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Not for the faint of heart. Then again, few of my short stories are.
Apocalypse Now… and Again
I wake up, and it’s Sunday. Bright light shines through the window. The sheets are soft beneath me. I roll over, slightly, and see her pretty sleeping face. So content. I wrap my arm around her, and she’s…
Cold. She’s so cold. I move to shake her awake, and find a warm spot. And breath a sigh of relief. I move back, rolling over, and look outside. It’s bright. SO bright. I can’t see out that window. I glance across the room, and realize that the light is so intense that the shadows are starting before they hit the wall. In fact, they don’t even hit the wall. The only shadows cast are on the direct opposite sides of whatever the light touches. I move to shake her awake, and realize, as I look at my hand, that that warm spot was-
I scream, chasing myself out of bed, and fall backwards. She was still cold. But the blood. The blood was warm. Is warm, as I watch it drip off my hand. I’m in shock, I remind myself. I have to breathe.
So I do. One. Breathe in. Dead girlfriend. Two. Breathe out. Blood on your hands. Three. Breathe in. Sleeping in bed with a corpse. Four. Breathe out. Panic.
I barrel out of the room, crashing the door off it’s hinges, and stop in the living room. There’s so much blood in here. So much. And pieces I can barely recognize. I see an ear. An eye. A hand. I know that hand. That ink. That marking, it’s-
It’s my dinner coming back up, is what it is. As I wretch over the sink, I remember watching my brother get that tattoo. How he convinced me to get one just like it. On my right hand. The one that has blood on it. So I scrub it off. I scrub off her blood until I see my own. So I stop. And wretch again. I wretch, blood. Why not? I think to myself. I crawl into the shower, and stand under the hot water, except the water, halfway through, turns to-
Do I really need to say it?
I dry myself off as quickly as I can. Using anything. Anything except a red towel. I’ve had enough red today. I want some blue. Maybe some white, as they cart me away. So I stumble back into my room, looking up, to the side, anywhere but at the bed. I find my way to my closet, calm, terrified. Still, the light is intense. I can barely tell the difference between a shirt and a pair of pants. But somehow, I get them both on.
I make my way to my front door, with each step, my mind racing, trying to formulate a thought, an explanation. What would I tell… whoever? No officer, it’s not my blood. No, no, I didn’t kill her. I just woke up in bed, and there she was, bleeding and dead. Oh, no officer, I didn’t kill my brother. Hack him to pieces? Nah. What? The door was locked from the inside?
And this revelation strikes me like everything else has. The door was locked. Only one in. Only one out. Small apartment. A lot of blood. A bad place to be. I weakly fiddle with the lock, and somehow remember the mechanics of a right turn. So I take a step outside.
And the noise, the noise makes itself known. And I nearly collapse from the volume, my world goes black as I shut my eyes and ears against it, but it doesn’t help. At first, I can’t tell what it is. I have no idea. So I stand there, and wait for it to sort itself out. All of it. All of them. A great big cacophony of a hundred different unbearable sounds. Screams. Sirens. Fires. Sounds I don’t recognize. Metal on metal. Gunfire. Screeching tires. Horns. Alarm systems. Everywhere and everything has gone absolutely crazy.
And I open my eyes. And realize that it’s so much worse. The world hasn’t gone crazy.
It’s gone to hell.
Fires everywhere. People running, people screaming. And I see where the light is coming from. The entire city burns. Like matches. Like twigs. And it’s everything. People jump, flaming, off of buildings, just to end the pain. The first jumper I see, I can’t help it. My eyes follow him all the way down. The inferno he’s become trails behind him, billowing smoke as he falls. And I can almost hear the sound he makes as he hits ground. A small, very small part of me, denial, I think, asks myself, is he ok? But I can’t look away. And then, I see him. I see him get up, and fall to his knees. Screaming. Because it didn’t end. And another part of me tells me that it isn’t going to, anytime soon.
But the fires, they coat everything. The waters, now rivers of blood, burn. The streets themselves. Cars and concrete. Big screens and produce stands. Animals, hell, even the clouds are on fire.
And then I see something else. The source of the noise I couldn’t understand. And I don’t think I ever will. Thee can be only one word for them. Demons. Horrible, unknowable creatures. Our books, our movies, they told us nothing of the truth. The truth is so much more horrible. Demons are not black smoke, are not human-looking beasts with powers. They are something unto themselves.
And no two are the same. A grotesquery of obesity and consumption gorges itself on human after human, pouring them into its endless gullet, which squirms and rolls as the people inside stay alive for the whole process. Nearby, a creature of such profane beauty, horrible and irresistible, gorgeous and nauseating, ravages a man alongside the road, performing acts that I can only imagine to be both intensely painful, and infernally exquisite at the same time. It’s impossible to look away. She/it terrifies me, yet I can’t help but want. To jump off this building, to land in her arms, to fall into her hell over and over again. And I almost do.
Until this ugly son of a b***h lands in front of me. And I feel nothing but rage for it. My first assumption is that it IS a creature of rage, inspiring horrendous violent acts amongst us, even as it commits its own, until I see that it is merely perched on the railing, a nonchalant expression on it’s slovenly face. And I realize why I am enraged. I can no longer see the profane beauty that had captivated me, from hundreds of yards away.
So I swing out, and land a blow to its face, and it tumbles, I watch, as it careens over the edge, and lands on the ground with a sickening splat, then, slowly, oh so slowly, climbs to its feet. Just in time to be devoured by… whatever the hell it is that sprang up from the earth beneath it. Nothing but teeth and mouths and claws and hunger, and the thing disappears. I look up, and the demoness is gone.
Part of me wants to surrender. Part of me wants to jump. Part of me wants to find the one safe place in this eternal hellpit that is safe. And I realize there is none. So I run. For the stairs, for the lobby, past more bloodied corpses, and I realize, they aren’t dead. They’re alive, resuffering their death with each breath they cannot take. And my soul weeps for them. And the grim realization that, so, too, are my girlfriend and brother. But there is nothing I can do for them, now. So I vow to find someone I can help.
It isn’t easy. Nearly everyone alive I find is consumed by something. One man swings wildly at me with a metal bar of some kind, until he falls in a crack in the floor. Another points a gun at me, and demands my money, my clothes, everything I have. Then he fires anyway, and there are no bullets left. So I keep running. Everywhere, people are mad. Mothers kill their daughters, over and over again, beings of unspeakable horror claim life after life, condemning them to an eternity of redeath. I burst out the lobby doors, and stumble into the street. Cars are flipped over onto each other, and the beast of hunger is still slowly rolling down the asphalt, consuming anything it touches, even metal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was eating the ground beneath it.
To say that the scenery around me is chaos would be inaccurate, mainly due to the somewhat constant problem of the spoken word not being intense enough to accurately depict true events.
It’s the end. That’s the closest I’m going to get. But for now, I’m focusing on one prime directive.
Running like all hell. It’s not hard. With panic in the streets, those few left sane are staying in dark corners, and everyone else seems to be staying out of the open, save for a few murderous psychopaths and the occasional evangelist.
Let me pause on the evangelist piece for a moment. I come across one, this scraggly, unshaven, old-Amish looking man waving a torn to s**t bible and screaming at the top of his lungs that his word and his alone could provide salvation. And he says something, I’m not sure what, but it clicks. All that panic, and calm, and terror, and fascination burning holes in my conscious, they all come to a head. And at that moment, my focus is absolutely clear. There’s only one thing I want to do right now, amidst everything and anything going on around me. I only have one desire.
So I clock the bible-thumping cassocked like I did the demon at my balcony, and he drops. And just lies there. At first, I’m worried that I killed him, until he stands up, and continues to rant, like nothing happened, walking along and screaming passages from the bible like that’s the only thing he knows how to do. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was true.
Back to running. I charge past block after block of hell on Earth, because that’s what it is, really, all those fire and brimstone rants you hear on late-night TV and in some really fanatical churches couldn’t have said it better. I charge past building after building, and the thought crosses my mind to find a family member, I’m not sure where, but I’m sure it’s in there. The rational part of my brain says that they’re probably as screwed as we are, so I just keep running. I run like there’s nothing left behind me, and if I don’t keep going, there won’t be anything in front of me, either.
I come cross a dead end, an overturned bus on a three-way, and bank a left.
And I fall. Right into this great big gaping hole-in-the-ground. One so big that, as I’m falling, the thought distinctly crosses my mind: “How the hell did I miss THAT?!” What happens next is horrible, almost unbearable to describe, but I will, because now, it’s all I know. First, my back cracks along the edge of a small cliff, and pain that I didn’t know could exist in a single human roars through me, as I bounce like a rag doll across edge after edge, rock after rock, down the rabbit hole I go, until all of that pain is focused into a single point in my chest, and I stop. I just lie thee and bleed, and have just enough strength to glance up. And I see that, amidst everything else, I’ve impaled myself. On a very angry looking rock. Blacker than I’ve ever seen, and curved in such a way that the angle hurts my eyes. Then, my entire world spins, as the rock I’m stuck on moves swiftly, correcting me to an upright position. And I’m brought face to face with something I hadn’t even thought of, but I wish I’d never met.
Him. The Adversary. The Morning Star.
I didn’t impale myself on a rock. I fell on his god damn claw.
And he is awesome and terrifying in ways not even Dante could have scribed for you. For he is free on this earth, free to exist in the plane of the living without description, without limitation, without law. This is his world now.
And the stress from all of this input at once presses against my consciousness from the inside out, and I feel ready to burst. Explode, detonate in a way so violent and traumatic that the last cognitive thought in my brain is that, for as much force is pushing on the inside of my mind, I might just take him with me. It’s the last positive thing I can think of.
And then I break. Into a million pieces, my mind fragmented into a million wavelengths, a thousand shards of excruciation, and for a second, I can see everything. And then it all goes dark. Darker than I’ve ever seen.
I wake up, and it’s Sunday. Bright light shines through the window.
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