Kingdom Come - Liam Brune

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The end of the world has its own strange inconveniences. Jess was looking one of them directly in the eye. The deer was a couple hundred yards away from her, grazing peacefully. It was blissfully unaware that the angel of death was creeping up on it in the form of a twenty-four year-old woman with a rifle nuzzled against her cheek. Luckily for the deer, her sight was resting on its eye, which two years prior would have been pitch black, but was now glowing a beautiful bright blue with strings of hazel coiled and circling the center.

 

Jess’ eyes were drawn to it. A strange sensation of hypnosis radiated through her fingers, holding them from the trigger. For a moment, she thought some otherworldly force was holding her back, then the realization struck her: That’s what she’d always thought Anna’s eyes would look like. The blue from her. The green from Jack. Nothing was physically stopping her from killing the deer—she just didn’t want to—but reminiscing over the dead wouldn’t keep her alive, and she needed to eat, so she placed her finger on the trigger and began to — Ping! The sound came from the back of her neck and shocked her into paralysis. Her time had come. She was marked. 

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By the time Jess reached the cabin, she held her marker in one hand and a bloody scalpel in the other. She was pulling a wheelbarrow that held her rifle, as well as another piece of questionable cargo that had been covered in a crudely constructed body bag. She was debating which had been more painful—carving the marker out of her neck or asking a nice farmer back in town if she could borrow a corpse. She had the time to mull it over. The cabin was a two-mile walk from the small town that the few thousand citizens of Kingdom Come had been able to cobble together. Presumably, it was the last remaining town in existence. 

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The cabin was decrepit to the point of near-collapse. It was surrounded by hills on all sides. Jess reached into her backpack and took out an old soup can that she’d filled with glass scrapings and gunpowder. She placed the can on the empty windowsill, then walked carefully across the cabin’s creaky floorboards until she reached a table in the very center. She placed her marker on the table before, much less gracefully, and she pulled the corpse out of the wheelbarrow and dropped it onto the cabin floor. She knelt down to unzip the body bag, which didn’t feel right, but the cost of living is high during the apocalypse, so she pulled open the bag to find the bloated face of a young man.

 

The sight was overpowering, so was the smell. She immediately wanted to close the bag, but she needed to do this. It was the only way to lure out the crow. She flicked the dead man’s eye and began her monologue, “Testing, testing. Is this thing on? Okay. If you’re watching this message, it means you’re dead.” 

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*

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Jess sat on a nearby hill, waiting and watching time pass, metaphorically at least. Time had a funny way of working since that fateful day in the August of 2054. She sat staring at the cabin for hours, but the sun didn’t move an inch. The earth was still spinning—it had to be, otherwise, she’d have been launched across the Rocky Mountains at a couple hundred miles per hour. Instead, it was as if the sky was a mirage, trapped in a fixed point of time, illuminating an endless day.

 

“Huh, I always thought people were stroking my ego, but I guess I really did have a bright future”. Her sarcastic compartmentalization was cut short. A truck was approaching, and The Murder came with it.   

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The truck was disappointing. Jess remembered the old movies she used to watch, where cartoonish villains would drive equally cartoonish cars, but she was ashamed to admit that she found the evils of reality a little bland. The four members of the Murder traveled in a basic, red pickup truck. Attached to the back was, what, a box? A cage? She couldn’t tell, but even with its inclusion, the truck wasn’t intimidating. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t befitting of supervillain status, but the passengers were. They were dressed head to toe in black military outfits that may as well have had the words Bad Guy spray painted across the chest. They were an enigma. A little marker beeps in the back of your neck, then a Murder of Crows pays you a visit, kills you, and leaves. No rhyme. No reason. Not a single word spoken. Then they move on to the next person. There were only a few thousand people left in Kingdom Come, and they were being picked off one by one.   

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 All four passengers stepped out of the truck. Two men, two women. At first, Jess couldn’t make out their eyes, even thorough the scope. It was only when one looked near her direction that she realized why. Their eyes were all sewn shut, except one. He was the only one with both eyes left untouched, and to celebrate that fact, he had a sloppily drawn portrait of an eye carved on his forehead. He was the first to make it to the cabin and peer through the window.

 

Even with a dead body peering back at him, he had no reaction. He simply turned around and looked at the other three. None of them said a word. None made a single gesture, but they seemed to understand each other perfectly. One pulled the gun off her back and walked to the other side of the cabin. The other two approached the cage attached to the truck. All of them operated perfectly, as if they hadn’t been horrifically blinded. The two opened the cage, and out walked the crow. The fifth and final person—if you could even call this thing human.  

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It was hunched over, struggling to walk on emaciated stilt-like legs. Its bones looked mangled under its pale ashy skin, which had clumps of black feathers protruding through it. Its face was covered by a metal bird mask with purple eyes peeking through. Somehow, it seemed different than the others. It seemed more human. Jess could see the pain in its eyes as the sunlight touched its skin. It crept its way into the house, followed closely by the four members of The Murder. The crow reached the corpse on the cabin floor and unfurled its hands. One had seemingly been torn off and replaced by a metal canister. The other was stretched and skinny, with a long, white nail sprouting from the middle finger. It held the canister straight out and, with its working hand, pressed a button on the base of its wrist. A hatch opened and pounds of thick dust poured to the ground. It then grasped the corpse by his hair and pulled it up to chest-level, turning it to face the dust. The crow crept his long, white nail across the man’s skull and rested it in the center of his forehead. It tilted its head slightly, and the dead man’s eyes flung open.  

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The corpse’s eyes glowed like headlights, casting white light across the cabin. Individual flakes of dust began to rise until the entire pile was suspended at different points in the air. A second wave of white light shot from the corpse’s eyes. As it struck the dust, it began to give it form. A third wave of light shot out. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. They began to fire in rapid succession, each one forming the dust, giving it color, giving it texture until it a dead man’s memory appeared before them in the form of Jess herself.

 

The replica began her monologue, as the real Jess aimed her rifle at the cabin: “Testing, testing, Is this thing on?”. Jess aimed her sight at the very special can she’d placed on the mantle.

 

“If you’re watching this...," she placed her finger on the trigger, “It means you’re dead." The sound of the gunshot spread throughout the valley, and even before the echo reached Jess’ ears, the bullet struck the can. It was sent flying into the cabin, and toward its five guests. The moment it struck the ground, the gunpowder inside was set off, and small shards of metal and glass were sent careening toward the cabin walls, with no regard for anything unfortunate enough to be in its way.  

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*

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Two times in one day: The thought that traveled through Jess’ head as, for the second time that day, she was carrying a dead body. Her only consolation was that the crow couldn’t have been more than 60 pounds. This solitary bright spot, however, was offset by the crimson slip-and-slide covering the cabin floor that she’d been forced to wade through. Her boots were covered with the blood of the five people she’d killed, but her only thought when she was up-close-and-personal with the mess she made was. I could really go for a Bloody Mary, she thought. 

 

Two years ago, she would have been in a self-induced introspective hell if she’d slightly offended someone, but now she was broken. Her delicate sensibilities had died with her daughter. When you take everything from someone, you leave them with nothing. She was a husk, just like the eyeless enigmas dead behind her, living for the sake of it. Her final motivation lied in vindication—or revenge—the difference didn’t matter to her anymore. But whatever moniker she used to label her grand plan, the next step needed a truck, and her visitors had been kind enough to leave her one.     

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*

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Are you ready to meet your better half? 

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The gate opens on August 5th, 2054 

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Transportation and tickets to The Miracle in The Kerguelen Islands for only Twenty-Three Hundred dollars! 

The poster mocked her. Driving for the first time in two years was hard enough without scenic advertisements about the opening of the gates of hell. But hey, she thought to herself, at least it was only Twenty-Three Hundred dollars for the privilege of dying slightly before everybody else.  

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A message and a door, that’s all it took to end the world. From what Jess’ remembered, the people of earth had been graced with a message from the beyond. But it didn’t come from the stars. It didn’t come from beneath the ground or the sea. It came from right here—and, at the same time, somewhere else. Somewhere that’s both zero feet and an infinite amount of miles away. And the people of earth, always in constant search for their own self-destruction, were just dying to meet its creator, so they made a door, and they opened it.

 

Jess wasn’t a doctor, but she was smart enough to know that time flowed in a straight line. Unfortunately, time on the other side didn’t. And apparently, time does not like being violently introduced to its strange peers, so reality started misbehaving. Some of it was normal, like floods and earthquakes. Some of it was stranger, like fifteen-minute ice ages paired nicely with pockets of space where time was stagnant. A person could wander into one, walk ten feet, and come out the other side three weeks later. Luckily, or unluckily, for Jess, the gate was on a small island just off the coast of Antarctica, on the exact opposite side of the globe as the Rocky Mountains.

 

The area was the last left standing, but among the people, it was chaos. A gaggle of headless chickens, among them, a then-pregnant, widower: Jess. The Colorado National Guard came in and rounded everybody up, but they were still just headless chickens in a smaller pen. Then, came the voice of the prophet, echoing throughout the entire state.

 

“Please, everyone remain calm. You’re going to be just fine." Then everything went black.  

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Two weeks later, they awoke with scars on their necks, they being every single living person – a number which was now one tenth the size. Jess didn’t know whose voice sent them into their golden slumber, but her contempt for him, hidden under months of grief, still spread like an infection, controlling her mind. He’d taken the last thing she cared about. She knew immediately after she opened her eyes to the eternal sun. A mother always knows. She’d fallen asleep as two and woke up as one.  

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*

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She stopped the truck just outside the front door. The giant once-glowing letters atop the building read Terran Labs. This is where they all came from—all those eyeless freaks. This is where he would be. Jess pulled the crow out of the truck and tossed it in front of the door. A beam of green light shot from the wall and scanned the area. But instead of settling on the withered corpse and opening the door it aimed at her. A robotic, yet disturbingly human voice spoke, “Welcome! The Doctor’s been waiting so long for a ‘normie’ like you!” Instead of opening the door, that she’d seen countless armadas of The Murder enter, the ground beneath her feet began to drop. 

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It carried her like an elevator down into the earth. After dropping two stories, it came to a stop and double doors in front of her opened to reveal a long hallway with a single door at the end and an elevator on the side wall that looked like it had been out of commission for years. Her violent rage turned to confusion, but still she continued.

 

When she took her first step, screens on every wall flashed to life, showing the same scene: a lone man in a white coat, with a dejected pain in his eyes. Jess continued to walk, and the man on the screen spoke, “I just wanted to be the hero, to save everybody." It was his voice. It was him.

 

Jess reached the door and saw the name plastered to the right of it: Dr. Grady Reed, the same name embroidered on the man’s lab coat. This is his office, Jess thought. He’s behind this door. Dr. Reed continued, “I just needed to tell someone," Jess grabbed the scalpel and swung open the door: “I’m sorry."

 

He was sitting in his office chair, dead, his throat slashed from ear to ear. He looked as if he’d been dead for years. 

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The recording continued: “There was a virus from the other side of that gate. It took me two days to notice it, two more to realize everyone had it, and twenty minutes to realize it would kill all of them, including me and, presumably you. In a panic, I looked for a cure and, shockingly, I found one, but in the chaos, I couldn’t get it to anybody. I pleaded with the national guard, and we decided, in our collective fear of our imminent death, to do something drastic.

 

They had a device that could connect to every microphone in the state and play a frequency, one so low that everybody would be driven comatose. It drowned out the chaos, and we started moving people by the truckload, injecting the cure into the back of their necks, with markers that could track them and read their vitals, but there were some unforeseen side-effects”. The video cut to another of a man strapped to a bed. The doctor injected a needle into the back of his neck, and he began convulsing. His bones were shifting. They were shrinking – he was becoming a crow.

 

“Only 1% of the subjects experienced the side-effects, but I needed to be better, to be perfect, so I dusted off an old project, a digitally-programmable parasite that would hunt any kill any virus. I tested it on the members of the national guard, and it worked… too well. It corrupted their minds, turned them into mindless drones with a single purpose: to eradicate the virus in every host, and it realized the most efficient way to do so, was to kill the host." 

 

The Murder, Jess realized. “This is my fault, my doing, but I can’t fix it. I’m too soon, but you’re not.” Another marker fell from the ceiling, landing at Jess’ feet. “The world is broken, but it will correct itself. However, in doing so, it’ll overcorrect. To put it simply: It’ll get hot—everywhere but here. Hot enough to kill anything with a regulated heartbeat." Like someone with a parasite in their head, Jess surmised. “I’m giving you a choice and a chance. Take the chip and they’ll follow you to the ends of the earth—all of them. Get far enough and they’ll drop like flies. This is the end for me, probably for you too, but everyone else can live."

 

He held up a knife. “It’s either starvation or the blade for me now, you probably don’t think I deserve it, but I’m taking the easy way out." The screen went black. Jess picked up the marker and weighed her options, realizing she was about to listen to the man she’d spent two years planning to kill. The strange inconveniences of the end of the world. One last sacrifice—to prove she was still human, to prove she deserved to meet her daughter on the other side.  

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