Chapter 101: Flashback: Cassius Victus Reincarnated, But Where?

No gravity. No up.

Cassius Victus wasn’t falling, and he wasn’t floating... his ribs had gone thin as window glass, letting ribbons of unmapped crimson and bruised-orange smear right through his chest cavity.

Every color bled across the void except blue. The spectrum had a sharp, metallic gap where the sky used to be.

His hands turned to clear gel at the wrists.

Dad paid forty bucks at the gate, the thought dragged up through a throat that didn’t hold air anymore.

Not a mountain trek. The safari loop outside Nairobi.

A wire-mesh tunnel had caged their Jeep. Outside the chain-link, a massive male lion sat unbothered in a red-dirt cave, licking dust off a massive paw.

"Look at that," his father’s voice echoed in the back of his teeth, dry and cigarette-stained.

"Lion lives free in a rock hole. We’re the ones packed in the wire box to stare at them. That’s what being human is... not caging mouthless things just to pass an afternoon."

A hard, violent violet washed over the edges of his vision.

The color expanded, thick as oil, swallowing the red and orange until the entire field of view went solid, humming ultraviolet.

Then it snapped shut.

Cold mud squelched between bare toes.

Cassius gasped. Real, burning oxygen tore into wet lungs, making his chest heave against the familiar rough cotton of his T-shirt.

He lay face-down on rotting fern fronds.

He opened his eyes, slowly. Where am I? The safari... Dad!? He held his head with one of his hands as it pained a lot, while he was recalling his memories.

Slowly he turned his gaze upwards in the sky, which looked old enough to be real.

"Crocodiles..." He spoke finally. His mind recalled everything, even his death which was given to him by the evil vampire Lord.

Night cicadas shrieked in a canopy so thick it blocked the stars.

His fingers dug into wet earth. It stayed solid. No glass, no transparency. Just dirt under broken nails.

His lips twiched for an uninterested smile. "So, I am alive here again?" He closed his eyes for a second as he said this. Then again opened them.

He stayed on all fours for a long, shaking minute, listening to blood roar in his own ears, before he forced his trembling knees to lock and pushed himself upright.

"Again the dark areas of the jungle... What’s with my immortal senses, huh!"

He limped ten paces through the wet ferns, avoiding a rotting stump, when a thumb-sized thing with segmented, oily-green armor zipped up and hovered two inches from his left nostril.

Cassius sidestepped right.

The bug mirrored him, dry and aggressive: zzzt-t-t.

He stepped left. It darted left, planting itself right in his line of sight like a winged punctuation mark.

"I moved," Cassius muttered, voice scraping raw.

It lunged.

He swiped at it... cheap, stupid reflex, and his bare foot hooked under a tight, woody runner of wild passionflower.

The vine didn’t snap. It pulled taut as a tripwire.

His weight shifted wrong.

He crashed down hard, knees crunching into damp silt, palms skidding across a patch of ground that gave a dull, hollow thump against his skin, like hitting an empty tin drum buried under a thin skin of wet loam. "Damnn---"

"Oh, come on."

He clawed at the muck. The top layer peeled away in a greasy gray sheet.

From the dark gap underneath, the bug shot upward.

A sharp, jaundiced flick of lemon-yellow light flared from its abdomen; not a firefly’s warm amber, hard and acidic like an LED dying in salt water.

It hung mid-air, buzzing a low, steady drone.

Cassius shoved both hands into the soft crust.

Dirt crumbled past his wrists into an open cavity.

He ripped his t-shirt over his head in one jerky, sweaty motion, balled the damp cotton into a rough shovel, and scooped out the slop.

Twice. Three times.

Wet earth caked his forearms.

The hole widened into a jagged, shoulder-width maw. Cold air rushed up from the dark, smelling of stagnant concrete and iron rust.

He dropped in feet first. A secret tunnel?

His bare soles hit cold, pitted concrete with a flat thwack.

The bug didn’t wait. It dropped past his shoulder, its lemon-yellow abdomen flaring a steady, sickly glare that smeared across ribbed concrete walls.

Hsshh... drop.

Condensation dripped from a rusted pipe overhead, hitting the floor ten feet ahead.

Every drop sounded loud as a pistol snap in the tight tube.

Cassius caught himself against the wall; rough grit biting his palm, smelling of stale calcium and old basement floor.

His bare chest and shoulders broke out in tight, prickly goosebumps against the draft.

In his right hand, his mud-clogged t-shirt hung like a wet rag, dripping cold silt onto his knuckles.

The lightbee drifted six feet off the ground, tracing a straight seam in the ceiling where two pre-cast concrete slabs met.

No wiring. No junction boxes. Just gray-on-gray geometry stretching into a curve he couldn’t see around.

A low, vibrating hum started under the floor, not the tiny bug which guided him, it was deeper.

Like an industrial humm of machinery setups. But, suddenly thousands of lightbees revealed themselves, glowing the tunnel all bright.

"Those are... Too many! But in here?" Cassiusspoke his voice soft and confused from the view as the light reflected on his muddy face and dark grey eyes.

Cassius took one step forward his expressions changing to seriousness.

The lightbees banked around the curve, their lemon glare throwing long, sick-yellow zebra stripes across the ribbed concrete.

Skkk-t. Skkk-t.

Cassius followed barefoot, the wet t-shirt in his right hand leaving a faint, dark smear against his thigh every time his arm swung.

Ten yards. Fifteen.

The air stopped smelling like mud and turned sharp with ozone and old paper.

A barrier blocked the end of the tube.

Wrought-iron door, thick as wrists, rusted solid into the floor and ceiling.

Padlock gone, replaced by a massive iron hasp fused shut with orange crust, he thought in his mind as he examined the door carefully.

The bugs hovered dead-center behind the bars, pulsing a low, steady buzz-hum.

Cassius jammed his bare fingers into the cold door and heaved. The iron didn’t budge.

He braced his foot against the concrete frame and pulled until his shoulder tendons popped... a dull, dry clack.

With a screech that set his teeth on edge, the hinges sheared through rotted anchor bolts.

The gate tipped inward and slammed the floor with a hollow, booming CRR-ASH.

"Yeah. Great. Noisemaker," Cassius panted.

Beyond the threshold, the tunnel opened into a wide, low-ceilinged vault.

The lightbees darted upwards, illuminating a staggering, ten-foot mound piled against the far wall... tangled car radiators, stripped copper tubing, and thousands of waterlogged, swollen paperbacks stacked like cordwood.

Cassius walked in and scrambled up the slope.

Scrap metal shifted under his bare insteps with sharp, metallic clinks and hollow pings.

A paperbound spine cracked open beneath his knee: Introduction to Hydrology, 1984.

He reached the crest, chest heaving, and wiped grease off his forehead with the back of his mud-caked arm.

"Who saves a library in a scrapyard?" he muttered to the dark. "Who even brings books down here?"

He scrambled higher up the mound, his bare toes sliding on greasy fan belts and jagged aluminum siding.

A metal-on-metal avalanche gave way beneath his left hand- shhhk-clatter... spilling a cascade of old, heavy discs across the concrete.

Cassius dropped to one knee.

He scooped a handful of the spill. Quarters.

Heavy, dull zinc-and-copper discs stamped with faded profiles of dead presidents, sticky with dried motor oil.

"Are you kidding me?" he muttered, letting them slip back with a hollow, ringing tink-tink-tink. "Loose change? In a bunker?"

He shoved his bare forearm deeper into the slope, past a nest of frayed coaxial cables, a rusted toaster casing, and a pair of heavy, over-ear studio headphones with gaffers tape wrapping the left swivel.

"Not possible," he rasped, his voice dropping into the hollow vault. "Am I in the human world! But the sky..."

His eyes narrowed as he completely found ordinary human world things which was too unreal to be in a vampire monarch era this normally.

"The Bastard king’s own bathhouse, was modern but the kingdom wasn’t for this type of devices..." He spoke aloud in shock.

Then his serious tensed calm hitting him to think properly. And then:

His knuckles hit something hard and flat underneath. He wrenched it free.

An old, cracked-screen tablet, battery swollen until the casing split open. Beside it, jammed inside a hollow alternator housing:

Three flip phones with antenna stubs chewed flat, an ancient digital camera missing its battery door, and an iPod Nano with a dead, silvered-over click wheel.

All caked in gray cellar dust.

All stone dead.

Cassius stared at the black screens, his thumb smearing grease across a scratched lens.

"Was my death... Where am I? The jungle, this pit. A secret tunnel. Is this corrupted hidden...s-scrap!?"