Free The Revenant Road by Michael Boatman Page A

oxygen reintroduced short-term memory to my brain and I rolled over onto my back.
    Wherever I’d landed it was dark. I’d entered Kalakuta sometime after 2:00 PM , had spent less than an hour with Kowalski. But the sky overhead was black, shrouded in Night’s cold embrace. Then I saw the moons.
    At first I thought I was seeing double, the result of my fall, a vicious hangover, or, hopefully, a malignant brain tumor.
    Of course there’s always the distinct possibility that you’ve popped your friggin’ cork.
    I closed my eyes and counted to ten. But when I opened my eyes nothing had changed. I was staring blearily at two full moons in a cloudless night sky. The largest of the moons (there were two of them) appeared similar to the moon I knew, its face pockmarked by a vast network of craters.
    The smaller sphere hung slightly lower above the horizon. Its face was disturbingly smooth, as if it had been swept clean by some monstrous valet.
    And it was green.
    A horrid, emerald light emanated from that viridescent sphere, a squalid corpse glamour that made me slightly queasy. Its light infected the heavens like a creeping poison: Sickly emerald veins crept outward from the gangrenous orb, extending their reach across the dome of that alien sky like a loathsome emerald spider web. The moon was sick, evil or both. It was wrong .
    I climbed to my feet and was immediately hammered by another surprise. I was standing on the edge of a precipice. The reason there were no clouds in the sky was that they were all below me. I’d landed atop a mountain surrounded by a field of green-tinged clouds.
    I staggered backward, away from the precipice. But some instinct warned me and I stopped. Turning slowly, I saw that the “precipice” was more of a circular dais and that I stood at its opposite edge. Corpse clouds surrounded me on all sides. I’d apparently landed atop a titanic stone golf tee.
    Vertigo double-pumped me in the stomach and I fell to my knees as a freezing wind sprang up around the golf tee, chilling me to the bone.
    “Kowalski!” I screamed. “You bastard!”
    An echo was my only response.
    “Alright, you’ve read about things like this,” I said to myself. “Any minute now, you’ll wake up. Kowalski’ll be there and he’ll say, “It was all a hallucination, Junior. I slipped some acid in your cream soda as a little initiation. What do ya think about that?””
    But a dark voice offered a more disturbing possibility.
    Maybe not, the dark voice said. Maybe you’re supposed to climb down from here, bearing tidings of doom and destiny. You know...like Moses.
      “Don’t be ridiculous,” I fired back. “Do I look like Charlton Fucking Heston?”
    The dark voice chuckled.
    Maybe you’re going to die up here.
    “Shut up!” I screamed.
    Abruptly the sick green cloud cover parted.
    The ground was closer than I’d imagined. Shadowed mountains surrounded my golf tee, forming a kind of bowl that extended as far as I could see. Far below me, lights flickered across a valley that formed the floor of the bowl. From the surrounding terrain I estimated that I was only five or six thousand feet above a field of moving lights.
    A vast plain stretched out before me, a plain covered by the pulsing light field. The lights displayed every color imaginable and some I couldn’t begin to describe. Some of them flickered and danced like the gleam of distant campfires. Others shone steadily, like the glow from a million electric lamps.
    As I watched, a new cluster of lights entered the great plain from somewhere beyond the horizon. The new cluster was the same sick color as the gangrenous moon.
    As the emerald lights rushed toward the field, the other lights moved away from them, crowding together, blending their colors, seemingly in an effort to escape. But the corpse lights were too fast. They fanned out and surrounded a vast cluster of multi-colored orbs, trapping them inside a swiftly closing emerald circle.
    When the