New world order, p.14
New World Order, page 14
part #6 of Crimson Shadow Series
“Taken?” Estella asked, frowning, “By who? What?”
The seven-armed octopus.
Sana shook her head. “Nothing. It… it seems silly now. Doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the dream or what I was saying before.”
It stood between the great beasts, she thought, wanting to strangle the life from both; it snatched up any it could reach, no matter which side they tried to flee to—it wanted them all dead.
Estella stared at her, and Sana hoped that the bizarre dream-creature’s involvement in her otherwise relevant dream wouldn’t distract her from the point she was trying to make.
“A-anyway,” Sana pushed on, shaken by the suddenly vivid memory of the dream, “when I awoke, I somehow knew that the tiger had represented Xander Stryker, who I’d only heard of in passing before that night. I decided then that I needed to join him—join you—and be a part of what he was doing. So I made all the arrangements, flew out here, and met him for the first time…”
“And?” Estella asked.
“And he was just as scary as he was in the dream,” Sana said with a nervous laugh that made Estella smile and laugh, as well. “He wasn’t mean or anything like that, but his aura…” Sana shook her head, still awestruck by the memory of her first encounter with him. “There was such rage and power and strength! He was just like the tiger, Estella, right down to his black-striped red aura! And I thought, There must be something in him, something good and just and pure. So, though it terrified me to do so, I searched; searched for some sign of what it was about this man that had called to me in my dream. But the deeper I went the more I saw a mind filled with pain and anger and hate and resentment and doubt and…” she sighed and shook her head, “I saw Xander for the tortured soul he truly is; saw how tortured he is. And there, in his own way, I saw the ‘why’—saw that he fought so that others wouldn’t have to suffer like he had. But this seemed wrong, too, because in many ways he was just as angry with the world as he was the people who’d wronged him. But then…” Sana smiled a wide, painful smile, “… I came across a part of him that wasn’t burning—the heart of the tiger, I thought of it—and it was you.”
Estella stared at her, tears welling in her eyes. “M-me?”
Sana nodded. “I saw that, as far as Xander was concerned, the entire world could burn in the fires of his hate… so long as he left a place for you to be happy and safe at the end of it.” Sana watched as Estella cupped her face in her hands and let out a sob. She nodded, knowing how powerful this vision had been for her, as well. “So I decided that, to know for sure if I’d made the right choice with taking the tiger’s side, I had to know who it was he was holding in his heart and away from all that fire.”
“And what did you think after you met me?” Estella asked, still weeping.
Sana shrugged. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Estella nodded slowly, beginning to shiver.
“There’s a lot of anger and violence inside Xander, and, knowing him and his history better, I can’t say I blame him for any of it. But whenever the subject of you comes up—in conversation or even just in his mind—he goes quiet and respectful. With any other guy, the thought of a significant other will conjure a lewd thought or visual, some degree of perversion along with all the other stuff. I figured that, this being the case, I’d be in store for some pretty dirty thoughts whenever you came up—I’d be prepared to think of ice cream and all other manner of distractions to escape those thought waves—but it was never like that. Everything else in him is so jagged and furious, but you, Estella… you’re pure to him.” She finally shrugged and wiped her face, feeling like she’d just signed her own death warrant with that confession. “So I… I don’t know, I just figured you two were, like, celibate or something. That’s all. That’s why your”—she snapped her fingers—“immediate openness to the subject of sex just sort of clashed with what I’d come to expect.”
****
Estella worked to stifle her cries as she hurried out of the office in overdrive. Though she was sure the young auric prodigy could see just how her words had impacted her—was sure that anybody with a pair of working eyes could see that she’d been impacted—she didn’t want another audience to watch her cry that night.
If she couldn’t be alone with her Xander, she at least wanted to be alone with her sadness.
With no other place to go, she resigned to going to the roof. Despite the state of the world and despite being several weeks into winter, the sky above their city was blue and clear and the sun shone bright and proud and certain just over the eastern horizon.
“Fuck you, too,” she half-sobbed, half-spat up at the shimmering orb.
She wasn’t certain how much of this response was that growing “like Xander”-behavior she’d been noticing and how much of it was the immediate effects of the sunlight on her skin, but it felt good to curse at it either way.
Her hands moved out of instinct and shaded her belly. She wasn’t sure if the sunlight could pierce the fabric of her shirt—the skin of her stomach didn’t feel as itchy and irritated as the rest of her exposed flesh—and have any negative effects on the life growing within her, but she’d never been one to take careless risks before.
Still, in a weird way, it felt good to be out there.
The pain of the UV radiation assaulting her sensitive vampire skin somehow seemed to offer validation to the agony she’d been feeling all night.
Yin… and Yang.
Estella blinked and looked away from the sun, then turned away from it entirely.
A thought…
Incomplete.
Finality seemed just out of her reach when she sensed an aura approaching and then—
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
“ESTELLA!” a muffled-yet-familiar voice shouted to her through the hatch that led to the roof from the inside of the building.
“What in the—Sawyer?” Estella started towards the voice.
“Yeah. Who else?” he called back. “Look, my ass got plenty tanned out there already, so I hope you’ll pardon me for not hopping back out there, but we’re back—yes, all of us; Zeek made sure to tell me to mention that for starters—and… well, there’s something you’ve gotta see.”
Estella opened the hatch and adjusted herself to block out the light as she saw Sawyer, looking, true to his word, burned and agitated, flinch at it. “Does it have something to do with Xander?” she asked.
Sawyer’s frown said enough, but he added, “No, not in the long run, but you have to see it, anyway.”
Chapter Seven
New World Order
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world
has yet owned has bled to death under our knives;
who will wipe this blood off us?
What water is there for us
to clean ourselves?”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
“Fuck! Fucking fuck with a dollop of freshly fucked fuck on top!”
Serena Vailean
“What is this?” Estella demanded, staring at the open laptop screen and the video that Sawyer and the others had paused and waiting for her.
“A response to Xander’s message,” Dianna said, folding her arms.
She didn’t look happy about this, hadn’t looked happy about anything since Xander’s transmission, but Estella couldn’t bring herself to think on that or even care.
She nodded to Sawyer to press play. He did so with a quick pass over the computer’s spacebar:
Click
“—AFFRONT TO EVERYTHING WE AS A SPECIES HAVE EVER KNOWN. MANY THROUGHOUT HISTORY, MYSELF INCLUDED, HAVE TAKEN UP THE MANTLE OF FIGHTING THESE CREATURES—DEDICATED OUR LIVES TO LEARNING THEIR WAYS AND HOW TO—”
Estella sneered at the display and, hoping to once again pause it for the sake of establishing some context to what she was seeing, she mimicked the strike on the spacebar.
The video paused with the man held in mid-rant, his finger aimed back at them like a loaded gun. His eyes were grayish-blue but shone bright despite his later years. Everything about him—his posture, his hair, and his demeanor in the video—made Estella think that he was (or once was) military, and the six heavily-armed men standing ramrod straight behind him only supported this assumption.
“What did he say before this?” Estella asked, glancing back at the others.
Sawyer shook his head. “Nobody knows,” he said. “That’s exactly how the video starts. It was broadcast in much the same way as Xander’s message, but it seems that he got to talking before the cameras were rolling.”
Estella frowned back at the stilled image. “This was on all TVs and computers like Xander’s broadcast?” she asked, wondering why she wouldn’t have sensed something about it earlier.
“Sort of,” Dianna cut in, still not sounding happy. “Most active networks have been spending the entire night working to avoid another hack like what Xander did, so this didn’t interrupt anybody’s regularly scheduled programming,” she half-whined the last three words like a network recording before adding, “but since all the news channels have been going crazy over the Xander footage they’re just as eager to share this along with it.”
Sawyer nodded. “Yeah, especially since it’s riding on the popular side of ‘gut anything that ain’t human.’”
“So who is that awful man?” Estella asked.
“Oh, just watch,” Sawyer said, moving to the spacebar once again. “He’s not shy about introductions.”
Click
“—DESTROY THEM! NOW WE KNOW THAT MANY OF YOU ARE SCARED—AND, I WON’T SUGARCOAT IT, YOU SHOULD BE—BUT WE ARE HERE TO TELL YOU THAT THESE CREATURES—THESE MYTHOS—CAN BE KILLED! WE HAVE DONE IT! WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO IT! MY MEN AND I HAVE BEEN WAGING A SEVEN-MAN WAR ON THESE THINGS FOR THE PAST FEW DECADES, AND WE’RE NOT ABOUT TO STOP NOW!”
Serena scoffed behind Estella and shook her head. “Somebody’s cranky! Get him a fucking Cialis and some room-temp chicken soup!”
“Shush!” Zoey barked at her.
Surprisingly enough, Serena listened.
“… BELIEVE THIS TO BE A GLOBAL DECLARATION OF WAR! TALK OF CHOOSING SIDES AND ACTS OF PUBLIC VIOLENCE MAKE IT OBVIOUS WHAT THIS STRYKER-CREATURE IS SAYING, AND WE’RE HERE TO SAY THAT WE WILL NOT BE THREATENED! BUT, MOST IMPORTANTLY, WE’RE HERE TO SAY THAT YOU, MY FELLOW HUMANS, ARE NOT ALONE! THE TRUTH HAS BEEN EXPOSED, AND WE’RE PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT THERE IS SOLACE AGAINST THESE TROUBLING TIMES: THE CEBOURISTS!
Zane growled and slammed the spacebar, pausing the video.
“Hey! Easy, man! The guy doesn’t live in my keyboard!” Sawyer said with a glare.
Zane offered a half-hearted “sorry, man” before looking at Estella. “So I guess wiping out that Ariel bitch and her crew didn’t slow down the rest of these Cebour-fucks everywhere else.”
Zoey shook her head. “If anything it just gave the rest of them a martyr to mourn.”
“Try a martyr and a smitten god,” Sawyer said.
Everyone but Dianna gave him a confused look.
“The Cebourists were taking to the streets outside the church that they hijacked from that priest Xander knew,” Dianna said.
“Father Tennesen…” Estella whimpered.
Dianna nodded. “Had Ariel’s body up on this big pyre along with…” she shivered and hugged her arms across her chest, looking away.
Sawyer set a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Along with…?” Zane pushed.
Serena nodded along with Zane’s encouragement. “Yeah, toots, spit it out! We gotta play fucking Pictionary or something?”
Dianna glared at Serena. “My brother. My fucking good-for-nothing, psychopath brother!”
Estella’s eyes widened. “Richard?”
Serena and Zane both grimaced at the realization of their blunder as a bunch of auras around the room—Zeek, Karen and Sasha, Satoru, and Tim’s—flared with fear and hatred. None, however, flared with more fear or hatred than Dianna’s.
Sawyer nodded. “Guess the Cebourists worshipped that son-of-a-bitch as some kind of messiah. Probably why that word kept getting crossed connections earlier when we were dealing with those two cases,” he sighed and shrugged. “Either way, between his less-than-wholesome tactics, his devil-may-care approach to what they’ve come to see as a holy mission, and his eagerness to use that serum that grants humans mythos abilities to give them a fighting edge, the Cebourists found in him a path to follow.”
Dianna seethed, making a noise that Estella would have otherwise reserved for an enraged vampire. “Those sick bastards are treating my brother’s insane vendetta like some sort of one-man holy war!”
Zoey sneered and shook her head. “And they took that vendetta to a whole new level by learning mythos-killing magic from an equally insane woman…”
“… and turned it into a new religion,” Isaac finished.
Sawyer nodded to all of them. “He was trying to warn us all—mythos everywhere—of the Cebourists. With one of their founders dead and… and whatever they had planned for Richard’s remains thwarted by Xander, they’d likely start a global mythos hunt. True to Xander’s warning, the Cebourists are going public, doubling their efforts to recruit new followers and…”
“And it looks like cutting down that bitch Ariel has sprouted seven new cocksucking leaders,” Zane growled.
“And such classy and charming cocksuckers, at that,” Serena chimed, glaring at the paused video screen with the furious-looking man frozen thereon.
Estella, still shaking from all of this, reached out and gave the spacebar an uncertain tap.
Click
“MY NAME IS ROBERT DiANGELO, AND I HAVE A MESSAGE OF MY OWN:
“TO MY FELLOW HUMANS, THERE ARE TOUGH TIMES AHEAD—UGLY TIMES—BUT WE’RE HERE TO SEE AN END TO THESE BLOODTHIRSTY MONSTERS ONCE AND FOR ALL! YOU CAN JOIN THE CAUSE—JOIN THE CEBOURISTS—AND HELP US TO FIGHT FOR A MYTHOS-FREE WORLD… OR YOU CAN STAY IN YOUR HOMES AND LET US DO OUR WORK!
“AND TO EVERYTHING ELSE, DON’T BOTHER RUNNING. WE’RE COMING FOR YOU!”
The man ended in what would have been a dynamic pose, once again pointing and sneering with an undeniably intimidating expression. In much the same fashion as the belated opening, however, the video rolled on for another few seconds, creating an awkward extension that ended with the man starting to turn back towards one of the six other men before it cut to black.
“You’d think such a charming scrotum of a man would be able to hire himself a capable video editor,” Serena groused.
Dianna shook again and finally let out a heavy sob, her bottled emotions forcing their way out. The room went quiet as Sawyer took her into his arms and ushered her away, heading for the stairs that would lead them to the office.
Sana, who Estella could only assume had been watching in on everything with her aura from up there, conveniently slipped through the door and started down so that they’d have it to themselves.
As the young Indian girl started down the stairs, she and Estella caught one another’s gaze and a shared thought, one that seemed irrelevant only a short time ago:
The seven-armed octopus.
Estella had “seen” the thought in Sana’s head when she’d been talking about her dream, but, like Sana, she hadn’t thought anything of the random element—just the sort of nonsense that dreams have a way of planting in the mind—that she’d disregarded it just as quickly as the gifted auric had.
But, as Sana worked her way down the stairs and hurried towards Estella, it became evident that there was more on the gifted auric’s mind than just this new turn of events.
Her pink aura, which swirled and thrashed over her head, was practically screaming “XANDER!”
****
It was quite possibly the most bittersweet of circumstances.
On the one hand, they’d found Xander.
On the other…
“Fuck!” Serena said with a gasp. It was one of the first times Estella had heard her say the word without a shred of humor or enthusiasm; the first time she seemed to take no enjoyment in the word. “Fucking fuck with a dollop of freshly fucked fuck on top!”
Sana had said they’d have company, all sorts of it, and she hadn’t been wrong.
News vans were circled around the block.
Rioters were struggling to get past a line of police in SWAT gear who’d set up a perimeter around the unseen barrier set by Xander’s aura. Though they held steady, Estella could see on most of their auras that, despite the job they were paid to do, they’d sooner be on the other side of it, clamoring and fighting for a chance at the monster they’d been tasked to guard.
How much of their effort is sincere and how much of it is because they already know there’s no getting through? she wondered.
A way’s away from the aggression, Estella spotted a select few who were kneeling in front of some low quality printouts of Xander’s face from his broadcast and burning candles in his honor. Though it was, at first, a somewhat endearing sight, it also felt twisted and wrong; not at all the sort of thing Xander would have wanted. Still fixated on this, Estella watched as several of the further-back rioters, not content with poking glances over the heads of those in front of them, turned on the small group, kicking out their candles and then turning their rage on the people themselves.
Isaac, seeing this, as well, sneered in disgust. “God! What the hell’s the matter with them?”
“Fear does ugly things to people,” Zoey said in a flat-but-still-disgusted tone. “Makes them erratic and violent.”
“So why attack one another?” Isaac asked, nodding towards the centerpiece of the mayhem.
Zane nodded, also confused. “Doesn’t make sense. There’s a few cops here and such, but that nobody’s made a break for it and crossed the line to get to—”
“You can’t see it,” Estella said in a low tone, too sickened by the sight.
Serena and Zoey both nodded, staring.
