2023

Grand Central Station, the buildings have grown around it since then, it was just a moment of sunlight that never came back after that.

Later on, he would be obsessed by the image and the sound of a phone ringing. It was one of those cartoon phones, red and glowing under a crude light, but the puzzling part about it was that it shook on its spot first before the ringing sound would be heard. He remembered Eugenie White mimicking a phone with her hand, bringing it to her mouth and ear, “someone’s calling you” she could joke, and the reason for such a joke was mysterious to Barry. Sometimes, she just did things to catch his attention, and then would detach entirely from his reaction. The way she laughed at her own pleasantry even prior to even speaking it out loud was something unapologetic that he cherished very much.

Presently, he scooped her with exaggerated ease ten centimeters before she collided headfirst against the cold and hard marble floor of the station’s main hall, and spilled herself into a flat puree of organs and scattered bones, falling from such a height as the crystal clock tower. He deposited her on that very floor as if she was a pile of champagne glasses and then he burst his own speed bubble with haste. The phone started ringing but he couldn’t notice it yet, he was focused on two things. The first one was the light, it was darker than usual, and he felt the hairs raise on his arms until the wave reached his shoulders, but he was too focused on the second thing, which was Eugenie White’s dazed face and which he found very entertaining.

She thought she was falling to her death and now, she was sitting comfortably at the top of the grand stairs. What should have been crushing under her was soft and welcoming. She blinked wildly but seemed to process everything quite rapidly for once, because her initial surprise quickly rose to some kind of horror. The phone was ringing and it was dark in this place and Barry couldn’t really comprehend it, because usually the sound appeared with an image, and Eugenie looked up at him with eyes as large as saucers. “Barry wait” he heard her through the ringing of the phone. Was it a real phone? He thought about this scene in the Matrix series where people were constantly running around and jumping on top of buildings, following the ringing of a phone. Eugenie had told him she had watched the first movie of the trilogy at the cinema; things like that allowed him to take the measure of her age.

He couldn’t hold a thought still inside his brain, it was the light, it was the strident ringing, it was Eugenie’s face and the hairs on his arms, something organic was calling for his attention but he kept ignoring it because if there was one thing Barry was always savoring, it was the moment after you save someone’s life when they are at a loss for words of relief and thankfulness. Finally, he started to smile brightly down at her, extended a hand to help her, pretty cool, right? She shook her head imperceptibly, raised her eyebrows to her hairline, “Barry no” Suddenly the immense passageway hall of the train station was bathed in light again as it was supposed to be on a sunny autumn day and Barry realized that the darkness had been caused by something of ample size sitting on the glass roof. It had moved. It was moving. It was ringing.

The light in that place, Grand Central Station, was something he had heard about, or read about, Barry couldn’t remember. The structure was built at an angle to reception the sun through the highly raised windows and their myriad of facets, so as to filter the rays from Earth’s stars into little strings people could touch with their hands, on the ground some twenty meters below. But that was before the city erected some giant skyscrapers around it, blocking the sun from the sides, and only allowing it to shine from directly above. Zenith, it was called. On a hill, on a mountain, he thought, one would see it better, admire the zenith, so why go to an urban place such as this big hub?

What was ringing? Phone, he heard inside his head. His ears. He understood that his body was screaming for him to get the fuck out of this place, his gut feeling had been shrieking and punching alarm bells for a while now but his brain had been on complete oblivious mode. There was no phone, there was none of that, no cover. There hadn’t been an update on the map of the enemy that had been able to reach his wristband device because of the velocity with which he had been operating. He froze midway through his descent towards Eugenie’s level and felt his heart shatter come to a stop. A nanosecond later, the droid ship that was now hovering above them dropped a dozen shots that formed a perfect straight line from the back of the stair promontory to the threshold of the first steps. Barry thought that the whole thing either was very quiet or very loud.

A fog of destroyed pieces of floor began to float one meter above the ground in perfect harmony, the ripped marble morsels glistening under the light, then the final bullet of the series hit him in the chest and projected him backwards, sending Barry flying madly down the stairs and rolling like a bag of turnips. He heard a faint NO from upstairs, Eugenie had seen it coming more than he had, he thought, as he ended his dive ramming against a pile of chairs that had been assembled there. A trash bin container fell on him from the commotion and lost its lid, hitting him hard on the forehead. Barry landed on his back without any air left inside his lungs and his eyes got hooked on the sight of the glass ceiling of the train station above him, the beautiful lenticular clouds of the season, shaped by the wind. Zenith was shining against them, dropping their shadow heavy down below, cropped hastily. He felt a warmth expand on his back and stick his sweater and tee shirt against his skin in something adhesive and slimy and boiling.

In a moment of absolute insanity and ravaging denial, Barry tried to wipe the bullet off his chest, to rub it away as if if was an burning insect that had just landed on him and he could get rid of it, he tried frantically, as if it was embers from a fire that he could extinguish on his shirt with some determined hand motions. His arms gave up after a crazy number of attempts like he had dipped them into concrete and the concrete had dried. He lied there motionless and progressively losing his shit, feeling the hard ground under him.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“FUCK” he whimpered, he thought, I can’t believe this happened to me, AGAIN, I can’t believe this happened to me again, oh, for fuck’s sake, for fuck’s sakes, it cannot be true. The familiarity of everything overpowered him, the bite, the sudden gnawing, the weight of his limbs. The feeling his life force was now pouring out of him, departing from him, uninterested in staying inside him, the unbalance of plumpness between the top part of his body and the bottom part, the sponginess of his skin, letting out a wave of cold perspiration from his toes to the top of his skull. The angry pressure at the point of entry of the bullet which felt like he was going to be sucked in through that small dot, pulsating through his right shoulder, his right arm, his fingers on his right hand, the base of his neck.

He forced himself to stop dwelling on his disappointment and stop thinking altogether and act, so his eyes browsed upwards for the alien ship’s blurry shadow before a new cacophony of detonations resonated behind him. Those assholes were blind, literally shooting everywhere and in quite a unorganized manner, he saw, so he popped himself up on his butt to bounce but the pain sharpened into a blast on the right side of his chest, and he choked on the water in his mouth, collapsed entirely on the floor in a starfish position. He pushed on his stomach again to rise the upper part of his body but that was impossible, “motherfu—” he gasped, closed his eyes, expelled some hot breath from his cheeks.

He wasn’t exploding like last time —oh m’god, last time, he thought bitterly, you and your parading of ‘I will never get shot again’— he was imploding and shriveling down, the right part of his rib cage was caving in, dropping inward. Some strings of ice and fire were being grated through him and pulling him hard, back to the ground. Things were very wet and slimy and freakishly warm on the floor in which he was wriggling helplessly, and he knew that he was marinating in a puddle of his own blood.

“Motherf—” the oxygen was warm to breathe too, burning and in insufficient quantity. In the corner of his eye, he intercepted the sight of the trash bin lid, which had ended its journey next to Barry and presented the possibility of a reasonably-sized shelter. Holding his breath through the anguish, he launched his hand to seize it by the small and skinny knob on its outside corona, brushed against it. Stretched once more in a second attempt before they opened new fire on him. One of the shots was a hot needle of air that went through his right forearm as he was flinging it to reach the trash bin lid. The pain was so intense inside his chest that he didn’t actually feel anything but the sight of the blood thrown upwards like a magenta color sprout made him lose his shit. Were they really that blind or was he really unlucky? Barry was fighting against a lot of things, including an astronomical disbelief.

“MOTHERFUCKER” he shouted and folded on himself, rolled on his stomach and pushed as strongly as he could on his left elbow, looked down. There was simply blood everywhere. “Ffffuu—” he was interrupted again by a new row of hostilities and, this time, very well aware of his sitting duck position, Barry shut his eyes and suspended himself through the fracas. Those seconds would see the ceasing of the telephone alarm and the crash of a great silence all around him. They evolved on a plane that didn’t even bolt, which was chewed by a strange slow motion, oily and voracious, born from the inside while eating him from the inside at the same time. He wished to appeal to a happy memory, or a conclusion to his existence on earth at the moment of leaving it, but the silence of those seconds was also accompanied by a dry emptiness. He felt like a shell whose hermit crab has migrated out.

He thought he might actually be dead already, What am I supposed to do? He asked absurdly. In the mighty absence of sounds he glanced in front of him, saw the pattern of the salvos undulate away from him in a circular motion, you are NOT dead Masquevert come on MOVE, the volume of his usual inside voice was deafening in such a quiet world, do something, GET UP! Hardly differentiating the up from the down, Barry bit his lips and followed some vague instinctual impulse that had not been sucked out by the ambient death vibe, felt his knees bend to prepare a jump forward, lifted himself on both his arms, gained a couple centimeters. The timid restoration of hope was almost more unbearable than the raging steel fire of the bullets but Barry chose to open his heart to it. He had courage.

What he had anticipated would be a leap forward moved rather like the soft crawl of a little snail. Barry winced and swallowed a protest, throwing himself into the motion one more time. The sparkling floor of the grand train station, a masterpiece of rococo, had been turned into Swiss cheese all around him and the debris was dancing up and down in the light like a wall of glitter, so beautiful, he thought, especially in the absolute silence that was hammering everything. He took a deep breath and pulled himself forward another time. It was pretty challenging to pick up speed when the upper right side of his body couldn’t carry him.

He was doing his best keeping pessimism at bay when one isolated projectile hit him in the back just under his right shoulder blade and the shock flattened him like a pancake. Desperation sank him. All sounds returned and engulfed him like a whirlpool. He heard the saddened grunt coming from his lips and found it so pathetic that his heart broke between his ribs. Some of those ribs must have been smashed at the passage of the little pieces of metal because the pain became sizzling and removed all the air out of his lungs. He felt the last drop of oxygen melt out from his lips. There was a feeling that he had been chopped into two vertical halves.

The disharmony and loudness and the incendiaries inflicted to the ends of the spaghetti strings of his nervous system crushed him for good now and he fused with the floor below, closed his eyes and let his head land gently against the cold cold polished mineral. That extreme change in temperature made him aware of how warm everything was and that he was covered entirely with sweat, and some very hot tears gathered at the corners of his eyes, scorching his sinuses. He buried his face in his sleeves and waited for his head to get blown up.