The Apocalypse Spiral

Chapter 6: Killing Time

I explored my apartment in an effort to remember anything, to jog my memory.

If her words were to be believed, Fels said that this place was mine...

I did recognize any of it but the feeling of déjà vu was scratching the surface beneath my scalp, nagging and yelling at me, telling me that I should recognize my surroundings.

I was here but I am not...

The apartment was pretty simple. The walls were white and the ceiling was gray. 

I had no picture frames hanging save for a painting of a potted plant & a seaside environment.

I had a barren kitchen, a similarly barren bedroom, a widescreen TV, a dusty game console, and a ceiling fan in the living room.

It was nothing to write home about, and whoever I was before was doing quite well before getting involved in this insanity...

Fels kept herself busy with the TV, watching reruns on a channel that played classic 80's sitcoms. 

I sat beside her as she chuckled to herself. I sat there, eyes toward the TV but my mind in the ether.

I was sleepy but I didn't feel like sleeping.

The food helped at least but my head still rang like a bell.

I still couldn't comprehend it...Time travel. f*****g time travel...

"Hey." Fels taps me on the shoulder. "You good?"

I shake my head.

"I need answers. I need to know everything." I tell her. "I'm understanding some elements of whatever the f**k this is...but I'm still in the dark....and you look like you're keeping your cards close to your chest."

Fels mutes the TV, sits with legs crossed over the knee, and turns to me.

"Well duh, I have to keep my cards close to my chest." She tells me, clearing her bangs off her forehead. 

"Time has rules and is a b***h to deal with...Trust me."

"See, it's stuff like that that makes me wonder what the hell you know about this..." I tell her, frustration boiling up with my chest. "You say you can't tell me this & that due to Time, whatever the hell that means, but you help me with...this." I gesture to the "watch" around my wrist.

"You tell me to go to the mountain, get thrown forward in Time, and then we go back a few months via a f*****g spell you have never told me about.." I continue, "And better yet, I don't even know who you are, I don't know why you're helping me or where'd you even come from, I don't even know who I am and you know who I was...!"

Pain surged in my head now. I felt sick and the cheese pizza within my gut was inches from being vomited.

"Chill," Fels says calmly. "I know this is way, way, way too much for anyone to comprehend...but you're still alive. Thank your lucky stars for that."

I press my palms onto my eyes and groan. 

I didn't feel lucky.

"Lucky? Really? That is the last thing I'd use to describe my situation." I lament.

"Heyyy, come onnnnn" Fels touches my chest with a bony hand, inching close to me. "Want me to make you feel good?"

I stare, taken aback by her words.

She bursts into laughter. 

"I'm f*****g with you!" 

Fels punches my left arm playfully.

"Goddamn, that is the last  thing I'd do to you!"

She continues to laugh. 

I didn't find it funny. The last thing I needed was s****l favors from a stranger, much less from a strange woman like this...

"So!" She composes herself. "What do you want to know? I'm all ears."

"I thought you were going to keep your cards close to your chest?"

"I am. I will." She replies as she shuts the TV off via the remote. "But I will answer with 100% honesty the things that I can answer."

"I don't believe you." I bluntly tell her.

"Can't know until you try, and besides, if I tell you anything at this point, you'll never know if I was lying or telling the truth right..?"

I fall silent. She does have a point.

How would I discern what was a lie and what was a fact?

I sigh.

"f**k it. Fine." 

"Great!" She says as she grabbed another pizza slice. "Shoot! Come on!"

I take a breath,  inhaling the cool air and scent of garlic deeply...

"What is your name?" I ask.

"Really? What are you going to ask next, 'what is your favorite color'?" She teases.

"Just answer the damn thing."

"I already told you. It's Fels."

"Fine. How'd you find me in that bathroom?"

"You were screaming and I was next door."

"Why help me?"

Fels opens her mouth, briefly hesitates, but eventually speaks.

"I'm stuck here. You were involved and I could help." She says.

"What'd you mean 'stuck'?" I ask.

"Stuck. I can't get out."

"Get out of the country...?"

She shakes her head.

"More like...off-world, or rather here but not here..." She says with hand gestures.

"I don't follow..."

"It's a complicated answer." She says.

"Try me."

"Look, I thought you wanted to know s**t about you?" She retorted.

"Fine. But I wanna know in the future." 

"Sure. Provided we survive, I owe you that."

"What do you mean that I was involved?" 

"What do you remember from before, before you went forward atop that mountain?" 

"Hey, don't answer a question with a question." I point out. 

"Answer the damn question. It's related."

I think back.

Right.

Visions...Tendrils...Me floating above a destroyed city, sucking the life out of men, women, and children alike...and beyond me was the mountain with something over it...

I sigh. The images raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

"I was...floating above the city, doing something to millions of people below..."  I tell Fels. "It seems like I was harvesting them...I saw the Mountain too. Something above it flickering,  I didn't know what it was, but  knew I had to get to it." 

Fels' face changed again. Her gaze got considerably darker and stared at me with an almost piercing gaze.

"I also remember the month of it happening...but nothing else aside from that."

A few seconds of silence, then Fels shattered it.

"You were harvesting them." She says. "Blood, organs, every single shred of human matter goes to you..."

"Why? How..?" I ask.

"That...I honestly don't know...but what I do know is how'd you die, or at least your original body died..."

"Lemme guess, I died while harvesting...?"

She nods.

"I saw it all. This lone figure floating among the ruins with millions of vine tendril things extending out below and then bam! The figure goes supernova!" She says, "That was you. I saw it all up in my condo."

"You weren't affected?"

She shakes her head. "I'm not from here. Your harvesting only affects the locals."

"So what the hell happened?"

"Your body couldn't take whatever it was and just went pop, I guess..." Fels tells me. 

"So you know me back then, the real me, before this all happened?" 

"Yep."

"And now i'm in the past..."

"Yep."

"Doesn't that mean that there's another me walking around as we speak?" I ask, "My memory is still a bit hazy, but fiction does dictate that time travel works that way."

Huh.

My memory is coming back. Nice.

"Well, One: This isn't fiction and Two: Technically it's still You occupying your "designated" spot in the universe...you just went back. So no, there isn't another one of you walking around...technically."

Again, her words barely made a lick of sense, but in a way, It did make sense.

Fels clasps her hands together and grins

"What I'm certain about though is how you'd get in a body that wasn't yours."

I raise an eyebrow.

"No bullshit. I do know...or at least I read about it from where I'm from."

"You got yourself stuck in a Spiral." She plainly says. "Remember my note? I think I told you that..."

"And I'm supposed to know what that means...?"

"No. Of course not." She says, "Yeah, you're in a spiral."

"A spiral...?"

"Yep. Ever downward from here..."

A chill went down my spine and my stomach dropped.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, to put it bluntly, You can't die," Fels says with a smirk. "You're immortal in a way."

"You're joking."

Fels shakes her head.

"Spiral baby. Loop the loop until the end." Fels cryptically says. "Down, down down, until you actually die..."

Fels leans over to me and places her arms on my shoulders, She pushes me, making me lie on my back.

She straddles me and effectively sits atop my groin/stomach area. Her eyes were wide and filled with madness.

A terror takes hold of me and I say nothing.

"You're walking a flight of Penrose steps, going somewhere and nowhere at the same time. You're outside of time. Outside of Space. A mistake of the cosmos existing out of spite and out of will. Sheer. f*****g. will. Do you understand that Jonathan, or whatever your name is? Do you?" Fels says in a low voice. 

Her weight was surprisingly heavy for a woman of her build.

In other circumstances, I would've felt otherwise with an attractive woman suddenly straddling me, but my senses were intact.

I didn't know her.

I barely trusted her.

And now, She's brimming with madness and cryptic darkness.

I was terrified.

"You're lucky...for now. But if you die, again and again and again...You'll eventually fade, metaphorically and literally and the Universe will forget about you. You'll be a ghost. A memory. A hamster in an eternal wheel of decisions leading to dead f*****g ends." Fels continues as she pinned me down. "You don't want that do you?"

I shake my head. 

I feel a tear roll down my eye and I immediately feel my masculinity shatter.

"So...What are you going to about it? Are you going to find your way through your spiral? Are you going to try to break your cycle?" She asks, her eyes did not blink for a full minute.

I nod.

"Speak!"

"Yes, f**k!" I unexpectedly yell, "Now get off me, please!"

She shakes her head.

"Nope. Not until I show you what the Spiral is. I can still see the doubt in your eyes, We can't get anywhere if you still doubt the nature of this Universe." She says with a smirk.

"No! I'm not doubting, I believe you dammit!" I say, trying to shake her off my waist. She was surprisingly strong. 

"Stop it!" She yells, grabbing my right wrist with her hand, "Quit being a baby about this! You failed to see your Spiral before and you will again if I don't actively show you now!"

A madness filled her voice, a reasonable sane madness that wanted to prove a fact.

Her free hand reaches for the table and for the pizza box. She lifts the lid and pulls something out of it.

It glinted in the light, lightly stained with the yellow of dried cheese.

A kitchen knife. Oh good lord...

"Fels! Fels...!' I say, trying to shake her off. She pinned me down well. She was either stronger than she looked or I was weaker than I expected. 

"Fels! f**k! Don't do this!" I yell out, tears now in my eyes.

What was wrong with this woman? The insanity...!

"Fels! Stop it! Get off of me!" I plead.

"I'm sorry. I gotta do this. This moment of truth is for both of us..." She says, "I gotta wash away your doubt."

She lets go of my wrist and taps her finger on my tear-stained nose.

"I'll see you in a little while."

Without hesitation, I see her left hand move sideways and then downwards, immediately I feel a coldness in my neck area as if steel had kissed my skin.

The coldness vanished and was replaced by a torrent of warmth that was periodically interrupted by a thumping.

I felt out of breath too and the vicinity around my shirt felt damp.

I bring a hand to the area and it is immediately soaked in red.

Fels had punctured my throat with the knife.

"Just let it be...and you'll see what I did is for me, for us actually..." She says with a grin. 

My world was beginning to fade, I felt like I was choking.

Fels still sat atop of me, her eyes looking into mine.

I was dying. Again.

But something inside me knew Fels' words rung true...

But before I could conjure up another though, My mind shuts off then my eyes go dark...

My world is plunged into a weightless, silent darkness. 

I felt no pain. I felt neither life nor death.

But I was sure that I had died...

There I floated, there I existed...

And there I realized that I was indeed inside an inescapable Spiral...