by J. Thorn
He would probably be found not guilty which could be worse than prison. Alex could not stomach another thirty years in the steel mill with nothing to show for it but a bottle of whiskey from the company store and a black lung. Lindsay was gone, her mother would sell him out if the investigation into her disappearance yielded something, and he was nothing but a worthless loser. If only he could have had another chance to save Lindsay he would make it all right. Alex Brown would die for her if someone would just give him the opportunity. When he put the noose around his neck and leapt from the chair in the basement, Alex had no idea the Great Cycle would grant him his dying wish.
***
Brown woke up at the base of a huge tree with the rope coiled around his legs. He was sweating, shaking and his neck burned. He looked around at the forest and rubbed his eyes, blinked and looked again. He was wearing the same clothes he had on in his basement, blue jeans, a denim shirt and work boots. As a millworker, those clothes represented his Sunday best.
“Hey,” he said. The word left his mouth and was smothered by the reversion. “Hey,” he said again.
Although Alex did not spend much time in the forest as an adult, he remembered playing in it as a kid. With two brothers and the neighborhood gang, Brown spent many afternoons catching salamanders and splashing through the creek. But this forest was silent, still. Alex did not realize he entered a reversion. He did not know the Great Cycle would keep him here until he redeemed himself.
Alex walked beneath low-hanging branches and over dead leaves that crackled underneath his feet. He could feel a thrumming sensation coming through the soles of his work boots and it increased in intensity the closer he came to a clearing. Other ropes hung from the trees and several had faded strands of caution tape wrapped around their trunks. Brown pushed his glasses up on his nose, they survived the fall through whatever magic hole brought him here. He laughed, not knowing exactly what to think of that.
As Brown approached the clearing, what he saw made him stop. He placed his hands on his hips and then put a hand on his forehead. The forest sloped down to a shallow valley surrounded by rolling hills on all sides. Green trees, mostly maples and oaks covered the ground as far as he could see. On the floor of the valley and in the center of the clearing was a rectangle floating in mid-air. It was two feet off the ground and bordered by a fine red line that resembled tubes in a neon sign. Alex could see a different sky inside the floating rectangle. It was cloudy and green. He started to walk closer and then stopped, looking back over his shoulder to the tree that dropped him to the ground.
I should be dead, he thought. And if I’m not dead, I should be laying on the floor of my basement, not in some weird forest.
With a shrug, he turned and continued down the slope to the valley where the rectangle remained suspended in air. Alex came within a few feet of the edge and felt the thrumming all the way to his waist. He realized the rectangle was the source and yet the energy powering it was hidden from him. Something had to have created this, but Brown could not speculate who or what.
“It takes some time to adjust after you find yourself at the base of the tree.”
Alex spun to see a person step out from behind the left edge of the hovering rectangle.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
Jack smiled and crossed his arms on his chest. He sighed and tilted his head back until the visor from his cap struck the back of his neck.
“I’m Jack,” he said.
Alex stood still, waiting.
“I’m Alex Brown.”
“Well, Alex Brown, fancy meeting you here. I’m just passing through. Seems like part of my path to redemption involves giving you some simple instructions. I don’t know why I have to, so don’t start talking over me. They don’t explain this shit. All I know is my fate is tied to yours and I’m here with a message. After that, they’ll be slipping me away and you’re on your own. I’m not as tight with it as Samuel, but I’m getting better with practice.”
“Why am I—”
“Shut the fuck up, Mr. Brown.”
Alex huffed and made a fist with his right hand. He hated violence but he knew he could take the scrawny teenager standing in front of him. Jack gave Alex a sideways smile and hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his saggy jeans. He flipped the hoodie up and over his backwards baseball cap and spread his feet shoulder length apart.
“I told you already. I don’t know why I’m here and I don’t know why you need this message, but you do. I find it interesting it involves someone we both know. How fucked up is that?”
“My Lindsay?” Alex asked.
“Bing, bing. You win.”
Brown felt the pain in his chest and the sadness of losing her. The police would never find her and he’d never see Lindsay again. He failed the true love of his life, the only person he ever cared about it.
“Is she…”
Alex wanted to ask about her but did not know what to ask.
“She’s here. In the reversion. You probably don’t know what that is and I really don’t give a shit. I can tell you I’m sure you’ll see her again.”
“How does she look?”
Jack whistled.
“Damn fine. She’s one hundred percent woman, if you know what I mean.”
Alex put a hand to his forehead, trying to make sense of the new information. Lindsay was alive, grown, and in whatever place he was, even though she was just a teenager several hours before when he tried hanging himself in that shitty row house in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
“You know her?”
“I knew her. Let’s say I was caught in her ‘web’,” Jack said. He laughed out loud at his own pun. “How did you know her?”
The question knocked the wind out of Alex. He staggered backwards trying to decide how to answer. How could he explain their love to a stranger?
“I loved her.”
“You don’t look like her type.”
“You don’t know her like I do,” Alex said.
Jack held up both hands and backed up a step. The rectangle hummed and the thrumming was now pulsing through Brown’s midsection and into his shoulders.
“So you two had something. Whatever.”
“We’re soul mates,” Alex said. “We’re destined to be together. I’m her protector.”
“I don’t know about the rest of your bullshit story, Mr. Brown, but you’re right about something. You will earn your one-way ticket out of Shittsville by protecting Lindsay.”
“From what?”
“Harm. What else?”
Alex stepped toward Jack and the boy stepped forward to meet him.
“I will punch you in the face if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on. I should be dead and Lindsay is just a kid.”
Jack nodded and winked at Alex.
“Would be easier if we were all dead, wouldn’t it?”
Alex swung at Jack and the boy pulled back but not in time. The fist caught him on the edge of the chin and Jack stumbled backwards toward the open portal. He struck the edge of it with his back, gained his balance and ran at Alex. Jack dropped low and put his head into Brown’s midsection while wrapping his arms around the man’s thighs, driving him backwards like a linebacker. Alex fell to the ground with Jack on top of him. The boy took advantage of the situation and delivered several stinging blows to Alex’s face. One to his right temple knocking the glasses off his head.
Alex reached up with his left hand and yanked Jack’s hoodie, pulling it down and to the left. Jack lost his balance and fell forward. Alex rolled away from Jack and jumped to his feet facing Jack and with his back to the portal.
“I will beat your ass, old man. I’ve done battle with spider crabs.”
“Where is Lindsay?” Alex asked. He took deep, ragged breaths trying to fill his lungs with oxygen in the depleted air of the reversion.
“I delivered the message I had to deliver. Go fuck yourself.”
Alex rushed at Jack but the boy anticipated the mo
ve. He stepped to one side and allowed Alex to fly past while leaving his right leg extended. Brown tripped over it and stumbled to the ground, his face striking first. Jack kicked the man in the ribs twice and then used his toe to roll him over on to his back.
“Tommy wants Samuel dead. Lindsay is bound to protect Samuel. You’re bound to protect her. Got it?”
The kicks and thin air took the fight out of Alex, who had little in him to begin with. He lashed out in the name of his eternal love and now that energy was spent.
“Who are these people?”
“You’ll find them,” Jack said. He took a step back and wiped his face with the palm of his left hand. “You gonna take another swing at me?”
Alex shook his head and he staggered to his feet.
“Where?”
“There,” Jack said pointing into the middle of the floating rectangle, the open portal into another reversion.
“What is that?”
“I’m done with you, asshole. I satisfied the Great Cycle. I did what they said.”
Jack stretched his arms and looked straight up into the sky as he spoke. Alex looked at the young man and then back at the open portal. The thrumming energy was making the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
“That thing ain’t gonna be open much longer. If you want a shot at getting out, at protecting Lindsay, you’d better jump.”
Alex was in the air and passing through the portal before he heard the end of Jack’s sentence.
***
Brown had a new mission that was really the same one he had his entire life.
Save his soul mate. Save Lindsay.
He thought it was always about Lindsay, and when she was gone from his life he saw no point in having one. Friends of the family whispered when he was around. Alex knew what they were saying.
“He’s a creep.”
“The guy is a pedophile.”
“He’s gross.”
He overheard some comments and deduced others but none of it mattered because it was all for her. He would give his life for Lindsay. In a way, he had and would do so again.
Alex thought about her as he trudged down the middle of the highway. Landing in this world was strange and disorienting. One moment he was falling through the air and hurtling towards the ground and the next he was face down in it, spitting sand and rolling over to stare into an angry, green sky. He thought about Jack and tried to remember as much of the conversation as he could.
Somehow, Lindsay was here, wherever here was, and she was an adult. Brown knew he would recognize her. The sharp contours of her face and her angelic eyes would be forever burned into his mind. He needed to make up for those final moments they spent together in her room. He would need to explain he was not going to do anything she didn’t want him to do. Alex wanted to tell her she was the sole reason for his existence in words that did not sound as though he was reading them off a greeting card. His Lindsay, she’d always be his little Lindsay, was in this new universe. This reversion as Jack called it. She was here and his job was to protect her from harm.
He scanned the horizon and then turned his eyes to the massive metropolis in the distance. Alex drove the New Jersey Turnpike to New York City one summer. Manhattan appeared to grow out of the highway and into the sky the further east he drove. He had the same feeling as he approached this city. It was probably thirty miles in the distance and would grow out of the valley. Alex ignored a handful of black birds circling the top of the buildings, choosing instead to focus on the highway. He walked for twenty minutes since arriving on the side of the road from the portal. Alex did not see a single sign of human life. No pedestrians. No cars. No sounds.
“This all feels like a bad horror movie,” he said while keeping his eyes focused on the center of the city. “Ain’t been a car on this road in months. Years.”
Alex walked and his legs began to ache. His thick arms became so from years of operating the heavy machinery in the mill. His legs, however, did nothing but stand for eight to twelve-hour shifts. The most walking Alex did in his daily life was from his couch to the refrigerator for another Iron City beer.
He thought he heard something but could not tell with his boots scraping along the asphalt. Alex stopped. The wind blew past him with a silent kiss, knocking renegade strands of hair over his growing bald spot. He turned one ear to the city and heard it again.
“Yes,” he said.
Alex hurdled the guardrail and ran around a field of massive boulders hemming the highway in on both sides. He jumped over the rocks and dashed around the boulders, his legs begging him to stop. He maneuvered fifty yards closer to the city but remained hidden from view, well off the highway. Alex crouched low, closed his eyes and listened. The noise grew louder, like the march of an army without a general. Like the march of the undead. Scrapes and clicks filled the previously silent world and then Alex detected grunts and moans.
“What the fuck?” Alex wanted to see what was making the noise and yet he wanted to run as fast as he could in the other direction. The two forces canceled each other out, leaving him paralyzed and stuck to the ground. He shook his head and detected more sounds. A conversation began between a man and a woman.
“Follow my lead.”
Alex waited for a response. The man spoke but the woman did not.
“You will let us through to the city. You will part.”
The words came from the man. Something was blocking their path. Alex cursed at himself. He stood, then he crouched down, then he stood again. He had to see what was happening and at the same time he did not want to risk exposing himself. When his curiosity trumped his fear, he pushed his head around the edge of a boulder and gazed upon a scene that would have been unimaginable before he put the noose around his neck.
A crowd of people filled the highway from guardrail to guardrail and extended all the way back to the city as far as Alex could see. But he knew they were not people. Alex loved zombie movies, the more realistic the better. He was a fan of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, filmed in Monroeville, up the hill from Homestead. Brown loved I Am Legend and the newer generation of zombie storytelling like The Walking Dead. So when he set his eyes upon the horde for the first time, he knew exactly what they were.
Brown pissed his pants and shivered. Knowledge of the creatures was not enough to control his fear. He saw the death in their faces and the decay in their flesh. These zombies were not stumbling upon each other or feasting on brains. They stood still with their feet fixed to the ground, swaying back and forth like dead, human palm trees. Alex found this atypical zombie behavior to be much more frightening than anything he saw on the screen.
“I know who sent you and why. This will not fulfill your ahimsa. The lord of the reversion is perverting your souls and using your flesh against you. Let us pass.”
The words shook him from his fear and when he turned his head to the right, he saw two figures stood facing the army of the undead, no more than five paces from the first line of the creatures. The humans had their back to him. He saw a man and a woman. She was tall, lithe and with long hair flowing down her back. Alex could not see her face and yet he knew it was Lindsay.
“I’m coming, honey,” he said although his feet kept him firmly in hiding.
“Let us pass.”
Alex heard her voice and a smile split his face.
It’s really her. It’s my Lindsay.
Alex watched as Lindsay stepped toward the first member of the horde and slammed her knife through the creature’s empty eye socket and into the cranial cavity. She pulled it out and drew her knife back behind her right ear. The zombie waddled, took a step forward and collapsed on to the asphalt. Another creature took a step forward and filled the gap previously held by the one now on the ground.
“Nice try,” the man said to Lindsay.
Lindsay stabbed again, using the same maneuver with the same deadly accuracy. Again, the creature fell to the ground. And again another took its place.
�
��You keep that up and you’re going to dull the blade,” the man said.
Lindsay said something else but Alex could not hear. The man and woman faced each other.. The horde remained silent and still, but did not retreat.
Alex watched her sheath the knife and hold her right hand out to the man. He took it and swung her around, placing a light kiss on Lindsay’s lips.
Brown shuddered and bit his bottom lip.
Lindsay kissed the man back.
In the next instant, they were both gone. The horde immediately turned and sauntered back towards the recesses of the city. Alex stood up and looked over the boulder hiding him from the horde as he rubbed his eyes. He looked again to make sure they were really gone.
“Holy shit.”
Chapter 6
“How do you know they’ll go into that building?” Tommy said. “There’s, like, a bazillion buildings here.”
“Our buddy the Reaper will take care of that,” Kole said. “He’ll use the horde to push them into the right spot.”
“Grimmy controls the horde?” Tommy asked. “Cool.”
“Not control. He can kinda guide them, but they don’t all go where he wants. But he’ll get enough in the right spot.”
Tommy and Kole sat across from each other on dusty, ancient office chairs. Papers and plastic bags lay scattered across the floor. Only the ambient daylight shone into the interior room. Without windows, most of the artifacts remained in place and were not sucked out into the reversion and buried beneath decades of sand.
Shallna stood against the wall. Holes in the drywall the size of grapefruits allowed the wind to push sand into the building’s infrastructure, through the holes, where it collected in mounds on the floor. It would have taken centuries to amass sand this far up inside a skyscraper. Shallna didn’t say much since Tommy’s arrival and Kole figured something about the boy was keeping Shallna quiet.
“Ain’t that right?” Kole asked.