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Four: The Destroyer of Worlds

All at once, Marc's senses left him. One moment he was careening toward the bruise of a lifetime, the next his awareness was floating without direction through a colorless, soundless void. The transition from Phys. Ed. class to this complete emptiness was so sudden that he was afraid he'd somehow snapped his neck when he'd landed and severed all of his brain's connections. But that wouldn't have made him go blind and deaf on top of becoming paralyzed, would it? He wasn't seeing darkness or hearing silence; he wasn't even able to register the absence of noise and light, he was so cut off from his ears and eyes, and his inability to feel any part of his body quickly gave him the helpless sense of being trapped.

When he was younger, he'd slipped while running along a swimming pool's perimeter and blacked out briefly after hitting his head on the concrete, but this void wasn't like being knocked unconscious. At the swimming pool, his mind had simply shut itself off until he began to come around, at which point he had wished that he could feel as little as he did now. Here, though, in the emptiness, his mind worked as well as it did while he was awake. His thoughts, confused and uncertain as they were, were all that existed.

If he wasn't paralyzed, and he wasn't unconscious, then there was only one other possibility he could imagine.

Marc was dead.

He tried to scream. He tried to lash out. Maybe in some other reality his body was convulsing and yelling in the middle of an ongoing dodge ball game, but here, in the realm of nothing, nothing is exactly what happened. With only his panicking thoughts to help him judge time, he couldn't be sure how long nothing continued, but it seemed like only a few minutes before something else joined him in the emptiness.

"Awaken."

It was a thought, but not his own. He didn't hear it, or see or feel it, but rather imagined, or perhaps remembered it. Indeed, the word that invaded his mind was only the summary of a memory of a torch sparking to life in a dark, endless cavern. Who are you? He made himself form the words in his thoughts. He knew he hadn't told himself to wake up, so unless someone's voice had broken through to his mind from the gymnasium, or unless he was going insane already from this complete isolation, someone else was in the void with him. If that someone could plant thoughts in his intangible head, maybe they could hear the thoughts coming out of it, too. What's happening to me?

"Awaken." An apple tree blossoming with thousands of pale flowers in crisp, dew-washed twilight. The memory was very different, but was somehow summarized by the same word in Marc's mind.

I don't understand. If I could wake up, I would. How can I get out of here? Am I still alive? Marc's thoughts erupted from him in a confused tangle, but as his anxiety gave way to frustration, his mind was able to voice one question clearly: What is going on_?_

For an indeterminable length of time, he was left alone with his roiling emotions, and he began to worry that he'd scared off the only thing that could help him. Then, finally, the other presence filled his mind again. "You have many questions, but I must not borrow the time needed to give you the explanations you deserve." Scenes and pictures bombarded his memory and imagination in a frenzy to form the other's sentence, but all he was able to retain of the visions were the words that inadequately symbolized them. "Later, your answers will find you. But now. Marc Daniels. Wanderer..."

A door opening on silent hinges into light so brilliant that nothing beyond the doorframe could be seen. Stepping through, regardless...

"Awaken."

* * *

"Tolinom? Tolinom?" A feminine voice led the return of Marc's senses, but it was muffled and faint, as though coming from a great distance. He became aware of a red light soon after, but it, too, was faint, seeming to come from the other side of a thick veil. "Tolinom," the voice said, and try as he might, he couldn't recognize its meaning or its source, "come on, get up. We have to go while they're distracted."

Someone shaking his shoulder reignited his sense of touch, and he could feel something hard and uneven pressing along one side of his body. He realized that he must be lying on his side with his eyes closed, and that the red glow was the backs of his own eyelids, but for some reason he still couldn't move. The hands on his shoulder shook him again, more vigorously this time, and the voice said, "I can't get him up. They must have drugged him." She sounded closer now, but only a little. Had someone packed his ears with cotton?

"Marc, stop wasting time. They'll be back any second," said a second voice, deep and gravelly, and even though Marc recognized it as little as he did the first, his attention was riveted to it after hearing his name.

"It's no use," the female said. "Can you lift him?"

"I can try," the second voice muttered. Whatever muffled Marc's hearing blurred the statement until it was almost unintelligible.

"Hur--"

She was cut off by heavy footfalls from somewhere in front of Marc, and a third voice, as deep and distant as the second, shouted, "It's his followers! They're at the camp!"

The man who'd addressed Marc cursed vehemently. "Let's get out of here. There's nothing we can do now..." His last words faded as leaves rustled and sticks snapped behind Marc, the sound of the third person's footsteps following the direction into which the gravelly voice departed.

"Let them go," a fourth voice said from somewhere above Marc's head, as smooth as the other two male voices were rough, but definitely masculine.

"But sir--"

"They came to free the destroyer of worlds. Do not let them fool you into believing they would give up so easily. They likely plan to draw us away from camp, just like before." The silken voice paused, and Marc was barely able to make out light footsteps approaching him. "Too few of us remain to split our forces, so we must all guard him, at all times. Until we reach the capital, neither of you is to let him out of your sight again. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," two voices said at once.

The light footsteps stopped in front of Marc's face, and he focused all his willpower into opening his eyes. "The Wanderer must not be unleashed," the smooth voice whispered.

Marc opened his eyes.

* * *

A hard wood floor knocked the breath out of him as he fell on it sideways, and while the gymnasium spun around him and a chorus of youthful shouts assaulted his now-completely-unmuffled ears, at least ten hard-packed balls pelted his legs and back.

He rolled onto his back to stare at the gymnasium ceiling's steel support beams, the chaos of the dodge ball game's final moments swirling around him while he tried to understand what had just happened. He was vaguely aware of Mr. Monroe yelling at him to get off the court, that he was out, but he was still absorbed in the strangeness of his unexpected vision.

When Brandon's upside down visage materialized above his head and offered a helping hand, he just stared through his friend, trying to tune out the noise in the gymnasium and make sense of all the voices he'd heard before his rough landing. "Come on, Marc," Brandon was saying, but Marc's mind was replaying a disembodied female voice telling him to get up so they could leave while someone was distracted. "Game's over. We're lining up again for round three."

He took Brandon's hand, more out of habit than from any conscious intent, and let his friend haul him to his feet. Once upright, though, he just stood, staring forward numbly, unsure what it was he was supposed to do next.

"Geez, that fall really did a number on you, didn't it?" Brandon turned him around to where the rest of the class was assembled along one wall just as they had been for the day's attendance check, waiting for the two of them to join everyone else so the next game's teams could be divided.

"Daniels, Davis, hurry it up!" Mr. Monroe yelled at them, standing at one end of the row of students with his clipboard tucked under an arm and his tennis shoe tapping the floor impatiently.

Brandon gave him a gentle shove from behind to get him moving, and, somewhat surprisingly, he began walking forward instead of falling on his face like an unbalanced statue. He made his unsteady way toward the end of the line of students where Mr. Monroe was waiting, but stopped before he reached the wall. He turned and faced the Phys. Ed. teacher before he understood why. "Mr. Monroe, I..." His voice dropped off. Marc still didn't know what it was he wanted to say.

Mr. Monroe, however, took one look at his face and guessed the rest of his sentence. "Go ahead," he said, nodding toward the boys' locker room door, "but make it quick."

Marc's feet took him slowly toward the locker room of their own accord while echoes of "Let them go," and "Marc, stop wasting time," competed in his head with what his teacher had told him. When his body finally made it clear what it intended, though, he moved more hastily toward the toilet stall in the back of the locker room, running with unexpectedly coordinated strides and bending over the toilet to throw up noisily. Only after his lunch was mingling with the toilet's contents did he notice that the bowl wasn't empty, and he vomited into it again at the same time as pulling its handle to flush it.

Once he'd rinsed his mouth of the taste of bile with cool water from the nearby sink, he sat on one of the room's long wooden benches as far from the toilet as possible, and leaned with his elbows on his thighs to stare blankly at his hands.

Nothing like that had ever happened before. Was he so stressed out about finals that his mind had lost its grip on reality? If so, the hallucination had done its job well; failing his senior year didn't seem nearly as important now as it had after his Geography test.

He couldn't discount the void and the voices as figments of his imagination, though. His family had a long history of alcohol abuse, but as far as he knew, no records of mental illness. Maybe his mother had gone through an experimental stage while pregnant with him, like what his younger sister, Julia, had been putting herself through during the past three years, but even drug induced brain damage wouldn't explain how no time had passed in reality while he was indulging in sudden madness. The entire episode had happened within the same midair heartbeat.

What was it the invisible presence in the emptiness had told him about borrowing time?

No! He couldn't let himself start thinking about that presence or the voices that had followed it as being real, or he really would start going insane. Try as he might, though, Marc could find no explanation for what had happened to him, and for its impossible timing, without accepting that it had been more than a momentary and isolated escape from reality.

He willed his hands to relax. He'd been clenching his fists hard enough for his nails to bite into his palms without realizing it, even though he was still staring at them. If his out of body experience had really happened, it wasn't something he could shrug off as inconsequential. It was either insanity, or it was somehow important, and he didn't know what he was supposed to do about it either way.

The scene he had listened to as it unfolded had sounded like a rescue attempt. Like his rescue attempt, judging by the way someone had been shaking him, and a failed one, at that. Except one of the last voices to speak had said something about the others trying to free the destroyer of worlds, hadn't it? That sounded like some kind of monster, so they couldn't have been trying to rescue Marc.

He found himself pacing back and forth along the narrow aisle formed between two of the locker room's benches, keeping a healthy distance from the toilet. What was it the woman had first said when her voice had brought him out of the vast emptiness he'd been in? Tonilon, or something like that. Maybe that was what the monster was called. But then, where did Marc fit into it? He tried to replay the scene in his head, but wasn't sure he was remembering everything exactly like it happened, all the words exactly as they were said. His name had only been mentioned once, he was pretty sure, but by the way the gravelly voiced man had addressed him, he could only have been the person they were trying to rescue, unless he'd been one of the rescuers. But if that was the case, why had he been lying on his side with his eyes closed, and why would he be trying to free the destroyer of worlds in the first place?

It could have been a different Marc...

For that matter, he had no real reason to believe he was supposed to be the person lying with their eyes closed at all. As strange as the whole ordeal had been, he could have been listening through the ears of someone else. He stopped pacing in front of his locker, looking at the red painted metal without actually seeing it. Maybe he was supposed to find a way to keep the rescue attempt from happening, or maybe it already _had_happened, and he was supposed to stop the world destroyer.

Marc leaned against the locker and rested his head against its cool surface with his eyes closed, making a quiet, metallic clang echo slightly around the empty room. He was getting delusions of grandeur. Whatever reason he'd had this time freezing vision, it wasn't to spur him into hunting down some demon. Besides, by everything he'd heard, the rescue had failed, hadn't it? What was the point, then?

Without moving, Marc looked out the corner of his eye at the small locker room clock and groaned. Evidently, the point was to make certain he failed Phys. Ed. along with the rest of his classes. Mr. Monroe had told him to hurry, but there were only two minutes left before summer break.

With a sigh, he set about dialing in his locker's combination, and chewed on the inside of his cheek while changing back into his tee shirt and jeans. Something was still bothering him about the impossible experience, beyond it happening in the first place. Something in the rescue attempt had seemed out of place other than what all the voices had said. It was more what he had felt than what he had heard that was disturbing him. There had been something unusual about the way the ground had pressed against his side, but the event had passed so quickly, and he'd been focusing so much on listening, that he hadn't consciously noticed it at the time. He certainly couldn't pinpoint what had felt wrong now.

His train of thought was broken when the Phys. Ed. class's male students charged into the locker room with him an instant before the school bell rang. They were a swarm of enthusiastic energy, the adrenaline remaining from their last dodge ball match adding to their excitement for summer break, or in the seniors' cases, for the end of high school all together.

Marc had more reason to feel out of place than being the one senior in the room who wouldn't graduate. He didn't know how to behave around his friends after something so phenomenally strange had happened, how to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary when everything, all of a sudden, was. So when Brandon clapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was okay while unlocking the locker next to his, Marc just shook his head, shoved his damp gym clothes into his backpack, and walked out of the room, through the gymnasium, and into the shouting, cheering, barely moving traffic of Miller High's hallways.

By the time he'd made his way out the school's main entrance and into the early summer heat, both Brandon and Trent had caught up with him somehow. He didn't shake off Trent's hand when it grabbed his upper arm, but neither did he turn to face his friends.

"Hey, Marc, my car's in the back parking lot," Trent said. "Same place as always, on the other side of the building." Trent usually gave both Marc and Brandon a lift to their homes on the way to his own house.

"I think I'm going to walk today," Marc said over his shoulder, then continued his way through the crowd pouring from the school building into the waiting yellow buses lined up beside the sidewalk.

His friends didn't leave it at that, though. While following him, Trent pointed out that the trip was almost four miles at the same time as Brandon asked, "Do you think you should see the school nurse? You still look a little out of it."

"I'll be fine," Marc said, stepping out onto the school's front parking lot behind the last of the buses. "I just need to clear my head, think some things over." He grimaced as soon as he said that. His friends would assume he wanted to be alone after a bad day of finals; they both knew he struggled with his grades, but by unspoken agreement they never talked about it.

Keeping to that agreement, it took only a brief moment before Brandon said, "All right. I'll see you tonight, then." He pulled Trent toward the back parking lot and left Marc alone to navigate through the steady stream of students and cars to the empty corn field that surrounded the school's property. He didn't waste any time; one car full of seniors was cruising around the parking lot and assaulting bystanders with super soakers, cheers, and silly string. While getting doused with cold water didn't seem like all that bad an idea at the moment, the idea of walking home with a mess of silly string mixed in wasn't nearly as appealing.

Two freshly tilled cornfields, one creek, and half a forest later, Marc was no closer to understanding the void and the vision than when he'd been in the gymnasium's locker room. He spent most of the long hike's beginning trying to decide what, if anything, to tell his friends had happened. It didn't seem like a very good idea to let anyone know that, in less time than it took for him to fall a millimeter through the air, an invisible, supernatural force had stolen his consciousness so that disembodied voices could warn him about something trying to destroy the world, but he didn't know how he could pretend that the only important events of his day had been the tests he'd failed. When he'd woken up that morning, he'd been able to think of few things more important than his upcoming exams, but after a single moment, finals had lost all significance to him. What was the point of high school if you were either losing your mind or being warned about an impending apocalypse?

Marc made it halfway from Miller High to his home before he found his hand traveling to the smallest pouch in the backpack slung over his shoulder of its own accord. With an irritated grimace, he stopped walking between a narrow stream and an old weeping willow, bringing his arm in front of him with more effort than should have been necessary so that he could glare at his clenched fist. It was trembling.

He managed to take five steps away from the willow before he was kneeling with his backpack on the ground in front of him, his traitorous hands swiftly retrieving his lighter and a battered pack of cigarettes from the small, front pouch. He swore at himself under his breath, but had a lit cigarette between his lips before they closed around the curse. Closing his eyes, he sat back on his heels and let his hands' trembles work themselves out. If ever there was a time for a good smoke, this was it. What had made Marc think finals week was a good time to try to quit was beyond him, but it was far from his first attempt.

He would try again tomorrow.

* * *

"You've been smoking again."

"I'll take a shower in a bit," he answered, raising his voice so that his mom could hear him from the kitchen. He'd underestimated her nose again; she made the observation before he finished closing their trailer's front door. After dropping his backpack on the small living room's couch, he stepped into the kitchen, intending to head to the bathroom beyond it to do exactly as he'd promised, more due to his nearly four mile hike under the early summer sun than to get rid of a scent that perpetually filled the little home. He stopped, though, when he almost tripped over his mom's legs. She was lying on her back with her head and shoulders hidden underneath the kitchen sink, her tool box beside her and an assortment of wrenches scattered next to her waist.

"The pipes are turned off again, aren't they?" He turned to the refrigerator instead of the bathroom door, stepping over his mom as she worked.

"Yep," she answered without pulling her head out from the sink's open cabinet. "That shower's going to have to wait, hon, but no more than an hour, I promise. If I don't have the drip fixed by then, I never will." Nothing else except the sounds of metal against metal came from beneath the sink until he was stepping back into the living room with an open soda in hand. That's when she asked, "How did your finals go?"

In a perfectly neutral voice, he said, "Fine," and walked out of the kitchen as if he hadn't just come home from the most stressful day of his life. Without offering any details, he crossed the living room to the narrow hallway between the trailer's three small bedrooms, grabbing his backpack on his way past the couch.

He paused with his hands on his bedroom's doorknob, the sounds of an old Mortal Kombat video game coming from the other side of his door. "Get out of my room, Jul--" he began, but finished with a rather lame, "Oh," once he opened the door. "Sorry, Brandon. I didn't know you were here already." He wasn't at all surprised to find his friend sitting on the edge of his bed with an old PlayStation controller in his hands, but Brandon usually favored racing games. Marc had forgotten he had that copy of Mortal Kombat stashed away in his old collection; his sister was probably the last person to have played it.

"Tim started celebrating graduation early," Brandon said as explanation. Marc just grimaced and sat on his narrow bed beside his friend, watching while Brandon finished losing his match. Brandon sighed and set his controller down beside him when the old box television asked him if he wanted to continue and began a short count down. "I was never any good at fighters."

Marc flopped onto his back, staring at the trailer's low ceiling with his knees still dangling over the bed's edge. A moment later Brandon did the same, folding his arms behind his head. "Feeling any better?"

"I think I lost my mind today," Marc answered. "Not that I was using it or anything."

"You probably did better than you think," Brandon said after a quiet moment.

"Oh, I bombed them all, but finals aren't what are bugging me any more."

"What's bugging you now, then?"

Marc tried to decide how much to tell the other teenager, if anything. He crossed his arms over his chest and turned his head to look at his friend. "Have you ever had an out of body experience?"

"Yeah, when I was little," Brandon answered without returning Marc's gaze. "I used to pretend I was somewhere else any time Tim was in one of his moods." Tim was Brandon's father, unfortunately for Brandon. He was the type of man who gave the worst kind of name to trailer parks by drowning himself in alcohol every evening and yelling at his wife and kid far later than most of his neighbors tried to get to sleep. He almost never became physically abusive, but Marc didn't think the emotional damage he dealt Brandon and his mother was much better than a few bruises and scars. Marc often wondered how his friend had turned out so well after being raised in that environment.

"I don't think this out of body experience was quite like that," Marc said, cutting short an uncomfortable silence.

"What was it like, then?" Brandon finally turned his head to look him in the eyes.

"You know when I fell in gym class today?"

"And almost knocked yourself out? What about it?"

Marc opened his mouth, but no words came out. There was no version of the vision he'd had that any sane person would believe. Brandon would just try to convince him to see a shrink. Marc's mouth closed, and his gaze returned to his bedroom ceiling. "Nothing. Forget I said anything."

"Well, now I can't." Brandon propped himself onto his elbow, turning his body to face Marc completely. "What kind of out of body experience are you talking about?"

Marc shook his head. "You'll think I'm crazy."

"Already do, so spill it."

Marc scowled over at his friend, but couldn't sustain his angry façade for long. He laughed, shook his head, and sat back up, staring at his hands in his lap the same way as he had in the gym's locker room earlier that afternoon. He wondered what it was he thought his palms would tell him. "Does the word 'Tonilon' mean anything to you?"

"Nope," Brandon said, standing up between Marc's bed and the room's small, curtained window. "We could go Google it on your dad's computer, though."

Marc was shaking his head before his friend finished the sentence. "Nah, I don't know how to spell it."

"So..." Brandon parted the window's dull yellow curtains to glance idly at the small grass and gravel yard between Marc's trailer and his neighbors'. "When did you hear the word 'Tonilon?'" he pressed.

"When I fell in gym class today." Marc didn't look up from his hands.

"I don't remember anyone saying--"

"I know. They didn't." Marc lifted one of his hands to run his fingers through his short, curly brown hair, sighing. "I heard a lot more than that word, too."

Brandon turned away from the window to study Marc's face. "You must have landed even harder than I thought."

"It was before I landed," Marc said. Then, forgetting to worry about shaking his friend's confidence in his mental stability, he told him everything, from the timeless void and the invisible presence that spoke to him within it using imagined pictures, to the apparently failed rescue attempt that took place from beyond his closed eyes. Throughout his retelling, he never looked up, and only once a long silence stretched after his description did he turn his eyes up to his friend's face.

Brandon didn't look concerned, as Marc had feared. Instead, his friend was studying him with the same intent expression that he used to examine riddles and difficult mathematics problems in school, his brow furrowed and his head tilted slightly to one side. "This isn't like the genie, is it?"

It took Marc a moment to remember what Brandon was referring to, and he shook his head once he did. In the third grade, when the two of them had only known each other for a couple years, Marc had tried to convince the other boy that he was a genie, and could grant his friend anything he wished for. For two and a half weeks, Brandon had assured Marc that he believed him, but he'd never wished for anything.

"Then you're right," Brandon said. "You've lost your mind." Then, before Marc had time to take the comment seriously, he asked Marc to tell him about the vision again, from start to finish. After he brought the vision's second telling to a close and began worrying out loud about what he was supposed to do about a couple of faceless voices trying to free the bringer of the Apocalypse, Brandon asked him if Trent had put him up to making up something so far-fetched.

Marc just stared at his friend for a short while, then muttered, "I knew I shouldn't have told you," and stalked out of his bedroom, leaving Brandon behind his open door.

Marc's dad had come home at some point during his conversation with Brandon and, as usual, had brought three of his work buddies with him for an evening of drinking, smoking, and poker. When Jake Daniels caught sight of Marc from the other side of the kitchen door and a thick haze of cigarette smoke, he yelled, "There he is! There's the high school graduate. How's it feel to be a free man, Marcus?" Marc just crossed the living room and let himself out of the trailer without a word, and heard one of his dad's friends say, "Teenagers, huh?" before he closed the door behind him. A few seconds later the men all burst out laughing after one of them made some joke.

He was pacing swiftly back and forth in front of the trailer when its door opened again and Brandon stepped out into the early evening sunlight. "Marc--" he began, but as soon as he heard the door latch open, Marc strode around the trailer's corner. He was climbing up the thin white birch tree behind his home before his friend could catch up, and had already swung from one of its middle branches to his trailer's roof by the time Brandon reached the tree's trunk. Marc didn't know why, but he always felt the need to move when he was frustrated or angry.

He found his hand reaching for his shoulder strap of its own will while Brandon made his careful way up the birch tree, but he'd left his backpack, and its addictive contents, in his room. Turning his back to his friend, he faced the sun lowering toward the tree carpeted horizon and shoved his hands irritably into his jeans pockets.

"Marc..." Brandon said again once he'd clambered on top of the trailer behind him. He only went on after half a minute passed without a response. "You said the presence in the void communicated with you using images that felt like memories?" He stepped onto the center beam of the trailer home's slightly slanted roof beside Marc and waited for an answer.

"Do you believe me all of a sudden?" Marc finally asked.

Instead of answering, Brandon said, "What if the vision was just another metaphorical image, like a sentence, or even a word too complicated to make any better sense than what you heard?"

Marc blinked. "I hadn't thought of that. None of it makes any sense, though, whether that's the case or not!" He sat down heavily, stretching his legs in front of him, and a moment later, Brandon did the same beside him. The sun was trying to hide behind the distant line of trees before either of them spoke, the only sounds as they sat coming from the poker party below them and the nearby highway.

"You don't actually believe me, do you?" Marc finally asked.

"It sounds like you don't actually believe you," Brandon answered, bringing a knee up to his chest and resting his forearms on it. "But of the two of us, you're the only one who has any real idea what happened to you today. If you say you were abducted from Phys. Ed. by invisible ghost aliens, then you were abducted by invisible ghost aliens."

"Thanks," Marc said wryly.

"I don't know what we're supposed to do about it any better than you do, but we have all summer to figure it out. I'm pretty sure the world's not going to end tomorrow." With that, Brandon stretched and yawned loudly, then pushed himself to his feet. "For now, there's a race through Machu Picchu with my name on it waiting in your bedroom." He offered Marc a hand up. "Care to join me?"

At first, Marc considered staying on the roof for a while, but he took his friend's hand after a brief moment. Dwelling on the problem all afternoon had gotten him nowhere. "You're on," he said. After all, Brandon was right. Vision or no vision, Earth wasn't in any danger worse than global warming.