“But you don’t know for sure, do you? How could you?”
“No, dear Emily. I don’t know for sure that vampires don’t eat cheeseburgers. Besides, everything we’ve heard about vampires might be total bullshit. But I don’t think you’re a vampire. Are you a vampire? Or a ghost?”
“Well if I was, you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. I sure as hell wouldn’t just tell you, first,” she said. “And stop calling me that.”
Emily was stalling. She didn’t know what to do. The only other person who might have known there was anything unusual about her was Master Liu. She’d studied Wing Chun Kung Fu with him for almost six months, during one of her longest non-jump periods since it all began. One night after leaving his studio, she’d been attacked downtown by a lecherous asshole that she was actually trying to help. She fought him off, but her adrenaline kicked in and she jumped—four years into the future.
A few weeks after that jump, Master Liu saw her on the street and stopped her. He acted like no time had passed, and he made no mention of the fact that she looked exactly the same age as before. He told her to come back to the studio. She was wary, but she did anyway. She managed to remain in time for three months, then something happened and she jumped again.
That second stint with Master Liu was different. He accelerated her training and started teaching her meditation, breathing, and a whole range of stuff he called “Chi Kung.” Chinese energy work, he called it. She went to his studio almost every night. He’d finish up the regular class, but ask her to stay after. He worked with her for hours on end, sometimes well past midnight, drilling her over and over on various techniques that were specifically designed to allow a small, relatively weak fighter take on bigger, stronger opponents. He taught her how to fight multiple attackers, and how to use anything at hand as a weapon. Sometimes they trained until dawn, never stopping to take a break. She had no idea how Master Liu did it. He had to be at least seventy, if not older.
She knew she was getting something special from him. One night, she asked him why.
“Because you are lost and in need, dear Emily,” was all he would say.
His words were etched in her brain. “If someone attacks you, or if you know for certain someone has ill intent and they’re about to cause you harm, then they’ve forfeited their right to safe passage. Your responsibility is to yourself first, and use whatever is at your disposal to incapacitate them. Do not hesitate. Do it hard and do it fast. Be decisive. Be merciless.”
Jim’s voice cut into her memory. “Emily?”
She was peering over his shoulder, eyes glazed over and unfocused, completely zoned out. She snapped out of it. She brought her eyes to him. He had that scrutinizing gaze again. Scrutinizing, but not judgmental. He was seriously intent on figuring her out.
“Sorry. I was thinking about someone.”
“No problem. It’s getting late. And I stopped you from getting into the homeless shelter. All the beds are probably taken by now. Do you have a place to stay tonight?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
He laughed. “I live just two blocks from here. In a house on Roosevelt Row. I have a spare bedroom. It’s yours if you want it.”
“Forgive me if I don’t want to cuddle just yet.”
He guffawed.
“Dear Emily, you’re quite a funny young lady. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I asked you not to call me that.”
“So what’s it going to be? Do you need a place to crash, or will you let me give you some cash for a room somewhere?”
“I’m not sure yet. Let’s leave, though. Either way, I’ll let you walk me to wherever it is I decide. I don’t feel like dealing with street urchins tonight. I’m tired.” She stood up from the table.
He did the same and started to walk away. She grabbed his arm. “Aren’t you going to leave a tip?”
“For who? There’s nobody here.”
“That doesn’t matter. Someone served you and deserves a tip. It’s only right.”
“I am the owner—”
“So?”
He pulled three one-dollar bills from his wallet and tossed them on the table. “Happy?”
She smiled. “Yes. Now it’s my turn.”
“For what?”
“To ask questions.”
“Such as?”
They walked through the empty dining room toward the front door.
“What’s your deal? You keep files? What kind of writer are you? What do you write about, exactly?”
He pulled out a set of keys, then opened the front door of the restaurant.
“You go ahead. I need to set the alarm.” He walked at a fast pace to the adjacent wall of the dining room.
She waited outside at the top of the steps leading to a porch just beyond the entrance of the restaurant. She looked at the sky. Everything was peaceful, and she could see the Big Dipper. For a moment, her mind took her back to a time when she was standing in the desert, looking up at the stars, when the great shadow came and took her away. She took control, snapping herself out of that nightmare. She brought her eyes down to the street.
A dark-colored Chevy lowrider with fancy rims and two primer spots along its hood cruised by slowly, the beat of its music sending out a rhythmic series of thumps that she could feel hitting her chest. She couldn’t see inside. It was too dark, and the windows were tinted black. It stopped for a moment directly across from the restaurant. The rear window on the driver’s side rolled down two inches, then stopped. Emily could feel two sets of eyes on her and a strong sense of curiosity emanating from the passengers in the vehicle. The window rolled up a few seconds later, then the driver gunned the engine and sped away.
Looking for someone, she thought. Obviously, not me.
Jim came out the front door, turned the lock with a key, and joined her on the steps. His hands were empty.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked.
He looked down at his body, then back at her. “What?”
“Your files. Or should I say, Emily’s files.”
“I locked them in the safe in the office. You never know when someone who knows Emily might want their contents to disappear. Forever.”
“Good point.”
“Let’s walk,” he said, gently resting his hand on her back.
The front yard of the restaurant, which was actually a re-purposed house, was surrounded by a wall six feet high. Between the porch and the wall was a nice garden. They walked down the stairs and along the garden path, heading for the sidewalk at the bottom.
“I’ll tell you ‘what my deal is’ on the way. It mostly has to do with some seriously weird paranormal shit that I saw on the battlefield when I was in the Marines. I did a tour in the Middle East. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in the night sky over a combat zone. I think my background might be able to help you. At least I think I can.”
“Help me? Why do you think I need help?”
The moment they stepped onto the sidewalk, four gang members appeared out of nowhere to surround them. Their guns were drawn.
“Hello again, rojo. Been a long time,” said the shortest one of the group. He touched her hair. She knocked his hand away. “You think I’d forget or something? I never forget a face. Especially a bonita face.”
The light from the lamppost highlighted his face well enough for her to see detail. She studied him closely. Something was familiar about him. Then she had it. He was the same gangbanger who had fallen down the steps in the basement of the Italian restaurant, right before the shootout started. Her eyes went wide.
“That’s right, puta,” he snarled. “Now you remember, don’t you? Let’s see if you remember this: where the fuck is my dinero?”
Emily’s mind turned in on itself, deciding to replay the events from April 1985, shortly after she and her mother were taken by the light in the desert.
CHAPTER NINE
Emily could hardly breathe as she watch
ed her mother scream in agony while lying on the razor-thin platform that was hovering in the middle of the room. The telescoping robotic arm of the great machine positioned itself over her mother’s terrified face, then extended four writhing, snake-like tentacles, each tipped with a six-inch-long gleaming needle. The needles spread themselves apart like a hand, reaching for her mother’s face, headed for her mom’s eyes and ears, just like it had done so many times the previous day.
Emily guessed that it had been twenty-four hours since the light in the desert had appeared and taken them into the void, because of how hungry she was. If she was correct, then today was the day after Easter. She actually had no idea how long they had been held captive, or whether it was day or night, or where on Earth she was—if she was even on Earth. There were no windows or doors in the room, and she couldn’t see movement of anyone else other than herself and her mother.
She figured she was inside some type of test chamber, plastered in a spread-eagle position against a vertical wall. The semi-transparent stretchy material that was holding her down gave a bit when she tried to move, but only an inch or so before it snapped back. She felt like an insect trapped on a specimen board, ready to be dissected and torn apart at the whim of a demented scientist.
The chamber was about twenty feet across, octagonal, with a high ceiling which sloped down to meet the walls about eight feet from the floor. In the middle of the ceiling was a black circle, with eight beams that looked like lasers radiating outward from it like spokes. The beams glowed with a pulsing blue light, giving the chamber a medieval glow as they danced around the room, but didn’t reflect off any surface. The black, featureless floor seemed to suck the light energy into its molecules, showing circular echoes of the light penetrating its surface before it disappeared.
The wall surrounding the chamber was divided into eight equal-sized panels that were situated between the glowing spokes of the ceiling. The panels were fully articulating, and able to adjust their position on either axis, depending on what type of advanced technology emerged. Sometimes the panels morphed into an iris, with overlapping sections that would expand or shrink to control its center opening. Other times, a snake-like apparatus would emerge from within that section—like the one hovering over her mother right now—and sometimes the panels would simply slide back to allow more room for the angular robotic arm to move about the chamber.
Whoever or whatever designed the space seemed to have an equal fascination with sharp, clean angles and flexible, serpentine appendages that, at first glance, seemed to move in chaotic, random directions. But they always managed to land with absolute precision somewhere on her mother’s body—usually inserting themselves in her eyes, ears, nose, or spine.
A metallic pedestal was attached to the floor in the center of the room, clearly the central focal point of everything that happened in the room.
Emily could only guess at the true purpose of the complex array of machinery that the room was capable of generating at a moment’s notice. The logical assumption was that this was some type of human experiment, one designed to inflict massive amounts of pain for some unknown purpose. Her mom was still screaming, and Emily knew that the procedure and the screams wouldn’t stop for at least another hour. She could close her eyes, but that wouldn’t stop the bone-rattling screams of her mother.
Candi Heart lay naked on her back, held to a paper-thin, rectangular slab that resembled a metal table. It was floating two feet above the floor pedestal with intense flashes of static electricity shooting back and forth between the underside of the platform and the pedestal.
Emily assumed that her mom was on an examination table. But it was no ordinary table, and the material couldn’t have been metal—at least not any type of metal that Emily had ever seen or heard of before. It was capable of contorting itself in any and all directions, depending on what technology was currently active in the room. It could bulge upward from its center to raise her mother’s midsection up to meet a probing set of implements, or it could raise the top half of the table, bending at its midpoint to lift her mother into a sitting position. Several times, it turned itself upside down and opened holes in its surface to give access to her mother’s spine. The holes would seal themselves as soon as they were no longer needed.
When the room was dormant, all of the wall panels remained smooth—a clean, unbroken gunmetal gray that was waiting to morph again at someone’s beck and call. The pulsing blue light from the spokes in the ceiling gave the panels a purplish tinge that was both comforting and terrifying: comforting because Emily loved the color purple, and she’d never seen a shade quite so beautiful, but also terrifying, because she knew that it was only a matter of time before she would hear a deep humming noise and then feel vibrations in the wall behind her. They signaled the start of another round of injections and tests, meaning the screaming would start again and she’d have to watch the machines hurt her mother.
Twice the previous day, two sections of the far wall had become see-through after the overhead beams were energized to full intensity and crisscrossed, spreading out and catching the wall panel at just the right angle. For a flicker of a moment, she could see a crowd of large heads on the other side of the wall, watching the proceedings in the room.
The worst part of the nightmare was when her mom would disappear near the end of the procedure. The vanishing immediately followed a predictable pattern of mechanical steps. The table would flip over and she’d be injected with something multiple times along the length of her spine, then the platform would right itself and she’d be injected in her ears and then her eyes. The painful series of injections—spine, eyes, then ears—were always followed by a wave of extreme sound vibrations that shook the room and rattled Emily’s teeth. Seconds later, the intensity of the light pulsing from the spokes in the ceiling would increase the speed of their strobe effect and continue to do so until each light reached a constant stream. Then everything would go dark except for the blue glow of her mother’s body.
The first time Emily saw it happen, she tried to scream, but no sound could escape from within the transparent cocoon holding her to the wall panel. She had thought the procedure was over, but it wasn’t. Speckles of blue energy played across her mother’s skin like miniature lightning bolts shooting out in a spiral pattern that originated at her belly button. When the vanishing moment was near, her mom’s back would arch and hold for ten seconds, then her body would tuck itself into a fetal position right as the energy bolts stopped pulsing and turned a solid color, covering her mother in a glowing blue light. An instant later, she’d disappear, leaving the chamber silent and empty.
Next, there’d be a loud crack, and a flash of light that seemed to wash out the black in the featureless floor. The bottom of the chamber would energize into what she could only describe as a transparent movie screen, revealing a patch of desert and cactus roughly twenty feet below the room. Her mother would then materialize somewhere on the surface below, but not as her present self. Sometimes she was younger—in her twenties, and other times she’d be a much older version of herself, elderly in fact, with a face full of wrinkles and age spots. But regardless of her age, her mother would always look up, seemingly to make eye contact with Emily right before a chirping sound would ring, like an alarm, then the room would begin to fill with a hazy vapor. Eventually, the fog was so thick that Emily couldn’t see her mother through the transparent floor anymore. A minute later, one of the panels would open, and the fog would be removed from the chamber, like a vacuum sucking the smoke out, leaving Candi lying on the floating table. Each time she returned, she’d be the same age as she was before she disappeared.
Fifteen minutes later, the entire process would start over, with slight variations in the order and timing. For about ten seconds at the start of the process, a vertical array of red lights would appear over her mother’s body and change their appearance and location, like a scoreboard, or a scene marker for a movie. Then it would start: the injections, the
humming, the vibrations, the light, the agony, the shooting lines of energy leading to her mom being encased in the blue fire before she’d disappear. Silence, a loud crack, a flash of light. The chamber floor flashing transparent. Her mother looking up at her, then the haze before Candi was back on the table.
Emily watched this happen over and over again, so many times that she’d lost count. Hour after unbearable hour passed, all the while her mother screaming and writhing in pain once the injections started. Each time her mother appeared on the table after the fog, she seemed skinnier, a little more fragile, like she was being eaten alive by the pain. Her skin eventually became drawn, her face pinched and frail. She looked like she would crumble into pieces if touched, or blow away in a cloud of dust if someone whispered in her ear.
Emily knew the end was near. Her mother couldn’t take much more of this. Candi hadn’t eaten or drank anything for hours, if not days, and neither had Emily.
Finally, after one trip to the surface, her mother didn’t come back. There was no loud crack, no flash of light, no fog, and no more Mom. Emily’s nightmare had gone from the unimaginable to the incomprehensible. She had held on to the fact that they were together as a family on that ship, until that moment; but now that comfort was gone. She was alone, trapped, and starving. Her lips could barely pry themselves apart from each other. She needed water. She needed help.
Emily could hear the chamber humming and vibrating differently than before. The flat rectangular object that her mother had been lying on floated across the chamber toward her, with the electrically charged pedestal remaining directly beneath it as it moved. The wall panels on either side of her swung open. Four mechanical arms reached out and took hold of her arms and legs just as the stretchy material dissolved, freeing her body from the wall.
Glassford Girl: Part 1 (The Emily Heart Time Jumper) Page 8