“No excuse, sir! As team leader I will accept full responsibility!”
One of the other men could be heard mumbling something to the team leader, and a few moments later the leader spoke again.
“Miss Counselor, sir? He left a note on the table here.”
“A NOTE?!” She was seething. “WHAT FUCKING NOTE?! HE’S LEAVING US COURTESY MESSAGES NOW?! WHAT DOES IT SAY?!”
“Sir, it’s just two letters. K and A, followed by a hyphen. KA-“
The receiver burst into a loud wall of static, shaking and clattering and vibrating on the hard wood of the desk, and in that same instant Geena and Cecil were themselves shaken by a very loud explosion. The floor trembled beneath their feet, and then the transceiver was no longer receiving a signal, no longer emitting sound.
Geena burst out of her armchair and over to the window behind the desk. She jammed the fingers of both her hands into the venetian blinds and wrenched open a hole, drawing her face into that hole and pressing her nose against the glass. Her mouth fell open as she gawked up at the neighboring highrise, which was a municipal residence and a satellite of the very building they were in.
On the face of that building, some six flights up from where she stood, smoke rolled in thick black gusts out of the charred cubby hole that was once Gabriel’s flat. The glass had blown out of nearly every window of the several dozen balconies on that side of the structure, as well as more than a few on the adjoining facade, and those residents that found themselves at home now crept out onto their balconies in hopes of seeing the source of this jarring disturbance.
A sound crept to Geena, registering in her ears through the haze of her astonishment. A low, rolling noise. Laughter. It grew behind her from where Cecil sat, still seated in his chair behind his desk. It grew, guttural and unrefined, to the point that he half-snorted when inhaling.
She turned to him, her face reddening with hostile disbelief.
He continued to laugh, removing his glasses and wiping tears away.
“Kaboom! HA HAHAHA!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Terrence awoke on his back atop a thin, gummy exercise mat. A thin zip-up sweatshirt was rolled up beneath his head, which throbbed as though his brain were no longer content in his skull and was now trying to escape.
He was famished, although at the moment eating was an uninviting prospect. After twenty minutes of weighing the cries of his empty stomach against the stabbing pain of a head that felt overfull, he was able to pull himself up onto an elbow. Minutes later he managed to sit up completely, supporting his weight with both palms pressed down onto the mat behind him.
He didn’t remember a whole lot of what had happened after they had left his apartment, although he knew it wasn’t good. Through no small amount of concentration and deliberate reflection, he pieced together the scene from the hallway just outside the door to his flat. Nausea jousted for space with the hunger in his stomach.
Beside him lay the bag he had packed for himself when leaving his apartment. It was a grey canvas affair, stuffed with shirts, pants, socks, underwear, toiletries, and some photographs, which he had removed from their frames and rolled together into a tube to save space.
On his other side was a large bottle full of water, and a small pile of what he could only assume were foodstuffs of one sort or another, individually wrapped in cellophane. He didn’t remember ever seeing these before, and was certain they had been left for him by Claire and… he struggled to remember the man’s name.
Owen. Right.
He chugged down a quarter of the bottle and tore open one of the bars, holding it up with a shaky hand for examination.
“Is this food?” he asked aloud, smelling the dense brown lump he held in his hand. Its scent was mild, and neither inviting nor repellant. He took a bite, and upon swallowing was still unsure whether or not it made for pleasurable eating. It was by and large savory and low on salt, but not without a sweeter note that registered on his tongue.
It was undeniably food, but Terrence couldn’t escape the suspicion that he was eating blended, partially dehydrated leftovers, dense and nearing elastic such that he had to chew each bite for a minute and a half before swallowing. By the time he had eaten a quarter of the bar he felt he was done. He wrapped up the rest and placed it atop the pile again.
Only now did he look around this room, which he couldn’t remember ever entering. It was a gym of sorts, very basic. He saw a punching bag, some loose weights, and a rope for jumping. Over near the wall there were more soft mats like the one he sat upon, and just beside these was a door, cracked slightly.
Hoping this was the washroom, he forced himself to his feet. His blood was slow to catch up with his head and he had to stand there for a minute until he gained his equilibrium. He waited for the small white dots to disappear from his field of vision before heading for the door.
“Ugh… I hope I don’t look anything like I feel.”
Talking to himself had become such a habit over the years that he no longer questioned whether or not it was normal. It was a large part of the process through which he wrote. Reading aloud what he had written. Then rewriting. Then reading it aloud to himself once more.
This process had permeated into the rest of his daily routine, and often he would find himself lit up in front of the open refrigerator in his flat, listing ingredients and verbally mulling over his dinner options, or enumerating the tasks that would come to fill his day as he took his morning shower.
“What the hell… What the hell happened to me anyway? And where the hell am I?”
His legs were weak beneath him, but they carried him towards the door nonetheless. The taste of the energy bar was fading from his mouth and seemed to have awakened his tongue and his olfactory sense, and the smell of the room faded into his head, pungent and sweet. He was grateful not to have noticed this prior to eating, as it had been hard enough work chewing and swallowing without the added distraction.
He pushed the door open, slid his hand along the wall, and found the light switch where he had expected it to be. The room lit up and he could see that it offered a toilet, a shower, and a washbasin with a vanity mirror above it.
Catching himself in the mirror, he froze. Purple bruising spread out from beneath the hair that covered his temple and made its way toward his eye, which was more than a bit swollen, although he had already known this before looking. He gently prodded his purple cheekbone. His finger recoiled from the sudden pain that filled half his face, and he sucked an involuntary breath of air through his teeth.
Then the interrogation began as he stood there studying himself.
“Alright. Speak. What happened to us? I remember Claire. I helped her in from the car. And then he… Owen… his name was Owen… he came in and we… Oh shit. Oh shit! The video! I’m in serious trouble, aren’t I?”
He pulled himself away from the mirror, unzipped his pants, and hovered over the toilet, still talking to himself over the splashing.
“And then…”
Nausea flooded his senses and he threw his hand up onto the wall behind the toilet. He heaved a few times, remembering once again his neighbor in a pool of blood upon the floor, but his meal remained confined to his stomach.
“Then the stairs, and… my car. The backseat of my car. It all gets blurry then. Somewhere around then, I guess.”
Something was alive in the back of his mind and clawing to get at him. An echo. Faint traces of something crude and clamorous. A woman’s voice, primal. Hateful. Raging. Screaming. And he realized that this voice had been with him since he had awakened, though only now did it make clear its intention to dominate all other thoughts. It was Claire’s voice. It had to be.
Just then, he heard a jangling, clicking sound coming from the main room. He came out from the bathroom and realized that the sound was coming from the only other door in the room, which he assumed was the entrance. His heart quickened and his mouth was open before he knew it, full of nerves and anxiety.
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“Claire? Is that you, Claire? Owen?”
The clicking sound stopped. A few seconds passed, absolutely silent, before it resumed once more. The deadbolt turned over, and then he saw the handle sink slightly as the door creaked open into the room.
A woman entered. She was slender and tall, her auburn hair loose and meticulously messy. Still at a distance of some ten meters, the floral notes of her perfume filled Terrence’s nose. While it was without a doubt excessive, it was nonetheless a welcome break from the other smells in the room.
“Um, hi there, miss…” he said nervously. “Who are you?”
The woman smiled with soft pink lips and tilted her head slightly to free her left eye from the wave of hair that so artfully obstructed it.
“You’re the journalist, aren’t you?” she asked.
Terrence was taken back. This was nothing like the voice he had expected to hear. This was… a man’s voice. And it made no effort to play at femininity.
Noting his shock, the woman smiled even wider and reached a hand up as if to run her fingers through her hair. Instead, she pulled her hair completely loose from her head in a sweeping motion and revealed short curls of matted brown hair beneath.
“My name is Gabriel.”
The voice fit a bit better now, but Gabriel’s make-up did nothing to make things any easier to comprehend as he stood there, playfully stroking his fingertips through the reddish brown fibers of the wig he now held down in front of him. He walked over to a rack of dumbbells and draped it carefully over one of the larger, heavier weights.
“Owen brought you here, did he?” Gabriel asked as he sauntered slowly towards the heavy bag.
“Um… yeah. I guess he must have.”
“You don’t know? You do know Owen, correct?” Gabriel had halted his gait where he stood and now studied Terrence sharply. His fingers curled tightly up into his palm.
“I… I don’t remember much past being home in my flat and reading a very bizarre message from a woman I used to know.”
Gabriel saw the extensive bruising now as Terrence angled his face up towards the light. The tension left his arms and his fingers extended once again.
“Is that Owen’s work?” he asked, nodding at Terrence’s face.
“No. No, I don’t think so. We were on our way...”
The memories were still hard to come by.
“…On our way to my car.”
This last part came out in an oddly triumphant tone. He was pleased to have pieced together two moments in time from the night prior.
“We were heading down the stairs. Wait, no. We were down the stairs, and headed out into the car park. And then there is just pain. Everything. My head. And then I woke up here. Where is here, anyway?”
“You’re in the Capital.”
The confusion was unmistakable on Terrence’s face.
“But why… why would they come back?”
“For you, of course. You are no longer safe anywhere else.”
Terrence couldn’t keep himself from laughing.
“HA! But I’m safe here? In a sweaty gym with a transvestite?”
Gabriel reached his hand behind him and up under his shirt, freeing the hooks from the eyes on his bra straps. Then he brought both hands up his front side and removed two translucent gel pads. After pulling both straps over and off of his arms, he pulled the black bra out through the armhole of his turquoise summer dress and tossed it towards the weight rack where his hairpiece waited.
“There’s an alarming number of men who enjoy wearing this stuff, you know. Me, I’ve always thought that less is more. I guess I’m more of a ‘naked and fresh out the shower’ type.”
“I’m sorry,” started Terrence, massaging his heavy forehead between his thumb and his fingers for a moment, “but my head feels like it might explode and I’m not sure where any of this is going. Who are you again?”
Gabriel began a slow circle around the heavy bag.
“I told you that already,” he half-shouted over his shoulder, taking a staccato jab at the bag.
“Alright then… Gabriel. So you’re a friend of Owen’s?”
“Hmm. I never really thought of it that way.”Gabriel threw a few loose one-twos into the canvas.
“I’ve never really done the friend thing. But yeah. Yeah, I would say that we’re friends. He might just be the only friend I have, come to think of it. So when he needs help I will certainly help him… which is to say that I will help you.”
“But how do you propose to do that, exactly? Are you gonna bring me take-out down here for the rest of my life? Do my laundry? Smuggle in word of the outside world?”
“Now you’re being ridiculous, and a bit scornful.”
He tossed a quick left-right into the sack. His movements were becoming sharper, and his weight was shifting rhythmically from his left foot to his right.
“Sure. We could do all that crap that just fell out of your mouth. Or I could put you up in an apartment. Give you a car. Clothes. A new identity. But perhaps you will miss writing touching news pieces about how people enjoy the weather when it is fine, or what they do to fill their spare time in the winter, both of which were stunning specimens of journalism.”
“You read my column?”
“Not normally. But when Owen’s video went live under your byline, it piqued my interest and I did my homework. I don’t mean to be glib or arrogant, really. I was just teasing. Actually, I do think you have a way with words on the page, even if they hand you shitty stories to write, and even if you do talk the way you do.”
“Wait… what’s wrong with the way I… Who the hell are you anyway?! Talking about a new apartment and new clothes and a new life? You don’t think the kind folks down at the municipal facility would notice any of this?”
Gabriel thundered his right shin into the side of the bag with such force that it startled Terrence.
“I am the kind folks!”
He pulled himself away from the bag and squared his body towards Terrence. Terrence had expected this conversation to continue its seemingly endless, playful course, frustrating as it was. But now he saw that Gabriel wasn’t smiling at all, and that frightened him into silence.
“My name is Gabriel Yakima, and I am the Minister of Mainframe Technology.”
Terrence wanted so desperately to laugh. To make light of the situation. To fall back into a kittenish sort of discourse. He saw, though, that Gabriel was being sincere, which meant that either he was telling the truth, or that he resided rather comfortably in the depths of a severe delusion. Either way, laughter was not prescribed at this point. So Terrence resolved to remain silent, to take in whatever this Gabriel Yakima had to say, and he was relieved when Gabriel at last continued to speak.
“No man shall live for free, however. After all, it would be… improper… for me to give you all of these things and expect nothing of you in return. It might make me feel used, and you some fairytale whore.”
“Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure I follow your analogy word for word, but…”
“I wish to employ you, Mr. Terrence Vilnius. Now take this.”
Gabriel pulled something from his handbag and tossed it at Terrence. It was a set of electric clippers.
“But… what?” stammered Terrence.
“You would be quite surprised, Mr. Vilnius, what a head of hair does to the human brain. It’s a deal maker. Or breaker. The old adage is “clothes make the man,” but there really ought to be such a saying about hair. For example, I put on this beautiful, albeit ridiculous wig…”
He had made his way back over to the weight rack and was sliding the hairpiece once more onto his head.
“And voilà! I’m a lady! Now shave those cutesy blonde locks off and we’ll be on our way.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Owen hated driving these electric cars.
It had nothing to do with the speed, or the acceleration or the handling. It had nothing to do with the body shape or the way the drive
r’s seat was set so low that it felt like it was in danger of scraping on the blacktop that scuttled by underneath.
It was the sound. More to the point, it was the utter lack of sound.
Nearly every vehicle in deployment in the military still ran on gasoline. There had been no charging stations in the arid half-developed mess of Albania, or hidden in the scrub bushes and caves of Afghanistan. And a two-hour charge… there was really no way of knowing where that would get you, or if it would ever get you back again.
The very idea of these electric cars in the military was unreasonable, if not laughable. And the military was all that Owen had known since his early years. Almost every single memory he possessed was retained from the time after his first developmental split had placed him into the martial life.
He knew how to work on gas engines. He knew what gas and oil and a wrench could do to a man’s hands, and he missed the smell of those fumes from his time as a Grounder, when he had been tasked with refueling the troop transports and the turret trucks.
But mostly he missed the sound.
The rising sound of increasing RPMs. Then the shifting of gears, and the rising would start anew. Lower. Seemingly deeper within the beast. Closer to its manic heart.
The car he now drove had no heart. And these roads had been tamed to a bland and uniform monotony. No bumps or cracks. Hardly even any curves.
How the fuck do people not just fall asleep and drive off into a tree? That shit must happen all the time, he thought.
Onward he prodded in near silence. There were a number of other cars sharing the road with him today, which was comforting. In fact, the proximity of this section of the border to not just one, but two moderately sized towns, had done a lot to add to its appeal when he had been making his plans. After all, it would have been hard to blend in had he been driving the only car on the road.
These had been hectic days, twelve by his count since they had escaped the capital for the second time. The first three were especially grueling, as he and Claire had been required not only to forcibly arrogate automobiles from random citizens as circumstance allowed, but also to effectively kidnap these unfortunate people and dump them deep in the woods off of back roads, taking their shoes to further impede their return to society. Otherwise, despite the solemn promises made by their tearful, frightened victims, they ran the chance of being reported immediately to the authorities. And with no more ammunition for the pistol, they were now unable to disable these cars’ trackers.
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