Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (2 page)

“I’ll do what I can.  And, hey.  One last thing.”

“Only?”

“You can’t change Gothica.  And you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”

Her words stung.  “She’s my sister… What choice do I have?  If I’m still alive in a few hours,” and I was feeling dangerously indifferent about that matter, “maybe we can talk again.”

{A thousand years later…}

“
S
ee him?” Sabetha asks, peering across the parking lot towards the movie theater.

I’m looking at my wrist watch, lost in my own tiny, shadowy reflection staring back.  “Not yet, but his show just let out,” I say.  A single, tiny drop of water lands on the glass face. It won’t rain for another eleven and half minutes.  I know this for certain but I instinctively look up at the sky.  It’s cloudy, like it always is. 

“What odds do you give him?”

“His death or his darkening?”

She shrugs. “Both.  Either.”

“One or the other will happen tonight,” I assure her.

But Sabetha persists, not satisfied.  “Well then what do you think will get him if he dies?” 

I try to make my answer sound absentminded as I look into the crowds pouring out of the theatre. “I don’t know.”

“Well focus, Delano.  What are we in for tonight?”

I know what she’s driving at.  Chyldrin unanimously agree that there is nothing more thrilling, no high higher, than drinking the blood of a newly darkened ilk.  Sabetha is hoping to live vicariously through tonight’s would-be predator, and wants to know if she shouldn’t get her hopes up. 

“Delano?”

She still hasn’t taken the hint so I catch her eyes and speak very purposefully.  “I think a
vampire
will get him.”

She flinches at the word, but finally takes the hint: I’m not in the mood for the game.  She pouts and looks back to the movie theatre.  

Tonight will be routine.  Isaac will die and the world will go on as if he never existed.  Hell, if I died tonight, the world would go on as if I never existed and I’m supposedly important.  Self-important anyway.  The only
real
difference between Isaac and me, as far as the world is concerned, is about our choices.

As an ilk – a human – fifty-one years, four months, seventeen days, and nine hours old, he can’t distinguish between what he
can
do and what he
should
do – not the way I can.  He doesn’t understand, as I do, that sometimes the strongest exercise in free will, is relinquishing it.

Then again there is the chance, the very slim chance that Isaac won’t die.  He might survive tonight.  He might emerge from this ordeal to become a voice of reason, a paragon of justice, a selfless hero who breaks the city free of its curse of stagnation and ignorance.  Anything’s possible…

“
T
here he is!”  Sabetha hisses, her voice squeaking with excitement.

“I see him.”  My eyes look across the parking lot towards the glowing lights of the movie theatre.  I peer deeply at Isaac.  Despite the distance between us, I see everything about him – every fiber of his clothes, every pore on his body.  His hair is upright and his eyes dilated as adrenaline surges through his blood stream.  His darkening has begun.

Sabetha puts on a pair of sunglasses, purely for the look, and coolly slips into the driver’s seat of our car.  I let my eyes linger on Isaac as I enter on the passenger’s side.  He is frantically fleeing the crowd of the forty-three people dispersing from the nine-twelve showing of
Among Us
, a controversial documentary, sensationalized by the rumors of its producers mysteriously disappearing.  But this was only the spark in the powder keg, the straw on the camel’s back, pick your cliché; Isaac has been hurdling towards this event for some time; one might even say his entire life. 

Not long ago, Isaac was an average ilk.  He paid his taxes to our conglomerate corporate government, Cynthecorp, had a daily routine which never varied, a wife and two kids, and he worked hard in the corporate sector with the false hope that one day he could retire
comfortably.  It was a good fit.  But lately, Isaac has noticed gaps in the narrative.  He’s come to see that there are a whole lot of effects in his world that don’t seem to have any causes.

Drifting away from the crowd, we see Isaac rub his arms and chest, trying to shake off the spiders he feels crawling all over him.  The corners of his mouth are drawn down and twitching and his dread-filled eyes dart about madly as he makes his way to a dilapidated ’87
Marquis
hatchback.  A few seconds later, we’re pursuing him on 612
th
Street.

He runs his second red light when Sabetha turns on the radio, a slow, rhythmic gothic-industrial beat hissing with grainy reception.  I turn it off and she throws me an annoyed look.  I ignore it and close my eyes, putting my hand delicately on her shoulder.  I reach out with my mind and feel up ahead of us.  By applying pressure to her shoulder, I let Sabetha know how to alter our speed.  We have it down to a science, bordering on an empathic exchange of senses wherein we can fly through busy intersections missing cross traffic by no less than a foot. 

Sure,
I
could drive instead, but that argument was lost centuries ago.

Ahead of us, Isaac cuts into the left lane and an oncoming ambulance swerves out of the way, the siren whining as it passes.  As a momentary uninterrupted stretch opens up, I open my eyes and look to the sidewalks and alley ways, trying to see the city as Isaac sees it – for the first time.  His mind is trying to decipher the new details of his old world.

“He’s handling this part well,” I say, practically asking for Sabetha’s agreement.

“Fifty he goes down in an hour,” she muses, turning on the wiper blades as a drizzle speckles the windshield.

“I think Isaac is different…”  Which is to say, I
hope
Isaac is different.

“Does that mean you take the bet?”  We jump the curb and scream down a sidewalk.

“I don’t care about the money,” I reply.

“Of course you don’t, all of it’s yours.”

Normally I would give her the satisfaction of a chuckle or smile, but I am preoccupied – perhaps too preoccupied – with Isaac’s fate. 

Sabetha knows the answer to her own question, but out of sheer habit she asks anyway.  “Delano?  You okay?”

I nod almost imperceptibly.  I am, for some strange reason, reminded of my own darkening and the events following it… about Alice… and about leaving the realm of mortality to join the Hyperion and become an immortal sentiner.  Isaac has no such prospects, if you could call Hyperion membership that, yet I still can’t help myself from empathizing with him.  I thought that part of me was dead.  “Poor guy.”  The words just sort of slip out.

“What?” Sabetha turns to face me, now positive that she has missed something.

I point ahead of us, reminding her of our target.  The red hatchback has come to a stop in the street and one of the doors is open.  Sabetha brings us to a sudden halt and then exits the vehicle, following behind me with a flutter in her black trench coat.

The heavens open up as we stalk Isaac from the roofs, four stories above. Within moments we are splashing through the shin-deep puddles in a pelting crackle of rain.  I watch apprehensively as Isaac stumbles into an alleyway and darkness.  Clutching his chest and folding into himself, he staggers through the narrow brick canyon.  He bumps into brown, rag-tattered figures that huddle around trashcan fires, under the porous shelter of fire escapes.  Isaac is trudging deeper into the rain slick alleyway and further from the light.

His senses are hyper-stimulated as the smell of the new air, the ache in his head, and the sight of the decayed ilk overwhelm him.  Isaac doesn’t know where he is or why.  The only motivation he has left is a craving for truth that consumes all of his conscious thoughts.  He has to know how.  He has to see why. 

Unable to stop him, I can only shake my head and sigh as Isaac walks towards the predator.  A gazer sits in the shadows, listening and watching.  Isaac passes near the alcove where the beast waits, its form deceivingly human.  But this time he doesn’t pass by, as he has unknowingly done ninety-seven recorded times before.  Instead, he stops and looks. 

When he sees the man’s bestial eyes, horror takes him and Isaac backs into the wall behind him.  The gruff, bearded figure emits a guttural, animalistic growl as it rises to its full height.  Isaac is frozen, looking through the shadow for the first time. 
Pick a side and run, stupid!
  But he only back pedals fruitlessly into the brick wall.

For a moment I have hope as I see Isaac’s demeanor change.  The fear melts away and in the back of his mind, as if standing within his own head and looking out of his own window-like eyes, Isaac is amazed that he can finally see through the shadows – something
he once would have considered just a sheet of impenetrable blackness.  Everything seems to make sense, and for a fleeting moment he understands what has happened to him.  What he has come to see in the past few days – in the past few
minutes
– is in fact the truth, unadulterated by his evaporating ignorance. 

But disorientation comes flooding back as the man before Isaac transforms into a
millitus
, the hulking, ravenous wolf form of the gazers, and leaps upon his body, rending limb from torso, and gorging itself on Isaac’s flesh.

Amidst the terrible screams and thrashing chaos, I catch a glimpse of the street beyond.  Isaac had almost stumbled back into the light.  A few undarkened ilk stroll under the streetlamp just at the end of the alley, but as usual, the undarkened don’t react to the screams.  But it’s not because they don’t care.  Far from it.

They don’t react to the screams because they, the undarkened, are incapable of hearing such things.

“
W
ell, you’re one for three,” Sabetha says on the ride home.  “He was killed tonight, but not by a chyld, and he went down at a paltry
fourteen minutes and nine seconds.  Give or take.”

“We’ll settle up later,” I say coldly.

A stale minute passes in which Sabetha’s enthusiasm for the game dies.  Sabetha tends to play two roles: one is a human pretending to be a vampire, and the other is a vampire pretending to be a human.  “You’re making me feel more apathetic than usual.”  Her tone starts casual but quickly changes.  “What’s with your sudden respect for ilk life?” she asks, bitingly.

“No one survives anymore…”  To be truthful, there
are
those that do survive the darkening to become sentiners like me, chyldrin like Sabetha, gazers like Isaac’s killer back in the alleyway, or a host of less definable monsters, but those types of darkened are initiated in a much different way.  They are turned – forced – into what they will become instead of being left to evolve on their own.  I am always looking for one of the fifteen percent of survivors who have a
pure
darkening… one lacking bite marks.  They are down from nineteen percent ten years ago and I have been continuously disappointed by promising candidates. 

We drive for a while, my eyes tracing the city streets.  I continue to think about Isaac, pondering his death’s particular significance for me.

I suddenly sit forward.

“What is it?” Sabetha asks.

I pause, trying to feel it out.  “Nothing.  Let’s just get home.”

“But it’s only ten... We could go shopping.”

I look down at my custom commissioned apparel;
Exo-tiq
leather jacket,
Phobe
oxfords,
D.
L. VI
wrist watch, and deep blue, multi-hued
Colonnade
button down shirt.  “No, let’s save that one for a night when things get messy.”

“Really?  We could get you a new pair of
Phobes
.  You scuffed them tonight, didn’t you?”  She looks down at my shoes for a half second.  Still slick from the rain, I can see my reflection in their tops. 

She nods affirmatively, “Yes, they’re all scuffed up.  Mine too.”  Sabetha digs her left heel into her right toe to mark the leather, depressing the gas pedal in the process and causing us to lurch back in our seats as Rolla, our car, growls.  

“Maybe tomorrow,” I say.

She swerves to a stop in the middle of the street, right in front of a high end shopping outlet.  It’s closed, but with a phone call that wouldn’t matter.

I catch her hopeful eyes with a look and she pouts, pushing herself into the seat with a whine.  “Fine,” she says, stomping the gas and sending us into a squealing burnout.  A few minutes later she pulls into the back lot behind our apartment and parks Rolla under a solitary light. 

Younger darkened sometimes think it’s strange that we leave our cherished vehicle out in the elements and potential danger.  Superheroes are supposed to have sanctuaries and caves to guard their precious possessions and, of even more value, their identities’.  But I’m not a superhero, the similar lifestyles notwithstanding.  I’m an immortal.  And as an immortal, I belong to a culture of notorious risk-takers.  Often purposefully, though mostly subconsciously, I will put myself or my things in harm’s way in the twisted hope that we won’t survive this time.  Not that we don’t love our car; we – that is Sabetha –
named
it, for kharma’s sake.  But when all of life’s surprises stop surprising you, the chance to have your heart skip a beat becomes quite desirable.  And if we, as immortals, have to give ourselves a handicap to make the game fun again, we will, and we do.