R.E.solve (Rain Experience Book 2)

by Thomas W. Everson

  “It seems real enough, despite the inconsistencies. Let’s head over to Emma’s shop,” Ami suggests.

  “I’m not sure I want to see her skeleton.” A lump appears in my throat thinking of saving Emma only for her to have died in some horrific manner.

  My heels dig gently into the horse and he moves to a trot. I steer to try and avoid the litter of bones, but there are too many. The horse crushes the bones under his powerful feet. Crunching sounds reach my ears and I fight back the bile from deep down. I’m glad when it only takes a few minutes to find Emma’s shop. It’s as I last saw it. Glass is shattered, the doorframe bent and inside is a mess. A little girl’s scream from inside triggers an instinct reaction. I jump down and burst through the broken windowpane of the door but no one is inside. It’s silent again.

  “What was that screech?” Ami asks.

  My voice falters, “I heard a scream. I think it was Emma.” I look back before heading to the door in the back of the shop.

  With my hammers brought up ready for attack, I kick the door open. But there’s nothing but blackness. The light seeping in from outside dares not to enter the doorway and I am hesitant. Unable to see anything inside, I listen intently for the scream again, but it doesn’t come. Reaching into the room I attempt to feel for a light switch. When I reach my hand around I feel nothing at all; no solid mass, no structure. A sense of deep sorrow and regret starts to creep in and overwhelm me. I pull my arm out but the shadow has latched onto my skin. It draws up my arm, attempting to consume me.

  “Let go! Let go!” I drop the hammer, watching the shadow work its way up my arm and now out toward my feet on the ground.

  Backing up, I shake my hand frantically and free myself from it. It pursues as I run from Emma’s shop. Scrambling onto the horse, the shadow floods out after me. I put the horse to a quick gallop to distance us from the darkness, but it follows.

  “Rain, what’s going on?” Ami asks frantically.

  “I don’t know. That shadow tried to grab me!”

  Looking back over my shoulder it, the darkness, rolls over the street and across the skeletons. My mind has a hard time processing what begins happening. The skeletons begin standing. Not only the ones which have been touched by the darkness, but the ones all around us. Climbing to their feet they attempt to grab us as we race by.

  “Rain!”

  “I know!”

  With only one hammer I swing on one side and kick at the other. Ami jabs at them with her shears. Their bones scatter to the ground, but the waves are endless. They fall at us from the windows above in the skyscraping buildings.

  “Keep going!” I focus on maneuvering the horse through the city streets, trying to escape from the horde of skeletons.

  The only place there were minimal skeletons was at the house, but do we risk going back there? Will Agatha and Eve’s skeletons attack us?

  I turn the horse down a street and head back toward the park with the house. More skeletons block our way. I mow them down with the horse. His legs shatter their forms just as easily as one of mine or Ami’s blows. Fear grips my mind as they all try to grab us, to tear us down from the horse. I keep my emotions in check until we can find our way back to the house.

  At the park, past the border of trees, everything around us changes again. The horse is barreling through the woods once more and the house cannot be seen, but we continue on in its direction. Shadows swirl around us, forming silhouettes of people in all directions. Their moaning and wailing reverberates as if it’s directly in our ears. The clearing comes into view and the house is there waiting for us.

  In the yard I dismount and begin tying the horse to one of the clothesline posts before remembering the door to the kitchen is locked. I throw the rope down and we jog to the other side of the house, hugging its sides. I knot the horse’s lead rope to the well post again. Our fear pushes us to run into the house, leaving him out there as bait, or a sacrifice, to buy a few more moments.

  The skeleton army has been replaced by the shadows, and possibly Drake’s ghost. I hustle Ami along and lock the door behind us. The curtains are open. I pull them shut.

  “Rain, I’m scared.” Ami throws her shears down and clings to me.

  “I know. I don’t know what to do. This…” I look out a crack in the curtains at the tree line. “I don’t know what’s going on. The dead coming to life, the shadows trying to cover me…”

  The cries and moans from outside grow louder. I grab her hand and back away from the window. There’s fright in her eyes, and I feel the way she looks. I focus on distancing ourselves from the noise. Back toward the stairs we collapse onto them and Ami hugs me tightly as we’re terrorized by awful screams and deafening wails.

  “I don’t want to die,” Ami’s soft voice can still be heard clearly over them.

  “I know.” I kiss her forehead. It’s all I have to offer her in these circumstances.

  Lying there for what may be hours, or days, it’s hard to tell when the sounds stop. Finally we are left alone in silence once again. Though I want to look outside to see if the shadows have gone, Ami has fallen asleep and moving would disturb her. Still, my body is becoming restless and my legs begin to twitch. Sliding out from under her arm I do my best not to wake her.

  I move to the window. The moving shadows in the forest have disappeared and Drake hasn’t reappeared, but the tension in my muscles remains. A nagging feeling plagues my mind that whatever is there lurks just out of view. My eyes dart back and forth trying to see them, or Drake.

  “Rain?”

  Ami’s voice in the quiet startles me. I jump, spinning around quickly to look at her. She stands, straightening her skirt and pulling down her blouse.

  “There’s a lull out there,” I point out. “It might be a good time to try to leave again if we’re going to have any hope of finding food.”

  “It’s weird, but I haven’t felt hungry at all.”

  “Same. I don’t know what to make of it, but it doesn’t matter does it? If we don’t eat we will die.”

  She walks to me and grabs my free hand with both of hers. Her soft smile and trusting eyes say she’ll follow wherever I lead. Opening the door to the yard once again I notice the quiet covering everything. We cautiously make our way to the horse and I help her up onto him. Untying his rope from the well I toss it up over his neck and climb into the saddle.

  Pushing him to the edge of the forest, I head the opposite direction from Chas, toward Asta’s former location. The horse trots at a slow pace. I look left to right nervously for any sign of the shadows, or phantoms. Behind us still lies the house, a hundred feet back and nothing seems out of the ordinary now besides the silence and the faded colors. Several minutes pass and the house becomes indistinguishable beyond the forest’s foliage.

  Ami’s breath resounds in my ear and amid the silence it sounds as if she’s breathing heavily. When I look back her face isn’t actually near me. The horse’s hooves crush twigs and leaves. The crackling grows louder to the point it becomes hard to concentrate. But an opening in the woods refocuses my attention and I push him a little bit faster to find out what it is.

  My mind is destroyed when a familiar sight becomes visible. I have no explanation for it, like any of the other things we’ve seen recently. The house comes into view once more. Though I don’t want to continue, screeching and wailing picks up from behind. When I look the shadows have returned, larger and combining. They begin converging and racing toward us. It spooks the horse and sends him into a gallop.

  It takes great effort to keep him from tripping and sending Ami and me flying. Back into the yard, we’ve come up on the other side of the house with the wilted garden and the clotheslines. Turning my head I try to gauge Ami’s reaction. I sense the shadows are no longer content to stay in the forest. They merge into a blob, like a tidal wave crashing onto the shore, to chase us through the yard. Steering the horse around the side of the house the shadows are converging in from that side also.
<
br />   “Get in the house!” I yell at Ami while pulling alongside the porch.

  We both leap down but she’s inside before me while I stare at the shadows overtaking everything in sight. I step in and close the door on the horse. Turning, I expect to see Ami but she’s nowhere in sight.

  “Ami?!” I yell out.

  “Up here!” Her voice rings from upstairs.

  Climbing the stairs quickly I fear something may have happened to her but when I look into the sewing room she’s looking out the window at the shadows surrounding the house. They’re overtaking everything until it’s pitch black outside.

  “Rain,” her voice quivers.

  “I’m here,” I wrap my arms around her from behind. “I’m here.”

  Ami looks at me but her face turns a sickly pale when the direction of her gaze falls to the closet. She grips my hand tightly. She tries to speak; her voice chokes up in her throat for a moment.

  “Rain!” she points. “It’s inside!”

  The black shadow swarms out of the closet and reaches for Ami like long stretched out whips. She screams. Instinctively I raise my hand and let loose a large shockwave at it, but it isn’t fazed by my burst of energy. Ami runs from the room and I follow right behind her. Instead of following her downstairs I run to Evalyn’s room again.

  “Evalyn! Evalyn, you need to help us now!” I kick the door open. Inside is nothing but blackness and it swarms out at me from there also.

  I run. As I reach the sewing room it reaches out of the door and tries to grab me. Dropping to my calves, I slide under it and nearly fall down the stairs. I leap back up and bound down them, taking half the stairway with each stride. Behind me it relentlessly follows as I run out the open door. The yard is clear of its dark mass and Ami’s already on the horse waiting for me. I leap on from the porch and grab the reins.

  “Hyah!” I crack the reins and put my heels hard into his side.

  He gallops away from the house, deep into the woods. Loud moaning and wailing follows as the shadowy mass pursues.

  I push the horse to his limit through the thicket. As the shadowy wave begins to overtake us it consumes the forest behind and all around us. Though we have nowhere to go I push the horse harder to try and escape. White light appears ahead of us. Though the shadow seems to be able to envelop everything, my mind hopes that within the direct light it will not follow. My heart sinks when I see what we are headed toward. We break out onto the white void and I can no longer hear the horse’s footfall.

  Expecting the shadow to stop, we both look back and nothing but a black mass exists where we just were. Our hope is shattered when it continues forward, attempting to overtake us. The horse continues to gallop, now completely unhindered. I push him as hard as possible to stay ahead of the darkness. The white ground seems to tremble beneath us and that too helps the horse move.

  The time differential doesn’t seem to be slowing it down! How are we supposed to gain any ground?

  As the horse gallops, a strange sight catches my eye for a brief moment as we sail by it. One of the ropes we had laid out is there, leading us back in the direction we originally came from; for lack of better direction, I follow the course laid out. The ground continues to tremble violently. Though I had been unable to damage the white ground, it appears to develop black cracks in it, like veins shooting out from the shadows behind us. It tries to grab us and I work the horse hard to avoid it.

  Strangely, as we follow the ropes we don’t see the blackness in front of us as we would expect to if this was such a small circular world. Instead Ami points frantically and I see what she’s pointing toward. It’s the house, not surrounded by the forest, not in the center of Chas, and not enveloped by this black shadow as we had seen only moments ago.

  Looking back again the mountain of black now towers high above and covers the landscape all around. While it tries to reach us, I dig hard into the horse’s sides and keep him at his limit.

  He won’t be able to do this for long.

  The house grows in our vision but the horse begins to slow, exhausted, until a large tremble shakes the ground again under us. It causes a renewed panic in him and he speeds back up. The black has begun closing in on the sides, flanking us. The fear rises in me that it might cut us off.

  To my surprise, I see blurs at the edge of the house. I can’t help but feel a renewed hope, at least until I look back to see Ami focused on the darkness nipping at our heels. Agatha and Eve become clearly visible and I aim the horse right for them. The poor thing begins to wheeze, and against my legs I feel his labored breathing. I feel bad, but I can’t help think I’m going to have to let the darkness envelop him.

  Maybe he won’t suffer long. It might give Ami and a few more seconds to retreat to the house. But then what?

  He finds us one last burst of energy and we make landfall into the green grass. Jumping down from the saddle I scream at the three of them, leaving the horse to die while I run and wave my arms frantically.

  “Go! Go! In the house!”

  They follow, but before we reach the doorway yet another mystery confounds the entire experience: the black mass crashes like a wave against an invisible barrier right on the border of our land. We and the horse are safe from the darkness. The horse’s knees buckle and give out. We’re protected from the black for now, but it begins to blanket everything beyond our border. It turns the pristine white void into a dark nothingness. Ami begins sobbing. She leaps into her mother’s arms, rambling unintelligibly.

  “Give the horse some water,” I yell at Eve by accident, the stress of the situation putting me on edge.

  Startled by my dominant command she does as I request. The horse puts his mouth to the bucket Eve has brought but it doesn’t seem to have the will to drink. My attention returns to the darkness just beyond them and it appears to be retreating, leaving white ground visible again, but not for long. It surges back, as if in a tidal pull, and then races forward again, crashing up the invisible boundary so the white backdrop starts disappearing. Instead of retreating this time it climbs higher and the white disappears, the black reaching far above us to snuff it out. I head back to the edge of the barrier and unleash another shockwave. Like before, nothing happens.

  “Evalyn!” I turn back to Agatha but yell at the house. “Can you inhabit her? Can you tell us what’s going on?”

  “You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on because I have no idea,” Evalyn replies through Agatha. “What did you piss off out there?”

  I head back to them and Eve joins me, trying to draw my arm against her nearly bare torso. I pull away, having even less patience for her advances right now. She tries again but when I glare at her she stops and just follows behind me.

  “We don’t know what this is either.” Ami continues to hug on Agatha’s body while Evalyn inhabits it. “But the whole time I got a strange feeling, like it was sapping me of any happiness.”

  “We came to a house we thought was ours and from our perspective we had only been gone for a few minutes. But the house was dead. Its colors were faded, the grass had died and Agatha and Eve were skeletons,” I explain to Evalyn. “And that’s just the beginning. We saw the forest, Drake, Chas and an army of undead trying to grab us. Then the shadows came, engulfing everything.

  “I tried calling out to you for help in the house Evalyn, tried to elicit a response but I had no idea if you could respond in spirit,” I continue.

  “I can control minor physical things in my spirit form. If I had been there I would have found a way to communicate,” she replies while brushing Ami’s hair with her fingers and staring at the darkness.

  We all watch from the yard just outside the kitchen as the black now completely surrounds our house and the only light is a small circle of white left far above the house. Though the white void has been all but snuffed out its light continues to permeate the grounds inside our perimeter, illuminating everything just as it was previously.

  Eve breaks the silence. “Y
ou’ve been gone for about two weeks by my count of eating and sleeping cycles. We weren’t sure you were coming back.”

  “We almost didn’t,” I tell her. “Whatever it was out there causing us to hallucinate, I think it was trying to keep us there. We were chased back to one spot a few times.”

  I become entranced by the black wall climbing to extinguish the white above us, likely trying to enter our safe zone.

  “Will this barrier hold?” I ask Evalyn.

  “I have no idea. I didn’t know one existed until now.”

  “Maybe it can’t enter because of the time distortion between here and there,” Eve suggests.

  “I hope that’s the case,” I say.

  Finally calming down, my stomach protests the lack of sustenance in my body. Hunger catches up quickly: intense cramps wrench my insides around and I feel faint. “I need to eat or I’m going to pass out,” I tell them.

  Heading into the house we prepare for a family meal. Eve sets the table, I slice bread, and Ami and Evalyn prepare rice, fried vegetables and chunks of beef sealed in its own juices. Our meal comes together and we sit at the table to eat. With Ami to my right, Eve to my left and Evalyn in the chair beyond Eve I take my time to look at each one of them. My mind questions if any of this is real.

  The smell of the food is real enough, and I can touch everything. I can feel the warmth from the plate, but everything there had a sense of realism too. Could this all just be a nightmare? Can I wake up from this?

  I’m famished, but I stir the food about on the plate. A deep emptiness and doubts begin to overtake me. When Ami reaches over and places her hand on mine, I’m brought back to reality. Her caring smile reassures me that at least she’s real. At last I move a bite of vegetables, rice and beef to my mouth. My tongue delights at the flavor, tasting like the most fantastic thing I’ve ever had. The salty, sweet, and savory components are highlighted as I chew.

  My first portion doesn’t last long after the first bite. Wanting more I realize all the cooked food was divvied up between the four of us. And while there is more left in the house to eat, I know we must conserve our supplies until we – hopefully – make it out of here.