Weary Traveler
Chapter 19

“Who the fuck are you?” Zoxillian shouted.

“Zox, what the fuck?” Mitch said, raising his hands to his ears.

Zox pulled back the hammer and the blue energy crossing through the weapon glowed fiercer.

“Tell me or I’ll kill you and throw your body in the incinerator.”

“It’s me, Mitch Henderson.”

“And I’m the CEO of Rotech. You ain’t no fucking bum,” Zoxillian said, stepping closer to Mitch.

“You told me not to look like a fucking bum.”

“Oh, I told you not to look like a bum? What else did I tell you, Mitch Henderson?” he asked, mockingly.

“I don’t fucking know…” Mitch said. “You’re Zoxillian the Third. Your first lab for the Memory Mod was downtown inside of an abandoned building. Some old place called, Diner. Uhh… Roxy’s Diner! And you had me stick a wire on the roof of my mouth for the prototype. And a black-robed creature appeared in my memories. And… you call me Weary Traveler.”

Zoxillian lowered his weapon a few inches. He squinted, scrunched his brows, and took a few prowling steps forward. His mouth hung open slightly as his white, colorless, marble eyes scanned the bum up and down, gawking in silence at the revived and refreshed bum. Analyzing his clean skin and repaired face. And then, a tiny grin crept up from the corners of his mouth.

“Weary fucking Traveler,” Zoxillian said, letting his arm that held the handgun go limp. “What the hell happened to you?”

Mitch dropped his hands and gazed down the length of his body.

“Made a couple changes,” he said, with a slight shrug of his left shoulder. “Some better decisions, better choices.”

“Incredible,” Zoxillian said, striding over to Mitch. He walked around him, examining him like an art exhibit. “How’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You almost look like a fucking corpo. You still don’t got that artificial, douchebag look though like the rest of us. Think we’re born with it,” Zox said, sniffing as if to claim ownership of the corpo appearance.

“Maybe all I need now is a pinstripe suit.”

“Don’t even think about it. Pinstripes are for the Zox only, here at Rotech,” he said, spreading out his arms to absorb the power of the headquarters.

“How’s Memory Mod business?”

“Smooooth as one of the Zox’s legendary pickup lines. Got most of the kinks worked out. No more extra wires on your temples or in your mouth.”

“How about the black robes?”

Zox ran a hand through his thick head of oily hair.

“It appears that those fucking demon things are here to stay. Just don’t try and mess with anything when you are in there. Mod researchers parsed through their data and figured out that they only appear and attack when something is altered in the memory.”

“Let’s get started, then,” Mitch said, marching up to the operating chair.

“Whoa, whoa, not so fast,” Zox said, holding out his hand, denying Mitch a clear path. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his rectangular credit wallet. “Forgetting something for the Zox?” he asked, wriggling the thin card.

Mitch hitched up his eyebrows, gazed at Zox.

“That a fancy Rotech pager or something?”

Zoxillian stood motionless, silent.

“What?” Mitch asked. “You need my fucking thumbprint now? I thought this was a classified oper-”

“Thumbprint?” Zoxillian asked, scowling at Mitch. He glanced at the device in his hand, then back to Mitch. “This here is a credit wallet. You know the rules. First you pay and then you-”

“Relax, I’m just fucking with you,” Mitch said. He dug into his right pant pocket, grabbed his credit disk, and adjusted the setting.

“Here,” he said, holding the disk over Zox’s credit wallet until they chimed.

They pulled them away and stared at their respective screens. 22C flashed red on Mitch’s disk, disappeared as he tucked it back into his pant pocket.

“Man... two-hundred credits!” Zoxillian shouted, voice echoing through the lab. “You must really miss your past, Weary Traveler. What kinda memories you going back to look at anyway?”

“Just some encounters I forgot about with people I forgot about.”

“You’re making me a rich salesman,” Zoxillian said, sliding his credit wallet into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Rotech pays me shit. Low-level corpos are no better than a nomad or bum scrapping by for the leftovers of society. No offense,” he said, smacking Mitch on his right shoulder.

Mitch plopped onto the operating chair, swung his legs up, and settled in. The plastic and faux leather crackled beneath his body. Metal gears and hinges croaked and groaned in a mysterious language of inanimate forces crying out for him to flee from his mind and his cruel memories before it was too late.

Zoxillian pulled up a wheeled chair and slid next to the gurney. He plugged one end of the cable into the sensory immersion rig and the other into the tech in Mitch’s head.

“Alright, nothing’s changed. Take a few deep breaths. Calm your mind and body and focus on your memory. Hold it at the center of your mind. Picture all of the senses associated with it. This reality will fade and you will be...”

Zoxillian’s voice drifted away like the faint echo of hushed chatter just before sleep washes over a drowsy person. A dripping silence crept in from the edge of Mitch’s consciousness, followed by the dimming of the lab’s artificial lights before they died off altogether, swallowed by the darkness of his unconscious.

The frigid, recycled, air-conditioning that spewed from the vents and the sterile, chemical potions that had bombarded Mitch’s senses, transformed into a grimy stench of sewer filth and toxic fumes. A sour, throat-pinching stink of urine-soaked stone, baking in the humid, summer heat, wafting through the thick air, consuming Mitch in the dread of his memory.

He blinked until his hazy vision focused and his conscious awareness populated his mind with the past. Hot rain dropped from the polluted darkness like pellets of gossamer fire, falling and sizzling atop the muddy ground. Thick plumes of smoke billowed up from the earth in every direction, like the planet’s lungs exhaled fire straight out of the furnace of hell. They swirled overhead, sucked and twisted into the prison of smog and soot blocking out the heavens.

He dropped his eyes, gazed down the length of an abandoned alley surrounded by fiery, crumbled brick and stone buildings. Mounds of torn garbage bags littered the ground around dozens of overflowing dumpsters, rusted with chipped paint and swarming with flies that buzzed with a wicked intensity like a symphony of kazoos.

Mitch inspected his body. Bare feet, bruised and bloodied. Rotten toenails, caked with mud and black sludge. Ripped jeans, a few sizes too small, and a torn shirt that hung loose from his weak neck, slung down his bony right shoulder. His fingernails were chewed short, threatening to recede to the cuticle and eat away at his emaciated hands.

“What’s it gonna be, Mitchy Bitchy?” a boy asked.

Mitch turned around, stared at a group of five teenagers standing in a semi-circle. He looked deep into their feral eyes, then stared at their hands. Each one displayed something on their flat palms. A grimy collection of jellies, gumballs, snappers, blasters, jawbreakers.

Mitch licked his lips and then shook his head, took a half-step backwards.

“Never done bonzos before.”

“Did we fucking ask?” the short one in the middle said, puffing out his bare chest, discolored by welts and sliced with cuts.

On the left and right, two, tall, identical-looking, skeletal boys covered in scratches and scabs, stepped around Mitch, encircled him like a caged animal at a zoo prodded by ignorant, hairless, talking apes.

“You either do these bonzos now or we beat the shit outta you and you never get to be in our crew,” the short one said, rising higher in his mud-caked combat boots. His bleached, black, jean shorts blended in with the alley’s mud and shadows and damp brick walls.

Mitch shuffled in a tight circle. The body of a teenager, the mind and memory of a forty-four-year-old. The experience and life-long misery of a former, bonzo-addicted bum, peering out. His past life confronting him, looking him straight in the face like he stared down the muzzle of a pistol with his shaky, teenage finger on the trigger.

He peered into each of the young boys’ eyes, studied their scowling faces. Searched his mind for any meaning… a shred of purpose.

He stopped once he had made a full circle, glared at the short boy for a long moment. And then, he tilted his head down and watched his right hand as it crept towards the gumballs sitting atop the boy’s filthy palm. His eyelids were split, gaping so wide that the dryness cracked his brown irises.

No. Don’t do it! he screamed at his teenage self, but his hand had closed the gap. His jittery fingers dangled over the dirty bonzos, prepared to pluck and gobble them down. Forever trapped at the beginning of a life of suppressed pain and torment from memories not confronted... from a conscious and unconscious mind not assimilated as one.

The filthy, bonzo boy smirked at his next victim. A maniacal grin. His crusty lips spread wide to reveal rotten teeth traced with brown crud and green gunk. He lifted his palm until the gumballs touched the tips of Mitch’s fingers.

“No,” Mitch said in a monotone voice, pulling his hand away. He loaded up his right arm and swung it forward, smacked the bonzos out of the boy’s palm so hard that they flew through the air, collided against the brick wall and splattered onto the mud. The boy’s hand absorbed the force of Mitch’s blow, whipped, and smacked the nose of the pudgy boy on the left.

“You’re fucking dead!” the short boy screamed. “Get ’em!”

The first club came from behind Mitch, smacked him on the back of his head. A flash of white light burst across his vision as his body crumbled to the floor, shriveled into the fetal position. His skinny arms clamped over his head in a feeble effort to deflect the kicks burrowing into him.

“Ain’t so tough now, are you, Mitchy Bitchy?” one of the boys said.

A sharp, pointed kick collided with the center of Mitch’s spine, sent a stinging pain through his nerves, followed by a warm, numb sensation like a blanket of heat consumed his body.

“I better not see-”

An alley-shaking swoosh swung from right to left like a Glider flew overhead. The chorus of kicks ceased. Only the sound of the boys’ panting breaths and the wincing heaves spewed from Mitch’s bloody mouth remained.

The swoosh returned, this time from left to right, followed by a dense thud that smacked against the ground at the front entrance of the alley, spreading a shockwave through the air.

“Oh, shit!”

“Run!”

Five pairs of quick steps sprinted past Mitch’s crumbled body and disappeared deeper into the dark shadows of the alley.

Mitch peeked from behind his hands. The boys had dropped their bonzos in the mud, leaving him as helpless prey for whatever landed at the alley entrance. He groaned, flipped onto his back, and slowly inched upwards onto his butt. White lights danced across his vision, blocked out whatever stood in front of him. He closed his eyes, tried to sniffle, but his nose was clogged with blood and snot.

“Mitch Henderson,” a deep voice bellowed, heard as an echo that rattled through his throbbing brain, “I told you to never return to this place… to this time. Tell me, is it bravery that I sense? Or is it stupidity?”

Mitch opened his right eye, then left. Let the dim light of the alley shine upon the black-robed creature. It closed in on him, levitating several feet off of the ground, gliding through the air as if it moved beyond time itself.

“Do you fear the demons that dwell inside of you?” it asked. “Or is your purpose to welcome and confront them, hmm…? Maybe you wish to send them back into the depths from whence they came? Back into the darkness of your unconscious?”

Mitch winced. Either from the creature’s words or the purple welts that peppered his body. He was now face to face with the creature, staring deep into its piercing red beams from behind his own swollen, tear-soaked eyes.

“Both,” Mitch muttered.

The creature reached underneath Mitch’s arms and hefted him onto his feet, steadied him on his wobbly legs.

“Look at you,” it said, brushing Mitch’s shoulders. “Was it worth it? Coming back to this lonely place… changing your memory of the past.”

“Past’s got no power over me now. I am free.”

“A foolish pursuit, altering the past. But a wise one you are for learning from your mistakes and correcting them. Can you walk?”

Mitch took a few, slow, aching steps forward into the light radiating from the alley’s entrance. The creature levitated on his left.

“My name is Raphael,” it said. “I am an angel of the past.”

Mitch gazed over his left shoulder, scanned the angel up and down.

“You look like death.”

“The past is dead,” Raphael said, coldly. “I am here to guard and protect against intruders that wish to alter the past in order to take control of the future. Their present.”

“Like me.”

“Yes… however, it appears that you merely wish to escape the shackles of trauma and pain that your memories hold over you. I am speaking of the rulers of darkness in your present. Against the spiritual hosts of wickedness that steal immense wealth and wield tyrannical power to dominate and control others by way of force.”

“Corpos…”

“And others… It is not my place to tell you. I must limit my intrusions with humanity’s free will or I will suffer the ultimate wrath.”

“Whose wrath?”

“A power and intelligence that far surpasses my own. A being so divine that the force cannot be described in mere, insignificant words. It is an inherent understanding… an experience of the supreme reality.”

“God?”

“Indeed.”

“God is real?”

“Do you know what love is?”

Mitch was silent, stared straight ahead. The alley warped and stretched like they walked on ground that rolled backwards. The light at the entrance to the alley was still in front of them as if the Heavenly Gates appeared at the edge of infinity, just out of reach.

“I think so.”

“Have you felt the fire of love burning within your heart? The eternal spark of consciousness?”

Images of Eleanor and Nova flickered at the center of Mitch’s mind. Their sweet smiles and pleasant voices. The warmth he felt while in their presence, like a veil of protection spread from their bodies and wrapped him in a cloud of light. He wiped a single tear that squeezed from his swollen, right eye.

“Yes.”

“God is the infinite and eternal force of love. God loves humanity, a divine creation of the beatific Universe. But, more importantly, God believes in humanity’s free will. Believes in every human being’s right to choose their own path, create their own destiny. However…” Raphael said, holding up his robed arm, “when evil principalities rule over the Earthly realm and destroy the free will of human beings, God’s love of humanity arises to protect against darkness and wickedness. Do you understand, Mitch?”

Mitch allowed the angel’s words to flow through his ears, wrap around his mind, trickle into his eternal soul.

“I understand, Raphael.”

“I am forbidden from entering your present and interfering with humanity’s free will… Nevertheless, protection of this realm of the past is under my discretion. I may choose to assist those whom I feel bear the strength and the courage to challenge the very principalities of evil that haunt your present reality. You, Mitch, have suffered much. Struggled through a lifetime of pain and sorrow, addiction and depression. And yet, you have discovered the light of love. You have chosen, by way of your own free will, to sever the tethers of your past. To escape from the suffocating stranglehold your wicked memories have over your life. It is this type of courage that I seek. This type of bravery that is required for the task, should you accept.”

“What’s the task?”

“To save humanity.”

Mitch froze, stopped on the unending path.

Raphael’s words echoed through the alley, rattled within Mitch’s ears. The brick walls seemed to shift, warp like they were made of dust.

“Rescue the human race from the forces of darkness that threaten free will,” Raphael said. “Stand up and fight against evil. Become a beacon of light and hope. Act as the link that connects this past, your present, and the future of humanity.”

“And if I decline your request?”

“There are others to take your place.”

Mitch trudged forward through the mud, continued down the infinite trail of light.

“I’m just a bum,” Mitch said.

“Yes… so you have been told by many,” Raphael said. “You must understand, Mitch, that powerful figures and institutions place labels on types of consciousness. They do this as a means of control. A way to categorize, demean, and demoralize entire sections of the population so that they never strive for greatness. A bum they say. But is that how you feel in your heart?”

“I feel like I’m capable of greatness.”

“Do not feel that you are capable of greatness, rather, know that you are. Only then will you begin to understand the truth.”

“What truth?”

“The truth of your free will…” Raphael said, placing his robed right hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “You decide.”

Raphael’s quick shove caught Mitch off guard.

His body stiffened, feet tangled and tripped.

Down he tumbled, face first towards the mud like a wooden plank. He posted his arms in front of him, but the ground had transformed into air.

He gasped, like the first moment upon awakening from a nightmare, strained against the restraints snaring him to the operating table.

“Easy! Easy, now,” Zoxillian said, pushing against Mitch’s flailing chest. “Long journey this time, huh?”

Mitch stared wide-eyed across the lab, settling onto the gurney’s stiff cushions. He gathered his panting breath and calmed his thumping heartbeat.

“Your vitals were pretty steady until the end. How’d it go? Any creatures from the black lagoon?” Zox asked, chuckling at his own joke.

Mitch gazed at the light shining down from the ceiling. The luminous lab twirled like he had stopped abruptly after spinning in circles. His hazy memory raced through his mind, melted, faded with each passing second running into the future. Thoughts of Raphael’s words bounced around the inside of his skull as his frantic mind tried to process, filter, and unify the realities of the past, present, and future within his bum brain.

“No creatures this time,” Mitch said, straight faced. “Get these straps off me. I’ve got somewhere to be…”