Neither the police nor the paramedics had arrived after nearly 20 minutes, and to Bel, it felt like an eternity. He’d churned through his emotions to figure out where his head was, at least enough to try to help everyone else in the bar, even though there wasn’t much he could do. Monica, the bartender, sat quietly on one of the bar stools, looking the opposite direction of the dead man 15 feet away from them. Bel didn’t know why they were sitting so close to him, but he knew that no one processed shit like this in the same way. He looked towards Sera, who was inconsolable. She hadn’t said a word to him, but Bel was OK with that. He wasn’t sure what he could say to her in this situation. It was beyond fucked.
Eventually he tired of waiting, and walked to the bodega he’d passed when chasing the man. Bel wasn’t sure how much shit he’d be in if the cops thought that he’d fled the scene or something, but he was too exhausted to care. The man behind the counter was eyeing the vomit on Bel’s shirt and asked if something happened. Bel waved him off, though. He didn’t want to explain that there’d been two people murdered 50 yards away. He just bought a pack of menthols and a lighter from the guy and walked back out. This was the first pack in almost two years. It had been one of the early things he’d done to change for Monica—quitting smoking—back when their relationship was still new. Looking back, it might have been the only thing he’d truly changed.
He pulled himself out of the funk—he didn’t want to think about Monica or anything else right now. Right now, he just wanted a cigarette. He tore the plastic off the Camels and yanked the paper wrapper off inside. It took several tries to get the lighter to strike in the wind, but it finally did, and Bel took a drag.
He sighed. A long, long sigh.
He felt like there was some emotion that he was missing. That he should cry, or be upset, or manic, or something, but he just felt empty. So damned empty.
Walking back, he saw that Sera had moved outside and was on the patio with a plastic cup of water. He walked around the side and slid in a gap between the fence and the bar wall, and walked over to her. She didn’t look at him, and he said nothing. He just flipped open the top of the cigarette box and held it up to her.
She took one, and Bel handed her the lighter. He watched her hands tremble as she tried to light it. He almost took the lighter back to do it for her, but the lighter struck and she got it herself.
Bel took a long pause and then clenched his eyes before breaking the silence. “I’m not gonna talk if you don’t want to talk, but you know I got you, right? You can talk to me, if you want.”
Her reply didn’t come immediately. Instead, slowly, she took two more long drags off the cigarette and then tapped the ash.
When she did finally speak, her voice was weak and breaking. “You ran after him. I thought you were dead. I thought he was gonna kill you.”
Bel felt his stomach churn. “Oh, Christ, Sera. I’m sorry.” He looked at her with pleading eyes, but she didn’t turn her head. Her gaze fixed on the last light of the setting sun.
Bel almost started talking again, but the sirens coming down the block cut him off.
Sera took a drag and slowly exhaled. “Thanks for the cigarette. It almost feels like it used to. You know, after work, lighting one up to kill the stress.” Another pull. “It doesn’t feel good, though. I don’t feel good.” She tapped the ash off. “I’m gonna go sit down.”
She never met Bel’s eyes. She just turned away and sat down on the patio and watched as three police cars and an ambulance pulled alongside the sidewalk.
Time moved quickly after that. The police worked through the scene like robots, taping off the bar, saying code words on their walkie-talkies, and questioning everyone. Bel overheard one officer bitching about having been up for almost 48 hours because of all the earthquakes. It didn’t escape Bel that all the cops seemed on edge.
He watched as the paramedics wheeled the bodies out after evidence was collected, and the scene photographed. It made him sick. There were covers over the bodies, but he still felt like he could see them. A thin cloth wasn’t enough to separate the reality he had witnessed and the action they performed. There were two more dead people now than there had been an hour ago. Two dead, innocent people. A voice in his head reminded him that people die every day, many of them innocent.
The cops turned Sera loose pretty quickly, as she hadn’t gotten a good look at the killer, and had seen nothing happen. Bel watched as she walked away to her car. Her face was stained red with her burgundy eyeliner. She hadn’t said another word to him. He realized he felt more sadness about letting her down that he did about the dead people in the bar, and that only made him feel worse.
Bel was on his second round of questions, though they were nearly identical to the first, only asked by a different person with more self-importance.
Detective Robber, as his uniform said, flipped open his scratch pad and tapped his pen on the page. Bel wondered if he practiced looking stereotypical in the mirror.
“Michael Belmont Graham, is it?” Detective Robber started.
“Yeah. Is your last name really Robber?”
“Rudolph Robber, but my friends call me Rudy.” The detective’s tone was friendly, but practiced. It wasn’t the first time he’d answered that question. “Mr. Graham, where were you when the attack happened?”
Bel didn’t like that. “I was right here, on the patio, when the murder happened.”
Rudy didn’t flinch. “Can you tell me what you saw?”
Bel sighed. “I passed the man in the bar. He looked like he was in his late forties, a little shorter than me—maybe five-foot-ten, and probably between two-hundred-thirty and two-hundred-forty pounds. He was stocky, and not fit, and he was wearing a black T-shirt with a gray Punisher logo, as well as a black ball cap with a black and white American flag with the blue line through it. The next time I saw him, he ran out of the bar, down the street here, around the corner, across the next street over, and into an alleyway. I tackled him, but he got away from me and ran off before I could follow.”
The detective scratched notes on his pad. “Uh-huh. Did you see what color his hair was? Did he have any distinct facial features like a beard, or any tattoos?”
“No, no beard, but he had short hair, like it was a buzz cut under the cap. Nothing funny about his face, and I didn’t see any tattoos, either.”
Detective Robber started a new line in their notes. “Would you say his skin tone was dark? Black or Hispanic?”
Bel cocked his head to the side. “Uh, no. He was a white guy.”
The Detective seemed unfazed. “Uh-huh. Could he have perhaps been a light-skinned black man? Or maybe mixed?”
Bel exhaled sharply. “I’m sorry, what?”
Robber repeated himself in the same tone, “Could he have perhaps been a—”
Bel cut him off. “No, I heard you. I just didn’t think you actually asked me that. No, man, he was a white dude. He had white skin. I got a real good look at him.”
“You’re positive about that? We don’t want to chase down any false leads.”
Bel was getting pissed. “He was white, man. Whistling REO Speedwagon and everything. Clear as day.”
The detective looked up for the first time from his notebook. “I don’t appreciate your tone, Mr. Graham.”
“Oh, that makes two of us.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
Bel scoffed.
The detective melted right back into his monotone line of questioning. “Is there anything else that could help us identify the man?”
Bel shook his head. “No. He was just your run-of-the-mill white homophobic weekend warrior.”
Bel saw the detective grind his pen into the thin notepad paper. “Mr. Graham, we have not determined this as a hate crime.”
Bel jerked his head up towards the sky. It was everything he could do to not snatch the pen out of the cop's hand and shove it into his eyeball. He took a deep breath and held it, finally releasing after a moment of thought. “Am I being detained?”
There was a momentary pause, then, “No, you are not being detained.”
Bel shook his head. “Cool. I’m gonna cash in some white privilege, then, and tell a cop to get fucked while I walk away.” He turned around and started walking.
“Mr. Graham…”
Bel didn’t look back. He just raised two fingers over his shoulder and muttered, “Get fucked, Rudy.”
Once Bel was a block away, he instinctively pulled his earbuds out of his pocket and popped them in, and then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. He took a deep breath and tried to get the cop out of his head. Looking at his phone, he had no idea what music to play. Scrolling through his recent tracks, he thought about playing one of his favorite albums or playlists, but he didn’t want to have something potentially tainted forever with the memory of the night. He flipped mindlessly through the suggested songs, but there wasn’t anything for this moment. So, he just slid the phone back in his pocket and let the earbuds do their noise canceling thing. He’d rather listen to the void than even traffic at the moment.
When Bel had left his apartment, he’d only intended to go for a half an hour, tops, and he hadn’t brought a jacket. He regretted it on the walk home. A chill wind blew in from across the Columbia River and threatened to turn his skin to ice. As he was walking past the Plaid Pantry again, he wondered if the same clerk was inside. Bel could use some mindless trivia to get his head out of the mud it wallowed in. He reached back into his back pocket, but there was nothing there. He’d forgotten the zine at the bar. Then he remembered he’d forgotten the card that he’d left to open a tab as well.
“Goddamnit.” Bel didn’t think he’d be able to go back to The Glass Slipper for a long while. He was going to have to get a replacement card. Then he thought about how fucked up it was to worry about a replacement debit card after seeing two people get killed.
“Fuck!”
Bel shouted it. He didn’t care anymore. He didn’t care if someone saw him—heard him raving like a mad man—he just needed to scream something, even if it was only against the wind.
“Fuck you!”
He saw the man’s face in his memory and felt a growl in his throat. Tears welled up in his eyes, and the wind chilled them on his cheek. This was it. This was Bel’s emotional outlet. Anger. It had always been this way. In school, in kitchens, in relationships. He was the angry kid. He’d learned to temper it, and he never lashed out physically, but irrational, unapologetic anger was his coping mechanism.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Bel thought about the killer. He thought about what he would do if he saw him again. If he were just walking down the street and saw the man heading towards him. He repeated it, over and over again in his head, until the short film that he’d constructed was nothing more than him beating his fists into a pulp of human remains. Bel wanted to be animalistic. He wanted to feel the aggression. He wanted to feed the man his own intestines like some kind of fucking macabre Ouroboros. Would he be able to do it? If he saw the man, could he take those steps that pushed him beyond all reasonable sanity?
Bel stopped again in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up towards the stars. The night was just as clear as the day had been, and he could see the myriad of twinkling lights above himself. Momentarily, as his eyes slowly adjusted, he could make out the faintest gradient in the stars that marked the body of the Milky Way galaxy.
There is so much out there, and so little down here, he thought to himself.
He felt a little more at ease as he reflected on the sky above him, and he started walking again.
By the time he climbed up the stairs to his apartment, the fall chill had truly set in, and he was shivering. He turned his key in the lock and pushed the door open into a dark apartment. The only light was a small one inside of Mephisto’s vivarium. Bel reached over and flicked the light switch.
Everything was exactly as he left it, not that he had expected any change. Maybe there was a small hope in him that Monica would have come back. She’d be sitting there on the couch, eating a bowl of cereal like she used to when she’d binge some trashy streaming show. She wasn’t there, though. As much as Bel wanted her to be there, to hug him—to comfort him—she wasn’t there.
Being in the closed environment of his apartment, he became acutely aware of the dried vomit on his shirt as the scent gathered in his nose. Bel didn’t wait until he got to his room. He took it off right then.
“I need a shower.”
He walked to the bathroom and dropped the rest of his clothes on the floor before cranking the hot water knob all the way around. It needed to be steaming—boiling—anything to cauterize the day and seal the wounds on his ego. He stepped in, and just stood there for a few minutes, thinking about nothing but the hot vapors roiling around him. It stung at first, but he didn’t move. He just let time fall off of him like the water.
After his shower, he took the dirty clothes into his bedroom and tossed them in the hamper. He grabbed some boxers and a pair of pants from the clean clothes pile, and went to pick up a shirt, but he remembered the whole Blockbuster debacle. He put the boxers and pants on and then started his search.
Bel looked through the closet, rummaging through the shirts that were hung from the hangers, but it wasn’t there.
“Come on, now.” In the back of his mind, Bel imagined himself having lost his marbles and only hallucinated going to the store. Then he remembered Monica would fold his T-shirts and put them in the small drawers under his bed when there wasn’t room in the closet. Bel thought about it—about her folding his clothes and putting them away for him—and he sighed.
He pushed the shirts aside in the drawer, looking for the telltale blue, and he saw it. He yanked it out and held it up, reading the text as it unfolded.
Friday
Nights
At
The
Last
Blockbuster
And then, at the bottom, in a cursive font: Anchorage, AK.
Bel dropped the shirt and felt his chest tighten.
“What the fuck?”
He had bought the shirt, there was no question about it. It was right there on the floor. But, he wouldn’t have bought a shirt for a Blockbuster in Alaska, though. He kicked at it with his feet to flatten it out. The words hadn’t changed.
Bel took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. “You know what? Fuck it. I’m gonna own this shit.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Is this what you want from me today? You think this fucking shirt bullshit is gonna break me? Fuck you.”
Bel bent down and grabbed the shirt. He looked at the text one more time before sliding it over his head.
He grumbled as he walked back to the living room. “Goddamned bullshit shirt.”
He walked over to Mephisto’s cage. Slowly, he slid the top back and calmed himself before he reached into the tank.
“Hey bud, you want to go for a walk?”
Mephisto was already halfway up the side of the glass before Bel could pick him up. The snake slithered up Bel’s arm, and he watched the silver and white scales as they stretched and compressed against his skin. Meph wandered up and around Bel’s neck, resting across his shoulders. Bel smiled, but there was a tinge of sadness.
“We gotta talk, Meph. I’ve had a rough day.”
Bel walked over to the fridge and grabbed a beer from the bottom shelf. He didn’t like to drink alone—he knew where that road ended—but he needed something, and another cigarette wasn’t the answer. He cracked it, and between sips, recounted the entire day to Mephisto, from the breakup, to the murders, to the shirt. It helped to say it all aloud, but when he did, he thought about just how insane the whole day had been.
“You don’t think I’m crazy, right, Meph?”
The snake flitted its tongue.
“We gotta work on your vocab, bud.”
Bel sat on the couch and pulled out his phone. It struck him that he hadn’t gotten any emergency alerts for any of the earthquakes.
“Fuck me, not another weird thing.”
He thought about it, but then it dawned on him. He set Meph on the coffee table, and the snake immediately went towards the beer can. Bel pulled him away from it, but then looked back at his phone. He went to the settings and through a menu to get to ‘Wireless Emergency Alerts’, and there it was. In a moment of frustration, he’d turned the alerts off probably more than a year ago because he kept getting alarms for emergencies in fucking Tacoma. He decided to flip the switch back, just to be safe.
“There. Not everything has to be some intense mental endurance trial today.”
He looked back at the table just in time to see Meph topple the beer can. Bel snatched him up and righted the can.
“Dude. You’re as bad as a cat sometimes.” Bel stood. “Come on, back in your house.” He walked across the room and returned Mephisto to the vivarium before going to the kitchen to grab some paper towels. On the table by the beer can, his phone buzzed, and then buzzed again, before producing an ear piercing alarm.
Bel dropped the roll of towels back on the counter and ran to the phone. He picked it up and read the alert.
EMERGENCY ALERT
GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE DETECTED
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED: SEEK SHELTER
UNPRECEDENTED GEOMAGNETIC DISTURBANCE IN PROGRESS
EXPECT COMMUNICATION AND POWER OUTAGES
Bel didn’t even have time to process the text of the message before the apartment started to shake. It wasn’t an earthquake this time, though. Some incredible noise rumbled across the ceiling. Bel ran to the window, just in time to see the belly of a 747 cross within a hundred feet of his roof.
“Holy shit!”
The plane was in a dive, and Bel watched as it careened over Sandy Boulevard, and then towards the airport. He stared in horror, mouth agape, as the nose of the jet struck the ground, and then the night lit up like day as a fireball bigger than anything Bel had ever seen consumed the plane and all the surrounding areas. A split second later, the shockwave and sound collided with the apartment as one, and knocked Bel from his feet. The window panes shook violently, and shattered, raining glass down on Bel’s legs, and he screamed in pain and terror.
It took a long moment, but he slowly crept back up and looked out the shattered window. A plume of black smoke rose into the distance, lit by the dancing fires below it, casting a morbid shadowbox of hypnotic silhouettes in the foreground. Bel looked up into the sky, following the smoke, and saw shifting waves of light in the atmosphere.
Aurora? Bel thought, in a startling moment of clarity.
He ran to the front door and swung it wide. He meant to get a better view of the aurora, but he stopped just before colliding with the old man in the tweed jacket, who was standing just outside his door.
“What…”
The old man looked at Bel. His face looked worn and tired, though his blue eyes still shone brightly.
The old man reached over and placed a ringed hand on Bel’s shoulder. “It will certainly be one unlike any other,” he said, echoing his words from earlier in the day.
Bel felt locked in place, as though the man had an iron grip on him. In the distance, he could hear some of his neighbors screaming, but he wasn’t able to look away from the old man’s eyes.
“What the fuck is happening?” Bel’s voice cracked on the words.
The old man remained calm, and his tone was soothing. “It is an end. The end of this world and its inhabitants. But it is not your end.”
Bel was feeling lightheaded, and he tried his best to control his breathing. “What do you mean?”
The old man pointed to the north, into the sky, and Bel followed his finger. Slightly to the left of the plume of smoke, a bright light grew in the darkness. Bel thought it might be a star at first, but it wasn’t. It was growing, not only in brightness, but in size. Bel held up a hand to shield his eyes from the intensity.
He didn’t have time to ask another question. The light burned, and Bel felt the emptiness again. Not despair, but finality. Inevitability. The heat rose, and he felt his skin tighten. He tried to take a step back from it, but he faltered. The light blinded him. The heat scorched him.
Then a coolness overtook him, followed by nothing.
----------------------------------------
Bel awoke in his bed and bolted upright. His heart was racing, and his clothes clung to his sweaty frame. He patted his arms and chest like he was smothering a fire, but there was none.
He pressed both of his hands against his head, gasping for breath. There was a strange taste in his mouth, and a familiar scent in the air. The smell of his old hometown. The smoke and barbecue like charred meat permeated his bedroom.
His breathing calmed after a moment, and Bel turned and slid out of his bed.
“Was… was it all a dream?”
He stumbled to the bedroom door and opened it slowly.
The apartment was dark, and directly across from him, the window that had shattered in the airplane crash was still whole.
“Oh, my fucking God. It was a dream.”
Bel looked around more. His phone was on the coffee table. Meph was in his cage. And Monica’s keys were on the kitchen counter.
Bel did a double take.
“Mon?” He called out for her, but there was no answer. He walked over to the counter and picked up the keys. They didn’t jingle. They appeared to be soldered together. Bel shook them, trying to break them apart, but they refused to separate. He threw them onto the counter, hard, and they bounced and slid before rebounding off the backsplash and clamoring to the floor.
“What the fuck.” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact.
Bel turned around and looked over the apartment again. Everything seemed normal. He walked to the couch and ran his hand along it. It felt the same, but there was no give in the leather, like it was stuffed with concrete. He tried pressing down with all of his weight, but it was as if he was trying to crush a brick.
He looked over at the restored window. It was exactly as it should be, except that beyond it lay a complete void. There was nothing. No street lights, no traffic, no stars, no trees.
Bel turned back and looked at Mephisto’s vivarium. He ran to it and tried to pull the lid off, but it was sealed to the glass. He looked at Meph and saw that the snake was the same as everything else. Some lifeless facsimile of the real thing.
A noise came from behind Bel, and he smelled the faintly smoky scent again. He turned, and the old man was standing in his living room.
“Ease yourself, Belmont. We have much to discuss and very little time.” His voice was still even and mellow.
“Who the fuck are you!?”
The old man held his hands out in a calming gesture. “I am Melchior, and I will explain everything that I can to you.”
“What’s going on? Where am I?”
Melchior paced slowly in front of the window. The rings on his fingers shone with an otherworldly, and in this darkness, impossible light.
“You are in a place between worlds, outside of existence. You could imagine it as though you were traveling through space, if you like, it is not too dissimilar.”
Bel shook his head. “What?”
The old man didn’t miss a beat. “Your world—Terra, Earth, Gaea, Tellus, Sol 3—is no more. There is no easy way for me to say that, so I will be plain with you. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I am not lying to you.”
“I don’t—” The words caught in his throat. His mind raced. No more? What about Sera? Monica? The faces of everyone he knew flashed through his thoughts, each one a question without an answer.
“It is something that you may ponder on later. Unfortunately for us both, there isn’t the time to discuss it now. Nod if you understand.”
Bel nodded.
“You are the last of the human species of your world. You are not the last human, as evidenced by myself and many other that you will meet, but you are the very last one of Earth. That makes you something of a commodity, to put it bluntly. You are what is referred to as a ‘Laster’. You are the last of your kind. Am I being clear enough?”
Bel nodded again, though more slowly.
“You are about to enter a new world, one designed specifically for you and Lasters like you. It is imperative that you survive. To that end, I have something that I must give you.” Melchior pulled a small wooden box from his coat pocket. He walked to Bel and opened it. It was a ring box, and in it, a simple silver ring.
“Take this ring. Do not wear it, yet. Not until you are on the new world. It must remain hidden from the Judge of Passage, which it will do, so long as it is not on your finger. Are you still following?”
Belmont nodded, but stopped, “Judge of—”
Melchior interrupted him, “I do not have time to explain it. Trust that I have your best interests at heart. Now, take the ring, and put it in your pocket. Do not wear it until you are in the next world.” He hesitated, his gaze hardening. “The laws forbid taking anything not of your world. That ring is a violation. If they catch you, they won’t ask questions—they’ll simply ensure you never existed.”
Bel reached out shakily and took the ring. He slid it into his pocket carefully and looked back at Melchior.
“Good. I am sorry that I cannot tell you more. You are already going to be greatly disadvantaged, but I believe in you. You must survive. We are running out of time, I’m afraid. The last thing that I must tell you is that it is absolutely imperative that you remain quiet in front of the Judge.”
“Ok.” Bel nodded, but his mind swam.
“Good. Remember, Belmont. I believe in you. I trust you will do the right thing.”
There was something in that, something behind what the man said, but Bel couldn’t grab on to it.
The ground shifted slightly below him, and then the world dimmed.
He saw the man nod to him, and then, just as the world disappeared, Bel felt an immense pressure wrap around his body, heavy and unyielding.
From the encroaching darkness, Melchior’s voice echoed, soft but resolute.
“Good luck.”