Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival by Giovanni Iacobucci Read Free Book Online Page B

liquify, too,
as the the phenomenon perimeter grew. He did not move from it. As
his body seeped into the gold light, he again felt a calm. The
sunshine-warmth was a welcome alternative to the frigid night
air.
     
    He remembered things he'd never seen.
    He saw the ruins of Old Bridgetown, decaying
in reverse. Re-assembling themselves into centers of society. A
cantina, a livery, a homestead.
    He saw the city in the shadow of Devil's
Peak. Not as it was, but as it once had been.
    And he knew his brother and Susanna to be in
this place.
    Safe.
    Waiting for his return.
    It was a vision.
    This was the greatest drug Jesse had ever
encountered.
    It was no street-grade hallucinogen.
    It was a rip in the very fabric of
reality.
     
    Sobriety and the midnight chill returned to
Jesse, hitting him like a wall.
    He stood, knee-deep in the dripping molten
gold. The ground was re-solidifying, the sea of energy dissipating
and the light shrinking to a finite point. His window was
closing.
    He made a decision.
    Jesse ran toward the rapidly cooling core of
light. The vortex knocked him off his feet and sucked him under
what little remained of the energy pool.
    With mere moments to spare, it consumed him,
and he was happy to allow it.
     
    All went light, and white-hot;
    Then all went black, and cold.
     
    Jesse braced for that falling,
pit-of-the-stomach feeling that, as a child, had always signaled
the beginning of the end of a nightmare. But instead of waking, he
felt an altogether more alien sensation.
    His consciousness rose up through the
heavens, up beyond the atmospheric limits of reality and into
another place entirely.
    He was unable to see
anything. He searched for any sense of the familiar, any
extra-sensory connection to Susanna. He had followed her down this rabbit
hole, and he was going to find her.
    Floating in this ether of Nothingness, he
searched for the warmth in the chill that he knew to be Susanna. He
raised his hands—if they still existed, he wasn't entirely
sure—towards the warmth. But there was a barrier before him, a
Plexiglas hallucination.
    Then came the fall.
    It was as if someone had pulled a trap door
lever and sent him down a garbage chute into Hell.
    He could feel himself accelerating. He was
dropping straight through the outer membrane that connected this
Darkness to Reality.
    Down, down he went. Down past the outer
fringe clusters of galaxies on the edge of the universe, down
further still.
    His mind's eye zoomed into the candle-glow
center of the Milky Way, and further still towards a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam.
    This tiny speck grew ever-more enormous until
it occupied his entire field of vision, and he knew it to be a
familiar blue marble he called Earth.
    A moment. Now, atmosphere was compressing at
his fore, heating up and sending fiery streaks of burn-off shooting
around his body.
    His ears were pummeled with the sound of air
whooping about his form, and only then did he realize outer space
had been silent.
    He could no longer keep his eyes open. The
violent kinetic display going on around him was too intense.
    That, and he also didn't particularly care to
see the desert slam into his face. That was definitely going to
happen. No stopping it now.
    Impact.
    Once again, he was embraced by darkness.
    Then, quiet. And sleep.
    When he next opened his eyes, all was
still.
     
    First, he was aware of the dirt. He could
taste it on his lips.
    Then a sky, cloudless and pale blue as it had
been for billions of days already.
    Jesse sat up. He patted his body, making sure
it was all still there. Apart from being horrendously dizzy, he was
alert, and unharmed. There wasn't even any obvious sign that he'd
just fallen from outside of all Existence and smashed face-first
into the Earth. No impact crater, nothing.
    He looked around him. Where was he?
    There was Devil's Peak, right behind him.
Just as it had been the night before.
    He began to put the pieces together in his
mind:
    The great sphere of light in