Today’s
Prompt: Fifteen years after a toxic spill in a small town, strange things are
happening.
—Courtesy:
Writing.Com
Word Count: 1,534
A man was standing in the middle of the
road when her SUV came bumping along busting on the scene from a sharp corner. She
was doing approximately, 120 miles an hour and barely had time to coordinate
her reflexes and slam down the brakes to avoid running over the man who as it
turned out was totally unaware of the situation. All he did was stand by and
watch like the whole incident was playing out on one of those big screens you spotted
at a movie drive-in. Her final thought, before she rammed the bumper into the
railings and went flying off the road into the cliff below, was, Oh God, I’m going to die. Not this way, oh God,
please. She was wrong on both counts.
“Well,
what do you have to say for yourself?”
She opened her eyes to blinding darkness.
She was lying face up on a bed. She said the only thing that felt reasonable in
this peculiar situation. “How did I get here?” And immediately, her mind supplied
an answer. I must have survived the drop
off the cliff. “What’s that rumbling sound? Is there a mill of some sort
close by?”
“No.
that’s the sound of the train coming down the track. And don’t worry, nobody’s
catching a train today, the rail’s a few miles off this place.”
Something struck her funny about the
voice talking to her. It had the timbre of a child’s voice yet, bore the weight
of maturity.
“Where
are your parents?” She turned her head as much as the racking pain in her body
allowed her but all she made out in the darkness was a silhouette.
“I
am my parent. Who are you? Where are
you from? How did you get here?”
“My
name is Ayara.” She didn’t know if she could trust this strange personality but
given the circumstance, she didn’t have a choice. “I had an appointment to meet
a client. Shortcuts are my fetish.” She shrugged like that ought to explain the
details.
“Shortcuts
can be wrong cuts.” The kid-man said, not unkindly.
“I
stayed in the middle of the road. Okay, I admit I leaned a little too hard on
the pedal but the road was deserted.”
“Explains
a lot about your predicament.”
“Don’t
give me lip. I know I’m a guest but I’d have been in some meeting if that vagrant
wasn’t standing smack down in my path.”
The reply was low when it came. Ayara couldn’t
believe she heard right. “You should have knocked him down.” He said.
“What
did you just say to me?”
The kid-man bent over and whispered into
her like he was afraid somebody might overhear him. “What I said Miss, is that
you should have run him over then gone ahead and met your appointment. Che sera
sera.”
Ayara let the words piece themselves
together into sensible whole rather force them into a traditional pattern of
rational thought.
“It
was a plot to waste him so you and some bastard as sick as you are made him
stand there. Then it would look like a roadkill and the driver takes the blame
and you and your murderous crew walk.”
“It
was best for everybody. For him.”
“Why?”
“They
come back.”
“Who?”
And then the truth dawned on her. “It’s some kind of sick ritual isn’t it?”
“What
it’s called doesn’t matter. Names often go with faces and we got no face to save here, in any case. They come
back. That’s the important thing to keep up your sleeve. But you, Miss, was
supposed to splatter his brains all over the sidewalk and by the time the sun
comes the next day, that’s two days ago, he would heave been reborn a new man. A
kid. Like me.”
Ayara had stopped listening when the kid
said, ‘two days ago’. She was ticking
off the days on her mental calendar. “You mean I’ve been out cold for three days?”
The kid-man ignored the question. “He would
have started over another lifecycle if you have listened to your instincts. But
now, Nicholas is dead indeed. Disintegrated bit by bit like a vampire in the
heat of the sun. by sparing him, you killed him.” He slammed his fist into
something close to where Ayara’s head lay, hard enough to startle her. She
heard an object topple over and crash to the floor.
The silence hung on the air like shed
skin. After some moment, the kid-man walked over to where Ayara lay in bed in
semi-paralysis. She flinched.
He sat at the edge of the bed but didn’t
touch her. Up close, Ayara searched his face to see if she could make out his
features in the darkness. All she was more confusing then she would allow
herself to believe. It’s the darkness.
Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking over what the man-kid had said, ‘We have no face to save.’
“A
few years ago, not quite twenty years, we had a factory in this town running tests
and all kinds of illegal researches that would raise the eyebrows of every Rights and Activist association. And it did. I remember there were a few court
cases to get them to pack up and leave town. But you know the way it is with
high profile cases, envelopes changed hands and the matter…”
“What
kind of tests are you talking about?”
“Cloning.
Human cloning through the use of nuclear energy. Of course, the fallout came as
the Rights groups had predicted. Folks
in the vicinity of the factory when it happened… let’s just say, they would have
been better off if they’d died immediately. The factory owners quit the site
and left us to count our losses.”
“Was
the man on the highway one of them? Is that why you sent him out to die?”
“Close
your eyes.”
She obeyed, dutifully. He slid off the
bed and she him move across the room. There was a faint, sharp click, the sound
of someone throwing a switch and the light came on.
“Open
your eyes,” the man-kid said not unkindly but his voice had taken on a grim
tone.
He was standing in the middle of the room.
It was where she spotted him when she peeled off her eyelids. He was a kid,
alright no doubt about it. And now the full weight of the phrase he’d spoken
earlier, the one she’d kept someplace in the backburner of her mind came thrashing
every wall of well-constructed ideals to pronounce itself justified. She thrust
her fingers into her mouth and bit down hard. It was all she could do to keep
from screaming. A scream that would have paid out for forever. “Names often go with faces and we got no
face to save here,” the man-kid had said.
The thing standing in the middle of the
room called up Ayara’s childhood memory of an episode of Daffy Duck which featured the hand of the cartoonist drawing the
series character fitted into weird costumes. At one point, it had Daffy Duck bickering
incessantly. The cartoonist took his eraser and wiped out his beak. The man-kid
had two holes where there should have been a nose. A face with no visible
features.
“How
do I hear when you speak since you have mouth? Is this a form of some sick
joke?”
“You
been hearing my voice come through as fine as wine in summertime and you haven’t
guessed the difference in the resonance?”
“Telepathy.”
She half-screamed the word like it would ease the terror. “We’ve been communicating
through our minds. Neither of us has actually spoken a word all day.”
“They
say ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ it had
to find a way to fit into the natural sate of things. Here we are never dying
and never actually, living. And if you would have it, the vagrant you thought you saved by throwing you jeep over the cliff
was my brother. I died a few months ago. Got killed is the appropriate word but here I am. I came back. We never
marry. We have no use for reproduction since we never die. We do not feed. With
no mouth, who needs food, right?
“I
guess those bastards achieved what they aimed at if only they hadn’t out and
left town in a hurry. Maybe, someday, we the hybrid would be the only ones left
in this world.”
“Miss,
are you okay? Miss, wake up.”
Ayara woke up to see a traffic warden
bent over her and shaking her looking deathly serious.
“Are
you okay? What happened here? Can you talk?”
She looked around. She was back inside
her SUV but the scene was different. Even her clothes had been changed. It couldn’t
have been a dream. She has got to find a way to prove it. While the cop was
still fretting over her, she tried to move and something fell out of her blouse
landing on her lap. She fetched the piece of paper and turned it around. It bore
an inscription.
“We got no face to
save.”
It was a confirmation and a warning
lumped into one message.
Eneh
Akpan
June
1st, 2014
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