by R. W. Ridley
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
He pressed his lips together and did an uncanny impression of a motorboat. Spit bubbles formed at the corners of his mouth.
“He’s a handful, that one,” Wes said. “Boy’s got all kinds of energy. Takes pert’ near all of us to keep him entertained.”
“He’s so big,” I said.
“Big and fussy,” Wes replied.
“Good thing there’s so many of you...” I stopped in mid sentence. I scanned the eyes of everyone in the room. I saw their faces then, as I remembered them, in my mind’s eye. There was something wrong. Something was missing... Not something. Someone.
“Ajax.” I said the name with a sense of urgency. Like I was commanding that they bring him to me now.
Wes hesitated. He looked at Tarak for guidance. Tarak simply nodded.
Before they could formulate a nice adult explanation as to where Ajax was, Tyrone spoke up and simply said, “They got him.”
“The Délons?” I asked out of reflex more than anything else. I knew it was the Délons.
“Yep,” Tyrone answered.
“He put up a hell of a fight,” Wes added. “Took six of ‘em out before they was able to get a net around him.”
“Did they...” I didn’t want to know the answer to the question so I stopped. Whether they changed him into a Délon or not didn’t matter. I decided I preferred not to know. But Wes read my mind and answered the question I didn’t ask.
“He ain’t one of them. They got him and the other go-rillas locked up somewhere, prisoners. I hear tell they make ’em fight for sport.”
“Where?”
“Délon City,” Wes said. “Don’t know much beyond that.”
I owed Ajax my life. The thought of him as a prisoner forced to fight his own kind for the amusement of the Délons sickened me. “I’m going there tomorrow.”
“What in the world of pig snot for?” Wes asked.
I wasn’t really sure how to answer the question. I chuckled nervously. “You might want to sit down for this.”
Wes did as suggested. “What is it, kid?”
“I don’t know exactly how to put this.”
“Put it in plain English and just spit it out, boy.” Wes folded his arms over his chest. They rested on top of his huge potbelly.
I did as he requested. “I’m their king.”
There was a jolt of suffering silence. They all stared at me blankly. Except for Nate. He fidgeted in my arms.
“Whose king?” Tyrone asked.
“The Délons.” I said it quickly. Like I was ripping a band-aid off.
“What are you saying?” Valerie asked.
“I’m the Délon king.”
They all looked at each other. Tyrone was the first to laugh. The others, including Tarak, quickly joined in.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“How’d you go and manage something like that?” Wes asked.
“I didn’t manage anything. It just happened.”
“A human cannot be Délon king,” Tarak said.
“I know.” I didn’t want to be king of the purple freaks, but I was more than a little upset that my friends thought it was so funny that I could be their king. “Look, I didn’t ask to be king. It was Roy’s idea.”
Tarak suddenly stopped laughing. “General Roy?”
“The very same,” I said.
“This doesn’t make sense.” Tarak stood and bumped his head on the ceiling. Chunks of plaster fell to the floor.
Wes didn’t appear to know why Tarak was so upset, but he had learned that whenever the big hairy goon got worried, they all should worry. He suddenly forgot why he was laughing. “What’s wrong, Fluffy?” He had taken to calling Tarak “Fluffy” mostly because it made Tarak mad.
“General Roy is to be king.” Tarak brushed the bits of ceiling from his shoulder. “It is written.”
“Looks like they’ve gone off script,” I said. “Because I got marked by the royal scarab and everything.”
“Marked?” Tarak’s hair stood on end. He stood fully erect and punched a hole through the tiled ceiling with his massive head. He spread his arms out wide and let out an ear-piercing roar. In one swift motion he lurched forward and snatched Nate from my arms, knocking Wes, Tyrone, and Valerie to the ground.
“Hey!” I screamed.
“What’s the big idea?” Valerie screeched.
“He’s been marked by the royal scarab,” Tarak said retreating to the back of the room cradling Nate in his left hand. “It’s not safe.”
“Wait a minute! Wait...” I was somewhat disoriented from Tarak’s sudden outburst. “I... I...” My mind was racing. The lingering doubt I had managed to shake about my own trustworthiness was building momentum in my gut again. I did not want what the Délons wanted. What did Tarak mean ‘It’s not safe.’
“Now, hold on just a fat feathered minute,” Wes said as he struggled to get his portly frame up off the floor. “Oz is Oz, and ain’t nothing going to change that. I know it sure as I’m standing here.”
“He’s been marked.” Tarak crouched in the corner seemingly afraid for his life.
“You keep saying that, and it don’t make a damn bit of difference to me. Plenty of people have been marked. They’s as harmless as someone who ain’t.” I was heartened by Wes’s defense of me.
“People who are marked,” Tarak said, the timbre of his voice grew softer and softer as he spoke, “are...” The big white monster searched for the right word. “Open vessels of information.”
“You’ve gone loco, Fluffy.” Wes crossed his eyes and twirled his index finger near his ear.
I knew what Tarak meant by open vessels of information. The Délons were monitoring me. I don’t know how, but they knew my thoughts... No, that’s not exactly right. They knew what I was feeling. It had something to do with the marking. They were tracking my emotions as if they were feeding off them.
“I have to go,” I said as I moved toward the back exit.
“What?” Wes followed after me.
“Don’t go, man,” Tyrone pleaded.
“Don’t listen to that big hair ball,” Wes said. “Stay.”
“It’s not safe,” I said. I reached Tarak and tried to get him to make eye contact with me. He turned away. I got a last fleeting glimpse of Nate as Tarak covered the toddler completely from my view.
“Tarak,” Valerie moaned. “Tell Oz to stay. Tell him you didn’t mean it.”
“It’s okay,” I said sounding more abrupt than I intended. “He’s right. It’s not safe for me to be here.” I turned to them with a brave face, but my heart was about to fall out of my chest. I felt at home with them. I felt protected. I didn’t want to leave.
“C’mon, kid,” Wes said. “Tarak’s wrong about this. I know it like I know a chocolate bar is sweet. He ain’t nothing but an overgrown poodle with on overactive imagination.”
“He’s our Keeper, Wes. You need to listen to him.” I walked out of the mattress store.
Wes followed. “We gotta come up with a plan, Oz. We set out to bring everybody back. Remember?”
“They are back.” I continued to walk away.
“That’s a bunch of bull and you know it. Ain’t nothing back but a gang of purple things with crazy spider legs on their heads, and purple-about-to-bes. This ain’t back. This ain’t nowhere near back.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Damn it, boy!” Wes roared. I could feel his anger chasing me down as I turned the corner of the mattress store. “Don’t you run away from this. We need you.”
Chubby saw me and started to approach. “It’s too dangerous, Wes.”
“Dangerous?” Wes belly laughed. “Good night and good crap, Oz. It reached about a half past dangerous a great while back. We’re staring down the gullet of one of those do or die moments you always hear about.”
I mounted Chubs. “You heard Tarak...”
“And Tarak’s a fine fella’... or monster
... or big ol’ shaggy ape, but he ain’t right about this. I know that like I know the sky is...”
I smiled. “You were going to say like you know the sky is blue.” I smiled through the purple haze of the Délon night. “Like I said before, I’m going to Atlanta... Délon City tomorrow. Me and Lou.” Wes’s face lit up when he heard Lou’s name. “And some others. Can you follow us without being seen?”
“Invisible is my middle name.” He smiled.
“We have to find Ajax,” I said. “This won’t work without him.”
“So we’re going to do this? We’re going to fight?”
“You’ll have to convince Tarak.”
“That big ball of fur will come around. You’ll see.”
I turned Chubby toward the road. “Then it’s settled. We fight.” I tapped chubby in the ribs with my heel, and he trotted back to Tullahoma.
EIGHT
I was saddle weary by the time I got back to the house. I jumped off Chubby’s back and hit the ground flat footed. My knees instantly ached and my back throbbed. I shuffled toward the back door.
I had spent most of the ride back from the mattress store in Manchester wiping the tears from my eyes. I had gone there looking for... I don’t know exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to feel safe, to feel like I wasn’t alone in this. But instead, I felt more alone than ever.
“I wanted what they wanted.” I said it to myself over and over again on the road home. I didn’t know what Mrs. Dayton meant by it, and I tried to convince myself she couldn’t be right. But my encounter with Tarak made me doubt myself even more, and there is no lonelier feeling on earth than when you doubt yourself.
I stepped up to the back door, and took a deep breath. I couldn’t let anyone else see the uncertainty in my face, although I was sure they were all asleep. I was a king. I was a warrior. I was a fourteen-year-old kid who had to conquer the world. Doubt was not an option.
I opened the door. The house was dark and alive. A pungent burning sugary odor beat against my face when I moved toward the kitchen. It stung my nostrils.
Gordy was crashed on the floor in the living room and Lou was stretched out on the couch. Devlin was nowhere around.
I crept along the wooden floor, feeling the stiff boards strain and creek beneath my feet. I sniffed the air trying to find the source of the smell. In the front foyer, I stepped in a puddle of goop, a clear liquefied rubber that stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I bent down to examine it. It wasn’t a puddle. It was a trail that wound down the hall toward my parent’s room.
The smell grew more intense the closer I got to the room. I tiptoed down the remainder of the hallway, my back against the wall. I knew that once I found the source of the smell I would be sorry I did. “That’s a bell you can’t unring,” my grandfather used to say, but I felt compelled to do it. My curiosity trumped my common sense. I placed my hand on the doorknob to my parents’ room and let it linger. I could practically see the odor drifting from underneath the door. As I stood there working up the courage to open the door, I heard a series of high-pitched squeaks and low moans. I tried to convince myself that ignorance was bliss, to just walk away and pretend the odor and the noises didn’t exist, but my need to know forced me to turn the knob and step inside the room.
I expected the room to be dark, but it wasn’t. It was more than dark. The darkness had been sucked from the room, and all that remained was a thick, soupy blackness. The burnt sugary odor barreled past the doorframe like an avalanche. I stooped with my hands on my knees, and felt my stomach twist in a knot. Within seconds, I vomited violently on my mother’s nice wood floors. I rose and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
The squeaking grew louder and more panicked as I took another step inside the room. I flipped the light switch, and was not surprised when the light did not come on. The light from the hallway poured in and fought through the blackness to illuminate my parents’ bed. Slowly, I could make out the figures of Mom and Pop sleeping beneath the covers.
They were both on their backs. I scanned their bodies starting at their feet. The smell circled me. It felt as though it were pecking at my face as I moved closer to the bed. As if it were warning me to stay back. I looked at my parents’ faces and swallowed a scream.
Their faces were gone, covered by large purple jellyfish-like masks. The jellyfish monsters pulsated and squeaked. The odor that had lured me into my parents’ room wafted from these grotesque little blobs. In an instant, I knew what I was looking at were shunters. They were sucking the humanity from my parents and replacing it with Délon blood.
I ran to my mother’s side, and searched my mind for a plan of action. Nothing useful entered my head. I reached out to ply the shunter from her face, but a long whip-like tail appeared out of nowhere and slashed me across the face. I stumbled backwards wiping the blood from my cheek.
I grabbed the lamp off the nightstand and raised it over my head. I lowered my arms when I realized that slamming the lamp down on the shunter wouldn’t do my mother’s face much good.
I held the lamp out in front of me with one arm to try to block the tail as I reached out with the other arm to remove the shunter from my mother’s face. I placed my hand on the slimy blob and the tail whipped towards me again. It caught the lamp repeatedly as it whipped back and forth. I tried to peel the shunter from my mother’s face with the other hand.
The purple blob would not let go. I looked closer and could see thousands of tiny tentacles digging into my mother’s face and head. Through the shunter’s purple gelatin mass, I could see my mother’s eyes darting back and forth.
The shunter’s tail ripped the lamp from my hand and flung it across the room. With invisible speed, it whipped the tail back toward me and struck me on the ear. I tumbled to the floor.
A low rhythmic laughter came from the back corner of my parents’ room. It was Délon laughter. I placed one hand on my throbbing, ringing ear and looked into the deep dark corner, praying that the laughter would soon stop.
“They don’t like to be touched.” The voice belonged to Devlin. “You think?” I said sarcastically. I stood. “Call them off.” “They’re not dogs, Oz. You can’t give them a command, a
treat, a pat on the head, and expect them to obey.” Devlin’s purple face now glowed in the darkness. His white eyes beamed. “How do I get them off, then?”
“You don’t.”
“That’s crap, and you know it!” I stepped toward him.
“Why would you want to? Look at them. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.”
“Stop this, now!”
He stood. His spider legs flared. His mouth opened and the insect mandibles snapped. In a motion too quick for me to detect he leapt on top of me and pinned me to the floor. “I should break your neck!”
“Do it and General Roy will make you skinner food.” I struggled to breathe with the full weight of Devlin on top of me.
“Mercy!” he screamed.
“What?”
“Explain this mercy to me,” he said. “This thing you showed me before... at the school.”
“Oh, mercy...” I wheezed. “But you’ve got to get off me. I can’t breathe.”
Devlin reluctantly complied and stood up. I crawled backwards with one arm and massaged my bruised chest with the other. I stood with difficulty.
My eyes immediately zeroed in on my parents again. “Mercy would be to get those things off my parents’ faces.”
“It would kill them,” Devlin said. “Is that mercy?”
I thought long and hard about the question. It may have in fact been the most merciful thing to do, but I wasn’t about to give Devlin permission to kill my parents. “No.”
“Then what is?”
“Easing someone’s suffering.”
His face twisted into confusion. “But suffering is so... delicious.”
I shuddered. “Not for humans. Suffering is pain. Don’t you remember any of this? From before?”
“Before what?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said remembering Délons don’t like to be reminded that they were once human. “Humans are about compassion. We treat each other in a way so as not to cause one another harm.”
His expressionless white eyes seemed to zero in on me. “We are here because humans were made to suffer by other humans. The Storytellers created our kind because they were tormented by others like you. Is this not true?”
I faltered. “That’s not what I mean...” He had me. I didn’t know what to say. “Look, we don’t always get it right. We humans make a lot of mistakes, but most of us, we try to do the right thing.”
“Then mercy is the right thing?”
“Yes, it is. I haven’t always shown it, but I’m trying to make up for that now.”
“Mercy is a waste of time,” Devlin said.
“You’d be dead if weren’t for mercy. General Roy was going to kill you.”
He tilted his head. His white eyes narrowed. He was churning this last bit of logic over in his twisted gray matter. His face looked pained. I could tell he was being punished by the Délon collective for even considering the concept of mercy. “Enough!” he barked. “We should leave the shunters. They will be finished for the night soon.”
“But my parents...”
“Trust me. You don’t want to be here when they finish. They will be hungry. And they aren’t very choosy about what they eat. Instinct will send them back to their solifipods to feed, but if they should find something along the way...”
I cringed at the thought. “I get the point.” I took one last look at my parents before we left. I wanted desperately to help them, but I couldn’t. I was growing tired of feeling helpless all the time.
***
I slept lightly for the next couple of hours. I didn’t dream. In fact, I hadn’t dreamt since this whole thing started. I guess there’s no point in it when you’re living a nightmare.
I lay in bed most of the time trying to forget what was happening to my parents. It wasn’t easy with my own solifipod sitting just a few feet away in the corner of my room. I thought many times about smashing the thing to pieces, but I knew the Délon collective would be on top of me before I sat back down.