NOT LONG FROM NOW
A FUTURE THAT CANNOT BE
The desert stretched in every direction, a dry and dead thing with an infinite horizon that sizzled and warped in the intense heat. A man in rags, face speckled with chapped skin spotted by the sun and a few days growth on his cheeks, shambled through a shadow patch created by the tallest hill he could find. It was a slight reprieve from the blistering heat, one that would be over soon, he could already see the glowing ground ahead, but he savored the shade while he could. The man walked through the desert; the last man on earth.
A bag slung over the man’s shoulder felt heavier than it was. It was a simple pouch, twice the size of the water jug the man carried on his hip, and it was filled to the brim with silver. The coins jingled some as he walked, a high-hat accompany to the percussive crunch of his feet on the sand. It was heavier than it actually was because the man knew the true weight of the silver. It wasn’t the number of coins or the tug of gravity that made the bag heavy, it was what was really in the bag that mattered and what was really inside was the cost of humanity, the price of power. Power was not something that should be light.
The man paused at the edge of the hill’s shadow, his toes poking out into the sunlight. He stared off at the stretching desert ahead of him, his destination nowhere in sight, and he swallowed hard at the walk that was far from over. Tiny grains of sand cut his throat on the way down. He grabbed the water jug from his waist, unscrewed the cap, and tipped his head back to have a drink. The weight of the coins threw off his equilibrium. He hadn’t noticed that the water jug was light until he was already going for his drink and only a few trickling drops rolled out. He tapped the side of the jug, trying to milk it for all there was, and he licked his peeling lips when he was done. The last man on earth screwed the lid back on, put the jug back on his hip, and stepped out into the sun. Journeys could only be completed as long as the traveler kept walking.
The walk went on and on. The man’s muscles screamed and sang, his legs turning to stone with every step, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. Sweat pooled in his boots, turning the sand stuck under his toes into mud, and it dripped off his face, stinging his eyes that squinted to see through the bright sun. The discomfort didn’t matter though. It would all be over soon.
After an hour, the ridge curved up into a hill and although it took some doing, the last man on earth managed to climb the hill and look down into the valley to see what there was to see. A small black dot of something very far away sat a few paces away from another distant and unfocused smudge of a thing. The man jostled his shoulder to hear the jingle of the coins he brought and he smiled. He slid down the hill, easing into the valley, and walked another three hundred yards or so until the dot took shape into something that resembled a man, but this was no man, this was a god, and he sat on a stool in the middle of the desert, smoking a cigar and drinking rum from a glass jug.
Baron Samedi chomped down on his cigar when the man approached. The skull paint around his face cracked in the sun, but he looked generally comfortable even in the heat. The man approached and then looked beyond the Loa, the god, to what had been the other smudge he saw in the distance. It was a cage, a tall metal structure with seven-foot-tall bars shooting straight up out of the sand. In the cage was a woman who sat on the ground, crumpled up around herself. She was chapped, sun-burnt, and her face was hidden by dark red hair. The last woman on earth refused to look toward the man.
“I’m surprised you went through with this, Baron,” the man said, his voice hoarse and his eyes still on the woman and the cage. “I’m glad, but I’m surprised.”
“Anything for you, Shadow,” Baron Samedi said around his cigar, his thick accent drifting away from him like smoke and sand. “Do you have my silver?”
The man let the bag fall from his shoulder, and he caught the strap. He held it out, but pulled back before the Baron could make a move to reach for it. “That’s not my name, and you know it.”
The Baron stood up and tossed his cigar into the desert. He washed the taste of smoke down with some rum and took a few steps toward the man. “You have no name, my friend. You only have my silver.” He grabbed the bag but the man didn’t let go.
“Once she’s dead, I’ll have my name,” the man said. “Once she’s dead, I won’t be her shadow anymore.”
“Maybe,” the Baron shrugged and yanked the bag of silver out of the man’s grasp. “Not sure how it’ll matter. You already shaped the world to look how you feel on the inside, Shadow. Then comes vengeance. But what comes third? I’m not sure you’ve thought that far ahead.”
The man chewed his chapped lip and looked down into the sand as the Baron walked past him. He thought of a thing to say, a thousand things, but nothing seemed to carry the weight he needed, nothing had enough sting. That was the problem when going up against the truth of a god. They were hard to get one up on. “You,” the man turned to try anyway, but the Baron was gone. There was only blowing sand behind him that covered up the footsteps of where he had been. The man sighed and turned back to the cage. Quips didn’t matter. He still had his vengeance.
The woman sat up when the man approached, but she didn’t turn to him. She didn’t give him the courtesy. The man stopped a foot away from the cage and drew a knife from his belt. For a while, they stood there in silence. Wind whipped and whistled around them, but neither spoke. The man didn’t open his mouth until he was ready. The woman was in no hurry to speed things along.
“It’s been a long time coming, this,” the man said, his voice a whisper above the breeze. “You had to know this was how it was going to end. It started with you casting me away, stripping me of my name and my life and my choices, and now it is going to end with me doing the same to you. We’re on the other side of the mirror now, Andy. This is it. No big speeches, just a knife through your heart. I’ll drag your body out of the cage so the vultures can have a last meal.”
The woman’s shoulders bounced. It took a moment for the man to realize what was going on but soon he heard the laughing. She was laughing, cackling almost, but her voice sounded strange, like it was echoing in her own throat. The man reached into the cage and grabbed the woman by the shoulder, spinning her around, forcing her to face him. He gasped and took a step back when he saw her face. The woman looked like the source — she looked like Andy Barclay — but this wasn’t her. Black blood drooled out of the thing’s mouth and her eyes turned yellow with bolts of cracking red shooting through the iris.
“Shaitan…” the man whispered the name. The demon in the cage only laughed more. Shaitan, Taker of Souls, the man’s tormentor in hell, and the inspiration for all of this. Shaitan was the man’s muse for the end of the world, but there she was cackling in his face. “This isn’t right. This isn’t what— I… I paid him, he took my silver. She’s supposed to be here!”
“You thought you already won,” Shaitan’s voice echoed around the man, as if the sky itself was speaking. “You thought it would be easy. The end isn’t the end. She isn’t done fixing this yet. She isn’t done fighting!”
“It’s too late!” the man shot back. “I did it. I destroyed the world, her family, everything. She can’t undo what I’ve—”
“If you honestly believed that to be true your heart wouldn't be racing right now.” Shaitan spit black blood into the sand. “You know what she’s capable of. You are her ilk, her shadow. If there’s a half-chance in Hell that Andy Barclay can save the day, you know that she is going to take it.”
“Hell?” the man’s brow furrowed and he collapsed onto his knees in the sand.
Shaitan laughed and laughed and laughed, her cackling echoing through the desert like a song on the wind.
***
SOMEWHERE IN HELL
The tunnel narrowed like a closing throat. Andy Stoddard-Barclay marched down the cold stone, blood dripping off her skin and clothes and hair, leaving a trail of footprints behind her. The chainsaw in her hand was still purring, rumbling, but the blade was no longer alive with righteous anger. Chunks of flesh stuck in the teeth along the blade. It had done its job, now it was Andy’s turn to do hers. It felt like the tunnel went on and on — that it would never end — but that was a trick of Hell. Nothing went on forever. Andy walked, and walked, until her feet bled and her blood mixed with the blood of her fallen adversaries that coated her, but she never stopped, not until she reached the chamber she was heading for, not until she saw him sitting there on his throne of bones, metal claws clicking up against a polished white skull on his arm rest.
“You’re working pretty f***ing hard to die, bitch,” the being on the throne said, his yellow eyes hidden by the shadows under the brim of his hat. A part of Andy thought she would get some joy out of spinning up her chainsaw again and burying the blade through his ratty red and green sweater until his chest turned into ribbons, but she salted that urge and watched it shrivel up like a snail. She needed this monster for something.
“We’re in hell, a**hole,” Andy said back to the guy. “Dying is sort of the least of my concerns right now. You know who I am?”
The f***face on the throne nodded.
“I need your help making things right. Earth’s dead, we need to undo that.” Andy was straight forward, she didn’t mess around. “There’s no dreams for you to haunt or teenagers for you to kill if the planet’s empty and there’s no one up there to have nightmares. So I need your help to undo it.” Digging into her pocket, Andy pulled out a severed finger, Baron Samedi’s severed finger. She tossed it to the f***face and he caught it with the hand he wasn’t wearing a clawed glove on. “That’ll give you a boost to reach through time. I couldn’t stop this before because I didn’t have the right sort of help. I need you to reach through time and connect my dreams to someone else’s, a vampire named Minzhe. We can only stop this together, and you’re the only one left to make this work. You’re our last redo button.”
The skulls on the throne began to laugh and the f***face sitting on them laughed, too. Freddy Krueger leaned forward into the light and looked at the finger of the god that Andy Barclay tossed his way. His burnt, shriveled face twisted into a smile.
“Let’s get this f***ing show on the road then…”
