All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 33: Out of the Frying Pan ~ Carrie Cutforth

Right This Second – Deadmau5

David’s POV

I reel back, my body hurtling through the void like a catfish that just bit the bait. The rusty fishhook in my jaw numbs my cheeks and jowls as my eyes suck back into their sockets from the sheer velocity my soul is being sucked through a vortex. I swirl towards the drain of entropy …

I jerk up from the violent dream on a large cot. It is pitch black but I still see hallucinatory fire snowflakes in the edges of my eyelids. I sit up in a cold sweat and listen to my heartbeat booming in my chest.  For a moment I can only hear the ticking of the grenade in my chest, and then:

An explosion.

That wasn’t another betrayal of the body this time. The bed begins to rattle under my weight with kinetic energy as the paper-thin flimsy walls of the room tremble at the touch of a far-off sonic boom.

Somewhere a baby cries.

Or is that a siren?

No, both a baby and a siren.

Where in the worlds did I land myself this time? Out of the frying pan...

Before I can get my bearings, another high-pitched sonic whistle…Pepper sits up inside the cot beside me, also bathed in sweat. It’s only then I take notice of the sultry air as fire rains just outside of our shack. Then another boom. My eardrums pop as my bones rattle – that one was closer.

Pepper looks at me with haunted eyes. She is rail thin, with jaunt cheekbones, and malnourished dry whittling hair. She looks....war torn…as she curses under her breath, “It is too soon. Too soon for us to die.”

Pepper swings her body around and springs into action the moment her bare feet hit the splintered floorboards. She runs into the direction of screams: that of the child or the siren I cannot say.

I watch her fly away from the bed, my legs tangled in the sheets as if I had been wrestling Jacob’s angel all night. I now see we are in a small rectangular one-room cabin made of cheap wooden planks merely stitched in place. It doesn’t aspire any confidence in me at all. I feel frozen in time and just want to go back to bed, allow this hellhole world I’ve jiggered in to fry all around my body as I try to will my soul to jump somewhere else, and soon.

I don’t have to look out the dingy window to know fire burns all around as the sounds of machine guns rip into the air. I try to ignore the collapse of civilization outside and sing to myself, “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones…” at the top of my voice, but not even I can hear the words above the rambunctious chaos that circles ever near.

My body betrays the will of the soul and finally pounces out of bed, bored from the inactivity, like a cat. I feel taller than I ever have, my body confident and lithe.

The door crashes open, and my body snaps to a rifle tethered behind the head of the bed. As soon as my fingers grasp round the barrel, images sear through my mind and I feel every molten blast that emanated from my hands in the past to tear into the chest of how many victims, too many, to count. Tortured face after tortured face crumbles in waves in my brain in the ‘verses motherfucked-up version of a viewmaster. And then I see her, Emma – no not just any Emma, my Emma, staring up from its barrel with a pleading look in her eye. And I see my finger on the trigger twitching—

“David!” a deep voice barks.

My head snaps up from its murderous reverie, and I feel my body respond with panther like reflexes, training the rifle at the man in command of several soldiers at the entrance.

Atticus, in a slick uniform that has seen better days, stares down the barrel of the gun and smiles slyly. “You might as well, Old Boy,” he cooed at me and my gun, “We are already dead. Or will be soon enough. It’s time to surrender the prisoner…And then accept our ultimate fates.”

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A/N

Thanks for all your patience. I've had a CRAZY two years since we first launched this book. I've finally outlined the last six or so chapters today, and am finally in a good place to crank them out all at once. All the chapters are going to be short but high octane and tying up a lot of loose ends: so be prepared.

Next chapter David reunites with the Emma of his world.