EPTPart I
Pain. That’s what I felt. That’s what woke me up. Then I felt the cold. It slowed my thoughts, my movements. It was hard to stay awake. I wanted to go back to sleep, but something made me open my eyes. I saw a room, full of crates and machinery. Dim, yellow lights flickered weakly on the ceiling, casting hazy shadows. I tried to get up, but my head hit something hard. More pain. I was in a glass tube. Searching for an opening, I found a lever with the words “OPEN” written below it. I pulled down, and the top half of the tube fell to the side. Pushing myself off the soft surface below me, I felt my back peeling off of it like a sticker, and the cold air rushed to my back. Then I noticed that I was naked. I crawled around like a newborn and found a jacket, shoes, and pants, conveniently stacked on a crate nearby. I dressed myself, and found relief from the cold. Now that my body was safe, my mind could work.
I examined the machine that held me. Under the hatch, I found small letters engraved in the metal. “Stasis Pod copyright 2573”. A faint memory flickered in my brain. The machine was designed to hold people in a state of coma-like sleep, stopping most body cycles and prolonging life. When and why was I placed in it? What year was it?
“Why am I here?” I said to myself, and my voice echoed in the warehouse. I tried to remember, but I found nothing. Holding my head in my hands, I sat on a crate and let the memories come back to me.
After minutes of thinking, I recalled my name. It was Adam Collins. My date of birth came almost immediately after, January 16, 2552. I had lived for 21 years. Fresh out of graduate school several years early, I found a job as an engineer. I had helped design many of the company’s machines… including the one in front of me. Why was I in it in the first place? I grasped the faint shadow of a memory… a test. I was testing the machine. I tried to remember further, but an empty hole obstructed my path.
“This should give me answers,” I muttered, finding a log in the machine. “Opening data files” flashed on the screen. There was only one file. It was labeled Adam Collins. I tapped it, opening the file, and on the top it wrote, “Date of placement in stasis: March 23, 2573//Date released: November 30, 2732.
“No.” I said, breathing quickly, “That’s not possible. I shouldn’t be alive.” But I was. I checked my hands for wrinkles, any signs of old age. There were none. The design worked too well. I tapped the log, and found a letter.
May 12, 2573
Dear Adam,
Nothing we tried worked. When we tried getting you out, the pod jammed. We tried reprogramming it, recoding the unlock sequence, and everything else. The problem was with the construction of the machine, not the code. I wanted to break you out by force, but Gordon said that it would be dangerous. That you might die in the process. That you would have to wake up on your own. Well, at least you don’t have a family to worry about. We will save a spot for you here at our company when you wake up. The facility is just across the street, in case you forget. Goodbye and Good luck.
Your friend,
David Liu
I fell on a crate and processed the information. I remembered David. A long lost college friend, we had miraculously found each other at the same company. He was dead, though. The company probably didn’t even exist anymore. But I would have to find out. Finding nothing else of use in the warehouse, I searched for an exit. I saw a green, flickering sign reading EXIT at the far right of the warehouse. I walked to the door, and pushed it open. I was bathed in white light.
The cold. It was cold. There was no sun in the sky, only light gray clouds. I remembered a bright sunny day. I remembered the name of the city I worked in. Lakewood, California. There was always a sun in the sky.
I was in a street surrounded by tall, gray office buildings. It was devoid of people. The cement, once black, was now gray and cracked, and the yellow strips that ran down the middle had faded. A pile of green pieces from a shattered beer bottle sat scattered on the sidewalk, and a broken vending machine lay on its side near a convenience store. Shards of glass from the broken windows of the store shined on the ground. The racks containing the items were bare, and empty syringes scattered across the dirty floor. A dull red van with a cracked windshield and broken windows sprawled on the street. The words “The withdrawal is coming” were smeared on the rear window in a black red substance . The last stroke of the G slid down the glass. Dust and paper blew across the street in the breeze. Wind chimes hanging on the roof of an antique store tinkled in the wind. Nothing else moved.
I walked across the street, towards the remains of a building, the Southern California Paper. Its door was knocked down, and brown paper fluttered all over the floor. The company had not survived. It seemed as if nothing had. I walked down the sidewalk, with no destination in mind. I heard the crunching of glass that fell from the shattered windows above as I stepped over them. An ad came into view. AMBROSIA: with one simple squeeze of the syringe, let all your stress, worries, and problems go! Medication that’s fit for a god! On the brick wall around it, the words “need more” was scrawled in blood.
“What the hell happened here?” I said to myself. My voice echoed in the stillness. Then I heard something rustling. It didn’t sound like the wind. I felt that someone was watching me. In the alleyway ahead, something moved. I stopped. Nothing moved. Glass tinkled in the wind. Then it moved again. I caught sight of it, a brown blur. It was the brown of a leather jacket. It was a human. I began to call out, but something about that person was wrong. His movements were darting; not human, but reptilian. Animal. But it seemed too erratic. It reminded me of drug induced REM. Fingers shot out and grasped the edge of the building, then slid out of sight. I stepped forward, and a body flew into me.
A strong hand enclosed my neck and slammed me to the ground. I struggled, but the hand gripped tighter. I could hear ragged, short breaths. The rest of the body flailed wildly. I got a glimpse of the face. Bloodshot eyes, dilating pupils, mouth encrusted with blood. I watched him for some time, his hand gripped around my throat, as he threw himself around. I felt his arm shaking, vibrating. Then he regained control. His pupils stopped dilating and a strange stillness came over him.
He opened his blood crusted lips. “Hello. I… am Milford… Cubicle.” He coughed, and a trickle of blood dripped from his mouth. The spots blossomed over my shirt. “No… not enough,” he rasped, struggling to get out every word. From inside his brown leather jacket he drew a bloody kitchen knife. He raised it, and stabbed down on my throat. A groan of pleasure escaped his mouth. He had missed and impaled his own finger. “I like it… when the red water… comes out,” he rasped as blood welled up and spilled onto the blacktop. “I wonder... is there any left in you?” He chuckled, and dried blood fell out. He looked at it disdainfully. “Red water...I tried to drip it out of myself... But the doctor told me not to. Doctor Watson… Of course, I drew some red water from him...He hadn't much to say over that matter after that... wouldn't even move his mouth. What a shame. But you...You seem fresh.” I lay quivering. This man… he had no qualms about cutting himself, or even killing me. He didn’t even flinch when he cut himself… as if… he had no fear… felt no pain.
“I think… I’ll take a small draught first… perhaps a slash on the cheek…” He lowered the knife to my chin.
“Do you feel pain?” I asked quietly.
He stopped. He dropped the knife. It clattered on the floor. His pupils grew wide, his mouth agape. He drew short, ragged breaths. “Pain?” He looked at his wound, as if he just noticed its existence. “Pain?” He muttered as slid down the cuffs of his jacket, revealing the scabs of his slashed wrists. “What does pain matter… if it makes the red water come out?” He shook his head and picked up the knife. “It doesn’t matter. So now… I’ll cut your throat.”
A deafening blast exploded from behind me. Milford Cubicle fell over. The red of his own blood, splatter painted on the cement, was the last thing he saw. A man approached, holding a still smoking pistol. Before I could get a word of thanks out to him, the urge to vomit seized me.
He watched as I pathetically gagged in an attempt to hurl out nonexistent food. His braided hair swung silently in the wind, and his heavy clothing ruffled on dark skin. Dangling in the wind, a doll hung on a chain around his neck.
“You seem fresh. Tender. Only those who survive here be scarred and rough. But you be seeming like someone from another world. A world before the scourge. Tell me, how you be getting here? What do you be calling yourself?”
Forcing back the urges in my throat, I struggled to speak. “ I’m Adam. Adam Collins.” Choosing to ignore his and ask my own questions, I sucked up air and gasped, “What was the man? Who are you?”
“He be what I call a sleepwalker. Someone who has delved in the effects of ambrosia for too long. You be speaking to Gabriel Moore.”
The nausea fading, I took a deep breath and processed his words. I remembered the advertisement. “What exactly is ambrosia?”
“If we be talking here out in the open, we be dead. The scourge has swept through here already, but there may be stragglers. Follow me.”
I didn’t like the idea of blindly following this man without any knowledge of this environment. What was the scourge? How did ambrosia turn that man into… a monster? The only way of obtaining answers, I knew, was to follow Gabriel. There was no choice. He walked down the street without waiting, and I hesitantly followed.
He moved catlike, smooth and silent. He watched all sides of the street, never dropping his vigilance. Kicking over bits of glass and rubble with each step, I felt my clumsiness growing increasingly apparent.
He motioned me to stop. “I be hearing something.”
“What?”
“Silence!” he hissed, pressing his ear to the ground. “Sleepwalkers. I don’t know how many. Hide behind the dumpster.”
I crouched with my back to the rusty metal. Silence. A piece of paper danced down the street, carried by the wind. Then, shuffling. Coming at slow intervals, the noise slowly came closer. Peering from the dumpster I made out a lone man, walking down the street. I craned my head to watch. Stopping, he turned his head around slowly, scanning his surroundings. His eyes locked with mine. He took a few steps toward us. Beside me, Gabriel cocked his pistol.
“We be having no Ambrosia with us. You can find it down that street,” Gabriel said pointing the gun at the man.
He eyed the gun mildly. “Oh,” said the man in a faint voice. “Then I must leave. But first I must inquire… Where would I find some grapes in which I could indulge myself?”
“You be finding grapes down that street too,” Gabriel informed the man, still holding the gun.
A sudden change struck the man. He opened his eyes wide, and his pupils dilated. I could see his body shaking. “Grapes? Over there?” He shuffled at a faster pace down the street. Gabriel trained the gun at his back until he turned the corner and passed out of sight.
“That be a nonviolent one,” Gabriel growled. “We be very lucky this day.”
“But why was this one so… docile?”
He shook his head. “Keep moving. Night be falling.”
We crept along the suburbs, moving by the alleys, meeting no other people. The sky grew darker, as night enveloped the streets. The darkness wrapped closer and closer around us. Hanging above us, the streetlights remained dark. I looked at the sky. Blackness blanketed the horizon, and no stars shone.
“What happened to the sky?” I whispered. “I can’t see the moon.”
“The sky be dark like that ever since the pollutants we created gathered and blocked out the sky. And ever since the city went dark, at night there be no light. So that’s why we must be hurrying.”
“Went dark?”
“When the scourge happened, there be no one to manage the power of the city. After a few years, the whole city lost power. I see this be happening to all the other cities. They went out, one by one. Like candles.” Opening my mouth instinctively to inquire about the scourge he kept referring to, I stopped and remained silent. All would be explained in due time.
And the time was just about due.
He ventured into another alleyway, bent over, and disappeared. Walking over, I could barely make out a man-sized hole in the concrete. Crouching, I fit my feet through, and slid in, landing on a wooden floor. Total darkness consumed me. My heart stuttered as I stumbled around, disoriented. But then I discerned the faint outline of Gabriel walking around a corner. Feeling the walls, I trailed his ghostly form until it halted. I heard the click of a lighter. Fire sprang to life and lit the wooden room. Wind lamented through the hole, and the fire quivered, flames waving over the metal bowl that held them. Gabriel’s braids cast shaking shadows against the wooden wall behind him. He fingered the doll around his neck.
“Now,” he said, “Let us talk.”
A chill passed through me, despite the fire. Some part of me knew that I was better off not knowing the truth.
“I’m listening.”
“So many things… Where should I begin?”
“Start with Ambrosia. Why does it affect people… like that?”
“Ambrosia… be not any gods’ drink. It comes from the devil, I be sure of that. It is a drug that was designed to cause people to forget their worries, fears, and depression. It be causing this by numbing the frontal lobe of the brain, the part which be controlling our reasoning and emotions. It be causing people to forget their worries and fears, but leaves the part which controls our pleasures awake.” He paused, thoughtfully flipping the doll around in his hand.
I interrupted the silence, “But to what extent does it lower fear? The man you killed, he had none.”
“I be getting to that part soon. This Ambrosia did its work fine, and it be one of the most selling products. Its key to its success be that it has no withdrawal… because the Terrazine infused within the liquid stopped the numbness when the effect be wearing off. But one day, they stopped using it in the drug.”
“Why?”
Gabriel let the doll fall limp. “Terrazine be an expensive chemical, so they knew that if they stopped using it, they be making a lot more. The drug be so popular that people would buy it even if they be knowing that the Terrazine was gone.”
“But how does this lack of Terrazine cause this… insanity?”
“Once the drug be wearing off, there be no Terrazine to stop the numbing. And without the drug to regulate the numbness… It be spreading all over the brain. That man you encountered… the numbness be in his system for so long that it spread to the parietal lobe. That be why he felt no pain.”
“How do you know?”
“I be tailing him for a long time. My goal, you see, be not only to survive, but to study the effects of the drug in hopes of reversing it.”
I remembered his craving for blood. “Then you know why…”
“When he was human, he merely be liking the color red. And drawing blood be the easiest way to get it.”
The fire flickered, casting shadows under his hardened eyes. It revealed scars on his face and arms. “But that still doesn’t explain why the city was deserted.”
“The scourge,” Gabriel said darkly.
“What is it, exactly?” I asked. “You make it sound like some sort of calamity.”
“You could call it that. But it be much worse, an apocalypse. Ever since the new drug be released, there be small outbreaks of withdrawal scattered around. We didn’t know what caused it until it was too late. When the outbreak be reaching its peak, we couldn’t contain it. The sleepwalkers ran rampant.”
“Why couldn’t the police- or the military- for that matter, stop them?”
“Many of the military themselves be taking the drug as well. Three-fourths of the entire population became sleepwalkers. Of course, many of them be slaughtered during the scourge. The scourge… all the sleepwalkers swarmed through every city like locusts… taking all the Ambrosia… killing everyone who be getting in their way. This city be scourged a long time ago. The wave of sleepwalkers swept to the east coast, to the Ashland. I be getting messages from humans down in Florida... they said that they be building a stronghold to keep the sleepwalkers at bay… but the messages stopped coming months ago.”
No. No. That wasn’t possible. I awoke not into a reality, but a nightmare. One from which I could never wake up again. “But,” I said desperately, how about the other countries? Some of them must have survived.”
He frowned. “I doubt it,” he said grimly. “The entire world be hooked onto Ambrosia. And I’ve lived like this for ten long years… and have never seen any help from them arrive. No radio activity from them, no messages, nothing. If there be any survivors, they be small groups like us. And I doubt many of them survived.”
I sat in silence, lost in thought. Something wasn’t right. I tried to remember earlier that day. Then it hit me.
“You said that the city went dark years ago, right?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you see, I woke up in a stasis pod that I was placed in years before people even heard about Ambrosia.”
“I’ve heard about those,” Gabriel said. “But wait… how could it be working for so long without power?”
“Stasis Pods are designed to function without a power source, for long term stasis. But in order to open it, it needs to have power. And when I woke up in that warehouse, the lights… they were on.”
“The warehouse could still have power if it be runnin’ on its own generator. But there’s no way it be on when the scourge struck, it would be long out of power. But that means that someone turned it on. But who?”
I furrowed my brow. “I don’t know. We should go back tomorrow, though.”
“I be agreeing with you. But we need rest. Follow me.” We exited the room, and climbed up a flight of stairs. Darkness once again covered me, but then dim lights turned on in the room.
“That be my power supply,” Gabriel said. “It should be las-“
The lights died. A scream pierced my ears. It came from the street below. The lights flickered, revealing three human figures crawling up the windows of our floor. Then they turned off, leaving us in total darkness.
Gabriel pressed his Colt pistol into my hand. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “We be needin’ to split up, to confuse them. You’ be on your own now.”
I stared at the weapon in my hand. The screams. They were right on top of us.
“Go, now!” Gabriel shouted.
I jumped down the stairs as the windows behind me were smashed in. The screams found their way inside. A pistol fired three times. Scrambling through the wooden rooms, I found the exit, climbed out, and sprinted through the black, cold night air.
I ran straight ahead in the darkness, stumbling into walls and streetlights, without thought of direction or destination. I needed to get away, away from the horror, away from the monstrosities. I forgot about Gabriel, I forgot about everything. Instinct took over. Slowing to a jog, and then a walk, I realized that I could see the ground in front of my feet. A faint glimmer of yellow light shone from inside a convenience store. Holding my gun up, I walked in. I found the source of light: a flashlight, still on, casting its dim rays over the counter. I slumped down by it, enervated. I caught my breath and I finally began to think. And the first thought that came to me when my mind began working was that for the past few minutes, it wasn’t. Fear. It crippled my senses. Dulled my reasoning. Left me senseless and irrational, almost like the sleepwalkers. I stared into the infinite gloom outside the store. The only thing left was to wait for daybreak, and hope that the sleepwalkers wouldn’t find me.
A shirt ruffled, caused by a puff of wind from the chilly darkness. I bunched up into a ball to preserve my heat as my sweat cooled. Then it hit me. There was no other source for the ruffling besides me… and it came from the other side of the counter.
“Kill me…” a weak voice whispered. I jumped and turned around. “Do…it. You have… a gun.” Looking over the counter, I felt as I had just opened a coffin. The opened jacket he wore revealed thin flaps of skin barely containing ribs that violently protruded from them. On his sallow, bloodstained cheeks grew a dirt-covered beard. A syringe, its point still in his wrist, was marked with the word Ambrosia.
“Do it… while I still have a shred of sanity left. Do it... before it wears off, and I become… a monster.”
“No, I can’t.” I had seen so much death, so much horror, and I wanted to hang on to what scrap of humanity that I had left.
“You haven’t seen what I’ve done. You don’t know what it’s like… to be a monster.” For a moment, an image flashed through my mind. A hand, scrawling a word on a line. “Because you… haven’t taken it.”
With an unexpected quickness, he snatched the gun from my hand, held it up to his head, and pulled the trigger, the shot echoing into the darkness. The man fell to the ground, his eyes closed almost serenely. “You don’t know what it’s like… to be a monster.” His last words rung inside my head, and then died away. Silence. I slouched to the ground, my legs shaking. Numbly, I pried the gun from the dead man’s fingers and crawled to the other side of the counter.
Huddled against the counter, I tried to erase what I had seen, what was still lying on the other side of the counter. As the dying flashlight grew dimmer and dimmer, flickering, I slowly fell asleep.
And then the dreams found me.
I was in a majestic room, high up in a skyscraper. A window showed the view outside. The sky was red. The clouds were gray. A man, one with no face, handed me a piece of paper and a pen. The sky darkened, and then I was left in the dim light of a lamp. I saw the line on the paper. Picking up the pen, I pressed it down to the line. But instead of a pen I held a syringe. I inserted it into my arm and squeezed. The world turned black, and then shined with radiance.
It was a flashlight. I blinked groggily and tried to make out the source of the light. It came from the doorway, and a dark figure stood behind it. The light turned off, and the store was once more dimly lighted by the flashlight on the counter. My eyes readjusted to the gloom, and they made out Gabriel, lounging by the counter.
“So you be making it through the night, eh?” Gabriel kicked the dead body. “And I see you made your first kill. Congratulations, boy.”
“I didn’t” I said. “He killed himself after he took the ambrosia.”
Gabriel raised his eyebrows. “That be the first one who acts this way. Most have not the sense to kill themselves.”
“Will he be the last?”
“I hope not. These sleepwalkers be a threat to us all. The more that kill themselves, the better for us. If sleepwalkers ”
The horrors of the night were renewed.
“Why would they be hunting us out? Could it be because we aren’t sleepwalkers?”
“It be something I observed before. It be strange. Many of them have a tendency for violence, yet they still be humans, loosely speaking. Perhaps this be some other affect that I don’t know of.” He shook his head. “There’s just too much I don’t know. I say our next move would be to find supplies, and then move to the Ambrosia headquarters. I wager that we be finding big information there. It’s not too far.”
“9238 Richmond Avenue.” I recited. “Wait... What?” That address. It just popped out of my memory. I didn’t know what it meant, or its significance. I just knew that it related to the headquarters. But how?
Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “How would you be knowing this?”
“I don’t know. Probably from those ads around the city.”
He cocked his gun. “The sun be rising soon. We need to move. I left supplies in some safe houses. We should see if they still be there.”
He took me to another part of the city, the suburbs. This place suffered much worse than the rest of the city. The cracked buildings lay in shambles and the jagged cement protruded from the ground at strange angles. Skewered by the cement, a flipped car blocked the street.
“This place fell prey to a great earthquake that struck years ago. It tore up almost half of the state. Not much sleepwalkers be roaming the streets here though. ”
I nodded, but I could care less about the earthquake. Without any food and drink for one day, the effects of hunger and thirst began their slow work, tightening my throat and stomach. The faster we reached the supplies, the better. But not even hunger could cloud my mind from the truth. The world was twisted, twisted beyond repair. I remembered a day, when the sky was blue, and the sun shone through the cotton ball clouds. It was perfect. A perfect world.
I kept walking though the broken streets, the shattered glass, the cracked pavement. Brown shapes hung on the telephone wires above. They were bodies. The bloodstained walls, the broken stone buildings, the faded signs were all that belonged to the world now.
I looked at the sky. The gray clouds had turned to the color of a wispy white with the arrival of the sun, and they slowly moved across the sky, but never letting a hint of blue sky show through. My eyes turned back to the ground, back to the carnage that swept through the world. The jagged ground looked wrong. It was warped, and a stop sign bent in impossible shapes as a delirium struck. Then the world around me disappeared. I was reading a picture book in a classroom. With my tiny hands, I turned the page, and a glorious foil picture caught my eye. It showed a beautiful day. The sky was blue, and the sun shone through the cotton ball clouds. I thought it was perfect. A perfect world.
“Adam?”
The cracked streets replaced the golden picture.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing. You just stopped for a few seconds. We must keep moving. The supplies ain’t be far.”
Assured by the promise of food and water, my mind could focus on other things, and it dwelled constantly on my enigmatic partner.
“Gabriel, what did you work on before this happened?” I gestured at the ruined buildings.
He shifted uncomfortably. “Genetics.”
I pondered that. It certainly explained his extensive knowledge of the drug’s effects… although I assumed it came from research. It didn’t explain his skill for survival and his expertise. Perhaps years of living in this world had hardened him. It came to mind that if I lived long enough, I might end up like him. Hardened, yes, but also hardened beyond feelings. It scared me. I wasn’t innocent anymore, but I still felt that I had a scrap of humanity left, one that was always being tested and pulled… until it broke. I wondered if there was more to this man than he let on. We walked in silence for the rest of the way, listening to the lamenting of wind, until Gabriel crouched by a jagged crack in the ground. He pulled it up, and dust and rocks fell into a black opening. The clattering of rock against rock echoed from the entrance.
“After you,” I said.
He put his feet down and dropped into the hole. I followed, and I landed in a small cell, lit by glints of light from above. Gabriel opened a dilapidated door, encrusted with rust, retrieved two packs, and threw one to me.
“There be food and water inside.” I frowned at the tiny pack. Opening it, I found a pack of pills and water canteens. I saw Gabriel shove a pill in his mouth and down it with water, and I did the same. Instantly the painful hunger abated, but that only made my enervation more apparent. Years sleeping in a frozen tube did not help my physique. Gabriel realized this too, and climbed up a set of rusty rungs and closed the crack over us. The wind everywhere could not find its way in, but I could still hear it blowing softly outside. I slept dreamlessly.
Weak light shone into the cell, and I opened my eyes. I saw the figure of Gabriel, pushing open the slab of concrete and climbing up. It was time. I rose to my feet and shook the sleep off, climbing out of the hole. Breathing in the stale, cold air, I looked up into the sky. Although it was covered by bleak clouds, I could see the small glint that marked the sun, rising from the horizon. It announced a new day, a new beginning.
And a new nightmare.
