by Landon Wark
The thought of it turned his insides to mush.
They might as well have left a bomb sitting in front of him.
“Don’t do it,” he whispered.
But what else could he do? Sit and rot waiting for his parents to make the five hour drive and bail him out while some technician exploded a few computer monitors while trying to figure out his notes? His mind came back to the point it was stuck on.
If the wrong person got hold of it…
He put his head in his hands as the spectre of what he was about to do came over him and its immenseness nearly crushed him. But what else could he do?
He moved fast, faster than he knew himself capable of moving. With one hand he scooped up the notebook from its resting place, with the other he heaved the chair that his bag and the book had been sitting on before they were defiled out of the way. He paused a mere microsecond as his brain called up the words that had ripped apart his apartment. He would never forget the sound of it. The final phoneme staggered on the tip of his tongue for the briefest instant and then…
Studs snapped, drywall broke, insulation flew like birds out of the wall, the flaking paint was obliterated entirely and Jonah McAllister thought his eardrums would rupture as he threw his arm up over his face. Split wires hissed like snakes and went silent. The lights in the room flickered and then went out. The whole motel shook with disbelief, quieted for a moment and then voices screamed with confusion into the darkness around him.
He drew his arm away slowly, peering into the gap he had just created. His eyes grew nearly as large as the hole itself. He had expected the cold of night to greet him, but instead what he heard were moans of pain and shock. Through the dust swirling around the opening he could see two people moving about the floor on the other side. He clenched the notebook in his hand while cautiously approaching the gap.
A man dressed in a hoodie and sweatpants sprawled on the floor in front of Jonah as he stepped into the motel office. He and another behind the motel desk in a buttoned shirt and slacks, flopped and rolled, each trying to recover, thin streaks of blood from superficial wounds covered their faces and arms. If they knew what was going on around them they were in no condition to do anything about it. Jonah found his breath heavy as he stepped past them, half a thought given to helping them, a full one given to running.
Behind him the door to the room he had just left was lifted nearly from its hinges as the giant lurched inside. His scarred mouth turned down into a scowl that made the floor quake beneath Jonah’s feet. Their eyes locked for maybe half a second before the monster was across the room and through the recently formed portal.
Standing transfixed before the rushing wall of flesh, Jonah bore the full brunt of the massive body, a force that knocked him clean off his feet and sent him sprawling to the floor a good six feet away, sliding until his head slammed into a nearby desk.
He tried to struggle wobbly to his feet, but a pair of monstrous hands laid hold of him, forcing him to the ground. The giant sneered as he pushed Jonah into the floor, almost trying to push him through, down into the basement. His small struggles proved futile against the gargantuan that held him down and in the throws of his thrashes he could hear—through the door to the room he had been occupying only a few moments earlier—a shout from the smaller man and a weapon being fumbled out of a holster and a safety being clicked off.
There was something about the hands on his shoulders and about the way the floor pushed into his back that caused a brief memory to surge forward in his mind, an intense desire, bordering on panic to get back up.
Jonah surged against the impossible weight once more before an irrational thought stole into his mind. It hesitated once in the ethical part of his brain before racing down his nerves into his mouth where he spat it at the sneering scar of a face glaring down at him.
At once the face burst into blisters, sneer becoming a draw of panic and pain. The air was full of the smell of burning flesh and boiling sweat. The hands came away from his shoulders and he rolled free in an instant. At any other time he might have been hypnotized by what had happened to the giant who was now rolling on the floor, hands covering his eyes against an unknown force, but now he was bent on one notion.
“Run,” he whispered.
Like a shot, faster than anything he had ever dreamed before he was running. Before he knew what was happening he was through a door marked red with the word ‘exit’.
Night enveloped him like a cold blanket. His bare arms bristled in it, hot lungs drawing the cold air in until he was certain they would freeze and then shatter. The notebook flapped in the frosty air as he pumped his arms. His feet skidded twice in the snow that lined the parking lot in which he had found himself, but he never once lost hold of the ground.
Behind him the sounds of the younger cop screaming at his partner hit Jonah's ears for a moment, but was then lost on the wind.
Jonah ran blind down an alley, veering left and then right and then left again, crossing sidewalks and streets, avoiding people wherever he saw them, no matter how far off they were. He ran until his legs burned and his lungs felt like they were breathing an icy fire. As the sound of sirens filled the air he leaned back against a chain link fence, desperate to catch his breath. The reality of what he had just done came down on him and his knees grew weak under it. Several minutes passed before he could move again and he went at a brisk walk in desperate search for a place where he could find shelter from the cold and hopefully something warm to wear. Once that was accomplished he would work out a way to get out of the city once and for all.
Jonah McAllister shuddered against the cold and imagined, however briefly what his mother would say when he failed to return home for Christmas.
Part Two
Sandy Jenkins Reads a Book
Sandy Jenkins was a creature of disgust.
She was disgusted with her name because of its ordinariness, disgusted with her job for the same reason and disgusted with the people around her for their failing to notice it. But the thing that disgusted her most was her body.
It was a bloated, saggy mess that was becoming riddled with wrinkles and cellulite. Even at thirty she felt old and stretched out, as if somehow her girth had been struck by more years than a thin woman would be. She would spend hours walking around the city in vain attempts to force it to comply, weeks on water diets that left her weak and sick and still there was no hope on the horizon. She would look into the mirror in the morning and for the first few moments she would see the grossness that the other women whispered about huddled around the water cooler.
She was disgusted with herself for caring what they thought.
Her disgust she buried in two ways: when she was eating she would eat, no point in holding back when it never did anything anyway; and when she was not eating she would read about people who did not have such ordinary names or jobs or lives. Her bench at work was littered with magazines about celebrities and gossip, her shelves at home running over with books about places that had never existed and people who had never lived and whose names that left her feeling tongue-tied.
She was in the middle of reading just such a book, this one about an alternate timeline in which civilization had never left the Greek empire. She kept the book below the table at the deli where she was eating her lunch salad, almost pressed into the rolls of her fat out of embarrassment. Its heroine, beautiful and forceful daughter of the Aegean sea, Aegera, was confronting the despotic king.
"Shit," she cursed under her breath so that the other patrons of the diner wouldn't hear. Every novel in the last few years had some kind of despotic king.
She was in the process of flipping a forward a few pages to see how long this confrontation went on for when her reading was interrupted.
The man at the table across from hers was muttering something. He would mutter something and then he would scribble something down in the ratty notebook he had perched on the table and then he would go right back to muttering. Several of
the other people in the deli looked up, rolled their eyes and went right back to eating. Sandy read the same line over for the eighth time and then shoved her bookmark between the pulpy pages, thoroughly disgusted.
When she sat alone in her one bedroom at night she was aware that it was taking less and less time for her to reach a state of thorough disgust with any given person. A fuse which once had seemed infinite had grown shorter and shorter as the years wore on. It was something she tried to stop, but as with her body, her temper refused to obey.
As her outsides got softer, her insides got harder.
“Excuse me,” she said, clearly directed toward the loud muttering.
The man did not look up, but was silent for a moment as he scribbled something down.
“Excuse me.” Louder this time.
He looked over briefly before going back to writing. Sandy’s brow furrowed. He didn’t look like the kind of person you would meet muttering in a deli. He was thin enough for sure and pale enough, and his face was unshaven, but he didn’t have the look in his eye. The kind of half glazed over look that a person got when his brain had finally been levelled by alcohol or drugs or maybe even syphilis. His appearance was unkempt, but more from lack of effort than from lack of proper facilities. He took care of himself, but he really phoned it in.
“Excuse me!”
Half the people in the deli looked over. A younger Sandy Jenkins would have blushed, but that blush was hidden by years of disgust.
“What?” he returned finally.
“You think you could keep it down o’er there?” she asked.
“No.”
Taken back by the bluntness of it Sandy remained speechless for a moment. Moments that were getting shorter and shorter all the time.
“People are trying to eat,” she pushed.
He looked over once again, studying her from top to bottom. “You’re obviously succeeding.”
In an instant Sandy Jenkins reached a state she thought unreachable, going past thorough disgust into a state that was beyond description. She opened her mouth to tear into the man, suddenly painfully aware of the swaying of her jowls when he shoved his chair out from behind himself, gathered up all of his possessions and turned toward the door behind her.
“I’ll save you the effort of a reply,” he said.
A police cruiser coasted by the large glass deli window.
The man stopped in his tracks, an action that seemed to go unnoticed by anyone but he and Sandy. The chair opposite her at the table squealed as he pulled it out and parked himself definitively in it.
“That looks like an interesting book,” he remarked without a second of delay.
She scooped the book with its cover of a muscular warrior and a half dressed maid into the bag at her side.
“I don’t see what business that is of yours.”
His eyes widened at the sound of car doors closing. Sandy turned around to see the two officers from the police car walking up to the deli. Her brow furrowed with the understanding that she should get away from him as fast as humanly possible. She tried to get up, but his hand clamped down on her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “Just until they leave.”
“Let go of me,” she demanded. He winced at the volume of her voice.
“Shhh! One hundred dollars to stay until they leave.”
He didn’t look like he had one hundred dollars, and the offer offended her. She tried once more to get up as the officers reached the sidewalk outside.
“One thousand!” he hissed. “One thousand dollars to have a friendly conversation with me until they go.”
Offended or not, the offer made her eyebrow arch. The chair groaned underneath her as she settled back down and his grip relaxed on her arm.
“Lemme see the money,” she said.
He frantically pulled two hundred dollar bills out of his pocket, placed them under a napkin and slid the parcel across the table to her as the officers opened the door to the deli. “I don’t have the rest on me. You can get it from me later.”
Her eyes widened at the sight of the money and the way it coasted effortlessly across the table. Sandy bit her lip and glanced at her watch. She had fifteen minutes until she had to get back to work. She could tolerate someone for that long, couldn’t she?
“You work around here?” he asked quietly, his eyes straying to where the two officers were ordering coffee.
“I don’t wanna tell you where I work,” she replied flatly.
“Fair enough. Is the weather out here always this hot?”
“Spring, summer and fall.”
“No snow?”
“Not unless hell freezes over.”
“It gets cold back home,” he muttered.
“You from up north?”
He paused for a moment. She sensed something sarcastic on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it.
“Yeah.”
The cashier was making disgusting chit-chat with the two officers, both married men.
“Bitch.”
The officers finished with her, both taking identical sips from their steaming cups. Sandy thought for a moment of stopping them, of saying there was something strange about the person sitting across from her, but she shoved the notion aside. She doubted she would ever see the second installment of her pay for this errand, and likely shouldn’t try, but the thought of it intrigued her. It was the intrigue that kept her going more than the money. Nothing ever happened around here.
“So…” he trailed off as the door opened, bell announcing the departure of the patrolmen.
He stood up almost instantly, ripping a page out of the back of the notebook and scribbling something down on it.
“I’ll leave the money at the desk of this hotel,” he muttered curtly. “You can pick it up tomorrow.”
Sandy looked after him as he left, still thinking about going after the two patrolmen, or even going down to the station a few miles away, but a look at her watch warned her that her lunch break would soon be over and she should be getting back to the call centre. The incident was already beginning to fade from her mind with the disgustingly sly smile given to her by the cashier.
Jonah McAllister waded through the pile of shirts and pants that had taken up residence in the dark hotel room. He kicked a pile over, rummaging through the harvest of paper that was revealed. He uncurled most of the scraps before shoving the whole pile aside. The families and cliques of the piles were so familiar now that he knew what he was looking for was not there after a few moments. He grumbled softly to himself, flopping down on the bed with frustration.
Absently he opened the drawer in the nightstand beside the bed, carefully pulling out a disordered stack of hundred dollar bills and counting off eight of the ten that dwelled there. The rest fell back into the drawer. It was all the savings he had from his efforts since arriving in this place. He would have to spend some time making some more money, an activity that had come to irk him over the past months. Gone was the giddiness that had led him to be so careless back home. Money had become more of an encumbrance, a chore, than anything else. He had to carry it with him wherever he went, make sure not to spend his last quarter in the lobby vending machine so he could copy it again and again, hours at a time. Just to afford this tiny, pungent room. The same words over and over again.
Then again, everything about the last few months had become an encumbrance to him. He had not once run afoul of the law since leaving home, but the fear—now working its way into paranoia—was always there. He had not been able to sleep for very long each night, nor in the same place for more than a week for fear that the giant man would be there, standing over him when he woke.
Although he had not worked up the nerve to make the attempt to find out; they had to be looking for him. He had nearly killed a police officer and obliterated a motel.
Every noise was an armed team coming to get him, every awkward stare was someone watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake. When the feeling set in he w
ould move to a new place and to new rooms that seemed to be getting smaller with each move. He was growing tired fast, his eyes ringed in dark circles, his face covered in coarse stubble and tongue laced in acid for anyone who would cross him.
And there were times, in the confines of the poorly lit hotel rooms and in the back of nightly buses, when he had nothing but his thoughts and notebooks, that he thought he truly might go insane.
He stretched out slightly and fell back onto the pile of papers littering the bed.
Keeping the maid out of the room was becoming another daily battle and he missed the privacy of his tiny bachelor apartment and the quiet security of the lab.
He missed his home and the way his parents would feign interest in his activities during their weekly phone calls. He even missed sitting in the back of a lecture hall listening to the other students talking about their escapades.
He sat, staring at the eight hundred dollars on the bed and found his thoughts straying to that woman in the deli. Not her exactly, but the book she had been carrying.
He chewed on his tongue for a moment.
“There's people out there looking for... magic,” he muttered, immediately regretting his choice of words.
Outside of his tiny room, on the rare occasions he had to head outside and clear his mind he could feel the same kind of quiet desperation that existed in the world. The social and economic unrest that had (he assumed) enabled him to easily cross the border were pushing people over the edge... Well, it had been for years, but now that he was close to it he could manage to get a look around the manic headlines and see into the human cost of it.
He gathered up all the papers and the notebooks that had grown exponentially over the past few months. His arsenal had grown with it, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. The various encumbrances and chores were weighing down on him far too much for him to break new ground. With no two dollar coins that would not raise suspicion he was hampered with an eight fold increase in the time it took to make an appreciable amount of money.
