Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) (5 page)

The blood in his mouth tasted like iron as Jack touched each of his teeth with his tongue to make sure none of them was missing. There was pressure on his right eye. He couldn’t open it. The left one he kept closed on purpose. Even now, the light outside his eyelids was excruciating. His head pounded and a piercing pain stabbed his left ribs each time he took a breath. His wrists were tied to something, maybe a metal pipe, judging by the sound it made when he tried to move his arms. The pipe itself hung slightly above his shoulders. That position made his head move forward whenever he shifted his weight from his knees to his arms to give his legs a rest.

He had lost all sense of time. He calculated that he was awake for about thirty minutes but he could be wrong. He had no clue how long he was out before. He couldn’t remember anything except Kasey’s terrified expression when they pulled him out of the car. Then there was blackness. He listened into the silence but there were no sounds other than the ones he made himself. He identified four floodlights, arranged in a square around him. Judging by the state his knees were in, he was kneeling on concrete. He wasn’t wearing a shirt anymore. The jeans had brown splatter all over them. Dried blood. Some of it must have been his. The rest came from the nice police officer. Carpenter.

He remembered her head exploding. It happened in a split second. She was still talking when the back of her head suddenly shattered into pieces of bone and soft tissue. He had closed his eyes out of reflex. When he’d opened them, he saw Kasey’s face. It was covered with blood, and worse. Then the men opened the car door.

“Hello,” he called out. He had done that at least once every minute during the time he’d been awake. In the beginning, he wanted to see if someone was there. He couldn’t see beyond the intense light so he had no idea where he was. But he thought that maybe someone outside would hear him. The problem was, he couldn’t yell loud enough. His ribs hurt too much. He could shout out a short “Hello?” but that was it.

But he could hear his voice echoing in what must be a large space. Maybe an abandoned warehouse. The perfect place to hold someone. He had seen enough movies to know that the cliché was a truth. Nobody would hear him. Nobody knew where he was.

He had lost all sensation in his hands. The cable ties had slowly but surely cut off his circulation. That and the fact that his hands were above his head. He moved his fingers regularly to keep the blood flowing at least somewhat.

Once, he tried to get up, but he realized that his legs were tied to the floor just below the knee. A piece of pipe, the same kind his hands were tied to, was placed behind his knee and secured on either side of his legs by cinder blocks. When he tried to pull himself up, his hands and wrists were flooded with pain. After a while he gave up trying to get out of this position. But he couldn’t stay in it either. The longer he knelt like that, the harder it became. There was no position that was comfortable or even slightly less painful.

Once he thought he heard a car outside. He yelled but stopped immediately after it felt like someone had just stabbed him in the side. The only time the pain was slightly lessened was when he concentrated on the weight of Kasey’s necklace on his chest. He hadn’t noticed how heavy it was before and the slight pressure on his skin felt soothing, as long as he was able to concentrate on it. Most of the time, the pain in the rest of his body was so overpowering, it blotted out that small comfort.

He got sick twice in the first hour he was there. The smell of it made him puke again until there was nothing left in his stomach. After the second time, he passed out. The wave of blackness came on fast and he woke up realizing that he had just wet himself.

“Turn those lights off. Now!” the voice came from his right. Jack heard a door close, followed by rushed footsteps on concrete.

“I said turn them off!” the voice was utterly familiar and completely out of place.

“Mom?”

“And untie him.
Now!
”

His mother, wearing one of the business suits she usually wore to work, appeared inside the square of lights.

“Oh sweetie,” she exclaimed.

Someone unplugged the lights. For a moment, Jack felt the coolness of the air on his skin. He hadn’t realized how hot the lights had been until now.

“Untie him. Hurry!” she said.

A man — one of the men who took him — cut the cable ties on both wrists. Jack’s hands fell down. He cried out in pain when he pulled them in and toward his stomach. The sudden increase in blood flow was unbearable. His mother knelt in front of him and he slumped into her arms.

“Oh sweetie, what happened to you?”

Someone removed the pipe above his knees and Jack fell to the side, curling up into a fetal position. Pain and relief flooded his body at the same time.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

He could smell her perfume, and even though she had not held him like this since he was thirteen, he remembered, could remember everything about it. He started to cry. That was also something he hadn’t done in a long time. He got punched in the stomach in middle school once. He cried more out of embarrassment and fear than anything. This was different. As much as the pain in his ribs let him, he sobbed into his mother’s arms as she held him and rocked him gently back and forth.

“Get some water!” she said to one of the men. “The police will be here soon. This was all a big misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding?” Jack’s mind turned in circles. Pain shot through his legs when he tried to straighten them.

His mom held the water bottle against his swollen lips.

“Here you go, sweetie.”

Jack drank a few sips but most of the water spilled out.

“Do you know what happened?” he asked. He couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t hold onto any thought for longer than a few moments.

“Yes. Yes, I do,” she answered. “Your girlfriend…”

“Kasey, have you seen her?”

“I have, yes. She’s fine. She’s waiting for you at the hospital.”

“Why… why am I here?”

“As I said, it’s all a big misunderstanding. The important thing is, you’ll be all right and we can get you out of here once the ambulance gets here. Okay, sweetie?”

“Sure.”

“Kasey was asking for her necklace.”

“She was?” Jack knew the meaning of what his mom told him but he couldn’t connect that to anything.

“She told me to tell you to give it to me so I can give it to her.”

“Can’t I give it to her?”

“Yes, of course you can, sweetie. It’s just that you’re going to be getting X-Rays and someone’s going to look at you to make sure you’re all right. In the meantime I can get it to her a little faster. Here, she gave me a pouch to put it in.”

Jack looked at the small black pouch in his mother’s hand. The top was open.

“If you can just take it off and slide it in there, I can give it to her. She’ll be very happy to have it back, don’t you think? It was so nice of her to let you wear it.”

“Yes. Yes it was. I guess it’s okay, and if she wants it back, she can have it of course.” When Jack tried to reach behind his head to find the necklace’s small lock, the pain stopped him halfway.

“Can you do it?” he asked. “My arms hurt too much.”

“Sweetie, Kasey gave you the necklace and you should be the one to take it off, don’t you think?”

“I can’t lift my arms. When is the ambulance going to be here?”

There was one thought Jack could hold on to. It was strange but it helped him to focus. His mom wasn’t wearing any silk stockings. At first, it was but a single thought. There was no other beside it, no “if, then” scenario attached to it. For some reason, however, the fact that she was here, with him, in a business suit without silk stockings, was far more impossible than this day had been until now.

“My nails are too long. It’ll be hard for me to open the lock,” she said with a smile. “Why don’t you try it one more time, sweetie?”

While he lay there looking up, his mother’s face blotting out half of his field of vision, his neck hair pricked up. It wasn’t the underlying annoyance in her voice. It was like the moment you hear someone behind you in a dark alley and you turn around, knowing that it’s too late. If this wasn’t his mother, what was it that held his head within her hands? He could feel the pressure increase inside his temples. The woman smiled. But now the teeth were rotten and pointy, a foul stench emanating from her mouth. Her eyes took on a yellowish tone. Her nails dug into the skin of his face, her right thumb pushing into the eye that was swollen.

Jack couldn’t scream. His vocal cords didn’t belong to him anymore. He couldn’t get any air either. And while the woman screamed in utter rage, she — it — stood up. Jack saw what he later remembered as hooves. They disappeared too fast for it to become a solid memory. But deep inside, he knew he had seen them.

“He will give it to me,” she said. Her voice was much deeper than before. “He will not want the pain anymore.”

The men came back. Two of them pulled Jack up and tied his hands to the pipe, securing his legs to the floor.

“He will give it to me,” it said again. “Or his mind will seize upon itself long before I will feed upon his flesh.”

The lights came back on. Jack shut his eyes. But when he did, he looked straight into an abyss. He saw himself cowering at its edge with nothing to hold on to. He felt its pull on him. Hands grasped for him from below. “Come down to us,” the voices whispered. “There will be no pain.”

Over the next six hours, Jack learned several things. If he tilted his head downward and away from the lights and opened his left eye slightly —actually, he was able to open his right eye a tiny bit as well — he saw a blurred image of the floor and his knees. He didn’t have to look into the abyss and the bright light was bearable. The pain in his knees and arms were a different story. They had become a red maelstrom in his mind, a vortex into which every thought he tried to hold on to fled. He wished to slip away, to let go and somehow lose consciousness. But he knew he wasn’t there yet. It would take longer. He began to look forward to it. Death and oblivion seemed like a release.

There was a movie theater in Albuquerque that only showed Kung Fu films. Jack had been there many times as a kid. His favorites were the ones with Shaolin monks. In one of them, called
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
, the main character, San Te, wished to enter the monastery and live there to learn Kung Fu. But in order to be accepted, he, together with all the others who wanted to join, had to kneel outside its walls for days on end with nothing to eat or drink. That was the first test to becoming a Shaolin monk.

As a kid, Jack had dreamed of traveling to China and entering the order of the Shaolin. He wanted to learn Kung Fu, mainly because of the bullies in his class. Until he hit fifteen, he was smaller than most of the other kids. He also stuttered. Not much but enough to be teased relentlessly. During projects, when he had to give a presentation in front of his class, he froze after the first few words, unable to continue, to the laughter and ridicule of the others.

Someone turned the lights off. One of the men grabbed Jack’s head and jerked it up.

“You gonna take it off?” the man shouted. Jack felt the spit on his face when he spoke. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you. You gonna take it off?”

“Why don’t you take it off yourself,” Jack replied. “What do I care?” He didn’t have anything left. He didn’t think he could open the catch on the necklace even if he wanted to. The question of why he had to be the one taking it off and not them hadn’t yet entered his mind.

The man cut Jack’s ties and removed the bar above his knees. Jack slumped to the ground. Someone poured a bucket of water over his head and chest. The cold made him jerk onto his side. The steps moved away. He was left with silence.

In
The
36th Chamber of Shaolin
, after day five of waiting outside the monastery, someone came out with a large pot of rice. Most of the candidates were completely exhausted at that point. They crawled toward the pot, grabbing the rice with their bare hands and eating it. Not San Te. He stayed kneeling even though you could see in his expression how much he wanted, how much he needed to eat something.

After the rest of the group had emptied the rice pot, they were sent home. The head monk told them that they were unworthy of becoming Shaolin monks. Only the strongest were able to enter. The monk then stood in front of San Te and bowed. He gestured at him to get up and enter the temple with him. San Te hesitated, thinking that this might be another test. But the monk helped him up and together they walked through the large oak doors and into the temple.

Other than the light of a dim streetlight outside, the warehouse lay in darkness. Jack saw a door in one of the corners. He assumed it was a door but he couldn’t tell for sure.
Maybe they had enough and won’t come back
.
Not very likely.
The pain was now everywhere. From his knees it extended into his feet and up into his back. Very slowly, the feeling in his hands and arms came back. He couldn’t move them yet. His shoulder muscles screamed in agony each time he attempted to lift his arms. The thought of getting up and running toward the door occurred to him. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to do that. At least not in the next hour.