The Central Park was closed, the Devil's Nest was empty. The plague was here.
It had a variety of names. Plague, Scourge, Beyond, the Scourge of Ages, the Third Scourge. Most of the city's population had been evacuated, along with the bulk of the US government, to other safe areas in America and across the world.
Within the Nest, the Plague played.
It possessed me. It infected. It killed from the outside in, the pain multiplying with every passing second. The first stages of the change were just moments from beginning, when they would set in fast and spread far.
I tried to fight back. No, I was fighting back. Instinct drove me far enough that I rose and marched towards the Portal, fighting every step of the way, but my body wouldn't respond. I was moving against myself as much as the magic that gripped me.
I was going to die, what could I do? Maybe if I moved at just the right speed, enough to avoid being caught in the lines of magic but slow enough to see the Portal's purple surface, I could make it inside before the change completed.
I had so many questions, so many things that didn't fit together. I had to know: How did my mission, my training, ever end up like this? What of the people I was sent to help, what was happening to them? Were there any survivors left in the city, any way for me to contact them, to warn them? Was the city doomed, or was the city a last hope?
The Portal to the Dark Beyond was just a few feet away. Skittering collections of flesh roiled and tore and twisted around me.
I had reached the Portal. There was nothing I could do. No one understood what was happening to the world. No one could guess what being caught in the plague's grip would do to me, what kind of powers it would give me.
The Portal had appeared suddenly, the size varying with each version of the story. It was about ten feet high, seven feet wide. It was a strange hexagon shape, with the black stone glowing brightly and the door of black wood slowly opening. The Portal's dimension shifted on its frame, bright colors traveling up and down the opening, spattering across the air. The Portal was roughly three feet away from the sidewalk.
I hesitated, then walked forward. I took the first step, then the second. There was no force keeping me on the sidewalk, but I was reluctant to take a step forward. I resisted, my arms still shaking and my knees weak and heavy. That was when I noticed the things.
They were at the bottom of the Portal, floating above the black ground. It took me a moment to realize that they were something like human and something like maggots. I wasn't sure how they could float, or even stand, but they did. They were about four feet tall, and were made entirely of pulsating, moving things. They were totally black, which I thought must have been how they could stand, their skin, their eyes.
They were there to greet me. They couldn't have been there for anyone else, if there ever had been anyone else. No one had ever made it to the Portal before me.
Why was I here? The darkness behind me pulled me, I could feel it growing closer. The things were reaching out for me. They weren't going to be enough to stop me, but they could slow me down. I wondered if they would dissolve away when I came in contact with the darkness.
I realized I didn't feel anything, see anything, smell anything. The world around me was a nothing. I was walking through nothing. I realized that even as I was wavering, my mind was still intact, still thinking, still resisting.
Who was I? What was I?
The world was at its end. My mission had come to an end. I had no answers. I wasn't sure what the questions even were. Just somewhere to start. Something, anything.
I walked forward.
The things sheathed to me, the darkness following.
Going into the darkness, I would never know the world. I wouldn't know that I'd been a hero, a champion of mankind.
I stepped forward. Even as the blackness engulfed me, one sentence was still echoing in my head:
Three people had escaped the city, three people had escaped the Plague, three people had escaped the darkness of the Beyond.
But now the words were gone. The words that I'd been trying to find, the question I'd been trying to answer. I was lost, trapped by the Plague, twisted by the Beyond.
The darkness consumed me.
