by Weston Ochse
He walked out of the room feeling more exhausted than he’d ever been.
He’d sleep for a year if he could, but time was ticking.
Sleep was for the innocent and he was way past being innocent.
He went to his room, closed the door, and lay on the floor.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Astral Plane
IT TOOK HIM two hours to enter the astral plane. The pain and ache on Lore’s face cast a pall over his motions like a dead moon across everything he tried to do, and try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of it. He thought about chasing after her several times, or even just calling her. Wondering if that small gesture might ameliorate his shame. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Her life was more important than his own peace of mind. So he let the wound fester until the rot of it collapsed upon itself.
Once in the negative space of the astral plane, Boy Scout couldn’t help but stare at the root of it all—the yazata. If anything, it seemed larger than it had been. Was it coming into its own? Was it realizing what it was? He feared touching it, worried that he might get sucked in and forever lose himself. But was that so bad? What would the world be like without Boy Scout? He doubted it would ever realize he was gone. He was less than a blip on its radar. If anything, the world might be a better place.
While the dervishes would no longer be targeting him, they’d still be after Preacher’s Daughter and McQueen. If there was only one thing he could do, it would be to help them—ensure their continued existence on this damned planet. To that end, Boy Scout headed west. He willed himself to move faster and faster, not yet able to just move and appear in another place. He knew there was no such thing as distance on the astral plane, but he couldn’t entirely wrap his head around the concept, so the best he could do was to travel at the speed of thought. He soon found himself above a vast darkness, which had to be the ocean.
Moments passed before he saw any hint of life, but when he did, he stopped and stared in awe at an immense being of light that moved languidly in the abyss below him. For a moment Boy Scout wondered if it might be a new creature, some astral being that existed only on the plane. But then he realized that it must be a whale. He saw the ghostly shape and how it tapered to nothing, the massive creature pushing through the darkness of the astral ocean.
Whales had always been a totem for him, their existence proof that there were things so much larger than what a man could be. He’d never really understood his need to see one in the wild, but it had driven him to make attempts between contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d gone to Monterey Bay twice, where he’d boarded whale watching ships. But the closest he’d come was a glimpse of a fin and the splash of a tail. Try as he might, he’d never been able to see one in all of its gigantic glory. Frustrated at his inability to connect, after extensive research, he’d gone to Frederick Sound in Alaska and joined a kayak tour. This special tour occurred only once per year because of the whales’ migration, but he’d timed it perfectly. Nine immense, two-person kayaks floated in the center of the sound, and around them swam a pod of whales. Not only had he’d seen several breach the water, almost leaping completely into the air, but many came close enough for him to touch.
Boy Scout had actually wept with joy in those moments, but he had never taken stock of what had been so significant—so important. Now he knew. His interaction with the daeva had informed a part of him that he hadn’t known needed defining. The ache to know that there is something large out there outside of the human spectrum.
He felt drawn to the beast below.
He knew he had to travel, but he wanted to touch it, feel its thoughts, its power.
He moved lower and lower, following the creature like a bird of prey. This was the closest he’d ever get to truly flying and he enjoyed soaring over the essence that was the whale.
Even lower, until he felt like he was underwater, although there was no water in the astral plane.
Soon he was close enough to touch the creature. In the material plane, the whale would weigh upwards of fifty-five thousand pounds. Adult females were larger than their male counterparts, clocking in at fifty-two feet. But here, like he was also, they were weightless, seeming to fly in the silence.
Then like an astral lamprey he reached out with his left hand and touched it.
The feeling was electric and immediate.
A great sense of longing and loneliness filled him. Searching. Missing. Wanting. A sense of looking and not finding. What was it missing? What had it lost? And then it came to him. Whales mated for life and this majestic thing was alone. It might live another fifty years and never know peace. Moving along its migratory and feeding routes over and over and over until it either died or was killed by an illegal whaler.
Boy Scout felt gut punched with the truth of it.
He imagined what it would be like for him if he was forced to walk the planet, never able to find the one he loved, the one he needed. One more reason his decision of never getting married had been a rock-solid plan. Then again, humans could remarry as well as fall in and out of love. Human love was a capricious thing that had less to do with a genetic need to bond than it did to entice men and women to procreate.
Boy Scout noted that his hand was pulsing with energy, growing brighter and brighter by the moment. The longer he stared, the faster the pulses came and the brighter it shone until he could barely regard his own hand. Was the whale giving him power? Was it reenergizing him? Or worse, was he taking power from the whale?
A flash of an eager grin on his own face filled his mind for a single, shocking second.
The yazata was hungry.
He tried to push away but lacked the strength. The yazata had pulled up to an all-you-can-eat whale essence buffet and wanted its fill. But how much was too much? Boy Scout could see the lessening as it happened in real time, the whale growing dimmer and dimmer by the moment. His outrage and desperation exploded across the astral plane with his pain, but he still could not remove his hand.
The whale dimmed, then dimmed some more, then became nothing more than a lighter outline in the darkness. Dead. Once a whale, now floating in the astral Pacific as so much dead meat.
He felt the wrongness of it.
He felt the guilt of killing such a miraculous creation.
Determined to do something, Boy Scout sought The White. He willed himself to change, to move, to become something other than he was, just so he could be somewhere else. He refused to be witness to this calamity. He didn’t know whether it was his will or by greater design, but in a flip he was no longer lamprey to a dead whale, but standing in the middle of a Vietnamese highway talking to Napalm Girl—Phan Thi Kim Phuc.
The roar of fire in the background threatened to drown out everything, but it wasn’t so loud he couldn’t hear the words coming from her mouth.
“What are you?” she asked.
Her flesh had been burned and the smell of it made his gorge rise. Still, he struggled to answer.
“I am Boy Scout,” he said.
“What is Boy Scout?”
Who was he speaking to? Could it be the yazata?
“I am who you are inside,” he said with the most trepidation he’d ever felt.
It felt like an eternity passed, then she said, “Ah, so it is you. But what are you? What is this I am being in your mind?” She held out her arms and he had to look away. She was nine and naked. Speaking with her thusly felt incredibly unseemly. He wondered absently why the yazata had chosen this image.
He paused before he answered, trying to honor the image while informing the entity.
“You’re an infamous picture from my memory turned real. You are Phan Thi Kim Phuc, also known as Napalm Girl. Her own country burned her village with fire and she had so many burns on her back, she was forced to run down the road naked after stripping off her burning garments.”
“Why would her own country burn her village?”
“Another army had entered her village and her own coun
try’s army sought to get them out. They used a bomb that made fire stay longer than it should.”
Another eternity seemed to pass, as if the yazata’sthoughts were as somnolent as the whale’s.
Napalm Girl tilted her head at an odd angle. “How did they make fire stay longer? Was this magic?”
“Of a sort. What is your name?”
“The sound of it would blind you and cause your ears to bleed. I still need you. I see in your mind much killing. I see in your thoughts much violence. I see murder. Ironic that it was us He tried to remove, when all along it was you. This thing I am being, this girl who has been burned by your own. You are a group that kills as a way of life. You profit by it. Death merchants. Why should you be allowed to continue?”
Boy Scout felt the need to defend his species, but he knew he had to tread carefully. “What of you? Why were you removed from this Earth?” On a hunch, he continued. “Why was it that God made a great flood come to rid the Earth of your kind?”
The Napalm Girl crossed her arms and straightened. She began to grow until she was three times the size of Boy Scout, towering over him, but she was still Phan Thi Kim Phuc, naked and burned.
“Because we were superior. We were first. Then came your kind, breeding like rats, small and inconsequential. I remember, you know. You were favored and we were asked to make way for you. But who were you to supplant us? Who were you to think that us first people needed to be replaced by a trivial race called man?”
Boy Scout realized that he hadn’t formed his body and did so, willing it into being so that he could better relate to the creature that was the Napalm Girl.
“This wasn’t our decision to make. God made this decision.”
“It wasn’t your god who did this. It was our gods. They agreed to do this in order that they should live. We were the first. We lived here before your god ever came.”
Boy Scout was in new territory now. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. What the yazata was saying was unprecedented. History that no human had ever been witness to. But what was he to say? Could he just ask it to leave? It was clear what it wanted. It wanted him, and now that it knew what it was, how to access and exercise its power, what was going to stop it? Then he realized that he had nothing to lose. The yazata had him. He was like a fish in a net, unable to move and slowly dying from being out of its natural environment. He was like the whale, except that he’d be kept alive and it was his spirit that would be consumed.
“What did you do with Sister Renee?”
“That one. She was my last. Her energy was imperious.”
A curious choice of words. Imperious. “Why do you say that?”
“She tried to take me over. She tried to free you from me.”
An empty joy surged through him knowing this. Even in the end, she had fought.
“What did she do?”
“Even now I can feel a small part of her lurking about, hiding behind thoughts and ideas. Mimicking memories. Attempting to elude my attempts to consume her completely.”
“She’s still alive?”
“Alive? What is this concept? I was alive once. Then I wasn’t. Now I will be again. Your words have no meaning in the universe of me.” The giant arms of the Napalm Girl snapped out and suddenly a doll-sized version of Sister Renee was there, struggling, arms beating against the fingers that held her, legs kicking. “She surfaced for a moment. That was awkward, wouldn’t you say?” the Napalm Girl asked the thing in its hand. Then she lifted the doll-version of Sister Renee to its mouth and swallowed it whole. A grin spread across the face of a girl he’d formerly only seen in agony. “Finally,” she said. “The last and final taste.”
The Napalm Girl increased in size once more until Boy Scout barely came to its knee.
“Do you understand now? Do you see how you are so insignificant? You sought to worship us and your god became jealous.” Napalm Girl shook her head. “Petty, that.”
Boy Scout didn’t know how to respond. It was as if his ability to be his own agent of action had been taken away. He stared at the great being in front of him, so much like a whale, but lacking the virtue of innocence. Did the whale treat the other things in the sea as this one did humans on land? Was the whale worshipped or treated as another being in the mélange of the oceanic life pool?
He couldn’t be sure how much time had lapsed as he thought these things, but eventually the Napalm Girl stirred.
“Now this is different.”
And then everything flashed to darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Middle of Fucking Nowhere
JUST AS SUDDENLY Boy Scout was strapped to a chair and everyone was arguing. He looked down at his wrists to discover they were tied to the arms of a chair. He tried to move his feet and discovered they, too, were affixed to the chair’s legs. He tried to speak, but fabric had been stuffed in his mouth and tied around the back of his head. His chest felt heavy, as if he were wearing weights.
Preacher’s Daughter was squared off with McQueen, both of them face to face and standing in front of Boy Scout.
Charlene stood back from them but seemed ready to step between the pair.
“You shouldn’t have made that promise,” Preacher’s Daughter shouted.
“I had to. You saw what it was doing. The damned thing would have killed us all,” McQueen shouted with equal velocity.
“He’s back,” Charlene said.
“What do you think we’re going to be able to do in seventy-two hours?” Preacher’s Daughter yelled.
“You prolonged the inevitable.”
“At least now we have an inevitable,” he yelled back.
“He’s back,” Charlene repeated.
Preacher’s Daughter said, “What do you mean he’s—” Then she turned to stare at Boy Scout.
McQueen did as well, then rushed over. “Is that you, boss? Are you really back?”
Preacher’s Daughter bent down and stared into his eyes. “This better be you,” she said, removing the gag. To McQueen, she muttered, “If you’re going to ask him a question, you really need to make sure he can speak.”
Once the gag was removed, Boy Scout worked his mouth, but there wasn’t any moisture. His mouth was raw and as dry as a desert.
Charlene brought him a water bottle and tilted it so he could drink.
When the bottle was empty, he nodded and she stepped back.
“Is that really you, boss?” McQueen asked again.
“I—I think so,” Boy Scout said. “What—what—my arms.”
“Let me get those,” McQueen said and started to untie them.
“Hold on a moment,” Preacher’s Daughter said. “What’s the safe word?”
“You do realize that the yazata knows everything Boy Scout is thinking, so it would also know the safe word. You do realize that, right?” McQueen asked.
“I don’t give a shit. I want him to tell me what the safe word is or else we’re not going to untie him.”
Boy Scout struggled to remember. His mind was a fog and felt at once too full and completely empty. “Safe word?”
“We talked about it,” she pressed. “What’s your safe word?”
He still couldn’t remember what she was talking about. But then things finally clicked into place. He remembered killing the whale. He remembered speaking with the giant version of Napalm Girl. And he remembered what they’d joked about being his safe word.
“Rumpelstiltskin,” he said.
Preacher’s Daughter exhaled and nodded. “That’ll do.”
She untied his left wrist while McQueen untied his right.
“What happened?” he asked.
Preacher’s Daughter glanced up. “You don’t remember anything?”
He shook his head. “Last I remember I was in The White.”
They moved to his legs.
He rubbed at his wrists and noted the deep gouges made from the rope.
“Why did you tie me down?” he asked.
“You don�
�t remember anything?” McQueen asked.
“Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Please, someone tell me what the fuck just happened.”
Preacher’s Daughter and McQueen finished and stood back and stared at him.
“Nothing just happened,” Preacher’s Daughter said. “It’s been happening for three days.”
Boy Scout blinked. “Three days? I was gone for—What did I do?”
“You shot a ray of light out of your mouth that disintegrated the fucking wall, is what you did,” Preacher’s Daughter said. “Then you almost obliterated us.”
A ray of light? “Please say you’re joking.” He looked at McQueen.
“Sorry, boss. Not even joking. One minute we were sitting around drinking, the next you came out of your room like a fucking monster with rays of light coming out of your mouth. It’s one of the reasons we gagged you.”
Charlene approached with her cell phone and held it out.
“Watch the video,” she said.
Boy Scout watched in fascination as his image stood in the center of the screen, rays of light shooting out of his mouth, his eyes aglow.
“How did I… How did you…” He looked at Preacher’s Daughter. “I thought you left.”
She shrugged. “I came back. I knew you were just being a dick and trying to save me, but it’s up to me what battles I decide to fight and not fight. It’s not your choice. As far as how we subdued you, it was de Cherge. He had a stun gun and hit you with it three times. Then we tied you up and brought you here.”
“The yazata might be all powerful, but it still has to deal with a human body,” McQueen said. Boy Scout looked around and realized he was in a large motor home with pull outs.
