by Ryan Schow
“Yes,” he snapped, “Jules.”
“She’s not good for you,” I say, thinking of their future together.
“I know.”
I say nothing. We just stare at each other. Both of us right, both of us in agreement, both of us wanting to fight nevertheless.
“You know,” he finally says, “I hate what you’re becoming. You used to be so…not this. You once had a pulse. Once upon a time you knew how to crack jokes and laugh.”
He’s right. Maybe that’s why I’m so angry. Because I can’t not be angry and I’ve come face to face with who I become as a result of this anger, and my need to right so many wrongs.
God, why am I so freaking hostile?
He leaves me standing there looking like Dumped Darla. A total loser. Whatever. Back inside the cafeteria, I collect a tray of food, level several people with the blackest of stares, then take the food to Cameron. She needs someone. Not me. Not me at all, but someone. Which makes me reason that I’m better than no one.
At her room, I knock lightly on the door. She doesn’t answer. Big surprise. She’s still in bed, wanting to be asleep, but she’s not. She’s wide awake. Seething. I knock again and she tells me to go away. Using my mind, I unlock the door and open it.
When I walk in, she’s pissed to see me, and scared.
“I brought you something to eat,” I say, setting the tray on her desk right next to her bed.
“Get out.” There’s no conviction in her voice.
Moving back toward the door, I say, “Seriously, Cameron, eat it while it’s hot.”
“I’m not eating,” she says, not letting her guard down, but relaxing a little because she feels my intent is not to hurt her. What is my intent? I don’t know just yet. Perhaps I should figure that out. I guess I feel bad for retaliating with such animosity. Maybe I shouldn’t have scarred her body or had all of her hair pulled out in chunks. Gosh damn, her head looks dreadful!
Oh well, bygones…
“I’m serious, Raven. After what you did, whatever it is you are, I don’t want you in my room. And take the food with you. The smell is making me sick.”
“You don’t have the balls to starve yourself to death, or kill yourself, so just give us both a break and eat already.” To bystanders, it would appear I’m out of patience.
They wouldn’t be wrong.
Cameron crawls out from underneath the comforter, grabs a dinner roll and overhands it at me with everything she has. I can keep it from hitting me with my mind, but I don’t.
I deserve it. And she needs this.
So the roll blasts me in the cheek and blows apart. I simply stand there and take it. It doesn’t hurt. Pain no longer hurts. Still I suck at acting. That’s why even this pathetic feat of retaliation on Cameron’s part does little to placate her.
For a second I wonder if I should act hurt, but the moment passes.
Her body trembling with rage, on her knees on the edge of the bed closest to the desk, she grabs the bowl of soup and launches that at me, too. The side of the porcelain bowl line-drives me in the face, but most of the soup misses, spilling out over my shoulder. I feel the gash open on my forehead, feel it wanting to close. Mentally I hold it open a little longer, let it bleed.
Cameron needs her revenge.
She startles at the sight of all that blood, but then I let the wound close and it shuts right before her eyes. I reach for the napkin, mop up the blood and a wet smear of vegetable broth from my cheek. There are chunks of carrot and celery still in my hair, but I don’t care.
Vanity is so last month for me. I don’t even care about being wanted by boys anymore. My life is so much more than that.
“How did you do that?” she asks, dumbfounded.
“You mean how did I heal?” I ask. Cameron nods her head. “I just do.”
“You are a freak,” Cameron says before she realizes her error.
“If you think I’m a freak, you should look at the horror show that is your baldish head,” I say before I can get a hold of my tongue.
“Wow,” she says, her eyes narrowed, much more brazen than before.
“I’ll go. I should go.”
And I do. She says nothing. Then again, I don’t really expect her to. It’s not like you make a mess, then try to clean it up and expect the mess to thank you in the process.
2
So, I have a weakness. A lot of them actually. In this case, though, I mean a Jake Teller weakness. It’s sort of like heroin in that you think all you have to do is put your mind to quitting it, but you never really can because the drug is more powerful and addictive than you thought. That’s Jake. My ex-teacher, ex-lover; the guy who shot me in the face after I saved his beautiful butt in a bar fight. What the hell am I doing? It’s stupid, I know, but he will see me because I’m on his radar right now, for better or worse.
As I’m walking to his front door, my retarded girl brain is saying, it’s okay, his future wife gave him the hall pass to do me. And obviously we have some sort of a mutual attraction. Like that matters. He’s OLD, old AF. So naturally…
….I knock on the front door.
I feel him coming to the door, looking through the peep-hole (the fluttering in my chest starts), seeing me (hundreds of butterfly wings flapping in my chest become thousands) and going back in the other room (that motherf*cker!).
Okay, I admit, I didn’t see this coming. I sort of just stand there, mouth hanging wide open. I am this all powerful human-hybrid able to huff and puff and blow his gosh damn house down, so why do I feel like the rejected little girl again?
Because I am.
Leaving his house, doing seventy miles an hour in a twenty-five mile an hour zone, I’m thinking, at this point, if one more thing goes wrong, I won’t be surprised.
Swear to God, I won’t.
When the phone in my car rings, the Bluetooth sound of it ringing through the Audi’s speakers makes me jump and catch my breath. It’s Holland. I don’t even need to check my caller ID anymore. My head has caller ID.
“Yes?” I answer, extra polite because I don’t want him picking up hurt or anger in my voice. Which makes no sense. He’s the perfect person to dump my animosity into. Then again, he’s also at the lab trying to resuscitate my future self, and I’d kind of like to talk to her/me one day.
“Where are you?” he snaps. He’s back to being mad at me for smacking him with an invisible hand.
“What do you want, Holland?”
He takes a deep, calming breath, and it has me thinking I’m a perfect place for him to put his anger also. It’s kind of funny, really. But not.
“Just come down here already.”
I head to the underground lab where Holland says he can’t save the future me and suggests we incinerate her. That’s his big plan. Alice is standing by in her new sexy body with blank Barbie doll eyes and nothing to say. Future me, she’s in one of the glass canisters, just sunk to the bottom in the pink goop. Bits of flesh float off her capped stumps.
Turning away, she’s too hard to look at, and this effects me more than I realize because it’s not a “she” I’m looking at. That’s me.
Me!
My hands curl into fists. I’m starting to burn at the core. What festers inside of me like sadness and remorse, or fear perhaps for what lie ahead, it quickly sparks into the only emotion I seem to know how to process: anger.
“Would someone please give me some positive news!” I shout. But no one does. Holland just stares at me. Alice’s new body just stares at me. “Get her out of that f*cking tank!”
“Language,” Holland says.
Fuming, I tell him, “For a mass murderer and a sociopath, you sure have an interesting set of principles.” He doesn’t even move. Frustrated, I wave him off, then start pushing buttons on future me’s glass canister.
“Get away from there before you screw something up!” Holland says, pushing me aside.
He begins the draining process, then turns the canister horizontal and together we pull
my future self from the tank. She flops out flat on a gurney, silent, alive but zombified.
“If you have any flashes of genius,” Holland says, sarcastic, his tone diamond sharp, “I am all ears.” I cross my arms, stare at him. With that, he says, “Why don’t you just leave then. Come back later. Maybe bring me and April here coffee and a sandwich.”
“Get your own damn coffee,” I snarl, turning and leaving.
I can’t be there anymore, looking at me, looking at him, knowing what he is, what all of us are.
Rusted Plates and Barbed Wire
1
He looked at future Raven’s body, laid out naked on the table. What a mess, he thought. Vodka would not fix everything, but for Holland, it was destined to be a start. A chilled tumbler of Belvedere iced the hot edge of his emotions. The Polish Vodka wasn’t great, but it did have a natural vanilla flavor to it, and it was four times distilled, so for the most part, it did the job without being too offensive.
Tools got the ear plugs out of her, he thought. Vodka keeps me sane. Get the tools. No, wait. Tools might not do this job.
The rough cut circular plates capping her eye and the two stumps, they looked medieval. Like something beaten into shape with a blacksmith’s hammer. The one on her eye, he was pretty sure he could pry that awful looking thing off. After another drink. Which he had.
Wiping his eyes, blowing his nose and steadying himself, he wiggled his fingers under the metal plate just under her brow and against her cheekbone. One of the fingers cut open in the process. Still the plate didn’t budge. Whatever was under there, whatever was holding that thing in place, it wasn’t as easy to get out as the tentacles holding the “living earbuds” in place.
No, they weren’t easy at all.
Looking over at the mechanically living earbuds, sitting in the glass jar, he hypothesized about the metal plates. Wondered if there was something unusual about them as well. Something unusual or futuristic. Which was to say, something he couldn’t figure out.
He suckled his cut finger, tasting blood as it healed itself.
When he was healed, he squished his fingers under the plate again, used a makeshift wedge (a pair of needle nosed pliers jammed against her face and under the plate) to pry it up, then he found it was connected to a twist of wire, and…ouch, shit…barbs?
Is that…barbed wire?
Gripping the metal disc with his hand, he gave a righteous tug and the barbed wire pulled a half inch through an old piece of cracked eggshell eyeball. What he noticed, however, mortified him. The barbed wire, when he pulled it, the plates on her hacked off arm and hacked off leg, they snugged hard against the skin.
Impossible! he thought. How were they all connected?
There were no slots on the outside of the plates, no weld spots, no screws to tell him how they were all connected. He scratched his head, pondered the equation without any kind of satisfaction.
This girl, she was an unsolved mystery. A riddle without an answer. One thing he knew for sure, this contraption, it was used to stop her from regenerating her limbs.
So her captors knew of her regenerative abilities…interesting.
But these things, my God, talk about horrific! And murderously brilliant! Perfect, really, if you thought about it. His admiration waned, however, at the realization that he didn’t have the tools for the job.
Holland drove fifteen minutes down into Roseville, went shopping at Home Depot, then returned within the hour with a small box of razor blades, a pair of red handled Knipex brand barbed wire cutters and some vice-grip pliers.
Using the razor blades, he see-sawed off the skin smooshed and gnarled against the rusty plates, wiped away the seeping blood, then dug his fingers into the fleshy, sopping wet soup of gore and got a hold of the plate connected to the stump that once held a leg. When he yanked up on it, bits and pieces of attached skin came up, opening several tiny wounds while at the same time exposing the barbed wire strand coming from the center of the plate. The barbs brought with them hunks and pieces of skin, the same as a triple barbed hook might do when dragged from the tight belly of a caught fish.
He’d seen things a million times worse.
Working the cutters in between the skin and the rusted plate, he muscled the cut. It wasn’t easy, but the barbed wire jumped back into the nasty, open-wound mess of her leg. Looking at the back of the metal plate, he saw the barbed wire strand had been welded to the plate from the inside.
What the hell? How was that even possible?
Baffled, his brain reaching for answers, he found he needed more information to solve this crime. He went to work on the circular arm plate next, not having to pull as hard to get the cutters in place. The barbed wire now had give to it.
Even with one end of the barbed wire cut, he was no closer to understanding the mystery of this torturous contraption. How did they all connect, and what was the state of her organs if the barbed wire was, in fact, connected? After some tinkering, a bit of trial and error, and lots of yanking, he confirmed the strands were indeed connected. Which meant when he freed the plates, to get the wire out, he would have to hook and drag the barbed strands out through the center of her, which would cause unimaginable amounts of damage to her insides.
There was no scientific precision required; only the stomach to do the job. Which was fine with him. He wasn’t called The Angel of Death because he was a pussy with a weak stomach and a penchant for sympathy. Inflicting pain was his favorite pastime.
The problem was, if this version of Raven didn’t heal right, she might bleed out and die. Then again, if she hadn’t died from the contraption being put on, it would stand to reason she should not die from having it removed either. The only thing he could do was take off the eye plate, then call Raven and let her decide what to do next.
The Motherf*cking Devil
1
Holland called when I was getting myself some coffee. A Salted Carmel Frappuccino from Starbuck’s. He asked what I was doing and I was like, “Not getting you coffee. And not getting you a sandwich.”
“Whatever,” he said. “Just come over. I got the plates off her arm, her leg and her eye.”
“Is she okay?” I ask, forgetting the breezy mood I managed to find in my blended drink.
“It’s not pretty, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“God, you’re such an asshole,” I say, hanging up on him. Ten minutes later, after roaring up highway 80 in the RS5, I arrive. My future body is laid out on the gurney. There isn’t much blood, though, so that’s a plus.
He tells me my options, says he isn’t deciding what to do with the barbed wire since he’s tired of being blamed for all the bad shit in my life, and I’m like, “I guess you’re learning.”
“Whatever,” he says. I sometimes forget he’s so freaking old, and me—I’m barely even on this earth compared to him.
Softening my tone, dialing back the sarcasm, I say, “Give me a minute with her, please.” To my dismay, he fails to oblige me.
Closing my eyes, psychically feeling my way through her broken body (my broken body), I can’t help remembering the creatures who did this to me/her: the gladiator looking cretins living hundreds of years away, in the future. With a cold shiver, I remember having my arm and leg hacked off, how it felt having something puncture my eyeball. They didn’t thread anything through me. It self threaded. And from where did these barbed wire strands emerge?
Who knows.
This device, these rusted metal plates Holland managed to pry off me, they defy all manner of physics and logic. They’re impossible. Then again, I was dead in outer space for centuries, until I was brought back to earth, to a floating city named California. For some people, that might seem impossible, too.
After spending time inside her memories, I realize my present moment, to her, is the dark ages. The things I don’t know about the technology of the future are untold, so really, when it comes to this grotesque, barbed wire contraption, I’ll never get any satisfactory
answers.
“You need to leave me with her,” I tell Holland. “Seriously.”
“What are you going to do?” I simply shrug my shoulders, my eyes still roving over the details of her/my body. “Let me guess. Kill everyone involved?”
I’m not sure if he’s being caustic or if he’s on to something.
“I’m not killing anymore.” I’m resolute on that point. At least, the way I’m feeling standing beside my future self, that’s what I’m wanting.
He laughs, then says, “Yeah, right.” He then looks at future Alice (who has entered the room without a sound) and gives a nod toward the door. She disappears as quietly as she arrived. Holland, however, remains ever present with no intention of leaving.
“What, Enzo?” I bark. “What in God’s good name do you want?” His eyes say I’m not really getting to him anymore. My overt teenage angst. My aggression.
“You know,” he replies, like I’m not rattling him with my outbursts and my blasphemy, “I felt that way too once, but I realized that by not killing people, I was letting lie dormant an incredible talent. Not to put too fine a point to it, but there’s a splendor in death. Mass murder is a song that never ends, a symphony of power and destruction, the dichotomy of brilliance and absolute darkness. To stop killing is akin to asking a painter to toss his brush, or a writer to abandon his pen. You are a proficient assassin, Raven. And I am a proficient killer. Even though we do not care for each other, we provide balance in this world. And perhaps the next.”
“I kill you in the future,” I tell him, deadpan.
“You said as much already.”
“But you survive. Just like I killed me, too, and I survived.”
“People like us will always survive, my dear. We are a necessary evil.”
“I could take your head right now. Just lop it clean off, stuff it in a gunny sack and barbeque it a thousand miles from here. At any point I could do that, and our future would be brighter because that is a death you will never, ever come back from.”