Wiped vomit and blood from his face as he touched her. She started to cry.
“Did you see it?”
Cervera stood over the engineer’s glass, jaw dropped. There were lifesigns on two. Not flickering, strong. They were talking. Finally. A breakthrough. Two survivors who weren’t squealing bags of smeared flesh and agony. Finally.
West nodded, nodded and sobbed, stroking Maggie’s hair, wiping tears from her. He nodded. He’d seen the light. They’d both seen everything.
“James!” Her voice echoed down the corridor. Richter heard, but he kept running. “James, please!”
He came to the chamber door, slid to a stop across the slick, tilted floor. He could hear Benton running to catch up. He opened the door anyway.
Two people looked up. Gray eyes. Forty-eight corpses around them. The light at the room’s center throbbed.
Hope slammed into his back, grabbing his coat and pulling him into the corridor. She shoved him against the wall, stood between him and the thrumming, screaming ball of light.
He turned to her, his eyes distant, his mind lifetimes away. He saw Balfour coming down the corridor, the hallway of an alien vessel, forty-eight corpses, two survivors, the light.
“James—
A palpable thrust of brilliance tore from the light at the chamber’s center. West and Maggie clawed into each other, the song of the trillions broadcasting above them, the light reaching out, out, out
When Richter came around, one of the K group survivors was cradling his head. A girl. The other crouched beside Michael, whose head lolled toward him. Richter’s heart stopped an instant when he saw Michael’s cold gray eyes.
“Hope?” He coughed out, choking on something copper. “Hope?”
“She’s—” The girl’s cold hand was against his cheek.
“Hope?”
The man tending to Michael whispered something.
“What?” Richter tried to get up, found himself weak in the aftermath of the light, drained. Something was fundamentally different.
West turned around, a small motion of his head indicating the chamber.
Richter threw Maggie’s hands from him, crawled slowly, painfully into the orb room. Made it to the edge of the drop into the bowl. Saw what remained of Hope Benton curled peacefully against the corpses of Assault K.
Something broke.
There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.
David Smith Jennings died an old man in the far, far future.
Antonia Cervera was shot and killed by David Smith Jennings in Wind River, D.C..
Abrah Allen-Kennedy was killed in the Quebecois nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.
Buddy McClure broke his neck and drowned on the bottom of Lake Superior.
Hank the Cowboy was cancelled.
Honeybear Brown lives on, under the couch.
James Richter went into the future to find
AMONG THE LIVING
was never known to command respect from his peers was known to steal his fourteen minutes in fragments was known to sometimes allow ashes to burn on his forearms and face while waiting patiently for them to gutter out because at least it was something nearing proof that he was there at all
was never known to entertain such revolutions but the autopsy was inconclusive as to when and why he chose to enact such validity [then strike in my name; these are mine to erase.] on histories [if the self is defined as
[/there is nothing left to enlighten
wished he’d sky-wide hands with which to grasp the world; such moss, the old-growth, teardrops of ocean: the cellular towers would embed themselves in his palm like fiberglass dust as he squeezed a little too long, a little too hard, neither burned nor blistered by the lukewarm blood.
considered himself an aggressive driver considered himself a philosopher, a deep thinker, an author behind the wheel considered his thoughts the best when thought while driving, while wrapped within a ton or two of green Ford, tan interior so aligned with the subtleties of his landship that once just north of the Mexico exit when the number two cylinder coil blew and his truck resonated new harmonics across grinding metal, he promptly took the exit, checked the oil, and turned around to home because his father had once fixed airplanes in a life younger than his own.
defined himself in histories of who started hating him when. [the places between stasis are horror.]
was known to accelerate into curves accelerate into downslopes into relationships was known to fear braking.
learned eventually learned early learned a little too late that locating his happiness within the broken puzzle pieces gifted in the hope of finding purchase in the segment he’d long ago torn from his own viscera only forced the disbelief of soulmates and wondered him wandering in search of so much more than this.
he’d invented his own mathematics to explain absolutely nothing.
wished he’d a sky-wide heart with which to love the world: [the world, to him, was always internal, never and he’d hate cities for reasons.
sometimes pretended he could poetry, sometimes neglected the laws that fed him, always hated womyn, always hated person’s who couldn’t tell the different between websters plurals and possessives.
if it were possible, he’d use subjunctive.
if it were possible, he’d trade his ability to dream.
found inspiration at speeds above legal, at acceleration, at speeds in alternate states: [New York drivers are so…aggressive.] found something comforting in riding the edge, the rumble strips calling out, dead deer
at what point does animal
become meat
become carrion? once took a mislabeled hamburger from the dining hall heatlamp to find portobello: wondered then if that was the taste of coffins, memorials, garroted friends. he’d spit out the first bite, but took so many more after the voices.
how much now is left of you? the sickly fascination with unstrung vocal chords, rotted through, never again to sing.
was once so twice so always so enamored by speed and swerves that the rearview mirror delighted hindsight with the dopplered impact of an orange construction barrel. water.
