Rising by Patrick Sean Lee (sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt) 📖

I would have done better to crawl out of that sewer and brought their buildings down in flames, street by street. Suddenly we find ourselves in a maze. A box that has eyes and ears and an enemy waiting for us to…simply…open…the…next…door.

“Wait!”

SEVENTEEN

 

“What?” Sant asks.

“They’ve got to be right on the other side! Mondra, get on the right side of the door. Sant, put your back against the wall over there…”

The door is set into the wide hallway with a foot or two of flat space on either side. Whoever is on the other side can’t see us now that the watchers are toast. I hope. If I were them, I would expect us to either open the door, or else knock it down. Standing side by side right in the middle, ready to start blasting them. I’d have my lackeys aim their guns chest high, dead center, and then goodbye Alana from Black, once and for all. So I lose ten or twenty men in the first exchange? So what? My troops standing behind them open fire over the bodies of their dead buddies before they even hit the floor.

Maybe three seconds. She didn’t even have time to raise her hands and let loose, and the two with her didn’t have the time or smarts to take us all down. Good riddance, rebels.

Neither Sant nor Mondra asks why. The do as I say. I can see that my sister is nervous as can be. The veins in her lithe neck are pumping furiously, but she’s controlled, even with tons of adrenalin coursing through her body at light speed. She holds the gun upright with both hands, close to her body, its barrel against her cheek, and waits. Sant is looking back and forth from me to the door. Same position right over there.

I lay down, center of the hall several feet back from the door, and stretch my arms out, palms up. They’ll miss me, but I won’t miss any of them. I am scared to death.

“Open the door, Mondra, but whatever you do, don’t step into the opening,” I try to whisper over the muted blaring of the alarm on the other side. “Just push it in.”

She nods, glances across the way at Sant, and then reaches for the handle.

Twist. The latch disengages, and I can almost see them aiming right now. I don’t think. I don’t wait. I close my eyes as the door begins to swing inward and summon everything inside me. Quick as a spider flying across her web at the bug that just landed.

The leading edge of the door catches the leading edge of the force, and smashes fully open with a crash into the wall on the hinged side, then back it ricochets. I do it all again, expecting in that instant to perhaps hear the sounds of gunfire from those who survived. I hear only the door smashing back to where it was a split second ago, this time ripped off the heavy hinges? The shattering of glass. And then it’s so weird quiet. Even the alarm in there has died.

I open my eyes. Mondra is nailed to the wall. Sant, too. She is shaking like crazy now, but Sant is just peering down at me, waiting for me to give the next order. In front of me there isn’t much dust or fire—even destruction to speak of. I guess because Mondra opened the door into...a stairway!

No gunfire. No shouting. Sant steps into the opening beside me first, and I can hear him laugh a laugh of relief. Mondra is beside me almost as quickly.

The stairwell landing is extremely narrow. It’s like, with their penchant for ostentatious architecture, why couldn’t they have made this stairway a little bigger? I mean, even a rat would have trouble…well, maybe not. But the landing leading to the first step down is treacherously narrow, and there’s barely enough room to the right of the down section for the up section of stairs to begin!

Straight across under the steps going up, a window sits in the wall, shattered. The noise I heard a second or two ago. Mondra looks at all of this only briefly before she slings the gun’s strap over her shoulder, steps forward and begins the descent.

“I know where we are now,” she says, her words bouncing in rhythm to her rush down each step. “The cells are underground. Come on!”

I’m right behind her. Not a good place to be if…or more probably when…we run into the next bunch of goons. If they’re on their way up. I won’t be able to unload on them without taking her out as well. And the same is true behind me. We race down two flights of stairs until they end, and there is only a solitary door to our left. Little shards of glass on the concrete crackle under Mondra’s feet as she bounds toward it. Other than that, though, it’s quiet. There’s nothing worse than eerie silence when you know they know you’re among them.

“Same thing?” she whispers when Sant and I arrive at her side. “I open, you blast them?”

I don’t get it. Troops waiting in the hall when we broke through. The watcher devices blinking before Mondra destroyed them. Alarms. Alarms. They have to know we’re here. There were two ways for the invaders to go—right or left at the tee upstairs. Did they think we’d go left instead of right into the stairwell? Massed beyond the other door up there? But that couldn’t be. The damned watcher had to have alerted them that we were headed toward the stairwell door. Are they letting us go forward now, leading us into some kind of trap?

Mondra is waiting for my answer. Sant has already moved close to the wall to my left. Well, we can’t stay here. Yet…

“Mondra, something’s wrong. I just feel it,” I whisper. And that’s when it dawns on me. Descends on me I should say. On us. Whiffs of white smoke drifting down from the ceiling thirty feet above us. No heat. No pops of red-orange flames. Can’t be fire. I see a dead space of nothing a few feet above our heads, just below the curl of white pushing it out of the way. Smothering it.

Not smoke. Gas!

“Get on the floor! Hurry!” I scream.

I don’t really see either of them react. I close my eyes before the last word leaves my throat and bolt forward, hands extended, willing with everything inside me for…

The metal door doesn’t slam back into the wall on the other side, instead I hear the infinitely quick and hard screech of it leaving its hinges when it cartwheels down whatever space is beyond. The terrific explosion. The sudden absence of precious air as the mass of the door sucks it with it. We don’t have time, but I unleash another blast of energy into the void anyway. Whoever is in there…

“Move! Move! Move! They’re gassing us!”

 

 

EIGHTEEN

A swirl of fog beats my head. How can that be, I wonder? Fists of mist. Hah! One wave knocks me down, another pummels me. What?

My nose hurts. My eyes hurt. My throat feels like someone rammed a metal rod down it. I want to vomit, but my stomach doesn’t have the strength.

I’m dying. I must be, but that final door behind which everything disappears into nothingness eludes me. All thought should have vanished like a candle snuffed. No feeling of there is something else, something more. Something different than the world I’ve known for sixteen years. But still something.

 

What’s on the other side, Father?

A wonderful land, Alana. Padraig. The gods walk there among all good men and women who have passed, and there is peace.

Do they see us? Where is this place where all the dead go? Above us in the clouds?

Everywhere. Padraig is like the night. We cannot really see it, but the land of the gods surrounds us like the darkness. Emmani is no longer in pain. She isn’t crying, nor is she afraid any longer, and your little sister can see you and me. She is happy.

I want to see her if she can see me. Why can she see us but we can’t see her?

When we die we’ll meet her again.

That isn’t fair, Father. I don’t want to die.

But we all do, my darling girl. And then we are taken to Padraig where all who have tortured and killed us become our servants for all eternity.

 

I don’t want to die, because I have a feeling there is nothing else when I do.

Nothing.

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Publication Date: 06-20-2015

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