The Altonevers (31 page)

“
Are they going to kill
us?” she whispers.

“
What?” he asks.

“
Do you think they're going
to kill us?”

“
What did you say the first
time?”

“
Stop it.”

“
If you said stop then
why'd you ask?”

“
Stop.”

“
Anna! We don’t have
ti-”

“
Sh,” she says
angrily.

“
Silence!” One of them
shouts harshly through a thick accent of everything sounding like
it ends with another vowel. She looks over to the fat man with his
eyes closed, shaking in place with wobbling knees. Sweat, is
pouring down his face and dampening his fine suit of luxury. It's
dark outside, and they’re far from the city of grand streets,
bio-luminescent light and glowing casinos. Almost all the goons are
wearing sunglasses and speaking a language that to her very much
resembles Japanese. It’s nighttime and they're out in the dark of
the city limits, where the trees grow and the self illuminating
skyscrapers replace the sky in the scene over their headlights and
shoulders.
Anna’s hummingbird heart is
throbbing in fear, with flashes of white pulsing through her eyes,
she's hyperventilating the dense smell of wet grass as silently as
she can. Her mind is flooding with thoughts of death and the things
she hasn’t yet done. Cider reaches out for her hand, and she grips
his fingers loosely.

A man, which they can't see
because he’s standing behind a car’s brightly shining headlights,
that're blinding them and casting their shadows to the death
stained wall. The unseen man is humming a tune with his throat and
tongue without moving his lips, sounding like he's gargling through
nursery rhymes. A loud huffing noise, proceeds the footsteps in the
dirt of a short vicious looking man approaching in a midnight
purple suit. He sniffles and lifts a gun to the fat man's face,
then holding it between Anna's wide open eyes for a few seconds,
and again pressing it to the fat man’s head. With a loud ear
chopping pop of red he staples the fat man's round head to the
bullet riddled wall.
The man with an
ambiance dominating presence stares at each of the two with a
reptilian expression. Completely devoid of emotion, stroking his
gun with white gloved fingers while clicking his jaw and rolling
his head around his neck. His neck and left shoulder are painted
with a large blotch of scar tissue shades lighter than his toasty
tan toned skin. Cider thinks he took a shotgun to the neck, but
wondering how he got back to be living, and she stands petrified
with balmy hands, feeling the chill in the air around her. The
stoically menacing man begins to growl primal noises through his
throat, sounding much like the death rattle of a ill spirit
possessed alligator. She can hardly hear him over her ears ringing
from the gun shot a foot from her head.
I’m going to die, she thinks, for what gambling chips, to
waste away in the odds of fortune, playing the odds of the house's
game.

“
Huh,” Cider says out of
nowhere. Looking lost in thought, rubbing his shaven chin, seeming
to completely forget his present predicament. She can feel the cold
emanating from the stone faced perfectly postured killer with a
disheveled Elvis styled hair cut. The air begins warming around the
throat gurgling man. He snatches the sunglasses from his face,
showing his large white black spotted eyes of a thousand yard
unwavering gaze.

“
You,” the man says, like
spitting through his teeth, dead locked in focus on her pupils with
an intimidating intensity. Her nerves are going berserk under her
skin, trembling through to the tips of her fingers. She clenches
her jaw to stop from nibbling on her tongue. Feeling the heat of
him rise beside her as he stands over her, emanating to the
atmosphere the tone of his shifting emotion. She doesn’t move or
flinch, petrified in the racing thoughts of instinctual
panic.

“
You,” he changes his view
to Cider.

“
Yes?” he asks.

“
Why are you here? You
don't belong here,” the man says warmly.

“
Us,” he says pointing to
her then at himself, “we're just passing through.”

“
Us? you were in the
driver’s seat and she was in the back, though you were both armed,”
the man speaks in a clinical tone putting a frost in the air around
him.

“
Hmm, that's a good point,”
Cider answers with a shrug. Anna looks at him and shrugs, not
thinking of anything to say but the truth, and nerving up the
courage to meet the man’s thousand yard glare.

“
We were gonna rob that
fat, gross fat man,” she says.

“
Oh ah…” the man pauses
with a stunned look on his face, then bursts into a maniacal
cackle. Holding his stomach as forced laughter comes from the crowd
behind him. Cider and Anna both uneasily join in, awkwardly forcing
themselves to play along. The laughter dims down when this thin
man’s does, the others are following everything he does, as though
they're tuned to his frequency.

“
That's perfect,” he
says.

“
Why's that perfect?” Cider
asks.

“
Hello. My name is
Yakutom,” Yakutom says extending his hand to shake Ciders. Cider
accepts without a second of thought, though finding it hard to read
the smiling man’s body language or face.

“
I'm Cider, thank you for
not killing us.”

“
I didn't say that,” he
says shaking his head. Then laughs, followed by the others like a
chorus of crickets in the grass.

“
It was a joke. It’s so
rare we get new people around here...and if you do what I ask, it
will remain a joke. So let us see if we can be friends. Okay. Call
me Yaku,” Yaku says with a giant smile.

“
Sounds good to me,” Cider
readily agrees, Anna upset with his carelessness, elbows roughly at
his ribs.

“
What?” he yelps, assuming
a side blocking boxer's stance.

“
That you still don't
listen to the terms of a pact when your existence is pretty much, I
don’t know, allowed by one,” she says.

“
That, is a good point, but
we don’t have much choice in the matter. Mind if I smoke,” he asks
Yaku, though already lighting one.

“
Not at all,” Yaku says
lighting one of his own. The light of his lighter showing the
savage extent of the horrible scar of his neck.

“
Do you want to die?” Cider
asks her.

“
No.”

“
Okay then. anyway what
happened there?” he asks Yaku, who stands for a solid minute
without saying a word. The air is heating up around him, almost
boiling its own moisture outward. He then starts blurting words out
fast enough to tie his own tongue, though doesn't.

“
Hara-kiri, for the honor
of myself and my family,” he says giddily.

“
You mean…”

“
Yes suicide, but don’t be
scared, for now at least,” Yaku says while bowing his head in
shame. Not for the act of seppuku, but for the failure that caused
its necessity.

“
Hey man,” Cider says
looking through his eyes, “Relax about it, me too.”

“
What do you mean?” the
warming man asks as Cider rolls up his sleeve to show him his rose
colored scars. The two trade laughter and tales of near death, and
death. Bonding as brothers of the same trade, a fellow traveler
reminiscing reload times and calibers, sex and the thrill of feet
to the ground when standing behind a door waiting to go in or out
when your soul is on the line. Yaku won’t say whether he's working
for Alister or even knows him, if not then some other guy or gal
just the same, he supposes.

“
That's all very nice, but
I’m afraid I still must say,” Yaku says.

“
What? what is it?” she
asks.

“
That because I like you, I
will give you this opportunity.”

“
Opportunity,” she asks
skeptically.

“
And what is your name? I
bet it is beautiful. It must be when a person has the sort of
energy around them that you do,” he says sweetly.

“
Anna,” she
says.

”
Anna, sounds delightful,”
Yaku says.

“
Thank you.”

“
Yes okay. An opportunity
to do exactly as I say, so that I may not have to shoot you in the
face,” he says cheerfully. The two shrug at each other in
agreement, understanding their only way out is with this maniac
seeming manic at the moment. Anna not entirely used to this type of
arrangement, thinks, as long as it’s nothing sadistic she'll be
fine.

“
So what's the plan?” he
asks, shaking the man’s hand.

“
On the way over,” Yaku
says ominously, then taking a brown leather satchel from his breast
pocket, putting it over his face and huffing deeply, inhaling like
a vacuum cleaner. Looking up with a milk mustache of white powder,
his eyes wired open with a megalomaniacal gaze. Heating up the
ambient air, that starts condensing into tiny niveous clouds
encircling him.

“
Yes yessssss, it’s going
to work,” Yaku shouts, in either rage or elation.

“
What’s going to work,” she
asks suspiciously.

“
Gravestones, waves and
waves of gravestones,” he mumbles between breaks of laughter.
Inhaling again from his satchel. “I'll explain on the way,” he says
suddenly refreshed as though huffing fresh air as his goons herd
the two into the open door of a car hovering a few feet from the
ground. Yaku’s clicking jaw rolls around his face as he shifts
between personalities and the moods of each personality, cycling
through at least three a minute. He seems to like whatever that
powder is, a lot, and a lot of it, all the while incessantly
smoking and drinking with an insatiable hunger for more. He and
Cider, with a little help from Anna, empty the limo of its liquor
by the time they leave the wilderness and slip back into the
bioluminescent city.

A massive unending metropolis whose
scene of self illuminating city surfaces has a way of luring the
liveliness of a person to the surface. Accompanied by a warming
sensation percolating just under her skin the two at this very
moment sit entranced by the glow through the tinted window of the
floating luxury limousine. A monolithic metropolis seeming to be
created from a single gargantuan piece of polished glass, with each
different object, surface and shape having their own individual
hues of bioluminescent light. It's immense depths stretch in all
directions, giving the impression that the individual is minuscule
in contrast to the singular existence of this techno-metropolis.
She can't tell if the lights are coloring the glass or the glass is
itself is made of colored light. Each skyscraper reaches for miles
upward, flooding the atmosphere with air illuminating effulgence .
Looking closely, she sees that the glass is everywhere, at second
glance that everything is made of it. The facades and floors, the
asphalt and even trees leaves and parks grass, are illuminating the
air. Every surface is both the color and the light sources of this
Alto.

“
Why does everything look
like that?” she asks, interrupting Yaku from a face reddening fit
of rage.

“
Like what dear Anna?” he
asks kindly.

“
All shiny like that, is it
all glass?” Cider asks.

“
It's a glass, everything
here is made of bioluminescent glass, though we called it that eons
ago.”

“
Everything?” she
asks.

“
Yes everything, even most
of the people, and the animals. The plants and leaves, snakes on
the trees, and the trees themselves. Everything that looks all
shiny, which is everything if you look closely enough,” Yaku says
smiling a foxes smile.

“
That's good to know,”
Cider says.

“
Yes, interesting,” she
adds, triggering Yakutom to go on a half hour long riff about
technology and control, ending with “We are so advanced we no
longer know what it even does. It's just there, seamlessly
interlaced to our nature.”

“
Are the rivers like
glass?” she asks.

“
As smooth, yet as porous
as that old woman over there,” Yaku says.
The city is filled with nineteen fifties Americana
architecture, and styles with the ambiance of a society living on
the whims of the casino’s fortune. Everywhere you go displays small
to systemic aspects of their culture being drenched in the ways of
the atomic age. Of casinos, cigars, slicked back hair, and
miniskirts walking over neon writing reflecting off stainless steel
looking furniture and checkered floors. The men are all zoot suited
as though in a cartoon doo wop group, and the women are mostly
nude, dressed in body paint and miniskirts, often on roller skates.
Cider casts a favorable glance to Yakutom’s midnight purple suit
and Elvis styled hair.

Assuming her usual perch of looking
through the window, though through the bright transparent facade of
this lavish, marble floored room of luxury. Having stained violet
walls with deeper shades of purple atmosphere emerging around him
portraying his present mood. The floor length facade offers a
panoramic eye full, filling her eyes with a multitude of mammoth
bio-luminescent glass structures. Lit and constructed so the
structures complement each other and form a single, almost
monolithic, illuminated techno-metropolis. She finds the scene
stimulating, seeming as though a meal for the eyes to see, and
enticing a hunger to see it more.