“One-thousand, two-hundred, and sixty-two steps.” Roland mumbled to himself as he stared up the facade of the Eclipse tower.
The skyscraper loomed over the surrounding city, a defining presence on the skyline. Years of neglect had stolen its luster. Broken windows dotted its face, gaping like missing teeth, while those that remained unbroken were now covered in enough dust and grime that even under clear blue skies they held no shine. All over paint was peeled away in jagged strips, revealing walls stained in rust and rainwater, tears of a building weeping over its lost grandeur.
Still, for all this, the building was the most magnificent presence west of the Schuylkill river. At over four-hundred feet tall, it dwarfed any of its neighbors. A dominating presence. One so magnificent that it almost felt regal.
Roland liked that. He liked it a lot.
There were many reasons that he chose to live here. Rational reasons. In the early days especially, the maze of floors helped protect him and his stash from the hordes of ghouls wandering the streets. The hotel and restaurant occupying the top floor was another bonus, few thought to loot it, and in the early days it was essential in helping Roland get by.
Now those reasons had mostly evaporated, though this had little sway on his mind.
As much as the stairs annoyed him, Roland had no thoughts of leaving. Living here made him feel like a king. He was a king. King of the Apocalypse. A fitting title his Viceroy Max had appointed him as a gift for his twenty-first birthday.
And who better? He’d survived the apocalypse. How many could say the same?
There were pretenders of course. Those who kept the appearance of their humanity, but were rotten away beneath the surface. For years Roland had clung to hope that they weren’t ghouls. He was charmed by their smiles and he grieved with their tears.
It was all just an imitation though. As soon as they spoke the illusion was broken by their demonic hysteria that poisoned his mind.
Despite it, Roland tried to communicate with them. Many times in fact. But his will was broken by their hateful curses and he had to put them to rest. He didn’t want to, but he had to. They were savages living in the shadows of opulence, too blind to see what they had lost and too ignorant to see the path to return to it. He had to guide them. No one else could.
Still, he regretted how many he had to put down. Someone, somewhere might find a cure for them. If that happened, what would the world think of him then?
Roland had no doubt that when that time came, if that time came, he would be put down, just as he had done to so many others. And they would call it justice. They wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t understand, the difficulty of the situation he was in. And yet they’d see him as a monster. He was certain of it. As if he were a ghoul himself! Him! The King who guided them!
“Ungrateful bastards.” He growled under his breath.
Without a second thought Roland unholstered his pistol and emptied the magazine in the direction of the bronze man standing atop city hall. Lazy bastard hadn’t moved one inch since the apocalypse.
He didn’t bother to use the sights. He didn’t even bother turning to look at where he was shooting. It wasn’t about hitting anyone, Roland was a compassionate king, it was about sending a message. Maybe after this that lazy bastard would finally get to work.
When the last shot was fired Roland didn’t bother reloading. He pulled the trigger a few more times just to be sure and then tossed the weapon aside, now just another one of many sprawled across the street. He didn’t like the way it handled. He would try a different one tomorrow.
“Ready Max?” Roland asked his Viceroy.
Max barked eagerly, coming out from his hiding spot behind one of the burnt out cars. He pitter pattered excitedly towards the front door, even giving a few spins along the way.
Roland wondered what exactly he was so excited about. Did he enjoy climbing all those steps? Or was it because he was always fed when they reached the top? Or maybe it was the view, Max did like to stare out the windows. It was one of the few things they both enjoyed doing. Roland’s favorite part was sleeping, though he doubted Max felt the same.
Whatever he was excited for, Roland couldn’t damper his mood. He was a good boy, he deserved better than that. In this way and many others Max was the perfect Viceroy. They balanced each other out perfectly. If there was one thing in the past few years Roland was certain he had got right, appointing Max was it. Everyone had their weaknesses. Roland was no different. He wasn’t so arrogant to be blind to that fact, loathe as he might be to admit it. But between him and Max, their strengths and weaknesses complimented each other perfectly.
Max was good at spotting trouble, finding food, and keeping them moving. On the other hand, Max was a terrible shot. He couldn’t handle a gun no matter how many times Roland showed him. He didn’t have a talent for diplomacy either. More than once he had completely fumbled collecting taxes from the peasants. Roland had told him over and over again that belly scratches were not an acceptable form of payment and yet Max never seemed to get the message.
At the front door of the tower Roland wiped his shoes off on his new welcome mat. Dogs Welcome. People Tolerated. It said. Roland had to admit it looked out of place, but then again, so did the rest of the entrance. Gone were the fancy windows and revolving doors, replaced with plywood and an ordinary wooden door. A king belonged in a castle. He really needed to install a portcullis one of these days.
Once inside Max danced to the stairwell door. Fatigued as he was, Roland couldn’t bring himself to let Max down. He pushed on.
One-thousand, two-hundred, sixty-two steps Roland thought with a sigh. He knew the exact count. Not because anyone had told him, nor because he’d read it anywhere. He knew because he’d made the climb many times before; every day for the past four years.
Four years of the same routine. Over, and over, and over again. Living on the top floor of a skyscraper without power was exhausting, but it was where he belonged. A king needed to watch over his lands.
On the tenth floor Roland dropped off some of his supplies. There was a slim chance any feral would manage to break in and make it up this far. There was no sense in carrying all the added weight the whole way up.
The rest of the climb was just boring exhaustion. Roland lamented the whole way that the elevator still didn’t work. He’d tried to have it fixed once, he’d even gotten lucky one day and found a mechanic wandering the streets that he’d put to the task.
The mechanic said there was nothing he could do, there was no power. So Roland took him to the power plant. There the man said it was a refinery and not a power plant so Roland shot him. Clearly he had lost his mind to the virus, so there was nothing else to be done.
Roland panted as he made the final step onto the floor of executive offices which he’d made into his home. It wasn’t quite the top floor but it was close enough. All that remained above him was the hotel and restaurant, an observation floor, and utility floor.
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Max bounded around the walls, seemingly completely unaffected by the exhausting climb. Predictably, within a minute he was pawing excitedly at his food bowl.
Roland poured Max a bowl of his favorite freeze-dried dog food, though his mind was elsewhere. A King had many responsibilities weighing on his mind, and Roland needed a way to alleviate the stress. So he wrote.
Before the apocalypse he had always aspired to be a writer. Now that dream was quite possibly the only thing keeping him sane. He would have given up on everything, given up on a cure, if it weren’t for the possibility it might one day grant him an audience.
His world was practically the only thing he cared about now. The apocalypse had taken everything else. He wished he could have recognized what mattered before it was gone. Meaninglessness was a scary thing. It was what Roland feared most, that life meant nothing, that all of human achievement and progress meant nothing. That it was inevitable that humanity would eventually be put on the course of extinction.
Whether by nuclear war, or a gamma ray burst, or coronal mass ejections, or a great plague. Roland feared that extinction might be a probabilistic inevitability.
Roland’s world was an exploration of these fears. A cruel world filled with apocalyptic events where humanity only had tools to escape extinction by the skin of their teeth.
Just as he was settling in and had put pen to paper, he stopped. Something caught his eye. A glimmer. Far in the distance.
Max barked.
Roland put down his pen and picked up his binoculars.
“A car! Good eyes Max!” He shouted standing up.
Roland bolted for the stairway. He bounded down, three steps at a time, leaving Max in the dust.
Cars didn’t work anymore. Everyone knew that. The mechanic he’d once talked to said something about an electromagnetic burst frying all the circuitry. He had said it was fixable, but the man had also proven to be insane, so Roland just figured all the cars were broken and nothing could be done about it.
Now it appeared that mechanic had some modicum of sanity left. It was a shame that Roland had to put him down. If this car was working though that meant there had to be another mechanic! Maybe one who could fix the damn elevator!
The stairwell of the Eclipse Tower was faced by glass windows all the way from top to bottom. Though dirty, they still did their job well enough for Roland to track the car with his eyes glued outside.
It was going slow, not even reaching ten miles per hour, but to Roland it seemed like it was racing down Lancaster Avenue. 42nd & Lancaster, 41st & Lancaster, 40th.
Roland picked up the pace, eventually jumping directly from landing to landing. His knees creaked beneath the strain.
On the tenth floor he lost sight of the car behind other buildings, but not before he could make out some of its more distinctive features. It wasn’t any ordinary car, but a military truck, with a light machine gun turret mounted on the top.
Had some part of the military survived? Or maybe the government? Roland figured that when the nukes fell, that was it. Several years had passed after all, and without any word from any “officials”, everyone just figured the government had been totally wiped out.
Regardless of who they were, Roland had to meet them, he had to get their attention somehow.
He began firing his pistol straight up in the air as he sprinted through the city streets.
At 34th and Market, there was a loud bang, but not from his pistol. His breath was forced out of his lungs and suddenly up was down and down was up. He flew through the air, limbs freely floating around him, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
As he landed, his head hit the asphalt. Hard. Stars decorated his vision, and his thoughts slowed to a crawl. Far in the distance he heard the screeching of brakes and then the four car doors open and slam shut. Then the dull echoes of human conversation reached his ears.
“Jesus christ! Is that him?”
“Fuck he’s still moving.”
“Mean son of a bitch isn’t dead.”
Roland rolled around on the ground, not in pain, but extremely disoriented. He tried to get to his feet several times, but on each attempt found a new set of broken bones to fail him.
“That’s him!” Someone yelled. “Open fire!”
The air cracked as bullets filled the air in a hailstorm of metallic death.
In an instant Roland’s blood boiled, and a blinding rage overcame his senses. What was this? A coup? Did these insects doubt his leadership? Did they think they could possibly fill his shoes?
Roland stood up. His body was bent and broken and quickly being decorated in bullet holes, but he was possessed. A living embodiment of vengeance. Death was at his doorstep, but he would not go down without a show of defiance. He reached for his pistol, only a thumb and one finger still functioning, and slammed in a fresh magazine.
In a moment that lasted an eternity Roland leveled his weapon. He could not see, and he could not feel, but Roland was certain that he knew the direction of his assailants, and he would not let them go without retribution.
Two shots was all he managed. But even in that he felt confident that he had scored a hit. A smile crept upon his lips as his consciousness faded, receding into a black void of nothingness. The ever present hum of human senses dulled, becoming a distant drone of mere notions untethered from the confines of rationality.
“So the bastard can die.” He heard someone say closeby.
Just before the curtains closed on his life,his mind ruminated one thought.
I wish I could have written my story.
The end…
Except it wasn’t.
Language and thought decayed, withering away into a forgotten realm of experience.
And yet, for all that was gone, reality warped paradoxically into and outside of itself giving birth to something new. It transformed into a new realm and a new state of being. A state that was pure, untainted by the stain of human experience, built upon nothing but the nature of existence.
As the noise of his human mind faded, Roland slowly grew an awareness of this new reality. Perceiving it in ever greater detail. It came to view like eyes adjusting to the dark, or a great expanse coming into focus.
As Roland’s perception grew to see more of this world, its existence gradually condensed into something almost material, coalescing into thin tendrils, then winding into streams and rivers, twisting down to unfathomable depths. Further and further it went, eventually turning into a viscous core brimming with energy. At its center it crystallized into an impassable monolith immune to even the scrying of his soul’s eye.
As he stared ever deeper into its depths he realized it was a mirror. No, that wasn’t right. This sphere was no mere reflection. It was himself, boiled down to its very essence.
Then, in an instant, the blinding radiance of consciousness rushed back into him as his soul bloomed inside the rotting roots of dying mortal flesh. A violent surge of human senses and ethereal existence clashed between his soul and this body, merging in an unholy matrimony.
For a singular instant in time, Roland experienced the impossible, with a foot in each world, he could perceive the unveiled truth of reality. It was a true instant, ending as soon as it began. Though for as brief as it was, it did not pass without consequence. Aspects of both realms, alien and foreign to one another, bled into his body and soul, twisting him unnaturally into a paradoxical being existing in both, and in neither.
In that eternal and instantaneous moment, time lost meaning. How much of it had passed in the space between his two lives? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Years? It simultaneously felt both instantaneous and the course of billions of years.
Then he was all at once surrounded by a cold and damp darkness. Human senses tore through him, crackling through his mind like lightning, scrambling any coherent thought before it could come to focus. Only the primal instinct for survival dominated, taking hold of every impulse and leaving room for nothing else.
Roland gasped for breath, but managed to take in less than a whisper, as though he were breathing through a straw the width of a thumbtack. His lungs spasmed as the dark and damp enclosure pressed in further on his chest. No matter how much he struggled, the pressure did not yield an inch back.
He didn't know what had happened, or why, or how, but more pressing matters concerned him. All that mattered now was the earthen tomb surrounding him. He was buried alive.
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