Planet Urth Boxed Set

by Jennifer Martucci

  “Hey Missy, how do I look?” her father asked as he outstretched his arms and turned.

  “Like a man who’s going to clean up at the tables,” she replied.

  “That’s my girl! That’s what I like to hear!”

  She did not reciprocate his enthusiasm. Unable to mask her worry, she bit her lower lip and turned from him.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Eric called,” she began.

  “That dirtbag friend of Kevin’s?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “What the hell did he want?”

  “He wants to talk. Now. He’s on his way here as we speak,” she said.

  “What could he possibly have to say to you after all this time?”

  “I have no idea, Dad. I am so confused. I’m totally freaking out!”

  “I don’t have to go, you know,” he offered.

  “Yes you do! You are going.”

  “Not if you need me I’m not,” he protested.

  “Dad, come on, be serious. You put in for two personal days to play in this poker tournament, talked about it every day for the last two months. You are going.”

  “How can I leave now that this clown has called and is possibly stirring up more trouble? The answer is I can’t and I won’t.”

  “No way! I’ll call Alex as soon as Eric leaves right in front of you and make plans to stay at her house for the weekend. I’ll be safe there. I mean, with her brothers, come on! I’ll be safer there probably than I am here right now. Her parents will be around, too. No worries. Go. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.”

  Melissa’s father did not say anything for a moment. He appeared to weigh her words and consider her argument. She watched as his eyes darted from one side to the next as if literally searching for a sound rebuttal but came up empty.

  Finally he grumbled, “Fine.”

  “Then it’s settled, you will go to the Connecticut woods and play some poker!” she said trying desperately to seem cheerful.

  “I’m not leaving for a while. I’ll be here when that jackass Eric gets here. And I’m not leaving until he’s gone,” he assured her.

  “Great. I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she said, relieved.

  Suddenly parched, she walked toward the refrigerator in search of a beverage. As she placed her hand on a bottle of iced tea, the doorbell sounded. A wave of nausea rolled through her belly. Eric waited on her doorstep.

  Carrying the bottle, Melissa crossed the kitchen and walked to the front door. After taking two deep breaths to calm herself, she opened the door.

  Eric Sala, tall and lanky, stood framed by the entryway.

  “Hey,” he said nervously. “Can I come in?”

  Before she could answer, he was in her house looking anxiously over his shoulder before shutting the door behind him. His eyes were rimmed with dark crescents, his features haggard. She could only describe his overall demeanor as terrified. Eric looked terrified.

  “I didn’t see your car. Did you walk?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah, I cut through the woods behind your house just to be sure I wasn’t being– ,”

  “Hello Eric,” her father interrupted as he stared at Eric with contemptuous eyes capable of intimidating the toughest of adversaries.

  “Oh, uh, hello Mr. Martin, I didn’t know you’d be here. I can leave if you want?” he asked just Melissa.

  “Please stay,” her father answered robotically.

  Eric looked at Melissa imploringly and asked in a hoarse whisper, “Can we speak privately?”

  “Sure,” Melissa answered, uncertainty lacing her every word. “We can go up to my room.”

  Melissa began climbing the staircase, with Eric in tow, to the second floor of her house. At the top of the steps, a long hallway waited. At the far end was a bathroom that neighbored her bedroom. Her father stomped up behind them and stopped them before they entered. He spoke to Eric.

  “I’ll be right across the hallway in my room, you got that? If I hear anything I don’t like, you’re gone,” he warned in a voice that was a low growl.

  The word gone hung in the air. There was a sense of permanence in the way he had spoken it, of irreversibility. With her father’s message clear, Melissa ushered Eric in to her room.

  “Wow, you really like purple,” he joked nervously as he gestured to her frilly lavender comforter and matching curtains.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” she replied icily.

  He sat on her bed with his back to the window.

  “Eric, what do you want? Why are you here?” she heard herself ask in a strong, clear voice.

  He rubbed his palms down the length of his jeans as if smoothing phantom creases from his thighs to just above his knees. The single hoop earring he wore in his left earlobe quivered as he parted his lips to speak.

  “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Well, since I allowed you here unannounced and uninvited after you tackled me in the woods behind our school, I’d think an apology would be in order for starters,” she said firmly.

  Eric shoulders slumped. His pale cheeks became streaked with red. He raised his hands, palms out, and said, “I don’t think an apology would cut it, Melissa. I screwed up, bad. Things are far worse now, so I’m paying, believe me,” he rambled.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked impatiently. “If you came here to start crap, my father is right across the hall and he’ll kill you, trust me.”

  “I’m not here to hurt you, honest. I’m not going to do anything to you. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then I’ll ask the question again: why are you here?”

  “Because Anderson and the others, they aren’t themselves.”

  “What, they’re reformed,” she asked sarcastically.

  “No, no. You don’t understand. They’re not who they used to be. The people you see aren’t them.”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “No, come on, I don’t do drugs anymore,” he pleaded.

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “They’re not who you think.”

  “Then who are they?”

  “What are they is a better question,” he mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “It can’t be them, Melissa. I saw their bodies in the woods that day.”

  “That’s not what you told the police,” she countered testily.

  “Yeah, I know. I told the police I didn’t see them. I wished I hadn’t seen them then. Kevin, Chris and John, they were dead. I know they were,” he fought back tears. “The guys now, the ones who came back from wherever, are worse.”

  His words sent a shiver down her spine. Every cell in her body seemed to shudder simultaneously, contesting at once the question that burned in her mind, the question she felt bound to ask.

  “Who do you think they are, Eric?” she asked in a voice that quavered.

  “Monsters,” he replied with conviction.

  Melissa felt the room begin to spin. A vivid memory appeared in her mind’s eye. She remembered seeing a monster less than half a year ago. It had been submerged in thick, opaque fluid in a large cylindrical tank in a far corner of Franklin Terzini’s underground laboratory. Alien in appearance, it had resembled an adult-sized fetus. She remembered how it transformed before her very eyes. She agreed with Eric’s assessment; Kevin, Chris and Eric were very much monsters. But she reasoned that they had not been grown in a deranged geneticist’s lab like the creature had been, nor had they been assigned the gruesome semblance associated with the word “monster” that had been indelibly etched into her psyche. She winced involuntarily and wrapped her arms around her body for she knew monsters did, in fact, exist, and in multiple senses of the word.

  “Monsters?” she asked and feigned incredulity.

  “Melissa, I know it sounds crazy. I hear myself saying it and to my own ears I sound bat-shit crazy. But that’s the only word I feel describes them. They’re out of control.”<
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  “How so?” she asked, but did not want to know the answer.

  She watched as Eric’s fair skin paled even further and a look of utter fright claimed his features.

  “The first night they came back I was stunned, believe me. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it the first time I saw Kevin. I mean, I thought it was some kind of after-effect of a bad trip or something.”

  “Okay,” she rolled her hand forward in a gesture meant to encourage the point of his story to arrive sooner.

  “Anyway, we went out to celebrate. We went to that club down on First Street in Darling, The Terrace Club. They had been drinking when they picked me up; nothing new about that. But when we got there, they did shot after shot of tequila then drank beer after beer. It was insane. Those guys could always drink, but they put away an inhuman amount of liquor, and didn’t seem all that drunk.”

  Melissa couldn’t help but pick up on yet another reference to their less-than-human characteristics. She did not comment on it or react visibly. She listened intently as he continued his story.

  “It wasn’t just the crazy drinking that got me, though. It was how they were acting too. They’re usually jerks, but smooth about it, you know?”

  “Oh I know,” Melissa said acidly.

  Eric’s pallid skin adopted crimson bands again. He looked down sheepishly.

  “Continue,” she ordered him.

  “They just started getting loud and rowdy, grabbing girls and stuff, you know, groping. They were being total assholes. I was embarrassed but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t,” she said sharply. “Eric, none of this makes me think there’s anything unusual about them, just that they were drunk and aggressive; seems pretty typical, to me at least.”

  The scarlet smatterings that colored Eric face expanded. He ran his palms down his thighs once again and one of his legs began to bob up and down incessantly.

  “I know what they’ve done to you, what I’ve done to you,” he said quietly. “But believe me, if you let me tell you the rest, you’ll see what I’m saying. You’ll believe me.”

  “Okay,” she said softening slightly.

  “So they started dancing up on these girls on the dance floor, really grinding on them and the girls got pissed. They pushed them off. Three guys saw this happening and stepped in. A fight almost broke out and we got bounced out. Turned out, there had been complaints about us, or them rather, from some other people and the girls and the owner had us kicked out. The other guys, they stayed and got to hang out. Kevin, Chris and John were pissed. They were flipping out like I’d never seen before.”

  Eric paused.

  “Is that it, Eric?” Melissa asked calmly.

  “I wish it were,” Eric replied and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Have you ever been to the Terrace Club?”

  “No, never,” Melissa answered.

  “The parking lot there is set way back, far from the club and far from the street. It has lights but they’re those ones that give off the creepy yellow light.”

  “Sodium vapor street lights,” she informed him. “They cause less environmental pollution.”

  “Yeah, sodium vapor street lights, sure. So the lot is lit by them and it’s pretty dark and Kevin tells us we’re going to wait for the guys in the parking lot, wait for them to come out and kick their asses. I told them I wanted to leave. They got really pissed and started calling me a little bitch. They’d never been like that with me before, Melissa. I can’t explain it. They were different from the guys I’d been best friends with since we were kids.”

  “Hmm,” Melissa managed, held by his account.

  “We waited for those guys for three hours until like two in the morning when the last of the people cleared out. We were in his car in the far corner of the lot. No one saw us. We watched the guys come out with the girls they stuck up for. They walked them to their car, talked for another, like, twenty minutes, exchanged numbers and the girls drove off.”

  Eric’s disposition darkened dramatically, visibly. He took a deep breath and blew the air out through pursed lips. As he raised his hand and raked it through his spiky black hair, she could see it trembled.

  “There were a few cars left in the lot that probably belonged to employees. It was deserted except for the guys that they argued with in the club. Kevin jumped out of the car; John and Chris followed. I got out last. I wanted no part of a fight but I went with them because,” Eric’s voice faltered and trailed off briefly before he continued.

  “Right away they started cursing at the guys. They turned to face us and looked shocked. Next thing you know, Kevin, John and Chris were on them. I mean, I couldn’t believe how fast they moved; they were just there, right on top of the guys from the club, pounding on them. The guys never stood a chance.”

  Eric swallowed hard. His eyes brimmed with tears. Melissa could see the pain in his face, the torment.

  “Next thing I knew, the guys from the club were on the ground and Kevin, Chris and John were going crazy, punching them and stomping on them. The club guys, they were screaming in pain, screaming for them to stop. But they didn’t seem to care or even notice the screaming. I tried to stop them Melissa, I tried,” he said in a voice cracking with emotion. “But they were frenzied, just swinging and kicking. They threw me to the ground. I half-expected them to start stomping me, too.”

  Tears streamed down Eric’s cheeks as his eyes stared straight ahead, unfocused. When he trained his gaze on Melissa, his fear was palpable.

  “They just kept going, Melissa; they killed them,” he whispered huskily.

  Melissa felt chills spread over her entire body, expanding outwardly from her core in lacey threads of ice. She knew the story. She’d heard about it in the news, read about it in the newspaper.

  Her eyes met his and filled with tears as she said, “I know about them, the three kids that were killed from Marlboro. It was all over the news! That was just last week. Their bodies were found outside of the Terrace Club.”

  “Those are the ones,” he affirmed. “Those are the guys Kevin, Chris and John murdered.”

  Murdered; the word sent about another onslaught of anxiety. Melissa sat on her bed beside Eric. They both sat in silence staring at the floor below.

  After a moment, Eric spoke.

  “The murder, it wasn’t even the worst part, if you can imagine that,” he said bitterly. “The ride home was unreal, like something straight out of a horror movie.”

  “How so?” Melissa asked and, once again, didn’t care to hear the response.

  “They were laughing about it. On the way home, they laughed about killing those guys, like it was some kind of fucking joke or something. I sat there stunned. I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t believe what I saw, couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was like a nightmare,” he gasped and broke down crying.

  Melissa wasn’t sure how to respond to his tears. He was raw, vulnerable, but had attacked her not long ago. She felt for him, but only to an extent.

  “When they dropped me off that night, they asked me if I was cool with what happened. Like anybody could be cool with seeing three people murdered, then hearing the murderers laugh about it all the way home,” he said bitingly. “I said I was fine, that everything was cool but I don’t think they bought it. They also told me not to tell anyone, that if I did there would be a problem.”

  “Oh God,” was all Melissa could manage.

  “If they find out I told you or anyone else about this, they are going to kill me. I know it.”

  Eric began to sob after his last admission. He cried, hard, releasing whatever anguish he’d held for the last week, or perhaps the last five months. Melissa had no way of knowing for sure. But she was certain his tears were ones of terror, and repentance.

  Though reluctant to offer him any form of consolation, she knew what it was like to be in mortal danger, had a working knowledge of fear; after all, she’d been an intended target. E
ric was defenseless, pathetic at best. She awkwardly placed her arm around his shoulders and patted stiffly. He responded eagerly and collapsed into her and wept.

  Melissa allowed him to rest against her as he cried. She left her arm around his shoulders, despite her reservation and tears of her own that threatened, for what felt like forever. She would wait until he was sufficiently calmed before she attempted to convince him to go to the police.

  Chapter 16

  Gabriel had been put to many tests in his short existence. He had survived extraordinary circumstances, contended with a ferocious enemy and survived an assassination attempt. He had also loved for the first time, a phenomenon he was constructed to never experience. Navigating the winding roads of Harbingers Falls, he relived each exhilarating moment spent with Melissa and, despite the dire circumstances he suspected that prompted his return, he was thrilled. His heart pounded wildly, threatened to beat out of his chest. The excitement inside him was electric. He felt lightheaded, elated. The moment he’d awaited for five long months was finally upon him. He’d dreamt about it, saw her face vividly in his memory, but couldn’t wait to see her in person: her clear, emerald eyes, her full lips, her lengths of golden brown hair. Every part of him hummed and buzzed excitedly. He would wrap her in his arms as soon as he saw her, inhale the sweet scent of her skin before holding her at arm’s length from him and looking at her, enjoying her every feature.

  Turning on to Blackstone drive, Gabriel James could not think of anywhere else he would have rather been.

  “You’ve been really quiet,” Yoshi observed.

  “Just thinking,” Gabriel replied.

  “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “Seriously, it will.”

  “I don’t know. It’s been so long. I can’t wait to see her. But what if,” Gabriel’s voice trailed off.

  “What if what? What if she’s with someone else?”

  “Well, yeah. You know that’s what I’m worried about.”

  “Listen, from what you’ve told me, that’s highly unlikely. She loves you and you love her. All you need to do is see her. Once you’re with her, you’ll see that nothing has changed. Her feelings will be the same as they were five months ago. Trust me.”