The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Author:Alan Averill [Averill, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781101610985
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2013-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

chapter twenty

“That must have been one hell of an important call,” says Tak to no one in particular.

He’s staring at the bones of a woman lying facedown in the crosswalk. She’s draped in the tattered remains of a blue dress and holding a cell phone in one hand. The other hand is splayed across the pavement with most of the fingers gone. There is a large, ragged hole in the top of her empty skull, and the more Tak stares at it, the more it looks like someone jammed a straw in there and sucked out the insides like a milk shake. He can see a handful of such skeletons from his current vantage point, all of which appear to have the same wound. He has an idea what caused the carnage but doesn’t want to think about it just yet. There will be plenty of time to freak himself out later.

His pancake-free insides have finally stopped twisting around, a fact for which Tak is eternally grateful. He uses the sleeve of his rapidly disintegrating suit coat to wipe a fleck of puke from the corner of his mouth, then jogs in place to test his legs. When they don’t send him crashing to the ground, he takes that as a sign it’s time to move. Soon his mind is clicking into survival mode, sorting through his priorities and working on solutions for each. The usual top of the list, water, is shoved to one side and replaced with shelter; Tak is more than willing to die from thirst if it saves him from meeting whatever punched a hole through the brains of an entire population.

But you can’t die, he thinks. You can’t because Sam is back in the solid timeline with Yates. And you know the kind of man he is. You know what he’s capable of.

The thought of Samira in the company of Charles Yates strikes Tak with physical force, and he finds himself fighting the urge to begin vomiting all over again. Such thoughts are poison if he’s to have any hope of surviving this bombed-out shell of a timeline, so he quickly makes a new deal with himself: Stop thinking about her. Just don’t think about Sam until you’re out of this place. Then, once you’re back in the solid timeline, you can ruminate until your heart explodes. Deal?…Yeah, okay. Deal.

The city in which Tak finds himself is a massive thing that must have once teemed with life. Surely the people who lived here wouldn’t recognize the silence of the place now; they probably never knew a time when things weren’t loud and bustling and wonderfully alive. Judging by the height of the buildings that tower around him—as well as the occasional fine suit he sees shrouding a skeleton—Tak appears to have landed in the financial district. Cars litter the streets and sidewalks, and a few have even slammed into the sides of buildings. These broken wrecks are marked with odd, unrecognizable names: “Solaris,” “Technic,” “Fananza,” “Grin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.