The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League (2 page)

The boys raised their drinks or nodded, and others just screamed the chorus to each other.

Athan didn’t feel quite right. He couldn’t tell if he was troubled by the dark, charcoal scrawls he had locked away in his room, or if he was genuinely sick.

“
Tim!
I don’t feel great, man…” Athan called into his friend’s ear.

Tim yelled back. “You can’t bail man, the band’s just started, plus it’s my
birthday!
”

“No…I’m ok, just saying…” His head was becoming a throbbing mess.

Deep breath. Maintain…

He stumbled towards the blue glow of the bar.

Water, water will fix it.

The barman gave him a glass of water just as he asked, only it was mostly ice.
Great.

Just when he felt that he needed to scull something to feel better.

He sipped and sipped trying to feel better, but it felt like he was getting more drunk.

A wave of dizziness passed over him and a feeling like water running down his spine.

The glass fell from his hand and smashed on the tiles next to the bar where he stood, and his body began to shake and shiver.

What’s happening?

Was this the beginning of another mental seizure? Was he about to draw all over everyone?

He fell to his knees, sweat soaking his shirt and running down his forehead into his eyes, burning them. Athan’s vision blurred.

He could see his hands shaking against the tiles. He was taking quick breaths, trying to focus and steady himself.

One of his friends yelled to him.

“…You’re bleeding.”

“He’s trashed!”

“Get some help!”

“Are you ok?”

“Are you ok?”

“Are you ok?” The voices echoed over and over.

The world began to vibrate like a film going out of focus or a television station losing reception.

The faces of his friends were confusing smears of familiar colour. He shifted his weight and tried to stand. He didn’t want to be dragged out like another worthless drunk.

Someone on his left lifted him and he used the marble bar to steady himself.

“You have to get him out of here now!
He can’t be here!
” The barman yelled behind his back.

Athan tried to look at the man to see why he was being so aggressive, and then he saw the dark smears and hand prints he had left on the clean bar. Maybe it was from the dirty floor, but it was dark, it couldn’t have been charcoal, not again. He stared at his hands trying to get them to focus and stop shaking.

Blood.

His hands were covered in blood, and it was running down his forearms.

What?

“The glass mate.” Rob’s voice. “You fell on your glass. You’ll be ok.”

Rob and Tim were holding his shoulders, trying to keep him steady.

Athan blinked trying to see clearly, and everything moved like waves on the ocean. Waves with smudged faces.

“What’s wrong with him?” Tim was calling to Rob.

Rob shrugged. “Maybe his drink was spiked.”

Athan swayed, leaning on Rob’s shoulder, trying to shuffle to the door, but he had to cross the dance floor to get there.

“My God! That guy’s bleeding!”

He could hear the girl’s squeal rattle through his head, bouncing of every facet of the inside like it was a tin can.

“Rob, I need…” Athan swallowed.

Athan felt his body convulse.

Once, then again.

He blinked and it seemed to last forever.

The world vanished.

Suddenly there was a pinkish blur on the dance floor under the flashing lights, then another. It was like the blur kept rushing at different people then vanishing. Tim, Rob and the other boys were dumbfounded.

The blur kept jumping from one person to the next on the dance floor, and soon the dancers started to see it.

Then came the screams, a few at first but more and more started.

The band stopped playing their set and squinted to see why everyone was panicking.

The screams were building, more and more of them, and people were falling over each other to get to the stairs to get out.

The whole time the blur kept flitting about, disappearing as it hit people, then reappearing from someone else metres away.

Athan’s friends joined the mob racing for the door.

They didn’t know where he had gone.

Only Rob remained on the dance floor looking, he couldn’t abandon his friend.

“Athan! Athan!”
he yelled.

“Athan! Where are you! Athan!”

Athan was running as fast as he could through what looked like a charcoal smeared nightmare.

There were flashes of colour, but everything was indistinct.

Where is everyone?

He was too exhausted to yell, but he figured if he moved quickly enough, he might be able to get out.

It reminded him of trying to take off a wet shirt. It was suffocating and claustrophobic, but if he was quick he could be finally free of it.

The smudgy blurs would multiply and every now and then there would be a flash of colour or lights. The blurring began to take the form of a landscape. A desolate place that could have been the bottom of the ocean. It had a white glow and an odd smell, and what looked like leather, everywhere. Suddenly he was in the dark again, running though dense veils of charcoal smudge.

He stopped to catch his breath.

He didn’t know how far he had come, or where his clothes had gone.

All around him was like a liquid black that felt warm and familiar, like it was a
someone
rather than a someplace.

“Hello!”
He called out into the dark.

“Athan! Athan!” came a voice that echoed through the black.

He stopped at the sound and closed his eyes to work out the direction of the sound.

Where is it coming from?

It was coming closer, barreling towards him, and suddenly he could hear the screams, whimpers and the scuffles of feet.

He was standing on the smelly beer-soaked carpet of the dance floor again, completely naked and staring across at Tim and Rob, who looked pale and terrified. Tim was shaking his head slowly with disbelief.

“Where am I?” Athan began as he stepped toward them.

“What the hell happened?
Who are you!
” Tim shuffled back a few steps.

Athan was scared and confused. “I don’t know…”

“Stay away…” Rob covered his mouth with his hand and recoiled from his friend.

Athan’s clothes had been trampled and kicked around the stinking carpet. He began to grab what items he could and pulled them on while people on the dance floor area shook with panic or just dumbly stared at the naked man shuffling about under the flashing lights.

Some were whimpering and pushing their way through to the stairs.

The atmosphere was thick with fear and disgust.

People were terrified when Athan came close. Some screamed.

He was afraid as well.

Athan pulled on his pants and wiped the tears and sweat from his cheeks.

“I think I need to get home…” he muttered.

“
You
!” A security guard’s voice boomed from the stairs.

Athan figured it was only a matter of time.

“
You
, need to get the hell out!” The guard pointed at Athan, who was now semi-naked pulling on his clothes.

“Get away from me!”
Athan yelled back.

He was already too shaken and scared to be afraid of the big Samoan guy in a tight black T-shirt.

The man’s face remained the blank mask it always was when he had to throw out another loser drunk from the club. The guard pushed through the throng of panicked people like a rhino, smashing everything out of its way. He marched up to Athan, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back towards the steps.

Athan panicked, waving his arms and legs about trying to get free of the man’s bear hug.

He needed to get away.

He needed to get home.

Then Athan slipped into nothingness again and his empty clothes fell to the floor. The bouncer was left blinking at everyone around him, his mouth hanging open.

Athan stood in the black, naked again.

This time it felt more calm and nurturing.

He felt safe.

How did I do that?

He knew it must have been him. Athan had wanted to
not
be in of the arms of the big Samoan so badly that he had ceased to be in his arms, he was somewhere else.

“I must be calm.”

He told himself to relax, to breathe and observe.

Don’t run
.

Running was a bad move. It felt like he had been running for hours, but then he found himself back in the club as if only a moment had passed.

Time passed differently while in the dark.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He focused on what he could feel, smell, see and hear.

He stood motionless, listening. Only silence.

Where the hell am I?

Athan looked at his still sweaty body and his bloody hands. The blood was dry. It was dry and crusted around the cuts of his palms, as if they had stopped bleeding hours before.

It’s healing already? But I just did this…

Then the smell came suddenly.

Athan breathed deeply.

It was familiar, yet not. He couldn’t decide if it was even a smell.

The bouncer, Athan could feel him, as if he was still in his big arms, but it was more like a smell. To his left there came another feeling or scent, like freedom, a way out.

He stepped to it, then through it. He passed through the black as if it was a veil of water or like stepping outside into the rain and the light came back and he was free.

“I’m out.” He blinked in the dull light.

He took a breath.

Around him stood monolithic towers like emaciated body parts and the ground was like the wrinkled skin of an old man’s hands; it was soft and fragile, pale and flecked with darker spots like freckles.

“Am I dead? Please tell me! Anyone?
Hello?
” his voice trailed off and echoed between the poles of bone.

My drawings.

This is what I draw
, he thought,
all of this, I created this. This is in my head
.

Athan bent down to stroke the soft skin on the ground. It was warm and soft under his fingertips.

It felt real.

Everything in dreams is real until you wake up, he decided, as he looked around to find a way out.

Through the fog he could see a tangle or mesh of some kind.

“That way for home,” he whispered.

Why that way?

He could smell it. But how could he even smell? This place was not even real, and dreams don’t have a smell, maybe it was a feeling, or instinct again.

That way.

Keeping track of time was not easy, his feet were sore and he was feeling a bit breathless. The walk was taking a while, half an hour he thought roughly.

The skin on the ground had developed broad ridges and vertebrae-like groves that looked kilometres long.

It felt pleasant to walk on the skin, but it had become less frail and soft and more firm and leathery.

The way out was close, he could feel it.

Home.

After wandering around the base of what looked like a giant elbow, he found a spot that felt…different.

A door maybe, like the one he walked through in the dark that felt like the security guard.

Athan touched the place gingerly with his fingers and they disappeared into the purplish skin, as if it was water.

He stood marveling at how something that looked solid rippled around is fingers. When he withdrew his hand it was dry.

He sat on the ground beside it, too afraid to step through.

He was so unwilling to linger in the dark that he had stepped through into this place, now that there was a doorway he could see, even in the dimming white light, he felt like he could somehow drown or be trapped inside it.

He was scared, naked and alone.

Athan woke suddenly, startled by movement.

He had been leaning against an edifice that was moving in the breezeless air.

Not a tree at all, but it had moved.

He shuffled backward and looked up at the black coral-like web above him. It disappeared into the fog far above.

He was still next to the strange door at the base of the organic structure.

He took a deep breath and clenched his fists.

It was time he woke up to find out what had happened to his body.

He took another deep breath as he braced himself.

Diving in eyes closed would be the best way to get it over with.

Time to wake up.

Athan jumped through.

Lockie lay motionless on his bed, completely dead to the world, passed out after too many drinks and Athan stood naked and breathless in his housemate’s room.
I’m home.

Athan was wide eyed, blinking, adjusting to the change.

He had watched himself stepping out of Lockie’s body like a ghost in a horror movie.

He’d stepped right out of Lockie’s sleeping body. Lockie may as well have been a hologram.

What happened to me?

He held out his hands in the dark and examined his wounds.

His cuts had healed, even the blood that was smeared all over his arms was little more than a few brown flakes.

He decided to get to the safety of his own room.

He was quiet as a mouse. The last thing he wanted to do was try and explain himself to Lockie if he woke up.

He slipped out and tread carefully on the old floorboards.

His room was locked, but there was a trick to getting the door open when you didn’t have keys. His keys, of course were gone, along with his wallet and his mobile phone. They were in the pockets of his pants, which he no longer had.

He took the handle and lifted it till the catch was released.

He was lucky they were old locks.

Athan pushed the door open and turned on the light, and there it was, the charcoal scrawling on the walls and the piles of scratchy drawings.

Black smears everywhere, a mess.

Everywhere he looked he saw drawings of the other place.