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Already happened story > MANDALA > A Day in the Afterlife | Luke’s Ladder: The Box

A Day in the Afterlife | Luke’s Ladder: The Box

  Brute force evacuate soul

  Car-Crash pushed open one of the myriad of doors built into the walls of the garage, this one a metal fire-escape push-door that squeaked on its hinges and smmed closed in its frame, and led Luke down an office hallway.

  It took Luke a moment to realize it was the same office, though maybe another floor, that he had met Filepress in, because while at that time the office had a distinct middle of the night feel, this time soft sunlight bloomed on the frosted gss office windows from slits in the blinds within, and the emosphere was screaming that it was just before dawn on a Thursday m.

  They took a turn and followed another hallway, with almost no doors besides one propped open on a humming half-lit breakroom and another closed door beled riser room, to a set of double doors that opened on a thin carpeted space, with restrooms and a fire escape oher side and another set of double doors at the far end.

  Luke, who had never had to take more than a single door or craft jump to get anywhere iher, was on the verge of crag a joke about the trip, but got caught by his own intellect w through his gut feelings towards a realization.

  The office was making him travel just as he would in the Real, preparing his mind to travel to a pce that was very simir to it. How simir? He was suddenly, annoyingly, afraid. As much as he had tried to vince himself he hated the Other with a fanatic passion, the idea of leaving it and falling into the Real, with his Spirit alive and scious, was terrifying. All the talk of pain and torture aing trapped that he had ughed off just minutes before was now sm in his ears.

  Ae his best efforts, as if sensing he was close to breaking, his mind decided to pile another red-hot weight on top of him, and he remembered something Rory had told him.

  “They make you walk, or drive, or fall, some kind of terrestrial travel, something like you would do oh, that tells your mind “Hey, we have traveled a distao separate you from everything, and so you have to travel the same distao e back. That’s how they trap you.”

  She had been talking about Demons. Luke had to ugh, as he followed Car Crash through the double doors. No one would gh all this trouble for him. His soul wasn’t worth a damn.

  He gnced back over his shoulder, saw the closed doors staring at him with darkened gss, and remembered something else. Something that one of the other faceless Spirits who had been with them on and off that night had said, after Rory’s talk of the Demon trap.

  “Yes, but the trick is not to try and go back the same way you came. You’ll never escape them that way. You have to gh.” He had made a motion with his hand, fingers pressed together like a karate chop, of gliding forward, and had hunkered down and followed the movement with his eyes so full of seriousness aermination, that Rory had rolled hers and Luke had smirked into his drink.

  But now, the memory made his hair stand on end and his breath flutter in his chest, despite the fact that his real body was safely tucked away oher side of existence.

  The double doors smmed shut and Luke found himself in a wide lobby. A white noise hummed at the edges, possibly traffic or voices or footsteps on other floors, and all arouing areas of various shapes led to doors of every kind. Medical ches with hospital double doors. Hotel front desks and darkened dining areas. Call ter break rooms. Elevator lobbies. Gss and crete waiting areas borrowed from some financial office towers. Even apartment plex gyms and college admin desks.

  Nowhere, Luke noticed, did the lobby lead to any kind of fro. It was like a frohat had been severed from the front of whatever it had been built for and bee entombed in the peripheral portions of a huher pces.

  There was a rouion desk at the ter, with a womaed, staring at the desktop as Car-Crash sauntered over to her.

  “Mornin’ Lina. Got a new body for the bricks. Let’s put him on ’s job. I think B.P. has a slot—”

  “’s job has already go,” Lina said in a voice that nearly threw Luke back out the doors. It was a smooth voice, like an attorney-politi Luke had seen on TV once, and it bounced off everything harmonically, like the whole space was ected to her vocal cords.

  “Shit,” Car-Crash said, his voice a dusty chair-squeak by parison. “I need something in DFW. What about, uh,”

  She looked up for the first time and Luke got caught up in the beam. Her face erfectly sculpted and made up, like a supermodel pying a CEO in a movie, and her gold-grey eyes bzed like crete under a midday sun.

  “Tenpound is still colleg for street ers.”

  Car-Crash drummed his fingers on the ter as if he was thinking, but Luke got the feeling from the rigidity of his mask that he was just getting an eyeful of Lina’s chest.

  “Uh, yeah. Sounds good. Who—”

  “The street squad seniors are Tommy Twelve and Backdraft.” The light in her eyes fluttered as she spoke, as if she was reading something unseen.

  “Fug Tommy will roll him,” Car-Crash scoffed.

  “Backdraft it is then,” Lina said wearily. “I’ll send the word out now. Here.” She handed Car-Crash a door key, along with a smile that said “I kly what you want. Why don’t you do something to make me give a shit?”

  Car-Crash took it with a nod and turned on his heel.

  “All right. Have a good one, Lina. Let’s go man.”

  “Good Luck,” Lina said to Luke, her eyes something like dolences. Luke nodded and hoped her vision wasn’t as peing as Filepress’s.

  He turo follow Car-Crash and stumbled in his step. The Lobby had shifted, somehow, as he was staring at Lina, and the various waiting rooms seemed different than they had been just moments ago, re-ordered, and he couldn’t find the double doors and broet break room Car-Crash had led him through when they came in.

  Car-Crash also seemed a bit disoriented. He stopped suddenly and spun on his heel a few times, even gnced back at Lina as if sidering askihen finally stopped and looked at the key.

  “Oh, shit. Here we go,” he said mostly to himself and poi a linoleum and white paint region of the surrounding circle, which Luke identified as they got closer as an apartment plex undry room, plete with masking tape and sharpie ‘out-of-order’ bels on the maes and loose articles of children’s clothing on the ground. The room screamed ‘middle of the night’ which Luke found hard to believe, until Car-Crash shoved the door open, and Luke found himself walking down a strip of crete lot fractured and pot-holed in every way imaginable, shimmering like a crushed sb of bck gss under gring white lights and a steady, misty drizzle.

  The cold sensation of night rain on his skin was about the st thing he had expected to find oher side of that door, and he looked around fns of the uy of it all, like looking for the zipper on a chuck-e-cheese suit, but found only a perfectly natural apartment plex back alley.

  A Brick wall mouthed with glowing broken blinds and protruding rust-grilled window units, a tall splintered and stained wood fence, and the muffled echoes of their own footsteps. The most out of pce thing he could find was Car-Crash himself, and even he seemed trimmed to fit, his broken tempered gss mask now looking more like a very well sculpted piece of cospy than a morphed memory.

  Car-Crash stopped at a door seemingly at random, put the key in, and turhe bolt. He stepped back without taking the key out and waved towards the door.

  “Ok wele home. Get the fu.”

  Luke stared at the door, then looked back at Car-Crash, who seemed to be waiting on something.

  “Uh, ok. What—”

  “You will notice that I’m not attempting to expin any of this to you,” Car-Crash said with an acidic irritation. “That’s because it’s a waste of time. Just gh the god damned door and the box will do the rest.”

  “The box?”

  But Car-Crash was already walking back down the alley, and in just a few steps he disappeared into the darkness beyond the e of white light and glowing misty rain.

  Luke turhe nob and pushed the door inward, and something about the sound of the door made him stop dead still.

  He reized it. It was the same sound it had made a thousand times. It was the door to his apartment.

  No. It wasn’t. He remembered his apartment, ohird floor of a three-story five-year-old plex, everything smooth, new crete and e stucot even any rust oe hinges yet. Looking out over unused shrubnd down to a two-ne road in one dire, and the most baren stretch of iate between two metro ters iher.

  But that door was distant, hazy, fading. This door was right here in his hand. The feeling was ensnaring, like sensing the edge of waking in a dream. He couldn’t help but move towards it. He had to remember who he really was.

  He stepped inside and the apartment came ba. It was like that other apartment, in a way. The clutter and furniture were nearly identical, and even the smells were the same, but once again, this one was near and close and real, while the other was being more distant with every heartbeat.

  Though he hadn’t noticed it at the time, time ihe apartment was ed, pi the ends. Far away and higher up, with the be of distance, another Luke could see the , like a cough drop between two twists, and the way time squeezed him over half an hour in a heartbeat, formed the seds directly into memory, and pushed him towards the bed.

  He skipped the shower. Skipped the beer, even. He was so god damired. A double shift, surely. He stripped down to his underwear and barely got uhe sheets.

  As he y, staring at the ceiling, the world pressed out at the seams, growing moment by moment, as he i with each breath.

  The sensation of being stu a precipice of recolle reached a cresdo, and he floated up off the bed.

  “Oh fuck, I’m dreaming.”

  He rarely ever realized he was dreaming before he woke up, but he must have fallen asleep so fast his mind didn’t have a ce to trick him.

  Up, up, into the darkness of the ceiling. The shadows of the pop texturied and broke and he floated into a white noise void.

  “What was I gonna do tomorrow?”

  But the question was deeper than that. He didn’t even know who he had been today. He had to wake up. He had to remember who he was and what he was going to do and what day it was. And he had to do it quick. He might be te for work. He might have fotten something important. He might even have someone waiting on him. He o, absolutely had to wake up.

  It fred out above him. A bright light. Like a little warm sun. A pin pri the darkness letting in some of the summer heat oher side. There. That was his real life. Not fantastiot wonderful. Not even pleasant. But real, solid, steady, iructible, secure. Like a uniform crete sb. He was tired of floating around on clouds, dang in nebue, swimming in imagination. It spoke to him, told him about yesterday’s traffic, gas prices, news stories, even straext messages from unknown numbers. It told him of the real world, and it promised to take him there.

  He reached out his hand for the light, and this time, he caught it.

  Crash test dummies. on Fodder. Even the lowest rung of Hardworlders are a rare breed. Dropping in with a box takes a lot of mem, which means a lot of funding. Luke has just fallen mind first into corporate Hardworlding, and the Luke that es out the other side will never be the same. ime, Luke gets a wake up call from hell. episode, Door Kickers.