The End is Not for You

While this work and there's doesn't share the same reason for existing, the fear depicted is that of an unknown more horrifying than meeting your final bullet or the imaginary creature you can but refuse to imagine. As our universe coldly gently grants us a peek into its depths, there's nothing to say we've even peered in the correct direction for answers that shake you awake.

As far as being trapped underground goes amid vague rumbles and smashes from above jostling loose moisture of no less than a variety, Hugh found himself somewhat uncomfortable. The rebar through his shoulder could stand to be a little more to the right, but considering his imprisonment, he could take it, although not for much longer. He’d lose the strength to pull himself off the spike in a couple of minutes, most likely less. There was about a foot of bar to clear. Its pointed top made his left-handed grip weak without leverage. He looked left for something to put under his back to slide himself a few inches off the seatbacks he was sprawled out on. Even the first layer of dried blood was a challenge to his years of inflexibility. His right arm felt dead until he smacked it, but it still refused to move, feeling like half a ton of skin wrapped around a ton of bone. In his hollering, he thought someone out there should hear him and started with Beatrice. His last memory of her was by his side.

It was the only hope he saw fit to call out for examining his limited view of the ripped, clanking train car. Wiping the forehead of sweat-laced scum, he couldn’t place its consistency. What emergency lighting remained orange in hue and more off than on, the color could not be as bloody as he thought. His glass ceiling was splintered enough to leak. The bag he stole the book from was from a college student that appeared crushed and bled from above his head down near the pinched end of the car. That’s the first time he thought about how he arrived here in this high-rise predicament. What this could’ve done to Beatrice pushed him to call out even louder. Something changed outside the car, and he switched his Beatrice calls to ‘Anyone?’ This didn’t stop his scrambling for his escape. Much closer, an aluminum siding thump added cracks to the emergency window.

L.E.D. flashlight could rip a pupil in half, and it did only for a brief moment even as Hugh shouted, ‘Hello there,’ to it scanning the car. “I can move my legs; I’m just stuck in an awful position,” He said. He didn’t want to silence his outcries, but the source of dripping annoyance left him preferring to keep his mouth shut. Decapitation may be an overstatement, but no muscular flesh or bone glued it to the body. The most formidable layer of skin must have held on for dear life during the crash, he thought. Whoever held the white light beside them kicked the corpse through the glass without warning. In his complaint, she could at least deduce his fight was not all gone as she lowered herself down. Clearly built from pieces of the destruction and the beginning of rigor mortis, her mission appeared to scavenge over any recovery prospects. Hugh asked for help to the beat, please, and thank yous to a few uh-huh and hmm-mm.

“Can you tell me if you see any others alive? A woman with dark hair, yellow sweater—”

“No,” and to this stranger, that was that. The scavenging through corpses continued.

“You’re a survivalist, correct?” Hugh asked to her bewilderment. Essentially, survive at all cost making it impossible to put up with slack?”

“Yes,” she said, exiting his view.

“Then I won’t bother with my name. You could use an extra hand, two legs, and some wit—”

“And if I have all that in spades, aren’t you a lost cause?” she replied. However, whether she stayed in this line of questioning depended on what she would find after lifting a leveraged steel beam for a grocery bag.

“Except now that you’ve found me with the strength to deal with my own problems, leaving me makes you fucking evil. Especially without a courtesy bullet to the head. Can you doom me to suffering?”

“You die; it’s not your problem and will barely be mine,” She replied, stepping over him.

“Sure. Just like preventing a subway derailment wasn’t my problem until it suddenly was. I can move my body enough to let you leave me behind, and—and you haven’t lost all respect for the dead, have you? Shutting eyes, religious or not, is only avoidable by freaks and psychopaths. I would’ve shut that kid’s eyes across from me if I could reach. You don’t need faith to respect.”

“The staring is creepy,” she said.

“Because you care. Not to mention because my grim outlook only grows colder, you won’t be responsible for me after we part; for whatever reason, you gave me a shot, I blow it, it’s blown. Preserve your conscious, and the rest is up to me, would—wouldn’t you agree?” Hugh asked. “I’m crossing my fingers on both hands in case you—”

“Case!?”

“—you can see them, although I am losing the right arm feeling.”

“Oh. Why do you think that matters?” she asked.

“Jesus Christ,” Hugh exclaimed, “That’s not what I damn, this hurts. Regardless of your world view from your scavenger life status, we’re both human—”

“You might be,” she quickly interrupted solemnly.

“Let’s confidently assume I have the paperwork to prove it. Giving me a chance could give you an advantage later. Given life's unpredictability, you have to consider that you are willing to leave me alone; lost and not helpful will always be potentially greater than not wasting the effort to see what I might offer you in return. How can I repay your kindness; if you like the shorter version? That’s got to sound fair.” Hugh would have held up prayer hands if he thought it worked and the spike wasn’t lodged where the gesture could crack his collarbone.

“Reasonably, it does. Unless I wait.”

“One good pull and some of my fading and admittedly wimpy cries as you stroll off like a bandit, and I’ll be left to find Beatrice anyhow. I have to give her a chance, not you.”

A pause like no other followed, three seconds long, one shy of a whole eternity, before she pocketed her last trinket in her cargo pants pocket and reached for his left hand. The right she had to bend for, attempting not to bring forth those wimpy cries prematurely. No three count to brace, but micro advice is to keep the rise as inline with the slanted rebar as possible to prevent further internal damage. Clear of the spike, Hugh was dropped on his right side as if the extra second to soften the landing wasn’t worth the water rations. Fighting the urge to writhe on the ground sucking his teeth and curling up good and tight, he pulled off his leather belt to tighten it around the profuse bleeding with her Nobel-like kindness shining the light in his eyes mostly. The wrap from a scarf he clocked when he woke up made a decent enough sling for the trek to finish the job in a hospital. As soon as he was snugged up— “Beatrice!? Beatrice, can you hear me?!”

“If you make it long enough to figure it out and come to terms, you should move. Other, less social scavengers will have seen your entrance. They eat meat.”

While not leaving the way she came, her cautious expertise rang similarly. The bodies were mangled within, engulfed in metal and fire that left no other traces of its heat. Limbs and torsos grew steel shrapnel violently. Some grip around the outside didn’t explain it, nor did the perforated ceiling he saw through the window opening above. A sky of city streets bustling with ants-sized London affairs instantly sent the word dream to the forefront of his understanding. The skylight was born of the train’s crash before its last stop through the tower's roof and three or four floors in. How many floors from the ground could have explained Beatrice’s long trek for help? In the meantime, he’d spend the next five or ten minutes climbing out of the train with the front end pinched like a toothpaste tube by an angry child closer to the bottom for maximum launch. An arm strapped to the chest and his lack of pull-up practice since high school P.E. in the early nineties left him appreciating his blood loss to a rigorous degree, rolling onto the left side of the car on its side. Looking back in the darted handicap holds, seats, and wires tangled in a maze trying to grease him before shocking him to death, he thought of the extended period of guess-the-sturdiness he may have to play. What if the rest of this building looked anywhere near as bad as this one auditorium backstage area inside a waving, whistling skyscraper?

He scanned from on high in and around the exterior of the car. Recovering the strength to keep his 235-pound frame carrying more than he should, the familiar regret of missing those suggestions to join a gym he received in pamphlets and bless your heart subtle advice. It was mainly a level of lament brought on by what he considered was lackluster yelling frothing with his heavy breathing every few rounds. His equally enamoring surroundings motivated his search for anything Beatrice related in the wreckage. The essence of the tragic search grew tiresome, quickly re-gazing upon confused expressions held in the face of something horrifying beyond death scattered across the room. They had been ejected, whipped out of a window. But the gap in the ceiling was pretty big. “What happened after we landed?” He needed a metal detector to find his bearings but realized the seats could have easily been part of a shaken Martini because how else could he have ended up where he was found in the train car? His limit was reached, but jumping off the top of the car felt far more haunting with his arm the way it was. Clearing the debris to land on one of the extremely aged seats facing the stage looked like a bad bet on all sides. But he couldn’t bare to retire his search over eyes the strange woman missed or had nothing worth stealing.

“Where did she go?” There was plenty more to search if the fresh smell of innards wasn’t creating sickness in its abundance as he moved over them, rising with the heat waves. Amid using the crumpled slope to withstand the least amount of gravity possible, she, the stranger, rushed back into the frame. Her hand signal that could be kin to bringing the roof back to its pre-party height paired well with the whisper-shouted him to get down. A snappy argument ensued, prompting her to move a cart with broken wheels and crumbs, emphasizing avoiding the creators of the approaching noisy grinding diner bell that accompanied the task. On its side, the drop was only enough to crack the floor beneath their feet. He didn’t need help getting back to his feet this time; she pulled him away from some unsourced floor quakes.

“Keep quiet; don’t stop over an answer you can just ask later.”

Hugh’s longing look at the car, home if he understood, was halted by the haunting howl blended with a language, blended again with gear teeth breaking. All on top of it, a thicker-than-water gargle layered throughout their vocal cords—its vocal cords. Entering the stairway with the door shut and locked behind them, the howl didn’t falter, pressing like a needle intending on slowly pricking the eardrums to death, one prick at a time. A primal need to curl into a ball loosened his grip on the amalgamation of railing that couldn’t decide on a decorum theme in the emergency neo-lit halls down the winding steps. The further down, the better the air felt to breathe. At seventy flights to go, Hugh stopped for a breath, something this youthful spirit felt no need for but wished he would have known before trying to lead their fleeing.

Hugh’s downright refusal to go back underground became an acceptable reason why she should have told him why before he burst through the front glass. Brave he was, picking up the leather barstool sitting at the receptionist’s desk she figured would have clued him in on its own, but at the sight of an inverted city overhead teasing the skyscraper tips yet only visible in rare cloudless voids, he was worse off. It couldn’t have helped to realize why she had that level of authentic cockney or that the city copied, immediately making him wonder whether he was looking at himself was also somewhere in England.

“I—I was the rain,” Hugh stated.

“Never looked at it that way. But have you ever thought of breathing life back into drop?” she responded.

“It’s not real—where have I gone?”

“I figure it was only locals falling. Did it say Hoboken on that ma—”

“Jersey City, Planet Earth. Did you fall?” Hugh asked.

“Born here. It wasn’t like this last year. What’s up there?”

“I came from Jersey metro. I was in a tunnel.”

“Nothing is stopping this. We’re getting ripped from tits to tips of follicles to the dead skin on your heels, down the middle,” she shrugged.

Survivors, if that’s what they consider themselves, had carved their passageways under streets, inside the infrastructure, all veins of the train system. There’s no telling how long the weight on the surface will remain light enough for the supports, improvised or not. Many walls, from basements to sewer lines, had to be blasted with explosives to continue commerce while it lasted. She explained some of this over a fire, under a manhole open to the sky. Hugh thought carefully about his following questions. She could have more than three more good answers left before her guesses put her off to see if that sound was an animal. Yet, in her vehement claim to not be labeled even in case of emergency, the shortening of his life was only the surface excuse she hid behind. She also turned cold whenever he spoke of returning home, and its disarray certainly left him speechless, but if her hopelessness is indeed so great, why survive?

Through the basement of a hospital's over-stocked morgue department, Hugh found supplies to patch and clean his injuries; however, his arm will never be the same. The population, as it was, will never happen again. That was her answer to wondering if there was anyone studying the issue or if they even existed in the first place. She laughed when Hugh called it an issue. He tried to see the morale boost blatantly thrust forward by her blasé acceptance of a thunderous crash above, shaking dust loose from the brick and dirt with a hint of the Thames. Cans of beans he found floating in such waters of the waste systems sat well enough in his stomach, for now, for him to keep moving. His thought process included a few steps she didn’t like, one of which was taking his newly found flashlight from WW II and searching thoroughly in and around the car roof it crashed through. She claimed it was another reason her name wasn’t necessary.

It was the cleanest section of the London Underground Hugh could find, but he wasn’t looking. As she suggested, he found a pack to fill with supplies before leaving him by the fire. The walk he took was very indecipherable in a disorienting way. Walking through a hole in the wall made by a collection of a sledgehammer he found in pieces led to a room left unfinished. By what, he thought grandly. Measurement still sat in the corners, length by width by height. He tried to rub them from the wall, but they weren’t on the wall. His fingers went through them, and a stinging still hurts when he stretches on the five-foot bench in front of a metro line filled with unused train cars. The doors in the room, that storage room from a hotel, appeared genuine in look, in its loose jostle when the surface rumbles rocks heavily, its lintel where a key could be seen. After grabbing the key, he grabbed for the doorknob that wasn’t there. In every angle except one of his hand could find, he believed the knob was their mocking of him. It took touching the door with his palm and rubbing over the flat, splintery surface before he moved onto what he could.

Blankets, small decorative pillows, along with a broom handle, and fabric for a better sling were snatched up under the guise of leaving quickly. To say it was a light that delayed his exit would miss the uber nature that caught his eye. Like a chip in the tile, Hugh picked at the drywall that held it; he only had a slither to look through. Its greeting was unyielding, not that it spoke or communicated. It or the place swirled sharply, revealing colors he thinks that his occipital lobe couldn’t deal with and thus grayed it against his will. His heart skipped a beat when his part went from the color and shapes he couldn’t identify to a violent rejection of Hugh of sheer disappointment. All of it went on and on or not, with a smooth velvet look except for the vicious grays coming and going as it twisted or faded into itself, angry into spikey pauses more and more as Hugh locked eyes. The headache won in the end, and he had to snap to and stop clawing down the wall.

He slept relatively soundly on the bench for a couple of hours with an imagination engulfed by his reality surpassing its capabilities. The attempt to recreate or create something similar forced his dreams to rapid-fire as a poorly written sketch comedy script balled after each failed punchline. Using sounds to deduce safety or dangers is the primary reason why he gave up on being afraid to nap. Examining the train stop would have to be the concrete that weighed his mind down to the tangible of his six-foot radius. He started by flash lighting each direction of the tunnel. That being confirmed perpetual by the constant pelting above pushed him to study the transit map in general. He couldn’t remember the outside of the building nor its name, which most tall ones do. A third can of beans and some stretching later, he began walking down the Marden Line.

Hugh's second into the daylight would be taken with more caution. Firstly, the day switched on instantly when his digital watch struck 10:23 AM. His analog, for which his leather-band watch could do both prior, jumped to whatever time it saw most pleasing down to the minute hand. The second hand ticked sixty seconds in twenty to twenty-five seconds. It was well within his right to assume the digital watch was accurate to an extent. So, he decided to consider its ticks to a clear ruler to prevent further One-Mississippi missteps between events. To remain reasonably horrified by the human skulls, which would have prevented his search, so he focused on it being from Desert Storm based on the Camel pack of smokes lodged under a helmet cover. During the time he was a year out from joining, and by graduation, his interest changed significantly to archeology. His inability to pick an area of history called a discipline left his arch morphing to go and put the only silver lining in his supposed disappearance. If he had gone to school here, the loans he owns wouldn’t still be more haunting.

Hugh timed the small pauses in the downpour throughout the night, and while the when was often unexpected, the daylight lulls were always seventeen minutes. Watching from the Underground, he found an opening and about a quarter mile to travel. Eyeing a spot and a backup in case the slowed bus gained some gravity. He started moving in what he thought was serpentine, tripping every few feet and trying not to look up too often. The tremendous majesty of something so massive, staying afloat, not struggling as the falling objects and people suggest. How his event connected to his arrival here plagued his trek, especially losing himself, searching for something. Unannounced to him, a yacht from a Gibraltar dock was crashing overhead.

At the doorway, with thirty seconds to spare, the growl caught him. Bleached sounds as they crept toward him from inside. Eyes on top of eyes, and they looked in three different directions depending on the layers of flesh hanging over them. Whining, some would say, except they had a nursery rhyme rhythm pinning for Hugh whether they moved on human legs, or a fleshly pirate peg unable to pick itself up, or a complexion. Sunlight burned them but didn’t stop them from growling in a high-pitched drone staying at a frequency where each mountain peak vibrated his ears. It shook them as his brain twisted, making keeping his eyes on the increasing number of them an arduous task in swiveling a neck, feeling as if he needed his glasses to hold them from popping out altogether. It was a deceptive claim to say he had an accurate count amid his unfortunate survival freeze and would have to trust that his backup was still evident. An immense longing from its eyes, all of its eyes going this way and that way, drew him in with a step-less approaching kin to a sultry finger curl beckoning. Its mouth was center mass, and as it opened, the pain of it called forth more violently. A tongue of fingers greeted him. Not exactly fingers, unless the hinges were meant to be so rusted in the bean of light passing through a window, didn’t set it a flame. Four Mississippi, three Mississippi, two Mississippi--