Every Day is Like Doomsday (8 page)

Elliot made three trips around the food court and
hit up Wetzel’s Pretzels and the self-serve yogurt kiosk.
He wasn’t full but at least he wasn’t starving any more.
He sat on a bench facing the movie theatre and watched
the people come and go. It was a Friday night and the
place was about as packed as he had ever seen it. He didn’t
have enough money to go see a movie but neither was he
looking forward to the walk back to school. So he sat,
indecisive, and did nothing.

He watched the line at the theatre inch its way
forward and envied every single person in it. They were
normal. They had their lives ahead of them with their
boring jobs and their family drama’s and all of their other
pedestrian complications. His eyes locked onto a couple
who were vigorously making out in line without regard
to propriety.

“Get a room,” he muttered, even as he was secretly
jealous of the guy. Then he realized who they were. Sarah,
the girl he’d loved since grade school but had never had
the guts to make a move on and their mutual best friend,
Adam,were licking each other’s tonsils.Elliot thought that
he was sad, he thought that he was broken hearted at losing everything he’d known, but this brought it all home.

His best friends. The day after he was arrested. His
best friends.
He wondered if they had been getting together in
secret before he even disappeared but had to stop thinking
about it because it made his head hurt. Part of him wanted
to jump up and run into the crowd and expose his friends
for the lying bastards they were but he knew he’d never do
it because he didn’t have the balls.This realization deflated
the already sagging balloon of his ego even further.
He took one last look at them as they separated to
step up to the box office and then took off. In a daze he
went into the arcade next door, looking to watch someone
else play some senselessly violent video games because he
had no quarters to play them himself. He needed to do
something to sate the bloodlust that he wouldn’t allow
himself to act on. He wandered for a little bit, soaking in
the normality, trying to take his mind off of the gaping
hole in his heart. There were quite a few kids there, most
of them younger than Elliot, but he walked past them all
as he made his way to the back corner of the arcade where
the incredibly violent games were kept.
He walked around the last bank of motocross games
and then stopped. There she was, Innya, replete in all her
moody, Slavic beauty. Her back was to him but he still
knew it was her. She was wearing the same gray hoodie
she had worn all day but had changed from her black,
pleated skirt into a tight pair of dark blue jeans. Her platinum blonde hair was perfectly smooth and curled under
at the base of her skull and her bare neck was the sexiest
thing he’d ever seen. It was the most he’d allowed himself
to look at her since he’d known her and as soon as he did
his hormones took over. His friends weren’t missing him?
Then fine, he wasn’t going to waste time missing them.
He was going to seize the moment but there was only
one problem.
At her side stood two boys Elliot recognized from
his Fort Rose High as members of the basketball team.
Elliot had never seen them in the arcade before and
deduced with his impressive mental abilities that they
had been trying to engage Innya in the hopes of getting
in her pants. It appeared that they were wasting their
time because she ignored them as she cut down monster
after monster in House of the Dead 4. Elliot’s respect for
this violently beautiful creature increased tenfold.
Elliot came up beside her and said, “Hello,” to her
and then, “Hello,” to the boys. They shot him looks that
said they wanted to throw him into a locker or a trashcan
or some other receptacle big enough to hold a slight-statured human nerd. But there were no trashcans or lockers
in the immediate vicinity so they settled for malevolent
glaring, simple and to the point.
These boys obviously had no idea what she was and
he wasn’t about to let his only friend, to use the term very
loosely, be hassled by a couple of jockular asshats, even if
she could take care of herself. And then he knew just how
to get rid of the boys. He hoped it didn’t get him a black
eye and a broken jaw in the process but if it did maybe
he’d get to throw a punch or two and work out some of
this aggression. Maybe Innya would even be impressed.
“So, are you guys members of the New Fundamentalist Reform Church?” Elliot asked the three of them.
Innya ignored him. The boys rolled their eyes.
“No, we’re not members of your stupid church,” the
stupider-looking boy said, “Now get lost.”
“My church is not stupid. Perhaps you don’t understand what the church is all about. Let me tell you and
once you have a better grasp of what we are about and
what we can do for you perhaps you’ll want to join.”
Elliot had spent so much time in the Church with his
father that he knew this spiel by heart. Heart pounding
nervously, skin tensing in expectation of a punch, Elliot
opened his mouth to start in but the boys backed away
from him.
“Dude, what the hell is wrong with you?” asked the
shorter, uglier one.
Elliot shrugged and smiled, acting clueless. He
could be dumb when it suited him.
The two boys exchanged glances and walked off.
“We’re out of here. Enjoy your conversion,” they said to
Innya, who was still ignoring the whole exchange as if it
hadn’t been taking place directly over her head with her
in the middle, still diligently killing hoards of the undead.
Elliot knew that the only thing that had kept
him from getting his ass truly kicked was that the boys
believed he was only there to witness to Innya. He knew
that if they had sensed any shenanigans or saw Elliot as
competition in any way then he probably would not have
escaped a brutal beating.
As soon as they were gone and out of earshot Elliot
stepped up to the game cabinet and asked, “Are you following me?”
“Considering I’ve been standing here playing this
game that is highly unlikely. But who was that couple you
were staring daggers at? Friends of yours? ”
As Elliot stood there open-mouthed Innya’s last
man was overpowered and eaten by the zombies.“GAME
OVER” flashed in red across the screen in case she didn’t
already feel bad enough that she just lost. She dropped
her hands from the controls and turned to Elliot, her face
still blank.“I suppose I should thank you for getting rid of
those boys. If they didn’t leave soon they eventually would
have figured out what happened.” She walked away.
“What? What happened?”
She turned around and her face was lit up by a sly,
insanely sexy smile. Then she held up two wallets, one in
each hand, as she backed away from him. She shoved them
into the black duffel bag she had slung over her shoulder,
turned and walked toward the entrance to the arcade.
Elliot was stuck in place, mesmerized by the sight
of her perfect ass in her tight jeans. He tried to remember
what Sarah’s ass looked like but found that he couldn’t.To
his surprise his mouth started to water. But he knew that
she’d kill him if he so much as looked at her sideways so
he did his best to quiet his libido and hurried after her.
“Wait, so you were following me?”
“Not at all. In fact, I wasn’t even aware you had
left campus. I just like to play video games and harass
the Norms but I saw you on my way in and you looked
so hilariously furious that I just had to stop and watch.
Those two were really going at it, weren’t they?”
Elliot’s anger returned, a little darker at Innya’s
provocation. “My best friend and the girl I love are basically boinking each other, in public, the day after I’m
incarcerated. I trusted the two of them and I thought
Sarah was a good girl and now I know she’s just a slut.”
“Whoa. Wait a minute,
svolotch
.”The mocking tone
of her voice was suddenly replaced with a biting chill that
made Elliot concerned for his safety. “Just because a girl
has sex doesn’t make her a slut. And she wasn’t kissing
some random guy, she was kissing her best friend. That’s
not slutty. That’s… relationshippy.”
Elliot ignored her and pushed open the doors and
stepped outside, trying to keep the tears of anger from
his eyes. He knew that Innya was right. He was being
unreasonable but after the past couple of days he’d had
he just really needed to hold on to that anger for a little
longer. “I know you’re right,” he said without looking at
her, “But can you just agree with me for a minute? I need
agreement right now, not logic.”
“I don’t understand, but okay. Yes, that girl is a giant
slut. She will have sex with anything that moves, even a
Cossack, and we all know how bad that is.”
“What?” Elliot asked, thoroughly confused yet
pleasantly surprised at her agreeability. She seemed to be
a totally different person than the one he had just been
with a few hours ago.
“Nevermind. You’re far too dull to truly understand.”
They continued in silence for a time and Elliot
gradually found his rage and pain giving way to curiosity.
After a while he asked, “So who are you, anyway?” He
didn’t like the silence. It made him concentrate too much
on his feet, which were killing him, and his legs, which
wanted to kill him if only they could find their way up
to his throat. It also made him think and he really didn’t
want to think at the moment.
“What do you mean? I’m Innya.”
“I know that. But I don’t know anything about you
and you seem to know a lot about me.”
“I know very little about you, too, and I’d like to
keep it that way.”
“You know I’m the one who let those guys into the
football game with their bomb because I am an idiot. You
know that I’m a fraud and that I shouldn’t be in the VA.
And you know who my dad is.”
“Who’s your daddy?” she asked with a smile.
“See what I mean? You’re all over the place. You say
things that seem to come directly from TV and then you
call someone a Cossack. I don’t get it. What’s up with you?”
Innya looked thoughtful and chewed her lip. Elliot
wondered whether this was something she always did
when she was thoughtful or just something that she was
doing now for effect. Just how much of her was calculated and how much was real? Then again he supposed
that could be the same with anyone, not just a super-hot
Villain who was protecting him but who also threatened
to kill him every now and then and probably would if he
rubbed her the wrong way.
“I was born in Russia.”
“Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. What part of
Russia? Wait, nevermind. I suck at geography so you telling me a name won’t help.”
“I’m from all over. We were nomads. My people
were circus people, performers.”
“You’re a circus freak?”
“No. Not a freak. But it’s where I learned to do this.”
She left off talking and performed a series of rapid front
walkovers, followed by a strange move where she stood on
her hands and her head was touching her butt. It looked
very uncomfortable yet eerily sexy. She un-contorted her
body and executed a series of effortless back-handsprings
to where Elliot was sanding with his bottom jaw brushing the tops of his shoes.
“You were a contortionist?” Elliot’s mind spun
with many very wicked fantasies, all of which involved
learning how to tie two people into a sex pretzel. Part of
him realized that these fantasies made him just as bad as
Adam and Sarah but the rest of him told that part to shut
up and mind its own business.
“More like an acrobat. I only performed once
before my parents recognized where my true talent lay
and decided that we all needed to move to the United
States and follow my career path.”
“Which was?”
“They wanted me to take over a village.”In response
to Elliot’s screwed up face she added, “Only a small one.
They weren’t greedy.”
“Okay… So what is your true talent anyway?
Besides the art of boob diversion I can’t tell what your
superpower is.”
“I am a megalomaniac. I want to rule the world.”
She said the words not without some pride but it only
made Elliot more confused.
“That’s not really a superpower. It’s more of a mental illness.”
“Not my brand of it. I am a master of lies and
manipulation. I will tell you what you want to hear, like
that you are my best friend in the entire world, and you
will believe me even as I am plunging the knife into your
back and twisting it.”
Maybe his heartbreak and loneliness had him acting rashly. He didn’t know what had gotten into him but
he said, “That doesn’t sound like a bad way to go.”
Innya locked eyes with him then and though Elliot
shuddered but couldn’t look away from her icy gave. In
his peripheral vision he saw one corner of her beautiful
mouth lift and when she spoke he felt the words caressing something so deep within his body that he didn’t even
know it existed.
“If I wanted you to, you’d love it.”
Elliot nodded. His mind felt full of fog but instead
of being disorienting, like the haze he had experienced
after his mild concussion, it was reassuring, sweet and
strangely erotic. He could let go. At that moment she
could have told him to step in front of a speeding garbage
truck and he would have bounded off in search of one to
run him over.
He was just about to suggest such a thing when
the sensation ended and the world snapped back into
focus. “What was that?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut
against the suddenly too bright streetlight. He didn’t add,
and why did it end? But he thought it.
“Told you it was good.”
“It was amazing. But if you can do that then why
haven’t you taken over everything already?” He knew he
should have been afraid to challenge her but the quickly
fading afterglow kept the fear at bay.
Innya simply glared at him, pursed her lips and
ignored the question. It was unsatisfying but since he felt
certain that no good would come of that line of questioning he changed the subject. “So how come you don’t
have an accent? If you came from Russia just before I did
shouldn’t you be speaking with an accent? Billy and Greg
told me you didn’t even speak English.”
“Billy and Greg were morons. They watched me
speak to everyone else in English and yet because I only
spoke Russian to them they thought I only spoke Russian. Do you understand?”
Elliot nodded. “So why no accent?”
“I was only in Russia until I was about eight. I
learned English at a very young age by watching American TV shows and movies even before we came here. We
had a VCR, a TV and many, many bootlegs.”
Finally, Elliot thought, common ground! “I love
movies, though I watch a lot of them on Netflix because
we don’t have any art-house theatres in this town. What’s
your favorite?”
“
Die Hard
,” she said emphatically.
“Really?”
Her smile changed to a frown in an instant. “What
is wrong with
Die Hard
? It is an excellent movie.”
“Yeah, but the good guy wins. Shouldn’t you like
movies with more ambiguous endings?”
“No. The good guy does win but he has the best
one-liners of any movie I have ever seen. My favorite is
‘Yippie-ki-yay, Motherfucker.’ It’s brilliant.”
“But you’re still sympathizing with the good guy.
That just doesn’t seem right.”
“One: just because I am a Villain doesn’t mean I
cannot see good things for what they are and maybe even
every now and then appreciate them. Two: anyone with
lines that funny can’t be all good. Good guys usually have
very poor dialogue because they’re so concerned with ‘I’ll
save the day’ and ‘you can’t do that’ and ‘hey, get back
here’. Have you noticed that?”