Lost
In between the roots was a small, cramped hole, sloping down through the thick, clinging tangles. Crawling, squeezing, she pulled herself through. There was nowhere else to go. The roots pricked at her back, at her side. She pushed them roughly aside, showering herself with bits of dirt and moss-softened stones. Down further, the light from above all but gone. The roots too, softened, sliding into place as soil and stone took the place of old wood.
Further still, into complete darkness now, she crawled. The slope of the floor became steeper, slowly enough to catch her off guard. A moment later, she was sliding deeper, then rolling, then falling. Falling into a pit deeper than any she’d known before. Falling for moments, then for minutes. In this lightless void she floated alone. Her memories, unbidden, played out again and again. The voices, loud and many. She shuddered. She’d rather the silence, yet her mind raced to fill it.
At last, a light, far, far below. So far that by the time the speck had grown into a flicker, and then into a flame, she had plenty of time to remember the terror that was the ground after a great fall.
The end of her fall was a plunge into cold, deep water. She drifted, sinking, stunned after her long descent. Her body slowly, sluggishly pushed itself up, wanting, needing air. Her lungs constricted, pain finally sparking frenzied movement. She breached the surface and gasped for breath. She breathed. She blinked.
She had fallen into a pool surrounded by high stone walls, with only a small bit of land jutting from behind her. She swam towards it, hauled herself out and onto rough, rocky ground. Her head laid against soft sand and dirt, and her eyes drifted closed.
She slept dreamlessly.
Later, she woke, stretched, and sat up, back to the curved stone that surrounded the cavern. It was a deep gray in color, and though smooth, small flakes of dust drifted down wherever she touched it. A soft glow filled the cavern, allowing her to see the stone and still water of the pool she’d fallen into. It came from a plant growing along the wall. Some glowed yellow, some green, they pulsed gently at the tips of small buds that hung from a trailing, dull green vine. It was enough light to make out a crack in the walls, wide enough that more vines hung from a low ceiling of the same dark stone.
She sidled around the pool until she reached the tunnel, then squeezed through it, turning sideways to push herself past the narrowest part. The walls on either side fell away, and she emerged into sparse, brown weeds and patchy grass. Behind her was a stone wall, roughly twice her height, covered in moss and vines. Above the wall loomed thick ferns and other plants, casting long shadows against the vine’s dim light. The crack she’d squeezed through was well-hidden by foliage and shadow. She looked ahead.
Lunapocalyspe, or The Really Bad Idea to Send All the Dead People to the Moon
Somewhere deep in the bowels of bureaucracy sat a miserable sack of a man. The nameplate on his door proclaimed him to be "Mr. Smiles", though someone had blotted out most of that with a suspiciously dark stain that smelled of jam. Mr. Smiles himself was extremely busy when the door to his office swung open, scattering papers like freshly falling leaves on a lonesome autumn lane.
"Sir!"
A stubby, bespectacled little pencil-pusher pushed his way into the cramped office with the grace of a County Fair Winning Pumpkin.
"-Whuh huzzat huh?" spoke Smiles, eloquently, rising from the drool covered table and deftly yawning. "Dennis? Is it still Wednesday?"
"No sir, it's the day we've been dreading. It's a madhouse out there and folks just can't wait anymore. It's time to make a decision on the You-Know-Whats, sir."
The pair looked at each other blankly.
"The You-Know-?"
"The Zombies, sir. The dead people? That keep coming back and trying to move into their old houses? And they keep trying to get their pensions reinstated? And everyone's been complaining about the horrible smell and all?"
"Ah." He leaned back, thoughtfully considering. "Zombies. Right. Uh…"
"A decision, sir. On what to do about them."
Dennis started pacing, getting his grubby footprints on all the very important garbage papers covering the extremely-comfortable-to-stand-on-for-hours-every-damn-day concrete.
"Right. Well. They aren't, ah, eating people? Like zombies do? They do that, right?"
"No, sir, they just sit and watch infomercials mostly. Sometimes they try to yell at passerby, but most of them don't have very functional vocal chords, so… mm…" Dennis trailed off, still stomping around on his annual reviews. All of which were, by the way, flawlessly average.
"Huh…" The tiny TV suspended in the corner flickered, captivating both intellectuals as the grainy image swirled. For several moments, the pair simply watched as the news covered the launch of a strangely phallic space shuttle from the nearby Cape Caramel. As the oblong rocket faded into a dusky sky, the men shared a knowing glance.
"I think I might have an idea, Dennis. Get NASA on the line."
Glasses askew, Dennis looked truly awestruck. There wasn't an ounce of hesitation as he snapped into a salute.
"Yes sir!" He turned to leave, slipped on an old receipt for hand sanitizer and crashed into the hallway. The door gently closed behind him with a satisfying click. Mr. Smiles cracked a signature grin and leaned back, eyes shut and arms limp. Another day, another problem solved.
A Place in the Sky
Harsh sunlight pours through an unfathomably deep blue sky as she approaches the midpoint of the bridge, lined with waist-high crenelations of polished marble. Clouds roll alongside, visible against the clean stone only from their roiling textures. Beyond the clouds are distant towers of the same alabaster stone, reaching higher and higher into a sky that fails utterly to hold them beneath it. Occasional arches connect towers, some decorated with complex and beautiful masonry, and others hardly more than a slab of pale rock. The towers themselves twist in haphazard mockery of architecture, splitting and rejoining into parallel monoliths that wave and dance in a constant climb to infinity.
She reaches the center and pauses, hesitating. She shivers. The tower before her stretches dizzily higher above, casting a faint shadow across the horizon. Likewise, she turns behind, viewing the crumbled archway she had only just passed underneath. A strong wind blows constantly, fierce enough to threaten to fling her straight over the side of this narrow span of stone and into the enormous cloudbank below. Peering out, she can only see yet more sky and flashes of towers that stretch downward into nothing lie beneath.
Among all this blinding brightness, she sees a shadow dart across the smooth face of the tower wall before her.
“Not here…” she breathes out, barely more than a whisper.
Suddenly tense, she bursts forward, sprinting now to cross the bridge as more shadows flow along the face of the tower, crawling along the open archway that lies at the far end of the narrow span. Before she has taken five steps the shadows burst and boil outward, swelling in size to engulf the archway in murky blackness. Tendrils of slender ink reach out along the bridge, worming through sky and stone alike with aberrant ease.
Crying out, she stumbles, turns, and flees. Back along the bridge she had crossed minutes before. Convulsing shadows tremble under blazing sunlight, reaching for the tips of her fingers, the ends of her hair.
But she stops again. The way back, clear only moments ago, now holding a presence that seemed all too heavy for the weary stone to bear. A figure in the vague shape of a person. Skin drooping in folds and piles around its feet. Limbs dragging behind it, twitching as they crushed stone to dust. Eyes that look anywhere but forward, constantly seeking, never seeing. Drool that whips away in strings from the gale that blows among the towers.
It stands barely taller than she. Like a pebble before the massive archway, tall enough to let a small building pass beneath it, that leads back into the tower. It doesn’t even block half of the narrow bridge it stood on. It doesn’t even move forward, content to be still, to wait, flesh squirming behind it.
She falls to her knees. There is nowhere to go.
Behind her the shadow has engulfed the bridge. The way forward is lost. Before her stands unceasing madness, unknowable suffering, unending horror. The way back will never return.
The shadow reaches for her as she trembles.
And she screams, her voice shattering what she only now realizes was maddening, senseless silence. She moves, rising, sprinting to the bridge’s gap and hurling herself from it without hesitation. The wind howls with delight as she falls through dense clouds, disappearing into that boundless sky. The shadow writhes in senseless fury.
The Hunter grins.
“Are you outta your mind, kid?”
Verne sighed. The girls in the back of the room glanced over, smiling, seductive. Honestly, they made it damn hard to concentrate. Briefly, he envied the musclebound guards standing opposite them, one on each side of the dull metal garage door. They’d heaved it up to let him enter the ‘bedroom’, if a concrete and metal box in the corner of a parking garage could qualify as one. He guessed Leadhead didn’t like people running once they were in his sanctum. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to make a deal, or to run.
“Yeah. I’m crazy.” He smiled politely, eyes flicking back and forth. He ran a hand down the front of his button-down, smoothing out wrinkles. When Leadhead reached for his drink, he winked at the girls. They tittered, grinning at him. “You don’t have anything you’ve been wanting to, I dunno, test out?” he asked, impatient now, watching Leadhead gulp down a copious amount of booze. His nearly bald head shone like a bowling ball in the dim, yellowed light of the bedroom. It made him chuckle, inwardly. Laughing in the face of a gang leader wouldn’t do him favors at this point.
Leadhead’s eyes narrowed. The man sat splayed out in a plushy leather loveseat, filling the whole thing himself. His outfit was a pile beside the chair, metal scraps and chains rusted over and dull. Here, in the bedroom, the leader of Crush was just another (admittedly very wide) scrapper, a torn tanktop stretched over bulging, soot-stained flesh and sagging muscles. His face was as hard and gaunt as ever, though.
“Test.” He spat out, a glob of brownish gunk hitting the carpet. “Yeah, test. Right. What you’re askin’ for here isn’t a test, kid. It’s a murder. You want a fight with somethin’ made to fight that.” He raised an arm to the poster dominating the wall beside him, a hulking behemoth of dirt-matted hair and blood-slick biotech rising over chunks of a fallen skyscraper. Beorgan. The pride of Crush. Verne turned, as if seeing it for the first time. His eyes widened, and he whistled long and low. He turned back to Leadhead and cocked an eyebrow.
“I’ll fight him, too.”
