His thoughts were interrupted when the cell phone in his pocket rang. He slid it out of his front pocket and hit the green button as he raised it to his ear.
“This is David. How can I help you?”
“Uh,” the voice on the other side hesitated. “This is the woman from earlier. Well… Uh… I think someone is following me.”
“Give me a minute,” he told her as he pulled over to a parking space in front of a dark coffee shop. Throwing the transmission into park, he closed his eyes and asked. “Where are you currently at?”
“Huh, at?” She sounded flustered. “I’m driving on Monroe Avenue and I… just crossed over 7th street.”
“OK,” he said, letting his vision stray almost in the same way someone who had an out-of-body experience drifted over their body, but faster and in the direction he commanded it to. Soon he found Susan cruising around in her blue Porsche, and right behind it was a brand new bright red Camaro tailing her. There were two dark figures in the car. He used his unique vision to peer into the car, and what he saw made him gasp.
“OK,” he paused for a second, trying to remove the fear from his voice. “Just keep driving like you normally would, and I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Yeah, but…”
He cut her off with a hard press of the red key. This is bad David thought, really bad.
***
Susan was nervous behind the wheel of her customized Porsche. She knew she could probably outrun their car, but something just wasn’t right about this whole night. Every time she glanced back into the rear view mirror to see the two looming figures in the red car she felt chills run up her spine.
And that damn man, the deal breaker, she didn’t even know why she called him instead of the police. Cause he protected me from one weirdo tonight, so what’s two more, her mind whispered. “Shut up.” she said out loud since her brain was obviously against her. “I called him over ten minutes ago. If he’s some hero were the hell is…”
A loud crash from behind cut off her dialog with herself. She slammed on the brakes, and when the car screeched to a halt, she threw open her door to find out what the hell that was all about. Before her eyes laid a mesh of black and red metal, with glass scattered all about, protruding from the side of a gray granite building like it was a piece of pop art. She couldn’t believe the reality of the situation, especially since the passengers of the caved in car were frantically trying to get out of the vehicle. They should be really hurt she thought, they should get a lawyer like me to sue the hell out of the driver of that SUV, but they looked better then all right the way they were prying their bodies through the twisted space that use-to-be the windshield.
“What the hell are you doing?” David Fallow shouted at her from a hundred feet away.
“That was you?” She asked as he reached her.
“Who did you think it was? Your fairy godmother? Yes it was me, and we need to get out of here.”
“But those people are hurt.” She said tonelessly.
“Those aren’t people, look,” he pointed, and she looked. She saw the two figures in tattered black robes with only a few scratches that were caused by them pulling themselves through the jagged space. They seemed to heal as she watched them. “Can humans do that?”
“No,” she replied.
“Then drive,” he told her getting into her passenger seat.
Taking her eyes from the two, she ducked them into the door, focused them on the road ahead, and drove.
After staring at the windshield and the dimly lit city beyond it for a while, David suddenly spoke. “Make a left here.”
“What?” that snapped her out of her driving daze and into a kind of road rage. “Why?”
“I’m giving you directions to a place where I think we’ll be safe.”
“What about my house?” She screamed.
“Look, obviously they are targeting you, so I kind of doubt that your home is a safe place to go to right now.” At that comment something snapped inside of her, and she slammed on the brakes, nearly sending David’s head flying through the windshield. “Hey what was that for?”
“I’m not driving another god damn mile until you tell me what’s going on. Who those people are? And why the hell they’re after me?”
He looked at her for a second, still braced against the dash from the sudden stop, and finally sighed. “OK, I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to keep in mind everything that has happened tonight.”
She eyed him warily. “OK.”
“Then for the love of God get moving. I’ll tell you on the way there.”
She lifted her foot off the brake and slowly applied pressure to the gas almost as if she didn’t trust him to keep his end of the bargain.
“So where are we headed to?”
“To a business associate of mine. A man known as the Alchemist.”
“The Alchemist? What sort of name is that?”
David groaned. “That doesn’t matter. What does is the fact that his place is the safest place I know in the area. Do you or do you not want to know who and why they are following you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Please continue.”
“Make a left here. As I was saying before, deal makers are contractors who pursue people to sign contracts to sell their…”
“Souls?” Susan interrupted. “Sorry this is just so weird, what else would this deal makers want?”
“You’re not too far off, but what they really want is body parts.”
“What? To eat or what?” She said briefly taking her eyes off the road and looking at David in disbelief.
David had to wonder if they really did want this blond ditzy brain or even if she was a lawyer.
“No, not to eat, they acquire these body parts so inhabitants of the nether realm or what you would probably call demons can walk in this world.”
He was expecting another question this time, so he paused and gave her time to think about it.
“So if they take a vital body part how does the person live?” She asked.
“Well the contract has certain properties, call it magic for a lack of a better term, that gives the organ donor, what we call someone who signs a contract, sort of a ghost body that can replace the donated part until a suitable replacement can be obtained.”
“You mean…”
“Yes,” he cut her off for once. “The organ donor has to find the same sort of tissue in a living or dead person and take it into their bodies.”
“Eww,” her face cringed. “Who would want that?”
“Well there are certain perks to being an organ donor, the first being immortality. And the second is the power to manipulate the organ that you gave away and in some cases that part in others.”
“OK, tell me right now why I shouldn’t pull over right away so I can sign away my perfect breasts for ones that I can control.”
He looked at her 32D breasts for a second before saying, “your breasts aren’t your best organ.”
He liked the fact she was sharp enough that she figured out that they were after her ‘best’ trait. What he didn’t like was the fact she slammed on the brakes again, but at least he had his seat belt on this time.
“What are you talking about? What better organ could they want from me?”
He was amazed how dense the girl was, but the fact that she hadn’t completely fell apart made him believe that his guess was right.
“First of all I’ve never heard of a deal maker contracting a pair of breasts. I know someone’s skin, but never just the breast. And second, it’s not your breast that made you the youngest junior partner in the firm’s history, although they might have helped.”
“Full within the next year if I win my next few cases.” She commented.
“And you probably will and not because of your breasts, but your brain.”
“So you think they want my brain?” She pondered. “And the associated powers with that would be mind reading, mind control, and maybe even other ESP abili
ties. So what would the down side of this be exactly, besides having to eat brains like a zombie?”
“Believe or not, immortality, seeing friends and family grow old and die can make you yearn for death. Then there’s the whole karma thing, cause immortality doesn’t mean you’re immortal, as you saw with the supposedly immortal deal maker in your office tonight, and depending on what sort of karma you accumulated in your life you either go to paradise, get another chance, or hang with the demons. And I’ve seen the kind of blood baths they throw.”
“So I just do good until I become mortal again or some dumbass decides to burn me at the stake.”
“That would be great, if you didn’t take into account that when a dealmaker sells your contract to a demon both the nature of the demon and the karma it collects affects you. And trust me it’s much easier for a demon to rack up negative karma then it is for you to get the positive kind.”
“Ok, I get it, bad all around.” She grumbled and started to drive again.
“Bingo, take a right up here.” He directed her. “We’ll be there soon, do you have any other questions?”
“Yeah, what’s this Alchemist guy like?”
“He’s a dirty old man.” He said with a straight face.
“Great,” she replied, sarcastically at first, then. “At least he’ll think by breasts are my best feature.”
***
Standing outside of the Alchemist’s steel reinforced entrance the pair heard a raspy voice over the intercom’s static.
“So along with a few extra contracts you brought a treat.”
“See,” she commented to him.
He pressed the button to reply to the Letch. “No I just didn’t want a zombie master roaming the streets.”
“Zombie master?” she asked after he took his finger off the button.
“That’s what we call brain donors.”
“That’s fitting,” she said, then the door slid open, and David led her down a long, narrow corridor to another metal door. It opened to reveal a humpbacked, bald, wrinkled faced old man dressed in gray sweats.
“So where’s the goods,” the old man’s droopy eyes rose up to Susan’s chest. “And I don’t mean those, babe.”
“Right here,” David said pulling the documents out of his pockets. “Along with several others.”
He took the papers in his bony hands, they were yellowed with age and rolled up and sealed with a blood red wax stamp. “I’ll put this one in the client’s box and put the rest in storage for later inspection.”
“Eww,” Susan squealed as the old perv smacked her on the ass on his way out of the bleak bunker-like room. After he was gone Susan turned to David and asked. “What’s the deal with the contract? I mean, I know the deal with them but why did you take them, and why hand them over to the geezer?”
David’s metallic coloured eyes shifted to the corner of his eyes to look down at her. “I’m a deal breaker. That basically means that organ donors hire me to recover their contracts. And as for the old man, he used to be a deal maker. So he knows the ins and outs of the contracts, including how to break them.”
“Hmm…” she thought about it. “So how exactly…”
Before she could finish, the Alchemist came bursting out of the door. “You dumb son of a bitch, what have you done?”
“What?” David asked.
“Follow me.” He told them, leading them through the still open door. He shuffled them along another narrow corridor until they reached a small room filled with electronics. Susan scanned the room seeing devices that looked like life support machines and others she had no clue what purpose they could have. “That.” The old man jerked his scarecrow finger at a small black and white monitor.
“Shit,” David muttered when he saw the bubble shaped screen.
“What?” Susan said, trying to get a better view in the crowded room. On the screen she saw two figures, one a bald man with pointy features and the other had long dark hair and judging from the size and shape was probably female. Both of them were in black robes. “Is that who I think it is?”
“And you brought them here!” The old man cried. “Never in a million years did I think that you were stupid enough to let yourself get followed here.”
“We weren’t!” David screamed. “They must have been tracking her somehow.”
“Great,” the geezer threw up his arms. “What now?”
“I guess I’ll take a look into it.” David answered.
“It,” the man looked stoic as he thought. “I guess I’ll get you a fresh pair for when you’re done.” With that said, the Alchemist exited the room.
“Look into what?” She asked.
“Shh,” David told her as he bent down to one knee and closed his eyes. “I need to concentrate.”
So she stood there waiting. Waiting there with nothing to do, bored she looked around the room again trying to find some gauge or label that would give her a clue of what the mysterious machines did. That was until she smelt something burning. Frantically she inspected the room expecting to see the start of an electrical fire. Very soon into her search she caught the sight of smoke from the corner of her eye, but when she looked down to the source of the smoke she could barely speak.
“Dav-i-id, yo-our e-e-eyes are smoking-ng.”
His face was twisted in pain as the smoke leaked out from beneath his lids.
“Please just be quiet for a few more minutes.”
So she did as he said, though it tortured her some to see him in such pain. Sometime before David stood up the Alchemist must have snuck in, because as he rose the man said, “here” and handed David a cylindrical container.
“Thanks,” David took the container and raised the lid, white gas spilled out along with two round objects, which he picked up. Opening his eyelids a silver-white film slipped down his cheeks like tears, and in the vacant spots where those steel gray eyes once where he popped in the two orbs. After doing an obvious vision correction, he looked at Susan with his sickly dull green irises. “Yeah I know. Gross.” He wiped the substance on his cheeks off with a moist towelett.
“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” she said wiping the look of astonishment off her face. “I just realized that you must have made a deal with one of those guys.”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “But that’s a tale for another day. Now we have to prepare for them.”
“How?”
He sighed. “Unfortunately the only way for you to survive is for you to sign the contract.”
“What?” Susan protested. “I thought we were trying to avoid that?”
“I know, but if you don’t let the Alchemist do the deal, they will, probably after driving you insane.”
She took a deep breath. “OK.”
“Hey old man, go get that blank contract and emergency gear.” David asked him, and he went.
“While we’re waiting can you tell me what was with your… eyes?” Susan wondered.
“As you guessed, I made a deal for my eyes. So I can pretty much see anything I want to.”
“Does that include the future?”
“Not exactly.” He thought how best to explain this to her. “You see in the realm of light there is this device that shows the outcome of any action taken. Fortunately it takes so little…” He paused to try to find the right word for it. “Presence, I guess is the best word. It just takes me looking into it for it to activate all the different possible outcomes to any actions I might take. The unfortunate thing is, that I still have too dark of karma to watch the device for more than a few minutes without my eyes dissolving.”
“What did you do that was so bad?”
“Some of the things were the demon’s influence over me, but most of it was just me gone mad with power.” he sorrowfully said. “But again, now’s not the time for old stories.”
They stood in silence until the Alchemist came back. “Shall we get started?”
No one spoke, but Susan shook her head yes. The old man unro
lled the yellow paper to reveal red writing in some weird dead language. “So what do I do?”
“Just sign.” He offered her a feathered pen.
“That’s it?” She asked, and when the old man rattled his skull in response, she took up the pen and signed. “Nothing happened.”
“Wait a minute,” the Alchemist said rolling the contract up. With a small knife he slits the pad of his thumb and lets the blood drip onto the yellow paper. When the blood hit the paper it begun to create the seal and that’s when Susan head begins to throb. Soon the pounding seemed to radiate red ribbons of light that streamed from her head and poured into the seal adding to its solidity.
“What happened?” she asked. “Besides a slight headache I don’t feel any different.”
“Here, eat this and tell me how you feel.” He said placing a bowl of gray-greenish gloo in front of her.
“Is this what I think it is?” She asked.
“Just eat it and don’t think about it?” David told her.
“Fine,” she said digging into the contents of the bowl.
She’s surprised to find that she likes the taste and finishes the bowl in a matter of seconds. At first just her headache lifts, then she could feel the control she had over her nerves, mind, and body. She played with her hand for a while, moving it at considerable speeds while watching it move in slow motion.
“Neat. So how do I fit into this plan of yours?”
“Well,” he said inspecting his revolver. “When they break through the door I’ll take down the deal maker first. That’ll leave just the she-demon. She’ll be too fast for even me to hit, so I’ll need you to hold her in place for just a couple of seconds.”
She was nervous about this plan, but because of the change in her, she knew she could do it. “Alright.”
“Now here’s the important part. As soon as the bullet hits her, you’ll need to get away from her or else you’ll get caught in the fire.”
“Wait a minute,” she protested. “I just got these powers and you expect me to be able to be that precise.”
The Spinetinglers Anthology 2011 Page 29
