We stayed on that road for a while. The sun was much lower in the sky when we came to the end of the line. Olivia saw it first. She ran forward, pointing off into the distance, and tried to get my attention. She had moved towards a cliff that shot straight downwards. When I came rushing to her, I saw the precipice. It rocketed downward a good hundred feet, the sheer drop making my legs wobble. But that wasn’t what the girl was pointing at.
She’d seen something far more frightening, darker than anything I could have imagined. Somehow, in that second, the air dried and boiled. The oxygen was sucked out of my lungs. When I looked up, I was gazing at a broken metropolis, with an evil darkness surrounding the heart of the city.
A menacing veil of, black clouds rotated on an invisible axis. Spikes of lightning struck rapidly through the mass while thunder shook, felt even from where I stood. And I could hear laughter, laughter secreting from the darkness.
All the world was laughing, a dark hissing, a multitude of voices raising on high that no one else could hear. I tried to cover my ears but it wouldn’t dissipate. The world started reverberating and shaking. The darkness expanded from the center of the city and started pouring outward. I watched in shocked, muted horror as it covered everything. Without warning, the shadows washed up and over concrete towers and ruined streets, covering them in some deep blackness.
“Jackson? You ok?” Olivia asked.
“I think so,” I struggled. The laughter died away, and the darkness returned to the center in a blink. Maybe I was physically capable, but I was not really ok. Whatever this was, whatever it was going to be, this was why we were here.
In the days to come I learned about a barrier that would keep us out from the center of this city. Discovered that nobody was over the age of twenty-six, and that no one had memories of their past. We survived in a broken city touched by a disaster that left nothing unscathed. We were also disappearing, and not because of disease, murder, or other strife’s. It was something far more sinister, and if I don’t figure it all out soon then my fate is sealed.
Chapter 1: Getting to Know My Nightmares
It’d been two years since “The Forgetting”, and only have a month left before my turning and am no closer to the truth than before. I have tried to solve our ultimate dilemma, but my fragmented memories of the past life haven’t helped.
My dreams just kept getting more vivid, more surreal, more malevolent. Sleep was impossible with those nightmares, flashes of the barrier and the darkness, dreams of me leaving Olivia alone in this brutal world.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight, and didn’t even try. I had the cold sweats before I laid down. My mind raced with the possibilities of the next day, but the shadows that leapt across the darkened room kept me grounded in the here and now.
I tried to still my thoughts and closed my eyes. Straining to remember, I wondered what my life was like before The Forgetting. Sometimes I fantasized about it, hoping my past was better than my present. But it always led back to this place and time, and that damn barrier. A barrier that surrounded me, hissing, a weird electricity burning the air. A “welcome” taunted me from the darkness that is the city’s center and begged me to come inside. I resisted initially, but soon felt like I was being pulled in against my will. I couldn’t stop it, was never able to.
My eyes snapped open.
I had tried to sleep in the living room. It was small but did the job. The rest of the house was rather spacious, but for some reason I liked this room more than the others. Most of the house was in complete disrepair. I had worked on the place for the past two years, trying to patch it up, but it resisted many of my attempts. There were giant holes in the ceiling that I did my best to plug, but they still leaked when it rained. And the smell of decay could never be washed away. But it was what Olivia liked, so we stuck it out.
The couch’s old springs coiled with a rusty twang as I sat up. The fabric smelled old and was torn in places, stuffing spilling out. It was never comfortable, but I couldn’t sleep anyway so there was no point in getting rid of it. Plus it would be awkward to throw someone else’s belongings away. This wasn’t really our house. There were photographs still hanging on the wall, with people we didn’t know, so we respected their space the best we could.
The floorboards moaned from below, and I knew a certain someone was up.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Olivia asked as she entered the living room.
I shook my head. I was beginning to feel the awkwardness of constantly being awake, seeing things that weren’t there, feeling as if someone was watching me. Occasionally I would get dizzy and need to sit down. Bags were growing beneath my eyes, and I was sure they’d never go away.
Olivia’s stomach growled. She tried to cover it up, but I still heard it. She hadn’t eaten that much in the past few days. She wasn’t a stubborn eater, but clearly understood our situation. We may have had ample supplies, but they wouldn’t last forever unless we committed to maintaining a certain lifestyle. I motioned towards the other room opposite this one. She shook her head, but her growling stomached betrayed her.
I marched her toward the space where all the food was kept. I, for whatever reason, could not remember the name for this room. For now, Olivia just called it the food space. That was another thing this house provided for us besides shelter. A basement packed with preserved sustenance was directly under our feet. Most of it was canned, some of it packaged. We’d stockpiled it, moving it from other places to here. It paid off after all the days and nights of work. We had years’ worth of food.
“So Olivia, what do you say? You daring enough for the peaches again?” It was hard to see anything yet, particularly Olivia’s reaction. There were slits in the wooden planks I had nailed over the windows, and morning was just beginning to shine through.
Olivia’s response was nothing more than a faint, horrid expression.
“Ummmmmm no?” she asked.
“No?” I asked. I reached for a flashlight I kept on a nail hanging near the basement stairwell. Olivia was afraid of the darkness, and refused to travel downstairs. I turned back around to face the girl with the question still hanging in the air, the light in hand.
She really acted much older than she should. Of all the children I saw in this city, she was the most mature by far. She was certainly more developed than most of the adults as well. That’s why I knew the comment she made wasn’t because she hated peaches, they were admittedly disgusting. Maybe they were too old? Or maybe something else. Either way, they weren’t good enough to eat anymore.
Then something lit up Olivia’s world and she asked, “Can we have some… uhhh…” she cut off mid-sentence, then blushed and twirled her hair.
“Some what?” I inquired. I already knew the answer. For as strongly will-powered she was, she just couldn’t resist the taste of chocolate. We kept several bars sealed in a small plastic container set in a dark corner. It was a very dark chocolate, almost bitter. Olivia loved it nevertheless. I had discovered them a few days back in the basement. The instant it touched my tongue, I relived a memory from before The Forgetting when I was just a child. It was an old memory, and jagged in places, not whole.
“You know!” She squirmed, looking up at the ceiling and only sometimes catching my sight.
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to let her off this easy, not this time.