He’s woken up by the same two guards, kicking his body.
Chapter 10
Then
Two sets of initials in a heart, carved into the heart of a tree more than 100 years old, grown over with bark, keeping love a secret. Now hacked out of the wood.
Meanwhile, somewhere else in time, Jon is eating his breakfast.
“Where’s Dad?” asks Jon.
“He went to work early. Why?” asks Jon’s mother.
“No reason.”
“You know you can talk to me, too.”
“Uh-huh,” Jon says, into his cereal. Maybe not about this. And besides, he’s fallen into this trap before, he knows what happens: he tells her what’s on his mind and the next minute, he’s in the shrink’s office, having to explain why what’s on his mind is on his mind. She made herself an alien. Not him.
He finishes his cereal, gets his bag and starts walking to school. He doesn’t like school. He must hand in his recording for music class. He must write his test. He doesn’t want to write his test. He just wants to be alone. He runs a stick along the side of the fence as he walks and it makes a click-clack sound. He just wants to see Michelle again. He loves her. He loves her like every mushy, romantic song he’s ever heard has ever told him how to love someone.
Instead, the bells ring and he’s late. He sprints around the corner, into the school playground and there’s Gregory Ashcroft, resident asshole, who’s good at sports and does fairly well academically. If you didn’t talk to him, you’d say he was fairly good looking but as soon as he opened his mouth, everything about him screamed asshole. Right now, for example, Justin Pearson, resident geek, who’s not good at sports, kind of pale and doesn’t do that well academically, is sitting down on the edge of the low wall in the playground at the front of the school, doing his best to ignore a crowd of children who have gathered around him and Gregory.
Gregory is saying, “Justin, if your parents had a little more money, you could go for plastic surgery, you know. You wouldn’t have to live your life being ugly. Come on guys, let’s start a collection for Justin’s plastic surgery.”
Gregory’s cohorts and henchmen chortle to themselves and snigger at his unsurpassed, at least in their eyes, wit.
Jon knows he shouldn’t be involved but fuck it.
“Yeah, Greg, but at least ugly can be fixed, stupid is forever.” The playground laughs, hard, not at Justin anymore but at Gregory. Gregory slowly turns to Jon, his face red. He regains some of his composure by swallowing some air, at least by the looks of it and stares straight at Jon before smiling and very slowly, drawing his hand across his throat, like a blade. The message is unmistakable. Jon may have won the battle but the war is never ending. Fuck it. Justin, pale as he is, is a decent kid and doesn’t deserve this kind of shit.
“You’re all late!” comes the shrill voice from the entrance to the school and a teacher rings a bell, scowling at the children as they file past her.
Jon makes his way through the noise of the school halls to his first lesson, music class. Minutes after he enters, Jon’s teacher has taken him outside. She has long, flowing black hair and Jon and every boy in the school has had a crush on her at one time or another. Each student was assigned the task of making a song. They could sing. They could play a guitar. They could run their finger over the lip of a glass. It didn’t matter. It was supposed to be fun. Jon’s recording is nothing but noise. Static. Thirty minutes of static. The kind you’d hear if you tuned the radio to a station that wasn’t there.
“Why did you do this, Jon?” asks Jon’s teacher.
“I thought we were allowed to do whatever we wanted,” says Jon, kicking the ground.
“You were, but it had to be a song.”
“It is a song,” says Jon. He tries to get up and walk away, but she grabs his arm to stop him.
“Sit down, Jon. I’m your teacher, you’re supposed to listen to me. This is really your idea of a song?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, Jon. What are the words to your song?”
“They’re whatever you want them to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if you listen to it for long enough, you start to hear words.” Jon’s teacher is staring at him. Jon’s teacher hasn’t been trained for this.
“I made it white noise on purpose. That way, anyone could find what they were looking for in it.”
“Go back inside and sit down,” says Jon’s teacher, sighing. She makes a note in a book. Jon’s teacher doesn’t know what to do. After music class, Jon is outside the school building five minutes before the start of his test and Gregory Ashcroft and several of his goons, including one who’s particularly covered in acne, Jeremy Shaw, are slowly backing him into a corner by the lockers. Jon regrets nothing.
“What kind of retard makes a song out of noise?” says Gregory, slamming his fist into his open hand again and again.
“You’re a bit of a freak, aren’t you, Jonny boy?” asks Jeremy, who has the privilege of being Gregory’s second in command. Jon turns around and faces the wall, not even acknowledging them. He’ll just keep staring at the wall and they’ll go away. Instead, it makes them angry.
“My name’s Jon, not Jonny boy,” says Jon quietly to the wall.
“What did you say, faggot?” Asks Gregory.
One of the goons grabs Jon by the shoulders and shoves him towards Gregory. Gregory catches him with a fist in the stomach.
“Did that hurt? Jonny boy? Speak up, faggot,” says Gregory.
Jon finds himself thinking of Michelle. The thought of Michelle makes him happy and he can feel the blood rushing through him in the same way it did the night before. Then he thinks of superheroes. He thinks of superheroes smashing through buildings, throwing cars. His mind takes him somewhere else. It tries to take him somewhere else. It doesn’t quite work. Gregory is pulling Jon’s hair. Tears are streaming down Jon’s face. It hurts. This hurts. He wants to hurt them back. Suddenly, he feels Gregory’s grip on his hair loosen and he hears Jeremy and the rest of his goons gasp.
“Look what you’ve done,” whispers Jon.
He can feel the air thinning around him, like it did in his bedroom the night before. A giant creature made of fire and thorns looms over Jon, growing out of him, howling, clawing at the boys, reaching out for them. Gregory, Jeremy and his friends run, screaming, not knowing or understanding what they’re seeing. The monster becomes mist just as quickly as it became real but not before looking Jon straight in the eyes.
Jon sits in the corner, panting. Everything is red and he’s covered in sweat and just as scared of himself as the other boys are. He just wants to be normal, but this sure isn’t it. He still doesn’t want to write his test and that at least, that not wanting to be at school, feels like it might be a normal thing to feel.
Jon, remembering what his father tells him about working hard and getting through things, remembering his father telling him that school doesn’t last forever, walks towards the exam hall, trying to forget the monsters. None of it’s real. None of it’s real. None of it’s real. He tries not to think about what’s happened over the last twenty-four hours. He goes inside the hall, sits down and they hand out the paper. He takes out his pencil and tries to think of numbers, of how they fit together and he finds it hard. He’d find it hard even if things hadn’t started jumping out of his head into the real world. He’s good with words. Bad with numbers. Bad with directions. Good with pictures. He wonders if anyone is good at everything. He tries to stop wondering and focus on the test. The teacher, his music teacher, is walking up and down amongst the desks, moderating the test. Jon is pushing his pencil across the paper, across the symbols. Symbols that represent quantities of things. No specific things, just abstract things. That’s what he finds difficult. Just things.
He tries to focus. He tries to drown out his thoughts. They cannot be drowned. They float to the surface. He’s yelling at himself inside his head and just about to start cr
ying when he feels a cold hand gripping his leg below the desk.
He freezes and looks down. A dark figure made of static and shadows is lying on the ground, staring up at him. The child behind him isn’t in his desk anymore. No one else has seen the creature made of shadows gripping his leg yet. The hand slowly grips tighter and the dark figure starts to hiss. He thinks it’s happening again, what happened the night before and with Gregory outside, it’s happening again but it doesn’t feel like him. This doesn’t feel like him. He remembers what it felt like and something tells him he hasn’t made this.
Someone else has made this, whatever it is. The shadow slowly starts trying to pull him from the chair. He grips onto the desk and holds on as tight as he can. A girl in the desk across looks up and sees what’s happening and her faces freezes in pure fear. Jon looks at her, unable to scream, unable to do anything, holding on as tight as he can as the creature strains against him. She opens her mouth and screams for him. The silence in the hall is shattered and everyone turns as one. The figure leaps up and throws itself at the exam moderator, Jon’s beautiful music teacher, tearing and ripping, blood spraying across the room in violent arcs. As if it were an encore of last night, bright light pours through the window, the air thins and everyone in the exam hall starts to scream louder, and then a blast wave hits and everything goes white.
Chapter 11
Now
A fireman’s axe, found in the ashes of a burnt out building.
“Look at that, the lovers have been cuddling,” says Deformed.
“Put some clothes on, you freak,” says the shorter one, the one who’s quiet unless he’s sure big Deformed is somewhere near. They throw a bright white jumpsuit at him and watch him get dressed. Edward’s chest is rising and falling, which reassures Jon that he didn’t die during the night, although the collar around his neck is still cutting into him, still making him weak.
“Don’t worry cupcake, we’ll finish him off tonight,” says Deformed. Jon looks away. He will not let them know he cares about anything anymore. They’re just toying with him. Trying to make him snap. Fuck them.
“As for you, the doctor would like you to join him for breakfast. Now get up and walk or we’ll drag you there like last time,” says Deformed.
Jon gets up and follows them out, casting one last look at Edward before he leaves. He will be sad if he dies. They lead Jon through the twisting corridors of the compound and finally out onto a terrace, below the white marble spires. Waiting for him is a table made of the same wood and chrome hybrid from the doctor’s office, two chairs, and plates stacked with food and a vase with a single red rose in it. The guards make Jon sit in the chair and fasten restraints around his arms.
The doctor walks in through a side door and says, “That won’t be necessary, will it Jon?”
Jon looks at him and then at the guards; he nods in agreement and the guards, after a confirming glance at the doctor, undo the restraints.
“How did you think he was going to eat?” asks the doctor. The guards shrug and slink off, leaving the two of them alone.
“You want to know about your father, don’t you, Jon?” asks the doctor.
Jon doesn’t trust his voice, so he just nods.
“We’ll get to that soon enough. First, let’s talk about what you did to one of the guards during your acquisition. He nearly went mad. We had to send men out in the middle of the night to find his sister and assure him that she wasn’t anywhere near the cell you were in,” says the doctor.
Jon chuckles to himself. It felt good to do that to the guard, even though it killed him inside to see James again. It was worth it.
“Tell me about that,” says the doctor.
“Why should I?”
“You will if you want to know what happened to your father,” says the doctor. There’s a noticeable look of pain on Jon’s face.
“I can see that got to you. If you want to know how he died, you’ll cooperate,” says the doctor. “I don’t want to be mean but I will get what I need.” The doctor loads his own plate with food.
“You were lying then, when you said I was wrong, that he didn’t die in The End,” Jon blurts out before remembering himself.
“I wasn’t lying. He didn’t die in The End. He died causing The End,” says the doctor and he says it while cutting his eggs and bacon, like he’s discussing the score from a sporting fixture, like he’s talking about a traffic jam or the weather.
Jon remains still, not touching his food, wondering if it’s as poisoned as the doctor’s words, although if they were going to kill him, they would have just done it by now.
“You don’t believe me?” asks the doctor.
Of course he’s lying but Jon figures he might as well get a free breakfast out of it. He starts to eat. He loves flapjacks and apple pie and there are ample amounts of both. Jon doesn’t respond to the doctor.
“Tell me, Jon, what do you think happened at The End?” asks the doctor.
Jon flinches for just a second. It’s illegal to talk about The End because of the emotionally unstable reaction it can cause in certain survivors. It figures the government would ignore its own law.
“We were invaded by the shadow army, a group of supernatural monsters that disappeared shortly after the attack. There were also several bombings, a nerve gas attack, some kind of chemical warfare strike against the civilian population and that all pretty much killed the entire human race,” says Jon.
“Really? Is that really what you think happened?” asks the doctor. Jon shrugs again and takes a bite of his food. He chews it slowly. The doctor reaches down behind him and takes out a paper folder.
“Read those,” says the doctor. Jon puts down his knife and fork and picks up the folder. It’s a collection of random pieces of paper. The first is an official looking military report with the word “classified” stamped across the front.
29/11
Flight patrol commenced at 16:00 hours and lasted 9 hours with pilots Patterson and Dutch from base Charlie 053. Plane nearly ran out of fuel due to pilots not being able to land safely. Pilot Dutch reports wild black river suddenly rising up out of nowhere and “attacking” civilian population. Reports from Patterson contradict reports from Dutch. Patterson indicates he witnessed packs of roving “dark” animals attacking the civilian population, hence he, without waiting for authorisation from central command, unleashed a full artillery strike on the dark creatures inflicting massive collateral damage on civilian population.
Over the course of several hours, Dutch was able to talk Patterson into landing the plane. Both Dutch and Patterson have been detained indefinitely, pending further investigation into “The End” related global incidents.
Jon puts it down and picks up the next piece of paper, a page from a diary.
29/11
Mother is dead. Father is dead. A giant black dragon appeared out of the sky and breathed fire upon our village. Father says we have been bad people for aiding the Americans. Perhaps this is why we were punished. The black dragon spat death for hour upon hour. Of our family, only me and Sister survive. We begin today to walk to the hospital. We are both weak but I believe we will make it. I hope someone finds this one day and knows what we went through. The thought makes me feel hopeful.
Jon keeps paging. There are articles and notes and reports and a hundred different accounts of the day humanity died. All mention the shadow army at one point or another but there are bits that don’t fit together, that don’t make sense.
“I don’t…I don’t understand,” says Jon. The doctor scoops another forkful of food into his mouth.
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” says the doctor. He chews his food.
“The End, when the shadow army invaded, as we call it here, was the worst day in most people’s lives. But what many people don’t realise, is that they had a choice in what kind of day it was. People projected what the worst possible thing that could happen was onto that day and then, in their minds,
it happened. It was, in fact, a mass hallucination.”
Jon has stopped chewing and the food has turned to ash in Jon’s mouth. Jon was there. Jon saw the shadows, he can remember the hand on his leg, the bright light, the smoke, the chaos, the pain, he smelt the gas. And then he remembers Wilfred, the young boy he’d helped out of the school when it happened. Wilfred thought they were being attacked by wolves.
“It’s not possible,” says Jon. Jon whispers it. He barely breathes it.
“It’s entirely possible, Jon,” says the doctor. “I know because I was there at the epicentre, as was your father.” He puts down his fork and begins to stare intently at Jon.
“And let me ask you this, Jon. Does that kind of hallucination sound familiar to you? The kind of hallucination that the viewer creates themselves? That they project? It should. It’s a gift both you and you father shared. He tapped into the noosphere, the global collective consciousness, just like you tap into people’s minds. He did it to the entire human race, but as is always the case with your and your father’s talent, it was different, for different people. People found their own horror,” says the doctor.
“Your father ended the world as you know it, Jon.”
Jon’s mind is swimming.
“Let me elaborate. You know the shadow army, the invading force that destroyed everything? That was us. It was always us. Half the human race looked like shadows to the other half and we killed each other. We were fighting, killing ourselves. We were our own enemy and officially, we’ve never discovered where the shadow army went after the attack because, well, they never went anywhere. We were them all along.”
“Then what about the war afterwards? Who the hell was I bombing? Who the hell have we been at war with for the past ten years?”
“Ourselves. Always ourselves. It’s a tragedy but there’s only so many people left in the world capable of farming, of being doctors, of leading, of being of actual use to society and there were too many refugees to take care of.”
Intentional Dissonance Page 7