Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition Read online

  SOMEONE TO REMEMBER ME

  The Anniversary Edition

  – by Brendan Mancilla –

  Copyright © 2014 by Brendan Mancilla

  Cover design by Natasha DiMatteo All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Written in the United States of America

  First Printing: February 2012

  ISBN-13 978-0-9850016-0-5

  To Ian Hillis, who I will remember forever.

  CONTENTS

  Part One: The Survivors

  Chapter One: Dawn

  Chapter Two: A Nearby Sadness

  Chapter Three: On the Hunt

  Chapter Four: Timeless Knowledge

  Chapter Five: Among the Shallows

  Part Two: Rapture

  Chapter Six: In Memoriam

  Chapter Seven: Origins

  Chapter Eight: A Soul to Keep

  Chapter Nine: The Flaw

  Chapter Ten: Love and Reconciliation

  Part Three: Eternal Recurrence

  Chapter Eleven: Summons

  Chapter Twelve: Mortal Coil

  Chapter Thirteen: Grand Cross

  Chapter Fourteen: All Creation

  Chapter Fifteen: Someone to Remember Me

  Afterword & Acknowledgements

  In this hour of daybreak, my sins yearn for absolution once more. They have endured exaltation and exile, ecstasy and misery, born from kindness and yet mired in criminality. Judge my actions as you will, decry them as you must, but the reward for my patience is nigh upon the horizon.

  A cold light spreads across the ruined place you fought to possess and, in your arrogance, doomed forever. This fatal truce, this peace in death, could not last. Perhaps that is why you stir? Woken from your age-long slumber, summoned to action by the dawn of the roses.

  Part One: The Survivors

  Chapter One:

  Dawn

  Vomit came easily, the third time around. It burned and scraped against the back of his throat and threatened to course through his nose. In the end it burst through his mouth and splattered against the cement, giving him to chance to gasp for air and think. Amidst this wondrous activity a singular thought occurred to him:

  How could he be vomiting when he didn’t remember eating?

  Trembling, he fell to the ground but made sure to avoid the pile of what had once been in his stomach. If the air hadn’t been bleached by some other baleful odor then he might have worried about smelling like vomit. That brought another thought to mind and he sniffed the air. Try as he might he couldn’t name the scent that it carried to his nose. As he inhaled gulps of air, he figured that it eliminated every other smell. After a few seconds his nose could not detect the bile only inches away.

  A faint pain in his hand distracted him from the air quality. Clasped in his fist was the stalk of a flower. Dark green, its…thorns, yes, thorns was the right word...the thorns had cut into his skin. Because this…the words clicked into place in his mind, this was a rose, and roses had thorns.

  And this rose, in his hand, with its thorns, had cut him. A bit of blood dribbled along the stalk of the rose until it hit the pavement. There was no pain. And that was odd because as soon as he pulled the rose free of the cuts, the gashes remained. He turned his hand about as he evaluated it. He didn’t know how to fix a cut. He had no idea how to repair the damage done to his body.

  He felt that time was slowing down for him. Unable to make sense of anything, the sky and the air were halting their movement to give him a chance to catch up. Why couldn’t he remember words, or names, or even where he was? What caused him to wake up, sick, and at a loss for everything? At least it wasn’t nighttime. One advantage was obvious to him: the time of day.

  Gray, useless light fell through the street he stood in the midst of. It pushed through the great towers that were bathed in black shadows. Far in the distance, obscured and mottled by the morose clouds, the sun rose and punched a couple of lucky beams through the coverage. As white light pressed inwards it illuminated the buildings and a dim gleaming emanated from them, carrying a twinge of something alien—a color other than gray and white—to their lonely observer.

  Holding his hand up to guard his eyes, he could see that nothing stirred in the approaching dawn. The street he stood on, vacant in every direction except for the towers that guarded it, betrayed no other people. He knew when the stillness endured that things were not as they should be and panic overtook him.

  “Hello?” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. By standing, he inhaled more deeply than ever before. “Is anybody there?”

  The vast emptiness of the city carried his voice a distance greater than it might normally travel. No response. Such silence. Such emptiness. Around him, the relentlessly tall buildings stood and watched his vain attempts to not feel alone. Overwhelmed, he staggered backwards.

  Where was he? How could this be? Where were the people, their voices, the signs of life that a city should exhibit? Why were the streets empty, the doors shut, the windows crusted over by dust and dirt? If he was alone, then he had a mournful city to himself, clearly abandoned by the original owners, whoever they were.

  That was it. Abandoned. Everything, the whole entirety. The buildings, the streets, the sidewalks were abandoned. Wary of remaining in one place for too long, he wandered down the empty street and cast his eyes up the lengths and sides of the buildings.

  Size had no meaning here because everything was tall, imposing, and empty. He supposed that each one of the towers could house incalculable numbers of people. What had caused the inhabitants to leave? Better yet, what had caused him to stay?

  Being alone began to frighten him. His life had started four minutes ago, when he’d realized he was vomiting in the middle of a road. No other memories came to mind when he prodded for them. When he asked himself to remember any detail before a few minutes ago, his mind shrugged irresponsibly. As the lonesome magnitude of his situation began to settle in on him he remembered that in his hand, his only clue, was a rose.

  Where could the rose have come from? As his mind devoured and reconstructed his understanding of the word city, he concluded that an industrial beast was no place for a flower. Towers, metal, steel, glass, pavement: they were their own type of nature where the artificial crowded out the organic.

  His pacing became hurried, his fear worsened, and with each step he felt driven towards something. In the oppressive silence the only sounds he heard were those of his feet against the pavement. Soon he was running, almost flying down the black top, searching for something. His heartbeat, his steps, his gasps for air, they worked together and formed a patchwork music. Becoming cohesive, taking form, the music slid out of the dark spots in his memory.

  No more than a memory’s wisp, he hummed the musical notes and the fear within him became still. His mind’s slow feed of information, which had reluctantly come to him when he thought about roses and cities and buildings, evaporated in the heat of the music. His mind remained a black depth when it considered the music.

  He felt like he had been running for a long time. Not from fear but because it felt good to run. Testing his physical strength felt correct. Until he started running he hadn’t realized how stiff his body felt. In defiance of its resistance, he whipped through the streets of the forgotten place, but clutched the rose while the music pulsed through his head.

  The rose was his link, it was his key. To what, to when, to whom, or to where could not be answered yet. The answers were here and now
here else, he felt certain of it. The knowledge he sought was being watched by towers rotting with lonesome grief.

  In the dark spot of his mind the song burned clearly, the lyrics dictated to him by a force stronger than instinct.

  “Day of wrath, oh day of mourning!” he hissed, the melody absent from the words. His body trembled and slowed to a stop. Without the melody the words issued like a warning from his lips and were emboldened by the dead city.

  In his fear he refused to reach out and touch the song again. He shuddered to a stop and cast a fearful gaze across the endless stretch of city ahead of him. When he thought of the song it made him feel connected to a story he was afraid to think of and simply unable to remember.

  The fear was too great and the loneliness set in again. For how impressive a sight he found the city, it was a shame that he should be left alone inside of it. An unpleasant sensation returned to his hand and he looked at it.

  Well, almost alone.

  In his bloodied hand was the rose. He held it up in the feeble light of the morning, facing the weakened dawn. The sun brought a faint hue of another alien color, too weak to cling to the rose for long, to his eyes. A brief life in the petals of the flower, a soft reminiscence of old glory. It encouraged him to think that there could be more beyond the gray and the grief. When the clouds parted, the sun rose above the obelisks of towers. A featureless white orb ascending the scentless air, dominating the silent city.

  He hesitated, wondering where to go. The music had propelled him forward and without it the familiar uncertainty returned. Because walking on the empty street felt too strange to endure much longer, he returned to the sidewalk. The buildings lining the streets here appeared even older than the first ones he saw. These buildings, not nearly as tall as some of their neighbors, were a combination of brick and steel at their base. At their zenith they were glass and metal, aged by the elements, their comparative youth scarred beyond recognition.

  Studying a particular doorway, he left the street and carefully approached it. Drawn to it, he thought he heard an echo of the music but dismissed the notion. The door was part of a wide landing, an opening for the building’s occupants to flood in and out of. As he got closer he realized that the wooden door was actually glass. Glass that was so filthy, so disgusting with dirt and mud, that it looked—and felt—as grainy as wood.

  He wiped a hole in the grunge with the bottom on his fist and peered inside. Perceiving only darkness, he used the width of his open hand to clear a larger area. Dirt crumbled away from the glass while some clung to his hand. The glass, cold to the touch, yielded little more of the building’s interior.

  His attention was grabbed by an audible clicking noise. Beneath his palm and fingertips the glass warmed. Small red lights appeared beneath each of his five fingers, contemplating whatever secrets they might glean. As the lights in the glass deliberated, he heard it again. The music came back, ringing in his ears alone, weighing his mind down, pushing his body towards the ground. If he could have cried out, he would have, but the music forced sentient thought from his mind and pulled him towards the past. His mind, so much of it blank already, plunged into vacuousness. Dimly aware that his hand was still pressed against the glass, held in place by the same forces trying to swallow him into the past, he did not see the lights switch from red to green.

  Somewhere in the distant past, when the lights flicked from red to green, the hatch opened with unbearable sluggishness. It lowered itself outwards, revealing the street that had been commandeered by a small army. With each inch that it grew the opening allowed in the sounds of the helicopter’s blades, their whirring growing less distinct as the flying machine slipped into dormancy. Undoing the safety buckle in his seat, he rose and escorted himself out through the fully opened hatch.

  Stepping out of the helicopter meant rejoining a world bathed in nighttime. The city’s towers sparkled with a million lights. It was a beautiful sight and not one he thought he could ever stop appreciating. Armored personnel carriers were scattered around the street, uniformed men and women keeping the perimeter under control. A tremor swept through the militia, a ripple of familiarity caused by his arrival. One of the officers broke away from a small contingent he was animatedly conversing with. Dealing with the majority of the citizenry meant being reminded of a biological fact: he was a head taller than the average citizen.

  “One-Six-Two-Seven?” the officer inquired, looking up at him to make eye contact.

  “Yes,” One-Six-Two-Seven answered with a nod. He glanced behind him and saw that the helicopter was asleep, its pilot conducting a check of the exterior. Street landings were an increasingly common occurrence and required constant mechanical examinations by the flight crew. Most of the city’s residential streets were only just wide enough to support a helicopter’s girth.

  “Sir, I didn’t realize that you would be the one sent to deal with the situation. I only meant to call for a negotiator,” the officer said apologetically.

  “Why?” One-Six-Two-Seven demanded sharply. “I’m a HARM commander.”

  The officer snorted. “That’s a bit of an understatement. You’re from high command itself.” Realizing that he’d inadvertently been disrespectful, the officer amended himself by saying, “What I meant wasn’t—”

  “I know what you meant,” One-Six-Two Seven interrupted. “I think I’m qualified to begin negotiations, don’t you?” he asked. Gulping, the soldier nodded. “Debrief me.” He started walking towards the building entrance that their people and equipment were clustered around. A set of floodlights had been erected outside the entrance, columns of blinding light pointed at the affected area.

  “We believe the suspect is contained on the ground floor. We cut power and quarantined the first three floors after landing people on the roof. Interior scans indicate that there’s one life-sign on the ground level, and per regulations we called for a negotiator,” the officer looked at One-Six-Two-Seven expectantly.

  “How did the suspect get into a building all the way out here? The neutral zone is miles away,” he wondered aloud.

  “I don’t know. Haven’t had the chance to ask yet,” he answered with an attempt at situational humor, as the two men quickly approached the line of soldiers and equipment that marked the safe zone between them and the building’s doorway.

  One-Six-Two-Seven held out his hand.

  “Give me your gun.”

  “Sir? Are you sure that’s—”

  “It wasn’t a question,” One-Six-Two-Seven answered. Reluctantly, the officer turned over his pistol to his commander. “Turn that light off.” Someone at the floodlight shut it off obediently. “Stay out here,” he finished, approaching the glass doors and placing his hand on the cool surface. Since the power was out, the door pushed open easily, the glass beneath his hand missing their usual lights.

  Closing the door behind him, One-Six-Two-Seven studied the hallway. There were plenty of side-halls and adjoining rooms to be searched, if it came to that. His instincts told him that much would be unnecessary.

  Instead, he called out: “Are you there?” Silence followed until the other man in the room made himself known: a shadow at the end of the hallway, having appeared from nothing. One-Six-Two-Seven bravely approached the figure, the man who was himself a head taller. Compared to the average citizen, the criminal in front of him was a giant. With his head hanging in shame, the man fell to his knees in front of the negotiator.

  “You don’t need to do that,” One-Six-Two-Seven warned. “Get up.”

  “Not in your presence,” was the reply. “Forgive me.”

  “You’ve broken the truce by coming here. You’re aware of that?” The shamed man, his face hidden by the shadows of the dark lobby, nodded. “Then why?” One-Six-Two-Seven stressed.

  “I came through the tunnels. I wanted to see it. Just for a minute. But one of the masters discovered me. I have never seen the city—I have only known the inside of our hold,” came the forlorn explanation. “I di
d not mean to jeopardize the truce.”

  “Well, you have,” was his blunt response.

  “Then you must do it yourself,” the man pointed at the gun in One-Six-Two-Seven’s hand. “I would rather fall at your hand—” he inched closer to his executioner. “Please. If they take me, they will dissect me.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” he answered, hesitating. He felt foolish for having taken the gun, for thinking he could act so brashly. It was one thing to imagine protecting the truce, it was another to act in its defense.

  “It would be an honor to die by your hand, to fall in the presence of my go—”

  “Don’t!” One-Six-Two-Seven snapped irately. “I don’t need to hear that.”

  “But it’s true! How can you stand to be around them? They call us savages, yet they are the ones who see you the most and yet not at all. How can you tolerate them as you have?” he bemoaned, feeling pity for One-Six-Two-Seven.

  Kneeling, One-Six-Two-Seven admitted, “I don’t know. I take it one day at a time. I think about the truce and it helps.”

  “Sometimes, those who have lost something precious fight the hardest,” his companion murmured, finally looking him in the eyes. One-Six-Two-Seven couldn’t name what he saw but he guessed it might be defiance. Strength. “They took something from you. Like they did from us. Maybe that is why you tolerate their insolence? You’re waiting for a chance to take it back.”

  “Maybe,” One-Six-Two-Seven admitted quietly. “Or maybe I don’t want to see anyone else die.”

  “Then today you will be sorely disappointed.” Glancing over his shoulder and through the glass to the militia barricade outside, his companion urged, “You must do it now. They grow restless.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” One-Six-Two-Seven offered apologetically, rising as he took aim.

  “Don’t be. Death is only a door,” the crouched man lowered his head and closed his eyes, clasping his hands together as if in prayer.