Underworld Earth Read online

“Mark?”

  The man I met at the airport still clutches his copy of The Road. His face is white, and beads of perspiration collect at his brows over a grimace.

  “I... I wasn’t sure if anybody was left,” he says, stepping out of the elevator. “Man, am I ever glad to see you. You really don’t want to go down there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Is everyone downstairs dead?

  Mark gulps. “It’s bad, Sam. Hospitals across the country are turning people away. The only ones with the medical knowledge to stop this are falling over, just like the rest of us.”

  “So,” I reply, “what do we do? Because from the sounds of it, that lobby is just littered with bodies.”

  “Pretty much. More dead down there than living to haul them away. I don’t think anyone else is coming to help.”

  None of this makes sense.

  “Why aren’t we sick?” I ask. “I mean... I don’t know. Seems like all the locals are dying or dead, but we’re fine. Why is that?”

  Mark shrugs.

  “Not sure. I thought I was the only one. Came up here to make a pass at finding someone else. That’s when I ran into you.”

  I don’t know when this all went to Hell, but we are clearly there now, simply waiting on the Devil to show his face.

  I must get home to my family.

  One thing at a time, Sammy, my late mother’s voice reminds me from within a deep, emotional abyss, so full of events I am not ready to begin processing.

  “I know where we can go.”

  “You do?” Mark asks.

  “Yes,” I nod. “I have an old friend here in town. Freddie Conway. Surely, he can help us.”

  There is no other option but for Mark to agree. There are no planes to bring us home anytime soon, and from what he says, most people in this town could be dead. Regardless, his affirmations are hesitant, still indecisive whether I’m trustworthy.

  Trust me, buddy, I muse, that goes two ways.

  “Okay,” he finally replies, “we should bypass the lobby. Nothing but corpses down there. Think I saw an emergency stairwell over here.”

  “Will that set off an alarm?”

  “Probably, but the fire department would not be an unwelcome sight right now. Come on.”

  Past the elevator, a solid glass door with a push bar warns us in bold lettering: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY- USING THIS DOOR WILL SOUND AN ALARM.

  Mark ignores the stickered lettering, pushing the door outward. The stairwell is a claustrophobic combination of stone and barred windows, presumably to keep the infirm from escaping. With the heavy rings of the fire bell overhead, four floors stand between us and solid ground, and every flight of grey concrete is one step closer to my family.

  A thick metal door at the bottom is sternly engraved with another warning. Mark leans into the push bar, forcing the door open, and optimism dies. The closing door silences the alarm, replacing it with absolute silence. Fresh air filters into my nose and mouth; under grey skies threatening downpour, my eyes fall on graver sights.

  Taking the lobby exit would have been a gentler transition. In every direction around Haven’s only hospital, the dead outnumber us. Many were caught by surprise; colds they shrugged off this morning overtook every bodily function. Vehicles on the road came to disorderly stops. Several of their doors are open, bodies spilling or sprawled out on the pavement. Some didn’t even make it past the doors and died slumped over steering wheels. Pedestrians of all ages are collapsed on backs, stomachs and sides, bodily fluids drying beside their gaping mouths.

  Other than whistling winds, not a sound on Earth remains. Corpses in the plaza across from the hospital tripped over each other, meeting gravity and creating piles of human ruin.

  Shock subsiding, a familiar sensation forces my chin to point groundward, eyes squinted shut as a flash of light and several voices pour through every audio sensory input I know, rendering all my senses madness.

  In the last three years, I have had to kill more people than I ever did in my life. What’s even worse is, given our circumstances, I set out to learn how to do exactly that. How to fight.

  What is happening to me?

  The world is yours now, Samantha.

  If all these people are dead, I don’t think a visit to my old friend Freddie’s house will yield different results, other than further traumatizing myself.

  You decide what to do with it.

  “Hey,” Mark says, “you okay over there?”

  “Yeah,” I reply as he helps me regain balance. Hand over my aching temple, I thank him, and Mark lets go.

  “Here. Let’s sit down.”

  “No, I’m okay. It’s going away. We can’t stay here, Mark. I have to get home. To Connecticut.”

  “Are you sure? Is that such a good idea? I mean, it’s not like these sights will end once we leave Haven. Probably gets much worse from here.”

  I can’t afford to consider that.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “My family could be in trouble. I have to get home, Mark.”

  Clutching his book, my only companion in the world tepidly nods, suggesting he will retrieve his vehicle from hospital parking so we can get on the road.

  “On the upside,” he jokes, “I won’t have to pay parking now, right?”

  When I don’t react, he shakes his head, telling me to stay put. At the wasteland of dead stretching out for miles on end I am left to process our predicament, standing in an underworld on Earth.

  Apocalypse is a bleak affair.

  Harper

  The hospital ward is dark as I enter its double swinging doors. Intermittent whirring pours from open frames, where semi-private rooms meet people with little care in the world for privacy, so long as the tradeoff alleviates their suffering.

  Here in the District of Columbia, it was hard to miss bombed buildings or men with assault rifles. I don’t know their goals, other than picking off remains of the federal government to enforce anarchy. I don’t care for the fleeing survivors I passed, trying to escape the fighting. The highways are barricaded, and many won’t get far.

  These events are not my concern.

  Instead, my efforts are concentrated on the empty hallways of a large hospital with more dead than living inside of it. I need few directions through its once-sterile halls, because the Nephalim told me exactly where my target would be.

  The sixth-floor nurse’s station is abandoned, because they, like the doctors they serve, have become victims of a pandemic nobody saw coming.

  It brought down America in the course of a day.

  Of course, the gunfire outside is not because of the plague. It was merely the catalyst for tensions that have been boiling over for years. Now, all the crazies are out, wielding their guns, and there are few ways to put them back in the bottle.

  Only weeks ago, I sat in a cafe in Paris. The little patio coffee shop I frequented, buying coffees I never drank to appear normal to onlookers, brings a smile to my face. For a while, I tried to live a normal life. The locket played along, and I could speak with people as I wished and pretend my humanity lived on.

  For a while, it indulged me.

  May I reheat your coffee, madame? a well-kept waiter with a crown of black hair and a groomed moustache asked.

  No thank you, Louis, I told him, affixed on the flat screen over his shoulder, playing the news. What’s going on?

  Oh, that? Rioters, madame. Same old story. Nothing to worry about.

  That was before Gabriel found me and implored me to return to the Shroud. When all the world had to worry about was some protestors in masks, waving signs at their perceived injustices, things were simple. I could fester in my own definition of unfairness but had no signs to wave.

  Even now, all I have are white flags.

  When I first woke after dying, I thought it was a dream. For some reason, it chose to dump me in the same spot I laid eyes on the Shroud for the first time. A familiar rage poured up my throat, sitting up in the subway station I
initially encountered in the purgatorial realm.

  This time, there were no incoming phone calls from a row of slot-operated boxes at the escalator’s foot. I looked upon them, recalling when a woman named Evie once called me and said I had to save the Shroud.

  This time, I was angry, because Tim said it would be different, and it looked the exact same.

  Continuing down the hospital corridor to its end, I shake off the memory. Moving past the nurses’ desk, my shoes make no sound, stepping around the debris strewn along the hall after the building was raided by looters.

  Gabriel’s second target is in a room at the corridor’s end. The door is ajar, revealing a motionless body in a white gown, sound asleep. Rolled on her side to prevent bedsores, the woman’s eyes are closed; there are few signs of life beyond a faint cloud bouncing on the respirator’s inner plastic. The hair might once have been darker than mine was before bleaching it in a Queens’ gas station bathroom, but it’s completely grey. Other than a dime size hole in the right temple, trailing off into a scar spilling down her face, her skin is perfectly preserved. She does not flinch or move for anything; the right hand is frozen in rigor mortis, shriveled like a chicken’s foot.

  There is nobody left to monitor her, but by some freakish coincidence, she lives.

  Gabriel, I said in Paris, Ramona Knox is in a vegetative state in the Capitol.

  I wish it had never come to this.

  What’s your point?

  The last time I saw my complicit friend Tim was in this very room. Nothing has changed since I laid eyes on the woman who helped cause the Breach.

  Well, I guess you will have to figure it out, won’t you?

  Fucking angels.

  “Visiting hours are between six and eight.”

  The voice behind me is as recognizable as it is startling. I turn to lay eyes on the bearded man I have not seen in years. His suit is gone, replaced by jeans and a hooded sweater. There is no emotion in his face, as usual, but it looks troubled, nonetheless.

  “How long have you been standing there?” I ask.

  “Long enough,” the man says. “I don’t get out much.”

  I smirk, looking back to the woman I’m tasked with killing.

  “I know why you’re here, Harper,” he says, drawing my attention back to him. History soaks the tone, but the words are few.

  “Do you?”

  The man nods.

  “Right now, the Council is in panic. Because of what she and I did, their infallibility is suddenly... less absolute.”

  “I don’t understand. Why haven’t you come forward?”

  “I will have to face them at some point,” he replies, looking at the comatose woman on a hospital bed. “But not now. Not yet.”

  “So, we’re all supposed to clean up your mess, Tim? Christ, if I had known what you were going to do with the Arcway, I would have never helped you build the damn thing.”

  He says nothing.

  “I don’t think you realize what you and your girlfriend have done.”

  “On the contrary,” Tim says, walking to the bedside. “I know and see everything, Harper. Even now.”

  His hand grasps Ramona’s limp one. The woman does not respond, nor does her heart monitor react, continuing to deliver intermittent tones signaling stability.

  “Do you know what the Atlas’s endgame is? Because now, Tim? Now I’m supposed to kill seven people—including her—to undo your mess.”

  I wait for an answer. He continues to study her, as if she will rise from the dead at any second, simply because he wished it.

  “Tim?”

  “Yes,” he replies, “I know about that.”

  “Well, maybe stop playing mysterious for a second, and help me? Your old friend?

  “I’ve done everything that was asked of me, Tim. I helped save Grace. I helped you build the Arcway, when all I wanted to do was be allowed to just…”

  “Die?” he asks.

  I nod. Joining him at the bedside, I grasp the railing dividing us from Ramona Knox’s slumber. Tim’s eyes fall on the locket, studying its star shape.

  “I realize I can’t go back. The people I love are lost to me. I hoped there would be peace on the other side, Tim. But... I wish I’d had more time with her.”

  I search for any semblance of the man who helped me take down Hale, but whatever becoming Death did, it had whitewashed any empathy I would recognize in his lingering stare.

  “What the Atlas is doing is not even guaranteed to work,” he says, sinking my dead heart in its ribcage.

  “What?”

  My old friend sighs.

  “That said, it is the only chance to reverse the Breach. Suffice to say, had I known the true extent of my miscalculation, I might have reconsidered.”

  “‘Might have’?”

  “The Atlas believes by purging the individuals who still exist from the original timeline, they have a comparable landscape to reset the living realm. If they were to attempt this with those individuals still occupying it, it could alter the fabric of reality by creating duplicates, which cannot be allowed to happen.”

  “Why not?” I ask, warranting his exasperation. I don’t feel bad. He deserves to squirm a bit.

  “Well for one, it would play havoc on the human genome. Were those duplicates to reproduce, the effects would not be immediate. But go a couple generations down the line, theirs becomes the dominant genetic sequence. From which I can immediately deduce five or six existential threats. Militaries would exploit them, creating super soldiers. Incest would become inevitable over time, eventually leading to mutations in human DNA that are not beneficial to the Atlas’s interest.

  “No matter what you do,” he concludes, “we cannot supersede the Atlas’s wishes. This is a disruption for them, but a far greater one for humanity. They will simply ride it out until you fulfill your task, regardless of the cost.”

  Meeting his stare toward the incapacitated woman, I’m not sure why I confide in him.

  “I don’t know if I can do this, Tim.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shake my head, clenching teeth as I talk; it is the only way to keep raw emotion from rising with the words.

  “I killed a man I shouldn’t have felt bad watching die. And you know what? I did feel bad. Because that’s who I am. Mortal or immortal, I’m not a killer. I see people suffering, and I want to help them!”

  “Yes,” Tim replies, “Like Campbell Madison, right?”

  My realization that he knows slides off him. Tim lived through Madison’s violent reign over a town in Washington State, when we weren’t all living in alternate dimensions of his creation.

  “Know about that, huh?”

  “Not a lot of things I don’t. But don’t feel sorry. Madison was a monster and needed to be taken out. The others, I’m certain, will be less easy.”

  “And you know who these people are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then,” I say, “why the long face?”

  Tim sighs.

  “I’m sure Gabriel has already told you... not all the names will be as easy as Madison was, Harper.”

  “There sure is some secrecy around these people, don’t you think?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, would it not be easier to just tell me who all of them are, and let me go about it in a way I see fit?”

  Tim shakes his head, looking down at Ramona. She sleeps peacefully, oblivious to the Hell going on around us. No medical professionals to tend to her, it would be a wonder that she lived, if not for her bond with Death.

  “Some of the people... the Atlas knows you may take issue with.”

  “Take issue? Like who?”

  Tim grimaces.

  “Nathan Wallace?”

  The name was not one I expected, although perhaps I should have. Wallace is so far from what men like Madison represented, the task seems so unfair next to his vile deeds.

  “Nathan? But… he would only be a kid!”
r />   “Which,” Tim replies, “is exactly why the Atlas has been doling out names to you, two at a time. Not all the targets will be simple.”

  I will have to come back to my friend and constant ally in our battle against Hale; he died horribly following me against him, trapped inside a realm within which our souls could be wiped from existence.

  I may no longer sleep or dream, but the memories are enough to give the most heartless immortal nightmares.

  “Fine,” I say, glossing over it in conversation, even if I can’t in my head. “Who else? I assume you’re not going to let her come to harm, so I have to continue somewhere.”

  Tim falls silent, caressing the sleeping woman’s hand.

  “Sydney.”

  That one is a little less distasteful, but still poses a challenge of its own.

  “Tim... no.”

  “I would have thought you’d have less of a problem with her than Nathan.”

  One by one, the Atlas wants me to kill these people who don’t deserve to die. Madison did, and I can understand why Gabriel wants Ramona Knox, but one by one, it seems I must dispatch individuals I’m not entirely comfortable dispatching.

  “I can get her to help me, Tim. She sacrificed herself to save me in the Shroud. No matter what her past was, I know there is some good in her.”

  “Hmmm,” Tim muses, “I wonder what that says about the Wallace boy.”

  Do none of these people have a conscience?

  “Gabriel said seven. I count four. One is down. You vouch for this one. So far, you’re not making it easy.”

  I never sought to add more suffering to an already morbid world. Watching my old friend guard his greatest mistake, I want to run away. Let the Atlas sort this out. If they ever find me, I will then answer them.

  But if they don’t...

  “Start with them,” Tim advises. There is something he is not telling me, but I will not argue with entitled immortals any longer.

  “Fine,” I say. “I guess I’ll know where to find you when I’m done, huh?”

  “Of course. I will be right here.” As I turn to leave, unwilling to let him see disgust drape my visage, he calls me back. “There is something else. Someone, rather, who may be able to help you with your task.”