Hello 👋 I hope everyone had a fun Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I went through some of my sketches in Procreate and I had some old artworks involving a lot of Hidden object games I’ve played this back then. So I wanted to show some here:
This first one is from the Game Series: Dark City. It is a Hidden Object game thats available in IOS and it takes place in the Victorian timeline. The first drawing is the main character “The Detective” in the series until the 5th game. If you noticed that blue eye shown through his monocle, its based on his in-game mechanic where its used to deduced the scene needed for the mystery. There is like a few scenes i can get to gather reference and all of them are just the backs of his head , so i just improvised 🤷♀️.
The second character is Agatha and she appears in Dark City: Budapest. She became a main character in the 6th game and so on in the series. I think she is supposed to be a possible love interest for the “Detective” since i have seen scenes in the game that showcasing it. I haven’t finished the rest of game series yet but overall I enjoyed the games i have played in the series.
This next drawings are actually redesigns of two characters from Mystery Case Files series. First one is Benjamin Wright and i wanted to give him some traits to have more personality in his appearances. The reason for the piercings is based on a headcanon of mine that he gotten them because the guy (Jack Talon) from Ghost Patrol has piercings and he thought it was cool, so he went and get them. Did he regretted getting a tongue piercing? Maybe.
Second is Allison Sterling and I wanted to give her a sort of “modernized” fashion (mostly because I gotten tired of her just wearing plain outfit that I’ve seen many characters in games and wanted to make her different). I’m still not sure on her preferred fashion though. Oh and if you noticed scars on her sketch, its was referencing what happened to her during Mystery Case Files: Crossfade. Theres an actually have plot involving the scars in my Au but thats it for now.
Allison pursed her lips, standing against her door in nothing but her underwear and straining to hear what was being said between Geno and Ben. He’s early. He’s never early. And he sounds far more bothered about Snatchers than he usually is. What is going on? Why isn’t Ben questioning that? He knows the guy better than I do and it’s obvious something’s up. She took a breath and pushed herself away when her roommate left the living room to shower.
She resumed the forgone activity of getting dressed, but the worry weighed heavily on her. She couldn’t make out much of the conversation, but she had heard plenty to know that something was wrong and Geno wasn’t going to talk to Ben about it for whatever reason. Her phone buzzed on her bed. When she picked it up, she felt the blood drain from her face and she found herself glad that she picked it up with her right hand, as it wasn’t given to shaking like the rest of her had started to do.
Remember to talk to the good doctor.
She unlocked her phone to try and reply to the message, but when she did, it was gone. She hadn’t accidentally deleted it, nor had she dreamed it this time. Her heart raced as she tried to come up with something, anything, she could do. She had no way to respond and if Ben had been any indication, talking aloud like a loon wasn’t any good. Frustrated, she threw her phone down onto her bed with a groan.
Do I talk to him now, while Ben’s preoccupied? The last one… it said he’d know in time, right? So maybe it’s better to bring it up before I can freak him out more. But… She paused, realising she’d started pacing, worrying at the fingers of her prosthetic hand. What if he already knows? What if he’s in on it? Maybe it’d be better to get answers from him. Though, if he does, then he spent a good lot of time denying it.
She cursed whatever powers-that-be that would let the world devolve into such a state, man or otherwise. She hadn’t caught more than a few hushed words when their conversation dropped to nearly a whisper. It gave her the distinct feeling that they had known she might have been listening. They wouldn’t have been wrong.
She slipped into a pair of black athletic shorts and an oversized band t-shirt with the nigh-unreadable logo of a death metal band that looked as though it was spelled out from assorted branches and bramble. Cradling her right arm in the other, she sighed, closing her eyes for a few seconds and trying to regain her composure. Turning, she picked up her phone, opened the door, and strode out into the living room, trying her best to look mildly annoyed instead of panicked.
When she did, Geno looked up from his phone and locked it, putting it face-down beside him, saying with a far-too-casual tone, “Hey, Al. How ya been?”
She paused, narrowing her eyes and sighing, “Fine. Fine, Geno. More of the same, if Ben hadn’t told you. Flashbacks, that sort of thing.” The doctor nodded, looking her over and then nodding toward her right arm.
“No problems with the prosthesis?” He smiled hesitantly when Allison silently shook her head. “Good.”
He took a long breath that looked like a half-heartedly-resisted yawn, stretched, and gestured to the couch beside him, but Allison remained standing a few feet from the opposite side from where he sat.
“You’re acting weird.”
“Come again?” Geno looked taken aback, but not, perhaps, as much as he should have.
“I heard you talking when you came in. You’re never worried about Snatchers. They know to leave you alone. Ben didn’t ask, and I don’t know why, but with that, on top of everything else, it’s just weird.” Allison crossed her arms, fixing him with a stern glare, as if trying to break the mask she suspected he wore with it.
The doctor simply shrugged in response, “I’m waitin’ for something. A message from a client. Worried about them, is all. I guess it’s just leaking over into other things.”
Allison’s blood turned cold and a shiver shot up through her spine, setting in the small of her back and refusing to leave. She could feel herself paling, and could tell the man on the couch before her noticed as well.
Geno spoke before she could, “You alright? Still with us?” He waved a hand and it brought Allison back to her senses through virtue of mild irritation winning over. She waved a hand at him as if trying to bat his out of the air from a distance.
“I’m fine, Geno. Just… I still think something’s up,” she said with an indignant look, though she couldn’t direct it at him, her eyes looking away, as if hoping that when she looked back, he’d be back to what she expected: A somewhat callous, somewhat paranoid, thirty-something New Yorker who really only cared insofar as he could keep his clients or friends. Ben was both, and always took priority, and yet he let him run off without so much as a word of what he’d like to see or do.
“I’m an underground doctor, Al. There’s always somethin’ up,” he said dismissively, “Now tell me what’s been goin’ on. I might have somethin’ to take the edge off those flashbacks.”
Maybe nothing is wrong? Maybe it’s just me. She shook her head and sighed, “No, no more pills, Geno. The last shit you put me on turned me into a zombie for a month. I’d like to feel like I’m alive, not like the living fucking dead you guys seem to think I am sometimes.” She shot him a smirk and was relieved when the Russian rolled his eyes, the green emphasised only slightly by the dark circles beneath them.
“Yeah, yeah. Never were one for pills, were ya. Look, that’s the only real option I got until you can find a therapist to talk to who’ll believe ya,” he said, waving a hand around.
Allison snorted derisively, “Right. Tell someone that I’m a living conspiracy theory.” She looked to the bathroom. The water was still going. Granted, it’d barely been a few minutes, and Ben often took up to an hour in there sometimes. Her gaze darkened and Geno looked somewhat unnerved by it.
“Got somethin’ on your mind, there, Al? Ya look about to murder me. Don’t think I’d like that too much,” he said, making an attempt at levity.
She stood there, staring at him for a few seconds and fighting an internal battle of wills with herself before she finally spoke, “What do you know about “the activation,” Geno?” The doctor swallowed hard, and it was his turn to lose most of the colour in his face.
He cleared his throat and asked softly, cautiously, “What were you told?”
She shook her head, swallowing hard to clear the lump in her throat that had formed when his demeanour changed so dramatically, her voice cracking at first, “Noth- nothing aside from that I was supposed to ask you about it.” To ask him for it would’ve been more accurate, but she continued to try playing it safe for the time being.
Geno nodded slowly, scratching his forehead and looking away, “You know not all those scars were from when ya died.”
“I’m still not convinced I was dead, but go on.”
“No, trust me. You were dead. Dead as a fuckin’ doornail. No matter how you might’ve had air to breathe in that coffin, you were in there for a month. Not much would keep you from croakin’ while ya slept, and it would’ve been pretty obvious to any trained mortician that you were still kickin’ when they opened you up.” At the last part, he lifted a finger to point at her chest. The scars she’d always made sure to hide on her front were ones that made her sick to look at: the scars from an autopsy that had healed over. They weren’t entirely obvious, since it seemed like an attempt was made to be subtle. Where the cuts would’ve been made all the way up toward her shoulders, they stopped halfway.
“Then how would these have all been healed when I woke up? How didn’t I just split the fuck open, Geno?” she raised her voice somewhat, the topic upsetting her now.
He shrugged, sighing and muttering, “Beats me, kiddo, but that’s the way it is. That’s what this activation’s all about. The way you were prepped, the way you were examined, all of it – it wasn’t standard procedure. Not by a long shot. To make matters worse, the implant to facilitate that arm of yours was already there when I opened you up. All ready and waitin’. I dunno why, I dunno how, and I dunno who… but I know what I’m expected to do.”
Allison took a reflexive step back, as if fearful, asking cautiously, “And… what’s that…?”
Geno shook his head, “Don’t worry yourself over it, Al. It ain’t gonna kill ya if that’s what you’re worried about. Granted, I dunno what the hell it’s gonna do. But you’ve got all kinds of gizmos in that head of yours. I ain’t even really convinced that’s the end of it, either. Someone’s got plans for you.”
“I don’t think I want any part of it,” she said hesitantly. She’d begun to look like a cat backed into a corner, green eyes wide and her posture starting to look defensive.
“I dunno if any of us’ve got a choice,” the doctor said, sounding resigned, “The way I understand it, you get one of two sides of this coin, and the other side ain’t the one you wanna mess with. It ain’t what any of us wanna mess with.”
Allison stared at him, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Geno shook his head, looking right at her, almost apologetically.
“It ain’t a choice of mine, and it ain’t yours neither,” he said, pausing for a few minutes, “Dunno how much they’re gonna like me tellin’ ya this, but… it is what it is. You got snatched up at some point, and something was set in motion. Someone wants you for something, and I don’t think the people we’ve been hearin’ from are those same people. They’re trying to stop somethin’ and apparently they’re using you to start it.”
The violet-haired girl could only stare.
“Look,” the Russian said with an even stare, “Now ya know, and it’s now or never, ya follow? What we need to do, though, we can’t do it here.”
Allison looked back and frowned, watching the bathroom door, “What about Ben?” Geno responded by waving a hand dismissively and pushing himself up with a grunt to walk toward the bathroom door.
Rapping on the door with a knuckle, he cracked the door calling in over the steam and sound of running water that met him, “Hey Benny, I’m taking Al back to the clinic. I need to have a look at that implant of hers. Somethin’ tells me it’s causin’ her all this grief.”
Ben sounded sceptical, “Are you sure? You don’t want me there to check it?”
Geno dithered for a bit before speaking again, “Eh, nah. Not right away anyhow. Come down when you’re good and ready. I wanna scope her vitals and all that, see how it’s reacting physically first. Take your time, bud.”
A pregnant pause filled the air before, no less sceptical than before, Ben replied, “If you say so. I’ll be down. Just be careful with the Snatchers.”
“Yep.” Geno gave a wave to Allison, closing the bathroom door with a click and walking across the room to gather his things.
Allison just watched him, standing still and holding onto her prosthetic arm as though it’d pop clean of her shoulder if she let go. This seemed to annoy Geno, who walked to the door of the apartment and beckoned to her impatiently with a crane of his neck.
“What’re ya waiting for? We gotta move, Al.”
“R-right. Right, sorry. I-I just…” she shook her head, unsure of what, really, she had in mind to say, what excuse to give. Instead, her mouth hung open for a moment as she stared, forcing her to snap herself back to reality and run to her bedroom to collect her things.
She stopped once she was ready to go. A black leather purse with silvery metal studs around the middle and zipper hung from one shoulder, a pair of plain white ankle socks and black-and-grey tennis shoes adorned her feet, and the only thing left to get was her phone. She stared at it blankly, likely for far too long, she felt, just waiting for it to go off.
It never did, of course. No mysterious messages, no buzzing in place of a perpetually-silenced ringtone, nothing, came from the device. Silence was her only companion in her room then, leaving the ringing din of her own anxiety to deafen her momentarily, her body frozen and her eyes fixated.
A rapping on her door jolted her from her unwitting stupor, and she called back, “Alright, alright, I’m coming! Just, uh… you know… you know what, nevermind.” She opened the door to see Ben outside, dressed and ready to go, Geno looking pale behind him.
Ben’s hair was still dripping wet, but he looked unnerved, his breathing fast. He still had an oversized beach towel, a stark yellow with smiling cartoon fish on it in a wave pattern, wrapped around himself, arms hugging it tightly. In one hand, though, he clutched his phone so tightly that his knuckles went from a dark bronze to a sickly white, his face seeming to be struggling to match it.
“Allison. You need to wait for me,” he said matter-of-factly, “Just… wait. Okay?” Allison looked to Geno, and the man in question rubbed the back of his neck, looking as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Mind… telling me what’s up? You two… this looks bad,” Allison said slowly, her heart leaping into her throat and causing words to become difficult.
When the woman looked back to Ben, he averted his gaze, muttering gruffly, “It’s not nothing. But it’s pressing. It’s… look. I’ll explain when we get to Geno’s place, okay?” Allison nodded, dumbfounded. Ben was hardly ever so shaken; she wondered what had gotten into the two of them.
The Iranian man turned and pushed himself out of the hall, past Geno, and practically power-walked to his room, half-storming, half rushing. She wasn’t sure if he was angry or terrified. Perhaps, she reasoned, he’s both.
Geno gave her a lingering stare, a frown firmly in place, before he returned to his things, resting at the top of the long stairwell that descended to their front door. Allison followed in silence after she finally grabbed her phone from her bed, holding it in her hand tightly instead of placing it in the holster that dangled from the strap of her purse.
After a few scant minutes, Ben emerged from his room, curly hair slicked back on the side where it was prevalent from the water it yet retained. He wore a black, torn-up tanktop with the logo of some superhero Allison didn’t recognise on it, his necklace only evident by the chain that led down beneath the shirt. Baggy grey cargo pants with ripped, frayed bottoms barely hid his black, scuffed-to-oblivion steel-toed boots which he kicked things with pointlessly when he was bored. On his back was a camouflage backpack with additional black padding at the bottom, likely meant more for electronic equipment like his laptop and peripherals than anything else.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said darkly, and started for the door, pushing past both Geno and Allison. When he did, she saw something she wasn’t used to seeing dangling from his belt: a sheathed combat knife. She knew he had it, but she’d never seen him use it, despite his insistence that it was worth having. He’d never carried it with him before – he wasn’t some showy mall-ninja that wanted to impress people – but he was paranoid, and she saw it clearly here as he pounded down the stairs to the door.
“I- I guess we’re going, then,” she said weakly to Geno, who only nodded, not meeting her gaze, walking down before her. She swallowed hard, looking down at her phone one last time before she, too, descended the stairs to where Ben held open the door and Geno waited beside him, both men looking, disturbingly, blank.
“Come on,” Ben sighed, locking the door and turning, “We’re going to fast way, down East Ninth, toward Erie City.” Geno looked startled, but nodded. East Ninth street was ever a business centre in Cleveland, but walking the street itself was dangerous. There were no sidewalks down the stretch of road, and the utility tunnels that ran beneath were notorious for Snatcher activity.
“Why?” Allison asked, standing still, “That’s asking for trouble.” She frowned, folding her arms, phone still clutched tightly in her natural hand.
“…we were told to. Let’s go.”
She looked to Geno, alarmed, who then looked to Ben, but the man was already walking rather briskly down the hall toward the elevator. Geno turned to move too, so she set her jaw, holstered her phone and rushed after them.
“Another unprecedented wave of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks following the catastrophic events on the East Coast, this time by a group that claims to have had a connection to the attacks, has the nation reeling. Many popular US-based social media sites went down for nearly six hours starting late last night, and many have reported their accounts as having been compromised.
“The group, called the “Conquering Dead,” is said to be a sub-group of the Korean Loyalist Coalition. The name’s meaning is unclear, but speculation is that it has something to do with the KLC’s premise of a splinter group in the formerly-Chinese territories that were forcibly taken by Korea during World War III. The “Conquering Dead” have been responsible for several smaller attacks in recent years, but have grown far more prolific since the-”
“Hey, here,” Ben’s voice interrupted the rather hyped-up newscaster’s voice to draw Allison’s attention away from the well-dressed woman on TV, and tossed her phone to her, “Looks clean. Dunno why you got to acting all cagey about it.”
Allison rolled her eyes, her tone flat, “I told you it was just a dream, Ben.” She got a sigh and the signature whole-head-roll that came when the self-styled “hacktivist” rolled his eyes, from one shoulder around to the other.
“Look, it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially with these new phones, okay? Who knows what kind of fucking surveillance crap is going on with those, especially when you don’t even bother to jail-break it. It’s not like anybody’s gonna worry-”
Allison cut him off, sounding exasperated, “-about a dead girl jail-breaking her phone, I get it. Third time this week.”
“I’m glad we understand each other. May I, then?”
“No.”
Ben’s head travelled from shoulder to shoulder again with his eyes, “Fine. I still don’t get it.”
“Imagine that this phone to me is what your necklace is to you,” Allison said softly, cradling the precious device. Ben recoiled as if she’d punched him square between the eyes, a hand gripping the silver heart as his own heart leapt into his throat.
“That’s… a hell of an assertion, Alli,” he almost croaked in surprise once he regained his voice.
“My mom gave me this phone,” she said, her voice getting softer, her voice catching as her throat began to disobey her, “It was her way of saying she was sorry that we were moving again. It was brand new, then. Only thing on it was a goofy duck-face selfie she took. And… somehow, it was with me… when…” She fought hard against the pressure behind her sinuses, but it was obviously a losing battle. Tears overwhelmed her eyes and the build-up in her sinuses caused her to sniffle in an attempt to keep her nose from making more of a mess of her face.
Ben took a seat beside her as she got continuously more upset, his arm, softly glowing blue with its circuitry tattoo, slung around her shoulder to hug her tightly. He said nothing for a long time. There was nothing he felt he could say. He simply comforted her as best he could as she sobbed against him, soaking his shoulder.
It’d been quiet that night. For once, he had a night to enjoy himself, to try and forget about everything that’d happened in the past month. Sitting down at his computer, he began to unlock it when his phone began to ring. Had it been any of his friends, his parents, even Rich’s parents, he may not have answered, but the name and picture on the phone’s touchscreen made him stop, frozen, his whole body tingling as though he were about to get struck by lightning.
Madeline Heisenbauer, the girl who had died with her mother and brother on their way to Baltimore. His best friend with whom he’d stayed in constant contact, even when they were separated by the moves that pushed them states apart. The girl who would later be known as Allison Sterling for her own protection. Steeling himself, he went to pick the phone up when it stopped ringing. His heart dropped into his stomach and he waited, his hand hovering over the phone, waiting for it to ring again, or at least go to voicemail. Before the phone rang again, however, he got a text. The sender was unlisted, and the phone number was a string of unintelligible wingdings and ASCII, and the message itself didn’t make the nausea that was creeping up on him or the adrenaline-fueled shivering any better.
“It is who you suspect. Answer it.”
He started to try and respond when the phone began to ring again. Maddie’s number again. Scrambling to answer it, his voice cracked, sounding almost panicked. Appropriate considering the situation.
“Hel-” he forced the lump from the throat, “Hello? Who… is this?” He was met by frantic, panicked sobbing, the familiar voice on the other end practically in hysterics.
“Ben? Ben, help me, please…” The girl on the other end choked on her own words, barely able to keep herself from screaming by the sound of it, “I… I don’t know where I am. I… my arm’s gone. It hurts so much and… I can barely move. It’s… padded, I… where am I…? Ben, get me out of here! Help me, please!” She grew more and more desperate as she talked. Ben couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“No, no, this can’t be right. You’re not Maddie. Maddie’s fucking dead. This isn’t a fucking joke. Who the fuck is this and how’d you get her number?” he began to sound angry, but all the anger in the world couldn’t dispel the sinking feeling that kept growing in him, threatening to swallow him whole.
Maddie’s crying grew more frantic and she nearly started screaming, “Ben, please! It’s me! I’m not dead! I’m not fucking dead! I… oh god… oh my god, I’m… I’m in a casket. I’m… oh god.” She began to go into hysterics, and he could hear screaming and pounding between the desperate cries for someone to let her out, for help. He almost threw up right there. It had to be her. But she was buried two hours away.
“Maddie? Maddie, listen to me! I’m coming to get you out. Okay? Just… just stay put. Fucking Christ, I can’t believe this… just… listen. You have maybe four hours of air left in there, okay? But if you can’t get yourself to calm down, you won’t have half that. I’m gonna throw my shit together and come out. But I need you to calm down. Okay?” he willed his voice to sound as calming as possible. It took a few mintues, but she finally calmed down to a soft sobbing again, her voice weak and raspy.
“Hey. M-” he caught himself, cursing himself for thinking back like that for so long, “Alli. You gonna be alright?” She noticed, but attempted to act as though she didn’t. Ben didn’t buy it, but felt better at her pretending otherwise for his sake.
“Yeah. It’s… just been hard, y’know? I still have nightmares about being stuck in that… coffin…” her voice was soft, cracking a bit.
“No, no, I getcha. It… it has been. I can only imagine how scared you were, but I’ll be fucked sideways if it didn’t scare the shit out of me, too.” He couldn’t tell her that he’d been a recipient of some cryptic message from an unknown sender, too. Worse was the fact that by the time is was all over, the text and all traces of it were gone. No tool he had could recover any trace of it ever having been sent, but the proof that the night wasn’t a dream was living with him.
Allison stood slowly, her natural arm rubbing at her eyes before she let it drop, slack, and muttering, “Gonna go get myself cleaned up so Geno doesn’t think I’m a fucking emotional mess.”
Ben sniffed a soft laugh, smirking half-heartedly, but trying to at least be empathetic enough to resist what he was going to say. He paused, flustered for a moment when she answered the unspoken quip.
“Yes, I know, I am one, but I can at least try to not look like one,” she said, shooting him a look from the bathroom doorway that said she knew exactly what he was going to say.
There was no denying that she, of all people, knew him well enough to know that that would be the chosen jab. The only response he could muster was to close his eyes, purse his lips, and shrug, head lazily listing from side to side in resignation. The vice that he wasn’t aware had gripped his heart so released a bit when he heard her laugh before closing the bathroom door.
He worried about her. Something was going on there, and the possibility of her having been receiving texts from a blocked caller that pulled the same disappearing act as they had with him was unnerving, to say the least. A dead girl coming back to life long after she’d been buried, with her phone fully-charged, no less, was strange enough, but this reeked of something more.
She’d been in there for at least a week. There’s no way there was that much air in there to keep her alive. How the fuck…? He leaned forward, looking back at the TV as the news station Allison had been watching returned from its commercial break. The news was awful – all sensationalist hype, made to keep people in line, in his opinion. He still found a sick pleasure, sometimes, in seeing just how certain stories would be spun, who would be blamed for what, and what would never even make it through, despite its importance, in the face of what celebrity broke up with whom. He wasn’t feeling quite like dealing with that at the moment, though, and started paging through channels until he found another of his shows. He couldn’t focus on it, though. There was too much on his mind. Truthfully, there had been for the last four months, but there hadn’t been a thing he could do about it.
I need to ask her again if it said anything. No way that was a dream. But… Ben slowly sat up straight and eyed his phone on the coffee table.
“If you hear me… I want an explanation. Whoever you are, you know things, and I get the feeling you’re guiding them, so I want answers,” he said, talking at his phone. For nearly five minutes, he sat still, staring at it with narrowed eyes and waiting for the inevitable silent buzz. Nothing came.
“I look like a jackass.”
“Usually, yeah.” His muttering was interrupted by his roommate’s, the shock of coming back to reality from his deep focus causing him to jump and his heart to shoot into his throat.
Allison paused in the doorway at the sight, damp violet hair draping around her head and a plaid towel that looked particularly massive draped around her like an over-fluffed toga. Her shoulders and arms were fully visible, natural hand clasping the towel to her chest so it wouldn’t fall. The point on her right arm where her prosthetic had been attached was clearly visible. The rubber shield that usually protected the joint was off of it, likely sitting in the bathroom behind her somewhere, leaving the excessive scarring up to her shoulder visible, those marks coming from more than just the surgery to implant the arm. She bore scarring around her neck and on her scalp, as well, though her hair had grown in around it. She managed to keep her hair in a way that usually left it hard to tell, hidden further by the knit beanies she’d wear out. That was hardly the extent of it, of course, but there was only so much he was willing to pry out of her… and only so much even she knew.
“Fucking Christ, Allison,” Ben breathed, the flat of his palm pounding his chest as if it would calm his racing heart. The girl shrugged on her way to her room.
“Not my fault you spaced. It’s what you get for sleeping on the couch,” she shot back, grinning to herself. She vanished into her room, the door shutting behind her.
Ben deflated on the couch, but soon after pushed himself to his feet and headed for the bathroom, muttering, “Might as well clean up, too, if he’s gonna…” He trailed off, shaking his head at himself for continuing to think aloud.
As he’d thought, the shield for her prosthetic was sitting precariously on the edge of the sink. He picked it up, moving it to the side, and caught his reflection in the mirror. He smirked, fondly regarding his jawline and the smattering of dark stubble along it and retreating back up toward his hairline. Running a finger along it and feeling the rough texture, he smiled, contemplating as to whether or not he might let it grow in. It wasn’t important for very long.
A few pounds at the door startled him, followed by a gruff voice that answered the unspoken question, “Ben, open up, will ya? Fuck’s sake, ya better not be sleepin’ in!” Ben was prompted to check his phone on the way back out of the bathroom. Barely quarter-‘til-eleven.
He opened the door, groaning, “Geno, why the hell are you so early?” As he asked, a scraggly man in a grey university hoodie and ripped jeans squeezed past him with several heavy bags full of equipment. He didn’t answer at first, rushing into the room to set his things down. After a few moments of checking his phone and looking around, he seemed to relax a little and let himself flop against the couch.
With a finger rising to flick something away from an eye, he muttered in a thick New Yorker accent, “Runnin’ early. My bad, shoulda called, but I wound up rushed to get off the street. Snatchers.” The Russian man was in his mid-thirties, hair something of a brown, balding mess, the sides reaching his shoulders and a widow’s peak that reached back to the middle of his crown, some wispy strands tossing about in the middle. His face was rough and pocked where a full beard didn’t cover. If one were to glance at him with his duffle bags, they wouldn’t see a doctor, but a homeless man. He claimed it was part of his “cover.”
Ben grimaced at the thought of Snatchers. Colloquially-named, they sounded far less dangerous than their name let on. Often violent, if not outright murderous, Snatchers roamed the lower streets in the darkness and preyed on people with cybernetic enhancements, openly displayed technology, or other valuables that would fetch them a good price. They were worse than common thugs, however, as they had a way of operating and access to weapons and tools that made the idea that there was no organisation or group dynamic to the otherwise sporadic and disconnected criminals rather dubious. Ben and Geno had agreed on multiple occasions that it had to be a secretive gang, but was likely being covered up somehow to make it seem less coordinated.
“How close were they?” Ben asked, walking to the window to peer out into the city. He missed Geno’s half-hearted shrug behind him.
“Few bllocks. To be honest, I shouldn’t have cut through the alleys on Euclid, but I did,” the doctor admitted, sounding rather blasé about the situation. Ben turned and cocked an eyebrow at him, but he waved the younger man off.
“You brought your whole office with you,” Ben observed with a curious look, “What’s the occasion?”
Geno shrugged again, crossing one leg over the other and waving him off with the same devil-may-care attitude as before, “Ain’t nothin’ to worry about. Just got a busy day ahead of me. So, Allison’s still havin’ issues with PTSD, is what y’think?” Ben shrugged.
“You tell me. She woke up missing an arm, dead for a month, six feet under. I think I’d have a hard time getting over that, too, wouldn’t you?”
Geno’s tone lowered and the man took on a suspicious expression, “I’d be worried about more than that, Benny.” He started counting on his fingers, holding them up as he did, “Fully-charged phone, no other survivors for miles, a month in a casket – dead or not, not to mention your little phantom tip-off? Oh, and don’t forget the fact that she’s covered in almost surgically-precise scars.”
Ben shook his head vehemently and muttered, “Look. Now’s not the best time to think about it.”
“There ain’t a best time, but now’s a time, and it’s a time to start worryin’ about what your little friend is gonna bring down on our heads if…” he trailed off and shook his head, “Look, just don’t go forgettin’ about it. It’s fishy – real fuckin’ fishy.” Ben sighed, nodding his agreement.
He spoke quietly, “Alli got a message of her own last night. Wouldn’t tell me what it said. I think she might be trying to convince herself that it was a dream.” Geno’s face went blank and he eyed the dark-skinned man before him.
After a long pause, Ben was about to prompt an answer from him when he held up a hand as if to stop him, muttering, “We’ll just have to see if that turns out to be somethin’. You didn’t tell her about the text you got, did you?” Ben shook his head slowly. “Good.”
“Good?”
Geno shook his head, “Maybe she’ll be able to convince herself it was a dream. Maybe they’ll leave her alone if she does.” Ben shot him a look. “Look, maybe I hope for the girl that she can get back to as much of… whatever passes for a normal life these days, huh? Don’t look at me like that.”
Ben relented, crossing the room again, heading for the bathroom, though his tone was still somewhat dour, “It is what it is. Just… make yourself at home. I’m gonna take a shower.” The balding Russian gave him a slow wave and pulled his phone free one more to check it.
Ben peered at himself in the mirror for some time, staring at himself, hands gripping the edges of the sink far more tightly than he really realized, his knuckles whitening some and offsetting his dark, middle-eastern tone. He pursed his lips together and grunted in irritation.
Should I press it? Geno’s acting weird today, but… well, he is a weird dude. More paranoid than I ever could be. Guess he’s got a right to be, though. “Underground” doctors aren’t really liked on any side of the fence sometimes. He ran a hand through his hair. Thick, black, and curly, he’d been mistaken for being African-American instead of Iranian more than once. It wouldn’t have been a big surprise if there was some in his family history, but, given his history in the adoption system, he never felt the need to revisit those days.
He reached over and started the water, staring out at the city while he wondered just what the hell was going on around them. Sure, the attacks on the east coast threw the country into turmoil, but this was a brand new level of weird.
For just a brief moment, he forgot as the warm water cascaded over him in the shower. Even if it was a moment to forget, it was nicer to do so, despite what he had been told.
“Yeah, if you can,” Ben said as he paced the kitchen. One hand held his phone to his ear while the other fiddled with his necklace. The necklace had been his boyfriend’s, left among his things when he was shipped out with the Navy. It was a simple silver heart pendant, no larger than the tip of Allison’s thumb, on a leather cord. Ben had gotten it for him as an anniversary gift.
That was nearly three years ago. He’s done a lot of healing. He’s had to. She sighed to herself, looking over her shoulder at Ben. His boyfriend, Richard Stokes, Lieutenant Commander aboard the U.S.S. Haiti, had been lost with the rest of his shipmates when it had been destroyed by an attack from the KLC – the Korean Loyalist Coalition. The militant group had formed in the Chinese territories taken by North Korea more than thirty years prior, after it had forcibly taken South Korea. Though the Korean stance was officially one of peace following World War III, the KLC operated with nigh-impunity, its existence all but denied by the Korean government for decades, even as it operated openly at some points, even as it killed good people like Rich.
“Alli,” Ben said behind her, bringing her, once again, back from the past, “Geno’s coming up tomorrow around lunch. I’ll make sure you’re up.”
Allison nodded, her tone distant, “Alright.”
“Something the matter?”
“Just thinking.”
“About what? Flashback still bothering you?” Ben circled around the couch to take a seat next to her, giving her a concerned look.
She shook her head, despite it being mostly a lie. I can’t bring up Rich, though. We can’t both start sitting around in a rotten mood tonight.
“Just worried about what I lost when the power went out. My backups were what woke me up, but,” Allison trailed off in her lie, ending with a silent shrug.
To her relief, Ben merely mimicked the gesture, looking unconcerned, and began digging around in the couch cushions for the remote that would turn on their modest television, hanging in its thin metal frame like a blank landscape canvas on the wall. Eventually, he dug it free and began flipping through channels, putting his feet up on the coffee table and yawning. He eventually settled on a cartoon that was wholly unfamiliar to her save for having seen mention of it online, either in conversation or memes to which she typically paid little mind.
Allison got up silently, but was forced by Ben’s questioning stare to explain herself, “I’m just going back to check on my computer. I think I passed out with V-Pro running.”
Ben shrugged again, turning his attention back to his show, and she made to return to her room. When she returned, her the overhead lamp was off, but the “mood lights” as she called them, a collection of clear blue glass soda bottles, strung together with white Christmas lights and hot glue around the periphery of her room, bathed the room in a cool shade. The room itself was particularly tiny, meant more as a small study than anything, but after Ben took her in, she needed a space of her own, however small. Two mattresses lay atop one another on one end of the room and taking up nearly half of the available space, both shrouded in spare sheets, a bundled mess of blankets and pillows sitting in the middle. Multiple shelves had been secured above it to hold what few possessions she had, most of it being simple clothing – jeans, t-shirts, underwear kept in small plastic bins on another shelf. On the other end of her room, a plush desk chair sat, angled toward the door from when she’d vacated it previously. Three old flat-panel monitors hung, anchored to the wall, displaying the wallpaper at the login screen for her computer. Hey keyboard rested against the wall, likely having clattered to the floor from her lap when she fell asleep early that morning. Her headset remained where she’d dropped it next to her chair earlier, having landed among the rat’s nest of cables that occupied it in part.
Despite the lie that she had come to check on her equipment, she simply flopped into her bed after shutting her door behind her, staring upward at the overhead lamp before reflex bid her gaze away from it, as if she expected yet another light to suddenly turn on right in her face that night.
It’s been four months. She sighed aloud and raised her right arm above herself, staring up at it as she flexed mechanical fingers, rolled her wrist, pointed her palm to the ceiling. The prosthetic was a dull grey colour for the most part, but its casement had been “decorated” over the past few months in an attempt to help her adjust emotionally. Stickers, paint, and even some shoddy engravings on the metal gave it very nearly the look of a high-schooler’s long-worn cast. Despite the decoration, however, she opted to cover it more often than not. She traced the fingers of her left hand down the prosthetic’s casing, across the joint of her elbow, and down to the point where it connected to her, and where her right arm had been severed. A soft plastic cuff connected the grafting point where it was anchored into the remaining bone of her upper arm, making it appear as seamless as possible and covering the scars marring the end of the stump that remained.
She sighed, letting the arm drop with a clatter and a final thump against the thin memory foam topper on her bed. Her eyes fluttered closed, but she didn’t sleep – not yet. The shock of her dream, of seeing *him* again – at least, she thought it was him – of the shock of waking to the power going out, and then the episode she’d had in the bathroom had all left her feeling much more awake than she knew she should be, even despite having slept most of the day away.
Ben laughed raucously in the living room, much to Francis’s chagrin, and a pounding began on the ceiling from above them, vaguely discernible shouting starting from above them. As it went quiet, her phone began buzzing incessantly from atop her computer’s tower. With a sigh, she pushed herself to her feet and scooped it up. Though Ben preferred to keep to older touchscreen phones, Allison had a brand new one – or it was brand new when he mother bought it for her as a consolation gift before they were to move. For some inexplicable reason, it would up in her casket, fully-charged, but powered off when she awoke.
No. No, I can’t think about that right now. It’ll just send me back into another PTSD fit. She shook her head rapidly as if to dismiss the notion from her mind and hit the button on the top bar of the device.
Though it normally appeared to be two plastic bars no longer than her fingers, attached to one another by some force, when the power button was hit to unlock it, the upper bar snapped upward, a flexible LCD pane unrolling from within the bottom, made stable by the panes of glass that extended from seemingly nothing as it snapped open. Ben once explained it as something to do with flexible synthetic crystal that hardened upon receiving a small charge – the same charge that allowed touch to control the LCD panel beneath the top pane, and that tinted the bottom pain to a smoky grey.
A message flashed on her phone from an Unknown sender. That was odd enough, if it weren’t for the message itself.
When the doctor arrives, ask him for the activation. He will know what to do, and so will you.
Her blood turned to ice for a brief moment. Technological genius as Ben was, pranks were not his forte. Still, she had no one else to suspect. Everyone who knew her from before was either dead or thought she was. Following her return, she was nobody. Ben helped to make sure of that, of course, so that she could start over once she was ready. As it was, the woman known as Madeline Heisenbauer had become Allison Sterling. She took to the new name, at least. She picked it, after all. Shaking her head, she resolved to confront Ben. If anything, at least he would know how to figure out her mysterious messenger. When she started for the door, however, her phone buzzed again, softly, this time, against her pillow.
Bitar will know in time. He is important as well. But he must not know now.
Allison stopped and shuddered. How…? She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat and cracked her bedroom door, peering down the short hallway and into the living room. Ben had left his phone on the kitchen counter. She went white and eased back into her bedroom, leaning against the door and sinking down, her knees pulled against her chest as if to keep her heart from escaping should it succeed in beating out of her chest.
She woke in the morning, slumped against the door. She wasn’t sure when she had fallen asleep, but the stress of the dream, the flashback, and then those damned –
She scrambled for her phone, still lying open on her bed, its screen flashing a low battery warning. Dismissing it, she navigated to her text messages. Yet, search as she tried, she only found her conversations with Ben. Her heart skipped.
But… if those weren’t real, why was I against the door? Was I…? She shook her head. Sleepwalking might not have been a bad assumption, but it could stand to be troublesome. She checked herself over for bruising, for aches or pains to suggest she may have tripped, but found nothing.
“Nothing,” she echoed to herself, slowly rising from her sprawled position on the floor from when she lunged to her bed for it. But… No, no, I’ve had weirder dreams already.
She pressed the tips of her fingers to the inner corners of her eyes, squinting away the remainder of sleep before kneel-walking across her bed to peek through the blinds in the single window in her room to the world outside.
Though there were dark clouds moving swiftly over the city, pushed by harsh autumn winds coming from off Lake Erie, Cleveland appeared as it often did in the early morning. People walked the streets far below on their commute, the once-modest city, like many others, having become crowded with the exodus of people from cities farther east that no longer existed. Many stayed with family, had found jobs in the last four months, and managed on their own in the rapidly-expanding metropolis. More, however, were homeless and desperate, driving the already-spiralling condition of the country’s crime further into the ground. The people had become numb to killings, to violence, to drug trafficking. Even the police, sparse as they had become in the years following the third World War and the Second Civil War just years before it, had become despondent in many cases.
Cleveland wasn’t the worst out of all of it, but it still had its problems. Cybernetics, belongings, and more from augmented people who had been murdered often wound up on black market sites that Ben perused frequently. It was often where he got his hormones. Though their use for gender affirmation had been made legal again following the Second Civil War, he found it was still cheaper and easier with the pharmaceutical corporations spiralling out of control. It was a dark era, only marginally better than those that came before, punctuated by a mad tyrant of a president whose assassination sparked the second civil war that the United States had ever seen, the fanatical right declaring war against the left, and eventually dragging all of the country into chaos. Multiple states seceded, only to be brought back in after the conflict was over.
Of course, this was all ancient history to Allison. The worst of it ended with World War III, which was over by the time she was out of third grade, and was fought in a country on the other side of the world. She hardly even understood what it had meant until she was in high school and it was a very recent, and very necessary, history lesson.
Ben had moved here a year after Rich died. He liked the city. It appealed to him far more than the apartment he and Rich had shared back near Pittsburgh. Allison wondered at the time where he got the money. To her knowledge, all the years he and Rich had been together, they had survived off of his military pay. Yet, in the past few months, Ben had always had enough to support the both of them. She found out then that he had some kind of work-from-home situation he’d stumbled upon in the city, and only ever had to take short trips to the company’s small office across town on occasion. After that, she didn’t feel like questioning it; they were comfortable enough, even if the building in which they lived had its fair share of problems.
With a sigh, she let the blinds snap shut, the apparatus rattling for a short time after as she turned to head out of her room. When she opened the door, she found Ben, as it often happened, snoring on the couch, sprawled out awkwardly, still in nothing but his boxers. Looking down at the clock on her phone, she peered at it for a long moment.
8:36am. Geno won’t be here for another four hours. Shrugging to herself, she headed out into the living room, still dressed in the purple camisole and plain underwear she’d been wearing when she assumed she passed out the night before. She padded softly across their living room, the carpet masking her steps and softening them against the concrete floor beneath, and headed for the kitchen. She rummaged about in the cabinets for a bowl and spoon and started a bowl of cereal. Ben’s phone still sat on the counter, its screen off.
“Hey, get me some too,” Ben grumbled from back in the living room.
Allison smiled a little to herself and shook her head, calling back, “Your phone’s out here, too. Want that?”
“Oh. Yeah. Wondered where I left it, but didn’t feel like getting up,” the young man laughed.
She picked up the old phone and chucked it across the room. It impacted the back of the couch and fell to the floor with a soft thump, prompting Ben to blearily peek up over the back of the couch. He shot her an exasperated look, to which she simply shrugged, turning to get him the first part of his request, the spoon still sticking out of her mouth after she took the first bite of her own bowl.
She sat down next to him, placing his breakfast on the coffee table where he usually set his legs, speaking after a bite here and there, “Have you ever gotten a text from an unknown number?” She paused, regretting her decision to ask, but there it was.
Ben hardly reacted, speaking nonchalantly, “Probably a wrong number.”
“No, I mean an unknown sender. Like it was unavailable.”
He paused, turning to look at her as he spoke this time, “That’s a little weird. Usually something shows up. Though I guess it’d be just as easy to put in a name that says “Unknown Number” or something in certain apps… Either way, why? Is someone texting you?”
What do I tell him? That it was a dream that I’m not convinced was actually a dream?
“Just a weird dream. It just got me curious, I guess,” she lied, going back to her cereal. He clearly didn’t buy it.
“Then you’ll be okay letting me check your phone, won’t you?” he asked cautiously, “I think a few months is past the time people would be sending “wish you were” texts to a dead person. What did they say?”
She scrunched her brow, “I don’t remember. It was just a dream, like I said. It may as well have been gibberish.” It was another lie, but if it were real, and she couldn’t talk to him about it, what would happen if she did? There was enough strangeness going on following her death, and not all of it was related to her having come back from it, either.
He rolled his eyes and held out his hand, speaking evenly, “At least let me make sure.”
With a grunt of exasperation, she gave in, getting up and walking to her room before returning with the phone she’d neglected to start charging. Fortunately, it still had a few minutes of battery life left. She let it shoot open, and unlocked it as she walked back, handing it to the dark-skinned whiz kid. Without a word, he rocked back and shot forward to his feet before walking off with it, presumably to his room.
“Ben!” Allison protested, but was silenced by a hand held between them for her to talk to instead. She grumped and sat back down on the couch to finish her breakfast, pulling the remote back from the endless void between the cushions in the couch into which it seemed to be inexplicably pulled. Flipping through the channels, she waited for her friend to return.
The sun was setting. She had to be at work an hour ago, but that was okay. With any luck, maybe no one would notice. They hardly noticed when she was there, anyway.
No, that’s a lie, but who cares? I quit two days ago, she thought to herself and laughed, garnering a smile from him in response.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, reaching up to gently brush the back of a hand against her cheek. She shook her head in response.
“I quit two days ago, but I just thought, ‘oh, I’m an hour late to work’,” she mused aloud in response, still chuckling softly, “I guess it was every bit the soul-sucking job I thought it was, huh?”
He didn’t respond. He smiled again and she leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder and peering down the grassy hill overlooking the suburban neighbourhood. There was no tree atop that hill. It wasn’t that romantic. But it did just fine. It had ever since high school.
They sat there for what felt like forever, as if the sun and stars exchanged places time and time again in the blink of an eye. It felt like they could have, might have, if they weren’t lost in each other’s company. Or maybe they did. Who was to say? it was peaceful, though.
“What’s that?” he asked, a hand extended on a straightened arm, pointing at the horizon. Vague shapes began to take form in the sky beyond, but it was impossible to make them out in the split second she could see them.
Something vibrated at her hip and she pulled her phone up, only for it to make a deafening beep in her face as an alarm went off, and then from behind it, the whole world flashed a bright white before she knew no more.
With a gasp, she awoke, the events of the dream that woke her still somewhat clear, but hazy enough for her to have trouble recalling it the more her mind attempted to pull her back to reality. Reality was important, too, since her reality at the moment was pitch dark.
Why... why can’t I see anything? Her heart raced in her chest as she struggled for awareness, her body still numb in her shocked, bleary stupor.
Slowly, she became aware of a heaviness on her head and she reached up, hands cupping around the slim, yet solid plastic out casing of a virtual reality headset. Heaving a sigh of relief, she laughed in spite of herself and lifted it off of her face, leaning back in her desk chair and letting her right arm fall slack, its mechanical joints clicking and clacking as she let the device from which she’d just liberated her senses fall to the floor with an unceremonious thud against the thin carpet.
Again, she was confronted by a deafening beep that startled her from her reverie for just long enough to make her look around her bedroom. Her sight once again hers, she realised that the room, normally lit by at least three monitors and a her overhead lamp, was dark. The beep sounded once more and she sighed, realising what it was just in time for another noise to make her jump for the third time since she assumed she fell asleep in the middle of a VR game.
Three hard pounds came at the door to her bedroom, and the decidedly tenor male voice that came from behind it, sounding thoroughly annoyed, “Allison! The fucking power’s out again!”
No shit, Sherlock, was her first thought, though she eventually conceded when her name was called again and the irate knocking continued.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Ben, I heard you. Did you think I didn’t notice?” was her reply, a bit more venomous than she initially intended, but it had its intended effect. regardless.
The young man on the other side sighed, muttering a muffled, “Right, sorry. Can I come in?”
“I suppose. Why?”
“Christ, Alli, why so standoffish all of a sudden?” Then question hit her and made her stop, recoiling and sitting up, her remaining natural arm raising and directing her hand to her forehead.
“I’ll just come out,” she muttered, sounding tired and defeated all of a sudden, “No point in me being in here anyway if everything’s dead.”
She pushed herself free of her desk and spun the high-backed microfibre chair, lifting herself out of it and crossing the several feet of space in the tiny room between her desk and the door.
Opening it caused a bright flash of light that forced her to shield her eyes, batting around with her prosthetic right hand reflexively until it went away, her roommate Ben lowering his phone, which he’d set to flashlight mode for the dark in their apartment. With a weary apology, he set it aside, letting the light sit facing the ceiling so that they could both see.
Her roommate wore a somewhat vexed, but reserved expression. His face was softly-chiseled, framed one one side by a mess of long, impossibly curly black hair, the other side of his head shaved to fuzz and revealing the multitude of piercings and jewelry up the exposed ear. He had several more about his face, ever being a connoisseur of body modifications, right down to the soft blue glow emanating from the bioluminous tattoo covering his right arm in a circuit-like pattern. He wasn’t wearing much save for boxers and his necklace, though she couldn’t see much else of the Iranian-born twenty-something thanks to the darkness and the drastic contrast from his phone’s light.
After a few moments of trying to squint the bubbles of light out of her vision from getting directly blasted in the face by that light, she waved for him to move aside and headed for the closet in the kitchen to check their breakers.
“Dunno if that’s gonna do any good, Alli,” Ben said, following a few paces behind her and shining the light of his phone over the girl’s shoulder, “I think it’s out for the whole building.”
When the pair stopped, Ben’s supposition was confirmed by the bangings-around of their neighbour upstairs and the old man’s assorted cursing. Despite everything, it made Allison giggle somewhat behind a smirk.
Franklin Carver, a World War III veteran with a disposition to match the man he once praised as the saviour of America in his youth, was often the loudest when there was a problem in the building that affected him. He often served as the duo’s gauge as to whether or not they had to fix something, or simply wait.
Turning, Allison headed for the bathroom, deciding that that wait would best be served without a dangerously full bladder.
“What time is it?” she muttered to Ben, halfway in passing.
“About half-past ten. Why?”
She thought back. The last point at which she was even aware of the time had been that morning. I’ve been out most of the day?
Before she could ask the question, Ben apparently read her from the way she froze, saying, “I take it you had one of your episodes again. Do you want me to call Geno? This’s been happening too much A--”
“I’ll think about it,” she said hurriedly, and with a few quick strides, changed her prior course for the kitchen and quickly locked herself in the bathroom. Relief was swift, but the question asked of her and reason for it gnawed at the back of her mind. She didn’t normally have what amounted to narcoleptic fits... or she didn’t.
A lot has changed since I died. For all I know, this could be normal, now. She opened the blinds in the small window across from the sink, the bathroom illuminated by a brightly-glowing corporate sign from the building across the plaza thirteen stories below. Turning, she leaned forward against the sink and peered at her reflection in the mirror, tinted yellow from the lights outside.
She was a fairly mousy girl, standing barely two inches above five feet and having the look, both in complexion and in body shape, of someone who neither ate nor got around much, looking thin and almost fragile. Her face was somewhat gaunt, her own dark green eyes ringed by dark, heavy circles that caused her to look more like the walking dead than a girl in her late-twenties. She reached up with her right arm, its cold, metallic fingers parting the lids of one eye to get a better look at it.
Nothing out of the ordinary, but... who am I to say? It’s been almost four months now and I still look like I did the day I- Her thoughts were cut short when the lights flickered back on, making her cry out in shock more than pain, the bright fluorescent bulb above the sink blinding her and making that yet again her vision had gone white.
“Well, the power’s back on, at least,” came Ben’s voice from what sounded like the other side of the apartment’s living room.
Allison only muttered, “Right. Great. At least that’s working.” She stopped, then rotated her right shoulder, as if testing the weight of the mechanical arm that’d been grafted to what remained of her bicep following the accident and her return from the dead nearly a month later.
She sat in the back seat of her mother’s car, making sure she was dead to the world in whatever way she could. Thick-padded studio headphones blocked out the world while she listened to the same station she’d been tuning for months online. She had it nearly down to a science, each band at least possessing three songs she enjoyed, and all of those songs playing fairly frequently. She had nearly fifty bands that passed through that station by that point.
Her mother took a sharp turn, merging onto I-79 far more quickly than their luggage had been prepared to handle, and Allison was quickly buried under several suitcases worth of clothes and personal belongings. As if she wasn’t already sour due to the move, this was simply another transgression for her to hold against the world at large.
She spat a curse, righting her headphones and pushing away the offending suitcases, just barely catching the laughter of her older brother and her mother’s half-hearted apologies, her focus more on the horrendous traffic jam that had built up heading out of Pittsburgh. The highway hadn’t been bad up to this point, though, the idiocy of nearly every driver ever known to history to live in the city besides.
She remembered her mother spouting curses that went drowned out by a particularly powerful solo in a particularly loud metal song. She’d lost interest in the entire trip weeks before it had even happened. She had no job, and her brother came down from up north to help them move, so the fact that her mother secured a job in Philadelphia meant that she had no say in their relocation.
They inched along the road, bit by bit, until they finally cleared the construction zone that seemed to have sprung to life from nowhere, closing all but one lane of the four-lane highway for nearly four miles. By the time they’d gotten going again, Allison had drifted off to the sound of two people screaming in rasping, yet powerful voices about viking fables and old Nordic battles that could have been fact or fiction.
When she woke, it was to screaming loud enough to pierce the veil of not only sleep, but death metal. In retrospect, it was somewhat appropriate that it was “death” metal, if not morbidly so. They planned to stop through Baltimore to see her grandparents, but that plan had gotten very seriously waylaid. A flash and a roaring explosion caused the entire road to buck, the car skidding to a halt before swinging into an emergency turnaround gap between the barriers dividing the road to turn and flee.
Before she could even take off her headphones to ask what was going on, the world went white, and all she heard were the brief screams of the soon-to-be-dead, her own included.
She came to with a start and a gasp, realising that she’d slipped into the memory again and had backed against the wall opposite the sink, cradling her prosthetic right arm and shaking like a leaf. The light in the room seemed odd, and she discovered why when she looked to the left, watching Ben walk into the room with a startled look on his face.
The tattoos on his chest were the first thing that stood out, the skull between what used to be the transgender man’s breasts peering forward, the scars from that surgery covered by black smoke patterns with white, Arabic words in either side, translating roughly to, “Be true to yourself.” It was a mantra he’d recited often when they were children, before he had even been able to start on the hormone treatment that allowed him to become himself.
She gave a start when she realised he was talking to her, but her thoughts had become so disorganised, she hadn’t noticed that her ears were ringing. She clapped her hands to either side of her head as though it would help, but it did nothing for her. The taller man’s touch, at that point, was all the guided her, as her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on just staying forward, focusing on everything but what was right in front of her. After a few more minutes of the disarray that her mind had slipped away to become, she felt reason start to reassert itself.
“Ben,” she barely slurred, lying on the couch in the middle of their living room.
“Shh,” came his response, gentle and kind, “I know. It’s okay. You gonna stay put so I can get you some water?”
She could only lamely nod.
“Good.”
Though he took a his sweet time, it still only felt as though an instant had passed before she was cradling a neon blue plastic cup in her natural hand, sitting up and tentatively raising it to her lips. Though her first instinct was to cup it with both hands, the her roommate was keen to repeatedly guide it away.
Every time he did, it was always in the same patient tone, “Not with that arm. Not until you get your senses back. Don’t want you crushing anything, after all... again.”
She wasn’t sure why she laughed with him, but she did, despite knowing that’s what would happen.
A few minutes of silence went by before she found words again, even if the only one that left her mouth at first was, “Ben.”
“Mm?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how you put up with me,” Allison said in a somewhat melancholic tone, staring down at the ice spinning in her otherwise-empty cup as she tilted it about idly.
“Me neither. But it goes both ways, Alli,” he said, squeezing his shoulder and getting up off the couch. She looked at him with a somewhat lost expression and he rolled his eyes.
“Come on, now. You pass out for half the day, then you have a flashback? I’m calling Geno. That’s all there is to it.”
She sighed, nodding and conceding, “You’re right. Maybe something’s acting up again. I just... ugh, I don’t want him pushing more pills on me, Ben.”
Geno, doctor though he was, was a somewhat questionable man of Russian heritage. Though his parents hailed from Omsk in Siberia, he bore a thick New Yorker accent which made him all the more bizarre. He was, however, a good friend of Ben’s who had been looking after him for some time, and, in the last few months, had begun checking up on Allison as well, following her return to the living. He had even overseen the installation of the cybernetic arm that had very nearly become like a natural limb to her.
Ben walked into the kitchen, sliding his phone off the counter and into his hand before he began dialing for the doctor.
He loves to say I came back for a reason. I’ve yet to find out what that might be. She slumped down onto the couch and tossed her cup back, the half-melted ice cubes sliding into her mouth. She began chewing them to drown out the conversation behind her.
