So ended the faithful captain of Orlando.
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙
Sara woke in a high place standing backwards in what seemed an unending passageway to the past. With little thought, she recognized it immediately as the largest period of time she ever perceived all at once. Her mind wobbled under the weight of the realization that she held decades with all its thousands of individuals, events, and hopes in her gaze. She found it difficult to believe her mind’s ability at viewing such a thing. She feared insanity under its depth. She could feel parts of her mind stretching as it strained to analyze the grandeur of the information before her. The new waves of information came against her skull like the pounding of a stake into the earth. She reeled under the blows.
Squinting her eyes, she perceived it: the very beginning of time. The first thoughts of this new race. The first steps. The very first human kiss wrapped in the innocence of what had started.
And from the unfolding of her mind, came a new ability. Like a slumbering giant, the subconscious of her mind came under her control. Her mind opened before her like a doorway leading into new understanding and methods of knowledge. As if the solid walls of time now turned to glass, subtle orange words dwelling behind the halls came into view. Like skinny orange threads they surrounded the past. Considering it miraculous that she could even perceive the words, she moved towards them with hands extended as if to touch.
As she gazed at the fascinating string of words before her, she realized them to be sentient. Without eyes, they stared into her just as she did into them. Their foreign bodies reacted to her touch. With little effort now, she stepped backwards towards the future taking in even more of time. To her astonishment, these words grew in both intensity and occurrence. In reckless abandon, she leapt backwards taking in whole centuries of human history. As the words revealed more of themselves to her, she understood them to be leading her somewhere. The more she felt led, the more she felt ushered into something altogether welcoming and familiar.
In frantic desperation, she consumed time like an addict would her substance. Although she could never hope to understand even a fraction of what she saw, she consumed it none the less. The more she viewed, the more she found the orange words spun around time encasing it like a cocoon. As she progressed, the mystical words became so interwoven with the halls they were inseparable. Century after century turned to millennia. The more she saw, the faster it went. All her surroundings whirled out of control until she came to the stunning realization she held almost all of time in her gaze.
Her story, although incredibly important to her, drained like a tiny stream of water into this vast expanse of ocean before her. She found it staggering that the tiny flow of each individual’s story maintained its significance and meaning though eclipsed by the magnitude of time. The spectacle penetrated her. Her heart ached to become witness to her entire race. She cried and opened her arms to this. Humanity. Her race. Her people. Their lovely planet and all it had endured. Alas, their great sum!
In tears she saw everything. The beginning. A child. The good and bad. Every people group. Every civilization. Dreams. Threaded dreams. The same ones woven through so many minds. Astounded at her mind’s sensitivity to so many stories, she gazed again and perceived Earth. The precious home of her people. It hung like a fortress of hope against the void of space. Compassion swelled within her and she wished to embrace the world and rest her head against it.
The orange words flowed like fingers through every individual and then into the future. Her mind desperately tried to grasp the meaning of the words but it proved ineffable. The orange strands hijacked all of time wrapping it in itself. Surrounding her as if an embrace of love the words moved through her as they did all of history. Hope poured into her heart, overflowing it beyond its brim. The words were everywhere. They had meticulously thrust themselves into every era of history. Not one human being in the entire race remained untouched by them. Every life lived collided with the words at some point. For some, it came on mountaintops. For others in near-death experiences. And for those precious few, it found them in their wombs for they would never taste life. Like a thread it wove through every human soul.
Just as the hotel hosts prophesied, the sadness of the halls had soaked her soul. But she failed to realize it kept her blind to the overwhelming wonder on which the halls hung. Without this comforting wonder, the humanity she came to know seemed such a desperate lot. Their tales reeked with the sadness of a storm-tossed sailor frantically clutching at anything promising safety or relief. But now, she understood the true heart of life to be good. As she gazed on the magnitude before her, desperately trying to comprehend it, she realized this sadness to be the one who hijacked history. The words were merely taking it back.
Even stronger now, she felt the words leading her forward. All of time hung before her with the exception of one event. She viewed the battle of Orlando in perfect clarity now. The pain of her childbirth seemed distant and small.
Only one thing remained: the last event.
As if begging her to turn around, the words steadily flowed from the beginning of time to its end behind her. With sweaty palms and pounding chest, she gathered her courage. The hair on her skin rose and her eyes widened. Her heart skipped inside her.
In an act of brazen courage, she pivoted.
Fire. Light. Dreams and hope. Love and wonder. A kiss! The exact sum of her existence. The innocence of childhood. Genuine, explosive laughter. Worth, value, and the opposite of apathy.
She stood surrounded by waves of the orange words. Even with the evolution of her mind, it could not understand. Her mind darted across everything she knew as it scrambled for words. But description fled its grasp.
Her skin burned with a great intensity. The flames pulled at her skin like a magnet does metal. Dark spots within her flesh rose to the surface and burned up.
Like a woman on the ocean shore, she found herself infinitesimally small on the brink of something grand. The words, rushing from her, collected themselves into the belly of the sun. With intrinsic rage, its flames scorched a circumference spanning her vision. With its fire she burned before it but she did not die.
A solar flare of orange words burst from the sun and penetrated her body. It cut through her as a sword. With her arms she covered the wound and weakly fell.
But the floor refused to catch her. And so she fell into something altogether different.
She plummeted from the sun through time and space. A solar flare clutched her and followed as she fell. But finally the sun’s arm broke off and she fell alone. The halls of time – that she loved so much - vomited her out as if disgusted. Through eons and systems unknown she fell like a disregarded mystery too painful to keep.
After a great and painful descent, she landed into a place she bore no knowledge of and wished only for death. The orange words became scarce. The few remaining stretched into tiny strands about the darkness.
Though she wanted only to huddle into a ball and die, she saw another. A zombie. Unlike the others in history, it stood awake to her. Sara stood astounded that reality tore so badly that a zombie from Orlando clawed its way to this sacred place. She felt both the world of reality and time as distant experiences. They held little influence in this limbo. But above all, she felt the monster’s hatred of her kind. Its eyeless sockets locked onto her.
Without warning it lunged through the darkness and knocked her over. As she struggled against it, she finally understood.
“Brady!” she screamed at him and struggled even harder against his strength. As the zombie clawed into her chest with his disgusting hands, she yelled, “You bastard! No!” But her strength could not overcome that of a Zombie King and he subdued her.
She watched in horror and pain as he plunged into her chest and ripped from her body her beating heart. Her strength and will to live evaporated and her hands fell lifelessly to the floor. She could do nothing but watch him bite into her heart.
His t
eeth ripped into the priceless treasure and peeled back its surface with the cruelty of an Aztec sacrifice.
As he did, two things changed.
He seemed much less zombie and much more the Brady she had loved. By the time he consumed the last chambers of her heart, he seemed altogether the old Brady.
Secondly, when he finished her heart, she found her body restored. Even before he could lick his lips, the hole in her chest was whole like it had never been torn apart.
Sara considered all of this the insanity of a dream. The zombies in Orlando must have thrown her head against the wall and knocked her into this fantasy.
“Sara,” he said in a soft voice.
Finding strength, she cured him and screamed, “Let go of me!”
“Sara, I love you.”
In rage, she began to beat his chest. “No! No!” She wailed against him in fits and screams. He embraced her and she hated him for it. For some time the two struggled like this. Finally Sara’s strength failed and she resorted to only breathing curses and glaring.
With tears in her eyes she breathed over and over, “I hate you.”
Sara had not realized it before, but the ground now seemed littered with orange words. Brady picked up one of these. With the tiny strength she had left, Sara fought his movements. But Brady overpowered her and thrust the orange word into her chest. Like a drug, the sensation washed over her almost immediately. Her rage subsided and she leaned her head gently against the floor.
With their faces only inches apart, she stared up at him without words.
Brady whispered, “Sara.”
Though her rage ended, his greeting still struck her like an arrow in her deepest wound. Her head turned slightly from him as if she expected a second attack.
“How I’ve missed you!” he whispered.
Sara’s lips moved into a frown and she replied, “No. You don’t get to say those words to me.” She couldn’t help crying. “You’ve murdered me – in every sense of the word. You’ve killed my friends. You’ve taken every hope from me. I’m less than a whore to you. After all you’ve done, you come to me and try to whisper of love? Damn you, Brady!”
“Of all the paths in all of history, this one alone brought you and me back together. You’ve watched how I scoured time. I found one way, and only one way, that you might survive. The hatred. The murder. It couldn’t have been done any other way if you were to survive.”
He grabbed another burning orange word. “Know my true motivation.”
“It was always you,” he said with a weak smile. “All of this was always about you.”
She looked up at him her wound far from healed.
“I will not believe you – you are a liar!” she yelled. “Your words and your promises are broken. No burning words can ever remedy that. You promised you would not leave. But when the world came against me, I stood alone.”
Brady moved the orange word towards her and she put both hands on his. Shaking her head she tried to push him back.
“No,” she said in tears.
He pressed it into her chest despite her efforts.
Immediately her mind soared through images, feelings, thoughts, and desires. As if she instantly read a book, she knew it all. Her head tilted to the left and soon her body followed. She curled her knees up to her chest for in this world she carried no bulging child. She clutched her clothing and pulled it up tightly against her chest.
“Soon you will have Peace,” Brady whispered. “And then you’ll know my words are not a lie. I have been with you in a way far more intimate than if this rotting corpse walked along beside you.
“You never truly had to fear zombie flesh. I would never have let them destroy you completely. Your trial has always been between what your mind knows and your heart feels.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you. You’ve done awful things. You’ve murdered our own.”
Brady took a final word and pressed his body up against her back. He reached over and placed the word into her chest. She did not struggle against him but only tilted her face towards the ground and stared out from weary eyes.
“This is all too much,” she whispered. “You’ve bombarded me.”
“This was my only chance to tell you.”
She rolled over to see him face to face. Brady met the depths of her gaze.
Still spinning from the drug-like answers, she searched his eyes for a lie. “My heart wants to believe you. It always has. It wants to see Brady and Sara to the end. Even when you said those awful things to me in the prison, it searched for a way to justify you.
“But now you need to know: I am old and bitter. My heart towards you is shriveled. Abused and sore. I don’t know that it would survive opening like that again. It has endured all too much.”
“You underestimate it. You’ve called yourself a whore but I see a queen. Hurting but ready to leap into hope.”
“Queen of the damned maybe. You would have me join you and your dead army? I will not. You’ll have to murder me like you have the others.”
“Wait till you have Peace, you will understand.”
A terrible cracking noise shattered the silence and Sara knew it signaled the ending of her time here.
All of time now seemed to swirl around her. As if it were all pulled in one direction and her another, she saw the past, present, and future tearing away from her.
“Be with me again in Orlando and I will believe you. Come with me!”
Brady only smiled – that fateful, devilish smile he gave when he would not answer but knew something Sara wished to know.
The sound of rushing wind came crashing against her ears. The cracking noise erupted again and this time came with an intense pain in Sara’s groin.
“Everything,” Brady yelled, “everything I have done has been accomplished that you might ‘come with me.’”
She began to cry from the intensity of the pain. “Brady!” She doubled over and recognized now the pain to be that of intense contractions. “Brady don’t leave me again!” But despite her crying, she could not find him anywhere.
She huddled fearfully as all of time tore away in one terrifying direction. Time fled off to the right as if it were sand being violently sucked out of the room. Beads of it pelted her face as it flew and Sara covered her face with her arms. But something inside her compelled her to look through the opening in her arms. Through the overwhelming chaos, she managed to see through the debris to a single object. It stood firmly inside the great storm. The whirling bits of time collided against its surface in futility. Straining her eyes she recognized its unmoving frame.
“I swear to you,” the form said. “I will get you home!”
She reached out to him for comfort but the final fingers of time released her. She fell out of its reach and back into the world of the dead.
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙
Sara woke to a grim scene. Val became corrupted first. In animalistic hunger, she turned to Maya and pounced on her. Inhuman grunts escaped out of Val as she held Maya’s arms down and bit into Maya’s jugular. Maya screamed in horror and agony but this only fueled Val’s rage. Val clawed at Maya’s face with her fingers while her mouth tore into her soft flesh like a starving dog would devour scraps.
Maya tried to protect herself but Val easily overpowered the tiny woman. Maya looked at Sara and tried to speak but Val responded by digging her fingers into Maya’s face and biting off her lower lip.
Sara watched helplessly from her bed as Maya’s face became unrecognizable. Soon Maya’s eyes, surrounded by exposed muscle and bleeding flesh, stared out silently. The only noise Maya made was the rasping of her breath which sent little splatters of blood out her mouth and onto the floor. As Val devoured her lower body, soon Maya’s eyes drifted down into lifelessness.
Sara withdrew into herself as another intense contraction overcame her body. When Sara looked up again, Val’s face startled her. It stood only inches away from her own face with a devilish gaze. Val’s bloo
dy jaw hung carelessly open. Sara could not help seeing bits of Maya between Val’s teeth. Like an animal, Val leaned in and sniffed Sara. But she did not eat her or even attack her.
Several more zombies entered the room. Sara recognized them immediately as members of Adus’ troops now corrupted. They, likewise, stared at Sara through wild eyes.
An oversized hand reached in to the concrete above the doorway. In great strength it pulled back the concrete and broke it into pieces. Making a doorway for itself, the great brute entered. It slid its fingers between Sara and the bed and lifted her up effortlessly. Once it pulled Sara to its chest, it ran back out the entrance.
As Sara passed, she saw the zombies successfully overwhelmed every corner of the complex. Not a single human remained uneaten or uncorrupted. She could not help recognizing many familiar faces now in the ranks of the dead.
The brute took her back out an entrance to the surface. Sara looked out over the sea of zombies. They filled every corner of every area. Like ants they’d covered all the buildings and surfaces with their presence. Sara watched in a trance-like state as hundreds of dead faces passed before her. She clung to her captor’s arm afraid of what came next.
When they came to their destination, the brute dropped her on the ground. A lesser zombie came to her and scraped down her back tearing off her clothes and leaving five bloody gouges all the way down her back.
After receiving the wound, she looked up to the terrifying sight. There before her stood three corrupters. Eyeless deathly faces drilled into her. Sara shuttered at the sight of them. She’d thought the world felt cold before but now lying naked before these terrors she knew an altogether new winter. Uncontrollably, her jaw started to quiver and soon her whole body shook. Though she hated to do it in front of them, she could not hold back her tears. Any remaining shred of dignity drained out of her and she wept.
Sara’s world became a dizzying world of blurry, haunting faces. Every direction she looked, she saw only death and terror. Every rotting face looked on her in hunger-lust.
One of the eyeless terrors leaned forward and placed his disgusting fingers on her chest. Effortlessly, he pressed her onto her back so the kings could oversee the progression of her labor.
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