by John O'Brien
One such creature, a secretary in a law firm whose only thought moments ago was of the upcoming weekend, ended her fight when she encountered a moment of clarity; seeking an end to the suffering, she leapt from a fourth-story window. Her long brown hair streamed behind her as she plummeted, the air rushing by her face unfelt as she welcomed the release at the end of her fall. With tears in the corners of her eyes, she hit the ground with a heavy thud, bounced, and landed again. Her bones shattered, but the fall failed to deliver her—she lived on. What should have been a release only brought more pain. The hunger continued unabated and she was left unable to seek an end to her agony.
A scant few others were able to make identical choices, some successful and others meeting with the same failure. Broken bodies lay on the streets, trapped inside of vehicles, or wandering with gunshot wounds. Women were the most successful, through overdoses and sliced arteries. With most of the afflicted, the instinct for survival outweighed the desire to end their lives.
In the deep waters, for those unlucky enough not to immediately succumb, subs became submerged tombs for the dead, soulless, and revenant. It was the same for ships plying the waterways. Most of those who were left without souls succumbed within a week due to dehydration. Those whose souls had been ripped from their bodies mimicked their familiar motions. The revenants, their souls hovering beside their bodies, meandered in passageways, staterooms, kitchens, and engine rooms, waiting for a pure soul—an event that would most likely never occur. They were forever bound.
Survivors? Yes, there were survivors. They were the ones who happened to be far enough below the surface that the black wave never reached them. They emerged from missile silos, opal and coal mines, subways, bunkers, parking garages set deep underground, deep basement offices, and underground storage vaults. Most of the survivors were on the dayside of earth, as most of the others lay in their beds waiting for alarms that would never go off. Except for those in deep bunkers, caves, and people working nightshifts underground, those on the dark side of the globe were hit by the third wave. The survivors emerged from the depths at the end of their shifts, or finally made their way topside from stalled subway cars, only to find that they had surfaced in an entirely new world.
Many of those in populated areas were immediately beset by revenants. They sensed the presence of intact souls nearby and rushed toward them. Survivors emerging from subways found themselves immediately surrounded. Opaque revenant shades, hovering in and out of the bodies, lunged outward with astonishing speed. Plunging into open, shocked mouths and nostrils, the revenant soul entered bodies and partially ripped intact souls out, leaving another revenant in its place. With that act, it was somehow able to affect its own release—a soul for a soul. The revenants that walked the surface of the world became reapers of souls.
* * * * * *
CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research): Switzerland
The pain…Oh god, the pain! Werner’s mind screamed. It wasn’t really a thought, but rather an overall sensation that incorporated everything.
It wasn’t even really pain. At least, not in the normal way pain was felt. It was like every muscle, every fiber and nerve was being torn all at once. But, it went deeper than that…much deeper. The agony was somehow different. It was as if his brain was telling him how it should feel and sending signals to experience it. Rather than his nerves sending signals to his brain, his brain was sending those signals to his nerves, and then they were returning them. He felt like this was occurring in his very soul. He never thought there could be an agony like this.
This…This is what real pain feels like.
A stubbed toe or broken arm hurts, but there was always the underlying knowledge that it would fade after having been endured for a while. This went on, and on, and on without end.
The hunger for release…Oh God…The hunger!
A deep abiding hunger that could never be sated, a need that couldn’t be satisfied. In moments, he had a touch of clarity, a momentary sense of wholeness during which he knew who he was. But, then there came the tugging and pulling, something that he always knew was coming.
Oh God! Here it comes again.
A tearing sensation and an accompanying agony that couldn’t be described. He screamed, the shriek not only audible, but ringing through his mind and soul. A scream that echoed across the universe, traversing its breadth in an instant.
He searched for relief, for the sense of a pure one nearby…one that had an attached soul. He wanted it, needed it. He needed this to end. A sense of cold swept through him and he felt another moment of togetherness…he was complete, but with the memory of the pain that he knew would come again.
Help me…Please help me!
The tearing began. An internal screeching. Fingers raking across a chalkboard the size of the universe. It filled everything.
I need release...Please…Please…Please…Oh God…Nooo!
His world turned to the cold of deep space, felt in the very marrow of his bones. He saw a wall drawn toward him, or him toward it. He wasn’t sure which it was…perhaps both? If he had the capacity to wince, he would with the collision. But, he felt nothing, just the ice and pain inside. He thawed out, or that was the sensation, and found himself on the other side of the wall.
That’s not possible, a small corner of his mind thought, and then even that thought was gone.
I neeed…I neeed
Introductions
Eidolon (apparition)
─ A spirit image of a living or dead person in ancient Greek thought.
─ An imprint or image of the body left after death.
─ In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon is the spirit of a living or dead person, a shade or phantom lookalike of the human form.
* * * * * *
Sam Donaldson
“Ouch,” Erin said, stumbling forward to catch her balance.
Sam reached out to grab her arm with a quickness and grace that belied his middle age. “Easy, sweetheart. You can’t just stare at the walls and ceiling and still expect to remain upright. You have to keep an eye on your path as well.”
“Another philosophy lesson, Daddy?” Erin asked, looking up with a playful grin.
“No, just one in physics. If you kick a rock, you will lose every time,” Sam replied, releasing her arm.
“You’re such a dork.”
“The last in a long line of dorks. In fact, I’m quite proud of my dorkiness, and let it shine through at every opportunity.”
“Obviously.”
Sam looked at his daughter’s face. Lit only by the reflected glow of their flashlights, her eyes seemed to sparkle. Although part of her face was cast in shadows, her smile brightened the entire cavern…a smile that never failed to send a rush of warmth coursing through his heart. Erin had been a shining light in his life ever since she emerged into this world sixteen years ago. She meant the world to him; she was his whole life.
Both flashlights focused down the tunnel they had been traversing for a while. Beyond the beams and their radiated light, darkness prevailed so completely that Sam could envision the end of world lying past their lights. Along the rocky floor, a line of mostly rotted railway timbers stretched, gradually fading into nothingness as it continued past the range of their flashlights. They carefully threaded their way across the splintered wood, finding and avoiding the occasional rusting railway spike. Their shadows stretched long behind them, with secondary shadows dancing on the walls, warped by their roughhewn nature and making it appear that phantoms followed their path. The smell that reached Sam’s nostrils was like many other caves he had been in; this one dry and musty rather than the dank smell found in caves where water leaked from the ceilings or ran down walls. Finding the old tunnel entrance alongside the road, they had decided to pull over and explore. That had been about an hour ago, and they had been following the old mining tunnel ever since.
They had started out on the road trip a couple of days ago, a summer ritual for the past f
ew years. Toward the end of the school year, when the rainy weather of the northwest began letting up and the sun made an occasional appearance, they would open the atlas and find a destination to visit. When the weather broke for good and summer was firmly entrenched, they packed their bags, threw them in the trunk, purchased munchies and drinks, and exited the driveway to explore for a couple of weeks. It was a time Sam looked forward to each year, the two of them on the road with only an open-ended plan to guide them.
Sam smiled as Erin, completely ignoring his advice to keep an eye on where she was going, edged toward one of the tunnel walls. Focusing her beam, she leaned forward and ran her fingers along the roughhewn rocky surface. She was certain she was going to find a vein of gold from which she would be able to pluck an extruding nugget.
“They can’t have found and taken it all,” she had said, announcing her intentions after entering.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high, but I’m sure there’s something they left behind,” Sam had replied.
Sam pulled his jacket tighter against the chill in the tunnel as he watched Erin carefully examine the walls and pillage through some of the lose rubble. The cold reminded him that they should be heading back to the car soon, but Erin seemed so enthused with her search for hidden treasure. It was these kinds of moments that made him content, especially when considering the horror of the moment when it became just the two of them.
* * * * * *
He had been a staff sergeant on his third tour, stationed in the Khandahar Province of Afghanistan. He had been pulled off an operation and told the news: His wife and daughter had been involved in an accident. That was the only detail he had been given at the time. He agonized over every minute he had to sit in the stuffy office waiting for his emergency leave paperwork to be processed. Fear and anxiety built until he thought he would explode. Finally, just as he was about to depart on the long flight home, he had been brought word that as his wife and daughter had been returning from a late Christmas shopping trip, a drunk driver had crossed the lanes of the road they were traveling and hit them head on. They were both still unconscious in an ICU.
The flight home had been agonizingly slow. Emotions warred within him as he tried to will the aircraft to fly faster. There were countless times when he thought hours had passed, only to look at his watch and see that it had just been minutes. He thought the flight would never arrive. Upon landing, he had been pulled into a small office of the Armed Forced Special Services and given the sad news that his wife had passed away while he had been en route and that his daughter was still in a coma.
He remembered the moment he walked into the hospital and stood at the door of his daughter’s room. His eyes had flooded with tears, seeing her with tubes running everywhere and hooked up to a ventilator. Deep bruises encircled her eyes and bandages covered the deep cuts she had sustained. He had never felt so helpless, seeing Erin lying motionless and hooked up to machines. The room had blurred as silent tears streamed down his cheeks. That, coupled with the knowledge that he would never see his wife again—never exchange the witty banter that defined many of their moments, never see her smile or hear her unabashed laughter, never hold her close during the quiet moments in the evening—was almost too much.
In a shell-shocked daze, he listened as doctors came and went to tell him of his daughter’s status. The endless days of sitting beside his motionless daughter, of anxiety with no release…helpless. Of being told that Erin had swelling on her brain but that an operation at that point was too risky. They would monitor and evaluate the possibility at a later point. And finally, that moment of being told that she may never recover, and that if she did, there were substantial odds that she would have chronic brain dysfunction.
He became an emotional wreck. Sam didn’t recognize the world around him, was unconscious of its existence, and merely existed in the space he occupied. He dealt with his wife’s funeral in an almost detached fashion. Events had proved too much and sent his mind fleeing the world, forcing it inward. He had been pulled from a combat zone immediately following a firefight and had been flown across half the world without enough time to come down from the combat stresses, and then was thrown immediately into an entirely different magnitude of stress.
Without the time to de-stress and unable to find an outlet, the pressure built. A deep-seated anger settled within. He was angry that he wasn’t able to make it in time to see his wife one last time, angry that the driver of the other vehicle made it through with hardly a scratch. It mattered little that he had been charged with manslaughter. The man had entered into his life and harmed his family, and he wanted retribution—he needed an outlet for his mounting anger. Thoughts of murder cycled through his head; there had been a couple of times when his consciousness surfaced enough to find himself standing on the walkway outside of the hospital, on his way to end the life of the man who had harmed his family.
At his core, he knew that wasn’t right, and that it would mean he couldn’t stay with Erin. The emotions continued to roil inside, going from an anger that couldn’t be contained to deep sadness. Thoughts of murder turned to thoughts of suicide—he needed to escape from the pain. The one thing that stayed his hand was that Erin was still there…still alive…and she needed him to be around when she awoke. There was never a doubt in him that she would eventually wake, and that allowed a marginal amount of sanity to remain. She needed him, and he needed her.
Then, there was the day that the anger left. One moment, it was all consuming, and the next, it fled as if it had never been there. That moment came from a call in the middle of the night, waking Sam from a restless sleep, when the doctor on the other end of the line told him that Erin was awake. To this day, he can’t remember getting dressed or the drive to the hospital. He vaguely remembers the doctor saying something to him as he rushed by and into Erin’s room. The bruises had healed and bandages had been removed some time ago. Lying on her bed, she looked at him and smiled.
“Hi, Daddy,” she had hoarsely croaked.
He fell to his knees on the cold, linoleum floor and wept, the tears cleansing the anger from his soul.
The roller coaster hadn’t ended with Erin’s waking, but little else seemed to matter. Although still deeply saddened with the loss of his wife, Erin was with him and this softened that blow. There were still the seemingly endless visits to specialists, each one telling him that his daughter would have a difficult time in school and her learning would be slowed. In his opinion, that hadn’t happened in the least. Sure, she had her moments when comprehension was difficult and she blankly stared at him, not understanding what he was trying to tell her, but her heart was larger than the heavens above.
He had been offered a hardship discharge, but Sam elected to take an early retirement instead. He didn’t receive as much as he would have if he’d stayed in for the duration, but it was enough to get by. With that and from the odd jobs he did for folks, it was enough. And he was able to spend time with Erin. At times, it seemed like it was just the two of them wrapped in the bubble of their own little world. He put his past aside, and everything he did was for her. Over time, they both healed, and the summer ritual was an important part of that.
* * * * * *
“Daddy, I found some,” Erin cried, jolting Sam from the trip down memory lane.
Her shout reverberated off the hard walls and echoed down the long tunnel. That was a game they had played for a short time while they walked along the old rail cart tracks. They shouted down the tunnel, pausing to listen to the sound of their voices fade into the dark distance. Then Erin had asked, “Daddy, what if we shouted something and heard something different echo back?” That pretty much ended the game.
Walking over to where Erin was crouched near a pile of rubble, his boots scuffing across the hard floor, he knelt down to look at a rock nestled in her palm. She moved it back and forth with the flashlight focused on it. Small goldish flecks winked from the dark surface.
“Well, I’ll be d
amned. You did find some,” Sam stated.
“I knew they couldn’t have taken it all,” she said, looking up with a smile on her face.
She then stood and placed the small rock in one of her pockets. Then, their lights went out, plunging them in total darkness.
* * * * * *
Commander Lawrence
Hours after submerging, Commander Lawrence stood in the control room feeling a little relieved. The deep-sea test had proceeded flawlessly to this point. It was now only a matter of getting the boat to the surface in one piece, heading back to shore, and parking it without putting a dent in the Navy’s new toy. The anxiousness he felt prior dissipated as the business of the test took over, but it never completely left until the deck tilted and they began rising toward the surface. He knew something could still go wrong, but it was mostly a cake walk from here on out.
As they motored slowly toward the surface, some of the anxiety returned when sonar reported no contacts. They should have passively heard the sound of their escort’s screws churning as they patrolled the test area, but there was nothing—it was quiet all around them.
Levelling off below the surface, the boat barely feeling the swells rolling above, Lawrence looked into the cramped sonar compartment. The sonarman just shook his head. Lawrence had the comm mast extended and broadcast that they were surfacing. Expecting an immediate acknowledgment, the nervousness that had begun to creep in heightened when there was no reply.
Commander Lawrence resisted the urge to pace as he raised the periscope. Pressing his eye to the viewer, he slowly rotated the scope to find the ocean empty of any vessels. Their escort was nowhere in sight. He was concerned—even if they had risen in the wrong place and their escorts were out of sight, they would have responded to the radio communications.
“Are we in the correct position?” Lawrence asked, lowering the periscope, unable to fathom how they could possibly have gone so far afield.