The Loop

It had all gone to shit last time, and now Adam was trusting this man again. He had spent the weeks following their failed heist going over the plan and its execution in his head again and again until the whole thing broke down into a jumbled mess of words and images with no clear connection to each other. A device that looked and felt perfectly intact. The feeling of something huge coming up from underground. A giant creature that was as much flesh as it was pistons and levers and dripping oil and blood, vaguely humanoid but with limbs where no limbs should have been, eyes where they served no purpose, viscera spilling from its malformed body in horrific torrents as a new insectoid arm-like appendage burst from its back. Christine screaming. Tomas, with the device fitted over his head, covered in a sheen of sweat and unable to move. The feeling of his powers deserting him slowly as the thing’s influence grows around him.

He had managed to yank Tomas free of the device and get him clear of the building with his power before it had faded completely. He had struggled against Tomas’s bearhug around him as he tried desperately to get back inside to save Christine and Tomas had shouted over and over that she was gone, that they had to leave. He had wheeled on Tomas, wanting to kill him where he stood, but there was no time; they could see the creature emerging from the front of the building. Tomas’s ankle was broken, and Adam carried him through the air, carried him far enough away that he wouldn’t be killed immediately by one of those things, and then dumped him and left him to fend for himself.

The rest was a blur, but one thing was certain: they had been set up. The twin herself, perhaps? Working in concert with those Abominations? But no, Adam didn’t think she would sink so low as to betray her whole species. The Twins might have been reprehensible opportunists once upon a time, but they had always had their dignity. No, it seemed more likely to Adam now that she had believed the information she had given to Tomas, but that the creatures had known about the warehouse too, had known that eventually she’d tell someone like Tomas about it, and that eventually someone would bring along a few valuable Hypes to fall right into their trap.

And now the cycle was repeating itself. Tomas showed up with a crazy plan, and Adam was swept off his feet by this feeling of hope that his brain had become so unaccustomed to that its effects were like a drug. So caught up in this feeling was he that he threw caution to the wind. And this time, he had even less holding him back. Without Christine, he truly had nothing left to lose.

“You’ll see her again, my friend,” said Tomas softly. It was like he had read Adam’s thoughts, and Adam was shocked, not for the first time, by how astute some people could be, even the ones who weren’t telepathic.

“In this life or the next, I suppose,” he replied.

“Or the one before,” Tomas said and laughed.

“That too.”

The plan was a little different this time. The device had been a decoy, sitting on a table in the middle of the lab as if inviting someone to use it; Adam should have suspected it was a trap as soon as his mind had touched it. But anyway, the device had only ever been a pale copy of the one whose powers it was based on: Lakshmi Khan, one of The Twins. The other twin, Prisha, was the one whom Tomas had spoken to in captivity. Prisha had assumed her sister dead, but in the months since their last disastrous meeting, Tomas had tracked down leads that led him to believe that she was still alive and in hiding. Even if all the devices were destroyed—as now appeared to be the case—if Adam and Tomas could get to the source of the devices’ powers, they could still enact their plan.

A couple days later found them working their way North toward Utah, to the town where Tomas’s sources had told him Lakshmi was holed up. It was strange for Adam to think that Tomas, formerly a criminal and a villain and a mostly despicable human being, was more involved in the resistance than he was. If it weren’t for his occasional interactions with Tomas, he wouldn’t have even known there was still any resistance to speak of. Not that it seemed to be a very effective one, but still …

On the road they didn’t encounter a single living thing, human (powered or otherwise), animal, or Abomination. This latter was nothing either of them missed, but the lack of the former two did push Adam deeper into his present state of isolation and despair with each passing mile. In the former world, before he had powers, long before the beginning of the apocalypse, he hadn’t been much of a people person. His family had always had piles of pets growing up, though, and he had found in the animals a companionship and a likeness of soul that eluded him in other people until well into his young adulthood. He’d gotten there eventually, though, not least because of Christine. And now all his past pets were dust in the dirt, and Christine was a corpse they hadn’t even been able to bury. She had likely been left out in the open to be picked at by crows—the Abominations had no use for burials—and such was his loneliness now that he would have wept for joy at the sight of anything living, even those very crows who had by now pecked the eyes out of the body of the love of his life.

Even the plants were either dead or well on their way. It made him wonder why he had been so insistent on continuing to fight the good fight before Tomas had showed up; what was there left worth saving? Nearly all the ordinary people had been killed. Likely there were some holdouts, but it was only a matter of time before they were either found and murdered, or they starved to death, or they realized they couldn’t handle the bleakness of the world any longer and decided to end it themselves. The majority of Hypes were either captured and held in the facilities Tomas had described where they were stripped of their powers and experimented upon, or killed if they tried to resist. A few obviously existed who weren’t yet captured or killed, but not many. And those who were still alive and free were as impotent as Adam was when it came to actually fighting the creatures, regardless of whether they considered themselves a ‘resistance’ or not.

So again, he wondered, what had he thought was the point? But Tomas had come along and rekindled just enough of a spark of hope to keep him going. And a sliver of hope was all he had ever needed to push forward.

—————

“Where the fuck are we?” Adam asked. Such was the advancement of the aesthetic of the apocalypse now that most roads were blown over by sand and buried in dunes eight feet high. Road signs had either blown over or were crusted in dust. Some of the supports holding the signs had even rotted away too quickly for natural degradation to account for. He noted again how the look and feel of the collapse of the world seemed specifically drawn from some shared cultural consciousness. He was almost surprised that there weren’t zombies punching their way up from the ground or meteors raining from the heavens to add a real sense of finality to humanity’s fate.

The sky had grown somehow both more red and more gray. There was a soft but persistent undercurrent of thunder without a single moment of complete silence to collect one’s thoughts fully, and the lightning that caused it flashed interminably behind clouds that allowed enough of their light through to leave constant afterimages on Adam’s eyelids, while somehow also blocking most of the sunlight that might have made things seem a little less despairingly demoralizing.

The air was close and oppressive and it smelled of things acrid and caustic and sour like rotting flesh left in a bath of sulfur. He choked breathing in and coughed breathing out. It would have been better if it was stiflingly hot, because it would have at least felt more right for their location and for the Hellish landscape it had turned into, but instead it was cold. Not freezing, just cold. Cold enough to make walking all day miserable, but not cold enough to numb the aches and pains and push them to the periphery of awareness.

Every car they passed was broken down and degraded to a degree well beyond what was reasonable for the amount of time they had sat abandoned. Something was eating the world alive, and while the Abominations were obviously behind it, they didn’t actually have to be present to make it happen. Indeed, while no one knew how many of them there really were on the planet, it didn’t seem like the overwhelming alien invasion force that a young, science fiction obsessed Adam would have imagined. But although their numbers weren’t overwhelming, their power certainly was, and the nightmare scenery and the hopelessness of each step and the pain of the grit blown in Adam’s eyes by a wind that seemed engineered for exactly that purpose and no other was all the evidence that Adam needed to know that this was an enemy that humanity had never had any real chance against.

“Ten, maybe fifteen miles North of Flagstaff? It’s hard to be sure,” said Tomas.

“Excuse me?”

“You asked me where we were, didn’t you?”

“I might have. I honestly don’t remember saying anything.”

“Having trouble keeping track of your thoughts, my friend?”

“You could say that.”

“Join the club. And if it gets too bad, focus on this: we’re nearly there.”

“And then what?”

“And then we hope that Kali still lives. And we hope that she’s willing to help us. And we hope that she doesn’t hold too much of a grudge for all the times you tried to arrest or kill her and her sister.”

“As if you never tried to kill them?”

“Did I?” he laughed. “Yes, I suppose I did. Once or twice. But then again, I’m a villain; nobody ever expected me to play nice. And anyway, Kali loves me.”

Kali, Adam thought, the Hindu Goddess of Death and the Doomsday. It was strange and a little pointless to still be using Hypes’ pseudonyms now—after all, Tomas wasn’t still referring to the two of them as Poltergeist and Hourglass—but hers was strangely apt for their mission and their present circumstances.

Kali and Saraswati—Lakshmi and Prisha to those who knew them. The Twins. The Goddesses. A few years ago Adam never would have imagined it possible that he might someday willingly go to them for help, and he certainly wouldn’t have guessed they would willingly give it.

Things change.