The Thunder Beneath the Eye
by Nick Karpuk
He would graduate in a year, onto college, onto life, onto a job, onto retirement, onto death. The wheels of life turn faster and faster until the latter end of your life is a just a blink in the spectrum of existences span. All men are born to die. The string of morbid logic had haunted him for weeks, culminating in this mad dash towards nothing in particular..
He thought a backpack full of food and a lack of concern for tomorrow could probably last him a while. And so he walked.
3 miles on, he began to sweat, the backpack was becoming a heavier and heavier burden upon his spine. He wiped the sweat away from his brow, and made the near involuntary response of blinking twice. At the moment he didn't correlate the two events, but at the precise second of the second blink, a sound like thunder reverberated through his brain, impacting against the walls of his skull with a dull thud. He whipped his head about frantically, expecting attackers, immanent danger. Stumbling to the ground, cradling his pounding skull for moment, before he noticed the group of people standing above him. They were dressed with inescapably odd hats, wearing suits of a disgusting shade of green, all with mustaches. All of them were also giving him dirty looks, and he realized the this ring of business men were surrounded by a large number of well dressed people walking in either directions.
"What the hell?" He was thoroughly baffled. The well dressed men realized that he was all right, they all moved on, leaving him on his small island of pavement among the flood of inconspicuous pedestrians.
David hopped to his feet, ignoring the queer expressions he gained from passerby. God it was crowded, all the building were suddenly high rises, bums were lining several nearby walls, and there was currently a large traffic jam. He was an amateur car obsessor, and he couldn't help but realize that some of the models didn't look the least bit familiar. Many were gray, and they were all streamlined past a point that David would have thought possible. He blinked again in amazement.
He took a step, blinking once again, cannon within his head firing off once more. Like a bad editing effect in some low budget movie, the scenery was changed. He tripped over the curb that had once been 2 steps in a different direction. He had to jump backwards to keep from getting his ankle run over by an oncoming car. The lane had been widened in an instant, and he only recognized a few cars anymore. God they were moving fast!
The traffic was moving at a frenzied pace, the average speed easily topping 70 m.p.h.. No one was really driving easier, all the cars were flowing in organized sequences, shifting and weaving at a frenzied pace within inches of each other, the hectic pace somehow protected from an anarchic scene of mangled vehicles.
"Whats happening!" Of course many people ignored him, they were far too accustomed to the insane to notice him.
He flopped into a sitting position, holding his head, as the strangely dressed people walking past gave him disgruntled expressions. He hadn't the energy left to observe this though, he was buried in mandatory contemplation.
"When I blinked! That was when it happened, when I blinked." Inspiration had given light to his situation, but this catalyst gave him no security, just an increased sense of paranoia.
To test out the theory, he first took 4 steps backward, just encase they should widen the road any time soon. He blinked, and the same dull gun shot rang through his inner ear. He opened his eyes into a vista of towers, seas of cars, and noises of a bustling metropolitan area. He was going into the future, slowly hurled forward by his own reflexes.
He stood up, for the first time realizing that his backpack had not joined him in the voyage, and began to walk, falling in line with the sea of pedestrians. He had never been so terrified in all of his 17 years. He began to cry, his self pity enhanced by the undisguised sneers of the strangely dressed people surrounding him. He was tortured, trying to keep his eyes open, to stay in this place, regardless of how bizarre. The future could be worse, would be worse in fact. But he couldn't keep away the tears, and his eyes began to burn. He closed the for a split second, praying that the nightmare would stop.
He opened them onto night, nothing alive at this hour, silence surrounding him, except for the faint sound of a bugle wafting downward from the seemingly omnipresent buildings shooting upward, reaching through the clouds, hover-cars flying from each sector to the other on their nightly tasks. He continued to sob, alone in the eternal darkness and the cold air.
He had to keep his eyes open, he was determined. But he realized there was no one here now. The streets were now empty, the streets were beginning to corrode from the lack of use. Garbage was spread lightly across the road, the occasional piece of garbage plummeting from above. He couldn't stay here, he had to close his eyes, the polluted air stinging his iris. He was so horribly frightened, but he had to close them. Thunder sounded.
He was in a labyrinth, a concrete maze, a grate over head exposing an even more lonely street. They had become novelties by this time. The horn still sounded faintly above, but the sheer loneliness of the tunnel blocked the long, mournful note from his mind. The quiet was filled with the cackles of creatures deeply alien to Davids very sense of hearing. They could feel him, they were coming for him, the abandoned demons time had put here to rot, pulling down the infidels in their cataclysmic downward spiral. He panicked, running down the cement corridor.
He began to run insanely through the nondescript corridors, turning through endless number of bends past tunnels and murky streams, trying to ignore the sting of the hostile fumes that threatened to seal his eyes. He grabbed a latter ahead of him, pulling up towards a faint light, and found himself in a room with a small halogen bulb, four undecorated walls, and a grate overhead. Nothing could be seen through the grate except giant monoliths of glass and stone. He could still hear the faint screams in the distance.
He feel against one of the walls and sobbed for what seemed like an eternity, trying to keep his eyes open, failing three times. Time wouldn't kill him now, time wouldn't let him die. The concept sank in, and for a moment he began to appreciate the sick irony of it all.
"I got what I wanted." He began to cackle insanely, feeling a little relief in the sudden buoy of pleasure in this ocean of disquieting isolation. He wanted his child hood, a place without pain, a place like sleep, somewhere with no such abstract notion as tomorrow. A place where he could have died a long time from now, in a place he could recognize.
He looked up and the saw the effect of three blinks. The buildings were in ruins, smoke everywhere. No longer did the faint bugle sound. The shouts and jeers of abandoned hopeless people reached him from far off. He had seen the world end at 17. He let out a long anger soaked wale, I cry of pain and desperation, and the voices beyond the grate merely let out a sick laugh.
A disturbed twist of irony had granted him immortality, and he was about to mentally collapse. He began to cry again, and could stop. He kept on crying, watching the world degrade and change around him, watching the cement corrode, the light burn out, the grate and a large portion of the ceiling also disappearing.
His throat hurt and he was incredibly tired. Maybe sleep would take him to a place where he could die, where life would no longer be supported. Somewhere a long the course of time was a place where earth couldn't exist. With faint shudders he closed his eyes, too tired to care about the waves of thunder thudding upon the back wall of his mind.
In a dream he heard his mother calling him, a soothing voice beckoning him back to the waking world to greet an unchanged and secure universe. But this was dispelled by the prodding sensation he began to feel in his temples. He opened his eyes to an alien laboratory, to creatures only faintly man staring down out him. With their opalescent eyes and expressions that seemed to nearly be a smile.
He screamed, they gagged with a black rubber object. He cried, they simply dried the tears occasionally and carried on with their business. They wouldn't let him die, they would torture him for the sake of their twisted scientific pursuits until he unlearned the very concept of pain. A knife was raised, and the bite of blade woke him from his self pity.
He blinked from the terrifying shock of that sensation, and found himself surrounded in glass, with a horrible sense of weightlessness. He was encased in a small container, he could barely move his arms, and his legs were pinned. He was free floating in space, without a planet in sight.
How the hell had he gotten into here, what the hell was going on? He blinked over and over again in frustration, nothing was happening, when had the thunder stopped, how long had he been sleeping when time stopped. He knew he was going to die, to starve in this tube.
He let out a scream, purely to appease his own frustration. No one would hear him again. For all effective purposes, time had buried him alive.