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This is a previous version of Chapter 6 - Fish and Frogs.
6.Fish and Frogs
I woke up in the trunk of a car
with a hood over my face and my hands cuffed behind my back.I could feel Erika’s body jostling against
mine.I tried to comfort her, but she
seemed unconscious.
The car stopped, and I was
carried out of the trunk and tossed around some more.Again, I reached around for Erika and called
her name, but my labors were for nothing.I spent maybe an hour with my hood on in a cold room and my hands cuffed
behind me on a cement floor, still woozy from the chemical that’d knocked me
out.
Finally, strong hands lifted me
up from the floor and placed me in an aluminum chair. A hand dove into my pants
pocket and pulled out my cell phone.
When they finally took the hood
off, Escher’s face was only inches from mine.
I could see five or six people
behind him, a few of them in their giant trench coats and a few more dressed
more savagely in dirty, worn clothes, with grease stained tattoos
everywhere.
“Where is Erika?” I asked Escher,
trembling.
“She’s under our
supervision.”
Escher paced back and forth in
front of me.He was dressed like some
sort of pimp caricature with a deep purple velvet robe and matching top
hat.I couldn’t see a weapon on him, but
that didn’t make him seem any less dangerous.
“You aren’t the only one who’s
afraid, Clark Horton.Do you know what
really killed America?”
he asked.
“No…no, I don’t.”I would have said anything to get out of the
spotlight.
“Fear killed America.We thought that if we were just secure
enough, if there were enough safety procedures, we’d be safe, but safety is a
myth.They used airplanes against us,
and in response we made airplanes unusable.We used trains.Then they put a
bomb on a train, and soon just the threat of an attack was more powerful than a
real one.We shut down the trains.
“We choked our own society.We thought that lions and wolves eat with
knives and forks. We didn’t realize our enemies would use our fear against us.It’s a sick cycle, Frightened Boy.You, like America, need to wake up.”
I sat petrified, watching
him.
“Excuse me,” Escher said
suddenly.A lithe, dark-skinned man with
set of quotation marks tattooed over his temples stepped up to the purple-robed
leader and opened a small wooden box, similar to one a wealthy man might use to
store his cigars.Inside was a syringe
filled with a thick red liquid. It looked like blood.
Escher took it out of the case
and carefully injected it into his arm with the familiarity of an experienced
junkie. When it was empty, he appeared dizzy for a moment.“Tessellations,” he said.“It is all one thing in many different forms,
repeating.You’re a part of the pattern.Frightened Boy is the rabbit. I don’t know
how I missed it before.”Then he looked
down at his arm, at the injection site.“Don’t worry. It’s nothing serious.I don’t use drugs. My dreams are frightening enough.”
I stayed quiet.
He stared into my face, his eyes
unfocussed.I sat uncomfortably for
thirty, forty seconds until at least he blinked again and began speaking.“Let him go,” he said.
Someone I couldn’t see was
standing over my shoulder, and they untied my hands at his command.
“You are free to move about, but
be careful.The Strangers are under my
control, but not every danger is a Stranger. Before you go, I know you have the
footage taken of me while I visited TasumecTower.I know the police don’t have copies of it,
which is the only reason you are still alive.You will be free to leave when I have my hard drives, and I am satisfied
yours are the only copies.As you could
imagine, I have a lot on my hands.Enjoy
my hospitality.”
I stood up and rubbed my
wrists.I was feeling extremely nervous,
like I may as well have had green skin considering how much I stood out.But then again, given my company, green skin
may have helped me blend in more.
A slender white cat slid out from
under my chair and coiled itself around my leg affectionately.Its small, wise face seemed to be smiling at
me.It was somehow familiar.
I felt a presence behind me and
turned.It was a face I’d been seeing a
strange amount of.
“Whisper,” I said.
“Hello again.Fancy we should meet here.”
“Where’s Erika?”
“She’s around, I believe.She isn’t captive.She’s been asking for you… seems to think
highly of you.”
“Something like that,” I
murmured.
I took in my surroundings for the
first time.I was in an abandoned
shopping center.Racks and shelves had
been restacked to create rooms and corridors, and shopping carts had been torn
apart and welded back into makeshift fences.Everyone I saw was eccentric and bizarre; it felt like being in some
burlesque army.I didn’t really
understand what everyone was doing around me, but they seemed busy.Pots of stew boiled over small fires, knives
were sharpened around flaming trashcans, and weapons were being taken apart,
cleaned, and reloaded.Modern computers
were hooked into old gas generators, and assault rifles were stacked in large
heaps under too-small camouflage tarps.
I walked around the chamber I was
in, marveling at the inner walls they’d built from the gutted store.As I neared a curtained doorway, I heard a
low growl.It seemed too monstrously low
to be animal; I could feel the vibrations in my stomach.
A hand gripped my shirt and
yanked me backwards.I nearly fell over
and immediately panicked as I saw the ferocious, scarred black head of a
Doberman peering at me through the curtain.I felt like I had awoken Anubis.
“It snarls at foes, it guards his
throne, it gnaws on bones,” the man with quotation marks said to me.The lithe, long arms were contoured with
ropey muscles, and I realized with startled revulsion this was the same man I’d
seen murder those policemen with his bare hands.He offered no other explanation, but none was
needed.I couldn’t see the body of the
dog, but judging from the head, it must have been gigantic..
I noticed that Whisper’s cats
were watching from a safe distance away.
I stumbled backwards and found my
way out of the gutted shopping center, feeling as though I was intruding on
something forbidden at every turn.I
noticed Whisper was still beside me.
I stepped outside into the warm
night air.Everything around me was
covered in boards or bars and wrapped in fences, as though this was an invading
army that’d set up hurried defenses.An
abandoned highway intersection wrapped up into the sky, covered in garbage and
lifeless cars.
Everywhere there was cryptic
graffiti in excited spurts of bright colors.I didn’t understand it at all, but it was beautiful in a strange sort of
way.I could not fathom how people had
reached the tops of buildings and sides of highways without scaffolding or
lifts or even ropes and ladders.
“Someone holds their feet,”
Whisper said behind me, as though she was reading my mind.“There are two people involved with
graffiti.Someone paints the tag, and
someone else holds them over the ledge.Do people do that sort of thing where you live?”
I stood in silence.
“Clark!”
I heard Erika’s familiar voice behind me, and relief gushed through me.She was practically running at me with a hand
waving in the air.She looked unharmed,
and a short, fat, angry man was trying to follow her, cursing as he waddled.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Of course, my Lord.” She
smiled.“I used to live in an Orange
Zone many years ago.I’m used to this
sort of thing.”
I realized then that I hardly
knew anything about Erika’s past.
“Clark,
meet Grundel.”
“Pleasure,” I said to the sweaty,
fat figure before me.
“Damn straight,” the balding,
rotund, sweaty man said.He wiped a meaty
hand off on his torn jeans and offered it to me.It felt like gripping a spoiled ham.“I heard what Escher said about this
kid.Frightened Boy.Hah!”
“His name is Clark,”
Erika said defensively.“’Frightened
Boy’ is a mean name.”
“The f**k it is.He is what Escher says he is,” Grundel
frowned at me.“I’m supposed to keep an
eye on you two until you cough up whatever it is Escher wants from you.You don’t exactly fit in around here, so
don’t think you can just slip away.You’re live bait in this part of town.”
I found myself unconsciously
stepping backwards as Grundel spoke.Globs of pink spit flew from his mouth and felt cold and gross on my
face.
“I don’t have what Escher wants,”
I tried to explain.
“Then you better find it fast.No one here is going to tell the Red King
he’s wrong on this one"not when we can just watch you die and have it over with
instead.”
I squirmed uncomfortably.It wasn’t as though Grundel had poor social
skills. Instead, it seemed as though he actively tried to make people want to
punch him in the face, and he was damn good at it.
“I’m not sayin’ you two are
totally screwed, kid,” Grundel said.“She’s pretty.He might keep her
around… so there’s hope.”
Erika frowned. “F**k off,” she
commanded the equally pudgy, podgy, and dumpy man.“We’ll be fine.Escher isn’t going to kill us. He’ll
understand, and Clark will get us out of
this.”
“Mouthy b***h,” he mumbled.“Believe in whatever gets you through the
day.”Now Grundel looked dismissively
off into the distance at a fight between two dogs, and the conversation was
over just like that.
There was a long pause as I
searched Erika’s face for signs of the dread I was feeling.She looked excited rather than terrified,
though, like this was some theme park ride and things were well under my
control.
As for myself, I’d switched into
a sort of macabre resignation and was only dreading the painful moment in which
I’d be killed.I hoped I’d be shot in
the head without warning, or at least something that didn’t require pain or
cringing.I wouldn’t try to run away
because I’d rather be stabbed than pulled apart by wild dogs or suffer slow,
sick, and starving.
“Come on. My place is just a
block over.”Grundel pointed toward an
abandoned convenience store that looked like a hard kick would collapse
it.“You two can sleep there.”
I was eager to get away from the
Strangers and be with Erika.My entire
world felt out of place, and Erika was the closest thing to comfort that I
could cling to.
*
In the background, an old radio
played white noise with bits of information floating in and out of the speakers
during breaks in the static.I’d hoped for
something romantic"I could have used romantic.It was Grundel’s radio, though, and it was his home, so I didn’t dare
ask him to turn it off or change the channel.
He listened to it like it was the
best show on Earth and only paused every few minutes to write something down.
“I knew there was something
strange about you,” Erika said.Her
breath tickled my shoulder as she looked into the side of my neck.“I just knew I had picked someone special.”
As seemed often the case with
Erika, I didn't know how to respond to what she’d said.I pretended, though, for she’d been at this
act for a while, and I was getting comfortable with playing along.
“Everything will be fine,” I told
her.“There is a larger plan at work here.I know exactly what is going to happen.”
“Am I safe in you?” Erika asked.
“You’re safe in me.I will protect you.”
God lies. There was no plan, and
I had no idea what I was going to do.She believed in me, so I echoed that.Isn’t
that God’s line anyway?"Just stick
with me long enough, and I promise that everything will start to make sense in
the end."
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Havoc has been cried and the hounds of war are loose in Banlo Bay, the last metropolis in America. You’re either a mouth or a mouthful, and young Clark Horton survives like a squirrel in the Serengeti—during the Great Collapse he spent months diving in dumpsters and drinking from drains.
Now that he’s finally got a roof over his head and doing better than 90% of Americans in 2056, along comes Erika. She’s a vagabond, con artist, and worse, beautiful. She’s inexplicably latched onto Clark, intent on casting him in the star role of one of her elaborate schemes.
Clark has no choice but to trust her as soon both are swept into a war between the city and the Secret Society of Strangers, a terrorist group whose members possess surreal powers inspired by the work of Descartes and Lewis Carroll. This elite team includes a mystical banshee who destroys men’s minds with esoteric truth, a backpacker whose headphones play tunes that can topple towers, and a man so completely boring that he’s invisible.
At the center of the Strangers is Escher, the Red King. The gun-toting psychopath is a solipsist who is convinced all of reality is an invention of his own mind and that everything he sees is a twisted remnant of his past life as mind-bending graphic artist M.C. Escher.
Clark and Erika’s blooming romance is tested by Escher, who is convinced that Clark is destined to become one of his chosen few and has a unique, existential bond with the young man—which might be fine, except Escher has a plan to kill every other person living in Banlo Bay.
It’s up to Clark and Erika to stop Escher from achieving his ultimate goal of obliterating the city—but first they’ll have to decide if that’s the right thing to do.
I'm a young but established novelist with one published novel - 2005's Jimwamba (Flame Books) under my belt. I have recently completed work on my new story, Frightened Boy, and am presently seeking to spread the word and get feedback on the book. Thanks so much for your attention.
Excellent chapter! Escher's word were so true. Everything in this chapter was absolutely fantastic. I think no words can rightfully express my feelings towards it.
I've written novels most of my life - I finished my first one when I was fifteen. It sucked; so did the next two or three. Then I went to college and got a degree in English and slowly my novels got b.. more..