The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves (45 page)

BLOOOOOOONG!!!

Again, the ground shook,
his ears vibrated, and his skeleton thrummed like a tuning fork.
Like before, a crushing onset of nausea followed as everything
around him emanated the awful green, the color of putridity. This
time, he couldn’t help himself. He threw up all over the driveway.
With such force, he fell to his knees, his head spinning with
vertigo he shouldn’t have felt. The gut-wrenching flips within his
stomach increased. He threw up again with greater force, with less
ejecta. The ferocity of his regurgitation caused white flashes to
burst before his eyes.

Instinctively, he twisted
to the right as he began to fall to the ground.

He never remembered
hitting the ground. Though, he did recall his mother’s screams,
ear-splitting, agonized wails that would’ve driven him to weeping,
if he’d had the chance.

He never heard the third,
god-like reverberation that made his world disappear.

He was gone to this
world…

…
And to his his mother as
well.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

Derek Benson

Wednesday, November
24
^th
,
the Day before Thanksgiving,

At the Same
Time…

BLOOOOOOONG!!!

Having heard it, felt it,
watching the building shake with it, for the second time, he
staggered about. It was hard not to blow chunks
everywhere.

He probably would’ve done
it anyway, if he hadn’t been amazed by the fact everyone walking in
the mall, just beyond the threshold of the entrance to the Arcade,
had suddenly froze in place. A second before the first hideous
sound had resonated through his very soul, groups of friends,
families, boyfriends and girlfriends had been strolling, talking,
laughing, joking, arguing and explaining about things in their
lives. A second after, they’d all stopped. It was TIVO on steroids.
They’d halted mid-stride, in mid-sentence.

Now, they were a strange
collection of macabre figures just beyond his reach. They were
already beyond his ability to arouse their attention. They couldn’t
hear. No, they couldn’t, because he had already yelled at them.
They had remained motionless. No one turned a head. No one was
inclined to even gesture in his direction.

He took a step closer,
feeling as if some giant worm had taken root in his intestines and
decided, out of the blue, to do the Watsui at his expense. He could
barely move without a flood of discomfort overwhelming him. He
reached out a hand to steady himself against one of the video
games, using its solidity for both physical and metal support. He
took another step, his eyes never leaving the rigid people before
him. His only goal was to reach one of them, to try and shake them
from their stupor, so they could help him. He was going to be
sick.

BLOOOOOOONG!!!

He never made it past that
last step. When the sound came, everywhere at once, within and
without, and all he could do was surrender. He saw the ground
rushing up toward him. There was nothing he could do to arrest his
fall.

It was of little
consequence. He was swimming in blackness well before he hit the
carpeted floor…

…
Everyone outside the
Arcade ceased to exist…

…
They blew away like dust
before a raging sandstorm.

Truth be told, though, it
wasn’t them who’d disappeared. It was him. In the blink of an eye,
he was further away than any astronomer could’ve measured with the
most powerful telescope in his possession.

It was Derek Benson who
was no more.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

Sophie Reed

Wednesday, November
24
^th
,
the Day before Thanksgiving,

At the Same
Time…

Already on the floor of
the bath house, a structure built alongside the pool, in the
backyard of her family’s home, she struggled for air. Puke was
soaking the ground around her, wetting her hair, staining her
designer clothing, still Sophie Reed writhed in pain. The very
cells of her body resisting the unnatural forces forcing her from
her world and into another.

From somewhere outside the
pool house, she could hear her family crying out. She tried to move
to help them, but found she couldn’t. She didn’t know this, but her
body did, down to her very DNA.
Every
single bit of her humanity was
fighting against the change occurring within her. What was
happening was wrong, supposedly impossible and, quite possibly,
unholy. Never in the annuals of time had such a thing been written,
been spoken or even screamed in a nightmare.

This was an event of
unconceivable audacity!

It was a Rending into
something else, something unknown, unheard of. Something combined
and reformed into something new.

If she could’ve seen it,
Sophie Reed would’ve seen her house melt away like ash before the
wind, in a single breath. The voices of her tortured family
dissipated into silence. Then, her entire neighborhood dissolved
next. A second later, she would’ve witnessed the greater Los
Angeles area disappear in one heartbeat. She would’ve seen as the
vast city was replaced by pristine wilderness in the next - miles
and miles of snow-covered earth. She would’ve felt a preternatural
cold settle her body, about the land, a chill that shouldn’t have
existed, would grow and strengthen. She would’ve felt a winter
unlike any such season experienced on earth. She would’ve seen it
descend upon her new home and flourish.

If she were awake, gazing
over this unwanted landscape, she would’ve wept. Her loss would’ve
been beyond measure.

Yet, she had no inkling
she’d been snatched out of the World of Man and placed upon the
Construct.

Rather, she was
unconscious, lying in a huge puddle of vomitous goo, in the middle
of the pool house that a minute ago, had stood in her parents’
backyard, but was now…

…
Incalculably far
away.

Sophie Reed had passed
out. She shifted from one world to another altogether - a place:
one part known to her, another inexhaustibly evil.

Though, she didn’t know it
then, when she awoke, her new home would be called, the Melded
World. Unfortunately, there would be no joyous welcome for her
either.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

~ Interlude ~

The World of Man

Thursday, November
25
^th
,
Thanksgiving, 6:37 am…

She walked through the
double-paned, bulletproof doors of the main entrance of the Central
Communications Center, serving the northeast Los Angeles
Metropolitan Area. She walked into the vast parking lot that
surrounded the building on three sides. Her mind was still racing.
Her palms were still a little sweaty at the thought of what had
happened the night before. There was still some tiny part of her
unwilling to believe what happened - had happened in the first
place. She had been working for the Los Angeles Police Department’s
Communication Division for more than twenty years and not once –
not a single time! – had she experienced a night like the one she
had just endured.

Endured, by God! What a
terrible, terrible night!

This was the only way she
could term it,
Endured
with a capitol fucking “E”. She had categorized as such in
order to get her mind around it, so she could comprehend what had
occurred was, in fact, real and not some wild figment of her
imagination. This was reality and not some program on
TV.

Twenty god damned years!
s
he fumed
.

Still there had never been
an ordeal as intense, as long and as mysterious as this one had
been. Not once in all that time had her supervisor ever been asked
to contact the FBI. Not once had she had ever been liaised with the
Department of Homeland Security. Never, had there been a time when
she’d been ensconced within a team with the wide scope of knowledge
and vast capability as the one she’d been grouped with over the
course of the past hours.

It had all started with
the Event had begun. That’s what they were calling it
now.

The Event.

She had been grouped with
the team, because she’d been the first 911 operator to take the
first of those eerie, if not unbelievable, calls that had come
pouring in the night before. The Government of the United States of
America had requested her services for the time being, complete
with the promise of a hefty restructuring of her employment
contract and an ironclad confidentiality agreement, over which she
fretted. She knew now, if she so much as
farted
a hint of what she knew, they
had the right to be so far up her ass, they’d tickle her
tonsils.

Denise Miller chuckled at
that. She slunk her hands as deep as they could go into the pockets
of her three-quarter length, wool coat, bringing them together,
hoarding the warmth of her body trapped within the heavy outwear.
She needed it closer to her body.

Son of bitch, it is cold
out here!
she thought, visibly shaking,
feeling her nose beginning to chap as tears came to her smarting
eyes. Immediately, the moisture pasted to the skin at the outer
edges of her eyelids. She gazed up into the sky seeing the dark
clouds passing sedately above her, asking silently if it was going
to snow again. The only response she received was bluster of wind
about her person that sucked all of the warmth from her.
Damn!
She
shivered.
Where the hell did I
park?
She glanced around.
It had been a long night, indeed, if I can’t
remember where in the hell I parked…

I don’t have much
time
, she told herself sternly still
peering about. She had only a few hours before she had to report
back to work, back to the large conference room her team had
commandeered for the duration of investigation. Her and her
supervisor both had been released for this part of the early
morning. They’d been told to go home, freshen-up, change clothes,
get something in their stomachs and then report back, ready to go
by the time the all-important TelePresence video conference with
Washington D.C. began at nine-thirty. They would be meeting with
the President’s National Security Advisor.