Grim kept low, crawling along the snake’s body, its scales catching on his clothing, wondering if he could somehow get under it.
“I can crawl up its ass.”
Grim winced, knowing what he had to do, casting a quick glance at the red dragon, only a few ground-shaking steps away from the snake’s midsection.
Avoiding the snake’s wide-open, dead, beady eyes, Grim crawled past its snout and then stuck a toe in its lips.
Steeling himself, Grim began to back up, working his feet into the gaping mouth.
He continued to wiggle his way inside, like a tight, wet pair of jeans. At chest-level, the smell hit him—rotting meat and reptile breath—and Grim pressed a palm to his mouth to stifle the gagging sounds.
Then the snake began to move.
FABLER ○ 2:29+pm
The image projected in front of Fabler looked like a blend of magic mushroom hallucination and high-definition 3D movie. So realistic and so close he reached out to touch it, only to have his hand pass through.
A baby. Curled up in the womb. So detailed he could see its eyelashes.
“That can’t be real.”
“Were you and Lori trying to have a child?”
Fabler nodded at Jake without taking his eyes off the wonder floating before him. “But the last time we were together was three years ago.”
“Three years for you. If we really went through a wormhole, it could only be a few months for your wife for various reasons. Would you like me to go into detail why?”
“No.”
“This new information drastically increases the odds that Holly is still alive. I didn’t really believe I’d see her again. I couldn’t even work out how to test the hypothesis.”
“I see a penis.” Jake clapped him on the shoulder. “If I’m not hallucinating all of this, then congratulations. It’s a boy.”
“YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS, MR. FABLER.”
“Is surrendering still the plan? Or do we listen to Lori and attempt to kill them all? I can go either way.”
“What should we do, Jake?”
“I’d posit that besting a technology so advanced is unlikely, but we’ve been doing well so far, and the greys seem to be having some difficulties, as evidenced by the exotic lifeforms running around. But the risk of death is higher if we fight. Though perhaps that applies to you rather than me, because I’m a blue-eyed redhead.”
“FIVE…”
“FOUR…”
“THREE…”
“I love you, Fabler! Don’t give up!”
“TWO…”
“ONE…”
Fabler made his decision.
PRESLEY ○ 2:29+pm
Unable to take a breath, her vision dotted with pain motes that grew from tiny flickers to movie spotlights, Presley thrashed and squirmed, trying to free herself from the anglerfish’s jaws, clamped onto her back like a beartrap.
Genuine panic—not the self-inflicted kind—gripped Presley and overpowered all rationality. She writhed like a bug on a pin, her diaphragm spasming, coughing blood and spraying the floor red.
Then training or reflexes or dumb luck intervened, and Presley stabbed upwards with the icicle tooth, feeling it sink in deep, suction pulling it from her grasp.
The pain and pressure let up.
Suddenly released, Presley crawled a few feet forward, turning onto her side, ready to kick out with her good foot to prevent another bite.
But the anglerfish didn’t attack. Its own tooth stuck out of its good eye, and it shook its body, trying to work it out.
Presley dragged herself to the nearby wall, tried to get up.
Couldn’t.
Her injuries went beyond broken ribs.
Presley tried to take a deep breath—
—and couldn’t, causing a hacking fit that threatened to knock her out with pain.
The anglerfish stopped shaking and stood still.
She managed to crawl a meter away, blood bubbling through her pursed lips, and felt a cough building up.
Presley coughed.
The fish monster took a step toward her.
GRIM ○ 2:31+pm
Grim, fighting to get out from between the snake’s unhinged jaws, watched the jungle floor stretch away from him until he hung, face down, twenty feet in the air.
He stretched out his hands, each grabbing a fang, holding himself in place like a gymnast doing a handstand on the parallel bars so he didn’t slip out and faceplant to his death below.
Grim realized what he’d gotten caught up in, the sudden shock scaring him even more than the height.
LORI ○ 2:31+pm
She watched as her husband got down on his knees.
“Fabler! Fight them, Fabler! You have to fight!”
Some guards headed toward Fabler and the other man, while another guard wheeled her away, turning her gurney and pushing her into the dark hole.
Lori tried to turn her head, tried to see what happened to Fabler.
But Lori entered the blackness hearing nothing at all.
FABLER ○ 2:31+pm
On his knees, hands in the air and right leg crossed over his left leg, Fabler watched the greys take his wife and son away.
More greys approached, weapons drawn.
“Are you sure this was the right move, Fabler?”
“No,
Jake. I’m not sure at all.”
“So what happens next?”
“I guess we wait and see.”
AUTHOR NOTE 5
I’ve often wondered why reading fiction can be so immersive.
Good stories make the reader suspend disbelief, blurring the lines between how a mind/body reacts to real-life stimulus vs. a carefully-ordered group of words.
If a story is working as designed, you empathize with the characters. You feel their joy, and their pain. You laugh, cry, worry, smile, cringe, get aroused, become frightened, by literally experiencing what is on the page, in the literary literal sense.
Story is more than a collection of words. Story is a form of consciousness. It is an entire world you have created in your head.
The writer offers you the rope. But you are the one who hangs yourself.
When story works well, it is so real that it becomes a vicarious workout of your limbic system. The emotions you feel are indistinguishable from real emotions, but without real-world connections or consequences.
Interrupting this story is no doubt irritating, especially when all of the main characters seem to be at their lowest points.
But if you stuck with this book thus far, you’ve already shown how imaginative and open-minded you are. So you’ll likely tough it through yet another Author Note.
Take pride that some of your peers stopped reading much earlier. They had certain expectations for this story, and felt disappointed when things got crazy. They thought this was a murder whodunnit.
Now there be dragons.
I imagine it’s like going into a restaurant, ordering pasta fagioli, and halfway through the bowl—in mid-bite—the food transforms into butter pecan ice cream.
For some people, yucky. They’d demand refunds, complain to management, think they are doing the world a service by going on Yelp and leaving a bad review.
They are misguided. Being negative isn’t helpful or useful. It’s masturbation without orgasm.
But people have a surfeit of opinions and a distinct lack of empathy.
It’s fascinating. The disconnect is huge.
People hate the cop when he pulls them over for speeding, but love the cop when their house is being robbed and they need help.
People criticize a movie when they have never created anything in their lives and have no concept of the effort it takes.
People boo the sports figures that don’t win, while their own fat asses couldn’t ever have made the team.
People publicly shame those who made a mistake, as if they themselves have never made one.
Society is a codependent group of narcissistic hypocrites without mirrors.
Here are some better guidelines.
You can leave a server a bad tip only when you’ve worked in a restaurant and know what it’s like.
You can protest abortion only when you’ve adopted ten children.
You can send your children to war only when you’ve fought in a war.
You can call out shortcomings when you recognize your own.
Change isn’t easy to accept. This is one reason why most people refuse to change. Many
The solution to anger isn’t abandonment or attack. It’s forgiveness.
The antidote for destruction is creation.
We’re all consumers. We take and we use. We live off the efforts of others.
Do you grow your own food? Make your own shoes?
Maybe you built the house you live in with your own two hands, but where did you get everything you used to build that house? Did you cut the wood and forge the nails? Did you make the tools to cut the wood and forge the nails? Did you make the tools to make the tools?
Did you make the tools to make the tools to make the tools?
Did you make yourself?
Everything came from somewhere.
We depend on others. Not only for our existence, but for our entertainment. Other people have done so much for us, we are blessed with leisure time.
Some spend their leisure time reading.
Thank you for that.
I know this story has gone to unexpected places. It was intentional, deliberate, and later I’ll justify my reasons.
But you’ve stuck with it so far. Maybe you’ve considered quitting. Maybe you’ve complained to others. Maybe you’ve had some weird dreams about everything that has happened so far.
If you are reading this, you are still interested in getting the questions answered.
Through all the turns and twists, you still want to know what happened to Lori. Maybe even at the surrender of your own enjoyment.
Or maybe you like butter pecan more than pasta fagioli.
Whatever the case, here you are.
You must have some hope that I understand how narrative structure works.
The payoff might be worth it.
The third act is coming fast.
Let the driver drive.
Enjoy the ride.
Or quit.
It’s your story.
Do whatever pleases you.
After all, you really believe it’s your life. You think you have a choice.
We all have to amuse ourselves however we can, to distract us from the truth.
JAKE ○ August 27, 1994 ○ 2:32pm ○ 777997944
Jake stood at the head of the classroom and stared at the blackboard, covered with chalk-drawn numbers and symbols.
His teacher squinted at the boy. “What do you see, Jake?”
“An equation.”
The class laughed.
“Do you see the answer to the equation, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“Write the answer down, Jake. Then you can return to your seat.”
Jake didn’t move.
“Do you really see the answer, Jake?”
“I see more than the answer.”
The teacher raised an eyebrow. “What is it you see?”
“I see the story.” Jake smiled. “And it’s beautiful.”
JAKE ○ August 27, 2017 ○ 2:32+pm ○ 7447435313997944
The light stretched into darkness, time crunched into infinity, Jake’s consciousness spaghettified and snapped back.
Jake knew he lacked the brain elasticity to see the math, but coming out the other end of the wormhole, he saw rigid math everywhere.
The elegant curves and fractals of the melty plastic walls.
The predictable meter of the visual spectrum, light as music.
The matrix of his gurney bindings, seemingly random but predictably uniform in its unconventional lattice. So simply complex. Drawing the eye back and forth the crisscross non-patterns, so engrossing that Jake didn’t even care that the gurney floated, or that they’d been captured, or that the Schwarzschild radius hadn’t torn apart his atoms and spit out the info as Hawking radiation.
Jake had a vague awareness of being stripped to his underwear, of Fabler resisting and being met with disproportional force, of a black yet sparking collar being placed around his neck, of being taken through more blobular hallways and coming to a room with monitors that seemed made of liquid and equipment that seemed scientific in purpose and a grey wearing a silver robe with a face straight out of science fiction.
“I am the Watcher. The supplication collars you wear are hooked to your neural pathways, and can also be triggered by pheromone secretions.”
He pulled up a sleeve and rubbed a rippled spot on his wrist, and the pain snapped Jake right out of his infatuation with the gurney straps.
The agony lasted on a few seconds, but Jake decided he’d do whatever he could to avoid a repeat performance.
“If you try to touch your collars, they will activate. If you even think about trying to touch them, they will activate. If you try to touch the collar of another volunteer, both will activate.”
“Where’s Lori?”
“Do not speak out of turn, Mr. Fabler. I will take pleasure in switching on your collar and keeping it on until you go insane with agony.”
“And I’ll take great pleasure in killing you, Watcher.”
“Not only is that threat feeble, considering your current position, but it is unimaginative and unspecific.”
“I’ll make it more specific. I’m gonna kidney punch you so hard you bleed to death out of your tiny dick.”
“Ha! He knows your dick is tiny.”
Jake looked around for who spoke. An oddly sensual voice, neither male nor female, with a strangely synthetic tone to it. But Jake didn’t see anyone else in the lab.
“Where’s my wife?”
“Last warning, Mr. Fabler. Control your outbursts or I will seal your mouth closed.”
“I’m gonna seal your ass closed by shoving your head up there. You’re gonna choke to death on your own shit, Watcher.”
The Watcher raised up something—some sort of tool with a vial of liquid attached to the side—then rubbed his wrist and pointed the tool at Fabler’s face—
What Happened To Lori - The Complete Epic (The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective Book 9) Page 56