The Void (17 page)

“I’ll be okay. You know this is how it has to be. I have to handle it—or her—or whatever it is.”

“She’s a God.”

A pity…
it drawled, slobbering its two separate mandibles. It teetered on its crawly legs and rocked its fizzing abdomen at Embry in a hypnotic sway.
Funny children… I was going to possess
your
body, Embry, and compel you to finish off his mother… Just the way his mother killed your wife…

“Meredith didn’t kill Hanna.”

“Oh yes, she did. Ask her. Ask Orin,” Tina chittered, saliva dripping from her fangs.

“Meredith didn’t kill Hanna.” Embry repeated

Take control of your emotions. Don’t let her get to you. It gets stronger when you show fear and or anger. Keep calm. Keep centered, think happy thoughts.

Morgan sensed what was happening and closed his eyes, mumbling the words only he knew. Immediately they began to come, crawling out of the walls and the dark places towards him.

“I’m not scared of you. You have no hold over me. For years I felt responsible for my son’s death, but I know now it’s not my fault
.

I can cure your cancer…
Tina muttered, displaying signs of unease. Her talons, on the tip of her legs, fretted and clicked on the inner earth’s surface. She skittered from one wall to the other side, waltzing to and fro.
Let him go. This is between you and me.

“Damn straight it is. I came here for Morgan, and I’m taking him.”

Can’t do that… He won’t go with you…

“Morgan,” Embry said, “Do it now.”

They swarmed over him in their thousands, all the spiders he had ever dropped into the hole. They covered him in a protective blanket and dragged him away, back towards the exit, back towards the surface.

Tina screeched and scrambled over the walls and knocked Embry off his feet. Her spiny legs pinning him to the wall, raising him up high as Morgan disappeared into the dark, covered in a blanket of spiders.

Embry shook, unable to breathe. The wind had been knocked out of him, and, as he tried pulling the pincers off his neck, the stinger on Tina’s lower body pierced Embry over and over again, penetrating his organs. Embry bled, feeling the life seep out of him. Pain rocketed in his stomach, lungs, and lower ribs as Tina shrieked at him
“That’s where your cancer lies, Embry, my boy! It’s here and here and here and here!!”
Stabbing him over in different parts of his body.

Morgan Brewster was dragged through the tunnel and finally at the edge of the cavern, on the ridge crest of the sinkhole where it went down to its murky depths.

ORINNN!!
She shouted.
COME BACKK!!!

“Fuck you,” Embry spat. He mustered all his strength, all the pain and hurt he experienced during his entire life, and drove the knife into one of its eyes. He pulled it back out and thick, coppery blood exploded in a misty spray, spattering him with its skein full of orange-black fluid.

Tina screamed—an earsplitting squeal which blew cold wintry breeze on Embry’s face.

You fool,
it cried.
What’s your last wish before you die?
She sliced his right ear off. Instinctively, Embry raised his hand to stop the blood flow, screaming. He held the knife in his other hand and swung it downward and started to laugh—slow guttural bubbling peals of laughter that sounded like a madman in a lunatic asylum. Tina recoiled, flinching.
What is so funny, old man?

Embry giggled at the insanity, and then stopped, wisdom filling the void in his eyes. “You can’t break what’s already broken. I don’t fear you you’re nothing—a fucking nobody,” Embry dug his hands into Tina’s jaw and stretched, using the blade to disconnect the muscles and tissues. “Do you hear? Just a fucking nobody!”

He sawed into Tina’s mouth and rammed his head in. He crawled and slid into her mouth, distending her jaw, breaking it. Tina reeled backward, staggering on her hind legs as she wailed. Her tongue turned a bluish tinge as he maneuvered past it, crawling in, sliding past it. He slid down her gullet, down the pipeline that was Tina’s esophagus, and he settled in the fiery pit of her stomach juices, ripping through the tubing with his knife. Stomach acid pumped into the chamber as the fluid ate into Embry’s skin.

Tina shrieked.
GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT OF ME!

He was Jonah; and she was his whale.

Embry howled in the gullet of the beast as more stomach acid swirled around him, smoking his skin and melting off the flesh. Embry didn’t just have third degree burns; he was liquefying. Embry jammed the knife in the soft pouch of inner digestive factory, bringing his arm down again and again. The handle softened and broke loose, and, now, Embry just held the blade in the palm of his hand, crying and screeching, as he slashed this way and that.

“Die you pitiful shit! Die!” he wailed, lips peeling off as they dissolved. “Die!”

Meters away, at the edge of the sanctum, before cliff veered down and away into the hole that went for many miles further, a gang of dragonflies upended themselves and flew toward Morgan. These were the malfunctioned drones which the government had sent in weeks before, but came unhinged and broken down two hundred feet down into the hole. These same dragonfly drones woke up, fluttered their wings, and soared toward the boy. Twenty, forty, now a hundred of them coalescing and buzzing as they formed a thick soupy mass and Morgan swung around and began to levitate in the air. These mechanical drones whirred and buzzed, picking Morgan up and raising him straight out of the sinkhole as his spiders broke away, falling back into the abyss.

Morgan closed his eyes and meditated, humming a prayer.

IV

Out of the darkness, a young boy with pallid face and huge, wet eyes reached up as the drones set him down on the ground, then like the spiders before them, returned to their tomb. He ran toward his mother and encircled his arms around her neck, crying. She lifted him up and asked, “Where’s Mr. Embry?” holding him close, covering him with kisses.

“He’s not coming,” Morgan sobbed into her neck. “He’s not coming.” He repeated.

They held each other and cried at the edge of the sinkhole. They both looked down into the gloom.

V

Word of the impending air strike had reached Maple Street seconds after Morgan was freed from the hole. The soldiers who were informed were giving evacuation orders using large bullhorn speakers. Despite their requests that everyone leave in an orderly fashion, most people screamed and ran, racing for what they deemed to be the safety of their homes. Others still were already frayed to breaking point by the events of the last few hours and wandered around the debris littered war zone that used to be where they lived. It was when the soldiers themselves shared panicked glances and abandoned their posts, clambering into a personnel carrier and tearing away from Maple Street did Meredith begin to think that something was seriously wrong. It was this that enticed even those who were in a daze to figure out that something serious was afoot and to relocate as far away from Maple Street as they could.

Within minutes, the street was deserted, and only Morgan’s tears punctuated the silence as he hugged his mother. Sunlight began to creep over the horizon, warming Meredith as she clutched her son tight. She held him at arm’s length, her own tears flowing freely. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, or just that she had never looked at him before, but he looked different. Changed somehow. He was still a boy, but there was a knowing in his eyes, a timeless age that told her that he had seen things that no human should ever see. None of that really mattered to her anymore, though, because she had her son back, and that was the important thing. It was then, as Morgan stopped crying, that she heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching jet. She stood and looked down the full length of the deserted street, and could see it. A speck on the horizon. A blemish on a beautiful blue-purple sky.

Her stomach tightened when she thought of how people had run. How the soldiers had sounded so shrill and afraid in the urgency of their evacuation orders before tossing aside weapons and abandoning expensive military equipment. There could only be one reason for that, and she suspected she knew what it was. She cupped a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun and watched the plane draw close.

VI

The triangular matte black B-2 stealth bomber sliced through the pre-dawn sky as it raced towards Maple Street. Its payload, a 2,500lb B83 class nuclear bomb was nestled in its flat underbelly. Armed with its maximum 1.2 megaton warhead, which would devastate a five-mile area surrounding the impact point from which nothing would survive. Its deployment and the orders to drop it on a street in suburban America had raised eyebrows for pilot, Karl Groves. However, he was trained not to think, and only to act on orders, these particular ones having come from the president directly. As the first rays of dawn began to creep over the horizon, the bomber began to lose altitude as it made its final approach towards its target. As was customary, Groves checked that the orders still stood about dropping the payload. The silence on the radio was agonizing and seemed to last forever. Every fiber of his being hoped that there would be an abort order. Even though he was trained not to think about what might happen on the ground (out of sight, out of mind, was what they always said in the academy), now, in reality, he couldn’t help but think about the devastation and loss of life that his actions would directly cause. Sure enough, the president was the one giving the orders, but it was him who would have to physically carry them out. Even though the leader of the country was holding the gun, it was him who was the bullet that would absolutely obliterate a huge section of his homeland. The radio crackled to life, and the pilot’s heart thundered against his ribcage. The seven-word response made him feel nauseous.

Orders still stand. Proceed with the operation.

He considered disobeying but knew that even that action was futile. They would just send someone else to do it, and he would still end up rotting in a military prison for the rest of his life for no reason. He activated his targeting system, already input with the exact coordinates of the hole. All he had to do was push the button. He held his hand over the release handle and made his final approach.

VII

Meredith scrambled to her feet, desperately looking for somewhere, anywhere that would provide them shelter or protection from the coming blast. Crying out in frustration, she knew that nothing would even come close to protecting them and that everything she had just gained back was to be snatched away from her again. The sound of the plane was growing louder now, and she could see the sunlight shimmering across its surface as it approached.

“Mom,” Morgan whispered, but Meredith was too horrified to listen. Perhaps one of the abandoned tanks could offer them protection? Maybe if-

“Mom,” Morgan said again more firmly.

Meredith stopped flustering and looked at her son. He looked beautiful, framed there in the golden hue of dawn, a small boy with impossible age and knowing in his face, his elongated shadow a true reflection of the man he had become in such a short space of time. As she looked at him, she saw a wonderful and incredible thing.

He was smiling.

He walked towards her and stood at her side.

“It’s okay,” he said as he squinted up to the sky. The plane blasted overhead, and they both watched as she shimmering white object fell from its innards as it banked away. There was absolute silence as it fell, both of them watching its progress. Meredith felt Morgan’s hand gently grasp hers, it was warm and alive. And she somehow drew strength from his presence. She tore her eyes away from the falling bomb and looked at her son. There was an incredible kindness there. If he was feeling any of the horror that she did, then he wasn’t showing it. She was starting to wonder if perhaps he didn’t understand what was happening and that they were about to be vaporized into nothing but dust. His next words put paid to that idea and made it clear that he understood what the situation was.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “Just close your eyes. Enjoy the feel of the sun.”

She watched as he followed his own instruction, turning his face up towards the warmth of the day and the bomb that was rapidly approaching the hole. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she joined him, closing her eyes, turning to face their coming death, which was now whistling as it cut through the air towards them. She started to wonder if it would hurt if they would feel it as they were pulverized down to an atomic level. Just as panic was about to take over, her son’s words again brought her calm and peace.

“Remember,” he said. “Be strong. It can’t hurt you if you’re not afraid.”

Meredith tightened her grip on her son’s hand and felt him do the same. They stood at the edge of the hole, eyes closed and smiling. Meredith felt nothing but love as she stood with her son, and even as the whistling sound grew to a mighty crescendo, there was no fear.

Mother and son stood firm, hand in hand as they waited for the end to come.

.