The Pale: Volume One - Jacob Long (10 ebook reader txt) 📗

felt natural and therapeutic, and Adam sobbed. “Téa, I think I might be going insane.”

The concern on Téa’s face grew deeper, and her eyes glistened. She said nothing, only listened.

“I think something bad happened to me when I got shot. I don’t know, but . . . I can’t think straight. I’ve been having these awful dreams, and . . . I don’t know if they’re dreams. I don’t even know if this is a dream. I can’t tell what’s real anymore! Do you know? Do you know anything about Christina? Is she with Danny? Did she leave me?”

A tear broke away and streamed down Téa’s reddening cheeks. She sniffled and looked down at the hands she’d started to wring together. Finally, reluctantly, she nodded.

“Oh god!” Adam cried. He lay back in his bed and raged at the ceiling. The tears soaking his face couldn’t soothe the pain. “Dammit! God dammit!”

“I’m sorry.” Téa had meant to say it louder than a whisper, but her throat was too choked up.

“And they’re calling me a traitor! They want to put me on trial and decide whether or not to put me down! I had a lawyer come by, and the bastard dropped off these stupid papers!” Adam smacked the stack of white papers off the bed. They burst like a firework in all directions, some of them swirling and twirling through the air on their way to the ground. Adam regretted it. He knew it was probably Téa who had picked them up in the first place. Téa didn’t really react. She just sniffled again and contemplated the hands in her lap.

“Goddamn Hashem was doing me a favor when he shot me.” Adam continued more quietly. “He freed me. I can’t take this. It’s some cruel joke that I ended up back here . . . and I just want to quit. I don’t want this anymore.”

To Adam’s surprise, Téa left her chair and reached for him. She took his head in her hands and pressed it to her chest in all the embrace she could manage with Adam bedridden. She cuddled her cheek against the top of Adam’s head and gently rocked him. It felt good. The fabric of Téa’s shirt wiped away the tears, and Adam felt cared for, for the first time in a long time.

“It just feels like everyone is out to get me. I’m in a lot of trouble, but I was just trying to do the right thing. There’s nothing you can do to help me.”

“I’m sorry, Adam. I’m so sorry. It’s all so awful.” Téa broke their embrace and the two friends gazed into each other’s eyes. “But there is something I can do for you.”

Adam gave her a questioning look as she sat down. Téa started fidgeting with her fingernails and avoiding Adam’s eyes. “You said that . . . you didn’t want this anymore—that you can’t take it. Well”—Téa looked at Adam with glistening eyes—“we can get you out. If you want to quit, we can.”

“What are you saying?” Adam asked.

Téa looked up at the IV bag hanging above Adam’s bed. It pumped essential nourishment into his arm through a long clear tube. “I can put something in this tube, something that’s not supposed to go in your blood. It will cause a clot. In time, that clot will reach something vital like your heart or brain. It will prevent blood from getting to important organs. Without oxygen, your brain will die. You’ll have an aneurysm, or perhaps a stroke. It will end it.”

“Are you serious?” Adam asked.

Téa pursed her lips and nodded sorrowfully. “You just give me the word, and I’ll do it. You just need to let go. You won’t ever have to stand trial. You won’t ever feel pain again. Maybe the next life you receive will be better, you know? You’ll fly among the stars.”

Adam’s face slowly became darker and then darker. Every word Téa spoke drove him into a rage. When he responded, his voice became gruff and menacing, a way he would never talk to Téa. “What is this?”

Téa looked at him, perplexed.

“I’m still dreaming, aren’t I?” Adam said. “I still haven’t woken up.”

Téa shook her head in forlorn concern. “No, Adam. You’re awake. This is real.” She reached out to gently rest her hand on Adam’s arm, but he pulled it away.

“Don’t touch me!” Adam barked. “What is this place? What’s happening to me?”

“Adam, just stop.”

Adam glanced around the room, his eyes like a wolf’s. “This isn’t real. This can’t be real. I need to escape this place.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” Téa pleaded.

Adam turned to her, grave and focused. “Téa would never advocate me committing suicide. She loves me. I know that. She did everything she could to convince me not to join the Army. She never said it outright, but I knew it was because we weren’t going to see each other anymore. And you know what? For a moment there, I almost didn’t go. She’s my friend, and you . . . you’re not.”

Adam’s eyes flashed to the book Téa had been reading, and he quickly snatched it from her. He pulled it open to a random page and tried to read. There were words, but Adam couldn’t comprehend them. His brain saw them as blurs, lorem ipsum that made even less sense. “Of course,” Adam said to Téa as he threw the book to the floor. “Of course there’s nothing in it. I’ve never read that book before the same way I’ve never read UCMJ cover to cover. This is all a dream.”

Adam looked to the doorway. He’d still never stepped foot outside that infernal room. “I’m leaving,” he said simply. He braced his hands against the bed and pushed himself up. It proved difficult, far more difficult than the last time he’d tried to leave.

Téa was quick to stand. The phantom feigned concern and tried to coo Adam back into complacency while she placed her hands against his chest. “Adam, you’re going to hurt yourself. Stop this.”

“Yeahhh, right. I’m gonna hurt myself. I’ve heard that before.”

Adam’s nurse strode hurriedly into the room and bent over next to Téa. She too tried to restrain him. “Mr. Rodriguez, you know you cannot leave this room. You are in our custody.”

“No! I’m not listening to you people anymore! I’m getting out of here! Get your damn hands off me!” Some invisible force greater than the strength of the two women was trying to will Adam back into the bed.

Benito Alvarez appeared on the opposite side of the bed, seemingly from thin air, and added his hands to the effort. “Come on, man. Don’t be stupid. You leave this place, and you’ll be in a lot worse trouble. How is that gonna look?”

“You!” Adam snapped. “There’s no way you could have known that Hashem wasn’t going to do it! There’s no way!”

“Unless I told him.” Harun El-Hashem appeared next to Benito in his ridiculous white lab coat. He sneered at Adam.

Harun came to regret showing his face. Adam quickly swung his dominant right hand up into the drug lord’s face with all his strength. The punch landed with a force that would have made the real Benito shudder. Adam’s knuckles connected squarely on El-Hashem’s lips and front teeth. It rocked him. He collapsed against the wall and slumped to the floor.

“Doctor!” screeched the nurse.

Adam screamed like a maniac. “I’m not afraid of you anymore! Let me go! Let me go!” Adam gathered his strength and pushed mightily against the tide. “Let me gooooooooooo!”

Adam found that he was lifting himself from the unyielding ground. The hands of the friends attempting to restrain him were gone, replaced instead by the lazily swirling mist. The scrubs he had been prisoner in evaporated into utter nudity. His gaze darted around like that of a startled cat. To his sides and behind him, there was only mist and the unknown. To his front stood the golden gate and its accompanying battlements. He’d been deposited back at the starting point.

“It wasn’t real,” he assured himself, finally vindicated. “None of it was real.” Adam scanned around the space. He was questioning it all. He had been asleep, or . . . he was the dream? If he hallucinated that, he could be hallucinating all of it, even his release.

Slowly accepting that he was no longer threatened—quite so obviously, at least—Adam sat in front of the gate and regained control of his breathing. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as he remembered. The mist wasn’t nearly as frigid or thick. It did not crowd against him. It seemed as though it were no longer interested.

“Interested mist.” Adam chuckled at the idea desperately. What had just happened to him was unaccountably strange. Something about the mist was hallucinogenic, but it was actively trying to break his spirit. It played with his mind and attempted to drive him to suicide like it had a will of its own. “Interested mist” was definitely possible on that plane; however, the implications of being released from the illusion were not comforting. It meant that the gate, the Custodian, the Wheel of Fate, and the monster waiting to eat him were back in the realm of possibility. That, too, was unaccountably strange. Adam didn’t have the faintest concept of the things in his new world. Anything was possible.

Not wanting to dally, Adam stood. He was still in the mist and therefore was not safe. He unlatched the gate, slipped through, and closed it quietly behind him. He made for certain that the latch was firmly in place. Some part of him didn’t want to disturb the mist or antagonize it in any way just in case it decided to slip through the insubstantial barrier and drag him back.

Adam hurriedly left the gate and tread across the smooth stone, toward the trench. Every other step left a bloody footprint. The creature was nowhere to be found. It didn’t howl, growl, hiss, or otherwise disturb the quiet if it were nearby.

“You live,” the Custodian’s deep voice reverberated in Adam’s ears.

Adam stopped short on his trek and looked up into the darkness above like a wary lemur. Then he rolled his eyes and spoke upward as if the Custodian of the Wheel of Fate were a god that dwelled in the black abyss that lay beyond the walls of the cavern. “Yeah, I live. What the hell just happened to me in there?”

The Custodian responded. “I was not planning to expose you to that life-form until much later. If I had a choice, I would not have had you exposed to it at all.”

“It is alive,” Adam said breathlessly. “I had a feeling, but . . . I just couldn’t . . . I . . . I don’t know . . . I just couldn’t—”

“Comprehend it,” the Custodian finished.

Adam didn’t like admitting his shortcomings, but in the face of so great a revelation, he couldn’t help but be dwarfed. “Yeah.”

“There are few that exist who can.”

Adam stared upward in awe. “What was it?”

The Custodian didn’t answer at first. The deity hesitated so long it began to appear as a refusal to answer. “It is old,” the Custodian finally said, “unaccountably so. It is not known where it came from or how it was created. It simply exists.”

“You don’t know where it came from? Is it older than your wheel?” Adam asked.

“The wheel,” the Custodian stressed. “The Wheel of Fate. It is your god. It created your species, and you only exist because it allows you to do so.”

Adam couldn’t help but feel annoyed. He didn’t like it when he would be preached to about the gods that humanity had invented on earth. Having a new god insisted upon him, however real, was irritating.

“That being said,” the Custodian continued, “it is unknown. The Wheel of Fate may be older, and it may be younger. The inception of both date back to time immemorial, and neither can be said for sure. It is known that the Wheel of Fate did not always occupy this plane. When it traveled here to engineer the creation of humanity, it discovered only the mist swirling in the dark. In the eons that it has inhabited this plane, the mist has made no effort to move from its resting place or otherwise act, but the danger it presents cannot be understated. That is why the Wheel of Fate erected the barrier.”

Adam turned and gazed skeptically at the golden gate that stood between him and the pale mist. He stuck a thumb out at it. “You mean this little gate here actually keeps the mist out?”

“That is only how you perceive the barrier,” The Custodian explained. “It is the result of your consciousness attempting to represent the barrier with an ideological equivalent. This entire space, the creature that pursues you, and the pain you feel are all representations of concepts you can comprehend only through association. If I attempted to show you the manner in which this plane actually exists, you would only be confused, perhaps to the point of sensory collapse.”

Adam put his hands on his hips, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “You use a lot of big words,” he grumbled. “So I’m imagining all