I Will Rise

by Michael Louis Calvillo

  “I haven’t really had time to think about it,” I think.

  We enter the market, Annabelle traipsing through the glass door as if it weren’t there and me and my clumsy flesh entering the old-fashioned way: by pulling it open. She stops in front of a newspaper stand and points. “You’ve made the front page, cutie.”

  Did she just call me cutie? I smile and ready a sarcastic retort, but Annabelle points hard and forces my attentions to the newspaper. The playfulness drains and I feel cold.

  Seven Dead in Walnut Creek Massacre reads the headline. Beneath it is a subheading, but my eyes have begun to blur and all I get is jumbled copy involving police officers, paramedics, firemen, a K-9 unit…and below the words an overhead photograph of the crime scene. In case you are wondering, Walnut Creek is the unimportant name of the until-now unimportant small town I live (lived) in. My vision worsens, the paper fuzzes out and I shake my head.

  “Relax,” Annabelle soothes.

  I take a deep breath and after a few seconds my eyes refocus themselves on the picture. There, at the edge of the mini forest, are cars and people and miles of yellow cautionary tape and a smattering of black tarps covering what can only be the dead.

  I start to say, “I thought,” but again catch myself and then continue speaking with my mind. “I thought you said it takes twenty-four hours? I mean, I understand Lumpy and Paunch, but what about the others?”

  Annabelle exits the market and I follow. She stops by my stolen car. “There is a lot we have to talk about, but first you have to bump into each and every one of these people.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t care how you do it, shake their hands, pat their backs, accidentally trip and brush by them, just touch them all. This is your purpose. Don’t ever forget that. You now have purpose, responsibilities, and you must see them through. Besides, it keeps the cops off your trail.”

  I shake my head only half-listening. My eyes scan the gas station and I count eleven people including the clerk behind the counter and a baby in a car seat.

  “Charles?”

  Sizing up the populous of the gas station has sent me into a trancelike state. I don’t want to kill these people. My hand buzzes, my head buzzes, my heart pulses. I don’t want to kill anybody, but my body does. My body sings electric and I can actually feel juices pumping in my brain. Waves of fluid. Ugly solutions. I don’t want to kill, but my body does. Pictures cloud my head. I see an army of people: men, women, children of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities. They are all pointing and laughing and a few of them are even mocking my seizures, shaking and flopping about like senseless idiots. I hear them: a rumbling of disrespect, a sea of insults, stripping me of my humanity, reducing me.

  “Fuck them.” Annabelle senses my state and seethes beside me. “Look at those worthless sheep. Look at them thinking they’re better than you. Look at them pumping gas, slaves to the machine, desperately convincing themselves they are happy. Why don’t they understand? Why can’t they see what people like us see? Why do they hate us? Because deep in their hearts they know we are right. They know we are better than they are because we care. Because we take note of what we are becoming and we fight it. We aren’t whores and it pisses them off. We aren’t weak and it makes them feel ashamed.”

  The army in my head continues to hurl insults. They call me a retard and a reject and a cripple fool. They call me gross and fat and make fun of my clothes. They call me impotent and sexless and perverse. They call me godless. They yell, “God doesn’t love you, God never loved you, because you are a pathetic aberration!”

  Taking a deep breath, I fast-walk toward the pumps. I feel like I am on autopilot, powered by something apart from myself. I picture a pair of magnets and how if you slide a piece of paper in between them and drag one, the other will follow, fixed, pulled, trapped.

  There are four pumps, double-sided, eight nozzles in all and each one is full. I approach the first one and a woman, midforties, pleasant, looks up from pumping gas and smiles at me. My brain aflame, my eyeballs sizzling, sweating, tears stream down my face.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I shake my head no and lightly lay my left palm on her forehead. She doesn’t attempt to move it, instead she keeps smiling at me. White blossoms at the back of my brain, it unfolds and expands until my inner vision is a vast, unending blank. Translucent flitters, anti-opaque souls, and in my head the white world shrinks down and spins out. At the electrified conjecture where my thoughts, my vision and my soul meet, I see a black rosebud. In stop motion, herky-jerky advancement, it begins to bloom. The dark petals splay and at the death flower’s center: infinite black, the end, a spiraling eternal nothing.

  I remove my hand from the woman’s forehead and she says, “The power of Christ.”

  I am momentarily confused, but quickly catch on and play along. “God be with you,” I say with a weak smile and push past her.

  On to the second pump, but before I am able to approach the man pumping overpriced gas into his overpriced car, the woman calls after me, “Do my baby.” I turn around and she has hoisted the car seat containing the baby from her car. She extends it toward me in offering.

  Everything goes by as if in a dream.

  Here but not really here.

  I never really realized how easy it is to casually touch people. Instead of laying my hand on any more foreheads in this dramatic, religious(?) fashion, I simply brush by each of the gas pumpers. A slip here, a trip there, death doled out easy as pie and nothing but concern and goodwill in return.

  I enter the market and naturally clap my hand on the back of an old guy pouring over a spindle of beef jerky. I say the hot and spicy is the best and then lay it on him. He laughs heartily and smiles and I notice he is missing a mess of teeth.

  On my way out I stop and ask the clerk for directions I don’t need and then shake his hand in thanks for the information. Done. Simple. Eleven down.

  My body, a mass of vibrating atoms, a battery of death, a thorned stem, throbs its approval. I feel good. I feel right. No hassles. An ever-growing black hole and in the end all I can really remember are eleven pairs of staring eyes.

  Returning to the car Annabelle is beaming. Her eyes look hungry. “Oh, I wish I could hug you!” She smiles.

  I wish the same and smile big back. As we get in the car I notice Eddie is lying down. I get a little panicky, but Annabelle tells me not to worry. “He’s only sleeping. He’s not dead…yet.”

  Pushing the “yet” from my mind, I stare a little a harder and see that he is breathing. Relief washes over me and I start the car. After a minute or so of driving I am back on the freeway and I notice the gas gauge. As it stands, the tank is about a quarter full. It won’t last long and I’ve gotta do something soon.

  “You never answered my question,” Annabelle derails my thoughts. She is playing with her hair, looking incredible, a vision of poised exquisiteness inches away from me in the passenger’s seat and goddamn what the hell is it with this burgeoning attraction?

  “What question?” I forget about the gas and the fact that I was just at a gas station and force myself to ignore the perplexing allure and focus.

  “Why haven’t the cops caught up with you?” she asks.

  I look at her expectantly.

  “The whole time I was away I was worried I’d return and find you in jail,” she says. “When I was away, all I thought about was you and your safety and the threat of humanity stopping you before you begin.”

  “Really? You were thinking about me?” The fact that people care—Eddie’s concern, Annabelle’s worry—is going to take some getting used to.

  “Of course I was thinking about you. How could I not? You are only the most important man in the world.”

  I blush.

  Pushing her hair behind her ears she continues, “I need to have more faith, not get so freaked out all the time. Of course the, the…we’ll just call it the earth for the sake of conversation. Of course the earth
will try its best to protect you, you are its champion, but my visions, my responsibility as your guide makes me feel like it’s all riding on my shoulders, like I am the only one who can save you. ”

  “I can handle myself, you know.” I’d like to think it’s not just Annabelle and the earth keeping me afloat. I mean, I am in control here, I am making decisions.

  “I know and I have to have more faith in you too, it’s just that this is a long time coming for me. The earth has been priming me mentally, in a direct fashion, for years. I’m ready, I’m aware. This is all so new to you. How can you be expected to evade law enforcement? Your conditioning was a lifelong clandestine process. You’ve been trained to hate and wired to infect and I kept wondering how the earth planned on carrying this thing through if it just expected to drop it in your lap and say, ‘Here you go, surprise, now run.’ I should’ve realized it wouldn’t let something as simple and messy as human organization stop you.” She crinkles her nose as she says this.

  “So we’re in the clear? I’m safe driving this stolen car?”

  “It looks that way. Fortunately, you are okay and fortunate for us all, these deaths are strange and jarring and executed in such a manner that you and I have time to breathe and carry on. Their inexplicable nature sends shockwaves of confusion and frustration throughout the community in question. By the time the police begin a thorough investigation, all of the detectives and officers involved in the case will already be dead or dying.”

  Annabelle takes a second and then explains, “This first round, the five dead apart from Lumpy and the dog, were a special circumstance. The process is complicated, but on a basic level it works like this: the longer you touch someone, the quicker they die. Like charging up a battery. You drained Lumpy right then and there; he died instantly and his body retained the intensity of your touch. The residual charge flowing through his corpse was so great that the officer, the two paramedics and the two firemen who touched the body moments after you fled the scene all died within fifteen minutes. Their corpses also retained an exceptionally powerful charge, killing all who came in contact with them within a couple hours. This third wave of victims in turn infected a fourth group that died another four hours later. The charge finally diminished, equalizing within this fourth collection of victims and the people they have touched, before death and after at the crime scene or on a slab in the morgue, will die within the standard twenty-four-hour period.”

  This crazy shit makes my brain ache. What am I?

  Annabelle keeps on, speaking matter-of-factly, no big deal, “Since the newspaper went to press this morning seventy plus people have died, mostly police officers and hospital employees and their loved ones. That’s why no one is after you. Walnut Creek is in a state of upheaval. It’s all over the televised news, the radio, and will be all over the papers, local and national, tomorrow. Still, nobody even knows about you. The initial disturbance, you and Lumpy and Paunch, have all been forgotten, overshadowed by this huge crisis. At this rate, if you keep touching and moving, you will never get caught.

  “If you drain someone like you did Lumpy, you release an explosion of instant and quick death. If you continue to only brush a person or lightly touch them, the death spreads nice and even. If you stick to the latter, these twenty-four-hour time frames allow for the infected victim to extend the touch to a wider range of people, thus extending it to an even wider range of people. Either way, the proliferation is rapid and eventual. Town after city after state will fall, and before we know it, it will be time for the final joining. ”

  Her we go with the esoteric bullshit. “The final joining?” I think to her.

  “Yeah. I tried to explain it to you after Lumpy shot you. It was too early, there was simply too much going on for you to comprehend what with your transformation, and the idea of our mission was still too fresh in my mind, too unformed to gel and come out right. Remember when I said that there is another?”

  “Sort of.” I’m really getting the hang of this mental telepathy thing.

  Annabelle flickers, disappears for about thirty silent seconds and then reappears before I have a chance to process. She frowns. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I almost forgot. I have to take care of something. My alarm’s going to go off and I’m gonna fade soon. I just hit snooze. I’ll keep explaining until it wears off. Before I go on, do you still have my address?”

  “No, I…”

  “Write it down this time.”

  Reaching across Annabelle, I pop open the glove box. Score. A smattering of pens spill forth and I manage to catch one. The rest hit the thinly carpeted floorboard and roll under the passenger’s seat. Keeping an eye on the road I search out a scrap of paper, an old grocery store receipt, and attempt to hand it to Annabelle. My pen-and-paper-laden hand goes right through her and bobs in time with the vibrating car hovering where her transparent left breasts jiggles. I turn a hundred shades of red.

  “I’m not really here, remember?”

  “Right, right.” I position the receipt on the steering wheel and get the pen ready. Annabelle recites the address—a residence in Mesa, Arizona.

  When I finish, I exclaim (mentally), “Got it.”

  “Good. Anyway, as I was saying, once we’ve carved a substantial rift, touching everyone we can, we have to meet up with number three.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s not really important right now. What is important is that we meet and destroy the human disease once and for all. The details are still fuzzy in my head, but they will come. Right now, I know you have to come to me and then I have to guide you and then when we align with number three and he’ll do the rest.”

  “He?” Something sick and woozy raises a lump in my throat. I am used to envy, wanting to fit in and all, and not having any girlfriends and/or desires toward girls I am rather unfamiliar with jealousy, but lo and behold there is no mistaking the feeling—jealousy, big and thick, spreads its gauzy wings in my throat. I don’t like it one bit.

  Annabelle is intuitive. She smiles at me. “As I said, it’s not important. He’s not important.” And under her breath, words teeming with smoke and fire, filling my chest with odd heat, “Don’t worry. He’s not you. Not even close.”

  She winks and then snaps back to business. “It’s important that you get here as soon as possible. Oh, and beyond important is that you remember not to touch me. Until the joining I am susceptible to your touch. We have to be extra careful, if you so much as brush by me, it’s finished. We also have to make sure nobody you touch gets close enough to touch me. I suppose your role at this point, other than touching as many people as possible, is protecting me. Do you think you can do it?”

  Chapter Ten

  Anti-luck

  The sun is just beginning to set and for the past few hours I have been doing nothing but thinking about Annabelle. Driving and thinking and getting pissed because alongside thoughts of Annabelle I am thinking thoughts about him, number three, and I am angry at myself for thinking about him because I am not excited about meeting him, nor I am excited about this so-called “joining.”

  Who fucking cares, right?

  And why do I feel such hostility?

  Why does it even matter? It doesn’t, but it does, it does, it does and something hideous inside feels threatened. Weak and envious. Colorless. Helpless and gooey. I am the only one that matters. I am the anti-savior. What am I scared of? And what is up with the red rage spreading itself over my brain when I think not only of him, but of him and Annabelle together, communing, learning, her guiding him and educating him and making him feel special and important and caustic just like me?

  I feel petty and trite and stupid and pedestrian and trivial and irrelevant and paltry and any other word that fits. The land is darkening, the town of Walnut Creek is diminishing, and ten random citizens—a baby and countless numbers of loved ones and strangers—are dying, Eddie is still sleeping, snoring away the time, and thanks to a careless hands
hake still dying, and here I am seething with jealousy. Jealousy! And I don’t even like people, especially not in the romantic sense. The very idea of it, kissing and courtship and time spent talking, spooning, emotionally expanding until presto: the coup de grâce—the extremely unsavory act of exchanging bodily fluids—makes me sick. Well, at least it used to. Now I feel frenetic, kinetic, and spiky things leap about my rib cage when I think about her. I feel swimmy and tingly. A short time ago, nothing, but now Annabelle, big as sin and sinking in, has taken root. My heart smiles and aches for her return.

  What is happening to me?

  Is this love, infatuation, adoration?

  For sure.

  And for all of this inner turmoil, for all of this jealous worrying, I am flying. I am smooth. I am as sweet and cool and warm as a hot fudge sundae.

  Enough. Stop. Come down.

  The transformation, I know.

  This is only precautionary, I know.

  Keep him dumb and in love and he will do what he is told. Annabelle is my guide, she is the party planner if you will, and as long as I follow her everything will go as planned. Everything will cook right along and we will meet number three (three’s a crowd)…and why does he have to be involved anyhow? I have the touch. I am the most important man in the world. Me. That’s what Annabelle said, isn’t it?

  I think this preventive measure, this love initiative, is working far too well.

  Enough then. Push it from mind, but like Sisyphus rolling the rock, it just keeps on coming. Gritting my teeth I try for something else. As I begin to get my thoughts around the love thing I am able to center on Eddie.

  From the heights of love I fall and tumble, end over dizzying end, into the depths of sorrow.

  What am I going do about Eddie?

  If Annabelle (oh, lovely Annabelle. Stop!) is right, and I have no doubt she is, the little guy is sleeping away his last night. There is nothing I can do to save him and it breaks my dead heart. I have to do something, but nothing comes to mind and I fight with myself for what seems like forever. Suddenly, out of the blue and clear as day, it hits me full force: I can make his last hours worthwhile. Ideas like weeds: we’ll be in Vegas within hours. I’ve never been, but I’ve seen pictures, and if my memory serves me correctly, there are a few roller coasters. Maybe even upside-down ones. There’s no better feeling in the world than that of overcoming your fears. Eddie deserves as much and given the circumstances, it’s the very least I can do for him. Besides, there are shitloads of people for me to brush up against and that should make Annabelle plenty happy.