tlparadigm

[tlparadigm]

White Void Prologue + Ch1-2

White Void, a Canadian fantasy-horror short story written by tlparadigm & kb, inspired by The Long Dark, Stranger Things & The Lord of the Rings.

~~~

Prologue - Paradigm Shift

Falling. The beaten up truck was falling. Maybe the snowy rocks below would make her death come faster. Maybe she’d die of shock before she hit the ground. But the cliff had not been steep enough for that, she’d feel all the pain and fear as her rusty blue pickup truck hurtled into the ground of British Columbia, Canada.

The vehicle smashed against the rocks with an ear piercing screech, and she lost consciousness, her eyes drifting back into a dark painful void of stars.

~

Chapter One - The Oath

Alex Summers was alone. She’d spent the past four days alone, in the middle of nowhere with an injured man who was going insane. The crash had put them both into shocked fear. She found herself falling back into the memory burned into her mind;

The helicopter blades sliced through the freezing mountain air, chilled with the dry aridity of the sky. The rhythmic sound reverberated out to the dawn. She was in a daydream of a hopeful future she was so close to having, when the motor halted and burst into flame. The helicopter span like an amusement park ride, but instead of amusement it was bone chilling fear.

She opened her eyes in shock, and she was falling. Her perception of time distorted, everything slowed down until there was nothing, only her and the spinning helicopter frame around her. Her hand reached out, grasping at the endless crevasse of metal, then sky. Everything was a blur, a blur that swirled out of existence. Suspended in the air, she closed her eyes and surrendered herself into the infinite sky now above her. There was no time for parachutes, in seconds it was a fireball in the trees. All that remained was a mess of mangled metal.

She was shoved back into reality by Keith Miller’s tinny yet dreadfully cruel voice, the man was her now ex boss from Vermont, she’d worked as a marine biologist for most of her life. But now her life was over, she’d taken a government job, and had to deal with this idiot. He flicked her to get her attention.

“Hey now, you’re the goddamn biologist Miss Summers, you’re gonna stay here and make sure a wolf doesn't rip my face off!”

“I'll come back for you Keith, I promise, I just need to find water, there's a river about one kilometre south of here, it will only take me a couple hours to get there and back.”

“No, no, please, you can just wait for me, please let me just finish bandaging my leg”

“Keith you’ll just hold me back. You're losing blood, and drinking all of our fucking vodka. Which is for your wounds!” she said.

“Alex, we’re in no rush, you're just scared that the wolves that attacked me last night are gonna to come back to finish you off. Go do your woman job and make me some more soup. You don’t deserve your job anyways, you do realize that as soon as they figure out that you're basically homeless they’ll cut you off.” Keith spat hurtfully. 

“Us, Keith, those things attacked us. I fought them off, and you, like an idiot, tried hitting them with rocks, while I was trying to ward them off in a way that wouldn't get us killed! If I don’t find us good clean water before nightfall, we’re both screwed, we can’t just live off snowmelt forever!” She shot back as Keith leaned back down onto the frozen dirt beneath them and closed his eyes to rest, mid way through an argument; the man was slowly going insane.

This argument had been going on for almost twenty minutes, Keith had been sexist and cruel all the flight from Vermont and as soon as they crashed, he’d looked to her for all the support. He’d been given a big promotion which would get him out of America but out of sheer bad luck he’d gotten trapped in a snowstorm which buried the whole city of New York under a blanket of ice and snow.

Insanity stole into his mind like a deranged thief, taking any fraction of empathy the man might’ve once had, adding new dangerous ideas, seeding a new personality, and disarranging the rest. New sparks of enraged emotion that Keith should have dismissed as chaotic seemed to prick apart his mind. The insanity seemed to make sense to Keith in one revolutionary eureka moment after another, which Alex could not understand, it was luring him further and further from the man she once knew, until it was so deep into his skull that she no longer recognized the already vile man in front of her. His mind seemed to her to be an inescapable maze, a fiery prison without any sort of filter.

Nobody would remember Keith Miller. He would die either way now, whether they got water or not. He’d become delusional by this point. Alex didn't like the idea of doing this, he’d gone back to being angrily quiet after the argument had ended, and now seemed to be picking apart his fingernails, as if sharpening them.

She quietly lifted the revolver out of her bag and turned the safety off. Slowly, she lifted it to Keith’s head. Keith’s craziness seemed to disappear in that moment. All he said, was a quiet “thank you” than she pulled the trigger.

There was nothing but silence in the frozen forest around her. The sky was fading into twilight. Crows with grievous eyes and ink stained wings, circled around her and the body before her. One landed on the branch in front of her and cawed once, daring her to move. Alex stared downward in shock at his corpse, ignoring the crows that were beginning to rip at Keith’s flesh. She could almost feel their intense, beady little eyes staring into her frozen frame as she started to shiver in the cold wind, she grabbed handfuls of snow and threw it at the ugly birds.

Crows above her squawked angrily as the silence of the woods was disturbed, and as the smothering quiet returned, she started to cry. Chapter Two - The Crypt Two days later, Alex Summers buried Keith Miller beside an icy stream. She walked through the white Canadian woods. She hated it here, every night she could hear the howling of what seemed like hundreds of wolves, but in reality, it might have been about seven. The wolves had seen better days. Their fur was thin and it clung to their frames like a windbreaker in a snowstorm. The movements of the animals were faltering as if each step pained them and their heads were sunk low to the ground. These animals had looked sickly, not fine and majestic like she had often seen them elsewhere. Winter trees stood amid twisting roots that twisted into one another until each dead root sunk into the frozen soil. Rough bark glistened in the early evening frost, making the forest’s trees look like pillars of light and dark. Dark cracks lay in the bark like scars, yet each woody crevice only served to make them all the more spindly. She later climbed up the hills which wrapped around a frozen river to a highway, she was pretty sure it was highway 97, but she was completely lost in the blank landscape. She walked for eternities. It was unending. A light in the distance caught her eye, a gas station. She sprinted until she couldn't run anymore, she was starving, she felt like her insides were being eaten away by a million worms.

She reached the gas station right as there was movement near the door, it was an older man in his 60s, he had an assault rifle in his hands. He shot her in the foot, went over to her limp body and dragged her across the asphalt, her dry skin shredding along her exposed hands and arms. She should've kept that winter jacket on, she thought to herself dreamily as she drifted into unconsciousness and the old man lifted her onto a table, and pulled a needle out of his pocket. She awoke to the sound of screaming. Alex Summers was lying flat on her back, on a countertop in what she remembered was a gas station. Her wrists were sore, she tilted her head up to see that they were tied to the handle of a cabinet, she looked to her other side, she saw a large figure looking in through the glass of the storefront. Her vision was blurry and her thoughts were jumbled but she could see blood splattered around the entrance. She stared at the looming entity in the door— it stared right back at her, unmoving. She started to wonder if it even existed. The blurry entity grunted, then it fell down onto four legs and backed up. Then, it charged into the glass window. The glass broke easily against the beast’s impact.

Alex wearily assumed it wanted to rip her face off, but the creature went straight for the far side of the store where there seemed to be some sort of meat stored. The creature broke through the glass that kept the meat cold, then started eating voraciously, it ate quickly, getting more and more nervous as it ate.It suddenly jumped up from its seated position and quickly made its way out of the building. She watched it leave through the broken window, then she seemed to drift back into sleep. 

She dreamed of Alaska, the view of the Bering Sea before her and the cold, but welcoming breeze flowing through her hair. A boat waited for her at a small wooden dock, her boat, used with the last of the money left for her by her parents. She had gotten so close to creating a better life for herself, away from the collapsing global economy, away from the constant fear of disaster and away from the plague, Edge-14.

Her peaceful dream evolved into a nightmare as the blurry unconscious thought of Edge-14 invaded her mind. The sickness had moved from door to door like a salesman and just as unwanted. It washed from the east-side of North America, a slow moving tsunami of fever, insanity and gory death that picked off both strong and weak in equal number. There was no greater destroyer than this parasite, impervious to wealth or pleading. 

The visions of devastation shifted to something far worse that had been hiding in the darkened crevice of her mind. She stood in a dark room on the fourth floor of an abandoned apartment building. Blood and other nastier human substances were stained on the walls, leaning against a support beam in the middle of the empty space was a young girl. 

She was only thirteen, but already she would die, Edge-14 had plagued her body, soon it would plague her mind. She looked up at Alex, a sliver of hope in her bloodshot eyes, her expression changed as she started to cry. She tilted towards the dust filled floor, she lay in the dust, sobbing.

Alex sat with her for days, the little girl’s brown eyes had looked up at her with tiny slivers of hope even though there was none. 

The girl died in her sleep, wrapped in Alex’s arms. The recurring nightmare was like a plague of its own, ruthless and cruel.

[tlparadigm]

Here’s a little mix I made a while ago. Hinterland’s The Long Dark meets Netflix’s Stranger Things. Enjoy!

[tlparadigm]

Stygian Paradigm

Stygian Paradigm

By tlparadigm, for Kindred Spirits it pertains to

-Prologue-

The end of the western world began Saturday, December 31st, 2011. Yellowstone Caldera last erupted 630,000 years ago. More recently, Mount St. Helens erupted March 20, 1980, and it killed 57 people. But in the final days of December 2011, Yellowstone became active and destructive once more, the governments of the world rushed to evacuate the citizens of North America and prepare themselves for the worst. An idea was born. A special type of geomagnetic device would be constructed to contain the blast like a vacuum, a bio-weapon. The device was supposed to compress the tonnes of ash bursting from the volcano; They failed.

December 2011 - South Dakota

Yellowstone Caldera exploded. The North American continent is in chaos, people are rushing to escape to the other side of the world, or accepting death and staying where they are. Thirty-three of us trekked east to Prince George, British Columbia to a large cave where we could hopefully survive for a few years. All vehicles had stopped working from the failure of the device so we would be walking all the way. We would arrive by early February, after a 2,430 km walk from South Dakota, where most of us had lived. What the governments did not expect, was that a backup geo-magnetic pulse from the device was so powerful that it caused ruptures in the ground which ultimately caused an eruption at Mount St. Helens as well. With ash coming from the volcanoes, chemically charged by the device, mutation soon followed in the animal kingdom and pure insane chaos in the modern world.

January 17th, 2012 - Medicine Hat, AB

After weeks, our group of 33 was whittled down to 17. We had all watched as packs of wolves and other beasts tore our comrades to shreds. We breathed ash as we walked through the streets of Medicine Hat. Our lungs slowly deteriorated. On one of the finals days a huge male cougar attacked our camp, it mangled 8 of our comrades. Their deaths were gruesome. 6 of us now remained, soon only 4 including myself. As I left my fallen comrades to nature’s merciless rage, I pondered the events of the past month, as soon as the new year hit everything had gone to hell. I was then reminded of the Mayan calendar myth, the calendar had gone for roughly 5,125 years but ended on December 21rst 2012, but it was only January. Why had both Volcanoes erupted, even though they were over 1,380 kilometers away from each other, could it have been a coincidence or some sort of accident? I doubted I’d ever find out the whole truth.

January 24th, 2012 - Jasper, AB

The four of us were anxious about going into Jasper National Park but so far the view was spectacular so we put up with the seemingly endless amount of walking. We occasionally passed trailers and cottages, if we were up to it we’d snoop around in and hope to find other survivors but everywhere we looked it was like we were in a ghost town, just without the town, only the highway which we traveled on and the forests around us, we would stay on the highway even when we passed various towns, since we no longer had the heart to search them. We had stopped just outside of Jasper, Alberta when we heard gunfire coming from the south where we’d soon be passing the town. The four of us grabbed our gear and started quickly moving towards the shots which were still sounding as we neared closer. Two of my three companions were a young couple named Ben and Samantha who had lost their house in the initial chaos of early January, they had nervous looks on their faces and I could tell that they were running through the possibilities of why someone was firing a weapon. The other was my good friend Daniel who I’d known since high school, we had survived in the wilderness before but that was for fun and we had more resources at our disposal but this was far different, this was life or death.

The man who had been firing the weapon seemed to be in his late 50s, with a messy grey-white beard and electric blue eyes with red lines around the edges which suggested lack of sleep or maybe some sort of drug use. He almost shot us as we approached but as the four of us looked around to figure out why he was firing we saw no obvious reasons. A creepy sparkle came to his eyes as he lowered his weapon, the woman of the couple asked the old man if he was ok but he seemed to ignore her question and instead exclaimed

“Welcome to Jasper! Now, where do fish keep their money, my friends?” We looked at each other confused and Sam slowly said “Uh hi, and is it the riverbank?” A wickedly crooked and chaotic smile came onto the man’s face and after a few seconds he finally said, “Ah you are a smart girl, the name is Lucien, this town is my town, I am its sole inhabitant.” A shocked look came to Daniel’s face, “It’s sole inhabitant? Jasper had around 5000 people living in it, they couldn't have all left!” he said, raising his tone a bit as he talked. “Take a look for yourself young man, but you’ll only find clues of the past.” We set up camp in Jasper and talked with the man, who seemed to be going senile which was surprising considering he only looked to be in his late 50s maybe early 60s. I didn't know why he had asked us that odd riddle but he was just weird. Ever since we had arrived in Jasper the man had been giving me a look, a sneer was always on his face when he looked my way, he gave me chills.

January 25th, 2012 - Jasper, AB

The next day, I found myself in an argument with Lucien, I’d caught him checking out our bags and holding our ammunition in his hands. He pleaded that he was innocent and he was only making sure we hadn't left our equipment somewhere that bears could access, but, I knew he was lying through his teeth. He was still arguing with me when suddenly stopped and went still, he started off at something behind us, we all looked but there was nothing, then there was a gunshot from beside us. Lucien had drawn a sidearm from beneath his long gray tattered trench coat and had fired at us but had missed very poorly even though we were only a couple of meters away from him. Reflexively Daniel grabbed his rifle from beside him and aimed at Lucien, seeing this, Lucien spat at Daniel for pointing a gun at an old man then he pointed an obscene hand gesture at him. So Daniel shot him in the right foot and returned the hand gesture. Swearing and screaming, Lucien limped off into town. Later that day we heard another gunshot coming from the part of town that Lucien hung around the most, we all went towards the noise to see what was going on. What we found we had not expected, but there, in a parking lot, in the western area of the town, lay the body of Lucien, a gunshot wound in the side of his head. I thought it to be an odd place and time to commit suicide. Especially when you have a whole town to yourself, but the man had been a psychopath, and it would be best not to question his final intentions.

January 26th, 2012 - Yellowhead Hwy, AB

Sam and Ben had stayed in Jasper so they could attempt to gather more materials and see if they could get a vehicle working again so they could meet Daniel and me later on. Later still, Daniel and I discovered that an aggressive, scruffy and scarred grizzly bear had been stalking us since we left Jasper. We were almost out of bullets and we were weak from days of walking. I watched as my close friend I’d known for 16 years was brought down by the 300 kg bear who had ambushed us that afternoon, I gazed at his face as his insides being torn open and as he drew his final breath, the bear looked at me. Its eyes glowed red, it growled, an unearthly growl. Then it charged at me but went off course and kept running past me further into the forest. In seconds, after horrible screaming and agony, Daniel, the guy I’d known for so long and became so close with, was gone and so was the bear; I was alone, and the nature of Jasper National Park was my only company.

January 29th, 2012 - Portal Lake, BC

I managed to find a rest area today, but also a final news report from earlier in the month which I’d never heard; the government's device and the double volcanoes had caused fractures in the earth's crust and were cracking the tectonic plates apart. More volcanoes were brewing just like here, earthquakes were destroying whole countries, hurricanes obliterated whole cities and the death toll was catastrophic. I came across a small aging wooden cabin in the woods, I found exactly what I needed, a better hunting rifle then what I’d taken from one of my comrades, along with ammunition and multiple food rations. Around 300 km until I reached safety, at least with this better gun I could avenge my fallen friends and comrades.

February 2012 - Moose Lake, BC

I was into British Columbia now, almost at Red Pass. I’d stopped to rest at the easternmost point of moose lake when I saw some sort of building across the Fraser River from where I sat on Yellowhead Hwy, I managed to half swim half trudge my way towards the building which I now saw used to be a lighthouse. The only thing was that the lighthouse had been destroyed somehow and only the bottom half was still standing, even in ruins. I stayed there for two days than in the night I was awoken by a spine-chilling howl. A wolf pack had arrived.

I could hear them outside, snarls and growling filled the gloomy night air. I didn't sleep again for the remainder of the night. Hours later, the howling had stopped. It was strange, they had me trapped but I could now see them retreating back into the surrounding forest. I slowly stepped out of the ruins to investigate, I had a bad feeling about this. Of course, the old bear eventually arrived to finish me off. With the rifle in my hands, I prepared for the worst. I had run out of rations, I was starving and that bear would be pretty dang good for cooking. I went to the top of the ruins to see if I could get a better shot but the stairway where the ruins ended were too narrow to get a good shot, so I went back down the winding stone stairs and crouched down at the door to ready myself. I waited for a while, then the massive bear charged towards my shelter. I fired two rounds at the beast, it didn't slow. I dove back into the ruins and the bear tore into the building. Moments later I was on the ground, punching at the bear’s mangled ugly face. I could feel sections of my torso being torn to shreds, I reached for my knife as the bear slashed at my blocking arm.

I drove the knife into its jaw, the creature roared in pain and trudged out of the broken lighthouse, but I knew it would soon be back. I was quickly losing blood, I crawled towards my backpack and the rifle which had been tossed beside it. I grasped for the painkillers even though I knew they wouldn't heal injuries of this magnitude, then I reached for the rifle and slowly stood up one last time to face the beast before me. There would be no survivors in this eternal fight between mankind and nature, and it seems, there weren’t, not really. Nature always wins, we can’t control nature forever. We just have to learn from our faults and remember our sins. I guess life as we knew it found a way to survive, and we didn't. Perhaps one-day mankind will go among the stars, and nature will lie in the soil, the air and the seas. But perhaps mankind won’t make it that far, maybe it will be nature taking back what’s rightfully it's own.

The End. “Welcome to the Quiet Apocalypse” - The Long Dark, Hinterland Games