The Altonevers

by Frederic Merbe

  The lights return and music resurfaces as loudly as before. Anna hits the bartender with her full mug in the face. The gorilla like man bear hugs her and Cider shoots him in the foot. A few shots are fired from the man standing fifteen feet away, just missing the two and shattering bottles of the back bar. She jumps the bar and gets into a wrestling match with the furious bartender she made into a cyclops a second ago. Cider returns fire, hitting the man on the fourth vision impaired shot, that he was allowed by using a club goer as a body shield. The gorilla, enraged swings a wild fist with flaring nostrils, hitting Cider just over his left ear.

  “Owwwww,” he screams, Holding his ringing ear then ducking a second swing and standing for second of looking the oaf in the face like a showboating boxer, then shooting him twice in the stomach. Anna struggles with the burly half blinded man, holding her own well enough until she’s wrestled to the ground and the man gains leverage. The two laying belly to belly, she's staring into his screaming face as he strangles her. She desperately flails her legs and tries to gouge out his good eye. Taking her last breath almost a minute ago her face blues with bulging veins. The man’s drink serving strong hands don’t loosen a bit, she screams with empty lungs then spits in the man’s face thinking she’ll die. As her head feels it will burst and eyes dimming, she struggling and getting her ankle high enough to grab her gun and shoot wildly at the man, hitting his hip and right under his right armpit.

  She lays gasping for air by the time Cider hops the bar and ducks for cover, stapling the bartenders head to the ground.

  “It's a massacre out there, and we ain’t got that kinda firepower,” he says, patting her on the back and noticing her heavy breathing and lightening blue face, then softly stroking her shoulder.

  “Anna, why are you so sad?”

  “I'm not sad! that guy almost killed me,” she coughs, gasping for air asking, “where were you?”

  “In a gunfight. I got back here as soon as I could. Like I promised. It was just that there were bullets in the way,” he says.

  “Good enough,” she rasps, and he pulls her from under the defiantly heavy dead bartender. A colorful cascade of the bars sappy fluids spills down onto them from some of the onslaughts gunfire shared between two heavily armed rival clans. Ravaging the flesh of the fleeing frightened crowds, dying on the dance floor, slaughtered in their fantasies. The two keep their heads low, out of the violence, watching the bending violet lights of the gluttonous alligators energy erupt as he devours the life force of his foes in droves.

  “You see Anna, that is a reaper. I am not a reaper.”

  “I never said you were a reaper,” she says

  “Yes, you did.”

  “When?”

  “A lot when we argue.”

  “And now is the time for-”

  “Your right now’s not the time for this.”

  “Okay. We could really die here,” she says, nodding her head and staring blankly at him.

  “I don't know. This guy seems to be doing a pretty good job out there, and it's a pretty nice light show too,” he says. Anna peeks up over the bar like the soldiers in trenches peer into no machine gun nest. Seeing that the dreams, minutes ago brightly burning, are dimming and twisting into grim ghastly nightmares devoured by Yaku before her eyes. Filling her mind with horrible sights can never unsee.

  “Okay, yeah…It looks like he’s winning,” she reports, “I mean it is mostly a firefight, but there are a lot of other casualties many dreams have died. To sum it up its carnage out there.”

  “So what do you think?” he asks.

  “I think we get the hell out of here,” she says. He pecks her on the lips and springs into action, hopping over the bar in a single leap, then bounds back behind the bar a second later.

  “There's a lot more action out there than I thought,” he says.

  “Oh save me my white knight.”

  “Oh shove it,” he says and the two exchange obnoxious looks with the utmost insincerity. Watching the frenzied tempest of lights clashing overhead like magnetic fields at war. The glowing blues of Yaku's rivals are weakening then being violently overtaken, diminishing to deepening his violets now dominating the room. In a matter of minutes all the sound stops and the room is pitch black again. The sudden stripping away of the wave club’s overwhelming stimuli leaves the two in shock instantly standing in a sensory vacuum. Hearing only the footsteps of a giant's shoe clacking against the synthetic floor. The two look at each other and stay as still as sleeping cats, the footsteps stop, leaving a few moments utterly blank black silence.

  “I can see the smoke of your cigarette,” Yaku says with glitch rasp.

  “Idiot!” she says smacking his shoulder.

  “What?” he shrugs.

  “Come out come out wherever you are. Your right there. Don’t worry it's me your friend.”

  “I think we should go out, he's saying nice things,” says Cider.

  “Yeah with the voice of someone who has the flu, in hell,” she says.

  “Relax, what else can you do. It's funny you know, how necessity has a way of freeing one from the worry of doing,” Cider says.

  “Yeah I guess,” she frowns, then stands. Cider right behind her after admiring her behind, pretends to be a bartender.

  “So what will it be friend?” he asks.

  “Hahahaha, we should be going, others will be arriving soon,” the thin glutton says. He's the only one alive on a blank checkered dance floor, littered with those who've died in their dreams, and others for their ideas of honor. Yakutom is barely containing the energy he consumed, he's overflowing with purplish plasma spilling from his scarred shoulder blade. His bones oscillate under his skin, making him appear his body is vibrating.

  “We have to go now. This is the match that will ignite the flames of wrath and vengeance that will engulf the clans to cinders. They will come looking here first, that’s how the fire will spread,” Yaku says smiling. The two stand stunned in mind numbing awe, as their senses go through withdrawal from the all enveloping overwhelming sensory stimuli of the wave club suddenly snapping to a soundless pitch black nothing. Yaku huffs from his satchel, his life line, that he breathes like a deep sea diver breathes from an air tank. She sees Yaku, bound to a physical addiction that resembles his insatiable lust for the energy around to feed his own euphoria. They leave the wreckage of shattered bodies and broken glass, the whole club now devoid of any movement, of anything for the senses to feel, dead and empty.

  They're thirty stories high in a flying car at a vision blurring speed. The two and Yaku are in the middle car of a three car convoy, moving up down and diagonally with complete disregard for traffic laws or others. The glutton fervently huffs his powder, almost pulling the whole satchel into his lungs. The oinking, snorting squeals of him clearing his nose proceeds a rocket passing an inch under their vehicle. Exploding with no flame against a glass facade, heating the glass to burst outward and cooling a second later into the shape of a liquid rose frozen in place.

  “Did you see that?” she says with her face pressed against the window, admiring the rocket’s flower like blast wave spread tens of feet across the side of the wall.

  “Lose them,” Yaku orders his driver. The goon’s speed up, way up, evading and reprising with rockets of their own. Rocket propelled grenades are the best to blow enemies out of the sky and onto the street. Blow out one of the millions of apartments of this colossal illuminated metropolis.

  “It is rising,” Yaku says looking around to the thunderous cascade of explosions blowing the surface glass of every colored structure into dust, with cars streaking through them flying everywhere fighting falling and swooping fill his field of view. The clan's cars are at full scale war, whizzing through the sky and streets like fighting hornets while raining rockets at each other, vitrifying a rose garden of their explosions on the city’s glass surfaces in the process. A kamikaze slams into the car in front of them, stripping it from the air with a splash of fire.
>
  Their car banks wildly down and left, then rises higher and higher. Leading a car tailing them up to a moment of no momentum, free floating, free of G force, then plunging downward for seconds, banking left to wrap around a tall building. Dipping swerving at several streets, exhausting all his best tricks, the driver can’t shake the bogies consistently at their seven o' clock. He slams on the breaks, cuts the steer shaft sharply right and stomps on reverse as hard as he can. Cider and Anna are thrown into the seats in front of them. Yaku riding shotgun, smashes the windshield with his face. The driver, the only one wearing his seat belt is fine. Anna aims a rocket launcher with the rocket a foot from Cider’s face. A boom, as the rocket leaves a burst of smoke that fills the car pushing them to their seats and yaku’s face again against the windshield. Sending a refractive streak of heat through the air toward their persistent pursuers now at their nine thirty, exploding flamelessly into the back bumper of the fourth car, that crashes into the one in front of it, which sideswipes the second car and falls into a clump of wreckage cart wheeling across the street before completely bursting into a ring of fire.

  “Wooooooo! good timing Carrots hahaha,” Cider yells smiling through a face of ash.

  “That was so awesome,” she says riding the rush of releasing such destruction, in defense at that.

  “I know I totally seen it, it was like waaaa bewwww bang!” he says.

  “Bewwwww,” she says in glee, trying to mime the sound of the rocket streaking through the air “Bewwwww baaaang boooom,” she continues. Yakutom pulls his face from the windshield just as volley of flak cannons tear through the side of their vehicle, slaying the driver though hitting no one else with anything but shrapnel. The glutton grabs the wheel to steady their erratic path.

  “Someone needs to drive,” Yaku says.

  “You're in the front seat, why can’t you drive,” Cider asks.

  “My head is a bit rattled,” he says rubbing his bloodied head, “and I’m a boss not a driver.”

  “I know what you mean but, it’s kinda....” he says rubbing his chin.

  “Backwards,” she completes his thought.

  “I don't care. I need to get back to the suite. Ahh, the sweet sights my eyes will behold from my suite. From my throne,” he says with an appetite longing for the destruction of his own design.

  “Whatever man, then we’re free to go right? no demon stuff chasing us or purple aura, whatever that shit is,” he says.

  “My energy,” Yaku says gracefully.

  “Yeah all that stuff, yup let's go,” she says, pushing Cider, who takes a few adrenaline soaked seconds to unbuckle the dead driver’s seat belt, and throw the corpse from the sky high car to take his seat.

  “Yup,” he says reaching for the shifter.

  “Seat belt,” she says, minding the importance of safety.

  “Yes dear,” Cider says with a sigh as he accelerates. Hardly able to see through the shattered windshield, they horribly soar around the air. Barely evading their attackers and nearly crashing tens of times, each time Cider yelling, “It's the learning curve,” or something to that affect.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says nearly sailing into a billboard attempting to assail the airborne pursuers persisting at their seven o’ clock.

  “Our lives,” she shouts back, rolling around in the backseat, at times almost eating the seat’s stuffing. Yaku’s rolling pearl beads in his hand while huffing face fulls of his powder. Humming and giggling, then grinning and lightly singing something which Anna catches a part of his muttering, “around the ro......ashes, ashes,” as rockets resound all around them with Anna and Yaku sloppily returning fire. The explosions everywhere they whizz past are melting and cooling into roses and creating Rayleigh waves collecting and quaking across every surface of the bioluminescent glass metropolis. Yaku loves every second, delighted as a bird in a bath, humming his tune ever louder to the rising carnage and the rectangular structures fragmenting into smaller chunks as the war rages on. Easier for the glutton to chew and greedily consume the energy of.

  “Thank you,” Yaku says reaching out to shake Cider’s hand, who does so readily while not slowing down. Making Anna think he must be doing it purposefully to scare her, he can’t be that reckless she thinks, and rethinks. She shakily shakes Yaku's cold hand in a forced formal way, still not sure if he'll suck out her life force or worse.

  “Thank you for helping make my destiny a reality,” he says in an elated tone, “and you, good luck to you both,” Yaku says with one last huff of his powder, then without word or warning leaps from the passenger’s side of the car speeding six hundred feet from the ground glowing with tons of shattered glass.

  “We're leaving immediately right?...Right? where’s the station?” she asks as a demand.

  “What? oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Screw the station this place is going away, and fast,” he says as they zoom as far from the glutton as they can, as fast as they can. The lines spreading across the shattering glass thicken, forming into large faces and figures reaching out to cover every surface of the city. That seems to follow the two, haunting them as they pass through the crumbling cascade of continually fracturing fulgent chunks of glass. Diminishing as they fall, becoming niveous clouds rolling down to the ground, until each fragment becomes individually invisible to the naked eye. The last of this Alto’s wind they’ll ever know sweeps across their skin and ears as they vanish into a silent white void, absolutely devoid of any and all stimulus.

  The view from the gluttons suite is a sight to behold, though Yakutom is too busy engorging himself in the monumental amounts of energy pouring into him from every direction at once. Absorbing lake size amounts of energy with each passing second is paralyzing his body in blissful consumption of the life force of countless lives converging by the second. He's drinking directly from the rivers of life by absorbing their souls in death, in doing so he's becoming both life and death of this Alto. The energy tasting to the palette of his soul like the purest water a desert thirsted person will ever taste. Enraptured in the elation of even the slightest fraction of this places power, and still not contented, knowing that eventually he'll eventually devour it all. With a rattling gargle of his vocal chords he rolls to his side trying to smother himself with his beloved satchel, but dropping it. Spilling it to the ground, and struggling to reach it, but paralyzed in his own amassing of energy, unable to move even an inch toward his prized powder.

  The ocean of energy becomes too enormous to be contain, intensifying to greater concentration then his mortal cage can contain. His flesh starts bulging and rupturing, though his face still holds an expression of unadulterated bliss as he’s trembling to being torn apart. He forms into a deep purple ethereal sphere that erupts in the snap of a finger with the effect of thermonuclear bomb flamelessly exploding, instantly vaporizing anything within ten miles in any direction and staining every surface with the nuclear shadows of a city full of fleeing people. Then atomizing what remains of the metropolis with secondary, light bending aftershocks of collapsing and expanding undulations of massive force that are only visible as refraction, and resemble massive spherical Rayleigh waves the size of tsunamis. Virtually effacing and erasing every shattered shred of matter they touch, until there is nothing left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Light to bright

  Driving for what must be by days by now, through a niveous white that’s been blank but for a lightly drawn line of the horizon. As they near the line, it begins to bend, then wiggles and breaks into separate squiggles and contours, creating soft shapes under a far off milk white sun.

  “Did you see that?” she asks.

  “Yeah, there’s another one,” he says, pointing to another line spreading toward them and separating in the same way as the first, then another and another that. With each new horizon line nearing and rising into shape and contour of the scene around them, of jagged rock faces and wind assembled sand dunes are rendered to greater detail. This cycle of horizon li
nes gaining greater clarity continues for a hundred lines more, until the scene they're driving through washes into shape spreading and seeping slowly, darkening and granting depth to their desert surroundings. The two take pleasure in shouting out the shapes they see out of the distance of each nearing horizon, until they eventually emerge into richer strokes, swipes and washes until converging and amassing to immerse the two in a single recognizable place. They’re driving like bats out of hell through a landscape of light pencil strokes, blowing charcoal and blotting black ink stains. The seeping dark's and thickening lines are defining and lifting the remaining blankness into discernible shapes with shades of gray rendering curves and angles between the darkest blacks and the lightest whites. Seeing the sandy monochrome desert they’re speeding through, she instead watches the rising shapes arising to fill her view, staring at the edges of cloud or inkblot butterflies that become what they eye sees in them.

  She’s waiting in the car as he goes in to use the rotary phone at a fill up station. The scene is mostly monochrome with tinges of dour color, and wood weathered over a century by dry heat and windblown sand. Cider's standing with a finger plugged in one ear, rocking and swaying as he speaks into the receiver. From the car she can't tell if he’s happy or enraged, as he shakes his fists, then jumps up and down. In the middle of a vaguely rendered desert on the verge of being completely visible, everything has the look seeing it through a cathode ray tube television, really old television set. Ching! the bell of the screen door rings as it opens, followed by the thwack of it closing behind him. Smoking and strolling past the gas pumps with a wide eyed grin. The crunching sand under his feet sounds scratchy, their voices are rasped to the other, sound carries through a low fidelity speaker. Him, he's something, a twister of his own trouble, floating by without a care, she laughs at the thought, and him saying he knows where he is going, and that it'll be brighter for them both, something that she’s beginning to wonder.