Women of the Grey- The Complete Trilogy

by Carol James Marshall

  Craig heard the thud, understood the thud, but didn’t care. He was just thinking. Thinking of Lisa like a puzzle. There were so many pieces of information, but none of it fit together to create any scene. There were just endless puzzle pieces with no match.

  By the time he got to his third beer, Craig had fallen back asleep. He drank the beer trying to either understand what he believed or forget what he understood—just enough to sleep without dreams.

  Iggy

  Sitting next to a dumpster and trying to find shade, Iggy was thinking clearly, but pretending that he was not. He knew clearly that he spent many a day or hours talking to dumpsters. Now, he looked at it and it was what it was… a dumpster. Iggy could not see more than what it was. This should have made him sad. He had spent years wrapped up in madness and now he had to pretend that he still was.

  Iggy needed to buy himself time. He needed to figure out what happened to make his thoughts go down that path. That unreachable path that kept him speaking gibberish, homeless, and frightened. The path that filled his brain full of endless smog where tiny bits of information came through, but he could never grab the information enough to understand it.

  Standing up, Iggy punched the dumpster then felt sorry for it. In his madness, this particular dumpster was understanding and kind. This dumpster listened when no one would. He shouldn’t punch it—at one point this dumpster was his best friend. Rubbing his knuckles, Iggy needed to focus and think. He remembered he had family. Iggy needed to remember who they were. Where were they? He had a brother and a sister he was sure of it. But, their faces… their faces were not there. The name of his sister wouldn’t come up. His brother’s name… Iggy just could not think of it. The sickness in his brain had taken his memory away, but that didn’t matter; Iggy knew he’d get it back.

  He’d get it back, he’d remember everything, then all those that were unkind would be made to understand. They would believe that this happened. Some would not believe, but that didn’t matter because some would. Those that believed would gather with him to understand and figure out why one day he woke up crazy and years later he woke up sane.

  “Believe it or not, it happened to me,” Iggy told the dumpster, gave it a pat, and walked away. Somewhere on these streets there was information on himself. When he first got here? Did anybody know how he got here?

  Rafael

  Rafael wanted to go outside, but he knew after the store his mother wouldn’t let him. He laid under the kitchen table and ate his cookies watching his mom’s legs in the living room. If she left to the other room, he’d follow.

  The store being empty scared her, and he’d never seen her scared before. She wasn’t the type of mommy to act scared. If things went wrong, she went home, closed the door, and wouldn’t open it again until she had to go to work. Rafael was used to this. Usually, that was no big deal. He’d wait until she was watching the walls and sneak out back to spin, but today he’d stay.

  “NO creo…y no creo,” is all she said once they got home. She gave him some cookies, sat on the couch, and told the walls “no creo…no creo.” Rafael wasn’t sure what that meant. He didn’t understand the words, he didn’t understand his mommy, and she didn’t understand him.

  Rafael’s mom was lost in panic. The demons were loose and after them. To believe that the demons were real gave them power to control her, to not believe they were real would make her a fool. She was not woman enough to protect the boy from the demons who were full of mockery for all things human. She wasn’t enough of a human to give this boy a soul. She was even less of a human to guard him against the evil that was just beginning its chase. She needed warriors. She needed her brothers.

  Lisa

  Lisa woke up feeling different. Craig was gone and she wasn’t surprised. She was more surprised that he was there in the first place. Stretching, she had to think on that. How did he get there in the first place? Was this how all human women perceived men?

  In turn, Lisa wasn’t surprised about her reaction to the blood yesterday, but more intrigued by it. She somehow knew that she always had that in her. The arousal by the blood is what intrigued her the most. Was that lust? Is that what the humans feel during sex? The desire to be consumed or to consume the other? That thought made Lisa pause, sex equals cannibalism didn’t seem right. She sighed, before the blood she had never thought of sex. There was no sex in The Grey. It was something humans did. It was something the less evolved did. Sex was not very tidy according to the Mothers.

  Lisa had no information on sex other than what she had seen on TV. It was not taught or explained in The Grey at all. But, the blood against her skin felt like sex to Lisa, even though she didn’t know what sex really was. She knew the basic information. The clinical version of sex. Man-woman, man-man, woman-woman, and so forth. She knew why humans had sex—some to procreate and others for emotion. The emotion part is what got fuzzy for Lisa. Feelings, love, caring… emotion gave her pause. Why was this necessary? Why did it matter so much to humans? Thinking about that flapping tongue made Lisa realize that sex was to procreate, yes; it was to fill an emotional need maybe, but sex was lust. Sex was a deep wanting of sugar dusted lust.

  It’s time consuming and wasteful to spend one’s life on an emotional rollercoaster over others, and Lisa had to, at some point admit, to herself that she might be an empath to those nasty humans. She was wasting time detoxing herself of their “feelings”—time that could be better spent preparing for End Point. Trying to shake it all off, Lisa grabbed a pear and sat on her porch looking around Feline street, but the thoughts kept pouring into her brain.

  Sex to pro-create she understood. Sex for emotional fulfillment she didn’t get, but she had a basic grasp of it. The sex for the sake of sex, sex for lust is what was unclear to her until now. Now, she had felt lust; bloodlust, but lust all the same, and it changed her. Lust changes a rational intelligent being to an irrational idiot, this Lisa was sure of, and that is why there was none of that time consuming nonsense in The Grey.

  “We are all the same and none different…” Lisa told the clouds who couldn’t see her through the smog.

  Helen sat in her bedroom trying hard to hear her daughter. She had told herself to let go. Let it be. But, she sat trying to feel her, hear her, to get a sense to where she might be. The shift brings change. It is the beginning of the end of her mission. “To get to the end, we must start at the beginning,” Helen muttered to herself. The women of The Grey were all connected. In order to survive, they must survive together; there is no “self.” The first mission was the tester that the first Superior Mother invented to make the girls of The Grey the women of The Grey—to see if her own her choices were of the self or of the unit.

  Superior Mother ate her grapes, drank her tea, and wondered why some of her girls questioned existence constantly. It was exhausting to hear their steady chatter in her head. At the beginning, there were always questions. They wondered about all things they had not seen in The Grey. Everything from cable television to ice cream.

  Superior Mother yawned and stretched on her bed. It was still early in the day; the sun had not set and there were no stars to be seen. Her eons were gaining on her and the daily fight to remain vigilant and strong weighed her down. She must not falter for when she does, if it is noticed by another Mother of The Grey, then talk of sleep will come with comments on whether or not it was time that Superior Mother went to bed and another tuck her in. Just as she had once done—taken her Superior Mother to bed, tucked her in, wished her well, then sealed the door to her chamber. The next morning, she woke up knowing that now she was Superior Mother, now she would know all the corners, dark paths, and every inch of The Grey. There would no longer be a door closed to her—all was for her to know, all was for her to command.

  She ate her last grape and thought about what a foolish girl Lisa had been so far, sitting and wondering on lust. Lust was for the lesser evolved. Perhaps Lisa liked to stroll in the gutter.

  Craig
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  Craig just didn’t know what to do with himself this morning. It seemed stupid to get to work like any other day and pretend that something odd in his universe hadn’t happened. He couldn’t help but think of all those nut jobs on TV talking about being abducted by aliens and how life was just never the same. Craig shook those ideas right out of his head because he was being a drama queen for sure on that. He blacked out and ended up somewhere else, it happens.

  “Shit happens man…” he told one of his coworkers as he walked past him. His coworker lifted his coffee cup and said, “Man, I know it.” There was no need to drag it out any farther That’s as detailed as these everyday working men needed to be. Craig didn’t still feel shitty, but not great either. He had the urge to surf because that would occupy him enough that he wouldn’t have the time or energy to think.

  And that’s when it hit Craig, that was how he went on. He got busy surfing. He’d surf until his legs yelped and his arms would go numb. If he focused on the physical, then he’d be too tired to think. That’s what all those alien suckers needed, some physical labor to tire out the body and tell their brain to shut the fuck up.

  Iggy

  Standing outside the shelter, Iggy wanted to see the big guy. He knew there was a big guy here—a silent, large man that helped him sometimes. Iggy could see him, in his mind’s eye. Large, quiet, pointing Iggy in different directions, handing Iggy different things. Iggy felt that he was the key to knowing who he was. But, big guy wasn’t there today, and Iggy didn’t want to ask anybody. If he asked them they’d notice that he spoke clearly and wasn’t twitching at the hissing sidewalks. If the people knew, then it might go away. This had to be a secret; the answer for Iggy was to never let the Gods know he was sane. He didn’t want anybody to know until he was sure, very sure that it would not be taken away, that nobody could snatch it away from him, because that he could not endure.

  Rafael

  School was a hateful, awful place. Rafael couldn’t learn like everybody else. He couldn’t; he tried, but he couldn’t. Inside the spinning boy was a boy that wanted to be like everyone else—a boy that needed to be like everyone else, but he couldn’t. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t make it happen.

  Instead, his brain, heart, and ears focused on what his teacher said. But the rest of him, the rest of his body was his enemy. It was uncontrollable. His hands inferred with this want. He didn’t want to tap uncontrollably, he wanted to understand reading. When he tried to read, his legs would start turning and the rest of him would follow. Rafael would curse his legs; if he could just cut them off, then maybe he’d be able to focus on what the teacher wanted him to know. But, his body didn’t want to and Rafael had no control over his body. He had no control over his feet or hands, legs, arms, anything. Rafael was inside the body; he pulled on the levers, tightened the screws, and kicked the tires, but it would never let him drive. He wasn’t the one driving, and therefore school was worthless.

  He stood up and yelled, “WORTHLESS!” then off his legs went to the other room to spin. The teacher did not blink at this, out bursts were the norm in her classroom. The teacher’s assistant felt her heart tug for the boy. He’d never be normal no matter how much they tried.

  Rafael spun, waiting for his body to stop like it did in the store; it stopped and fell over and at least, when that happened, it gave him a few seconds to focus on reading a label off a can.

  Maggie

  Sitting in church seemed logical to Maggie. She was Hispanic and raised Catholic—you see the devil, you go to church. What Maggie couldn’t make herself do was go confess to the priest. She needed to tell him. That’s what her sister would say. Her sister who was beautiful and kind would tell her, “You have to tell him,” but Maggie knew that if she told him, it would instantly put the mark of a crazy woman on her.

  The priest man of God would not believe that she saw the devil; he would believe that she had a vivid imagination because she was lonely and all of it could be solved by joining the other older gente in bingo. Bingo was meant to help the lonely, sick, poor, and those hoping every day for death. Bingo will solve it all, is all Maggie could imagine this white man telling her. Maggie had a suspicion that the white people didn’t believe in the devil and hell the way Latinos did. To a Latino, the devil is evitable. To the white man of God, the devil was nothing but a scapegoat.

  Maggie grunted, she would tell him nothing. Instead, she would go live her life knowing that, sooner or later, hell would be her retirement plan.

  Lisa

  Lisa kept hearing voices. The voices seemed more like suggestions. Her body had suggestions on what she should do and it came out as voices. Rocking back and forth at her kitchen table, Lisa wanted to believe that every suggestion she heard was the right thing to do, but one suggestion would contradict the other repeatedly, over and over again until Lisa did nothing but rock. The whole of The Grey was in her head, discussing her next move for End Point. Everybody thought they knew the right thing to do and every Mother wanted to be heard.

  Instead, Lisa left; there was nothing to do but walk. She’d walk and peek at her marks hoping that it would give her some insight on what was next.

  Mother 23: “Ahhh, just drug them all and put them in place.”

  Mother 93: “Drug them? How distasteful, it must be done with style and good manners.”

  Mother 38, taking precise and obnoxiously small bites of an apple: “You’re both wrong. She should give up either way. She doesn’t have it in her to become one of us.”

  Superior Mother entered the room, blinking rapidly and patting the table. “Ahhh… here comes the rift,” she sighed.

  Mothers 23, 93, and 38 all scooted their chairs closer to the monitors.

  1

  Week 2

  The Rift: a break between two things.

  Craig

  Craig sat on his bed staring down the hallway for a while. He didn’t know for how long. Lately, this house seemed like an old idea. An idea that he tried and tried again, but never seemed to have the follow through to work. His parents had the idea of a home in sunny California, filled with children, love, and always a fresh pot of coffee.

  They had this for many years, but the children grew, the times changed, and those children didn’t want children of their own and found far off places to live. His parents grew old and sickly, and Craig was all that remained. Sadly, Craig remained not for the love of family that his parents dreamed of, but for the love of his waves. The time came when both parents had passed, and the other children didn’t want the old bitter house in pit of Los Angeles.

  That’s when Craig moved in and let the house put its teeth in him, and with that revelation, Craig punched the wall and heard a hiss from the house. That hiss was it for Craig, he had woken up and today was the day. This very minute was the time and there wasn’t a second to lose. With some kerosene and a match in hand, Craig was ready.

  He suddenly stopped. Before he burned it down, he wanted to destroy it. He wanted his ax, and he wanted to savior breaking every window, door, and table in the house. He wanted all of the pictures gone, the TV, and his bed gone, all of his clothes gone. All of Craig gone so he could start over again. “All over again…” Craig told the kerosene and it responded, “Then burn it down and walk away…burn it now…”

  “Done,” Craig smiled.

  Whistling, Craig started his truck and left to buy himself a steak. In the restaurant, he’d hear the sirens get louder and louder. He’d have some explaining to do, but he didn’t care. The house would be gone, and he’d be free. Maybe after the steak he’d go get himself a hotel room, get up, and go to work tomorrow. He’d let the burn cool down, then he’d let the leftovers be looted. What if he just never bothered to show up there again?

  Out of nowhere, Lisa sat next to Craig in the booth and whispered, “Your house is burning down.”

  “I know,” is all Craig could mutter between bites.

  Lisa waved for the waitress, “You can slee
p on my couch.”

  After that, they both discussed how they liked their steaks cooked and why sleeping on couches was greatly over rated.

  Helen

  Helen watched her daughter eat yet another disgusting piece of beef on the monitor. Why was this girl so intent on filling her body full of vile flesh when she needed to stay alert and aware of the comings and goings of her marks? The cooked beast would do nothing but slow her down. The rift was such a dangerous time. Her marks would have a separation between themselves and something important to them, that could go in Lisa’s favor or not. There needed to be constant surveillance on the marks to see if she could make sure the rift brought them closer instead of driving them away. But, here she sits, gnawing on dead cow.

  2

  Week 3

  Shatter: To break into many small pieces.

  Superior Mother was tired and the day seemed to drag on forever with the ladies. Busy, busy… always something to accomplish and organize. Superior Mother often pretended to stay focused on whatever task they informed her about, but lately she hadn’t cared much. Forcing herself to sit up straight and pretend to listen to the meeting was daunting.

  Mother 35: “She’s at the shatter. We must agree on the shatter.”

  Mother 9: “We mustn’t agree on anything. We will discuss and present our ideas to Superior Mother who will then determine the nature of the shatter.” With that, Mother 9 frowned significantly—a frown that displayed a belief that all others, except herself, were incompetent.

  Mother 23: “I agree, such disloyalty to Superior Mother! We do not know what’s best for The Grey. We must be guided by Superior Mother. If we all believe the shatter should go in different directions, then we are not the same, we are different.”