by Forbes West
Standing around, gazing at the house like a feral animal, he thinks he hears something in the distance. A click, or something metallic dropping onto the roadway.
Alexandros stands still and closes his eyes. There is a flash of green around him and then nothing. Again he tries, and again a flash of green, and then nothing.
Pulling up one sleeve, he displays a metal arm-guard that goes from wrist to halfway up his forearm.
Alexandros inspects the arm-guard, and to his mute horror, sees that the blue stone, shaped like the zodiac symbol of Scorpio, is scratched and broken in two.
Without hesitation, Alexandros runs to the road, his lungs burning, his body aching from the exhausting battle he has already pulled off. The highway itself is flashing, pulsing with yellow neon lights that clearly mark out every X.
After a few moments, Alexandros sees that there is a simple vehicle speeding down the lone black highway marked by the yellow Xs, its lights on. It is a Karmann Ghia—a yellow, slightly rusted compact car coming at full throttle; a machine used by its driver in a current fit of abject terror after seeing the burning of her family’s home.
He takes out his pistol and runs into the middle of the road, holding up one hand. The car does not slide to a nervous, screeching stop but rather charges forward, fully enveloping Alexandros in its headlights.
“Stop! Stop!”
He fires three shots into it as the car comes towards him; one shot punching into its front bumper, the other passing through the windshield, and another into the left side of its young driver, a woman by the name of Saki Tetsuhara.
The car slows to a stop in the middle of the road. Alexandros charges towards it. He sees Saki clutching her side. Her face is a horrible mask of pain and fear. “What the fu-”
After a brief moment of eye contact, Alexandros grabs the door handle. If he had been listening, he might have heard Saki say “Please”, whilst looking at him through her brown, watery eyes.
“Get over! Get out of the f-” he yanks the door open and pushes Saki violently into the passenger seat, sitting down in a small pool of her lifeblood. She screams for help as Alexandros jams one sneaker-covered foot onto the gas. He turns the car around in a wide U-turn, driving over the shoulder and back in the same direction that Saki just came from. He switches the headlights off.
Out of the darkness comes a tall, beautiful woman who seems to slither forth from the night, her immaculate figure dressed in a dusty black coat. She watches as the Karmann Ghia flies by, easily seen in the light of the seven moons shining overhead and the flames erupting from the ranch house. The woman closes her eyes. The Ghia crunches to a stop, throwing Alexandros forward and cracking his nose against the steering wheel with a short, sharp snap. Saki is knocked briefly unconscious as her head slams against the windshield, cracking it.
The tall woman walks casually over to the stopped Ghia, her features faintly illuminated. Alexandros sees her through the rolled down driver’s side window and his eyes become wide with fear.
In under a moment, Alexandros and the driver’s side door are yanked from the car in a screech of metal and screams, and flown nearly thirty feet before being deposited back onto the shoulder of the road. The neon yellow Xs stop flashing.
Alexandros, his left arm broken and a few ribs cracked, straightens up and in terror shoots at the woman whose face is stretched and contorted in a hideous death mask grin.
Saki regains consciousness and stumbles away from the vehicle after opening the door that is now slippery with her own blood. She begins a pitiful pattern of falling and getting up again as she moves down the road.
The beautiful woman picks Alexandros up by his neck. He shoots her twice before noticing there is no effect. The beautiful woman, in a clear voice with a hint of metallic buzz under her words, speaks as he gives up struggling. “Quite a bad mistake you’ve made here. Why couldn’t you wait?” She loosens her grip on Alexandros’s neck.
Alexandros drops to the ground, his pupils dilating, becoming as wide and as black as the night sky. His voice takes a drugged, lethargic tone. He sits up on his knees. “I don’t know where he is...”
The beautiful woman squeezes his neck again and then lets go.
Alexandros speaks after a moment, struggling for breath. “I don’t know... Please, the Ephors or someone else will be here shortly. We need to go...”
The beautiful woman studies him for a moment. She puts out one hand, now a deep blood-red. She lifts his limp form, then sets him ablaze and tosses him forward. As Alexandros falls back to the dirt one last time, burning alive in that horrible fire, he shoots once more into the air, his gun making an audible clicking sound as he runs out of rounds.
He dies in agony, flailing around on the cold dirt as a literal human torch while the beautiful woman stands by and watches, her face blank.
Saki does not die right away. She struggles to move forward on the ground, crawling, and then collapsing finally. She tastes her own blood in her mouth as she weakly cries for help. She clutches her side, feeling herself go numb. A blank, stupid terror rips her rational mind, turning it to unresponsive threads. She recognizes the feeling of coming oblivion and of a fright so ugly. Saki feels her life leaving her.
When her head hits the dirt, she hears the single bell that tolls for all God’s creatures and becomes conscious of an uncompromising darkness surrounding her. Saki feels reality rip away. As she dies on the side of the road, she thinks only, this shouldn’t have happened, this shouldn’t have happened... A thousand tarot cards emblazoned with the Devil on his throne holding a torch downwards, his goat head crowned by a pentagram, fly past her in a whirlwind, reviving her. She manages to grab one that’s stopped on her body, seeing its awful design up close. THE DEVIL, M AND P, it reads.
As she is in the dark, alone, and in another place far from herself, Saki thinks she hears the other woman say, “And over the world, nor stop, nor stay, the winds of the Storm King go out on their way...”
* * *
You awaken in an unfamiliar spot, with an IV in your arm and your chest feeling as if it is stuffed with cotton and glass. You think about your dream as the seven moons send light through your hospital window. Was that a dream, or was it somehow real? When you try to finger the IV, your hand only moves a few inches before it stops abruptly. How did you get handcuffed to your bed? You cry a little, frightened and alone, as the realization comes to you that Rachael Zur, the woman in the dusty black coat, as pale and as dead as corpse—your sister was the woman in the dusty black coat. You pray that night, crossing yourself and begging Christ that the dream was not true. You think of how you met your sister in that cave a lifetime ago but always thought the incident was a lie your mind made up, a fragment of a dark imagination like Slinks’s unexplained appearance and disappearance. You don’t dare dwell on the meaning of that little period of time when you wandered back from the coast, as it would hint that perhaps you are not healthy and not whole and that your mind is a broken instrument that can no longer be relied on. You forgave yourself for your downfall and you moved on to forget about the cave. You pray that the dream is not real.
Chapter Sixteen:
Last Night at Mission Friendship
The next time you wake up, Dr. Cartwright is standing over you. He takes out a flashlight and checks your pupils.
“How do you feel?” His face is kind and reserved. He wears a white doctor’s jacket with his ID sticking out.
You respond with a cough. “Where am I?”
“Back inside the Mission.”
The Ni-Perchta lieutenant from the security forces is standing to the side, watching you closely. You’re wearing a medical gown. An IV pumps something into your arm. “Shit,” you whisper.
“You seem to have had a reaction to certain, ah, medication you’ve been using.” Cartwright indicates the nervous, blue-uniformed Ni-Perchta. “The Lieutenant here found you. You collapsed outside the inn.”
The lieutenant comes over and unl
ocks your handcuffs. “You were angry,” he says.
“Was I poisoned?”
“By yourself,” Dr. Cartwright says coldly. “Drug tests came up positive on many different, uh, matters. We’ll discuss further in forty-eight hours.”
How you got into the lobby remains a mystery to you. You remember the dream, of course, that strange dream of your sister, the man on fire, Dr. Cartwright...
“You were near death. Actually, past that. You had a heart attack,” Dr. Cartwright says, looking over at a calendar that shows a picture of Solomon’s Bay lit up at night and of Solomon House University’s main building floating in the air.
Seventeen days are crossed out. The calendar shows the month of February, 2013.
“What day is it?” Your stomach feels tight and cramped; a drowsy feeling fills up your head at the same time.
“February Seventeenth. You’ve been out for two weeks. We thought about giving you a med-evac back to Solomon’s Bay, but that was overruled by the new Bureau agent,” Cartwright says, with a bit of disgust.
“Who? What happened to Alexandros?” you ask.
“Oh, Jake? Transferred to Mission Passages in the North. There’s been a problem there. They burned half of the Mission down. Some of the security forces rioted. I guess things are getting worse near the remote tablelands and Bear Center. We have a new agent—a Mr. James Farson.”
“Farson?” you ask.
Cartwright nods. “Apparently a cousin or something to a certain Guy Farson.”
You nod, seeing Dr. Cartwright closely as if for the first time. There’s a look of hesitation in his face. He pats your arm.
“Get some rest. ”
You nod, trying to get comfortable with the hard, sterile pillow of the hospital bed. At night you wake up again, the seven moons once more streaming through the windows of the clinic. You breathe deeply, awakening from dreams that boil in the back of your brain. You think of the cave and Slinks and of what may have happened to Saki.
There’s a shadow in the corner of the room; it’s man-shaped. You can barely make out who it is until it’s nearly on top of you.
Saki whispers something into your ear. “My family is dead, Sarah.” She looks around the room to see if anyone is coming. Her eyes are wild, red, and crazy.
You prop yourself up on your elbows.
“I think Mathias has people inside the Network. Jake Alexandros was with them, then was killed in front of me by someone I don’t know. But these masked people took the body away...” Saki says, whispering further. “They killed my family, Sarah,” she repeats. “They were after one of the ranch hands. Uh, a Billy Knochen. I managed to bring our ranch hand back to life. A man named Jeremy. He told me.”
“God,” you say. You get out of bed and look in a white cabinet next to it. A Network flight suit and your underwear are in it, and your sneakers are on the floor.
Saki shakes terribly. “I’m leaving. But Mathias has agents inside the Network.” She sits down in a plastic chair next to your bed. She holds up a tarot card in the moonlight as proof.
“These were all over the road.”
You look over the tarot card, sickened by touching it. You hold Saki tightly and kiss her on the cheek.
“Please, where is Guy? Where are they?” Saki asks.
“Did a woman save you, Saki?” you ask quietly, petting the back of her hair, comforting her.
Saki looks at you curiously, pushing you away. “Yes, yes, a woman did. She was traveling up the yellow X road. Saved me from Alexandros but I think she...”
You zip up your flight suit. “I know.”
Saki gets out of her chair quickly and pulls out what had been Alexandros’s gun. “How do you know?” She sticks the gun in your ribs and pulls back the hammer. “How do you know?”
You stare right at her. “I just do. I’ve been here in a coma, Saki, please.” Her eyes flicker to the calendar and the chart. “Please let me explain...”
She lowers the gun and sits back down, gun still pointed at you.
A burst of submachine gun fire blasts through the clinic. The Ni-Perchta lieutenant blows Saki away, shooting her several times in the chest and once in the head. She lies there bleeding on the floor; the gun she had in her hand drops.
“Oh no!” you scream. “Oh no, oh no!”
One of the other Ni-Perchta security forces, this one in traditional armor, drags you away from the scene as another one takes out an ori-baton and tries to heal Saki. It seems to be working a little. Her eyes flash white, the green flecks go into her body, and her wounds are healed. But it doesn’t take. The lieutenant, young and scared, speaks up in broken English. “It do that. It do that if she been healed early in the past. If in the past, it does not heal right. It does not heal right.”
They try over and over, and Saki’s eyes start to flutter but never fully open. The Ni-Perchta lieutenant listens to her chest. “I think…” He stops. “Her heart is beating slightly.” You thank God for that.
* * *
Twenty minutes later and down the hall, you wait for James Farson, the new agent from the Bureau of Off-World Affairs to arrive. When he does, he sits with you in his office, as Saki’s blood still dries on your shirt.
Farson, who looks sort of like Guy but unlike Guy speaks with a Jersey accent, takes out a cigarette and lights it. “I need to take your statement on what happened in there.”
You sit there silent, licking your lips. “She was upset. She wanted to show me the gun but your security forces…
“They see a woman pointing a gun and they shoot. I’d say that was an appropriate response. I’m sorry to hear that she’s comatose. Did she mention anything else about the attack on her family’s farm?” he asks. “We’ll send out a patrol. All stations have to report in once every two weeks.”
“So, Jake, he was transferred?” You nervously tap a series of patterns on your knee with your left hand.
James raises an eyebrow. “The whole Oberon is going through a period of transition. So they’re moving people around like chess pieces. The Ni-Perchta are rioting in the north. The Witch-Lord just sits on his hands. Look, I’m not a newspaper. Read up on it, and read between the lines of what’s reported. And so I guess Jake is transferred. Central Services in Solomon’s transmits the orders. I don’t ask the details behind said orders.”
You nod.
“The doctor tells me you had high levels of Adderall and cannabis in your system. Adderall you do not have a prescription for, and cannabis, well...You’re banned from the Mission grounds. You no longer work for the Network, and you’re banned from any future employment with the Network. You step back on Mission grounds, you’ll do three years in a Witch-Lord dungeon.”
You call him something that starts with a c and ends with sucker.
“Keep it up, Miss, and I’ll ban all the residents here from the Benbow. I might still do that when the new Mission Manager gets here.”
“Who’s left to ban? Half the Mission’s departed,” you state. “We’ll be lucky to make it until the summer solstice. Mathias and Petty and God knows who else are gonna get us all killed.”
James ignores you and signals for the trigger happy lieutenant to come over and escort you out. You stare at him for a long time. “Winkie bastard...”
* * *
The radio is on in the background as Guy sips a whiskey and listens to your story about Saki, his eyes red and watery. The fireplace roars and a regular storm is picking up somewhere out in the Breaks. The wind batters the windows every once in a while. Your suitcases are strewn around the bar because of James Farson’s permanent eviction order.
Guy is very upset about Saki’s condition; so is Treena. Guy seems like he is going to cry. “Poor Saki’s family. Poor Saki,” he says with genuine sadness. He then repeats that same phrase with genuine anger. “Oh, God.”
“They didn’t trace the Adderall you jacked to me, did they?” Treena asks. “You shouldn’t be doing it to begin with. It’s a vital too
l for concentration, and I should have never lent you any or looked the other way on your addiction and theft. I felt bad for you and I should have said something. It’s not some, some toy for clubbing and staying up listening to badly-produced techno.”
Guy nods and then sighs. “My uncle is such a dick. I can’t believe he’s out here. Rule-crazy dick. One time when I was fourteen he saw me drinking a beer with my friend Steve and told my dad. What a faggot. I’m sorry, we are related but it’s not a, uh, friendly relationship.” Guy rubs your arm.
You shrug and speak with an almost dead monotone “They’ve got armed guards outside the Benbow now with strict orders not to, you know...” You take a sip of beer and put it down, pushing it aside. You work up the courage to say, “Guys—can we talk outside?”
The wind is really picking up and you hear the first splattering of rain against the Benbow windows.
Guy rolls his eyes, sniffling. “Oh yeah, sure. Let’s go out in a freakin’ thunderstorm. Can’t this wait, girl?”
“No. I want to discuss things about the S.B. Crue. To get it flying again so we can take it to Quadling,” you insist. Treena gets the hint and tugs on Guy’s shirt. The three of you walk outside, and you lead them out as far from the Benbow as you can, like you are walking to where the S.B. Crue awaits.
Lightning plays out in the fields around you, and drops of rain blast through every once in a while.
“Saki told me that Dr. Cartwright, Dee, the old Mission Manager, and Botha work for Mathias and Petty. So did Jake.”
Guy strains to hear what you are saying, so you have to repeat yourself. Treena grabs both of your arms and leads you to the S.B. Crue. You all crawl on-board, under the tarp that's been placed over the ship.
As the rain pitter-patters all over the tarp, you tell the others what she said.
“It’s all true.” You make yourself believe it as you tell a heavily modified version of your story to Guy and Treena. You know she was helped by a woman, your sister; you know that she said Jake was there, and that she had Jake’s gun. The dream was too real and the evidence is there. It frightens you deeply.