by J. D. Laird
The force is too much. The combined weight of both Gabriel and the creature, and the crumbling integrity of the building, prove too much for the fire escape. The staircase retreats and pulls away from the apartment building’s side. Rusted metal creaks as the bolts holding the emergency stairway to the building snap off. Gabriel grips tightly to the bannister and the creature screams as the fire escape falls across the alleyway. The fire escape’s upper portion peals away as the lower half remains intact. With a diagonal lean, the metal staircase comes down and crashes into the adjacent building. The force of the impact throws Gabriel free.
Crashing through a window of the adjacent building, Gabriel flies forward covered in broken glass. His body is disoriented from being thrown from the collapsing fire escape and Gabriel closes his eyes. He tries to regain his sense of direction. Turning onto his back, Gabriel sees he has fallen through the window into an apartment. The creaking fire escape looms outside, threatening to further its ascent at any moment. For the time being, the decrepit stairs remain pinned between the two buildings in the alleyway.
Landing near a couch, Gabriel uses the armrest to pull himself to his feet. Nothing is broken. Gabriel’s body is bruised but not overwhelmed his pain. His eyes scan the scene for the creature.
On the floor. Gabriel spies the creature’s firearm device. It lays abandoned, this weapon that creates bursts of green light. Gabriel approaches the foreign object cautiously. He keeps a wary eye on the fire escape, waiting for the creature to emerge.
The device has the shape of a gun, just like Gabriel had first noticed. Only it is bulkier than any gun Gabriel has ever seen. There are several dials on the side of it and a few screens with digital readouts that display symbols that Gabriel doesn’t understand. It has a handle attached to what looks like a trigger. The trigger Gabriel thinks he knows how to use. He reaches for it. The pull of his sense of curiosity is too much not to.
Out of the shadow an arm strikes Gabriel under the chin and he flies backwards. Soaring through the air, Gabriel crashes into a wall near a furnace in the corner. His brain rattles inside of his head. The plaster on the wall is cracked from where he has crashed into it. The creature screams and reaches for its weapon. Gabriel knows he can’t let the creature get control of the device.
A fireplace poker leans against the furnace and Gabriel decides to equip it as his new tool. Gabriel grabs the handle of the fire iron and crosses the distance between himself and the monster quickly. Swinging the poker like a bat, choking up on his grip, Gabriel swipes at the creature with the crooked prong of the poker facing his target. The prong chips into the beast’s forehead causing the creature to reel backwards howling. The beast’s dark red blood sprays through the air.
Whatever had protected the creature from Gabriel’s bullets doesn’t stop this blow from his new weapon. Seeing the blood Gabriel feels revitalized. His anger wells up in his chest again, only this time the feeling is richer. The feeling is fuller by having succeeded in injuring his foe.
He charges the creature again, hollering a mighty battle cry. The prong flies through the air again, but this time the creature is ready. It catches the prong with its hand, clamping its claws around it. The creature hisses.
Gabriel tries to pull his weapon free but his monstrous opponent is too strong. With a powerful kick, it strikes Gabriel’s knee and he falls to the floor onto his back.
The fire poker is thrown to the side, the creature dismissing it. Gabriel is vulnerable again, on his back. He reaches for his flashlight. Before he can wrap his hands around it the creature is on him, however, pinning his shoulders to the floor with its powerful hands. Its fearsome reptilian paws press into him, with more force being applied the more he tries the move. The creature looks straight into Gabriel’s eyes. A wicked tongue then creeps out of the being’s mouth and licks Gabriel’s face. Gabriel is helpless to stop it.
Another screech from the creature and the sound echoes off the walls of the empty apartment. The powerful being places a thick and clawed hand on Gabriel’s chest, and wraps its other hand around the side of Gabriel’s head. With his hands free Gabriel strikes out. He punches and claws at the horrid being’s scaled flesh. He attacks its armored arms but only succeeds in breaking the flesh of his own knuckles. Gabriel tries scratching at the creature’s head, but it has reared back its head out of reach.
The hand encircling Gabriel’s head tightens and Gabriel tries to wiggle free. The thumb of the creature’s hand digs into Gabriel’s left eye. He screams as the talon-like finger punctures his eye socket. Pain unlike anything Gabriel has experienced before shoots through his brain and makes his whole body feel sick. His stomach turns and his limbs flail. Over his own screams he thinks he can hear what sounds like laughter coming from the foul being on top of him as it continues to work its thumb into his eye.
Gabriel’s hands gropes for something, anything to save him in the moment. He finds salvation when his right hand wraps itself around something metallic. It is the discarded fire iron. Gabriel brings the poker up and over his head. He then quickly repays the creature for his own pain.
The creature makes its own screams as it falls off Gabriel. From the horrid beast’s own eye socket it pulls the fire poker away. Adrenaline flows through Gabriel from the ferocity of the fight and allows him to overcome the pain that radiates from his eye. He rolls away from the bellowing creature as it claws at its own missing eye. Behind Gabriel is the creature’s weapon. Gabriel crawls for it and snatches it into his hand.
He springs to his feet and Gabriel rounds on the creature who is now charging towards him. Gabriel grips the device with two hands and places both pointer fingers on the trigger. He aims the end of the weapon at the creature and sees the blood running down its grotesque face.
In the half a second that follows Gabriel is transported back in time. For a brief moment he sees himself with his father, back on the plains of Arizona. He is taken back to the day when his father had first handed him a gun and told him to point it towards a tree. Gabriel remembers the lessons that his father had taught him; to breathe out when you pull the trigger, to keep your body relaxed, and to not tense up. Gabriel’s father’s voice reminds himself, “This gun is a tool, just like any other. The pistol is like a hammer and the bullets are like its nails.”
Gabriel pulls the trigger.
36 Madison
It isn’t until they reach St. Louis that Madison is truly ready to believe. Even now, however, Madison’s sense of reality is struggling to incorporate all of the new information she is receiving.
When she first sees the cars abandoned on the roadways, and the holes in them, Madison suspects that maybe there has been an attack from an enemy nation. She thinks that some new weapon has been implemented. Some new terror that cuts through surfaces and blows holes in structures. Madison holds onto this belief for miles until she finally has to let it go. Exit after exit on the highway, car after car, each one has the identical circular cutout. A missing portion of a vehicle where a person had most likely sat. The cuts are too precise and have been done with too much accuracy for a single weapon to target. No weapon could so perfectly target human beings in this way, not to this scale. And the scale is enormous.
All of Madison’s theories, and the theories of her colleagues back at the mountain base, had been close. Yet, none of them had fully understood what had happened.
When they had lost their satellite connection they had suspected it had either been an attack on the base or something wrong with the global satellite network. The more Madison drives the more she is sure that the entire country has been hit, if not the entire world. Power is out everywhere. The electrical blackout had been global, Madison decides. It had affected anything that ran on electricity. None of the clocks, radios or flashlights that she came across so much as flickered with a spark. Madison’s confirmation of the widespread nature of the problem is the downed 747 airplane that has plowed into St. Louis’s civic plaza.
Madison wonders at how terrifyi
ng it must have been to suddenly lose power at twenty thousand feet. It is while going through this wreckage that Madison sees her first mast collection bodies. All are dead, many mangled beyond recognition. The fact that they remained behind, that they weren’t missing like the others is significant, but Madison doesn’t yet know how or why.
This was no foreign invader from another nation. There are no ground troops, no planes overhead and no bases of operation. If an enemy nation had attacked they would be ransacking the nation for supplies and for resources. As far as Madison can tell, she and Tobias are the only ones left to explore the forgotten towns and cities that lay along their route. The world is empty and silent.
There are other mysteries that sprang up as they drove too. At a pit stop Madison had tried to drink water from a public faucet but Tobias had charged at her. She was still wary of him, so Madison was prepared for his assault. She grabbed his wrist, used his own momentum against him, and flipped the giant man onto his back. From the ground he continued to claw at her. He was trying to tell her something.
When Madison finally let him up, he ran and got a bottle of water. Tobias handed it to Madison. The two of them had become accustomed to just taking things off shelves. Madison had already helped herself to a change of clothes after stopping by a retailer outside of Columbia.
“So, it’s ok to drink the bottle but not from the tap?” Madison had asked Tobias.
In response, Tobias had shaken his head fervently.
When Madison asked him ‘why’, Tobias held up his hands with his fingers spread apart but his thumbs still touching. He danced his fingers back and forward as he pantomimed the movement of a spider. He then held his pointer finger and thumb close together to indicate that the spiders were small. Madison didn’t know what this meant. She didn’t know explicitly anyway. Yet, from then on Madison resolved to only drink bottled water and stayed away from anything connected to a public utility.
Tobias knows things, Madison was sure of this if nothing else. He knows things that he shouldn’t know. It was odd to have the young man as her guide. He seemed to have an innate GPS guiding them, directing them wherever they needed to go. If there was a blocked road or a collapsed bridge, Tobias always knew a way around. Madison even debated letting him drive once or twice, but then she was reminded by the ache that was still in her jaw that she’d rather maintain as much control as possible.
Yet the closer the two of them got to D.C., the more Madison starts to notice a change in Tobias. It is that night that they spent outside of Columbus that Madison really notices it.
Tobias seems to be more aware and less absorbed in his own thoughts. To Madison, he seems to be less inwardly focused. He lifts his chin now, doesn’t keep it curled into the center of his body. As they sit around a small fire, Tobias even sits with his back straight. It is something that Madison has never seen him do. When she hands him a cooked can of beans, he eats it at a tempered pace. Which is odd because every other meal they have had Tobias was always eating very slowing, as if savoring every bite. Now Madison doesn’t have to wait for him before he hands the can back to her to be disposed of. Something is happening to Tobias. His transformation is just yet another mystery.
Despite this, however, Tobias still doesn’t talk. This makes it difficult for Madison at times. Their journey had been made largely in silence. The only interaction would be when they got lost and he would point in this direction, or that, to re-direct them.
Occasionally Madison would ask him questions. She would try and get clarifications for her own questions, her theories, and he would either nod or shake his head. There were some questions that required more than just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer though. It were these questions that bothered Madison the most. So in the silence of their trip and in the still of the night, Madison would just think to herself. She was trapped in a tangled web of the mysteries in her own brain with little hope of escape.
Madison runs through everything that had happened over the past few days. The full scope of everything was still difficult to articulate. Madison tries to remember what it had been like to know a routine. She tries to remember waking up in the morning so certain of what both the day and the future would hold. There was a time when she knew where her breakfast was coming from, what she was going to wear that day, and what she was going to do. The comfort of sitting down at the same computer, sorting through people’s conversations, logging them, taking lunch, returning to work, and then returning to her quarters. All of it had been so comfortable in a way that Madison knows she will probably never feel again.
From the moment the servers went down and the base had been hit to when she had opened herself up for the first time to a man who was dying on her lap, that had only been a few days ago. Yet, even as traumatic as it had been, there is still more waiting for her. There is more to be worried about, more mysteries to solve, and even perhaps some things to be hopeful for.
Madison has climbed up through the ventilation system, exhausted her body and fought off claustrophobia. She had been rescued, only to need to be rescued again, only to meet a young man who would capture her for a final time.
Now Madison is free. She is free and on her way to find answers. It is the only way that she can move on, she knows. All of the instances of physical imprisonment were nothing compared to the prison of ignorance. It would be the imprisonment of the mysteries that would kill her. It would be living a life in a world vanished that would drive Madison to her death. It is why Madison needed to get to Washington D.C. She knows what is waiting for her there may very well be more abuse. Yet, Madison needs to find answers.
Somehow, she senses that Tobias knows this.
37 Gabriel
From the second that Gabriel pulls the trigger to the creature’s weapon everything changes. There is a flash of light, only not the green and exploding one that Gabriel is expecting, and the light doesn’t fire towards the creature. Instead, a white light envelopes Gabriel. In a flash, Gabriel finds himself in another place entirely.
Gone are the apartment and the bloodied creature. Gone is the collapsing fire escape. Gone is anything that Gabriel recognizes at all.
He is in a field of pillars. Some of the pillars are taller than others, but each stands at least two hundred feet tall. From the towers, there are bolts of what appears to be electricity jumping from pillar to pillar in brief and sporadic arches. For miles around there is nothing but these pillars. They are arranged in rows and Gabriel seems to be in the middle of an endless field of them.
Gabriel’s whole body nearly collapses as a combination of confusion and pain from his eye overtakes him. In his hands he still holds the strange weapon. It is stretched out before him just as it had been in the apartment. Gabriel pulls the device towards him and studies it. He looks at the nobs and dials on the side of it and studies the screens with their strange symbols. He wonders if any of them had been changed or had been moved. Gabriel debates throwing the device aside, abandoning it in this strange place that he has now found himself in. Instead, however, he holds onto it. It is heavy and dragging his arm down, but he grips it more tightly to compensate.
The ground is hard but it is dark so it is difficult to make out the texture. Gabriel holds up one palm and applies pressure to his punctured eye socket. The site is throbbing, along with his head. He presses on the wound firmly and the compression seems to relieve some of his suffering. Gabriel wishes he had a third arm so that he could pull out his flashlight. On second thought, he thinks, maybe it was better not to draw attention to himself.
Standing in the middle of a maze of strange conduits, with no clear idea about how he got here, but assuming it had something to do with the alien device, Gabriel debates his options. He could do nothing, just lie down and wait for some terror in the dark to come to him. Though the thought of having another reptilian creature assault him in that moment seems draining. That leaves two more options.
One is to pull the trigger on the device again. Doing s
o might send him back to the apartment with the creature. If that were the cause then Gabriel could finish what he had started. Yet, there was also a chance that using the device would send him somewhere else, somewhere worse and more foreign. It was risky. Instead Gabriel decides on option three, to explore. It is the only option that if it doesn’t work out he could still fall back on the other two.
And so Gabriel starts walking in no direction in particular. He just walks down one of the rows that are laid out with pillars jutting electricity to either side. The experiences that follow are bizarre and foreign, but that has become the nature of Gabriel’s life recently. Since Gabriel had awoken in the basement everything had changed. The world had changed and so had he. Gabriel wasn’t the same man. He wasn’t the same one who said ‘yes, ma'am’ and ‘no, sir’ to every request. That person had disappeared along with the old world. This was the new Gabriel, the one who identified as a survivor and a fighter. He even had a battle wound to prove it.
About two hundred yards into his walk Gabriel has to stop. His eye is still aching and the pain is mounting again. The blood flow seems to have stopped, however, which he is grateful for. Gabriel sits down in the middle of the row of pillars and begins working at the threads of his shirt. Using his teeth as a cutting instrument, he is able to tear away a long strip of the fabric at the bottom of the shirt. Gabriel then uses the tattered cloth as a dressing, wrapping it around his head and over his eye. He pulls tightly, making a secure knot. Gabriel then pads the bandage around his eye with excess fabric to absorb any additional blood.
Standing again, Gabriel continues his march into the unknown. The strange device still dangles in his hand at his side. He walks for at least a mile, and sees nothing new, nothing to help orient him to the scene. There are just the pillars to his side and the occasional stream of light as electric currents arch overhead. Everything about his life is now so surreal that Gabriel feels numb to the oddity of it. He is too exhausted and too emotionally overloaded to take it all in.