Desiree closed the door, locked it, and turned to face him. Suddenly he felt as if he were the prey and she the hungry lioness.
He gulped. “I’m really a nice guy most of the time. But I can be bad, if I need to be.”
“Walter, I like that you’re a nice guy. It’s the first thing I noticed about you, even from a distance. You may not have known I was watching, but I’ve seen you hold doors for other people, help them carry things when their arms were full, lend them lunch money, listen to what they say. Most of the time, that’s exactly what women want. It’s what I want. But women are… complex creatures. So once in a while we also like a bit of a wild man. You seem like the best of both worlds to me.”
“You may never be safe,” he pointed out. “What if Mr. Carmichael comes back? I don’t think he’ll leave you alone.”
With a lovely smile, she led him to the couch and sat him down. “In that case, maybe you’ll just have to stay here to protect me.”
There was a stirring in the loincloth, and he felt very self-conscious. “Maybe I should get dressed in real clothes.”
“No, Walter. You stay just the way you are.” Desiree leaned over to kiss him.
KYLE AISTEACH is a writer, blogger, and educator based in Fresno, California. His work has previously been seen in Cosmos Magazine, Digital Science Fiction, Emerald Sky, Stupefying Stories, and in various anthologies. At 6’4″ and 260 pounds, Kyle Aisteach is one of the biggest authors in this anthology.
For more information please visit his site:
www.aisteach.com
Man of Water
Kyle Aisteach
Viraquae—
I should start at the beginning…
Please forgive me if I’m confused. I’ve been running for my life for the past three days. At least, I think it was three days ago. Time seems unreal to me now.
My name is Baxter Small. Congressman Small. Former Congressman Small. I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I don’t know what woke me, but it was just in time. A man in a Special Forces uniform crept across my living room, knife in hand.
Two tours in a war zone. The instincts are still there. I kicked the coffee table. Three meals’ worth of china rattled. The soldier hesitated long enough for me to dash for the door.
As I reached the footpath across the street, I heard my burglar alarm go off belatedly. I ran—well, trotted—at my age I don’t run so much anymore—toward downtown. There’s an all-night coffeehouse about a mile from my house, and I kept the best pace my old frame would allow all the way there.
That late at night, only a few die-hard denizens were present. I sat down with my back against the wall of amateur art, and I thought about what to do next.
A young woman—dressed in black, with pale skin and too many piercings—moved over to me. “You’re Congressman Small, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Former Congressman,” I said. “I’m a private citizen these days.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard that.” She sat down across the small table from me without waiting to be invited.
I considered the implications of my burglar alarm going off only after I had made it clear across the street. That meant the soldier had gotten in without tripping it.
“So, what are you doing now? Are you a lobbyist or something?” the young woman asked.
I had seen the soldier before, I recalled. And it made staying awake a priority. I looked at my uninvited companion, glad to have her stimulus. “No,” I said. “I’m retired now.”
Viraquae—literally man of water in Latin. The soldier was the CIA’s viraquae. When I was on the Armed Services Committee I had spent some time with the handlers while we were considering their budget. I had seen that Special Forces soldier then. It was a form the viraquae frequently took when it was responding to one particular trainer. They change form based on who is around, based on what the greater need is.
Fascinating creatures, viraquaes, when they’re not trying to kill you.
“Oh, well, I heard a lot of politicians do that when their careers end,” my young companion said to the ceiling. “A sort of a safety net.”
Most people have met a viraquae at some point, only not realized it. They’re that stranger who was there for you. Just the right person at just the right time. The one who you always wished you could find to thank.
Most viraquaes aren’t captive, and aren’t trained killers. The CIA’s is the only domesticated one I know of.
“Most politicians aren’t hurting for money,” I said, glancing around the coffeehouse. The more people around me the better. Viraquaes are weak in crowds. They’re empathic. Crowds pull them in too many directions.
“It’s got to be hell, you know,” the young woman said, “working your whole life like that, only to lose it all in one election.”
“It’s the nature of the job,” I said. After all these years, they had actually sent the viraquae after me.
“I hope your family’s supportive,” the young woman said. “Mine’re a bunch of freaks.”
I felt myself twinge. I hadn’t really been paying attention as my new friend had drifted into dangerously personal matters. “Oh, right,” she said. “I remember now. I read about your divorce.”
I had one advantage that most other people don’t have. I know what a viraquae is. The one the government owns had been captured after World War II, and was generally used in places where there was no jurisdiction or where it was important to leave no evidence. But as long as I was awake and the handler wasn’t nearby, my own needs would confuse the viraquae if it got near me. It would take the form that I needed, not the form the handler needed.
The young woman leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Look, if you’d like, I’ve got some stuff that really helps with the pain.”
It took me a few seconds to figure out what she meant. And then I laughed. I could just see the headlines: Former Congressman Overdoses. “No, thank you,” I said.
The young woman twisted in her seat. “What’s a budget clearing account?”
It was an odd question. I wondered what they were including in those blog things that her generation seemed to get its news from. “It’s an account used to hold money temporarily. When a payment is supposed to go out, but there’s nowhere for it to go, it moves into a BCA,” I explained. “Or if a payment comes in and it’s not clear what budget it belongs to, same thing. Makes the accounting easier.” It also makes it easier to make money vanish in the shell game.
She tipped her head toward the back of the coffeehouse, arching her body over the arm of her chair. “Where is the money?”
A calm dread came over me as I realized.
I looked the young woman directly in the eye. “I never had it. Tell your trainer to check with the taxpayers.”
“What?” she—no—it said.
German is the language of choice for handling the trained viraquae. On the several tours through the training facility I had learned the command to send it back to its jar. “Geh zu d’Haus!”
The young woman melted into a clear puddle. It flowed over the velveteen seat cushion without wetting it, and then slithered toward the restrooms in the rear of the coffeehouse.
No one else seemed to have noticed. I stood up and headed out the front door.
Almost on instinct, I went to the homeless shelter. Hundreds of people, all with terrible needs. Even the best trainer wouldn’t have been able to keep the viraquae focused. I spent the night there, trying to ignore the smell of urine and the screams of my fellow humans.
The next afternoon I decided to risk going to my financial planner’s office. She set me up with some traveling money, and I signed everything else over to the homeless shelter. And then I caught the next bus south. We drove all night. I even got some sleep—about thirty people on the bus, none trying to get close to me.
The next day I found myself in a dirty part of a town near the Mexican border. Prostitutes walked the streets. On nearly every corner, money openly changed hands for drugs
. A graffiti artist spray-painted the door of an abandoned car. And there I was, a disheveled old man walking the streets like I belonged there.
The first gunshot sent me diving for the nearest door—veteran’s instinct—my rational mind screaming at me that it was just a backfire. The fourth shot shattered the window on the other side of the door, and I belatedly realized the instinct had saved my life.
Everyone else on the street had taken cover, too. One of the drug dealers, hiding behind the abandoned car, had drawn a weapon of his own, but looked around confusedly, not sure where the shots had come from.
A husky voice came from behind me. “Jesus Christ! What’re they shootin’ at you for?”
I hadn’t noticed the woman in the doorway when I dove in. She stood taller than me in her stiletto heels, and she wore so much makeup that the foundation cracked and sank into the lines on her face. Her outfit barely qualified as lingerie. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I said.
“You can’t be on the street,” she said. “It ain’t safe. Here, this is my buildin’. You better come up.”
“No really,” I said. “I’m safer on the streets.” Again the headlines flashed in front of me. Former Congressman Shot With Prostitute.
“You talk sense, now, grandpa, you comin’ up,” she said, peeking out of the doorway once to check the street. She grabbed my wrist and dragged me up a steep, dark stairway.
We entered her apartment through a kitchenette with a water closet standing in the corner. She had just one room, with a double bed on the far wall and a lot of knickknacks cluttering the counter and hung on the walls. “Now who’s out there shootin’ at you?” she asked.
“Just some old friends,” I said.
She moved to the wall by the bed and looked out the window as she asked, “What’d you do?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. The truth was that I had returned something that they had stolen. The truth was that not every police jurisdiction thinks the government is above the law. I finally settled on, “Played their game for 25 years, and then decided to play my own.”
She stepped back into the kitchenette and took a glass out of the drying rack. The old plumbing creaked and groaned as a trickle of water drained out of the faucet and filled it. She brought it to me. “You can stay here. You seem nice.”
I smiled politely and took a drink. As a politician it was always more important to seem nice than to be nice.
She glanced out the window again, and began to fidget.
I was alone with her. Just the right person at just the right time. And it was between me and the door.
I folded my arms and kept my tone pleasant as I asked, “Wondering where your trainer is?”
Her jaw went slack. “Huh?”
“Geh zu d’Haus!”
She melted, but re-formed almost instantly.
In retrospect, I realize the plan was ideal. The trainer fires off a few shots in the street—he may even have been the drug dealer I saw—and the viraquae and I are instinctively drawn to each other. It probably wouldn’t move on me while I was interacting with it, but once I fell asleep…
The viraquae took two steps toward me.
I focused my mind, the way they taught me to in those acting classes I took when I was planning my first run for city council. “Would you like me to tell you what I really, really need?”
The viraquae stopped, staring at me.
“What I really, really need,” I said, “is to see reality, quite clearly.”
I could feel my heart pounding as I waited. I concentrated. If I needed something more than the handler needed me dead…
Finally, the viraquae melted. And so did most of the decor in the tiny room. Only a small crucifix adorned the wall. I had never realized they could affect an environment, too.
Whoever actually lived here was a meticulous housekeeper. I carefully stepped around the viraquae. It squirmed on the floor like a giant amoeba.
“I don’t know if you can understand me in that state,” I said as I started to wash my glass, “but I fully intend to disappear. To never be a problem again. To live my life in some foreign land and never again strive to change the world.”
I put my glass back in the drying rack and looked around. The viraquae pulled itself up a bit before settling back down into a blob.
“Confusing, isn’t it?” I said. “Not knowing what you’re supposed to be, not knowing how to be yourself.” I pulled the cash I was carrying out of my pocket and left it on the table. “I’m going to leave now. What I really, really need is for you to stay here for at least 48 hours. I suspect whoever lives here needs something.”
I stepped out into the hallway, locking the door behind myself—not that doing so would actually slow down a viraquae, but it might stop the handler from undoing my suggestions.
The back door of the building led out into an alley. I marched toward the sun as fast as I could go. Midday. Toward the sun is south at midday.
And I walked. Clear out of town and into the desert, remarking the whole time on the viraquae’s odd choice of forms when interacting with me.
I hadn’t brought any water, and even in the winter the sun baked me dry. It is winter now, isn’t it? The sun set quickly enough, but on foot, I couldn’t be confident I was moving fast enough to bed down safely. It had caught up with me at the coffeehouse almost immediately.
I saw a campfire. As I approached, voices carried toward me. I made out a group of about two dozen men around it, probably illegal immigrants making their way north, though the campfire was a risky move if that was the case.
I’m sure I looked like a viraquae to them—a mysterious old man appearing out of the blackness into the firelight. One spoke excellent English, and when I explained that I was heading south, they happily offered me a share of their food and water.
My Spanish is extremely limited, but even so the conversation was pleasant. I lay down against a large rock and watched the fire for some time.
After a while the English speaker leaned over to me and spoke in a voice that sounded like he was about to start a ghost story. “What do you know about viraquaes?”
I looked around. The rest of the group had gone quiet and studied us as though they could suddenly understand.
“More than most,” I said. “If you’ve heard of them, you know more than most.”
The whole group sat in rapt attention. The English speaker crossed his hands on his knees. “Do you know where they come from?”
“There are a lot of theories,” I said, sitting up. “Why? Are you a viraquae?”
He half smiled as he spoke. “If I was, I would not know it.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” I admitted.
“I would be whatever I was,” he said. “I would believe that I am me. My memories real. My body real. And I would not be able to tell you where I come from.”
I nodded, and noticed that several of the others were nodding, too. “I suppose,” I said, “that if I really needed to know, maybe you’d be able to tell me then.”
“Is possible,” he said, leaning back and looking up at the sky.
“Geh zu d’Haus!”
He smiled broadly. “They say they come from the stars,” he said. “They say they are angels. You know what I say? I say they are men like you.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a little, even as I surveyed the blackness for an escape. “I’m no viraquae.”
“Not yet,” he said ominously. All eyes were still on me. “But you might be.”
“Viraquaes live to be helpful,” I said. “I’m afraid that I’ve spent my life being anything but useful.”
He stood up and leaned over me. “You, in your heart, you want to serve. That is why you became a politician.”
“I became a politician as popularity contest,” I said matter-of-factly.
He spoke gently. “Then why do they send a viraquae to kill you?”
I hadn’t mentioned that fact. “Obviously, I don’t know enoug
h about viraquaes,” I said. I knew I should try to run, but alone, in the desert…
“Do you know your choices?” he said.
I tried to sound confident—to feel confident. “Yes.”
“No,” he said and raised himself up to his full height—only about five feet. He held out his hand. “You can choose to be one of us. We were men once. Men who left our bodies to serve. Men like our captive brother who hunts you. Baxter Small, you can be a viraquae.”
I found myself unable to respond for a long time. It felt like my body resonated. “Is this a setup?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
And it was a good one. I looked directly at him and spoke as carefully as I could. “Haven’t we tried this once before? My will is too strong for you to kill me directly. Servant of two masters. So you have to convince me to just give up, or be close to me when I let my guard down.”
“Not us,” he said. “If you say no, we help you go to Mexico. But, Baxter Small, you can live forever. You can help forever.”
I looked around. One by one, the other men in the group melted into individual viraquaes. The fire vanished. In the light of a quarter moon I could just make out the one last silhouette. “Baxter Small, what is your need?”
And all at once, I understood. And it was what I wanted.
And in that moment, I felt myself melt.
My body lay against the rock, motionless. And in a thousand directions, I could feel the call of people who needed me.
My name is Baxter Small.
You can find my remains in the desert north of the Mexican border.
But somehow, I knew you needed to hear my story.
I can’t stay, though. Someone else needs me. And I have to flow away now.
Part V:
Weird Fantasy
A former US Marine and ex SoCal police officer, MICHAEL EZELL lives in California with his wife and two sons. Michael’s work appears in Stupefying Stories’ Weird Wild West edition, and two additional anthologies: I, Automaton and Girl at the End of the World.
Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 34