I Will Rise (13 page)

“You don’t have to talk out loud, you doofus. Use your mind.” Annabelle taps her forehead.

Instead of speaking I think,
“Where have you been?”

“It is a long story.” Annabelle makes a sour face. “Some other time perhaps.” She takes a little breath. “Anyway, it’s good to see you on your way. I was worried I’d find you in jail.”

I think,
“I can’t believe this is working.”

“What? Not talking? Pretty cool, huh? So, what’s up with Chatty Cathy back there?”

The endless story drones on. I meet Eddie’s eyes in the rearview mirror and give him an encouraging smile. He smiles back and I can’t help but laugh.

“Charles?” Annabelle gives me impatient eyes.

“Right,” I speak aloud and then catch myself. With my mind. Fortunately the word slipped at an appropriate time, as though I am engaged in Eddie’s speech.
“Right,”
with only my brain this time,
“that’s Eddie. He’s a genius.”

“Great, but what I meant, Charles, is why is he with you?”

Do I detect a bit of attitude? I lower my eyebrows and muster up a deadpan mental voice,
“He came with the car.”

“Funny. Look, Charles, this isn’t a fucking game!” Annabelle is pissed.

She’s very attractive when she’s angry. Attractive? What is happening to me?
“I know,”
I think back.
“In any case, it’s a long story.”

“Well, we both know we don’t have time for those. Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull over. We gotta get rid of him.” She gives me a serious stare.

There is no way I am leaving Eddie in the middle of nowhere. Even when I wanted to ditch him, I couldn’t do it, and now that I like his company, now that he’s almost a friend, I wouldn’t even fathom such a thing. Instead of explaining all of this to Annabelle I just say, er, think,
“No way.”

Annabelle lets out a long sigh. “He’s going to die anyway. Do you want to see that? Obviously you’ve grown somewhat attached, but this isn’t a pet we’re talking about, Charles. This is a little boy, and believe me, he is going to die.”

“He’s fine. I won’t let him die.”

“Have you forgotten what this is all about? Do you even remember why you are here? They are all going to die and we are going to kill them. I don’t know if this kid is humanity imposing a line of defense, trying to soften you up and turn you, but it’s too late. It has already started and there is no stopping it.”

Silence, except for Eddie’s jabbering. We drive for a mile or so and then Annabelle points to a gas station off the freeway. “Get off here and pull into that station, there’s something you need to see.”

“We’re not leaving him,”
I mentally protest.

“Have you touched him?” She crosses her arms across her chest and looks back at Eddie. I look back too.

“Are we going to swipe a car?” Eddie inquires.

“Not yet, just a little break is all,” I say aloud and then inside, to Annabelle,
“What do you mean have I touched him?”

Before she has a chance to answer, my brain tunnels inward, mad spirals, and there at its center, encased in a brilliant white glow, I see two hands—one adult, one child—locked in a handshake. I see smoke billow from their palms and a quick separation, as if flesh has been burned.

“If his skin has come in contact with…” Annabelle tries to continue but I cut her off.

“What do you mean, ‘have you touched him’?”
I scream internally. My head goes light and swimmy, my mouth is dry as sandpaper. I hug the wheel and steer with my arms. Pulling into the gas station, I clumsily careen the car into a parking spot and screech to a halt. I rest my head on the wheel.

From the backseat: “Are you okay?” Eddie, concerned.

“Give me a minute, Eddie.” I close my eyes.

Annabelle speaks slow and careful. She can sense that what she is about to say is going to hurt. “I’m sorry, Charles. It’s the change. It’s the new you. If you touch anybody, if you so much as brush against them, they will be dead within twenty-four hours. And in turn, anybody they touch and then anybody the touched victim touches and so on and so forth, will also be dead in the allotted twenty-four-hour time period.”

And on and on and on, world with end, amen.

It’s the new me.

I can’t stop picturing my big, stupid hand, encircling Eddie’s tiny little palm, fingers, fingernails. The smoke. The recoil. The nonchalant dismissal.

I killed him. Right then and there I killed him. Worm food. Dead child talking.

“What’s going on, Charles?” Eddie’s voice is saturated with worry.

I suck it up. “I’m just tired, man. Kick back for a minute and just let me think and rest and then we’ll make a plan, okay? Cool?”

“Cool,” he echoes enthusiastically through a huge grin.

Annabelle goes on: “I really am sorry, Charles. I know you weren’t as prepared for this as I was, but you have to start looking at it in a different manner. People have made you and I what we are today. They deserve what they are getting and what’s more, we are protecting something pure and innocent. We are preventing the human world that damaged us from damaging the beauty that is at our origin. In essence, we are protecting the children. We are putting an end to the dysfunctional pattern of growth that has developed within the human strain. You have to remember that kids like him are growing to be adults like that.”

She points to a man in an expensive suit pumping overpriced gas into an extremely overpriced luxury car.

“Or worse, they grow up to be like us.” She steps through the passenger’s door and walks around the front of the car to my door. “Come on.”

I tell Eddie to sit tight. He gives me a nervous look, but I calm him down by assuring I will not ditch him. I get out of the car and walk with Annabelle to the gas station minimarket.

“Do you know why you haven’t been apprehended by the cops?” she asks. “Why they haven’t chased you down?”

“I haven’t really had time to think about it,”
I think.

We enter the market, Annabelle traipsing through the glass door as if it weren’t there and me and my clumsy flesh entering the old-fashioned way: by pulling it open. She stops in front of a newspaper stand and points. “You’ve made the front page, cutie.”

Did she just call me cutie? I smile and ready a sarcastic retort, but Annabelle points hard and forces my attentions to the newspaper. The playfulness drains and I feel cold.

Seven Dead in Walnut Creek Massacre
reads the headline. Beneath it is a subheading, but my eyes have begun to blur and all I get is jumbled copy involving police officers, paramedics, firemen, a K-9 unit…and below the words an overhead photograph of the crime scene. In case you are wondering, Walnut Creek is the unimportant name of the until-now unimportant small town I live (lived) in. My vision worsens, the paper fuzzes out and I shake my head.

“Relax,” Annabelle soothes.

I take a deep breath and after a few seconds my eyes refocus themselves on the picture. There, at the edge of the mini forest, are cars and people and miles of yellow cautionary tape and a smattering of black tarps covering what can only be the dead.

I start to say, “I thought,” but again catch myself and then continue speaking with my mind.
“I thought you said it takes twenty-four hours? I mean, I understand Lumpy and Paunch, but what about the others?”

Annabelle exits the market and I follow. She stops by my stolen car. “There is a lot we have to talk about, but first you have to bump into each and every one of these people.”

“What?”

“I don’t care how you do it, shake their hands, pat their backs, accidentally trip and brush by them, just touch them all. This is your purpose. Don’t ever forget that. You now have purpose, responsibilities, and you must see them through. Besides, it keeps the cops off your trail.”

I shake my head only half-listening. My eyes scan the gas station and I count eleven people including the clerk behind the counter and a baby in a car seat.

“Charles?”

Sizing up the populous of the gas station has sent me into a trancelike state. I don’t want to kill these people. My hand buzzes, my head buzzes, my heart pulses. I don’t want to kill anybody, but my body does. My body sings electric and I can actually feel juices pumping in my brain. Waves of fluid. Ugly solutions. I don’t want to kill, but my body does. Pictures cloud my head. I see an army of people: men, women, children of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities. They are all pointing and laughing and a few of them are even mocking my seizures, shaking and flopping about like senseless idiots. I hear them: a rumbling of disrespect, a sea of insults, stripping me of my humanity, reducing me.

“Fuck them.” Annabelle senses my state and seethes beside me. “Look at those worthless sheep. Look at them thinking they’re better than you. Look at them pumping gas, slaves to the machine, desperately convincing themselves they are happy. Why don’t they understand? Why can’t they see what people like us see? Why do they hate us? Because deep in their hearts they know we are right. They know we are better than they are because we care. Because we take note of what we are becoming and we fight it. We aren’t whores and it pisses them off. We aren’t weak and it makes them feel ashamed.”

The army in my head continues to hurl insults. They call me a retard and a reject and a cripple fool. They call me gross and fat and make fun of my clothes. They call me impotent and sexless and perverse. They call me godless. They yell, “God doesn’t love you, God never loved you, because you are a pathetic aberration!”

Taking a deep breath, I fast-walk toward the pumps. I feel like I am on autopilot, powered by something apart from myself. I picture a pair of magnets and how if you slide a piece of paper in between them and drag one, the other will follow, fixed, pulled, trapped.

There are four pumps, double-sided, eight nozzles in all and each one is full. I approach the first one and a woman, midforties, pleasant, looks up from pumping gas and smiles at me. My brain aflame, my eyeballs sizzling, sweating, tears stream down my face.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I shake my head no and lightly lay my left palm on her forehead. She doesn’t attempt to move it, instead she keeps smiling at me. White blossoms at the back of my brain, it unfolds and expands until my inner vision is a vast, unending blank. Translucent flitters, anti-opaque souls, and in my head the white world shrinks down and spins out. At the electrified conjecture where my thoughts, my vision and my soul meet, I see a black rosebud. In stop motion, herky-jerky advancement, it begins to bloom. The dark petals splay and at the death flower’s center: infinite black, the end, a spiraling eternal nothing.

I remove my hand from the woman’s forehead and she says, “The power of Christ.”

I am momentarily confused, but quickly catch on and play along. “God be with you,” I say with a weak smile and push past her.

On to the second pump, but before I am able to approach the man pumping overpriced gas into his overpriced car, the woman calls after me, “Do my baby.” I turn around and she has hoisted the car seat containing the baby from her car. She extends it toward me in offering.

Everything goes by as if in a dream.

Here but not really here.

I never really realized how easy it is to casually touch people. Instead of laying my hand on any more foreheads in this dramatic, religious(?) fashion, I simply brush by each of the gas pumpers. A slip here, a trip there, death doled out easy as pie and nothing but concern and goodwill in return.

I enter the market and naturally clap my hand on the back of an old guy pouring over a spindle of beef jerky. I say the hot and spicy is the best and then lay it on him. He laughs heartily and smiles and I notice he is missing a mess of teeth.

On my way out I stop and ask the clerk for directions I don’t need and then shake his hand in thanks for the information. Done. Simple. Eleven down.

My body, a mass of vibrating atoms, a battery of death, a thorned stem, throbs its approval. I feel good. I feel right. No hassles. An ever-growing black hole and in the end all I can really remember are eleven pairs of staring eyes.

Returning to the car Annabelle is beaming. Her eyes look hungry. “Oh, I wish I could hug you!” She smiles.

I wish the same and smile big back. As we get in the car I notice Eddie is lying down. I get a little panicky, but Annabelle tells me not to worry. “He’s only sleeping. He’s not dead…yet.”

Pushing the “yet” from my mind, I stare a little a harder and see that he is breathing. Relief washes over me and I start the car. After a minute or so of driving I am back on the freeway and I notice the gas gauge. As it stands, the tank is about a quarter full. It won’t last long and I’ve gotta do something soon.

“You never answered my question,” Annabelle derails my thoughts. She is playing with her hair, looking incredible, a vision of poised exquisiteness inches away from me in the passenger’s seat and goddamn what the hell is it with this burgeoning attraction?

“What question?”
I forget about the gas and the fact that I was just at a gas station and force myself to ignore the perplexing allure and focus.

“Why haven’t the cops caught up with you?” she asks.

I look at her expectantly.

“The whole time I was away I was worried I’d return and find you in jail,” she says. “When I was away, all I thought about was you and your safety and the threat of humanity stopping you before you begin.”

“Really? You were thinking about me?”
The fact that people care—Eddie’s concern, Annabelle’s worry—is going to take some getting used to.

“Of course I was thinking about you. How could I not? You are only the most important man in the world.”

I blush.

Pushing her hair behind her ears she continues, “I need to have more faith, not get so freaked out all the time. Of course the, the…we’ll just call it the earth for the sake of conversation. Of course the earth will try its best to protect you, you are its champion, but my visions, my responsibility as your guide makes me feel like it’s all riding on my shoulders, like I am the only one who can save you. ”