A World Long Since Dead

Chapter 11: Hope

Up above, bathed in light, Mason froze like a deer caught in the headlights.

He didn’t even see it coming.

It moved silently, like it wasn’t even there, and now he was caught like a rat in a trap.

He stared at the bright, glowing, white creature that was rapidly approaching him.

Every instinct told him to run for the thick, safe walls of Elysium.

Instead, he looked down at Jade’s panicked face, still stuck in the depths of the tunnel below.

“No! Mace, you’re all that matters, Run!” She screamed, but he ignored her.

He reached out to Jade, and helped her climb out, feeling an ever growing pounding in his head.

“Organic” The alien voice from within him boomed.

His vision blurred with pain, head splitting, he felt as if he had drank a bar dry and was suffering for it.

Mason and Jade stumbled, barely able to walk, for elysium.

The steel entry door lay rusted at their feet, but once inside, they realised that the large, broken, windows offered little protection.

“Down…” Jade shouted over the sound of the pounding in her head.

“Stairs…. Down…”

They ran through the hallway where Mason had first entered elysium, the light from the creatures piercing like a laser through each window in turn as they raced past.

Increasingly weary, they felt as if their lifeforce itself was draining from them.

From a sprint, to a run, to an erratic, meandering stumble, they eventually found their way through a long-since rotten wooden door to the staircase at the end of the hall.

They tripped and then crawled most of the way down, the effects of the creatures life-leeching attacks lessening the deeper into the earth they got.

Finally, they reached a heavy steel door, still standing despite its age.

They were supporting each other now, using their little remaining strength to keep themselves standing.

After their ordeal, it was all they could do to collapse against the steel doors rusted frame, forcing it open with the sheer weight of their desperation, miraculously feeling it give, their exhausted, enfeebled, bodies collapsing to the floor inside.

They slept.

For how long, they didn’t know.

When they awoke, a faint shaft of light emerged from a thin crack in the aged roof, tantalising them with daylight from somewhere high above.

Jade turned on her flashlight again, and with it, found herself and Mason face to face with a corpse.

Fleshless, ancient, bones bleached white from time, teeth leering from within an empty skull, it seemed to stare at them.

Tattered pieces of black leather hung limply from it’s jagged, rotted, skeleton.

“My god…” Jade covered her mouth.

“Tyran…”

“We don’t know that” Mason said.

“It could be anyone”

He failed to mention the greyman in the alley that had fired that fateful bullet, the one wearing a coat like Tyran’s.

It was not clear what had happened to him, but Mason would have preferred a death in this dark and dismal place rather than becoming one of those… things…

In the red beam of Jade’s flashlight, Mason found an old aluminium wastepaper bin with some yellowed, decomposed papers inside.

With the aid of his lighter, he set fire to it, and filled the room with a warm, orange glow.

“They already know we’re here” Mason said. “Won’t make much difference”.

Jade nodded, and they began to look around.

The room was small, square, and mostly abandoned.

Four iron work tables lay bare, arranged in a four feet square grid in the center of the room, and some wooden shelves adorned three walls. They were mostly rotten, having long since lost their content to a growing pile of dusty paper on the ground.

The corpse near the door was, thankfully, the only one in the room.

The wooden desk it lay next to looked expensive.

Oak, maybe? Mason wondered.

There was a silver nickel-plated desklamp on it, with an old-style green lampshade.

This must have been his desk.

Mason searched the wooden drawers of the desk, but found nothing but more fuel for the wastepaper bin fire.

Then, in the flickering firelight, he noticed the corpses hand, outstretched.

On the floor next to it, a message:

“There is no hope” Scrawled in faded, chipped, white paint.

“There’s nothing here! Mason! Nothing!”.

She was right. Whatever was here once, is long gone.

“So, that’s it then?” Jade said, casting a glance over the message scrawled on the floor.

“Jade, I…”

“Well, can you fix the damn watch or can’t you?” She snapped at him, and Mason thought with dismay that it was the first time she had ever done so.

“No, I can’t… I’m sorry…”

There was nothing more to say.

Every few minutes they would see a faint electric blue glow from the top of the stairs.

They were still out there.

They couldn’t get in, but they didn’t need to.

They had time.

All the time in the world…

The bleached white skeleton with its final message of dread was a testament to that.

How long had he waited here?

Weeks? Months? Years? Until he lost hope?

The fire burned to embers, and neither of them could be bothered to add any more fuel.

Time passed. Hours, maybe?

The faint shaft of light from above faded.

“Why a watch, Jade?”

She mumbled something in response.

“Why not a computer, or a cell phone? Why something so anachronistic?”

“Mm? I don’t know” She replied lackadaisically.

“The greymen first found this reality after the atom bomb tests in the 40’s. They used those watches back then. Maybe that has something to do with it?” Jade wondered.

“Hmm”. Mason replied.

“You told me… That you found other artifacts…” Mason mused.

“Tell me about them”.

“What the point Mace?”

“I’d like you to.”

“They were like the watch. Antique style, you know? Necklaces, bracelets, there was a fountain pen… Like I said, we never got them to work, and we never found the owners, not alive anyway. You were the first. That’s why you are… were… so important. Tyran believed it was the watch, but I believed that it was you… That you could save us…”

Mason stared at the watch, its hands stopped at the moment they were struck by the greymans bullet.

He thought back to what Jade said about fate.

The bullet hitting the watch, Jade having exactly the right tools when he needed them, the artifact being a watch when his grandfather was a watchmaker.

Fate, she called it.

But was it fate, or was it design?

Could the watch have been made for him?

But why?

And by Whom?

Jade said that they couldn’t get the artifacts to work without their owners…

Could it be that the artifacts themselves were useless? worthless trinkets, just psychological “anchors” to assist the human mind, that feeble thing, to access the power that was within itself all along?

Mason needed to know.

In the darkness, he slipped out.

Jade didn’t seem to notice.

He climbed the stairs in darkness.

He could feel the entities presence.

It was there, in his mind, laughing at him.

At his foolishness, his arrogance.

Mason reached the top of the stairs, and made his way back down the hall, past the row of broken windows.

There was no light.

There was no longer any need, the entities knew he was coming.

He stepped out once again from the concrete safety of elysium.

It was there, ahead of him.

The rippling water more still now, the electric blue glow fainter.

He realised now that this was their true form. The “greymen” that Jade spoke of were simply a crude approximation, a projection, used to pierce the veil between worlds and observe humanity before they were ready to attack in force.

They regarded each other.

Man and alien.

They spoke without words.

He understood now, the images that entered his head when he first felt the entities presence.

Mason was wrong before. There was no malice here.

No evil.

Humans were simply food to them. All organic life was. They regarded them as no more than a morsel of meat to be hunted and slaughtered.

No more than a prey animal.

But in searching the mind of the entity, it too sensed the mind of the man in front of it.

For the first time, it saw something there. The briefest flash of understanding. A glimpse into the nature of human reality and the physical laws and mortal frailties that governed it.

A spark, but a spark that could burn like tinder to ignite a wildfire.

For the first time, the creature felt… Afraid.

The electric blue glow surged, great bolts of lightning flashed violently from the entities core, the world shimmered in ultramarine.

Mason smiled.

It was too late.

He closed his eyes. His mind was calm, his stance firm, unyielding.

There was a great screech from everywhere and nowhere at once, the world seemed to shake violently, the blue glow got brighter, and brighter.

Mason opened his eyes and within them burned a white-hot fire.

Then it was gone.

The entity disappeared into nowhere, and there was only darkness, silence, and the stillness of ever-falling snow.

“Mason…”

He turned, and saw Jade walking toward him from the crumbling walls of Elysium, clutching her empty revolver.

“How… How the hell… did you…” She spoke incredulously. It was as if she had to force every word from her mouth one at a time.

Mace smiled again, and took her hand.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about He said.

“But not now. I think it’s time to go home, don’t you?”

“Go home? But, the watch…”

“I don’t need it” He smiled again.

“You were right. All along. The power is in me, not the watch.”

“Are you ready?” He said.

Jade nodded.

Mace took her hand gently, and kissed her, their embrace warm even in the biting cold.

The awoke to a warm late-summer sun.

It was early morning, and the pair stood outside a familiar antique shop in District 4.

“Stay here” Mason said, and broke his embrace.

The doorbell dinged as he entered.

“We don’t stock anything made after 2020” and old mans voice croaked from behind the rows of ancient bric-a-brac.

Mason walked to the counter.

The old man eyes him suspiciously, then curiously, and then… A flash of recognition…

“My god! Mason!”.

“Listen to me carefully” Mace replied, and removed the broken watch from his pocket, pushing it across the counter towards the old man.

Mason leaned close, and whispered a message in his ear.

He stood enthralled, open-mouthed.

He had no reason to, but he believed every word.

Mason turned to leave.

“Oh, and by the way” the younger man said, as he opened the door.

“Be careful on the stairs, they’re slippery”.

He rejoined Jade on the street outside, and stood, gazing wistfully at the small, quaint shop.

He knew he would not see it again.

An expensive black sedan with tinted windows rolled silently towards them, it’s electric drive whisper-quiet.

“I got your message, what the hell is going on?” Tyran said through the open window.

“Just drive, I’ll explain on the way” Mace replied.

“Who the hell are you? And on the way to where?” Tyran became increasingly agitated.

“Do what he says Tyran, trust me!”

Mason and Jade climbed into the black sedan, and it glided off into the dawn, sunlight glinting against the black and chrome.

Mace Korbin stared through the tinted windows as they drove.

Past cobbled streets and kitsch terraced houses, past a sleeping world unaware of what awaited them.

Towards a future uncertain, and a world under silent attack, but a future that for the first time rang with hope.

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