by Quil Carter
I couldn’t even have that.
My nose then wrinkled and I recoiled away from the brick wall.
I could smell him on me.
Then I made the mistake of stepping back, and was reminded of the semen inside of me.
I dry heaved, steadying myself against the brick wall, and as my breathing once again was snatched from me.
He was everywhere. He was fucking everywhere. The world, the greywastes, Skyfall, Alegria…
My bedroom. My clothing.
Me.
I can never escape him. Never.
Only death.
I think I knew that it would eventually come to this tonight. There was no escaping Silas, this was the only way I could be rid of him.
I’d come to this same conclusion one and a half years ago, and I would’ve succeeded if I hadn’t been weak and had gone to my master for comfort in my last hour of life. I’d have taken enough drugs to kill me and if he hadn’t woken… I would have died.
Silas had injected me with Narcan, a drug that reverses opiate overdose. It also came in pill form and carried the name Suboxone. A better and more reliable version than the one they had pre-Fallocaust. That damn drug had saved my life, and after being in the hospital for three days for observation… had been sent home. He’d made me go to Dr. Zamir for psychological help after that, but the doctor had gotten nothing from me. I knew he’d be reporting everything to Silas, and that most likely the conversations between the two of us had been recorded. I decided to tell Zamir what he wanted to hear, and continued my suffering in silence.
Well, I was quite done suffering. I would do it away from home, and now I was bitter and miserable enough to not need comfort in my final moments.
All I need is rope and a support beam. That shouldn’t be too hard to find.
I turned around, my hand unzipping my jacket so I could purge myself of his smell, and took a step forward.
Then I stopped.
The purple tin with red and blue designs was several feet from me, sitting alone and out of place in such a dark and dank area of Skyland. It was surrounded by filth of all kinds, and here it was being bright and colourful, as if it had the right.
I wasn’t sure why, but the tin being there had me seeing red. I stalked over to it… and I kicked it. “Fuck off!” I screamed, my voice breaking to pieces inside of my throat. I slammed my bloodied hands against the brick, one after the other, until I sunk to my knees.
To my right, further down the alley, I heard a light scraping and when I momentarily stopped breathing to listen, another heartbeat.
I looked to my right and saw a dark figure in the middle of the alley bending over to pick up the tin.
It was… a man. He was shrouded in silvers and greys but I could see his silhouette against the faded yellow street lamps behind him.
When he turned his head to me, my breath caught in my throat. I don’t know why it did, perhaps that was the reaction that any person got when they’d been discovered while hiding. Either way, when those two large white orbs fell on me, as if the moon itself had split into two, I seized up like an unoiled engine, and my body became a statue.
Then he began to walk towards me, tin held loosely in his hand. I remained on my knees like the lost fool I was, and let this man, consumed by the darkness that enclosed both of us, approach.
And when he was close enough, I saw a stripe of light appear on his leg, and with each step it illuminated him further. The light soon lit up blue jeans, then a silver and black button-down, then finally the face of a man my age, if not a bit older. A face that held small bruises, and a large fabric band aid over his left temple.
This man slowly sat down beside me, and leaned his back against the brick wall of the alleyway. I didn’t look at him or even acknowledge that he was there. I continued to stare at the ground, my eyes now focusing on the sliver of light he’d originally stepped into.
I heard him open up the now dented tin, then it entered my vision. He was trying to hand it to me.
I looked down and saw that it had a roll of gauze in it, but also a small slip of paper. I stared at it for more than a few moments, then decided to pluck it out with my fingers.
I opened it and saw some writing written in pen.
Do you want to talk for a bit? If so just say.
“I can leave if you want,” he said to me. I heard a lighter begin to flick, followed by a spark of light, then he inhaled, and a plume of silver smoke wafted into the air before being consumed by the night.
“Why have you been following me?” I whispered. I didn’t look at him; I couldn’t move. I was surprised I’d even managed to form a sentence. Everything that had happened tonight had rendered me stunned and shattered, broken pieces from a marble sculpture that had been violently assaulted with an iron bar.
“I go for a lot of walks too,” he said simply. I heard shifting as he moved around. “Want to go for a walk?”
Go for a walk? The despair that I’d been feeling previously found me, finding every spark of life that this stranger had breathed into me and extinguished them one by one. Not even meeting this man had helped bring light to this chasm of misery. If anything, I wanted to be rid of him. It wasn’t safe for me to have friends. Silas would kill them, every one of them.
“No,” I whispered. I closed my eyes tight and tried to force the burning away from my eyes. “Just… get as far away from me as you can.” I hated myself all the more when a tear escaped my closed eyes and slipped down my cheek.
“Why?” the man asked, his voice low and concerned.
Then I felt him touch my shoulder and I jumped a mile high, my heart leaping into my throat and expanded to cut off my oxygen. As he stammered an apology, I jumped to my feet and started to walk quickly towards the street.
“I’m sorry… you’re a prince, I shouldn’t have touched you. I was just… trying to be nice…” His shoes slapping against the concrete echoed throughout the alleyway, adding to the sounds of my own gasping breath.
You think I’m recoiling away from you because of the differences in our social status? No, no, you idiot. It’s because… I just… I can’t have anyone touching me right now. Not after what he did.
“It’s not that,” I said before I could stop myself. I got to the end of the alleyway and began walking away from Alegria. The last thing I wanted to do was go back there, but yet I was also too ashamed to go to the Skytech laboratory. I didn’t want Perish to see me. I didn’t want anyone to know what happened, I just fucking wanted to hang myself in silence and be done with all of this.
“I… I just…” Words failed me, my mouth turned to mush, and to add to continued failures of my body, the pain from Silas’s assault had my knees buckling almost with every step. “I just…”
I fell again, and this time I couldn’t hold back the gasping sob. “If you really wish to help me… find me some rope.”
The footsteps stopped. “Rope?” he said, confusion thick in his tone. He had a friendly voice, a voice that seemed to not know hostility or judgement – a voice that was naïve enough to not know what final solution I was seeking out. “Why a rope?”
Anger temporarily cut through my sadness. No, it wasn’t anger, it was desperation and just hopelessness. “I’m the damn p-prince,” I cried. I struggled to rise but once again I collapsed. It humiliated me. “Get me some damn rope, that’s an order.”
He ran to me and grabbed me to keep me steady. I tried to jerk my body away from his but I was too weak, and this stranger too strong. “Elish, please calm down…” he said softly. He gripped me harder. I thought it was to be forceful, but I realized my legs had given out again. “You’re not well and you shouldn’t be out alone. I have an… an abandoned… a place I stay in when I don’t want to go home either. Let’s go there.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t fucking know who you are,” I cried. I steadied myself against a nearby bench and tried to collect myself. “Just leave me. Let me do what I need to
do. You’ll have no part in this. If they see us together…” I looked down the dark sidewalk, lit only by the tall black streetlights and the occasional store window, then in the opposite direction. It had just occurred to me that if I was to follow through with my intentions of killing myself, this man would be blamed.
I wasn’t sure if there were any cameras here. The thiens did monitor popular places and who knows if a shop owner might have one set up. I couldn’t… I didn’t want him to die because of me. I had enough blood on my hands.
“Wait…” I saw his shadow as he took a step towards me, then he placed his hand on the bench I was leaning against. “What do you plan on doing?”
I felt my face tighten, and I held a hand over my mouth as the tears slid down my face. “I’m going to hang myself,” I said to him through a broken tone. “It is in your best interest to leave me right now. I don’t know if there are any cameras watching, and since you’re the last person to see me… they may blame you. I will… I will write a small note that it was solely me. That’s the best I can offer you right now.”
He was quiet but I saw his hands clench the iron rung arm of the bench. “Hang yourself?” he said in a subdued tone. “You… know that’ll hurt a lot right? There has to be an easier way…”
I looked at him in shock. What an audacious thing to say. “I’m a chimera, I don’t care if it hurts,” I said coldly. “A few seconds of pain is better than a lifetime, or worse yet, an immortal life time of being miserable, depressed, constantly abused, and the slave of a monster.”
The man looked back at me, and only under the streetlight above us did I finally get a clear look at his face. Besides the bruises and the bandage, I saw that he had kind eyes, navy blue, dark brown hair, almost black, and clean shaven but for a patch on his chin. He had two earrings in each of his ears as well, both hoops, and was several inches shorter than me.
And that man made a face at me after I snapped my words at him. “You really think it’s a few seconds?” he said, his left eye squinting from the ridiculous expression on his face. His eyes were more expressive than normal, and so bright in this dark place. “It’s until you strangle yourself to death, so maybe a few minutes. Do you know that a lot of people who hang themselves… they find their bodies with deep gouges in their neck, flesh and blood in their fingernails? They’re literally clawing themselves trying to get the rope off of their neck because it hurts so much. The moment they do it, they regret it.”
I paused. I wasn’t sure that was true. That… didn’t sound like a good way to go.
“I’ll find another way…” I said lowly. I began to walk away from the bench and down the sidewalk. “An overdose worked fine the first time I attempted it. I made a mistake then and I will not make it twice.”
I heard him follow behind me. “The pharmacies are all closed.”
My teeth clenched, I whirled around. “I’ll find a fucking way!” I snapped. “This is the Fallocaust. It’s not that fucking hard to die.”
“I have some stuff at my place…” he said while I walked as quickly as I could down the street. “Why don’t you come there and by the end of the night… if you still want to do it… I’ll give you the bottle I have. There’s really no way else to do it… and it’ll be a nice death, you’ll just fall asleep, right?”
I didn’t know if I was too tired to argue, or deep down inside I did want to go with him. Either way… I found myself nodding.
And because of my chimera hearing, I heard the man give the smallest sighs of relief.
“Good…” he said quietly. I saw him beside me again, and when I glanced at him to see what he was doing, he held out his hand. “My name’s Julian.”
I wasn’t going to take his hand. I stuffed both of mine into my pockets and kept my eyes forward. “There’s nothing good here,” I said to him. “I just want to get this over with.”
Julian didn’t say anything back. The man kept walking, slowly for me, and I continued to follow him. I didn’t know what I was doing, my mind was made up, I was done with this and I was done with Silas. That monster might be able to take everything from me… but he won’t take away my right to die.
After several blocks, Julian stopped. He motioned with his chin towards what I realized was a huge skyscraper. It was abandoned but in good-enough condition to be repaired one day.
“I’m on the third floor,” he said. He started walking up the crumbling concrete steps, I followed and saw that the windows inside of the skyscraper were boarded up.
Julian knelt down beside a sheet of plywood. He slipped his fingers in between the sheet and the frame of the door and slowly slid the plywood back, revealing darkness and the distinct smell of musty, old building.
“Follow me,” he said. “At least if I’m a serial killer… you want to die anyway, right? Nothing to lose.” He laughed dryly as he was swallowed whole by the darkness. I hesitated, glanced over my shoulder once, then got down on my knees and followed him inside.
I coughed when I stood up and looked around the vast lobby. It was covered in debris and a lot of the ceiling had fallen down, coating the chairs, reception desk, and many tables and plant pots in a wavy curtains of grey powder. I could see little rat prints in that snow-like dust, and bits of exposed chair stuffing, bright white with the aid of my enhanced vision, that had been scavenged for nests.
“The stairs work fine,” Julian said, his voice quiet but inside this cave-like room it was reminiscent of a thunder crack. “Most of the floors have the ceilings intact, the lobby is just bad for some reason, perhaps there’s water getting in somewhere.” I turned away from the cluttered lobby, needing to brush several hanging cords out of my way, and followed him into a dark stairwell.
I squinted when a bright light turned on and my night vision faded away. Flashlights were the bane of every chimera’s existence, they reduced our vision to that of any normal arian.
Even though I wanted to, I didn’t complain. I retraced Julian’s steps as he led me up the flights of stairs, billions of dust motes floating by the beam of light as he shone it near enough to me that I could see where I was going.
On the third floor he led me down a large hallway, curls of wallpaper running off in both directions like they’d been shaved off with a knife. They crunched under my shoes and kicked up enough dust to make me sneeze. He then opened one of the double doors, and a flood of light bathed my vision.
“Welcome to my little slice of paradise,” he said as I entered into the apartment.
It was done up quite impressively. It was no hovel covered in dust and made up of broken furniture, it was brightly lit with an old brown couch and a coffee table with a book under one leg and a television set that sat atop what appeared to be a dresser. Behind that was a kitchen table covered in old electronics, and stacked around that table, boxes of what appeared to be more electronics and tools to fix it with. There was also stacks of books and comics, and when I glanced towards the kitchen I saw cans of food and drying dishes in a dish rack.
“I’m stealing power from a daycare next door,” Julian said with a dry laugh, then he kicked a black extension cord. “Don’t tell anyone, alright? I’m trusting you.” I followed the cord until it disappeared through one of the tightly sealed windows. This skyscraper had floor-to-ceiling windows that covered the entire west side of the apartment, and every one of them, what appeared to be over twenty floors, were boarded up. Julian looked to have gone a step further though, there were blankets held in place by tape, preventing even this strong light from leaking through and alerting the thiens.
“They don’t see the cord?” I asked. I saw that the cord was plugged into a power bar, and almost all of the outlets were in use.
“Nah, no one really goes to the back of the building often, and I have it tracing the windows and siding as much as I can to have it blend in. You should’ve seen me; I was hanging out that window like a monkey at two in the morning hooking everything up.” Julian walked into the kitchen. “I stay he
re as much as I can… I’m supposed to live in that blue house on the corner of Kellen and Johan. You can come here as much as you like.”
“It sucks at my home as well,” I said to him. I rubbed my nose, it was rough and flaky from the blood drying. I bet I looked like an absolute mess right now, I didn’t want to see myself. “Why… did you start leaving me that tin?”
“I don’t have a heart made out of stone.” He came out with a kettle and plugged it into the power bar, then he put two mugs onto the coffee table and sat down on the couch. “You… I…” I was surprised to see hesitation on his face, then he shifted around nervously. “I’d never seen someone look so upset, and… every time I saw you after you just looked worse and worse. It’s… I mean… no one else helps you? Am I just insane or something since you’re a prince? Fuck it if I am… no one should be treated the way he treats you.”
I gaped at him. No one… no one had ever said anything like that to me before. I felt astonished, absolutely taken aback at his bluntness and honesty. Everyone around me just ignored how Silas treated me, or if they were Nero, justified it and made it my own fault. This was the first time I was ever hearing someone admit that this was actually wrong. It only confirmed that everyone in my life was living in a warped bubble of their own fear-ruled reality, because doing the mental gymnastics necessary to make Silas’s tyranny justifiable was the only way they could sleep at night.
This guy… his words meant so much to me and he didn’t even know. I was living in a world where every person around me was telling me I was insane, that I was crazy and out of place… then this one man from the outside grabs me and tells me… I’m not the crazy one. It’s them.
“No one helps me,” I found myself whispering. “He controls everything… Skyfall, the greywastes, the world… down to my siblings and I, those who work for us, everyone… and when they do something to displease him… they die. If they threaten his control over us, or dare take attention away from him, they die. If they get too big for him, or show defiance… they die. Or they get their brains fucked up and they become mindless robots.”