Author’s note, 4/3/09:

I did some light editing of chapters three and four, so if you had a powerful need to read those with less spelling mistakes and one or two tightened paragraphs, you can now do so. Other than that, enjoy, and I’ll try not to wait another couple of months for the next submission.

Don’t Let Me Down

By Simon Jimenez

Chapter Five

“Come Together”

*

When Brody told me that the world was going to end, for some reason I wasn’t that surprised. After all the shit that I’d seen, the end of days seemed like a logical conclusion to it all. Anything less epic would seem like a copout.

Apparently, so the story goes, fifty years ago a powerful psychic in one of Brody’s ‘circles’ predicted that at some point in the near future, the equivalent of the apocalypse was going to occur, wiping away all life on the planet. This sent the mythical realm bat-shit insane, which led to the deployment of reliable soldiers and detectives like Brody’s mom, to try to find out when and how the day of reckoning was going to strike.

I think if it wasn’t for the weed I was smoking, I probably would’ve panicked and jumped off the cliff we were perched on. Instead, I nodded my head, smiled, leaned over and kissed him. We had sex twice that night. Call it an ‘end-of-the-world’ high.

That night, I dreamt of darkness, and a baby’s wail echoing in the distance. I stumbled, following the screams until I entered a room ankle-deep in blood, and lifted the baby out of the pool. There was a knock on the front door, and when I opened it, I saw my Dad. He grabbed me by the neck, and the world began to rumble.

“Take me to the White Tower,” he whispered.

When I woke up, Brody was no longer next to me. I slipped into my jeans and stepped barefoot onto the cold dirt, shivering against the bite of the morning air. I stood back and watched the world breathe; the trees swayed like trembling hands, the grey sun flickered in and out of a cloud’s shadow, two crows flew in unison over the cliff, toward the city. It was hard to imagine this all being gone at some random point in time... and even harder to imagine me being so blasé about it all. What was wrong with me?

Brody was calling my name. I turned away from the cliff and saw him waving at me from across the clearing.

“Do you want some breakfast?” He yelled.

The Pinkermans were a family of two middle-aged parents and five children between the ages five and thirteen. Every couple of months, they camp out in the wilderness and have a picnic brunch, no matter the weather. Joan Pinkerman, the mother, was the self-awarded best chef of grilled breakfast meats, and wore a matching apron to prove it. Marty Pinkerman, the father, watched his wife cook with pride. The children fought over the best pieces of meat. 

I nibbled once on my slice of ham, before realized I wasn’t hungry at all. Instead, I watched Brody play fork fighting with the five year old, wondering how he convinced this tight-knit family to let two complete strangers eat their breakfast.

After we thanked the Pinkermans for the meal, Brody drove us back to civilization. It was on the way down a dirt road slope that an intense wave of nausea slammed against my stomach. “Stop the car,” I moaned, “Dude, stop the car.” I jumped out, leaned against the rock wall, and emptied my guts. The force at which I gagged was so great I was brought to my knees. It was hard to breathe. I felt like a wrung-out towel.

Brody rushed over to me, rubbing my back. “You alright?” he asked.

I was on all fours, staring at the pebbled ground below me, and all I could think about was the sun burning out, the clouds raining acid, and the Pinkerman family burning in apocalyptic fire. The world was going to end.

“I-I’m fine,” I stammered. Then I threw up again.

“Fucking hell...” Brody muttered, “I should never have said anything, I don’t know what I was thinking... I’m so sorry, Harbor.”

“Don’t be,” I said, wiping my mouth of filth, “It’s better that I know.” I pulled Brody into a desperate hug, squeezing as hard as I could. “It’s better that I know.” No matter how much I repeated it, I still wasn’t convinced. A pathetic part of me wanted to be angry with Brody, while the rest of me just wanted to hug him. “It’s better that I know.”

He drove me home after that, a silent ride filled with awkward glances. I made sure that the kiss goodbye was longer than usual, just in case. “See you tonight,” he said, before driving away.

Gwyn was in the kitchen, eating cereal, when I attacked her from behind. She let out a loud oomph when I wrapped my arms around her and hugged. “Where did that come from?” she asked as I let go, milk dribbling out of her mouth. “And I only ask because the last time you hugged me like that, you killed my fish.”

I shrugged playfully. “I’m just in a hugging sort of mood.”

“Eww, you had sex last night, didn’t you?” She started to wipe her arms down. “Now I have gay all over me. Thanks a lot.”

I punched her shoulder. “Fuck you.”

We watched a movie together that morning. I can’t remember the title, or what it was about. My focus was on Gwyn, who was watching the screen like a cat about to pounce a piece of string. She had Dad’s green eyes, mom’s sharp ears, grandma’s blonde hair; she was an amalgam of my entire family. Her smile, though, was uniquely hers, and when everything has gone to hell, that was what I was going to miss the most.

“Stop staring at me,” she said. “I’m trying to watch.”

“Gwyn, I--” but I stopped myself. She didn’t need to know. “—Nevermind.” 

The rest of the day was a haze. Nothing felt real anymore. I sat on my bed, hands gliding up and down fixtures in my room, knowing that this was all going to disappear. Forever. There was a finality to my life now that hadn’t been there before, like I caught a glance at the end of a book, just enough to catch the gist, and the gist was everyone dies.

I took a nap, subtly conscious of the sun’s light fading through my window. I fell asleep, and had a strange dream again. I was standing in a city alley, drenched in night, watching two figures moving in unison against the wall, a man and a woman. When the man came, he stuffed a few dollars into the woman’s fist. He walked away, and she fell to the floor, crying.

The baby’s wail echoed in the distance once more. I went to find it. I needed to find it. I walked so quickly that hadn’t even realized I was already there, in the blood soaked room, the same woman cradling the crying baby in her starved arms. There was a knock on the front door. I went to open it, and found my Dad on the other side again. His hand shot out and grabbed my throat. He squeezed with relish, then pulled his mouth to my ear and whispered, “Take me to the White Tower.”

“Harbor.”

I jumped awake, and hit my forehead against Brody’s in a loud thwack, sending him reeling to the floor. Still in too much shock to feel any pain, I got out of bed and helped him up, apologizing profusely.

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” he assured, rubbing the new welt on his head. “I’m the one who should be worrying about you. You were screaming in your sleep.”

We sat on the edge of my bed, the only source of lighting coming from my bedside flexi-lamp illuminating our laps and hands. Mine were shaking with a need to hold something solid, so I grabbed the blanket. “It’s just this dream I’ve been having. Vivid dream... babies, blood, white towers... it’s the same thing over and over.”

“Oh,” he said with a crack of a smile. “That’s pretty fucked up.”

“Dude, shut up.”

“Sorry,” he said, realizing I was in no mood to make light. “Look, one of my ‘associates’ is cashing in on a favor from me, and now that I have no secrets to hide from you, I thought you might like to come for the ride.” He paused for a moment. “It’s okay if you’re not in the mood. It might be better for you to rest.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I needed to get outside. I needed to do something.

Brody took me to meet an immortal man. He wandered the lonely alleys long after everyone had gone to bed, humming tunes as old as the moon that lights his way. Scars and happy wrinkles ran along his face in deep canyons, allowing ink shadows to fall across his gnarled cheeks like tears. Underneath his tattered shawl, he wore a serene, thin-lipped smile, oblivious to his worn physical state.

The immortal man told me he was done with living in the shadows of the streets, watching the world pass by one day at a time. In his weary silver eyes, the sunrise had ceased to be novel, people were endless reruns, memories still as painful as the day he received them.  

“I fought in the civil war,” he said in his rusted voice, “...and lost. My brother Nathan and I, we marched side by side with boys no older than sixteen, followed our captain straight into an ambush. Lost everything I had in one battle.” His lips fumbled over the next few words, his eyes staring right into the roaring barrel fire. “Nathan threw his body over mine to shield me from the rain of bullets coming from the north. Tore his guts apart.” He coughed. “It’s funny, I had just told him the day before that I would protect him no matter what, that I’d never let him die. But I was scared, and weak, and he knew it. 

I was alone after the battle. Wandered the forest for days, hungry. It started to rain, so I took shelter in a nearby cave... found this deep inside, floating above a pool of red water, like it was held by some invisible string.” The man brandished a flower from his coat, a vibrant yellow lily that smoldered under the moonlight like a miniature sun. “This is what you came for, is it not?”

Brody nodded, but said, “Only when you’re ready to give it to me.”

“When I’m ready...,” the man repeated impassively. His large thumb traced the stem of the flower in small strokes. “I’ve been living with the guilt of my Nathan’s death for more than two centuries, believe me, I’m ready to die. I would’ve died long ago if I was able to drop this damn flower.”

His eyes had fallen into a light trance.

“It’s so yellow, so soft...gilded feathers of an angel. I could never bring myself to drop it, this fucking beautiful thing.” He took in a breath, and shifted his gaze toward Brody, staring right through the crackling fire. “That’s why you’re here, though. To help me let go.” He extended the flower over the fire, his tired eyes begging Brody to take it away, the curse of immortality. “Help me then. Nathan is waiting for me.”

In his truck, Brody lowered the flower into a foot long brown casket, and locked it inside with a silver key. As we drove out of the land of warehouses and trash piles, I saw the now mortal man back away into the shadows, clutching his heart.

“He’s going to die soon.” I said with certainty, still staring out the rear window.

Brody didn’t bat an eye. “Probably.”

“You don’t seem bothered by it at all.” I turned back around. “In the next few minutes, a man we were just talking to is going to die in some alley, never to talk again. How do you not blink twice about that?”

He glanced at me with an amused smile. “I just don’t think about it.”

Best advice I heard all day. I shut my eyes, stopped thinking, and dozed off into yet another nightmare, where my dad’s hands were around my throat, and had only one demand.

Take me to the White Tower.  

School the next morning passed quickly, the teachers’ voices not more than a blur in my ears as I watched the clock tick by. Suddenly, it was lunchtime, a fact that made me happier than usual. The school cafeteria wasn’t my favorite place in the world, but it was familiar. The loud noises, the ant-like movements from one end of the room to the other, it made me comfortable in a world of strange and random happenstance.

Alice and Melvin were deep in conversation by the time I sat down beside them. I don’t even think they noticed me sit down until I said, “I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Isn’t it a rule that if you actually were losing your mind, that you wouldn’t know it?” Alice pointed out. “What’s bothering you?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, wondering why I even opened the conversation on that note. “How was your guys’ weekend?”

“My Dad and I drove down to the beach,” said Alice.

“Ellis and I visited our grandma,” said Melvin.

Almost in unison, they asked, “What did you do?”

“I just hung out.” I felt around my back pocket and realized that I forgot my wallet. No lunch for me today. “What were you guys talking about before I interrupted?”

Alice’s face brightened. “Melvin was telling me about what his little brother did for his grandmother. I heard you met him. Is he as cute as he sounds?”

“Yeah, he’s adorable,” I said. “What did he do, Melvin?”

Melvin swelled with pride. “My grandma is really sick, so she’s staying at the hospital, but they were going to kick her out because there was something wrong with her insurance, so Ellis charmed the officials into giving her an extended stay.”

“What is he, eight?” I said. “How did he do that?”

Melvin shrugged. “He appealed to their sense of reason.”

“This is what happens when you go to privately owned hospitals,” Alice said, shaking her head slowly. “Same thing happened with my nana. She’s dead now, the bastards. We should picket. Which hospital is your grandmother in?”

“White Tower Hospital.”

My stomach fell through the floor. I grabbed him by the collar. “What did you say?”

*

The monolithic White Tower Hospital stood like a giant elephant tusk in the center of the city. As I stood outside its wide sliding doors, I berated myself for being so stupid not realizing the connection sooner. Of course, it still didn’t make any sense why I was dreaming of my Dad wanting to go here in the first place. I hurried inside, eager to make the most of this visit considering I was missing the last three classes of the day for this.

The main lobby was a giant white circle, with the information desk curving along the west wall, and the waiting room separated with a sheet of glass along the east. Each step I took echoed. My eyes took a while to adjust to the blinding fluorescence.

As I tried to think what it was I was doing here, my feet began to move on their own. I felt myself pulled towards the elevators, and jumped into an empty one right as the doors shut. My hand lifted itself and pressed the 7^th dial. Somehow, I knew that was my destination. The door slid open on the 7^th floor, and I walked out, guided by an invisible force down the long corridor, wondering where I was being led to, until I stopped in front of room 717, the very last door.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I walked inside, but what I found wasn’t it. The room was ordinary, the bed, the IV drip, the respirator, all ordinary. Nothing fantastical or revealing about any of it. But the man attached to all this machinery, he sent shivers through my body.

He was youngish, no older than thirty, had a shaved head, and a weakly pale complexion. He had a breathing mask on, and sounded like he could barely hold his lungs in place. What frightened me about him, though, was how much he looked like my father, from the angular jaw to those prickly green eyes.

His chapped lips formed a trembling smile. “Hello,” he said.

Slowly, I waved at him, my available vocabulary quickly dimming.

“I was wondering how long it would take for you to get here, there... here,” he said in labored breaths. “You did get my messages, yes?”

He looked at me and I looked at him, thinking that it was a mistake to come here without Brody. But I couldn’t turn around and leave, almost as if I was tethered to my spot with invisible restraints. What else could I do but play along? “Are you talking about the dreams?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’m sorry if they frightened you.”

“Why didn’t you just call?” I asked.

“Would you have come if I had?”

He got me there, I thought. Then, in one of those moments of dawning realization, I recognized his voice. “You... you’re that guy who called my house weeks ago. You said--”

“The seven are coming with the end of the world,” he finished. “Sorry about saying that ‘one month’ part... months are passing days of hours in minutes, they swallow...” his words began to overlap, and he coughed. “I only wanted you to hurry up.”

“I don’t understand...” I swallowed a wad of spit. “Who are you?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “I can see snapshots of the future, blurred images and non-sequiturs of events that don’t relate to anything. My brain, it doesn’t work like others... It’s hard for me to remember how I, when I... no, it isn’t time yet.” He shuddered, and those green eyes fell on mine. “I am a mixed result of an unholy union, a pure blood psychic and a human. I am the baby in the blood of your dreams, and the scratches don’t reveal the depth, you have to run to find him, Harbor is not....” The man shook his head like a dog with lice. “Eugh. As I was saying, my mother was the psychic who predicted the end of the world, Brody has told you about her already, has he not?”

“How did you know?”

“I am a psychic, keep up, I’m way ahead of you and I can’t see the clouds when the walls, the walls... I’m sorry, but I can feel myself losing grip. I don’t have long, which is why I needed you to come here todaaaay.... Will you listen to me?”

I nodded, and walked forward until I was at the edge of the bed, my curiosity overriding any suspicious feelings of fear. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I’ve waited so long to meet you and the seven are coming with the end of the world, Harbor Ryan of Ryan Harbor, harbor, water, streams, the rain comes hard don’t go home he’ll drown you.” He shuddered again. “Please forgive my ramblings, I don’t have long, which is why I needed you to come here todaaaay.... will you listen to me?”

“Yes, you already asked me that.”

“I did?” He seemed genuinely confused. “Yes, I did. The seven are coming with the end of the world, the world is dying, water... rain.... I don’t know when or how, but you need to save him.”

“What seven?” I asked, starting to get frustrated by his riddles. “Who do I need to save? Why did you bring me here?”

He grabbed my hand, making me jump in surprise. His skin was so cold. “Seven figures of night, circling their prey, I don’t know how long you have, but they will come, come into your head, don’t let them in come in. You need to save the boy, the holder of Zeus, the Godchild, take him to the cabin or else all is, all is, all is- Goddamit it doesn’t fit the pieces of eight, I can’t reach the end!” he screamed. I stepped back as the man collected himself, slowing his breathing, wiping his forehead. “Forgive me, it all wants to come out at once. As I was saying, I am the baby in the blood and no, no that was not what I was saying, I was saying Ellis Moore.”

My brow furrowed. “Ellis Moore? Melvin’s little brother? What the hell does he have to do with anything?”

“Save him,” was all the man said. He shuddered again, this time in violent spasms, as if held down by a paint shaker. Before I was about to go get a nurse to help, the spasms stopped. The man’s eyes were sedated. “...that’s enough of that, I’ve spoken my piece, you know the truth, you may leave.” The EEG beside his bed began to beep slower and slower. “My end has come, I have performed what was asked of me, you may leave.”

“B-but I still don’t understand. What am I supposed to save him from? When is the end of the world?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can only see snapshots of the future, blurred images and non-sequiturs of events that don’t relate to anything. My brain, it doesn’t work like others, doesn’t work quite like my mother’s.”

“Why am I here?” I demanded. “Why did you call me?” I felt like I was about to lose it. I could feel myself peering off the edge of sanity, into the oblivion of the end of days. There was an intense need inside me, aching for a purpose, for some sort of meaning in all this fucked up nonsense.

“I am a mixed result of an unholy union,” the man repeated, “of a pure blood psychic and a human. I am the baby in the blood of your dreams.”

“You already said that!”

“The weeping woman is the seer of the apocalypse, my mother, she was beautiful in red. My father, the man in the alley with the sweat-stained money...” He licked his dry lips. “My father was your father.”

And like that, my world was flipped over once more. “What?” I said, refusing to believe what I heard.

“We are half-brothers.”

“...no.”

“We are connected.”

“My Dad... he didn’t...”

“We share a bond, Harbor,” he said. “My mind refuses to link with any other. For my entire life, I saw your life through your eyes in my dreams, my random thoughts all piecing together when I saw the whole, the center, which was you. I love you, You are important, Harbor Ryan... my brother. Without you, there is no future.” He let out a harsh cough, spilling blood on his breathing mask, but despite that, he kept on talking. “Save the Godchild Ellis. He... needs to go home. I need to go....” The EEG began to pulse out to a beat every few seconds. The man’s green eyes were drooping. “I saw this day coming for me entire life. I dreamed of it for thousands of nights, I so wanted to meet you.” His hand raised out, reaching for me. “Please... just once...before I go. Let me feel... something...”

The least I could do was oblige, though my hand wouldn’t stop trembling as it reached out for the stranger’s. I could feel the world stop turning as our skin made contact.

Like lightning bolts in my mind, I saw the proof of his heritage in images reeling through my mind at rabbit’s pace. I could see Georgia Reeve, the psychic who foresaw the end of the world, begging for money on the street, and then selling herself to a younger version of my Dad. I could see her give birth to my big brother in that lonely, ramshackle apartment; there was so much blood, and the neighbors would pound on the walls for the baby to shut up. She gave her child up on a doorstep, and he had new parents.

I could see him, growing up, alone and friendless, babbling incoherently about blurred images and non-sequiturs to people who refused to listen... dreaming of images of me, learning to ride a bike, watching my father die, kissing Brody... listening to my half-brother on his deathbed. The assault of prophecy never stopped attacking his mind. His parents knew there was something wrong with him, so they sent him to an institution, where he stayed until his ‘unholy’ body began to fail.

Now he was here. All his life, he had gone from one cold, empty room to another, and he just couldn’t wait for the end of the world for the final freedom, so now he was going to die. The last image I saw was Georgia Reeve, holding her baby, knowing that she was going to have to let him go.

“Let me go.” he whispered.

I opened my eyes when the last beep on the machine became a wailing swan song and a flat line. His eyes were still open when he died, so I closed them. I didn’t know his name. There was still time to find out, there were ways, but I wanted to get out of there as quick as possible, get somewhere I could breathe.  

There was too much confusion.

*

Alone in my bedroom, I sat with my back against the edge of nightstand, feeling the warmth of the lamp shoot down on the back of my neck. As I tried to ‘just not think about it’, my mind kept circling back to how cold my brother’s hand was when I held it. I held up my own hand into the light and stared at it, the veins and bones running their course through the skin, the warmth it exuded.  

Someone knocked on the door. “Harbor, it’s me.” I let Brody in. He had a pile of papers in his hands, patient records. “It’s true,” he said, sitting on the bed, “he was your brother, and the son of the psychic, Georgia Reeve. His name was--”

“Stop,” I said, trying to fight back tears. “I don’t want to know.” 

“Okay...” Brody said, shrugging it off to indifference, “well, we have surveillance on the Moore household, so no one is getting to Ellis. And the, um, seven figures of night, we have no idea what that means, but we’ll keep looking....” He fell silent when he saw that I wasn’t paying attention. “I probably sound like a broken record saying this, but... are you going to be alright?”

“It’s funny,” I said, still staring at my hand. “I always wanted an older brother.”

Then I smiled.      

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