I swung my legs under the too-big chair, tapping my fingers on the thin wooden sides. I hummed to myself while I waited for my dad.
All around me, dead bodies rotted.
Most of them were coffined, some of which were stacked like boxes in a moving van, while some stood alone. A few bodies lay out in the open, faces grey and sunken. There were even a few urns, sprinkled around the room on top of or next to the towering stacks of coffins.
The walls of the room disappeared behind coffins, urns, and piles of bodies higher than a full-grown man. I'd walked for a long time to get here, to the exact middle of the room, to sit in this hard wooden chair. I'd gotten tired towards the end, and Daddy's employee had to carry me.
I breathed in the rotting stench of death and kicked my legs faster. A wide grin spread across my small, round face. It smelled beautiful- like baking bread, or wet paint and sawdust. It smelled like home to me.
I heard footsteps plodding down one of the aisles. Soon, a man in a previously white lab coat, now stained with browning blood, turned a corner and came into view. Swimming goggles protected his eyes from anything that might splatter. He held a test tube with a strange liquid in either hand- one was blue, one was red.
"Daddy!" I squealed, jumping off my chair and hugging his waist.
He laughed, setting the test tubes down next to an urn to pick me up and swing me through the air. Then he set me down, still giggling, on my chair.
"Okay, Sara," He said, retrieving the vials. He held one out to me, and I wrapped my little fist around it.
"You got it?"
I nodded, and he put the other vial, the blue one, in my left hand.
He knelt down to be eye-to-eye with me.
"Close your eyes," he instructed. I did.
I'd started to hone my abilities even before he said, "Focus, Sara." I knew the drill.
Every hair on my arms stood on end. I opened my eyes to watch the show.
Hastily, Dad called into his walkie talkie to turn off the lights. Then he took the batteries out of the tool and tossed them away. Any electrical device in the area could be dangerous.
It started with a spark, a single ark of purple light, and then a whole matrix was jumping back and forth between the vials, like a constantly changing spiderweb. The electricity traveled down my arms, into the floor.
It tickled.
Then sparks started going further. One entered a bare body, and it's fingers began to twitch. Another arc dove straight through a coffin's lid, and a few seconds later it's occupant fell out, squirming on the floor, unable to remember how to stand.
Soon the room was as well lit by the purple sparks as it had been by luminescent bulbs minutes ago.
All around the massive room, bodies rose. But what was really interesting was what happened to the urns. All the ashes from every container rose into the air and collected in a heap in an area cleared for that propose. There, it collected into the vague shape of a giant- Arms, legs, head, torso, and as more ashes floated in, it grew and grew.
Whole minutes passed until every body was affected. They stood slowly swaying, waiting for orders.
The sparks died down. The lights came back on. I blinked at the change. I tossed the vials aside; they were empty.
"Say what we practiced, Sara." Daddy grinned, practically jumping up and down with excitement as he surveyed his new army.
I remembered the time we'd spent in my bedroom, when he'd pounded the sentence into my head so many times, I'd known it was impossible to forget.
I took a deep breath. I spoke slowly, but sure of myself. "By the power given to me by those who bestow the gift of Ner- Nero-..."
I heard Daddy suck in a breath as I strained to remember how it was pronounced.
"Necromancy, I order you to heed the orders of this man."
I pointed sternly at my Dad, scowling at the multitude.
I looked at my Daddy. I'd never seen him smile so wide; at least, not since I first touched a dead man, and he twitched.
He bent down and kissed me on the cheek.
"Thank you, sweetheart."
Then he turned to face his army again. Wide metal doors at one end of the room began to lift.
"Thorough the doors!" He shouted. "Into the world!"
Obediently, they began to shuffle through the now useless wooden boxes. The ash giant, by now, had to duck to get through the door big enough for an airplane.
My Dad followed them, calling over his shoulder for me to go back to my room.
"You don't need to see this next part," He told me sternly.
But I wanted to see the helicopters take off- I didn't know where they were going, but I loved the wind and sound the propellers made.
So, after waiting for my dad to disappear, I scrambled towards the doors.
I almost immediately ran into a man whose overalls were almost as bloody as my dad's coat.
He frowned. "Didn't boss tell you to go back to my room?"
"No." I hate lying; always have. "Well... Yes."
He sighed, and escorted me back to my room. We walked down white, sterilized halls, without window or decoration. Then we came to my door. It was painted pink.
When he opened it, it revealed a room holding almost everything a little girl could want. Almost.
Stuffed animals stacked on a huge, fluffy, pink bed. Dolls and a huge, multi-level doll house. Paint; crayons.
But no books, no TV, no computer. The only way I knew any of that existed was Sam. He worked for my dad, but he liked me more. He'd said so.
Sam hadn't been able to actually get me any books, but he'd gotten me a newspaper. Newspapers, he'd explained, wrote about what happened in the world. Important things, like wars and fashion and earthquakes and some place called Wall Street that had lots of numbers in it.
My Daddy told me that what we were doing, what he'd been working on, (he called it 'our little project',) was going to change the world. So maybe it'd show up in the newspaper.
Sure enough, next week came around, and Sam brought me another newspaper. The headline was in all caps. That made it important.
Before sounding out the headline, I looked at the picture below it. I smiled. It was a picture of Daddy, and his army, standing on the steps of a very large, very white building with lots of pillars and a dome on top.
I looked at the headline again. I didn't know that word. The next chance I got, I asked Sam about it.
He shivered, and then said... How did it go...
Ah, ah-pok, ah-pok-al....
Right! Apocalypse.
No comments:
Post a Comment