Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Read online

  I would love to think that I would have, but I know better. I would have done the same job that I always had, fixed them right so that they wouldn’t come back. That is just my way and, quite frankly, there are worse ways to be.

  I took his money, jumped in the truck and drove off without saying good-bye to anyone. I hadn’t gotten close to any of the other mechanics. As I passed Bobby’s car I saw him sneaking a sandwich that he brought from home for 3 p.m. when his appetite got to him. He looked up at me with a mouth full of food and big round cheeks, like a hamster dressed in people clothes.

  And I thought to myself “Him they want to work here”

  Rent was $150 per week, so I paid for a whole week. Then I put another hundred in the box spring of my bed, and put the rest in my pocket. A night out maybe wasn’t the best idea I ever had, but I’d had a bitch of a day.

  I bought myself a steak dinner downtown, and had a couple beers with it. The waiter turned his nose up at my decision to turn down his wine recommendations, but I didn’t hear an offer from him to chip in on it, either.

  I can’t afford to drink much so the beers really hit me. I pushed myself up from the table, paid the bill cash with a tiny tip, and stumbled out the door. I’d driven here and I didn’t need to compound my situation with a DUI, so I decided to take a walk around the block.

  I must have still been angry about what happened that day because the people I passed tended to look in my face and then get out of my way. I also wasn’t in much of a mood to justify myself to any of them so I just kept walking. The sun had set and the street lights were on. Cold night air blew against my face; the city smells of car exhaust and open dumpsters in a restaurant district filled my nose.

  I was passing by a parking lot when I heard someone say, “That’s pretty funny,” and then I heard a dog yelp.

  I don’t know why but that got my attention. I looked to my left and I saw four guys standing around in a circle.

  They laughed and the dog yelped again.

  I crossed a short, wrought-iron fence and passed two lines of parked cars, and then I saw what I was hoping I wouldn’t see: four guys kicking a dog.

  Something just burned inside of me when I laid eyes on that. Who does that? Who the hell needs to see some animal suffer for their jollies? I stepped past the third line of cars and called out, “Hey!” at the four guys.

  They looked up from the dog toward me. They were guys in their early twenties like me, better dressed than I was, probably guys who’d stopped off for a drink together after work on a Friday.

  I expected them to scatter but they didn’t. If anything they looked as irritated with me as I was with them – as if they were saying, “Who are you to talk to us without permission?”

  “We don’t have any money for you, hobo,” one of them, a light-skinned black guy, announced. The others chuckled.

  The dog tried to get up and one of them pushed it back down with his foot.

  “You don’t want to touch that dog again,” I said.

  One of the other guys, a white guy in a grey suit with a red tie and white shirt, his brown hair cut close to his scalp, grinned, turned, and just kicked the dog under the jaw. It yelped, turned in a circle and whimpered.

  “The fuckin’ dog pissed on the tire of my brand new car,” another, also white, said. “You better take a walk, pal, or you’re going to get what he’s going to get.”

  You grow up on a farm, you learn to respect animals. Even the food animals like cows and chickens and pigs – they’re going to die, but you don’t want to see them suffer. The life you make for yourself costs them theirs.

  But dogs are special. A good dog guards your crop all night from the varmints that would eat it. A dog protects you from what might come to eat your herd. He’s your companion, he’s your friend. He works right beside you for no other reason than because he can.

  “I’m telling you one more time to get away from that dog,” I told them.

  I started walking, they lined up between me and the dog. It didn’t run away, and then I saw why. They’d already broken his leg.

  I’m not ashamed to say, I lost it. It was too much. I’d gotten kicked out of the Navy for no damn good reason, I’d gotten fired for no good reason, now here I was going to have to work through the whole, hot summer on someone else’s property for no good reason, trading sweat for pennies, because all I ever did was to try to work for someone else and then stand up for myself.

  No. Not only no, but hell no! I charged forward and I engaged.

  The first guy caught me in the stomach with his right. I reached out and took him by the side of the head with my left hand, and punched him square between the eyes with my right. Another of them leapt at me and caught me around the shoulders, trying to drive me to the ground with his weight.

  If I didn’t have fifty pounds on him, that might have worked. As it was, I caught him in the chest with my right elbow and punched the guy coming up behind him with my left fist. The first guy was staggering to the ground, shaking his head, when the fourth guy punched me in the head.

  The guy with his arms around my shoulders tried to drag me to the ground, circling behind me and pulling back. The fourth guy, the black one, hit me in the stomach, then again, and again, then looked up at me and smiled, as if to say, “This is what you get, aren’t you sorry now?”

  I pasted him once in the mouth, then in the throat in a left-right combination. He stepped back, both hands on his neck, and I could see the third guy had chosen the better part of valor and had taken off.

  I reached my right hand behind me, found the back of the second guy’s head, and then flipped him over my shoulder. He landed on his feet and I took him by the hair and punched him in the back of the head, right behind the ear. He dropped like a stone.

  The dog whimpered again. I turned and he was laying by the guy I’d punched in the throat. For all of the pain the poor animal was in, he laid his head on that guy’s leg and his tail thumped the ground. His broken leg lay twisted out behind him.

  The guy was making some kind of gasping noise. I’d probably hurt him pretty badly. The first one lay quiet on the ground, and the fourth lay next to him. They were amateurs. I took a step toward the dog, wondering if I had enough money to afford a vet.

  “Stop right there!” I heard behind me. I turned and saw two uniform cops with their weapons drawn, and that third guy standing behind them.

  Great.

  “So you was defending a dog?” the big cop asked me. He was black, overweight, dressed in over-tight pants and an over-loose jacket. His stomach poked out three inches past his belt line and strained the last two buttons of his white shirt. His tie looked like a test pattern and his breath proved that coffee could get rancid.

  “They were stomping it,” I said, not looking at him.

  “They said they found it that way,” the cop informed me. “They say they were trying to get it into their car when you came up, tried to mug them.”

  “I want a lawyer,” I told him.

  “Sure,” he said. “We’ll get you one, one is on the way, but while he gets here, let me tell you something.

  “Them boys you beat up? One of them was a fellow officer’s brother. And that punch you gave him in the neck? Well, he died.”

  No way! I didn’t hit him that hard.

  I looked up at him. He wasn’t lying. “I don’t want to talk to you until I hear from my lawyer.”

  “Well, you’re poor, so you get you a prime, public defender. And when he is through seeing his other thousand valued customers, I am sure he will get around to you.

  “And I bet, with all that long, blond hair, they gonna love you in prison, Randy Morden, dishonorable discharge, U.S. Navy, because it’s four against one, and they sent that dog to the pound, so he ain’t talkin’.”

  The cop grinned again, turned around and left. Two hours later, when the public defender, an overworked, greasy-haired white woman with coke-bottle glasses, finally arrived, she told me t
he exact same thing. She may get me off with manslaughter, but the DA wanted Murder Two and odds were that I would do no less than ten years.

  And she let me know that they were putting down the dog.

  I lay in a dirty little cot, in a dirty little cell, in local lock up. A single bulb burned above me, a stainless steel toilet ran to my right. The whole place stank of urine and fear.

  My cellmate was a big, dark-haired, dusky weightlifter-type. I don’t know if I could have beaten him in a fair fight. I resolved not to fight fair if he pressed me, but so far he just stared at me.

  After about two hours of this, he finally said, “You dat murderin’ white boy?”

  “Why, you going to do something to make me want to kill you?”

  He put up his hands, “No, no! I saw you on the news, man! Say you killed a man,” he snapped his fingers, “didn’t take you nothin’.”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I said, wondering if I should just pick the fight and get it over with. It occurred to me that, at its very best, the rest of my life would be like this. Fighting other people to be one step up from the bottom. No money, no future, no fair shake – and no one to blame but my damn self. I seemed preordained to screw up.

  As if he read my mind, the other man said, “They say you a lifetime loser, man. They say you kicked out of the Navy, say you have an ax to grind, that they going to lock you up.”

  “Whatever,” I said, hoping he would just shut up. But he didn’t.

  “No, man – don’t you be giving up, now. You look at me, and what you see?” He spread his arms wide, his big chest rippling underneath a loose-fitting cotton shirt. “Just another bruddah, huh? Well, I tell you something, you’d be wrong, man!”

  And he leaned close to me, so I could smell his breath, and unlike the cop’s, his smelled sick, sweet like dead things smell, like his insides were dead even though he kept moving on the outside.

  “I am my own religion, man,” he whispered, his eyes sparkling.

  Oh, man! “Look, I had enough of Jesus freaks in the Navy-“

  “Pah, don’t tell me ‘bout no Jesus, man – this ain’t about no Jesus. I’m an Egyptian, man. I’m the last high priest of Anubis, and I tell you, man, Anubis can walk you right out through these bars like they wasn’t here, man.”

  “Yeah, well, I am the Green-Freaking-Lantern, myself, man, so I don’t need no Jesus and I don’t need no Anubis, either.”

  The other man shook his head. I didn’t know what an Egyptian looked like so I didn’t know if he was one. If so, then he was the biggest one I ever saw. I didn’t look forward to him going on about his god all night.

  Most of what he had to spew covered not giving up, about faith. That pissed me off worse than anything, because giving up wasn’t on my itinerary. I wasn’t giving up. I might not beat this – those guys were going to lie, like that junior officer had – but that didn’t mean it could beat me.

  As for faith – I didn’t want to hear it. God didn’t care about me.

  “Look, shut up, OK?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear about Anubis – you don’t want to be free of this place?”

  “Sure, I want to be free of this place, but you know what? That ain’t gonna happen. I killed a cop’s brother to save a dog, so quite frankly, your Anubis is about all that could get me out of this situation if he were real, which he isn’t. And like the rest of the world, he doesn’t have any reason to help me.”

  I’d had enough of religious people in the Navy. This belief that ‘god’ comes out and helps you for no reason. A nice fantasy, but nothing in my life ever went that way and I didn’t doubt that nothing ever would.

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, man. You have had a whole destiny that brought you to me right now. So if none of it ain’t your fault, and if you could believe in Anubis, then he would have a reason for getting you out of here.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What reason? Why should he be any different than anyone else?”

  “You fought the just cause, man,” he said. “You coulda kept walkin’, but you didn’t. You a warrior, man! You fought for the one who couldn’t fight for himself.”

  “Yeah, right!”

  “If he took you out of here, would you be willing to believe in him, then, man?” The Egyptian’s eyes shone bright – obviously, this is what he had been working toward all along. He stood a good three feet from me now and still I could smell the sick-sweet reek from his breath. I felt exhausted, tired of fighting, tired of being fought, tired of the cards life had dealt me and how I had played them.

  I’d fought for the dog, but they killed it anyway. What did its suffering really matter? What did anything matter now?

  “Sure,” I told him. “Sure, mother fucker – if Anubis can get me through these bars right now, then I’ll convert. You got your warrior.”

  “Then give me your hand, man,” he told me and he reached out a huge black paw to me.

  I reached up from where I sat and I knew that doing this must be fundamentally wrong. I looked at those dark, clutching fingers and watched them enfold my lily-white hand. That grip felt as cold as a tomb, as if he had been holding ice, but dry and rough like sandpaper. I watched him with his hand holding mine as he reached up his other hand, the palm up, toward the one overhead light in the ceiling.

  He looked down at me, sitting on the cot, and his eyes flashed yellow. This was no trick of any light – his eyes turned yellow like a feral animal’s. I remembered where I’d seen eyes like that before.

  I looked past him and could see a single, uncovered, 100-watt bulb in the cieling. I would have thought they would cover those things, so that the inmates wouldn’t break them.

  And it would have been a good idea because the Egyptian with the yellow eyes drove his thumb right up into it, and the current ran through us both. For some reason I remembered, from Nuclear Power School, electronics training for Mechanics, “It takes .1 amperes of electricity to kill you instantly.”

  In the prison block, the overweight guard munched his Hostess Donettes and watched his favorite show on the television. To his surprise, the power blinked, and he heard the slam of a circuit breaker opening. As the inmates started yelling and swearing, he heard a low groan and guessed what must have happened.

  He grabbed his keys and his baton and hit the “assist” button to bring other guards to help him. There were only five inmates here tonight: two car thieves, a drunk, a dope dealer and a murderer. He couldn’t remember if he had taken all of their belts and shoelaces but was pretty sure he hadn’t.

  He unlocked the first gate to the long hall between the cells. County lock-up wasn’t as elaborate as a prison, just a block of ten opposing cells. First two: drunk snoring, car thief screaming, pointing down the hall. Second two: One empty, dope dealer swearing, eyes wide. Third two: both empty. Fourth pair: car thief, sitting on the ground, holding his head – he is OK.

  Fifth pair: empty. The prison guard stopped in his tracks. He looked into the dark cell. The toilet had no seat; he could see the water running. The bed had been laid in and he could see a crease in the gray blanket. The cover was still on the light although the bulb was dark. There were no marks on the gate or the lock.

  But he himself had locked that big, freaking Viking in here. He’d seen him sit; seen the beaten look on him. Yeah, that one might have offed himself somehow – figured out how to do it with the light.

  The guard ran back to light off the “Escape” alarm. Well, he couldn’t have gotten too far. How hard would it be to find Goldilocks on steroids?

  Chapter Two

  Alone on a Lake of Tears

  Nothing – no pain, no smell, so sense of touch. I floated in a void, with a sense of motion that belied going to or from anywhere. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were shut or open, or even if I had eyes any longer. I was dead, electrocuted, en route either to heaven or hell.

  Not precisely, a voice like a kettledrum boomed in my head. You couldn’t doubt that you had hear
d a voice like that, more of something that you wished to never hear.

  Hello?

  I wonder if that is how you addressed your Earthly God.

  Um, no…

  Then address Me as you would him, for now I am God to you.

  This left me a lot to consider. First, something called itself my God and, secondly, if it didn’t come from Earth, then where did it come from?

  I am not a patient being.

  What God are you? Then the Egyptian’s promise struck me.

  Anubis?

  {A chuckle} So, you were, in fact, converted of your own free will?

  Um, I guess.

  Then I tell you, I am to Anubis as you are to the smallest thing that crawls upon the ground. He exchanged you to Me for more power then he could ever in his Earthly existence know.

  You traded something like that for me?

  You will give Me more than ever that bauble could.

  {My turn to laugh, if only in my mind} Wow, do they have the shell game on your world? Anubis pulled a bait-and-switch on you.

  I felt him in my mind then – it felt like the most personal rape you could suffer, gone as quickly as it began. Afterward I felt like I had been left floating in a septic tank and couldn’t figure a way out.

  You are mistaken, not I.

  If you say so, God. So now what?

  You are come to my realm, now. I will give you a weapon of Mine, which I forbid you to lose, and some small amount of food. Then you are on your own to live your own life.

  Um, my track record for doing that isn’t really very good –

  Enough!

  My body, at that point, felt more pain than I would have thought existed in the whole world. It felt as if he had touched every fiber, every niche, and every part of every cell in my body and lit them all on fire. An assault on every level, like slipping toes first into a blast furnace while licking a light socket and being castrated by your father. What I still identified as my body twisted in agony. I could envision being forced to pull back my finger and toenails and pour acid on the undersides, gouge out my own eyes, a million other personal torments, leaving me humiliated, ashamed, wracked in pain. He left me panting with my mind on fire.