The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage
Page 21
Just like I thought. No real choice at all.
The needle was pegged. There was no more room in me for fear. Distantly, I realized I was trembling.
“Easy, there,” she said.
My chest heaved as my open mouth took in lungfuls of air. On the exhales, I said, “First. One.”
“That’s what I’d do,” she said. “And really, you should calm down. I’m told they’d rather have you alive, so you’re probably going to be all right.”
She thought I was scared or crying or panicking or something. Like a blubbering child.
She shifted the grip on the gun to her right hand so she could reach behind her hip with her left hand. Probably to get the handcuffs.
The hole at the end of the barrel of the gun finally moved.
I leapt.
My left hand closed around her right forearm, and the gun went off. I felt the recoil through her skin, up into my arm. The sound was agony. The left side of my head vibrated with a high-pitched whining noise.
She couldn’t do anything with her right arm; I was too strong. She hit me again and again with her left fist, all over my head and face and shoulders, while my momentum tumbled her back onto the carpet.
I managed to get her flailing left arm by the wrist. I had her pinned.
Her face was inches below mine. Her expression was one of perfect calm.
She bashed me just above the bridge of my nose with her forehead. Just like in the fucking movies.
I saw stars. I lost my grip on her left arm. Nothing could make me let go of the other one.
I couldn’t see from the pain. Half of my head was filled the haywire noises my shocked left eardrum transmitted to my brain. I felt her twisting, hitting.
She got a knee between my legs, fast.
Sickening pain twisted up my guts. The gun went off again.
Blind, half-deaf, unsure of even where the gun was pointing, I lashed out with my right arm. I connected with skin. I slashed back and forth, crying, desperate.
My hand and arm and neck and face felt hot and wet.
My vision cleared.
Her face was close enough to kiss. She stared at me with a different kind of calm.
Her body relaxed. The ragged mess of her throat bubbled with blood. Each pulse was weaker than the last.
She didn’t dare die because of me. I could not kill someone. It was something that just could not happen.
I tried applying pressure to her neck to slow the bleeding. My fingers slipped in the blood and sunk into her flesh.
Her whole neck was a jagged, flayed wound.
“No no no no no no no…”
I tried using my whole hand. I pushed my palms hard on the pulpy flaps of her neck. Her head lolled back when my fingertips pushed the base of her jaw.
The blood no longer flowed. If she had breathed her last, I hadn’t heard it.
She was gone.
From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Nineteen
It really happened.
I killed someone. With my bare hands.
I killed someone.
Her eyes were open. Staring at the ceiling. Whatever moisture there had already dehydrated, leaving them dull. Flat. Hard.
I followed her (dead) gaze up. The ceiling was just as dry and flat as her eyes.
I understood why people closed the eyes of the dead in movies and whatever. It wasn’t a sign of respect or some symbolic gesture that the person was at rest.
It was so people wouldn’t have to look at them. Because it was horrible. It was the future.
Blank, staring, nothingness.
I finally turned away. Finally turned my own excellent, inhumanly sharp, unique eyes that would disappear completely from all of everything when I eventually died…so that I wasn’t staring at the cold gray things on her face.
Instead, I found myself looking at my hands.
So much better.
Not.
My hands were bloody. Cold. Sticky. Clammy. Worse, the smell filled up my brain with actual, fresh essence of dead woman.
She was all over my hands.
I had just a moment of horrible, helpless realization before the gagging hit, and no warning at all when my stomach rebelled entirely and hot vomit erupted from my mouth and nose.
I doubled over. My instinct was to grab my stomach, but even through the burning pain of acid tearing up my throat, I stopped before I got the blood on my hands all over my sweatshirt.
My knees gave way, and that too-new carpet got bloody handprints when I broke my fall, me puking all the way down.
At least I couldn’t smell anything for the moment. Just my own guts.
Violent retching gave way to tearful gasping before too long. I stared at the blood and puke soaking into the rug until the trembling in my arms—more like seizures along my muscles—got me scared that I might just collapse into the mess beneath my face.
I pushed myself into a roll and ended up on my side on the cold kitchen floor. The view from down there, plus the fact that I was absolutely wrung out, forced some calm on me for the moment.
Calm enough to think.
Which was bad.
This day here in Kirby Lake was all part of an inevitable progression. This had to happen eventually. How could it not?
It started last year with Byron. He had only wanted to talk. He was scared: worried about Brenhurst’s plans for him, worried over what he might be, and he turned to the one kid in town who just might be able to sympathize.
Except I was also the kid Byron had picked on for years, and I was full of a double dose of confidence thanks to my first date with Lina (Lina! Damn it!) and the Sovereign news and what it might mean for me.
He came to me for help. I jumped him. He fought back, better than he should have been able. That was our first clue he might be a Sovereign. I cut him, lightly, across the belly.
That was the first time.
A week or so later, a little swipe across Lester Brenhurst’s hatchet face. That one, it felt kind of good.
Then, a year…a whole year…of feeling like the part of me that liked flesh under my fingernails was growing under my own skin, like I would eventually shed my self-control and let it all just happen. That the…whatever I was…maybe deserved to be…
Me.
Then the thing with Lina. Which led to knowing about Eric Finn.
Fucking Eric Finn. Dude got off easy.
Over there in the living room, getting cold on the carpet…that could have been you, Finn.
Every time I exhaled, shallow and fast, curled up on the linoleum, I made a little noise. Keening, it’s called.
I sounded crazy to my own ears. Even to the left one, which no longer felt like it was mostly stuffed with cotton and broadcasting a high-frequency heartbeat.
I wasn’t going to be half deaf. Yay me.
Carefully, slowly, I got myself upright. My legs felt like tubes of water.
That woman. She had to happen. It was just a matter of time. The thing inside me had been threatening. She brought it out.
What if I’d just allowed myself to be handcuffed? Taken to wherever she was going to take me? I could have found out what this whole fucking shit has been about, all these months, really, for real.
I leaned hard on the kitchen counter.
Yeah. They would have told me the whole deal, right before they killed me, because that’s how that works, right?
The whole question wasn’t worth asking. When she threatened me, the thing inside came out. It doesn’t like to be caged. It doesn’t like to be refused.
She fixed it. That thing is me, now.
Hello, me. You are one fucked-up piece of shit.
“I’d like that glass of water now, Evelyn.”
Oh, that was no good. My voice. I barely recognized it.
Rather than dwell on that, I ran the kitchen tap, squirted some dishwashing soap into my palms, and rubbed my hands furiously under water that was hot as I could bear. The sink didn’t run red ne
arly as long as I thought it would.
Just like that, my hands were clean.
“Sure,” I said out loud, just to try it out. “It’s just that easy. You’re soaking in it.”
It’s not like I sounded like my crazy dad or anything. Just shaken up. Totally to be expected.
Because.
I had just killed someone.
With my hands.
I stared at them. The knuckles were almost healed from my fight with Eric Finn. I didn’t look too closely under the fingernails. I knew what was there.
I wondered if there was a nail file in their bathroom.
Because it matters if there are pieces of a dead person’s skin under my fingernails. Right now my nose was full of bile and puke and a little hint of soap, but before too long, I’d smell that shit on my fingers, and I didn’t want it.
I didn’t want it.
To get to the bathroom, I’d have to go down the hall.
To go down the hall, I’d have to walk past her.
I did it. There was no way not to walk on bloody carpet. It was soaked through. My shoes made squishing noises.
I looked at them. They were, big surprise, a bloody mess. I realized my fucking socks were probably wet.
Not just wet. Be clear. Bloody. From all the blood that came out of the dead woman’s body. The woman I killed. That one.
I was in the hall.
There were two rooms on the right. On the left, the bathroom and, father down, what was probably the master bedroom.
Can you hear the sound a television makes right before the picture comes on? Kind of an electric crackle-hiss? Or is that just me (and probably my dad)?
My hearing was coming back just fine, because I heard that, then. Only, lots. Coming from the back bedroom.
The bathroom would wait. Just like the too-new furniture and the paper plates in the kitchen, that electric buzzy hum didn’t make sense, somehow.
I squitched down the hall and into the master bedroom.
There was no bed there.
The room was full of televisions.
From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty
Three folding tables were set up along the far wall of the master bedroom, where the headboard might have been if there had been a bed. The tables held a bunch of black and silver boxes with glowing LED lights and displays, all connected with a mess of cables.
The televisions, three rows of them, were mounted along the wall above the tables. Only they weren’t really televisions. Each square of black glass had a little glowing green light, but no channel switcher or volume knob.
I was reminded of the pictures of the mission-control room at NASA, but smaller. That meant those weren’t televisions at all. They were monitors.
Two small office chairs waited in front of the table. I would have leapt at the chance to sit down, but my body was so low on fuel I settled for falling into one of them. It creaked a little. Its casters rolled on the thick plastic mat between them at the carpet before I planted my feet. I left red smears on the plastic.
I examined the array of electronics boxes on the table. I couldn’t make heads or tails of some of them.
Some of the others, though, were pretty obviously some kind of video-cassette players.
What the hell was all this?
I noticed one long box with a set of A/B switches not unlike the ones on the amplifier Alex, Carson Meunetti’s guitar player, used.
I turned everything to A and flipped a chrome toggle.
The monitors fuzzed to life.
I fiddled with switches and buttons. Pictures in black and white popped up on screens on the wall.
They were all from Denver Colorado’s place. The tree line at the edge of his backyard. His back porch. His front porch. The rooms of his house, even the bathroom. A shot of the roof, even. The inside of his garage workshop.
I didn’t realize I was looking at live camera feeds until I noticed the wind chimes hanging above Denver’s back porch shift in the breeze at the same time as I faintly heard them outside.
What the hell?
These people had cameras all over Denver Colorado’s house. How was that even possible? And what the hell for?
How, that was a mystery. But the why-for was easy. The woman—
(her name is Evelyn, my nasty subconscious burst out, and you killed her.)
—the woman and her partner had been watching Denver’s house for who knows how long, waiting for my dad to show up.
Which he had done, and left again, apparently with Denver, for who knows where. With the woman’s partner following.
Holy fuck.
Were the cameras all over my house? Is that why (Evelyn) had stayed behind? Had they been waiting for me?
That didn’t feel exactly right. She seemed genuinely surprised when I showed up.
Didn’t mean they hadn’t been spying on me. That was…gross.
I played with more buttons. The things I thought were video-cassette players, Betamaxes or whatever, didn’t actually have any cassettes in them. They played recordings all the same once I figured them out.
I watched the silent screens.
The images were strange, as if they were made up of hundreds of little boxes that constantly rearranged themselves to form a kind of mosaic, or coordinated collection, I guess, of pictures. The movies were somehow blurry and jagged at the same time, and they made my eyes ache.
I watched, though.
I saw my father, grizzled, hairy and filthy, come into the yard from the woods. Him and Denver talking. A woman about Denver or my mother’s age—who was that?
On another screen, my father sitting down for sandwiches just like plain folks. Some kind of discussion.
I saw my dad in the bathroom, stripping bare-ass naked. Under the layers of rotten clothing, his body was all lean muscle. Given his long, tangled dreadlocks and beard, I was surprised to see he had almost no body hair. That was weird.
He put his clothes into a garbage bag, opened the bathroom door just wide enough for the bag, and thrust it out. On a different screen, the mysterious woman took it and carried it out to the trash.
My dad took a long time figuring out how to draw a bath. While he was working out all of that, Denver Colorado and the woman had a pretty spirited conversation in a bedroom.
I found the fast-forward. The screens jumped and sped.
I hit play when I realized I was seeing my dad getting a haircut and a shave. The woman was doing it: big drastic chops with the scissors on his scalp and over most of his beard, a straight razor on his face for the last of it. He looked like he would bolt at any moment.
I watched, fascinated. He didn’t bolt.
So many questions. It was frustrating to see it all happening but not hear a thing. What was this all for?
Clean-shaven, with a close haircut, in clean clothes he must have borrowed from Denver, my father was nearly unrecognizable. Only his eyes, still wide and half-scared and always moving, betrayed him as the same person.
I fast-forwarded again, but eventually everyone went to bed, my father curled up on the floor on a pile of blankets he pulled off Denver’s couch.
I stopped the “tape” and thought about what I’d seen. My dad shows up at Denver’s, he gets all cleaned up by Denver’s friend, or girlfriend, maybe, then the next morning they’re all nowhere to be found, and one of the PrenticeCambrian fuckers goes after them.
Did they know the guy was after them?
It shouldn’t have taken that long to hit me, but looking back, I guess I can be forgiven for being a little dense, given my morning.
My dad was in some very serious danger, and he probably didn’t even know it.
I had to figure out where they were all going. Somehow, I had to catch up with them before…Evelyn’s…partner did.
If I could find them, if we could get to the partner…I couldn’t give the thought any more form than that, but it drove an urgency into my body that gave me a sudden burst of energy.
I shot out of the chair, out of the bedroom, and down the hall. I had to get back to Denver’s.
The body stopped me.
She was so very, completely, absolutely dead.
It had happened. This thing had happened.
I closed my eyes. I just couldn’t look anymore. I let the rest of my sensorium guide me until she was behind me and I was at the front door.
If I could figure this out, maybe everything would work out.
Yeah. But she’d still be dead. And I’d still be the person who killed her.
From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty One
I felt like every housewife and kid home sick from school in Kirby Lake could see me leave that house and slink next door to Denver’s. The skin on the back of my neck crawled. I couldn’t stand up straight; anything more than a crouch felt like I was painting a bull’s-eye on my back.
There was a dead woman back there. How was it possible the whole world didn’t know it?
If they did, they hadn’t had time to come running just yet. I made it around to the back of Denver’s house undetected, so far as I could tell.
I didn’t know how to get in. I didn’t have a key. He was like family, but that didn’t mean he trusted me with coming and going as I pleased.
I decided shit was too important to fuck around. I took advantage of what little energy I had left in me and kicked the door in.
The sound surprised me; it was very loud in the quiet of the neighborhood. I slipped inside the dim kitchen right away.
Bath or not, my father’s pungent animal scent was all over the inside of Denver’s house. I was probably the only person who would notice, but man, it was strong. I half expected to see him come around the corner.
The house was not quite silent in the way that only empty houses could be. I didn’t have anything to worry about, as far as that went, at least.
I had to figure out where my dad, Denver, and the mystery woman went. But first…
Standing in the kitchen with my energy reserves pretty much entirely drained from the awful business of the morning, I couldn’t resist opening the fridge. I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if I didn’t get some food in me.