Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Atlas throws his heel onto the object and bends in his leg. Metal scrapes floor.

  Groaning, Smit rocks onto his back and clutches his bullet wound. He sputters breath, spits staccato growls, his rumbles a beastly fit resonating beyond the room’s steel door.

  Atlas drags the key toward his hip, extending his hand, contracting his leg, until the key’s teeth brush his middle finger. He slaps his fingers down, scratches stone, and repeats. His hand crawls.

  “Imperialists, Imperium.” Smit pushes himself onto his knees. “Skies will—all falling—bloed opent and will stain their clouds red on gate day. You and the rest.”

  Atlas flicks the key into his palm. He grabs it. He twists his hand around and, key’s bow between middle and forefinger, its tip to his cuff, scratches for some matching hole. The key catches on the keyhole’s round, slips from Atlas’s fingers, and clatters to the floor. He reaches for it.

  Smit gets on his feet. “Prison will find you always, transgressor. Shh, now. Shh—shouldn’t’ve fought Olympus. Have I told you?”

  He reaches it. Atlas clenches the key and turns it toward the keyhole. His forefinger slides forward, a fraction past his middle finger, and the key again slips. It drops.

  A century’s centimeter’s journey it drops. The key clinks against the hole’s internal left edge, then its right, and then wobbles into the hole’s depths as it there settles, stem and bow sticking upright. Atlas exhales. He presses a finger into the key’s shoulder, but it holds still. He contorts his arm and hand and presses from the key’s opposite side; it revolves. Revolves halfway around, then sticks. Atlas jabs his finger into the key but a faint click braces it in place.

  The earth shakes; a footfall jars it from circular orbit.

  “I’m gonna boil you, froggy, like the Chinese.”

  Smit stomps across the stone. Atlas thrusts his arm down. The key hits the ground, dislodges from its snag, turns the last degree, and unlocks his cuff.

  Atlas raises his free hand.

  He swipes it across the air. Wind pours from his fingers and throws Smit staggering backward, his hand bumping the overhead lightbulb. Light and shadow swing with the bulb’s chain; incandescence oscillates, sways over Atlas’s knees. He squints and blinks and grabs the key, inserts it into the left cuff, and frees his other hand.

  Wavering, he stands. Darkness migrates across the room, light swinging right, and Atlas steps forward. The light swings left and Smit’s yellow grin flashes in it. His boot plunges into Atlas’s stomach; Atlas lurches into the wall. World disappearing, reappearing, blurring, swaying, light, darkness, Smit’s chuckles quivering in between, Atlas clutches his gut and represses a gag that touches his burned throat.

  A bloom of flames rides the air. The lightbulb swings across the room and Smit’s attached to the flames: his hand seeds them. Atlas watches as the lightbulb swings to one extremity, shadow taking his feet, and then kicks off the wall and runs for the door. Fire streams overhead; Atlas ducks. When light swings back to skim his heel, he reaches the door and, yanking it open, slips out the threshold. He wrenches the door shut, inserts his key into a slot beneath the handle, and hopes to Imperium it shares fetters’ same lock. He turns it and the door clicks.

  Smit wails inside. Tapered flame seeps out the door’s four cracks, sizzles on dissipation. Orange flickers brushing his arms, Atlas jumps back and drops the key from clammy fingers, hands charged, palms spread in air-kissed freedom. He spins around. He whips his head in every direction.

  He jogs for the right before he sees it; emerging in his widening pupils, beneath his feet and past his arms, the tunnel of a hallway lays a winding path. It breaks into countless rooms: door after dungeon door, each steel, thick. Caged lights line the ceiling and walls, tarnished metal claws enclosing glass of bluish, of yellowed, reddish auras of mismatched bulbs suffocating behind air’s haze. He blinks and the left wall’s line of lights ends short. Atlas glances after the last bulb; his gasp into new darkness echoes and, in the same step, he glimpses left’s lights wrapping around a gray brick corner. He digs his heels into ground as he grabs for the tunnel’s fork he only now sees, staggering a couple meters past it. He backtracks. He turns.

  He runs down three similar divides nauseatingly familiar, to each other and the route from the first Elisium cell he endured. But the pressure in his ears tells him this network burrows deeper, spanning a great portion of Elisium’s underground. He imagines the beings walking—working these halls. He imagines the faces of Lydia, the tattooed Accend, the featureless mask of the suit-and-tie male around the corner and behind the stutter of sconce light. The echoes of his footsteps mimic another’s. He jolts and glances over a shoulder.

  Crash.

  Atlas jerks his head forward. Three or four steps ahead, a muffled explosion rattles a steel door and its loose, rusty hinges screech. Face white, Atlas slows. The door flings open. A cone of room’s light grazes the door’s rivets, flushing Atlas’s face yellow, and a body flies out of the dungeon. The male slams the opposite wall and, moaning, slumps to the floor.

  Atlas skids to a stop.

  “Yeah.” Back molded to the wall, Samuel grasps his chest and chokes without sound. “Tha’s right.”

  Samuel presses his palms into ground, drags his feet, winces as he crawls to stand. His mouth’s painted with blood, his jeans slit across the knee: two additions to the black eye and swollen cheeks still unhealed. He dusts off his front. Then snaps his fingers and points through the open door.

  “You get mad,” Samuel says. “You throw your Little Miss tantrum because we know who’s won.”

  He strides back into the room. Three bangs, four bashes later, Samuel walks out again and wipes his mouth, throwing the door handle as he goes. It swings closed. He looks at Atlas. His eyes widen and tone brightens.

  “Attie!”

  Stepping toward him, Samuel purses his lips. He folds his arms, deepens his voice.

  “Took you long enough. I had this one,” he nods to the dungeon, “in the bag hours ago. Some fun never killed anyone. Except him. Maybe. I didn’t check.”

  Atlas stares. “We must depart.”

  “I love it when you get all down to business.” Samuel daintily flicks his hand.

  “Gene—she would be where?”

  “No, I’m completely fine. Nothing broken. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “Samuel, focus. This is no joking matter.”

  “I don’t know where she would be.”

  Atlas grabs his own bloodied arm and inhales. “Where is the figurative heart of the dungeons?”

  Samuel’s eye twitches. “You’re good at following.”

  He turns and gestures to a fork’s left corridor. Samuel runs; Atlas follows. The low ceiling angles up and its caged bulbs rise until, several connecting tunnels later, ground’s shock rattling their skeletons, light floats into underworld’s mist of a sky and blackness bites at their heels. The floor tips downward. Ceiling’s concrete randomizes, breaks at clusters of boulders. The shaft vertically fans into an enclosed ravine tangling roots, raining dirt, and Atlas and Samuel descend.

  XXI

  Exodus

  They wander for forty years, so Atlas’s tremors say. Steel three fingers thick stops them. Samuel pushes open the door.

  Its hinges scream a centimeter’s creak across four hundred square meters of stone flooring broken only at the metal bench in the room’s center. Atlas and Samuel step inside the doorway that touches ceiling the height of three men. They walk onto ground fit for three hundred, the whole devoid of pillars and supports: claustrophobic vacancy, earth’s crust compacting, drooping, stirring imaginings in depths of mind of depths underground too naked. In the corner, one exposed nerve of a tree root, thicker than a trunk, crawls from a jagged crevice. Atlas gasps for breath.

  Stretching his hand, Samuel releases the door’s handle and glances over a shoulder at the tunnels, at their echo. Atlas glares forward.

  “Gene.”

  She l
ies upon the metal bench under light enough to elongate restraints’ shadow across her body. Two around the ankles, two around the wrists, one around her waist. One at her neck. Her hair drapes the frame that holds her and the table horizontally.

  Atlas steps and his foot bends inward, curls under his quivering legs. He stumbles. Samuel yells something. His words strike Atlas’s cheek and thrust him down, his side hitting stone. Heart beating a river, Atlas pushes himself onto his feet before vertigo warps his sight. His cheek aches. He grasps it and squints at a white mass.

  Eden smooths her shirt.

  She stands up straight, settles her dominant foot, and, looking at her hand, touches the screen of an electronic rectangle. It glows.

  “Wow.” The Queen of Elisium purses her lips and slides her rectangle into her pocket. “Your escape was quicker than last time. All that practice, Only Escaped . . .”

  She looks up and smiles. Atlas shields his cheek’s red she bludgeoned into birth. Samuel walks between her and him and makes a face.

  “I told you to duck,” Samuel says to Atlas, then turns to Eden. “Great devil, Eden.”

  Atlas glances at Gene.

  “You know,” Samuel flourishes his hands, “how I hate being involuntarily locked up. Honey, why didn’t you just lynch me?”

  Eden leans around him. “Did you and Smit get along? He personally requested to look after you for the time. He’s an artist.”

  “That’s cheeky.” Samuel swerves his head back into Eden’s view. “You gonna stop ignoring me?”

  Atlas’s eyes adjust. Gene’s pants are cut across her shins and thighs and her shirt’s torn at her waist and shoulders. No blood. Burns.

  “It’s not overconfidence, really, that I gave you wiggle room in your cell, Atlas. I hope you know. I’m curious—fascinated. You’re fascinating.”

  “You uncultured ragweed,” Samuel says. “I’m this, like this close—thousand rusty razor blades in your morning facial and there’s nowhere I’d rather drive a power drill—” He lowers his finger, relaxes his scowl. “I’m in love with you so bad. Let’s talk about it?”

  Red patches scatter her skin through her clothing’s slits, dozens visible, some raw and newly burst, most still developing, raised, shining bright crimson where they bubble. Gene lies still, her head to the side, eyes closed. Her chest rises and falls and an inhale slips down Atlas’s throat without warning. He shifts his foot a centimeter toward her.

  “Samuel.” Eden drags a hand down her face.

  “No, you. You’re the one.” Samuel points. “What happened to raiding Florida retirement homes and assimilating spring breakers? When did you become obsessed with war?”

  “When it approached. And don’t pretend you haven’t changed. You deserve your mortality.”

  “It’s not so bad—makes life exciting.”

  “Exciting? That human stink seething in your entrails?”

  “Ew.”

  “Humans raised Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Jong-il, Mao, Assad. Out of their weakness, humanity craves slavery and Sidera will take them from us—from themselves—and you’re choosing to join them in the pen now? Everything we stand for could be destroyed in seconds if Sidera grazes Earth without our preparation. Violence isn’t an answer. It’s the only answer.”

  “And Earth will take the blow, right? I kinda like the world the way it is, dearest. Humans have too created NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, shoe horns, Reddit, street art, Eraserhead—”

  “All of it will be thrown under the yoke. When slavery threatens, their death is compassionate, and all humans are born to die.”

  “—KEXP, longboarding, Netflix, Costco—”

  Eden screams. “Corporation is slavery as an institution.”

  “Yes,” Samuel leans back, “ma’am. I’ve been meaning to ask: why do you want the coin again?”

  “Pylon will open. We must meet war as it comes.”

  “So,” Samuel ducks his head, “you want The Presage, do you? Wanna open Pylon first? Found out little Denim doesn’t have a morsel of info about an opener and you’re very cross ’cause you don’t have a Skittle to go on, you radiant nincompoop?”

  Eden clicks her tongue. “Blood opens. That we know.”

  “Uh-huh.” Samuel glances at Atlas. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Not you and me.”

  Atlas looks back at Samuel, looks at Gene, and abandons thought. Samuel squints into distance, twitches. Atlas’s vision blurs.

  “Who said this, huh? Who started the ‘Hie, hurry! Siderans are coming to ravage your wives! Run for the hills and think of the children!’?” Samuel asks.

  “History.”

  “Age-old grudge, yes. Ambiguous, cryptic ‘history,’ no.”

  “My hands,” Eden bulges her eyes, “twitch for need to pluck every fanatical totalitarian’s head from his government-endorsed body and set it aflame in a sky shattered by Pylon as I watch hundreds of thousands dance in the bloodied streets of corporate, bureaucratic America, the gateway to all Earth.” She brushes her lip with a thumb. “That’s what whispers of revolution. I hardly need other reason.”

  Samuel nods. “ ‘I.’ Not so much about Elisium now, yeah, babe? Lookie here—wring out them rubber necks, y’all. Jimmy caught shellfish and Eden caught selfish.”

  She lifts her chin. “Independence equals selfishness.”

  “Really? Not even a little bit?” Samuel nudges Atlas’s foot as he kicks up his own heel, crossing his ankles. “Not a little fazed by my redneck?”

  Atlas blinks at the nudge, then scans a metal table—a high, portable tray one meter from Gene: upon it, knives, all clean, a small plastic bottle, three or four metal instruments. He glimpses Eden’s hand. He charges his. He shifts weight and calculates the evenness of stone beneath foot from him to bench.

  Eden rolls her eyes. “Petty, shallow, insecure, emotionally deflecting—always the same little Sam who trembled in Covey Manor, behind Daddy’s burning—”

  “Shallow?” Samuel’s jaw drops. He watches Eden’s bottom lip.

  Atlas breathes in.

  “—never did take you seriously.”

  “How am I shallow?”

  Breathes out.

  “You should’ve thought about your loyalties, Samuel, because Earth’s greatest mountains can’t keep Sidera from falling into an engulfing explosion that smells of rusted rivers through boneyards you’ll never have the competence—”

  “S-H-A-L-L—?”

  “—maybe if you didn’t keep shooting my ravens, you tasteless, wannabe bassist who’d never have had—yes, I’m saying it—a chance with that girl from Eurythmics if you lived forty years—”

  Samuel grabs Eden. He constricts his arms around hers, digs his hands into her blouse, and kisses her. Atlas thrusts off the ground, sprints for Gene. Moving up her back, Samuel knots his fingers into Eden’s glacial hair and gasps against her mouth.

  Atlas slides into the bench. He catches himself gripping its edges, rattling cuffs’ metal, and Gene halfway opens her eyes.

  She crinkles her forehead. “Atlas?”

  He whips his head around and sweeps his hand over the instruments’ table, fingers through the smaller scalpels and scissors, and two clack to the ground. He turns. He presses his thumb into the keyhole on Gene’s arm restraint: sharp, intricate—

  “Attie.”

  Atlas flips around. A glimmer rides the air, pulsating, spinning; he stands on the tips of his toes, extends an arm, and catches the bronze object. Its teeth dig into his closed fist. He looks for the source.

  Smirking, Samuel wraps his pitch-arm back around Eden. He stands parted from her but clenching her arms, her waist, wresting it, stilled, into his.

  Atlas faces Gene and shifts the key to his thumb and forefinger. He inserts it into her left arm’s restraint, twists, and throws open the leather strap, the metal plating. Gene lifts her hand. It falls. She cringes.

  Atlas says, “No, do not—”

  A shriek severs the room and drives
nails across concrete chipped by ice, clawed under exploding diamonds the warmth of absolute zero.

  Squeezing the key inserted into Gene’s leg restraint, Atlas jerks his head around. Samuel lies on the ground, Eden over him. She burns her stare into Atlas, drags her hand across her mouth, and takes a step. Samuel flings out his arm; he grabs her ankle and yanks her down, to the cold concrete, her chin slamming it. She cries out. The following second’s silence shoots a hundred volts through Atlas’s arteries and trembling fingers.

  He frees Gene’s leg, then her other leg, then her other wrist, key clattering against its corroded locks. Eden kicks Samuel’s shoulder and gets on her feet. She stomps on Samuel’s hand. Atlas shoves his key into the waist restraint and turns it. Samuel screams. The restraint clicks. Eden lifts her palms to Atlas, to Gene. The restraint unlatches.

  Atlas steps to Gene’s neck restraint and inserts the key, but his thumb and finger slide from it; he wipes his hand on his pants. He twists the key ninety degrees and thrusts the cuff open. Gene rubs her neck.

  He sees—between charred threads of the shirt she stained a day earlier with coagulated cream called banana pudding, Atlas sees a black patch denting the side of Gene’s waist. Parched and flaked into a leathery charcoal slab the shape and length of a finger. Her skin. Two seconds, three, four Atlas stares.

  Orange and white vines, fluttering leaves and jagged thorns, spin into a stream that glows the distant walls and sears the flooring. Atlas’s brain resumes. He swings his arm as he turns. He snaps his hand onto the flames’ path and outpours the voltage under his skin. A wind cyclone matches the churn of fire, meets it head-on, and bursts each petal, each withered, teardrop blade backward and from unity. Sparks scraping stone, the stream disperses.

  Eden stands where it was. Her eyes narrow. Atlas steps into lingering heat and dimming light, lurches forward, thrusts his left hand to join his right, and lobs a horizontal tornado. It hits her chest.

  She flies off her feet.