Losing It: A Collection of VCards (26 page)

Fire Stone

By Misty Provencher

Following
Capstone
, the final book in
The Cornerstone Series

This scene is an epilogue of sorts to the Cornerstone books.  Following the dramatic final act in the last book, this scene will give readers even more closure to the series and information of what has become of their favorite characters. 

*Note: Readers may also enjoy more cameo appearances of some of their favorite Cornerstone characters in my Sci-Fi/fantasy novel, The Fly House.  Happy Reading!

***

This
can’t be happening.  None of it. 

Five minutes ago, we were losing the world.  The Fury were overpowering us and all I could think is: we are the Ianua,
the good guys
.  We are never supposed to lose.

Four minutes ago, I was shot, trying to save Grace.  Garrett too.  All three of us, dead.

Three minutes ago, we were not exactly dead.  Alive, but without our bodies, if that makes sense.  Souls can’t be killed, I knew that—but it is a whole different thing between knowing it, and then having it happen and then really
knowing it.
  Souls just keep moving on.  At least, that’s what we did—Garrett, Grace, and me—standing on nothing but air, about ten feet outside the mouth of the cave, at the peak of the mountain.

Two minutes ago, the Addo told us to make a decision.  The dimension in which we’ve been living on Earth had been so compromised by the Fury that the natural order, the balance that keeps the world moving forward, was ruined.  We all had to start new, in one of the opened dimensions that Garrett, Grace and I had to choose.  It would be a reset for the world and it would rebalance the human race. 

The doorways to these other dimensions, our choices, opened up like huge, white canvases in the sky before us.  If I had been chewing gum, I would’ve swallowed it.

One minute ago, we chose the door we wanted and the atomic
whoosh
flooded my ears, like we were being sucked down a high-pressure toilet.

I clung to Garrett and Grace, sure we’d made the wrong decision, since toileting off to the next dimension seemed like a bad start.  The rest of the souls were extracted from our current dimension too—those living and those dead.  I could see them coming across the sky from all directions, rushing at us, crazy clouds full of sparkling souls.  I saw Addo’s body fall to the cave floor like a limp sock, his spirit rising up from the meat pile of flesh and sweatpants and Jesus slippers like a twirling firecracker.

“I see you, Nalena!” Addo hooted to me. “Time to go!”

BANG!
—

All the souls, from all the ends of the Earth, crashed into Garrett and Grace and me in one long, glimmering wave.  Grace flitted out of our arms and in any other moment I would’ve screamed, but I wasn’t frightened now. 

The crazy peace I felt as we tumbled among the million other souls, was overwhelming.  Grace, although gone, was still here, with me.  With us.  I was part of this massive whole and they were part of me and we were mixing up together so intimately, like a heap of crayons melting and sliding together in a dryer drum on a warm, Sunday afternoon. 

Even so, I clung to Garrett just as tightly as he held to me.  He was a distinct part of what made me what I am, and the one part that I never wanted to lose again.

We melted together, with the souls all around us, right before we streamed toward the door that Garrett and I had chosen.  All the spirits combined, we filled the air.  We were every color then, our emotions and thoughts running together, aware and understanding swirling into each other.  I could feel the fear of an eighty-five year old man and the joy of a three-month-old baby, elation of families, relief of reunited friends, and Garrett’s whole spirit came racing through me like a spritz of citrus.

Don’t let go
, I thought, and I wasn’t the only one thinking it.  I held on, hoping it was still Garrett I had, and then—

BANG!

We split apart, a million separate beings again.  The individual spirits zinged, zanged, and sparked—most zipping through the door, although some whisked off through other doors.  I held tight, praying hard. 
Please, let me stay with Garrett…with our family…
and then, everything went black.

Maybe it was hours, or days, or lifetimes before I opened my eyes, I don’t know, but I am definitely here now.  Wherever here is.

I lift my face off a cold, dirt floor, but I can’t see a thing.

I breathe in dust and choke it back out.  It smells burnt here.  Old.  It smells like funeral soil in the rain—all opened up with a whole world blindly muddling down below, the smell of here and now mixing with the somber feeling of being utterly lost.

I cough it out, and push myself up onto my butt. 
I have arms.
  I have a face, a rear end and a throat that chokes up all over again.  I have a body again.  After being out of it, being back in one now is as heavy and clunky as being stuffed into a knight’s armor.  And just as creaky. 

Holy crap.  My bones are anchors. 

As a naked spirit, I could twirl like a sprite.  Now I’m shoving my limbs around like mammoth, metal turkey legs.

I blink.  All I see is black.  I remember kind of fuzzily how to focus my eyes. 
Squint
.  Dang it.  I still can’t make my vision work.  Or maybe it is working, but there’s nothing to see.  Just the darkness.  It’s so black, my eyeballs strain to feel the texture of the shadows.  I can’t be blind…I can’t…

“
Grared
.”  I garble through a cough.  Mouth isn’t working yet.  I try again, concentrating to arrange the sounds correctly.  “Garrett…”

“I’m here,” he says.  At least his mouth works.  And he’s close.  I reach out.  His hand reaches back, just as clumsy as mine, our fingers jabbing at each other, pawing through the dark.  But the minute I feel his skin, I know it is him.  We scoot together, huddling in the darkness.  He smells of citrus.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.  In the dark.  Wherever we chose to start again, I guess.”  His tone is curious, I can almost hear his mind turning over possibilities.  Mine leaps around, more scared than I want to admit.  At least now I know I’m not blind.

So choosing a new world
was
real.  It seems better fitted as a dream.  I shiver and Garrett stretches out an arm, dropping it over my shoulders.  I move in closer and—

“Uhm…we’re naked,” I say.

“I noticed.” I hear the smirk in his voice. “We’ve been born again, I guess.”

I reach up, remembering how my hair once felt, a world ago.  It feels oddly the same.  My chest, my skin—I feel like I did before, the same body I’ve always remembered having.  There are no bullet holes. 

My hand thunks awkwardly on Garrett’s chest and I use his neck and face like a path, sliding my fingers up into his hair to continue my inspection.  Soft twine.  The same Garrett my fingertips used to know.  I let out a heavy sigh of relief.  Running my hand back down his chest, I search for the open skin where I saw the bullets penetrate him, but there is nothing.  We’re still us—and whole—as far as I can tell.  The way we were, before we were shot.

Something falls, a few feet away, startling us both.  Rocks?  We both startle, but with the sound comes a thin stream of light.  It peeks in, over the top of our heads, illuminating the area around us with a soft, dull glow.

“We’re in a cave,” Garrett says, looking around.  “This is a cave.”

He stands, goes toward the light, blotting the saturated beam from my vision.  More rocks fall and what I can see of Garrett grows wider, like a camera lens opening up.  His broad shoulders, the narrow taper toward his waist, the black lines on the gears of his arm tattoo.  The darkness cuts him off beneath the ribs and I don’t try to decipher what lies beneath the shadows.

He inspects the hole and then he pulls a few more stones free.  Light streams in, coating the walls.  He smiles at me.

The cave wall is blistered.  I touch it and the crust falls free.  Dark brown beneath.  What are we doing here?

“Maybe we’re still in the Core?”  I whisper, going to his side. 

“I don’t think so.  We went through the door.  We’re somewhere, but I don’t think it’s where we were before.”

Together, we start yanking rocks, widening the hole, the light gushing in.

“Be careful which ones you pull,” he says.  “It could cave in on us.”

We work slowly then, pulling out each one like pieces in a Jenga tower.  I rise up on tiptoe to look out of the hole we’ve made, squinting at the scenery outside.

It is late in the day and the sun is shining, but nothing looks as it should.  The ground is black and loose.  Black ash, I think, as far as my vision will travel.  As if the whole world’s been burned, except that there is a forest outside with super weird trees- as if they’re made of plastic. 

The branches droop; the leaves are huge and jagged.  There are sprouts of something around the tree trunks too, lots of weird foliage.  A bizarrely large squirrel with no tail scurries out from beneath one leaf and leaps under another.  It carries a hunk of something in its clutches and stops, poking up like a gopher to chew on the prize.  But it’s not a gopher either.  I jump back at the sight of it.  It’d be fairly adorable, if it didn’t have meat hooks for claws.

“What is that thing?”

Garrett still peers out the opening.  “I have no idea.”

I swallow hard.  “We can’t let it get in here.”

“It won’t.”  He sounds so resolute. “But let’s see what it’s eating.  Maybe we can eat it too, if we need to.”

I stretch up to watch with him.  The animal looks like an adorable guinea pig on steroids, with frightening spikes for claws.  It finishes its meal and scuttles back under the low hanging leaves.  Stopping at the stump of a tree, it tears off a chunk of the bark as if it is crusty bread.  That tree isn’t one of the plastic ones.  It’s one of the low-lying, light brown ones, the color of cardboard or honey graham crackers, and when the animal rips off a chunk of bark, the plant sheds fine, sawdusty crumbs.

Garrett turns from the opening and looks back into the deepest part of the cave.  He squints at the far wall.  The cave doesn’t seem to go in very far, but it is dark.  There could be a huge cavern behind us, for all I know.  Best I can tell, three walls are solid and the mouth of the cave is what is blocked by the rocks and little monster pigs, bumbling around on the other side.

“I don’t think there is any other way out and I don’t see anyone else out there,” Garrett says, angling himself in different directions to see out of the hole more clearly.  He puts his face right up to the hole and shouts in quick succession, “SEAN!  MARK!  BRANDON!  ZANE!  MOM!  DAD!  ADDO!  IRIS!”

No one answers, but he jumps back, nearly knocking me down. 

“Cover the hole!” he says.  I don’t question him.  We both hunch down at once, grabbing rocks and stuffing them back into the hole we took them from.  As we push the stones in, I can hear claws climbing up, displacing the rocks outside. 

All I can think of is rats. 

Huge rats with five razor-sharp butcher knives on each paw. 

I shove another rock into the opening and Garrett slams the last one in place, generating a sharp squeak from the other side of the rock wall.