Blood is, supposedly, the vessel for the soul. Levi, dragging a black garbage bag through a grassy morass, wished his hands weren't covered in so much soul right now. It made his grip slip, sliding along the plastic of the bag as he trudged along.
The bag wobbled dangerously as he pulled it, heavy and leaking, putrid to the nose and the touch. Levi gagged dryly as he went, his stomach lurching. He'd plug his nose, but that would only smear blood on it. The thing sloshed as it moved, as if it were full of half-congealed pudding.
He persevered.
This field, just off of a small country freeway, was alive with the late-night sound of crickets and frogs and other nocturnal creatures that frequented such places. There was no trail for Levi to follow, and so he was left to simply hope that the tall grass, sharp enough to leave tiny cuts on his exposed legs, would protect the bag from rocks underfoot instead of rendering the bag into pieces to allow its contents to ooze out.
He paused for a moment, panting with exertion. His breath left clouds of condensation in the air as he looked up at the stars, the moon, burning above. He shivered softly. The moon felt as if it were watching him, a massive white eye, hanging in the abyss of stars and clouds and darkness. Levi had to keep himself from crying, from throwing up, whichever wanted to come first.
He dragged the bag to the creek bed, each movement of the bag sending a jolt up his spine. He was hyper-aware of his surroundings, every sound making his ears twitch and his head turn as he moved along the half-dry mud. He froze in place, all at once, and his body instinctively crouched down low. He waited a few moments for a blow that wouldn't come. Someone was watching him, someone or something. Probably a coyote... but only probably. His skin crawled, and he started walking again.
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Twice he almost fell, stumbling over a root or a rock or some other obstruction. Once he slid a touch and was worried he would slide all the way back and land on the bag like a grotesque waterbed. Thankfully, he stopped himself. He doubted it would have held up under his weight anyhow.
His slow, lumbering walk brought him to a stone platform in the middle of the field. Smooth and featureless, a twin line of silver rails ended here, a rail line that stretched out east from this point. There was no proper stop built into it, instead it simply ran into the stone platform and halted. Those silver threads, he knew, stretched from here all the way to the East coast, into the shallow fog of the night. And yet here, at this small, flat stone platform, the chains that spanned the world, that pulled two halves of a continent together, came to an abrupt end. What mountains, seas, and rivers had failed to stop, had ended at this stone. It seemed unchanging, unbreakable, unmovable.
Perhaps it was.
Levi stepped onto the platform and shuddered. Everything had gone silent the moment he'd touched it. The breeze, the chirping crickets, the croaking frogs. Everything stopped, as if he had gone deaf. Only the sound of his own footsteps colliding with the stone let him know he was still capable of perception. He grunted and tugged the bag onto the platform. A warm breeze washed over him, the last remnants of summer giving him a brief reprieve from the chill of the Autumn night. It reminded him of breath on his collar, hot and damp.
Never before had he encountered a silence so loud. It was all-encompassing, disorienting, like he had stepped into a void where no sound was possible.
A sound came again as he pulled the bag onto the platform, a sound, slowly at first but with rising speed and ferocity. The yipping, howling, thrashing sound of dogs. Coyotes, wild hounds, beasts that live on the outskirts of human settlement.
"I'm sorry Levi," said Arthur softly behind him. "I'm so, so sorry."
The dogs barked louder and louder as he moved to the edge of the platform.
Not quite dogs.
Levi ran into the night, away from those two silver chains, away as fast as his weary legs could carry him.