by Ryan Schow
“I’ll take care of the cops for you,” I tell Sensei. “You just focus on getting some rest.”
He turns away from me, closing himself off. I don’t really want to leave him like this, but this is what he wants, and who am I to deny him his peace?
For now, there is so little of it to be had.
7
The minute I arrive at the dojo, my eyes lock in on the lines of yellow crime scene tape stretching across the front door like a blight on the upscale shopping center it resides in.
I park my Audi, get out of the car and start ripping the tape away. I can’t stand what I’m seeing. This is my dojo. My school. The big, yellow ball of tape gets stuffed into the nearest garbage can and by the time I’m done I can’t decide if I’m pissed off or so sad I’ve bypassed crying and moved straight to hateful depression.
An uptight looking lady in a boring blue housedress steps out of the sewing supply store shouldered against the dojo and says, “You can’t do that,” to which I take off my Chanel Lacquered Tween sunglasses (my beautiful Jackie O’s, but made for 2016), look at her and say, “And yet you just watched it happen.”
This middle-aged woman has fine hair down to her hips and that unsettling look that makes you think she got transported here from the mid-eighteen hundreds and hasn’t yet found a way to integrate. It’s almost like she’s dying to milk a cow or churn some butter or something.
“I’m calling the police,” she announces, crossing her arms and looking upset about being challenged by me, a snooty sexy little thing with an overpriced (but very badass) car.
“When you call,” I say, “let them know I’ll be heading their way in the next few minutes.”
Using the sparest of movements, she starts to play with her creepy hair. Already I’m thinking she’s way too old to have hair that long. She’s a relic of a bygone era. I almost ask if she shouldn’t be in back chaffing wheat or preparing to re-shoe the horses at dawn, but I don’t because I’m trying not to be rude. Or take my bad attitude out on her.
“You a student?” she asks.
Eyeballing her long and hard, I’m still a bit hesitant to back off, but I can’t stand that whole tattle-tale vibe she’s putting off. Then again, she’s not exactly running off to call the cops, so maybe she’s full of crap.
I change the subject, or rather, I get to the subject I’m wanting to be on. “What happened here?”
“Guy killed his students. Went berserk or something.”
“You see him do it?”
She stops playing with her hair and says, “I’m calling the police now.”
“Whatever, lady. Do it. Let ’em know I’m coming. Unlike you, I’m not full of crap.”
“What if I told you I called already?”
“I’d say thanks.”
She huffs out loud, then turns and goes inside.
Using my mind to unlatch the dojo door, I open it and walk inside. The smell smacks me straight in the face. It’s flaked, airborne blood I’m smelling. It’s dried carnage. Putting memories of Tavares’s dead, dried body out of my mind, I plug my nose, look around. What a disaster.
We’re talking overturned chairs and the brownish evidence of gore slopped and splattered everywhere. The mat is the worst. The whole thing is countless, claylike ponds of dried blood. God, I don’t want to even get on the mat. I drop my butt into a chair, unplug my nose, and after a moment of centering myself and breathing in the harsh stench, I open my mind to the scene that happened here.
I saw what Sensei saw, felt what he felt, yet still I’m compelled in some voyeuristic fashion to wallow in the violence that unfolded here.
Images and old energy permeate my brain. I close my eyes. Absorb it. The feeling of movement sweeps through me; the phantom sounds of a swinging blade whisks through my mind; disembodied cries flood my mind as severed arms and legs and heads thunk! on splot! on the floors; the wet, squishing sounds of every hacked-apart body is being barfed out of thin air, coming from somewhere in between the compressed layers of time. It’s like all the bloody fish parts you feed whales just dumped out on the floor at once. Except this chum isn’t fish as much as it’s human beings. Kids and their friends, moms and dads, my old friends and peers.
It’s so much worse than I thought now that I’m here, sitting with it, awash in the wake of its energy.
My heart slams into my chest when a hole in this remembered world of the past opens in thin air. Is this where The Operator stuffed the old man and his dead dog while he was attacking Netty? Did he create this? I shove my mind into this hole the second it opens, if anything to satisfy a morbid curiosity.
Sickness bowls through me.
It’s like Hell with the lights turned off. My eyes snap open and the memory slowly falls away, the start of a headache trailing behind it.
There’s no reason for me to be here. God, I can’t be here! Do I really need to relive these same awful memories I saw earlier in Sensei’s head? It’s stupid, me doing this. I don’t need any more bad images on top of all the bad images I’ve already got crowding my brain.
Inside, I feel him moving, smiling, relishing in my horror. The Operator. He’s silent now, still, like somehow I’ve given him water at the time of an incredible drought.
I sigh in absolute disgust thinking, go ahead and smile you demon. You’re in my cage now, the cage I built for you.
8
From deep within the tomb that was once a place of learning not only self-defense but important life lessons, I stand and turn to leave. That’s when the black Crown Victoria with red and blue grill lights flashing arrives out front. Like the place is on fire.
Great.
Looks like the long-haired lady from the wrong century wasn’t bluffing after all. Apparently she called the cops when I started pulling off the crime scene tape.
The officer comes in the dojo, a normal looking man. Not fat or droopy eyed. Not smoking a cigarette, or dressed in a rumpled JC Penny suit, or bald headed and frumpy. He could be an accountant. Or a bank manager. This guy looked so normal he could be an insurance salesman, if not for the undercover car and the badge hooked on his belt.
“This is a crime scene,” he says, more forceful than I expected for looking so vanilla. But that’s the thing about cops: they always speak with an air of authority because the voice is often times better at forcing compliance than a gun.
“This is a crime scene,” I repeat.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, the verve of him quite large.
“What are you doing here?” I reply.
“This is my scene.”
“Well I train here, so technically this is my scene, too. As in, I’ve been here longer.”
He comes right up to me and I don’t back down an inch. He doesn’t know it yet, but my dick’s bigger. The look on his face betrays his surprise. It turns to irritation fast. He thinks I’m some entitled rich bitch and boy is he wrong!
“Were you here when this happened?” he asks.
“No.”
“Let me see your ID.”
“You don’t need it,” I tell him.
“ID now,” he says, snapping his fingers and holding his hand out. The sharp change of tone has him sounding more fatherly than anything.
“It’s in my car, but what good will it do you anyway? You want to run it and see if I have outstanding warrants in what, a murder case? You want to check for unpaid parking tickets? I’ll tell you who I am. My name is Savannah Crawford-Swann, only daughter to billionaire Christian Swann, whom you haven’t heard of because your station in life doesn’t necessitate it.”
“Let me see your hands,” he says, unmoved. I show him them and he makes a move toward me. He’s got one hand on his handcuffs and the other is reaching for me like he’s taking control. Holy balls, is he wanting to haul me in for questioning? Man, so many thoughts are crashing around in my head right now! Clear your mind, I remind myself. Clear it.
“Stop resisting,” he says.
&nbs
p; “Resisting what? Are you forcing yourself on me, officer?”
“Detective.”
He moves again; I counter.
“Stop it!” he says, abandoning the cuffs for his service piece: a Sig Sauer P226. It’s crazy how much I know about this gun. Why do I know so much about this gun?
Dulce.
“You stop,” I say.
I feel that dark part of me wanting to assume control, but I don’t assault cops, or detectives. I tell myself he isn’t a bad man. I’m just a smart ass kid who has no clue as to what she’s doing. We square off. He unsnaps the leather holster holding his weapon.
“You want to know what happened here, don’t you?”
He stops.
“I do.”
“I know exactly what happened. I saw it.”
“You said you weren’t here.”
“Have a seat, Detective. You don’t need your gun. What I want is for you to know what I know, and then you’ll know exactly what happened and why I’m here.”
Outside the front wall of glass, the sewing lady is peeking in. I give her a physical shove with my mind that has her practically falling backwards and catching herself, and then scuttling away like a rat back to her hole.
“You sit first,” he says. “I’ll stand.”
“I sit, you sit.”
“You first.”
I sit down, tilt my head and raise an eyebrow. He furrows his brow, then sits in a chair four chairs from mine. Look at this, look at how civilized we’ve become.
That’s when I say, “I’m going to show you.”
He starts to open his mouth, but I hold it shut with my mind. He tries to stand, but I pin him to the chair.
“Don’t fight it. I won’t hurt you. You came here to know what happened, Detective, but with all the interviews and informal interrogations you and your department have conducted, you still have no idea what really happened.”
He’s mumbling against his own closed mouth, panic lighting a fire inside his big green eyes. I draw up my thoughts, my memories, feel the ball of them gathering in the front of my mind. The things I’m seeing in real time—the dojo, the waylaid Detective—they all begin to lose color. The tinge of grey erases everything not black or white. Seeing me, knowing my eyes are changing to black, the Detective sits wide-eyed and squirming like crazy under his skin.
Then his head shoots back, the chords in his neck standing taught.
He does this involuntarily because I’m shoving the murders as seen by my sensei into the detective’s head with force. It’s the same thing I did to Cameron. The detective’s eyes roll back until all I see is pure white. He bucks under the strain. His body fights me involuntarily, an effect of me jamming so much knowledge into him all at once.
In the detective’s mind, the second boy—The Operator’s second clone—he corrals the gore he created, shoves it into the interdimensional hole he’s opened, then beats the hell out of Sensei. When he’s done, he re-opens the interdimensional hole and all that carnage spits itself back out onto the mats.
At this point, I release the detective fully from my control, and the world I see goes from shades of grey to full color. We’re both sitting silently across from each other, staring into each other’s eyes. He’s panting, like he can’t believe what I just did.
“What in Jesus’ name are you?” he finally says, still trying to catch his breath. Still trying to make sense of me and what just happened. Fortunately for him, he doesn’t go for his gun. At this point, I would have lodged it in his mouth.
“I’m the girl with all the answers.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Many impossible things are, in fact, possible, Detective. Science and the mainstream media just haven’t caught up yet. I mean, if you think about it, people were once jailed and killed for suggesting the earth was round.”
“That aside,” he says, “how do I explain this?”
“Your reports don’t allow for science-fiction, I get it. And your captain would put you on psycho leave if you told him what you saw. I get that, too.”
“So how then? I mean…you can’t explain that and not sound crazy! And where is that boy? The one who came twice purporting to be the same boy remade?”
“I have something for you, Detective. It’s going to be your only break, and it will exonerate my sensei, whom I suspect will never recover from this emotionally. If I provide you this lead, I expect you tell my sensei he is no longer a suspect, and I expect that you’ll release a statement to the press accordingly. Do we have a deal?”
He nods.
“Say it.”
“We have a deal,” he says, relenting.
“The gun shop across the way,” I say, pointing outside two blocks away, “has the neighborhood’s best high-definition surveillance cameras. Your team canvassed the area, and they questioned business owners on this block and across the street, but no one saw anything unusual. And their store cameras? Those few who have them, they yielded a few blurry feeds at best. But no one asked the gun shop for their camera surveillance.”
“How do you know all this?” he asks.
“Go to the gun shop, Detective. It will show you the boy coming into the dojo. Sensei killed that boy after he saw his entire dojo had been slaughtered. Surveillance will also show a second boy coming and going from the dojo looking exactly like the first boy who killed everyone. Put out an APB on that boy. He is your murderer.”
“And when we find him? How do we prove he did what he did when he’s clearly something…supernatural?”
“You won’t find him.”
“What do you mean I won’t find him?”
“He’s already dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And you know this how?”
“Because I’m the one who killed him.”
He sucks in a breath so deep his nostrils flare to accommodate the huge influx of air. I just stare at him, my face neutral, my eyes soft. Something diplomatic enters his aura. He’s toeing the line of a major turning point. Like he can’t decide what to do with me. He’s thinking, is she bad or good? He’s thinking, can I cuff her before she…does whatever it was she did to me again?
“You can’t take me in, Detective. And you can’t find me once I’m gone. So that line of thinking, it has to end.”
“You gave me your name.”
“I gave you a name. It’s not my given name. I’ve had more than a few names in my life, and I’m sure I’ll have more still. So really, my name means nothing. And to answer your question, I’m good. Not bad.”
“How—?”
Getting into his head, telepathically I say, “You should forget me already. Forget it so deeply that by the time you get back to your car, you will barely even remember what I looked like, let alone my name.”
He goes for his gun. I stop his hand from getting there. He looks at his frozen-in-place arm, then up at me. Our eyes meet. I clamp his body down again.
“I told you, Detective, you can’t take me in. And even if you could, I’m guilty of nothing in your case. In fact, I’m actually helping you here. Filling in pieces of the puzzle you didn’t have until now.”
“Let go of me,” he growls.
I let go.
He’s pissed off at not being in control, but coming to terms with it.
Smart detective.
“So how am I supposed to spin this?” he says. “And what do you want me to do with this information?”
“Confiscate the video footage, watch and re-watch it at the station, then enter it into evidence in the manhunt. You won’t find this boy, though, and every direction you take from this point forward will bring you and your team to dead ends. This is a cold case that has only to cool. It’s a case that’ll never be solved because the boy is gone from this very existence. And be glad, because that immortal pestilence was far worse than even you have the brain power and creativity to imagine.”
“You never answered my ques
tion. What are you?”
Softly, I say, “A friend.”
He doesn’t like this answer, but he sees something in my expression that makes him believe I’m telling the truth.
“Go to the gun shop,” I say, standing. He doesn’t stand with me.
When I walk out the door, he doesn’t call after me. Outside, the sewing lady is sitting on a bench in front of her shop smoking a long, charcoal brown cigarette.
Looking at her, I say, “Thanks for calling the detective. It saved me the trouble of finding him myself.”
She just sits there, slack-jawed, her hostile eyes dry and unblinking as she roasts me with her gaze. Her cigarette smell is offensive. Something foreign. I want to hate her, but perhaps that’s the wrong tact. It could be she’s just a woman with a tough story of her own. If this is the case, I don’t want to know it, so I just leave.
I get in my car, power up the beast of an engine, then creep out of the parking lot and head back to Sensei’s apartment. I’ve got to do something about him, lest he slip into a fog of alcoholism and perpetual madness. If he did, I wouldn’t blame him.
I will, however, chastise myself if I don’t at least try.
9
When I get to Sensei’s apartment, I walk in unannounced. He’s sobering up enough to know he’s ready to start drinking again, but honestly, I’m not having any of this.
“No more alcohol,” I say.
“Get out,” he barks through his wired up face, then flinches at the pain.
“No.” He starts to move but I stop him. “Be quiet or I’ll shut your mouth better than all this wiring can.”
The last thing he says before I force his mouth shut is, “This is your fault.”
“You already said that,” I say, “and I already said I know. I can’t fix a lot of things, but I can fix some, so I’m going to start with you.”
After containing him, I use my mind to remove his casts, and everything associated with his super slow healing. I almost feel bad for him, having to recover at a snail’s pace.
I start with his ankle bone, then his ribs, then the rest of him, going inside, calling forth white blood cells, flushing out old blood, bringing in new blood. What I’m going to do, it’s truly a labor of love. All day long I stand here until I can’t stand anymore and my brain is mush. I make us dinner, but barely. I need sleep in the worst way! And Sensei, he just lays there, spent. He falls asleep sweating. After a nap, I remove the wiring holding his once broken jaw together, then feed us.