All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 29: City of Angels ~ Willow Polson

Music Track: “The Game Has Changed” – Daft Punk/Tron Soundtrack 

That sickening feeling again. I know it well. Stop the world, I want to get off. Oh, I guess I did.

In the mist, though, a flash of green and black. A sound. A word.

“David!”

Pepper?

I landed with a crunch and found myself flailing to catch myself. My shoulder hit a fallen branch as my feet slipped in the gritty gravel soil of... wherever I was now. It was night, but I could see that apparently this David was hiking somewhere, and doing a piss-poor job of it.

“Shit,” I wheezed as I checked out my shoulder. Not dislocated, at least. I looked around and saw the distant lights of Los Angeles. A cold gust ripped through my clothes and tossed junk in my eyes and took my breath away. I guessed that I was probably somewhere in the Angeles National Forest.

I got my hands under me but as I moved, my head started swimming. Again? Already? But this wasn’t another jump, it was just dizziness. My stomach growled loudly and painfully. This David had gone without a good meal for far too long. I focused on my hands in the dim moonlight to try and clear my head, and realized that they were familiar, if a lot more boney than before. The black fragment of an unfinished tattoo and an inch-long scar. I knew what universe I was in.

I heard metallic clicks around me. I recognized what that sound was now—guns being cocked, safeties being taken off. It’s a sound nobody should really be that familiar with, especially when they’re all pointed at you. The three of them had somehow snuck up on me, probably when I had my dizzy spell.

“State your business,” said a muffled male voice from behind either a mask or scarf. I didn’t look up to check.

“David Blunt,” I said to my hands. “Tell Emma the other David is here. The other David. Say it like that.”

I could hear one of them run off into the brush. Uphill. So that’s where she was. The other two didn’t move. I had no idea if they’d put their guns away or not, and kind of didn’t care.

I wondered about the David I’d jumped into here, for the second time now. What he was like. Emma had said before, and I’d pieced together, that he was something of a freedom fighter in the shadows under a bright facade. I wondered how many other realities I was a fighter in. How many realities I was Batman. But nobody wants to be with Batman, except the criminally insane.

“David?”

I looked up and saw her. Emma. My....

But was she mine? She wore a black cloth over her head, something like the Virgin Mary wears on the covers of Christmas cards, but stealthier. She had a dozen different necklaces and smelled of patchouli and something else. Some other kind of thick perfume like church incense made liquid. I briefly flashed on the universe where I’d screwed up her holy vows.

“I made it back,” I croaked, my throat thick and my tongue dry. She peered at me, not sure what to think. I was not the same David that this body had been an hour ago. Hell, I wasn’t even the same David as I was the last time I was here. I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. Who or what I was turning into.

“Something from that night, that only we would know.”

It took me a moment, but I was able to understand what she meant and dredge something up. It all seemed so far away and long ago.

“Sushi, and the prism...” I started, my gaze dull. “Uh... the drawings... that spiral...” Don’t think about the spiral pattern, David, that’s what kicked you out the last time.