Corrosion: Terminal Horizon (The Portal Arcane Series - Book III)

by J. Thorn

  Tommy smiled at her and pretended to shove a finger in his nostril but he didn’t turn sideways first and so it appeared as though he was rubbing the side of his nose.

  “Tommy,” Lindsay said. “Samuel and I want to help you. If you’re lost, we want to help you find your way home and if you’re supposed to be here, we want to protect you.”

  Samuel shuffled his feet and sighed.

  “I know,” Tommy said.

  “You know what, son?” Samuel asked. “C’mon, Lindsay. Let’s take this kid and either hunker down for the night or get the hell out of here.”

  “Samuel is nervous. We’ve had to deal with some monsters and he doesn’t want them to get us. You understand that, Tommy. Right?”

  Tommy nodded and winked at Lindsay.

  “How did you end up in this room, honey?”

  Samuel waited for a reply and glared at Lindsay.

  “I remember hockey practice. It was really cold and I was the last one there. My sister was so pissed.”

  “And then what?” Lindsay asked.

  “We were in the car and I think I fell asleep. When I woke up I was here and then you guys came in.”

  “That’s the same three sentences he gave us the first time, Lindsay. Let’s go,” Samuel said.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything else? Think real hard and then we’re going to follow Samuel out of here.”

  Tommy looked at Samuel and the smile on the boy’s face made Samuel wince. Tommy hoped Kole wouldn't be mad at him for not following the script.

  “Nothing else but the dream.”

  Lindsay let go of the chair and stood up. She took a step backwards until she was shoulder to shoulder with Samuel.

  “What dream?” she asked.

  “The one with the big bomb. You know, the one that made all the zombies.”

  ***

  Samuel found a utility closet at the far end of the office where he could see the main door. Even if someone or something came through, he would have at least ten seconds to react. He would not be surprised and would have a chance. Lindsay and Tommy spent their time gathering as much as they could for the night. The office space remained cool but comfortable. Samuel would not even consider a fire without knowing how the smoke would escape or who might be able to see the flames. Tommy brought armfuls of paper to the utility closet and dumped them in three distinct piles. Lindsay cut the thin padding from several chairs and it would serve as crude pillows. Samuel told them to only make two beds. That he would stand guard all night, but Lindsay insisted on taking a shift, no matter how much tough-guy attitude he gave him.

  The last ambient light left the office, covering it in silent darkness. Samuel left the door of the utility closet propped open and sat on the rear wall in direct view of the floor’s main door. Lindsay found a jasmine tea candle in one of the desk drawers along with a matchbook. Samuel explained that fire in the reversion was different and the matches probably would not work. Lindsay convinced him to try and the tiny flame inside the utility closet would not be as risky as a campfire, so he agreed to light it.

  Tommy watched the candle come to life on the fifth match. The flame crackled and spit as a low, green flame danced above the wax. Samuel looked at Lindsay and Tommy.

  “You were right. I think this is low enough that it won’t be visible from the outside.”

  Lindsay gave him her best told-you-so smirk.

  “But it won’t last long. And because we don’t know how long night will be here, I suggest we blow it out and wait a bit before lighting it again.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Samuel. We’re only getting so many hours out of this candle and it’s already dark. I think we should let it burn and not risk being unable to light it again.”

  He waved at Lindsay.

  “Fine. Have it your way.”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said.

  “Well you are.”

  Tommy kept his head down, staring at his hands.

  “Tommy,” Lindsay said. “Can you tell us about the dream before you go to bed?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Good,” Samuel said. “Tell us everything you can remember.”

  “It might take a while.”

  “That’s fine,” Lindsay said. “Tell us.”

  Tommy looked at the candle and then raised his head.

  “They came from the bomb.”

  “Who?” Samuel asked.

  “The zombies.”

  ***

  Lindsay was on her side facing Tommy while Samuel sat on a chair in the doorway. He sat so he could see into the utility closet and out into the thick blackness of the office. Samuel waited for them to get situated for the night. It felt like an odd reversal of a classic night-time routine. Tommy would be the one telling the story, however.

  Although Shallna planted the dream in Tommy’s head, the story would feel real to him. Shallna made sure to include the emotions and feelings of the soul and transplant that into Tommy as well. Energy in the Great Cycle passed easily from one soul to another, much like a broadcast signal as opposed to a phone call. If another soul could tune in to the broadcast, they could feel it as well.

  Kole wanted the story to be detailed and long. It was another tactic to keep Samuel in his place. The story was true and would explain how the horde came to be, as well as their role in the reversion. It would also explain why the lord of the reversion could summon them but not control the mob entirely. What neither Samuel nor Kole understood was the horde’s numbers were about to swell and they would fill the city like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  The multiverse was going through its own mass extinction and the victims of its death throes would be delivered to this final reversion in preparation for the end. As more and more worlds succumbed to a violent, catastrophic end, the inhabitants of those worlds would mutate into the horde and accept their fate at the hands of the final reversion. The souls of the horde would be set free by the cloud and therefore they had to protect the cauldron from those seeking to destroy it, like Samuel.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Me too, honey,” Lindsay said. “But you have to tell us a story before we go to sleep, remember? We need to know about the zombies out there because we need to get somewhere in the city and they look dangerous.”

  Tommy nodded and Lindsay put her hand in his. Samuel huffed and took a look at the main door but saw no intruders.

  “Okay.”

  Samuel slid his chair closer to the foot of Tommy’s bedding. Scraps of paper stuck out from beneath the boy’s legs, the typeface of a lost generation fading on the memos.

  “The dream. Tell us and don’t leave anything out.”

  “Higaki should tell it. He was there for a year after it happened,” Tommy said.

  Lindsay looked at Samuel and he shrugged.

  “Sure. However you want to tell it,” she said.

  “He’s a zombie now but he wasn’t before the bomb.”

  “No, of course not,” Samuel said.

  “He told me this in the dream. I’ll tell it to you.”

  I think it was August 6, 1945. I was thirteen and a student at Hiroshima Akieden and a member of the Student Mobilization Program. I was one of a group of twenty students assigned to help the army. Me and my classmates, we were at the army headquarters about a mile from the epicenter ready to start our first day of work. At 8:15 a.m. I looked out of the window and saw a blue flash in the sky and all of a sudden I was floating in the air. I felt my body slam to the floor, yet everything was dark and silent. I couldn’t move because I was pinned beneath the chunks of building that fell on top of us. I remember thinking that I was about to die, so I yelled.

  “Mom, help me.”

  I felt hands grab my shirt and my shoulders shot up. A man was breathing and I could hear him moan as he tried digging me out.

  “Don’t give up, young man. I’m going to get you out. Don’t give up.”

  I wanted to close my eyes
and sleep and I’m sure that was death coming for me. But it didn’t. I kept trying to wiggle my body free of the timbers and chunks of wood holding me down. With a final pull, the man yanked me free and I was standing on my own two feet. My head hurt and I tasted the bitter burn of blood in my mouth. I could see light coming from a break in the rubble, so I stumbled towards it. I pushed through the building’s east wall until I stood on the ground outside what was left.

  Everything was on fire. Everything. A soldier ran past and yelled at a few of us to get to the hills and take cover. I remember only seeing three or four of them crawl from the building. The rest were burning alive inside.

  It was morning but it looked like twilight because so much dust and smoke was in the air. Some people I met later said they saw a mushroom cloud and heard the loudest thunder in their life. But I didn’t because I was inside it. I looked around and saw people shuffling through the streets. They looked like walking corpses, skin and clothing dangling from bloody and burned bodies. The injured were also headed to the hills. We thought somehow we’d be okay if we got there.

  Most were naked. Their skin was black and charred and many had their eyes swollen shut. Some even had their eyeballs dangling out of their sockets. Those with the most severe burns held their hands above their heads to lessen the throbbing pain. I watched as many of the walking ghosts collapsed and did not get up. With the few classmates who survived, I stumbled toward the hills while stepping around the dead and dying.

  When we got to the base of the hill, I saw the army’s training ground, about two hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. It looked like a field of snakes but was really the dying people waving their arms in the air, asking for help. Most asked for water in faint whispers but we didn’t have any. Some of us tore off strips of our clothing and dipped them into a nearby stream. We ran back and placed them into the mouths of the dying. Those that were still alive tried sucking the moisture from them. All day long we attended to the people in that field, but there were no medical supplies or doctors. We did the best we could but spent most of the day watching people die.

  The sun went down and the darkness made things worse. We watched the city continue to burn while we heard the low, desperate whispers of the walking dead begging for water.

  There were about eight thousand middle school students in the center of the city. They were brought there a few days earlier to help the army clear fire lanes. They were in the streets when the bomb exploded, a million degrees at the center of the explosion, one thousand feet in the air. All of those kids, my classmates and friends, were instantly vaporized and more died within days. Because of this, almost eighty percent of kids were gone from the city. My aunt was a teacher working with those middle school students. My dad and I spent days turning over dead bodies, hoping to find her. We never did. She had two children of her own, my cousins and now orphans.

  The people that died on that day were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to live with the burns and radiation sickness the survivors did. My sister and her two year old son were on a playground when it happened and were horribly burned. We could only tell it was her by the sound of her voice. They only lived for a few days but I can’t imagine how much pain they had to suffer first.

  The soldiers didn’t know what to do with the bodies. There were so many. They threw bodies into a ditch and set them on fire with gasoline. They would have to turn them over with bamboo poles, believing that burning all of the flesh to a crisp would prevent the radiation from making others sick. I was thirteen, standing next to my parents watching all of this. It was the most gross, disgusting scene you could imagine, yet I couldn’t cry. The experience was so shocking, it was beyond grief. My friend Sishi told me she returned to her home the next day to find the skeletons of her family, yet she could not cry either.

  As the weeks passed, the mysterious effect of the radiation from the atomic bomb began to affect many people. My uncle and aunt lived in a suburb of Hiroshima and were not in the blast zone. They had no injuries or burns. And yet, they started getting sick. Purple sores appeared on their bodies and they lost their hair and teeth. My mother cared for them until they died and we had no idea it was from the radiation. We thought their internal organs were liquefying in their bodies and coming out as black sludge. The doctors told us if we got the purple spots, we would die. Every morning it became part of the routine to check for them.

  My city of over three hundred thousand was filled with mostly women, children and the elderly. Almost all of the men were in the army and serving elsewhere. Hiroshima became nothing but a heap of ash and rubble with mounds of charred bodies and skeletons everywhere. By the end of the year, more than one hundred and fifty thousand people were gone.

  Lindsay could not control the silent tears streaming down her face.

  “That was it. That was my dream.”

  “Did he tell this to you or did you see it?” Lindsay asked.

  “She. It was a girl. She showed me through her eyes. Then told me about it after.”

  “She seems older than you,” Samuel said.

  “Yep,” Tommy said. “She was a teenager but this happened to her in middle school.”

  A heavy pause filled the room.

  “Wherever this happens,” Samuel said to Lindsay. “Those that die end up here. They become the horde.”

  “Why do they want to keep us pinned down, Samuel?”

  “Maybe it’s how they break free. I really don’t know.”

  “They’re still in there.”

  Lindsay looked at Tommy.

  “Who is, Tommy?” she asked.

  “The people. They’re still inside the bodies. We should ask them why they don’t like us.”

  Samuel stood and exhaled. Had he known the boy’s motive, Samuel would have cut his throat that night.

  Chapter 8

  When Alex Brown made it to the outlying areas of the city, he noticed a change. Footprints disturbed the sand on the highway and on the sidewalks.

  Gotta be the zombies, he thought. Haven’t seen anyone else besides Lindsay and the man.

  Alex stopped in front of what was once an upscale building in an expensive neighborhood. Ornate iron work decorated the exterior and the trees sat in stylish soil boxes embedded in the sidewalk. The sand did not cover all of the sidewalk, which Alex thought was odd, but then again, everything was odd since he fell from the noose. A gust of wind cleared the fancy soil box of the nearest tree and he smiled.

  Just the same wind current over and over again, burying some of the city while keeping other parts clean.

  Wrought iron railings, once shiny and black now flaking and red with rust, lined the steps leading up to the door of an old brownstone. Brown looked down the right side of the street where the buildings stretched for blocks. Most of the doors and windows were destroyed or broken long ago, making each structure look skeletal. The wind-blasted sand scoured the brick of the buildings to a smooth finish and any painted trim was also stripped of its paint and bleached bone white. Alex sighed and caught a whiff of motor oil. It stained the street where cars used to park.

  Nothing left but oil stains and cockroaches.

  Alex chuckled at his thoughts. He could not remember the last time he had so many conversations with himself. He was never in an abandoned city before, so Alex thought this might be what people do. They talk to themselves until insanity creeps in like a slow mud slide, burying rational thought, layer after layer.

  He decided to enter the brownstone as the sun dropped low in the sky and the dark, gray cloud was now closer to the eastern horizon. Alex’s internal biorhythm told him it would be nightfall soon and he yawned. His throat felt sore from the noose and he rubbed his neck, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

  Lindsay. Eyes on the prize.

  The thought of her name snapped him back into the moment and he strutted up the steps and stood at the open door. A plant box hung beneath the bay window to the right of the door. The glass was
gone but Alex could see into the first floor living room. A single drape dangled from a rod inside and waved back and forth like a witch’s cape. He ignored the tingling sensation at the back of his neck and stepped into the building. Alex stopped and listened.

  Nothing.

  He thought the air felt different in this world, somehow less than normal and guessed it made things quieter too. He remembered a show on NOVA one time about outer space. The narrator said there was no air in space and so there couldn’t be sound either.

  “No Led Zeppelin?” he asked.

  Alex’s voice startled his own ears, so he decided to place a gag order on his mouth. He would only be allowed to speak to himself inside his head until further notice.

  Fine. Be that way.

  The air moved through the building and Alex saw smaller drifts piled in the corner. He looked down and did not see footprints in the sand. A frame hung in the vestibule to the left of a spiral staircase. He could see the wall behind the frame and a pile of glass on the floor below. There were doorways on his left and right. The doorway on the right went into the living room with the bay window, while the one on the left was a coat closet with the door ripped from the hinges, lying on the floor near the staircase. Alex thought he’d be safer on the second floor as he could hear people.

  Or zombies.

  But he had no idea how stable the buildings were.

  He turned to look at the living room one more time and decided to take a chance on the second floor. He put his hand on the railing and took the first step. Then he looked into the frame and jumped back.

  “You jumped before we were done. Kinda rude.”

  “Are you inside the wall?” Alex asked Jack.

  “I’ve learned a few things since I’ve been here. My buddy Major told me about Kole and Deva.”

  Alex blinked and when his eyes opened, Jack was at the base of the steps. The young man wore a black baseball cap backwards with a black hoodie hanging from his thin frame. Alex could smell a trace of the boy’s musky scent. He looked into Jack’s face and smiled.

  “Coming through walls. Yeah, I’d say you learned something from your buddy.”