by Dima Zales
I have no conventional weapons, but a thrifty magician can always improvise. Maybe I can use the lock picks that constitute the stud in my tongue to stab him in the eye? Or create a card waterfall from the deck in my pocket as a distraction?
Settling on a more mundane option, I frantically slip off my right stiletto and jump to my feet, channeling Buffy by holding it in front of me like a stake.
I’m face to face with the guy now, and the most horrific odor assaults my nose. It smells as though I plunged head first into roadkill. The fumes are so nauseating I almost pass out.
Instead of fainting, I swing my makeshift stake at his face, aiming for his eye.
I’ve only stabbed playing cards before, and I’ve never done it with one high heel on. As a result, my weapon lands way off the mark—in the middle of the man’s chest.
To my utter shock, the heel penetrates a couple of inches into him, as though there’s a hole there already. His clothing is intact, yet I hear a rip of some kind.
Could there have been stitches in his chest? He does look sick enough to be post-heart surgery, though he’s way too spry.
Ignoring the shoe protruding from his chest, the man wraps his foul-smelling hands around my neck and starts to squeeze.
My hands fly up to claw at his strangling fingers, but he’s bizarrely strong, and I can’t inflict much damage with my short nails. So I knee him in the groin, using all my strength. Pain shoots through my knee, but I take solace in knowing no man could withstand such an attack.
I’m wrong.
The fingers around my neck don’t loosen, and through my blurring vision, I see his glassy eyes staring at me without blinking.
I claw at his face next, but with a similar lack of success. My lungs are now screaming for air, and though I’ve practiced holding my breath in order to one day perform a Houdini-like underwater escape, panic overwhelms me.
My body thrashes mindlessly, and my head feels like it’s about to explode through my ears as the world grows more distant.
With the last remnants of consciousness, I realize that this is it.
Blackness overwhelms me, and I die.
Chapter Four
I gasp, and as air fills my non-exploded lungs, I realize I’ve just had a nightmare.
And what a weird nightmare it was. My heart is still thrashing in my chest as though the strangling fingers are squeezing the life out of me.
This sucks. There’s no way I’ll be able to go back to sleep with this much adrenaline coursing through my system.
What time is it? Do I have to get up for work?
Wait a minute. Am I actually in my bedroom? Now that I’m calmer, I can feel bright light pummeling my eyelids, and I always close the extra heavy curtains at night.
Distant voices speaking nonsense are also inconsistent with the bedroom theory, as is my half-sitting position.
I open my lids by a micron, but it’s enough to show me that I’m still in the TV studio.
Crap.
Did I just black out in front of all these people?
The concerned faces around me support that hypothesis.
As I sit up straighter, memories slowly trickle in.
I was having some sort of an episode and collapsed onto the couch. After I passed out, I had a weird dream—the most vivid dream of my life.
A dream about dying.
I blink my heavily mascaraed eyes in an effort to reorient myself.
The commercial music is playing somewhere, so I couldn’t have been out of commission for long.
As I scan the crowd, a strong sense of déjà vu hits me.
The sickly guy from my dream leaps onto his feet.
His skin is a purple shade of gray, his eyes are blank, and his cheap-looking blazer and over-starched shirt look like they’re being worn for the first time. Just like in my dream, the way he moves is highly erratic.
Also like in my dream, the audience’s attention swings to the strange man.
“Stop him!” Darian screams again, and the nearest man in black starts the sprint that didn’t reach me in time.
Every detail of what’s happening is so familiar to me that I begin to doubt my sanity. Could I be dreaming now?
That would imply that the first dream was a dream inside a dream, like in the movie Inception.
The studio audience all react with the same horror as the gray-skinned guy once again jumps onto the shoulders of the audience members in the second row.
Dream or delusion, I’m not waiting for him to choke me. I take off my heels, but this time, with the intention of fleeing.
“Sir.” Kacie’s voice is just as panicked as I recall. “You can’t be up here!”
As the guy’s rheumy eyes glance at Kacie, I jump to my feet and dash toward the corridor that led onto the stage. The floor is icy under my bare feet, but I scarcely register the discomfort, my body firmly back in fight-or-flight land.
The door I came through is closed.
I grab the handle, rattling it frantically as an abominable smell reaches my nostrils. It’s the roadkill stench from my dream, and I gag, barely stopping myself from projectile vomiting at the door.
The handle doesn’t budge.
The door must be locked.
I spin around.
My attacker is already reaching for my throat—and I know how that will end. Operating on pure instinct, I slam my back against the door and slide down, making my neck harder to reach.
His hands meet with a loud smack where he missed his target.
I take advantage of his momentary distraction by punching him in the groin, which is currently at my eye level. My fist connects with spongy flesh, but just like in my dream, the guy doesn’t react to what should be a debilitating hit for any man.
Instead, he takes a lumbering step back and bends over me, hands still reaching for my neck.
I’m about to lunge in desperation at the small gap between his legs when I see another pair of legs behind my attacker.
My run wasn’t a waste of effort.
It gave the black-clad security guard time to catch up with us.
Pulse hammering, I watch as pale, neatly manicured fingers grasp my attacker’s shoulder.
The gray-skinned man’s bending action stops, his shoulder compressing as though the fingers of the security guard are a hydraulic press.
What happens next makes me question the reality of this moment. Maintaining his graceful grip on the gray-skinned man’s shoulder, the guard grabs the man’s arm with his free hand and rips it out of its socket with a ghastly tearing crunch.
The stench of rotting flesh intensifies, but all I can think is that there’s not enough blood.
Not much blood at all, really.
If this is a dream, I blame Ariel. She’s a huge fan of fighting games, and this is eerily reminiscent of how she ended my character in Mortal Kombat last week—minus the fountains of blood in the game.
Adding to my sense of unreality, the gray-skinned man reacts to the loss of his arm with the same aplomb as to my groin assault. Staying on his feet, he tries to reach me with his remaining arm.
The black-clad guard uses the arm he’s holding to club his opponent on the head. There’s a sickening crack of bones breaking, though I’m not sure if it’s the skull or the arm.
I clap my hand over my mouth. I’m not particularly squeamish, but this is beyond what I can stomach.
My attacker staggers, but incredibly, he remains on his feet, glassy eyes as blank as always.
Another black-suited guard leaps into the fray, grasping the wounded man by his still-intact shoulder on one side and by the gory remnants of the detached arm on the other. Then, grunting from the strain, he rips my attacker in half.
Literally.
My stomach heaves, and I bite the fleshy part of my palm to hold back a scream.
This is even more impossible than ripping out the arm. If this were the classic “cutting a lady in half” stage illusion, I could think of a number
of ways it could be done. But to do it for real, the force required would be staggering.
This must be a nightmare.
But why am I not waking up?
The guard throws the two halves of the old man on the ground, and the nightmare continues as the half with the head keeps twitching, eyes blinking as though alive.
“End it,” the other guard hisses at his partner, and I watch in dazed disbelief as the first guard stomps on my attacker’s skull, crushing it like an egg.
He keeps stomping on parts of the corpse until the twitching stops.
Numbly, I stare at the brains splattered on the floor like a grisly modern art painting.
It takes a moment to remember where I am, and when I look back at the crowd, they’re scattering like quail.
All the exit doors must be locked, however, because I see people struggling with them to no avail.
Kacie is hiding under her desk, and Darian is approaching us, his face livid with anger.
“Do the Mexican earthquake coverage now,” he says into a walkie talkie. “We have a small malfunction here at the studio.”
A small malfunction?
I suppress a maniacal giggle.
“What about the lady magician?” the woman on the other end of the walkie talkie asks, her voice slightly staticky. “She wasn’t done.”
“Have Juan say that Sasha tried to warn the Mexican authorities about the earthquake—that should tie the segments together. Then say the politicians she warned were skeptical of an American psychic, and then proceed to the earthquake coverage,” Darian says and clicks off the device.
I’m too stunned to be annoyed at him for making me out to be a psychic.
Crinkling his nose at the ripped-up body on the floor, he says, “Gaius, what the hell? I was hoping for more subtlety.”
The guy who did the halving—Gaius—shrugs. “You wanted the girl alive, and she is,” he says, the cadence of his speech oddly hypnotic.
I finally recover my voice. “What’s happening? Who was he? How did you rip him apart like that?”
Darian pays me no mind. “Wipe everyone,” he says to Gaius and my other rescuer, and then he repeats the instruction into his earpiece. “They’re to remember that Sasha was amazing, and that she had to run to another big performance,” he adds as pale security guards start grabbing people in the audience and forcing them into what looks like staring contests.
“And her?” Gaius points at me.
“She’s a Cognizant, though not under the Mandate,” Darian says as though I’m not there. “Even your illustrious leader wouldn’t be able to fully glamour her. Or would he?”
“If it’s time for inappropriate questions, shouldn’t you have foreseen all this?” Gaius’s hypnotic voice drips with honey-laced malice. “And how are you planning to stop the Council from killing her for this?”
Darian’s eyes narrow. “Just do your best with her.”
“That I will,” Gaius says with the same arrogant confidence that the traders at my day job possess.
He kneels so that his eyes are parallel to mine.
I try to scramble back, but with the closed door behind me, there’s nowhere to go.
Gaius takes off his sunglasses.
He has the kind of pretty face that some women swoon over, but I’m not a fan. His eyes are the color of arctic sky. Then they start to change. The pitch-black pupil turns reflective silver and begins to expand, first covering the iris, then the white of the sclera.
My breath evens out. The mirrored orbs that are Gaius’s eyes each reflect a distorted image of me, my face translucently pale and my pupils the size of dimes.
A drunken serenity steals over me. Analytically, I know it’s something to do with his gaze, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t close my eyes or look away.
My consciousness sinks into a dark, underground place. The closest I’ve ever come to feeling this way was when I was drunk on a dozen shots of tequila.
Through the haze, I register only slices of events.
The guards, if that’s what they are, finish their odd stare-down of every person in the crowd. Gaius picks me up like a feather, and a blink later, I’m half-lying in a limo that’s zooming down West Side Highway.
Just as my mind begins to clear, Gaius peers into my eyes again, and the haze envelops me once more.
When I next come to my senses, I’m inside my building’s elevator, propped up by a body so hard it might as well be made of marble.
“Almost home,” says the familiar hypnotic voice as the mirrored eyes stare into mine. “You’re amazingly resilient to glamour. I’m truly impressed.”
I must black out again, because in the next instance, I’m standing by my apartment door with a strong arm holding me upright. Gaius’s pale finger is on the doorbell, and I’m too out of my mind to chastise him for waking up my roommates when I have the key to the place.
The door opens, revealing Ariel in her silk nightgown.
The arm around me tenses, and I can’t blame Gaius for his reaction. Even when she’s wearing hospital scrubs—clothes designed to make nurses look less sexy—Ariel looks like a supermodel, and in this skintight nightgown, men would gobble fish oil with a spoon for her attention.
When I look at beautiful people, I often philosophically ponder what it is about a person’s face and body that makes it so appealing. Is it symmetry and proportions? If so, Ariel’s is among the most symmetric faces I’ve ever seen, and her body’s 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio is pure mathematical perfection. On top of it, her skin is melted-candy smooth, even now, when she’s not wearing any makeup. And, whereas more traditionally pretty faces have infant-like, small facial features, Ariel’s Greek nose and jaw are strong, yet both are sublime on her face, giving her a touch of the exotic.
Her dark brown eyes stare at me with worry, then focus on my chaperone with undisguised hostility.
“What’s going on? What are you doing with her?” Ariel’s voice is melodious even when angry.
“Sasha isn’t feeling well.” Lowering his shades a couple of inches, Gaius scans Ariel up and down, his gaze lingering on her ballerina-long neck instead of her breasts. “I’d like to put her to bed. Why don’t you invite me in?”
“Hell no. I’ve got it from here, thanks.” Reaching for me, she loops a toned arm around my back.
“Suit yourself,” Gaius says and steps back, letting Ariel support me fully.
She’s about to drag me into the apartment when he says, “Just one other thing.” Reaching out, he winds a hair from my head around his finger, and before Ariel or I can protest, he yanks it out.
I flinch but feel nothing—I must be too flabbergasted to feel such minor pain.
Pocketing the hair, he says, “She isn’t likely to remember any of this in the morning, so you might not want to cause her unnecessary grief by reminding her.”
Instead of answering, Ariel pulls me into the apartment and slams the door shut, almost hitting the pale man in the face.
“What happened?” she asks, turning me to face her. Her eyes hone in on my neck as though looking for a hickey. “Did he—”
I sway on my feet. “I just need to sleep so I can wake up.”
“Good idea,” Ariel says, and though we’re nearly the same size, she picks me up like a bridegroom and carries me to my bedroom without a hint of effort.
Anyone watching this would be amazed, but I’m used to this sort of thing with Ariel. She likes to call herself “Army Strong,” and I sometimes half-jokingly wonder if the Army gave her special drugs to turn her into a super soldier.
“Do you need help with your clothes?” she asks once she lays me on the bed.
Unable to think of a good reply to such a difficult conundrum, I blink at her and plummet into sleep as soon as my head touches the bliss of my memory foam pillow.
Chapter Five
I’m disembodied. This reminds me of playing a virtual reality game, one where I look down and, instead of my breasts, see a fu
turistic gun, or whatever else the game designers decided. In this case, I see a wall with a large clock above rows upon rows of gray metal squares. It’s a sight CSI shows regularly feature—the inside of a morgue.
Unlike the disembodiment of VR, though, I can smell my surroundings, though I wish I couldn’t. The chlorine and faint perfume scents aren’t masking the stench of death, and the worst part is that I recognize the putrid fumes from somewhere.
According to the digital clock on the wall, it’s 5:29 a.m. on Monday morning. Does this mean I have to get up for work soon? And if so, wouldn’t I need to locate my body first?
A woman enters the room. She has a heart-shaped face, and the outline of her lips mirrors it, though her mouth reminds me more of a spade (as in, playing cards)—in part thanks to the blackness of the lipstick. Her eyes and hair are also black, with metallic undertones in the fluorescent lights. With her black skirt and white lacy top, her outfit is more fitting for a cocktail party than the morgue, but her earlobes are adorned with dangling earrings that end in little skulls.
Reaching into her tiny black purse, she takes out a smartphone and begins to look around.
I guess she doesn’t find whatever she’s looking for, because she grunts disapprovingly and reaches for the nearest metal square, pulling it out with a screech.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a dead body inside.
It’s a man in his forties. His gray skin hue looks oddly familiar and has something to do with the smell. I can’t recall what, though. My memory must not work as well without my physical brain.
The woman studies the corpse intently. Walking up to his head, she opens his mouth and puts her phone there, as if that were a perfectly reasonable perch for it.
The phone doesn’t stay put in the corpse’s mouth, and the woman’s lips purse in obvious annoyance.
With an angry motion, she reaches into her purse again and takes out a knife. It’s butterfly style, where the blade sits between two handles.
With a whoosh, she stylishly opens the knife with a well-rehearsed flourish that the performer in me can appreciate.