Aaron joined the side of the barge with all the people. Everyone was soaked and sodden from the ordeal, cradled in thick, woolen blankets despite the tyrannical August heat. The only audible sounds were that of the barge, carrying them at a maddeningly lackadaisical speed away from the horror that had just befallen them, the water from the bay lapping innocuously along the sides. Aaron tore through the tarnished air with a hoarse whisper and a motion to the cots, “Are they all…?”
“Yeah,” croaked the man whose untoward comment about the sun launched this whole catastrophe. He didn’t realize it, though. He was oblivious to his own sense of blame, and Aaron somehow couldn’t decide whether that was reprehensible, or for the best. “The ones above the water are breathing. Just not awake, though. We decided as a group to preserve the bodies where they died, in the water.”
It made sense. It made too much disturbing sense. It made Aaron sick to be alive. He didn’t see the foggy faces he knew from his past lives. He didn’t really feel much of anything… and the lack of feeling spurred an avalanche of guilt, but that’s all. And then, more guilt, because guilt is a selfish notion, not unlike self-pity and idle complaining. Guilt roars though a person, serving no purpose other than a snide, glum gloat about how practically it can julienne-slice someone’s soul. Aaron stopped thinking about it—his head lodged squarely in the sand of the issue—and he swayed to numb shock instead.
Regardless of the fact that the world around him had ended, that Armageddon had just taken place and he had, idiotically enough, survived it, Aaron was still bored while he waited for whatever his life was becoming to happen. Aaron noticed in his boredom that the population of the barge was a ratio of 80 cots to 20 people. There was a solitary huddle of gray-skinned, dazed zombies breathing and silently crying. And, looking over the partition, he could see that most of the cots were sunk below the surface. How many of the people in the semi-circle where he sat essentially raised themselves from the dead? What odds did he have while he was baking in the odious glow of the serial killer sun? How lucky was he?
An old colleague of Aaron’s from his early days of learning the ropes in his father’s company walked over to him and broke the clamor in his thrashing mind. Aaron got up, hugged her for a long time, and they both fell into a shiver of silent sobbing. She pulled away and opened her mouth to speak, but before there were words, Aaron jolted awake in a fluorescent hell of beeping and buzzing that smelled like Lysol and loomed with death. He was throttled back into the torturous grip of reality, his skin saturated and glistening with sweat. He was alone in a hospital bed, at 9:27 a.m., wishing he could throw up. And yet, a part of him felt paralyzed, totally incapacitated, not having the strength or the resolve to let go and fall into his own sickness.
Chapter 15
Aaron was lost in his own consciousness, feeling more at home in dreams than reality. What is happening? How did I get here? Was the catamaran real? Was the explosion, the flirtation with death…
Was all of this Aaron’s true dimension? He was alone in a hospital where confusion seemed to reign supreme; where it seemed like everyone was speaking in low tones of a language he didn’t understand.
Aaron mashed the button for help above his hospital bed, maxing out his strength on the first try. It felt, internally, as if someone had detached all his organs—snipped his veins and capillaries—and rearranged them somehow. He felt all stirred up inside, like his brain was jostled into pieces and scattered all throughout his frame. His heart was no longer in his chest, but somewhere else, somewhere frozen and untouched by light. Aaron felt intrinsically and thoroughly as though he were, for the first time in his life, someone else.
No one answered his call for help. No one came to answer his questions. All he could hear were the shrieking beeps of machines, stoic and unchanging in their monotony. Every now and then, a rustle of hospital scrubs or sneakers squeaking across the linoleum would permeate the sound waves around him, but Aaron felt as though he were slipping deeper and deeper into a comatose state, a trance of quiet bewilderment that fogged over his mind and muddled his tenacity.
In his final grips of consciousness, Aaron pulsed his brain—whirring in the turbulence of disorientation—trying to remember. He found himself lunging toward the final shreds of his reality before everything unraveled, thinking back to the last real, tangible picture his mind could paint: Vanessa. She was with him, rocking softly across the ecstasy in the same rhythm as he was, in the same frequency. Just the thought of her blanketed his body with serenity, calmness radiating through him now just as she’d sent electric spikes through him the night before.
Where is she? Is she in danger? Could she be as close to me as the other side of this wall? Was she waking up from a gripping nightmare as well, chained to a hospital bed with no answers? Aaron’s mind felt overheated with a fiery internal dialogue. He began to shout, but the sound of his voice was lost in the ether, disappearing into an invisible vortex as soon as it left his mouth. He was trapped in some kind of vacuum, menacing in its ordinary stillness.
Physically paralyzed and clutched by mental turbulence, Aaron began to harness all the emotion within him. Like a battery on a charging station, he pulsated internally, rearing back in preparation only to burst forward, out of the prison inside of which he’d awoken. A deluge of physical strength surged through him and his muscles began to pump with energy, emboldening his biceps and quads until finally, his entire body was rippling with newfound expansion. With a simple jerk of his forearm, Aaron snapped the now-flimsy chain of the handcuff that had previously held him prisoner to the hospital bed.
Aaron raced out of the hospital room with unmeasured bemusement. His field of vision was doubling, tripling, warping and folding on itself. It was as if the rage bubbling up inside him served as his only fuel, that without it, he’d still be comatose and trapped within the cage of a nightmare. He could see people, but their faces were scratched away, vague and utterly lacking distinction. Every time he looked in a new direction to solve the mystery of where he was, what he was doing there, and what happened to him, more of the same confusion was revealed.
Eventually, as less and less was making sense around him, Aaron made the decision to simply run away. His muscles were still vibrating with a sort of electrical current that had seemingly been turned to full blast by his own will to escape. And yet, running wild through unmarked hallways that twisted and turned in his limited vision, Aaron caught sight of himself in a pane of glass. Fear overtook him. What he saw wasn’t a man, wasn’t himself, wasn’t the person he knew himself to be. He screamed again into the void.
What Aaron saw when he looked at what he believed to be his own reflection ripped through him, singeing away at his sense of security cell by cell. Looking into the monstrous red eyes glaring back at him, seeing the way the saliva dripped from rows of jagged fangs, taking in the view of the talons he’d sprouted from his knuckles, Aaron wanted to collapse in terror. This was no mortal man, and for a moment, Aaron believed that he was looking at a screen, a picture, some kind of film designed to horrify him. It wasn’t reality. It simply couldn’t be.
And then, sinking under the weight of the realization, everything began to make sense. All the pieces to the mysteries of the past few weeks were clicking together, connecting in Aaron’s overrun mind. His father’s sudden illness. His own unfounded seizures. The feeling of untapped energy bubbling up within him, coercing him to morph into something he doesn’t recognize. The urge to protect. The craving for hedonism. The kiss of sybaritic temperament.
Nothing was as it seemed. And yet, beneath the gray veil of the surface, all the clues fit together. He was poisoned. Someone did this to him; someone infused his bloodstream with some sort of toxin. Suddenly, Aaron’s board room seizure rippled into his mind under a new lens of clarity. The wound in his leg throbbed before his episode; just after he’d drifted off on the sofa in his office. She came to wake him up, the remind him of the meeting, to see if he needed anything. She d
id this to him. She made this monster.
“Desiree,” Aaron growled, his voice finally rumbling out toward the air in front of him.
It had to be Desiree. She was the only one close enough to both Aaron and his father to be able to harm them. The fog was being wiped away in Aaron’s mind, and he couldn’t believe that he’d been so blind before. Of course his father had been suddenly harmed. Though he was reaching his elderly stages of life, Charlie was always known for his go-get-’em attitude, his utter defiance of the takeover of time. Aaron felt the stupidity billowing up in his mind for not being able to see it before. Poison was the only answer to this equation. Poison, given slowly and succinctly, perhaps over a long period of time. It could have been a few drops in a cup of coffee each day. It could have been an abrupt dosage, meant for lethal effect. Whatever it was, she had done it, slowly and surely, to both of them.
Was it her intention to create a beast? Was it Desiree’s intention to transform Aaron into the mythical, otherworldly creature that stared back at him? Was she as conniving as she seemed now, illuminated in Aaron’s memory with such malignant intentions? With memories of her bleeding back through his brain—the flirting, the cleavage, the disgustingly sweet banter—was it all a grand distraction? Was she really edging her way closer to him, to Charlie, to the seat of power?
Aaron could feel his heartbeat normalizing, simmering down after broiling under the weight of his transformation. The fangs that hung threateningly over his teeth began to incarcerate themselves inside his gums once again. The tufts of fur that had blossomed all over his body began to hibernate inside his pores. His muscles had folded over on themselves, compacting his body into its usual frame. The hospital gown no longer felt taut and stretched across his mutated body but now fluttered in the wind of people walking by. The faces normalized, and Aaron could now make out the features of every nurse scurrying past, every doctor ambling along.
Mr. Lee turned the corner of the hallway and nearly dropped his cup of cafeteria coffee. “Aaron,” he croaked. “What are you doing out here in the hallway? And… how did you break your arm restraint?”
Aaron stared down at his right arm, encased not by a busted metal handcuff, but the unraveled strips of standard rope confinement. He knew—with every synapse firing—that he was handcuffed. That spurred his initial feeling of terror: the illusion that someone had a hold on him. How could he have been wrong? How could he have imagined something so concrete, so undeniable?
“I…” Aaron began, dizziness now buzzing through him. “I… don’t know. I don’t know… anything.”
“Let’s get you back in bed,” Mr. Lee said in a voice streaked with concern as he took Aaron by the elbow and led him back down the hallway to his room.
Chapter 16
Vanessa was spilling scrambled eggs onto her sister’s plate—plastic and sectioned off in bright colors so that the foods wouldn’t touch each other—when her phone began to buzz. The eggs heaped over one section into the other on purpose, as it was Vanessa’s secret way to mask the fact that multiple foods at breakfast time was a strange luxury from a bygone era. Setting the plate down in front of Emma, who wouldn’t stop drawing at the table, Vanessa clicked the green button on her phone screen. It was a number she didn’t recognize, however the area code was local, so the chances of this person being a bill collector were slim. Still, a pang of terror ran up Vanessa’s spine as she moved the phone to her ear.
“Hello?” She sounded tentative, unsure.
“Hi, good morning,” a cheery woman perked into the phone. “Am I speaking with Vanessa?”
The unease took a tighter hold. Skeptically, Vanessa replied with a gulp. “Yes. Who is this?”
“Hi Vanessa, this is Rebecca from Human Resources at Kümertech Incorporated. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
Bewildered, yet still with some sort of shaky understanding of the root of her newfound connection with Kümertech, Vanessa eyed Emma over her shoulder. “Emma,” she said as she tilted her head away from the microphone. “Can you be a good girl and eat your eggs? I need to take this call in the living room.”
Emma nodded theatrically, her sandy blonde hair coming loose from the lopsided ponytail that Vanessa had haphazardly thrown together on top of her sister’s head.
Walking in to the living room, Vanessa said into the phone authoritatively, “I’m here. What is this regarding?”
“Well,” Rebecca said in a disarmingly cheerful tone, “I have a direct order from our CEO to reach out to you on whether or not you’re interested in the position that has just opened up.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” she began, trying to be as polite as possible. “I don’t think I’m sure what you mean,” she stammered.
“Oh, I was… under the impression that you and Mr. Ridley knew each other well. He… didn’t tell you?” Rebecca sounded confused.
Vanessa was silent. What could she say? It felt like she was unexpectedly barging into a lion’s den, and the lion was worried about not having set an extra place at the dinner table.
“Let’s back up,” Rebecca started again. “There’s a position open at our company to be the secretary to the CEO. I have been instructed by Mr. Ridley himself to give you a call and offer you the job. Now, I thought he’d already discussed this with you, so I apologize for my candor. Would you like me to go over the salary and benefits with you now over the phone, or should we meet in the office to discuss and negotiate?”
Vanessa’s voice was long gone, floating along a river of surprise in a far-off yonder that she couldn’t see. She was only 21 years old. An uneducated stripper caring for her disabled little sister in the wake of her parent’s death. A cushy office job seemed like it was galaxies away, in another dimension where the social tiers weren’t so bold, so stringent. And a salary negotiation? Any job that paid a salary instead of a measly hourly wage was a dreamy, distant reality for Vanessa, whose mind still calculated things in terms of minimum wage at a panicked moment’s notice. Insecurity pumped through her veins. Why was she being considered for this? Youth aside, she had no marketable skills. What did she bring to the table?
“L-l-let’s…” Vanessa stuttered, “Let’s arrange to meet.”
“Okay, no problem. How does today at 1 p.m. sound?”
“Oh, can it be earlier?” Vanessa asked, the talons of her daily responsibilities shanking her as they gripped her. “I need to pick up my little sister from school, and the bus route calls for a few transfers. I’m worried that a meeting that late will cause me to be late getting her after her classes are done.”
“Oh, I completely forgot to mention,” Rebecca chuckled. “Pending acceptance of the position, a company car is available for you to drive today. As soon as you sign the onboarding paperwork, you're free to take the keys.”
Was this a joke? It had to be. Vanessa reasoned that if she just stayed silent, listening ever fervently to the other end of the call, the breathing would transform into giggles, and whatever insensitive idiot whose mind hatched this plan would shout, “GOTCHA!” into the receiver before hanging up.
And yet, Vanessa hadn’t told anyone about her lurid trysts with Aaron. Not even Jessica. The last time she saw him, Jessica watched Emma while she thought Vanessa was working. Filled to the brim with shame and disgust, Vanessa didn’t tell her that she’d blown off her shift at the strip club. How could she? It would be deplorable enough if there was a good reason for it, but this… this sneaking around with a wealthy man twice her age? No. Vanessa could never confess that to anyone, much less the woman who so graciously watched after Emma night after night without asking for a dime.
“Vanessa? Are you still there?” The voice boomed into the phone, drowning out Vanessa’s billowing thoughts.
“I… yeah, I’m here. I'm sorry. There’s a car? I wasn’t… um… I wasn’t expecting that.”
“It is quite a perk, yes,” Rebecca said in a voice that translated to a smile over the phone. “So, can we
expect to see you at one today?”
“Well… sure. Okay,” Vanessa’s voice was still tinted with hesitation, but she couldn’t turn this down. Her callow naïveté was in full bloom in the past few days as she burned bridges and shirked responsibility, all for the sake of physical contact.
“Great! Hey, real quick before I let you go,” Rebecca was speaking to her as if they were already colleagues, old pals who passed each other in the hallway and commiserated in the ladies’ staff bathroom after changing their tampons during the workday. “What’s your last name? The email from Mr. Ridley only says your first name.”
“It’s… McCarthy.”
“Okay, perfect. I've got you in for a meeting with me here in Human Resources at one o’clock p.m. today. Make sure that you bring your social security card with you, as well as any photo ID you have and a copy of your birth certificate if you have that, too. We’ll see you a bit later!”
“Thanks,” Vanessa replied in a daze. “Bye.”
* * *
Once Vanessa had dropped Emma off at kindergarten, she walked upstairs with what felt like blocks of lead for shoes. Each step seemed to melt her feet into the floor, dragging her down, preventing her from making the pilgrimage upstairs for the first time in over a year. Her room and Emma’s room were on the ground floor, and all that sat on the top level were her parents’ rooms: a home office, the master bath, and of course, their bedroom. Gulping, Vanessa turned the handle on the door to reveal a ghostly, ethereal memory. The smell of a life she used to know came whooshing toward her, drowning her in nostalgia. Everything is as it was: all the trinkets her mother collected were in perfect order on the bookshelf, and all her father’s books were stacked on his bedside table. The only thing separating their room from its lively counterpart in the past was dust, blanketed over every surface and populating the air. The dust was a thick smog inside this forgotten room, preserved in time.
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