***
We departed the motel at three AM. We had no time to waste anymore. Alice slept, and I drove, lost in my thoughts. It was really happening. We were really leaving Earth. We were journeying to a planet we hadn’t even known about a year before, though many in the group we had met told us that the people in power had known for decades. Pangaea had always been their Plan A in the event of a worldwide, catastrophic event.
I wondered what it would look like. I had played a lot of space video games, and like every other person in the world had seen Star Wars. The planets were always vastly different from our own, and sometimes, those differences resulted in grave problems for the characters in the fictitious stories. Alice had suggested that we could go there and find that there was no oxygen. As I pictured walking out of the spaceship, ready to take my first breath of Pangaean air only to find nothing but hollow, dry emptiness, I shuddered. Suffocating certainly wouldn’t be as quick or painless as being blown apart by a massive bomb.
We weren’t even sure that it was a bomb. For all we knew, the sun was going to explode. Doomsday theorists had long suspected that one day, all of the energy the sun harnessed would fire at us, incinerating everything in its path. Some would argue that it was the only consequence of our irresponsibility with the environment. In other words, it would serve us right, as we had done everything in our power since the Industrial Revolution to harm the planet we lived on.
“Mother Nature will fight back.” My father had told me once, as we watched harrowing footage of Hurricane Katrina.
I was young at the time and yet still able to understand the horror that was occurring down south.
“But Dad,” I countered, “The people down there don’t deserve to die!”
“Of course not,” He had replied as he clicked off the television, “But we will all pay the price for what we’ve done to God’s creation.”
I didn’t believe that babble for a second, even then. I was still young enough to believe most of what my parents told me but I had never grasped at faith the way they had. Even when I was required to take Sunday school classes and attend church with them, I didn’t buy any of it. I guess one could chalk that up to precociousness.
The scientists who were instrumental in our escape had no definitive answer, either. One even told me that all his life he had believed in his field of work, never looking to any higher power for answers, as he felt he already had them through mathematics, algorithms, and high probability hypotheses.
“But I know that whatever is coming is bound to make a believer out of me.” He had told me after taking a long drag on the cigarette he was holding with a shaking hand. “We’re escaping it, yeah. But we never would have known this was coming if it weren’t for having the dream. That means something.”
It means something. It means something. That was all anyone could say. I remained unconvinced that whatever would cause the destruction of our world wasn’t just an earthly occurrence. If it was a nuclear war that was about to break out and kill everyone, then it was the result of selfish and imprudent acts by our worlds’ many governments. If it was the sun exploding, it was because we were too ignorant and greedy to protect the land we had inherited.
Faith is a dangerous thing. My grandmother had told me that, and I hadn’t understood what she had meant. But now, as everyone grasped at some reasoning, some explanation for the coming events, I did understand. Alice was even susceptible to it, though she had always been more of a believer than I was; knowing that, I don’t know why I was so surprised at how heavily she was leaning on her faith in those final, traumatic days.
Just as I was swearing to myself that I would never look for any divine reasoning in what was about to happen, the horrible face of that creature that had killed our parents popped into my mind like a petty taunt from beyond. I shuddered again, contemplating waking Alice so she would distract me by talking about anything else. I looked down to turn the volume up slightly on the radio. That stupid song about roses and their thorns was playing sadly on. Gross...
My foot slammed the brake pedal before I had even looked up. Instantly, every sense was on high alert. I could smell the slowly rotting McDonalds leftovers that were in the trash bag on the backseat. The darkness around me was suddenly intensified, but somehow, I could see for miles in every direction. My eyes possessed a light that could see through shadows. I knew from the last time that had happened that only one thing was waiting in the vast expanse of darkened space on every side of us: a Watcher, as Alice had begun to call them.
I reached over to shake her awake, but she grasped my hand before I could touch her. Looking over at her quickly, I found that she was already sitting up, staring out into the darkness ahead of us with widened eyes. Just like me, she was already on edge, ready to fight. But I also saw in her face an expectation that startled me; she knew that the Watcher lurking somewhere near was the last of our parents. She knew it was her dad.
“They’re suffering.” She whispered.
“What?! Allie, what are you talking about?”
“When they’re trapped in those things… When they’re consumed by them…” She whispered as she reached down and put the car in park.
For a long time, I stared at her, completely lost as to what she was talking about.
“What?!” I said finally. “Are you still asleep right now?”
“Quinn, they’re still in there!” She snapped at me, “They’re trapped in there.”
She was talking nonsense. The grief had finally gone to her head, and the fear I knew that she felt in that moment didn’t help her even pretend to be level.
“What are you…Wait!” She had jumped out of the car after opening the glove compartment and pushing the button to release the trunk. We kept the shotgun back there, loaded and ready to go.
“What are you doing?”
“You had your dream. I had mine.” She answered brusquely, still speaking softly even though there was nothing but that thing around to hear us.
“Alice, you’re being crazy right now!” I told her as I followed her up the road. “We’re in the middle of the desert, okay?! We can’t do this now!”
She kept walking, not acknowledging a single word I had said.
We heard the throaty shrieking before we had even seen it; it echoed all throughout the open space, amplified to a volume that hurt my ears because there was nothing around to break up the sound. I ran forward to push her down, but she had already fired the gun. The creature had charged right at her from straight ahead, but it had shocked her when it screamed and the bullet missed, veering off too far to the left. She ducked down, and it jumped right over her, running towards me now on all fours.
“Shit…” I muttered, and immediately, my body turned itself, and my legs moved quickly, making me sprint in the direction of the car. I jumped up onto the hood, ran over the top and back down the bottom before jumping onto the pavement and running back around, trying to confuse it. My diversionary tactic seemed to be working; the creature stomped and snarled in frustration, practically tripping over its feet in its attempt to follow me.
“Quinn, bring it down!” She shouted to me, and instantly, I felt a surge go through my entire body so that when I turned around and charged at it, I was running at a speed far greater than anything a human being could be capable of reaching. When I tackled it backwards, for a moment my body stuck to it, frozen with ice that it carried inside. I yelled out and pushed the creature hard, sending it hurtling several feet away from me. When I looked down at my hands and arms where my bare skin had touched it, I found that I was bleeding. My skin had frozen to the thing and stayed attached even when I pushed it away.
“Oh my God…” I muttered, “Alice, it’s frozen…”
“That’s because it’s dead!” She yelled back at me impatiently. “It’s from another place! Just tackle it!”
The creature charged at me again, and this time, I ran back to the car to grab a bungee cord that I suddenly remembered
throwing in the trunk two years ago after my father and I finished helping his friend move to Forest Hill, a city four point two miles (or nine minutes) from my home right in the middle of Bel Air...
What the hell? How did I know that?
The beast ran at me like I knew it would. I swung the bungee cord out just as it reached me. The cord wrapped several times around the creature’s neck so that when I pulled down, he fell flat on his back. It hissed, sputtered, and even gasped out a few words. “Smell” and “eat” were the only two I could make sense of. The rest were in a dead language. I knew it no longer existed the same way I knew that I could bring it down: I just knew.
I held the cord firmly in my hands as I knelt down behind its head. Its hair was black instead of white, but still long. Its features were more masculine; its nose was bigger, its mouth was smaller, and its jaw was more pronounced, though its teeth were exactly the same as the woman's.
“Alice…” It dragged the word out threateningly. She was standing in front of it now, the shotgun at her side. Though she was not aiming, ready to shoot and kill the monster, I could still see the fierceness in her eyes that I had seen earlier as we prepared for the fight we had just won.
“Let him go!” She yelled at the thing, aiming the shotgun at its chest.
“Gone…” It hissed at her, its black eyes turning over white as it smelled the air. I knew that it could smell the blood seeping down my arms.
“He’s still in there! Let him go!” She fired a shot right next to its head. The bullet left a deep dent in the bumper beside my head; I supposed it wasn’t the best time to fuss at her for shooting my car…
I knew that trying to get the creature to let her father go was useless. But I also knew she would never shoot the beast holding him captive without knowing for sure that there was no chance he could be saved.
Her fear was growing, and so was mine. If she didn’t shoot the thing, it would kill us both. The hope that her father could be saved was draining from her face. If I could have let go of the cord that was keeping the creature on the ground I would have gotten up and shot it for her. I couldn’t stand the idea of her having to kill both of her parents.
“Burning…”
Tears began to fall from her eyes now, and she lowered the shotgun.
“Look at me, Alice.” I said, and after she moved her hands away from her face, she did, “It’s the only thing you can do for him. It’s the only humane thing you can do.”
I understood those things suddenly. They were the result of a person being consumed by an evil that was older than their own race. The evil mutated their physical appearance and acted through them, terrorizing the living for reasons neither Alice nor myself knew yet. But although they were completely possessed, the original person was still alive somewhere. They were falling through the darkness that consumed them, being ripped and contorted and burned and eaten by it. The only way to save them was to kill the beast that held them firmly in its grip. I knew that just like Alice had known it after awakening from her sleep.
She raised the shotgun, and with tears running down her face, she whispered, “I love you, Dad.” Then, in an explosion of sound that ripped painfully through the dense silence, she fired the gun.
Thick, black liquid splattered onto my face, and I jumped away from the body before it turned back into her father. I wiped the blood from my face before it dripped into my eyes, listening to her crying softly as she grasped the creature’s clawed hand. After turning back around, I watched the hand turn quickly back into one belonging to a human.
“My mom told me. She told me I had to help him pass over. He was stuck inside of that thing!” She managed to gasp out through her deep, powerful sobs. I knelt down beside her, holding her head to my chest as she began to cry even harder.
“I had hoped,” She whispered. “A part of me thought that maybe he had escaped it. Either it had killed him… or he had gotten away. But I had hoped that if someone had to do it, that it would be me.”
“I know. I know.” I told her as she grasped both of my arms tightly.
“It was my responsibility… but he’s…” She laughed slightly, and I looked at her in shock. “I’m relieved, because he’s okay now. Wherever they are, our parents are okay, Quinn.”
I had known that, too. It was the only thought that could comfort us. People had been using the notion of “a better place” for centuries to console the living after their loved ones had passed to the land of the dead. Alice and I both didn’t know where that place was, but we knew it existed. Slowly, we were beginning to know things like that. The idea brought the comfort then that had evaded us for days.
“Do we have time to bury him?” She asked me softly. “I know you said we’re running out of time. But…”
I grasped her hand and kissed her.
“We’ll make time. Come on.”