by Alan Marble
Jonah crossed into the living room wearily, flopping onto the futon with another heavy sigh. His video game controller was conveniently close, as was the remote to the television, but none of it interested him this night. Lying back on the futon, his legs dangling over the wooden arm rest, he gazed up at a ceiling fan that spun in lazy circles overhead, its long, fleeting shadows dancing across the ceiling, stretching off into the corners of the room.
He longed for someone to talk to, but it was already well past ten, and for all the desire he had for human contact, he didn’t know who he could bother with something like this. Sheer terror and disgust at witnessing the murder of his friend had permeated his mind for hours now, the incredulity and irritation at having been implicated by the police detective only adding an unpleasant layer on top of it all. He closed his eyes for a moment, then, fearing what he might see in the darkness if he let his mind wander too long, he opened them again to stare up at the lazy turn of the fan.
“What a day,” he commented to the emptiness.
Before he had time to get too comfortable, he extricated himself from the futon and shuffled his way into the kitchen, pulling the door to the fridge open. He had almost forgotten how empty it was: a carton of orange juice, a pizza box that probably didn’t have anything worth eating in it, a few sodas and beers as well as his hard boiled eggs. It was the beer that he was looking for, though, pulling it out and twisting the cap off. He threw his head back and guzzled down as much as he could before his throat began to burn, then pulled the bottle away. Breathing out a drawn-out “Ahhhh,” he kicked the door to the fridge shut again, forcing the whole thing to rattle a little, before shuffling his way back to the living room and sinking back into the futon.
In an almost automated movement he reached for the remote, flicking the television on and letting the flickering dance of the image fill his eyes. His thumb found the channel up button, and he began to press it, again and again and again. News, late night talk shows, sports channels, classic movies and even weird, twisted cartoons that were obviously not meant for children. None of it really registered as more than blurred movement and white noise in his mind, though, and after a few minutes of robotic cycling through the channels he set the remote off to the side and left it where it was, an infomercial with a grandmotherly looking lady hawking some wonderful new kitchen gadget. Jonah didn’t care what it was; the noise and dancing pixels in front of his eyes were a welcome break from his memory of the day. Lifting the beer bottle to his lips, he leaned it back and gulped down another swig of the beer without even tasting it.
It didn’t take too long for him to kill of the bulk of his drink, only a few rounds of “But wait, there’s more” echoing in his ears, the grandmotherly woman on the screen keeping track of time in measured little product pitches. The flashing 1-800 number in front of his eyes had just about burned its way into his short term memory when a sound like a knock on the door broke his little reverie, every bit as effective as an explosion in the otherwise quiet of the night, and leaving him feeling every bit as shaken. His heart suddenly felt like it was beating a hundred miles an hour right in the middle of his throat, and Jonah whipped his head around to stare at the door incredulously.
No one could be knocking on his door at this time of the night, he reasoned to himself, and continued to stare at the door as if it might divulge some kind of secret if he looked hard enough. Another moment passed, and there were no further knocks on the door, no sounds in his apartment other than the enthusiastic sales pitch on the television. Nearly convinced that he had merely imagined the sound, Jonah still felt a weird compulsion to make absolutely sure, querying the door with a meek “Hello?”
The words had barely left his lips when the door abruptly caved inward, literally flying off its hinges and crashing into the apartment, careening off the opposite wall in a shower of drywall and splinters. Instantly the same panic that he had felt earlier in the day shot through his veins, calling up the latter half of the “fight or flight” response, but sitting on the futon as he was he had nowhere to go. Arms flailing, he tipped backward over the arm of the futon and landed unceremoniously on his back, kicking his feet and pulling himself back up to standing, turning to stare at the gaping hole where the door to his apartment had once stood.
In its place stood the same black-eyed mountain of a man who had broken Sam’s neck. With nothing between them, he got a better look at the man, a better feel for just how wrong he seemed. Eyes that were set too closely together, thick eyebrows that bled together over a wide, bony nose, ears that looked misshapen and folded in strange little points. It all looked like some kind of absurd disguise that was poorly fashioned and fit even worse.
“Oh shit,” Jonah breathed, eyes widening in panic as he took a few unsteady steps backward. His mind instantly recalled the fact that, instead of being in a strip mall store with a back exit, he was in his third story apartment. The only exit was the doorway in front of him, and he certainly wasn’t going to be making a break for it now. “Shit … shit shit shit …”
With the same lack of emotion and the same strange accent as before, the man spoke up. “Where is it?”
Jonah waved his arms in front of him, still clutching the beer bottle in one hand and sloshing what was left of it all over the ground in front of him. “Look, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about …”
Staring him down with that inky gaze, the intruder took a few purposeful strides forward, forcing Jonah to retreat instinctively. “The token. Give me the token.”
“Token?” His mind racing, still trying to think of some escape, Jonah thought of the fire escape through his bedroom window. This man could move, though, and there probably was no way he was going to make it down the fire escape without being caught. He was also fresh out of any kind of weaponry to defend himself with, save the beer bottle, and he found himself brandishing it as if it were some kind of knife. “I don’t know what the hell you mean! Just get the hell out of here, man!”
The man’s fists tightened with an audible crack, a grimace full of crooked and twisted teeth the only hint of an emotional reaction that he betrayed as he took another step forward. “Give me the token and I will leave.”
“Look, I don’t have any freakin' token,” Jonah began, feeling sweat begin to drip down his brows, getting into the corners of his eyes and making them sting, when he remembered the purchase he had made. “Wait … the coin? The coin with the dragon on it?”
“Give it to me,” the intruder demanded, a meaty palm held open in Jonah’s direction.
The last time he had tried to find the coin, he had come up empty. “Look, I don’t have it. It fell out of my pocket, back at the store, when I was getting my keys … I don’t have it but I bet it’s still there, you just have to go back and get it, I could show you where I dropped it …”
The man paused, his inky black eyes blinking once. “Then you are of no use to me.”
Jonah remembered with unwanted clarity what had happened the last time the sinister man had uttered that statement. In a weak effort to defend himself he lobbed the empty beer bottle, watching it bounce off the man’s forehead without so much as leaving a mark. The man didn’t even flinch, and Jonah could do little more than throw his arms up in front of him. So this is how it ends, he thought to himself, morosely.
Before he felt those meaty hands closing around his throat, however, another loud sound broke the quiet of the night, a sharp crack of shattering glass. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the main window of his apartment exploding inward, the blinds fraying and scattering in a shower of glass shards and an unidentifiable dark blur that streaked right across the room, smashing his television into pieces, before crashing head-on into the bulk of the intruder. The sinister man showed a brief flash of emotion - confusion - before he was bowled down to the ground, caught up in that blur, then crashing into the wall with an enormous thud that shook his framed posters right off the walls.
The insis
tent tinkling of little glass shards bouncing against each other, bouncing against the remnants of his television, filled his ears like a weird sort of rain shower, an otherworldly cloudburst that was just part and parcel to the continued shattering of his day. Whatever it was that had crashed through his window had been enough to send the hefty intruder crashing against the far wall with enough force to rend the drywall asunder and leave a yawning hole, where he could see his bedroom through the little white dust that had been kicked up. What emerged from that dusty hole, however, was the last thing he could have imagined.
It was a woman. A young woman, it seemed, about his age; fiery red hair, piercing green eyes, attractive in a strangely subdued manner. She was dressed simply, a loose flannel shirt and blue jeans that had been scraped and cut up by glass, covered in a fine layer of plaster dust that was still settling from the hole in the wall, little bits of drywall caught in her hair giving her a kind of wild look. Her gaze fixed directly on him, and she barked out a single, simple command: “Run!”
Jonah was in shock, and his feet felt like they were made of lead. Rather than run, rather than move at all, he simply stared, slack-jawed, at this strange woman who had materialized out of a blur that had come crashing in through his window with enough force to knock down a small mountain of a man.
“Is there something wrong with you? Run, goddammit, it’s only stunned,” she repeated, stepping forward and grasping him by the wrist with surprising strength, shoving him in the direction of the exit. This time he complied, if in something of a daze, his feet first shuffling beneath him, picking up speed as she pushed and shoved at him from behind, repeating the command to run with increasing urgency each time.
Jogging out the door and down two flights of steps, Jonah blinked into the cool night air, stopping when he got to the bottom of the steps and turning to look at the woman in a state of confusion. Shooting him an irritated look, she ran past him and grabbed him by the sleeve, tugging him along. “Did I tell you to stop running?”
He wanted to protest, wanted to cry out, wanted some kind of explanation, but the sound of heavy footfalls beginning to crash down the stairwell erased any sense of hesitation he might have. Picking up the pace, he followed the strange redheaded woman across the street. Her destination seemed to be a blue pickup truck that he did not recognize. Without any hesitation, she made her way to the driver’s side and threw the door open, jumping into the cab in a fluid motion. Jonah could only stand and stare in confusion. “What … what the hell is going on?”
“You’re getting in my truck,” she shouted, reaching over and kicking the passenger door open, turning around to glare at him with an angry urgency. “Now.”
Blinking in confusion, he rounded the front of the truck and hopped in the opened door. The woman hardly waited for him to close the door before she fired the engine up and threw the vehicle in gear, mashing the gas and sending it screeching down the road. With a yelp of fear and surprise, Jonah swung his arms around wildly, grabbing hold of the safety belt and tugging it around his waist, fumbling to get it latched, when he heard her voice call out firmly once again. “Hold on tight!”
The truck lurched suddenly to the left, mashing him tightly against the door, with enough force that his head dangled out the window and he found himself screaming into the night. A flash of green suddenly caught his attention, as he realized a motorcycle - his motorcycle - was right there next to the truck. No one was riding it, however - the machine had simply fallen right out of the sky, crashing into the pavement in the exact spot where the truck had been only seconds before. With an angry crunch and squeal of metal, he watched as the bike’s frame simply snapped in half, sending the front end careening off to the side, little bits of green plastic fairing and mechanical components shearing off, scattering across the road before the body of the bike came to a rest.
Whipping his head back, he saw the silhouette of the sinister intruder, standing right in the spot where his motorcycle had been parked, a menacing shadow that shrunk into the night as the truck sped on down the road. “My bike … what the hell happened …”
“Be glad it was just your motorcycle,” the woman said, a little flippantly. “Would have been much worse if it was your ass he was lobbing around.”
THREE
“Wait … lobbed … what are you talking about? You trying to tell me that guy picked my motorcycle up and threw it at us?”
Again her response was oddly flippant. “Sorry to be the one to break it to you. Hope you have good insurance.”
Jonah could hardly believe that he had just witnessed his bike falling right out of the sky, but now she was trying to insist that a man had simply picked it up and thrown it at them, dozens of yards away. He wanted to comment on how incredibly insane that kind of statement was, when his mind suddenly reeled with the events that had unfolded in the last ten minutes. The strange murderer showing up at his door, ripping it off its hinges and demanding a coin from him. The strange blur that had come smashing through his window, which had, apparently, turned out to be a relatively petite woman his own age. All of this, on top of having been witness to the murder of his friend right in his own coin shop.
He turned to look at the woman again, his jaw slack, his mind already hurting with the unlikely string of events. In spite of the bits of drywall that still clung to her hair, in spite of the run, her face was strikingly serene - the look on her face almost slightly amused - as she guided the truck down the quiet nighttime streets. His jaw flexed, a hundred questions suddenly rushing to the fore, demanding to be asked, but instead he started out with the one that seemed to be the simplest. “Who are you?”
“Rebekah. You can call me Rebekah, though,” she said, turning to look at him briefly with a playful twinkle in her eye.
The playful demeanor did not sit well with Jonah, particularly not in light of what had just happened. “No, not your name. I mean, who are you? What are you doing here?”
Though she did not turn to look at him this time, her gaze remaining fixed on the road in front of her, she flashed a rather jovial little grin. “Saving your ass. You have a problem with that?”
“Have a problem with that?” Jonah felt himself starting to shake and sputter, the same angry reaction he had felt earlier in the police station, when he had been accused of being a murderer. “Look, I don’t know what the hell you think is so funny, but do you have any idea what kind of a day I’ve had?”
“I know exactly what kind of a day you’ve had.” The tone of her voice had taken on a sharp, surprisingly serious edge, a kind of unspoken rebuke that made Jonah retreat back into his seat some.
It was enough to douse some of the fire that had been building in his chest. “Then what the hell is so funny?”
“Never said anything was funny, Jonah. Just happy to be alive.”
The absurdity of the statement caught him off guard, and for a moment he simply stared at her in silence. “Wait … you know my name?”
She paused before replying, stopping at an intersection and looking both ways, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “Of course I know your name. It’s my job.” She reached in to flip on the stereo, some contemporary rock station cutting through the silence. “Makes it a little hard to save your ass if I don’t know anything about you.”
Jonah huffed in irritation. “I want to know what’s going on here.”
“Long version, or short version?”
The hundred questions still bouncing around in his head were once again clamoring for their moment, but for now he held them in check. “Let’s start with the short version.”
“All right. Your friend back there, the big guy, he’s after one thing, and one thing only. That token that you picked up at the coin shop. He’ll do anything he has to in order to get his hands on the thing, right up to and including murder as you unfortunately know all too well.” She paused briefly to take a breath, her head bobbing lightly in time to the music. “That means, as long as you’ve got th
e thing, you’re in danger. My job is to get you safely out of that danger.”
“Joke’s on him then. I don’t have the thing anymore,” Jonah complained, rather bitterly.
Rebekah, as she had called herself, simply laughed out loud at that. “Oh, sure you do. It’s gonna take a lot more than that bonehead back there to get it away from you, too.”
“I do not,” he insisted, stuffing his hand into his pocket. To his surprise, and his chagrin, his fingers immediately brushed against a coin that felt just about the right size. Pulling it out, he laid it flat in his palm, the shifting glare of the streetlights as they passed illuminating the stylized dragon on one side. “What … the hell?”
“It’s yours, Jonah. That’s what it was made for. Now that you’ve got it, it’s yours to keep.”
With a grunt, he leaned over to throw the coin right out the window. “Well if this is all he wants …”
“Stop,” she interrupted, her voice suddenly firm and almost dangerous, enough to freeze him in his place. He turned to look at her again with a startled glance, but she did not look at him, her eyes still fixed on the road. “That would be a bad idea. Besides, as far as he’s concerned, you still have the thing. He’s going to be looking for you.”
“Shit,” he cursed, under his breath, feeling around in his pockets again. “I need to call the cops … they need to know about this … and I left my damned cell phone back in the apartment …”
“The cops?” She laughed, again, shaking her head. “You think the cops are gonna do something to protect you? They sure as hell weren’t doing anything to keep him from finding you tonight. Look, my job is to keep you safe. Stick with me, you’ll be safe enough.”
The absurdity of the whole thing was beginning to creep up on him. Jonah grimaced as he shoved the coin back in his pocket, glancing up to see that Rebekah was turning the truck onto an on-ramp, getting on the Turnpike, the big green sign overhead proclaiming it was the way north, toward Orlando. “Where the hell are you taking me?”