a_strange_rider

Rotation.
             Looking between his slender fingers, the young man noted the length of the street before him. The hue and fog made it difficult to actually see the end of the road and the bend of the corner, or a good distance anywhere. The fog was usual and so with it the pungent bitter smell that never left. It reeked of a mixture that was indescribable, although it wasn't yet clear if it was lethal or not. The young man did not need to see the end of the street to know what was there; he had memorized this path and each crack and wire that curled across the monochrome sidewalk. He even knew the people that crossed his path, seeing in them the faces and features of the ones he knew. A haggard man limped merrily beside him resembling his bright-eyed, pompous roommate. A woman with thin lips and wider hips strutted by with a bag of green and yellow fruit; she was almost identical to a girl he knew, though much more aged. He had known the girl resembled for years, but never told her he loved her. He couldn't; it was unlikely to have gone his way. The young man knew few others besides them, and rarely spoke to anyone. He rarely spoke at all, sometimes not for days at a time.
              The man, or boy, depending how you were looking at him, was planted firmly above the world that had left him to his solemn path. Above him were the blue florescent lamps that lit the world so commonly. The lamps made the fog a tone of cobalt. The young man was rummaging in his pockets, his phone was ringing, fancy piece of shit, always lost and rarely useful. Somebody was calling. He let it ring.
                Higher above the young man and the lamps, there were buildings. Even higher than anything else were more lights, though no one could truly see them, but they were not stars; no one knew quite what they were, but they were always there. The young man didn't know what the lamps or "stars" themselves looked like, but he knew they were there because of the shadow they cast upon the street. He never directly saw them, just like the thousands of crisscrossing wires that connected the world. The electronic ivy spread up and across walls and buildings. Ivy, along with all plants, had not been seen growing wild for centuries, at-least not by civilians. But the young man had books to allow him to know such things, even if he didn't think much at all. It is possible that even the plants he saw the lady, who crossed his path earlier, carrying weren't real, a synthetic perhaps, but he had no way to know. He did little less than care and walk onward. Others were brushing by, hushed and looking wretchedly around themselves. There were too many people about. This was not rare. There were always people out; the time of day never mattered. This day was following his dream to the slightest of details even to the unpleasant bitter odor that only he seemed to notice and despise. This was universally common now for the world he knew. The clouds that stored this horrible malice were giants, constantly covering the land, releasing their burden onto the surface of the dispirited Earth. What fell was not water, but dark and vicious smelling than the sewage beneath ground. From the smell of the air, he knew it would rain soon.
             He wasn't worried though, and he was prepared with two layers of hats, combined as one to better protect his cold, almost shaved head. He sauntered forward knowing the path probably better than his own name, which he couldn't say he possessed as of yet, but he had been given one by the few others who acknowledged him. He was called Sid. For the moment it would do. Although he was rarely spoken to by those who knew him (and even more rarely waved at in either greeting or farewell.)
           Sid's feet swept the ground as he strode softly forward towards a destination he wouldn't know until he got there. He was counting the poles, counting the wires crawling up them. It was an old habit; he didn't bother questioning why he did it. He kept his head down, conscious of every effort not to look up. It was the sky itself he feared and loathed. Nothing else in his mind existed when he was outside his sanctuary of a home. His fear had remained constant throughout his life, and he had never once looked up. He lowered his head slightly, eying the ground more intensely. The ground held such a better mystery to him, far more than the sky could provide. The planet itself could not hide treasures that lay beneath the concrete; moss and golden mushrooms constantly exploded up through the sidewalk throughout the city. Sid kept walking, avoiding others' looks and stares at his strange posture and frantic rummaging in his pockets every few seconds. He was getting exhausted; his breathing was getting heavy from this long trip; he needed to sit; he needed to smoke.
             Sid took his pack of cigarettes out of his airborne jacket's front right pocket and sat down at the nearest bench. He took out the last one of the pack and put it between his lips to hold while he searched for his lighter, but it escaped him and seemed to be hiding in places unfathomable. His mind steadied on the last whereabouts of his faithful lighter, but to no avail. He wouldn't let himself ask for a light; there would be no reason to drag another mess of a mind into this dilemma. He returned the cigarette to the pack and placed it back into his pocket. He sat for a moment, defeated, but taking deep breaths to steady himself. His anxiety would have to wait.
                   Sid rose up, resigned to go forward. There was only the path ahead, though he didn't know the destination, he would know when he got there. He had dreamed the destination many times before. As with last night, he awoke like the many times before after a dream similar to his current reality. He had believed he always had dreamt of it, but was never sure. In the dream he was walking in the same path he had just came, seeing the same sights and people, but in this dream at a point up ahead there was supposed to be a door, to what he didn't know what, Sid had never opened it. He had spent most of the day on this quest. He didn't know he would be traveling this way. But he was not in control, the dream was. He nudged his worn hats closer to his eyes, covering his eyebrows and assuring no view of the skyline. Sid began to move again.
                He minded the people around him on the street, giving them enough attention not to glance into their eyes and also not to run into them. Far too many feet obscured his gaze as he walked through the crowds of people, going wherever their uninvolved lives took them. He didn't notice much, except at how many shoes he saw connected to their many legs.
            Squeezing through unnoticeable in the world was effortless for Sid. He knew nothing of himself; he noticed very little going on in general, but still watched the world. Sid did not analyze anything or understand any cryptic meaning, but here and now he simply knew; he simply was. Such as he was the witness to everything, taking in everything, anything. The world and he were more than united; he was a physical shell for everything he saw, the machinery to which information was gathered.
He had stumbled to the location where there was supposed to be a door in his dream, but oddly there was no door. Sid stood before an unmarked building. He noticed the cracks in the walls about the street, but there was nothing uncommon about the wall or road; all too recurrent. Sid stopped his roving stride, disrupting and unsettling the many-legged beast about him, to stand alongside a wall. Nothing peculiar. His eyes flashed for a moment.
           The paint was chipped all along it and went up towards the rest of the crippled building. No one noticed this ancient canvas, probably due to the long ago sterile covering of beige paint used to plaster the veiled mural. Up above, at about eight feet was the barely legible word EXIT over a painting of a door frame. It was a unique discovery, like paintings of animals in caves from ancient civilizations. It was a mere shadow of what it used to be, and possibly that wouldn't have been much. Now moving closer, Sid put his hands upon the wall and brushed lightly, feeling the grooves between the old brick and paint that lay beneath the beige for countless years. The touch was cold and soft in places where mold had grown in complete defiance to the world around him. These senses brought a twinge of a thought to Sid, but as he was no thinker; his mind eased back into a calm. There was no real exit, the door must have been an illusion, and he would never see what lay beyond. The building it belonged to was mainly run down and would probably be condemned and demolished, but its existence would be remembered if only by him in this one unique state it was in when he found it. Yet his thoughts were blank, focusing on no particular crack and no spectacular element of the painted door or wall.
           Footsteps rang aloud from down the street, beyond where Sid had come. People were running. Sid tilted toward the running individuals. A man in black was being pursued rapidly by two armed men. Soldiers? Sid stepped back as they drew nearer to him. Several people behind him hadn't noticed and were paying for it by the brute force of the man knocking them down as he ran past. There was silence, but the running man's ears were pounding with the rhythm of his heart. The suited men pulled out their weapons from the side holsters. Sid blinked. The man running didn't hear the shot go off. He moved on for several feet until his legs weakened; panic had struck his eyes. Sid watched as the man seemed to grow smaller. The cement took his weight and slowly cushioned his body as the man turned and fell on his back inches away from Sid's boot. Blood seeped from the man's lips; he gave no resistance; he knew he was lost. His eyes though, penetrating as they had been most presumably in life, were pointed towards the sky. Even when they no longer flashed with life they looked upward.
Despite the images of the quickly panicking street people, Sid was not shocked. The men in suits came forward, the black and green of their fatigues creating a disgusting hue upon the wall as they walked closer to Sid and the now dead bald man. Sid's eyes explored them both. Their badges read something ambiguous and official. They eyed him in return, each with visored eyes. They were identical to each other. Both the one on the right and left had a mustaches and wide rimmed glasses under helmets of moss green. "Stand clear, this is a sanctioned procedure..." The left one said to everyone, but Sid did not listen. The City Guard in London was known for their long-winded bullshit. The one on the left kept talking while keeping his eyes rigidly on Sid. His hand was on his holster, returning his firearm. His finger was still on the trigger. Sid lowered his hat. The talking officer's voice rang out lawfully, echoing in the street.
                   Sid's was focused on the second man; he was picking up the limp body. Still the crowd was silent. The man, who until a short while ago was running was now lying face down, flipped over by the suited man. His eyes were no longer towards the sky. He was hauled over the officer's shoulder, legs at the front of the officer's chest, arms falling to his back. A deep stain remained were his body once lay. Sid would never know why this man died. Without a shudder Sid left the corpse and soldiers. Their eyes piercing his back He crossed the street without caution down an adjacent road, which was crowded, amassed with thousands standing with their fists pointed towards the skies. A man was standing upon an automobile shouting at the flood of human intellect. The crowd appeared patch-worked to Sid. They were barely threaded together with their arms raging above their heads. Some shouted words of "Revolution" others shouted "Peace" others "Chaos" or "Order" all things far forgotten; the words sounding odd adrift in the air.
            Many others were walking past the crowd with the same patchwork look about them. No eyes would connect; none turned a head to view the crowd itself. Cars crusaded past, wearily avoiding the people on foot. The smell from the exhaust was strangling. It was a relic of past centuries, and still burned the petrol that had cost the country everything. The people looked far too comfortably normal in the dimmed world. Even their skin, which used to have multitudes of color, was black from the constant fall of cinder and soot. No one minded the way that the world simply was, or had been, for as long as they knew. Sid's own hands were slate colored. He pocketed them and started to walk calmly through the revolutionaries. There was commotion erupting. Sid didn't even bother looking up. Another mass of people was spearing through the crowd, screaming words in an unfamiliar language to many, but not Sid.
           Shouting and outrage occurred, a gun was fired, then many more after that from all around. The masses looked grayish and, everyone was indistinguishable. These were not soldiers this time. A path formed as bodies fell. A flash and a rumbling roar quaked the street violently. There was no warning, and a sudden deafness came, caused by what sounded like an exploding bomb. For that's what it must have been. Sid checked the time. Shrapnel passed around him.
             The entirety of the street was illuminated. He had no choice but to shield his eyes. The air began to fill with smoke. Sid began to cough violently and lifted his shirt and jacket collar to his mouth to filter the smoke. Fire was born about the place of the impact, which was now a crater of cement and rubble, though this wasn't as impressive as Sid had expected from an explosion. The fire tore at the people and houses like wolves upon prey. The flames were ripping around the street, stabbing further into the crowds. Many were screaming above and below. The seams began to come undone; the world itself appeared to be splitting. The hundreds that were peacefully in their houses above were now panicking, yelling out their windows. Then, as in all loss of hope, they began to drop themselves from the clouded inferno into the streets, falling swiftly like the dark rain. They would rather face the cement than feed the starving flames.
              All of those on the street were in a fury of movement, blurring in and out of Sid's sight. Panic could not be stopped. The blurring mass was trampling those in its path. Several to Sid's right were still and huddled, crying silently. Will they die? His legs locked. His hands clasped as well, one to his mouth the other to his side, opening and closing mechanically, grasping the air. Sid could barely breathe, his lungs were burning, and each inhalation brought a new struggle. Only strands held the patch-worked crowd together. Sid was lifted by the pure force of movement and dragged along. He grabbed onto a pole nearby, clinging with all deliberate strength, intellectually knowing the risk of letting go.
              Natural gas was used to power the city long ago when power was scarce, far worse than now. Underground pipes were used to move the gases, three to four inches reinforced to protect against a fire, but none of that mattered to the bomb. The fire reached them, breaking through any and all protection. The gas lines and tanks immediately combusted. The entire foundation of the city itself seemed to shake, a force equal to that of an earthquake. His arms linked robotically to a pole nearby, he knew no other thoughts except that he was still standing. The buildings, like the people in them, began to collapse, crippling in on themselves. No order remained. The street itself was cracked and thrown about.
                This was no dream. This was vivid; this was vibrant. Why in all this chaos did his mind finally begin to work? Why had he just now opened up his eyes when he might now die? His hats were long since lost, but he could not remember them falling off. His jacket and jeans were torn and charred; somehow he was still in rhythm with life. He was as persistent as the moss that had grown between the cracks. In his dream the world had been in control. He was now swaying to the breeze of everything before him. All his elegant structure was lost and the contrast made his stomach turn. He lost his insides to the ground.
Where was the authority? Did they have only the time to kill, but not to save?
           The chaos was apparently reaching its peak, but each moment spanned years. Structures and people alike were scattered across the landscape. The fires were not to be forgotten as within each step lay burning flesh and debris, the two beginning to mix. Soon the fire would catch up with Sid as it had done to everything and everyone else. He was no exception. The fabrication of the masses was lost, shredded, and torn. The patchwork was gone. They were dispersed in the fallen. Singled out, they panicked with nowhere to hide. Pushing, shoving, and tearing at one another. There were no sides to any of this, just the connective chaos.
              Obscured by the blur of rushing bodies, Sid was able to decipher mere fragments from the world around him. But one stood out so clearly, one was calm, and in steady rhythm he strode forward to a clearing in the people. Its pace was in time with the dance of the flames upon the flesh. The body was charred black, fully illuminated. There was no distinguishing between sex and age. It did not matter, but so calmly it walked forward. The pain alone must have been unbearable to live, let alone walk calmly without sway.
Sid could not look away from the charred body. The sight had to be viewed through the many fragmented moments like a strobing of lights. It stood several yards away from him, but was as clear as if they were inches apart. Sid was on his knees, still holding to the pole, but his grip was gone, he was crossing towards the living inferno unconsciously. It began to sit down untroubled, serenely. It crossed its legs; the ground about it was a scattered mess of the old order. Although aflame, its eyes were intact. No harm had befallen them although everything else that was distinguishable was gone. He could see clearly into the deep reflective blue. They were bloodshot, but not full of tears. It then turned its flawless blue eyes towards Sid. Their eyes connected.
              Sid felt intolerable pain about him. Images flashed before him. A flash of color. Sounds. Music, but with too much static to make it out. He began to see plants, even though they did not exist anymore. He saw animals that too did not truly exist. Eyes of men and women were piercing his own, everyone gone, alive and to come was before him. Then he saw the stars and the cosmos, planets parting and aligning with their moons. So quickly these images came to him. Then it simply disappeared. He was still in the sight of the androgynous being. Then it looked upward into the all-seeing eye. The world faded as Sid collapsed.
         The havoc returned to him and his senses as he regained some remnants of life. He was on his back and could look nowhere else, but towards the one thing he had feared his whole life. The clouds that he believed to always be there weren't. He saw the sky unabated by anything. High above him was the clockwork veil that blanketed the world. Sid could see the gears turning in the sky.