Copyright © Damien Steinfield, 2017
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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1
Damn, it’s so cold as a wagon tire. I shiver as I am being dragged through the caliche, after the casualty ground, and try to make out what is happening around me. If only I wasn’t so knackered and fuzzled! There’s a tree there, coruscated by a bunch of lightning bugs, resembling quite a lot to northern lights. I haven’t seen anything like that up to this moment. It’s so quiet and celestial.
Is this all there is to it? My mind refuses to believe.
My head hurts like I’ve bumped it against an outthrust and all it’s a blur. Two possemen, whose faces I cannot see due to the white camails they had covered them with, are helping me, out of all the ricketiness of my equilibrium, to get myself someplace that I’m not cognizant of.
I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know why I feel as though I’m defying gravity, and that not in a good way, like my body can’t respond to impulses and I can’t move in on my own neurosensiferous spikes.
I steal a last glance to that enchanting tree before we take the opposite direction. I don’t know how to explain this estrangement that I’m feeling inside. I don’t know where it’s coming form, to what motivation it’s rendering to, or if it’s earnestly justified after all. Probably it might be only the outcome of my lack of knowingness at this point.
I don’t know what happened to all my memories, or if I have any. But there’s one thing I know for certain. I have got a bad feeling about this. Much to my surprise this place is all soundless and rather calm, quite the reverse of my state of feelings.
I shiver.
Not from the coldness this time. There’s a fuss out there someone it putting up, and somehow this quaint of a thing makes just a slight turn to my emotiveness. Someone is thundering, stressed out, like a train that’d lost its track, providing this caterwaul. I want to take a look at it and find out what or who is causing all this riot, but my body doesn’t respond. And these stiff men holding me are not seeing to collaborate.
They’re so silent, just like this ambience… well, until the riot took place.
Any moment forward, I feel like my head is gonna explode from the way that uncertainty is beginning to stir up more and more ruffianly and making my synapses already more whacked and injurious.
As I keep moving forward, the previous bellowing is becoming vague and unperceivable. I wanna know where I’m being dragged at. But my head rejects not only the answers that I don’t have, but the inquiry also, which I’m seemingly not capable to bear with. That’s how tired I feel.
A galvanizing tower makes an appearance afar. It looks like a skyscraper, only that it isn’t. Is this where I live? Do I even know this place? Being that I’ve got absolutely no clue about my perspective, questions start popping up in my head. Random questions. Silly questions even. Just those kinds of questions that arise when in blackout. You don’t know anything about yourself, your whereabouts, or your life, so you start wondering the most nitwitted of questions. Like, do I like oranges or do I like pomelos? Am I a laid-back or am I the life of the party? Am I insomnious?
You just start asking lots and lots of questions about yourself, like you would do if you met someone knew and exciting. You start wondering about them. What do they like and what are they about? But I’m currently so muddled with all these questions, I can’t even realize I’m having them. I can only tell that I do feel sleepy and tired.
It’s becoming bleary any progressing time… And it shouldn’t, since this is the most exciting part as we enter the door to that tower.
If you had a myriad-ways to-obscureness list, I’d check off every single list. But at least, I can get a whiff of my surroundings, and entering that door, I think it’s the signal to get this thing started. I’m just a free step away from entering it, and two stiff men stand inexplicitly on each side, hulky pandanuses bespangling on the either parts of the front.
Like, I couldn’t quite grasp it. This place’s giving me so many mixed signals. I may not recall much from my past, but I think that from here on out this is gonna be the place that I will make the most out of. Some other man inside, next to whom, all smiley, is standing a pretty decoy, ghosting, holds in his hand what turns out to be something that resembles quite a lot to a tool that you use to crack nuts with, just by neatening the hard-shelled within and applying pressure onto it. In this case, instead, my cubital nerve is the nut and what was supposed to be cracking just infuses a smidge pinch into my whole arm, like a thousand bees thumping me at once.
“Ouch… What was that for?” I hinge and my other hand goes immediately into my arm.
They don’t talk. He just smiles, deviously, while his decoy is still ghosting.
Next thing I know, I’m heading towards a room, which looks like one a scientist uses to perform sophisticated experiments on. It looks like a paviour. Light blue tinging amicably, while intensified, navy lines push along each corner, ending up in little dots. The guards stay outside and survey me throughout the glass-wall with the other two doctors, or whatever they’d like to be referred as. The man who pinched me with the nutcracker thingy holds a tablet into his arms. He’s all involved into it now. His fingers seem to scraping into it.
In the room where I stand, which separates the other just by a thin, delicate piece of glass, some shifts that hold up against the floor, which obviously seems to be computerized, hoist themselves spontaneously from the ground up and into my body. Each of them pluck in, to my hands, my legs, arms, shoulders and forehead. Basically, I’m abstemiously squelch by them. The round shaped quants that are fleeced against my body, don’t actually feel that bad. It’s just like scraping a bunch of luffas on my skin. And they actually feel nice.
Though I’m not sure I can say the same about their motivation.
Blue will-o'-the-wisp of dense lines of lights pop up from nowhere and start scanning my body, toe to head. What are they doing to me? Why is all this necessary?
I’m starting to feel scared. Not like I wasn’t before. But now that I can really see what is going on around here, I’ve got a bad feeling about it. The biparavectors light off and a cybernate voice fills the rom.
“Detection! Subject identified as denizen potential. Detection! Subject identified as denizen potential.”
The voice kept repeating. The faces of the strangers in front of me scowl altogether, and skittishly the man controlling the tablet encumbers into it again.
The biparavectors pop up again. This time they are coral tinctured. They swing again, just as the first two did, across my body. I can’t feel them, don’t know what their purpose is too, but what I k
now is, I’m worried.
And my blackout doesn’t help.
“Quantum cascade laser identifies the subject as invariable ablative.”
This statement was repeated again by the speaker installed to the walls, until the man with the tablet pushed it off.
There was a slight tint of delightedness on their faces. I knew this was good, what I didn’t know was if their interest was correlative to mine.
The glass barrier between us slides up and disappears, leaving a freeway towards me to go through and get myself released.
“Welcome aboard. You’re officially the new member of The Resurrection Eatonii, the house of survival. Congratulations, I don’t know if you realize what a huge deal your being here is to you and to this house. Now you can proceed to the vestibule, and join the others, as we’ll have a welcoming preach.”
The two possemen grabbed me by the shoulders. Clearly these men knew nothing about manners. The hallways are free, white, digital lines prolonging all the way, ingrained as ancient Egyptian wall paintings. Adenanthera pavonina embellishing the indoors.
I hear a sound, like that of a riot becoming louder any step I take forward. There’s a room on the left. I can tell by the open sides of the door which give a great display of the capacious lobby. There are people around the all-shades-of-amber foyer and it much looks to me like a fancy party, the one where you drink pink champagne, have patrician chit-chats, and enjoy art around pretentious indoor plants, that is minus the rumbustious hurly that infuses the room.
The guards release my arms.
They leave.
Much to my surprise I feel relieved. I don’t have strange men showing me around like a prisoner, and there are other people—causal people—like me forward. If only I could gather it up and make a step forward. I feel anxious, face sallow like a bleaching clay. I don’t know any of these people. I don’t know the meaning of me being here.
The least of normal I can expect of this is to be nervous.
After a moment of contemplation that seemed like an eternity, I convince myself I have no other option but go there and find out as much as I can about them, about this place, about… me.
I string along.
As soon as I’m parallel to the door I can perceive nice, elating music on the background. After all, this is like a fancy party. They all look so parry. Agitated, but happy. Is this place so delight-stirring and I knew nothing about? I mean, what did I miss?
I keep waddling, gaping around the astonishing gold tinted interior and amazing contemporary, digital lines on the walls, same to the ones on the hallways, but gold. Each line on this building was the same color to the background it was ingrained to, but only much more emphasized. You could tell it gave tremendous brilliance to the ambience.
As I’m looking at everybody having joyous conversations with their companions and the tables all around the room (even though there were no chairs to be found. Fancy party!) I instantly bump into something that seems to hit against me like a meteoroid to a planet. Once I clear out my perplexion, first thing I realize is that it’s not something, but someone. A girl. Skinny, red hair, Vandyke brown eyes, cherry lips girl that looks like ones you see on the covers of fashion magazines. You don’t need to be smart or fuzzy to tell that she’s hell pretty.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
Good. I speak.
She checks out her drink and then gapes over her top, and once she realizes there was no damage done, she hoists her head and smiles at me.
“It’s okay, silly goose, at least you managed not to turn me first-day into a total disaster. Now that would have been embarrassing. I’m Zoey by the way.”
“Zoey,” I say and gape as though it is the most beautiful name I have ever heard. “I’m…” I hesitate.
Wait.
I just realized that I cannot recall my name.
“Oh, don’t worry. You’ll get to it. It happens to everybody after the body scan.”
“It does?” I frown. Clearly I didn’t get a thing she was saying.
“Yeah, it’s from the ketamine they put us into so we could resist the toxicant atmosphere.”
What was she talking about?
“Don’t worry. It will come to you. And you…” she took a look at me, head to toe, “need to loosen up a little. It seems like being here is the worst thing that happened to you.”
Maybe it was. Not that I knew anyway.
“You need to come with me. I’ll introduce you to my friends.”
Friends? When I usually went someplace, it took me a while to adjust and be amicable. But… not here! You could make friends in the bizarre place in the blink of an eye.
“Hey, guys. Meet,” she took a gap for a moment and squinted, bearing in mind that I didn’t give her a name. “Mind if I call you Greyson? I always had a thing for that name.” She tells me.
I shrug.
She smiles.
“So, this is Greyson. And here we have Andrew, Cody, Carter and Avery.”
They all give me benign smiles. I try to push one through too, though throughout all the befuddlement I’m clutched into, I don’t think it comes off exactly as I intended to.
“You’re so lucky to be here.” The girl behind the table tells me. Avery, was her name?
“We all are.” Andrew adds. “If it weren’t for the resurrection team, we’d all be suffocated by the fluids now.”
Clearly I didn’t get a thing they were talking about. It was all a blur to me and it didn’t get any better. I felt like I didn’t want it to. Like if I let myself be cognized of my surroundings, then what I had to discover would be so horrendous, I wouldn’t be able to bear with it.
But then again, that was just a feeling.
“We need to whoop it up here right now. There’s plenty of time to inconvenience ourselves about the restoration of the world. After all, we did make it.”
What did he mean, we did make it? What was happening to the world? The world that I clearly was remembering nothing about. And by the way, why could I not remember? Why was I brought here in the first place? The only good thing is, these people in the foyer seemed nice. And I could relate to them. Well, not in that way, like I could understand what they were about… but relate, as in I could feel adjusted and comfortable around them, differently from the people in uniforms.
“You want a drink?” Zoey grabs a glass of champagne from the tray the caterer who comes by holds in his hands.
“Um,” I hesitate. Do I like to drink anyway? But she doesn’t let me overthink it.
“Sure you do.” She says and puts the glass in my hand. I look at that merge of light pink and gold inside the glass and all the bubbles infusing amuck. Approach it to my lips and take a first sip. Boy, it tastes divine. I sure must like to drink. I’d be a fool if I didn’t.
I lean back against the luxurious gold and enamel pillar to my left. Just endeavoring to relish my snotty beverage and not rendering to the jamais vu (which sure is ever so emphasized, despite my excruciating efforts to put a barrier to and just snub it) of a lot of other inclusions, of a lot of other strangers. Even though it’s, like, a rather bizarre of situation, it just felt like I’ve been to this before. Déjà vu captivates me thoroughly. But that’s a random ambience. Maybe my being inclined to it just highlights the fact that I’ve had a social life prior to this moment. I look at Zoey. She’s one of those people you want to be around to, not only for the fact her exquisiteness splashes around you and makes her the epicenter of your attention, even if you try to fight it… which you’d fail, epically, but also because she’s so freewheeling and unprompted.
Dang it, she’s cute.
And frosty… Um, I don’t know what I meant by that, but surely must be related to the way she makes quantic vibrations swing through me.
One thing I’m sure. Despite the rumbustiousness and revelment that is going on in the foray, that is fueled by the incitement sparked when a bunch of people are put in the same environment, which leads to a tende
ncy to make out of their surroundings; as a matter of course, there’s a lot less going on here than there is in the other part of the pharos.
I’m actually surprised at how few have send-off regards. They’re just taking delight in savoring the sparkling and being already encumbered in giving the best perception of themselves to the other companions. Is it just me that is drenched by a whole bunch of concerns and, like, a constant headache that refuses to let go? It’s either I gravitate towards intricate, or something really suspicious is taking place here. And given the circumstances, me being too hard to please seems like the less convenient option.
All the room embraces a sudden soundlessness that comes like an abrupt cosmic attack. A suit and tie man spruces towards a highlighted spot. Seriously, there are so many lights there as though someone has fixed the set-up to their homemade network videos. Anyway, that’s beside the point, and I better stay focused if I wanna find out what’s the purpose of my being here and all the others’ for that matter.
“He’s Orson Berkeley,” Zoey mumbles in my ear. “He’s the head of all this arrangement. You don’t want to have him on the rancor side. He’s a man of many powers.”
“How do you know all that?” I frown.
“Oh, she knows a lot, buddy.” Cody smiles at me. “She’s one of the firsts to be dwelling The Resurrection Eatonii. Had a lot of time to take the place into scrutiny.”
My head swings back and forth. That makes sense. Her insight into the place could come handy in prospectus.
“Not only pretty. Knowledgeable too.” I think loudly. God, that is embarrassing.
Zoey sways her head, smirk joined, and ditches my comment.
They’re all inclined to whatever the suit up man has to say. A leery silence in the room. I try to be attentive too. After all, I have to take inventory of everything that shows up, if I want to make a sense out of this.
He takes a glance around the room, stiffly, and then pats the microphone in front of him twice. A screechy sound fills the room. The audience gasps. As the ambiance adjusts to its normal pitch, Mr. Berkeley takes up with proceeding with his welcome or whatever he’s there doing.
Faking Apocalypse (The Apocalyptic Games Book 1) Page 1