benjaminkeyworth
patreon
Superworlds - Chapter 2 - Matt Callaghan, Deceased
🕑 Added 2023-06-30 13:19:15 +0000 UTC“NO!”
Time froze. The world around Jane fell silent, swallowed by the sound of her final gasping breath. The scene crystallised, the colours shining – a painting of perfect detail, suspended forever in gloss.
The bright-lit alley, moths floating, wings shining mid-beat beneath yellowed lights. The chipped brick walls, breathing softly with dust and moisture – wisping hints of steam rising from the bitumen, the distant cars and lancing headlights. The press of people, their rippled clothes, their frozen faces, caught mid-turn and mid-fall from elation to horror. Recoil, spreading like a wave from the gunshot, the slow flash of cameras, the slow drop of signs. Eyes widening in terror. Mouths opening in screams. The hands reaching out, too late, to pull Matt back.
Her own face, too, was screaming; her own body as much a part of this scene as anyone’s. She saw herself in the centre of it, the golden widow in some medieval painting – her own hand reaching back for him, her own lips locked in a hoarse and mangled shout. Always too far away, always too late. The shooter, his body flickering as his invisibility wavered, disrupted by the gun’s sudden kick, seeming to appear from nothing, a man surfacing beneath a quicksilver veil. In that moment, in that space, every line of his face glistened in perfect detail. Pale and middle aged, with sagging cheeks and a thin, receding hairline, a bulbous nose and dumpling chin. He looked almost surprised at the life he had taken; shocked by his own accomplishment, to see his hand holding the black‑barrelled pistol, to see that he had killed.
Like water sliding through ice Jane’s awareness turned glacially towards the bullet; the spinning, slow-rolling metal burrowed free from Matt’s temple; the tip of a relentless trail of brain and viscera that now free moved ever forward. Pieces of him, suspended in mid‑air, debris from the flesh-stained tunnel. Droplets of blood; pieces of bone. A fine mist of gore caught a moment before it would spray across the crowd and carry with it Matt’s life and soul. And Jane, stuck there, always, alone across a six‑foot void that may as well have been eternity, always crying out, always reaching back. Always too late.
A frozen, perfect picture, seared into her mind, from which she could never escape.
No.
No.
NO!
Jane screamed.
A piercing shriek, raw instinct, a single urge – undo. Without thinking, without knowing, like bones tearing free from flesh, Jane clenched her fists and ripped herself apart from time, rearing up beneath the surface of eternity. The Earth fell away – time fell away – and in an instant she was a blur‑edged shadow, raked in every direction by a howling, freezing wind. Infinity pulled at her – the endless plummeting darkness, the seething kaleidoscope of everything that ever was and ever is and ever could be. Yet in that moment – in that breath – her mind held no room for pain. She did not think, and the delirium of the timeless world which would have torn apart a conscious mind was not comprehended by an instinctual one. She had not meant to go, she just went – and in that briefest space of being she had but one perfect, unyielding want.
Undo.
Jane screamed into oblivion and threw herself mere seconds, hurtling up and over and plunging back beneath the river in a single, rushing arc.
Suddenly, reality hurtled back into focus. The alleyway shone and heaved, buzzed with movement and noise and light. She was her. She was back. She was there between the buildings, between the people, the screaming and the cameras and the waving signs. Matt was behind her, looking across at her, glancing back. He was smiling.
“It’s okay,” he said.
And then an invisible space behind him moved, and a man holding a gun appeared and pointed it at Matt’s head. Jane’s eyes widened, and her lips twisted in a snarl.
BANG
The gun fired and the shot flew harmlessly off into the air, slamming into the brickwork above the crowd with an abrupt, impotent crack. Suddenly, the unseen assassin was visible – his eyes bulging, staring up at Jane, who was now mere inches away, her hand wrapped around his wrist in a vice-grip, aiming the pistol up at the wall. Behind them, Matt spun at the sound of the shot, colour rapidly draining from his face. Jane did not look back at him – instead her teeth bared and her eyes blazed, boring down into the shooter as she held him quailing before her. Her right hand clenched the front of his shirt, her left holding the hand with the gun, and she stared at him with such unrestrained malice that the killer wilted in its wake.
Then Jane snarled, and her eyes burned gold, and with a crack she broke his wrist.
The man shrieked. The crowd screamed, recoiling at the sound of gunfire, and suddenly the stillness broke into pandemonium, people scrambling backwards as others pressed forward, a sudden sea of confusion swirling around three rocks. The gun fell from the man’s grasp, clattering harmlessly to the ground, and the pale, dough-faced man went limp beneath Jane’s unblinking, murderous gaze. Her teeth bared; his lips trembled.
Then Jane snapped her head forward and headbutted the assassin straight on, and the man collapsed without a second thought.
All around her, the crowd fell abruptly silent. A sort of stunned hush descended as the assembled masses stared at the two of them – Jane standing tall and burning in her sparkling dress, and the slumped, broken-nosed assassin hanging limply in her grip.
“Holy crap,” said someone.
Then all at once the alley erupted in cheers.
