Disconnection (27 page)

“You won’t have to worry about hearing when you’re dead.”

Dean’s heart jumped. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.”

Dean blinked hard. He was almost certain he had heard Stan right that time. He wasn’t
that
messed up.

With his heart racing, Dean leaned back in the car seat and observed his teammates. Something was up. They were too nonchalant about his injuries. Sure, Owen had said something at first, but that was it. They hadn’t bothered to ask anything else, no offer to take him to the hospital, or at least get out the first aid kit that Dean had seen the last time he had been in Stan’s car.

Strange
, Dean thought.
Really strange
…

Stan turned off the highway and onto a backass-woods exit. “We’re almost there,” Owen announced.

“Okay,” Dean answered, watching with worry as the scenery passed by him.

Something is up. Something is definitely up. I don’t like the taste of the air tonight
.

Stan pulled into a tiny cove around a sharp bend. “We’ll park the car here,” he said, “so the farmer doesn’t see us.”

“The pig farmer?” Dean asked.

Stan and Own nodded in unison. Owen turned around in his seat and looked at Dean inquisitively. “You’re up for this?”

Dean shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really get what we’re doing.”

Stan said to Owen, “You better let him stay in the car. Look at him. He’s pretty fucked up.” There was no concern in his voice.

“You’re right,” Owen agreed, nodding.

Stan continued, “Besides,
we have to kill the old fucker this time.”
He turned to Dean and ordered, “Stay here. If everything goes according to plan, we shouldn’t be gone long. Have another beer.”

“That I may do,” Dean mumbled, opening the cooler and popping open his second beer as the two other boys exited the car. He watched as they walked to the trunk and took out a net and a shotgun.

After Owen and Stan began their journey into the nearby green foliage, Dean put his beer aside and reached to the front seat, popping open the car’s trunk with the press of a button.

Stepping out of the Mustang, Dean was aware of the sudden night that surrounded him. The sky seemed darker than usual, the moon only a sliver of orb above the earth. Dean inhaled a sharp breath and crept to the trunk of the car. He pulled the door open wider to have a good look. His eyes searched the trunk’s contents—soccer clothes, a soccer ball, a dozen empty Heineken bottles. Finally he spotted the first aid kit under a pair of Nike socks.

He began to clean himself with disinfectant. The more he cleaned, the more he realized how bad Sela had messed him up earlier. He looked at a mirror inside the kit and saw that his face looked like it belonged to a zombie from
Dawn of the Dead
.

And my friends didn’t care
, he thought.
They barely made mention of it. What happened to southern hospitality anyway?

(We have to kill the old fucker this time)

Had he heard them right? Probably not. It was his ears. They were playing tricks on him, that
had
to be it.

He pressed his hands to his ears, listening for a buzzing sound that might indicate ear injuries. He waited a moment. There was nothing.

I hear fine
, he realized. He hadn’t been hearing things earlier. Stan said they were going to kill a pig farmer.
Surely they were joking
, Dean thought. Why would they want to kill a farmer? Why would they want to
kill
, period?

Dean tried to chase his doubts away. After he finished bandaging his wounds, he went to the trunk again and stuck the first aid kit back inside. As his hand reached through the clothes, he touched something wet. Suspicious, he moved forward to have a better look.

Stan’s soccer clothes were drenched in blood as red as the car he drove.

Horrified, Dean stepped back. The blood only clarified what he had earlier tried to deny—Stan and Owen really were going to kill that pig farmer. And judging from the state of Stan’s clothes, Dean doubted that the farmer would be his friends’ first kill.

Get out of here
, the voice in his head told him.
Get the hell out of here
.

Despite his pain, especially in his back and knees, Dean headed as fast as he could in the direction that he had seen Owen and Stan go only minutes before. He didn’t know the pig farmer, or why his friends would want to kill him, but whatever the motive, Dean knew he had to stop it from happening.

The world has gone mad
, he thought as he fought to put one foot in front of the other.

W
ake up, my little girl.

Sela woke slowly from an intense and vivid dream in which she was running in quicksand. While she was slowly drowning in its grainy pearls, a dozen wild beasts surrounded her, their glowing amber eyes steadily watching her and laughing with fetid breath. The furry beasts carried spears which they pointed at Sela. In the desert darkness, she fought to stay on the ground while contorting her body in positions that made it impossible for the spears to puncture her skin.

She was falling into the sand when she heard in the distance voices belonging to a different realm of consciousness, and she followed these voices to her eventual wakening, where one voice in particular stood out above the rest:

(Wake up, my little girl. He is coming for you.)

“Mother?”

It had been so long since she had heard her mother’s voice, but still, she knew its soft melody when she heard it.

Sela opened her eyes.

She was in almost complete darkness. The only light appeared in beams from the floorboards’ cracks above her. The air smelled of rotting wood and dust. Sela tried to move, but it hurt, God, did it hurt. She struggled to stand, but the ceiling was too low. The most she could manage was to lean on her hands and knees with her back in the air, resembling a crab crawling on the shore.

Every part of her felt as if it had been through a grinder. Her head was the worst. It was as if her skull was cracked into a million pieces. Sela reached up and felt her forehead, her fingers dipping into a long wound that was sealed and sticky with congealed blood.

Where am I?

(Don’t you remember?)

The fight with Dean. The episode in the bayou. The swim in the water, almost becoming alligator food.

And the run to the highway. The shaggy-bearded man. The blood pouring from his teeth. The severed cat’s head. Running again.

And Harold Applegate. Better known around the world as the Devil.

A cry caught in Sela’s throat. She was in the hands of the Beast.

No one could save her now. She had to save herself, if that was possible. She reached up and began to feel the ceiling’s surface. After a moment her fingers felt the cold steel of a metal latch. Aggressively she pulled at it, but it became clear that the latch could only be lifted from someone on the outside looking in.

Feeling there was no hope, Sela began to scream, “Hello? Can anyone hear me? Someone help me, please! Please! I’m down here! Someone, please…”

No voice answered, but something vaporous spoke to her across the molecular fields of air and dirt:

Of course no one answered what did you think did you think you were down here by way of an accident? We have PLANS for you
.

Sela cringed. The voice of Harold Applegate had reached inside her mind and answered.

“I don’t believe in you,” she said aloud. “I don’t believe in God. I know the rules. In order for Satan to exist, God has to exist. And in my world, He does not exist.”
Every protagonist needs an adversary
.

Satan laughed.

You don’t have to believe in God for Satan to exist. You create your own gods by your refusal of God, Sela, didn’t you know that? Even that Jew boyfriend of yours could have told you that. Fiddle-faddle, if you had just stuck to Sunday school like your parents had wanted. If you hadn’t turned your parents into barbeque
.

“I did not kill my parents,” Sela said, her voice echoing in the darkness.

Of course you did. Here, I’ll show you
.

A soft orb of light developed in the center of Sela’s underground tomb. It started small and grew larger, until it was the size of a basketball. Sela moved closer to it, transfixed it by its powerful rays. The orb’s light became brighter and brighter until colors moved through its core, spreading out and encircling until it finally replaced the white light. Greens and blues, reds and yellows, purples and browns formed into particles of solidity, shapes, until suddenly Sela was staring into her parents’ living room.

Take a look, Sela. Take a good look, my tortured dear
.

Inside the orb, seven-year-old Sela ran down the stairs in her pink nightgown. After a quick look upstairs to see if she had wakened her parents, she turned her back and headed to Barbie’s Dream House. She took out her shoebox of Barbies and began playing. Malibu Ken and Barbie were lying in bed on the top floor. Pretty Flower Barbie was in the kitchen with her rubber hands resting on the counter to keep her standing up. Butterfly Barbie and Nurse Barbie were outside checking out Fantasy Ball Barbie’s red Corvette.

Seven-year-old Sela’s only problem was Florida Vacation Barbie and the Dr. Ken doll. They were lying outside the house with nothing to do. Sela the child made a humming sound of indecision in her throat before standing up and disappearing into the kitchen.

Present-day Sela, complete with forehead injury and a twisted ankle, closed her eyes, afraid of what would happen next.

Open your eyes, Sela. See what you did
.

Sela reopened her eyes just in time to see her seven-year-old self enter the living room, this time carrying something in her hands. The child was nearly bouncing with glee when she finally bent to the carpet and reached for her bored Barbie and Ken. “Dinner for two,” the child said, situating the dolls into the eating area of the kitchen.

Then she revealed what she had taken from the kitchen. She opened her palms and out came a tiny candle and a box of matches.

The adult Sela rolled her eyes back. “No,” she whispered in the darkness.

Do you see now? Do you see now what you’ve done?

“I was just a baby.”

Satan laughed again.
You knew exactly what you were doing
.

Sela the child lit the candle and set it inside the kitchen. Nothing happened at first. No plastic melted, no burst of flames. It was almost as if time suspended for just a moment, long enough for the adult Sela to look thoroughly at what she had done, to see for herself how one childish act had caused her parents’ deaths.

Sela, Sela, went quite mad, burned her house, her mom and dad
…

“Shut up!” Sela screamed. “I wasn’t
mad!
I was just a child!”

There are no accidents, remember?

The flames killed Florida Vacation Barbie first, and then went on to engulf Dr. Ken and his mistress Pretty Flower Barbie at the doll house’s sink. The couple upstairs was its next victims, followed last by Butterfly Barbie and Nurse Barbie, who up until that point had so innocently been contributing to consumerism by their admiration of that rich bitch Fantasy Ball Barbie’s fat European sports car.

Sela ran upstairs after the flames melted the blond hair of Alaska Barbie. The adult Sela watched her as she went flying up the steps in panic, almost tripping over her cotton nightgown on the way up.

It took just a few minutes after the Barbies were slaughtered for the fire to extend into the rest of the room, the deadly orange tongues reaching out and destroying everything in their path.

Sela covered her wounded forehead with the palm of one cool hand and closed her eyes, no longer able to bear the horrific image in front of her. “Make it go away,” she whispered. “Please, make it go away. Show some mercy.”

I have no mercy
.

And so the scene continued. Sela no longer had to have her eyes open to see what was happening. The Devil had made it so the orb was glowing inside her eyelids, just as bright as it was inside the room. There was no escape. Sela was forced to watch.

The flames killed the carpet, the furniture, the lamps. They climbed on the walls and turned them to ash. Sela heard her mother and father scream from upstairs. She heard them shout her name. She watched the fire trucks from a flame-engulfed, shattered window as the large yellow vehicles rolled into the driveway. She saw the helmeted firemen crawl out of the truck. A fire hose was quickly extended from the truck. Several firefighters set up a trampoline near the house. They were screaming at her mother, telling her to get her kid first. Sela watched herself fall into the trampoline. Then nothing. The scene died.

Your house fell
.

“Yes, I remember.” She thought,
why did you show this to me?

Because you are evil, Sela. You killed your parents. There is more bad than good in you
.

Sela sobbed into the palms of her hand. Thankfully, the Devil stayed quiet as she languished in her misery.

When she finally looked up, clouds had spread through the air. Sela could see the smoky current from the light shaft above. Something was happening. This was not the first time she had seen the air change in such a way. The room always became murky right before …

In Sela’s pocket, Chloe’s cell phone rang.

D
ean worked his way through the thick green growth. Nightlife sprung around him; cricket calls and the fluttering rhythm of bat wings set the background noise. Dean’s knee forged and fought under his weight to keep his feet moving. His injuries had weakened him to the point that he felt like a hundred-year-old man climbing Mount Everest.

After reaching a clearing where a white house stood lonely amid a rock-strewn driveway, Dean heard for the first time the snorting sounds of swine. The pig farmer was close.