspects of wolf and human, were just bent enough to deliver an instant kick if found the need to and just stiff enough that it would take a ram from a crazed bus to move her even a millimeter. 

“He’s out cold! Good work, team!” The man above congratulated. 

“Team?” The girl said.

“That’s right! You and that boy there!”

The girl looks at the boy without moving her head more than a centimeter or two. “I really didn’t do much. And this kid? He’s just a Newdead. He was supposed to run.”

“He saved you! You shouldn’t be so harsh, Lyca.” There was not a hint of sarcasm in the ghoulish man’s voice. The boy ran his hand through his tangly paper white hair and removed as much debris as he could. He could not come up with anything to say. He had tried to save her, but it was not him who did it. It was the man. Not that the boy did not appreciate the praise; he would love to pretend he was impressively heroic.

The girl sighed and gave up the argument before it began. She knew the man was troublesome when it came to his backwards, side-to-side, up-down logic. He was probably the second most annoying guy she knew (though she suspected he would be bumped down to third if she had to put up with the Newdead any longer than walking him to the village). Speaking of which, “Hey, kid. We’re going back to Asphodel, so if you don’t want to become Reaper food, I suggest you come with us.” 

The boy shot up straight at this. “Reaper? What’s that?” The girl wasn’t listening to him; she was already scaling the rocky wall by digging into it with her aura power. Pebbles slid down to the boy’s feet, taunting him. “Wait, Miss! How am I supposed to get up there? Can I have some help?” The girl ignored him and disappeared above. A few worried seconds later, a familiar figure appeared. That is to say, the wolf girl and fanged man threw the limp body of the maniac who menaced just before. Each held a leg, and the man beckoned to the boy in a cheerfully blase fashion. The boy arched an eyebrow, but he decided to trust their better judgement. They seemed to know what they were doing in this world more so than he did. It was grimly uncomfortable, but the boy used the moth man as a ladder. His battle-torn wing had been cleanly removed, but he was still alive. The boy was on the edge of whether the moth man had ever exhibited warmth or not, but the lukewarm temperature the boy felt touching the rough gray skin was enough to unsettle him. 

“So, um,” the boy attempted to break the ice, of which amounted to about a glacier after the incident, “Could one of you please explain what’s going on?” 

“You’re dead,” the girl said flatly. She shared the weight load of the unconscious tower of a man with her companion, who was dressed in an odd combination of battle gear and formal wear. Seeing the limp face of the man who had threatened the boy’s life moments past felt surreal to him. He had been so scary but now he appeared almost peaceful; like he was finally getting a moment to rest.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought…” The boy chuckles. Somehow saying that felt odd. “But that’s okay.”

The girl eyed him like he was growing a second head. “You really are something.”

“Something quite courageous!” the fanged man chimed in, puffing his chest out in invitation for the boy to do the same. “You should be proud of what you did back there. I saw it before I got to you.” The girl scoffs, silently disagreeing. “By the way, this unsatisfiable pursuivant of mine is named Lyca, and I Fritz. We make up the current Asphodel Village Guard, or AVG if your mouth is ever weary.”

“And we’re going to Asphodel now?” The boy illuminated.

“Oh, how worldly!”

“Don’t butter the Newdead up so much.” Lyca’s eyes have a sharpness to them, the boy noticed. It fits her, he thought. Then he thought. In all this time, he had not even considered the concept of names. He knew somewhere locked in the depths of his memory that he owned one but could not for the life of him recall it.

“I can’t remember my name.”

“That’s how it is,” Fritz tells him. “You can hardly remember anything after you first get to the Afterworld. It is a tradition here to come up with your own name. I constructed mine, and so did Lyca. I won’t pressure you to come up with one now; take your time and put your heart into it.”

“Just come up with something practical,” Lyca pitches in. “Anything works, really. Just don’t be John Charles Xavier Julius the Fithteenth And Also Almighty. If you went that route of extravagance I’d have to shorten it to just Ignoramus. And then punch you for being stupid. Really, it took me ten seconds to come up with mine. I was like, oh, I’m like a kind of werewolf thing? Lyca it is I guess. See?”

The boy chuckled. “I see what you mean, but I don’t think I’m in any particular rush.” He looked at his arm and frowned. The blood was unceasing in its escape and beginning to stain the baby blue of his sweater. “Hey, um, not to alarm you guys, but I have a gaping wound that should probably be attended to, I think.”

“Suck it up,” Lyca replied immediately. The boy turned to Fritz for affirmation. 

“Yeah, my furry friend is correct on this, I’m afraid.” The boy became uneasy at this. What was going to happen to him? The sting of his gash was becoming more prominent by the second. “You shouldn’t worry too much about it though.” The boy doubted this message by any metric he could devise. “Liches can withstand more damage than humans back in the Beforeworld can. You should acclimate yourself to the sight of injury and blood and likely also death if you’re to make it through the regular grind of Afterworld existence.” 

“Liches?”

“That is what we are. Physical manifestations of your soul given form by the Afterworld. Pretty neat, I’d humbly consider.” The moth man began to stir, setting the boy on edge. Fritz slammed his head with the butt of his weapon, of which was a curious combination of axe and cleaver, returning him to the land of ducks and sheep. The boy cringed. 

Then he fainted.

“...ay”

“Ra…”

“Ray!” The boy jolted awake. 

“Jeez, quiet down!” a familiar voice barked. The boy scanned his surroundings to locate it. It was Lyca, clutching the wolf-like ears atop her head. “These ears are sensitive, you know! What was that for?” There was a fine dresser behind her with a vertical mirror sitting on top of it, joined by a few sparse items, including notes and something that appeared to be a violet-irised eyeball with wings. There was a rug covering a rectangular perimeter of the dark wooden floor, but more rugs piled carelessly in the corner of the room, each embedded with erratic scratch marks. A small makeshift hammock supported the boy’s weight. Around his arm was a bloodied bandage. There was only one door, presumably the front door, peculiarly decorated with a smaller door at the bottom. 

“A doggy door?”

“I’m over here.”

“Sorry.”

Lyca sighed. Her tone turned softer, as much as a stone can be made soft after a drop of water. “Had your first Dream I presume?”

Something snapped back to the forefront of the boy’d consciousness. “Ray…” He cought it before it falls through by materializing it through vocalization once more.

Lyca’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Ray. I get it. I guess this is where I explain Dreams, right?”

“My name…”

The wolf Lich froze. “What?”

“Ray.”

The girl became frustrated. “What am I supposed to make of what you’re saying? Could you be a little more vague? I think that would do the trick.”

The boy brought his hand to his face and studies it, as if trying to delve into the depths of his mind trying to piece together a memory from what he was seeing. He traced the creases and lines with his eyes, trying to find something hidden in the cracks. He clenched his fist and his eyes. “I’m Ray.”

“Um… that’s a good choice, I guess. Looks like you took my advice. Not sure why you have to be so theatrical about it though.”

The boy removed himself from the hammock and looked the girl in her crystalline eyes. “That’s not what I mean.”

“Stop. You’re weirding me out.”

“I’m Ray.”

“Yeah, cool.”

“No, I’M Ray! It’s my name.”

“Mhm.”

The boy paused. “I remember.”

Lyca eyed him with a look now comprised of confusion rather than ire. “Come again?”

“It’s my name. From the… Beforeworld, you guys called it? I’m sure of it.”

Lyca laughed nervously. “You really sure about that? It’s incredibly unlikely - no -  impossible for a Lich to recall their name on their first Dream. The first Dream shouldn’t even developed enough to recall any information. You should have been almost fully bereft of sensory data. It can take hundreds of years to remember your name, and by that point you’ve already moved on. Are you telling me you actually remember?”

“Yes.”

“For real?”

“Really real.”

“I…” Lyca stammered and did a funny contortion with her facial features. Then she shifted to defeat. “I’ll have to take you at your word… Ray. But this is really weird.” 

The boy shrugged and kicks off his white tennis shoes before sauntering to the mirror. Lyca scolded him not to get too comfortable, but he did not pay attention. Instead, he was transfixed by his familiar yet off kilter reflection. It was of uncanny valley, but instead of being fixed between inhuman and human it was between himself and the contradictory. His face was divided vertically at the center. On one side his warm gold eyes and soft complexion were present as had always been; on the other was an indescribable darkness, a black that knew no light, like a black hole or a 3D model before shading. Planted in the midst was a lone oviform white in place of his left eye. He did as he would to squint that eye and watched it collapse to a horizontal line. He took a breath and pushed his hand through his cloudlike hair. Then he placed a finger on the mysterious left side of his face, imitating the behavior he had performed when he first found himself in this strange world. Sure enough, a weird sting, indescribable but perhaps most analogous to a sudden shock of electricity combined with a burn, meets his hand and he is forced to pull away. A thick dark smoke leaps away from his hand and face. At least he had found some answers.

His attention shifted away from the mirror and towards Lyca, who was giving him a judgemental look. “Where is the moth guy from earlier?” he said.

Lyca, appearing to ignore him for a moment, retrieved the winged eyeball from her desk and it spurred to life atop her palm. She gazed into it deliberately and made unusual gestures with her hand in the air. Ray asked what it was. “An Eye Phone,” Lyca responded unattendedly. After a little more fiddling with the space before her, she pocketed it. “Come with me.”

“Thanks for saving me, by the way!”

“It’s my job.”

Ray felt slight disappointment after seeing Lyca exit the door like a normal person but followed her through nonetheless. As the two walked, Ray was exposed to a less than cheerful village. Gray-red tones filled the atmosphere and the architecture of the silent town featured an odd blend of styles ancient, modern, and multicultural. The “roads” were a darker tone than the rest of the terrain and there were no vehicles to be seen but there were a few bicycles. The diverse yet few Liches they crossed appeared to be in a sort of functioning stupor. They solemnly looked on and shifted by without a sound.

A thought found its way to the forefront of Ray’s mind and he asked it out loud: “Is there any way out of this place?”

“Already sick of this town?” Lyca commented. “Can’t blame you.”

“It’s not that!” Ray asserted, making waving motions with his hands. “I don’t hate it, I’m just curious. And I meant the Afterworld.”

They pass by a store with a rustic sign reading in faded Blackletter “Weapon Stop.”  Lyca stopped, dark sand brushing past her high boots. She turned and trained her laser of a pupil onto Ray’s. “What? You think you can just knock on the door to life and wait for someone to open it?”

“Who knows?” Ray positted. “There could be a doggy door.”

“You…!” Lyca placed her palm on her forehead. “There is no way. Not in an eternity. Don’t get it in your mind. It will just make you hope for the unhopeful and you will rot away in literally never ending despair.” She continued walking, the sound of her steps on the stone walkway echoing in the still air. 

“Are you lying to me?”

Perhaps unconsciously, small sparks of aura flickered and vanished at the edge of her right claws, illuminating them in a soft light. “It doesn’t matter how much time or effort, you won’t be able to. Not you. Liches like you are devoured by this world if they go that path.”

Ray lit up. “So there is a way!” 

Lyca continued to stare for a moment before turning away and continuing onward. “You’re a freak.”

The Newdead stepped forward and picked up speed to catch up. “Hey, I just wanted to know. I don’t actually have enough of a problem yet that I’d want to leave anyway.”

“You were almost killed.”

“Killed? Aren’t we already dead?”

“Freak.”

“Come on, tell me what that’s about,” Ray pressed. “Being new to this world and all, I have lots to learn and I need to get it from somewhere. You’ve been a great teacher so far!”

“Shut up.”

“Please?”

Lyca, defeated, explained: “Your soul can’t die but you’re as good as dead without a body. So please, for the love of gods, be responsible. Don’t come fruitlessly running in to ‘save’ the person whose job it is to make sure you don’t die.” She pauses. “Here we are.” 

Before them stood a monument of garish colors not unlike what one would find in a jester’s garb, a manor wide as a parking lot and that was under the real estate of another dimension. That is to say, although it may well need not to be said that compared to the cruddy atmosphere of dull shades, this structure appeared almost surreal in its potency artistic or paradoxically comprehensible incomprehensibility. There was a clarity in viewing it; a sense of solidity sparsely found in this realm of the undetermined. Was it that the vision of a craftsman gave form to the meaningless world of abstract? Or was it simply ridiculous? “Probably the latter,” Ray said aloud.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” Four banners hung down from the roof, each of them displaying the same symbol yet slightly different, apparently hand drawn. It was a heart with an axe-cleaver behind it; Fritz’s. “The Asphodel Village Guard? Or AVG, if my mouth is ever weary?” Lyca nods once. “Sweet. Can I go inside?” Lyca gestures for him to stay and ascends the stairs of the elaborate porch that made up the mansion’s front yard. She reaches the door, activates her aura, shoves her claws into the door, rips it off its hinges, and discards it. “Wh-What did you do that for?!” Ray stammered.

“Oh, it’s a bit of an inside joke, I suppose one could say,” Lyca responded calmly. There were the muffled sounds of feet clambering against wood. Soon the tall, long-faced, straight blonde-haired man from earlier appeared before the two in dapper apparel. Lyca glared at him. She and Fritz engaged in an intense handshake spanning over fifty moves while Ray watched on, confused yet invested. Fritz’s mouth turned into a mischievous grin, exposing one fang. He suddenly withdrew his arms and reached from behind the visible the entrance and produced his axe-cleaver, swinging and letting it cut the air before him. Lyca bent backwards to dodge and grabbed the weapon with her aura, taking it from him and hitting him on the head with the butt. She spun it around and dropped the weapon into her hand, pointing it at the fallen Fritz. “I give!” he shouted playfully. Lyca set it back down where Fritz had it previously. He rose and steadied himself. “Welcome to my abode!” he says to the boy.

“It’s interesting,” the kid responded.

“Ah, yes, architecture and design interior and ex is a fancy of mine. Why don’t you come in?” The Newdead did. Lyca had disappeared, left to return home. The hall now before Ray was massive and open, so much so that he supposed dropping a blade of grass would cause a deafening echo. The walls were painted a slurry of unnatural colors. They were lined with doodles of varying quality and dazzled with exorbitant amounts of glitter. To the left and right thirds stood a line of large chrome-colored statues of mythological figures: Medusa, Cerberus, Quetzalcoatl, Kaguya… Ray was inexplicably familiar with all of them. To each corner of the grand hall was a flight of spiral stairs. Two went down, two up, each diagonal to its likeness. A lime green tint pervaded the room due to the light emitted by jade stones set on pedestals like torches, each inscribed with the same symbol. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Well, what should I call you in the meantime before you decide on a name?”

“My name’s Ray. I remembered it.”d

“You… Remembered?” Fritz raised an eyebrow. His confusion quickly turned to pride. “That’s wonderful! I’ve not known anylich who’ve remembered their name so swiftly. That goes to show how truly unique a specimen you are and gives me further confidence in my decision.”

“Your decision?”

A hand rose and descended forcefully, a finger pointed directly at Ray’s face. “I’m enlisting you to join my Guard.” A moment of still silence passes.

“Huh?” Ray still had to process the information he was given. Fritz retracted his gesture and smiled. 

“You don’t have to accept if you don’t wish it. In that case, you’ll be staying in my manor until we can find a place for you in the village. You’ll have a luxurious room as if of a six-star hotel and gourmet servings of afterworldly dishes until a home is found, and you will never face any more killers or monsters again, if we have any say in it. Your afterlife will not be in danger and you can live out your eternal existence in tranquility. Sounds lovely, does it not?”

Ray thought to his desperate encounter with a Reaper. He could not remember much of his past, but he was certain that event was the scariest thing he had ever experienced. He thought to the blood, the violence. He thought to the Lyca whose afterlife was nearly ended in that moment. Then he thought to the village. The sullen passersby, meandering through existence without purpose. The town that was rusted cog in the infinity mechanism, a town that could vanish and none would know. A conference of the jaded, a speck of dust in the corner. Between risk of double death and an eternity of naught… 

“I’ll join. And I’ll make this village better.”

“Of course. I knew your answer before it even left your lips. Never let that spark die.”

“I won’t.”

ETERNITY WANDER

[markmceachran]

Everything Goes Wrong / Killing Spree

Angel’s head was once again in agony. It was like the concussion had revisited the worst pain upon him. His head was cloudy, vision blurry and he couldn’t move. Breaths were difficult and painful to take, ribs had been broken. He started to move a little, but couldn’t pull his arms out in front of him. Something had then bound behind his back. Through his blurry vision he could make out shapes, maybe people, in front of him, but it was dark. What light there was flickered and moved around. It was torches. The floor was cold and damp, his face pressed down against it. Legs were stretched out before him, bound to one another. Dry air scratched down his throat with every breath, and pressed out against his ribs. He kept is breaths shallow. His nose was clogged, full of blood and snot and possibly broken. Angel couldn’t be sure, his mind was not all there.

Visions of what had happened started to form inside his head. He remembered taking off from the Tevatron. He retraced his path from the Hanger in reverse, dangling the hunk of metal and rare-earth elements below. The expectation was that The Dragon would be spotted somewhere along the way. They had damaged the helicopter, after all, which left it spewing a smoke trail. It should have been easy to track.

There was no sign of them: no footprints, no burned out buildings, nothing. Even as they hovered over the hanger they could see nothing that suggested that The Dragon were even there. The dead were gone. The smattering of tracks around the hangar, nonexistent. Only a helicopter-sized hole in the top of the hangar showed them evidence that what they had experience over the last three days was real.

Three passengers in the helicopter left the scene baffled, and terrified. Their plan was to head back to Jim’s building, drop off the magnet, get it connected to the cooling system, and fire up the laser. It was predicated on the idea that their would-be assassins would be in the middle of the desert between the city and the Tevatron. They should have followed.

“They should have followed,” Jim said into his headset.

“They didn’t follow,” Angel replied. “Why didn’t they follow, Jim?”

“Maybe they gave up.”

“They walked all the way from the outskirts of Toronto to get here, Jim. They had us surrounded. They should be ravenous, not deterred.”

Jim grumbled something into the mic that stuck out like a twig from the hard-shelled audio ear-muffs and shook his head.

Angel passed over the rail yard to see the earlier battlefield. The demolished train car was there, as was Jim’s working train, parked right where they left it. None of it made any sense. The Dragon had a train. They had a really good vector on where the helicopter was going. They had options, and it looked as if they took none of them. It was as if they had vanished from the Earth.

“What now?” Angel said.

“We carry on. We don’t have enough information to do anything else.”

Up they soared ever so gently, Angel was still suffering quite a bit. The blades chirped away from the outside, overwhelmed by the engine noise on the inside. They were heading straight to Jim’s building.

* * *

“Angel, Hope?” Jim was regaining conciousness as well. His body faired better than Angel’s. A head-bleed that had already clotted, a broken arm, and a slight puncture wound in his abdomin that left a stain of dried blood on his plaid shirt.

“Hey Jim,” Angel said, still laying on the floor. “I think we have company.”

“Yeah. They were waiting for us.”

“I still think this is a terrible plan.”

“Lookin’ that way, bud.”

The Dragon were waiting for them at the building. As the helicopter hovered over the top floor, it gently set the magnet down. Hope slipped out to cut the cargo loose with her blade. It wasn’t the best way to drop the load, but without someone on the ground it was the only way they could do it. She clung to the landing rail and swung her nimble body so that she could reach the loosened cargo strap and cut through it. Just as the tether feathered its way toward the top of the building a beam of light slid across the bottom of the bird, carving a surface scar into the metal. It reached a spot within the radius of the propeller and stabilized on the blades as they spun about. They were sheared by a third, flinging the outer edges toward another nearby tower. The projectile metal swords stabbed into the building in a cluster, as if thrown by a dart champion.

Without the tips of its wings, the machine lost most of its loft. At first it fell slowly. Angel and Jim gasped for air while hope clung for dear life to the bottom of the machine. With the little control Angel had he tried to get to the edge of the building as not to land the whole machine on top of Hope. She managed to let go and drop onto the roof of the building as the machine slid through the air, down below the top floor. It was practically flying sideways, Angel was trying to save what little he had left of the blades and get some distance between the machine and the building before attempting to correct the flight profile.

Chirping blade sounds were replaced with an engine that was overrevving and a high-pitched whine caused by the uneven edges cutting through the air. With a little luck the machine moved away from the building and Angel leveled it out, but could do nothing to prevent the eventual meeting with the ground. He held the stick far over to one side to slow the increasing rotation speed of the machine. Without the full torque of the blades, the counter-rotation gearing to the rear rotor could only compensate so much.

There was no time to talk to Jim about how to crash in a helicopter, no time to regret not having parachutes, not that there was time to put them on. They only had time to fall, and for Angel to do his best to control the machine and coax whatever loft he could out of their shortened blades. Angel hoped that the sand was still soft, that it would absorb some of the force that was about to drop down on it. The storm wasn’t but a few days prior. The sand doesn’t completely settle. It’ll be alright, he thought.

* * *

The moving, flickering light was emitting some murmurs and whispers now. One of the whispers was a word Angel could just barely make out, “Hope.” He tried to look over at Jim, he tried to pull himself up. He could do neither. Every part of his body hurt, and what parts didn’t hurt very much were just numb from him laying on them.

“How long, Jim?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Could have been awhile. I’ve got dried blood on me already.”

“We crashed.”

“Wasn’t your fault. Or maybe it was. I blame you for my survival,” Jim joked, because what else could he do. He was bound on the floor just like Angel. They tied his hands in front of him to account for his broken arm, but they tethered them to his legs to prevent him from trying to hop away like an idiot. Joking was the only pleasure he had, and he needed some with all the pain he was in. His old body was bruised and sore.

Angel’s head was clearing and his eyesight grew sharper. He could make out figures of men with torches, and singed bar, half-burned curtains in front of a dented metal door. It was Jim’s bar. This was poetic for Angel, in a way. Hope and Cindy were sitting at the bar just as things started to go sideways. Maybe it wasn’t their fault, he thought. Of course it wasn’t their fault. They’re not maurading maniacs bent on destroying what’s left of humanity. Those two are just a couple of girls who fell in with the wrong crowd. He had heard the real history of how they got tangled up with The Dragon, but liked his shorthand version to be more playful.

He was beginning to understand how Hope initially worked her way into the good graces of The Dragon. She can be gentle when she wants to be, and probably when she has to be. Cindy’s involvement was obvious, why would you ever cast off a doctor. Medical care had gone way downhill since the fall of society.

Not that any of this understanding would likely matter. Angel was ready to accept his fate. This one-eyed Dragon was going to clobber him in the head again and put an end to his life. He’ll leave the face intact so that he can bring my severed head back to Tynon and show him how he killed the betrayer. Fair enough. I wonder if I’d be enough. Maybe if I tell him that I killed those men in Buffalo, and I shot the laser through the two at the hangar, would that be enough, would he leave Hope and Cindy and Jim alone? Or at the very least just kill me and Jim and call it a day?

Angel had nothing to lose. He was bound, bloodied and broken, fated to die under almost any circumstance. Perhaps going out in some noble fashion would help the world a little bit, help Hope and help Cindy and the women at the Tevatron. Put that out of your head, Angel. Don’t give up anything about the Tevatron and what’s going on there.

“Derrrrng!” the elevator shattered the quiet and mumbling in the bar. The doors did not open.

After a minute the slow, uneven grind of the doors on the tracks revealed that it was more than just a glitch. “Blerrasshhhhhhhhhhhhhhck!” said the garbled, deteriorated voice that matched the condition of its owner.

“Remind me to disconnect that,” Jim said. “She used to have such a lovely voice, but now she’s just some kind of mutant hiding in the speakerbox.”

Shuffling feet emerged from the elevator box. It was not the sharp clicking that one would expect to accompany evil, it was quiet, measured, and slow. Once the feet came to a halt the clicking actually did start up. It was not footstep, though. It was the sound of a skilled killer tapping on the ground. Not the man, but his club. It had seen blood, and bone, and muscle, and brain. It was a devious device put to devious purposes, weilded by a one-eyed maniac who was getting better and better at weilding it.

The torches and the mumbling in the background were silenced by the entry of this new person. They gathered close to Angel and Jim on the ground putting more light into the area allowing Angel to see clearly their adversary, the one-eyed man who bashed him on the head at the hangar.

“That’s the one, Jim. That’s the guy that got me,” Angel said.

“Ah, yeah. He’s only got the one eye, unless he’s just trying to be a pirate.”

Angel laughed, and whinced in pain from his ribs.

Neither Jim nor Angel had been tortured before. They didn’t know what kind of pain the one-eyed Dragon was thinking about inflicting upon them. The laughter they were experiencing would likely be the last bit of pleasure they would extract from the situation. As the room brightened with the torchlight, their chances of survival dimmed. This man was like no adversary they had ever even heard of. Their experience with The Dragon had been relatively benign compared to what was about to happen. They rightfully did not expect a sadist to be standing before them, so they joked.

They joked.

* * *

Hope watched it go down. She managed to swing from the bottom of the propellered machine and land on the roof of the building. It was one of those things that she had imagined she might be able to do in a dream, if she repeated the dream over and over again until she got it right. She hadn’t dreamed about this. She didn’t even think about this. Pure instict drove her to escape the falling machine even if it meant a mid-air swing hundreds of feet in the air. With subconcious confidence in her own body’s ability her instincts pushed her, like a father pushing a daughter in a swing. There was no choice, her body just did it.

Landing on the roof hurt. She was fortunate to be left with only scrapes and bruises given the awkward way she hit. It knocked the wind out of her lungs, leaving her gasping as she moved to the edge. She had to see the machine go down, to know if they made it.

It was all in slow motion. Tragedies often unfold at what seems like half-speed. She knew the machine would hit the ground; she was expecting it. As she watched Angel’s fantastic maneuvers that righted the bird during its descent, she didn’t realize that she couldn’t hear it, or anything. She was watching in silent as her mind shut out everything else except the vision of the helicopter falling out of the sky. A gasp of air, a dropped jaw, eyes welling up with tears, she lay there on the roof, head peeking over the side.

With a puff of sand and scattered metal, it hit the ground. What was left of the propeller continued to spin, but at an odd angle, as if it had become dislodged from the rest of the machine somehow. The tail was touching the ground and the booms were sticking up at odd angles.

For awhile there was no movement, nothing from the bird, nothing from the area around it. The sound of the quiet wind slowly emerged from the background and filled Hope’s ears once again. Then the voices came, not from the roof, but from the ground. The Dragon came, some from across the bridge and others from the building below. She waited and watched. Short of jumping from the building and having enough luck to land on one of them, she could do nothing for Angel and Jim at the moment, so she watched.

They dragged two limp bodies out of the machine and laid them on the sand. One of them purched over each body, examining them. She couldn’t make out any words, just the noises of men’s voices. As they dragged the bodies toward the building she had no idea if they were dead or alive, but in that moment she decided that she was going to find out.

A familiar rage awoke in Hope. It was the same feeling she felt when she killed the two Dragon in the helicopter so many weeks ago, rooted in her anguish from when they raided the medical camp, killing so many, but it was more complicated than that. She was angry at them, and angry at herself. She became the lover of the man who ordered the raid, the man who ordered her own capture. Her heart was burning with fire on both sides. The flames her chest and burned across her body, extending all the way to her fingertips. On her right she held the despise of the wicked men who have caused so much pain, on the left the grief and self loathing that accompanied the powerlessness of her situation, and how she found enough power in selfishness and self preservation that ultimately resulted in the betrayal of all those around her.

She was disgusted, angry, resentful, despised, rotten inside, and the rot was now burning out the puss and stink of her soul. Arms shaking, palms sweaty, she was ready. The fire in her heart energized her body. She had the strength of two men running through her, and the cunning of the finest killer The Dragon could bring forth. A rampage was coming like these killers had never seen.

Her mind filled with visions of killing them one by one. She imagined sneaking up on one from behind and stabbing him in the throat, holding his limbs until his brain drained of blood. An impaled skull awaited the next one, and the one after that would take a few kicks to the groin before she dispatched him by twisting his head around. Hope had all sorts of colorful ways to kill these men, and she was going to try each one.

Kills 1 & 2

Two Dragon stared out the blown out window of the garden, keeping watch over the activity by the helicopter. If they spotted anything unusual it was one man’s job to call the elevator and deliver the message to Jacko. The other man stayed behind to keep watch and relay the information to the messenger upon his return, and repeat the process. Jacko’s plan appeared to be working to that point, so there was for the men to do except watch.

They didn’t hear Hope slip through the stairwell door. The howling wind across the open windows kept them from hearing her tie off the cargo strap to the drain pipe behind them. Enamored by the vision of the shattered flying machine below, they didn’t notice her sneaking up behind them.

It wasn’t until the first man was noosed and kicked out the window that they noticed her at all. He fell 30 feet before the tether was taught and the noose tightened around his neck. It wasn’t as satisfying a kill as she had hoped. She didn’t hear the neck snap or any screams from him, just a grunt when she kicked him in the back and some scuffling of his feet on the ground when he tried to regain his balance. She enjoyed imagining his last thoughts, his terror and panic at the thought of the ground rising up to meet him, and the sadness at the sound of his own snapping neck. Would he know he was dead, or would it all just go dark? This idea gave her some pleasure, some relief from the burning in her heart. His death, however, was but a drop of water, a splash onto the fire. It reignited quickly.

The second man gave her a close kill. He saw his friend fly out the window followed by a slack, yellow cargo strap that chased him from behind. His eyes traced the strap’s route backward and met the vision of a woman with her leg slowly retracted from its forceful kick. He felt fear, and Hope could see it on his face, and he could see the rage on hers. She was not tall, but in that momen she was taller than he. His body grew small and week in the face of her impending slaughter. There was no fight in this man, he was paralyzed.

Hope imagined another version of herself taking pity on this man. He would see her softening and soften himself, dropping his club, dropping his guard. She would bind him to the drain pipe with the cargo strap and come back for him later. He would become her prisoner and, after awhile, she would free him after she felt he had served his sentence. They would go on living, never becoming friends, but not staying enemies either. He would live.

Someday she wondered if that version of her would ever replace the killer. Years from now, when the world begins to right itself, maybe, but not today. This Hope gave him no mercy. His throat was slashed before the noose tightened around the other man’s neck. The gasping of air, the choking on blood, these sounds gave her more satisfaction. Her fire cooled for a moment. She closed her eyes to feel it and inhaled deeply, growing strong in the process.

As the heat returned she clenched her fists and tightened her jaw. She had more work to do before this fire would go out. It might not even be completely extinguished when she finished. She would be satisfied to leave it smoldering, even if only for awhile.

Kill 3

“Dinnnnnnnnnnnck,” went the bell on the 35th floor. The door opened on the opposite side of the elevator shaft. Whoever was on it couldn’t see how Hope had desecrated the two scouts. He would not suspect.

She slinked up to the rear of the elevator’s column and listened. The man called out to his friends, but recieved no answer. He walked around one side, she moved to the corner and waited. He called out again, still no answer. The fool, he arrived at the corner of the shaft where she was waiting, and he looked away. This fool of a man was looking the other way, unlike any other normal human. It was as if he didn’t want to see her. A fleeting sensation of dismay brushed across Hope’s mind as he finally turned his idiot head the other way and saw her, arms outstretched grabbing for his head.

The idiot would be looking the other way for the rest of his short life as she twisted his skull around to make it so. Cracking neck bones and the snapping spine gave her the sick sensation of pleasure for much longer this time. Her body cooled with the beading sweat that was developing across her skin, and the dousing of the flame from this kill. This poor, dumb man who had managed to survive in a killing community, how could he be so bad at staying alive?

Kills 4 & 5

She knew better than to take the elevator, there was no telling what she might encounter when the doors opened, if they opened. For all she knew the machine would finally give up and leave her stranded in the metal box to burn from the inside out.

The dangling man inched his way up the side of the building, Hope thought she might need the cargo strap again and she didn’t see any point in announcing her presence to the rest of The Dragon just yet. She also grabbed one of their clubs. The malet felt heavy in her hands, not just in weight but in what it had done and what it represented. It was their chosen killing machine, and this one had the weight of one that had taken a lot of lives. Stained brown with dried blood and heavily dented, she wondered how many souls this filthy beast had freed from the earth. How many skulls shattered, bones broken, muscles destroyed along with their owners had been left in its wake?

Her eyes shifted focus from the club to the man she had pulled it from and whatever pity she had for any of them evaporated, leaving her like a possesing spirit giving up on its host. Like Jim, she saw only one way for this to end, and she wanted to bring it about. They all have to die, all of The Dragon. They will kill and maime and destroy until there’s nothing left of humanity, and if that means that Hope had to give up her own, she would make that sacrifice. She would become a killer, just as they are. No more flourishes of pity, or remorse would ever make their way into her heart for any other Dragon’s death. Her hardened heart could burn forever so long as she was putting an end to them.

Floor by floor she made her way down from the 35th using the stairwell near the elevator shaft at the center of the building. Most levels had some desks, a lot of wheeled chairs, and the higher ones still had many windows intact. For all the damage the structure had endured, it was in surprisingly good shape looking at it form the inside. Hope wasn’t there for a tour, though. She painstakingly stalked through each and every floor looking for an opportunity to sneak up behind another Dragon bastard and gut him.

34 – nothing. 33 – nothing. 32 – nothing. She spent 10 minutes on each floor, and that was too much time. She had seen them dragging Angel and Jim into the building. She didn’t know which floor they were on, but she knew where they weren’t. Alive or dead, she was committed to finding them and and creating a trail of bloody bodies along the way, but which would it be: alive, or dead?

If they’re dead, they were already dead, she thought. And if they wanted them dead they would have killed them right in the helicopter. They wouldn’t have bothered dragging them around. If they were already dead, then they’re already dead. She wasn’t sure if her logic was sound, but it gave her comfort to think that Angel and Jim were still alive. It gave her rage a noble purpose, and this made her feel better. Her bloodlust was in-line with what she thought was the higher objective of saving them. With so many floors to clear, she had quit a lot of time to reconcile her feelings on the matter.

More than three hours had passed since she started down the stairs. When she go to the tenth floor she noted that, while the desks and scattered cubical walls still provided a maze of hiding places for potential assassins, most of the chairs were missing. Nine, eight, seven, none of them had chairs at all. Another hour had ticked by when she arrived at the fifth floor where the mystery was solved.

Jim had thrown all the chairs down the stairwell. Nine office building floors worth of wheeled chairs were clogging up the stairs below the fifth floor, like hair in a shower drain. There was no climbing over, or around, or through he mesh of five-pointed star legs, hydrolic pressure plungers, cushioned and mesh seats and backs, and adjustable arms. If it went all the way down to the ground level, Hope imagined that it would take her several days to clear them all. Burning them would be simpler, if they would burn. In all likelihood the materials would melt into a solid brick of stair-well molded plastic blocking the first and second floors.

Like the floors between 35 and six, floor five offered no satisfying kills. The Sun was getting low in the sky now, and Hope was feeling the fatigue of her long day. Her muscles ached. She walked to one side of the office and propped herself up on a desk. Closing her eyes for a moment, she enjoyed the sound of the wind across the hollow of the window panes. Breathing became slow and heavy. While her body rested, her mind was still imagining more killing. Three was not enough, she wanted more. More, she whispered to herself, and she thought she heard something whisper in return. Her head cocked sideways instinctively to give her ear a better angle on the sound. More whispers, she heard, but they weren’t whispers, just a faint conversation.

Down below her were two Dragon standing on the train platform. They didn’t see her, they weren’t looking for someone from up above. These two men were standing guard at the train platform in case Jim’s train showed up looking for trouble.

Hope’s body re-energized with a new rush of adrenaline and her mind assigned each of the men a specific way to die. She was eager to kill, and her brain was on automatic as it sorted out how to get down to them. Over on a side of the building, just out of view of her prey, she tied off the cargo strap to a heavy desk and lowered it down. These men were on the third floor and after she used a little bit of the strap to fashion a sling for the club, she had just enough to get down to them.

She had never repelled before, so her descent was awkward. Wisely she chose to do this out of view of the two men, as they would have surely noticed her lack of stealth on the way down if she tried to drop in directly behind them. She found her way in to the building and set up the kill.

Her luck continued as they were assigned to look out for a train, not look behind them for someone sneaking up. Excitement filled her as she was about to inflict some new damage with the club. A smile spread across her face as she approached the two men standing at the edge of the platform.

The first man would have to wait his turn. A little push was all he needed to fall down onto the tracks. It was an odd landing for him, hitting his head on one of the rails. By the time he pulled himself up it would be too late for his partner.

Swinging low and wildly with her new weapon, she struck the second Dragon on the front of the knee, buckling his leg in the opposite direction of its normal operation. He screamed at the sight of his retreating shin and thigh and fell to the ground grabbing at the demolished joint. Hope was swift and more precise with her next swing. The man stopped screaming when the club came down on his head. She was beginning to understand the appeal of these bloody mallots. Cracking sounds of bone and tendon were very satisfying.

As she wound up for her third swing, which she wasn’t entirely sure was necessary, but was going to take anyway, a pair of hands wrapped around her ankles and yanked them out from under her. The man down on the tracks had recovered a little more quickly than she expected. Her body came down with a heavy thud and the man started to drag her down onto the tracks.

Hope was nimble, and her mind was sharp. She had lost her club, but not her wits. Using her arms, she popped her body up off the platform, putting all her mass into the air, and shoving herself right into the chest of the man below. He crashed down on the tracks once more, dropping his club, as Hope had dropped hers just seconds before. Her landing was soft, and had the added benefit of pressing all the air out of her adversary’s lungs. When a man can’t breath, his first priority is to breath. This gave Hope the advantage becasue her priority was still to kill the man. As he struggled to push her off, now quite disoriented from two falls on the train tracks, she grabbed his club and started to bash him in the face with the narrow end. This was an interesting experience for her. To this point she had snuck up on all of her victims and dispatched them before they really understood what was happening. This man that she was sitting on was fully aware of her, and that he was about to die. His armed flailed about as he tried to block the club’s hilt between each blow. Blood flowed into his eyes giving him no chance at any meaningful counter move.

With panicked lungs, no vision and a face that had been turned into a ball of beaten meat, he started to choke on the blood that was running from his nose down his throat. He gasped and flailed more slowly as she continued to bash his face. As his efforts became more futile and weak, Hope smiled again. More than any of the others, she enjoyed killing this man. His suffering doused the flame in her heart for a good while.

Kills 6 & 7

Hope worried that the scream of the first man might have alerted others to her presence, but after several minutes no one came to the third floor looking for trouble. She lurked around the third floor, wiping her bloody hands on the walls, desks and any other thing she felt like. Outside of the bloody trail, she scouted the floor just like the others, but it was just a habit at this point. She was just going though the motions. If she really wanted to complete the job she would have gone up to the fourth floor and checked it out. She was no longer interested in clearing the building so much as she was interested in finding another Dragon to kill.

Jim had done a great job of blocking off the main stairwell with chairs, and that would do well to keep people below the fifth floor, but there were a set of escalators that went between the third and ground floors. They were well beyond functional as time had broken almost everything, but a broken escalator is not really broken, it just becomes stairs. With her favorite club and two holstered blades, she crept slowly down the escalator stairs. Stealth had been her best ally so far, and she wasn’t about to give it up by clumsily swooping down to the ground floor.

The ground floor was not at all like the ones above. It was an open, spacious lobby with decorative marble and massive desks. In the dim light of the setting sun it reminded her of the old bank she used to hide out in before those bastards took it from her, before the beat her to within an inch of her life. That brutal memory lodged in her head as she skulked around each corner of the lobby, looking for Dragon. She was binding it with her time as Gannon’s concubine, with the attack at the medical camp, the death of her friends, her betrayal of the rest, the killing of the men in the helicopter, at the hangar, and all those she killed at Jim’s building. All of the pain she inflicted, and that was visited upon her hardened into a lump in her chest at the center of her burning heart. It invigorated her.

When she spotted the two Dragon standing guard at the top of the stairs to the bar, she didn’t bother with stealth. It was casual, the way she walked up to them with her club. One of them had set his on fire to cast light in the area, the fool. He was so close to the flame that he could barely see how she bashed his friend to the ground. He thought he was good at killing, and maybe he was, but he wasn’t ready to kill in that moment. This little woman walking up and crushing his friends skull like an egg was not what he expected. Nor did he foresee her smashing his hand with her club, breaking his fingers and knocking his torch away.

The fire flickered in the darkened city, half buried in the sand. Protected from the wind, and with no rain to douse it, the fire would keep burning into the night, until the weapon was consumed by it.

The post Everything Goes Wrong / Killing Spree appeared first on Mark McEachran.

http://j.mp/2zwoeNa November 23, 2017 at 08:30AM