The woman squirms uncomfortably, so human.
“To be human is many things. If you expected a feel good experience, find your answers elsewhere.”
She turns away, pouts, then turns back to me. Taking in her faux paramour.
“I live life in the margins, traipsing with wolves. My experiences of being human bring nothing but pain. I would rather not think about being human. I would rather not even be human. I would rather not share this with anybody. Why would you want this?” But this guise is what I have. Much as you do, whatever you are, whatever mask you deem appropriate to gather what you need.”
Her transparent face, gnarled and throbbing, is a lattice-work of veins protruding, angry. Her skull is decorated with symbols that wander aimlessly beneath her skin.
If she were human, I’d expect tears would be shed. She simply vibrates, grows blurry again.
“Now where’s my fucking rig?”
Niceties no longer needed, I’ve discarded them with the final dregs of interest I have for this woman; this thing. I no longer aspire to anything but success in my quest.
She points to the dresser. I yank the top drawer open and there, resting somberly next to a Gideon’s bible, my goal.
Impatient and ready I prepare the syringe.
“If this is what it means to be human, why would anyone make that choice?”
Mind reader. Or just paying attention. Finally. She perplexes me, this one.
“Where I come from, it’s not a choice. It’s a curse. One I hope to remove.”
I do not look deep into the tan liquid—of course, tan; no question, tan—as I thrust the needle into my neck and my eyes swell with tears. I sense the thick slither of worms within me…everywhere.
Screaming, I drop to my knees, the floor, drool slowly sliding from my lips, a string of it filled with worms. Worms that elude gravity and climb back up the wet rope. I close my mouth but they seek passage and success, filling my nostrils. I glance up, the room shaking, vibrating much as the woman was, but she’s the only thing not vibrating now. She is still and stiff, this room an extension of her frustration, a psychic tsunami.
She smiles, a face like nothing human.
She’s learned well. The value of distancing oneself from others. From feelings, emotional attachments. Humanity in a handbasket. Heading for Hell. The usual handbasket path.
Hang on…
Chapter 12 Chernobyl
Rudolf Chernobyl was irritated to no end. He made Interstate 880 and drove up and down the stretch between Oakland and San Jose for hours, with no destination at hand, perplexed by the loss of contact with Marlon Teagarden. Failure was rare for him. The crushed tooth, a cog slipping out of gear in his inner GPS, was a first. He wondered if this was evidence of his skills depleting, such an analytically human conceit. This thought disgusted him as much as the breakdown. He was a hamster spinning on a wheel, and this much was something he cared not the least for.
He eventually rented a hotel room just to the south of Oakland, a Motel 7 in Hayward. He wasn’t ready to leave yet. After all, what if the radar within decided to slip its cogs back into place? Unable to sleep, he seethed as he flipped channels, not watching anything.
He knew what he was, how he worked. He knew what it took to fulfill each mission he was sent on. Though he detested mixing with those driven by their addictions, addled by a lack of willpower, struggling in the quicksand of futility, barely able to stave off death, he knew what it took. It wasn’t just the class on par with flies who dined on shit who aggravated him as sandpaper to an eyeball. The upper class with their technological gadgets and frivolous follies wasting time and money on drugs and decadence, settled into the same pool of genetic muck. He understood it was all a part of the deal, of what this planet and its absent gods catered to. They were the grit he cleaned from beneath his well-manicured nails. But they also satiated his main lust, a love of art. As well as the other two heads of the Cerberus within: an opportunity to indulge in sadistic mayhem and the ability to mete out death.
The following morning, still awake, still seething, to the point he decided it best to reconvene to his headquarters, his private castle within the mountains east of Flagstaff, Arizona, his internal GPS blipped back to life with information he found impressive, thought-provoking.
Marlon Teagarden was in Roswell, New Mexico many hundreds of miles from Oakland, California, where he had last sensed his presence. This was not as far-fetched as one might assume, but it still surprised him. Probably as much because his radar blipped back to life as anything else. Was it trustworthy?
Had the intermission been filled with Marlon getting on a plane and hastily making his way to Roswell? Had the lost time been triggered by something in that dreary apartment complex that deeper investigation would have revealed? This thought stirred a rage that caused him to crush the remote control in his fingers into melted plastic. He remembered something Alice had said as well, about Marlon disappearing because of a drug, a leg of the Centipede.
Rudolf rented a private plane, paid an exorbitant sum of money to make it to Roswell before Marlon Teagarden had a chance to evade his capture. The blip still strong, he paced the perimeter of the parking lot, a lion in a cage, before centering on room ten in the Crash Land-Inn motel. The sun was high in the sky, the heat, stifling. The motel was a bleak gray welcome mat on the outer edge of town. But the homing device that was Marlon’s tooth had awakened with vengeance.
He was here. He had to be here.
As Rudolf raised his fist to the door, the blipping, which had ratcheted up to frantic rate, a drum solo worthy of Neil Peart of Rush, one of the few bands that brought pleasure to his ears—most music sounded like rubber squishing animals, roadkill serenades—ceased. Sudden and complete. Again. It was gone. He knew Marlon was gone as well.
Or was he? Was it simply a glitch in his machinery?
He gritted his teeth until he heard them crack. He pulled back and licked the teeth. They were as good as new again.
He knocked.
A female voice said, “Go away.” She was sobbing.
He knocked again.
“Damn it. I said go away!” Adamant, the anger snuffed out her sobbing , and firmed the quiver in her voice.
Rudolf was also adamant, with frustration riding shotgun.
“I need to know if Marlon Teagarden is still here.” Still. Already banking on failure.
“You just missed that jerk,” the woman said.
“Let me in. I need to know where he’s gone.”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Go away.”
They’d reached a stalemate.
Rudolf Chernobyl was not good at stalemates.
He glanced both ways: one way a smattering of cars in the motel parking lot; the other a man getting a soda at a vending machine. He glanced up at the sun, drawing energy, his white suit feeding on the heat. With a concentrated push, the screws holding the lock in place popped out of the inside of the door, as well as the hinges, tearing at the frame. He gripped the sides of the door, finishing his grand entrance as the chains snapped in half.
“Hey,” the woman said, leaping off the bed, her tiny, twitchy hands clenched. She was adorned in white panties stained wet at her crotch, and an off-white, unbuttoned blouse. The lower half of the blouse was crinkled, as if she’d been wearing it tied below her moderate bosom.
Rudolf set the door back in its shattered frame and scooted a large pastel yellow chair in front of it.
Tribal tattoos laddered up her arms, across her torso. Her legs were adorned in runes. Her figure was taut, fit, yet her face seemed a monument to indecision. Rudolf took this in and said, “He was just here? I didn’t see him leave, and I’ve been outside, in this vicinity, the last few minutes. I would have seen him leave.”
She laughed, slumped to the bed.
“He didn’t leave by the usual means.”
“He left by a magic doorway?”
The woman’s undefined face seemed to morph, or
at least the shadows that lived there dug deep into unseen crevasses did.
Rudolf was intrigued, watching her emotions play out like this.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I’m also going to Ride the Centipede—”
“Ha! You’ve no clue as to what Riding the Centipede entails, do you, mister? One at a time, get in line.” She seemed satisfied with her brash assumption, propped up a pillow behind her and lit a cigarette as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Even though a strange man had broken down the door to enter her motel room. It was as if she did not care. Her life could be in peril—and was, truthfully—yet she was more intent on filling her lungs with smoke than realizing the full scope of what was in motion here.
Rudolf found this most displeasing, but had to rummage for more information.
“I’m…next in line,” he said, wrangling for specifics.
“No, uh-huh. One a year, from what I was told. Marlon’s it. I was tagged to get him along his way, get what I wanted from him. He didn’t give me a very good spin on what I wanted.”
“My name is Marlon. That other fella…he must have been an imposter. You know how…rare it is to Ride the Centipede, he must have heard I was on my way and…” Though his words fizzled as bubbles escaping atop a glass of champagne, the shadows in the woman’s face brightened, the lines became less harsh, but no less indistinct.
“You’re Marlon Teagarden? You’re Marlon Teagarden?” She sat up taller, shaking her head. The face seemed a blur.
“That other guy. That jerk…” She pounded the bed with her tiny fist. Smoke cloaked her features. The shadows and blur, buried behind a thin fog. “No wonder he had no clue as to how to fulfill my request.”
Rudolf slowly crossed the room to the bed, moved her legs gently, and sat down.
“I guess we were both duped, eh?” she said, her face no clearer up close. She was the epitome of average, nothing stood out, no real impressions to be gleaned.
“So the drug is what opens doorways?”
“Yeah, you know that. Isn’t that how you got here?” she said.
Rudolf noticed as she scrunched her legs to her chest as if she finally felt vulnerable. He wondered if she was putting two and two together and finally getting four. After all, he had materialized outside the door…
“Kinda got eyes like David Bowie, don’t you?”
“Sure. Bowie.”
Tension sawed at Rudolf like razor wire slicing into a neck. Blood prayed for release.
“You like…you like Bowie?”
“He’s one of my favorites,” Rudolf said, but still, the tension cut deeper.
This tedious woman had nothing more for him. Teagarden was gone, but at least he had confirmation of his method of travel.
There was no time to waste. The chase was on, and it was different than any other he had encountered before. He would have to find a way to tap into the missing time between destinations. He would have to mull over it all, and follow up once Teagarden blipped to life in his head again.
Chasing a phantom, he must be swift or fail.
Failure was not something he wished to experience ever again.
“What was your request?”
Her voice was a swirl of foam atop a cappuccino. “I just wanted to know what it really means to be human. I wanted a normal day, not one driven by the self-loathing demons that roost inside me.” Her eyes glazed over.
“We’ve all got those demons to deal with. I have made friends with mine.”
“You’re lucky then, I guess. You can’t know what it means to feel like this always. Like every breath is an exercise in endurance.”
“You’re tired of it all, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I just want to feel human. Normal.”
“I believe I can help you,” he said, staring into her moist eyes.
The shadows of her features softened. “I wish,” she said. She looked at him quizzically as if wondering if he could really show her happiness.
“I can show you what it means to be human,” Rudolf said, moving closer to her. He raised his hand to her cheek, delicately stroking it.
She closed her eyes and leaned into his large hand, her smaller hand touching it as he caressed with care. “Yes, please. Yes.”
“Wonderful,” he said, his smile brightening. Magnificent and awe-inspiring. “This facet of what it means to be human is called dying.”
He squeezed her malleable face in his palm, slamming her head into the wall above the headboard.
Her eyes bulged; her hands tried and failed to pry his from her face.
“Now, most all living creatures die”—most, he thought, acknowledging his designs on immortality—“but the cognizance that death is imminent, the sharp shock and adrenaline rush. The pure understanding that these are the last moments of your life and the realization as well that you’ve wasted the whole damn thing. These things are purely human.”
Intrigued by the doughy condition of her features, the undefined allegiance to her own self, he kneaded as one would raw dough. He twisted and bones snapped and cracked .
Her face, the layout of eyes and nose and mouth, contorted with the force of his vehemence. Picasso would have been proud. Or perhaps Dali would have appreciated his handiwork. The reshaped face the perfect accompaniment to the often drooping, dripping, soft materials in his art. Soft. Like Putty. He felt like an artist for the first time, this woman’s death wrought with such stylistic flair.
Perhaps he should explore sculpture, he thought, distracted not the least by the woman’s screams.
The force of his sculpting prompted her already bulging eyes to burst from her eye sockets, dangling as piñatas awaiting the baseball bat. Her body twitched and spasmed to finality.
He released her, uncorking his fingers from within the putty-like flesh. She slumped sideways across the bed.
He stared at his masterpiece. Her face was realigned, the eye sockets with the dangling eyes aslant to the right side, the nose toward the forehead, the mouth stretched into a clown’s grimace across the left. It all fell into the looping shape of a question mark. The swivel and swoop. The utter impossibility, yet here it was for him to admire.
“I cannot conceive why anybody would want to know anything more about what it means to be human, Miss. But I hope I’ve satisfied your request.”
Piss and shit leaked out of her panties.
He wiped his blood and snot coated hands on the bedspread.
Rudolf moved the chair out of his way and pried the door open, turned and set it in place again. Not perfectly, but in this bleak outpost, good enough not to be noticed for a while.
As if it mattered.
Rudolf Chernobyl was not a man to be denied. Especially when he was a man on a mission.
Chapter 13 Blake
Forty-five minutes cruising back and forth and to every edge of Roswell, New Mexico, the no frills chit-chat that had accompanied Terrance Blake’s and Jane Teagarden’s first face to face meeting had fizzled to dead air in the furnace of the rental car, no matter the AC cranked to Antarctica. Sweat pooled at Blake’s armpits, the back of his neck.
Blake had landed an hour and a half after Teagarden. His first impression of the woman he’d seen only on television ten years ago was dominated by her severe gray-on-gray skirt, with darker gray heels that teetered at a precarious height below gams to die for, and that there were no laugh lines on her face. Nary any lines at all. Perhaps her hair being pulled back into a tight pony tail had something to do with this, the skin skimming the skull—no wrinkles allowed. Only the surprising extravagance of too much make-up broke the rigid presentation, the whole cheerless demeanor.
They weaved through now familiar streets to the western perimeter of a town constructed with a wry sense of humor. Alien lampposts and alien-themed businesses abounded. One restaurant that served a brisk cup of coffee, had a flying saucer crashing through the ceiling
The more they drove, the more Blake felt
as if he’d made a mistake. He’d simply picked up a piece of paper a disheveled man had dropped and taken it to heart. Maybe it was not meant for him. His instincts, usually spot-on, could be slipping.
(“Ano-anomaly.”)
Breaking the silence, Jane pointed out a motel to her left, a flat collection of blocks shaped like a horseshoe that, as far as Blake cared, signified all the good luck leaking out.
“You would think the proprietors would cut down that palm tree blocking the sign…and add a UFO like the restaurant.”
Blake mumbled, “Mm-hmmm,” and smiled, though he looked past her face.
Teagarden remained stolid.
(“Ano-anomaly.”)
When he spotted the man.
“He doesn’t belong. That man does not belong here. Turn around.”
Jane Teagarden swung a U-turn in the middle of the four empty lanes and slowed down.
“That guy, the big guy in the white suit with the glaring sun-on-snow hair.”
Jane stopped the car and said, “I don’t see what you see. He’s probably just a businessman, got a room and heading out for an early dinner.”
Blake’s curiosity prickled like a rash, with the tenacity of poison oak, or the unnerving presence of an impossible to reach itch beneath a cast, inspiring unbent hanger madness.
Blake watched as the man dawdled at the door to a room in a way that seemed unusual. Definitely no Joe Six-pack. Something did not gel right. From where Blake was sitting, the car parked next to the curb, outside of the parking lot for the motel, his instincts cranked up to nearly intolerable, needle pushing into the red.
He stepped out of the car and stamped out the butt of his cigarette on the hot asphalt.
“Blake.”
“Stay here. Just…” He held up his hand, a crossing guard halting traffic.
As Blake headed toward the man and, more precisely, the room—could Marlon be there? What about this man made him think he had anything to do with Marlon?—Jane Teagarden exited the car and crossed in front of it, hesitated, then stopped. She watched Blake.
The man with the glaring sun-on-snow hair—bottled lightning bolt brilliance, more white than any hair Blake had ever seen—turned from the door and walked away from the room heading out to the parking lot. His car.
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