Beginnings

by J. S. Frankel

  Paul had taken those words to mean no one would beat on him or call him names or make fun of him because he was a nerd and didn’t fit in with others. Being equal had had to be considered a good thing. That had been all he’d really wanted.

  “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders,” one of his teachers had said after class one day. “Once you get out of here, you’ll have a bright future.”

  Oh yes, this had indeed been a compliment. Paul had loved reading, had loved to learn and he’d figured if he couldn’t compete with the other kids on the sports field, at the very least he could outdo them in the classroom. They’d respect him for being smart…or so he’d thought at the time.

  A reality check had come about two weeks later. “Nerd,” one of the kids had said before smacking him in the face. Paul had fallen to the ground, blood dripping from his nose. “You’re just a loser who wants to make us look bad.”

  Talk about a mismatch. This kid had been older and bigger by five inches and fifty pounds. He’d also happened to be one of the more popular kids around and had had a lot of friends. Paul hadn’t. In a dog-eat-dog environment such as this, a kid without friends hadn’t been able to be very happy. What had made it worse, though, had been morons like this kid who couldn’t even pass lunch hadn’t liked anyone upstaging them.

  In a fit of anger, Paul had gotten to his feet. Rage had outweighed reason, and even though he had been no match for his opponent, he’d lashed out and caught the punk with a sharp, snapping left. It’d rocked the other kid back on his heels. “I don’t have to make you look bad,” he’d said. “You got this all on your own.”

  It hadn’t been a typical answer. Shy by nature, he’d tended to back off and take the passive approach. Still, there had been times when only a fist would do and this had been one of them.

  The kid had come forward to finish the job, but Max had hustled over to break up the more-than-likely massacre. “That’s enough,” he’d shouted while holding back the bigger boy. Jerking his head at the door, he’d added, “Paul, go to the library. We’ll talk later on.”

  With a nod and a faint smile of surprise as well as gratification for hitting back, Paul had left. His nose had hurt, his body as well, but he’d felt a sense of pride. He’d hit back for a change and taken satisfaction in having gotten in one shot. It hadn’t helped much, as the same night the other kids had entered his room and ganged up on him just after lights out…

  In an abrupt flash of neurons, the sense of total recall happened and things shifted to his most recent alleyway adventures—the taste of blood in his mouth, the agony of every muscle and nerve ending on fire, the imminence of death… It all came through and forced him to wake up. He did so, heart thudding. A shadow seemed to cross the room then his eyes swam into focus. “Where am…?” he started…and fell silent.

  Swiveling his head around, he peered through the darkness. This wasn’t a hospital room. Hospital rooms were white. They were sterile and impersonal and cold. This place had wooden walls, a dresser and a full-length mirror in the far corner near the window, and he lay in a comfortable bed. “Wow,” he said in wonder, “I’m alive.”

  Continuing his inventory, he saw a small wooden night table next to the bed. An electronic clock on it showed the hour of six in the morning. He wore the same dirty clothes minus his pants. Neatly folded, they sat at the foot of the bed. Looking down at his body, there were fresh bandages on his injured leg.

  A sudden stabbing pain in his ribs made him exhale a sharp breath. Lifting up his hoodie, in the dim light he made out large bruises on his torso. It was amazing he hadn’t suffered any severe injuries. He reached down to touch the bandage on his leg. Someone had fixed him up, but who could have done it?

  Her— It was the girl. It had to be. In a flash, he recalled the events of the night before. Death had come to him along with a savior. The girl… She was some kind of vampire… Angela. She said her name was Angela, and from the way she’d destroyed the Bangers, she seemed more like an avenging angel than one of mercy. He couldn’t decide which.

  On the surface it didn’t seem possible, yet at the same time he wasn’t lying in some alleyway bleeding to death. He was alive…but where?

  Getting out of bed, Paul tested his legs, found they worked and moved stiffly over to the window. Peering out, a large backyard with a single tree in the center of it greeted him. A garage sat just outside the fence. He had to be in a house.

  “Duh, thanks, Captain Obvious,” he muttered.

  After grabbing his pants and drawing them on, especially carefully over the bandage on his right leg, he went to the door and eased it open. He poked his head outside and swiveled his neck left then right. The hallway was dark, but he made out two other doors directly across the way. Another door was next to his.

  “Hello?” he called softly.

  No answer, so he crept outside and went to the first door across the hall. Gently turning the knob, the door opened and he saw a room much like his, with the exception of there being no furniture. Outside of two wooden tables roughly twelve feet by six in the center of the room with four large buckets positioned at each corner, the only other thing he saw was a transparent bag with a valve attached. It lay at the base of one of the tables.

  However, Paul’s attention wasn’t on the bag. He stared at the bluish liquid jumping from one bucket to the next. He also stared in wonder at the second table. Sand was leaping from each bucket in a series of McDonald’s-type arches. Not a grain spilled. It was like watching something…alive.

  “This can’t be happening,” he whispered.

  Both elements kept jumping back and forth, but now took on other shapes. The water went first and the sand imitated it. First there was an airplane, next a bird and finally, a dolphin. At times he thought he saw a pair of eyes staring back at him from the water, but denial was not just a river in Egypt, as the joke went.

  “Oh man, this…isn’t real,” Paul murmured. “It can’t be.”

  Slowly, he backed out. Trying the next room, he found the door was also unlocked and it was dark inside, but he thought he saw a refrigerator in the corner. There was no other furniture, save a bed, and on it sat a figure that seemed to fill the room with his presence. He took up most of the space on the bed, and his shoulders had to be at least five feet in width. A second later, the figure got up and stood there as a monolith would, silent and impersonal, its head brushing the ceiling.

  “Oh holy crap,” Paul whispered as the figure shambled over. By his estimation, this thing stood at least seven feet in height. It wore a pair of clean black pants and a neatly-pressed white shirt along with heavy work shoes. That was normal.

  When the creature stepped out of the shadows, though, all thoughts of normal went out of the window. The face—scarred, greenish-yellow skin, hollow dead eyes and patches of rotting flesh—made Paul think of only one word.

  Zombie… This thing was a zombie. It stood there, bits of flesh dropping from its face to the floor, but it didn’t seem to notice them. “I’m hungry,” the thing said in a gravelly voice like a truck running along a bumpy road at high speed. “Can you get me something to eat?”

  Screaming was called for in this situation, and Paul let one loose that would have rivaled anything out of a Grade-B horror flick. With a start, he leaped back and shut the door with a slam. This…was too unreal.

  A touch on his shoulder made him jump and he let out another scream. “Holy crap it’s…”

  His voice died away when he saw Angela, her hands clasped in front of her body. “Hi,” she said. “You’re up.”

  “It’s not a dream,” he breathed. At this point in time, he was totally convinced he’d stepped into some kind of nightmare.

  “No, I’m real,” she answered, giving a tentative smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “Uh, better, I guess.”

  After taking in a couple of deep breaths, Paul felt his heart rate slow from hyper-high to semi-normal. His body still hurt, but it felt a lot
better than before. However, he wasn’t thinking about his body. He was thinking about what he’d seen and more importantly, what those things were going to do. “What’s going on here?”

  In the dim light of the hallway, she stood out as a slender waif. In a fashion shift, she’d changed her outfit from black leather to a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved light green blouse. No shoes or socks. The floor was freezing cold, so he immediately wrote off the concept of central heating. Yet the cold didn’t seem to bother her.

  Her fangs were also gone, at least for the moment. Long black hair swirled around her face, and her blue eyes regarded him with a look of curiosity. A second later, the look of curiosity faded as she sniffed the air then leaned over to sniff him. Her nose wrinkled and she pulled back. “You need a shower.”

  At her declaration, Paul became aware of his own body odor. He reeked and reeked hard. “Oh, um, yeah, I guess I do. Where’s the shower room?”

  “End of the hallway,” she stated in an even voice and pointed with her finger. “Leave your dirty stuff there. I’ll get some fresh clothes ready for you.”

  Dazed and confused, he followed where she pointed, wandered into the shower, stripped off his clothes and looked at his face in the mirror. He noticed a number of bruises and a black eye stood out, making him look like a raccoon. The tile was old and stained and the toilet looked antique with a chain to pull when the job was done. The bathtub also had a number of cracks in it, but the hot water felt good and it put him in a more positive frame of mind.

  Stepping out of the shower, he found a towel had been placed on the toilet seat and he dried off. Wrapping the towel around his narrow waist, he padded back to his room and saw an old pair of black pants, a belt and a lumberjack shirt neatly folded on the bed. They were a little large, but clean clothes were clean clothes.

  When he came outside after getting dressed, Angela was waiting for him. “Now that you’re ready, I’m going to ask you what you think of my friends. You met them, right?” she asked.

  “Friends… They’re your friends?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t have anyone else. We talk…sort of.”

  Oh…this was a little too much for him to process. How could you talk to water, sand and a patched up quilt-work of a person? Angela caught hold of his arm in an iron grip and steered him back to his room. There, she flicked on the light and guided him over to the bed. He sat, wondering what was about to happen.

  “Before we do the introductions, let me give you a rundown on your injuries,” she began, and started reading from the list. “Those Bangers gave you a real beating. I’m surprised they didn’t damage you worse.”

  “Who, uh, who put the bandage on me?” he asked.

  “I did,” she answered, and glanced at the chart again. “You were out for a few hours. From what I can figure, you have a couple of severely bruised ribs. You’ve also got contusions and a whole lot of lumps. Other than that, you’ll make it.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, still somewhat dazed, but acceptance was slowly beginning to sink in. He did ask the most obvious question, though. “Uh, do you want me to call you Angela or something else?”

  “Call me Angela,” she said. “Like I told you before, I don’t have a last name.”

  No last name. She didn’t have a last name and her friends probably didn’t, either. But were they really alive? People weren’t vampires or intelligent water or zombies. They didn’t exist. He’d read the stories, seen the movies and thought it all mindless fun. At the very least, it had taken away from the grim reality of his life in the orphanage for a while.

  However, now he’d come face to face with these myths that weren’t myths at all, and he had no idea of how to handle it. All he thought of was Angela’s most previous statement. “You don’t have a last name…okay. So…next question…what were those things?”

  “They’re not things,” she replied in a somewhat testy voice. “They’re my friends. They just look a little different, okay?”

  She didn’t wait for him to reply, but her manner softened somewhat as she said, “I’ll give you the basics. The water guy you saw? His name is Ooze. The sand thing—I haven’t figured out if it’s a he or a she yet, but we think it’s a guy—is called Sandstorm. We call the big guy CF.”

  A water guy, a sand dune and a zombie…perhaps a werewolf was next on the list? Oh wait, maybe another creature that slithered or flew or spit acid was lurking somewhere in this place. Angela remained silent, so he posed another obvious query. “What does CF stand for?”

  “Cannon fodder,” she answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it explained everything. In fact, it made his confusion increase exponentially.

  “Cannon fodder,” he repeated, and wanted to say something more but a knock sounded at the door.

  Angela went to open it. The zombie and a transparent bag full of water with a vaguely human shape stood there. “Hey, we got a new recruit?” the water guy asked, staring at Paul curiously. “He looks like everyone else we see on television.”

  A mouth formed inside the plastic bag, and the voice, while male, sounded like it was coming from underwater. In a moment of supreme lunacy, Paul wondered what else it would sound like.

  Grunts came from the zombie and a piece of its cheek dropped to the floor. After a moment, he bent over to pick it up. This whole scenario had entered the land of the weird, gone straight to the realm of odder still and was now in the process of taking a detour to planet strange, times a hundred.

  “Where’s Sandstorm?” Angela wanted to know.

  Her question broke his train of thought. Ooze replied, “Staying in his room,” and he jerked a water-filled finger behind him. “You know he’s a little anti-social.”

  “I’m hungry,” the zombie said again. “Where’s the food?”

  Now a pair of eyes formed in the water and they rolled around. When Ooze spoke again, he sounded more than a little aggrieved. “Where else do you think it is? It’s in the kitchen. You also got a fridge in your room, but I guess you didn’t notice that, either.”

  “It’s empty.”

  With that reply, the zombie moved off, his feet making heavy thudding sounds as he clumped along. Angela pointed down the hallway. “Ooze, follow him and make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.”

  “That’s me,” the bag of water sighed. “Call me nanny.” As they disappeared from view, his groan filled the air. “Man, please do not disintegrate on the floor. You know how hard it is to vacuum up skin.”

  “Sorry…”

  Angela shut the door and let out a sigh as if she’d been expecting this to happen all along. “Are you freaked out?”

  Talk about an understatement! “Where am I?” Paul asked, once he’d gotten his mouth working again.

  Waving her hand at the wall, she recited, “You’re on the second floor of this house. We’re in Allegany County, New York. This place’s name is Angelica. That’s where I got my name from. My maker chose it for me.”

  “Your maker chose it for you?”

  Angela offered a curious smile. “You repeat things a lot, don’t you?” Before he could answer, she continued, saying, “Suit yourself. I use the word maker. You could call him my father, my creator or the scientist who works in his secret laboratory. It doesn’t matter what word you use. He made me. He made all of us.”

  Paul mulled the information over in his mind. Whoever this maker was, that could wait. “Uh, well, you have a nice name,” he agreed. It seemed like the thing to say, something nice and neutral. “Uh, is this some kind of farming community?”

  “It’s more like a tourist spot,” she answered. “I’m not really sure. I’m still in learning mode.”

  Confused by her reply, he started to mumble out a question, but she took his hand in hers once again. Her skin was cool and dry, and she opened the door and pulled him along the hallway. “Come with me.”

  With her strength, he couldn’t resist. At the end of the hallway lay a set of stairs. As he walked down the
m, a creaking sound resounded and he made an effort to tread lightly. It didn’t help.

  On the first floor, the water bag—Ooze—and the zombie were sitting on a couch facing a television set. The room was filled with antique furniture. It was dark as the drapes were drawn. However, lights that must have come from a nineteenth-century bar lit the room in a cheerful yellow glow.

  From his position on the couch, Ooze offered a smile which stood out in the liquid. Nothing else floated inside the bag—its brains had to be part of the water. Thinking and talking water—this was going to take some getting used to.

  The zombie guy exuded a vaguely mossy smell as it munched on something pink, the size of a hamburger. While Paul had seen enough zombie movies to know what they liked to eat, he decided not to ask. Some things just weren’t worth knowing.

  Their journey continued past the living room and through a large and fully stocked kitchen which housed three freezers that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a restaurant, a dinner table with chairs and two ceiling-high cabinets.

  “We’re almost there,” Angela said.

  She stopped at the second cabinet. It had three drawers. She twisted the handle on the middle drawer. Immediately, the cabinet’s front slid aside and Paul’s jaw dropped as he viewed a series of steps leading down. “What is…?”

  “Secret passage,” she said in an offhand manner. Reaching inside, she flicked on a light switch and motioned for him to follow her. “Down here.”

  “What is this?” Paul asked in another moment of wondering what movie set he’d walked onto. With tentative steps, he descended the staircase and came face to face with something out of a mad scientist’s finest fantasy.

  “Take a look,” she said, once they had reached the bottom of the stairs and she’d flicked a switch. Unlike the lights upstairs, here, a series of light bulbs strategically strung across the ceiling illuminated everything in a sickly yellow glow.