by The Behrg
Donavon grimaced, taking the weight off the leg the rabid native had bitten into. After pouring alcohol over it and attempting to clean it out, they had wrapped it up as tightly as they could with the roll of gauze. The purple veins spreading upward on his calf like cracks in a windshield, however, were far from comforting.
“I’d go with you if I could,” Donavon said. Not that he meant it.
“It’s okay. I only had one mask.”
Something splashed in the downstairs bathroom just past the staircase, and then Spree let out an angry screech. It sounded like he had fallen into the toilet.
“Too bad the monkey couldn’t deliver a message for us,” Kenny said.
You are the monkey, Donavon thought.
He wasn’t sure if Kenny was up to the task — or any task, for that matter — but what did it hurt letting the guy try? A small chance of success was better than no chance at all, he supposed.
“It means a lot that you would do this,” Donavon said. “Get help. I’m not used to, you know, relying on other people.” Ding — Ding — Ding! Total lie. “But I know you can do this.” Glauunng — the sound of a gong crashing with an even bigger lie. “I have faith in you.”
Man, if his agent could only see him now.
Kenny rubbed at his greasy forehead, his unwashed hair like a violently frayed curtain, draping over both sides of his face. “I just want to go home.”
“We will,” Donavon said. “We will, and the world will know who to thank, whose idea it was to traverse through this light to save Faye Moanna. I’ll even tell them you saved me from the cannibal upstairs.”
Kenny snorted, a half-laugh escaping.
“Seriously, we get out of this, I’ll find you an A.D. job back home. Assistant Director. And you know where that leads.”
When Donavon finally sent Kenny out the front door, layers of duct tape had been added to his face mask. Kenny pushed a rolling desk chair in front of him, using it like a blind man’s walking cane — both for support and as a tool to detect any change in the landscape.
“I’ll be back! I promise,” Kenny called, before the chair hit into the latticed gate.
Donavon heard him fall and land with an “oomph.”
“I’m okay,” Kenny shouted back.
Donavon shoved the bookcase back in front of the broken door. Its shattered wooden pieces had been spread throughout Sir William’s garden when they arrived last night. The light searing his closed eyelids finally shut off as he sealed the final gap, bookcase pressed flush against the wall.
He leaned against the empty shelves, wondering if this was any different than a hit-and-run, wondering if he would be responsible for one more death. He hadn’t even sent the man off with a bottle of water.
He fell back against one of the patterned couches, this one a faded cream color with floral decorations on its cushions. Something that belonged in the home of a decrepit old grandmother. A moment later, Spree popped up beside him. Donavon rustled the monkey’s wet head before remembering where it had been.
Opening the tin case he had kept from Kenny, he took out another rolled joint. Lit it with a lighter on the glass coffee table. He closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the hard cushion and blew out a puff of smoke.
He had never felt so alone in all his life.
No fans, no assistants, no agent to shoot the shit with or PR chick to bang in order to garner a positive review. And without all the little patrons that made up his little clan of followers, who was he? Who was he, really?
A nobody.
Without others to look up to him, to set his place in life, he didn’t exist.
A man’s stature isn’t based on his height, but those whom he chooses to stand beside.
His father’s words. Some of the few Donavon actually agreed with.
Maybe he shouldn’t have sent Kenny off.
He drew in another long breath, letting the herbs calm his mind. Crawling down the chute from the attic and across the room, he heard the native woman’s voice lilting in song. He sat up, setting the joint on the coffee table in front of him.
“Come on, Spree. It is not good for man to be alone.”
The monkey followed him only to the entrance of the pantry, whereupon it left him with a mewling shriek. As he climbed the hanging staircase, he wondered if he wasn’t acting like some idiot in a horror flick, venturing into a basement or down a long hallway, completely ignorant of the audience yelling at him to stop. The blood rushing to his head, coupled with his hobbled gait, made him question which role he was playing. The hero? Or the victim?
The light was still on in the crawlspace above the pantry, casting the room in a sickly hue. Donavon ducked his head beneath it, continuing until he was in front of the cubby of the desk. The native girl was huddled in on herself, limbs bent in a stance only a contortionist could achieve. Her eyes were so large on her face, saucers staring back at him with curiosity.
She could be pretty, he realized, if she was cleaned up. Then again, Donavon had always had a thing for anorexic girls.
“Do you speak English?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
She shifted slightly beneath the desk, more of her face becoming visible. Dried blood ran down the sides of her mouth and chin.
His blood.
“How long did the old man keep you here?”
Her nose wrinkled in response.
“Would he come up here, like this? Talk to you out of sheer boredom?” He added an English accent, stating, “Sir William, astronomer extraordinaire. Keeper of hot crazy women who prefer human flesh to catachapas, or whatever those nasty corn pancakes are called.”
The native’s eyes lit up as she recognized Donavon’s impersonation.
“Who’s speaking with a terrible accent now, you old coot?”
The flash of a gunshot ran through his mind. Sir William falling backward, releasing Faye, blood gushing from his torn open throat.
Watching a man die had been nothing like Donavon had imagined, movies failing to properly prepare him for the ugly reality. There had been no quiet descent into a calm void, Sir William slowly slipping away. Instead it had been frantic.
The bullet had entered his throat and must have fragmented out, taking with it skin and muscle and bone and tissue. The crude opening was so wide that with each of Sir William’s breaths, Donavon could see the actual muscles in his throat squirm and contract. Folds of flesh and blood, so thick it looked like gel, seeped from the open wound. Blood bubbled from Sir William’s mouth like the fizz of a soda can while his body convulsed in violent waves. The stench of fresh shit wafted through the room, and still the Englishman’s eyes roamed, wildly searching yet unable to find anything worth looking at for more than half a second.
At one point Donavon remembered wishing he had a pillow to smother the man, just to make it go quicker. No, death wasn’t anything like the movies. It was ugly and messy and vile. And whatever Sir William had been hoping to see — a light, or tunnel, or familial ghost children or wife — in the end, it hadn’t been there. He had died in a room full of strangers; even the priest had failed to give him a proper sendoff.
Dropping the accent, Donavon said, “You know the old man who put you here. What was he really doing? Why did he take you? Why are you here?”
“Why you here?” the native girl repeated.
“I don’t think sex trafficking is big for women with shark teeth,” Donavon continued. “Are you connected with the old native? The Indian? The, uh, Shaman?”
The girl’s eyes went wide. “Takushkansh’kan.”
“I don’t speak your language.”
She spit out a long stream of more gibberish then began to pull on the collar around her neck, looking to Donavon as if he would free her.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I like to keep my flesh where it’s at.”
With a sigh he left the desk, limping over to the bookcase in the far corner. What he had at first mistaken for ro
ck samples on the shelves were something else, something … foreign. Donavon was no geologist — he had barely finished high school — but the sponge like crystals on the shelves looked like nothing he had ever seen. Oceanic, maybe.
He picked one up, surprised at its lightness. It was the size of his fist, but everywhere he touched, the mineral, or whatever it was, crested inward, leaving indentations from his fingers. He had had a pet snake as a child, an albino king snake, and whatever this was reminded him of a shed snakeskin; solid, but only the shell of what it was meant to be. The remaining flakes of a memory.
“No. No, no, no,” the woman said.
As Donavon turned toward her, he involuntarily squeezed his fist together, mashing the substance in his hand into a tight ball. The woman’s head poked out from the front of the cubby, watching him with a frown.
“No, no,” she said again, a note of sadness to her voice.
“Are you talking about this?” Donavon asked, opening his hand. He half expected what remained to float off into the air, drifting like the seeds of a dandelion. Instead, the flaky substance had melded together into a hardened rock.
The girl’s eyes stayed on the rock.
“What is it? This?”
He shook the rock in her direction and the girl darted back beneath the desk. Her moans were the sound of someone trying to ward off an oncoming migraine. Or someone pleasuring themselves.
Donavon dropped the rock back where he had found it, its ashy grey color making it seem deceptively normal. On a whim, he picked it back up, shoving it into the pocket of his shorts. He poked at another specimen, this one carrying shades of red and orange within its grey mass. Its scales — was that what they were? — drew back at his touch.
Or maybe it was just the joint he had smoked. Kenny may have been a total dweeb, but he sure had some strong Jane. He suddenly wished Faye were with him. She would have loved going through this stuff.
That feeling of loneliness pressed in around him. The room was too small; claustrophobia crawled up his skin as if a hundred Sprees were scaling him.
“I gotta get out.”
Turning to go, he bumped into a pile of rolled parchment and old maps which all fell, rolling off a large and worn suitcase that had been buried beneath them. He went to grab the handle but the thing barely budged with the weight of whatever was inside.
The old man’s bowling ball collection?
Donavon bent down, finding the zippers in the back. A small gold lock wound between both of the clasps. He tried to pull them apart but the lock held firm.
Glancing about, he rose back to the bookcase, grabbing the larger red and orange rock specimen. It molded beneath his fingertips, its surface like tiny needles lying flat. Maybe it would be strong enough to break the lock, though he doubted it.
His hand gripping the stone twitched, a sharp prick causing him to drop the rock.
“Ah, mother —”
He brought his finger to his mouth, sucking at the drop of blood that had begun to well. Where the rock had landed on the suitcase was a small clean slit, sliced through the tough fabric. He wouldn’t need to break the lock after all.
He gripped the rock by its end, sliding it along the edges of the suitcase. The fabric split apart with ease, as if he had been using a hunting knife. When he had finished, he turned the rock back around. There wasn’t a single sharp edge on its other side that he could see.
What the hell?
He ditched the stone, tossing it into the corner, anxious to be rid of it. Then he peeled back the top of the suitcase, it’s zippered center remaining intact.
A short sword and U-shaped shield gleamed inside, set atop an old uniform of what looked like chain mail, neatly folded. Maybe Sir William had been some Renaissance freak or one of those LARPers, playing at Dungeons and Dragons in parks rather than on tabletops. From the moment Donavon had met the man he had felt something was off with him. Not in a million years, however, could he have guessed just how crazy the old bat was.
The sword was much heavier than he had suspected, especially for its size. Its blade was only three feet long or so but it had a heft to it that felt good in his hand. Beneath the shield and links of armor, he removed a tall but thin book. It looked more like a ledger than anything, the cover glittering with a printed title in another language. Latin maybe. Or Greek.
“Little help?”
Donavon jumped at the noise. He had forgotten about the girl, so caught up with the discoveries in the chest. A rat scuttled unseen beneath fallen papers and a pile of filthy rags that looked fossilized. Tucking the book beneath his arm, he held the sword out in her direction.
To his surprise, she didn’t flinch. Instead she bent her neck to give him a better angle at the chains with which she was bound.
She thought he was going to free her.
“There’s no way,” Donavon said.
“You … little help, I big help,” the girl said. Her large eyes were like a dirty pond, all the sediment settling at the bottom. But while what lay on top looked safe, it was impossible to know what lurked beneath.
“So you’ll help me if I help you? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yes.” Her filed teeth turned what she might have meant as a smile into something far more sinister.
“I don’t need your help.”
“I big help. You little help.” She again pressed her neck to the side, expecting him to release her.
Donavon moved around her in a half circle. He shook his head. “No.”
“No … bite,” the girl said.
“You’re not ever getting free from there.”
“You’re not … ever … getting free … from there,” the girl repeated.
Donavon shuddered. The words coming back at him felt like an omen.
Her eyes drilled into him, unblinking.
Ferocious.
Seductive.
“Here,” Donavon said, moving back to the bookcase and grabbing a pale orangey rock. “Play with this.” He tossed it to her and she instantly ducked back beneath the desk’s cubby. It knocked against the desk’s side, landing just outside the girl’s secret lair. She hissed at it venomously. Or she could have been hissing at him.
Donavon raised the book up and staggered to the stairwell. He had to get out of this room. As he limped down the stairs, using the sword as a crutch, he heard the girl’s voice trailing after him.
“Little help … big trouble.”
He was sweating profusely. When he made it to the pantry, he almost collapsed into the shelves of canned goods. Racking sobs broke through him like a wave cresting over rocks, then dashing to pieces.
“I can’t do this. I can’t do this!”
Donavon swept the sword across a shelf, knocking bottles and cans to the ground. His breaths came in desperate, shallow gasps.
“Little help? Little help?”
The native’s voice. Was she speaking or did he just hear her in his head?
You’re alone.
The thought was both his and someone else’s.
Everyone else’s.
The world, confirming what he had always known, his greatest fear.
Alone.
Alone!
ALONE!
Verse XIX.
Zachary Morley had expected a little more gratitude. Maybe a little pampering. Definitely more access to some of the heavier drugs in the Facility. But after all he had done for Dugan and his men, in sending Zephyr up to save their sorry asses, he was now being treated like a criminal.
After transferring him to a wheelchair, a task which had ruptured every pain cell in his body, Dugan’s men had brought him up to the upper floors. The subpar opiates in his system were incapable of masking the pain caused by each jolt and jumble along the way.
Only a handful of doctors and scientists had escaped the purported barricade that now cordoned off the rest of his staff, along with Stanton and his goons. Morley still wasn’t sure what he thought of those measure
s, though he was hardly in a position to suggest fallibility. His world had changed overnight; he could no longer be certain who was friend or foe, who was wrong or right. The only thing he did know was that he needed to be on the side that won.
Whichever side that was.
Rather than take Morley to the control room, where they’d actually have an understanding of what was going on outside, Dugan’s men had left him before the twisted rubble of a collapsed wall caused from the earthquake. Hi-tech thermal imaging goggles had been strapped to his face to keep him from going blind. So he stared out at a gray tinged landscape lacking even a single shadow. It was like they had suddenly entered a cartoon world where the laws of science no longer applied.
Morley scratched at the underside of his man boob, sweat and skin peeling away in what felt like dried glue. “I’m really Jonesing here.”
“Come on, just give us your thoughts.”
The short bald stocky one spoke with an authority Morley questioned. Put him in field armor and, with that thick red beard and bald head, he’d look just like a dwarf. Rojo, Dugan’s team called him, painfully illustrating their lack of creativity.
“In my best estimation — and keep in mind, this is under duress and I’m not nearly as coherent as I’d like to be — I’d say what we’re looking at is … pure light.”
“Pure light? What the hell does that even mean?”
Morley looked at the man. “I’ll give you the stupid version. See, no one really knows what light is. It’s a quantum, it’s a wave, it’s a photon or a subatomic particle of an electromagnetic force. It’s massless but, when observing photoelectric cell effects, we find light has momentum where p = mc, m being the virtual mass and c, of course, representing speed, or the speed of light; therefore it does have mass. Now all light is an emission of energy in some form or another, consisting of a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation and all wavelengths have a finite spectral width or minute variances within the optical spectrum. So pure light would require the optical radiation to be perfectly monochromatic, all of one wavelength, hence … no source.”
Rojo stared back at him without expression. “Thanks for the stupid version.”