The Riser Saga

by Becca C. Smith

  As he tightened his arms around me, he leaned in to my ear. “Hello, Granddaughter.”

  That could have been a loving moment in life if Geoffrey Turner wasn’t completely evil.

  Turner pulled away with an even larger grin than before. The roar of the crowd egging him on. I was amazed that I was still conscious.

  He turned to the microphone. “It is with great pleasure that I award Chelsan Derée with a full scholarship for the rest of her stay here at Geoffrey Turner High School.”

  More roars from the crowd.

  Turner droned on and on about the tragic events that led to my mother’s death and my home being destroyed.

  It gave me time to process. Paying my way through school indicated that he wasn’t planning on killing me soon. Or maybe it was an alibi. I needed to discuss this with my friends. But in the mean time, I needed to stay on my toes around this guy. And I needed to calm down! I was letting my terror rule me and I wanted to keep my head clear. Think this through, logically and calmly. I could use any dead thing in my near vicinity to hurt him if need be. That was good. Just because these five corpses were out of my control didn’t necessarily mean I was screwed. To keep my mind focused I found a dead mouse’s black hole inside the assembly hall wall. I attached to him easily, made him run a little, even threw in a jump. Okay, that meant Turner didn’t control every dead thing in the surrounding area. Just these five guys.

  I glanced back at one of them. A lady with black-rimmed glasses and blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was wearing a pants suit and holding a briefcase. She was even fidgeting for goodness sake! Whoever was controlling her was really good. A thought hit me. Maybe someone wasn’t controlling her. Maybe this was more like the Vodun ritual Mr. Alaster told us about from the Scientific Journal. If that were true how were they controlled? There had to be some way. I needed more information. I tried connecting with her black hole, but she had the same protective wall that the first man had.

  Quick test. Yep. They all did. Great.

  My mind was ripped back into the present moment when I heard Turner say, “I’m going to meet privately with Ms. Derée in Principal Weatherby’s office to take care of all her needs. Thanks to the press for coming out here and thank you to Principal Weatherby for such a kind welcome. Good day to you all.”

  Privately? Uh, oh.

  I searched the audience to see Nancy, Ryan and Bill giving me looks of encouragement, but I could tell they were more scared than I was.

  I was getting dizzy with all the deep breaths I was taking, but it somehow calmed my stomach. I barely heard Principal Weatherby excuse the students. Their shuffling out the door was just another step closer to me being alone with Gramps.

  “Ms. Derée?” Turner held his hand out for me to follow Principal Weatherby.

  Weatherby turned to me with an expression of genuine concern. “Don’t worry Chelsan, we’ve restricted the press access to my office. They won’t bother you.”

  I smiled, but inside I was thinking that I’d kind of like the reporters around now. Maybe I could convince Principal Weatherby to stay with us. “Principal Weatherby?”

  “Yes, Chelsan.” I’d never seen him so worried about me. He was usually warning me that if I didn’t have the money for this school I was no longer welcome. I guess with everything that had happened to me, he was feeling a little guilty.

  I walked up next to him so that Turner and his staff were trailing us by a few feet. I spoke quietly so only Weatherby could hear. “I’d feel more comfortable if you stayed with me. I’m too nervous around the Vice President.” I glanced back to make sure Turner didn’t hear.

  Weatherby placed his hand on my shoulder supportively. “I hear you, Chelsan, but I can’t argue with the man. He wants his time alone with you. Don’t worry, it won’t take long, he has a busy schedule. He just wants to go over some contracts with you so he can set you up financially. Great man, Geoffrey Turner.”

  Yeah, he’s peachy. Oh by the way did I mention he wants to kill me? Okay, thanks for your support. Bleh.

  I was on my own. I could deal. Hopefully.

  We were at Weatherby’s office in no time.

  “Thank you, Principal Weatherby, we’ll only be a few moments,” Turner said with his usual grin.

  “I’ll just be in the teacher’s lounge when you’re through.” Weatherby shook Turner’s hand, gave me an encouraging wink and headed toward the lounge next door.

  “After you.” Turner held the door for me and I walked through trying not to shake too much.

  Turner entered with his staff. One of his men closed the door. When everyone was inside the five corpses lined up against the wall. Weatherby’s office was pretty large with a six foot oak desk near the back and brown leather furniture. The throne behind the desk (and it seriously looked like a throne, over five feet high, two feet wide, mahogany trim with grommet punched leather) was a statement of how well Weatherby thought of himself. There were holo-pictures everywhere on his wall of Weatherby with some celebrity or political figure. It was almost like a shrine to himself and how many people he’d met over the years.

  Turner sat in Weatherby’s seat of power and motioned for me to sit across from him in the puny wooden chair reserved for visitors. “Please sit.”

  “I’ll stand.” Better to stay on my feet.

  “Suit yourself.” Turner nodded his head to one of his staff and the woman with the briefcase walked over and laid it on the table. “Thank you, Marion. Could you close the curtains, please?”

  Marion didn’t say a word as she walked to the large window overlooking the cherry blossomed courtyard and closed the heavy brown curtains. Only the overhead lights from the office gave any illumination to the room.

  “So.” Turner let that hang in the air for a good two minutes.

  “So,” I said back, trying to figure out what he was going to do next.

  “I finally meet the murderer of my only son.”

  And there it was. He really did blame me for my father’s death.

  “No chance of this being a heartfelt family reunion then?” I figured I’d throw that out there.

  “No chance,” he said and my blood temperature dropped forty degrees.

  “If you had given your blessings instead of your curses, he’d still be alive.” Wow. That was bold. I was really impressed with myself.

  Until I saw the look on his face.

  I had never seen so much loathing in a person’s eyes before. Not even Jill’s and that’s saying a lot. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. But maybe I shouldn’t have. Something about this man made my skin crawl and I realized it wasn’t fear, it was a revulsion that spread through me to every fiber of my soul. If he knew who I was then the attack on the trailer park was intentional. It wasn’t random, it was purposeful and targeted. He was finishing the job he started eighteen years ago.

  “Trash.” He said it so quietly and with so much venom I almost flinched instinctively.

  Minutes passed with agonizing slowness as we stared at each other from across the room. His dead staff motionless, watching.

  Turner focused his attention on the briefcase and opened it as if we were in the middle of a business meeting. He pulled out an electronic reader and he punched up a contract, sliding it to me on the desk.

  “Thumbprint, there. It’s your money for the rest of the year.” I could tell he was detached at this point. Maybe I could get through this meeting alive after all. Come to think of it, it was crazy for me to think he’d try anything in such a public setting. How would he explain my dead body after he just had his private meeting with me? I had been so worked up on the possibility of an attack I hadn’t stopped to really think about the practicality of it all.

  “I’m going to read it first, thank you.” My body and mind were starting to relax a bit. He wouldn’t hurt me. Not today anyway.

  “Be my guest.” Turner leaned back in the giant chair folding his hands comfortably over his stomach.

 
I read the contract fully which didn’t take long since it consisted of two paragraphs. Nothing in it suggested anything of foul play, just a brief summary of how much money I was to receive minus the costs of tuition and materials. It was actually a hefty sum; I’d be able to live out the rest of the year in comfort. If I wasn’t killed first, and therein lied the rub. I thumbprinted the document and it instantly deposited the cash into a savings account. Sweet.

  “Can I go now?” I asked hoping he’d say yes.

  “No.”

  I tensed up. The way he said it chilled me.

  Slowly, Turner stood up from his seat and walked over to me. “You’ll be leaving, but it won’t be alive.”

  I took my chance.

  I whirled around with as much speed as I could muster and bolted for the door. Two of his staff members grabbed me before I even made it a foot. I tried to scream. They covered my mouth, blocking any sound to signal for rescue.

  Turner placed a finger on his mouth and smiled wickedly at me. “Are you going to be quiet?”

  I nodded my head, knowing no one was outside anyway. Weatherby had made sure that we were to be undisturbed at all costs. That cost was me apparently. The man let his hand off my mouth.

  “You must be able to tell that my staff here is special.” Turner mocked.

  “You mean dead? Yeah, I noticed.” I could feel my eyes roll.

  “You’ll be like them soon. It’s a quick ceremony, and then you’ll be under my control,” he said, very pleased with himself.

  I hadn’t thought about this outcome. Of course. He could kill me and no one would know the difference because everyone would still think I was alive. Everyone except my friends, they’d know, but who cared at that point? How was I going to get out of this? A question I was asking myself a lot these days. Stall. Stalling is good, and then maybe I could think of something in the mean time.

  “Do you control them?” I asked not expecting a real answer.

  Turner laughed. “You sense my little barrier do you? Tell me, do you know why you can’t break through it?”

  Oooooh, so condescending. I hated that I was related to this guy, but what was worse, I knew he knew more about my power than I did and that was just annoying.

  “I know more than you think.” I said it with as much conviction as I could muster.

  And to my surprise, Turner actually paused in doubt. “What do you know?”

  Things started to click in my head and I decided to make a gamble. “Everything Jason Keroff knows. He’s been staying with me at Nancy’s.” I was fishing to see if he had Nancy’s house bugged.

  And it paid off.

  “That boyfriend of yours may have found a way to block our listening devices, but it won’t matter in about ten minutes.” Turner glared at me.

  Ryan. Why didn’t he tell me he had blocked Turner’s signal? It didn’t make sense, but regardless of how the signal was blocked, the end result was Turner hadn’t heard anything that happened at Nancy’s. And that meant, he only had the Virtual Reality bar incident for his information on me. Didn’t know what that meant yet, but I knew it was important.

  “Syringe,” Turner spat out. He was really going to do this.

  The woman called Marion went to the briefcase and pulled out a syringe full of clear liquid.

  “It’s a quick poison, you won’t feel any pain. Unfortunately.” His eyes were actually sparkling with that last statement.

  Panic. This was a good time to panic.

  She leaned in to inject me with the poison.

  Struggling was out of the question I was so paralyzed with fear. I was going to die. I was seriously, unequivocally about to die.

  The needle was about to touch my neck when…

  …I acted on instinct like when I was seven with Bruce and the spider.

  THWUMP!

  It felt like a tearing of flesh as I ripped into the black holes of all five of the dead bodies. The invisible barrier that kept me out was obliterated. My whole body flushed with the power of it. I almost wanted to burst out laughing from the rush.

  I made Marion pull back the needle.

  Turner’s face fell in disbelief. “Marion! Inject the girl!”

  I reached into the two men holding me and made them grab Turner instead.

  Turner was too shocked to react properly. He looked at me with horror in his eyes. “Impossible!”

  “Oh, it’s possible, Gramps.” I was gaining my footing and for the first time I knew I was going to get out of this round alive.

  I made Marion point the needle at his neck. I had no intention of killing him, but I wanted to get out of this office unscathed.

  “Stop! I order you to stop!” Turner was trying to order the corpses, but I had full control.

  “You’re going to tell me a few things, or I’m going to have Marion, here, inject you with that poison. Remember, it works both ways. I can bring you back, too and I have no problems with the authorities finding your dead body later in your own bed,” I said as cold and calculated as I could. I was right, too. I could end this now. He’d never bother anyone else ever again. All I had to do was let Marion inject him. We could all walk out of there and no one would know the difference.

  Except me. I’d know. I just couldn’t do it.

  I wasn’t a killer.

  Without warning, Turner’s eyes rolled back in his head and the whites turned a deep crimson. He spouted out words that I didn’t recognize and the air started to charge with electricity. That’s when I felt my grip on the corpses’ black holes start to wane. I had to think fast. I was going to lose control over the dead people very soon.

  So, I did the only thing I could think to do.

  I disconnected their spinning holes from their bodies, like I did with Bruce when I left him under the tree.

  I leapt back from the corpses that dropped to the floor like rag dolls.

  This jolted Turner back to reality, his eyes normal once more. He glared at me with an almost awestruck expression.

  The five people deteriorated to different levels of grossness before our eyes. Marion was still juicy (that’s about the nicest way I could describe it). Two of the men quickly turned to skeletons and the last two were a grayish blue color and smelled really bad. And I mean really bad.

  That was my cue to leave.

  Before Turner could perform some crazy mojo on me.

  “You explain it,” I said and left the room as fast as I could.

  I waved at Principal Weatherby as I passed the teacher’s lounge and practically ran back to class. I didn’t look back once. I didn’t have to. I knew Turner had his own mess to clean up.

  I hurried into Physics and sat down in a seat near the back. My teacher, Ms. Norbert, nodded to me in greeting, but continued with her lecture, not wanting to disturb her lesson plan. Sitting there without Ryan, Nancy or Bill was bordering on torture. I wanted to tell them everything that happened, but most of all I just wanted to be around people who cared about me. My meeting with Turner ran through my mind over and over again. It hadn’t sunk in yet how close to dying I had come.

  About five minutes later the loud speaker came on. Principal Weatherby’s voice sounded shaky and disturbed. “The school is closing for the day… and maybe the week… I…I… please walk to the carpool or parking areas in an orderly fashion. Your parents will be informed when you can… come back… good day.”

  Everyone gossiped immediately about the strangeness of Weatherby’s announcement and the nervous trill of his voice.

  “Settle down, class,” Ms. Norbert said with firmness. “Now get in single file and do as Principal Weatherby says. Read chapters eight and nine in your readers while you have some time off.” Students made their way to the door. “I’ll be giving you a test on both chapters when you get back so no slacking!” She added with a note of authority and the class groaned in unison.

  I made sure I was the last to leave. My heart was racing. I would have given anything to have been a fly on the wal
l when Weatherby walked into his pristine office and found five rotting corpses on the ground. Especially, since they were alive and kicking ten minutes before. I imagined Turner would be making a massive pay-off to Mr. Weatherby’s bank account; that, and I was sure a clean-up crew was on its way, hence the shooing of children.

  When I reached the door I sighed in relief when I saw Bill and his twenty bodyguards waiting for me. The look on his face was a mixture of relief and worry. “Are you okay? What happened?” Bill went in for the hug and I hugged him back. It felt so reassuring and nice after everything I’d been through I almost wanted to cry.