"Sorry, Dave. That’s still the wrong answer." She said in a chiding tone.
She looked away and then back, peering into him in a way that made him squirm a little. "Like I said before, everything has to end. Now still seems as good a time as any to end it." Her even delivery was the same, but the sadness in her eyes seemed deep and consuming. He didn’t remember that at all.
By impulse more than thought, his mouth opened and words fell out, repeating the unwritten script. "What’s your name?"
"Just let go, Dave."
The sounds of the fist fight near the gas pumps grew louder. He struggled with everything in himself not to let it draw his attention this time. The effort was fruitless. His eyes darted away for only a moment, but when he looked back, she was gone as he knew she would be.
This was too much for him to handle. It was like watching memories of his life play out from a different camera angle, sometimes with new scenes added. He was living DVD extras.
He had to find her. He had to get more information from her. Somehow he had to convince her to stop this, or at least make some sense of it. He had too many questions, and she clearly had the answers.
***
David spent all his waking hours the next week looking for the girl. He drove up and down every street in town, and spent hours on end in the gas station parking lot. He had to see her again. He was drawn to her, the beauty of her, the presence of her, but not in a way he could understand. Above all, though, he was compelled to know her motivations.
Why was she ending everything? Why did she keep making him go through it? Why wouldn’t she tell him her name? Did she even have a name?
The breakdown of society came as no surprise to him. After the ‘no drive’ orders and curfews went into effect, he searched for her in the hours he could. He didn’t care that his apartment had been looted, and that he hadn’t bathed. Nothing could sway him from his course. He was locked on to his devotion, to the idea that she held the answers, and she meant more to him than just the end of everything.
He thought about telling Des what was going on, but he knew she didn’t want to talk to him, and sounding this crazy would only make things worse between them. He missed her more than ever before. He had purpose, however strange it was, and it felt wrong to not share that with her.
At the end of the week, feeling defeated, he decided to watch the world end again, hoping to get more answers the next time around.
He didn’t want to die on his roof this time, so he settled on a familiar hilltop from his childhood as a vantage point. From there he could at least enjoy seeing the end of everything. It was bound to be a hell of a show.
***
Walking to the top of the hill, on the back of Old Man Perkins’ property, he realized that it had likely been more than sixteen years since he was last here. He’d climbed this hill many times in his youth. Scouts, teen drug experimentations, and eventually picnics with Des. Since then, he’d not been back. Somehow he felt drawn here, now, to watch everything end.
There were screams from somewhere nearby. Lives were ending. He found it unsettling, and yet not all together upsetting. His only focus remained climbing up the overgrown trail ahead.
At its crest, the tree line broke apart, giving him a panoramic view of the valley below. The town, and miles beyond it, was laid out before him and the sky opened up above him.
It was amazing. The sky was awash with colors that would have been breathtakingly beautiful if they hadn’t been the herald of the last few gasping moments of a dying world.
Layers of the atmosphere were ripping away as the sun itself exploded, being crushed into flashes and flares that extended millions of miles. The ground beneath him convulsed a few times, but he managed to retain his footing. Buildings nearby weren’t as lucky. The sounds were nightmarish.
The brush rustled close behind him on the trail he’d used to get the hilltop. Expecting an angry animal, he turned around and met the gaze of the anonymous beauty from the gas station.
She still had him at a disadvantage as she approached. She seemed to know so much about him, and he knew nothing about her. He couldn’t find words until she was almost next to him.
"Hi…" he stopped to dramatically draw attention to his ignorance of her name.
She dropped her face to look at her feet for a moment before looking up at him. "I guess you can call me Miri."
Her expression was apologetic, devious, and innocent all at once. There was no disputing that she was adorable, her mannerisms as much as her appearance.
David turned back for a moment to the lights dancing through the air and the waves rippling across the ground. The earth jumped violently under him again and he found it better to sit. When he looked over his shoulder at her, she was smiling down at him. He offered up his hand, which she accepted, closing her fingers in his and sitting down cross-legged next to him.
After a moment, she leaned into his shoulder, as if seeking comfort. It was absurd, he thought. Like a drive-in date. The picture showing was Armageddon, and there would be no drive home after.
"There are a lot of questions… I really want to… need to know more."
She pulled in closer to him. "It’s the end, again, Dave. Your questions won’t matter for very much longer."
"Well, if this is the end…" Caught up in the moment, he turned his face into hers. Before she could react, his lips touched hers. Their bodies both shuddered, from the lightest of touches. The ground under them trembled, leaving him unsure if it was from the cataclysmic events surrounding them, or the discharged energy of their touch.
They drifted back from each other slowly, gently dissolving their contact and leaving their hands trembling as the electric power of the moment began to dissipate. It hit him as hard as it had the first time he’d kissed her, minutes old in her mother’s arms.
Everyone had told him that it was just his imagination, but he’d always known that that kiss had bonded them more powerfully than any physical, earthly connection could ever have.
She leaned away from him as realization poured over him. "Oh, my God… Miri… Mireille… It’s you… alive! My… Mireille… I knew there was something… familiar, but… You look nothing like yourself… My God!"
He stood up, and pulled her to her feet. Though he stared at her wide-eyed, it was difficult to see all of her at once, like there was more to her than he could take in. Finally, he leapt forward and caught her up in his arms. He held her as close and tight as he could. She laughed lightly in his ear as she awkwardly tried to hug him back.
"It’s a miracle. That’s what it is, a miracle!" He announced loudly, before putting her back on her feet. As she stumbled to keep her footing, he smiled so broadly it almost hurt his face.
Pulling out his cell phone, he continued to beam. "I have to tell your mother! She’s going to go nuts over this! You have to tell her you’re alive!"
With a quick sweep of an arm, she smacked the phone out of his hand, and it sailed through the air away from them.
"I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave," she said in a mechanical monotone.
"But you’re here. You’re alive! Des will be so…" His excitement fell short as she interrupted him.
"Emotionally devastated? Ruined?" She shook her head slowly as she continued. "She grieved. She accepted the loss. She kept living, even after losing you, too. You were the one who I needed to find peace. How cruel would it be to talk to her now, knowing she only has minutes left to live? How awful would that news be? Completely confused by it, and knowing you have no time to celebrate it? No."
Arched eyebrows and a gaping mouth eventually gave way to words for him. "But… but, how? You’re here…and you look…" He pointed at her, trying to find words.
"Oh, this?" She looked down at herself, "This body isn’t mine; it’s just a form I’m inhabiting for the moment. It was a vacant vessel. She… this person, has already moved on."
He stared at her in stunned disbelief.
A
nother violent shudder tore through the earth, sending buildings in town roaring to the ground. It was almost unbearably loud even at this distance.
"I’ve done this many times, riding around in an empty shell. But this," she gestured to herself head to toe. "This is not really being one of you. It’s not being alive. I’ve only actually been alive… been born, that once."
"If that’s true… if that’s true then how did it… I mean how did you… happen?" Desperately, he tried to wrap his mind around what she was saying.
"She… my mother… she wasn’t going to be pregnant much longer, the child inside her had moved on, so I decided to get involved. I took her place in the womb… took her body. It seemed like the best way to learn about how your species worked, and you both seemed like you’d be worth learning from."
The air was thin now, and David was getting a little light-headed as a mammoth wall of water crashed in the distance. There was a cacophony of breaking, crushing, rending, and tearing. Screams and wails of the dying were only audible for the briefest of moments between the colossal groans of the Earth itself, giving in to forces greater than it could weather.
David took only peripheral notice that all existence was passing away around them. It was a petty annoyance he now knew he’d experienced, in reality, more than once before.
This time, however, Mireille held them both in place as everything ended. Her eyes – not the deafening sounds or terrifying sights – held all the power of the moment.
The Earth was broken and crumbling apart, as everyone on it met their fate together. Apocalypse. The end of the world. The death of everything and everyone in mere seconds. He couldn’t care about any of it, only her.
***
Finally there was the familiar antiseptic aroma and sense of floating. He was back in the void. There was a long silence before he ‘spoke’ again in stunned disbelief. "So you ended all existence… everything… because of love?"
"Can you honestly name a better reason?" Her reply seemed as much a dare, as an answer. "This is the twelfth time I’ve done it. You always seem to shrug it off and continue in your misery."
He replied softly, but unapologetically, "I thought I was having nightmares. I’ve had a lot of them over the years. But, c’mon, couldn’t you have done something…smaller?"
"I started smaller, but nothing ever got your attention. Even blinking out all of your perceivable existence by collapsing your whole solar system into a black hole didn’t really seem to hit you that hard. I love you too much to give up."
"Out of love… for me… you killed everyone and ended everything?" His mind wouldn’t allow him to accept what he was hearing. The urge to calm his nerves with a cigarette became overpowering.
"Yes! And I’d end it all, over and over again, an infinite amount of times. As long as I had hope you’d figure it out."
"Why couldn’t you just talk to me? Like we’re talking now?"
"Would you have listened? Would you have believed me?" Her questions hung unanswered, as he took stock of the situation and the scope of what she had done. When she continued it was with a softer voice that sounded a little like Des’. "I finally did what I was warned I should never do. Talk to you face-to-face. We don’t wish other beings to be aware of our existence. What I’m doing now is…illegal? It’s looked upon as a far greater offence than your society views genocide. There will be consequences."
"What are you? I mean, really. You’re my daughter, but…" He was treading water, looking for anything to cling to.
"I guess you could say I’m like an angel…like the Old Testament kind. I ignite and extinguish, like a gardener prunes and plants. I create as well as destroy. It’s always been my lot, always will be." She added, almost as an afterthought, "There really aren’t a lot of us… beings like me, but I’m not the only one."
"You mean you never really were our child, not completely, anyway?" He asked it more to himself than her, and she sensed that. "I won’t believe that."
"I was never supposed to be your daughter, per se. We were only supposed to share a biological connection, and that was simply supposed to be to the shell I inhabited. I only intended to use the experience to learn about being human. You were what I didn’t account for. It was your love that tied me to you… and you to me."
David struggled not to believe what he knew were facts. No matter how bizarre this was, it was true.
"I’ve watched for a few thousand years with wonderment, at what your kind does to and for each other. I had to feel what it was like firsthand. It was selfish of me, I know. What I got was more I had bargained for." There was a waver in her voice, and then the briefest pause. "What I got was you, and the love we shared, however short our time together may have been. It was more than worth it."
"Oh, my God, Mireille. I just can’t let go."
And there it was. Inside him where it had always been, locked in a room in his mind he’d simply chosen to forget. Love. Love for himself, and for her, and for the act of living. Love now un-abandoned, like it had been picked up at the Greyhound Bus station’s lost and found.
His emotions and thoughts flowed out to her, confessing what he never could, the essence of life returning within him. Winter had finally ended, and rebirth was now at hand.
"You don’t have to let go, you just have to keep going. Your pain is my only regret. It’s only because I know love, your love, that I feel guilt. I can’t watch you suffer the way you have. Not when I know that it’s due to my own selfish, fickle desire to understand your kind."
"I love you… and I miss you everyday." He choked back his sobs.
"I’ve never been gone, not really. I never will be." The passion of her words was palpable. "Even your kind are never completely gone. Death isn’t an ending. Don’t you understand? You gave me, in four short years, what I always wanted to experience and could never understand. You let me feel love, and gave me the ability to feel it for others. You have to live, Dave. Really live. If not for you, then for me. Watching you as you have been is killing me."
There was an excitement and a peace that flowed warmly over him, through him. Somehow he knew she could sense it.
"So, I’ll ask again…right now you’re nowhere. But from here you can go anywhere. Where do you want to be?"
The comfort he felt in himself, for the first time in longer than he cared to think about, was profound. He was ready to live, not just exist. Understanding finally the power of that first kiss on his daughter’s head – the kiss that had been his finest moment and eventually brought about the end of everything – he spoke confidently, "I don’t think I’ll ever let you go…not completely, but I’m ready to go home."
He was sure, now, that he heard her beaming smile in her reply. "Why didn’t you just say so?"
PREVIEW OF
BLOOD AND SPIRITS
BY DENNIS SHARPE
PROLOGUE
THE YEAR IS NINETEEN FIFTY-THREE. The sky is a deeper blue, and the world is generally a better place.
A little girl plays on the grassy front lawn of a small house on Summit Drive. She has a cute face and a winning smile, even if she does tend to be a little overly plain tomboy. Her red hair is in pig-tails, and her shorts are rolled up to keep them from being as dirty as her mud-coated legs. She is a happy child.
A dark sedan pulls up in the driveway, and a man in a well-pressed uniform gets out, puts on his hat, and makes his way to her front door.
She stops playing to look at his uniform and marvel at how much better it looks than her daddy’s.
The officer talks to her mommy on the porch for a moment, but she can’t hear what they’re saying. A feeling of dread comes over her as her mommy leans against the doorway, crying. Whatever it was must be horrible; her mommy doesn’t ever cry.
Everything unravels for the little girl. From that moment on, nothing can ever be the same.
She goes to daddy’s funeral in the most beautiful dress she’s ever seen; this gorgeous thing given to her to cover
the ugliest loss of her life. Everything that has been her world quickly disappears. Her only memories of a normal life will all be from before the age of eight.
***
My body jerks up to a sitting position as the tight muscles of my limbs spasm. Instinctively, air forces its way into my tightened lungs, the panic ebbs, but calm refuses to replace it. Another nightmare, but not just any bad dream. My memories had come back to haunt me.
The year is 2012. I keep reminding myself of that as I ease back down into the reassuring pillow top, already beginning to drift off again.
Kathy, that little girl, was me once upon a time. She was small and weak before Jules found her. He took her in, changed her, and gave her strength.
He killed Kathy. What he left was Veronica. He made me.
I have no regrets.
CHAPTER 1
I’M TOLD IT’S AN ODDITY that I still sleep. It only comes in short bursts, no more than forty-five minutes at a time. Most others with my condition -- and I have only known a handful -- tell me they don’t sleep anymore. Some of them haven’t in more than five decades. I can’t imagine the hell that must be. Even in my brief moments of rest, I still dream and in that I find relief. Even if the dreams aren’t what I like, they are still an escape.
The soft thickness of my comforter envelops me as I relax back into bed. Before I’m completely awake, my mind begins to unfold, opening to the world around me. In the distance, the fog is rolling in off the river, dense and blanketing, its vaporous fingers right there on the edges of my consciousness. The night is cool, and the last lights of the dying day dance across my ceiling, reflected from the crystals hanging in my window. The light tinkle as they sway into each other is a reassuring sound; the beautiful prisms they cast, a blessing. Not one night comes that I don’t wake to thank Jules for having the windows in this house ‘treated.’ I can actually see the sun, even if I can’t be out in it.
I am now completely aware for miles around me. I’m awake, and not even grudgingly so. Not tonight. He’ll be here soon. I look forward to it and fear it all at once, but I ask myself ‘why dwell on what we can’t change?’
Destroyer of Worlds Page 3