Donovan Meanwhile: Kings of Sparta

by Bierley, B. L.

“Sit here,” he tells me as he goes about digging through drawers.

  I can hear people outside placing their orders, and I think about food safety.

  He returns with some paper towels and rubber tubing that’s used for I don’t know what, wraps them both around my arm above the wound, to stop the bleeding.

  Sarah’s wrapping something in tinfoil. Hands it through the window to someone. “We need to go to the hospital?”

  Malik just grunts. He’s got me propped up against the kitchen cabinet, and I feel cold stainless steel against my back. It feels refreshing.

  “Who is he?” She asks, then looks at me. “Who are you?”

  I just look at her weakly. “Um.”

  “I don’t know,” Malik says. “We didn’t get to introductions yet.” He’s cutting the extra tubing dangling from my arm.

  “Are you from around here?” she asks me.

  “Crystal City,” I manage to say. A line etched between her brows.

  “Sounds like a strip club.”

  A waiting customer got her attention and she turned away from me. Malik tossed the extra tubing aside and examined his work. “How’s that feel?” I nodded.

  “Don’t mind my wife,” he said and grinned. “I never do. Let me get you some water.”

  “I need you to help me cook, Malik,” Sarah said over her shoulder.

  “One moment, woman.”

  He hands me a clear plastic cup of water and I suck it down. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was.

  “So, what happened to you?”

  I hand him the cup and he refills it. I’m feeling stronger already. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I was getting chased by these guys. They were trying to kill me. One of them shot me. I went into that maintenance closet, and then you found me.”

  He frowns. “I didn’t see any men around. How long were you in there?”

  I shrug, and it hurts my arm. “A second? Maybe less?”

  Malik looks up at Sarah who has been listening while she cooks. I can hear something sizzling on a griddle.

  My stomach growls.

  “Did they rob you? Where is your Field?”

  “My what?”

  He points to his eye. “Your FaceField.” That must be what those people outside are wearing.

  “I don’t have one of those.”

  They both laugh. “What kind of person doesn’t have a Field these days? No offense. You don’t look poor.”

  I don’t even know what they’re talking about but I’m offended. “Well where’s yours, then?”

  Malik stands up and gets something from a shelf up above, while Sarah plates some more food.

  “We’re poor, but even we have one. Just don’t use it while we’re working.”

  He brings down one of the same devices, a clear visor with one lens. He tells me to put it on. The band goes around the back of the head and it rests on my ears. The little clear plastic lens is a few centimeters in front of my left eye.

  When it’s sitting comfortably, he presses a button on the side and the little lens lights up with images and data. I’m looking straight at Malik so the first thing it does is bring up his name, Malik Amari, and some kind of random snippets of information.

  Where he ate last.

  What movie he watched most recently.

  “It’s social media!” I say. “I’ve never seen this before. Does it link with Facebook, or what?”

  I look up at Sarah and it displays the same sort of information about her.

  “We only have the one Field,” Malik says with a hint of shame. “We can’t afford two. But as long as we share it and post often enough between the two of us nobody can tell, so it’s ok.”

  He takes the Field off of my head and turns it around and puts it on his own.

  “I won’t have a profile,” I say. But he’s just staring slack-jawed at me through the lens.

  He swallows. Takes off the lens.

  “Nope, no profile.” He smiles at me and looks at my water cup. “Why don’t we get you some juice or something.”

  He stands and goes to grab something out of the fridge, but he mutters a few things in Arabic to his wife and now she’s looking at me with a mix of curiosity and alarm. She wipes her hands on a dish towel and dons the FaceField.

  “You’re right.”

  Malik has returned and hands me a bottle of prune juice, then with a smile he reaches over and locks the back door to the truck.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Just...stay where you are. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  That’s never a welcome statement, especially from someone whom you didn’t think was going to hurt you in the first place. I can feel my pulse in my arm as my heart starts to race.

  I try to stand up, but Malik puts a hand on my shoulder and keeps me down. He says something to Sarah that sounds urgent.

  She sighs, and he repeats the order.

  She reaches through the service window and starts hastily pulling in all the napkins and condiments, letting them fall to the floor. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we have to close. Thank you for your patronage.”

  She pulls the awning down and locks it. I can hear angry customers shouting outside but the sound is muffled and the rest of the truck seems eerily quiet now.

  “Start the van,” Malik orders her.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” she snaps back.

  “Dammit, woman.” He stomps past her to the front and climbs into the drivers seat. I don’t bother trying to get up. Sarah stares at me as he fires up the engine. “They know where he is now thanks to us,” he shouts to her. “We need to hide.”

  He pulls the gear shift and the truck lurches forward. Sarah grabs the counter to hold herself upright. Loose items fall to the floor in the kitchen, and I can’t help but wonder whether the cutlery is secure.

  “Where are we going?” I finally ask after a few minutes. Sarah is still just standing there staring at me.

  She just shrugs. “You’re worth a lot of money to some people.”

  “My cousin’s garage is a mile up the road. He’ll keep us safe until we can claim the reward.”

  But then he slams on the brakes and I roll over onto my side. Sarah falls down.

  I hear the blast from a gun and then the front windshield shatters on the passenger side. Malik ducks and turns the wheel, taking us down another street.

  “They found us fast!”

  The big truck engine struggles to get up to speed. I hear another shot from behind us and the truck swerves and slides.

  Lost a tire.

  “Crap!” Malik yells. He struggles to keep the truck moving in a straight line.

  “Malik! You’re going to get us killed!”

  I hear a vehicle outside race to get ahead of us, and then Malik slams on the brakes.

  As I’m sailing towards the front of the truck, I view through the windshield a dark green Jeep—or something kind of like a Jeep, a model Ive never seen before—cut across the road in front of us.

  Malik tries to steer around them but with only three functioning wheels he can’t keep us from sliding and we end up running up on the sidewalk and slamming into a storefront. He asks Sarah if she’s ok, and she says she is.

  Then in seconds he’s out of the seat and he rushes back to me. On his way he reaches into the fridge and pulls out a gun.

  I throw my hands up the air. After all this he’s just going to shoot me dead, and I don’t even know what the hell is going on.

  But he hands the gun to me.

  Then he steps back and puts his hands in the air. Nudges his wife who does the same.

  Suddenly the back door gets yanked open, ripping the lock right off, and there’s a blonde woman with a ponytail and a flack jacket pointing a very large weapon into the truck.

  Malik starts talking immediately.

  “Officer thank god you’re here! He was trying to force us to take him to Canada! I didn’t know what to do!”

  The wom
an lowers her gun and gives an exasperated frown.

  “Give me a break. You alright, Burke?”

  I do a double take when I realize she’s talking to me. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on,” she holds out her hand and helps me down out of the truck. There’s a huge guy next to her wearing some kind of powered armor on his torso. The guy who ripped the door off the hinges, I presume.

  “Do we get the reward money?” Sarah asks.

  The woman laughs. “We’re not cops.”

  “Government?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Then who are you?”

  “Interested third party.”

  Malik and Sarah lower their hands, but the blond woman throws her gun back up and they reach for the sky again.

  “But the cops’ll be here soon, I’m sure. And when they get here, you won’t tell them anything about us. If you do, we’ll find out. And we’ll find you.”

  The guy next to me holds up the metal door like Exhibit A, and bends it right in half. He drops it on the ground with an ear-shattering clang.

  I can tell from the look on Malik’s face that he gets the point.

  “Hey, guys!” Someone shouts from the Jeep-thing. A kid with a mohawk and earrings. “We gotta go!”

  I hear sirens a few miles away.

  “Come one, Burke,” the woman says to me. I follow her to the Jeep because what else am I going to do?

  Yeah, I know what I said.

  Run.

  Resist.

  Escape.

  But you saw what they just did to this food truck. I don’t want to end up like the food truck.

  I climb into he backseat of the Jeep with the woman. The man with the armor takes it off and climbs into the passenger seat.

  The mohawk kid hits the gas and we take off.

  Outside the car, the city looks different. I mean, I don’t know Baltimore all that well but I’m no stranger to it. There are taller buildings than I’ve seen here before. Shining, glass skyscrapers with solar panels lining the edges.

  Most of the cars that we pass are silent and sleek.

  And of course every single person on the street is wearing one of those FaceFields.

  The woman next to me has been watching my face the whole time. I can feel her eyes on me.

  I look at her.

  “Welcome to the Meanwhile,” she says.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I learn some names on the drive.

  The blonde woman is Bellamy. I gather from context that she’s the ranking member of the team.

  The kid with the mohawk is Dweeble. I assume it’s a nickname. He’s a very good driver.

  The other guy is Mastodon, and he seems to made entirely out of shoulders and chest. I don’t think Mastodon is a nickname.

  Mastodon is keeping his eyes on the road and his mouth shut, but Dweeble keeps chiming in with comments to the woman that I don’t understand.

  I hear him mention Matt a few times, but not in a friendly way.

  “Where have you been?” seems to be the common thread of everything Bellamy asks me, and since I don’t really know what she’s referring to, I don’t quite know how to answer.

  “Where am I now?” I finally ask. “Maybe that could help me tell you where I’ve been.”

  She puffs out her cheeks. “That’s a complicated answer that you’re probably not ready to handle just yet. I want to avoid confusing you as much as possible.”

  I pfft.

  “You sound like Fake Matt.”

  Bellamy seems tickled. “You call him Fake Matt?”

  “Do you know him?”

  She gets a distant look in her eyes. “I have, in the past. I’m glad he got our message to you, though.”

  “Not much of a message. I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that. I have to wonder how long you’d have been wandering around lost if the trace hadn’t found you through that FaceField check-in. That was a lucky break.”

  She doesn’t say anything else to me for another fifteen minutes, the rest of the drive, until we pull into an underground parking structure that looks like it survived a flood or something.

  The four of us walk to an elevator that takes us down underground, and we exit into a narrow, concrete hallway. Strips of fluorescent lights lead the way to a reinforced steel door.

  On the other side of the door, the hallways continues. The walls are polished smooth and painted two-tone blue, and interrupted every so often by another steel door.

  Dweeble and Mastadon walk ahead, to a stairwell that goes down. They tell Bellamy they’ll see her at dinner, and then take the stairs.

  Bellamy opens the door we’re standing next to, and it’s an interrogation room, like you’d see in a cop show.

  “How’s your arm doing?”

  It’s the first time she’s asked about it. But it’s also the first time I’ve thought about it in a while.

  I shrug, and it still hurts.

  Bellamy notices me wince. “We’ll have the doc take a look at it. Just wait here, though. You need anything? Water? Coffee? Soda?”

  “I’m actually starving, to be honest.”

  She nods, and leaves me in there with the door closed. There’s one metal table in the middle of the room with two chairs on either side.

  She said they weren’t cops, or government, so I wonder what jurisdiction I’m actually under right now.

  Five minutes later a guy around my age comes in. He’s probably older than me, honestly, because he’s got a little facial hair coming in and he has a gun strapped to his thigh.

  He sets down a can of off-brand soda and a prepackaged blueberry muffin.

  “She said you were hungry.” His voice is even and kind.

  “Are you the doctor?”

  “Gavin,” he says, shaking my hand. “Gavin Hanson. And, no, I’m not the doctor.”

  He sits across from me and produces another can of soda for himself. “Drink up.”

  I dig into the muffin first and it’s gone in seconds.

  “Obviously you’re suspicious of my intentions,” he says. “I don’t blame you. But Bellamy felt I was going to be the easiest for you to talk to, given we’re both on the young side.” He gave me a wink, and I noticed his eyes were a deep green color that I wasn’t sure I had seen before. “I’m here to answer any and all of your questions.

  “When can I go home?”

  I had that question already in the chamber.

  “You’re further away from home than you realize,” he says with a sympathetic grin.

  “What do you mean?”

  He leans back and puts his feet on the table. Trying to make me think he’s casual. “Tell me how you got here.”

  “Your people brought me.”

  It’s not a sarcastic answer, but he chuckles. “Fair enough. Before that, though. Tell me what happened to you so far today and I can help you sort things out better.”

  I narrow my eyes at him, wondering if this is some kind of interrogation technique. “Are you the NSA or something?”

  “What’s that?”

  Snort.

  Cute answer.

  Alright, I’ll play along for now.

  I recount the events starting the day before, when Fake Matt showed up and gave me the glasses. Hanson listens quietly and nods the whole time I’m talking, like nothing seems out of the ordinary.

  I tell him about the park, seeing the refugee camp, the Russians on motorcycles, the thrift store, the shoes, and finally meeting Malik and Sarah.

  When I’m done, Hanson puts his feet down and elbows on the table.

  “Have you ever read Through the Looking Glass?”

  I know the title. It’s got something to do with Alice in Wonderland. Hanson clarifies that it’s the sequel, and explains the plot.

  “Alice steps through the looking glass over her fireplace and finds herself in the mirror world. Things are the
same, but different.”

  I nod my head. “Like the Mirror Universe in Star Trek.”

  He doesn’t get the reference. He doesn’t know what Star Trek is?

  “Anyway,” I say, “what’s your point?”

  “That’s you now, Donovan. You’ve gone through the looking glass. This world you’re in right now, it may look a lot like your own world, but it’s not. It exists alongside it, like a twin universe. It’s the same underneath, but it’s gone through a few different experiences, let’s say.”

  Obviously I’m having a hard time believing what he’s suggesting, and I let Hanson know this by staring coldly at him.

  “Those shoes you’re wearing.” He points down at the sneakers with the blue strand around them. I had almost forgotten I was still wearing them.

  I wonder if I’ll ever see my old Chucks again.

  “Those shoes are very special. They brought you here. When we had Matt give you the message, we knew it would lead you to Yuni Perralto’s laboratory.”

  “Laboratory? It was a thrift store.”

  Hanson chuckled. “I’m sure that’s what it looked like. Yuni is a pretty creative guy. He told us he had a way for you to cross over, but he kept all the details under wraps. He’s also a very paranoid guy.”

  “Apparently he should be. There were Russians crawling all over the place when I got there. They gave me this.” I pointed to the makeshift bandage tied around my arm.”

  “Yeah.” Hanson stands up and starts pacing the room. He seems older all of the sudden. “The Russians are a problem right now. Bellamy will fill you in on all that. I’m just here to cover the basics of life in the Meanwhile.”

  That’s what Bellamy had said, too.

  “What’s the ‘Meanwhile?’”

  He blows out air. “Boy. That’s a big one. You have those glasses Matt gave you, right?”

  I had almost forgotten. They were in my pocket.

  I fished them out and was happy to find they were still intact.

  Hanson seems pleased, too. “Good,” he says. “Let’s go to the roof.”

  He takes me up another elevator, different from the one I came down in, and we step out onto the roof of a magnificently tall skyscraper. The wind is whipping against my face for a moment, but as we step away from the elevator doors and out into the open air it calms down.