Copyright 2012 Michael Offutt All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including printing, photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.
This novella is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Wraith
Chapter One
Jordan walked over to Kathy in a cowboy strut. It seemed out of place in a teenager who wore designer sneakers. As he drew closer, he saw a look of horror on her face that chilled his blood. It caught him by surprise.
She stood gaping at the work of a psychopath, or possibly something worse.
Broken bones littered the concrete floor.
For a moment, that was all Jordan saw, but he felt a familiar tingle of energy course down his arms raising the fine, blond, almost invisible hairs on his skin.
The slipstream-it was trouble-he was the cause, and he couldn't control it. Jordan tried to push the slipstream away, but it wouldn't back down any more than a hardon in tight denim did in the middle of a crowded hallway at school.
Try as he might to subdue it, the force swept him and his sister up into it. The whole behaved like a quantum singularity from which they could not escape.
Before his eyes, the bones fragmented, spun in swirling circles, and then disappeared entirely. In their place he saw three women, skin gray and wrinkled around the eyes, but flesh still toned in the agelessness of early twenties.
Two men, faces ringed in thick facial hair with chains around their wrists, cowered in shadows. They were spattered with filth, looked haggard and beaten, and were using what remained of their energy to list horror on their faces like the fine print on Craig's list.
Jordan heard a loud boom and the wood door covered in peeling white paint splintered inward from shotgun fire. Four women illuminated by sunlight, wearing leotards of leopard skin print on leather, and reflective shiny sunglasses across the brim of the nose, entered the alcove. Brief, terrified screaming followed, and the female in front holding a cigar in her lips, fingers stained with tobacco juice, raised the shotgun and took aim.
Jordan saw that the woman sported a unique tattoo on her arm that looked like a black hand. She shot one man in the chest and the smell of gunpowder washed over Jordan's nostrils, choking him momentarily, and the man crumpled in a bloody heap on the floor.
"Where are the other two?" the woman asked, accent southern and thick like gravy.
With hands shaking, one man urinated in his pants, and the stain spread outward. "They're in the mine-you won't get them."
Next to him, Kathy screamed, turned to Jordan, and shook his shoulders violently to force him out of the slipstream. His neck, stiff with tension, felt on the verge of snapping like a twig.
Jordan saw the woman pause for a second and remove her glasses to peer his way when the vision finally faded. "Jordan, stop it. Please...stop," she sobbed, shaking his shoulders. He turned to her, swallowed hard, tasting blood in his mouth, face gleaming with fresh sweat mixed with speckles of black gunpowder.
"They were murdered," he said, half under his breath. "Murdered and just left here for insects to scavenge."
Kathy unzipped the front of her skin-tight motorcycle suit, lifted a corner of her shirt that was only partially damp to his nose and it came away red. "Don't ever do that again," she blurted out.
"I didn't intend to, Kat! I-I don't have the best control of this thing yet." His hands trembled in the same way they did when he was high on caffeine and adrenaline. He took one last glance at the scattered human remains that lay piled in the rear of the shop and at the door that was shut with a large, gaping hole in it from the shotgun blast. Empty shell casings in red plastic tipped with oxidized brass littered the ground. "Let's go out front-I-I'm done exploring."
When the twins returned to Kolin, the svelte Brit thanked him for having the foresight to bring him the air hose from inside the garage.
"Did you get into any trouble?" Kolin asked and began to fill their tanks by siphoning the gas from the underground tanks into their motorcycles. "I thought I heard something."
When no answer came, Kolin looked up at Jordan over his shoulder, young and handsome in a way that he had no idea what to make of him, but the peculiar look on the lad's face drew him in. Curious, he bit. "You look like you've been kicked in the goolies. I hope that isn't the case of course. What's got you so gutted, mate?"
Jordan crouched on the balls of his feet. He looked down at his faded Levis and out across the scrub with pretty blue eyes. "I think a bunch of people were murdered here by some women carrying shotguns. They had chains about their wrists-maybe they were slaves. I'm not sure. One of them mentioned a mine."
"Did they bear any distinctive markings?"
Kathy spoke, "One of them had a black hand tattoo on her forearm. Does that mean anything?"
"No. But if my helm can get a signal out here, I can have a butchers at it. Give me a second." He grabbed the glossy black head gear shaped like a motorcycle helmet. Kolin donned it and used his tongue to press touch sensitive buttons on the interior of the visor which doubled as a computer screen that only the wearer could see.
"Is that a computer?" Jordan queried.
Kolin nodded. "I can control everything with a tongue pad and if I need to zoom in on details, I can press my nose to a point near dead center of the glass to get a much closer look at things. One second, mate, and I may have an answer-"
There was a minute of silence as that ended when Kolin lifted the visor and spoke, "This thing has one hell of an aerial-I'll have to remember to thank Met when I see him again-he's such a good bloke. Anyway, there's a possible match for the icon you saw. The Black Hand is a lawless gang that operates a refinery near old Grand Junction which really isn't that far from here. They have a business with I.A.G. to supply refined fuel and I'm thinking that what you saw were prisoners that came out this way to hide. See, Kilvarough has no more room in its prisons to keep anyone that's been sentenced to her Majesty's pleasure. Instead, these skivers are sent into the wastelands to serve their time on corporate farms or in fuel refineries. They must've escaped from a detention center and the women were bounty hunters sent to collect them."
"Bounty Hunters?" Kathy questioned. "Those people were defenseless. They were murdered in cold blood. I doubt that was any bounty hunter, it looked like they took pleasure in committing murder."
Kolin's eyes drifted south as he stood there filling the tanks, tongue barely visible between his lips-a pose he often took when deep in thought. "The whole thing is dodgy, but it doesn't change the fact that we have to go through old Grand Junction. It'll be prudent for us to skive anything that may attract attention, and I don't know about you but I'm proper zonked. After a one night layover, I suggest we depart and cross from West to East at the ruins of St. Louis. Remember, we need to go through during the day because if we try to cross at night, we'll make some fine meal or worse for a night-roving beastie with a craving for human flesh."
Kolin started winding up the hose. "This could prove useful later. Let's get a move on-we don't have much daylight left. As we get further south, you may see the White Tower. I'll outright pass on any questions you may have about it; as no one knows who built it and as far as living memory goes, it was always there and was so elevated in fact that its top disappeared into the clouds above and glimmered in the night sky. When it shattered, the whole world went shambolic. Ours started drifting into yours-and then the monsters up and appeared, all drinking blood, hunting, and just downright being nasty night terrors. We'll just have to be cautious."
Jordan looked at his sister and between them, Kolin thought they understood about half of what he said. Kolin decided that he liked the seventeen year old boy, and that there was something definitely charming about him aside from his astonishing looks.
The twins followed Kolin's lead and got back onto their bullet bikes without saying a word. Kolin directed them south on the desolate interstate, leaving the Tesoro station in the dust of history.
Please let me know what you thought via an email please. :)
I will promise to post Chapter Two soon.