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 it was no use.  I spent maybe an hour with my hood on in a cold room and my hands pinned behind me on a cement floor, listening to my heart thump.

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.

Five Strangers stand behind him, some in trench coats and others dressed savagely in torn clothes, tattoo-strewn skin greasy in the light.

“Where is Erika?” I asked Escher, trembling. My voice cracked as I spoke, and I blushed.

“She’s our prisoner.” 

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’re afraid, aren’t you Clark Horton? You aren’t the only one.  Do you know what really killed America?” he asked.

“No…no, I don’t.”  I would say 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 instead.  Then they put a bomb on a train, and those were taken away. Soon just the threat of an attack was all they needed.

“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 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. 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.

“Now, for you.” The leader of the Strangers bent over until his eyes met mine. He stared into my face, gaze 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 stood over my shoulder, and they untied my hands at his command. 

“You are free to move about, but be cautious. You cannot leave, and there is more to be afraid of here in the Orange than the Strangers. You are welcome to stay with us for a period of time, but you must know - I know you have the footage taken of me while I visited Tasumec Tower.  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.  Its small, wise face seemed to be smiling at me. 

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 bulging 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 who murdered those policemen with his bare hands, in the Tasumec Tower lobby.  He offered no other explanation, but none was needed.

I noticed that Whisper’s cats were watching from a safe distance.

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 became aware that no matter where I walked, Whisper was in eyesight.

I stepped outside into the night. Smelled like tire fires.  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, collapsing under its own weight. 

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, soft voice coming from behind me.  “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. 

The balding, rotund man only grunted.  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.”

“Well what the hell am I supposed to do?”

 “I’m not sayin’ you two are totally screwed, kid,” Grundel said.  “She’s pretty.  He might keep her around… so there’s hope. But you, you’re fucked.”

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. 

There was a 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 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. 

“Come on. My place is just a block over.”  Grundel pointed toward an abandoned convenience store. Looked like it just needed a hard kick and it’d collapse.  “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 at high volume. Words floated around in the static mess, but nothing intelligible surfaced. Grundel leaned forward and listened to the radio with great focus, though, nodding his head at the sounds of the static as though it spoke to him in a language only he understood.

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.

 “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 often seemed the case with Erika, I didn't know how to respond to what she’d said.  I pretended, though, because 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." 

Today I’m scared I had let Erika Bronton down.

Reviews

[Neroscuro]

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.