Katie ran up to us slightly out of breath. “Buster! No more running away! You almost died last time!” Katie’s long blond locks were tied in a neat ponytail. She had no idea he had actually died that day. When he was killed, everyone in the park came running out of their trailers from the screams of anguish flooding out of Katie. I just couldn’t bear to see her giant brown eyes filled with such sadness and despair, so I kept Buster on my own leash and Katie had been happy ever since.
“Hi Katie, Buster looks good.” I made Buster turn and lick Katie’s face until she giggled and fell to the ground from his onslaught of affection.
After I was sure she’d had enough attention, I had Buster stop so she could regain her composure. She was still laughing when she said, “We’re going to play Frisbee today.”
“You guys have fun. I’m off to go read,” I said and scratched Buster’s head for emphasis. Waving at Katie I walked to the outskirts of the park, a smile still on my face.
It took a while to get to my favorite spot. It was a field of rolling hills smattered with wild flowers and a large willow tree resting on top of the highest peak. The tree was a haven of shade on a particularly hot day. The only thing that could possibly break up the heat wave were the darkened clouds I could see on the horizon. Unfortunately, the clouds were making the air thick with humidity, but at least my willow tree would give me some comfort.
I walked up the incline of the color-filled hill leading to my tree. The flowers were gorgeous this time of year. Every color imaginable covered the landscape making me feel like I had stepped into a painting. Most people steered clear of this area because with flowers came bees, and lots of them. There was even a hive in my lovely willow tree. Thousands of these fields existed all over the world, another part of keeping the planet green and well oxygenated. I never minded the bees; they pretty much kept to themselves and if they buzzed around me, it was only out of curiosity, not the malice that most people assigned to the poor species. Even if you were stung, it’s not like it was a life or death situation, unless you were allergic or something. But as many times as I’d frequented this spot not once had any bee killed itself by stinging me.
I pulled back the long hangings of leaf-covered branches that draped to the ground from the top of the willow. My private fortress. The buzzing of the beehive added a nice hum of life to the day. I laid my blanket on the ground, plopped down on my stomach and pulled out the reader.
I scrolled down to the Scientific Journal and brought it up on screen. I decided to start from the beginning since all the science mumbo jumbo went completely over my head last night. I had to admit, even awake and well rested I was still having trouble getting through the terminology of the report. Words like neurotoxins and membrane proteins were cluttering the pages. I had to use the built-in dictionary just to get through two sentences. After the first read-through, what I gathered was this: using certain forms of Voodoo rituals (i.e. ceremonial garb, prayers, herbs, blood, not specified whether human or animal, yuck) they were able to bring back the corpse for up to five minutes. No matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find anything that explained my power. It’s not like my mom performed Voodoo, and my dad died before I was born. It was disheartening and I immediately felt defeated. Was I some random fluke of nature? Some misstep of evolution? I had no answers. Maybe I was missing something. I resolved myself to asking Mr. Alaster on Monday. Possibly he’d have some insight that I couldn’t see. I could never tell him my secret, of course, but in a round about way I could at least find out what he knew. Not much, I’d guess, but it was worth a try.
Flipping through the pages of my reader, I found a news clipping of Jason Keroff. He droned on about Vice President Turner and his crusty old body and I didn’t pay attention to the rest. I just admired his adorable smiling eyes and sarcastic smirk he was so good at.
And suddenly, Ryan popped into my head. The spontaneity of his kiss. The dirty blonde mess of hair. Uuuuggh! He was ruining my perfect crush on Jason. It took me weeks to forget about Ryan after his tutoring ended, and that was a professional relationship. Now that he added a kiss in the mix (which could have been totally insincere) it was going to take me much longer to block him out of my head now. I quickly thought about my strategy of how to avoid him at school. It worked before, it would work again. No talking, no close proximity and above all, no eye contact! It was those eyes that pulled me in every freakin’ time and I was mad at myself for wanting to believe, even if just for a second, that he actually might like me. That was the biggest mistake I could ever make. I had to make him the enemy or I’d never get through this. Always remember, he ignored me and brushed me off last year. And even though he apologized, I had to believe that it wasn’t heart-felt. Guilty feeling, maybe, but lying about it all the same.
THUMP!
I grabbed my head in pain. It felt like someone had just hit my forehead with a steel hammer. What was that?
THUMP!
I started to panic. Was I dying? Was this some sort of brain hemorrhage? What was causing me this intense pain? It felt like an axe jammed into my brain and split it in two.
A green mist appeared in front of me, blinding me, seeping into my head through my nose and ears and mouth. I screamed in fear until the green fog started to clear and suddenly I was in the trailer park standing in front of my mother. She was in her garden, choking from the same green smoke. I reached out for her, but my hand went straight through her body like she was a ghost. Then I realized, I was the ghost. I was at two places at the same time. My body was still under the willow tree, but some other form of me was back in the trailer park watching my mother drop to the ground, coughing from the smoke filling her lungs.
I looked around and the green mist was everywhere and everyone in the park was choking and collapsing to the ground.
“Chelsan?”
I watched as a ghost of my mother stepped out of her writhing body.
“Mom! What’s happening?” I couldn’t hide the panic from my voice. Either I had fallen asleep and this was the worst nightmare I’d ever had, or something very unexplainable and weird was going on.
THUMP!
I cringed in pain and when I opened my eyes, my mom and I were in an empty room. “Mom? What is going on?”
She wouldn’t answer me. My brain was squeezing with agony. I must have been having some kind of seizure and it was causing this insane delusion.
“I wanted to show you before it’s too late,” Mom spoke to me and her eyes met mine. There was a kind of desperateness to her expression I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Before what’s too late?”
THUMP!
“Make it stop!” I cried out from the torment and when I opened my eyes Mom and I were in the most extravagant mansion I had ever seen. Almost every item from the stairway, to the tables, chairs, even the frames on the wall were all gold. It was like stepping into Fort Knox, melted down and molded into a house.
“Where is this place?”
Mom put her finger on her lips to quiet me and pointed.
That’s when I noticed a very pregnant version of my mom standing in front of Vice President Geoffrey Turner and his wife, Roberta. Uh oh. She was a Feline. A genuine cat lady. I had only heard about Felines in history class. Back in the early two-thousands (before Age-pro) women and men used to have surgeries to literally lift their skin off their skulls and pull it back to get rid of their wrinkles and sags. Gross. As a result the more they did it the less human they looked until eventually they started to resemble cats, hence the term Felines. On top of that they’d inject themselves with some kind of paralysis drug to freeze their faces in place. It was a horrendous sight; I had only seen pictures, but standing there in front of this woman with her long black hair pulled back tightly in a bun, midnight colored eyes and shiny-stretched-back alabaster skin, made me cringe.
Looking at mom was a relief to the eyes, in her early thirties, fresh, vibrant, beautiful. The complete opposite of a Feline. Mo
m had obviously started her Age-pro by then and her face was timid and scared. She was standing next to a man and my heart nearly jumped out of my body. I was positive with every fiber of my soul that it was my father. He had my eyes and my lips. I found that I nearly choked from the emotion at seeing him.
The scene was surreal, as if watching it on a holo-tv and hitting pause. All four figures were frozen in time like we had stepped into a three-dimensional photograph.
This was so confusing, why was my mom talking to the Vice President? What were they doing in his mansion? And then it hit me…
“This is your memory.”
Mom reached out and touched my face, nodding once. “I know about your gift.”
My eyes widened. “You what?”
“I need to show you everything I know.”
“But why now?” I asked. Still trying to figure out what was happening.
“Just watch.”
It was like she hit play. The four figures started moving.
WHACK! Goeffrey Turner slapped my father so hard, he actually fell backwards.
“HOW COULD YOU FRANKLIN?! After all these years?!” Turner roared in outrage.
I turned to the ghostly image of my mother to see her reaction, but she just watched the scene in front of her, expressionless. As if these were events she had played over and over in her mind, she had become numb to them.
“I LOVE HER!” My father screamed back. “AND I LOVE THE BABY SHE’S CARRYING!” He took a deep breath to calm himself and looked at Turner pleadingly, “She’s your grandchild, father. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
What? Did he just call Vice President Turner his father?
My mom from the past began to cry hysterically, holding her swollen belly, trying to regain her self-control. My father immediately supported her with his arms, keeping her steady.
“She’s trash, Franklin, look what she did to you?! You know what must be done,” Roberta said quietly, but far more deadly than Turner’s slap to the face.
My father’s eyes seemed to pop from genuine terror. “You wouldn’t dare,” he hissed.
“You’re back now and we forgive you, but we won’t let you mate with this trash. These are the consequences you have to pay.” Geoffrey Turner reached out and touched my mother’s belly. “She’ll be coming soon, I’d say my good-byes if I were you.”
That seemed to crack whatever composure was left in my father. He punched the Vice President so hard in the face that he flew back five feet to land on his gold coffee table.
CRACK!
I cringed as I realized some kind of bone snapped in Turner.
Roberta wheeled on my parents.
And then the most frightening thing I had ever seen happened…
Roberta’s eyes turned a deep solid purple. Out of her mouth a large boa constrictor slithered its way to the floor and moved with lightening speed toward my pregnant mother.
“Mom,” I said in a quiet frightened voice.
“Keep watching,” was all she said.
My dad grabbed a gold statuette from the mantle and threw it as hard as he could at his mother. It hit with such terrifying impact that Roberta crumpled to the ground with only the sound of the THWAP to her head. The snake vanished only milliseconds from my mother’s feet…
…THUMP!
I clenched my hands over my head from the tortured agony of the returning…
THUMP!
The surroundings were starting to swirl and change once more. I didn’t know how much longer I could take the throbbing pain. My mind was racing and sluggish all at once. I wanted to vomit, but I could literally feel the disconnection between my body and this strange form I was currently in.
Red, orange and black churning colors swarmed around my eyes with dizzying force. In an instant everything was in focus.
Mom and I were standing next to a ten-foot bonfire. It was the only source of light in the pitch black dead of night. The flames licked up the side of a silhouetted cliff face and the sound of crashing waves filled the unnatural silence.
That’s when I noticed Geoffrey Turner and Roberta standing in front of the fire. Their faces were painted like skeletons and they were dressed in long black robes embroidered with intricate tribal designs.
Their eyes were inhumanly pitch black and they began chanting unintelligible words. The fire responded in turn, flames rising higher and higher, crackling and snapping like a furious counterpart to the spine-chilling peace of the night.
Roberta’s feline face was monster-like in the fire’s glow. In her hands, she held a picture of my mom. She threw it into the flames and the fire roared in answer.
Turner reached down and picked up a cruelly serrated knife with symbols carved into the handle. He screamed in a kind of tortured pleasure as he tore into his arm with the saw-toothed blade. Blood poured from his wound into the fire.
The fire was alive with what could only be described as ecstasy. Flames were jumping and leaping into the darkened sky. Turner’s voice was hoarse and crackling as he said, “The mother and child will die.”
Turner’s wound closed like an imaginary zipper, zipped his skin back together, forming a large white scar. Both Geoffrey’s and Roberta’s eyes cleared.
WHOOSH!
The flames instantly extinguished and we were all plunged into darkness.
THUMP!
Ow. Seriously, ow.
Mom and I were in a delivery room. My delivery room.
There she was, dead on the gurney, and me, the baby me, dead in my father’s arms.
The doctor was there. He placed one hand on my father’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
When my father didn’t respond the doctor shook his head in sympathy, “I’ll give you a few moments.”
The doctor left the room.
I was stunned by the memory. I turned to my mother. “But how?”
“This is how it happened,” she said and looked at me. Her eyes were filled with tears and then she turned back to the memory.
As soon as the door swung shut my father took a deep breath and placed my corpse on top of my mother. He leaned down and kissed mom’s lifeless body.
I gasped as my own father’s eyes rolled back in his head and when he stared down at the two of us, they were solid red like a nightmare. He grabbed a scalpel from a nearby tray.
“I give my life for theirs.”
And he slashed his arms and throat, dropping on top of our cadavers with a thud. His blood sparked and cracked as it seeped into our skin and clothes.
SNAP! The baby me’s eyes popped open and she breathed in life.
As the last vestiges of life left my father, his eyes began to swirl black, like the holes I could see in dead people. Faster and faster it spun until it twisted its way out of his eyes and into mine.
In that moment, my mom of the past, gasped for air underneath my father’s dead body.
“That was how you got your power,” Mom said quietly next to me. I could see this memory was the most painful for her to watch. There were tears in her eyes as she saw herself on the gurney screaming at the sight of my father’s corpse.
Doctors rushed in, shock on their faces. They quickly removed my father and grabbed the crying baby to make sure I was okay.
The scene froze in an eerie melee of chaos and blood.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” So many things were racing through my head. If she knew all along what happened, why was she just now telling me? And in this freaky way, and getting back to the original topic, how was she showing me this? What was happening?
“I’m not done.”
THUMP!
I really wished the thumping would stop already. I could handle the visions, but the thump, thump, thump, was going to make my head explode, literally. The environment began to transform once again, colors melting into each other like an impressionist painting until our trailer slowly came into view. We were inside and I gasped at what I saw.
We were in the memory of the d
ay when I first used my gift. Bruce threw my mother of the past into the trailer wall. I almost started to panic when I knew that I was about to watch myself kill him. The seven-year-old me was screaming at the top of her lungs and suddenly Bruce was being taken down by the black widow. It was sickening to watch. It was one thing to reflect in a memory, but seeing it in front of me like this, like a voyeur watching some gruesome snuff film, was unbearable.
“Stop it, please,” my voice was barely a whisper.
The Riser Saga Page 6