And then the voice within regrouped with renewed insistence. You will bow to me or I will rip you into nothingness and feed on your remains. Release or die!
Sunny felt something sink its fangs into her mind, the searing pricks traveling down into her spine, making her entire body shudder.
“Sunny, get down!” she vaguely heard Harris cry. He was reaching for her. Sunny wanted to shout at him to run, not to touch her, to escape, but she couldn’t move her lips. All that came out was a low, weak groan.
“Shit! Sunny’s been shot!” Harris cried at the driver. Harris was reaching across the gurney, trying to get her to duck.
Sunny couldn’t respond. All she could see was the massive wall of putrid green energy, crushing her, strangling her, squeezing her mind until it felt as if it would be crushed into a tiny particle of nothingness…
She felt herself letting go, not by choice, but by a precise attack aimed at the last of her willpower, the portion of her mind still holding on. She felt that core of herself enervate, the mental fingers grabbing the stone of her being weakening and sliding free from the sheer force of the gale around her.
Good. The voice sounded pleased, relieved. That’s good…
A new round of thumps into the side of the ambulance brought with it a sharp blow to her back, like a Louisville Slugger slamming into her shoulder. Up ahead, the driver screamed, and the steering wheel jerked.
In a violent scream of tires, breaking glass, and twisting metal, the world began to spin…
Chapter 2: A Wanted Woman
Sunny opened her eyes to the sun playing across the little ambulance windchime that her Mom had sent her from Canada three years ago, back when Sunny was fresh out of the hospital after the crash. It was cheap and chintzy, and therefore one of the only things that the government hadn’t repossessed when she’d lost her job as an EMT with Dena’ina South for ‘not showing up’.
That still hurt. She’d been there every day, sometimes doing double shifts to cover coworkers’ emergencies, and her notice of dismissal had been a letter in the mail:
March 1 st , 2015
We are sad to see you go, Sunny, but after three weeks of no-shows, Dena’ina South has to let go even you. It would have been nice to receive some warning of your intent, but I assume your last callout was too traumatic for you, and you don’t plan to return to life as an EMT. Thank you for your superior work ethic preceding the crash and never-wavering drive to save lives in the worst of circumstances. Take solace in knowing you helped hundreds of people in your nine years with us. You will have our recommendation despite your unconventional departure.
- Tarl Tallhorn
She’d taken the letter in with her the next day and asked what the fuck, that she’d been working her ass off. Tarl had told her that couldn’t be true—nobody remembered her coming to work. Sunny showed him the time sheets. Tarl accused her of doctoring them. Sunny got in his face and called him a lying prick. Tarl tried to shove her out the door. Sunny shoved back, and he fell and hit his head thirteen times on his desk. She was escorted off the property by hospital security, and her second dismissal slip was much more curt.
March 4 th , 2015
You’re fired. In light of recent developments, it would probably be better if you didn’t ask Dena’ina South for a recommendation.
- Tarl Tallhorn
Her one consolation was that he must have still been bleeding when he wrote it, because it was smudged with brown at the upper left hand corner.
Chump.
At other hospitals, however, it was the same. Her name preceded her and she managed to get herself into two different positions without recommendations from her boss…only to be fired in much the same way.
“We don’t understand why you’re not showing up…”
“Your timesheet keeps getting stamped, but nobody remembers seeing you…”
“Are you trying to get charged with fraud?”
When it became clear that Life had decided to keep her from making money as an EMT, Sunny had been forced to use her meager life’s savings to stay alive for the next five months. After all, Sunny had been a thrill-seeker, living on the wire, blowing her paychecks on games and camping trips. Daphne had been the sensible, fiscally responsible twin…at least when it came to everything but babies. Her sister had let Sunny borrow a couple months’ rent, but then even her patience had run out.
Finally, in December of 2015, with no jobs in sight and Dome living so expensive, Sunny had been forced to choose between moving into her sister’s nicely-furnished spare bedroom where she could cohabitate with Daphne and Gary and bucktoothed Garyspawn in their nice middle-class condo, or moving out to the asscrack town of Willow to sleep on the grungy carpet of an ancient 6-plex under a couple of towels at 45 below zero because she couldn’t afford furniture.
She’d chosen the 6-plex.
Daphne must have gotten butthurt about it, too, because she and Sunny’s five nieces and nephews hadn’t come to help her move.
Then again, that might have been due to the fact that Gary had knocked her up yet again and Daphne had just given birth to kid No. 6 and everyone was in the hospital cooing over the baby.
Blech .
Even Harris, who had kicked her out after he’d convinced himself she was cheating on him because she was ‘gone’ all the time, hadn’t come to see her. Thus, Sunny had been forced to pack her belongings alone, load the cardboard boxes into the truck alone, and when it came to heavy stuff like her big table, her desk, or her loveseat, she’d been forced to just leave it behind.
In the days that followed her December move, the bitter, spit-freezing cold of Willow after the perpetual summer of the Anchorage Domes had been a brutal slap to the face for Sunny. She’d been raised and lived her whole life in the safe, jungle-like conditions inside the Fabriglas barriers, so that first week, alone and feeling the cold seep in through the thin wooden walls, had been a harsh awakening to Sunny’s unhappy new life as the forgotten bum panhandling along the megarails of society. Repo men had even taken her trendy Klondike floater, leaving her with a broken beater of a blue Ford truck that her sister had lent her for moving day and had never asked for back because only outdomers used them nowadays, anyway.
Sunny still remembered that day like a scalpel to her heart. It was the day she’d finally been forced to admit that something had changed, that she could never have her old life back, and that whatever had happened in that damned ambulance wasn’t going to go away with time, despite her shrink’s repeated assurances—in each of twenty free ‘introductory’ sessions—that it would.
A scratching at the glass near her bedroom window ripped Sunny out of her thoughts like a rabid wolverine tearing at stale curtains. Narrowing her eyes, she didn’t bother turning to look who was trying to break into her apartment—she already knew who it was. She waited for Marie to get tired and go rob somebody else.
The scratching continued.
Sighing, Sunny glanced at the window near the foot of her bed. Marie, the druggie native girl who lived in the apartment above and to the right of hers, was once again trying to jam a screwdriver into her window frame to force it open.
Sunny looked at the clock. 4:47. Normally Marie didn’t start until at least 5:30. She must’ve had a long night. Sunny stared up at the ceiling, listening to the scratchings and grunts of effort by her neighbor outside. It was the third time this month that she’d needed money for a fix.
Outside, a man’s voice whispered against the windowpane, “You get it yet?” Tommy Delvas was a part-time worker from the junkyard at the end of the road; a skinny, tattooed creep who liked to hang out on their street and do meth with the other druggies. He had probably put her up to it—as far as Sunny could tell, Marie rarely went off to commit crimes unless she was egged on by her violent, douchey boyfriend.
“No, it’s stuck. Shhh!”
“Why? She hasn’t been home since she rented this place.”
“You sure it was a gi
rl?” Marie asked. “I thought it was a guy.”
“Arty says it’s a girl’s name on the lease. Dammit, you’re taking too long! Just gimme the damn screwdriver. I’ll do it.”
“No, stop! I got this!” Despite Marie’s complaints, Tommy grabbed the screwdriver and shoved the native girl aside. Immediately, the prying at her window got more intense. Little did he know that Sunny had nailed her window shut two years ago, when the first would-be thief had shown up at her doorstep, prybar in hand.
“Fuck, it’s not coming up. Why’s it not coming?!”
Sunny sighed and sat up before Tommy decided to just break her window. She glanced at the dark shapes moving outside, huddled low against the hedge to stay out of sight. Her exhausted body aching for just another few minutes of rest, she forced herself to get out of bed. She grabbed her airhorn off the counter and opened the front door to circle the 6-plex quietly, so as not to disturb her guests.
The two intruders were huddled beside her ground-floor window when she found them, arguing about why her window wouldn’t open.
Sunny blasted them a full fifteen seconds with the airhorn, waking up the neighbors and setting off barking dogs in several of the apartments nearby. The crotchety old woman above Sunny slammed her window open, hair still in curlers, cigarette in hand. “What the fuck?!” Janelle Cavoris snapped. She set an open beer on the sill. “Who the hell are you and why are you setting off a goddamn airhorn under my window at five in the morning? You want me to call the goddamn cops, you twiggy bitch?!”
The two burglars, of course, were bolting around the corner with criminal speed, stumbling over each other to get away. Tommy actually shoved Marie to the ground, giving the would-be ‘cops’ something to nab and slow them down.
What a shithead , Sunny thought, as Marie stumbled back to her feet, looking dazed.
Tommy was already out of sight. When Marie glanced at Sunny, however, she gave a gentle smile.
“Hello.” Marie looked her over dubiously. “What are you doing out here?”
“I dunno, just looking around, carrying my airhorn for no good reason.”
Marie frowned a little and Sunny saw her glance down at the screwdriver in her hand, and for a very tiny, hopeful moment, Sunny thought maybe she’d make the connection. But that moment of hope died with Marie’s next words. “Entryway’s at the other side of the building.”
“Thanks,” Sunny said. “Good to know.”
Marie, who was painfully polite and shy when she wasn’t jonesing, nevertheless continued to frown at Sunny and her airhorn. “Can I help you find someone?”
“Nope, just gonna stand here for a bit with my trusty airhorn.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Suspicion started to tense up Marie’s body, and that glimmer of hope flickered within Sunny again. “Why not?”
“I live here,” Sunny said. “Someone was just trying to pry their way into my apartment with a screwdriver.”
She watched Marie nudge the screwdriver behind her back as she frowned. “Really?” She came over and knelt beside the window. “Oh wow! I wonder who did that.”
Sunny glanced down at the screwdriver in Marie’s hand. “I wonder. By the way…what are you doing out here? With a screwdriver and all?”
Marie tensed. “I wasn’t trying to pry open your window, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You sure about that?”
Marie stood up indignantly. “Not all natives are criminals, white girl.”
“That’s true,” Sunny said. “I worked with a bunch of them at Dena’ina Hospital.”
That seemed to soften her mood a bit. “Whatever. I hope you find the guy.” Standing, she turned and wandered off. Marie got maybe two steps before she slowed, shook herself, and looked down at the screwdriver in her hand again. She started to turn back…
…then saw Sunny standing there and quickly hurried away.
Sighing, Sunny knelt and surveyed the damage to her sill, wincing at yet another set of deep gouges that now overlaid at least a dozen more. The wood had started to splinter. She was going to have to replace the frame before winter. Great.
A beer can hit Sunny’s head from above, splashing fermented barley across her scalp and dribbling it down her back. “Hey! I’m talking to you! What’s with the goddamn airhorn?!”
Tensing, Sunny wiped beer from her forehead and leaned back to look up at Janelle Cavoris. She forced a smile. “Just trying to jump-start that pacemaker before everything coagulates, you walking corpse.”
Janelle blinked at her. “Who the hell—I’m calling the cops.”
“You do that, you ill-tempered cow.”
“What did you call me, you blockker bitch?!”
“I called you a cow!”
Janelle gave her another moment of slack-jawed disbelief, then disappeared inside her apartment. A few minutes later, Sunny heard the hair dryer, followed by heavy metal music.
The same music, of course, that usually kept Sunny awake at three in the morning, while she was utterly exhausted after yet another day as one of the nameless low-income forgettables who worked menial construction jobs for the Dome Commission, people with no serious skills to speak of, mostly ‘Stone Rushers’ who had gotten trapped in Alaska when the state seceded from the United States back in 1992.
Blockking was hard. It took a lot of physical muscle and dexterity to shove those heavy slabs of granite around, even with the bankstone antigravity fields in place. Inertia, especially when applied to massive, eighty ton blocks, was a bitch. Sunny always drove home wrung out and exhausted, but at least the Dome Commission paid in cash, which she could then use to buy food.
Currently, the Republic of Alyeska was funneling money into building a seawall to keep the Cook Inlet out of Anchorage in case of another tsunami. It was a throwaway project, one that everyone knew the government was doing merely to keep useless people like her employed, but as one of those useless people being employed, she found she liked to eat and didn’t really have the same kind of complaints about the Dome Commission and its ‘mindless megastructure projects’ that she’d had back in her heyday as an EMT.
After all, the Domes had to do something with all those people.
In 1989, when Sunny had been four, there had been only 550,000 people in all of Alaska. In a single year following the bankstone discoveries, 1990 to 1991, the Stone Rush had dumped fifteen million people on the Anchorage area alone, forcing Edward Banks to shut down the borders in a frantic emergency order to control the flood. Despite his measures, three million people across Alaska froze to death in the shortages following Alaskan independence.
Then, with his people starving, his brand-spanking-new Republic of Alyeska facing trade sanctions from a pissed off North America, and with very little infrastructure to support its millions of Rushers, Edward Banks had to find something for all those extra hands to do. The Dome Commission and its megastructures project had been formed.
Now those twelve million survivors were breeding—current count was thirteen and a half million people in the Cook Inlet area alone—and they had to do something , and if the Republic wanted to put Sunny and her ilk to work doing useless shit to keep everyone busy, so be it. At least she wasn’t freezing to death at forty below, or huddled outside one of the massive luxury apartments looking for handouts.
No, she was now one of the poor dumbshits who was always out building those towering luxury apartment complexes on Hillside—or whatever else the Dome Commission wanted built that week. No days off, because she couldn’t afford it, and Alaska had done away with its labor laws when it ditched the United States and stepped onto the global stage as a world power, so no worker’s comp or sick leave.
Sunny, like all the rest of the hungry masses, had long ago lost hope she was going to crawl her way out of her cycle of working, sleeping, eating, and working again, because, face it, there wasn’t anything for blockkers to do but move blocks.
And it was
dangerous. In two years of working the blocks, Sunny had seen sixteen guys at her workplace die, crushed to death by the granite. Granted, usually it was because they were doing something stupid, like crawling under a live block to retrieve a cell phone or a set of keys.
Then she thought of the senior foreman who’d been killed last month, a friendly guy in his fifties who’d been working the blocks for almost thirty years. The eighty-ton block he had been maneuvering into place overhead had fallen on him from fifty feet because some rich kid nose-dived his toy airplane into the resonance apparatus, knocking the bankstone coupling loose.
Squish .
The other foremen who saw it happen said the kid had done it intentionally and had run the kid down in the local park, but the Dome Police had forced them to let him go. After all, what was one Ordinary blockker compared to a Desirable’s kid? Desirables did stuff nobody else knew how, like remove tumors or run electric lines. Blockkers moved granite from one pile to another. The kid had never been charged, and word was he did it four more times, at other construction sites, before he tried for a fifth and a tragic accident liquefied him under an eighty-ton block after it slipped in transit…from two hundred feet up.
Sunny’s stomach reminded her how she’d skipped dinner the night before to save what little cash she had to make rent in six days, next Friday. Even living all the way out in Bumfuck Willow, with semi-regular work as one of the millions of faceless nobodies who showed up to move blocks for the Dome Commission, Sunny was still having trouble making ends meet.
Rent for her shitty apartment outside the climate-controlled North Anchorage Dome was six hundred dollars every two weeks, and on most Commission projects she was lucky to make a hundred bucks a day. It really depended on how many tons of granite she moved in a day. Sometimes she got stuck with a faulty resonance machine, which always cost her money as she figured out the kinks to get the antigravity field working—some of the equipment that the Dome Commission used in its construction projects was so old that it had actually been manufactured outside the state, and she always marveled at the little ‘INDIA’ stamps, wondering how vast a trade network must have once existed for Alaska to have been importing things that had been made on the opposite end of the world.
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 2
