by J. T. Stoll
“How’s my girls?” She hugged both of them. “My early riser slept in. What happened with Pieter last night?”
“A mess,” Vero said. Her toast popped out. She put it on a plate, buttered it, and started nibbling. “Glad it’s over.”
“It’s over with Pieter?” Her mom sounded hopeful.
“No, I mean, last night’s over. He made me hang out with a lame friend of his.”
“And what’s up with that axe?”
Her mom hadn’t been awake the night before when Vero came home. Bella must have said something about the axe. “Um… Pieter gave it to me.”
“Pieter? What?”
“Well, no, it was his friend, Neil.” That would make a better explanation. “He’s a… a really big nerd. It had something to do with a… a video game. What am I supposed to do with something like that?”
Maria stared blankly. “An axe? You stay away from that kid. He’s weird.”
Vero would have loved to do exactly that.
Her mom pulled out a chair and sat at the table. “Did I ever tell you what Juan got me our first Christmas?” She had, actually. “A chainsaw. A chainsaw! What’s your madre going to do with a chainsaw?”
As she launched into the story, Vero’s mind drifted. She’d just lied to her mom. It wasn’t a first, but if everything James said were true, she was stepping into a whole new level of deceit. The idea settled at the bottom of her stomach like a cheap cheeseburger.
After breakfast and some sitting around the house, ---Vero found herself overlooking potholed streets on a cracked plastic chair on the front porch. Pieter still hadn’t returned her texts. She called him.
“Hello?”
“Where you been?”
“Uhn, asleep. What time…” Muffled sounds of movement came through the phone. “Whoa. Twelve thirty?”
“You just wake up?”
“Yeah. Feel like I got hit by a bus.”
“Me, too. Get over here,” Vero said.
“Gimme a minute. I need a shower… I’ll pick you up from your place.”
“I’ll be out front.”
He paused. Did he suspect about her house? “Sure. Out front, then. And bring your thing.”
“I’m not carrying that out of my house.”
“Fine. Okay. See you in twenty.”
After a little wait, Vero walked out of the mobile home park and stood in front of the house around the corner—the one with the mailbox planted in the cement. She paced up and down the street, unable to stand still. What were they supposed to do? Why did James think they could fight his war? More importantly, was Jed already looking for them, and did he have a way to find them?
The White Lady pulled up along the curb.
“Finally,” she said, stepping inside the car.
Pieter yawned. “Sorry. Took longer than I thought. You want to go to Carlos’s place? I’m starved.”
Vero smelled pot on him. She wrinkled her nose and rolled down the window. “Sure. Downtown sounds nice right now.”
The car seemed to inch along the road, to get accosted by every red light. She wanted to get out, to hold hands, to embrace, even to just talk about what had happened. Vero moved her hands back and forth from her lap to the window to her sides, her questions a swarm of mosquitoes inside her mind.
After shifting gears, Pieter put a hand on her thigh. “Nothing to worry about.”
Some of the mosquitoes vanished. “Easy words.”
“You prefer hard words? We’re completely screwed. Totally, completely screwed. That better?”
She smiled and gave a low laugh. When he took his hand away to change gears, she silently cursed his manual transmission.
They parked on the roof of the downtown parking structure. Vero and Pieter walked along the asphalt toward the elevator, dodging periodic cars.
“Pieter, I…”
“Yeah?”
“Last night, I mean, what do we…”
They stopped outside the elevator. It was a gorgeous day. At three stories up, they stood on one of the highest buildings in the city. Downtown looked almost like a forest, trees sprouting from planters in the sidewalks. Bishop’s Peak and Mount Madonna towered in the distance, their shadows lengthening along the town. Golden hills surrounded the city, their grasses waiting for winter rains to bring life.
Pieter pulled his arm tight around her waist. “It’ll be okay.”
“That mean you have a plan, or…”
“Sure. Enjoy you. Go to school. Graduate. Go somewhere fun for college. Get a great job. Be happy.”
“Umm… so… the whole Ruach thing? Another dimension? War?”
Pieter’s voice sped up a little. “You hear me agree to a war last night?”
“No.”
“So, where’s the fun in a resistance? I could think of about a million better things to do with my time.”
“But the prince, Terian…”
“The guy doesn’t even know how to get to our world. James opened the portal, not the bad guys. And even if Terian does figure it out, we pay taxes for a reason. Swords and spears against U.S. fighter jets? Good luck.”
Vero’s breathing slowed. Pieter could face the worst parts of life with a smile. He’d slept all morning while she’d worried. She wanted to be as carefree as he was, wanted to believe that last night wouldn’t destroy her life as she knew it.
“You think it could be that easy?” she asked.
“I don’t see a reason to make it otherwise, you?”
Tension in her shoulders released. Images of blood and battle faded. They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the gentle business of the city.
“You hear what happened after we left?” Vero asked.
“Neil texted me. The police took a report, searched the area, then let them leave. Neil and Gloria might get called to testify, but the cops don’t even know that the two of us were there. There’s nothing to tie us to this thing.”
“And James?”
“An ambulance took him away, but he was pronounced dead on the spot.”
He’d died on another world, far from friends and family. She should feel sad, but relief came instead. He hadn’t asked their permission before bursting into their world. Pieter was right: They didn’t owe James a thing. She felt a bit guilty about the relief though.
“You’re quiet,” Pieter said. “You want to save the world or something?”
“No, I don’t,” Vero replied. “Not if it’s like last night at least. Didn’t seem quite as glamorous as the movies.”
“Well, maybe if we had their wardrobe budget…”
She grinned. He punched the down button to summon the elevator. Despite his words, Pieter didn’t wear his usual easy, carefree look. He seemed tense, like he couldn’t quite ditch the memories from the night before.
They walked a few blocks to a tiny shop with a sign overhead that read Santa Maria Steaks. A glass window faced the street. Somehow, the entire guts of Carlos’s restaurant fit in one tiny room behind that window. A few tables on a plaza out front provided the only seating.
“Give me tri-tip!” Pieter bellowed into the ordering window.
A young blonde girl smiled back. “Sandwich or combo plate?”
A voice came from the kitchen. “Hey, Vero, Pieter!”
“Carlos,” Pieter said.
Vero’s brother-in-law, wearing an apron stained black with years of barbeque residue, walked up to the window.
“Isn’t it, like, a 10 percent discount for friends and family?” Pieter asked.
“Nah, for you guys? Free.”
As though Pieter didn’t know.
“Vero, you want anything?” Carlos asked.
“Maybe just a little salad.”
“And give me a Cactus Cooler,” Pieter said.
“A what?” Carlos asked.
“Only the best soda of all time. I swear, you get Cactus Cooler on tap, you’ll double your business! It’s so hard to find a good orange soda around here.”
Vero and Pieter sat in the shade at a mesh metal table. The blonde girl brought a tray out a little later, and Pieter dug into his beefy sandwich. Vero’s side salad was anything but. Diced beef and blue cheese covered the top. It had to have a million calories.
She exhaled and leaned back in her seat, glad to have Pieter to calm her down. It felt so good to do something simple like watching her boyfriend gorge himself on a tri-tip sandwich to the sound of passing traffic. Even the bearded man digging through the trash just felt… simple. Normal.
“Well, sorry to put you through all that last night,” Pieter said.
“Hey, you didn’t know what’d happen in that field.”
“No, I mean the dinner.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “I kinda predicted it. Just… no more double dates for at least six months, okay?”
He nodded. “Sure. There just… used to be a lot more to Neil than games and anime.”
Across the street, two men plummeted from a roof to the sidewalk. Pieter, facing away from them, didn’t notice. A few people nearby stepped back in shock, but the men landed on their feet. And they had weapons: a mace and a sword.
Impossible, impossible, impossible. That was Jed and Dek. Jed’s hand clutched the cut Vero had given him the night before. Dek held… was that a JanSport backpack? It looked new. The two soldiers glanced around.
Vero leaned in and whispered to Pieter, “Pieter, Pieter, they’re here.”
“Who?’” he asked.
“Quiet,” she whispered, beginning to tremble. “The guys from last night. Across the street. What are they doing here?”
Pieter flicked his head around to look then turned back to Vero. He stayed quiet, but if she knew Pieter, he’d come up with something.
She shoved her head onto the mesh table, a gross, sticky thing that probably had drunk college student barf dried all over it. What were those two guys doing here?
“Don’t panic, stay hidden,” Pieter said in a low voice. He placed a hand on her elbow.
Jed and Dek looked in their direction, a number of cars passing on the one-way street between.
“I have my armband in my purse,” Vero said. “If I slip it on, we could maybe get on the roofs, and…”
Pieter shook his head and kept his voice low. “You don’t think they’d spot that? What are they doing?”
“Jed’s staring straight at us. He’s pointing this way.”
Pieter clenched his hands into fists. “He saw us in the dark. He doesn’t recognize us. I’d already have a sword in my back if he did. Stay down.”
Jed and Dek leaped across the street. Vero jolted; Pieter pushed down on her elbow and ducked his head next to hers. “Quiet,” he whispered. “We can’t outrun them while they’re using those things.”
The two soldiers landed on the sidewalk nearby. Vero’s breath came in gasps. Her hand stretched to her purse.
“Chill,” Pieter said, his voice barely above a whisper.
She moved her head just enough to glance up with one eye. They weren’t looking at her and Pieter. They walked quickly toward Carlos’s shop, just a few feet from Vero, then passed behind her, out of her vision.
“Let’s go,” Pieter whispered. “Slow.”
The stickiness from the table smacked as Vero pulled her skin away. She lifted her purse off the ground; the strap vibrated with the shaking of her hand. Pieter took her arm, and they walked—so slow she wanted to scream—up the street.
From behind them, Jed shouted, “Give me your dollars! All of them!”
She risked a glance backward before passing around the corner of a brick building. Jed stood at the window to Carlos’s shop, sword pointing at the glass. Once out of sight, Vero stopped to listen.
“That a sword?” Carlos asked. “Why you have a sword?”
The sound of shattering glass echoed around the courtyard. The cashier girl screamed.
“Put your dollars in this bag,” Jed shouted.
“We need to get out of here,” Pieter said.
“No,” Vero said. “We’re just going to walk away?”
He tugged Vero’s arm. “Nothing we can do. Even if we had our weapons, I don’t think we could take them, not just the two of us.”
They walked at a brisk pace up the street. Vero’s chest heaved up and down; a tear escaped down her face. She wasn’t all that close to her brother-in-law, but he’d made her sister really happy and had been amazing to their whole family. He and Emilia having the baby was what made everyone move to SLO. He’d even found their rental, such as it was. He was a good, good man. She didn’t want baby Maria to grow up without a daddy.
Sirens blared somewhere in the distance. The police wouldn’t get Jed, not while he could jump. And even if they caught up to him, they might regret it.
Pieter pulled Vero into a little clothing store. Pretty dresses hung from racks around the room. It was the kind of place her classmates could afford to shop at.
“They won’t see us in here,” he said.
Just ignore it, eh? Pretend nothing was happening? Suddenly, Vero wanted rather to hurt those who’d just hurt her family. Though here, surrounded by cute tops and some expensive accessories, a more sensible side warned that she was better off hiding.
4. Carlos’s Apartment
“Then I said, ‘Usually, a gun’s better for a holdup than a sword,’” Carlos said in Spanish. He laughed. Vero didn’t remember him spouting that line, but she kept quiet.
The five Mendoza women surrounded Carlos in his living room. Emilia coddled baby Maria. The TV played, and Vero sat in a recliner on the outer edge, texting her friend Kristin.
Carlos’s laugh changed to a frown. “Then he busted in the glass. Wish I’d been standing farther back, might not have these.” He held up arms covered in white bandages.
“He get the money?” Vero’s mom asked.
“Yeah. Julie opened the register. Four hundred dollars! I told the girls to drop cash to the safe more often. We gotta have a talk about that.”
Vero was responsible for this, somehow. If she hadn’t been there that night… no, Jed would have come through either way. But if she hadn’t taken the weapons from James… no, that didn’t make a difference either. Regardless, she didn’t want to be part of this conversation.
Vero’s mom poked her daughter in the arm. “And you just ran away?”
Vero mumbled some kind of affirmative and slouched lower in the chair.
“Quiet, it’s almost on,” Emilia said.
A large, three-dimensional eight rotated on the screen then transitioned to a man standing in front of Carlos’s shop, the front window shattered. A voiceover spoke in English. “A quiet Sunday afternoon in downtown SLO turned dangerous when two robbers with swords held up five separate downtown businesses then vanished.”
Grainy security footage showed Dek throwing a young woman to the ground in a souvenir store.
“I’m here with Carlos Fontana, owner of Santa Maria Steakhouse,” said the reporter.
Carlos showed up on screen identified by the text local restaurant owner.
“Come on, it’s Santa Maria Steaks,” Carlos said to Vero and the others. “They got it wrong.”
“Quiet,” his wife said.
The Carlos on screen said in English, “Yeah, I was barbequing some tri-tip when they showed up. I was pretty nervous.”
The screen cut to another restaurant owner, who claimed that the robbers somehow got onto the rooftops and ran away. Someone also reported them stealing a backpack, the one Vero had spotted them with.
“The two culprits are still on the loose,” the reporter said. “Due to their weapons, police suspect they may also be responsible for the murder of an unidentified homeless man off Orcutt Street last night.” The TV displayed sketches that looked a little like Jed and Dek. “Suspects are armed and highly dangerous. Back to you in the studio.”
Carlos snatched the remote off his table and muted the TV.
“That’s it? T
hey interview me for fifteen minutes, and that’s all? I had some good jokes in there.”
“Honey, your jokes never work in English,” Emilia said.
“Or Spanish,” Bella added. The other sisters laughed.
“Five stores in one afternoon,” Carlos said. “I don’t get how they outran the cops. The tall guy even looked hurt.”
“And why swords?” Vero’s mom asked.
As her family jabbered back and forth, Vero slipped out onto the second-floor apartment balcony with her purse and sweater. She looked out over a quiet street.
Better that her family didn’t know about the field. Carlos might like all that attention from Vero’s family; he hadn’t lived with it his whole life. Right now, she needed privacy and quiet, not loud sisters.
Okay, so Jed was out there, somewhere, beating people up and stealing money. He probably just needed a place to stay and food to eat until more people from Ruach arrived. The only other thing he had on his mind was… well, to do what he’d promised: kill Vero and the others—if he could even recognize them after seeing them in the dark. If today were any indication, he might never find them.
She pulled out her well-worn phone and flipped it open. “Can I wake up now?” she texted Pieter.
Amazing that the night after getting hit with an axe, Jed was out committing armed robbery. That was the power of the soul armors. Was there a limit, or could he just use it all day like that?
Vero looked at the armband at the bottom of her purse as she waited for Pieter’s response. It looked like a simple piece of jewelry, but it could do amazing things. The night before, aside from the fight, using the soul armor had felt incredible. She looked around, confirmed the balcony was empty, then slid the band under her sweater.
Her phone bleeped with Pieter’s response. “Nope, nightmare continues. You okay?”
“Family kidnapped me to come watch Carlos recover at his place.”
“He hurt bad?”
“Santa Maria Steaks got it worse. What do we do?”
“Hide.”
A cool fall breeze blew by. “We’re armed, you know.”
As she waited for Pieter’s reply, she focused on the band. The thing felt warm, despite the cool air. Warmer than it should. Like a bolt of lightning, something inside her ignited. Diotein roared to life.
