She looked down at the leftovers from her first kill (first of many?) smoldering there in the grass.
At this point he wasn’t really recognizable anymore. The face was the most damaged part—just a charred skull now, with leathery tendons attached. He almost looked fake, like a prop fashioned from latex and plastic; something creepy to put out in the yard and scare the kids on Halloween.
“He’s not real,” said Simone.
“Smells real to me,” said the woman sitting in the grass on the other side of the corpse, who then reached out and started tugging at the dead man’s shirt, popping buttons loose and exposing the skin of his belly.
She was a beautiful woman: perfect bone structure, perfect body proportions.
She was a giantess: 6’6” at least.
She was some kind of a monster pretending to be a person. In the few minutes since her unexpected arrival, the woman’s teeth had changed, become sharp, like little shark teeth, and they gleamed silver as though made from metal instead of bone.
It had occurred to Simone that the woman—she called herself Myra—might be a robot, maybe something sorta like The Terminator. But if so, her comments so far had made it seem that she was a good Terminator, like Arnold in the second movie, sent to protect Simone and guide her towards some future date with destiny.
Which means I’m the chosen one, I guess. I’m the John Connor in this story, the Buffy Summers, the Kal-El.
Simone felt a cackle building deep in her chest, the kind of cackle you might hear in the company of people crazy enough to eat their own poop.
She kept it inside. Barely.
When Myra completed the task of exposing Chance’s torso, she started probing at his stomach with her bare hands, obviously intending to rip him wide open.
Simone was about to look away, because she really didn’t want to see his guts if she could help it, but then Myra jerked her hands back quickly and started sucking on a finger.
“Still too hot in there,” she said.
The woman’s efforts had resulted in a bloody little hole just above Chance’s belly button. There was steam rising out of it.
Simone watched the steam puffing up, exactly like steam coming out of a hot tea kettle.
A question occurred to her, and she looked over at the enormous woman. “Can you do this too?”
“What’s that?” Myra’s voice, despite her strange accent, part hillbilly and part Australian, was smooth and reassuring.
Simone pointed down at the corpse. “Make people burn up from the inside out?”
Myra shook her head. “No, not me. You need venom to do that.”
“Venom?”
“Yes. You have venom sacks in your throat now.” Myra pressed her fingers against her own throat to show the exact location. “It comes from being linked to one of the great serpents—think of it as a blessing. This kind of venom is a very potent substance; a mystical substance. Burning people up is only the most basic—most primitive—way of using it.”
“And you don’t have venom?”
“No… You and I are similar in some ways, but you are far greater than me. Closer to The Great Father. I have some blessings of my own, but the venom will always be beyond my reach.”
“I was thinking you might be a robot.”
Myra laughed. “Why would you think that?”
Simone shrugged. “Why not? Under the circumstances, robots don’t seem like such a stretch.”
Myra’s expression became thoughtful. “Hmmm… I suppose it is a lot to take in.” She paused for a second, reached down and snapped off Chance’s left index finger, then continued talking as if she’d done nothing out of the ordinary. “You’ll get used to it, I promise. Everything takes time”
She bit off the end of the finger and chewed it up with her horrible metal teeth; behaving exactly like someone munching down on an especially crunchy French fry.
“Just a snack,” she said when she noticed Simone staring, “something to chew on while we wait for him to cool down. Would you like some too?”
Simone was about to say no, but before she could get the words out, Myra reached down and tore off his middle finger.
SNAP.
She held the finger out to Simone, smiling, shark teeth smeared with fresh blood. “Here you go.”
“Actually I think I’m gonna pass on that.”
“You sure? You’ll feel much better if you let yourself sample a little. I can tell you’re craving meat right now. It’s natural for you to crave it.”
Simone looked at the finger for a long time—a very long time—before crossing her arms and looking away. “No thanks. That’s not something I would do.”
“Are you sure? Why don’t you just have a little taste, see what it does for you.”
“I said no.”
Myra’s face fell. “I’ve upset you haven’t I? I’m pushing you too fast.”
“Push all you want. Nothing’s gonna make me eat a person.”
“That’s fine, hon. Don’t worry about it. There’s no reason why you should be ready to embrace your new life so soon.”
Jesus, what is this? Can this really be happening?
Myra shoved what was left of the index finger into her mouth, and crunched down on bone; it sounded almost exactly like somebody chewing up a hard candy. Then her whole manner changed suddenly; she stiffened, tilting her head in the direction of the road, eyes widening with alarm.
“What is it?” asked Simone.
“Car’s coming,” she said, and stood.
She grabbed Chance by one pants leg, and lifted him as if he weighed less than a small suitcase, dangling him above the ground head first, and carrying him in the direction of his truck. When she was about five feet away, she stopped, and slung him casually into the air.
He arced gracefully, leaving a stream of smoke in his wake, and landed in the truck bed with a loud BONG.
Simone was so stunned by the demonstration of strength it didn’t even register that she hadn’t noticed the sound of a car coming herself.
Then she did hear the car, still distant.
About 10 seconds later it finally appeared—a white sedan that passed by the house without slowing.
“Close call,” said Myra. “It’s so quiet out here… Easy to forget about the road.”
“Seems like you reacted in plenty of time.”
Myra shrugged. “It’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t think of the danger. The grass is so high they probably wouldn’t have noticed him anyway, but still, I should know better… Speaking of which, there’s an important question I should’ve already asked you: what is the likelihood of unannounced visitors today?”
Simone paused to think about the question, then said, “None, I guess. My mom’s in Florida for a couple more months. I have no other relatives here.”
“Friends?”
“Some of my old high-school friends live nearby, but I’m not close to any of them anymore.”
“Do you have a man?”
“A boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“No. Not for a long time.”
“You like women then?”
“No. I just don’t do committed relationships anymore. Don’t like to feel tied down.”
Myra nodded her approval. “A sensible attitude—also convenient for our sake, because we have many things to discuss—secret things not meant for the ears of outsiders. Not to mention the fact that you’ll be needing some privacy this evening.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, you’re going to feel a great need for privacy. For darkness. You may have already felt twinges.”
Simone thought back to earlier in the video store when she kept returning to the little bathroom… The feeling of wanting to hide, to be alone—the right kind of closed in.
Yes, she understood what the woman meant.
“I know this all must be frightening for you,” said Myra. “To have your whole reality turned upside down like this can’t be ea
sy. But you must understand, this is a great day. You are becoming what you were always meant to be. I will help guide you—that’s the main reason I’m here—and I can’t wait to tell you everything I know.”
As Myra spoke, Simone noticed that the woman’s teeth were normal again.
When did that happen?
Then a better question occurred to her—did it actually happen at all?
Maybe the woman never had sharp metal teeth in the first place.
Because I’m probably hallucinating a lot of this… Maybe all of it.
If something this bizarre happened to an ordinary person, they would have to accept it at some point, even if it seemed impossible. But for her, it was much harder to reach that point of acceptance.
At the best of times, she literally couldn’t believe her own eyes; her eyes had been lying to her for years. Maybe not to this extent; maybe this particular situation didn’t seem to have much in common with her ordinary hallucinations, but that only meant that her brain tumor theory was gaining a little momentum.
“Just a brain tumor,” she mumbled. “Probably…”
Myra raised an eyebrow. “Brain tumor?”
“Just considering possibilities,” said Simone.
“About what?”
“About everything.”
Chapter 2 - Before You Go
The rows of weak fluorescent lights that covered the ceiling of the underground laboratory did very little to combat the gloom of the place. The atmosphere was unnaturally oppressive, and Malcolm Thackery was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
He sat at the desk of the recently deceased Joseph Santini, staring at the man’s computer screen. It was a huge screen, almost as wide as the desk, so big that it actually made the computer a pain to use. He had to turn his head all the way from one side to the other just to read a line of text.
Not that it really mattered—from what he could tell, the machine didn’t have anything useful on it anyway.
It was becoming quite clear that Joe had been a strictly casual computer user. He had the Chrome web browser installed, several folders full of pornographic photos, some basic virus protection software, and a Star Wars screen saver. Other than that, everything Malcolm could find was the sort of junk that virtually every computer came installed with from the factory these days.
Of course there were a million deeper ways to investigate someone’s computer for information, and Malcolm had already begun to explore them, but so far these efforts had proven fruitless. Joe’s web browsing history appeared to be almost strictly porn related, with only occasional moments where he poked around occult websites, and none of these appeared to have any relation to this particular case at all. Joe’s email accounts were full of spam—almost nothing but spam. There were a handful of emails from some woman named Sharon Santini—maybe a sister. The emails were sketchy little communications of no significance—planning family gatherings and that sort of thing.
Joe was clearly one of those people who had never really bought into the whole concept of the information age.
Still, Malcolm thought. If I had more time, I could probably find some little scrap of evidence on there somewhere…
But he didn’t have more time. He’d already delayed leaving here as long as he dared. He needed to head for Virginia as soon as possible, to see if he could find the young woman who appeared to be the target of all this insanity.
Malcolm supposed he could load up the computer, and a few boxes of books into his van for later investigation. It was hard to say how things would go once he left here. He might end up with loads of time to sit around reading books and staring at a computer screen. It was doubtful, but anything was possible.
The only useful thing he had found in the whole laboratory so far was one of the boxes of books, which had been entirely filled with material related to the occult history of dragons.
Most interestingly, There’d been copies of “Dragons: The Untold Story of the First Extraterrestrial Invasion of Earth and The Men Who Stopped it,” and “The Serpents: A History of Dragons in Ancient Times,” both of which were published by Rising Leaf Books, a company owned by an arcane group based out of Canada called the Circle of the Knotted Fern.
The Circle were in the know, so-to-speak, and their books were only distributed among the various other groups who were in the know—groups like The Order of Merlin, for instance—which was to say, they weren’t available to the general public in any way shape or form, and most of the information in them was actually real, or at least much more accurate than anything you could find on the normal market.
Quite a bit of evidence seemed to be pointing towards the idea that this whole thing was tied to dragons. It was hard to credit in some ways. Dragons were a relic from a mostly forgotten era. They had been all but cut off from this plane of existence for a very long time.
Among all the strange, half-real beings that lived in The Gap Between Worlds, dragons were probably the most mythologized, but the popular cultural ideas about dragons were largely inaccurate.
Real dragons weren’t actually big lizards at all; like many of the most powerful Gap natives—the so-called Titans—they were totally alien creatures with no relation to any earth animal. Physically, they varied quite a bit: some were legless and greatly resembled snakes, while others had legs and could actually run pretty well. They were amphibious, totally lacking wings—despite myths to the contrary—and generally preferred to spend daylight hours in the water, coming out at night to hunt large game on land. The Loch Ness monster was, in reality, probably a dragon, but most scholars who knew anything about such matters agreed that the real Nessie had died centuries ago, and the creature people saw from time to time was probably some lingering trace of the original monster’s soul—a ghost dragon, essentially.
One of the few myths about dragons that wasn’t total bunk was the whole fire-breathing thing, and even that part wasn’t exactly right. Most dragons had the capacity to spit a special venom that could reportedly cause all sorts of strange effects, including, but not limited to, spontaneous combustion.
Dragons could also supposedly use the venom to knock victims out, paralyze them, bring them physical pain or pleasure, alter their moods, make them float, turn them into puppets with no control over their movements, and all sorts of other terrifying things. There were even crazy stories about dragon venom bringing inanimate objects to life—whole armies made of clay, marching on cities and outrageous stuff like that—just nonsense most likely, but it definitely made one wonder about the powers real dragons might actually wield.
Even with all the horrible things going on, the idea of finding some trace of an actual dragon in the modern world was terribly exciting to Malcolm from a scientific perspective, and it occurred to him that Joe had probably felt the same. The man had been a scholar at heart, after all.
It probably hadn’t taken much to get Joe to involve himself in this scheme, whatever it was. The smallest utterance of the word dragon would have been more than enough to make the man’s ears perk up.
No more perking up now though, Malcolm thought, and glanced over to Joe’s corpse, lying on the concrete about 20 feet away, covered in a sheet.
Joe’s blood had seeped through the white fabric in the area where his head was.
Malcolm looked away again.
Nasty business, this.
Would it get worse?
It seemed possible—even probable—that it might.
Malcolm stood up from the computer with its apparently worthless contents, and set about the task of gathering things to take with him.
It was time to get moving. He hoped he hadn’t already delayed too long.
- - -
Twenty-minutes later, Malcolm trudged over the pine cones that littered the forest floor, carrying Joe’s computer tower, huffing and puffing a bit.
This was his eighth—and hopefully final—trip hauling stuff up from the bunker to his van.
He’d debated taking
Joe’s enormous monitor with him too, and finally decided it was just too awkward to carry. If the situation arose where time would permit him a further chance to study Joe’s computer files, he would probably also have time to go buy a cheap monitor somewhere.
Arriving at the head of the trail, he stepped out of the woods and crossed the yard to his van; he’d left the side door open for easier loading, and the little warning bell inside was protesting insistently to remind him of the fact. He took a few moments to nestle the computer tower in between two boxes so it wouldn’t rattle too much during the drive, and he was just about to close the van door when he heard the sound of a car approaching from somewhere in the distance.
The sound immediately made his hackles rise. His muscles tensed, his heart raced, and it struck him immediately that this sudden wave of gut-wrenching fear was way out of proportion to what was actually happening, which made him wonder if he was perhaps in the process of having a psychic tingle.
Generally, he found it was best to assume the worst in these situations, and so he made haste.
He quickly slammed the side door shut, rushed around to the driver’s side, and climbed in. As he cranked the van, he saw them in his rear-view mirror, pulling into Joe’s driveway.
They were in a white SUV. The windows were tinted and he couldn’t see inside, but suddenly he knew quite a lot about the occupants anyway.
Yes… His intuition was definitely awake, and functioning at a peak level too… Random facts were streaming into his head so fast that he could hardly keep up with them.
He was now certain that the vehicle was packed full of men, that they were extremely well armed, that they had been sent to kill him, that one of them had an old-fashioned handlebar mustache (an especially useless bit of information there) and that they were listening to a song by Earth Wind and Fire as they approached.
Of course, my bloody psychic radar had to wait till it was too bloody late to do me any good before gifting me with all these wonderful insights…
A quick strategic assessment of his surroundings made it clear just how thoroughly screwed he was.
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 11