Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  Finally, a door opened and an unfamiliar man stepped out on deck. He was probably in his late fifties, average build and height with nothing remarkable about his features at all. He was one of those people that would have blended completely into a crowd, capable of disappearing entirely. A few more tense seconds passed and the door opened again. David joined him on deck, looking cheerful as ever. I really hated that fucker. Perry, at least I was assuming it was Perry, was staring at Don.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked him, his voice raised to carry across the street but otherwise as colorless and bland as his features.

  Don was livid. He made his first mistake then and acted on his own; he crossed the street. Eric and I could do nothing except follow him.

  “Where is she, Perry?” Don asked, his teeth gritted.

  Perry just kept staring at him. David wouldn’t take his eyes off of me. Here’s one of the worst things about having an eidetic memory: it’s impossible to forget anything. I cringed as a flashback of David masturbating in his motel bathroom replayed in my head. I would need a lobotomy to get that out of there.

  “Don,” I said cautiously, “this isn’t your circus.” I wanted to remind him he needed to let Eric and me handle things, but I also wanted Perry to think he had been unwittingly dragged into this. I didn’t want anyone else’s life ruined because of these assholes. Whether it worked or not, at least I got Perry’s attention.

  “Dietrich.” He looked me over in a way I didn’t like. It was a weird mixture of loathing and… attraction. It made my stomach turn, not in a because-I-can’t-cry kind of way, but in an I’m-actually-nauseated-by-you kind of way. I was really hoping Eric hadn’t noticed, but I knew better. Eric, like me, noticed everything.

  “Should we wait for Lottie?” he asked. By the way he asked me, he already knew she wasn’t coming.

  “Sure,” I answered, “assuming Lydia’s still alive, otherwise we might as well all go home.”

  Perry almost smiled at me. I preferred his usual vapid expression. Now that both men on the boat were staring at me, I felt like I was an onionskin under a microscope; why couldn’t Eric say anything?

  “So we’re at a stand-off, then,” Perry responded.

  This was news?

  “Is it just a body you want? Fine, take mine,” Eric suddenly said.

  Goddamn it. I had wanted him to speak, but what the hell did he think he was doing? This apparently caught Perry and David by surprise too because they finally looked away from me and turned to Eric.

  “Why?” Perry asked. He was still startled. So was I, actually.

  “Why not? I think she deserves to live, and I’ll take my chances with you assholes.”

  I really wanted him to shut up now. Perry looked Eric over, but in a different way than he had examined me; he had his business investor air about him, weighing the value of one transaction against another. It made my skin crawl.

  “And why should I trust you?” Perry finally asked. Greed was winning out over logic.

  “Why the hell should I trust you?” Eric shot back. “Leave Lydia with Don and Dietrich. I’ll come with you. What else could you want?”

  “No,” I said automatically. I didn’t know what was going on in Eric’s head, but I was convinced he had lost his fucking mind without David ever having to lay a hand on him. If he was just trying to stall them until our coworkers arrived from Houston, then there were better ways than bartering with his body.

  But Perry was a businessman. “Don comes, too. As collateral. We’ll let him go afterward. You have my word; at his age, he wouldn’t be worth much anyway.”

  I could tell Eric was about to agree. Seriously, what the fuck was he thinking?

  “I’ll go,” I heard myself saying. What the fuck was I thinking? Eric hadn’t planned on this. Hell, I hadn’t planned on this.

  Perry was looking at me again in that way that made my stomach turn, and I willed myself to keep my lunch down. “Too bad you didn’t make this offer. They could make a killing on you.” And he actually smiled at his own bad pun.

  “You know we’re not… if you fuck with us, every single one of you will be hunted down and exterminated,” I warned.

  “We assumed as much. But as you can see, most people wouldn’t deserve that,” Perry nodded toward Don.

  He was right. They wouldn’t. But that wouldn’t stop it from happening. “It doesn’t matter,” Perry continued. “Behave, and you’ll be fine, Dietrich.”

  Behave? What was I? Seven?

  “Alright, enough already, where’s Lydia?” Eric asked. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut?

  “David, go get her,” Perry instructed. “You two,” he turned his attention back to Eric and me, “will need to be searched.”

  I was ok with that as long as Perry wasn’t the one searching me.

  “Right here on the side of the road?” I asked.

  Perry just shrugged. “You’d be surprised by what people don’t notice.”

  For the first time, Perry had said something I agreed with. The door opened and David came out with Lydia. Aside from being tired and scared, she seemed fine. All three of us exhaled. I realized we had all been holding our breath. David handed something to Perry behind Lydia’s back – I didn’t need to see it to know it was a gun. David stepped out onto the dock and strolled toward us.

  “Wait,” Eric said, and for a brief moment, I allowed myself to hope he had come to his senses, “the car keys are in my left pocket. Give them to Don. Take her wherever you want, just make sure it’s somewhere they won’t think to look for you. Dietrich will know how to find you.”

  I think right then I really did hate him.

  Don just agreed, his eyes glued to Lydia, relief etched profoundly throughout his posture.

  David finished with Eric and brought the weapons he had taken off of him over to the boat then came back toward me. I half expected him to take a swing at me, both out of personal animosity and having a strong suspicion I had been the one to kill Jackson, but he only glared at me then frisked me, too. At least he was quick and efficient. I doubt Perry would have been. Actually, by the way Perry was watching us, I know he wouldn’t have been.

  “Alright, boys.” There it was again; even Perry couldn’t resist calling us boys. Eric still didn’t seem to mind. “One at a time, then.”

  Eric went first and stood on the starboard side of the yacht, opposite from Perry and Lydia. I followed and stood by him.

  “Wrists,” Perry instructed, and David, for once, looked happy.

  He produced a fistful of zip ties, not unlike the ones I had used on Jackson, to bound our wrists behind our backs. At least he didn’t pull them tightly enough to break the skin. If I hadn’t had so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I would have noticed it still hurt though.

  “Take them below deck,” Perry ordered.

  “Wait, let me stay out here until I see Don and Lydia drive off,” I suggested.

  It only seemed fair, and to my surprise, considering we were already disarmed and tied up, Perry agreed. I probably wouldn’t have.

  I met Lydia’s eyes for the first time. She was trying so hard to be brave and only the tears and her trembling lip betrayed her. She wouldn’t look at Eric.

  “It’ll be ok, Lydia,” I told her. Apparently, I could lie to people I just really liked. There were probably a hundred things she wanted to say, especially to Eric, but she wouldn’t tarnish his sacrifice for her by voicing them. I could have traveled from one end of the universe to the other and not found a spirit as gentle and good as hers.

  Eric was already below deck when Don and Lydia drove off, and Perry let me watch them until they disappeared around a bend in River Road.

  “Ok, Dietrich, I’m sure you have friends who will be trying to join us soon. Let’s go.” The motor of the yacht had already started. There was nothing I could do except let him take me below.

  Chapter 19

 
I wasn’t overly surprised to find myself sitting across from Judge Willis McGrath. I was still trying to think of a way out of this for Eric but we were heading back out onto the lake now, and Eric and I were restrained and disarmed. I knew struggling against zip ties wasn’t a good idea – the plastic would only dig into my flesh. So Eric and I both sat as still as we could, occasionally being jostled by a wave from a passing boat. I glanced down at his wrists and noticed a thin red line where he was starting to bleed. Eric had been right. We were fucked. I figured I couldn’t make this any worse.

  “So Willis,” I asked, “we’ve apparently got some time to kill.” I bit my lip. Maybe I could make it worse. Eric just snorted. “How did Lottie do what she did? The mechanics of it; how’d she do it?”

  Willis raised an eyebrow at me and I fully expected him to play dumb again, to tell me the same bullshit we had heard in her apartment in Baton Rouge. But Willis McGrath was full of surprises. He told me the truth.

  “She didn’t do anything. We can’t control something like this.”

  What the hell? I swallowed. I really wanted some water. I would have even settled for a Budweiser.

  “Then how did this happen?” My voice sounded small. I hoped it only sounded that way in my head. Jesus, how pathetic.

  Willis was unconcerned, bored almost. “We don’t know. Some of you people are like that. The first few times it happened, we assumed it was our doing, and tried to reuse the bodies, with the same effect. There’s nothing to be done for it, unfortunately. Such a waste of an otherwise perfectly good body too.”

  Holy shit.

  “So Lottie… my Lottie… I mean, my fiancée, it was her brain…?” I was stuttering. Willis was still bored by me; Perry was still leering at me. And I felt incredibly seasick.

  “I suppose there may be something different about her brain. It’s been a long time since this has happened; we wanted to do an autopsy on Lottie, but I suppose, given your affiliation, we will just have to trust to keep each other’s secrets.”

  How could this asshole sit there and talk about cutting apart Lottie so calmly, casually, like she was a frog in a high school biology class?

  “And who the hell did you think Lydia was going to tell?” Eric snapped.

  Willis slightly raised a shoulder. In some ways, he reminded me of my mother. We didn’t even deserve a full physical response from him. “Lottie’s case is unusual for a number of reasons, not the least of which she sought out her past and you went along with it.” He was still directing this to me. Eric was already dead to him. “This is the kind of thing that would drive most people crazy. In the past, it often did. Even if we didn’t kill them, they typically didn’t live very long. As you can imagine, if people at home knew this was a possibility, well, would you pay to come here?”

  “It’s my understanding you’re already doing quite a bit of lying.”

  “It’s sales, Dietrich. Besides, losing one’s mind is far worse than losing one’s life.” Judge Willis McGrath was the kind of pretentious asshole who would use words like “one” instead of “you.” Kind of like using “whom” instead of “who.”

  But I thought about what he’d said; Lottie had insisted she never intended to run into me but she had also given in so easily, had told me far more than she should have that day in Houston. And she also knew she had given me enough hints to find her if I’d wanted to. She may not have expected to see me in the coffeehouse that day, but once I caught up to her, she had gambled on me, on my love for her, on our love for each other. Those two years had been a Hell for her, too, but Lottie hadn’t gone crazy. Some part of her had clung to the hope that one day, somehow, we would be together again.

  When I was seventeen years old, I met the most incredible girl on the planet at a college party I hadn’t wanted to go to; that night, I thought she was beautiful and smart and funny, with a sarcastic wit complemented by this unbelievably sexy smirk. As the years passed, I had often thought she was even a little weird like me, except in a much more endearing kind of way.

  When I was twenty-seven, two years after she was killed in a car accident and I had fallen into my own afterlife, my own personal Hell of a world deprived of her in it, I discovered there always had been something unique and wonderful and extraordinary about the woman I had always known I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It wasn’t so much that her mind had inexplicably resurrected itself; it was how deeply her faith in me ran that had allowed her to survive without losing her mind.

  And I had nothing left to ask Willis McGrath. I didn’t care anymore about their world or their manipulation of people living here or even what he had tried to do; I only wanted to get home to Lottie. Preferably with Eric. But as we continued driving out farther onto the lake, I still had no solutions. Eric was going to die.

  Why had he done this? We could have waited. We should have waited for others to arrive. Surprised them. Negotiated with something other than another human life. Hell, surely someone knew how to be a pirate and could have boarded a moving boat had they taken off again. At this point, it probably didn’t matter what his motivations were, so I asked him, hoping he’d offer some clue, some hint that he’d had a plan all along.

  “Eric, what were you thinking? Why would you do this?”

  Eric looked at me, and typical Eric, with a serious, grave face, told me, “Did you know your wrists are bleeding? It looks kinda painful.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You owe me a case of Budweiser, by the way.”

  “Yeah, I’ll leave it on your grave. You want Bud Light?”

  “Dude, I’ll be dead. I won’t give a shit about calories. Get me the full calorie crap beer.”

  Even Willis, who I am certain didn’t even have a sense of humor, was watching us with a bemused expression.

  “I’ll bring you a good hefeweissbier, too. You know, as an ‘I’m sorry you went and got yourself killed’ gesture.”

  Eric smiled at me. Only Eric would have started making jokes when he knew he was about to be murdered. Only I would have gone along with it.

  “That’s really thoughtful of you, Dietrich. You would definitely be my kind of guy if I were gay.”

  “Any guy that buys you beer would be your kind of guy.”

  Eric thought about that. “Hm, maybe, but you’d still be my favorite.”

  “What the hell are they doing?” Perry asked Willis.

  It was a good question. Eric was just being Eric, and I was just trying to enjoy the last moments I had with my best friend before these bastards killed him. But after everything we’d been through together, we could joke about some really weird shit.

  Willis just shook his head. “Let’s just hope his personality and memories aren’t restorable.”

  And that’s what finally pissed me off. They could have beaten the shit out of us and it wouldn’t have pissed me off as much as Willis McGrath – cocksucker extraordinaire – putting down my best friend; the man who had recognized talent and potential in me at only eighteen and led me to a career in something that paid well and I thought would be exciting; who had saved my life and whose life I had saved; who had never once judged me for being a little weird or asocial; who could joke with me about dying; who had kept me company in my Hell of an afterlife after Lottie had died.

  I glowered at Willis. “He would be lucky to become even half the man Eric is.” Whatever tiny spark of amusement I had found bantering with Eric had been extinguished. I was cold, filled with ice, unfeeling and I wanted them dead.

  “Hey Dietrich, remember your question?” Eric asked.

  Of course, I remembered. I never forgot anything.

  “Two part answer. One, I sort of meant it. I mean, I care about Lydia, but I did it for you and Lottie, because you’ve both been through more shit than anyone should ever have to live through… or die through… Christ, I don’t even know, this whole thing still fucks with my head. But I want y’all to be happy
. And I can’t imagine Lottie getting over the death of Lydia, not entirely, not ever.”

  I wished I hadn’t asked. There was no way I was ever getting over the guilt of my best friend being willing to die for my happiness.

  “And two, do you remember that time we were in Damascus?”

  Maybe it hadn’t been such a stupid question after all.

  “Yes,” I took my time answering, trying to figure out what about that trip was so significant right now.

  The most memorable part of that trip to me was that it was in Damascus that I had witnessed a man being tortured with those thin, sharp, flat metal rods. And then I knew. I concentrated on keeping my breathing steady, my heart rate down, to keep myself from perspiring. Given their size, those rods were relatively easy to hide from someone like David, someone who didn’t have professional training like us to look for those kinds of things. And wherever Eric had it hidden, it was accessible behind his back. He was cutting through the zip tie around his wrists.

  I realized I needed to say something though. These men weren’t professionals; neither of them had had the forethought to sit behind us. I didn’t want either of them to move.

  “Damascus was a mess. Hot as Hell. And it took us two weeks to find our target.” I was actually just making shit up. I should have watched more spy movies then I would have known what kind of spy-sounding-words to use to make my story sound more plausible to them.

  “I remember you hooking up with some journalist.” That part was true. “Shit, Eric, you didn’t get her pregnant, did you? This is kind of extreme to get out of child support.”

  “Nah, at least I don’t think so.” We needed to keep the attention on me.

  “I tried dates. Found out I don’t like dates. I’m talking about the fruit, obviously.” Also true. Apparently, I’m kind of a picky eater. “We spent a lot of time following people around. And taking turns napping because it is really fucking hot in Syria.” Not true. Except for the part about it being really fucking hot in Syria.

  “Oh, and I ran into someone from Germany, which kinda pissed you off because you don’t speak much German and couldn’t keep up with our conversation even though we were just BS’ing about politics and shit.” That was sort of true. It had happened but not in Damascus; we had been in Cairo.