Frightened Boy, Scott Kelly [book suggestions .TXT] 📗

under the bathroom floor, apparently to keep the gore from seeping outside.

Escher stepped behind the bar and began pouring drinks. He drank Irish whisky neat, and Lux had a gin martini. Mal didn’t drink.

“What about you, Frightened Boy?” Escher asked me.

“I’ve never really gotten drunk,” I said.

“Well, there’s only one cure for that. Rum and Coke! The beginner’s drink.”

He poured me one with two perfectly square ice cubes. I stared at the gradient of colors ranging from watery caramel to coffee brown swirling at the bottom.

I took a drink. It wasn’t awful, and it felt warm. Some part of the hole in my soul that Erika left was filled by the alcohol.

Soon, I was halfway through my second one and feeling quite free. I turned on the television in the bar.

The news was on—some bullshit about dangerous pollens.

“Stay inside. That’s what it’s telling you,” Escher said.

Another story, and this one was about a missing child.

“Rapists and pedophiles everywhere. Keep the kids locked up inside,” he said. “That’s what this means.”

Next, a five-car pileup.

“Don’t drive! There are drunks on the road, and you’ll die. Fear for your very lives,” Escher said, slurring sloppily.

A gun fired, and I spilled my drink all over my shirt. Escher had fired into the newscaster’s forehead, turning his brains to glass shards, sparks, smoke, and silicon. Visions of Mal’s treatment of Flint Amstrong came to mind.

“People would be a lot more peaceful if they stopped worrying about what they cannot change,” I said. “Take me, for instance. I figured I was dead from the minute I met you, Escher, so every day I’ve been alive this past month has been a bonus.” Except Erika. Didn’t need that.

“It’s been nice knowing you, too, Frightened Boy. I’m glad you’ve made it this far. I’m almost sad it has to end.”

*

I woke up to the sound of a battering ram crushing the door to the bar. Tear gas attacked my eyes and lungs as I gasped to get a hold of the situation. Police swarmed in. The first one fell where he stood as a bullet from the barkeep’s shotgun, held by Mal, peeled his flesh back. Before I was fully awake, I was cowering behind the bar, using it as cover.

I peeked over the bar and out a window: three trucks, maybe four, and dozens of SWAT officers. They’d found us.

I turned and saw Escher sitting in a yoga position with his eyes closed. Lux had his hands on his headphones, looking like he was ready to take them off any moment.

Mal stood and continued firing shots at those who entered; the tear gas had no effect on him as he brought the invasion to a standstill.

They’d wait us out or bring in heavy artillery.

Escher pulled his pant leg up. Tucked inside of the upper part of his right boot, like pens in a shirt pocket, were two red syringes. Escher pulled one of the two out; it was full of a viscous red liquid that could only be one thing: his blood. He injected it into one of the bulging veins of his inner arm. “I need you all to close your eyes and form a chain,” Escher said, the peaceful look in his eyes undisturbed by the gunfire and bloodshed. He stood up over the counter, directly into the line of fire.

The sound of gunfire continued, but Escher remained standing. Something about him seemed different, comforting. Suddenly, I was okay with this insane plan.

“If you’ve ever trusted him,” Lux said, “now is the time.” We both grabbed one of Escher’s hands.

I’ve never trusted him.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Escher warned.

I felt a hand, calloused and sticky with blood, grab onto mine. Mal.

"You don’t want to try and see this,” Escher said.

I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes; I needed answers.

I immediately regretted it. I was catapulted out of consciousness and surrounded by a simple pattern of repeating rectangles that formed a cell around me. All sound ceased. I felt as if the room I was in had been transported to the bottom of the ocean.

Everything around me was a simple grid of rectangles. A single rectangular shape in the floor caught my attention, seeming to stand out from the rest in an impossible twist of perception. I noticed it was a parallelogram, slanted on its edges.

The sounds of the violence around me had been drowned down to a muted hum. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t take my eyes off the figure in front of me—the simple shape.

“Now!” Escher said, his voice clear and inescapable.

Suddenly, the shape exploded into a cascade of repeating variants of itself, a shape twisting impossibly into its own cannibalization, gaining color in patterns as it collapsed backwards into infinitely small tessellations, creating a looping tunnel that seemed to continue forever in front of me. To my right I could see outside of shape, where the tunnel snaked onwards for miles, maybe thousands of miles, into the dark space around it. I could see that the loops became a spiral that seemed to swallow itself far in the distance.

“Take a step,” Escher said. “Just one.”

I wasn’t even sure I still had legs. I took a step forward as his drawing hand tugged at mine.

Escher released me. I was back on Earth again, out of the polygonal room. I looked around, confused. We were four blocks away; the police were still raiding the bar where we had stood.

“Where…how?” I asked Escher.

He only grinned.

*

We sneaked further away toward the outskirts of the Orange Zone to Kingwood. I didn’t bother asking Escher why we were returning.

We made it into the cool, beautiful forest, and Escher lead us through the seemingly endless variations of overgrown roads and monumental trees until we at last reached the opening that held Escher’s base, the mega-church that’d been half-reclaimed by nature.

The moment I saw it, though, I knew something was wrong. The smell of gunpowder and blood wafted from it in billows of stench.

Escher put an arm out to stop us and drew a pistol from beneath his clothes. Mal cocked the shotgun, visually thrilled at the amount of killing he’d been doing lately.

We slowly approached the large opening to find the source of the smells: fifteen dead Strangers, all with bullet holes like shiny new black buttons. They had been the remaining survivors of the Battle of Banlo Bay, but now they were just more for the body count.

*

Escher fired his gun into the air, and a body dropped from a tree. The man’s body armor wasn’t the sort that any of us had seen before. He was wearing a tight, black Kevlar suit, a small gas mask, night-vision goggles, earphones, and a belt full of God-knows-what. Escher’s bullet had penetrated the spot where his helmet met the collar of armor, driving directly up into his jaw. The man’s helmet seemed to contain most of the gore, so only a sick drizzle of blood spilling from his mask gave away his condition.

This was more money, more armor, more weapons, and more technology than I’d ever seen packed onto a human being.

I was staring into the reflective black goggles of one of Little Brother’s men. No more police, no more pulling strings; Little Brother was getting desperate to see Escher die. This was the private reserve.

A dozen or more men in identical uniforms whizzed down cables from the treetops, dropping like black curtains over a stage.

From the center came a figure holding a large television set. She was partially recognizable; in fact, her emotions were what made her a Stranger. She looked basically like she had before. Maybe a little guilty, but more than a little pissed. And that air about Whisper which had made her seem magical, the reason everything she did was so cool—was gone.

Without saying a word, she put the television screen down on the ground. She pressed a button on its front, and an image appeared.

It was a fat man, balding badly. He had brown hair—or at least, around the edges of his head and the wispy puff of it that came from his forehead, as though someone had ripped the horn from a stuffed unicorn doll. He had on a simple headset; his hands were on a keyboard in front of him. “Nice to finally meet you face to face,” he said, and I knew who he was. I knew that Voice.

Before I could say anything to Escher, he responded. “Little Brother.”

“We can negotiate your surrender, Escher. This doesn’t have to get violent.”

“There is nothing you could possibly say that I would be interested in hearing,” Escher replied.

“I know where you came from,” the television said. “I know your past. I have your face, I found your record. You were a soldier during the Collapse. During the battle for Detroit, you took a bullet to the head. They evacuated you in time, got the bullet out. You’re just a regular person, like anyone else. Everyone you kill is a regular person as well, Escher. You’re an excellent fighter because you were trained to be a soldier. Can’t you see?”

“No,” the Red King said. then shot the man closest to Whisper in the chest, splitting him open.

Mal appeared from behind, fired two shotgun blasts into the backs of two of their helmets, and ripped the rusty dagger from the chain on his neck and clutched it in his right hand. With his left, he pulled back the head of the man nearest him, gripped his throat, and his windpipe in his fist. At the same time, he thrust the rusted blade up into the armpit of the next nearest operative.

Lux released his headphones from his head, and I turned around, dashing through the familiar camp.

As war and the sounds of Lux’s headphones raged behind me, I ran through the deserted base at that speed I could only obtain when I am faced with eminent death—or, really, any threat at all. At last, I found Escher’s jeep—the first one he’d taken me out to the Train Supply Station with days ago. I turned the key, and the vehicle came alive.

I went forward until I hit a tree, then craned my neck and began driving backwards toward the gunfire. I squealed to a halt and honked the horn.

First Lux—headphones back over his ears—and then Escher jumped into the jeep after me.

I saw Mal so completely covered in blood that all of it simply could not belong to the Co-Intel operatives, but with his old iron dagger, he lashed lavishly, leaving spurts of crimson fluid wherever the tip reached He’d never looked happier in his life. He took bullets from the agents like boxers took punches. Six were dead and bleeding at his feet. Mal’s mouth gaped to catch as much of the flying nectar as possible, some biblical demon incarnate.

Escher picked me up and threw me into the back seat. “I’m driving,” he said, slamming his foot down on the gas.