J. Mitchell - Midnight City

Zoey’s eyes traveled down the front of it… then stopped as she noticed the slot on the bottom half, inside the ring of the faded question mark. A rusted, metallic one, just the right size for a quarter.

She knew she had come to her moment. A decision point. There were no feelings to guide her here, nothing to tell her what to do. But she knew anyway.

Zoey carefully unwrapped the coin in her hand and held it over the slot. The far-off rumbling seemed to grow louder now. Behind her, Max whined uneasily, watching Zoey, reading her intentions.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, trying to assure herself as much as the dog. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it’ll all be okay.” Max looked at her, unconvinced.

Zoey looked back to the coin that hovered over the slot, and sighed. As always, going back wasn’t a real choice. Pushing forward was her only option.

With forced courage, Zoey shoved the coin into the slot.

IT WAS LIKE ZOEY had been sucked into space. Light receded and swirled away until everything around her was an impossibly dense field of pitch black, completely absent of anything resembling light, and Zoey floated through it all in a delirium of senses, none of which worked the way she was used to. Touch, sound, sight, smell—they all morphed and bled into one another, and she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.

As Zoey floated, she felt the rumbling again, growing and building and rushing toward her like the footfalls of a thousand horses, but she couldn’t see it coming, whatever it was. She tried to duck or spin, to twist out of the way, but in that solid haze of blackness, there was no way to tell if she was even moving at all.

The sound grew louder and stronger until it roared over her, filling her fractured, disjointed senses with an intense surge of noise and heat. Zoey tried to scream, but nothing came. In this place, she had no mouth, no lungs, nothing physical to her at all… and the realization was frightening.

The rumbling went on, roaring around her, sweeping her down and away toward a place that felt both solid and intangible, a nowhere place. But a place nonetheless. When she reached it, her consciousness, such as it was, filled with imagery….

ZOEY SAW A GIRL.

This girl was younger. Much younger. So young, she hadn’t yet learned to speak.

The little girl was in a crowd, with her mother. It was dark, and stars filled a clear black sky.

The girl had never been allowed to stay up this late, but tonight was special. Tonight was the meteor shower her mother had told her about.

They were gathered with dozens of other people on top of an overlook, where the lights of a city flashed in the distance.

The girl’s mother hoisted the giggling child up onto her shoulders. It was one of her favorite things, Zoey somehow knew, seeing the world from her mother’s vantage, being so high up.

Zoey didn’t wonder where the girl’s father was. She simply knew he had never been there. For as long as the little girl had been aware, there had only been her mother. And that had always been enough.

Zoey heard the mother’s voice tell the girl to look up, and saw her finger pointing to the stars.

The little girl followed the gesture excitedly, and gasped. Above them, the stars were moving. They were falling. Streaking through the sky in pinpricks of light.

But something seemed wrong. They weren’t as far away as she would have thought.

In fact, they seemed very close. Too close. And they were coming closer still.

As Zoey and the little girl watched, the falling stars transformed before her eyes into trails of fire, raining through the sky all around them, stretching from horizon to horizon, hundreds of them. Maybe thousands…

It became clear one of the “stars” was directly above them, falling toward the city in the distance. It was huge, they could tell, even from this far. The little girl never would have guessed stars could be so big.

Screams erupted in the crowd. Zoey and the little girl watched as the people around them began to run. They slammed into the mother, and the woman struggled to keep a grip on the girl.

The woman turned to run herself… and then stopped, as above them, the sky suddenly ripped itself apart in a maelstrom of sound and color.

Zoey and the little girl looked up in time to see the air all around the falling “star” waver in a strange way… and then, impossibly, watched the huge shape begin to slow as it fell, as if it were somehow freezing in place in the air.

A wave of clear, rippling energy erupted from the huge thing, flaring powerfully outward.

The mother screamed, pulled the little girl from her shoulders, held her tight…

…and then the wave hit and everything went white.

Zoey was there when the little girl awoke, watched her groggily come to. She was alone, they both realized at the same time. The mother was gone. So was the crowd of people. She was the only one left, and there was no explanation why….

It was early morning now. Dim, yellowish light was everywhere, but the sun was hidden. Where was it? The sky above her was a strange, sickly shade of orange, like nothing she had ever seen.

The little girl looked around in fear. Where had everyone gone? Why was she alone? Where was her mother?

Zoey watched the girl slowly pull herself forward, toward the edge of the high point they had been standing on earlier. When she saw where she was, her eyes widened.

The city was burning ruins now. But that was the least of what she and Zoey saw.

What was in front of them was almost beyond description.

Amid the fractured landscape, they saw huge tornadoes of swirling black energy. Lightning that flashed in bright streaks of purple and red. They saw rolling waves of energy, glittering spheres of light and dark… and something like a tower in the distance, split in half, frozen in the air, spanning high above what remained of the city.

And then something roared above the little girl.

They looked up, and the sky was filled with machines painted blue and white, listing and turning in the crazy currents of wind and energy that swept through everything.

One of them hovered over her, descending down, closer and closer, the sound of its engines whining loudly.

There was a flash as a metallic claw attached to a long length of cable shot down toward her.

The moment it fired, Zoey realized she wasn’t watching the little girl anymore; she was no longer an outside observer.

Zoey was the little girl, looking through her eyes as the Vulture claw raced toward her.

The girl was her, Zoey now knew. This was who she used to be.

And then the claw slammed into her, and everything went black.

THE DARKNESS ENVELOPED ZOEY again, a solid, unmoving pitch black of nothingness.

The rumbling swarmed around her still, furious and loud and unknowable. To Zoey, it felt like she was swept upward now, through the dark, but there was no real way to know. Here, there was no up or down, no true direction at all.

The sounds intensified, drowning out everything, even her thoughts. And her mind was flooded with imagery again….

ZOEY WAS SOMEWHERE COLD. Cold and dark.

Not so dark as the place from before: nothing was as dark as that. But dark, still.

Zoey knew it had been years since they had found her in that broken, chaotic landscape, all alone. And she knew this room, too. The same room they always brought her. And she knew she was strapped to the same table made of black, rippled steel, held in place by the same strange, fibrous strands.

Dread filled her, because she knew what was coming. Any moment, it would begin. Any moment…