By N.C. Krueger
2nd Place, Prose, Create | Encounter 2024
The ghostly light from the six computer screens envelops us, turning our uniforms an eerie seafoam-blue, and my brown skin gray. The only sound is the blacklights’ buzzing.
“Sensor, ready?” I say, my voice even.
“Ready.”
Then I feel it again. His cold breath, prickling the hairs on the back of my neck, and his silent fingers, tracing their way between the notches of my spine. It’s now, in the lonely moments before I send the warheads flying, that the shadow comes creeping by. Invisible, unnamed.
I glance over at the sensor—she’s intensely focused on the all-consuming blue glow. Behind her spreads a cartoonish mural—the only decoration in the tiny bunker—where our squadron mascot, the grim reaper himself, stands grinning, his black cloak sweeping over mountains, trees, and deserts.
Quickly I look back to the screen, flickering with the spy-camera image of a real desert and a gray compound. And a man, dressed in white, talking on the phone, so small I can see the pixels he’s rendered in. From here, it doesn’t look real at all, I think, and the shadow’s fingers trickle up my neck and press against my skull.
Click. The sensor’s locked on.
His breathing comes again, faster and faster on my neck. I shiver.
Click. I release the bomb. His fingers crawl into my ribs, tightening like a vice, and as time slows cold hands wrap around my body, fixing my feet, locking my jaw; there’s a rush of darkness and distantly I hear the sensor counting to five—
***
I’m standing in a desert. The sun is high, but I’m cold to the bone. Above me is the glint of something curved and shining, and his fingers are still at my back.
“Dreaming,” I manage to murmur. Then, “Where am I?”
Don’t you know? His voice is gentler than I’d expected.
“No.”
Look, says the shadow.
Then, I see the man in white, talking on the phone.
We lock eyes.
The next instant, we are engulfed in a whirlwind of fire. And then the roar, breaking my ears, then the searing heat, the smoke filling my lungs, and still my eyes are locked with the man in white.
But now, his skin melts off his bones and his bones carbonize to ash. Somehow, only his eyes remain, ever-burning into mine.
Far away I still hear the blacklights humming, or maybe it’s my drone, my reaper of steel and circuitry, high in the sky, far from the desert, father even from the bunker, always too far to know. Always, too far to understand. But I know we’re burning from the heat of its gaze.
I see the shadow for the first time, looking too solid and real to be a shadow, eyes black like a night without stars, curly hair silhouetted by the inferno. The crescent of his scythe, shining silver and white. The beating of his dim, purple wings as he flies to the crumbling man.
“He saw me,” I whisper. “He understood.”
I look up into the man in white’s eyes. “Didn’t you?”
There’s no answer, and his eyes roll from his sockets, dropping into the sand.
The scythe rises like a moon above him. The Reaper enfolds him in his wings. They are like curtains falling, falling like shadows, stars, bombs, grains of sand . . .
***
My head spins. I’m floating backwards through the smoke. And then I see that the smoke is far away, a column of black smoke rising on a flickering screen. I’m sitting in a desk chair, in the bunker with the blacklights and computers.
The sensor peeks at me from behind her square glasses. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” I’m shaking. “I am.”
As I get up to leave, I stare at the mural on the wall. The cartoon Death winks at me with his empty eye-socket. I shudder and look away.
Commenti