Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (78 page)

Finally, he comes to the wall’s end in
that direction. He feels around and forward. The wall is smooth and
straight in the direction of the noise. He steps around to the
inside. Then, his right knee buckles. His body turns as he falls
off to his right. There is the sensation of his head crashing
against rock, but he has not hit the floor yet. A fraction of a
second later, his shoulder crashes into the rock floor.

Jacob feels three things at once. He
feels dizzy from the blow to his head. He feels the electric
numbness in the rest of his body. And, most of all, there is the
sense of realization. He realizes that, if he had been in contact
with one wall on his left and then fell into another wall on his
right, then he has probably reached the side of the cave and is now
in some kind of corridor, a corridor that might lead him to the
source of the noise he is hearing. For a while, he
rests.

#

Jacob walks, because he has to now. He
is afraid to try and bend his injured knee to get down on all
fours. With this injury, comes the thought that the future is not
like the past. In the past, he only observes. But in the future, he
can be injured and feel pain.

Jacob does not limp very far before he
feels the metal. It’s tall and wide, and the noise is coming from
the other side of it. Tired but somewhat relieved, Jacob searches
around on the metal for some kind of handle. Eventually, he finds
plastic. By the contours, he can tell that it’s a keypad. There are
nine rows and six columns of buttons.

“All right divine spirit or whatever
the hell you are, I need some light now. And, oh yeah, it’s going
to be really hard to get in there without the fucking
code!”

Suddenly, something falls over Jacob.
The electric numbness is quickly gone. There is not cold, nor or is
there warm. It’s the same insensitivity to temperature that he has
felt before. His whole sense of his body changes. First, it’s the
sense of his arms and legs that he loses. Then it moves inside,
taking away his organs and bones, working its way out to his skin.
His usual senses leave him. What is left is just a sense of
being.

Then it all changes again. Sight comes
back, but not his eyes, and hearing comes back, but not his ears.
And now he is hard, like a part of the steel he touched earlier. He
becomes aware that he is part of the door.

He is on the inside looking down. He
cannot shift his vision at all. The whole thing is like watching a
movie screen with a paralyzed neck. Jacob can only be the unmoving
steel door and take in the sights and sounds before him.

Down below, at an angle, there is a
crowd. Because he cannot look straight down and see its end, Jacob
cannot tell its size. The main focus of what he sees is a stage. On
the stage, a man stands behind a microphone. To the man’s right,
two other men sit in chairs. One is a small man with a goatee and
short brown hair. Jacob does not recognize this man. The other
sitting man looks all too familiar. The man has long dark hair with
gray streaks. But it’s the way he’s slumped over in his chair, like
his narrow shoulders cannot handle the weight of his head, that
helps Jacob distinguish him.

“Now to the business at hand,” the man
behind the microphone says. “We come here today to pay credit where
credit is due. When we started this endeavor, I knew we needed
someone who could act as a middle man, someone who could make moves
for us, someone to use stealth and find out the things we needed to
know, someone who could, as this man is so fond of saying,
understand the three D’s: dealing, dealing and of course,
dealing.”

The crowd roars with cheers and
laughter. The man who Jacob is now sure is an older version of the
same Shane Tantenmore who burnt to death just outside of Oklahoma
City stands up and shouts something as he throws his fists into the
air. At the sight of this, the crowd increases in volume. Jacob can
feel his steel frame shake as molecules of air bounce off
him.

“Brothers and Sisters of the Gray
Society,” the microphone man shouts, “without further adieu, I give
you the man once known as Shane Tantenmore. I give you the man you
know as The Dealer.”

Jacob had hoped the crowd would relent
soon. But it only grows louder, and he shakes faster. The shaking
doesn’t hurt, nor does it make him dizzy. These senses are gone.
There are now three senses: the familiar senses of sight and
hearing, and a new sense of total being. The new sensation
invigorates him, but it’s also a distraction. The more his
molecules move, the more his attention goes to them. He has to
fight with himself to hear and see what is happening. The molecules
bouncing off each other is all Jacob knows when the crowd reaches
the apex of its applause. And then it is suddenly gone.

The crowd hushes, and Shane starts his
speech.

“Thanks Don. You the man, and all dat
shiiii.”

Laughter comes from the crowd. The man
Shane called Don, who has taken a seat to Shane’s right, comically
stands up and nods his head in acceptance. The laughter becomes
stronger, then dies down.

“All right already, it’s my turn now,
so I’ll do the jokes,” Shane says. Again, there is laughter. Shane
motions for more and the laughter turns to loud cheers.

After the cheers die down, someone in
the crowd shouts, “Thank you, Dealer!” The cheers start again. Then
a chant starts up. It’s quiet at first and then grows steadily
louder, teasing Jacob, like the slow onset of a good high, or the
tongue of an experienced partner.

“Dealer, Dealer, Dealer . .
.”

Jacob slips away until the chant
stops. Now Shane has moved a few steps away from the microphone, as
if to take it all in. He nods his head triumphantly and then moves
forward.

“I guess you should hear the whole
story, just as it really happened. It all started in my hometown, a
little place known as Nescata. You see, I had wandered into a local
bar there, just to have a few beers and play some pool. I thought I
might be able to hustle some drunks out of their money. Well, low
and behold, there was this guy there who I was able to hustle more
than money from.”

A few hands clap as Shane nods his
head.

“He was sitting at the bar, bragging
about how he was a good friend of this big time brain named Dr.
Todd Blacklund. Well, I used to know Todd too. He was this real
smart kid from Nescata who had gone big time. Anyway, this guy said
that he had visited Todd out in the panhandle and that Todd was one
of the big wigs at the OPECRC. That was all he said at first. But I
got an ear for things. I mean a giant federally funded research
facility out in the middle of nowhere and a friend of one of its
top dogs; I knew there had to be something the Society could use.
So I made friends with this guy. I bought him a few beers, let him
beat me in a few games of pool, shit like that. Then, when he
wasn’t looking, I slipped some happiness into his beer. Well, it
wasn’t long before he and I were the best of friends.”

There is more laughter. It isn’t hard
for Jacob to imagine the scene. He had partied with Shane in high
school. Shane had always done the most drinking and the most
smoking, but he had never once seemed drunk or stoned.

“Well, the old boy just got to
laughing and to carrying on. And before I knew it, he was creating
a ruckus. Well, it was clear to me and the other people in the bar
that this fella was unfit to drive. So I, being the outstanding
citizen that I am, volunteered my services as his personal
designated driver.”

Someone from the crowd shouts, “Go
Dealer.”

There are a few more supportive
shouts, and then Shane makes a downward motion with his hands and
says, “Please, I know it’s hard, but do try to hold your praise
till the end.”

There is more laughter. Jacob is
shocked at Shane’s ability to work the crowd. The Shane he had
known in high school had been many things, but he was not
charismatic.

Something’s happened to
him. He’s somebody now. Somebody wicked and deadly. But
somebody.

“Well, we were having so much fun, so
I couldn’t take the man straight home. First, I took him to get
laid. Then we went back to my place for another drink and another
sprinkle of happiness. Anyway, I thought I had done convinced the
old boy that I was the neatest person he’d ever met. So I planted a
thought in his happy head. I started talking about how the
government was always tricking us good old boys and shit like that.
You know, kind of made it sound like he and I were on the same side
and all. ‘Yeah’, he told me ‘blah blah blah’ hook, line and sinker.
He spilled his guts about our friend Todd Blacklund. Evidently, he
and Todd had put away a few beers together a few weeks earlier, and
Todd told him a few things.”

Jacob
cannot see this, Todd having a few beers. It seems
unbelievable.
Unbelievable like the
prospect becoming a part of a futuristic door
.

“Apparently, old Todd was a little
depressed about how things were going. It seems he wanted to work
on medicine, but the government had thrown a bunch of money at him
to work on something else, a little flu bug so to
speak.”

Holy
shit! Todd?
Jacob thinks.
Beer is one thing. Biological warfare is quite
another
.

“Anyway, that was all this guy had for
me, so I made sure he got home safe. I’m sorry to report, though,
he did later develop the most hideous case of the flu.”

There are more cheers, not laughter,
cheers. Jacob goes away and then comes back.

“Well that’s about enough about me, so
I’ll move on to a true friend of mine. When I heard about this bug,
I knew I could do some dealing and get my hands on it. The only
problem was, I had no idea about what to do once I got it. So I
found me a genius. I found this man.” Shane points to the smaller
man with the goatee. The crowd cheers. “Then I got another man on
the inside of the OPECRC to get all the classified documentation on
our little flu bug.” Shane points at the man with the goatee again.
“And this man over here got inside the main computer at OPECRC.”
Shane pauses for a few seconds. He looks around the crowd before
speaking again. “Now, he’s not much on talking to crowds, so I’ll
do my best to explain to you whatever the hell he did. He was able
to find out for us how we could safely store and handle this little
bug. He told us how the bug had been genetically engineered to feed
on all animal life. He also said it would die off within one week
of killing off the last of the animal life it had access to, which,
of course, we figure consists of everything outside of this and the
various other bunkers we have located around the world. And oh, by
the way, he educated us on what to make these bunkers out of, so
the bug wouldn’t have access to us. We blew up the one man in this
world who could have stopped the bug, its creator, Todd Blacklund.
Then we released the first batch right here in Oklahoma. In fact,
it was released only a few miles from this bunker. Once we saw its
success in North America, we E-mailed the people we had stationed
all over the world to release it in other areas. Of course, this
was only to hurry up the process, since the bug would have
eventually made it to these places anyway.”

“Now, from what I understand, we
should be able to resurface in two more weeks.” He looks at the man
with the goatee, and the man shakes his head yes. “Then we’ll all
meet up in Paris, France to form our new society, the Gray
Society.”

The cheers are loud and long, and
Jacob reaches even higher levels of sensory experience than he had
before. Then, when Jacob returns, he hears Shane close his
speech.

“Now I feel like he should say
something, since without him, none of this would have been
possible.”

Jacob,
who believes he knows by now who the man with the goatee is,
thinks,
Shane, you don’t know how right
you are, buddy.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff
Limerod!”

The crowd sends Jacob away with its
cheers again, and the next thing he knows, the man with the goatee
is standing behind the microphone. Jeff Limerod, who many years
earlier had blown himself to oblivion with a bomb from his stomach
pack, throws his hands in the air, and shouts the last thing Jacob
ever hears him say.

“The day of redemption is
here!”

The crowd noise sends Jacob away
again, but this time he doesn’t come back.

#

Jacob slipped from her
embrace.

“Ow! Jacob? Where are you
going?”

“I have to meet my family in
town.”

“All right.”

Sonnie got out of the bed and threw
her arms around his back.

“What’s the matter? Did it happen
again?”

He pulled away from her. “Don’t worry
about it.”

He saw her look at him, her lips
moving back and forth between a half-smile and a frown. He looked
away.

“Are you mad at me? Did I do something
to upset you?”

“No! It’s Sunday. My family is going
to see my grandma at the nursing home.”

“All right. I’m sorry.”