“Who are you?” Kyle asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“My name is Michiko,” she answered while glancing around them and scanning the perimeter of the force field. “We’re taking too long,” she added. Reaching around her left hip, her hand disappeared into a satchel and then produced a small flask. “Here. Drink this.”
At first Kyle wanted to resist, but at this point, it really didn’t matter. He was too weak to put up a fight. So he opened his mouth as she placed the tip of the flask gingerly against his lips. A cool, minty liquid spilled over his tongue and down the dry crevice of his throat.
“I think I’ve had this before,” he croaked after she paused to give him a second to catch his breath.
She smiled. “Of course you have. It is from the same essence that makes up your powers.”
He frowned, but before he could speak she gave him another drink. This time he pulled on it, hard, gulping at the liquid, feeling energy return to his body. Soon it coursed through his bones, then his muscles and tendons until, at last, the tips of his nerves were nourished as well. All the pain from his stings was erased, save from the one on the back of his neck, but even that one was now reduced to barely an ache.
“Can you stand now?” she asked tentatively.
To his surprise he felt that he could. “Yes.”
She pulled him to his feet with ease. Standing face to face, Kyle could see that she was about five foot nine. She stood with the calm stance of an athlete as she returned the flask to her satchel and put her hands on her hips. “So,” she said with a humorous squint, “you’re the millionth?”
Kyle shook his head in complete dismay. “I’m the something or other.”
“Our gray friend told me you might be confused.”
“Gray? You mean The Gray Man?”
She nodded. “A good sensei. I spent time under his tutelage before I chose to come here to find my obi-san.”
“Your obi-san?”
Her lips grew tight and a pained expression flashed across her face. “My love,” she said. ”My true love.”
“Your true love is here?” Kyle asked, looking around them at the landscape of hell.
“Yes. It’s a long story. No time, horo-sha. We must go.”
“Into the city?”
“Yes. It’s the only way now. Our only chance. The Dark Rider waits on the other side of the force field, out there, beyond the dunes. He watches us. I can feel him.”
“The Shaman guy, right?” Kyle asked as they both turned and headed into the city, his arms and legs still shivering with pins and needles as whatever venom the hornets had stung him with was slowly offset by the drink.
She nodded.
“Seems like Gray is helping me a lot; first the dude with the lantern and now you.”
Michiko froze, her feet nearly digging into the road. “What did you say?”
Kyle stopped as well. “What do you mean?”
“You said a man with a lantern helped you?” It was less a question and more an accusation.
“Yes. Tall. His face was covered in—”
“He was tall? In all black?”
“Yeah. That was him. He found me when I first got here. He guided me here.”
Her eyes moved from side to side as she thought intensely. Then she looked up to Kyle with a mixture of fear and awe, and shook her head.
“What?” Kyle asked.
“He is no friend of The Gray Man, as you say, nor a friend of anyone with God in their heart. Do you understand this?”
“Actually, no, I don’t.”
“You are a millionth. This is for sure. The ruler of this place didn’t come to greet you himself, but he certainly sent one of his best men for the task.”
“Why? I mean… I’m so tired of not understanding things. If that’s true, then why didn’t he just kill me, gobble up my soul, whatever, right there on the spot?”
Michiko looked over Kyle’s shoulder to the city walls. “Because they don’t want you dead, horo-sha, they want you here,” she said grimly, before drawing her sword. “It’s a trap.”
“But why?”
“They want you alive because you’re proof that the great law has been violated. One side has crossed over into the other. This is not allowed. It is why our Gray friend is so desperately trying to find you and get you out of here. The longer both he and you are here, the greater the chance that a conflict of universal proportions can erupt.”
Kyle was flooded with relief. “He’s looking for me? Why? I don’t understand. I did my mission. I did what I had to do. Why would he come after me?”
Her face softened and her eyes gazed upon him warmly. She put a hand out to his cheek and held it there, against the stubble of his beard. “Yes. We all heard. You did indeed do what you had to do, and you did it with honor.”
“Well. I don’t know about that, but the point is—”
“The point is that honor begets honor, horo-sha.”
They looked each other in the eye. Kyle said nothing.
“He is of honor, our gray friend,” Michiko continued, looking to the ground suddenly, as if picturing The Gray Man in her mind as she spoke. “So much so that he has risked everything to save you, to save the one under his charge who sacrificed all to achieve his mission and fulfill his purpose.”
Kyle shook his head. “I did what I was supposed to.”
“No, horo-sha,” Michiko said. “You did what so few would’ve done.”
The sky around them was beginning to go from orange and yellow to various shades of red and amber.
“What’s going on?” Kyle asked.
“Nightfall is coming,” Michiko answered grimly as she tilted her small chin to the sky.
Kyle nodded, not wanting to talk anymore about what had happened. He wasn’t a hero. Since he’d gotten here he was regretting what he’d done. Tamara. The kids. How could he have been so stupid? He had a life to live. He was too young to die. He should’ve let Victoria be. It wasn’t Kyle’s fault that the pretty boy barista had a thing for married women. There were consequences to everything…
Caitlyn’s face, in the throes of passion, came immediately to his mind.
Yes. Consequences. And Kyle had been even worse than that boy in his misjudgments, because he was old enough to have known better; he knew better, and did it anyway.
“That’s the real reason I’m here,” Kyle unwittingly said aloud.
Michiko looked at him but made no comment. She simply nodded towards the city, and as they walked on, he heard her whispering something in Japanese. Over and over. Perhaps to calm herself, or heighten her focus, he couldn’t tell.
The city before them still glowed white, even more so now against the backdrop of the darkening skyline. It was something to behold: surrounded by a towering wall that stood a good three hundred feet all the way around, it had a large, double gate made of thick bars of iron that was swung wide open, with no guards nearby, which seemed odd. Why build such a fortified city and then post no guards?
Beyond the walls Kyle counted the tops of about forty skyscrapers, all glowing white, with glass windows of light green and gray. One of the buildings had a globe on top of it with an arrow through it, the tip pointed skyward.
As they crossed through the city gates, Kyle wasn’t sure if his instincts were returning at long last or whether simply Michiko’s words were having an effect on him, but upon seeing the streets of the city completely abandoned, it did indeed feel like a trap.
There wasn’t a single soul in sight, and the irony of this thought almost made him grimace. How long, he wondered, does a soul last here anyway? Probably not very long.
The blue was back. He felt it there in his mind, like caffeine, awakening him and informing him: he was wrong; souls here last forever and ever and ever. The agony never ended and the sorrows of a lifetime filled you by the bucketful.
Here you were a bottomless vessel of pure agony.
He shuddered, looking at his feet as he walked. Then a question came to him. “Michiko?”
“Yes, horo-sha?”
“If this is a trap, then why are we walking right into it?”
She looked around confidently. “Two reasons. First, we cannot go back. The force field will not allow it, and even if it did, The Rider and his servants would be waiting, as those are their lands. And second, where we need to get to now is on the other side anyway.”
“The other side?”
“Of the city.”
“You mean… ?”
“Yes. And I suspect we’ll have to fight our way there, every step of the way.”
The waitress was about to get it when “the blinding” began. White flashes across his eyes that were so bright they dug past his corneas and directly into his brain. He blinked, twice, hard. The blinding passed for a moment and he could focus again on his little pets; one still bleeding and now yelling at him to leave the waitress alone and, oddly, the waitress not saying a thing, just staring at him with pretend bravery as he approached with the knife.
When the blinding came a second time it was so severe that he dropped the knife, doubled over and then stumbled backwards, falling on his ass as he gripped his temples. Through the light he heard The Other speaking a word or two, and at first he couldn’t quite make it out. Then he did: Canada. That word came clear as day, but it came with gibberish, a series of languages, Spanish being the only one that The Bread Man could even begin to recognize.
His mind was being pierced, the words like splinters, and the agony was more than he could bear. The girls had fallen silent, evidently stunned by his collapse, and after a little while he was able to stop rolling around and make his way on hands and knees to the door of the garage, where he slowly pulled himself up. He released the locks gingerly, one at a time, wincing because their metallic sounds banged like gongs inside his head.
Shit. He had a migraine. Just like that. He hadn’t had a migraine since he was a kid. They’d begun when he’d first realized that his father was beating up his mother every night.
The migraines lasted for years. Until junior high, when The Other had visited him for the first time, outside the school gym during The Fall Dance, where the girls had ignored him all night and he’d fled to weep quietly against a chain link fence behind some trees.
Don’t worry, The Other had told him. It’s okay never to be loved. And they will NEVER love you. But you will make sure they wish they had.
At the time he had no idea what that meant, that he would become what he was now, so he walked home confused and brokenhearted, but also happy that he had a new friend.
After making his way around the garage door, he closed it gently behind him. Managing to get his key ring out of his pocket, he now reversed the process, locking each deadbolt, one at a time, as quietly as possible.
Canada. Something about Canada. He once had an aunt in Canada, but she was long dead. So? What was The Other trying to tell him?
A chill ran over him as he wondered if, maybe, this was a clear message for him to run. Run to Canada. Something had gone wrong. They were on to him at last. Finally, some lawman had sniffed him out.
If so, then for sure, he had to run. Before they got here and found out what was in the garage.
The air was crisp with cold and the sun had long ago set resentfully, as if deliberately trying to delay him from what he wanted to do, which he only did at night. Killing them during the day never seemed right. He tried it with a couple of girls. Both times were disappointing. The blood was too red and the screams comical instead of terrifying. Night was the proper venue and now, with his head pounding against itself, he was going to lose the opportunity to finish the waitress.
But it wasn’t his fault. He breathed in deeply, the scent of all the eucalyptus trees on his street filling his nostrils and scratching at his throat, and reassured himself again: he couldn’t get into trouble. The Other was the one delaying him, changing the game, telling him to run now.
But he was missing something. He was sure of it. Part of the message was garbled and hard to make out. He tried to concentrate but his head was throbbing viciously, as if thinking was too much for it to handle. So he began guessing: Ontario. Toronto. Quebec. They were cities in Canada. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was supposed to escape to a certain area. A certain place.
He walked gingerly back into the house, where he splashed some cold water from the kitchen sink on his face and fumbled at one of the cabinet doors. When it stuck a little, he became enraged and yanked it clean off the hinges, tossing it against the wall behind him. Inside the cabinet was a bottle of Aleve. He opened it and swallowed four at once, drinking water from the open faucet.
The throbbing would need time to subside. Time and darkness.
He made his way to the living room, sat in his father’s old recliner, tossed a blanket over his face and asked The Other to please make things more clear, he was sorry, but he just didn’t understand.
Silence.
Why did this have to happen? The Bread Man was just this morning beginning to feel normal again after what had happened.
After that stupid, bleeding girl had ruined everything, forcing him to go after that stupid waitress.
He could kill them. In fact, he decided he would, right now. Screw the rules. Those bitches had it coming. Because now everything was going to change, he could tell. Now he was going to have to run off to Canada and who knew what else.
He tried to rise from the chair, intent on grabbing the butter knife he’d seen next to the sink while he was splashing his face and head to the garage to stab them with the dull blade a hundred times each, but the minute he rocked his weight forwards in the chair his head exploded in agony.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh…” he moaned as he slowly reclined again, the blood in his ears pounding, his eyes clamped shut, his eyelids like levies holding back the tide.
The house was mercifully dark inside, save for the Felix the Cat night-light that shone from the hall. It used to be in his bedroom, when he was a child, a gift from his mother one day while they were shopping at the Dollar Store, but now he was grown and no longer needed it to protect him from things under the bed or in the closet. Those things were all his friends now, and so the light filled a more perfunctory role these days: it kept the hall lit so when he got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, he didn’t stub his damn toe.
But there would be no getting up from this chair. Not for a long while. Not until the Aleve kicked in and his migraine began to subside. For a split second The Bread Man felt lonely.
His mother used to care for him when he got migraines as a child. She would bring him aspirin and a cool towel for his forehead and she would just… be there until the pain went away. There was no one to take care of him now. Not his merciless master who’d probably caused the migraine in the first place with his commands in his head, and not the stupid pretty girl on her period in the garage and certainly not the mean little waitress, who he was sure would dig her nails into his eyeballs the first chance she got.
The walls creaked and the kitchen faucet was dripping. A car drove by outside and then faded off into the distance. His migraines always did this: heightened his senses. But the sounds were soft and he was growing weary.
Canada. What the hell would he do in Canada?
As he slid into unconsciousness, he realized the answer, and a bleak little smile crossed his face.
But of course. He would kill.
He wondered if Canadian girls put up a bigger fight than American girls.