Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (15 page)

Dade wrinkled up his face in distaste. “Just remember what I told you,” he said to her.

“Oh I will keep my eye out for what was it you called it? SexKinkySex?” The Nurse’s manner went from flirtatious to threatening. “Of course you can intimidate us now,” she said. “But things are changing. Something’s brewing.”

Dade started for the door with Ann Marie right behind him. Just as he walked out, he told them all, “Don’t break the rules.”

Outside the strip club, Ann Marie noticed a growing line of men waiting to get inside. She pleaded with Dade to try to help them. “You can’t just let them walk in to be brainwashed,” she said. “You have to do something. Somebody has to help these poor men.”

Dade stopped near the entrance and considered it. “Fine,” he said with what she could only interpret as sarcasm. He raised his voice and addressed the growing group of men outside the club, saying, “Gentlemen, may I have your attention. My associate tells me that I should try to stop you men from making a terrible mistake. I’m supposed to warn you that this isn’t a regular strip club, that it’s run by an evil coven of supernatural runaways who will make you forget your own name and won’t stop until your wallet it totally empty.”

The men seemed even more excited when they heard Dade’s description. A few started whistling. One shouted, “Hell Yeah! Everyone is raving about this place!” The drunkest of the group started improvising his own song, something like, “E-E-Evil stripper. E-E-Evil stripper!” They all seemed even more insistent to get inside.

“See,” Dade said to Ann Marie. “I tried my best.”

...

Near midnight that night, across the city, more than one hundred children, teenagers and young adults waited in line. They were all clutching mysterious red flyers that had been pinned up all over the projects and bad neighborhoods. “
Take Back YOUR Country from the VAMPIRES! Your blood-sucking parents have FORSAKEN you!
” was written out in big, block letters with no names or phone numbers. The flyer offered only a date, time and vague location: “
Meet Midnight Saturday, Asylum Corporation Scrapyard
.”

Most of the young people didn’t know each other. They hung out along the barbed-wire fence, holding their flyers and searching for familiar faces in the rather destitute-looking crowd. Each had come for somewhat different reasons but a vein of desperation connected everyone. No one seemed to know who had created the flyer, what exactly it meant, or what was about to happen when the time reached midnight.

One young man, with dirt on his face and a backpack full of plastic soda bottles he was keeping to cash in for emergencies, asked a young woman standing next to him, “Do you know what this is about? Is this the beginning of the revolution?”

The young woman, who was perhaps twenty and looked like she had run away from a good home, kept her eyes pointed toward the inside of the scrapyard. She answered, “I’m just hoping there is some food in there.” She noticed something strange, a group of perhaps ten people approaching in full-length, black hooded robes. As the coven arrived at the scrapyard, the scores of people waiting with the flyers did their best to stay out of the way. Most avoided eye contact with the hooded group.

“Who are they?” the young man asked the woman, whose brunette hair had almost completely transformed into dreadlocks. “What the hell are they wearing?”

“They’re bad news,” the woman said. “I’m out of here.” She crumpled up the red flyer, dropped it on the ground and disappeared down the train tracks.

From a distance, it looked as though the coven was being led by some sort of dwarf. However, when he let down his hood, everyone saw a small child with a bald head completely covered in tattoos.

The child leader stopped the group in front of the scrapyard entrance. He turned to face the crowd of runaways. The cyclone of colors that made up the tattoos on his head got a few people in the crowd to gasp out loud. One of the poor young boys holding a flyer got a look at the tattooed boy’s face and let out a falsetto shriek. He then took off on foot into the night.

The boy took a cold look around the crowd, at the collection of bright eyes, young faces and malnourished cheekbones. Someone yelled out to him, “Are you the one that called us here?”

The boy slowly shifted his head from left to right but didn’t speak. One of the coven women in his coterie came forward and pulled her hood down. She was perhaps twenty, fair-haired and looked like she could have been president of her high school. “This isn’t us,” she said, taking her place next to the tattooed boy. “We haven’t called anyone. We’re here with all of you.”

With the hum of an electric motor, the chain link gate to the Asylum Corporation scrapyard opened to reveal a path inside. The disheveled crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings started inside first. They were mostly excited, hurrying past one another on their way into the scrapyard. Only a few expressed any apprehension. The tattooed boy and his hooded apostles followed the crowd inside.

Old F-22 fighter planes with forty millimeter bullet holes and shredded Apache helicopters lined the path inside the scrapyard. Hundreds of discarded replacement parts, including rotor blades and airplane cockpits, formed neat stacks marked with letters and numbers.

Everyone started to hear music.

The sound of a violin was clear in the night air. Everyone followed the sound. As they got closer to the source of the music, they could see the faint orange glow from a fire. Then, everyone saw the outline of an old man with a fedora hat in front of the bonfire. Bernard Mengel played the old melody while the curious group of young people filed around him.

The old man let everyone get close without seeming to notice. He kept playing his violin with fury at what seemed like supernatural volume. When he finally stopped, perhaps forty young people were circled around him.

The boy with the tattoos lowered his hood and stood before Bernard Mengel with a look meant to threaten. With the tattoos on his face twisting and distorting, the boy glared at Bernard Mengel like a boxer before a fight.

The old man smiled and chuckled at the boy’s display. Bernard put his violin down at his side and lowered his fedora hat to his chest. He looked right at the boy and yelled out to the crowd. “It’s a face only a mother could love!” he shouted.

One of the girls in hoods, the albino nurse with rosy cheeks and dyed black hair, took her place next to the boy. “What’s this about?” She asked Bernard. “This is our territory. We call the meetings.”

“I’m afraid that information is outdated,” Bernard said, taking a set of aggressive steps toward the hoods. In an odd, completely inopportune way, the old man started to laugh hysterically at them. Speaking to the tattooed boy, he said, “I understand you’re the leader of this little sewing circle. Not very impressive,” he added as he looked over the hooded coven. “Not very impressive at all.”

Someone in the crowd yelled, “Who does this old man think he is!”

Another shouted, “This old fucker has a lot of nerve coming down here with those expensive shoes!”

“Name’s Doctor Mengel!” he shouted to the group. “Everyone can call me Bernard.”

Someone else in the crowd shouted, “Let’s fuck Bernard’s ass up!” A disjointed chorus of, “Let’s fuck him up!” started.

Bernard smiled warmly as though tickled by the idea of being swarmed by the group of homeless young people. He shouted to them, “You would all be within your rights to beat the life out of me!” He looked around and could tell that he had some of their attention. “After all, I am part of the wrinkled generation that has taken everything from you and left you with a shell of a society. I am one of the people looking down on you from the window of a foreign car while you pick through the trash. I am one of those who will live beyond my years as I suck you into an early grave.”

Every set of eyes in the junkyard was on Bernard Mengel, especially those of the silent tattooed boy.

Bernard went on, saying, “You have every right to want justice.” One of several women in the outskirts of the crowd seemed to capture his attention out of nowhere. With big, brown eyes shining through the dirt on her face, she was layered in half a dozen tattered sweatshirts and looked to have been on the street for some time. With his eyes fixed on her, Bernard pushed his way through the crowd until he was standing right in front of her. The girl seemed afraid but somewhat curious. He looked at her as though he had just downloaded her entire life story into his brain. He even nodded softly to himself like he could feel the signal coming through. “I’m particularly sorry for what’s happened to you,” he said to her. Then he placed his hand on the tattered fabric covering her womb. “It’s a travesty what they’ve done to you.”

The girl, along with everyone else, was listening carefully. She asked him, “How did you know?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bernard answered, before addressing the crowd again. “What does matter is that this young woman’s baby was stolen! Stolen by whom? Stolen by a corrupt society, stolen by a generation that abandoned its own children. Stolen by a group that told this woman, because she is poor, she had no right to be a mother. Can you imagine? These rich enemies of nature have robbed you of the most important feature of life. They take everything from you, then claim you are an unfit mother. Then the bastards take your very child right out of your womb. My dear, my children, that to me, means war!”

He pointed to another woman in the crowd, telling her, “You lost yours because you couldn’t find enough food to keep your baby alive inside of you. We all know there is plenty of food to go around.” Bernard then shouted louder than he should have been able to. “The reason is you’re not good enough to eat and your baby isn’t good enough to even take her first breath! That’s what these savages believe. In their hearts!”

Then he started to walk through the crowd, looking at each of the young homeless like a sergeant inspecting a new platoon. “I don’t need to tell anyone here what’s going on in this world. You all know that this abomination cannot stand. This world, this disgrace, is not fit to continue.”

“Oh shut up, old man,” argued back one of the hooded girls, the albino nurse with jet black hair. “You’re just some old fucker and I can’t seem to figure out what you’re doing here.”

The tattooed boy took a big, threatening step toward Bernard and lifted part of his right lip like a snarling dog. The tattoos on his drew a frightening set of sharp, pointy teeth. He didn’t talk but his face told Bernard and everyone else that an attack was imminent. The old man just smiled back as though he had just seen a precocious act from a toddler.

At that point, the girls in hoods started to assemble around Bernard like a pack of wolves. One of them started to chant something in an odd language. “
Bromo vitro delo mogato
,” said the group, as their voices seemed to suddenly come together in an odd chorus. “The Kingdom is rising,” they all said together. “The Kingdom is rising! The Kingdom is rising!” The albino girl shouted to Bernard, “You’re gonna see something now, old man.”

The teenagers who had just come for potential food started running for the gate. The bonfire started to undulate in a sort of heartbeat, like it was being repeatedly stoked by an invisible force.

The hooded girls joined hands, forming a tight circle around Bernard and the tattooed boy. They all continued to chant something that didn’t sound like a language. It was more like they were speaking in tongues. Every so often in the chant, they would break from the gibberish and shout together, “The Kingdom is rising!”

The tattooed boy bent forward and fell on his hands and knees. One of the hooded girls took a box cutter and cut a slit in the back of the boy’s robe. The skin on the boy’s back teemed with moving, swirling lines. Every square centimeter contained some manner of rough tattoo. The chanting started to increase in volume.

Suddenly, it looked as though the boy’s tattoos had turned into tiny insects. They started scurrying around on his skin. The tattoos seemed to be morphing into images. On the little boy’s back, it looked like shooting stars in ballistic trajectory. Then it turned to what looked like folding of some kind of disgusting origami, terrible images combining into each other. Symbols from human history, from threatening-looking hieroglyphics, to hanging stick-figure bodies, to pentagrams, to images of teeth and blinking eyes.

Afraid as they were, some of the runaways were transfixed by the sight and ignored the urge to flee. Bernard Mengel was only slightly entertained by the strange display. He watched it like an unexceptional street performance. The look on his face suggested he was close to yawning.

The coven stopped chanting with one of them telling him, “We’re gonna find out what we’re supposed to do with you. The symbols are going to tell us.”

“Oh please, do let me know,” answered Bernard, with a half-smile that was almost mocking. “This is an interesting trick,” he said. “It’s only the forty-eighth time I’ve seen something so impressive. The first time was in Mozambique. A five year old autistic girl figured it out. Come to think of it,” he said, “that little girl was probably a lot more powerful than this entire group.”

“Shut up, you old bastard!” said the albino in the hood while the rest of the group continued to chant. Tattoos danced around everywhere on the boy’s skin.

Bernard said to the coven, “I take it the walking sketchpad is your leader.”

“We don’t have a leader!” the albino girl snapped at him.

Then the tattooed boy got up and took a step toward Bernard. He had the upper right corner of his mouth flicking up and down like a wolf baring teeth. Black had swallowed up the boy’s entire set of eye sockets.

“That’s your problem,” said Bernard. He looked the small child right in the blackness of his eyes. “Leadership. All this potential and all you’ve done is figure out something no more impressive than a parlor trick.” For a moment, his words became softer as though he was speaking only to the tattooed boy. “You’re more of a child than they are,” he said as though trying to sound comforting.