by David Beers
Alex had been so young when the indoctrination of their beliefs started, just as other children learned Christianity or Islam. Alex had no way of refusing it or understanding that the world would never see life as they did. His parents taught him his family was in danger and always would be. Movement became something expected, and he even took pride in his ability to handle it while other children felt it the end of the world. God was coming for his family, and that was the singular truth he knew. His family, his mother and father, stood between It and the death It brought for humanity. No book taught him these things, but words from his parents’ lips.
Those words never prepared Alex for the world—or how the world would affect his belief. Didn’t tell him he would come back from college unwilling and unable to believe anything about a God chasing them.
“You know it sounds insane, right?” he asked his father; it was a question he would never dare ask his mother. He was close with her—their constant movement alone kept their familial unit strong—still there were things you could say to Dad but not Mom.
When had that been? Two years into college? Certainly not the first, Alex’s nerve was too weak then. They had been in the car, heading…where to? The movies?
“I know what it sounds like, Alex.” His voice revealed no surprise from the assertion. He didn’t even glance at his son.
“It sounds crazy to me too, Dad.” Alex looked across the car at his father. Lucas rarely, if ever, showed anger—but Alex didn’t know which buttons he now pushed.
His dad only nodded.
“You told your mom?”
“No.”
Lucas nodded again.
“She never thought you’d reach this point. She thinks we raised you well enough that the outside world couldn’t change you. I wasn’t sure about it though.”
Looking forward to the road, Alex said, “Why do you believe if you know how ridiculous it sounds?”
His dad was silent for a few seconds. The sound of the road beneath the tires filled the car. “Other religions base everything they know off old books. Many of the things they believe sound silly when you actually consider them: a virgin birth, or reincarnation as an animal, are two pretty big ones. Your mom and I don’t have a book, Alex. I was there and I’ll never forget what I felt in that room. I know what happens to me at night and I know the things your mother goes through. I don’t have any proof for you; there’s nothing I can show you. If we’re right, you’ll see it one day—and for that alone, I wish we were wrong.”
“I just can’t believe there is some God hunting us, Dad.” Alex would meet his father’s eyes if necessary, but he didn’t want to.
Lucas only looked forward, seemingly ignoring what Alex said. “I don’t see things exactly as your mother does, but the basics, those are right.”
So many things didn’t make sense, so many contradictions. “Why did we move all the time when I was a kid? A God can’t follow us if we change zip codes?” He felt anger slipping through; the years he thought he had been lied to pressing on him.
Lucas smiled a bit. “It does sound stupid, huh? For a little while it works, though. When things get bad, we can move and It loses track of us. Not forever, but long enough to let us recover some.”
Alex could go on; he knew that and he saw that his dad would not anger or dodge his questions—he also saw his dad’s faith wasn’t wavering. “It’s impossible. The Thing you’re talking about can’t exist.”
“I hope you never have to find out otherwise, son.”
They had taught him the same things since he could walk. His mother telling him he had to be prepared—ready when his parents were no longer there. They never told him why the basis of their lives wasn’t apparent to him as it was the rest of the family.
“Then why can’t I see everything like you and Mom?”
His dad was silent again for a second. “I guess It’s not strong enough. You were involved, but not completely, with what your mother and I did. It needs us first, our sacrifice, before It can gain the strength to find you.”
“You really think this Thing is coming, huh?”
“I know It is.”
There were other conversations—worse ones with his mother. Fierce ones. That was the first though—the start of Alex abandoning his parents’ world. As it turned out, he had been wrong and they right. Would it have mattered if he listened to them then? Or would he still be sitting in this black desert listening to voices that should be resting?
“Are we going to stay here forever or are you going to let me do what I mean to?” he asked aloud, thinking (crazily, of course) as he did that he might swallow one of those voices. That he might eat the dead.
The car’s frame shook on its wheels as the wind battered it. Alex could hear the speed picking up, assaulting the windshield. It would break if the speed picked up more, smash in on Alex and perhaps smother him next. Would he be found the next morning, sitting on this desert road, suffocated by air? Or did he exist in some other realm forever now?
The wind halted and the voices whispered off into the air. Silence replaced them—a deep, pervasive thing. Alex waited without making a noise. For hours? Longer? He didn’t know and supposed it didn’t matter. He could have turned his car on and timed it, but why? He walked outside for a while, counting his steps and never turning once he left the car in order to find his way back. He went slowly, making sure each step was solid before leaning forward. It felt like walking on a treadmill in the deepest, darkest parts of space.
He finally went back to the car. He waited longer. Time moved like a boulder through a glass house, each second a shattering presence.
“Why?” he asked, breaking the silence of this world.
It had to be…what? What was the reason behind this? Why keep him here?
Time lagged like the space between heartbeats on a cardiac arrest patient’s monitor.
Had days passed? Years? Alex wondered if Brittany had aged while he sat in this eternity. Wondered if his parents’ voices had passed by him in the wind that now seemed so long ago.
He wondered about his sanity and whether he was losing it now. For so many years he lived convinced that he walked on a line of sanity thinner than a spaghetti noodle—the world on one side and his parents on the other. Now that he recognized the truth in their belief, would he actually lose his mind? Now that he realized sanity was not some elusive quest, would it finally slip away?
Taken from him bit by bit in a world made of his own thoughts.
Click.
Nearly audible and felt, something fell into place. That was it. Lost out here, the voices in this desert would take that sanity from him, and if not those, then the ones in his head. Finding insanity here meant being delivered to this God. There would be no need to drive farther, only roll over and die as his parents had. That’s all this was—a way to break him.
“Okay.” He turned the keys, flooding the car with power, and let his seat back. He turned the car off again and lay down. “Do what you need to.”
He closed his eyes and slept.
When he opened them, the sun shined down and he sat nearly in the middle of the road. A truck passed on his left.
Alex started his car and drove on.
14
Present Day
James & Brandon
James awoke. The sun hadn’t peeked through the window yet; darkness still lived outside the room. His alarm was silent, but he lay awake anyway. He could almost remember what woke him, but it was slipping fast, racing away in a fog James couldn’t see through. What was it? Why was he up?
His alarm went off, cracking the silence of the room and the direction his brain was desperately trying to go.
James rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Five-thirty in the morning and his day had to begin. Meant, hopefully, tonight he could report back more than the bullshit he’d been shoveling the past week. James understood, from the phone call yesterday, shoveling wouldn’t be acceptable anymore. His door to door trave
ls had stopped and he could categorize what he had been doing since he met That Crazy Fucking Lady as one of the following: walking near the rubble of the hotel, scouring the internet for traces of Alex Valdez, and lying on his reports.
To be honest, which James didn’t want to be, he had fucked around for the past week—because That Crazy Fucking Lady had scared him to near immobility.
Samuel Taylor called yesterday though, and two minutes after, James saw his life with a clarity that had been evading him.
“Agent Allison, your reports, to put it bluntly, aren’t worth anything to me. This door to door strategy you’re imploring is nonsense, and if you don’t know that yet, perhaps you’re the wrong person for this assignment. If so, that’s fine, but we both need to recognize that and move on. It’s been a week and a half—the news cycle here is relenting but the government there isn’t. Do you understand what that means? I’m shocked there isn’t a report out yet claiming terrorism from a U.S. citizen, but when it does happen, I have to know more than what you’ve given me.”
“Mr.—“
“No, wait a second, Agent Allison. Let me explain again why you’re down there. Your job, the only thing that matters to me, is to find out what Alex Valdez was doing and report it back. So far, it seems you have interviewed every single employee to set foot on the hotel’s premises, and all of them know less of Valdez than I do. All I know is he went to Mexico, had been once before, and his parents killed themselves. Do those things sound like enough to combat the Mexican government when they open up on us in the press?”
“No, sir.”
“No, they don’t. I’m going to give you two days to come up with something more than interviews with bellboys and cooks—if not, I’m sending in a team and you get to see your brother again. Let me explain something else as well: I sent you because I had complete faith in your ability. While you have failed miserably to live up to my expectations, I haven’t totally lost faith. Don’t let me down.”
Samuel Taylor hung up.
James continued holding the phone to his ear, staring forward. When he put the phone down, the fear residing in him—the knowledge of the picture and That Crazy Fucking Lady—finally subsided. The block of ice firmly situated in his chest, unwilling to let him move forward, melted.
Today was a make or break day, as the saying went.
He had lost sight of why he came; that was true. There were other people involved in this, not just one man running around; Valdez had a wife and she had a family, too. The stupidity with which he began this endeavor embarrassed him. He had thought the answers were here, in Mexico, because this is where the building fell. It started falling in America though, in Georgia, and that’s where James had to search.
Every contact Alex Valdez had in the past two years now waited on James’s computer.
He threw on his robe, grabbed his laptop, and went to the couch. The names filled his screen.
Brittany Valdez.
Adam Piper.
Daniel Nayek.
The list went on; phone numbers followed each name, addresses followed those. Social security numbers came next and finally relationships: wife, supervisor, psychiatrist. James needed this, not the shanties he had visited. He needed the man’s past.
Whatever woke James wasn’t even a memory.
Missing. Four hours later, that word seemed to be all James thought. Alex Valdez and people around him were missing.
The psychiatrist’s secretary found his dog nearly dead in the man’s house, having not been fed or watered in days. She showed up after not having any calls returned. Alex’s wife was gone too, reported by her parents.
James had thought a man came down and blew up a building, now it appeared an entire crew might have done it.
The wife’s parents agreed to speak with him. They asked him to call back at one, his time. The mother, Alice Chambers, had been at work and wanted her husband along on the call.
He sat the computer on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch. What would they know? Whether their son-in-law was insane and their daughter with him? What did it mean if that was the case? That they drove down here and blew the fucking place up? James might have a week left, at best. The Mexican government faced tremendous pressure to come up with a why, and what if all James could find in rebuttal was simply: the man had screws loose; his genes stemmed from a pair of people that cut each other up. Would that be enough? That this wasn’t an attack on the Mexican country, but a man who couldn’t keep the voices in his head from bursting onto reality’s landscape?
The other people he spoke with commented about a break down years ago, but they said Alex’s recovery was flawless. Everything else they told him had been about Normalville and Alex and Brittany being upstanding residents. James needed Brittany Valdez’s parents to understand what else could have happened.
James picked up his phone, found his brother’s number, and called. He had called last night, but there was no answer. He had left a message but received no call back.
“Hello.” His brother’s voice came over the phone, sounding like he stood where Atlas should have been.
“Brandon? What’s going on?” The word missing fled from James’s brain.
“Nothing. Sorry I didn’t answer last night.” He offered no more explanation, just stopped speaking—his voice still carrying the same depression as his greeting.
“Are you sick?” James felt something growing in his stomach; it could have been either guilt or a tumor, but both stemmed from the same thought—he left Brandon and something had happened. Something Was Wrong.
“I just…I’m not sleeping well…”
“What’s going on?”
Brandon kept quiet for a few seconds before answering. “I keep having these nightmares. Every time I try to sleep, I have them. I’ve just been staying up so I won’t dream.”
The tumor in James’ stomach relented slightly; only sleeping problems, nothing overly serious. “How long has it been happening?”
“Maybe a week.”
James nodded on his side of the conversation. “I should be back by next week, but do you need me to set up a doctor’s appointment? I can do it from here.”
“Yeah, that might be good. I’m not going to be able to go to school Monday if I don’t get some sleep this weekend.”
“They might not be able to see you until Monday. Have you taken NyQuil or anything?”
“No.” Brandon paused for a second. “It’s not that I have a problem sleeping. I don’t want to go to sleep. The stuff I see scares the hell outta me. Forcing myself to sleep through it would be…I don’t know, unbearable.”
“What do you see?”
His brother didn’t answer.
“Brandon?”
“Yeah,” he said, almost to himself. “I don’t like thinking about it, let alone talking about it. There’s always this green pool and it’s growing, trying to swallow me, I think. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but every time I wake up I think it’s a little closer. Like it might swallow me even when I’m awake. I don’t know—explaining it just sounds fucking stupid.”
Brandon rarely cursed in front of James. Maybe out of respect, or maybe he rarely cursed in front of anyone, James didn’t know. His cursing now did little to ease the feeling in James’s stomach. “Look, I’ll call as soon we get off the phone. I’ll get the earliest time I can, but if it’s not ‘till Monday, you’re going to have to get some sleep.”
Brandon said nothing.
“Hey, you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“Even if it’s only a few hours of sleep, it’s better than nothing.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let me make the appointment and I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
“All right.”
This would be fine. James had no reason to really worry; worst case scenario involved Brandon taking a pill before he went to bed. James would be back in a week and then this would pass.
He’ll be
fine.
James made the appointment and then waited on the phone call with the parents. He hoped the ‘whys’ came now. He hoped this phone call would light up the darkness of Alex Valdez.
His watch said one and James hit send on his phone.
“Hello?” A polite voice answered. James heard a click as someone else picked up the line.
“Mrs. Chambers, it’s Detective James Allison with the Atlanta Police Department. I hope you’re doing as best you can given the circumstances. Would you like my badge number for your own records?”
“That’s okay, Detective. My husband is on the phone with us now.”
“Hi, Detective,” the man said. His voice lacked the polite optimism of his wife.
“Hello, sir. I’m calling about both your daughter and her husband. Just so I’m clear, how many times have you been contacted by our department?”
The husband spoke. “Twice, but once was just us reporting them missing. The second time some guy asked us the same questions we had already answered.”
“Well, sir, I’m going to be your new contact. I know that you might be repeating yourself some here in the beginning, but I need to make sure I get the information directly from you two and not a sheet of paper someone else wrote. Does that sound good?”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Chambers answered.
“Fine. Now, when was the last time you heard from your daughter?”
“About three weeks ago,” she said.
“What did she tell you? The more details you can share, the better: how she sounded, who she was with, where she was at, even what she had for breakfast. You understand? Anything you can remember will help.”
“Yes, sir. She called us early Monday morning, on the sixteenth, at about four. It woke us both up. She didn’t come out and say it but she was scared; she was really trying to be…I guess, determined. Alex, her husband, had left—was already missing.”
Mr. Chambers began speaking with only his wife’s silence as a cue. “Alex has a history of pretty severe mental illness. Brittany thought he was slipping back into it, that he might already have.”