Chapter Five: A Light in Dark Places
Sera swerved to miss a sandy spot in the road. The El Camino was very responsive, moving only enough to miss the sand, but did not need a correction in the steering. The sun was still high in the sky, and her head was still pounding like it was a drum, some miniature percussionist playing on the inside of her skull, but the dizziness had faded some, and she was able to concentrate clearly on everything that might lay ahead.
As Gabriel finished his story, her thoughts went to the night before and the sense of dread and wrong she had felt. Had the cougar screamed the hundreds of screams of all her friends and family at the Brig? Had she known what was happening, but ignored all the signs and premonitions? Brushing her darker thoughts away like the hair she pushed behind her ear, one came through that put the rest to shame, made them seem light grey compared. Suppose she had known, saw, and heard what had happened as it were, would her presence have turned the tide, changed the course of history as fate had lain it out? She wanted to believe that she could manipulate her own future with the choices she made, but also feared that those same choices had been spread out before her like a tarot card reading.
“So they’re moving in the daytime, now,” Sera said, reiterating what Gabriel had just stated. She pushed past the fog of deep philosophical thoughts, thoughts which seemed meaningless and trivial compared to heated blood, elevated senses and awareness, above all else, the thrill of life, of being alive even while others died, others who had done nothing at all.
“Yeah, and it’s all leading up to something big. I think that everything we’ve seen in the past is gonna be nothing like what’s headed our way,” Gabriel responded, fright hidden beneath the calm of experience. He hadn’t told her about the man who bore his face, who had fled into the night. Maybe he had fallen asleep, maybe he had dreamed it. Seemed unlikely, but possible. Tried without success to forget it, push it aside for more important things.
The needle of the speedometer hovered around fifty-five miles per hour; an almost insane speed for one who hadn’t actually driven before, but she wasn’t relying on only her own experience. Sera felt the presence and knowledge of all in her bloodline who had come before her, could tell when and where to press on the accelerator or the (brake) other one.
“We’re almost there,” he added almost hesitantly.
“I’ve got a bad feeling, though.”
“What?” He pulled the pistol from its holster and loaded a round into the chamber. “You think we should be ready?”
She nodded slowly as the road came around a hill, view to the city hidden by a dune of grass and dirt and brush, yet even as the wind blew, the smell of something else was in the air, smoke and fire. The smoke coiled upwards in the sky, and it was thick and black against the dry blue. The feeling crept over her before she could even see what was happening. The glimmer. Then the land blocking sight was gone, showing with certainty the entire plain surrounding Hill and the chaos that lay siege.
“Jesus! There are thousands of them!” Gabriel grabbed hold to the ‘Oh, shit!’ handle and maintained his grip on the handgun.
Sera swallowed deeply, nodding again. Gunfire from semi-automatic weapons was quickly dropping those closest to the hole, but the entire base was being swarmed from all sides by the destrachan. From their vantage point, both she and Gabriel saw that several had gotten to the wall and were quickly being joined by others.
“Look at them leap! Fuck!” She cringed at her own observation. Those who had leaped to the walkway on the wall now proceeded to knock the soldiers firing their guns from their height to the waiting throng of hungry shades. “Find something to hold onto.” She said softly.
“Uh-huh,” he agreed, still holding tight to the handle over his head.
Her foot dropped the gas pedal to the floor of the cab and the El Camino shot forward, speedometer needle edging quickly past sixty, seventy, eighty-five. Burying the needle now, but still accelerating towards the throbbing, screaming army. The sounds of the car’s engine died away for her, she could only feel the beating pulse of a heart. Her heart, but not only hers, it was distant, moving south even as she was, though much faster, were it even possible. The thump of a regular heartbeat echoing in her ears, above everything, above the din of the battle and the rumble of the motor beating its repetitive beat into the exhaust pipe. Yet the thrum of the heart that echoed her own’s cadence was more important than this, though this might be a turning point in her fight against the destrachan. It certainly felt that way.
The first three she hit made no moves to stop her, nor did their small mass do much to slow Sera’s valiant steed. Only when the front bumper had smashed its fifth, sixth, and then seventh did any even notice her. Gabriel lost count after number nineteen. Blood splashed on the windshield, blurring visibility in its reddish haze, leaving the crushed and mangled corpses behind in the dust. Up ahead, the more densely packed destrachan began to turn. Less than a mile until Hill’s main barricade.
“Keep them away from us, unless you want to walk to the wall,” she ordered without much preference for either one choice or the other.
Gabriel nodded in agreement as the first shade made its landing in the El Camino’s bed. Its eyes bulged from its sockets, hair long and unkempt, tattered shreds of clothing long since past their prime. Skin was pale and dull, almost waxy from the look of it, and its teeth were bared in a hungry grin, yellow and blackish and rotting in the creature’s skull like an old wounded jack-o’-lantern. The shade flexed its muscles, black and blue shading the skin like a domestic violence victim, and curled one of its gnarled, claw-like hands into a fist. The glass window at the back of the cab frosted over with a spider-web pattern of cracks and breaks as a single nine millimeter bullet passed through, making a sloshing sound as it flew through the shade’s eye and crunching as it cracked the wet bone at the back of its brain. Stumbling backward and slightly confused, a second round exited the gun’s barrel, blazing its smoking trail through the once-man’s nasal cavity and the back of its head, brains spraying outward into the wind in a conical pattern chasing the bullet as the vehicle whipped along the road.
Another two destrachan flew into the air, legs swimming rapidly as they moved towards the vehicle’s bed. One more came from the front right, flailing its limbs about wildly and awkwardly, reaching into air as it landed on the hood of the car. Another recoiled off the passenger door, lacking grip, as its head sounded like a watermelon being crushed under the El Camino’s rear passenger side wheel. Atop the hood, the shade balanced itself with practiced skill, diving at the windshield and shattering the glass with its hardened head. Broken glass cut at its neck muscles and scraped skin and flesh away from the man-thing’s hand and forearm as it reached inside; blood ran down the inner side of the glass and across the dashboard. From its crimson hold, the destrachan lunged forward at Sera, pulling a shard of glass free from the rest of the windshield. Air rushed into the cabin, filling it with dust, grit, and tiny glass slivers that could make his eyes bleed from the terribly sharp dryness. All the same, Gabriel knew with his eyes half-shut exactly where the creature’s head was, could feel and sense its dead and blackened aura, moving, groaning through the living air, a chill, a center of pure dread and anger. He fired twice into the destrachan’s face, ripping a bloody hole in the cheek and drilling another into its forehead.
It all happened in an instant, each microsecond lasting a lifetime, as the two once-men in the bed pushed the shattered glass into the cab, raining bits of glass and film onto both Sera and Gabriel. Holding tight to the wheel with both hands, she turned it left, gunning the accelerator and swinging the ass end of the car around in a blur of metal and flesh and glass. Twisting and barreling forward at eighty-five miles an hour, the car tossed the two standing from the bed, knocking them into a group as they headed to the battle. Left and right, the car bashed and crushed the destrachan to the ground, crunching their bones beneath its tread as the El Camino tried to regain its footing. Finally, the corpse flopping about the windshield gained flight, thrown like a rag doll from the hood and landing roughly on the sand.
Sera pulled the wheel slightly right, then left, correcting the car’s course with patience, aiming the vehicle to hit several who hadn’t yet cleared a path. There was a path, now, only clear for a few hundred feet in the front and closing rapidly in the rear, but it was there. Partial sentience. Air rushed in through the hole in the front windshield, and at their backs the rear windshield had fallen in behind them as they bounced crazily around. The glass at Sera’s left shattered as a fist broke through, grabbing the steering wheel and struggling, attempting to wrest it from her grip. The broken window’s glass dug deeply in the destrachan’s forearm, cutting and severing chunks of flesh and skin, yet the shade maintained his viselike grip even as the tendons and ligaments snapped and the arteries and veins sprayed outward, coating the window with its viscous crimson blood and dripping it down the door’s interior panel. She beat savagely at the sickening hand while attempting to steer, tearing at the fingers gripping the wheel with inhuman strength, and finally ripping it free. The destrachan screamed as it was pulled under, tires pounding it and shaking the car as it went, howling its agony to the world. A pile of bloody fat and skin landed on her right thigh; the stench was horrible, filling the cabin with odors of decay and disease. Dry-heaving once, she gained control over herself and the El Camino.
“Half a mile, now, come on, baby, you can make it.” Gabriel whispered his supportive nonsense to the car; Sera looked at him as though he had just pulled a boogie from his nostril and eaten it, tasting the slimy saltiness as it went down. He turned to see her quizzical glance with an eyebrow raised, seemingly unaware that anything had happened. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Were you just . . . talking . . . to the car?” she asked, light-humored. A little smirk crossed her lips.
“Was I? I mean, I was. Just like talking to a horse, right?”
“It’s a machine, it can’t hear you.” Possibly in response to this, the car sputtered before continuing smoothly.
“Maybe it can,” he grinned widely at her.
At speeds in excess of eighty-five miles an hour, the destrachan outside the car were there in an instant and gone in a flash. Most, she was sure, would have been unremarkable as people, let alone as the beasts she had hunted since childhood, yet even as she passed, the glimmer of each individual seemed to hum with a separate quality before joining with the mass. Every passing face hinted at their humanity preceding the disease that had crippled their minds and warped their bodies. She could see the faces, torn with disgust at what they had become instead of dying, something much worse than any could have imagined. What was the sickness of shades and how had it devastated the human form to such a degree?
Begin with what you know, she thought, when do they turn? It began at the first bite of a once-man. Or woman. Or child. Wracking the body with pain and infectious fever, twisting the cells around with rapidity and disdain. Mutating and transmuting the blood, the saliva, the bone, the muscle into something that was no longer human. A living organism, a symbiont, that forced its host to abandon and prey upon its former humanity. An unholy union between life and death that created something new and unforeseen in all its glory.
A virus. The thought wasn’t hers, but somebody else’s, someone familiar yet distant, a name with no face, a voice with no name. Jack. It reverberated, rebounded in her memory, a recollection of a recollection that was her own, and yet was not at the same time. A contradiction within itself. A virus, then.
The virus would create creatures from the darkest depths of human conscience, draw upon the shadows that haunted men and become them. Vampires of old, folklore that so captivated the imaginations of millions, sought out and destroyed in every apparent form. Chasing ghosts through the millennia, men had been frightened by these creatures of the underworld that had not existed, could not have existed prior to this time. Destrachan. They did exist, now, and preyed upon the living as they huddled in their tiny towns and outposts, fighting them off when they could, but more often than not falling victims, helpless before them. The shades could not have existed before this time, before the old ways fell by the wayside, could not have. These once-men could not hold sway over the past, for if they had men would have been doomed from the beginning. And might be, anyway.
Eight of the blasted and blighted beings converged on the El Camino as it sped forward, passing the blurry faces that begged for release, yet stumbled on. Moving quickly and leaping into the fray, bludgeoning and cutting, hoping for another taste of flesh as they ripped the guards from their turrets, biting, and clawing. Sadness in their eyes as the lifeblood of their prey fell upon the parched earth, sadness at every sin they had committed unwillingly.
One of them, a female, landed on the roof of the car, grabbing onto the weatherstripping around the door and holding it with a single clammy hand as its other arm reached inside, through the window. Before Sera could react, that scabby, scaly hand grasped her neck with unholy brutish force and attempted to pull her out. Another female had grabbed a fistful of Gabriel’s short brown hair, gripping his right forearm with its other clawing hand, pulling and taunting him through the cracking glass. Sera’s head caught on the broken glass, cutting the scalp as blood flowed through her hair and down the side of her face and neck. That scabbed arm drew her attention from the wheel and the approaching base. She could feel the creatures fingers, gripping, sliding and twisting as the blood, her blood, bubbled around its skin, as her air passage was slowly, but surely being cut off from the life-giving oxygen. A male destrachan, hair falling from the greenish skin of its head, flesh peeling in the manner of a leper, grabbed the steering wheel with a bleeding hand through the driver’s side window, fingers slipping from the oozing black liquid even as the female’s grip broke from Sera’s neck. The male dove through the window, snapping the female’s arm; bones from the break penetrating the outer layers of skin, muscles twitching from pain as blood poured onto Sera’s jerkin.
The destrachan was now wrestling with Sera for her life, breaking off more shards of glass from the side window. One hand of his–its–gripping the wheel, and the other the bruised flesh of Sera’s arm. The struggle was intense, a tug-of-war against her death and his (its) meal. The slivers and tiny chunks of glass made a tinkling sound as they fell into the car, falling against each other and collecting in the wind rushing into the cabin. Several large pieces had embedded themselves in the once-man’s gut, snapping off inside and little pieces dripping with the blood as it poured out–and still more in other places, but in spite of these wounds which would have stopped any man in his tracks, the shade continued to struggle. Glass cut deeper into its entrails, ripping terrible holes in its vital organs.
With all her strength, Sera pulled back from the window, wrenching more glass free from its rails as the destrachan was dragged with her. It seemed, however, that the shade wanted her outside the vehicle much more than it wanted entrance, as it pulled mightily against the door. Its weight shifted, pressing its knees against the door’s outer panel, metal pinging as it grew misshapen and deformed under the creature’s distress. The change in the force’s direction was sudden, catching her off guard, and cracked her head against the broken glass once more. Blood issued copiously down the side of her face and ran through her hair, vision once more blurred in a quickly reddening haze. Dangling from the elbow, black goo spurting thickly from its veins, the female destrachan’s hand grasped Sera’s hair with an iron grip as if it had a mind of its own as it twisted and stretched the ligaments and muscles still holding it to the remainder of the arm; the female shrieked its horrible shriek in a frenzy of hunger and pain.
A harsh, fetid funk rose from the black blood that reminded Gabriel of dog shit, a steamy, swampy odor that brought a feeling of nausea all on its own–even without the stomach-turning rotting wounds on display that were all part of the shades around him. Up until this point, he’d thought they would be able to take out quite a few more of the once-men before making a final stand. Perhaps even make it to the wall, now only seconds away, but something was wrong, that stomach-turning odor was only part of it. Time streamed by him as if everything he did was in slow motion, while everything else moved normally, completely unlike the true feeling of battle, and that was the whole of it. Battle time is slow time, every move made like taking a breath, easy and smooth, opponents moving slower, allowing time for deflections and sweeping attacks. This time, however, it was all wrong, different in some way than every battle he’d ever seen. Hope against hope as he might, it was different this time. Gabriel dropped his gun.
The 9mm, ancient and battle-tested, well-worn and battle-true, fell to the floor of the cabin with a clunk. Which isn’t to say it was his fault that he’d dropped it, just that regardless of fault, he had dropped the gun. The shade pulled on him with great force, using him as an anchor of sorts to gain a greater foothold in the car. The destrachan clawed furiously at his exposed flesh, attempting to gain an easy meal. It had gotten up to its waist inside before he had finally been able to fight back. Pain flooded his mind as his hair parted from his scalp, left in the fist of the nearly mindless once-man (though it was female.) One of its hand holds loose, the creature lost its balance and sought vigorously for another as it fell backwards out the window. Its other mangled, claw-like hand dug into the flesh of Gabriel’s bicep, gripping angrily with as much force as the twisted fibers and disease-ridden flesh could muster.
With a snap, the back of Gabriel’s hand was crushed against the window lift handle, middle finger cracked just behind the last knuckle. He dropped the gun.
Everything should have moved slower in battle, much slower than it had, as adrenaline pumped like water over falls through the veins and arteries, nerve endings firing every sensation to the brain. Neurons and dendrites popping electricity, transmitting all things physical into memory and through the animalistic, instinctual part of the brain. Blood was the only thing that could possibly quench the flames of a person caught in that battle frenzy, gallons of it. Some would say that most often remorse is felt for things said and done in the heat of battle, but really, the remorse is for giving in to that sick and sadistic side of every man, the feral, blood-thirsty side. Remorse for the satisfaction felt after the hard clash of steel and feeling its vibrations flow through the forearm and shoulder into the bones. Remorse for the acrid smell of spent gunpowder, and the ecstatic boom from the firing, the explosive way the bullets doled out their death and destruction, but no remorse for the blood spilled.
Every detail was important, the smell of everything around, the dry desert air, the scent of burned and burning gasoline, the stench of decay. The coppery taste of a man’s own blood, the dank spray of an enemy’s. The perfect way the sun reflected through the cracked and cracking glass, reflected off of dented metallic pain, heat waves rising from the hard desert floor. Flash of gunfire, not too far distant, and the hundreds of destrachan standing between them and the relative safety of the wall. Yes, battle time was slow time, every second a lifetime.
It was only half a mile to the wall.
With his left hand curled into a fist, Gabriel punched squarely into the female’s face, her grip–its grip–instantly released in a flash of surprise. Sera shook her head once, freeing herself from the shattered arm of the shade holding her hair. Without a nanosecond of hesitation, Sera let the wheel fly free. It spun hard counter-clockwise, the destrachan struggling with the wheel was thrown free of the El Camino, clutching at the air in its fervor.
The wind blew softly in the cabin of the car, and grass and sagebrush rustled softly with it. Battle time was slow time, but it always flowed downhill, like an hourglass losing its sand.
Through the crimson haze of blood loss and fever, Sera saw the car lose its wheels. It was flipping, tossing and turning through the air, its passengers bouncing as the cabin rolled sideways with the car. The roll alone was enough to kill her, but Gabriel would live and be stricken with the sickness of the shades, damned to consume the blood and flesh of humanity until he was destroyed. The vision faded in the mid-day sun, scorched from existence in its light. She could feel herself dying, fading, breathing the last breath of the living, ready to give in to death, to fate, the universe’s bitch.
Wait. It isn’t happening. Or hadn’t happened. The car was losing its wheels, one instant flipping over and over as rapidly as a hummingbird’s wings, and the next it wasn’t, just starting to roll. Every living, vibrant color cracking, showcasing the inner darkness and complete hopelessness of an infinity of nothing. Everything was breaking in her madness, fever stealing memories of form and color, all save for the red. That sickening blood-red crimson of emotion and the despairingly dismal sentence of eternal black and grey. The haze continued to shade everything around her, wounds pulsing with an electric glare, puddled, coagulating blood a deep purple. That black aura that seemed to follow the destrachan was absorbing life, will to live, and the light of the sun in a strange way that could only be described as a hole. An all-consuming hole. Maybe it was a black hole, pulling every shriveled bit of anything toward it. Wicked nature of the beast, a yawning maw of never-ending hunger and pain, spreading its disdain for the living and for the hope each contained within.
A deepening depression filled Sera down to her core, draining her will for her own survival, peeling away at her strength, tugging away at her adrenaline-filled resolve. Broken, broken, broken. That ancient civilization of light and science, of technological marvels leaving cracked shells behind, the only remnants of the world and its peoples, bringing about its own destruction from disease and blame-laying. A history of excess and indulgence had ended that world of long ago, and everything had changed since. Nature had taken back its blooming deserts and rugged mountains of shifting rock. The oceans once again teemed with life of their own, swimming and fighting and living. Not that it mattered in the slightest. Mankind was about to be decimated in a single blow from a mighty hand, a plague of unknowable proportions laying waste everywhere men had once collaborated. It seemed as if nothing could stop it now.
Reddish glow burning dim in the daylight. The horrible sorrow was consuming in its ferocity, and in that heated moment, a short distance from her destination, she snapped.
The wind blew softly all around, rustling the grass and sagebrush where they stood, and the scent of blood and oil filled the air.
Battle time was slow time, and she snapped. Breaking free of the bonds of time and the rules of physics, of science and morality, she snapped. The El Camino twisted in its tracks, spilling to the right, moving ever so slowly forward even as the needle buried itself past eighty-five. The dashboard clock which had spun silently and slowly, each click a second, had stopped, and was reversing itself, hands trembling in the impact of what she had done. What had she done? She could feel it tugging at her, a billion golden threads tugging away from her and to her at the same time, pulling and straining at her mind, at the unreality of these new events. Was it really happening? Hands now free of the wheel now reached for Gabriel’s shirt, pulling him towards her. Time had done more than slow, it stood still. Running destrachan frozen in their tracks, gunfire flashes frozen in their burning millisecond of fire and metal. As she touched him, he came to life again, unfrozen from his place in the passenger seat. All around them, the world had paused, mechanical waves of fluid movement and sound now visible, rippling the air as they attempted to pass. Rippling around the point of origin like a pebble in a pond. Rippling around her. Sera was a focal point of energy with waves of reality and time splashing through the air around her, blurring and catching everything around her, mutating their images like heat rising from concrete on a sunny summer day. It was cold, though, too, breath freezing in the air, a biting, bitter taste creeping through their clothes and holding on their gooseflesh.
“What the fuck just happened?” Gabriel’s confusion was matched by a similar look on Sera’s face.
“I don’t know, but we need to get out of this car.” The vehicle was gradually gaining air beneath its driver’s side wheels. “And get your gun.”
“Okay.” Gabriel’s right hand dripped blood onto his pants, the wound wasn’t bad yet, but the blood was crystallizing as it fell, bouncing off the fabric like a stone. His fingertips were already going numb.
“Can you use it with your left hand?”
“I think so.”
Sera’s right hand on his forearm, he reached down for the gun, pulling away from her, at once going stiff and slowed to a fraction of his normal speed. A stone in a pond. The waves rippling around her, moving out from her, stopped in mid-air, reversed, then moved forward a little before reversing again. How fast were they traveling? The needle on the gauge in front of her said 85 mph, and while she wasn't entirely sure what the 'mph' meant, she was certain that it meant pretty fucking fast. Fast enough to kill, and that's all that matters. So why then had everything stopped, become cold, frozen in time, and why did she seem to be the only one unaffected? Perhaps this is where I see my whole life flash before my eyes, she thought distantly. Was this the fate she had survived the slaughter of the Brig for? It would be the punchline to a great cosmic joke if it were, but she couldn't let that happen. She grabbed his hand this time, tightly gripping onto him.
“How’d you move so fast!” Then the icy feeling came back, stronger than before.
“Keep your hand in mine if you want to survive.” Her cheeks and nose flushed red from the severe cold. Nodding in agreement, Gabriel returned her grip and only glanced into her emerald eyes for a moment before grasping the gun with his right hand. Beneath them, the passenger side steering rod groaned under the weight of the whole car and bent. The sound was long and drawn out, sounding like a whale, or an orca in the water, its waves moving slowly, rippling in the fluid air and traveling far out. To Sera, it was almost like fingernails grinding on a chalkboard.
He would have cried out had he not bitten his lip from the go, stretching out with his fingers, meaning to move the gun quickly. The cold of the gun was startling, almost as if it hadn’t been fired only moments before, and still their breath hung, icy in both its temperature and texture as it brushed back against bare skin. The swift temperature change was unexpected for someone so accustomed to harsh desert weather, it never really got cold there, keeping covered was the most important thing, and this wasn’t a typical winter cold. It was the definition of freezing, tearing into the lungs and stretching along the bones, leaving nothing in its wake but a gasping, frost bitten victim. It hadn’t even been thirty seconds. Extremities had grown red, blood slowly cooled in pools as the heart continued to beat more muffled with each thrum. Vicious and atrocious it was, an abomination for the mind and soul, growing depraved with each second in the intensity of these hellish wastes of temperature. The severe excess of times and places was sloshing through the now, traveling along a golden wire with the cold, and it went right through the pair of them. Her hatred was white-hot, and it surrounded her body and mind like a shield against the cold of the timelessness. Ripples of heat rose from her hands that obfuscated the landscape, but she saw enough to know that the car was going to roll, and not only that, but it would kill her and the frightened boy Gabriel when it did.
She could sense all her ancestors, even way back to the beginning, an apelike man with both instincts and intellect, using green twigs to draw ants out of a hole. Men and women streaming across the centuries, the millennia, and eons to fire-based societies, as shamans told stories of powerful gods and great battles with blood soaking the earth down to the bedrock. Voices long past in tongues even longer past echoed, echoed, echoed through her brain and vibrated in her blood, agitated by the cold. Threatened by the contradictory events now taking place, paradoxical events that might very well shatter all of human existence. Leaning further into the cab and pushing against Gabriel’s shoulder, Sera kicked outward at the bent and broken door. Ice had seeped into the latching mechanism, and the thing was now frozen solid. She knew this the same way she knew a lot of things, things that couldn’t exactly be called intuition, because it was more of a feeling than a knowledge.
Or maybe they’re the same thing, separated only by a fine line in my mind, she thought distantly. A floating sensation filled her body and she realized at once that it wasn’t imagined at all, nor was it just the detachment from the swift current of time. The El Camino was flipping, already rolling in the time to be, but just starting in the now. Expertly and professionally, all in one graceful motion, in the snap of a person’s fingers, the satchel was on her left shoulder, right hand still clenching Gabriel’s left, and the Colt was strapped to her back.
She turned back to the door and kicked twice before feeling any give in the hinges. Pushing and straining against it, she raised her other foot to the latch side and then gave it one last kick before it flew off into the distortion of time and temperature. As it sailed slowly through the air from the force of her blow, Sera leaped after it, Gabriel in tow–nowhere near as gracefully–after, legs flailing and twisted from the quickly shifting surroundings. She landed on one end of the door, now softly floating to the ground, gray and dim and distant from everything else, and she pulled Gabriel up to her, allowing him to gain his feet.
Gonna be a rough landing.
Leaning back, she attempted to brace herself from the eighty-five mile an hour impact, regardless of her time bubble, the concussion of landing on the ground might still be enough to kill them. Would it be enough? Crazy talk. Who in their right or even wrong mind would even try to do such a thing? The temporal distortion had been smooth at first, wave after flowing wave moving and rising and falling with ease, warping the field of view around sounds and velocities. The El Camino was curling up around the front end, bending and twisting the metal even as the engine’s dull thudding permeated the atmosphere surrounding it. The air pulsed with life, even in the harsh cold, and the sounds of life, as drawn out as they were, reverberating back and forth in a distorted world. Yet even though it had been smooth, gentle waves of discordance with everything around them, soft echoing of the gunfire not too far from them, easy, calming hum of constructive and destructive interference. It was out of tune, waves breaking and bashing harshly between the two worlds, the real, and time warped. Convulsions of existence trying to abruptly wink them out of a paradox, rippling around them like a bubble, albumen surrounding them as a yolk, even as they swam almost freely in time, not fully, that might drive a man insane, or so they say, but as close to true freedom as either Sera or Gabriel had ever felt. An exultation of a success against dark forces now drove them onward and upward in spirit, gaining momentum as the bubble in time surrounding them cracked, that cold greyness being washed away in the beams of true sunlight, warm and then hot, gaining energy and life as those same cracks widened. That black aura of hate and malevolence, the glimmer, was being countered. As the two airborne surfers descended to the ground on the bent door from a maroon-colored 1973 Chevrolet El Camino, the cracks continued widening in that protective time bubble that surrounded them in frozen air. They still held tightly to one another’s hands, penetrating that bubble back into a normal course of time and space where a second was a second, and the only distortions visible were heat waves rising from the desert. Where gravity accelerated objects toward the earth at nine point eight meters per second, and sound waves weren’t seen in whatever medium they traveled without electronic aid, only heard. Where normality reigned supreme and that ugly threat of the destrachan was real, not only imagined or visible, and threatening. Life and death went hand in hand like Jack and Jill heading up that god damned hill, and blue skies shined over all in the desert, where chance had almost as big a role as fate. The entire experience, the harsh cold, the ripples of unreality amid the normality, and the ascension as had been felt by both was riveting, and even now, as everything neared the renewed connection with a historical time-line, a disappointment crept over them.
“When we land, shoot for the petrol tank on the bottom of the car.” Again she ordered him about, and again, he only nodded, understanding in some simple way that she was something special, meaning something to a lot of people, and if her reason for living wasn’t just happening now, it shortly would. He still held the gun in his right hand with the broken bird. Blood had crystallized on his skin and grew hard against his flesh. A large circular bruise was forming on the opposite side of the window crank’s cut, which was itself a deep crescent shaped groove, blood trailing down from the tips of it and running down his ring and index fingers.
“Brace yourself.” This was more of a suggestion than a command, but he had already done so, bending his knees slightly at the back of the door. The ripples around them intensified, smooth harmonic motion changing rapidly to a more convoluted waveform with jagged valleys and peaks rambling sporadically like a fly’s movement, and for that last moment of utter cold and distorted silence, flash fire from gun barrels seemed to come from all around, bullets paused in their streaks toward their targets freezing and reversing, then continued back on track, copper hulls screaming past the speed of sound with a crack and a soft sound of a foot stepping in wet cow dung as each bullet fired found its target, a wet smacking sound as it ricocheted off the back of a skull and bounced erratically around in the brain’s cavity.
The sun’s rays were in full view again, clear in the early afternoon light, the same scene that they had approached before so hopelessly was a little brighter, a little better than they had left it. The door crashed to the ground, digging a deep groove in the sand and pushing it out in front of it, creating a hill of dirt and tiny rock nearly three feet tall as it slowed to a stop. Gabriel let go of Sera’s hand, and leaped to the unmoving earth, tossing the gun from his right to his left hand. The El Camino, which had only been kept from rolling for so long by the strange burst of timelessness, now continued it preordained path, rolling onto its passenger side and flipping up into the air. As the vehicle came down, once again on the passenger side, only this time ninety or so feet down the road, Gabriel fired twice, first round hitting the oil pan to the left of the tank, quickly adjusting and striking the aluminum tank just as it would have gone out of view. There was a whoosh as the first vapors caught, and a crunch as the gases inside grew more pressurized, then exploding in a small radius, aluminum shrapnel flying forty feet or more away. The unfortunate once-men caught in that blaze were aflame, and dead; those unlucky enough to have been just outside the blast were horribly wounded. One in particular, having lost his nose long ago–scabs covering the flesh in a rotten mottled green and brown–had been struck by a flying piece of the tank, losing his arm from the shoulder down.
Most of the debris had spread southward, towards Hill and its massive wall. The wreckage was lightly burning, but the destrachan corpses smoldered, and these gave off a stink of lighted offal. It would be unfair to say that the nearest destrachan were closing in around them slowly and in a manner that closely resembled hyenas. Unfair to the hyenas, unfortunately, for compared to these creatures who looked as if they had already knocked on death’s door the hyenas were full of both grace and beauty.
The group of shambling and slow moving shades drew closer, having fallen behind those far quicker than they, yet all seemed to turn at once, attention directed towards Sera and Gabriel. In his clip, he knew there were just sixteen rounds remaining, and another two full clips of twenty apiece. That made fifty-six, an awfully small number compared to the crazed mob of the shadowy once-men that not only surrounded them, but Hill as well. His eyes gleamed lustfully as he thought carefully through the next few minutes that might determine his fate.
“And blood shall flow like a river, and the earth shall tremble before her might as if the sky did yield its secrets to her. Mountains shall part in her name as in the days of old, and the seas shall dry and wither that she might walk on dry land.” Gabriel wasn’t aware that he had even opened his mouth, nor did he know that the voice coming out of it was not his own. But Sera recognized that voice. A name with no face, a voice with no name.
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Sera emphasized the word ‘that,’ a strange thing for anybody to say, especially in a time like this, when a certain doom encroached upon them, waiting to devour their flesh and imbue their strength into the disgusting, most wretched form that was a destrachan body.
“It’s a small passage from a prophecy made by the last prophet of the Mormon religion, before the world went mad.”
“No time for that.”
Gabriel nodded as Sera adjusted the rifle’s strap around her shoulder so that it crossed her chest and allowed her to carry it on her back. Strange rounds needed testing, but she didn’t want anything unexpected to happen in the very near future. As all this transpired, the strange quotation, the explanation, the shifting positions, the circle around them grew tighter. Only a few more feet before they would be overwhelmed.
The glimmer hummed in anticipation, dark and foreboding in its audacity, the deadly complacence trying to creep over her own thoughts and feelings, the urge to give up becoming to great too bear. Give up, give in, we have already won. The insidious hum that grew inside, that undeniable urge to end everything continued, even as a single wisp of a horsetail cloud raced across the pale blue sky.
The crack of a gunshot brought the hum to an end, that deadly daze had stupefied her without her knowledge. Gabriel had started the fight. He was shouting something to her as well, but her hearing was muddled, an irritating mosquito hovering on the tip of her brain, and she looked to the right, at the door they had sailed through the sky upon. It lay where it had fallen, not crumpled from the impact, it’s maroon paint had been scuffed, but she couldn’t see that clearly. One thing had come to her attention, and just before she looked away, she smiled as she drew her spear-knife as a loose thought drifted through her mind like a horsetail wisp of a cloud sailing in the sapphire sky. Frost had begun to melt on the mirror of the door, and on the interior panel, dripping blood forming a sliding sludge across the vinyl.
“Let the wind blow, and the damned grass rustle.” Sera joined in the fray.
Spear-knife in hand she leaped to the nearest shade, a short distance, and touched its face, frost gleaming from its oily skin as the world around her grew slightly dimmer. The knife knew her work as well as she, and the throat of the ill looking once-man gave way beneath the shear blade made for just this purpose. Its flesh parted around the steel, leaving barely a trace on the skin of what had occurred. Quickly, too now, the blood didn’t flow in the dimness that surrounded the creature, and the distortions returned, surrounding every living creature in sight. She smiled as the blade sang crisply in the chilled air, refreshing in its desire to spill blood and the animal instincts within her thrummed with life. A hot pleasant thrum, the adrenaline ingenuous and part of her. Surges of color came through as the slaughter continued, sometimes from Gabriel’s gun, downing another shade as it neared him, but also from patches of the sky, intense blue pouring over her mind. Sometimes the color came from the eye of a falling enemy, a rich, loamy hazel streaming around her. The killing was filling her; rhymes of bad taste and without reason had place in the eccentric nooks and crannies of a mind infused with an inherent power. Intoxication was the feeling most like what she felt, a breath of fresh air after breathing too long in a dank cavern. The smell of dark and deep things beneath the surface of the earth replaced by baking turds in the sun, brown and listless sagebrush wafted about in the breeze and a steaming morass of an enemy’s entrails.
Sera sped from shade to shade, leaving corpses to drop slowly in her timelessness before moving on to another. Thriving on the bloodshed so necessary for her own survival. A primal scream ululated out of her throat as she twisted the neck of one destrachan to an unnatural angle. The cry was predatorial, a final call of a deep hatred for these creatures that had so long plagued all of humanity and a deep love of all things living. The blood of those slain was dribbling on the ground as hers surged upward through the veins in her legs, to her heart, and back out to her hands, one clutching the matted and greasy hair of a shade and the other gripping tight to her spear-knife.
The slaughter was a mockery of the overwhelming force of the disease that had once buried an entire world of people. Nothing mattered to the knife, though, as much as Sera thought and pondered on anything, the knife brought everything back to its starting point, the line at which every living thing begins, an equalizer. A judge, jury and executioner rolled into one sleek, metallic package. A sweet silvery blade that could overcome the world with audacity, with its desire to become the conflict inherent in mankind. The disease had been set upon the world for whatever reason, by whatever forces, and now it was being undone by a simple tool and its simple girl. That spear-knife with its unassuming twenty-eight inches of sharpened steel bar wrapped in leather was bringing hope just as it dealt death with a single dexterous stroke of Sera’s hand.
From the wall, it would seem as if in the single blink of an eye an entire score of destrachan would fall to the ground, had any of the militia men been watching. A swath of the densely packed shades would drop as if they were wheat and Sera was the reaper’s sickle. Deathblow after deathblow, blood spilled into the sand, dark and viscous, issuing forth from their necks and mouths. Yet still, round after round Gabriel continued to fire, left-handed of course, into the waiting throng of once-men, scabrous and filthy, and now, waiting to die. They were making progress.
Thus far, the only shades near enough to kill had been the slower creatures of the pack, not quite the same as those seen leaping walls and running faster than even Gabriel could run, but they weren’t pushovers, either. That black aura which had distracted Sera so was diminished, and even such simpletons as the destrachan could not but notice the short time in which this was accomplished. A word from the past, meaning clear as a mud hole in April showers hung in minds and in the air, waiting for an unseen trigger-man. She could sense it almost looming ahead like a mysterious mansion on a dark and stormy night. Waiting patiently behind its steel and brick fence and cracked, overgrown sidewalk with a living pulse that any would fear as he neared it, crossing the street as he crossed himself, hoping that nothing would reach out and pull him into the monstrous depths that surely awaited. It hung tenebrously as an anvil on a string barely holding it up as thread after thread, strand after thin strand snapped beneath its weight. It was only a matter of time.
Esseshoos. It wasn’t said in the open, but all heard it the same, Sera, Gabriel, the remaining militia men, and the throng of destrachan, it was released and now poured through the open floodgates like a wall of water. Invigorated, the entirety of the horde rushed, synchronously, like a group of marching soldiers give a double-time command. Again, that dreadful sinking feeling, feet embedded in concrete shoes, legs wrapped in the thickest steel chains, tossed overboard and left to drown in icy waters. Sera’s cheeks flushed red, and she was breathing hard, ice formed in her eyebrows and lashes.
This is almost hopeless, she thought. Anxiety rose up in her throat like bile and vomit, chunks burning their way upward in an acidic bubble.
Esseshoos, more than a mad chant, more than the near-word it was, on the lips and tongue of every mouth that could utter. Sera stopped herself from speaking the blasphemy as she sought the courage to continue. Blood caked in the late noon sun, and it steamed from the dead flesh, left where the destrachan corpses fell. She gripped her knife with both hands, left on top of right, and gritted her teeth. Frost gleamed down its blade from the handle to the tip, icy streamers coloring the steel blue, and the knife glittered dangerously in the sunlight.
“Jesus.” Gabriel noticed the huge number of dead destrachan surrounding them–well, surrounding her. By his hand, sixteen; he loaded a new clip into his gun. By her hand . . . more than he wanted to count.
“I’m going to clear a path for you, so start running as soon as all hell breaks loose.”
“What about . . .”
“Just move as soon as the fuckers start to jump, okay?”
Dark shapes began to blot out the sun, their shrieks filling her ears and threatening to drown out her voice. Flesh darkened with burns and blood, the first nearly caught her by surprise as it sailed downwards to meet her. Its fingers spread-eagled into claws, nails torn and skin ripped. Eyes bulged slightly, dark circles under them like an insomniac, furious and ever hungry. One leg of its trousers had been shredded below the knee, and the other grew holes the way a salt-lick did. Prevalent around it, a sharp odor smelling of both decay and vomit, of piss and feces, a stench that could wilt a hard starched shirt, fold an opened rose and turn the head of a sunflower. Its teeth bared in an open yawn of malevolence, almost sharp and pointed were the ones that hadn’t yet rotted out of its wormy gums. Enamel had wasted past yellow, stained brown and black in a swirl of cavities and plaque, around which purulent pink gums seemed to slide in an orgy of life and disease.
Anemic was the word Gabriel would have used, had he noticed the same details as Sera, but she was other-worldly with fever and running mad with it. He, on the other hand, was not only practical, but only deigned to notice things which had some bearing on his actions at all, be they in the present or in the very near future.
Battle time was slow time, slowed by the primal reckonings of instincts and even the greatest opponent can last only a few short minutes in a fight–the greatest of equalizers. Prowess pitted against power, and speed against strength, ability against experience. Hot, violent blood coursed through Gabriel’s brain, and more than anything he wanted to please Sera, show her what he was capable of, prove he was worth more than a damn.
His right hand ached and burned with a twist of numbness right in the center, bones had cracked a bit, but none showed and the only evidence of any injury was the circular bruise on the one side, and the arc of blood on the other. He heard the shriek the instant it flew, a hideous cawing like a raven laughing and choking at the same time. The shade was in the air, attacking position, the first to strike in this way, with the attention of all the dull creatures on it. Itself, the once-man wasn’t particularly intelligent, being of the eat now, remember later if at all variety, so being the first to do anything wasn’t exactly at the top of his to-do list, nor was it on his mind. Half-starved, ribs showing through the tatters of a shirt, the only thing going through his brain, besides the ravening hunger, was that word which reeked of madness about all else. Esseshoos.
Reality rippled around Sera as she manipulated time like a strip of cloth, tugging and pulling it into her pocket for control and courage, a leaping twisting motion not unlike fighting for air. A rather small shade near her was the perfect stepping stool for her ascent as she moved onward and upward towards the once-man in flight. The coolness of the blade seeped through the leather wrapping it, chilling Sera’s hands and left them feeling raw, as if in a biting wind. The shade twisted from her kick, and she let herself be carried with its force, dim light shining high above in the grey, distorted sky. Another’s head bobbed at just the right time to be crushed back down as she forced herself into the air, launching towards the blasted hungry eyes of the flying destrachan.
It was a strange feeling, floating in the air, hanging like a balloon whose helium had leaked out just enough to hang, seemingly unaffected by the normal flow of gravity, from up to down, smaller objects accelerating uncontrolled towards the larger. Air itself seemed to harden as well, almost as solid as the earth it floated above, just concrete enough to grip her feet in grey nothingness. She slipped out into the hanging atmosphere and launched herself into a full run up a nearly imaginary flight of stairs, invisible even to her own eyes, hoping against hope that the dizzy unsupported feeling of a great fall would dissipate, and that the air would hold her just long enough to finish what she intended.
Gabriel had turned his head just enough to witness this spectacle from the corner of his eye, Sera, cheeks flushed and hands chapped, hair moving atop her head like a field of long desert grass in the wind, rushing onward and upward through the air, flying without wings. She was a blur of motion, as was the shade, a flurry of blows and blocks against the creature’s vicious onslaught. Keeping the tearing claws from her face and neck was a challenge unlike any she’d ever had, and her fever-soaked brain threatened to force her collapse, yet she could not give up. Blow for blow she matched the destrachan, slicing and cutting with her spear-knife as it battered and beat upon her arms and body. Cold seeped through her, but could not cool her forehead as the vapor rose swiftly from it.
I have to finish it. I have to finish this now.
She spun around in the air, kicking with all her might in a round-house of rage. The destrachan twisted in the air, the beginning of the end.
“Yetye gor shiamon.” The creature’s voice startled her, but could not stop her blow. She was at the thing’s throat, slicing with that spear-knife through its jugular and sinews as blood burbled and drizzled, it too felt the awful cold of the timelessness surrounding her. The silence surrounding her rivaled even that of their master’s name-chant, had all but stilled as these events unfolded, and for the crime of being tainted in the most awful way, its glazed eyes frozen with death and cold, the destrachan had paid.
Released now from that chilling timeless grip which now had taken its toll on Sera as well, the frozen once-man fell to the earth and shattered, right arm breaking between the shoulder and the elbow, and again at the wrist, breaking beneath the creature as it landed. Steam rose from the corpse in the mid-day sun as the frozen blood once again could pool in the earth, replenish the desert’s lost water. Floating gently to the ground, Sera put one knee to the cracked and parched earth, bowing her head in exhaustion. Her breath streamed from her blued lips and nostrils as if it was chilly in the god-forsaken desert, but the illusion dispelled itself as the leather of her jerkin once again stretched in the radiant warmth.
Her head came up as her hands reached to the ground, needing to touch something just to prove that indeed she was on the ground once more, and as she looked from right to left, assessing the situation perhaps, or just assuaging the notion that it had just occurred, a smirk of a dubious nature curled onto her mouth, and her eyes glinted with the bloodlust. She turned to Gabriel, whose mouth had dropped, and winked.
The name-chant, Esseshoos, had stopped, replaced with a fearful calm, a reverence out of place in a land torn with plague and madness, and parched from lack of rain, where crops dried and shriveled, yielding little or no food at all, where darkness once again brought nightmarish fantasies of ghoulish monsters and the daytime gave no peace of mind. A hush over a throng of people, who could have been cheering her name but a moment sooner, had frozen in shock.
Then, as the ocean waves ebb and flow, the single thought which had amassed these creatures in this place for the singular purpose of destruction reversed, and not even the eternal hunger that seemed to drive them to wherever they might go could have stopped them from leaving. Turning and shuffling and running away from the battle for almost no reason at all.
The tide of the battle had turned in a way not thought possible by Gabriel, at least until he had seen the swath of Sera and her sickle as she reaped what the plague had sown into reality’s fabric. Sera, ever confident and unfettered by the strange ethics of the past, turned face down to the ground and vomited.
“Jesus!” Gabriel ran to her side as she collapsed to her back, spent from the battle’s fury and the fever’s heat burning her brow. As she slipped into unconsciousness, the destrachan’s words as she had slit its throat came back to her. You are his. There was no question who he was. The master. The creator. Gabriel holstered the pistol for the first time, surrounded by fleeing destrachan, and he bent to her side. Picking her up with the greatest of care, he noticed that for the first time in his life, he cared whether another human being lived or died. If she died, his entire view on the world would change. If she died . . .
Gabriel, racked with concern and realization moved quickly to Hill’s main gates. The time had come to see what she had saved, and what he had left behind.
Copyright 2006