The Slice

by Greg Taylor

  “It means I have lived for almost four sections.”

  “Okay, obviously your calendar is a little different from ours.”

  “It is? How old are you?”

  “Fourteen. I’m fourteen years old.”

  “That’s what you call your sections. Years.”

  “Yes.” Annabel hopped off her bed, went to her desk and came back with a desk diary. “Let’s figure this out. I’ll show you what I mean by years. You can explain your sections.”

  Annabel lay down on the bed next to Calanthe and opened her desk diary. “OK, here’s a calendar for one year. Twelve months in a year. See? Twenty-eight to thirty-one days per month. One day is twenty-four hours long.”

  Calanthe studied the calendar with a concentrated frown. “This is very complicated.”

  “How do you measure your…” Annabel thought about how to put this. “Time. I mean, what is a section?”

  “It has to do with the seasons. The number of seasons that pass. A section is four planting seasons, come and gone.”

  “Okay, it sounds like one of your sections equals four of our years. If you’ve lived for almost four sections, that means you’re around fifteen, sixteen years old.”

  “What is that?” Calanthe asked. Annabel had paged through her calender to the current week. Calanthe was indicating the October 31 square, which had an image of a ghost floating over the word Halloween.

  “That’s Halloween. It’s a holiday we have. We get dressed up in scary costumes, kids mostly, some adults, and go around from house to house in the neighborhood to get a bunch of candy.”

  Calanthe frowned.

  “I know. Weird, huh?”

  “If we had a calendar like this, there would be a symbol of a circle, with a jagged line through it. It would be around this time of year.”

  “Really? What does the symbol mean?”

  “It stands for a holiday of ours as well, our most sacred one. It’s called the Day of Days.”

  “What do you do on that holiday? What do you celebrate?”

  “We thank our gods for our bountiful crops and pray for deliverance through the coming winter. It’s a very old ceremony, from the beginning of our days. It’s very festive. The children are allowed more freedom than usual, which is nice. It’s a day to look forward to.”

  Annabel nodded. Over the years she’d read in her history books about such ceremonies celebrated by ancient, agricultural societies.

  “Out of all the children,” Calanthe continued, “I was chosen to be the hostess for the Day of Days this year. It is a very big honor.”

  “Wow. You must have been excited.”

  “No, I was not.” Calanthe’s expression was a mask, not giving away or expressing any emotion. “Toby asked me the other night when it was that I felt I was ready to leave my village. I had wanted to leave for a very long time. But I was afraid. I didn’t think that I could actually make it. When I was chosen to be the hostess for this year’s celebration, that was the sign I was looking for.”

  Annabel frowned. “Why was that?”

  Calanthe didn’t answer right away. When she did, it was as though she was reciting scripture of some sort. “After sunset on the Day of Days, a large bonfire is built. The entire village gathers for a final ceremony. The name of the ceremony is difficult to translate from our original language. The best I can do is … the Slice.”

  Annabel’s heart quickened. Slice. That’s what she thought she’d heard Calanthe say that day under the bleachers.

  Calanthe made an attempt at a smile. “That’s slightly humorous, yes? Tonight, I had my first slice of pizza. In both cases, the definition is the same. To separate from the whole.”

  Annabel didn’t like the turn Calanthe’s story had taken. She didn’t have to wait long to hear the ending.

  “At the end of the ceremony,” Calanthe continued, “in order to assure that our gods continue to smile on us throughout the winter and the spring, an offering is made.”

  No, Annabel thought. Don’t say what I think you’re going to say.

  “Each year, it is the hostess for the Day of Days who is offered up to our gods.”

  Annabel closed her eyes, as though that might somehow blot out what she just heard. “You were actually going to be sacrificed, Calanthe?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s totally insane.”

  “I am hoping, once this year’s Day of Days has come and gone, that my people will forget about me. That I will be left alone to live with you. In peace.”

  “So, that’s the main reason they came after you. To bring you back for the Day of Days.”

  Calanthe nodded. “I know they will continue to look for me until then. It is not a random thing, the person who is chosen for this honor. It is a divine choice. That’s what my people believe. And this year, I am the one.”

  “Whew.” Annabel realized that her mouth was really dry. “I need something to drink before we talk about this anymore. How about you, Calanthe?”

  “Some juice would be nice.”

  Annabel nodded and was about to go get their drinks when Calanthe suddenly grabbed her wrist. “What are you?… Calanthe! No! That hurts!”

  But Calanthe did not let go. Annabel gasped from the pain of Calanthe’s grip. “Please, Calanthe…” After several desperate attempts, Annabel managed to wrench her arm away from Calanthe. She slid off the bed and backed away across the room, her eyes opening wide at what she was seeing. Just like the day under the bleachers, Calanthe’s skin was becoming translucent, slowly revealing her underlying veins, arteries, and muscles.

  “Calanthe! Can you hear me?”

  Apparently not. Calanthe wasn’t dreaming this time, but she was in the grip of something very powerful. It was as though she had become possessed by another entity. The attack was already causing Calanthe to sweat profusely. Her hair was matted to her forehead. Her T-shirt and baggy pajama bottoms were soaked through.

  Annabel was certain that she was witnessing the Altering, the transformation Calanthe had told them about just before Strobe left for Canada. But why now? Had Calanthe’s revelation of the Day of Days precipitated the attack? Just as that thought occurred to Annabel, Calanthe suddenly came off the bed and seized her by the throat!

  The pressure was so great, so fast, that Annabel couldn’t breathe. Or speak. She grasped Calanthe’s hand with both of hers to try to free herself. But it was no use. Calanthe’s grip was overpowering. And excruciatingly painful. Any strength Annabel had left was quickly dissipating. She felt herself blacking out.

  And then …

  The attack disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

  Annabel felt Calanthe’s deadly grip loosen. As soon as it did, Annabel inhaled huge gulps of air. She tried to focus on Calanthe, but all she could see were explosions of bright lights against a black background. Slowly … the bursts of light faded.

  When Annabel’s vision had finally cleared enough to be able to see Calanthe, the girl was staring down at her with a horrified look on her face. Calanthe knew what she had done to Annabel. Worse yet, what she had almost done. She stood and slowly backed away from Annabel. Then she turned and ran from the room.

  Annabel tried to call out to Calanthe, but all that came out was a hoarse whisper. She tried to get up but fell back with a wince. She was extremely weak from Calanthe’s assault. Forcing herself to crawl to her desk, fighting back nausea, Annabel grabbed her cell phone. Then she punched in Toby’s number and waited for him to answer her call for help.

  21

  Things might have turned bad all of a sudden in Hidden Hills, but they were far worse for Strobe up in the dekayi village. After breaking into the building at the edge of the village square, Strobe had immediately felt that he wasn’t alone in the darkly lit meeting hall.

  He was right.

  After moving farther into the hall, Strobe was able to make out at least eight serpent-like creatures, hovering in the shadows in the far corners, just out of rea
ch of the light cast from the torches mounted on the wooden pillars.

  Strobe immediately began edging his way toward the front of the hall. He was feeling dizzy at this point, the unbeatable numbers of dekayi only adding to the sensation that everything around him was swirling into a deadly tailspin. As much as he tried, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to get out of his nightmarish trap.

  The front door of the hall suddenly burst open, and the three dekayi that had been following Strobe pushed their way inside, their serpentine heads immediately twisting and zeroing in on their prey. Emboldened by the arrival of the three sinister-looking creatures, the other ones in the hall left their shadows and started coming for Strobe.

  Okay, come and get me. I’m gonna take out as many of you as I can before you do.

  Sliding the crossbow from his back, Strobe brought it up and started pulling the trigger as fast as his less-flexible left finger would allow. But instead of the weapon responding to Strobe’s trigger pull, all that happened was …

  Nothing.

  Strobe immediately locked onto a possible reason. The disgusting gelatinous ooze that had paralyzed his hand might have done the same thing to his crossbow. Some of the stuff could have found its way into the casing and jammed the mechanism.

  I’m a dead man, for sure!

  Strobe’s fatal thought was pushed aside by the sound of whirling blades. The helicopter! In the frenzy of the past few minutes Strobe had totally forgotten all about it.

  When Strobe turned and charged for the stage at the end of the hall, a hopeful plan was already forming in his head. He had to get up to the roof of the hall. The pilot could meet him there and whisk him off to safety.

  But how to get up there? As Strobe approached the dark stage, the huge serpent statue slowly became visible to him. As soon as he saw the statue, Strobe knew that he could use it as a ladder to the ceiling.

  Slinging the crossbow back over his shoulder, Strobe leaped up onto the stage and hit the statue at a run. He quickly scaled the larger-than-life serpent to the top, where he found himself face-to-face with the wooden idol’s gaping mouth and long sharp teeth.

  In the hall behind and below him, Strobe could hear the snapping-sucking sounds of dekayi feet. Holding tightly on to one of the statue’s teeth, Strobe shot a look over his shoulder. A half dozen of the dekayi were on the walls and fanning out toward the ceiling, trying to cut off his escape route. Several more of the creatures had slithered onto the stage and were about to crawl up the statue.

  Now what?

  A thought hit Strobe like a punch, slamming him into action. He yanked off his backpack and hung it on the statue’s long, curving tongue. Found the flares in the pack. Started setting them off, one after the other.

  The first few he threw to the floor far below, aiming for the rows of cushions that faced the stage. Some feeling was coming back into Strobe’s right hand, but he still had to use his left, making things—such as accuracy—more difficult.

  But Strobe was humming now. He thought he had a slim chance to get out of this. When one of the dekayi suddenly curled around a wooden hump of the statue’s twisting shape and leaped for him, Strobe was ready. He jammed a flare into the thing’s mouth, instantly turning hisses to screams when the white-hot magnesium flame scorched the creature. Writhing backward from Strobe’s attack, the dekayi lost contact with the statue, fell to the stage below, and hit it with a hollow thud.

  All the other dekayi immediately halted their progress toward their prey. The flares had added a dangerous new component to the fight. The floor of the hall was already ablaze, the cushions acting like brittle tinder, feeding the fire, and causing it to expand rapidly.

  Strobe pulled down his cell mouthpiece, told the pilot of the helicopter to meet him on the roof, then tried to figure out how to get up to the roof. It was then that Strobe noticed a circular stained-glass window—black with a jagged red slash through the middle—on the wall above and behind the statue, near the apex of the roof.

  That was it, Strobe knew. His escape route. All he needed to do was get to that window. As fast as possible. The flames below had already worked their way to the stage, leaping higher with every second. They looked like living things that wanted to eat Strobe alive.

  Just like the serpents. Fortunately, most of the creatures were retreating, getting out of the building before they burned to a crisp. But a few die-hard dekayi were still coming for Strobe. One was on the wall behind Strobe. Another was upside down on the ceiling, crawling toward him.

  HISSSSSSSS!!!

  The dekayi on the wall had suddenly leaped to the wooden statue and was slithering upward toward its prey. Strobe set off another flare, and held it out toward the serpent. The creature immediately retreated a short ways down the statue.

  “Not far enough, you giant maggot.”

  Strobe started down the statue toward the dekayi, jabbing the flare toward the creature as he went. That seemed to do it. The serpent twisted and leaped back to the wall, where its grotesque, suctioned feet took hold of the wood and stuck.

  “Not as dumb an ugly slimeball as I thought you were.”

  Strobe was definitely feeling it now, his body humming with energy, his thoughts sharp and focused. He was even trash-talking a dekayi! But Strobe still had several more obstacles to deal with. The other dekayi had crawled across the ceiling and was now blocking the window that Strobe had targeted as his escape route.

  “Bad idea, dude.”

  Reaching into his backpack, Strobe pulled out a flare launcher. Typically used to fire a flare in the air to indicate a person’s position or to put out a distress call, Strobe was about to improvise. He kept a wary eye on the dekayi nearest him as he delicately loaded his burning flare, then …

  BAMMM!!!

  The flare flew upward in a spectacular flaming arc and hit the dekayi with such force that the device impaled the leathery skin of the creature. The thing reacted violently, screaming as it tried to keep its grip on the wooden wall. But it couldn’t. Falling to the floor below, the creature disappeared into the flames, which had racheted the temperature in the hall up to an almost unbearable level.

  The other dekayi was now retreating back down the wall. Strobe’s only enemy at this point was the fire. He wiped the sweat from his eyes as he reached into his backpack and pulled out an odd-looking contraption, long and slim.

  “James Bond time,” Strobe said with a tense smile, mentally thanking the other MCOs, who had been very thorough putting together his pack before they had left New York.

  After a quick and delicate maneuver up and onto the very top of the serpent statue—vertigo territory—Strobe aimed his James Bond contraption at the ceiling just above the stained-glass window and pulled a trigger. A sharp hook attached to a long synthetic rope shot upward and stuck into the ceiling. Strobe gave the rope a hard pull to test it. If it didn’t hold his weight, he was a dead man. Simple as that.

  The flames had crawled up the statue and were licking at Strobe’s feet as he pulled on his backpack. After testing the rope a final time, Strobe swung out into the space above the out-of-control fire.

  Just as he began to climb toward the ceiling, Strobe went into a freefall! He looked wildly up at the ceiling. The hook at the end of the rope had lost its grip! Strobe was a mere second away from being engulfed in flames when the hook mercifully snagged on the edge of the jutting window frame that surrounded the window … and held.

  Strobe jolted to a bone-jarring halt. A quick sigh of relief was followed by a difficult climb to the ceiling. Swinging precariously back and forth on the rope, Strobe finally reached the window.

  He slid the crossbow from his shoulder, reached back, and slammed the butt of the weapon into the glass. It shattered outward, creating a large, jagged hole. After clearing the larger shards of glass away from the border of the window, Strobe carefully crawled through the opening. Using the bottom frame of the window as a foothold, he eased himself into a standing position
outside the building. He steadied himself, then reached up, grabbed hold of the edge of the roof and pulled himself up and away from the window.

  The helicopter was waiting for him. As Strobe made his way carefully toward the copter, all was chaos below. A crowd of dekayi—in their human form—had gathered and were quickly forming several lines from a large water trough at the edge of the square to the burning meeting hall. They were furiously passing buckets of water down the lines to the source of the fire when Strobe reached the helicopter. As soon as he was safely inside, the chopper took off.

  But Strobe wasn’t leaving unnoticed. The dekayi might have been blindly focused on the out-of-control blaze, but on the other side of the square …

  The Tall Man slowly emerged from the shadows. His cadaverous face glowed red from the fire as he looked up at the departing helicopter, his alert, cruel eyes tracing its path until it could no longer be seen. Then, the dekayi did something unexpected.

  He smiled. It was a smile that could send a chill down the spine of the devil himself.

  22

  Walking through the dark woods near Annabel’s house, Toby was about to jump a small stream when he noticed something … the faint impression of a bare foot in the damp ground next to the stream. The foot outline pointed out a new direction for Toby, which he immediately followed.

  Toby had ridden his bike over to Annabel’s immediately after getting the ghastly news about Calanthe’s Altering. He had urged Annabel to stay home while he searched for Calanthe. In spite of the fact that she could barely speak—the result of her throat still feeling like it was on fire—Annabel wouldn’t hear of it. The two had decided that Calanthe had taken to the woods, an easy call, and had split up to look for her.

  After discovering the bare footprint, Toby walked farther and farther into the increasingly dense woodland. His NVGs allowed him to pick up additional cues in the pitch-black night that someone had blazed a path through this part of the forest.

  A couple of fern plants flattened by a passerby.

  A chest-high tree branch freshly snapped off near the trunk.