As opposed to "foreward." Because the next chapter in Ruthless (from which this excerpt comes) is called "backward."
Glorna, a wood sprite, perched in a crooked branched
of a chatty pine tree while the tree murmured to him a scenario of what killing a modern king might be like should
Glorna continue with his plan to assassinate someone set on becoming the king
of all vampires. Clearly, the pine had more whisper than wit, but since Glorna
was a wood sprite, he was obliged to listen.
“Such a king,” the tree said, “would travel in a motorcade of high-speed
limousines and an army of men who’d fight to the death rather than let their
monarch break a nail. The king would occupy the middle car, so you must time
your dive from the branch onto the correct limousine roof. Once you hit your
target, gunfire will spray from the other vehicles and seven ninja warriors
will do a dance of death to avoid it as they dive on you, kicking and blocking
your counter chops and kicks in a fur ball of high-pitched verbal utterings
that only makes sense to ninjas. Six will lose their balance and fall to their
deaths.”
“Why?” Glorna asked.
“I don’t know why,” the
pine said irritably. “It’s some kind of rule. Are you going to listen or not?”
“Sure,” Glorna said.
“Now the gunfire will not
hit anyone, just come perilously close. The last ninja, however, will push you
to the hood and pin you there. Your head
will sink lower than the grill of the car and leave your face just inches from
the rapidly moving pavement. But you’ll flip that ninja over his head with the
kick of your feet, being saved from falling only be the tenuous grip of the
hood ornament on his clothes. Once
you’re free of the last ninja, the magical swords will attack.”
“Magical swords?”
“Yes. Six steel blades
with no one holding them. They’ll stab and slice while you dance around them
until the swords give up and the serpent takes over. After that will come the
poisonous monkey, followed by the green tiger, all attacking while the cars
speeds over one hundred miles per hour and the gunmen continue to shoot.
Eventually, the car will hit something and explode, but the king and his guard
will survive. Got it?
“Got it.”
Glorna knew the tree was
full of sap. Killing the king of vampires would be far more difficult. Most
wood sprites were cautious mythical creatures, not given to performing assassinations
without some sense of duty or cause. Glorna was different. Glorna was the cool
bad boy type - if wood sprites could be cool, bad, or boys. The point is:
Glorna wasn’t here for the whispering of pine trees, he was here to kill.
The wood sprite knew who his target was, though was less clear on why
that was his target. True, a strange leprechaun from a different realm did
offer him money to do it, although Glorna didn’t understand what money was, let
alone have any idea on how to spend it. Wood sprites lived in the trees they
protected and typically cared about nothing except their trees. But it wasn’t
cool, bad, or boyish to be so duty-bound. With all that time to kill, why not
kill?
So
why did he hesitate? There had to be another reason.
Maybe his target was too ruthless, especially to wood sprites who were
too cool, bad, or boyish. The leprechaun that had offered him money to make the
killing also hinted that the assassination was a competition, that Glorna had
to make his hit before somebody else “hit” first. Timing was everything.
“Get there before a vampire bites,” the leprechaun warned.
So
Glorna sat – and waited.
Soon a rust bucket van drove under the branch where Glorna was poised to
drop from the tree to the roof of the vehicle, superhumanly balance himself as
he broke through the windshield, and then stab his target with a knife. But the
van just stopped.
What the hell? Was this a trap?
Patiently, Glorna
remained in position, toes curled around a limb, hoping the van would soon be
on its way, but it stayed, as if to block a motorcade from driving under a wood
sprite/assassin. Glorna sighed and tightened his grip. If the van didn’t move,
how would the motorcade drive past? Maybe the truck was broken. Glorna could
offer to fix or move the van, but cool bad boys didn’t help people, they yelled
at them.
He
dropped from the branch to do just that only to find that the unmoving driver
was his target. This was way too easy to be cool, bad, or boyish, but at least
he got there first. He quickly stabbed his target who didn’t even resist.
Maybe his next crime wouldn’t be so
boring. At least he got his target first. Glorna looked around. No sign of any
vampires.
The two killers that followed thought the
same, not realizing that each was too late.
“Not again!’ thought the pot-bellied, white-bearded, middle-aged man
still sitting upright in that rusty white single seated van. He had been
delivering newspapers, his only job for the duration of his adult life, when
something distressed him, making him unable to correct a mistake. His face was
still red with anger and with the approaching footsteps, he wasn’t feeling any
calmer.
First, he’d been stabbed in the belly then shot in the head with a
bullet, which was now rattling uncomfortably in his skull, and all of that was
before he wound up with the huge pain in his chest. So naturally being dead was
a perfectly reasonable expectation. Along with being dead should come the
feeling that any concerns about this other newspaper carrier, who had parked
behind him and was now approaching his van, should be somebody else’s problem.
Ed, for that was the driver’s name, lamented on how many other people died so
often in such a short time. It hardly seemed fair. Most people that died, he
was sure, didn’t have to work the next day.
Suddenly Ed realized something. He hadn’t just been murdered; he’d been
assassinated! Hell, anyone can take a knife or a bullet, but to be the victim
of some elaborate conspiracy; well, didn’t that make him important?
He
saw the carrier quiet distinctly now. It was the new carrier, John Simotes, and
somehow Ed Calkins knew something about him that he didn’t know the day he
hired him. At first, John seemed like a godsend, as he was willing to take a
paper route Ed thought he would never fill. This route contained pockets of
small towns surrounded by forests, grasslands, and farm fields, which increase
the mileage exponentially, all on the carrier’s dime. John not only accepted
the route, he especially asked for it, so Ed thought of this new carrier as his
LPC: least problematic carrier.
Don’t get him wrong. Ed loved his carriers. Most were hardworking
problem-solvers, trying to pull themselves up in the world by taking extra work
for extra money. But carriers, by their nature, always came with problems they
brought to work with them. For example, a carrier takes the route to get his
car fixed, but he needs it fixed to do his route; do you have an extra car I
could use? Or money. I'm a little short right now, can I have an advance? I
need a sitter; can you watch my kids while I do the route?
Until now, Ed thought
John’s problem was the two-year-old boy he took with him on the route, a little
boy with an exceptional talent in music and an equally exceptional appetite, so
much that he was eating his proud parents out of house and home. While the
parents were proud, they didn’t seem happy, at least not with each other. That
seemed to be the most of this carrier’s problems.
Now, inexplicably, and all at once, Ed knew the truth. John’s main
problem was that he was a vampire that fed on human blood, and he was trying
not to be a vampire that fed on human blood and was failing miserably at that
endeavor. That problem was about to be Ed’s problem as John just found his next
supply of human blood in Ed. As bad as that seemed, that wasn’t John’s biggest
problem, which was also about to become Ed’s biggest problem. John wanted a
changeling son.
“Relax,” John murmured to Ed as he closed in. “It will be fine.”
But it wasn’t. John was
going to make Ed a vampire too and pass onto him that little deal of making
that changeling son that, two years ago, became the little John-Peter that
accompanied John on the route. Sure, John; make a human, do a better job this
time, and get it all done a couple of years ago? No problem…except how? John
was insistent. Ed could use his skills as a computer programmer to write AI
software to the specifications of his bachelor’s psychology degree, which
undoubtably gave him all the knowledge he would ever need to make a child from
scratch. Ed kept insisting that the deed was impossible, but John kept
insisting otherwise, as John-Peter already existed.
Teeth sank into Ed’s neck. The experience seemed familiar in an awful
way. Ed felt the vampire sucking deeply not only for his last drop of blood,
but his very soul.
To
this, Ed might have smiled. He didn’t have a soul as it had already been stolen
by his lover and wife, which is an important distinction to note. Ed had many
wives, but only one was, by the enforcement of her own machete, and would be
for all times, his lover. All other women were just potential wives that would
be numbered, but never bedded, as Ed believed he was in a bragging rights
contest with the biblical King Solomon.
Still, something felt wrong. It was almost as if Ed wasn’t protected by
his lover’s theft from eternal damnation. Was he going to answer for his plans
to kill off every other living male on the earth? To be fair, his plan was to
enable someone else to do that and kill them once he finished. What about his
plans for world domination? To be fair again, they were no longer his plans as
everyone seemed to steal them before he could bring them to production. What he
worried about the most was what he did about the day he won the lottery. Ed was
a broken creature. Surely the Divine would understand and show mercy. More
likely, the luck of the Irish would swoop down at the last minute and rescue
the damaged soul just before it hit those eternal flames.
The timing problem suddenly had a surprising solution. As John informed
him, Ed was going to disappear for a time too slight for anyone to notice, but
a small plastic leprechaun would appear in his pocket when that time was up.
John’s wife, who was about to get out of the car and listen to his final words,
should receive that leprechaun with his last instructions, “Give it to the
boy,” meaning John-Peter. Between now and then, Ed would have plenty of time
and every kind of help for his task, as John would supply his own blood and an
impressive piece of wood that Ed’s imaginary leprechaun friend could use to
craft a changeling body.
While Ed objected, time did something strange. How was it strange? Image
a rubber circle with a seven second radius. Now imagine the center of the
circle being pulled downward for ten years. Technically, this would be a cone,
but to the naked imagination’s eye, it would look like a very deep, narrow
cylinder. Now, as Ed realized that he would have to cover for himself to allow
for burial, plans that required being at two places at the same time, and a
wild idea about stealing future technology that may or may not have gotten him
lost and had him wandering through the end of time till he was back at its
beginning. You must now imagine some very long, impossibly thin warts to that
cylinder, folding upward, downward, and making it impossibly ugly and just as
impossible to imagine. All of this time travel would make Ed crazy, John
informed him, but it would also make him famous.
Now, Ed was never the sanest man to begin with, but understand the havoc
that time travel can bring to mental wellness. There are three things to
existence: who you are, where you are, and what you are doing. Normally, none
of these things contradict each other. To understand this, take a butcher,
baker, or candlestick maker in France during the summer of 1812. Pick one,
let’s say a candlestick maker named Jean. We can say with confidence that if
Jean is making a candle somewhere in France in the summer of 1812, that Jean is
from France in the summer of 1812. Now throw time travel into the mix. We might
see Jean, making a candle somewhere in France in the summer of 1812, but do we
know he is from France of the same time? He could be from the past, doing work
for his future self or completely the reverse. None of that matters of course.
Jean could make too many candles, and no one would notice unless he took
nuclear technology from some Russia launch site in the late winter of 2031 and
made a very large candle that impressed a customer who then lit it with a blow
torch so that it blew/will blow France out of existence. That might catch
notice. If you’re a new vampire, or plan on becoming one, don’t try what Ed did
about time travel without senior vampire supervision. You see, if Ed had merely
gone back in the past, future, and imagined present, the result might have been
benign, but Ed unwittingly changed the course of human existence in his
efforts, thus effecting what can be called deep time, which effected a disorder
that he coined “deep time psychosis” or DTP. If you should become a vampire and
ignore the warning about deep time, know that the only person that can treat
your DTP is Ed Calkins himself.
Yes, Ed Calkins would become the
vampire’s leading authority of not only psychosis, but also Astro-Time Physics,
a mathematical field which he invented, despite not really understanding any of
the underlying math. He also became the poster child for why vampires needed to
bite more qualified authorities into vampirism.
Ed
did disappear for seven seconds. When he reappeared, Melissa, John’s wife,
rushed from her car to aid the dying Ed, but he grabbed her jacket and dropped
a plastic leprechaun in her hand.
“For the boy,” he croaked, just before he actually did
croak.
This is the tale of what happened in
that seven seconds…except of course, when it didn’t.
Illustration by Nancy Calkins for "Ruthless"
