*
Dropping to his knees, the lengthening and thickening coils of supernatural electric blue carpeting dragged the first Blank Man to his knees like tentacles of a squid. The Blank Man that Maddy had once nicknamed Ernie began to scream for help, the sound feeble and hoarse like a new instrument unaccustomed to playing at a particular register—as fear was not an emotion with which he was accustomed.
Giving his partner a casual glance and otherwise ignoring him, the second Blank Man, whom Maddy had once given the name Bert, retrieved the tiny wooden coffin held by his side and dropped it loudly atop the bar.
“Ain't so Pepe now, eh Arturo?” Rudy screeched hysterically.
At the sight of the coffin, Rudy began to wheeze with pent up laughter. The newly birthed pelicans took flight all around him. He could actually feel the feathers of their wings brushing against his ears.
It’s real. It’s all really happening, Rudy thought as he felt a strange crawling sensation down his arms and up his neck. Out of the corner of his eye, Rudy sensed movement and looked down to find a trail of long and slender white objects moving in a line down the length of his left arm. He reached instinctively up and swept the side of his hand across his neck. Two unlit cigarettes bounced to the floor at his feet.
Peering down at the open pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, Rudy watched in morbid fascination as a cigarette separated from its brothers and slithered out of the foil opening to crawl up the front of his shirt, the middle portion of his tube-like body rising and falling like an inch-worm.
Rudy began to dance around, slapping at his body like a teenage girl who had just walked through a spider web.
Someone begin to scream with laughter. It took him several moments to realize that it was him. The laughter exploded from his belly like thunder from a storm cloud, the noise so foreign coming from him that it sounded to his own ears like sobbing.
Torres dropped to his knees and stared with an open mouth at the coffin on the bar. Coming to his senses, he gazed back over his shoulder at the slowly advancing scarecrow and snatched up the pistol from his dead soldier’s hand.
Rudy screamed something at him that at first he couldn’t understand. Finally, it registered: “It’s her, Arturo! She’s doing all this! Shoot her! Shoot the witch!”
Torres blinked in numb-wonder at Rudy and dutifully turned the gun on Maddy, who remained in Grant’s embrace, both pairs of eyes still closed against the monstrosities surrounding them.
Bert, the remaining Blank Man, marched determinedly from the bar past Rudy, retrieved a reflective object from his pocket and lashed out in the direction of Torres’ gun, which fell to the floor along with several of the big man’s fingers.
Torres lifted the mutilated stump of his hand before his eyes and wailed like an injured animal.
In response, Rudy began to laugh even harder, slapping his knees even as they began to buckle.
“Freeze! Drop your weapons!” a shout came from the fire-escape door. A group of uniformed combat-ready men piled into the room and instantly began to spread themselves out across the room, their laser-sighted weapons searching for targets.
“No way,” Rudy wailed hoarsely, grabbing his gut and trying to control his laughter. “This shit keeps getting better and better!”
Two of the agents swooped down on one of the suited men, who lay completely unrestrained in the middle of the carpeted floor of the restaurant, yet still feverishly calling to be freed. Rolling him roughly onto his stomach, they cuffed his hands behind him.
Another agent rushed Rudy, who lifted his hands in acquiescence and turned to face the stage in expectation of the eventual pat-down. “I’ll do anything you want, man, if you just give me a cigarette,” Rudy said hopefully, peering down at the floor and the white sticks scattered there.
Did one of them just move?
“On second thought, you got a stick of gum?” he asked dully.
Bert lowered the large knife he welded and cast it aside with a disgusted smirk. He placed his hands behind his head and dropped with resignation to his knees, quickly sighting the bloody gun in the pile of chubby dismembered fingers lying beside him. He peered up to gauge the distance between him and his target.
But she and the man were both gone.
He scrutinized the fire-escape door on the opposite side of the room more than twenty yards away. There was no realistic scenario in which they could have reached the door in that short of a time and shut it behind them without a sound. Since the entire floor was free of tables, he had a clear line of sight. There was no other place they could have gone but through that door.
Unless she was still somewhere in the room.
It had finally happened! She had expanded her awareness to the next level.
She had broken through the psychic shields that protected him and his partner. The infiltration had spread completely, he thought with sudden alarm, and she could make them see or un-see anything she could imagine. Her power had become potentially limitless, subject only to the mental capacity of her target. To make matters worse, she had taken them completely off guard using the confusion around them to her advantage.
Yet instead of taking their lives, she had chosen to escape.
That decision displayed her basic weakness, he thought. Unlike them, she was restrained by a moral code.
That would give them the advantage next time. If there was a next time, he considered. There was the distinct possibility that they might both be removed from service indefinitely because of this debacle.
Glaring over at his partner a few yards away, wreathing in the full throes of madness on the carpeted floor as the agents attempted to get him into restraints, Bert, the Blank Man glanced down at the discarded gun again and considered shooting the weakened amateur in the head just as a professional courtesy.
The emergency lighting flickered on along the walls and rendered both dark-suited men in bright white lighting. Bert cringed, lowering his head.
Agent Morrison, a young short-haired man wearing a flashy green tie beneath his uniform rushed in behind the other agents. “Arturo Torres, we have a warrant for your arrest. We have enough from that shop in Houston to put you behind bars for the rest of your life.”
Cradling his bloody hand beneath his arm, Torres glared at the floor, his body vibrating with hatred. He casually lifted the gun that no one had bothered to confiscate yet and casually placed it into his mouth.
“Stop him!” Morrison bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Uniformed men rushed him from every direction as a bullet traveling at high velocity through Torres’ cerebral cortex effectively removed all possibility of his giving any person a loan, a gun, or drugs ever again.
“Well, shit!” Morrison exploded, shoving past the nearest agent to take a look at the corpse of the mobster. “Exemplary job, guys.”
Turning to the apparently more lucid, suited man whose hands were folded cooperatively behind his head, Morrison reached out and flicked the dark glasses off of his face with an index finger, revealing ice blue eyes. “You want to give me an idea of who the hell you are supposed to be? Elwood Blues?”
Bert slowly peered up into the eyes of the agent and gave him a secret smile.
Agent Morrison blinked at him, his pupils growing larger. He took a single step backwards and gasped.
Cursing under his breath, Rudy ignored the stick of gum the agent had been in the process of offering him, snagged the loosely-held rifle out of his hands, and opened up on the remaining Blank Man, reducing his head to a red and grey stain on the head agent’s obnoxious green tie.
“There! I’m done now,” Rudy snapped as he dropped the rifle at the agent’s feet and thrust his palms into the air in surrender.
The agent spun him around, threw him chest-first onto the floor of the stage, and buried his knee in his back.
“Sorry, sorry,” Rudy coughed, as the agent struggled to remove the handcuffs from his belt. “You think I could still get that gum?�
��
27
Maddy stood alone at the railing of the Riverwalk looking out at the Mississippi, pondering the nickname it had been given as the “Gathering of Waters.” The title of “Old Muddy” had always seemed more appropriate to her.
Grant backed slowly up to stand beside her. “No one’s following us yet,” he said breathlessly. “We should go.”
Maddy shook her head. “It’s okay, Grant. No one will find us here.”
“We’re only a few blocks from the casino,” he protested incredulously.
“No one will follow us now,” she said, turning to study him. “You said you trusted me. You meant that, didn’t you?”
His taut shoulders slowly relaxed. He gave her a simple unqualified nod. “You’ll have to explain to me what just happened? I heard screams. I heard gunshots. But nothing even touched us. In fact, we just walked out right under their noses, didn’t we?”
Maddy studied him. She could see a little agitation in his eyes, but that was probably just a little of the residual adrenaline. Beneath that, she could see a strong foundation. This incident wouldn’t blow his house down, she knew. If he accepted this particular batch of weirdness, they would be okay. Really okay.
“What are you really asking me, Grant?”
“What did you do to them?”
“Well, in the words of Louis Prima, ‘I took a bucketful of steam and a dozen rooster eggs, and I mixed them up gently with a bushel full of goldfish legs.’”
Grant turned away from her with a tense smile and gazed out over the river.
“I just showed them nonsense. I gave them something else to worry about,” she said. “A carefully shuffled shell to look under.”
He studied her and an amused smile broke across his face. “So, you twisted their perception of reality?”
“Well, if you want to get technical.” She made a small expression of surprise with her mouth, her eyes going out of focus for a moment. “I guess Bert and Ernie were right after all, huh?”
Grant sighed heavily and searched behind them. It was hard to break the old practiced patterns of paranoia.
She asked if he trusted her and he had answered truthfully. He had answered from his heart. Now he had to convince his mind. That feat would be something altogether different.
Maddy turned back to the small lapping muddy waves of the river and reached blindly back to gently take his hand.
In response, he firmly grasped her hand and settled comfortably by her side.
A laughing young couple walking hand-in-hand brushed past their backs, nearly colliding with them, despite the fact that there was plenty of room on the Riverwalk. Grant frowned in consternation at their seemingly rude behavior, then slowly it began to dawn on him.
They couldn’t see them, just like inside the club.
“Could you do this all along?” he finally asked her.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” she responded with a nervous giggle, leaning closer and putting her weight against him. “I think I just I woke up. It was your trust in me that opened that locked door. I just needed a guide to show me the way inside.”
Grant slowly, awkwardly folded his arm around her waist. Suddenly, it felt natural to him. Her warmth, soothing the cold places. Her substance, filling the gaps in his soul.
“How did you know about Torres? How he felt about my wife? Were you able to see something in his mind?”
“No, Grant. Just the natural power of woman's intuition.”
Glancing up, Grant spotted the couple that had passed them walking together on the Riverwalk seemingly oblivious to their conversation. It struck him in that moment the enormity of this talent that she seemed to have and he understood for really the first time why she was such a prized target. She held a power that could be very valuable and very destructive.
By all rights, he should feel a healthy fear of her, he decided, but he hadn’t lied when he said that he trusted her.
“I’ve dedicated my life to making amends for her death,” he told the woman beside him, his hand wringing the metal railing. “Now that I know that she was targeted by an evil man just because she was a good woman, what am I supposed to do with that?”
“Give yourself absolution, Grant, and start living again. Like a good man should.” She leaned her head against his arm. “You’ve done your penance and Lara forgave you a long time ago.”
“How could you know that?”
“Maybe it's a conversation she and I will have sometime in the future.”
Grant gave her a cathartic chuckle and wiped his eyes. Taking her hand, they began to walk down the path beside the Mississippi.
“I thought I was going to die tonight,” she reminded him. “And suddenly, there's a tomorrow.”
“After what happened tonight, I see the whole world in a different way. I mean, what am I supposed to do now?”
“What do you want to do?” she asked, glancing furtively over at him.
“I know what I don’t want to do,” he replied. “I don’t want to go back to the depressing life where I did my time, waiting to die.”
“You could stay with me,” she suggested, linking her arm in his securely. “They say that you’re responsible for the life you save.”
“You or me? I mean, who really saved who here?”
“I think we both made out on that deal.”
They laughed together and caught each other stealing a look at the other at the same time.
Maddy stopped abruptly and planted herself in front of him.
He took her face in both hands and gave her a tame kiss that quickly grew passionate. Like blood rushing back into long resting legs, he remembered the steps again and followed his heart along the dusty dance floor.
When they finally separated, he continued to hold her face in his hands and simply gazed upon her. She opened her eyes and smiled sheepishly at the attention, ultimately blinking and burying her face in his chest to hide the tears of joy she could no longer contain.
Finally, she thought. Finally!
“I guess I kept another little secret from you,” she admitted in a quiet voice. “When I used to remember the moment shared with someone out at Jackson Square, I also recalled a kiss. A wonderfully, romantic kiss.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, kid,” Grant quickly responded with a wry smile.
She tagged him on the arm and started away from him with a mischievous look on her face. He gave pursuit.
“Now that we’ve got the big decision out of the way, where shall we go from here?” he asked her.
“Short term, I could really go for a drink right now,” she told him. “A Hurricane sounds good.”
“Well, if we’re talking about short term, I think I'd like to go back to the little church if you wouldn't mind. Y'know, the one with St. Expedite,” he told her.
Maddy paused and allowed him to catch up, giving him a look of surprise. “You?”
“In the heat of it all, I kinda asked old Jude to pray for a hopeless cause and help us out.”
She took his hand and squeezed it tightly. “That’s big, Grant.”
“Can’t remember the last time I prayed,” he confessed, looking down at their joined hands with an intensity reserved for the freshly committed. “Now, I think we need to talk about the long term plan. I don’t know what happened after we exited the stage, but I heard a lot of gunshots, and I have a feeling whatever organization wants you, isn’t about to give you up so easily.”
Maddy gave a sober nod.
“Here’s the deal,” he replied. “I'll get your back, if you just keep your eyes out for what's ahead.”
After a few moments, she said, “Grant, y’know how I’ve been practicing this little exercise of releasing control and allowing myself to be guided?”
Grant nodded, recognizing the seriousness in her face.
“I think maybe that’s what they mean when they talk about Faith,” she whispered. “You think?”
Grant remained silent, considering
her question.
“I’ve been living in the future for so long,” she said, gazing down at their intertwined fingers, “that you’ll have to excuse me if I want to just live in the present for now.”
She ducked down and brushed her lips across the top of his hand, smiling brightly up at him. “How about we both just live in the moment for a change?”
Together they walked hand and hand toward the lights and sounds of the French Quarter.
6-7-15
For Gi Gi
About the Author
Bryant Delafosse was born and raised in Southeast Texas. He currently lives in Southern California with his wife, son, and two terriers, Luna and Jules. His two previous novels include The Mall and Hallowed.
You can email the author at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @BryantDelafosse. Become a Fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/BryantDelafosse.
Remember the Future Page 19
