All those hyphens.
She and her daughter somehow thought it was a source of pride to be a multi-hyphenate – poor, brown, unmarried, unfed, unable to care for the child brought into this world, and a “boyfriend” who was a worthless soul, weakened by a dependence on heroin that was nothing if not pathetic, a dependence that was a sign of weakness of mind, body, and spirit.
All’s the better that he’s dead.
Besides, I needed a wife and a child to look respectable.
And they would work just fine.
We both served a purpose to each other, and it was the furthest thing from love.
Love is a sign of weakness of mind, body, and spirit.
And so, it is that I have created this day for myself – the Emperor’s Ball – to celebrate all the wonderful things I am and all the wonderful things I will be – even though, during this Emperor’s Ball, it is the bastard daughter of the Puerto-Rican-from-the-Bronx that will be honored.
Anything to look respectable, both on my part and theirs.
And this is as good as it’s ever going to get for them.
They should be grateful.
Chapter Ten
Evanora
The blast was sudden.
All I remember was hearing a loud explosion and seeing a flash of white light.
Huge glass shards flying everywhere, with one missing my neck by mere millimeters. I still don’t know how I ducked.
The crunching of marble, and the columns crumbling, razed to dust in a matter of seconds.
My ears were ringing.
My vision was blurry.
People were screaming – but I couldn’t hear them clearly. It was almost like they were in an echo chamber – but I knew they were screaming, because I could hear the tinny, almost cartoonish sound, even though it sounded so far away.
I was okay – I knew that much. I pinched myself to make sure I was still alive and, content that I was, ran my fingers quickly over my body to make sure I didn’t lose any limbs or suffer any major lacerations.
When I assessed that I, in fact, was perfectly alright – just a little dirty, the dress torn, and the hair and makeup looking like Hell had a holiday and backed up to get it again, but perfectly alright, all things considered – I looked around me to try to find my mother and Tommy Sherman.
“Mama?” I thought, but I’m not sure if I said, “Mama! Tommy! Mama!”
I could feel myself fading in and out.
The next thing I remember is feeling large hands on my shoulders, and I was spun around to face the ceiling from the floor.
“Evie,” he seemed to say in slow motion.
I took a minute to re-focus my eyes, and when I saw for certain that I was face-to-face with Tommy – his mask long gone, his gorgeous Nordic befreckled face covered in soot, his copper hair whipping wildly behind him – I snapped out of it.
“Evie! Jesus Christ Evie, are you okay?” he screamed. I could hear him clearly now. I’m sure they could hear him on the Bowery.
I looked down. Where are my shoes? I thought to myself. “Yeah, I’m fine, Tommy – I’m fine,” I answered, in a daze, blinking my eyes slowly in the hopes I could focus them. Where are my shoes? I thought, again.
He grabbed my hands and helped me to my feet. “We gotta get out of here,” he said breathlessly. “Can you walk? Can you run? Is anything broken?”
“I’m fine, Tommy,” I mumbled, trying to look around but was too shocked to do so. “Where’s my Mama?”
He shook his head, grabbed my hand, and began to run. “I saw her a second ago, she’s fine,” he reassured me. “We gotta go, Evie!”
And even though I was hoping that we could see her in person, I knew that the urgency of the situation required me to get out of the way as quickly as possible.
Or maybe it was my state of shock that made it easier for me to just go along with everything.
More flashes of light, then we were outside. The cold air whipped through my body and immediately snapped me back into reality.
“Where are we?” I asked.
It was a rotunda – I knew that much. There was a tall, phallic monument before me, and I could make out the word Columbus on the side, though the rest of the statue was all the worse for wear. There was a stagnant pond near the monument that smelled positively fetid, and walking around us were the psied, zombified populace that seemed to not care, in the least, that the Annual Emperor’s Ball had ended so ignobly.
So, who the hell did this? I thought, fading slowly back into a dream-like state. Who, amongst all the somnambulant living dead, had the wherewithal to set off a bomb?
“Evie!” Tommy screamed in my face, apparently because he’d been talking to me and I didn’t answer because I was lost inside my head. “Do you know where we are?”
“Uh, yes. This is—” I paused for a second, still in a bit of a shock – “Columbus Circle? Or what used to be Columbus Circle – everything’s named after Emperor now…” My voice drifted off.
“Right,” Tommy said, grabbing my hand again and taking off on a sprint. I kept trying to refocus my eyes to see where we were going, but each time I thought I had a handle on where I was, the buildings went into a blur again.
Finally, in a desperate attempt to gain my footing, and to figure out where we were, I grabbed Tommy. “Tommy!” I shouted. “Where are we going?”
We stopped dead in our tracks, and I took a minute, with a clear mind, to assess the situation.
There was a busted glass building to my right, but through the grime and the broken glass, I could make out the big red letters T and S. Next to the building, there were risers, but certainly they’d seen better days – chipped, and stained with a substance that I hoped was nothing more than water (but probably was a lot more than water), there were more of the somnambulant living dead laying in between the cracks – some, staring off into the darkness; others, sleeping; and still others making disjointed grunting noises. I could tell, looking around me, that these buildings were once magnificent, but were now just hollowed out shells made of twisted steel and fading brick. Torn posters, litter, and rotting food completed the picture of pure misery before me – worlds away from the pure white, pristine life in my gilded Emperor’s Park high-rise that I was used to.
I was stunned. “What…Tommy, what is this place?”
Tommy exhaled and shook his head. “Behold, Times Square – the once-mighty epicenter of tourism and life in New York City. For a time, too, it was the home of countless pornography shops and 10-cent strip clubs and prostitution” – I met this statement with a skeptically raised eyebrow – “but I think that’s a myth. Never mentioned it in the history books.”
“Well it’s absolutely awful,” I said. “So how did it get like this? And why are we here?”
“This is what happens when the Cabal is let loose on a city,” said Tommy, almost spitting out the word Cabal as he continued. “You know what, yeah, this place wasn’t the best – there was so much wrong with it – but to turn a once-vibrant city into a wasteland because people aren’t perfectly in lock-step with your ridiculous rules is just a sin.” He shook his head, then looked around before settling his eyes on an opening I hadn’t noticed before. “Alright. We’re going in there.” He took my hand again and sprinted towards the opening.
“What’s in here?” I asked while running down the stairs next to him, taking care not to trip as we all but slid down the crumbling concrete.
“The Subway. Or what’s left of it,” he said, pointing ahead to a graffiti-laden, rusty train car – one lonely train car that looked like it hadn’t run in years. “See this? This used to be the conduit between all the different parts of the city.” He kicked the side of the car, which loosened one of the bi-fold doors that he then kicked all the way open. “Step inside.”
I shuddered. “I’m cold,” I said, looking around before gingerly taking a hard, faded orange colored seat.
But, I wasn’t cold -- I was scared out of
my mind. Terrified, to be honest. So many things were going through my mind at the same time. Where is my Mama? Where are we going? Who did this to us? Is everyone else who was at the party okay?
Tommy, ever the gentleman, took off his suit jacket – which sustained a sizable tear in the left shoulder because of the blast – and wrapped it around me before stepping into the car, kicking the bifold door shut, and racing to the front of the car into the control room. He ran his long fingers, slowly, over the various buttons before pushing the largest one, which lit up the entire switchboard and made the engine sputter, then roar, to life.
“Where are we going?” I asked as the train lurched forward and came to life before roaring down the tracks.
“Uprising Radio sent a transmission, and we’re going where they said,” he said.
“Uprising Radio?” I asked. The train roared louder.
“Long story,” he shouted back. “But we’re going to Bleecker Street, then down towards the Bowery. I’m dying to see what’s going on there.”
I grabbed onto the chair rail and closed my eyes. Faust’s old stomping grounds, I thought as I drifted off into a fitful sleep, suddenly paralyzed by fear and shock.
Chapter Eleven
Jamie
“Do you have anything to say before I mete out your punishment?” I growled. Once a Major General, always a Major General, I thought.
I was still grabbing onto Mathieu’s neck while banging his head up against the lamppost.
Mathieu began to wail openly. “Please, Major General, sir,” he cried. “Please, please, please reconsider. I won’t tell anyone I saw you, Major General Sir, I promise sir.”
But I was unmoved. “You want me to show you the same mercy you denied her” – I spat out the last word – “am I right?”
Mathieu was genuinely confused. “Who, sir? Who is “her,” Major General, sir? If I knew who she was—”
How could you forget? I thought to myself. Are they all the same to you?
“ANGELIQUE!” I roared. “ANGELIQUE DENHAM! MY FIANCEE!”
Basile pulled my shoulder back. “If you don’t calm the fuck down…”
Suddenly, I heard a loud mechanical roaring sound beneath my feet. My face changed into a million different colors at once, because it was a sound I hadn’t heard since my lead-singer-of-Faust days. “Is that…wait…nah…” I said out loud, trying to process what I was hearing.
Kanoa looked off to the right, then ran to a rusted metal grate beneath the building where he’d stood above the Cabal. Smoke was billowing out, and the sickly sulfuric smell permeated the air. “It smells absolutely awful,” he said, grimacing. “What is this?”
Instantly, I let go of Mathieu Sherman, who was just as instantly scooped up by Basile. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, motherfucker,” he growled at Sherman.
I put my head on the curb, and my hands on either side of me, hoping to once again hear the roar, and if only to make sure I’d heard it the first time. “It’s the Subway,” I said, softly. “Who the hell is riding the Subway?”
The Subway system had fallen into complete disrepair since Emperor had taken office. While the NYC transit system was never the picture of cleanliness, Emperor’s appointment had turned the Subway lines into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The psied populace often slept in the piss-and-graffiti stained hallways, catatonically lurching around, never searching for the sunlight or fresh air. The grime of the old city was caked onto everything – the tiles, the seats, the trains, the people – and the trains didn’t even run, mostly because there was no one to run them.
It was a far cry – and a long way away – from the efficiency of the pre-Emperor system of the Subway, and I often wondered if anyone remembered a time when passengers would complain about a three-minute arrival delay and a 25-cent fare hike…because, given the state of disrepair of this system, I’d take those days over these any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
I first realized that we were no longer alone when I heard the man we’d inadvertently saved in the abandoned building’s doorway. He was sitting on the weather-beaten concrete steps, crying hysterically. And as I tried to focus my eyes on him – in the hopes that I could see that, if nothing else, he was alright – I saw two shadowy figures run to him and kneel before him. The shorter one, a woman, was drying the tears that ran down his face with the sleeve of a jacket suit that looked to belong to the taller one, who was unquestionably a man, and most likely her boyfriend.
“What happened to you?” I could hear her ask, tenderly. “Why are you crying?”
The almost-victim let out a heaving sigh, then shuddered and tried to stop crying. “It’s them,” he said, gesturing in the general direction of the street. “The Cabal. They were going to psi me, but those men saved me.”
“Psi you?” the shadow of the man, who had a strange accent, asked. “Why? What did you do?”
He shuddered again. “I was drawing on the concrete,” he said, gesturing to the road beneath him. “Colored chalk drawings of a woman I keep seeing in my dreams.”
I looked to the concrete at the picture the young man drew. It was of a woman – blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, delicate features – ghostly, ethereal, wispy and willowy and almost cherubic in her appearance.
Angelique, I thought. The revenant, again. How are they seeing her in their artistic visions?
I looked at the three of them again. The woman looked at the drawing, then looked back at the man. “It’s beautiful,” she said, sincerely. “What men, though? What men saved you?”
The man in the doorway gestured towards me and my compatriots. The woman looked at him sympathetically as the man helped him to his feet.
The girl stepped forward to the man we’d rescued, who – it seemed – was much calmer now. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Chip,” he replied.
“Okay, Chip,” she said. “And are there more like you?”
“Absolutely,” Chip said. “They’re just in hiding. I made the mistake of being found. But they saved me. Those men” – he gestured to us again – “those men saved me.”
“Alright,” she said. “Go. Run. Go to the others like you and stay out of sight. Tell them what you saw here and get them organized. I have a feeling we’ll be needing you all soon.”
It was Kanoa who made his presence known to the couple first. As he stepped forward, he moved his sunglasses slightly down the bridge of his nose, then arched his left eyebrow curiously as he sized up the woman.
The woman, unafraid, stepped directly into his line of sight. She seemed to recognize him. “Hey. I’m Evanora. Do you remember me?” she said confidently in her little-girl-esque voice.
Evanora? I thought to myself. Wait a minute…
Kanoa took his sunglasses off, cocked his head to the side, then smiled in delighted surprise. “Oh shit!” he said excitedly. “Wait! You’re Emperor’s step-daughter! We were just talking about you – I was assigned as your detail for a time!”
Evanora smiled broadly. “Yes!” she said. “You were always so sweet to me. You used to keep a piece of Tonosama candy in your pocket for me, and every day, I would come up to you and say hello, and every day, you would have a new piece of candy for me to try. Supreme Allied Commander Shinomura!”
Kanoa, still smiling, nodded slightly. “Yep, that was me.” He looked up at her and the smile disappeared suddenly. “The emphasis, of course, on the word was. What brings you down here?”
“Explosion,” the man answered, stepping forward. “Hello, Supreme Allied—”
Kanoa held his hand up. “Please,” he interrupted. “My name is Kanoa.”
“Alright, Kanoa,” the man corrected himself, “well, I’m Tommy. Tommy Sherman. I was Evanora’s escort for this evening, at the Emperor’s Ball, and the next thing we know, there was an explosion…”
We all heard a choking sound at the same time, and turned to face Basile all but strangling the life out of Mathieu Sherman, who still somehow ha
d the wherewithal to sputter out, “Tommy…son…Tommy…”
And it was then that all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Oh no, I thought to myself, we really hit the jackpot tonight.
But much to my surprise, Tommy’s face contorted into one of pure disgust as he slowly approached his father. “As I live and breathe,” he snarled, nearly spitting out the words, “if it isn’t my pathetic excuse of a father, and someone with really broad shoulders doing me the favor of choking the life out of him…”
Basile turned to face Tommy, a look of pure shock on his face. “Wha—bruh!” He held Mathieu out to Tommy like he was holding onto a rag doll. “This thing right here – this is your daddy?”
Tommy shook his head. “Brings me no joy to say it,” he said, “but yes, unfortunately.”
As Tommy strode over to Basile to discuss the fate of his father – who, it didn’t seem, would make it through the night – I quickly slid over to Evanora and pulled her into the doorway of the building where Chip once stood.
“Did you – did you say your name was Evanora?” I asked, scanning her face frantically for something – anything – that would betray her heritage and reveal her to be who I thought she was.
“That’s right,” she said, “I’m Evanora.” She squared her shoulders again and looked at me, her face asking the question before her mouth could. “Who are you?”
Her eyes were a light amber – like a lioness. Her chocolate brown hair was mussed – though I could tell that, earlier in the evening, it was pulled and braided to perfection. She was slight of build, but tensile – like cold-rolled steel. But it was the almond shape of her eyes and the pixie shape of her nose that gave her heritage away – they were the eyes and nose I’d seen a million times before, over the course of ten years, long before she was even a glimmer in her father’s eye…
“What’s this I hear? You passed out in the delivery room, you pussy?” I said, slapping Jordan on his shoulder blade and laughing. We were outside Mount Sinai hospital, pacing furiously and smoking cigarettes like chimneys, with cars whizzing past us and rain misting above us, as we waited for Tom and Willie to emerge from the Subway. “All the piss and shit and cum and period blood that we’ve seen throughout our travels as the fuckin’ savages that we are, and here comes your baby girl and you pass the fuck out. I swear to God, man, you fuckin’ kill me with your ridiculousness…”
The Gathering: Book One of The Uprising Series Page 8