11: The Turn

What happened between the time the lights went out and when I awoke, I do not know, but the dreams I had were like nothing I had experienced up to that point, nor since. It was like the most horrifying, disturbing nightmare you can imagine, ramped up a thousand times, and mixed with memories of actual events in the most twisted ways. I saw that day, six years before, when my life had been turned upside down, replayed a hundred times in as many different ways. I was back in that toyo, watching the hunter’s rocket as it flew towards me in slow motion, only this time I had time to swerve out of the way, and for some reason I chose not to. In some version wanted to turn, but I was afraid, and I turned the wrong direction, or I wrenched on the wheel, but I was too weak to move it. The outcome was the same; I had doomed Lara, Roddy, and Marila to their deaths. It had been my fault.

In other visions, I was upside down, hanging from my harness, whimpering and moaning as my friends were taken from the car, one-by-one, and murdered, leaving me to the last. I could have protected the, but I did nothing. Another time I begged for mercy in exchange for letting him kill my wife, or I did the dirty deed myself. Always it started with those cursed white boots in the side window of my upside-down toyocar, and ended with everybody dead, except me. It had been my fault, and my doing. They had died and I had lived; I was a murderer, a coward, a traitor, all of the above, and everybody knew it.

I felt myself dying; my soul was torn asunder from my body as dark shapes grabbed ahold of me and pulled me away, into the depths. There was darkness, and gnashing of teeth; death settled over me like a blanket, and not the peaceful ending of my physical self, but an eternal death, an eternal separation from…something. I could feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, but that nothing was something. It was torture, flames, discordant wailing in my ears, a red hot poker burning despair throughout my entire being. I was as dead as dead could be, and my death would never end.

Next, I was on a gurney rolling through the corridors of Core. Tye and Sal were pushing me towards Kasim’s operating theatre, neither looking happy with me at all.

“He killed them,” one had said.
.
“He’s guilty,” the other had added.

“Why bother fixing him at all? Let him die, like he let his friends die,” that had been a feminine voice. Naomy’s voice. She was looking down at me, her hands bloodied from pounding on the ice. Her expression said that I hadn’t been worth the effort. She could never love a despicable piece of human trash like me. My eyes fluttered open (had I been looking through them, before? I wondered) and I smiled at the face of my saviour. She spat in my face, looking disgusted that I had even looked at her.

Pain overwhelmed me, and I was in the operating room. Kasim was sawing my legs off – why was I awake for this? Why hadn’t they at least given me some freezing?

“Not worth the cost of anesthesia,” Kasim had muttered, tossing one useless, fleshy leg onto the ground.

Naomy and Tye stood to the side, laughing at me as I writhed and screamed in pain. One of them handed me a loaded pistol and guided the barrel to my temple.

I pulled the trigger, and…

* * *

Noal thought the nightmares were ending as the images began to fade; he was returning to reality, none too soon for his liking. Eyes fluttering open, images of the white-masked hunter flashed before him, also fading into hazy reality. Still partially consumed with a drug-induced stupour, the familiar sight of a white hunter’s mask filled his hazy field of vision as though through a curtain of fog. But it was real, he knew that as surely as he knew is own name – Neal, er Noal.

The hunter’s metallic voice rang in his head, fuzzy, but intelligible. “You have treaded the path I set before you with more skill than I could have expected, Noal. You should know that your performance up until now has been exemplary, and I greatly look forward to seeing what you will bring to the table in the months to come. Consider this,” he gestured to their surroundings, “my gift to you, for duties faithfully performed – stay as long as you need to. We will meet again, when you are ready.”

Noal wanted to scream at the hunter to wait, stay, face him like a man, but the fog overtook him for a last few sudden moments before dissipating for good. He sat up to examine his surroundings and found Hunterwraith gone God-only-knew where. Noal jumped to his feet, tenderly testing his balance and strength and finding them in good order. He had no idea where he had been taken, or where Hunterwraith had gone, but suddenly he didn’t care. Wherever he was, it was unlike anything he had ever heard of humans building. Floors, walls and ceiling were all lined out with a cold, dark alloy, laced with a luminescent material that gently pulsated in icy-blue tones. Judging by the design, it was a vault of some kind, whose use he could not ascertain.

Then, looking around, he saw what the vault had been storing; a veritable treasure of historical documents, works of art, data recordings, and much more, stretching nearly from wall to wall. Instantly all thought of revenge left his mind, and he was consumed with what he had found. A brief look over the collection told him that this was no mere collector’s horde – artifacts ranging in age from one-hundred and fifty years to six-thousand years all shared the same space, and possibly had for centuries untold. But why? Already his mind was working over what he saw, analyzing the physical features for patterns, commonalities, clues – anything. The objects were related, that much he could tell from a simple visual inspection, but to find out the how and why would require a more thorough examination.

Near the centre of the collection, Noal spotted an old crate filled with dusty, but empty, notebooks, and writing utensils that seemed useable despite their age. He could do wonders with a notebook and some paper. While he had categorized and analyzed a lot of data over the years, he had never had to condense an entire collection of this size solo, nor without the aid of the Codex’s computerized database; this was going to be a hell of a job, but it was here that Noal was most in his element.

To start with, he took several notebooks from the crate, one for each time-period, medium, and genre represented in the collection, and arranged them in a large circle around himself. He took a moment to memorize the location of each category’s book, then took and sharpened a pencil from the crate for each notebook. He would go through many pencils and notebooks by the time he was done; fortunately there was seemingly no lack of either. Next, he spent several hours memorizing each and every object, artifact, and document, its exact location, appearance, period, creator, and potential significance. Noal had an exceptionally good memory.

He decided to start at the end and work backwards, beginning with a number of heretofore unseen documents from various government insiders, scientists, and analysts dating back to the days right after the shift had begun, discussing their own theories and hypotheses regarding the causes of what they were in the middle of experiencing. Some documents were of a purely scientific quality, while others cited top-secret contact with sources inside something called the ‘Pentagon’, as well as a mysterious location known only as ‘Area 51’. These documents Noal spent much time on, taking copious notes, nearly to the point of re-creating entire documents in point-form and Codex short-hand, but he had a feeling he would need those notes before long.

That was only the beginning; from there Noal moved back in time, reading over transcripts of inter-net conspiracy theories involving extra-terrestrials, any number of powerful mega-corporations, billionaire entrepreneurs, and every world-wide government agency imaginable. He skimmed through photographs of UFOs, accounts of mysterious abductions, experiments, and weather phenomena. He had read such things before; the Codex had an extensive library of television programs, tabloid magazines, and science-fiction movies regarding such things, but there was a pattern to be gleaned here, he was sure of. He just needed more time to study his notes more closely. That would have to wait for another time, however; he had a lot more to cover.

As he worked his way back through various periods of history, shunning sleep, food, and even water, a grander picture began to emerge, present in every piece, whether it be renaissance frescoes, Italian sculptures, Victorian literature, pre-historic mythologies, poetical writings, and everything in between. From the modern era all the way back into the first whispers of Mesopotamian civilization, a unified theme and pattern emerged. Oddly, the pattern was only clear when examined from the end to the beginning, rather than the way one usually read through history. All throughout the ages there had been whispers of something dark growing in the shadows; a civilization-spanning prophecy of apocalyptic proportions culminating in the single most significant event in Human history up to that point: the great shift.

One thing was becoming ominously clear about the event that had radically re-shaped the face of the world and human society; for millenia out of memory, people had known that it was coming. They had been warned, but by whom? A stack of notebooks sat to one side, full beyond bursting with his observations, realizations, and analyses on every single item in that vault, yet he needed more information still. Something was missing that he couldn't put his finger on, but whatever it was he knew it was important.

It was also important that he stop; he had filled every notebook in the crate and used up every pencil. He had no concept of how many hours or days he had been in that vault, but as he placed the last notebook on top of the stack, all the cumulative fatigue and hunger that had been silently gnawing at his body and mind since he had jumped through that window above the Steampunk Culture Club on level one hit him all at once. His muscles turned to jelly, stars danced in front of his eyes, and suddenly he found himself face down on the floor, rapidly succumbing to the grip of sleep. Consciousness flowed through his fingers, and he gladly let it go.

He awoke with a killer of a headache and no more idea of how much time had passed than when he had gone to sleep. The hunger pangs he had felt before had developed into a full-fledged stabbing pain in the middle of his gut, and his mouth was dry and chalky from dehydration. But Noal's physical state was the least of his problems at that very moment; the vault was empty, and everything – the entire collection – had disappeared. On the bright side, his notes had not been touched. A metal case sat on the floor in the exact middle of the vault; it hadn't been there before. Noal opened it, carefully, and found a note, hand-written in a language he did not recognize, attached to a small, round disk encased in a blue plastic casing. He stuffed the items into a pocket and took off his cold-suit jacket, folding it into a makeshift sack for the notebooks.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he was raging at Hunterwraith – he knew it had to have been he who had left him the note, and the empty vault – but now his physical needs had begun to outweigh all other concerns. He had to get out of there and find his way back to his friends – maybe stop to find something to eat first – and get back to the Codex as quickly as possible, to start analyzing his notes, and hopefully get Hunterwraith’s cryptic note translated.

Finding his way out of the vault was harder than one might have thought. The chamber itself was expansive, and light was somewhat hard to come by. Not only that, but everything that appeared to have been meant as a possible point of entry was sealed tightly shut. Eventually he stumbled up an alcove hidden in an un-illuminated corner, with a latch that looked like it might actually open something. It took all of his remaining strength just to pull it, and when the door finally squeaked and squealed its way open, he was confronted with more darkness. With nothing else to do but have faith that there were no gaping chasms waiting to swallow him up, Noal stumbled as quickly as he dared through the pitch-black passage, feeling his way along with his fingers as he went. At the end of the tunnel his fingers wrapped themselves around a metal grate, opening stubbornly to let him through into… more darkness.

Here, at least, he was no longer in a tiny passage, but in a more open area; he could feel a light, warm breeze blowing in from no particular direction. There was an odd smell in the air: sharp and oily, almost like petrol-fuel, though there was hardly any petrol left since the major deposits had been used up. Then it came to him where he was: not in New Babylon anymore, but outside, in the giant empty oil reservoir in which the city had been built. How the hell did I get out here?

“Hello!” he shouted, “Is anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?” There was no answer, so he kept walking, feeling out each invisible step before committing to it. He had no idea where he was going, or why, but something told him to just keep on walking; for all he knew he was walking around completely in circles, but either way, he was walking. His strength was quickly leaving him, however – he hadn’t eaten in what was probably days, and had taken breaks to drink only when absolutely necessary (the requisite evacuation took up too much of his precious time to do very often).

The first time he fell, he almost couldn’t bring himself to get back up and keep walking, but he did it, and kept walking, and fell again. And got back up, and kept walking, and fell again. And got back up, and kept walking, losing count of how many times he had fallen and gotten back up. He almost didn’t feel the change in the air until it was too late to stop from falling headlong into a deep hole; as it was he barely managed to throw himself to the side enough to gain himself a rolling slide instead. He knew he should have been thankful that he had only suffered scrapes and bruises instead of a broken leg or neck, but it didn’t matter. He was lying at the bottom of a rocky hole, and he was finished. He let unconsciousness take him, well aware that he might never see light again.