Writer Battle_Chaos

by S Shane Thomas

  She wished she had stopped to pee. In her haste, she had been holding it for quite a while. Now, the pain was distracting and annoying.

  She stood rigid. There was nothing to do but wait. She thought things through from where she stood, looking around her.

  If this had been her own little ruse, she would let them stew awhile. Why rush in? She would let them have time to develop a full head of fear. Let them have time to allow their imaginations to run wild.

  On the safe side of the crystal wall, Kate was explaining something to Carter that Ophelia couldn’t hear. She was definitely in on the plot, although she couldn’t be sure to what degree. Carter on the other hand appeared to have been oblivious.

  She tried to stare them down, but they barely looked her way. Her Narcissistic nature made her annoyed, even now, that she wasn’t the center of their attention.

  Her familiars were beginning to whimper softly. They were not used to resignation from their master. They sat watching her for any signal she was still in command, but she paid them no mind.

  Getting restless, they wandered about the room. They looked for a way out. Anyway out would due, but it was air tight. It wasn’t just air tight, it was impenetrable. Nothing was getting in or out. Ophelia knew that automatically, but her familiars were hardly so clever.

  Cripes! Ophelia thought as she watched Kate and Carter leave the room and come back with chairs. Nice, comfortable chairs. Clearly they were waiting for someone and it was going to be awhile, she thought. She still wanted to pee in the corner.

  Edgar fled as he watched the door slam shut behind Ophelia. He had not entered, because not being so in love with himself as was Ophelia, he had noticed what she missed. He tried to warn her but she was already inside and the sound was swallowed up as it came out of his mouth. Then the door, which had stood open waiting for him, swung shut when he hesitated outside.

  He fled to warn the Coven, to save his brethren, to bring back an army and liberate one of their own.

  But now he also fled eleven hunters who came out of the woodwork, literally, like nearly invisible ninjas.

  Clearly, they were in hot pursuit of him.

  How could this make any sense? What could they do to him? Edgar wondered.

  The Coven was used to acting with impunity. They certainly had no match among uninitiated humans, did they? Edgar wondered. This was Ophelia’s hubris. She never even saw them. How could she have missed them?

  Edgar looked back at his pursuers who were closing fast. Even now, he could barely see them as they blended into the night.

  One of them aimed something resembling a crossbow at him and fired. He jumped and managed to dodge the projectile, but a second ninja, for lack of a better word, fired and got him with a dart in the butt cheek.

  He took three more steps before he could no longer feel his legs. His legs gave out from under him and he hit the pavement, skidding another three feet.

  A ninja knelt beside him as he lay immobilized and felt his neck for a pulse. Satisfied, she reached down and pulled the dart from Edgar’s ass.

  Another ninja knelt down and looked in Edgar’s eyes. Then she grabbed him by the chin and top of the head to get a better look in his eyes.

  “There you are,” she said with a saccharin sweetness. “You’re in for a shock.”

  Was she the Order? He wondered. Why would the Order attack so blatantly?

  He tried to conjure Chaos, but she just smiled and said, “Are you trying to mesmerize me? Your gestures won’t work now. Just relax and accept your condition.”

  Several long hours went by before the door behind Kate and Carter opened suddenly.

  Ophelia fixed her gaze on the entry. She had passed the time in standing meditation, as best she could, attempting to not give a psychological advantage to her captors.

  Even so, she was getting so she wanted to puke watching Kate and Carter babble their sickly attentions toward each other. Eventually, she was calling them Crater in her thoughts and sometimes Carkate which she didn’t like but eventually morphed it into simply Carcass, which she did like.

  They hadn’t spoken to her in hours although they went on incessantly among themselves which she couldn’t actually hear, the little butt wipes. She came to the conclusion that someone left them here to get at her, like she wasn’t even worthy of their asinine attention and she wasn’t going to let that work. Or maybe it was fucking working, she couldn’t be sure.

  She never sat, not even on the floor, she barely moved and, despite wanting to pee in the corner so badly, she wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing she was anything other than in control.

  Now she shrank a little even while she was relieved to have something happening finally.

  Her two useless familiars quit their juvenile exploring and watched the door right beside her.

  Come on, damn it, pumping the melodrama for all it’s worth?, she thought. Just walk through the bloody door already.

  As if on cue, a figure appeared in the doorway, cast in shadow so Ophelia couldn’t make out who it was. They stood there a moment, drew a breath and stepped forward.

  “Hello Ophelia, how have you been?”

  Ophelia was indeed shocked and failed miserably to hide it. She nearly forgot not to wet her Capri pantsuit.

  “What’s the matter, my dear, has the cat got your tongue?”

  Still only silence.

  “I realize it has been, what?…forty years since you dumped me?”

  Ophelia caught her breath and swallowed and ignored that last phrase. “Presley, is that really you?” she said conjuring up something from deep down inside. Just hard to be sure what it was.

  “Indeed it is me. How have you been?” Presley asked with a real smile.

  “Oh, I’ve been, uh…” she said, catching herself. “What do you mean dumped me? It was you who left me.” She was playing a risky gambit, but then she was at an extreme disadvantage.

  “Funny, the tricks one’s memory plays on a fellow,” he said still smiling. “I’d swear you gave a little speech about how we were so young and how I would find another. That you needed to pursue your calling. What was that? Destroying humans who got in the way of the Coven?”

  “I only meant that I was going to be, uh, well, devoted to establishing my, uh, career and that you would probably find someone, before I could ever make it back to you.” She flinched knowing she hadn’t said that well. “And destroying humans? We have many humans in the Coven. We value humans.”

  “Yes, true, but don’t you mean humans who have value to you. And I waited ten years for you. You never came back. Not even once.”

  “No, I did come back and you were dating Shelly Mandel…”

  “Ophelia don’t. Enough of all that. Let me explain the situation in which you find yourself. You are in a plasmonic containment unit. There is nothing which can cross through the barriers of this unit. Not even your so-called Chaos can cross this boundary.”

  “That’s not possible,” Ophelia butted in, perhaps where she should not have.

  “It is possible. I have worked on this for the last forty years…. Well, make that thirty years, because the first ten, I was…waiting for you!” He was getting worked up now. He tried to steady himself.

  “How could you have invented such a thing, you’re not a scientist?”

  Presley continued with some frustration, “I did, well, I negotiated it. With some humanoids from the Eschelin Galaxy-the Eschelids. We have an alliance with them. They provide us the technology to eliminate Chaos-loving bad agents on our planet, just as they did on their own planet and they will open trade with our organization.”

  “And why,” Ophelia cut in, “do you suppose they want to eliminate Chaos agents?”

  “You have three minutes to convince me to stop the timer or the chamber you are in will compress you down to the size of a golf ball and and turn you into a diamond, which I will lovingly mount on this cane I carry.

  “This may seem
extreme, but it is the only way to assure that everything within that chamber is converted into something inert, and, therefore safe.

  “The two diamonds already mounted on my cane are your mother and your father. They were also in exactly the same place you are now. Haven’t you wondered why there is no trace of them left, not even in the ether? That is why, because they are now inert. The colors in the diamond are there because of the impurities. Your mother’s is scarlet and your father’s is violet. I’m hoping your beasts in there with you won’t make yours muddy.”

  Presley hadn’t realized until now just how angry he had become that he had given all the love he had to one who couldn’t return it to him, or so he thought. He had internalized it so long it had festered. Unable to stop himself now, he raged forward explaining his plan to eliminate the Coven from the planet.

  “Assuming that you are no more convincing than they were, I will have eliminated the core leadership of the Coven and the remaining mop up operation can begin with the various weaponry the Eschelids have already provided. We already have Edgar and we begin that operation later tonight depending on the outcome here.”

  Presley looked genuinely concerned for Ophelia. “Your three minutes starts now.”

  Ophelia was in shock and lost twenty seconds just trying to digest all she just heard. She tried also to pack away the rage at her parents’ fate.

  “Presley,” she began, “we have been good for humans and to humans…”

  “Hang on, don’t waste time on that. You have been tried and tested. What part of simulation do you not understand? I so wanted you to pass, but your buttons are just too easy to push. I told her just muss up your hair and your true nature would spill out all over the place. You had your stinky beast eat her.”

  Presley interrupted. “Try again.”

  “She shot me, and my familiar.”

  “You knew she couldn’t hurt you. She was a child. Try again Ophelia and quickly”

  Ophelia was panicking and she knew it. She had barely a minute. “We, my parents and I, come from the Eschelin Galaxy. We escaped when they tried to eliminate us there. We should have been better to humans, I’ll admit that now. We were angry and took it out on them and that was wrong. However, the Eschelids are an evil force and you do not want to do business with them. They will ultimately eliminate humans as they have done with all races they encounter, including ours, but they will never stop at eliminating just us. If they are now here on this planet, we need to team up against them and stop them.”

  “That would be more believable if you had passed the first test.”

  Ophelia really didn’t know where to go. She had only one hope left. She said, “We have a daughter Presley.”

  “What?! You’re just making that up,” Presley said, stunned.

  “I’m not. Why do you think I left for that first year?” Ophelia said. “When I came back you were seeing that strumpet, Shelly. I was so angry, I took it out for forty years every chance I got. That was wrong. I know that now.”

  “She’d be at least forty,” Presley said, amazed.

  “Forty-one, Presley, and a sweet heart.” Ophelia said, desperately. “Hit the stop button Presley.”

  Presley came to his senses and dove at the button, but too late. The machine had begun its terrible cycle. Everyone present could hear its hideous intent.

  Ophelia pressed her face up to the crystal wall. Real tears spilled onto her cheeks. None noticed, not even Ophelia, that the crotch of her Capri pantsuit was now wet.

  Presley pressed his face to the crystal like a visitor to a death row convict. “What have I done?” he put his hand up to hers.

  “Her name is Genera, please don’t harm her,” was the last thing Ophelia said.

  Later that evening, just as promised, Presley unleashed legions with special weaponry. The plan was for the first sweep with plasma rifles which they used to vaporize the non-humans. He saw no issue with their imminent annihilation. They weren’t, after all, real humans or even on this planet legally. He was pretty sure, they were not the most clever from their home planet. Or that’s what he told himself. Once having eliminated their leadership, he expected to make quick work of the common non-human.

  The humans who were working with the Coven were to be rounded up and put into internment camps where they were to be put through conversion therapy to eliminate their unnatural relationship with Chaos.

  The next morning, after the hideous machine completed its cycle, Presley stopped by to pick up his new golf ball sized diamond. It was a complex stone, soon to be cut into the center piece for his cane. It had deep swirls of color from cinnamon to deep crimson. He gazed at it and cried for just a moment washing the stone with his tears. It certainly buffed out in his hand to an intense shine, and he wondered if he should just mount it uncut in the rough which made him feel better. As he walked out into the alley, he felt very like a god.

  Chapter 6 S Shane Thomas

  The City

  Carter shook off the last effects of Chaos that had rippled through the world, his world, of logic and reason. He blinked his uninjured eye and rubbed the side of his head. Many of the circumstances he was dealing with had remained the same, it seemed that fate had simply forgotten to focus on all the little details.

  “At least we didn’t get stuck in a bubble,” Sarah’s ghost said.

  Carter was startled. Somehow he had been confused into thinking Kate was with him, “Did you get caught in that last wave of Chaos?”

  “Nope. I just stood here, waiting for the world to unfreeze,” Sarah’s near transparent form posed like a statue, but rolled her eyes about.

  “I don’t recall being cold, it’s just that I thought you were Kate, somehow, and then this bubble appeared, and Ophelia, a familiar that looks like you, and the familiar named Roger, were inexplicably all trapped together in it.”

  “Not that kind of frozen. In the blink of an eye, everyone was standing around like you said, only instead of chasing one another or hiding, everyone held perfectly still. Then this voice in my head simply started reciting actions that people took, and sharing their petty thoughts.”

  “Sounds like you had a rougher time than me. At least I thought I had saved Kate already. So you became telepathic? Is that an ability you have since you became a ghost?”

  “God, I hope not! Boring! I think the Chaos simply took motion out of reality for a while. That voice simply stated actions, but everyone was holding still. Then Ophelia’s thoughts prattled on and on. By the way, Kate is safe, and Ophelia and her goons are doomed.”

  “They won’t break out of this bubble?” Carter cocked an eyebrow.

  “Plasmonic containment unit,” Sarah replied. “Presley said this thing is a plasmonic containment unit, not a bubble. I think I got backed up a bit after the wave of Chaos passed. Maybe Chaos forgot that we are at the center of this plot for the Order to take over the world.”

  “Who’s Presley?” Carter asked. The first wave of Chaos made him feel like he had one too many magic brownies, this last one just made him feel confused.

  “I am,” said a man standing in the doorway, leaning against a cane.

  Carter started in surprise. He looked at the silver haired lean man and mustered half a smile. “Hi.”

  “Thank you for luring Ophelia out of hiding, the Alliance has been hunting her for nearly thirty years,” Presley said. “I worked with your sister. That creature in there is only wearing her likeness,” he gestured toward Ophelia’s familiar.

  Carter opened his mouth and pointed at Sarah’s ghost.

  “He can’t see me, bro, only you can. Trust Presley, I’ve been working with him since I joined the Alliance. Just pretend I’m not around when there are other people in the room,” Sarah’s ghost said.

  Carter closed his mouth with a click of his teeth, he looked at the familiar, then at Presley, and nodded his head.

  “I’m going to serve Ophelia a death sentence for crimes against human
ity, you may want to look away,” Presley said.

  Carter noticed that beneath the older man’s cool exterior he seemed sad. His voice had cracked slightly and his eyes looked puffy, like he had been crying. Carter turned his back and tried to ignore the sounds of Ophelia meeting her fate. He jumped when a hand patted his back.

  “She was someone very dear to me before she committed herself to the Order and its cruelty,” Presley gestured for Carter to walk with him.

  “What now?” Carter asked.

  “Well, first you should clean yourself up, then I believe you are overdue for a reunion with Kate.”

  “Kate? She’s safe?” Carter rubbed his swollen eye and tried to slick down his hair.