Gothic Harvest

Gothic Harvest




         Dawn arrives, carving its intrusive way through the cracks in the walls, and growing stronger and stronger as the warm darkness slowly retreats back into the shadows to await the time of its return. A ray of the unstoppable light grazes over my closed eyelids, bidding me to awake though I can find no other motive to. But, even without motive, I must bring myself back to the realm of the conscious. Every day I must, for if I don't, I may slip into a much more permanent form of sleep. Again.
         So, my eyes edge themselves open and are confronted by the sight of a shabby arrangement of wood and nails, held together only by their refusal not to be. Piercing shades of yellow and white stab through the cracks in the boards, forming incomprehensible shapes from nothing more than their own existence.
         A cold air caresses my cheeks and arms, moving slowly as more of my mind returns from the realms of my subconscious. My skin, though warm while I slept, rapidly cools from its own realization that the air is of a different, much colder temperature. I feel a damp softness against my back that scratches against the sensitive edges of my now twitching fingers. The surface is uneven, bumpy and smooth in places without any even alternation. But to my front is nothing but the soft caress of the air against my exposed face and arms.
         I cannot feel the air on my legs...because of my pants. It takes my mind a few more moments to realize that I am actually wearing something to cover up the entirety of my legs. My back and front torso are likewise covered, but with a different material, judging from the difference in the feeling. The pants are warmer and rougher, whereas the shirt feels almost weightless.
         With these feelings clawing their way into my consciousness, my beloved state of sleep slips slowly through the cracks at the edge of my mind to wait, like the shadows, for their chance to return.
         I do not draw the first breath of the day. My heartbeat does not change. In fact, it does little more than lay in my once mortal chest, useless and cold as death itself. The same chest does not burn for the precious relief of the cold air around me, for I have no further need of it than to tell the temperature. I do not raise my body from the surface it lies upon.
         I lay there, letting my memories swarm like a torrential onslaught of crippling blows into my mind. I remember my name. It is a very strange name, though one cannot choose his name. Not even in the strange circumstances I have been thrust into have I ever had the chance to change the name given me. My name is Dred. My life is over. My afterlife isn't paradise, but a continued sentence on Earth. I could never have thought of a better Hell. Memories from both my lives spent in this hell intrude into any thoughts I would have if I wanted to have them. A flash of bright colors, like a kaleidoscope set in front of an ultraviolet light. A brief glimpse of a girl, her brown and golden hair draping delicately over her shoulders as she laughs at a joke so meaningless that it means nothing any longer. A crowd of people, all holding signs and moving in unison as if conformed in the way insects hold to so greedily. And countless other reflections either to brief or too painful to acknowledge. Then my mind returns the responsibility of seeing to my eyes. Why and how they still work I do not know.
         When they drained me, my eyes should have crippled and died with nearly everything else within me.
         And when they drained me, they didn't fasten me in well enough to keep me as the pet they needed for the dog fights. They want me back. And not even the sanctity of the first few moments of awareness can hold them at bay.
         That is why, as soon as my eyes are aware that I am staring at a ceiling, and as soon as my back is aware that the surface supporting it is a damp and moldy bed of straw, I am fully awake. My nerves are taught, and my ears listen for even the smallest of noises. My eyes search out every crack in the ceiling above me, assaulting my brain with every insignificant detail. The beautiful meaninglessness of the random assortment of curves and holes in the ceiling is magnified, every minute detail mine to behold. I see a small section of the uppermost parts of the adjoining walls too, for my vision encompasses more than I had ever cared to see in my previous life, but is necessary for survival in this one. The entire place is of wood and rusted nails, the color of which is the same shade found in most rotting places of the same materials.
         My vision wobbles and shifts, as if being stretched along the edges, and the center-most point of my focus becomes nearly microscopic in its clarity. I do this of my own accord, a sort of reminder to myself that I am no longer human. I see every pore of the wood in the small space that is my vision now. One would wonder how something with so many holes could stand to keep itself together. I close my eyes for a period of time small enough that anyone not cursed with my state of being would not have noticed it. Just long enough for me to refocus my vision.
         Now that I am awake, lying down would serve no further purpose than to present an easily disposed of target to my pursuant. I lift myself up rather quickly so that I am sitting. Through my perception there is a strange and almost incomprehensible gap between the will to move and the action. My mind commands the motion to exist, but my body is incapable of moving at such a speed as id demanded of it. The resulting emptiness between the mind and body is strange to feel, as if two layers of a physical wall were separating themselves from each other. This is not caused by my body being too weak or too dead to respond, but by my mind being much, much too alive.
         I do not pull the two layers of my being into a single entity. I have the full power to do so if I chose, all it would require is a slowing of my mental activities, which I could will to happen if I saw a need to do so. But if I were to give in to my own desire to return myself to a more human state of existence, I would only become easier prey. The gap allows me to comprehend  the horrors around me, react to them, stay alive in spite of them, before most would even notice they were present. It is this gap, this empty stillness that has kept me as alive as I am now.
         The air changes only slightly, imperceptibly, but my skin feels it and the pressure is brought to my mind. A mere second later, my ears deliver the message that someone is breathing fifty feet away and to my left. Someone…because the breaths are too controlled to be an animal. I listen for a heartbeat, separating mind from body even further through concentration.  The tell tale beating of life does not come to me. There is no heartbeat.
         Without thinking, I command my hand to choke the handle of the pistol on my waist. The cold still metal is a feeling of life to me, as familiar as breathing would have been in my previous life. My fingers wind mercilessly into the fitting of the handle, designed so that the pistol will not fly from my hands at the speeds that I am moving. In one fluid motion the pistol is out of its home, in my hand and moving through the air.
         The cold uncaring touch of the weapon stimulates my mind until every shift of the air is like a pounding upon my fingers and arm. I feel every current, every impossibly imperceptible change in the flow of the fluid air around me. It caresses the weapon and my fingers, nudging by measurements too small to know. But I feel every one, and command my hand to use them to change the direction of the weapon. My finger squeezes and unforgiving metal clicks to give way to an explosion at the end of the barrel. To my senses, the shock is immense. I feel it all, even the escape of the bullet as it leaves its home to fulfill its purpose. I see it moving, see the sunlight shine from it fro a second before it crashes through the wall. I see in unbearable detail every splinter of wood thrown to the sides or incinerated by the searing metal’s heat. Then there is red and white joining the cacophony of colors among the splinters. Along with the explosive sound of the gun, there is now a sickening crushing and crunching sound of metal destroying bone. The skull of my target reacts as the wall had, but adds its own touch of crimson in a brilliant sparkling arc that catches the light to shine through the hole created by my bullet. But that is all I see of my target, the bone and blood.
         With the danger avoided, my mind and body come a little closer together. Not much, but enough for the air currents to be unknown to me once more. I rise to my feet and make my way over to the hole in a short time. I see no reason to rush, but do nonetheless, for even walking presents me with the emptiness between will and motion. It is such a strange feeling.
         The wall I had shot through had been the door to what I had been sleeping in, which had, in my moment of increased awareness, revealed itself to be a barn. With one arm I slide aside the large wooden door to reveal the outside. For only a moment the sunlight disorientates me. But I command my irises to reduce my pupils until the light is bearable. I look down at my kill, lying a few feet away and sprawled awkwardly upon the ground. The sight would sicken me if I hadn’t seen it so many times before.
         Her dress was white, though now lies over her stained with the essence of her living. Her face would have been beautiful if not for the expression of pain and surprise forever etched into it by me. She would have been about nine years old if ReBirth had not turned her into a self aware marionette. As she is now, she is nothing more to me than a meat puppet. I kneel down next to it, and harshly pull at the black collar around its neck. The body lurches lifelessly at my pulling until the collar snaps. The insignia on it, one of two hands grasping a star surrounding a heart shape, gleams in the brilliance of the still rising sun. It is my trophy. I have survived once more, because I was the first to pull the trigger.

Chapter 1

         There was a time…when concepts like returning the deceased to their previous state were completely unheard of. Terms like “Twice-Born” and “The Human Boundaries Project” just didn’t exist. Politics were once centered around the ethics of unborn children, survival, even frivolous things such as rights of human beings. Those must have been such simple times.
         Simplicity, like innocence, is such a fragile state. Both are lost to me.
         Today I stand upon a place of worship, looking down at all the simple people, watching them as they move this way and that, letting what little part of my mind I allow to wander vaguely wonder for what purpose some of them are moving. There is an antic, bald man in a blue suit, moving briskly and with a grimly satisfied look on his face that all but shouts the words "I'm doing it and you can't stop me." A few feet from him seems to be his exact opposite. This man is young and bearing a striking resemblance to a flag pole. He wore no suit, but rather clothes that must have been scraped from the floor of his home. His expression is utterly nonexistent, as if saying...absolutely nothing.
         For a moment I wondered which of the two I favored most. I could choose only one, for my target would not wait for me to act upon both of them. Exactly fifty meters ahead of the two men, in the direction that I was facing, was another man. This one required no choosing, for I had no control over his fate other than it was my personal duty to ensure that it ended by my hand.
         He stood slightly taller than the others, though in all other ways almost utterly unremarkable when compared to the other members of the crosswalk. What I was observing was a pedestrian intersection in a usually busy city street. The name of the city mattered little to me, all that mattered was the unremarkable man.
         I command my mind to separate further from my body, enhancing my senses simply through faster interpretation of what they gathered. My vision shifted until the unremarkable man stood directly in front of me. He had a bit of hair desperately reaching outwards from the chin of his thin, bony face. His eyes were brown, a boring sort of unnoticeable shade probably designed specifically to be just as unremarkable as the rest of him. The hair atop his head was combed over in a way that spoke of a television news caster, with a slight bald fighting deviously against his hairline. His clothes were simply those seen on the street openly. Nothing designer, nothing decrepit. Simply a white shirt and blue jeans.
         Even his physique, suspended somewhere between the state of obesity and normality, was forgettable. I would not have noticed him if I hadn't already known him to be a Puppet. From the look of him, his age probably held itself between 29 and 35. So he couldn't be completely under them, unless their methods had been modified.
         All this information was presented to me rather quickly. None of the men had moved little more than a step. Now that I had my target, I was ready to move.
         I didn’t give myself time to question my decision. Decisions could never be rethought anyway, for decisions are already made before we realize what drives us. The second I had seen the two victims, I had already chosen which one would be shown mercy, and which would find his life transformed among thousands of others. I could, would only chose one of them. I already had.
         I closed my eyes, and uttered a silent apology to the less fortunate one. He had not brought this upon himself, hadn’t done anything to draw them to him. He merely existed, which was enough for them. His life, all the many things he had seen and loved, would mean nothing in less than five minutes.
         The high noon sun cast an iridescent glow upon the street below me through my eyes. In the light, humanity’s rightful home, they looked so…alive. So beautiful in their needless motion. It wasn’t fair, what would happen to them so soon. Perhaps one of them would have seen the world bathed in the light at all times as it was now.
         A second later, the light faded to normality. The effect had only lasted little over a second. As the glow subsided, I kicked at the center of the cross standing before me. Three strong strikes and a crack appeared at its base, foretelling of its fall. I stepped back a few feet, then lengthened the gap within me. With tremendous focus, I tackled the cross directly at the center of its four beams. The wood splintered and broke at its base and began to tumble down over the side of the building. I jumped, placing my right foot at the top of the cross, and my left at the bottom. The cross leveled out and fell horizontally, with myself upon it, riding it to the street. My fall attracted the attention of some of the people on the street, who stopped to stare open-mouthed at my descent. The wind whipped around me, throwing my hair upwards and slightly lifting my shirt. After two and a half seconds of falling, I reached down and grasped the cross by the bottom end with my hand. I pushed off of it with my feet, angling my body so that I now rode the cross upside-down, using my hand for support. The ends of the cross tilted by impossibly small measurements, but I kept it horizontal by adding minute amounts of pressure at different angles as I felt the changes.
         I tilted my head to see the unremarkable man already in motion. He was running towards the two men, who were still relatively in the same location. He was almost moving in slow motion, but then, so was I. The only things moving faster were my eyes. I calculated his distance, angle from me, and height all with what could have been incredible speed if recorded. With these numbers as my weapon, I arched my back until I felt my feet scrape along the walls of the church. I tensed my legs and kicked off the wall, using my back as a springboard to send the cross flying as a missile through the liquid air towards him. Now was the time for my decision to exist in the physical plane. As I kicked off of the wall, I drew from my waist my pistol. Once again, the cold steel stimulated my mind. I aimed flawlessly at the older man, and pulled the trigger. A near moment later his determined expression is replaced by pain and shock, then nothing. He falls to the ground in the same moment that my feet touch it.
         The unremarkable man already has the other man. How I wish that he could have kept his absent expression, but from this point forward, his expressions will be less than absent. They will be useless. For now, the last thing his face will ever show to the world is fear. The unremarkable man has him in a gray station wagon and is driving by the time my bullet reaches the balding man. The captured man stares through the windows with a plea in his eyes that cuts through my calm like a hot knife through ice. A smooth shattering.
         As my feet hit the ground and they drive away, I already know that it would be useless to shoot after them. The car is bulletproof. The car is always bulletproof. The cross lies shattered at the corner of a nearby building, undoubtedly swept away by a motion of the unremarkable man’s arm.
         They are so much stronger, so very faster than I am, it is a wonder that I have been this successful.

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         The lock gives an echoing click as my specially prepared key slides into the unique slot of my otherwise inconspicuous door. Constantly I am forced to keep a low profile, sacrificing camaflouge only for safety, and only relying on safety when I am most vulnerable.
         As the door opens, I am comfortably assualted by the sight of my meager living space. An eight by ten room, furnished only with a single bed and a few useless sentimental objects.
         It had been three days since the last time I'd slept in this room. For the past three days I had been following a particularly elusive target. A new, stealth driven Puppet on a reconaissance mission. My location here had been discovered by it, and I either had to find and destroy it, or risk loosing the last stable place I have left.
         I swing the door, cross the threshold to my bed and fall seamlessly from my stride to a laying position. The door shuts behind me. I must sleep.
         As my body sinks into the reluctant cushioning of the mattress, swirls of thought become more and more profound. Several of my memories weave in and out of perception, fleeting glances at the life I used to live. At first my mind shrinks away from them, as a man might shrink away from something too pure to see. But eventually I succumb, allowing my mind to be flooded with dreams and visions of who I used to be.