Eternity Lost

I remember towers boundless in their pursuit of the sky, I remember intellects unrestrained in their pursuit of truth, I remember humanity unburdened by the thirst for the vacuous and obscene. I remember the Lost Empire, the one guided only by knowledge, ruled only by the free heart. But I can not tell you of her glories, no for you and all my kindred have lost even the ability to imagine her existence...

On some level I always knew I was not one of them. They scurried around with petty goals and small ambitions, dividing the world into a million tiny autocracies. I was at a loss to understand them and so I just watched and wondered. When my body refused to age I suffered little surprise and kept waiting for the answers I knew one day would come...

Chapter One

The Lost One

         Not even rain could clean the city, its foulness penetrated too deep into the layers of concrete and bureucracy, but for a few hours it granted the illusion of purity. At those times she could always be found on the roof of the crumbling apartment, face upturned into the deluge. In her imagination the rain not only cleaned the city and washed away the plague of humanity but cleaned her own mind of the memories of their barbarity as well. In its cool wake, with her eyes still shut, only thoughts of sunrises, sunsets and a wild world untainted by man or women, remained.
         When she finally opened her eyes, the gray skyline stared back unblinking, banal as ever and blurred by shifting smog. She sneered at it, as one against an untouchable but hated enemy, then she left for the shadows of the floors below. Drugdealers, prostitutes, thieves, these were her housemates, their dens marked by the scent of sex and smoke. Once she had lived in what they called the uptown, where villains with more refined weapons and fashions made their lairs. There she had learned that she preferred evil in uniform not hidden behind layers of silk and civility.
         “Hey bitch!... Bitch turn around when I'm talkin' to you. Bitch where is your pimp?” She smiled. Once she had afforded human beings the privilage of communicating with her. Now she refused to listen to their words for their words meant nothing. Like the chattering of a chipmunk, only the tone mattered to her and that very little. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his friend who knew better try to pull the exuberant young peddler of flesh back into their sordid den. “Bitch look at me when I'm talking to y...”
         She wished she knew what they saw in her eyes when they provoked her. The shock, the uncontrolled release of urine meant that on some subconcsious level they knew her, knew she wasn't one of them and knew she was not to be bothered. Unfortunately or fortunately due to her feminine facade it was usually to late when they realized this.
         She left it curled on the ground cradling the broken hand it had dared touch her with. It was not out of pity that she spared his life. She had no pity for man nor women; they were a disease and if she had the energy she would clean the planet of it. No, it was her own unfathomable bordem to which the man owed his life. She was so tired of this world and this species, that could she have done so she would have taken her own life. So far, however, that seemed impossible.

         The entity who looked for all intensive purposes like a female human being in her mid twenties entered her apartment and shut the door on the pimp's pained wailing. An entity known only as Kim, she pulled from the refrigerater a fresh dog carcass, slammed it across the table and began to eat.

***

         Questions, so many questions. Who was she, what was she? Kim traced her finger around the ragged edge of a hole torn through the cushion of her couch, where did these come from? After a century and change she'd learned to live with questions, as she'd learned to live with the dreams, as she'd learned to live with the endless hunger, as she'd learned to live with humans.
         Still though the questions remained, occasionally resurfacing to taunt her and remind her that she was truly lost, an alien amidst aliens. Much more than sheer strength set her apart from the creatures who owned this planet.
         Time, for one thing, was difficult for her. The humans seemed to measure history by their wars and measure the passage of their lives by marking brief incidents of happiness. Kim had never been at war (unless one could be at war with all of humanity) and she knew no happiness beyond dreamlike memories of a past to distant to concretize. Her first memories contained men riding beasts of flesh and blood, now they rode ones of metal and oil. A century, two, she didn't know and didn't care. What did time matter if nothing significant changed but the means by which they killed and enslaved one another and the speed at which they destroyed the world around them.

***

         As Kim passed the factory she watched the line of workmen slowly trundle through the gates. Heads and limbs hanging like zombies wrenched from the grave for mindless servitude. She recalled butchering a plantation owner once, ripping out his throat. In fact she could still remember the pathetic gurgle his life made as it poured out across the floor boards. She'd hated him, of course, but she had killed him for more important reasons. In those days she had yet to grow tired of the taste of their flesh. After she'd finished with him, she'd set free the man's former slaves on a whim. She recalled how they praised her bloodied hands, pawed at her feet like dogs released from the abuse of a cruel owner. Now, how would the modern slaves react if she slaughtered the owners of that plant, those who sat in comfortable chairs collecting the wealth of their labor. Only the scale and refinement of the crime differed and yet those men would now fight to defend their own owners.
         She shook her head and kept walking. Humanity had definitely advanced over the course of time, what it was advancing toward was something not even Kim could bare to dwell on for long without a shudder of revulsion.

         Her road carried her beyond the heavy soot of the industrial district, through slums of living dead and up winding gravel to a fenced complex. “You're late,” her superviser met her with an ugly sneer. Kim was certain much of the bloated old hag's hatred had to do with the youthful appearance of her ancient body. As she passed, she half considered letting it see the real her and leaving the woman soaking in her own piss, but that would mean finding another source of fresh meat and they were not easy to come by.
         Kim held her ears against the baying as she moved between walls of cages. She ignored the feeble greetings of her coworkers busy cleaning feces and refilling food bowls, two steps in the same endless process. She could understand why man choose the canine as his eternal companion, it shared his two most outstanding qualities, the ceaseless desire to dominate others and the compulsion to shit where it eats.
         She sighed with relief as she shut the door on the endless noise. In the yard beyond, animals not as amicable to man paced and flashed wild looks between the bars of their cells. Rejects from zoos and circuses, the facility was their last home before the injection ended their misery once and for all. Stepping over the warning fence, Kim unlocked the iron door and stepped in with the tiger humans called Zara. She'd lied on her resume, telling them she was an expert animal trainer and put all their doubts to rest with her fearless displays. Little did they know, she had about as little to fear from Zara as they did from a kitten.
         Visitors to the facility watched in awe as she laid down with the big cat, stroking its sagging sides. Out of view from the public claws which could gut a human kneaded into her impervious flesh.

         At first glance Kim might have seemed similar to her coworkers, who also disdained humanity for the companionship of animals, but she knew different. In them Kim could easily see the same evil which pervaded the rest of their petty species. Within the facility's concrete walls they set up their own tiny hierarchies and oligarchies. All the while they projected onto the animals they cared for all the things that they wished or believed they could be, but none of them truly Saw those animals just like none of them truly Saw one another. Had they been able to, Kim surmised, they would have long ago killed themselves and left the world to the beasts they so adored.

         She spent the morning with Zara, whos green eyes, though dulled by captivity, still Saw. Then it was on to other more mundane tasks, the spreading of straw and spraying of cement floors. She spoke to no one, though occasionally they would speak to her, “isn't that dangerous; where did you learn; why don't you work at a zoo; at a circus.” To all she returned the same shrug. Why talk to a creature that could not hear, why speak when the only thing she could say was a lie. Kim had never had much of a stomach for lies, even when they were necessary.

         At dusk she passed the cage of the great old grizzly, Max, reaching through the bars to scratch his ears. When she left he bemoaned her passing like his wild kin would the departure of the salmon runs. Her last stop, the door which warned 'Restricted' in red letters, opened to reveal a dark room full of huddled shapes. This was where they killed the unwanted. Cowards that they were they used deadly serum for a prolonged, painful but ultimately civilized death. Better the public not hear yelping than animals suffer the dissolution of their bowls.
         One of the insipid humans was finishing the deed with quavering hands. “Oh Kim its you,” she said raising the needle and giving the animal a momentary reprieve.
         The entity faked a cordial smile, “go home, Lavender I'll finish here.”
         “Oh thankyou, Kim, you're such a dear. Sometimes I think you're the only one who understands how it feels to work back here day in day out.” The entity watched it go, lip snarling. Dealing purposeless death on an hourly basis and all it can think about is its own feelings. As soon as the door closed, Kim reached out and snapped the fated dog's neck killing it instantly. Perhaps the best definition of a human was a creature for whom the center of the universe was always itself, or better yet a creature for whom all other creatures were inanimate objects.

         Bones snapped and sinew tore as she folded the now limp canine corpse neatly in half, then fourth, until it fit smoothly into her pack, what she called, her lunch bag... Hoping no one would notice the periodic drip of blood from the lower seam, she left for the night.

***

         Headlights passed with errie regularity, each pair flashing briefly on the young women who walked along the deserted streets. Her stride betrayed neither fear nor bravado. Her's was the walk of a tiger through the jungle, of confidence which transcended the need for any feeble display. As the stores turned into apartments and the apartments into crumbling fire hazards, the flow of automobiles ebbed to a trickle. In Kim's neighborhood only career criminals could afford such transporation and they flaunted it with whirling chrome and glinting hood ornaments.
         She watched one such car pass her domicile, a metallic testament to the driver's arrogance. In its wake it left clashing ripples of disonant music which sent shivers up her arms. Gladly, Kim left the street, though not before encountering a young boy scrawling numbers on the sidewalk beside the steps to her building. He looked up with eyes wide and awake and Saw her. He smiled. Kim turned and went through the door. Some, she knew, could See, but they were as much a danger as anything and they did not soften her opinion of their race in the slightest. One did not judge a species by its mutants.
         On the rickety stairs she encountered a man with a bandaged hand, he gave her so wide a berth that he almost fell backward over the railing. “Is that the bitch that done that to you!” she heard the raucous crowing of one of its slaves and kept walking. Like the slaves at the factory, it too would fight to defend its master – fascinating. “You a monster, bitch, you hear me, You ain't even human!” Kim indeed heard her. You ain't human, those words could mean only one thing, it was time to leave. As soon as she entered her apartment she began packing. She might have prolonged her stay by trying to blend in, but sooner or later they always saw through those guises, sooner or later someone always spoke the words, or some variation on them – you are not human. When they did it was time to leave. They would soon come looking and she did not want to be here when they arrived.

         Minutes later she shut the door, leaving only the gutted remains of a spaniel to mark her occupancy. On the street below the boy was still scrawling numbers, which Kim now recognized as pieces of a larger equation. He smiled again provoking Kim to smile despite herself. She walked over to where he sat leaning on chalk smudged elbows. “Listen, kid, do me a favor alright.” He waited patiently for the request empty eyes gazing up at the woman. “Do your.. math somewhere else for the next few weeks.”

         “Why?...”

         “...Because... because I'm a monster and there are other monsters who'll be coming here looking for me.”

         “Bad monsters?”

         “Yes, very bad, do you understand?”

          He nodded and started organizing his chalk sticks. When a thought struck him he looked up catching Kim as she was about to leave. “Are you a good monster?”

          “...I'm not sure.”

***

         She let the aimless asphalt guide her, like a upturned leaf on a winding stream. Slowly but surely it carried her out of the city. Away from its anonymity she felt exposed, but also refreshed by the open sky and the relative silence. She'd lived in the country before, even the wilderness, but They eventually found her there too. Perhaps this time she would just keep walking...
         Unfortunately the hunger was harder to avoid then her faceless pursuers and it soon drove her toward the light of human habitation where prey was plentiful. In a prefabricated neighborhood encroaching on the wilderness, she paced under ghostly porchlights, ears pricked for the sound of her standard fair. The incessant yapping of a some useless lap dog drew her to a fenced yard. When it saw her eyes materialize out of the dark it fell silent as if suddenly recalling the lessons of its distant evolutionary past. But its silence came to late and in an matter of moments most of its organs, bones, and skin sat churning within a distended stomach.
         Kim leaned against the house, feeling not quite full; even the scrawny run aways at the pound carried more meat on their bones than such miniature house pets. And so the hunter continued her search. By the end of the night the neighborhood had five fewer pets and was a great deal quieter.

***

         An uneasy silence followed the long dark caddy down the street as if ejected from its tailpipe along with the exhaust. People closed doors and windows without knowing why and mothers pulled their children from a sidewalk that suddennly seemed even less safe. Jeremy looked up from the splattering of smudged numbers to see the car pull up slowly across the way. It was not like the vehicles which frequented the End. Black and unfeatured, it presented no pretense to the viewer. Tinted windows turned the occupants into shadows and a white licenseplate read simply G O V. The men who emmerged looked as featureless as the car they drove. Bland plastic faces screwed onto stiff suited bodies, they stilted up the stairs past where he used to play. Jeremy didn't have to guess, he knew. These were the monsters the nice lady had told her about. He wasn't surprised to see they looked like men, for she was a monster too and looked no different than a normal woman.
         As Jeremy pondered these thoughts one of the figure's heads ratcheted around, black lenses fixating on his position. The souless gaze held him only for an instant before instinct took over and he ran, leaving his scattered sticks of chalk behind.

***

         A plastic sheathed finger traced the coarse edge of a hole left in a flea-ridden couch. “It was here.”
         Another hand wiped a smear of blood from the open carcass on the table, “It has given up human prey...”
         Another stood looking out of the window. “A tactic to evade us. It has never before shown kindness toward the humans.”
         “It has never before been deprived of its supraconscious for so long.” The one investigating the couch stood and moved to the closet. Rifling through ragged shirts, he extracted an umbrella and unfolded it. His eyes spied through two conspicous holes in its vinyl surface.
         “We can find her this time,” said the one still hovering over the carcass. He picked a wriggling maggot out of the putrid remains squeezing it until the larva's green insides ejected onto his glove, “a week at most and she travels by mundane means.”
         “Even humans can round this globe in that amount of time.”
         “But she disdains their company, she will avoid crowded transports.”
         “True.”
         “We will make the initial search radius 500 miles then; mobilize four packs...”

***

         Adam decided it was an official miracle; in the morning he would phone a bishop. From noon to nightfall, the dog next door had not quit barking. Either the animal's vocal chords were made of some space age material or God himself had interceded on the canine's behalf assuring its opus of noise would never end. There was no other explanation so either NASA or the Catholic Church had to be notified.
         The fledgling author grappled his hair in taut fists as he tried to block out the incessent noise but it ate through to his mind like a corrosive acid, dissolving every thought before it could materialize into so much as a word. On the blank computer screen in front of him the cursor blinked hatefully, in time with the symphony of noise.
         Frustrated to the point of temporary insanity Adam screamed, he screamed at the dog, at the blank page, and at his stupid hick neighbors whom, in their infinite wisdom, purchased a pet only to chain it outside all day long. When the echoes of his maddness finally drifted away, however, they left behind them... silence. 'Could it be', he waited for the inevitable continuation, but it never came. Not a sound, not so much as as a ruff. Now Adam screamed again but this time in joy. He praised every diety he could think of, from Vishnu to Allah, ignorent all the while that the true object of his gratitude was currently feasting on the fresh internal organs of a disemboweled Rotweiler.

         After snapping the chain between her fingers, Kim slung what remained of the dog over her shoulder and headed toward a nearby barn. On the way she passed some cows which flared their eyeballs wildly as they might at any predator. She watched them gallop clumsily off into the far corner of the pasture. She'd considered eating one of them instead, but the animals had been bred by the humans to be so stupid that she feared consuming them might diminish her own intelligence.

         The barn was empty save for the scattered remnants of that year's hay crop. She tossed her meal upon the matted brush and piled some up for herself into a makeshift nest. As she drifted off toward strange dreams, the shadow of a cat, investigating this newcomer in its territory stretched down from the rafters. Before sleep took her, she felt the soft ripples of paws upon the hay and heard rythmic purring as the feline curled up beside her to share in the warmth.

***

         Adam awoke in the morning to the knock of what could only be an officer of the law. As he rushed about hiding praphenalia he imagined a course in cop college where all future pigs stood rapping upon fake doors getting graded as to the extent the sound resembled that which preceeded the abduction of Jews from their homes sixty years earlier. This one must have gotten As in that one, he thought as he opened up and blinked at one sullen policemen and a very angry redneck.
         “Mr. Schiflet, why would I murder your dog?”
         “Well you din' like Jenny none, you made no secret a' that.”
         Adam looked to the cop for a dollop of reaason, “officer does hating your neighbor's dog make you guilty of killing it.”
         “No sir,” he answered after a moment of reflection, “but it does make you a suspect...”

         Ten all to long minutes later, Adam closed his door on Randy Schiflet's continuing diatribe of professed vengeance and the cop's ineffective attempts to defuse the situation. Happily, this was still a free country and he was free to ignore their continued knocking however facsistic it might sound. He went about making breakfast as he let the too local stooges tire of activity. Cracking eggs into a still cold pan he couldn't help but wonder, 'what kind of animal could kill a Rotweiller like that.' Randy was right about one thing, it must have been an armed man. The biggest animals around here could nearly have fit down Jenny's throat whole.
         By the time Adam's egg sandwich was prepared to perfection the police had given up on procuring his cooperation. He ate it on the back porch with a view on the neighboring farmland, pristine in a pragmattic sort of way. It was then, between bites of egg, bread and cheese, that he noticed it – a scrap of fur flapping like a pennant upon the barbwire, its tip stained red. Curiosity and hunger warred within him for a moment and though hunger won, he skipped down the steps to the fence after he'd finished his food to observe what looked very much like evidence.
         He held the familiar bit of black fur in his fingers and wondered, should he find the murderer, whether to condemn or congratulate the fellow. Maybe he'd report him to the police but also dedicate the book to him, that seemed fair enough.
         Without the natural skills of a farm raised boy, Adam fumbled his way over the fence, slowed by the fear of tetnis should he let the rusty barbs prong him. In the far field he found more evidence amidst the grass. A dolup of blood here, a smear there, a clear enough trail for a mind uncumbered by stupidity to follow toward the old hay barn.

         Clouds of lung assaulting dusts and spores swirled through the stray light beams in the decaying structure. Adam feebly shielded his mouth with his sleeve, breathing slowly through the fabric as his eyes adjusted to the sudden shade. In seconds the dark drew back across webbed rafters and below, the shapes he'd mistaken for globular shadows picked up hints of deep red. His eyes followed them to the splayed carcass of what was once his neighbor's dog. Bits of meat and organs lay strewn atop the surrounding hay as if the animal had simply chosen this spot to explode, but then again Adam knew for a fact it had been carried here meaning he was beholding either the work of a feral animal or a canine serial killer. Neither of these hypotheses, however, prepared him for what awaited his eyes around the corner.
         He half expected to see a dire wolf back from a much exageratted extinction, instead he saw a young woman, a woman in red. The red began in her hair, flowed in disheveled torrents down to her shoulders where it gave way to the red stains of blood which forever hid her clothing's original color. She turned to look at the intruder, evidence of her meal still dribbling from the corners of her red lips. In the one eye she exposed to Adam, he saw the truth, that she was not human. Every instinct, electrified by this realization, commanded him to run and he would have had a hand not shot out and lifted him as easily as a robotic arm might manipulate a piece of sheet metal. He strangled in her grip as he watched the alien eyes casually consider what to do with him. Black creeped in along the edges of his vision advancing like a spectral mold. His throat convulsed straining for desperately needed air, but nothing came and the black continued to advance until it had consumed sense, thought and feeling.