by Rob Cornell
Some more of the glow in her horn faded. The color had drained from it too. The light was plain white with some sparkles in it.
Better hurry, bitch. Looks like you ain’t got much time.
She responded by making Earl slap himself. It didn’t hurt any. He was too numb for that. But he knew she didn’t do it to hurt him, just make him feel like a fool.
She sidled up to the examination table and directed Earl to come close to her. She compelled him to snap on a pair of the gloves. Next, he loaded up the needle with some of the painkiller and injected it near the wound.
She bucked and kicked out with a hind leg. The kick hit the base of the arm to the light attached to the table and knocked it loose.
The light’s bulb shattered on impact with the floor, and the arm hit with a dull clang.
Once she settled, she had him gather up a huge stack of gauze pads. With his free hand, Earl gripped the knife and gently pulled it loose.
This is where you die, he thought, even as he dropped the knife on the table and applied the pads to the wound. They soaked through almost instantly. He grabbed more and pressed them on.
He went through a full box of the pads before he had the bleeding stopped.
It should have bled more. She shouldn’t have been able to survive all that blood loss. But Earl had noticed while he worked that her horn began blazing again. The color came back. A sparkly mist hung around it. The air smelled like cake frosting.
Something had kick-started her magic again. And now she used it to start healing herself.
He held the gauze on for another five minutes before Elka had him remove it.
The wound was still there, still looked pretty deep, but it didn’t bleed near as much. By the time he finished stitching her up, it hardly bled at all.
He dressed the wound with fresh gauze and used the tape to hold it in place, though the tape didn’t stick so well on her hair.
She still had all that blood on her. Earl wondered if she would ever get the stain out. He supposed so. But at the least, he hoped the wound left behind a scar.
All finished, Earl and Elka faced each other by the table. The table had a mound of bloody gauze with a pair of bloody latex gloves on top.
This where you kill me, Earl thought.
Elka chuffed. I’m done killing.
But she didn’t let go of his mind. She guided him out of the infirmary. Back through the tunnels and eventually to the hall with all the windowed rooms where he had locked her up.
So you’re gonna put me in one of them cages? What’s the point? I ain’t going nowhere when I’m fucking paralyzed.
I’m not locking you up.
She led him halfway down the hall. At one point, they passed a room with starved vampires trapped inside. Their red eyes in their emaciated faces followed Elka and Earl as they passed on by.
If Earl had feeling in his body, he would have shivered.
They stopped in front of the room Earl had locked her in, but she didn’t lead him into it. Instead, she turned, gave him a long look, then pulled out of his mind and let him drop to the floor.
He felt no connection to the rest of his body. It was like he was a just a head looking up at the track of lights along the ceiling.
“What are you doing? Just gonna leave me here to starve?”
She clopped around him and headed back the way they had come.
He couldn’t watch her go. He could turn his head to either side, but he lay parallel to the hall, so no way to look at her.
“Come back here, you bitch! Kill me. Have some fucking guts and kill me.”
Eventually, the echoing tock tock of her steps faded to silence.
Well, not total silence.
He could hear things stirring in their cages.
Earl’s breathing got away from him. He grew light-headed as he lay helpless and gasping.
Was that it? Leave him here to listen to all those things while he starved to death? Did she think it would scare him?
What’s so scary about a bunch of locked up monsters? She ain’t done nothing worse than if she’d left me anywhere else in this place.
Then the lights in the hall went out.
Earl’s breathing quickened. He lolled his head back and forth and blinked his eyes over and over, trying to get them used to the dark. But the darkness was too thick.
Without sight, his senses rearranged themselves so that his hearing grew sharper.
The stirrings became clearer. Now he could hear a wet, puckering sound. Something tittered in the dark, the sound muffled by its cage, but plenty loud enough to turn Earl’s face cold and make his scalp prickle.
But none of those noises frightened Earl half as much as the one that came next.
A short buzz and the following snap of every latch on every door unlocking at once.
The bitch must have found the control room. It had rows of monitors fed by cameras all throughout the complex. It also had master controls to power and lights. And similar controls for the electric locks.
Hinges creaked. Things slithered. Tiny feet pattered across the floor. Hungry gasping echoed down the hall.
Then a whisper.
“So…hungry…”
He heard the monsters closing in on him.
He screamed his throat raw.
His screams turned to a sloppy gurgle as something bit his neck and tore loose a chunk of flesh and tendons.
His damned neck.
One of the few places where he still felt pain.
The pain lasted a long while. Death held off long enough for Earl to hear other things gnawing at other parts of his body, cracking his bones, chewing on meat and muscle, all while the creature he knew had to be a vampire drained the blood through his open throat.
The Dawn
Chapter Sixty-Three
JESSIE WOKE TO THE SMELL of pine and a rustling somewhere off to her right.
When she opened her eyes, she gasped.
She lay in bed in a small room with brown paneling, the kind that was popular back in the freaking Stone Age. On the walls hung framed movie posters for Chinatown, The Exorcist, and Blue Velvet. A small desk sat against the wall under the Chinatown poster. A stack of books—freaking textbooks—were stacked on one end of the desks. Parked in the opposite corner was a trio of action figures—Han, Luke, and Leia. She teared up when she saw them.
They had belonged to Ryan.
She didn’t remember taking them. The last time she had seen them was not long before that ghost had possessed Ryan and drove him insane. It seemed like a thousand years ago.
The rustling she heard came from the window by her bed. The window was open wide and the curtains fluttered in a soft but steady breeze. The pine smell, she knew immediately, came from the woods out back.
Holy shit, this is the cabin in Illinois.
But how had she gotten here? Her mind scrambled for recent memories. Pain blossomed in her chest as she recalled her most recent memory.
For a moment it felt as though Elka’s horn still pierced Jessie’s heart.
After a couple of deep breaths, the feeling passed.
The memory didn’t.
She cycled back from there through nearly six years of her life and ended up back on the front stoop of the ratty house in California where she had seen her real dad for the first time.
Tears streamed down Jessie’s face as she picked through those memories. She moved forward in time, stopping at points and sinking so deeply into the recollections she swore she was back in the moment, reliving it.
She stopped traveling through her life when she reached the time where she, her mom, and Craig lived together in this cabin. Her chest ached for a different reason. She found it hard to breathe because if she took too deep of a breath she would break open and cry full out, and never be able to stop.
Their time at the cabin hadn’t been perfect. Not even nostalgia could shine off the hard days. But between the hard days, they’d had good ones too. Still, sh
e could easily weave past the bad days while she remembered the good.
Craig trying to help her with her English homework, an essay on the Christ symbols in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
He had tried his best to help her word her opening paragraph even though he had never read the novel himself. After that, she had assured him he had helped a great deal, and when he’d left, she deleted the opening and started over.
Christ symbols, she had heard him mutter out in the living room. Fuck does that even mean?
She’d had to close her bedroom door so he wouldn’t hear her burst into laughter. But somehow his annoyed question gave Jessie the inspiration to go on and finish her essay.
Won her a B-minus. Best grade she’d managed that semester, since it was the only time she’d really put any effort in.
Another memory.
Catching Craig and Mom half-dressed and pawing at each other on the living room couch in the middle of the night when they had thought her asleep. She had come out for a glass of water.
Oh, gross!
And she’d run back into her bedroom.
Or that time she tried to chop wood for the fireplace with Craig and nearly took off her own foot.
Or the time her mom found Jessie crying in the bathroom over some stupid taunts at school. Mom had wrapped her arms around Jessie and hummed a tune so familiar, but she couldn’t name it. Later she would realize it was a song her mom had made up and sang when Jessie was four and had that nightmare about monsters climbing in through the window.
There’s no such thing as monsters.
There’s just no truth to them.
And don’t be scared, little Jessie,
Your mommy’s here till the end.
Her song had only been half right.
Her mom had been there till the end.
Someone in the doorway cleared his throat.
Jessie started, but when she saw who it was, every muscle in her body turned to warm taffy.
Craig smiled at her. His eyes shined as if wet. “It is so good to see you.”
Jessie took that breath that broke the fragile damn inside of her. She cried and her vision got all blurry and she sniffled and snorted like a pig and she didn’t care.
Craig was here. Her dad was here.
Alive.
She leapt off her bed and sprinted into his arms.
He wrapped them around her and they held each other as if they might fall off the face of the planet if either of them let go.
She cried into his chest, soaking a spot on his flannel shirt. She could smell the detergent he’d washed it in. Same detergent he had washed all his clothes in when they’d lived at the cabin.
She stopped feeling like a wuss for blubbering all over him when she heard him sobbing along with her.
They held each other for five minutes at least.
Then a thought occurred to Jessie that made her pull back. “Where’s Mom?”
The lines in his face deepened. It made him look older. She had the feeling he’d aged a lot since she saw him last, more than just those three years.
“She isn’t here,” he said and closed his wet, red-rimmed eyes. “She doesn’t belong here.”
“What the hell are you talking about? This is our cabin. This is where we lived like a family. She damn well does belong here.”
He cupped her face in one hand, thumbed away a streak of tears.
“This isn’t the cabin. Not for real.”
She swatted his hand away. “Quit screwing with me.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“What diff—”
“Think. What’s the very last thing.”
Her chest hurt again. Hurt bad. And it felt…open…as if…
She looked down and saw a hole in her chest, bloody around the edges, but no longer bleeding. She gingerly touched the hole’s edge and the pain sparked anew. She winced, then looked up at Craig.
“I’m supposed to be dead.”
Craig sighed.
From outside came the chatter of birds and the ratchet sound of cicadas among the trees. The breeze through the window turned chilly against the back of her neck.
“Jessie,” Craig said. “You are dead.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
THEY SAT AT THE KITCHEN table. A bay window looked out to the back porch. Beyond the porch’s wood columns that held up the awning, Jessie saw nothing but trees, all a thick green blur of leaves and tightly spaced brown trunks. As usual, she couldn’t name any of them, but watching them sway in the wind soothed her.
That whispery sound they made that came through the open window. That soothed her too.
The hole in her chest had closed.
But a knot in her belly refused to untie. Not because of the news of her death. Strangely, that didn’t bother her so much. The fact that she was reunited with her dad had a lot to do with that.
No, what bothered her was that her mom wasn’t here with them.
A purple mug of steaming tea that smelled like jasmine sat on the circular oak table in front of her. She didn’t remember how it got there. Part of her wanted a sip. It smelled good and the warm liquid would feel nice going down.
She worried she couldn’t keep it down, though.
Craig sat beside her. He had a can of Budweiser, of all things. Condensation on the can ran down its sides like tears. It was cracked open, but Craig wasn’t even looking at it. He stared out the bay window. Actually, it seemed like he was looking beyond the forest, seeing something Jessie couldn’t.
“Why?” she asked. “Why isn’t she here? You’re not telling me she’s in hell or some shit, ’cause I don’t believe it.”
He absently shook his head. His gaze remained on the thing beyond the trees.
“I don’t know if there’s such thing as hell. Or heaven. As far as I can tell there’s just life, and then something on the other side.”
“Then why isn’t she here, on the other side?”
Finally, he drew his gaze away from the window and looked at Jessie. “Because this isn’t the other side.”
Jessie slapped the table. Her mug jumped and some of the tea sloshed out. Now her drink had tears too. “Cryptic doesn’t suit you, Dad. Stop fucking with me.”
One corner of his mouth turned up. He let out a short, breathy laugh. “Still got that mouth on you.”
“Hey, this mouth of mine helped save the world.”
He nodded. “I saw that.”
“You saw…” Jessie covered her face with her hands, then dragged them down and gave Craig the below the eyebrow stare. “Seriously, you need to start explaining shit.”
“There’s time for that. Lots of time.”
“Maybe for you. But I’ve got shit to do. I need to find Mom.”
“I already told you,” he growled. “She’s not here. I looked.” He let go a long exhale, and in a softer voice, said, “I looked.”
“Where are we, Dad?”
“The Inbetween.”
She drew back. “The same place Gabriel came from?” She blinked. “Why are we in a place like this? Did we do something…wrong?”
He rubbed his chin and went back to staring out the window. “I’ve spent a long time thinking about it, because I didn’t understand why I ended up here. But as Gabriel’s plan unfolded, and things with that unicorn escalated, I started to get some ideas. Now, with you here, I think I know exactly why.”
Jessie waited, but he didn’t go any further. “And that is?”
“The prophecy.”
Jessie laughed, although nothing felt very funny. “That’s weird coming from you.”
“Weird.” His gaze still focused on some distant sight. “That’s one word for it.” Then he returned his attention to Jessie. “I’ve found, if you work at it, you can have some influence on the physical world from here. Do you remember those dreams you had about me?”
“It’s going to happen again,” she said with a bitter taste in her mouth. “Yeah,
only I didn’t understand what you were talking about until it was too late.”
“It’s not too late. Everything happened for a reason.”
Jessie huffed. “Who are you and where is Craig Lockman?”
He stood up and gently took her arm. “Come here.”
She let him guide her over to the window.
The breeze here felt warm again. Apparently, the Inbetween had bipolar weather patterns.
“Look out there,” Craig said. “Tell me what you see.”
“Um, trees. Duh.”
“Look harder. Look past the trees. It’s…it’s pretty amazing. I only started seeing it when you arrived. So it’s you that…I don’t know what you’d call it. Opened it?”
She wrinkled her brow and gave him the stink face. “Opened what?”
“Just look.”
So she faced the window and tried to look beyond the trees, whatever that meant. Was it like X-ray vision or something?
She got the sarcasm slapped out of her when she finally saw, all at once, what he meant.
The trees faded. Just evaporated. The view from the window changed completely. It looked like the cabin sat on a cloud above Earth, and Jessie could see houses and cars and even tiny little people.
She found she could manipulate the view as well. Zoom in and out. Turn from side to side and even in a full circle. She could also spin the planet like a giant globe to navigate to any location she wanted.
And when she really looked hard.
Holy shitski.
She could swoop down and settle right into a person’s head. Which she did with a woman in a shopping mall in Arizona, pushing one of those double-seated strollers that carried a pair of twin baby boys.
Jessie could feel the woman’s emotions.
Tired. Frustrated with her mother-in-law who walked beside her, nattering on and on about the proper way to feed a baby, and it sure as heck wasn’t breastfeeding. Oh, no. A proper woman used formula and kept her boobs in her shirt.
Oh, shut up, the mom thought. They’re my kids and I’ll swing out a boob anytime, anywhere if my kids are hungry. That’s what a proper mom does.
Jessie laughed and flew out of the mom’s head.
While she was at the mall, Jessie dipped in and out of a number of heads, getting to live a few seconds of a dozen different lives.