Thomas Prescott Superpack (99 page)

“You do know that I’m the one getting married, right?”

“Tell that to my colon.”

She laughed. “Tip off is in ten minutes.”

“Okey-dokey.”

Five minutes later, I stepped from the bathroom. Lacy was looking at herself in the mirror for the one thousandth time. She looked stunning. Her dress was custom-made by a French seamstress in trade for one of Lacy’s most prized paintings. But Lacy got the better end of the deal, the dress would have cost somewhere in the low five figures and Lacy’s paintings were lucky to go for the high fours. Anyhow, I didn’t know the exact jargon, but the dress was strapless, had hundreds of little white beads, and Lacy looked beautiful in it.

She looked at me and said, “You ready for this.”

Was I ready to give away my baby sister, my best friend, so far the only love of my life, to another
man. No. I was not. Hence the explosive diarrhea.

Lacy shook her head at me. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t you dare start
crying. If you start. I’m gonna start and my makeup is going to run.” She was already crying at this point. So was I.

She sniffed, walked towards me, and I put my hands on her shoulders. I had practiced the words I wanted to say for the last hour. While I was on the pot. I took a deep breath, wiped the tears off my cheeks and said, “Lace, I still remember the day you were born. I was eight. It was third quarter of my basketball game. Mom’s water broke in the stands, dad runs onto the court, yanks me by the arm, and all three of us jump in the car. An hour later, you were born. You were just this tiny little thing. Ugly as hell.”

She wiped her eyes and slapped me on the chest.

“For the last twenty-six years I watched as you went from my annoying baby sister, to a bumbling teenager, to a beautiful, funny, smart young woman. Mom and dad would have been proud.”

Lacy pulled me to her and we held each other for a long minute. For the past ten years all we had was each other.

“I love you, bro.”

“I love you, sis.”

“Hey can you guys wrap up the
Lifetime
movie bullshit. It’s show time.”

I turned. It was Frank.

I had remained close with the Campers over the past three months, visiting them twice in New Mexico and them visiting me once in Seattle. And the three of us had gone on a two-week trip with Lacy and her fiance Caleb to Italy. Anyhow, Frank was one of the ushers. Frank in a tuxedo was a sight. Like the penguin king.

I looked at Lacy and said, “You ready?”

She nodded and smiled. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Frank disappeared.

I slipped my arm through Lacy’s and the two of us walked out of the small room. The second usher was standing with his hand holding one of the double doors. It was J.J. Watkins. And yes, somehow, I had come to like the man. And I’d even found myself laughing at one of his jokes every so often. I’d say one out of every eight.

As Lacy and I neared, his jaw went slack. He gulped and said, “You look friggin’ beautiful.”

“Thanks. You look pretty friggin’ handsome yourself.”

J.J. blushed. Then he pulled the door open. The rustle of people getting to their feet filled the room.

Here we go.

The music started.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

Lacy and I started down the aisle. Lacy’s and my friends were on the right side of the small cathedral. Strangely enough, the majority of the people who Lacy had invited were people we’d met aboard the
Afrikaans
. But, I suppose under the circumstances, it’s only natural we’d made such close bonds with so many different individuals. Plus, they all had enough money to travel to France.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

Berta and Reen were in the back row. When they had returned to the States, they did what normal lesbian couples do; moved to San Francisco, got officially married, and adopted two Vietnamese children.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

We passed Walter and Marge Kohn. Three days earlier, I spent the day with my favorite three-quarters dead couple. In the span of twelve hours, Marge said the phrase, “The French are idiots,” 32 times. I know because I counted.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

A petite brown woman and a frail looking brown teenager with crutches were taking up the next row. Ganju’s wife and son. On the slip of paper Ganju gave me there was information for a second bank accountant. His. I followed his instructions and the money was transferred into his wife’s name. His son had already undergone two surgeries. Doctors were optimistic that after one final surgery his leg would be almost as good as new.

Next to them were another mother and son. Bheka and his mother. The two now lived in
Capetown where both Bheka and Llandee were going to school. Llandee’s HIV had not yet progressed to AIDS and they believed with the right medications, she would live a long life. Bheka was tested. He did not have HIV.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

The next row was occupied by two of my favorite people. Trinity and Gilroy. I lobbied heavily against inviting the two, but it was Lacy’s wedding, not mine. She and Trinity somehow became friends after the ordeal. Fucking Facebook. Anyhow, Gilroy had been somewhat tolerable the past couple days. I only thought about ripping his gold cane from his hand and shoving it up his ass twice. Maybe his near-death experience had softened his ego; it was hard to tell.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

Rikki was in the next row. Next to her, her father. Track Bowe. Who just recently was named, “Philanthropist of the Year,” by
People
magazine for his generous efforts to eradicate AIDS from rural South Africa. To date he had donated three billion dollars and he promised another three billion over the course of the next year. He created the
Rikki Foundation,
which consisted of 3,000 private doctors who traveled around South Africa testing for HIV and distributing lifetime supplies of medication to rural villages.

The videotape Rikki had made of her meeting her father for the first time had gone viral on the internet with over 400 million hits on YouTube. The look on his face was priceless. Google it.

As for me and Rikki, we never did have the conversation, but we didn’t need to. We both knew where we stood. And we would always have that one amazing night.

Dum, dum, de, dum.

There were three people in the final row. A beautiful black couple and a jaw-dropping brunette. Timon and his new wife. And Gina Brady. After hearing Gina’s tales of Timon’s heroics, Lacy insisted he and his wife attend her wedding. When they arrived four days earlier, Timon showed Lacy one of his clocks and Lacy put him in touch with three stores in France that would love to sell his clocks exclusively. He’d already received advanced payment for two hundred.

As for Gina. She sort of, kind of, became my main squeeze.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

She caught my eye as I moved past. I winked at her. She actually reminded me of Lacy. And yes, I was madly in love with her. But, I’ve said that before, so take that with a grain of salt. Maybe, two grains. Hell, a whole shaker if you must.

Lacy and I reached the stage and the music stopped. I looked at Caleb standing next to the altar. He looked like Keanu Reeves. But alive. My sister couldn’t have found a better guy.

I took a deep breath, slipped my arm from Lacy, and watched as my little sister took two steps towards the altar and gazed lovingly into the man’s eyes she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. I walked to my right, stood next to Gina, and slipped my hand into hers.

Lacy had spent the last couple months training Baxter to be the ring bearer. Everyone watched as Baxter walked down the aisle, a pink pillow tied to his head. He walked ten feet, fell on his face, and began to snore.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I hope you enjoyed
The Afrikaans
half as much as I enjoyed writing it. The idea first struck me in 2008 when I was searching the internet for stuff about pirates (who doesn’t love pirates) and I read a story about a luxury cruise liner—the
Seabourn Spirit
—being attacked by Somali pirates. Then while deciding where I wanted my adventure to take place, I stumbled upon some AIDS demographics for South Africa. Devastating stuff. (As I write these words, South Africa carries the highest HIV prevalence in the world, with over 5.6 million people infected with the virus. In the KwaZulu-Natal providence, 16% of the general population has HIV and over a third of the adult population.)

When the story began to take shape and I started writing it, I kept forgetting where all the people on the cruise ship were. I printed out several sets of the
Seabourn Spirit
deck plan, which the
Afrikaans
is based on, then proceeded to account for every single person (passenger, crew, and pirate) for each important sequence. Imagine a green dot for a passenger, blue dot for crew, black dot for pirate, red dot for Thomas, orange dot for Rikki, etc., etc. It was quite fun actually. I think the binder is in my parents’ basement in Colorado. Knock on wood. That thing is going to be worth at least $4 someday.

Back in 2008, I wrote the first draft in four months. That’s about the time I started my publishing company and I spent the next two years getting
Unforeseen
and
Gray Matter
out. Then in 2010, I started
Maddy
and in early 2011, I began
Oz
and
The Afrikaans
got lost in the shuffle. After a year in San Diego, I was finally ready for the second push. It had been over three years since I’d read
The Afrikaans
, so first I had to go back and reacquaint myself with the story, reading it three times. Then I had to outline the changes I wanted to make, then I had to incorporate them. The process took another four months. So, it took four years to get out, but basically it only took eight months to write, which isn’t too shabby.

I think, without question,
The Afrikaans
is my best work to date. I’m sure some of you were disappointed that only half the story was told by Mr. Prescott, but hopefully the other viewpoints didn’t bore you, and when the story did get back to Thomas, he was worth the wait. And I truly hope you like the character, Gina Brady. We will see her again, wink, wink.

I took some creative liberties (many, many) with diabetes, bombs, narcoleptic dogs, Zulus, diamonds, oil, and a couple others. Hopefully these did not make you scream.

Check out my website for book updates: n
ickthriller.com

Thomas will be back Summer 2015 in
Walking in Memphis


I know there are millions of books out there and I just want to thank you for choosing one of mine.

As always, I am humbled by His greatness.

God is Love

Nick

P.S. I’ve added a little bonus for all you new fans,
Arrival (Maddy Young Saga 1).

Maddy is quite different than Thomas, but equally entertaining. (At least in my opinio
n
)

ARRIVAL: MADDY YOUNG SAGA 1

nickthriller.com

“How did you die?”

I turned my head. The girl couldn’t have been more than seven. She had light brown hair held back in a ponytail. Her nose was dusted with light freckles, her cheeks as well, only not as densely as the freckles on her nose.
  She waited a second for my response, then said, “I went into diabetic shock.”

I nodded, like this wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard.

She continued, “I have an uncle here. Uncle Trent. He died in a car crash when I was five. I’m supposed to go live with him I guess.”

She wrinkled her nose. I had a feeling she didn’t like Uncle Trent. Maybe Uncle Trent was like my Uncle Bill. Maybe Uncle Trent liked to make up stories after ten cans of Miller High Life, then get pissed off when you told him he was full of shit.

“So how did you die?” she came again.

This was the hundredth time I’d been posed that question in three days.
How did you die?
It was yet to lose its level of absurdity.

I took a deep breath and said, “I slipped in the shower.” I kept the part about how I’d been jerking off at the time to myself. No sense upsetting this delicate flower more than was necessary.

I surveyed the other people in the small room. There were twelve altogether. Plus me. A baker’s dozen. Each was clad in the same getup. Scrubs. That blue meets green color.  Coolmint. There were two black people. A man and a woman. Both appeared to be in their thirties. A boy around fifteen, his hair dangling in his eyes. Two old people. One in a wheelchair. One sucking from an oxygen tank. A couple of men around fifty. An Asian woman. Then four women of that indiscriminate age between fifty and sixty.

I peered more closely at the woman to my right. Her eyes were puffy, the lines of her face stretched tight with fear. In fact, as I swept over each individual, I noticed the only shared trait among the group was the fear. Like each was staring into the face of a Bengal tiger.

My gaze returned to the small girl. She was the exception. She didn’t have the fear. In fact, at the present moment, she had something black in her hands. I was not so far removed from childhood that I knew it was a PSP. Playstation Portable. She noticed my eyeing her and smiled. She said, “Grand Theft Auto.”

I found myself letting out a small chuckle. My first in the past seventy-two-hour period. Not many laughs when no one will tell you anything, you are asked thousands of questions, are continually hooked to a machine, have a hand shoved in your ass, your balls fondled, every mole on your body inspected, your teeth cleaned, eyes checked, and are drained of at least a gallon of blood.

The girl continued, “I was up playing it all night. I forgot to take my insulin. I was playing it when I died. They gave it to me a couple days ago.”

She broke eye contact and went back to her game. Interesting. She died and her PSP had come with her. Did this mean that when her parents walked into her room the next morning and found her dead, her PSP was gone? Or was it there, clasped in the whites of her hands. I didn’t have much else to go on. I mean, the only thing in my hand when I died was my dick.

In three days, there hadn’t been many answers—only promises that in time everything would make sense. The only answer, the only definitive thing that anyone would share, the only time anyone would look you directly in the eye was when you asked them if you had died.

They wouldn’t waver, they wouldn’t blink, they would only nod their head and say, “Yes.”

⠔

It was silent for the next ten minutes. Everyone anticipating the door opening and answers walking through. The room itself was antiseptic. A third grade classroom meets a military quarantine. The windowless walls were a light blue. There were four rows of four chairs. Three empties. The chairs were white plastic, just slightly reclined, but not enough to relax, or be comfortable in any way. There was a flat screen television on the facing wall. I was in the front row, ten feet from the large-screen TV. It was on screensaver and the manufacturer's name was plastered on the icy blackness in giant white lettering.

SONYY.

The overall energy in the room was similar to a doctor’s waiting room. Or more accurately, an oncologist’s waiting room. Like everyone here had found a lump and was waiting to hear they would be okay. Or if they would surely die. Only, everyone here was already dead. That’s what I was trying to wrap my head around when the silence was broken. Not by any sound, but by the stale air diffusing into parts unknown.

The door exhaled, a leg propping it open. The owner of the leg was also the proud owner of a white lab coat, its bottom half hanging over brown slacks, which led to brown dress shoes. A doctor’s leg. In the silence it was evident the doctor was having a conversation with someone in the hallway.

I strained to hear the words, but I could only hear the muffled, throaty voices of grown men. After thirty seconds, the man straightened, and walked briskly into the room. I squinted. He looked to be in his late thirties.  He had that perfect olive skin you only see on commercials and in magazines. He had a sharp nose and thin, wispy brown hair. He was maybe 5’10”, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. This put him six inches shorter than me and six pound lighter. He wasn’t unattractive. Nor was he striking. He struck me as a Matt. If you took all six men leaning forward, almost hovering over their uncomfortable white plastic chairs, and put them in a blender, Matt might be what you came out with.

Matt walked to the front of the room, settling in directly in front of the flat screen. That second Y, that extra Y that someone had decided to tack onto the old reliable lettering that had been imprinted on my DVD player, that unnecessary Y that was causing me more grief and anxiety than the Bar exam I’d been studying for, was still visible, clinging to the right edge of Dr. Matt’s lab coat.

Matt cleared his throat and in a voice a hundred pounds heavier than his body, he told us his name was Dr. Raleigh. He had a disarming manner about him and you could almost feel the collective pulse of the room drop a hundred points. He said, “Now I’m sure you have plenty of questions and over the next couple days, I will try to answer most, if not all of them.”

“Where are we?”

Twelve heads turned and stared at the black man who had blurted out the question we’d all been thinking for the past three days. At least the question I’d been thinking for the past three days. I couldn’t be certain how long each of my classmates had been here.

Everyone whipped their heads backwards and bore their eyes into Dr. Raleigh. He gave a wry smile and said, “The truth of it all is that no one knows—”

I almost heard myself yell, “What? What do you mean nobody knows. What kind of lame answer is that?”

If I did say these words aloud they were drowned out by a woman bursting into tears and someone—I think the same black man—jumping out of his seat and screaming, “Nobody knows! My ass! Where the fuck are we?”

“He wasn’t finished.”

I looked at the young girl. She was staring at the black man, her video game held in one hand. “He wasn’t finished,” she repeated.

The man sat down. The room went silent. I found myself fighting back a smile.

Dr. Raleigh looked at the small girl and said, “Thank you. You’re right, I wasn’t finished.”

He waited for her to acknowledge him, but she was already back to her video game. Already in the process of stealing a car. Or killing a hooker.

Dr. Raleigh looked up and said, “As I said, nobody knows what this place is, or where it is. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as where you came from. Where we all came from. It’s the same Earth. Same solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. All of them. The food is the same, the weather is the same, TV is basically the same, the buildings look almost the same, the cars. Most things are the same. There are, of course, some small differences, but we’ll get to that later. The only major difference between where you are now and where you were is, everyone here has died.”

I noticed he didn’t say that everyone here was
dead
. For all of us, all thirteen of us, plus Dr. Raleigh, we were very much alive. Not ghosts, not replicas of our old selves. This wasn’t heaven or hell, or some sort of purgatory. We were the same exact person on the same exact Earth and with, as far as I could construe, the same exact problems. Only we had died. Only the seven-year-old girl next to me forgot to take her insulin and she’d died. And I couldn’t shake the image of Joni Isaac bending over to get her notebook and I was jerking off in the shower and I slipped and hit my temple on the water spigot and I’d died.

I looked around the room. My comrades didn’t seem to feel as relieved about the prognosis as I did. For the most part, faces were still stricken, eyes still puffy, heads still down. But then
again, most of these people had families. Families they would never see again. Kids, they would never play with again.  Other than me, the teenager, and the young girl, there was a good chance everyone in this room had children they would never again lay eyes on.

For the first time in my life, I felt lucky. Lucky I only talked to my parents for six or seven minutes once a year, five of those minutes spent listening to my father talk about how his portfolio had grown in the last quarter and his recent real estate purchases throughout Fort Lauderdale. Lucky my only sibling was twenty-five years older than me, with a family, and a job, and didn’t want to be a part of her accidental little brother’s life. Lucky I moved out the day I left for college and never looked back. Lucky I never took a dime of my father’s millions. Lucky I was a loner.

No, I had no idea what any of these people were feeling. How could I? How could I possibly know what any of these people were going through? I couldn’t. Couldn’t even scratch the surface.

“Yes.”

I looked up. Dr. Raleigh was looking at one of the menopausal fifty-something women. She had her hand raised.

Dr. Raleigh said, “You have a question.”

She sniffed a couple times and said, “They must have a name for this place. They must call it something.”

“Actually they do.”
 He cleared his throat and said, “Welcome to Two.”