by Becket
“I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain!” came my response in my best Scotty accent.
“What was that?” asked Ms. Crystobal.
“Nothing,” I said, feeling that old sting of being misunderstood. “It’s a trekker thing. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll give you a few more minutes. But then Wyn will be out of time. I’ll have to send you.”
“I’m not sure if this rig can get to one hundred.”
“Keep going,” Ms. Crystobal said, and then added, “Kirk out.”
Back in the Black Building…
Lowen told his Sleeper Devils to grab Wyn and follow. They did.
Wyn went with them willingly.
Nell walked beside Lowen as he led them to one wall where there was one particularly evil-looking torture device. It had several spikes and something that looked like a rooster’s beak.
“I wonder what you’re capable of,” Lowen said thoughtfully to Wyn.
The Blood Vivicanti shrugged. “My highest score on Super Mario Brothers for the NES was fifty shy of a million.”
“Certainly,” Lowen went on, ignoring Wyn’s last remark, “you are much more than any mere human. You could say that you and I are the same. You made what you are. I remake what I am. The difference is that what you accomplished once, I continue to accomplish.”
“I like how you prattle to give yourself time to think,” Wyn said. “It’s a much more effective torture device for your listener.”
Lowen smirked knowingly. He glanced toward the iron maiden in the corner of the room.
“The differences between humans and the Kharetie fascinate me,” he said. “For instance, the Kharetie have only eleven bones in each foot. But you humans have twenty-six.”
Nell looked down at her Mary Jane’s. She knew where Lowen was going with this. She knew all about being broken.
“I have three PhDs,” Wyn said. “I am the only one in history who effectively mutated the human genome into the übermensch. I think I know how many bones the whole human body has.”
Lowen sneered at him. “Do you know what it feels like to break each one, one at a time? For all your talent, for all your acumen, for all your indomitable willpower, for all your beautiful passion, the human frame possesses no more and no less than the fragility of butterfly wings. Once touched, forever damaged.”
The Dark Man walked around Wyn.
“I could take you apart at the joints,” he said, “beginning with your toes and then moving up to your soles. Would your soul be mine then? Perhaps not. You’re strong, yes. But each time you refuse to tell me how your Blood Vivicanti are made, I will break off another bone at the joint. Refuse me fifty-two times, and we would only be finished with both feet. The arms together have over sixty bones. I could go from your arms to your thorax. Or to your hands! Oh now, the hands are quite lovely. Twenty-seven bones a piece! You might have remade the prison of your body into a Nietzschian paradigm, but you are still manacled in the frame and figure of a man.”
Wyn raised an eyebrow.
“Did someone write that speech for you?” he asked sarcastically. “Because words like ‘Nietzschean’ and ‘paradigm’ seem a little beyond your fifth grade reading level.”
Lowen crouched before Wyn and stared him in the eyes.
“Did you know that the design of the Red Man, as you call him, was based on a Blood Thirster from Khariton?”
“All right,” Wyn said with a hint of doubt in his voice, “I’ll bite. What’s a Blood Thirster?”
“Well,” Lowen said, walking around again, sounding more eager, “the Kharetie keep Blood Thirsters as pets. But during what you might call the Jurassic Period of my planet’s history, Blood Thirsters had been the dominant life. They drank the blood of all the other animals and they gained their abilities, the way you do – and I guess the way I do too now. Who knows? One day, when the Kharetie invade earth, the Blood Vivicanti might make excellent pets also.”
Wyn smirked. “Since you’re a Blood Vivicanti too,” he said, “not to mention originally from Khariton, yet have possessed a human mutation of Kharitonian DNA, many might think of you as a bastard in the finest sense.”
Lowen picked up Wyn with one hand and launched him across the room.
Wyn crashed through a desk and a wall.
Nell and the other Sleeper Devils went to retrieve him.
But he stood on his own. He did not fight back.
“So what am I in for?” he asked casually.
Lowen looked confused. “Sorry,” he said. “Was my human language not clear? Kharetie speech might be less ambiguous. Let me explain it again,” he said and then enunciated: “You will suffer as I break your body until you tell me the procedure for making the Blood Vivicanti.”
Wyn laughed at him. “No,” he said, walking closer, “I mean when you make me one of your Sleeper Devils. I want to know what the experience will be like.”
Lowen blinked at Wyn in disbelief.
Wyn gave him a cheeky grin. “That is your big plan, isn’t it,” he said, “to make me a Sleeper Devil.”
The Sleeper Devils blinked at one another.
Nell looked at Lowen with a concerned expression on her face.
The Dark Man gaped at Wyn, seemingly not sure what he should do or say. He folded his fingers together at his mouth. He looked upset and pensive, trying to plan his next move.
Wyn was boyishly playful.
“I haven’t spoiled any surprises, have I?” he said. “I know you’re not going to kill me or dismember me. You want me intact so that you can make me into a Sleeper Devil, like that Nell thing you sent to Mary Paige.”
He looked at Nell. She looked down with a defeated expression.
“You want me to be an unbroken Sleeper Devil bent to your service,” Wyn said, feeling a hint of sympathy for Nell, a slave, an addict. “I’m much more valuable to you that way.”
Back in my eighteen-wheeler…
I reached 100mph. The truck was now shaking violently.
Ms. Crystobal spoke through her telepathic channel. “Ready?”
“Now!” I shouted in reply.
I heard nothing more for a few seconds.
Back in the Black Building…
Lowen lost his temper, clenched his fists, and gnashed his teeth.
Nell stepped back.
“Theo,” Wyn said calmly to Lowen.
Lowen hissed angrily. “That’s not the name of this body any more! Theo is gone!”
“Theo,” Wyn said again, more softly, more calmly, “I have one last word for you before you make me your slave.”
Lowen narrowed his eyes.
Wyn grinned. “Checkmate.”
Back in my eighteen-wheeler…
An energy portal suddenly opened before me in the middle of the road. My job was to drive straight through it.
You see: A powerful magnetic field had been preventing Ms. Crystobal from opening a portal to the Black Building’s 120th floor.
She and Wyn had been a diversion. They were to lure Lowen and Sleeper Devils away from there before I arrived.
My eighteen-wheeler and me were the lulu of a surprise that night.
We drove through the portal.
It went from where I had been to a place about, oh, 120 floors up – and midair, too, just outside the Black Building.
For a few very long, very scary, and very exciting seconds, the road was gone from beneath the rig.
The eighteen-wheeler glided grace-fully through the air like…well, like an eighteen-wheeler gliding gracefully through the air.
The feeling of weightlessness in that massive machine was kind of thrilling.
The nearer we soared toward the Black Building, the more I could see my reflection in its opaque windows.
I had the biggest smile on my face!
Back inside the Black Building…
An alarm resounded.
All the lights turned red. Lowen’s face was bathed in red light. He was grimacing.
Wyn was also bathed in red light. But he was smiling. The plan was working.
My rig and I had collided straight into the Black Building and we had burst through into the 120th floor.
I’d forgotten about my airbag. It burst open in my face. I tore it away and tossed it through the window.
The eighteen-wheeler bounced along for a second or two until I gained control of it.
Then I put it in line with the metal coffin. It appeared to be a mile off in the center of the room. I pressed the gas and drove straight toward it.
My job was to rescue the Red Man.
By the time I got to the Red Man’s coffin, a few Sleeper Devils were wandering into the room with astonished looks on their ashen faces. They were very surprised to see an eighteen-wheeler barreling toward them.
They looked even more surprised when I ran them over.
Lowen’s vast army would be there soon. I didn’t have much time.
I parked the truck beside the Red Man’s coffin. I opened the lid.
Inside, the Red Man seemed to be resting peacefully.
In his ears were metallic earbuds playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, otherwise called “the Jupiter Symphony.” It seemed oddly fitting for a man from another planet.
I listened closely.
The fourth movement was playing on a loop. That amazing counterpoint in the finale, with all five motifs combined in the fugal coda was brilliant and unparalleled.
I fear that the Red Man might never move again after that.
I tried removing the earbuds, but Lowen had implanted them somehow. If I tore them out, they would also tear off the Red Man’s skin, perhaps his whole ear. And I couldn’t do that.
So I closed the lid and hoisted the coffin onto my shoulder with the Red Man inside.
Yes, I am that strong.
I am a Blood Vivicanti.
Hundreds of Lowen’s Sleeper Devils started swarming inside the room. They saw me and chased toward me like a stampede of wild animals, their mouths open hungrily, their hands reaching toward me like claws, and in their eyes flickered the flame of madness.
Hurriedly I put the coffin in the back of the truck and I climbed into the driver’s seat.
The Sleeper Devils reached me and climbed all over my rig.
I put it into gear and pressed the gas.
There were so many Sleeper Devils before the windshield that I could not see a thing. I drove by intuition. I knew that the hole I’d knocked into the Building was behind me so I turned the truck around and hoped I was heading in the right direction.
It was like shooting an arrow in the dark and hitting a target on Mars.
My rig rode on. I could feel its great weight crush numerous Sleeper Devils under all eighteen wheels.
Their bile and black blood made the way slippery. It was as slippery as driving over a swarm of locusts.
More Sleeper Devils smashed through the windshield and flooded inside the cockpit like a swarm of stinking locusts. Their filthy bodies pressed against me.
I tried fighting them off me but I had no other choice. I turned the steering wheel hard and the truck rolled over onto its side. It flipped a few times and then slid for a few hundred feet.
For some reason, my photographic memory was blaring Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns.
Dizzy, bruised and cut, though healing quickly, I clambered out of the truck.
It was crumpled like a broken accordion.
All around me was a field of crushed Sleeper Devils.
But in the distance more were coming, running fast toward the truck.
I had a slight limp. But I was healing quickly.
I made my way to the back of the truck. I opened the doors and took out the Red Man’s coffin. It was still shut and he was still inside. I hoped he was all right.
I shouldered the coffin and came around the rig. I could not quite believe what I saw next.
At least a thousand Sleeper Devils must have been running toward me. They were running so quickly and so wildly that they did not have any regard for one another. The faster ones trampled over the slower.
The riot of moving bodies got so intense that they formed a tsunami of arms and legs and gnashing teeth. This demented wave rolled higher and higher and it towered over me. It would come crashing down at any second.
Isn’t that rich?
Me on the ground.
Them in the air.
Send in the clowns.
I took the Red Man’s coffin from off my shoulder, opened the lid, and slid inside with him.
That was perhaps the first time in my life that I was happy about being petite. His body was huge! His muscular chest was practically smushed against the lid. I had to coil up around his waist and legs.
His natural body odor was a delightful mixture of lilacs and raspberries.
Outside the coffin was the thud of the wave of Sleeper Devils crashing down on us. The metallic frame was strong. But under that great weight, I could hear the metal groan as it bent inward.
For a moment I dreaded that all those Sleeper Devils would crush us.
But then there was silence.
It sounded as if the Sleeper Devils were gone.
I waited a moment to see if my ears were hearing things accurately. But I could not even hear the sigh of a gnat for miles around.
I was going to wait another minute or so, just to be safe.
Then someone outside the coffin knocked on the lid.
Slowly, I opened the lid and looked out.
To my great surprise, I saw before me, with her arms folded and her usual pursed-lipped-cocked-eyebrow-expression of impatience, Ms. Crystobal.
“You coming?” she said. “We haven’t got all night.”
Send in my hero!
Ms. Crystobal seemed to be all by herself. There appeared to be no Sleeper Devils at all.
Slowly I crawled out of the coffin. Slowly I looked around.
All around us was the vast room of the 120th floor. It seemed empty too. No Sleeper Devils. No eighteen-wheeler. Everything appeared to be completely gone.
“What happened?” I asked, looking at Ms. Crystobal.
She didn’t miss a beat. “Now that you punched a hole through the energy barrier protecting this room I was able to open a dimensional portal inside.”
“What happened to the Sleeper Devils?”
“I opened another portal,” she said matter-of-factly.
“To where?”
“To here.”
I didn’t understand. I looked around but we seemed to be absolutely alone in the room.
Ms. Crystobal saw my confusion. “You asked the wrong question,” she said. “You should not have asked to where, but to when.”
“All right,” I said: “To when did you send them?”
“A few years from now.”
I thought about this. “You sent them to the same room, but some time in the future,” I said, trying to understand.
“Yes, where they have probably already died – or I should say – will die from exposure.”
“Exposure?” I asked, not quite sure what to think. “What will happen to this room in the future?”
Ms. Crystobal sighed. “In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure. But I think it has something to do with the implosion of a neutron star.”
Once more I lifted the coffin with the Red Man inside and placed it on my shoulder.
Ms. Crystobal pointed toward a hole in the room in the distance. It was the place where I had come bursting in.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
We ran to the hole just as a flood of new Sleeper Devils began charging into the room.
We stood on the edge of the opening. We looked down the side of the Black Building.
We were so high up that the tops of the tallest skyscrapers were far below us. The wind was tearing powerfully at us up there. It might have blown a mortal away.
It’s good to be Vivicanti.
Ms. Crystobal an
d I were about to leap from the opening.
But suddenly a familiar voice called my name, “Mary Paige.”
It was Theo.
“Don’t turn around,” Ms. Crystobal hissed at me. “Just jump and don’t look back.”
But I didn’t listen to her. Excitedly I turned around.
The face looking at me was Theo’s, only the eyes were different, not the shape or color, but the spark of life, the look. Theo wasn’t there anymore, I saw.
“Theo?” I asked.
I took a step closer to him. He wasn’t that far away. I hadn’t heard him approach. It was as if he had appeared out of nowhere.
But I stopped with the next step.
Standing beside him, smiling at me was a girl I knew quite well. It was the kidnapped girl from my fifth grade class, the pale girl whose black blood almost killed me. It was Nell.
I could still taste her horrid blood in my mouth. I could still see her tortured life through her Blood Memories. The sense of her inside me made me sick to my stomach.
And where are the clowns now?
On the other side was a shirtless man. He had been tortured. He had no wounds but his flesh was covered in blood.
It was Wyn.
Several Sleeper Devils were binding his arms from behind.
Yet still he winked at me. Forever the boy.
Ms. Crystobal spoke to me through her telepathic touch.
“That’s not Theo.”
“Who is it?”
“Look and see and know.”
I did – I looked – and I saw. And I knew the face of the Dark Man. Through Nell’s Blood Memories, I could see him with all his many faces as clear as day. And now I could see him again, past the eyes I once knew to be Theo’s, deep in the emptiness of a lost soul.
