Infinite Games

9. Right Side Down

The bug game was crushed with an invisible force and consumed by the concrete below our feet. There were four of us now. Four contenders who had chosen the possibility of death over an eternal afterlife.

At this point, death was very much on the table. In Tesselation the winner takes all. Everyone else winds up dead. Not immortality dead. I mean dead, see the light, let it consume you, and cross your fingers it doesn't hurt to go wherever you go.

I fell to all fours as the concrete playing field ascended towards the dark midnight above like the beginning of every terrifying roller coaster bringing you to your doom. All my limbs became weighted down with iron bricks as I tried to regain my footing, and instead of getting back up, my arms gave way and let my chin take a turn at trying to hold me up.

I smacked the ground pretty good, and clenched my teeth as chin bone cracked. The throbbing spun my head in a whirlpool of pain, and I used all my strength against the g-forces holding me down to turn on my back.

Molasses-blood globbed down my chin and neck. Plastered to the floor as it sped to the black nothingness above, I shut my eyes and prepared for the worst.

The sensation that arrived when we stopped was unlike anything I had ever felt, and was nothing I wished to ever feel again. The darkness we had risen to was a blanket of the heaviest weight and largest size. We were pressed up against the unyielding mass, underneath it. All thoughts in my mind were crushed with the rest of my body, and when I emerged from being flattened like a run-over caution cone, I was lying entirely unclothed in a back alleyway.

My rebirth into the mortal realm was a painful one. The ruby skin which had padded my flesh in the womb of The Underworld was torn away, pried off as if someone had --in the dark blanket-- wielded a scalpel to conceive my old body, and shed me of my satyr hide. I arched my back and flexed my feet as a scream tore open the passageway to my breathing lungs. Breathing! I was alive!

What a glorious thing to feel one's heart beat in their own chest! It felt terrible, of course, to wait for a dead heart to remember what pumping was. It had been almost a hundred years. The gears must be rusty.

Besides screaming, nothing else seemed to work all that well. My body moved instinctively, curling into fetal position as my nose detected an acrid odor that reminded me of cleaning up after a crazy party. A few blinks sent my eyes into gear, and they focused on the alley. The brick wall nearby was coated in bright graffiti. An overflowing dumpster was protecting me from any casual onlooker, and there were a few used condoms to store the beer and other miscellaneous items I was resting in.

I puked.

When the pain of being skinned alive numbed, I sat up, and began to peel away the remaining crimson patches that the iron blanket had missed.

Just to test, I grabbed a shard of evergreen glass from a smashed bottle and plunged it into the palm of my right hand. Blood --flowing, pulsing, red blood-- sprouted from the incision and streamed down my forearm. I held it up to my face and laughed; the amazing wonders of life seemed so priceless when death had been your only friend.

A clattering of metal ravaged my ears, and I dropped my hand to my bare knee. Merely five feet in front of me, a uniformed worker had dropped her cellphone with a bag of recyclables. I froze. She froze. We sized up one another.

It wasn't Joon. The features on this woman were bloated, and the star tattoo beneath the strained hair net was certainly not part of the profile picture. Nor were the dreadlocks.

Not that I could really be the disappointed one here. She must have been in shock, probably thinking, I've stumbled upon a homeless guy trying to take a bath with his blood, some spilled beer, and cigarette ashes.

I extended my hands, palms-up, in her direction, "I mean no harm."

She glanced below at my nakedness, and her eyes shot up to mine again as she slowly reached for her cellular device and backed away while dialing three numbers and pressing the call.

"Wait! No! Please!" I crawled towards her, which only made her run.

Slamming an angry fist on the recycling bag, I let out a yell of frustration. My first contact with the living world for a century and I had probably just earned myself a spot behind bars.