- No matter how many times he blinked, he couldn’t clear his vision; he couldn’t rid himself of the seemingly endless plane that stretched out before him. If hell and heaven existed, Gallagher felt, for sure, that he had fallen somewhere between the two, lost in the midst of limbo. Nothing else could describe the utter lack of life. The colors he once knew seemed long lost, replaced by mixtures of black and white.
Somehow, he’d ended up on his hands in knees, right in the middle of a place he’d only heard about in his old church. When he was ten, he used to fear Judgment. He used to pray at every meal and before his head hit the pillows. He used to believe so strongly in a power greater than himself, in a place bigger than the realm of living, breathing humans. Faced with the realization that the religion he forsook had at least some truth, he felt like the proverbial walls were closing in on him. He didn’t need to breathe, but his lungs were screaming for oxygen. He couldn’t really see that well, but his eyes strained for a form of clarity that his mind and his heart couldn’t provide. He’d fallen into the Shadow Realm.
“Hello?” He pressed his palms into the dirt and pushed himself back, stumbling a little as he regained his footing. His question, though more like a plea, echoed around him and then disappeared, swallowed by the darkness. The air itself seemed like a miniature universe. “Where the hell am I?” That time, his words didn’t echo at all.
With his hands on either side of his head, he closed his eyes and tried to recall his last moments. He’d been fighting with a woman. She mentioned something about a bounty, or so he thought. He’d tried reasoning with her, but she kept hitting him; he tried fighting back, but she had an obvious advantage over him. He could remember the way she moved, almost like a blur. Even in the darkness of the sewers that had surrounded them, he could see enough to know that she would inevitably kill him, if kill were the proper term.
Gallagher gripped at handfuls of his hair to try and rip the rest of the events from his mind. He remembered the black substance oozing from his wounds. He remembered running, fleeing like a coward, into the refuge the sewers provided. After that, his mind drew a blank. He couldn’t remember if someone came after him, if the woman had pursued him. He couldn’t remember if he left the sewers or if he perished in the underground world.
When he finally opened his eyes, he expected to see some evidence of the passing time, but the scenery remained the same. If he had to describe his surroundings, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even find a word to hint at the place. When he swatted at the thick air surrounding him, he couldn’t feel a breeze. When he tried running, searching for anyone he might have seen on the streets of Harper Rock, no cool air met his cheeks. It almost felt like he’d fallen into a vacuum, a void meant for eternal suffering. Where he existed, no flames needed to lick at his flesh to deal out a worthy punishment.
“Damn it. Damn it, Noah. I’m lost.” His voice was strained and broke halfway through his words. When he said his sister’s name, he knew he was crying, but not a single tear stained his face. Then again, he didn’t need to feel the salty tears to feel the pain that accompanied them. “I was killed for a bounty,” he finally reasoned.
Reasoning gave him something to focus on. If he could just try and figure out how he got to his current state, he knew he could keep sane and find a way back, if such a way existed. Patting at his pockets, he felt the outline of a lighter, the one thing he still had on himself. He took the item out of his jeans and flicked the lid back, exposing the lighter itself and creating a flame. The flame sprung to life, but the traditional orange and red was replaced by shades of grey. In that sense, the item was useless to him, but he kept a hold on the lighter, enjoying the feel of the cool metal against his palm. He didn’t need to really see himself to know that he still existed, that his wounds had not faded. Honestly, he didn’t want to see himself. Maybe the plane did everyone a favor with the removal of color.
“I’ll start walking northeast and keep moving in a diagonal line. Keep thinking,” he mumbled to himself, setting off at a steady pace. “I was killed for a bounty. What did I do? What did I do before that chick went crazy on me?” His voice hitched when his anger spiked, but he quickly regained control of his emotions. He was never the type to dwell of displace blame. He’d done something. And then it hit him.
Before his skirmish in the sewers, he’d run into a group of cops. One yelled at him to halt and opened fire, so he’d done the only thing he knew, he returned fire. He ended up in a standoff with the city’s finest, or the city’s pigs; he didn’t really care much for cops, even when human. With one cop dead, he’d attracted even more attention, ending up in yet another brush with the law. Two cops were left bleeding out on the street, and he’d gone into the sewers. He remembered sprinting, ducking around the corner, hoping that everything would pass, and then he remembered the woman finding him.
Gallagher stopped his movements and stared up at what could have been a beautiful night sky. The lighter in his hand, held so tightly at his side, seemed the only connection he had to the world he left behind. With the knowledge that his actions resulted in his travel to the judgment zone, as he’d come to call it in his mind, he remembered the last strikes against him. Another woman and a man had hit him, and then his body had changed. He’d turned into something, something he could only describe as a shadow of himself, and then he ceased to exist there. With all of his thinking, his head would have been throbbing, but he couldn’t feel the pain; he couldn’t feel any pain at all.
In the pit of his stomach, Gallagher knew that he’d have to reflect. He knew that he couldn’t find a way out without reflection. He couldn’t explain how he knew, just like he couldn’t explain how he knew about the sunrise and sunset in Harper Rock, but he’d accepted the feeling as fact. He’d exist in the realm of suffering for some time. Even if he didn’t know why, he knew that killing those cops had been wrong. He wasn’t human, but there were still rules, rules he had yet to learn.
Tucking his lighter back into the right pocket of his jeans, he continued walking. It didn’t matter if he had a form, if his clothing existed, if the sky overhead really existed—he had to think and to believe; he had to keep sane.