Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  "I think he's a star," Cecil argued. "Like a star person. Or a star that's alive."

  "That's his hair, Dorkbrain. It just looks like a star because it has five points and it's yellow." That last statement was more of a guess on Scotty's part as the black-and-white spectrum had translated its true color to a faint suggestion of gray.

  The concept of artistic intervention sounded simple but wasn't. For one thing you were supposed to use the "magic" crayons that came with a kit you had to send away for. And there was a piece of clear plastic you were supposed to put over the TV screen before you started drawing. This came with a "magic" erasing cloth.

  Not only did The Dink think it was important to use the magic "Winky Window" on our TV screens but our parents did too. Apparently Georgie Peterson had ruined his parent's brand new, six-hundred-dollar color television when he tried to assist ole star-head without using a Winky Window, first. There were differing versions of the story—one involving magic markers—but they all ended up pretty much the same. My guess was Winky Dink and You would be replaced by something less interactive before the summer was up.

  Just as well; we were Transformer fans, instead.

  "Stars aren't alive, Poindexter," Steadman was still rolling his eyes at Rosewood as Winky Dink disappeared and some equally ancient, black-and-white commercial came on.

  "Sez who?" Rosewood retorted.

  "Odd Og, Odd Og," the commercial jingle singsonged, "half turtle and half frog . . ."

  "There's nothing alive in outer space! There's no air to breathe!"

  "Maybe he don't need air."

  "Dork! Anything that's alive needs air."

  " . . . don't you laugh at him at all!" some kid in the commercial was declaiming. "Odd Og plays ball!"

  "Maybe there's aliens that don't breathe air," Cecil argued.

  "Course they breathe air. They wear spacesuits, don't they?"

  "Not space monsters. Space monsters don't wear spacesuits."

  "That's because they don't fly on spaceships. They stay on their planets and kill earth people who come there."

  The plastic monstrosity in the TV commercial was sucking up a succession of toy balls and spitting them back out of its oversized mouth like one of those machines in the batting practice cages over at Henderson Park.

  "Maybe the Dink's half fairy and half star," I suggested, taking my cue from the mildly disturbing commercial.

  Scotty shot me a look of half amusement and half disgust.

  "Well, we don't even know if it's a he or a she or an it," I added lamely.

  "I'm all three," Winky Dink announced from the TV screen. "I'm what you would call an asexual being."

  The commercial was apparently over but I wasn't so sure the show was back on. The Dink looked different—like somebody else was drawing him now. His voice was different, too. Less human—which was really saying something in contrast to its typical, chipmunk-on-helium quality.

  Steadman's mouth dropped open. "Did the Dink just say a dirty word?" he asked me.

  "Poindexter," the not-so-Dink said, turning as if he could see Cecil hanging across the hassock in my living room, "I need a submarine. Or, rather, your buddy Chris is going to need one. Think you can draw us up one?"

  Cecil stared back at the screen, open-mouthed. "Asexual" had shot past him without even ruffling his hair. He was still playing catch-up. "Huh?" is all that he could finally manage.

  "Hurry, my little bipedal tadpole!" the Dink insisted in a lower, older voice. Older in an ancient sense. "Make haste before the next commercial! The Dragon is coming and we must catch him while he still dreams!"

  Cecil continued to stare, his eyes taking on a glazed and confused aspect. "Dragon?"

  Scotty whirled on me, his own eyes alive with excitement and perhaps more than a little fear. "Quick! Where's your crayons?"

  "Don't have any," I mumbled around suddenly numb lips.

  Actually, I did have crayons. Just not the "magic" variety. Nor did I have the special, protective Winky Window to put on the TV screen. Scotty knew this: he had pronounced drawing along with Winky Dink to be as babyish as wearing pajamas to a sleepover.

  "Plastic wrap," he said, turning and running for stairs leading up toward the kitchen. "Where does your mom keep it?"

  How would I know? Aside from the refrigerator and the cookie jar, kitchens are unmapped territories to eight-year-old boys.

  There was a sound of drawers being rifled and then Scotty Steadman was thumping back down, taking two steps at a time, and running back toward me, trailing a cellophane tail of Saran Wrap.

  "Are you a star person?" Cecil finally managed to ask the cartoon character on the screen.

  "We come from beyond the stars," the thing pretending to be Winky Dink said. "Hurry, child of Earth! The constellations are nearly aligned and the Old Ones grow restless. Even before he appears, there will be others. . . ."

  Another advertisement started as Scotty tried to get the cellophane to adhere to the front of the television. There was something even more wrong with this commercial than there was with the not-so-Dink. I couldn't tell, at first, because Steadman was in the way and the picture had gone bad.

  Winky Dink Land was nothing but a series of striated bands of differing grays in the background most times but now the screen was filled with swirling grays and patches of leprous white. There were some colors, too, but they weren't colors I could name. They weren't colors I had ever seen before. They gave me a headache and the half-digested cereal began to curdle in my stomach.

  "Do not attempt to adjust your television set," Rosewood intoned, trying to lower his voice to sound like the Control Voice on The Outer Limits. "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical . . ."

  Steadman chuckled as he wrestled with the clinging plastic. "You may be a dork, Ceec, but you're our kind of dork."

  Whatever was wrong with the video portion of the signal, the audio was unaffected. The commercial singers had started in again but now the words were slightly different: "Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth; half demon and half god . . ."

  The thing that oozed onto the flickering television screen bore no resemblance to the plastic, half turtle and half frog of a few moments before. Both could be described as unnatural juxtapositions of disparate taxonomies—but that was where all similarities ended. This thing was larger—but its true size was impossible to map against the amorphous grays at the back of the small picture tube. There was simply nothing to lend it perspective but itself. And what there was to see did not appear to be all of it . . .

  Plus, it did not appear to be a battery-operated piece of plastic. It was alive.

  The . . . thing . . . appeared to be a seething mass of tentacles—but little like an octopus and less like a squid. The writhing, squirming mass seemed both gelatinous and chitinous in its various parts—like a festering knot of centipedes, feasting on a large and agitated spider. And the appendages were covered with additional appurtenances—eyes, mouths, cilia, claws. All of them alive with their own, separate intelligences!

  Cecil was standing now, his mouth slack and open, his eyes wide and almost frantic but for their stillness. He had the better angle: Scott continued to block my view of the writhing horror as he struggled to fit the plastic wrap in place. Even as I was largely spared the full impact of the monstrous apparition, Scotty was too close and too distracted to focus on the hideousness just inches away in a seething sea of phosphors.

  And then I smelled it: the sharp, acrid, ammonia stench. By now I could count my nightmares in the hundreds but this was the first time one had come in Smellovision.

  Steadman smelled it, too. "Aw, jeezely cripes!" He glanced back at me and then looked at Cecil. Looked again. Turned back to me. "Poindexter's pissing himself!" he said in a horrified whisper.

  I had already seen the dark stain expanding outward from the crotch of Cecil's pj's like a mindless amoeba. All I could do was nod. And raise a leaden arm to try and point.

  I couldn't even find
my voice to say "look out" or "run"—even as Cecil began to shriek like a tugboat whistle, emitting short, sharp blasts of ear-numbing sound. My arm was still on its way up as the tentacles came out of the swampy gray radiance of the TV tube and grasped Scotty by the neck and one arm.

  He was too surprised to scream, at first. Or offer much resistance. By the time a half dozen fleshy ropes had emerged to secure him and drag him into the foggy maelstrom inside the set, the screaming was pretty much over and I was waking up.

  It was only a dream.

  So . . .

  Any minute now . . .

  Some sense of relief would rush in to replace this overwhelming dread that had followed me into the world of the waking.

  Any time now . . .

  But the closest I could come to a happy thought was the sense of relief that Scott Steadman was still dead in the real world. The twisted, burning, metal pyre that eviscerated him years later on Interstate 44, just outside of Oklahoma City, seemed a far kinder fate than the horror waiting just outside this fragile reality.

  Dreams of madness . . .

  No wonder I felt little relief in waking up. A trio of third-graders shrieking in terror over something that never really happened didn't hold a candle to the more gruesome memory of Jamal's screams from earlier this morning. Horrific ululations of terror that went on and on.

  And, more appalling: ended abruptly.

  Olive's nephew hadn't calmed down or tired out. He had just . . . stopped. As if he was a piece of equipment—an organic relay for data from some hellish dimension—and a switch was thrown, a circuit breaker was finally tripped.

  Then Jamal's eyes had turned black. Even the whites. His eyes sat in his sockets like ebony marbles, staring like the emptiness of the cold void between the stars. He simply stopped screaming, his eyes went dark, and he had stood there like an ancient pillar, the sole remains of a ruined ebony temple, a remnant from long eons past.

  I shook my head as I sat on the edge of the bed. The event was bad enough: no need to embellish the creepiness with my own macabre mood. Mama Samm or Olive would report back to me once they knew more. In the meantime I had more pressing issues.

  Like the safety of my unborn son. CNN was turning into a clone of CBN and the 700 Club, reporting hourly that the world was going to hell—capitalization optional. It wasn't just the seismological and climatological phenomena. It was the parade of atrocities on the hourly newscasts that suggested we were well past the "two-minute warning" and humanity was running the clock out in "sudden death overtime."

  School shootings were a weekly occurrence now. More often than not, teacher and principals were shooting back. Parents were murdering their children at unprecedented rates. Adolescents increasingly divided into two parallel tribes—those who saw suicide as preferable to pointless years of meaningless existence and those who felt that, if each of us was "owed a death" then two, three, half a dozen or more, were even better.

  Birds fell from the skies like viral bombs, their carcasses incubating new generations of plagues. Four-legged animals went berserk and savaged anything that came within reach before spinning in endless circles, mad farandoles that ceased only when their frantically beating hearts burst.

  Churches preached intolerance. Mosques sermonized jihad. Philosophies mentored nihilism. Politicians abandoned statesmanship to practice mindless partisanship, making war against each other while real enemies made lists in the shadows of their national monuments. The culture of cynicism that had grown up over generations had taught us to mock heroes and scorn sacrifice.

  In the end it was greed and selfishness and vanity that out-Zenned the Buddhists on mankind's path to ultimate Nirvana. Somewhere along the line we had decided it was safer to believe in nothing. Nothing can betray you; nothing will disappoint. And, seemingly close to the end, nothing was what we were left with.

  Ultimate Nirvana.

  Sunyata.

  Emptiness.

  Oblivion.

  Extinction.

  As for me? My personal path to the Nirvanic state was more of a Kurt Cobain thing—minus the mumbling and really bad fashion sense. I was feeling, more and more, like a clockwork puppet, rapidly winding down to entropic oblivion. It was only those little surges of horror, here and there, acting like momentary jump starts to keep me going.

  As usual, my metabolism was messing with my meds. The antidepressants made me too numb to think, the dread I felt for my unborn family clouded any residual judgment. More than ever, I needed to see Lupé, to know that she was all right. Up until now I had taken the advice that she just needed "time" and that we just needed "distance" and that, eventually, she'd "come around."

  Well, screw that.

  If the world was going to Hell in a FedEx handbasket, we needed to talk. Soonest. How would I ever have a chance of fixing things between us if she never took my phone calls and all of my letters continued to go unanswered? Absence rarely makes the heart grow fonder. More often it makes the commitment go wander.

  Perhaps it wasn't her.

  Other individuals, groups, species had a vested interest in keeping us apart, in maintaining the status quo. I knew most of the weres wouldn't be happy but the idea of a baby sharing wampyri and lycan/were heritages was enough to make the real power brokers, the vampires stain their undies crimson.

  So why was Marie Laveau taking Lupé under her wing?

  Pagelovitch lending natal support through Dr. Mooncloud was his way of keeping his finger on the pulse of change. When I had first turned up as an anomaly in the scheme of things his first reaction had been to find a way to exploit me as a resource. Other Domans would have exterminated me and maintained the status quo. He still had hopes of convincing me to return to Seattle. My son was probably just his latest bargaining chip.

  Or a better addition to his preternatural petting zoo.

  But Marie Laveau was half-mad and her unpredictability made her all the more dangerous. I really needed to get down to the Big Easy before unseen and unfathomable machinations closed any more doors between Lupé and myself. And I didn't have time for any distractions like Twilight Zone podcasts from the zombie help.

  But I did have to pee.

  The blackout curtains on my cabin windows admitted no light but I instinctively knew it was late afternoon even before rolling over to check the bedside clock.

  I groaned out of bed and attended to business without turning on the light in the head. Some things take time getting used to: pissing red instead of yellow was one I hadn't managed, yet.

  Finishing up I realized that I was thirsty, as well.

  Bad enough dealing with fey foes who abduct you, menace your family, and threaten violence. But when they screw up your sleep cycle a definite line has been crossed. . . .

  Since I had crawled between the sheets without undressing there was no need to fumble for my robe. I did, however, fumble into my shoulder rig. I checked the freshly cleaned and oiled Glock before sliding it into the holster. (Thanks, Olive.) If you think wearing a gun to raid the refrigerator is silly then you haven't been paying attention. If anything, I still wasn't taking my own "Wanted" status seriously enough.

  I padded into the galley and pulled another blood pack from the refrigerator. Cold or warm? There's very little difference between refrigerated and reheated hemoglobin once it's been stored for any length of time—in terms of sustenance, that is. Taste is an entirely different matter. Too bad microwaving breaks down the cellular elements and renders blood both unappetizing and non-nutritional.

  I wandered through the salon while tiny blue fingers of propane flame caressed the saucepan on stovetop.

  There had been a precipitous drop in The Hunger after my little sojourn in Colorado. Was it the result of the out-of-body experience I had when I "died"? (A second time?) Or, more likely, a side effect of the nanites Dr. Mengele's clones had injected into my body? Before Jamal had gone all Edgar Cayce on us this morning, Olive had suggested that the microscopic machines in my bloo
dstream had finally "activated." There was sufficient evidence that they had been performing rudimentary activities all along—replicating, performing cellular repairs, even some tissue augmentation. My lowered dependence on blood made sense as a byproduct of my microbiological makeover.

  So what did Olive mean by "finally" activated? And why was I suddenly looking to scarf the same amount of hemoglobin that usually sustained me over the course of an entire week in less than twelve hours? Stress? Yeah, that always amped up the Bloodthirst. Being subjected to a little faerie B & D, doped up and probably starved in the process, running from the sun, and learning that my unborn son had attracted the attention of "people" who were not known for their humanitarian virtues . . .

  Or maybe the time differential had had a hand in reprogramming my body's electromagnetic fields—a little jet lag from the time-zone difference between the realm of the faerie and my own personal reality show.

  And then there was that presumed blast of elven mojo . . .

  I shook my head. This was just plain nuts. The more I thought about it, the more Dr. Fand's version of reality made sense.

  I peeked through the forward curtains. One of the New Orleans enforcers was just outside, on the prow.

  If Volpea was "standing watch," this was a novel approach.

  She was stretched out on a lounge chair wearing a great deal of cocoa butter and very little swimsuit. From this angle I couldn't tell if she was alert or dozing. She wore sunglasses and her face was turned toward the water. I had no desire to be caught staring so the wise thing to do was to back away.

  Right now.

  Just take a step back.

  Any minute now . . .

  What's the harm in looking? asked that lately all-too-familiar voice inside my head.

  I closed my eyes: I was not going to have this conversation again. At least not so soon after the last one. And the topic seemed to arise with increasing frequency these days.

  It's just looking . . . the silent voice repeated.

  The loyal heart knows no distractions, I rebutted. Yeah, like I'm having a conversation with a completely different person.