Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)

by Laurence Dahners

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Pre-prologue

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter

  Chapter

  Chapter

  Chapter

  Quicker

  An Ell Donsaii story

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2011 Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  This book is the first of a series, the “Ell Donsaii stories.”

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Pre-prologue

  Allan Donsaii was an unusually gifted quarterback. He was widely recognized to be startling strong and was a phenomenally accurate passer. During his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, he was never drafted because the pro teams felt he was too small.

  Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and was extraordinarily quick. She rarely played a game without a “steal” and usually had many.

  Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously throughout college and married at the end of their senior year. Their friends kidded them that they were only marrying so that they could start their own sports dynasty.

  Their daughter Ell did have Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s strength and accuracy. The child also had a new mutation affecting the myelin sheaths surrounding her nerves. This mutation produced nerve transmission speeds that were nearly double those of normal neurons. Nerve impulse transmissions were a great deal faster and thus she had much quicker reflexes. Yet the new myelin sheath was also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors resulted in a brain which had more neurons, though it wasn’t larger and a more rapid processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller scale CPU architecture that enables faster processor speeds.

  Most importantly, under the influence of adrenalin in a “fight or flight” situation, her nerves would transmit even more rapidly than their normally phenomenal speed.

  Much more rapidly…

  Prologue

  Joe looked up at the waitress. She was a pretty redhead, early thirties, slender, nice legs. He’d been admiring her earlier. She’d asked him something.

  “Would you like a refill on your drink?” she asked again.

  Joe let his eyes pass down her body and back up. “I’d like a long drink of you.” Her pale green eyes frosted over. “But I’d settle for some more Coke.”

  “Coming right up.” She said in a strained tone. It sounded like she had intended to sound bright and cheerful.

  Bitch, he thought to himself as she turned and strode off to the battered counter of the little cafe. Thinks she’s too good for me. Her long graceful stride drew his eye and, though she didn’t wiggle when she walked, her tight little butt looked great in the pleated mini skirt she was wearing.

  Joe was seething inside. Nonetheless, when she returned, he smiled and tried again. “Hey, thanks for the drink cute stuff. What time do you get off work?”

  Her eyes, cool before this sortie, went cold. “Sorry, I’m married and have a kid.” There was a long pause. Then with a little smile, “But it’s nice that you’re interested.”

  Yeah right, he thought, “nice that I’m interested.” Bitch just wants a tip… yeah, I’ll give her a tip all right. Fuming inside, he paid his check, tipped a single penny, picked up his shades and headed out to his car. As he was about to get in he saw the sign in the window of the small seaside joint. “Open 11AM to 9PM.” Damn, it’s 8:45 right now he thought. He went around to the trunk instead. As he opened it, heat from the long summer day billowed out at him. He rummaged through his duffle, finding his black Levis, a black long sleeved shirt and black sneakers. He went back into the little restaurant’s bathroom, changed, and then strode back out to sit in his car and wait for the woman to leave.

  He nearly missed her. She left through the back door of the restaurant and it was out of his line of sight. But then he recognized her getting into the old clunker two cars down from his. To his amazement he heard a old gas engine crank, then her little blue Toyota backed out of its space and turned out of the lot trailing a small cloud of dust. His black Ford, already turned on for the AC, whirred out of its space and turned to follow her. He checked his gauge and saw that the fuel cell still registered three quarters. In a few minutes the two cars were rolling over the bridge from Emerald Isle to Morehead City. She turned into one of the shabby older residential areas of the town. Joe lagged farther back but was still able to see which driveway she pulled into. He drove past, picking the number off the mailbox and parked just around the corner. “Sammy?” he said to his AI.

  “Yes?” her sexy contralto responded in his ear.

  “Who lives at 319 West Garson Street, Morehead City, North Carolina?”

  There was a momentary pause while the AI searched the net. “Kristen Donsaii, age 33 and her daughter Ell, age 11.”

  “What about a husband?”

  Another pause. “Allan Donsaii, died six years ago in a boating accident.”

  Yeah right. Sure you’re married! Joe snarled to himself. He put on his black gloves and picked up his cap, got out of his Ford and started back toward the bitch’s house. To his surprise, just as he got to the beginning of the faded picket fence in front of her small clapboard house, she stepped out the door in jogging shorts. She headed down the walk without recognizing him, opening her gate right after he walked past it, then turned and jogged off down the street the opposite direction. Joe turned around to admire her slender, muscular legs as they flashed off in the fading sunlight. Her bouncing ponytail attracted his attention a moment. Dumb as a post, he thought to himself, running at twilight. He walked around the block as the light faded further. When he came back past her place, he hopped over her little fence, strode up to the porch and stepped into the shadows of the vine covered trellis beside the door. He put on the black stocking hat and pulled it down over his face. After a moment he thought, Damn, it’s too hot for this! But, immobile and covered in black, he knew he’d be hard to see in the twilit background.

  Joe stood quietly, listening for the sound of a TV but heard none. Kid must be out, he thought to himself. Or maybe just on her AI. He shrugged, doesn’t really matter.

  It seemed like forever before he heard the tapping sound of the bitch’s feet coming back down the sidewalk. Joe stilled himself as she came around the corner, stepped through her gate and trudged up her walk. He waited until she’d turned the key in her lock, surprised that she was so poor she didn’t even have a door AI. As the door swung open he stepped in behind her, grabbed her ponytail, ripped her AI off her head and forced her through the opening. She stumbled and fell forward with Joe crashing down on top and driving the breath out of her. Distantly he observed that her body felt nice and firm.

  There was a little shriek from across the room. Hauling back on the bitch’s ponytail with his right hand, Joe straightened his mask with the left and looked over to see a kid sitting on a worn couch, head tipped back to gape at him under her AI’s “HUD” (Heads Up Display). “You’ll keep quiet if you want your Mommy to live,” Joe snarled. The kid stared at him with wide eyes.

  The bitch under Joe gasped a breath and wheezed, “Ell! Run!”

  Joe hauled back on the ponytail, “Run and I’ll break your mommy’s scrawny neck! Pull off that AI!” The little girl slowly pulled off her AI’s headband, disconnected the jack from its beltpack and set it asi
de. Joe rose to one knee and forced it into the bitch’s back. He dug in his satchel for his duct tape. “Put your left hand back here.” The woman started to struggle and he clapped her hard on the side of the head. He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “I’m gonna do you in any case. But if you make it hard for me--I’ll do your daughter as a bonus.” She slumped, putting her arm back. He wound the wrist with duct tape. “Now the right one.” Shaking in reaction she put her right arm back by the left and he bound her wrists together.

  Joe looked up. To his surprise the skinny reddish blond kid was right in front of him, trembling like a leaf. He’d expected to find her cowering on the couch. Well, this certainly simplified things. Sitting on her mother’s back he said, “Gimme your left hand kid.”

  It wasn’t her left hand, but rather her right that moved.

  Impossibly fast, that hand, like a striking snake.

  Two fingers spread out to go on each side of his nose. They plunged into his eyeballs. Her sharp little nails punctured the sclera, bursting the globes like grapes struck by arrows.

  Joe reared back, clapping his hand over his ruined eyes and scrabbling backwards out the door by feel alone.

  When the policemen came, he was still staggering through the unending dark, searching for his car.

  ***

  Jamal turned to Aki and said, “I think we’re too close. That one gun sounds like it is just over those rocks.”

  Aki stood on his tiptoes. Thirteen, he’d just hit his growth spurt and he’d always wanted to see more and be first on the scene for every exciting thing in their war torn little world. “Help me up, give me a foot. I want to know what the American devils are doing down there.”

  Reluctantly, Jamal bent, clasped his hands and gave Aki a boost. Aki skinned up the rock and raised his head over the edge, looking around in delight. There was a knocking sound and Jamal’s temper flared as he felt Aki spit on the back of his down turned neck. He dropped Aki’s foot and stood up shouting in anger, then bemusement as Aki fell, not just to his feet to bounce around boasting of his exploits, but all the way to the ground. Aki lay rigidly twitching, his hands twisted into backward fists. Jamal dreamily noted that Aki’s head was misshapen. Jamal wiped the back of his own neck and came away with blood. Absently he noticed splatters of blood everywhere around them. He bent over Aki’s quivering form and saw a splatter of blood on his forehead. No, it was a hole. Jamal reached toward the hole and then noticed Aki’s bulging, but lifeless eyes.

  Jamal was running, running, running.

  It seemed as if he had been running forever but it was actually only a few hundred meters to his house. He stepped into the small mud brick shack he had shared with his mother and Grandfather since his father had been killed in the fighting. The adults were both at work, even in a war you had to eat, and this war, though fluctuating in intensity, had been a constant in the family’s life long before the Americans had arrived to take up one of the sides in the conflict. Jamal went to his hiding place, an old wooden crate in the corner that served as a table. He turned it away from the wall and, folding himself up, sat down and pulled it back over him. There he sat while his breathing slowed and the racing in his mind calmed. After a bit he had settled and began to think about getting out and going for help. Someone should tell Aki’s mother. But then Jamal heard more firing. It sounded like it was on the street outside! Jamal huddled back down, squinting out through cracks in the box. He could only see the narrow confines of the room. Despite the heat he shivered, queasy waves rolling over him as he thought back on his friend Aki. His mind’s eye brought up Aki’s smiling, grinning face, always full of devilment, converted to the lifeless husk he’d last seen lying in the blood splattered dirt. Though he knew he shouldn’t as a man show fear, he quietly sobbed in terror.

  Someone ran into the room! In mid sob Jamal closed his throat and made no further sound. He peered though the cracks. Mother! Jamal weakly reached to move the crate he hid beneath. But then another shadow entered the room. A Soldier! Jamal shrank back in terror at the beetle helmeted horror that had entered their little dwelling. Jamal’s mind gibbered as the soldier grasped his mother by the shoulder and spun her about, ripping her clothing. She fell to the floor and the soldier fell on top of her, forcing his way between her kicking legs. Jamal felt warm urine pouring into his own crotch as he reached out to push away the crate with watery arms.

  Then he saw his Grandfather step into the room with one of the kitchen knives. To Jamal’s great admiration, the frail old man advanced with sudden vitality toward the struggling couple on the floor and quickly dropped, plunging the knife into the soldier’s back.

  But it didn’t plunge! It stopped, point barely penetrating the soldier’s armored backplate. Propelled by all the force he could muster, the old man’s hands slid off the handle and down over the blade lacerating his fingers. With a shout that must have been a curse the soldier rolled off Jamal’s mother and away from his grandfather. A pistol appeared in the soldier’s hand and barked twice at Grandfather, then swung to Jamal’s mother where it barked once.

  The soldier stuffed his obscenely swollen organ back in his pants and was struggling to his feet when another beetle helmeted soldier burst in through the doorway. “What happened?”

  “Tryin’ to question these frags when they attacked me! Sunsabitches!”

  The second soldier looked for a moment at Mother’s bare legs. Briefly Jamal thought he would question the story he’d been told. But then the soldier simply shrugged, looked back over his shoulder and said, “Let’s get outta here.”

  The two soldiers hustled out of the door, leaving Jamal desolate and alone. No family. No friends. No life. Just an upwelling bleak hatred.

  ***

  Jamal stood staring at distant heat mirages through the chain link fence around the refugee compound. A small voice came from behind him. “Jamal, there’s a man wants to talk to you.”

  He turned and saw Aki’s sister. For a moment he saw his friend’s smiling likeness in her face, but her face sagged with no hint of Aki’s sparkle. He thought back, trying to remember if she had always been this way? Or just since Aki and her father’s death? She started to turn away and Jamal realized he should respond. “What does he want?”

  “He’s talking to boys who don’t have families.”

  Jamal wandered to the little table where the man sat near the entrance to the compound. The man, obscenely fat, sweated profusely and wiped his head with a cloth that had probably once been white. Jamal instinctively disliked him. “What do you want?”

  “You have lost all your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you hate the Americans for their part in your tragedy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want revenge?”

  Jamal stared. Revenge? Of course, but how? Nonetheless, “Yes.”

  The man stared into Jamal’s eyes. “You might be killed… or called upon to die.”

  “I do not care.” Jamal spit into the dust. What was there to live for?

  The fat man stared into Jamal’s eyes a few moments longer, then shook his head as if frightened by what he saw. He wiped his head again and stood. “Come.”

  “I, will, not, study, that, accursed, language!” Jamal’s eyes were slits and he could barely control his trembling fury. “All these things you want to teach me are worthless. They will not help me kill Americans! Just give me a gun and send me into the city! Or give me a bomb and I...”

  The blow cut him off in mid sentence. Jamal flew from the stool upon which he had been sitting to crash against the dusty mud-brick wall. Head ringing Jamal looked up into a face somehow all the more fearsome for not appearing angry. “Little one,” the man who had struck Jamal shook his head. “Our plan is not to waste you in killing one, or two, or even fifty Americans. Oh no, you will be much more deadly than that. A great warrior does not kill a few through brute strength but thousands through cunning. At the moment you have no cunning. However, we wi
ll teach you cunning, and deceit, and strategy. We will fashion you into a weapon much more dangerous than the Americans’ vaunted ‘smart weapons.’ For now though, you are a ‘dumb weapon’ who does not even know how little it knows.” The man squatted down, bringing his face within a few inches of Jamal’s. His garlicky breath and coarsely pitted skin made Jamal shrink away. “You will learn what we tell you to learn when we tell you to learn it and you will not complain again!”

  Thus Jamal set about learning English and eventually many other things he thought unimportant. But he never again complained. Not even when he found, years later and to his great amazement, that he was being sent to the accursed America to study at a university there.

  Chapter One

  Ell’s AI chimed in her ear, “You have a call from Mr. Mandal.”

  Mandal was her school counselor. Ell said, “Yes?”

  Mandal’s voice came on, “Ell, your SAT scores have come in, I assume you’ve seen them?”

  “Yeah, my writing score sucked.”

  Mandal chuckled, “Ell, you maxed out the math section! I wasn’t even aware that they gave 100th percentile scores until you got one! I checked with the testing people and it means you got the highest score in the country, so that it was better than 100 percent, or all, of the other test takers. I’m certain that this is the first time anyone in our school district got the high score in the country. And as a sophomore you can take the SAT again next year and focus on getting a better score on the writing section.”

  “But I want to go for early admission.”

  There was a pause. “Can you come in and talk about it? I’ll look into what your options might be.”