Anthem's Fall

by S. L. Dunn

  After what felt like an eternity immersed in this chaos, Kristen wedged through the last pair of shoulders and stumbled into the wide empty space surrounding the behemoth. Kristen stared at the giant dead body, eyes wide with anxiety. Now up close and personal with the malformed corpse, she identified with the people who had given it a wide berth. It looked as though a big game kill had been left in the middle of the avenue.

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Madison yelled over the uprising surrounding them as she looked with disgust at the hulking carcass.

  Kristen hesitated, overwhelmed by her surroundings. Beside them, a group of men had stopped a Ford with Maryland plates that was attempting to plow a path through the avenue. They pushed it back and forth on its tires, trying to flip the sedan over. Behind the tinted windows and locked doors, Kristen saw a family.

  “It will only take a second,” Kristen called out numbly. Diverting her eyes from the horror around them, she walked determinedly to the dead body. She slipped off her backpack and kneeled beside the giant’s still shoulder, marveling at the sheer size of the strange man. Resting lifeless against the pavement, Kristen could not even venture a guess as to how much this person weighed.

  “We’re going to get a blood sample and then get back up to the Lutvak ballroom as fast as we can. We’ll get there before Vengelis returns.”

  “And what if he realizes we left while he was gone?”

  Kristen looked up to Madison as she unzipped her backpack. “Then we’re in trouble! But we don’t have a choice. This could be our only shot to get a sample of their blood. I guarantee they’ll be sure to retrieve this body before they leave. And that’s assuming they do leave!”

  “What does it matter?” Madison shouted.

  “Because.” Kristen took out the thin glass tissue slide and wiped it down with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, her eyes nervously locked on the sky for any sign of Vengelis. Beside them, the Ford finally flipped, and the group of horrible men whooped with excitement. The indiscriminate sounds of anarchy and disorder surrounding them made her cringe. She felt as though she was immersed in the middle of a parade or sporting event gone horribly wrong. Kristen had never thought a crowd could be so coldblooded, its impulsiveness so chilling. “Vengelis said their power is derived from their genetics. With a sample of this blood, we can map their genetic code and then delineate a blueprint of strength. We’ll figure out what they are, and with that information decide how we can defend ourselves against them.”

  “I really think we should get back!”

  “Look around!” Kristen motioned to the masses, to the flipped car. “What will we do without a means of protection? Nothing! This—what you see right now—will claim the entire world unless we can find a means to pacify this insanity.”

  Madison gave a fretful sigh.

  “Take this giant here.” Kristen carefully ran the slide along the giant’s jaw line, smearing blood across the thin glass. “Who killed him? I have no idea. But it certainly wasn’t by a human hand. Clearly Vengelis was lying to us. There’s more to his story than he told me. The only thing we know for certain is that we are completely at their mercy. We have to use anything we’re given to protect ourselves, and right now, we can get this giant’s DNA and go from there.”

  “Okay, okay,” Madison said. “Just please hurry.”

  A swell of screams rose suddenly from the crowds to the north. Kristen looked up and exchanged a momentary concerned glance with Madison before slowly rising from her kneeling position and anxiously peering over the people that sprawled up Seventh Avenue. The power to the city had either been shut off or severed, and the shade upon the city was striking as a cloud passed across the sun. For the first time Kristen noticed the electronic billboards overhead were now ominously blank, and the darkened storefronts and lobbies of Times Square appeared sinister in the afternoon light.

  A sharp gnawing sound suddenly tore down the avenue from far overhead. Kristen elevated her gaze, and her shoulders drooped in woozy horror. To their north, beyond the spire of the Marriott Marquis, one of the massive dark skyscrapers looming down from the blue sky was visibly pitching.

  “Oh dear god,” Kristen murmured. “Please no.”

  “We have to go back that way,” Madison called.

  “I know.”

  Kristen held her breath. If the skyscraper were to collapse, all of its surrounds—Kristen and Madison included—would be immersed in the lethal wave of debris. Then, as the building began to steadily and perilously tilt into the open autumn air, it abruptly stopped. The mirrored windows hung in the wind like a grand modern rendition of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The entire skyscraper—including the broad hole near its top—seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse. But for the moment it held. The crowd stood motionless below it, in a collective unease that even the slightest budge would cause the building to thunderously tumble down onto them.

  After allowing herself one shocked moment, Kristen turned and kneeled back down to her backpack.

  “Kristen, let’s go!”

  “All right, all right. Just hold on. I—”

  As Kristen spoke, the lower wall of the Marriott Marquis exploded, flinging loose mortar across Times Square. Kristen spun toward the noise, and her heart seemed to momentarily forget to beat. She recognized the source of clamor at once. Before a word could be spoken between then, Kristen and Madison watched as Vengelis Epsilon erupted out of the hotel and accelerated directly toward them above the crowd. Vengelis was covered in caked blood and dust, and his face looked beaten. Before Kristen even had a moment to consider their situation, he landed in the empty street before her, his feet splintering the pavement.

  Kristen found herself even more confused as she beheld Vengelis’s appearance at close proximity. His previously regal face was swollen and beaten. Kristen stood in shock as she held the blood-streaked glass slide. Vengelis’s unsteady and swelled gaze moved slowly across the scene. He looked from the fallen giant, to Kristen and Madison individually, to the blood-streaked slide in Kristen’s hand. His eyes narrowed wearily on the slide.

  “Clever,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “We thought the building was going to collapse. We weren’t running away.” Madison spoke quickly. “We were going to head right back.”

  Vengelis said nothing; he looked only at the slide Kristen held.

  “Give it to me.”

  Kristen hesitated and rolled her fingers into a fist around the fragile slide. Vengelis looked up to meet her gaze and held out his open palm, his face oddly solemn. His hands were mangled and raw, his arms shaking with exhaustion.

  “You have no idea the magnitude of power you are considering wielding so recklessly.”

  Kristen nodded grimly. “Says the man who wields it.”

  Vengelis considered her, the thoughts behind his beaten face impossible to guess. “Give it to me,” he said.

  Kristen opened her hand and looked down at the slide—the Sejero genetics—within her grasp. She knew exactly the enormity of power held in her hand: the power to defeat the man standing before her, the power of gods. With no other choice, Kristen sighed in submission and held the slide out to him.

  Vengelis nodded sternly, his expression betraying a glint of compassion toward her idea. She noticed he did not seem overtly mad. He reached out to take the slide from her, and their hands reached toward one another to swap the blood sample. But in that exact instant, something happened that Kristen did not entirely understand. A flash of movement registered in her peripheral vision from the right side of the avenue. Then a tremendous impact occurred in front of her. In a transient sequence of her conscious vision, Kristen saw the image of a shoulder drive into Vengelis’s side much like a tackle. It was as though a speeding car had hit Vengelis, except the force even greater.

  Instantaneously, Kristen was lifted off her feet and a rush of air launched her backward into the door of the overturned Ford. Her back formed a gigantic dent in the
passenger side door and shattered the window. Kristen slipped down off the car and came to rest on the ground, the side of her face pressed against the cold pavement and her ears ringing. The wind was knocked out of her, and her chest heaved futilely for breath as she blinked in shock. For a prolonged moment Kristen lay on the pavement, her mouth moving incoherently with confusion.

  Something—someone—had hit Vengelis.

  A firm hand took hold of Kristen’s shoulder and pulled her shakily to her feet. It was Madison; she was helping Kristen up with one hand while clutching her own forehead with the other. Madison also had been knocked down, and her shoulder was scraped from the pavement. Kristen turned and marveled at the impression she had made in the side of the car door. She reached out and touched the indent. Her body must have hit it at a perfect angle, as she realized she did not feel any injury. Madison shook Kristen’s shoulder violently, and Kristen turned to her as she mouthed something urgently and shook her once more in exasperation. She saw Madison’s lips forming the words let’s go over and over again. It took Kristen a moment to realize she could not hear anything.

  The impact had deafened her.

  Kristen lifted her arm and motioned to her ears. As she did so, she realized she was still holding the slide in her hand. She and Madison both looked down at the undamaged slide in disbelief. Kristen drew her gaze from the slide to the direction Vengelis had been launched. A gaping hole disappeared into the side of a storefront. Vengelis—and whatever had hit him—had gone straight through the side of the building.

  Let’s go! Madison’s lips moved again in the ringing silence.

  Kristen nodded. The clamor of the avenue was faintly audible, like the dull drone of a distant highway. Kristen turned around with a mustered resolve, and—whether by the concussive force of her crash with the Ford, or the actual quaking of the street underfoot—her world spun with vertigo. She stumbled forward a few steps and picked her backpack off the pavement, placing the slide in its protective case with trembling hands. Again, Kristen nearly fell over, and this time she realized it was not just her—the entire block was shuddering.

  Come on! Madison pulled on Kristen’s arm, and looked skyward to the towering buildings with an expression that revealed both awe and fear. Kristen, too, raised her attention to the sky. In her dreamlike quiet, she watched as two struggling figures brutally fought over the heads of the masses. The two juggernauts burst through the air, their evanescent movements barely visible to the spectators. To Kristen, it almost seemed as though the two battling forms were not moving at all, but instead were apparitions appearing suddenly here or there, and vanishing before her eyes had a chance to discern any concrete vision.

  But their battleground offered evidence to their all too tangible struggle. Kristen turned slowly around as various floors of the towering buildings around her burst inward or outward with the impacts and accelerations of the two great beings. The two bodies surged back and forth among the skyscrapers, and each impact with the confining buildings had a wrecking ball effect on the towers. Loose debris, shattered glass, and huge fragments of concrete plummeted and ricocheted down into the crowd of upturned faces. Madison pulled again on Kristen’s arm, harder this time. That was all it took to shake Kristen out of her overwhelmed daze. At once, Kristen averted her eyes from the battling gods and met Madison’s expression with a fierce resolve.

  The two young women turned and began sprinting up the avenue, the backpack containing the enigmatic Sejero blood jostling and bouncing off Kristen’s shoulders.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Gravitas

  Pulse, pulse, pulse.

  Hammer strikes in the darkness, as though his heart had transformed into an instrument of torture. With each new beat, the flowing blood reawakened every nerve ending in his body. There was only the pounding throb of pain to his being.

  Pulse, pulse, pulse.

  Yet it was the exhaustion’s influence that overwhelmed the hurt. Compared to the fatigue saturating into his very bone marrow, the pain was nothing; the pain was acting to ground him in reluctant consciousness. Were it not for the throbbing agony, his mind would have allowed him to sink into a paradise of nothingness.

  But instead of passing out, and with an unthinkable force of willpower, Gravitas opened his eyes. Through his swollen eyelids, he peered into deep blue skies scattered with clouds. How long had he been dazed? Where was he? Where was Vengelis Epsilon? He blinked many times, and slowly turned his head to examine the sleek glass of a few nearby skyscrapers as they ascended stoic and impassive into the blue of the sky.

  With a mournful sigh, Gravitas thought back to what felt like a lifetime ago when he had awoken with Kristen that morning, her fragrant hair wet from the shower and a pale morning sunlight across her smile as she lay next to him. The thought of her was painful to consider, and he nearly retched in misery as he quickly shook the sentiments from his mind and gathered his bearings. He was tangled up in the crumpled heap of a car. His upper torso had split through the roof, and the back of his head was resting at a strange angle against the tan leather of a backseat. Gravitas easily dislodged his shoulder from the malleable steel and sat up. There was a frenzied flood of people stampeding northward up the avenue, as if the car on which he had landed was afloat in a river of rioters. He could hear them bumping up against the car and scratching the doors as they passed.

  Gravitas lifted a hand to place against his face and assess the damage, but he stopped before his fingers reached his cheek. The pain splitting across his face was beyond words, but his condition did not matter. He was conscious; the fight would continue. Without a second thought, Gravitas abruptly lifted himself out of the remains of the car and accelerated into the air. He was insensate and drunk with fatigue, and he veered to the side, inadvertently grazing into the side of a skyscraper. His shoulder cleaved a broad gash into a dozen stories of sparkling windows. Gravitas dazedly cursed his indiscretion and continued to rise more carefully, halting above the tall buildings to survey the streets below and locate Vengelis Epsilon.

  A tearing noise rose against the sounds of the city, and Gravitas turned to watch the building his own body had maimed begin to tremble. The supports were yielding, and he watched with a pleading expression as the broad tower began to pitch to the side for a moment. Gravitas reluctantly drew his gaze away from the teetering Midtown skyscraper, as it looked like it would hold for the time being. He focused on finding Vengelis, and his efforts did not take long. As he peered down into the city, he watched one of the lower floors of the Marriott Marquis burst outward and expel thick rubble across the square. Penetrating out of the dusty upheaval, he saw the glint of Imperial First Class armor. Gravitas discerned the Epsilon accelerate down the avenue and toward the fallen body of the Royal Guard Darien. Gravitas’s swollen eyelids narrowed as he noticed the apprehension, perhaps even panic, in Vengelis’s excessive speed. Vengelis veered down Seventh Avenue as if his life were on the line, and came to a landing beside the gigantic corpse of the Royal Guard.

  Without hesitation Gravitas erupted downward, the sound of his approach drowned out in the welter of the streets. Vengelis’s vulnerable side was facing an open intersection, and Gravitas descended with a swooping approach to mercilessly blindside him. It appeared as though Vengelis was preoccupied, or perhaps he had considered Gravitas defeated; either way he had left himself completely undefended as he stood by his fallen soldier. Gravitas barreled downward and pulled up at the last second, coming level to the street and sprinting as hard as he possibly could toward the emperor. His vision blurry, Gravitas watched Vengelis lift his arm out to someone, leaving his fragile midsection wide open for an ambush. Thundering up the street with all of the force his beaten body would allow, Gravitas lowered his shoulder and thrust himself forward with every drop of his remaining strength, plunging his flexed shoulder straight into Vengelis’s ribcage.

  The impact was ferocious. Gravitas could hear a number of Vengelis’s ribs crack from the impac
t. Together the two bodies—Gravitas on top of Vengelis—reeled across the street and crashed through a plate-glass window into a deserted five-star restaurant. Weakened by his injuries, Gravitas simply pushed forward, pumping his legs one after the other. He drove Vengelis backward, his shoulder buried into the tender space below Vengelis’s armpit.

  Vengelis let his own body fall underneath Gravitas and flipped him over with a heave. Gravitas’s momentum carried him booming through a hostess table with a discharge of splintered wood. He rolled across the restaurant in a calamity of tablecloths, shattering plates and silverware.

  “You don’t quit, even when you’re beaten!” Vengelis screamed hoarsely. He rose to his feet on the mahogany floor, wincing from his ribs.

  Gravitas grunted and ripped a white tablecloth from his body. He ran straight at Vengelis, swinging out with a right fist. Dodging his head out of reach, Vengelis sent his knuckles up into Gravitas’s stomach. The blow sent him straight through the ceiling, and Vengelis ascended after him. They interlocked arms and began to wrestle through the walls and ceilings of the building. Floors and walls crumpled and disintegrated around them, the structures yielding to their bodies without the slightest resistance. Gravitas reached down and grabbed Vengelis behind the knee, pulling Vengelis’s left leg into his grasp and pushing his shoulder into his stomach. Vengelis fell backward; their two bodies smashed through drywall and mortar and out into the daylight of the city.

  Vengelis swung his fist and caught Gravitas behind the ear. The blow forced Gravitas to relinquish his hold on Vengelis’s leg, and sent him careening through the air and into a billboard. Back and forth across the open street they fought, even Gravitas now disregarding the massive damage he was inflicting to the buildings around them. Concrete and steel broke against them like porcelain. There was not a trace of defenses now between the two of them. Every swing from either one of the Sejero warriors struck its mark as they exchanged blows like wild animals. Gravitas could barely see, and his limbs felt like they were filling with hot lead. He was beginning to even forget whom he was fighting or why.