by Mike Wild
Time passed. Then came footsteps. Voices she recognised.
Ralph: “Oh, my dear girl …”
Yuri: “English?”
Jackson: “Don’t. The radiation …”
Yuri again: “Fuck the radiation.”
Strong arms cradled her. Trix felt no sensation from Yuri’s touch on her red-raw, black-blistered skin, nor cringed when Yuri’s fingers brushed the half of her face that was skull-like grin and socketless, dangling eye. She was barely aware how he gently supported her head to stop it lolling unnaturally to the side.
“I always thought you were hot, but this is ridiculous, yes? Smeshnoy. Wake up, now. Wake up.”
Faintly, she heard her own voice.
“Did it … did it … ”
Work? was what she wanted to ask, but her mouth didn’t, couldn’t, move. She relaxed in Yuri’s arms, and something happened to her eyes. Even from within they took on a glaze, and her vision faded, as if looking through frost on a window pane whose vista was a darkening sky. They wouldn’t move anymore—just stared straight ahead—and when she tried to query why, she forgot the question. Mouth open, lips unmoving, she felt an urge to swallow and blink, but could do neither. A thin line of saliva trickled down an unmoving throat and an eyelash ticked unbidden, and then Trix had no idea she’d ever existed.
Blackness.
Utter blackness.
Nothing.
Until …
“Jesus Christ, what’s he doing?”
The words startled her back to awareness.
“He’s killing himself! Dragomiloff, stop him!”
“Professor!”
Trix saw—saw—what happened next. Both Jackson and Yuri repelled from Ralph by magic of the old man’s casting. She saw also the reason for Jackson’s initial cry. Ralph did indeed look as if he was dying. His cheeks were hollowing, his eyes sinking, his limbs thinning—and all because of his muttering and the blue fire pouring out of him and into her.
Into her remains.
Trix had no idea how she was seeing this. How she was hearing this. She knew only that she was hovering above her own form, as if having some near-death out-of-body experience. Except, she was clearly dead. This was no near-death experience. This was no waiting for the white light to beckon, for loved ones to welcome her with open arms; if anything, the opposite—something had resparked her consciousness and was holding it here, pulling it back from nowhere, and being pulled back hurt. Old man, what the hell are you doing? she thought. I’m dead—let me go—healing can’t help me now. But Ralph stayed where he was, intent, not giving up. Sweating, shaking violently, he, too, now looked like a corpse—wrinkled, reduced, a shrunken thing a year or more in its grave. Then, he roared, roared so loud, so long, that it seemed he was ejecting his very soul. And perhaps he was. For as he roared, Trix roared—roared because she was back in the grip of her own dead self. The broken, blackened thing beneath her, though still unmoving, seemed to claw at her every nerve ending, dig hooks into nonexistent flesh, hold her like a fly ensnared. And as it did all that, the blue fire that Ralph had shot into her remains exploded upwards in a blinding column to consume her.
It was like being in a bright blue, roaring furnace, filled with whipping flame. Trix had no idea what was happening, only that phantom limbs snapped taut, freezing her in cruciform position, back arched as if to break, head tipped back, neck feeling as if it might snap. She had no choice but to stare upwards, where, forming from the blue, she swore she saw angel’s wings. What she couldn’t see was what rose from below—her body, her physical body, disassembling to snake upwards in a tangle of vein, tendon, sinew, and fibre, like roots from mulch. But she felt it—her phantom self becoming enwrapped from the toes upwards, then the wrapping penetrating her being, finding its place while filling out with muscles, organs, and bone. She didn’t need to see what was happening to the mulch, because she knew now what was happening. As her new body—searingly and agonisingly—became sheathed with skin, as her old body hollowed, collapsed in on itself, and as she was finally released from its grip, she knew what had captured so much of Ralph’s interest in that grimoire they’d found.
One of the ultimate spells. Perhaps the ultimate spell.
Resurrection.
She dropped to the ground, sucking in great, rasping lungfuls of air, the stuff raw and burning on newly born tissue. Her naked body was sheened with sweat, her hair hung damp and heavy down the sides of her head and over her cheeks. She felt feral. But her fury had nothing to do with that. Thus, when she’d gotten past the grunts, was able once more to articulate, she dredged up the first two words of her new life.
“DAMN YOU!”
They were aimed at Ralph. Ralph who’d promised her that he would not die on the levels. Yet here he was, dying—dying because of her. It was possible that, with a mage of this world, the resurrection spell may well have been used like any other; more demanding, perhaps, but essentially just another spell. But Ralph was no Yillarnyan mage, not even close. He was just an old man who wanted to learn. And in using the spell had, like Torb, drained from himself everything he had to give.
So now it was her turn to cradle the dying.
“Ralph …”
“I mastered it, Patricia … brought you back.”
“Yes, yes, you did … you did. Now teach me, so I can save you.”
Ralph coughed. “I rather doubt we have the time.”
Trix wanted to insist they had the time, but she had only to look at Ralph to know he spoke the truth. Instead, she held him for a while, whispering things, remembering things, smiling. He whispered and smiled back. Finally, the old man said, “Patricia—?”
“Yes?”
“Where am I?”
The question sent chills through her. She did her best to force one more smile.
“With me,” she said.
Ralph released a long sigh. “That’s all I need to know.”
Trix had no idea how long she held the old man, after he’d gone. Save for covering her with a blanket, the others let her be. But eventually a small form that had been struggling in Elly’s grip for some time finally broke free. A few flaps of its wings and the reptilian creature settled on Trix’s shoulder, nuzzling her ear.
Trix stared up at Elly.
“What?” Elly said. “You think I’d leave him behind?”
Puff’s nuzzling coaxed Trix from her grief. She pecked his forehead before shooing him away, then laid Ralph gently down, covering his body with the blanket that sloughed slowly from her shoulders. It was time to see if everything they’d sacrificed had been worth it. If their plan had actually worked.
Trix rose, wandered, unsteady on her feet, like a newborn calf. The first thing she noticed was that, as Shen had predicted, there had been a significant translocation of dimensions, particularly here at the explosions’ epicentre. So much so that her bare soles trod more on cracked tiles from DOME’s mezzanine than the flagstones of Deephold. A great chunk of the complex had journeyed to this side of the rift, as clearly a great chunk of Deephold had journeyed to the other. Part of the vast dungeon was now entirely gone, replaced by a swathe of DOME interior enclosed within a partial curve of its exterior wall. But only partial. Where it was incomplete, it opened the dungeon to the world outside.
Through the gap came such smells and sounds! Yillarnyan sunlight streamed in. A strange sunlight, greeny-yellow, seeming to come from two sources at once. Twin suns, then? Trix itched to find out, but there was something she needed to confirm first. Because one of the streams of sunlight lit the remains of the Grimrock Café, now little more than a sloping wedge of rubble, slowly spilling tables and chairs from its end—and where they spilled was into the pit.
Trix picked her way down. She stepped over beams and girders, wove around a small section of corridor that had fallen from Citadel, ignored the blackened lumps at her feet that might have been melted flesh. She wove around some cables that sparked the last electricity this world would see,
then ducked under the bent remains of the one boom gun that had come through with them. She caressed its base, noting its presence for the future. Then she reached her intended destination. The rift. Except how could it be called the rift when it was a rift no more? The section of earth appeared now to be nothing more than that—just a slice of substrata of Chinese desert that happened not to be in China anymore.
Trix had to be sure. She ran her palm over clay and sand, clawed her fingers, pulled clumps away. Nothing but more clay and sand. She clawed deeper, then deeper still, upwards, outward, and her hand came away filled with a strangely coloured soil—Yillarnyan soil. That seemed to clinch it. The rift was gone.
But what of Kh’Borian?
Trix turned back to the pit. Ghost images of the final battle with the godleech played across its remains. But it was just memory. The pit was silent now, and every sense told her that Kh’Borian was gone. Not just from here—Yillarnya—but from Earth, too. And if Shen’s theory was correct, from existence itself.
Trix took a deep breath. Relief that it was over clashed with foreboding of the issues now to be faced, given that the price of victory was being marooned here. She had no idea what awaited through the breach in Deephold’s walls, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the Er-Rainy Pennines. She climbed back out of the pit, found Elly proffering scavenged clothing, shrugged into trousers and tunic, then at a prompting of “come see” let herself be led out of Deephold and into the light.
Trix gaped, as had the others. She’d unexpectedly emerged on a promontory a distance beyond the lower slopes of a gargantuan mountain. Below lay a sweeping vista of woody green, valleys, and rivers feeding into a glistening coastline. To the north, a volcano burbling lava over a grey and wasted expanse, and to the east, a swampland shrouded in mysterious fog. From the west came the muted clashes, clangs, and occasional magical flares of a great battle, while south could be seen the ramparts of an expansive, cream-coloured city, from which, even at this distance, the smell of exotic fruits and perfumes wafted on the wind. And what else that wind carried! Great reptilian creatures, wings slowly flapping; a flying machine that appeared half-insect, half-manufactured; and—honest to gods—a giant face, projected from a towering lighthouse onto a passing cloud, that at one point seemed to glance her way. Between them all lay signs of numerous small towns and ancient structures that may as well have ‘unexplored ruin here’ written all over them.
Trix might have giggled with the possibilities, had it been a game. But among all the Yillarnyan wonders also sat pockets of Earth transposed the same way as DOME. Lengths of collapsed roadway with skewed cars, the distant and burning heights of an office block, a shopping mall half-sunken in a mire, and, of all things, an amusement park roller coaster poking its twisting and twisted heights above the trees. Trix knew they wouldn’t have come through alone, these things; there would be humans, too.
Possibly out there, as well as those pockets of humanity, Ian and Jentiss, not returned from seeking to help those near Deephold. Assuming a hot spot hadn’t taken them to Earth. She resolved to find them, to not lose her brother again.
But first—
“There’s no going home, you know.”
The others—the newcomers, Elly, Strom, and the rest—stared at Trix.
“We know,” Elly said. “Shen explained.”
“How do you feel, knowing there’s no going back?”
They took it remarkably well, considering.
“Aye, well,” Strom said. “Maybe one day there will be. Meantime, fuck only knows what kind o’ beasties are out there, so you’ll be needing a constant supply of armour and weapons, I’ll warrant.”
“Along with other kinds of equipment,” Manny chipped in. “You no longer have access to DragonCorp supplies, after all.”
“Then there’s beer,” Al Shaughnessy added, “Because I reckon once in a while you’re gonna wanna get pissed. Bring the raw materials for these guys, by all means, but while you’re at it, find me something to ferment.”
“And I was thinking,” Elly finished, “that if you wanted a hand out there, I could maybe come along? That is, if you’ll have me?”
“I’ll have you,” Trix replied. “Meantime, there are things we need to sort out. Fortify this place, for one.”
“I’d go with that.”
“But not quite yet, eh?”
Elly stroked her thumb across Trix’s cheek, wiping away the salty rivulet of a recently dried tear.
“No. Not quite yet.”
They buried Ralph on a nearby hillside. The ceremony took place early morning and, wittingly or not, unseen things keened sadly in the nearby mountains. When it was done, everyone but Trix and Elly drifted off. Elly put her arms around Trix but sensed a tension in her.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Am I real?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Of course you’re real.”
“No, what I mean is, can I really be real? Whatever it is Ralph brought back—can it actually be me?”
Elly bit her lip. Considered a while. “I think the best way to answer that would be to ask yourself what you want to do next.”
“Get out there,” Trix said. “Find our people. Help them.”
Elly started off down the hill. “Then I guess you’re really you.”
Trix stared after her. Smiled. She took a last look at Ralph’s grave then followed on. She could already hear sounds of activity from within the transplanted section of DOME—the bashing of Strom’s hammer on an anvil, the shriek of Yuri’s axes being sharpened on a lodestone, the bubbling of vials from Barking Jack’s nascent apothecary, and as she walked between panels being raised to fortify the perimeter of what she was already beginning to think of as ‘the compound’, a curious realisation came over her.
She’d stopped thinking about home.
She was home.
They all were.
Read on for a free sample EverRealm
Mike Wild has been writing since before he was born. No – wait – since before YOU were born. Probably. Among his credits are Doctor Who, K9 And Company, Starblazer, Masters Of The Universe, ABC Warriors, Caballistics Inc, as well as his Kali Hooper novels for Twilight Of Kerberos, and the fantasy western, Seven Cities Of Old. Mike enjoys a drink and a smoke and, as his wife would readily agree, mostly lives in a world of his own.
One
The end of the world arrived one night and nobody knew it. They slept, partied, worked overtime, called boyfriends, girlfriends, parents. On the other side of the planet, it was day, yet no one on that hemisphere knew the world was over either.
The human race died due to being completely clueless.
Which is how we all thought we’d go out anyway, right?
But this isn’t a story about the end of the world. Not this world, at least. I could go into detail on how the dead rose and got a little hungry, so they decided they’d hunt down anything living and devour it. And when I say the dead rose, I mean all of the dead. Not just humans.
Nope.
Dogs, cats, birds, potbelly pigs. All of the animal kingdom decided that death wasn’t their thing, so they’d just get up and start gnawing on anything they could catch.
And they weren’t slow.
Nothing special like super speed, no. They moved at the speed of their species. Hence the world ending in one night. No overweight housewife or fat businessman is going to outrun an undead German Shepherd with a sudden hankering for people meat. And the wino on the corner sure isn’t going to outrun the recently shot gangbanger that has just acquired a taste for flesh that has been marinating for years in fortified wine.
Twenty-four hours and it was over.
You would have thought that the civilization of the 23rd century would have had a better clue on how to handle an undead apocalypse. Centuries of film and television and other media laid everything out there. But people are sheep, and when no one stepped up to take charge, not that there was much time for t
hat, the sheep simply fell over and let the undead wolves rip their bellies open and feast on their hot, steaming guts.
I mean that figuratively and literally.
So, how did I survive? That’s a different story. One I have zero interest in going into too much detail about. There was a lot of blood, a good amount of betrayal, and quite possibly the biggest pile of luck any man could step in.
No, this story is about a whole other world. In a way.
It’s complicated.
Two
“Holo,” I called in as loud of a whisper as I thought I could get away with. The area should have been clear of the undead, but I never took anything for granted. Not when I’d survived longer than approximately eighteen billion others. “Holo!”
There was a grating noise from the alleyway to my left and I froze. I waited, listening hard to see if I could tell what was moving in the dark shadows only a few yards away. It could have been my Siberian Husky mix, Holo. Or it could have been a wave of undead rats that smelled my living flesh and were getting ready to charge me. I’d watched more than a few survivors go down that way.
I wanted to call for my dog again, but I couldn’t risk it. I’d already made way too much noise. It was supposed to be one last, simple scavenging mission. That was all. No risks, no detours, no trouble. But Holo always had other ideas. He was a smart dog, like really smart, but he had a mind of his own and was fearless in the face of the hordes upon hordes of undead that stalked the city streets.