Chapter 11: The Screams
“Wake up…”
“Wake up!”
“Jackson, wake up!”
The voices echoed from all around. A thousand different screaming voices erupted through the darkness. They spoke in unison, aligned and loud.
My eyes opened, slowly, letting my vision clear as my temples throbbed. The pain slowly subsided, and the voices vanished. The pain was all but gone and I was fully capable of lifting my outer extremities again. But I remained on the ground.
The soft glow escaped my hand and demanded attention.
It was a sphere, mostly smooth but with slight etching around it. It was cold. The glow filtered along the etchings, through a metal casing. The blue wasn’t just one color, shifting from navy to indigo and sapphire. I knew it was crazy, but I felt I had seen this sphere before, sometime and somewhere else. Maybe not in this life, but maybe before The Forgetting.
My eyesight returned to normal as my vision fully rested on the sphere. Bringing it closer, I traced a digit along one of the etchings. A blue light followed my fingertip before fading with the rest of the orb. It was like the thing was breathing, or had a heartbeat. Whatever it was, it completely canceled out the effects of the barrier just by touching it.
I felt I had to test this. I dropped both hands and cradled the device to the floor. Taking a deep breath and holding it in, freeing my grip from the sphere, I withdrew both hands. My muscles almost refused at first but obeyed. A shock of nausea and dizziness spurred up quickly. Almost fainting again, I shot my hands back onto the orb. The pain dissipated just as quickly.
“So you’ll let me cross?” I asked the orb out loud.
The small sphere didn’t weight much, and was made of material I hadn’t known before, some kind of metal, thin but very strong. The sphere didn’t yield a millimeter when I pressed it with my thumb. An idea popped into my head. Moving towards the black box powering the timer, I crossed over the threshold and the sphere died permanently. When I took the orb back over the barrier, it hummed to life once more.
“Well, okay then,” I sighed.
Thunder cracked above me and shook the building. I couldn’t help but laugh. I hadn’t experienced so much unneeded adventure ever before in my life, and really didn’t need any more. But I knew more was coming.
The only path was forward. I yearned for it to be easier, but doubted this journey would be. Traveling the opposite direction I came, I left the control unit and its timer behind, still no closer to that answer of why the timer existed. At least the sphere was a small marvel. Having to hold onto it could prove tedious since it left me with only one hand to climb with.
The angle of the building finally leveled off. Everything on this side was whole, or at least as much as a destroyed skyscraper could be. The windows that were the flooring were not broken, but merely scratched in places. Most of the furniture had slid away, most likely out the open hole on floor forty-five. Crossing this part was unpredictably quick and painless, save that I had to use the strange blinking blue sphere as a makeshift flashlight.
“Where should I go?” I asked the orb. It lit up blue in response, then died back to darkness before repeating the process.
“Thanks,” I scoffed.
This part of the office structure hadn’t really been affected by the weather. There was no mold or decay. The walls were mostly unscathed expect for a few cracks here and there, and most of the remaining furnishings were in decent shape. Even the pictures on the walls looked like they could have been hung there yesterday. I moved through a couple more floors and came to the point where the building had collided into another, forcing itself inside. Somehow the other structure was able to maintain the weight of itself and the other.
It was twilight inside the other building, immensely different from this one, as if being inside the barrier had transformed it beyond its normal form. I jumped through the hole and landed with a thud. It was only a five foot drop into the new building. Once inside, I felt a thousand times better, standing on a real wood floor. The windows were in their rightful place, and were only for looking out instead of standing on.
I felt a strange sense I’d been here before. I couldn’t tell if being in this specific room was it, or this entire tower, or maybe even being on the other side of the barrier. It wasn’t like anything was recognizable, but it felt strange enough that I had to leave the room immediately. Yet the feeling stayed as I exited into the hall.
I ran down the hallway looking for a stairwell that would lead down. The red timer still shone behind me through the dirt-streaked windows and open cracks in the building’s exterior. But it was fading quickly, so I had to use the sphere more, holding it out in front of me. Its blue light illuminated the hall. It made for an awful lantern, though, as it died every few seconds. Navigating this old place with this light source was mind-numbingly slow. After some time I finally discovered the stairwell and escaped into the darkest abyss I had found thus far.
The stairwell circled downward with no red light from the timer to guide my descent. Every few seconds the notion of missing a step occurred to me as the glow died. It was a maddening affair, though I realized something as I stopped in the darkness.
I was the only member of this city to cross the barrier and survive under my own free will, probably the only one that ever would be. The thought took hold for a little too long as my left foot took one too many steps, and sent me flying down the last couple of stairs. I slammed hard on the left side of my shoulder and the sphere rolled from my grasp, settling a few inches away.
It started immediately, the pain circling my chest and a fire creeping into my lungs. I reached out for the sphere as a sudden muscle spasm locked my arm. My hand swung over and hit the sphere, sending it flying down the stairs. It bounced off each step, rolling slowly down. Getting upright was going to be impossible so I drug myself to the steps, and rolled down. Twisting and turning, my ribs burned and my shoulder nearly broke. A spasm took hold in my left calf while a buzzing sound filtered in loud enough to drown out everything else. I crashed onto the next level and reached out and grabbed the sphere before it could take the next step.
My lungs burned around my bruised ribs as I rolled to my back. I touched each one. None were broken, but I was sure they were black and blue. Something felt snapped out in the wrong direction in my left shoulder, leaving me unable to move it. A few nerves twitched in my neck. It heated up and pinched off. I couldn’t grip the sphere in my left hand, and instead held it in my right.
I spotted a sign hung near a door. It showed a ‘forty-two’ etched in the plastic. This was going to be a long descent, one that I wasn’t going to make quickly. I got to my feet, and started limping down the stairs.
It was ages before I finally reached the bottom. At least there were no other surprises, though that awkward sense of familiarity was still present, gnawing.
The building must have been a hotel back in the day, I realized as I strolled into the ground floor lobby. There were several concierge desks around, and a few brochure stands still holding flyers. Curious enough, I walked over and grabbed one that detailed a city much cleaner and crisper then my current location.