Authors: Chase Webster
Chapter 7
An elderly man held a woman in her mid-twenties around the waist, with her legs bent over his shoulders. The old man looked Mr. Universe ripped; like forty scrambled egg whites every morning for breakfast ripped. He wore a gray Deftones T-shirt and shorts too short with untied New Balance sneakers on his bare feet. The young woman hunched over in his lap was in a UTA polo with a giant atom and the word “Planetarium” written across the back. Supervision would have been happy to see their staff giving customers such a friendly welcome.
“I apologize.” I began to slowly shut the door as the elderly Deftones fan lifted his head from the girl’s neck.
His deep black eyes filled with confusion and distant recognition. A smudge of red climbed upside down from his upper cheek down to his pinched lips. Flesh hung from his mouth and a trail of sticky liquid led from his face to a gaping hole in the soft tissue on the inside of the girl’s left shoulder. His eyebrows tightened, almost meeting in the middle. He spit little bits of skin and said the most heart-wrenching thing I’d ever heard. “Jacob?”
“Oh shit!” My brain exploded and I stood dumbfounded. I’d never seen the man in my life. There’s little more disconcerting than an old man, mouth full of blood, saying your name. My world shut down.
Where am I?
A bathroom.
Who is this?
Retired American Gladiator?
What do I do?
Two options: run or prepare to defend myself.
Act…
I froze as the Deftones fan tossed the girl to the side and tackled me into the wall. An automatic hand dryer jammed into my spine. A meaty, calloused hand wrapped around my throat and lifted me up the wall. Thick fingernails dug into my skin.
The old man’s eyes stared into mine like empty vortexes. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” I gasped and flailed fruitlessly.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” He said this as if he meant me specifically. Nothing about him seemed familiar. How could it?
My arm weighed half a ton, but somehow I managed to lift it to his face and thrust my thumb into one of his hollow eyes. I clinched my fingers in his tasseled hair and shoved my thumb into his socket.
He screamed, pulled me back and slammed me into the hand dryer with one hand.
The old man’s mouth opened ungodly wide. He snapped his mouth at my side as if to take a chunk out of my abdomen. My knee instinctively found his throat and kept his face at bay as I threw a couple wild punches.
“Eat’em,” I yelled between struggled breaths. “A little help would be nice.”
I dislodged myself from the grip of the snapping grandpa and smacked hard against the moist floor. The overwhelmingly rotten air rushed back as I slid on my back, using my feet to shield me from the lumbering lunatic.
I pushed toward the exit, keeping my feet between the lumbering cannibal and myself. He grabbed my ankle and lifted me upside down. Everything flipped over. The bag of piss looked like a balloon clung to the ceiling.
I thrashed with my free foot, which he grabbed with such strength that gravity felt like it reversed.
The upside-down monster grimaced. “Why did you come in here?”
“To piss, dude,” blood rushed to my brain. “EAT’EM!”
I looked over the bottom of the stall partitions at the bleeding girl that appeared to be lying on the ceiling. She looked so accepting; her eyes open, staring back at me.
“EAT’EM!”
“Eat what? Why are you yelling eat them?” asked Mr. Universe.
My fist barreled into his groin and he threw me. My head crashed into the urinal and a big bag of nasty softened my fall. Careful not to pop it, I rolled under the first stall so I lied next to the bleeding woman.
The room rotated back to its normal orientation as I stared into her eyes. She looked young and lovely – her eyes crystal blue and familiar.
I rolled to my back as the old man pushed open the stall door and loomed over me, a giant. Clinched in his tight fist was the disgusting mop – a shit-water stiffened pad barely hung onto the metal rod. He lifted it above his head.
A sense of déjà vu came over me. Still, I had no idea who he was or why he was trying to kill me.
I rolled quickly under the stall, avoiding the crack of splintering wood and clash of metal against tile. Lifting myself up, I sat by the toilet opposite of the unconscious woman. The floor was covered in caked urine and twisted pubic hair from dozens of different dudes with a dire need of lessons in etiquette. In front of the toilet looked like some idiots had a pissing-for-distance contest not long ago.
My attention turned to the missing chunk from the woman’s shoulder. The hole looked much smaller. At second glance scar tissue had already formed. It looked like she’d been bitten more than a week ago.
“What the?” the words fell from my lips.
“That guy looks like you,” Eat’em said from somewhere outside the stall, bringing me back to the fight, “if you swallowed another you that had already swallowed another you. Yes. He’s like the Russian Stacking Doll version of you! But with muscles.”
“Thanks,” relief spread through me at the sound of his scratchy voice. “Any advice?”
“Yes,” Eat’em ducked under the partition. He made a face at the unconscious woman and continued, “buy a DeLorean and go back in time to remind yourself not to be such an idiot. And bring me a drink from the future.”
“If I make it there,” I said as the big guy slammed through the stall door, “I’ll think about it!” I slid under both stalls, back toward the urinal.
“Who are you talking to, Jacob?” The brute followed me inside and outside the first stall as I rolled back and forth under the partition.
Did he use my name again? In my confusion I couldn’t be sure. How would he know me?
I rolled out once more, planted both feet on the swinging stall door and kicked it hard into the brute. I stood and ran into the door, pushing hard against a force much stronger than myself. I rammed into it repeatedly as he stood there like an unmovable wall. When I felt him push back, I dropped to the floor and planted both my feet on his ankles as the door swung open above my face. He stumbled forward slightly before catching himself. I grabbed the bottom of the door and pulled it over me once more, smacking him hard in his face and he fell back into the stall.
On my feet, I ran toward the exit. I shoved past the bathroom door and crashed into one of the wet floor signs cordoning off the entrance to the planetarium. Balance lost, I stumbled and fell into the double doors, which flung open, toppling me toward a stairwell lined with theater seating. I held tight to a rail, spun on my heel, and momentum carried me headfirst into the stand for the projector.
I slumped down, out of breath.
“Disgusting, yes.” Eat’em sauntered to my side, his tail waving gracefully behind him. “Absolutely grotesque!”
“Grotesque?” the word clattered against my skull.
“You didn’t wash your hands,” the little demon stuck out his tongue as he sat on the step beside me. “Just kidding, yes.”
I stared up at the curved ceiling, the long tiles normally hidden by the illusion of space. Constellations formed from architecture instead of stars. No Big Dippers or Orion’s Belts. No Pluto or Saturn. Those were a hallucination created by a small electronic box. Without it, the room contained no magic. My father used to love the planetarium, but now it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be reproduced with a cheap smart phone app. A device small enough to fit in my pocket could be pointed at the sky, day or night, and the universe would be labeled – zoomed in with a pinch. A telescope that could be used anywhere.
“This is magical, Jacob,” Eat’em used me as a ladder to get to the projector. “Look at that, yes. Do you see that?”
I rolled over and crouched behind the projector stand. My throbbing skull would have to wait. Dread pressed against my heart. A dour aura pulled at my nerves and a change came over me. I pushed away my fear and gave myself to a feeling far more sinister. My hand searched the opposite side of the projector stand and my fingers found the plug.
“Hey!” Eat’em shouted. “Don’t unplug it! I must know what it does, yes!”
The old man moved impossibly fast. Faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He leapt sideways through the open hallway, defying gravity as he jumped several rows of chairs. All of his muscles tensed as he leapt, flying toward me like a two hundred pound baseball. The twenty-pound projector was my DeMARINI baseball bat and I aimed for the stands.
Both the projector and the old man’s skull shattered on impact. Fragments of bone, plastic, and metal shards exploded from my fists. Sour blood splattered from the impact as the man who knew my name crumpled into the back of a row of seats and dropped to the floor.
I should have felt remorse, maybe shock, but I felt powerful. I should have been afraid, but I was calm. I should have been confused, but I was clear-headed.
Adrenaline worked wonders in my system, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it wore off and I collapsed under the stress of what I’d done. For the moment, I had to disappear. And as diverse as the crowd may be on campus, running around sticky with blood was sure to get me noticed.
I left Eat’em to mourn his shattered projector and hurried into the planetarium lobby to lock both sets of double doors leading into the building. The planetarium itself was closed, but I ran the risk of someone using the building as a shortcut to get from one class to another. The doors were glass, so I just had to count on nobody putting too much effort into looking inside.
On the opposite side of the lobby stood a supply closet and a small stand that sold souvenirs and UT swag, including mugs, pens, and a couple boxes. An open box of gym clothes beneath one of the shelves looked rummaged through. I grabbed a pair of blue shorts, a grey shirt, an orange hat with a mustang on it, a towel that matched the hat, and a container of hand soap from an open locker before making my way back to the bathroom crime scene.
I used the sink to wash up. Soap suds and blood pooled at my feet, as I scrubbed hard at my skin. I rinsed my hair over and over until the water ran clear. The clothes I brought went into my backpack, which I grabbed from the counter where I left it, and I dressed in my new outfit.
I looked like a college student. Or at the very least, I looked like Steve Buscemi playing a college student. I scraped what blood I could from my fingertips and ran the faucets with the drains closed until the water ran over, onto the floor.
“Can we get Frosties after this?” Eat’em sulked into the hallway from the planetarium. “I need something to take my mind off the magical box you took from me, yes.”
“Sure,” I didn’t care. Hopefully, Val wouldn’t mind the diversion, and if so, I’d deal with Eat’em’s pouting then. “Whatever you want, buddy. You ready to go?”
“Yes.”
I hesitated to look at the girl beneath the stall, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As awful as I knew I would feel later, I left her where she lie as I took a pen from my backpack and very carefully punctured the nasty bag beneath the urinal.
Cleaning the bathroom wasn’t an option. I knew nothing of criminology, or how easily they could separate DNA from the soapy tiles. As horrible as it was, I had to pop the bag.
The horrid scent worsened as foul liquid followed me into the hallway and quickly flowed into the open theater, pouring down the stairs.
I put my
shoes back on in the lobby and waited until I felt certain all traces of my presence were hidden in filth. The sour aroma filled the room. Hidden in the horrid pool of body fluids was my DNA, but I could do nothing about it.
My throat tightened. I needed to move before I began to feel nauseous again.
“Let’s go,” I headed out, Eat’em lagging behind.
“What are you going to tell Val about your new outfit?” Eat’em met my eyes in the door’s reflection.
“School spirit,” I answered as we stepped into the sun.
Chapter 8
Val had a copy of the paper the morning after the incident. I ripped it from his hand, dreading the inevitable. No front-page headline declaring a murder on campus. I flipped to page two. Page three. Nothing. Then on the fourth page, a blurb so insignificant I almost missed it. The police blotter: “Vandal strikes Planetarium”.
My eyes deceived me. It couldn’t be. They had to have found the bodies. The search party had to have started. The school should be on lockdown. Where was the article I expected?
My heart wrenched as I thought about it, a cold chill travelled down my spine. I expected Val to ask why I looked so guilty, but he let me read.
“Yesterday afternoon the custodians arrived to find the projection system in the planetarium in pieces. Vandals broke in and destroyed the 20,000-dollar projection equipment, leaving nothing but shrapnel in its place. In addition, a nearby bathroom was found to have suffered a similar fate as running sinks and urine flooded the floor, and several stalls were found dismantled. Police expect the same vandal is responsible. The planetarium underwent a huge remodeling and was set to reopen next month.”
As I reached the end of the blurb I almost burst, “What about the girl?” But I caught myself at “Wha…” Nowhere was she mentioned. No bodies or missing persons mentioned in the entire paper. Why? No way did I imagine what happened.
I began to plan my trip back to the planetarium.
“Earth to Jacob!”
My kneejerk reaction was to think it was the mystery woman from the bathroom. Inexplicable sorcery helped her escape death and she knew what I’d done.
“JACOB!” a hand struck the table in front of me. “Wake up!”
The sweet smell of ocean breeze snapped me out of my daze. “Uh… Dixie?” my voice cracked sheepishly. “Hi.”
“Hi!” She smiled broadly, her face pulling back in a fake display of shyness. She wore her purple-streaked hair in a bun. Her makeup seemed less harsh than it had been the day before. Still, she’d gone bold with eyeliner, giving herself the appearance of an Egyptian princess. “Are you OK? You weren’t in class.”
“Yeah,” my gaze dropped from her face to her tiny hand, which still planted on the table in front of me. “I’m sorry. Yeah, I forgot what time it was. I haven’t been getting much sleep.”
“Oh whatever!” Eat’em yanked at my hair. His toes gripped my collarbone as he stood on my shoulders, leaning over the top of my head. “All you do is sleep, yes. I suggest we procure a Jolt Cola. You wake up long enough to say no, yes. I request the acquisitioning of a Standing Rock. You wake, say no, sleep, yes. I beseech, Jacob! The caroling warble of an ice cream truck! Wake, no, yes! ‘Haven’t been getting much sleep.’ For crying out loud…”
“Well,” Dixie pushed me aside with her hip and sat on the edge of the chair. Eat’em clambered over to my opposite shoulder. Dixie’s hipbone pressed against mine. “What class do you have next?”
She almost sat in my lap. I felt her breathing on my cheek and the hairs on my arm tingled as her skin brushed against mine. The air caught in my throat. My chest squeezed out an answer. “Nothing.”
“You’re done for the day?” Her turquoise eyes glittered so close.
“Yep.” I tasted her breath on my lips. “Got a few hours to waste until my uncle… uh… cousin gets off.”
“Good!” she wrapped her hand over mine on my lap. I wanted to wipe my sweaty palms on my pants, but hoped instead she wouldn’t notice. “While you’re waiting on your uncle-cousin you can come to my class then? I have Biology… another hard one. Not for you, of course, since you’re a genius, but for the rest of the world… it’s a tough one. I have Kempter. She’s an absolute science nut. Pretty much, if you don’t like biology as much as she does, you can expect a big goose egg on all of your tests.”
“Goose egg?”
“Yep,” she raised her narrow eyebrows. The follicles where she plucked them were beginning to grow back. “A big fat zero.”
Eat’em whispered in my ear as if anyone would hear him even had he marched up and down the library playing a small bugle and banging a snare drum against his head. “I don’t like her, Jacob. Does she have to sit so close? Tell her to go away, yes.”
“We wouldn’t want you to get a zero, would we?” No greater confidence boost existed than doing the opposite of what the demon wanted me to do.
Dixie wrapped her arms around my neck, hurtling Eat’em to the floor. He landed with a thump and cursed loudly.
“Maybe afterward you can fill me in on what I missed in class today?”
“It’s a date,” Dixie smiled and stood, pulling me up behind her by the hand. “I sure hope Leibniz does it for you. If so, we’re going to have a lot to talk about.”
Eat’em perked up at the mention of Leibniz. He trotted up my side until he perched on my shoulder again. “Leibniz first, then she goes away, yes!”
I followed Dixie out of the library. The philosopher seemed as good a topic as any. Anything that could keep my mind off the missing planetarium employee and keep Eat’em quiet for a few minutes I’d meet with open arms.
Still the first week of school, the class was primarily a meet and greet, with a silly name game as a way to introduce ourselves to our lab partners for the semester. Professor Kempter noticed my name not on the roster and almost sent me packing, but instead offered to let me continue the class if I went and added the course “with immediacy.” With Dixie pressing to be my lab partner, I couldn’t say no.
Using the letters of our first names we had to come up with words that described ourselves. It went around the room with people using the same words over and over with little variety. It got to me:
“Just” – I believed in fairness. Justice.
“Arlington” – I was born in Arlington, Virginia… and, of course, I’m in Arlington now.
“Caring” – I don’t know… Maybe “Copout” would be better. Everyone else seemed to be caring, so I guess I’m caring too.
“Obstacle” – Sure. Why not?
“Brave” – I must have sounded like an idiot. No more than anyone else.
“Daring, Intelligent, eXtraverted, Impressive, Earthy.”
“Hey!” Eat’em stood stoic on the large black table that made up our desk. It was fitted with built-in sinks and Bunsen burners. Eat’em pricked up and growled at Dixie. “She skipped me! Yes! Ugh… Jacob. You got to get rid of her. I hate her so much, yes. My name is Eat’em! Energy, Amp, Throttle, Emerge, Monster!” It might have sounded deep had he not just been listing the brands of his favorite energy drinks.
We continued around the room, learning how we were all a bunch of sweet, caring individuals and then we played a few more nauseating games to set everyone’s names to heart.
After the grade school introduction, Kempter finally handed out the curriculum. It contained a range of material grouped by macro and microbiological studies. A month would be devoted to each of three fields, the last of which interested me most: Bacteria, virus, and parasitic infections.
I told Dixie I would see her soon and watched her out of the lab. Part of me wanted to follow her, but I knew I couldn’t wait two months to speak to Professor Kempter about what was on my mind.
“Professor,” I waited as the last student made his way out the door. “Mind if I ask you something?”
Kempter had a narrow face on a large body. A mug shot would make her look much smaller than she really was. Still, she looked pretty and young for a college teacher, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. Her brow furrowed as she looked up at me, almost as if she were disappointed in my presence. “I usually only take questions from my students, Jacob, but since you promised to fix the issue, I’ll make an exception. What is your question?”
“It’s about bacterias.”
“Bacteria,” she corrected me. “Yes, we’ll discuss bacteria and viruses in the last chapter. You’ve got a while.”
Eat’em peed in the drain of the eyewash station at the corner of the room. He shouted over his shoulder, “Let’s go! I’m scheduled for a battle to the death with a bottle of syrup.”
I hesitated. With the planetarium incident still fairly fresh in my mind, I didn’t want to say something incriminating. Then again, for all anyone knew it was merely an act of vandalism. Still, I felt I ran the risk of saying too much, that maybe she knew more than the paper suggested. “I’ve taken interest in the subject recently. I saw, uh, I saw an animal acting a little strangely and uh…”
“Strangely how?” Kempter puckered her lips, her face pinched in curiosity.
“Well,” I relaxed, “I guess it seemed to recognize me. Like, it should have just ignored me, but it didn’t. Instead it looked at me as if it’d seen me before.”
“An animal?”
“Yeah,” I scratched my brow, “a dog. I mean, had it been a person, he might have said I looked familiar. That’s the look it gave. And it attacked me.”
“The dog.”
“Yes,” I said, “the dog.”
Kempter sighed. “Sounds like a regular dog to me. Maybe it liked your scent.”
“When. Did. You. Get. Attacked. By. A. Dog?” Eat’em called out while banging his head against the door.
“I guess,” I said. “I just figured it might be infected with something. It wasn’t a wild dog, it seemed domesticated, but it was very aggressive. It bit someone. A girl. It looked bad…”
“Yeah, bad,” Dr. Kempter interrupted me. “Did you call 911 or animal control? Where did this happen?”
Scrambling for words, trying to describe the assailant as a dog had dug me a hole I didn’t plan on talking my way out of. “Well, no… I didn’t call anyone. It happened so fast, the dog chased me away from the girl. I was able to beat the dog away with a tree limb. I figured the dog was sick. I went to, uh, check on the girl, but she was gone. I guess she must have healed quickly. I don’t know who the girl was or if she went to the hospital or where she went or anything. The whole thing seemed weird, you know.”
“Doesn’t sound like any bacteria or infection I’ve ever heard of. Rabies maybe? Was the dog frothing at the mouth?” I shook my head no. Kempter threw her paperwork into a satchel and shoed me toward the door. She checked some equipment under the desks and went to turn out the lights. “What do you mean when you say the girl healed quickly? How much time passed between the bite and her disappearing? ”
“Minutes,” I said. “Seconds. I mean, I didn’t get a great look at it, but it seemed like a bad bite. Not something you could just walk away from, but there was no sign of her. She was gone.”
We stepped into the hallway. Kempter’s berry-shaped frame filled the doorway as she passed through. “Sounds a little fantastic to me, Jacob.”
“What if it was an infection? How would you tell?” I felt like a complete buffoon. “What if it’s a virus that hasn’t been discovered yet? Is there any way to know something is infected by looking at them?”
“Like the dog?” she asked. “What kind of dog was it?”
Eat’em shouted, “A CHIHUAHUA!” and I repeated the word, regretting it immediately. “Chihuahua.”
“Sounds like a vicious Chihuahua,” Kempter smiled.
Eat’em laughed and I shook my head shamefully, “It was.”
“Well, Jacob, it wouldn’t be too difficult to tell you if your friend was bit by a super-powered Chihuahua,” She shoed me once more, leading me backward. “I just need a blood sample and if that dog is really that aggressive…” She paused. “Someone should catch it and put it down. Man-eating Chihuahuas running around… it’s dangerous.”
With a facetious “Stay safe” Kempter hurried off, moving faster than her beach ball body should have allowed.