by Bryan Smith
Matt Lewis cranked a handful of paper towels out of the wall-mounted dispenser and briskly dried his hands. “I’m telling you, the guy is a nothing. A zero. A cipher. You ever just look at him when he’s not paying attention to you, when he’s off in his own little world? Man, it’s creepy. There’s nothing going on there, I swear to you. He’s a total blank slate. And he’s so perfectly handsome it’s almost like he’s a pod person, like he can’t possibly be real.”
Dean chortled. “Yeah, I know what you mean, buddy. It’s like he rolled off some anchorman assembly line. He’s Plastic Zeke, model number six-hundred and fucking sixty-six.”
Matt Lewis almost doubled over with laughter. He braced one hand against the edge of the sink basin and held the other over his belly until he recovered. “Oh, shit. That’s funny. Yeah, I bet if you shaved the hair at the back of his neck there’d be one of those bar code symbols.”
Dean held his arms straight out and paced about the bathroom, doing an impression of a fat Frankenstein’s monster. “I am Zeke Johnson. I am your anchorman.” He said the
words in an archly stilted, exaggerated way, like a robot from a 50’s b-movie. “Welcome to New World Order News. I mean Venture World News.”
That set Matt off on another ludicrous laughing fit. Zeke ached to leap out of the stall and pummel both of the snide bastards. His face flushed red and his teeth were on the verge of puncturing the bit of lip pinched between them.
“And what was with that near meltdown of his yesterday?” Matt’s tone shifted now, became more serious. “Guy freezes up on air like some jittery grade school boy at his first school play.”
Zeke flinched, recalling that he’d made a similar analogy at the time. Hearing this echo of his own thoughts tumble out of Matt’s mealy mouth was depressing. It gave the man’s other negative comments extra weight. Maybe it was all true. Maybe he really was nothing more than a pretty shell, just a glorified prop with a voicebox and a pulse.
NO!
That was pure bullshit. He was smart. He had the grades and IQ to prove it. And he was nowhere near as shallow as these jerks were making him out to be.
But Dean Clark saw things another way: “Yeah, that was weird, dude.” Zeke rolled his eyes. A grown man, a professional, using the word ‘dude’ like some stoner or surfer? Pathetic. “Hell, I’d almost feel sorry for him—if he wasn’t so fucking full himself.”
Zeke’s eyes went wide.
That son of a bitch!
“Uh huh.” Through the vertical slit to his left, Zeke could see Matt nodding. “Ain’t that the truth. He’s conceited as hell. A stuck-up, pompous, arrogant asshole.”
Zeke seethed.
The two charter member of the I Hate Zeke anti-fan club fell silent for a few moments. But Zeke was too enraged to notice at first. Then one of the men made a loud, throat-clearing noise and said, “Ah…is that you in there, Grant?”
Zeke frowned.
Grant?
Who the fuck was that?
He wracked his memory for a face to match the name, but it wouldn’t come. Panic started creeping in. He didn’t want these guys to find out the object of their derision had been listening in the whole time.
So he decided to wing it. He cleared his throat and pitched his voice deeper than usual. “No. It’s Tom. Tom…Grunick.”
Zeke wanted to slap himself. Hard. Tom Grunick was the name of the character played by William Hurt in Broadcast News. His favorite movie. Out of all the names he could have picked, why that one? Jesus jumping Christ on a motherfucking pogo stick! He’d have been better off telling them he was Ronald Reagan. He prayed his adversaries wouldn’t make the connection.
“Sorry to bother you, Tom.” Matt. The sleaze. “Thought you might be our buddy.”
Zeke cleared his throat again and kept his voice pitched low. “No problem.”
Matt clapped a hand on one of Dean’s mountainous shoulders and said, “Let’s go grab a bite to eat.”
“Wooooo-doggie!” Dean Clark made an exaggerated sound of licking his chops. “That’s the best idea you’ve had all day. Feel like I could eat me a horse!”
Zeke thought, You look like you already did, you fat prick.
Then they were gone, the door gliding shut behind them. Zeke drew in and expelled a deep, calming breath. He counted to ten. Some of the volcanic rage swirling within him subsided. He hitched his pants up, washed his hands at the basin, and opened the bathroom door. He searched the corridor for signs of Dean and Matt before proceeding. They were nowhere in sight. The profound degree of relief he felt then made him feel like a coward. It wasn’t like him to avoid confrontation.
He stepped into the hallway and turned left, moving quickly toward a bank of elevators. He punched the down button and waited for one of the doors to open. While he waited, he wondered how anyone could be as petty as those two given the momentous things happening in the world today. It was as if they were utterly oblivious to the possibility that the world was ending. He replayed their conversation in his head, marveling at how very goofy much of their banter had been. They were like a couple of frat boy buffoons shooting the shit around a keg. Amazing. And to think they’d called him the shallow one.
A bell dinged and a set of doors slid open to his left. He hurried in that direction and ran straight into Angie McDowell, one of the makeup technicians, striking her with enough force to send her tumbling back into the elevator car.
“Aw, shit!”
Zeke rushed to her aid, proffering a hand to help her back to her feet. “Jeeze, I’m so sorry, Angie. I was in a hurry and didn’t see you there.”
She swatted his hand away and scrambled to her feet unassisted. “Fuck you, Zeke. Watch where you’re going, you absent-minded jerk.”
Then she slipped past him and hurried out of the car. He watched her slim figure zip down the corridor, enjoying the way her shapely butt moved in those tight khaki slacks. Then the elevator door closed. He punched a button marked ‘L’ for Lobby and the car began its descent.
It occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing. He was supposed to be heading to the studio. But he appeared to be in the process of leaving in the building. He knew he should feel alarmed by this apparently unconscious (and foolhardy) decision, but he felt no such thing. He still had no clue what he had in mind beyond exiting the building, but that was okay. He’d figure something out. All that mattered was that he would not be returning to the studio. Not now. Not ever.
He shook his head, wondering how he could have progressed so quickly from worrying about his job to walking away from it forever. Angie McDowell had displayed a previously well-masked disgust for him. Coupled with the overheard bathroom conversation, it implied a disturbing pattern. How many people at VNC thought Zeke Johnson was self-centered scum?
Some of them? Most of them?
It made Zeke sick to think about it.
After stopping numerous times to admit and carry several people to various floors, the elevator at last arrived at the lobby.
Zeke hesitated a moment longer. It wasn’t too late to turn around and put a stop to this madness. Maybe he really did have some personality flaws. It was remotely possible, he supposed. He could work on some things, make people like him better. Then he sighed and joined the flow of people entering the lobby.
A little later he was in his car and moving away from VNC Headquarters. He thumbed a button and the Thunderbird convertible’s top began to retract. He lowered the windows and moved a hand roughly through his heavily moussed hair. He loosened his tie and enjoyed the feel of the wind against his face. When his beeper chirped a few minutes later, he chucked it out the window.
* * *
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
5:02 p.m.
“Can you believe that!?” Rose Horton shook her head and stared in wide-eyed disbelief at the television screen. “He’s resigning! Who’s going to be president now?”
Rose was a heavy-set woman in late midd
le age. She favored clothes with bright floral patterns and had a big helmet of frosted hair that made her look like a time travelling refugee from the early 1960’s. She lived alone in the house across from Jasmine. Her own husband had died more than a decade ago, just a few months before Jasmine and Gary had moved into the neighborhood… The way she talked about Jim Horton—constantly, and frequently in the present tense—was sometimes creepy. You’d think the man had passed away only months ago.
She sighed. “I don’t remember the order of succession, Rose. I’m not thinking so clearly right now.”
Rose’s demeanor shifted at once. The news was forgotten as the whole of her attention zoomed in on Jasmine. She patted Jasmine’s hand and her face took on a look of intense concern. “You poor dear. No one expects you to be thinking clearly.” She made a clucking sound and shook her head. “So don’t you go worrying what other people think. You listen to me, because I’ve been through it, okay? Your folks will be here soon. And your brother. Let them handle the arrangements and whatnot.”
Jasmine sniffed. “You know what’s funny?” She smiled even as she choked back another sob. “I was just thinking about how you talk about Jim as if he’s still here sometimes. I don’t think I’ll be doing that ten years from now. Because I don’t believe there’ll be any world left by then. Hell, there may be no world by next week.”
Rose passed a tissue to Jasmine, who accepted it gratefully and blew her nose. Rose clasped hands with her and looked at her even more intently now. “Don’t you worry about what you can’t control, sweetie. You can make yourself sick with worry and it just does no damn good at all. This thing that’s going on, I know it’s scary, but I have faith everything will be okay in the end. The best minds in the world are working around the clock to stop whatever’s making this crazy stuff happen. I truly believe they will succeed. But I’ve made peace with the idea that they might not and I’ll tell you why. This may be the end of our world, but there’s another world beyond this one. I don’t mean other planets, but another realm of existence. The afterlife. Heaven. The silver lining here is that failure only means I’ll be reunited with my Jimbo that much sooner in that better place. Just as you’ll be with your Gary again.”
Jasmine didn’t say anything. She didn’t know whether she believed in an afterlife. She hoped like hell there was one. The notion of Gary not continuing on somewhere else in some new, unfathomable form hurt too much. Yet when she looked deep within her heart and tried to be honest—at least with herself—about what she truly believed, she always failed to achieve that level of inner peace she imagined people of pure faith possessed. She had too much trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of a soul separating itself from a body at the instant of death and ascending elsewhere. It seemed like too much of an old-world, archaic concept. A grand lie conceived by ancient tribal elders to comfort the peasants in the face of perpetual famine, pestilence, and war. In the final analysis, she’d always considered herself just too smart to fall for what amounted to nothing more than a bunch of creaky old supernatural hokum.
Except that things were different now. There was a startling new paradigm to take into account, one that, on the surface at least, forced even the most militant atheist to allow for the possibility of alternate planes of existence. Hell, that was a given at this point. What was even more intriguing, from Jasmine’s point of view anyway, was what seemed like a real chance that some supernatural force was at work here, laboring to rip asunder the fabric of reality. A fact that suddenly made all that old-world hokum no longer seem quite so…hokey.
Jasmine balled up the tissue and dabbed moisture from the corners of her eyes. She felt a little better now. Rose, as kooky as she sometimes seemed, had a point. Maybe there was a silver lining. Hell, maybe she should embrace The End. Maybe she should be down on her knees right now, praying to God, just in case.
Her gaze went to the television, where the focus had shifted for a moment from the president and the developing international crisis. The Headline News anchorwoman, a sleek, young Hispanic woman named Maria Delgado, was talking about one of her own colleagues. The man’s picture was shown in a corner of the screen. Zeke Johnson. Apparently, the man had gone missing and a search was underway.
Rose patted her hand again and stood up. “I’m going across the street a minute, okay? Poor little Phoebe’s been cooped up all day.” Phoebe was Rose’s yappy Pomeranian. “I’ll just let her out to do her business and be right back over.”
Jasmine waved vaguely at her. “Oh, go on and stay home for a while. I know you must be tired of sitting with me. Go rest up some.”
“Nonsense.” Rose’s brow furrowed deeply. “I don’t want to hear any more such silliness out of you, young lady. I am your neighbor and your friend, and I will be here for you as much as you need me.”
Jasmine sighed. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just…I wouldn’t mind being alone for a while. Come back later tonight. I’d like the company, really. I just…”
Rose nodded. Her expression had softened somewhat. “I understand. Believe me, dear, I understand. It was ten years ago, but sometimes it seems like yesterday. I’ll leave you alone for now. But you call me the instant you feel like you need somebody here, you got that?”
Jasmine nodded. “I do.” She managed a weak smile. “And thanks for calling me a ‘young lady’. It warms my forty-two-year-old heart.”
Rose smiled. “Why, you’re just a sapling still.” She touched the other woman’s cheek. “I’ll be off now. You call me!”
Then she was gone, leaving through an archway that led into the foyer. A moment later came the sound of the front door slamming. Jasmine flinched. Then she sighed, relieved to at last have a bit of time to herself. She hadn’t been alone since the moment the paramedics had arrived and performed their futile attempts at resuscitation on her dead husband. The intervening hours had been filled with an unending stream of personal visits and phone calls from friends and neighbors, and from Gary’s business associates and family.
Jasmine got out of her chair and walked slowly around the house, still feeling a tad sluggish from the pills she’d been taking to calm her nerves. She turned out each light she encountered, allowing an early evening darkness to envelop her. She imagined most people were doing the exact opposite today. Today humanity existed in world in which awful, unfathomable horrors were quite likely to emerge out of dark spaces at any given moment. It was a scary thing, of course, but for the time being Jasmine was numb to the horror of it all.
For now, at least for this moment and probably the next, she welcomed the darkness.
* * *
Rose Horton stumbled over something as she began to cross the street. She managed not to fall flat on her face, but when she turned around to scan the road for the impediment, she saw nothing. So she stood there, hands on her protruding hips and shook her head. “Huh. That’s the damnedest thing. I could’ve sworn—”
Then she frowned.
Because now there was something in the road—and in the approximate vicinity of where she had expected to see the rock. Something about the size of a cockroach. It was moving. Twitching, actually. Just sort of flicking up and down without getting anywhere.
Rose scowled. She hated bugs. Filthy, nasty, disgusting things. She moved closer and raised her foot to crush the offending creature. But then she saw that whatever it was was actually protruding from a very tiny hole in the asphalt and was clearly just the tip of something much larger.
The wiggling thing surged through the hole, sending up a shower of asphalt and releasing a cloud of steam that smelled awful, like a battlefield trench filled with sun-baked corpses. Rose flew backward and landed flat on her back in her own front yard. Something that looked like a winged serpent fluttered in the air above the street. Its mouth full of needle teeth made an awful chittering sound. The thing’s bulbous head twitched and its glowing red eyes extended on thick black stalks.
Rose, praying she might reach the sanctuary o
f her home before the thing could focus its attention on her, began scooting backward over her lawn. Then she stopped and screamed as the thing dove out of the sky directly at her. Its mouth opened wide and the needle teeth drilled into her neck. She remained alive for a time as the creature’s venom flooded her veins. The pain was exquisitely terrible.
The last thing she saw was the blood-red eyes of the serpent as they jerked about atop their dancing stalks.
CHAPTER FOUR
DARKNESS UNLEASHED
Two days after the president died, and one day after his successor’s abrupt resignation, the world as those of us living then had known it came to an end.
* * *
Early morning,
Somewhere in the U.S.A.…
It sits on a couch in a human dwelling, the one shared by its first slave and her lover. It is still getting used to this form, the tiny body of its host, and is still figuring out all it can do. Its physical capabilities seem limited compared to those of the larger women, and it has considered abandoning the Abby-shell and taking up residence in Laura. Or her lover Kelly.
But this diminutive form is not without its advantages. The larger creatures make certain accommodations for Abby-shell, treating her with a degree of deference, as if she is special somehow. The creature residing within the Abby-shell knows this is not a result of its myriad mental manipulations of the women. It has looked into the knowledge recesses of Abby’s dormant mind and knows this is typical ‘adult’ treatment of ‘children’.