The Rapture: A Sci-Fi Novel

by Erik, Nicholas

  I slump down, where his head’s almost level with mine, watching the activity outside through the blinds. They’ve found me, and they sure didn’t waste time doing it. Surrounded, but I have an ace in the hole—I’m willing to eat a bullet.

  I let out a laugh. What else can I do? I got set up—and it must have been Kristine. Eyes or not, I guess a loose thread can unravel the entire thing. Something slams through the door, and it crumbles, giving way to a stream of police.

  “I didn’t do any of this,” I say, shotgun sliding to the ground, “you got to believe me, I didn’t do any of this.”

  “To think we let you go, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch,” Richards says, slinging the cuffs on to my wrists, “three of them?”

  “Already dead.”

  “And three more in that cesspool of a factory. My God, Mitchell, you’re a real sick one.”

  “Those were self-defense.”

  “We got the call, said you’d be at the diner, which is where you were. And then you ran. Guilty as anything.”

  “Big guns scare me.”

  “The innocent don’t run, Mitchell.”

  “It’s Kristine you want. I swear.”

  “Six goddamn bodies in the ground.” There it is, the righteous indignation Richards has been trying to hold back. He drags me the whole way back to the station on foot.

  He bangs my forehead, splits it open on the metal bars when he puts me in the cell. It’s something he had to do, knows is wrong, but couldn’t help himself. “I should’ve just shot you, Mitchell, you goddamn lowlife scum-sucker.”

  “That’d have been real nice. Too bad you missed out on that.” I mean it.

  “Don’t expect anyone to come for you, Mitchell.” And he locks the cell door, leaving me to rot.

  I feel the temperature drop when they turn off the lights, leaving me in arctic darkness.

  “So,” a high-pitched voice says, cutting through the frost, “what’d they got you for?”

  “Mistaken identity.”

  “I’ve heard that line from more than a few.”

  “And you?”

  “Just a man talking crazy, causing a ruckus. Name’s Jepsen. Mikey Jepsen.”

  “I’ve been hearing a lot of crazy these past couple days.” I’m not sure I want to hear more.

  “I can see why they locked you up, then.” Laughter pings off the walls and fills the room. “I didn’t even catch your name.”

  “Damien.”

  “Brothers with that Isaac boy, then? I’ll tell you, he’s got a temper like the worst fires I’ve ever seen.”

  “You know him?” I’ve never heard of this Jepsen.

  “Know him? I’m here to kill him.”

  “You work for the Bull.”

  “I do. Been a mighty good working relationship. Until Rod threw me in here today.”

  “He ate a bullet a few minutes ago.”

  “That’s my good luck, then.” Mikey kicks his feet against the bars. “I guess I don’t want to do this. But it is what it is.”

  “If you’re going to rub one out, keep it down.”

  “Son,” Mikey says, voice hushed, like he’s telling me that a dear friend has passed, “I do believe that you have found yourself in a bit of hot water. And that is God’s truth, as I see it.”

  “I don’t believe in none of that.”

  “Oh, you should, though, boy. Best thing I found in this world yet.”

  The bars creak, the sound of a cell door opening at a deliberate, unhurried pace. For a man who has to get somewhere, he’s in no rush at all; one foot sets down and its echo dies before he places the other in front of it. A lock clicks, close enough that I know it’s the door to my cage. I press against the cool concrete, run my hands along the smooth wall for anything to use as a shiv.

  My fingers leave empty.

  All I hear is breath, him waiting, just waiting, for what, I don’t know, and I stumble over the rusty slab they call a bed and fall to the floor, my shin banging against the metal with a loud crash that gives me a start. I can feel him, sense him, don’t know how, but know—some primal urge deep in my soul.

  “Sorry about this, kid. You ain’t seem so bad, anyway. But both of you Mitchells are real troublemaking bastards. Preventative measures need to be taken and all.” He’s looking down on me. I can’t see his eyes, but I imagine them burning a hole right into me, blazing there in the darkness. I curl into a ball, shove my face in my shirt and brace for whatever hellfire shall be brought upon me.

  If there’s a Heaven, I doubt I’ll get in.

  The lights flick on, and Mikey screams, his eyes accustomed only to darkness. But me, still human—with all the fear I was born with, could never snuff out—I can live in the light, even though it’s bright enough to bring tears. Guards pound on the other side of the door, far off, closing in—years or seconds, it doesn’t matter. His cries continue, a creature used to living in the shadows, not the day. The guards, they won’t make it in time.

  I throw myself across the cell, claw at the blade Mikey has held near his face. He pushes back, and I can feel the sinews in his arms straining, the wordless this is it his body screams right before I ram the sharp silver into his eye socket and out the back of his skull, smooth as a sword sliding into its scabbard.

  Cops break into the room now, a whirl of noise and oh shits, soon after which I’m chained to the bed. They haul Mikey’s corpse out and turn the lights off, and just like that, I’m surrounded by the cool stillness of false night once more.

  I can’t even get on the metal cot the way I’m cuffed. But I just sleep right there, on the dirty floor.

  Slivers of light shoot beneath the door, rousing me from sleep. In the haze of day, I can see that the entire holding area isn’t much larger than a couple closets. I shut my eyes, mind drifting towards memories—good times, no, but better than this—long since swallowed by time’s omnipresent march. I wait and watch the tiny slice of light grow brighter until someone comes to free me.

  The door opens and the sun floods in; this time, my eyes burn. An alarm goes off on my watch; it’s noon. Twelve hours.

  “Goddamnit Mitchell, we leave you alone for no more than twenty minutes and you brain a man with a blade.” Richards’ deep voice booms off the tight walls. “Now, I’m coming in and removing your cuffs, and if you try anything on me, I’m going to put this,” and he points to his pistol, “in your mouth and do some redecorating. Clear?”

  “Got it.” When I stand, Mikey’s blood splashes on my boots.

  “We’d like some answers before you kill anyone else.”

  “I’d be glad to,” I say as we walk through the narrow halls, and I’m not sure whether I mean I’ll be glad to clear my name or glad to keep on going where I’m headed, wherever that is.

  20

  No Escape

  “You sure had an eventful morning there, Mitchell,” Richards says, from the other side of the room. I want to hate him, but I can’t. None of this looks good. Seven bodies, and Kristine and Janice are gone.

  “Mikey came after me.”

  “It’s over,” he says, shaking his head, “the girl led us to the haul in your truck, the whole deal.”

  “Then there should be a black book in there, and this weird thing, some boxy looking device that has some GPS—”

  “I don’t think so,” he says, “so it’ll be awhile before you get out of here.”

  “Check the evidence, man,” I say, my arms bleeding from straining against the cuffs, “go and check it. You’ll see.” I can still feel the black book in my pocket. I won’t play that card—not yet.

  “You know, this will move a lot quicker if you just start talking.” Kristine removed it all, the bitch. She’s going to leave me here.

  “That goddamn whore.” I’m thinking about Kristine now, the .45 that I hop
e is still going into her gut if I don’t get out by midnight. I just wish I was the one that could airmail it to her.

  “There’s the Mitchell that I know best,” he says, “don’t understand why Rod thought you were such a pussy.” The only thing keeping him from strangling me is the security camera in the corner of the room. “We talked to your liquor guy, too, and he confirmed that you were more skittish than an alley-cat with a load of methamphetamines shoved up its ass.”

  “Danny?”

  “And you know what he told me?” He flashes a smug grin, like he wants me to ask. I don’t. “Not curious? Well, I’ll tell you anyhow. Told us you were shutting down that crappy bar and cutting out. Hell of a coincidence ten hours after the bank goes boom and your buddies are cooked crispy style, don’t you think?”

  “Isaac.”

  “Yeah, turns out we can’t find him. But we’re looking.”

  “He was right next to me in the damn bank!”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Richards says, “you admit you were there.”

  “Yeah, you moron,” and I rattle my chains, “you found the stuff in my truck. But I’m not your guy.” Not the most evil guy, anyway.

  There’s a loud knock at the door.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Richards says as gets up and leaves. Like it’s funny. I hear his footsteps trail off down the hall. There’s no way out—this might as well be a padded room. He returns with a manila envelope.

  “Take a look,” he says, tossing it real casual on the table. I fan the contents out. Standard police shots of the jewels—which don’t look as good in evidence as they did on my bar—and other loot. Henderson, dead on the floor. Richards puts his hand down on the stack, stops me from going further.

  “Her? Here?” I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “You ain’t seen this? What were you doing last night? Too busy babysitting me?” No response. “I didn’t kill him.”

  He jabs his hand at the cross on the ground. Kristine’s cross.

  His hands are on my throat. “You vile son of a bitch, this woman, she’s the only one worth a damn, the only person that could bring me back from where I’ve been.” I gag and try to shake free, but but there’s no way out. “I loved her you bastard, I loved her, and she gave me another chance, and now…”

  The door swings open and a swarm of officers lift Richards off and carry him out, feet kicking.

  “I’m going to kill you Mitchell,” he says, far down the hall, but plenty loud for me to hear, “Kristine was a good one.”

  Christ. Richards has jumped off the deep end. She saved him? Maybe she cleansed his soul or something. I try to remember what the Rapture was about. Something about rebirth, salvation, absolution. If I ever got out, I’d have to do some research.

  But right now it’s just me, left alone with all I’ve done, as well as that I have not. The only way out is through the door, and the evidence says, if I don’t make it out now, I’ll be getting the needle. Or a return to a life no one wants.

  And then it comes. A revelation. Two of them. Richards said “the girl” called. He’d have recognized Kristine’s smoky voice. I could tell that he loved her; no way you forget a voice like that.

  Which meant that Kristine didn’t set me up. It was Janice, that two-faced cunt-rag.

  The second, and more pressing, thought? The way out.

  I work one foot against the other and manage to remove my right boot. It must look like I’m having some sort of episode, so I can only hope the security guy is taking a little break.

  I crane my head to see what’s come out. Red logo, bull horns; The Bull rides to a potential and ironic rescue. I snare the bag with my toes, and, after a few false starts, manage to contort my leg up and over the table.

  I arrange the powder into a sloppy set of lines. If nothing else, I’ll be pretty buzzed—or dead—when Richards comes back. I stare down the powdery mountains, think for a moment, but I can’t put this shit—whatever it is—back. Not that I’m concerned about criminal activities; all things considered, I think this is what’s considered to be a low risk proposition.

  I tear up one of the pictures and roll it into a crude tube. Pain shoots up my nose as I carve through the first line.

  Richards isn’t from the future. I can tell by the way he talks. Kristine must have found him, saved him, and then she disappeared somewhere else, wherever they turn out Feds. That’s how he recognized the cross.

  My thoughts jump back to the present. I’m on a roller coaster, that feeling you get at the top, looking down, everything building in your stomach. Except this, it doesn’t subside, stays locked in the center of my being. Every neuron is firing.

  Back when I was nineteen, a girl I was hot for, Miranda Sterra, a pretty brunette, with these eyes and an ass you could bounce a quarter off, showed up at the El Dorado.

  Miranda was wearing the tightest jeans, so tight she must’ve stole them from her kid sister. And there I was at the bar, knocking back my third or fourth beer of the night—past a certain point, it all fades—eyes focused on the bubbles and the foam, everything but the girls, Jasper off somewhere, hooting and hollering with the rest of the horny morons.

  The second rush of white lighting drips down the back of my throat and my heart pumps, a piston in a race car going 230 that’s only built for 190.

  Miranda sat down and said, in a voice ninety percent girl, ten percent woman, “Martini, no olive.” Without even looking, I had a boner ready to scream out of my pants. “Say, Damien, didn’t know you came here.” And she gave me this smile, all sweet and all sour, something beautiful and broken beyond repair. You know when you lie down on the blacktop in the middle of summer, where you go, goddamn, it’s nice to be alive, and I feel it all so much right now because it hurts so damn bad? That’s what Miranda was like: bad for both of us, but damn if I didn’t feel alive.

  She didn’t have a motorcycle, though, or a leather get-up, not like Kristine. Another rocket soars into my brain, launches me straight into the stratosphere, where no one can breathe without a special suit. I can hear footsteps now, voices even, but I don’t know if that’s my brain hallucinating or the assholes returning to harass me. I shake when the door rattles, but it doesn’t open. Richards must be the only one with the keys to this whole joint. Someone needs to make duplicates or something.

  I don’t want to shove another line of toxin up my nose—because that’s all it is now, just arsenic or drain cleaner—but I bend down, do it anyway.

  Miranda took me to the champagne room, free, because the bouncer there had a little thing for her—who didn’t—and we sat there for a long time, losing track of drinks, dances, each other.

  “Hey, bend over for a moment,” she said to one of the strippers, and tapped out a line of powder from a vial, right onto the girl’s bare ass and snorted it up. “Try it.”

  “Sure,” I said, and the night was mine, everything delineated, a path glowing before me like it had never been before then. And I screwed her there, after the dancer left, lit out of my mind, until her ass cheeks glowed red in the murky light.

  That was the first time I did flare and the first time I screwed Miranda and, later that same night, the first time I got my ass beat bad enough to almost die. And it was the first night when I decided that I wanted something better, only to find that being a Coyote was a hell of a rabbit hole.

  I can hear screams and shouts, but my vision is blurry and I’m starting to drool on myself, and the last thing I see—or think I see—is Miranda’s huge boyfriend knock my teeth in and drop me out in the desert, five miles from Riverton.

  I can see myself, that kid, morning sun tearing at his back, and I watch each step of his journey as he drags his bleeding ass home. I hear his words, broken and humble, as staggers up the crumbling steps.

  “God help me.”

  Be careful what Go
ds you pray to.

  Because some of them, as it turns out, are assholes.

  21

  Dreams

  “You found me,” Isaac says with a little shrug, “I thought you’d come sooner.” I look down on him, out of my body. Maybe this is what it’s like to die.

  “You know kid,” he says, dragging in long and deep and cool, holding the breath in for about a year, “when mom and dad died, went away, I was all you had. And I worked hard, I did.” His laugh is smooth, effortless, belies his actions. I can see his face, or the faint outline of it, in the shadows. He looks as real as the last day I saw him.

  “Sometimes, though, you have to move on,” he says, “and I left you behind a year ago.” Two paths in the woods diverge, but what I’m curious to know is—even though the chances might be low—if somewhere down the line, far away, they can meet once more.

  “This place I found has a good feel, though,” he says, “it’s, you know, kind of like home. Only better.”

  I manage to speak. “Why’d you do it?”

  “If I brought you along,” he says, walking away, “I’d always have to take care of you.” I try to follow him, once more, but I’m frozen here, locked away in solitary stasis.

  Death changes a man’s weight, makes him heavier, like something’s missing. One might take this is evidence that we have souls. I don’t have the answer, but I’m breaking a hell of a sweat carrying these bodies out in the emptiness. The sky is blue, but it’s dark on my plane of existence. And the pile of flesh never gets smaller, always stays the same.

  Holes in the desert fill as soon as you shovel the sand out, and digging a grave is like trying to build a house by yourself—a noble pursuit, but impossible. The ground is hard on top, but underneath it has no hold, caves in on itself.

  “Giving up there, Damien?” It’s Janice, sitting on a park bench, surrounded by grass. And here I am, covered in blood, this pile of bodies—Lenny, Mitch, Jasper, Henderson, Jepsen, the faceless thugs—still besides me. And I’m looking at this girl, far away but still crystal clear, eating an apple in an oasis. I step towards her, but I can’t get closer. She scolds me. “No getting out of this. There’s more work to do.”