“Oh, shit!” someone exclaimed.
Es looked toward a group standing by the windows and ran over to see what they were staring at, only to see plumes of smoke in the distance.
“What we are seeing now is the result of the aftershocks from California. Billions of dollars in damages are being reported in several surrounding states and we have received word that the portion of California that fell into the Pacific Ocean is causing a tectonic shift. Tremors are being reported across the country.” Es looked at the screen of a nearby TV and back out the window. It all felt so unreal. “Half of California is now beneath the sea and the other half is in ruins while aftershocks are being felt all the way to Canada and Panama.”
“This just in. The fall of California has caused a shift in the tectonic plates by over a hundred miles! This has resulted in flooding for many of the southwestern states and it’s expected that other plates will shift. We are being told that everyone is to remain indoors and stay calm.”
The Earth began to rumble once more, this time so loudly that Es felt it in every fiber of her being. The windows began cracking and car alarms began sounding off. She dropped to the floor because she couldn’t keep her balance.
Once it stopped, they moved closer to the windows. Down below in the streets, there were people scrambling everywhere, their screams faintly heard from the building, and cars were blaring their irritating alarms.
Es’ heart was pounding so hard she thought it might jump right out of her chest. The Earth began to move again, this time knocking her on her backside. A window shattered just as the man standing near it lost his balance and she watched as he fell through it. A woman near Es screamed as they saw him disappear.
Before anyone could even suggest they should crawl underneath the desks, the building shook like a martini being prepared. Then the floor tilted in the direction of what was left of the shattered windows. Everyone scrambled to their feet and ran for the exit.
“Damn!” Mr. Thornton exclaimed as he shoved his body against the door. “It won’t budge!”
Two other men tried to force the door open, only to glimpse their once beloved snack machine lying in the way. They tried to shove it open enough to get through, but the next tremor destroyed a few support columns in the lower portion of the building, causing them all to fall backward as the floor dropped a few inches.
“Dammit! I’m not dying here like this! Come on! We have to open this door! It’s our only way out!” a man said.
They gathered together, trying to move the door.
“What’s that sound?” It was Debbie’s voice somewhere behind Es.
They turned and watched as their wheeled office chairs rolled out of the windows, the desks slowly sliding not far behind them.
They turned to the door once more. Es could see the wide-eyes and pale faces of the others’ panic, which mirrored her own as they desperately tried to open the door. The floor dropped further and they fell backwards yet again, sliding across the slick tile floor towards the open windows.
Es couldn’t get a hold of anything. She could hear screams behind her as she turned over, trying to grab something. Anything. The broken glass tore into her legs and her arms as she slid out the window. She could hear everything now. Sirens. Screams. The rumbling of the Earth. Complete chaos full of fear and panic.
This is it. This is how we die. The wind was stinging her eyes and pulling strands of hair out of her ponytail. She may have been falling, but she felt like she was floating. She looked around her at all the office supplies, disposable coffee cups, broken glass, and other people finding themselves on the verge of death.
Es always thought her life would flash before her eyes when she was nearing death. Instead, it was more like seeing everything in slow motion, as if being thrown out a window had plunged her into a movie scene. Falling out of a building from over twenty stories up wasn’t how she imagined her life would end. Especially when things were finally starting to go right for once.
When Mr. Tom Thornton had called two days before to schedule an interview, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Although now it seemed like the worst timing. At least she had taken a chance on something better for herself.
Out of the corner of her eye, there was a flash of blue light. She turned her head to see people falling into the light, but when the light disappeared, so did the people, as if they had been turned to ash in an instant.
She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable moment of death, cursing her poor timing. If only she had pursued photography from the very beginning, maybe things would be different now. A loud explosion jolted her eyes open and she saw part of the building she had just been in collapsing. Soon I’ll be buried beneath it. There was a flash of light and then nothing.
A New Beginning
Es woke up on a cool, dusty wooden floor with no idea where she was or how she got here. The last thing she remembered was falling to her death from an office building with some of it about to crush her to death - if she didn’t die from the fall. Es sat up slowly, taking in her surroundings. It was a small, fairly plain room with a bed beneath a large window, a wooden chest against the opposite wall and a large fireplace taking up the majority of the wall across from the door.
As Es folded her legs beneath her to stand up, she discovered she’d lost a shoe. She tossed the remaining one into the cold fireplace. After assessing the damage to her arms, she stood and removed her shredded stockings to check her legs.
Wow. I thought it would be much worse. As long as I keep the cuts clean, I’ll come out of this with only a few scars. She limped over to the fireplace and tossed the tattered stockings onto her lonely shoe and gazed at the photographs on the mantle. Grabbing one, she tried to blow the dust off of it but failed.
With a sigh, she grabbed her stockings out of the fireplace to wipe off the photograph. It was a well-drawn image of rather short, odd looking people that resembled hairless dwarves with what looked like animal-human hybrids standing behind them. Es wiped off the other two photographs to find similar creatures and wondered what kind of stories the artist had woven in their mind.
She turned to exit the room and felt a tug in her mind. Thinking it was nostalgia from her childhood days of fantasy, she shook it off and opened the door to a hall with three other doors and a staircase at the end leading downwards. Her curiosity got the better of her. She couldn’t help exploring the rooms. She didn’t find anything else interesting, however, except for an odd lack of electricity. The rooms were bare except for beds and each had its own fireplace.
Es carefully made her way downstairs to a large empty room with a lone coat on a stand between two doors. She looked into the open doorway on her right and found a small kitchen the size of her parents’ walk-in closet. The counter took up nearly half the room and the open oven took up the other half. She perused the cabinets and cupboards, finding nothing but more dust. She stood to leave the small room, wondering how long it had been since anyone had lived there.
Then she spotted something interesting on the wall: a small shelf of various sized leather bound books with a cloth bag hanging on a hook beneath. Most likely old forgotten cookbooks, but worth a glance. Es picked one at random to flip through its pages and stopped. The images scrawled on the page were not in any language she knew of and she had done her fair share of research over the years with her high interest in world cultures.
The writing was rough and resembled runes, but it made no sense to her at all. Something tugged at her mind again, this time more like a static shock. She grabbed another book, this one containing beautiful writing that reminded her of the elven scripts she often saw in movies. It was similar to calligraphy, with the way it curved, flowed and connected. She was entranced by it.
With her curiosity even more piqued than before, she opened the others one by one, studying the way each script was written. Each book and its unique language pulled at her mind harder than the last, giving her a headache.
As
she reached for the last and thinnest book, which had been hidden by the others, a blood-curdling scream from somewhere outside caused her to freeze. She had forgotten to be grateful she survived the disaster she had previously found herself in. She needed to figure out where she was now. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.
Cursing herself for getting distracted, she started packing the books in the bag. She couldn’t help thinking about how familiar these unknown scripts felt to her. Before she could think about it further, a loud crash sounded above her. Her head snapped up as what sounded like a fair number of men were trampling on the wooden floor in the room she had awoken in.
Not letting her fear get the better of her curiosity, she snatched the rest of the books from the shelf. She swung the strap over her head and across her shoulders just as the thunderous feet pounded down the hall toward the stairs.
Es reached for the door to leave the dusty old house but a screech behind her turned her blood cold. She turned her head and her eyes widened as they made contact with eight red ones staring her down. She thought the creature before her an impossible thing of nature as it let out another shriek and moved toward her.
She flung herself toward the door and snatched the coat on the rack beside her. As the creature stumbled on the stairs, she bolted through the door, slamming it shut behind her. Before she could even think to catch her breath, the creature came stomping after her. She ran down the narrow street and rounded the corner of the house across from the one she had been in as a crash sounded behind her. The large creature was coming for her.
Es took refuge in the thick, overgrown roots of a tree nearby. No sooner had she hidden herself than a blonde woman ran by in the alley in front of her with a similar fuzzy creature on her heels. As Es tried to remain motionless, she heard screams from all around her. Some she could identify as human but some came from the abnormally as-large-as-a-truck spiders. There was one other familiar sound: a fire alarm perhaps?
Since she had evaded her attacker, she begun to take in her surroundings from her hiding spot. The houses were in pretty good shape considering the cracks in the walls, the faded exterior and the extra gigantic trees growing everywhere. The roots she was hidden among were thicker than her! As her eyes followed the roots upward, she noticed the houses had ceramic tile roofing and above that was . . . a green sky?!
Eyes wide, Es slowly crept out of her hiding place, starring at the odd sky. A rustle to her right forced her to quickly retreat back to the roots. She glanced over and spotted a bearded muscular man in a sleeveless leather jacket carrying a bloody spear.
The way he was standing, with his feet wide apart and holding up the spear, told her he was no stranger to a fight. He was yelling at something out of sight. And then she saw it. At first she thought it was a large blob, but as it moved further into view, its features become clearer. A dark blue mushroom twice the size of the man was waddling towards him.
What is this place?
Es watched as the man thrusted his spear in the mushroom’s direction and it stopped. The man grew confident and began to jab at it, forcing it to back away. The mushroom’s large stubby arms swatted at the spear in defense. The spear hit its mark, however, and became lodged in the mushroom’s flesh.
The two foes stilled. The mushroom puckered its bottom lip and began to whimper like a child. It stood up to its full height and reared its head back, opening its mouth wide. Es couldn’t help but giggle a little at the thought of this ten foot mushroom behaving like a toddler preparing for a tantrum. And then it began shrieking.
Es swiftly shoved her fingers in her ears, but the sound was so head splitting her fingers didn’t help much. Her brain felt like it was going to explode out of her ears. She looked over at the wailing mushroom and spotted the man lying in the dirt, blood trickling from his ears.
Vibrations underfoot told Es something big was coming. Sure enough, a black-clad blue dragon humanoid walked up to the mushroom. The blue dragon was a couple of feet taller than the mushroom, its folded wings nearly as long as it is tall. Its thick tail was dragging a few feet along behind him.
The dragon-man patted the mushroom’s head and it quieted down to a whimper. The dragon-man knelt before the mushroom, yanked out the spear and patted its head again before he sprayed something over the mushroom’s wound. The mushroom sniffled away its cries and the dragon stood, picking up the fallen man with one hand and the spear in the other. The dragon walked away with the tearful mushroom waddling close behind.
Once the quiet had returned, Es removed her fingers from her ears. Her headache was much worse now, thanks to that idiot stabbing the mushroom. Where am I? First I find books in unknown languages, then a truck-sized spider comes after me, and then a giant blue mushroom wails like a banshee with a dragon man caring for it? And then that . . . the sky is green! Green, not blue. Am I just dreaming? She continued starring at the green sky. Maybe she had survived the fall and the collapse of the building and she was lying in a hospital hooked up to all kinds of drugs making her dream all kinds of crazy things. Or this is my afterlife.
Her churning stomach didn’t help matters. When was the last time she ate? Es glanced around her and decided to make a break for it. She slipped on the coat she’d grabbed from the house, only to find it was actually a hooded cloak. It covered more of her than a coat would have, so she was fine with it.
She didn’t know where she was going, but something told her she’d been here before. Like a repeated dream or déjà vu. As she moved through the houses, she saw more and more were in ruins, each in worse shape than the one before it. She came upon a clearing and found a small shimmering lake with a forest nearby. Still hearing the occasional screams and yells, she made her way towards the trees near the water’s edge, being careful to remain behind the rubble as much as possible. She was almost at the tree line when several splashes from the lake caught her attention.
Winged turtles leapt into the air from the lake. Four blue wings supported each turtle as they flew over her. She was mesmerized by them, the water droplets rolling off of them and glittering in the sunlight.
A gigantic rusty orange colored tentacle breached the water’s surface, followed by several others, swirling through the air in search of the turtles. Es watched in shock as a few turtles struggled to free themselves but were dragged back beneath the water. She turned on her heel and sprinted for the trees, hoping that whatever was in the lake wouldn’t catch her, too.
As she darted into the forest, loud shrieks resounded behind her. She dared to glance back only to see a few spiders had followed her. She was actually glad they had been stopped by the tentacles. She faced forward once more and raced through the trees, trying to put as much distance between her and the odd creatures as possible.
After some time, she stopped to catch her breath. As she was bent over, her lungs burning, something brushed her head as it fell to the ground. It was a rainbow feather, about as big as her. Her eyes widened in fear once again. Had she stumbled across yet another abnormally large creature? With a deep breath, she tilted her head back and looked high up into the branches of the forest.
There, hidden among nests, were several brightly colored birds. Am I about to become a snack? Just as the thought came, screeches resounded behind her. Her head whipped around to find the group of spiders was catching up to her.
Feathers fell like party confetti as the birds took flight and dove at the spiders. Es took it as the perfect opportunity to make use of her perpetual invisibility and scram. She took off running, her adrenaline keeping her from exhausting. She didn’t get far, however, as her headache worsened, making her nauseous. She walked into a clearing and discovered a glowing red gemstone shaped like an obelisk and growing out of the ground like a weed.
She inched closer, feeling a tug in her stomach and as she got closer, the stone’s glow began to pulsate. She noticed a familiar symbol near the top and she could’ve sworn the stone itself was pulling her forward. She tried to step back
, but this time she was forcefully yanked forward. She tried to lean back and dig in her heels, but the stone was pulling her towards itself. She wasn’t mistaking it. She was being dragged and couldn’t stop it.
She stretched out her arms, hoping to prevent being slammed into the stone. Was that a voice behind her? The stone pulled her in anyway, her arms too weak to keep her body at length and her cheek pressed up against the stone’s smooth side.
The stone was warm and as soon as her face was against it, it started to hum and vibrate. A pair of hands gripped her shoulders, and she cringed as she felt a pinch somewhere deep in her mind. Then everything went black.
Finding Some Answers
Valdrik stood with his feet apart and his thick arms folded across his broad chest. His thick, black, untamable hair flowed down from his head and onto his shoulders. He was covered head to toe in black. Black boots, black belt, black climate control body suit, black pants and an open black jacket. His emerald green eyes eerily shone bright against his dark gray skin.
Lotus: Dark Lotus Chronicles One Page 4