G-157 (15 page)

Chapter Seventeen

John’s Town

In the beginning…

On the day they thought they had become the masters of the human mind, Jenkins was sipping coffee and flipping through the paper on the terrace of Maggie’s. It was a Saturday morning, and the business district was alive and bustling as the people of John’s Town went about their lives and ran their weekend errands. There were women pulling children along with one hand and cradling grocery bags in the other. Teenagers strolled down the streets to meet up with friends for basketball games or to study for their upcoming fall midterms. Men carried bags full of nails and hardware and new garbage disposals to bring home and play handyman around their properties. An old couple sat on the bench near the City Hall lawn with binoculars pressed to their eyes, pointing at the birds they spotted through the pastel orange and red leaves clinging to the oak trees.

Jenkins smiled as he sipped his coffee and checked his watch; seven minutes after nine, and his town was a bucolic as ever.

“Mayor Jenkins?”

“Hmm?” Jenkins looked up to Maggie Sandoval as she stared down at him in her blue apron, ordering pad in hand. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I got lost in the beautiful morning. What did you say?”

Crows feet appeared on her lips as she smiled, and new fine lines decorated the delicate skin around her gentle eyes. She was a few years older than him, but the time didn’t matter. To Jenkins she was everything beautiful and soft and warm. Once their hands had brushed when he went to reach for the check as she handed it to him. Desire was forbidden, something to be bred out of their existence here, but her eyes had locked with his, and in that moment there was an unspoken understanding between them. She had not moved her hand away as he clasped his calloused fingers over hers, and in her silent stare he heard her whisper to come to her, to be with her in that one moment when the pinnacle of difference between
men and women forged them into a single entity. He’d never forgotten that brush of her hand.

“It is gorgeous out, isn’t it?” she said, her eyes peaceful and loving as she smiled at the scene. “I love autumn. I know it’s a bit morbid and cruel to say because everything is beginning to die, but everything looks so beautiful this time of year. Funny, isn’t it? How something can look so beautiful just before it dies?”

“I never thought about it that way,” Jenkins said.

“I try not to since it makes me sad to think that all the trees are going to be so ugly for the next few months until the snow melts again. I just hope it’s not going to be too cold this year. Last year was miserable.”

“I don’t think it will be too bad. It’s still pretty warm for this time of year.”

“I hope you’re right. Anyway,” she said as she clicked her pen and pressed it to the ordering pad. “Did you decide what you want for breakfast?”

“I think I’ll just have a couple poached eggs and some toast. Maybe add on some bacon, too.”

“You got it,” she smiled. “Should be ready in less than ten minutes.”

“Thank you, Maggie.”

She nodded, and his eyes followed her until she disappeared behind the swinging door into the diner.

Jenkins smiled and went back to his paper. The coffee tasted warm and delicious on his lips in the chilling air. He turned through another page, brushing through the upcoming building projects to expand the library and begin construction on new houses off Buffalo Trail for the slow growing population. A shout of a woman pulled his eyes away from the news and into the streets.

A woman in a red hat had taken a tumble into the street. Her two young children pulled at her coat, trying to help her stand. Jenkins smiled at the two small boys as they tugged at
her arms, trying to help her up. The smile dissipated when her hands flew to her face.

Jenkins stood up and craned his neck over the railing. The woman kept her hands over her eyes and slowly curled into the fetal position in the gutter.

“Momma, what’s wrong?” one of the boys asked as he leaned in close to his mother’s face.

“I can’t see!” she screamed. “I can’t see! I can’t see!”

Jenkins leapt over the railing and sprinted towards the woman.

She was rolling around in the gutter when he reached her, screaming that she couldn’t see. Her boys began to cry as her body started to shake.

“What is it?” Jenkins kneeled down and grabbed the woman’s hands. “What is it?”

“I can’t see!”

He ripped her hands away from her face. Her eyes were rolled so far back into her head he couldn’t see even the lower rim of her irises.

“What happened?”

“I can’t see!”

“Did you take any medications today?”

The woman’s head gave a jerky shake. “No. I just can’t see! I can’t-“

A gurgling of vomit burst through her lips, the beige fluid sending up a rancid stink. Her hands curled into fists as her body convulsed, twisting and crumpling in on itself. Great seizures racked her body, and even with all his strength he couldn’t still her.

“Did your mother do anything unusual today?” he asked as he struggled to pin the bucking woman and looked to the boys.

“What do you mean?” the older boy cried.

“I mean did she-“

Another scream ripped through the city.

And another.

And another.

He felt his gut sink as he looked at the writhing bodies littered across the business district. The world began to spin as he stood up and watched almost a hundred people spasm on the streets, gurgling up foam that spewed through their mouths as they clutched at their rolling eyes. Children began to scream and run from their parents as they dropped to the ground, screaming that they couldn’t see just before their bodies began to twist. Others stood helpless on their own and began to cry. Some of the older ones were crouched over their parents, shaking them and trying to straighten their convulsing bodies. In his ear he heard the voice screaming.

“Malfunction! Malfunction! Make the call, Jenkins!”

The screams of the city began to fade, the surreal scene slowly waning into a far away thing that was not in his realm. The sound of his breathing swelled in his ears.

“Make the call, Jenkins!”

He started on stiff legs back towards the diner, his heart beginning to pound. The sound of blood gushing through his temples drummed in his ears. Shaking hands reached out and tried to hold him steady as he climbed over the railing, but they weren’t strong enough, and he lost his balance and toppled to the ground.

“Make the call!”

Rubber legs propped him back up. He felt bile rise in his throat as his hands pushed open the swinging doors. Suddenly his skin felt hot, too hot, as though he were about to combust in the middle of the restaurant. The coldness of the steel door leading to the kitchen helped ease the burning, but they couldn’t ease the sick feeling in his gut as he smelled his breakfast burning on the stove.

She was in a crumple on the greasy floor, her hair matted with foamy vomit. Deep spasms tore at her body, sending her in back in forth motions across the floor where her head struck against the steel metal leg of the counter. He dropped to his knees and crawled towards her.

“Make the fucking call, Jenkins!”

Tears stung at his eyes as he cradled Maggie in his arms. Her pure white eyes were all that looked back to him as she trembled in his arms, the seizures threatening to crack her in two. Her tiny hand was clenched into a tight ball at her side. He took it into his, and kissed the soft skin that smelled of sugar and cinnamon.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

That was the second time the Army came in the daylight.

***

Jenkins wasn’t reprimanded for the mind sweep failure. How could they charge him with making the call to wipe out more than half the population when they hadn’t understood it themselves?

It took several years before they understood how simple their mistake had been. The voltage they’d used to wipe out the people’s memories had been just a fraction too high. The voltage they’d used was just a smidge too strong, and it caused the synapses in their brains to cease firing correctly; some were too rapid, some too slow, some operated not at all. If they could have just eased it a little more, they could have been successful, and in the future they were, once their mistakes had been made.

Chapter Eighteen

Wednesday April 7, 2010

Population: 396

She was crouched in the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light clawing its way through the trees. The
mucky stench of rotting pine filled her nostrils, mixing with the faint scent of water to create a grotesque, yet sweet smell in the air. The breeze nipped through her jacket, its icy teeth sending pinpricks across her skin. Her ears
began to adjust to the qui
e
t
of the woods, and soon she could hear the faint trickle of running water nearby and an owl hooting in the distance. She heard twigs being snapped and branches rustling close to her as someone trekked through the trees. She followed the sound, listening intently as it moved towards an orange glow filtering
between
the thick black tree trunks.

A low, rumbling hum emanated from the clearing. When she could make out the dancing tips of a fire’s flame, she got on her knees and crawled closer to its warmth. An old log was placed at a  serendipitous angle at just the right distance to hide her, yet allowed her to see the fire and the source of the hum in the clearing.

Her eyes grew wide when she recognized Gary. He stood staring into the flame, a dangle of drool hanging out of his open mouth as he gazed down at the fire, stupidly humming to himself a long, monotonous sound with no end or beginning. Her calves began to cramp as she watched him. The woods went silent.

Gary stopped humming, and continued to drool at the fire, so quiet and so still, like the statue of David, until a violent tremor shook him. Every muscle in his body began to shake so vehemently it forced out a strange clicking sound from deep within his throat, as though his organs were being squeezed out of him one notch at a time. Then as quickly as it had come, the tremor left him. He
took a slow look
to his left, then to his right, and reached into his pocket.

His arm rose until it reached the back of his head. She squinted hard to see what his hand was doing, barely able to make out his fingers
rubbing at his skin just below the scalp line
. A quiet click boomed in her ears as the blade of the pocket knife opened. A quick glint of steel flashed in the firelight, and he began to cut.

Her hands flew to her mouth as she watched him dig and saw into his own skull until he ripped off the back of his scalp and held it over the fire. Vomit lurched in her gut at sound of his blood singeing in the flames as it dripped and burned away in the ashes. His head rolled to the side, his absent eyes unnerving as he pointed the blade of the pocket knife towards her.

“You,” a voice shouted from behind her. She screamed when she saw Troy charging out of the darkness towards her.

“You promised you wanted only me,” Troy screamed.

“Troy what are you talking about?”

“You promised!” Troy gained momentum as he pulled a bat from behind him and raised it behind his shoulder.

“Troy please,” she cried.

“You promised me,
Aire!
” With all his strength he swung the bat towards her head, sending chips of bark flying from the log she had hid
den
behind as the bat came smashing down. Aire screamed as she ducked and began to run towards the sound of the water.

Branches and shrubs scratched at her limbs in her blind bolt through the darkness. Fallen logs and abandoned tree stumps tried to trip her as Troy raced behind her. Tears filled her burning
eyes as she barreled into the night
. She stretched her arms in front of her, but they did not react in time to stop her from colliding with a wall of blackness. She bounced backwards into the water and heard her wrist pop as she caught herself on a boulder. Her frosty breath cast an eerie fog around the darkness that had stopped her.

The African’s outline
was barely discernible in
the pale
silver
moonlight. His skin was so dark she could only see the whites of his eyes as he stared down at her, the rest of him blending into the night sky behind him. Tears and breath clouding her vision, she
had to squint her eyes to see
his fist slowly stretching towards her. From his unclasping fingers, a radiant white light appeared from the palm of his hand. She
held her breath as the metallic rice grain
began
to float above his palm.

“Beware the blue lion,” his rumbling voice whispered, and the rice grain faded into wisps of silver smoke, taking its light with it as it disappeared into the shadows of the night.

The awe of the moment faded when she heard Troy approaching. He was encroaching faster this time. She jumped up to flee across the stream away from the African, his brilliant eyes following her across the rocks. His guttural warning followed her into the darkness, whispering to her from every inch of the woods.

Beware the blue lion.

Her shirt torn, her foot bloody from the loss of a shoe somewhere along her flight, Aire kept running her losing race. Troy’s footsteps thudded ever louder behind her, that awful wail
he was making penetrating
her skull, strangling her brain. Panic rose evermore as the adrenaline pulsed through her veins.

Beware the blue lion
,
the voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

It was no use. She knew he was going to catch her, but she couldn’t give up, she had to keep running, had to make sense of it all. But it was too late. Troy had grabbed her from the darkness.

Aire let out a piercing scream and thrashed sideways so violently she jerked herself off the bed. Mitch leaned over from atop the mattress to look at her, his eyes wide.

“Aire are you okay?”

“What?” she panted, looking around her alien surroundings, soon realizing she was safe in her bedroom. “Yeah, yeah I’m okay.”

Her parents arrived at her door and pushed the switch on the wall, the light from the lamp on the nightstand blinding her. Her father didn’t have his glasses on yet, and only three rollers had been removed from her mother’s hair.

“Aire, dear,” her mother cooed from the doorway. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. It was just a bad dream is all.”

“Well, dreams aren’t real,” her father said brightly. “Hurry down, Aire Safari, we’re making your favorite pecan and banana muffins.”

Aire nodded. Her parents stood staring at her, waiting for her reassurance. She conjured up a weak smile. “Cool.”

They both smiled and left her room. She flopped back on the floor and let out a sigh. When she looked up, two cool blue eyes were peering down at her.

“Were you in Africa?”

“Don’t say Africa,” she said as she rubbed her eyes, “or Aire Safari.”

“So you
were
in Africa.” Mitch leaned further over the bed.

“What makes you think that?”

Mitch shrugged. “You kept saying something that sounded like African.”

“No more talk of anything to do with Africa,” she pointed at him.

“Did you really see a blue lion? That would be so awesome!”

“Mitch, I said hush it up. No more talking.”

He sat staring at her, his eyes wide and unblinking. She’d taught him the staring contest as a baby, though neither of them had ever spoken to each other or anyone else of it. He started to grin at her, but then contorted his face so that it all scrunched up to one side and his eyeballs bulged from below two high arching brows.

“But you hate pecans,” he said in a gurgled, nasally voice.

Aire couldn’t help but laugh. He reached down and pulled a single strand of hair from her head.

“Victorious!” he shouted as he leapt off the bed and scrambled out of her room. She stretched and rubbed out the tingle of her head from the strand of dark hair that had been
snatched
. Over the years she had collected a small ponytail of
Mitch’s hair from her winnings that she’d stashed in her night stand.
A story for the grandkids
, she thought.
Might as well let him enjoy one of his few victories
.

Instead of going downstairs, she let herself lay down a few minutes more to reflect upon her dream. Gary she could make sense of. Finding out he was exhibiting bizarre behaviors would stress anyone out enough to have a nightmare. She’d been dreaming of the African with the rice grain nearly every night since
The Moto, though before he was always a vague, floating figure. She’d seen his lips moving before, but could never make out what he’d said, as though he were far away under water
.

The blue lion warning, however, did not make sense, yet even that she could understand as a normal dream oddity. It was Troy that
really bothered her
. Why would she dream something so terrible about him? They’d had the most wonderful time together over the last few days, so why the terror now?

Sunday had been beautiful. He’d taken her to The Restaurant for the rare treat of a lamb dinner. Afterwards they took a walk around the
pond at Duck Park and shared their first kiss
. Not a peck on the forehead kiss. It had been a
real
kiss, one in which she’d raised a heel behind her and her lips had gone
numb from interlacing with his in
a wonderfully warm moment of pure bliss. If she closed her eyes she could still see his green eyes coming towards her, could still feel the softness of his tongue.

The beautiful vision was replaced by the anger in his face, the way he’d curled his lip and swung that bat at her made shivers bolt through her muscles. She had to get up and do something to distract herself. This morning she would not be permitted the small luxury of a romantic memory.  The nightmare had been too great.

***

During history class she couldn’t help but stare at Gary. From the corner of her eye she searched for signs that he was crazy, searched for any madness like she’d seen in her dream. Halfway through the hour, the truth revealed itself.

He’d been listening
with intense concentration
, vigorously writing down what
mrs. Finch
had been saying on the extinct tribes of Easter Island when it happened. His hand had suddenly stopped moving and his eyes held the blankness she had seen in her dream. He turned his head, a contorted sneer forming across his mouth. He froze in that unnatural position for
almost
a full minute before his body convulsed in a quick jerk, and he returned to his copious note taking, as though nothing at all had happened.

She turned her head away to gaze down at her own paper where the sweat from her palms had smeared the ink in her notebook. What could it mean? She’d found nothing in her hours of research in the library about the little rice grain or strange behaviors related to concussions. Absolutely nothing in the countless books of biochemistry, neurology, and strange medical ailments explained the events. There was no one in John’s Town who could help her, nothing she could do on her own. She couldn’t even confide in Doc on this one. There was something within her that warned not to show anyone the
thing
she’d picked from Troy’s helmet.
Beware,
a dark, sickly feeling
in her gut whispered
,
dangerous to show anyone.
She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to ease the headache beginning to build behind her eyes.