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A Murder of Crows

Prime: Chapter 14

By Anthony StaufferPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 27 min read
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Author's Note: Within this chapter, the main character, Claire, reads a book of poetry. The poem that she reads in the book is not a poem written by me. Instead, it is written by a fellow Vocal author, Julianna Byrd. The poem, "In the Wake of a Storm", is used with her express permission, though I have only used a single verse of the whole. Her creativity deserves the honor of recognition. Thank you, Julianna!

The lightning flashed relentlessly in the roiling sky above. The thunder crashed around her in a constant din. The abyss before her was brighter than she remembered, and the reflection of the blue and pink light swam in her eyes. Across the abyss, the two shadow men stood still, and though she couldn’t see their faces through the blur, she could feel their gazes upon her. There was no danger in their presence, but comfort and protection. Claire turned her head to the form now resting upon her right shoulder.

The crow looked back at her, its black eyes as bottomless as the chasm before them. She watched as the bird threw its head back and cawed loudly to the storm above, then looked behind them. Claire turned slowly and, for some unknown reason, was not surprised by what she saw. As was the norm, all of her surviving others stood in their usual positions; but, this time, each of them had a crow on their shoulder, just as she did. And, just as her own crow did, all of them, in unison, threw back their heads and cawed at the storm. Claire was aware of the vibrations pulsing again within, but they were without pain.

She began to walk among the others, and as she passed one after the other, she could feel the subtle changes in frequency and power of the pulses. Use them as a compass, said Gabriel. Several rows back in the sea of evenly-spaced others, Claire felt a step change in the vibrations. Intuitively, she came to stand face-to-face with the woman. The other’s eyes were open without seeing, and Claire couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. But she felt the lifeforce within the woman, her soul. Her crow, as if it had not just cawed into the storm, perched on the other’s shoulder motionless and unblinking. It didn’t even acknowledge the presence of Claire’s crow, who was staring at it intently.

You’re next, thought Claire, taking in the unnerving stare of the other’s deep blue eyes. In her head, she heard the response. I am here, take me. Looking her other up and down, feeling like a drill sergeant inspecting his company, Claire saw that she was in a similar state to the other she had killed, albeit accidentally, the day before. She accepted the fact that the reality she was in was, most likely, not the only Dahmer World out there.

“See you soon,” she said her to other to no reaction.

Claire memorized the feeling of the pulses before she walked away and back towards the chasm. Stopping a few paces from the edge, she studied the two shadow figures on the opposite side.

“Who are you?” it was both speech and thought.

The answer was simultaneous and telepathic, You will have the answer soon. Despite the indignance she felt from their answer, she took it in stride and focused her mind on her journey’s purpose. If Gabriel wanted her to kill her others, then that’s exactly what she would do. Do you really have the heart to kill so many… so many yous? It was the question Claire did not want to ask, and it was also the very question that she could not prevent her mind from asking. Shut up! she thought to herself. But she remembered the feeling she had had by the light of campfire not so long ago.

KILL HER! Gabriel had yelled, and the feel of the cracking vertebrae beneath her hands would be something, she thought, that would haunt her to the end of her days. Now, though, as she stood at the edge of the chasm in her dream, Claire’s heart sunk at knowing that such a scene would seem tame before all of this was over.

“I am become Death,” she said, looking at the shadows on the other side. “The destroyer of worlds.”

The shadow men seemed to bow in her direction, and she knew it was time to awaken.

Claire opened her eyes to an unkempt man standing over her. In his hand he held a machete, on his face he had an expression of satisfied intimidation. His clothes hung on his body so loosely that Claire thought he might fall out of them. But she could see that his remaining sinew held significant strength, so this man was still a threat, the machete notwithstanding. Regardless, Claire only stared at him with dead eyes and unafraid.

“Well, hello there, my pretty! I didn’t want to take you by surprise,” his raspy voice giving away the terrible health he was in. “I prefer my prey to be aware of my killing them.”

The cannibal straightened his back in a measure to equal the intimidation on his face. Claire could see the dried blood on his neck as he lifted his head, no doubt a residual mess from his last few meals. She then shifted her gaze to Max, tail straight and ears laid back in response to the threat before them. He had a paw on her leg, flexing it so that she could feel his claws extending and retracting.

“I’m busy,” she said to the man, raising her glare back to him. She then lifted the Hellcat that was sitting in her lap and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet right between the man’s eyes.

Claire stood up and stretched, welcoming the new style of pulsing vibrations within her. She nodded to herself in satisfaction, then leaned down and picked up the dead man’s machete. Winking at Max the Cat, she began packing up her things with some haste. That gunshot will definitely draw unwanted attention. And she wasn’t wrong…

As she secured the sleeping bag to the bottom of her backpack, a familiar voice floated across the empty store, but it dripped with poison.

“Look kids, this bitch killed your father.”

Julie, she thought as she turned towards her. It was this world’s Julie, and Claire barely recognized her. Her hair was a frizzy rat’s nest, the black heavily sprayed with gray. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her barely-there, tattered dress hung about her like it was on a hanger. Julie’s eyes had a madness behind them, and it brought a pang of sadness to Claire’s heart. To either side of Julie stood two boys, twins, probably no more than thirteen of fourteen years old. Their condition was no better than their mother’s, except that their madness was more subdued. Claire could see no despair in their faces as they looked at the corpse of their father, all that she saw was the both of them licking their lips. Are they hungry?!

Through the lump in her throat, Claire said to the woman before her, “Julie, this is not who you are?”

Julie’s madness hiccupped, and her expression became one of enraged curiosity. “How do you know me?”

Claire finished packing her things and slung the backpack across her back. Without changing her expression, she concentrated on the matching the vibrations within her to the vibrations she felt when she stood before her other in the dream. She could feel it working. She could feel that other’s reality inching closer to her, the pulses gaining in frequency. But Claire felt no pain this time. Giving herself over to her journey was exactly what she needed to do. Not only could Claire feel the other’s reality approaching, but she knew what direction she’d have to head once she got there, and, more important still, she now knew, intuitively, how to open the doorway between worlds.

“It doesn’t matter how I know you, Julie. I just know that there are better versions of you out there, and I hope you can take some joy in knowing that.”

Julie let out a growl of irritation, and she watched as this strange woman, who spoke to her as though they were friends, picked up her late husband’s machete off the floor.

“Get her, boys!”

The pulsing vibrations began to seemingly emanate from her body as the realities grew ever closer. The power Claire felt was kind of intoxicating, and a smile spread across her face. At the same time, Julie’s boys took off at a sprint, raising their own machetes in preparation for their attack. Julie herself watched intently, her own self-loathing still held at bay by the curiosity this strange woman had dug up insider her. Claire, with Max in her arms, smiled at Julie.

“Goodbye, my friend,” she said.

The two worlds met and the air around Claire crackled with energy. There was a flash of white light and Julie and her twin boys were gone. The Walmart she found herself in appeared eerily similar to the one she just left, with the exception of the bodies of John Friedman and Julie’s husband. The place was quiet, so she set down the backpack and transferred Max into it, leaving the zipper partially open for him. Claire then closed her eyes and focused on the pulses, waiting for them show her the way.

Gun and machete at the ready, she took off through the store and made her way through the fog outside. The search for her other was on, and the long journey was laid before her. It was near the noon hour when Claire knew where she was headed, the Pennsburg Diner. She had seen gnawed bones and decaying human body parts all along the way to the diner, and so she knew that this was another Dahmer World. Is my other a ‘Dahmer’? The thought gave her a shiver but steeled her feelings against the idea of killing her.

She snuck up to a window on the restaurant’s west side and took a peek. There were three people at the bar, two men and a woman. The woman was obviously her other, she’d be able to recognize herself from a mile away. She only knew one of the two men… It was Dylan Overby, her ex-husband. Claire rolled her eyes and took a deep breath. She ducked beneath the level of the windows and made her way quietly to the front entrance. The diner had a small entryway with entrances on opposite sides, with the entrance to the restaurant proper on the adjacent wall. On the side that Claire had chosen, the glass in the door was long ago shattered into nonexistence, leaving only the restaurant door to be opened. I’ll have some sort of surprise, anyway.

As the three sat at the counter eating, Claire flung open the door and raised the pistol, ready to fire. She balanced the arm holding the gun on the blade of the machete while the men stood up at the intrusion. Her other simply turned around and looked at her, the blankness in her eyes unnerving. Claire decided she was not going to screw around, and she put a bullet in the head of the man to the right, then swung the machete and sliced the neck of Dylan to her left. Without pause, she brought the gun barrel to the forehead of her other.

“Weapons?”

Her other shook her head ‘no’, then asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m you,” she answered, sitting down in Dylan’s chair. “But I’m not you.”

“I’ve seen you in my dreams,” said Other Claire as she wiped her mouth with a dirty cloth. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Who are you eating?” She never expected the question to be answered as she looked at the man-steak sitting on the plate next to her. “How can you do this?”

“We need to survive,” Other Claire said, somewhat flippantly. “I’m not sure who he is. We went to school together, I know that. Maybe…”

Don’t say it, Claire thought, the ultimate dread invading her psyche.

“Er-”

“NO!” she screamed and stood up, aiming the Hellcat at her other again. “You deserve to die!”

* * *

“Why do I deserve to die?!” her other screamed back. “Because I’m doing what I need to do?!”

Claire grunted as the woman opposite of her knocked the pistol from her hand and punched her in the face.

“I’ve seen you in my dreams,” Other Claire kept herself in close proximity to maintain the upper hand. “The crow tells me that I should let you kill me. But I’m doing well here, working for The Corporation.”

Claire backed into Other Claire’s black office desk. She hadn’t been in the old B&H building in many years. She remembered it being a grocery store, then, more recently, an appliance store. Eric had known the family that owned it quite well from his childhood. Now, here, it was the Office of Public Trust. Corporations had taken over this world, and her other had been caught up in their ladder of control. This office was responsible for dispensing necessities to the residents of the Valley. They got to choose, essentially, who was to live or die, and it was all based on their contribution to The Corporation. How many people… how many friends had her other condemned to death because her boss said it was necessary?

“This is not who you are!” Claire said. “You compromised yourself to survive.”

Other Claire grabbed her by the throat. But Max wasn’t having it. The cat rose quickly out of the backpack and swiped at the hand on Claire’s throat, cutting deep and making the woman pull her hand back, blood blooming from the laceration without pause. Claire took the opening and threw a punch combination into the face of the other.

“I did what I had to do…” said the other, holding her now broken nose.

Claire pulled the machete from under her backpack.

* * *

Her other ducked the swing of the machete and its blade crashed into the register, sending it to the floor of the convenience store. Claire braced herself and lunged forward, catching her attacker off-guard and putting her shoulder into her chin. Other Claire was swept off of her feet with the blow, her Makarov pistol flying from her grip.

With Claire’s blade to her throat, her other spat some words out in Russian. This pissed her off. Claire had only been in this world for a few hours, but the revelation of it hit her full bore. Apparently, back in the early days of President Reagan, the Soviets had made a nuclear incursion into the United States, their point of attack was New Orleans. Norfolk, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston were all nuked in quick succession. The invasion made landfall in Alabama, North Carolina, and Connecticut. The eastern United States was quickly overrun, the lower Mississippi and Ohio Rivers the New World’s border between the United States and Novyyrus, the Soviet Union’s newest Soviet Socialist Republic.

She knew she was in for a surprise when she saw every sign was in both English and Russian. In the four decades since the Soviet invasion, and with most of the major cities on the eastern seaboard nothing more than nuclear wastelands, Claire’s precious Valley had been built up into a populous suburb of King of Prussia. Her other appeared to be a tax collector, and she wore a uniform that appeared rather militaristic.

Claire let the vibrations within her lead her to the Turkey Hill, now called Malen’kiy Magnit, where she found her other harassing the American cashier. She ambushed the two men to either side of Other Claire, having perfected her ‘one shot, one slice’ technique. It was only a few moments after that when she had her other on the floor and heard her scream in Russian. She also heard the approach of sirens, her presence did not go unnoticed.

“Speak English!” Claire yelled at the woman on the floor.

It was then that Other Claire saw the woman holding the blade to her neck for who she was. Her face crinkled in utter confusion. “Who the hell are you?” she whispered, her native tongue flowing out of her with no hint of Russian beneath it.

“I am Death,” Claire whispered back, then pulled the machete swiftly away from Other Claire’s neck and plunged it through her heart.

The gasp of the cashier reminded her that she was not alone. Max popped his head out of the backpack and meowed his urgency at Claire. She removed the machete, wiped the blood on her other’s uniform, and placed her hand to the dead woman’s mouth to collect her soul. The rush of the soul flowing into her was like a drug, and she threw her head back in ecstasy. The sirens were much louder when she returned herself to the moment and she quickly stowed the machete on her back and tucked her pistol into her pants.

“Goodbye, comrade,” she said to Other Claire, then turned to the cashier. “I’m sorry for the troubles you’re about to have.”

Claire had lost count long ago of how many worlds she had visited, and along the way, she was able to connect the style of her vibrations to the type of world she was about to travel to. So, she tuned in to a world that she felt was apocalyptic and disappeared, the cashier looking on in stunned silence.

* * *

The Turkey Hill was abandoned in this world, and the dense fog told her that it was either a meteor-strike, or the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption, that led to it. She walked the near mile it took to get to the reservoir, heading down 6th Street and into the wooded lands beyond. The clearing was empty and dark by the time she arrived, but the used firepit she found let her know that she had been to this world before. She didn’t care what world it was, only that she was alone. It was time for a rest day.

The MRE disappeared quickly into her belly, and she pulled the book of poetry from her pack while Max lay at her feet, purring loudly by the fire. She turned the book to page 77, to a poem that had become one of her favorites, In the Wake of a Storm.

So you shift your attention

to protecting the one person you truly can

and mentally prepare yourself for the next storm,

ensuring you have clothes to bundle up in,

an umbrella for the journey,

and—if you're lucky—an escape plan.

This verse resonated most with Claire’s current situation. The only question was what was her escape plan? I don’t even know what the endgame is! As if in answer, a light snow began to fall in the clearing, and she wrapped herself tighter in the sleeping bag. To Claire, it didn’t even feel cold enough to snow, but then again, she wasn’t even sure what the date was. The last date she remembered was November 2nd.

She didn’t let such things bother her, though, because she certainly wasn’t living a normal life. Days, months, years, even daytime or nighttime had no real meaning to her anymore. All there was to her life was Max, reality-jumping, and convincing herself that she needed to take the lives of her others. Fortunately for her, the lion’s share of the others that she’d come across weren’t exactly stellar individuals. It still confused her that, as deeply convicted and caring as she was, her others could fall victim to the basest feelings of humanity and do such terrible things to others. Part of her actually felt joy in knowing that those versions of her were now dead.

A few more poems later and sleep took her, the purring of Max against her belly a comfort. When she awoke, Claire opened her eyes to a light layer of snow covering the clearing and the fire burning low. The fog was as thick as ever, and she wondered if the fog would ever lift in this world. Max was not with her as she got out of the sleeping bag and stretched. She reached into her backpack and pulled out an apple for breakfast, but before she could take a first bite, her eyes fell upon the trail of blood heading off into the woods. Claire set the apple down on the sleeping bag and pulled the Hellcat from her waist.

The trail of blood only led a short way into the trees, but her heart broke at its end. There lay Max, unmoving and bloodied.

“Oh, God!” she yelled quietly. She rushed to his little body and placed her hand on his near frozen form. “No!”

Claire’s tears flowed freely in icy morning, her only friend on this journey was gone. Max had helped her so many times over the days and weeks of reality-jumping. Looking around Max, she saw other cat paws, but they were much larger. Bobcat… She picked up his body and held him to her chest. What was she to do now? Her thoughts sped through her mind like a motorcycle down a highway. Suddenly, her mind stopped, and she set the cat back down in the snow. Would it work? Claire had no idea, but it was worth a shot.

She closed her eyes and placed her hand in front of Max’s mouth. Reaching out with her internal vibrations, she tried to connect with Max’s soul. There was no sense of time in those moments of searching, and for all she knew, it could have been years that she was sitting there. Then she felt something, nothing more than a tickle. It didn’t feel like the souls of her others, but it felt like a soul. With all of her will, she pulled at the entity inside Max. There! And with her mind she wrapped her will around it. It began to loosen.

Before she knew it, Claire was in the dream. The crow stood on her shoulder, and her others, still too numerous to count, were unmoving and staring into nothing, their own crows silent and still. At her feet she saw a shimmer of green and blue, and she knelt to get closer to it, to feel it more intensely. Claire put her dream hands around the shimmer and focused; in the real world, a small streamer of shimmering green and blue light poked out of the cat’s mouth. Time continued to stretch out, but Claire would not relent. Then she felt it, the first contact with Max’s soul.

Time began to speed up again, and she felt the soul wash through her. In the dream, she saw Max materialize. As if nothing had happened to him, the cat rubbed his head on her hand and purred loudly. She wasn’t sure what she had just accomplished, or what the repercussions of it would be, but she didn’t care. She had her Max back! It didn’t matter to her that he would only be in her mind, he would be there.

When she opened her eyes, Claire saw that there was a small pile of gray ash where Max’s body should have been. Around her the snow had all melted, and the air smelled warm and fresh, like a late spring morning. She could feel the cat’s presence within her, as though Max had become a part of her at the core. Where she had brought their souls together, she knew, intuitively, that nothing could separate them. Claire took a deep breath and felt the fatigue in every ounce of her body. She had blocked the pain of the numerous cuts, scrapes, and bruises she’d suffered over the last however many days or weeks. It was something she could no longer do, and she knew it was time to return to the dream.

She laid back down in the sleeping bag and was asleep within the span of a breath, and the dream was there. With Max by her side, she looked again to her others, living statues representing the facets of her own existence throughout the realities. Interspersed among them were spots that were empty, except for the carcasses of crows. A murder of crows, she thought cynically. And she walked among them, still unable to count their number, despite having taken out enough of her others to lose count. As she looked over the others, Claire felt herself drawn. Time seemed to slow as she made her way to the pull’s source, unsure of what she would find.

The woman she stopped in front of stared into nowhere, the crow on her shoulder following Claire imperceptibly. She wore a gray pantsuit with a white blouse underneath. Her hair was a dirty blonde, inverted bob; she stared with large eyes of a deep blue; and she stood tall, her back straight and confident. This Other Claire had shallow laugh lines under a thin sheen of makeup, and the soft, rosy lipstick gave her lips a subtle pout. She was a professional of some sort, and Claire felt a pang of jealousy looking her up and down. Who do you work for? Do you help, or do you hurt? Am I going to like you? The answers didn’t come, but the vibe she got was that this woman was one to envy.

Max rubbed against her leg, then rubbed against the leg of her other and meowed loudly. Max knew that there was something special about this one, and a wave of fear shivered through her. The cynicism that Claire had developed on her journey ran into a wall, and she realized that this other may be a good person. The fear was having to kill that good person, and how she could convince herself that doing so was the right thing to do. She chose to go to this woman’s world next and tuned her vibrations accordingly.

Claire stared at the other as she tuned into her, then she let out an audible gasp. The tuning connected them, and when the connection was made, Other Claire’s eyes shifted, for only an instant, to her and back to nowhere. Eyes wide, Claire moved in a little closer, unsure of what she saw. This had never happened before, and she was unsure of why it happened now. She severed the connection quickly, her gaze locked on the other. Stiffly, she moved to stand by the other next to them and established a connection with her.

Nothing… nothing at all. She looked to the ground and shook her head back and forth. Spinning, she stepped back to Professional Claire and re-established the link. There! She had seen it! Professional Claire’s eyes did it again! Does she know?

“Mother,” said the shadows across the chasm behind her.

Claire turned her head and torso slowly, looking past the crow on her shoulder to see the shadow men. She whipped her head back to stare once again at her other. “Oh my God!”

She quickly woke up, the fog still hanging thick in the clearing. As she sat up, a single tear rolled down her cheek. Was she a mother in that reality? What was that world like? What were her children like? Who was their father? The revelation made her shiver again, and she rushed to pack up her things. It was time to learn what her life should have been.

* * *

Belphegor’s head slapped off the concrete floor, Gabriel’s hand crushing his throat. He had not felt this kind of pain since his days of being human. He didn’t know that he was capable of being harmed in this way since those days. But Gabriel’s strength was insurmountable. Belphegor left their last meeting with a sense of foreboding. There was no chance of defying Yehwah, it was his pledge to indulge his boss as was required. Yet, there was no chance of overcoming the angel. Yehwah had sacrificed him, and it appeared that Gabriel would oblige that sacrifice.

Gabriel had put his face within inches of Belphegor’s, “I am the first of the first! I have supremacy here, demon! I told you to stay out of the succession, yet you persisted!” He pulled Belphegor up slightly and slammed his head into the cement a second time.

“I… had… no… choice…” the demon gasped through his compressed throat.

Gabriel hung his head in sadness and closed his eyes. “And neither do I, brother.”

He placed his knee on Belphegor’s chest and removed his hand from the demon’s throat. Gabriel’s eyes flung open and flashed an iridescent blue as he dug his hand into Belphegor’s chest to remove his heart. He held up the heart in front of him and flared his eyes even brighter. The demon’s heart burst into blue flame and disappeared.

“Requiesce in pace, frater,” he whispered to his empty hand. Rest in peace, brother.

Yehwah would not take kindly to losing one of his demons, and Gabriel had no clue as to what the repercussions would be throughout the multiverse. He knew the power of the Yahweh and the Yehwah, but he didn’t know the extent of the powers of their stewards. As it was, he was loath to go see his steward after this act. Yes, the current Yahweh was diminishing rapidly, but the power of the deities was potent right up until their end, and no angel or demon had ever killed another angel or demon in the history of the cosmos. Gabriel was operating in uncharted territory now, and all he could hope for was that his intuition about Claire panned out. Stay alive, Claire, or I’ll be dead…

* * *

Yahweh sat upon his throne, his face long, his eyes sunken, and his hair grey and straggly. The burden of the centuries weighed down on his shoulders like a cinder block wall. He had never known such fatigue, not even in his days as a human when he led the great British Empire against her king. It’s almost over, Oliver, he thought to himself.

Then his throne began to tremble. Something had happened… He felt a surge of energy bloom through him, and, for a moment, his fatigue faded. Never had this happened before, and though he was Yahweh, he wasn’t the Yahweh, and so he didn’t know what the tremors meant. Hurry, Claire…

* * *

Yehwah sat upon his throne, his dark eyes staring into the surrounding darkness. Though he could feel the fatigue of his reign, and he knew that his time was drawing short, he could also feel the power of the shifted balance that had been his life’s work. For nearly a millennium he had reigned, having survived two Yahwehs and dying with a third. They were weak because of him. The world had embraced order, it had embraced law, and it had embraced the slow degradation of freedom. Give them the illusion of choice, he had thought long ago, and they will submit themselves to control without even being aware of it. That was his long game, that was his key to keeping chaos at bay.

Then his throne began to tremble. Something had happened… He felt power drain from him, as if a part of him had been cut off. He searched for his demons and felt all but one of them. Never had this happened before, and though he was Yehwah, he wasn’t the Yehwah, and so he didn’t know what the death of one his own meant. Hurry, Azrael…

Claire's journey takes a very unexpected turn in Chapter 15, take the ride with her:

A Home for the Holiday

Series
3

About the Creator

Anthony Stauffer

Husband, Father, Technician, US Navy Veteran, Aspiring Writer

After 3 Decades of Writing, It's All Starting to Come Together

Use this link, Profile Table of Contents, to access my stories.

Use this link, Prime: The Novel, to access my novel.

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