Paul Jones - Revelations

“I’m going to kill all you fucks,” she yelled, hot tears of rage spilling over her cheeks. “You’re going back to whatever hellhole you came from. You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?” Her finger caressed the trigger of the shotgun just as the alien’s cube seemed to explode brilliantly.

A numbing buzz surrounded her. It ran across the surface of her skin like static electricity and filled the inside of her head with a momentary flash of blinding light that pulsed through every synapse, penetrated every memory she had, filled each molecule of her being. Abruptly, she was disconnected from her body. It was as though a switch had been thrown, freezing all communication between her brain and her nervous system.

The only way Emily knew she was falling was because her eyes were still her own: She saw the red grass rushing up to meet her, and in the final second before she hit the ground, she saw Mac’s distraught face as he rushed from the edge of the clearing toward her.

Then everything went white.

Emily found herself suspended in a place between sleep and wakefulness, enveloped by a warm light that had no color, yet seemed to contain every shade and hue imaginable. It might be that place, she dreamed, that humanity had defined as the ever-so-thin line between life and death; limbo, if you pleased. Or perhaps it was the sanctuary which, as a child, defined the limits between life and dreams, and that as an adult, had seemed lost to her forever. No matter where she was, it was peaceful, quiet; she was finally at rest. The non-light tingled against her skin, its silk-like texture holding her securely in place, not against her will, but because she willed it to embrace her. It brushed against her skin, warming her like the first sigh of a mother’s breath against her newborn’s body.

Emily tried to remember everything that had come before this moment, but all she found was a blank slate; there was nothing but the now, and she reveled in the knowledge that she was an anomaly, brand new, an incongruity overlooked by the universe, both newborn and eternal, yet somehow, still an irreplaceable facet of a vast mechanism, comforted by her own anonymity, her own individualism, her own uniqueness.

Time passed, and after what seemed like a quiet eternity of serenity, from the nothingness a red spot began to form in the vast and narrow limits of her mindscape. Tiny at first, it quickly spread through the non-light like a drop of ink in water, pushing outward as it grew, pulling in everything that surrounded it.

Emily watched as if from a distance, with no hint of fear, only wonder and fascination.

More tiny dots of color, each unique as she, appeared, quickly spreading out across the canvas, merging and bonding with each other until a sudden rush of experience soaked her, drenching her in memory.

She sensed herself exhale a gasp of astonishment… followed quickly by pain as the tide of reality washed her ashore, and…

…Emily sat up, instantly regretting the move as every nerve in her body seemed to send a simultaneous signal to her brain, a flood of information and experience that overwhelmed her, setting every synapse on fire. She slumped back down again, and a low moan escaped her as she was overwhelmed by disorientation. When it finally eased, she rolled gently over onto her left side, fighting against the urge to vomit, dragging in deep gulps of air. Slowly, the spinning began to subside, and her senses and nerves began to return to normal. Still, her skin tingled with static electricity strong enough it made her want to scratch every inch of it.

She forced her eyelids to open. Slowly! Slowly! Unsure of how they might handle any sudden light.

She tried to remember everything that had happened in the past few…? How long had it been? Hours? Days? She had no idea how much time had passed, or how she had gotten here; she had a hazy vaguely recalled memory of… an open field, beings that had no right to exist on Earth… and Thor!

Her eyes snapped fully open.

She was naked. She could feel a rapidly cooling liquid or membrane coating her skin and she suddenly felt chilled as it began to evaporate off her body. Ignoring the pain and disorientation she pushed herself back upright.

“Thor?” she called out, her voice a weak croak. Her vision swam for a few seconds with even this simple effort. A blur of swirling colors played in front of her eyes, gradually organizing themselves into shapes, which in turn coalesced into objects as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of her locale: curved walls, a ceiling of nothing but black above her still-whirling head, the hard shelf she sat upon, its surface smooth, slightly warm beneath the palms of her hands.

She was in some kind of a room, her senses told her. It was poorly lit but not dark, and, as her eyes were gradually adjusting to the twilight, she noticed she was not alone.

Three figures stood at the dimly lit edge of the room, hidden within the penumbra of shadow.

Thank God . “Mac? Is that you?”

Emily blinked a couple of times as she tried to focus on what lay at the boundary of her sight as the three silhouettes finally resolved from the darkness around them. She stifled a scream of confusion and fear at what stood before her.

Two of the figures were the same elegant aliens she had seen in the field. They stood unmoving, their blank oval faces staring—if that was the right word, they had no eyes after all—directly at her. But it was the third figure, flanked by the two aliens as though they were his guardians, their shadows cast across the shorter shape, that caused her heart to pound. There was something disturbingly familiar about the outline.

The middle figure took two steps forward into the light.

An abrupt intake of breath from Emily marked her recognition, then a name shattered the silence of the room: “Jacob?” she asked.

She stared hard at the figure, unsure of whether what she was seeing was true or a trick played on her by the shadows.

It was Jacob, free of his wheelchair, his legs apparently now fully functional as he took another step closer to Emily.

“Hello Emily,” he said, his voice slurring slightly, as though he was still getting used to forming words with his mouth and tongue. “It is so very good to see you again.”

Emily pushed herself across the shelf she sat on until she felt a wall at her back, her eyes darting around the room, searching for any way out of it and finding nothing. The walls were seamless with no apparent exit.

“You have nothing to fear from us, Emily. We are not here to harm you,” Jacob said, a hand extended out in front of him, encouraging her to stop her nervous shuffling.

Us? We? Her heart skipped a beat when she thought back to the creature that had tried to take her and Simon’s family in Stuyvesant. It had taken Simon and eventually Ben, turning the child into some thing that she had later killed, but not before the creature had used Simon, transforming him into a puppet to lure the children and Emily to it.

“What… what the fuck are you?” Emily asked, her eyes shifting constantly from Jacob to the two sentinels standing motionless behind him, then back to Jacob again. She could see no connection between the two silent creatures and Jacob, no black tentacles that would mean he was under their control. But that did not mean that he was not their thrall in some other way.

“Our creators gave us no name, but over the millennia, other species have named us. You may think of us as the Caretakers. It is the most appropriate, I believe.”