Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “No.” Gene exhales. “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

  When the cars in front accelerate enough for one vehicle-wide gap, she flings the steering wheel right and drives off the highway’s exit. She turns down a narrow street.

  “What the devil, woman?” Samuel’s jaw drops. “Where are you going?”

  Gene pinches the bridge of her nose. “Not so loud.”

  “Is this better?” Samuel yells.

  She cringes. “I’m going to lose my vision if we don’t stop. We’re finding a hotel.”

  Shoving his back into the seat, Samuel sits and folds his arms. Atlas looks at Gene. She yawns. She stretches her neck, blinks, rubs her eyes, squints. Sun strobing between blocks, she turns down two more alleys, each narrower and bumpier than the last—and shadier, which is the sole reason she can identify one sandy-bricked, five-story building occupying a block’s corner. She parks before it, the eight-space parking lot full. A neon banner hanging above its doorway flickers. The last three letters in HOTEL are burnt out.

  Samuel and Atlas get out of the sedan and wobble on sore legs for the building door. Atlas pauses, turns around. Gene still sits in her car, her forehead against the steering wheel, eyes closed. He returns to it, opens her door, and bends down.

  “Gene, we have reached your hotel,” Atlas says.

  She groans.

  He shifts his mouth, shifts his feet. “We have reached your hotel, Gene.”

  She groans softer.

  His hand hovering over her back, Atlas frowns. “Do you—shall I—”

  He swallows and withdraws and eyes her up and down. Then settles his feet into road with great effort and wraps his arm around her shoulders. He lifts her out of her seat. Eyelids lowered, face ashen, she winces and staggers into his arm’s curve as Atlas guides her toward the hotel’s door, up its splintered porch steps.

  They duck under the frame and enter a small lobby made smaller by floor fans and mismatched lamps. Various sculptures—a woman with eight arms, a bus bursting with discolored mushrooms, a fat animal of some kind—litter the front counter. Behind it, bead curtains hang from the second story’s staircase railing that creaks upon front door’s thud. It’s dark.

  A woman with prominent under-eye bags and purple lipstick emerges from the bead curtain. She props herself up by counter, gaze vacant. Gene straightens off Atlas, mumbles to the woman, and after a semi-silent exchange, receives one of those magical rectangular cards. Atlas and Gene trudge up the stairs.

  At the end of the short hall on the forth story, Gene stops at door number three. A wall lamp sprays yellowed glow too dim to illuminate the insect crawling from cracked baseboards. Gene lifts her key card. She whispers something.

  Atlas leans into her. She repeats herself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Imperium assist me.” Atlas purses his lips. “I don’t understand your intent.”

  Gene swipes the key through the door’s slot. “I’m so broke now. And this hotel smells like drugs and I could only get this one smelly room in this smelly city and I don’t know why I’m here and I can’t—” She hangs on the doorknob. “There’s no way, in this state, we’re getting to Montana, let alone Sidera. I shouldn’t have left my job.” Lowering her voice, she turns the doorknob and creaks open the door. “Shouldn’t have come.”

  Atlas steps around her and meets her eyes. “You will be okay, Gene. We will be okay. Do you know how I know?”

  Cringing, she shakes her head.

  “You’ve escaped Sidera, in a sense. You’ve left the familiar, the safe and steady for life lived in extremes,” Atlas says. “You’ve been freed.”

  “I’ve done a stupid, stupid thing.”

  “For a not stupid life.”

  Gene rubs her temples and stumbles into room four-oh-three, Atlas following. She rolls onto the bed, draws her legs into her chest, and buries her face in her knees, her side striped in sun. She slows her breathing. Atlas walks to the window’s curtains and tugs them together until every last slit of evening sunlight departs. He sits on the bed’s edge.

  He scoots a centimeter toward Gene and stares at the hair draped over her face, over the coarse bedspread. He scoots another centimeter. He stares. She lies still. Lifting a hand, Atlas touches his forefinger to her hair—

  Gene gasps and sits up. Atlas recoils, sliding his hands under his legs.

  “Where’s Samuel?” she asks.

  His heart skips a beat. “I haven’t the slightest.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  She squeezes her eyelids shut. “Go after him then.”

  Atlas’s voice cracks. “You’re ill.”

  “Go.”

  Atlas stands and runs out the door, swinging around its frame. He jogs down the stairs, out the hotel, into the street. He glances in every direction and pants and spins around. Except for a couple parked vehicles, the road is empty, horizon steeped with hundreds, thousands, millions of reflected suns off skyscraper windows and thousands of walkers walking underneath. Three—four connecting alleys stretch from the hotel corner, concrete webs multiplying farther down, at his right, at his left where rumbles a train rumbling his mind’s map. He looks right, looks left. His eyes widen.

  Adrenaline shoots through his veins. He blinks focus into his pin-pupiled gaze down the alley around hotel’s left and runs for it.

  Heart pounding his throat, he brushes his hand along the ragged scrape of raw brick as he turns the corner. He beats his heels against the sidewalk, against asphalt as he outruns oncoming traffic, against the soil of a planter as he hurdles it. Walkers glare at him. He bumps into one; the man yells something. Atlas keeps running.

  He half climbs, half leaps a chain fence a hundred times less daunting than fences of Sideran make and bolts through a parking lot, under a railroad overpass, his breath echoing along its shaded enclosure. A line of sickly buzzing blue subterranean fluorescent lights oscillates in and out against his profile. He exits the tunnel and finds sun again.

  He stops.

  Squinting through streets wisping heat waves up building bases, Atlas turns around and around and loses his breath to something more tiring than movement. He stands and pictures it. Imagines Samuel’s hands around the walker’s wrists, her neck—

  A little bit your fault too.

  Samuel’s voice resonates.

  Your fault.

  A wind drifts up Atlas’s back. He shakes out his hands shaking away the images and opens his arms to the breeze. He watches his sleeves flutter and his palms lift toward sky. The breeze splits on his cheeks, curves around his neck. Blood cooling, pupils dilating, he turns his head with it, then his body, and looks down the channel of his back’s windbreak, where currents flow: an alley.

  Inhaling the atmosphere, he runs for the narrow path between two windowless walls. Oasis gales thrust him onward in a whirl of summer-singed maple leaves that floated from beyond concrete towers, his soles reinventing concrete’s crash as buoyant patters. He knows already where he’ll find Samuel. The wind told him.

  Atlas slips around one last corner and the currents die.

  Two figures stand in the shade of a storage unit. He sprints for Samuel and the woman he pins against the wall, his forearm shoved into her throat, fingers lit with an orange glow. The woman’s wheezes toss her tangled hair, peep her groan. Atlas throws long his stride, spans the last meters, and leaps off the ground, into Samuel’s side.

  They collapse. Samuel’s head slams cement; the skin above his left temple breaks open, trickling a dark red, and at Samuel’s feet, Atlas crumples into the roll and cushion of his own shoulder. The woman glances at their sprawl. Tears streaming down her face, her hands around her throat, she pivots and jogs out the alley the way Atlas came.

  He presses his arms into cement, sits up. Samuel stirs, moans. Atlas stands, walks around his prey, and kicks the crow-black of Samuel’s croaking, writhing body onto its back.

  Samuel’
s eyelids flutter. Atlas narrows his.

  Angling his shoulder, Atlas grounds one foot, bends a knee retracting the other, and then snaps his leg straight. Atlas’s heel smashes into Samuel, whose jaw takes the brunt and head bangs the cement for the second time. Samuel stops stirring.

  * * *

  “Dear heaven. What happened?”

  His arm under Samuel’s shoulder, gripping his jacket, Atlas drags Samuel into the hotel room. Samuel’s knees brush the carpet that catches his chin’s drool. His head hangs and its blood dries, his eyes three-fourths of the way closed. Atlas dumps him. Samuel thumps onto the floor and splays and settles and Gene cringes at room’s rattle. Mouth open, she scoots to her bed’s edge.

  “I hid the blood adequately,” Atlas gasps for breath, “as you requested, to not ‘draw attention.’ ”

  “Huh? What? Don’t tell people I requested to hide blood.”

  “But walkers stared and a short man in dark blue with somewhat of an overbearing belt followed us down the street until a woman exchanged words and paper with another man and turned the first man’s attention. She had rods on her heels and circles on her ears and very little fabric on her—”

  “No. What happened with,” Gene points at Samuel, “that?”

  “The interruption of assimilation.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “His victim survived.”

  Gene’s brows tense. “Is Samuel a vampire?”

  “Vampire?”

  “They suck your blood and get all the dates.”

  Atlas looks at Samuel. Back swelling and contracting, Samuel melds his cheek to a carpet stain. He snorts into it.

  “He absorbs life.” Atlas slouches into his hands propped on his thighs. “I don’t understand the technicalities.”

  “So,” Gene bends down, “is he going through, like, withdrawals?”

  Atlas nudges Samuel with his foot.

  Frowning, Gene hugs her stomach and asks, “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Good Imperium, I pray not.”

  Her frown deepens.

  “Perhaps.” Spine uncoiling to his sigh, Atlas wipes his cheek. “We should hope he remains unconscious through the night and wakes to an ache in the head more severe than gradual decapitation.”

  Gene grimaces. “Bleh. Don’t say stuff like that.”

  Atlas’s head recoils into his neck. “Why not?”

  “Because you—” She gestures up and down his sweat-streaked Sideran uniform and his wide, searching eyes. “Because. Let’s not talk about headaches.”

  Mouth skewed, she lies down again, resting halfway against the headboard. Atlas steadies his breathing. He steps toward her.

  “But are you well?” he asks.

  “Throwing up helped.” Gene presses her lips together. “You should be glad you left when you did.”

  Samuel lets out a muffled grunt. Atlas yanks him up by his jacket, revolves his back to the wall farthest from the door, and sits him against it. Samuel’s chin rolls to his chest and his drool drips to his lap.

  Gene stares between them, rubbing her neck. “But I am kind of exhausted now. Is it okay if I get some sleep?”

  “Yes.” Atlas sinks into the lumps of the recliner beside Samuel, his own limbs stiff and limp as rope. “Rest, by all means.”

  Gene reaches across the nightstand and switches off the lamp. Sun through the sheer curtains dims and air’s dust escapes sight and mind, silence exploding imagination far beyond it. Dusk blackens the room. Atlas glances at Samuel, at the sliver of fading street light across his cheek. Samuel huffs in and puffs out, grumbles, winces every minute or so. Atlas kneads the soreness in his hands. Gene doesn’t budge. They listen to Samuel and the quiet that descends between grunts.

  Gene sits up and clicks on the lamp. “This is weird.”

  Atlas nods.

  “I’m at a drug-den-turned-hotel in Chicago,” Gene inhales, “on a mystical mission to bring down the extraterrestrial Third Reich; there’s an unconscious soul addict on my floor; and I’m talking to a wind-shooting alien that I met a few days ago when I hit him with my car.”

  Atlas says, “I don’t know if ‘alien’ is the correct term.”

  “If my dad knew what I was doing, he’d be so freaked. Not to mention my mom.”

  “Siderans are simply people from—”

  “I mean, I moved to Monroeville to try and start fresh, not war or gas explosions—”

  “—another location, comparable to walkers truly.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Gene drags her hands down her face. “Atlas, what are we doing?”

  “I am sitting in this chair and you are sitting on the bed.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Because there is the one chair and one bed and it was reasonable to—”

  “No, I meant—”

  “I understand your inquiry.” Atlas half-smiles. “We are doing, Genesis, what no other would. And I’m happy to be doing so with you.”

  Her face flushes. “How is a Sideran the only one who makes sense on this planet?”

  “Only one human makes sense to me.”

  She arches a brow. “That doesn’t count. I’m the only person you know here.”

  “And I wouldn’t care to know any other.”

  Grin stretching till toothy, Gene lies down again and burrows under the covers. She turns off the lamp. Darkness and stillness fog every corner and consume every wayward glow and flood every sense, the rustle of the bed’s comforter dissolving over Gene’s shoulder and halfway toward paisley wall stencils beyond sight.

  Gene whispers, “Thanks.”

  Atlas’s forehead wrinkles. “For?”

  “For being the only person I would care to know.”

  He looks into room’s black and, keeping under the murmur of Gene’s settling bedspread, eases the words from his mouth.

  “You’re welcome.”

  XV

  Day II: Unseen

  Forty-five minutes out of Madison, Wisconsin, and billowed trees dominate the plains, mirror the billowed clouds. The sky gathers, exhales a white puff, and fans out again. It repeats a thousand times for a thousand matching cumuli that traverse a populous sea of sapphire, clouds thickening at horizon, scattering at sky’s apex. Straight up, up past the cloak dividing Earth’s atmosphere with Sidera soars nothing but blue. It makes the cobalt in Atlas’s eyes shine brighter. He feels it. He leans toward the passenger window.

  From the driver’s seat, Gene glances at him. “I’m really sorry you ended up having to sleep on the floor.”

  Atlas stares into distance. “I prefer it. As I have said three times.”

  She lifts her shoulders and shifts weight, twisting her hands around the steering wheel. She again glances to her right and smiles.

  “How is that what catches your attention?” Gene asks.

  “Hmm.” Eyebrows tensing, Atlas turns to her. “Hmm?”

  “The sky—it’s all you look at and the only thing on Earth not ridiculously different from Sidera, the way you describe it.”

  “It’s—” He inhales. “Though the sky is the same blue,” Atlas angles his gaze out the windshield, “Sidera’s and Earth’s are inexplicably different. It’s similar to an old acquaintance I’ve not seen in many full cycles. There’s more to be learned.”

  Gene bites her cheek. “Like what?”

  “All things.” He retracts his view to his knee. “The sky will always stretch beyond your barriers.”

  The corner of Gene’s mouth lifts. Samuel groans.

  “Please—” Samuel lies on his stomach, his legs sprawled, bent, and buries his face into the back seat. “Please kill me.”

  Gene looks in the rearview mirror. “You still back there?”

  He groans again.

  “You may return to your old habits,” Atlas faces Samuel, “if you wish to forfeit The Presage and Eden’s approval. Simply return home.”

  Samuel claws at his seat with clammy, pale fingers and
blurts a noise like a sob combined with a grunt and a yelp.

  “I barely recalled—” Atlas lifts a finger. “Eden exiled you. You don’t have a home to return to.”

  His moaning crescendos.

  “By the Imperium, put an end to your whining.”

  Gene frowns. “Atlas, he’s in some serious pain and that blow to the head yesterday isn’t helping.”

  Atlas’s forehead crumples. “Why would his injury assist in relieving pain?”

  “We have no idea what he’s going through.” Gene leans right and lowers her voice. “He’s changing. I think maybe he wants to.”

  “I have ears, Gossip Girl,” Samuel mumbles. “And my bloodlust is alive and well, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, shut your mouth,” Gene says.

  Atlas stares at her.

  “What?” She looks back. “He’ll get healthy faster if he saves his energy. He’s even being sarcastic again. Workin’ already.”

  “I’m so passionately sorry you slept on the floor. Denim, is it okay if I throw up in your purse?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I’m doing it.”

  “What—no—”

  Samuel retches and Gene swerves and Atlas bends over and hugs his knees. Samuel sits up, drags a sweating hand down his face, and laughs. Eyes rolling back, the whites glistening like his damp brow, Samuel laughs and laughs and sways side to side. A chill crawls up Atlas’s nape. Gene steadies the vehicle and gapes at her rearview mirror.

  “Are you insane?”

  “No, I’m out-sane.”

  Atlas watches his window and lets drone their bickers as an all-encompassing blanket of Absolute Praises his ears adapt to encrypt. When they stop, the stereo hums replacement white noise. The highway rolls from their wheels and sun stoops into the windshield’s frame, their train of vehicles slowing, coagulating as they reach Minneapolis and accelerating, diluting as they pass through. Gene swings down her sun visor and Atlas reads sign posts and silently repeats every town, every vowel, every consonant until they find place in memory. He studies road’s exits and entrances, the vehicles’ behaviors, how walkers behind steering wheels bob their heads to unheard music, how they multitask consuming sustenance or speaking into their glowing rectangles. His vision blurs and doubles.