Tether

by Jeremy Robinson

  But Rain is sensing only one person. A him. Not a them.

  “Can you hear me?” I ask Rain, trembling beneath her blanket. “Can you hear him? What he’s saying?”

  I can’t see her face, but the way the light flickers from within the blanket, I can tell she’s shaking her head.

  “Can you focus?” I ask. “Try to control it. Contain it.”

  “We don’t know what it is,” Reg says. “How can you expect her to—”

  “I can try,” Rain says, voice strained. Her body stiffens. She sits up straighter, revealing her face. Pulses of blue energy flow through her skin. Her luminous eyes are brilliant and pinched, as she furrows her brow in concentration. The light dulls, but it takes intense effort.

  “It’s…” Rain grimaces. “It’s looking for an outlet.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “Rage.”

  As the word escapes her mouth, something moves through me. It’s like a magnet has tugged on my soul for a moment. It’s followed by a chill, and the hair on my arms standing on end.

  A stunned Reggie stares at her arm, hair on end, too. “I felt that,” she whispers. Louder, to me. “I felt that.”

  “Can you hear what he’s saying?” I ask Rain.

  “Turn right!” she says, and Reggie follows the instruction, taking us the wrong way down a one-way street. At the end, Rain says, “Left,” and we follow the path as the storm above builds. Wind-swept trash spins through the air. While some people gather in windows, silhouetted by their flashing lights, others decide to get out of Dodge, some in vehicles, some on bikes, but most are running in the streets.

  After a series of rapid-fire directions, Rain shouts, “Stop! He’s here.”

  Reggie and I look out the windows. We’re stopped in McKinley Square, at the base of the Custom House Tower, a five-hundred-foot-tall building that looks like a bell tower, sans the church at its base. Once upon a time, it stood on Boston’s waterfront, looking out over the Atlantic, but the city’s land reclamation efforts separated the building from the sea by several blocks.

  I turn back to Rain, who’s no longer hiding beneath the blanket, but also no longer glowing as brightly. I don’t think the…signal, or whatever it is, is less intense here. If she’s right, it’s more intense. She’s just controlling the effect it has on her body. Or containing it. Who knows how it works. But the look on her face says it’s not easy.

  “Can you hear him now?” I ask.

  Her face relaxes for a moment, and then twists with anguish. “I…hear him. He’s… I can’t understand. There’s too much emotion.”

  “Can you let us hear?” Reggie asks.

  I think that’s a spectacularly bad idea.

  Whatever is happening is powerful enough to affect the whole city. What’s going to happen to Rain if she allows it to move through her?

  Before I can voice my concern, Rain says, “Yes.”

  Her body goes rigid, her inner illumination is bright enough to make me squint. Her eyes are like a car’s high beams, and when she opens her mouth, light emerges. I have flashbacks of a movie. Big Trouble in Little China, I think. What was his name? Lo Pan? The light streaming from his eyes and mouth. This is the same, but the sound…

  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard.

  Rain screams. Her high-pitched voice becomes like the roaring of a waterfall. The volume of it forces my hands to my ears. And then, all at once, Rain and the city go dark.

  13

  The inky darkness around us inspires nothing but fear.

  “This is not good,” Reggie says. I’m about to respond when she does it for me, talking to herself again. “No kidding. But what could it be? It’s not atmospheric. Not true. I saw the storm. But that’s a byproduct. Like the lights. So what’s causing the—”

  Rain’s light returns with the suddenness of a nuclear blast. I flinch back, hitting my head on the low ceiling. Reggie lets out a yelp that morphs into a scream, when the city shakes and the light show resumes.

  The quake thumps once, jouncing the car.

  Outside, chaos grips the panicked throng. People flee in all directions.

  They don’t know what they’re running from or where to go, but if what happened in Cambridge is being reported as a terrorist attack, their frantic flight response is understandable.

  What changed? I wonder, looking to the sky again. The clouds roil with flashing light, swirling around a dark core of clear night sky positioned directly above us.

  Rain has led us to the storm’s eye.

  “I’m starting to think this might be a bad idea,” I say.

  “Wait,” Rain says, struggling to contain her brilliance again. “It’s getting closer.”

  “It?” I say. “I thought it was a he?”

  Rain either ignores me or doesn’t hear me. Teeth grind. Hands clench. Her light dims.

  What the hell are you?

  Rain makes a solid effort, but then loses the fight with a gasp that turns her face toward the ceiling. Her back arches. “Coming…” she says. “Here…” Then she lurches forward, glowing eyes staring past me and Reg, out through the windshield.

  The car is thumped again, bouncing off the road for a moment.

  “That’s not an earthquake,” I say, slowly turning to face whatever it is Rain is looking at. “It feels like…”

  I see the impossible, slipping into and out of reality a few hundred feet away. But I’m not seeing the whole thing…just part of it.

  Just…a limb.

  An arm.

  A two-fingered, emaciated hand the size of a house, knuckles down in the street.

  The pale skin flows with long, luminous hairs that ebb and flow like they’re underwater, but the skin looks dry, like someone came along with a giant peeler and partially peeled back flakes of flesh, exposing the luminous blue beneath.

  The way the meat of it compresses and cracks suggest it’s supporting immense weight, but all I can see is an arm, tapering up a hundred feet and out of existence. Whatever it’s connected to must be…massive. Hundreds of feet tall.

  An ethereal cloud flows through the city. A living thing, flashing with thunderless lightning.

  “This isn’t possible,” Reggie says. “This can’t be real.”

  “Pretty sure we’re all seeing the giant white arm,” I say, and then I motion to the people outside the vehicle, now fleeing in a unified direction—away from the arm. “Mass hallucination?”

  Reggie shakes her head. “It’s not a real thing. Mass hysteria, sure. Happens all the time. This…” She motions outside the car. “This is real hysteria. Mass delusion. Even more common. Politicians and corporations propagate mass delusion on a daily basis. But mass hallucination, in which a group of people of different backgrounds, ages, living situations, beliefs, and preference in media—all of which affects what we hallucinate—doesn’t exist.” She looks through the windshield again. “We’re all seeing the same damn thing…because it’s real.”

  Her eyes flare wider. “And it’s coming this way!”

  The long arm lifts off the ground and swings forward, sliding a hundred feet closer before slamming back to the pavement. A car folds inward and explodes beneath the arm’s weight. I follow the flames upward. The limb is longer now, stretching high up into the air, but I don’t see a body.

  “It’s angry,” Rain says.

  “Shit!” I shout with a start. I’d forgotten she was there.

  How the hell do you forget about a glowing woman in the back seat?!

  When there’s a ghost-monster-thing stomping toward you, I respond to myself, realizing that if I’d verbalized the debate, I would have sounded a lot like Reggie.

  “And afraid,” she says. “It’s confused…”

  “Can you communicate with it?” Reggie asks.

  Rain shakes her head. Fast little tics, side to side. I don’t know if that’s a solid ‘No’ or an ‘I’m not going to freaking try.’ Either way, I think it’s a bad idea. The less at
tention we draw to ourselves the better. In fact, I think it’s time we make ourselves scarce. We’re not going to get any answers if we’re pancaked in the middle of the street.

  “Get us out of here,” I tell Reggie.

  “But look at it.” Reggie is being guided by scientific curiosity. It’s making her overlook her own mortality. “This is going to change the world.”

  “We won’t be around to see a changed world if it takes another step!” I shout. The upper end of the arm is leaning forward, like some other hand somewhere is stepping forward.

  And then I hear it.

  The thunderous roar of a collapsing building. To the right, the building behind the Custom House Tower crumbles to the ground like it was kicked.

  When I see a second, luminous white limb slam down amidst the debris, I know that’s exactly what happened.

  How is this possible?

  I thought ghosts were intangible.

  Shouldn’t it be sliding through the buildings?

  Shouldn’t it be a shit-ton smaller?

  Ghosts are supposed to be the spirits of people. As far as I know, they look like people, too. This…is something else. Or was. If it’s a ghost at all.

  Thoughts of the unreal are replaced by sobering thoughts of reality.

  How many people were hiding in that building?

  How many people were nearby when it collapsed?

  My questions are erased when a billowing, gray dust cloud roars toward us between buildings. “Reggie!”

  Reggie puts the car in reverse, lays on the horn, and hits the gas. She swings an arm over my seat and twists around to look out the back window. “What—get down!” she shouts at Rain, whose glowing face is blocking her view.

  Pedestrians scatter away from the onrushing vehicle, clearing a path for us, even as they run for their lives. While Reggie looks back, twitching the vehicle left and right to avoid people, I turn forward and watch the thing we’re all running away from.

  Pulses of light shoot up through the limb, extending what can be seen, and revealing what might be a shoulder joint. The glowing hairs react to each pulse, fluttering as they pass.

  Weight shifts and lifts away.

  “Here it comes!” I shout.

  The fingers rise from the ground, revealing a crater in the pavement, reaching from one side of the street to the other.

  As the arm swings toward us, trailing a cloud of dust, I look up again, imagining the size and position of its unseen body. It’s not there…but it is. And if it comes into contact with the physical world… My eyes drift higher. Custom House Tower is five hundred feet tall, much of it solid granite. Untold tons. It will all come crashing down, right toward us.

  The horror I see next replaces those conjured by my imagination.

  People run through the streets in our wake, trying to escape. Most are dressed for bed. All of them are screaming. And the lot of them are oblivious to the massive arm swooping through the air like a wrecking ball. I see flashes of what will happen to their bodies upon impact, but I reassess when the limb slides through the dust cloud ejected by the collapsed building without creating any wake or disturbing the flow.

  Is it only material when it steps down? I wonder.

  For a moment, I think the people it’s about to strike will be okay.

  But then it reaches them.

  No one explodes. That’s the only positive thing I can say about what happens next. As the twenty-foot-wide, two-fingered fist swings down the street, each and every person it passes through falls to the ground with a wail of agony. Glowing blue wisps are yanked from their bodies. Pulled up into the beast’s flesh.

  It’s taking their souls, I think, despite the fact that I don’t believe souls exist.

  When the bodies hit the ground, they’re nothing more than desiccated husks dressed in loose fitting clothing.

  I shrink into my seat, unable to speak or scream.

  The fist slams into the ground just a few feet shy of the Prius. The impact bounces the car into the air.

  A deep cold burns my skin for a moment. Then the tires return to the pavement and we screech away.

  “Reggie…” I say.

  “Don’t want to know!” she shouts.

  I look up as something high above flickers into view. A body? An eye? Many eyes? I see it for just a moment, but it’s enough to let me know I never want to see it again. The brief flicker into reality is also enough to collide with, and knock over, the top half of the Custom House Tower.

  14

  “Faster!” I scream. There must be something in my high-pitched panic—the sound of a man who knows he’s about to die—that resonates with Reggie. She slams on the gas and throws caution to the wind. It’s do or die time. If she has to thump a few people on the way, I’m sure our future selves will look back on this moment with regret. But right now, in the moment, no one is analyzing choices, because they’re not really choices at all.

  They’re knee-jerk reactions built into our DNA, meant to keep us alive. And if you want to get logical about it…no one, short of an Olympic sprinter, has any hope of outrunning the collapsing tower. And I don’t see Usain Bolt anywhere.

  Thankfully, Reggie doesn’t run anyone over, or even bump anyone. Turns out my fellow Bostonians are smarter than the genius behind the steering wheel, or maybe they learned the real lesson taught by the movie Prometheus: when something tall falls toward you, don’t run away. Run to the side. The street clears as people head north en masse, through alleys and side streets.

  I nearly suggest we do the same, but my conscience catches up with me before the falling tower. Taking the car down one of those tight spaces would mean running over a large number of people to save just three. Not even Spock would agree with that logic.

  We need to outrun the tower or—

  Darkness.

  The world shakes outside and inside my body.

  I’m thrown upward and then wrenched back down, pummeled on all sides.

  Metal shrieks. Snaps.

  We didn’t make it…

  We didn’t—

  I see light. It’s bright. Hurts my eyes.

  It’s Rain in the backseat. The brightness cast by her face cuts through the dust now flowing through the car’s interior.

  I’m not dead.

  But I haven’t escaped the Grim Reaper yet.

  Grit fills my lungs, forcing great heaving coughs from my chest. I lift my shirt and bunch it in front of my mouth, breathing and coughing.

  When the dust starts to settle, the world remade coalesces around me. The Prius’s hood has been crushed by a granite block, flattened like an empty tin can underfoot.

  Debris surrounds the car. When the tower fell, it also came apart. While most of the building fell short of us, stones ejected from the collapse sprayed out into the street.

  “You okay?” I ask Reggie.

  She cricks her neck back and forth. “Shook up, is all.”

  I turn back to Rain and jolt when I find myself face-to-face with her intensely glowing eyes.

  “Get out!” She gives me a shove. “GET OUT!”

  When a giant monster is rampaging through a city and a skyscraper has just narrowly missed falling on your head, you don’t think twice when a glowing woman screams at you to get out. I shove open the Prius door, flop onto my hands and knees, and then break into a sprint. As I bunny-hop through the debris, a quick glance to my right confirms that Reggie is with me, more fleet-footed than I would have guessed.

  I look farther back, expecting to see Rain, but she’s not there. The Prius’s interior warbles with bright light, as she kicks at the back door, trying to get out.

  Pebbles grind beneath my feet as I slide to a stop.

  My moral debate team is working overtime today. Should I go back and help her? The argument against this course of action comes from a block to my right, where the second glowing appendage is kicking its way through another building.

  How long do I have before the soul-sucki
ng fist slides forward again?

  Seconds?

  And what about after that?

  Behind me stand six of Boston’s largest skyscrapers, dwarfing the Custom House Tower, both in height and girth. If this thing plows through those with equal ease, there isn’t going to be anywhere I can run…if I don’t leave now.

  Rain weighs in with an angry, “GO!”

  When I see her slide into the front seat, heading for my working door, I obey. Reggie is a good half block ahead of me now. I don’t know if she’ll be able to hear me over the rumble of destruction and the cacophony of screams, but I try anyway. “Reggie! Head for North Station!”

  Clear of the rubble, I look back again.

  Rain is on her feet and on the move. I thought Reggie was quick, but Rain is like lightning, her legs a blur as she weaves her way through the debris field, propelled by Morgan’s pink Swoosh Nikes. Dust billows out of alleys on the southern side of the street, kicked up by whatever building has just finished falling to the ground. But I don’t lose sight of Rain. Her brilliance shines through the darkness.

  It’s staggering.

  If not for the massive glowing leg rising up behind her, I might have stopped to watch.

  “It’s coming!” I shout.

  Rain slips out of the cloud without missing a step. At our current paces, she’ll pass me in ten seconds.

  If she makes it that far.

  The limb swings toward us.

  A group of coughing and wailing people emerge from the debris cloud in Rain’s wake. They’re following her light, I realize…straight toward oblivion.

  None of them see the two knuckles sweeping toward them. I suppose there is some mercy in that. They’re alive and running and desperate, one moment. And then it moves through them, leaching their lives away with the quickness of a gunshot.

  The shock of seeing that happen again is overwritten by the realization that Rain is next.

  I open my mouth to shout a warning, but even as I do, I know it won’t make a difference.

  “Rain!” I shout, as the bus-sized hand swings through her.

  I lose sight of her glow a moment later, as the limb continues its arc—straight toward me.