The Shattered Genesis
Eternity Series: Book One
BEGIN: YEAR 1
Part I: The Exodus
Brynna
I pretended not to notice the two unabashedly obnoxious college jocks in the corner of the room talking about me. Despite the differences in our chromosomes that some would say result in me, a woman, never being able to understand them, little boys, I could imagine their inane, sexually charged babble as clearly as I could see the untouched drink on the table in front of me. I could feel their hormones raging and their egos inflating vividly, as if they were actually drilling said babble painfully into my ears. I had never had much respect for younger men. I had been around too long to be swayed by what they believed to be smooth-talking.
I was twenty-two physically. Only physically.
I began to contemplate the true meaning of age and time, only to be baffled a mere minute into my mental debate. Normally, I could sit and stew over the topic for hours, attempting to make sense of it all. But that night, I just wanted my brain to shut down, to submerge itself in silence. I was sick of raging thoughts.
Instead of trying to understand the deeper meaning of things, I switched my concentration over to the bar I was in and the patrons that surrounded me. A group of girls around my physical age were sitting directly behind me having an enthusiastic debate about something that was obviously of dire importance. I allowed myself to listen in as one of those girls allowed her spirited indignation to reach its maximum point of intensity; she raised her voice suddenly, shouting about an 'idol' and something called a jay-low. I wondered if perhaps idolatry had become a new college trend. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I zeroed in on a conversation that was occurring between a man and a woman who were also of my physical age. Every now and then, he would smile at something she said, or vice versa. They shared a quiet laugh, and with a roll of my eyes, I decided that they were like every other couple I had ever seen, and their rapidly changing topics, all of which were painfully uninteresting, would soon bore me to sleep if I continued to listen in so nosily. I shut them out and moved on to a group of particularly average looking people in the back of the room.
“I am sorry, but there is no way that Tolstoy is better than Dickens!” One particularly agitated boy exclaimed with an emphatic slam of his fist on the tabletop. My eyebrows raised when the shaky table gave an ominous wobble that left the glasses rattling violently in the aftershock of his blow. His friends laughed at his dramatic flair and mock outrage, and his face that had begun to redden from the effects of his third beer broke into a lopsided, almost dreamy grin.
Well, at least they knew who Tolstoy and Dickens were. As their conversation continued, however, I found their frequent hand-gesturing, and the very discreet way they were looking around to make sure people were listening, to their conversation to be pathetically brash and utterly aggravating. “Look at how smart we are, world. You can only wish you knew what we were talking about!”
Oh, God or Gods, I thought, spare me from such ludicrous shows of artificiality...
Now one might wonder what a condescending non-human would be doing in a place like that. Was I so miserable that I had to sit smack in the middle of a rerun of some ridiculous 90's prime-time drama or some wannabe smartly written sitcom and denounce their players in my mind? The short answer: Yes. It made me feel superior.
My thoughts were rudely interrupted when one of the aforementioned obnoxious jocks approached my lonely table by the window. I know how cliché it must sound, but the smell of alcohol that wafted over me as soon as he opened his crooked mouth forced images of unshaven homeless men buried under piles of filthy rags to pop into my mind in unwelcome clarity.
His future... I thought, having to fight off a smirk as the next thought tumbled to the forefront of my mind, Okay, that was awful...”
“I don't recognize you.” He told me loudly over the sea of voices as he plopped his remarkably sizable posterior into the seat across from me. The chair creaked under his weight, and I almost laughed.
Was chivalry really that dead?
“I don't recognize you, and I know everyone.”
Now, I had two different courses of action plotted and ready to go in my head. I could humor him and allow him to think he had a shot only so I could turn him down flat after he made his sloppy, drunken pitch. Or I could turn him away and be a humanitarian about the whole damn thing.
“Everyone?” I responded as I turned my head and looked at the television propped up on the wall behind the bar. The news was on; on the screen there was some diagram of the solar system with an arrow pointing far away from the reaches of our sun. I turned my head to look at him. In the dim light his features contorted, taking away his boyish good looks and replacing them with the features of a quizzical spider monkey; his arms were elongated and drooping at his sides and his uncommonly dark eyes were studying me with more curiosity than I expected. After blinking once, his appearance shifted again and that time, I was startled by the change; his nose had flattened, and his nostrils grew taller and thinner. In his black eyes, I saw a dangerous lust. I had just taken a sip of my watered down margarita and wondered if perhaps it was stronger than I realized.
“Everyone.” He replied, and I was tempted to say, “Everyone?” back again to see how long I could keep him repeating himself. “And I have definitely never seen you before.”
“You wouldn't. I don't go to school here.”
“You don't?” He asked, his voice rising as he prepared to give an impassioned monologue on why his overpriced Ivy League school was the best in the world. “It's only the greatest...”
Well, that was enough human contact for one evening...
“While I am sure that is going to be one rousing speech, I am actually on my way out. It was so...” I rolled my eyes to the sky, “nice talking to you.”
Anyone with half a brain would be able to tell that I was being sarcastic. But this young man did not have half a brain.
“I have a scholarship there. Football.”
“Yes, that happens commonly, as I hear it. Lumbering voids like yourself getting essentially paid to go to school just to use your large motor skills in brainless sports, and those actually interested in bettering themselves through education having to pay with money, possessions, the rights to their first born sons, et cetera. But really, you look like you are in pain now. I have lost you. Silly me, even as I was referring to you as a lumbering void, I forgot that you were one and went on one of my intricate rants with no concern for your mental discomfort. My apologies.” I started to gather up my bag and stand. He rose to his feet. “I hope your major in Business Communication is enough to cradle you if and when your professional football career just does not come to fruition.”
“How did you know I was majoring…”
“Oh, you lot always are.” I replied slowly, knowingly, with my trademark condescending grin.
“I get it.” He pointed at me, nodding slightly as something dawned on him that escaped me, strangely enough. “You like girls, right?”
“No.” I replied, unable to remove that small, disdainful smile from my face. “I just don't like boys.”
The girls who had been gabbing about the idols exclaimed in what I assumed to be shock but as it turns out, was actually a thrilled cry of feminine unity. One held her hand up to me as I passed, and for the hell of it, I slapped it, allowing her to believe that we had formed an estrogen-charged bond, however short-lived it may have been. At the very least, I gifted those girls with a line to use when dribbling morons in a bar came up to them looking to, as the young people call it, “score.”
Once I walked outside, the wonderfully harsh winter wind filled my lungs and cut at my ex
posed skin. I walked to the curb and dug into my purse, looking for my ever-present pack of Camels. I found them and pulled one from the pack, crushing the filter and putting the cigarette between my lips. Now, for the real challenge: the lighter search.
It was while I was rooting around in my bag that I became aware of someone standing next to me. I looked to see a middle-aged man leaning against the street-light's post and outstretching his lit lighter to me. I know it sounds girlish and stupid, but I had always wanted someone to light my cigarette for me. I couldn't fight the strange glow I felt well up inside of my chest as I leaned forward and lit my cigarette in the flame he was holding.
“Thank you.” I said, and after that, I was lost as to what to say, so in staying true to my social awkwardness, I studied him closely for a long moment. He was at least forty, perhaps even a little older. I was never very skilled at pinning down someone's age by mere guessing. He was in need of a shave, but not desperately; his stylish goatee was starting to spread out across his face like an army of insurgent troops waging war on an untouched plain. His hair was gelled and styled in that perfectly calculated mess that men seemed to favor in those days.
“You're welcome.” He replied politely. He seemed to take no notice of me analyzing every detail of his appearance. “So, not to sound strange, but I was watching you.”
“That sounds very strange.” I said before exhaling smoke away from him.
“I know it does. In the bar, I was watching you. You seemed awfully disdainful.”
“That's my general state of being, I suppose. I didn't think that it was so obvious.”
“Well, I can assure you that it is.”
“Okay. Thank you for letting me know.” I looked out at the street as the cars flew past, letting the noises of the evening fill my ears in hopes of drowning out any more of his observations on my character. But it isn't easy to drown out someone who is standing right next to you, and even the horns blaring and the rushing whir of the traffic couldn't suppress his voice.
“Do you often shoot down the advances of young men?”
“Who are you, the official spokesperson for the conversational and social rights of horny, drunken, college frat boys?” I asked, knowing that I was being prickly and as he suggested, disdainful. But as I said, disdain was constantly flowing from my lips and mind. It was my dominant status.
“No. Just an interested observer.”
“If you're trying to avoid sounding strange, please be aware that your attempt is not even close to believable, let alone totally convincing. You are failing miserably.”
“So are you.”
“I don't try to sound normal anymore.” I informed him somewhat more defensively than I had intended. “It just makes me look as pathetically stupid as those young twits in that bar.”
“Aren't you their same age?”
“I am. But I'm not a twit.”
“I like your use of the word 'twit.' One rarely hears that in conversation these days.”
“I like to keep a wide variety of insults handy, even if I am not insulting a person or a group of people to their face or faces, respectively.”
“Are you an English major?”
I chuckled to myself for a moment, thinking about how odd the conversation was becoming. Was he trying to pick me up, or was he trying to annoy me? Neither option seemed particularly befitting of him.
“I would have been, I suppose.” I told him. “At least you went with 'English Major.' Generally, when people hear me talk, they assume I must have a mental deficiency. One young man, who must have thought he was God's gift to the mental health profession, told me once that he felt, in his not-so-professional opinion, that I was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome.”
“And what did you say?” The man asked me. “May I?” He indicated the pack of cigarettes that I had started to put back into my bag.
I handed one to him and watched closely as he lit it up. I couldn't help noticing that it was quite attractive the way he expertly inhaled and exhaled the smoke.
Snapping out of my own observance, I answered his question.
“I said that was an insult to people with Asperger's Syndrome.”
He was the one who laughed softly now.
“I read a lot as a child and still read a lot today. That might be the reason for my advanced sentence structure, I suppose. I did take a test while I was in school to determine my IQ. Apparently, it was quite high. But I have never put much stock into that. I find tests that are meant to define one's intelligence to be, in most cases, horribly misleading.”
“Is it an effortless thing? The way you talk, I mean?”
“I suppose so. I don't feel like I am putting much effort into it.”
“I see.” He nodded. “So where are you headed?”
I looked at him again, raising my eyebrows slightly. I had given the idea of him trying to pick me up and trying to annoy me the appropriate amount of thought but I had never pondered the possibility that he might be dangerous. To not immediately think the worst of a man was a new and very undesirable turn of events in my world.
“See, that was me sounding strange again. I know exactly what you're thinking.”
“That you're a rapist and a murderer? That's what I'm thinking.” I was starting to back away very slowly, so as not to give away my plan to run should he give me a reason to.
“Well, I didn't think you'd immediately go to rapist and murderer.” Every step of distance I put between him and me, he immediately mimed. “But dangerous, yes. I did assume that's what you were thinking.”
“Well, you assume correctly even if you did not correctly gauge the level of danger I believed I was in. Have a good night, dear sir.”
I turned away, expecting him to shake his head and continue on in the opposite direction. Instead, he caught up with me and began to saunter along at my side as I walked.
“Alright, I'll admit it,” I told him as my body began to tremble and my feet carried me forward at an even quicker pace. “You're officially starting to worry me.”
“Sorry.” He replied apathetically before turning his gaze to meet mine. With an intense warning in his eyes, he muttered, “Just go with it, okay?”
“No, I will not 'go with it!’” I snapped at him, stopping in mid-stride and turning around. I was going to go back to the bar and ask one of those drunken morons to walk me home. They probably would refuse, but I would risk rejection in hopes of gaining safe passage to my apartment. I would allow their advances to continue just until I was safely inside with the door locked securely behind me. I would take their endless chattering about football, or my physique and all the things they would like to do to it, in order to avoid being assaulted by this strange man who was walking beside me.
“Brynna? That's your name, isn't it?” He asked calmly. I stopped walking and turned to him.
“So you're a stalker, too?!” I exclaimed before reaching into my bag and rooting around for the other item I constantly kept on me: my pepper spray. Just as I was about to dump the contents of my purse onto the sidewalk in order to find it, I looked up to see him holding the canister between his thumb and forefinger.
“You left your bag on the back of your chair.” He explained before placing my only possible weapon in his jacket pocket.
“Alright, I want you to listen to me,” I kept my voice steadier and bolder than anyone could possibly feel in a moment like that, “I don't know who you are. I don't know if this is because you're just craving sexual contact or if it’s in response to some familial crisis that you experienced as a child...” I was rambling, trying to keep him at bay with my ridiculous over-thought and unnecessary musings. “But I can assure you that I am not experienced in sex and as a result, not good at it. Okay?”
Leave it to me to still be over-analyzing someone even as I faced the prospect of being horribly violated. Call it my defense mechanism. I firmly believed that I could talk my way out of anything. It was the last straw of hope I grasped at when f
aced with trauma.
I didn't realize it, but I was backing away from him slowly, preparing for the moment when I would drop my bag and run back to the bar. I looked behind me, and my heart iced over with the unthinkably strong intensity of absolute, desperate terror. The two jocks from the bar had been following in our wake like shadowed specters in the dark. The dim light cast by the street lamps contorted their features again or perhaps my own fear did that for me. Perhaps I was seeing them as appearing monstrous because I knew their unspeakable intentions.
“Oh, my God...” I whispered softly, and I tried to remember everything I knew about adrenaline rushes and the inherent, animal instinct to stay alive. Whoever said that when one is in a bind they can suddenly become unstoppable fighting machines clearly never experienced the fear that prey feels. They especially did not account for when the prey had felt that same suffocating fear before...
“Listen to me, Brynna.” The man was walking towards me, reaching one hand out slowly.
“Do not come near me! I...” I scrambled for something, anything to scare him away. “I have a knife!”
The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could fully realize just how ridiculous I sounded. Why would I have reached for pepper spray when I had a weapon that would end the current shenanigans in a more severely final way?
I've always considered myself as being of much higher intellect than almost everyone else on the earth. But in situations where one feels what I felt at that moment, it just does not matter what some faulty IQ test said about you. There is nothing to do, say, or think; there is only the swelling, smothering fear in your chest, paralyzing you while mentally driving you to act. It was a blip in nature, to experience that simultaneous urgent prodding and frozen hesitation, and it was a blip that was frustratingly paradoxical, to say the least.
“Just walk with me.” The man instructed calmly as he reached out his hand to me. “You have no chance of outrunning them...”
“Oh, my God...” I muttered again. I looked all around me frantically for a way out. I couldn't go back to the bar and I couldn't run straight ahead. But there were no cars coming, and I knew that if I had any chance at all, it would begin with me running across the street.
I turned and darted into the road, narrowly avoiding being mowed down by a cab that appeared from nowhere and went rushing by with its horn blaring and a curse word being screamed out of the window by the driver. I had never been skilled at sports or any type of physical activity; I possessed the endurance of an eighty year old with chronic arthritis and spots on her lungs. But with that adrenaline coursing through me, I ran, as some clever person who thinks up clichés once said, like the devil was chasing me, which in my mind, he was.
But just as that expression took a lap around my mind, I became aware of the fact that no one was chasing me in reality. I stopped running, allowing myself to stand panting on the sidewalk, leaned up against the brick wall of a closed health food store and ruing the day I started smoking as it limited my already hindered capacity for prolonged physical activity. I looked around, back up the street towards the music blaring out of the open door of the bar I had just left. I saw no one.
“Okay...” I muttered to myself, realizing that I was trembling even more intensely. I continued to walk quickly despite the tightness in my chest that made my heart feel as though it were attempting to beat through cellophane. If there were people around, I like to think that I would have asked for help, but out of fear of looking like a crazed albeit well-dressed drunk on the street, I probably would have just barreled on past them as though I were just in a big hurry. In the city, no one would think anything of a twenty-two year old young woman speed-walking down the sidewalk. No one would ask questions.
I was alone and looking over my shoulder almost against my will, expecting to see those three men following me. I tried to stop myself from picturing their motives but unfortunately, my brain stirred up horrendous scenarios that played inside my head like cheap, exploitative B-movies at a 1970's grind-house.
I do apologize for all the similes. But sometimes these figures of speech are the only way to truly convey an emotion. They are the last ditch effort of those who cannot make sense of things, even years later.
I reached around in my bag, looking for my cellphone as I continued to power-walk home. I avoided shrieking in frustration when I found that it was missing. What else had that man taken from my bag? I didn't have the time to stop and check. I just had to get inside. I just had to lock myself in the safe confines of my apartment, where I would immediately begin trying to forget the awful turn of events my first night out in months had taken.
I had only seen civilian cars pass by for the duration of my trek. A cab hadn't passed since the one that nearly left me pancake-flat on the asphalt. If I saw one and was able to get inside, I contemplated throwing my arms around the driver and thanking him for being in the right place at the right time. I imagined the relief that would flow through me as I crawled into the warm cab and began to put as much distance between me and that bar as possible. I would even kiss the driver's cheek just to show him how thankful I was for his arrival and rescue. I am sure he would have already experienced stranger things than that in his career.
But no cab rolled down the street, and I was left walking alone. No one passed by me, either. I looked at my watch and rolled my eyes; it was almost two A.M. and everything was beginning to wind down in our fair city. Leave it to me to lose track of time. But then, how could I ever have imagined that something so terrible would happen? Several years earlier, I had stayed out until well past two in the morning many times and never once encountered a group of demented sadists.
Of course, times had changed very much in those two years.
When I finally came around the corner, and my building came into view, I could have cried. I would have, if I had been physically able to do so. My reprieve was short-lived, however; with another strong dose of supreme horror, I realized that the same two jocks were lurking outside my building, their athletically hefty forms sitting prone on the bench just across the street.
I mumbled a very rare expletive and ducked into the alleyway beside the building that was four over from mine. After I had cussed once, a whole stream of colorful words and terms spewed out of my mouth. How did they know where I lived? What could they possibly want? It could not just have been to assault me at that point, and honestly, was my insult really so damaging to their already far out of proportion egos that they had to hunt me down and harm me over it? I cursed myself and my big mouth. I cursed my own over-inflated ego. I cursed the day I realized I was not normal.
Throughout all of that cursing, I didn't think about where the third man, the one who had spoken to me, was lurking. As I stomped and kicked like a child having a particularly contemptuous tantrum, I didn't hear his footsteps approaching behind me. But even if I had been completely silent, I still would not have heard him. Just as I poked my head around the wall, I felt his hand wrap around from behind me and hold firmly to my mouth as he pulled me backwards.
Forget all human tendencies. Forget the thought processes and emotions that elevate us above other mammals. The moment I felt him pulling me back into the darkness of the alleyway, I fought like any other animal in a struggle for its life. At first, I just thrashed around wildly, attempting to weaken the painfully strong grip he had on me. Quickly, I realized attempting some actual defense was my only hope.
I opened my mouth and sunk my teeth down into his hand while simultaneously kicking my foot back to nail him perfectly between the legs. He suppressed a cry of pain by just grunting like a wounded hippopotamus, which I would have found hilarious had I not been in a fight for my life. After his hand released my mouth, I took in an unbelievably capacious gasp of air and screamed. As a child, before I decided against having friends, my companions and I used to have competitions to see who could scream the loudest. I always won. But those screams were nothing compared to the real thing; I was sure tha
t everyone in the metropolitan area had heard me.
But just as the last bit of air was exhaled from my lungs, his hand was clamped over my mouth again. When I opened my mouth to bite him again, he swung my body hard to one side, causing my head to slam hard against the brick wall of the alley. I tried to scream, but the sound choked off as silver and white stars danced in shimmering pools of black in front of my eyes. I collapsed back against him, struggling to stay awake as the ground slid sideways abruptly, right out from beneath my feet. I was hanging upside down with nothing keeping me attached to the earth but him anymore. I was preparing to tumble head over heels into the starless black sky. I would keep falling forever...
I snapped out of those thoughts just as I began to feel the sensation of falling. My head rolled painfully to one side and rested against something that scratched at my skin.
I started to mutter something, but I felt his hand press to my mouth again.
“Do not say anything.” His voice whispered fiercely to me, and instantly, that fight sparked to life once again. I pictured a phoenix roaring back to life from its own ashes, from its own demise. But with my head spinning and exhaustion beginning to take over me, the phoenix's life was snuffed out by one mighty wave of ocean water.
My eyes shot open, widening when I became aware that I was submerged in complete darkness. There were three peculiar, nickel-sized holes in the black wall in front of my eyes and through them, I could see the alley clearly. I attempted to move my head but found that it weighed far too much for my small neck to support. That was new. Before, I had a completely normal head, of a completely average weight.
Strange, I thought to myself.
The scratchiness that I felt against my head was the man's stubble; my forehead was rested against his cheek. I wanted to exclaim in disgust at having to lean against him simply because my body refused to support the weight of my newly very heavy head. I would have exclaimed in disgust, if I hadn't heard an ominous growl just outside where we were hidden.
“Don't say anything.” The man behind me hissed even more urgently in my ear. He reached up to press what felt like a thick piece of cloth to my wound and held my head against him firmly.
They can smell the blood... My mind whispered tremulously. I knew that by instinct alone, before I even knew what they were.
I heard a growl that was even more eerily distressing than the first. For some reason, in my delusional state, the second growl sounded almost conversational, almost as though this animal (it had to be an animal) was trying to communicate with another.
All thoughts shut off quite suddenly, though, when an impossibly gargantuan creature walked right into my field of vision. I prayed that what I was seeing was a contortion of reality brought on by my head injury and the fact that my glasses had flown off in the fight. Whatever that monstrous being was, it appeared to stand at least eight feet tall. It had to have weighed well over six hundred pounds. Physically, it was shaped like a human, in that it had two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. It was clothed in black scraps of fabric and matted fur. At the end of its long arms, I saw that its fingernails were elongated and sharpened to thick, dangerously pointed claws. Hair that was long and black hung down past its broad shoulders. When it dropped down onto all fours and began to sniff the ground, I began to beg whatever higher power existed to spare me from seeing its face. Somehow, I knew that the sight of it would snatch the breath from my lungs and freeze my racing heart in its hurried tracks.
That higher power had it in for me, though, because just as I began to plead, a second creature identical to the first dropped down in front of our hiding place. The man behind me must have known that I was going to gasp because once again, his hand was covering my mouth. He needn't have silenced me though, because the indescribably appalling face looking at me through those three holes in the darkness, those harrowing black eyes staring into my own, were enough to make the world flip out from underneath of me again and send me tumbling backwards into space.
The fall into eternity was less frightening than those eyes.