Chapter 49.5 - Encroachment (Patreon)

This is a mini-chapter that was supposed to happen later in the story, but for reasons, I decided to move it down the timeline. Chronologically, this takes place right before the incident with the Mines where Rob was teleported into a prison.

Next full chapter won't be delayed by this.

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Jason was having a nightmare.

That much on its own was no strange occurrence. Nightmares were an old friend by this point. At least once a week, always involving the chains and the void, but with numerous variations of the formula. There were just enough remixes to keep things fresh and ensure that Jason could never fully adjust to the effect they had on him.

Sometimes he was taken. Sucked into the void, drifting in eternal darkness until the heat death of the universe – and beyond. Unable to see, unable to hear, unable to breathe, and unable to die. Sometimes the portal spat him out into the middle of the ocean, and he drowned alone, body sinking to the bottom of the sea to become food for sharks. Sometimes he was dropped into a bizarre forest of purple grass and blue leaves, wandering aimlessly for hours until a monstrous wolf cracked his skull like an eggshell with one clamp of its jaws.

And then there were the times where he wasn’t taken. Nightmares where he pushed Rob in front of him. Nightmares when the chains targeted Rob first, and he did nothing to stop them, fearing that he would be their next target if he interfered. Nightmares where Rob glared at him with accusing eyes as he was dragged in, declaring that their friendship was broken, and would never be repaired.

No matter what kind of nightmare he had, Jason would wake up in a cold sweat, suppressing a scream so he wouldn’t disturb Jeanette. Then he would either shiver at the results of being pulled into the void or wallow in guilt over how relieved he’d felt in his dream when Rob was taken instead of him.

This nightmare wasn’t like any of the others. The traditional college campus setting was absent, replaced with a large white room with no doors or windows. Neither Rob nor the usual panicking bystanders had bothered to show. The void was as pitch-dark as ever, and its chains had clamped their manacles around his arm, but they were barely pulling at all. It was a brand new flavor of weird, like he was tasting vanilla ice cream after months of being forced to eat the experimental combos unearthed from the back of the freezer.

“Ran out of ideas so soon?” Jason said. “Pretty lame. Where’s your A-game?” He knew he should keep his mouth shut and not taunt his nightmares into trying harder, but years spent with Rob had instilled one or two bad habits in him. Righteous anger weakened his impulse control worse than any amount of booze could.

As if responding to his challenge, the chains pulled with greater strength – in the sense that a 3-year old is stronger than a 2-year old. Jason quickly stopped paying attention to its feeble struggles, his eyes bugging out as numbers and letters started flashing before his eyes, appearing and reappearing like a light switch being fiddled with. The symbols were, as far as he could tell, a random assortment that looked like someone had motorboated a keyboard. They were contained within rectangular shapes, and copious amounts of squinting revealed that rows of symbols were spaced from each other in a uniform manner, forming lines that would have reminded him of a book if the text was remotely readable.

Jason concentrated on the numbers and letters as the manacles put a token effort into tugging his arms. The brief moments when the symbols flickered into existence were barely enough for him to decipher what they said. Well, not decipher, as he still had no idea what the fuck it was supposed to mean, but if nothing else was aware of the kind of nonsense he was looking at.


@#a(*ct$r S/\/\
_)(*: Ja/@#
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---
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---------%

~~ss#v* ><>< @/~^^^d!
_)(*: Al*)*%#!* )))ista(((

“This supposed to be avant garde or something?” Jason asked.

Then he woke up.

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“Jason!” Jeanette shook him gently but firmly, urgency in her tone. “Please, wake up, you have to, you have to see this!”

He was wide awake in less than a second. Analyzing trippy dreams could wait – Jeanette’s disturbed expression could not. “What is it, Jennie?” He held her in his arms, and she buried her face in his chest. “I’m here for you,” he soothed. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She stayed silent. A minute later, Jeanette disengaged from his embrace and showed him her phone. Any suggestions he’d been about to make about her not ruining her sleep schedule died in his throat as she clicked Play on the livestream. Jason’s body froze as he watched the footage of a street located several miles away from his college campus, a gaggle of onlookers who needed to fucking run crowding around their object of interest. He almost couldn’t blame them – they’d never seen anything like it outside of videos and overplayed news segments. If they lived to see tomorrow, they would have one hell of a story to tell.

The void had returned.

It was smaller than before. The size of an apple instead of being large enough to swallow a person whole. But that all-encompassing darkness, a blackness deeper than space and colder than ice, was unmistakable.

Jason forced himself to breathe. The only thing keeping him centered was Jeanette’s iron grip on his arm. “How long?” he croaked.

“About fifteen minutes ago,” she whispered.

He leaned closer to her. The two of them took solace in each other’s warmth as time crawled on. Cell phones were lowered as the crowd grew restless. They muttered to each other as they began to wonder if they wouldn’t be able to get a cool video for their Instagram page or whatever the fuck kind of reasoning they had for still being there. Anticipation turned to disappointment as the void sat there, taking up space and disrupting traffic, but not doing much else. Perhaps, their moron brains thought, the excitement was done for the night?

Jason knew better.

Suddenly, a bird flew straight down from the top of the sky. It divebombed into the void, disappearing in an instant. A freak accident – unless it wasn’t. The crowd held their breath, waiting for something interesting to happen and satisfy their curiosity. A few seconds later, their prayers were answered.

A creaking sound filled the street as the void expanded just long enough for the bird to come bursting out. It was different. Wrong. Five times as big as before, with glowing red eyes, a second set of wings, extended talons, and bones jutting out of its skin. It screeched out a cry like scraping glass and barreled towards the nearest onlooker. Blood arced through the air as a woman’s throat was torn out in the blink of an eye. She didn’t even have time to scream before she hit the ground, eyes wide and glassy as her heart pumped the life out of her body.

The crowd, realizing that they had bit off more than they could chew, dispersed and ran away in a panic, trampling each other in their haste. Bodies fell one after another as the bird took advantage of their disorganization to cut through them like a weed whacker in a flower bed. A small group of brave souls – a.k.a. the few that had guns – managed to subdue the bird, but not before over a dozen corpses had been stacked on the ground. Black blood oozed from the creature’s wounds as its grating screeches fell silent. A second later, the fucking thing started to melt, dissolving into a viscous black slurry that filled Jason with an indescribable sense of unease.

Unease that morphed into dread soon after.

A voice rang out. Not through the speakers of Jeanette’s cell phone, but in their minds. It was scratchy and harsh, like gravel being put through a wood chipper. One word was all that was said, and one word was all it took to make their blood run cold.

New.

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Thanks for reading!