Forts: Endings and Beginnings Page 16

  Sighing deeply, Arthur dropped to his knees. The bizarrely solid sphere below him crackled, fizzing like the spark from an electrical socket and dancing momentarily around the folds in his pants. Through its hazy exterior, he watched the forest floor pass below in a blur. Every fallen branch, leaf and sprouting flower was visible in the darkness, lit up by the light of the glowing ball. How many years had it been since he’d seen a flower, he wondered? How many years had it been since he cared? Even before the war, even when flowers were as common as the breeze, even then Arthur could scarcely remember a time in which he bothered to take notice of something so simple.

  So many years spent looking at the stars, so few looking at the world beneath his feet.

  So many regrets.

  Rising into a standing position once again, Arthur Crumbee took a deep breath, puffed his chest, and whispered in the direction of Tommy Jarvis a single word. “Stop.”

  Caught up in the concentration necessary to create and maintain his ball of crackling energy-light, Tommy did not hear the mumbling of the timid scientist.

  Reaching up, Arthur straightened the filth-encrusted tie dangling from his neck, breathed deep once more, and restated himself with increased urgency. “I must insist you stop this thing right now, young man!”

  Skidding across the dirt below, the ball of light slid to a stop amidst a cloud of grayish brown soil. The moment Tommy lowered his hands, it retreated into the fingers from which it had originally grown. When the crackling energy sphere underneath him evaporated, Arthur dropped to the dirt, stumbled, lost his balance and plopped onto his rear with an echoing thud. Looking up at Tommy, the little man with the dull purple skin watched with his mouth hanging open as the glow from the boy’s eyes and the sheen emanating from his partially crusted lips slowly dimmed and evaporated from existence. It was an incredible sight, to say the least. Then again, most of the things he’d seen since Tommy Jarvis washed into his cave had fallen into that exact category.

  With his interior light momentarily dissipated, Tommy seemed almost to awake from a dream. “What’s wrong?”

  Arthur didn’t have an answer. In fact, he wasn’t sure why he yelled for the boy to stop in the first place. When the words escaped his mouth they seemed to make perfect sense. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. With the glow of Tommy’s sphere gone, the surrounding forest once again turned pitch black. The moonlight above that managed to snake its way thought the dense treetops and suddenly became the only source of illumination. It was barely any light of which to speak.

  “Are we not going the right direction?” Tommy asked with some confusion.

  After struggling to get his roundish body to its feet, Arthur dusted the dirt from the seat of his pants and sputtered, “No. I mean, yes. Yes, I do believe we are headed in the correct direction. This will take us to the doorway to Ocha just fine. That’s not the problem.”

  Now it was Tommy’s turn to sigh.

  A part of him, though, appreciated the random stoppage. His arms were tired. His head was noticeably dizzy. The tips of his fingers felt numb and sort of tingly, as if he’d slept on them for hours. Directly across from him, the little scientist named Arthur Crumbee tossed his hands in the air before smacking them with some force across his forehead. He was frustrated; that much was obvious.

  With an audible huff, Arthur stumbled over to a nearby tree and pressed his face against it. Everything was happening so fast. After years of solitude in which his only excitement was the occasional summer storm and the continual search for food, his current situation was almost too much to handle. He needed a second to collect his thoughts, a moment to absorb all that had occurred and all that was about to. The pink-skinned child with the flowing mass of hair and the incredible living light pouring from his fingers asked him to lead the way to Ocha. For reasons he wasn’t entirely sure of, Arthur agreed. In truth, he didn’t want to go to Ocha. He didn’t want to go anywhere near Ocha, no matter what the Ochans had done to his people and his life and his home, no matter what they’d done to his wife. He didn’t care about Ocha anymore. Those wounds were old. They had long since decayed. He no longer wanted revenge. Tamara wouldn’t have cared about revenge and she would have been disappointed in him if he did. She was a scientist the same as he; she would have seen the pointlessness in it. Revenge never accomplished anything, for anyone, ever. On top of it all, though the creature calling itself Tommy Jarvis obviously possessed remarkable powers, he was undeniably a child. A single child against an army, an army that laid waste to entire worlds—the idea was laughable at best.

  Powers or not, Tommy Jarvis was going to die.

  This was the logical conclusion. This was the obvious result. There is a science to logic, and it’s a science Arthur spent a lifetime studying and learning to understand. It’s the science that took his wife from him, and it’s the science that allowed him to find peace with that.

  Behind all his worries and his common sense realizations, however, there remained the God particle and the unexplainable dialogue it seemed to have with the boy. He’d spent so many years observing it, and waiting, and cataloguing, and preparing himself for any reaction whatsoever from the tiny remnant of the beginning of all things. Not only had it given that reaction to Tommy Jarvis, but it also seemed to become one with him. Saying goodbye to Tommy meant saying goodbye to a lifetime’s work. Tamara wouldn’t have understood this either.

  Turning from Tommy, Arthur shrugged his shoulders and pinched nervously at one of the fleshy folds of his neck. “I just—I just need a second, child. I need to think about this.”

  “We don’t have time,” Tommy responded breathily. “I wish we did.”

  While he wasn’t sure how he knew they didn’t have time to muck around in the forest, Tommy was keenly aware of the truth in his statement. They had to keep moving. They had to get to Ocha. Everything would be explained in Ocha.

  With a heavy sigh, Arthur gazed up into the sky, through the tops of the trees and toward the stars scattered across the blackish-blue sky. For a brief moment, he smiled. Over the course of his life he’d seen many worlds. Despite their wildly varied differences, the stars remained a constant. Sure, they were arranged differently from place to place, but no matter what, they were always there. For Arthur, there was an undeniable beauty in this – a cohesiveness that simply felt right.

  From behind the little man, Tommy spoke pleadingly. “I need you to come with me.”

  How the boy knew this to be the truth once again escaped him. He simply did, and it simply was. The little purple scientist with his sweaty rolls of skin and the silly looking monocle needed to join him on the journey as well. Arthur Crumbee needed to come along. Arthur Crumbee needed to guide him. His mother had told him so.

  Moving away from the stars, Arthur turned his gaze again on the slim form of the boy behind him. What a unique creature it was. Despite the obvious simplicity and admitted pointlessness to certain aspects of its form, what a truly remarkable thing. There was something powerful residing inside the boy, something that went far beyond simple science and something that ultimately came far closer to creation.

  Shamefully, Arthur’s head and shoulders dropped. His voice reduced to a whispered tremble. “Tell me you know how this ends, child. Tell me you know what happens when we arrive in Ocha. Grant me this much at least. Mind you, I fully understand the idiocy of this query, the utter foolishness, and the fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

  Taking two steps forward, Arthur moved within a few inches of the blonde haired boy and looked up at him with sad eyes. “Just—just lie to me.”

  Arthur cringed as the words escaped his lips. They spat in the face of everything he’d ever known and everything he stood for. He prided himself on the truth, no matter how harsh or difficult to come to terms with. He reveled in the hidden safety this sort of unrelenting honesty brought to him. Faced with a situation for which his science had no explanation, he was pleading for the exact opposite. It was sha
meful.

  Tommy Jarvis looked down at the little man, watching as his pudgy fingers twiddled and played anxiously against each other, as his floppy lip quivered and the moonlight shimmered in the moisture of his eyes. He could have lied. A lie would have solved the problem, and a lie would have put them back on their journey to Ocha. He could have given Arthur Crumbee exactly what he was searching for, exactly what he believed he needed in order to move forward. It would have been so easy.

  Though the world in which Tommy Jarvis existed hadn’t changed in the least since his encounter with the twisting light that had taken the shape of his mother, the same could not be said for the way in which he interpreted it. Something inside told him he couldn’t lie to Arthur, that he couldn’t give the sad little man what he so desperately desired.

  Instead he offered what he believed the little man needed.

  “There are no answers.”

  As luck would have it, this was enough.

  *

  *

  CHAPTER 27

  AND SO IT BEGINS

  *

  “Get downstairs and stay there!” Ed Williamson screamed, forcibly shoving his wife in the direction of the basement door.

  The ground beneath him continued to shake violently. At well over seventy-years-old, the Williamson home whined, moaning its disapproval and struggling to stand firm against the tremors. The glasses on the table in the dining room tipped over and rolled onto the hardwood floor. The chandelier in the living room bounced wildly, jingling and threatening to break loose from the ceiling. The wedding picture above the fireplace toppled forward and shattered to a hundred jagged pieces against the tile below. At first Ed thought maybe the shaking was the result of an earthquake, despite the fact that neither he nor the tiny town he’d spent his life a resident of had ever experienced one. Very quickly he came to the realization that this couldn’t be the case. The shaking had been going on for nearly five minutes. Add to that the fact that it wasn’t continual, and an earthquake simply made no sense. There were noticeable breaks between the tremors, unexplainable dead zones from one massive jolt to the next. Those pauses, the weird in-betweens—they felt unnatural, oddly mechanical, yet not quite. It didn’t make any sense. If Ed hadn’t known any better he might have believed the shaking was caused by footsteps.

  Footsteps. What a stupid idea.

  Once he’d maneuvered his wife through the doorway leading to the basement, Ed attempted to close it behind her. Whatever was going on outside, he needed her away from it. He needed her out of sight and he needed her somewhere relatively safe. Edna Williamson, however, had other plans entirely.

  Wedging her leg in the path of the door, she kept it from closing and pressed back at her husband with all the strength she could muster.

  Grabbing his wrist she held him tight. “Wait just one minute, Edward Williamson! What do you think you’re doing? You’re not leaving me alone down there! You’re coming with me!”

  To no avail, Ed tried to pry his arm free from her steely grip. Despite her age and her rather unassuming appearance, his wife was proving remarkably strong. Again the ground shook, causing Ed to nearly lose his balance, almost crashing into his Edna, and nearly sending the pair tumbling down the stairs. If he hadn’t snatched the door handle at the very last minute, this is exactly what would have happened.

  “Don’t you start, Edna! Not now! Don’t you dare start this nonsense now! Just go!” Ed screamed in frustration as a family portrait of the couple and their son crashed to the floor behind him, bounced off the tile, and sent a hunk of the wooden frame slinging across the room. “I’ll be right down! I have to see what’s going on first! I have to see if anyone is hurt! I have to! It’ll just take a minute, I promise. Get downstairs, get into a corner and cover up!”

  Edna’s grip tightened further still, threatening to crush the bones in her husband’s wrist. Snatching hold of his shirt collar, she pulled him close enough to feel the heat from his labored breath on her face. “You’re not going anywhere without me, Edward! Do you hear me? I am not leaving you!”

  From somewhere outside came the unmistakable wail of someone screaming: a woman, maybe even a young child. This was followed immediately by the explosive sound of shattering glass, of crunching metal and snapping wood, of crackling flames. No, this was no earthquake. This was something else entirely, and Ed needed to know exactly what. Again the aging timbers on which the house was built groaned. The tremors were getting louder. Whatever was causing them was getting closer. Placing his free hand on the back of his wife’s head, Ed pulled her close and planted a very brief, very rough kiss on her thin, wrinkled lips. She was so stubborn, so annoyingly stubborn and so beautifully hardheaded. He loved her so damn much.

  Removing his hand from the back of her mass of gray hair, he wrapped it around her arm and pulled her from the doorway into the shaky room just as another picture fell from the wall and crashed to the floor.

  His eyes looked at her pleadingly. “Stay close. Don’t you dare let go of me. Do you understand? No matter what.”

  Edna responded with a nervous nod. As much as her husband was worried for her safety, she was equally fearful of his. His knees were bad, his back was shot, and it had been a mere five years ago since his hip was replaced. She refused to let him out of her sight. If something went wrong, she wanted to be there.

  Arm in arm the pair made their way carefully across the room and toward the front door. After opening it, they stepped outside. The sky was an awful, densely packed crimson mess, the color of dried blood, of decay and loss. Immediately Edna noticed how stale the air tasted on her lips, like sand and burnt cigarettes and day old soda. It smelled like sulfur, like scorched hair and plastic. In the distance she watched with horror as great plumes of black smoke rose up from behind the homes of their neighbors. Three doors down, Mr. Jefferson was hurriedly packing his children into the car while his wife tried in vain to get the engine started. Directly across the street Roger and Beatrice Jackson stood huddled on their lawn, wrapped in each other’s arms, staring blankly at the spires of black smoke the same as she and Ed. Somewhere out of sight a woman screamed and an infant began to cry. There was arguing, so much arguing, and screaming, and yelling, so much confusion. Pulled tightly against her husband’s chest, Edna could feel his heart thumping faster than it had in years, beating against the side of her head and ringing in her ears. At first she imagined it was the rumbling of the ground causing him to shake in such a manner, but that wasn’t it at all. He was terrified.

  Without warning Ed pulled her close, crushing her body against his and mashing her head to his chest. “Oh dear God.”

  His mouth was hanging low, his eyes opened wide, unblinking and watery. Edna followed his petrified gaze past the mountains of black smoke in the distance. What she saw caused her heart to leap. What she saw couldn’t have been real. Rising high above the tops of the houses was the head of what could only be described as a monster. It was a dinosaur. Perched on a neck the length of a football field, the mouth of the mammoth beast opened and roared so loudly it shook the leaves from the trees. Beside the monstrous thing another head popped up from the horizon, and beside it another still. Within a matter of moments the gigantic creatures were moving in their direction, more of their ungodly large bodies coming into view with every step. Though Edna’s eyesight wasn’t nearly as reliable as it had been years ago, she believed she could see small huts built onto the creatures’ backs. In those huts were what looked like soldiers dressed in armor the color of charcoal and grime.

  Reaching up, she tugged at the shirt of her husband, trying to pull him back toward the house. “We—we—we have to go. We have to get back inside.”

  Despite her pulling, Ed refused to move. His feet were unresponsive, as if he was standing in concrete. He still hadn’t blinked.

  “We have to go now, Ed! Listen to me, Edward, we have to go right now!”

  The indescribably large creature had reached the house directly ac
ross the street. One of its gargantuan legs lifted into the air and smashed into the roof of the Anderson’s home. With a single step the leathery appendage reduced the two-story home to little more than semi-recognizable debris and smoke. It was as if a bomb had gone off and the home was made of paper. It stood no chance against the truck-sized muscles of the growling dinosaur. Shards of wood and metal, and bits of tile, pipe, and glass were tossed violently in every direction at once. From the airborne ugliness emerged a refrigerator that slammed through the wall of the house next door and crashed into its living room. Whipping its head from side to side, the great beast roared so loudly the sound almost knocked Edna to the ground. From the smoldering mound of rubble and pockets of fire between the monster’s toes emerged more soldiers. Swords at the ready, the warriors in the dark armor spread out from the smoke and the flames like a well-trained fighting machine.

  Leaving his wife and children screaming in the car that refused to start as they pounded against the glass windows, Marcus Jefferson charged in the direction of one of the overly muscled soldiers. A moment later he was dead. A few moments after that, so was his son. His wife and daughter were hogtied and left sobbing on the smoking grass.

  Too terrified to even formulate a scream, Edna pulled her husband violently backward and into their home. The confused duo tumbled to the tile floor just inside the door, scrambling to make sense of what they were seeing. After landing stiffly on his side, Ed was awakened from his momentary trance.

  Despite the blinding pangs of pain coursing through his artificial hip, down his leg and into knees, Ed Williamson quickly popped to his feet. Wrapping his arms around his wife, he hoisted her into the air and carried her quickly toward the door to the basement. Once there he lowered her again to the ground, shoved her inside and locked the door behind. Despite the volcano of madness erupting outside, the utter pointlessness of this act was not lost on him.