the trouble in berea
part three
CHAPTER NINE
Eleanor Robertson screamed.
She did not know what else there was to do.
She screamed till her throat was raw; she screamed until she was gasping for breath.
She screamed because the Smiley-Faced Man stood in front of her.
She screamed because he clutched a still-smoking revolver.
She screamed because he used it to splatter the floor with Lewis Gordon’s blood.
She screamed because now he was pointing it at her.
Eleanor Robertson did not care to think about God. She always told herself ‘when I bite the dust, I’ll see if there’s anything else. But what’s the rush?’ She never understood the eternal fascination with divine, post-mortem judgement, and thought the secret to being a good person was to do exactly that, be a good person. But she did fear death—to her, there was only one life we were guaranteed, and it was the one we were currently living, so cherishing it was imperative.
That was why, when the Smiley-Faced Man’s hand went up, she threw herself forward like a raging bull, slipping on bits of Lewis Gordon’s leaking brain matter before slamming her shoulder into his gut. He growled like a beast as he was sent backwards, firing a bullet that did nothing but cause wooden splinters to sprinkle down from the ceiling.
The Smiley-Faced Man hit ground, Eleanor hit the body. Lewis Gordon’s eyes, mangled from the .357 hollow-point burrowed between them, stared back at her. His face was twisted in fear—he’d known he was going to die but hadn’t been given enough time to make peace with it. All that knowledge, fifty, maybe sixty years of a life, was leaking out the back of his head in gummed-together chunks. Another scream punched out of her throat, but her brain was two steps ahead of her heart. It got her hands moving. She snatched the snub-nose out her waistband and, gripping it with both hands, snapped it toward the Smiley-Faced Man, who aim his magnum right back at her.
Two people. Two guns. One man already down and dead.
Eleanor was shaking, the Smiley-Faced Man was not. He was a killer and she was barely versed in shooting. The tense air was made heavier by their rushed breaths, lungs struggling to catch up after the scramble. Both of them knew the stakes. Berea, and now the body on the floor between them, made it clear—one wrong move, one bullet to the skull.
Behind her, H.O.S.S spit out the transcoded voices of groggy truckers woken from a Jack-Daniels-daze. They were attempting to decipher her verbal vomit by figuring out who was responsible for such an elaborate prank. Aliens? Mass-murder? A gunshot? That provoked giggles and snickers that quickly turned into worried whispers. They were already starting to wonder if such an oddity was real.
“Oh, it’s real,” Eleanor muttered. “It’s real, real.”
They couldn’t hear her and, even if they could, they wouldn’t believe her, either. They’d talk about it, they’d dissect it, and then know what? They’d move on. People always moved on. Society always moved on. Life always moved on. Time went forward, not backwards, and for the average Joe, looking into the past was a powerless thing. What would it do for them?
But if just one person remembered her words and stayed curious about them…
The Smiley-Faced Man stepped forward; Eleanor stepped back.
His boot squelched the sticky mess of coagulated blood, ripping through bits of brain matter. He shook chunks of thought and person off his rubber sole like mud.
The silence was cutting—she’d rather speak up and be shot than just sit there, waiting to be shot. She collected her thoughts, wound them into a bundle of spit-spackled words, and sling-shotted them across the room.
“What happens now?” she said. “What the fuck happens now?”
The Smiley-Faced Man remained stoic. Unflinching. When his voice once again returned, it was cold as ice: “That is very simple. You, Eleanor Robertson, die.”
“According to the news, I’m already dead.” The Smiley-Faced Man took another step forward and she waggled her gun at him. “Don’t fucking move!”
The Smiley-Faced Man didn’t fear her. If he was a mountain lion, she was a frazzled cub, desperate and lashing out but unable to hurt its elder. He proved this with another step forward, and her shaky hands couldn’t do anything about it. Her fingers itched the trigger, but didn’t crank it back. “Today, your body was discovered. Tomorrow, the world will get a peak into the crime scene where it all happened.”
Everywhere else, life continued on. All over the world, people were mindlessly trudging through their days. Driving, gossiping, working, sleeping, eating, complaining, fucking—but for Eleanor Robertson, time had come to a stand-still. There was nothing but this moment, because who knew what came after it?
“Why’d you do it, Eleanor? Why’d you kill poor Lewis Gordon?”
Eleanor thrusted the snub-nose out and fired a bullet that splintered the floorboard in front of his toes. “I said stay back!”
This got the Smiley-Faced Man to stop. There was a pause and then he said: “Let me tell you what I think happened.”
With his free-hand, the Smiley-Faced Man reached up and seized his smile, digging his claws into the foamed grin of his mask. He peeled it away, ripping the fabric from his skin as a rain-shower of sweat seeped off his reddened cheeks and down his exposed neck. Once it was fully off, he discarded it like he hadn’t ever needed it, tossing it down onto Lewis Gordon’s corpse like he wasn’t anything other than a pile of trash.
A pair of eyes looked back at her, now. Real eyes. But there was no humanity in them. These eyes were iced by slaughter and did not see her as a person, but rather prey, stalked and cornered, frightened and ready to be consumed. What lurked in from of her was a hellish man whose work had forged him into a beast.
A beast whose name was even more widely feared than hers. A beast she had encountered once before, at Gorman Jakobs’ party. A beast she had hoped to avoid until she could conquer and now, even though she wielded a gun, wasn’t confident she could. His was bigger, stronger, and while she had been trained to shoot, he was trained to kill.
D’Angelo Darce.
He put on a selfish smile fueled by his personal joy at her suffering. “What I think happened,” he said. “Is that you upset the wrong person.”
Eleanor didn’t want to waste any more breath or time. She hammered the trigger again, this time aiming to actually hit Darce—but the man leaped away with ease and fired a retaliatory shot. She never even saw the bullet, just heard the combustion of it being disturbed from its slumber, and then felt it tear through her flesh as easily as if it were paper.
She tried to scream but all that came was a dry heave. Her brain was trying to issue orders and every command was getting lost in the shuffle. In a mere second, she lived a lifetime where her body wasn’t hers anymore, no longer a single unit, but instead thousands of individual puzzle-pieces whose daily routines had just been shattered. It was the equivalent of a natural catastrophe. An Earthquake had just come in the form of a lead package carrying a dangerous amount of potassium sulfate, and it had fractured her clavicle, missing her deltoid artery by less-than-an-inch.
“And that wrong person, Eleanor Robertson, retaliated in such a way that you, fearful, fled all the way back to your hometown, seeking the comfort of your mentor, Lewis Gordon.”
Bloodied chunks of cracked bone ran down her shoulder, over her breast. Already the world was blurring together into a smattering of wet paint, just blots of nonsensical color. Those puzzle pieces inside her were scrambling around but getting nothing done, too disjointed to get back to work.
“But unfortunately for you, old feelings die hard. Years ago, you betrayed Lewis, and he didn’t just forget. You stole the Belridge Murderer case from him and sensationalized it, used it to kickstart your own career. When you got here, things went south and you, a little too jumpy from the previous attack on your home…”
D’Angelo Darce took aim at Eleanor once again. Her snub-nose, that little black invention of copper-death that had been given to her as a gift, lay next to her in a steadily spreading pool of crimson life-goo.
“…you shot him…”
Eleanor’s weakened voice couldn’t break through the shouting puzzle-pieces. Even if it could, it wouldn’t matter—the water flooding her bloodshot eyes reduced the snub-nose to just another smudge in the melting Earth.
“…and he shot…”
Eleanor hung onto consciousness by a string, but it was tightly wound, tense and ready to snap and rubber-band that bastard D’Angelo in his smug face. She shook her head, knocking over all the puzzle pieces, getting them to shut up so her brain had a chance to speak. It did not scream, or yell, or freak out—it merely said one word: RUN.
She threw herself to the side as another shot rang out. This one hit old H.O.S.S, ensuring it would never eek out another static-soaked word. If she had waited even a second longer, her brain metal would’ve been cooking in the sparks spitting out of the ruined machine. Darce hammered the trigger again, and this one would’ve killed her for sure—but guns, much like humans, are prone to mistakes, and in that moment, all the luck in the world swelled to Eleanor’s side.
It jammed.
She didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. The floor was slick with death, yet she stumbled through it, pushing out the backdoor as Darce struggled to dislodge the chamber. Just before she plunged into the snow, another bullet rang out, racing over her ear and taking a chunk out of the frame.
Then, the frigid air of the storm embraced her.
CHAPTER TEN
Eleanor Robertson was accustomed to danger. That, she believed, was a prerequisite for any journalist worth a damn, and the only thing they ever cared to talk about when you got a bunch them together. When she was a young upstart doing the big-city-broadsheet-circuit, bouncing from Tribune to Times to Post to Globe, she met hundreds of writers who spent their breakfasts, lunches, and dinners trading stories, trading out the details meant for the papers in favor of expounding upon their own personal glories.
These “glories” were typically composed of awful things. Corrupt politicians who tortured the opposition because they could and gang-battles over neighborhoods lost to the terrible concoction of drugs and poverty. The countless deaths of war and the way bombs made skyscrapers crumble. Famine, disease, natural catastrophe—you name it, she had heard some idiot in a two-thousand-dollar suit gab about it like they were knocking on death’s door because he got to watch it from afar and snap pictures.
These men had scarred hearts. They had, time after time, thrown themselves into the gruesome side of the world and brought back a piece of it with them, like a soldier stealing his enemy’s dog-tags to pass out when he got home. They didn’t do it to spread awareness about anything. They did it for the thrill and told themselves they didn’t so their conscious didn’t get scarred, too.
Eleanor thought they were hacks. Bozos who wrote well but didn’t have the right spirit, and that was why she abandoned the corporate news-cycle in favor of working for herself. News isn’t constant, it is curated, and when it needs to be constant, it becomes clumsy. They knew how to report, not make a story, and reporter details leaves people momentarily shocked, while writing a story leaves an impression.
The truest danger a journalist could feel was the fear of not getting their words out into the world. Of having something needing said and being obstructed by someone who believes you shouldn’t say it. That danger permeated Eleanor Robertson’s life—every celebrity she hunted had, in some way or another, attempted to obstruct her or bring about her undoing, and all had failed.
But she had only been in danger like this once before…
…and that was the night Billy Kid died.
Berea.
Kill them all. Cut them up.
“Stop, Fido. Stop.”
She had gotten that story out into the world and for everyone else, that was where it ended. But for her, the story had an epilogue. That same man who had hunted her that night, who had slaughtered an entire room full of people, chased those who fled into the cornfields down and blasted their brains onto the dirt, was still after her.
And she had to survive.
D’Angelo Darce pursued her like a hawk. Every glance over her shoulder proved pointless, she couldn’t see shit through the falling snow, but she knew he was right on her, rushing through the trees, searching for a shot that would plant her on the ground for good. If it wasn’t for the storm…
“The Samurai runs,” he said through heaving breaths. “That isn’t very like you, Eleanor Robertson.”
Eleanor kept her hand glued to her wounded shoulder, hoping to stifle the bleeding. One less way for him to track her. She had nowhere to go and was running out of time, fast. Before long, she’d bleed out,. What would it take to get away from him? A miracle. If she lost him in the woods and was able to turn around and get back to her car…well, what would that do? Start this all over again? A new chase would begin and someday, maybe a year, maybe two, maybe ten, he would catch up to her and their battle would resume.
It wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. She was certain of that. She was also certain that soon, if she didn’t think of something, she would be. Her jellied legs could only hold together so long…
That was when she heard an all-too familiar sound. One that, as a child, meant it was time to turn around and get out of there. One that her parents, and everyone else’s parents in Belridge, had attached a story to: the clanging of chains.
“When you hear them chains, you’d better get on home, understand?” her mother had repeatedly told her. “They used to chain them poor miners together so they wouldn’t get lost, and bunches of them lost their lives down there, digging ore for the rich men, and they don’t like nobody getting close, especially not little kids.”
As a young girl, the clanging of chains had terrified her. She and all her friends had truly believed spirits were going to burst out the snow and gobble them up. Now, as a grown woman with a bullet-wound in her shoulder and a determined killer chasing her, plunging into the dark depths of the mines seemed the sort of bad idea she needed, because it was bad idea for both him and her.
Another gunshot rang out—a tree limb just behind her snapped in two.
“Oh, Eleanor,” D’Angelo Darce said. “What an embarrassing way to end it all.”
She gritted her teeth so tightly she thought they might crack. Anything to keep herself from spitting fuck you back at him. She had to stay focused, moving. Already the ground beneath her was becoming tough to run across, buried railways scattered across the uneven stone. Soon she saw minecarts full of snow, wheels rusted in place from decades inert. With each step, the clanging grew mightier, her poor legs grew weaker. She dug her claws into her shoulder, because terrible as it sounds, the pain kept her awake.
When she stumbled around another dilapidated shack, this one meant for storage, still cluttered with piles of likely-looted trunks that once housed excess ore, she finally saw the fabled entrance to the mines, and what awaited her were no ghouls or ghosts—just a bundle of wooden planks smushed in a man-made doorframe with the word CONDEMNED print on it in big, crimson letters.
Chains were strung around the planks, padlocks dangling from them like Christmas decorations. Only instead of being scattered with glitter, it was frosted-rust. A century ago, these would’ve stopped you from ripping the boards free and kept anyone but the most dedicated out. Now? All she had to do was press her palm against it, apply a little bit of pressure, and they broke apart like cheap drywall. They were rotted straight through.
She had made just enough of a gap to push herself inside when Darce caught up to her. He snapped off another round that lodged itself into one of the padlock’s keyholes, but thankfully she was already inside, running through the darkness.
She threw a glance over her shoulder and saw his face press through the opening, eyes darting manically around as he searched for her. This had gone on too long—that callous calm that permeated him was fading, bubbling into a stew of rage. He popped off another bullet, lighting the area for a brief moment, but she doubted her saw anything worthwhile.
Eleanor Robertson didn’t know where she was going, but she was gone, gone, gone.
Growing up, Eleanor knew nothing about the purpose of these mines. If you had asked her what their purpose was, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you. She never heard about the silver trade or how it once propped their entire community up—just that it was a devilish place, a portal straight to the underworld.
And she wasn’t alone, either. It seemed that everyone’s parents had some secret agreement to say only ludicrous things about these tunnels where once scores of men worked over a hundred hours a week with no reprieve. But they did not discuss the horrors of that. No, those wouldn’t keep the children away. They conjured up stories of ghosts and ghouls and creepy-crawly monsters. Every movie they’d see, someone’s mom or pop would point at the screen and say: see that ugly sucker? That’s what’s waiting for you in the mines if you go there, understand?
What they weren’t told was what really lurked down there—darkness.
Absolute, unrelenting, darkness.
Eleanor had never encountered true darkness. Most people, she guessed, hadn’t. Shutting off all the lights in your home? That doesn’t come close. Even in the deepest of night, moonlight still seeps through your curtains, microwave lights still blink with each passing minute. And, most importantly, you have access to light. A switch to flick, a string to pull, hell, even just a door to walk out of.
Absolute darkness was all-consuming. It is not being able to see the next step you’re taking, relying on luck to make sure you weren’t about to trip over something left-behind or skittering by. It is not being sure if your eyes were open or closed. Her lighter had fallen out of her pocket during the scramble at Lewis Gordon’s home. If she had known that prior to entering these tunnels, maybe she would’ve second guessed diving so recklessly inside.
Breathing the air was like shoving your mouth in a bucket of fiberglass and taking a huge huff. It was a stinkdamp—the stench of rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide, permeated the air, and had for decades, so it was as repugnant as could be. Sprinkle in an unhealthy lot of rotten wooden tools which crunched underneath her as she tiptoed along, taking each step slowly and carefully, and you had a perfect concoction of misery.
“You’re just delaying the inevitable, Eleanor!” D’Angelo Darce’s voice echoed through the tunnels. “One bullet to the brain, this all ends instantly. You keep dragging this out, you know what will happen? You’ll fall over, too weak to move, blood loss taken over.”
Her lungs were worn-out, sore from running, raw from chugging in the heavy, polluted air. She labored on relentlessly with no end-goal except not letting that voice draw any closer, stumbling face-first into posts, following tunnels which went up or down at the dynamite’s whim. When she first entered the mines, she heard the wind whipping the walls of the mountain. But now? Nothing but her footsteps, and…
“You know what will happen after that? The cold will set in. Your body will start a process called vasoconstriction, pulling blood away from your fingers and toes and toward your heart. Then, you’ll start to shiver as your body tries to warm itself up. Only you’ll be too weak to shiver, and hypothermia will quickly take hold.”
Darce’s words were getting jammed together, propelled by a frightening erraticism. He was splitting in two, diverging from the this-is-only-business killer into some sort of depraved lunacy. In Berea, he had been a man doing his job. But here? This was personal. It wasn’t the U.S. government or whoever the hell he worked for that wanted Eleanor dead—it was him.
“And it’ll all happen before you know it. Victims of hypothermia, they typically aren’t aware of their condition. Trust me, I know.”
Eleanor wasn’t sure how long she had spent slowly maneuvering the tunnels of the mine, or how the hell she was going to escape their bleak grasp, but she was certain of one thing—D’Angelo Darce was losing his mind.
What started as cruel jeers aimed straight at her throat quickly descended into sloppy insults, and those sloppy insults melted into slurred, nonsensical yelling. Maybe it was the absence of light, maybe it was hypothermia kicking their organs into low-gear, or maybe he, like she, was afraid that this would be the last thing he’d ever see: nothing.
He raved on without purpose, lashing out at the rotten air, spewing globs of shit and fuck and bitch out like she was just a few steps in front of him. She wasn’t. She didn’t know where he was, but knew he wasn’t nearby. In his head, though, she didn’t doubt his prey was just within reach.
She couldn’t think about him. She had to focus on getting out. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t.
It was like her brain had fallen out of her head and been replaced with a lump of snow. She couldn’t piece together two words in her head because by the time she got to the third, they were all frozen solid. Even if she could issue any commands, those puzzle pieces wouldn’t listen—they had spent all their energy addressing the bullet wound and now they were turning to snowflakes like the rest of her insides. Her legs carried her forward on instinct, like two machines left on after the rest of the factory closed down, not sure what everyone else is doing, but only having one job to do.
Soon even they gave up. Her left leg, whose kneecap still had a crack in its shell from Berea, jammed in place, which caused the other to stutter step, and then she went down, barely able to brace herself before slamming into the frigid rock.
She might have busted her cheek open. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t feel the pain of a fresh cut but felt the warmth of exposed blood streaking down her chin. Her fingers were purple, skin swollen so fat her knuckles pressed against each other, and though she tried dragging herself along, she just didn’t have the strength.
Piece by piece, her humanity stripped itself away. First, her eyes shuttered their doors, blocking out all sound. Then her sinuses packed up their bags and took a hike, robbing her of the putrid stench and taste of the mine. She couldn’t tell if her vision was gone but knew her sense of touch was—there was nothing to feel, not even the springy pang of numbed muscles.
She was a living corpse, clogged up with thought, waiting for its heart to flush them all away with one final beat.
Eleanor Robertson, the person, wanted to continue on.
Eleanor Robertson, the body, could not.
She wasn’t a daydreamer. She didn’t let her mind wander into the absurd too often. Eleanor Robertson feared death, but didn’t often think about how it was going to happen, and on those few occasions she did, she was certain she was going to go swiftly. She always thought she would be at some bozo’s party, sipping a martini and working her magic, snake-charming someone’s secrets out of them, when they would get a little too paranoid and put a bullet between her eyes.
Instead she was back in Belridge, laid in the middle of the same mines she was always warned to avoid, bleeding out from a bullet in the shoulder, frozen stiff as a board, eager to just die and get it over worth.
Was this the price she had to pay for putting the Berea manuscript out into the world?
She understood why most people didn’t do the right thing. Often it got you nothing at all. Hell, most times it screwed you over.
But this, at least, screwed Darce over too.
His chaotic cries had ceased. Wherever he was, she hoped the bastard was suffering the same fate as she was. For what he did to Billy Kid and the entire Red Legion, he deserved that.
She laid there in silence. She didn’t think about what tomorrow would bring or about what the day before had brought. She kept her head empty, focusing on what few remaining breaths she had left.
Then, something began to drag her.
She didn’t know what it was. She couldn’t see it, could barely hear it. But as it tugged her across the chilled floor, rock-tips scraping her back like acupuncture needles, something strange happened—feeling returned.
It happened all at once, like a jolt of electricity sparkplugged straight into her veins, and it fucking hurt. Each muscle, woken up with a rush of energy it hadn’t anticipated or wanted, tried to reject it and return to its slumber. They were sore, sluggish, and struggling to come to grips with the idea of still having a job to do. She tried bending her limbs. The muscles around them constricted and kept her in place, revolting.
That only sharpened the pain. Her sense of touch was worsened by the swelling, which made every little movement feel like her skin was about to burst and spew those hardened muscles out like grubworms. It took some writhing for them to get the memo to wake the fuck up, but soon she was able to ball her fattened fingers into fists and curl her toes in her sneakers.
Her other senses were revving their engines back on, too. The pungent stench of the ancient air came first, enflaming her raw nostrils, and when she could taste the rotten-egg-sulfur she spat and kept her mouth shut. Her hearing was the last to come back, pressure draining from her eyes, replaced with the shuffling sounds of whoever had taken hold of her. She squirmed, trying to escape their grasp, but couldn’t muster enough energy to get away. Their grip was too tight.
“Fuck you, Darce!” Eleanor yelled. Her voice came out slushy, slurred by a tongue not quite awake enough to perfectly recreate movements it had made a thousand times over. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”
She motored her knee forward, fueled by a fresh guzzling of gasoline from her pumping heart, and tried jamming her foot into the bastard back. She missed and her heel slammed into the stone, getting her to grit her teeth but not give up—she thrusted out again and again, unrelenting in her quest to get free. He couldn’t be much better off than she was. If she could escape, even for just a second…
Another burst of energy coursed through her, though this was different. Soothing. It was like easing into a warm bath, bubbles coating her skin. And as those bubbles popped, her worries disappeared. Soon, even the pain was easing, and life seemed to be rewinding. Around her, the bleak walls of the mines came crashing down, replaced by the vinyl paneling that trapped the tobacco haze into Barry Baldwin’s basement where she, at the age of ten, had smoked her first cigarette.
That smoke whisked her into another memory. Now she was thirteen, sitting on the floor of Mr. Milford’s gas station with Martin Atters. Between them was an assortment of Little Debbie snacks and a box of Silver Age Marvel floppy issues from the old man’s childhood. He wasn’t drunk that day, so he was smiling, and they were smiling because they got free brownies and comic books.
It was like a drain had come unclogged in her head. The memories were pouring out, one after the other, blurring into a pleasant mess. One second she was laying on the grass next to Kenneth Colton, counting the stars and plotting out a future with both of them together, then she was arriving in New York for the first time, dazzled by the sparkling billboards and the promises she had made. These were the things dreams were made of.
And Eleanor Robertson quickly came to realize they were exactly that—dreams, and nothing more.
Through these dreams, these smiling faces which had begun to swirl into a vortex, glimmered a ray of light that grew wider as she drew closer to it, alluring and impossible to resist, made of all good in the world. She knew what it meant, and now understood that this shadowy figure was not D’Angelo Darce, but rather the Grim Reaper, and he was taking her straight to Heaven.
So this, she thought. is what it’s like when your life flashes before your eyes.
Only, when they reached the end of the tunnel, engulfed in the radiant glow of the light, she was not confronted by pearly gates, nor did Peter flutter down to greet her. Instead of the fluffy pillows of Heaven’s clouds, it was the frostbiting chill of snow that embraced her, and as her vision returned, memories gone, darkness escaped, she finally saw who was actually dragging her.
Fido, the Shuunite.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So long ago, when she was still a green-penned reporter whose name nobody knew, Eleanor Robertson had met Billy Kid, emaciated, on the side of the road. She had aided him deeply, helping him return to better health, and though she hadn’t believed them, she listened to his stories, and followed him for many years after, always ready to jot down anything he said. He, she always told herself, would be her magnum opus—the man whose story would one day become synonymous with her.
In a twisted way, she had been right. Though not Billy Kid’s story, the Trouble in Berea was forged through the blood of those he had brought together and was, at least in her mind, the most important thing she had ever, or would ever, capture on a page. What she hadn’t expected was this—that one day, she would save one of those creatures he spoke of, and in return, they would save her.
“Fido,” Eleanor gasped. “Oh, fucking Fido!”
The Shuunite made no attempt at response. It did not pause, it did not look back at her. It just kept shuffling along, duty-bound.
She almost couldn’t believe it. Until she reached down and pawed at the tentacle it had wrapped around her ankle, she was certain it was a mirage. It was just all too perfect, wasn’t it? A short while ago she had been trapped in the mines, desperate to die, and now she was being dragged outside, across a boulderish abscess hung off the side of the mountain. It was guarded by wooden fence posts which ensured you wouldn’t trip and fall into the void below and a hundred years ago, hard-working men probably retreated here to get a glimpse of the sun, maybe suck down a cigarette without blowing themselves up.
Now, a spaceship hovered over it.
It was bullet-shaped and hovered in the air without the aid of any propellers, rockets, or human technology. As she leered up at it, she saw snowed brush away from it in a wide arc as it seemed to warp the very air around it. Jettisoning out of its undercarriage was the same protective beam she had thrown Fido into back in Berea and waiting for them within it were the same brethren who had eagerly anticipated its return then, too. As the Shuunite brought her through this beam, into the middle of its “family”, Eleanor felt safe, truly safe, for the first time in a long time.
These were the creatures who Billy Kid had trusted so dearly and though they could not speak to her, not physically at least, they looked down at her with the same expression they had shared when one of their own had been kidnapped. She was wounded, likely dying, and so that meant they were as well.
Their tentacles began to move in unison, all twisting into one another. Eleanor tried to reach up and grab hold of them, wanting to be part of this ritual, but found herself restricted by an energy she couldn’t comprehend. Their eyes blinked in alternating patterns of two as their teeth clicked rhythmically together, and the ground beneath her shuddered, soil grumbling at the strange disturbance.
Then, that energy which restricted her dissipated, and all the Shuunites slipped back, unfurling their tentacles and leaving her be. There was a second where Eleanor did not move, unsure what had just happened. But when she did? It was like all the mileage had been taken off her body. Like every broken bone, every cut, every sickness, every headache, hadn’t ever happened. Like she had just been born anew with no frostbitten fingers, cracked kneecaps, or mostly importantly, bullet-ridden shoulders.
Eleanor Robertson couldn’t believe it. She sat up, patting herself all over, then lifted her head and looked at Fido. “You…saved me.”
Fido stared at her unblinkingly. The being did not react to her amazement. She guessed that an eternal lifetime of traveling the universe meant moments like this, which to her and Billy Kid were everything, was just another blip in the radar to it. Earth was nothing—just another planet for the catalogue—and saving her was just repayment for an earlier favor.
But then, the Shuunite surprised her, stretching out one of its tentacles. It let it hang in the air ahead of her, clearly seeking a response.
Eleanor remembered Billy Kid telling her that they only communicated telepathically and didn’t let this opportunity pass her by. She seized the Shuunite’s tentacle quickly and kept her eyes glued to it, curious of what was to come.
The voice that came to her was not unique, but rather the sum of many parts. It was the piecing together of a thousand different tones and accents with all the human washed out. Eleanor could’ve been speaking to an answering machine for all she knew, yet it was backed by a certain intelligence which reminded her that its words were important. “Eleanor Robertson,” it said. “Us Shuunites are most grateful for your assistance and hope we have done an adequate job in repaying you.”
Eleanor did not know if she was expected to respond out loud, so she didn’t. She closed her eyes and thought forcefully. “I’d be dead without you,” she said. “Thank you.”
Fido clearly had no plans for small talk—there was something that needed to be said. It breezed on. “I am aware the Billy Kid explained to you our mission. That we Shuunites are duty-bound to record the history of the universe. That mission is coming to an end. It should have ended long ago, truthfully. But we were unable to complete the final phase of this project.”
“Final phase?”
“Once we have recorded all there is to record about a society, we gather two specimens from it to forever live on in our eternal museum. One who, per the standards of the civilization, represents the moral good and one who, again, per the standards of the civilization, represents the moral evil. It is a most complicated process of much deliberation.”
Eleanor couldn’t believe it. “You’re saying you take people with you…?”
“Precisely. The evil are taken against their will, forced to live an eternity of shame. But the good we give choice to, and if they say yes, we grant them a life of their greatest desires. For this such position, we had decided on Billy Kid. Unfortunately, we can no longer do such a thing.”
“Billy Kid would have been perfect,” she said, tears stinging her eyes.
If Fido was distraught about Billy Kid’s death, he didn’t let it be known.
“Yes, he would have been. And, though we are unsure if you would be perfect, we trust Billy Kid’s judgement in people, and he always claimed you as good a person as he. That is why we would like to ask you to come with us.”
A couple months ago, Eleanor would’ve snapped up this opportunity in a heartbeat. She would’ve chased the story, heading up to space just for the thrill of finding a way to sneak information back to Earth. But now? Even being granted the opportunity seemed like a cruel joke. She didn’t know who they could find that would fit as well as Billy Kid—but she was sure it wasn’t her.
She couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to do it. She opened her mouth, just about to tell Fido so, when…
“…this can’t fucking be real!”
The screech was rabid, fueled by hatred and cracked by a desperate squeak, and what followed it was a thunderous BANG that by now was all-too-familiar to Eleanor Robertson. A bullet whizzed straight at her, certain to end her life. She tried to move—but when she did, Fido kept her held in place, all eyes blinking at her, still waiting for her answer. To it, nothing could threaten them, and that was a fair assumption. When the bullet reached the ship’s tractor-beam, it was like a tree thrown into a woodchipper. It got chewed through effortlessly, leaving behind a flurry of metallic embers.
“That night in Berea, you took everything from me, Eleanor Robertson! Then you led me here, now I’m seeing those same things you took, and it doesn’t make sense!”
D’Angelo Darce shambled out of the mines, struggling to keep his path straight as his wobbly legs made it look like he was on stilts. A gash ran from the top of his head down to the base of his chin, slicing straight through his nose and lips and draining blood that showered his entire body, causing everything to stick to him. All the dust, debris, dirty-bits of the tunnels—he wore a suit of it like a bagworm.
“Must be the cold. Or maybe some goddamned chemical clogging up those mines. But they’re not here. Not real. You are.”
Every venomous word from Darce was coated in a glob of bloodied spit and pushed out with a heave of belabored breath. He lacked the cruel tact which made him so frightening before. Now? He was a mess. A feral beast without limits or reason, driven only by his intent to rip her to shreds. If Eleanor Robertson had seen this version of D’Angelo Darce a month ago, she wouldn’t have ran, just called the police, because this guy? This guy was a loon, not the D’Angelo Darce whose reputation had sent her traveling across the country.
“And you took them away from me. You robbed me of what was going to make me un-fucking-touchable. With these…things…I was going to snatch this country’s balls!”
He hammered the trigger, punctuating his sentence with an authorative blast that was blitzed by the beam. That didn’t matter, though. His personal vendetta to see Eleanor dead had blinded him to any resolution but that, and the next three shots were wanton, not even coming close to her, diving into darkness. He tried unloading another round—but the chamber of his revolver simply spun on, out of ammo.
Eleanor watched as D’Angelo, who had convinced himself that there was no life to be lived if he didn’t win, struggled to jam more hollow-points into his revolver. They kept falling between his blood-soaked fingers, down into the snow, as spit-stained cursed spewed from between his lips. He called her every foul name under the sun, then a few extra. It was almost…sad.
“You fucking bitch, I’m gonna get you, I really am, I’m going to get you…”
She turned back to Fido, whose tentacle she still clutched. The Shuunite gazed back at her unaware, or maybe just uncaring, about her and D’Angelo’s feud. She thought a moment, took a deep breath, and when another bullet rang out, she said: “I’m sorry, Fido, but I cannot come with you. There is still too much for me to do here on Earth and, truth be told, there are much better folks than me out there.”
Fido lowered its head in an uncharacteristic gesture of understanding. It was one of the few universal pieces of communication that existed, a bow of respect. With that, its time in Eleanor Robertson’s life was over. The Shuunite began to pull away from her, toward its brethren—but she never let go of its tentacle. That lack of action caused all its eyes to widen.
“But, if you’d grant me another request…it is to trust my judgment and take this man with you. He might not be the evilest man to ever live, but he represents the evilest pieces of society—those in power who endlessly seek more.”
D’Angelo Darce paid no attention to her words. She guessed he was the type who, though he made a living off punishing people for things they said or did, never truly cared about anyone’s voice but his own. He gripped his revolver with both hands and steadied his aim, certain this would be the one to blast all the visions away.
…But then one of those visions appeared right in front of him.
Fido did not lunge. It did not charge, run, or jump. To call the motion anything other than teleportation would be an injustice. It was simply there one second, in front of D’Angelo Darce the next. The man snapped his gun up, but it was hopeless. The Shuunite wrapped its tentacles around his limbs, restricting his movement, and then pulled him into its black-tar body. Darce fought back like a mouse being choked by a snake—he writhed, squirmed, and screamed, but soon found himself swallowed whole, submerged in the goop.
That did not stop the man’s thrashing. As Fido returned to the safety of the beam, pot-marks appeared all over the Shuunite’s stomach, bubbles swelling up and popping as he threw a tantrum, punching and kicking the creature’s innards. It belched up desperate pleads for help from someone who never gave anyone a second chance, and once again bowed to Eleanor. She took hold of its tentacle one last time.
“Thank you,” she thought. “For everything.”
And with that, she knew it was over. It was time to walk out of the beam’s embrace and into the darkness of the storm. She took ten steps away from Fido, boots crunching ice, and only when the falling snowflakes began to wet her reddened nose did she look over her shoulder, catching the last glimpses of the Shuunite’s ship as it flew over the trees and away. The man’s waning cries echoed through the mountains before dissipating entirely and with that, D’Angelo Darce was no more…
…and Eleanor Robertson, contrary to the belief of the rest of the world, was alive.
She had actually done it—she had won.
Just a week ago, that thought would’ve had her bumping fists with Martin Atters, wearing a boss-bitch smirk as they popped champagne to a hard-fought victory. She would’ve been visiting Kenneth Colton to brag and pushing out more hit-pieces than ever before, unafraid of anyone. Every enemy in her phonebook would’ve been getting a call. Why? Because she was Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai, and if she could slice-and-dice a fuzzball with hands as dirty as Darce’s, nobody could take her down.
Instead, she cried.
She cried because she was alive. She cried because all her aches, pains, and wounds had been healed. She cried because the Shuunite’s were gone and she wouldn’t ever see them again. She cried because the Berea incident had been exposed to the world and now it was up to everyone else to decide what came of it. She cried for her burnt-down house and for Lewis Gordon, who gave his life for the truth. She cried for the unfortunate members of the Red Legion, slaughtered like cattle by a man whose ambition was only matched by his cruelty. Most of all, she cried for Billy Kid, who had always smiled for everyone else, and now could smile no more.
And then, she went home.
EPILOGUE
Eleanor Robertson sat in front of Smith Corona electric typewriter, fingers tap-dancing over the nail-shaped, crème-colored buttons but not touching a single one of them. Sat in the carriage, half-drooped forward, saddened by her inactivity, was a piece of paper with a single phrase written on it in emboldened letters: Chapter One.
The rest of the paper was blank. Nothing but a canvas hungry for words. She, the writer, had been the first to stain it with ink, and thus was duty-bound to fill its gluttonous desires. The problem wasn’t what to write, she had a damned fine idea of that. The problem was how to write it. She let one hand leave the gravitational pull of the typewriter to take a hit of the Marlboro Red she had left burning in the ashtray, hoping it would help brush the dust off her brain and get it working things out. No dice.
The hardest part of doing anything is getting started, she reminded herself. It was an adage her father used to proudly spout whenever she’d complain about not wanting to do her homework. But she had never been the type to let her thoughts fly without purpose—to her, writing was not rewriting. To her, writing was more like cooking. She gathered each ingredient to make the perfect recipe, them all stew to perfection, and only began to cook them when the time was right.
This time was different, though. Even though she had been preparing for this piece for nearly a decade, it was like the words were still trapped in the gummy-goo of her brain, and every time she lowered her hands to type she gave them a tug that only snapped them right back into place. Maybe it was because this was different than anything she had ever tried doing before. To call it more important wasn’t right, that seemed like an insult…but in a way, it was.
More personal. That was a better was to put it. What she was here to write, it wasn’t an ordinary piece. It wasn’t slicing the secrets out of someone else’s life and placing them on a platter, a perfectly assembled charcuterie board for the public to pick apart and scrutinize. These were the secrets of her own life and the idea of laying them all out…
Well, let’s just say it got her to light another cigarette. This one she sucked halfway to the filter in one huff, nearly hacking up a lung in response.
That was why she wasn’t in LA. Sometimes the thrum of the city—the honking cars and the chattering alleyways and the sky-blackening smog—made it easy to lose oneself, and Eleanor had spent to long covering up all the pieces that made her, her. Instead, she was up in Oregon, tucked away in a log-cabin some lumberjack had stacked together a couple decades ago and now rented out to folks like her, urbanites desperate to cleanse the grime of civilization from their very bones.
She had been here, alone, for three months. Martin Atters had been the first to suggest it, and Kenneth Colton had backed him up profusely. Both of them petitioned the idea because they insisted it would help her shrug off the past and move forward—to be a person again, not just a reporter. Escaping the paparazzi was just a bonus. Ever since they had learned she was not, in fact, dead, they had hounded her. Just exactly what happened the week she went missing was everyone’s wet dreams. Eleanor knew what they thought: if they could get her to slip up, it would make their careers.
They were glad to waste her time and had made a habit out of stalking her. Too bad they wouldn’t ever believe the truth. Not that she would ever dream of giving it to them.
She finished the cigarette in one huff and corkscrewed it flat into the ashtray, partnering it with the first butt. Next to her was a cup of Folgers that she had brewed this morning but forgotten about. Dried streaks of coffee ran down mug, forming a rim of black on the coaster below, from an is-this-too-warm sip taken two hours ago. Now it was bitter and chilly, lacking any punch.
The cabin was empty. You could hear all the bugs skittering around in it. Not the nasty kind, the roaches or the termites, but those who sneak in just a second, the kind smushed by wheels of speeding bikes in the cities—the grasshoppers, the beetles, the centipedes. She was learning to love the wide-open days, not duty-bound to a schedule but following the flow of where the hours took you, and learning to love the silence, too, even if it left her alone with her thoughts a little too often.
Those thoughts, still knotted to the past, kept her from drifting into a new era. She was chained down by them, forced to relive memories of Belridge every morning when she woke up and every night when she went to sleep. Her dreams were filled with blood-soaked snow and corpses, and she was so desperate not to lose even a glimpse of what she had seen that, for a long time, she had wanted it to stay that way.
But it was time to move on. Time to forge a new path. That was why those bozos had insisted she come out here, wasn’t it?
The hardest part is getting started.
The hardest part, Eleanor thought. Is figuring out where to start.
So much had happened. Cobbling it all together into something cohesive didn’t seem possible. She had spent her entire adulthood assembling the narratives of other people’s lives, but her own? That was a different challenge entirely.
One that she, Eleanor Robertson, the Person, knew she needed to conquer if she wanted to go on living.
She took a deep breath. It was all about getting these first words down. Once she did, everything else would come easily.
She lowered her dancing hands and froze them to the typewriter keys. The cold plastic made her fingers want to jump away but she knew that, if she did, she would have to repeat this whole process tomorrow, and someone can only go through it so many times before they start feeling worn down.
No, now was the type. She just needed to write.
“The Trouble in Berea began with bad bolognaise…”
But that was wrong. That wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. That was just a piece of it, a piece she had already spoiled. What she wanted to talk about was…everything. She scratched out the sentence with a felt-tip and took and took a deep breath. If she was going to rewind, she needed to go all the way back to the beginning. All the way back to where it started before she even knew anything was starting.
This wasn’t the story of an event, it was the story of a lifetime.
With one last deep breath, she tried again, this time certain:
“I first met Billy Kid when he was fifty-five years old, and he told me aliens were real. I didn’t believe him—but now I do.”