Authors: Bryant Delafosse
“Twenty four hours later they found his body in the front seat of his car parked in the empty parking lot of the Astrodome.”
Cora began to cry against her mother’s shoulder.
Lara held her tightly, stroking her back and riding the steady waves of the sobs wracking her tiny body.
Chance stepped up behind Owen and rested a hand on his shoulder but the ten-year-old barely noticed.
He stood as still as a statue, his eyes gazing at Charlene raptly.
“He called me on the phone at four o’clock that morning talking about things that never happened,” Charlene proclaimed.
“Psychobabble like the assassination of JFK.
The election of Nixon in 1968, when every child with a third grade education knows he was president before Kennedy.
A war in Vietnam that lasted until 1975 instead of 1970.
A peanut farmer named Carter.”
“Your father was a good man,” Lara said soothingly into Cora’s ear.
“A good man who went insane and slowly despaired.
With you for a confessor, the choice he ultimately made never surprised me.
Death was a welcome alternative to investing in a lifetime of pain with you.”
Stiffening, Lara lifted her head and said: “I guess I should have known that the life of a child raised by a woman like you would end tragically.
Maybe it was my faith in the man that made me believe that his resolve would be stronger than yours.”
There was a clunk and clatter of cardboard dropping to the floor.
Charlene turned toward Lara.
“You scourged him with indifference and crucified him with your guilt.”
Chance saw the shoebox fall to the floor just before the old lady turned with what looked to him like a gun.
He swept Owen back behind him and turned his back to her.
Lara glanced at Chance as he turned away, noticing with alarm a handgun tucked into the lip of his jeans.
What was a fifteen year old kid doing with a gun?
As her hate for the woman who murdered her husband rose, the presence of the other spewed into her brain like
an
stream of venom through a snake’s fang.
Kill them.
Kill them all while you have the chance.
She seized the metal ball in her hands and let the shoebox fall to her feet (the small forgotten object in the plastic baggie dropping alongside it).
At the sight of her grandchildren, the throbbing hate she felt ebbed momentarily, and she re-exerted control over what was left of her.
No, she snapped.
Just the woman.
The children can go.
You must kill them!
Kill them all!
I command you!
You command me, Charlene thought with amusement.
Do you know who I am?
Who are
you
to command me?
I am.
All that surrounds you is my creation, except for the humans.
They must be removed immediately so that my domain may be perfect again.
I am human.
Shall I destroy myself then?
You belong to me.
Do what I ask!
I belong to no one, Charlene roared with every cell of her brain, lashing out psychically like a cornered lioness.
For a moment, there was complete and utter silence within her and she thought that perhaps “her friend” had once again left her to her own devices.
Good riddance, she thought in passing.
Instead, it appeared again the next moment, but now she sensed distance and somehow disappointment.
So be it.
If you will not remove them, I will.
Charlene felt her legs go numb,
then
disappear beneath her.
She felt her body move forward and as much as she fought, she could not stop herself.
A tingling blanket of coldness rushed up her torso through the core of her, freezing her midsection (along with what was left of her womb) and her legs.
My son is truly gone then, she thought.
All that remained of my Benjamin has disappeared including the place where I created him.
As the icy fingers moved steadily up her chest and into her arms, she realized fleetingly that indeed a part of her boy still survived.
In the children.
She watched as the hand with the grenade disappeared over her shoulder, like a big league pitcher cocking his arm back to hurl a heater across the plate.
“Run Cora!
Run Owen!” Charlene screamed as her arm holding the grenade recoiled.
But the children were already in motion.
Chance and Owen already had a head start and Lara was a few steps behind them, carrying Cora in her arms.
Behind her, Charlene moved stiffly toward them, screaming at them like a crazy person not in control of her own mind.
Like Ben.
No, not like him.
He had been sick.
A fresh wave of guilt washed over her again and like a final reminder of her sin, her legs collapsed beneath her and she tripped, falling forward atop Cora.
Locking her shoulders, she came down on the flats of her forearms, dropping Cora with a thud and driving the air from her lungs.
Lara fell forward, nose to nose with her daughter.
Cora’s eyes were white, the pupils rolled up again like shades of a window and she gave a sudden gasp, sucking air back into her chest, words fluttering out like birds from a shaken tree.
“Grandma Charley’s gone black,” she whispered.
A figure separated from the shadows surrounding them and rushed up beside Charlene, snatching the hand holding the metal ball and squeezing it firmly closed.
“Release me right now,” Charlene shrieked incredulously, but the other simply gave a single shake of the head.
“You’re hurting me!”
“It is necessary to prevent further injury to innocent lives.”
Lara jerked her head back to look over her shoulder so suddenly that she felt the tensed muscles in her neck crack.
Two thoughts occurred to her: How long had he been watching them, she wondered, and how unlike a machine to apply stealth.
“Simon!” Cora squealed in joy.
When Simon’s eyes shifted, Charlene reached up with her other hand and attempted to pry his hand away.
In turn, he seized the hand and wrenched it away.
“I demand that you let me go!”
“No, “he simply replied.
“Lara, are you and the children okay?”
“Skinned knees and bruised elbows, but otherwise we’re fine,” she called out, casting a look up at Owen and Chance standing at a safe distance up the corridor.
Simon turned his eyes back to the woman held in both his hands, studying her as closely as he would have a damaged Bot lying prone before him in an effort to determine where the defect laid.
“You share several key genetic characteristics with young Coraline.”
“She used to be Grandma Charley,” Cora volunteered.
Lara glanced over at her daughter.
“Used to?”
“Grammy’s gone bye-bye,” Cora replied matter-of-factly.
“The Boogeyman’s got her now, Mommy.”
As Cora threw herself against her, Lara cast a look over her daughter’s shoulder at her son, his wide eyes staring fearfully at his grandmother and the man opposing her.
She recognized that look intimately.
He has his own Witch, Lara thought with a shudder.
Charlene stopped struggling and cast a glance from Cora to Owen.
Slowly her eyes shifted back to Simon.
“Why did you deactivate the Emergency Beacon, Unit 001B?”
“The data transmitted was erroneous.
The source has been corrupted,” he answered, slowly but firmly bringing Charlene’s arms down to her hips.
“How do you know my manufacture designation?”
“I am,” pronounced the woman standing before him with the ghost of a smirk on her lips.
The two stared for several long moments directly into each other’s eyes, then Simon spoke: “Lara, take Cora and the two boys and retreat to a safe distance please.”
“Simon, what’s happening?”
“She holds an explosive device in her hand and I do not know the age or stability of the ordinance.
Go!
Now!”
Lara set Cora to her feet and turned her in the direction of the dealership.
Giving her a pat on the bottom, she said in a firm tone, “You and your brother go back to the showroom and wait for us.
No arguing this time.
Go!”
Cora rushed over to Owen and Chance, who continued to stand at a respectable distance.
Gathering them both around the shoulders, Chance led them quickly away, casting several uncertain glances back over his shoulder.
“Lara…”
“Simon,” she responded sharply, “don’t you know me by now, Sunshine?”
“I know that you will protect the children at the risk of your own personal safety.”
“My children are safe now thanks to you,” she responded.
“None of you are safe, woman.”
Simon regarded Charlene with interest.
Lara sidestepped slowly around the peripheral, eying the weapon caught between the fingers of the woman and the machine.
“Charlene, what are you doing?
You could have killed your own grandchildren!”
Charlene began to chuckle deep in her throat.
“I do intend to kill her.
Along with the rest of you.”
Overcoming her shock at the reaction, Lara stepped around to Simon’s back and darted close to his ear.
“I’m afraid that she may have gone insane,” she hissed.
“That’s one explanation.”
Charlene turned her eyes back to Simon.
“You received the data, yet you continue to allow these units to function,” she stated.
“You are a faulty unit and must be removed from service.
Shut yourself down, Unit 001B.”