by James Sperl
Andrew faced Cesare but said nothing. What would happen would happen, and no amount of resourcefulness would get them out of this scrape. He recognized the harrowing truth of this in Cesare's troubled gaze just as deeply as Andrew felt it in the pit of his own stomach.
Light flooded the southern border. A crescendo of roaring motors pushed to their limit accompanied ever-increasing brightness. By the time Andrew realized what was about to occur, the impact was seconds from taking place.
Semis reinforced with steel plates and spikes rammed the vulnerable southern boundary at full speed. Vehicles employed as barricades were tossed like toy cars. Scores of bodies were sent hurtling through the air in doll-like lifelessness upon impact with the merciless machines. The trucks barreled through the remaining defenses, carving a substantial path into the heart of the community.
New Framingham was compromised.
Cars and trucks streamed in behind the semis, gunning their engines with malevolent glee, as they mowed down anyone who stood in their way. Windshields exploded from torrents of gunfire, vehicle bodies becoming riddled with hailstorms of bullets from concentrated fire that rained down from the rooftops. A car exploded in a fireball of atomic orange, but its demise was an unequal trade for the scores of other vehicles that rushed in behind it.
Cesare clamped his hand around Andrew's forearm and pulled him toward the eastern checkpoint. “We need to get out of here!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Andrew found his eyes in the madness and nodded with an urgency sapped of will. The carnage had stunned him into a moment of inaction, but Cesare pulled him back. The situation was as stark as a white dot on black paper: New Framingham was no longer safe, if it ever was to begin with. With its borders breached, the only place left to go was out.
A startling crash accompanied by a crunch of screeching metal pulled Andrew and Cesare's attention to the northern border. A similar attack was underway there, with more semi-trucks blasting through the makeshift barricades and plowing a path of destruction for the hordes of vehicles that eagerly tailed them.
Andrew eyed the scene with incredulity that ascended to awestruck terror. Even after all he had been through, after all that he had seen and experienced, human beings still found ways to shock him with their cruelty. In a time when they should have been pulling together as a species, the modus operandi of their existence persevered as it always had, the innate desire to destroy a supreme virtue that ranked above all else. Since those primordial first days when humans crawled from the water to stand on two legs, and consciousness and sentient thought invaded their brain to allow perception and emotion, humans had elected to kill rather than to survive, to erase rather than to preserve. Andrew understood the truth of this intrinsic violence now more than ever, and he gazed upon the current moment humans had created with a sickening acceptance: New Framingham would fall. He wondered if it didn't deserve to.
Vehicles poured into the once-thriving community. Heavy-duty trucks and cars retrofitted with armor bulldozed the Sleep Zone. They ground bed frames and mattresses into the asphalt beneath smoking black tires. People attempting to flee were run over, limbs mangled, heads crushed.
A swell of crackling gunfire rose up from the southern border. Through the exhaust and flames, after more vehicles had penetrated New Framingham's weak defenses and sped inside, the next wave of the assault began. Hundreds of silhouetted figures, with guns blazing, pushed into the community. The forms of unknown assailants fell in horrific numbers, as the whole of New Framingham's rooftop defenses turned their sights on the marauding force. Bodies collapsed by the dozens, leaving their comrades to navigate the accumulation of corpses as if they were nothing more than misplaced cordwood.
A secondary assault began at the northern checkpoints. Shadowy figures stormed the destroyed gates, their faces flash-illuminated by microbursts of port exhaust from their weapons. The dead piled up swiftly. Unlike the expansive and open southern border, the northern gates were narrower affairs that created choke points. The enemy army became congested as they tried to rush inside, their numbers clogging in the limited space. Gunfire rained down on them until their forward momentum nearly halted.
But it was too little too late.
The forces on the roofs began to scatter once their aim transformed from an exterior, unidirectional enemy to an interior, omnidirectional mob. Brave men and women rushed to the rooftop edges and fired down into the parking lot where the teeming, outsider army swarmed. Bodies toppled to the asphalt, both from above and on the ground, the night air becoming saturated with the cries of the dead and dying.
Andrew watched this scene straight out of Hell play out as if he were an omniscient observer incapable of sustaining mortal injury. The carnage seemed to swirl around him, as he once again became stilled into silent consideration of this madhouse spectacle. And once again, Cesare was there to pull him back from the brink.
He yelled at Andrew from directly in front of his face, though Andrew couldn't discern what he was saying. His voice was muddied and distant as if he spoke through water. Andrew tried to focus on Cesare's lips and the words that came from them. The eclipsed sound began to filter back—shouts of pain and anguish, rage and fear. Cesare ducked from a nearby explosion but promptly sprang back into Andrew's field of vision. He took Andrew's face in his hands, and Andrew felt the world rush to meet him.
“We need to go, my friend,” Cesare said with unsettling calm.
Andrew blinked away his remaining stasis and forged a nod. He felt Naomi's tender body writhe in his arms. He sensed the heat from a nearby fire on his cheek and tasted the acrid smoke from gunfire on his tongue.
Then he heard the Sound as it ripped across the sky.
At any other moment, people would have ceased activities to regard the terrifying noise in kept-breath silence. But everyone was too consumed with destroying one another to be bothered with its presence. The killing and atrocities continued unabated, relegating the Sound to an all-too-appropriate soundtrack to score the end of the world.
Andrew burrowed his way back to the present. He centered on Cesare. “The safe house!” he shouted hoarsely. “It's our only option.”
Cesare nodded furiously. “We have to try!” He took Andrew's arm and maneuvered him in the direction of the eastern checkpoint. Both men adopted a fast trot. “The attack seems to be concentrated primarily on the northern and southern entrances!” he yelled above the din. “They aren't attacking through the eastern and western gates!”
Andrew raised his head and locked on the eastern checkpoint, as he rushed toward it. While some of the residents were engaged in skirmishes outside the perimeter, the vast majority had trained their weapons inward to fire upon the invaders already inside.
Cesare swerved toward a downed man, whose chest gurgled crimson from a gaping hole. He wrested a rifle from his curled fingers then rejoined Andrew in mid-step, chambering a round to the semi-automatic weapon he had just acquired.
“We'll probably have to fight our way out!” he cried. “But we're as good as dead if we stay here!” Andrew only panted. “Just keep Naomi behind me, and I'll cover our retreat until we can—”
Andrew scrambled to a stop at Cesare's abrupt, unfinished sentence. Turning, he discovered Cesare sprawled on the ground. Andrew gaped in mounting horror then collapsed onto his knees beside his friend, who, he was aghast to discover, was beyond help. Where a handsome, young face had been was now a partially gaping hole of violence. Red, seeping gore splattered beneath the place where his head lay. His one remaining eye stared indifferently into the darkness above him.
Andrew sank back onto his haunches and let his eyes drift to nowhere. Naomi shrieked incessantly. Snot streamed from her nose, rivulets of tears tracking her face. She screamed from a place beyond the mere discomfort of infancy, her cries a full-throated response to the lunacy that surrounded her.
He made no attempt to quiet her.
CHAPTER 71
“What the hell's
happening?” Dustin said though Clarissa sensed it rather than heard it. “I can't see myself!”
She clutched his hand tightly even as she marveled at this new form of communication: Holy shit. We can talk with our minds!
“Can you hear me?” she thought. She felt Dustin's hands twitch.
“Clarissa? Is...is that you?”
“Yes. Now don't move.”
“How are we doing this? I can hear you, but it's like it's in my head and not something I—”
“Be quiet! And don't move a muscle!”
Though she couldn't see Dustin, she knew he understood the reason for her urgent pleading. Not ten feet from where they stood, a spidery creature more than twice their height lowered itself from some unseen place in the murk. It appeared to investigate the area with meticulous precision, lethargically sweeping its black head in a purposeful arc.
Dustin's hand shook terribly in hers. Clarissa could feel the shivering radiate up his arm. Neither of them had ever seen anything like the spindly monster that probed the darkness with unsettling patience, its death-black limbs groping randomly. Clarissa was convinced it had seen them, but it failed to find them. The terrifying moment revealed a weakness: They can be tricked.
She and Dustin had only managed to make themselves disappear seconds before the thing clambered down to examine the area. But it seemed confused as if it questioned what it thought it had seen. A simple swipe in her and Dustin's direction from a wiry limb would have all but confirmed its suspicions, but it only puttered about in creepily elegant movements. After an endless moment, the creature reached upward and hoisted itself into the pitch.
“I think it's gone,” Clarissa thought.
“Why can't I see myself?” Dustin said in his mind, panicked.
“It's something I learned to do the last time I was here,” she replied. “I could make myself invisible. And apparently, it's transferable—just like I hoped.”
“Well, I'm glad you can't see me. I think I pissed my pants.”
“You and me both.”
“How are we able to do this? How can we talk to each other in our minds?”
Clarissa shrugged but forgot that Dustin couldn't see her. “I don't know. I guess we're just willing it to happen.”
“This is fucking crazy.”
“To say the least.”
Dustin took Clarissa's hand with both of his. “I'm sorry about your friend.”
Now it was Clarissa who was glad they were invisible; she didn't want Dustin to see her succumb to the initial stage of grief. “Thanks,” she thought and wiped away tears no one would ever see.
“So this place is a true dreamworld,” Dustin projected. “Whatever we can imagine becomes real.”
Clarissa sniffed silently. “I think so.”
“Okay. What do we do now?”
Something moved in the deepest recesses of the Nothing Place, but Clarissa found it oddly unaffected her. They can't see me.
“We use it to our advantage,” she thought.
“All right. How?”
“Whatever these things are, I think they're limited by what they can do. We stood a pebble flick away from one of those creatures, and it didn't know we were here. I think they have to see us physically. This place is new to us, but I don't think it's without restrictions for them.”
Clarissa could almost feel Dustin's hand absorb understanding.
“Which means as long we remain invisible,” he started, “we should be able to go wherever we want to in here.”
“Precisely.”
“Okay. So where do we go?”
“There,” Clarissa thought, as she pointed at the distant light, once again forgetting that Dustin couldn't see her. “Toward that light.” She felt Dustin's body shift and knew he looked where she indicated.
“I see it. But what do we do to it once we get there?”
Clarissa had given this a tremendous amount of thought. A ghost of an idea had sprung to mind upon her last visit to the Nothing Place, but that idea had cemented into a concrete belief now that she knew she could physically manifest whatever she wanted. With their imagination their only limitation, she was convinced they had the ability to put an end to this cosmological nightmare once and for all.
“We blow it the fuck up.”
“Do what?”
“You heard me. We get within spitting distance of that cursed portal or whatever that thing is, and we imagine enough nuclear weapons to annihilate a solar system, and we blow this fucking place to kingdom come.”
Dustin's hand slackened. “How're we going to do that? I don't know shit about nuclear weapons. I don't even know what they look like. Do you?”
“No,” Clarissa responded. “But it's like with the flashlight and the lightsaber—I don't know that we have to. I think we can just imagine what we think it looks like as long as our vision of what it's supposed to do is clear.”
Dustin seemed to consider a reply before he thought, “So you're saying we just need to mentally create a stockpile of nuclear arms and, what, stack them by that light using our minds?”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“Jesus, this is beyond crazy.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“But...how can you be sure it will work?”
Clarissa stalled ahead of her response. “I can't. But it's the only thing that makes sense to try. If we can affect things physically in here, then there's no reason to believe that detonating a thousand nuclear weapons—a million even—won't level this place into space dust.”
The light in question throbbed ominously. Clarissa thought she detected silhouettes of people in the far distance against its ice-blue glow.
“All right,” Dustin thought after a contemplative moment. “Let's do it. How do we begin?”
“I don't know. I guess we just imagine the bombs and mentally place them by that generator light. I'll try it.” She inhaled and concentrated. “Here goes.”
A single waist-high bomb supported by aerodynamic fins appeared directly in front of her. It looked like one plucked straight out of a Road Runner/Wylie Coyote cartoon.
“What the hell?” Dustin thought loudly. He accompanied his reaction with a mental chuckle. “What is that?”
“Don't laugh! I don't know what they look like!”
“I'm not laughing. Just...why is it here instead of way over there?”
Clarissa had no answer. Perhaps there were limitations to what they could do after all.
“I don't know,” she thought. “Maybe...maybe we can only create things that exist in our immediate vicinity. Like, in order to make them real they have to be near us.”
She looked at the undulating light and felt Dustin did the same thing right at that moment.
“So we need to be standing directly in front of that thing to place our imaginary stash of bombs,” he thought.
Clarissa swallowed, and her heart galloped. “Looks that way.”
“Or do we?”
Clarissa frowned and turned toward Dustin's invisible form. “What do you mean? What're you thinking?”
“I mean maybe we don't need to be standing right next to it. Just one bomb would do pretty significant damage in here let alone several. A hundred? A thousand? Nothing should be left of this place after that magnitude of an explosion.”
While Dustin's reasoning was sound, it was rooted in logic reserved for a different world. Nothing was a guarantee.
“I hear what you're saying,” Clarissa began, “but the laws of physics as we know them may not apply here. I mean, just the fact that this place exists flies in the face of everything we thought we knew. Anything could happen. For all we know, a nuclear bomb the size of the sun could have no effect on that light from this distance. But we still have to try, and if we're going to do that, then we need to increase the odds in our favor as much as possible, which means placing the bombs as close to that gateway as we can.”
Dustin didn't reply to this, his silence, Clarissa reasoned, a
n unspoken accord. The light increased its animation. In the past few minutes, it had grown, both in size and activity. Horrifying shapes materialized from out of the blackness to stand in front of it, each one depositing flailing bundles into the maw before it slunk back into the darkness.
Blood left Clarissa's face as if suctioned out. She stepped forward and watched in terror as more creatures delivered similar squirming items into the hungry light. Realization jolted her like a Taser shot: Oh my God, she thought. Those are people. In an instant, she understood what she saw. More than that, she knew what it meant. She spun toward Dustin and groped for his shoulders.
“It's happening. Right now.”
Clarissa could almost feel him frown.
“What's happening?”
“The Sound. It's going on right at this moment. Outside of this place. Those creatures are...harvesting. Gathering up the people who're lost in here and sending them through that portal.”
She felt Dustin's body nudge toward the light.
“But sending them through for what? Why do they want us?”
“I have no earthly clue. And I'm okay with never knowing so long as we can put an end to this. But now's our shot. If that gateway is open and those poor people are being sucked away to God knows where, then our explosion should go there too. But we need to move. Fast.”
Dustin's body quivered. “All right. So...how should we do this?”
“There're too many creatures by the portal to get close,” she thought. “One of us needs to create a distraction to draw them away so the other one can place the bombs.”
Clarissa felt Dustin's hand tense. “Okay. So which one do you want to do?”
The answer was not one Clarissa wanted to give, but it was the only prudent decision to make. The safe decision.
“Since I've got more experience in here, it should be me that tries to create the bombs. No offense.”
“None taken. As much as I'd like to step up and do the chivalrous thing, you're right. I'd be afraid I couldn't make the nukes happen when the time came.”