“Damn it all,” I swore under my breath. I must have been out for hours, so I was running far behind schedule. The night was dark, and the moon was high enough to be late in the hour. My little girl would be worried, but hopefully Susan could comfort Olivia. I knew she’d do her best to try.
“We’re not done here yet,” I thought. I needed to figure this out, to get closer to the tower and that timer. Questions needed answers, especially why the hell that backwards tick lined up with my twenty-sixth.
“Sorry Olivia, I’m not coming home just yet,” I said with a sigh.
The water was only an inch deep as I climbed down the brick pile and into the street. The water level dropped lower and lower as I moved a few hundred feet closer to the illuminated tower. Thankfully, the red numbers even being two blocks away made a typically dark night a little lighter.
I turned a corner and had to pause. There was a party up ahead, with everybody that still lived Downtown dancing in the streets. The main street was lined with tables and drinks, a usual custom when someone turned. They were celebrating, and ultimately saying goodbye.
The people left would bring out the alcohol and drown in it. They would get hammered in an effort to celebrate and forget the person who walked into the center of this dark city. Everyone knew everyone. When someone turned, it was harder to take, as if a piece of you was breaking off. Of course I didn’t feel the same way. With any luck these people had forgotten about me, but I sure as hell hadn’t forgot them. Rage filled my stomach again, and I had to push it down. I couldn’t let myself drown down here.
I hid behind some bushes and watched on in silence. Even if we were dying off every day to some strange event, there were perhaps a few hundred still celebrating underneath the stars. That might not even include those who didn’t partake in the festivities. I had to be more careful this go around. Or did I? They were drinking, and it was dark. All I needed was something to cover my face.
The closest table was empty, and no one was close by. I took a seat at the table, walking like I belonged and making sure I was as casual as possible. The night was filled with chatter, a virtual squawk box.
I forgot how crazy it got Downtown. It was so much livelier than where Olivia and I lived. Olivia would have loved this. If she were here, she’d have the time of her life talking and dancing the night away. Sadly, it would never happen. She was linked to me, and I was linked to dirty lies.
A variety of instruments covered the tabletop. There was freshly grown food, and spirits that would punch me down into the ground if I partook. There were several flashlights, one that I pocketed, and a lantern in the middle that kept the shadows away. A hooded sweatshirt hung on the back of one of the chairs. I put the sweatshirt on and lifted the hood over my head, finding a certain calm with my cloaked image.
I didn’t want to waste time if the party came back and found a stranger taking their things they so carelessly left unattended. I managed to keep my calm and not just run through the crowd. I had to exit the party without drawing attention to myself in the crowd of intoxicated youths.
The strings of a guitar played from somewhere up ahead. People danced underneath a dead tree whose limbs reached out in all directions. Lit candles were placed among the branches, and an eerie glow illuminated the air. It was hauntingly beautifuclass="underline" the slow dancing, the dead tree with its lights, and the guitar player strumming his instrument to an unhurried, passionate song. For half a second I forgot why I was there, wanting to dance to the slow melody. But those red numbers set me right back on course.
“Here’s to Adam!” a voice saluted. I passed a table surrounded by six or seven faces all raising a glass to the air.
“Here, here!” a woman exclaimed. She tilted her glass downward, and spilled some whiskey on the ground. “One last drink. Drink up. Drink up.” She started to cry. The others either tried to consul her or shed tears of their own.
Was Adam a name I could remember? It wasn’t exactly ringing a bell. Not that I would really remember all the names here; it’d been nearly two years since the beginning. Yet even knowing that another had walked into the darkness it brought me back to the time when I had witnessed the turning.
Back during The Forgetting, there was a thousand of us. In those early days we starved, disease was rampant, and dozens were shot. But that didn’t even account for the majority of the people who disappeared. That belonged to something inexplicable.
These people had built this settlement close to the swirling mass of clouds near the city’s midpoint, nicknaming it for what it was: Downtown. It did rain enough in this area, therefore drinking water was most likely the reason for staying so close to these clouds.
I was there, trying to bargain off items for supplies, before I was ever hated, when it happened for the first time. Screams erupted just outside, and panic evolved into full mayhem. I ran to where the shouting was the loudest: at the barrier.
The barrier was the border that separated the lighted world from the darkened mass of clouds that never moved out from the center of the city. A twenty-six year old woman, the person turning, or so we later called the process, was already past the barrier, the invisible blockade.
I tried to pass through the barrier myself but a lingering pain started in my head and traveled my spine before curling my toes. My skin radiated with heat, and it felt like I was melting from the inside out. I couldn’t open my eyes, and it would only get worse after that.
But this dark walker, as we had called them thereafter, moved through the barrier with ease. They would slowly walk towards the darkest part of the city, so dark we couldn’t see into it.
Some fought to get to the walker, but none of them lasted; the pain was too unbearable to try for long. How the dark walker could continue on against this pain was impossible to understand. Unless, of course, they weren’t feeling anything at all. After a few more minutes the girl disappeared into the blackness. The dark clouds above shook with thunder while waves of lightning careened across the sky, as if welcoming the girl into the gloom. It was eerie to watch. Even more unnerving was that somehow I understood why this was happening, but just not at that moment.
Since then I had watched twenty-two individuals walk through that barrier. The first couple times I tried to help, but failed. I’ve watched bigger men than me pushed aside as the dark walker moved toward the unreachable part of this city. These walkers always succeeded breaking through whatever was stopping their departure.
So I just watched on instead. After each incident, I questioned whoever was present, trying to gain some knowledge or to fathom the process. There was one clue that always kept popping up, the one idea that aligned with everything else, the one factor that everyone usually remembered for some odd reason: their birthday. The dark walker was turning twenty-six.
The table of drinkers were still sipping their whiskey as I recalled the events of the first turning. The partiers sang, laughed, cried, talked, and did just about everything in-between. They didn’t notice me just staring as I thought about our complicated past. A surge of vulnerability struck me and I tightened my hood. Being cautious was top priory, and getting lost in the past couldn’t happen again.
The timer soon came into full view, eclipsing a building at the intersection. Those red numbers flickered, predicting my downfall. Plopping on the ground and not caring, I took a seat in the middle of the crowd, and the middle of the mayhem. This didn’t make sense. The timer was somehow synced with my twenty-sixth birthday and dictated my eventual turning. There was no way around this. Everyone turned, and no one was immune to whatever this was.