by Caleb Adams
“Are there many of us left?” he asked as I started to pare them down to something less than eagle talons.
“Less than when we last spoke. And most likely lesser when we are done with this conversation,” I replied.
“They took our books and they took our paintings. They took your god and they took my earth. Worst of all, they took our thoughts and left no one with a mind of their own to think.”
“It will all be returned to us someday, Gilly.”
“You were always Eleanor Porter’s orphan child. Their hands are like chalkboard erasers on humankind’s blackboard of creativity. They are the dawn of ignorance and the pirates of freewill. They are the subjugators of hope, the oppressors of love’s vagary. They’ll return us to apes. An ordained de-evolution. We’ll be rewound millions of years in a flash. I pray for a starman to intervene. But then again, what would be left to see? Name me one distant visitor who would possibly travel light years for this?”
“We are not yet defeated. I still have faith.”
“Faith, you understand, is not wanting to know what is true.”
“Do you not even wonder how it is you lived so long without some hand of providence to intercede?”
“No, there is nothing arcane in a heart that still beats and lungs that still breathe.”
“And so there is nothing you believe?” I asked, now moving on to his right hand.
“With age comes decay and reality. Hopefully, one will have no fear of that.”
“You’re a liar if you say you have no fear,” I said as I decided to fight back.
“Of the pain and putrefaction, of course. But in most circumstances, you can always change the length of that.”
“I must leave, Gilly. I cannot hear any more of this,” I said as I returned his hands to his lap.
“Prior to that, and of course before our deaths, I want you to take me up there. They have shattered the stones of the pyramids and leveled Petra and Greece. I would like to see the hills and trees before they get their hands on them.”
“We would get no more than thirty feet before they tore us to pieces.”
“Look at this body. I am now its inmate. Lucky I would think one who could unlock the time to set themselves free.”
“That key I cannot give you. And for myself, I am not yet ready.”
“Then you are not only weak, but a conspirator with the breaths I take.”
I then watched as he picked up his can of vapors and brought the opening once again to his nose.
“Gilly, you need a respite from those vapors. Can’t you see? They are destroying you. There will be nothing left when we are set free.”
“Please, no more of your words at my door. My brain hurts like a warehouse. It has no room to spare for another one of them.”
I soon left and took a slow walk around the tunnels. I was in despair. If I didn’t intervene, I knew he would be dead before me. And then I could call him my murderer.
Journal #14, Gilly and Me – Day 1075
“Gilly,” I said as soon as we walked in. He was standing in a corner with his back to us. He had on yellow parachute pants and a matching suit coat. He was painting on the clay wall with the oil pastel crayons he had asked me to bring before we entered the sewers. From what I could see, he already had earth, a star, and a moon.
“Can you go find them and bring them back in?” he said after laying down another stroke.
“Who?” I questioned.
“The lovers. They were just here. They must have had backstage passes.”
“We didn’t see anyone on our way here, Gilly. Maybe you were dreaming.”
“If that was so, they appeared more real than the two of you.”
“Okay, maybe they were here, Gilly. But I have someone more important for you to meet. I brought the priest.”
“Is it the one from before?” he asked.
“No.”
“That’s good. The other one was one of them.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“His hands and feet were always clean.”
The priest and I glanced at each other.
“Gilly, please turn around. We would like to speak with you.”
“If it’s my last rites, it will have to wait. I still have death and lovers to paint.”
“No, he is just visiting.”
Gilly set the oil pastels to the ground and turned to face us. In what could have been no longer than an instant, he looked fifty years younger and then as quickly returned to his dying face. It wasn’t only me who took witness to this trick of the light. I saw it also in the eyes of the priest.
“How are you feeling?” the priest asked.
“Upside down and inside out, but I am becoming quite used to it.”
“Have you prayed tonight?” the priest then asked him.
“Aye, my Lord,” Gilly replied.
“Then you have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“If you bring him here to save me, then he will be well received.”
“Gilly, just say that you do accept Him. I want you in heaven with me.”
“I have been kinder than you. By that alone, if I am not with you, it is because your heaven is a level below mine.”
“Perhaps I should leave,” the priest said as he placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Gilly,” I pleaded. “Say it goddammit. Say He died for your sins.”
“I must get back to my painting. Time may be infinite for you and your god, but it is not for me.”
I collapsed to my knees, and the priest walked away. The cross around my neck I removed. For a moment, I was thinking of tossing both it and my soul across the room. For a moment, I was thinking of following Gilly right into hell. That did not last, and I returned it to around my neck. I felt drained and I felt I had lost. I felt as if my birth meant nothing at all. Gilly, he must have felt something beyond me.
Journal #14, Gilly and Me – Day 1077
“Gilly, wake up. I think God has finally left, and we should follow Him right on out of this place,” I said, whispering in his ear as I lay next to him. I was shivering in the thought of dying as he was twitching in his sleep. I was thinking of all the things they would do once our tunnels were completely overrun. All night while he slept, I listened to the sound of sporadic gunfire and small detonations that were now taking place. It was only a matter of time now before they would find us, two old queers nestled in our death scene. I was thinking it was time for us to travel on before they stole the breaths right out of our mouths. And then as if he had been reading my mind, he squeezed the wrist of the arm that I had wrapped around him. He was wearing a pleated, white tuxedo shirt and nothing else. He had blindfolded himself with two turns from an elastic bandage, and for eyes glued on black buttons taken from the cuffs.
“All the nightmares came last night,” Gilly began. “And it looked as if they are here to stay. There will be no room for me, and it will be no fun for you.”
“Yes. So we should get ready to leave this stage.”
“If you unwrap your arm from me, it will surely be easier for me to make an exit.”
As he requested, I withdrew my hold on him. He crawled like a cat to the wall. When he turned around, he was sitting there like a rag doll. He was sitting there as if the only life left in him was being borrowed from mercy’s chest.
“My vapors, please,” he requested.
“You’re a junkie, Gilly. The world is dying all around us, and all you can think of is getting high.”
“I am sorry, but for most of them, I was dying here first.”
I was never the one to deny him anything, and so I brought the can over.
“Do you even know what’s going on right now?” I asked.
“Your god has left and been replaced by one with less patience for our frivolousness.”
“And don’t you think you were part of that banality?”
“And if all my life I just sat around and prayed, they may have been able
to call me Peter Pious, but I would have been more the liar.”
“Gilly, I have something for us. We can drink it at the same time and leave together.”
“How nice and naïve to think we can take a friend with us on the way out. Unfortunately, I must educate and enlighten. Death, you see, has no other passengers. We all ride with it alone. Each in our own cars. You in yours and me in mine,” he replied and then returned for another long inhale from his can of vapors.
“Gilly, I beg of you, if not with me then before or after. I do not want their hands to be the last things that touch you.”
I called his name again. I rattled his body. I slapped his face. My words and actions though were of no more use as he had already found the cave where Hypnos lives. All the while, death was marching closer, the inevitable parade of battle cries and wails. I swear I did what anyone else would have done for the one they most loved. I gave him a kiss, and then I broke his neck with a swift benevolent twist. In death, he looked no different than in life, so of what charge could I be accused.
Journal #14, Gilly and Me – Day 1078
Gilly, wake up. Their weapons are firing not more than a few quarters away. I have hailed down death’s car and you were right. I am looking inside, and it looks like I will be riding alone. You may have had a one-day start, but I will ask the driver to go all night if he has to. I will see you again, Gilly. Because ha ha. We are forever entwined.
Agnes Day
My Last Testimony,
I must tell this story. I must tell it not only because my death is most certainly near but because He wants me to tell it. Why else would He let me live for another three days? There could be no other plausible explanation. For not too long ago, I was shot. Through the heart. Yet here I sit with a pen in my hand. I beg of you not to think insanity has befallen me, or at the time, I had merely drifted off to sleep. Neither would be true. For I was God’s witness. I swear to you I was.
Three days ago, they finally came. As we all knew that one day they would. Why they could not have just poisoned us with gas I do not know. Why they did not just flood our tunnels and drown us all I am not certain. It would have saved them maybe a thousand or more. But I suppose as in the beginning, as they have proven, they have no respect for life, not even their own. That I have always found inhuman. And oddly, that has brought me solace as I would rather have my death come at the hands of those outside God’s dominion than from one of His own children.
When our area was finally breached, they immediately began to fire upon us with their automatic weapons. And we, we began running toward the other end in one great stampede. There was no courtesy. The young and the old were trampled into the ground, and I could feel their bones breaking under my feet. I wanted to stop to help those who had fallen, but you must understand it was impossible. There was not even room enough to cover my ears from the deafening sounds of their bullets and their explosions ringing out in the tunnels. It was horror, unimaginable, and ineffable.
To what place were we seeking refuge, you might be asking? It is an easy question for me to answer. None actually. We were just trying to run to add a few more minutes to our lives. Soon we came upon a line of soldiers waving us along. They were getting ready to topple a few of the coal cars in order to stop the advance of the Caliphate. After crossing by, I stopped to catch my breath, and then for some reason decided to stand beside them and wave my arms along with them. The rush of those fleeing soon began to thin out. Instead of three of four running down the tunnels at the same time, it was now a single file. I should have continued on, but I was transfixed. Inside I was cheering each of them as if it was the finish line to some race, and I was the only spectator who had not left.
Finally, the soldiers determined that the coal cars had to be pushed into place. It would have allowed no one else through. I could not bear that, so I jumped on the back of one of them, but it was to no avail as he threw me off. After picking myself up, I bit down on the hand of another one. He was not as kind. He grabbed me by the hair and whipped my body into the tunnel wall. My head did split a little from the impact, but the pain or blood I did not think of.
As I knew would be, another wave of us came down that tunnel. And now twenty, maybe thirty were stacked up on the other side with no route of escape. Minutes later, the Caliphate finally came. Their bullets tore into the backs of those we had forsaken, and I had a clear view of all their death faces. And where their bullets did not find flesh, they found the first coal car so that it sounded like a hailstorm raging down upon a tin roof.
With a view now unobstructed, our soldiers started firing their weapons. They were screaming like mad, and I was covering my ears and thinking of how war could not have possibly crossed God’s mind when he created Adam and Eve. It was five minutes at most before they had shot all of the Caliphate dead. I was not joyous. I was thinking of how they had all been led astray and of all the beautiful things they would miss.
The living among us were now seven. The soldier near to me handed over a spare weapon and I refused, telling him I am here with but prayers to defend. We heard nothing for an hour or so. Our hopes rose with each passing minute. None of us spoke. I think that is true. I can’t remember now. Fear is an odd emotion. It silences your tongue but fills your head with all these loud and terrible thoughts.
The sound of running footsteps. That’s what we heard. Faint at first, then building from there. A crescendo, I suppose. The next sounds came from the soldiers clicking off the safeties of their weapons. Not long after, an avalanche of voices. We all knew it. None of us would be saved. The second wave of the Caliphate had arrived. I made the sign of the cross, bestowed upon myself my own last rites, and waited.
A girl came first, fifteen or sixteen years on this earth. She was carrying an infant close to her bosom. She was twenty or so yards from us. The soldiers aimed their weapons around her. And then the gates of hell opened as the first faces of the Caliphate could be seen. Still ten yards away, neither her nor her infant had a chance. I saw flesh and blood explode right out of her left shoulder. The pieces of flesh hit one of the soldiers in the face, and he had to wipe it away. She stumbled a bit but kept running. Then the bullets opened up more holes in her body and she fell, her elbows skidding across the railway boards as she lay the baby in front of her. I stood up and cursed God in a voice that ripped my vocal cords. I told Him to do His own work and not let others kill for Him. One of the soldiers must have heard because he turned around and shouted at me to get down. A bullet found him next, and then I saw smoke rising from a hole in the upper left part of my chest. There was no blood and there was no pain. I then put a finger to it and felt the casing. And then I thought, how possible was that? How does a bullet go no farther after it enters the skin?
The last soldier remaining reached around and grabbed a grenade. It had just left his hand when he too met his death. The grenade rolled toward the infant. At that moment I should have lunged for cover. But the grenade changed into the shape of a red ball, and I was both mesmerized and paralyzed. I know you are thinking that it was my mind playing a trick on me. My mind wishing that the soldier had mistakenly thrown a red ball instead of a grenade. I swear though, neither my eyes nor my mind was deceiving me. The light that came next was not a flash, but a bloom of the most brilliant white I had ever seen. Soon it enveloped everything in the tunnel. I felt peace. I felt warmth. I felt this infinite love spread throughout my entire being.
For how long I was asleep, I am not sure. It could have been a minute, an hour, or a day. I now lay where I had once stood, curled into a ball with a thumb to my mouth as if in the womb of my mother. I did not move at first. Instead, I listened. But there was not a sound to be heard. So, I arose and immediately looked out to where the girl and the infant had fallen. To my utter astonishment, the coal cars were no longer there and so also had the girl and her infant disappeared. Inside of me, a fury swelled. How dare they steal the innocents.
I then stood up and walked to th
e Caliphate’s side of the battlefield. The first Caliphate soldier I came to was lying face down. By his hair, I grabbed him to turn his face to me. I wanted to scream so loud that on his walk to hell, he would still be able to hear me cursing him. But as I looked at him, a horror shot through me as his eyes were missing. To the one next to him I looked. The same. I then began to wade through the rest of their dead. Another one. The same. One more. The same. The same. The same. All of them had had their eyes removed.
A sound of fluttering of wings turned me around. And there I saw the girl holding the infant close to her breast. The sight weakened the pulse of my heart and drew my skin pale. She gave a smile to me, and tears rushed out to wet my cheeks. She spoke not but gave a nod of her head for me to follow her. And I did so, following her to this room. A room well concealed. A room with an old desk, blueprints, and dust from at least one hundred years ago.
“We must go,” she then said, meaning her and the infant.
“The Caliphate will eventually find me here, won’t they?”
“Yes, but you have an extra three days. The angel He sent cannot hold the bullet any longer than that.”
“Why me? Why was I given more time than the others?” I then asked.
“Because He saw the light in you, Agnes Day.”
There is a clock here, atop the desk it sits. Somehow it still keeps time. The devil, or God, or both of them I assume have given it back its life. After the girl and the infant left, I turned it to face the other way. I did not want to watch the hands go around. Outside I can hear the crusaders running down the tunnels screaming like savages and uttering words incomprehensible to me. It is only a matter of time before they discover this room and then me. There is a God that I know. There is only one true God that I am certain. I have seen His works, and I am amazed. If this is His plan, then I accept it. Who am I to question His will? What right have I to ask for more time? He has already shone His light upon me. He has made me His witness, and for that, I gladly accept His decision.