by Sean Platt
“No, they’ll either use them to track us or fry it so we can’t use them. They’re worthless.” Ed removed the radio from his belt and tossed it to the ground.
Ed looked up at Brent, “OK, now I think you should go get your family and get the hell out of town.”
“And go where?”
“Hell if I know, but if they stay there, I can’t promise they’ll stay safe. Obviously, you can’t go back to the room you were renting.”
“Then please,” Brent said, “come with me, tell my wife what’s happening. She’s more likely to believe it, and leave, if you vouch for me.”
“I don’t have time,” Ed said. “She was your wife, you ought to be able to find some way to reach her.”
“She had me arrested,” Brent said. “Things didn’t end well. She thinks I’m insane.”
Ed looked up at the ceiling and sighed, then back at Brent, “I’m sorry. I need to get out of here now. I don’t have time to play marriage counselor. Tell her to turn on the news, though. Tell her all this crazy shit going on, all the violence — it’s the alien infection. I don’t know if she’ll buy it, but it’s something.”
Brent wanted to argue, wanted to plead, but knew that despite everything, Ed would help if he could. But Brent wasn’t selfish enough to ask him to ignore his need to reach Jade as soon as he could.
“You’re right,” Brent said. “Thank you. I’ll figure something out.”
“OK,” Ed said, “Good luck, Brent. Now get out of here before they send more Guardsmen.”
Brent said, OK, looking down at the bodies and hoping he could convince Gina he wasn’t insane.
* * * *
CHAPTER 3 — Mary Olson
There was a nightmare inside the machine.
The silence on this side was sickening. Mary could see Paola through the small glass window, her mouth open in a giant O as if screaming, but she heard nothing through the alloy walls. Mary could often feel her daughter, and as her own throat constricted, awful and raw, she knew it was Paola’s violent pain she was feeling.
“What the hell is happening in there?” Mary screamed at Marina, staring through the window, her eyes large with horror and rage as she stared at her daughter trapped inside the sparking coffin, kicking and thrashing. It looked like she was getting shocked from the inside as she kicked against the metal tube.
“I don’t know,” Marina said, sounding panicked. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Can you stop it?”
Without a word, Marina circled to the back of the machine, then disappeared from sight — Mary kept her eyes fixed on the window — as Marina kneeled to what must have been a control panel at The Capacitor’s bottom. Two seconds later the whir died, and the sparks stopped. There was a loud hiss, then an ear-splitting release as Marina circled back to the front, flipped a recessed catch on the front of the machine, and opened the doors.
Paola, who looked 13 again, fell from the parted doors, out of The Capacitor, and onto the floor before Mary or Marina could catch her. Mary fell to the floor beside her convulsing daughter, then wrapped her arms around Paola, pulling her daughter tight to her body, smothering Paola with kisses, rocking her back and forth, and whispering that everything would be alright, over and over.
When Paola finally stopped shaking, she looked up at her mother, wearing the same, innocent face Mary had watched evolve from a baby for the last 13 years, the same face she wore before her mother’s cut in the kitchen, before she went to the hospital to see what her healing could do, before their mad flight from Colorado, pushing the Volvo across three states to California in a desperate race for help. Paola tried to say something, maybe, Mary couldn’t be sure: eyes danced beneath her lids and something like mangled words croaked past her cracked lips.
“Honey?” Mary said, trying to hold herself together, unwilling to let her thoughts unravel and circle the worst.
Marina ran to the wall, slammed her thumb on a button, and screamed, “Dr. Phillips!”
“Honey,” Mary repeated, shaking Paola hard, needing her to feel the urgency. Paola stayed silent, lids slightly lifting, just enough for Mary to see how high her eyes had rolled up into her head, showing nothing but white. “Honey,” she said again, louder as she rocked her daughter harder.
Paola showed life by licking her lips, drawing a breath, and croaking a whisper. “It’s … in … h … ”
She tried for what seemed like forever to push another word through her blistered lips, but nothing came. Mary said, “It’s in what, Sweetie?” Then, after 30 seconds of waiting: “Just tell me what, Honey, then you can sleep, okay?”
Her heart pounded, waiting for Paola to answer. Finally, Paola licked her lips again, said, “It’s … in him,” almost in a whisper, then fell funeral silent.
Mary screamed as a man ran into the room. He was sharply dressed in a well-tailored suit, a bright-blue tie looking especially blue against the deep black of his jacket. In his right hand he held a small, leather bag. “What happened?” he asked Marina, ignoring Rose and Mary.
Marina said, “I don’t know. The girl went into The Capacitor like two minutes ago, and it all went so … wrong … ”
Marina couldn’t finish her sentence. Mary thought it looked like she was losing her mind. Still focused on Marina, and ignoring everyone else in the room, the man Mary assumed was Dr. Philips asked, “When did this happen?”
Marina said, “Just now!”
“No,” he shook his head. “How long was she in The Capacitor before The Current went bad?”
Marina looked baffled, then after a pause said, “It happened right away … immediately … then her knees wobbled as if the truth was too heavy to hold her, and she sank to kneeling. Looking up at the doctor she added, “She was so much … older … before.”
The man frowned, more than worried. He turned from Marina and kneeled toward Paola. Mary screamed at the “doctor” before he made it halfway to crouching.
“You get the fuck away from my daughter!” Mary’s arms were snug around Paola. With all her strength she pulled her to a limp noodle version of standing and started dragging her daughter toward the door. “And stay the fuck away from me. All of you!”
Rose started to come toward her, apologizing, but Mary yelled at her, too. “No, Rose!”
Mary kept walking backward toward the exit, dragging Paola while the man and Marina both pleaded for her to stay and let them help.
“No!” Mary screamed.
The man opened his mouth to say something, but Marina shushed him by waving her hand.
Outside the study, Mary managed to lift Paola into her arms — grateful that she was back to her little girl — then used her remaining adrenaline to make it outside. She dropped Paola back to a languid lean against her body, then pulled out her phone and dialed 911 as the valet began to approach her.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Mary screamed before he made it halfway.
The kid, maybe 20, looked like he had been slapped, then slunk off to wait behind a small podium where he probably killed most of his hours working for the same freaks who had brought harm to her daughter.
A single ring, then: “911, what’s your emergency?”
“I need an ambulance for my daughter!”
“What is your address?”
“I don’t know!” Mary looked around the front porch, panicked, hoping to see an address, or maybe a welcome mat. She looked over to the valet, but realized she had too much bile to say anything civil. “I’m at Marina Harmon’s estate, in Malibu! On PCH!”
A brief pause, then: “What is your emergency?”
“I don’t know … ” Mary felt deeply uncertain, unsure whether she should say anything about the machine or The Church or Marina. She had no interest in protecting them, but the whisper inside her said it was best to say nothing. “ … She just lost consciousness, and is completely catatonic.”
“We’re on the way. Please stay on the line. Tell me, Ma’am,
is your daughter breathing?”
“Yeah, she’s breathing.”
“Do you know if she took any medication?”
“No!” Mary screamed, and was so annoyed with the questions, she hung up.
Mary wondered if she would be able to find Luca, or if Boricio would be able to find him. He had said that he sometimes thought he could feel “a part of the Boy Wonder thinking shit in his head.”
Mary tried to think a message to Luca, on the off chance he could hear her, too.
Are you out there, Luca? Can you hear me?
Rose ran out through the front door with Marina trailing behind.
Rose was crying, Marina seemed scared.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” Rose asked Mary through her crying.
“Does it look like I’m okay?” Mary couldn’t look at either of them, afraid she would scratch out an eyeball or four — six if the valet dared step toward them.
“I’m so sorry,” Marina said. “I have no idea what happened … I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Mary yelled, “Do you even know what your machine does — what it did to my daughter?”
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated, her face a hot shade of salmon. “We’ll do whatever we can to fix this, but you have to let us help you.”
Mary said, “You can help by staying away from me, from us.” Then, through gritted teeth, she added, “Please.”
Marina stepped behind Rose, and the three of them — five counting the valet and Paola — waited in silence for the ambulance to arrive.
In less than five minutes the ambulance screamed to the curb, and paramedics poured from the doors. Seconds later, Paola was lying on a stretcher, and the paramedics were asking Mary what was wrong. She said she didn’t know, while trying not to sob, still certain that speaking of the machine would do nothing to help Paola, and might even invite Marina and The Church to say, “Hey, we were trying to cure her. She aged 10 years!”
Marina’s gut told her to keep her mouth shut and keep Paola’s secret to herself as long as she could.
Mary stepped into the back of the ambulance behind her daughter, lying on the stretcher. Rose tried to climb in behind Mary. Mary wanted no company, but wouldn’t have stopped her. Fortunately, the paramedic did.
“Are you family?”
Rose shook her head. “No.”
“Then you can’t ride.”
She stepped back from the ambulance and looked up at Mary, helpless.
Mary, finding a calm spot in her voice, knowing it wasn’t Rose’s fault, and that she was a link in the chain that might save her baby girl, said, “Take the Volvo. Get Boricio and meet us at the hospital.”
Rose nodded as twin doors swung shut and the ambulance brayed, launching away from the wraparound drive and out onto Pacific Coast Highway.
* * * *
CHAPTER 4 — Boricio Wolfe
Boricio mashed a green nugget into the bowl with his thumb, flicked the lighter, and pulled in his breath.
For being in a state where weed was legal, if not downright ballyhooed with balloons and streamers, Boricio couldn’t believe the Fruity Pebbles, waste of time, barely-oregano he’d managed to score. Boricio had smoked bowls in the best half of the 50 states on the parts of the map that mattered most, and knew how to score without even trying, but he’d had to give it the old college effort to bag crap that would’ve been weak at Woodstock. Apparently, the good shit in the Golden state was going to the stoners with glaucoma.
After a long night spent ridding the world of bodies that weren’t supposed to be a part of his to-dos, Boricio was a cannibal in a mosh pit: hungry as fuck. But he didn’t have a car — Rose didn’t want to rent one seeing as how they could grab a cab or get a ride wherever they were going, and wouldn’t be in L.A. all that long — the only places he could find around the motel were crap shacks where you rolled down your window to grab a bag of food. Weed — even weak-ass crap — made Boricio willing to shove shit in his body he never would’ve been willing to otherwise swallow, but he was especially sensitive after a purging, sought or not, and would rather gobble cunt from a herpes-pocked whore than order a value meal, with flavors made in a lab.
Boricio didn’t want no Walter White wizards waving chemical wands anywhere near his food — snacks or otherwise — and laughed out loud when passing McCrap shacks from Arby’s to Zippy’s: the biggest drug dealers on the piss-covered planet. Ronald Fucking McDonald may as well have been Rapey Raccoon — made up by marketing parasites to draw kids into their cummy webs from the time the tiny shits could say “Buy me a motherfucking toy,” hoping the crack kept itself in their brains, blood, and hankers until after they were old enough to grow out of stupid. Not that they ever did; most assholes’ heads were too packed with short and curlies to know any better, partly because their tastes were crude. They could discern sweet and salty, sour and bitter, maybe even astringent, but focused on scent most, which could bend how a fucker tasted. Chewing sent gasses up your smell holes, so shit foods were filled with fake scents and trash that didn’t belong, which was why the number one ingredient in a chicken nugget wasn’t chicken, but corn.
Right now, Boricio was smoking the weed equivalent of a McNugget, and while he wouldn’t settle for inferior food — he would rather eat a banana and wait for something worth chewing — he’d settle for inferior weed since even the feeble shit made Boricio’s world a bit better.
Weed slowed his brain enough to think. He usually suffered from juggling too many thoughts at once, but weed gave Boricio the ability to pull one to the front of his mind. It slowed his patterns and calmed his disposition, made it so he could intercept and interpret individual thoughts, then turn them like cubes in a Rubik. Everything was better when weed came first: purging, exercise, cooking, eating, and — no doubt about it — fucking. Rose agreed with that one.
Even sleeping was better, and after the beer-battered bullshit of Boricio’s fucked up night, disposing of three bodies when purging hadn’t been a line on the day’s menu, was exactly what he intended to do. Unfortunately, Boricio made the mistake of turning on the news, which woke his ass up right quick.
The story about the school shootings were barely fresh news when some new bullshit went down — a cop in Chicago went full-on postal, walking into a mall and opening fire with an assault rifle, going from store to store, shooting people until he was finally killed by some dude with a gun. The cop had killed 89 people in less than five minutes.
Boricio knew immediately that it was because of the alien. He was infecting people. While the media hadn’t said dick about it, probably covering shit up like they always did, Boricio could feel it in some small part of him that still felt connected to Luca, wherever Boy Wonder was. Though he hadn’t heard any of Luca’s thoughts in at least half a year, Boricio could feel him out there, feel his concern blooming as shit went down.
Boricio had tried talking to Luca in his head, like Luca had been able to talk to him in the other world, but he’d failed to manage a two-way palaver.
The fan was whirring, waiting for shit to hit it. As Boricio watched the news, he felt an overwhelming responsibility for the women in his life, Rose, Mary, and Paola. He didn’t know where they were going, but he wasn’t gonna let any of them out of his sight until shit had dimmed.
It looked like the Brady Bunch would be getting back together for a very special episode, and Boricio would be looking for Little Man Luca — just as he promised Mother Mary — in no time at all.
But first, he needed some sleep.
Boricio pointed the remote at the TV, flipped it to black, then dropped the remote to the carpet and closed his eyes.
Worry — for people other than himself — was new for Boricio. Boricio had spent nearly all of his life concerned about Boricio, and on Christmas and other such charitable days, a bit more Boricio. After Luca got to “fixing” him, he realized life was more than Boricio squared, and that there was something primal in knowing there was more than y
our lonesome — a reassurance in being touched, in feeling the brush of someone wanting to touch you, and not just on their way to your yogurt.
That’s what had happened with Boricio and Rose: He knew it the second he saw her, not too long after crossing back into this world from the other, seeing her smile and somehow knowing they were destined, even though Boricio didn’t believe in shit like that.
Rose was the flower in his garden, worthy of all the shade and sun and food he could find, deserving of shelter from every instinct Boricio would squash to give her succor.
Though the shit wasn’t as Shakespearean, it was also how Boricio felt about Mary and Paola, as if they were connected, and his responsibility, maybe a cosmic duty, to keep them from harm. He saw it when he opened the hotel room door to Mother Mary smiling, saw it when a too-young-for-titties looking Paola stood awkward behind her mama, and knew it like he knew the swing of his own sack while standing beside Mary in the garage, sniffing danger around them.
It was odd enough, giving a shingle of shit about one person, let alone three, and now added to that Boricio felt a sudden and indefinable worry for the entire goddamned planet. He shouldn’t have: Boricio was a hunter, not prey. If the world circled the shitter, he’d survive, same as always.
When the meek got fucked, the wolves did fine.
Boricio was top of the food chain, and loved his crown, but it was a lot harder to stay at the peak when worried for others — what they were doing and what you had to do to keep them breathing.
FUCK!
Sleep was impossible: too much on his mind. Boricio swung his legs from the bed, planted his feet on the floor, then launched himself to standing, and started pacing the room.
He wanted to tell himself it wasn’t time to worry, but predator’s guess said it sure as fuck was. He wanted to turn the problem like a puzzle in his hand. He had to do something, figure shit out, couldn’t allow himself to stay clueless. Too much depended on him making the right move, though Boricio didn’t know what the right move was beyond some vague notion of first finding Luca.
