Author's Note:
I had been working on a sequel to Poison, but then I went and wrote this. Demyx is my favorite Organization XII member, because he's such a sweet and dorky guy thrown in with a bunch of conniving psychopaths. I felt really bad when I spoilered him to spoiler.
Yes, I am the kind of person that empathizes with videogame characters. It's a personality flaw.
Having considered and discarded the possibilities that he was dreaming, that he was tripping, and that he was sick and delirious with fever, Myde came to the hesitant conclusion that he was dead. But even that theory didn't quite hold up, since when he came to he'd found himself physically substantial enough to have (a) a pulse, (b) an arm that had gone to pins-and-needles from lying on top of it for too long, (c) and a powerful urge to pee. It seemed a little anticlimactic, to have the first action in your afterlife be taking a piss on the beach, but he really had to go. Couldn't be helped.
He chanced to look back at the spot where he'd been lying. The impression of his body in the sand was already wearing away in the cold wind, but what was left was splattered with rusty…something. He picked up a clump of the sand and crumbled it between his fingers. It was hard to see much in the thin red light, but it smelled of iron and smudged the tips of his fingers dark. The largest pool was where his upper chest had rested, and on reflex he clapped his right hand over his heart. His shirt was in shreds, the material stiff and slightly sticky to the touch. The skin beneath was puckered into a web of old scars. Deep scars. Terrible scars. They hadn't been there this morning.
So the stickiness on his fingers was what he was afraid it was. He felt suddenly dizzy. Blood…he didn't do so well with blood, especially not so much of his own, and in enough quantity to make him wonder how much a human body held. Not a good thought, not a good thought at all; it forced him to his knees to vomit violently and at length. When he felt well enough to stand he got up and began wandering down the beach, to get away from all the blood.
The time of day was impossible to discern; the ball of red light that wasn't the sun gloated over a world gone to gray and ash. The grains taken up by the wind lashed every inch of exposed skin, and he could detect the acrid tang of smoke on the air. What had happened to him, on that beach under the blackened clouds? He had hiked down to the shore that morning under a clear sky with Maddy trotting along beside him, maybe to go for a swim, maybe to lie down and soak up the sun, maybe to play a rousing game of fetch with some of the driftwood. Those had been part of his vague plans, at any rate. What actually happened…it was a nightmare given flesh and the license to walk brazenly under the sky of the waking world.
First was the storm. It whipped up from the few wisps of cloud in the pure blue sky, the worst he'd ever seen, the mother of all ocean squalls. Storms came fast, on the coast, but never that fast. The air dropped twenty degrees in as many seconds, driven against him in fierce gusts that bit straight through his jeans and t-shirt. Then They came. One, two, three, a dozen, two dozen…he lost count. They looked just like the pictures in the tabloids, down to every detail, except these weren't blurry photographs—they were real, and without a shadow of doubt he knew they were hungry. There were dark bodies and golden eyes everywhere he turned. He ran, but no matter how far down the beach he got there were always more ahead of him, rising out of black puddles in the sand. He was surrounded in minutes, and then they were on top of him. He didn't remember many specifics after that, only pain. It hurt a hundred times more than anything had hurt in all the eighteen years he had been alive. It was drowning and freezing and being eaten alive all at once.
This wasn't fair, he thought, as if dying ever was. This was his vacation. He'd just spent the last six months practically living out of a bus, chugging from one city to another with the band, playing show after show after show. He was going to have some time off: he could write up some new songs, see his parents, stay in the cute vacation home he'd bought for them all by the ocean, eat food that didn't come in little styrofoam boxes, play with Maddy, try out new aquashaping choreography with a whole ocean full of water. That was what was supposed to happen—except two days after throwing his suitcase on the bed of his new house, he died.
Being dead didn't feel very much different from being alive, except for a strange numbness of sensation, a faint ache in his chest, and the feeling that he had misplaced something important. And what were the dead supposed to do with themselves? He'd always thought there was some big someone up there who took care of things like this. But there wasn't after all, and here he was, alone, on the beach at the end of the world. Maybe he should go look for Maddy. He wondered if dogs could smell ghosts.
He thought he could remember her snarling at the creatures, a sound more vicious than anything he'd ever heard from her throat. Yes…there. A lump in the sand that wasn't a tangle of seaweed, farther down the beach. It wasn't moving. He ran to it and began working her little body free of the driving sand. Her neck was bent at an unnatural angle, but other than that her body was unmarred. It really did look like she was sleeping, like she would perk up at any moment and go right for his face with her long pink tongue. But the skin beneath her silky fur was cold. Myde stroked it anyway. He had no idea what her parents had been, but she was friendly, fluffy, perfectly lap-sized, and quite possibly his truest friend. Could he say anything less, of someone who had died trying to protect him?
He had found her hanging around the backyard of his parents' house when he was thirteen, still in puppy hood, thin and flea-bitten. It had taken two weeks of wheedling before his parents consented to take her to the vet, then inside the house. Once cleaned up and fed, everyone fell in love with her, but Myde was still her favorite. She was even musical, of all things; she would howl along atonally with the twang of his electric guitar when he practiced. It drove his high school bandmates crazy, but that was part of the fun.
There was no way to take her with him on tour, and yesterday had been the first time he'd seen her in months. It was an inexpressible relief—dogs were simple. People were so complicated sometimes, especially in the music business. They wanted a nice meaty mouthful to chew and savor for a few weeks, a few months, a few years, and when the flavor had gone they wouldn't hesitate for a moment spit him out again, just like every other boy before him. He was young, cute, and could play a guitar. Real music wasn't a big part of the whole thing—it barely mattered to them that the electric guitar wasn't even his favorite instrument. That honor was reserved for a gift his brother had given him, an old, handmade sitar, long-necked and graceful, that he'd picked up on some trip halfway around the world for a fraction of what it was really worth. It sang with the pleasure of warm turquoise seas and sacred rivers, and could shape water like no other instrument he'd ever held. The crowds ate that showy magic up like candy. It felt slightly perverse, cramming the ancient art of aquashaping into showbiz kitsch, dissolving and reforming his instruments in a shower of bubbles, summoning his own backup dancers out of puddles. But it made money. Lots. So he did it.
Not that any of that had the slightest importance now, since the weather forecast looked like a 100 chance of Armageddon. He was shaking uncontrollably from the cold, but there was one more thing to do before he went for shelter. He took Maddy above the tide line and dug her a rude grave, the best he could do with only two hands to work with, and piled it with a few stones. Not a fitting memorial, but it was all he could do. He started the walk back home, not knowing what he would find.
The smoke on the air wafted from what remained of their neighbor's house to the south. There were still tongues of flame licking greedily at the timbers; if there had been anyone inside, there was nothing he could do to help them, and walked on. His house was intact but deserted, and his brother's car was gone. Had he gotten away? Was there someplace safe to get away to? He pulled a coat and some sturdier shoes from the closet, and wished belatedly that he'd accepted the offer of basic handgun training from the head of security. It was possible that he couldn't die a second time, but he could bleed (he'd cut his hand on a piece of shell digging Maddy's grave) and if those things found him again he didn't want to find out what would happen.
He found his cell in his car, blinking madly. There were fifteen new messages on it. The first one was from his brother, and went something like this: "Pick up your fucking phone, Myde. There is a fucking alien invasion and they are fucking EATING PEOPLE and we have to get out of here NOW and where the hell are you?" The next five were in much the same vein: from his mother, Maxwell (head of security), Alan (the drummer), from his agent, another from his mother. The sixth was from his brother again, sounding even more frantic than before. Then it sounded like the phone hit pavement, and he could hear faintly, in the background, a male voice screaming in agony.
He snapped the phone abruptly shut. Numbly, he tapped through the numbers he had on speeddial, then every single one he had on his phone, then the police, then long chains of seven random digits. No one answered. He looked again at the call log. They had all been placed in the space of half an hour, the most recent of which was over five hours ago. "You're probably the last one left on earth, Myde. How does that feel?" he whispered to himself.
The answer was not what he would have expected. Tears—there should be tears, most of all, and screaming, sobbing, shaking, maybe even the desire to punch his fist through the windshield, though he wasn't usually given to violence. But he didn't feel much of anything, really, except empty. It took conscious effort to cry for them, when before today he would have had a complete and total breakdown. He wasn't very good at stoic or restrained; that was his brother's job. When their father died in some pointless and probably preventable pileup on the freeway, he'd been a mess for weeks. That's what he should be feeling like now: limp with grief, sobbing, helpless. He cried for a while, because it seemed like the appropriate reaction, but it was a detached and mechanical motion. His heart wasn't in it, and eventually he gave up.
As long as he had this unnatural calm, he might as well use it to find out if there was anyone left. He reached up to fiddle with the rearview mirror and froze when he saw a stranger's tear-streaked face staring back at him. The boy reached up to touch his face in shock just when Myde did. He ran his hands through his hair, which was all wrong, too short in some places and too long in others. "Who are you?" he asked the boy in the mirror. "Are you even Myde? Because last time I checked, he was a rock star with blue hair, that guy on the cover of Imminent Demise. Goddess, Alan knows how to pick album titles, doesn't he," he said, and did not laugh. "You are obviously not that Myde, since your hair is now blonde and much longer than it was yesterday, and your eyes are blue instead of hazel, and your face is the wrong shape. But you are wearing the clothes he put on this morning, you have his car keys in your pocket, and what feels like his brain inside your head," he said. Maybe he was crazy after all. Deceased and crazy.
It still felt like he had a mind, at least so far, more of one than he would have expected after what he'd been through. Might as well go see what happened to everyone else, no matter who he turned out to be. He backed out of the driveway and started down the road, too fast, but how likely was he to run into any cops? The trickle of traffic on the mountain highway was frozen in place. He wondered vaguely where the pause button was, and who pressed it. Some of the vehicles had run off the road, into fences, lampposts, or each other. He wove through the stopped cars, giving up on trying to stay in the right lane. There was something wrong with this tableau, besides the obvious, and it wasn't until he came upon a truck with blood splashed all over the spiderwebbed windshield that he realized what it was. There were no corpses, neither inside the cars nor out. The only body he'd found so far was Maddy's. The windows of the cars had been smashed and some of the doors thrown open, but the passengers were nowhere to be found.
The mystery would have to wait. His brother's silver convertible was up ahead. He stopped halfway in a ditch at the side of the road and got out. Nuggets of window glass sparkled amidst the umber gravel, and there was a spray of dried blood on the driver's door. Something plastic crunched under his foot—it was his brother's phone, the screen now a lace of cracks. He slipped it in his jacket pocket, just because, and sat down on the asphalt to wrap his arms around his knees and shiver. He was completely adrift, the chains to his anchor in the wide world snapped forever.
Dani would have known what to do—he was always in control of any situation. His brother had looked out for him ever since he was old enough to toddle. He'd been the one who finally got their demo tape noticed by the right people, by force of personality alone. He'd convinced Myde to put off going to the music conservatory in the fall, full scholarship or no full scholarship, since the band needed him. Dani was the frontman, of course, since he could sing, and he was better looking, not so bony, and most importantly, had the kind of stage presence that made teenage girls throw their panties at his head. Myde talked too much and too fast, and had a funny laugh. Like the sun and moon, his brother burned bright enough that some of his charisma reflected off of Myde, and had brought them both more money and fame than they knew what to do with.
Even without those things, just to get a few steady gigs around town would have been enough, as long as Myde could play. When he used to have the time, he'd sit on the sunwarmed roof tiles with his sitar, and work out new melodies until the stars winked in and out again, forgetting hunger and fatigue. Dani never did that. He owed his brother a lot, and would never say it to his face, but he knew, deep down, that he was the better musician. Dani had a passion for the spotlight. It wasn't the same thing.
But then his brother had been displaced as reigning king of the supermarket tabloid rags by headlines shrieking Aliens! and They walk among us! Myde dismissed it at first—some fad; since who'd be stupid enough to believe in little black aliens? It at least provided some respite from the paparazzi, since if those bloodsuckers were busy chasing down creatures from outer space, they weren't lurking around trying to snap pictures of him eating popcorn in his underwear. After two weeks, the alien mania didn't go away, but was picked up by the mainstream papers. There were videos, authenticated by experts, played on endless loops on the evening news. The air thrummed with fear and anger against anyone and everyone, so deep in the bass ranges it was almost impossible to pin down but could still be felt, a sickening hum deep in your bones. People started disappearing.
Now they were all gone, every single one, even the boy he'd thought he was.
"Why are you here?" he asked the empty air.
"Because you, my friend, have been given an encore," it answered.
There was a man standing over him. Not standing next to him and leaning over, but literally standing firmly on nothing about ten feet in the air above his head. The image he presented seemed oddly out of joint with his voice, which was jovial, relaxed, with a hint of sarcastic bite; his face, meanwhile, was like that of a nasty old torncat, badly scarred and with a yellow eye (singular, the other was covered with a rakish eyepatch). He was dressed in a tight black coat the reached to the tips of his boots, and Myde noticed that his salt-and-pepper ponytail was falling up. "I'm gonna miss this place," he said. "You people really knew how to cook up a skillet of shrimp. The spaghetti al mare at Mancini's? Great stuff. Damn shame to lose it."
"Who are you? What's happening?" asked Myde, rising to his feet, as the man walked down a set of invisible stairs until he was standing upright on solid ground.
"Come with me, and all your questions will be answered. I don't think you'll like the answers—neither of your seniors have—but you'll get them," the man said, and chuckled to himself. "Out of every soul on this world, yours was the only one strong enough to survive. You, of all people—a flash-in-the-pan teenage pop star with a bad haircut. The irony, oh, gods, the irony."
Myde stared, for once in his life, at a loss for words. "Well, come on," the man said. "We haven't got all day."
"And if I stay here?" Myde finally asked.
"See that?" he said, pointing to a thin crack in the road almost at the edge of his range of vision. "Your world is imploding. You'll want to be far away when this happens."
Myde thought on this for a few moments, and puzzled at the paralyzing terror he didn't feel upon hearing this news. The survival instinct was still there, a desire not to experience more physical pain, but it wasn't as sharp as it should have been, not nearly, considering the circumstances. There was curiousity in there, at least, and the man promised answers.
An oval oil slick slightly taller than a man bloomed beside them. "After you," he said, sweeping his hand by way of invitation. It made the air taste of ice and the black space between the stars.
"I'm not going in there," said Myde.
"Yes, you are. What I said before about staying? Not really optional," he said, and before Myde could bolt grabbed his arms hard enough to bruise and threw him in.
The boy who was Myde died.