Babylon Terminal Read online

  Falcon Eddie stood above me, the sword in her hands again.

  Through swollen and bloodied eyes, I looked up at her and gave a slight nod, then bowed my head so she could take it off with a single swing of the blade. Do it, I thought. For Christ’s sake, just do it.

  “Didn’t have to be like this,” she said. “But you got my respect, Monk.”

  She widened her stance.

  I closed my eyes.

  And then, from what sounded like somewhere far away, there came an oddly familiar clicking sound, followed by a deafening boom.

  I opened my eyes, still barely conscious, and saw Eddie standing there, her face ravaged by confusion. An enormous wound had blown out a section of her abdomen, and a length of intestines dangled from the gruesome cavity like bloody rope.

  Behind her in the dark, the Dahlia stood holding my shotgun. It was still smoking.

  Eddie dropped her sword and fell to her knees. Looking down at her stomach, she groggily tried to push her innards back in. The intestines slipped free of her weak grip, squishing and squirming about like blood-spattered eels. She vomited black blood and bile, swaying there on her knees with a look of utter disbelief. Then she fell back into the mud and lay still.

  I fell forward onto my hands and crawled over to her.

  She was still alive. “Not like this,” she gasped, slurring the words as her chest began to wheeze and buck. “Not like this, Monk, not…please…not like this…”

  I took her bloody hand in mine and held it tight. With my free hand, I slid one of her .45s from its holster and placed the barrel beneath her chin. Had I waited, she’d have been dead in minutes anyway, but she deserved better than to be taken out by an amateur she should’ve heard coming. This way, she’d die by my hand. To someone like Falcon Eddie, to someone like me, that made a world of difference.

  She tried to speak again but it came out as an indecipherable gurgling sound.

  We were still holding hands and looking directly into each other’s eyes when I pulled the trigger and blew her brains out through the top of her head.

  9

  I know nothing. In the silence of sorrow, I am an embryo floating in murky fluid, unaware of how or why or when I have become, what came before or what awaits me. With the voices of angels in my mind, my eyes begin to see…I am sitting in a chair in an otherwise empty room, my legs covered with a blanket. I am impossibly old, and everything is so…white…the walls, the floors, the ceiling, all of it an intensely dazzling white. I don’t seem to notice, as I’m having trouble breathing, and I’m gasping, slowly taking in small gulps of air. But it’s not enough. I struggle to breathe, and I’m frightened, which only makes it worse. I cannot breathe as I should, as I need to, and although this is horrifying enough, there is something…else…something in the room with me I cannot quite see. It lingers at the edge of my peripheral vision, and for some reason, I cannot turn my head to get a better look. Perhaps I don’t want to, because whatever it is, it’s looking right at me, and I wish it would stop. I can feel its eyes on me but I want it to go away and leave me alone. I can feel the evil within it, profane and unclean as it considers me the way one contemplates an insect prior to stepping on it. But it makes no sound, as except for my wheezing and gasping, it is especially quiet here in this strange little room of blinding light and forgotten toys.

  Suddenly, before me, there is something more beyond the light. Not behind me or to the side, but straight ahead, through a thin plate of flawless glass, it moves with a majesty and beauty I cannot even begin to comprehend. Such colors and vibrancy I have never seen or even imagined. Is it a dream? Or am I what it dreams of? This mother of all things, so close I can smell it…but still beyond my reach, my touch…it makes me want to weep, because I know now that there is a God, and I am in its presence. I have been all along. And I am no longer afraid.

  I am ashamed.

  * * *

  I tossed the .45 into the night and tried to get to my feet. On the third attempt, I managed it, but I was still shaky. Bloody, battered and nauseated, I stumbled over to the Dahlia, who was still frozen and holding the shotgun as if she’d drifted into a trance. I gently took the weapon from her. Doing so broke the spell, and she began to tremble and quake, her eyes streaming tears.

  “She would’ve killed you,” she said softly.

  I put my hands on her shoulders, hoping to steady us both. “Listen to me,” I said. “When—”

  “There was nothing else I could do, she was going to—”

  “Listen to me,” I snapped, tightening my grip on her shoulders. “When they come…and they will come…you tell them I did this, that I shot her in the back, then finished her off. They’ll believe you. Do you understand?”

  She stared at me through her tears.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  No one ever stepped up to save a Dreamcatcher, they cheered when my kind was killed and called it justice. But the Dahlia had saved my life and put her own in severe jeopardy, and I wished there were something more I could do for her. But there wasn’t. We were slaves, nothing more. I leaned closer, until our foreheads touched, and felt her arms wrap around my back. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “I wish you’d take me with you.”

  “No.” I kissed her pale cheek, smearing it with blood. “You don’t.”

  I gathered my weapons and managed to get back to my car without collapsing.

  I left the Dahlia on the side of the road.

  The last time I saw her, it was in my rearview. She was standing in the dirt like the lost waif she was, an orphan in the dark watching me go, until the night had swallowed her whole.

  Head spinning and body aching, I sped into the outlands.

  And one step closer to Julia.

  * * *

  For miles and what was surely hours, I drove through nothing but wasteland and darkness. Illuminated by the headlights, serpentine shapes of dirt and sand slinked across the highway from the dead land on either side of the road, skittering across the asphalt like snakes. But nothing else moved. Nothing else lived.

  Eventually, the outskirts of a city appeared in the distance, emerging from the darkness. At first I thought I must be seeing things—a city out here?—but it was right there before my eyes, and I was headed straight for it. Nowhere near the size of my hometown, with the exception of two tall smokestacks, it lacked the giant spires rising high into the sky, the predominantly black steel architecture, the trains and sky trams, and consisted instead of smaller buildings spread out over a vast stretch of wasteland.

  At the edge of the city, I pulled into the dirt lot of a gas station and slid in alongside the pumps. Head pounding, I forced myself out of the car and tried to get my bearings. I hurt everywhere, and my gums throbbed where my tooth had snapped off earlier. I spat into the night, threw on the closest gas pump, pushed the nozzle into the tank and let it flow. No one came out, and the building, while lit from the inside, appeared empty.

  Once my tank was full, I ventured inside in the hopes of finding someone, but the station was deserted. I found a key attached to a chunk of wood marked RESTROOM hanging from a hook behind the counter, so I grabbed it and made my way around the side of the building to the bathrooms.

  A filthy tile floor welcomed me, along with an equally filthy double sink, mirror and toilet stalls. The smell of the place matched its look. Overhead, a set of fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, bathing the room in a strange hue. I got a look at myself in the mirror, and immediately slumped against the sinks. The beating I’d taken earlier had not only left me exhausted and racked with pain, but with the cuts and bruises to prove it. I turned on the faucet. Water with a brown tint burst and spit forth as I reached into my mouth and checked my teeth. Except for the one I’d lost, they were all intact, although one molar felt a bit loose. I figured it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I left it alon
e. But my hand came back bloody, so I scooped a handful of water from the faucet and rinsed out my mouth. Spitting the whole mess back into the sink, I watched the blood and dingy water gurgle down the grimy, rusted drain, then worked my head slowly back and forth in an attempt to ease the pain at the base of my neck. It did little to relieve it. I next inspected the wounds on my face, lightly touching the cuts above my right eye—which had stopped bleeding some time ago but were now caked with dried blood—and the purple and black bruises above my left. After splashing another handful or two of water on my face and washing off my eyes, I moved to my nose. My nostrils were ringed and flecked with more dried blood. I took hold of the bridge of my nose and moved it to the left, then right. It hurt but didn’t begin to bleed again or make any crackling sounds. I wiped away the dried blood, then inspected my jaw, which hurt and felt as if it had been knocked out of line, but seemed to move and function as it should. Another dark bruise, along with a scrape, stretched from my temple to the side of my face, courtesy of Eddie’s kick. I touched it carefully, and winced in pain. It looked bad, but nothing was broken. My hands were bloody from numerous scrapes and cuts along my knuckles, so I washed them off as best I could and worked all ten fingers and both wrists until most of the stiffness and pain had ceased. Thankfully, again, nothing was broken.

  Limping from the kick to my knee, I left the bathroom and returned to the station. I was still alone, so I tossed the key on the counter and headed back to my car.

  Back behind the wheel, I lit a cigarette and considered things a moment. Did I want to go through this strange city I had never been to, or was it better to go around it and continue deeper into the outlands? Which one did Julia choose? I wondered. By the time I finished my smoke, I’d decided to drive straight through the heart of the city.

  The moment I reached the main boulevard, I realized the city was empty too. No one on the streets, nothing moving, block after block of empty sidewalks, dark and silent buildings on either side of me, cars and various vehicles parked and unmanned, debris and trash blowing about in the night breeze. Were it not for the occasional murky streetlight, the entire city would’ve been cloaked in darkness.

  I slowed the car and crept along the avenue, my eyes darting back and forth in an attempt to keep as much of the area in sight as possible. But the deeper into the city I drove, the more I began to understand that something was wrong. If this were a dead and abandoned city, why was everything in such relatively good shape? Some neighborhoods were worse than others, of course, but overall, the city looked as if it were occupied, and appeared, much like my own, to be slowly wasting away yet still maintained on a menial level.

  You’ve never even been out this way, have you?

  It didn’t seem possible I’d been…alive…as long as I had and had never ventured this far from the city. But I hadn’t. And until that moment in time I’d never questioned it.

  As I moved slowly through the city, I couldn’t shake Falcon Eddie’s question. And all that did was open the floodgates for those the Dahlia had asked.

  Do you remember being a child?

  I turned at the corner onto another wide drag, but found more of the same.

  Why do you think that is?

  But I did have memories. Didn’t I? They were vague and not always in context, but I did have them, I…

  Why can’t we remember?

  It’s just the way it was. When people worked, they rarely remembered how they got there or what led up to it, they were simply there and doing their thing. The Dahlia had said that. I’d once gone with Julia to see her mother who was not her mother, and I couldn’t quite remember either. Certainly something had led up to our being there, and something had happened when it was over. But I had no memories of either.

  Do you ever remember being anything other than what you are now?

  I ran a hand through my hair. It came back damp with sweat. These were the thoughts and questions that started problems. That’s what I’d been taught. You didn’t question, you did your job—and we all had jobs to do—because questioning how things were, or the laws, or how they’d come to be and who was behind them accomplished nothing but discontent, and moved people closer to being runners. And runners were nothing to aspire to. To question was to conspire against creation and the way of the world, the way things were meant to be, the way things had to be.

  Or so I’d thought. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’d been wrong all along.

  Maybe the runners had it right. Maybe we didn’t have to populate the dreams of the others. But if not us, didn’t someone? Or had the Dahlia been right? Had we been lied to all along? Fooled into believing things that were not necessarily so?

  I was gripping the steering wheel so tight my palm had begun to hurt. I eased up and rolled along another block of quiet buildings and empty vehicles.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that none of it mattered without Julia.

  It suddenly occurred to me that the dull streetlights I’d seen earlier were gone. This street was pitch-black, so I grabbed a flashlight from my glove compartment and aimed it out the driver’s-side window. Without realizing it, I’d ventured into a much worse neighborhood that consisted largely of blown-out buildings and run-down storefronts that looked as if they hadn’t been occupied in ages. The beam from the flashlight swept slowly through the darkness, eerily revealing small portions of the street at a time and eventually illuminating a lot where a large brick building had once stood. It had long since been reduced to rubble and piles of bricks scattered throughout the lot, and on either side of it stood two abandoned, barely standing tenements.

  In the narrow alley between the next two buildings, something suddenly glowed at me through the night. A pair of eyes reflecting the flashlight beam. I stepped on the brake, slowing the car to a stop, jammed it into Park and stepped out.

  With a quick look around, I walked toward the sidewalk, the flashlight out in front of me and my other hand clutching the pistol in my coat pocket. The eyes remained where they were, unmoving but blinking occasionally. I walked across rubble and debris and onto the sidewalk. In the alley, the pair of eyes became an old man huddled in the darkness, looking up at me with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

  “Come out of there,” I ordered.

  “I’d surely like to oblige, mister,” a gravelly voice answered, the words slurred. “But I don’t believe I can stand up just now.”

  I looked to my left, then right, sweeping the flashlight as I did. The street was empty and quiet. Nothing moved but the beam of light.

  “Don’t worry,” the old man said, “they’re all sleeping.”

  Moving closer to the alley, I leveled the light at him. “Who?”

  “Why, the rest of the people, of course.” He shielded his eyes with a liver-spotted hand gnarled with arthritis. “Sure would appreciate it if you wouldn’t aim that right at my face, mister.”

  I lowered it a bit. When I took a step closer, I realized why he couldn’t stand. The stench of cheap booze drifted up out of the alley and hit me, mixed with the smell of body odor and urine. “They’re asleep?”

  He nodded, brought a brown bottle of liquor to his mouth and took a long pull. With a loose, rumbling cough, he wiped at his mouth with his bad hand, then scratched maniacally at his cheek, which was covered in stubble and several scabs. “I’m the only one awake now.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Photas,” he said, coughing again.

  I’d heard rumors, but most of us believed the city of Photas was a myth. And yet, if this drunken old homeless man was telling the truth, it not only existed, it had been closer than I’d ever imagined possible all along. “City of the Night Sleepers,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” the old man answered. “They’re like the others. They sleep in the night and live in the daylight. Somebody’s got to tend to the others that sleep in the day, or even the Night Sleepers that sometimes sleep in the day, see?”

  “Then what about you?”
>
  “I used to be one of those freaks,” he said, “but not anymore. Not in a long time.”

  “But if you’re one of them, how did you change?”

  He held up the bottle and smiled wide. Not a tooth in his head. “Found salvation in my magic elixir here, friend. Helped me see the darkness and made me realize I didn’t have to be like that. I’m just a bum. Far as they’re concerned, I’m the freak. They don’t understand how beautiful the night is, and they never will. But you and me, friend, we know different, don’t we.”

  “You mean to tell me you just stopped sleeping at night?”

  “Sure did.”

  “And nothing happened?”

  “Like what?” He shrugged. “I hardly ever work anymore anyway. Nobody pays me any mind. They think I’m some sort of wizard or something. Some even claim I’m a demon.”

  I tightened my grip on the pistol in my pocket. “Are you?”

  “I’m just an old man, son.”

  Madness, I thought, how could it be that simple?

  Like he’d been suddenly reminded of something else, he ran his mangled hand across his face, touching the array of scabs littering his cheeks, chin and neck with his fingers. “Been changing, though, must say.”

  “Changing how?”

  “My eyes,” he said. “And my skin, it’s changed since I became a day sleeper. When we work, we all look the same, but the rest of the time we look different. Now I’m becoming more and more like that all the time. More like you, less like them…me.”

  “Why do you stay here?” I asked.

  “I got nowhere else to go and no way to get there if I did. Truth is, mister, most nights I don’t walk so good anymore.”