Good and Evil : Freeland - Part Two (9781628547375)

by Pulver, William

  Brody’s dream was again becoming reality. A strong wind came up and the human chimney stacks turned into sand from the bottom up as they started flowing over each other until the stack’s height was quickly lessened.

  When all the search party had reached a sacred sect in the middle of what appeared to be a bowl of spread out flat land in the desert, the ground trembled again. This time, the earthquake brought the sky to life and a trumpet blared, louder than any horn ever heard, from nowhere. The ear-piercing sound got people to drop to their knees, cupping their head with both hands as blood started to trickle down the side of their faces. Each droplet of blood that hit the ground reincarnated those who were turned to sand and piled in the stacks, as more and more humans kept coming back to life. Up through the sand arose bodies like in the beginning of time when man was created. The Rumor Millites’ blood was sacred. Their praying had finally paid off.

  After a strong, billowing wall of desert sand was rolled across the barrens, a hot, torrential rain followed behind, pouring down from the now deep maroon colored sky, further spreading the droplets of blood and almost taking the sight of those in battle. It washed away a lot of the loose pebbles of sand and solidified the ground, sewing back up the suture like a mixture of cement. The blood red skies were angry; several lightning bolts dropped many a Pastie. It was the wrath of Christ that had come during his third and final visit. More and more humans emerged in full growth to help fight off the evil combatants. Still their armies were too few, but so went the parable when David’s growth was compared to that of the giant, Goliath’s. Good and evil fought on, determined through the will of God that the good were going to conquer, or at the least, they felt like they should be returned to heaven because of their spiritual sacrifice: their efforts to risk all to save all.

  One man’s head exploded from the ear-breaking loudness of the noise as he fell over, front first, beheaded. His body was scooped up and stacked in another tightly woven ring; his sins had finally caught up to him. His blood turned to black marble where it became another perch for the mighty-winged beast, Satan. That same color of black eclipsed the sun, and all surroundings had a morose draw to them. The shadows that were created made the environment all the more eerily desolate. It was soothing, though, as a temporary cool that kept the seeker’s skin dry.

  More and more bodies were being placed in the human smoke stacks. They became Satan’s markers to summon all who he was able to defile. The ground had split down the middle of this desert trap, again. At the same time, Satan emerged through the center of the tallest stack. The bodies turned to desert grit as a sand-fall trickled down in a frozen state as it solidified back up to his perch. This tower, his roost, was nothing more than lost souls holding hands in a circle, standing on each other’s shoulders with no clothes on. Their bodies, gray from death, had been stacked in the bare. There were whores and vagabonds, Jezebels, a female pedophile—the daughters of the great Babylon. People who purposely spread HIV, more of the transgender type, switched gender, and the sadomasochists who blood let, crack heads on the pipe, porn stars and chicks that only like men with fast cars. Dudes that have molested the youth, liars who can’t tell the truth, sex offenders, rapists, voyeurs, and the damned who went out killing on drunken benders. All of these people consisted of the stacks that raised Satan to his stand where he looked down lovingly upon all of them. From the top of his towering perch of sinners, Satan raised a cane into the sky and summoned the planet to split in two. A pale green horse came to him as he rode off into the crimson horizon, with his left hand in the air. The Grave followed him: he who is known as Death.

  The roof to the Freeland fell through in a ripple effect. Due to the cataclysmic belt of earthquakes, the domino effect took over, and all within Freeland were exposed. This meant that the pillars of Larami encircling the globe were also freed.

  The Pasties looked like ants below, all equipped with solar star blocking shades; the totality of them now Dilators.

  Satan’s droves of Dilator Pasties emerged from the center of this elongated suture and started plucking people off one by one. There own faces were starting to take the form of the human’s within. The human’s weakened thoughts of denying God’s help had strengthened his evilness to the point that Satan got to sit back behind the veil of life and watch as they all perished so easily, doomed before they could even have a chance to fight in this ever progressive spiritual warfare. Their weapons were useless against the strength of the masses. The other stacked rings of bodies were set on fire as the beast cast a bolt of lightning from his cane. Several more jolts followed from the darkening sky.

  The smell of burnt flesh made Treble and Abby jump back on their jet air ski and take off into the empty wilderness. They escaped due to the fact that the devil was so busy with his different sects of lost souls. He disappeared as the fighting continued. He vanished to another sect of Trendago popping up here and there, wherever he pleased.

  While they were dodging left and right through several high towers of odd-shaped rocks that changed to more stacked rings of bodies as they passed by, Abby held on tightly to Treble’s sides. A wrath of some giant, evil grasshopper with a human head-looking, hydraulic-catapulting robot-thing emerged as tall as the stacks and came pouncing after them, knocking the body stacks over with its scorpion tail as it hopped past the rings. A snake-like creature with a huge human mouth and lion’s teeth trailed back and forth behind him as it devoured the bodies, twenty at a time. Back into the ground, it would disappear and reappear like a fish jumping out of water the closer the giant got to the fleeing duo. Treble fully gripped the cycle’s throttle, not sure what to think of what was happening but knew he didn’t want to stick around to see if it was all make-believe. The percussion alone from the grasshopper’s landings was pushing Treble and Abby all over the place, mid-air. The sound waves were visible in their centrifugal wake from the center out. The ripples visibly bent objects as they pierced through them.

  Treble’s only goal now was to keep going full throttle until they found something that would lead them to his friends. The solar star had re-merged and the clouds dispersed, but it was still hot. It was too hot to stop and rest, a heavy heat now at 132 degrees Fahrenheit. Treble was thirsty again, parched from a lack of hydration.

  A look ahead revealed the image of something glistening from the sun. A reflection from a mirror, or something, was hitting Treble in the eyes. He gassed the throttle one more time. Nothing happened. Back and forth he revved the gas, but nothing happened. The machine slowed down to a crawl and started to sink into the loose sand. Treble protectively jerked Abby off the bike and landed just outside the straight line of rising vapors. The craft disappeared, but they were feet from the reflecting object sticking halfway out of the loose, shifty soil.

  This time, Abby walked up to the large side view mirror of some heli-bus and said, “We have found them. Keep this; we are going to need it.” Her serious face exemplified that of a grown-ups; it was eerie how she sounded so old and wise. Treble pulled his t-shirt down from halfway up his chest and brushed the loose sand off of the lower part. He slapped the dust from his pant legs and reached over to grab the object.

  “Do you see who I am?” He stood next to Abby and held the mirror up in front of both of them.

  “Yes, you are Treble Wolffe, the nicest kid on the planet, best friend to one of the smartest kids I have ever known, my ex-boyfriend, and long lost love, Brody Bienemy. I screwed up, Treble. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t done to him what I had done, cheating on him and all, he wouldn’t have done what he had done, and none of this would have happened. Talk about the butterfly effect.”

  “You didn’t cause any of this. He did, by his own free will. He didn’t have to react the way he did. It was his choices that got him sent to where he is. He does have some problems. You know that, right?”

  Abby said, “I see you in the mirror and believe you are wh
o the mirror says you are, but I don’t see me. I see the little girl who got her innocence stolen by her cousin when he tied her to a pole in the garage with a jump rope and proceeded to ruin her emotional existence. I will never get that little girl back, and I blame every boy I’m with for that. That isn’t fair to them, but I don’t want to change. If anyone should be sent to DSOH, it should be me. That is who I see in the mirror. It makes me not even want to look. Brody’s problems are wreck-related. You knew him before the accident; he wasn’t anything like he is now. He was peaceful and nice. His only aggression was because of sports. All of you athletes are like that. Even we girl athletes are like that. That part, I understand, but I made him want to wreck. I pushed him to the point in his mind that he didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “Listen, Abby, I used to huff gas with Brody. He isn’t that innocent. He has had his share of bad choices with the ladies; you weren’t his first. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but he was my first.”

  That was all she had to say. Treble knew that the first is the worst if it doesn’t work out.

  It is just something about a girl when she gets her virginity taken away that makes her love that person for the rest of her life. He could go on and sleep with a thousand more, and forget about her, but she will always hold him dear in her heart. The man’s mission is to find more firsts so he can start his mortal time harem of loves that he can always fall back on as long as they all stay living. Treble thought to himself. Brody was aware of this, and so was every other sinning male on this planet, knowing it made finding a virgin all the more challenging and rewarding.

  A wire, attached to the mirror, was tugged upon like a dog at the end of its leash when Treble started pacing back and forth thinking about where they should go now that they were on foot. The string, pulled taut, released a wake in the sand as the ripple ran the length of the mirage. The two people started sinking as Abby grabbed tightly onto Treble’s back. They sank down a slide, a contraption created by the devil’s children. Five hundred feet down they slid until being stopped by the solid ground at the bottom. Treble stood up to try and catch his breath after becoming a deployed air bag to break Abby’s fall. He heaved in a deep draw of oxygen as he hunched over and looked around. There were several little Pasties, slugs, snakes, and timberpines, thousands of them running and slithering in the same direction for some reason. None of them stopped to check on what had been caught in their trap. Overhead, sounds of tromping feet echoed through the hollows; the acoustics in the cave system were extraordinarily vivid. There was an all out Armageddon taking place, and he didn’t know if he was in the safe zone or not. It all became apparent the moment a Dilator grabbed him by the arm, Abby too, and escorted them through the droves of Pasties. More and more people came sliding down several different chutes; all were cupping their hands in prayer, asking for forgiveness. Treble did the same, but Abby did not.

  The tunnels behind were closing in, and dust shot out like a thousand tornadoes were being trapped in a funnel. No one could see where they were going except for the Pasties. The inner tunnel sandstorm exploded as the walls collapsed; it was getting pushed through the open areas. Treble tried to use the Dilators for cover as they braved the cave storm head on, not faltering the slightest. Abby ducked down to her knees still bound by vine rope cuffs around her wrists.

  “Are we going to make it out of this, Treble? Please, let me go first if they decide to choose either one of us as a sacrifice. You don’t deserve to go, but I do. I will not ask for forgiveness, for my name is not written in the Book of Life. I let go of God, instead of letting go of what happened, the minute he let my cousin mess with me. God obviously doesn’t want me, or else he wouldn’t have let that happen. So, if God doesn’t want me, then Satan must. Let me go, Treble Wolffe.”

  “I can’t leave you here unattended. Just hold on, have a little faith, and something good is about to happen.”

  At that moment, the Dilators pushed Treble and Abby through an odd dimensional door where they couldn’t get back out. If this were a trap, then the mercury door was the jail cell that kept them in purgatory for the time being. Whatever the case, they were out of harm’s way. Again, Treble got down and sent the Lord a knee-mail, titling it: Forgiveness. He asked the Lord to have mercy on his soul if he should so decide that today is the day that it is taken away.

  A stack of withered Pastie bodies were jellied to a puddle over in the far corner where a large apparatus was sitting. Their eyes all hollowed, none had any life left in them.

  In the far corner, Treble could see a flickering of neon light coming through a sliver in the rock. He slowly crept over, Abby hanging by his shirttail, as they tiptoed to the light.

  In this room, several familiar-faced apparitions were floating overhead. There were a large group of those same creatures huddled with their backs toward them in the far corner. On the other side, a foot was seen as four more bodies were wedged into a triangle. In the middle was the sliver of light that caught Treble’s sight in the first place. He reached out, not certain if the Pasties were going to come back to life or if they were even dead in the first place. He grabbed the big toe of one and jerked; it came off with no struggle. He grabbed the rest of the foot and the leg peeled back at the thigh. He tried to grab the other two at the same time, but to no avail. All it did was shorten the length of what he could grab within the hole to another part of the cave system these three were trying to get through. Teble walked back to the mercury door and used its ever-changing silver reflection as luminance so he could see the scattered parts of what looked like a machine. He found a scoop-like shovel, fabricated from the back of a seat, and went back over to the wedged Pasties. He scraped and carved each one out until the sliver of light had broadened. When he reached their heads, he noticed their gems were missing too. The heads crumbled to the floor. He and Abby scooted through the hollow tunnel and were soon on the other side where the neon-blue-lit waterfall was echoing downward.

  Since she wasn’t going to walk with God, Abby was put through the gaping funnel first by Treble, certain this time he wasn’t going to be used as a landing cushion. She screamed all the way down, until landing with a gargled splash. Then, Treble knew it was all right for him to go next.

  He hollered down, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, that was the most fun I have had in a long time!” Her cheery voice was drowned by the noise of the water rushing between Treble’s legs. It finally swept him off his feet and sent him head first down the water slide. He laughed the entire way down.

  Treble landed in the middle of a deep pool. Abby had already made her way to the side where it looked like the walls had been punched in by someone. She was looking up into the corner from where the vine had previously extended down. The rope didn’t lower far enough, but there were footholds kicked in a ladder manner all the way up. Treble realized this was their escape route. At least it is going back up, he thought.

  “Can you lift me up so I can climb to reach the vine? I will get to the top so I can tell you what is up the next level.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think I should go first this time? There might be something up there that could be holy and need someone who believes in God to find it.”

  “You might be right. You go ahead. I will get on my hands and knees so you can step on my back, that way you can reach the first foot hold and then grab the rope to climb it. Just let me know what is up there, okay?”

  Treble stepped on Abby’s semi-muscular back and climbed the rope in seconds. He pulled himself up to the level where his friends were, but they were all asleep, with pomegranate-looking ink stains on their shirts. They all had smiles etched on their faces while passed out. No one stirred when Treble called out their names, one by one. He went back to the window-sized hole at the top of the rocky structure with a hard, red fruit tucked between his chin and chest. He told Abby about whom he had fo
und.

  “Will you come back down so I can come up there? Are there any more places to escape from up there?”

  “Yeah, I am coming down now, and I don’t know, I didn’t see any other openings, but then again, I didn’t look.” Treble climbed back down the thick vine, careful not to drop the fruit and gave her a boost, this time after having her feed off his offering. She partook but instantly threw it back up then scaled the wall and was soon up with the others. After Abby’s body rejected the nourishment, Treble said, “There is more fruit up there in case you want to try again. Just lay down so you don’t fall out. Go to sleep like the others. I will return later when I find us a way out of here.” He left the room and was soon out the other side of the vault where Zon and the other football players had punched in the walls. In the far corner was another rope vine; this one swung down from the ceiling. Treble grabbed it, backed up, and held on tight as he soared over an endless, dark pit, and was soon on the other side of this horizontal elevator shaft, looking hollow. He didn’t look behind but pushed the vine back. It stuck against the wall where he had last grabbed it.

  Treble was now on a full sprint through a tunnel of lit bugs that twinkled like stars. He thought that he was entering a planetarium of some sort, having remembered when he was seven when his mom had taken him to one in Seattle. The barrel of stars started spinning, or at least the light sources did, making him feel nauseous, like he was in a whirlwind tunnel, holding on to the sides.

  Treble tried to regain equilibrium as the shaft quit spinning. He took a step forward and heard a crunch. He lifted his shoe to see that the bottom was lighted white. He stepped again, and now he could see clearly. One of the bugs from the ceiling flew down his throat. He gasped for air and choked for a second. The bug tickled the back of his tongue, causing the gag reflex. He hacked up the critter enough to accidentally bite down and savor the flavor. In a grotesque facial expression, he forced the insect down and then stood tall as it tasted somewhat titillating. He grabbed more and more, like he was getting the best selection of prime rib at a steak house. The tunnel lit up from his joy of feasting as he audibly laughed out loud. Now he was comfortable with this separation from the tunnel. He reached out his arms and wobbled back and forth. The cylinder rocked to and fro. Treble tested its parameters, nearly doing a three-sixty from the inside. He came back to upright after playtime was over, and he commenced walking through the openings in hope of finding the rest of his high school classmates.