Chapter 3.2: Dead Zone (continued)
Del Rey was eleven when Fang and his father moved topside in the same scraper as Carlita, Raz, Garden and him.
Fang was a few years older, but still hung out with the other kids—101 Cali’d never been the kind of place where you can pick your friends, so everyone banded together like family, especially back in those days. Which would have made Fang like an older brother, except he never really warmed to anyone. He was always quiet, acting distant and reticent to the extreme.
One day while the three boys were sharing some pilfered roach-chocolate brownies in “the Third-Floor Fog Lounge” (Carlita and Garden had refused to come, not that Dead Boy particularly wanted his kid sister hanging out in the local party spot anyway), Raz got Fang to open up a bit.
“So, what’s your story, Fang the Man?” Raz asked. “You and your Dad work here in the laundry, but you never did mention your mother.”
A tense silence stretched that Raz awkwardly tried to laugh off with a quick change of subject, but Fang waved his hand dismissively.
“Nah, it’s alright,” Fang said. “My Mom and little brother died out in the fog while we were coming here.”
Raz cursed with an affable shake of his head. “Those wraiths are the absolute worst.”
“Not the wraiths.” Fang spoke slowly yet steadily, as if driven to tell his story against his will by some outside force. “Something worse. We got lost down by the wharf and stumbled right off the pier. We were out in the bay.”
Del sucked air in between his teeth. Raz whistled, long and low. Never before had either boy met anyone who had braved the open ice.
“So what was it like?” Del asked.
Raz punched his friend in the shoulder. “Dude, his mother—!”
“It’s OK,” Fang said with a shrug. “I can’t really explain it well anyway. Everything got … weird.”
“Weird how?” both boys asked in unison.
“Weird like … like those shapes you learn about in math class. Everything got real messy. Hard to think straight. And I was separated from the others anyway. I didn’t see what happened to…” he trailed off with a sigh. “Everything was just, like, geometric or something. I dunno.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Fang died six months later from a viral outbreak that claimed a fifth of the lives in the scraper. They say that when he passed, the edges of each iris angled into a perfect hexagram.
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Fang was right.
The moment Dead Boy steps onto the open ice covering Lake Merced, his world explodes into a dizzying array of sharp corners and impossible shapes. The fog solidifies before him, fractalizing into a million tiny dodecahedra that swim before his eyes, colliding and combining into wavy forms that expand and contract like a breathing, billowing cloud.
A massive rush of vertigo throws him to his knees. Vomit wells up his throat in a sudden unsupressable wave; it crystallizes into pink pearls that spew from his mouth and bounce and roll across the lake’s surface, disappearing into the fog in a spreading miasma of upsetting color.
Dead Boy tries to stand, but the frozen-over lake suddenly pitches him forward, the ice inexplicably sloping downward beneath his feet, opening into a gulley before him. He slides down the icy incline, completely out of control. The thick fog smacks into his face like a continuous spray of pebbles, forcing him to close his mouth and squint his eyes. Whereas before unharvested trees had whizzed past him during his flight through the park, now tall deadly jagged spires of ice jut out at odd angles all around him.
After colliding painfully with two of these rock-hard spires—the icy protrusions are covered with what look and feel like razor-sharp teeth—he desparately grinds his axe in the ice behind him to slow his descent into the uncanny valley. He wishes he could see better; the fog is dense, dangerous and growing very dark. Eventually, he slows to a stop and regains his footing, only to smack his head on solid ice above him. Icicles rain down all around, stinging the back of his neck.
It is now completely lightless. Feeling around with his hands and his axe, Dead Boy surmises he is in some kind of a tunnel. It opens out into an incline the way he came, and branches out into a series of tunnels before him.
No way in hell am I getting lost in the dark in a Crypts network under the lake! he thinks. He wants to scream, is desparately holding his panic in check, but the sheer terror and awe of this place silence any sound that might eke from his throat. There are no more howls or shouts from his pursuers either, he realizes. All is deathly quiet.
As silent as a thief in the night, he exits the tunnel and slowly walks around what he feels to be a smooth metal wall of some kind rising steeply out of the center of the lake. The air is so thick and cold that each breath comes in a labored gasp. It smells like death and tastes like stagnant water thirty years undisturbed.
He walks on and on with blind scraping steps for a very long time, one hand trailing along the cold wall on his right side, the other weakly dragging his axe. After what seems like an eternity, he becomes vaugely aware of a faint blue glow trickling through the fog from an indeterminate distance ahead. His surroundings progressively begin to lighten and come into view, revealing the stark landscape of a pitted icy lakebed, from the center of which a gigantic metal dome rises into the gloom above. The faint blue light is glowing out of a chasm that cuts across the gully floor and through one side of the metal wall.
“Del Rey…” Katana’s voice abruptly cuts across the interminable silence like a shattering crystal, far off yet distinctly clear in a way that brings the image of her evil, mocking face directly to Dead Boy’s mind. “We know you’re down there, Del Rey. And we’re coming to get you.”
Dead Boy runs for the light. But when he reaches the chasm, he is not at all prepared for what he sees down in its depths.
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