The Altonevers

by Frederic Merbe

  Losing herself in the past presented to her, she begins gazing to other scenes of her liking. The sun now passing behind a precipitous patch of rainbow resonating atmosphere that's amplifying the colors of her mind, getting lost in the thought of the first time she's rode a bicycle. The clouds start chilling into creeping sheets of ice freezing over the flat water's surface. Coming to look like an ice skating rink lit up by spotlight at night. The crowds of people and her middle school classmates appear, faceless and fading, but for one. The boy she'd shared her first kiss with skating toward her in a navy green jacket, his face fades as he nears. All the students vanish and she sees only the curving lines left by their skates continuing on the ice without them. The navy green jacketed boy returns though a foot taller, his jacket becoming a blue purple and smoking, with Cider’s face, inebriated on his skates though skating smoothly. The two encircle each other laughing then racing each other around the track with her pink plaid scarf flapping in the wind.

  He falls, a lot, mostly to her imagined drunkenness of his, though many she supposes are to make her laugh. To see her smile as he always says. They dance terribly, chopping the ice with the blades of their skates. He tips over trying to pick up his drink and she falls pulling him up, him pulling her to the ice. They lay face up watching stars in the night sky through their rising cold fogged breath. The clouds break apart, and her mind fills with the sight of a bayou city of swamp docks and cobblestone. A Cajun port city crowned by a multitude of spectral figures marching the streets in brass band celebration. Lead by a beautiful ebony voodoo priestess with a crown of bat bones, wickedly smiling wolves teeth between black painted pointy lips, waving a silver scepter to lead the boisterous marching and the blaring band wind instruments rising and bending a carousel top of the atmosphere. Anna trembles to this thought, unsure where it came from, though knows it’s a place she’s pretty sure she'd never been to remember. Uncertain of what to make of its dreary seeming cheer that's unsettling her as harshly as someone suddenly slamming on piano keys.

  clicliclicliclicliclicliclic....

  “Uhh, did see your mind through your own eyes?” he asks.

  “Did that happen to you too?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you see?” she asks.

  “Sex and violence,” he answers proudly.

  “You’re terrible.” she says.

  “Hey, don’t be mad, you were there after all,” he says.

  “Oh shut up!” she says. The two sit shoulder to shoulder as stowaways swaying gently in one of many empty boxcars, of a sunlight stippled string of silver gliding effortlessly through the ether on gilded amber glowing InterAlto rails. With a sudden shift of weight they swoop into a steep sloping incline. Within a second they're hundreds of miles from the sun drenched still water surface, the wheels squeal and splash sparks when sliding ever onward on their eternity intertwining amber rails.

  Clicliclic clicclicclicc clickclickclick clickclickclick clack click clickclick clack click click click...

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the trunk

  BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!...repeats as her heart beats faster, hardly able to breathe in the total darkness and dampness of trapped breath. Laying close to him, and a ham juice sweating fat man in the trunk of the car with burlap bags over half their bodies. BEEP BEEP BEEP...and so on as one of the goons that bound their hands has left the car door open.

  They’d washed up after splashing through a few Altos, to an extravagantly large perpetually self illuminated techno-metropolis. With technologies seamlessly interwoven with physical reality, so immersive they seem to be as seamless as the bioluminescent light this Alto is dressed in. She likes being in an Alto that's futuristic compared to her own standard and this place gives her a feeling that resembles the wonder of watching a magician. Everything is flowing and moving effortlessly without anyone ever touching a thing. The whole society has a sinful attraction to the chirping of gambling chips changing hands. Every structure large and small is constructed after the sense stimulating grandeur of Las Vegas casinos.

  The two were aimless, and getting by honey potting disgusting old men and holding up hookers to set up their pimps, so Anna won't feel used when attracting the ugly old men. Making a lucrative living just to ride stacks of clicking chips and flitter them away, left to the lint in their pockets before each time they sleep. Numbers, blackjack, dice, roulette, any table, anywhere they can carelessly lose their money for a cheap quick thrill. Even at the tracks, which are always brimming with degenerates shouting at deadbeats drinking from the moment they wake. Who waken without purpose but to poach the purses of the winning losers next to them.

  Anna, not usually liking to see animals made to dance by people, is enamored with the sinewy strides of the galloping horses and beating rhythms of their hooves gliding around the track. Having a favorite too, a large black mare with a patch of white between piercing red brown eyes. She was surprised to find they're all entirely synthetic animals, down to the shape of their manes and eyelashes. That they're biochemically conjured creations formed by atomically aligning the raw elements that comprise them into the anatomical recreation of living creatures, without it ever actually being born. To which Anna was open jawed in awe when hearing, and Cider was shocked, slurring and shouting about it as artwork of an animal.

  “I mean it was so subjectively avant garde post modern scum it was laughable, that's why I laughed, like the biochem animator laughed to the bank not believing you believed it was a horse,” he laughed.

  “It looks a lot like a horse to me” she says enjoying an ice cream. Through a stroke of luck his shouts drew the attention of a repugnant mouth breathing sweat oozing fat man looking accustomed to luxury of never wanting for long. The two were both instantly on their game of lightening the heavy man’s heavy pockets. She was revolted by his drool, especially when he gargles his gross snorting breaths, even more so by him trying to purchase her affections, for what would have been a very traumatic experience if she were actually a call girl. She was especially happy they were to hold him up, seeing it as a drop of justice to a vile man otherwise out of its grasp.

  She got into his waiting limousine and he whined and groveled when she drew her gun on his gut. Cider took the wheel, they thought they'd gotten away clean when six headlights they thought were police became clear in the rear view. Speeding to get beside them and waving for them to pull over. Each vehicle filled with black suited goons armed with mini automatic weapons, who surrounded the limousine before yanking all three of them from it, then putting bags over their heads and throwing them into the trunk of another car. Driving for sometime before turning down what Anna and Cider, who had come to an agreement after learning to decipher the muffled mumbles of the other, seemed like a dirt road. A dirt road is usually a bad sign when you're tied up with a sack on your head in the trunk of a car. The car abruptly skids, it's tires digging into the dirt to stop, and for a while at least one door of the car has been left open.

  Beep Beep Beep...the sound seems to make it harder to breathe through the canvas sacks around half their bodies. A large trunk, but the other guy is a large man, and he smells. Spurring Cider to knee and kick him repeatedly until tiring himself out. The trunk door swings open letting a gust of cool air across her back. They’re pulled out and pushed to stumble around like blind mice, then lined up in front of a blood stained cement wall. Cider takes an intentional flop that gives her a giggle, because of his shouting, “Oweee,” well before the thud of him actually hitting the dirt ground. The sacks are pulled from their bodies one by one. The fat man first then Cider, leaving Anna the last to see the group of well dressed monotone goons of Asiatic descent surrounding them. Leering stoically in a way that’s terrifying to her, while Cider seems to be reading them with his eyes, scanning each of their blankly staring face. She's figuring he’s figuring their odds of making it out of this alive.

  “Are they going to kill us?” she whispers.

&nbs
p; “What?” he asks.

  “Do you think they're going to kill us?”

  “What did you say the first time?”

  “Stop it.”

  “If you said stop then why'd you ask?”

  “Stop.”

  “Anna! We don’t have ti-”

  “Sh,” she says angrily.

  “Silence!” One of them shouts harshly through a thick accent of everything sounding like it ends with another vowel. She looks over to the fat man with his eyes closed, shaking in place with wobbling knees. Sweat, is pouring down his face and dampening his fine suit of luxury. It's dark outside, and they’re far from the city of grand streets, bio-luminescent light and glowing casinos. Almost all the goons are wearing sunglasses and speaking a language that to her very much resembles Japanese. It’s nighttime and they're out in the dark of the city limits, where the trees grow and the self illuminating skyscrapers replace the sky in the scene over their headlights and shoulders. Anna’s hummingbird heart is throbbing in fear, with flashes of white pulsing through her eyes, she's hyperventilating the dense smell of wet grass as silently as she can. Her mind is flooding with thoughts of death and the things she hasn’t yet done. Cider reaches out for her hand, and she grips his fingers loosely.

  A man, which they can't see because he’s standing behind a car’s brightly shining headlights, that're blinding them and casting their shadows to the death stained wall. The unseen man is humming a tune with his throat and tongue without moving his lips, sounding like he's gargling through nursery rhymes. A loud huffing noise, proceeds the footsteps in the dirt of a short vicious looking man approaching in a midnight purple suit. He sniffles and lifts a gun to the fat man's face, then holding it between Anna's wide open eyes for a few seconds, and again pressing it to the fat man’s head. With a loud ear chopping pop of red he staples the fat man's round head to the bullet riddled wall. The man with an ambiance dominating presence stares at each of the two with a reptilian expression. Completely devoid of emotion, stroking his gun with white gloved fingers while clicking his jaw and rolling his head around his neck. His neck and left shoulder are painted with a large blotch of scar tissue shades lighter than his toasty tan toned skin. Cider thinks he took a shotgun to the neck, but wondering how he got back to be living, and she stands petrified with balmy hands, feeling the chill in the air around her. The stoically menacing man begins to growl primal noises through his throat, sounding much like the death rattle of a ill spirit possessed alligator. She can hardly hear him over her ears ringing from the gun shot a foot from her head. I’m going to die, she thinks, for what gambling chips, to waste away in the odds of fortune, playing the odds of the house's game.

  “Huh,” Cider says out of nowhere. Looking lost in thought, rubbing his shaven chin, seeming to completely forget his present predicament. She can feel the cold emanating from the stone faced perfectly postured killer with a disheveled Elvis styled hair cut. The air begins warming around the throat gurgling man. He snatches the sunglasses from his face, showing his large white black spotted eyes of a thousand yard unwavering gaze.

  “You,” the man says, like spitting through his teeth, dead locked in focus on her pupils with an intimidating intensity. Her nerves are going berserk under her skin, trembling through to the tips of her fingers. She clenches her jaw to stop from nibbling on her tongue. Feeling the heat of him rise beside her as he stands over her, emanating to the atmosphere the tone of his shifting emotion. She doesn’t move or flinch, petrified in the racing thoughts of instinctual panic.

  “You,” he changes his view to Cider.

  “Yes?” he asks.

  “Why are you here? You don't belong here,” the man says warmly.

  “Us,” he says pointing to her then at himself, “we're just passing through.”

  “Us? you were in the driver’s seat and she was in the back, though you were both armed,” the man speaks in a clinical tone putting a frost in the air around him.

  “Hmm, that's a good point,” Cider answers with a shrug. Anna looks at him and shrugs, not thinking of anything to say but the truth, and nerving up the courage to meet the man’s thousand yard glare.

  “We were gonna rob that fat, gross fat man,” she says.

  “Oh ah…” the man pauses with a stunned look on his face, then bursts into a maniacal cackle. Holding his stomach as forced laughter comes from the crowd behind him. Cider and Anna both uneasily join in, awkwardly forcing themselves to play along. The laughter dims down when this thin man’s does, the others are following everything he does, as though they're tuned to his frequency.

  “That's perfect,” he says.

  “Why's that perfect?” Cider asks.

  “Hello. My name is Yakutom,” Yakutom says extending his hand to shake Ciders. Cider accepts without a second of thought, though finding it hard to read the smiling man’s body language or face.

  “I'm Cider, thank you for not killing us.”

  “I didn't say that,” he says shaking his head. Then laughs, followed by the others like a chorus of crickets in the grass.

  “It was a joke. It’s so rare we get new people around here...and if you do what I ask, it will remain a joke. So let us see if we can be friends. Okay. Call me Yaku,” Yaku says with a giant smile.

  “Sounds good to me,” Cider readily agrees, Anna upset with his carelessness, elbows roughly at his ribs.

  “What?” he yelps, assuming a side blocking boxer's stance.

  “That you still don't listen to the terms of a pact when your existence is pretty much, I don’t know, allowed by one,” she says.

  “That, is a good point, but we don’t have much choice in the matter. Mind if I smoke,” he asks Yaku, though already lighting one.

  “Not at all,” Yaku says lighting one of his own. The light of his lighter showing the savage extent of the horrible scar of his neck.

  “Do you want to die?” Cider asks her.

  “No.”

  “Okay then. anyway what happened there?” he asks Yaku, who stands for a solid minute without saying a word. The air is heating up around him, almost boiling its own moisture outward. He then starts blurting words out fast enough to tie his own tongue, though doesn't.

  “Hara-kiri, for the honor of myself and my family,” he says giddily.

  “You mean…”

  “Yes suicide, but don’t be scared, for now at least,” Yaku says while bowing his head in shame. Not for the act of seppuku, but for the failure that caused its necessity.

  “Hey man,” Cider says looking through his eyes, “Relax about it, me too.”

  “What do you mean?” the warming man asks as Cider rolls up his sleeve to show him his rose colored scars. The two trade laughter and tales of near death, and death. Bonding as brothers of the same trade, a fellow traveler reminiscing reload times and calibers, sex and the thrill of feet to the ground when standing behind a door waiting to go in or out when your soul is on the line. Yaku won’t say whether he's working for Alister or even knows him, if not then some other guy or gal just the same, he supposes.

  “That's all very nice, but I’m afraid I still must say,” Yaku says.

  “What? what is it?” she asks.

  “That because I like you, I will give you this opportunity.”

  “Opportunity,” she asks skeptically.

  “And what is your name? I bet it is beautiful. It must be when a person has the sort of energy around them that you do,” he says sweetly.

  “Anna,” she says.

  ”Anna, sounds delightful,” Yaku says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes okay. An opportunity to do exactly as I say, so that I may not have to shoot you in the face,” he says cheerfully. The two shrug at each other in agreement, understanding their only way out is with this maniac seeming manic at the moment. Anna not entirely used to this type of arrangement, thinks, as long as it’s nothing sadistic she'll be fine.

  “So what's the plan?” he asks, shaking the man’s hand.r />
  “On the way over,” Yaku says ominously, then taking a brown leather satchel from his breast pocket, putting it over his face and huffing deeply, inhaling like a vacuum cleaner. Looking up with a milk mustache of white powder, his eyes wired open with a megalomaniacal gaze. Heating up the ambient air, that starts condensing into tiny niveous clouds encircling him.

  “Yes yessssss, it’s going to work,” Yaku shouts, in either rage or elation.

  “What’s going to work,” she asks suspiciously.

  “Gravestones, waves and waves of gravestones,” he mumbles between breaks of laughter. Inhaling again from his satchel. “I'll explain on the way,” he says suddenly refreshed as though huffing fresh air as his goons herd the two into the open door of a car hovering a few feet from the ground. Yaku’s clicking jaw rolls around his face as he shifts between personalities and the moods of each personality, cycling through at least three a minute. He seems to like whatever that powder is, a lot, and a lot of it, all the while incessantly smoking and drinking with an insatiable hunger for more. He and Cider, with a little help from Anna, empty the limo of its liquor by the time they leave the wilderness and slip back into the bioluminescent city.

  A massive unending metropolis whose scene of self illuminating city surfaces has a way of luring the liveliness of a person to the surface. Accompanied by a warming sensation percolating just under her skin the two at this very moment sit entranced by the glow through the tinted window of the floating luxury limousine. A monolithic metropolis seeming to be created from a single gargantuan piece of polished glass, with each different object, surface and shape having their own individual hues of bioluminescent light. It's immense depths stretch in all directions, giving the impression that the individual is minuscule in contrast to the singular existence of this techno-metropolis. She can't tell if the lights are coloring the glass or the glass is itself is made of colored light. Each skyscraper reaches for miles upward, flooding the atmosphere with air illuminating effulgence . Looking closely, she sees that the glass is everywhere, at second glance that everything is made of it. The facades and floors, the asphalt and even trees leaves and parks grass, are illuminating the air. Every surface is both the color and the light sources of this Alto.