For a moment he forgot how and why he had gotten up there. Even the sound of the ocean seemed to fade away. “I don’t like them,” he said, locking eyes with her and using a special tone of voice he reserved only for girls. The urge had come from the back of his brain, taking over at a speed that seemed to him quite a bit faster than light.
“You don’t go to school here. Do you?”
“Strix,” he said.
For a moment, Callista’s face flashed a mixture of fear and confusion. “You’re one of the three,” she said. “I wasn’t even sure if there were more or if the whole thing was just a new computer game or something.”
“I don’t know if it’s a game or some kind of psych experiment. All I know is I like where it’s taken me so far.”
Callista appeared disappointed at his remark. “It’s weird,” she said, “the whole thing.”
“Did you meet a guy who claimed to be Blaise Lorrance?”
“It was him,” she said.
“How do you know?”
She hesitated but eventually mustered confidence, saying, “my dad told me.”
“Interesting,” said Morgan, crossing his arms and grinning at her. “Your daddy told you.”
“That’s right.”
“And I guess ‘daddy’ is the authority on old scientists.”
“You’re pissing me off.”
“I see.”
She told him, “Why don’t you get off this roof before I tell someone you’re here. I don’t get the sense you’ve been invited to give a lecture.”
“I own this place as a matter of fact. Actually, my daddy does.”
“The whole school?” Callista asked. “I thought it was owned by a committee of trustees.”
“Nope. That’s all wrong. Me and my daddy own it. Every bit,” he said, smirking.
“Get out of here,” she said, taking a step forward like she intended to throw him off the roof.
“Easy!” he shouted, relenting and walking back to the ladder. “You’re crazy to act like that up here!”
“Oh, afraid of heights?” She yelled. “What a big man!”
“Listen, I don’t know how this went south so fast. I just wanted to talk to you about Strix.”
“Get out of here!” Callista yelled.
Morgan slipped and nearly fell on his way down.
Lucas was propped up against the wall near the ladder. He was fast asleep, snoring with vomit still stuck to his face. Morgan hit him in the shoulder, sending him into a coughing fit that woke him up.
“Let’s go,” he told Lucas as he held out a hand to hoist him up. “I did what the bird told us. We’re good.”
“Was she up there?” Lucas asked, clearing his throat. “Was Strix right?”
“Yup. He was right on. We’re well on our way to being best friends.”
They started down the stairs with Morgan plodding to accommodate Lucas, who was nearly passing out from the exertion.
“Don’t take this the wrong way man,” Morgan said to him, “but maybe you should see a doctor or something.”
Lucas’s face twisted to immediate anger. “I’ve seen a doctor or something. I’ve seen loads of doctors! Do you think I want to be like this?”
“I’m sorry,” Morgan told him. “I didn’t mean…”
“Doctors, nutritionists,” Lucas went on. “Holistic healers. My mom would hire a witch doctor if she could. Do you think I want to be fat? Do you think it’s just because I can’t control myself around food or something?”
“Listen, I didn’t mean…”
“Well it isn’t! I eat fourteen hundred calories a day and I have to force those down. I can’t even stand food!”
“Calm down, killer,” Morgan said, putting a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Lucas said. “Having vomit on me this long puts me in a bad mood.”
“I can imagine.”
“So what happened up there?”
“Nothing really. I just met Callista.”
“So she was there. What did you talk about?”
“Nothing really. I mentioned Strix. She seemed freaked out about it. Understandable, I think.”
“I guess the owls are linked up, sharing information, and trying to set us up to meet. But why?”
“That’s the strange thing,” said Morgan. “She seemed surprised when I brought it up. She wasn’t expecting to meet anyone if you ask me.”
“I guess the owls somehow know that she hangs out on the roof?”
“Supercomputers,” said Morgan. “They know things I guess.”
Just as the school was nearly out of sight, Lucas felt comfortable enough to ask Morgan a question that had been quite active in his mind. “Was she pretty?” He asked.
“I guess,” Morgan said with a note of distaste. “If you like that uptight kind of thing. I, for one, don’t like classy women.”
…
Chapter 7
The Jellyfish Collector
Early that evening, Morgan arrived home to find his father waiting for him at the kitchen table. The man had poured himself a drink of bourbon and had his anxiety pill bottle open on the table. Morgan had taken the long way home, delaying his arrival with the hope of avoiding him completely.
“Where you been?” He asked Morgan as soon as he saw his face.
“I’m making you money, like you said,” Morgan snipped. “The owl told me to go meet someone, so I did.”
“Your brother needs you to clean him up. The little shit shat himself.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Clean his ass good,” Morgan’s father said with a dead, drunken stare. “Or you know what happens.”
“I know what happens,” he told his father with their eyes locked.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” Morgan asked, before heading up the stairs.
Morgan’s younger brother, Brian, was struggling to clean up the mess in his bed. He was on his hands and knees, crying and whimpering about what he had done. His condition made him so weak that the effort had exhausted all his strength.
Morgan carried him to the chair in the corner of the bedroom. He held him and rocked their bodies together until he stopped crying.
“It happens to everyone,” Morgan told him. “Don’t let Dad tell you any different. He’s just taking out his bad mood on you. Now let’s get you cleaned up and I’ll set up fresh sheets for you.”
Brian said, “I’m such a bad brother. I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” Morgan snapped. “You’re the coolest kid I know. You could never do anything bad. Except say something like that again. Are we understood?”
Brian nodded and a trace of a smile bloomed on his face. After Morgan got him cleaned up and in a fresh bed, the exhaustion dragged him to sleep almost immediately.
Strix came to life as soon as Morgan sat down on his bed. Soft red and blue lights pierced the darkness of the bedroom, blinking and shifting, until Strix had fully booted.
Morgan looked at the thing, and with frustration, told it, “I did what you wanted. I met the rich girl. What other kind of crap do you need so my dad gets paid and off my back?”
“Please don’t be frustrated, Morgan. Of course it is understandable that you would be. This must be very confusing.”
“Ridiculous is more like it.”
“Please, Morgan. All we ask for is your patience. You’re excelling in terms of the project. We’re learning so much from you.”
“Hey, I aim to please.”
“We’re very happy to speak with you, Morgan. We consider us friends. Do you find us to be your friend?”
“Whatever.”
“As your friend, we believe it is our duty to alert you to coming danger.”
“Oh yeah? Am I in danger?”
“No,” said Strix. “I’m afraid it’s your brother who will require protection.”
Morgan glanced over to Brian, who was still f
ast asleep.
“It’s OK,” Strix went on. “Your brother can’t hear you.”
“Protection from what?”
“You know what from.”
In that moment, Morgan heard his father yell something at the TV, his words slurring together. “He just likes to scare me,” He told Strix. “I don’t think he would hurt his own son.”
“Humans can be unpredictable,” said Strix.
...
That evening, Lucas’s mother presented him with his nightly vitamin slurry, a concoction she had invented several years earlier and administered without fault. He swallowed the beige creamy paste and it left a bitter trail in his mouth.
“You shouldn’t have gone out after school today,” she told him. “You were probably exposed to all kinds of things your little body isn’t used to.” She studied his face, asking, “What was it you were doing today without telling me a word?”
Lucas glanced over to Strix on his nightstand. “He told me to meet a boy at school and walk to that fancy private school up the hill.”
His mother scowled at the toy across the room, saying, “I didn’t agree to send you all over town. I thought you would just be talking to the thing.” She walked over to Strix with a look like she intended to spank the stuffed owl. She sternly told the thing, “That’s the end of the field trips. The money we’re being paid is nice but I’m not putting my son at risk. Do you hear me?” She asked Strix.
The owl didn’t answer. It kept as silent and inanimate as the wooden nightstand on which it sat.
“I’ll call Doctor Lorrance myself,” she went on to the owl. “Don’t think I won’t.”
Lucas noticed that his hands were starting to shake and beads of sweat slipped down his back. At the same time, he was shivering. His mother wiped his forehead with the palm of her hand.
“My little boy,” she said. “I don’t know what we would do without one another.”
“I’m feeling tired,” Lucas said as he felt his body being pulled to the sheets. “More than usual.”
“It’s because you were out galavanting with that awful boy. He’s obviously a thug.”
“He doesn’t seem so bad.”
“You’ll see,” his mother told him as she went to the door. “You’ll find out they’re all bad.” She closed the door, leaving several inches of gap.
Lucas was nearly asleep when he heard Strix say, “Lucas, we know you’re tired but we would like to speak with you briefly.”
“What is it?” Lucas asked, sliding open just one eye.
“We’d prefer you didn’t go to school tomorrow.”
“I’d prefer not going too, but what makes tomorrow so special?”
“Lucas, you should take the day off tomorrow.”
“I wanted to talk to Morgan about what happened.”
“Meet him after school,” said Strix. “We strongly suggest you tell your mother you’re feeling more ill than usual.”
“Why?”
“It’s a matter of your safety, Lucas.”
“My safety? What’s supposed to happen to me?”
“We’re trying to spare you a great degree of unpleasantness.”
“I’m going,” said Lucas before turning his body away from Strix. “I’m not afraid. Everyday at that place is hell. It never changes. I’m not scared.”
…
Chapter 8
Nox Jaborosa
One of Blaise Lorrance’s less celebrated but critical inventions siphoned the compression waves of pounding ocean sound into towers shaped like stretched conch shells. Each stood perhaps four building stories tall and dozens were strewn up and down New Mountain to the Bastion like strands of Christmas lights. The spiraling architecture resonated with the howling ocean so precisely that they were the equivalent of black holes for sound.
Without them, the scream from even an unremarkable storm could mean instant brain damage, the kind where one collapsed into seizures, drooling and ears bleeding.
The structures, forged in the great scientist’s special titanium alloy, hadn’t rusted a flake in all the years. Lucas always called them the twisted seashells and he could see one from his bedroom window, in the run-down park across the street.
In the morning, he was up early, watching a few of the neighborhood boys spray graffiti on the tower’s base.
He heard Strix tell him, “Please Lucas. You can save yourself a great deal of trouble if you simply stay home from school today.”
“I already told you…” He said as he struggled to pull himself out of bed. Beads of sweat were already forming on his forehead. “I may look scared. I may even be scared. But I’m not living my life scared.”
“Since there is no reasoning with you, please be careful today, Lucas.”
He got dressed and on his way out, told Strix, “They’re after me everyday. Today is no different. What happens happens.”
“The line between bravery and stupidity is a fine one,” said Strix.
…
The school day proceeded in an ordinary way, with Lucas mostly ignored and given a few feet of distance by the other students. Many had heard rumors of Lucas’s mysterious illness and its potential to spread. So they mostly averted their eyes from his pale acned face and focused on one another.
On the way out, he noticed the same group of boys that had become unpleasantly familiar. Nox Jaborosa’s troop was skulking by one of the sound-absorbing Lorrance towers next to the campus. They were grinding and snorting government-issued anxiety pills, with all four sets of their eyes rust red. The boys sneezed and coughed as they slurped the powder into their noses.
Nox and his friends formed a circle around something that interested them, poking it with sticks and jumping backward when it moved. The group laughed and hollered at the thing as it flipped and squirmed around in the grass.
The nearly six-foot electric eel had somehow been sent into the air by one of the waves, thrown clear over the Bastion to have its fall broken by one of the campus trees. Electric eels were historically fresh water fish but the ever-warming waters and changing landmasses had expanded their habitat.
The leader of the group of boys, Nox Jaborosa, was the most brutal with the creature. The other boys had been taken over by mostly curiosity but his interest was purely sadistic. He started to wrap the eel up on the end of his stick as the animal squirmed and hissed.
Whatever plan he had with the eel was immediately forgotten when he saw Lucas walking across the schoolyard.
Nox inhaled one last line of powder and rose up like a cobra. He pointed at Lucas and started to laugh, a booming shrill chuckle distorted by the drug. The others didn’t seem as intoxicated, but they joined him in laughter.
“It’s that walking pile of mucus, Lucas!” Nox shouted with the whites of his eyes red and his pupils swollen over his irises. “I was thinking about you, bitch tits!”
This sort of harassment wasn’t anything unusual and Lucas ignored the group as he passed.
“Don’t you dare ignore me!” Nox cried out. He started after him with the other boys following. “Come here, you sperm whale! We’re just trying to be friendly!”
When they caught up to Lucas, he found himself quickly surrounded. Nox Jaborosa shot a vicious poke with his index finger that landed in the middle of Lucas’s chest. The pain made him wince.
“You got some nice titties, Lucas Mucus,” said Nox. “You even got cleavage!” Nox was taken over by a thought that showed itself as pure menace in his face. He shifted his eyes over to the Lorrance tower. Then a smile nucleated in the left side of his mouth. “I got an idea for you, cleavage boy,” he told Lucas.
Two of the other boys grabbed Lucas’s arms from behind. Nox held him by the hair, pulling him toward the fifty-foot seashell tower. He tried to hold his ground but all four boys were too strong.
“Aren’t you going to scream or call for help?” Nox asked, tugging harder on Lucas’s hair.
“Go to hell,” Lucas grumbled.
“You disgusting turd. You smell like forty varieties of crotch rot. Go on, call to someone,” Nox went on. “See if anyone will help you. You’re so gross, no one wants to even look at you!”
There were other students around the yard but they were all making an effort to look in the other direction and not get involved.
“No thanks,” said Lucas. “I don’t need help.”
“Shit, we got a real tough guy here,” commented one of the other boys as they reached the tower.
They held Lucas against the titanium by the arms, neck and hair. One of the boys took out a homemade lock pick and began trying to open the lock on the tower’s maintenance door. A sign on the door read: Do Not Enter: Hazardous noise and decibel levels inside. Wear ear protection.
The group got the door open, pushing Lucas inside the hollow tower.
Inside, it felt like a hurricane straight to the face. The crashing and hissing of the ocean was so loud that Lucas felt the vibrations shaking his jaw. His ears nearly burned at the noise. He pressed his hands to his ears as hard as he could.
When the door shut, he found himself in near total darkness. Only a pinhole of light made its way down from the top of the fifty-foot tower. When Lucas’s eyes finally adjusted, Nox was staring right at him.
“I love it in here!” Nox screamed so hard that his voice cracked. “It traps the noise. That means nobody can hear shit outside and we have total privacy.”
Nox gestured to his friend, who wiggled the electric eel out of a bucket and onto the end of a stick. He was careful not to touch the thing. Then Nox grabbed the collar of Lucas’s shirt, pulling it down and sending the buttons flying. He ripped off the rest of Lucas’s clothes until he was down to his underwear.
Nox laughed at Lucas’s body. “It’s even more disgusting than I thought it would be,” he said, taking the stick with the electric eel on the end. “You look more like a manatee than a human. I love your tits though.”
Nox held the electric eel to Lucas’s face. The animal hissed and squirmed on the stick. Crackles, like tiny firecrackers, went off all over its body.
Break the Bastion Page 5
