The Wake Up (The Seers Book 1)

by Angela Panayotopulos

  He’d spotted his uncle. He aimed his gun.

  Elias stopped in his tracks. His head turned as if he’d just seen Greg but he did not look surprised. His eyes never left his nephew’s face. The hilt of the knife bit into Lexi’s palm and her fingers trembled with the force of clutching at Yang’s nape, fearing that releasing the wolf would trigger a shot if Greg was only kidding now. Then she wondered, stupidly, if a thrown knife or a snarling wolf would get to Greg faster. She was the furthest away of them all.

  Nothing, a little voice screamed inside her. Nothing will get to him faster.

  She looked back up again, seeking answers. Sure enough, the reflections in the ceiling mirrors betrayed the surreal standstill below. Reality unfolded within that other dimension. Her cousin had sprouted a tail.

  That wasn’t the strangest thing. Lexi had seen tails before, and some were darker and longer than Greg’s spearheaded one. The horror was how this tail moved, growing and shrinking before Lexi’s eyes. It flitted like a snake’s tongue in and out of Greg’s body, a man torn by indecision. Lexi froze, unwilling even to blink, realizing—as had the others—that it would take just one misstep to push this person to the point of no return.

  She bit her lip and tasted blood.

  Then one of the guys—Farhad probably—said something and pointed at one of the other guys, and they all laughed. Hollow, desperate, brave laughter. Perhaps the eyes behind the sunglasses blinked. The tail froze. Little by little, it slithered back into Greg’s body. His curvy ram’s horns—swollen with anger—seemed to shrink back against his hair. Greg swerved the gun and shot at a glass bowl.

  The gun clicked, unloaded.

  Lexi slumped against Yang, weak with relief. Her cousin laughed it off as if he’d only been teasing them the whole time, but his laughter sounded no more real than theirs. Elias and Marc continued inspecting the furnace as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. Jerry complemented Greg’s new tattoo, a black serpent that coiled around his right arm with the head at his wrist and the tail curling around his elbow. Adam turned his head and glanced at Yang; he met Lexi’s eyes and barely shook his head. Lexi’s knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the softly growling wolf.

  It took a few more minutes for Greg to get bored. He slung the firearm into the jeep and ducked into the driver’s seat. The vehicle screeched away. A pair of black tire-tracks scorched the asphalt in its wake, as if the ground had sprouted its own set of horns.

  Lexi tilted her head back and studied herself. Her reflection gazed back from the ceiling, a girl with soot-black hair and earth-brown eyes, her lips stretched thin like a bloody line in her ghost-white face. Feathered wings were folded tightly against her back. Two dark horns, born of fear and hatred for her cousin, slender and curved like a young kudu gazelle’s, protruded from her skull.

  Her reflection smiled back grimly. Well hello, it seemed to say. It’s been a while.

  5 / Roadkill

  “I’m working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing.”

  –E. B. White

  Her father drove the pick-up home that evening, with Lexi riding shotgun; he’d carpooled with Jerry that morning since he’d been expecting his daughter. Yang curled up in the rear cargo enclosure, nibbling on a coil of rope. Mom had called, anxious for them to arrive before dinner cooled, anxious to see her eldest daughter home from college. They drove under a canopy of gathering clouds, dark and pregnant with water. This was typical for a Virginian summer: days that dawned with scorching blue skies and brewed up afternoon thunderstorms before dissipating into cool, clear nights. Thunder rumbled in the distance, predictable as ever.

  A few blocks before their neighborhood, Elias turned down the volume on the radio. “You’re not to tell them anything,” he said. “I don’t want them getting upset over nothing.”

  “Shouldn’t they know? In case something else happens?”

  “Nothing will happen.”

  Lexi bit back a snort of disbelief. She turned her head away and stared out the window. After a moment of silence, she glanced back at her father.

  “Why does he hate us?”

  “Hate is a strong word. The boy is angry.”

  “That you didn’t hire him because he’s your nephew? You’re not obligated to. You’ve said yourself that a pig’s got nicer manners. He’s the biggest dumbass alive.”

  Elias raised his eyebrows.

  “Sorry, I just meant—”

  He braked the car abruptly, and Lexi yelped and grabbed at the dashboard in front of her. Her father switched gears repeatedly between reverse and drive, and the car jerked back and forth, the tires rolling over something. Yang yipped from the back of the vehicle, scrabbling to regain his balance.

  “Sorry,” Elias said. He shifted the gear again and tapped the gas pedal. “Rattler. They’re poisonous.”

  Lexi’s eyes widened and she stuck her head out the window, staring back. A snake’s carcass sprawled across a third of the road. It was so mangled she couldn’t tell head from tail. Pieces of its shredded skin lifted and drifted in the aftermath of the car’s passing.

  “He’s not just angry that I didn’t hire him,” Elias continued, glancing in the rearview mirror. Lexi eased back into her seat and stared at the road ahead. It was strange witnessing her gentle father disemboweling a creature of God, albeit a snake. “People get angry when they’re scared. People get dangerous when they feel threatened.”

  “He’s evil.”

  Her father glanced over and half-smiled at her obstinate conviction. “He’s human. He’s going through a rough patch right now, and he’ll have his hands full at the courthouse with his parents next week. So I don’t want you upsetting the others. Got it?”

  Lexi gazed out the window. This isn’t a patch. I hope he leaves us alone. I bet he ends up in jail. She nodded anyway.

  They pulled into the driveway, the air infused with the metallic scent of incoming rain. The two-story red brick house reared before them, its dark shingled roof appearing black against the backdrop of thunderous sky. Golden light spilled from the first-floor windows, with shadows of movement behind the lace curtains. Glowing specks pulsed throughout a front yard that was as grassy and green as Eden: fireflies, seeking shelter before the storm.

  Lexi unclasped her seatbelt. She’d heard the rumors of domestic abuse, though the family kept to themselves. She could understand where Greg was coming from, to some extent. Understanding wasn’t the same as justifying. But maybe her father had a point. Perhaps anger was a seasonal thing that dissolved when fears were extinguished. Perhaps a refusal to fan the flames was the best policy.

  But a remedy of killing with kindness? That seemed unrealistic. Especially in a nation now overseen by a bully. President Daimon. Six months after his inauguration, the words still tasted bitter in Lexi’s mouth. She said and thought of them as infrequently as she could.

  The first raindrops lashed against the windshield, sudden and violent, pinging like bullets. Her father yelled at her to hurry inside. Yang deafened her momentarily as he yapped at the lightning. Lexi grabbed her backpack and rushed towards the front door, the wolf at her heels, her dad following with an umbrella.

  For whatever reason, she couldn’t get the image of the dead snake out of her head.

  6 / Pandora’s Son

  “They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her

  not to open it. She opened it. Every evil

  to which human flesh is heir came out of it.

  The last thing to come out of the box

  was hope. it flew away.”

  –Kurt Vonnegut

  In the heart of D.C., near the end of summer school classes, in the middle of a cafeteria set at the heart of a residential building that also housed libraries and classrooms and reception halls, around the rim of a round plastic table, twelve college students took turns passing a pocket mirror as the
y munched on their lunch. Someone handed the young man the mirror. He froze as he studied it. A couple of moments later, he passed it to the young lady sitting to his left, dropping it quickly as her palm extended towards him so she would not see how badly his fingers trembled. She looked away, unsettled by the tattooed serpent head that appeared each time the youth’s wrist peeked out from his shirt sleeve.

  The mirror made its rounds. The students ate their lunches and sipped from their coke cans. The young man sat motionless, his lunch untouched. He crouched down and retrieved something from his backpack without a word. He brandished the gun before anyone realized what he held.

  Then he stood, aimed at the students closest to him, and pulled the trigger.

  The last bites of their peanut butter sandwiches clogged their screams. The sight of other students upturning their chairs and tables in a scramble to escape made the shooter laugh. Strangely, he didn’t feel amused. Becoming famous wasn’t a joke. Yet he felt he had to laugh. He was expected to do so; that’s what other warriors did in films and in the media reports.

  By the time the cafeteria’s occupants unfroze from the shock of the initial gunfire, all of the boys and girls seated at the shooter’s table were dead. A bearded black man with a greasy apron leapt from behind the pizza counter and ran towards the shooter. Instead of shooting at the cafeteria employee, the young man grabbed his backpack and bolted for the door.

  He glanced over his shoulder as he ran through the halls, skirting around other students who lingered at their lockers or who drifted in and out of classrooms. Pandemonium ensued in his wake, with two security officers giving chase, impeded in turn by the startled and screaming students they tried to avoid running into. They repeatedly shouted at the shooter to disarm.

  He ignored them, heading to the building’s largest room.

  It served as the building’s dance hall, with two of its four walls covered completely with mirrors. As luck would have it, there was no dance class in session. A janitor dressed in jeans and a blue smock looked up from where she was cleaning the windows; she took one look at the gunman and ducked behind floor-to-ceiling curtains.

  The young man felt a twinge of relief that she’d hidden before he could aim at her. He paused in the center of the room, panting, gun clutched in one hand, unsure of where to go and why his feet had brought him here. He glanced at the mirrored wall ahead of him, expecting to see the officers burst through the door behind him at any second.

  Instead of confronting himself in the middle of a big empty room, he found himself facing a second gunman—a creature far more malevolent and ugly than he. Uglier, in fact, than the head that had gazed back at him from the pocket mirror. Its face was shadowed by the black ram-like horns curving over a human head, a forked tail whipping at the air behind it, its eyes full of fear and rage and the promise that it would kill him without hesitation.

  If such a being lurked within him, perhaps worse monsters lurked within his peers. He had been sure, back in the cafeteria, that it was a kill-or-be-killed scenario.

  Or perhaps not.

  No one had fought back. His friends had not retaliated and morphed into monsters. They had fallen like flies. Perhaps such evil did not lurk in the others. Perhaps he’d been wrong. The thought came to him suddenly, stopping his heart as if he’d been yanked from the dance hall and flung countries and time-zones away only to crash into arctic waters. It marked the end of something, as revelations often do.

  He was the monster.

  . . .

  “Mr. President, we need more time.”

  “You’ve had enough of it.”

  “The truth, sir, is that we don’t know the truth of what happened during yesterday’s shooting.”

  “Of course we do. We have our version. The survivors tell the tale. Our story becomes history.”

  “With all due respect, we can’t leave these things unexamined.”

  “I could not agree with you more, Director. That is why these things are being and will continue to be extremely and thoroughly examined. Why, otherwise, would I have instigated the Agency and made you its commander? I’ve entrusted you to lead a tiny minority of the world’s greatest experts sworn into secrecy.”

  “So why speak without solid findings? Let us not feed them a theory that’s not yet proven.”

  “Why do you test my patience? Are you unfamiliar with the myth of Pandora’s Box?”

  “You believe that boy is just the beginning?”

  “Beasts must remain tamed lest they revolt and eat you alive. Realizing their greatest desires—self individualism, pure anarchy, political chaos—will unleash their darkest aspects. And it will destroy them. It will destroy us all.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “You will help me craft the story. Tell me the possibilities that your agents have explored.”

  “We considered drugs. Hallucinogens. Yet the majority of the autopsies show no traces of drugs or chemicals. Speculations have shifted in a new direction.”

  “Being?”

  “We are now considering victims as the result of a new-age wave of mindfulness that has opened doors to toxic and delusional self-regard. Some neuroscientists claim that these mindfulness sessions might be encouraging victims to hallucinate in front of mirrors for the sole purpose of self-discovery.”

  “Psychobabble bullshit. But I like the Pandora-like connotations. What else?”

  “One of my agents boasts an extensive chemistry background. He suggests the mirrors themselves may be defective, perhaps created by artisans who are looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. You usually can’t tell in the beginning, he says. Over time, however, the warps begin to appear gradually, sometimes over the span of decades. If these are left unchecked, the mirror gets to the point of becoming like that of a funhouse: what you see isn’t what you get. If this is so, the warps must have been small, in this instance as in most, for no one else in the school to have noticed.”

  “Is there proof in this scientifically?”

  “It is a difficult theory to test, Mr. President. A test could depend as much on the viewer as on the object. It is difficult to bring in a subject for questioning, given that this category of people—if you will—have either committed suicide or are refusing to come forward.”

  “Unsurprising. Thank you, Director, for this 4 a.m. chat. Insomnia’s a bitch.” Daimon laughed then, in a precursor to his own impending joke. His chuckles rumbled, devoid of humor, as if mirth was a kidney stone that had gotten stuck somewhere in the intestinal mess of the phone lines. “Perhaps I had too much to eat at the dinner we hosted for the diplomats last night. It’s hard to digest so many human hearts in one sitting.”

  The Director chuckled obediently with the leader. He bid the President goodnight. He wondered, not for the first time, what the nation had gotten itself into.

  7 / Distortion

  “Mystery [is] a fog of human invention that obscures the truth, and represents it in distortion.”

  –Thomas Paine

  Lexi curled up cross-legged on a humid August afternoon, nestled on the cool leather sofa with a tattered copy of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in her lap, grinning at the fact that her seven-year-old sister clutched a Greek summer school workbook instead. Sophia glanced over, eyes filling with tears at the injustice of it all. She looked ready to rip up her blue Greek grammar textbook and stuff it down the drain of the kitchen sink.

  To distract her sister before the waterworks could begin, Lexi set down her book and reached for the remote, zapping through the TV channels. The button on the remote control jammed and stuck at one channel. The screen flooded with the trumpet symphony that accompanied the beginning of the news. Lexi and Sophia groaned. The adults—their mother making cookies, their father unpacking grocery bags, their grandfather munching his way through a bag of cashews—glanced over from the adjoining kitchen.

  Newscaster Sia Cussak graciously welcomed her viewers. One of the top reporters of primetime TV, she
had a gift for reassuring the world. Strands of highlighted hair, stiff from assaults of hairspray, curled around her face and demanded: Look at me. As she moved, the fabric of her impeccable pant-suit swished and whispered: Everything is fine. The make-up on her face painted a rhetorical question: Would I have time for such preparation if it wasn’t?

  But Sia had this tic...

  It’d been for a project for one of Lexi’s elective classes, Drama 101: Introduction to Theater; the students had to choose national celebrities to study and mirror their facial expressions and mannerisms. Lexi had chosen Sia. She’d gotten more make-up tips from the evening news than from any Cosmopolitan magazine. She’d also cracked the code of the best poker face on national television, simply by watching instead of listening. She’d learned that Sia’s lower left eyelid spasmed—so slightly that you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for it—before a particularly horrific news report.

  Lexi’s mouth dried. Sia was dolled up with a harbinger’s war-paint, the mascara emphasizing her eyelid’s flutter. Tonight she held a monster of a hand.

  “Turn it up,” Elias requested, but Lexi was already pressing the button. Her mother paused the egg-beater. Pappou grabbed his cashews and came to the sofa to sit down next to Sophia.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re all likely familiar by now with the Tuesday of Tragedy that rattled the nation earlier this week,” Sia said. “It will remain a nightmare ingrained in the hearts of dozens of students and their family members who have been affected by the horrific D.C. university shooting when, just past noon, eleven students were gunned down in a cafeteria. In the days following the shooting, experts have investigated the gunman’s intentions.”

  Lexi sat up straight. They’d all heard of the shooting, of course. It was one of the dozens of school shootings occurring every year. She hadn’t heard details and the gunman’s identity had not been revealed. All Lexi knew was he’d been a male student who’d decided to play God. A sick bastard, basically, probably neglected and abused as a child, his heart exploding with the lack of love and remolding that muscle’s shrapnel into bullets.