You leaving you, for now
The last two gunmen stepped over the corpses of their teammates towards the broken corner office. One kicked in the door while the other stepped through the window frame. The girl was dead, but the guy was breathing softly, leaned back against a file cabinet. Door-man put three rounds through the guy’s face and the window man reached down and opened the newest corpse’s closed fist. It was empty. He had time to look up at his companion before the PKP flashed on the catwalk and both gunmen fell dead in a storm of drywall and gore.
“They got him,” Lindsey sighed, gasping for air after her short sprint.
“He’s gone by now.” EP already sounded like she was drifting away.
“I hope so.”
“See you back there.” The line clicked off. Lindsey took her earbuds out and dropped them on the catwalk. For the first time in what felt like years, she heard the real raw sound of the world, but now it was a world falling apart. The fire roared and cracked just behind her, and the whole half a mile of warehouse groaned and snapped and even dripped. Outside, sirens and shouts and engines blended into a uniform drone of tragedy that rolled ghostlike through the broken bay doors and drifted down through the broken roof.
She had taken the pills instead of the injection to give her time.
Though struggling against the brain-crushing tunnel vision brought on by the last grenade blast, she managed to shed her armor and ammo and weapons into a pool of spent brass at her feet, and stomped towards the stairs, sending more shells and debris clattering down into the falsely illuminated darkness. She had a tourniquet on one leg and quickclot on almost every bit of skin she could reach. It might burn, later, she realized suddenly. That other her. Waking up somewhere, but not here. Would she remember? She had heard they didn’t, from those that believed they continued at all. She hoped it was true, that she would take the memories with her. They were hers, after all.
As she stepped shakily down the stairs, impatient fire spreading behind her and water dripping down after her, she shook off her NVGs and let her eyes adjust to the dim glowing light, half refracted spotlight glare, half firelight, and saw it all with her real eyes for the first time. They ached, too accustomed to seeing only softly glowing images of distant death.
When she got to the recycling door, she ripped off her coveralls and gloves and got down to just her underwear, boots, and tourniquets.
This is all I can give you girl. The boots are a gift. Thank me next time you put on your socks without feeling any scar tissue.
She limped out the bay door with her hands up, blinded by a spotlight, metal and brass and glass crunching under her boots, the fire roaring behind her, throwing waves of heat on her bare skin.
The cops were yelling something, but she was already past the point of being able to understand. She slowly let herself down as boots marched towards her, casting long shadows on the cement ramp.
In her underwear was a note, written on the back of a receipt, stuck in an empty bandage pouch, telling a story of being kidnapped and drugged and wrong pin numbers given. It was all she could do for her, and she passed out hoping it would be enough.
Then there were two of her, one sinking into liquid thoughtless blackness and another walking down a shifting hallway towards another world.
****
EP killed the last drone feed and exhaled what felt like her last breath. Lindsey always tried to give her Self an out. Funny, considering she claimed to believe the Hardworlds didn’t exist after they left. A blessing and a curse, to see them all like this, from above. Her first mentor had warned her. They will forget you were watching and lie to your face about things you saw with your own eyes.
She took her ear buds out and set them on the desk, then activated the meltdown on her phone and tossed it on the ground. She started the hard wipe and changed into the clothes she had dropped into almost two days ago. She took another deep breath and took three big swigs of vodka then splashed some all over her clothes. Next to the door, she pressed a circular button until it clicked five times like a gas starter. Four separate unseen fires ignited, and the room began to smell of burning plastic.
She went out and shut the door behind her. There was an airgap between the office and the rest of the building, and it would burn down to ash and leave nothing but a blackened space in the concrete building around it. Gone, but not missed. If something grew in the space left behind, she was sure it would still smell of burning plastic. But would the walls remember? Would the new thing know?
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Her flashlight swept the barren concrete floor. The few remaining broken shelves watched her leave, impatient. The gaping empty freezers on the wall with their old plastic smell were ready for her absence. She had disturbed them by coming here, kicked up old air and broken rightful silence, like a bomb dropped mistakenly in a forest. It longed to heal what she had wounded. It pressed in around her, expelling her, touching her while it did it. She almost cried. Maybe it was the liquor. Maybe it was all the dead friends.
The lot was bright and dead. The lights kept on to discourage vandalism and vagrants. Light defending the dark. The humming present guarding unerringly the still past. A young woman walking alone in a bad place at a bad time of night, trying to save what she had borrowed, because it could never be returned.
She made it to the street just as dawn was starting to break. A soft suburb with basketball goals mounted in the ground and fondant lawns hugging chalk-smooth sidewalks. Pink and yellow breathed over paper roofs, and windows blinked back streetlight reflections sleepily. She lay down in the alley, a streak of mosslike grass between planes of stained wood the color of sandwich bread, and took the pills with the last of the vodka.
A mourning dove tested the depth of the houses with its voice. The girl in the grass dreamed of birds roosting in a burning building. Though she screamed and ran, waving her arms, she couldn’t get them to fly away, and they all burned together.
****
The office was empty and quiet, but demons of fire and shadow with flashlight eyes pressed in on the window. Metal began to scrape metal outside and Gradie knew the warehouse was folding in on itself, forming a jaw of broken-girder teeth, wet with jet fuel saliva. It would soon eat the office and digest him in a stomach made of cellophane and sloshing with Propofol that stretched out in the parking lot like a trash bag bloated with rancid juices.
He took a deep breath and squeezed the coin. The metal was soft as silver and hummed like a mild electric current.
I did it. It’s over.
He stood up and walked his mind through the steps to get out of the Dreamworlds. Michael had told him he would have to do it himself this time, and he tried like hell to remember every single thing he had learned from EP and Celeste and all the other journeys.
Make a path. Create distance.
He turned his back to the window and pulled a filing cabinet off the wall like it was made of Styrofoam and found a door behind it lit up in gentle white light. He pushed past it and shut it behind him. The hallway beyond was made of apartment walls and smelled of pan asian take-out. The blue-grey lights wavered like tear-filled eyes. He knew he was far away from the world he had left and turned around to prove it to himself.
The hallway stretched back for miles and curved up, disappearing behind its ceiling. The voice that had waited silently under his mind for the past two days, threatening to speak, was gone. It was a brief feeling of loneliness. He thanked that other him, for whatever part he had played in the final victory, but there was no one around to hear. He was the only him in this hallway.
The sound and smell of rain grew stronger as he walked towards a door at the end of the hall. When he got to it, he heard the storm beating on its other side in heavy drops. It sounded like being inside a car while it went through the wash. Water leaked in under the door and moved past his feet like liquid mirror glass. He knew everything behind him was flooding, sinking, that it would all join the dripping nightmare hallways he had seen with Celeste, and something else he couldn’t remember, in that world beneath the world. Those tunnels and hatches that connected every abandoned building and empty home in every dream he had ever had, and maybe even the dreams of every other him.
He shoved out into the grey shower and slammed the door behind him. It shattered from the force, leaving him with no way back.
Good.
The woods were familiar. At first glance, he had thought he was in a rainforest, but as he stomped ahead, he saw it was the type of raw brush that might be left between two housing divisions back home, or growing unchecked behind an apartment complex. Shouldn’t it be a rainforest if that was what he was expecting? Was his own mind defying him?
“Welcome back,” Klara said in his mind, and he almost sobbed. Her voice felt warm and compared to the cold of the rain, and the sensation of hearing her in his head was completely Otherworld, and he realized how much his Spirit had missed it.
“I trust you have your mask on,” she said gently. He summoned his mirror mask and pulled it over his face.
“Where am I?”
“You tell me.”
“It’s a forest.”
“Then it’s a forest. The Otherworld made it for you. You can decide which forest it is, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a forest on the Allworld, south of the big suburbs. If you push through those bushes, you should find yourself at the edge of it.”
He moved a wing of greenery out of his way and stepped onto cement. There was a big fountain in front of him, the bottom glittering with bright pennies. There was no rain here, and the copper shined in the sun. On the other end of a big cement court, a mall repeated itself. Like a thousand different malls fused together. People walked in and out, flew up through the skylights, parked crafts on the roof. He had made it.
“I’ve got the coin.” He held it in his hand and let it glare in the sun. For a moment he thought about turning it into a penny and throwing it into the fountain.
“Good. Meet us at the office.” The sensation of her presence left his mind gently.
He flew up through the blue sky till it turned black and tore around the curve of the massive pulsing planet. The memories of his days in the Hardworld slipped from his mind like raindrops off a windshield. He tried to catch them, but it was hopeless. It was all little more than a fading dream. Lucy would have to make do.