City of Phase
Book 1 of The Maze
by
George Willson
Text copyright 2013, 2019 by George Willson
www.fempiror.com
www.georgewillson.com
Originally published as The Maze: City of Phase
Cover Photography by Tasha Willson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.
First edition, November 2013
Second edition, August 2017
Third edition, June 2019
Printed in the United States of America
For Tasha and the girls
who keep me forever engaged
in my personal maze.
Also available in The Maze:
The Kursas
The Off-Worlders
False Invasion
Ancient Visitors
The Terraformers
Also by George Willson:
Vengeance
Atari Speaks
The Fempiror Chronicles series:
The Awakening
Mutation Genesis
Razer Hunt
The Elixir
PROLOGUE
Around and around it went in endless circles. A neverending process of spinning with no beginning and no end. Watching it was hypnotic on a normal day, but this evening, it was all that could capture her attention as it cut through the alcohol soaked air around it. Or at least, she assumed the air was soaked with alcohol since that was the only thing she could smell besides the dirt buried in the carpet around her head that her hair was undoubtedly absorbing the longer it melded with whatever she spilled from the bottle she occasionally upended to imbibe the bitter potion of forgetfulness.
Michelle Palmer had eschewed the whole idea of a glass a long time ago since it was so limiting. With all of the other limits placed upon her life, why bother with the limiting convention of a glass when she intended to drink more than the glass held anyway? Something ran down her face. Either she had spilled more of the liquor, or it might have been a tear. Did she have enough of those left to even cry anymore?
The fan on the ceiling kept spinning. It had an easy life. Just follow the path laid out and never stop. The only resistance it hit was air, and its entire purpose was to push that air out of the way and keep going. If only she knew how to push her obstacles aside so easily and keep spinning. Growing up, she believed that she could accomplish anything, but after twenty-five years of life, she had learned it was a lie. Accomplishing anything was only possible when you make all the right choices. Why had her choices gone so wrong? Hang the fan wrong, and it falls. Its life is over. And it isn’t even the fan’s fault.
She thought of the place where she had worked for the last five years remembering the view of the city from the nineteenth floor and the trees lining the neighborhoods. She had loved it so much when she started, but as time marched onward and her life took a downturn, the windows between her and that view turned into a prison from which there was no escape. At least a prisoner knew they were trapped. It took her years to realize the glass might as well be bars.
How many days had she sat at her desk watching the world drive by and wishing she could leave? How many days had she wanted to fly away like the birds that drifted by on the breeze? How bitter had she become at each client who called in with their petty problems that could not compare to hers? She wished for a tenth of what they paid for the service her company provided. Less than that. Even one percent of their wealth would solve all of her money problems and remove her from the destructive position where she had found herself. So little to them, but so much to her.
She took another drink and felt the warmth of the alcohol wash over her. This time, she knew some of it trickled down her face to the floor of her living room, but she did not care. No one else cared, so why should she? She could sit on the pathetic excuse of a couch only a few inches from her head, but moving from the floor would take too much energy. More than she had anyway. It took everything she had just to unscrew the cap from the bottle she was spending all of her effort not to spill as she held it. She needed something to chase the schnapps she had finished earlier.
She stared at the ceiling fan whirling over her head, her vision blurring in and out as tears streamed down the sides of her face and soaked into her hair spread out on the floor. How many drinks would it take to forget her problems? She still remembered everything. It still hurt. She wanted someone to hold her and take it all away, but then she remembered why she did not have this either which brought on more tears. She took another drink and a little of the poison dribbled out of the corners of her mouth into the carpet.
Around and around and around it spun. The fan was supposed to circulate air to make it lighter, but the air in her apartment did nothing but weigh her down. A single lamp in a corner cast just enough light to illuminate some of the living area, but what constituted kitchen and dining areas were obscured in the darkness past her field of view much like any hope for a better life. There was almost no furniture besides the couch, and the dining area buried in the darkness was that in name only since it contained neither table nor chairs. Her bedroom contained a half-deflated air mattress since the circumstances that even led her to this apartment precluded her buying a bed.
She closed her eyes. She felt the feeling of peaceful sleep wash over her for a moment, and she welcomed it. When she slept, the world was gone, and she was happy -- lost in a dream of better days and happier times. Some part of her wished to live there forever and let this lost cause of a life slip away. She took a deep breath, but when she breathed out, as so often happened, she broke into sobs. The one feeling that always hit her in the end was the one feeling the apartment represented above all others: loneliness. No one was with her. No one wanted her. No one was going to be with her tonight or on any other night. The air the fan pushed down around her formed an impenetrable force field that none could enter or escape. She was trapped.
Somewhere nearby, she heard a ding like that of an elevator. Through the haze of her alcohol soaked brain, she was confused by this. Her apartment building did not have an elevator. The ding was followed by the sound of elevator doors rolling open, and light hit her eyelids.
She opened her eyes and rolled her head toward the light. Standing in the middle of her living room was a blur that could resemble an elevator. She shook her head realizing how far gone she was. She had had so much to drink that she was hallucinating. Then she considered with some horror that she might have drunk herself to death, and this was actually the light that people moved towards during their near death experiences. Did one take an elevator to the afterlife? Can one miss this elevator? Is that why people become ghosts?
Unwilling to spend the entire afterlife as a ghost in the hell of this world, she rolled over and attempted to stand. That was not happening. Her legs buckled under her, and she nearly passed out. She refused to be trapped. If she had drunk herself to death, she was not going to haunt this trashy apartment. She crawled with everything she had toward the light, and no sooner had she pulled her legs inside the elevator car than the doors closed behind her.
Her energy spent, she felt a wave of peace wash over her as the moving compartment rumbled around her. Wherever it took her, she knew she was going to a better place.
CHAPTER ONE
Consciousness. It was coming, but Michelle was not sure what to make of it. She could feel that she was in someplace unfamiliar to her. It smelled wrong. She was lying in a bed, but the covers were also wrong. Keeping her eyes closed, she thought back to crawlin
g through a drunken haze toward the light of an elevator - an elevator positioned in the center of her apartment. It was ridiculous. There was no elevator in her entire apartment building, and there was no way one could open in her living room.
The bed where she lay now was comfortable, she thought. She felt very well rested considering how much she had imbibed whenever that had happened. It was then she realized that she had no hangover. None. There was no way she could have drunk as much as she did and wake up with no hangover. It did not happen - at least not to her. Either she had slept for several days without waking, or the elevator really did take her to the afterlife where hangovers did not exist.
She opened her eyes, and the room was dark. She had to find a light switch or something. She sat up and discovered that the lights were probably motion sensitive since they immediately popped on and blinded her. She squinted hard for a few seconds allowing the sudden influx of light to wash over her before venturing to open her eyes again. She did it slowly and found herself in a plain, white room. It reminded her of a hotel room where it included everything one needed to live including a bathroom, but everything in it was stark white. Was it a hospital? Hospital rooms were also set up this way sometimes. Or maybe since she vividly remembered her pain and drunkenness, the mysterious elevator had taken her to hell. Sure, fire and brimstone might be the common idea of hell, but no one really knows for sure till they arrive.
She scanned the room and found other than the curiously doorless bathroom, there was only one area that seemed to contain a door, though it had no knob or anything to open it. As she sat on the bed, her ears adjusted to the ambient noise of this hospital, or maybe institution, and she heard the faint sounds of at least two different male voices speaking casually to each other in the next room. Her breath quickened as she wondered what these men might do with a woman who was likely trapped in here with them.
She pulled the covers back to look at herself. She found that she was dressed exactly as she was before including the faint smell of alcohol that had spilled on her shirt and jeans, and she did not feel like she had been hurt in any way. Almost unwillingly, she smelled of her hair, and it was just as rank as her clothes. What kind of afterlife would cure the headache and leave the stench? She figured, however, that if she were dead, she had nothing to be afraid of, and if she were alive, she had to be in some kind of long term asylum or hospital. Either way, she had to walk out that door or at least let the staff know she was awake.
She swung her legs out of the bed and tried to stand. Her legs were a bit rubbery, as if she had slept for some time, and she had to catch herself on the bed as she stumbled. With a deep breath of air that smelled faintly of sausage and eggs, she took a few steps toward the doorway and looked for some way of opening it or contacting the outside. On one side of the door frame, there was an unobtrusive panel that looked like it might do something. She placed her hand against it, and the door whooshed open like something out of Star Trek.
Tentatively, she stepped into the end of a huge living area with the same hospital white walls as her room. More knobless doors were all she found at her end of the room, but moving away from her, the walls curved outward to create a considerable living space before they returned to the original width at the far end of the room where she saw the unmistakable sight of a single set of elevator doors. On one side of the room, there was a long counter against the wall with five chairs set into the floor along it, and a window at the far end of the counter opened into a huge well-appointed kitchen whose entrance was near the elevator. The other side of the room had a long, living room style couch which chairs at either end facing a huge, flat screen television mounted on the wall, which only contained the image of a spiraling clock, moving like a screensaver, followed by another door.
A man sitting on the couch looked to be around thirty dressed simply in jeans and a blue t-shirt containing the design of a cabinet with a light of top along with a logo-sized image on the left breast side of the shirt of the same spiraling clock that was on the TV screen. He had looked up at the swish of her door, like he was waiting for her, and upon standing, he appeared to be just over six feet in height. Not only did his face show no surprise at her arrival, he appeared pleased.
“She’s awake,” he called out to someone else in the kitchen. The kitchen door swished open, and another man, who was slightly shorter and dressed in navy trousers and an open-collared, short-sleeved, tan shirt with the same spiraling clock logo on the left breast side, walked out. He smiled when he saw her.
“Hello,” he said invitingly as he approached her, but he stopped well short of her giving her a comfortable amount of space. “My name is Blake, and I’m the Guide here. How are you feeling?”
She was not sure how to respond to him, and he seemed more than patient enough to wait her out. She only stared at him blankly for what felt like a very long time before she finally asked, “Where am I?”
“This is the Maze. I would guess you’re a little disoriented.”
She nodded uncertainly. It was an understatement. Before she woke up here, she had crawled through a fog toward a light, and now she was in something called a Maze. She figured she had to dreaming, in some kind of weird, new recovery program, or actually dead. In any event, this could not be real.
She glanced to see the other man standing next to Blake with his hands in his pockets. He noticed her gaze and said, “I’m Perry,” coming nowhere close to the level of confidence and charisma Blake displayed. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Had she met him? she thought cynically. She had their names, but little else. They also had not answered her question to any degree of acceptability, and she had not even given her name. It seemed about as far from meeting anyone as one could get. As she was trapped and probably dreaming, however, she figured she had nothing to lose from this. She did find it strange that she consciously thought about dreaming within a dream, and that she remembered what happened before getting to this point. If she were dead, she would have no idea how that experience would go, not that she could share this with anyone if that were the case. Maybe this was normal.
“I’m Michelle. Michelle Palmer. So what is all this anyway? Am I dead?” Might as well get that question out there, regardless of how silly it sounded. What did she have to lose?
“You’re not dead, Michelle,” Blake assured her, although she figured this was exactly what a dead person might say. “You had what appeared to be a night of heavy drinking, crawled into the elevator, and you’ve been sleeping for two days.”
“Two days?!”
“You almost had too much to drink, to be honest,” Blake continued. “When you got here, we took you into the medical room over there…” He pointed to one of the doors at her end of the room. “...to make sure you were alright since you were unconscious. Your blood alcohol content measure over point two-five, so we had to give you some fluids to try and flush out your system.”
She looked at her arms, but there was no evidence of an IV or needle marks. Blake seemed to pick up on what she was doing.
“Yes, it was administered via a needle. You won’t find any marks, however, because I closed the wound once you had recovered enough. As soon as you were in the clear, we moved you into that room where you slept it off. I suspect you would have recovered on your own provided you had stopped drinking when you did.”
“I’m not dead?”
“You’re not dead.”
Blake smiled, and while her brain understood his words, she still did not comprehend the situation. She remembered being in her apartment crawling toward an elevator - an event he confirmed. The problem with this was that her apartment had no elevator in it. The scenario was impossible. The only way this could make any sense would be if she were hallucinating the elevator, and maybe she had been found by a neighbor and taken to a hospital.
“I know what you’re thinking,” blake said snapping her out of her mental world. She just stared at him, wondering what he could possibly have
to say next. She was not the most creative of people, so it was hard to accept that she would make up something she did not understand. Was this real or not?
“I saw an elevator,” she said. “In my apartment. That isn’t possible, but you said I got in it.”
“This will take a little bit of explanation, but the elevator was real, and you did get into it,” Blake continued. He turned to the elevator doors at the end of the room. “Those doors opened, and we found you inside. You were picked up from your time and place and brought into the Maze to help you sort out your life.”
“Is that a fact?” Michelle responded, getting a little riled up at the thought of this presumptuousness. “What makes you think-”
“All in good time,” Blake gently interrupted. She closed her mouth and looked at him a little more suspiciously, now wondering if she had been committed to a psychiatric ward with these two as fellow inmates with some kind of delusion. “The Maze is called as such for two reasons. First, we have things to do here. We have to navigate some, shall we say, scenarios that we’ll get to eventually. The second is because each of us has to navigate our own lives to find the meaning within them. Once your meaning and value and purpose are discovered, the Maze will return you home to pick up where you left off.”
“Pick up where I left off?” she asked incredulously. “Why would I want to pick up anything where I left off? You saw the state I was in when I got here. What part of the cause of that do you think is worth picking up? My life was horrible, and if I’m out of it, I’m much happier for it, and so is everyone else, I would wager. I wasn’t in my apartment drinking for fun. There was no party going on. I was trying to forget, and now I get time to think about it? No, thank you!” The memories flooded her for the first time since she had awakened, and she fought back the tears. Wherever she was now was better than where she came from, and she did not care if she never went back. Blake guided her to sit in the chair closest to her next to the couch. He and Perry sat on the couch and looked at her.
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