Book One: Fissures dans les Ténèbres
Chapter 2
"We're going mad."
"Calm yourself, Eddy; a simple case of heat stroke if anything."
"Heat stro- That was not heat stroke! I've had heat stroke and it was nothing like that! Never heard of heat stroke causing the same hallucination between three people!"
"Until I have finished analyzing yours and Ed's phones, that is the only proper answer I can offer." Eddy alternated between sitting on the workbench and pacing around manically in disarray, not really sure which he was in the mood for, but most definitely shot Double-D some disconcerting glances at his friend's sudden calm. This was not normal. This did not happen. Yet it had. And they had all agreed that it had to do with the phones suddenly turning into a better Matrix movie than Reloaded and Revolutions had been. So while Eddy paced restlessly and sat even more restlessly, Double-D was removing components from their phones; connecting it to his computer every now and then to see if his analyzing had garnered some results. So far, nothing and it did the same amount to calm the ever growing sensation in his stomach that this was something that he may end up not being able to explain. "Why don't you go join Ed on the couch?"
"Join Ed on the couch; have both of you gone completely mental?!" Running a hand through his short and sparse hair for what felt like the millionth time, Eddy took a firm hold of the work bench as if to reaffirm himself that he wasn't going to float away mid-sentence or something equally odd. "A thing straight out of Godzilla pops up in the sky, chases after us with the intention to rip us violently to pieces and then popping straight back into whatever weird ass B-movie it came from; how the hell can you guys be so damn calm?!"
"Because I have to!" The scientific mind of the group snapped, dropping the tweezers and tearing off his goggles. He gave Eddy a disheartened look before averting his gaze to nothing in particular. "There is not one scientific case in the history of mankind that can explain what occurred today, Eddy, and if what we saw was actually real... What's to say it wouldn't return? That it doesn't have friends? That this is the beginning of something bigger than any of us? That's why I choose to stay calm because if I do not, I would not be able to function properly due to the fear of the possible causes and outcomes from that... Thing we saw." Silence fell over them; the eerie kind of silence that occurs when no one in the party really wants to add something to an already charged situation. Quite ironically so, this is when the power went out.
"Double-D, power's out!" Ed called from the couch, having been informed of the outage due to the television screen having cut to black right in the middle of a sentence which was really only acceptable if one was watching The Sopranos.
"Backup generator should become activated quite soon!" Barely had Double-D finished his sentence before power did indeed return to the household. Heaving out a sigh, he glanced at his friend seated next to his work. "I'm not saying it would happen, quite on the contrary, but nothing seems no longer impossible."
"Yeah, I know, whatever." Gritting his teeth, Eddy contemplated on saying something but decided against it; what was there really to discuss? "I'm gonna join Ed on the couch."
"Do so, Eddy." The inventive young man followed his distressed friend's back with his eyes until it disappeared out the door. A heavy sigh escaped him and his head collapsed into his open hands, sliding his fingers in under his beanie.
It was illogical. It was nonsensical. It was damn near impossible. He began to rub his temples and threw up a mental template of the situation.
Fact: The creature couldn't exist.
Contradiction: They had all witnessed it, sober and in their right state of mind.
Question: If so, could the existence of the creature correspond to their reality?
Answer: Perhaps, though unusual and, to his knowledge, previously unheard of.
Question: Where had it originated from?
Answer: Unknown.
Question: What caused its sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance?
Answer: Unknown, but the events were most likely in cause and effect of the text messages Ed and Eddy had received.
Conclusion: He had to get the phones working.
Question: How?
Opinion: Fuck all.
He slammed his fist down upon the workbench in frustration. Questions; nothing but questions. Usually, Double-D lived and breathed for questions, looking to feed his burning curiosity, but even he had a limit. He didn't even know what it was he was trying to do here. Sure, look for answers, but how? Crack the code that crashed them in the first place? He didn't possess the expertise. Even if he did get them working, then what? What would he do with the information? Further yet, would it matter?
Once more he glanced upon his friends' cell phones and sighed. There was one last thing he could try, a sliver of an idea in the back of his mind, but it was insane. A mere impossibility that it would garner any positive results. Not to mention dangerous. But... Of course, how could he know it wouldn't work if he didn't try? Like so many other times he had helped himself and his fellow Eds out of tight spots?
In the meantime, Ed and Eddy were sprawled out in the couch, trying with immense mental strength to block out the encounter with the scarlet monster with the mindless droning of afternoon television. They both failed miserably; mostly because they'd never really given a flying toss about mental strength but even more mostly due to the fact that television these days can easily be, to put it simply, shit.
"Hey, Eddy?" Ed took a quite so normal breath.
"I don't know, man." Eddy shifted uncomfortably.
"Yeah, I don't know either, but what do you think?" Ed filled his lungs with air in a familiar manner.
"Trying not to." Eddy fixed his gaze determinedly on the television.
"Why?" Ed's nostrils widened as air flowed past them.
"The hell would I want to?!" Eddy gritted his teeth hard.
"It's interesting." Ed granted his brain some fresh oxygen.
"It's shit-your-pants-scary; that's what it is!" Eddy pressed his thumb down upon a remote control button violently.
"Come on, what if it really isn't of this world?" Ed inhaled.
"Then mankind is fucked; let's hope it's just us going batshit cray cray!" Eddy quickly glanced out the window before cursing internally over his lack of interest in increasing his mental strength and whatever powers there be that decided that television should go down the crapper.
"I don't know." Ed breathed calmly.
"Look, I don't wanna talk about it! And would you stop breathing so fucking loudly?!" Eddy snapped and while throwing the remote control down onto the couch, to instead focus on glaring at Ed in contempt, inadvertently changed the channel one last time for that day. What followed was rather interesting.
"Eddy."
"Yeah, sure, I guess it's kinda cool for you to finally be encountering a real life monster after all those years wanting to be one, but this is fucking real, Ed! I don't know about you but I kinda like living!" Eddy punched the couch cushion next to him in deep frustration.
"Eddy."
"Look, I'm sorry for snapping, man, but this is just... It's freaky. I mean, yeah, what if?" Eddy picked at a hole in his jeans absentmindedly, trying to focus his thoughts.
"Eddy."
"What if it isn't from Earth? What is it then; alien? Some kinda inter-dimensional being? Mutation from nuclear waste? Sure, we were lucky to get away now but what do we do if it comes back? With friends?" Eddy ran a hand through the sparse hair he had and looked at his friend with a dejected look.
"Eddy."
"Yeah?" Eddy, at first confused at his friends monotonous conversational contribution, followed Ed's gaze to the television before having the same thing done to him that had been done to Ed when he had laid upon the content of the new channel; his breath got caught somewhere in his throat and was currently being negotiated for between his wind pipe and brain.
A moment passed.
"DOUBLE-D, GET IN HERE!"
"HURRY!"
Another moment passed.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, SOCKHEAD?!"
"YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS!"
A third moment passed before Eddy's wind pipe, satisfied with the unusually large settlement it had received, released the breath it had been holding which finally rushed up to his brain to give it some startling news that had been received from the guys down in optics. This was all it took for Eddy to jump up off the couch with frightening speed, bolt to the hallway door connected to Double-D's garage and promptly throw it open.
"WHAT'RE YOU, DEAF?! GET IN HERE!" Double-D was not, in fact, hard of hearing but rather situated in a sound proof environment due to the fact that his neighbors had many a time complained about his late night attempts at trying to improve machinery around his house. One would be surprised at just how loudly a turbo charged toaster could fire bread.
"For heaven's sake, Eddy; you scared the living daylights out of me! I'm doing something-"
"FUCK THAT, COME ON!" Instead of waiting for the full explanation of the nature of his friend's experiment, which you will receive within a few moments, Eddy grabbed Double-D's arm and yanked it, pulling him with as he darted back to the living room. The latter could do nothing but try and match the speed.
"Thank god for DVR!" As soon as the two entered, Ed pressed a button on the remote in his hand which unpaused the image of the newsreader.
"- reports are pouring in about something unidentified making its way towards the Transamerica Pyramid but it is at this time unclear what it is." The man on the screen in front of them, who had dedicated a great part of his life to get to where he was right there and then, suddenly looked as if the cameraman had pulled out an enormous foam finger flipping him off. "What the hell- Is this real? Do we have confirmation on this?" A nervous irk arose in Double-D as the newsreader looked to his left and right around the studio. "Ladies and gentlemen, we will now proceed with displaying live footage of the event in question and if it is as described to me..." It didn't appear as if he was able to finish the sentence as he instead looked down upon his desk where the light of a monitor illuminated his face. This picture was then disrupted by a more low quality, and a much more eerie, one.
"No..." A whisper escaped Double-D's lips as he stared upon the television in hopeful disbelief and absolute horror. Ed and Eddy, even though they had already witnessed this part of report, did the same.
"I'm being told that we are currently seeing... What appears to be some sort of beetle, at least four hundred feet in height, and it is slowly making its way towards the Transamerica Pyramid. It appeared out of nowhere a mere minute ago and officials claim no knowledge of the thing's nature or origin."
"Look familiar?" A question, asked by Eddy, that had never been closer to a statement in the history of curiosity. Double-D faintly grasped the couch.
"It can't be..."
"Early witnesses believed it to be some sort of publicity stunt, a balloon, but this was later debunked as evident by the trail of- Oh, god." There was a brief interruption where the picture returned to the studio, showing the newsman staring into the camera and having lost all sense of professionalism. All hope seemed to have gone out in his eyes as he clasped a hand tightly over his mouth."As the trail of devastation it is leaving behind shows. Viewer discretion is within all seriousness advised; parents, please don't let your children see this." He quickly added the last thing before reluctantly turning back to the screen. The low quality picture returned and swooped down to show an excessive amount of damage having been done to the streets of San Francisco themselves, cars having parked on those streets and, most horrifically of all, the ruins of multiple buildings. There was a brief moment of silence.
"We're not insane, that much is for sure." Ed had seen enough monster movies in his days to know where this was headed but even he couldn't have anticipated what followed soon afterwards.
"This is..." Double-D searched his brain for words to describe the horrors he was witnessing but there seemed to be none.
"This is fucked up." Eddy had something close to the true nature of the situation but it wasn't even enough to begin with.
A beetle, gray in color and approximately four hundred feet in its hunched over stance, was slowly walking through everything and everyone on its way to its apparent destination; the Transamerica Pyramid. Though dwarfed by the immense building, it was evident that this would not deter it from attempting to walk through this as well. The immense wings on its back swayed in the wind as the four legs smashed all in its path, its pincers opening and closing at random intervals. What frightened the three friends the most though was the striking resemblance between this disproportional insect and the one that had popped in and out of their lives fairly quick earlier but had left a lasting impression nonetheless.
"The- The damage it could do should it-"
"This. Is where it gets even weirder." Double-D thought Eddy's statement ludicrous, as it would surely be impossible for the entire event to become even more out of the ordinary than it already was.
As previously stated, Ed had expected the footage to continue with the beetle smashing its way through the Pyramid which would then at one point fall and cause an awful lot of damage to an awful lot of people. This, obviously, did not happen. Because this is when the fourth, and by far longest, oddity had begun to occur.
The screen suddenly turned to white as a bright flash blinded the camera and when the picture returned, there was something dropping out of the sky; seemingly originating from the top of the Pyramid. The camera attempted to zoom in but this decreased the picture quality to such a degree that it was deemed better to just get a wide shot instead. This was, from any cinematographer's point of view, a good thing as something quite extraordinary happened when the sky bound object in question made contact with the beetle. The giant insect's head was thrown back as if having been punched.
Not only was its head thrown back; its entire stature was shook to such a degree that the creature had to muster up all of its strength to stay upright after its hind legs had given in. This gave it a reason to, for the first time, make a noise; it emitted such a monstrous, guttural roar that it made anybody human who listened to it tremble in fear. It quickly brought its pincers up to its head, snapping them furiously at whatever it was bothering it but this unknown entity seemed too fast for it. The object, a mere dot against the size of the beetle, leaped off its head and extended something above its head which it quickly and ferociously brought back down again. The scene froze temporarily after the impact.
"What the-" Eddy, who had gone to retrieve Double-D before he had seen this, began to say something about the quality of the broadcast before several points of light burst out of the beetle's head. To many viewers' astonishment, or to those who still possessed some at this point, the enormous insect seemed to dissolve all at once into a ridiculously high amount of fine particles that rose to the heavens while the tiny speck dropped down onto the ground below. Apart from the collapsed buildings and indentations of enormous footprints in the street, there was no evidence the beetle had ever been there. Silence seemed to fall upon the world.
"Holy shit." The severity of the situation dawned upon Ed and he was actually starting to feel terrified; this was so far from what they had experienced. They had been lucky, they had escaped the beetle hunting them, it had simply disappeared. This beetle had devastated an entire block in just a few steps, killing countless of people without any more effort than just walking.
"I don't wanna. I just... don't wanna." Eddy whispered and fell back down onto the couch, staring lifelessly at the screen where the newsreader had reappeared; pale and shaking.
"I- In all my years of- It can't be. It simply can't be..." He looked down at the cards in front of him, the teleprompter that was sure to be in the vicinity of the camera, around the studio but wherever he looked, he seemed to get no comfort. So he looked back to the screen and recoiled in absolute horror. "Holy shi- What the hell is that?!" The picture cut back to the area around the Pyramid but was this time located on the ground directly in front of it. The quality was a lot better but also a lot shakier as the person holding the camera approached a figure. The dot that had dropped out of the sky was no longer a dot. Standing in the exact middle of four humongous indentations in the ground stood a man-like figure.
It was man-like in the sense that it stood proudly on two legs with pants wrapped around them, two arms resting along its sides and a head on top of its shoulders. Upon further inspection, which could have been conducted at least fifty yards away, it was actually nothing like a man at all.
First and foremost, it was a light shade of green. Following this, one would notice the multitude of bolts violently protruding from its green shaded skin. Sparking wires escaped its shoulders and a metal mask covered its entire face with a head of spiky, fiery red hair coming out on top. This would also be where one would realize that it stood close to ten feet tall, towering over all other things remotely man-like. If one could get past all these things, and the steel-toe boots it wore with its tarnished pants, one would probably lay eyes upon another small detail and wonder panicky how in the world one didn't see that before; the enormous twin-headed battle axe it held in its left hand. It was upon seeing this weapon that the cameraman stopped dead in his tracks and proceeded with slowly moving away, which any sane person would have deemed a good strategy.
"Ed." Double-D felt how dry his throat had become and attempted to swallow.
"Yes, Double-D?"
"Could you... What's the time differential between the beginning of the report and the appearance of the... Green. Thing?" Having failed to swallow, Double-D began turning pale. He had a hunch, one he didn't like.
Watching the entire thing backwards and then forwards in rapid succession did nothing to help the three young men's confused sense that this may have been the beginning of an end to the world as they knew it.
"Just under ninety seconds." Double-D looked as if he had been struck by lightning and he held onto the couch even firmer for support, afraid he would collapse.
"Oh my god. It's- It's my fault..."
"What is?" Eddy perked up in confusion which quickly transformed into a deep sense of worry when he saw a shimmer in his intelligent friend's eyes. Double-D closed his eyes and his lips pursed into a thin line.
"I- I did this. I called them here." With that statement, Double-D turned his back on friends, couch and gruesome imagery the TV displayed and retreated to the garage.