by Yates, B. D.
He closed his eyes, lowering his head to rest on the end of the club.
“I'm not proud of it, but I was driving drunk. I always end up driving drunk. What if I wrecked my car and that's what landed me here?"
Emmit couldn't reply. His mouth had gone dry, and his tongue felt too fat. He kept shrugging and arching his eyebrows as a default response to everything the Reverend was saying. It was all he had to offer. It was then that he realized he had no idea just what the Reverend had done, his evil deed, a sin that had been bad enough to earn him a spot in his hypothesized Hell.
It must have shown on his face, because the Reverend smirked and nodded reluctantly, his shoulders sagging as if a tremendous invisible weight had just been dropped on them. Emmit felt the impulse to feign confusion, but the Reverend knew he wanted to know. And he did.
"I don't like to talk about what I did, so I'm gonna make it quick. I mean I know what you did, right?"
Emmit shrugged, his old reliable gesture.
"I drink and drive... a lot, alright? Because I'm an alcoholic. I tried AA but all it did was make me think about drinking more. I got into an accident once, driving home with a fresh bottle. It was snowing, and the roads hadn’t been plowed yet. I lost control, and… two little... two kids got killed. Alright?"
Emmit couldn't mask the shock and revulsion on his face, and the Reverend's strained, dark eyes dropped to his shoes. A million other questions bloomed in his mind like poison flowers; had he gone to jail? Had he gotten off? Was he already a Reverend before it happened? Did it make him question his faith? But he didn't dare ask any of them. The Reverend had paid what he owed in full disclosure and honesty, although it had clearly hurt him to do so. Emmit extended his hand and patted the man once, twice on his frosty shoulder. A simple gesture most men seemed to want to use when emotional support for a fellow man just felt too embarrassing.
They stood there on silent watch together for a long time, Emmit freezing despite his new clothes but still thinking he preferred the outside over the cabin. The Reverend swapped his vigilant watch back and forth from the smudged shapes of the dark forest to the heavens above, and seemed to find a sense of peace there. Just as Emmit began to think their conversation was finished, he spoke again.
"There's one other thing too. Something no one else has seen but me since I'm on watch all the time. And maybe Roy, because he gets defensive if I mention it."
Emmit was intrigued, but there was another feeling developing in his chest, a warm but unfamiliar feeling he hadn't expected to ever experience here with these men. He felt trusted, relevant. Like he mattered, if only to one survivor.
"I think I know the way out of here," The Reverend said secretively. "But no one who tries ever comes back."
Chapter 5: Deacon
A few hours before dawn broke over the endless snowy wilderness, the Reverend had told Emmit that it might be wise to head back inside and try to get some sleep before Roy woke up and caught them talking. The heat felt incredible on his skin, but as Emmit tiptoed back to his sleeping spot, he was still certain that no sleep would come to him. Especially not after the last bit of information the Reverend had entrusted to him.
No one ever comes back but that doesn't mean the Links got them. Maybe they don't come back because they got out. They got back to their own reality, or back through the time rip, or whatever the hell this is.
He folded his shivering hands behind his head and stared at the fog on his lenses, not bothering to wipe it away. Not being able to see anything but the opaque smudges helped him concentrate, almost if they somehow shielded him from the mess he had gotten himself into. For the first time in his life, he thought, he'd be sad to see them go.
The Reverend had told him that sometimes, just sometimes, a brilliant white light would appear far out into the woods, stabbing through the frigid darkness like a lighthouse beacon. They had hoped to see it earlier that night, but as was usual for Emmit Mills— no luck. The Reverend had said to him in hushed tones, "It kind of... throbs. Pulsates. It reminds me of a door when you try to prop it open on a windy day, always trying to close." He had been staring longingly into the black trees, looking like a lonely man at an airport waiting for his love to return home to him. "That means you could try for it just to have it slam shut before you make it, I can't lie about that. But it's beautiful, New Guy. It looks like a star fell from Heaven and made a bed out there in the dark."
Emmit tried to picture a star, a giant ball of fire and blinding light, nestling between all those dead trees and roaming dead people. He pictured himself running toward it, feeling the heat baking his flesh as he hurtled himself toward the cryptic glow. The walking dead would be there, of course; probably drawn to the light, staggering and stumbling over each other with their stupid grins and stiff, grinding tendons. Reaching out to grab at it with their poisonous hands. Reaching for him as well, but he would be inside it, basking in the cleansing light, rocketing through space and time like a god of lightning. Maybe he would wake up on the other side of that light, sweating and panting in bed, trying to clear the sleep fog from his mind as he recovered from the worst and most vivid nightmare he had ever had. Christ wouldn't that be amazing; for all of this to be nothing more than a bad dream brought on by too much cheap liquor.
Sleep caught him off guard as it always seemed to, and before he even realized he was drowsing, he had joined the chorus of snores. The real dream came soon after, slamming into his brain like a towering, malignant tidal wave that carried shipwrecks loaded with bad memories and unquiet spirits.
Emmit dreamed that he was sitting in a massive arena somewhere, a giant bowl lined with thousands of seats and vibrant with multicolored light beams that spun and rocked back and forth. There was heavy metal music thundering over the gargantuan speaker system, almost loud enough to make him want to cover his ears. He could feel the bass drum like a second heartbeat in his chest. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and black powder.
Am I at a concert?
No. In the center of the arena was a wrestling ring, the mat clean and white and the ropes coated with blood red plastic. As he stared, jets of bright blue and yellow flame erupted from each of the posts in the corners of the ring. The flames and lights were synced to the pounding music, and gooseflesh prickled his thin arms.
Wrestling. I remember now, I love wrestling. I used to go to these all the time.
"When is..." came the ghostly voice of a child, echoing and fading out as if it had come from the bottom of a deep cavern in the floor beside him. He looked down to see where the voice had come from, his head moving slowly, sluggish with dream speed. The seat beside him was empty except for an action figure of one of the wrestlers, tossed carelessly onto the cushion with its muscular plastic arms upright as if demanding to be held.
Emmit tried to reach out and touch it, and his fingers passed through it as if he were a ghost.
"When is..." the voice came again, and now there was a shirt slung over the arm of the chair, a small shirt, terribly expensive and yet cast aside indifferently in an untidy heap. Distractedly, he thought to himself "Better not forget those, too expensive to forget those..."
Now the crowd began to stir, their collective voices steadily building to a dull rumble. Hadn't he been alone in here just a few moments before? Every seat had been empty— but Christ in heaven they weren't empty now, not by a long shot.
Emmit stood up on legs he couldn't feel, twisting his upper body to look all around him. Fear wormed its way into his stomach like a huge, frozen snake, wrapping its shimmering scaled body around his guts and constricting.
The stadium was filled to the rafters with decomposing corpses. They were slumped this way and that, falling over onto each other, some with their slack arms draped over the backs of the seats as if they were relaxing and enjoying the show, despite the fact that they happened to be dead. The bodies far off in the distance looked like crumpled piles of old, mildewed papers. As the pyrotechnics flashed and hisse
d up from the ring, their purplish faces flickered with the dull orange glow. Even from this distance—
Cheap seats, could only afford cheap seats...
—he could see their vacant eyes, dried and beginning to deflate but still reflecting the firelight like ancient lightbulbs. There was a corpse beside him, half sitting and half falling out of its fluid-sodden seat. Its head had fallen over to stare at him blankly, the surfaces of its eyes scratched and hazy. It was like it was watching to see what he would do next, its thin hair fluttering softly in the flow of the air conditioning.
"When is it going to..." came the child's voice again. It was closer this time, more solid somehow. Like the speaker was moving closer to the top of the invisible cavern.
Who are you?
The corpse in the chair beside him began to twitch, the muscles in its face pulling and jerking as if attached to thin wires. Then the corpse parted its lips in a sleepy smile, and a monstrous, maroon-colored millipede, bristling with wriggling legs, writhed out from between its teeth and skittered up its face. The corpse did not blink as the millipede crossed one open eye and decided that the gelatinous surface was the perfect spot to stop for a rest, crossing the eye socket like a line of living stitches. Emmit tried to scream but his throat didn't work, even as he felt the muscles and tendons tightening until he thought they might break.
"When is it going to start..."
Closer now, right up against his head with a sensation like lips softly brushing his earlobe. Someone leaning in to speak. To be heard over the cacophony of music and crowd and pyro.
Beside him, the corpse stared and grinned on as the millipede began to wiggle its sharp appendages and climb up to roost on the top of its matted, sun faded hair. A thick rope of dark liquid glimmered in the corner of its mouth, welling up like a black tear before spilling out and stretching, down and down, swinging from its chin.
Wake up I want to wake up I want to wake up NOW—
Now there was a shape in the seat beside him, a shape he couldn't focus on. Each time he tried, there was nothing there; but if he turned his head just slightly, he could see the translucent figure of a small human body beside him. The action figure began to float and dance in the air as if hoisted by a poltergeist.
The corpses in the crowd began to stir, arching their spines and struggling to stand on weak legs as their bones and tendons popped and cracked like microwave popcorn. The corpse beside Emmit tried to stand along with them, taking its insectile passenger along for a wild ride. Its stomach lunged out awkwardly with a muted crunch of spine and it struggled to its feet, arms hanging slack in their sockets and mummified head rolling back far enough to split the leathery flesh of its neck. More of the black ichor bubbled out of the fresh wounds with each strangled sound the corpse forced out. The millipede hung on to the dead man's hair by only a few legs, its shelled body curled into a U shape lined with squirming legs.
Why are they standing oh Jesus why are they standing—
Then the humanoid shape beside him spoke, and Emmit's world disintegrated; his new reality that felt more like swimming against rapids than merely existing. A strange place in time where being awake felt like struggling against violent surges of water and curds of foam, against the iron grip of icy currents that dragged him dangerously close to sharp rocks and whirlpools with no way to stop or slow down. That world became nothing more than an uncomfortable mind-itch when he heard the words the ghostly child spoke, and his memory erupted against the dome of his skull like a depth charge.
"When is it going to start, Dad?"
The corpses, thousands of them, stood drunkenly around the haunted arena. They all began to slowly clap, splintering hand and finger bones and casting a collective cloud of skin-dust into the lights. Applauding the agony of Emmit's realization that he had left his child behind.
He jerked awake, not realizing that he'd already been screaming for nearly ten minutes.
"My son!" He shouted to the uncaring ceiling, the dusty wooden planks ebbing and flowing with orange firelight and purple shadow. His voice was hoarse and ululating. "I have a son!"
The other men had all bolted upright when the screaming fit started. Muddy wackily clutched a wooden club and hoisted it above his head with his good arm, his bald head whip lashing back and forth. Pup was screaming too, his words drowned out by Emmit's own pained cries. It sounded like "shut the fuck up", but Emmit was in too deep a state of panic to know or care. Poke was staring at him, and the bastard was smiling. One corner of his weaselly mouth was upturned, his badly tattooed flesh wrinkling with sadistic joy. Roy thumped over to him calmly, as if he had been expecting this to happen all along and had been ready for it.
Emmit felt like he was having a seizure. His mind was like a crowded subway car, the memories like impatient passengers who were all late for something and pushing and shoving each other, willing to kill for a precious few feet of space.
He saw flashes of a hospital and remembered horrible grinding hunger pains in his stomach, paired with a hot ache in his lower back from the uncomfortable chair he had sat in. Some mindless gameshow had been playing soundlessly from the mounted TV, and his wife—
—they wouldn't let her eat, she couldn't eat so I didn't, for eight hours we couldn't eat—
—was laying in the hospital bed with a giant absorbent pad under her to soak up the water that slowly leaked from her, her green eyes flashing and filling with tears with each crippling contraction. A monitor beside her was side scrolling with peaks and valleys, measuring each contraction as they tore through her rounded abdomen.
—Kelly, her name is Kelly and she's the mother of my child, Kelly is her name she's the mother of my child—
Next came a brief flash of himself standing by her side, resting his hand clumsily on her shoulder as she pushed and the doctors pulled, bringing a tiny, bloody boy into the cold brightness. His son. His cries had been sharp and tinny, and his first act as a resident of earth had been to send a golden arch of urine onto one of the masked ladies helping to receive him.
—cut his cord I cut his cord I cut his cord—
He moaned as he relived the first time he had held his son's hand, his tiny digits wrinkled as if he had been born an old man. He could feel the surprising strength of the baby's hand wrapped around his fingertip. Subconsciously, Emmit had begun to squeeze his own fingertip as he thrashed and bawled. Roy was placing his giant bear paw hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently.
"Deacon!" He cried, as his son's name surfaced amid the turbulent maelstrom. "Deacon, I'm sorry!"
His words were reduced to unintelligible noises and guttural sobs, his chest hitching as he gasped for breath and then exhaled it again with fresh tears. His glasses were fogging over again, and his cheeks were hot and damp.
"No more," he half said and half moaned. "Please God, no more..."
But God had been too busy or too apathetic to spare him. There was more.
Now he saw himself standing nose to nose with Kelly in his cramped little apartment kitchen, after their separation. Her green tiger eyes were sparkling with hate for the man she had once loved enough to marry and carry his child. They were arguing, screaming, soaking each other with spittle and gesturing wildly with their arms and hands. Deacon—
—Deek, you call him Deek, his nickname is Deek, it's only DEACON when he's in trouble—
—Deek had been screaming as well, crying so hard he was about to vomit up his dinner of pizza and Hershey's kisses. His little hands were working furiously, ripping open an aged Paw Patrol backpack and yanking the clothes out of it. Kelly had wanted him to leave, and he hadn't wanted to, because he loved his dad, and Emmit loved being his dad—
WHAP!
Emmit's head was knocked to the side and rocked back on his neck, and his left cheek suddenly felt tingly and scorched. The sound had been unmistakable; Roy had slapped the living shit out of him.
"Snap out of it," he grumbled, and to his surprise, Emmit did. The new knowledge
was still there, nagging at him like a flea under his clothes, but it was no longer a runaway train roaring behind his eyes. Now it was just an uncomfortable out of control feeling; the feeling you got when the first of the month came and went and you realized you forgot to pay the rent, or the shame of those anxiety dreams where you show up to class and realize you were butt naked. It was the complete and unadulterated torture of helplessness and separation— his boy would be wondering where his daddy was and why he hadn't seen him, and he hadn’t been able to say goodbye.
I have to get back to him.
"Thanks," he forced himself to say, fighting the urge to put his hand on his cheek. It would almost certainly bruise. "I just remembered... my son, Deacon. My ex was going to take him from me, she... she didn't care for the neighborhood I lived in, and I was always broke, and... we’re still married, we just…" his eyes were getting wet again, and his lip began to quiver. He wanted nothing more than to be out of that wooden fucking box.
"Told you it wasn't always pleasant," Roy said flatly, then shoved Emmit back down onto his makeshift bed with a fair amount of force. "Sleep. And let the other guys sleep too. I'm sorry about your boy, but there's no helping that now. The Links coming around here, that's something you can help. But I won't have anyone too exhausted to fight."
Emmit could feel the other guys staring at him, making him feel like a child again, a child being scolded for throwing a tantrum in the middle of Toys 'R' Us because he didn't get the expensive toy he wanted. He didn't think he was being all that unreasonable.
Emmit dropped his eyes away from Roy's wide stare, hating how weak he felt. But what could be done? He was powerless here.
"You're right," he said, fighting the tears and trying to keep his voice steady. The lump in his throat bobbed up and down. "I'll take it out on the Links," he said, trying to sound braver than he felt. He was rewarded with a small puff of laughter.