NOVEL NEXT Chapter 15: Lead
Chapter 15: Lead
BATHROOM, MOTEL ROOM, CITY OUTSKIRTS (MIDNIGHT)
Valerie holds her breath when breaking the plane. Inchoate shadows fill the room when she uses the phone light. She reaches her hand out around the corner and turns on the sterile white overheads, leaving little to the :.overactive.: imagination.
The lipstick scrawl says:
RUN REPEAT IN S4CR3D
PURGE TO P1NK
TAKE 2 TO T4NG0
LA FIN
Valerie snaps a picture.
She steps back, peering into the tub: a festering black tumor. The leaky faucet will not tighten any more. She eyes the sink, the handles, and balks at washing her hands.
VALERIE: The source... it’s all infected.
MOTEL ROOM, CITY OUTSKIRTS (SEVERAL MINUTES LATER)
Bruce sits in the armchair again, pistol trained on the door. Valerie paces the aisle between the beds.
BRUCE: Any ideas?
VALERIE: They’re instructions.
Bruce sips bottled water.
VALERIE: I’ve found them.
BRUCE: (looks over)
VALERIE: “SACRED” and “PINK” and “TANGO.” (lifting her phone) The alphanumerics gave them away.
BRUCE: That’s too easy.
VALERIE: Maybe it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s not we who have the hard job.
BRUCE: Speak for yourself.
FOREST, MOTEL PERIMETER, CITY OUTSKIRTS (EARLY MORNING)
A pincer of black silhouettes stalks through the trees: helmeted, armored, rifles trained.
MOTEL ROOM, CITY OUTSKIRTS (CONTINUOUS)
Valerie sleeps spreadeagled on the bed, fingers grazing the edge of her phone.
The spotty parking lot light winks out.
Bruce holsters his pistol in exchange for the rifle and chambers a round.
MOTEL PARKING LOT, CITY OUTSKIRTS (CONTINUOUS)
The armored unit washes silently through the lot and into position, CRASHING into a dozen rooms at once and abolishing their former pretense of stealth.
MOTEL ROOM, CITY OUTSKIRTS (CONTINUOUS)
Bruce’s rifle barks a burst of rounds through the open doorway as the door BLOWS INWARD OFF ITS HINGES.
The soldier in the doorway falls, stunned, but manages to lob a grenade up the hall.
Bruce dives on the grenade like a fumbled ball and sends it hurling back through the doorway to BURST IN A STUNNING SHOCK OF LIGHT.
Valerie’s fingers close on the phone. She opens NEXUS and chooses an entry at random, crouching down near Bruce.
Bullets tear through the walls, TV IMPLODING as the pink mist forms and takes them away to:
MOTEL ROOM, MOTEL RUINS, CITY OUTSKIRTS (INDETERMINATE)
The sky, visible through the holes in the walls and ceiling, stews a septic green. Vines grow up and through the motel ruins. Moss covers what’s left of the windows.
VALERIE: What was that?
BRUCE: We rested too long. They’re on us. (crunching broken glass) Any lead on where we are?
VALERIE: End of the world?
BRUCE: (chuckling) Checks out.
They pick their way through the blown-out motel room out into:
PARKING LOT, MOTEL RUINS (CONTINUOUS)
More devastation, dilapidation, evidence of nature’s conquest and subsequent reclamation:
The two cars in the lot have been burned out and bludgeoned into husks. Trees grow up through giant rifts in the ruined asphalt. A jagged black scar runs through the green sky: starless.
BRUCE: Somethin wrong about that sky.
VALERIE: I feel like we crash-landed on an alien planet. Can we go?
BRUCE: Let’s see if we can’t find my truck first.
VALERIE: That’s assuming an awful lot.
OVERGROWN GRAVEL ROAD, FOREST, CITY OUTSKIRTS (INDETERMINATE)
Skeletal branches overhang from both sides of the road. Tufts of dead grass cover all but the faintest of wheel ruts. Valerie and Bruce walk single file up the center beneath that same caustic sky.
The surrounding forest offers not a single natural sound. No birds. No bugs.
VALERIE: You parked in this?
BRUCE: Not this. Wherever--whenever--we are, we’re months-to-years post catastrophe.
VALERIE: Nuclear?
BRUCE: Ain’t nothing nuclear about what’s after us.
VALERIE: Maybe in an attempt to purge the shadows--desperation--
BRUCE: In this world the shadows won. Here.
Bruce leaves the gravel road and breaks his way through several dead branches toward his truck.
Nature hasn’t reclaimed the truck so much as fallen upon it, covering it in dead limbs, pine cones, needles, and sap. The hood, however, is dirty but clear--as if recently opened.
Bruce holds up a hand, stopping Valerie.
BRUCE: Someone’s been here.
VALERIE: How could anyone possibly find this?
Bruce reaches into the cab and pops the hood.
BRUCE: It could be rigged to blow.
Bruce lifts the hood and scans the contents.
BRUCE: The battery is different.
VALERIE: Guardian angels?
BRUCE: (closing the hood) Stand back.
Bruce finds the key under the floor mat, reaches inside and turns the ignition. The truck starts right up. The engine is the only sound in the SILENT AND DEAD forest--perverse, as if breaking an unspoken law.
BRUCE: Someone is telling us to drive.
PICKUP TRUCK, HIGHWAY, CITY OUTSKIRTS (INDETERMINATE)
They are the only vehicle on the SAVAGED road, traversing fractured and rubble-strewn tarmac. The headlights are necessary on account of the heavy “overcast” sky.
Bruce (relenting) tries the radio and returns static.
Valerie leans her head against the window, absorbed in her music.
Before them looms the city: lightless and grey, towering and dead--the last monument to an extinguished civilization. Or an infernal keep harboring unthinkable horrors.
BRUCE: I’ve been thinking.
VALERIE: About?
BRUCE: Your “instructions.” Or how to implement them.
VALERIE: (internal) My body is an implement.
BRUCE: The shadows are relentless. They’re coming for us even now. I’ll bet what’s left of the world on it.
VALERIE: (quoting) They follow it.
BRUCE: Our problem. Our solution.
VALERIE: I’m not following.
BRUCE: We send them through it to... God knows where.
VALERIE: (internal) Pink.
BRUCE: And then we close the door. We destroy it.
VALERIE: What about us?
BRUCE: I don’t know.
VALERIE: What about all the realities the nexus made?
BRUCE: They’re not long for life with the shadows coming.
VALERIE: It’s a suicide mission.
BRUCE: Not exactly your typical sort.
VALERIE: There has to be at least one reality, right? Preferably one where everything turns out OK?
VALERIE: (internal) Tango.
BRUCE: Maybe that’s up to us.