by Marlin Grail
I’m not being fair. He did try to teach me. I just didn’t want to learn. I let out another muttered curse. My irritation has me going in circular thinking.
Ashton’s first hotwiring in this apocalypse happened after the car we took from our house got…destroyed…during the beginning months. I immediately think of my bandmates. Most of them anyways.
Thanks, Kary, Opal, and Reggie. You all won’t know my mocking voice anymore, but thanks for that.
Overtime, as I bring up memories of Ashton and me during this apocalypse, I ridicule myself more. But in a teasing manner.
“He had perks on so many things. Ashton saved our status as successful survivors with many of the things he knew.”
I find a way to laugh to myself about our past as the duo that overcame many predicaments. It’s no surprise this has lightened up my mind, clearing up my conscious enough for me to recall Tanner’s tweezers.
He left it on the ground behind me. I pick them up, seeing their fine tips could certainly substitute as the screwdriver.
I’m not proud of what I had to do. Some might say I was still controlling with a soft touch, because I didn’t demand the one with the keys to give them up. Clearly, whoever they were, had been too frightened to climb in their jeep and drive off.
I’m not proud I put that much fear in them, in all of them, but I did what I had to do.
The first screw is clunky. It’s truly not an easy task with these long and thin tweezers. When turning them to loosen, every now and then, my fatigued fingers drop the tweezers, but I work to pick them right back up.
It happens a second time, then a third time.
I’ve prided myself in self-control, but this time around, thinking of the three seconds, four seconds, then the ten seconds I spend picking back up the tweezers, resituating my wounded thigh from being jabbed by the driver seat frame, and thinking of the time being lost to get closer to my people, I exhale a vehement growl.
I use the same hand holding the tweezers to continuously rub my forehead, wiping the remaining liquid from the time spent in the sewers off my hair. It’s flaked and dried, but the fire where Tanner’s people congregated is liquefying it again.
I’m likely lying to myself, because the flame inside me, the bottling anxiety from feeling I’m wasting my time, is likely the reason it’s boiling my sewer hair. I don’t work with hate in my vocabulary, but I hate having sewer hair.
The first screw comes undone. Then the second screw is up next. I should feel I’m prevailing, but, watching it fall, I can’t feel successful.
This is futile. What are you going to do when you get the compartment open? You can do many things with optimism. But, a car doesn’t run on optimism. It runs on machinery. An engine is cold, even if hot from the ignition. Humans built cars on optimism, but when the machine was finished, it gradually forgot how it came about.
Humanity’s optimism to create something eventually gets forgotten.
These emotions make me feel I’m doing it wrong. That I’m wrong in not knowing how to hotwire a damned car. All of it bubbles and I even start to resent Kary, Opal, and Reggie—those bandmates from a life before—when I remember them sabotaging me and Ashton’s car.
I stop feeling elegant control. “The hell with this.” I look at my tweezers. When I squeeze them shut, I see the fine tip is straight enough to use as an ignition key.
Passion is what made an engine come to creation. Passion, and brute force when putting together the pieces.
Could I be this close on the verge of losing hope? Especially when I jam in these tweezers, considering them as my last hope to turning this jeep on? They maneuver the clutter from what’s in this ignition, trying to deepen. I’m trying my hardest not to let my breathing snap into a snarl of anger.
The tweezers neither have the width or capability in strength to turn the ignition upward.
Nothing.
Much of this has failed. So does my withheld rage. I bash the steering wheel with both of my hands, hoping, in some way, it draws something new to change where I sit, where I stew in self-disappointment. Like the jeep’s off position, nothing changes.
I remain where I slouch, where my head rests on the car horn, and all I can think is, “There goes more time wasted.”
The fire crackles its dance. There is nothing different than after I ran those people off. I’m fortuitous to know people aren’t the problem anymore for me. The problem is now I wish at least one of them would come back, so I can get the answer I thought I would, before my meditative state completely brushed off the urgent need to know the whereabouts of those helicopters.
You lost yourself, Gary. What are you becoming?
Chapter XLIII
I moan solemnly when lifting my head back up. I lay it against the head rest of the driver seat. My eyes focus on the molded-in wording and symbol of this car’s model and trademark on the air horn. My fingers smooth the grooves of the mold, while I wonder to one thing.
Was Claw, Feral, Ominous, Grim all normal at one point in time? The more I apply my abilities in life, the more seductive the power feels. I begin to want to feel it longer, where I have no care in the world besides what I see before me.
What happens if I start to forget, or care, about my people?
The very question jolts my fingers to form a fist. I smack the air horn alive from several pounds to it.
“No!” I shriek in fury, and in denial.
I want to care! I want them in my life!
This is the first time in a long time where I have just myself to steer the ship of destiny. A 360° passage I can freely navigate, anywhere I’m willing to risk being the right way to those helicopters. Only this time, I want to know where I’m going.
Risk is what drove us to the shelter, and risk is what we took breaking out of Claw’s infrastructure.
This time around, I want to know exactly what’s ahead. As much as this captain wants the ship to stay in place, it drifts afloat. Either reaching a destination, or crashing.
Gary, you know what is left to try.
I suck my lips inward, flaring my nostrils from a lack of emotional stability or being centered with myself. Though, I still am in control of how to make a full-on conversation with just my voice.
“Risking your sanity again is all you have left to do the sane action.”
“Is it really the best choice?” the infuriated part of me comes about asking.
The dispirited side pants for a defense, but can’t. “They’re counting on you to find out where exactly they are.”
There’s no other voice to pitch in. Thinking about how I’m creating a contending argument with myself to spark and cease it, I couldn’t be any more aware of this insanity unfurling.
Look at you. Arguing with yourself.
My thigh’s internal hurt erupts. It’s proof again that there is a mind-body connection. Because pain is pain, regardless of where it is located.
And embracing pain offers a chance of happiness. The chamber to the gun that aims at life gives opportunity of luxury in peace. Take this chance, Gary. Summon a haze.
Though no hazes made themselves present during my conjuring of the undead, I won’t let that deter me. Which means I have to meditate and welcome them more than I believe I can, believe I could ever accept and embrace them as part of life.
Just entrust, if you lose your sanity from this, you’ll remember it came with good intentions.
I’ve already closed my eyes, mostly to fight and resist off the pool of tears. They’re tears full of hopelessness, and are wanting to become a waterfall. Now that sensation to cry drains away, as I purposefully log out as Gary, the man with a care for all. I log into Gary the haze collector.
His one and only endeavor is to send out the vibrations from hazes to find him.
We find each other. If we didn’t, then we couldn’t be one. We couldn’t be together, you and me. Engulf me in your darkness, because we are one of the same. Take me in…
Without
consciously being aware, my mouth chants a little phrase of endearment to the hazes. I notice my concentration has significantly improved since the last ten minutes. It’s faster than I could possibly fall asleep, but it’s the quickest I’ve ever felt in a dream, a lucid one where I’m light as a cloud, and as dark as a haze cloud.
The symmetry and significance comes lighter than a feather in my head. It comes more fluently than a song I’ve ever started in the spur of the moment. I picture the air-pollution coming into my body, breathing out as visible haze. My mouth is an active volcano; one not stopping dark smoke from leaving it.
Then, it dawns on me.
It’s worked.
Without having to open up my eyes, I know this jeep, with its convertible roof down, is completely covered. I won’t see that air horn, nor its molded logo and text, anymore. Nothing within less than a foot of me will be visible.
The cold gusts of what feels like wind is complicated. It’s circling my arms like a miniature railway system flowing in intricate paths all around me.
I’ve done it. I’ve brought a haze to me, while sitting in this jeep.
I’m speechless to make any noise externally, because, while I’ve succeeded in drawing in a near haze, it means I’ve once again shown my abnormality to myself. I sit here silently, suffering shivers from the cold gusts created from the haze. I could be lying to myself about that being the cause for my shivers.
What’s going to happen to me?
I begin mentally calling for the phantom’s voice, somewhat surprised it didn’t greet me first. “Come through.”
A response doesn’t follow after seconds of leaving my mental words at those two, emboldening and loudening ever more, until I hear its untroubled voice bounce back.
It’s normal in its cadence, metallic in the slapping of its delayed voice, however, never has its words been invasive on one thing.
My hunger for equal revenge on all of C.F.O.G.
What I hear next, however, shocks me.
“Ominous is ready for alliance, and you will find your people where he tells you to go.”
Chapter XLIV
(Lissie)
I know I’ve been ticking off Will and Ashton with my incessant sniffling. The mucus running down my nose continuously reminds me it’s not from a cold. It’s from Gary. Janice and I are on the same page, both of us bouncing our shoulders up and down in response to the crying we share, as we sit in this transport.
Hannibal sits between us girls, and he makes stressed exhales in obvious discomfort.
I couldn’t care less about him rubbing the back of his neck. Nor do I care that is probably from the awkwardness he feels as Janice and I squish him in-between our grief.
I notice Janice try and wrap herself around his body. It’s clear to me it’s so she has someone to soothe her sorrow.
Except Hannibal denies her as he politely brushes her hands away. “I don’t deserve your kindness.” He deems he’s not to be granted that level of compassion. Comparing both of our crying and sticky faces to his, there are no signs he wants to grieve his own losses.
Men. They never want to show their emotions. Gary did the same, but I still could see so much of the strongly felt feelings beneath his skin. Maybe Hannibal is just better at pretending than Gary was. Or Gary was just no ordinary man. I…loved…him because he knew balance.
Tearing my thoughts from my lost love, I see Will is quiet. His hand cups his mouth while he looks out his transport’s window. He’s staring at the functioning haze cloud that masks our helicopters.
Ashton sits beside Will. His broken foot is extended, no bent angle at his knee whatsoever. But he is angry enough to bend Hannibal to obediently answer his interrogation.
Surprisingly, Hannibal puts up no resistance.
It’s Ashton’s most recent question I’m intensively focused on, enough for me to stare at Hannibal’s jaw through glassy-eyes. I watch it tense when he can’t immediately answer where we’re going.
I can tell it’s because he doesn’t know.
Men. They’re always difficult with just being open and honest when they obviously don’t know something. Gary knew how to be what Hannibal can’t be. Honest. And, he also didn’t need someone prying for an answer. Gary could be stubborn in not allowing himself to be cornered like that.
Gary…
My thoughts can’t stop from circling back to Gary. I have to look down and wipe my eyes on my sleeve when they’ve grown so glassy I can no longer see Hannibal’s jaw.
Just when I believe my heart is just starting to put itself back together, it falls apart. It showers the world with tears, shattering any budding hope I have that I’ll get past this.
“You’ll know you’ve gotten past it—just a tiny bit—when you can think of his name without bawling.”
It’s what’s been looping in my head. It’s my hope—all I have left now.
I feel that certainty weaken further though, as Janice wipes her eyes dry, while I wipe my own just to make room for them to overflow with tears again.
I was his girlfriend. Of course I shouldn’t be embarrassed in the least bit when mourning over his…
I just can’t think the word. Not yet.
I told myself earlier today I would stop being a bitch to the ones I care about, Janice being one of them, and, here I catch my face from falling entirely to my lap. I feel like a disgrace just from thinking I’m being bitchy over Janice finishing her tears before mine.
You deserve this time, Lissie. We’re not leaving this helicopter for a while. I’d imagine—
Suddenly, the cockpit comes to life with one of our pilots shouting, “Hannibal, we’ve got radio contact!”
Hannibal seems relieved to have something else to distract him from feeling at a loss with Ashton. He straightens his back. “With the Dogs following us now?”
There is something in his authoritative tone, an instinctive thought that his pilots wouldn’t have to shout this at us if it wasn’t something they could handle on their own.
“No!” the pilot responds. He then begins to make inaudible speech with the other pilot. But it clearly sounds like a question he had for the copilot. The pilot then glances back at Hannibal. “It’s from the three yesterday!”
My reflexes result in stretched arms touching Hannibal. “Did Gary leave with three—”
He shakes his head, a mouth full of sympathy. “I’m sorry, but no.”
He lacks bravery to look me further in the eye. It’s likely the intimidation rolling through me for Hannibal to attack my lingering hope. His quick answer deals it a hard blow.
I want Gary alive. I want him alive. He’s alive. I don’t know how, or when the time will come, but when it becomes clear what happened, there’s no doubt I’ll rejoice like a fool. The kind of giddy fool he’ll want to see.
It’ll be the most caring and thoughtful behavior I’ve ever shown anybody.
The bubble of hope Hannibal burst stays down, but not because it was destroyed by him. It’s because he gives reason to not shield myself off, when it affects each and every one of us equally.
“Three of our helicopters were taken without authorization,” Hannibal explains. “And, we classified it as a collaborative escape by some of our officers and personnel.”
This is when Will snaps away from his window, and entirely fixates to the conversation. However, there’s rising hostility in his tone. “Escape? The hell were they escaping from?”
Chapter XLV
Hannibal can’t make eye contact with anybody anymore. He uses his hands’ gestures as a means to defuse the friction. Will cocks his head in apparent wariness to what Hannibal has to say.
“Just, please listen,” Hannibal strains in nervousness. “Those who fled weren’t running from something bad. I swear. I believe they were just…tired of the overall mission, and they couldn’t let me know they were tired.”
My own suspicion rises, like Will’s. I cross my arms, letting a finger lift and wipe an irritable
tear or two as I charge in with my own line of questioning.
“What were they tired of? Why didn’t they feel comfortable just telling you they’re done? What was so bad they felt they had to escape?”
I bitch in the defense for my people. This affects us equally. I won’t stir the pot of helplessness by not doing, or saying, anything productive.
Hannibal starts to get agitated. His tone is curt. “You have no idea how much was at stake, and how important the long-haul was for me.”
Janice scoffs. “You think losing our friend, her partner, wasn’t just as high in stakes as whatever you’d been doing at that area?”
We both give him the scornful look women can bring on any man, equal to hellfire and brimstone. Hannibal turns his head back and forth between us, surely trying to comprehend how he’s on the losing side, even when we ride in his helicopter.
He’s shown, day one in his new life as a survivor, that pressure isn’t what he can presently endure. The pressure of knowing people, not workers, look at him. Not as a boss, not head to a secret agency project, but just a person that gives what they can for his and our survival.
Hannibal houses his face from the both of ours with his hands. He attempts to block off and center everything emotionally, like back before the pilots brought in this bit of news.
“Okay. Okay, I know it’s not sounding good. I won’t disregard what you’re worried about, but they’re contacting us for a reason—which means they don’t want to be hidden.”
His posture, still perfect, and the slick curve of his back matches his tone is sign he’s becoming full of purpose again. “What do they want?” he asks the pilot.
Will, Janice, Ashton, and myself are freely expressing suspicion all around. Considering Hannibal hasn’t tried throwing us out of his helicopter, a response I could picture he’d do if we were getting too close to a secret, means something positive.
