Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Chapter Nine

  The Cuckold on the Other Side of the Glass

  Dan shivered in the darkness as he looked through his faint reflection in the one remaining window of the little airport, out toward the road to Vedic City. He couldn’t believe it was snowing outside, really snowing, like Fire up the damn snowplows and get those roads clear or folks aren’t going to be able to get to work in the morning kind of snowing—not that folks were going to work anymore, or that there was anybody left to drive the plows even if there had still been folks who needed to use the roads.

  He also couldn’t believe Brennachecke hadn’t given him more detailed instructions. Can the flying lessons even continue in this? he wondered. When Brennachecke had left with his little band of pirate flight students just a few hours ago, he’d convinced himself that he should go into Vedic City and find out what the hell was going on. But now, with the snow tumbling out of the sky like it was February instead of July, he wasn’t so sure.

  First of all, he would leave tracks. If the snow continued coming down like it was, that wouldn’t really matter; they’d all get covered and nobody would be the wiser. But if it stopped . . . And it had to stop; it was the middle of summer after all, so surely no amount of climate craziness could produce this radical a change from the norm for any kind of extended period of time—or could it? If it stopped, then he’d end up leaving a trail right back here and fuck up the entire plan. Assuming that the plan was still the plan.

  And even if the snow didn’t stop, and his tracks were covered up, it was maybe twenty degrees outside. God knows what that became when you factored in the windchill. Dan was prepared for a couple of cold July nights—nights in the forties, or even the high thirties. He had a solid jacket and some thick canvas hunting pants, but they were hardly enough to weather a freak blizzard for a significant amount of time. He knew his hands would be too cold to accurately shoot his bow with any kind of speed by the time he got across the cornfield and into Vedic City, never mind by the time he actually found anything out. He had a knife, but using it as a weapon under the circumstances was a bad joke.

  What do you call the man who brings a knife to a gunfight?

  A dead man. Ha, ha, ha. (Not.)

  “Fuck me,” he muttered to himself and turned away from the glass, just as unsure about what to do as he’d been an hour ago.

  * * *

  “It’s not impossible, but it’s a lot harder,” Brennachecke said, looking out the library window of the Raj over the little balcony and at the freak July snowstorm hell-bent on covering the ground with white. “The cold makes your engine harder to manage, at least initially. Stiffens the rest of the plane up. But the ice is the real problem, and the wind, of course.”

  The Man-in-Charge frowned. This was not what he wanted to hear. The powerful effects of the berserker blood he was swapping out as they talked about the next session of Brennachecke’s flight school didn’t actually do much to settle his tingling nerves. Flying was exhilarating. The idea of stopping because of a little snow was so ridiculous he wanted to scream and break things.

  As gravity pulled the stolen red AB blood down from the IV bag and into his spiked vein, his frown deepened and deepened. He preferred AB to O when it came to swapping. The universal donor essence of type O blood felt cheap to him. It couldn’t be as good if anybody could use it. AB, on the other hand, would kill, or least really fuck up, anybody with another blood type. It was special. It made him special. Swapping with AB made him feel so much better than just settling for O. Or at least he thought it did. Both made him stronger. Both healed his wounds. Both filled him with confidence. And he was feeling strong and healthy and confident. But AB made him less frustrated. Calmer. More in control. Or at least he thought it did.

  He looked again at the bag hanging next to him and at the big handwritten letters on it, confirming for the third time that this was AB and not O. Maybe it wasn’t any better after all. He just didn’t know anymore. The MIC was not the kind of man that typically wondered these kinds of things, and so the very fact that he had these questions only made it all worse. He wordlessly motioned to the attendant who was doing the blood work to set him up with another bag. The man set to work on it immediately without needing any further clarification, but the MIC needed more than just a new bag of blood, so he grabbed him and dragged him over to his side and whispered something in his ear.

  Brennachecke turned and looked at the MIC just as the private instructions were ending. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. “I can still go over procedures and we can work in the plane on the ground, inside a hangar or something, but there’s just no way I safely put you in the air until this stops.”

  The MIC nodded, but said nothing.

  The man seemed distracted, and Brennachecke didn’t know if that was something that would end up being in his favor or not. What he did know was that he needed to check in on the Kessler sisters. Since they’d landed, Brennachecke had not seen any indication the MIC had made it clear to anybody other than the men who had actually picked the girls up that they were to be left alone. Would the message have been reliably passed on? he wondered. Not likely. He had no gun and no knife anymore. In the plane he had had leverage. He could easily enough just crash the thing and kill everybody; none of the pirates, the MIC included, knew enough yet to stop him from doing it. But they were not in the plane anymore, and Dan was back at the airport being snowed in more and more with each minute that passed.

  Brennachecke was at the mercy of the deal they’d made. Deals made with less than honorable men even in the best of times tended to be trouble—and these were anything but the best of times. He felt sick to his stomach at the thought of what could be happening to Jennifer and her sister right now under his very nose. He still intended on putting a bullet in Jen’s head at some point soon, but he didn’t want her to suffer before he did it—or after, for that matter.

  “I need to see those girls.”

  “You need to figure out how to keep our little fight school up and running in the weather,” the MIC said as the attendant slipped out of the room.

  “I told you what I can do down here,” the old soldier said. “I’m sure the snow won’t last and we’ll be back in the air in no time. It’s July after all.”

  “Then I’m sure it will be no time until you see your precious little cunts.”

  “My concern is that they’ll be . . . damaged when I see them.”

  “Then you better figure out a way for us to fly tomorrow, old man.”

  Brennachecke sighed. This was the third time he’d gone through this conversation with the MIC, and the stubborn man simply would not give. He looked out the window again at the snow tumbling down from the sky and then at the four guards with AR-15s in the room with them. He didn’t even know where the girls were being held.

  “Please.”

  The MIC smiled sadistically. The two men’s eyes locked. Neither one liked what they saw down there in the wells of the other’s soul.

  * * *

  “Screw it,” Dan said. “Screw it, screw it. Screw. It.”

  He opened the door and marched out into the snow, hoping to God that he was not making the biggest mistake of his life, but also not really caring anymore if he was. This plan of Brennachecke’s had been risky to begin with, and that was before the snow started falling. Maybe the pirates would think his tracks were a deer’s. Surely they were not that stupid, but maybe Dan would get lucky. He was due for some luck. Long overdue, actually, he thought. Of course, that wasn’t how luck worked, so far as such a thing existed, and Dan knew it. As far as he understood it, luck was just a selective viewing of random chance happenings. Folks just didn’t recognize the randomness over the emotional power of the “lucky” event.

  “Success and failure are in the hands of God, my love, not your own.” The words were his mother’s. They suddenly came to him unbidden and without any love behind them.

  “Yeah, that’s why you’re d
ead and I’m not,” he muttered in response to himself, feeling colder on the inside because of it. God didn’t fucking save you in the end, he thought as the emotional shreds of his mother’s passing stirred up around him like leaves in a whirlwind.

  “Yes, my love. He did. He took me just as he took all the faithful of His children to live forever by His side in heaven. It’s you and the other sinners He left behind to fend for yourselves in hell.”

  “Shut up, Mom.”

  It didn’t matter anyway. Lucky or not. Good idea or bad one. Blessed by the Lord or cursed. Dan needed some answers, and he was going to get them. The snow was accumulating fast. Each time Dan looked back as he made his way through the cornfield that separated the airport from Vedic City, there was a little less of a trail for somebody to follow. He smiled in the cold.

  * * *

  Beverly was already on her way there when the stitched-mouthed attendant found her and passed on the message, which he’d written on a page in a small notebook as he looked for her, that the MIC wanted to see her in the library. She came in and closed the door behind her, smiling as she watched Brennachecke and the MIC staring each other down. For a moment, she just enjoyed having secrets. Then she went to her lover’s side.

  This had been one of the best days she’d had in years. Strides forward had been made in the preparations for her coup. The Kessler girls had proven themselves to be powerful and intelligent and she was excited to have beaten them into giving up the knife, and even more excited about the idea of bathing in their blood. Then again, she considered now, if she did decide to let them live, the idea of twisting and molding their young and naive little minds into her own sinister tools for maintaining power was pretty exciting too. Her dreams felt so close. But then, as if the MIC could tell his demise was imminent and knew he needed to remind her who was in control, the rug was suddenly yanked out from under Beverly’s feet.

  “Suck it,” the MIC said to her as he continued to stare Brennachecke down.

  “The Kessler girls are—” Beverly began proudly, not hearing what the man had said, or even registering the fact that he’d spoken in the first place.

  “Suck it,” he repeated and pulled his penis from his pants, his eyes never leaving Brennachecke’s.

  Beverly looked at Brennachecke, who did not break the invisible beam connecting the two men by returning her look. She smiled her jackal smile. This time it was coy and seductive, as if to say the performance she was about to give was really for his benefit and not for the man whose penis she was about to take into her mouth. Then she placed herself between the legs of the Man-in-Charge and did what he had asked, while inside and in absolute secret she burned in both humiliation and anger. The MIC grabbed her roughly by the hair and forced himself deeper and deeper down her throat until tears filled and then dripped out of her eyes. She fought for breath, but did so elegantly, never once betraying the appearance that this was exactly what she wanted to be doing.

  Brennachecke didn’t flinch. He didn’t break eye contact. He knew that somehow this juvenile, sadistic staring contest would determine if he saw the Kessler girls before he finished teaching the MIC and his pirates how to fly. Beverly was just being used as a ploy to break his attention.

  Beverly, for her part, even while the MIC brutalized her mouth, understood what was happening too. This wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about sex either. Brennachecke needed to be broken and the MIC was demonstrating how powerful he was. Even as she felt his hot, slippery ejaculate wash down her throat and was tossed aside like a penny fuck whore, Beverly didn’t take it personally. She’d play the part, for now. Then one day soon, she’d use the karambit claw knife the Kessler girls had been so reluctant to give up to split the man from asshole to throat.

  One day, she thought. Soon.

  She smiled up at her abusive partner and seductively wiped her lips. As she sat on her chair, her robe open, fully exposed, she cocked her head and shot Brennachecke a look that said she’d take him that way too if he wanted. His reaction almost made the humiliation worth it for her. Almost.

  The MIC had broken eye contact when he’d blown his load, but somehow because of the way he’d done it he hadn’t exactly lost the battle of wills, nor had Brennachecke exactly won. He watched as Beverly turned to the MIC and whispered in his ear like she hadn’t just been sexually assaulted by him. He laughed. She whispered some more and then she laughed herself.

  “So, no flying until this fucking crazy storm passes, huh?” Beverly said to Brennachecke, absently playing with herself.

  “No, not after just a single day behind the stick,” he said, wishing the woman would cover herself up and stop trying to titillate him. “Flying in weather like this takes a seriously advanced skill set.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “And as long as the girls stay untouched, then you’ll teach that skill set to our people here, yes?”

  “Of course, eventually, but you’ve got to start at the beginning. And that is still where we are here. Now look, I’ve made good on my end of our deal. I know you took the Kessler girls in today, we saw it happen. So I think it’s time I got to confirm that they’re okay.”

  “Oh, they’re okay. Confirmed.”

  “I need to see them with my own eyes.”

  “Why? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Not at all.”

  Beverly laughed. Brennachecke and his stupid honesty was actually rather refreshing after the constant mind games she’d been playing here.

  “Tell me something, Brennachecke. What do you intend to do with little Bobby-Leigh after you murder her sister? Are you going to kill her too?”

  Brennachecke was too stunned by the question to answer it, which was just fine because Beverly didn’t really care what the answer was anyway. She’d just wanted to see his reaction. She smiled, until movement outside the window on the little balcony caught her eye and she turned toward it. The smile on her face widened into a goblin-like grin as she suddenly recognized who was outside watching them in the snow.

  “Dan! Oh, Brennachecke, you brought friends! Why didn’t you tell us!”

  Brennachecke turned his head toward the balcony to see what Beverly was talking about, but the cold steel of his well-seasoned soldier’s instincts already knew exactly what he would see. In the instant he saw Dan through the glass, those same soldier’s instincts also knew exactly what was going to happen next. There would be no more flight school for the pirates. There would be no more staring the MIC down. No more sexual exhibitions by Beverly. Not that any of these things were really great losses. The really great losses would be coming soon enough, though.

  This plan of his had been moving sideways since he’d arrived, so he guessed part of his mind had already been mentally preparing for a disaster. There was not so much as an inkling of surprise in his heart when Dan kicked in the French doors.

  With a flurry of cold and snow, the man who once used to be in love with Beverly entered the room, drew an arrow from his quiver, and nocked it. He didn’t say a word as he drew the string back and let the arrow loose in a smooth, almost beautiful movement. Brennachecke didn’t know how he knew who Dan would be aiming at with that first shot, but he did. Still, even though he could see it coming, the old soldier was only fast enough to avoid being killed instantly. He wasn’t fast enough to avoid being hit.

  The arrow landed with an audible thud just below his shoulder and ran through his body and nearly six inches out the other side before coming to a vibrating stop in his chest. This was the first time Brennachecke had ever been shot with an arrow and it hurt a lot more than he thought it would. But even as the pain exploded through his chest and shoulder, he could tell that the piercing tip of the bolt had missed anything immediately vital. In his experience, immediately mortal wounds were not quiet or sneaky about their natures, though somewhere in the back of his mind he did note that there was an awful lot of blood oozing around the arrow shaft.

  Regardless of how serious of a wound it was, he had t
o keep moving. He closed his eyes and mentally shut off the pain and threw up blinders to the blood. Odds were that everybody in the room would be dead in the next five minutes, and if he was going to buck those probabilities, he needed to get his hands on a gun, and fast.

  * * *

  Dan trudged through the thick snow like an insect. He was unaware of being pulled forward by forces he couldn’t really understand. Unaware that he was moving steadily toward his own death. Unaware that the loss of his life would seem both completely unnecessary and inconsequential to all the folks who witnessed it. Unaware that his consciousness was the equivalent of a single cell in the follicle of a single strand of arm hair on the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the first atom bomb. Unaware that he was insignificant in all the ways that mattered, and yet remained an integral part of the complex clockwork of chaos that maintained the very fabric of the whole of existence.

  He wasn’t alone in his ignorance. Humanity was never designed to comprehend even the smallest pieces of the big picture. How can a single cell in a person’s body understand its role or its importance in the actions that person’s body will take years from now? We are all just cells in the great body of the universe. Our purposes are locked into the way we carry out the daily functions of what we are designed to do. Do you think a liver cell understands the significance of what it does day in and day out in terms of protecting the organism as a whole? It most certainly does not. It just wants to keep up with the liver cell next to it. Man is no different, not that folks will ever stop trying to make sense of things. That is the curse that balances the power of our intellect.