by Schow, Ryan
“Holy shit,” the mother said.
Holland stood, staggered backwards. “I thought you were dead,” he said with suspicious eyes. Her breathing stabilized and she became very quiet. Like she hadn’t seen any of them, which seemed impossible.
Then, lifting her head, Abby stared deep into the distance, in the direction the bullet originated from. Her mouth remained silent, her eyes fixed on…something.
“What are you looking at?” Holland said. “What do you see?”
Ignoring him, Abby sat up fully and brought both hands together in a slow, cupping motion, as if she were gathering wool, or pooled energy. She then pushed both hands out in front of her, strenuously, and used what appeared to be the last of her strength to thrust her energy toward the horizon. Abby then went completely still, closing her eyes. A minute passed. Then, she drew a sharp, powerful breath, held it a few seconds, then expelled it from her barely opened mouth in an almost maniacal hiss.
Everyone but him bristled. He’d seen some spooky shit in his life, but right now, this could very well take the whole damn cake.
Slowly, Abby moved her extended arms up over her head, palms pushing waves of energy high into the sky, the strain on her body obvious. Chords in her neck stood out like ropes tethering her head to her neck. Her flesh bled itself of color. When her hands were directly overhead, when her head was tilted up to the sky, her eyes snapped open.
Everyone took a step back. The mother gasped.
Abby’s irises were gone, eaten up by ink black pupils, pupils the color of deep space. There was not so much an emptiness about her as there was a frightening throb of might and vengeance. To him, it was new, but not new at all. Whatever she was doing, he stood mesmerized.
“What’s she doin’ with her hands?” the daughter said. No one answered her so she said to Abby, “Whatchu doin’ girl?”
Abby ignored her, flipped her hands over and made them into twin fists facing downward. The minute they became fists, she jerked them down with such speed and force, the second knuckles of all her fingers punched divots into the tarmac.
All three of them waited with bated breath. What they were waiting for, however, no one could say for sure. Abby’s face hung in shadow, her chin on her chest, her thick hair draped over her features hiding translucent skin, dark as death pupils, and lips pursed tight enough to leave tiny calloused creases all along her mouth.
“Abby?” Holland said. He pulled back her hair and saw her face was changing, like Alice’s, but more menacing. Something infinitely darker.
She looked up, sluggishly, but not at Holland. Her eyes crept ever upward, until she was looking at something in the sky directly overhead. Her face was a mask of bluish veins and pitch black eyes and an hostile sneer. The skin was stretched so tight over the contours of her face, it gave her a hellish, evil look. A look Susan shrank from. Abby kept trying to look up, but her neck reached its point. It wasn’t enough, though. Abby wiggled her head the slightest little bit left and right, then a noisy pop! broke the silence, making them all jump.
Holland wondered, did she just dislocate her vertebrae?
Abby’s head reached its furthest point before she did whatever she did with her bones…and then she dropped it backwards just a little further. Her neck looked broken in half backwards.
The mother moved back, hand to her mouth, clearly terrified.
“What’s happening to her?” the daughter asked. Wordlessly, the mother tried to grab the girl’s arm, but her daughter shrugged her off. “No, momma.”
Holland watched Abby as she stared directly into the sky, unblinking, like she was in some kind of a trance. He followed her eyes upward, saw nothing in the sky above.
“Faster,” her mouth said. And then the air around them grew warm and turbulent, but not like a tornado. More like a spiritual disturbance. Or a supercharged sound wave with a concussion ferocious enough to stop a human heart. Holland lost his breath to the power, found it hard to keep from passing out. The mother and her daughter, they were staggering backwards on unsteady legs and holding their chests.
“Faster,” Abby’s mouth said to no one, her eyes now pure black, the skin on her face so thin and pale it looked see-through. Holland fought to breathe. “He’s coming,” the mouth said.
“Who?” the daughter managed to ask. Her mother held her by her shirt, unwilling to let her go, her face pure and utter fear.
That’s when Holland saw it: the black dot in the sky approaching. It was dropping at impossible speeds. Too fast for the laws of gravity. Holland scrambled to his feet, hooked his arms under Abby’s armpits, dragged her backwards, well out of the way. Her body was petrified wood. A stone sculpture.
“Faster,” Abby said.
As the pulsing power rolled through Holland, he looked up in the sky again, saw the dot taking shape. A sadistic chill fueled his curiosity. She had become something immortal, something lethal. It wasn’t a dot in the sky, it was a man. Presumably the shooter.
“Faster,” Abby chanted.
Her power quaked through them all with such force, the mother turned and blew chunks all over the tarmac. The daughter fell to her hands and knees, the strain on her face monumental. Even he threw up a little in his mouth. Swishing the meaty, acidic juices around, he swallowed them back down. His eyes barely left the approaching man even though his gut was chock full of warm swill.
“FasterfasterfasterFASTER!” Abby chanted, as if she were hyperventilating.
The sounds of the screaming man rose in pitch. Seconds later, he slammed face-first into the old tarmac with such speed and force, he literally cratered the runway, while at the same time splashing gore everywhere. Everyone but Abby turned away.
For the most part, the girls were spared from wearing the meatier parts of the man, but they could not escape the carnage completely. The daughter stood on unstable legs. She just stared at the exploded body. Her mother was crying now, doing that annoying hiccupping thing children do. Not the daughter, though. Nope. She was walking over to the body, ever the curious child.
“Where in the effing hell did he come from?” she asked.
Her mother looked at Abby and in a sloppy, accusatory sob said, “She did this!”
“You’re goddamn right she did,” Holland said with immense satisfaction. “That man there is the shooter.”
Holland joined the daughter over the corpse thinking it was a sweet, horrifying affair. The body was crushed so flat into the dipped and busted cement, it no longer retained a three dimensional element. It was just a heap of meat, save for a few fragments of bone and a pulverized vertebra.
“Pancaked gore,” he said out loud, laughing to himself.
The man was driven so hard into the ground he was now part of it. Behind Holland, to Abby, the daughter said, “What are you? ’Cause you ain’t no human like you said, not doing whatchu just did.”
Her tone was manic curiosity.
Abby, her face pale white and transparent, her pupils still pitch black and huge, she turned her head like a possessed doll and said one word: “Unkillable.”
Now the girl staggered backwards, clearly scared. The mother inched forward, terror smashed all over her face, ground deep into her every gaping pore. She grabbed her daughter by the shirtsleeve, dug in and pulled, saying, “C’mon, Macy. Let’s git.”
“Momma, what is she?” Macy was saying, frantic, like she couldn’t fathom someone like Abby, and it was enough to rattle her to the bones.
“A product of Satan,” the mother said, sounding half manic. “Pure evil, she is!”
She was now hauling Macy away. When the girl finally went with her mother rather than putting up a fight, the two of them wasted no time getting to their car.
Holland said to Abby, “Time to go.”
It took a minute, but the black tide in her eyes started to recede. Her skin, it was becoming peach again, the bluish veins fading from sight. “Not sure I can walk,” she said.
Holland tried helping her to h
er feet; she had little control of her body. By the time she was up the stairs and in the plane, her motor skills were fast returning. Holland wiped them both down with a damp towel that came back red, and with greyish pieces of meat. Up front, he said to the pilot, “We’ve got to go, man.”
The pilot, a discrete looking man with reasonable features, ran the jet’s pre-flight sequence in preparation for their return to the Bay Area.
“You took a round from a high powered rifle right through the heart,” Holland said when they were back in the main cabin.
“I did.”
No feeling, he thought. Nothing. Barely even human.
“So how are you alive?” he asked. It was outrageous. Last time she died, it took days to figure this out. Weeks. Now, if he tore open her shirt, he was certain he’d find perfect, virgin-looking skin.
“Whatever it was you did to me was amateurish compared to what they did down there,” Abby said. The way she said “down there” sent chills crawling up his spine. Not much scared him, but Dulce was another story.
“Which was what?”
She rolled her neck back in place, her pupils still very dark and intimidating, and then she settled into her seat and said, “Not now.”
“If not now, when?” he said. He was not a man before her but a boy. Not Josef Mengele or Dr. Green or even the homicidal Enzo Holland; he was but a shadow stretched out in her wake. The power and control he felt as the Angel of Death…gone. Before her, he was weak, needy for answers. Aching to understand.
“Don’t concern yourself with the details,” she said, her tenor colder than a Boston freeze. “You don’t need to know.”
He was thinking, um, yes, I kind of need to know.
“You don’t need to know,” she said in response to his thoughts, “you want to know.”
Suddenly she looked to the right, her head jerking sideways, instinctively, almost like an animal. Standing up, he leaned across her lap, stared out the plane’s oval window into the distance. Whatever it was she sensed, he saw nothing.
“If you don’t want them to see the jet, I suggest we leave.”
He stood up straight, gazed down upon her, this nightmarish girl, and said, “Who?”
“They’re coming, Gerhard. Or Holland. Enzo, is it?” She didn’t look up. He had the feeling she wasn’t even interested in anything he had to say.
“How do you know that?” he said. He didn’t say his name. Delgado must have told her. Did he tell her the new name?
“They’re already on their way.”
Holland hustled to the cockpit, warned the pilot to get moving a.s.a.p. The Rolls-Royce BR725 engines roared to life. Holland returned to the cabin, eying her suspiciously all the way.
“Did Delgado tell you my name?” he inquired.
“No,” she said. “I just know it’s Enzo Holland. Like the car. Like the country. Get this thing moving. Now!”
Right then the plane pushed to a start, then taxied to the end of the runway.
“Go!” she screamed, her voice carrying through the cabin with the kind of shrill tenor that could shatter glass.
In the distance, a black van appeared. It was moving fast, clouds of dust pillowing in its wake. Holland felt his hands become claws on the G6’s armrests. When the concussion wave hit him again, it struck low in his belly, and violent. Like the world’s worst fart building in your stomach in the form of a gigantic, trapped gas bubble.
The van exploded into flames a second later, a torched body sailing through the blown-out side door in the process. The van coasted off the road, stalled out in a ditch; the entire vehicle was engulfed in flames.
His eyes flashed to Abby, his stomach still knotted, still cramping, still rolling hard. “Did you do that?” he asked, breathless, thrilled.
“Sit back and shut up, Doctor,” she said, her skin pale again, her eyes dark, but not all the way black. “I’m tired.”
“You did,” he said, “didn’t you?”
She then turned that iniquitous gaze on him. The weight behind her eyes was crippling. He felt like he was fifty feet under water, his chest crumpling, his bones collapsing. Why couldn’t he breathe?
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Mengele. They’re such a giant waste of my time.”
Somehow, he knew she knew he hated being called that name. She kept staring at him until he thought the words, “Get out of my head!” with such force that she looked away.
“Very well,” she replied, even though he hadn’t uttered a single word. “I’ll stay out of your head so long as you let me sleep.”
By the time he could breathe again, she was already closing her eyes, already going to sleep.
His physical body ached from the strain she put on it. Staring at her, he thought only one thing: Weapon.
Whatever she was, she was his creation, she was lethal, and she was immortal. Then something occurred to him: she wasn’t a weapon, she was a god.
Dead is Better
1
Abby was not herself. That’s why this had to work. Orianna looked at her daughter, saw the familiar face, but nothing was familiar. Not her expressions. Not her tone of voice. Not the things she said or the way she said them. And for some reason, to Orianna, this lifted a lifelong burden off her beautiful, now slender shoulders. She actually had a chance at being this child’s mother. At least, in a way that freed her from the ties to her very selfish, very dysfunctional past as Margaret Van Duyn.
That woman was dead. Orianna would definitely mourn her, and she would always remember Margaret Van Duyn, but for now, dead was better.
That night, at dinner with Abby and Christian, she could imagine all their lives together. Friend could become girlfriend, girlfriend could become step-mother—a way in. An impermanent permanence. A fresh start. Slow down, she told herself. Slow down and enjoy each moment.
Even though it was the first night together for the three of them, Orianna knew that she had her daughter back. When it was time for her to leave, Christian and Abby escorted her to the front door. It was chilly outside. She wrapped her arms around herself, unsure of how to say good-bye to her family that wasn’t her family. Christian said goodnight with a kiss on her cheek, but for Abby, Orianna opened her arms and hugged her like her life depended on it. She didn’t want to let go.
“Now that’s a friggin’ hug!” Abby said, with a smile on her face.
“Too much?” Orianna asked, stepping back. Inside, her heart was breaking. Whether it from the sadness of this girl not knowing she was her mother or from her finally having a clean slate with the girl, Orianna wasn’t sure.
“Nope,” Abby said. “Never had a hug that real in my whole entire life. It’s like I could feel it coming from you to me in our souls.”
“You want to get lunch tomorrow?” she asked, casual, even though her entire world hinged on Abby’s answer.
“For sure,” Abby said, grinning. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”
Her daughter was about to go inside when this handsome boy next door opened his front door and came outside. He waved to Abby who waved back at him.
“Holy crap,” she muttered under her breath. “Who’s that?”
“Jacob,” Orianna said, quickly. “He broke your heart once upon a time. You’re friends now. Sort of.”
“I’m gonna meet him, dad,” Abby said. Christian nodded his approval. Abby crossed the lawn to meet him, but not before whispering to Orianna, “Oh my God, this new life of mine is the shit.”
The old Abby would never say something so crass, Orianna thought. That begged the question: if she could be someone else, and Margaret could be someone else, and neither had to acknowledge the past, could it work?
She hoped it could.
“What do you think?” Christian asked, interrupting her thoughts.
She didn’t need to think. The answer fell from her lips virtually on its own. “I think I love her,” she said. “Even though she’s totally screwed up.”
“W
e should keep her then?”
Looking at him for the first time, really looking at him—her gaze penetrating deep into his eyes, boring into the heart and center of his Christian Swann essence—Orianna glimpsed something magnetic, something alluring and reachable. It was like nothing she’d ever seen in him when he was Atticus Van Duyn. Smiling, almost like he knew he was being seen for the first time, he slipped his hand into hers, and she didn’t reject him.
“Yeah,” she said, her heart wide open, left vulnerable for the breaking, or for healing. “I’m sure I want to keep her.”
The Fog of Lust and Redemption
1
We return to San Francisco, take a limo out of SF International, and head to the lab. Holland has work to do. He’s insistent. When I ask the nature of his work, he replies, “I am having significant personal problems with my latest transformation.”
“Like how?” I ask.
He rolls up the glass partition between us and the limo driver, shifts uncomfortably in his seat a bit, then gazes out the window at the nighttime sights of downtown San Francisco.
“Mental problems,” he finally says. He says it like he’s admitting to a porn addiction, or having once jerked it in church.
“What kind of mental problems?”
Yes, I know I’m prying, and yes, I’m fine with it. In fact, watching him squirm delights me, and that’s no small feat with this new, crippled emotional center of mine. That’s why I refuse to connect up with his mind and see what he’s seeing, or feel what he’s feeling.
He turns and looks me right in the eye, his soul a fiery pit of hunger, remorse, anxiety, regret and hatred for almost everything. “At the risk of sounding over dramatic, or perhaps even too forthcoming,” he says, “I’m having the kind of problems where people end up dead.”
“You started out a killer,” I say, as if this sufficiently explains everything.
“No. I started out as a boy. Not a monster.”
“And now you are.”