Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten

by Richard M. Heredia

  “And that was two days ago…?” I asked afraid of the answer.

  “Y-yes,” was all she said.

  “What did they say at her school?” I inquired as the image she’d depicted of her mother’s memory sank in deeper.

  “They say she never made it to class. No one saw her on campus that day.” There was frustration and anger soaking her tone as if she suspected some sort of conspiracy. They must’ve had some issues at the school regarding this. Fucking typical bureaucrats, never wanting to be held accountable for a goddamned thing, well, it’s your job motherfuckers!

  “But, I thought you said your mom saw her go into the school?” I was confused.

  “I did! Those stupid, fucking jerks are covering their asses over this, I can feel and it makes me sick!” It wasn’t Tirza answering, it was Tess, through clenched teeth and a number of hand strikes to her steering wheel. “I know, I did, because I always do! I wait until she is completely within the gates of that place! Every day, god damn it!” she continued saying that more to herself than to us. Tirza’s mother was a regular attendee at church, so to hear her curse and talk with such violence was unsettling.

  “That’s not a very big school, how could they misplace a student with all the security and special attention they have in place in order to make sure no one gets hurts. I don’t understand?” I said quietly to my ex-girlfriend as her mother kept muttering with rabid hostility in the seat next to her.

  “Neither do we. My dad has been down at the police station raising hell, and they – the police – are interviewing everyone that works at the school, but so far nothing…” She wiped at her nose with what appeared to be an old fashion handkerchief, then breathed heavily.

  “Jesus, it sounds so weird. Why would - ? How could - ? But, that don’t -,” I kept cutting myself off mid-sentence, the shock of the situation making me flounder.

  “So, you haven’t seen her or heard anything?” The raw hope behind her muffled words was heart wrenching. I had to force myself to set aside the emotion lurking behind my every breath. Things between Tirza and I weren’t like that anymore.

  “No, Tirza, we haven’t. I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Is that why you came here, you thought she might hiding out here?”

  “She always had a crush on you, Eff, you know that,” she smiled through her puffy, bloodshot eyes. “We just figured she might have shown up here, you know. It was a long shot, but right now, we’re not leaving any stone unturned.”

  “I wish she had come by, Teezee, I really do, but we haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”

  “Ok…”

  “I can have Jacob ask around, if you want. I mean, he knows a lot of people and some of them aren’t… well, you know all that nice… that might lead to something, you know?” I offered, trying to come up with anything that might make them feel a tiny bit better.

  She glanced pass her mother and through the window at Jacob who was standing a few feet from Ramona and Katie. All three of them had decided to stay near the front entry of the house, giving Tirza, her mother and I some privacy. “You guys just hanging out?”

  “Yeah, my cousin flew into town just last night to spend the summer with us.” There was no need to spread Katie’s business all over town. A little white lie here and now, never hurt anyone.

  “Oh, Katie,” she said through a catch in her breath, bringing her eyes back to mine. “She’s here the whole summer, huh?”

  “Yeah, she needed to get away from some things in Oklahoma,” I clarified, feeling like I was suddenly standing on shaky ground.

  “…or get into new ones…,” she murmured so lightly I wasn’t sure I had even heard her right, but she covered it almost immediately. “Well, will you let people know to keep an eye out?” I nodded. “And, yes, I think it would be a good idea for Jacob to ask around a bit, as long as he doesn’t get into any trouble or anything. You know how some of those kind of people can be, always spying, looking for the next ‘diseased’ person.” She said it with raised eyebrows and then smiled wanly. She tapped her mother on the arm, who was still cursing under her breath. “We can go now, mom.”

  “Bye Tirza, we will do what we can ok? If we find anything out I’ll call you, I promise,” I reassured her, then gazed passed her. “Bye Mrs. Cardenas, we’ll do what we can.”

  She was trying to be strong and not cry, but she wasn’t having much success when she waved a small wave at me. “Ok, Eff, you tell your momma I said hi for me, ok?”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you, Eff, call me if you find out anything,” pleaded Tirza. Then her mother crushed the acceleration pedal and they were gone.

  I walked back across the street with my head lowered, studying the ground. I really wasn’t all sure there was anything we could really do, other than ask around. Two days, she could be anywhere by now or… I just pushed those thoughts to the side, not wishing to rehash anything overly negative right then.

  Yet, there was something that Tirza had said that sparked a thought, a train of thinking that burned brightly for a moment or two and then fizzled out. Now, I couldn’t quite focus along the same train of thought. It eluded me. What had she said? “…the next ‘diseased’ person…” Why did that resonate? Why was that important?

  “What’s going on?” asked Katie, which brought my head up. I hadn’t realized her and Ramona had walked from the front steps of the house and had intercepted me half up the walkway. There was empathy in her eyes, her voice subdued and calm.

  My thoughts scattered. It still took me a few moments to recover. “Like Ramona said, Tirza’s little sister is missing, she has been gone for two days now and nobody seems to know where she went, not even the school where her mother dropped her off. Everyone there is saying she never made it to school, but Mrs. Cardenas says she dropped her off and saw her walk onto the campus grounds. So, Tirza and her family are all freaking out as you can well imagine. The cops are all over the school like ants, but still no sign of her,” I explained as coolly as I could manage, attempting to keep what I felt in my heart right where it belonged – buried. I didn’t want to break down.

  “That sounds awful,” Ramona commented, coming about to put her arms around my waist, trapping one of my own within her grasp as she gave him a long squeeze. “You ok?” she asked, knowing how much I liked the little girl.

  I nodded.

  “You sure, ‘cuz?” was Katie’s question as she gently touched my cheek, a slow, tender caress.

  I smiled dejectedly. “How could I not with you two around? You guys make me feel like a king.” I tried to sound light, but I know I didn’t succeed. I hadn’t really tried hard enough.

  “You see,” began Ramona with a little mischief in her grin, “they were right, Estefan.”

  “No they weren’t,” I muttered derisively.

  “Yes they were.”

  “Who was right?” asked Katie.

  “The girls at our school,” began Ramona, gazing across me at Katie. “If you ask them about Estefan - how he is, what he’s like, etc. They all pretty much say the same thing.” There was wicked delight spreading across my girlfriend’s face.

  “And what is that?” Katie’s tone dropped a few octaves. She had obviously formed an opinion of her own.

  The other teenager chuckled. “They say he has ‘powers’. They say if he puts his mind to it, he can get any girl to go out with him or kiss him - a select few even said he could get girls to sleep with him if he really tried. They say he accomplishes this by saying the right thing at the right time. This apparently makes females hearts melt in droves.”

  I expected Katie to laugh and say those girls were all full of shit.

  She thought about it, though, the very same fingers that had nuzzled my cheek were now tapping her lips. “You know, he kinda does do that.”

  Her response floored me. What!?!

  “Last night, I was having a tough time with things. He had me calm and comfortable, and I swear to god more
than a little moist just by what he said.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “Were you using your ‘powers’ on me last night, Effy?”

  Ah come one, Katie, I don’t feel like brutal honestly right now, goddamn it!

  “No.” I had had about enough of the ‘powers’ bull-pucky that Ramona swore by for more than a year now.

  “He might not have known it, Katie, but he was using them. He uses them all the time, but, he thinks, it’s his natural way of being. He just goes around being himself. Yet, for you, it’s something else entirely. Before you know it, you realize you’ve made decisions about him that you shouldn’t be making, willing to do things that you shouldn’t be willing to do. That’s right about the same time you realize, he’s not a normal guy. You see there is something about him that attracts you, and you can’t figure it out.” She chortled seductively. “That’s usually when you feel your panties hit the floor.” Ramona hadn’t let go of me, and, as she finished, she shook me in her arms, rattling my brain. “Isn’t that right?” She licked my earlobe and made me shiver with delight despite my efforts to subdue the sensation.

  “You make me sound like some hard-up vampire or something,” I quipped, but didn’t pull away.

  “Cuz, there is no way you’re that hard-up, You’ve never waited one hundred years to be with the right girl. You took every one you could get your hands on like you were sampling a box of chocolates.” Katie winked, then laughed, walking beside me, opposite Ramona, her narrow hips rocking this way and that.

  Ramona rattled with a lengthy purr.

  Maybe I was in some trouble here…

  “Where the hell did Jake go?” I asked, seeing he was nowhere in sight.

  “He went back upstairs,” relied Katie offhandedly.

  “I gotta talk to him about lighting some fires under people’s asses in the neighborhood, see if he can turn up anything on Lisa,” I said to no one in particular. “If there is someone out there who can stir the pot, no matter how big the damn pot - Jacob can do it.”

  “You got that right,” agreed Ramona as we walked back in the house and closed the door behind us.

  { ¹Winston Churchill: a British politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955; widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century. }

  *****

  [He breaks the surface, though his fingers never stop moving.]

  Lisa was one of the first persons that we knew personally, who suddenly disappeared without a trace in the second half of that year.

  There would be many thousands afterward…

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~ Chapter 19 ~

  (Summer – 2018)

  A Deal is Struck

  [He sinks back into the mire of the past.]

  It was after dinner. After, Katie and I had helped my mother clean up kitchen. After, we tarried about with my siblings and my parents, for a time. It was hours later, when Katie, my step-sister Flavia, my brother Johan and I strode up to the Loft to watch a movie my mother said was too violent for the younger kids to see. I had frowned at her, because I didn’t think The Hills Have Eyes VI was all that violent. But it wasn’t my place to decide the right time for a kid to see someone decapitated. That was a parents’ job, not mine. Therefore, us four, older kids happily marched up to the Loft, flicked on my 37-inch plasma, popped in the High density Blu-Ray and made ourselves comfortable wherever there was room - on my bed, on the floor. Katie and I had scooted toward the headboard and sat leaning against my pillows, while my long-legged stepsister stretched out lengthwise across the foot of the bed. My brother, who had brought his lounge pillow, was resting upon it at the foot of the bed, raptly watching the flat screen from a prone position.

  It wasn’t long, sometime after the main characters were introduced and the gratuitous full frontal nude scene passed when Katie yawned. This was followed by the sweaty over edited sex montage that made Katie squirm at my side. At first, I thought it had made her a little hot and bothered, but when I glanced over at her, I knew, she was bored.

  “What’s wrong, Kat?” I wondered, pinching her on the thigh.

  She slapped my hand, giving me a warning glare, mouthing I wasn’t allowed to touch her like that in front of others. I nodded and did it again, which made her mad. She poked me in my side and made me jump involuntarily. I tickled her back and made her wiggle and grunt as she tried not to laugh out loud. My sister turned to look at us for a few seconds, then rolled her eyes. Flavia returned her attention to the movie, flipping her long auburn hair over her shoulder as she did so.

  “Stop!” Katie whispered hoarsely.

  I stopped,but left one of my hands on her thigh, just above the knee. She glanced at it and then grabbed a hold of it and squeezed. My cell phone chimed, disturbing the lot of us. It was a text by the sound of the alert, so I leaned over to have a look at it on the nightstand. It was Ramona – “Anything from Jacob? FYI, everything for tonight is cool… ;)”

  I showed it to Katie. She smiled and rubbed her hands together with excitement. The three of us had made big plans for later that night. We were eager to see if we had the guts to fulfill them. I texted her back with Katie leaning on my shoulder, watching as my fingers danced over the surface of my phone –“Nothing yet! It’ll probably take a few days. You still gonna be here at midnight?”

  “You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked my cousin, wanting to make sure she was one hundred percent sure. This was the sort of thing that could scar a person for life, if they hadn’t thought it through properly. I needed to make sure the Katie sitting next to me, right then, would be the same Katie I would awaken beside in the morning.

  “Eff, I wanted this last summer remember,” she began, then she lowered her voice and spoke into my ear. “But, we were interrupted…”

  I whispered back. “Were you really going to give my head that day?”

  “Absolutely,” she answered with an affirming nod of her head.

  “I knew it!” I replied huskily, a bit too loud than I wanted too.

  “Hey, guys! Will you be quiet or go somewhere else, I’m trying to watch this,” bellowed my aggravated sister, looking over at us with distain in her glare. She, once more, returned her attention back to the movie. On screen, there was a horribly deformed man chasing a diminutive, effeminate man through a maze of tunnels, yelling something about butthole love. I watched the back of her head for a bit, wondering if she might’ve put two and two together. Maybe she was acting like an ass, because she didn’t approve. Would she tell her father? I hoped not, if this were the case.

  Then my cell vibrated and chimed again. I gazed down at the text message –“12 midnight sharp, baby doll! See you soon!”

  I edged myself toward the edge of the bed, pulling Katie with me. She came willingly, entirely pliant. I led her toward her bed on the other side of the room. I leaned toward her and said, “Ramona is good to go, so I guess we’ll see what happens.”

  “Just be ready, Eff, because I really want it to happen. I don’t want you to get all weirded out,” she leaned back into me. We wove our way across the remainder of the room toward where she was supposed to sleep, but hadn’t yet. I sat on the edge of her bed, and she followed suit.

  “You sure, Kat?” I asked, speaking under the 7.1 digital surround sound of the Blu-Ray audio system playing the movie. I wanted to make sure she was absolutely open to what the three of us had discussed whenever Jacob had walked out of the room earlier that day.

  After we had made our way back to the Loft, and I had finally calmed down over the news of Lisa’s disappearance. I’d asked Jacob to ask around among his more nefarious acquaintances (about which he said he would). We went back to what we had been doing before the interruption. The girls and I lounged on the bed, where I told Katie all about Lisa with Ramona listening.

  Meanwhile, Jacob went back to rolling a few joints from his portion of the marijuana.

  When I had finis
hed answering all of Katie’s questions about the unfortunate young teen, I had got up from the bed to ask Jacob if he would roll a few for us from our stash.

  He smiled broadly and said that he would, winking at me, raising his eyebrows at Ramona, thinking I was planning a fuckfest with the girl later on that night.

  I just let him think whatever he wanted; keeping him off the real trail was the key at this point. I went over to the satellite radio receiver and turned it on to the classic rock station. At once, some old jams from way back in the heyday of Heavy Metal¹ began to blare. All of us liked to “rock out” now and again, even though the era was long, long gone.

  When I returned to the bed, I found the girls deep in conversation. I let them go on for a time when it dawned on me that they were discussing the subject of sex. I was suddenly confused.

  “What’re you guys talking about?” I had asked.

  Ramona had been talking, stopped and said as a matter of fact, “Our Katie has made a request.”

  I jerked my head back, chin to chest. “Oh, and what is that?” I asked lightly, thinking Ramona was messing around.

  “She has asked me very politely and respectfully, if she could make love to you tonight.” Sixteen words that made my lower jaw drop to the carpeted floor was all it took.

  Holy fuck, Katie wasn’t messing around!

  “Really?” I asked. Then I squinted hard. I knew I had just sounded like I’d just entered puberty, complete with an ever-breaking voice box. I looked from one of them to the other, my eyes as wide as saucers.

  Both of the teenage girls merely nodded, Ramona gravely and Katie demurely, which was so not like her. It was a complete farce.