by P. J. Day
Shia seemed to be arguing with strangers in another room. “The lamest scene in movie history has to be the monkey-swinging scene. You killed my childhood memories. You’ve slaughtered them,” he read out loud. He then paused. Paolo and Cindy could hear the sound of his footsteps as he paced randomly around his hardwood floors. “Sarah Geary...ooh, nice pic, but I’ve already apologized for the Crystal Skull—do I really have to do it again?”
“Is he reading his own critiques?” whispered Cindy.
“I think so,” Paolo answered.
Cindy nudged Paolo. “I’m going in. He’s distracted.”
Paolo nodded, swallowing nervously.
“Facebook, its love hate with you,” Shia said, loudly.
“Why do you keep reading that stuff? Who cares what idiots on the internet think?” said a young female’s voice.
Cindy stopped pushing through the door. “Damn, he’s got someone else in there with him.”
“You want a beer?” Shia asked the other girl in the living room.
“He’s coming to the kitchen,” whispered Cindy. “Use your phone and find his Facebook page.”
“Why?” Paolo asked.
“Post something crazy on there...”
“...like what?”
“Talk smack on his...uh...on his uh...on his cars, yeah...his cars,” Cindy said, as she took another glance at his kitchen. “Also, tell him he’s got bad taste in countertops.”
Paolo scrolled through phone and found the Facebook page, as he came upon the message Shia had just read out loud. He typed and maintained intermittent eye contact with Cindy.
Shia walked into the kitchen and Cindy closed the door.
“Come to the kitchen, I want to show you something in the garage,” Shia was heard through the door.
“Dammit. Hurry, Paolo,” Cindy pleaded, with her ear against the door.
“I just got this brand-new, white Panamera,” Shia bragged. “We can take everyone up the coast now.”
Cindy’s eyes grew wide. She turned to Paolo. “Move, move, move...”
“What? Where?” Paolo asked, as he submitted his comment.
Even though the door was closed, and both Cindy and Paolo could hear each other’s panicked panting, they were able to overhear the Facebook notification sound of an incoming message.
Shia was right behind the garage door when he heard the bloop. “They wrote back, huh?”
The girl Shia wanted to show the car to was also behind the door. Cindy and Paolo were hiding in an alcove next to the water heater.
Frustrated, they heard the girl say, “Shia, stop obsessing over what these losers think.”
They heard Shia exit the kitchen, as his hard soles tapped the hardwood with flustered urgency.
“If you’re gonna keep doing this, I’ll fall asleep on the couch,” said the girl, as she followed him to the living room.
“Whatever. Just give me a few. If you fall asleep, I’ll wake you up,” Shia said.
Cindy opened the door again. She scanned the area beyond the marble countertops. A conspicuous red pantry door caught her eye.
“Only douchebags with bad credit drive yellow Lambo’s?” yelled Shia. “Are you serious? How does this guy know what I drive?”
“That’s the best you can come up with?” Cindy asked Paolo.
Paolo shrugged.
Cindy tapped him on his shoulder. “Do me a favor; take a look at that pantry door.”
Paolo came up from behind Cindy and peered through the door, and stared straight at the pantry.
“That door feels out of place doesn’t it?” asked Cindy. “Everything in that kitchen has been remodeled. From the countertops, to the fridge, to the oven, to the cabinet doors, all of it is extremely modern, except for that pantry door. It looks like it came with the house and has never been replaced.”
“We don’t have much time. My chest is beginning to hurt. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Let’s check out that door. If there’s nothing behind it, we’re out of here,” whispered Paolo, nervously.
“Let me make sure that’s where we should go,” Cindy said, as she rolled the rondure across the slippery kitchen floor with force. She pointed the dowel through the crack in the door and the rondure rolled straight toward the pantry door, where it collided with the small bit of wall underneath the pantry.
Luckily, Shia didn’t hear the sphere make contact, as he continued to argue with his computer. “Brown marble kitchen countertops resemble petrified feces? What?”
Cindy sneered at Paolo. “Really?”
Paolo slightly pushed on Cindy’s back as they both entered the kitchen, still staying low to the floor.
Loud, angry keystrokes reverberated through the living room and into the kitchen, as Paolo and Cindy made their way to the pantry door.
Paolo’s back was turned toward Cindy, as he kept a watchful eye toward the living room.
Cindy opened the door. Bags of beans, various canned items—actually, all beans and a George Foreman grill—greeted her. “I’ve never seen so many beans in my life,” she said, as she stretched her arm into the back of the pantry shelves, hoping for a lever or switch, but the fiddling of her fingertips found none. “I don’t think this is it.”
Paolo turned around and glanced up at one of the shelves. He noticed a faded Green Giant can of lima beans. Its font unmistakably 70s. “That can looks older than Shia. Kinda strange he’d keep something that old, don’t you think?”
Cindy reached for the can of lima beans. “It’s stuck,” she murmured.
Paolo then reached up and pulled on the can with more force. The can snapped downward, its top hitting the wooden shelf bottom.
The sound alerted Shia in the living room. “Who’s there?” he asked loudly.
All the shelves inside the pantry pulled themselves backward a few feet, revealing a dark entryway in the ground with a ladder.
With urgency, Cindy got on her knees, picked up the sphere, and backed herself into the hole.
Shia stood up and faced the kitchen while still in the living room. “Hello?” he asked again.
As soon as Cindy was well below ground, Paolo got on all fours, his cracking joints echoing throughout the kitchen, as Shia approached.
Paolo wormed into the entrance, his foot accidentally stepping on Cindy’s hand. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?” he whispered.
“I’m okay,” Cindy whispered back.
He then grabbed the pantry door and shut it before following Cindy below ground.
Shia peeked into the kitchen. “Who’s here?”
Suspecting someone had infiltrated the pantry, he gingerly stepped toward the red door. As he placed his fingers at the corner edge of the door, his female guest, who had awakened from her nap, entered the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
He turned around, quickly snapping his hand away from the pantry door. “Nothing.”
“Are you done?”
“Done with what?” Shia asked.
“Answering stupid Facebook posts?”
“Yeah...yeah, I was hungry and I thought that I would have...uh...some beans.”
“Beans?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Let’s drive down the PCH. You promised me, remember?”
Shia glanced over his shoulder at the pantry, and then turned toward his guest and grinned. “Of course.”
“You said you’d let me drive?”
“Yeah...yeah,” he said, escorting her through the garage. He closed the door behind him, after taking one quick, concentrated squint at the pantry, rationalizing away the remote possibility that someone was onto his secret.
Chapter Twenty-eight:
Dungeons & Dimensions
“Déjà vu,” Cindy muttered, as she limped alongside Paolo. Fortunately, this time, the tunnel was lighted with a succession of construction lamps along the wall. “Wonderful, another stupid underground walkway.”
“Is this tunnel similar to the one under the church?” Paolo asked.
<
br /> “Yeah, but the one under the church was dark as night. Also, if there is a winged demon awaiting us at the end of this tunnel, well, it was nice knowing ya’.”
They walked by rusty pickaxes and wooden wagons filled with stones. Used-up lanterns littered the ground, giving the tunnel the appearance of an abandoned mine shaft. Paolo sniffed the cold air. The smell of what he perceived as gunpowder penetrated his nostrils. “TNT,” he said. “They probably used explosives to tunnel.”
Cindy repeatedly turned her head over her shoulder, seeing if the young actor was onto them. “Did you close the pantry door?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you think he suspected us?”
“I think if he did, he’d be on our tail. But either way, just keep marching forward. We’re the walking dead anyway.”
Cindy trudged forward, without saying a word. Her silence showed agreement with Paolo’s assertion.
“We’re not coming out of this alive, you know,” Paolo added.
“Good. We’re going to die doing what we love,” Cindy said.
“Now that I think about it, the only people who are going to miss me are maybe a couple of my students.”
“That’s pretty depressing.”
“Well, I never had kids. My ex-wife hates me, despite me still paying half her rent, while she lives with her mooch of a boyfriend, and my sister hasn’t talked to me in two years.”
“Why’s that?”
“Petulance,” Paolo stated, solemnly. “Pettiness. It’s a sibling rivalry that’s never been addressed with an adult mindset.”
“That’s tragic. I actually have an excuse for not speaking to my family.”
“Every family dynamic is different,” said Paolo, as the tunnel curved up ahead.
“I was beaten repeatedly by my father for not living up to his expectations. My mother enabled him, and my sister, who I excuse somewhat for being younger than me, was a mute, and continues to be a mute, as she hasn’t called me since becoming a doctor.”
Paolo lowered his eyes. A momentary feeling of shame swept through his body as he realized that his situation was nowhere near Cindy’s experience. Picking up the phone was all that Paolo needed to reconnect to humanity, whereas, Cindy needed a complete memory extraction.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” related Paolo.
“No worries,” she said, pulling her lips back with each step. “That’s why we’re here, right? To search for something bigger than ourselves, something that makes us forget ourselves.”
“It’s kind of like being jettisoned into space with the promise of discovery but knowing you’re never coming back?”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” she said, as her grim countenance changed to one of acceptance.
The professor then pulled out his smartphone. “No signal.”
“We’re on our own.”
“I’ll record what we see,” Paolo stated as he played with his note app.
With each step across the hard floor, Cindy’s foot felt as if a searing, iron mallet was pounding it.
“You’re going to have to help me again,” she begged.
Cindy staggered and propped herself against the craggy wall. Paolo rushed to her aid and lifted her arm over his shoulder, brushing the side of her cheek in the process with his hand. “You’re warm,” he said, as he placed the back of his hand on her cheek. “You’ve got a temperature.”
Sweat beads filtered through the pores on her forehead. The infection in her foot spread to the area just below her calf muscle. “I’m okay,” she said.
“I should have taken you to the hospital.”
“There’s no time, trust me,” Cindy muttered, her voice weak.
Paolo carried her a few more meters before seeing the tunnel’s end just ahead. “Looks like something’s blocking it,” he said.
He helped her bear up against the wall. Then, he planted both hands on the stone enclosure, which exhibited a slight curvature that extended slightly into the tunnel. With all his strength, he pushed the wall. Scabrous stone impinged the area between his shoulder and neck. The wall began to roll as he willed it to his right. The stone wall wasn’t a wall after all, but a large wheel that could be moved with moderate force.
As soon as an opening was revealed, the smell of gunpowder permeated the air again, this time more pronounced. A dazzling display of white, fiery light blinded Paolo and Cindy, as the stone wall rolled away.
“What is that?” Cindy asked, turning her face away from the opening.
“I don’t know.” Paolo tried to peer over his forearm. His squinted eyes adjusted to the white rays. He made out a collection of metallic poles with white flares at their tops, shooting reflective beams toward the ceiling like supernatural balefire.
“Magnesium,” said Paolo. “What we smelled was magnesium. That explains the white flames.”
Labored and pale, Cindy added, “They seem to be surrounding something.”
Their eyes fought the intense glare as they entered. A large, rectangular, metallic glass box sat vertically in the center of the room. When Paolo walked up toward the box, Cindy yelled for him to step back, as the murky smoke behind the glass began to swirl.
“Don’t touch it,” she said.
“It doesn’t look hot,” Paolo said, glancing back at Cindy.
“Don’t touch it, I said,” Cindy reprimanded.
The black smoke inside the box churned as if it were wind-struck. Not knowing what to do next, Cindy began thumbing through the red book for answers. “This container looks too modern. I don’t see a depiction of it in the Apocryphon.”
“You’re gonna have to let me touch it,” Paolo said.
Cindy shook her head. She hopped toward the professor and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. “Let me do it. You have class to teach on Monday.”
Paolo seized Cindy’s wrist. “Are you sure?”
“What’s the worst that could happen? Probably a little hot...a little too cold, maybe?” Cindy said, with a smile. “Electrocution? Oh, that would be bad.”
The professor inspected all the sides of the glass box. “It doesn’t look like it’s plugged in anywhere.”
Cindy stood a foot away from the glass. The white light from the torches reflected off the glossy panes. Both their reflections stared back at them. Cindy reached with her index finger, its tip making connection. “It’s room temperature.” She extended her hand, planting her whole palm on the glass. Her silky locks began to extend upward.
“Cindy, I think there’s some sort of static...”
“...don’t be silly, I don’t feel anything,” she said, smiling.
Paolo noticed her brown eyes begin to lose their color. They went from hazel, to yellow, and then to a gray color. “Back away, get your hand off the glass,” Paolo urged.
“It’s fine. I don’t feel anything. Let me see if I can see through the smoke.”
Cindy neared the glass, smashing the tip of her nose against it while trying to peer through the undulating gaps between the swirls of smoke. She then felt a tingle race up her arm.
“You see anything?” asked the professor.
“No, it’s just billowing smoke,” she said, as she felt the same tingle in her arm race to her spine. “This feels like by one of those battery-powered massage trinkets.”
“You should probably stop touching the glass,” said Paolo, worried.
“Fine,” she said, trying to pull her arm away. “Um, it’s stuck.”
“What do you mean?”
“My hand is stuck to the glass.”
“Here,” Paolo said, as he pulled on Cindy’s arm.
“Ow...ow, my foot.”
“I’m sorry, but let me adjust myself here, so I can help you pull your arm off,” said Paolo.
As soon as Paolo began gently tugging on Cindy’s arm, he noticed a speck of red glistening at the corner crease of her lip.
“What’s wrong?” Cindy asked, concerned at Paolo’s stare
.
He swiped his finger at the corner of her mouth and held it up between their eyes.
“Is that blood?” Cindy asked, with slight dread. She spit toward the ground. Bloody sputum splashed all over the rocky floor. “Get me off it,” she said, panicked.
Paolo used measured strength in his attempts to pry Cindy off the glass, but his efforts were futile. The slight tingle Cindy had initially felt race throughout her body began feeling like violent pulsations, as if a train of marbles gently crawled and rolled right underneath her skin. Her veins and capillaries illuminated like neon roots, making her skin thin and translucent.
“Cindy!” Paolo yelled. “Stay with me.”
A heaviness settled inside her head, pushing her eyelids down. The taste of blood raced across her taste buds. The metallic-tasting liquid settled in the pockets behind her lower lip. Her hand came loose and her body fell forward. The crown of her head thumped strongly against the glass. The sound her skull made when it made impact was terrifying. Paolo lunged forward and caught her lifeless body before it thumped to the ground.
Cindy heard a rush of water race through her ear canals. The sound fizzled and hissed for a few seconds, and then her hearing quickly normalized. The chatter of men, hurried men, awoke her senses. She was in an office, the same office that was in the boat-shaped building, the one with the scattered papers on the ground.
A thin, bald, middle-aged man with tattoos on his neck stood behind the desk, instructing other men who wore suits that would’ve been fashionable 30 years ago. Light grays, navy blues, gold cufflinks.
“This is it,” the bald man said. “You’ve all been chosen by Adonai to maintain humanity’s current direction. From here on out, you do not let anything interrupt what has been in motion for the past 2,000 years.”
“Uriel, what about Thalia?” asked one of the finely dressed men with the thick, black sideburns, and clean Adonic face standing next to Fisker. “Why must she remain alive? Her mere presence alone risks the entire harvest.”
“Don’t look at me. I had nothing to do with the ratification of the Concord, but what I know is that Thalia’s influence on mankind was far too great for her to be sacrificed as if she were a dog. Her techniques and cooperation have been essential. However, her exposure to the elements of this plane have severely weakened her as you can see. She does not have much time left, I presume,” Augustus Fisker said, as he glanced over his shoulder, and gazed at the rectangular, metallic box that held a frail, raven-haired woman against the back wall of the office.
