Break the Bastion

by Christopher Rankin

  “Nox,” Strix went on, “we’ve talked to you about spreading your mad ramblings? Haven’t we?”

  Nox suddenly dropped the spray paint can and by the time it hit the ground, he had disappeared around the corner. He was screaming, “Please no! Please don’t go inside my head!”

  After Nox disappeared, Callista took her Strix out of her backpack and sat him down on the pavement. “We need to talk,” she told the owl.

  “Of course,” said Strix. “Speaking to you three is our explicit purpose. What would you like to talk about?”

  “I’d like to know why you scared Nox away,” she said, bending down like a baseball catcher in front of the owl. “I want to know what you’re hiding from us.”

  “We assure you, Callista,” said Strix, “that we have all three of your best interests in mind. We encouraged Nox to leave because he presented a danger.”

  “Why won’t anyone tell us who Belasi LaCrone is?”

  “We’re afraid we’re limited in information,” said Strix.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Callista. “You seem to know everything just when it’s convenient. I want you to tell us exactly what’s going on in this city and what Belasi LaCrone has to do with my dad.”

  “I’m afraid we’re unable to be of service,” said Strix.

  Callista was frustrated and turned away from the owl. She told Morgan and Lucas, “I don’t care if he won’t tell us. We’re going to find out what’s happening in this city.”

  …

  The following afternoon after school, Callista appeared in front of Lucas’s house. Before she had a chance to knock on the door, Lucas’s mom saw her outside and opened the door.

  “What are you selling?” She asked Callista, pointing to the “no solicitors” sign she had tacked up on the door. “We don’t want it, whatever it is.”

  “Is Lucas home?” She asked. “I’m his friend, Callista,” she said, holding out her hand to shake. “Remember we met before.”

  Lucas’s mom just stared at her hand in the air. “He’s upstairs,” she said. “Funny he’s never mentioned you to me. How do you know him? From school?”

  “No. We go to different schools.”

  “Then HOW do you know my son?”

  Lucas heard Callista at the door and came downstairs. “It’s OK, Mom,” he said. “I know Callista from school.”

  She looked at them both, saying, “Your little friend told me you go to different schools. Looks like you’re lying.” His mother looked at him as though she couldn’t have been more disappointed. She told him, “Don’t forget to take your medicine. You may not care about me, but I care about you.” Then she disappeared up the stairs.

  Callista asked him if they could take a walk and talk. When he told her he was going upstairs to fetch Strix, she said, “No. Let’s leave him. I want to talk, just us two.”

  Lucas appeared perhaps an inch taller than she remembered. There was a certain power in the angles of his face that had been covered up by the rashes and chin-handles. His neck no longer hung over like a pious monk. However, the biggest change she saw was in his eyes.

  They had gone from those of a sleepwalker to those of a fighter pilot just before takeoff.

  When they got down the block, Lucas asked her where Morgan was.

  Even though the question was rather plain and innocuous, Callista looked as though it had mortal importance. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought I should talk to you.”

  “Why me?” Lucas asked. “We don’t know each other that well.”

  “I don’t know,” she told him, shaking her head. “I just felt like I needed to.” She added, “I’ve been curious about you.”

  Lucas didn’t know quite how to respond, so he just nodded.

  Callista went on, saying, “You look so different, so much healthier.”

  “It’s Strix,” said Lucas. “He’s been helping me.”

  Her expression took a dark turn. She asked, “Are you sure he’s here to help?”

  Lucas stopped walking and turned to her. “What do you mean?” He asked. “Do you think Dr. Lorrance designed him for something else?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but it seems like something’s wrong. Do you think he’s manipulating us?”

  The question troubled Lucas. After all, Strix had brought him health and growing vitality, saved him from Nox and been his closest friend for months. Still, there was something that bothered him about the whole thing.

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “But for what?”

  “He knows something, something he won’t tell us.”

  They made it a few blocks from Lucas’s house when an alarm siren started to scream in the sky. A splatter of sea water from a wave crashing against the top of the Bastion created a shadow over Lucas’s neighborhood. Something had splashed over the Bastion and whatever it was had only a few seconds before it collided with the Earth.

  Lucas took Callista by the shoulders and pulled her underneath a building’s overhang just as the spray landed in the street. The droplets and spray hit the pavement with a dull smack and hiss. As soon as the siren stopped, Callista and Lucas noticed something stuck in the branch of a tree.

  A large octopus, just about the size of a tomcat, had its arms wrapped awkwardly around an overhead tree branch. The animal didn’t seem to be terribly injured but it was struggling in the tree.

  When Callista asked Lucas what they should do, he was already at the base of the tree and ready to climb. His once corpulent body had become lean, his muscles strong and toned. He pulled himself up with his arms, sliding his legs onto another branch. Pretty soon, he was face to face with the frightened octopus.

  The animal’s tentacles swirled around the branches and its colors changed from dull grey to a flashing bright green. It was clearly disturbed by Lucas’s presence but he got even closer.

  Callista yelled from the base of the tree for him to be careful but Lucas didn’t hear her. His mind had crisp focus on the frightened eyes and slippery tentacles of the octopus. He held out his forearm to the creature, allowing it to wrap its tentacles around. The octopus squeezed and pressurized its suckers on Lucas’s arm.

  With one arm holding the octopus, he lowered himself down from the tree like an arboreal monkey. There was something so graceful about his movements, a near effortless display for such a tall and heavy boy.

  When he was on the ground, he told Callista to follow him to one of the Lorrance hatches in the neighborhood. There, he stuck his arm into the flowing water and the octopus headed back to the ocean.

  “Does it hurt?” Callista asked him, pointing to his irritated and bleeding forearm. The octopus’s tentacles had left his skin chewed up.

  “Yeah, it does,” said Lucas. “Not as much as my lungs when I first started running at night but it hurts.”

  “Morgan said you are crazy about saving the animals that splash over the Bastion. I don’t think he gets it but I do.”

  “I’ve always felt a bond with them, especially the cephalopods,” said Lucas. “When they’re out of the water and lost, they feel the way I do most of the time.”

  The conversation turned to Belasi LaCrone and his lair on top of the Bastion. Callista wanted to pick up Morgan and try to go up that night.

  Lucas told her, “It’s not time yet. The ocean is too violent. We need to wait for a quiet night.”

  While he walked her to the cable car station, she asked him about his father and the night he had died.

  “I wasn’t there when it happened,” he said. “He died at home with my mom. There wasn’t much left of him by then.”

  “No matter how hard I try,” Callista admitted. “I can’t remember anything about the night my mom went off into the storm. Or anything else from the time before that. I don’t know why it’s blacked out for me.”

  “Did she say anything to you before she ran away?”

  Callista remembered something out of nowhere. It was as though the memory had always b
een there but only then removed its camouflage. “She did,” Callista said. “I don’t know why I never remembered until just now when you asked me. It’s strange.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I think the Storm Madness was hitting her hard,” said Callista. “She was paranoid. I remember her leaning over me in bed. She told me I was in danger, terrible danger, she said, and to run away. That was the last I saw of her. I don’t know why that memory only now came back.”

  …

  That evening, while Morgan was cooking a meal of chicken and rice for his brother, his father stepped into the kitchen. For once, the man was in a good mood, high off anxiety pills and just the right complement of gin. He reached into the pan and pulled out a strip of chicken for himself.

  “It’s for Brian,” Morgan told him.

  “The kid barely moves all day,” said his father. “I don’t think he’ll starve to death.”

  Normally Morgan would have said something snarky and aggravate the situation but he had a question on his mind. It was a question that his father was quite suited to answer.

  “Have you ever heard of someone living on top of the Bastion? You’ve been there for years. Has there ever been talk?”

  His father thought about it. “The government is pretty serious about no one going up there,” he said. “They say it’s for our safety but everyone that’s been there knows that’s crap. Remember when I told you about the one guy that snuck up there and got so scared he turned into a vegetable. Well, the rumor is, and who knows if it’s true, that he found something weird up there.”

  “What do you mean by weird?”

  “Who the hell knows. That’s just what I heard.”

  Morgan asked him, “Have you noticed anything strange at work? Like people missing?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Killian. “There’s been a lot of talk about that. A few guys stopped showing up. Didn’t say anything to anyone. Good thing it’s no one I liked.”

  “What do you think happened to them?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Killian went on. “Maybe they just got sick of the grind. There have been a few small earthquakes lately. The wall sways for hours after one of those. Shakes the wimps up. Maybe they got scared. Probably smart of them.”

  …

  A few days later, Callista appeared in front of Lucas’s house just as he was leaving for school. She had to sit down on the curb to catch her breath before she started talking. Lucas learned that she had left school shortly after arriving that morning, taken the cable car down the hill and jogged straight to his house.

  Her hands trembled when she got out her rolling tobacco and anxiety pill powder from her messenger bag. After taking a puff of her homemade cigarette, she told him, “They’re gone. Half my school. Half the students. Me and a couple of other girls started asking the teachers and they seemed more freaked out than us. They didn’t seem to know anything.”

  “What do you mean by ‘gone’?” Lucas asked. “Did they just disappear?”

  “There are stories of people leaving in busses in the middle of the night but who knows if that’s true. There’s nothing on the news about it. Just the war as usual.”

  “I’ve seen a few busses,” Lucas told her, “but they were bringing people in.”

  “A lot of those people are looking for their kids.”

  Lucas noticed his mother’s face in the front window. She had been watching them.

  “I need to show you,” She said, raising up the curb in an elegant way, like a cobra. “Come with me.” Grabbing him by the palm, she started to drag him along. “We’re going,” She told him.

  When they arrived at her campus, it appeared the school was in the middle of a fire drill. However, it seemed to be nearly all faculty outside. Some of the middle-aged, buttoned-up professors were debating and gossiping about what had happened. Some were off in the grass smoking by themselves. Some just stared white-faced, as though they could have stopped breathing at any moment.

  Callista and Lucas reached the main building and realized many students had been left behind.

  Just as they arrived, a group of five boys sailed a liquor bottle full of gasoline into the front façade of the hall’s second floor. Then they lit the fuse of a bottle rocket that whistled into the gasoline running down the school emblem.

  When the fire started with a whisper, the five boys cheered and howled in a shared primal laugh. Neither the teachers outside, nor anyone else, said one word. Another group of maybe twenty seniors came barreling out of the side entrance, carrying computers, paintings from the art gallery, and anything else they could get their hands on. They passed by a number of faculty members who barely glanced at them.

  Callista brought Lucas over to her history teacher, Doctor Novelitz, who was standing by one of the oak trees and watching the fire. She asked him to please tell her what was happening.

  He smiled in a defeated way, saying, “I’m surprised to see you. I thought you would have been one of the ones that left.”

  “What do you mean? Where did these people go?”

  “Look around,” said her professor, “who do you see left behind? I was watching the fire and I realized it. Just the useless and the monsters are left. I guess I’m a teacher and it’s not professional to characterize students that way. Maybe I’m wrong through. It does seem strange to see you here, Callista. I guess I had you all wrong. Hell, even kids have their secrets.”

  “You don’t know anything about who took them?” Lucas asked. “Or where they went?”

  “I showed up today,” said Novelitz. “They didn’t. And it’s not just students. I’d say a good third of the teachers are no shows. I tried to call the police but I get the sense they’re a bit preoccupied.” He added, “One of the janitors told me last night that a guy down his street had his kid taken at gunpoint. When I asked by who, he told me, the government.” Novelitz asked, “How about you tell me what’s going on.”

  Just then, two more boys dodged falling bits of burning school emblem on their way out of the front entrance. Lucas recognized one of them immediately. It was the same preppy bully he had trouble with before. The boy was dragging an anatomical skeleton out by the leg bone and pointing one of the school’s antique swords like a lance.

  “Hey man!” He shouted to Lucas before they both stopped. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He said to Callista, “Relax. Don’t give me one of those death stares.”

  “I do think we’ve met,” Lucas told him. “In fact it was in the very same spot.”

  The boy didn’t have a clue.

  “Do I really look that different?” Lucas asked him. “Remember,” he made a barfing sound.

  “No,” the boy said, almost afraid of Lucas at that moment. “It couldn’t be but…I guess it’s the same face.”

  Lucas’s reshaped posture made him seem half-a-head taller. His shoulders had swelled at the expense of his waist and his formerly gangly arms seemed like heavy machinery. The only thing that hadn’t changed was Lucas’s look of stoic combat.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” Lucas asked them. “Where everyone went last night?”

  “I know some left willingly,” said the other boy. “My brother went with them last night. Didn’t take me or my parents. My dad tried to get them to take us all but they wouldn’t. One even pointed a gun at my mom.”

  “Who’s they?”

  The kid chuckled but at the same time looked terrified. He said, “Just regular people. Could have been anybody.”

  Both boys seemed intimidated and Lucas’s former tormentor told him, “No hard feelings then, about before. I guess we’re cool.” Then he picked up the anatomy skeleton by the ankle and ran off with his co-conspirator.

  Lucas followed Callista to the edge of the school’s front pond. She sat down on one of the boulders and twisted together a cigarette. For a while neither spoke.

  Eventually, Callista told Lucas, “My dad is involved in whatever this is. I know it. He
has this weird electronic blueprint or map thing he tried to hide from me.” She asked Strix, “Is he at home?”

  “Your father is in a meeting downtown until later this afternoon,” Strix said. “It’s likely that you will have several hours of access to his office without his supervision.”

  Callista told Lucas, “We’re going to get some answers.”

  …

  Callista’s estate was indeed empty when they arrived and her father’s office door was unlocked. She remembered that he had set the map away in an envelope, along with some other papers. It was in his locked desk drawer but she knew how to get inside. Her father kept the key hanging behind his wall calendar.

  When she pulled the drawer open, there was only one item inside.

  “That’s it,” She said. “The manila envelope. Open it.”

  When they slid the map out and opened it, the ink sprung to technological life, with glowing blueprint lines and intersections overtop of a geographical map of the world. Lucas touched the surface of the cold, glassy paper and the atlas zoomed in on a neighborhood in one of the small settlements left in the Himalayas. The blueprint showed even more complexity, the lines meeting individual dots and clusters. Everything moved like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

  With the map glowing in her face, Callista said, “This had to be aliens. Look at this thing. It lights up like Strix.”

  “Twenty-first century technology produced things like this,” Lucas told her. “The science and engineering was supposed to be forgotten.”

  “Somebody remembered,” said Callista. She pointed to the map, saying, “Go to New Mountain near the Bastion. I want to see us.”

  Lucas rubbed the surface of the map until he got to coastal Pennsylvania. Then he slid his fingers apart until he was over the hill. Right away it became obvious Callista’s house was special. The spot was the brightest on the page and it flickered like a lightning bug.

  “Why is my house so special?” She asked. “Zoom in.”