The Void and the Shadow: The Savior

[feotakahari]

The chronological beginning of the story.

When I first met the Savior, I was standing in a high school chemistry lab, holding a bottle of hydrochloric acid and debating whether to throw it.

“Stay back!” I shouted. I didn’t know if zombies could understand English. But I didn’t think zombies could open doors, either. Then three of them had opened up the door to the chem lab and shambled on in.

I’d never heard of zombies walking out of inky black portals, either. Or zombies wearing faded white . . . jumpsuits? Were those jumpsuits? And their eyes were inhumanly large, crisscrossed with black veins.. Maybe they were zombie aliens. Zaliens.

Also, I’d never seen zombies on my high school campus, rather than safely comfined to a movie screen. So forgive me if my memories are a bit disjointed. I was doing my very best not to freak out.

“Just throw it already!” someone shouted from behind me. I wasn’t sure who. I sloshed the liquid out of the bottle, but I wasn’t close enough, and it splashed one zombie across the chest instead of the face.

Fun fact: acid doesn’t do much to zombies.

Just as I was mentally preparing myself for an ineffectual last stand, the door opened, and a black blur shot through. All I remember is the ringing of metal. By the time everything slowed down enough for me to process it, all of the zombies were on the floor, and the intruder was bringing a metal baseball bat down on one’s skull, over and over until it stopped moving.

I’d seen her in a few of my AP classes. She was a little shorter than me, but pretty muscular. (Had to be, the way she swung that bat.) I couldn’t place her ancestry--black? Native? Maybe part Asian? She was wearing long black sleeves in the summer, and, incongruously, a black knitted wool cap with cute little kitty ears sticking out of it.

“Come with me,” she said, not at all winded by what she’d just done. “We’re fortifying the gym. We’ll be--”

She looked up at me, and she froze.

I’ll save my self-description for later. Just think of me as an involved bystander for now. But one thing I do want to make clear--every time the Savior saw me in those early days, there was a second before her face went carefully neutral. In that second, she gave me a look of hatred and revulsion unlike anything I’d seen before.

She looked past me to the others gathered in the chem lab. “Well, come on!”

“Who . . .” I managed.

His name was Lewis Bell, but neither of us knew that yet, or even knew that he was a he. We didn’t know he was the Savior yet, either. So in order to keep things straight (hah!), I’ll start this off with what I wrongly knew--a teenage girl with a kitty hat and a baseball bat.

“I’m Allie,” she said. “Now let’s get going, before more of these things come.”

The Survivor

When I met the woman I love, I was wrapped in vines, struggling to find a way free.

They weren't real vines, not exactly. I could sort of see them and see past them at the same time, not like they were transparent, but like they weren't there. And they didn't come from the ground, but from holes in one of the big-eyed creatures' jumpsuits. This one looked a lot more awake and aware than the rest. It held our group in place, while the slack-jawed zombies prepared to tear us apart.

Allie was biting frantically at a vine with her teeth. I was trying to calmly think my way out of this, but everything I came up with involved the chemistry lab, and there was no way for me to get back there now.

I wish I could say I thought up a clever plan to defeat the monster. What actually happened was that a portal opened behind it, and someone I’d never seen before hit it in the head with an enormous warhammer.

Allie was out and fighting as soon as the vines vanished. I hit the ground with a thud, but I got to my feet pretty quickly. I saw a zombie on top of one of the other survivors, and I tackled it off, punching it in the face over and over.

I’m not as strong as Allie or the newcomer, and I didn’t think to go for the eyes. I was still punching it by the time the newcomer came over to finish it off. As soon as I pulled my hands away, she fragmented its skull with her warhammer.

She looked kind of like Allie, actually. Same skin tone and general facial structure, though much taller--shockingly so. Deep blue hair, with just a hint of green. (Somehow, I suspected it wasn’t dyed.) Black robes, tattered and repeatedly patched. She definitely wasn’t from around here.

Anyone injured? she asked.

I didn’t hear her say those words. It was like I skipped from not hearing her to knowing she had just said something, with no time in between. I couldn’t tell you exactly what words she used, either. It was more like fragmented concepts--the concept of our group, and the concept of injury, with a question attached.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the save,” Allie said, “but can you tell us what’s going on?”

Soon, she said, pulling a bottle of green fluid and a strip of white cloth from somewhere in her robes. She cleaned and bound the worst of the bite marks on one of the survivors, and when she was done, she looked at Allie. I’m Tuwotahl of the Seventh Legion. We search for the Savior.

An image entered my mind. It was a woman, similar-looking to Allie and Tuwotahl. She was wearing black robes with the hood up, but I could see that her hair was blue. She was holding a sort of jagged shard, blacker than black.

Allie pulled her hat off, introducing us all to the Fro of Doom. It spilled every which way, uncontrolled and untamable. It was black, not blue.

“You’ve got the wrong number here,” Allie said as she put her hat back on.

Perhaps you’re not the Savior yet.

The Saint

The Shadow hunts us. Where is safe? Tuwotahl asked. She sent an image of high walls, with blue-haired women at the top, aiming bows down at the land below them. Evidently, there were castles wherever she came from.

“An army base, maybe?” Allie thought out loud. “I’m not sure if there’s one nearby . . . Any other ideas?”

“I have one,” I said. I pictured an old brick fort, long since abandoned by its original inhabitants. Trees surrounded it, covering at least a half-hour drive in every direction, with only one road connecting it to the outside world. I tried to push the image out of my mind, towards the stranger. If she could show me pictures, maybe I could show her pictures, too.

You send! Tuwotahl exclaimed. Blurry. No practice? Of course not. You speak sounds. She looked me up and down. Good first try.

“What just happened?” Allie asked. Nobody answered.

Tuwotahl pulled something out of her robe. Jagged, darker than dark . . . the same shard(?) from her vision. She pressed it into my hand. It felt cold and hard, like a piece of obsidian.

Think of the place, she told me. Sight. Sound. Smell. Anything you have.

I thought, and to my amazement, one of the black portals appeared between us.

Hurry, she said, pulling Allie by the shoulder. For lack of a better idea, the rest of us followed. As soon as she were through, she grabbed the shard from me, and the portal closed again.

A few of my friends were out front in the vegetable garden. They stared in amazement at the motley group that had popped out of nowhere.

It’s time to describe myself.

My name is Shannon Hayes, and at the time of the first attacks, I was a sixteen-year-old girl. I’m short, but wider at the stomach than I’d prefer. (I hike, garden, and get all sorts of exercise, but that’s just how I’m built.) I’m pink from frequent sunlight, with brown hair and eyes. You wouldn’t look at me twice if you saw me on the street, save for the simple brown robes I wear, a striking anachronism in the days of jeans and T-shirts. The same brown robes worn by everyone else who lives in that fort.

“Welcome to the Church of the Branches,” I said. “Be at peace, and enjoy your stay.”