by GX Knight
There were no peep holes, nor any moral fetters to overcome at the Street Viper booth. I filled out a few papers, they took a quick digital snapshot, I was given a brief tour through one of the garage trailers, I was given a free T-shirt, and then I was sent on my merry way with an autographed photo of Cade Arkman, the guy who did the crash stunt. They promised that I would hear something soon if they thought they could use me. The entire process took about fifteen minutes. In that time spent with the lovely Meg, my recruiter with the chocolate hair, daisy dukes, and Viper mini-tee, I did not feel this setup was anything but what it was… a fun tour by friendly and awesome people. Human-people, I might add. And people whom I would have done anything to please.
I didn’t want to go home. I felt as though my burden to join the Street Vipers had not quite abated after signing the papers, so I meandered out of the park stopping here and there to stare at a closed stand, or an old sign. I was looking for anything that might keep me from having to go back to the apartment and deal with what I had done, even though every moment I stood free from mystical boogey men proved me right.
I was one of the last ones out as the fairgrounds emptied, and so I stopped at the edge of the parking field to admire the large Street Viper promotional poster. It was amazing. A hooded cobra with razor sharp fangs that popped off the plastic waved in the wind. Between the fangs, set behind the top and in front of the bottom, “Street Vipers” was written in words that looked like they could cut your eyes if you stared at them too hard. I smiled and dreamed of the freedom that came from being a Street Viper.
For a moment I felt like a kind-of fog lifted, and I found it odd that I had become so taken with joining them. There was something unnatural about my fascination with the team. But it settled back in as I rationalized my hope. Perhaps it was destiny? Maybe after all the crap, Life finally decided to throw me a bone? People all the time talk about love at first sight. Usually it’s in the form of a relationship, but maybe in my case it was about a calling, a calling to drive fast and be awesome? It could happen?
The night air was cool, fresh off the rain. Springtime drizzle hung like a latent mist canopy. I found an empty bench cuddled back where the trams park for the night, set my shirt and picture beside me, and there I sat, hands shoved in my pockets, feet stretched out, my head draped over the seat back. I stared up into the violet void searching the stars hoping to catch at least one. Did I go home and do damage control? Did I stick to my guns? Clearly this group was normal, and my insane father had been wrong, so at least I had that going for me.
You know, and I know, there is nothing like someone else’s domestic squabbling to capture your attention. You try not pry, but at the same time, like a car wreck you rubber neck at a slower speed, without stopping, because at the end of the day, we all love to see the carnage. I certainly did. Plus, anyone else’s dysfunction besides my own was like a breath of fresh air. It meant I wasn’t the only one screwed up.
I was just sitting off to the side and a little back toward a fence hidden behind one of the parked trams beside the main gate where the impressive Street Viper banner hung. I watched unnoticed as the crashing stunt driver Cade Arkman and my recruiter Meg argued while they setup a ladder to start taking down their Street Viper sign.
“We’re not dating anymore.” Cade said to whatever she was haranguing him about before they finally landed within earshot. I hadn’t really noticed when I got his autograph, but he had what sounded like an Australian accent. Though he could have been an albino Serbian who was rattling off in Mandarin, I would still likely think his genesis was the land down under. I was mildly addicted to the culture, and I have often wrongly associated people from other parts of the world as Aussie. I would like to say I had some lofty reason for that, but I had fallen in love with one too many Aussie actresses, so I assumed that the entire island/continent was swimming with smoking hot blond bikini models with amazing voices. I’m a dude, color me guilty.
Meg was mad. She had legs that went on for miles, and she stomped every lovely inch of them across the concourse. Her Midwest accent was clearly not Australian in origin, but the fact that she was talking to an Aussie made her seem that much hotter. Her strappy heels clicked on the sidewalk as she paced back and forth past the ladder Cade used to take down the sign. “I don’t care who you see. You can sleep with the entire garage for all I care. All I’m saying is keep your ho-train to yourself and quit parading your skanks past me. I know it’s all part of some game you like to play, but I’m not playing anymore, Cade. So quit…” She paused and bit her lip in thought before summoning enough courage to spit out, “…or else.”
Cade was the rock star of his little world, and as with most rock stars they tend to want their way. Something else I knew about rock stars, they really don’t like ultimatums. Cade was no different. He ripped the sign down tearing out the rings that held it, and he jumped down from the top of the ladder landing on his feet with almost no give in his knees as if he had just stepped off a curb, and not sprung from eight feet in the air.
He dropped the sign, about the same time I dropped his obnoxious photograph, and I was on my feet. Cade was seething. He stood over Meg like a predator. He had black teen pop rocker hair that he shoved out of his eyes and he leaned in closer to her face until their noses touched. Meg tried to cower away by his hand like a bolt locked into her chocolate hair locks and tugged them tight so she couldn’t move. Like a horse on a reign she stopped as he challenged her, “Or else, WHAT?” He yelled that last word with venom befitting the snake he represented.
Does anyone see the potential for another seventh grade hole-in-the-gym-wall incident should I do anything but hide until their domestic spat was over? If so, that makes you better than me, because what I saw was an amazingly beautiful woman in distress, and while I’m sure the hope of Meg and I sharing a milkshake, should this go well, be impossible, I was not thinking with the logical part of my brain that promised to let common sense prevail. I had stopped wanting to be a knight in shining armor years ago, but for some reason I was still trying. I balled up the Viper shirt, stepped from around my eaves dropping corner and pelted Cade in the back of the head.
I knew the shirt wouldn’t hurt, it was his attention I wanted, and I got it.
So what do you say in the stare down? Our shadows raked across the sidewalk in every direction. Meg trembled from behind Cade, and I had no clue what to do next. I had never been in a real fight, and may I remind you, this guy flew through a windshield, over fire, and landed without a scratch. Think he knows how to take a hit? Yes. I had to go to the ER one time because I got a splinter in my thumb. Now before you judge, I would like to say, it was a big splinter.
Cade spoke first. I cheered on the inside, twice in one night I had won my stare-downs. “Well, well, if it isn’t one of the nuggets looking to join. Something you would like to say to me, Nugget?”
I mumbled out something that sounded like, “Leave her alone,” through very dry lips.
An amused sneer spread across his pale, thin face. “Make me,” was his challenge.
I was a statue. I had no hope of him walking away, but I had no fear of him kicking my ass either. I felt absolutely nothing. The entire world morphed into a hollow shell. If you strained to listen, you could have heard the ocean. That was until he turned with a backhand that landed across Meg’s face and sent her falling into a lamppost.
So that volcano from earlier? It was still there, and it turned the vacuum of nothing that surrounded me into pure fire. I ran the distance between us, and with my best one-two I landed a right-left to each cheek. He didn’t budge. I fell to my knees when the heat my mind was manufacturing around me got sucked in through my fingers. The sensation ran up the length of my arms and then changed. I missed the warmth of the anger as sharp icicles of paralysis stabbed me all the way up into my shoulders. Punching people always looked so much easier on TV. I didn’t realize it hurt that bad.
The few glances I could catch of C
ade’s face when not gawking at my own broken hands was unnerving. I couldn’t move my fingers or raise my arms. It felt as if my bones had been turned into sticks and then put into a wood chipper. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t move. My body was going into shock. But that physical shock was nothing compared to the mental shock I felt as Meg joined Cade in looking over me, she now wearing her own maniacal smile.
“Got what you needed, Babe?” He asked her.
“Sure did.” She purred, caressing Cade’s arm. “He’s the one we’ve been looking for.”
Then, from God-knows-where on her scanty outfit, she pulled a taser and put it up to my neck. I felt the world go black, and through the crackling sound of electricity pulsing through my already pained body, I also heard my seventh grade principal’s voice yell a single word from across a great distance. All he said was, “Detention!”
BEGINNINGS
Tragedy strikes people all over the world, every minute of every day. You know who does it? Life. She has an entire arsenal at her disposal, and she’ll hit you with the same club she used on some poor Schmo halfway across the world. Most of the time, things end the same, and while her random victims may never know one another, their story winds up reading like a cookie cutter pamphlet of sorrow. They lived, they died, and life goes on for everyone else. Sometimes however, there is that One Guy, where that One Thing happened, and while Life is wandering around with her baseball bat smacking good hardworking people over the head like moles in a kids game, fortune allows that single individual to temporarily extend the story with a luck more incredible and impossible than any other of those who suffered the same affliction were afforded.
I am that One Guy.
You know that dream where you try to run, and you’re mind tells you you’re using all your strength to move as fast as possible, but you’re actually moving in slow motion as if you were under water? Well, this was worse.
I have no idea how long I was under. I felt as if it could have been a lifetime. There was a barrage of dim lights, sounds of metals scraping, and pain. Intense, sharp, and excruciating horror crawled over my subconscious. For seconds I would become lucid, it was like having been rolled under an ocean of torture, and as one wave would cough me up long enough to catch a breath, I was sucked back under to start the roiling nightmare all over again. There isn’t much room for actual thought in that situation. You have to rely on instinct, but I do remember, just one second where I could summon cognizance enough to regret. Regret what? I couldn’t remember that. All I could do was regret.
The first memory I had where I felt as though I was me, actually me, and not some spirit lost in a void, all I could do was hear, and what I heard was a howling wind that sounded like a thousand banshees moaning for blood. Water trickled down my cheek, each drop sent cool refreshing vibrations down my spine. After a few more minutes of adjusting, my vision slowly returned. It wasn’t like waking up and having someone slowly raise the lighting level until you could see. Rather, it was as if two small white dots appeared in front of each eye, and with a hum, the dots shot out into horizontal lines that squealed opened into gigantic movie screens of pure white brilliance.
I wish I could remember more detail about my emergence back to reality, but all I could do was listen to the echo as my deep searching breaths filled my head as if I were in a barrel. I stood, at least I thought I did; it felt more like my body was floating, my legs were under there somewhere. I stumbled from a metal box through a torn open door and out into the banshee wind that raked frost covered nails over my naked body. I fell again onto gravel, the sounds of more metal scraping rolled across a debris strewn parking lot.
The best I could do was pull up to my knees to see the Street Viper trailers torn from one end to another as if cut upon by a very large can opener. The trucks that pulled the trailers burned, and while there were no bodies, off in the distance there was the unmistakable rattle of gunfire thumping on the wind.
My mind grasped like a drowning man clutches for a life preserver to get a handle on what was happening. The best I could do amidst the blur of it all was to run toward a nearby tree line. I did a pretty good job for the first two steps -it was the third that gave me trouble. I hit the edge of the paddock, I tumbled over the threshold of a very large hill. The good part about being so numb that you can’t feel your hands or most of your legs is that you don’t feel the fall when you slide down a fifteen foot embankment.
I tried to stand again, checking myself for scrapes, but everything seemed fine. A little slower, I finally found some sure footing and sped my way through snow covered trees as fast as I could. Though I wore no clothes or shoes, I tread across rocks and branches as if they were as smooth as tile. The longer I traveled the more detail I started noticing in the woods around me. I could see snow hares hundreds of yards away through billowing snow crystals of intricate fingerprint-like patterns. The hares bounded away from me as I plodded through thick brush until I overtook them and then left them behind. Branches snapped into splinters as I waved them away with a light swing of my arms, and though the snow beat across my face, and the cold was present, it never became unbearable. It felt more like sitting in a car during the winter with A/C blowing. It’s not pleasant, but it wouldn’t kill you either. It was only when I came across the clearing of a frozen lake that I saw the full moon watching overhead. It was the middle of the night. Until then I thought it had been day, or at least early evening. I could see through almost any shadow.
For the record, I hate the snow. That’s one of the things I love about the deep South. There is little to no snow during any given winter. There was a light dusting that settled mostly up in the trees, and a few armies of swirling crystals floated across the little lake. Considering my very naked state I was concerned about frost bite, but while I was not completely comfortable, I wasn’t freezing either. I assumed by the tubes that had been hanging from my arms, that I was full of drugs that kept me from feeling it, and while it didn’t hurt, it didn’t mean I wasn’t unknowingly freezing body parts off right then and there. I checked myself, everything seemed fine and mostly warm, though I had to admit, something felt a little… off.
Either I had managed to distance myself from the fighting or it had stopped. In the silence I decided to take a break, not that I felt like I needed one. I could have kept on running. I wasn’t getting winded. In retrospect that should have freaked me out, but the small percentage of my already-freaked-out mind assumed that it must have been the adrenaline, and so my priority list moved on to more pressing things like escape, survival, and of course, clothing.
I took an undignified bow at the water and sipped what must have been half the lake of its icy goodness. The water tasted better than any drink I had ever tasted before. I felt as though I had not had a drink in months. Judging by the winter around me it was possible that was an accurate assumption since it was spring when I had gone to the fairground to see the Street Vipers. After I had my fill of water, I took my newly found super sturdy stance just in time to be hit in the head by a falling duffle bag. Guess my reflexes still needed some work.
I didn’t have to be told, despite a mysterious electronic voice from on high ordering me to, “Get dressed.” I dug through the bag and found some black running shorts and a red T-shirt which I wasted no time putting on. It wasn’t exactly weather appropriate, but I was happy to have anything at that point.
The mind is an incredible tool. I don’t know if it’s because I was in some kind of survival mode, or if because all those stupid stories, which may not have been as stupid as I originally thought, had in some way prepared me for the strange and outlandish, but as I stood barefoot in the snow, barely feeling the cold, I hardly batted an eye when before me, from the sky, appeared a woman wearing white and silver armor. She just dropped in from a perch up in the branches of those enormous evergreens that towered over us.
When I say armor, I don’t mean that bulky stuff you see in the history books of plate covered chainmail
where the wearer looked more like a struggling-to-move robot as opposed to the nimble warrior before me. She wore a black underlay like a wetsuit, only it was scaled, and it protected the vital joints not covered by an elegant metallic shell of pearl marked with intricate silver patterns. Though her face was hidden, it was definitely a “her,” because the armor maker was kind enough to allow ample room along the bust, and her pelvic area was covered by the plated pearl. It was fashioned to look more like a woman’s bikini bottom. Thigh coverings met just under it, and the shingled abdominal-extension locked in above it keeping her protected while making the look seem like an almost seamless single unit while still allowing for impressive movement and agility. When you’re a guy as practiced at observing and appreciating the fairer sex as I, you notice the little things like that.
She wore a dual crossed scabbard on her back that was built seamlessly into her armor. The hilts of her swords curved outward at the bottom. I wanted to see her pull them. By the way the handles and the blades curved, she would have to bear them with the blades flowing up the length of her arm, as opposed to the more traditional grip one normally would use with a sword. Very cool.
The helmet was round taking an upside down tear shape. It had a few hard angles at the top which gave the “face” and “head” portions their proper dimensions. The face was a perfect mirror plate that slid down from the crown of the head. Nothing like being distracted by your own reflection as you parried away with a fighter, whose armor was made to reveal her smoking hot form. I don’t mean to be chauvinistic, but if it’s a spade, call it a spade. Distraction was a tactic as good as any other. The second I laid eyes on her, despite the fact that I had yet to see her face, I was tingling in all the right places. If I had to fight her, I would lose.
