Weary Traveler
Chapter 12

The hallway swirled. White lights flashed and morphed into a tight, spiraling vortex as if it gobbled up all space and matter within a whirlpool swirling around a miniature black hole.

Mitch hyperventilated, seeking out the oxygen that had escaped from the hallway. His lungs felt like they collapsed in on themselves, disappeared into a vacuum that popped at the center of his chest, expanded outwards and sucked him deeper into the depths of a dark, empty void.

His invisible arms swung, scratched, clawed at the air, fought back against the asphyxiation like he had awakened in outer space after an extended bonzo trip.

“What did you do?” the Crawler asked. His voice descended several octaves, trapped in a state of slow motion like an antique record player spinning warped vinyls at a speakeasy up in the Twilight.

Mitch strung together a collection of breaths, turned his heavy head towards the left and stared at where the Crawler should have been. The creep’s body transformed into a blob of color. Twisted and warped by concrete and white light, creating a new creature fashioned from inorganic matter and animated by the fundamental forces of the Universe.

The bum shook the flashing light from his head, swatted at the space in front of him with his invisible hand to clear a path. With every blink of his eyelids, reality shifted like it jumped through dimensions. Drifting between alternate realities and strange worlds. Time and space warped by the pressure and energy from the GravGun blast, pulled within its earth-shattering grasp.

Mitch peeled his eyelids open, clamped them closed, transported into the shadows of an ominous alley, staring at his reflection in a puddle of mud.

His eyelids burst open like an electrical current zapped his face. The blinding white light of the Crawlers’ concrete corridor tore through his eyeballs like serrated daggers.

He clamped his lids to escape from the fiery incandescence, found himself peering down into the puddle of mud, his wretched reflection staring back at him as the water rippled from the puke purged from his acidic stomach, spewed from his rotten mouth.

He blinked, teleported back into the bright corridor and watched the Crawler manifest back into reality with an outstretched hand reaching towards the fallen bum.

Mitch leaned away, pressed his back against the wall, and shimmied onto his wobbly feet. He shuffled sideways, crept past the Crawler still dazed in a crumbled heap on the concrete.

He faced forward, stumbled from one wall to the next like a rusted pinball in a retro arcade, shoulders smacking against an immovable force, flexing his eyelids as wide as they would open, allowing the chill of the hall to cool his blazing eyes and dry the tears that filled his sockets.

He clenched his lids, but only the darkness of his empty skull stared back at him. When he opened them, his eyes discovered a metal hatch protruding from the wall on the right. He stepped in front of it, gripped the handle, pulled the hatch open. The rancid stench from inside blew him backwards, colliding into the adjacent wall.

He punched the air as if he fought against an equal, invisible enemy, both struggling for dominance in the realm of the unseen. A bubble of sharp bile clawed up from his sick stomach and retched out of his rotten mouth, sizzled atop the concrete.

And then, a grating clash echoed through the hall like a collision of metal and stone. A chorus of shouts and stomping feet on dense concrete engulfed the corridor.

Mitch looked back in the direction he stumbled from. The Crawler was still dazed on the ground, his torso swaying like a blade of synthetic grass caught within a gentle breeze. He reached out and grasped at the space in front of him, wriggling his fingers and turning his hand over as if he captured something out of the ether and held it in the palm of his hand.

The shouts grew louder. Their stomping feet transformed into a booming roar that echoed through the corridor like a stampede of radioactive, synthetic beasts prowling deep in the scorched badlands.

“Fuck it.”

He inhaled a lungful of cold air, filled his lungs and puffed his cheeks, yanked the handle open.

Reality rippled with the noisy stench spewing off of whatever filth waited at the end of the narrow tube, smacking Mitch in the face like waves of wind injected with hot, steaming garbage.

He lifted his right leg and stuck it in the hatch, then his left, leaned backwards, hugged the GravGun close to his chest, and launched into the putrid stink of death.

Down he slid, across a wavy ramp, slippery with disgusting slime. His bulbous pockets slapped against the greasy walls, whipped around a right turn, picked up speed down the slick, metal surface. Flinging left and looping right. Diving down into deep trenches and shooting up over valleys like some kind of depraved, Crawler carnival ride.

He swung in a wide, arching left turn and burst into a long straightaway where a patch of gray flickered in the distance. It continued to expand until it engulfed Mitch’s invisible body in a hazy fog.

“Oh, shit!” he yelled, voice echoing.

He pressed his palms against the slippery walls in a feeble effort to stop his momentum.

His body stiffened. And then, he launched through the air. Arms and legs flailing. Body falling like a bum rocket that failed to break out of the Earth’s gravitational pull, screaming until the endless wasteland of garbage engulfed his body, swallowed him whole, sucking him beneath the surface into its toxic grasp.

Three seconds… five seconds…

He broke through the top layer, gasped a lungful of the noxious, eye-watering fumes. His throat burned like he swallowed fire. Air passage swelled to block the sewage from reaching his internal organs. The landfill reeked of rotten death and synthetic eggs dipped in boiling vinegar.

He balled his hands into fists, army crawled across the top layer of garbage, crinkling and crunching beneath him, until his legs escaped from the clutches of death. His invisible body made it seem like the trash was alive, possessed a haunting mind of its own. Shifting. Trying to flee from its own stench. Failing. So it consumed any sign of life that dared to get away.

Mitch crept onto his aching feet, reached for the disk on his chest, twisted, and pulled. A loud, plopping suction burst into the air as he reappeared, visible feet planted firm on the garbage.

He analyzed his limbs and torso covered in the bunched-up Chrono-Suit, unzipped the top half, and let it dangle down around his legs.

He looked up with trembling eyes and stared out across the endless landfill.

“My God…”

He bent at the waist and vomited the rest of the scalding bile from his empty stomach until nothing but dry heaves seized his body. Then swiped his mouth with the back of his filthy fist, straightened his spine, and stared out across the massacre.

Mountains of red-stained, orange jumpsuits piled on top of each other, stretching in the boundless distance and buzzing with planetary colonies of synthetic flies. The decaying bodies mixed in with armies of torn trash bags, chewed open by the Crawler’s lab-grown rats scurrying across the top layer of contaminated death thrown from their false Paradise.

Mitch scooped up the GravGun and stumbled forward, narrowed eyes staring straight ahead, looking away from the slaughter that his feet trampled over. It was like trying to replace balance after a long night of booze chugging and bonzo popping, stepping through a minefield of bums passed out on the ground. Each of his feet stretching too far forward, too wide, tripping over a limb jutting up from the filth. His sickened mind, too broken to care about the bodies trying to drag him down into the grimy grave and claim him as one of their own.

He turned around, peered through the pollution towards the faint spectrum of light tracing Rosenfell’s hazy, city skyline in the distance, and trudged through the landfill. His steady steps gained traction, stability, growing accustomed to the uneven surface of garbage and death crunching and squishing beneath his feet. Steps grew louder, louder. Panting breaths increased in intensity, fighting for any trace of oxygen within the vile air.

The putrid stench of lingering death wrapped its slimy, wretched fingers around his body, pulled him deeper into its depths, further into the darkness of his unconscious mind.

And then, Mitch froze, clamped his lips closed, listened…

The crackle of rustling garbage and whistling winds filled the air, followed by the steady crunch, crunch of heavy steps and heaving breaths.

“Don’t fucking move,” a hoarse voice said.

Mitch’s droopy eyelids cracked open, eyeballs stared into the dark void.

“You make any sudden movement and we’ll kill you right here,” said another.

“Now put your fucking hands up and turn around real slow.”

Mitch gulped, inched around towards his right until he stared down the muzzle of a steel pipe and a Crawler light rifle, and into the rabid eyes of Sebastian and Felix.

“Knew you wouldn’t wait for us, bum,” Felix said.

“Now, wait, wait, hold on,” Mitch pleaded, holding up his hands, “I was heading back to Jefe’s right-”

Sebastian lowered the light rifle and leapt into the air. He dropped into the cavity of garbage where Mitch stood and leveled a fist like a block of stone square into the bum’s frail nose.

A sharp sting shot through Mitch’s nasal passage, crept into his brain like a breath of fire. Hot tears filled his eyes, turned his reality back into a dizzy soup of hazy light, swirling matter, and immense energy.

“Just wait,” Mitch said in a nasally voice, sniffling.

Felix raised the steel pipe high over his head and launched even higher than his ogre accomplice. He swung the pipe with the full force of his three-hundred pound body and seven foot fall into the pit, smacked Mitch on the crown of his head like a sledgehammer on a boulder.

White light consumed his vision as his body crumbled into the garbage, wriggled and writhed into the fetal position, shriveled and melted into a bag of rotting bones and spoiled flesh like the blood and water of life drained from his carcass.

Two ferocious pairs of heavy hands ripped across his body, dug their claws into his flesh. They flipped Mitch onto his back, ripped the Chrono-Suit and janitor jumpsuit off of his broken body, left him in his soiled boxers that had decayed from chalky white to a moldy, yellow-green.

He stared at the giants through the tears in his eyes. They were peppered with sparkling, white light and a gray haze that swirled in the wind blowing sour slaughter through the janitor cemetery.

Mitch chuckled. Something wicked, maniacal, uncontrollable, like a madman off his bonzo meds wreaking havoc at the back of a funeral gathering.

The growing pain from the steel pipe blended with the rest of the torment and suffering that coursed through his veins and robbed his brain of a normal life. The sorrow that prevented him from overcoming the ghosts of his past. The trauma of a fucked-up childhood. Always lurking. Forever haunting, hunting, waiting for him to make the fatal slip. Looming over his life, strangling his soul like an indestructible straitjacket.

And then, he cut off his laugh. A rusty-toothed smile crept across his broken face. He pointed a shaky finger at Sebastian and Felix hovering over him, wearing masks of sadistic pleasure.

“You’re still… a pair… of stupid, fucking trolls,” Mitch said, unwinding a shaky middle finger and leveling it at the buffoons.

“This is for stealing Jefe’s bonzos,” Sebastian said, hurling a kick into Mitch’s ribcage.

Mitch turned onto his side and curled into a ball to protect his internal organs.

His cackle returned, louder than the first time, as if pain itself was the last thing keeping him alive. Abandoned for eternity within that dimension of space, imprisoned within that infinity of time. A lonely island with the population of one, lost soul. A lonely bum.

“Bitch kick,” he said, voice muffled by his arms and garbage wrapped around his face.

“And for leaving us with those disgusting Crawlers,” Felix said, grunting as he swung the pipe into the bum’s lower back.

Mitch’s consciousness fluttered, wavered, like a flashlight running out of battery while hiking through a dark, abandoned sector of Japan District.

“Jefe’s gonna love all of this tech,” Felix said. “Gonna be worth a fortune in the markets.”

“Good thing you won’t be needing it, bum,” Sebastian said. “Won’t be seeing you again.”

Mitch unfurled like a blooming, synthetic flower. He tipped onto his back and pointed up at his assailants.

“Oh,” he said in a calm, steady voice, “I’ll be seeing you two real soon.”

Sebastian smirked, shook his head.

Felix stepped forward, raised his right leg, and dropped his boot onto the center of Mitch’s face.

Warm blood gushed from his broken nose, dripped from his infected gums, filled his mouth with the sharp taste of metal as if the steel pipe itself wedged down his throat.

A shroud of darkness filled his head. He reached for it, clawed and scratched a piece of it away, unveiling a patch of entrancing, white light hiding beyond the abyss.

The mystical luminescence rocketed towards him.

Closer, closer.

Faster, faster.

That warm, unfamiliar radiance of God shined within him, burned from deep down in his broken body. Engulfing his dead mind. Stretching around his beaten, bloody soul.

He pushed, swatted, tried to prevent it from consuming him.

He punched and roared to scare it away, block it from absorbing his body.

Failing.

Accepting fate.

The forgiving light pulled him into its warm grasp.

Down, down, down he tumbled, into the black hole void. Swallowed by the brilliant light of unrequited love.

*****

Mitch gasped, coughed up blood.

He smacked his aching chest, sucked in a lungful of foul air. Warm crimson oozed from the gash on top of his throbbing head. Some of it dried in patches like a shredded cap that clung to his thin hair, the rest coated his wrinkled forehead.

He snorted the blood trapped in his nostrils, hocked a slimy loogie, and purged it from his mouth along with two decayed teeth from his lower jaw.

Darkness clung to his tear-crusted eyes, sinuses ached from the stinging numbness slicing through his concussed brain. He tried to prop his weak arms against the trash, but his skinny body crumbled straight back into the landfill, claiming the bum as one of its own.

He rolled onto his side, groaning like a maimed, synth-animal that had been captured, thrown into a cage of rot. Far away from the population of nomads, corpos, Crawlers, and even other bums less fucked-up than himself.

A booze-and-bonzo-addicted beast. Flesh covered in purple and blue and black welts tinged with stripes of dried, crusted blood like some kind polka-dotted artificial animal cooked up in a CorpoMax laboratory. An abandoned human being left to die alone, to fight against the darkness and misery of his memories. That perpetual battle with his unconscious mind filling him with the dread and destruction of his past. The trauma and abuse of his childhood, on into his lonely adulthood, finally catching up to him, pulling him under.

Mitch laughed at the perfect madness of it all. A single chuckle choked by the blood and mucus that lined the back of his swollen throat. He rolled onto his back, gazed into the somber sky that blocked out the heavens.

The clouds looked like they dropped onto him, erased him. That permanent shroud of smog trapping the remaining human population within a coffin of looming death. Filling Rosenfell’s sinister people with the toxic breath of Rotech and CorpoMax, spewing their poison into the dead city.

Mitch wrapped his arms around his broken ribs, groaned as he lifted his torso. Bones shifted beneath his discolored skin, bags of garbage crinkled and crunched beneath him. His lifeless eyes gazed down at his bare chest and concave stomach, his skinny legs and bare feet like his body was not his own.

And then, he crept upwards onto his feet. Resurrected from the ashes of defeat, pulling himself out of the clutches of death. Of hell. His soul rising towards the heavens above.

He kicked his legs forward. One slow, aching step at a time, hobbling through the landfill with a hunched back atop shaky legs. Marching on towards the beginning of the end; or the end of the beginning. Back to his tent in his lonely alley. Past and future inverted, melting together into an eternal present. Fleeing from the grave of garbage that had nearly claimed his soul, back into the hazy, psychedelic glow of Rosenfell.