Dion awoke to a dark, windowless room. He had to pee, his head had hurt, and he couldn’t remember what happened. Dion’s stomach flip-flopped, and he leaned to the side because he knew what was going to happen. He retched out what was left of his dinner, afraid and alone.
After some time Dion remembered where he was and then he started to cry. Nero had tricked him into a decrepit old house, locked the door, and refused to let him leave. The cries turned into wails, loud and echoing through the walls of the house.
Wild-eyed and crazy, his captor burst into the room. His red hair was dark and messy, sticking out in various places.
“It's late. Please be quiet. I don’t want to kill you.”
Dion continued to cry but was a little quieter now.
“If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so a long time ago," said Nero. Dion realized he was right, and he stopped crying, but that didn’t abate his fears. If he didn’t want to kill him, what could he be there for?
“What do you want with me," Dion asked.
“I don’t want anything from you," said Nero.
He took out a cigarette from his back pocket, stuck out his thumb and a little flame came forth, lighting his cigarette. He took a long drag, his daily source of nicotine calming his nerves.
“I’m taking a nap. Don’t make any noise so I can sleep. That crazy bitch tired me out,” Nero sighed.
He left and locked the door behind him.
Sounds of the ocean waves greeted Nero as he stomped through the old house, the floorboards creaking underneath his weight. Exerting all that energy at once made his skin turn sour and his forehead tingle. He needed iron but he refused to eat, so instead, he took a nap inside one of the house’s bedrooms.
The smell of seaweed was strange to him when Nero opened the bedroom window, and he finished the last of his cigarette, quicker than usual. The room had nothing but an iron frame bed, a bare bathroom, and a space heater.
He took the scabbard, sword still inside of it, and laid it on the bed, telling it goodnight, and it grumbled back something about finally someone gaining manners. Just as he was drifting to sleep Nero remembered he forgot to set an alarm to wake himself up in time.
Nero stood on one of the many beaches of Atlaan. He couldn’t tell if it was Florentine or Silver Beach. So much of it was destroyed.
Large cement boulders and portions of buildings jutted out on the beach. Black splotches, like a giant, had used an ink brush over the coastline, marred the white sand, and Nero knew immediately that it was another nightmare.
He had many nightmares, daily, and they were of no concern to him. They used to make him cry, or fear sleeping. Now he awoke and stared at the ceiling, upset that he could not get in his minimum six to nine hours a day.
The difference between this nightmare and all the others is that it was so much duller. All of his nightmares were so beautiful, so crisp, every rigid line and detail, pure perfection, it would be impossible for him to not breathe in his trauma every night, reliving the experience daily.
This wound seemed fresh, yet somehow dull.
Walking across the coastline, the sounds of explosions in the background, Nero was bored. He wanted something new. Lucid dreaming didn’t help to rid him of his nightmares, but it did enhance some of the experience.
The dead bodies on the shore were so realistic!
One of the dead bodies even looked like Mr. Mata, his driver!
A new body washed up on shore, this one much different than the others.
Snow and ash fell from the sky, and the explosions became louder, and more frequent while Nero ran over to it because she seemed to still be alive. Her stomach was distended, and filled with water, her long blonde hair sticking to her face and neck. The woman’s eyes were wide open, in shock, her blue eyes flashing with her skin, her skin that was the same, dark inky color splashed over the beach.
She weakly lifted her arm, trying to say something, but all that came out was filthy, tepid, water, and she started to convulse, over and over, and Nero was now scared because something about it was too real.
He could smell the blood on the beach.
He had never smelled anything in a dream before, he had heard music, and seen pictures, and colors, but never smelled, and he started to think, maybe everything was so dull because reality is so much duller than imagination.
“Don’t try so hard,” Nero said.
He held up the woman’s head, and she cried, black tar, spilling out of her eyes, and her nose, and she shivered, grasping at his face. He stood still because she was scared, she was dying, and he told her, it's okay, I’ll make it hurt less.
He let out a loud singular shriek because something was working its way inside of him.
He could feel it.
It started at the base of his tailbone, and inched up his spine, making his left arm jerk up and down, as the dying woman held onto him, smothering tar all over his face, coughing up as much as possible, and she clutched onto his long hair, bringing him as close possible.
He knew this was his punishment for thinking of trying to make it hurt less.
He was only trying to help.
The woman pressed her lips onto his, and his muffled screams were drowned out by the sounds of shelling, the rumbling of machinery, and the screams of victims. The strange feeling, the little worm, crept up through him, and once it pushed through his organs, and wound up his esophagus, the transfer began.
Nero’s fingers played in the sand, and he imagined he was somewhere else as whatever was inside of him ate whatever came out of the woman, in great, big gulps. He cried because the feeling was worse when the creature slid back into his body, the essence received, and the woman looked at him and said,
“Ewoh Ewoe beeu vouY”
The room was still when he awoke, the smell of blood and ash gone, and Nero touched his stomach, tentatively, his face, because nothing was on it, no black slime, no dying women, and the only sound around him was the soft lull of the ocean waves.
He stood up.
A familiar feeling came over him, so he didn’t fight it.
He pushed his muscles on the bottom of his abdomen without his hands, only focusing on it using his mind, another odd skill he had, and threw up black tar, crying, retching, the smell foul.
Unable to stand still he would lurch, and move a bit, and then more would come out until the entire ground was covered in it.
“You’ve cursed me, you stupid sword,” Nero cried.
You have done that on your own before I came into your life, Unas replied.
Something twitched in the slime and squeaked and Nero shouted because he saw what it was. Chittering and slithering, it had stumpy hands and feet, a round body, wide, white eyes, and tiny wings, disproportionate to the size of its body.
“It’s a sender, ” Nero shuddered.
He coughed up bits of diet soda mixed in with more black sludge, and he moaned because he had never seen such a vile method of messaging before and couldn’t fathom how anyone sent the creature through his nightmare.
Nero sat on the bed, and dry heaved because the strange organism would melt into paper, its message sent. But there was no paper in the room. Nero watched as the fat, ink-laden creature bobbed, up and down, and sat on the space heater.
It exploded.
Nero could taste ink in his mouth, and he stared at the walls because the message was sent, the sender never returned a message, that’s why it's called a sender! Nero started screaming, the sword was shouting, Dion could hear him, from down the hallway, and now he was crying, out of sheer confusion.
Nero was terrified.
He could read it.
Nero had not read a proper sentence in years and the written language on Paradis was different from his homeland. Now it stared back at him on the walls, on the floors, on the bedsheets, and the ceiling, in all capital letters, crudely written.
“YOU NEED TO COME HOME”.
Dion still needed to pee and regretted not saying anything. What felt like half a day to Dion was just three hours, and Nero returned to the dark room and turned on the lights. His hoodie was gone, and his shoes were gone, all that was left was his stained pants and white tank, emitting a rank smell from the cursed message.
“It's time. Get up from the floor.”
“I need to pee," said Dion. “Please.”
Nero stared at him for a long time and assessed the situation, then told himself he was just a bystander and decided to be a little nicer.
Just a little.
He took Dion to the tiny bathroom and shut the door behind them, and flicked on the dark, buzzing yellow light. “You’re gonna go in front of me. I don’t trust you to not try to escape through the window,” said Nero.
The idea never occurred to Dion, but he was grateful he wasn’t going to piss himself. He peed into the bowl as Nero glared at him from the corner of the bathroom.
After he washed his hands, Nero took a gun out of his pocket and held it to his face. “You’re gonna walk calmly with me down the hallway, down the staircase, and sit in the chair in the kitchen. If you try to run, I will shoot you in the foot.”
Dion muttered yes quietly and did as he was told. He didn’t want to try anything that would ruin his chances of getting out of there alive, and he was no brave soul. Doing as he was told, he went down the hallway, its squeaky floorboards announcing his death, down the staircase into the void.
It was hard for him to see, as the lightbulbs in the kitchen weren’t working, and the only light filtered in from the windows, the city lights, the debris and flames in the distance, and Dion knew that he was only alive on borrowed time as he saw the chunks of metal fall into the ocean.
Nero zip-tied Dion’s hands behind his back and instructed him to sit in the old wooden chair at the large table, and Dion started to cry again, quietly, because he could see Sky Stadium explode, and it was so beautiful because the fireworks they were supposed to use at the finale song exploded at the same time with it.
Ignoring his emotional breakdown, Nero left the room and came back with the trusty orange backpack that he emptied onto the table.
Dozens of phones spilled out of the bag, many of them broken after their job had been done. Nero carefully inspected them and picked up one with a piece of green paper taped to it.
Nero took the tape off and inspected the paper. Nero had color-coded the numbers on the phones so he could call the right numbers when it was time. Alto was right for nagging him to learn how to read, but he had come this far, so why bother learning now?
He entered the matching symbols into the phone and made a call, but it went to voicemail.
Nero didn’t like that.
He was tired of calling people and them not picking up. It was quite rude.
Nero called twice more, and finally, someone picked up.
“Who is this," said the man on the line. “It is fucking 4:49 AM.”
“I have your son," said Nero.
The line went silent for so long, Nero was about to end the call when the man spoke.
“Are you a rival gang to Enemy? Who is this? Is this the Federals,” asked the man. Nero recited his script to end the call as soon as possible.
“Listen carefully. I will not repeat this. Come to 2567 Sirens Peak if you want your son to live. Come before sunrise. Bring me 5,000 in cash. Do not call the police. If you do, I will kill him, I will kill you, and I will kill his mother."
Nero didn’t wait for him to answer back. He ended the call and promptly broke the phone in half. He put all the broken phones into a trash can and set them ablaze.
