The corridor of memory (2)

He fell and fell for what seemed like a long time. Long enough, at least, to abandon the panic he initially felt. As if he would never reach the ground.

As if such a thing could be possible.

Instead of shaking with fear, what he did was think, finally. This was all strange and perhaps the strangest thing was that he hadn't realized until just now how strange it was.

The cascade of memories. The apparition of her older sister, like a ghost.

And now this. The fall that wouldn't end.

A dream?

No, Jonathan didn't think he was dreaming. Strange as it was, it was all painfully real. The cold. The pain. The feeling that he was going to eventually pass out from the loss of oxygen as he was strangled.

There were many strange things he could point to, but he was certainly awake. This was no dream.

So what was it?

What had happened to him? How exactly had he gotten here?

Jonathan felt he had the answer on the tip of his tongue. Before he could reach it, he hit the ground. He thought: I'm going to die, but nothing happened to him. He felt pain, yes, but as if he had simply tripped and fallen to the ground head first. Not as if he had fallen for miles and miles.

He shouldn't have felt pain in any kind of way after that in the first place.

He should have burst like a balloon filled to bursting with water. What was this? What was all this shit? He looked around.

He was still in a dark void, but beneath his feet stretched a golden path cutting through the darkness.

Examining more closely, he saw that it glittered and looked like some kind of crystal. Though it was evidently harder than any crystal.

Jonathan figured the answers to his questions would be at the end of the path. And even if there was no other side, even if at the other end he would find nothing but the same suffocating darkness surrounding him on all sides....

Where else could he go?

So Jonathan got to his feet and started down the golden path.

In the midst of the darkness.

He found nothing but darkness. The landscape, if it could be called that, around him didn't change at all. Until it suddenly did. All at once, in less than a second.

A golden room appeared around him as if it had been there all along.

A room that seemed to be made of the same crystal as the path he had followed here. Okay, he had gotten somewhere....

But Jonathan still had no answer. Or any idea how he would get out of here, which was the important thing.

He had people to go back to. He had to get back, no matter what. Jonathan put a hand to his forehead, wiping away the sweat, then dug his fingers into it. Squeezing. His head ached. Suddenly it did.

He closed his eyes and relaxed his grip, which had unconsciously strengthened, in response to the pain.

Tried to take a deep breath. To calm down.

That would do him good, whether it helped with the headache or not.

As with the room itself, the ghost of her sister appeared in the center in the blink of an eye. As if she had always been there, really. Only he hadn't seen her until now.

That he hadn't been able to see her until now.

She was looking at him, silently, standing where she was. And in her eyes there was no longer fury, no longer hatred.

There was no more... nothing.

But she was not dead. He saw her breathing.

This... this couldn't be happening, even if it wasn't a dream. If not for all the crazy things that had happened to him before he'd gotten here, because his sister was dead.

And there was no turning back from death. Dead is dead, he thought.

Dead is dead.

So what was this, what the hell was this, how could he reconcile it, if it didn't reflect reality but wasn't a dream either?

Jonathan slowly approached his sister's ghost. As if expecting her to spring into action, to pounce on him at any moment. She didn't, however.

She allowed him to approach her.

He stood in front of it.

He swallowed saliva.

Her eyes were not empty, he realized, now that he could see her up close. They were not empty. There was something, but...

"What do your eyes reflect? Tell me, please," he begged, unable to look away from them.

That's why he didn't see the next thing coming.

The weight that suddenly fell on his back, the arms that wrapped around his neck, squeezing, trying to kill him, to break his windpipe.

Cybernetic arms.

■

Mary bent down to take his pulse, her beating heart in a fist. She waited to speak until she was sure it was Jonathan's heartbeat she felt, not her own.

"He's alive."

The other two, of course, sighed with relief.

The other was alive, too. When the two collapsed, they had come down from the rooftops immediately. Of course they had. And now they were here. It was very good that Jonathan was still alive, but what could they do now?

What had that thing done to him, exactly?

Maybe the right question was what had it done to them. Both of them. Because the leader of the robots was still lying motionless on the floor. And not because he was dead, even after the gun had pulverized half his body. Still clinging to life somehow.

A light bulb went off in Mary's mind. With a fingertip, she lifted one of Jonathan's eyelids.

Her unsubstantiated guess turned out to be correct. Beneath the pupil, his eye was flicking back and forth. As if he were in the middle of a deep sleep. Was it the deep phase where the eye moved like that? Well, whatever.

Mary clicked her tongue.

"We have to get him out of here," Roxy said.

Thanks for stating the obvious, she thought. Mary swallowed it because it wouldn't be constructive, but mean.

"How? Our car is broken. And nothing but desert awaits us for many miles, all the way to the nearest city or town."

"I know. But it's better than doing nothing. Come on, let's go. Grab him."

She was right. She was right, of course she was. Mary took a deep breath.

She bent down, intending to grab Jonathan in her arms. To escape by taking advantage of the paralysis of Max and his small army of robots. However, she didn't get to take Jonathan in her arms, much less escape this damned city.

She felt a burst of pain in his cheek. Fell backwards onto the ground.

"What?" Jamie squealed.

She was shocked, too. Where had the attack come from? How had she not seen it coming? She put a hand to her face.

Then she realized that Jamie was looking in the direction of....

Jonathan. Because that's where the attack had come from, the punch that had knocked her to the ground.

From Jonathan.

He was writhing on the floor. In complete silence, but punching the air, all around her. What the hell was happening to him? What's going to happen to us?

All she knew was that this was something new.

Something she had known ever since Jonathan had cut down the first of the enemies, discovering that as human as he might seem, his veins ran 'blood' as black as tar.

Ever since an army of those robots, without a sound, had come at them.

But this was more than that. And it was even more terrifying.

Because they could only stare and hope for the best.

■

Mechanical arms could only mean one thing. He hadn't seen the bastard on his back, but he had seen more than enough for his liking.

After much struggling, Jonathan managed to get it off him.

Grabbing him and throwing him to the ground in front of him. He rolled on the ground pathetically. He had known it before, but seeing him he could confirm it.

That was Max, leader of the army of those strange robots.

There was no other enemy from the past that had also had cybernetic arms. He had faced others, but none that had had both arms replaced, so that hadn't been a possibility from the beginning.

Max recovered, rising to his feet.

"It's you. Of course. What's all this?"

Max prepared to continue the fight, clenching his fists, assuming a different posture. He didn't look like he had learned to fight hand-to-hand.

Not that he needed to, of course.

So it didn't matter. It wasn't going to be any easier because of that.

"Your grave."

"You said..."

The right words came to him from a place far away at once, when until then he had been desperately straining to remember.

"You said you would show me the truth of this world. Are you going to do it? By killing me? Or have you already forgotten about it?"

Jonathan remembered the words, but not the context. The context was brief, vanished like soap bubbles bursting.

"In a way," Max admitted without a second thought, still maintaining a pretentious air of superiority. "I know how you are now; I know you would be of no use to us. So I don't have to explain the truth to you."

He wasn't interested in what this thing saw as the truth.

What he was interested in was something he had said very clearly just now. He now knew what he was like?

What did that mean?

And the realization hit him like a bolt of lightning, because it was something so simple that he should have known all along. Max knew because he hadn't been the only one who had fallen through the cascade of his memories.

This thing had invaded his mind.

Not only that. Thanks to it he finally realized what was really going on.

It wasn't a dream, but it wasn't real either.

That was because it was happening in his mind. It all made sense now. The memories of how he had ended up here hadn't come back to him, but now he understood enough.

There was something else remarkable in his words.

"Of no use," Jonathan repeated, as if testing an unfamiliar word. "But you're just surrounded by robots."

"Don't be naive. You've suspected it all along, I know. Those weren't robots. They were the inhabitants of this town."

Jonathan felt a shiver.

Of course he had suspected it from the beginning, and more so as time went on. But he had dismissed it because it was ridiculous, because it couldn't be possible.

Suspecting it and hearing it right from the enemy’s mouth were two very different things, however.

Now he had nowhere to hide.

No, Jonathan didn't think she was lying. It wouldn't make sense.

It was painfully real, like the mental golden world Max had him trapped in. It might be mental, but that didn't mean he was out of danger.

Max had threatened to kill him. And Jonathan didn't think he was lying about that either, didn't think he was bluffing.

"What have you done to them?"

"Free them from the pain and loneliness of the flesh, lead them to a better place. A refined existence. As I was going to do for you. But now I'll just kill you."

A better place.

Those words, of course, echoed endlessly in his head. Like a curse. Jonathan grimaced.

The leader of the robots could kill him in this.... Mental space. Right.

But, if so, the reverse was also true.

He could kill him.

In that case, nothing had changed. He simply had to finish what he had started.

Then they could be at peace, at last.

The battle resumed.

■

They picked him up between the three of them in the end and, of course, moved him with all the care in the world, for he was someone important to all of them. But a few steps later they dropped him.

Once more.

"We can't carry him. Not like this... Shit," Mary said. That summed it all up.

They would always drop him, because Jonathan, due to whatever was going on, wouldn't stand still. There was no way. And it's not like they could get him to relax. Drug him, if they had to.

Jamie bit his lower lip hard. It wasn't long before she felt the blood filling her mouth.

"Am I just going to have to sit there... watch him die?"

She uttered those terrible words, which made her shrink in on herself as if the weight of the whole world had fallen on her shoulders. Crushing her.

Roxy was startled. Why, hadn't she thought of that? She had. Even after Mary had taken his pulse, confirming he was alive, she hadn't relaxed.

Maybe because Jamie could risk her life without a second thought, but at the same time she could be a very skittish person.

Afraid of losing anything truly important to her.

Maybe because...

She bit her lip even harder.

He what? Shut up.

"He's not dying. He'll be fine,'' Roxy replied. It sounded more like she was trying to reassure her than that she believed it.

Jamie looked away, returning her gaze to where it should have been all along, restlessly. The fallen Jonathan, writhing on the ground, still wrestling with an unseen foe.

Tears stung her eyes, blurring her vision. She forced herself not to reach up to wipe them away. She simply frowned.

Jonathan could do anything. Thanks to him, they'd gotten out of so much trouble.

He could beat anyone who got in his way. But could he or anyone fight an invisible enemy?

You better hope so, she thought with sparks of anger flying in her heart. Even though it was stupid because Roxy wasn't to blame for anything. You'd better be.

Yes, she was powerless. And she could only watch when he' d needed her most, perhaps, ever.

Jamie couldn't return the favor.

Jamie would never pay back everything she owed him, being this helpless. The tears she had been trying to suppress all this time fell down her cheeks.

■

They collided in the middle of the throne room (he suddenly thought of this space as a throne room, for some reason). More accurately, their weapons clashed.

Jonathan swung the sword and Max raised his arms crosswise, parrying the attack. Sparks flew in the space between them.

Anyone who got close would be cut to pieces.

But there was no one who could get close.

Not even the ghost of his sister. They were truly alone now. And he would solve this.

"I wish I could destroy everything you love," Max said. Wasting oxygen in the middle of a fight was the stupidest thing to do, but he felt the need to bark anyway. Maybe because it was the only thing he could do. "To see you suffer. But I can't. Because out there I'm already dead. Because you killed me. So I'll settle for dragging you down to hell with me."

Jonathan let out a war cry, redoubling his efforts.