by Bryan Smith
Emily had a short-lived panic attack when she realized Warren wasn’t joking. She knew instantly what a bad idea accepting the invitation would be. Her first semester tuition had already been paid. And her parents were so proud she was going to college, even if they had reservations about her choice of major. If she ran away with her boyfriend, their hard-earned money would go to waste. They could get a portion back, maybe, but not all of it. Also, she and Warren were very young. They had their whole lives ahead of them. Maybe they were meant to be together, and maybe they weren’t. If they threw away the opportunities available to them now, maybe they wouldn’t be there again should they come to their senses later.
But they were in love. And so Emily went with Warren. They spent three months driving around the American south, picking up work where they could and living virtually hand-to-mouth. They learned a painful truth in that time. That no amount of romantic fantasy was enough to keep you going when you were living on the brink of starvation and had only a handful of pennies to your name. So, just about the time she should have been wrapping up her first semester at college, Emily surrendered to the inevitable and asked Warren to take her home.
There’d been every bit as much hell to pay as she’d expected upon her return. Her parents forbade her from seeing Warren as a condition of being able to stay at their house. She bristled at being treated like a child. She was eighteen. Young, yes, but legally an adult. She could do what she wanted. So she kept seeing Warren in secret. Eventually she started school while Warren spent his days crashing at Dan’s apartment and drinking. This went on for almost a year, Warren floundering while Emily slowly warmed to the challenges of college life. Then came the first in a series of ultimatums. Warren either had to get his act together or she’d leave him. Each time Warren made a promise to either look for a better job than his convenience store gig or go back to school. Preferably school, as far as Emily was concerned. And every time Warren failed to live up to his word.
So, finally, she left him. And Warren skipped town without so much as a goodbye phone call. If Emily had harbored any illusions of going blithely on with her life without Warren, they were shattered when word reached her that he was gone. In many ways she’d never quite recovered from the blow. She dropped out of school and started tending bar at the Villager, where she’d been until doomsday.
The man responsible for breaking her heart couldn’t possibly be back in Nashville. The odds against that had to be astronomical. She figured this was nothing but coincidence. Still…she had to ask the question. “Jasmine…your ‘young friend’…what was his name?”
Jasmine smiled again, but this time her eyes did sparkle with some unidentifiable emotion. It might have been love. It might have been sadness. Probably it was a mixture of both. “His name is Warren.”
Emily’s thunderstruck expression made Jasmine’s smile fade and morph into a frown. “The look on your face reminds me of my brother-in-law Frank when his only son announced he was gay at a family reunion.” She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes as she watched Emily struggle to form words. “The young man’s last name is Hatcher.”
Emily gasped.
A deep weariness seemed to draw Jasmine’s features downward, making her look the way Emily imagined she would ten years hence (assuming she, or anyone else, was still alive in ten years, of course). The woman lazily went through the motions of lighting a cigarette. She turned her head up and blew smoke at the washed-out sky. She looked at Emily again and sighed. “I take it the name has some significance for you.”
Emily could only nod. She was still reeling from the dual revelation. Warren Hatcher, her truest love, somehow had survived not only doomsday but the nameless infection that wiped out most of what remained of the already decimated human race. And he had come back to Nashville. She supposed there could theoretically be another young Warren Hatcher with the same connections, some cruel doppelganger delivered by malevolent fate, but she didn’t believe that for one second.
Her Warren was back.
And just like that all the troubles they’d endured in their time together as a couple seemed so petty, like so much nothing. She knew that if Warren were to appear before her now, she would throw herself into his arms and hold fast to him forever, the painful past and all its angst forgotten for good. But as soon as this bit of knowledge crystallized in her mind she became aware of the less-than-friendly way Jasmine was no regarding her. She was puzzled for only a moment, but then it all came clear.
I let myself get attached to my young friend from New Jersey…
Of course. Jasmine’s words took on a deeper significance now. ‘Attached’ was an obvious euphemism. She was in love with Warren. Or, at the very least, she’d been fucking him. The knowledge darkened her thoughts and feelings and set her blood to boiling. On one level, she knew this incipient rage was ridiculous. She’d forfeited whatever claim she held over Warren years ago. On a more primal and much more irrational level, she didn’t give a fuck.
Warren Hatcher belonged to Emily Sinclair. Not this hag. This cold bitch with the dead eyes. Emily felt a sudden urge to leap across the table and claw those eyes out, but she managed to restrain herself.
Jasmine peered closely at her, seeming to sense the hostility raging just beneath the surface. Then she took another puff from her cigarette and smiled wryly. “It makes sense, I suppose. We’re pawns on a cosmic chess board, aren’t we? We’re being manipulated by invisible hands, drawn toward some inevitable fate. You were his girlfriend, I take it. His high school sweetheart, perhaps.” She chuckled. “Clearly you and Warren are meant to be together again.”
But the smirk touching one corner of her mouth made the sarcasm in her words plain. And Emily knew the bitch wouldn’t surrender her hot young stud without a fight. Knowing this made her anger burn brighter a moment longer—until the absurdity of this little dance struck her, eliciting a humorless laugh of her own.
“I doubt that, Jasmine. After all, Warren’s not here. For all we know, neither of us will ever see him again.” Emily felt grimly satisfied at the way Jasmine’s eyes flared at that suggestion. “By the way, I wasn’t just a girlfriend. I was the love of Warren Hatcher’s life. And vice versa.”
Jasmine’s smirk returned. “It’s funny, though. I don’t recall him mentioning you.” Another puff from her cigarette. “I suspect he’s simply moved on emotionally while you have not.”
Emily laughed. “We’re very close to blows, you and I.”
Jasmine flicked the cigarette away. “Oh, please. You’re welcome to him, if you like. You should know something, though. Warren’s not exactly…himself anymore.”
Emily frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jasmine opened her mouth intending to elaborate (or so Emily supposed), but her mouth froze in an open O for a long moment and her eyes went wide and staring at something beyond where Emily was sitting. “Oh…my God.”
Emily’s frown deepened as she turned slowly around to see what Jasmine was gawking at.
She nearly fell out of her chair.
Warren was standing on the sidewalk a dozen feet away. Lurking just behind him was a distantly familiar-looking man. The stranger’s expression was befuddled. He seemed confused and haunted by something at the same time. But Emily had no room in her brain now for analyzing him. Warren was here. A tide of powerful emotions threatened to carry her away and she was only dimly aware of tears spilling hotly down her cheeks.
Warren smiled. God, he was as handsome as ever. More so, maybe. He seemed suffused with some inner, almost otherworldly glow. He looked almost godlike to her, standing there backlit by the diffused sunlight. “Emily. It’s good to see you again.”
Emily leapt from her chair and into his arms, just as she’d imagined she would moments ago. Her love had been returned to her. It was a miracle. At last she had something to hold on to—and live for—again.
Then Jasmine said, “It’s not—”
The older woman made a so
und like something had suddenly become caught in her throat. But Emily paid her no mind. Nothing else mattered anymore. Nothing except that she was back in Warren’s loving embrace—where she belonged.
Warren laughed softly and patted her back. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Jasmine? Your manners, perhaps. Yes, I thought so.”
He laughed again.
Something in that sound triggered a faint alarm at the back of Emily’s brain, but she ignored it. She kissed Warren on the mouth, then pulled back a bit and beamed at him with tears still streaming down her face. “I thought this day would never come.”
Warren’s arms encircled her waist, the fingers of his hands interlacing at the small of her back. His eyes sparkled as he said, “I always knew it would.”
A sudden thought pierced Emily’s joy. She tensed in Warren’s arms as she said, “Why didn’t I see or hear you coming down the street?”
Warren’s breath was soft against her ear as he said, “Shhhh. You forget about that.”
And she did.
* * *
“It’s almost time for you to start walking down that road, Flash.”
Flash looked straight ahead, avoiding the old man’s gaze. “You’ve been lying to me.”
Flash was sitting behind the useless wheel of a Ford truck. He’d shifted his base of operations—meaning his body and several warm six-packs of beer—to the cab of the rusted hulk a day ago. He liked to sit here and stare through the glass. With enough beer flowing through his veins, he could almost believe he was home again, sitting in his recliner and staring at his widescreen television. But when he was closer to sober—like now—the windshield was less like a television screen and more like a window, one with a view of the Gates of Hell.
Because that was how he’d come to think of Salvation Road.
The entrance to a place of damnation.
“Salvation Road isn’t the way to hell, Flash,” said the man sitting in the seat next to him. “How many times do I have to tell you this? It’s—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Flash cut him off. He’d had a lot of time to mull over the outlandish things the man had told him, and his patience was nearly at an end. “That’s where my destiny lies. Salvation Road is where good will finally triumph and evil will be vanquished forever and ever. Blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.”
The old man sighed. “It’s true, Flash.”
Flash looked at him. And this time when the old man turned his piercing gaze on him, he didn’t look away. That sense of cosmic awe he’d experienced before in the man’s presence was absent, was probably gone forever. Because he knew now that the mysterious codger wasn’t some biblical apparition. Nor was he, as previously claimed, a previous incarnation of Jeff Wheeler able to appear to him only in visions. That’d been so much hocus pocus and trickery. He was a real flesh and blood man, and he was right here with him in the truck now. For real.
Yet, for all his deceit, he was something more than an ordinary man. He possessed the ability to reach into Flash’s mind and make him see things that weren’t there, make him feel things he knew he shouldn’t feel. Knowing this scared Flash some, but not as much as one might think. Despite the manipulation and trickery, he sensed nothing malevolent in the old man. Quite the opposite, in fact. Flash believed the man meant to set him on an important journey. There was a noble purpose at the root of all this, he was sure of it.
A conviction that made him no less cranky about the lies. “Maybe it’s true. But that’d make that one of the few true things you’ve told me.” He grunted. “Hell, maybe the only one.”
The old man didn’t say anything. He averted his gaze from Flash and stared out the windshield. He let his head settle against the headrest as he closed his eyes.
Flash grunted again. “I’ll take your silence as a confession of your sins.”
The man’s eyes fluttered open. He looked at Flash through red-rimmed irises. “Okay, Flash. Or Jeff. Whatever you’d prefer to be called. It’s true. I’ve filled your head with grand lies. If you feel used and misled, I regret that, but I am not truly sorry. You _do_ have a pivotal role to play in a great drama, a genuine showdown between what your race would think of as good and evil. It’s not really so simple, so black and white, as that, but it’s the best way I have of putting it for you.”
Flash shook his head. “Why didn’t you just tell me this from the beginning? Why all the special effects? Why make me think I was some kind of second coming?”
The old man smiled. “Now you tell me something true, Flash. Didn’t you feel more motivated to do this important thing when you believed it was the fulfillment of some ancient religious prophecy?”
Flash finished off a beer and chucked the can out the open window on his side. “I guess I did.” He looked at his companion and nearly chuckled. They must be quite a sight, the two of them. Sitting here in this truck, drinking beer. Like a couple of rednecks out for a joyride through the post-apocalyptic wastelands. Like Hee Haw gone to hell. “Who are you, really? Hell, _what_ are you?”
The old man stared at him for a long moment, some of that old intensity returning to his gaze now. Then he said, “Before I try to explain that to you, tell me one thing, Flash. Will you do this thing for me?”
Flash sighed and didn’t immediately reply.
The old man pressed on: “I have to know. Because if the answer is no…frankly, I’ll have to force you to do it. And I can, Flash. Have no doubt of that. But I’d prefer that you go of your own free will.” A pause. “So…will you?”
Flash laughed bitterly. “Either way, it’s not really my will, is it?”
“I suppose not.”
“You suppose not.” Flash rolled his eyes and popped the tab on another beer. “Why me? Why not anyone else still around the day you came to me?”
The old man stretched, groaned, and sat up straighter in his seat. “Goddamn, but this body is so feeble, so nearly useless.” He made a clucking sound. “Ah, well. Nothing to be done for it now. Flash, I chose you for this role for the simplest of reasons. You were there. I arrived through a crack in the fabric of your reality moments before the unleashing of the Shoth, those flying beasts. I knew what was about to happen. And that there was nothing I could do to stop it. Your world was already doomed. But I also knew there was a slim chance I might later be able to avert the total extinction of your race. To do that, I would have to bide my time. And I would have to hide. I hijacked the body of the man you came out to meet that day. That body is my host. Here, I’ll let you see him as he really he is.”
The air around the old man seemed to shimmer and suddenly the flowing white robes and long white hair were gone. Physically, he still appeared the same. But now he wore glasses with thick frames and lenses and a business suit that looked like it had last been in style around about 1978. The man smiled at him. “This is the ‘strange’ man your coworker told you about that morning. Mr. Gabe Hassler. A ‘talent agent’, or so he billed himself. Mainly he just bilked money from the legions of dreamers who came to this city in hopes of becoming famous singers. Though I’m in control of his body and mind, he’s still sort of here. It’s a unique symbiosis. When I make references to things in your culture, that’s Gabe shining through.”
Flash scowled at the image. “I think I prefer the illusion.”
“Very well then.”
The air around the old man shimmered again and the white robes and flowing hair returned.
Flash’s brow furrowed as he thought a moment. “So…you came from the same place as those…Sloths?”
“Shoth.” The man nodded. “And, yes, I did.”
“And you say you came here to save the human race from extinction?”
Another nod. “Yes.”
Flash, thinking hard, pursed his lips and drummed his thumbs against the cracked steering wheel. “But those flying things…they’re all dead. Are you telling me there’s some other threat, something else that’s come here from your world?”
“I am in
deed.”
Flash frowned. “Whatever it is, it couldn’t possibly be worse than those things.”
The old man’s features took on a much more solemn cast. “Oh, but it is. Much worse by far.” He sighed. “This thing, this force, is like me in many ways. We have the same origin. If you were to see either of us in our true forms, your limited senses would perceive a free-floating energy cloud. Something constantly shifting, amorphous and malleable. Like me, this other being is able to infiltrate the minds of other creatures. Like me, it is able to inhabit the bodies of other creatures. As I am doing now with Mr. Hassler. As it is doing now with…” He indicated the stretch of Broadway beyond the Salvation Road billboard. “…someone…out there.”
Flash glanced in that direction and shuddered.
The old man continued, “Unlike me, this other being is interested primarily in spreading death and destruction, and in subjugating and humiliating those it chooses to keep alive. I was its adversary long ago. A great war was waged between the forces of light and darkness, a conflict that devastated the world we come from nearly as thoroughly as this one has been devastated. For a time longer than several of your centuries, the opposing armies stood at a virtual stalemate. Then, perhaps because I’d grown complacent, the tide began to slowly turn in favor of darkness. And darkness eventually prevailed. I went into hiding, making myself effectively invisible to my enemies. But I monitored the activities of my adversary. I knew I would not be able to prevent it from spreading its dark influence to other realms, but I believed that if I were very watchful, and very careful, a chance might arise, an opportunity to extinguish the darkness forever.”
Flash blew air through clenched teeth. He looked at the billboard overlooking Broadway. SALVATION ROAD, it read, AVAILABLE OCT. 7. The significance of the date hit Flash and elicited a humorless laugh. “Let me guess, you want me to walk down ‘Salvation Road’ tomorrow?”