by David Beers
His mind screamed, yelling his brother’s name to anything that would hear it. He had to make it home; he had to raise Brandon. That gun could stop all of those plans. Greed, though, pulled him forward—greed for knowledge, or power, or simply furthering his assignment.
He followed her in, closing the door behind him.
Darkness lived in the corners of the room she led him to. A single, dull light bulb plugged into the ceiling did a poor job of banishing the shadows. Brown carpet covered the floor, heavily stained. A small round table, with two chairs on either side, sat alone in the room. If this lady owned any other furniture, it was out of sight.
Surely she has a bed, he wondered as he entered.
The woman sat down, placing the gun atop the table. James stood a few feet from the door; the gun still giving him pause.
“Come. Sit. I’ve given away most of my furniture, because I won’t have much need for it soon.” She pointed at the other chair. “The gun isn’t for you. Mexico is no longer a safe country.”
He nodded, knowing she told the truth but still cautious, still wanting to get home to Brandon. He had not holstered his pistol, there was no way he would see the inside of any apartments, ever, if he carried that around. He had a gun on his ankle though, and he felt pretty good that he could get to it in time, if needed. A second later he went to the chair.
“There,” she said, pointing at the wall behind him. James turned to see what he had missed. “That’s her. I’m Abella and that’s my Roberta.”
A picture of a young woman hung on the wall. She held a dog, an ugly little thing, but her smiled showed that didn’t matter. She wasn’t looking into the camera, but off to the right at something out of the picture. The dog looked on cue, ears perked and head slightly tilted.
“She’s gone?” James asked, turning back to the table.
“She’s dead. Gone means she could come back. She’s not coming back.”
“She was at the hotel?” He met her gaze, seeing that her eyes had turned to steel—caring less than nothing about him.
She smiled then, her teeth a dull yellow—contrasting sharply with her daughter’s beautiful smile behind him. As her lips spread over teeth, the rest of her face remained still; no joy accompanied the smile. “Not for long. She made it home long before the collapse.”
James squinted, still looking at her but stunned.
“Do you still want to speak with me or do you have somewhere else to be now?” Her smile looked as if there had never been anything worth smiling about, ever, for this woman.
James nodded again, as much for himself as to her question. This girl’s death had nothing to do with Valdez; it was almost laughable how much hope he held in entering this apartment. “How’d she die?”
He asked the question hardly caring about the answer—the girl probably wasn’t even at the hotel when Valdez arrived.
“Why do you want to know? Does it matter anymore?” She kept smiling: aren’t we all just as happy as we can fucking be? “She killed herself in a way. Suicide.”
James leaned back in the chair, nearly awash in depression. The whole conversation was a waste and he still held no entry into this goddamn thing.
She laughed then; a chuckle at his despondency. “She killed herself, I imagine for the same reason the man you’re looking for did. Because He wanted her to.” The woman leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. She crossed her fingers and rested her chin on the bridge they built. “So. What else do you want to know? What can I help you with?”
“Who do you think I’m looking for?”
“Oh, I don’t know his name. I think I’ve seen him though—the same way I think I’ve seen you.”
You’re being fucked with. Maybe since you knocked on the door.
He pushed his chair back from the table, but didn’t stand up. “What…” Fear was beginning to take over and the Spanish inside was turning to mush, unable to come to his lips. “What the fuck are you talking about?” English erupted from him.
He needed his gun. The pretense he came under was gone, and whatever veil of innocence this woman wore was trashed. He sat naked before her and she held his clothes.
“You don’t want to know, Mr. Allison. My daughter didn’t want to and I don’t either. So why don’t you pack up and go back to America? There’s nothing you want here. Nothing in that rubble should mean more than your life, and I promise, if you stay that’s what you’re sacrificing.”
She broke eye contact and looked over his shoulder then. She nodded, wanting him to follow her gaze—her smile fading.
James turned to see, his eyes landing on the picture. It hung as it had before, except for the dog. The ugly, unkempt hair seemed like a blessing to what he saw now. It lay rotting in the girl’s arms. She still held it close, still looked into the distance, but now the dog no longer supported itself. Sagging against her body, its head fell over her arm with its tongue protruding slightly from its mouth. The eye James could see had shriveled up inside its skull, resembling a black raisin now. A maggot writhed around on the tip of the tongue, perhaps looking for a warmer, darker place. Its companions feasted on the dog’s stomach—a fist sized hole with white worms crawling through it, growing fat off the flesh they consumed.
James flew from his chair, knocking it over and pushing the table back a few inches. He back pedaled from the picture, moving anywhere he could to get away from it.
“There’s nothing here for you, Mr. Allison. Nothing in Mexico City. You see that now, right?”
James heard nothing. He sprinted for the door, the woman and the picture behind him—leaving both to each other.
“...going fine.”
James heard the last two words. Everything else Brandon had said was lost in the past, because James wouldn’t ask him to repeat it. Nearly thirty minutes of conversation and he couldn't recall anything. He had phoned to check in, which was pointless because James couldn’t listen to more than a few words at a time.
The maggots kept staring at him. In James’s mind, he saw them all stop moving and turn. They didn’t have eyes to actually reveal what they focused on, but for James there wasn’t any other option. The maggots stopped eating and watched him, even as his brother continued speaking.
In the hotel, James kept all the lights were on, even in the bathroom, because he couldn’t stand the thought of darkness right now. Home visits were no longer a possibility; he’d have to figure out another way to work through this.
“I saw a dead dog today,” James said, unsure why. He had only seen a picture, and what he saw inside of it simply couldn’t have been.
“Huh? On the street?” his brother asked.
James closed his eyes. Stupid. He shouldn’t have brought it up.
“Yeah,” he answered.
Neither spoke for a few seconds.
“Everything okay?” Brandon asked. “You sound weird.”
“I’m fine.” Except the maggots were looking at him again, watching him talk on the phone as they stood at attention inside the dead dog’s stomach. “I just need some sleep. What time is it there?”
“About eleven.”
“You need to get to bed—you got school tomorrow. You’ve been going to school, right?”
“You already asked me that.”
James didn’t remember, didn’t have a clue about anything he had said. “I’m just double-checking. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay, love you.”
“Love you too.”
James hung up and turned over on his stomach, burying his head into the pillow—he knew closing his eyes meant maggots, but he had to think. He had to focus on what the fuck happened in that apartment.
“Goddamnit. You got things to do besides worry about a crazy bitch and her hallucinations.” He did, too—needed to be typing out an email and sending it encrypted to D.C. What else could he say? He’d been down here for two days, and so far all his reports were the same fucking thing—did he want to change it now?
Talk about a dog that went from scruffy looking to decomposed, and inside a picture, no less? Maybe he could talk about seeing maggots when his eyes closed, and that they seemed to be staring at him? Or that the only person who would speak to him, spoke of a suicide that had nothing to do with Valdez—
“She thought they were,” he interrupted his own thought process. Abella, the woman who had put all this into his head, thought the two were: “connected,” he finished.
Impossible. No one knew if Alex Valdez was even dead, and the girl had killed herself. Even so, he kept his head buried, wondering what was true.
He opened his eyes and immediately felt sweat soaking his hair and forehead. He shivered even though a blanket covered him. The dream faded fast for Brandon Allison, nearly leaving him wondering why he awoke. He stared forward into the darkness, breathing as if he’d been sprinting instead of sleeping.
Brandon could only remember teeth—massive knives chomping and the impending knowledge that they were coming for him. He lost the rest of the dream in seconds, but Brandon stared ahead until sunrise—watching those teeth and wishing his brother were home.
11
Alex’s Parents
Julianne & Lucas
Julianne Valdez knew that mother’s intuition existed. She wouldn’t argue with anyone who quoted the scientific impossibility of sensing things not transferable through matter. She would only smile at them, much as she did now at the Christmas card from her son. The woman in the picture with him—proving that a mother could be honest about her only son—was too beautiful for Alex. She should have been pictured in magazines, at least for the first thirty to forty years of her life before her beauty faded—Julianne knew that would happen as well. The girl was smart though, held some advanced accounting degree and appeared to pull in a nice sized income. Salaries combined and living together, the two were doing well. All those things added to Julianne’s bittersweet happiness.
However, she smiled mainly at the intuition she felt now; she knew the two people on the card would never live with anyone else. This woman was it for Alex, even though he hadn’t asked the question—hadn’t even spoken of it to his parents—they would marry. In the Christian religion, as the ceremony would surely be, till death do us part would be taken seriously by these two.
That made Julianne smile, too.
She put the card to the side of her desk, and looked down at the notebook in front of her. Her eyes were dry and she knew that was a good place to leave the work. She was no writer, but she had discovered through this notebook that if she wrote while crying she could get a lot of truth out—she only hoped it was understandable. She put the cap back on the pen, opened the drawer and stuck both inside her desk. Lucas slept in their bed, probably dreaming as she would be soon—if she went to bed. Lucas slept no matter what, in an active refusal to…to back down? Almost a stupid thought, yet there wasn’t any other way to say it. He took an Ambien every night, hell, he might have been up to three now—Julianne didn’t check and wasn’t worried about it; at this point, it didn’t matter and they both knew it. He slept through his dreams every single night. He didn’t speak of the terror he saw. Didn’t need to. When she slept, she experienced all the same things.
Julianne saw no point in forcing herself through that each night, but she wouldn’t argue with Lucas. If she did sleep, when He awoke her, that was it; she didn’t attempt to sleep again. She rarely screamed anymore, although she would often wake with tears wetting her face. She couldn’t stop that.
Was it getting worse?
Of course. How could she deny it? This would be at an end soon, at least their part would be. She wanted to finish writing her notebook, because Alex would need it—whether he understood that now or not. Alex knew what they believed, but had simply written his childhood off as crazy—had stopped believing himself. Julianne could try to tell him the truth, that Huitzilopochtli would come for him too, as they had all been touched in that hotel room. It wouldn’t matter, though. Not with the pretty girl standing in the Christmas card, not with his American life and his soon to be American wife. Alex wouldn’t believe again until he saw those teeth, saw them every night for a month. Then he wouldn’t have a choice.
So she had to write down the things he needed to know. The reasons this happened and where it would lead, all of those things would matter to him in the future. Besides this notebook, Julianne wasn’t sure how else to help her son, because her time was almost up.
She stood from her desk and walked outside to the porch. The cool autumn air surrounded her immediately, but she didn’t mind. It would help her stay awake. As late as it was, Lucas would be sweating and moaning in bed—Julianne wasn’t ready for that yet. She needed to think, to see if she could discover how much time they had left. All she wanted was to finish the notebook on her desk—nothing else. So tired of running, of dreaming, of knowing it didn’t matter how far they went, it would never be far enough.
She sat down in a chair and closed her eyes. Not to sleep, though. There were tricks to this; things she had learned over twenty years of fighting Him. He was always there, waiting on her, willing to let her come to Him if she wanted. Why wouldn’t He? Insanity awaited her mind when she reached Him—and that was the point, to make her break. Whenever she contacted Him, she could feel His hunger for death, feel the twisted nature of His original purpose.
She closed her eyes, leaned back and—
—was with Him.
Her muscles gave completely and she slumped deep into the chair. Besides her chest rising and falling as she breathed, nothing moved.
If Julianne’s brain activity could have been measured, it would have shown something very different than her body. Not dreaming, but complete brain functionality. Most in the medical community would not have believed it possible—her body showing all the signs of deep sleep, but her brain processing information at nearly super human levels.
To Julianne, those things were not important. She lived in His world now, which was to say she lived in Him. A circle of color spun around with a diameter of at least a mile: a tornado that produced no wind but profound beauty instead. An infinite number of hues slammed into each other as they spun, creating colors Julianne had never seen. She moved inside the perimeter of this God without fear—He could not touch her now. He lived here, watching these colors rage and waiting to return. Before she cut herself years ago, these colors had been still and black, and He had slept in that blackness. Now He was awake—semiconscious at least. Her bloodshed had done that, and now He chased, and chased, and chased.
She stopped in the middle of the spinning kaleidoscope. Blackness stretched out to all sides, ending at the wall of colliding colors. She waited for Him in the middle of that black eye.
It took time, but He finally came. There is no need for your presence here anymore.
You haven’t taken us yet, she responded. As she had no physicality in this place, there were no words originating from her—rather thoughts or feelings, or maybe communication even more basic than that. For His part, the conversation originated from the spinning world around her, pulsing in towards her with each word and retreating just as quickly. The colors rushing forward and touching her briefly with each thought.
It’s soon now, Julianne. Is that why you’ve come?
She didn’t respond, only watched the miles of light spinning before her.
You can’t save your son. He’s mine and anyone he touches as well. You must know this; you cannot still believe any of your world isn’t mine.
Laughter rang from the colors, not touching her, but causing the entire circle to dance as if electricity ran through it. Julianne knew this entire conversation amused Him—like a cat playing with a mouse before opening its stomach with a claw.
I don’t think I’ll allow you to visit anymore. You’ll live here soon, another painting on the wall for your son to look at when he arrives. Another color dancing with the rest.
Silence followed briefly; the colors slo
wed in their turning.
You know when this ends; so speak or leave.
He told the truth, didn’t He? Things would get bad, surely worse than this, but the when had always been up to Lucas and her. Never to this monster. How long could they last?
The answer was simple then.
Until they couldn’t anymore.
Lucas took a bite of his eggs, not tasting them or the pepper he lavished on. Necessity made him push the eggs into his mouth; the pepper was simply him trying to find some taste in his food again, some enjoyment.
Julianne sat across from him, and as he chewed on his food he decided he wouldn’t tell her about last night. He would have told her about all the nights before, shared them gladly. He wouldn’t mention last night, though, nor the thoughts it summoned this morning. He would hold all of that inside and spare her because it went too far. Too much.
“Did you sleep?” he asked.
Looking out the kitchen window, she sipped her coffee. She didn’t look at him and didn’t answer right away. Was she frightened? Finally, after all these years, was she seeing it as he did? Last night had shown him where they stood; did she also understand where they were in Its grand scheme—or did she still think they could outrun this thing?
Julianne shook her head after a few seconds, still not looking at him.
Lucas moved the eggs around with his fork. “Is it getting bad?”
She nodded.
Lucas had known where it would end. From the moment he cut his wife’s hand open, he had known where this would crash at. She saw it now, too. This distance between them, this silence, was her way of coping. He could never understand things as she did, could never talk to It when he wanted—but he always understood the end better than she. Sometimes when waking up from his dreams, he saw not only their end, but the world’s—all from what they began in that hotel room.