“President Slams Horoscope Readers”, “President Admits Ignorance of Common Knowledge”, and “First Daughter Afraid of Inexplicable Phenomenon” were among the headlines the next day. Of course, there were others that depicted stories that were more or less accurate.
So Jade could write her essay, she perused over the articles, both the true and false, to invent an eclectic paper that combined everything in the articles. If one read the assignment derived strictly from yellow journalism, one might think the president’s speech aired on a paternity talk show. That was how fictitious it seemed when I proofed my good friend and cousin’s paper.
Jade hadn’t been the only one ordered to write a paper; Krystal Nicholson had transferred into the public school the day of the field trip. She worked off of every article Jade had collected and also tried to interview Gavin over the proceedings but he was of little help. As I knew, Gavin interpreted the speech as a chance to catch up on the reruns of his dreams that he’d not viewed in a while. Gavin’s studious behavior forced Krystal to depend on me. As tempting as it was to feed her false information, I didn’t need to; the newspaper articles and her paraphrasing of Jade’s paper fed her enough false material, anything I’d give her, might seem correct.
Before long, the school day was coming to a close and the few left awake were yawning violently. With the coming of two o’clock, also came the dismissal of students. Gavin stood up from his seat but wouldn’t move until I was ready. Jade however, rushed in her normal way. Gavin’s courtesy towards me annoyed Jade as much as it brightened my spirits. Krystal Nicholson was still hesitant about her new group of friends, so she tried to conceal her thoughts until she knew what our reactions would be.
“Let’s go to that new mall that just opened in Northern Virginia!” Jade suggested. “I’ve got a little money in my pocket and that new mall opened only last week.”
“You mean the one in Arlington, Virginia?” Gavin asked.
Jade nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
“I heard its got four floors and in the center is a marvelous balcony capped by an arched skylight!” Krystal added.
“You’re welcome to join us.” Jade invited the girl, forcing me to realize I’d have to adapt to her presence because if I didn’t, I’d only suffer.
“I’d love to darling, but I can’t. I tried telling my parents gently but my father was livid nonetheless. H-he was angrier than I’d ever seen him.” She frowned and her voice quivered. “He backhanded me when I told him, then he grounded me until he feels I’ve learnt my lesson. On top of that, he restricted access to my bank accounts, so I could only buy things related to the baby--I didn’t even know he had access to my bank accounts. I really should get home--I don’t want to get in any more trouble.” It was then I realized the magnitude of her sacrifice in exchange for a night spent sleepless in bed. Even I had to pity the poor girl.
“Okay then, we’ll hang out later.” Jade assured. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Can we stop by the apartment?” I asked Jade as more of a command with a question mark than a question.
“Yeah, I want to drop my textbooks and laptop off.” She replied. “I don’t want to lug this stuff around while exploring a four floor shopping center.”
“I mostly want to change clothes,” I confessed. “I’m fine wearing long sleeves while confined in this skyscraper city, but we’ll have to go outside. It’s late May and the temperature is over eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”
“You’re right, I don’t want to go outside in winter clothing.” Jade agreed, examining her own sweatshirt.
The walk to the apartment didn’t take long. Jade’s key opened the door for Gavin and I to enter. Something was awry about the eerie silence in the residence; the sound of my grandfather’s snoring wasn’t even present in the hallway connecting the apartment’s two bedrooms. The silence bothered me more than I might’ve expected.
Apparently Jade was disturbed as well because she croaked out “Maybe they went to the doctor or something. Grandfather always has those appointments and maybe they forgot to tell us.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “That’s probably it.” Our moment of uneasy silence lasted several minutes until Gavin brought it to an end by saying he would sit on the sofa while Jade and I changed.
She and I walked to the largest bedroom and shut the door behind us. The reassuring click of the door knob calmed me; it portrayed some sense of normalcy. The absence of our grandparents was disturbing. Jade opened her dresser and her exasperated sigh was the only indicator of the concern she had.
“They’re probably fine.” I mumbled, knowing Jade and I were worried because of their age. I dropped my shirt in a laundry basket, noted I’d have to wash a load when I returned, and rummaged through the lightweight shirts in the top drawer of my dresser. Cursing my fashion sense, I selected a tank-top in the only color I had. It was almost too small for me, but still suitable for wearing out in public. For a brief instant, I hoped it wasn’t skintight so that Gavin wouldn’t gawk over me, but the thought should never have crossed my mind; Gavin was the last male alive who would derive a sick pleasure from a girl’s shirt being a little snug. Even if he were, I was his girl and not susceptible to such atrocious behavior, or so I hoped. Besides, Gavin was better than that.
Jade pulled on her capris and grabbed her wallet. She sat down on my bed (because we now had bunk beds and hers was the top) to tighten her sandals. If anyone had adapted to the beach life better, Jade sure gave that person competition. Since she’d moved to South Eastern Virginia, she’d matched her personality and attire to that of the locals.
With Jade being fully dressed, I opened the door to our bedroom. For once, I left my computer behind, and took only my clothes, currency card, and personality. I didn’t have any intention of spending money, but if I didn’t have my currency card then I’d find something worth purchasing. Truthfully, I wasn’t worried about the price of anything I could potentially find; the rent payments on my father’s house were accruing interest in a bank account.
According to the mail I received, the house I’d loved as a child was in superb condition. A young couple just out of college had moved into the house a week after I moved out. The husband was an old-school carpenter who made furniture. His wife was a third-grade teacher at the school I attended before my father died. When the two people moved in, they also began paying rent on the spacious plot of land away from the house I owned. At first, I didn’t know what they wanted with both the house and land when the house was situated on several acres of pre-cleared land. The answer came when the husband. Mr. Neil Taliaferro, sent me a message requesting permission to build a workshop on the extra land, despite the detached garage outside the house.
Because both the sixteen-acre plot of forested land and the house had been paid off long before Hubert fouled the air in the house’s bathrooms, most of the rent was left unused. The deal with most rentees and the owner of the property they lived on was that the land-lord or land-lady fix any problem but the Taliaferros and I agreed that whatever needed to be done to the house would be deducted from the rent payments. To prevent the Taliaferros from conning me out of the rent, I asked them to document any problems with the house. Though I’d trusted them to begin with, I’d been surprised to receive notification of every nail driven into the wall or every color of paint chosen, along with the kind of details I’d hoped for. Every month, when the rent came, a report came, and if there had been a holiday, so did a bonus hundred dollars. This proved to me that there were still good people in the world.
Following Jade into the main room, I gave Gavin permission to leave his things in our bedroom. My offer was actually more of a ploy to get a hug without Jade’s seeing than it was anything else. My clever scheme worked better than I’d expected and even made a peck on the lips possible.
While Gavin and I were busy being somewhat naughty, Jade wrote a note to our grandparents indicating where we were.
With everything that had needed to be done complete, the three of us walked to the very same Mag-lev train station Gavin and I had been at the day before. Jade insisted upon riding first-class in one of the compartments that imitated the trains of a bygone era, but Gavin and I refused to pay such a large price for a ride that wouldn’t last an hour. To her dismay, Jade rode coach with us. Coach was much more like riding a passenger jet than a train; there were three sections of seats with two rows by the windows and three in the center. Jade, Gavin, and I took three seats in the middle in that order. I wasn’t sure whether Gavin was lucky to be between two girls or if he was unfortunate to be next to Jade.
I had no problems being around Jade; I found her funny at times, but Jade’s personality made Gavin uneasy. Since we’d been dating, he’d grown accustomed to Jade’s idiosyncrasies but still he wasn’t the best of friends with her.
As predicted, the ride was short, so we were at the next train station momentarily. Jade had a frown plastered to her face over the stopping of the train; she’d wanted to ride the train until her attention was no longer satisfied by the blurred images in the train’s windows.
Outside, the lawns were nicely trimmed and the hedges were cut to perfection. It made sense that the mall was just across the well-cared for garden-like expanse. It made for a seamless transition between the noisy commerce of the train station to the hustle and bustle of the shopping mall. On top of that, it let wary travelers enjoy the shopping experience while waiting for their next train.
Inside the mall, at the heart of everything, was an open area with benches and the smell of roasting nuts wafting down the hall. Each bench was positioned in relation to the focus of everyone’s attention, which was an indoor garden. With a young pine tree in the center, the garden was bathed in color of every kind, including a wall of giant sunflowers fed by the fiber-optic “plumbing system” and the skylight above. When standing at the bottom of the four-story column beneath the arched skylight, one had to bend one’s neck backwards just to see the sky above. The immense proportions of the grand opening made one feel puny and completely insignificant.
“I wanna go see what it looks like at the top!” Jade darted towards the escalators.
By the time Gavin and I had made our way up the four dizzying flights of escalators, Jade was already leaning against the railing; she was looking down at the tree that would eventually grow to the height of the glass roof above.
Looking down from the fourth floor was a completely different spectacle than it was at the bottom. Rather than feeling unimportant, one felt like a god ruling over un-worthy three-inch tall beings.
I noticed an old man approaching our little trio, and had the strange suspicion I’d seen the man before. He wore a tennis shoe on one foot and a wader on the other. Until he stopped to peer over the edge, I thought he was coming to talk to us.
On the ground at least forty feet below, oddly shaped shadows began appearing. They seemed to be shaped like dragonflies only not really. Unlike all other shadows, this one wasn’t monochromatic. Deviating from the norm, the shadows were brightly colored. Where the wings would have been if the shape were of a dragonfly, the shadows were almost the color of blue slate, though a few hues lighter. The last three spheres of what would have been the posterior of the insect were each different colors with no two orbs, on either just one shape or any of the shadows on the ground, alike. Some of the colors were orange or red, or even as obscure as purple and green.
No one could determine where the mysterious apparitions on the floor originated from, until someone broke the silence the images had caused by screaming. “There! In the skylight!” My gaze wasn’t the only one to snap up to scrutinize the secrets hidden behind the transparent dome.
As swiftly as they’d appeared, the colored blobs vanished. Every captious eye (and the less observant ones too) examined the glass semisphere, daring it to provide a clue as to the identity of the missing shadows, all while accusing it of deceiving its observers. According to one of the gold-plated plaques describing the shopping mall, the vertically-facing window was Earth’s largest single pane glass dome. Somehow the creators of the dome formed a two-inch thick dome out of molten glass, and got it to harden flawlessly. Yielding no result, my studying of the seamless glass abated after only a few minutes.
Upon lowering my eyes, something caught my attention and forced my gaze to return to the domed structure. A motorcycle, designed for cruising across open highways, exploded through the top of the glass semisphere. At least two tons of shimmering blue rebellion accelerated towards the ground at nine and eight/tenths of a meter per second squared. The batteries that powered this beauty made it a solid mass, not unlike a baseball through a sliding door on a neighbor’s patio.
With the unexpected entrance of the electric motorcycle, the glass it had broken shot down in a path parallel to the motorcycle’s. For a split second, that seemed like all the destruction the once beautiful skylight would suffer, but by the time the motorcycle crumpled and the people stopped screaming, a greater dilemma was brewing around the cracked and chipped hole.
When the motorcycle came through the ceiling, in all of the levels, people rushed forward to the banister. Rather like sardines in a can, fleshy cloth covered beings filled every crevice their shoulders could fit. More than slightly perturbed by the massive influx of bodies, I scowled while they pressed me tighter and tighter against the railing. Jade was the only one I was touching who’s face had a name; Gavin and I had been separated by two or three frames.
Reminiscent of a bomb counting down to its explosion, I watched cracks skirt down the curved glass. Patterns emerged that were unmatched by any except the veins in an animal’s circulatory system. Doing math was a talent of the glass’s, as was apparent by the perfect division into millions of indescribably-shaped shards.
As jagged lines curved the once blemish-free spectacle, the cracks caused by the impact widened until visible ribbons of light were seen without the attempted intersection of the melted-down sand. Almost with no provocation, the two main halves that had been created by the growing chasm lifted up at the distance that was both farthest away from and perpendicular to the actual split. The corners of the shell, where the glass had broken the greatest, acted as a pivot point around which both halves of the remaining glass structure pivoted. Time crept along with its foot applying pressure to the brakes as the two pieces lurched towards each other. Groaning like a constipated couch potato, the two halves came together.
The instant they touched, time returned to normal speed, or if watches too were under the influence of the illusion, sped past the speed limit. Shards of sharp shrapnel blew apart in all directions. Rather than travel in a downward motion, the sharp projectiles moved diagonally, almost to the point of being horizontal. I tried to protect myself but was too slow; the crowds were too dense and the glass too swift for me to stop it.
Blood appeared in lines across my face, arms, and chest. Thankfully, it felt like I’d only been grazed for the most part. In the wake of the flying glass, were several cuts, but nothing too severe; others around me received far worse.
My self-examination was cut short when a sound I’d only heard once before came from the newly made 300 feet wide ventilation shaft. Coming from the opening where the sky light had been was an irregular swoosh, as if from a helicopter, undermined by a deep resonant humming. The sound was similar to that made by a helicopter, only this sound didn’t mean humans were arriving. If anything, this sound could only mark the arrival of a breed of creature that was unafraid of dealing death in its most ghastly form. The Catrions had begun their entrance.
As predicted, the vehicles they flew in swooped down into the mall. At least three dozen of the things came in and many pairs of them carried a black, rubber-like tarp large enough to cover a compact car. Those vehicles the Catrions flew which carried a black tarp thing dropped as low as they dared and released their cargo over immense crowds of screaming people.
The kind of crunch that usually accompanies the breaking of bones echoed around the shopping complex. After the first wave of rubbery tarps was dropped, three more waves dropped dozens more tarps, with each single tarp slightly overlapping the others. After the first wave, the groups of people on the first floor tried to scatter but sadly, each trap brought with it victims.
No one knew what to do about the terrifying creatures. Save those on the first floor, not a person moved a muscle and even blinking was a rarity among the many faces present. Like the others, the security guards were frozen with fear.
Something surprising happened to the black mass of tarps concealing countless bodies. It surged blue, as if an unprotected electrical current had passed through it, but milliseconds later, it disappeared, leaving the alive but crying bodies of those who had been buried beneath it.
That was when the security guards snapped out of their trance. As one entity, they drew their shock pistols, the weapons afforded to all military and police personnel so that no human life would have to die prematurely. The guns were supposed to stun humans, but in light of the tortured victims at the bottom of the four-story shaft, they weren’t enough to complement the rage of the security guards.
My attention was stolen from the unfolding mayhem by an incongruous sight; the old man who I’d thought I’d seen before worked the wader off of his foot, and pulled it, upside down, over his head so that his eye was visible in a two-inch hole on the side of the aged and weathered boot. How the man buried his entire head in the decrepit fishing shoe was an enigma to me, but he didn’t give me much time to ponder it because he grabbed the collars of Jade’s and my shirts and forced us to bend at the waist.
I felt his fingers touch a place on my body I’d have trouble letting Gavin touch, as his long digits clenched onto my stretching tank-top and the bra beneath it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jade struggling in the same way, but I was too petrified to do anything except call out to Gavin for help. With the man’s grip firm, Jade and I had no choice except to be dragged wherever this man was taking us. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but my fears couldn’t likely have been true with the man taking both Jade and I, but I’d been certain I was about to be raped.
He dragged the two of us into a girl’s restroom, and had the door nearly shut when a six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch tall male form in a lush black satin shirt barreled through the door, slamming the man with the boot on his head into the tiled L-shaped wall behind him. Gavin’s fist flew back and then forward into the tile where the man’s visible eye had been. The man was fortunate to have dodged such a blow but his good fortune ended soon thereafter; Gavin’s unusually long arms caught his throat, slammed it into the nearest wall, and singlehandedly lifted the body attached to it. Gavin might’ve taught his would-be victim a few choice lessons, if the man hadn’t delivered a kick that brought Gavin to his knees, and ironically grieved me also.
The man slammed the bathroom door shut while commanding the three of us with more urgency than I would’ve expected. “Take your clothes off! All of you!”
“What?! No way will I be a stripper!” Jade cried.
The man had been in the process of taking his shirt off when he stopped, took his wallet out, and handed Gavin, Jade, and I each a currency carc from separate banks. “There, now take it off. Take it all off and soak it in water!”
Jade stomped her foot but before sound escaped her lips, the man took his boot off, held it above his head, and spoke again. “Jade Cataye, Sruun Borealis, and Gavin Weylin, Erma commands you to do exactly as I say or die!”
“Wait,” Jade instructed calmer than what was possible in the situation. “Are you threatening to kill us?”
“I’m threatening to let them kill you. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a pair of deflated lungs but more likely, you’ll be abducted or have your face melted off. Trust me, I’m the only Catrion expert there is.”
Face melted off? That’s who this man was! He was the naked man at the scene of Hubert’s demise, Sir Harold McLeod!
Suddenly finding a trust in the man I wouldn’t have otherwise, I pulled my tank-top over my head, despite the appalled faces of my two friends.
“What the-” Say the first syllable of ‘help’, minus the ‘P’ sound to discover what Gavin said. “-are you doing?!”
I reprimanded him with a slap to the back of the head. “I can’t explain my reasoning but we have to do what he says.” Hurray for double entendres.
“Good, good,” The man dropped his drawers to reveal a secret I would’ve preferred remain secret; he wasn’t wearing boxers. “As you get undressed, soak your clothes in water and hand them to me. I’m going to seal us in, and water will render the biotoxin in their weapons useless as a viable killer.”
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