Scott Nicholson - Forever never ends

Then, after the hands of time reversed, after the sand had been stuffed back into the top of the hourglass, after history was once again unwritten and unmade, only a calm black nothingness would remain. The horrible eternal peace of a collapsed cosmos, with not a glimmer of light or life. She saw the future.

The vision came through a single touch. But now the touch was gone and the contact no longer burned, because she dropped on her back and kicked at the teenager. His flesh yielded like an overripe peach.

The initial stunning power of the psychic invasion had eased. The impressions of galactic anticlimax still stormed Tamara’s mind, but she compartmentalized them, put them aside for later study. First she needed to survive.

The teen fell away, but approached again like a drugged snail. The boy throbbed, pulsed with dewy joy, steaming like a hothouse orchid. Tamara instinctively knew he wanted to rape her. Not just a rape of orifice and flesh, but a violation of her deeper self. Her organic being, her fluid and cells and neurons and synapses, her blood and spit and sweat. Her soul.

She rolled to her feet and grabbed for the car door. Her fingernails screeched across the sheet metal until she found the door handle, then she was diving inside, banging her knee on the gear shift as she struggled into the bucket seat. She slammed the door just as the boy reached into the Toyota.

Tamara heard a sound like green beans snapping as the car's weight shifted. No surprise flashed across those fluorescent eyes as his severed fingers dropped into her lap. She slapped them into the floorboard, and milky fluid leaked from the wounds. Even disconnected from their host, the fingers worked, wriggling in some blind and silent search.

Then the boy's face was low on the windshield, soggy lips pressed against the glass in a cold kiss. The eyes gleamed longingly as oozing palms searched the glass, seeking entry. Tamara slammed down the door lock.

Did the shu-shaaa thing, the source of her Gloomies, have knowledge of locks?

She sensed that shu-shaaa was growing strong, eating the mountain, spreading like kudzu, soaking up sun and water and bacteria. It was ravenous, like the boy at her window who ached to convert her, to consume her energy and reduce her to a rotting husk. Just as its parent would leave the entire world as a husk after it had taken its fill.

No more voices. No more doubt.

All that was left was survival in a world gone mad.

Tamara crawled into the back seat and put her hand on the door lever. The boy sloughed his way down the side of the car, his marred hand leaving a wet trail on the glass. He moved slowly, but Tamara wasn’t sure that flight was wise. She could outrun this one, but she sensed that others of his kind were out there. Lots of others.

Still, she couldn’t stay here all night. It might be hours before anyone passed this stretch of nowhere road. Or it might be tomorrow. Mountain folks had a tendency to turn in early. And how could she expect help when the entire mountain seemed allied against her?

She decided to risk it. If she followed the road, she would soon come to a house. And with the moon coming out, she didn't really need light to avoid the others who had become infected- converted — like the boy had. She could easily pick up their chaotic vibes, because her sensitivity seemed to have grown with the nearness of the shu-shaaa, as if the Gloomies were as psychically tuned in to her as she was to them.

Whatever had shaped the mind or consciousness or soul that called itself shu-shaaa, it was growing stronger and more at ease in this environment.

In its natural environment.

And its understanding of Tamara mirrored her own understanding of it.

“Mah-raaa…” the boy said. “Tah-mah-raaa…”

Oh, God. It’s speaking. It knows my NAME.

Tamara flipped the latch and then kicked the door open with both feet, shoving the boy backward. As he staggered, she hopped to the roadbed. She ran toward the east in the direction she had driven up. She took one glance back at the boy, who stumped slowly after her, his feetless legs- no, STEMS, not legs — scissoring with a wretched slosh.

She heard its pathetic call with both her ears and her mind.

"Shu-shaaa… mah-raaa… eyezzzz.”

But underneath that voice, which was piped directly from whatever force drove the Gloomies, inside the blissful mist of that cosmic possessor, Tamara sensed the human part, the boy who wished he were somewhere getting high or flirting with cheerleaders or singing in the church choir. The part that was aware enough to know what it once was and could no longer be. The part that screamed inside, even while the parent hummed its pacific lullabies.

Then she fled down the road. She wasn't a jogger, but she exercised daily and found the work was paying off. Of course, she never thought her life might depend on it. Even one who sometimes saw the future wasn't always prepared for the worst.

Her mind turned cartwheels as she covered her first quarter mile with darkness falling like a dark shroud from above. She was out of immediate range of whatever had clogged her senses, the raging mountain that had croaked its appetite upon the world.

She tried to understand what could have brought something like that into the world. But maybe it had always been there, somewhere across a billion skies, across the not-quite-endless universe.

And it was not only growing, it was learning. It had adapted to the strange environment and was evolving in order to survive, assimilating itself into the biosystem. Or, perhaps, it was assimilating that system into itself in a mutual transference, a symbiosis where both predator and prey were the same.

Because it knew her name…

She was so lost in her thoughts that the car was almost upon her around the bend before she saw it. Its headlights washed over her as she jumped to the side of the road. Her ankle twisted as she fell in the ditch. The car slid to a halt, tires rasping on the gravel as they grabbed for traction. A door opened, lighting up the passenger compartment.

"You okay?" called a voice. She counted the heads of three men. Risky, even here in the low-crime region of the mountains. Still, she didn't have much choice, if she wanted to get home before the sun rose. Before the Gloomies swarmed.

"Uh, sure," she said, limping cautiously to the open door. “Had a breakdown up the road.”

“Yeah, saw the car,” an old man in the front seat said. He talked with the rural drawl that marked him as a native. “And the… uh.. boy…”

Under the interior light, she made out the faces of the men inside the Mercedes. The man in the back seat, who looked to be in his fifties, was well-dressed and had friendly blue eyes. The driver wore an expensive suit, his styled blond hair trimmed evenly three inches above his collar. He seemed a little nervous. She watched in the rearview mirror as his eyes kept flicking to the leather-faced old man beside him.

"Hop in, young lady,” said the man in back. “You don't want to be out there on a night like this.” He slid over behind the driver. “I’m Herbert DeWalt. Your chauffeur is Kyle Emerland and that there’s Chester Mull.”

“Tamara,” she said. “Tamara Leon. Thanks for the lift.”

Tamara got into the seat he’d vacated and looked at the two men up front as the Mercedes pulled away. They had driven out into an open stretch of valley, with hay fields on both sides. The rising moon bathed the valley, making the distant ridges look creamy and vague. She almost relaxed. Then she saw that the old man in the front passenger seat had a shotgun.

"Don't be alarmed, ma'am,” DeWalt said. “Nobody's going to hurt you. We're on a little business trip here."

Chester turned and grinned at her, showing his few teeth as if they were precious jewels. A dark knot of tobacco was lodged in one jaw. He smelled as if he had crawled out of a whiskey barrel.