MOSAIC

Chapter 17: Nightlife

I could see the window at the end of the corridor, rainy daylight filling the passageway like glimmering magic. Near the window a body had collapsed, head tilted awkwardly up towards the glass like he was still trying to see outside. I approached his decaying remains and was puzzled to find a lack of rot or gore, just crumbling mounds of ash and incinerated remains, portions of it partially tattooed to the wall like tree bark. Some of the withered ruins of his body floated into the air, wafting around like flecks of burnt newspaper. ​

A black speck of ash settled on my forearm and I felt a sharp sensation like something was trying to take root deep inside the skin. Dark smoky tendrils broke forth from the spot where the ash had landed and began twisting around a small area of my arm, creeping and extending themselves like creek floodwaters. I watched them struggle for a few moments before they abruptly faded as a surge of energy rushed through my arm, slashing against the foreign element like fire burning through straw. Whatever had overcome him, it couldn't overtake me. ​

Outside, stacked clouds of purple and black rolled over one another like vaporous mountains, the vast body of water beneath them stirring itself agitatedly, trillions of little waves rolling against one another in a never-ending expanse of trembling ocean water. The spectacle was nerve-wrackingly unsettling, like witnessing the preface to a war between sea and sky.

​I took a knee and looked hard at the once breathing, moving body of ash and cinders, scraping my hand through the dried coals and embers of its corpse. It killed him...but can't do anything to me...

​I pressed myself to the window again, breathing puffs of damp plumes against the glass as I strained my eyes to see into the waves down below. I couldn't see it from all the way up here behind the window's glass but it had to be down there. And I was going to draw it out. Because now, I stood more than a chance.

​I soared down the escarpment, charging my way onto the coarse black sands of the beach, scraped and bruised to the bone, and headed straight for the water. I waded right in, fully clothed, forcing my legs against the foaming tide that rushed against me. Once I had cleared the initial breakers and was chest deep, I took a breath and dipped my head beneath the surface, allowing my body to be sucked in deeper by the ocean's unstoppable tow. It wasn't long before I was dragged out into open water by the current, the shoreline just a distant watery image, re-appearing and disappearing with the bobbing of the waves.

​I floated in silence for a time, my lips blueing from the cold and eyes stinging from the saltwater. The bruised sky churned overhead, swelling and convulsing as though it were a sea of its own. Rain looked imminent, but it was strange in the sense that it felt as though the water was about to be gravitationally pulled skyward. I gazed up at the thick, bloated atmosphere and for a second I seemed to lose my balance, unaware if my body was actually in the water, or up in the sky looking down at a parallel ocean.

​I submerged myself beneath the surface again, the mute, resounding rush of underwater nothingness engulfing me. I strained my eyes to see into the murk, but it was infinitely barren. Bottomless water in all directions. I swam deeper in a direction I thought to be down, anticipating the submersed freight-train of a shark to come careening from up at me from the depths, but I wasn't even certain that I was underwater anymore. I wormed myself around through cold liquid space, but my body was becoming rigid, too frozen to propel myself around properly. There was heavy pain in one of my shoulders, so much the point where I couldn't even move it, like it was physically stuck. Strange sounds like distant muffled echoes came to me from somewhere— at first remote and distant, but becoming clearer and clearer by the second. A rush of de-pressurizing relief swam through my head, and all at once the heavy slog of oceanic submersion was drained from my ears and nose.