Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (32 page)

I pull an instrument of salvation off the table.  A silver candelabra of salvation.

†
Alan
a
†

I
can’t speak.  My mouth is full of blood. I try to say daddy.  Daddy please.  Daddy please...  He wraps me in a blanket and holds me.  Others are there too.  Mommy?  I am carried through the air.  Many hands are holding me and I start to panic.  I just want my Daddy.  I try to move but everything hurts so much.  I don’t want to die.  I am set down on something lumpy.  It’s not my bed.  

Someone is yelling.

“I have seen the horrors of the beast first hand!”

People are shouting. 

“I have seen what it can do.  How it can turn a father against a daughter.  How it can turn a mother against a son.  But I have also seen how there can be salvation!  I have seen even tonight that we might be saved.  Mrs. Elise, here by my side, may have lost her husband and daughter to the beasts, but she has not lost us!”

Mommy?  I try to say it but I don’t think anyone can hear me.  It starts to rain all of a sudden.  Do they know I’m here?  Mommy!  Mommy, can you hear me!

“And we have not lost each other!”

It’s pouring rain now.  I’m soaked.  The blanket smells terrible.

“We must cleanse ourselves of the beasts’ corruptions!” 

More shouting. 

“So that we might then cleanse this
city
of the
beast
!  Can you hear it?  Do you see it?  Then let these flames make night the day!”

The bad smelling rain stops…
Mommy?
…and suddenly turns to fire.

†
Delan
o
†

F
inally back in Central, I round the corner in the limo and skid to a stop.  I’m on the street before the tires stop squealing.  Nearly six miles of city before me is engulfed in a towering firestorm.  The conflagration reaches up into the lowest level of clouds and pollutes it with black smoke while the inferno ravishes the horizon.

“Sabetha,” I whisper.

Behind me, a van lurches to a stop and Corbin and Roger stumble out of it, hypnotized the by the infinite mass of flames illuminating everything in an erratic orange brilliance.  It’s as if the surface of the sun is only a few miles away.

I turn to them, their dumbfounded expressions only able to focus on me for a second before being drawn back to the blaze.

“Hey!” I yell and they both swallow hard and snap to attention.  “We have to find Sabetha and Bullworth.”

“Delano…”  Roger says to me, as if trying to explain a hard fact.

I cut him off.   “They’re somewhere nearby.  And we need to find them.”

†
Va
l
†

F
ar, far to the east... it looks like sunrise even though its midnight.  I climb onto the freeway, in the stolen sedan, a big boat of a car.  The highways of Gothica are, for the most part, the nearest reliable high point and from there I can see the strange light better.  The clouds are glowing.  What could do that?

“Dear God…” 

Suddenly, the hornet is in the backseat of my sedan and none of those fires mean shit.  Euthos is already squealing back and forth with his blue halogen lights blinding me through the rearview mirror. 

Bridge up ahead.  Need a plan.  The plan: get to the bridge.  I always pick the fastest cars… piece of shit boat.  The v8 gives me all it’s worth but this thing is a tub.  I get her up to eighty before crossing onto the bridge with a
thuh-thunk
.  Not really a bridge, just a road with guard rails that passes over water.  Ethos is gaining fast.  Shit, I hoped for some lamp posts, but they’re mounted on the outside.  The plan:  Use the narrowness.  Don’t let him get along side.  The hornet gets up behind me and starts swerving back and forth like a fuck'n chipmunk.  I use the fat ass of the car with its fins to block up the two lanes.  No shoulder either.  I hit the brakes to try to get him to ram me – his engine into my trunk – but he’s too quick.  Shit.  Need a plan, need a plan.  He definitely wants to pass me.  On either side is a shallow-as-hell lake.  Man-made I guess ‘cause there’s dead trees comin' out of the black surface.  If I can get him off the bridge…  No.  Oh shit he’s making a move!  

I reach up to this boat’s shifter on the steering column and drop it into first.  She lurches forward hard and revs like a bitch but more importantly, she doesn’t show off her break lights.  He’s using the flame thrower and blows it too late, the initial squirt goes right across the windshield.  As I downshifted I also grabbed the AK and now I shoot out the windshield, aiming at him.  Once the diamond debris clears, I take aim and shoot a series of single shots.  The fourth one hits by pure fuck’n luck and I see flames inside Euthos’ car.  I immediately start to speed up, gaining momentum.  The flames are flung out the side and over the bridge, but the flamethrower’s tank blows up just after clearing the guard rail.  It sends a shower of sticky flames onto the bridge which I drive through, without a fucking windshield. 

When I lean back up again I am inches from slamming into the hornet but at the last moment it moves out of the way.  I’m already doing sixty so I have a few seconds before Euthos goes from a near stop to up my ass again.  Need a plan.

Thuh-thunk.
  Off the bridge.  New plan.  You’re going to play chicken with the most infamous assassin in Gothica.  Wait that sounds like a terrible plan.

I get off the next exit and start heading west on a main street along the river.  There’s a bunch of old mills along my right to the north.  I’m at the lower tip of West Gothica and it’s not far to the edge.  Time to call this fucker’s bluff.  The mills are fading fast and on this straightaway I can get up to full speed so they fade even faster.  My eyes are half on the road, half on those blue headlights in the rearview. 

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…  He’s staying back just far enough.

I’m gonna die one way or the other…

The river at my side ends and so does the road.  Red dirt now.  I don’t see any more lights behind me.  Ahead are the lights of the cell.  It actually looks kinda pretty, all those little yellow lights on all the pipes of the oil refineries.  Not pretty enough to keep me from slamming on the breaks though.  I made my point – driving into the cell – and lost Euthos. It’s time to get the fuck out.

I pick a reference point and turn around and start to drive.  But it feels like I’ve gone too far.  Did I turn all the way around?  I picked a reference point.  Calm down Val.  You need a plan.  Don’t go any further till you know where you’re going.  Stop the car.  Look around.  Do you see the reference point?  It was the tallest refinery tower.  Well shit, now there’s three.  And they’re in the direction I’m heading.  I did turn around.  I did.  Didn’t I?  Or did I just mean to?  I must have been too focused on Euthos.  Okay, so use those points as a reference and make a three point turn.  And quickly damnit. 

I turn over the back seat to back up but when I turn ahead afterwards, there’s someone running just out of sight of the headlights.  I start shaking immediately.  All I can picture are the beams going across a crowd of white corpses, standing in the dust, while I’m stupidly looking out the back window and all I caught was the last one’s foot.  Why would I think that?  What’s going on in my head?  The car’s too exposed to an attack.  I mean the windshield’s gone for fuck’s sake.  The dust is everywhere.  I can’t see shit.  And here I am sitting here with the lights on.  I think I hear something and gun it but I don’t know which direction I’m going.  I think I’m just going further into the cell.  There are refineries all around me.  I close my eyes for a second like I can become psychic and figure out which direction to go in. 

Delano’s words keep coming back to me.

“Don’t ever go to the cell,” he told me.  “Never.  Do you hear me?”  Why is this coming back to me
now
?
“...And you’d notice then that even though you’re the only thing around for miles, all the lights are on, all the machines are humming and all the smoke stacks are pumping… And sooner or later, whatever keeps the cell running will get you.”

I open my eyes and slam on the breaks.

A person is in the road ahead.

A white corpse without any details, like he’s been bleached by the headlights.

A woman suddenly appears on the hood of the car.  Her skin is like wet paper.  Her hips are all deformed and her spine seams to grow forward and down from her hips instead of upwards.  Her shoulders are at shin level and arms lie backwards behind the feet.  She tilts her head sideways to look at me while I shit a brick.  Her eyes sockets are empty. 

“Where is my child?  Where is my child?  Where is my child?”

“I don’t know!”  I scream and step on the gas.  The woman falls forward towards me but turns to a thick black oil when she hits where the windshield would be, spreading across the glass that isn’t there.  Nothing matters anymore.  I have to get out of here.  No plans, just keep going.  Don’t stop.  Don’t stop for anything.   Darkness starts to overtake everything and I feel the wind somehow through the black oil in front of me.  I’m slowing down no matter how hard I press on the gas.  The engine is roaring as I red line it.  Then suddenly there is no wind.

I’m sitting on the dirt.  There’s no car.  The hum of the engine is now the hum of the power plants and it’s deafening.  The lights look like stars now and they’re screaming like children. 

Then all of a sudden they go out and everything is darker than I thought it could get.  From some place that I can’t see no matter how hard I look, there is a spot light on me.  I’m sitting in its light, about six feet in diameter and beyond it, I can’t see a fuck’n thing.  It’s silent now.

Then I hear something walking like a fucking dinosaur.  The slow footsteps shake the ground. It’s coming from that direction.  It’s grunting as it walks, dragging something through the dirt.  I can hear chains too, like it’s dragging something on the end of a chain.  

There's a deep grunt and then chains rattling.  A thud happens close to me and I hear small wheezing breaths.  Then the breaths go away as the chains go tight and that something is dragged through the dirt back to the giant.  The giant grunts again and the chains rattle like they’re flying through the air.

All of a sudden a little man lands in the light.  His legs have been hacked off and his eyes and mouth have been sewn shut.  He’s wearing a leather harness with chains leading back into the darkness towards the giant.  The little man sniffs the air from the position he landed in, on his stomach.  I don’t move or breathe.  He starts to sniff closer to me then reaches out with one of his hands and grabs a hold of my ankle.  I kick and squirm, but the other hand comes down with a meat hook and gets me through the thigh.  I see it, but don’t
even feel the pain yet.  Suddenly the thing in the darkness yanks on the chain with a grunt.  The harness goes tight around the little man and I’m dragged into the blackness. 

†
Delan
o
†

C
orbin kicks
open the inner door and I stumble into the random apartment with Sabetha in my arms.  Her long leather trench coat has been melted into black bubbles.  Bullworth enters next, holding two people we found on the street.  Their necks have just been snapped.  I set my sister down on a couch and Bull helps me feed her.  Corbin rushes around the apartment gathering things that might be useful while Roger comes over and begins to pat my shoulder firmly.

I let out an annoyed groan and look back at him.

“Sorry,” he says.  “You’re on fire.”

I look down at my leather jacket which has puffs of smoke coming off of it.  Scanning over Bullworth’s charred fur and flesh I determine that – by his standard’s – he is unharmed and don’t bother asking him.  Corbin comes out of a bedroom with a pile of clothes wrapped in a bundle of bedding – most of our apparel has been burned away from the fire.  He tosses it to Roger who heads out the door and down to the street.

“Do you think they’ll find us?”  Corbin asks, pausing between his scavenging to look through the walls at the crowds below.

“It doesn’t matter; we’re not staying,” I answer.

With Sabetha well enough to hobble, I toss Corbin the keys to Rolla and make our way downstairs.  He and Roger hop in our Rolla, their van still parked on some street not too far away, probably on fire.  Bullworth and Sabetha get into the back of the limo; I drive.

After starting up the engine, I see a group of anarchist gazers, one a millitus, round the corner.  They’ve tracked us.  The car phone begins to ring as I drive through them, splattering one on the grill and lifting the big furry one up onto the hood.

I pick up the phone and look in the side view mirror.  Corbin is right behind us in Rolla and Roger is leaning half out the passenger side window.  One hand is outstretched at the gazer on my roof like he’s trying to pick him up, while the other holds one of his small stones in it.  It looks like the stone, despite being the size of a dinner mint, is becoming too heavy for Roger to hold.