Picking through the Rubble Break 2

The once great city was dead. The only sound was the blimps overhead with their tiger-chuffing as they pumped out non-stop oxygen. He hauled himself over a piece of rubble blocking his path. Maybe it was once part of a great building, a skyscraper, that reached past the. . .

Percival looked up, almost expecting to hear the scream of an atomic bomb burning its fiery way across the sky. Not in your time, they said. Not in your time, no, not ever in your time. In what could have been your parents time, yes, but not ever in your time.

There’s not enough of us, Percival thought. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, but now there’s not enough of us. No one would do that. No one would wipe us out. But it was only a thought. A thought with nothing behind it. He was only thinking to think, but not to deduce. Like eating, but not because of hunger. His mind needed to think, and so, Poof; an idea, but it would soon wilt away like a flower that never spread its seeds. How many thoughts had he thought in his life? Thoughts that actually took root and grew.

Percival slowed to a near stop as he walked. There was something. A black-cat-intuition. The knowledge that something was coming his way.

A breath of wind laced with electricity!

Threshers!

He couldn’t yet see them, but he knew they were there. It was like the inaudible sound of a TV-humming that you felt more than heard. Percival turned, and there they were.

They zoomed overhead with a silent screaming. Their junk-metal constructed hoverpads with the red electro-magnetic eye at the bottom blasted him with a puff of hot. burnt-metal air. They flew in the symbolic pyramid, the sun glinted off the gilded silver on their pristine white robes. White for enlightenment. Their red-gloved hands held their scythes. They threshed the population of all the riff-raff.

Percival wanted to run, but his feet seemed to be made of the concrete he stood on. He was rooted to the spot, his fingers weaving in and out of each other like thread on a loom. The red eyes seemed to be winking at him. They knew his thoughts. Percival was filled with a deep set terror that caused the bile to rise up and burn his constricting throat.

We know you, they seemed to say, we know you inside and out. He sunk slowly to his knees, head bowed, awaiting the blow of a scythe. Waiting for it to split his skull and let the harvesters out. Waiting for the ice-cold wrenching as it severed his troubled soul in two. Waiting. Waiting. Constantly waiting in the solitude of screaming guilt and burnt-metal air.

And then they were gone.

There was a man at the front desk of the virtual palace. The scanning machine lay against the wall like a dormant beast in slumber, tired of eating cards and digesting numbers. The room was silent without its rhythmic beeping. It lay there, a blank screen in which he could read his own troubled face. He turned to the man at the desk, taking in the scraggly beard and dusty ragged overalls.

“What happened to the machine?” The man glanced up, his hands still mindlessly clacked on the beetle-black keyboard.

“It broke sometime last night. There was a long line just waiting to get outta here. Didn’t ya hear?” Percival shook his head, bewildered by the man’s rapid speech. It was probably due to the cigarette clamped between his thin, dry lips. “Oh! Well, it was on the radio.” The man paused to take a puff. Percival grimaced and blinked as the smoke enveloped his face.

Raising his finger he pointed to the man's cigarette. “Could you-,” he glanced at the man's name tag. Arnold, it read. “Hey, Arnold, could you-”

“Sorry. Hope the smoke don’t bother you. It never bothers me none. I use it all the time at work. I work on the rubble crews.” Percival glanced at the man’s worn-tired overalls and the haggard emptiness and his face. He wondered if his skin was made of the dust of the city. He’s made of air pollution and choking lungs.

“Is it better here?”

“Huh?” Arnold looked up at Percival as if noticing him for the first time.

“I asked is it better working here than on the rubble crews?”

“No, either way it sucks, but I only have three more months. President Noble told me himself, he said I was doing a patriotic duty.” The man looked proud as he spoke these words, but then his face blanked out like the machine on the wall.

V.C.N please.” The man said detachedly.

“Huh?”

Arnold looked up and took a puff of smoke, ignoring it curling around his face and his eyes. He didn’t blink. Glass eyes, Percival found himself thinking.

“Virtual chair number please.”

“Oh.” Percival fumbled with his card, wincing as it cut his arm. “2702.” The man clicked in the numbers and then glanced at Percival.

“ You're three minutes late. Why is that?”

“I saw some threshers.”

“And. . .”

“And I stopped to watch them.”

The man snorted. “Why? You got a guilty conscience about something?”

Percival glanced around wildly. “No!” He grabbed the ticket out of the man's waiting hand and walked away with his weezy laughter still echoing in his ears.

The virtual world was full of color, with bright yellows and vibrant greens, blues, and reds all woven together into one beautiful tapestry of pixelated code. It was alive! It beckoned him. It hummed with possibilities and left him breathless with wonder. He thought maybe if he swiped with his finger the colors would peel away like dry plaster on the walls. He wondered. . .

But right now there was color, and the numbing greyness of his world was just an ugly smear on his subconscious. A fog that would soon melt away with the sun. With bright yellow rays and. . .

Color, how he needed it. When he put on his headset and the full-length, sensitive, bodysuit, his world had melted into a dizzying panorama of cyclone rainbow. And he was falling. . . falling. . . falling. He could never get over that sensation. Of the falling into a world so unlike his own. He wanted to breathe in the air and let it settle on his lungs like dust on a mahogany table. He wanted it to permeate him. He never wanted to leave. He never, ever, ever wanted to leave.

“I want to see a river,” Percival called out into the dancing, whirling dimensions of colors. He reached out his hands to grasp the air for he was falling again, this time backwards. This time into a cavernous mouth of ever-shrinking darkness. And this time he wanted to stop the falling. He wanted his world to stop turning itself inside out and outside in. He wanted his world to stop swallowing and regurgitating itself.

And then he could hear it. The river babbled like goblins chuckling, like diamonds shifting, lightly kissing each other, in a box. The world around slowly melted into focus, and the colors slowly took shape. A tree here, a stone there, a roaring whiteness as the coursing waters worked themselves into a froth of whitewater fury. A darting fish! Golden scales flashing under tranquil blue and catching dappled shafts of sunlight. Brown blobs became cool mud underfoot, and he could feel himself sinking. He sat on a rock, closed his eyes, and tilted back his head, tentatively tasting the air, letting it dissolve on his tongue like a pill. The soothing rush of the river slowly rocked him to and fro, picking him up, setting him down. Picking him up, and setting him down like a trickling lullaby, and he let himself rock. . . and rock. . . and rock; until the only thing left was the taste of the verdant air and the delicious sense of sinking, rocking, and falling became the teetering world around.

Saturated with expectancy, the cool night air whistled through the rubble like a siren’s song, both eerie and strangely fascinating. It was as if nature hated the silence and decided to pervade it with a howling and biting wind that raised goosebumps and a deep-set feeling of vulnerability.

Percival hated the wind. He hated how it howled and whispered. The wind sounded with a hurry, hurry, hurry, and the cool night air whispered rush, rush, rush. Hurry, rush, slow down, slow, slow, hurry, rush, but he didn’t want to. He just wanted to stop and stand and stare into the fathomless darkness of the night sky. The dust from the debris and the smog lay like a blanket over the stars, hiding the soft, pale light from view. Even the moon was only a pixie-dust silvery sliver. He looked back at the harsh winking lights of the virtual reality center. A glaring red light that pierced the stubborn darkness like a spear.

Hurry, hurry. Rush, rush. Hurry, rush, hurry, rush!

Hurry, rush, but what for? All the worlds in a hurry. All the world's rushing in an electric steam. At least, all the world as he knew it. Pixels and code flashing at the speed of light. Nanoseconds. No time to think, blink, breathe before you're whisked away. Hurry, hurry. Rush rush, but where? Where were they going and why should he go.

Go!

And then it him: something was waiting for him back at the housing complex. He didn’t know how he knew, or what was waiting for him, but. . .

It was in the whispering. It was in the urgency of the wind. It was in the winking of the lights and the barely visible moon. There it was! All he had to do was listen to Bureaus blow his chilling premonitions.

Percival turned his back on the winking lights, and putting one dread-leaden foot in front of the other he arrived back at his room and fell into a dancing, pell-mell dream riddled with the confusion of his conflicting thoughts.