Fade (3 page)

Cynthia stared unmoving, certain she was watching a man die.

***

Aern, leader of the now defeated Fade, walked up the side of a mountain in which he and a scant battalion hid like frightened prey from the humans. Sweat glistened on his jet black skin, he narrowed his red eyes at the bright sun. But the heat did not bother him. Heat reminded him of home. But home was a place he’d probably never see again. This was one man’s fault. A single human had greedily lapped up the Fade’s hope. It had been pulled, unreachable, over some far-off horizon.
Jonas.
He’d wrapped their hope around himself like a warm coat and leapt through space with it, chiding them with his circus smile.

It had been fifteen years since their sure victory over the humans had been ripped from them. Now the Fade were no more than beasts, grazing on what the sparse land gave them, stranded on a strange planet they should have been ruling, knowing that any moment could bring with it the wild yell of a human army, clambering up and over them like a wave, ending them. They had already fallen so far, but Aern had fallen the furthest.

He held a single raspberry. He had found a sprawling bush of them at the edge of the tree line and collected a handful for the trip up the mountain trail. Rocking it in his large, black fingers, its juices wet the tips. He wondered, as he did almost every afternoon when there was not enough food for his people, and they were no closer to finding a way off this world, what would come of them.

Aern had held himself up as the greatest apostle to their Queen. For centuries she was worshipped from afar, respected by an ever dwindling few. But he returned deference to the utterance of her name. His planet’s government had even come to fund the research which led to the eventual journeys to find her. But, when Aern’s army had lost, their home planet had ceased communication with them. They did not want Aern’s righteous war spreading to their coward shores. So when they believed Aern’s crusade crushed, his own people had left his bones to bleach on a foreign world. The Queen would not be pleased. But their retribution could wait. It was this world that he would ask that she shattered first. He opened his wide maw and laid the red coal of a berry on his gray tongue and crushed it against the roof of his mouth.

The horizon dimmed at the end of another day and, once more, it was empty of human armies. The thought occurred to him that they had given up; they no longer thought the Fade enough of a threat to search out. In part, the thought angered him, but it also let him breathe for the moment he let it live.

For those almost fifteen years he had evaded the human's revenge, he and his scant remaining warriors. He wondered if the others, scattered across the globe, had fared so well. Not long after every piece of their technology had failed, and they had been forced into hiding, word had still filtered down from the braggadocios humans that the man, Jonas, was to blame. Aern knew the name. It was a name the Fade holding this continent knew well. So part of him was not surprised that even after they had ripped his powers from him, this Jonas still found a way to hand them defeat. But—and this was the part that had confused him for years—not before scampering off with a few other humans to another world, using the Fade's own technology. It did not make sense that he would leave, knowing victory was at hand. Unless, Aern had decided, it was to guard the final thing which would reignite the Fade's power—their Queen.

For so many years his people had tried to bring life again to useless tools with the hope of finding Jonas following him. For so long they had all but failed. Three years before, they had seen the blue gate again for the first time, but a crackling, miniature version of its former glory, refusing to form into the calm sea that would let them leave. And in those three years it refused to be repaired—still a mutilated, hectic light that no living thing could pass through in safety. Perhaps a Wraith could survive, but it did not matter. To go home would mean shame, and all other addresses had been lost to the human’s trickery. Besides, his only interest was in finding Jonas. And Jonas would not let himself be found.

Until he was.

An oxidizing shell housed one of the limited numbers of gadgets they had managed to get working, using parts scavenged from human technology. It sat in the rear of Aern's cave, its cracked screen flickering but reliable. It had been set on the task of finding where the human, Jonas, escaped to from the moment it had buzzed back to life. But it was silent all those years. Aern feared that Jonas had found the device which they had secreted into his skull so many years before. But, now, the machine was lit up in greeting as Aern trundled into the cave's entrance. The long, droning noise it gave confused him before he realized what it was—what it meant. He rushed to it, wiping a thick layer of dust from its screen. Something like a mathematical formula began to appear and Aern widened his thick, gray lips.

Something sparked in him, deep, a strange thing he had not felt in so many years—hope. He called out for one of the Wraith. The name was something he had picked up from the humans. The technology that made them special was something they had taken from another conquered world—and so, not obliterated by the human’s attack. Now that they had a place to go, the Wraith might be the only one among them who could survive a trip through the mangled portal. From the other side it could be stabilized. Their time of testing was over now. The Queen was calling them to her side.

***

The homeless man sat on his knees, bent over, his face on the ground. A thick, pink snake of a scar sat coiled on his head, just visible through his hair. Seeing it scared Cynthia even more. He gave a guttural moan, and she let out a yelp of her own, tripping backwards a few feet. Her head whipped around hoping to see anyone nearby. Then, he began to convulse, and she sank a hand into her pocket for her phone. She hammered out 9-1-1 and shook, waiting for him to fall over dead.

“Hello?” her voice broke. “There’s a homeless man at my school having some sort of seiz—” She stopped as she watched him settle, take in a long, gasping breath, and get to his feet. He looked at her, trembling. Then leapt at her, grabbed her. The phone jumped from her hand.

His eyes became wide and crazed. They seemed to stare into her, not comprehending what they were seeing. For a moment, it seemed that he might not let go; he might drag her into the woods. Then, his hands were off her, like touching her burned him, and he took hold of his own head. Moaning again, he careened to his right and ran into those woods alone.

Cynthia scrambled for her phone, cradled it between shoulder and ear and raced to her car. “Ma’am? Ma’am! Are you there?” A voice called from the other end.

“He…” She swallowed hard. “He grabbed me. Then he ran off.”

“Are you okay? Do you need help, ma’am?”

“I’m, um, not sure where he is now.” She landed in the seat and the car roared to a start. “Somewhere in the woods next to Black Oak High School.”

“All right, ma’am. We’ll send a car out that way to—” she didn’t hear the rest. She snapped the phone shut and chunked it and her bag into the seat next to her, pulling out of the lot. “No good deed and all that,” the words came out like crumbling bread, her hands shivering.

She had gone about a mile before pulling into a Get-N-Go and resting her head on the steering wheel. Her hands buzzed. She clenched them, blew out a frustrated breath and yanked her phone from the seat where she’d thrown it. Holding it with both hands, Cynthia scrolled until she found the right name and stuck it to her ear.

“Hey, babe,” a relaxed voice answered.

“Hey, Joey. I need a fix, man,” Cynthia said.

“You already go through that stuff you bought?”

“Nope. I just need something harder.
Tough day
. Some homeless guy tried to kill me.”

Joey was quiet. “Mm-kay.
Well
, c’mon over, make more sense out of that story and you can have a pop on me.”

“Really? You freaking rock, Joey.” She still held the phone to her ear with both hands, her leg chugging up and down like an oil derrick in fast-forward.

“I know that
,
” he said, laughing.

She tried to laugh back, but all that came was an odd shudder. “Be there in fifteen.”

It was close to one in the morning when she stumbled into her room. There was a folded piece of notebook paper stuck to her bedroom door with a giant exclamation point drawn on it. She pulled it off, flipped it open. It read: CALL NEXT TIME! The word
call
was underscored three times with an angry pen. She sighed and tossed it on her dresser, letting her bag slip from her shoulder.

Her phone tumbled out onto the floor and she almost didn’t reach for it, but saw the flashing light indicating that she had a message. As soon as she saw the name she went cold. There were three missed calls and seven texts from Jan.

“Crap,” she kicked a shoe across the room. “Crap, crap,
crap
!” The other one. Harder.

Sitting, she stared at the floor and ran her fingers through her hair thinking she might just pull it out. Cynthia read the texts. They grew from worried to frustrated rather quickly. She thought about calling Jan, but dropped the phone, falling onto the bed. “
Crap
!”

THREE

L
ucy eased the front door open and stepped in, giving as casual a look around as she could muster. The room was empty. She closed the door behind her like it might explode were she to close it too hard. Walking stiff, straight-legged, as fast as she could, with no noise, she stopped outside the kitchen. There, she craned her neck, trying to see into the room. It seemed empty, but she’d been fooled before. She moved from one side of the entrance to the other, making sure she saw it all before speeding through and to the left where her room was.

A smoldering heap of fear and accomplishment sat in her chest as she landed on her bed. She wasn’t sure where the jerk was, but she’d managed to make it through without seeing him, which meant no made-up chores or humiliating questions about how her day went, like he were some good step-father just checking in on his little girl.

Lucy lay there for a while, holding the end of the comforter balled in her hand, resting her head on it. Finally, she let it go and stood, making herself calm down. She had a few math problems to do, but that could wait. Lucy slipped down to the floor with the remote and flipped on the TV. Talk show, talk show, bad sitcom, news, news, cartoon. She stopped at Dora the Explorer, who was talking to her backpack in slow, well-enunciated English, and Lucy smiled.

A knock on the door gave her such a jolt that she almost ended up on her feet again. Defeated, she invited the knocker in. The knot in her stomach unraveled though when she saw her mother. “Hey, honey,” her mother said with a thin smile. “Pork chops okay for dinner?”

She frowned, knowing full-well her opinion about dinner was never the deciding one. “Pineapple?” She said, testing, hoping this meant what she thought it might mean.

“Pineapple,” her mother said.

“What about Gerald?”

“Your
father
has a meeting in Tipton until late. So it’s just us girls and our pineapple pork chops tonight. Baked or mashed potatoes?”

“Mashed and brown gravy, please,” Lucy said, her smile as big as the pig from which her pork had been chopped.

When her mom left she jumped to her feet and danced, leaping onto the bed. “I matter tonight, Bilby,” she reported to the fuzzy, brown monkey next to her pillow and rolled over.

Her dishwater blonde hair splayed behind her like a fan. Suddenly, she popped up like Jack, freeing himself from his box, and on the short, bone-thin legs of a fifteen year-old, leapt off the side of the bed. There was no way she was going to barricade herself inside her cave tonight, she decided. Maybe she’d help her mom cook dinner, or see if she wanted to sit in the living room and eat. They could watch that court show she liked together. She pranced to the door, and then she heard it.

“Hey, babe?” Gerald’s voice nauseated her.

“Gerald? I thought you had that meeting, honey?”

“Cancelled.” A moment of silence. “What’s this shit? You know I ain’t eating this.”

“Of course not,” her mother said. “What sounds good to you?” Her mother’s voice had changed. Now the high-pitched everything-for-you voice of a Stepford Wife.

Lucy moved away from the door and walked to the far side of her bed, sitting next to it. She thought, as she often did, of the man in her dreams. The man that she imagined must be her real father—memories tucked away in the folds of a child’s brain, peeking out while she slept. Had to be. They were too real to be concocted by her imagination. When that man touched her in her dreams, her skin didn’t crawl. She sometimes woke, feeling his love. This man was her Garden of Eden, lost by some unknown sin she prayed and prayed she could take back. He made her matter all the time.

Lucy wiped the tears on her face and felt stupid for indulging herself—again—in the idea.
This
was reality and it always would be…
But he might be real.
She slammed her elbow into the bed frame, went to rub it but stopped herself. Again. The bed clanged, jerking at each strike. Pain shot up her arm like electricity. Lucy fell over and cried into the carpet, holding an arm that sang with agony. She lay there, staring at nothing, eyes-wide until she heard the stiff voice of her mother calling her to eat.

***

Angela sounded like a jackal, bending at her waist, holding her stomach as her step-mom pushed her, both of them laughing to tears. Angela teetered, catching herself on the counter. "Woman! You almost knocked me down."

Angela's mom tried to respond but had spent her breath. So she playfully pushed her daughter again, wiped the tears from her eyes and returned to chopping an onion. They both calmed and went about making dinner for a moment before Angela sputtered and the whole laughing fit started again.

"You're going to make me cut my finger off!" her stepmother forced out through laughter.