Furies- Thus Spoke Read online

  Feet shuffle forward.

  The smell of perfume laces the air. A puddle of lingerie sits on the carpet. The air conditioner blows air over the small clumps of dirt on the floor.

  Yellow-green eyes roll down to the lifted hand and notice the dirt streaking the palm. More smeared on the shirt. Fingers touch a face and find more dirt on a cheek.

  “Where?” The word rolls foreign from wormy lips.

  The yellow-green eyes sense the well-trimmed brows above them furrow together. The brain sluggishly trips backward in time.

  “Are you joking, my dear?”

  “Oh—I—well. Sorry, Mr. Quintero, I thought that you would like this.”

  “I would...if I were a brain dead retard.”

  Brain bumbles to the present.

  “Saleswoman in Delgadar. Tried to sell me a...a tie?”

  Brain shuffles through memory.

  “Excuse me, did you give a signal? No, Miss Chevrolet, I don’t think you did. Get your ass back in your lane.” He pressed his foot to the accelerator and the car obediently zipped forward to close the distance between him and the next car.

  “Idiot driving mother f—”

  He felt his heart trip-hammering before stammering in his chest. Felt his heart thump sluggish. Felt his heart stop working. Felt...nothing.

  The present slips back.

  “Driving ho—No, meeting Jessica for lunch when I—” Yellow-green eyes roll forth and back in a shaking head. “What happened?”

  Feet seem to guide themselves to the blade of light stretching across the floor to the bathroom.

  The past infects the brain.

  Darkness

  Stale air

  A void

  A muffled crack

  Oxygen

  A flash of red and gold hair

  A face

  The present returns with languid grace.

  A doorknob is in a hand. The hand twists.

  Blinding light filters the world down to smears, glares, and gleams.

  Yellow-green eyes blink and focus.

  The sunken eyes see their glowing reflection framed by red skeins of veins.

  Sallow skin.

  Handsome features.

  Face of death.

  The corpse with the yellow-green eyes is named Giorgio Quintero.

  “Murder.”

  “What’s that?” The officer behind the detective elbows into his mutterings.

  The detective cants his head and looks into Dwight Jr.’s dead neon eyes.

  “Ever notice how certain words sound like their meaning, Ehasz?” The detective straightens his head, stepping back to allow a member of the forensics team with a camera in his hand to step past.

  “Not really, sir.”

  He mutters to himself: “No wonder you haven’t made detective yet.” He stretches up to his full height. “Take the word clean, for instance. Clean. Sounds pure and untainted, right? Now how about dirty? Sounds like sandpaper rubbin’ against your tongue.” He gestures at the two bodies in the living room. “Murder. Don’t know about you, but even though I see and say it almost every day, that word still sends a little spasm up my spine.” He glances over at Dwight where he sobs and stammers and sits in the kitchen, holding his head in his hands with occasional lifted glances at the bodies of his wife and son as he answers questions from the officer standing in front of him. “Glad he at least turned himself in.”

  Ehasz rolls his little gray eyes to the young corpse sprawled on the rug, blood soaked deep into the pattern. “Probably didn’t know how to handle learning his son was a freak.” He goes back to taking notes on a small pad of paper.

  “What about that one?”

  The officer’s eyebrows have a meeting in the middle of his forehead. “Sir?”

  “Freak. How does that word sound?”

  The younger man considers it. “Odd. Like something alien.”

  “Exactly.” A beat passes. “Hate how common cases like this are becoming, people actin’ like they’re in the presence of the culmination of their life’s fears when they learn someone’s an A-O.”

  “Anyone in your life genetically reawakened, sir?” Ehasz rubs behind his ear with his pen.

  The detective scratches at his carefully unkempt dark brown hair. “Not that I know of.” He shakes his head. “But I don’t think it’s all that different from someone with autism, dyslexia, or special needs.” A puff of wry laughter. “Or being anything but heterosexual.”

  “Maybe we should have you take over sensitivity training, then.” A tall, pudgy man in a suit and tie with a badge dangling around his neck walks into the room, clearing an easy path through the lively forensics team.

  The detective turns to him, his slightly oversized nose wrinkling with contempt. “Get here when you can, McGarvey.”

  McGarvey steps heavily over Annalise’s body. “Not too much to figure out here, gentleladies. Dwight was about to kill his son here when the woman jumped in front of the bullet.” He makes a gun with his first two fingers and thumb. “Bang.” He bends his thumb. “He offed the son next. Bang.” Repeated motion. “Then, he’s overcome with remorse for being a right bastard and calls us to take ‘im in.” He makes a book of his hands, shuts them as he looks over at Dwight being led out of the house full of lies in handcuffs. “Case closed. Let’s wrap the scene up and call it in. My wife’s expecting a package and the post office closes early today.” He leaves.

  “Heard they caught a perp over in Mercurmont boosting 8k TVs a few weeks back.” Ehasz licks his lips as he stands. “Had no problem catching the guy, but they couldn’t keep him.” He releases a bitter chuckle. “Sonovabitch melted through a pair of handcuffs and did the same thing to the patrol car door.”

  The detective wrinkles his brow. “They stop him?”

  Head shake. “Fired at him, but the bullets freaking melted before they hit him. Impact bruised him more than anything else.”

  The detective scoffs. “Don’t teach you how to handle this kind o’ shit at the police academy.”

  The detective’s name is Perry West.

  “Mail call.”

  The man in the lab coat looks up from the compound microscope as Paul walks into the laboratory.

  Paul holds up the envelope in his hands, the Nightingale Industries logo tattooed in the upper left corner. “’nother job offer no doubt.” He hands the other man the envelope. The man in the lab coat takes it...and tosses it on the table before going back to his microscope.

  Seconds later he hears Paul ripping open the envelope.

  The man in the lab coat tears his eyes away from the microscope once more. “The hell are you doing, Paul?”

  “For someone so smart, you aren’t very perceptive.” Paul scans the single sheet of white paper. “Dear Mr. Kennington blah blah blah. Noticed your work with the yadda yadda yadda. We’d like to offer you...Holy shit!” His eyes grow two sizes larger as they zip down the page. “They want to offer you a position as senior chemist in their medical biochemistry division!”

  “That’s nice.” The man adjusts the coarse focus, squints his eyes.

  A beat.

  “They’re also guaranteeing a nice bag of steaming shit on your first day.”

  “They always do.”

  “This is the part of the movie where your character starts bouncing all over the lab, maybe run out into the hall shouting and dancing before you kiss the first attractive woman you see.” His mouth tugs to the side. “Vanessa’s in the computer lab down the hall.”

  “Yeah, Paul, and Francie would slap the taste outta my mouth if she found out I even—” The man in the lab coat presses his thumb and middle finger to his temples, eyes slipping shut. “Could you give me a few minutes, please?”

  “Sure. I’ll let you celebrate in private.” Paul smiles a bit, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He whispers out of the laboratory.

  The man in the lab coat stands and moves to pick up the letter where Paul left it and reads over it for himse
lf, lingering over the offered salary.

  Crumpling the letter in his gloved hands, he sucks air through his nose and feels the hot threads of anger tighten his muscles. He stops himself before he can throw the letter in the trash.

  He goes back to the microscope and takes another look at the stained cluster of chromosomes. His stained cluster of chromosomes.

  “Damn.”

  He studies the faint blue speck of a gnarled chromosome that should not be there, unchanged from when he first noticed it three weeks ago. The organized structure glows and pulses and fades like a submicroscopic heartbeat. His hand clenches, and for a minute, it is almost as if he can feel his blood changing, stretching, pulling at the presence of this new...anomaly.

  He brings his head back and his eyes slide to the newspaper draped across his desk.

  “GENETICISTS ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER THE ORIGINS OF ALPHA-OMEGAS”

  He looks at the crumpled job offer from Nightingale Industries on top of the job offer from the tech division at StarPharm Medical, next to the offer for head of the science division at ChemBio International, underneath the letter from the biochemistry branch of the U.S. military.

  He looks at his chromosomes, at the work of his active Alpha-Omega gene.

  The man in the lab coat studies his reflection in the stainless steel freezer next to him. He steps closer to himself, running fingers through black hair cut close to his scalp, dragging a gloved finger down his widow’s peak. He eyes the small mole on the left side of his face, studies his lightly tanned skin, stares into light gray eyes with a slight brown sheen around the pupil. “Poisoned eyes and poisoned skin to go along with your poisoned blood.” He shakes his head at his reflection. “Everything about you is a damn swirl, a tainted swirl.”

  The alien sensation uncoils inside the man in the lab coat once more. “No.” He feels his entire body pulse, a thin screen of light coming from his core. The world goes silent and he can hear...feel...sense something turn on in his veins.

  His phone vibrates.

  FRANCIE

  As he reaches forward, his skin tingles tight. A dense and near invisible force wraps around his hand, shoving the phone inches away from his fingers like a magnet, just like it shoved away the microscope earlier that day and sent it clattering to the floor in expensive pieces, just like it knocked over a conical flask last week and ruined an experiment, along with a week’s worth of medical research.

  Frustration rips through his nostrils in a hot breath.

  He reaches again.

  The phone is pushed back by the faint silver-blue haze enveloping his fingers.

  He clenches his fist closed, clenches his eyes shut, and drags the vexation into a mental closet using one of the breathing techniques he’d learned recently.

  The near tangible force diffuses. He wraps his fingers around the phone and accepts the call.

  “Hey, Francie.” His voice is forced calm.

  “Hey, baby, thought I was going to get your voicemail for a second. How’s work?”

  The man in the lab coat glances at the microscope. His sigh rattles through the phone. “Turning out to be one hell of a day, beautiful.”

  The man in the lab coat is named Leo Kennington.

  The cross swings back and forth along with Adam’s eyes.

  He stares. He waits.

  Five minutes pass before he puts the necklace down and takes up the Bible on the coffee table. He opens it to the book of Galatians. His eyes rove, but they do not read.

  Ten minutes pass before he closes the book.

  He wipes his hands down his face and breathes deep. “What in the world am I doing? Probably just a short in the lights or something that made me think my hands were...” Adam looks at his palms, looking from one...to the other...and back.

  He studies his long, lined fingers and the slight quiver running through them.

  But they do not glow.

  He searches around the house for something he cannot find before he flips on the TV.

  “—will love the new cleaning power of orange fresh—”

  “—never told him that I would go to—”

  “—that slam dunk from Chase! I tell ya, this season he’s—”

  “—only in theatres June 11th—”

  “—has to be God. And the nations of the world will be shaken by the Hand of God. It’s a scary time to be alive, but it’s also an absolutely thrilling time to be alive. God wants to demonstrate His power not only to little Israel, but to all of the world. You see, in chapter forty-nine it says ‘all of my people will know me.’ Folks, I encourage you to pray for Israel, God wants you and everyone else to pray for Israel. You can join us on our website at—”

  Nothing.

  Adam turns the television off and looks up. He gets down on his knees and folds his hands together.

  “Are you trying to send me a sign, God? Is Bishop Martin right, are these Alpha-Omegas your heralds? Is it our duty, my duty, to bring them back to the light? Why did you lead them astray, God? Away from the flock?” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand what it is that you want me to do. Since I was quickening in my mother’s womb I was taught that You are the word, that You are the way...the only way.” He pauses. “Tell me where to go, God, order my steps.” He touches his forehead to his interlaced knuckles. “Speak through me, dear Lord, please speak through me.”

  His next breath comes in a hitch. He shudders. He opens his eyes and hauls in a lungful of air.

  L I G H T

  The room is pulsing with pure platinum light.

  Adam is held in awe as shafts of ivory brilliance cascade around the walls.

  He looks down and sees that the light comes from him.

  Joy

  Giorgio stumbles back from himself, breathing heavily.

  Breathing heavily.

  Breathing.

  He stops breathing. His head does not throb and thump with a buildup of blood. His chest does not ache. The world isn’t spotted and dotted with gray motes of approaching unconsciousness.

  “Because I’m not alive.”

  He lifts up his hand and sees that although it is just as smooth as it was in life, the color is now wan and weak. He touches his cheeks and finds them smooth and cold, the prominent bones now even more so beneath his dead skin. He forces himself to look at himself. “How am I still...alive...undead...reanimated...” He pauses. “How am I still here?”

  Giorgio walks back into the bedroom and finds the dead woman as he left her. There are only discarded wisps of garments on the floor, wrinkles in the bedsheets, and dirt on the pillows.

  Graveyard dirt.

  Giorgio steps toward the woman, grabs her shoulder to turn her over, and remembers it all in a flash.

  His heart stopped on his way to meet Jessica just as he entered Cade District.

  Death.

  Darkness.

  A sense of no sense of time.

  Sleep paralysis draped lackadaisical over rigid limbs.

  The top of his coffin splintered and cracked.

  He saw her blurred face wreathed by a mass of red and golden curls.

  Too dead to be conscious and too comatose to be cognizant, but still his dead eyes saw everything through the slight crack in his eyelids.

  She removed his body from his coffin and pulled him gently from his final resting place, kissing him on the forehead. “Poor, Giorgi. Kimmy’s gonna take you home and take good care of you, okay? Good care of her man.”

  Time stuttered forward in drunken minutes and wobbling hours.

  He was in the bed, this bed, and she stood before him in silk lingerie. “You didn’t want anything to do with me when you were alive; you were too much of a pretty boy. Thought I was too basic for you, didn’t you?” She slipped out of her bra. “My breasts were too big for your dainty fancyman hands.” She hopped onto the bed and straddled his corpse, hands wandering. “My mouth was too small.” She unzipped his pants and dragged them down to his ankles. “Is it too small to
do this?” Her lips wrapped around his unresponsive penis and worked eagerly. She looked up after a while. “Still too small for you, Giorgi?” She slipped out of her panties and tossed them to the floor. “Kimmy’s too much for a hot-blooded man, only the dead make her feel alive.” Her palms ran over his cheeks, through his limp brown curls, fingertips tickling over his nose. She lowered her warm mouth over his cold mouth.

  A kiss.

  A jolt.

  A death.

  A rebirth.

  Yellow-green eyes SNAP open as dry lips part and air rushes into deflated lungs.

  Kimmy had been killed by his kiss, and he had been revived by hers.

  Giorgio glances down and sees the flesh of her corpse has now gone gangrenous, paper-thin, and brittle. He reaches out to touch her hair when he feels an electric rush jolting into his fingers.

  His pink fingers.

  His alive fingers.

  He goes back to the mirror.

  Giorgio Quintero is alive again.

  To all appearances.

  Commissioner Willard Moskovitz.

  Moskovitz adjusts the nameplate as he sits behind his desk, crossing his legs and bobbing his foot as he offers West a professional smile.

  “So, Detective West, what can I do for you?”

  Perry leans forward on a chair back, drumming his fingers on the fabric. “You hear anything about the murder that took place in Century Heights last night?”

  The commissioner puffs out a laugh. “I’ve been in meetings with city officials all day trying to convince them the precinct needs more funding. I’m up to my considerably tight ass in paperwork and forms, so forgive me for not having been updated on the latest rash of felonies that have taken place.” He pauses a beat. “And I mean that sincerely.”

  Perry nods. “I understand.” He rolls his shirt sleeves up over his forearms with quick, efficient movements. “At approximately six o’clock last night, a father accidentally shot his son’s mother before murderin’ his son and voluntarily turnin’ himself in. He thought an Alpha-Omega was impersonatin’ his boy, makin’ him believe his son had been genetically reawakened. Unfortunately, forensics determined that the corpse was in fact his son...and an A-O.”