Weary Traveler
Chapter 16

Mitch rubbed his aching eyes, looked around the gigantic room surrounding him. A kitchen, dimly lit by a fluorescent, pus-yellow lamp dangling from the cracked ceiling by a rusted, bronze chain. The broken light flickered as if an earthquake rocked the building’s foundation, casting animated shadows across the decayed, white walls turned brown from chalky smoke and layers of grime.

He dropped his gaze towards the linoleum floor. A hideous hue of mud brown and burnt orange with outlines of a black floral pattern like it had been painted on by a child. It was warped by humps like the apartment was constructed upon mounds of dirt.

A puddle of pungent, stale water glistened on the floor beneath the sink, overflowing with food-crusted dishes and bowls, swirling with an army of flies that hovered with a buzzing hum. It crept through Mitch’s eardrums, scratched his brain, and filled it with a disoriented confusion like a deep sleeper trying to remember the hazy sounds and colors of a dream in the few seconds upon waking in a dark room.

His stomach grumbled, overtaking the sound of the flies. He clutched his belly and looked down his torso. His eyelids jolted open at the sight of his short limbs, his tiny hands, and small feet. A stained, brownish-yellow diaper wrapped around his bottom, sagged towards the floor. He touched the waistband with the tips of his fingers on his right hand. It was cold, damp, rubbing raw the tender flesh on the inside of his little thighs.

A rubber ball bounced over the top of Mitch’s head, startled him. He looked up as it rolled to a stop in front of a retro, flatscreen television set that rested on a wooden stand. He peered at the broken screen displaying an aerial broadcast of nuclear bombs dropped on a string of warehouses. The words, CyberTech War Begins, covered the bottom of the screen in a breaking news graphic. Beneath that, a stock ticker scrolled, showing massive gains in every sector of the market.

There was a distant thump thump… thump thump… thump thump… that exploded behind Mitch, expanded until it filled the room.

And then, something smashed through his back, launched his little body several feet through the air and into a skin-burning slide across the stained, brown carpet, grinding to a gritty stop beneath the broken television.

He shook his head in an effort to escape the white light that consumed his pulsing vision. Then blinked rapidly, pinching the uncontrollable tears that welled in his sockets and dripped down his nose.

He peered from behind soggy eyes at a muscular dog with rabid, black eyes and light brown fur with white spots. The creature had clipped ears and a chopped off tail. The foul stench of wet dog and spoiled urine soaked into its skin.

“Fucking Christ, quit your damn crying, Mitchy Bitchy!” a woman screamed.

Mitch felt sharp fingers squeeze around his left elbow, grip his slender neck, yanking him onto his feet in one motion fast enough for a second round of dizzying nausea to creep through his concussed head.

“Three is too old to be whining like a baby all the fucking time,” she said, fetching the ball from the dog, tossing it a few feet to the left, avoiding Mitch. She wore a shredded, cement gray tank top with sweat stains beneath the armpits. Ripped, jean shorts wrapped around her skeletal legs spotted with scabs and bruises.

“I’m three and’a half,” Mitch said, in a squeaky voice choked by the mucus in his throat. He stared up at the woman, vision of the room warped by the tears squeezing from his sore eyes.

“Err… I’m three and a half,” she mocked, bony arms stuttering wildly, “three and a half ain’t a real fucking number. You so dumb. What a pathetic waste you turned out to be.”

Mitch rubbed his wet eyes and swiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand.

“Jeffery was right, we should’a sold you the second I brought you into this world. Would’a saved me money on your lazy ass.”

Mitch’s mother tried to straighten her crooked back, placed her bony hands on her hips and shook her head slowly from side to side, scowling.

And then, her rage unleashed.

She stomped across the room, loomed over Mitch, barked smelly words in a babbling incoherence. She wagged her bony index finger in his face, scratching the tip of his nose with the dirt-infected nail chewed to the cuticle.

Mitch studied her with the curious eyes of a toddler. He watched the spit fly from her rotten-toothed mouth filled with missing teeth and contaminated gums, but he could not hear the words hurled at him. Only the noxious stench of her whiskey breath slithered across the small gap and squeezed into his little nostrils.

There was a shift in the room’s temperature, like the heater had been cranked up to ninety-nine degrees. Hot enough for the blood in Mitch’s tiny body to seethe and mask his vision of the hideous mother creature in a veil of red rage. As if her entire aura had been consumed within a cloud of fire, trapped by the flames of a blazing inferno.

A tingling sensation grew from Mitch’s empty belly, expanded outwards until it consumed his body and filled his skull with a strange, unfamiliar feeling, like a mental haze had unleashed something trapped at the center of his brain, awakening a secret superpower buried long before.

And then, the hot air in the decayed living room shifted, dropped from scalding to an icy chill, like a frozen ghost swooped back and forth, spreading gusts of frosty wind.

Mitch leered at the vile beast from behind narrow eyes. His jaw clamped so tight that the roots of his baby teeth cracked. Tiny hands clenched into fists the size of large, toy marbles.

“Fuck you, you fuckin’ bitch!” little Mitch screamed with the thrusting force of his entire body, hitching up on his tiptoes and flinging his arms towards his wretched mother.

The woman’s snarling mouth clamped shut. Her lips pinched into a line so straight not even one of the booze-stained bills sitting atop the rickety coffee table could slice through it. Her blood-boiled face dropped several shades to a pale pink. Her forehead scrunched atop furrowed brows and the crack in her eyelids thinned to razor blades, analyzing her little boy.

She leaned towards Mitch’s face.

“What did you just call me?” she whispered through gritted teeth.

Little Mitch’s pupils dilated, seemed to rotate within their sockets as if the world turned upside down. He sifted through the depths of his young mind trying to remember if he had spoken those words to his mother. He tried again.

“You heard me,” he squeaked. “I said fuck you, you fuckin’ bitch!”

Mitch ducked beneath a quick backhand and stepped to the right, circled around the giant woman towering over him.

“Well, well, well, would you look at this. Mitchy Bitchy, the big three-year-old, grew a pair of balls all of a sudden,” she said, shaking her palms mockingly at him.

“I’m forty-four now,” Mitch said, using his left hand to pinch his diaper wedgie from out of his three-and-a-half-year-old butt.

She belted an obnoxious guffaw.

“Forty-four-years-old?” she asked. “You smoking some of my synth-crack?”

“You’re a hideous creature and terrible mother and you will burn in hell for eternity for what you did to me,” Mitch said, pointing his little finger at the cackling wildebeest.

“Little Mitchy’s found Jesus? How sweet,” she said. “I brought you into this fucking world. I can sure as shit send you right back, you little cunt.”

“I’ll go anywhere as long as you’re not there, you synth-crack addicted whore,” Mitch’s little voice squeaked.

She gasped, leaned back and tucked her chin against her collarbone, placed a bony hand over her chest, thoughtless mind failing to process her toddler’s mature aggression.

“What’s up?” Mitch asked, spreading his arms out as if to challenge the beast. “Got nothing to say now? No insults to scream at your child? Nothing to throw at me? Nothing to hit me with?”

The woman stared at Mitch in silence with her head slightly turned to the left.

“I can’t believe I put up with your terrorizing bullshit for so long. You’re a weak, ignorant, disgusting human being who should have never been blessed with a child,” Mitch said.

“You little shit,” she said. “I’m gonna-”

A booming clash burst from Mitch’s right, sent a shockwave through the musty living room as the front door flung open and dented the moldy drywall with the rusted doorknob.

A dark cloud of smoke wafted through the room, swirled like a tornado for a few seconds, and crawled back out of the front door, leaving behind the black-robed creature Mitch encountered in his first memory. The beast clutched an enormous scythe in its right hand. Its scarlet eyes leered through the veil of shadow underneath its hood, beamed through little Mitch.

“Oh, come on!” Mitch said, throwing up his hands. “I’m just gettin’ warmed up.”

He stared at the approaching creature floating forward, hovering a few inches off of the ground.

“The past is off limits,” it said in a deep voice that wriggled the walls, shook the fabric of the memory like a wave rippling through a sphere.

“But it was just gettin’ good.”

“Your actions will have grave consequences.”

“I’ll revisit my past and change my memories anytime I please,” Mitch said, hands on his hips, chin raised.

“Never come back to this place. You are interfering with the natural order. The hierarchal class system must remain.”

“Natural order?” Mitch asked. “Who’s in charge of the system of the past?”

“That is beyond your comprehension,” the beast said, swinging its scythe in the space in front of Mitch, spreading a steady rhythm of whooshes. “You will pay with your life.”

“Fucking do it, then! I’ve been dead before,” Mitch said.

He squared his little body with the beast and charged forward, screeching a tiny, primal yell that pierced the air like it was breaking glass. He sidestepped the tip of the swinging blade and collided into the beast’s body, fell through the creature’s robes as if they were made of smoke.

Down… down… he tumbled, spinning in a tight spiral into cold, dark, eternity.

His eyes jolted open, torso shot up from gurney, chest heaved in, out, panicked lungs gasping for breath.

“Easy, easy,” Zoxillian said, patting Mitch’s chest. “Welcome back.”

Mitch blinked his eyelids hard like he snapped photos of his surroundings, shook the fog from his mind and looked around the room. Zoxillian was sitting on the rolling chair on the right side of the gurney, tapping on a holo-tab.

“You were in there for a long time,” Zoxillian said, looking up from the tablet. “How’d it go?”

Mitch cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes. A warm sensation flowed out from the center of his mind, swallowed his heart, bathed his body in a shroud of light and intense energy.

“Good,” Mitch said, gaping eyes staring at a point a few feet in front of him.

“Did our friend come back?”

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

Mitch jumped back into his mind, sifted through his racing thoughts and the escaping memory. The creature’s words appeared, clear enough to see. The memory-shaking sound of its voice crawled across his skin.

So strange… so vivid… so real…

“Nothing,” Mitch muttered. “Didn’t say nothing. Just swiped across my chest with its fucking sword.”

“Interesting,” Zoxillian said, tapping a few spots on the tablet. He scribbled something with the tip of his finger and closed the program. “The Zox has been getting reports by other testers about the entities interacting with them. Saying some bullshit about orders and systems.”

“Oh,” Mitch said, “that’s… weird.”

Zoxillian pressed on his right temple and stared just to the left of Mitch. His white-within-white eyes flashed red like an emergency siren, flickered off.

“Got another appointment,” he said. “The Zox is a busy man.”

Mitch swung his legs over the side of the bed, planted his feet on the tile.

“When’s your next opening?” he asked.

Zoxillian posted his arm against Mitch’s back and hurried him towards the front door.

“Not sure,” he said, fumbling beneath the left flap of his suit jacket. He pulled out his holographic business card and slapped it into Mitch’s hand. “Give me a call. But wait a few months. Don’t know the side effects of two rounds on the mod.”

“You already gave me one,” Mitch said.

“Then give it to one of your bum friends. The Zox needs more broken minds that want to take a wild ride on the Memory Mod train.”

Zoxillian shoved Mitch out the front door.

“And bring more credits!” he yelled, slamming the door shut.

Mitch kicked his legs forward into a trot down the empty road. There was a slight shift in the perception of his waking reality. The rotten stench of Rosenfell seemed less putrid. The gray sky seemed less bleak. His conscious, self-awareness expanded outwards. Illuminated by a budding mandala of light that sprouted from the middle of his soul.

The center of his brain felt like a weight had been lifted. Allowed his lungs to inhale, exhale without the jittery anxiety. The fleeting flashes of booze and bonzos that crossed his vision quickly dissipated like they were made of fog. Blown away by fierce winds of change.