by Platt, Sean
Quiet was best — it gave Boricio time to reflect, and perhaps even perfect his proposal. He thought about how grateful he was to have someone like Rose calming the grizzly that had been waking inside him, the same bear who had been sleeping at the mouth of Boricio’s cave as long as he could remember. Just when Boricio thought the old monster was finally ready to open its eyes, stretch its arms in a yawn, then amble outside the cave, Rose came along to wave it back inside.
Boricio had spent the last month obsessed with the idea of marrying Rose. She would probably want a wedding, maybe invite her sister, Mary, from Missouri. Boricio would be happy to go to the courthouse on Tuesday, since he still wanted to spend Monday in bed.
Boricio had even started looking for a house. They were comfortable in Rose’s place, where Boricio had been staying recently — though he still kept the place on Black Island for nights he worked late — but if they were going to raise a family, they’d need a bigger place, something Boricio had considered a few weeks before he had seen the blue line neatly dividing the center of the white plastic.
Boricio found a pair of houses that would be perfect for the two, and now three, of them. Both lay in Paddock island’s interior, where houses were much cheaper, though Boricio thought buying a house somewhere else, off the island, would be better. Boricio’s work at Black Island wouldn't last forever, and Rose could write anywhere in the world, though she preferred to live near the water. But the US of A was a mighty big place, with several long coastlines to choose from. Besides, who said they had to stay in America? Boricio would live anywhere with Rose, wet or dry; red, white and blue, or any color of the rainbow.
Only one dark cloud sat in the middle of Boricio’s otherwise perfect blue sky. But it was ink black, and held every memory of his monster father, the demon who murdered his childhood, then flooded it with ghosts who never stopped haunting.
The ghosts were still there; they lived in the cave with the bear. But they were afraid of the air around Rose, which was one of the million reasons Boricio wanted to draw his breath beside her. On the short drive to Schooner, those wretched memories were only a flutter, flickering through his mind like the final shot in a fading reel.
He would be a great father. All Boricio had to do was be the opposite from the heap of unspeakable that had been his father. Boricio wouldn’t tell his son to be a man; he would show him how to do it. And if he had a girl, well then, he’d spend the rest of his life loving his junior Rosebud more than any other girl in the world, except for her mommy.
Schooner or Later was one block away, nestled between calm water and the rest of Boricio’s life. He looked over at Rose and wondered what she was thinking and if she had any idea what was going to happen, any clue about what he’d been planning.
“We’re going to Schooner or Later?” She said as she realized where their route was taking them, then shook her head. “I thought we were doing something different this morning. A surprise? I’m not even sure I’m hungry.”
“That’s okay,” Boricio said. “Order something sweet to pick at, while I mow on the mizithra missiles in my breakfast bomb.”
Rose took off her seat belt, then turned to Boricio.
Boricio turned to meet her gaze and caught the widest smile he had ever seen.
She knew, and something was so beautiful in her knowing, Boricio couldn’t break her stare. She held his gaze and wouldn’t release. Boricio surrendered inside it.
By the time Boricio realized he was driving off the road, Rose’s Mini-Cooper was crashing through the first table, flying half way across Schooner’s relatively small Patio. The first table was empty, but the second wasn’t.
Boricio swung the steering wheel hard to the right, narrowly missing a pair of brunchers sharing a waffle before crashing through the wood and lattice separating Schooner from the water.
The Mini-Cooper landed on a boat, then tore into the cabin’s interior. Boricio looked to his right as Rose was thrown hard from her seat. Her head smacked the dashboard, which launched a fat chunk of blood from her throat onto the windshield.
Another jolt lurched the car back then forward and sent a piece of the boat crashing through the glass. Boricio felt a sharp pain stab his left eye and hot blood gushing down his cheek.
He turned to look at Rose — to see if she was okay — but the crunch of metal, shatter of glass, and water rushing into the cabin around him sent the world to black before he could see her.
* * * *
CHAPTER 2 — Charlie Wilkens Part 1
Black Mountain, Georgia
March 2012
FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…
Charlie woke naked in a glass cell, without any memory of falling asleep. He was lying on a mattress, with no blanket or sheets. One pillow, no case.
The cold floor was gray concrete, just like the ceiling and the one wall without windows. The ceiling wore a blanket of ominous looking holes, and a metal toilet sat in the far corner of the 20 by 20 cell, though it offered no walls for privacy. A metal band separated the longest width of glass at a door with no knob. Above the door, a speaker.
The other side of the glass offered nothing but darkness. Bright lights burned in a ring around his ceiling, turning the three windowed walls into mirrors reflecting the truth — Charlie was a caged animal on full display for his unseen watchers.
Charlie sat on the bed, placing the pillow over his crotch. He’d never felt particularly comfortable about the size of his penis, particularly when flaccid, where it seemed more like a turtle head peeking from a shell than any sort of useable cock. He wanted to get up and run, but his birthday suit made him vulnerable enough to feel almost grateful for waiting.
How did I get here? Where am I?
He remembered what the men in black had said after waving the blue light over him.
Infected.
He looked down at his arms and chest, pale beneath the harsh lights above. He wasn’t sure what the signs of infection were, but he felt no different. And his skin was its normal pasty shade of pale.
They must have it wrong. Besides, when would he have been infected? How would he have been infected?
Charlie thought back to the monstrosity in the back of the truck. Then to the bald fucker who had tracked him and Adam to Boricio’s compound, the one who had turned monster. Charlie didn’t want to become one of those things. He would rather die.
They had to be making a mistake.
Yes, that’s it. They made an error. Like when the light beeped on the kid, then it didn’t. I need another test.
I feel perfectly fine.
Thinking of the kid, and how they’d shot him even though he wasn’t infected, sent a chill through Charlie’s already icy body.
What kind of fuckers do that? What do they want? Are they looking for infected people, and fuck the rest? And if so, why? They starting a zoo? Or some kinda freak show carnival?
And if these are the same people who took Callie, is she infected too? Is she in a cell just like me?
As Charlie sat on the bed with the pillow still covering his lap, certainty spread through his body. He was being watched.
Though he couldn’t see anything beyond his reflection, Charlie was suddenly certain that someone was standing on the other side of the glass; he could feel them as sure as he felt the flow of cold air creating goosebumps across his naked flesh.
He looked down, feeling even more exposed, shifted on the bed, then stared up at the holes in the ceiling again, wondering their purpose.
Is that where the air is flowing from? No, that’s the black grid above the toilet. So what are the holes for? Gas, like the Nazis used to gas the Jews in World War II?
Movement pulled Charlie’s eyes to the other side of the glass and straightened his back. He pinched his eyes, but saw only his reflection staring back.
“Well, ain’t this some beer-battered bullshit?” a voice said, surprising Charlie.
He nearly leapt off the mattress before realizing the voi
ce had come from Boricio who was sitting beside him, also naked, though no pillow covered what looked more like an anaconda than a cock. Unlike the dream he’d had in the truck, this Boricio wasn’t neatly dressed. His hair was long and his face unshaven. Boricio’s appearance, along with the mirrored walls, made Charlie hopeful that this was just another dream. If so, perhaps the truck, Adam’s death, and all of that had been a dream as well. Maybe he’d wake up on the road next to the van they stopped to investigate.
“Is this a dream?” Charlie asked.
“Sorry, Charlie Brown,” Boricio said. “This shit’s as real as it gets.”
Charlie wasn’t sure he trusted Boricio’s assessment. Dreaming up a lie was easy to do. So was dreaming of Boricio to substantiate the lie.
“Are you really here?” Charlie asked.
“Nope,” Boricio shook his head. “I’m in your noggin, though that don’t make me a molecule less real.”
“What the hell does that mean? You’re either here or you’re not.”
Boricio turned and smiled, “Open your mind and think outside the box, Chuckie Fuck Stick. Your head has room for a little hippie bullshit. This is some to be or not to be shit here. Do you think you’re going insane in the membrane, insane in the brain?”
Oh fuck, I’m losing my mind!
“And Bingo was his name-O,” Boricio sang.
“Wait, you heard me thinking?”
“Yeah, and you might wanna stop talking out loud, because they’re listening, and nothing makes you look crazy quite like a fucker talking to himself.”
Charlie moved his eyes across the walls of glass, trying to see through to the dark on the other side. He saw nothing but Charlie, Charlie and more Charlie. It was The Charlie Show everywhere he looked, without even a hint of his co-star, Boricio.
So, what? I just think and you can hear me?
“Yup,” Boricio said, still talking with his mouth, though Charlie figured they couldn’t hear him if he was only an imaginary version of Boricio.
Where am I?
“A place called Black Mountain,” Boricio said.
How do you know what this place is called if you’re not real?
“You must’ve heard it, but don’t remember. I’m just telling you what you already know.”
So what good are you?
“Fuck you, Charlie Chum Water. I’m here to keep your ass from crackling in the heat of the fire. You ain’t even gonna get by, let alone outta’ here without me. And you can believe the fuck outta’ that.”
I can get by just fine on my own. I don’t need you.
“Yeah? How’s that whole going-it-alone thing working so far? Let’s take a minute to tally all that’s happened since we last saw one another, mkay? You got eaten by some giant fucking tornado, then spit into a snowstorm. You lost Callie. You almost froze to death until Adam saved your ass. Then you both got caught. Adam lost his fucking head, and you let a boy get shot to death. Now you’re infected and trapped in a cell. So yeah, America voted, and we’re gonna have to be sending you home.”
Shut up!
Charlie closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at Boricio.
Boricio whistled, then said, “I’m still here,” singing like he was Tweety Bird.
Go away. I don’t need you.
“Okay,” Boricio said.
Charlie looked around the room to see where Boricio had gone, as if he were real and confined to the same laws of physics as Charlie. But the figment was nowhere. Charlie felt alone again, wishing he’d not banished his only companion, even if that companion was only a man inside his mind.
Sudden movement from behind the window grabbed at Charlie’s attention. He sat straighter, perking as he heard a crash, like something dropping just outside the window. A light flickered in the distance, then brightened into life, washing a second cell in white. And then another, and another, and another, until a row of cells identical to Charlie’s were all screaming with light. Every cell held a prisoner — some lying on a mattress and others standing, while many were curled into balls in the corners.
He saw two rows of 10 cells, lining either side of a long hallway. Charlie counted twelve others, with no more than one prisoner in any of the cells. At the far end of the hallway separating two rows was a thin beam of light bleeding through the bottom of a door.
The door whooshed open, like in Star Trek, then two men wheeled a gurney down the hallway toward him. Both men were wearing yellow hazmat suits with enclosed masks and air tanks concealed beneath the yellow suits on their backs.
A second chill ran through Charlie as he stared, open mouthed and waiting, hungry to see which of the prisoners the two men would wheel out. But the men had come for a deposit, not a withdrawal, so said the long lump beneath the white sheet.
One of the men leaned toward the cell door across from Charlie, then tapped a black glass pad in the chrome frame of the door, probably entering a code on the panel to open the door.
The men wheeled the gurney inside the room, then hoisted the body from the gurney and onto the bare mattress, where a pillow lay waiting. The men blocked Charlie’s view of the new prisoner.
Charlie was already wearing a chill, but it seeped into his every pore with the realization of what he was seeing. Lying naked on the mattress, either unconscious or maybe even dead, was Charlie’s best friend and unrequited love, Callie.
* * * *
CHAPTER 3 — Brent Foster Part 1
Somewhere in Georgia
March 28, 2012
FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…
“The Prophet?” Brent said, his weirdo alarm buzzing like crazy as the old man’s station wagon quickly closed the distance between the grocery store and Black Mountain.
“Yes, sir,” the old man said. “I ran a little church round here for years; The New Unity Church parishioners were a humble bunch, and all of them blessed with visions of the Lord’s Wrath on the 15th of last October, before He gathered so many of his loved ones to Heaven and cast others into Hell.”
Brent tried to bury what he feared was an obvious bristle. He’d had little patience for charlatans and their shams before 2:15 a.m. a half year earlier. Less now.
Brent met the man’s eyes in the rearview and felt sickened by his self-righteous smile.
I wonder how much he’d be smiling if he knew that God had nothing to do with any of this. We were the ones pulled away, and delivered to another world. Our world isn’t empty.
“You don’t believe me, do you, son?” The Prophet asked, meeting Brent’s eyes and deepening his chill.
“I don’t know what I believe,” Brent said, “but I imagine I’m a ways away from saying God had anything to do with it.”
“I’m sorry to hear—”
“Well, why are we here, then?” Rojas asked. “I’m not saying I was any kinda Saint, but I was good, and I went to church every Sunday, and prayed every night before I went to bed. Why didn’t He take me?”
“Well now, son, can you really tell me you’re free of sins?” The Prophet smiled kindly at Rojas, his eyes twinkling as if reflecting the sins counted in Rojas’ personal book of life.
“Are you free of sins, Prophet?” Lisa finally cut in. “I mean, He left you here. What sins did you commit?”
Brent didn’t pick fights, and hadn’t planned to get confrontational with the old man, especially since the guy was giving them a ride to Black Mountain, but Lisa didn’t seem to have the same reservations. She almost seems to be looking for a fight, like she hadn’t flushed it from her system during the battle at the store.
“We’re all sinners, my dear. Just some of us are more honest than others. In answer to Mr. Rojas’ question, I can only say that God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps He is testing you as He is testing me.”
Brent wondered how in the hell The Prophet had picked up on Rojas’ name. He didn’t recall any proper introductions. Maybe he’d gathered it like Brent had, from the man’s name tag on his tactical vest.
Still, something’s weird.
Brent caught Ed, sitting beside him and wearing the same set of black handcuffs, nodding subtly, as if in silent agreement that the old man was definitely suspicious. If Ed felt suspicious too, then Brent felt a hundred times better about his hunch.
“I know it’s hard to have faith, especially in the End Days,” The Prophet said, speaking to everyone. “Believe me, I’ve grappled with my own faith from time to time over the years.” He laughed as though delight were in his secrets before raising the sad in his voice. “I grappled again after He took my family. Then again after I lost my congregation, followed most recently by The Good Lord setting demons upon my church.” He shook his head. “Though, I was wrong on that last one. He did not set the demons upon me. That was Satan. The Lord is the one who told me about the air horn. Told me in a dream the night before my church was plagued. Do any of you ever have weird dreams?”
Although Brent thought The Prophet learning of the air horn’s use as a weapon against the aliens in his dream was interesting, it was hardly divine intervention. If anything, it was dumb luck. But he wouldn’t argue with the man, so long as The Prophet didn’t try to sway Brent’s beliefs.
Whatever gets you through the night.
“I think we’ve all had weird dreams,” Lisa said. “Most people call ‘em nightmares.”
Brent flinched at her briskness, wondering why she was being so prickly. Though he shouldn’t have been surprised, she’d been the same way with Ed. Still, he didn’t want to see religious debate erupt in the car. He wanted to get to Black Mountain so that whatever was gonna happen could finally be over and done with.
Brent had been wondering what was next for some time. Ed seemed anxious about Black Mountain, but Brent figured that with all the chaos in the streets, he’d happily take his chances with another government entity, even if it were at odds with Black Island’s Guardsmen. Differences like these were usually political, and if Brent had one area where he was most confident, it was in his ability to navigate tricky political currents.