Transcendence

“What is it?”

“What the hell does it look like, Frank? It’s a paper bag.”

My brother winced and I bit back a sigh. Almost nineteen and still couldn’t take someone being short with him. Thanks for leaving me with a brother with a slinky for a spine, Mom and Dad, I groused and instantly regretted it. It had been rough since our folks died and I was a major part of that; the unexpected transition back into civilian life didn’t sit too well with me and Frank often took the brunt of my resent-filled tantrums. Last year had been the worst with him losing a leg in a fight I started. Since then, I’d done my best to be a better man, a better brother. I did okay but still had a ways to go.

“I’m less concerned about what it is,” I mused, “than where the hell it came from.”

He looked over at me. Frank was a handsome kid; strong jaw lined with spackles of hair, a short, pointed nose, divots in his cheeks that some would call dimples, and a pair of the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. Despite being on opposite ends of the melanin spectrum, we really did look like brothers.

“Yeah,” he said, “but if there was a bomb in here, that’d be more important to know than who put it there, right?”

“It would be,” I agreed, “but it’s not a bomb. No explosive or chemical agents. No viral or bacterial substances either. Nothing about it is shouting ‘danger’ to me.” I’d been a part of the Fold, a shadow company whose job it was to get extremely dirty in the theater of unconventional warfare. It’s not a job for a regular soldier and to combat the things we went up against, I’d been gifted some nifty biomechanical upgrades that bordered on the supernatural. And right now, they told me the same thing. “It’s just a bag.”

“Then why aren’t we picking it up?”

He had a point. We stared at the bag. It had no discernible shape and was big enough to hold a small lunch. It looked more like someone had balled it up and chucked it out a car window than putting something in it and setting it on our porch. Our house was a quarter mile from the main road and, as of yet, the wind hadn’t moved it one bit. Someone would’ve had to place it here; only they wouldn’t have gotten this close without me sensing them.

Frank broke the stillness when he stepped forward and reached for the bag. I instinctively slapped his hand away. He grunted and brought his stinging hand to his chest. Frank may have had the body of a young man who’d worked manual labor for the last three summers, but he hadn’t been bred and modded to surpass the pinnacle of human physicality. The slap had hurt. Frank massaged his reddened flesh, staring at me with a warring blend of anger and fear. Good. At least that was better than cowering. Can you blame him? my shit of a conscience murmured. My eyes drifted back to his leg. You couldn’t tell just be looking but when he walked, he favored it ever so much. Advanced bionics or not, it wasn’t the leg he was born with. And who’s fault is that?

“Don’t touch it,” I said, drowning out the devil of regret.

“Why? You just said there wasn’t anything dangerous about it.”

“I didn’t say that. I said there was no deadly substance that I could detect. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.”

Even to me that response sounded strange. Frank took it in stride and asked, “Then what do we do with it then? Let it sit out here?”

My attention returned to the bag. It didn’t sit well with me that we’d spent the better part of ten minutes staring at the damn thing without me just saying ‘Fuck it’ and picking it up. I’d been in rooms with killers and science experiments that, had they gotten out, would’ve taken entire cities off the board. But I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a generic paper bag and toss it in the trash.

“Leave it for now,” I said and glanced at him. “I’ll make a call and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

I went to my room and spent the a few minutes analyzing the situation. It seemed ridiculous: two grown men hesitant to touch a damn bag. If was borderline comical. More surprising may have been Frank’s decision to get me. It spoke to the fact that something about the bag stressed out the more primordial aspects of his being—the lizard brain that cautioned us when nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was why, heightened senses notwithstanding, I still hadn’t touched it. Yeah, it may have seemed absurd but instincts had saved my life just as many times as any tech riding around in my system.

Course decided, I made the call. It took longer than I expected to connect with the higher ups. Unfortunately, it was quite literally the last person in the world I wanted to speak to.

“Rafferty.”

I’d had a snarky response queued up but stopped when I heard my former mentor’s voice. It was harried. Shaken. Afraid even.

“Rafe, it’s Beck. What’s going on?”

“Beck, I don’t have time for your shit,” he spat out. “Shit is hitting the fan.”

“What kind of shit?”

“Need-to-know and since you’re no longer in the club—per your request, I might add—you don’t need to know.”

I wanted to curse right back at him but Rafe was right. I left The Fold to take care of Frank, but that didn’t matter. Family sacrifice or not, to Rafe I abandoned the fight for the greater good. I had no right to expect special treatment. Still, something about this…

“Look, Rafe. I didn’t want to make this call. But I needed to run something by the you guys…”

I told him everything. There were several seconds of intense silence before Rafe asked, “Did you touch it?”

“Rafe, I…”

“Did. You. Touch. It?”

Rafe’s clipped response ignited an irrational terror in me I hadn’t felt in years.

“No,” I said softly, “we didn’t touch it.”

“Don’t,” he said. His tone brokered no argument and I sat up just a bit straighter in my chair. “I’ll send out a Cleaner unit to your location within the hour.”

“Jonah,” I said, using his first name for maybe the third time in my life, “what is going on?”

His sigh carried a pain and exhaustion of someone forced to carry the weight of the world. “We don’t know. So far, there have been a dozen instances where people—agents, civilians, and all that’s in-between—touching them and each time something different, but no less terrible, has happened.”

“Like what?”

I never heard his response. The line went dead just as Frank’s shrill scream shattered every window in the house.

^^^

I descended the stairs and reached the porch in the span of a single breath. Frank lay before me, curled in a ball, knees drawn tightly to his chest. He was shirtless with a pair of board shorts his only attire and his skin was beaded with sweat.

Frank had always been tall, even taller than me but I had forty pounds of muscle on him. The convulsing body before me was that of a stranger. It was that of someone older, swollen and shredded with lean muscle and scars from years of fighting. That included his right leg that, a few hours ago, was a tangle of composite metals melded into the bone. Despite a complicated life where I’d seen parasites imbuing a host with incredible physical abilities before shredding their heart or bacteria that created a chitinous armor across an individual’s entire body with no ill effects, limb regeneration to this extent was as foreign to me as little green men. The shock of seeing my little brother whole again filled me with joy but it was short-lived as another spasm-induced groan rent the air.

“Frank.” I reached out to put a hand on him but pulled back, remembering Rafferty’s warning. I didn’t know what the hell was going on and there was a good chance that something like this worked with the same properties of electricity: touch someone attached to a livewire and there’ll be two charred bodies for the price of one.

I tried addressing him but the pain overrode his ability to communicate. It took another minute before his shakes subsided and he fell into a normal state of rhythmic breathing. I gave him another thirty seconds before calling his name again.

“It…” he mumbled, “it asked me.”

I frowned. “What?”

He offered me the same response before nodding towards the yard. I scanned it and then I saw the bag. It was ripped open and I could see its contents.

“My God...” I stammered and then Frank whirled and was in my face, his blue eyes locking my gaze in place.

Only his eyes were no longer blue.

Both eyeballs—pupils and sclera alike—were a maelstrom of black, red, and specks of silver. The flashed and swirled, whispering of limitless potential, fathomless knowledge, and bottomless rage. I imagined this was what looking through the gates of Hell would be.

And in that forlorn place, I think I glimpsed something of Frank, lost and alone.

Words failed me but I reached towards my brother, Rafferty’s warning be-damned, when something cold pushed into to me. I glanced down to see Frank’s hand fall away from the hilt of a dagger I hadn’t seen in thirteen years protruding from my chest.

“They asked me what I wanted,” Frank said, rising unsteadily. Every visible muscle pulsated to some alien rhythm and his veins throbbed as if they would burst any second. “I told them I wanted to be like you.”

Something in me broke at that. The pain was secondary to his confession and I was overwhelmed by a tide of love, sadness, and regret. “Why?” I moaned through blood-stained teeth.

Frank squatted down in front me of. I don’t know when I’d fallen to my knees, but now we were eye-to-eye. He cupped my cheek and his palm was unnaturally cold. “You’ve been my hero ever since you found me in that alley.”

I tried to speak again but the words never came. Darkness wrapped its shroud around me, cutting off the truth so clear in my mind. All the pain he experienced in the last ten years, the uncertainty, was my doing. I was his kin solely because I murdered his brother. And father. And mother. But even more than that, I wanted to tell him how sorry I was for these last three years together. The things I said to him, the things I did. If only I had more time…

It can be yours

Then Frank was gone and I felt myself falling, falling, falling…

My last cogent thought was of the brown paper bag. I saw the contents clearly enough. Not unlike the storm in my brother’s eyes, the inside of the bag danced with colors and shapes my dying mind could not comprehend. It was everything and nothing. Finite and infinite. The purest of light and enduring blackness. And through it all, a voice from beyond called to me.

What ye shall have and desire most of all shall be offered freely…

I tried ignoring the allure of that promise. To remind myself of the poisonous blade that often followed the sweetest promise. But as the talons of my sins threatened to shred my mind, body, and soul, I answered it. God help me, I answered it.

The End came for me…

And it laughed ever so cruelly.