Episode II - Session II: Second Avenue South
Episode II - Session II: Second Avenue South
Willie had nearly finished the bottle of rum, though to be fair, he had poured a least a couple of sips down the front of his jacket so that he would have the right smell. It was scary how easy it was to drink rum these days, but he put that down to just being “in-character”. He staggered forward now, to the edge of the recessed parking area, in front of the warehouse, and leaned against the corner.
He was sweating a little in the heat of the day, and he adjusted his hat as he wiped some sweat from his brow. The foil he had wrapped up in his cap was making his scalp itch, and it was baking his head like a potato. He had just about decided to take that foolishness out of his hat when a teenaged kid marched around the corner right in front of him.
Then another on. Then a third.
They were young, maybe sixteen, seventeen tops. All Native American, and unless he missed his guess, all Choctaw. And every face was stone cold, just completely empty of any kind of emotion.
They looked at him with almost robotic faces, and moved to encircle him. Instinct kicked in, and Willie took a step backwards. He tried to play it off as a stagger, and went for the bluff, “How you boys doing? You want a drink? Got a quarter?”
The fifth kid to come around the corner was carrying a plank of wood, and the sixth one was carrying a length of chain. At that point, Willie glanced back and realized that the others were palming knives or screwdrivers or something similar. Willie took several more steps backwards and stumbled, for real this time, and he didn’t have to bluff the nervousness in his voice. “What the hell are y’all doing? Children of the Corn?”
The one with the piece of wood swung at him high, as the first kid with the knife swung low. Willie fell for the tactic, dodged the club, and felt the knife slash his ribs, biting bone.. Another kid punched at him and connected with his stomach, hard. The breath exploded out of him.
He staggered back and shrugged off the third kid, who was trying to grab his shoulder and plunge a screwdriver into his chest. Willie jumped left and staggered right, then broke out into a sprint away from the kids. He ran for the car as hard as he could. He fumbled for his gun with one hand while he ripped the radio out of his pants with the other. As he brought the radio up to his lips, he could see it was red with his own blood.
“Mayday! Mayday!! It’s a trap!!! They’re killing me!!! Help!!!”
He heard the pounding footsteps behind him, and he even heard the whistle of the chain as it swung around behind him and connected with the back of his head.
. . .
Crystal speed-read through a few more pages of “Biology of Spiders” and then closed it with a barely perceptible shiver. She was glad she had not seen what the others had described to her in that lab last night, and she was not eager to see its mate in person.
She set the book down on top of a growing stack to her left, and picked up the next one from the stack on her right. This next one was “How To Open Locks with Improvised Tools.” Below that was “Legends of Native America”, “The Private Detective’s Guide to Special Investigations”, and “The Preparatory Manual of Explosives.” Crystal reminded herself to shelve these books herself when she was done, so that the university library staff wouldn’t think she was a complete nutcase.
As she flipped through a few pages on deadbolt designs and common door-latch weaknesses, she wondered again whether she was fooling herself. After this morning’s conversation with her grandfather, she had realized that this thing, this “calling” or “purpose” or whatever she could call it, was something she had to take responsibility for. (On some sub-process of her brain, she corrected herself: not “something she had to take responsibility for”, but rather “something for which she had to take responsibility”. Despite being stressed out and suffering from lack of sleep, she would not begin ending sentences in a preposition, even in her head.)
This calling that she felt, it wasn’t just random chance. The events a few weeks ago, with the zombies and Taylor Chu dying and everything, were not something she could dismiss as a freak accident. She had tried that over the past few weeks. She had thrown herself into study, and gotten the new motorcycle, and tried to convince herself that she had just experienced something like an occult car wreck. A random mishap in which she had been a participant. But not a career, not a recurring event, not a… a life.
Still, Crystal had checked in once a week with the others. She had jokingly referred to them as a “post-traumatic stress support group”, but the joke wasn’t all that funny. And she didn’t need to ask to know that they had all felt the same thing. There had been a reason that they all kept showing up at the library each week. They were called there.
There was a feel to the place when they were together, although not necessarily a pleasant one. Something more like an alert. A message, unspoken, but repeated for each of them, each week: “Be ready. Be alert. You have more work to do.”
When Crystal had seen the kids at the booth back home, talking about Sussistinako, she had felt an echo of that then. She had not been alert to it then, not like she should have been. Then at the library when she met… whatever she should call him, the new Taylor and the Indian guy, she had felt it again, more intensely. Like a surgeon must feel when he wants to enjoy a party, but he knows at the same time that he is on call. Something was happening, and event, a crisis, a…mission.
By the time she was being chased down the highway last night by the El Camino, she had been immersed in it again. But the phone call this morning to take care of that kid, that had brought everything home. As much as she was ready, in the sense of being alert, or keyed-up to handle this kind of thing, with…giant spiders, and Choctaw mind control, and whatever else came up, she had realized that she was not really ready, in the sense of being prepared.
Crystal had not had a plan for what to do with the kid once they were done with him, and relying on her grandfather to clean up that mess was something she did not want to do again. She didn’t want him involved in any of this, for his own safety.
The whole affair made her realize the other areas in which she should have already been prepared, but was not. Last night, when Cooper and Joe went through that locked door, if she had been there, she could not have gotten in after them, at least not without blasting through the door with a shotgun. She should have been able to pick the lock or disable the security system. During the gunfight a few weeks back at the construction site, she should have been able to prepare some additional options, like a smoke bomb, or something bigger, even.
There was the realization, for the first time consciously instead of just something hovering on the edges of her thoughts, that this situation with the lab and the events from last month were not two unique occurrences, but rather, two events, two crises, two missions in a series of missions that were sure to come. And she had better be more than just alert. She had better be ready.
Crystal was the smart one in the group. She needed to start acting like it. When Willie had called her earlier to tell her about the bus on Second Avenue, and their plan to check it out, she had wanted to be there, but this was more important. This was better for the group (the team?) for the long term.
And besides, she had her cell in her bag next to her, and she was only a few blocks away, with her Harley parked right out front. If they needed her, they could call.
At that moment, her phone rang.
. . .
Crystal burst through the swinging doors out to the front of the library at a full sprint, her bag slung over one shoulder and flailing behind her like a flag, and her helmet in the other hand, careening off the door frame with a tooth-rattling clang. She collided head-on with a couple of co-eds walking arm-in-arm and ducked under them as they cursed at her and separated like a drawbridge to her left and right.
Past the angry couple, she used a bench as a ramp and jumped the hedges in front of her, now running full speed across the grass towards her Harley. She swung a leg over and slipped the key in the ignition while pulling her other arm through the backpack’s strap. She screwed the motorcycle helmet down tight onto her head, pinching her nose hard enough to make it red, and feeling a weird crinkling feeling along the top of her scalp. She paused for a split second at that sensation, remembering the book she had been reading about spiders, and picturing a spider sleeping in her helmet which somehow she had just crushed into her scalp, before remembering the just-as-insane scrap of aluminum foil that Joe had convinced her to line her helmet with earlier this morning.
The bike revved loudly and roared out of its parking spot and into oncoming traffic. She swerved wildly and brought her bike back into line in time to dodge an eighteen wheeler that could have turned her into splattered pudding. In the back of her mind, she made a note to include a defensive driving or a motorcycle racing course of some type into her new curriculum.
She raced through the downtown campus, past the classrooms, past the medical library, past the hospital, past the Kirklin Clinic, dodging between cars, using the turn lane, the oncoming lanes, even the sidewalks as she needed, to dodge traffic and race towards Second Avenue. Cars swerved around her, pedestrians jumped out of the way. She heard brakes squealing and people yelling in her wake, even over the screaming growl of her own engine. Around the corner onto Fourth Avenue now to avoid the viaduct, the whole time yelling into her helmet radio for Willie to respond, hearing Joe and Taylor as they also tried to reach him, and all the while hearing nothing in return.
Now she was on Second Avenue: she dodged around another parked eighteen wheeler, and the scene came into view. She spotted Willie.
She was already going about fifty miles an hour. She twisted the throttle for even more speed.
. . .
Willie staggered backwards, tasting blood. One eye was swollen shut, and his ears were ringing. His radio lay on the ground fifteen feet away. His ribs ached where he had taken a crack to his side, and his wrist still stung from where the chain had violently disarmed him of his attempts to call for help.
With his one good hand, he pulled his gun, and staggered back a few more feet, making contact with a chain link fence. He was cornered now, and the punks knew it. He held the gun forward with one trembling hand, off-balance and off center, and gestured with it as menacingly as he could.
“Alright, that’s it!! Next one of you mothers makes a move and I’m shooting every last one of ya!!”
The punks didn’t seem scared of the gun. In fact, they weren’t showing any emotion at all, really. Despite the bloodthirsty beating they had just bestowed on a complete stranger, they didn’t even look excited. They just stared at him, and wordlessly formed a half-circle around him.
A second passed, and they didn’t attack again. Willie felt dizzy and took a halting step to the left, but the punk to that side menaced with his knife. He didn’t close in for a swing, but he didn’t back down either. Willie ran his tongue over the cut on his lower lip and tasted the blood, judging the cold predatory look in the kid’s eyes and trying to keep the gun pointed in every direction at the same time.
They didn’t need to attack again. They were like wolves circling their prey. They just had to sit now, and wait for him to bleed out.
With the taste of blood coating his tongue, he also tasted something else…the rum he had been drinking earlier. He pursed his lips and swallowed deep.
He whispered, “Oguon, if you can hear me, you voodoo b*&^%, I need some help…” The gun wavered in his hand, and he felt feint.
The punk in front of him reared back to take a final swing with his makeshift club.
The ringing in Willie’s ears grew more intense, and changed tone. It was lower now, more of a guttural, buzzing growl, and growing louder. It sounded a lot like a motorcycle.
Willie looked up with his one good eye. The punk in front of him raised the club over his head, and then was smashed and thrown across the street by the front of a speeding Harley-Davidson.
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