the alive

Terra

Remembering. It's like a tempest within a blizzard of fog. A powerful storm within a powerful storm where there's no reprieve from the blasting winds of memory. Deafening order of madness wading chin deep in the recollection of a horrible event.

Knew she was going to die the moment her idea to stop David Leonard entered her mind. This is the memory she breaths in and out of her thoughts. It was her whole existence when she was a prisoner of David in the empty city simulation. The agony of forgetting and reliving those awful moments like they were the first time, again and again.

Another horror cut deep her vision. Watched one similar to herself jump from the top of a crumbling building over and over. Exploding upon cement. Not her. Someone else. A different Terra.

But for this Terra, the real dread was Muerte. Muerte killing Paula. Muerte killing Lord. Killing them all. That endless shadow who would come out of the darkness until it was the darkness pressing on her skull, crushing her subconscious with it's hard fingerling hands and suffocating girth. Her ghost or whatever imagination she might have been was made of all that she was in that empty place within her dead ashen body at the bottom of the mire.

And so Terra relives her death for the first time since waking up. It disrupts her window watching from the fourth floor of the hospital. The world beyond the glass of orange red brick and grey black concrete and forest green grass and oceanic sky all swirl into the darkest parts of her mind as the distant horizon burns out. The weight of her body's too much to bare. She witnesses a horsehair coat laying on the floor of an apartment across the street and wonders if it's really there. Not her's. Fish eyes blink at her from that apartment in her murky direction. The gravity of the ground sucks. The fish eyes close. Nothing's there.

She's a phantom. A memory that remembers how she saved the city and other imaginary simulations. Exploded a hole in the Leonards tyrannically imposing base of operations with C4. Found the main WMD room. Pressed a crimson button and typed upon a stiff keyboard and locked herself in the main weapon area behind interior walls made of four foot Wolfram. The Leonards weren't expecting her. Not alone. Remembers she carefully disconnected the payloads from the weapon system. Unscrewed thin square bone white panels and pulled green glowing motherboards from dark metal cavities to find twisted lids above compartments of doomsday gasses ready to be mixed at the touch of another dark red button or a serious fuck up by cutting the wrong wire or the right wire. Such a misstep would bring about the end times. There were ten flaccid cords per weapon that she knew had to be disconnected in a certain order to shut off each missile individually. The worst of the wires was at the beginning of each repeating pattern. The first wire that she had to cut was invisible to the human eye. Somehow Terra found it each time by noticing its shadow among other shadows, which was somehow visible to her. After wires, hands became sore. Tight pickle jar like lids were twisted from inside each missile to release the harmless gases that weren't yet activated with the type of electricity needed to automate the apocalypse. She was in that room for hours. Sweat through her tank top and jeans and socks. Rosy cheeks. Disheveled sticky hair. Skin slick and drippy as though her body was covered in lubricant. She must have melted off ten pounds in the heat of the situation. Thirsty.

Flannel coat was draped across a dismantled missile like a saddle upon a finless shark. The banging and rattling noise of the Leonards trying to get into the room to stop her surrounded her every exit. They wanted to kill her. Badly. And she wanted to kill them.

When all the missiles were forever destroyed and all the gasses were whispered into the air, she found a crowbar. Smashed every console and hologram device in the room. Alphabets and numbers and binary operators laid underfoot everywhere. Crumpled plastic and thinner shards crunched under her boots.