Underworld Earth Page 4

  Even if I still smoked pot, that markup is outrageous. Raising the cigarette, I barely wish him a good day when another gentleman waltzes up to the gas station. His hair is a dark red, bordering on auburn. His beard is closer to brown, like he tried to dye it and botched the job. His ensemble of jeans and aviators are topped off by a bomber jacket and kicks outside his price range. I’m willing to bet he stole them.

  “The fuck, Robbie? You’re on my corner, again!”

  “Vic,” the thin boy says, “look—”

  Having some sort of prior arrangement to sell his drugs on this spot, the man scoffs and Robbie grumbles, shuffling off to peddle his dirt weed elsewhere. The newcomer, whose skin pigmentation boasts more privilege than Robbie, assumes his spot against the wall, lighting a cigarette. He notices us staring at him and nods from behind his shades, displaying full rows of stained teeth.

  “Take a picture, it will last longer. Unless, of course, you’re in the market. In which case, welcome!”

  “No thanks,” I reply, “Those days are long behind me.”

  The man snickers.

  “Beautiful kid,” he remarks, eyeing Fiona. My child, wiser than her years, returns a look of distrust. “Amazing how many things they make you reconsider, isn’t it?”

  This guy is a creep, and I have every intention of never seeing him again.

  “Only takes one moment to change the world, right?”

  I don’t remember the first time I heard that phrase, but it occurs to me often, and seems to impress this stranger trying to bond over a cigarette.

  “Hm. I like that. What’s your name, kid?”

  “Peter.”

  “Victor,” he says, pointing to himself. “Well, I won’t keep you fine people. You get that girl home. Never know what unsavory types are kicking about.”

  I chuckle, pitching the cigarette remains. It bounces off the sewer gate, rolling away in the spring wind. Fiona waves at him as I grab the milk she’s been holding onto, and we take our leave.

  “Seems like a very special girl!” he calls out behind me. Where I had almost wiped this insignificant person from my mind as soon as my back turned, I stop, consider looking back, but don’t.

  “Daddy?” Fiona asks.

  I won’t look back.

  It would only take one moment to be entangled with such an individual, pulled into the kind of world I no longer wished to inhabit after having a family. I have no desire to risk the safety of my own.

  Returning home, neither my daughter or I mention the strange man selling drugs outside a gas bar at the corner of Byron and Flagg. Meghan kisses my cheek and pretends to crush Fiona in a hug, and we can all be a family until the craziness begins again tomorrow. As we sit down to dinner together, I barely register the puffiness around my wife’s eyes, chalking it up to overworking and sheer exhaustion. We laugh and talk and enjoy one another’s presence and try not to think about all the things we don’t have.

  It only takes one moment to lose everything else.

  Samantha

  Rejection is a bleak affair.

  Airports have always been one of my favorite places. It’s where teary students kiss each other goodbye before embarking on long-distance relationships, and where married couples see each other off with much less affection. The younger couples pledge to be loyal, but one of them will be cheating on the other by Thanksgiving. They’ll be broken up the week before Christmas, when she comes home to find him all over that whore she hated in high school.

  If the wife is lucky, her husband won’t be shacking up with some bimbo in a four-star hotel while she’s at home, cooking your love-child chicken nuggets for dinner, simply because he won’t eat anything which is not processed garbage.

  By all accounts, Derek should have been one of those unfaithful pricks. To this day, for as many indications as my husband has given, he would never dare cheat on me, but there was always the lingering question of whether I would hear the name Mariela Layton again. I have no idea what the woman is up to now, but I fear the day her name comes out of his mouth.

  Warm spring air filters through the local airport terminal. Outside, the single-lane runway has all of three planes on the tarmac, ready to board passengers. The seats are suspiciously empty for a Sunday night. You would think plenty of hard-working Americans would visit cherished mothers they never bother to call or visit any other time of year.

  I couldn’t even manage that much.

  To eyes and ears, things I love so much about airports—teary reunions and weepier goodbyes at the very least—are conspicuously absent. When I left the airport this afternoon, renting a car from a sniffling Hertz agent, everything was normal. Bleary-eyed travelers joined me in the terminal. A stewardess who might have done better as a fashion model tried to cover her boredom with a fake smile, while a very hoarse barista served scalding liquid at the airport coffee bar. His was the only store open of several.

  What is going on here?

  The only other person waiting to board a plane sits three rows down from me; his nose firmly in the binding of a book. He has either read it before or is willing to sacrifice plot details as he watches me take a seat. The boarding gate is empty of any agent to confiscate my ticket home, and the man is my only company.

  “Seems quiet for an airport,” I call out across the lonely stretches of red cushioned seats, hoping he might know a reason why. Stubble coats his cheeks over a white collared shirt.

  The stranger chuckles into his book.

  “Guess you haven’t heard?”

  “I don’t follow local news. Not a local at all. Just grew up here. What’s going on?”

  The man closes his book—a beaten copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy—and gathers his lone suitcase. Pulled on tiny wheels behind him, he shuffles over the few rows separating us. He smells like musty cologne and sweat, and can’t be much older than I am, but looks a hundred years past.

  “Bad bug going around. Some of us are immune to it, but most…”

  “Just here? In Washington?”

  “It’s everywhere,” the stranger says, tapping the paperback against his knee. “Was all over the news a couple hours ago. Me? I’m here on a business trip. From Philly. Boss sent me up to deal with this Downpatrick guy—”

  “Kirk Downpatrick?” I ask, “The real estate mogul?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Anywho, boss says go talk to him. I go talk to him. Now I’m trying to get home, but all the planes have been grounded.”

  “What? They didn’t say anything about grounding the fucking planes.”

  “Look,” the man points. His outstretched finger draws my own sightline toward its subject.

  On the television embedded in a pillar, dictating everchanging departures and arrivals, every flight is drenched inside a red bar indicating indefinite delays or outright cancellation.

  The FAA grounded my plane home.

  I must call Derek. Excusing myself, I shuffle past the stranger, out of the row. It should be full of bored people, uncontainable toddlers and miserable travelers, but there is nobody here. Pulling out my cell, I keep my back to the man so he can’t eavesdrop.

  The call rings three times. Between each tone, my chest thrashes every breath, and I pray my family is safe.

  On the fourth, Derek picks up.

  “Honey?” he says, sounding nothing like he did this morning. The voice on the other end is tired and hoarse—just like the barista. “Sorry, think I caught something in New York. How’s the trip?”

  Snap out of it, Samantha.

  “Derek, you need to listen to me very carefully. Has any kind of warning from the CDC come out? Any kind of bulletin?”

  Derek coughs, but recovers, clearing his throat.

  “I’m not sure. Let me turn on the TV. I was just making dinner, started feeling unwell. Went to the pharmacy. Big line ups, though. Okay honey,” he says, “just checking out the news.”

  Derek falls silent. The only noise I make out on his end is the garbled spee
ch of a news announcer.

  “Oh my God,” Derek says.

  “What is it?”

  “Uh... CDC is declaring a state of emergency.” Something about a monkey injected with some million-year-old bacteria found under a receding ice cap.”

  “I don’t need to know all that, Derek! How bad is it?”

  “Not good,” he replies, “Survival rate is less than one in ten.”

  One in ten.

  “Derek, what about Nathan?”

  “Nathan? He went to Jake’s house earlier. I’m not sure if he’s home yet. Hold on, sweetie. Nathan!” Derek’s bark yields nothing, and he returns to our conversation. “Must still be out.”

  “You need to track him down. After that, please lie down. Make some soup. Drink some tea. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

  He chuckles.

  “Don’t worry, Sammy. I’ll be good as new in no time. Kinda in my prime here. What we should worry about is your mom.”

  “My mom?” I ask. “No. Stephanie doesn’t want me there.”

  The stranger behind me has his book open again but watches over the top of it. Feeling eyes burning a hole into my shoulders, I glance back. He disappears behind his frayed copy of The Road, pretending to have no interest.

  “Yeah,” Derek replies, “but that was before we knew about a deadly illness spreading across the fucking country, Sam.”

  He’s right. There’s no need to worry. We’re all in our prime and can weather any symptoms we’re hit with. That one in ten statistic applies to old people and babies, and everything else is a precaution.

  “Okay,” I tell him, “I’ll rent a car, stop back in Haven to check on Mom and Steph. Then, I’m driving back. Any luck, I’ll be home by tomorrow night.”

  “Okay, I’ll call Jake’s mom, make sure Nathan is okay, then I’m gonna lie down and sleep it off.”

  “Okay,” I reply, glaring back at my only company in the desolate terminal. “Feel better, hon.”

  “I will. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Lowering the phone, it’s clear what I need to do.

  “Anything new?” the stranger asks, joining me from behind. I shake my head. I have no answers to give. All I can offer is helplessness and confusion, none of which will benefit either of us.

  “Well,” he says, “I would not be averse to some company while we wait for this thing to settle down.”

  “I appreciate that, but I have to get back to Haven. My mother is very sick.”

  “You got a car?”

  “Did,” I reply. “Dropped the keys at the rental counter. Nobody was there. Had to leave a note.”

  The man points to the other side of the airport, away from the ceiling-high windows offering a view of the idle runway and distant Rockies.

  “I’m over in long term parking. Drove up. Boss will likely send me back within a week, so I was going to get it then, and just get home quick. But I’m not getting out of here anytime soon. I don’t mind giving you a lift to Haven. It’s just up the road.”

  Unsure whether to trust the stranger, it seems there’s not much choice. All I can do is hope against all odds my family will be alright and do my due diligence with Catherine and Steph.

  “Okay, if it’s really not a big deal…”

  “It’s not,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m Mark, by the way.”

  “Sam,” I reply, shaking it.

  We gather our luggage; pulling it past the empty ticket sales counter and shuttered shops. It is all beginning to make sense. Security guards are absent from the terminal doors, along with TSA agents, air marshals, exhausted stewards pulling suitcases and harried travelers that help make air travel such a goddamn delight.

  Just before passing through the airport’s sliding double doors into the warm, overcast demeanor of lower Washington State, I spot the rental key left on the counter of a Budget rental kiosk; the note I scrawled beneath the black fob and metal arm with a ring around both.

  How I missed the dead silence before is lost on me. It is all I can hear now.

  I’m sure Steph will be thrilled to see me.

  Harper

  I am the unhinged.

  After the Arcway was complete and Tim profusely thanked me, I never wanted to lay eyes on the Shroud again. In the back of my head, I have always been vaguely aware I would not escape the locket; for a time, I was at peace with my circumstances.

  It only took one moment to change all that.

  After making a stopover in Toronto and having my world shattered, I departed for Paris. I had no idea what I was doing there, other than escaping my thoughts. Biological imperatives do not apply to angels, even if I wasn’t certain of my status as one. I walked the cobbled streets and hid atop famous architectural monuments for weeks on end and had no intention of leaving.

  When the Breach happened, its effects were quite gradual for a wormhole. One day, the World Trade Center was a hole in the ground. The next, it was standing in the background of a spokesperson at the United Nations headquarters. The Sears Tower in Chicago, holding strong in the world I knew, later took its place. History was rewritten overnight, and I soon learned it was destroyed by Chinese foreign nationals in early 2007 over an extradition dispute with the United States. The Middle East was still a warzone, but no longer because the U.S. was playing proxy war games against Russia, and vice versa. The former Soviet kingpin is, in fact, in shambles.

  The Breach changed many things, Gabriel told me in Paris. Death reversing a person’s demise, regardless of who it was, altered variables on which progress is charted. This disruption branched into billions of indiscernible directions and exponential consequences. It led to outcomes we never considered. But the time has come for more drastic measures, Phoenix.

  It took two years to understand the full scope of what my old friend had done. Rather than watching over souls ready to separate from their bodies, shepherding them into his purgatorial realm, Tim was obviously distracted. His duties were clear, and made little mention of time-travelling, if any.

  When the consequences of that distraction manifested as a time loop, he was nowhere to be found.

  The Council of Atlas controls the Arcway now, along with every soul passing through it. The haggard widower who helped me stop the last self-destructive Grim Reaper and took his place had managed to fuck things up even worse.

  I laughed when I heard he did it over a woman, but by then, spite had long taken over.

  The Louisiana Bayou dominates the horizon, punctuated by Southern architecture my European capital of choice could not emulate if it cared to. Despite their shared French heritage, there has always been something grungier about the culture here, and the city has carved out something unique in the American melting pot.

  Trails of black smoke negate all of that, puncturing colors of a sun settled over Lake Pontchartrain. Were it not for foul tendrils of myriad groundside fires, I would only need to tolerate the gorgeous coexistence of yellow, pink and orange.

  Like so many beautiful things, its beauty has been tarnished.

  After the Arcway was finished, and future visitors to the Shroud would begin their journey through the afterlife under its star-spangled illusions, I only wanted to hide from the world. Stepping foot in New Orleans is yet another reminder I will always be forced to face it.

  It is here I must kill my first target. From stories Tim told me, Campbell Madison is ruthless as they come. His death must be clean, quick and hopefully simple.

  The locket around my neck activates. I do not understand the full extent of its abilities, other than refusing to let me succumb to my half-hearted schemes. One of the few things I have learned of it is the casual metamorphosis between silver and gold. The former state renders me the equivalent of a ghost, unable to interact with the world at large. Sometimes, I can present as a normal person at will; mostly, the trinket autonomously adapts to the situation. Occasionally, it denies attempts to interface with people or objects, and the timing
of these events tend to be a shade of cruelty in its own class.

  Without request or invitation, a familiar feeling envelops my body. Distance becomes relative, and I can move through time’s rubber band as if physics are merely guidelines. Blue ripples trail every jump, lending credence to the idea of a disturbance against the physical world with each blink of my eyes, unsure whether each jump will teleport me ten steps forward, twenty hours ahead or entire locations at once.

  I have no idea how teleportation appears to the human eye but I imagine watching a woman transported several feet ahead would startle the most casual observer. The ground covered between my emergence point and the airport Gabriel told me Madison would be in is relative, blinking forward several kilometers from Bridge City. Another flash carries me across the Mississippi, into a neighborhood called Elmwood. The sky is blackened with smoke rising from several mounds of corpses. Men drag cadavers out of houses in groups and clear the streets of them. Many faces are bloated and red, layers of soot applied over top. A woman lies crumpled in the road, her stomach rising with the days she has been forgotten there.

  The survivors wear breathing apparatuses. Even with those, several cough and hack inside them. The lucky ones wait until a compatriot collapses, begging to be put out of his misery. A shotgun is raised and their comrade slumps at slugs passing through their faces.

  These are not the regular emergency authority. It is not New Orleans’ finest piling the bodies and setting them aflame, but regular citizens who survived. None of them notice me, perched on a warehouse rooftop, watching from above. When I tire of spectating plumes of darkness that trail between the two-story buildings, the locket revs up for another jump.

  I blink, and the legion of good Samaritans setting their fellow Americans on fire to quell the plague’s spread are left behind me, traveling into the heart of darkness.

  The first time I met the woman who would become my life partner, helping me accept I would never properly love a man, was in an airport. It seems pointless to reminisce. The girl who knocked out the fellow accosting me inside a terminal bar is lost to me.