by Schow, Ryan
When I wake up, it’s to eat dinner. Where the hell did five hours go?! An hour later I’m eating dinner thinking I can’t even look at the dojo, much less go back. At seven o’clock, Netty and I show up for adult classes.
She works out. I watch.
This class is nothing like my sessions earlier that day. The students work on self-defenses: the defense against a rear naked choke; two defenses against a head-lock; one defense against a thrusting knife attack. After class, Sensei Naygel stretches me and, to be honest, everything is sore and stiff, but this time the stretching feels good.
When we’re done, he says, “See you tomorrow morning at eight.” I tell him yes, but in my head I’m thinking, uh yeah, that’s debatable.
The Early Years
1
Life in the Ukraine was Hell on Earth. Every day was a test of survival. No, it was worse. Hell might feel like paradise next to the Ukraine.
Arabelle Diederich was eleven when Olga Eltsina and her parents moved onto the property next door. She and Olga never spoke. Olga was a mute. A five or six or seven year old mongrel with ratty hair and small, ugly eyes who never uttered one single word. At least not one Arabelle ever heard. Olga wore dirty clothes and had an unwashed face, which made sense the first time Arabelle saw her parents. They had the same look. Poverty was a common condition in the Ukraine, but Olga’s family’s situation seemed worse. Infinitely worse when you consider water in the Ukraine cost half the monthly income and Olga’s father, Alexander, used most of their water for his whiskey stills.
When faced with the decision to bathe or make potato whiskey, Olga’s papa chose the smellier, more alcoholic route. Her father said Olga’s papa was a selfish, irresponsible man who would rather drink fermented potato sweat than keep a clean family. Eventually everything Olga’s family did or said got under Arabelle’s father’s skin. The thing about her father was this: the man could seethe like no one she ever met. His hatred was a palpable thing. An obsessive thing.
In the back yard, not twenty feet from the potato stills bordering Eltsina property was Arabelle’s family garden. Her father tended to it day and night, working diligently in both its care and protection. If people stole their food, they’d starve. Simple as that. That’s why her father kept a bow and a quiver of arrows just inside the porch door. To shoot animals or trespassers. To her father, they were one and the same.
One sunny afternoon, six months after Olga’s family had been living next door, Arabelle watched Olga’s drunken father try to steal from their garden. She was playing on the porch when he started pulling up carrots. At the very same time the violation was registering in her mind, her father was shoving through the front door and taking aim with the bow and arrow. He drew back and shot the man in the right shoulder.
Arabelle gasped, paralyzed. She had seen her father shoot animals before, but not a human. She started crying.
Wordless, her father bounded down the steps, the bow and another arrow in hand.
“Papa!” Arabelle heard herself yell.
As he trudged out into the yard, he said something about how he was going to help the man off their property.
Arabelle was afraid of her father in moments like these. He looked ten feet tall as he stalked out into the garden. Like a giant she loved and feared. He got to the fallen man, leaned down to give him a hand, and that’s when Olga’s father’s arm came up with a pistol.
He shot Arabelle’s father in the face. Arabelle reeled in horror. Her heart stopped. And then her father’s body fell down dead in the dirt.
Arabelle’s mother raced through the front door, saw what was happening, grabbed the shovel on the side of the house and sprinted into the garden. She saw her dead husband, then she turned on the man who shot him.
Again, the man’s hand came up with the pistol, but his strength had sufficiently drained. Her mother kicked the pistol out of the way. Arabelle held her breath. A second later, her mother proceeded to beat Olga’s father nearly to death with the shovel. When Arabelle thought her mother was done, that Olga’s father was dead, the wounded man rolled his head ever so slightly and put a weary eye on her.
Arabelle ran to her mother, grabbed the sleeve of her shirt and tried to pull her away. To save her. Her mother shoved her off. Her mother was a ragged mess with her hair hanging in wisps in front of her face. And those eyes! How could they hold such pain and fury all at once? Her quick, harsh breathing sounded like a charging bull. Looking down at Arabelle, she said, “нет!” Meaning no.
Meaning stop.
Arabelle looked at her father’s ruined face. She looked at Olga’s beaten father. For weeks afterwards, she would have nightmares about the look in his eye. The one opened eye that looked slowly from her to her mother, then back to her again.
He was staring at her, expressionless, bleeding.
Arabelle’s mother turned her eyes on him, then on her dead husband, whose face was blasted and meaty with red ruin and death. Then, in a fit of grief and screaming rage, she jerked and tore the arrow from the man’s shoulder, then drove it deep into his throat. Olga was standing in the yard ten feet away, her eyes seeing everything.
The look on her face that day, it never left Arabelle’s mind.
Not ever.
Only much later in life did she realize that, one way or another, all children suffer. All children end up damaged. Aggrieved. They shouldn’t have to be, but just like she was meant to suffer, so the rest of the children of the world were meant to suffer as well.
The Boy and the Red Tide
1
Half the world away, in the central region of Denmark, inside the city of Låsby on the barely traveled road Jens Martin Knudsens Vej, a thirteen year old boy named Magnus Svendson stood staring into a field. With blonde hair and ocean blue eyes, and a precious face with effeminate features, you could hardly imagine the evil he was about to do.
Laser beam focus.
That’s what he had as he watched the cow grazing barely one hundred feet away. The animal’s head was buried in the lush grass of an uncut pasture. It suspected nothing.
Mangus reached out with his hand, palm to the sky, felt the force of his will connect with the cow’s. Its physical body shuttered involuntarily. His head rose and he walked a small half circle. Mangus narrowed his energy, made it a cone with the cow as his target. He felt his will overtake the cow’s will. The two wills merged, and he assumed full control of the beast.
Raising his hand, his mind fully controlling the cow’s field of energy, he elevated the animal. The strain was monumental. Physical power rushed into the momentary void and he felt high. No, he felt better than high. Drugs alone could not mimic the things Mangus felt. His entire body crackled with electricity. He felt blessed by God. Fortified by his own supernatural talents.
On a construction site the next road over, thirty-one year old Ryker Jørgensen blinked twice, then survived a brief but forceful sweep of vertigo. Quickly, he fished his new cell phone out of his pocket, zoomed the video camera in on the boy, then zoomed in even further on the levitated cow.
The animal rose from the fields and hung twenty feet in the air. Mooing loudly. Thrashing as much as the beast could while being suspended in mid-air.
While Ryker filmed Mangus, Mangus’s attention was solely on the cow. He found that once he pushed through the initial pairing of his mind to his target’s mind, his strength returned. He was able to hold the animal without expending much energy at all.
Powering up his mind, he envisioned the cow’s demise. Channeling all his energy and focus into one righteous burst of purified power, he squeezed his outstretched hand into an iron fist. One hundred feet away, twenty feet in the air, the cow’s entire center section broke and crumpled in, folding the beast violently in two.
Blood and gristle squished and blew out everywhere. A red tidal wave of rain sopped down onto the field as the squeezed cow hung dead in the air.
Unbeknownst to Mangus, Ryker Jørgensen captured the entire
nightmarish event on his camera phone.
Feeling supercharged, feeling the resurgence of his power, Mangus raised his other hand and mimicked tearing the cow in half. He thrust both his hands in opposite directions of each other with force. Mid-air, the cow was brutally ripped in half. A flop of meat soup rained down over the green field as the two halves of the cow were flung fifty feet in opposite directions.
Mangus shivered with joy.
Ryker, however, turned and fought the queasiness boiling inside him. Then he got into his truck, sped all the way home, and uploaded the video to YouTube.
Within minutes, Ryker’s posting showed a thousand hits. An hour later the count surpassed one hundred thousand.
Then, ten minutes after that, half a world away, the director of Richmond, California’s Monarch Enterprises received a phone call. He dispatched a team to the boy’s location. Like the young Canadian girl, Alice—the one who melted a child on the playground—a second mutant child surfaced.
His next call was to Dr. Cameron, who couldn’t be reached. After that it was Dr. Gerhard, but he too, was indisposed. Dr. Heim answered the phone surprising the Director thoroughly. He hadn’t heard a single thing about the man in a decade.
“Hello, my old friend,” the Director said to the mad, mad scientist. “I have wonderful news.”
Just Disappear Yourself Already
1
Christian Swann was no longer hiding. When he was ugly and in the press all the time, when he was Atticus Van Duyn—billionaire entrepreneur and owner of SocioSphere.com—the last thing he wanted was extra attention. Much less the paparazzi around all the time. Being that rich, that in-the-spotlight, it’s how everyone got to know yours and your family’s flaws. Certain people, man they loved to needle you. Like they took some sort of sadistic joy in humiliating you before a worldwide audience.
Some scumbag paparazzi clown, he could take ten terrific photos of you, and it would be that one horrible photo that made the cover of Enquirer. The one with your mouth full of food. Your finger in your ear really taking care of business. That embarrassing picture of you picking your underwear out of the damp crack of your ass. Even the hottest celebrities are photographed on the beach with flopping-out bellies and dimpled butt cheeks.
The point is, when you’re famous, you aren’t ever really safe. People are always taking shots at you. Trying to dismantle your reputation. There’s always some asshole giving it that blue ribbon effort to completely destroy you. Such was the life of the late Atticus Van Duyn.
But for Christian Swann, life was the opposite. Rolling through downtown Palo Alto in his Audi R8 was him enjoying his freedom. Women stared at him, he stared back; no one snapped his picture or asked him questions about anything. For the first time ever, he was handsome and available. And not famous.
And he wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
At the stop sign on South California Avenue and Park, this sexy as hell brunette in a bleached white Maserati pulled up next to him, rolled down her window and said, “Nice car.”
His windows were already down. He smiled and said, “Funny you said that, I was thinking the same about yours.”
With her styled socialite hair, her big Jackie O sunglasses and her requisite breast implants, the brunette asked Christian if he wanted to stop off for a drink and he was like, “I’m going to lunch with my wife. She’ll be disappointed if I’m late.”
“A good wife learns to live with the disappointments of her husband,” she said, pulling down her glasses to show him the sparkle in her eyes. “I’ll be fun, I promise.”
“That I don’t doubt,” he replied. “Perhaps another time.”
“Yes,” she said, making a mock-pouty face, “perhaps.” She then flashed him a sexy smile, gave him a nonchalant sort of country club wave, and drove straight while he turned left.
As he cruised down Park Boulevard thinking things like this never happened to him when he was Atticus, he checked the time and realized he was late. Five minutes late. With Margaret, one minute late was like five minutes late, and five minutes late might as well be thirty. Except when she wasn’t on time. Whenever she was late, she’d say she was “fashionably late,” and Atticus would stifle the need to call her a hypocrite.
She would say, “If you’re the first one there, no one notices, but when you’re the last to arrive, everyone looks.” She would say, “It’s simple math.”
The late Atticus would say nothing. Christian, on the other hand, would have plenty to say about the matter. Margaret had changed though as well. She was changing more and more by the day.
He cruised a few blocks down Park then took a right on Sheridan. He was planning on heading into the public parking garage off to the left when he saw an open parking space on the right just outside Caffe Riace’s courtyard entrance.
Margaret was waiting just under the green awning, smiling. God, she looked beautiful. She saw him and waved. He waved back.
Just like old times, he thought. Before they became hostile with each other. Before he got lost in his work and drove her to cheating.
Except he wasn’t himself anymore. He was better looking. More relaxed and personable. No longer a slave to his job, to his career, to the media. Neither was she the same woman he married. They were both different. He got out of his car, met Margaret with a kiss on the cheek.
“If not for the writer, I could fall in love with you all over again,” he said.
“Well now that I told him to pound sand, I just might let you.”
This was news to him.
Good news.
The way she was looking at him, treating him, it was like she completely forgot he used to be a bipedal slug.
She took his hand; he let her. Together they walked into the small plaza, and into what used to be their favorite lunch getaway: the gorgeous Caffe Riace.
Within moments they were taken to a table outside and handed menus. Christian mistakenly sat in full view of a pair of life-sized male statues. The men towered over the tables. They were stained in a bluish green—what designers would call a patina finish—and they donned helmets and shields. Other than that, the David-like statues were nude. As in, people were trying to eat and these guys’ dicks were just hanging out there as if to say, “Look at me while you eat your spaghetti.”
Christian tried not to look.
Finally, sarcastically, he said, “Something about looking at green cocks while I eat makes this the best place ever.”
Margaret laughed out loud, covering her mouth because it was a boisterous outburst, then said, “Do you want to switch places?”
“No,” Christian replied, his mood totally airy and playful. “It’s totally fine. Besides, I don’t want to compete with a couple of dicks for your attention.”
“You won’t need to,” she said with a giggle. “Especially now.”
“What do you mean, ‘especially now?’” he asked. But he knew exactly what she meant. He could see in her eyes how his new looks effected her.
“Fishing for compliments?” she teased.
“Perhaps.”
“You look insatiable.”
He was wearing expensive blue jeans, a stylish button up by French Laundry (two buttons open, the sleeves rolled), and leather Italian shoes of the more casual sort. He didn’t tell her he purchased the ensemble specifically for their date, nor did he tell her he just came from the salon, but he did. Even his unshaven face was left untouched for a reason. His hair stylist said it made him look super hot.
“You think?” he had asked the younger girl.
“If I didn’t have a strict policy of not hitting on my clients, I’d totally want to do you,” she said. She was twenty-seven, blonde and ridiculously cute in a wounded, trashy kind of way.
“I’m not sure I like your policy,” he said. She blushed; he smiled. And in the end, he kept the three days of scruff and tipped her generously.
Now, to Margaret, he said, “I appreciate the compliment.”
She
waited a second, then said, “Don’t you have something to say to me?” The thing about his exish-wife was she lived for validation. She once said, “A truly flattering comment is sometimes better than ten minutes of oral. It lasts longer, anyway.”
Without a second’s thought, he replied, “I’m so taken aback by you right now that narrowing my compliments down to just one might take a bit of time.”
“So surprise me,” she teased.
“When you least expect it,” he replied without even looking up from his menu.
It was almost like a first date, but with decades of baggage and the barest window of possibility. He looked up and wondered if they could do it again. If they could survive each other. If they could thrive. He had a hard time getting past the idea of her cheating, of her being an addict, of the douchebag writer being intimate with her, being inside her.
“What are you having?” he asked, warding off dangerous thoughts.
“The usual,” she said. Capellini al Pomodoro was her favorite. A delightful dish with fresh tomato, a pinch of garlic and a touch of basil. “You?”
“Going out on a limb here,” he said. “Penne alla Norma. With eggplant, basil and ricotta.”
“I didn’t know you liked eggplant.”
Smiling, casual, he said, “I guess we’ll find out.”
The waiter brought them their waters, took their drink order, and then their food order. He found himself smiling a lot around her. After the change, Christian refused to feel jealous or apprehensive. In their earlier life, when men would vie for Margaret’s attention, and she would give them a smile or some form of acknowledgement, his jealousy would gnaw at him. Then it would turn to anger. Then, when it became too much, he turned the emotions back on himself. For years he suffered the most debilitating bouts of self-loathing.
Not now.
He was always afraid of losing her. He’d lost her. And he was terrified of her cheating. Which she did. Now there was nothing left to fear.
