Part 11 (2/2)
Brock was dumb to what he was being asked. ”Now why would I need to do that?”
A vein tensed in James's neck. His face was turning plum red. James seemed to restrain himself from reaching out and throttling Brock's neck. Instead, the distraught man shouted, ”f.u.c.king place the coins on her arm, or I'll leave you right now to figure it all out for yourself!”
Brock's hands were shaking. He feared further provocation with James, or being left alone in this awful town, so Brock carefully placed the quarter and dime on Angel's forearm. He took a step back and looked at the coins that didn't move. Brock wanted to shout, 'Now what?' but thought against it. Instead, they stood together watching his sister's body on the bed and the two coins.
”Any moment.” James's words were hushed. He kept pointing urgently at the coins. ”It happens fast. I don't want you to miss it, Brock. Keep your eyes open. Trust me. Keep waiting.”
Biting his lip, tucking his hands behind his back and leaning towards Angel, Brock strained his eyes and patience waiting for the miraculous to happen.
And it did.
The coins were gone.
They vanished.
Brock replayed what happened in his mind so many times, he couldn't deny it. The coins were sucked down into the threads of skin that opened up, pulling the coinage down. The flesh healed back up as if nothing had ever happened. Like it was natural.
Terrified by the occurrence, James began to speak, coaching Brock so he wouldn't lose his calm. ”It's happening to all of us, Brock. Even me. Without money, coins, rings, gold, jewelry, anything that has monetary worth, we can't live. We fall asleep like your poor sister. And you don't want to fall asleep. If someone doesn't come along and put money in you, you begin to rot. You don't get to wake up.”
Brock watched his sister.
”Wait for it.”
Grabbing James's arm and forcing him up against the wall, he shouted, ”Why should I wait? Maybe I'm under a f.u.c.king spell, but there's got to be a logical reasoning as to why my sister's arm just sucked down those coins. I mean where did they go?”
James didn't retaliate against Brock accosting him. ”Just wait, Brock. You have to see this before I tell you anything. I can't convince you it's real until you see it.”
Without realizing it, James urged him to once again study Angel. ”I can't explain much more unless you believe what I'm telling you. I'm sorry it has to be like this. There's no other way.”
Brock was startled by the sound of someone just escaping from underwater and gasping for a much needed breath. Then there was sobbing. He rushed to his sister who was suddenly alive, flopping back and forth on the bed as if shrugging a bad nightmare, weeping with her hands digging into the sheets, her eyes inflamed and bloodshot, her mouth bent in crooked disdain. He believed his sister was having a vicious panic attack until she set eyes on Brock and stopped.
She muttered it like a curse, ”What the h.e.l.l are you doing here, Brock?”
Brock was shocked and spoke with a limp tongue. ”I, you sent me a letter. You wanted me to visit you. You wanted to talk to me. You told me you were staying here, so here I am.”
Her eyes couldn't shape the scorn that was brewing in her mind. ”I'd never mail you anything in a thousand years!”
Brock backed up from the bed. ”You sent me a letter. I wanted to help you. Can't you be happy to see me? I know our relations.h.i.+p has taken a stab in the back, but I'm here now. I'm here to make things better. At least I'm here to try.”
She sounded much angrier now. ”I would rather go back to being unconscious than rekindle a relations.h.i.+p with you.”
”Did you know I've lost Hannah looking for you? She was here with me. We're going to get married, if you care. But somebody's taken her. If I didn't come here in the first place, we'd both be safe.”
Angel wasn't affected by his speech. ”My boyfriend's dead. This whole town's a graveyard. I was actually hoping I was dead. I was hoping to be dead for good.” Sneering with tears streaming down her face, she folded to her emotions. On the bed, she whispered in a hurt voice, ”Why did you wake me? I don't want to be awake anymore.”
James tried to mend the already terrible conversation. ”You don't have much time, Angel. He only put thirty-five cents in you.”
Angel and Brock waited for James to continue, and he did, happy he had their undivided attention. ”The man with the golden axe, he got to you, didn't he?”
Angel's eyes met James's face. ”Yes. How did you know?”
”Those who live in Blue Hills, we woke up changed about two weeks ago. I'm thinking it has something to do with the voices on the air. Perhaps it's supernatural, because no person could alter hundreds of people so quickly. Whatever the change did to our bodies, it turns us into machines that require money to live.”
Brock recalled the man with the golden axe, and that was the man who had attacked them earlier in the woods. ”The guy with the axe was the one who took Hannah. Do you know where he is? Is he making people change too?
”I don't know where he is, but yes, he's been going after people who come into town and altering them like the rest of us have been altered. He hides. The man skulks about town, finding people, and he dismantles them. He also collects the money inside of you. What he does with the money, where he goes, where he hides, is beyond me. The situation was terrible, but it became far worse when Chuck Durnham became who he was. Everybody calls him the man with the golden axe because he uses it to attack everyone. He can mutilate you, and then bring you back as a machine. I don't know how he does it. He just does it.”
Brock put the information together the best he could. The situation didn't have to make sense, but it had to end in getting Hannah back alive and safe. ”Then this Chuck Durnham a.s.shole is the guy we need to find. We can force him to tell us what we need to know to get out of here. He'll tell us where Hannah is, and how to fix you guys.”
Brock was determined to inspire them, but the two of them visibly failed to match his enthusiasm. They were too scared.
”I don't want anything to do with that man,” Angel confessed, curling up against the headboard. She was happy playing the defeatist. In a miserable voice, ”When I woke up the last time before this, my head was on a hook and my body was on a table. Chuck was working on me. G.o.d knows what he was doing. Modifying me, maybe. There were body parts everywhere, like human projects left unfinished. Like I said, I'm not going anywhere near that man, if he is a man.”
”He used to be a local firefighter.” James checked the barricade, and happy it was solid, he focused on them again. ”Chuck's father gave him a golden axe when he got his first job in a firehouse just outside of Blue Hills, though the man lived here in town. I don't know why Chuck became the way he became. Whatever's changed, we're now machines that run on money. It's like we have meters inside of us, and if they run empty, we expire.”
Brock couldn't help but shake his head. ”That doesn't explain the voices on the air, and the hot oil you described coming up from the ground.”
”I've seen it too, the black oil.” Angel suddenly had a thought, so she turned to Brock. ”Wait, I was hiding from that horrible man, and I entered a house. A typewriter was typing out a message. Yeah, I remember it now. It was a letter to you. The typewriter was typing by itself, but I heard voices, and the air reeked of rotting flesh. I ran out of there and oil dripped from the walls and the floor, and the whole place sank into this pool of black oil. The house was gone.”
”So you didn't write me.” It came out just as he thought it, all hope for saving a relations.h.i.+p with his sister a failure.
She refused to console him. ”Like I said, it was them, whoever's in the air. It's supernatural or...or it's...”
”It's death,” James broke in, his fingers posed contemplatively on his chin, rethinking everything he believed about the predicament in Blue Hills. ”These voices are obviously doing things to bring in people from the outside, including you, Brock.”
”It brought me here too,” Angel conceited, getting up, and searching through the mini-fridge and discovering a bottle of rum. The fridge was already open. Angel told them she'd put money into the slot without knowing what it meant and the door opened on its own. She tilted the bottle into her mouth, sucking it down, and Brock was surprised when she offered him a taste. ”I'm sure you need this as much as I do.”
”I'm sober now.”
To her, it was a f.u.c.k you.
She asked James, ”How about you? You get your life together too?”
”Maybe later I'll have a drink,” he said.
Not discouraged by their declines, Angel downed the rest of the mini-bottle and claimed another one in the fridge, but not before saying, ”I was led here with my boyfriend. He's a drug dealer. He said he got a call about a cheap deal going down in Blue Hills. The details were sketchy, but it brought us here. That's when the man with the axe got a hold of us. Then I woke in a room, my head was on a hook, and my boyfriend, I don't know what happened to him.”
She mentioned the detail without any s.h.i.+ft in emotion. She was still addicted. Her boyfriend was a resource, a tool to receive drugs and nothing more. The front of s.e.x and fake romance won most dealers over. Nothing much had changed since the last time Brock talked to her when she left the rehab clinic in Beverly Hills.
”So this force in town, it's bringing in new people,” James said to himself and then snapped his fingers once. ”Yes, it makes sense. To bring in more money, right? How else would this horrible place keep trickling on?”
”But why create this situation in the first place?” Brock refocused the conversation to getting out of this room and searching for Hannah. ”I have to find Hannah. I think this axe guy, what's-his-name, Chuck Durnham, is the only way to go forward. We have to get him in a position where he'll tell us what he knows. We can talk all we want, because it's only guesses. We're wasting our time in here.”
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