by Platt, Sean
Yeah, that was some scary shit, but hell if it wasn’t the near side of fan-fucking-tastic too. Like the trippiest movie ever, no ticket required.
**
Boricio spent the next day taking tiny swigs from what was left of a second two-liter bottle of slop while tearing down the highway. He remembered the colors, but none of the hundreds of miles of distance, the full tank of gas, or the two bodies that somehow found their way into his trunk.
The one with the nose ring looked like she would’ve been a ferris wheel and a funnel cake full of fun. Looked like a screamer, and sorta mean. But it doesn’t look like I took much time, what with that hole in the middle of her forehead.
Whatever was inside the green/brown sludge wasn’t near as powerful on the second day. Or maybe Boricio was getting stronger or building resistance. The trips were definitely shorter and time wasn’t so fucking tangled. Plus they ended with something a helluva lot less fucked-up than a river full of bodies. Boricio stopped at a hotel, made himself at home in the best suite he could find, and decided to get another ticket to the Magical Mystery Tour.
This time, he found himself at an abandoned gas station with an old man with crazy hair standing next to a kid. This weird dog was there too. While neither the old man nor the boy could see Boricio, as he wasn’t really there, the dog stared right at him, growling.
“Evil!” the dog said.
What the fuck?!
Boricio opened his eyes, his head swimming with the strongest sense of déjà vu he’d ever felt.
This is some weird ass third-eye shit, that’s what it is. Ain’t nothing to prove it, but I know it just the same. Shit I’m seeing in my head is somehow real, shit I could see now maybe, if I was in the right place.
Boricio was agitated that he had just a swallow of the liquid magic, but he took it in one gulp and spent the next several hours hovering just above reality.
I’m not alone.
Something on this planet wants me gone.
When the world is dying, even the hunters get hunted.
Boricio smiled.
He’d always been a hunter, but the world had always deprived him of a challenge. Sure, he kept on the move because he sure as fuck wasn’t ever gonna get caught. But he’d be lying if he said the kills had the same joy they once did, the same sweet taste. It was still nice, but a bit like fucking the same redhead in the back of the same Impala for five years running. Only so long could you keep getting it up for the fuck.
There weren’t many like him in the world. There couldn’t be. Only room for a few kings in the world. And now, it seemed, even fewer to challenge him.
**
October 17
8:14 p.m.
Somewhere in Alabama
Boricio flew by the “Welcome to Alabama” sign going 106 [mph]. The highway was dead, had been for a while. No people, no cars. No billboards, no buildings. Just streets going dark as the world turned out the lights.
Vanished people were enough what-the-fuck already, vanished cars were just plain beer-battered bullshit. When the seven horsemen first started galloping a couple days back, abandoned cars were everywhere. Boricio even saw several with their engines still running. But now, it seemed the cars weren’t nearly as plentiful.
Boricio sneered and stepped on the gas, frustrated that his own thoughts were a brew of confusion. He was feeling paranoid, like the springs of some trap had been sprung, and its claws were about to close on him. He was kinda glad that the liquid was gone. As good as the trips were, the ride down was a bitch.
Signs of civilization were shifting, if not disappearing entirely, and Boricio was starting to worry that he’d run out of gas right out there in the middle of the big empty. The radio was still mostly silent, except for the single station broadcasting the occasional static punctuated by the even rarer “Boricio.”
The needle was dancing just above the red when Borico saw the impossible — a dull red Ford F150 pulled to the side of the road. An attractive, slightly heavy woman with a sheer sky-blue tee shirt and denim skirt was waving at Boricio as he slowed to a stop behind the open tailgate.
Fry me a fresh tortilla full of fuck yeah; are those her nipples pokin’ through? Day-um, they must be the size of a quarter and the goddamn thumb holding it!
Boricio licked his lips and stepped from the late-model Honda Civic he had no memory of getting.
“Boy am I glad to see you,” the woman said, relief coating her dusty face. She smelled like a perfume this waitress he once fucked used to wear. Couldn’t remember the name of it, or the waitress, though.
“Likewise, Ma’am. Been out here long? Need help? What can I do? I’m about on empty myself. You outta gas?” Boricio smiled behind his friendly rat-a-tat-tat.
“I have close to a full tank. But the truck started rattling about 15 miles back and I got worried. Don’t know what I’d do if it flat out quit on me out here.”
“Yeah, you don’t wanna be stuck out here alone. Not with them creepers out there.”
“The creepers?” Splotches of white bled through the blotches of red on her face.
“Yeah, the creepers. They must be what up and replaced the people” Boricio tipped his head forward and then looked down. Ignorant yokel was one of his favorite masks. Seemed people liked believing that one, and Boricio liked to make it easy when appropriate.
“What do they look like?”
“Well, that I don’t know,” Boricio scratched his head. “I haven’t actually seen them. But I know they’re there.” It was true, he hadn’t actually seen them, so much as sensed them in one of his many trips.
The woman was scared, her eyes moving rapidly. Her voice rose an octave and fresh sweat beaded her forehead. Her breasts were heavy, covered in sweat and full against the tee. Boricio felt himself getting stiff, but he couldn’t rush it. This one had to last.
“You seen anyone else?” Boricio took a step back and leaned against the side of the Honda.
“Not since,” the woman choked, then fell to her knees and started to cry.
Boricio didn’t like this at all. No fun if they didn’t fight.
“Now, now,” Boricio knelt to one knee and put a hand on her back. “Everything’s gonna be okay; you’ll see.” Boricio moved in closer. “I’ve got a plan. Come with me. Everything will be okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Emil, Emil Branson.” Boricio held out his hand and the woman took it.
“Do you know where anyone else is?” she asked. He could tell she wanted a yes, to know he knew where others were. No problem there. He’d give her what she wanted, then take what was his.
“Sure do! Just heard a distress call on the CB. Small group, not more than 20 miles from here. Was racing to get there just as fast as this car’ll fly, until I happened on you.”
The woman met Boricio’s eyes. And that’s when he saw it. That ever-so-slight shift in the woman’s eyes. The same shift so many of his victims saw just before the end. He didn’t hear the person behind him until the last second.
Christ.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He felt the impact in the back of his skull and blacked out before he hit the ground.
* * * *
EDWARD KEENAN
October 15, 2011
early morning
Somewhere in Ohio
Ed put the gun in his pants as soon as he saw that the only person in the abandoned car was an obviously unarmed and pregnant teenager. She was skinny (save for the belly) and on the mousy side, with long auburn hair covering most of her face. When she finally looked up, he did a double take. The girl was nearly the spitting image, though a younger version, of his daughter, Jade.
“Are you okay?” he asked through the closed window. He didn’t want to spook her by opening the door.
She was crying and mouthing something he couldn’t hear through the rain which was drenching him.
“I’m going to open the door, okay?”
Sh
e nodded her head yes and he opened the front door, rather than the back, then leaned inside the car. The first thing he noticed was the purse on the floor in the front passenger seat. Then he saw keys dangling from the ignition, not much of a surprise considering the car was still running.
“Are you okay?” he asked again.
She shook her head no, wiping tears from her face. “They’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?” he asked.
“My parents. They d... disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
She waved her shaking hands at the front seat as if it should be evident, then explained, through a quickly rising tide of tears.
“We were driving home from vacation. But Dad didn’t want to stop at a hotel because he has to get back to work in the morning and we’d already left too late. So he decided to drive straight through. I was sleeping. Mom was too, in the front seat. Then I heard this loud whistling sound that woke me.”
She lost her voice to a sudden torrent of tears.
“It’s okay,” Ed said in his calmest voice. He would have put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but was too far from reach in the front seat. It was probably for the best; she might see the move as a threat and then she’d really lose her mind.
She found her breath and finished her story. “I heard this whistling sound, and woke up. There was ... something else in the car.”
Her green eyes were wide, wet, and tinged in red.
“It was like a dark cloud or something, but it moved weird, like it was alive. Pulsating. It moved over me and I could feel it, cold and filled with some sort of electricity. It even zapped me a bit, but it didn’t hurt exactly ... Then I noticed my dad was asleep at the wheel. And the car wasn’t moving. The cloud thing moved faster and faster like we were inside a mini-tornado. The whistling grew so loud I had to cover my ears. And...”
She cried again, then swallowed before continuing.
“There was this flash of light and it was suddenly gone, just like that. My parents too.”
She surrendered to her tears as Ed tried to make sense of what she had laid out. He wanted to ask the girl if she were certain she saw what she saw. Maybe she’d been dreaming. But she was obviously fragile and he knew from limited experience with his own daughter, as strong and independent as teenagers often appeared, they could easily and quickly regress to small children who needed reassurance that the monsters in their closets weren’t real at all.
No, the real monsters are on the street. And they’re often confused for the good guys.
As much as what she said seemed unbelievable, Ed had the honed instincts from years of training that told him when people were lying to him, or even themselves, with a shocking accuracy. It was part of what made him such a valuable asset to the agency. This girl wasn’t lying. To him or herself.
Ed felt the unseen pieces of the night’s puzzle slowly shift into place. Something had happened to the people on the plane, to the people in the house he’d been in, to the people in the store, and the cars, and everywhere else.
Something big went down.
Something his experience hadn’t prepared him for.
It wasn’t a terrorist attack or natural disaster. It was probably something that fell off the edge of his understanding.
“How long have they been gone?”
The girl looked at the clock on the radio face. 5:12 a.m.
“Three hours; it happened at 2:15 a.m. I remember looking at the clock because it kept flicking on and off while the cloud thing got faster. 2:15 over and over again.”
That was about the time his plane went down, though he’d not had a watch to know exactly. He swallowed hard and asked the next question in his softest, most careful tone. “What do you wanna do?”
She looked up at him as if it hadn’t occurred to her to do anything other than wait for her parents to return. She was shell-shocked, normal thoughts were canceled until further notice.
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve been gone almost three hours. You can’t just sit here on the side of the road. I almost ran right into your car.”
“I ... can’t leave. What if they come back?”
This wasn’t going to be easy and time was a foe. He’d have to level with her.
“Three hours ago, I was flying in an airplane. I fell asleep. When I woke up, the plane had crashed. Somehow, I was thrown into the nearby woods. But when I went back to search for other survivors, there weren’t any.”
She looked at him. “None?”
“None. And no bodies. Everyone on that plane, except for me, had vanished. At exactly 2:15.”
Her eyes widened as something inside her started to click.
“I drove through town and didn’t see anyone there either,” he continued, leaving out the part about breaking and entering.
“So what are you saying? Everyone’s gone?”
“I don’t know about everyone; I mean, we’re still here. But there’s a lot of people missing.”
“Where did they go? Are they coming back?”
Ed looked down at the purse on the floor, searching for the right words, but finding nothing. “I don’t know.”
The girl swallowed, wiping tears from her face. She seemed to be a bit less broken than she had a few minutes before. But he saw the familiar glimmer in her eyes — her brain was making the necessary adjustments to move on, even if it wasn’t letting her know just yet.
Ed marveled at the brain’s ability to sever emotions when necessary, to do what needed done despite emotional connections. He’d seen children become cold-blooded killers, soldiers mercifully end the lives of their fallen comrades, and agents turn on one another without hesitation. The Switch, as he called it, was in most people, though most would never discover it unless led there by circumstance. And it was almost never a good circumstance which showed you how to flick The Switch. It certainly wasn’t in his case.
Sometimes it was necessary to find The Switch in order to move forward. Those that couldn’t or wouldn’t flip it often paid a high price for their hesitance.
“My name is Ed,” he offered, leaning closer and extending his hand.
“Teagan,” she said, shaking his hand with a frail grip.
“Okay, Teagan. What do you want to do? Where’s your home?”
“Cape Hope, North Carolina.”
“Do you want to go there?”
“Do you think my parents might be there?”
“Honestly? No. I don’t know where people went, but I definitely don’t think they went home.”
She stared out the window, then her hands went to her stomach, soothing her unborn child.
“How far along are you?”
She pulled her hands away, as if embarrassed by her condition.
“Five months,” she said, then paused as if she were going to say something else, before deciding not to.
“Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”
“I hope so,” she said, her face straight for a moment until he got the joke. Then she smiled.
She found The Switch.
Now she could move forward.
“I don’t know; I want it to be a surprise,” she said, staring into the dark. “Do you think there are still doctors left?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “But I’m sure we’ll find someone who can help.”
He thought to tell her that he could, in a pinch, deliver a baby. But decided not to. She was still three or four months away and there was no telling what would happen between now and then. They were stuck in a rather horrible present, and to count on anything beyond the moment was wishful thinking. For now, he would look after her. But he couldn’t allow himself to get attached. If shit hit the fan, he’d have hard choices to make and he needed to know he could find and flip his Switch without missing a beat.
**
They decided to drive to Cape Hope, even though it was sure to be a pointless trip. Ed hoped to find someone she knew that she c
ould stay with, and then he could go on his way.
She left a note in the car for her parents telling them where she was and that she was with “a guy named Ed” who was helping her. Ed hoped for her parents’ sake they didn’t come back to the car to find the note. He was sure that if roles were reversed, he’d be scared shitless to find his pregnant daughter running off with some “guy named Ed.” She took her mom’s purse and their suitcases from the trunk, so nobody would steal them, and loaded them into “his” SUV.