by David Beers
“Come onnnn, Alex. You know who this is, don’t cha?” Tongues touching, bare breasts, a woman bent over against a wall—the voice spoke of these things without using words. “And if you don’t, you will soon. I promise.”
Alex looked around the room, expecting to see walls melting or people eating each other’s brains out of skulls. Whatever spoke through his phone was no more human than Alex was a bird; so this couldn’t be reality—not this phone call or this coffee shop, not any of it.
No one munched on brains, though, and the other patrons went on with their lives—not paying attention to his phone call or the delusions playing in his head.
He couldn’t be experiencing this.
“Done looking around?” The voice changed, an angry rasp reaming through the phone—neither male nor female, but something beyond both. “Because I’m not fucking leaving, Alex. Do you get that?”
Alex closed his eyes and saw teeth, large as suns, in straight points with spit dripping from them. They stood motionless, guarding a dark hole behind.
“I’m done waiting, Alex. The voice behind this one, the voice your cock moved for—that’s a real person. If I need to use this body to get to you, or your little unbelieving wife, I will. And when she sees me, sees those teeth you’re looking at now, she’ll slit her throat in front of us both. If you don’t come to me, Alex, then I’ll come to you—and I won’t stop. Maybe a year from now, when you’ve dreamed every night until then and seen you and your wife’s deaths hundreds of times, I’ll show up at your door inside this pretty little thing I have here. And then you’ll watch Brittany die. You’ll die too and both of you can come here with your parents.” He heard his mother and father then, beneath this thing’s words, whispering ‘Alex’ over and over. “Is that what you want? Because I don’t need her. I need you, you motherfucker, and I’m going to have you. This comes down to whether you want me to have her too.”
Alex said nothing and stared at those teeth inside his head. Watched the saliva drip off those giant, white knives.
“This is over, Alex. It was over when your parents decided to drop blood and bring me back. They realized it too, just as you’re going to.” The voice still wasn’t human, but softer now. “Either I show up at your door or you’re showing up at mine.”
His parents spoke again in the silence, a garble of words, but his parents all the same.
“It doesn’t matter how you show up, gun or knife—as dramatic as you want. Come though, so that I don’t take her in your place.”
Alex’s cell phone stopped working then. Four hundred dollars that died when the conversation ended.
Now, in bed next to Brittany, her hand on his chest and leg over his—the only certainty he could find was that she would not die. If he had to, fine, but not her.
The possibility that his delusions had become unmanageable, or that he should seek help, no longer occurred to him. His phone still didn’t work, and the call had been real. The teeth that appeared inside his head seemed to be etched there now, and he could not wipe them away. His parents ran their entire lives and were dead. Dr. Nayek could say what he wished, could even institutionalize Alex—still, at some point, that sexy woman on the phone would show up and bring death with her.
He could do it now, like he’d seen in movies, sit in the bathtub and cut his wrists. Brittany would wake up and find him surrounded by red tinged water. Did he want that? Her looking at his blood filling their tub?
No, let her wake to hope that this would end the way she wanted. He would tell her that they could meet at Nayek’s and she’d believe it. When she discovered the truth, the pain would be the same—but she could wake up happy once more. Alex could give her that.
He rolled over and faced his wife. She lay still with her mouth slightly open. He leaned forward and kissed her.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, quiet but questioning.
“I have to go into the office for a few hours. Can I meet you at the doctor’s?”
Brittany nodded, closing her eyes. Alex watched her for a few more minutes, taking in her beauty for the last time. He would break her, even ruin her life, but she would still live—so what other choice was there?
The car idled and Alex put his hand on the key. The gear stick stood in park and a pocket knife glinted in the passenger’s seat. A lot of people would walk into Macy’s throughout the day, but he doubted any would notice a man sleeping in the back of the parking lot. A few cars populated different spots now, but in a few hours the lot would be packed.
His body would sit probably until night fall, then someone would find him. They would alert the police and eventually Brittany would find out.
The car still ran, though, and he sat holding onto the keys in the ignition. He wondered what waited on the other side of the knife; he knew who waited, but what did that mean? When the two of them finally met, what would happen after? This being, this God, wasn’t consuming out of boredom. This consumption, the two decades of chasing his entire family had to lead somewhere. His parents thought they had known; and that kept them running for years, kept them from doing what he was about to.
That’s why he held the keys, why the knife remained in the other seat. If he killed himself, gave into this ancient Thing, would she die anyway? If Alex was the last part, the end of the beginning for this deity, then what came next?
The end.
Of life.
If so, Alex’s death meant nothing—because It would still come for Brittany.
Alex pulled his hand away from the keys. What could he do? There were no ‘next steps’ in his mother’s journal, no manual to follow.
The car’s air conditioner created the only noise around as an answer dawned.
“Just go back to the beginning.”
Something in that felt right, felt better than the knife in the seat next to him. Even if he didn’t know what to do once there, he knew the place where everything began.
Alex moved his hand to the gear stick.
Perhaps he feared his own death. Perhaps an attachment to humanity, like his parents before him. Maybe it was only Brittany. Whatever the reason, Alex pulled out of the mall determined to travel decades into the past.
I saw something that day, something your father never did. I’d like to put it into words, so that you can understand without experiencing it. I’m lost as to how our ancestors continued their bloodletting when they knew what I do now. Maybe they saw no other way.
When we went searching for Him, we felt the world needed Him. To us, this place was more His than ours—and the entire planet had forgotten Him. More selfishly, we wanted our God that had been stolen from us. What I understand now is: He is no one’s God. The human race never needed Him, only He intertwined Himself into our lives—making us inseparable. Then He took, and took, and took. The essence of Him, of It—what creates and sustains Him—is destruction. Death.
I’ve thought a lot about what appeared to be His death. The rapid decline of the people that worshipped Him combined with the dogma Europeans brought made it impossible to keep death continuing for Him. The volume of destruction probably increased after the Spanish arrived, but none of it dedicated to Him—somehow a passive observer isn’t enough, He must be the cause. Once people forgot Him, He had to hibernate: the closest thing to death something like It can feel.
He lives inside us when He can, but is an entity to Himself. I’m unsure whether He can leave this world, whether there are other places He could inhabit and control.
When your father began to sacrifice me, letting my blood flow, I became a part of Him—briefly. I felt His insatiable greed, saw that memories that spanned innumerable years. Insanity awaits us inside Him, forever feeling his thirst for death. Murder was all I understood, even after your father stopped with the flame. Huitzilopochtli was pulling me, grasping as a starving man would at food. Your father hit me in the temple, knocking me out and saving my life. I would have killed everyone in that room had he not acted.
That’s why we’re running and that’s why we all dream. He wants us back.
9
Days Past
Roberta
Her head hurt. Roberta Munoz understood nothing else when she opened her eyes. The pain thumped inside her skull, pulsing and retreating briefly before repeating the steps again—it took moments before she even understood that she had fallen asleep on the couch. After a few minutes, Roberta turned her head to the left and finally took in the rest of the room.
Was it late afternoon? Did she have to work tonight?
God her head ached.
Roberta shut her eyes. She didn’t have to work tonight. She knew that. Had she been napping? Was that what happened? She couldn’t remember lying down, couldn’t remember anything after…
Her mind tried to trace backwards. She remembered pushing the doors of the hotel, remembered walking out of work but nothing after. That was it; yet here she was, in hers and her mother’s apartment.
Her mother, Abella, would wake up soon—she did have to work tonight.
Roberta rolled from her back to her side, looking across the living room. The portable phone lay discarded by the couch, the red ‘on’ light still glowing. Roberta squinted; why was that here? Had she used it? She tried to remember, but Jesus, her head wouldn’t let go. Like it was actively trying to keep her from remembering anything. Roberta sat up slowly, feeling faint as she did. She breathed from her mouth, making a conscious effort to gain control of her body, which felt so frail.
What have I been doing? She bent down and picked the phone up from the floor, turning it off. The charger was in the kitchen; had her mother brought it in here?
That doesn’t make sense.
Then what did?
Is your dick hard yet?
The thought broke through the pain like an animal from a cage. Roberta had never said anything like that in her life, couldn’t even really remember thinking something like it.
Still, it clicked. It made sense. The words were familiar, were…Had she actually said them?
Alllexxxx.
She didn’t know the name, but it went through her mind all the same—clicking as it did. She had said these things. She didn’t know when or to whom, but she remembered—much like waking from a dream—that something happened.
How though?
She leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She closed her eyes again, trying to focus, to get past the pain for only a second in order to understand what was happening.
Thoughts vanished when her eyelids closed. No reaction, perhaps as there should have been, to reopen them and look around—to try and find reality again. Like her brain had been wiped clean and only the teeth remained to her. Maybe fear too, maybe Roberta could feel that.
The teeth filled her mind, yet she felt like she was actually looking at them. Massive things, filed to points, yet not sitting inside any mouth. Just teeth, hanging in blackness, staring back at her. Somehow seeing her too. They moved up and down slightly, as if the owner might be panting.
Roberta opened her eyes and saw the world still before her.
She shut them again; the teeth remained.
Roberta sat still a moment longer, then began sobbing. Alone on her couch with her eyes closed, she thought of the words spinning in her head and the teeth that wouldn’t leave.
10
Present Day
James
Looking at the hotel, James kept recalling scenes from 9/11. He watched from maybe a quarter mile away—just a man in shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt. The news stream, constantly running the explosion on all networks, could not begin to capture the devastation he saw now. Rocks, from huge boulders to small dust particles, covered the landscape. James could hardly distinguish the base of the hotel amongst the wreckage; the explosion having sent the building to land wherever it wanted. Police encircled the area, allowing only state personnel in—there were rescue teams, although James thought they would be better off praying to The Patron Saint of Lost Causes. Any people under those stones were, by all statistical measures, dead. Those not incinerated by the explosion, or crushed by the rocks, had surely succumbed to dehydration by now.
There wasn’t anything James could do standing here; he only wanted to see. The United States’s government believed one man had caused this, brought a skyscraper to the ground. James reported to Washington what he saw and heard from the motel visits, but none of it led to the ending he witnessed now. None of it led to a reason for this. James couldn’t begin to fathom how one man could destroy a structure this large. Without a plane, or months to plan, how could he bring everything down in such catastrophic form?
James just didn’t know. He thought he knew where to start though. Alex Valdez stayed here one night, and in the morning it all fell. If he caused it, then he had to have set explosives. That needed time and someone could have seen something. Seen and told someone—maybe only a parent or lover, and perhaps only through a phone call, but it was a start.
Samuel Taylor’s office could email him the hotel employee list. James would start there. Someone had to have seen something.
By American standards, James spoke fluent Spanish. In Mexico, he only hoped to be able to form complete sentences.
Nearly half the people on the list he received from D.C. didn’t have phones. That meant home visits, which were taking an almost paralyzing amount of time. In the two days following his arrival, he had done little more than try to work his way down the seemingly unending list. He began to wonder if there was a point, if he wasn’t burning precious time for nothing. The Mexican Government could produce a report any day detailing an American citizen’s involvement in the bombing—and James kept moving door to door, having each one shut in his face.
No one knew anything, and if they did, they weren’t telling an American.
Now he stood in front of an apartment complex painted bright orange. Roberta Munoz had lived here, in apartment A6—she had also worked for Hotel Indigo before its demise. James knew if he showed an FBI badge when the door opened, it would close even quicker.
He found her apartment amidst the other small rooms, barely more than shanties inside the edifice. At other apartments, especially in the beginning, James had paused to consider the disparities between his dwelling in America and whatever shithole he stood at. Now, twenty apartments in, he just knocked without thinking.
“Hola?” An answer came from the other side of the door. No peep hole existed, so with any luck his accent alone might prevent them from even cracking the door to get a look.
“Hola,” he answered in Spanish. “Roberta Munoz?”
James waited in silence, nothing coming through the wooden barricade in front of him.
“Roberta Munoz? Does she, or did she, live here?” he asked, his Spanish coming out naturally now.
“Who are you?”
James closed his eyes and focused on keeping exasperation from his words. “My name is James Allison; I’m an American representative from Hotel Indigo, Ms. Munoz’s place of employment.”
The door opened, only a few inches and a chain still connected it to the wall, but James could see a woman through the opening. Black curly hair framed her face and her eyes showed no interest for anything on his side of the door. “What do you want?”
The door remained op
en, however small. James nearly seized up at the question: what did he want again? He had nearly lost the reason in his search for a witness.
“Have you spoken to the police yet?” The question didn’t matter to him at all, but were the only words that came.
James thought he could see her nodding within the shadows of the apartment. “I tried before any of this happened—days before. No one wanted to hear me though.”
“Before?” he asked. “Before it collapsed? Why?”
The woman took a step back from the door, the shadows consuming her. “It doesn’t matter. Roberta’s dead now.”
James saw his opening begin to close.
“It does matter. That’s why I’m here, to figure out what happened, and if you know something then I’m telling you: it matters.”
He saw her hand move toward the door knob—pausing when she grasped it—whether to close it or open it, James didn’t know. “You won’t believe me, just like the police. No one will.”
“But you believe it?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “You should go.”
“You believe it and that’s enough for me.”
“It won’t help, Mr. Allison. It hasn’t helped me and it certainly didn’t help my daughter. It could have helped the police a few weeks ago, but they didn’t listen. It’s too late now. For any of us.”
James didn’t care if what she said would bring down Christ and a Host of Heavenly Angels. He was about to speak to someone, and that fact trumped all others. “It could and so I’d like to hear.”
Her eyes dropped to the floor. “What you look for?” she asked in a broken, accent filled English.
“I need to know what happened at that hotel,” he answered in Spanish.
She nodded again, still looking at the floor. After a few seconds she looked up and unlatched the chain, then turned and walked into the apartment—revealing a gun in her right hand.