Hope (Other World Protection Agency Book 1) (6 page)

“I don’t know. I have no answers
for you. I simply know you don’t want to go there.” In the very end, she had
understood that she was not alone. There had been a shadow or maybe more than
one shadow slowly moving towards her. The hideous torturous things they
promised to do to her was driving her mad. Even now she knew she would never be
the same.

“Guess what kiddies.” Charon said
in his faux kindergarten teacher voice. “The field trip is not over yet.”

Tara hugged Paul closer and tried
not to shake. She was over field trips. She would sit this one out thank you
very much.

“Tara.” She felt a hand on her
shoulder and knew it was Charon’s. Of course his voice in her ear was a clue.
          “I am tired.” Her voice came out surly, more like a pissed off teen than
a weary adult who had a reason to hide away.

“I know, but you have to come
anyway.” He was being gentle with her. She was sure he was the reason she had
been left in that living hell, so he should be gentle with her. Standing up
when all she wanted to do was sit, she focused on a corner of the wall so she
wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.

Taking both of their hands he
gave a sigh. “Let the tour commence.”

Once again, one minute they were
there and the next they were somewhere else. There was no bright sky or car
with a happy couple. They were in someplace that could have been a nursing home
yet it was a far cry from the ones she had seen on television.

“Where are we?” Paul asked the
question.

“We are on Demos.”

They were standing in the corner
of a room. It was not a very clean room, almost as if the aides had said forget
this and refused to tend to the occupant. Yet looking out the door, you could
see that the whole place seemed to be uncared for. The occupant on the bed was
elderly and frail and yet was obviously Demos.

“Why are we here? Do you think I
will feel sorry for these people? No, not people, monsters who come to other
peoples worlds and try to destroy them.”

“Tara you’re mad, upset and scared
and thinking you may be crazy. Yet, you still have to see the other side of the
picture. Just one view of the world, any world is enough to send someone off
halfcocked. If you don’t believe me just ask Raimel. Ah, here he comes now and
this time even he can’t see you.”

She watched as he entered the
room and finally knew what primal hatred felt like. She hated him with
everything they were both worth. She wanted to violently yank every piece of
his coal black hair out by the roots and tear off those wings. How she would laugh
in joy as she did it. She was definitely going crazy.

He went to the bed and knelt
down. She walked closer. She needed to hear and she needed to see. She needed
to feel, even if all she felt was horror and hatred. She needed him to suffer
the way she had been made to suffer. That was righteousness, right? That one
should suffer like she did.

“Mom.” That was his mother? She
moved in closer thinking about her own mother.

“Mom.” Did he almost look sad?
“You’re going to die. There is nothing they can do for you.”

“No son, I am not. Hope is
coming.”

“There is no hope.” He screamed,
making his mother flinch before he got himself under control. “Hope is dead. This
planet will never have hope. All we have is luck. Very few find that and fewer
hold onto it. You know this. Why do you continue to delude yourself? I can take
you home and you can die there.”

“I know you can’t feel it yet,
but I can. Hope will be reborn right here on our planet. It will grow and fill
your heart with the possibilities of what can be. It will break your heart when
you see all you have done.” She reached up and stroked his cheek. “One day at a
time my son. All is not lost.”

“I need to leave mother. I have more
lives…” He halted as he looked at her. “I have things to do, but I will come
back again soon.”

He strode to the door needing to
get away when he heard her call his name. “Raimel.”

“Yes mother.”

“Have I asked anything of you?”
She never asked anything of him.

“No mother you have not.”

“Then I ask that you honor this
request.”

“Mother?”

“Do as I ask.”

“I will try to honor your
request.”

“The one you have in captivity.”
He turned to look at her. No one should know about that. “Let her live. She is
the one thing that could break you.”

With that she laid back and
dismissed him by closing her eyes.

“I feel you in here. Take a good
look at my planet, then tell me if you can judge him as harshly. Charon, I know
you are there. Remember you promised to take me to see Hope being born.” This
time she dismissed them with her silence.

They disappeared this time to
reappear on what was a dividing line between the privileged and the slums.

“You are looking at the section
the lucky live in. The rest is where everyone else lives.”

“What do you mean? You’re rich or
poor and there’s no in-between?”

“Paul, I mean either you’re lucky
and end up here or you’re unlucky and you live over there.” He said pointing to
the other side.

Really it couldn’t even be called
a slum. She had seen places like this in third world countries. Looked like no
running water. No safe place to live. The people were wearing rags and no one
seemed to really care. There were no children playing happy games. There was no
hope in the faces of the people walking by. How could this be? Nothing in a
third world country could ever have prepared her for this.

“Tara, what if hope were a
person?”

“What? That’s preposterous. Hope
is not a person. Hope is this faint emotion that people feel in order to think
things will get better. Heck, according to legend, it was in the bottom of Pandora’s
Box and barely escaped with its life.”

“Paul, what if hope was a person.
What if Hope the person was killed before he or she grew up? What would happen
to a planet left bereft without hope?”

He opened his mouth several times,
but nothing came out. He simply looked around.

“Give it a try Paul. Tell me what
your life and your planet would be without hope.”

Again he looked around then took
a steadying breath. “My parents loved me. We lived a good life in a nice house
in the good section of the city. I had friends and family and enough to eat,
but still I struggled. School didn’t come easy, especially when I was younger.
My mom spent hours working with me. Re-teaching me at times. She would say that
not all teachers could work with every child, but she would always be able to
work with me. If not for her, I would have lost hope.”

He stopped as his eyes got big
and he realized it was the truth.

“It was the hope she gave me that
kept me moving on. When I said I wanted to be a doctor my dad almost laughed,
but not my mom. She said ‘Paul has given us a reason to celebrate’, so we had a
party. By high school I was excelling and the rest is history. Without the hope
she had in me and in her ability to teach me, I would not be here today.”

“Tara, I am asking you again.
What if Hope were a person and that person died? What would happen to the
planet and those that lived on it?”

“Without hope there are no
thoughts of a better tomorrow.” She continued as if the words were being torn
from her. “Without hope the planet and its people could perish. There would be
no medical breakthrough. No lifesaving medicine. No care for another, but it
wouldn’t end there.”

Tears started to gather in her
eyes and that cold hatred she felt flared hotter than the sun before it began
to cool. The cooling hatred was also the waning hatred and she began to feel hope.
It was almost like a tidal wave waking up in her body, taking her over.

“A planet without hope and a
people without hope would be condemned to a hatred so fierce or a sadness so
deep that whichever overtook them they would be unable to shake. Such a choice
is unthinkable.” She ended with a whisper.

“Do you understand now, Tara? If
your planet was hopeless you too might scour the worlds looking for hope in
order to end its life. In order to end your life.”

Without a word and without
touching them, they disappeared and reappeared in the warehouse.

“Mother?”

“Hi baby did you miss me?”

She considered fainting, she really
did, but how many times could she pull the floor thing in one day without
looking like a total wimp? So no, she was going to have to face her mother
whose name just happened to be Pandora, although they always called her Dora.

“Mom do you have something to
tell me?”

“Charon hasn’t told you yet?” She
threw him a look like he was the naughty child.

“Nope, I don’t think he has told
me yet. So why don’t you start with how you look as young as you did in the
picture when I was a baby?”

“Aww, that’s the easy part. I
stopped aging the minute I conceived you. Although I didn’t know of course. It
took Charon years to finally get around to telling me what was going on.”

“Course you know Charon. Go on.”

“Finally I understood that in
order for hope to wake up in you, well I realized that your life would need to
be hard. As your mom I wanted to protect you, coddle you. Instead I let you go
your own way. I let you ditch me and work this out on your own, but I never
left you alone. Please believe that I always knew where you were.”

“How can I be hope? It makes no
sense. There was hope already on the planet when I was born.”

“Hope is born every day. Hope
will keep families together and start revolutions to change things. And it will
be left behind when the person dies. Then there is a different kind of hope,
one that is a key. That would be you. Without you, the world would become
hopeless over time.”

“What is a key?”

“You have to wait on that one. It
will be revealed in time. Suffice it to say that without you, things would be
changing and not in a good way.”

She rolled her eyes at her mother
then looked at Paul. “Maybe we should make a list of things that have to be
done so life can go back to normal.”

“I have a feeling that normal is
over rated.”

“We have to save the perky…
Forget it. What’s her name?” He gave her a smile that was melting her new heart
to the core.

“Amanda.”

“We have to save Amanda.”

“We have to make sure one baby
boy Demos is born. I say we do that first and then save the perky blonde.”
Charon looked around innocently.

“Why do we need to make sure a
baby Demos is born.”

“I know the answer to this one.” Tara
said with her hand high in the air. “Pick me, pick me.” Charon waved at her to
continue. “Because Demos has no hope and I am just betting that someone is
waiting in the wings to kill little Hope Demos. Course we can’t call him hope
because he’s a boy.”

“So we make sure the baby is born.
We free Amanda and then all is ok? We just go back to our lives like this never
happened?”

“Paul, all I can give you is the
hope for tomorrow.” He smiled as he pointed to Tara, “what you do with it is up
to you. I would suggest everyone get a good night’s sleep, because tomorrow a
certain child will be born.”

 “Paul explore upstairs I think
you will appreciate it.” Charon said before he shimmered and faded away.

The upstairs was not a full
floor. It was simply offices or rooms around three sides of the warehouse with
the center open, allowing you to see the high ceiling. They were standing at
the top of the steps wondering what direction to go first. The floor still
looked like it needed a lot of elbow grease except for the section on the farthest
side. It looked as if someone had already scrubbed it.

Looking at each other they walked
over and opened the door. Walking in, they stopped in their tracks and just
stared.

“A bedroom?” The room was
beautiful, Tara held her breath as she marveled over it.

In the middle of the room sat a
four poster king size bed. The kind she had always secretly wanted. It had
matching dressers and night stands to go with it. The bare walls were now
covered with pictures of beautiful landscapes giving the feeling of being
outside, despite the lack of windows in there. She would have paid a fortune to
own something as beautiful as this room

“That’s putting it mildly. This
place is marvelous.” Paul said as he stood still just taking it in.

“You think he made this for you?”
She said that with a bright smile planting the seed that all of this had been
done for him.

The look he gave her said are you
crazy? “No I think he made it for us.”

“There is no us.” As long as she
kept telling herself that, she could keep distance and perspective between him
and her fragile new feelings for him.

“Are you sure?”

“Course, I am sure.” Men were
crazy. There was no them. Where was the Love? Where were the dinners and the
romance? Where was “I will be here in the morning?” No there definitely was no
them. There needed to be dinners and flowers or gifts. 

“Ok, there is no us then. So we
will just sleep here instead of downstairs.”