Chapter Eighteen: Seek the Truth
NICOLETTE sat on the corner of the bed, struggling with her frustration and disappointment. It had started out better than she’d hoped -- in some ways, much better! Hell, she was still pretty ready to go if it came to that; if he were to come back out, she was’t sure she’d have the willpower to refuse a second time. Honestly, after their last parting, she’d thought Daniel would be harboring too much anger for any subsequent conversations to be possible -- she had steeled herself for that.
She listened as he ran water in the sink in the bathroom, her thoughts refusing to settle. She sighed as she realized she didn’t want him to leave -- that less than five minutes out of sight, and she was already lonely for his company, even if he remained tense and angry.
How pathetic is that Nikki?, she thought, annoyed at her sudden neediness.
Her self-recriminations were interrupted when he spoke, his voice raised to be heard over the running water.
“Hey Nikki...I just want to say that I’m sorry. That I...that I understand if you want to take things a little slowly, take stock of things and see where we’re at. I totally get it.”
Not really, she thought ruefully, it’s a little more complicated than you think.
A moment passed as she briefly considered her options, then stood, rounding the corner into the bathroom, intending to lean against the doorjamb and (keep him from escaping) finish the conversation...
...and came face to face with an impossibility. Her eyes widened as she saw the silvery white glowing orb in the middle of the doorway, suspended by myriad silver-white tendrils radiating outward in all directions, reminding her of a lambent spider suspended in the middle of its nacreous web. Her breath caught as it brightened, brightened until its pure white light hurt her eyes, causing her to see bright sparks on the edge of her vision, sparks which left trails of color across her vision. The streaks of color formed patterns, shapes, images -- they filled her sight until all she could see was brightness. She was too stunned and blinded to feel anything other than a desire to run away, to cover her eyes, to dive under her blankets until her rational mind caught up. She desperately blinked her watering eyes at the sparks and the color as they seemed to form an image around her. She could see a heavy stone door in some dark place, marked with a strange triangular sigil drawn in soot. It was fashioned of some dark grey, almost black basaltic stone, giving the impression of venerability and menace. She knew it was important, though she wasn’t sure why she felt so certain. She felt fear and trepidation shorten her breath at the prospect of the door opening while she watched, filling her with a desire to flee by any means available.
Her surroundings blurred around her, brightening.
She found herself standing in a field of sere grass, listening to the wind whispering through the tall stalks. Distantly, she heard the boom of the ocean as it crashed against the rocky shoreline. The field was wild and overgrown as she turned a slow circle, seeing hills on one side of the field, the ocean on the other. The hills looked charred and barren, as though a great fire had swept through the area. She could still smell char in the air, and something else sweet and nauseating that wasn’t readily identifiable to her. She realized she was south of Half Moon Bay, in one of the fields just off the 1 freeway. As she completed her circle, she saw a pillar of oily black smoke in the distance, rising miles into the sky. Apprehension rose as she realized the pillar of smoke originated close to downtown -- the urban center of of the area.
Is Half Moon Bay burning?
She made her way to the freeway, walking over charred ground until she reached the steep embankment climbing to the freeway above. As she walked, she saw signs of fighting and burning, cars lining Highway 1, most of them filled with bullet holes. She stared fixedly down the road ahead of her, forcing herself to ignore the cars strung along the side of the road. She had made the mistake of looking in one car that seemed more bullet hole than car. The contents of the carseats in back flashed before her mind’s eye before she could stop it; when she first glanced inside the car, she had stared for several seconds before she finally realized what she had been staring at...people just didn’t do that in Half Moon Bay, but it was the buzzing flies and a return of that sweet carrion stench, rich and suffocating that convinced her she wasn’t seeing things.
She paused in front of a barrier blocking the road. A steel t-bar lined with the skulls of people and things had been driven through the asphalt, supporting a black velvety black banner. She puzzled over the sigil -- swords, and spiderweb, underlaid by the blacker-than-black rose. The rose showed in relief when the banner was stirred by the hushed breeze from the ocean, the general silence giving voice to the wind’s skirling mutter as it explored the ruins around her. She turned a slow circle; aside from the banner, nothing moved. She briefly studied the skulls, but their empty socketed gaze made her uncomfortable. She wondered if they were watching her when her back was turned after skirting the barrier in the road. She resisted the temptation to look back over her shoulder, afraid they might have turned to watch her, superstitious dread rising at the mental image. Empty shell casings winked in the weak sunlight as she walked, pinging and rattling as she scattered them. She wasn’t an expert in firearms, but they all looked to be casings for the same type of bullet.
That probably means something, she thought dazedly, struggling to find coherency in her thoughts.
When she arrived downtown, she was appalled by the general destruction, dread rising at the ominous silence. The heatless sunlight bleached the surrounding city of life and color. She crossed the intersection of the 92 and the 1, the only sound the faint creaking of the street signs and traffic lights on their long steel arms, swaying in the wind. Her eyes traced the pillar of smoke north from the intersection, where the 1 passed a gas station on the inland side of the freeway. She paused at the curb, seeing a huge crater which had been blasted into the asphalt, flattening the small repair garage to one side, the ground scorched and cracked around the crater itself. The air was filled with thick oily smoke carrying the sweet stench of burned flesh and the chemical reek of burning gasoline and plastic. She moved to the edge of the crater, looking down at the piled, smoldering wrack. It took a moment before her mind fully registered the jumble of bones and scorched flesh. She saw gleaming white bones covered in ash, some looking as though they’d only recently been added to the burning pit, skin burned red and black, splitting to show bleeding, charred flesh beneath. Unbidden, the comparison to a roasted luau pig came to mind, and she quickly turned around, shutting her eyes against the horror in the crater as she felt her gorge rising.
She stood frozen, bathed in the reek of the fire pit behind her, trying to gather her will, when she heard the faint scuff of footsteps behind her. Before she could react, she was roughly seized from behind and forced to the ground, feeling the dirty asphalt against her cheek as a knee was savagely pressed into the back of her neck, pinning her while her arms were pulled behind her, then bound with coarse rope which almost immediately burned her wrists and chafed them to soreness. She growled in her throat as she was roughly pulled to her feet and half walked half dragged through a crowd of people, surrounded by a circle of burning torches. She couldn’t remember when the sun had set.
The crowd drew back as she was dragged, naked, into the circle, her hands feeling numb and painful.
Her stomach sank, fear becoming terror as she realized that the crowd was comprised strictly of men. They stood, silent, following her progress into the center of the circle where there was a sort of raised concrete platform perhaps ten feet wide, ringed with an inner circle of torches, burning in the darkness. Every movement hurt, bruises covering her body; she had a dim recollection that the beating had been severe and merciless. Her left eye was swelling shut. Swallowing hurt, her throat feeling like it was lined with little fishhooks.
For a brief second, her conscious mind reasserted itself and she experienced a brief moment of lucidity. A single th
ought registered, This has to be a dream! I just need to wake up and....
...and she was dragged onto the concrete platform, past the line of torches. She was forced toward a block of dark glimmering stone, the light catching and reflecting oddly muted hues, revealing the stone to be partially translucent. The block was wedge-shaped, with a narrow shelf on the ground at the back. With a chill she understood its purpose as she was roughly pushed down with her knees on the shelf, the top of the wedge almost at the same height as her hips. She brutally aware of her nudity as she was forcibly bent over, her head on the downslope of the wedge, with her hips thrust rudely into the air. A heavy leather band was run over the small of her back, then tightened until she was restrained against the stone, vulnerable and exposed to the crowd surrounding the platform. She turned her gaze onto the crowd, staring at them defiantly, but drew her breath in with shock as she realized that half the men crowding around weren’t human -- were in fact only pretending to be human. Her eyes fell on one that looked as though he had advanced stages of syphilis, weeping open sores and flesh sloughing off amidst discolor and decay. As she ran her gaze over the group, she saw most of the men were something demonic that wore human flesh as a costume. She had no clear idea how she knew, only that she was certain.
Her hands were unlimbered and pulled to her sides, then refastened to the sides of the wedge, pulled so tight, she could barely turn her head. She tried to shout with defiant rage, but realized with a horrible shock that her tongue was missing; only a shrill gabbling noise escaped her lips. The noise increased as she screamed, her horror and terror momentarily robbing her of thought. A man with nails and a hammer came, pausing long enough for her to see him and to intuit his intent. He circled to the other side of the obsidian altar.
She screamed in terror and defiance, determined to register her resistance despite her fear. A figure separated itself from the mass, a woman, someone that Nikki recognized, though she couldn’t exactly place her. The woman’s hair glimmered in the darkness, its black lustrous waves throwing back the torchlight. Her oval face would have been attractive were it not for the mad hatred she turned toward Nikki -- though it was her eyes that caught Nikki’s attention. She felt a prick as a nail touched the back of her hand, her heart hammering in her chest in terrified anticipation of what came next. The woman leaned forward and hissed, “There is no room for your kind in this world, Nicolette. This is the price of failure.”
Nicolette understood the girl (her eyes should be brown, she recalled, though she still couldn’t recall where she’d met her before) was referring to the world around her, the ruins and death, the ruin of everything that had defined her world.
She began crying as she sensed the man with the hammer drawing his arm back. The girl leaned in, catching Nikki’s eyes with her own, the silver irises catching the wavering light of the torches, bringing out white specular highlights, the white sparkle catching Nikki’s attention, seeming to throw back the light as she stared.
The woman hissed, her voice strained with madness as she repeated, “This is the price of failure.”
Nikki understood it to mean her own defilement, her unwilling conversion into service of something...unspeakable.
The white highlight filled her vision, blinding her, the sparkle catching other highlights in the woman’s silver eyes, creating a nacreous web of filaments. Nicolette made another harsh, defiant gabbling noise as she felt a pair of rough male hands on her hips begin brutally pulling her apart. She waited in horrible anticipation for the hammer blow as she heard the girl’s voice, hissing across her senses, “Seek the Truth, Nicolette, or face the price of failure.”
She heard the single, heavy thwack, though she never felt the hammer blow as her senses dropped away, leaving her swaying in the hallway of her hotel, still facing the silver-white orb suspended in the middle of the bathroom doorway by numerous glowing filaments. She pulled back, feeling a dull fibrous pain in her head as a tendril which connected her to the orb pulled taught.
Right where the old man touched me, she thought, mercifully losing consciousness.
Interlude