Beyond the flashback, p.4
Beyond the Flashback, page 4
He used the double barrels to raise my chin. “I’ll be the judge of that. Now, listen. I want you to say something—all right? I want you to prove to me you’re human. Got it? It can be anything; a quote from a book, a humorous aphorism, a dirty joke; hell, we can have a Socratic dialogue, for all I care. Just entertain and enlighten me; prove to me you’re human and not one of these animals wandering the city like a saw-boned coyote—just looking for something to eat. Or fuck. And make it snappy, yeah? ‘Brevity is the soul of wit,’ they say. I don’t have time to dawdle—one look at me should tell you that.” He pushed the shotgun hard against my throat. “And go. You’re the Oracle at Delphi.”
I rolled my eyes, looking around. “Nobody try anything, all right? I—I got this. I think.” I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Okay. Fine.” I cleared my throat. “The Dreaming City ... by Hugo Eagleton. Ch-chapter One, paragraph one.” I paused to collect my thoughts. ‘It ... it was the first night of the Sacrificium, a night of sacrifice and death, a night when the black coins tendered in the Lottery would be tendered back. B-but it ... it was also the Hora Mil—Mille Semitis, the Hour of a Thousand paths, for that is the day the Sacrificium had fallen on this year, an hour when best friends might become enemies, when lovers of longstanding might betray oaths, in which anything and everything was possible. A night—in other words—for dreaming; but also for something else. Something elusive but impossible to ignore—nebulous—but as real as the River Dire; and which seemed to have stolen into the world on the wind itself ...”
I opened my eyes—having closed them in order to concentrate—and saw that he was crying. Weeping.
“Bullocks, of course,” he said, finally, and lowered the shotgun. “Pure, undiluted bullocks—as stupid and naïve as the young man who wrote it.”
He let the weapon fall to his side. “Ah, well. Such are the things men busy themselves with.” He cocked his head as though thinking of something, as though it were standing right it front of him, whatever it was. “And yet the thing is, I can still remember when I wrote that. Isn’t that the damndest thing? It was in that first shithole apartment in New York, the one in Flatbush, Brooklyn.” He smiled a little, thinking about it. “Susan was there, still young, still beautiful, but had long since fallen asleep. I was wearing comfortable shoes—funny I should remember that—and I’d eaten not long before. Nothing fancy, just—food that fit my stomach. And there was a good dog; Bruno, a Bull Terrier, laying right at my feet. And that part—that part was not bullocks. That part—well, it’s what I should have been writing about, isn’t it?”
He looked at me somberly, lucidly. “You’re here for the bunker ... aren’t you?”
I just nodded, slowly, firmly.
“And if I don’t freely give it, I suppose you’ll take it—isn’t that about right? That about it?”
I nodded again, slowly.
He looked at the dead; at the allosaur and the Smilodon, which must have been some sort of pet, and poor Sam, with one foot sticking out of her tarp.
“Is this all of you? Just you five? There’s no women? No kids?”
“There’s 28—27—of us ... in total,” I said. “Got a settlement in Issaquah ... that’s in Washington State, at an old drive-in theater. It’s been good, but ... we’re running out of things. Out of supplies. And it’s getting harder and harder to make excursions into the city, into Seattle. It, ah, it gets more treacherous every day. We ... we’ve lost a lot of good people.”
He seemed to think about that, scratching at his stubble. He leaned forward abruptly. “There’s food enough here to last a decade,” he said, conspiratorially. “Maybe longer. Not to mention the hydroponics, and a modest medical facility. There’s even a bowling alley.”
“We’d love to see it,” I said. I looked at Sam. “But I don’t want to leave her like that. Do you have a shovel—or a spade? Maybe some blankets? Or a pillow?”
He reached up and gripped my shoulder—the dude was definitely short—gave it a little shake.
“Son, we’ll give your friend all the honors she deserves, and more, or my name isn’t Hugo Eagleton.” He slapped my arm harder than was necessary. “You just follow old Uncle Hugo to the shed.”
And then we went, Lazaro, Nigel, Mr. Fantastic, Roman, and I, through the orange breezeway and into the back yard—which was populated with stone beasts—into his private world; which he’d decided to share.
Needed to share, I’m certain.
FLASHBACK TWILIGHT (2018)
I
Williams gazed down the long, overgrown slope at what had once been the East Mirabeau Drive-in Theater. “That’s a pretty steep decline, Ank. You sure you can handle it?”
He was doing it again. Responding to the imaginary voice.
The armored dinosaur examined the slope, flies buzzing about his eyes.
Williams gripped his rifle and looked behind them: Sure enough, the marauders were coming, the wheels of their trucks and ATVs and motorcycles kicking up great plumes of dust as they motored across the plain. He quickly joined Ank who was already descending, his great hooves sinking into the earth like anvils, the water containers and camping gear and boxes of ammo strapped to his shell sloshing and clanking.
“Those prints are going to be a problem,” said Williams, falling back to rub them out.
Your sanity is going to be a problem, he thought to himself, if you keep this lunacy up.
“Good plan ... even if I do say so myself.”
“It’s been the time for this since I started hearing your voice in my head. My voice, I mean. I mean—”
“Yes, sir, Mr. talking dinosaur!” He ascended Ank’s tail using its spikes for hand grips until he’d gained the crest of his shell, then tore open a box of ammo.
“What? What are we searching for, Ank?” His frustration with himself and the situation had begun to boil over at last.
Williams sighed, giving into the hallucination and its comforts as he had done so many times before. “Yes, I know. We’re searching for Tanelorn, where my great lost love awaits and they’ll be fields of green, supple plants for you to eat and all this, this Flashback, will be explained. I know, Ank. I haven’t forgotten. It’s just easier to believe sometimes than others.”
A shot rang out suddenly and Williams jolted as the bullet ricocheted off Ank’s armor. He peered at the top of the hill. The marauders had arrived and dismounted their vehicles, and were even now sighting them with an array of rifles and pistols. There was a pronounced crack! ka-crack! as more rounds bounced off Ank’s shell.
He did so, rolling onto the beast’s great, horned skull and coming up firing, his elbows resting on the edge of the shell. Crack! (Ka-chink). Crack! (Ka-chink).
The marauders began to fall as he pumped and fired again and again.
And then they were down and into the towering overgrowth, and Williams thought he saw a were- raptor flit past before a hail of gunfire forced him to crouch lower beneath the shell.
“We’re not alone here, Ank. Were-raptors, two o’clock.” He could tell by their unmistakable pale coloring. He pumped and fired as one of the marauders clutched his chest and tumbled down the slope. “How close are we?”
Williams jerked his head left and right as the predators began pouring past them on both sides, snarling and gnashing their teeth. And then they were there, they were behind the snack bar, which was dilapidated and covered in creeper-vines, and he scrambled over Ank’s shell and dove onto its roof.
Williams shimmied forward on his elbows and braced his rifle against the building’s cornice. The brigands were working their way down the slope, completely ignorant of what was coming—until the raptors began leaping from the overgrowth and knocking them down, tearing out their throats, gutting them with their sickle-claws.
“They’ll come for us when they’ve finished,” shouted Williams, scrambling to his feet. “What’s the plan?”
He skittered to a stop at the edge of the building and saw Ank preparing to strike the rear wall with his club tail.
“Is that a good—”
But it was too late, and the cinderblock wall collapsed at the impact as though it had been struck by a wrecking ball, after which Ank lifted his tail so that Williams could climb on and lowered him to the ground.
Williams peered into the gaping hole. The ‘50s-themed interior was mostly intact, it would make a good campsite if they could find a way to stop up the ingress. He moved forward, stepping over the rubble, his rifle at the ready. Ank lumbered in after him, the spikes of his shell scraping the edges of the hole and making it still wider.
“The pizza oven,” he said, scanning the kitchen. “And that refrigerator. What do you think?”
Ank looked at the big, commercial appliances, a bass grumble rattling his throat.
There was a crash upstairs followed by a scratchy shuffling and Williams froze, staring at the ceiling.
“God knows there’s someone or something up there.”
“Don’t say it,” snapped Williams, and pointed at him. “I’m not going to be bossed around by a figment of my imagination. And so long as I’ve got even a little sanity left, that’s exactly what you’ll remain.”
Ank only stared at him, his big, dark eyes impossible to read.
“Now move this ... this shit, and I’ll be right back.”
And then he was shuffling up the stairs—and the only sounds were those of the marauders screaming as the raptors tore them limb from limb; and the rumble of storm clouds as they collided high above.
Good Lord, what a mess, he thought, easing open the door to the projection room as the smell of decomposing flesh assailed his nostrils. What on earth happened—
But he knew what had happened, just as he now knew what had happened to the rest of the world (despite having no memory of who he was or where he was from). The projectionist had been going about his life when a storm-front full of strange lights had rolled in and changed the rules of reality forever—scrambling time so that three quarters of the population had simply vanished, and causing prehistoric animals and plants to begin materializing out of nowhere. And now all that was left of him was a rotting husk with only half its arms and legs, wedged into the corner of the blood-splashed and overgrown room (although the blood had long since dried), and seeming almost to twitch—which was impossible, of course. For if there was one thing Williams was sure of, it was that the projectionist was, in fact, dead, and so would not be returning as a were-raptor or anything else.
Were-raptors, he thought, and chuckled bitterly to himself. Time storms. A fucking talking ankylosaur ...
He had turned to go back downstairs, realizing, for the thousandth time, that his eyes, like his ears—indeed, his very thoughts—could no longer be trusted, when there was a sudden squelching sound followed by a snippet of music—AC/DC, to be exact, although he didn’t know how he could know that—which stabbed at the air briefly before reducing in volume quickly and vanishing altogether.
He whipped back around, rifle at the ready, as the corpse twitched again—this time noticing something he had utterly missed the first time: a child’s shoe, filthy white with pink laces, protruding from beneath the stiff, dead form. A shoe which moved as he watched, attempting to conceal itself.
Someone was hiding beneath the body. A child—or a midget, he thought insanely, and lowered his rifle. The wind gusted and the blinds of a nearby window rattled. At last he said, “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” Flies buzzed about the dead man in the near total silence. “But hiding beneath a corpse is no place for a child, do you understand? You could get very, very sick. I’m sure your parents wouldn’t want that.”
What the hell are you even saying? he reprimanded himself, not knowing if he’d been a parent in his previous life but fairly certain he had not. And this voice was joined by another, a merciless, pragmatic voice, which whispered: There’s still time. It’s not too late. Time to pretend you haven’t seen this. Time to leave this place and its potential burdens as far behind as you can.
“You’ll take my radio,” came a little girl’s voice, stunning him somewhat, for it was the first human voice he had heard since Devil’s Gorge and the western theme park turned survival compound. “The last grownups I saw wanted it too, but I got away from them. And my parents are dead; I seen them killed myself.”
A radio, he thought. Holy mother of God, a radio! He thought of the snippet of AC/DC he’d heard. And a signal! Someone, somewhere, was broadcasting. And that meant power, electricity, lights. It might even mean an entire city had survived.
“I would like to listen to your radio, I confess,” he said, trying not to sound too eager or overly interested, “but I would never take it from you, do you understand? I presume you found it amidst the rubble ... that makes it yours, and yours only.”
He lowered his rifle. “My name is Williams. I have a friend downstairs I’d like you to meet—his name is Ank.” He watched the corpse, listening, but there was no movement and no response. “Do you have a name?”
The wind moaned forlornly and the blinds rattled again. At last she said, “Luna. Because my hair is white.”
“Luna ...” He smiled in spite of himself—in spite of the situation. “Because your hair is white.” He took a tentative step forward and paused. “May I see it? I’ve never seen a little girl with white hair.”
There was a brief silence. “You promise you won’t take my radio?”
“Promise and hope to die,” he said, and gently moved the rest of the way to her.
The corpse shifted slightly and the filthy white tennis shoe reappeared. Then she began pushing outward and upward and he quickly laid down his rifle and began assisting—until the body had been rolled over completely and he could see her in her entirety.
The first thing he noticed were her extraordinarily light violet (almost pink) eyes, which stared out from their dark recesses with an eerily penetrative gaze. The second was that, beyond them, she had no pigment whatsoever: her skin, her eyelashes, her brows—all were white. And the third was that she appeared dreadfully malnourished and was filthy from head to toe, like a porcelain teacup left out in the elements too long.
But it was the eyes that held him, haunted him, for they were the eyes of an old woman trapped in the face of a child.
“I’m an albean, albin—albino,” she stammered, as though apologizing in advance. “Do you still want to introduce me to your friend?”
“Why yes, I do, very much,” he said, even as his eyes dropped to her radio, which was red and had a large hand-crank.
She pressed it to her chest possessively, crossing her arms.
“Yours,” he repeated. “And yours only. Promise.”
She seemed to think about this, eyeing him uncertainly. At last she said, “Can your friend come up here? There’s blood roosters down there.”
He plucked the hair away from her eyes gently. “They’re called raptors. And no, he can’t, he’s too big.” He picked up his rifle and stood, swinging it by its loop lever and cocking it. “But don’t worry. Raptors—blood roosters—are our specialty.”
The first thing she did upon seeing Ank at the bottom of the stairs was to scream, nor was it just any scream, but the kind which could only come from a particularly agitated little boy or girl—the kind that bore through one’s skull like a long, thin drill bit. Then she promptly scurried back up the steps and cowered behind the wall, shaking her head and saying, “No dinosaur, no dinosaur.”
“Luna, it’s okay,” stressed Williams. “He isn’t going to hurt you. His name is Ank. He—he doesn’t eat people. Especially little girls. Isn’t that right, Ank?”
Ank merely looked at him from beneath his horny brows.
Williams straightened somewhat awkwardly and gestured at Luna to come down. “Well, I ... This is Luna.” He looked back and forth between the two. “Luna, because her hair is white. Luna ... meet Ank.”
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. “I can’t hear anything.”
Ank snorted.
Williams was temporarily at a loss. “No, I guess you wouldn’t ... would you?” Of course she wouldn’t, he thought. Because in spite of what she’s been through, she hasn’t gone stark, raving mad, like you.
“Let’s just say that Ank can communicate with me without actually speaking, and that he can understand what you say to him.” He gestured for her to come again. “Luna, come here! He’s not going to hurt you. I promise. Show him your radio.”
