The Altonevers (34 page)

“
I know I totally seen it,
it was like waaaa bewwww bang!” he says.

“
Bewwwww,” she says in
glee, trying to mime the sound of the rocket streaking through the
air “Bewwwww baaaang boooom,” she continues.
Yakutom pulls his face from the windshield just as volley of
flak cannons tear through the side of their vehicle, slaying the
driver though hitting no one else with anything but shrapnel. The
glutton grabs the wheel to steady their erratic path.

“
Someone needs to drive,”
Yaku says.

“
You're in the front seat,
why can’t you drive,” Cider asks.

“
My head is a bit rattled,”
he says rubbing his bloodied head, “and I’m a boss not a
driver.”

“
I know what you mean but,
it’s kinda....” he says rubbing his chin.

“
Backwards,” she completes
his thought.

“
I don't care. I need to
get back to the suite. Ahh, the sweet sights my eyes will behold
from my suite. From my throne,” he says with an appetite longing
for the destruction of his own design.

“
Whatever man, then we’re
free to go right? no demon stuff chasing us or purple aura,
whatever that shit is,” he says.

“
My energy,” Yaku says
gracefully.

“
Yeah all that stuff, yup
let's go,” she says, pushing Cider, who takes a few adrenaline
soaked seconds to unbuckle the dead driver’s seat belt, and throw
the corpse from the sky high car to take his seat.

“
Yup,” he says reaching for
the shifter.

“
Seat belt,” she says,
minding the importance of safety.

“
Yes dear,” Cider says with
a sigh as he accelerates. Hardly able to see through the shattered
windshield, they horribly soar around the air. Barely evading their
attackers and nearly crashing tens of times, each time Cider
yelling, “It's the learning curve,” or something to that
affect.

“
Nothing to worry about,”
he says nearly sailing into a billboard attempting to assail the
airborne pursuers persisting at their seven o’ clock.

“
Our lives,” she shouts
back, rolling around in the backseat, at times almost eating the
seat’s stuffing. Yaku’s rolling pearl beads in his hand while
huffing face fulls of his powder. Humming and giggling, then
grinning and lightly singing something which Anna catches a part of
his muttering, “around the ro......ashes, ashes,” as rockets
resound all around them with Anna and Yaku sloppily returning fire.
The explosions everywhere they whizz past are melting and cooling
into roses and creating Rayleigh waves collecting and quaking
across every surface of the bioluminescent glass metropolis. Yaku
loves every second, delighted as a bird in a bath, humming his tune
ever louder to the rising carnage and the rectangular structures
fragmenting into smaller chunks as the war rages on. Easier for the
glutton to chew and greedily consume the energy of.

“
Thank you,” Yaku says
reaching out to shake Cider’s hand, who does so readily while not
slowing down. Making Anna think he must be doing it purposefully to
scare her, he can’t be that reckless she thinks, and rethinks. She
shakily shakes Yaku's cold hand in a forced formal way, still not
sure if he'll suck out her life force or worse.

“
Thank you for helping make
my destiny a reality,” he says in an elated tone, “and you, good
luck to you both,” Yaku says with one last huff of his powder, then
without word or warning leaps from the passenger’s side of the car
speeding six hundred feet from the ground glowing with tons of
shattered glass.

“
We're leaving immediately
right?...Right? where’s the station?” she asks as a
demand.

“
What? oh yeah, yeah,
definitely. Screw the station this place is going away, and fast,”
he says as they zoom as far from the glutton as they can, as fast
as they can. The lines spreading across the shattering glass
thicken, forming into large faces and figures reaching out to cover
every surface of the city. That seems to follow the two, haunting
them as they pass through the crumbling cascade of continually
fracturing fulgent chunks of glass. Diminishing as they fall,
becoming niveous clouds rolling down to the ground, until each
fragment becomes individually invisible to the naked eye. The last
of this Alto’s wind they’ll ever know sweeps across their skin and
ears as they vanish into a silent white void, absolutely devoid of
any and all stimulus.

The view from the gluttons suite is a
sight to behold, though Yakutom is too busy engorging himself in
the monumental amounts of energy pouring into him from every
direction at once. Absorbing lake size amounts of energy with each
passing second is paralyzing his body in blissful consumption of
the life force of countless lives converging by the second. He's
drinking directly from the rivers of life by absorbing their souls
in death, in doing so he's becoming both life and death of this
Alto. The energy tasting to the palette of his soul like the purest
water a desert thirsted person will ever taste. Enraptured in the
elation of even the slightest fraction of this places power, and
still not contented, knowing that eventually he'll eventually
devour it all. With a rattling gargle of his vocal chords he rolls
to his side trying to smother himself with his beloved satchel, but
dropping it. Spilling it to the ground, and struggling to reach it,
but paralyzed in his own amassing of energy, unable to move even an
inch toward his prized powder.

The ocean of energy becomes too
enormous to be contain, intensifying to greater concentration then
his mortal cage can contain. His flesh starts bulging and
rupturing, though his face still holds an expression of
unadulterated bliss as he’s trembling to being torn apart. He forms
into a deep purple ethereal sphere that erupts in the snap of a
finger with the effect of thermonuclear bomb flamelessly exploding,
instantly vaporizing anything within ten miles in any direction and
staining every surface with the nuclear shadows of a city full of
fleeing people. Then atomizing what remains of the metropolis with
secondary, light bending aftershocks of collapsing and expanding
undulations of massive force that are only visible as refraction,
and resemble massive spherical Rayleigh waves the size of tsunamis.
Virtually effacing and erasing every shattered shred of matter they
touch, until there is nothing left.

Light to bright

Driving for what must be by days by
now, through a niveous white that’s been blank but for a lightly
drawn line of the horizon. As they near the line, it begins to
bend, then wiggles and breaks into separate squiggles and contours,
creating soft shapes under a far off milk white sun.

“
Did you see that?” she
asks.

“
Yeah, there’s another
one,” he says, pointing to another line spreading toward them and
separating in the same way as the first, then another and another
that. With each new horizon line nearing and rising into shape and
contour of the scene around them, of jagged rock faces and wind
assembled sand dunes are rendered to greater detail. This cycle of
horizon lines gaining greater clarity continues for a hundred lines
more, until the scene they're driving through washes into shape
spreading and seeping slowly, darkening and granting depth to their
desert surroundings.
The two take pleasure
in shouting out the shapes they see out of the distance of each
nearing horizon, until they eventually emerge into richer strokes,
swipes and washes until converging and amassing to immerse the two
in a single recognizable place. They’re driving like bats out of
hell through a landscape of light pencil strokes, blowing charcoal
and blotting black ink stains. The seeping dark's and thickening
lines are defining and lifting the remaining blankness into
discernible shapes with shades of gray rendering curves and angles
between the darkest blacks and the lightest whites. Seeing the
sandy monochrome desert they’re speeding through, she instead
watches the rising shapes arising to fill her view, staring at the
edges of cloud or inkblot butterflies that become what they eye
sees in them.

She’s waiting in the car as
he goes in to use the rotary phone at a fill up station. The scene
is mostly monochrome with tinges of dour color, and wood weathered
over a century by dry heat and windblown sand. Cider's standing
with a finger plugged in one ear, rocking and swaying as he speaks
into the receiver. From the car she can't tell if he’s happy or
enraged, as he shakes his fists, then jumps up and down. In the
middle of a vaguely rendered desert on the verge of being
completely visible, everything has the look seeing it through a
cathode ray tube television, really old television set.
Ching! the bell of the screen door rings as it
opens, followed by the thwack of it closing behind him. Smoking and
strolling past the gas pumps with a wide eyed grin. The crunching
sand under his feet sounds scratchy, their voices are rasped to the
other, sound carries through a low fidelity speaker.
Him, he's something, a twister of his own
trouble, floating by without a care, she laughs at the thought, and
him saying he knows where he is going, and that it'll be brighter
for them both, something that she’s beginning to wonder.

“
Ahhh,” he sighs after the
driver’s side door slams shut.

“
What's the news?” she
asks.

“
It's going to be brighter,
for the both of us,” he says again, pecking her on the cheek.
Shifting the gear and speeding toward a scene rendering the rising
sun and all below it into realism with each mile they travel
westward. Over and over the horizon lines pass with more and more
frequency, spreading dark cold grizzly blacks with barely visible
tints of hue hardly distinguishable from the rough charcoal shadows
they're creeping out from. Color seeps slowly into the surfaces
sculpted by the face of a hot monochrome sun sitting far, far down
the bone dry two lane road. Shadows begin reaching each other,
binding and adding depth to the distance of the still dreary cool
colored desert.
A chill ripples through
the arid air, drying their eyes and noses. Cider licks his lips
repeatedly, as they’re dried out in seconds by hot winds whipping
through the open window, and crossing her eyes squinting to see
under the suns white light. The eyes of a wayfarer watching her
subconscious emerge out of the passing shapes of sand and rock
rising, growing from grayscale of charcoal and sloppily spread ink
blotches defining into an arid desert.

By the time they arrive at a
dilapidated dive, everything is of damp blue hues and deep ugly
shades of brown and black. Every room is permeated with the stink
of booze at Juno’s clam saloon, though not quite a saloon, it's
more like half a diner and half a bar with horrible servings of
either, one that people of the gold rush would likely be in. No one
is a cowboy, well one person , but he's talking loudly about being
on the set, which no one cares to hear, they all read him correctly
as an extra and not a star. The two take their place in the corner
with cups of tar black coffee. All the patrons have somber faces,
as neverwere's standing just outside the glowing lights of film
sets, of the spectrum, and knowing it.

“
You don’t have anything
thing else?” Anna asks the server.

“
It's all we serve. It's
what the gold miners drank since a long ago,” the well washed tonal
waitress says somberly. Who when realizing she’s referencing her
own life, bows out of view sadly with a muddied mood to match her
grizzly grays. Anna see’s the muddled colors of even the metal of
the bar stools are so dull they’re barely able to glint or reflect
any light at all. The two sit in the corner, watching the ticking
of a small wall clock for almost two hours. Taking turns sipping
the horridly thick black tar coffee, and watching the sun hardly
rise in hue from a putrid gray to a terribly dim disgusting
yellow.

“
Are you sure this is the
right place?” she asks.

“
Yeah...this is the right
place. It’s the only place around.”

“
Are you sure about your
friend coming?”

“
Yeah she'll show up, they
wouldn’t mess me over, not them,” he says without a doubt his
friend will arrive.

“
Are you sure you have
friends?” she asks, only half joking.

“
Yes, and the few I do are
good ones,” he says waving his spoon at her face as he
speaks.

“
Can't wait to see them,
they must look like monsters,” she says.

“
Hahaha. Beauty isn't skin
deep, but you know that,” he answers. A minute later the rickety
front door swings open to a Hellenistic queen of the silver screen
sweeps into easily being the brightest thing in the room. Instantly
captivating the eyes and drawing the breathes from all people, of
any room she walks into. Winking with her large blue always wide
open eyes at a smiling shhing Cider with slender fingers over
pursed perfectly plump race car red painted lips. Anna spews coffee
from her mouth at the beauty of the woman Cider calls his friend,
and leers at him suspiciously as he turns and repeats the Shh to
Anna.

The woman of unrelenting
salacity strolls through the room, her supple suntanned legs float
back and forth under a white sundress strapped over otherwise bare
shoulders. She’s beaming shades brighter than anything or anyone
else in the dim grizzly hued kerosene lit room. A blonde bombshell
exuding such an attractiveness she’s thought of as Aphrodite’s gift
to mortals, mesmerizing the primal passions of man and woman alike.
Dripping seduction with even the subtlest of movements, an allure
making even greatest of beauty queens become recluses just from
being in the same room as her for a moment. Her pheromones fill the
room she enters with an ambrosial aroma entices the noses of
mortals into believing that they have the strength of gods within
them. Her mere presence of sexuality embodified silences the room,
who're all salivating like starving wolves staring at fresh meat
their too weak to hunt.
She sits at a
table across from a gaunt looking man in a silk black suit. By
simply blinking her big blue’s she effectively possess the man with
lustful thought desire for her affections. She talks sensually with
a voice sounding like each word is whispered into a lover's ear in
the dark of a bedroom.