Get there, find the salon, park, go inside.
Inside, it’s a salon. Small, a bit cramped, but exactly what you would expect from a salon. And there was a middle-aged, larger woman with long black hair named Angela.
She tells me to sit while she finishes doing a client’s hair.
I do, she finishes, client leaves, and she motions for me to sit in her chair.
“I was sent here,” I told her but she knew why I was there and went about making sure I looked nice. I mean, my hair is always cut down to the nub but she shaved my face…that, actually, that was nice. It just…man, it felt great.
We’re out here in the fucking middle of nowhere and you’re off getting pampered.
[and travis chimes in]
Seriously, we thought you were fuckin’ dead.
I’m sure you two were fine. Least you have all the company you need; I still need females.
[they shoot a glance, as their “relationship” is still secret; Sensei Ki-Jo doesn’t notice]
That’s insensitive.
[and steve chimes in]
We still need female company—we like females, too.
[and Sensei Ki-Jo chimes in]
I think he have sex with large Angela.
[surprise and laughter fill the room]
Alright, alright, enough. Bunch of assholes.
So Angela finishes up and we leave out the back door. Behind the salon was a shed, and she opened the shed and went in and told me to wait. When she came back out, she had a tiny laptop computer. And a black pad.
Put my hand on the pad and the computer lit up with a picture of me and pretty much everything I’ve ever done in my life – including everyone I’ve…hurt, all the things I may not be proud of, everything really. Everything I did for a man named Ghos.
And that was it.
What?
[and travis chimes in]
Just a handprint?
Yup. And she said my contact was Charne if and when I needed something. I would always be able to reach her – or her replacement, if need be – at the hotel she had taken me to before Australia.
The Marquee Chanteuse, suite 1122.
Sort of like my case worker.
So…what happens next?
[and steve chimes in]
No one’s coming after you?
Nope. Sort of the point of being out here in the middle of nowhere. But the man that put the hit out on me is…well, he’s not able to do anything against me now, not about to come close or anything unless I say it’s alright.
The contractors that he hired have been called off – I met one of them.
Seemed nice enough.
***
As if on cue, when I began to ask about the bandits and whether or not they had attacked any more of the locals, a horn rang out from way out of the back side of the house.
Sensei Ki-Jo growled, out of his seat before anyone else had even turned toward the noise. Pipe already secured between his teeth, he made three quick motions to me that Steve and Travis was too preoccupied searching out the window to notice:
He was going to head off and fire from a distance.
I was going to stay, defend.
And every attacker was to die.
Then he rushed (something uncommon for Sensei Ki-Jo) toward the creaking, wooden stairs leading down to the bedroom and the lab and an open exercise area. As he disappeared, it registered what was happening – Sensei Ki-Jo had rushed to his bow-and-arrow and, with the thud of the downstairs door, run out into the forest for a good vantage point.
Steve and Travis had gotten up to look out the window and I was mid-run up the stairs to my room for my gun and my katana—when I realized the sword was gone, taken by the bandits a week earlier. And so I stuffed a nine millimeter handgun into the waist of my pants and broke one of the cardinal rules – I entered Sensei Ki-Jo’s bedroom and took his black katana from off the wall.
As I ran back down the stairs, I called out to Steve and Travis:
“Get the rifles – the long shots—”
But found myself interrupted by them both exclaiming:
“Oh fuck!”
Even from across the room I could see what they were talking about.
Outside, in the blue of a mid-dusk evening, a rain was lifting up and out from the forest. It was an odd rain, one that looked as if it consisted of long, thin droplets.
Steve and Travis ran back inside, their heads down.
I stayed, watching.
It was stunning, poetic.
Soundless yet echoing.
And as the thirty-plus arrows began descending toward the exterior of the house, it was apparent that each long, thin arrow carried with it a tiny flicker of orange on their tips.
the time to go
PATIENTLY COILED
David wakes up to the sound of his alarm on the second day.
Shepard meets him in front of the hotel with a cab waiting.
David purposefully sits with Shepard to the left but his right ear has recovered to the point of functioning just shy of normal and he can still hear him:
“Dawlish wants you to know they really appreciate you continuing to do this and this specialist is supposed to be one of the best in the country. They paid a tremendous amount of money to get her to come in on a Sunday. And I hear it’s a hot girl. Hear…” he trails, almost laughing. “Anyway, we’re gonna get you checked out, see about flying to London. They wanted me to remind you that if you feel at all uncomfortable—”
“I’m not going to cancel London,” David reminds him for a third time.
At this point, everything is in London.
I will win her back.
There’s a short silence and they pull up to another massive building.
“Office is on…the fifth floor,” Shepard says as they get out of the cab and meet in front of the pair of revolving doors.
“I’ll text you when I’m done,” David says, aggressively keeping Shepard from coming up to the office and waiting with him.
For some inexplicable reason, David can’t stand him this time around.
He’s crude and his sense of human is poor but Shepard is not a bad man. He works hard and is mostly successful at keeping David happy; the only thing holding him back is David’s dislike for him. He dreads his lanky, freckled figure each time he sees Shepard holding open the door or standing in the background, flirting with anything that breaths and has a vagina. Even when David can hear him talking, he ignores him like he can’t.
The day before, during the second, less eventful signing, David had snapped at him. Shepard had leaned over the table and his tie had hit David’s face and so David, flushed and serious, scolded him in a calm but threatening voice not to do it again.
Shepard had backed off for the rest of the day.
“It’s cool…” there’s a note of hesitation in his voice, “…I’ll be down here. I didn’t grab breakfast yet and there’s a food court. You…you want anything?”
David’s unsure if he’s insulted or just worried.
David shakes his head no and doesn’t say anything else before taking the escalator up to the second level elevators. As the stairs ascend, David’s pretty sure he hears Shepard call him an asshole under his breath.
A wild, uncontrollable rage swells inside his body as if it had been there all along, patiently coiled and waiting to strike at the right time.
David turns and hops back down the stairs and lands with a loud, metallic thud.
Shepard turns around at the sound and finds David’s beat-red face staring back at him. David keeps his hands on either side of his body but both fists are balled and scarlet.
He clears his throat.
“Did you just call me an asshole?” he asks.
Shepard laughs.
David’s anger grows.
“Seriously?” Shepard asks, the smile dropping as he realizes David isn’t joking.
David tilts his chin up with an unblinking gaze of utter an
noyance.
“Of course I didn’t call you an asshole. You’re like my favorite client. Are—are you alright, dude? You don’t—”
But David’s already turned around and headed back up the escalator to the doctor’s office.
ANOTHER DISCONCERTING CONVERSATION
And four days before the deadline, I call Henry Fox:
“Hello?” asks a young male voice.
“This is Mr. Ridley. I want to speak to Henry Fox.”
My teeth are gritted immediately.
A voice comes back, one that’s low, menacing, and old, gruff.
“You’re early, Mr. Ridley.”
“I have the address you’re looking for. What guarantee do I have that this matter is resolved?”
“No-no-no-nope, darlin’. That ain’t how it works. You need to bring me proof, bucko. I want to see him, know he’s alive. Well.”
“The fuck I will. He’s outside London.”
“What a coincidence—your brother will be in London soon. Tell you what. Have your brother take a trip to see him before Thursday, have him get a snippy-snap photo,” says Henry Fox as if he were talking to a child, “and send it over to me and I’ll let everything slide. You can go back to running your faggot school with your faggot brother teaching his faggot music to his cunt daughter. Which reminds me, she’s very pretty—”
“I will fucking rip out your throat!” I scream.
But the line’s already disconnected.
A VILLAGE OF WATER
“Where are we?” Lizzy asks.
“Um, well, lil’un. We’er at the town of Rumble Canyon.”
“It just looks like a lake.”
“Well, pickle, that’s because it is. When I was a young boy, there’as a town here.”
“What happened to it?”
“Well, there’as a nearby dam and they ain’t need it no more so they told everyone to leave. An’ then they flooded the area.” Then, to himself, “Think the land was more valuable as a lake.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Act’lly, this’as the first place I came after I left home. Accidentally found an abandoned town—well, I don’t know ‘bout accident. I’m pretty sure I ‘member a truck driver tellin’ me somethin’ about it and I think that’s sort of how I picked the direction to walk.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know…”
***
After hitchhiking for a day and a solid week traveling by foot and camping at night, twelve year old Chris Gibberts stumbles onto a very small, mostly abandoned town one dreary afternoon. It’s a dream come true. He drops his backpack near the outskirts of town and begins adventuring. Each house is empty, each street void of life. Everything’s unlocked, all the front doors open – everything’s empty, though, evacuated but for the cleaning rags, the cockroaches, the discarded and the unwanted. It takes three or four houses before the large red print catches his eye and he reads the warning glued to the front of each house:
FLOODING IMMINENT
There’s a long disclaimer in tiny print under it and, at the bottom, it gives the date and time of the flooding; however, the town is without power and Chris hadn’t brought his watch so he’s unsure if the flooding will be that day at 5:00 p.m. or the next. This stops him from searching houses and he travels to the edge of the small town. A part of him expects to discover a tsunami coming at him – the only things he had discovered thus far were mothballs, stained and broken couches, dirty rags, old clothes, and wiring.
At least a tsunami would be interesting.
On the edge of town, near a two-lane road leading over a small creek, up a hill, and out toward the horizon, Chris is momentarily distracted by a hardware store and forgets about the possibility of an oncoming tsunami. He leans in against the window, his hand against the glass and over his eyes to block the gray afternoon glare. The sun hadn’t made much of an appearance in the last few days but he had lucked out and there hadn’t been rain. The store appears empty, like everything else he had seen.
When he looks out and up the road, where a tsunami could be drawing near to demolish the town, he sees instead three distant cars blocking all traffic.
They’re police cars.
It’s a roadblock.
He stands, frozen; not by fear but curiosity.
Then he enters the hardware store. It’s musty and vacant.
“Surprise,” he mutters, kicking a wood doorstop in the center of the room.
The sound of the hollow wood bumping against the ground fills his stomach with a creeping dread. The tense knot in his belly tightens a bit more and a bit more each time he enters an empty establishment; the vacuum of human presence, the abnormality of an actual ghost town…it’s as if the people were abducted.
There’s a broom missing half its straw brush.
A box of unused light fixtures.
Two screwdrivers missing their bits and a hammer with a broken handle.
When he leaves the store and looks back up the road, far off is a police car speeding toward the town, its lights flashing and the rumor of a siren on the air as it rings in the distance. Chris’ initial reaction is panic – if the police find him this far from home they might send him to jail or, worse, back to his mother. He sprints around the nearest corner, out of sight, and runs full speed down as many blocks as he can, finally reaching a house with an old, dilapidated fence. The exterior is worn and tired, long-faded and chipped and broken, the owner negligent. Chris leaps the wood fence and rounds the house to a tiny back yard. After a few minutes of his own heavy breathing and the growing siren, he peers around the edge to see the police cruiser turn the corner a few blocks down and begin patrolling the neighborhood.
Chris leans his shoulder against the outside of the house.
There had yet to be a moment where he had panicked as much as he did when he saw the cop car approaching. In later years, he would realize how unsafe it had been to hitchhike by pretending to be a female – at the age of twelve, Chris just prides himself on being clever. In order to travel, he knew he’d have to disguise his young age: all it took was some makeup to highlight his cheek bones, padding in a tiny bra, a curly blonde wig tied down by a dark shawl, and large sunglasses; a twelve year old boy could look like a woman in her mid-twenties.
(It helped that the trucker saw twelve year old Chris drinking his first beer at a dive bar across the street from the truck stop and diner. It was the afternoon he left home. The bartender asked for I.D. and Chris, in his girliest voice, explained that her purse been lost and she was forced to hitchhike north.
Luckily, she did have cash.
The female bartender took pity and gave twelve year old Chris his first taste of beer. It was disgusting and he stopped after the first sip; by then, a truck driver had overheard the conversation and offered a ride, as he was headed toward Arkansas. Chris agreed and hitched a ride. The trucker kept himself under control, sometimes asking personal questions. Chris just made up every answer and, once over the Arkansas border, ditched the driver at the first stop.)
The police cruiser nears the house and the loud speaker blares the cop’s voice:
“Son, wherever you’re hidin’, you need to come out. You are trespassing. This is a dangerous place to be. This town is to be flooded tomorrow by 5:00 p.m. If you hear this, know you are NOT in trouble. We just want to be sure that you evacuate the town. Come out, son. This is a dangerous place to hang around. I know you’re still here. I just saw you with my binoculars. You are NOT in trouble.”
The police car keeps moving and the words, though audible, become indistinguishable.
“Sounds like you ain’t in trouble, kid.”
“Oh dear Lord!” Chris yelps, startled.
There’s the silhouette of an old man sitting behind the torn screen of an enclosed, rotted back porch. Only flecks of white hair, bushy and disheveled on top of his head, curly and scruffy down across his face. A bottle of beer raises to his lips for a tiny peck of a sip.
“Yer too young to be runnin’—how old’er you?” the old man asks from his seat.
His voice sounds fragile and shaky.
“What?” Chris asks, too confused to understand what’s going on.
“Come here, kid.”
Wary, each step carefully paced, Chris moves toward the thin, grime-covered screen between the old man and him. There’s a large slash in a section and Chris faces the old man through the tear. Even closer, the porch is dark and the old man’s features are hard to discern. His eyes appear black, almost unfilled, with deeply drawn crow’s feet reaching out over both temples and seemingly spreading all over his face. He’s slouched back and his hands shake while lighting a cigarette, shake with another peck of his bottle.
Next to him, on the mud-spattered floor, is a cooler with the lid closed and a round, deep pot with curled edges.
“Don’t get too close to me, kid. Stinks like shit in here.” The old man puffs his cigarette and exhales smoke that further haze his features. “What’er you runnin’ from, kid?”
“Um…my, uh, my mother.”
The old man belts out a hearty laugh and sends himself into a coughing fit.
“She take away your tv or something?”
CHRIS GIBBERTS – AGE 12
Two days before Chris leaves home, he sinks further and further into a tense ball on the dirty living room carpet beside his mother’s chair.
It doesn’t stop her, though.
“Yer gonna start LISTENIN’,” and she swings down hard again, the long, thin wooden rod striking the back of his button-up shirt so hard that a seam tears, “and yer gonna read the good book TWICE an EVENIN’,” and she slams it down twice more in rapid succession, the remaining WHAP noises filling the living room.
“And you ain’t to see that April Mae GIRL,” WHAP, “no more!”
She stops after that.
Chris doesn’t have to look up to know the wobbly fat hanging from his mother’s neck shakes with her head as her eyes look up to pray; before the weight became so extreme, she had bent her head forward. He’s yet to cry even though the first strike hurt worse than most – it had caught him in the face, unaware, and had left a small gash at the top of his forehead, blood soaking into the sleeve under his face. She may have stopped only because she had worn herself out. She wheezes in short-breath after short-breath then, with a few whispered prayers, she switches to her soft, apologetic tone:
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