by M. O. McLeod
A flurry of knocks came at Santino’s bedroom door. Distracted, Santino watched as his body reappeared before his eyes, all the veins, the dark colors around his eyes, the teeth, everything came crashing back. The knocks came again at the door and the door handle jiggled. Santino snatched the door open, taking it off its hinges a bit. “What the hell is it!” he roared.
Ross dashed into the room. “Your dad is breaking into the north as we speak!”
“No my dad isn’t,” Santino argued back. “The north is barred off from the rest of the city. No one can get into the north!”
“Your dad is on the news radio, all over the waves. They are rushing the post into the north, and…” Ross tried to tell Santino the worst news in the best way. “Kurma is already on the move. She has the police and the RAID behind her.”
Santino snatched up Ross by the collar. “Kurma is what?”
Ross wiggled in the air as he tried to breathe out his next words. “Kurma is going to take out your dad. That is what she and the mayor agreed upon, taking out the Phantoms for immunity in the city.”
And it click, it all clicked. While Santino was playing babysitter, while he was playing Mr. Business man, Kurma was winning the hearts of the people, winning the city out from underneath him. He had thought she was killing off the Phantoms so that they wouldn’t kill her first. Santino had naively assumed that he would take over the new territory and that she would never come for him since he had her brother Allie. But Santino was wrong. He had made the wrong move; he hadn’t even made a move at all! His father was going ahead while he was sitting cozy on the east side playing the bench, and now Kurma was out there taking his spot. It should have been him taking the north, not his good for nothing father. It wasn’t Kurma vs. Darius; it should be Santino vs. Kurma. He was a fool, but no more. First thing he had to do was find his father and put him back in his place; Santino was the first Phantom born, the strongest, the fastest, and now he even had a trick up his sleeve that no one else had, he could become invisible. Let’s see if Darius could learn that.
“Get everybody up and ready in five minutes,” Santino dressed quickly. “Now!”
Ross rubbed his neck. What the hell had he just gotten himself into? He was a tech freak, he sat behind a computer all day, he experimented with software and spied on the government, he did not actually go in the field. “What exactly are we going to do though, Santino? Kurma is killing off the Phantoms; I don’t want to die man.”
Santino didn’t plan on dying, that was the last thing he was going to do. He looked to Ross with a crazed glint in his eyes. “We’re going to the north and having ourselves a Raptor hunt.”
Ross said, “I thought Raptors hunted Phantoms.”
“Well I’m not asking you to think right now, we’re having a Raptor hunt and that’s final! Now get everybody up!”
“Okay, I will take care of everything.” Ross backed out of the room slow and did as he was told.
Chapter 26:
L’bluff, Manor –The Old City
The line leading into L’bluff, Manor was slow and the procession of people were made up of the stranded who trudged, stumbled, and drove out of the empty vast desert. Inis gassed and braked into the city’s limit. He saw a banner hang high between two pillars that read, Department of Migration Affairs & the Old Treasury of Manor.
Inis pointed to the sign and asked his mother, “The Treasury of Manor is doing what out here?”
Fae narrowed her eyes up ahead. She could see two lines forming, men and women with guns, and a huge black gate. “They are charging people into the city, it looks like.”
Sure enough, Inis was stopped, their truck was checked for other passengers and they had to pay a high fare to get into the city’s gates. Inis watched as beggars pleaded for spare change, he watched as the line that he was in become shorter and shorter as the other line become longer and longer, as the pleading and crying became louder and louder. Tents and makeshifts shacks were built along the city’s walls, a shanty town of sorts for those who had no money to enter the city's limits.
There were barely any skyscrapers in the Bluff; no towering condominiums, or hardly any congested streets that were filled with the typical cars and scooters like Alexandria. Still, millions of people lived amongst the Bluff; a city occupied with fields, woods, and the country side.
Finally, Inis and Fae found a small inn in the middle of the rural city. The rooms went month to month and Inis planned to leave his mother once she was settled. Inis didn’t know how to tell his fragile mother but he just didn’t think it was right to leave his whole family behind without going to look for them. His mother was safe. Now it was time to go back and find the rest of his family.
“Okay folks,” the day manager of the inn showed Inis and Fae to the first room up top in the north wing. “I have a little situation with an ex-tenant of the inn but don’t worry about that though.” The manager was a sweaty man who turned red without it being hot and had a bad limp. “The room is being cleaned out as we speak.”
“So the room isn’t ready?” Fae spoke up.
“It’s as ready as it is going to get,” the manager said. “There are people foaming at the mouth for this room, not to many in the city left, so be thankful.”
A ruckus was heard up high. The group walked upon an altercation mid-swing.
“You can’t just kick me out, you wench!” yelled a boy in his early twenties.
The manager ran up the last steps of the wooden stairs and tried to block his housemaid from danger. “Nathanial, you are out of here!” the manager puffed. “No rent, no money, no room.” He pushed Nathanial passed Inis and Fae and down the stairs.
Inis wanted to intervene but then again, he needed the room for his mom so he couldn’t lend too much of a hand. Instead, he moved Fae back away from the distraught guy whose clothes hung loose and tattered around his thin frame.
“I’m calling the police!” the manager yelled down the stairs after his old tenant.
Nathanial gave him the finger and smashed the high tables that lined the hallway leading out of the inn.
“Well, that takes care of that,” said the manager. He dusted his hands off and ushered the housemaid away and pulled a rusty key from his front pocket. “May I welcome you to your new home? How long did you say you were going to stay for?”
“Month to month until we can find something more permanent,” Inis said.
The manager gave him a look of pity. “The rent is due on the first, no drugs, no pets, and absolutely no grace period.”
Inis snatched the key from the manager’s hand and shut the door in his face. He turned his attention to the plain room. “Not bad…”
Fae walked around the studio in a small circle. “At least we have a little kitchenette; I can make my famous enchiladas that you like so much.”
Inis smiled and sat on the bed in the corner. Now was the time to tell his mother about his plans, the sooner the better. “You should be good here for a while until I come back.”
Fae breathed in deep. She had suspected something like this. Inis was her oldest son; he was the man of the house, the mature one, the one son who had her back and the rest of the family’s best interest. He wouldn’t rest until he had found his sister and brother, his niece and his nephew; that was just how Inis was, he wasn’t a deadbeat. “Can you stay for a little while? You just got here, catch your breath for a bit.”
Inis got up to leave, the longer he stayed the farther his family strayed away from him. “You have enough money for six months here. Try and find a job, find work, anything.” He made a couple of steps to the door. He couldn’t even turn back one last time, his mother’s sad face would have broken him.
“I love you, Inis,” Fae whispered. She held her tears back but she couldn’t control the trembling in her voice or the sweat that coated her top lip. “You know you always were the backbone of this family.”
“No, that was Kurma.” He grabbed for the do
or knob.
“Kurma is gone, now you are the backbone, my backbone, all I have left and don’t you forget that.”
***
Inis closed the door behind him, almost in tears and stumbled over the angry guy who had just been evicted. Inis didn’t want to leave the guy outside his mother’s room but didn’t see a way to make him go.
“Hey, do you need a ride somewhere maybe?” he asked the poor guy.
Nathanial looked up from the floor with tears in his eyes. “Where the hell am I going to go in the Bluff? Up to the farmers market and ask to plow fields for a couple of bucks?”
Inis had no idea what the guy was talking about or how the jobs worked in the Bluff. “You can’t just stay here crying though; the manager said he was going to call the police.”
“That’s better than nothing, at least I will have a warm place to sleep,” Nathanial said as he wiped his eyes and stood up. “Nathanial,” he said, extending his wet hand to Inis.
“My name is Inis, nice meeting you.”
Nathanial nodded his head and tried to settle himself. “I’m usually not like this man,” he sniffed loudly, “kinda embarrassing.”
Inis wasn’t fazed by it. He couldn’t imagine being homeless in the middle of winter without a penny to his name. “You can’t find any work around here?”
“Nope,” Nathanial explained. “No jobs, they are all taken or don’t pay nothing, so it’s working for nothing and then it’s competitive on top. The Bluff is for large families and people who are retired, not for young single guys like us.” He blew air out his nose and saw the frost in the air. “I really just need to get to Alexandria, there’s always work there.”
Inis must have heard him wrong. “You want to get to Alexandria? Haven’t you heard about the Phantoms?”
Nathanial shrugged his shoulders, he had heard some things but he didn’t really know what to believe. All he knew was that there were for sure jobs there, so many of his friends had up and left the Bluff for the big city of Alexandria; he was the last one in the old metropolis. “I hear that the Phantoms haven’t reached the north, there are still jobs in the north my man,” said Nathanial with hope in his voice. “Still a way to make a couple of dollars; all I have to do is stay in north Alexandria. I heard the city is huge, three times bigger than the Bluff…can’t be that hard to steer clear of a Phantom.”
“It’s not as easy as it seems to get into the north,” Inis stated. “It’s very upscale.”
Nathanial looked at his clothes and his hopes deflated a bit. Inis could tell that this guy was down on his last and he felt for him.
“Hey, um, Nathanial I’m actually going to Alexandria,” Inis said. “I could give you a lift.”
“Really?” Nathanial exclaimed.
“I’m going to be doing my own thing once I get back but I mean it won’t be a problem if you come along, I could always use a little bit of muscle, you know, an extra pair of eyes,” Inis joked.
Nathanial almost hugged Inis but stopped himself. “That would, man, that would be everything.”
“Let’s go, we can drive through the night, I drive, then you drive, deal?”
Nathanial was already heading out the door into the cold. Just like that, he was on his way to Alexandria, the city of lights. He had never seen a Phantom; he didn’t know what they were or where they came from. All he knew was that they were said to be in one part of the city. As long as he stayed away from that part of the city then he would have one less thing to worry about. Finding a job was his main priority once in Alexandria. He couldn’t wait to see the mega-city and the new surroundings.
The two boys drove out of the Bluff pass the open fields, pass the rundown barns, and out of the city limits and back into the desert.
“So do you have any family in the city?” Inis asked as he drove through the silent night of the sand dunes.
“No, no family. My family used to live back in the Dublin Estates, across the sea,” Nathanial replied.
“Dublin Estates, isn’t that the place that burned to the ground?” Inis had heard about the countries across the sea; the epidemic that hit the nation states had billions of people dislocated and refugees.
“It didn’t burn down,” Nathanial corrected. “You can’t burn down an entire country, I don’t think. Don’t believe the rumors.”
“So what really happened?”
“Over population, the decrease of crops, and the infamous acid rains of the Blasé Plant,” Inis revealed.
Inis looked to Nathanial. “That’s probably where the rumor started about the country burning.”
“The Estates didn’t burn, but it did rain for five years straight of nothing but toxic water that eroded and washed away everything,” Nathanial thought back. “Houses, buildings, entire blocks washed away. It was bad. All that’s left of the Estates are miles and miles of emptiness. They say that it will take a hundred years for the earth to right itself over that region of land.”
“So everyone really just up and left?”
“Either you had money and moved into the bunkers in the ocean communities or you moved to the west, hence, the cities of the Manor.”
“When you came from the Dublin Estates why didn’t you just move to Alexandria from jump?” Inis was curious.
“I had a girl and we moved here because it was super cheap,” Nathanial reluctantly said. “But then she got a job offer in Alexandria a couple of months ago and decided she wanted to live in the big city. She got a little money and got herself another boyfriend right after, and basically left me behind.” Nathanial hated thinking about his ex-girlfriend; she was such a snob and had probably always been that way.
“So no family or girlfriend,” Inis tried to understand the new guys reasoning. “Who will you have in a mega-city like Alexandria?”
Nathanial cut his eyes at Inis. “There is this girl that I used to know,” he slowly let his guard down. “I had kind of a thing for her back home.”
“She is from Dublin Estates like you?”
“Yep, but she moved before I did so I was thinking I might run into her, we could start up where we left off.”
Inis said, “Kind of a long shot.”
Nathanial shook his head, he didn’t agree with Inis. Anything was possible, just hours before he was being evicted and now he was heading into the biggest city in the Manor. “You don’t know how we used to be, trust me, if I find her then she is mine.”
“Well, I’m pretty popular in the city, maybe I know of her,” Inis said. He had just made the junior varsity wrestling team and was vice president of Cacheus High before Phantasm had hit the city. He may have heard of her if she was popular or into city sports. “What’s her name?”
Nathanial hadn’t spoken his old crushes name in years out of respect of his then girlfriend. But as the weeks went on and his ex-girlfriend went without returning his calls, Nathanial old feelings for the girl had come to the forefront.
“Her name is Rimselda,” he smiled as he thought about her. “Hair the color of rubies, I used to call her Rimy the redhead.”
Chapter 27:
Up North
Margie had enough of the mayor’s cheating ways. She flipped through the explicit pictures that the private detective had given her. Blondes, brunettes, skinny girls, Asians, and all of them were younger than she was. While the city was in chaos, her husband—the mayor, was busy with his face in between some cheap girls breast. She walked hard down the hallway, her feet thudding at each step. Margie found her cheating, good for nothing husband in the bedroom. She probably had to change her sheets; there was no telling if he had brought any of the many girls home.
The mayor sipped some hot tea as he read through the daily financial reports of his city; export had been cut down in half and import was at a complete stop. The city was living on its reserve and if Kurma didn’t clean up the streets then the city would have to look for assistance outside of the Manor. “Baby, are you about to run a bath?” he asked absent
mindedly.
Margie shoved his head aside, spilling tea on the mayor’s shirt. “Who the hell are all these girls!” she yelled in her husband face and threw the pictures in his lap.
Mayor Wilks was flabbergasted, not only from the hot tea that scorched his chest but that his wife had actually caught him. But he wasn’t going to go out that easily. He picked up the pictures and looked at the Polaroids.
“I’m your wife and you do this to me?”
The mayor flipped through the pictures and saw Christina, Shelby, Joni the yoga instructor, Phiffany, and Annalisa. They were all supposed to be secrets. His wife must have been busy while he was at the HQ handling business.
Margie grabbed the pictures out of her husband hands and smashed them in his face. “What the hell do you have to say for yourself?”
“I have no idea who any of these women are?” the mayor played dumb.
Margie snatched a picture and shoved it in the mayor’s face. “That’s you, you son of a bitch, right there. You can’t deny that it’s not you!”
The mayor snatched the picture and looked again. Sure enough, he could make out his face in the picture. It looked as if he was taking off some girl’s bra. Well, the cat was out the bag. “So what if it is me. Now what?”
“Now what?” Margie screamed.
“What are you going to do, divorce me now?” asked the mayor. His wife wasn’t going anywhere because if she was then she would have been left a long time ago. He hadn’t just started cheating yesterday.
Margie pushed the mayor back onto the bed with all her might and started pummeling him with her fist. “You think that I need you!”
The mayor tried to duck and dodge her assaults. He tossed her off of him which only infuriated his wife even more. He ran from the room and she chased after him, throwing things at his head. His phone started to ring and vibrate as the fight escalated. Mayor Wilks dashed into the bathroom and locked the door. His wife crashed into the door and screamed at the top of her lungs. The mayor could hear her throwing stuff at the bathroom, kicking and screaming the whole time.