Chapter 22
I opened my eyes with a startled gasp and sat up on a dark, crystalline mineral surface tinged with greens and blues; a dim cavernous corridor filled with stale air. I got to my feet as my boots scraped against the ground, my eyes peering into the uncanny lighting.
There were no proper shadows. The darkness seemed to come from the color of the cavern itself, but there was no proper light source either. Everything was generically illuminated by its own hues, with the sound of something like a deep rumbling wind coming from below.
“Fuck…” I said. “This again.”
The last thing I’d remembered was driving Jenna to her police cruiser at the Everglades to grab a few things; she’d called in sick—after checking it for hidden explosives of course.
No, it was after that. We’d just gotten back to my place. I’d gone into the garage to get the DVR boxes, but decided to check on my Ichor stash first.
The next thing I knew I was hallucinating this cave.
I decided to end this vision using dream logic, all I needed to do was follow the cavern out to… wherever it went. And hey, at least I still had my gauss cannon.
With slow, deliberate steps I followed the cave tunnel out to a wider mouth, where a bewildering sight awaited me. The tunnel didn’t lead out into a greater terrain, no, this was straight up trippy.
I was standing on a floating island, suspended in some kind of purplish gray nether, with many other mineral chunks floating within it, like asteroids in a clear pocket of a nebula.
Occasional bolts of red lightning silently sparked in the immeasurable distance, connecting the floating islands like neurons in a cosmic brain.
Unlimited adaptation or not, I wasn’t jumping out there.
A resonant hum suddenly emanated from behind me, prompting the immediate drawing of my weapon. I turned around, noting a swirling blue ether sweeping over the cavern interior like glowing water.
I slimmed my profile and turned to my side while proceeding toward it, following the bend of the cavern as the light got brighter.
And then I heard voices.
Human voices.
I didn’t go calling out like some horror movie victim, not until I knew what I was dealing with. The voices spoke with a distorted warp, like a reverse reverberation where the echoes came first with the clear voice coming last.
“Is it stable?” asked one male voice.
“The aperture is holding, but it’s losing energy fast,” a second voice replied.
“Increase the gain.”
“That’ll use too much power!”
“Increase. The gain.”
“If I do that it’ll—“
A gunshot.
I hunched down at full alertness with my cannon held in front of me, creeping closer to the source of the light.
There was the sound of fingers snapping impatiently, and then first voice then spoke again.
“Get that out of here. You; increase the gain.”
A nervous, younger voice replied. “Sir?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Maybe. The interplanar array is detecting a secondary object.”
“Use the dissolution frequency.”
“Ineffective. It’s out of phase with the surrounding field.”
And then I came around the bend, witnessing the source of the swirling threshold before a tall, dark silhouette. Humanoid in arrangement, but with proportions like a Mutable in its advanced stages.
Azure stone-like skin, with a bald head too big for its shoulders, and hands with long fingers featuring an additional joint.
It’s back was turned to me, with an image in the center of the swirling light like peering through warbled glass.
I saw a room on the other side of the energy membrane, something like a hyper-modern laboratory with various staff in white coats operating a wide console, where a pasty, gaunt, upper middle-aged man in a navy blue suit stood directing them.
His gray eyes were cold and emotionless, the scientific staff fearful and confused, and all of them were looking at me.
“What is that?” the gray man asked.
And then the tall figure before me suddenly turned around, the features of its face concealed by the shine of the light behind it.
I felt a gyroscopic vibration in my head as it stalked toward me, one that grew stronger the closer it got. It didn’t hurt, but my body visibly hummed from its presence.
Through sheer force of will I asserted my own headspace, dissipating whatever it was simply by observing it with my inner awareness.
That made the thing angry. It suddenly lunged forward with long fingers and even longer arms, and I was having none of that.
“Fuck this,” I said as I fired my gauss cannon directly through its chest, boring a hole where its thorax used to be.
A splatter of green viscera along with azure chunks flew back through the swirling threshold, covering the front of the scientific console with its contents.
The figure fell forward dead and slid face down on the ground, giving me a clear line of sight at the gray man staring coldly back at me.
“Close the aperture,” he ordered.
And then my surroundings faded into transparency until there was nothing of the strange environment I’d just been in. And I was standing in the same firing stance I’d taken when the strange figure attacked me, aiming at my reinforced locker full of contraband.
I was alone. Almost.
Mimi stood off to my left side by the inner garage door, staring at me with blue and violet eyes of inquiring concern, holding Barry the Bear-bat at her side by the nape of his neck.
“You okay, Jax?” she asked.
“Mimi,” I quickly lowered my gun and slid it into my chest holster. “I thought you were helping the girls shop?”
“I was,” she replied, taking a step down onto the concrete garage floor with her kitty-cased cell phone in her other hand. “I was gonna ask you for for your opinion on something, and then you traveled.”
My gaze narrowed. “You saw me day dreaming?”
“You weren’t day dreaming,” she said sweetly. “I see them too. Barry keeps them away.”
“Them?”
Mimi came around the front of my truck and leaned against the hood with a whimsically tilted head. “You can be honest with me, you know. I’m not gonna think you’re weird or anything. I’m just as strange!”
I took a deep breath, my shoulders rising and falling as I went to stand beside her, looking ahead at the locker while she stared at the side of my face.
“You know, I never told this to anyone, but, I don’t think that ‘meteor’ was an accident,” I admitted. “I don’t even think there was a meteor.”
“No meteor?” Mimi repeated with an utter lack of surprise. “Wasn’t it all over the news?”
“Yeah, that’s bullshit backed by fake footage.
I did some digging. Amateur astronomers would’ve seen it coming.
Nobody who was actually there saw anything in the sky.
The only thing I can confirm is that there was an explosion in the area before it was walled off.
I’m guessing an experiment gone wrong, that’s the only thing that makes sense. ”
“Hmm…” Mimi watched me pensively. “Can I ask you something, Jax?”
“Go right ahead.”
“How did you get your powers?”
Yet another story I hadn’t told anyone about.
“Sorry Mimi, but I’m not sure I can tell you,” I uttered. “If anyone’s listening, they might try the same thing on someone else—try to make another me. And that ‘other me’ might be a douche.”
Mimi nodded slowly, blinking slowly. “I understand… Did it hurt?”
“It’s not the damage that hurts, it’s the healing,” I confessed, then smiled at the distant sounds of music playing within. “Hey, you wanna get outta here and help me with something?”
Mimi hopped off the hood and straightened up excitedly. “Ooh! Ooh! Field trip?”
I nodded with a warm smile, then hollered out into the house. “Girls? Mimi and I are stepping out for a little bit.”
Jenna suddenly bolted around the corner to look out into the garage. “You’re leaving? But what about—”
“There’ll be plenty of time to go through that when I get back. Cassie has my number, and so does Monica. Here,” I said as I reached for Barry, which Mimi happily passed to me. “Barry’s gonna watch you until we get back.”
And then I tossed the stuffy at Jenna’s screaming face, prompting a series of guffaws from me and as she caught the stuffy and fled back into the house like she was carrying a hot potato.
“I think he’s growing on her,” Mimi said with a sniffling giggle.
“Technically, he already did,” I chuckled as I walked over to my second vehicle, grabbed the tarp with a tight grip and pulled it off, revealing a black 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
Mimi’s heterochromatic eyes lit up the second she saw the immaculately waxed classic car. “We’re going in that?”
“You know it,” I said with a smirk as I went to the passenger side door to open it for her. “No computers; no electronic bullshit. Just old fashioned American muscle.”
She happily skipped over and seated herself on the black leather interior, giddy and clapping as I shut the door and went around to get in on the driver’s side.
I smiled at Mimi like a cocky Greaser on prom night, lifted the garage door with the press of a button and drove off to the deep growl of an eight cylinder engine.