Sanguine Series (Book 1): The Fall

by Chris Laughton

  “What, exactly, has she said about the man?” Alexander turned back to Kai, trying to get any details that could help him use this vision.

  Kai answered without taking his eyes off the monitor. “Nothing really, she calls him ‘The Fever’ and talks about him ‘using his power to quell The Storm’, but otherwise, it’s mostly gibberish.”

  Alexander sighed. “When we’re done here, go over the audio again. Try to find me something.”

  Kai nodded, and Alexander turned his attention back to the monitors. It seemed like a very non-descript location and cabin that could be any age and difficult to place. What the hell else was there that he could use? He let his mind wander and just absorb the image: the stream, the snow, the wind blowing through the trees… he tensed slightly. Kai noticed the change. “What is it, sir?”

  Alexander now had the first legitimate shot at finding his target since he knew to be looking. “Kai, find out what kind of trees those are,” he said, pointing at the pines on the first monitor. Maya mixed up many things, but never locales. He continued, “I’ll have a little chat with Maya.”

  Kai nodded and stood up, fumbling with his keys to unlock her cell door. Alexander waited patiently, one hand clasping the other at his waist as Kai finished with the locks and lifted the security bar. The precautions were hardly necessary; Maya was not a terribly strong specimen, but Alexander took no chances.

  Kai swung the door open for him, but stayed in the Monitoring room to close it behind him. Alexander strode into Maya’s cell as confidently as he could, but if Maya registered it, she showed no reaction, not even opening her eyes. She still sat, on the edge of her bed, looking as calm as could be. She really would be quite beautiful, if she wasn’t so frustrating. She was taller than average, with the thickest black hair that even when it was pulled back in a ponytail made it almost halfway down her back. Her angular features were contrasted by soft, almond-brown eyes that could look quite sinister when she was the version of herself he preferred. But not now. They were just filled with hatred aimed at him.

  “You’ve been quite helpful this time, Maya,” Alexander broke the silence. “We know where to look now,” he bluffed. “Perhaps you’d like to narrow the search further? I could see what could be done about your…,” he made a point to cast his gaze around her small cell, “accommodations.”

  Maya sat as stoic as ever and something in Alexander snapped. All the frustration of so many fruitless visits came boiling to the surface. He had long suspected that she had all the information he needed to snatch up his prize, but used these meditation sessions to scrub it from her memory. Whenever the pendulum swung back to his preferred version of Maya being in control, she always said she couldn’t remember specifics of what she had seen. He was forced to try to interpret her cryptic visions off the monitors, while she sat, perfectly able to translate, refusing to help, ten feet away.

  He roared across the room, lifting her tiny frame by her neck and overhand throwing her across the room like a pitcher with a baseball. She slammed into the opposite wall and crumpled into the corner, collecting herself, but she stayed sitting. Alexander thought maybe the surprise nature of his attack on her had finally broken her spirit, but when she raised her eyes to meet his, there was still that damned defiance. Alexander worked to tame his temper. Her other side understood his frustration at her unobliging nature, but was slow to forgive physical injury that she also got to share the pain of, and Alexander kept her just fed enough to keep her alive, but not well enough for injuries to heal quickly.

  “You know this is pointless. You’ve seen it in your visions. There is no version of this that doesn’t end with he and I in the same room. Why stall it? Why inflict this pain on yourself?” he asked, speaking not just of her refusal to help, but also of her refusal to accept what she was.

  Maya smiled. “Because I can,” she said, in answer to both.

  3

  Mason Rayne looked as out of place in the back of this restaurant as a young person at a Bingo tournament. Clean-shaven, with a haircut that he never let get more than a week old and dressed in a finely tailored suit, he projected the image of someone with enough money to be in a look that never went out of style. In this case, it was purely pragmatic: the customers of the restaurant never confused him for a member of the staff, and he was left undisturbed. The downside was that it made the employees subconsciously nervous, and his whole purpose for being here was to get an accurate feel for the place, without any fear of his authority mucking up the employees’ performance.

  Before The Fall, corporations had started to focus on cutting waste, but this usually revolved around eliminating redundant workforce. The closest they got to examining the workplace itself was to install LED lights, or some other woefully inadequate, ten-years-too-late half-measure. After The Fall, reducing and eliminating waste had become a boom industry unto itself. Mason worked at the most prestigious firm for such consulting, and considered himself one of the best consultants at the firm. He credited this, in no small part, to his insistence on meeting his clients, in touring their operations, and establishing his recommendations, all in person instead of via video conference, otherwise known as ‘remoting in’. For one thing, it was difficult to get a strong enough signal to reliably remote in for as much time as he’d need, but for another, he found that clients prepared just a little too much for their video tours.

  This job was to optimize a popular restaurant that found a dwindling clientele made it necessary to cut costs elsewhere. In the United States, major cities like Seattle where he found himself now, retained - to varying degrees - the façade of what they had been pre-Fall, if perhaps in a bit more decline and with fewer people. It was a mask laid over the aging face of civilization that if you didn’t look too closely could be quite convincing, especially on the West Coast. Outside of the major cities, however, conditions varied wildly. Some areas maintained their rustic charm, but others had devolved into lawless territory with rumors of roaming nomads. They were nominally still a part of the U.S., and officially, the government maintained law and order throughout the country, but in reality, everyone knew there were areas to avoid.

  Where civilization still held sway, things had stagnated after The Fall, but living conditions were still generally high. Enough material goods had survived The Fall to allow the people still alive to scrounge and refurbish a fairly close facsimile of tech’s Golden Age. The unspoken truth was that eventually the functioning devices would run out, and as they lacked the means to produce more, a new, lower technological baseline would have to be established. For now, though, the population continued to shrink at a rate commensurate with the failure of the best devices, and so the impact of this dying tech could still be mostly hidden. Cracks were beginning to show, like seeing combustion-engine cars on the roads again, as even today’s meager manufacturing capabilities could handle their construction. Mason had still rented an electric car to drive to Seattle for this job, however, his hotel was close enough that he walked to this restaurant for his observations, and it sat unused in the hotel’s parking basement.

  By doing everything in person, Mason was able to actually observe the employees in the flesh and see all the practices and routines that made up their day. Remoting in wouldn’t have allowed him to read the order screens and see all the minute details that could be missed on even the highest resolution of screens still available. For now, he was watching one of the cooks prepare a meal, and he was fairly certain the man was doing it incorrectly.

  His focus on the cook meant he hadn’t noticed the commotion that seemed to be brewing in the lobby between an employee and a patron. Mason had already seen enough to craft his proposal from the back of the operation, so he decided to allow himself a bit of curiosity. As he moved to the kitchen entrance, he could see that even the customers sitting in the restaurant were watching whatever was going on in the waiting area, and once he was able to see the altercation, he could understand why. The patrons’ gilded tastes no
doubt made the homeless woman in the waiting area something of an oddity. They had far too much money to be able to tell that though her homelessness looked to have lasted for a while, she must have had places to stay until recently. Her hair was relatively clean, and there was no evidence of frostbite. Living on the streets appeared to be a relatively new situation for her, which Mason guessed was for a week at most. There were plenty of places to squat in Seattle these days, but it was still impressive that she’d made it this long.

  She was actually quite beautiful if you were imaginative enough to strip away whatever she’d been through since she’d been on the street. Her blonde hair framed her face quite nicely, even under the hood of the coat she wore. She glanced his way and he thought he saw a slight bit of interest in her eye, but she was far too involved in her argument with one of the restaurant’s security guards to pay him much attention.

  “Ma’am, am I going to have to call the police?” The guard was obviously nearing the end of his patience. Mason struggled to remember the man’s name. Something common like John or Jack, but as Mason’s reports never singled out employees by name, he hadn’t bothered to remember it.

  “I told you, I’m meeting someone here, and I’m certainly not going to wait outside in the cold.” She was telling the truth about the weather, at least. When Mason had arrived this morning, the temperatures had been hovering near zero and he doubted it had warmed up much. The seasons were so much more extreme and unpredictable these days than even just a few decades ago. Given her lack of experience at being a transient, she likely had just stepped inside to try to get out of the cold, but it was hardly a genius ruse she was trying to use. None of the restaurant’s regular patrons would’ve been caught dead even stepping over her on the street corner, let alone inviting her to dine with them. Of course, Mason wasn’t a regular patron…

  4

  Rebekah Liles was just being polite enough to prolong the argument. She’d already warmed up quite a bit and if this restaurant rent-a-cop would just let her hang out for five more minutes, she’d leave everyone be. Not like she wanted to be here, smelling the food as hungry as she was, but the lack of feeling in her fingers and toes was overriding her growling stomach. She had slipped in and stayed near the entrance, never approaching the metal detector and guard station. It was difficult to find places to warm up in, what with pretty much everything open to the public employing at least a few guards. Places like grocery stores and restaurants employed small armies to protect their precious food. Public security was the number one employer now, and it only made sense, since ‘criminal’ was the number one profession.

  It had taken a customer getting the guard’s attention and pointing her out, so she wasn’t sure what the big deal was if she stayed out of the way. She glanced at the guy’s name tag: Jim. An unassuming enough name for how much grief he was causing her now. She glanced towards the kitchen to see the small crowd she was drawing. Amongst the wait staff was a man sorely over-dressed to be working back there. Average height, but she could tell that under that expensive grey suit, he was carved out of oak. He was watching her with a pair of rather beautiful green eyes, but it was impossible to read his expression. A manager maybe? Jim was threatening to call the police on her, so she turned her attention back to him. She knew her time was almost up, but maybe she could still bargain. “Look, maybe I have my restaurants mixed up, so let’s say that if he’s not here in five minutes, I’ll leave. And until then, I’ll just be in the corner over there. You won’t even notice me.”

  “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. You’re going to have to leave now.” As Jim started to reach for her arm, the handsome man from the kitchen approached them, and Rebekah saw him check Jim’s name tag. Well if he didn’t know the staff’s names, he must not be a manager.

  “I’m sorry, Jim. She’s with me. Is it lunchtime already, dear?” He said the last part to Rebekah and gave her the slightest of winks before turning to look past Jim at the restaurant’s host. “Do you think there’s a table free for us?” If there was anyone more caught off guard by this than Rebekah, it was Jim.

  Jim stammered, “Sir, I was just about to call the police.” He was saying this even though he obviously knew it had no bearing on what the handsome man had asked, because he simply had nothing else to say and needed a moment to reorient himself.

  “Well now that would absolutely ruin my lunch plans.” The handsome man flashed Jim a disarming smile that had just the faintest trace of menace in it, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Tell you what, if she’s not up to your fine establishment’s dress code, we can just eat in the break room.”

  Jim’s career in security was trying to find an explanation for what was happening, but he had nothing. “Uh, no, no, of course not.”

  Now it was the host’s turn; Mason looked at him with eyebrows raised expectantly. “We’ll get a table ready right away.” He snapped at one of the gawking wait staff who took a moment to shake himself out of his trance and come up to talk to the host. While they were viewing the table map at the main kiosk, the handsome man flashed that smile of his Rebekah’s way with none of the malice this time. “Cold outside, isn’t it?” Rebekah was still in shock and didn’t say anything. Her instincts were telling her to run for the door. There was no way this man was as altruistic as he seemed, but her stomach rumbled again, and Rebekah decided it’s not like she had anywhere else to be; she would see how this played out.

  “Right this way, sir.” The waiter was adopting the tactic of pretending she didn’t exist and was looking only at the man. He led them to a table at the far end of the restaurant and luckily for everyone involved, there was nobody seated particularly near them. Mason took off his suit jacket and placed it over the back of the chair before pulling out her chair for her once he realized the waiter certainly wasn’t go to.

  Once they were seated, the handsome man checked the waiter’s name tag. Between not knowing the names and referring to it as ‘your’ establishment, he definitely wasn’t a manager. “Thank you, Aaron. Why don’t you bring us whatever you think is your signature appetizer?”

  “Of course, sir,” and with that the waiter eagerly retreated, although Rebekah noted that he didn’t hurry at all: a consummate professional. She went back to staring at the handsome man, and thinking this was an uncomfortable silence, but he didn’t seem to mind. He just arranged his napkin on his lap while humming something, seeming quite pleased with himself. When he finally looked up, he seemed surprised that Rebekah was watching him.

  “Aren’t you going to take your coat off? I’m Mason, by the way.” He extended his hand to her, but when she continued her shocked stare, he just shrugged and began looking around the table for a menu.

  Rebekah spoke the words without realizing it: “This isn’t ‘Pretty Woman’, you know.”

  This got Mason to smile. “Of course it isn’t. I’m much younger than Richard Gere was,” the joke didn’t land the way he wanted it to and he dropped his smile. “Look, I can assure you I’m not a threat to you. I didn’t really have a plan when I got us a table, and now my only plan is to eat lunch a little earlier than usual. If you’d care to join me, you’re more than welcome to.”

  Rebekah raised an eyebrow. “So will I be allowed to order something, or is this some new game of the rich where they just prefer a hungry audience at their meals?”

  Mason seemed hurt by the implication he would do that. “That would be fantastically cruel. No, we’ll eat lunch and I’ll pay, although to be honest, they may fear me enough to comp it.” He got the attention of their waiter and signaled him over. “Could we get a couple menus, please?”

  “Of course, sir.” The waiter was still pretending she didn’t exist when he left again.

  Rebekah’s curiosity was piqued. “So what are you? You’re not a manager; you don’t know any of their names. You’re not the owner; you don’t know the menu. You a government official or something?” The joke made Mason smile. Since The Fall, there’
s no way a government official would go anywhere without a cadre of bodyguards. They were so fantastically unpopular, that even with the full-time staff of henchmen the corporations provided, there were still routinely attempts on their life.

  “No, my firm was hired by this chain to help them identify inefficiency and develop a plan to eliminate it. The employees seem to be scared that I’ll identify them, but to be honest, if the solution was as simple as laying people off, companies have typically done it before calling us.” He leaned in like he was telling her a secret. “Don’t tell them that though, we might get a free lunch out of it.” When she smiled, he smiled bigger, pleased that he’d seemingly broken the ice. He leaned back in his chair. “So do you mind telling me who I have the pleasure of eating lunch with?”

  For all she knew the guy might still turn out to be an axe-murderer, but she didn’t see the harm in telling him her name. “Rebekah… with a k.”