Allie's War Episodes 1-4(14)

All but the black-haired man.
He stared out the windows.
“No one’s leaving,” he said a second later. He looked at Jon. “I won’t hurt her, Jon. But we have to go. Now. They’re on their way.”
Cass watched Jon in a kind of disbelief as he nodded.
Somehow, he believed this guy. She couldn’t help but wonder if the black-haired man had hypnotized Jon, too. He was a seer; he had to be. Now that Cass knew that about him, she wondered how she could have missed it before. His height. The weird eyes. But he hadn’t been collared.
Cass saw Jon wipe his eyes then, and realized in a kind of disbelief that he was crying. He really had known about this.
Wiping his eyes again, almost angrily that time, Jon tightened his hold on Allie’s arm. He gave the black-haired man a hard look.
“I’m coming with you.”
The taller man gestured in a downward slash. “No. Absolutely not.”
“You can’t stop me, man!”
“Yes,” the black-haired man said, but more gently. “I can, Jon.”
 


...It was the last thing Cass remembered before she blinked suddenly, and found herself staring around the dining room of the Lucky Cat in confusion.
It took a beat longer for the sound to kick back in.
Initially, all Cass had to go on were visuals.
Sirens rotated and flashed outside the diner windows. She saw people through the glass, most of them wearing uniforms, motioning and shouting, holding weapons as they headed for the diner’s front door.
Cass might have been afraid, under different circumstances.
As it was, she could only stare, sure it wasn’t real.
Patrons seemed to be coming alive around her, too, looking around themselves like they had no idea what had just happened.
Jon stood right next to the bar’s formica counter, not far from where Cass remembered seeing him last. A trickle of blood ran down his face from under his hairline; his arms had nicks and cuts where his T-shirt didn’t cover them.
The person who had stood between them, the person on whom the entire room had been focused, what felt like only seconds before...was gone.
The black-haired man was gone, too.






 
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4
ROOK

 
I am. No thoughts cloud me.
The stories that run silently in the background, all the time...about my life, my dreams, my problems, what it all means...they are all vaporized, gone.
I am. It is enough.
Time is not...not here, anyway. No past is, no future. No “just now,” no “the other day” nor “in a minute.” All lives live in one life that is not-life...at least not in the way I’d thought. I live in spaces between time increments, outside time which spins like a glass ball, a matrix clockwork toy whirling dutifully overhead. Breaths in and out make up a pulse, a beat that follows another...then another still. Life flows a thousand currents from that single point, an ocean of light and dark, colors broken into shards and shadows, interconnected like drops of paint bleeding over canvas.#p#分页标题#e#
I see the world in which my physical body lives.
It it real, too. It moves through time.
The walls of buildings glow like oddly invasive lines, showing me where to direct each foot. Movement is born all over again at each clench and unclench of muscles.
I look up and sky unfolds like a dark cloth thrown out on a windy lawn, rippling and vast. It is more than I can take in, so my mind filters, makes it manageable. Stars appear in that vast landscape, broken pieces of sun.
He pulls me along the street, and I feel fear through his fingers.
I don’t understand how he could be afraid.
It is so beautiful here I could cry. Colors here are the the truest, purest of colors, what the physical world tries to emulate but cannot. Clouds tower in silence, held breaths with hints of billowing motion. The night sky...
Well, night is the all-space.
Light whales wing past, screeching into silence. Dragons swim by. Fish, birds, trees, masks. People too...
They all live here, it is their home.
Am I dead? I wonder.
No, is all he says.
I follow the insistent tug of his fingers. I occupy myself by feeling my legs as they are jerked and released like a puppet’s wooden limbs.
The streets are full of glowing beings.
Most are white and gray sheep with blurred outlines. They have no features, no faces. Above their heads, thin, sparking threads rise up, forever into that darkness.
Humans, he explains. That is what they look like, from here.
From where? I wonder.
He doesn’t answer this.
I look at him then, too, see the structured light and chiseled features inside the same wash of dark and light sky. He is so different from the blurry sheep it is hard to see even the similarities. He is something else. He cannot be the same type of creature at all.