Délon City: Book Two of the Oz Chronicles

Copyright
© 2010 R.W Ridley All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 0-9792067-0-7

DEDICATION:

As always For Mom, Dad, and Marianna

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

PROLOGUE

The man in the white coat thinks I’m crazy. Then again he’s paid to think I’m crazy. He asks me for the millionth time if I’ve taken my medication. I ignore the question because I haven’t. It’s none of his business. I didn’t ask to be here.

He chews on the end of a Bic pen. His black-rimmed glasses have slipped down to the end of his nose. His brown eyes peer down at me. He asks me if I want to get better. Better than what, I wonder.

The man in the white coat tries to look indifferent about my indifference, but he is frustrated. Indifferent people don’t chew on the end of Bic pens. His mind is racing. He’s trying to trick me into talking. He wants me to reveal myself. Get inside my head. I can’t let him. I don’t know who he is. I know who he says he is, but nothing is as it seems anymore.

I am the last one. Only I know where the Storytellers are. “The Takers,” he grunts. “Tell me about them again.” I look at him.

“That’s right,” he says. “I’m not supposed to say their name,am I?”

I smile. He knows he can say their name. Their queen is dead. I killed her. He’s heard that story. He’s trying to get me to talk.

“Wait, I remember now. You took out the leader. Yes, yes... how did you do that again?”

He’s a bad actor.

I’m looking at him. This makes him uncomfortable. He shifts in his chair. He clears his throat. “These Takers... they ate people?”

He shifts again.

“They ate your parents? The whole town...” He flips through a notebook on his desk. “No, no, not just the town, was it... It was...”

I can’t take his senseless rambling anymore. “The end,” I say, “of the world.”

He seems almost startled by the sound of my voice. “The end,” he says hiding a smile. “That’s right. I remember now, and you brought everybody back. You’re a hero, Oz.”

This makes me angry, and he knows it. He’s pushing me. “I’m not a hero.”

“Really?” He’s back to chewing the end of his Bic. “You saved the world. You killed the Taker Queen. You saved the baby... what was his name?”

Nate is his name, but I won’t tell the man in the white coat. I look at my hands. They are not my hands. They are too old to be my hands. I try to rub the hair off my knuckles.

“Stop that,” the man shouts. “You rubbed the skin off last time.”

I continue to rub.

“This is why we have to put you in restraints.”

This catches my attention. I hate the restraints. I stop.

There is a moment of silence, but just a moment. The man in the white coat speaks. “Tell me why you do that.”

I don’t answer.

“Why do you do that to your hands, Oz?”

I laugh. “They’re not my hands.”

“What do you mean?”

I hold them up and show the man in the white coat. “I’m thirteen. I can’t have hands like this.”

He gives me a baffled look. “What year is this, Oz?”

This is the strangest question he has asked me. “I’m not a calendar.”

He picks up his small desk calendar and throws it to me.

I don’t look at it.

“What year is it, Oz?”

I look down. 2033. The man in the white coat has a smug expression on his face. I throw the calendar back to him. “It’s a fake.”

“Look at your hands,” he says. “Do those look like the hands of a 13-year-old boy?”

“Shut up!” I stand. “My name is Oz Griffin. I live in Tullahoma, Tennessee. I’m a warrior...” I pound the palm of my hand against my forehead. “We all are...”

“We?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know.” I grit my teeth. “What have you done with the others?”

The man in the white coat looks through his notebook again. “You mean Wes and Lou...”

“Where are they?”

“According to you the... Délons killed them.”

I collapse in the chair. “The Délons.” I shut my eyes. I remember now. My mother... My bedroom... I killed the Taker Queen, and the Délons took over. But... how am I here? This is not where I am supposed to be.

The man in the white coat clears his throat again. “Perhaps that’s enough for today.”

With my eyes still closed I say, “Send me back.” I hear the door behind me open. I turn and see a large man dressed in a ridiculously bright white uniform enter the room. His acne-scarred face is pulled taught as he flashes a phony reassuring grin.

“Chester will escort you back to your room.”

I repeat my demand. “Send me back.”

“As I said, Chester will escort you back...”

“Not to my room,” I scream. “Send me back!”

The man in the white coat hesitates. He stands and motions to Chester to leave the room. “Oz, I want you to listen to me.” He moves around the desk and stands in front of me. “There is no way back.”

I hold my temper. “You know that’s not true.”

“It’s all gone. There’s nothing to go back to.”

“The past is never gone,” I say. “It’s always there.”

“What makes you think I can send you back?” he asks.

“You’ve done it before.” I motion towards the couch in his room.

A moment of clarity washes over his face. “Hypnosis.” He folds his arms over his chest and sighs heavily. “That didn’t go well last time.”

“I have to get back there.” I am pleading now. I don’t like the sound of it, but I am desperate.

“It’s not real, Oz. You know that, right?”

If I tell him the truth, that he’s not real. That this room we’re sitting in resides only in fantasy. That the truth is in my head, back in my bedroom at home, he will never agree to send me back. “I know,” I say. “But it helps me think clearly when you put me under.”

He gives the matter some thought. “All right, but don’t get your hopes up.”

I jump up and run to the couch. “Yes, sir.”

“You may be a little too wound up for it to work. You have to relax.” He follows me.

I lie down and take a deep breath.

“Relax, Oz. Just relax...” He turns down the lights. By the time he says relax again I am already slipping into a deep sleep. I have to get back.

I hear him say, “I want you to tell me what’s happening, Oz. Not as if you’re there, but as if it’s a memory. It’s very important to keep your distance.”

I breathe deeply.

“A memory, Oz. That’s all it is.”

My eyelids are like lead.

“It’s in the past.”

His voice sounds farther away.

“You’re on the couch in my office. You are simply telling me a story from your childhood.”

Farther away.

“Do you understand?”

I think I nod in agreement, but I can’t be sure.

“Where does your story begin?”

I smile. “My bedroom.”

ONE

I survived the end of the world only to see it end again. At least that’s the way it felt. I heard the words jump from my mother’s lips. They cut as deep as any knife. Part of me believes she knew it, too. That she enjoyed seeing me sit dumbstruck, paralyzed by fear. I think she smiled. She lingered in the doorway of my bedroom, breathing in my despair. I sat on my bed, hopeless. The fight in me was gone.

After my Mom left my room, I rifled through my memory banks. Just a few minutes before, the world was done. It was gone. Deserted, except for a band of survivors made up of my dog, a handful of kids, a middle-aged mechanic, a talking gorilla, a shrink, and one of the greatest linebackers to ever play the game of professional football. We all fought side-by-side against a race of slobbering, greasy beasts called the Takers that consumed the entire population of the planet one-by-one. They swallowed everybody whole and transported them to some charred universe ruled over by their queen, a bigger, greasier version of the drones that had eaten the planet. And, I killed her... or it... or whatever you want to call it. It was dead. And now? Now I was here, in my bedroom, turning my Mom’s words over words in my head, “Délon City.”

The Délons were purple-skinned dead-eyed freaks with spider legs growing out of their heads and razor sharp mandibles that shot out of their mouths which they used to obliterate the brains of their victims. They were fierce, cold, and calculating. They turned humans into their kind. I had witnessed the transformation on the artificial turf of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. I watched like a whimpering baby as one of my warriors, a kid not much older than me, was betrayed by my cowardice. The Délons made him one of their own.

I moved to the window of my bedroom and peered outside. The sky was an intense shade of violet. That told me everything I needed to know. I wasn’t back home. Not the home I knew. The Délons ruled this world. The fight wasn’t over. We had defeated the Takers only to be left with another enemy to battle, but now there was no we. It was just me.

Kimball! If I could just see his canine mug, I would feel better. I would know that I wasn’t alone; that all hope was not lost.

I burst through my bedroom door. “Kimball, come here, boy!”

Nothing.

“Kimball!”

My Mom stepped out of the kitchen, a perplexed look on her thin pale face. “What are you doing, Oz? I thought I told you to get ready for school.”

“I am... I mean I will. I just... I want to see Kimball.”

Her confusion intensified. “Kimball, honey?”

“Yeah, Kimball. Where is he?” I was searching all of his favorite hiding places in our living room.

She walked over to me and gently placed the back of her hand on my forehead to see if I had a temperature. “Maybe you are sick, sweetie.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Kimball?” I knocked her hand away. It was done out of reflex not disrespect. I had just been through a war. I wasn’t in the mood to be babied.

“Oz, you know very well where Kimball is. He’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t want to hear that name in this house again.” She wasn’t angry. She was sad, sadder than I had ever seen her.

“Gone?” I backed away in a daze. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Enough!” she yelled.

“Sharon.” Pop’s voice carried from the other room. Seconds later he appeared half-dressed for work. His pants open. His work boots untied, and his shirt unbuttoned, exposing an unimpressive chest and potbelly. “What is all the yelling about?”

“Your son refuses to obey his mother,” Mom said.

“Is that right, Oz?” Pop asked.

“I just want to know where Kimball is.”

Mom and Pop shared a glance. Pop cleared his throat and approached me. “I thought you understood, Oz.”

“Understood what?”

“We didn’t have a choice.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I spotted a flaky purple rash on Pop’s neck. He unconsciously scratched it with black fingernails as he spoke.

“We had to put him down, son.”

The words hit me like a fist to the throat. I found myself not being able to swallow. My eyes burned from holding back the tears. I wanted to punch my father for even thinking such a thing. Kimball was a part of the family. He was a warrior. A tear escaped, and I quickly wiped it away.

Pop put his hand on my shoulder. His touch chilled me. I could see the purple rash was on his wrist, too. “It was the law, Oz. We had to.”

I couldn’t speak. Mom and Pop seemed to struggle with what to say as well. I could see the guilt on their faces, but I could also see the futility. They didn’t want to kill my dog, but they had to. I ran to my room and slammed the door behind me.

I paced. All hope was gone. I couldn’t start over again without Kimball. He was truly fearless. I was a coward pretending to be brave. I was beginning to doubt my own recollection of the events of the past few days. Maybe I didn’t fight as gallantly as I remembered. Maybe I had been the recipient of dumb luck. Maybe I survived because of circumstance and not skill. I had fooled myself into believing I was a leader, but I was nothing more than some scrawny kid who wanted to get home.

I looked at my bed and thought about crawling back under the covers and wishing myself back to the Takers’ universe. At least there I was a fighter. Or was I? I didn’t know anymore.