Into Unknown Realms

Crack!  The sound echoes across existence. It reaches to the depths of my soul and, for a moment, existence stops. I sense everything around me. Smoke, from the barrel of the revolver, is frozen in the crisp air. His eyes are glazed over and vacant of light, devoid of sentience and almost dark. A faint sparkle hangs in the deepest recesses of those eyes. Spittle hangs from his upper-front teeth like warped icicles. 
         The couple behind me reels from the sound. The woman’s right hand attempts to shield her face. She’s stuck aloft clutching her side. Her companion reaches out to catch her.  His wallet suspended where he lost grasp. The bum lies across the street in a pile of his own filth; his complexion, white beneath years of dirt and grime. His eyes empty with only a semblance of light in his eye betraying his years. 
         Time defeats the sound.  The woman screams in agony that invites despair.  She falls.  The man accompanies her, clutching her.  He yells in panic and fear.  The bum gurgles with apathy and contentment.  “Bitch!  What you think’n?!”  The thug shouts.
         Instinctively I reach out and grasp the gun.  Its barrel burns my left hand.  The smell of burnt flesh, burnt gunpowder, booze and cheap scent assail my nose.  I come across his jaw with my right fist.  A strong hit, he falls back releasing his gun into my hand.  My left leg gives and I fall face-first to the ground.  My leg and abdomen are numb.  The thug recovers shaking his head.
         “Oh, it’s on now!”  Blood runs from his lower lip as he lunges toward me.  I kick with my good leg, rolling into the street. The thug comes at me, leg cocked ready to strike looking for my stomach. I pull the trigger. Crack! My elbow digs into my chest, cracking. The gun flies out of my hand, heat from the barrel singes the whiskers on my cheek. The thug collapses, his head inches from my own. The same blank stare greets me behind the blood seeping from his forehead. His eyes fixed on mine and for a moment there is a glimmer. Then barren eyes focused on mine. He groans and his breath leaves him.
         Fire grasps my left side. I roll onto my back. The pain clouds my eyes and blocks my ears. I try to get up, forcing my will through the pain. The pain beats my will and I falter. A strange feeling of euphoria replaces the burning. The stars above suddenly become vibrant and vivid points of yellows, pale blues, brilliant oranges and faint pinks. The man, from before, appears before me miming. The euphoria fills me and the world blurs. A cool wind covers me and all becomes black and silent. 
         “Hurry.  Hurry.  Hurry!” a faint call grips the black-numb world.  Colors appear.  Mixing and swirling creating a cascade that seems to brighten the very core of existence.  I relax as my breath settles.  Then darkness, a cold darkness fills me, then I feel numb. 
         Thunder.  The sound is dulled by fog, the type that one experiences when half asleep.  A brilliant light shines before me.  I’m in a tunnel.  The light encompasses me.  I close my eyes yet the light penetrates my eyelids.  A figure appears in front of me.  He is a kind figure with a beard wearing white and a halo from the light. 
         “Do you recognize this man?” he says looking across me to muffled crying. 
         “Yes, it’s him,” another figure manages between sniffles.  Amy. 
“My beloved, where did you come from?  Where am I?” 
         “I’m sorry Mrs. Kollari,” the doctor lifts a hand to my face.  “You should know he died defending a couple from a stalker.” 
“Dead?  I’m not…”  Wait.  I was shot in the side.  I reach up to touch the face of my beloved.  My hand and arm look pale and faded.  I’m not breathing.  I can smell her perfume.  I can smell the disinfectant but I’m not breathing.  I touch her cheek.  I feel her warmth or more like a faint memory of her warmth.  A few hairs touch my hand, though fall through.  For a moment she moves her head almost to greet my hand. 
         “We tried everything we could.  He lost too much blood.”
         “I understand.”  She turns away.  “Please, can we leave?  I don’t…”
         “Of course.”  The doctor replaces the sheet.  His figure moves against the white background.  He disappears as darkness fills my view.  The fog fades.  Things come to me in the dark.  Images of events long gone and people I should know.  Amy, her bright-smiling face beckons me to remember what has occurred.  I focus on her and memories appear.

         The twilight brings a cool-crisp wind.  My costume is comfortable out here despite the thick cotton cloth.  A dark angle shivers across the patio.  For a moment our eyes meet and, it seems, our souls link.  She smiles, politely, and the reflecting yellow light connects us.  I give her my coat and bow graciously.  “You look cold, Milady?” 
“Thanks,” she shivers.  She takes the coat.  “Well it was the thought that counts.”
“Yeah, heh, my name is Drew.”
“Amy.  What are you supposed to be, someone that can’t afford sleeves?” she says joking.
“What, nah.  It’s impressionist…”
“Oooh, I thought you looked like someone from Kingdom of Heaven for a moment.”  I feel a bit dumb-founded.
“You know, you’re the first person to say that I didn’t look like a samurai.”
“Samurai?  No, the pattern on the lace-border is all wrong.”
“Holy crap!  I thought no one else would notice.”  I feel my heart, long gone, beating.
“Hmm, yeah, I’m kind of weird about that stuff, it’s a hobby.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s with that look?”  She pulls the coat over her mouth.
“Nothing, well just that, I thought I was the only person interested in things like that.” Our gaze penetrates beyond the very flesh that covers us.  “Are you here with anyone?”
“Not really, I came with a friend over by the, tall blond.”  She points and I turn to see a man dressed in desert fatigues flirting with a Daisy Duke imposter.  He turns, his face bloody and missing one eye.  In the eye’s stead, there is a hole seeping blood that seems to glow.  The light brightens encompassing everything and more memory comes.

         “GET DOWN!” the sergeant yells.  A stray bullet rips through the mud-brick barricade.  I fall to the ground.  A mortar explodes in the distance.  Before me, the slumped body of the soldier leans against the barricade.  The blood of a friend seeps from the eye socket down into a morbid pool in his lap.  “The mortar fire shouldn’t be too long. They’re just trying to scare us,” the sergeant orders.  I curse. Soldiers run toward mud-brick buildings.  “Leave him. That shot lobotomized him.”
“What about leave no man behind?” I argue.
“Shit, what movie are you watching?  GET YOUR ASSES DOWN!”  Soldiers dart for cover among the ruins of a village somewhere in Iraq, or Iran.  No one is sure since the lines change so often now.  A shell explodes behind and to the right.
         “Oh god, my legs!” someone shouts.
         “Medic!” I yell turning to see a mangled soldier writhing near a smoking building.  Three others try to aid but disappear in fire and smoke and dirt.  A shiver crawls up my back as I open my eyes to find a half-burned arm in my lap. It’s covered with lesions and blackened skin.  I scream knocking the limb away.  The scream echoes and the mortars become faint. Images of peoples’ faces twisted by tumors and sores cross my mind like a morbid vacation slide show. 

“Two years ago the plague started,” My boss, the Editor, lectures in a cool-detached manner. Doctors were and still are helpless. “As a medical professional, we were at the front lines.”  The pictures are a grim reminder of the horror facing us.  “The plague strikes randomly and without symptoms until the lesions form.  It has a lethality of 100%.  Thousands are already dead across the nation.”  His voice echoes in my ears.  “Kollari, I want you to take the lead on this.”
         “What?  Why?”
         “Because you’re the only one with the stomach for it.”
“Ah, okay.”
“No one else here saw the things you did during the war, including me.  You’re the best man for the job.”
“Yeah no one else is as cold as you either,” Jacobs snaps.  I glare at his grin.
“Let’s see how you feel about covering this stuff after you see a friend’s face explode during a conversation.”
“Enough, both of you.  Kollari, check the hospitals to see if you can get anything.” 

         The night was cool and crisp much like the night Amy and I met.  “Don’t go.  I don’t need milk that badly”
“No problem, it’s only seven.”  I smile back to Amy, my wife.  She stands and kisses me.
“Well hurry back.”
“Hey, it’s me.  What could go wrong?”  I leave walking down the stairs onto the sidewalk.  I tighten my scarf.  A while later I cross the street toward the corner store, passing a contented-looking bum.  A couple, attached at the hip, walks slowly behind me.  A thug jumps out yelling obscenities demanding our cash.  I refuse and he fires into my left side.

         Dead.  No, death can not be like this.  I can’t see a thing in here.  I force the drawer open by kicking the opposite wall.  “What the fu…,” a nurse turns to me or rather the drawer.  I stand and jump off the table.  She approaches the table looking shocked.  There, on the table, my pale doppelganger sleeps, half uncovered.  She puts her hand on his, my, neck and relaxes.  “Jeez, I need to stop volunteering for double shifts,” she mutters. 
I look at the corpse, my corpse, pale with skin like plastic.  I look down, wondering what I look like.  Two arms, two legs and one, well everything I remember in life is there although everything about me appears faded like a picture slightly out of focus.  Ghostly you could say. 
“Well lets get you back into your apartment.”
“Apartment?  Well people deal with death in different ways I guess,” I reply as she passes through me to the table.  Images suddenly fill my mind.  I see an image of a sunny day with a boy waving a doll.  He looks vaguely like me from this distance.  The image fades to another.  This image is of a high school room with the teacher at the front of the class lecturing about something although before me a magazine with naked men stashed in a book lays before me.  An unknown arm turns the page and the images fade again.  Then the image of someone, a man, above me and a memory of feelings of immense pleasure, appears and is gone in an instant.  The nurse leaves me pushing the table back into the wall.  She returns to her desk.  “What the hell was that?” I ask half expecting her to answer.  She sits and looks over papers.  I stand there looking at her doing paper work.  “That was you, your memories.  You gotta get out more.”  I walk over and touch her head.  More memory flows. 
I see a toy chalk board with badly written sentences.  “Now this is the subject, class.”  She turns to a group of stuffed animals aligned in rows.  “Here’s your homework.” She bends down to pick up a stack of paper. I pull myself back and the scene fades. 
“That’s interesting.”  I look around not knowing where to go.  That crisp night when I saw my beloved and the costume I wore returns.  I can feel the costume around me.  Black-cotton-blend pants, a maroon shirt and my maroon, sleeveless long coat and brown leather shoes.
I walk to the door instinctively reaching to grasp the knob.  I can feel the cool metal.  It seems more like a memory than an actual sensation.  I try to turn the handle but my hand passes through.  “Interesting.”  I pass through the door as easily as my hand a moment earlier.  The door seems to push me through. 
A thought suddenly occurs to me and I look down.  I think about the floor and how I passed through the door.  I slowly begin to sink into the floor.  The thought fades and my feet return to stability on the floor.  “Nifty, I thought all those damn movies were wrong.” 
A nurse and a doctor approach me.  “You see the man had a massive coronary,” the doctor says.  “He’ll be moved here.”  The doctor passes into me.  I get an image of a heart beating erratically then it stops.  An image of a hospital room lined with get-well-soon cards and successively older vases appears.  A man sleeps with monitors vocalizing his vitals.  An alarm sounds and a buzz.  A familiar nurse rushes into the room followed by orderlies. 
The doctor opens the morgue door and steps in.  “Hey Kris, how’re things going here?”  The door closes.  I wander the halls trying to avoid others.  I feel a slight rumble.  The hall goes dark.  The walls disappear into the darkness while only a faint glow appears from the lights.  The rumble increases to a tremor.  Screeches and howls fill the hall.  I look around but find no source.  The others seem oblivious. 
The tremors stop and the walls return to normal.  A few paces ahead, at an intersection, a strange blackened-boney creature crawls along the floor.  It appears to be about human height, were it to stand erect, although its skin is a deep blackish-gray with what look like glowing red lesions.  It crawls a bit further along the floor sniffing at passers-by.  One passes through the creature.  It snarls with a vaguely human like skull.  It crawls along the wall and ceiling passing me.  I turn to watch it enter a room.  “What the hell was that?”  I ask the air. 
A few moments later an alarm sounds and nurses, doctors and others run into the room.  “How could this happen?” a nurse yells.
“What on earth?” a doctor says.
“What the hell is happening to me!” the patient exclaims.
“Calm down sir!” the nurse replies
“Calm down, calm down?!  The fuck I’ll, I’ll…,” then a dull thud.
“Orderly!  Get the Specialists!” the doctor yells.  A young man runs down the opposite hall.  I look into the room to find a middle-aged man collapsed on the floor.  Lesions like those from the creature already forming.  “How the hell did he get the plague?!” 
“We don’t have any plague victims here!”
A figure in a blue biohazard suit slowly approaches the patient.  “Alright we’ll take care of him now.  Consider this room off limits to all personal,” the figure orders.  The doctors and nurses slowly file out.  The figure is joined by two others similarly dressed.  They load the man into a self-contained stretcher.  The kind the Specialists take away all plague victims.  The first seems to move around me almost like he was aware of me.
“Shit. That thing has something to do with the plague.  What is going on?”  I wander the halls.  “If those things are responsible for the plague then they can interact with others.  I wonder if I can inhabit people like that thing?  Hmm, maybe all those wackos who claim to have been possessed aren’t so wacky after all.  I wonder if I touch them.”  A similar rumble, tremor and the walls turn dark.  Another creature scampers across the walls.  I run after it.  “Well let’s see if this works.”
It crawls into another room.  I follow.  It stares over another middle-aged man sleeping.  “Hey goober!” I shout.  It looks at me snarling.  No light returns from its black eyes sunken into the sockets of its skull-like head.  It lunges knocking me into the floor.  It swipes and bites.  Good thing I’m already dead.  We fall through the floor into the laundry room.  I flip it over me with a kick.  I stand.  It returns.  I struggle with it returning swipes with fists.  “How the hell do you kill something that isn’t living?”  It snarls back defiant.  “Thank you very much!”
Crashing through the washing machine, advancing through the dryer I get an edge.  With my arms around its skull I pull up.  The creature’s body slums to the ground and slowly melts into shadow and fog.  I feel certain dread like nothing I’ve felt before.  The dull light brightens into brilliant white surrounding me.  Amy cries beyond.  I go to her.

“Mr. Kollari?  Can you hear me?”
“Uh, hmm,” I manage.  The doctor appears as a dark figure on a bight white background. I rub my eyes.
“You gave us quite a scare there Mr. Kollari.  We thought you were dead.  If it wasn’t for your wife, you would be in more ways than one.”  His voice and appearance are much clearer.  I look to the foot of my bed to see my dark angle, smiling.  I smile and try to sit up.  “Easy, you lost a lot of blood.  It’s a miracle you’re here at all.”
“I feel… good.  Better than I have in a while.  Amy, what’s that?”
“That’s your life,” she says holding up her arm with a bandage over her fore-arm.  She walks over.  We hug.
“She gave you a lot of blood.  I’ll leave the two of you for a while.  Oh someone is here to see you. I’ll send him in. Miraculous.”
“I missed you.  I feel better than I have in a long while,” I say. The feeling of her against me makes my heart beat. I feel the rhythm. It’s like that feeling you get just after holding your breath for as long as you can then taking in all the air your lungs can hold.
“I’m just glad to have you back. I felt like I had to see you one last time. The doctors don’t know how but you were breathing when they brought you out of the morgue after I insisted to see you another time.”
“Guess I’m hard to kill.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing.  According to the doctors you were dead for more than an hour. I couldn’t leave without you.” She tightens her hug. “You know what this means?”
“What?”
“I own you now,” we let go of each other.  She smiles.  The door opens and a nondescript man walks into the room. 
“Mr. Kollari,” he says hand out stretched. “I understand that you maybe interested in a very exciting job opportunity.”