371 rave reviews!
“Excellent, suspenseful read with some great twists…Wow! Very impressive…”
If you like edge-of-your-seat thrillers laced with humor, you’ll love the Manny Williams crime thrillers. Discover this entertaining series while Book I, Caribbean Moon, is just 99 cents!
Caribbean Moon (A Manny Williams Thriller, Book One)
by Rick Murcer
in its Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged!
Small-town detective and workaholic Manny Williams is thrilled with the prospect of finally taking the long-awaited vacation he had promised his wife, Louise.
The couple’s exotic getaway begins in sunny Puerto Rico, by attending the June wedding of a fellow Lansing police officer, followed with an incredible week-long Southern Caribbean cruise on the glamorous Ocean Duchess. Tropical paradise appears to be a perfect recipe for some desperately needed R&R…until the first dead body.
A bizarre, seemingly random murder in their posh San Juan Hotel, and the heinous cruise ship deaths of two of Lansing’s law enforcement family brings Manny and his unique skills out of cruise mode and headlong into the FBI-led investigation. Manny soon discovers that in this killer’s twisted perception nothing is off limits, prompting a race against time that could cost him everything.
5-star praise for Caribbean Moon:
Suspenseful and wonderful
“The characters…are well-developed, the dialog is realistic, and the setting is captivating. I’m looking forward to reading many, many more books by Rick Murcer.”
“Stayed up way too late reading and finished reading with my morning coffee. The suspense and story line were so well written that I was lost in the story…”
an excerpt from
Caribbean Moon
by Rick Murcer
CHAPTER 1
“I’ll need to see your ID, sir.”
“What?” Manny Williams stared at the pretty, Latino barmaid. He must have looked like a deer in headlights because she started to grin, rescued her composure, and asked again.
“Uh, I’m thirty-eight years old. I don’t . . .”
“Having trouble gettin’ served, Williams?”
Glancing to his left he noticed Sophie Lee, his diminutive partner as she stood a few feet away wearing one of her famous gotcha grins.
“I should have known . . . and don’t you have something else to do?”
“Why no, no I don’t.” Sophie sat down on the nearest bar stool and crossed her legs. “And you should have known what?”
“That you put the poor girl up to this. Does she know that even in Puerto Rico you can be arrested for messing with a cop?”
The barmaid’s face raced from smiles to the south side of unsure.
“Don’t listen to him. He has anger issues, plus he’s a workaholic.” Sophie lowered her voice to a whisper, drawing closer to the barmaid. “And well, among his other issues, he does the little blue pill thing.”
The young woman’s dark eyes grew large. “Really? But he seems so . . . I mean, well, look at him.”
“Blue pill thing?” said Manny, shaking his head.
Sophie ignored him. “I know. He’s all blond and blue-eyed and hot. Sad, isn’t it? You just can’t tell these days.”
“Ladies, I’m right here.”
“Think of his poor wife.”
“He’s married with that . . . problem?” the barmaid said.
“Yep. It’s like having the candy but you can’t get the wrapper off, in more ways than one.”
“Seriously, I haven’t left.”
“He’s in denial, but he’s starting to realize he has to talk about it, find out what’s up, er, isn’t,” continued Sophie.
“You’re right, it is sad. His wife must be miserable.”
“Okay, I’m getting out the cuffs,” said Manny.
“Wow. Does he like that kind of stuff?” asked the barmaid, now with a glint in her eyes.
Sophie nodded. “I think that’s why he wanted to be a cop, you know?”
Manny reached into his tuxedo pocket and quickly slapped one cuff on Sophie’s wrist, the other to the brass rod running under the teak wood bar.
His partner stared in disbelief at one hand, then the other. Her stunned look was worth a million dollars to him, and Manny couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her anywhere near speechless.
He turned back to the barmaid. “I’ll take that pina colada now.”
“Yes sir. On the house.”
Manny didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone mix a drink faster.
“Hey. Williams. Are you nuts? I mean you brought cuffs to a wedding reception?” marveled Sophie.
“You know me. I’m always prepared. And look at that, they came in handy.”
He grabbed his drink and began to walk away.
“Manny! You can’t leave me like this.”
“I can. But say the magic word and you’re free.”
Letting out a breath, her pretty face displaying her Chinese-American heritage, Sophie answered. “No.”
“Okay. I’ll come get you in the morning, if I remember.”
“Wait. Wait. Damn you. All right. Please let me out of these.”
He tossed her the key. “Good girl. It’s nice when people address me with manners.”
“I got your manners right here . . . and this ain’t over, Williams. Understand?”
Waving her off, he left the ball room and walked through the double doors of the reception room, his grin growing wider. “I still got it,” he said out loud.
Continuing through the lobby, taking his drink with him, he was intent on harvesting his share of the fresh Caribbean air. He pulled open the crested glass door, strolled to the stucco patio, and leaned over the wall of the posh hotel on San Juan’s Condado Strip. It was humid, and the damnable tuxedo upped his discomfort. Dots of perspiration multiplied above his lip. But that was okay. This was for Mike and Lexy’s wedding, and he’d survive. Getting married in beautiful San Juan, followed by an elaborate reception, was the wedding that dreams were made of. Not to mention the seven-day cruise that would start the next day. He hoped his fourteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer, would opt for something much less exotic when she tied the knot.
The full moon’s pale reflection rippled across the waves as they tangoed toward shore and, ultimately, into the hotel’s barrier rock wall. He’d seen a thousand full moons, but none matched this Caribbean version. Magnificent and serene. He felt some of his perpetual tension flow away.
Setting his drink on the ledge of the wall, he pulled out his wallet and touched his Lansing Police Department ID.
Manfred Robert Williams, Sergeant Detective, Lansing Police Department.
After eleven years, it still gave him a kick to see his title in print, almost as much as seeing his real name. His sometimes-eccentric father had pulled the name Manfred from where-the- sun-don’t-shine because he had wanted his only son to be different.
Mission accomplished.
His strong fingers loosened the black bowtie, and he released a pent-up breath. It felt good to get away, but there were cases to solve. The thing is there would always be too many cases, too many sickos, and not enough hours. Walking hand-in-hand with that was the fact he had no real sense of when enough was enough. It all added up to a workaholic’s perfect storm. Sophie had hit that nail on the head.
Complicating things even more were the results of his wife’s last mammogram. There was something there, an anomaly that the doctor couldn’t quite figure out. Louise had assured him it was nothing, that they would review the test results with the doc when they got home from this trip. But it didn’t sound like “nothing.”
Louise had insisted they not cancel this trip for a plethora of reasons, and she was right with most of them. Besides, his need to chill out had become as obvious as an elephant in the kitchen.
He sipped the drink—coconut aroma strong even if the drink was not—and tried to enjoy the scene in front of him. But his thoughts wandered again, this time to the job—what else—and his latest case. So much for relaxing.
“Good God, I’ve got the attention span of a two-year-old,” he growled. But the grisly homicide involving the murdered wife of a prominent psychologist clung to his hip, refusing to let go. The details of the murder stormed his senses. He tried to shove them away, but they hung in there like a door-to-door environmental activist. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t want to stop the thoughts from coming. He winced. Now there’s a question for the department shrink.
Sylvia Martin’s eyes—lifeless, posed in a glassy, haunting stare—were the picture the killer wanted no one to forget. Only the brutality of the attack matched its senselessness. The suspect had played out a host of sexual fantasies with her—postmortem, according to the CSU report. Not just sex either. He had lain waste to the corpse with such force that much of the upper torso had become a purple-and-black teething bar.
Alex Downs, the department’s head Crime Scene Investigator, could only remember one case with similar brutality. Eleven years prior, a psycho named Robert Peppercorn had attacked four young women and had raped, beaten, and bitten them repeatedly, falling just short of killing the victims.
After he had acted out his malefic fantasies, Peppercorn had congenially handed each of his victims a long-stemmed, red rose and thanked them for a good time. Sylvia Martin’s killer had left a black rose draped across her ravaged torso. Manny suspected it was no coincidence. The LPD wanted to talk to Peppercorn pronto. But he had been deemed cured by his psychological team and, after his release last year, had moved on. In fact, no one had heard from him since, not even his mother.
Manny rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. There were differences. Men like Peppercorn were motivated and controlled by impulses, disorganized, but the killer in the Martin case was a cold, calculating psychopath. Alex and his Crime Scene Unit saw obvious similarities to Peppercorn’s “work,” but said forensic dentistry was just not that reliable, and there were only fragmented bite marks, not clean ones from which to make a partial mold. Alex said it was like the killer had varied his marks on purpose. And that was a detail Manny didn’t think Peppercorn was capable of manipulating. He just wasn’t that bright. Still, if they could locate him, Peppercorn would be a good place to start.
His thoughts ran deeper as he passed a hand through his hair, an old nervous habit from adolescence.
Was the whole world going crazy? What kind of animal does that to another human? It made Jack the Ripper seem like Captain Kangaroo.
It was more than a random act; he felt it in his bones. The investigation could use him now, his intuition.
Let it go, man. The department can handle things for a week. You’re on vacation. Louise needs you; concentrate on her for a change.
Again, he switched focus to the coconut delight in his hand while he tried to bum rush the overwhelming nuances of the job.
Sometimes these nuances loomed like unholy apparitions and hung on with a life of their own. He pushed again, and they scampered to some recluse corner of his head. No more work. Not here. Not now.
That’s when the ear-splitting scream interrupted paradise.
CHAPTER 2
Eli Jenkins heard the shriek echo from somewhere beyond the pool, but didn’t care. Hell, it might provide a small, well-timed diversion. He stayed focused on the newlyweds sauntering toward the shadowy northwest corner of the hotel’s courtyard, their arms around each other’s waists.
They giggled and bumped playfully as they moved near the wall, past the steamy, chlorine-filled Jacuzzi. Alone and in love.
Except they weren’t alone.
Mike and Lexy Crosby were so absorbed with each other, and with the night, that it would have been impossible to notice the towering figure standing in the opaque shadows. Unless the couple had been looking for him. Really looking. Which they weren’t.
Jenkins stood mere yards from their eventual destination, hands clenched in powerful fists. He could do it now. He could tear them apart, and no one would see.
With three long strides, he moved through the shadows and locked in on the newlyweds. He would destroy the groom and then help himself to the fine, young fruits that Crosby’s new wife flaunted like a Las Vegas whore. Then he’d steal her soul, and if time allowed, he would make sure it happened with a slow, excruciating process. Anyone who hooked up with Crosby’s ilk deserved that kind of communion with the Grim Reaper. He would make her dance an agonizing waltz with fear, turning her mind to Play-Doh. She would beg him to kill her. They all would.
His heart rate strutted with anticipation. He wanted to see her face as she checked out, as her life-light faded like a dying star. Then, at just the right moment, he would catch her soul and keep it for his own. She would be part of him forever, like the others in Michigan. Just like that. They were with him, even now. The more the merrier.
Migrating closer to the unmindful lovers, he could barely contain his thoughts. There was no rush like the hunt. Nothing compared to the thrill of the chase as unsuspecting prey, shadowed by a merciless predator, lived in ignorance regarding their advancing fate. It was how it should be.
Twenty feet. He could feel their insignificant lives being crushed and snatched from them by his greedy hands. The man-mountain was now completely out of the shadows.
One stride left.
Slowing, his dark eyes tracked the small beads of sweat that slid lazily down Lexy’s neck toward her partially exposed cleavage. His nostrils flared with her scent.
He was judge, jury, and, of course, executioner—the very best part.
Abruptly, his anticipation turned to a limitless rage. It coursed through him as an endless resource, like black in outer space. The rage had been his constant companion, his life partner. Their mutual intimacy gave them purpose, like a symbiotic parasite and its helpless host. And now, they were both ready.
He returned his focus to the doomed bride and groom, taking one last, long stride that would ensure his immortality. This was it. All he had to do was reach out and they were his, eternally.
Until death do us part.
CHAPTER 3
The scream erupted again, to his left. Manny’s insides leapt somewhere past his throat, as he whirled to locate the source of the raucous shriek, reaching for a weapon he’d left locked in the safe of his Lansing home.
He searched frantically through the dim glow of the courtyard. It took a minute, but it soon dawned on him that it hadn’t been a scream of horror, or even alarm, but a piercing laugh coming from a boisterous, vacation-clad group of young women., The ladies were clearly enjoying the cash bar, though a little too loudly for him. Or maybe he was just wound too tight.
Imagine that.
One of the women stopped walking and turned to Manny. “Sorry if we startled you.” She moved closer. “I think I could make it up to you if you wanted to come to my room.”
“What a wonderful offer, but my wife wouldn’t approve.”
She grinned. “Lucky woman.”
The young ladies continued to stampede past, and he realized they could probably teach him a thing or two. Living in the here-and-now wasn’t a bad thing.
He ran his hand through his hair, concentrating on bringing his heart rate down to 150 mph.
The word is “relax,” Detective Williams.
Leaning against the railing, he looked past the two pools adorning the verdant courtyard and noticed the stars of the night, talking and laughing through the shadowy confines of the trees. This splendor was such a contrast to the gruesome, Hell-spawned scenes that he had become far too intimate with.
The bride and the groom stood in the shadow of the rock wall fifty yards away. She was still wearing the white, rhinestone-studded wedding dress that danced against the light whenever she moved. He guessed she wanted to wear it as long as she could.
Lexy had chosen wisely. Mike was a good man, strong, with a sense of purpose.
Manny had been a twenty-three-year-old rookie when he partnered up with Mike’s dad, Gavin Crosby. Mike had been just twelve. Good kid then and a fine young man and excellent cop now, just like his dad.
Gavin had been a great mentor, a clever detective, and a perfect choice as Lansing’s Police Chief. He had always been firm but fair, and Manny loved him like a big brother. To see Gavin’s son marry a wonderful woman like Lexy Castro was truly a pleasure. He felt like a proud uncle.
The small, stone bridge that led across the waterway to San Juan’s venerable old fort, San Cristobal, caught his eye, hovering above and beyond the bay. He followed the lit skyline to the cruise ship wharf where they would board the Ocean Duchess in the morning. Her lighted frame and distinctive exhaust stack towered above the pier district of San Juan, creating a striking silhouette, especially at night.
“Manny Williams. What are you doing out here alone? You could be accosted or something worse.”
He looked to the sky and smiled. That voice was unmistakable. Liz Casnovsky, Lansing’s accomplished DA, took a couple of awkward steps toward him and settled at his right. She was dressed in a silver, sequin-littered designer gown. Her black Prada heels and matching handbag topped off a sensational look.
She hooked her lean arm through his and gave him a peck on the cheek. Her breath was tinged with Kahlua, and her eyes held a slightly glazed quality.
“Well, if that happened, I guess I’d know who to hire to put the bad people away.”
“Damn straight, you would. Besides, no one gets to accost you but me, got it?”
“Got it,” he mused. “Where’s Lynn? Did you ditch your devoted husband already?”
“Devoted my ass! Whatever,” she slurred. “Do you know that he actually had the audacity to say I’ve had enough to drink and that I should go to bed before I hurt myself?” Liz straightened as to shuck away the words spoken by her husband, swaying a little too far to the left.
He steadied his good friend.
The tall woman peered into his face, “I have, haven’t I?”
“I would say any more Black Russians would intensify the morning’s headache.”
“That’s what I like about you detective; you never lie to me. Kind too. Not like other men.”
“Shhh. You’ll ruin that whole tough-guy rep I’ve worked hard to acquire.”
They gazed silently in the direction of the moving ocean, and he patted her arm. Manny knew that Lynn and Liz had had a problem or two, but it seemed they wanted to iron things out. He hoped they stuck with it because sometimes the castle in the sky can slip away like a dream at dawn.
Liz turned her head. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“You’re gorgeous. If I weren’t happily married, wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”
Liz giggled. “You’re such a smooth talker.” She gave him another kiss on the cheek.
“Okay, I’m going to my room. Lynn was right . . . this time.” Liz moved to the door, working hard to keep her balance.
“Do you want some help?”
“No, no, no, no. I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” Liz hesitated and then switched her bag to the other hand. “I love you, you know.”
“I know. I love you too, Liz. Now get your ass up to bed.”
“Yes sir.” The Lansing DA saluted with the wrong hand and disappeared inside the hotel.
Laughing out loud, he wondered about how much coffee she was going to need in the morning.
He finished his drink and stole one last look at the newlyweds standing in the shadowy courtyard.
Manny froze.
CHAPTER 4
Enormous hands extended toward Mike, then snapped back like a recoiling snake.
“Evening, folks,” slipped from his mouth. “Sure is warm, isn’t it?”
He watched as Mike and Lexy gasped in perfect accord, whirling to see who had spoken to them, who had interrupted their private kissy-face session, scaring the bejeebies out of them in the process.
Just your destiny.
The couple searched for his face. They had started a foot too low, but eventually found it. Their eyes widened in surprise. Jenkins was aware of how he looked, how intimidating. He would use it to his advantage.
All the better to kill you with.
Their undivided attention was all his. He smiled at the newlyweds with the disarming grin of a priest.
“Yes-s-s it is,” Lexy stammered. “You scared the heck out of me, er, us.”
“You’re pretty light on your feet. We never heard you,” said Mike.
“Aw, I think you were lost in love. I could have been a herd of runaway elephants, and you wouldn’t have heard me.”
The couple caught each other’s wide-eyed looks and laughed.
“You got us there. Wedding night, you know,” said Lexy.
“Well, I hope you don’t typically wear what you’re wearing on date night.” He bent low and whispered. “People might think you’re strange.”
Mike smiled. “Got us again.”
The conversation wound down as he asked the right questions about their special night, about them. They answered with gusto and naive honesty. He was so damn easy to talk to.
Besides, everyone loves to talk about themselves. Self-absorbed morons.
He could charm the habit off a nun, and he played it to the hilt. His amiable wit was infectious as his face animated with real warmth. It was easy for him to pretend to be the friendliest man on the island, and Mike and Lexy responded. They never suspected that he longed to tear them apart, to watch them die horribly painful deaths, begging for his mercy in pathetic whimpers. They would see the real him when he was ready, when his will said so.
The trio enjoyed a few more seconds of light conversation. Then he politely said his good nights and turned back toward the ten-story hotel. As he distanced himself from Mike and Lexy, a confident smirk spread across his sculpted face.
That’s why I’m the master. Self-control. Discipline. This wasn’t the right time. But soon. Justice is a bitch not to be crossed, especially mine.
The counterfeit grin disappeared like that of a kid whose candy had been stolen by the school bully. He was fully aware of ways to accomplish revenge. He had learned things in prison . . . ways. He absolutely understood the old adage that there are worse things than death, far worse.
They would feel what he felt and that would be a special reward for them. It’s always a treat to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
He slowed his pace and raised his head to the sky. Memories of his punishment and seemingly endless sentence flooded his consciousness, threatening to overpower him. The imprisoned lunatics’ oblivious, never-ending screams had attacked his sanity, his very soul. There had been times that he thought he would poke out his eardrums.
Vomit, week-old urine, and excrement had painted the concrete floors like some cage at the zoo. The mingled stench had been as repulsive as anything he’d ever endured—and that was just the beginning.
The oppressive guards had treated most of the inmates like garbage, less than caged animals. Except for him.
It had been his good fortune that much of the circumstances surrounding his captivity had been at least bearable. The guards would say little to him, preferring to keep their distance. The jerk-offs had been terrified of him. They’d been wise to be afraid. Very wise.
He glanced over his shoulder, targeting the couple one last time.
Bon voyage, bon voyage, my lovelies.
CHAPTER 5
Manny sprinted down the two flights of stairs, adrenaline rushing his heart, feeding like a hungry animal off his fear. That moving tree meant to hurt Mike and Lexy.
Halfway to the rock wall, he stole another panicked look in their direction, slowed his mad dash, and eventually stopped, staring intently in disbelief.
The threesome was no longer three, but two: Mike and Lexy. He scanned the yard, but the big man was nowhere to be found. It was like he had evaporated into thin air.
For the third time, Manny looked at Mike and Lexy and noticed how they stood so very close together, unconsciously swaying in perfect rhythm with the endless, cavorting waves. Not threatened, but in love.
His eyes dropped to his feet and then back to the animated duo. A full-throated laugh drifted through the Puerto Rican night. Mike had said something clever, something that belonged to just the two of them. He felt like some foolish eavesdropper.
Add busy-body grandmother to your repertoire.
Damn it. Would he always struggle with the never-ending process of unwinding? And this time, he came within a hair of looking like a complete idiot.
There is nothing worse than an overreacting cop.
But he could have sworn he saw a man behind his friends, arms raised and hands outstretched. Threatening. Menacing. Hadn’t he? Manny threw his hands in the air.
Shadows can cozen the mind, even that of an experienced cop. But he wasn’t in the habit of seeing things. Maybe it was the drink or the stress of worrying about Louise. Maybe he was rationalizing his slavery to his work, again.
This always-on-duty thing needed to stop before it killed him, or his marriage. Always on alert, on the watch. He was beginning to loathe that part of himself. The Guardian of the Universe—his daughter’s favorite nickname for him—was on vacation, and he needed to act like it.
He walked back up the steps and stood over the iron guardrails spiraling from the balcony. He was facing the ocean, but barely saw the moonlit waves as his thoughts turned darker, inward, accommodating another self-evaluation session.
He was frustrated with his workaholic tendencies, but was almost helpless to change. It was easy to mask his compulsion with noble thoughts—like owing the good people of Lansing an appropriate return on their hard-earned tax dollars, or that he was merely being a good cop. But earning his paycheck wasn’t the real reason, or at least wasn’t the only one. Good cops don’t let partners die, do they?
Harsh guilt welled up and attacked like a shark smelling blood. This was about Kyle Chavez, his second partner, his dead second partner. He closed his eyes. If Manny hadn’t played in that damn golf tournament . . .
He had taken an afternoon off to tee it up, and a few hours later, Kyle had been shot at a domestic. Kyle had been just twenty-seven years old with a wonderful wife and two beautiful kids.
Manny fought hard to ward off the demons, but they had the key to the door and, for now, they were staying.
The news of Kyle’s death had brought a suffocating weight to bear on Lucy Chavez, who had buckled helplessly to the hardwood floor of the couple’s home. The memory of her anguish still caused the hair on his arms to stand. No one should have to tell another that the love of their life had just been used for target practice. Not even cops.
Responsible or not, he felt like he had let Kyle’s family down, that he had donned the black executioner’s hood himself and pulled the lever. The fact that Kyle had broken protocol and gone on the call alone brought no consolation.
The counseling sessions with the department shrink helped (not as much as the ones with Louise). Ultimately, he knew it wasn’t really his fault. However, there are times when the mind understands, but the heart couldn’t care less. It was a torturous, unforgiving ordeal, and he had sworn that it would never happen on his watch again.
The lobby door opened behind him, and the loud music brought him back.
Manny refocused on the view a bit longer before slinking back inside the hotel, grateful Mike and Lex hadn’t seen him.
The rhythmic sound of the talented Latin band, playing across from the casino on the second floor, dominated the atmosphere inside. The lead singer was a tiny, energetic woman, whose throaty resonance soaked the room.
“Nothing like good music to soothe the head-case cop,” he rued.
The escalator ended at the second floor, and he walked past the thriving casino toward the elevator. He stopped for a moment and took in the compelling sounds of electronic bells, bongs, and sirens emanating from the “sin pit.”
Steely-gray smoke hovered above velvety gaming tables like it owned the place, and the pungent aroma of Cuban cigars and expensive cigarettes filtered to the lobby. Vegas had nothing up on this place.
Inside the elevator on his way to the fifth floor, he drifted back to the scene in the courtyard. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. The sizable man with the deceptive demeanor had sparked a singular thought in his mind. What if . . .?
Manny bit his lip. Not tonight. Besides, he was tired, far too tired to make character evaluations that mattered.
Leaving the elevator, he shuffled to his room, stripped off the penguin suit, which stuck to him like a second skin, and crawled between the cool sheets next to his slumbering wife.
Closing his eyes, he felt his body begin to reject the tension.
Not tonight. Not this week. You’re on vacation. Remember?
CHAPTER 6
Juanita Henkle was having a pisser of a night. She had lost a hundred bucks to those damn slot machines—mechanical, blood-sucking heifers. To add insult to injury, her friend, Sarah Cummings, who had brought her down to spend a week on the island, had disappeared with some local muchacho.
“He better be the real deal,” she muttered.
It had only gotten better. Her luggage had arrived late to the hotel from the airport, and it was beat to hell. And some of her clothes were missing— her favorites, of course. Even though the airline promised to reimburse her for the trouble, where was she going to find an affordable clothing store on Sunday morning, particularly on San Juan’s Condado Strip? After all, she was a twenty-eight-year-old working girl, and money didn’t grow on trees, especially in Zanesville, Ohio.
Juanita lit a cancer stick. She wanted her old clothes back, her comfortable clothes, but she realized she was the only one who really cared.
The smoke dancing across her eyes caused her to squint. Shit happens, but it seemed like she was always out of toilet paper. Not to mention, she had been hit on by some of the most narcissistic drunks in Puerto Rico: Latin Don Juan wannabes who sought to “charm” her with stale beer breath, unfocused eyes, and dicks practically out of their pants. Soaking one’s self in cologne must be the thing down here; they all wore enough to clear up any serious sinus affliction. She had turned them all down, flat. The big “L” was stamped on each of their foreheads. Maybe on their chests too. She didn’t want to know.
The institution of marriage was gaining considerable creditability for her. She wanted someone to hold, and to be held. Someone to grow old with. To have babies with. To even fight and make up with. Especially the making up part.
But not just any man would do, not for Juanita Henkle. The predestined man of her dreams would ride in on his great white steed, or at least a Mercedes, and take her away from this bar- scene masquerade. Then they would live happily ever after.
She screwed her cigarette into the scarred ashtray and exhaled one last ring of gray haze. Her man didn’t know her yet, but he would.
Someday my prince will come. Hurry up, boy. These drinks are gettin’ expensive, and I’m not gettin’ any younger.
Thank God the music was good. It was loud, but that chick could sing, and the band was tight. She had heard worse blaring from her car’s radio.
Juanita drained the last of her drink, uncrossed her legs, and decided it was time to exit this fruitless revelry. She was sure Sarah wouldn’t make it back to their room tonight, so she would get a little peace and quiet. Mama said a good night’s rest always helped settle things down. Everyone knows that Mamas are always right.
“At least Sarah’s having a good time,” she breathed to herself.
As Juanita got up, she caught her reflection in the wall mirror, bordered in Corona insignias. She was hot. Her flowing black hair, full cleavage, and shapely hips were more than a package, more like The Package. The red, low-cut Gucci dress (she had saved hard for it, and at least the airlines hadn’t lost this one) accented her “attributes” just the right way.
Any woman who looks this good has the prerogative to be picky, right?
She was about to leave when she noticed the tall, well-built man at the end of the bar, sizing her up.
Hold the phone! Good God, look at that.
He was a little older, but wow. He had perfect hair, and he must be six-four or so. A slow grin crept across her face. She knew what tall meant.
The stranger got up and came straight toward her. “I’m Eli Jenkins. What might your name be, young goddess?”
Juanita felt electric heat radiate through her. Hot and suave.
What the hell. No reason to beat around the bush. He just might be the happy ending to the day that she needed.
“My name is Juanita. Are we going to cut through the bullshit and get to the point here? I don’t need a drink or any more conversation. I’m in room 586, and I’ll be there in about five minutes.”
The band had begun an old Elvis tune, and she watched Eli flash a smile that would melt an ice witch’s heart. This was going to be good, maybe better than good.
Without waiting for his response, she spun on two-inch heels and walked across the glass-enclosed bridge that connected the two sides of the hotel.
****************
Jenkins leaned back against his bar stool and scrutinized the waning bar crowd. No one seemed to take note of his encounter with Juanita.
He signaled the flabby bartender and ordered another bottle of water.
“She shut you down, compadre?” he asked. “Don’t feel bad. She’s sent everyone away from her all night. She is very picky, no?” He drew out “picky” in two long syllables.
The nosy peckerhead had noticed him and Juanita. Not what he’d hoped for, but fixable. “Shut down, yes, you are right, my friend. I never had a chance. But there is always another senorita, no?”
The bartender nodded an approving look. “Indeed, there is, especially for a man such as yourself.”
“Hey, Miguel, more beer” echoed from the other end of the bar. The bartender raised his eyebrows and was off toward the pleading din.
Jenkins wondered if the simpleton would remember him. Even after he, and Juanita, shook this rich-prick hotel to the very foundation. It made no real difference. It would be too late anyway.
He finished his water and picked up his black-leather travel case, flinging it over his shoulder as he crossed the dance floor, happy to leave the sour tang of spilled beer and cheap perfume hanging in the air.
There wasn’t a soul on the mullioned glass bridge, leading to the south wing of the hotel, as he crossed it with seven long paces.
Exhilaration ruled his insides.
Juanita was fine, and she had never recognized him for what he was. Certainly not that twit. But she would be worthy of what he had planned for her, and of course, for him. He had found the perfect warm-up “playmate.”
A roguish grin settled across his face as he knocked at room 586. He glanced to his left and saw no one in the semi-lit hallway. Perfect.
Juanita came to the door wearing only a short, red nightie and a mischievous gleam. “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t keep a lady waiting? It’s a good thing my roommate’s gone for the night,” she teased.
“My apologies. Let me see if I can make it up to you,” he replied in his most charismatic tone.
“I’m sure you can,” she melted.
He slipped the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside of the door, dropping his travel case to the floor. The young woman moved close, pressing herself against him. He felt her excitement, her body heat. She kissed him with an eagerness that, for a split second, took him off his game. But only for a moment.
Juanita tilted back to look at her hot new lover, and he watched the eager smile evaporate from her face like rain on a desert road. She saw death smoldering from his face. Not just any death, but hers. Her one-night stand had become her last-night stand.
Her body trembled with a horror Jenkins knew she had never before felt. How could she have? She had never met him before. The woman’s panicked reaction stoked his arousal.
He clutched her tighter.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “No. Please don’t hurt me.”
Jenkins knew paralyzing fear had gripped her. Her plea was all she could muster before the drug-soaked cloth covered her face.
Whatever dreams she may have possessed about meeting Mr. Right or having perfect babies were obliterated forever. But she was going to be his, and that was special. After all, she was going to be famous.
He watched as precious consciousness slipped from Juanita like a fast-setting sun. He sneered. “I’m your god now. Your soul belongs to me.”
CHAPTER 7
Jenkins towered over Juanita’s plundered body. He studied his grisly, but precise, handiwork. He was satisfied. She hadn’t been the sport he had anticipated, not at first, so he had to “urge” her forward. She’d become responsive enough, though, as the drug wore off, and she’d understood her fate. But then again, they all responded like terrified animals when they realized dying was not just something that happened in the movies or on the six o’clock news.
Closing his eyes, he recalled the precise moment her soul had merged with his, at just the right time, at the instant he’d determined. He was in complete control. He was special. His evolution made him invincible.
Jenkins sponged blood from his mouth and chin with the back of his hand. He couldn’t help himself. She’d looked so damn good. Good enough to eat.
A moment later, he gently placed a black rose across Juanita’s body and then stripped the latex gloves from his hands, careful to avoid any contact with the bed sheet. He stood a long moment over Juanita before finally bending to her. Her expensive perfume, even as it mingled with drying blood, seemed to be everywhere.
He spoke in soft tones bankrupt of compassion, filled with only triumph. “You didn’t think I could let you get away, did you? How could you believe that? You looked so good and, well, it was your time, our time.” He whispered as if she would answer.
The room’s balcony overlooked the wide lagoon on the south side of the hotel, and he went there. The Caribbean moon mirrored against rippling water and caused little spangles of light to dance like fairies in an enchanted forest. The breeze was sweet and clean, possessing an intoxicating quality. Not like Juanita had been, not that enthralling, but it worked.
The upcoming cruise and the carefully designed plan moved across his thoughts. It was time to take what was his and reward them with what they had earned. They were entitled to dine on what he had to serve, all of them.
His eyes reflected malicious contempt, his very soul embracing it. The hatred had boiled long enough. Too long. Juanita had been easy, and she had embodied the last trial he required.
“I’m ready for what’s next, for my destiny,” he said out loud.
What a kick it was to be able to combine his “hobby” with joyous purpose. Taking the souls of women, after they had served their function, of course, was the thrill he always knew it would be. Making the others suffer for their indiscretions would be an even more indescribable pleasure.
Jenkins reached into his back pocket and took out a worn newspaper clipping that he had carefully tucked away. It was creased and faded from years of use. He read each line again. Over and over. He wanted to absorb the faded script, to ensure that he never forgot what was written there or who had written it, that the details were always and forever the same. Though that part was not a problem. He had it memorized years ago, but having it in his hand made it real, fueling his purpose even more.
The fifth line of the article caused him pause while the veins at his temples throbbed.
How could they quote such drivel? Such dog shit.
The source of that citation would pay oh-so-dearly.
Hatred rose higher and higher, and he reveled in it, basked in its purity, its honesty. Why not? It made him feel even more alive, more impregnable. But the rage mustn’t cloud his judgment. He must restrain the intensity of his emotions, or everything would be ruined. The process of learning that truth had been a hard lesson, but realized nonetheless.
Moving back into the air-conditioned room, he meticulously refolded the clipping and placed it safely in his pocket. He stepped closer to Juanita and slowly, like a tenderhearted lover, kissed her cooling, blue lips.
Then he walked out the door whistling a Three Dog Night tune.
Eli’s coming! Eli’s coming!
CHAPTER 8
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty. You gonna lay there all day or are you going to get your butt out of bed and take me on the most wonderful vacation of my life?”
Manny groaned and shaded his eyes from the bright, Caribbean sun that streamed through their room. The pesky clock radio blinked 7:15 a.m. Clocks and vacations were never intended to be friends.
Manny’s eyes flickered back to his wife, catching a glimpse of Louise’s face. It was all he needed to go from annoyed to a step above pleased.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “We’re going home today.”
“You can go if you want; I’ll just find some hairy-chested local who wants to have a week of hot food, hot sun, and hot sex with a well-developed cougar.” Her face was alive with anticipation.
“I have a hairy chest.”
“Why yes, yes you do. You’re a little older than I had in mind, but you might do. Want to be considered for the job?”
“Okay. How do I apply?”
Louise bent to Manny’s face and kissed him gently. She grinned. “Hold that thought. I need time to work out the rest of the interview process. But so far, so good.”
“Great. I’m up for the rest of it . . . well, almost.”
She looked to the ceiling. “I’m taking a shower.”
Louise was truly excited about this trip. For his wife to outrace him to the shower was like a Republican voting for Barack Obama.
Swinging his legs to the floor, he thought again about Louise and her resolve. She was determined to enjoy this trip even though the specter of the mammogram results lingered in the back of their minds. She was one special woman. But he’d always known that.
Louise had started the coffeemaker, and the tantalizing aroma pulsed from the small in-room java machine, inviting him to fill his cup.
He pulled on clean, white briefs (always white because colored underwear wasn’t manly) and started for the balcony. Parading out in his skivvies just might hand the beach joggers their first thrill of the day.
Moving past the full-length, oak-framed mirror, he hesitated and did a double take. Even though his face was scribbled with sleep lines and his hair mussed, he didn’t look half bad for a cop pushing forty. It wouldn’t last forever, but he would enjoy it while he could. He just might get that job Louise had open.
Manny continued his trek to the great outdoors, but a sudden, rapid pounding on the door said the balcony would have to wait. The knock echoed heavy and hard, like someone wielding a ten-pound sledgehammer, and for a moment, the heavy mahogany seemed ready to splinter into shards. Then silence. He threw on khaki shorts and hurried to see who had assaulted the peaceful beginnings to his morning.
He swung open the large, ornate door, panned one way then the other, seeing no one. The elevator was located twenty-five feet to his right and the stairs only about fifteen feet to his left. Whoever had battered their door was now long gone.
Frowning, he came back inside. That’s when he noticed the white stationery lying on the floor with his name printed on the front. Manny unfolded the paper and read:
Bon Voyage, Detective, Bon Voyage. This will be a cruise that you will never forget.
His glower melted and was replaced with a perceptive smile. Sophie. Always the practical joker, and knowing her, she’d probably been thinking about the prank since last night. Retribution for the cuff thing.
Well, missy, two can play this game.
Putting the note on the dresser, he headed toward the balcony for the third time.
Manny opened the glass door, and the heat engulfed him like the smothering kiss from a worried mother. It felt wonderful. The Caribbean sun must be heaven sent, caressing like no other.
The sound of the ocean lollygagging toward the shore was therapeutic. This is where he belonged. Some mystic, all-knowing voice whispered to him that it was so, and everyone knows those internal gurus are never wrong. Michigan had its pluses, but what could match this? Besides, no one shoveled snow in the Caribbean.
****************
Louise looked intently into the ornately trimmed mirror, wiping away the steam, and wondered how a woman her age could be concerned with the results of a mammogram. It didn’t add up. She was in great shape, not that old, and had no history of any problems in her family.
The mirror spoke, and she moved a little closer, gathering more detail from the doppelganger in the looking glass. She had been a good person, a great mother, and maybe even a better wife. But that’s how this beast howled.
Why would God allow this kind of situation in their lives? Then again, maybe God had nothing to do with it. Maybe there really is an unseen war between good and evil. Maybe humans were collateral damage and cancer was just one weapon that evil used to destroy the hope and peace God promised.
Louise fought the tears and glanced nervously at the unopened letter from her doctor. She began to slide a slender finger under the fold and then stopped. This wasn’t the time. She grinned through her tears as she thought about breaking a nail—that wasn’t going to happen before she got on the ship.
She took one last look, dried her eyes, and put on more eyeliner. Then she stuffed the letter back in her travel pouch. If the enigmatic dispatch was bad news, it would be bad news after the best vacation of her life.
****************
Louise emerged from the bathroom wearing only a black bra and lace panties, just as Manny sauntered back into the room. The coffee had helped, but the sight of his wife brought him fully awake.
They were to meet the rest of the Lansing crew in the lobby in about forty minutes and head over to a small, local breakfast nook, whose reputation for great food was next to none. But she looked so good, and he was feeling his oats.
“I think I’m ready for part two of that interview thing.”
“Manny, I just took a shower, and we have to meet the group soon,” Louise protested without conviction.
“Yeah, but we may never spend another day in San Juan,” he said as he drew her into his arms. “When we get old, we can say we did it in Puerto Rico.”
“True, unless you count next Sunday when we get back from the cruise. But you do seem like a good candidate.”
She pressed closer, teasing him to an even harder state.
He flicked his fingers. Her bra went slack as he pulled it away from her with a sweep of his hand.
“You are good at that,” she laughed. “I think the job’s yours.”
They fell back on the bed in the midst of a passionate kiss. In the enthralling ambiance of Puerto Rico, Manny and Louise Williams made love the way new lovers do.
CHAPTER 9
Fifty-six-year-old Gavin Crosby stood beside his wife Stella, shifting his considerable weight from left to right. He chanced a quick glance at his gold watch. Manny was late.
He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. But maybe it was a good thing. The boy just might be learning to lighten up.
The colorful tropical fish tank, part of the hotel lobby’s wall, caught his attention. Blue angel fish trimmed in black circled with yellow-striped sergeant fish and narrow pipefish in an endless carousel of motion. He hoped to see some of that kind of wildlife when they snorkeled at Trunk Bay.
His eyes darted around the rest of the room, and he found himself doing a quick exercise observing human interaction.
Alex Downs and his wife Barbara stood near the concierge’s desk carrying on a conversation with the newlyweds. Thinking of the day Alex was hired still made Gavin shake his head. Alex had just earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in criminology and forensic science. Bright man. However, he knew doodle squat about office politics and had gotten his proverbial tit in the ringer more than once. The CSI had come a long way, but kissing fanny was never going to be a long suit.
A short, balding man with an overlapping belly, Alex proved the notion that you can’t judge a book by its cover. He hardly looked like an expert in his field. Hell, in any field. But he was one of the very best.
Alex’s wife of twelve years looked like she belonged on the arm of a Hollywood movie star. Taller than Alex, she was slim with legs that went on forever. But her adoration for Alex was obvious: He was her one and only. Love indeed made strange bedfellows.
He switched focus to his son and new daughter-in-law, chuffing a sigh of relief. They had pulled it off. The newlyweds would never forget yesterday’s ceremony. And that’s what weddings were all about.
District Attorney Liz Casnovsky and her husband Lynn were engaged in a giddy conversation with Sophie Lee, Manny’s partner, and Sophie’s husband, Randy Mason. The group huddled near the glitzy, bronze-and-gold entrance of the hotel, smiling like Cheshire cats. Liz suddenly released an air-splitting laugh. Gavin cringed. Vintage Liz. She sounded like a mad dolphin, but it was always good to hear her laugh. Well, almost always.
The DA was a bulldog prosecutor, and with Lynn’s investment company growing in leaps and bounds, they lived the life of flourishing professionals. Not to mention they looked like a tanned Ken and Barbie. Yet, there was a wisp of sadness that seemed to haunt Liz. He thought it had to do with the appointment with motherhood she never had time to keep.
Gavin rolled his eyes as he watched Sophie interact with the others. She was always the comedian, the official smartass in the crowd. She was from the City, San Francisco, and the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Having moved east to marry the love of her life, the petite detective divorced him a year later after finding him “hanging out” with a couple of guys in a sleazy motel room on Cedar. She joked that she couldn’t compete with the men. Bring on the women because she could, and would, do anything any woman could do. But men, that was incomprehensible to her. Sophie laughed about it, but the scars would never really go away, not completely.
She had met Randy a few years later. And even though she had fallen in love with him, Sophie had changed. She had kept her maiden name because it made her feel secure and independent. No man would take her dignity again, and Gavin applauded that.
He didn’t care for Randy much. Maybe it was because Randy possessed the social skills of a doorjamb . . . or because Sophie’s roly-poly husband, adorned with the red Afro, had never cared for anyone except himself, until Sophie.
The elevator bell rang, and mirrored doors parted like the red sea. Manny and Louise stepped energetically from the elevator. Manny was first, dressed in a loud blue tropical shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses caught in the nest above his forehead. Louise followed, dressed in a straw hat; blue-and-white-striped midriff shirt; light-blue shorts; and white Tod sandals. They smiled like they had won the lotto.
“Where in hell have you been? You’re four minutes late,” said Gavin, tapping his watch. “And you look like a couple of damned tourists to boot.”
By then, the rest of the couples had migrated to the elevator.
“What’s that saying? You can dress ’em up, but you can’t take ‘em out,” chimed in Sophie.
“Ahh, have you losers looked in the mirror?” Manny chided.
After a quiet moment, laughter rippled through the group. They all looked like tourists.
“Let’s go eat, I’m starved,” encouraged Stella.
****************
No one noticed the big man leaning over the mahogany railing of the second floor balcony. He stared down to the lobby with black eyes and scorn to match. “This is going to be one hell of a vacation,” he said, as he clenched his teeth. “At least for me.”
CHAPTER 10
Sarah Cummings glanced nervously down the fifth-floor hallway. Oh man, she was in deep. Juanita was going to kick her ass up and down the steps of the hotel’s marble stairs. Kick her ass? Juanita was going to kill her.
She had left Juanita sitting in the testosterone-infested bar. Despite Sarah’s guilt and dread at facing her best friend this morning, she gave soul to a no-regret-time-of-my-life grin. Hector.
What a night.
A vision of Juanita’s pissed countenance stabbed across her mind, and the grin disappeared momentarily.
Good going, Sarah. You left her alone the whole night and most of the morning.
Juanita’s first night in San Juan, no less. “I’ll make it up to you, Nita, I promise,” she vowed, picking up the pace.
As she turned down the hall toward her room, the memory of her Latin lover’s amazing performance caused her to stumble over her sandaled feet.
Maybe she was in love. Well, in lust, at the very least. It had been her first encounter with a Latin man, and her eyes must have looked like small breakfast saucers after he’d stripped out of his clothes. She put her hand to her mouth and giggled. She had certainly experienced the full extent of his offering, several times.
Vivid recall caused her temperature to rise. “Woooo! Down girl.”
Then, for a second time, culpability for leaving her friend at the bar rose to the forefront of her mind. Juanita had told her to go ahead, that she would be fine. It’s what most good friends would have said, even if your BFF didn’t really want to be alone the rest of the night. Juanita and she had formed an unmatchable bond since third grade, right after the two girls had beat up that fourth-grade boy. There had never been any bullshit between them. They were like sisters and wanted each other to have a good time.
“Hey, you just got lucky first. My turn’s coming. Don’t worry, I’m a big girl,” Juanita had said.
Sarah stopped moving along the burgundy carpet and searched for her room card in her large handbag, wondering if Hector really would call her. Sarah wanted to see him again. Maybe he was the one. He was definitely brighter than she had first imagined. He was on vacation before he went back to the University of Miami to finish his master’s degree in environmental science. Hector wanted to save the world—well, at least Puerto Rico. It sounded so . . . noble.
The technical stuff that he chatted about had been fairly hard to understand. She had not followed his explanation of biodiversity or habitat restoration, nor had she really cared. Luckily, they hadn’t talked that much. Wooo! Sarah cooled herself with an imaginary fan, feeling like she had spent hours in the warm sun.
She finally located the keycard just as she arrived at room 586.
“Maybe she’s at the pool,” she breathed. Her pulse was racing. If Juanita wasn’t at the pool, maybe she was over to Max’s Grill (the hotel’s excellent restaurant) for brunch. But deep down she knew that Juanita would be inside, waiting like an old Jewish grandmother. Her shoulders slumped as she reconciled that she had it coming.
“Man, this is going to be ugly.” She took a deep breath, fumbled with the keycard, and dropped it on the carpet. “Damn.”
She retrieved the card and scowled at the Do Not Disturb sign dangling limply from the doorknob. She pushed the door and crept into the darkened room. The door caught on the plush throw rug causing it to hang open.
A timely breeze moved the patio door’s blind back and forth, offering the only light source. Her eyes were adjusting to the shadow-infested surroundings when she noticed the smell. She put her hand over her nose to block the sweet, coppery scent. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed movement. Sarah spun toward the source, held her breath, and waited.
The crimson numbers on the clock radio had changed, and she put her hand on her chest, swearing at the clock. The late night horror flicks might have to go.
Then she saw Juanita. Her unmoving form lay sprawled near the head of the farthest bed.
Moving closer, she found herself wishing Juanita was screaming at her. Her pulse raced faster. Maybe the girl was sick. She took another step, and the smell intensified.
Her ears pounded like a bass drum. She bent with caution, moving closer. Something was wrong, very wrong.
“Juanita? Honey, are you feeling okay? I’m so sorr—” She stopped in her tracks, then quickly tore open the drapes.
She lost all ability to speak or move. Her French-manicured hands clenched and unclenched with unconscious rhythm. The sight of her friend’s ravished body wrenched away Sarah’s grasp on reality. Bloody rivulets meandered down tattered breasts, and Juanita’s plundered neck was caked with maroon patches, her once-beautiful face bitten too many times to count. Her eyes were set with an unearthly, eternal stare that seemed to ask why Sarah had let this happen to her, why had she left her alone.
Categories free kindle nation shorts
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Christianity…”
-Kirkus Reviews
real God of the Bible.
Who’s Your Father?: Returning to the Love of the Biblical God
by Robert Bernecker
This eye-opening new book challenges readers to reevaluate their perceptions of God, and it thoughtfully exposes many misconceptions that are commonly found in the church of our day. Readers are led into a deeper understanding of the real God of the Bible and shown the path to a new and immensely satisfying relationship with their loving Father.
This compelling work is a thought-provoking and inspirational examination of how today’s church views God. As the church struggles to truly experience the unchanging love of our heavenly Father and to rest confidently in God’s perfect purpose for each of our lives, the cause of this crucial deficiency is usually overlooked. Who’s Your Father? explains how our concept of God has grown increasingly flawed, and it reveals how we have been taught to view our sovereign Father as a benevolent gentleman who won’t interfere with human free will. By fostering this view, we’ve unknowingly created a weak, unreliable, and frustrated God who we falsely believe will only occasionally choose to use his divine power to actively work in our lives in a powerful and effective manner.
Writing from the down-to-earth perspective of a well-versed layperson, Bernecker skillfully shows how we rob ourselves of incredible blessings when we miss the vital connection between the unlimited sovereignty and the unbounded love of the true God of the Bible.
Praise for Who’s Your Father?
In Depth Treatment of the Subject!
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an excerpt from
Who’s Your Father?
Returning to the Love of the Biblical God
by Robert Bernecker
CHAPTER 1
Learning from the Sparrows
Today, vast stress is laid on the fact that God is personal, but this truth is so stated as to leave the impression that God is a person of the same sort as we are—weak, inadequate, ineffective, a little pathetic. But that is not the God of the Bible!
— J. I. Packer, Knowing God1
Our concept of God can be formed at a young age, and many of our understandings and perceptions are thereafter colored and shaped by these early foundational concepts. For me, one distinct example was the notion that God was an all-knowing and attentive God, but his involvement in any given event could not be taken for granted. Indeed, much of the world was presumed to be allowed to function on its own without any intervention from God. For example, rain is formed from moisture in the air that has evaporated from the surface of the ocean, and this process ostensibly could and would take place without God’s control or direction. It was understood that the earth rotates on its axis and thereby causes the sun to rise each morning. It was observable that a man may jump off a cliff if he so desires, and he will certainly plunge downward and not accelerate upward. After all, God created nature, set the world in motion, and defined the law of gravity.
During this early period of my life, the church often sang a popular, old hymn that included these lyrics: “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.” This admittedly comforting phrase paints God as an attentive observer who constantly sees the activities of both sparrows and humans. We are taught that he may even be a potential benefactor if our choices and actions are pleasing to him. But is this really our God? Is he just a watchful, magnanimous old gentleman who sometimes chooses to extend kindness in our direction but most of the time allows evil to run its course? Is he either unable or unwilling to make circumstances or individuals different by interjecting his supposedly unlimited power and unlimited resources, even though he may be said to wish or desire they were different? Is a god that desires things to be different but is unwilling or unable to make them different really God at all?
In more recent years, during the pleasure of reading the Bible completely through many times in multiple translations, God began to form within me a completely different picture of himself. It turns out that the truth of the sparrows is much deeper than just God’s awareness of when or where they may fall for any arbitrary reason. What Jesus himself actually said in Matthew was this:
Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. (Matthew 10:29 NKJV)
Jesus’ words point us to a dramatically different reality than the incomplete, erroneous concept that had been formed in my earlier years. God is not merely observing the sparrows; he is in control of their circumstances, and he is exercising his sovereignty and his will over those circumstances! Not just one particular sparrow, Jesus taught, but rather, God is in control of all of the sparrows’ situations. How many billions of sparrows must this be? Yet, our God’s providence guides each daily!
This may have come as a new realization to me, but it is by no means my own newly concocted understanding of this passage. One very popular old-time commentator, Albert Barnes, wrote the following concise, yet elucidating, statement about the sparrow we see in this verse: “That is, God, your Father, guides and directs its fall. It falls only with his permission, and where he chooses.”2 Barnes’ view of this passage is neither unique nor novel; John Gill similarly expounded that “not one of them [the sparrows] is taken in a snare, or killed with a stone, or shot flying, or sitting, but by the will of God: from whence it may be strongly concluded, that nothing comes by chance; that there is no such thing as contingency with respect to God.”3 Adam Clarke also concurred with these views concerning Jesus’ words in this passage, stating, “All things are ordered by the counsel of God.” He adds, “The providence of God extends to the minutest things; everything is continually under the government and care of God, and nothing occurs without his will or permission; if then he regards sparrows, how much more man, and how much more still the soul that trusts in him.”4 Finally, John Wesley likewise noted that God’s control and direction extend to the smallest of creatures, and this fact provides us the great assurance that he will do the same for us.5
If we give this passage a bit of thought, it becomes readily apparent that we can know with great certainty that Jesus did not mean to merely teach us that God is ever attentive—that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without God noticing the event—because the thrust of Jesus’ teaching in the surrounding verses is that we should not worry or fear about circumstances, events, or even what others may do to us since God is sovereign over all, including the sparrows. This teaching would completely fail to provide us with any reason to “fear not” (v. 31) if Jesus was instructing us merely that the sparrow may fall for any haphazard reason, and while God will surely notice such an event, it is not at all certain he will involve himself or impose his own will in the situation. Rather, the only credible reason we could have to “fear not” is that Jesus was teaching us plainly that nothing happens outside of God’s sovereignty; if God involves himself in and controls the circumstances and details of the sparrow’s lives, not to mention numbering the hairs on our head as well (v. 30), then he is most certainly controlling the circumstances and details of the lives of we whom he values much more than the sparrows.
As critically important as this realization may be, there is additional truth that we can learn from these sparrows to which Jesus referred. Jesus could have claimed his own sovereignty over the sparrows by saying that they could not fall to the ground apart from his will. However, he did not do so. Instead, as always, Jesus pointed us to the Father who is ultimately sovereign over all, which in this instance includes even the tiny sparrows (cf. John 8:28–29; 12:49; 14:10; 15:15; 17:7). Moreover, I believe there is a concept which is all the more marvelous that Jesus was trying to get us to see—a truth that I think we miss very easily in today’s church because of the manner in which we have allowed our concept of God to become skewed. In my opinion, the greatest truth of this verse is that Jesus did not say that “his Father” is sovereign over the sparrows, even though he could have easily and correctly so asserted. Rather, he deliberately chose to assure each of us individually that it is “your Father” who is sovereign over the sparrows (cf. John 20:17).
This is amazing! Jesus is telling us that the ultimately perfect, all-knowing, completely sovereign over everything that exists, and all-powerful ruler of the universe is our own Father, not merely “the” Father! As a direct result of this great truth and, if one truly weighs and considers the matter, only as a result of this great truth, we should not worry because we are worth much more than many sparrows to him, and we know even the details of the sparrows’ lives are included in his purpose and ultimate plan. We must never miss the vital connection between God’s love for us and God’s purpose for us! A full comprehension of this truth compels us to trust our Father audaciously, and it sets before us a feast of God’s grace, goodness, and peace for our souls that cannot be otherwise experienced or understood.
Until we come to comprehend the infinite extents and depths to which this wonderful truth reaches, we may well refer to God as “our Father,” but we fail to live and believe as if he is actually a loving Father that will always give us good gifts and not bad (Matthew 7:11), who loves us so much that he chooses us to be his own (Ephesians 1:4), who has the unlimited power and authority to back up his unlimited love (Psalm 136:12), and who is involved in everything that surrounds us every day, even the sparrows over our heads. It is God’s power that enables him to subject all things to himself (Philippians 3:21), and it is the steadfastness of his love that gives us an unshakeable confidence in his purpose for each of us (Psalm 138:8; Ephesians 2:4–5). This, then, is our true Father; he is certainly not the detached ruler of the universe who will bring himself to tolerate us for Jesus’ sake, nor is he a dispassionate benefactor who will even give us eternal life if someone happens to help him out by “pointing us to Christ” or manages to convince us that the Gospel is a good thing for us to “accept.” Jesus’ words eliminate any possibility of the truth of this latter assessment and instead direct us to be completely confident in both our Father’s total sovereignty and his overwhelming love!
There is little confidence or faith that we can place in a God who is totally sovereign and infinitely powerful but who does not love or value us, a God who is not our own Father. Likewise, there is little confidence or faith we can place in a heavenly Father who either does not have the power and sovereignty to back up his love or who is not consistently willing to use his power and sovereignty on behalf of those he is said to love and value. Jesus, however, showed us that our God gives to us the perfect combination of unlimited love and unbounded sovereignty. We can, therefore, have a real and living faith, only because we can know that our loving Father exercises his sovereign purpose (his will) over all of the details in our lives!
It is not difficult for our finite, limited abilities and understandings to be overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite details of the circumstances and events of our lives. And yet, as I watch the many sparrows in my yard flit about, it staggers me to ponder that God, my Father, is directing each one of their situations every moment. They go up, and they go down, countless little birds making countless moves—and this just in my yard. Jesus said that all of these moves by these tiny creatures are God’s will. If someone were to take up a rifle and freely choose to shoot one of these little creatures, making it fall to the ground permanently, that would have to be God’s will. I certainly would not understand the purpose for such a senseless killing to be a part of God’s providence, but Jesus’ words would have to stand nonetheless. If it were not included in God’s purpose for the sparrow to be killed, he would most certainly act by giving the individual a desire to not shoot the sparrow or perhaps by causing the shooter to miss the shot. It is an absolutely magnificent thing to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God, my loving Father, is involved and in control of these minute details of life here on the earth! Our God is not a mere observer-god, but rather the sovereign, all-seeing, all-powerful, holy ruler of the earth who “subjects all things to himself” (Philippians 3:21). The apostle Paul summed up this incredibly wonderful truth in Ephesians 1:11, where he declared that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” This sweeping and particularly unambiguous statement bestows to us no less than the most solid foundation imaginable upon which an enduring, unshakable faith can be built.
The fact that our own loving Father is not an observer-god at all should constantly flood our hearts with joy and peace. With Paul, we can rely upon the certainty that he is the omnipotent and omniscient God who is intrinsically involved in everything that happens here on this earth. All things are from him, through him, and to him (Romans 11:36); it is Christ who holds all things together (Colossians 1:17), and our loving Father indeed “makes everything to work out according to his plan” (Ephesians 1:11 NLT). We must ponder and absorb the magnitude of the powerful words found in Psalm 135:6, which makes this unconditional, all-encompassing declaration:
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.
Assuming that God cares about us and about the sparrows as much as he says he does, this verse completely excludes the notion of a detached, hands-off observer-god. The natural and inevitable result of God’s great love for us must be that what he pleases will also always be for our good (Romans 8:28; Matthew 7:11), and, just like the fall of the sparrow, his presence in everything that happens in our lives is thereby guaranteed. In fact, God says of himself in Jeremiah 23:23–24 that he is a God who is both near at hand and everywhere all at the same time—a fact of which David was fully cognizant as he exalted in Psalm 139 that there is absolutely no place where we can flee from God’s constant presence, even if we should so desire. God said in Job 38:12 that it is he who commands the sun to rise each morning, and, according to Amos 4:13 and 5:8, it is God who turns daylight into darkness each evening. Our Father said in Job 38 that it is he who satisfies the young lions’ appetites and that it is he who provides the prey for the young ravens. It is even God’s command that causes the eagle to mount up and make its nest on high, a behavior that most today would wrongly ascribe instead to “Mother Nature” (Job 39:27).
Such an inconceivably intricate level of involvement and control is not only problematic for us to comprehend, it is also difficult for many of us to accept. By human standards, such behavior might even be negatively labeled “micromanagement.” Nevertheless, God’s Word provides us more than ample clarity, and we must realize that we too often unknowingly allow our perceptions of our infinitely capable Father to be shaped by the limitations of our own finiteness. Just as fish live their lives perpetually surrounded by water, so we as humans are constantly immersed in our own finiteness. For example, knowing that we have very limited abilities to give our attention to many things at once, we naturally try to automate as much as possible rather than attempting to control a multitude of details simultaneously. We would rather have a timer or photocell to turn on our outside lights every evening instead of trying to remember to do so ourselves, and we prefer to have a thermostat keep our house at a certain temperature instead of having to constantly pay attention to managing the temperature manually. We prefer not to control such things directly because we correctly discern that the fewer small details we have to manage, the more effective we can be in matters we judge to be of greater importance.
This is all well and good until we unintentionally transfer this same perspective to our understanding of our Father, and we thereby unconsciously dismiss the reality that God actually directly manages the smallest details of the universe. Because such a capacity is far beyond our comprehension and is precluded by our very frame of reference, we wrongly judge that God could not possibly actually actively manage all the sparrows in the universe while still maintaining full and undistracted control of the things that seem to us to be much more important. However, unlike us, God is infinite in his capabilities, and we unfortunately often fail to even attempt to understand the ramifications of this fact. When we do pause to contemplate this staggering concept, we still fall short of fully comprehending the ability to manage billions of intricate details simultaneously without having any less power or attention to devote to any other single detail. More importantly, our Father never has any less power or attention to devote to any of his chosen children, including all of our needs and prayers.
Because our Father is unlimited in perception, unlimited in power, unlimited in ability, unlimited in resources, and unlimited in wisdom, a billion sparrows can be micromanaged, a billion stars can be steered, uncounted eagles can be commanded to soar, and innumerable creatures and beasts governed and fed, and still it is as if he is not occupied with anything else at all as he relates to each of his children. If we can even begin to grasp this magnificent reality, such a realization can yield nothing less than unmitigated worship and adoration for our Father, who is sovereign over every detail in the universe and still chooses us to be his very own. We need to study and work diligently to develop this higher view of our God and make this high view an integral part of all that we think and do, indeed, an essential component of our very beings.
Daniel must have understood this concept as much as is humanly possible, and we can see his high view of God in his words describing the overarching preeminence of the Lord, which are found in Daniel 2:21 (NIV): “He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them.” It is vitally important that we understand that these are action verbs in this passage. God “changes,” God “sets up,” and God “deposes”; these verbs demand active participation and causation, not mere observation. This is well illustrated in 2 Samuel 7, where God told King David that it was he who had raised David up from tending sheep and caused David to ascend to the throne of Israel (v. 8). We should note well that this transformation of David’s life was solely because of God’s choice and the active hand of God, and it was not at all because of any other factor such as noble birth, David’s skill as a warrior, or even blind luck. God was also clear when he told David that it had been God that had caused David’s triumphs over his enemies (v. 9).
Our marvelous God next proceeded to give David a glimpse of the future, and in so doing God made it irrefutable that it was he who was going to divinely control this future and actively bring it to pass—once again we see action verbs used as God described the future. God would “give” David rest from his enemies (v. 11). God would “make” David’s name great (v. 9). God would “make” him a house (v. 11). God would “raise up” Solomon (v. 12), and he would “establish” Solomon’s throne forever (v 13). God would “make” David’s house and throne sure forever (v. 16).
Our response to the loving, active, controlling hand of our Father in accomplishing his purpose in our lives should be the same as David’s, who first humbly expressed his awe at being chosen by the God of the universe: “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” (v. 18). Moreover, David responded further with earnest praise for his glorious, preeminent God: “Therefore you are great, O Lord God. For there is none like you, and there is no God besides you” (v. 22). David also acknowledged that God had brought these things into being according to God’s own perfect desires (v. 21). Finally, David walked in a confidence born of knowing that his destiny would unfold exactly as his loving Father had purposed and spoken: “For you, O Lord God, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever” (v. 29). When we realize that the God of the universe chooses us just as he chose David (Ephesians 1:4-5) and promises to fulfill his purpose for us as well (Psalm 57:2; Philippians 1:6), we should follow in this same pattern of humble awe, earnest worship, and a confident walk. All three of these responses are rooted firmly in the glorious realization that our loving Father controls all of the details of his creation.
Indeed, there is nothing that is not under the umbrella of his sovereignty. Even the rain that I supposed was formed without divine supervision is created by God and under his direction and control (Zechariah 10:1; Psalm 147:8). It is God who causes it to rain on both the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45; Acts 14:17), and according to Amos 5:8, even the evaporation of water from the ocean in order to form rain over land happens expressly at his direct command. At times, he directly sends rain to one city, while specifically withholding rain from another (Amos 4:7; 2 Chronicles 7:13). If our Father directly controls even the rain, should not we relish his control over everything else as well? Paul said in Acts 17 that God made every nation of men and that God (not humans) “determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live” (v. 26 NIV). Every detail is included! Psalm 104:14 shows us that God “causes” even the grass to grow. The incredible breadth of this glorious truth is magnificently encapsulated in Psalm 119:91, which declares that “all things are his servants.” Indeed, we should join with Paul in exalting our God who “works all things according to the counsel of his will!”
Because God’s providence is consistent and reliable, the normal dependability of the natural order of things often causes us to fail to ascertain that our God is actually in control of all these details. God tells us that he makes the sun rise each morning (Job 38:12; Amos 5:8), but this particular providence is so predictable that we usually fail to offer him either credit or thanksgiving for this daily event. However, when what we perceive as the natural, expected order of nature is altered, we have little difficulty attributing what we term a miracle to the hand of God. When Jesus walked on the water, healed lepers, and changed ordinary water into superior wine, such actions defied the normal and are correctly recognized as miracles from the hand of God. Likewise, we also recognize the hand of God in miracles that we experience today. When sparrows fly overhead, however, we must know that this is no less from the hand of our God!
We make a great mistake when we attribute what we call miracles to God but deny his involvement in everything else in our lives. Our God is the author of both the miraculous and the mundane, and this is a realization that will revolutionize our walk with our Father. In fact, as far as it concerns God, there is little difference between the simple and the spectacular since he is in equal control of one as well as the other, both are integral parts of his purpose, and neither taxes his infinite abilities any more than the other. We rob ourselves of the security of our Father’s love when go through life waiting and hoping for God to intervene with the supernatural yet fail to appreciate his hand in the details of our daily existence. It is common for people of our day to label an unusual event that they perceive to be a good thing as “a God thing.” Doubtless there are indeed many “God things” in our lives. Our error is to attempt to compartmentalize those things that we will choose to allow to be “God things” while refusing to acknowledge God’s involvement in those things we perceive as less than spectacular.
Too often do we hear people quote James 1:17 and claim that because “every good and perfect gift comes from above,” we can therefore know that anything we humans consider or label “good” comes from God, and likewise anything we humans consider or label “bad” comes from Satan. Or, it may be suggested that the “bad” happened because God was either absent or uninvolved. However appealing it may seem at first glance, such reasoning is illusory for several reasons. Firstly, as C. S. Lewis masterfully and poignantly portrayed through the actions, attitudes, and words of the Green Lady character in his novel Perelandra, we humans actually have a tremendously flawed concept of what is “good” and what is “bad.”6 Indeed, we often may perceive a gift from our Father’s hand as “bad” when it is actually his sovereign method of lovingly working for our own good.
Secondly, this is a shallow, ineffectual theology that strips God of his sovereignty and thereby robs us unnecessarily of our comfort and faith in troubled times. God refuted this poor theology directly in Isaiah 45:7, where he said, “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things.” The psalmist exalted in the fact that our Father turns deserts into pools of water and at other times turns flowing springs into deserts (Psalms 107:33, 35). It is God who makes people to be mute, deaf, seeing, or blind, according to what he told Moses in Exodus 4:12, and it is he who both opens and closes women’s wombs, thereby either creating life or not, according to his own purpose and timetable (Genesis 20:18; 29:31; 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:5–6). Moreover, in 2 Chronicles 15:6, God is said to “trouble them [the Israelites] with every kind of distress” or to “vex them with all adversity” (KJV), and he actually says that he may “send pestilence among his people” (2 Chronicles 7:13). This same concept is also clearly seen in Ecclesiastes 7:14, Micah 1:12, Job 42:11, Jeremiah 44:2 and 42:10, Hosea 5:14–15, and Isaiah 31:2 and 47:11. In fact, Amos 3:6 teaches us that calamity cannot come apart from the Lord’s command: “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” Jeremiah summarized this principle poetically in Lamentations 3:38 (NIV) with the following words: “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?”
We must not, therefore, attempt to remove from God his rightful glory and throne by suggesting that he must not be actively involved in governing our lives and circumstances merely because we feel that something that is happening to us is “bad” as judged by our limited, flawed perception. We can learn from Psalm 71:20, in which the psalmist pronounced: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again.” This is a firm declaration that God is sovereign over our circumstances, and while he may well make us see trials for his purpose and our good, he nevertheless will certainly revive us. Here again, we must recognize that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” and find great contentment and rest in this profound realization.
It may be derogatory to say of people that “they are in the habit of getting whatever they desire,” but when this is said of the only holy, perfect, loving, omnipotent God of the universe—our Father—then it is no longer a detrimental attribute at all. Instead, it becomes a glorious tribute to the matchless power and unfailing faithfulness of our God. God gets what God wants! “Whatever the Lord pleases, he does!” This fundamental, basic truth about our Father from Psalm 135:6 could easily stand alone even if it were an isolated reference, but it is not; the Bible is filled with declarations of this powerful fact. If this maxim is given even a little serious thought, it quickly becomes evident that a god who does not get what he wants is not God at all. There would necessarily be some limitation to that supposed god’s power, knowledge, resources, or abilities—otherwise that god would, in fact, be able to get what he wanted and to do exactly as he pleased. “A ‘god’ whose will is resisted, whose designs are frustrated, whose purpose is checkmated, possesses no title to Deity,” said A. W. Pink, “and so far from being a fit object of worship, merits naught but contempt.” 7
But, our glorious God is not limited like this so-called god in any way at all. Praise, honor, and glory to him! Psalm 115:3 tells us that “our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” It is inescapable that what our God pleases is what our God desires, and what God desires is what God pleases—and that is exactly what he does. Not some of the time, but all of the time. God made this declaration of himself through the prophet Isaiah: “My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all my good pleasure” (Isaiah 46:10 NASB). What God says, that God will do (Numbers 23:19; 11:23; 1 Samuel 15:29; Ezekiel 39:8).
It is crucial to note that there is a huge difference between a God that simply foretells what he knows by seeing into the future (but supposedly does not control) and a God that brings to pass that which he wills and speaks. When God said to Abraham, in Genesis 17:5–7 (NASB), “I have made you the father of a multitude of nations, I will make you exceedingly fruitful,” and “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you,” and again about Ishmael: “I will surely bless him,” “I will make him fruitful,” and “I will make him into a great nation” (Genesis 17:20 NIV), he was not just predicting the future; rather, he was unambiguously stating exactly what he already knew he was going to do. In fact, the phrase “I have made you the father of a multitude of nations” in 17:5 is incredibly revealing and must not be passed over lightly. At that point in human time, Abraham was not the father of many nations; he only had a single teenage son, Ishmael, and yet God stated Abraham’s future in the present tense with as much certainly as if it had already come to pass.
This is indeed a powerful truth; our infinite, eternal God is outside of time, and to God the future is as if it is the present. What God knows he will do is in fact already done and not subject to being undone (Isaiah 45:23), and this knowledge is neither partial nor selective but is complete and all-encompassing. God said in Isaiah 46:11, “I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.” Here, and many other places (such as Isaiah 55:11 and Ezekiel 39:8), God told us directly that he will bring his purpose to pass. In another place, he said that he is “watching over his word to perform it” (Jeremiah 1:12). These many passages teach us emphatically that our magnificent God does not merely foresee the future; rather, he speaks of the future as it is included in his purpose, and then he acts and brings it to pass.
We can be certain his methods will vary; in this particular passage (Isaiah 46), he said that he may even call a bird of prey from the east or a man of counsel from a far country—but no matter what method he sovereignly chooses, we can know that God will bring to pass his purpose and his will. It is likely that God will most often use human choices, actions, and methods to accomplish his purpose rather than intervening with a lightning bolt from heaven or even a disembodied hand writing on a wall (cf. Daniel 5:5). It is up to us to properly recognize that God works his purpose through humans and not misattribute the work of his hand to others. Regardless of how God works, however, we may always be certain that “the Lord has both purposed and performed what He spoke” (Jeremiah 51:12 NASB).
If we are to properly know and worship our almighty Father, we must come to understand that he is not reacting to autonomous human choices as history unfolds and adapting his purpose accordingly. God’s proclamation in Isaiah 37:26 provides us with a delightful insight upon which we can build this faith: “Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass.” It is altogether too easy to get the human cart before the divine horse, so to speak, and we are often guilty of this error in the teaching of our day. We would do well to realize, acknowledge, and meditate upon the fact that God’s words do not merely predict history, but rather the unfolding of history fulfills God’s words. If we have a proper view of God’s sovereignty, this statement should not strike us as any great revelation. For example, at the very end of 2 Chronicles, after God had sovereignly brought calamity upon Judah, the few remaining people that survived this sword of judgment were exiled into Babylon (36:15–21). The chapter is quite clear that all of these things happened at the Lord’s command, but the language of verse 21 is particularly revealing because there we are told very simply and directly why it all happened: “To fulfill the word of the Lord.” We can thereby understand that this was not merely a particularly accurate divine prediction of human events; rather the Babylonian exile happened at God’s specific command, in order to fulfill his own words.
Likewise, when God foretells the future, as he did in Amos 8:9–14, he is actually stating what it is that he will do in the future, not merely what will happen. In that particular passage in Amos, when God spoke of coming natural disaster, famine, mourning, and death to idolaters, he was stating what would certainly be brought to pass by his immutable (unchangeable) will, this enabled by his irresistible, infinite power. Logically, infinite power cannot be resisted or impeded by any finite resistance. Mount Everest is huge, but it is nevertheless finite and could therefore be flattened or removed by a single word from our infinite God if such a thing were ever his will (cf. Psalm 97:5). It is no different when finite human will or finite demonic power meets infinite divine will and infinite divine power—God’s purpose will invariably be done.
God spoke of the absolute certainty of the accomplishment of his own purpose in Isaiah 14 by making this declaration:
Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand. For the Lord of hosts has planned, and who can frustrate it? And as for His stretched-out hand, who can turn it back? (Isaiah14:24 and 27 NASB)
A striking example of this principle is seen in Ezekiel 21, where the Lord foretold the future of the Ammonites:
And I will pour out my indignation upon you; I will blow upon you with the fire of my wrath, and I will deliver you into the hands of brutish men, skillful to destroy. You shall be fuel for the fire. Your blood shall be in the midst of the land. You shall be no more remembered, for I the Lord have spoken. (Ezekiel 21:31–32)
Here, God spoke his word, and that word foretold the future of the Ammonites. This was plainly not just a foreseen future, but rather a future that God himself would be bringing to pass. This future included sovereignly bringing in “brutish men” who would destroy the Ammonites, destroyers who supposed that they were acting of their own free will without realizing that they were in fact instruments of God’s purpose. God stated very simply the reason why this prophecy would come to pass with utmost certainty: “For I the Lord have spoken.”
We know, then, by these many passages, that God’s word is always done, God always does what God desires, and God’s purpose will be established. God is always sovereign. God will most certainly accomplish his good pleasure, which is his will and purpose (Isaiah 46:10). Our Father declared in Isaiah 55:11 that the word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but that “it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” Praise and glory to our Father! He will always accomplish his purpose and his desire. His word will invariably succeed in doing exactly what he intended it to do.
Even if God chooses not to do something, that lack of action is just as obviously what he desired. In other words, even if he did not do something, he still did exactly what pleased him most in that very act of doing nothing. We must additionally bear in mind that it is brashly presumptuous for us to ever assert God did “nothing” since such a judgment is only based on our flawed and limited human perception, and it is more likely than not incorrect. Moreover, although God certainly often does things in which it can be said he does not take pleasure, he nevertheless always maintains his sovereignty by doing exactly what he wills to do. For example, we know that God takes no pleasure in the death or punishment of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23, 32; 33:11; Lamentations 3:33; Jonah 4:11), and yet the Bible is filled with examples of God willfully imposing death and punishment directly upon the wicked. The same God who said that he does not delight in the death of the wicked also said that he would take delight in bringing ruin and destruction upon Israel should they turn to wickedness (Deuteronomy 28:63). It would be fallacious and illogical to even consider that God could ever act against his own will, even when such actions definitely do not bring him pleasure (a being that could act against its own will would certainly not be a god and perhaps not even sane). We can instead rejoice that God, our Father, is not callous or sadistic in any way at all; rather, he is the completely just, completely loving, completely powerful, completely wise, and completely sovereign God who always acts according to his perfect will.
Simply put, God would not be God if ever a situation arose in which he did not do exactly what he most desired, what he pleased, and what he willed. He is not a disappointed, frustrated, thwarted, ineffectual God—that is not a god at all. Our God sees all, and nothing escapes his attention (Hebrews 4:12–13) or happens outside of his sovereignty and without his involvement (Psalm 139:1–18). As Amos said, “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” God’s will is done! Indeed, there is no biblical support for the all-too-common notion that the world is spinning out of control, but we should not fear because one day God will rouse himself and reel it all back in, somehow managing to restore order at the last possible moment. God has not abdicated his throne, nor will he. Because we know he truly reigns and that his reign is completely unbounded, we can possess a persevering peace and an indomitable confidence that cannot otherwise be realized.
David possessed an intimate understanding of God’s supremacy over all his creation, as well as a keen awareness of God’s loving involvement in the details of David’s life, and he offered this astute exhortation in Psalm 27:14: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” It should be self-evident that waiting is just plain silly if one does not know or believe that someone is coming. If we believe our Father to be a disengaged God—a God who is either unwilling or unable to consistently involve himself in and exert sovereign influence upon human events or human will—then it becomes a ludicrous exercise to actually wait on that God. Given much of the teaching heard in so many of our modern churches, is it any wonder that the practice of actually waiting confidently on God is something that is rarely seen in our day?
Likewise, Paul’s directives for us to give thanks “in all circumstances” and “for everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:18; Ephesians 5:20) are impossible admonitions if we have no confidence that God is in complete control or if we possess no certainty that our circumstances are ordered by our preeminent Father rather than by others. It is nearly irrational to suggest that we should, or could, give thanks to God for situations and things we believe to be outside his control and beyond the scope of his perfect purpose. We cannot realistically thank our God for all circumstances if we presume our circumstances to have possibly slipped past his only-occasional attention, authority, and administration—even if we believe that God may proceed to work as best as he can to help us in what we imagine to be circumstances that he failed to either foresee or prevent.
On the other hand, when we know that our sovereign Father is an involved God, a God that always hears, always works, always governs, and always fulfills his purpose, it then becomes much easier to wait, trust, and even give thanks for everything. We know that there are neither unforeseen nor uncontrolled circumstances for our God. This is a confidence from which true faith can spring up. We can joyfully identify with David’s praise for our reliable, dependable, involved God: “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him” (Psalm 28:7). Indeed, when we come to realize our God is truly a sovereign God, we too can experience the understanding deep in our souls that the fruit of his righteousness is real peace and a quietness born of an abiding trust (Isaiah 32:17).
“No people ever rise higher than their idea of God.”8 This discerning observation by James Boice neatly encapsulates why developing a biblically correct understanding of the supremacy of our loving Father is such an imperative matter. If we do not believe our God to be perfectly and completely effective in his detailed, wise, and holy administration of all things within his entire creation, we have created a God of our making who is in truth not God at all. From within a whirlwind, God gave Job an extended and forcefully direct declaration of his effectual sovereignty over all things (Job 38–41). None of us today are likely to experience such a dramatic personal discourse from God, but we would do well to learn from the individual who heard these words directly from the mouth of God. After this extraordinary experience, Job’s words are both incredibly powerful and notably unambiguous: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2). We must join Job in acknowledging God’s sovereignty and giving him the glory he properly deserves, rejoicing always that no purpose of our Father can ever be thwarted in any way. Indeed, if we do not completely believe this eminently scriptural truth about our great God, then our God is not God at all.
Charles Spurgeon, often affectionately referred to as the “Prince of Preachers,” perhaps summarized this best in a sermon in which he passionately asserted that we must totally believe that God’s providence guides our path and our choices. He proceeded to eloquently describe how God is sovereignly in control of everything from the particles of dust that dance in a sunbeam to the insects creeping on a rosebud—as much in control of each falling autumn leaf as the tumbling of an avalanche. Spurgeon wrapped up these thoughts with these incisive words:
He that believes in a God must believe this truth. There is no standing-point between this and atheism. There is no half way between a mighty God that worketh all things by the sovereign counsel of his will and no God at all. A God that can not do as he pleases—a God whose will is frustrated, is not a God, and can not be a God.9
Notes
Chapter 1: Learning from the Sparrows
-
J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 83.
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Albert Barnes, Notes on the Bible, accessed January 22, 2012, http://biblecommenter.com/matthew/10-29.htm.
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John Gill, John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible, accessed January 22, 2012, http://biblecommenter.com/matthew/10-29.htm.
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Adam Clarke, Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible, accessed January 22, 2012, http://biblecommenter.com/matthew/10-29.htm.
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John Wesley, Wesley’s Notes on the Bible, accessed January 22, 2012, http://biblecommenter.com/matthew/10-29.htm.
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C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003), ch. 5, pp. 51–61.
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A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), p. 36.
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James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009), p. 151.
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C. H. Spurgeon, Sermons of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon of London, 2nd Series (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1859), Sermon #3114, “God’s Providence,” p. 201.
… Continued…
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Annie’s happily dating hunky Detective Raphael Campillio in Los Angeles, when her mom signs her up to be a judge at Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Guys Contest. Who cares if it’s 4th of July weekend with scorching temperatures? It’s a free trip home to Wisconsin. What could possibly go wrong?
It doesn’t help that Detective Jamie Ryan, a boy from Annie’s past is all grown up, sexy as sin, and determined to make her fall for him. Annie’s about to discover that going back home can be sweet as frosting or worse than a cake wreck. The temperature’s rising at the Hot Guys Contest…
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an excerpt from
Cupcakes, Pies and Hot Guys
by Pamela Dumond
1
Bliss
“Mmm. You’re killing me, baby. Whatever we’re doing right now is probably outlawed in eight states,” Detective Raphael Campillio said as he lay back on Annie Rose Graceland’s sofa. He was shirtless, totally buff and wore an “I Heart Cupcakes!” blindfold while he nibbled on Annie’s index finger.
Annie, straddling him, wore her typical baking attire—yoga capris and a lacy cami top. Not so typical: The cami’s straps dangled down past her shoulders courtesy of the very fine Detective Rafe—her new boyfriend.
She smiled and tossed her long auburn ponytail over one shoulder. Despite the fact that her marriage tanked and she was almost divorced (Hallelujah, she’d welcome that day), she’d managed to score the most smokin’, sweet, honest, available man in all of Los Angeles.
“You might be a hot shot detective in the City of Angels,” Annie said. “But I am still bound by my code of ethics (Ethics/shmethics—she’d just made that up) to put your detecting skills to the test.”
Rafe slowly pulled her finger from his mouth. “I detect fresh butter cream frosting,” he said. “While I’ll happily endure all of your tests and quizzes, please share the name of the board whose standards you are holding me to?”
Annie got the shivers. This man could quite possibly stop her heart from his sheer yummy factor. “The Board of Super Important People located in an ultra secret underground location. Probably close to Dick Cheney and Beyonce’s bunkers,” she said.
“Dick Cheney and Beyonce have adjoining underground bunkers? Fascinating. Next test, please.”
She dipped her middle finger in a bowl of frosting that sat on the couch and dragged it across his lips.
He circled his tongue around her middle finger.
Maybe she’d died and gone to heaven. “Absolutely. Important people have underground bunkers for nuclear events, obnoxious behavior, or even bad hair days,” Annie said. “Get real, Rafe. We’re living in L.A. One minute you’re a smart detective who solved a celebrity murder. The next, someone’s snapped a photo of you in your boxers and posted it on Twitter.”
He frowned and bit down on her finger.
Oh dang. Trouble. Time for damage control. “What are you going to do? Confront the media hoopla? If you’re a celebrity, you hide in your underground bunker while your people deal with the firestorm.”
Rafe frowned. “You did not take a photo of me in my boxers. And you definitely did not post it on the Internet. I am not going to be the next Weiner-Gate.”
Annie leaned back and checked that her cell phone was still safely hidden under the couch. “Getting back to the matter at hand,” she said. “Identify the two most delicious ingredients that you’re currently tasting.”
Rafe nibbled on her middle finger. “You. And let me think. You.”
“Wrong!” Oh jeez, he was frickin’ killing her. “Oreos and Kahlua are the main ingredients in that frosting. But I’ll give you another shot, ’cause I appreciate the fact you are here to serve and protect.” As well as the fact that he was spicier than Wisconsin cheese fondue spiked with jalapeños.
“Yes, ma’am. But I have other jobs I’m very good at.” Rafe tickled her waist, and when she giggled, seized the opportunity to tug her cami higher, run his fingers up her back and caress it. Repeatedly.
“I sense you are not taking this detecting test seriously.”
“You’re wrong. LAPD’s detectives are the finest officers in all of the country. Produce the evidence immediately.”
Annie tapped her frosting-swathed finger on his lips.
He wrapped a muscular arm around her back and pulled her smack dab on top of him. “Mmm.”
With her remaining ounce of willpower, she pulled her other hand off him. “Report of findings, please.”
“White chocolate frosting with tiny bits of fresh raspberries,” he said. “Almost better than sex.”
“Wow. You’re good. Good at anything else? Three, two, one…?” Who would have guessed getting divorced could be this much fun?
“I thought you’d never ask.” He ripped off the blindfold and flipped her beneath him.
“Whoa!” She stared up into his dark dreamy eyes just two inches away from hers. “I like that move. Where’d you learn a move like that?”
Rafe pulled her cami bra straps further down her arms with his teeth. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”
Brinnnng! Brinnnng! Annie’s land-line phone rang on the bookcase, two feet away from her head. Yes, she lived in the smallest, grungiest apartment in Venice Beach, California. And unless you were a famous artist or a zillionaire actor, small and grungy was normal for Venice. “Ignore that call,” Annie said. “It’s probably Nordstrom’s Rack with another sales announcement.” Or another bill collector.
“Ignored.” Rafe trailed his kisses down her throat and headed south.
Brinnnng! Brinnnng!
“Changed my mind. Answer it,” he mumbled somewhere in the vicinity of her belly button.
She stretched her arm off the couch, snagged her phone’s receiver and slammed it back down.
Rafe lifted his head off her stomach. “Are you the only woman on the Westside of L.A. who doesn’t have a fancy ring tone? No Pink. No Fergie. Not even Avril Lavigne?”
“Just a ten-year-old phone-answering machine combo with a speaker button. Return to more important matters, please.”
He shook his head. “That phone’s going to ring again in four seconds. One, two, three….”
Brinnng! Rafe pressed his face against her belly and laughed.
“Fine, you’re right. You detected. Just stay there and enjoy the two hundred crunches I did this morning as well as the chocolate cupcake I ate for breakfast.” She reached behind her and punched the speaker button. “Who is this and what do you want? And it better be important.”
“Is this the way you speak to the woman who nearly died from eighteen hours of excruciating contractions before she gave birth to you?” Nancy Graceland, Annie’s mom, hissed through the phone’s speaker.
“Sorry, Mom,” Annie said.
“You had a big head. If I knew beforehand that you had such a big head, I would have let Doctor Know-it-All schedule his CD selection,” Nancy said.
“C-Section, Mom.” Rafe smothered laughter into her stomach. “You’ve caught me at an inconvenient time. Can we talk later?”
“Before you moved to L.A., my calls caught you at inconvenient times. After you moved to L.A., my calls still catch you at inconvenient times. Will there ever be a convenient time to talk to your mother?”
Good old-fashioned Midwestern guilt. “I’m sorry, Mom.” She wriggled from underneath Rafe and plunked down on the floor. “What’s up?”
Rafe grabbed his shirt from the back of the couch, pulled it on and buttoned it.
Annie mouthed, “No,” and shook her head.
He pointed to his watch and resumed buttoning.
“I know you’ve been dying to come back and visit Wisconsin. Me. Your brother, Carson. Your auntie. Your grandpa.”
Annie knew she had to visit her mom, but also knew she hated traveling. She loved her family, but would rather shove pins under her fingernails than go back to the Midwest, especially in the humid, hot summer. Or the cold, frigid winter. That left about a three-month window that was relatively safe to venture back to the Midwest. If you didn’t count the tornadoes.
“Yes. Definitely planning a trip soon. Completely looking forward to it.” She was not planning a trip back to Wisconsin in the near future.
“Well, my darling daughter, you might as well thank me now.”
Rafe grabbed her around the waist. “I’ll call you later.” He kissed her on the lips. For a second she forgot she was on the phone.
“Annie,” Nancy said, “I hear heavy breathing. Are you all right? You had a bout of asthma when you were ten. Is it the asthma?”
Rafe pulled away, smiled, and gave her cat, Theodore von Pumpernickel, a scratch on his enormous white fuzzy head before he exited her front door.
“Just allergies, Mom. What am I thanking you for?”
“I have not only handled all your travel plans, I got you a one hundred percent free, all expenses paid, luxury trip back to Wisconsin.”
A red alert button fired in Annie’s brain and she broke out into a drenching sweat. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Even though it was summertime, it was seventy-four degrees on the temperate Westside of Los Angeles. Annie’s forehead was suddenly so damp she had to wipe the moisture away with the hem of her top. Was it her hormones? Was it a dreadful disease? Or was it another of her stupid psychic reactions? Because Annie was psychic—kind of.
Technically, she was empathic. She could feel in her body and brain the thoughts and feelings that belonged to other people. “Mom, you’re at home right?”
“No. I’m lounging on the Lido deck on a Regis and Kelly cruise in the Caribbean. Of course I’m home. Might I remind you that Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, is also your hometown.”
“I know that. What’s the temperature in Oconomowoc right now?”
“A mere ninety-nine degrees.”
Annie walked into the kitchen, grabbed a towel and mopped her forehead. “What’s the humidity?”
“Do I look like The Weather Channel? I’d venture a guess and estimate ninety-five percent.”
“Do you have the AC on, Mom?” Annie asked.
“I bought one of those cute little hand fans when I visited Chinatown in Chicago, last year. It saves on the electric bill, big time,” Nancy said. “And I recently read that sweating is healthy. It opens the pores. Releases toxins. Keeps one youthful.”
“So that means no on the AC.” Annie dabbed the rivulets of sweat that pored down her cleavage. Thank God Rafe had left. Thank God he didn’t witness this. She hadn’t been dating him forever, and she hadn’t shared her deepest secret with him. This profusion of sweat wasn’t a hot flash, or an allergy. Technically this sweat didn’t even belong to her. It was an empathic reaction. Annie’s body was picking up on the fact her mom was drowning in perspiration back in the scorching hot and humid Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in June.
“I didn’t call to discuss the weather,” Nancy said.
And just as fast as the heat wave started within Annie, the sensation disappeared. That’s what being empathic was about. The feelings showed up. They created havoc. They left. And Annie dealt with the fall-out. “What’s up, Mom?” She asked.
“Oconomowoc is having an extra special Fourth of July celebration. The town is hosting a statewide baking contest. They were looking for celebrity judges and, of course, I thought of you. Almost famous after your recent brush with the law.”
Oh, that was what “heavy petting” was called these days. “That’s nice of you.” Annie threw the kitchen towel into a laundry hamper in the corner of the room.
“I called all my friends. We voted for you. I just got word—Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Pies Contest picked you to be a celebrity judge! Can you believe your good fortune?”
Alert! Abort mission! Danger, stranger! The warnings bounced off each other as they rattled around Annie’s brain. Traveling back to Oconomowoc during tornadoes, ninety-nine degree weather with ninety-nine percent humidity on a national holiday weekend did not seem like good luck. More like a recipe for disaster.
“That’s four days away, Mom. I can’t just pick up and leave L.A. for a week. I have work. A life. A cat. I have… (A sizzling new boyfriend who needs a little, um, nurturing…) I have important things in L.A. I must attend to.”
Theodore, Annie’s long-haired, blue-eyed Himalayan wound around her legs, meowing loudly. Annie stepped into her kitchen, cracked open a can of cat food. She emptied it into his bowl and placed it on the floor. He pounced on it.
“Lost Angeles will always be there. Unfortunately. You need to come home and reconnect with your roots. The contest guaranteed first-class travel accommodations and tons of media coverage. Maybe this will help you break out of that deli you’re slaving in. You could start your own business again. And bonus, you can bring one friend for free. As long as it’s not She-Who-Cannot-Keep-Her-Legs-Together.”
“Mom, be nice. Julia’s completely changed since high school.”
“And I’ve got beachfront property on sale for pennies on the dollar. You haven’t been home in almost a year. I could die tonight and you would never forgive yourself.”
How bad could a trip back home to judge a baking contest be? “Okay, Mom. I’ll do it. Tell the Wisconsin Hot Pies Contest people I’ll do it. Send me the info, the tickets and the itinerary.”
“I already accepted on your behalf. The package should be on your doorstep tomorrow. This will be your best trip back home ev—” Nancy said.
Annie picked up the phone from the machine and put it to her ear. “Mom?” She smacked the phone with the heel of her hand. “Mom?” But the line was dead.
2
Already blew it
It was nighttime in Venice, California. Annie’s place was smack dab in the ’hood. A woman screamed loud and long. A grisly murder? A drug deal gone bad? Or simply an average Jane who couldn’t deal with the traffic or gas prices in Los Angeles one second longer?
Annie voted for the latter as she chopped limes on a wooden block and poked the wedges into the open tops of cervezas frias. She walked the few feet into her living room and handed them to her best friends, Julia and Grady. They sprawled on her couch and watched TV.
“Share the remote, please,” Julia said, a curvaceous late thirties blonde. She snapped her fingers at Grady. “If I see one more ep of Nancy Grace, I swear I’ll put a fork in someone’s eye. Probably yours.”
Grady held the remote up high in the air past Julia’s reach. “Promise that I don’t have to watch a Housewife, a Kardashian or one of those fake blondes with the fish lips who slept with Hefner.”
Julia pouted. “But I heart Holly.”
“Promise,” Grady insisted.
“Fine,” she grumbled.
He handed Julia the remote. She flipped to The Bachelorette.
“Nooo!”
“What kind of sicko doesn’t believe in true love?” Julia huffed.
Grady sighed and his shoulders dropped. “You have anything to eat around here?”
“I’m perfecting margarita-inspired cupcakes.” Annie swirled the frosting on the cupcakes so there were little dips and swells. She knew they tasted great. She wanted them to look gorgeous as well. She winked at Grady. He was handsome and smart in a film geek kind of way. But he batted for the other team and she was more than fine with that. “Feedback, please.”
She handed them cupcakes. They noshed enthusiastically.
“Outstanding,” Grady said.
“1800 Tequila?” Julia asked.
Annie knew Julia had met many “friends” and experienced too-many-to-count, let-alone-remember fun make-out sessions, all thanks to 1800 Tequila.
“You inspired me,” Annie said. “I might even name this cupcake, The Julia 1800 Smooch. Hey, I’m headed back home for a dealie on the Fourth. I’ve got one extra ticket.” She waved the official “Friends of Oconomowoc” eight by ten envelope in front of them.
Grady waved back at her. Annie tossed him the envelope. He caught it. Opened and perused its contents.
“What’s the dealie that could force you go back to Wisconsin in the summer?” Julia asked. “Your hair frizzes, your skin breaks out. I’ve never seen you crabbier than when it’s ninety-nine degrees out with ninety-nine percent humidity.”
“Mom signed me up as a judge in Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Pies Contest,” Annie said. “Sweet, huh? Apparently she thinks that after my “brush with the law” I’m a local celeb.”
“Did you share what your “brush with the law” really entails?” Julia asked.
Annie smiled and thought about Rafe and icing.
“Thanks for the super fun offer but I have to pass,” Julia said. “I’m definitely working that weekend. Another Smooch cupcake, please.”
Annie tossed Julia a cupcake, which she caught.
Grady flipped through the paperwork. He frowned at first. Then he smiled. “Um, Annie?”
“Yes, you can have another cupcake too.”
“I’ll skip the cupcake, but I’ll take you up on your offer to be your Plus One at the July 4th dealie,” Grady said.
“Sold!” Annie said.
Julia eyed Grady suspiciously. “You’re hiding something from me.” She zeroed in on the contents of the envelope that lay in Grady’s lap and lunged for them. But Grady hugged the envelope and its contents to his chest and curled up into a ball on the couch.
“Give!” Julia tickled him.
“You already blew it.” He giggled.
“That’s the title of Julia’s future memoir,” Annie said, dang curious what this fight was about.
Julia wrestled the paperwork away from Grady, leapt off the couch and leaned back against Annie’s front door while she flipped through the pages. Her face turned white. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“What? What!” Annie asked as Theodore cowered on the floor, his head hidden under her couch while the rest of his fat long fuzzy body stuck out.
“Your mom didn’t sign you up to be a celeb judge for a Hot Pies Contest,” Julia said. “She signed you up to be a judge for Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Guys Contest. You’re going to get up-close-and-personal access to the most smokin’ guys in the Dairy State. I am so your Plus One.”
“Hot guys?” Annie asked. “How could Mom get that confused with—?”
“Get real!” Julia said. “Has anything changed since high school? I formally accept your invite to accompany you back to Oconomowoc for the Fourth of July festivities.”
“No, no, Missy,” Grady said. “You have to work, remember? You already passed. I am a more deserving Plus One than you.”
Their bickering escalated as Annie contemplated what her mom had done. So what if the contest was about Hot Guys instead of Hot Pies? Did it matter? She was already happily involved with Raphael Campillio, her own personal hot guy. It was a chance to visit home on the cheap. She’d get in. See her family. Do the judging thing. She’d get out.
Really, how difficult could it be?
Grady won the coin toss and got to be Annie’s Plus One. But Julia was not about to let an event this tantalizing slip through her twitchy fingers. She snagged a couple of vacation days from work and planned to cash in a hunk of frequent flier mileage she’d inherited from her stepdad.
Annie asked for a week off work, and her boss gave it to her. Even though her mom insisted she stop slaving at Mort Feinberg’s Famous Deli, Mort was simply the nicest boss she’d ever had. She had finally graduated from the deli’s Back Back Kitchen to the Back Kitchen. Not that it really mattered. She still dressed like a beekeeper, baked desserts all day long and got hit on by guys half her age. There were worse ways to make a living.
After a romantic tryst that involved dark chocolate and peanut butter, Annie told Rafe that her Mom had signed her up to judge a hometown contest. She’d be back in L.A. in no time.
There was just one small glitch. Apparently Rafe had planned to introduce her to his family at their family reunion on the July 4th extended weekend. Annie didn’t know this before she made her travel decisions. Now she felt awful. “Should I cancel?”
“No. Go home and see your family. Family’s important,” he said. “Besides, with the contest, it’s a free trip. You can’t beat it. You can meet my crazy relatives some other time.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I feel bad.”
“Do you have old boyfriends you’re dying to see back home?” Rafe asked.
“That would be a definite, no,” Annie said.
“So you’ve got nothing to feel bad about,” he said and kissed her. “Don’t forget me when you’re gone.”
“I could never forget you,” Annie said.
It was the morning of June 29th. Annie’s luggage was packed. Small liquidy things were stored in see-through plastic bags that could easily be tossed into a plastic container for a trip through the airport’s X-ray machines.
Julia and Grady convened at Annie’s place, as it was closest to the LAX airport. Grady ordered the cab, which screeched to a stop in front of Annie’s 1950s style apartment complex and honked twice.
Annie had her obligatory carry-on. Her one big suitcase was stuffed with all the makeup, hair products and fancy outfits she’d assumed she’d need to be a contest judge. She’d never been a judge before, but had watched enough seasons of American Idol and X-Factor to know Paula, Nicole, Kara and J-Lo were totally glam.
After a little drama about how many suitcases Julia could bring (she’d packed four) they piled into the cab’s back seat and were on their way.
Annie frowned. “I hope Theodore’s going to be okay while I’m gone. The cat sitter seems nice but a little flighty.” Annie spotted an eerie blue light emanating from the passenger seat next to the taxicab driver. The light turned into wisps of blue smoke that twisted around each other. They wove back and forth, curlicued around each other, grew thicker and finally coalesced. In their midst a familiar shape of a tall half-naked blue man wearing a silver thong took form. That man was the ghost of Dr. Derrick Fuller.
Derrick shook his immaculate head of thick, albeit dead, groomed hair and glanced down at his silver thong. “Well, congratulations to me! Not only do I look superb, just like I did before I died, but if there are no limos available and I am forced to ride in a cab, at least now I can sit in the front. Not be stuck in that disgusting, germ-ridden, vinyl back seat located behind the smudged I-doubt-it’s-bullet-proof Plexiglas partition.”
“Whatever, Derrick,” Annie said. Great, she thought. She was headed out of town to be a judge at a beauty pageant. The last thing she needed right now was the narcissistic ghost of the self-help author-guru who not only ruined her marriage, tanked her bakery business when he was killed with one of her signature cupcakes, but then haunted her to solve his crime. And when she finally nailed his killer, asshat Derrick Fuller still didn’t pass to the Afterlife.
“Derrick’s here?” Grady asked and eyeballed the cab’s interior.
“You told him that he can’t come to Wisconsin with us, right, Annie?” Julia rifled through her purse. “Who needs a blue ghost in a silver thong when there are so many red-blooded live men? I can’t find my lip plumper. I think I forgot my lip plumper.”
“No, Derrick’s not coming to Wisconsin with us,” Annie said. “He’s working very hard on performing good deeds so he can pass to the Afterlife.”
“Say the word and I’ll try my best to travel with you,” Derrick said. “It might count as a good deed.”
“The word is No.”
“You’ll miss me in Wisconsin, cupcake,” Derrick said. “A disaster or debacle will ensue. You’ll be pulling your cheaply dyed hair out of your large head as you frantically attempt to reach me for advice. But I will be too busy helping other people.”
“I will have you know my hair dye costs $8.99 a box,” Annie said.
“What if the recycled airplane air sucks the hydration from my lips and I arrive looking wrinkled?” Julia asked. “Do you think they have lip plumper at the airport stores?”
“What airline?” the cab driver asked as he turned onto Lincoln Boulevard heading south toward LAX.
“One second.” Grady flipped through their itinerary. “Damn! Excuse me, driver. Pull over for a moment, please?”
The cabbie pulled to the side of the crowed zooming six-lane thoroughfare. “Meter running, you know.”
“What’s up?” Annie asked.
“We’re going back for my lip plumper?”
“We’re not leaving from LAX.” Grady grimaced.
“Long Beach?” Annie asked.
“John Wayne Airport?” Julia chimed in.
“No,” Grady said.
Julia’s Margarita Smooch Cupcakes
-
Yield = 12 cupcakes
Ingredients:
-
-
1/2 stick butter (1/4 cup) softened
-
1 cup granulated sugar
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2 eggs – room temperature
-
.75 Tsp vanilla extract
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3 Tbsp canola oil
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One large lime, zested
-
-
1.5 cups cake flour
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.75 Tsp baking powder
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.5 Tsp baking soda
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1/4 Tsp salt
-
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3 Tbsp tequila
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3 Tbsp lime juice
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1/2 cup sour cream
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1/2 cup milk
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line standard-size muffin pans with paper liners.
Cream butter and sugar together 5 minutes or until smooth. Add vanilla then add eggs one at a time. Add tequila and lime juice. Mixture will look curdled. Add oil.
In a separate bowl combine dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and pudding mix. Add zest.
In a small bowl, whisk together 1/2 cup milk and sour cream thoroughly
Add dry and milk/sour cream mixtures to the mixing bowl in two additions, scraping down sides and bottom of bowl. Mix until smooth.
Divide the batter evenly between the prepared liners, filling each about two-thirds full.
Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 18 to 20 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through baking. Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Margarita Frosting Ingredients:
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4 oz. butter, room temperature
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4 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
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2 cups powdered sugar
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1 tablespoon lime juice
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2 tablespoons tequila
Frosting Instructions:
Add butter and 1/2 of the powdered sugar to large mixing bowl. Combine on low speed.
Add tequila and lime juice and gradually add remaining powdered sugar. Once combined, increase mixer speed and whip until light and fluffy. Add additional powdered sugar if stiffer consistency is desired. Garnish with lime wedge and sprinkle of sea salt.
Recipe courtesy of Cupcakes-A-Go-Go in Madison, Wisconsin. Co-Owner – Laura Devries (Address, store hours and links at book’s end.)
3
Hoofing it
Annie pulled her wheelie suitcase as she looked up at the Blackhoof Bus Station sign in downtown L.A, located square in the middle of skid row. The scorching summer desert sun blasted down on her and seared every pore on her face. “You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me!” She held one hand high overhead and attempted to shade her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Grady said. “When I saw it was the Hot Guys Contest, I totally blanked on the location of our departing venue.”
“Midwest Airlines versus Blackhoof Busline?” Annie asked. “The pristine pain-in-the-ass security riddled gargantuan airport versus the teensy urine and taco scented bus station in downtown L.A.?”
“Again,” Grady said, “I might have experienced a tiny brain fart.”
Julia yanked enormous black sunglasses out of her over-sized designer purse and slid them on her face. “You all stay out here and acquire a little more sun damage. I’m going inside to buy my ticket. Then I’m hitting the pharmacy across the street for lip plumper and some SPF 60. Because when I hit fifty, I want to continue to look thirty, darlings.” She walked off.
Two days later, Annie watched Julia and Grady as they practically melted down the bus’s stairs in front of her.
Julia’s hair was in a bun that stuck to her skull and didn’t budge.
“Hey, look Julia,” Grady said. “Your head’s been Saran-Wrapped.”
Julia flipped him the appropriate finger.
Annie clomped down the bus’s enormous stairs and glanced around at their destination. It was hard to miss the banner hanging from the station’s roof, “Welcome to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Home of Lac LaBelle: Stay and Play a While!” It was a hundred degrees outside and felt like a steam room inside of a sweat lodge.
The bus driver quickly unloaded the passengers’ bags and set them on the curb. Arriving passengers walked past travelers who wiped their dripping brows as they boarded the bus. One big fellow wearing a muscle T-shirt was red as a tomato, wet like he’d just taken a shower and looked like he might explode at any second.
“So help me God, if this is what that flippin’ brochure meant by ‘Hot Guys,’ I will kill someone.” Julia pinched Grady’s arm.
“Ow. Is there some reason you always have to take it out on me?” he asked.
“Yes. You’re always the closest.”
“I learned the hard way back in high school not to be anywhere in arms’ length of Julia when she’s crabby,” Annie said.
“Grady, be a love and help me with my luggage.” Julia tossed her carry-on over her shoulder. “Where’s the nearest AC?” She fanned herself and headed for the bus station’s front doors.
Grady wiped his glistening face with a tissue. Its remnants stuck to his two-day face stubble like TP on the bottom of someone’s shoe. “Why should I help?”
“Because you always do,” Julia said.
He sighed, grabbed Julia’s three other bags, as well as his one, and stumbled after her. “My back hurts. I’m not having fun yet.”
“I didn’t force you to come here.” Annie ran her hands through her hair which felt as sticky and crusty as an old cinnamon Danish.
As she searched for her suitcase in the smallish line of bags perched on the curb she felt a zit erupt on her forehead. An old hunched geezer toddled off with his blue suitcase. A tatted teenage girl grabbed her enormous backpack, hoisted it onto her shoulders and hiked away. There were only four suitcases left on the curb. But none of them were hers.
“Where’s my suitcase?” Annie started to panic. That bag had all of her fancy contest judge clothes, as well as her makeup, yoga mat, and her book, How Not to Stress.
The bus huffed, puffed and lumbered out of the parking lot. Her bag had to still be on it. She frowned. “Stop!” She chased after the bus. “You have my luggage!”
But the bus didn’t slow down. It belched a big puffy gray cloud of exhaust smoke into Annie’s face. She coughed and stumbled after it.
“Stop! I need my fancy clothes! I beg you, please!” Her eyes teared.
An older van, with a satellite dish on its roof and a green and yellow sign emblazoned with “WNOC,” screeched into the Blackhoof parking lot. It barely missed Annie and separated her from the bus and her luggage.
“No!” Annie smacked her palm on her forehead.
A coiffed thin young woman with teased big blonde highlighted hair that hadn’t wilted from the heat stepped out of the van’s door. She wore a tight Ralph Lauren knock-off summer suit, clutched a microphone and strode toward Annie. The woman glanced back at the van as an older schlubby blond man eased out the driver’s door carrying a video camera. “Olaf, pick up the pace, my strudel,” she said.
Olaf grunted, bent down and rubbed his knee. “Yeah there, Stephanie,” he said. “Right after my third double bypass.”
Annie watched the bus rumble, puff and belch away with her luggage and everything she needed to be a contest judge. How could she do this gig without all her proper clothing and accessories? She couldn’t. She hunched over and covered her eyes with her hands.
“Yay!” Stephanie jumped up and down in front of Annie and clapped like a cheerleader. “You’re Annie Graceland Piccolino in the flesh.”
“Annie Graceland.” She stood back up. “I’m losing the Piccolino forever when my divorce finalizes.” She hacked. Her mouth tasted like she’d been sucking on an exhaust pipe. “So nice to meet you, but I have a wardrobe emergency. The bus just left with my luggage and I’m a judge—”
“You’re a judge in the Hot Guys Contest! You’re one of my inspirations,” Stephanie said. “A local girl who made it good.”
“More like made it semi-medium,” Annie said. “But thanks.”
“I had to be the first to welcome you back. I’m Stephanie Storms and I officially represent WNOC, the local premiere cable news station.” She grabbed Annie’s free hand and shook it enthusiastically.
“Awesome to meet you.” Annie extricated her hand from Stephanie’s zealous grip.
“Olaf-kins,” Stephanie said. “Contact HQ. Tell them to send the intern to intercept the No.154 bus on its way toward Appleton and search for Annie Graceland’s luggage. Top priority.”
Olaf sighed and pulled out his Blackberry.
“That’s sweet of you,” Annie said. “Tell me that thing’s not on?” She pointed at the mic.
“Not until Olaf gets here,” Stephanie replied. “Professional courtesy. But honestly, I would very much appreciate a heads up on the dishy details during the Hot Guys’ Contest.”
Annie frowned. How was it possible Stephanie hadn’t broken a sweat while Annie’s complexion was most likely gray from the exhaust smoke and she sported armpit stains that headed toward her knees? “Don’t know. The contest people might have rules or conditions about press leaks that I don’t know yet.”
Stephanie opened her timeless Coach bag and pulled out several documents.
Stephanie had a vintage Coach bag? Annie loved Coach.
“I thought of that,” Stephanie said. “Legal at WNOC drafted this document that grants you permission to share color commentary contest information with me. As you can see, the Wisconsin’s Hot Guys’ contest president signed here, the VP here, and legal counsel, here.” She pointed to their signatures.
“Oh.” Annie scanned the documents and felt a stab of envy that she wasn’t that organized.
“Obviously you can’t share voting results with me, but you’re not privy to that information anyhow. This copy’s for you. You can call the station and speak to my supervisor if you have any questions.”
“Okay,” Annie said. “Let me get settled at my hotel and give me a shout. Especially if you find my luggage.”
“Absolutely!” Stephanie jumped up and down. “This will be, like, so much fun!”
Annie wanted to bond with Stephanie, so she managed a hop. When she heard a tiny but robust engine rev and a couple of pop-pop-pops.
In Venice, California, those metallic sounding pops could be auto backfire, gunfire or fireworks. Right now in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, they were gunfire. A dirt bike sped through the Blackhoof parking lot. Its driver, a smaller leather-clad figure wearing a helmet aimed a handgun at Annie and Stephanie.
Stephanie heard the gunfire and screamed. Annie tackled her. They landed on the pavement—Annie smack dab on top of Stephanie and sweating like a married politician sneaking out of a cheap motel room. How was it possible Stephanie still hadn’t broken a sweat? Was she a creature from another world that was secretion-less?
Pop-pop-pop! More gunshots rang out.
Annie caught a glimpse of the bike’s skinny wheels and heard the squeal of rubber on blacktop as the driver pulled a Youie and sped off. “You okay?” Annie asked as her heart raced.
“Frick!” Stephanie said. “I mean, dang. Except for the fact your knee might be in my kidney, I think so. Is Olaf okay? Tell me Olaf’s okay. He’s the only cameraman I have access to.”
Annie looked over her shoulder. Olaf had one knee on the ground and his camera aimed at the fleeing biker. “Hot damn!” he said. “This is what news should be.”
Instead of relaxing at the contest’s swank accommodations at The Lake Lodge on the shores of Lac La Belle and sampling its many luxurious amenities, Annie spent her first morning and afternoon back in Oconomowoc at the city police station.
Neither Grady nor Julia had witnessed the shooting. They were briefly questioned, quickly released and cabbed it to the lodge. Julia was probably getting a mani/pedi and Grady writing a treatment for a screenplay about the driveby gunshot incident, even though he hadn’t seen it.
Annie sat on a plastic chair in a tiny sterile air-conditioned squad room waiting to be interviewed by a local police officer. She put her head on the metal table in front of her. She should have followed her instincts. Something warned her not to come back. There wasn’t even a dead body and she was already in a police station. She banged her head on the table several times.
The door to the interrogation room swung opened. “A smart girl once told me that head banging should be reserved for punk rockers who don’t care about losing brain cells,” a man said, “—because they’ve already lost theirs.”
Annie raised her head off the table. A tall, built, early thirties, dirty-blond man walked into the room. She blinked. Maybe the Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, PD had a time machine warp room, because the guy resembled a younger Brad Pitt.
“Annie Graceland. It’s been a couple of years, hasn’t it?” the man asked.
She squinted at him. He was handsome in that high cheek boned blue-eyed kind of way. And he looked familiar. “I have no idea, mister…?”
“Detective,” he said, pulled out a chair on the opposite side of the table from her, sat down and smiled. “How are you?”
That wasn’t the first question she expected to be asked by an Oconomowoc detective. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
“I’m dehydrated, haven’t slept in three days. I have a contusion on my knee from rescuing this Stephanie TV person.” She raked her fingers through her hair. “My hair might have worms. My luggage with all my clothes and important business stuff is missing and I’m seriously wondering if I’ve made a really bad decision coming back to Wisconsin on a holiday weekend. Why do you look so familiar?”
“Stephanie’s a hometown pain. We’ve been hoping and praying for years that she’ll head to bigger pastures.” The detective got up, walked to a mini fridge in the room’s corner and opened it. He snagged a bottle of water from the fridge and a blue bag from the freezer. He walked back and pressed the ice pack onto her knee. “This will decrease swelling and stop your new bruise from becoming a big one.”
She shuddered and felt something chilly, wet and slimy slither down her back. She shook her head. The Officer hadn’t placed an ice pack anywhere near her back. Just on her knee. “Thanks.” She was having an empathic reaction. Oh, frick.
“You’re overly tired and will probably sleep like the dead tonight after you spend a couple of hours with Nancy.”
How did he know about her mother, Nancy? Right. She was back home. Everyone knew everybody in smallish midwestern towns.
“Your hair could use a wash,” he said. “But I don’t see any worms wiggling onto your shoulders.”
She shuddered and involuntarily flinched. “That’s a good thing.”
The detective handed her a big bottle of electrolyte-enhanced Lac LaBelle Mineral Water. “Drink this.”
She chugged the water. Immediately felt a little better. “Thanks. I have to help host opening ceremonies for a contest tonight. No time to see my mom until after.”
“Got it,” he said. “In regards to you coming back here for July 4th—we’ll be arresting our obligatory roster of idiots. Drinking and driving, drinking and boating, drinking and drinking, illegal fireworks, a couple of car crashes, a few druggies, and of course the town flasher. What were you thinking coming back for a summer holiday?” The man leaned back in his chair and regarded her.
Annie took a swig of water and stared at him. “I was thinking I’d see my family. I wasn’t thinking I’d end up at the local P.D. when I haven’t even broken a single law. What’s your name, detective, and why do you look familiar?”
“My name’s Detective Jamie Ryan,” he said. “You babysat me when you were in high school and I was ten.”
Good God, it all rushed back and flooded her noggin’, filling up all the little wrinkles and crevices in her brain like a tsunami. Little Jamie Ryan with his skateboards, dogs, video games and addiction to Harry Potter books. Goofball Jamie Ryan, who used to stick tadpoles down her back and giggle so hard he’d lose his breath. He had grown into Detective Jamie Ryan with the dangerous crystal blue eyes.
“Oh. Right. I babysat a lot of kids,” she said. “You grew up nice, Jamie. I mean you grew up to be a law-abiding, nice young man, Detective Jamie Ryan.”
“You grew up nice, too, Annie,” he said. “Sorry about the tadpole thing. I was a little obsessed with girls and frogs back then.”
Annie knew that statement described the majority of boys. She slugged back some more water. “I’m a judge at—”
“Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Guy Contest,” he said. “Technically I’m in favor of the contest. But honestly a little concerned it will objectify men.”
Annie burst out giggling. “You’re still hilarious.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Like every single beauty contest for women doesn’t objectify them?”
“Well… but… kind-of…it’s completely different.”
“Ha-ha! Hiding any frogs, buddy?” Annie laughed so hard she clutched her stomach. And then like any pageant judge, she pulled it together. “I’ve got to be at work by six p.m. What do you need to know?”
“Let’s start with the idiot shooter in the parking lot.”
There really wasn’t that much to tell him. A couple of gunshots that seemed to be aimed at Stephanie. The shooter was a person on a dirt bike who wore leather in ninety-nine degree weather and, therefore, must be completely deranged. Since Annie had never met Stephanie until today, she had no idea who would want to harm her.
Annie then mentioned her luggage was either stolen or still on the No.154 Blackhoof Bus headed towards Appleton, Wisconsin.
“Did you have a chance to fill out a missing luggage—”
“No,” she said. “That’s when I nearly got run over and the shooting started.”
“I’ll handle that for you,” Jamie said. “Make some calls.”
“Thank you.”
“You need a ride?” Jamie eyeballed her.
A memory popped into Annie’s head like it was yesterday. Jamie’s folks hired her to babysit and dog walk while they attended a Clean the Lakes event at the supper club. Sixteen-year-old Annie walked their German shepherd down their long blacktop driveway surrounded by thick woods.
Half way down the blacktop, ten-year-old Jamie burst out of the bushes on his skateboard dressed like a ninja warrior. He yelled, “Hai Ku!” and spooked Sasha the dog, who bolted toward the woods like she was possessed. Annie tried to hold onto her leash, but ended up falling onto her butt and dragged down the sloping pavement.
“Sasha, no!” she yelled over and over, finally letting go of the leash. The dog stopped its panicked flight, panted heavily and looked at her, confused. She padded back to Annie who lay face up, her legs half on the driveway and the rest of her in the leaves and moldy dirt. Sasha leaned in and licked her face.
Annie gained a nasty case of road burn on her toucas as well as her first exfoliating dog-wash facial. Jamie wheeled up to her on his skateboard, held out his chubby pre-pubescent hand and said, “Hey, lady. Need a ride?”
“No, thanks.” She spit out a few dog hairs. “I think I’ll wing it.”
Now Annie looked at Jamie’s hand. It was muscular. Had long fingers. A couple of scars. No wedding band. “No thanks,” she said. “I think I’ll wing it.”
It was late afternoon when Annie left the Police Department clutching her fourth bottle of mineral water, her Coach purse and her tote. She walked out the double doors into the parking lot and called Rafe on her cell. His voicemail answered and she felt a little sad. “Raphael. It’s Annie. I miss you. We’re officially in Wisconsin. Yay! A little drama. Fill you in later. I hope all is great in your world. Mwah!”
Annie craved a bath, a salt scrub and possibly a delousing. She spotted a vintage baby blue Cadillac convertible polished to an impossible shine turn into the police parking lot.
Her mom owned three cars. One was an ancient clunker. Another was an inexpensive newer model that got great gas mileage. But the vintage blue Caddie was Nancy’s favorite, which she only unveiled on special occasions.
But a strange woman with bright red, short spiked hair, sporting enormous dark sunglasses and hot red lipstick was behind the wheel. Not her mom.
Annie’s mom was blonde, had always been blonde, even though now technically she should be silver. The Cadillac’s driver looked like her mom’s younger wild cousin, Gert. The one who ran off twenty years ago to Lithuania with the crazy artist dude.
“Annie Graceland!” The firecracker red-headed woman hollered. “I can’t believe I had to find out on the WNOC news that you landed in town.”
“Gert?” Annie asked. “How’s Lithuania and where’s Mom?”
“First things first.” The woman put the Cadillac in park. Turned off its engine and tossed Annie the car keys. “Put your suitcase in the trunk. Only one tiny bag?”
“I had a tote and one large suitcase.” Annie placed her tote into the trunk and slammed the car’s trunk. “Blackhoof lost my most important bag. All my beautiful pageant outfits were in it. Without them, people will think I’m an idiot. A moron. A loser.” She got in the passenger seat and handed the keys back to the glamorous older redhead who fired up the engine. “So, when’d you get back in town, Gert? And where’s mom?”
The woman cracked a smile and instead of backing up to exit, circled the Cadillac slowly around the parking lot and waved to several police officers in uniform. “Gert left that whack-a-doodle artist and moved with her younger boyfriend to a nudist colony in Costa Rica years ago. She opened a Mr. Softie Custard shop on the beach. Made a fortune. Thanks for the compliment. But I’m not Gert.”
Oh, my God, Annie thought and stared at the woman. The firecracker wasn’t Gert. It was her mom, Nancy, with radically new hair, something different about her face, but the same attitude. “Mom?” she asked. “Are you all right? Do you have a disease? Do we need to go to Mayo clinic? I swear we’ll figure it out together.”
Nancy waved her hand. “I’m fine.”
“What happened?” Annie asked.
Her mom laughed. “Seventy happened, darling.” She revved the engine and gunned it. Annie flew back into the cushy Caddie seat as they squealed out of the parking lot. “And seventy is the new fifty.”
4
Time Of Our Lives
Annie’s mom pulled onto the two-lane street. The lake side had a wide grassy shoulder. The opposite side swept past houses, driveways, and relatively thin grassy shoulders that dipped down into leaf filled mossy ditches. “Like, wow,” Annie said. “You didn’t tell me you had some work done.”
“I haven’t told a soul except for my Wild Women’s Group. I wanted a little tiny uplifting so my face and my spirits matched. It’s called a ‘Time-of-Life’ lift. Minimal cutting. Local anesthesia. You can go back to work in three days!”
“You don’t work.”
“You can go back to Bible Study in three days!” Nancy tapped her finger on her cheek that was closest to Annie. “Daughter’s kiss goes right here.”
Annie smooched her mom’s freshly minted face. It was still her mom and it felt warm and wonderful. Like mini-marshmallows in hot chocolate. “Are you driving me to the Lake Lodge?”
A tiny frown squirmed its way onto Nancy’s face. “Yes, dear. Considering I haven’t seen you in a year, I’m more than happy to pick you up like a Tibetan Sherpa and schlep you to your destination.”
“The contest’s opening ceremonies are tonight.” Annie looked at her watch. “We’ll have a ton of downtime to catch up and hang out and—what time is it here?”
“I stopped keeping track of time a while ago.” Nancy hard turned the steering wheel to the right and whipped the Caddie onto the picturesque, tree-lined, two-lane road that circled Lac LaBelle. “Gloria, my Wild Women’s tribal leader, says when you count time all it does is make you depressed that so much has passed. We should simply pay attention to where the sun is in the sky.” Nancy eyeballed the sun. “I’d say it’s about five-ish.”
Wild Women? Tribal leader? Five-ish? Oh shit. Opening ceremonies for Wisconsin’s first annual Hot Guy Contest started at six p.m. Annie was exhausted. Once she realized they were taking the bus, she had planned on a nap as well as plenty of downtime to prepare before the opening ceremonies. Annie reached up and tilted the rearview mirror toward her and gazed into it. She looked like a creature who had just escaped the third realm of hell.
She had fresh pink zits, grimy hair and errant eyebrow hairs that were attempting to unite in the uni-brow look she sported in junior high. This would not do. She was a pageant judge. She was supposed to look coiffed and glamorous. Somewhat like Paula Abdul. Or Stephanie.
“Hurry, please. Pedal to the metal, Mom. Remember the multiple conversations we’ve had about how slow drivers can be as dangerous as fast ones?” Annie pulled out her cell phone and hit one number for speed dial.
“I was only driving slowly because I lost my license a couple of months ago.” Nancy punched the gas.
Annie’s head started throbbing and she felt the one visible vein on her forehead pulse. She placed her phone to her ear.
“Hot Guys Central. How can I be of service?” Julia purred on the line’s other end.
“I’ve been at the police station the entire day, my suitcase is stolen or missing. No bitchin’ clothes for the contest, no makeup, no fancy hair doo-dads. Mom picked me up and we’re headed for the lodge. I’ve got to look presentable and coiffed like a beauty pageant judge in approximately forty-five minutes. Tell me that you and Grady have had less than three drinks apiece and can save my ass?”
The Caddie’s engine revved. Her Mom swerved down the middle of the two-lane road that curved around the lake. Small non-suicidal forest animals dodged its wheels and dove for safety.
“Hold on,” Julia said. “Grady, put the strawberry daiquiris in the fridge.”
“But I just picked the berries from the Lodge’s garden,” he whined.
“They’ll keep. Annie needs us to be kind-of sober.”
“Then why are we on a road trip to Wisconsin? I don’t know anyone who vacays in Wisconsin who stays kind-of sober.”
“Save the drama for Los Angeles,” Julia said. “God knows that town needs it like oxygen.”
Annie’s heart skipped a beat ’cause in that statement she knew Julia was re-connecting with her Midwestern roots.
“Julia?” Annie asked.
“We’re on it. Mission Pageant Judge. Heads up? Skip the lobby,” Julia said. “It’s packed with swooning women, men who aren’t frightened of who they really are, as well as those who are still in the closet. Park on the lake entrance. Between the wedding gazebo with the plastic white rose cascades and the Bait and Tackle shop with the enormous smiling trout. Take the back elevator to room 303. Do the secret knock.” She hung up.
“I don’t remember the secret knock!” Annie shouted into the phone as she and her mom in the Caddie blasted down Lac LaBelle Lane.
“I do,” Nancy said. “That’s the one Julia did on your bedroom window junior year in high school every time you were sneaking out to go to a party.”
“Oh, that secret knock,” Annie brain-strained for the memory. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, my only daughter.”
A little over an hour later, Annie teetered toward a conference table podium in the Lake Lodge’s packed ballroom. It was outfitted with a long white table skirt with red white and blue emblems celebrating the Contest. She knew the following: she flunked the secret knock three times until Julia threw open the door and yanked her inside.
Her friends stripped off Annie’s road clothes and pushed her into the shower. They ruthlessly scrubbed and exfoliated her from head to toe and even managed to shave her legs. Annie survived with just one bleeder—a nasty razor cut on her calf that would not clot.
She reached down and rubbed the drying blood over her leg in the hopes it would make her look tan, not like she needed to go to the ER.
Julia and Grady dried her off with multiple cushy three hundred-thread count lodge towels. They slapped sparkly self-tanning moisturizer on her entire body, plumped her lips, plucked her uni-brow, transforming it into two eyebrows, teased and sprayed her hair to enormous proportions, rimmed her eyes with kohl and made her drink two cups of coffee spiked with just a tad of Kahlua.
She squeezed into one of Julia’s spandex one-size-fits-all outfits—a skimpy off-the shoulder leopard print dress. And the absolute worst? They made her wear really tall heels. Everyone who ever met Annie knew she was petrified of tall heels.
Annie caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror in the hallway on the way to the ballroom. “I look like Tarzan’s girlfriend, Jane.”
“You’re welcome,” Julia said.
“I totally appreciate all your efforts, but you know I can’t walk in heels.” Annie wobbled, her arms extended out to her sides for support, as she pushed off the hallway’s walls.
“Own the heels, work the attitude and be the totally cool contest judge that we know you can be.” Julia grabbed Annie and smooched her on the cheek. “Kill them, babe.”
Grady smooched Annie on her other cheek. “I’m writing all this down you know.”
“Change my name this time,” Annie said.
“I changed it last time.”
“You called my semi-fictitious character Fannie Laceland. Everyone with half a brain figured it out.”
“Considering that spec script went nowhere, I think you’re still off Hollywood’s radar.”
Annie teetered toward the conference table where the other contest judges were already seated. She spotted Stephanie on the sidelines, picture perfect and posing in front of Olaf’s rolling camera. They were the only video camera crew in attendance. In L.A. this place would have been infested with news crews.
She couldn’t wait to meet her fellow judges. They were probably Nicole Scherzinger or J-Lo types. Gorgeous, hip, cool. She felt lucky to be included in their company. She took her seat at the conference table. Phew. She’d arrived. She hadn’t fallen. And she didn’t feel any bugs crawling in her enormous hair. Disaster averted.
An older woman sat next to Annie. She had silver hair, looked like someone’s beloved Nana and smelled like overly sweet roses that had been dipped in lilac
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an excerpt from
The Journeys of John and Julia:
Genesis, Book I
by Aurelia
LINE 1
The conference was scheduled to begin at 11:11 PM, sharp.
The conference room would appear at 11:00 PM behind the old amphitheater.
Eleven minutes would be plenty of time to get the invitations out and for everyone to arrive with time to spare.
It wasn’t really an invitation though, it was more like a directive and no RSVP was necessary. Everybody just had to appear. It was a duty. It was non-negotiable. It came with the territory and no one had ever questioned it.
It was highly unlikely for unwelcome visitors to show up in the area at that time – the sites of a conference were always chosen with the greatest efforts to that effect and the old amphitheater lay abandoned in the middle of a vast ancient forest with huge virgin growth trees. Most of them were more than a thousand years old, beholders of events almost too fantastic to believe. They say that the occasions on which human beings stumble into their midst are rare. They reason that a few old stones arranged in a half circle with a big slab of rock in the center and by no means spectacular enough to attract attention is all someone would see. They conclude the site is ideal.
On this particular moonless night, the creatures of the forest were the only witnesses to what was going to happen.
At exactly 11 o’clock, a slight movement disturbed the calm of the scene. In fact, it was more a blur than a movement, really. The dark night air behind the amphitheater became alive, quivered, warped, wobbled, emanated a strange hissing sound – all in astonishing disregard for the laws of physics. To the uninitiated however, it was no more than the wind in the trees. You had to strain your eyes really hard to notice the conference room emerging out of the empty space between the amphitheater and the bordering trees. It blended so well into the landscape that it was hard to determine whether it truly existed or if the remote forest in combination with a black night triggered the imagination into seeing things. Therefore, despite the fact that the absence of any human being could not be totally assured, the chances of being detected were negligible.
Any of the twenty-two members of the group could summon a conference, and each of them understood that this privilege was never to be abused. It was an unwritten rule that without a good reason – genuine or subjective – no one was allowed to initiate a meeting.
Actually, there were twenty-three associates, but everybody thought of the Siamese Twins as one person. They were not twins exactly – Siamese or otherwise – they were a couple.
Nobody though could recall them ever being apart and that fact had earned them their nickname.
Today Theodore Cliffton had placed the call. He was known to behave foolishly at times, but all his colleagues would show up anyway and the conference would happen, no matter who sent out the invitation.
Here he was, a young looking man, dressed in a uniquely patterned colorful shirt, khaki-shorts and sturdy hiking boots, a safari hat lying next to him. He sat on the center rock of the amphitheater, very still with his eyes closed, in deep concentration. Not a muscle on his entire body moved. He could have been part of the landscape – that’s how still he was. Just before he opened his eyes, he nodded to himself as if affirming something in his mind. Then he stretched his legs and got up.
As he looked in the direction of the conference room, an opening appeared in the wall closest to him. He knew he had only a few seconds to enter before the building shifted sixteen and one-third degrees counterclockwise and the door would disappear. He picked up his hat and swiftly moved through.
The nondescript exterior of the hall gave no clue of what was inside. The structure was round with a diameter of maybe fifty yards but held only one room. There were no windows, yet the room felt wide and airy. It had a high dome ceiling with all kinds of strange symbols painted on it. The walls were a funny looking metal structure – they resembled a gigantic honeycomb. The metal gave off an iridescent glow, filling the whole room with a soft, shimmering light. There was not a single door.
In the center of the room stood a huge round table with twenty-two high-backed chairs evenly spaced around it. They were beautifully crafted, and each of them looked slightly different, including one as wide as a bench.
Aha! That’s where the Siamese Twins will sit, Cliffton thought, while he performed his duties as host, inspecting the room making sure that everything was as it should be. His dazzling blue eyes reflected the luminescence all around him as he looked up to the ceiling with its many symbols and a pleased smile crawled over his face.
That same moment, as if responding to his smile, a magnificent red and golden feather separated from the ceiling and slowly descended towards him. It stopped only inches away from his head – then moved horizontally towards the table. It circled the table three times and finally came to rest on the back of one of the chairs. Merging with the wood, it created the impression of a chair with a red and golden feather painted on its backrest. Cliffton approached the table, pulled back the newly decorated chair and sat down. All he needed to do now was wait.
Because he had closed his eyes again, he missed what happened next. Twenty-one more symbols began one by one to protrude from the ceiling, slowly gliding towards the table and attaching themselves onto the chairs. Just like the feather had. There was a golden wand with pointed tips on each end, a beautifully woven piece of fabric that seemed to be nothing more than a radiant beam of moonlight in one moment and completely opaque like a pearl the next, a rose, a crystal ball, a pair of keys – to name just a few. Each of them found its place as if directed by some invisible force.
Would there have been a clock in the room, it would have shown that this whole affair was completed in less than thirty seconds. But time was of no consequence in these surroundings. Everything happened in a special rhythm the way it always had, the way it always must.
Theodore Cliffton’s silent contemplation was interrupted by a low purring sound. He opened his eyes and saw exactly what he expected to see: The humming noise meant the mysterious mechanisms of the hall were getting ready to allow the next person in.
Sure enough, just a little to his left, a door appeared and his esteemed colleague, Doctor Chester Magnussen, stepped into the room. He was a tall, ordinary looking man of middle age and seemed a little bogged down by the black pilot case he carried in his left hand. The eye-catching, ankle-length crimson cape he wore, gave his appearance a certain old-fashioned dignity and suggested that he had either been on his way to the opera or to a costume ball, when the invitation reached him.
“Hello Avi,” he said cordially, placing his bag on the table. He pulled out the chair next to Cliffton’s, the one with the golden wand on it. “Nice job you did selecting this site. Must have found it on one of your travels I reckon?”
Cliffton smiled. Avi was what his friends called him, and it was short for his nickname, The Adventurer. All of The Twenty-Two had known each other for what felt like eternity and with a few exceptions, they hardly ever bothered to use their real names.
“Hi Mac, good to see you again. How have you been?” Cliffton replied with his smile now reaching all the way to his voice. “I stumbled across it, while investigating some rumors about a Bigfoot living in these forests. Made me really curious. Only, then I got sidetracked with – oh listen,” he interrupted himself as the low humming sound started up once more.
“I know Avi,” Magnussen mumbled to himself, “of all your wonderful traits focus surely is not one of them.”
But Cliffton was no longer listening to him. He watched the door reappear just a little bit to the left from where it had been before, and a spectacularly beautiful woman, covered from head to toe in a long flowing gown, made of some shiny silver-blue material, walked in. Despite the fact that she was carrying a sizable ancient looking book, she moved with such easy grace that it seemed as if her feet didn’t even touch the ground. It was impossible to guess her age – one moment she looked like a young girl and then, only an instant later, as ancient as her book. But looks were of as little consequence in these surroundings as was time.
“Good evening MaDame” Magnussen welcomed the new arrival with greatest reverence. “May I help you with your book?”
“Oh come on Mac, don’t treat me as if I was an old grandmother.”
Mirra Prestessi shot Magnussen an icy look, as she threw the book on the table. “Besides, I know you know that I would not let you or anybody else handle the book even if I was feeble which I am not so thank you very much.”
“Ah Mirra,” Magnussen answered, an expression of alarm on his face, “it just makes me nervous to watch you throwing the book around the way you do. I think of all the things that could happen if – “
The arrival of more people interrupted their dispute, and soon the hall was filled with the humming of the appearing doors and the laughter of old friends.
Most of them were loosely in touch at any time, but for all of them coming together for a conference was a big deal nevertheless. They clearly enjoyed this opportunity to catch up. A beautiful lion with an impressive dark mane walked around the room greeting everyone by rubbing his gigantic head against their hips and was purring with pleasure like a kitten. He belonged to Leona Strong, and in her presence the big cat was usually well behaved.
At exactly 11:11 o’clock, everyone had taken their assigned seats according to the symbols on the backrest of the chairs, and the conference could begin. An anticipatory silence fell over the room.
Cliffton cleared his throat and got up.
“My dear friends,” he said, opening his arms wide in a gesture of warm welcome. “Thank you all for being here tonight.”
Then, true to his style, he jumped right to the heart of things without noteworthy preamble. “I must introduce a matter of great urgency. I was contacted by a girl. She is thirteen years old, her name is Julia and she is in dire need of our help. She is not aware of her reaching out, yet the emotional intensity of her wish to have a different life is so strong that I even lost interest in chasing that Bigfoot I have heard about. And there is no need for me to tell you how much Bigfoots mean to me. They are the sweetest creatures and they – “
Chester Magnussen realized, as did everyone else, that Cliffton was dangerously close to losing sight of the proposed subject and, finding his friend’s leg under the table, he gave him an as he hoped discrete, yet firm kick to the shin.
Thankfully, today this nonverbal suggestion was enough to bring Cliffton back to his proposition. He was filled with childlike curiosity and it was quite natural for him to explore any new situation at the snap of a finger. As consequence of such behavior, he lost himself as quickly in a labyrinth of stimuli. Needless to say, keeping up with him posed quite a challenge for his friends.
“Er – where was I? Er – yes, Julia. Her parents recently separated and a few months ago her Grandfather died. Her world is upside down and she suffers deeply. She wants to change but aside from getting her parents back together doesn’t know what and if she knew that, she wouldn’t know how. She is not aware of the fact that the emotional intensity of her sincere wish to have a life without pain and full of happiness is like a prayer. I can’t explain why but I strongly feel we must let her see that every prayer is answered and that reaching out is never ignored! So I invited you here to look into her case and to get your valued opinions, as to how we should proceed.”
Regardless of his little deviation into the world of Bigfoots, it had been an unusually lengthy speech for Cliffton, and this fact was enough to convince the group of the validity of his claim. Even before he sat back down, the group was already discussing the information. Everybody talked at once – someone even yelled across the table.
“Please please my dear Ladies and Gentlemen,” shouted a stern looking man over the noise. “Let’s have some discipline here.”
His steel-gray hair lay so tight around his head that it resembled a helmet. In combination with a beard that covered almost all of his face and a pair of bushy eyebrows, he looked as though he wore a visor. His piercing gray eyes rested briefly on each of the members as he glanced around the table. He radiated an aura of unmistakable authority. As if muted by remote control, there was instantaneous silence.
“Er – yes – thank you, Herr Kaiser,” said Cliffton, noticeably relieved that the burden of restoring order had been assumed by someone so much better suited to the task. “I shall gladly answer all of your questions regarding the case. However, I was hoping Mirra would be kind enough to help us get some clarity, by affording us a glimpse into her book first.”
Mirra Prestessi, at the moment wearing her young-girl-look, had not participated in the general conversation. She sat with her eyes shut and seemed to stare at the closed book in front of her. Any stranger would have thought it very odd at best, that someone could actually stare with their eyes closed, but the people in the room had long become accustomed to Mirra’s way of looking. A common joke among them was that she really possessed a thousand eyes and that she used her physical ones only as a show of social graces. Despite these efforts to not intimidate with her eccentricities, by far not everybody felt comfortable looking into her eyes.
Half the time they were of an unclouded dark blue that bordered on purple and inflicted a sensation of being pulled down into the frightening unknown of the deep sea on a calm day. The rest of the time, they changed to a silvery blue, reminiscent of a sheet of arctic ice or the smooth panel of a mirror. On these occasions, there was no way to penetrate their glassy surface and everything they looked upon was reflected back in a threateningly clear way. Whichever color they were, caught in the path of their gaze, even the most carefully projected mask, pretense or wall was stripped away. In the presence of those eyes was no room for any perception other than truth. Mirra Prestessi was a strange woman indeed.
Without anyone touching the book, it suddenly flew open. As if by magic its pages started to turn; slowly at first, picking up speed with every turn of the page, creating a delicate breeze that made Mirra’s dress move in patterns resembling the concentric circles of a stone thrown into a pond.
Everybody in the room watched the process with fixed attention. It always was such a treat to snatch a peek into Mirra’s book, and it was by no means certain for the book to comply in all cases. The level of excitement in the room could not get any higher without becoming audible even to human ears, when Mirra finally opened her eyes and the book came to a stop.
Anyone unfamiliar with the workings of the book might have wondered why it had stopped at two blank pages – but then again, said person could have flipped through the whole book without finding so much as a single dot of ink in it. To the uninitiated, the book contained nothing but innocent blank pages – page after page after page. Such a person might have thought the book an unused journal perhaps and his guess would not have been far off the mark. Just some journal he never dreamed to exist.
Although the members of the group were aware of the special powers the book possessed, Mirra was the only one able to obtain information from it without the help of Chester Magnussen. By nature of her being, she practically was the book. With those weird eyes of hers, she had seen everything that ever has happened and stored it in the book. And – as if this was not fantastic enough already – her eyes had seen everything that ever was going to happen and stored it in the book, too. And alongside everything that ever has happened or ever will happen, the book stored all the things that could have happened but never did and maybe never will, too. In short, Mirra’s book contained every imaginable possibility as well as every unimaginable probability – past, present and future.
No member of the group however, found this particularly noteworthy. After all, time was of no consequence in these surroundings. And in an environment where time is of no consequence, anything is possible.
“Well,” said Mirra while aging slowly and not minding it a bit, “looks like the book thinks there is something to Avi’s claim. Mac, would you please?”
Chester Magnussen was already on his feet, fiddling around in his pilot case. He was obviously looking for something.
“Somebody tell me what we want to accomplish here. Visual only? Tactile? The whole shebang?”
Although his questions were not addressed to anyone specific, everyone respected that this was Cliffton’s call – so he was in charge. For now, anyway.
“I suggest we first go into visual-audio-sensory-mode, Julia only, time vector alpha-457.9-present with some explanatory narrative for off-screen goings-on if necessary,” Cliffton answered, reading the numbers off a scrap of paper he had taken out of his shirt pocket. Aside from a pouch around his waist he never carried any baggage, but seemed to produce everything he needed miraculously from the depths of his shirt. “Based on what the book shows, we evaluate the data and then take it from there,” he continued, looking around the table for response. Everybody signaled agreement.
“Then this is all I need,” said Magnussen, pulling a bizarre looking object out of his bag. On first glance, it might have been no more than some ordinary stick; colorful and round with smooth edges on both ends, about twenty-two inches long.
On closer observation, the colors came to life; swirling shapes, moving in a dark-violet medium of peculiar viscosity bending and contorting with the motion of the shapes. So, although the idea seems extreme, it looked as if the wand contained a condensed version of the universe.
Magnussen removed his crimson cape to reveal the floor-length toga of dazzling white he wore underneath, held together by the most awesome belt in the form of a snake biting its tail. With a movement of his galaxy wand as swift as it was elegant, he touched the book, and one segment of the honeycomb-structured-wall lit up like a screen.
He slowly lowered himself back onto his chair, as if not to disturb the swirling motions of his wand. Mirra closed her eyes again – not out of any necessity, she just preferred to look with her eyes closed – and the honeycomb-wall-monitor displayed some static. From the metal frame around it, bright-green flashing characters indicated the marker ‘alpha-457.9-present-Julia-VAS/n’.
Magnussen adjusted the position of the wand with the tiniest tilt of his fingers, the static cleared, and the face of a pretty girl with light brown hair cascading in smooth curls just below her shoulders appeared on the screen. Her eyes had the subdued blue-green color of the ocean on a cloudy day. Specks of gold, scattered around the iris like motes of dust in a ray of afternoon sunlight, matched the healthy golden glow of her skin perfectly. Framed by long thick lashes, those eyes were the most outstanding feature in a face otherwise obscured by traits partly still belonging to the face of a child and partly already to that of a woman.
“May I introduce Julia,” said Cliffton, his voice vibrant with a tinge resembling the pride of a craftsman presenting his masterpiece.
His remark was quite superfluous, because as far as anyone could tell, Mirra had always been accurate in finding the proper blank page in her book.
LINE 2
Julia was in her room, staring into the mirror above her dresser, moving her head this way and that while studying her face critically. With a pleased smile she turned around and grabbed the phone from the side table next to her bed. Sliding it on, she quickly speed-dialed the number she would have remembered in a coma. She sat down on her bed, one foot tapping impatiently on the floor.
“Finally! What took you so long? I miss half my life waiting for you to pick up the phone.” She listened intently to the voice of her friend on the other end of the line – her tapping foot picking up speed.
“Ok, ok. I see. Just why you think we have those scientist geeks inventing all this micro stuff if you don’t take it with you everywhere?” The impatiently tapping foot seemed to have infected her free hand. “Listen, all I wanted to tell you is, the stuff we bought at the mall yesterday is fan-absolutely-tastic! I put it on before I went to bed and it wiped this pimple completely!”
Phone pressed against her ear, Julia got off the bed and started dancing around the room.
“Yesss! Another victory in the battles of adolescence! My life is totally changed! Now I’m so ready to go to camp and face Miss I’m-so-Wonderful and her homies.”
She stopped her spinning in front of the door and put her free ear against it.
“Sorry Kellie, gotta go. I hear mom coming up the stairs. Probably because I didn’t respond when she called. Keeps her in shape,” Julia giggled. “Twenty stairs less on the stair-stepper at the gym tonight. Talk to you later. Sure. Bye.”
With her usual display of excess energy, which she tried to work off in the daily gym routine her daughter had hinted at, Julia’s mother knocked at the door, and by the time Julia had a chance to answer, she was already sitting on the bed. She wore a dark two-piece suit and pumps of the same color. Her auburn pageboy hair, beautiful enough for shampoo commercials, bobbed around her made up face. No doubt, she was all geared up to go to work.
“Wow mom,” Julia exclaimed, closing the door behind her mother, “sometimes I think you’ll be the first one to break the faster-than-light-speed-barrier.”
Under normal circumstances, Julia did not allow her mother to violate the fragile structure of their mother-daughter-boundaries by rushing into her room without being properly invited in. But this morning, she still carried that glorious sense of well-being, originating in her triumph over that nasty pimple and consequently, she felt rather generous towards the world. As a sign of just how deep this generosity reached, she surprised herself by extending it to include her mother.
“Julia I have to talk to you,” said Elizabeth, dropping her shoes on the floor and pulling her legs under. “Why don’t you sit with me for a minute.”
“Sorry but that sounds way too serious for the space I’m in right now. Whenever you start without saying any of those nice things mothers are supposed to say – you end up saying something I don’t want to hear.”
Julia walked towards the mirror, scanning her smooth, unblemished skin in an attempt to hold on to the blissful feeling, which now was fading fast. “I’m in such a great mood and I won’t let you spoil it with your mother-daughter-intimacy stuff.”
“Oh come on, darling,” her mother sighed, fighting for composure as she recognized the dreaded if familiar feeling of tears pushing behind her eyes, her usual emotional response to harsh words. Julia’s in particular. “It’s never the right time for you. You’re either depressed about something or too busy talking on the phone or off solving mysteries with your nose in a book and we hardly talk at all anymore.”
“See, now you’ve done it. Thank you very much. This is exactly the reason why I don’t want to talk to you. It’s all about you and your needs.”
Julia turned around, the golden specks in her eyes shooting phasers in the general direction of her mother.
“First you come busting into my room with no regard for my privacy whatsoever, then you lay that speech on me, guiltying me for the failure of our relationship, when the truth is that you’re jealous because I have a life and you don’t.”
She tried to read her mother’s expression and decided to top her speech with some authority. “Doctor Kline told me I have a right to my space.”
“I’m glad your therapy is working,” Elizabeth stressed every word. She was torn between sympathy for her daughter’s plight, resentment for her daughter’s behavior and self-pity for being a single-mom stuck in a disintegrating situation, “but if you think I pay a thousand a month to support a conspiracy between you and your therapist to abuse me, you are mistaken.”
“Great! Now it’s a conspiracy. What’s it gonna be tomorrow? Voodoo? I think you’re paranoid. No wonder dad couldn’t stand living with you any longer.”
Horrified, Julia listened to the words as they tumbled out of her mouth.
Mothers do have a way of driving innocent young adults crazy with their stuff, claimed a furious voice inside her head. Yet, underneath the soothing warmth of her anger, she felt the notorious, spindly finger of the guilt-monster reaching for her conscience, causing a throbbing sensation somewhere in the back of her head. You’ve gone too far this time, it suggested, hooking her, trying to reel her in.
Ultimately, this time her anger won. She stomped her foot on the floor in an effort to scare the guilt-monster away as much as giving emphasis to her next words, and in the hidden landscape of her mind, she transformed into Stepmother telling Cinderella that she couldn’t go to the ball. Throwing her head back while at the same time rolling her eyes towards the ceiling, she managed to give her voice a haughty pitch. “I’ll be so glad to be rid of you for a while when I’m at camp.”
There was a moment of silence that could not have stretched more than a second yet seemed to last way beyond the tick of a clock.
Finally Elizabeth’s sigh broke the spell. “I’m glad you mention it – because you’re not going.”
The way it frequently happens in situations that extend normal perception into slow motion, Elizabeth noticed that, in spite of her feelings of frustration, she was able to speak in a fairly calm voice. She attributed that fact partially to shock at Julia’s hateful words and partially to relief that at last she was able to inform her daughter of the changed situation. Some of it anyhow.
“Grandmother called yesterday. She wants us to visit and the only time I can get off work with that big project and all is during the time you’d be at camp.” Elizabeth spoke fast now, eager to get it over with. “I informed Ms Vabersky already and she promised to make the necessary arrangements. She said she’ll even try to get us a refund for the retainer.”
She watched Julia with some trepidation. Waiting for her daughter to respond, she started picking the cuticle of her thumb with the nail of her index finger, something she did whenever she needed to keep it together in situations beyond her control.
Julia tried to absorb what her mother had told her. It didn’t make any sense. Her mouth fell open as if to take the information in that way – it was no use. All of her senses screamed that what she had heard was bad, yet the meaning eluded her, as though the synapses in her brain had stopped firing before she was able to interpret the message. She stood paralyzed. With her anger spent in the quarrel preceding this fatal blow to her summer plans, she began to cry.
“Oh no Mom,” she sobbed, “you can’t do that to me! You tell me all the time I don’t take enough interest in my school friends, now I do and I really want to go. I worked so hard to get on the all-star team to make this happen. Please, can we talk about it? I didn’t mean what I said about you and Dad!”
In an attempt to turn the situation around, she moved towards her mother and threw herself on the bed next to Elizabeth.
“But of course we can honey,” Elizabeth answered, gently stroking her daughter’s back. “We’ll talk about it tonight. I gotta run. I’m late as it is and I have this important presentation today.”
The second she heard herself talk about the presentation, she remembered that she would take her clients out to dinner and would not be home until late. Unable to deal with more of Julia’s disappointment at the moment and afraid that Julia would notice her annoyance, she added quickly: “Why don’t you call Grandma and tell her how excited you are to spend some time with her?”
She got up and kissed Julia lightly on the back of her head.
In a balancing act, Elizabeth put on her shoes, as she advanced towards the door. She always struggled to cram as many things as possible into a single moment. She called that managing time. One hand on the doorknob, she looked at Julia and announced in a voice a touch too chirpy to reflect her true feelings: “I’ll leave you some money on the counter. You can go to the mall and do something fun.”
Julia listened to the sound of her mother’s footsteps disappearing towards the garage. As soon as she heard the door bang shut, she reached for her phone to call Kellie.
“Something terrible has happened, can I come over? Thanks. See you in a minute.”
For a brief moment, she considered just slipping into her sneakers and rush over to Kellie’s without bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth – then decided against it. No matter how big a crisis she was in right now, her getting another pimple or, god forbid a cavity, surely wouldn’t help the situation. She trotted into the bathroom and took care of her morning routine.
Back in her room, she pulled on her favorite jeans and T-shirt to band-aid her bruised self-esteem, slipped into her shoes and went downstairs. In passing, she snatched the money off the kitchen counter, stuffed it into her jeans pocket without even counting it, grabbed her keys off the hook by the garage door and left the house.
A big gray cat with a fluffy fur coat got up from his sunny place on the front lawn to greet her. Yawning, he gracefully stretched each of his limbs separately – the way only cats know how to do – then walked right in between Julia’s legs. In a major effort to stay on her feet without stepping on the cat, Julia bent down to scratch him behind his ears.
“Hey Twinkle Toes,” she purred, “something terrible has happened this morning. I’ll fill you in as soon as I’m back. Gotta run now. Kellie is waiting.”
She opened the gate carefully as to not let Twinkle Toes out – a bit in denial about the fact that a waist-high fence is no real obstacle for a cat.
LINE 3
The members of the conference watched Julia stroll down the street, and Mirra opened her eyes as if bored with the lack of action.
“What do you think of her?” Cliffton asked anxiously, addressing everyone in the room at the same time and of course, everyone shared their opinion at once.
“Please please, let us not start this again,” Herr Kaiser’s voice thundered above the din. “I am sure we can discuss the matter in an orderly fashion.”
As before, the commotion ceased immediately. He looked around the table and noticed several raised hands.
“Now now, this is much better,” he growled his approval.
With a slight bow of his head, he prompted the regal looking woman to his right to speak. Despite her majestic poise, she radiated a motherly quality of warmth, kindness and understanding. Her words carried the simple grace that comes from a benevolent heart full of love for all there is.
“I think Julia is a nice enough little girl. She’s merely going through a normal adolescent separation phase.” Her wonderful smile brightened the whole room, her breath smelled like roses. Everybody was mellow and relaxed as she continued. “I recall that Julia recently had her first menstruation, so of course she will be in conflict with her mother. Let us not forget that this is a necessary step in growing up for a girl. How else would she be able to define herself as a woman of her own? I can help her with that easy enough. Let me just –”
“Regina I warn you! Don’t you dare mess with the situation before we all reach an agreement,” Herr Kaiser interrupted her sharply. “We all appreciate and respect your desire for harmony but there are certain rules even you have to follow.”
“Of course my dear, rules made by you and your kind,” Regina retorted without changing her expression. “However, I guess you’re right for now. Because your vision is not tainted by desire, you do excel in an indisputable kind of clarity. And no, you don’t have to remind me of what happened the last time I interfered without your consent. Just promise me to return the favor and not discipline her without consulting me first.”
“I’m sure King Arthur still remembers too, what happened on that occasion,” Mirra chortled under her breath.
Herr Kaiser, missing Mirra’s comment, seemed pleased at Regina’s relenting so quickly. In his presence no one was entirely without reason. And there was definitely no need for him to promise Regina anything. Actions caused reactions. If this indicated punishment to her, there was nothing he could do. He turned to the woman sitting at his left.
“Counselor what is your opinion? How do you read the situation?”
Dora Bell, The Counselor, was a tall thin woman. Her already longish features were augmented by the way she wore her hair. It was of a deep orange red and must have reached all the way to the floor. This of course was pure speculation, as no one had ever seen it undone. She always piled it up on her head in three tiers like a wedding cake, causing the impression of her wearing a pointed hat. In between layers, she had stuck decorative golden and silver pins with three-leaflet ornaments dangling from them, creating a most delicate tinkling sound whenever she moved her head. She must have spent hours every day to get it done just so. But because time was of no consequence in her surroundings, that didn’t really matter.
Her neck was long and slender, providing ample room between earlobes and shoulders for dangling earrings, which repeated the three-leaflet pattern of the ornaments in her hair and echoed their sound. Her dress, in the same color as her hair, was unadorned as not to take away attention from her head.
Her fingers played with a pair of enormous old-fashioned keys on the table in front of her. Their clinking added another score to the symphony played by her jewelry.
“Nobody likes to admit failure but let me be frank. I have tried many times to get Julia’s attention, to no avail.”
Her lovely melodic voice chimed right in with the rest of the tune. “Julia is only one of many children of this generation, whose imaginary capacity is swatted by this overload of sensory input so readily available to them through modern technology. Just remember what we saw in her room: a telephone, a computer, a TV, a sophisticated sound system. At times when I tried to contact her, I even resigned myself to using these devices. But there is just too much going on for her to notice. Sometimes she talks on the phone, while looking at something on the Internet, with the TV blaring in the background. And now with her grandfather dead, who was the only person in the family with moderately evolved senses of intuition, I don’t see how there’s a chance for my being heard at all.”
Dora slumped back in her chair, raising her arms above her head to signal the group her utter helplessness in the situation. The sudden motion provided her ornaments the opportunity of jingling into a crescendo.
“Maybe we could contact her through a dream,” Mirra suggested. “Luna, what do you think?”
Moni Lunaluna, a round-faced woman with short silver-blond hair and shimmering complexion, answered: “Dora asked for my help in the matter a while ago and so I tried. But Julia likes to wake up to her music-alarm-clock set at a bothersome loud volume, which instantly produces more information for her senses to absorb. There is simply no time for the subtle vibration of the dream to float to the surface and to penetrate her waking mind. Therefore my efforts have been lost as well.”
Cliffton thought it wise to say something in Julia’s favor. The discussion was not at all going in the direction he had hoped it would.
“I monitored Julia on and off since she reached out and asked for our help, so I am aware of the place she’s at,” he offered, doing his best to communicate competence in the matter. “This is exactly the reason why I summoned you. What I am about to propose needs to be sanctioned by all of us.” He looked as if he had been asked to jump off a cliff and as he continued he did not sound quite so reassured anymore. “Er – there’s only one way to say it so I say it: er – I was thinking, maybe – er – we could make direct contact with her?” His voice trailed off as he cast a timid glance at his colleagues, then he added hastily: “I admit this is unorthodox but she is in this phase of transition and I am convinced it could work.”
The level of tension in the room was high. All of The Twenty-Two seemed to hold in their responses in a combined effort to avoid another one of Herr Kaiser’s reprimands.
Finally, Brian Liebermann, the male half of the Siamese Twins, broke the silence.
“What you’re suggesting is risky business,” he argued, looking grim. “I realize it has been done before, but never with someone so ill prepared as this Julia. What is your feeling about it, Helena?” he inquired from his wife.
Helena Liebermann tilted her head as if the space above held the answer to her husband’s question, a mannerism her friends were quite familiar with. It was like a pavlovian response – you asked for her opinion and her head turned upward. At last she spoke.
“I agree with Avi insofar as Julia definitely needs some guidance. I suppose she would not feel so lost if her father were still living with them. She trusts him. She listens to him. Perhaps we could do something to get her parents back together.” She casually glanced around the room, seemingly with no intent other than reading the expressions of her colleagues. When her eyes reached Regina, the slightest movement of delicately chiseled eyebrows provided the response she was looking for.
“They are such a nice couple,” she continued her assessment, “what a shame they lack the insight necessary to grow together as husband and wife. I suggest we –
But no one heard what Helena suggested nor if she made a suggestion at all, because Regina had left her seat and moved towards Chester Magnussen and his wand.
The proximity of Regina and her rose-scented breath sent a pleasant shiver through his body, and for a fraction of a second he lost his focus, causing the wand to lift off the page. A fraction of a second does not sound like much, yet in surroundings where time is of no consequence, it presented just the opportunity needed for Regina to carry out her plan.
Before anyone had a chance to intervene, she exhaled deeply and the page in the book turned. The wand settled back down, and the screen showed Julia and her parents in the kitchen.
Julia and her father sat at the table, ready to start eating breakfast. Elizabeth stood at the stove, impatiently tugging at a strand of long auburn hair that had come loose from her ponytail. As she had done many times before, she asked herself silently, whether she would ever find the courage to cut it off.
She had always thought she would look great in a pageboy, and short hair would be so much easier to deal with. But Peter just loved her mane. In endless arguments fought out inside her head, she unfailingly succeeded in convincing herself that it would be unfair to show up with short hair when he had fallen in love with a woman who had locks right down to her waist. Yet deep down the feeling persisted that her whole life would be completely different, if she could just get rid of that hair. With a sigh she took off her apron and put the last batch of pancakes on the table.
“Mmmh honey,” Peter said, smiling appreciatively, “breakfast smells delicious as usual. Surely I’m the luckiest man alive to enjoy a gourmet breakfast in the company of the two most gorgeous girls on the planet.”
Sitting down while pouring herself a cup of coffee, Elizabeth returned his smile with an expression full of love and contentment. Gone were her thoughts of a different life.
“Thank you darling,” she said, “you know how much I enjoy our mornings together.”
Peter took his wife’s hand into his, squeezing it gently.
“And how about you, princess?” he asked, addressing Julia. “You seem unusually quiet this morning.”
Julia, startled, looked around the room. It was filled with an almost unnatural brightness but aside from that, everything appeared to be quite normal – no different from any other morning, as far as she could remember. Yet she felt weird. It was hard to put her feeling into words; a vague sensation in the pit of her stomach, maybe a faint idea of something being out of place…
“Must be the aftershock of that terrible dream I had,” she said when she finally managed to speak. “I dreamt you guys were separated. Dad, you had moved out and Mom, you were some sort of big deal in corporate world. I think you owned one of those environmental companies. You took care of the planet but left me home alone all the time with lots of cash to throw around for comfort and all I’d do was hang out at the mall. I was terribly unhappy and wished with all my heart for my life to be different.”
Speaking these words, the knot in her stomach tightened, but Julia chose to ignore it. “And there was a fight I had with Mom and I said awfully hurtful things to her. I think there was more, but it’s all slipping away so fast now, I can’t remember clearly what else was going on.”
She took a sip of orange juice and let out a deep breath. “Boy, I’m sure glad it was only a dream though. I never want to feel so lousy again – ever!”
Both her parents had listened attentively to her story. Peter opened his mouth to give a – no doubt – comforting reply, but no one in the conference room paid him any attention. In fact, since Regina’s intervention no one had bothered to watch the screen at all. The inside of the circular hall with its beautiful decorations bore no resemblance to the well ordered meeting it had housed just a fraction of a second ago.
Everybody had left their seats, frantically trying to move towards Regina, shouting and gesturing wildly. The very instant Chester Magnussen’s wand had reconnected with the book, the metal structure around that segment of the wall, which served as monitor for the book, started to blink furiously on and off – a deluge of neon-red light, emitting a penetrating beeping sound. In between beeps a computerized voice announced “Reality Breach at vector alpha-457.9” in endless repetition, as if to communicate the urgency of the matter to the members of the conference.
That was of course entirely unnecessary. Everyone of them was painfully aware of what Regina had done: she had single-handedly altered Julia’s reality while Julia was in her normal, waking consciousness, a measure strictly reserved for only the most exceptional situations. However even then, all of the twenty-three had to agree unanimously that all other options were exhausted and a shift in the individual’s chosen reality proved necessary and beneficial not only to the individual involved but was to the highest good of all life everywhere. To ensure the least impact on the psyches of all concerned, it was only done after careful planning and preparation. Full compliance with predominant systems of belief provided a strict frame of reference for every action that needed to be carried out.
Of course those extra precautions merely needed to be put in place since humans had abandoned their belief in magic, and incidents of this kind had either been banned to the land of fairy tales or diminished to the world of horror stories.
And because all of them longed for the time when it was normal to be in direct contact with the outer world, no one was totally innocent of the kind of trespass Regina had caused. In the course of eons every one of them had been tempted to interfere and some of them had tried. This fact, however did not justify the violation in the least. The situation was serious.
“Everybody, everybody take their seats and Chester, turn that thing off before I forget myself!” Herr Kaiser roared, face red, bushy brows a straight line. His voice sounded like a sonic boom and the cacophony of outrage subsided quickly into silence with everyone tiptoeing back to their seats as ordered. No one wanted to see Herr Kaiser forgetting himself!
“Of course Willhelm … at once … what was I thinking?” Chester Magnussen answered as if coming out of a trance. With visible effort he pulled his galaxy wand away from the page. The alarm stopped and the metallic structure reverted to its usual opalite glow. The screen went black with a small, slowly blinking red square in the lower right corner as the only visible reminder of the fact that the very structure of reality had been upset.
The book jumped a few inches into the air as if violated by this sudden disconnection and shut the moment it hit the table.
“Hey Mac, whoa!” Mirra’s voice as cold as her glare, so cold it felt like icicles reaching for Chester Magnussen, “how often do you think I have to ask you to not pull your wand without proper shut-down on my part first! You pull that thing so fast you shape-shift into a torturer pulling toenails. Now there’s an unbecoming identity if there ever was one! And FYI, you weren’t thinking at all! As usual you just couldn’t resist Regina, now could you? All she ever needs to do is to get close to you and you lose focus. If I had it in me to feel disgusted about such behavior, trust me I would!”
“Thank you Mirra, thank you, but this is quite enough,” said Herr Kaiser, still trying to compose himself. “We are all more than capable of imagining what that must feel like for you and I’m sorry for your inconvenience but,” his voice gaining volume as his speech gained momentum, “we do have a reality breach at hand and we have to find a solution to that mess. You all know the longer it goes on the more difficult it becomes to re-instate the proper time-line.”
“Be assured you have no idea about my feelings at all,” Mirra unimpressed. “And honestly Willhelm, I don’t quite understand your fuss. It’s all in the book anyway – so it’s all the same to me whether they’re back together or not, whether they’ve ever met or not, whether they –
“Of course it makes no difference to you,” Herr Kaiser cut her off. As much as he generally enjoyed a neutral perspective, on occasions that required action he had very little patience for Mirra and her philosophical detachment. “It does make a big difference to them though and you know it. Just to refresh your memory,” his sarcasm as sharp as a samurai sword, “in the time-line where Julia’s waking consciousness is right now, she didn’t even reach out to us for help!”
“Hurray to that!” Mirra unbothered in her knowledge that she was pushing it, “I’d say the meeting is adjourned and we all go home.” Then as was her nature, reflecting Herr Kaiser’s sarcasm right back to him, she added, “Please Willhelm, enlighten me, what was it again that happens in the time-line where she did reach out?”
Herr Kaiser, engulfed in his anger, was blind to her provocation and charged right ahead. “Great that you should mention it, because as you very well know, if we would not be blessed enough to operate within surroundings where time is of no consequence, we’d all be transported back to who knows where the moment the wand hit Regina’s turned page. And nobody but your blasted book knows exactly what happens in that other time-line. So why don’t you do me the favor and shut up.”
Taking a deep breath he turned towards the Twins. “And Helena you of all people know better than trying to eliminate choices from people’s lives. It is their birthright to figure out truth and consequences of their decisions. Did you forget that this is how they learn? I will have no more of this interference business. Do I make myself clear?” His voice reverberated off the walls, creating a sound like rolling thunder.
“Crystal clear, dearest,” Regina Green exhaled slowly, sending another whiff of roses through the room. The energy changed instantly back to peace and calm. “Julia asked for a different life and in a way, she got it. And all this rehashing of what we already know does not bring us any closer to a solution of the problem. I suggest we look at the facts and then decide what we can do.”
“Oh blast! I don’t want to hear another word from you!” Despite Regina’s attempt at restoring harmony, Herr Kaiser was still mad at her. “Of course Julia has gotten a different life but we don’t know whether this is the life she would have chosen, never mind that not a single being in her environment – and that does include her cat – had a choice in what happened. And as much as I would like to explore all the different vectors that could possibly grow out of this incident, we do have to take responsibility for our screw up. So let’s get on with it. How much time has passed in the outer world since the breach?”
“That would be 92 seconds and counting,” said Mirra after consulting the index of her book, which of course, to everyone else was nothing but another blank page.
“Good, good! Then we’re well within the limits of our 5 Minutes reversion rule,” said Herr Kaiser. “Get ready! Mirra, Chester, please. Let’s get her back to vector alpha-457.9 with a 94 second reversal extrapolation to make sure she’s not missing anything there. Come on now, do it!”
Mirra, looking not older than fifteen at the most, went into silent communication with her book once again. As soon as it opened to the appropriate page, Chester Magnussen inserted his wand. The metal frame displayed ‘alpha-457.9-ex94r-Julia-VAS/n’. The blinking red square disappeared as the image of Julia leaving the house emerged on the screen.
A big gray cat with a fluffy fur coat got up from his sunny place on the front lawn to greet her. Yawning, he gracefully stretched each of his limbs separately – the way only cats know how to do – then walked right in-between Julia’s legs. In a major effort to stay on her feet without stepping on the cat, Julia bent down to scratch him behind his ears.
“Hey Twinkle Toes,” she purred, “something terrible has happened this morning. I’ll fill you in as soon as I’m back. Gotta run now. Kellie is waiting.”
As she opened the gate carefully to stop Twinkle Toes from leaving the yard, a feeling of familiarity rushed through her body. For a brief moment she felt disoriented. She shook her head as if to clear her mind.
“Wow Twinkle Toes,” she said, “did we not do all that just a few moments ago? What a weird day this is.”
This remark brought a total recall of the argument with her mother, and the emotional impact of her personal tragedy pushed any memory of everything else that had happened this morning into the depths of her subconscious mind.
Thus, as the members of the conference watched Julia stroll down the street, her consciousness was safely restored to the here and now.
The synthetic voice streaming from the shimmering metal frame informed the members of the conference that ‘particle beam download at vector alpha-457.9-present-Julia’ was complete and the room echoed with the sound of applause.
LINE 4
In the big city, in another dome shaped structure, another conference room. Very different in more than one way from the conference room of The Twenty-Two, it towered over the city at a staggering height of 1500 feet. The pitch-black interior didn’t give any clue as to what it might look like and the only source of light was a large screen that seemed to hover suspended in mid air, displaying the bigger than life-size face of a man. An artificial voice announced “Constellato for Mr. Oten” – “Constellato for Mr. Oten” increasing the volume and thereby the urgency of the message with every repetition.
At last, a disembodied sound from the darkness suggested, “Go ahead.”
“Mister Oten,” the face on the screen came to life, “I just noticed a random particle beam download at vector alpha-457.9. It caught my attention because it has an overlap of 94 seconds in real-time. I thought I better let you know.”
Niem Vidalgo Oten stepped closer to the screen. Staying in line with the black theme of his surroundings he wore a black suit and black turtleneck sweater. With his black hair, thick black eyebrows and dark eyes the dim light of the monitor upgraded him from disembodied voice to disembodied face. “And what exactly does that mean?”
“I cannot be sure,” Constellato, rubbing his right eyebrow with the middle finger of his right hand, “do you want me to speculate?”
“No, your simple opinion will do,” said Oten, adding the feature of disembodied hands to his physique. Judging by the movement of those hands he pulled a black chair towards him and sat down. He looked like a spooky pantomime in a black box performance.
“Someone at this vector has experienced a déjà vu of 94 seconds.”
“A déjà vu?” white hands patting back a stray strand of black hair on white face. “How can that happen?”
“Like I said I honestly don’t know,” Constellato’s voice showed signs of unease.
“Then use your million dollar brain and speculate. And you better don’t waste my time.” The hidden threat in Oten’s answer provided a perfect explanation for Constellato’s apprehension.
“A tiny rupture in space-time is the only logical conclusion. Created by a moderately high-energy wave and it’s not coming from our side. I already checked.”
“Can you give me a visual?” asked Oten, leaning forward in his chair.
Without answering, Constellato’s hand seemed to reach out of the screen into the room pointing at a three dimensional holographic version of Julia carefully opening the gate and leaving the yard. They watched how she shook her head telling a big gray cat with a fluffy fur coat, “Wow Twinkle Toes, did we not do all that just a few moments ago? What a weird day this is.” And as Julia strolled down the street Constellato pulled his hand back from the room into the screen.
Oten let out a suppressed sigh as if to mask his relief. “Thank you C. I don’t think we have to worry. Some random energy fluctuation, no more. If she would have powers she would have been more excited but she seemed rather depressed to me.” And emitting a scary snorting kind of laugh he added, “In any case we have her readout and should it happen again we know how to tag her. For now we just leave it be.” Unaware of the fact that symbolically speaking, his decision to leave the girl’s identity unchecked boosted the trouble-factor of his life by the power of twenty-two, Oten snapped his fingers, the screen turned black and the room returned to impenetrable darkness.
LINE 5
Back in the conference room of The Twenty-Two everyone was cheering, clapping their hands and dancing around the room in demonstrating their relief at a disaster averted. Even Herr Kaiser showed the pleased victorious demeanor of a job well done.
“Alright! Alright,” he said at last, “now let’s not forget the reason why we assembled here to begin with. Avi tell us what you had in mind.”
“Er – yes – thank you Willhelm, er – Herr Kaiser, er – thank you all for your input,” Cliffton stammered in a nervous attempt to gather his thoughts. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “As I was saying, I am aware of Julia’s disposition and I realize the risks involved for us to seek direct contact, yet I strongly believe the attempt would have great merit. Especially now with the – er – incident – er – I feel we have a lot of explaining to do.” He swallowed hard. “My original idea was to establish some support for her. There is a boy, John, a childhood friend who lives by the Lake. He is sensitive and very interested in all things out of the ordinary. Mirra, maybe, if you would?”
Mirra sighed and closed her eyes focusing on the book. The familiar process of the book turning its pages started once more. Because the wand was still plugged in, a multitude of images flickered across the screen.
“How would you like it, Avi? Same time-vector? Same mode? Some of Mirra’s omnipotent viewpoint if it helps with clarity?” Magnussen asked.
“Yes please, if no one has any objections?”
Magnussen interpreted the ensuing silence as consent.
“All right, then I’m all set.”
The very instant the pages came to rest, the metal structure framing the lit up section of the wall read: ‘alpha-457.9-John-present-VAS/n’, and the figure of a boy became discernible on the screen. The twenty-three watched curiously…
LINE 6
… as he entered the kitchen of his parents’ ranch-style home. Bare feet a little bit too big for his height stuck out from pajama pants a little bit too short. His blond hair reaching in curls below the chin, still tousled from sleep, added to the impression of innocent clumsiness so adorable with puppies.
KND Freebies: National security thriller PATRIOT & ASSASSIN by Robert Cook is featured in today’s Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt
The second in the Alejandro “Cooch” Cuchulain series of national security techno-thrillers
Special ops agent Cooch finds himself at the heart of a plot to release nerve gas in one of our nation’s busiest stadiums, then later into the sadistic hands of the terrorist who planned that attack.
Cooch leads a Rhodes Scholar former Seal, a stunning MacArthur winning physicist, a former USMC Master Sniper and the former director of the CIA’s special operations unit, now working in the White House. Together, they engage a large contingent of Al-Qaeda, among others, while working to improve the life of Muslims.
Patriot and Assassin incorporates strong character development and powerful, thoughtful dialogue to drive this politico-thriller at a breakneck pace.
Praise for Patriot & Assassin:
“Cooch’s best skill is turning an eight hour flight into 30 minutes!…I love how easy it is to escape into the characters and action, while appreciating the nuggets of culture, geo-politics and technology that are scattered throughout the story…”
an excerpt from
Patriot and Assassin
by Robert Cook
Southwest Texas
The afternoon shadows from the pool house stretched up the gravel path toward the huge, log-framed ranch house. Alex Cuchulain walked beside his friend, Brooks Elliot, talking idly about the travails of the economy and the housing bust. Both men seemed fit, light on their feet and balanced. Their T-shirts were wrinkled and newly dry, with damp circles at the waist of their swim trunks. Behind them walked two women, their dates. One was the owner’s daughter and their host, LuAnn Clemens. The second was Dr. Caitlin O’Connor. The hair on both was slicked back and still wet from the pool. Each carried a bath towel wrapped casually around her neck.
A sharp snap sounded just behind Alex. He turned his head just as a sharp pain hit the seat of his wet bathing suit, accompanied by another snap.
“Ow!” Alex yelled and turned to see LuAnn pulling her towel back, and Caitlin’s towel snapped just past him as she pulled back on its base. They were grinning and giggling.
As LuAnn snaked her damp towel out again at Alex, he snatched the end from the air just before it unraveled and gave it a pull. She sprawled forward and fell on the sharp gravel. She let out a loud yelp.
As Alex opened his mouth to apologize he heard a footfall behind him and immediately felt a slamming force just under his rib cage that drove him into the air. Eh? He felt himself reacting to thousands of hours of training. This happened to be Form Twenty-Eight of the repetitive martial arts drills the CIA had designed to counteract the seventy-two most common forms of physical attack. For each of those there was a physical response that was drilled, nearly endlessly, into workers who were chosen for the violent work of the Agency. As his mind turned to identify what other dangers lurked, reflex drove his response. Alex threw his legs uphill, using his stomach muscles and twisting his body over the force, drove his assailant under him as they fell. The part that took the longest to master was next: the impact of Alex’s fall must be broken, lessened somehow. His right arm was extended, slightly bent. As the impact of the man hitting the ground was first sensed, Alex drove his right elbow into the mass of the head and neck beneath him, accompanied by a loud exhalation, “Heeyaaa!”
The impact of that blow went through his assailant’s face to the dirt below. Bone could be heard snapping as the force of impact from Alex’s fall was countered. Judo used Newton’s law of motion that for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction. The slowing of his fall allowed his feet to continue to swing over the base of the conflict, then tighten the arc to hit tight to their landing spot. His upper body twisted along in the earlier arc of the feet, the arms of his assailant no longer grasping him tightly. Alex came to his feet in a balanced crouch, looking for an adversary. The flesh on his face was tight and bunching around his eyes. His breath was whistling loudly through his nostrils. Brooks had spun, back to the scene, and was standing with his knees flexed, one foot in front of the other in a crouch, hands raised, looking for others. There were none.
“What the hell was that?” Caitlin yelled, looking at the large cowboy still on the ground, inert. She looked at Alex, crouched and lethal. She thought of a big cat, some kind of nasty cat. His thighs were quivering, his head was up with nostrils flared, but there was no new threat. His lips were drawn back, exposing his incisors. The whole scene was erotic in its ferality, Caitlin thought; she had always been thrilled by violence.
Easy, laddie. It’s apparently over.
Jesus Annie, here I go again, Alex thought. He had just had a brief street fight with an amateur and here he was looking for someone to kill, to maim. As Brooks had once said, “Lose the Cooch look, if you can. It scares the civilians.” Still, that reflexive, preemptive hostility and readiness built over so many years had done Alex more good than harm. He was alive.
Alex dropped to one knee to reach for the man’s neck. He felt a strong pulse and noticed a shard of bone sticking from his jaw. A steady trickle of crimson flowed from the bone to the gravelly soil and was quickly absorbed.
“Darned if I know, Caitlin, but he appears to have hurt himself in the fall,” Alex said with a frown.
As Brooks helped LuAnn to her feet, he brushed the gravel from her. With a pounding of feet, three cowboys rushed around the maintenance shed. They skidded to a stop, and saw their friend, Jeeter, lying motionless on the ground, then looked at LuAnn, unsure what was going on.
“What the heck?” one of them yelled to LuAnn.
“I tripped and skinned my knee,” LuAnn said, pointing at her bloody kneecap. “Jeeter must have thought Alex here was acting up and tried to defend me. He missed the tackle, and there he is.”
After some confusion the ranch hands started to figure out how to move Jeeter. When they first saw the jawbone protruding from his face and blood dripping into the soil, there was some muttering among them and hostile glances at Cuchulain and Elliot, who stood with the women, watching. A ranch hand showed up with a canvas stretcher, and they began to move Jeeter to it.
LuAnn led her three guests toward the ranch house. On its porch, Virgil Clemens, her father, leaned against a tall wooden column with a wooden toothpick dancing at the right corner of his mouth. He watched them approach. As they got to the porch steps, she could see his upper lip twitching in what was Virgil’s idea of a grin.
“Hell, LuAnn, you just got here and there’s trouble already,” he said. “I’d better buy everyone a drink before things get out of hand. Cocktails start now and dinner is in ninety minutes. That should give you time for a few drinks and a change of clothes. I expect my foreman will fill me in on the details of the excitement before then.” Virgil waved his hand in the general direction of a wooden sideboard with wine and whiskey standing on it. There were pretzels and nuts in a big wooden bowl and a refrigerator beneath.
Alex and Caitlin each carried a glass of wine up the wide, wooden stairs and into their bedroom. Caitlin had a bowl of peanuts and popped a few into her mouth as she gazed at the room. She thought of it as upscale cowboy décor. The guest space was longer than wide, with bold Native American print cloth on the walls, and a random-width, planked oak floor with rugs scattered along it. The bath had a sliding paneled door and a floor tiled in alternate light and dark triangles. Beyond the dual sinks and mirrors, on the back wall of the bath, was a long, glass-enclosed shower. Nice shower, she thought. Now that could be interesting.
Caitlin turned to Alex with a frown as she walked to a desk and said, “Well, that was exciting. You could have killed that guy. That would have been a real vacation stopper for me.”
“For all of us, actually,” Alex said, shaking his head at her familiar self-absorption. “A two-inch miss would have put my elbow into his temple and lights out. I’m getting old and slow. I should have heard him coming.”
“It was pretty exciting,” Caitlin said. “It turned me on. I’d like to see it again, in slow motion, and watch your face.
Southwest Texas
Dawn, the Clemens’ ranch
Cuchulain walked from the ranch house with the ochre light of dawn casting long shadows across the rough grass toward the main corral. He wore a faded pair of Wrangler jeans and a blue cotton button-down shirt. His still-wet hair was slicked back, black and shining, with a few threads of silver showing on the sides. A middle-aged man was sitting on the top rail of the corral, smoking a cigarette, one foot hooked under the second rail. His wide-brimmed hat was pushed back on his head and a steel-gray brush cut showed beneath it. A large rectangular silver belt buckle on his jeans caught an early ray of sun. There was lettering of some sort on it.
“Howdy,” he said, and jumped down from the rail. He stuck his hand out. “I’m the foreman around here.”
“Hello,” Alex said as he reached with his hand to greet him. “How is the cowboy who fell yesterday? Jeeter?”
Cuchulain’s hand was suddenly squeezed hard, and Alex instinctively returned the pressure. He could feel thick calluses against his as the pressure increased. The man was strong. The pressure leveled, then dropped as the foreman gazed into Alex’s eyes; then he nodded almost imperceptibly and let go. He jumped nimbly back up on the rail.
“Well, his jaw hinge is shattered and the jaw’s broken in one place,” the foreman said, as he settled himself. “But I reckon he’ll live.” He flicked his cigarette to the dirt. “How do you pronounce that last name of yours?”
“Coo-HULL-an,” Alex said. “Why?”
He studied Cuchulain. “They ever call you Cooch?”
Alex shrugged. “Seems likely with a name like mine.”
“I was in the marine corps for twenty-some years. Word gets around. You that Cooch? The one who worked for the spooks?”
Alex sighed. “I’d rather not make a fuss about it. That was a long time ago. I’m a businessman now.”
“I figgered. I’ve broken hands with less pressure than that. My name’s Proctor Mikey. They call me Mikey. Took me awhile to figger you out. Then I remembered that your buddy Elliot was a Seal; the boys was all excited about that. They thought maybe they’d have a fight in his honor.”
“It’s not too late,” Alex said.
Mikey dug a small sack from his shirt pocket, unfolded a paper from a small orange packet, and began to roll another cigarette. “I never got to meet your daddy. Never met a man with the Medal of Honor. Wished I had.”
Alex looked at the dawning sky for a long moment and said, “He was a good man.”
“The boys sort of gave up on the fight in Elliot’s honor. They figure you fucked up the ranch’s honor when Jeeter got hurt going after you. Jeeter’s jaw’s wired shut, but he wrote a note at the infirmary. It just said, ‘Protectin LuAnn.’ They’re planning to work on you some. We call it ‘riding for the brand,'” Mikey said quietly. “They like that LuAnn girl.”
“Hell, I like her too. It was an accident, or at least not what it seemed,” Alex said as he sighed and looked away. “Well, does recovering honor for the brand include guns and knives? If not, Elliot and I will deal with it. But you’d better call around and get some more folks for your side. If that guy who jumped me was one of the bad guys, you don’t have nearly enough folks to make it fun.”
Mikey snorted a double laugh and then coughed violently. He hawked a wad of phlegm and spat it on the dirt.
“I reckon the boss would be highly pissed if he had a bunch of hands in the hospital or the hoosegow,” he said. “Anyhow, they’re fixin’ to have you ride a horse that will do the job for them. You ride much?”
“Only a little,” Alex said. “I’ve ridden more camels than horses.”
“We got us a big horse named Cottonmouth. Good name. He’s meaner than a blind fucking snake. They got him in mind for you, for a bumpy little ride across the prairie. And Cottonmouth’s a biter.”
“Hell, the fight’s sounding better all the time. Any advice?”
Mikey sat for awhile, pondering. “My claim to fame around here is that I was national high school rodeo champ a thousand years ago,” he said, and pointed to his belt buckle. “I know horses.”
“And?” Alex said.
“Two things,” Mikey said. “First, if you punch a horse really hard just between his ears, high up, and you can punch right, he’ll go to his knees. Maybe a trained guy like you would kill him, but he’ll behave if you don’t. Second, and sneakier, but you may be able to pull it off if the rumors about your hands are true, and I just seen some evidence that they might be: you just whisper a bit in Cottonmouth’s ear while they are holding him and run your hand up just between his ears and press hard. The place is called the poll; it’s where nerves cross under a horse’s skull plates. The plates don’t quite meet there and there’s a little dip, so there’s room to push a strong finger down in. Horses don’t like pain; it makes them behave.”
“Good to know, I guess,” Alex said. “I don’t suppose you could show me how to do that on a horse.”
Mikey smiled. “I reckon I could, both of us being marines and all. It’s the least I can do to stop a massacree on my ranch.” He eased himself from the rail, stripped the paper from the remaining tobacco, and dropped it into the dirt. He ground it with his heel and walked toward the stables with Alex beside him.
Mikey stopped just as they reached a stable and turned. “I need to ask you something, but it’s really none of my biddness,” he said.
“Sure.” Alex shrugged and smiled. “Asking is free.”
“Do you have any contacts left? Where you can give someone a heads-up to see if something’s funny?”
“Funny, how?” Alex said. “Who would want to know?”
Mikey studied Alex. “There was a different crowd of Mexicans came to town about three, four days ago. Not like most of the coyotes that bring illegals across. They’re a bunch of bad asses, plus a guy who dresses funny and speaks bad Spanish. The locals are scared to death of them.”
“Yeah?” Alex said.
“Yeah. We get a pretty steady stream of illegals coming through this part of Texas. We’re on a good smuggling route from Mexico. It’s been going on for quite awhile, but it’s really none of our biddness, so we stay out of it. The immigration game changed with this crowd that just came in. One of my ranch hands, Gomez, is a former marine. He did his Iraq time, twice. He was in town when those guys came into the cantina. Gomez thinks that a funny-looking guy was speaking Arabic to one guy who translates to Spanish. The bad guys were pissed when they did it in public, but still treated them like royalty.
“So, if they’re bad asses, they’re too expensive to be moving illegals. What are they moving?” Mikey said. “It don’t smell right, and my nose works pretty good for smelling trouble. Gomez took a picture of the guy with his cell phone. Quality’s shitty, but it’s a picture.”
“Did he now? Well done,” Alex said with a tight smile. He dug out his wallet and found a slightly wrinkled business card to hand to Mikey. “Ask him to e-mail me a copy of that photo soon. It could be anything or nothing. Still, it’s a change in behavior for them, isn’t it?”
“Yup,” Mikey said. “And it might be worth looking into, or not. You know anyone to alert? Word was that you were doing spook work for awhile and were good at it. I thought there might be a loose connection or two you could tweak. Immigration is one thing, but they don’t need those guys for that. What worries me is what they are planning to bring across the border.”
“I’ll make a call,” Alex said. “Maybe someone will take a look. Are you available to talk a little more and maybe Gomez too? I might want to go to town to night after dark and get a beer with Gomez. Check things out.”
Mikey glanced up sharply and said, “Hell, we’re marines. You know that.”
“Yeah, sorry. I’ve been a civilian too long. Once a marine, always a marine. Semper fi.”
Mikey snorted, and said with a grin, “Fuckin-ay-tweedie-grunt.”
***
Breakfast was Texas big: eggs, blueberry pancakes, three kinds of toast, jalapeño cheese grits, home-fried potatoes, two kinds of fresh squeezed juice, and meat galore. When they finally pushed back from the table, Virgil said they should get ready for the day’s trail ride and meet at ten at the corral. On the stairs to their room, Alex quietly asked Caitlin to turn Emilie’s intelligence assessment loose on any West Texas/Arab connection and explained his plans.
LuAnn hurried to catch her father as the guests walked to their rooms.
“Daddy,” she said. “I need to talk to you, now!”
“Sure, honey,” he said. “Come on into my office and set a spell. Hell, I always have time for you. Since your mother passed, there ain’t no one else that matters.”
“Look, Daddy,” LuAnn said. “That thing by the pool where Jeeter got hurt was an accident and it was my fault. The hands are acting like our honor was violated, and I’m afraid Alex is in trouble with them somehow.”
“Honey, don’t you worry too much about that, but I’m glad to see that New Yawk hasn’t screwed up your powers of observation,” Virgil said. “I talked to Mikey a little while ago, and he said that it’s under control, mostly. If it gets out of hand, I’ll have him stop it.”
LuAnn shifted in her chair, looked out the window for a moment at the dry rolling hills, then said, “I really don’t like this, and I don’t know Alex well yet. His date is a barracuda with a foul mouth and an IQ in the stratosphere. If she gets to thinking this is about her somehow, things could get ugly. I like her, but she’s scary smart, tough, and it’s all about her. If she had a lobotomy, she’d make a good lawyer. But I think what they are doing is exciting. I think I want in.”
Clemens chuckled and stood up. “Best-looking barracuda I’ve ever seen. Well, let’s just see how it works out. Mikey thinks that your friend Alex is safe enough. As far as the rest of it goes, if you’re in, I’m in, at least sort of. Let’s just see how things play out.”
A little later, Alex sat in a wooden rocking chair on the broad veranda, uncomfortably wearing a brand new Stetson cowboy hat Caitlin had bought for him. He was nursing a white ceramic mug of coffee in one hand and had his Kphone in the other, reading messages. Caitlin came through the thick double door. She was dressed in skin-tight jeans, a plaid cotton shirt, and a white Stetson. Her high-heeled cowboy boots were hand-tooled black leather, with math symbols carved on them in white. She wiggled her behind and trilled, “Ta-da!”
Alex jumped up, spilling hot coffee on his hand.
As he stood, Brooks and LuAnn walked out the front door, followed by Virgil Clemens. All walked toward the corral, talking idly about breakfast, where four saddled horses waited, one with two ranch hands holding its bridle. Another very large saddled horse was standing by Mikey, looking at him as a favored Labrador retriever might.
Mikey walked over to the group and began to assign horses. Each guest moved to the assigned mount. LuAnn was beside Virgil while her horse stood waiting, patiently. Alex was last.
“Young feller,” Mikey said to Alex, “the boys picked this horse out special for you. They thought he’d be good transportation.”
“Daddy! Cottonmouth?” LuAnn whispered. “Stop it!”
“I’ll stop it later, if it gets nasty,” Clemens said quietly. “Right now, it’s just fun. Let’s see if Mikey is as good as I think he is.”
Alex walked to his horse and stood in front of the left stirrup, just behind his nose. They looked at each other. The horse started to turn his head, and his lips curled from flat, yellow teeth. Alex blocked Cottonmouth’s head from turning with his left forearm and stepped forward, sliding his right hand up and over his thick neck to his ears, then between them, probing. There was indeed a tiny gap between his skull plates. Alex slid a forefinger just above that gap and dug a little. Cottonmouth settled back, unsure. Alex leaned to whisper in his ear. “Look, horse, one of us is liable to get hurt here. I’d rather it was you.” He pushed down with his forefinger between the skull plates. Cottonmouth shifted a bit and Alex pushed harder. The horse became still and Alex eased the pressure slightly.
The cowboys holding the horse looked puzzled and at each other quizzically. This was not the Cottonmouth they knew. One of them said to Alex, “Why don’t you just stick your foot in this here stirrup and mount up, cowboy. Other folks are waiting for you.”
Alex stuck his left foot in the stirrup and swung up and over the horse. He felt the horse’s muscles bunching, ready to explode. He pushed much harder on Cottonmouth’s poll. The horse stilled immediately and Alex felt him beginning to weaken at the fore knees. He eased back on the finger pressure. Cottonmouth turned his head, eyes rolled back, awaiting instruction.
Mikey swung on his horse and snuck a wink at Alex.
“Let’s move out now, folks,” he said.
Alex moved the reins against Cottonmouth’s neck, then gave him a little kick. The horse moved obediently to the rear of the line. Alex took his hand from the top of Cottonmouth’s head after one reminder squeeze.
The horses moved at a brisk walk away from the corrals with the mid-morning sun casting a yellow glow on the field. The light put in sharp contrast the mechanical nodding of steel oil well donkeys, rhythmically pumping money from the ground.
One of the cowboys who had been holding Cottonmouth’s bridle said to the other, “He’s a daggone tenderfoot. How did he get onto Cottonmouth and just ride away like he was on a rental pony?”
“Beats me,” the second man, older, said. “It was spooky. He whispered in Cottonmouth’s ear and that was the end of the horse acting up. I never seen the like.”
“I’d sure like to know what the heck he said to that horse,” the younger man muttered.
West Texas
It was late afternoon when the riding party came ambling back to the Clemens ranch, horses close and their riders talking casually. Cottonmouth, with Alex aboard, seemed happy and placid while he walked beside LuAnn and her mount. As they entered the yard and turned to the corral, ranch hands came forward to take the horses and help the riders down from their perches. As Alex dismounted and turned to Caitlin, one of the hands, a young man, reached for Cottonmouth’s bridle. In a flash, Cottonmouth spun his head and knocked the man to the ground and then bared his teeth, reaching for him. Alex yelled, “Hey!” and Cottonmouth stopped as he felt Alex’s hand on the top of his head, pressing hard, then faced back to the front, again apparently placid. Alex stuck out his hand and helped the ranch hand to his feet, then brushed a little red dust from his shirt.
“Sorry about that, young fellow,” he said. “He’s sensitive. I whisper nice things to him. He likes that.” Two older hands stood, jaws agape at the horse’s change in behavior, then shook their heads. Just across the yard, Mikey relaxed on his horse with one leg thrown over the saddle horn, grinning and rolling a smoke.
Virgil leaned against a log pillar at the main house, in the shade, watching the four chatting casually, making their way to the house. When Alex and Caitlin came abreast of him, Virgil said, “Alex, could I have a word with you in private?”
“Sure thing, Virgil,” Alex said. “Caitlin, I’ll catch up with you at the bar in a minute.” Caitlin nodded over her shoulder as she walked inside.
Virgil stepped inside the house and said quietly, “I heard from Mikey that he told you about those nasty critters in the village. If there’s anything I can add to the picture to make a believer out of you, let me know. I’d like to make them go away.”
Alex smiled and said, “I e-mailed the photo that your man, Gomez, took in the cantina to a friend in DC this morning, along with a heads-up. I imagine someone is already looking into it. I may drop by there after dinner for a look.”
“Is this likely to be something where you or Elliot gets involved?” Virgil said. “Mikey said you were in that business for awhile. Elliot for sure was in the violence business.”
“We’re out of that business,” Alex said. “If there is something to be done, the pros will do it. Brooks and I are old and tired. We’d just get in the way, but if I hear that something went down, I’ll let you know.”
“Good. I’d rather not have any trouble here, but if it’s coming, I’d like to be ready.”
“I don’t think it will come to that,” Alex said. “You’re too far from the border. Still, I’ll keep my ears open. I’m heading back to DC tomorrow for a few days.”
“Thanks. Brooks and LuAnn are headed back to New York. Caitlin’s going with you, I think.”
“At least for a day or two,” Alex said. “Right now, I think it’s time for me to have a glass of wine.”
“Caitlin may be getting impatient,” Virgil said with a chuckle. “She’s not one that I’d keep waiting. Good information technology managers are hard to find.”
Caitlin handed Alex a glass of red wine as he reached the bar. She picked up a small bowl of peanuts and walked toward the stairs. He was a step behind.
****
Two hours later Mikey grinned as Alex and Elliot walked down the path from the ranch house to Mikey’s office and quarters beside the bunk house. “You’re a bit scruffy now, aren’t you, Mr. Cuchulain?” Alex was in a dark T-shirt with a bandana tied around his hair. Elliot was quiet beside him, with a dark shirt, dark pants, and dark-leather hiking boots.
Alex said, “Si, Chico.”
“You speak a little Spanish, do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” Alex said. “It’s a secret. All this shit is secret. I was never in the cantina with Gomez.”
“What do you want to wear?”
“I’ll wear my boots and my jeans. I’ll need an old open-necked shirt, an old worn hat, and a crucifix maybe, to give me luck.”
“Can do. One of Jeeter’s shirts will fit you; he doesn’t need them right now. The rest is easy. Listen, Gomez isn’t sure you can pass as a Latino. He’s nervous about it.”
Alex laughed. “Going into a cantina full of bad guys makes one nervous. Let’s get my clothes together, then Gomez and I will talk. You sit by. If he’s still nervous about me, maybe I go in alone.”
Mickey shrugged. “Gomez is a solid guy. It should be fine. It’s not like we have a sand table to plan this mission. It’s a sneak and peek.”
“It is, indeed. And that’s all it is. If trouble starts, I’ll start it.”
***
Later that evening, just after full darkness fell, Alex and Hector Gomez walked into a small cantina several miles closer to the Mexican border than the Clemens ranch. A quick, casual glance showed two small groups in the room, separated by a number of empty, cheap, wooden tables with flimsy chairs at them. On one side of the room were six men, most dressed in casual clothing. Two of them, with scruffy beards, were seated in the center of the group, dressed a little differently, with coffee mugs in front of them. Two others, who were younger and lean, drank beer from bottles. A very large man sat beside an older Mexican, who seemed by his body language to be in charge.
Alex and Gomez found a table at the edge of the other group, made up of a few locals. As they sat, Gomez studied Alex. If he hadn’t seen him as part of the Clemens riding party, Gomez would have guessed he was a dangerous Mexican, someone to avoid. His Spanish was fluent and now colloquial, with a vague Mexican accent. Alex had done something to darken his face a little and the scars on his face stood out in white. There were many tiny scars on his forehead and the old furrow of a knife scar slid down his left cheek through thick wrinkles around his eye. The wrinkles were beside both eyes and seemed to bunch up in a hood beside them. He wore an old blue denim shirt, tight across the chest, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and three buttons open at the neck to reveal a thick thatch of black chest hair with an ornate crucifix on a gold chain hanging amidst it. His forearms were huge and tracked with distended veins. Alex had large, lumpy, battered hands.
Gomez could hear Alex breathing fairly heavily through his nose. This is so fucking exciting! Alex said call him Cooch before we left. His Spanish started as pure, upscale Castilian. He listened to me, then asked questions, then listened carefully again. After twenty minutes or so, Cooch said, “I think this language is close enough.” He started talking in an accent that sounded like he was Mexican, from somewhere. For Mexicans that spend a lot of time out of the country, their accents get blurred. Cooch nailed the accent. Who the hell is this guy? Mikey seems to think he walks on water.
A man brought two beers to them, and then spoke to Gomez.
“So, Hector,” he said. “Welcome back. Who’s your big friend? It’s always nice to see a new face.”
“A distant cousin from Baja California, Pedro,” Gomez said. “We were childhood playmates. This is Alejandro. He’s on his way east and stopped in for the evening. We decided to have a beer.”
Pedro stuck out his hand, and Alex took it, standing. He loomed.
“Hola,” Alex said, as he glanced across the room. Everyone in the room was looking at him, the newcomer. Across the room, the older Mexican studied him carefully.
Alex sat down as the bartender walked away and said to Hector, “These are bad guys. I know one of them, so we got what we came for. Let’s finish our beer and get out of here.”
Gomez nodded and tilted his bottle to his lips. He took two big gulps and put it down.
Alex tilted his bottle and took a sip, watching the leader in his peripheral vision. After a few moments, the older man turned and leaned to the large man beside him. He spoke a few words.
The man set his bottle on the floor and stood. He was wide, with no discernible waist. His hair was dirty, pulled back and held with a rubber band. He hitched his pants and began to approach their table, rolling a little as he walked. There was a confident grin on his face.
When he reached the table, Alex stood up from his chair.
“I am Gordo,” he said, belly bumped Alex back into his chair, and smiled. Gordo had a gold rim around one of his front teeth and there was an incisor missing on the left. Alex reached to Gordo’s elbow to catch himself as he was bumped, and again came to his feet, his index finger digging hard into the little elbow hollow where the funny bone is.
“Ngggh!” Gordo grunted. The surprise of the sharp electric pain immobilized him for a moment.
Alex turned the big man to his left after another deep squeeze into the elbow and brought his left hand to grasp Gordo’s neck. His fingers reached under each ear to the point where the soft mastoid bones are most exposed. He squeezed hard with his thumb on one side and two fingers on the other side of the neck and felt the bones there yield slightly to his grip. The man was still, quivering from the pain.
“Senor,” Cooch said to the older Mexican. “Your colleague is impolite. Is there a reason we should be adversaries?”
“Why are you here?” the man asked. He watched curiously as his messenger stood silent. It was out of character for Gordo to be passive.
“I am here to have a beer with my cousin before continuing my journey to the east. I have no reason other than that to be here. Have we met?”
“We have not, but you don’t fit in here.”
“We don’t, it seems. We’re happy to leave. A noisy altercation might draw the attention of the gringo police. I cannot afford that.”
There was a long silence. “Neither, I suppose, can I afford that. But there are just two of you. We could easily kill you and hide your bodies. We plan to be here only a few more days.”
“There are six of you and five of us,” Alex said. “There may be no one left to dig the graves. And there is no profit in it for you or for me. You will be the first to die; your colleague beside me will be the second. I will likely be the third. It may be better if we just leave now.”
“I think you are lying to me, senor. I see but two of you. The man of mine beside you appears to be useless as an enforcer. So kill him now as a gesture that you are not from the police, then convince me there are more of you. Do you need a knife? Your time is short.”
***
On the drive to the cantina from the Clemens’ ranch, Brooks had been in the passenger seat beside Proctor Mikey. Alex and Hector Gomez sat in the back seat of Mikey’s Crew Cab F250 Ford pickup truck. It was the off-road model, painted a deep red, with big tires and four-wheel drive.
“Nice truck!” Alex had said.
Mikey smiled. “I call her BART, my big-ass red truck. I spend my money on trucks and rifles. I sell a little venison and some boar that I shoot. Since my old lady dumped me ten years ago, life’s been pretty good.”
“OK, let’s keep life good,” Brooks had said. “Here’s the way we do these things, and this is all classified, so no bragging rights back at the ranch. Cooch and Hector will find a table that we can see, that is not in our line of fire, but in our vision. We’ll zero in on the leader, if he is obvious. Cooch will look directly at him when he is standing.
“If it is going to get nasty, Cooch will point at something, like the edge of the bar or a vertical timber. There will be a knife sticking out of it. Shoot the knife at the center of the blade. If he points again, shoot a bottle. If he points at someone, shoot him dead. Then work from right to left and shoot anyone who produces a gun. One shot each. I’ll put the two guys in the corner down and work left to right. At first, I’ll avoid killing anyone who looks like an Arab, because we might want to talk to them. Hector, do not stand up after you sit down. If you have to shoot, drop and shoot from a kneeling position.”
Mikey had grinned. “Fucking Seals,” he said. “You don’t leave much to chance.”
“It sounds like you’ve been there, Mikey,” Brooks had said. “With bad guys we try to leave nothing to chance, but we still manage to get a few buddies killed, from time to time. I’d like to avoid that here.”
“Yeah,” Mikey had said. “I don’t disagree. It’s just nice to work with the A team.”
Cooch and Hector had been dropped short of the cantina, to walk the last fifty yards. Mikey had planned a spot to stop and Gomez had made a rough sketch of the interior of the cantina. The F250 moved quietly past the cantina, then switched off its lights and turned left onto a dirt road that curved back toward the way they had come. Mikey had night-vision goggles pulled down. In a short time, the cantina was visible from the driver’s window and Mikey had turned the truck with its hood away from the open window. The two men got out and lowered the tailgate, then crawled up on the bed of the pickup. Two thick mattress pads were laid out with several small sandbags of dull black nylon stacked at their sides.
Mikey opened a long box mounted against the side wall and picked up a bolt action Remington Model 700 rifle chambered in .308, with a Swarovski Z6i three to eighteen power scope mounted. He had a Leupold range finder dangling from his neck. He reached again and handed Brooks an old M14 semi-automatic rifle that showed signs of loving, professional care. It had a tactical scope mounted. Next came two loaded magazines for it. Mikey had reached again and came out with a small handful of cartridges. He opened the .308’s bolt and began to push them, one at a time, into the ammunition well of his rifle.
“It’s eighty-seven meters to Cooch. Your M14 is zeroed at one hundred yards with 140 grain Nosler bullets. What are we looking at here?” Mikey said a few moments later, as he looked through his range finder.
Elliot looked through his tactical scope, and said, “We can’t see into one corner of the room. I’m going to go twenty-five yards west and find a new spot with a better view. In the meantime, shoot where the man points. Nice M14, by the way. I love this rifle.”
Mikey reached again into the box, brought out two Motorola two-way radios, set the channels, and handed one to Brooks. Brooks dropped it into his shirt pocket and slid to the ground from the extended gate of the truck. He pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes. They were not the Generation Four goggles the Seals used, but Generation Two was good enough to see his way on a partially moonlit night.
***
Cooch reached with his right hand to Gordo’s chin and released his left to hold the palm along his jaw line. Just as Gordo started to move, Cooch gave a hard, twisting snap with his right hand as he held the neckline from yielding with his left. There was a sound like a dry branch cracking. As the man crumpled to the floor, Cooch dropped his right hand behind his neck and in one motion threw a knife from a scabbard that hung there. It stuck, quivering, in a vertical wooden roof support beside the Mexican boss.
“I don’t need a knife to kill him,” Cooch said. “He’s dead. There are now five of you. I could have made it four, but thought I would use the knife as a demonstration of your risk. As I said, I would rather not have noisy trouble.”
“Do you have more than one knife, senor, or is that danger gone with your showmanship? What now? I’ve seen no evidence that there are more of you than I see.”
Cooch pointed at the knife. It disappeared with a loud spang; the sound of a nearby shot followed closely through the open window.
“Now you have evidence,” Cooch said. “May we now leave in peace?”
“You have murdered one of my men.”
Cooch sighed loudly. “He was killed only at your request, senor. He wasn’t much. I imagine he’d have died soon anyway if you are in the violence business. But I suspect violence is just a byproduct of something else you do.”
“You know of the violence business?”
“We are in the violence business, senor. All we do is to sell violence and its enabling tools. It’s usually a good business, but this evening is about to be bad for business. We aren’t getting paid.”
“You may leave, but I will remember you. I hope to kill you slowly someday.”
“And I you, senor,” Cooch said. He pointed at the bar. A bottle broke. He reached in his pocket, pulled a roll of bills from it, and dropped several on the table, then turned his back and walked to the door with Hector close behind, a 9mm Sig Sauer Model 229 pistol dangling from Hector’s shaking hand and a huge grin on his face.
… Continued…
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an excerpt from
Children of the Plague
by Gregory Carrico
PART ONE:
The End of the World
~Chapter One: Waiting for the Scream~
Lanni leaned face-first against her flimsy bedroom door, waiting for the scream. The phony wood grain pressed shallow lines into her forehead and flattened nose, and the ghost of two-year-old paint haunted her with a faint odor.
She relaxed her grip on the door handle just enough to let the prickling flow of blood return to her fingers. Each sensation became an anchor, something to cling to against the rising tide of pressure behind her eyes. Though they distracted her from the dull but constant pain she already felt, they were not an inoculation against what she knew would come.
Any second now…
Pain was seldom worse than the anticipation of it, but Lanni knew exactly what to expect, and it scared her. Her neck and shoulders leached tension from the thick air, making the pressure in her head even worse. She hated waiting almost as much as hearing her mother’s screams rip through the thin walls of their mobile home.
The continual sounds of her mother’s suffering weren’t easy to bear, but some of her screams were different; they reached right into Lanni’s soul. She knew it was crazy, but they had a physical, painful effect on her.
Alex, her twin brother, felt it too. They had both been plagued with sudden, odd headaches for weeks, but for the last two days, the pain had been relentless. And this morning, when the screaming started, it grew magnitudes worse. Now, with her mother wailing in agony only a few paces away, the pain was climbing to new levels.
They found the situation easier to deal with when they were together. Even though they didn’t discuss it, her pain was muted in his company, and she could tell it helped him, too.
At that moment, however, she was alone with nothing but the feel of her cool bedroom door against her warm face, and the faint smell of paint to help her tune out the throbbing pulse in her temples.
Oh God, here it comes.
The long, moaning cries from the end of the hall settled into a quicker rhythm of higher pitched barks. It was the same pattern every time, and it meant one of the big screams was imminent. Even the already tense air knew it was coming. It coiled around her, tighter and tighter, a giant, invisible snake squeezing the air from her chest, until finally…
The scream.
It’s just a sound. It can’t really hurt me.
But thinking that didn’t make it true. It did really hurt her. It bashed into her tender head like a Louisville Slugger. Even when the scream finally died down, the pain lived on, and it got worse every time. She didn’t know how many more she could take.
Where is that ambulance?
With luck, she’d have a two-minute reprieve before the next bad contraction. That was more than enough time to walk a few feet down the hall to Alex’s room.
Despite an overwhelming sense of urgency, she couldn’t afford to give in to her fear, not even a tiny bit. She walked calmly down the narrow hall and tapped on her brother’s door. The “Barging In” rule surely wouldn’t apply at a time like this, but sticking to her routine helped her keep a grip on her self-control, so she waited for him to answer.
“Alex?” she called. It was barely more than a whisper.
More than anything, she wanted to be out of the hallway before the next scream. She glanced nervously at her parents’ door, now only a few feet away, as though a monster was about to smash it down.
There’s no such thing as monsters, dummy. This is perfectly normal. All pregnant women scream and cry.
Something in those screams scared her, though, and whatever she tried to tell herself, it was not normal. She recognized the gasping and whimpering, already starting again, as the air coiled tighter around her.
Oh no. Not yet…
“Alex!” She was louder this time and a bit panicky.
Her father’s deep voice rumbled softly through the walls like distant thunder, muting her mother’s exhausted panting. But despite his almost magically soothing tone, her mother panted faster and louder. The snake was still coiling.
Screw the “Barging In” rule…
She shoved the door open, but it bounced off of something on the other side and snapped shut again, knocking her backwards.
“Ow! Dammit!” a guy’s voice said. It wasn’t Alex.
The door opened about two inches, and a vertical slice of a wide freckled face peered through the crack. It was Alex’s enormous friend from their football team.
“Jacob? What are you doing here?” She pushed the door, but neither he nor it budged. “Move. I need to come in.”
“Not now, squirt,” he whispered, and closed the door.
Anger and disbelief overpowered her fear.
Squirt? Did he just close a door in my face? In my own house?
Her father’s voice grew louder as he tried to talk over her mother’s intensifying groans.
“Okay. Okay. You’re all right. Squeeze my hand. It’s all right,” he said in a continuous litany.
“Oh… Ohhh NOOO,” her mother cried in a trembling, high-pitched voice. “It’s bad, David. It’s so bad. I don’t want… Don’t… Please don’t let me die!” Every word sounded forced. She was struggling to keep up the fight, to live.
The door opened when Lanni tried it again, and she slipped into the smallish room, ready to punch Jacob in his big nose if he got in her way. Alex was at his desk, sketching on an oversized pad with colored pencils, as if nothing else in the world mattered. His haunted face was nearly as pale as his paper. He looked so much worse than he had just a couple of hours earlier.
“Look, pipsqueak,” Jacob hissed, standing up from the edge of the bed, “he won’t talk to you right now. You know how he gets, so just go back to your little lair and let him draw.” He grabbed her shoulders and spun her around to face the door.
She had no hope of resisting him, but she defiantly planted her feet and made him push, anyway. At six-foot-two, with arms like a teenage Hulk, he had little trouble. He was only a year ahead of her, but even for an eighth grader, he was a veritable giant.
“What’s the matter with you? This is my house,” she said in disbelief. “Let go of me!”
“Just knock it off and get out of here, okay? I don’t want to hurt you,” Jacob said. Something in his tone sounded odd, less sure of himself than usual.
“Hurt me?” It was the last straw. Whatever his reasons were for acting like this, she had had enough of it. She kicked his shin with her heel and stomped down on his sock-clad ankle.
“Ow! What the…”
As he reflexively hopped onto his other foot, she jammed her shoulder into his chest and shoved. Sensei Rumiko always said “Distract and destroy.” It worked. He stumbled backwards and fell on the bed.
Her racing heart pumped more pain into her head, but it didn’t keep her from noticing the rage boiling up in Jacob’s face.
“That’s right. Get up and grab me again, because I do want to hurt you!” she said. She felt like she was watching the situation unfold from a tiny room in her mind. She had every reason to be upset, but this lust for violence wasn’t like her. It wasn’t like Jacob to be so forceful either.
He jumped back up, looking like he wanted to tackle her.
Was this really happening? Couldn’t he hear her mother screaming and pleading for her life in the next room? Had the entire world gone crazy?
“Jacob, get out of my house! You shouldn’t even be here.”
“Alex told me to come over,” he growled. “He said it was important, and I’m not leaving until he tells me to. So get lost, and quit bothering everyone.”
She gasped as his iron-like fingers clamped onto her right shoulder. As his other arm reached past her to open the door, she reached up and pinched the thin skin on his triceps, just above his elbow.
He jerked his arm back with an angry yelp, while Lanni took advantage of his distraction and grabbed his other hand. She twisted until his pinkie was on top, and in a single, fluid motion, she rolled his fingertips toward the ceiling and pressed toward his chest. He dropped to his knees like a bag of rocks, leaning forward to relieve some of the painful pressure on his wrist.
Lanni’s rage was in full swing. “Are you seriously making me do this?” she asked, red-faced with exertion and anger. “My mother could be dying, my twin brother is sick and no one knows what’s wrong with him, and you still think this is the time to mess with me?” She pressed harder on his wrist, forcing his face closer to the floor.
“Lisa… Lisa-Ann! You’re… you’re gonna break my wrist!” he stammered.
“Yeah, I think I am,” she growled. “And it’ll serve you right. Are you ’roid raging or something? You come into my house and push me around? Listen to that! That’s my mother!”
“I’m… Ouch! I’m sorry! You can let go now. You made your point.”
She slapped the inside of his elbow, bending his arm and putting even more pressure on his wrist. “If you ever put your bigugly hands on me again, you won’t get them back.” She gave him a final shove and sent him rolling sideways into the bed frame. “Now get out of here!”
Alex never even looked up from his drawing. It was the local high school mascot: a knight in full armor with his sword raised high and a bold red S emblazoned on his shield. He could draw that one in his sleep, and that’s just what he seemed to be doing.
Jacob winced as he stood up, cradling his hand. “You know I let you do that, squirt. You’re getting pretty good, though.” He was embarrassed and trying to sound tough, but the real anger was gone from his voice.
“Bye, Jacob.” She sat in the chair next to Alex and watched his hands dance across the sketch pad. His talent for tuning out the world was epic, but as their headaches had grown more intense, his focus had become more than a little trancelike. His glassy eyes leaked at the corners, and if he even knew she was in the room, he showed no sign of it.
“I’m real sorry I grabbed you, Lanni. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s just… all this is really freaking me out. Alex is being weirder than usual, and your mom… is she having problems? I know she’s in labor, but she doesn’t sound good, and Alex hasn’t said a thing.”
Lanni turned and stared at Jacob, dumbfounded. “Labor? She’s only four months, so, yeah, I’d say she’s having problems.”
Jacob’s face went red, and he looked at the floor. Despite their little melee, he wasn’t trying to be mean. Saying the right thing just wasn’t one of his strengths. He was usually a pretty gentle guy, even though he tried his best to hide it.
“She sounds bad,” Lanni said, “but she’ll be all right. Being pregnant hurts, doesn’t it? That’s all it is.” She sounded less confident with each word. What she knew about being pregnant wouldn’t fill a thimble, but despite her words, she suspected that this was anything but normal.
Jacob nodded confidently. “I’m sure you’re right, Lanni. Maybe she’s having triplets this time. That could be it. And what mother wouldn’t scream with three or four kids like you in her belly?” He was trying to be funny, reassuring, and comforting all at once but couldn’t quite pull it off.
It wasn’t his fault, though. With all of the dire news on TV, very few people had anything to be cheery about. The stories ranged from deadly pandemics, to biblical prophecies of last days coming true, and everything in between. Something was obviously very wrong in the world.
Pregnant women were dying in startlingly high numbers across the globe. The few women having stillbirths or miscarriages were the lucky ones. The rest died in painful, premature births of seriously deformed and even mutated offspring. It was enough to make the nut-jobs predicting the end of the world sound perfectly reasonable.
The realities of the situation were crushing, particularly given her mother’s condition. She had no factual basis to believe her mother would be one of the lucky few, yet she refused to abandon hope. But as long as those terrible cries kept coming, she could hope, and she would cling to that hope, however slim, until it was gone.
Alex’s pencil stopped scratching across his pad, and the entire house went eerily quiet. He lurched up from the desk, knocking his chair over backwards, and sending an assortment of colored pencils cascading to the floor. He just stared straight ahead, ignoring Lanni and Jacob like he was still in his trance.
“Dude,” Jacob said, putting his hand to his chest. “You scared the… Aahhg!” He interrupted himself with a high-pitched gasp of pain, falling once more to his knees and clutching the sides of his head. It would have looked comical, like a scene from one of those D-list horror flicks he and Alex loved so much, if not for everything else that was happening.
Before Lanni could react, nauseating pain hammered her head and washed over her body. She saw stars through blurred vision, and ringing filled her ears. Her sense of balance abandoned her. Somehow, she caught herself on the desk, leaning heavily against it with both hands. Confused, she wondered if the house had been struck by lightning.
Alex was little more than a blur of motion as he stepped over his whimpering friend and brushed purposefully past her into the hall.
With virtually no reprieve, the pain struck again. It felt like her head was being crushed and trying to explode at the same time. Her nausea became an inexplicable and almost overpowering hunger.
As her sight returned, she found herself staring at Jacob’s flushed throat with an insane urge to sink her teeth into it. If she hadn’t been immobilized by shocking jolts of pain, she might have done so.
Still not recovered from the previous assault, her vision blurred and her ears rang again, as yet another wave hit. Her muscles twitched and jumped, treading the thin boundary between agony and numbness. Even clutching the edge of Alex’s desk, she barely kept her feet.
She gasped for air but couldn’t draw a full breath. Her heart quivered in her chest. Even with the overload of sensations wracking her body, in a moment of shocking clarity, she knew she was dying.
She wanted to resist it, to fight, to scream, but with the strange energy pulsing through her, her body didn’t seem to get any of her mind’s signals.
No!
A low, primal growl of rage clawed its way into her consciousness, but she couldn’t draw enough breath to give it voice.
Panic.
This isn’t happening. I won’t let this happen!
With every ounce of will she could muster, she forced her body to respond and was rewarded with a tiny, convulsive gasp of air. It felt like a great victory, but it was fleeting. She couldn’t hold out against the current of power trying to wash her out of her body.
The world went utterly dark.
#
And then it all came back. With no warning, the aches, the sounds, the smells, and the inexplicable terror came crashing back. She could see again. Her brother was beside her, watching her with a hopeful expression.
The energy that nearly killed her was still there, inside her. But now, it felt no different than her arm or leg. It had become just another part of her.
Alex breathed a relieved sigh as she started to act normally again. “Come on,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”
Then she remembered her mother, and the screams, and the pain. But where had they gone? The house was still silent. Even the moaning and whimpering had stopped. The waves of energy still rolled through the house, but they didn’t hurt her anymore. They broke against her like water on a stone.
Alex must have understood what she was thinking, because he shook his head. “No. Stay beside me,” he said. “We have to leave.”
“Leave? We have to help Mom! Find a phone,” she said. “Call 911. We need that ambulance here, now!” She ran to her mother’s room without waiting for him to answer.
“Lanni, wait! Don’t go in there,” Alex said. “You can’t help her.”
“Alex! Mom is dying. Get the damned phone.”
“You don’t understand, Lanni. It’s her. This is all coming from Mom. I don’t know how or why, but she’s been doing it for weeks. It’s never been this bad, but I’ve felt it, and I know it’s her.”
“What are you talking about? Please don’t go crazy right now. I really need you.” She started crying. Why was everything going so wrong?
“I thought I was going crazy, too. I keep hearing voices in my head. They sound like you, and Mom, and Dad, and other people, too. It’s mostly just bits and pieces, but now I know they’re real. One of them makes me want to do things… terrible things, but I think I’m stronger. I get these urges, and…”
“GET THE PHONE!” she yelled. He was raving. It was ridiculous to blame their mother, or anyone. It had to be a freak power surge, or a solar flare, or something, but that didn’t matter to her. Nothing mattered except getting to her mother. She pushed the door open, and her heart sank.
“Oh no. Please, no,” she sobbed.
“Lisa Ann! It’s not safe, yet. Stay with me.”
Lisa Ann. She hated her name. He always called her that when he wanted to sound important, or if he was nervous about something. It was an odd thing to notice, given the scene she had just stepped into.
Blood covered everything. It dripped from the ceiling and down the walls, and soaked the bed. Her mother’s contorted, blood-spattered face gazed vaguely in Lanni’s direction, frozen into a rictus of horror. Her legs were both twisted to one side at an unnaturally sharp angle, and her belly looked like it had been scooped away with a giant grapefruit spoon, leaving only an empty red cavity.
Her father’s feet stuck out beyond the footboard on the other side of the bed, toes down.
“Dad?”
Silence.
Lanni took small steps around the foot of the bed, not wanting to see what awaited her.
“Daddy?”
One of his feet rocked gently from side to side. As his body came into full view, she knew that she was losing her mind, just like her brother. An impossible creature stood on her father’s back. It looked like a wrinkled, black football with four bowed bulldog legs and yellow clawed feet.
Glistening with blood and gore, it made wet, slurping sounds as it rocked back and forth, clinging to her father like a demonic tick.
I must be dead. This is Hell.
Blood poured down her father’s side from beneath the little monster, and his body jerked as it tugged him from side to side. It pulled away from him and sat back on two legs.
The center of its chest was split open from top to bottom and filled with several concentric rows of pointy shark-like teeth. Each row opened and closed in turns as they shredded an apple-sized chunk of her father’s flesh, working it deeper into its body. If it had a head or any sensory organs, they were very well camouflaged.
Ignoring her, the monster dropped down on all four feet and bit into her father’s back. It must have hit a big vein or artery, because blood sprayed from the new wound. He was still alive!
In a blind rage, she screamed and charged at the creature. She wanted to hurl it against the wall and stomp it to death. It didn’t even try to move as she reached for it. She was vaguely aware of her brother saying something from the hall. His tone sounded urgent, but his words didn’t register with her.
The strip of floor between the bed and wall was barely wide enough to accommodate her father, so she fell to her knees, straddling his legs, and tried to pull the little monster off of him. It was hot and slippery, though, like it was covered in oil, and it slipped right through her hands.
A bluish substance dripped from her fingers, leaving no residue behind. It flowed like liquid but felt as dry as powder. She scarcely noticed these details before lunging forward to try again.
This time, as she reached for it, the monster quivered slightly, and another wave of energy slammed into her. It definitely came from the little toothy football beast. She felt most of the energy flow around her as it had done in the hall a few moments ago, but the tiny bit that managed to affect her felt like a bare-knuckled punch from a professional boxer.
Completely dazed by the attack, she fell forward on her father’s back, while the impossible little beast easily hopped aside.
It sat up on two legs again, right in front of her face, giving her a very clear, up-close view. She noticed that two of its legs were longer and thinner, and the conical section of its body between the shorter limbs was covered in twisty raised ridges, very reminiscent of a human brain.
It moved toward her tentatively, taking small, searching steps with all four limbs, but it pulled back when a yellow claw grazed her chin. Aside from the momentary burning feeling, it didn’t hurt, though she knew it had given her a pretty good cut. She could feel what must have been blood flowing from the spot.
Her eyes drifted shut, but she fought to stay awake and forced them back open. Instead of the little monster, she saw her old pet rabbit, Carver, sitting in its place.
Now I’m hallucinating. I must be in shock.
Her eyes closed again, and when she opened them, Carver was gone and the monster was back. The slightly raised ridge on its underside split open, and the shark-like maw chewed the air in anticipation. It smelled like burning plastic and rancid meat.
It jumped at her and landed on her head, digging its thick claws through her scalp. More warm sticky fluid flowed down over her face as it lowered its jaws to her head, just above her left ear. The last thing she noticed was the horrible crunching sound of its teeth digging into her skull. Unable to fight back, or even move, she hoped that Alex, at least, would escape from the surreal, chaotic nightmare that had descended upon their waking world.
~Chapter Two: The Princess Room~
She heard his voice.
“Shh. Be still, Lanni. You’re doing great.”
Soothing hands cradled her head, softening the pain. She pried her stubborn eyes open and saw Alex’s emaciated face hovered over hers. He looked so much older. Fire razed everything inside her skull, and as much as she wanted to care about Alex, her own suffering dominated her attention.
Other voices droned in quiet conversation, near, but out of sight. Sensei Rumiko and her husband John, she thought. Dr. Harris was with them, too. Had they all come just for her?
The biting reek of the monster’s breath still burned her nostrils, a reminder of what caused her pain. The memory triggered a warning bell.
The monster! Danger! Had it escaped? Did Alex kill it? What if it was still in the house?
Her body barely responded to her mental distress. She wanted to shout but had to settle for a weak frown. The tickle of alien energy coursed through every cell of her body, electric blood, ready to jolt her flesh into action. Instead of obeying her, it responded to Alex’s touch, tingling the most around her wounds.
Another energy, distinct from, and somehow at odds with the first, coiled deep inside her like compressed light, held back, but eager to shine. Unaware that she had been suppressing it, the strain of holding it in quickly became too much. It expanded until she was encased by it, like an invisible exoskeleton.
A pained wince ruined Alex’s smile. His hands jumped back from her head, but he quickly smiled again. Lanni recognized his fake smile. It was sweet of him to make an effort.
“What did you just do?” he asked. His tone was soft, but insistent.
Do? He wasn’t making sense. She hadn’t done anything. She expressed her confusion with a barely perceptible shake of her head.
He touched the sides of her face again. He flinched but held his hands on her skin for two more seconds before jerking them away. Anger, or perhaps frustration darkened his face, but the plastic smile bounced right back.
She had seen this expression countless times, though seldom directed at her. He typically reserved his “patiently annoyed” look for people who interrupted a muse-inspired frenzy of drawing or painting.
“I’m trying my best, Lanni,” Alex said. “You’re doing really well, but I’m not done yet. You have to stop this… whatever it is, for just another minute. Can you do that?”
“I’m not doing anything,” is what she intended to say. The strangled, wordless sounds that gurgled up from her throat were more like a comedian’s portrayal of a drunk than actual speech. Frustrated and exhausted from the effort, she let her head loll to one side.
A glass figurine toppled from the tall chest of drawers behind Alex, as the little football-shaped brain-monster moved into view. Lanni couldn’t say a word to warn him. Her fingers barely lifted when she tried to point.
Alex hadn’t noticed. He touched the sides of her head again and closed his eyes.
“Lanni,” he groaned. “Please stop. I really can’t take it anymore.” Each phrase struggled out through clenched teeth. He sat beside her on a huge bed, staring at his hands. The room around them was entirely unfamiliar.
The nasty odor of rot and burning plastic, along with her spinning head, made her stomach lurch. Were his hands smoking?
“I’m going to get you out of here, Lanni. I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
She couldn’t answer, and even worse, she no longer cared to try. The pain in her splitting skull spiked when he let go of her head. She gave in and let the pain drag her into unconsciousness.
As she sank into a welcomed sleep, an important-sounding voice on the radio advised everyone to stay in their homes until the authorities determined the nature of the attack.
#
When Lanni woke up, there was only pain. No trace of light reached her eyes, nor sound her ears. Neither warmth nor chill alighted on her skin. Pain was her entire existence.
And then the world lurched. It dropped away beneath her and rose again with a fury, knocking her around with merciless unpredictability. She only knew that a foul-smelling monster had bitten into her skull and killed her.
Sounds came next. A cacophonous racket of rattling metal and glass punctuated the deep growl of a diesel engine. Another lurch reminded her that she had a body, and it was none too pleased about taking such a beating.
Sensei Rumiko would have said, “Embrace your pain with joy, child, for only the living can feel it.” This tidbit of advice usually followed a stinging strike with a bamboo training sword called a shinai.
“Lanni? You awake?” Alex shouted over the growling engine. “I’m sorry about the ride. We’re on an old logging road, I think. Fifty-Two and Twenty-Six are both parking lots. There’s a cruise ship at the Naval Weapon Station, and I’m trying to get us there before it leaves.”
The engine settled into a loud idle, and the bouncing stopped. Tension she hadn’t even noticed around her chest, waist, and arms vanished, and after the sound of a sliding zipper, cool air blew across her shoulders.
“I bundled you up in a sleeping bag and strapped you to the seat with bungee cords,” Alex explained as he unwrapped her. “The seatbelt broke away from the floor when I tried to buckle you in. It’s rusted out.”
“It really hurts,” Lanni said, mentally celebrating the sound of actual words. “I can’t see.”
“Your head is wrapped up. I had to cover your eyes to make it fit. Dr. Harris was a little crazy, but I got some information out of him. Some medical advice. We’re in his Scout.”
“That explains a few things,” she said, hoping he’d hear her weak voice over the engine. “Who’s with us? Sensei? Martha?”
“No one. It’s just you and me. Martha and Mrs. Harris are gone. I’m sorry, Lanni. Just sit tight. We can’t stay in one place for very long. I haven’t seen as many out here in the woods, but more than you might think.” The engine roared, and they lurched into motion, pulling her back against the seat.
Lanni wondered if he meant the football monsters. How many could there be? Martha and her mother didn’t deserve to die, especially at the hands—claws—of one of those things. She didn’t have so many friends that she could afford to lose a few. How many more would die before someone got things under control?
She thanked God for Alex. Her somewhat pathetic, deathly ill twin brother had rescued her. He had really stepped up. She would never take him for granted again.
#
A persistent, droning buzz, like an angry alarm clock, battered through Lanni’s wall of frightening dreams. Alternating flashes of red and white light strobed through her closed eyelids, demanding her attention.
Princess Jasmine and Prince Ali smiled down at her from their magic carpet, muddling her sense of balance. The warning light’s blood red pall gave them a demonic cast.
Instantly alert, she sat up and scanned her surroundings. The room was barely large enough for the bed. Windows lined the wall to her right, and two doors faced each other at a right angle on the left. Disney characters, mostly princesses, smiled from wall- and ceiling-mounted posters.
The charged paddles of a crash cart near her bed dangled over the side rail, the word “ready” blinking green on a color LCD panel. Despite the fire alarm’s insistence, she smelled no smoke.
She hopped down from the bed and pulled the Disney Princess bed sheet over her bare shoulders.
Where are my clothes?
A man’s shouts in the hall distracted her from her search. Loud enough for her to hear over the alarm, his voice carried through her door.
“Back off! Stay back, now. I’m not…”
Gunfire interrupted his sentence, probably from a twenty-gauge shotgun. Lanni shrank into the corner beside the door as hard soled shoes ran past.
“Dammit!” the same voice shouted a second later. The gun fired again, and the tapping shoes came back her way. He spouted a stream of profanity that made her ears burn. Why couldn’t people speak anymore without swearing?
She cracked the door to risk a peek. A pot-bellied, middle-aged cop was charging toward her. Barely missing a step, he noticed her opening door and fired the shotgun at her.
A chunk of the door frame and wall exploded where her head had been. As soon as she saw the barrel swinging in her direction, she pushed back from the door. In her haste, she tripped on the sheet and fell sideways on the bed.
The “electric blood” sensation returned, infusing her body and kicking her reflexes into high gear. She rolled with the momentum of her bounce from the bed and kept moving. The flashing lights and buzzing alarms slowed down. She had never seen the world so clearly or felt every motion with such precision.
Discarding the sheet, she grabbed a blood pressure cuff hanging from the wall, and hid beside the door. She pulled the coiled hose taut between her hands, raised it over her head and waited.
The door burst open before she could take another breath, and the chubby cop took one step into the room, planting a black boot on the floor in front of her. He moved in the same slow motion as the flashing alarm. Their eyes met while his gun swung toward her in a slow, sweeping arc. His brows lifted in surprise, but Lanni didn’t wait to see if he was changing his mind.
~Chapter Three: Meet Pete~
Lanni swung the rubber tubing down on his barrel like a jump rope, deflecting it to the floor. With a deafening blast, it destroyed the tile between her feet. She dropped into a wide-legged squat, throwing a loop of hose around the barrel.
Off-balance and surprised, the cop stumbled back against the door frame, holding the gun’s stock in one hand, while his other grasped at the wall to regain his balance. Lanni dropped to her side on the floor and kicked his ankle, tugging the weapon toward her as he fell.
Dropping the hose, she snatched the shotgun from the air and spun it toward him, pumping a shell into the chamber.
“Get in here and close the door,” she said. The world returned to a normal pace after its strange slow-down. The cop did as she said and put his hands up.
“Easy does it,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His eyes dipped for moment at her naked body and then shot back up to lock onto hers.
“I guess your Remington has a mind of its own, then. I better hang onto it until we’re sure it’s going to behave.”
He nodded without looking away from her eyes. Smile lines and crows feet furrowed his round, tan face. It was a friendly enough face. She could almost see him trying to figure a way out of his predicament.
“Fair enough,” he said. “You got two shells left. If you can find your way to not putting either of them in me, I’d be in your debt. I’m Pete. What’s your name?”
“Nice to meet you, Pete. My name’s none of your business. Get over on the other side of the bed. Let me know if you see my clothes. Remi and I are watching, so keep your hands away from that pistol.”
“I’m not interested in shooting you, okay?” He kept his voice calm and steady as he limped past her, scanning the room. “That was an accident. Everyone outside that door has gone crazy. They’re killing each other out there. I’m just a guy trying to stay alive, and I can help keep you that way, too, if you’ll let me.”
She remembered the bloody scene in her parents’ bedroom, and the monster that killed Jacob, her brother’s friend. He had gone a bit crazy, too. In that light, Pete’s story wasn’t beyond belief.
A woman’s voice came from the hall. She ran past the door screaming in an oddly low, primal tone. A clacking sound, like an animal with long toenails or claws, followed after her. Then they both fell silent.
“I don’t see your clothes, hon,” he said, untucking his shirt. “If we stay here, something’s gonna find us, and we’ll have to fight it. I don’t plan on standing here with my hands in the air waiting to get torn up. If you’re gonna shoot me, let’s just get it out of the way.” He started unfastening his shirt buttons as he spoke.
“What do you think you’re doing, Pete?”
“It’s the apocalypse out there. Do you really want to run around killing zombies with nothing but a shotgun and a smile?” He pulled his shirt off and tossed it onto the bed. “I’ll turn around while you get dressed. Meanwhile, you should think about taking my pistol and letting me carry the shotgun. It’ll be easier for you to manage. I’ll give you a quick lesson on how to shoot before we go.”
“Put your pistol on the bed, too,” she said.
He flipped the holster’s safety strap, drew the pistol with two fingers, and gently set it beside his shirt.
“Here you go. It’s loaded.”
“I’d sure hope so, Pete,” she said with a touch of sarcasm. She looked the weapon over, ejected the clip, and pulled the slide to check the chamber. It was a nine millimeter with a much fatter grip than she would have liked. At least the trigger was in the right place. She set the shotgun back on the bed, barrel towards Pete.
“Well?” she asked, gesturing for him to turn around.
Pete’s shirt was bulky and ill-fitting, but as a dress, it worked better than many she’d seen at school. The mixed scents of his B.O. and perfumed deodorant helped mask the monster-stink that seemed to follow her everywhere. It was a little gross, but a fair trade.
“You can take your Remington,” she said, tying the rubber tubing from the blood pressure cuff around her waist as a belt. “But I’m not leaving until we find my brother. If you want to protect me like you said, then you’re helping, too. Those are the rules. Does that suit you?”
“Yes, miss. I reckon it does.”
“Good,” she said. She kept an eye on him, but she didn’t expect him to be any trouble. He seemed sincere enough.
“You’re a pretty unique little girl,” Pete said. “You kick like Norris, move like Chan, and you obviously know your way around guns. I’ve met less confident Paris Island drill instructors. Who are you, Darlin’? Is your daddy a cop? A marine?”
She wasn’t sure how to answer. Her dad was a hunter. He’d made sure everyone in the family could handle a firearm, and sometimes they would shoot paper bad guys together at the range. The rest was as big a mystery to her as it was to him.
Another unintelligible shout came from further down the hall, but she kept her attention on Pete. He looked nervous.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “If I shoot you, it won’t be an accident.” If he chuckled at the comment, the buzzing alarm drowned him out. His eyes definitely crinkled, though. She hoped she wouldn’t have to.
The thought hit her like a punch on the chin. When had she become so hard? She had never been a softy, but, Scarlet O’Hara, what was happening to her? She almost felt possessed, like these moves, thoughts, and ideas were coming from someone else. Normal teenage girls didn’t assault police officers in the nude or threaten them with loaded weapons.
She wasn’t nervous or even a little bit scared. It must have been adrenaline. An abundance of confidence from her successful martial arts moves surely contributed, but she wasn’t that good of a martial artist. She shouldn’t have been able to do those things.
Don’t question it. Just keep being a ninja-assassin for a little longer. If you live long enough, you can figure it out later.
“Your patch says North Charleston. Where are we?”
“This is the St. Francis Medical Center in North Charleston,” he said. “By the mall. Y’all drove here from Goose Creek? Which way did you come? Not River’s Ave., I’ll bet.”
His last phrase came out too loud as the alarm klaxon stopped. They both froze, straining to listen for signs that they’d been heard, while the alternating red and white strobes continued flashing.
Pete wordlessly handed her two full magazines, gesturing for her to put them in the shirt pocket, and then fed two more shells into his shotgun. She decided to trust him enough not to shoot him. For now.
“I don’t know which way we came. My brother drove and I slept. What’s going on out there? What did you mean about people going crazy?”
Pete looked at her for a moment, and then nodded, apparently deciding she could handle what he was about to say.
“About four hours ago,” he began, “calls flooded the nine-one-one dispatch. They came in three waves. First, people flipped out and attacked each other. Not just strangers, either. Neighbors, friends, even family members were hurting each other, sometimes fatally. The strange part is that none of them used weapons.
“The second wave of calls, if you can believe it, was worse. Escaped wild animals were attacking and eating people: mountain lions, bears, wolves, you name it. They said the same of pets, too. A few even claimed they saw aliens, demons, or monsters that looked like headless dogs.”
Lanni nodded. She’d seen that much for herself, though she wasn’t sure she’d admit it to anyone but Alex.
“Those calls didn’t last long,” he continued. “The last batch was reports of people dying. Some just fell over with no signs of what killed them. Some said… well, horrible things. About fifteen minutes after it started, the phone networks died. All of them. Land lines, cell phones, even satellite phones. TV, Internet, radio. All gone.”
“How can they do that if we still have power? Is it terrorists?” Lanni asked. She believed he was being honest, but it didn’t make the least bit of sense.
“Maybe. I don’t know. After everyone started dying, it was every man for himself. Even if we could communicate, there aren’t enough survivors for it to even matter.”
Pete had the same sad expression she used to see on her father when he had bad news to share. Maybe he felt bad for being so candid about it with her. He seemed more affected than she.
The trauma of losing her family, and now learning that so many other people died, too, hadn’t hit her yet. She knew she’d be a crying wreck later, if there was time to cry. Until then she’d just keep taking in one shock after another, filing each tragedy away to be addressed later.
“I think we better get going,” she said. She had heard enough and wanted to act. “What should we do?”
“We find your brother first. We get him and any other survivors somewhere safe. My mother’s house out on Johns Island is well-stocked and remote. There’s all the fish and crabs you can pull out of the river, too. We can survive out there until things settle down. What do you think?”
“Okay. That makes sense. Let’s get going.” She wanted to occupy herself with action to keep from thinking about how increasingly grim the future looked.
“Which one of y’all is older, you or your brother?”
Pete seemed like a decent sort of guy, but something in Lanni’s head wouldn’t let her give her full trust so quickly. She didn’t really know him from Adam. He must have noticed her hesitation.
“You don’t have to tell me anything. I just want to recognize him if I see him first,” Pete said. “It’s okay if you don’t trust me. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty smart of you. Whether you trust me or not, I only want you and your brother to be safe. As long as I have anything to say about it, I won’t let anyone or anything hurt either of you. You have my word.”
“We’re twins,” she said. Pete’s patience was reassuring enough to earn at least that much trust. “We kind-of look alike. At least we did before he got sick. His hair is thin, now. He’s lost a lot weight. Pale skin.”
Describing Alex upset her. Aside from forcing her to acknowledge his illness, it made her realize she hadn’t seen him since the Scout. She assumed he’d brought her here, but in truth, she didn’t know.
I’m not going to cry. I won’t cry anymore.
Pete came around the foot of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. He gave her an understanding, slightly sad smile. “Okay. Stay close to me, and watch our backs. Tap my shoulder if you see anything move. I mean anything. You ready?”
She gripped the pistol with both hands, like her father taught her, and nodded. Without the deafening alarm, the place had become so quiet she could hear the light bulbs buzzing overhead. The screams, crashes, and running feet had all stopped, too.
Pete put a hand on the open edge of the door and looked back at her. “You want to tell me your brother’s name?” he asked. “It might come in handy.”
“Why not?” she began. “I’m Lanni. My brother’s name is…”
Lanni gasped as a hand shot through the gap and locked onto Pete’s wrist. He stiffened like he was being electrocuted and fell to his knees with a vacant expression.
Lanni stepped back and aimed her pistol as the door smashed into Pete, knocking him over. Still holding Pete’s wrist, a short doctor wearing an ill-fitting, white lab coat stepped into the room.
“Call me Alex,” he said with a distant, almost ecstatic expression.
~Chapter Four: Penny Thoughts~
Lanni moved her finger from the trigger but continued watching Alex through the white dot on the pistol’s sights. She resisted the urge to run over and hug him. He was different. He radiated menace. She silently prayed that he hadn’t turned into one of the crazy zombie people Pete told her about.
His eyes locked on hers, but he seemed to be staring through her. His thin, parted lips simulated a clumsy smile. “How is your head, Lisa Ann?” he asked, somewhat automatically.
Her fingers drifted to the side of her head, grazing the tender, but miraculously well-healed wounds above her ear. “It’s fine,” she said, resuming her two-handed grip on the pistol. “What did you do to Pete?” Goosebumps rose all over her body, stimulated by the increasingly familiar electric tingling.
Alex blinked at the limp police officer and let go of his wrist, snapping out of his trance. The spidery sensation crawling over her skin intensified and then stopped.
“You can’t be too cautious,” he said, glancing at the gun, “even with me.”
“What happened? What did you do to him?” Lanni asked again.
“Only what I had to do. Three hosts have come for me in the last hour, Lanni. Five of their puppets, too. Pete, here, could have been under their control. He might have been one of them.” He dropped a long, black duffel bag on the floor. “Clothes for you. Weapons, too. Kit up. We have to get away from here.”
Alex flinched as Lanni fired two rapid shots. A brain-faced monster, like the one that almost ate her head, clacked into view through the open door. Blue ichor spattered the door frame.
The monster leapt out of sight with remarkable agility for a creature with two bullet wounds. It didn’t scream or make any sounds other than the clack of its claws on the tile. A stench like a flaming skunk saturated the air.
“Wait!” Alex said, stepping in front of her. “Leave it alone. It’s with me.”
“It’s with…” she began. “It’s with you? No, Alex. That’s just not going to work for me. I don’t ever want to see that thing again, and I sure don’t want to smell it! No way.”
“I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Alex began, obviously struggling to find the right words. “It’s just . . . neither of us would be here right now if it weren’t for that thing.”
“Exactly,” Lanni said. “So why is it still alive?”
“That’s not what I mean. We’d have both been killed at least twice on the way here if it hadn’t saved us. I know it hurt you, but it didn’t know what it was doing. It was less than a minute old. It followed us all the way here. I think it knows we’re its family.”
“Family? You and I are all that’s left of our family. That thing killed the rest. It killed our mother! I watched it eat our father.”
“Yes, you’re right. All we have left is each other. No one will ever come before you in my eyes. But what’s done can’t be changed. The world we knew has become a dangerous place, and that thing can help us survive in it.”
Pete’s head twitched as he inhaled a convulsive breath. It reminded Lanni that they had bigger things to worry about. No more sounds came in from the hallway. If the thing was still out there, it wasn’t moving.
“How long have I been out? That thing has tripled in size.”
“Almost five hours.”
Lanni lowered the pistol. A lot had happened in such a short time. She needed to know more about what was going on outside, and she was worried about Pete.
“You shouldn’t have hurt him. Is he going to be okay?” she asked. Judging by Alex’s expression, her anger must have been obvious. He stepped closer and touched her shoulder, careful to avoid any bare skin.
“He’ll be fine. And so will we. I’m sorry I had to leave you, but I’m back now. I won’t leave you again.”
“We’ll see.” She knelt and pulled the double zipper on the duffel bag. “What’s a host, and why is one coming for you?”
“All right,” he said. “I don’t know if I can say this without sounding crazy, but here is what I’ve learned. It all comes back to the plague. It changes people in very specific ways. The thing that came out of mom started off human, but the plague took over and changed it.”
“I know that much. I was there,” Lanni said. She didn’t need constant reminders of what happened to her mother. “Hosts?”
“Hosts look like normal people, mostly, but the plague controls them. It’s almost like they are possessed. They can hear what you think. They get in your head and take everything out. Vampires! That’s what they are like. But instead of blood, they drain your mind. They take your thoughts, memories, experiences everything.”
Lanni looked up from the duffel bag. “You’re right. That’s nuts. How did you learn all of this in just a few hours?” She suspected she knew the answer, but she had to ask.
“I tried to tell you before, but you wouldn’t listen. I can hear what people think. I’ve been hearing it for a few weeks.”
In light of everything she’d been through that day, his claim was no more absurd than her mutant newborn sibling trying to kill her, the strange power humming inside her, or an even stranger aura that encased her. She couldn’t logically explain the mostly healed wounds on her head, either. They should have been fatal.
“Even if that’s true,” she began, “how would anyone know it? Who could you possibly have learned this from?”
“There’s more to this plague than anyone knows. Whatever it is, Lanni, it’s aware. There is a communal intelligence that lives in it. This intelligence, called the Con, can inhabit certain types of people once they have been properly altered by the plague. They become hosts. They are physical bodies for the Con. They know what it and each other knows, and they want to drain every ounce of knowledge from every sentient creature on Earth. The drained husks they leave behind are its eyes and ears. And fists.”
It was a lot to take in. If he was right, and he was like these hosts, how long would he last before becoming one of them?
“What’s going to happen?” she asked. “Are you going to go crazy and try to kill me? Drain my mind? What are we going to do, Alex?” she asked.
“I can’t get into your head. I can’t even touch you. Something in your touch blocks the plague, neutralizes it. I must have something similar, too, because all of the other hosts want to find me pretty badly. I learned all of this by doing to them what they want to do to me.”
Her mind raced to process everything he said and come up with a course of action. “The cruise ship! Did you mention a cruise ship at the Naval Weapons Station? They couldn’t come for us out in the ocean, could they?”
He held up an index finger, alert to something she couldn’t hear. “There’s another one,” he whispered. “It’s found me. You’re too important, Lanni. I won’t let them have you. I’ll wake up Peter, and the two of you can sneak out. Get as far from the city as you can. Once you’re far enough away, I’ll finish them off and catch up with you.”
“I don’t think so,” Lanni said. “You said you wouldn’t leave me again. Whatever happens, we’re staying together.” She listened for signs of anything approaching, but all she heard was Peter. His rapid breathing sounded like a coon-dog sniffing out a trail.
“Take Pete’s Remington,” she continued. “If he can walk, bring him. I won’t be completely useless, especially with all the goodies you brought. The plague Con thingy must have big plans for me, because I think I could kick Jackie Chan’s butt after the changes I’ve been through. And if you keep calling me Lisa Ann, I’ll give you a demonstration.”
He didn’t smile, but his demeanor lightened. “That was for calling me ‘little brother,’ twerp. Last I checked we were the same age.” It was funny, but Lanni knew their bickering comforted him as much as it did her. It lent a familiar touch of normalcy to the ongoing nightmare the world had become.
He turned serious again, apparently aware of the host coming closer. “It will be here in a minute or two, maybe less.”
“If you know where it is, let’s go get it. We could ambush it. Why wait for it to come to us?” Lanni asked.
“I’ll handle the host. I am curious to know what, if anything, you remember after our… after that thing bit you in mom’s room.
She hadn’t thought about that yet. It wasn’t something she wanted to remember. “Mostly the smell. I’ll never forget that reek. I smell it all the time.” Ozone and rancid meat stung her nostrils, obviously because of the monster she shot, but she suspected she would be able to smell it even if it hadn’t been there.
“The rest is just random moments. I remember your hands. They smoked and sizzled like cooking bacon. I remember hearing voices in the Scout. What happened to Sensei Rumiko and her husband John? I thought I heard them. I don’t see how they would have ended up with us, though. They live way out in Summerville.”
Alex shook his head. “That’ll have to wait. I’m going to try to wake Pete. If he can walk, leave, like I said. Take the Scout. Otherwise, he’s on his own. Things are bad outside. Anyone you see out there is going to be a plague-crazy husk. Assume they all want to eat you. Even the ones that look normal aren’t people anymore.”
“Zombies,” she muttered. “Pete said there were zombies. We’re in a Todd Brown novel, aren’t we?”
Alex rolled his eyes. “Zombies, Lanni? Really? If we were in one of your zombie books, you wouldn’t be such a dork. You’d cuss like a normal teenager, wear slutty clothes, and you’d kick ass with a battle ax in one hand and a plasma cannon in the other.”
The image made her grin. “That does sound cool. Is there a plasma cannon in that bag?”
“Everything but,” he said. “Seriously, though, don’t underestimate them. They aren’t slow, stupid undead. They are alive. They’re strong as horses and vicious as a pack of starving wolves. They’re quick, too. Treat them like dangerous wild animals, and you’ll be pretty close.”
The offspring’s clacking claws moved down the hall at a casual pace. It must have been sitting out of site, waiting. Alex’s frail body, wispy hair, and sunken eyes were worse than ever, but he still seemed like himself, only more confident. She hoped her trust wasn’t misplaced. He was her brother. What else could she do?
He saved my life. He came back for me.
“How can I be sure some host isn’t in your head, controlling you?”
This time he smiled. “No matter what I tell you, that could always be true. But it isn’t. A host could give you false thoughts and memories to make you think are really here with me, when in fact you are really stabbing me to death with a soup spoon. They can wreak havoc in your mind from a short distance, but they have to touch you to harvest you.” He looked down at Peter and gave her an apologetic shrug.
“You really are one of them, aren’t you?” Lanni asked. She didn’t realize she had raised her pistol again, but it was pointed right at him.
“Only a little. I don’t think you or I fit any of the molds. We have the virus, if that’s what it is. It changed us, but you are still Lanni, and even though I have all of Pete’s knowledge and memories, I am still Alex. I risked everything to save you. I’m still your brother, and there is nothing I won’t do to protect you.”
Tingling spider webs crawled over Lanni’s skin again. Alex lowered his gaze and tilted his head like he was listening once more.
“It’s here. It’s not alone. Save your bullets for the host,” he said with a pointed glance at the pistol. “Not me. The bad one.”
“If you aren’t the bad one, then fix Pete. Put him back in his body.”
“It’s not that easy. I’ll try after we deal with the brain-sucking monster, okay? You should know he felt really bad for shooting at you. He came in here to save you. He hoped to take you to his niece at Columbia University in New York. She’s working with a group that has isolated plague particles they’re calling nanites. They are trying to find a way neutralize them.”
“Is that true?” Lanni asked. “The part about the scientists, I mean.” There were so many questions she wanted to ask. He had given her so much to consider, but there simply wasn’t enough time to ask.
Alex shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out. Pete isn’t the only one who thinks so.”
“Hello?” a tremulous female voice called. “Please, is anyone here? Can someone please help me?” She sounded like she was crying.
“Oh no. The host will find her,” Lanni said. “I’ll go get her. You take care of Pete.”
Alex grabbed Lanni’s arm to stop her and quickly let go. An angry red welt appeared on his palm where it touched her bare skin. Wisps of smoke curled up from his hand and vanished in the air.
“So far, the hosts only know about me. Go hide in the bathroom. If you get a clean shot, take it. Don’t hesitate.”
Pete looked up at Alex and smiled. “There you are,” he said. He sprang to his feet, his shotgun floating up from the floor to his waiting hands. He aimed at Alex’s chest from a few inches away, and an ear-splitting pop shot through the room.
The side of Pete’s head exploded, pierced by Lanni’s bullet. He dropped to the floor again, this time lifeless.
“He was going to do it. He was about to shoot you,” Lanni said, stunned by what she had just done. She had killed a man. No, she killed Pete.
“It wasn’t him. The host was in his head. Now she knows exactly where we are.”
The section of wall beside the door crumbled as two thick claws tore through. Their offspring companion easily ripped a waist-high hole into the room and hopped through. Lanni’s skin went cold and tingly as her aura deflected the offspring’s mental assault.
Alex stood his ground, clawing the air with his hands. Each swipe stripped away bands of the offspring’s flesh. It leaped at him, its bright yellow claws extended and jaws open wide. Lanni fired two rounds into its quivering, brainy face with little effect.
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an excerpt from
The Symbolon
by Delia J. Colvin
ot love,
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,”
Shakespeare Sonnet 116
CHAPTER 1
653 B.C. Carrara
Alex stirred sleepily and opened his eyes. He shook his head in mild amusement; even in her sleep she needed to possess him! Kristiana was lying naked, except for the long crystal that was strung on a leather cord and permanently bound around her neck. Her soft body, with its delicious curves, straddled his, as her arms and legs wrapped around him in ownership. She was beautiful, he had to admit. Her curves, along with her sexual appetites, were intoxicating, taking him to pleasures he had only previously imagined.
To have lived his long existence without the secret knowledge of a woman…then to feel Kristiana alive in his arms, and to make love to her, was extraordinary! It was a welcome distraction from the previous 500 years of extreme loneliness and devastation that had been his life.
Mani and Melitta had been right; it wasn’t good for Alex to spend his life mourning. Cassandra was dead and gone and nothing could be done about it. Alex was immortal and would live forever…and his soul mate, his symbolon, was gone.
And if, in fact, he would live forever, he had to find something more in his life! As Mani had said, Alex had been gifted with immortality for a reason. Still, it struck him as unjust that he should have survived the drowning. Over the years, he had continued to believe that the gods would smile on him and bring Cassandra back…somehow. But now it really was time to find some way, impossible as it seemed, to move on.
Melitta had told Alex that the first step to a new life was for him to at least attempt to be distracted by something other than Cassandra. He had tried. But it seemed that any activity that didn’t include thoughts of her were wrought with a never-ending grief.
Once, he went an entire year without sculpting or painting her. He had kept his mind engrossed in the precarious task of climbing the great mountains north of his home. This was an enterprise that should have occupied his mind completely but several times, during the night, despite his exhaustion, he had caught himself beginning to draw her face in the ground.
He almost held his breath as he counted down the final days of the year. On the last night, he didn’t sleep. He sat perched, waiting for the sun to crest the mountains. Then, leaving behind all of his supplies, he ran possessed by the need to see and touch the paintings and sculptures that were all that he had left of her.
He wondered what was wrong with him. How could a woman that he barely knew, except for his visions of her and their brief time together as children, affect him even after all these years? But thankfully now, because of Kristiana, thoughts of Cassandra had become only a dull ache in his heart. He tried to shake off the melancholy that had become his constant companion over the years.
Trying to convince Kristiana that he was not the man for her had been a challenge equivalent to convincing a hungry lioness that a bleeding lamb would cause her indigestion. Once her sights were set, she persevered regardless of the cost! He knew it was a tremendous hardship on her to be married to a man that seemed only capable of loving a memory, but she felt certain that she could make him love her. And her physical efforts were certainly proof of that, he thought with a wry smile.
Kristiana’s long bronze hair spilled over most of her face. He brushed it back, noticing the occasional gold strands, from their time in the sun. The honeymoon had been fairly brief—only a month, too short from her perspective, too long from his. Alex was not an idle man and now that rendering artistic representations of Cassandra were no longer appropriate he struggled to find worth.
Still Kristiana seemed happy and her insecurities were reasonable considering that he was still obsessed with his Cassandra. During their first sculpting lessons, three years prior, Kristiana had tried to get him to sculpt someone or something else. He had explained to her that he was there only for Cassandra, and if Kristiana wasn’t able to help him with that, he would find another tutor. With the sizable remuneration he was paying her for her services, Alex knew that Kristiana could not afford to turn him down. He was certain that she had been hurt, but she needed to know the truth.
It had never been his intention to lead her along and he often thought that he should have refused to marry her. But after that early June evening he had agreed, not out of the joy of new love, but to resolve her desperate need for him and his desperate need to have something in his life other than grief.
Their courtship, if it could be considered that, had begun recently, after three years of Kristiana’s constant flirtations. She had asked him to join the townspeople at her home to celebrate the sale of one of her sculptures. When he arrived, it was evident that he was the only guest…and her dress suggested that no one else was invited. Alex decided that he should leave. But she begged him to stay. Of course, he knew that she had not invited anyone else. The men and boys in town would have flocked in had they been asked. Kristiana had offered Alex a drink and he sipped it. When she began to dance provocatively, he told her it was time for him to leave. Alex stood and realized that he was incapable of walking. That was all he remembered.
The next morning he awoke, stunned to find that they were both naked in her bed. Kristiana arose, almost covering herself with a blanket, and spoke of Alex’s promises and seduction the night before.
He knew it was all a lie but watching her, despite his headache, he felt something other than grief. It certainly wasn’t love. He knew she was not to be trusted. There were rumors around Carrara that she could cast spells and Alex had suspected that her interest in growing and blending various herbs was not purely medicinal. However, it was the first time in 500 years that he had been distracted by other thoughts.
He felt a touch of exhilaration at the possibility that he could enjoy life. And frankly, he had been flattered by her efforts. Within minutes, Kristiana’s brother burst through the door—no doubt to witness the impropriety. Paolo stomped through the room, insisting that Alex had taken advantage of his poor sister and demanded that the pair marry. Alex had difficulty containing his snickers at her brother’s sanctimonious shock as Paolo was known for his legions of sexual exploits! And although Alex was quite certain that nothing had happened, he ensured that there was no further question of his conduct while they discussed what the future might hold.
Despite his attempts to convince Kristiana that she should marry someone else, she had no doubt that he would eventually love her. And perhaps she was right. It wouldn’t be the same as his love for Cassandra—a connection and love that he could only have with his symbolon. But perhaps he could have something that, it appeared, he could never have with Cassandra—a life.
Even after the wedding, Alex’s obsession continued to be like a burr under the saddle to Kristiana. During their honeymoon she had insisted on seeing his home, Morgana. He knew that despite what he had told her, she expected far more than the simplicity that he preferred…and he had warned her! She had been shocked to find the simple shack that had been built by his father. Of course, he had fortified the structure with more modern enhancements but Kristiana was stunned into a rare silence to see its contents; almost every open space was occupied by artworks of Cassandra.
Still, he felt that Kristiana had handled it better than expected. She had merely asked what he would do with them now that they were married…and refused to sleep there. And she did that all without breaking a single thing, Alex recalled, with some relief! Before leaving, she asked him if he would torch the shack along with his tribute to Cassandra. It had never occurred to him that Kristiana would want his centuries of work destroyed. Alex had tried to reason with her and hoped that she would understand that this was his life’s work. But in truth, to destroy it would be like killing Cassandra and that, he could not do. In order to maintain their marital bliss, Alex had agreed that they would return to Carrara and build a home that would be more to Kristiana’s liking.
Watching her sleep, Alex realized that even now she appeared to be scheming. Then she drew a deep breath and stretched, pushing the long, clear crystal around her neck into him. He reached over to move it and she jumped up now wide awake, her eyes alarmed. She snatched the pendant from his fingers then seeing his surprise she relaxed and gave him a sensual smile as her mouth moved to his.
∞
Alex hadn’t expected to like the tiny Etruscan village, but Carrara had grown on him, as Kristiana had. The discovery of the extraordinary, white marble, heralded as the finest in the world, had changed not only his fate but the fate of the residents of Carrara, as it created a major industry in the sleepy town.
It was still early when the sun slowly rose over the mountains, in Kristiana’s studio. Alex watched as the light shifted dramatically through the various hatches in the ceiling of the studio capturing the white dust that clung gracefully to the air and coated everything within yards of the building, including Alex and Kristiana, with its mystical sparkle; transforming an otherwise drab room into a magical place.
“Why are you striking it there?” he asked, amazed at Kristiana’s adeptness with the hammer and chisel.
“Watch!” she ordered, without taking her eyes from their position on the glistening white stone. The chisel sat angled on the delicate face of her sculpture. Alex held his breath as the hammer gently tapped on the marble and the piece broke away perfectly, leaving what would become the delicate chin of a woman.
The room held numerous works that Kristiana had completed recently and had not yet been sold. Most of her sculptures were of women that rose, arms outstretched, from the sea. Her work was a marvel to him in that is was ageless and appeared to be effortless.
Noticing his expression after her last tap, she signaled for him to come closer for another lesson. “As I tell all of my students,” she quipped, seductively placing Alex’s hand on her chest, “You must feel the cut in your heart first before you cut with your hand.” She pulled his arms around her. With Kristiana, he could almost imagine what it would be like to be happy.
“But you must practice! I never see you practice anymore,” she scolded, softly. An unfinished work sat in the corner. Neither Kristiana, nor Alex had the nerve to move it. The face could be transformed into someone else but he didn’t have the heart for the work anymore.
Analyzing one of her works, Alex said, almost distracted, “You need the marble more than I do.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He had told her that he would go up the mountain to select and purchase more marble—it gave him something to do. He envied Kristiana with her passion of creating art for the sake of creation. His goal had only been to see Cassandra and Alex had no desire to create other works. He knew that his hands and heart knew only that subject. It was better not to sculpt.
She rose, facing him, with a mischievous smile, and turned his palms towards her, “To be a great artist you must have the marble in your veins.” She placed his hands on her hips, covered in white dust. He smelled her hair and felt her curves. “But we will begin with it on your hands.”
He kissed her lightly and offered her a rare smile. Then pulling back, he said, “I need to leave now, if you wish me to return this evening.”
Until then, he had been concerned that too much time away from her would cause his mind to wander back to Cassandra, causing his pain to return. But now, after a month of togetherness, he knew that he needed the time to himself. And Kristiana needed marble.
She sighed, “Tonight then.” She kissed his neck and pressed into him to close the sale.
∞
The narrow, dirt road wound its way through the village of Carrara and then up the hills to the marble quarries. Alex could see the serpentine pattern from the numerous hairpin turns up the precipice. Although he recognized that his seeming immortality kept him safe from most of the hazards of the roads, he still preferred his own two feet, as opposed to a cart or horse. Flying marble and ox were constant companions on those roads so he walked and would gladly pay the price for delivery.
From the village, he could see Kristiana’s brother, Paolo, directing the crew on the construction of their new home, a veritable palace, which she had decided to name Bella Vida—Beautiful Life. It was good to see Paolo take an interest, as it appeared far too easy for him to get into trouble.
With a friendly wave, Alex wondered what Paolo and Kristiana would be scheming while he was gone—perhaps an additional wing for Paolo’s pursuits? Alex shook his head in amusement. Paolo was a few years younger than he and tended towards self-indulgence. With the olive skin of the Easterners and blue eyes of the Galts, Paolo was striking and the responses that he received, particularly from women, tended to support that viewpoint.
Alex had spent a great deal of time attempting to instill humility and ethics into Paolo to no avail. He was, like his sister, high-spirited and single-focused on whatever was occupying his attention at the moment, whether it be the virtue of a new girl, or plotting to increase his wealth. Still, outside of the Trento family, the family of oracles on the other side of the country, Paolo was his closest friend and Alex tolerated his antics, knowing that Paolo did have a good heart…besides, now they were brothers.
With the town behind him, Alex turned off the road to cut through a field where the wild flowers sprung up towards the sun and framed the base of the marble mountains in yellow and deep blue. Arriving three years earlier, he had climbed across those mountains, seeking a famous sculptor; a teacher. He had been attempting to capture his memories of Cassandra for centuries—her as a child, her looking at him, her sleeping, her and the visions that had dominated and preoccupied both of their lives. He constantly clung to his memories of her, while attempting to create something new. But he needed a new medium. When he realized that painting would never be able to capture her spirit, he began experimenting with bronze with amazing results. However, once he had seen the white, Carrara marble, he had to learn to sculpt with it!
Stepping through the deep field he brushed his hands over the soft blossoms, and then abruptly sensed the ocular flickering, both a gift, and a burden of his destiny…a vision. Already he knew that this was not a minor vision regarding wealth or other relatively unimportant issues. It had been over 500 years since he had felt an impulse this strong! Alex’s heart dropped into his stomach as he realized it was like…his visions of Cassandra.
The flickering formed a circle in his range of vision. Soon it would obscure his view and his ability to walk. He felt a slight trembling, as he suddenly became desperate to see her beautiful face again…and then just as suddenly, he felt his chest tighten in dread, terrified that a vision of her from the past would send him reeling back into that nowhere land where his grief ruled. Still, to think of seeing her face…he felt his heart rate climb as he closed his eyes. Then the thought occurred to him, causing hope to germinate—what if she had come back?
Immediately Alex realized the error of his thinking. The vision could be of Kristiana’s safety. Then he shook his head as the corners of his mouth turned up momentarily. He would hate to see the fate of anyone attempting to best her! Kristiana was a woman of fire…she was well-known for her adept handling of a dagger.
Giving into the inevitability of the moment, Alex slid to the ground, as the kaleidoscope effect overtook him. He placed his head in his hands, with his eyes closed, and he looked…
The breeze gently caressed the tall grass as two women moved along the trail.
His heart leapt! It was Cassandra! But not a vision from 500 years ago—her clothes were more modern. She was alive! He choked as his heart rushed to his throat…and then he remembered Myrdd’s instructions. He must pay attention to the details! Alex pushed back the emotion and watched. Oh, to see her beautiful face!
She was wearing a Roman toga and her brown curls were tamed in a long braid, with tiny tendrils that escaped around her face and neck. He noticed that her eyes were no longer the extraordinary shade of oracle blue that they had been; though they were still breathtaking, with the deep blue framed by her dark lashes.
Furrowing his eyebrows, he wondered for a moment if this vision was some kind of trickery. But he immediately disavowed that thought, in what he realized was a desperate attempt to believe that she could come back to him.
A fast moving cloud moved over her, creating a momentary shadow. Then he heard the soft resonance that he loved above all others, her laugh—beautiful and joyful. He breathed it in, attempting to make it a permanent part of his soul. He had forgotten the sound of her voice.
To see her face after all these years was surely a gift from the gods…or a curse. His only desire, at that moment was to take in the vision of her. But he knew to protect his heart, he had to force reason into this new reality. Cassandra had died. He had watched her body disintegrate until Mani had insisted that he bury her. This could not be real—but Alex watched, just the same.
Habit forced him to determine time in the vision; it could be only a few years away. She looked to be 16, he decided, as he wiped the tears of joy from his face.
She was walking with another young girl, possibly a servant, who ran ahead to the river. It appeared to be the Tiber. Cassandra stepped in the crystal clear water to cool herself.
He tried to guide his glances, feeling that he was peering on a private moment—betraying her. But he could not. As usual the vision would dictate.
From a bend in the river, the servant girl was talking to someone. A moment later, Alex saw the servant, face down on the now blood-stained bank of the river, out of view from Cassandra.
Alex involuntarily sucked in a deep breath; he couldn’t bear to see Cassandra harmed again! But he forced himself to pay attention to the details—he heard Myrdd’s wise council from the past; the old man who was the first oracle, and Alex’s mentor. “Where is it, boy?” Myrdd would ask.
It was obviously summertime; the vegetation was a deep green along the river. There was a hillside ahead; a stone building peeked from behind the trees.
Hearing the footsteps in the water, Cassandra turned and smiled, and then seeing something, out of Alex’s view, her eyes became suddenly wary as she started to back up towards the shore. The water was so clear Alex could almost see a reflection. Then he saw the struggle…and the flash of a dagger.
Easily controlling her, the attacker skillfully drew the dagger in a fine line over Cassandra’s throat. The loss immediately caused his gut to wrench. He watched as the red line on her neck rapidly widened, while Alex choked in pain. He saw the horror of realization seep into her eyes…and then he felt the enormity of the loss of his symbolon renewed in his soul.
The murderer carelessly dropped his beloved in the river, and the film that coated the water parted, allowing a clear view through the water of the face that he adored. She stared blankly upwards and red ribbons of blood clouded around her. His Cassandra was dead…again.
∞
Once the violent sobs and retching had ended and the shaking had subsided to a point where he could see something other than that final vision of her, Alex stared helplessly at the sky analyzing and reanalyzing every detail. Was it now? Did it already happen? Was she alive? Was there any possibility that he could change it?
Then he remembered—Kristiana! How could he tell her? But there was no choice!
∞
The ground moved by in a blur, as he rode on one horse, while leading a second. He would arrive in Rome, nearly 200 miles to the south, by midday, if he rode all night and only stopped to water and feed the horses.
Kristiana had taken the news as expected. He had broken her heart—though she knew no outlet for negative emotion other than rage. Alex didn’t have a chance to talk to Paolo, though he was certain that Paolo would insist on a physical battle to defend his sister’s honor. Alex had no intention of fighting Paolo!
As the sun set behind the hills to the west, Alex tortuously replayed the scene in the vision, searching for clues; he remembered the clear water as the murderer approached, and he scanned for anything that might be a reflection. Then his thoughts jumped to that last awful scene, with Cassandra’s eyes staring up at him. The water was clouded with debris…a fine mist that prohibited any reflection.
Suddenly, Alex’s eyes narrowed in thought, with the realization of the incongruity. The debris in the water floated on the surface, but wasn’t there before the murderer approached—the murderer had tracked something into the water. Alex drew a deep breath and ran it again. There was something familiar about the debris. Was it pollen? No, he decided, pollen was yellow and this was white. Then he noticed something that had escaped his attention before—because it was something that had become a part of his new reality; a crystalline sparkle on the water. His eyes narrowed…was it Carrara marble?
CHAPTER 2
Present Day—Morgana
Asleep in a tee shirt and pajama bottoms, Alex struggled. Valeria saw the signs of another one of his nightmares—his tense movement and sweat-drenched brow, the rapid breathing and near-words. In fact, they had occurred almost every night since her return home from the hospital. He would refuse to tell her about them, saying it was all “old news” but she wished that he would talk to her.
Camille had said it was to be expected; he had spent eons fighting very real threats to Valeria’s existence. How could that all be forgotten in the few months since what they had termed, optimistically, “the final battle”. In her mind it was akin to calling World War I, “the war to end all wars”; it simply begged to be proven wrong. But she would keep her sentiments to herself. Alex had been through enough!
She had finally recovered from pneumonic plague and the near drowning. Though not in 24 hours as she would have if she were like the rest of the oracles. On the bright side, an MRI at 10 days revealed that the massive lesions in her lungs had completely healed! The doctors, stunned by the results, said it should have taken at least eight weeks for her lungs to heal and asked for another MRI. Mani had halted those discussions fairly quickly. However, she still seemed to need a lot of sleep. Mani had warned that although the lesions were gone, pneumonia was still a very real possibility due to the weakened state of her lungs.
Still, they all clung to the dream that she was now immortal. She had survived the curse that had killed her over numerous lifetimes on her 27th birthday. Valeria remembered the moment when Tavish had asked the question that was on most of their minds. Could the curse have been delayed a year? As soon as he let the words slip from his mouth, she could see his regret. The momentary flash of terror in Alex’s eyes had been almost more than any of them could bear. Tavish was crushed!
Despite the fact that he seemed like a big, tough Scotsman, she had discovered just how sensitive he was that day. He slowly kneeled in front of the leather sofa where Alex and Valeria, sat, with what she was certain were near tears in his eyes.
“Laddie” He drew in a breath, “Lass…I dunnot know what causes me mouth to ramble on without thought!” Then he stopped as if he was afraid of his emotions. The whole room sat speechless, no doubt trying to find the right words to erase the fears and hurt that had just been released.
“Tav…it’s alright,” Valeria said. Leaning forward while clinging to Alex’s hand, she stroked the side of Tavish’s face. In response to her touch, Tavish pulled back and dropped his head as if ashamed of himself. “It’s alright,” she soothed as he shook his head.
Camille jumped in, “Tavish, we all know that you were simply talking through what was going on in your head and that you don’t really believe that as a possibility. Isn’t that right?”
Swallowing, Tavish nodded and rose.
Finally Alex was able to push his fears back and speak, “Thankfully, we no longer need to concern ourselves with curses.” His arms worked around Valeria in a way that displayed a hint of his fear that his love might not be with him permanently.
Still all indications were that the threats had been handled and that she was now immortal! It also seemed that they had rid themselves of their enemy, the immortal Aegemon, who had probably placed the curse. And her eyes had returned to the extraordinary color that they termed, “oracle blue”, that was really multiple, extraordinary shades of blue. It was still a shock for her when she looked in the mirror.
In addition to that, Mani had tested Valeria’s blood before and after the final battle and discovered that on both tests she carried the DNA of an immortal oracle. The question was did she only have that DNA this lifetime or since her life as Cassandra of Troy? And based on the DNA, why didn’t she recover as an immortal might. Needless to say there were a lot of questions that didn’t appear would be answered unless Valeria became sick or started to age.
Aging was the other question. Had she already suffered her Prima Mortis—the first death of an immortal that would stop the aging process and identify her Achilles’ heel? If so, was her Achilles’ heel the plague, drowning, pneumonia, hypothermia or high fever? They might never know the answer to these. She laughed and said that she had decided to steer clear of all of them…at least for a while. But as much as Alex loved that she was happy, he simply didn’t have the ability to find any humor when it came to talk of her possible mortality.
Over the past few months, with all they had been through, Alex and Valeria had grown even closer. As he continued to struggle in his sleep, she brushed his face and whispered his name. He always had that moment when he took a harsh breath—as if a door had closed and he seemed to be wondering which world he was now in.
Then his arms would find her and cautiously, as if she might disappear, they would move around her with so much longing, that she could almost feel his eons of pain. It always brought tears to her eyes. But she tried to hide it from Alex. Especially today!
“Hey,” she said, gently stoking his face. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” His breathing slowed as he clung to her tightly.
Finally he relaxed and pulled her into him affectionately. He took a deep breath, trying to cleanse himself of the memories and brushed her hair back from her face.
“Are you kidding?” He smiled, but the dream still clung to him. “It’s way more than okay!” He pushed the smile to his eyes. “I’m marrying the woman of my dreams in just a few days!” And then she saw that the dream was now behind him. It was always a marvel to her how he could do that!
Cocking her head to the side, she thought about asking him if he wanted to talk about it. But now seeing his spark back, she didn’t want the worry to return to his extraordinarily beautiful face.
She pulled his left hand into hers, in a move that was now familiar to him, and began tracing the triangular mark on the back of his hand between his thumb and forefinger that was formed by continuous loops.
“Tell me about it again,” she said, as she pressed her mouth to his hand.
“It’s our unique mark; the one that is only for you and me. This particular shape is called a triquetra or more commonly, a trinity knot,” he said, his voice still sexy with sleep. “Apollo gave a special mark to symbolons…soul mates, if you prefer,”—the corners of his mouth turned up in the way she loved—“so that we would know our other half.”
“But our mark is more significant,” she said, her eyes focused on his.
Alex brushed her face with his free hand, as his eyes glowed with love, “Yes. Most of the marks I’ve seen appear fairly arbitrary. And ours does seem to have particular significance.” They laced the fingers of their left hands together, in a need for more closeness.
“I do think that Apollo could have made it easy on us and placed mine someplace more obvious,” she joked, and then lowered her brows. “Alex, do you really think I have our mark?”
“Absolutely!” he said, and then glanced down towards their hands. “But…you know, I have never needed a mark to know that we belong together!”
The sun flitted through the windows and he smiled, as he pulled her head down to his and kissed her sweetly, then with her face still inches from him, his eyes filled with playful joy, “Besides, I was thinking that searching for your mark would give me something else to do…”—he drew a quick breath—“on our honeymoon!”
It was the first time either of them had mentioned the honeymoon and what occurred in her body at that moment was a reaction of a previously unknown magnitude and it shocked and thrilled her! She felt an electrical charge that forced her heart into high-gear and revved her internal engines. He responded by running his hands down her spine, as his mouth covered hers.
Then just as suddenly he sighed and rolled her onto the bed next to him. With his voice husky from sleep and desire, he drew a deep breath muttering, “Just a few more days…”
Shaking it off, Alex offered her a cursory glance and a smile before jumping up. “Coffee?”
She pulled up on her elbow. “You need to ask?”
“Good point!” He grinned.
“I’ll shower, while you make the coffee,” she proposed.
She went into the bathroom and turned on the water, and then while the temperature of the water warmed, she peeked into the great room, “So where exactly are we going?”
“You’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said without turning his head from the task at hand. But she could see the hint of his smile from the angle.
She pouted, “But you know I don’t like surprises!” He turned to bring the coffee pot to the sink on the marble island. Now facing her, he began filling it with purified water.
“Yes, I do know that.” He winked. “And as you well know, I did share that with Camille. But she has insisted.” He raised his eyebrows innocently and shrugged, “I am therefore…sworn to secrecy.”
This had become a standard line of question and answer between the two of them. Because she was still looking at him expectantly, he sat the pot down and cocked his head to the side. Leaning his arms on the counter, the corners of his mouth turned up in a mischievous smile. She attempted to match his expression, except her eyes widened in expectation when he began to snicker…which always caused her to giggle, effectively ending the stand-off. As he went back to the coffee-making, she went back to the bath.
Stepping into the warm shower, she realized that it was useless—she had been trying to get it out of both of them for months now. Despite the fact that he said it was Camille’s secret, Valeria knew that a part of Alex was anxious to surprise her. He seemed to live to please her!
Camille, being very organized about things, had come by daily with a very long list of details from colors to flowers. Valeria hated to admit it, but it was kind of the best of both worlds; she didn’t have to plan the wedding or worry about the results. She just had to show up to what she knew would be just what she would have wished for…and then marry the beautiful man that was well beyond anything she could have ever dreamed up. Tears of joy formed at the thought of how very fortunate she was that he had found her…and loved her. She blinked back the tears as she stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in the rich Turkish towel before heading into the bedroom.
To her surprise, Alex was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for her, holding her coffee cup. He normally avoided being near her when she wasn’t fully dressed. Especially fresh out of the shower—the temptation was just too great! She gave him a brief quizzical look before taking the coffee.
“Here you go. Just the way you like it.” He winked.
Sipping the coffee, rich with cream, she sighed, “Hmmmm!” And then taking advantage of his sudden mood, she leaned in just enough to kiss his neck. “Thank you!” She smiled seductively at him.
Then she noticed that he was looking at her with…that look. With a hint of embarrassment, she posed. He let out his beautiful laugh that always lifted her heart and she started for the closet.
“Hang on!” He grabbed her hand and pulled her back to him.
Carefully moving the coffee cup behind his back, she leaned into him. He wrapped his arms around her amorously, running his hands over her shoulders and down her back. Stunned and excited, Valeria wished she could get rid of the full cup of coffee in her hand and lunge at him.
She reasoned that perhaps he was feeling more relaxed because the threats seemed to be gone and they were actually going to be married in only a few more days! She was breathless…and still holding her cup of very full coffee—perhaps that was his plan! Then Alex released her.
“Wow!” She raised both eyebrows, attempting to hear her voice over her pounding heart, “Where did that come from?” she asked breathlessly as she gently pulled her cup from behind his neck, being careful not to spill a drop. Her responses to him were always such a wonder to her!
He smiled and took a deep breath, “I just want to be married to you!”
“Well now.” She leaned back into him, and said softly, “That is an amazing coincidence!”
∞
She sipped her second cup of coffee as Alex laid out his jeans, tee shirts and short on the bed. Camille had informed her that she only needed to bring her comfortable clothes and the rest would be supplied. When Valeria tried to argue that Camille shouldn’t be spending money on clothes for her, Camille replied, “Oh don’t worry! I’m sending the bill to your fiancé—he can afford it!” Alex had smiled a perfectly contented smile and kissed her neck.
There were only a few things she knew for certain. First, that it would be in Greece—unless something had changed in the past couple of months; second, that they were going to request approval for an immortal marriage from the Ancient Council of Delos, a secret society of immortals, and lastly, that Weege, her closest mortal friend from Manhattan, wouldn’t be able to join them. That was disappointing, but she understood. That’s what happened in corporate America.
Camille had very quickly become Valeria’s best friend and was taking the Maid of Honor role. She was quite a planner! Although there truly were far more details than Valeria was interested in; she was interested in being married to Alex! While the wedding would be nice—it was the marriage that she desperately wanted.
Pulling her suitcase out from the closet, she remembered the last time she had seen it. It was the night that she had gotten up the nerve to declare her love to Alex. That had been a monumental moment for her! She was here with Alex because she had found the courage to tell him that she loved him!
She smiled, remembering her confusion about his love for Cassandra. It seemed so obvious now that he had been trying to remind Valeria that she was his symbolon—the reincarnation of Cassandra. At the time, her insecurity had kept her from being able to see that! Not that her confidence had taken giant leaps forward. But being with Alex and feeling wrapped in the warm cocoon of his love had changed things for her. The world had become a brighter place full of hope and wonder! She realized that she hadn’t fit in with her previous world…because it wasn’t her world. This was her world! Here in their beautiful cottage north of Trento.
From the time Valeria had left the hospital, she had tried to talk Alex into just sending for a justice of the peace so that they could be married and enjoy all of the pleasures of marriage…and so that he didn’t feel that their life together was quite so fragile. But obviously it was important to Alex to treat this marriage in a manner that honored the vision that had carried him through 3000 years. She also suspected that the sweetness of the vision of their wedding night was a dream that he desperately desired and was willing to wait for.
As she packed her toiletries in the bathroom she glanced at Alex who had just pulled his sports bag from the closet. “So, do I need to be nervous about this council thing?”
“Not at all!” He sat down. “I hope you don’t mind, beautiful.” This wasn’t the first time for this conversation. He pulled her onto his lap. “Besides, I would like you to have the experience.”
She recalled the story that Alex had told her. Apparently Apollo had selected a secret and sacred location for the council meetings and presented that location only to Cassandra, the last oracle, Myrdd, the first oracle and Aegemon, a priest. Apollo and Cassandra had even recorded the laws of immortals, though Valeria didn’t remember any of it.
“I understand…I guess. You want our marriage to mean that we are together forever.” Valeria leaned her head on his shoulder. “To me, you are forever, no matter what anyone else says.” She smiled. “I do understand that you’ve waited much longer than I have for this. But I still don’t understand why this council would even care!” She kissed his cheek and then rose to continue packing.
“Look at it this way,” Alex said as he began rolling his tee shirts and placing them in the sports bag, “when an immortal marries a mortal, that union is short term—basically it is similar to dating in terms of commitment. The immortal is with the person such a short period of time that there is no requirement to get council approval.” He zipped the bag shut.
This discussion always caused her to wonder if having her declared an immortal was for the purpose of providing Alex with some validation that she would now be with him forever. Or perhaps he expected that she would suddenly remember all of her past by going to the sacred location.
He continued, “Council approval wasn’t always necessary for immortal marriages. But because an immortal marriage is for an eternity, it can cause a lot of issues if there is a bad pairing. In fact, it’s been the cause of several major wars.”
She giggled as if he was pulling her leg, “Really?”
Raising an eyebrow, he said, “The Trojan War, of course, and World War I to name just a few. Two ticked off immortals can create a world of havoc!”
There was a concern that perhaps she was not immortal. Was she going to marry this beautiful, sexy man and in ten years be older than him? What about in thirty years—if she was fortunate to live that long this round. He didn’t seem to care about her aging. But her ego did!
Her other concern was that even if she was immortal, what if her “clock” had been reset and she continued to age until her “new” Prima Mortis? She didn’t want to be like Jeremiah, who was 147 and still ticking. Still there could be worse things than to spend her life with the most beautiful man in the world who would never age and loved her unconditionally.
“Darn!” she said, standing in the closet. Alex looked up from placing his toiletries in the suitcase to see her walk out with a handful of crumbled burgundy knit, another one of the many Christmas gifts from Alex.
“Oh well!” He cocked his head to the side. “Your favorite sweater will be here when we return! You won’t have much need for it for…”—his eyes sparked—“at least a while!”
She smiled, placing the sweater back in the basket in the closet. She wondered, did he mean that they would be where it would be too warm for sweaters? Or better yet, that they would have little need for clothes? She loved that thought, and felt her face flush in response to it. Their housekeeper, Ingrid had been instructed never to wash Valeria’s clothes. It made Valeria feel ridiculously pampered and besides, Ingrid did enough without worrying about the clothes that Valeria could easily care for.
As she closed the suitcase, she watched as he zipped the garment bag that carried several tuxedos and a few suits. She bit her lip imagining him in a tux…and had to sit down when she thought of him out of the tux! Then a sudden feeling of dread overtook her.
“Alex? What happens if the council denies your request?” She could have sworn she saw his pupils flash.
“Not a problem.” His smile broadened, but she was certain it was for her benefit. “The first step is for the council to declare you an immortal. With the documentation we have from Mani, that shouldn’t be an issue. But really, beautiful, I don’t want you to concern yourself with this! There is no reason for them to deny it!”
“Still, what if they do?” She persevered, as she wrapped herself into his arms in an attempt to halt her increasing vulnerability.
“If they decide, for some insane reason to deny our union, we’ll be married by a justice of the peace!”
“Promise?” Her eyes narrowed at him.
Giving her a confident nod, he leaned down and kissed her. He knew she had a tremendous amount of insecurity regarding this council that held her future in their grips.
From where she stood, she could see the family portrait over the fireplace. Knowing that she had spent most of her existence truly isolated from the rest of the world, with no pictures even desired to mark time and relationships, the family had surprised her at Christmas with framed pictures of her with the family and then a photographer had arrived and they posed for professional portraits. It was the one thing that she would never have thought of, and the thing that meant the most!
Now, there were pictures of her and the family throughout their cottage. Over the mantel was the largest of the portraits. It was a picture of her with the family surrounding her. As much as the official family portrait meant to her, the candid shots meant even more. They seemed to capture the spirit of her family.
The picture of her and Alex laughing together the night before her birthday was her favorite, then there was the sweet picture of her arm around Caleb’s neck, while her other hand messed up his hair—the boy who had never before experienced human touch. The look on his face was priceless!
Valeria loved the pictures of her, Ava and Camille—the three musketeers! She glanced to Alex’s side of the bed and saw another one of her personal favorites; it was a picture of her sleeping in his arms. It had been taken the day that she had returned from the hospital. The day he thought would never happen! She had survived the curse and had committed to their life together. The glow in his eyes was so beautiful, that she couldn’t look at that picture without feeling the extraordinary depths of his love.
Still curled in Alex’s arms, they heard Lars tap his horn from up the hill by the main house—they were leaving! She smiled excitedly and went to the door. As she was about to step out, he stopped her.
“Your jacket?” He reminded her gently, as he held it for her and she slid into it, he wrapped his arms around her, happily holding her for a few moments.
The horn honked again. The family had taken to this system of announcing their impending arrival due to Valeria’s inability to receive their non-verbal communications. She grabbed her purse and bounded out the door.
There was two inches of fresh snow on the ground that had already been cleared from the steps and the area in front of the cottage. Valeria took in the look of her beloved home with the fresh snow piled heavily on the evergreens, causing the deciduous trees to almost disappear, except for their thick trunks. The sky was brilliant, winter blue and the temperature a crisp 30.
Homer, the ancient caretaker of the property, stood nearby shoveling snow off the main drive. Alex stepped outside, with a book in his hand.
“Val, I think I’ll bring The Odyssey, what do you want?”
She wondered why she hadn’t considered something of this magnitude earlier. They could be gone for weeks, or more…she hoped. “Uh, Pride and Prejudice—oh, and maybe Shakespeare’s Sonnets!” That would keep her occupied.
Alex nodded and glanced at the old man shoveling the walk, “Grazie, Homer.”
Although she had heard his name numerous times, hearing it in conjunction with the poet, Homer’s, The Odyssey, and then noticing the old man’s ancient movement, suddenly leant itself to a new idea. Noticing her unspoken question, Alex mouthed, “What?”
She mouthed back to him, “Homer?” As Homer slowly lifted another scoop of snow, Valeria wondered how he had possibly cleared the walk so quickly.
Finding her question quite hysterical, Alex let out a beautiful, rollicking laugh, a sure sign indicating that the old man wasn’t “The” Homer! Immediately, the caretaker turned back around and Alex bit his lip to stop the snickering.
Homer didn’t seem to notice and uttered, a low, guttural, “Prego.”
Lars’ classic black Mercedes pulled up in front of them and the windows came down revealing Lars, Ava, Camille and Caleb.
“I’ll be right back.” Alex said as he returned to the house.
Valeria walked towards Lars’ car. She smiled at Camille, who had her straight, black hair pulled into a shiny ponytail. She was wearing a black sweater dress that set off the dark mahogany of her skin and her brilliant blue, cupie doll eyes.
“Hey! We’ll see you there tomorrow!” Camille yelled excitedly and then added, “And don’t worry about a thing! It causes wrinkles!” she teased.
Seeing only four of the family in the car, Valeria asked, “Where are the rest?”
Lars responded, “Tav and Daphne are flying down tomorrow.”
Ava cut in, leaning an athletic arm out the car door. “Couldn’t stand the idea of listening to them arguing all the way there!” Valeria laughed.
The front door reopened as Alex came back out wearing his down vest and sunglasses, while carrying the two suitcases in one hand, a camera bag hooked around his neck, and two bottles of water in the other hand. Valeria knew she should have helped him—as if he would have accepted the help!
“Where’s Mani? Is he flying with Daphne and Tav?” Valeria asked.
She noticed Alex’s slight flinch, “Uh, sorry love, Mani won’t be there.”
Stunned and disappointed that Alex’s closest friend wouldn’t be there for the wedding, she asked incredulously, “Mani isn’t coming?”
“Caleb’s filling the bill as best man!”
The ever 13-year-old Caleb, who was concentrating on his computer game, looked up and lifted his hand in a victory fist, “Yes! Best man!” He was such a sweet boy and meant even more to her since saving their lives.
“I think Caleb is a wonderful choice.” She winked at Caleb, who still had a major crush on her.
“All right, well, we’re heading out. We’ll see you there!” Camille said as the car began to roll down the drive. Wherever “there” was, Valeria thought. As the Mercedes disappeared down the drive, Alex tossed the suitcases in the trunk of his car.
“Why isn’t Mani coming to our wedding?”
“He’s…” Alex carefully positioned the garment bag in the trunk, but she suspected that he was stalling. “Don’t worry—we’ll celebrate with him later.” And with that, he closed the trunk, tossed the camera bag in the backseat through the open door and said, “Got your passport?”
She nodded, looking at her “real” Louis Vuitton bag that had been a Christmas gift from Camille—the only stipulation was that Valeria had to get rid of the “knock-off”. She gave the bag to Ava, to Camille’s chagrin…and Ava’s delight! Not that Ava cared about style whatsoever! Still, she liked a sturdy leather bag that wasn’t “frilly and feminine”.
“So…are you going to tell me now? Alex, where are we going?” she asked for the hundredth time.
Giddy with excitement, he said, “Let me have my surprises!” He closed his arms around her waist and kissed her sweetly, and then suddenly overwhelmed with joy, he swung her around.
∞
The Porsche easily plowed through the snow as they wound along the drive leading to the highway and off Morgana. Valeria glanced through the forest and appreciated the way that everything seemed to be aglow with hues of pale pink and blue. Once they entered the highway the snow quickly became a wet mess and then as they continued out of the mountains and into the valley towards Venice, the roads dried. All the while, Alex’s smile had continued to broaden.
“I hope you don’t mind that we didn’t go with the rest of them, but I wanted to have the day alone with you.” He winked. “I know we’ll have the honeymoon…but I really haven’t had an opportunity to court you.”
The honeymoon! Her face flushed just thinking about it, as that marvelous warmth ran through her body. He noticed her reaction and his mouth turned up in the delightful smile that she loved. He hadn’t told her where they were going. But frankly, she would have been absolutely content to spend their honeymoon at the cottage or in her Manhattan brownstone which she had decided to keep.
In fact, her only requirement for a honeymoon was that the two of them were there alone for as much time as possible. And Valeria was quite certain that there was not enough time in a mortal life for her to express what she felt for him!
She turned away, regaining her composure, “I never mind being alone with you! It’s being without you that I can’t take!” And with that she was surprised to find a tear come to her eye. He gave her an inquisitive look.
“Well fortunately, you won’t have to worry about that! Beautiful, I am yours forever!” He took her hand and pulled it to his mouth. And then, while still miles from Venice, he pulled into a field. Now it was Valeria’s turn to give him an inquisitive look.
“I always wanted to show you Venice. So I thought we would take the morning—unless you’re anxious to…get ‘there’,” he teased.
“Isn’t Venice still several miles away?” She pointed to the southern horizon. Alex’s eyes sparkled.
“You know, you’ve been so weak that I wanted to wait until it warmed up a bit to do this.” Then he pulled around a hill and there was a feast set out in the field, along with a hot air balloon that was still laying flat on the ground.
Valeria’s jaw dropped! She tried to find something to say, but again, he had taken her breath away with some remarkably romantic gesture. He parked and jumped out, opening her door for her. They ate a wonderful breakfast while the crew filled the balloon with hot air.
Then he took her hand, helping her into the basket. They both sipped their Mimosas as the balloon rose. Within minutes they were over Venice seeing the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge. She looked down on the ancient city with its green waterways filled with gondolas, and the magnificent domes of St. Mark’s Basilica with the extraordinary piazza that looked out to sea.
“Fantastic!” Valeria enthused.
Alex nuzzled her neck, “Napoleon dubbed the piazza ‘Europe’s finest dining room’ because of the spectacular views.” She pulled his arms around her tighter.
It was so very romantic and beautiful; she turned and kissed his cheek as they landed in a field east of Venice.
“What about the car and our luggage?” she asked, drinking him in from beneath her lashes.
Just then a boat pulled up. Alex led her to the motorboat and gave the driver instructions in Italian. She loved hearing him speak Italian! It was just so…sexy! She felt herself blush. Valeria was very certain that the only sound more extraordinary than Alex speaking Italian was his beautiful laugh. He winked at her and she drew a deep breath as the boat jetted towards Venice.
“You know what you do to me, don’t you!” she gushed privately to him and kissed his ear. His smile widened, as he looked on.
“I’ll keep that in mind!”
They pulled in near St. Mark’s and crossed the bridge to walk through the pigeon-filled square, stopping in one of the shops to get a cappuccino. They toured St. Mark’s and then walked back to the Grand Canal. An elegant gondola awaited them, “Buon giorno, Il Signore e la Signora Morgana!”
Stepping onto the gondola, Valeria’s eyes lit up at the gondolier’s assumption.
“Like that, do you?” He sat down next to her.
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “More than you know!”
The gondolier began singing Puccini, as they moved effortlessly through the canals of burnt pastel buildings. Valeria felt the anxiety that had affected her earlier drifting away.
“I’ve always wanted to ride in a gondola…it’s so Venice, and so very romantic,” she said.
“Mussolini tried to ban them.”
“Why?”
“He thought they were archaic.” A bit of sunlight flitted over them, as the gondolier continued his romantic serenade. Gesturing towards the gondolier, Alex continued, “Most people believe that the gondolier punts, or pushes off from the floor of the waterway. But see what he’s doing?”
Valeria watched and noticed that he was gently turning the oar back and forth. Alex continued, “That method of turning the oar actually exerts less energy than that of walking.”
They pulled up to a restaurant and Alex thanked the gondolier in Italian, glancing at Valeria to see if it had the desired effect…it did. Then he took her hand and they walked a few blocks before turning into a quaint restaurant. Again, the staff was waiting for them.
They ate a marvelous lunch and then strolled along the ancient brick streets passing an ornate building that looked like a fortress with numerous sculptures of lions. Squeezing her hand, he told her that it was known as the Arsenal, the first mass production, moving assembly line in history! In the 1400’s, while it took most shipbuilders months to build a ship, the Arsenal could produce them in hours. She smiled dreamily. She could listen to him forever!
“You know,” Alex said with a wink, “there is one little detail of the wedding that Camille and I agreed would best be decided by the bride.” Coming around a corner, Valeria saw an extravagant bridal shop with the most exquisite wedding gowns that she had ever seen. He steered her into the store.
“Alex, my guess is that these are all special order.”
He cocked his head to the side and lifted an eyebrow, “They may be for others…but not for you!”
An older, very attractive woman, probably the owner of the shop, greeted them by name in Italian; while a man, obviously her assistant, rushed to get Valeria a glass of champagne. Then the man and woman talked while critically analyzing Valeria’s figure and coloring. They made her turn around and then both smiled, approvingly. Then the woman gave several orders to her assistant, which he hastily executed, while the woman led Alex and Valeria to a comfortable lounge that had two dressing rooms large enough to be bedrooms.
They sat in a comfortable loveseat while the shopkeepers brought back various gowns for them to look at. Alex didn’t say a word while he observed Valeria’s responses. The woman held out several lacy gowns that were beautiful. Valeria didn’t want to offend her, so she just nodded a yes.
As the woman was about to hang the gowns in the dressing room, Alex said, “Scusa per favore.” requesting that the shopkeeper give them a minute before placing the dresses in the dressing room.
“You don’t like them,” he challenged Valeria.
“They’re beautiful!”
“But?” He raised his eyebrows. The male shopkeeper attempted to tell Valera something, that she was certain was encouragement to try on the dresses. Alex kindly held up a finger, to silence him, and waited for Valeria to speak.
“I don’t know. They’re really beautiful. I’m just not sure that I see myself in something like those gowns. Probably we should have just gone to the justice of the peace because this big fancy wedding is just…I don’t think it’s me.”
Alex pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes for a moment and then raised an eyebrow, “Let me try something. I want this to be fun for you!” She nodded, feeling like a pigeon in an exotic bird shop.
For the next several minutes, Alex explained to the shopkeepers exactly what he was looking for. They nodded and listened, anxious to please him. Valeria thought she heard the names of several designers, but she didn’t know enough Italian…or about designers to determine. She did love his voice!
Valeria leaned towards Alex’s ear as he finished speaking, “I think you’re going to have to teach me Italian.”
He beamed and kissed her forehead. Then the assistant noticed the blush moving over Valeria’s face and down her neck. The shopkeepers both laughed and the woman made a comment to Alex that made him turn his head in mild embarrassment as he brushed his finge