Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Smit throws the flames from his arm, sparking, popping, weaving for Samuel’s back. They explode—one leap, one heartbeat—on his leg. Gene’s mid-step sputters and Samuel makes a noise. He twists halfway around and, hopping on one leg, pats two or three burning remnants from his thigh.

  “Attie,” Samuel spots him and jerks his head, “git.”

  Atlas stands still. Boots rattling the drinking glass tower, Smit pounds a crescendo against the linoleum.

  “Atlas, come on!”

  The remaining employees, the last strangers, run past Samuel and Gene and out the door. Atlas turns to Smit.

  “Gene, Samuel,” Atlas stretches a palm, “wait in the vehicle.”

  “What?” Gene gapes. “No way—”

  “ ’Kay. Have fun.” Samuel jerks Gene through the door. “Be back before curf—”

  His voice drops behind the click of the door, the ding of its bell, its glass’s muffle.

  Smit ignites both hands and cups them together, cooks an inferno that climbs higher than its duplicate braiding brighter his eyelight. He thrusts it at Atlas. Atlas jolts and sweeps his hands lengthwise, Smit’s fire dipping behind view of his swing. The drinking glass tower follows his gesture as it shoots, dining-side, off the counter. It rides air several meters, dissolves into the fire and wind between Smit and Atlas. Chiming and shattering and hisses through singing rims and bumping, airborne crystal ring a symphony that slows time. Atlas drifts with his motion and gazes, glass’s glimmers in his irises, into the crystal storm. Fire seeps between its cracks and warps in the mass, its surviving heat warming Atlas’s face. The rest disperses.

  The glass then pours upon walls and tables and floor. Each vessel ruptures a hundred clinks that merge into one rainstorm pealing decreasingly translucent splatters across half the building, spotlights’ rainbows reflecting in every chip. A ricocheted shard cuts Atlas’s jaw. Another scratches his arm. Twenty more spray his clothing but don’t sever it.

  Smit screams. Atlas glares. Twisted inward, Smit groans and cradles his face with his hands. A rounded, clear glass wedge sticks from his cheek, blood trickling down his chin.

  Atlas watches Smit curl his fingers around the wedge, grip, and yank. Blood gushes out. Smit chokes on screams in his gut, vomiting silence from his gaping mouth. He pushes his hands into his thighs; one clutches glass. Atlas watches for seconds too long, his legs jellied, and then turns to the exit.

  “It says—s-says you are the travel—” Smit coughs and moans. “Traveler. Holder of the key. Liberator.”

  Atlas turns back to him.

  “Enemy’s tool but tool still. You.” Clutching his cheek, red streaming through his fingers, Smit smiles a grimace. “Tool—weapon. Weapons can change hands.”

  Atlas bends in his fingers, channels a charge, and then snaps them, his arm straight. Wind slices the air. Smit ducks, hair ungluing from his scalp and riding the gust. The wind breaks on the far wall; two picture frames fly off it. Wincing, Smit clamps five fingers around the crystal glistening his cheek’s red and straightens posture.

  “War of the Titans ends soon—soon and yours lose. Sovereign comes.”

  Smit smacks his boots against the floor as he thrusts his glass shard for Atlas’s stomach. Atlas dodges and swipes a hand up. Smit flies off his feet, into a pool of shattered glass.

  Vision swaying, graying, Atlas gasps and staggers into a nearby table. He holds on to it. The charge in his veins shrivels, shriveling his lungs as it does, throat sore, shoulders hunched; his windpulse flitters complaint to overuse in stale, indoor air too far from Sideran skies, his power too unfledged to compensate.

  He blinks and digs his fingers into wooden grooves. Somewhere beyond vision’s tunnel, Smit stands. Four knuckles of a hot sledgehammer plunge into Atlas’s side and the air remaining in his lungs bursts out. He lurches from Smit. Atlas trips on his toe and tips and slams the linoleum, glass at his back. White flashes behind his closed eyelids. Smit’s steps boom in his ears, glass grinding underneath, and Atlas rolls over, stops his breath, pushes his hands into blades into floor, and lifts himself onto his knees.

  He inhales ice water. His every limb freezes.

  Atlas knows seconds after agony casts its webs, pulsating, cutting toward spine and muscle and breath, that a foreign object parts his flesh. Glass severs his lower right back: glass painted with Smit’s blood, the same from his hand, in his hand. The shadow hanging over Atlas glides backward and, releasing his glass shard, Smit stands up straight.

  Atlas gags. He claws the shards under his hands. Gawks between them.

  Smit’s voice drills at the cement in his ears. Smit laughs. Possibly. Atlas drools where sound stumbles between his crumpling arms and tastes metal that isn’t there.

  “—for your prophet, your lovely.”

  The neon highlights in glass gravel swirl Atlas’s vision. He inhales but stops. By themselves, the shard’s edges cut again.

  “Sovereign comes for sick, dirty, corrupted human cows and sheep of your world.”

  Atlas lifts his chin, his eyes to blue spotlight meters away, and his dilated pupils shrink. He presses his palms into floor, locks his elbows, tucks his toes under his feet. He kneels. The pain screams but—Atlas takes one hand off the floor—recedes under a resurrecting charge. He squeezes a fist of wind. Reaching behind his back, he clasps the glass shard, bites down, and pulls. His hearing registers an outcry, twisted, sputtered, seconds delayed, and it’s his own.

  The glass slips through his bloody hand. It clacks to the floor. Fighting groans, finding breath, Atlas stands on wobbling feet and faces Smit.

  “My,” Atlas exhales, “world.”

  Smit’s eyes gleam.

  Atlas narrows his. “Is upheld.”

  Slicking back his hair, blood slithering into his lips’ corner, Smit bares red teeth. He pulls his flames tall in the flourish of a hand and waves them forward.

  Atlas dives to his left and, grunting, skids into the bar. The flames miss him. They scatter on the wall, lick up wood panel, engulf some decorative flag, and Smit casts another glowing burst at Atlas’s side; but Atlas ducks behind a bar stool; the fire batters its cushion and grazes his hair and singes its ends. Smit closes his hands. He charges.

  Sliding over glass, Atlas thrusts from the bar, into Smit’s alignment, and angles a foot on stop. Smit raises his arm and bends his elbow. He pops his fist forward. Atlas shifts weight, twists and leans, dodges his knuckles’ blow, Smit’s bloodied pinky brushing his cheek. Atlas lifts his palms to Smit’s stretched shoulder drifting in momentum.

  And outpours a gust.

  Wind blasts hair and clothing and glass and crashes into Smit’s shoulder blade, throwing him off his feet, through the air. Whiplash jerks his limbs far from torso’s leading motion. He lands on his flank.

  Atlas upturns his palms and curls his fingers. The wind still surging changes course as it billows outward and upward, rattling floor’s crystal. It then, at the budge of his fingertips, coils toward Atlas and twirls in on itself. It churns in spirals. Wind chases rapid the circle it drives around Atlas’s body and cyclones a tunnel tall as the Helena waterspout, if only ceiling didn’t impede. Adrenaline entwined with ionization serrating veins electrifying blood, Atlas clenches his fingers and the twister lifts floor’s thousand glass fragments up into its turn, sorting the small translucent from the heavy transparent. Multicolored glimmers dart before his eyes.

  Glass swirls before his back, his sides, his face, but doesn’t touch him. It and the wind follow the tic of each arm, each pinky, and adjust accordingly, a clear halo around his skin’s every centimeter. One finger-width from him, a blade tornado whips vision’s distortion.

  Smit stands, cringing. His rodent eyes twitch visible their whites. Atlas steps toward him and the glass cyclone too moves. Atlas meets Smit’s pupils through microseconds’ molecules’ shifting gaps, through glass’s lightshow, and communicates a novel.

  Smit wipes the blood from his chin. Mouth agape, h
e forces a breath.

  Then scuttles to the bar’s exit with speed uncanny. He hits the door’s revolving glass, bell dinging, and Atlas throws his hands forward. Smit slips through the threshold. Atlas’s cyclone curves around his body, flings off his fingers, over the bar, across the dining floor, and five hailstorms merged explode on the closed door and bordering walls. Half the explosion impales; the door’s solid glass converges with irregular shards and cracks into lightning branches. Smit’s back blurs through the webbed but standing door glass and then disappears.

  Atlas drops his hands. The glass settles and silences and air replaces wind. The charge in his skin sinks under, his back buoying pain, gritting his teeth.

  The music behind the bar murmurs. A sweet melody. Atlas stares at the tattered bar stools, smoldering walls, and cluttered linoleum, and a chill rides pain up his spine.

  Stepping over a crunch, he limps out the bar’s door.

  “Atlas!”

  Sun stings his eyes. His frame shudders.

  Samuel and Gene jog across the parking lot. “Get in the car now.” “What happened?” “Saw Kenny book it out the door and I’ve stolen six phones since people started scurrying.” “Are you okay?” “Cops are definitely still coming.”

  They reach him. Atlas slumps into his center and claws his side. Gene stretches her arm around his back and spots the blood down its bottom right.

  “Oh, my—”

  Samuel squints. He walks around Atlas and his mouth parts. He rubs his neck.

  “Car. Now,” Samuel says.

  Gene holds Atlas up on one side and Samuel slides his arm under Atlas’s shoulder on the other. They stumble to the Mustang.

  Atlas chokes on shallow breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “Mmhmm. Just never,” Gene hyperventilates; her voice trembles, “never be that stupid again. Good heaven. Never.”

  “I—I intended, I apologize I cannot retain cleansed apparel.”

  Gene sighs. “Atlas.”

  He grimaces.

  “Don’t use big words right now.”

  Samuel jerks Atlas into the back of his Mustang and tells him to keep pressure on his wound and lie on his stomach. Atlas doesn’t; he forgets. His head spins. His body droops where it lies against leather padding and he yawns three times. Each instance sears. His fluttering eyelids battle his back for attention.

  Gene climbs into the back seat’s other side and, looking toward his gash, a hand on his shoulder, cringes with Atlas’s cringe. Samuel tells Gene she shouldn’t be in the back, that Atlas should lie down, that “Are you people listening?”

  He slams his foot on the gas and they swerve out of the parking lot, down the road, fifteen—twenty miles per hour above the speed limit.

  “Gotta fly off the radar. The FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, and all three-letter acronyms are after us now.” Samuel points at Atlas. “Don’t bleed on the leather.”

  Gene glares.

  Atlas frowns. “I heal quickly, remember?”

  She nods.

  Atlas lulls his tone and slows his breaths. “Remember.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  He eyes her.

  “That—” Gene swirls a finger at Atlas’s face, “you have gouge-ness. Comforting’s my job.”

  Atlas shakes his head toward his window, glimpsing the claw marks that stripe Gene’s chest. He wavers a second headshake a second later but stops short his over-movement with jaws steel-still.

  Gene contorts her face at her window’s top frame. “I shouldn’t have left you.”

  Shifting toward her, Atlas winces and Gene jerks back to him; he blanks his face, softens his jaw, but she doesn’t soften hers. Samuel digs through his console with one hand and then throws a bundle of napkins into the back. Atlas grabs them and, puffing through his grimace, stuffs a fistful behind himself. He leans into his seat.

  Gene bites her lip and trembles. Atlas opens his mouth—

  “Uh-uh. Gouged people don’t talk. That’d be right idiotly.”

  “I am w-well.”

  “Sure.”

  “I will convince you.” He wipes the sweat from his temple. “Ask me a question.”

  Gene’s brows tense.

  “Any question.”

  “Will you stop talking?”

  “Let me make light of this, Gene.”

  She presses her hands into her seat, leather crinkling, and then wrinkles her lip toward her watering eyes and then rounds it as she blows out her breath and relaxes her brow a notch. She bats her eyes drier. She changes tone.

  “Is Sidera beautiful?”

  Atlas forces a smile. He scans the seat’s bulge between them. Swallowing his pulse, he reaches and presses his clammy palm around the back of her hand. Though it stabs, his inhale opens electrons’ duct in his chest that gives warmth that takes thoughts that leave his mouth to instinctive motion. The vehicle purrs and bumps bob. They stare at their hands.

  “Sidera is—is—” Atlas exhales, “is more than beautiful.” He lets stretch till skewed his smile. “It’s perfect. The limitless golden plains are lined with flowers of every imaginable hue, the land never dying, s-sun never setting. If you travel for long enough, leap enough blue-cracked crevices, you will reach the edge of a floating isle. You won’t realize until you duck your head beneath its cliff that you’re cradled by infinite sky only, sky that breathes wisps of cloud you watch coast across the universe in a seamless sweep. You can see all existence . . .”

  XXX

  And How We Find It

  Limbs, clumps, creatures perched in swaying nets cast their shadows across glass glazed with moonlight projections. Two side windows, two windshields: the above branches there project their dance. A warm breeze picks at the Mustang doors but doesn’t breach. Wind only curls off the vehicle’s body and into overhead canopy housing green painted black under sky swaddling naught, no cloud to reflect moonset so silent, no streak of gray to indicate limit or lid. The trees rustle.

  “So why—and I’m asking because I’m still not,” Samuel squints, “sure.” He looks through black, past his steering wheel unmoved for hours. “Why are we not in Pittsburgh demoralizing my babe with our sass?”

  “Because it’s late,” Gene says. “We’re all tired. And Atlas is hurt. I’m not going to say it again.”

  “So,” Samuel purses his lips, “why?”

  “Samuel.”

  “Attie’s hardly hurt. The gash is shallower than it could’ve been and didn’t pierce an organ, lucky duck. Either Smit had weakness in his drunk swing or he strategically slid that glass where it wouldn’t be fatal. Just confirms our guess that Eden needs you.” From the driver’s seat, Samuel jabs a thumb over his shoulder; Atlas glimpses its motion. “You’re still a melon for yanking it out so you’d bleed all over. Why do they always do that in movies?”

  “He needs rest. You need rest.”

  “After letting Attie have his face-off—after all that picking through his wound, getting disgusting on my hands, stitching gnarly up with your annoyingly bitty needle, cleaning what I should never clean again, and then driving my first and last, one and only into a scratchy, dank tree patch, I deserve bloodshed.”

  “Poor you. Atlas just had numbing cream.”

  “Well, if he’d have just taken your burn pills—”

  “He can’t swallow anything.”

  “You could’ve chewed them for the pup.”

  “He can’t swallow anything.”

  “Swallows his spit all the time.” Samuel peeps a noise and twists toward the back, his outline breaking windshield’s moonlit drift, his face merged with his seat’s featureless shadow. “Attie, do you poop?”

  Atlas hugs his gut and presses his wounded back into his bandage into his seat. It aches.

  Gene scoffs. “Samuel, stop.”

  They shut their mouths and wind ripples distant treetops; but the car muffles its roar. Atlas knows only by the creak of leather, the lurch of the seat that Gene shifts toward him.


  She says, “But do you?”

  Atlas glares into the approximate area that holds her nose.

  “It’s been nine hours since we left the bar, Denim, and—yes, I’m believing Kenny—Eden’s probs staking out twenty miles from here, give or take, at Pylon. He wasn’t lying. Though he lives in a Björk music video, Kenny doesn’t lie and I know one when I see one.” Samuel exhales. “We’ve sat enough. ’S been eight days—eight waitin’ days since our Elisium escape and eight days since the ‘eight days’ you yourself said Eden kept chanting. She’s planning that ‘travel’ or something big tomorrow. We need to wreck those plans.”

  “We will depart,” Atlas faces Samuel and strengthens tone, “in the morning.”

  “He spoke! Attie, do you poop? Yes or no.”

  “I merely concern myself with how we might enter the city without her notice. However, stratagem can wait.”

  “I am so,” Samuel rolls back his head and yells, “bored. Let me listen to Nick Cave.”

  Gene leans toward the console. “If we turn the car on, we could be seen. We’re supposed to be hiding.”

  Samuel crosses his arms and Gene reclines. Atlas closes his eyes, his view changing little, and folds his hands on his lap, resting back his head.

  The wind quiets; their slow sighs of breathing replace the whooshes, heighten heartbeats in their ears. Something touches Atlas’s hand and his eyes jerk open. He sees nothing. Warmth, softness cup around his hand and draw it off his lap, toward Gene. She holds it halfway between them.

  Minutes, moments, hours, less later, her hand eases its grip. Atlas twitches a foot, wrinkles his closed eyelids, breathes and breathes awake his imagination of the rising sun, travel into Pittsburgh, and after; and he opens his eyes. He watches Samuel’s profile against windshield’s trickle of light. Samuel too fidgets.

  “Smit was wrong,” Atlas whispers.

  Samuel budges his head. “Kenny’s wrong about a lot. For one, I don’t believe he’s naturally overweight.”

  “No.” Atlas’s forehead crumples. “I intended that Smit expressed, I believe, that your past self will never depart. Allow it time. He will be wrong.”