Chapter 21

  Eric

  Eric tried to move the body out of the church the next morning, but it was too heavy for him. After five minutes of striving to drag it out the door, Frisby revealed that he could simply teleport it away. Eric didn’t ask where.

  He made breakfast, grabbed his sword, and checked again on the metronomes. They looked just as they had the day before, all ticking away. Liz’s metronome, the gold one, still bore the faint marks where the cyborg alien creature had tried to break it. He pulled out his phone, noted that it needed charging, and began a to-do list.

  Item 1: figure out security systems.

  Item 2: what’s the deal with these metronomes? (Somebody knew. Somebody, somewhere, had left him a clue. He just had to find it.)

  Item 3: Jimothy. Doors.

  After typing these into the notepad on his phone, he growled in frustration and shoved the phone back into his pocket. This was no to-do list. It was just a list of shit he didn’t know. And if he started a list like that, he’d be here all day before he finished it. What he needed was action, decisive action. What could he do?

  He considered this as he climbed to the top of the tower, flung back the grate, and stepped up onto the big platform. He could see more of the city in the daytime. “Daytime” meant that the dark sky, heavy with clouds, allowed a bit of light to filter through from beyond. He faced techno-ville at the lakeside where he had traveled the day before. To his left, a mess of highways cut through stretches of relatively barren, undeveloped land; sometimes overpasses stacked up on top of each other four or five deep. To his right, a distant river wound toward the lake. He could tell it was there only because of the upraised drawbridges. Behind, away from the lake, the city mounted again into a dense mass of skyscrapers, but they looked odd in some way he couldn’t make out.

  He spent some time making sure he understood the layout of the streets immediately adjacent to his church-thing. A trickle of smoke still crawled up into the sky from the wreckage of the destroyed craft. He would go check that out. But first, security.

  He returned to his huge man-cave, put some more music on while charging his phone, and played with the array of computer consoles.

  The music was solid. Fuzzy techno with a heavy kick. The beat thumped through the stale air, vibrated through the stone floor and walls, drummed through Eric’s blood and bones as he sat before the computer array. He knew what to do. He didn’t know how he knew. Maybe it was the music. Something about it stirred him. He wanted to run, to fight, to do something, anything.

  He seized the mouse and clicked rapidly through a series of options and screens. Strangely familiar, all of it. It didn’t take him long to figure out why. It was almost identical to a digital-audio-workstation, which he used for mixing music. Furthermore, the computer array linked with the nearby music mixing equipment somehow. It was also ARKO-tech.

  He set up the security measures, the warning alarms, the detection of incoming craft–basically all the available options, just in case. He made sure he would receive a message on his phone if something were to go amiss, and he sent a test signal to be sure he’d receive it. Something else caught his eye when he closed out of the security windows: a digital illustration of the seven metronomes, complete with readouts and measurements. Each had a STATUS, and each STATUS read ACTIVE. Each came with a scrolling digital readout like a cardiograph, ticking away beat by beat. Heart-rate monitors, basically. Eric could look back through the complete history of the heart rates of himself and all his friends ever since each of them began around twenty hours earlier. He scrolled back through his own feed to the part where he had fought the cyborg thing. Judging by this graph, he’d been one step away from a fucking heart attack.

  “Weird,” he told Frisby, who had settled upon an unused keyboard and was tapping random keys on it with his tiny claws. “Super fucking weird, man. Like, what’s the point? I guess it’s good to know everyone’s not dead.” He considered scanning the graphs for the others, or maybe just for Isaac, since Isaac definitely would not care, but he decided against it. He closed all the windows, swiveled away from the computer array. “Let’s go exploring.”

  He took the sword, along with a sheath which almost fit it that he found in a closet. With this, he could carry the sword across his back, freeing up a hand. He packed some food and water into a backpack, which after some experimentation he could swing on overtop of the sheath.

  He left through the front door and locked it behind him with his phone. He stood in the barren street for a moment, watched the sky overhead. No sign of the dragon. Not that he’d ever see it if it was up there above the clouds.

  He returned to the wreckage of the ship the dragon had destroyed the night before. The streets were unnervingly quiet and grim in the dim light.

  Bits of the wreckage leaked tendrils of smoke up into the dark air. The smoke rose unnaturally straight. Eric smelled fire: charred flesh, burned plastic, burned metal, burned everything. He wanted to cover his mouth with something, but all he had was Heidi’s bandana and Kate’s scarf, both of which were stained with blood. He didn’t like the idea of using either of those as a filter. In fact, why the hell did he even bring those?

  Thoughts of those two reminded him of the ceramic hexagon, which he had placed around his neck. He checked it. All the symbols, still glowing. If one of them went out, would that mean that someone had died?

  He looked back at the smoldering wreckage. Honestly, he’d always hated breathing in shit that he knew could mess him up. If he had like a filter mask or something…

  A trickle of grainy gray fog leaked from the hexagon and coalesced into a white filter mask in the air in front of him. It fell to the cement.

  “Cool,” he said, then added, “thanks,” for whoever might have done this. He suspected Frisby, but the dragon seemed preoccupied investigating one of the blackened bodies. Eric strapped the filter mask over his face and joined Frisby.

  This corpse resembled the creature he’d fought in the church. The others he found were similar. An explosion had blown the ship apart from the inside. Eric searched with intent to scavenge, but little remained. He found a small black box with blinking lights on it. A battery? A case? A handheld game console? He put it in his backpack. He found a cluster of soft rubbery orbs, scratched and singed but not badly damaged. Food? Grenades? Sports balls? Into the backpack.

  He came away with an assortment of knick-knacks and two things he thought could be useful. The first was a kind of tactical helmet, slightly too large for him but otherwise able to fit his head. It was powered. Some experimentation enabled him to remove the clear faceplate in front, to display various readouts, to scan the surrounding environment. The second thing he found was a weapon. It had the head of an axe, like what his opponent had wielded the night before. This was a small one, more like a hatchet, so he carried it with him.

  He and Frisby left the wreckage to meander through the streets, tinkering with the many functions of the helmet as he went. The nature of most of these functions eluded him. He decided that the best time to work out the mysteries of this technology would be back in the safety of his base, not out in the streets. He clicked the switch that retracted the visor.

  The axe got a few practice swings as he went. Like the sword on his back, this weapon included technological enhancements. Rather than the vague green energy which cloaked the blade of the sword, this axe could manifest a red laser-like beam along the otherwise-dull curvature of its blade. It could also fire a slow red projectile out of the end, although as far as Eric could see, this did no damage to anything it struck.

  He wandered in the direction he thought of as “north,” which meant that the lake was to his right just like in Chicago. Frisby fluttered about to investigate random objects as though he found everything in sight intensely fascinating. Maybe he did. He was only a day old, right? How much did the mini-dragon-angel actually know?

  Eric attempted further communication with Frisby Wiser. It was clear from previous interactions that it could understand him fairly well. Where had such understanding come from?

  “Frisby,” he said as he took a break on a low stone bench beside an empty lot covered in pale sand. The dragon swooped in and alighted on his knee. “You can understand me, right?”

  The dragon nodded.

  “You know who I am?”

  Another nod, but already its relentless curiosity caused its attention to wander to the empty lot behind him.

  “Do you know who Leah is? Leah Walker?”

  After a slight pause, Frisby nodded again. Its tail whipped back and forth through the air behind it like a dog. Yeah, of course it knew Leah. Leah had named it.

  “And the others? Isaac, Liz, Heidi–well, you met Heidi.”

  It nodded, but its attention turned to a tiny hole in the fabric of Eric’s jeans. It pawed like a cat at the hole, getting one of its tiny white claws through and widening the hole slightly.

  “Okay. Then how about this: Benjamin Franklin. Know him?”

  Frisby stared at him, his eyeless face twisting one way, then another. It seemed puzzled.

  “Ok. Dwayne Hartman.”

  Frisby froze completely, except for a slight tremor that ran through it from the tip of its tail to its scaly nose.

  “So you know Dwayne? Huh.”

  Frisby Wiser raised its head up as far as it could stretch, opened its jaws, and produced a tiny belch of white smoke. Sparks like a myriad of microscopic lightning bolts crawled through the cloud as it dissipated. Frisby repeated this act, then looked down as though ashamed. Frisby shook its head.

  “Is there a better way for you to communicate with me?” he asked.

  In response, Frisby only wrapped its tail around his leg and hugged his thigh.

  Maybe the dragon could learn to write? Probably not. He should have known better. Liz had had Callie with her for years; if the angels could communicate somehow, Liz would’ve known.

  He continued on, swinging the axe. Its energy blade could slice clean through the thin metal lampposts which lined the streets in this area. He powered the blade back down to conserve battery after leaving a short trail of severed lampposts. It made him think of Heidi, though. She’d like this weapon. Did she have something like this, wherever she was fighting? What was she fighting against? Did she have metronomes or something similar to protect?

  She’d probably be all right. She was the most badass of them all. And besides, she had that black angel with her. It would have to be something nasty indeed to threaten her with Baha around. She’d probably be fine. If it were Kate in danger, or Jim, he’d be worried.

  But he shot her a text anyway.

  EW: whats the situation over there?

  EW: no need to respond at once if youre like in the middle of something

  And she didn’t. Scenarios scrolled through his mind, consisting mainly of Heidi locked in pitched combat with mysterious foes, maybe facing her own hulking cyborg-like creatures. Even in his imagination, they didn’t stand a chance against Baha. It tore them to shreds.

  He kept walking. North, to check out those big empty areas he had seen. He worried about straying too far from his base. What if, again, someone came to attack the metronomes while he was gone? Would the dragon come again and kill them, and maybe this time leave two for Eric to fight? He had to find a faster means of travel if he ended up being here for a while. He had so far seen nothing resembling a vehicle, though the road he walked on had clearly been designed for automobiles or something like them.

  HS: We’re good. You?

  EW: same

  HS: You said you killed a cyborg?

  EW: yeah

  EW: a drop ship came and landed by my base

  EW: a dragon came and fucking took them out

  EW: an actual dragon not frisby

  EW: it left one for me

  EW: which i had to fight cause it was trying to break some metronomes

  HS: And you won?

  EW: i got lucky

  EW: i scavenged this energy sword

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  EW: bargain bin lightsaber thing

  EW: frisby helped

  EW: bet baha wouldve cleaned it up

  HS: I’ve been fighting too

  EW: do tell

  HS: Not cyborgs. Shadow monsters that live on my moon.

  HS: They are disturbing

  EW: no shit

  HS: I’m worried about the others.

  HS: What if Kate had to fight a monster?

  HS: I don’t think she could do it

  EW: maybe

  EW: shes got people with her though

  EW: anyone on your moon?

  HS: Sort of.

  EW: how can you sort of have people on your moon?

  EW: wait no i got this

  EW: metal moon right?

  HS: Right

  EW: so theyre like all shredding it up on guitars

  EW: facepaint and long hair and biting the heads off bats and shit

  HS: Ha

  HS: I wish

  HS: At least I would understand that a little

  EW: so how can you ‘sort of’ have people on your moon?

  HS: They’re people, I guess

  HS: Just different

  HS: I shouldn’t judge

  EW: weirdos?

  EW: sounds great

  EW: wish i had some

  EW: meanwhile im just over here in fuckin solitary

  EW: me and my dragon

  EW: two dragons i guess

  HS: Double Dragon?

  EW: what?

  HS: Nevermind.

  HS: And the cyborgs?

  EW: yeah i hope im done with that shit though

  EW: came way too close to making me the ex-metronome-king of spooky city world

  HS: I wouldn’t count on it

  HS: I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to fight

  HS: I am, anyway

  EW: shit

  EW: how do you know?

  HS: You have a home, right? And your own room?

  EW: yeah

  HS: Mine had body armor, disinfectant, and bandages waiting for me

  EW: well fuck now i really am worried about the others

  HS: Have you found a way out? Or one of these doors we’re supposed to find?

  EW: not yet but i think im on to something

  HS: Okay. Talk to you later

  EW: yeah just dont die

  EW: uh but if you do die...

  HS: ?

  EW: die with honor

  HS: Understood

  EW: that was a joke okay

  HS: Understood

  Eric stood at the edge of a black abyss, as large across as a baseball field, and stared into its depths. He couldn’t see the bottom. In the dim daylight, he could hardly see anything at all down there. Part of the cracked asphalt road descended into the darkness like a crusty disintegrating ribbon. Power lines dipped down into the murk on his side of the chasm and rose again on the other side, the dangling power poles which dragged the line down barely visible.

  A sinkhole of some kind, obviously not supposed to be here. It lay on the edge of the flat area with the highways. Eric climbed atop a nearby cement wall and looked out across the sinkhole. Highways wound through low hills of dead grass, coiling around each other and mounting up into stacks of overpasses. Beyond, the city began again. An airfield made up a large part of that flat space. He thought he saw more sinkholes there too, similar in scope to the one at his feet.

  He clambered back down and approached the edge. The lip seemed solid, but he could not tell by looking down whether anything supported the road he walked on. For all he knew, it could collapse at any moment.

  He wanted to go down into the hole, though, see what was under there. He’d need light. Did he have a light? The helmet might help. What else…the six-sided medallion? He held it up for observation. The symbols glowed, but not bright enough for illumination. He pictured a flashlight in his mind, a long black one like the one in his apartment back home. That would be perfect.

  A trail of mist leaked from the cool hexagonal medallion and coalesced into that very flashlight. It fell to the ground. Instead of clattering on the asphalt, it exploded in a silent whoosh of pale silvery mist.

  Eric looked to Frisby for help, but the dragon was occupied in attempting aerial barrel-rolls. Eric imagined the flashlight again and watched it form again from mist. He caught it before it fell. It was cool and heavy, the tiny diamond-pattern grip on its shaft very real to his touch. He clicked it on. Nothing. He checked the battery compartment. No batteries.

  He imagined batteries and caught one of them before it hit the ground. Once he had placed them in the flashlight, it worked. A beam of bright white light cut through the dim air. He returned to the edge and directed the light downward. Bits of metal glinted far down at the bottom of the pit. The area immediately below his broken road was not terribly deep. A tunnel came out there from the direction of a cross-street. A subway? He saw no rails.

  He circumnavigated the pit counterclockwise and found a way down after only a few minutes. A metal railing dangled down from a partly collapsed building, and Eric felt sure he could safely climb down into the darkness below.

  Sand slid down on top of him as he descended the railing. He dropped the flashlight partway down, but did not hear it land. He reimagined it at the bottom while clasping the medallion. Soon after, he abandoned the flashlight in favor of a headlamp.

  The tunnel he had seen was a huge dark gap in this collapsed hole. He followed it away from the sinkhole. It descended at a steady angle. Unlike the collapsed pit, which was clearly not supposed to be there, this tunnel was artificial. It was like the tunnel of a two-lane road through a mountain except that the floor was of metal instead of asphalt.

  It became pitch black almost immediately. His headlamp illuminated only a small fraction of the space in which he walked. He kept his light on the swivel but detected no threats. No monsters in the darkness, no alien cyborgs, nothing alive at all. He tried the settings on the helmet as he went. One of them acted like night-vision goggles, but he thought he’d save it until he needed it. If his interpretation of strange symbols was correct, the helmet was low on battery.

  Steadily downward, minute by minute. Was he wasting his time? Probably. But this tunnel clearly went somewhere, and since he didn’t know shit about this world, he might as well try to figure something out.

  The tunnel branched when he had walked about twenty minutes. To the right, to the left, dead ahead. The tunnel directly ahead inclined downward at an even steeper angle. He continued on. Frisby, who had been whirling in the air before him, suddenly swooped to Eric’s shoulder and gripped it tightly. Eric paused. Danger? He looked about and raised the axe, though he did not activate it.

  He saw nothing. But he heard something. Or felt it. It was like the distant rumble of machinery. He squatted and put a hand to the cool, dusty metal. Faint vibrations–very faint. He continued on.

  He saw lights when he had walked another five minutes. Distant sodium-vapor lights, orange streetlights. The tunnel opened up ahead, connecting to a larger space. Eric approached slowly. The distant rumbling trembled in the air.

  He stopped once he reached the point where the tunnel ended and open space began. And here, all at once, he understood why it was called the Hollow Moon.

  He almost missed the movement to his right. Maybe he would have, thus ending his entire adventure before it even began, had not Frisby Wiser launched himself into the air in alarm and drawn Eric’s attention away from the space below.

  He fell backward as a heavy chain churned through the air. It clanged deafeningly on metal as it rebounded in a shower of sparks. A heavy, rhythmic thumping began, like a throbbing bass line, as a figure emerged from the shadows nearby. Eric caught only a scattered series of brief, confused images during the next few moments, but he could tell that it was a machine.

  The beat helped him as he awkwardly dodged, scrambled away from his assailant. He moved with that beat, allowing it to dictate the pacing of his actions as it did for the thing swinging chains at him. He caught one on the helmet as he stumbled back, flinging him to the ground, bright shapes flashing in his vision. His assailant pressed the attack.

  It was some kind of machine, or robot, not much larger than Eric. And it had that beat, like a heartbeat, thumping, pulsing. Eric, in the slow time of panic as he scrambled to defend himself, became keenly aware of the two contrasting rhythms: his own excited pulse and the steady thumping of his opponent. The machine’s beat was slower, much slower. The swinging chains, which struck sprays of sparks on the metallic floor and walls, seemed to float ponderously through the dark. Maybe it was just the adrenaline, but Eric had time to stand and dodge. In fact, his own heartbeat was so much faster that he could just…step around them. They were hardly moving.

  He knew this wasn’t right, couldn’t possibly be right, be was terrified that thinking too hard about it would somehow break the spell.

  He closed the distance, activated the laser axe, and chopped at the strange boxy machine until its beat stopped. In the end he stood panting over a smoking, stuttering ruin of gears and wires. The heavy chains had struck him only once, but that one blow might have ended him if not for the helmet. He still felt dizzy, disoriented from that blow.

  “Where did it come from?” he asked, speaking mainly to himself, although Frisby replied with a tiny little growl. Had it just been standing there, waiting for someone to come by? Was it a guard? Did Eric’s presence trigger it somehow?

  Cautiously now, and with the headlamp turned off, he approached the huge open space. If he could judge its size correctly, basing his estimate on the array of lights illuminating a scattering of tiny spots in the darkness, he was looking at the interior of his moon. All of it. There was nothing there, mostly. A galaxy of tiny specks of lights glittered when he looked directly down over the edge, maybe hundreds of miles away. Those would have to be much brighter than mere streetlights.

  The tunnel opened into this space at an angle, and a metallic mesh walkway formed at the termination of the tunnel. This walkway ran without guardrails into the darkness over the yawning void. Eric walked a step out onto this walkway and crouched down. He’d never been afraid of heights. He had stepped without concern onto the clear glass floor of the Skydeck in Chicago. But this gave him vertigo; it made his head spin. He couldn’t quite accept the reality of a space like this even when he was looking at it. It was too fucking big.

  One of the lights to his left moved. Eric crouched and watched as it approached over the maze of hanging catwalks. He clicked the laser axe on and off a few times. If the light came too close and seemed threatening, he would cut the walkway.

  The light stopped a few dozen yards off. It looked like all the others, like a streetlamp, but it was being carried like a lantern by a person. This person looked 0% machine. Eric stood up.

  They regarded each other. The other figure snapped its fingers a few times in the silence. His hand flared with light at each snap.

  “Are you him?” the man said at last. He had a young voice, and now Eric could see that his face, partly obscured by splotchy patches of shadow from the light he held, was thin and pale. Scratchy stubble adorned part of his chin. Eric rubbed his own chin without thinking. Hardly anything there, of course. He guessed the stranger to be around twenty years old. He looked like a regular college guy on the streets of Chicago, though maybe a little dirtier.

  “Am I who?” Eric asked.

  “The hero,” the man replied in a tired but interested voice. “The time guy. The heart. Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have the hexagon?”

  “Yeah.”

  The man nodded to himself. “Good,” he said. “I thought I heard her stirring up there.”

  “Who?”

  “Eranex. The dragon. Have you seen her?”

  Eric nodded, then realized he still had his light turned off and he was probably a figure of shadow. He clicked his light back on. “Yeah,” he said again. “My name’s Eric. Who are you?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m Jacob Hollow.”