by Devon Taylor
Rhett took the weapon, dreading the idea of having to use it, and went after the others.
* * *
When he caught up with the other four, they were already a few decks down and still descending. Rhett noticed that the farther down they went, the older the levels of the Column looked. It was still polished metal and gloomy blue light, but the steps and the railing were worn, shining in a smooth, almost-bronze color. And the metalwork was more ornate, with the railing sporting swirls and curves and whorled designs.
Rhett looked up and saw all the upper decks of the Column stretching away in a spiraling tunnel. To think that this was the heart of the same ship he’d seen cutting through black ocean waves only a day before. That reminded him of something else.
“We’re not getting off the ship?” he asked the group as a whole.
“Why would we get off the ship?” Mak snapped over her shoulder.
“That was a special assignment, mate,” Basil said quickly, before an argument had a chance to spark. “Had to use a … back door of sorts. I’ll explain when you’re older.”
“The Harbinger has her own access points,” Treeny nearly whispered. Rhett had to strain to hear her.
As Treeny spoke, Mak stepped off the stairs only a deck or two up from what appeared to be the very bottom of the Column. From here, Rhett could hear a thunderous growling—the engines—and the heavy whump-whump-whump of the propellers beneath the ship.
This level opened up to a high-ceilinged, diamond-shaped room, with old, splintered wooden doors lining every lengthy wall, about seven of them on each side. There were no signs, no numbers on or above the doors. They just stood there like unanswered questions, ready to collapse into heaps of sawdust, propped up only by the toughness of their frames.
As the five of them stepped into the room, Rhett caught Basil eyeing the knuckle blade that he’d strapped to his thigh. Basil rolled his eyes.
“What are you? Wolverine?” he said in a tone of disgust, and shook his head. But his eyes were smiling.
Meanwhile, Mak was standing in the middle of the room, her head down and her eyes shut. Theo, Treeny, and Basil were eerily quiet. Rhett did his best to do the same but was highly aware of the rustling of his clothes as he rocked from foot to foot in an anxious dance.
After another moment, Mak lifted her head. She immediately stepped to the left and closed the distance between herself and the second door from the right on that wall. She gripped the worn-out brass knob … and turned.
Rhett wasn’t sure what he expected—or wanted—to see. But when Mak opened the door and a wedge of brilliant sunlight appeared on the floor in front of him, he felt a weird sensation of relief. He hadn’t known he missed the sun until it was there in front of him again.
Through the door, Rhett could make out a swatch of prickly desert, wisps of dust doing circles through a tangle of dead, crackling weeds, the white dirt challenging the sun with its hot shine.
Without a word, Mak stepped through the door. Rhett could hear her boots crunching into the brittle earth.
The rest of them followed her through.
FIVE
The light would have been blinding had it not been for Rhett’s new existence as Death personified. But it was still bright.
The sun hammered itself into everything, and as the five of them stepped through the doorway onto the gouged, scorched dirt, Rhett didn’t even need to force his senses to feel the heat.
They were in the middle of nowhere. Desert stretched out around them like the ugly underside of a painter’s canvas, with jagged rocks spiking up here and there, bristling with weeds and a few bulbous cacti. Low mountains warbled along the horizon like flexing muscles.
Ahead there was a cluster of squat brick buildings crowded around a single road, where the heat was baking off the pavement in watery shimmers. It looked like the main drag of some little town.
The five of them looked absurd standing there, surrounded by the dirt and the blue, cloudless sky, in their shadow-colored clothes and armed to the teeth with weapons that were better suited for serial killers and trained assassins than a bunch of dead teenagers.
Rhett glanced behind him, at where they had come from. Half-buried in the ground was a battered Airstream trailer, coated with rust and textured with dents. The windows were caved in, and a ragged hole grinned wide, showing tufts of insulation and the swirling galaxies of dust and bugs inside the trailer. It looked like a mouth chewing on a wad of cotton candy. The door stood open, but within it, where the filthy guts of the trailer were supposed to be, was instead the room of doors inside the Harbinger. It was crooked now, trapped inside the confines of the slanted trailer, but there was nothing different about it. It was like an optical illusion—such a big space behind such a tiny door.
“Theo,” Mak said. Her voice was different now without all the high ceilings and wide rooms to amplify it. Out here in the badlands, she was far less intimidating.
Without needing further instruction, Theo stepped past Rhett and Treeny and swung the Airstream’s door shut. It clacked against the trailer with a plastic-y smack, and when it bounced back again, the view of the inside of the Harbinger was gone. The doorway between worlds was closed.
Somewhere far off, an eagle screamed.
“Now what?” Rhett said, reflexively squinting against the sun. He wasn’t a huge fan of the desert. “How are we supposed to know where we’re going?”
Mak whirled around, a look of pure curiosity on her face.
“You can’t feel it?” she asked. Her tone was suspicious, accusatory. The others looked at Rhett, their faces more interested than anything.
“Feel … what?”
There was silence, and the stifling tension ramped back up again. There was a part of Rhett that wished he could crawl back through the trailer door to the ship and go hide out in his cabin. He had no idea what she was talking about.
Then Theo spoke, saving him.
“It’s like … uh … like my Nana’s blueberry pie,” he said. He was grinning from ear to ear, proud of this profound explanation.
“I … I’m not sure what you mean, buddy,” Rhett said, afraid of pissing off the behemoth.
Theo thought, drumming his fingers against his lips. “It’s just a warm feeling in ya gut. Makes ya feel full and happy. Ya know? It’s … it’s … what’s the word?”
“Instinct,” Treeny murmured.
Theo snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Instinct.”
Basil chuckled, and Rhett just barely caught the fading afterimage of a smile on Mak’s face.
“You just need to focus,” she said, her voice back to that prosecuting tone. “You should feel it if you try not to think about it.”
“I don’t even know what you guys are talking about,” Rhett responded. “Maybe I’m really not supposed to be—”
“Oh, will you just shut up?” Basil cried. “Close your eyes. Forget about blueberry pie and think about a lasso. Should be easy, considering our current environs.”
Rhett gave him a skeptical look but did as he was told. He closed his eyes.
“Now imagine the lasso is around your waist. Imagine it pulling you gently.”
Rhett did. He thought about the time his dad had taken him to an indoor rodeo upstate. Along with the bull riding, there had also been riders lassoing calves. He thought about the loop circling around in the air above his head and then coming down around him and cinching tight at his waist. And he imagined some invisible hand tugging on it, nudging him, and …
He felt it. Really felt it. Some sort of force—like a wind or a vacuum—pushing and pulling him. He remembered the way the others had reacted back at the mess hall. Surely this is what they had been feeling. Already he knew there was no other choice but to follow it.
“I feel it,” he said. His voice was low, excited. “I seriously feel it.”
“Show us,” Mak said challengingly. “Take us where we need to go.”
Rhett glared at her,
but he was also smiling. “No problem.”
He marched past them, following that unseen guide, confident for the first time since arriving aboard the Harbinger. The thought that they were going to find a dying person at the other end of that invisible lasso hadn’t even crossed his mind yet.
The town crept closer, and Rhett was sure that their destination was somewhere within it—the shapeless push was leading him straight there.
It was a sleepy-looking place, with a handful of cars parked along the sidewalks. The buildings themselves were mostly businesses, or what used to be businesses. They had boarded-up doors and big sheets of brown paper taped up in the windows, squares of poster board with OUT OF BUSINESS or CLOSED FOR GOOD scribbled across them. The few remaining ventures were the usual staples: a bank on one corner, a decrepit realtor’s office halfway down the street, a McDonald’s at the far end. This was a town—one of many—that had been left behind.
As Rhett led the group onto the broiling asphalt, focusing on the push, on where it was taking him, he caught sight of a faded, weather-beaten sign just at the edge of where the town began: WELCOME TO TURNSTILE, ARIZONA—POP. 743.
“Quaint, isn’t it?” Basil murmured. Mak shushed him.
The group paced down Main Street with Rhett still in the lead, feeling the invisible guide growing stronger. They were getting closer.
As they passed the bank, Rhett glanced over and saw the lone teller with her pinky jabbed up her nose, digging around. He grinned. He felt like he was in the old west, part of a gang of outlaws about to hold up the entire town. Their feet clopped against the hot road and he could almost hear the sound of spurs rattling.
They walked on, with the defunct shells of Turnstile’s businesses rolling past them, until they got to the end of the street, where the McDonald’s sat on one side. On the other, sitting in an oversize, rock-strewn, weed-littered lot, was a diner.
It was a relic, a long cylinder of metal, like a bullet with windows, propped up on cinder blocks and reflecting the sun in slippery glints. There were tubes of cracked or broken neon lining its edges, and the few signs that were hanging in the windows (OPEN, TODAY’S SPECIALS, ASK ABOUT GIFT CERTIFICATES) were barely legible, the words blasted out by the sun over the span of who knew how many years.
Rhett stopped in front of the diner. The push, now almost overpowering him, propelled him closer to it.
“This is the place,” he said. And without waiting for anybody to doubt him, he took the steps up to the door and let himself in.
A bell over the door jingled as he stepped inside, but nobody looked up or glanced in Rhett’s direction. He wasn’t even sure if he’d heard the bell himself. It had sounded more like a clacking sound than a jingle, the way a bell sounds when you cup it in your hand and shake it. And had the door really opened? Or had his mind fabricated that so he wouldn’t have to deal with the wild concept of walking through walls? He could ask himself these questions until his ears bled, but he doubted that the answers would ever get any easier to hear.
While he glanced around at the tacky 1950s décor, the bell did its weird clack-clack-clack a few more times. The other four hadn’t doubted him after all.
There were only a couple of small groups in the diner. A foursome of teenagers in the back corner, cracking jokes at one another and trying to stifle their laughter for the sake of the atmosphere—they just had glasses of water in front of them. Near the window, there was a group of older folks still nursing their coffees, chatting quietly, occasionally darting annoyed glances at the teenagers. There was a single waitress. Her pretty brown hair fell to her shoulders, and her peach-colored uniform hugged her curves. She might have been just out of high school. Maybe the teenagers in the corner were some of her friends. Rhett doubted it.
The waitress was helping an older gentleman with touches of gray in his hair who was sitting by himself at the bar. She was leaning close, trying to hear his order.
Rhett felt the push nudge him in that direction.
“There,” he said, pointing at the man.
What would it be? Rhett thought. Heart attack? Stroke? Would he accidentally choke on a mouthful of steak and eggs? Would the guy just keel over for no …
But then the waitress was done jotting down the man’s order, and she had tucked her little notepad back into the pocket of her uniform as she stepped away from where the man sat, to pass his order along to the cook. When she moved away, the push moved with her.
“Wait…” Rhett said. But Basil was patting him on the shoulder in that infuriatingly patient, parental way.
“Good work,” he said into Rhett’s ear. “We’ll take it from here. Just watch and learn.”
“But … that wasn’t…” He was stammering, trying to make sense of what was about to happen.
Mak, Treeny, Theo, and Basil all moved toward the young waitress, who was pouring a cup of coffee for the man she’d just taken the order from. She was whistling along with Ritchie Valens playing “La Bamba” out of speakers in the ceiling. She finished pouring the coffee and turned to put the pot back on the burner, her hips swaying with the song now.
Before Rhett could even imagine what might happen next, the girl stopped. She was standing between the bar and the back counter, where the coffeemaker was waiting to receive its steaming pot. But the pot was still in her hands. And then it wasn’t. The coffee pot slipped out of her fingers and dropped to the linoleum, where it shattered and sprayed hot liquid in every direction. The sound was like an enormous egg cracking.
Mak stepped behind the bar, casually, slowly, while Basil, Theo, and Treeny took up positions around her, creating a blockade. Mak moved closer to the girl, who was now just standing there, facing the back wall, steam from the spilled coffee curling around her legs. The older guy, the one the waitress had helped just before, was looking at her, obviously concerned. He was saying something that Rhett couldn’t quite make out—“Hey, hun, you all right?” maybe.
Then the girl collapsed.
She sank to the ground, folding in on herself like an accordion, right into the spreading puddle of coffee, right into the waiting field of glass shards.
In some kind of trance, Rhett stepped up to the bar and peered over it. Beside him, the older guy was shouting something, yelling for help, but Rhett could barely hear him. His voice was lost in something else. It sounded like static. But buried in the white noise, Rhett could hear another sound. Something like a heartbeat, slowing … slowing.
The waitress lay on her side in a pool that was now equal parts coffee and her own blood. Sharp triangles of glass stabbed into her. Her eyes were open, darting around, panicking. Rhett could almost hear her thoughts: What’s happening to me? She looked terrified.
Mak knelt beside the girl, her knee dipping into the coffee, and Rhett had a flash of his own death, of the men trying to pull his body out of the car, hunting for a pulse. But Mak didn’t look for a pulse. She reached over and took the girl’s hand. Immediately the girl’s eyes focused, finding Mak and locking on to her, asking a hundred questions without speaking.
“It’s okay,” Mak whispered. Her face was all at once devoid of its rigid, bitter tension. Now her eyes were kind. She smiled a sad smile at the girl. Mak could have been an entirely different person. “You’re dying,” she said. “I don’t know why exactly. Something in your brain. It’s failing. But it’s okay. You can follow me. I’ll carry you over the threshold, to the clearing. We’ll be each other’s anchors. You are my weight and I am yours. I will find your way. And you will find mine. There is no emptiness on this side. There is no pain. This is not the end.” Mak leaned in closer until her nose was almost touching the girl’s. A tear ran out of the girl’s eye and rolled down her cheek. “This is not the end,” Mak whispered again.
Around them there was all kinds of commotion. The teenagers were standing in their booth, stretching their necks, trying to see what was happening. The elderly folks by the window were trying to get out of their seats, trying to co
me over and help. One of them was on the phone. But to Rhett, none of this was happening fast enough. It had the quality of a record playing on the slowest setting. Voices were long, moaning howls, and movements stuttered as if broken down into individual seconds.
Rhett sensed all this but never took his eyes off the dying waitress. He had been so eager to get here, to prove himself. For what? For this?
The girl’s head seemed to get heavier, sinking down into the soft cushion of her arm. Her eyes found some far-off point, and the light dwindled out of them. She was still.
Rhett wanted to tear his gaze away from the awful sight. But something else was happening. A wisp of thin, almost invisible white smoke crept out of the girl’s mouth and floated toward the ceiling. At first, Rhett thought it was more steam from the spilled coffee. He could see the tendrils of swirling mist stretching down into her throat, though. It was like a snake made out of fog, roping itself through the air as if coaxed by a song.
Mak leaned in again, with her lips nearly kissing the roiling smoke, and inhaled. What had escaped the dead girl’s mouth was captured by Mak’s. The pale smoke swirled down into Mak’s throat and vanished. Then she stood, giving the girl’s body one last sad look.
“All right,” Mak said. “Time to go.”
The world around Rhett returned to its normal speed and vividness, snapping back like an elastic string. Suddenly people were shouting for the cook to call 911. The guy who had been the last person served by the girl was clambering over the bar toward her body, knocking over saltshakers and napkin holders, trying to look brave but seeming more petrified. What is he going to do? Rhett thought. Surely this guy knew what Rhett knew, that this young woman, who had probably been stuck in this tiny town her entire life, had poured her last cup of coffee.