Quest SMASH

by Joseph Lallo

  A man with a black fedora sat in the corner, perched atop a three-legged stool like a pigeon on a skyscraper. He wore a maple-bodied acoustic guitar strapped across his torso, fingers moving across the frets. He spilled blue notes and minor chords into the swirling mix of muted conversation and clanking dishes. Samuel recognized the melody, an old delta blues standard, but he could not place the song. A microphone jutted from the top of a stand, but the guitarist ignored its existence, his head down and swaying along with the swinging beat created by his right hand above the sound hole.

  Samuel looked down at a white mug on a table. A book and a folded newspaper sat askew, the newspaper dangling from the edge as if trying to escape. He could see the dark swirls in his chai latte as the steam climbed through the air. He noticed a half-dozen other people involved in various solitary acts. One woman bounced her head in rhythm to the song confined to her ear buds, ignoring the guitarist pouring his soul forth from the guitar. One man sat in the corner, a single chair at a small table facing the wall. He thumbed through a crumpled, dog-eared book. A young couple sat at a table across the room. They both wore safety pins for earrings and patches on their black leather jackets, declaring allegiance to long-dead punk bands. The man had his hands on the table face up, while the woman had hers inside of his, facedown. They gazed into each other’s faces, oblivious to everyone else in the room.

  Samuel turned back to the bluesman. He saw the alabaster skin on his hands and chuckled. Purists claimed the white man could never play the blues like the originators, but he wasn’t a purist. Samuel closed his eyes and let the familiar, twelve-bar pattern soothe his nerves.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  The question ripped him from his thoughts. He opened his eyes to find a woman standing before him, holding a steaming mug and a Danish on a plate. The corner of the wax paper beneath the pastry stuck out at Samuel like a preschooler’s tongue.

  “No,” he said.

  Samuel felt an immediate sense of connection with the woman or, more accurately, the girl. But he also felt a deep sadness. She appeared to be on the verge of womanhood, sparkling eyes, slight hips and an optimism about love and life she would share with everyone she knew.

  She wore her jet black hair below the shoulder in wavy patterns that reflected deep, purple hues in the light of the coffee shop. Samuel loved the way it framed her oval face. The woman’s skin shone with a brilliance punctuated by dark eye shadow and glistening, maroon lips. She shed her bulky winter coat to reveal a lithe form beneath. Faded, black jeans clung to her shapely legs and rode low on slender hips. She wore a ragged, gray sweater over a black nylon top that held her breasts upright. Samuel guessed her to be in her early twenties, but with a vulnerability that made her appear even younger. He made eye contact, trying to avoid being hypnotized by her blue eyes.

  “I’m Mara,” she said, extending her hand outward while placing her coffee on the table.

  “Samuel,” he said.

  “I never approach guys. Even at the bar. Sorry if this is a bit awkward.”

  He smiled and waved off the fumbling attempt to break the ice. “It’s fine.”

  Mara paused and took a long look. She gazed at Samuel, and he saw electricity pass through her face.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered.

  Samuel sat still. He lifted his mug to his lips until the coffee singed his bottom lip.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked.

  Without waiting to confirm her revelation, Samuel explained. “I know I’m asleep. Dreaming. Maybe you are, too. Even if you’re not, I think we can communicate this way. I did with Kole.”

  She froze, as if that name slapped her across the face. She looked around at the bluesman, the punk lovers, the bustling barista.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Mara looked at her hands, holding shiny, red nails up to her face. “It feels so real.”

  “Most dreams do, until you wake up.”

  She nodded in agreement. “How can we— What should—”

  Samuel laughed as Mara’s brain struggled to process what was happening. “I don’t know. The dream scenario I had with Kole was, well, not quite as comfortable as this one. Why don’t we enjoy our gourmet coffees and talk?”

  Mara looked over each shoulder as if the authorities were about to break down the door in an FBI raid.

  “I think we’re good until I wake up. Scone?”

  She smiled and leaned back in the chair. “I miss this,” she said, twirling a strand of hair around her slim fingers. “I miss my hair, the fragrance of my body wash, insignificant things.”

  “Funny how life’s little pleasures escape your notice until you lose them all,” Samuel said. “I miss my music.”

  He turned to face the man in the fedora. The melody changed. The key changed. However, the faceless guitar slinger continued to jam those comfortable, familiar chords.

  “Tell me about you,” Samuel said.

  Mara blushed and passed a hand in front of her face.

  “Sorry. That sounded so bad. Didn’t mean to embarrass you.” He shuffled in his seat and moved his mug from one hand to the other.

  “It’s okay. I’m not very good around guys.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, leaning forward. “Guys at your school must be tripping over you.”

  Mara shook her head. “Dropped out second semester sophomore year and never went back. I commuted, anyways. Didn’t really buy into the whole college experience.”

  Samuel left it at that, sensing the scab on that wound never entirely healed. “I get it.”

  “What was college like for you, you know, back in the day?” she asked with a wide smile.

  Samuel leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “It was hard carrying all the clay tablets back and forth to class. We didn’t even have the wheel back then.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way—”

  Samuel took a turn at dispelling the clumsiness. “I know.”

  Mara sipped from her mug. Samuel loved the way she cupped her long, slender fingers around it on both sides. If she had a scarf, she could be on the cover of one of those trendy catalogs for European kitchen gadgets.

  “You’re kinda cute for an older guy.”

  Samuel blushed. The bluesman stopped playing and was shuffling through a handful of papers while holding the guitar on his lap.

  “Tell me your story,” Samuel said.

  “Can’t we just sit here and drink coffee and leave it at that?”

  He sensed reluctance in her voice, but felt a pressure to force the issue.

  “I don’t think that’s why we’re here. I think I’m getting these dream opportunities for a reason. It must have something to do with the reversion.”

  The last word made her shudder. It pulled the curtain back on the coffeehouse façade, which Mara had convinced herself was the new reality.

  “Fine,” she said, a new coldness emanating from her face.

  Samuel waited. He drummed his fingers on the table as the notes spewed forth from the guitar again. The punk rockers brushed past with a mixture of leather, espresso and jasmine incense.

  “We didn’t have much. My dad worked the factory. He turned a nut on rods, or some bullshit like that. We never really knew exactly what he did, but it kept him at sixty to seventy hours a week. He’d work a full eight-hour shift on Sunday and be home by noon.”

  She let the statement hang and gave Samuel time to do the math.

  “Didn’t leave much quality family time. My mom babysat, which made me and my brother feel even less special. On any given day, ten or twelve kids would be running through the house. My dad would come home after a twelve-hour shift and the chaos would eat at him. I swear you could see it in his face.”

  The guitarist shifted into a down-tempo shuffle that reminded Samuel of “Stormy Monday.” He thought of the dark cloud propelling the reversion forward, and the title of the song, before pushing it from his
thoughts.

  “I’m telling you this because it had a lot to do with me leaving school. My mom got sick and couldn’t watch kids anymore, and the factory started losing contracts to overseas companies, which meant my dad lost hours and eventually his job. I took over parenting for my younger brother, and I couldn’t do that and keep up with my studies at the same time.”

  “I wonder how many other women have been in that same situation.”

  Samuel meant the comment as a token of empathy, understanding, but Mara simply shrugged and continued.

  “Tommy, my little brother, was late that night. I was going to pick him up from hockey practice because my dad was already asleep and my mom had taken too many of her ‘little sleep helpers’ to even consider getting behind the wheel. I remember thinking how crazy it was for a twelve-year-old kid to be at hockey practice until eleven o’clock on a Friday night. They don’t call Detroit ‘Hockeytown’ for nothing.”

  Hearing the name of the city ignited a synapse in Samuel’s dream brain. He felt an ache behind his forehead, trapped in a place where it would gnaw and fester. And you let him out there

  “I think it was December. It had already been dark for like seven hours and a heavy, wet snow had been falling for the past two. Detroit was in dire shape. They couldn’t afford to put police officers on the street, let alone rock salt or sand from a plow. If you live there, you accept it.

  “So I was on my way to get Tommy, cranking some killer metal on the car’s CD player.”

  Samuel nodded. Then he held up his hand, flashing Mara the devil horns, an international sign for heavy metal.

  “I don’t think Dio started that, but it’s fine if history thinks so.”

  Samuel raised his eyebrows and smiled. His mind flashed to a Judas Priest concert he attended as a teenager, and he couldn’t remember any fans that even remotely resembled someone like Mara. He would have gone to many more if they had.

  “Yeah. So the car is really warm and the music is really loud, two things that wouldn’t be happening in our house. My time in the car was as much of an escape as I could manage. I guess it’s why I never complained too much about chauffeuring Tommy around. It gave me time alone to think and listen to metal.

  “He was waiting for me on the curb with his stick held like a sword in one of those high-fantasy movies. I remember him being the only kid sitting out there on top of his hockey bag. He came running over to the car toward the trunk. I pulled the latch, and it rose like the opening jaws of a monster. He swung all of his weight around to get the bag to clear the bottom of the bumper. He pushed the rest of it in and then shoved the stick on top. I heard the muffled thump of the trunk shutting. Tommy yanked on the handle of the passenger side door, and I shook my head. He was a skinny kid and not heavy enough to sit in the front, you know, with the airbag laws and stuff.”

  Samuel nodded. The more Mara talked, the more he shifted in his seat. The delicate strumming of the bluesman started to erode his patience.

  “Tommy climbed into the backseat and started immediately yapping about practice. I turned the music down to let Tommy have his say. It’s not like Mom or Dad was going to ask him about practice when we got home.

  “I made a right out of the parking lot and eased on to Route 24. The four-lane cut right through our hometown. Strip malls and used-car lots straddled it with an occasional stoplight thrown in to allow greedy idiots out of the big-box stores with their plastic crap.”

  Samuel smiled. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and began shooting glances about the room. The patrons continued on their individual pursuits, and the notes coming from the guitar strings felt like death by a thousand cuts.

  “Like I said, it was December, dark and cold. With snow. But that wasn’t really a factor in it.”

  A wheeze escaped Samuel’s lips.

  “I passed through a busier section of 24, closer to the stretch with the car dealerships. They were all closed, but there was an Italian restaurant across the street from one that always served dinner late. We were driving at about forty-five, keeping the limit. We had some old-school Metallica jamming. Pretty sure it was Ride the Lightning, probably “Fade to Black.” Tommy and me, we loved that song. The dynamics are brutal.

  “There weren’t many cars on the road, but enough to keep the headlights dancing in the mirrors. Tommy shifted into the center area of the backseat, finding some way to do that while keeping the seatbelt fastened. He knew I’d friggin’ flip if he didn’t have it on.”

  Mara shifted in her seat and drew a breath. She had doled out as many of the inconsequential details as she could, and now it was time to tell Samuel what he wanted to know.

  “There was a car in front of me, maybe a hundred yards or so, and nobody behind. We were in the left lane with nothing but faded lines on asphalt to separate us from the traffic going the other way.”

  Mara could no longer look at Samuel. Her vision clouded from the tears oozing from the corner of her eyes.

  “So anyway, the car in front hits the brakes hard. I see the flash and think he probably wanted a lasagna and passed the parking lot going forty-five or fifty. But then I got that feeling in my gut, the kind that probably comes from evolutionary instinct, if you believe in that kind of thing.

  “The car fishtails, and by now I’ve closed the distance and I’ve taken my foot off the accelerator. Dad always got pissed when I used the brake to slow down on the highway. He said if you remove your foot from the gas, you’ll slow down and won’t scare the shit out of the people behind you.

  “By now the car is spinning on the slick roads and I see the side of some featureless sedan. And as soon as it crosses to the right into the slow lane, I saw the headlights from a car coming in the opposite direction and crossing the double yellow line.”

  The blues player stopped strumming. The barista stood with a dirty dish rag in one hand and an empty mug in another. Everyone inside the coffee shop stopped and stood like motionless creatures trapped in a dying world. Samuel’s eyes shifted from one to the next as their skin, hair and clothing morphed into a greyscale curtain of despair. He watched as teeth fell out and eyes turned to obsidian voids. The oppressive silence of the reversion swallowed the hustle of the coffee shop. The smell of incense and roasted coffee disappeared as well. Samuel watched the lights dim, and the walls dropped their adornments like a tattered robe, allowing the crooked and rotten planks to show through.

  “The headlights looked like eyes,” Mara said. “I know that’s a corny cliché, but it’s true. The car looked like an angry beast. I remember starting to swerve the wheel in the midst of Tommy yelling. Time sped up and then slowed. I watched as the filaments in the headlights exploded on impact. That was the last thing I could see. I remember thinking I wasn’t even going to see the face of the other driver. Was it a man? Woman? Were they drunk, lost, disoriented? Were they courting death, like me?

  “The hood shot upward into the shape of an inverted V on impact. I can’t really explain the sound. You would literally piss your pants if you heard it. I think I did. I felt it more than I heard it. It was like the oncoming beast was eating my car.”

  Mara paused. She put a napkin to each eye while Samuel stared at his folded hands. More and more of the creatures from the dying locality appeared in the coffee shop in complete silence. They stood next to the table and behind Mara. Samuel tried not to look into those lost faces.

  “I’m short. I was short,” Mara said, stumbling over her existence within an unknown world buried in the dream of another. “The seatbelt locked and I felt the burn on my neck.”

  Samuel lifted his head and saw Mara tugging at the collar of her shirt. She pulled it down far enough for him to see the bruise he noticed when he arrived at the Barren.

  “And then blackness. I don’t remember pain, not sure what happened to Tommy, what happened to anything.”

  The tears came freely, without Mara using words to plug the dike.

&nbs
p; “I can’t even remember how long there was blackness. When I opened my eyes again, I was here,” she said, using an arm to scan the room of the standing undead. “Well, not here, but here in this locality.”

  “Where?” Samuel asked, unable to speak more than a single syllable.

  “Wandering through that fucking forest. The one where nooses hang like leaves from the branches. The one you came from.”

  He paused and put a hand over his mouth. “Do you think you’re dead?” he asked.

  “Do you think I’m dead?” she said. “I guess I wasn’t sure up until now.”

  Samuel felt the room shudder. The forms in front of his face shimmered as if the entire room were submersed in water. He lifted his shoulders, sensing what was coming.

  “I’m waking up.”

  He reached across the table to grasp Mara’s hand. She extended hers and looked into his face through puffy, red eyes.

  Samuel blinked the sleep from his eyes, staring at the back of Kole’s head as he slept on the floor of the cabin. Major glanced down at Samuel and then returned his stare to the window and the undead sentinels on the other side.

  Chapter 11

  The four of them sat like prisoners within the walls of the one-room cell. Major shifted every so often, bending and craning his neck to acquire a better view of the army of undead soldiers surrounding the cabin. Their presence destroyed the Barren and any hope of exploring it further. Mara and Samuel sat on their respective chairs, across from each other at the table, while Kole remained slumped on the floor, running his finger through the dust. One lonely pot of gruel remained, which they hoped would last for as long as they needed it. Major saved three cloudy bottles of water, now positioned at his feet.