The Red King (Wyrd Book 1)

by Nick Cole

  Chapter Three

  The three days that follow are lost.

  Moments float and surface on the memory-sea of those lost days like escaped flotsam from some recent wreck now lying in the seaweed and sandy bottoms of the ocean.

  The wreck of himself.

  There is a moment sitting on the kitchen floor. Sprawled and hitting the vodka straight from the big plastic bottle.

  There is a moment when he sits in the garage all day with the garage door closed listening to the car radio because the boombox is getting really bad reception. When he walks back into the house, he’s sure it’s four o’clock in the afternoon but it’s actually six in the morning of some other day. He drinks until nine, watching the morning golden, listening to old cassette tapes of Garrison Keilor’s Lake Woebegone. The stories are beautiful and they make him cry for the people in them. And he drinks more and wonders what it would be like to leave this place and drive to Minnesota. To look for that lake town and find someplace like it. To just live there, knowing all that they knew about themselves and how they thought and lived because Garrison Keillor had already explained everything Holiday would ever need to know to live among them.

  In the afternoon, the late afternoon, he goes to the store for more supplies. He’s shaking and nervous and he’s waiting for Terri or whichever cashier it was who refuses to sell him more booze. He doesn’t get any but he pulls it all off and says nothing. When he gets back he can’t even remember which cashier he’d been shut down by. He watches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and passes out at questions and awakens during the bath scene.

  Rosencrantz?

  Guildenstern?

  Gary Oldman?

  Tim Roth?

  Both go on to have huge careers.

  Who am I? he thinks later, during a quiet moment, sitting in his big chair. He smells smoke and looks around for his cigarettes, making sure he hasn’t left one lit between the cushions.

  You’re Hamlet.

  It’s later, when he’s staring in the massive mirror that covers one wall, drinking a beer and smoking, when he arrives at that conclusion.

  Someone somewhere is screaming outside.

  At first it sounds like it’s outside, but when he turns the TV back on, it’s Oldman and Roth who are screaming for Hamlet on the television, during the final battle.

  And then the end. Tim Roth and Gary Oldman waiting to be hanged at dawn’s first light.

  Tim Roth says, “It could have been something more, y’know.”

  True.

  True.

  True.

  He hits play again and starts the movie from the beginning.

  When he wakes up it’s three am. It’s dark and cold and even the jazz station is silent.

  KLF is gonna rock you.

  “When was the last time you ate?” he asks himself.

  He gets in the car and drives through a thick fog to Del Taco, feeling distant and achy as mist swirls and clutches at the beams of his headlights.

  He buys tacos, a burrito, and a big giant diet coke from the one manager running the place. It takes the manager a long time to get the order together and he apologizes, telling Holiday that no one decided to show up for work that day.

  Holiday drives off into the foggy night.

  I’m finished, he thinks. I can’t drink anymore. Time to stop now.

  As he’s driving along the quiet street leading back to his neighborhood, surrounded by the dead of night and a thick fog, a man wanders out of the swirling mist and onto the road as Holiday speeds toward him. The man had stumbled out from the trees alongside the road, noticed Holiday, almost careening now toward the MG.

  Holiday narrowly misses him and spills his taco in his lap.

  “Drunk!” screams Holiday above the roar of the engine, feeling strange and out of place. The fog swallows him and he wonders if the incident, the man on the road, actually ever happened.

  Back at the house, he pops another beer and watches an old version of Julius Caesar in black and white until dawn.

  Drinking.

  Chapter Four

  At dawn there was smoke in the air and Holiday rose smelling it, his head pounding. Wan light filtered through the venetian blinds in his bedroom. There were beer cans everywhere.

  “I’m done,” he groaned.

  He reached over and tried to shake a cigarette out of a pack on the nightstand. Empty.

  In a teacup nearby he found some butts, selected a longish one, straightened it out and lit it again. It smelled ashy and old. Somewhere far off someone was honking a horn insistently. Then someone leaned on the horn and it stayed that way for a while. In fact it didn’t stop. Holiday got up, feeling dull, achy and tired. Far away from himself.

  He tried to remember what it felt like to be with her. To be the man she thought he might be.

  But that guy felt gone. Long gone. Whoever he was then is as gone as she is now. This is who he is.

  Tired, dry and sick he stumbled toward the bedroom window.

  He peered through the blinds and he could see a few people out on the narrow street that ran though the townhomes, wandering up toward the sound of the still blaring horn farther up the street. He took one more drag down to the filter, then went back to the ashtray teacup and selected the runner up. He sat down on the edge of the bed, temporarily forgetting and then remembering all at once the sound of the still blaring, distant horn. It continued without seeming end.

  He searched the tangled sheets for the channel changer to his bedroom TV and when he couldn’t find it, he stood up and manually switched the old set on and then turned it off because there was no picture. He turned it on again, then raised the sound which he didn’t mean to do, then found the channel button and went the wrong direction, or so he thought, because all of the channels were showing the same blue screen. When he finally got the unseen mastery of the buttons down, he scrolled down into the primary stations.

  All three showed the emergency broadcast message.

  Except there was no, THIS IS A TEST message. In its place were two sentences. STAY INSIDE. And, LOCK YOUR DOORS. All three stations encouraged viewers to stay tuned to this station for further information and updates. He went through all the channels once again finding nothing but static and blue screen stations and other repeats of the Emergency Broadcast message.

  This is weird, was his first thought.

  He finished the runner up butt and found the bronze medalist. He lit that one and looked for his smartphone. He found it in his jeans along the stairwell. At some point during the bender he’d taken them off and left them there on the stairs as he climbed toward bed. He put the jeans on and pulled out his smartphone, finishing the third place finalist far too quickly. There wasn’t a pack of cigarettes in the pockets.

  Bringing up the apps on his smartphone, he opened his news feed and found one Breaking News alert. It simply said, “President Orders Evacuation!”

  Holiday went back upstairs and looked out through the blinds in the bedroom window. Still more people moved up the street toward the sound of the ongoing and annoying horn.

  His mind dully grasped at straws that weren’t there.

  What do I know? he asked himself.

  Nothing.

  He put on a found shirt and went downstairs. He was just reaching for the front door when the gunfire went off. Two shotgun blasts. They echoed off the close walls of the tight condo complex, reverberating along the walkways between the buildings. Instinctively Holiday was down, crouched on all fours. Waiting, listening near the front door. His vision was star bursting from the sudden effort of dropping down in the prone position. He could feel blood pounding in his ears.

  The horn was still blaring.

  He stood up and tried to look through the two little windows at the top of the front door. Outside he could see the small terraco
tta pavestone walkway and steps that led to his tiny front gate. The narrow street, a few cars. An identical version of his condo, but in reverse, on the other side of the street. A man wandered across his view for a brief moment, then swiftly disappeared behind the high hedges that ran along the low wall ringing Holiday’s portion of the condo. His garden.

  Something about the wandering-swiftly aspect of the man bothered Holiday. Like the man was moving with a purpose, but haphazardly, like a drunk.

  Something is not right, thought Holiday.

  He flung the door wide open, marched down the steps and leaned over the gate, looking down the street at the backside of several people moving toward the sound of the horn. He could see a car up there. An SUV in the middle of the road, surrounded by Tuscan villa-inspired townhomes that rose up along both sides of the street. The SUV’s doors were open.

  It’s a car accident, was Holiday’s first thought. That’s what this is all about. And then he turned, looking in the opposite direction. More of them. People. People? They came up the street toward the wreck. Fixated on the sound of the horn. Neighbors? Mostly not. Some he barely recognized from his minimal existence in the neighborhood. This was a neighborhood full of actual adults, newly married and single up-and-comers with jobs, real jobs, not coffee house jobs and some dead end acting career. People who went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. Normal people. He barely knew any of them.

  Then one of his neighbors turned toward him as she lunged awkwardly up the street. He knew her. He’d seen her jogging many times before. She was good looking. A young hot mom type. He’d seen her pregnant last year. This year she was jogging every late morning. Getting her body back in shape. On weekends he’d seen her and her very fit husband, a male model type, jogging together. Pushing a jogging stroller. Normal people.

  She looked at him, her face pale, her hair wild. Her eyes rolling, then beady and ferocious as she noticed him. She was wearing her super-hero jogging outfit. Tight and curvy with a colorful stripe. Now ripped in a few places. A black crust of blood ringed her perfect heart-shaped mouth. She looked at him and…

  …hissed.

  Then she came stumbling diagonally across the street at him. Holiday backed up the steps, retreating to the door as she lurched up to the tiny gate that defined his dwelling, waving claws, not hands, at him, crusted also, nails chipped, a giant wedding ring still on one badly broken finger. Swiping at him as he backed away behind the open door into his townhome and gently shut it. He crouched down feeling sick to his stomach. He waited to hear her beating on the door.

  She’d looked angry.

  She’d looked insane.

  He crawled on all fours to the fridge and found a lone can of beer. He popped it, still hearing the distant horn.

  Any second now I’ll hear her raking her fingers across my door. I know it.

  Instead the horn went on with its unyielding bleat.

  He popped the can and drank thickly.

  She did not attack his front door.

  He sat there on the floor of the kitchen, finishing the beer.

  He found a butt and lit it.

  When both beer and butt were done, he stood, telling himself that he felt a little better, and glanced from the kitchen to the front door. A short distance that seemed to telescope the longer he stared at the door, waiting for her inevitable attack to begin.

  It didn’t.

  He crept up to the door and a moment later chanced a look into the two tiny windows at the top.

  She was gone.

  Holiday raced up the stairs, staying low at the top so that no one from the street could see him in the big window that looked out into the neighborhood. From his bedroom window, through the slats of the blinds, he could see jogging suit hot mom limping off down toward the still blaring car horn and the wreck at the end of the road.

  “What’s going on?” His mind scrambled for an answer and kept landing on the fact that he was vaguely in some kind of trouble.

  The people on the street were piling up around the bleating car, some falling to their hands and knees as they struggled to get inside. He heard a sharp series of distant pops that ended almost as soon as they’d started.

  A small gun, thought Holiday. Someone had fired a small gun.

  He turned on the bedroom TV and scanned the stations again.

  Nothing.

  The horn stopped.

  Outside, through the slats, he could no longer see the wreck. People were crawling all over it. It reminded him of a pile of rats he’d once seen in the garbage dumpster of a restaurant he’d worked at for a little while. The wreck on the street was like a rat pile.

  “Something’s not right,” he told himself again.

  What do I know?

  He found a small butt on the nightstand and lit it, sitting on the edge of his bed.

  There’s an emergency.

  He took a drag and exhaled stale smoke out into the room, watching as it filtered the morning light coming in through the blinds.

  People are…

  … acting weird?

  … sick?

  … insane?

  He took a drag, finishing the butt and sat there turning the filter over and over. His index finger was nicotine stained. He felt dry and hollow from all the booze.

  He took out his smartphone and started to dial…

  But who do I call?

  I could call her?

  Are you okay? Something weird is happening. Are you okay wherever you’re at…

  And…

  …whoever you’re with.

  He thought about the chances of her saying she was wrong. That he should come get her.

  He dialed her number.

  It didn’t even go to voice.

  “All communications are unavailable at this time due to Executive Order 19. We apologize for the inconvenience,” said the pleasant robot lady.

  He tried the number of the coffee house.

  Same.

  He tried a few others.

  Same.

  Nothing.

  He found another butt. The last serviceable one that might hold even the smallest amount of tobacco. He lit it.

  What do you know?

  There’s an emergency and people are dangerous. No one can come and help me. I’ll need to protect myself.

  He exhaled the last of the smoke in a tight thin stream with a sigh that seemed to sum up everything unspoken, as if everything was just too overwhelming…

  And, I’m out of smokes.

  Chapter Five

  The shooting started an hour later. Far away and distant. Up the hill, in the nicer section of Viejo Verde where the McMansions and the dotcom-ers had purchased their starter homes. Gunshots rang out and cavitated through the gated communities like sudden thunder rolling along the ridgeline. There were wide swathes of manicured park up there where feathery willows, sculpted hedges, stunning lawns and dramatic commons nestled among stately homes inspired by someone’s idea of the hacienda and the belle époque. Three car garages. Pools. Marble floors. Man caves. Home theaters. Designer kitchens. That’s where the shooting that afternoon started.

  The pop, pop, pop of a pistol.

  The Bang Bang Bang of an AR-15 on semi auto.

  The occasional loud Ka-Boom of a shotgun.

  It went on for an hour.

  And in that hour the rat pile around the wreck ceased. It ceased as the people-rats lurched away from the pile in the center of the tiny street and headed down a sidewalk between two buildings of attached townhomes. A sidewalk that Holiday knew led to the far edge of his townhome complex, The Vineyards. If those people continued that way they would crawl up a hill, cross a wide dead-end four lane street bisected by a median filled with cut hedges and palms and other flowering tropical plants. On the other side of that wide
street and dead end they would find a hill leading up into the expensive neighborhoods.

  The McMansions.

  Later, from the high windows in the bedroom of his townhome, as the day reached its hot, smoky orange peak, he could see those people from the wreck, from the rat pile, crawling up that landscaped slope, lumbering off across the wide road and into the expensive neighborhoods on the hill above. After that he couldn’t see them anymore.

  The gunfire continued. At times its intensity rose in pitch and urgency only to drop off and then seem altogether gone. Then, suddenly it awakened once more with renewed vigor, only to again fade. As he listened, Holiday could hear the level of gunshots getting weaker and weaker with each fresh restart.

  By three o’clock, Holiday was crawling the walls for a smoke. He’d seriously considered driving to the store. A quick, mad dash through whatever was going on out there. But the MG was a convertible, he’d reasoned. If there were more of those crazy people out there on the way to the store, the canvas top wouldn’t be much of a defense against them. So he let the plan go and waited, watching out the windows and making occasional forays into drawers and the small walk-in closet and other hiding places, in search of forgotten cigarettes.

  Then he saw the smoke. Black and thick, rising up like a blistering pillar in the hot, still air of that end of summer day. It rose up into the hazy blue sky, rising in front of the high, billowy, white thunder-bumper cumulus that built up in the afternoons during late August and early September, out over the desert and the mountains.

  There was no one on the street below his townhome. All the rat-pilers had gone up into the expensive neighborhood, toward the place of diminishing gunshots. Wherever that was.

  “Go for it,” he heard himself say. “Now.”

  He wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Or maybe I’m thinking about it too much, he told himself as he found his keys under the couch and entered the dark garage. Maybe that’s all I can think about right now. Cigarettes. Maybe I’m not seeing things clearly. Maybe whatever’s happening is localized. Maybe just up the street there’s a cordon of fire trucks and cop cars and help. And cigarettes…