Surrender

by J. S. Bailey

  SURRENDER

  Copyright © 2017 J.S. Bailey

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Open Window

  an imprint of BHC Press

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2017945446

  Print edition ISBN:

  978-1-946848-59-8

  Visit the publisher at:

  www.bhcpress.com

  Also available in trade softcover

  novels

  Rage’s Echo

  The Land Beyond the Portal

  Servant

  The Chronicles of Servitude, Book One

  Sacrifice

  The Chronicles of Servitude, Book Two

  novellas

  Solitude

  A Chronicles of Servitude Story

  short story collections

  Ordinary Souls

  multi-author anthologies

  Through the Portal

  Call of the Warrior

  In Creeps the Night

  A Winter’s Romance

  The Whispered Tales of Graves Grove

  Tales by the Tree

  To my parents—for instilling in me a sense of creativity

  and never discouraging my dreams.

  But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.

  If anyone slaps you on the right cheek,

  turn to them the other cheek also.

  Matthew 5:39,

  New International Version

  Put on the full armor of God,

  so that you can take your stand

  against the devil’s schemes.

  For our struggle is not against

  flesh and blood, but against

  the rulers, against the authorities,

  against the powers of this

  dark world and against

  the spiritual forces of evil

  in the heavenly realms.

  Ephesians 6:11-12,

  New International Version

  1995

  NATE BAGDASARIAN stood at the foot of his four-poster bed practicing Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre” on his violin for the school ensemble when the telephone on his bedside table let out a shrill ring. Annoyed, he set the violin and bow down atop the quilt his Armenian great-grandmother had stitched by hand. He’d been practicing that same bar for an hour now and still couldn’t get it quite right.

  This phone call might be a welcome reprieve.

  Nate plucked the phone out of its cradle with a flourish, grateful his parents had let him get his own phone line when he turned sixteen: a small blessing in a household he shared with two younger teen siblings who found themselves incapable of not talking to their friends for five minutes.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” crackled the voice of his friend Mick Honeycutt. Mick epitomized everything Nate wasn’t: laziness, irresponsibility, and recklessness. Nate had a blast hanging out with him.

  Nate plopped himself down atop the ancient quilt and ran a hand over the violin. “Is it a plane ticket to get me out of this hayseed little town?”

  “Close,” Mick said. “You busy?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That violin don’t count, man. You know you’ll never be the next Mozart or whoever.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. Mick was about as musically literate as a potato. “So what’s going on?”

  “Meet me in your driveway in twenty minutes, and you’ll see.”

  The line went dead before Nate could inquire further. No doubt Mick had gotten his hands on some new piece-of-junk car that would last a month before turning into scrap. In the past year Mick had gone through a junked Nova, a Ford Pinto, and a Datsun held together with bungee cords. Nate wondered what monstrosity Mick would bring to show off this time.

  Nate picked up the violin and ran the bow across the strings, hitting a sour note. Grimacing, he set them aside again. He could practice some more after he’d seen Mick’s new toy.

  As Nate went to his bedroom door, he felt an odd fluttering sensation inside his head. Shaking it, he kept walking.

  “YOU’VE GOT to be kidding me.”

  Mick beamed as he leaned against the side of a gleaming red Mustang Cobra so un-Mick-like it was almost absurd. “What do you think?” Mick asked, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

  “I…it’s…wow.” For once in his life, Nate struggled to find the right words. “What did you do, rob a bank?”

  “Naw, I’ve been saving up. Got tired of junking a car every few months. This baby here’s two years old. V8 engine, 235 horsepower, goes from zero to sixty in 5.9 seconds. Want to go for a spin in her?”

  Nate hesitated before answering. The voice of reason advised him to go back up to his room and get his notes and phrasing right before the ensemble met up for practice tomorrow night.

  Just live a little, whispered a different, sweeter voice. You can practice more when you get back.

  “Okay,” Nate said. “But I can’t be gone long.”

  “Right, right, you’ve got to practice.” Mick rolled his eyes. “Gosh, why couldn’t you have taken up guitar, instead? At least that’d get you some chicks.”

  Biting back a retort, Nate buckled himself into the passenger seat. Mick got behind the wheel and threw the car into reverse.

  “Did I tell you it goes from zero to sixty in 5.9 seconds?” Mick asked as they cruised along the manicured streets of Autumn Ridge, Oregon.

  “Oh, does it?” Nate bit down on his tongue to hide a smile.

  “Hell yeah, it does! You just watch.”

  Nate assumed Mick would take the Mustang out onto the freeway to demonstrate the car’s abilities, but instead he bypassed the exit ramp and turned onto a two-lane state route that headed west into the mountains.

  Mick checked the rearview mirror once the town had disappeared behind them and then drew to a complete stop in the middle of the road. Nate’s pulse quickened. “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” Mick jammed his foot down on the accelerator, and the car shot forward so fast Nate felt himself pressed back into the seat. The speedometer needle crept up to sixty in what felt like no time at all.

  “It took seven seconds,” Mick said with a frown as trees whizzed past them.

  “Probably because we’re going uphill, Einstein. Whoa, take it easy, man.”

  Mick took a curve at breakneck speed, making Nate’s stomach lurch like he was on an amusement park ride. He gritted his teeth. “Could you maybe slow down?”

  Mick eyed him, puzzled. “What for?”

  No sooner had he uttered those words when the biggest buck Nate had ever seen strode out of the woods into their lane. Mick swerved to the left, directly into the path of an oncoming car barreling toward them.

  The sound of screeching brakes filled the air, and before Nate could fully register what was happening to him, his head bashed against the window, and pain seared through his neck with an agony he hadn’t thought possible.

  The airbags should have deployed, but they did not.

  The fluttering in Nate’s head came again like the wings of a trapped bird, and the next thing he knew, he was floating midair above a lonely mountain road as a yellow coupe shoved a red Mustang Cobra into and over a guardrail, sending it tumbling into a wooded valley like a crushed can. The Mustang rolled and bounced about fifty feet
before lurching to a stop against a fir tree whose branches shuddered upon impact.

  The coupe stayed partly on the road, its nose pointing toward the Mustang that lay broken below it.

  Nate took a closer look at the Mustang as the wind whistled through the trees. No sign of life appeared within.

  Fear surged through him. He had died in the car. That’s why he was floating up in the sky like a ghost. But he couldn’t die. Not now. He was only nineteen years old.

  “You can’t take me!” he bellowed at the sky, though he knew in his heart that nobody heard him.

  Something fluttered again inside his mind. There is another way, but you must surrender yourself to me.

  He had no clue what that meant, but it seemed the only lifeline he had.

  “I—I surrender! I surrender!”

  Very well.

  Nate’s perspective performed another abrupt shift. He found himself inside the car again, suspended by the seatbelt he’d been prudent enough to fasten before Mick began their joyride.

  The pain in his head burned nearly beyond description, and he struggled to breathe.

  “Mick?” he croaked, looking to his left and seeing his friend’s eyes frozen open in surprise. Mick’s head sat at an unnatural angle on his shoulders, and his sandy hair and face were awash with blood that dripped off the end of his nose onto the dash.

  Nate opened his mouth and screamed.

  NATE’S SENSES grew fuzzy. The next thing of which he was consciously aware was a bright light glowing from somewhere up above. He blinked and saw his family standing around him—Mom, Dad, Leon, and Pamela. His grandmother sat in a chair nearby blowing her nose into a pink tissue.

  Nate licked cracked lips. “Where am I?”

  “The hospital,” his father said in a brusque tone. “You’ve been here all night.”

  Nate tried to smile, but it hurt too much so he stopped. “That’s good, right? That I’m in the hospital, I mean. It means I’m going to be okay.”

  An awkward silence settled over the Bagdasarians, and raven-haired Pamela, age fifteen, began to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” Nate asked, looking from his father to his mother. Something felt decidedly odd about the way he lay there, though he couldn’t put a finger on it. “I am going to be okay, right?”

  “You most certainly are not!” his mother shrieked. “Your spinal cord was severed in the crash!”

  Before the shock of her words could register fully in Nate’s mind, his father took his mother by the hand. “Shirley, get a hold of yourself. At least he’s alive.”

  Nate watched helplessly as his mother’s face turned cold. “He’s never going to walk again. He won’t be able to feed himself, change his clothes, go to the bathroom…”

  Nate realized then what felt “off”: all sensation stopped below his neck as if he were only a head lying on a pillow. “Mom? Mom, I…”

  Her blazing green eyes seemed to belong to a stranger. “That stupid Honeycutt boy ruined you, and you were stupid enough to go with him! If he wasn’t dead, I’d go and kill him myself!” She turned away sobbing, and Nate’s father gave him such a look of pity that he started to cry, too.

  “But my song,” Nate said, remembering the violin he’d left lying on his bed. “I’m supposed to be practicing my song.” He tried to sit up, to lift his arm to scratch the itch on his nose, but nothing happened.

  And then, with sickening certainty, he understood.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER

  BRADLEY SCHOLL burst into the house out of breath, his chest hitching as he labored to breathe. He slammed the door closed, double-bolted the latches, and leaned against it a moment while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  He’d always hated this cold, miserable time of year that mostly seemed to be night. Bad things happened at night. Bad things were happening now.

  Or were they? His thoughts had been so muddled this past year that he could scarcely keep things together. It became a struggle enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and eat and put on clothes like a normal person. The thing he’d heard at the bar tonight? Could have meant anything. He’d been drinking; he could have misinterpreted a conversation on which he’d had no business eavesdropping.

  He patted the wall for the switch, knowing a scaly, clawed hand would reach out of the shadows and ensnare him, but the light came on without incident.

  Bradley shrugged off his coat and threw it over the back of the recliner. Not for the first time, he wished he didn’t live alone. It would have been nice to come home to someone who could lie and tell him everything would be all right.

  He went to the fridge and selected yet another beer, then went down to the basement to play around in his lab in an effort to distract himself from his troubles.

  The lab was just a hobby. Rows of potted plants—all of them legal, of course—lined up under banks of grow lights he’d ordered from the internet. Some of them were blooming—a December miracle.

  Bradley swigged his beer and picked up a scalpel. It shook in his hands as he used it to slice away the outer skin of an aloe leaf. He placed the pale green strip on a glass slide, squirted on a single drop of methylene blue to enhance the color, and dropped a slide cover into place before slipping it under his microscope.

  He twirled the knobs to bring the plant’s rectangular cells into focus, hoping to forget the thing that had sent his nerves on a nosedive. His microscope had been his most loyal friend in recent years. Using it to peer into a less chaotic version of reality generally calmed him.

  “Bradley?”

  He stiffened at the sound of the voice, and though he kept his eye in front of the microscope’s eyepiece, his vision went out of focus.

  “Bradley, you’ve got to move on.”

  Gritting his teeth, he turned. A young woman in a white tank top and cutoff denim shorts perched atop his lab stool, eyeing him with pity.

  My sister.

  “Go away, Jess,” he said, hating the rasp in his voice.

  Jess flinched at his words, and the sight of it hurt him. “Bradley, you shouldn’t be here anymore. You’re dead. You’ve been dead awhile.”

  Bradley choked out a sob and brushed away a tear with the back of his hand. “No. You’re the one who’s dead. You got high at a party and fell off a hotel balcony.” Bradley had been so devastated by the news that he took a month-long leave of absence from the product testing lab where he worked.

  Where he used to work. They’d sent him packing months ago, and not because of his continued grief.

  Jess’s brown eyes were wells of sorrow—she’d inherited them from their mother, while Bradley had been given blue eyes so pale they could have been made of ice. “Please don’t do this. You know you’re dead, too. You just don’t remember it.”

  Memories rushed through his head: drinking at a different bar, getting into a fight with another patron, and being thrown out into the cold.

  “I don’t remember it because it never happened,” Bradley growled. “Now I don’t know what you want from me, but you’d better go before I—” He broke off, embarrassed. What could he do, call the cops on a ghost?

  Jess slid off the stool and strode up to him, the top of her head coming to his chin. He tried not to recoil. She looked like Jess down to every last detail, but he knew it couldn’t be her, not in the flesh. He’d watched as the lid closed on her coffin, and as the coffin was lowered into the earth.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “I can show you.”

  Before he could object, she latched her other hand onto his, and the next thing he knew, he was stumbling drunkenly along the shoulder of the road.

  Something clanged close by: the railroad crossing. Bradley squinted, his cheeks stinging in the frigid air, and realized he stood precisely where the tracks crossed Umpqua Street.

  An oncoming train barreled into him, sending him into oblivion.

  Then he was back in his basement like he’d never left it.

  Jess released his hand. “S
ee?”

  Bradley shook his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t. I mean…” He gestured at the rows of potted aloe, romaine lettuce, and peas. “If I’m dead, how are these plants still alive? No one else is here to water them.”

  “They are dead. Take a closer look.”

  Bradley blinked. All of the plants had withered, even the aloe plants, which he’d found virtually impossible to kill. A layer of dust coated everything in the lab, and spider webs stretched their way from the grow lights to the table beneath them.

  “Now do you believe me?” Jess asked.

  “I don’t know.” Bradley ran a hand through his blond hair. “I want to see where it happened. To see if I can remember for real.”

  The corner of Jess’s mouth turned up in a knowing smile. “Let’s go, then.”

  She took his hand, and together they ascended the stairs into the living room. Out of force of habit, Bradley slipped on his coat.

  He really, truly, despised the cold.

  They set out into the night, hand in hand once more. Bradley was surprised that Jess’s hand gave off warmth. Perhaps he perceived it that way because he was dead, too.

  “Don’t be sad,” Jess said as they walked to the end of the street and turned left. “Everybody dies.”

  Bradley just nodded. The thought of spending his entire afterlife with his baby sister at his side took away some of the sting. They’d been the best of friends in life. That could continue on into death.

  It only took a few minutes to reach the tracks that crossed Umpqua Street, as they were only a few blocks from his house. The wind scattered dead leaves across the road and into the parking lot of an abandoned factory beside the tracks. Bradley veered off the road and walked down the parking lot parallel to the tracks, letting go of Jess’s hand to shove his own into his pockets.