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spookyspaghettisundae · 1 year

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And Then It Was Gone

Steam rose from the van’s mangled hood. Metal hinges squeaked where one of its broken back doors swayed in the desert wind. The airbrushed painting of a wizard, holding the world in his hands, had been defaced in the chase, both by one vehicle ramming into the other, and skidding through the sand.

Its final crash still rang in everybody’s ears. An afterimage of sparks flying lingered. The whine of metal bending under pressure. The violent thrash every time the limousine and the van had collided. The thundering of the van gone flying, tumbling off the road, and skidding through the dirt, now lodged between cracked cacti, sleeping on its side.

Gunshots still echoed in the vicinity. No rhythm to these small thunderclaps—interrupted by shooters and shootees repeatedly seeking cover behind boulders. The limo driver cowered behind his white chariot, blubbering with terror.

The battle wasn’t over yet.

Yet two of the people involved stood as still as statues. One, having left a trail of blood in the sand behind him: FBI Director Anthony Collins. Dragging his leg, he failed to get back up after crawling out of the crashed van. He stared into the barrel of an FBI service pistol before seeking its owner’s hardened gaze.

Special Agent Derek Wells gripped that pistol, trained at Collins, dead center of his face. Even several steps away, Wells towered over his superior, mentor, and former friend.

They both cast long shadows. The director’s eye glittered with despair. The other man’s eye sparkled with fury, focusing down the sights of his service pistol.

And every time another gunshot clapped behind them, Wells never even so much as twitched, but his index finger curled more and more around that trigger.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Collins finally spoke.

BANG.

Aria had shot at someone, elsewhere.

Wells stayed calm. His discipline overrode the emotions that gripped him.

“Then shut up unless I’m asking questions,” Wells said.

Collins displayed his open palms in surrender—one wept blood from a thin line, the other was smeared with blooms of bright crimson.

“Derek, I swear, I—”

“What did I just say?”

Wells clenched his jaw. Unlike Collins, he hadn’t budged an inch.

BANG.

Barry ducked behind his boulder as the mystery shooters retaliated at him.

The gunshot had made Collins flinch. He gasped for air like a fish on land but refrained from uttering anything. Wells, on the other hand, had found back to his old self—the ranger in active duty, abroad.

Desert sand, the sound of shooting, and the paralyzing uncertainty that straddled the line between life and death. Mirrors, one and all.

“How long have you been involved with Weidmann?” Wells finally asked.

Collins’ hands trembled and twitched upon every ensuing gunshot nearby. BANG. BANG.

Aria and Barry had entered a stalemate with the two remaining shooters. The bullets exchanged kept hitting rock, chipping away at boulders. A stray bullet THWUNKED as it hit the steaming van, offering dubious cover to both Wells and Collins.

“Two years,” Collins finally answered.

“How?” Wells asked.

BANG, BANG.

“How, what?” Collins asked, with mounting despair cracking his voice.

“How did you get involved with Weidmann and his cronies?” Derek shot back with anger.

“That’s… Derek, th-that’s a long story, we’re not in a—”

Derek Wells interrupted him with a growl and a sneer. “Do not call me Derek. Now’s the wrong time, Anthony.”

BANBANBANG—

Despite the sudden staccato of shots fired, Collins regained some composure, contrasting the awkwardly bent thin frame of his glasses on his nose, and one of the cracked lenses obscuring his vision.

“You’re probably hoping I say I was blackmailed or forced. I wasn’t. I started working with Weidmann because of… a fluke. I did the blackmailing to get to… to know. It’s so, so hard to stop scratching at the seams once you see what’s underneath. Don’t you feel it now, too? Now that you’ve seen? Look at you, holding me at gunpoint while there are still threats to neutralize around you… just to learn the truth.”

All the while of Collins rambling, Wells was grinding his teeth. Then he offered a reply, enunciating every syllable with the sharpness of a knife.

“I wish we never met.”

Collins no longer trembled. The words plunged deep into his heart like a knife. Their bond of friendship had always been an earnest and mutual sentiment. Now, it crumbled to dust under the crushing weight of revelations.

“I’m sorry,” Collins croaked out like words he hadn’t spoken in a very long time. Softening. “You… you must be wondering why I sent you to Chicago and why—”

“I don’t give two shits about that. Why did you turn on Weidmann, why ambush us out here like this? What’s your endgame?”

“I didn’t!”

BANG! BANG!

The shots punctuated Collins’ shift in demeanor, a face twisting from despair into anger. And a body had hit the sand in the desert outside of Las Vegas, accompanied by a soft thud in the distance. Judging by the audible distance, Wells wagered it had been one of the shooters, and neither Aria nor Barry.

“I didn’t,” Collins repeated more softly. “I didn’t turn on Weidmann. This—I think this was Michael’s doing.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Wells fired back. Through gritted teeth, he growled, “Don’t lie to me anymore.”

Collins shook his head and cemented what he said. “This was Michael, I swear. I can’t prove it now, but I know it. I always knew he was going to turn on Weidmann, but who was I to do anything about it? And I didn’t think… I didn’t think he’d go this far. I was the newbie in this cabal.”

With a despair of his own admixing in his gut—for fear of knowing that Parker was now alone with Michael—Wells smirked. Defiant, angry, and afraid.

“Oh, so, with these occult clowns, you are walking the mile in my shoes.”

The wind howled as they fell silent. Even the shooting ceased. Sweat beaded on their foreheads, baking instantly in blazing sunlight.

BANG.

“I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but,” Collins spoke softly. “Weidmann is a good man, even if he is surrounded by dangerous individuals.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”

Collins shook his head. “You know me, I—”

Wells’ expression softened. His jaw unclenched.

“I thought I know you. Turns out I don’t know jack shit.”

And the finger around the trigger loosened.

He just wanted an excuse. Part of him wanted to see Collins whip out a gun, and give him an excuse to pull the trigger. Any excuse to execute him on the spot, and drown everything in the tried and true American tradition of excessive amounts of alcohol.

All answers be damned.

Then why don’t you finish things?

A Whisper.

It surfaced in Wells’ mind. At first, he thought it was a thought of his own. Until more Whispers followed. They mimicked his voice, but something about them—

It was nothing like anything he would think.

If you wanna save Parker’s life, you’re gonna need to start batting in the big leagues, Derek. There’s no more turning back.

Whispers that spoke to him.

Don’t turn your back on this prick. Finish him before he can help spread any more misery. That’s how you justify each pull of the trigger, right?

“What’ll it be?” Collins suddenly asked with more confidence. His eyes narrowed. Glittering, scanning, studying Wells’ cracking demeanor.

I know it’s hard to override your sentiments. We’re all just human after all.

BANG.

Wells’ finger almost tightened around the trigger again.

Almost.

Another body had dropped in the desert.

But I can take over for a little bit. You will, of course, share the responsibility after the fact. But I can see the many ways you’re hurting, and believe me, brother, that hurt is holding you back.

You weren’t always like this, right?

So… vulnerable.

“Fuck,” Wells hissed out loud.

He knew of the Whispers from what Parker had told him. And hearing them himself for the first time had flooded his body with a new kind of fear. A sense of vertigo threatened to dizzy him.

Collins nodded. He mistakenly believed he was getting through to Wells—oblivious to the Whispers in his former friend’s mind.

I’ll help wrap things up here, Derek. All you need to do is…

LET ME IN.

Somewhere off a dirt road, far from THE HIGHWAY, Wells’ yelling pierced the silence of the desert.

“If I could forget everything I witnessed and turn back, I would! If I could forget who I am, I would!”

I can help you out with that.

Collins stammered, “D-Derek—

“Get out of my head!”

Confusion wracked Collins’ face now, barely comprehending how Wells was no longer speaking to him.

“Darling, are you okay?” asked Aria.

She and Barry both approached behind him. The cadence of her steps suggested she was stumbling here and there because of high heels unsuited for the terrain, and also owed to all the booze she had imbibed on the road. Barry trailed a few steps behind her, keeping his weapon raised, and his head on a swivel for any other potential attackers.

Wells refused to peel his gaze away from his mark, even with the Whispers invading his thoughts. Collins only stared at Wells’ wide-eyed.

“No,” Wells blurted out. “No, I’m not. I’m hearing some voice in my head. And I repeat. Get. Out.”

The wind howled as everybody around Wells stood in stunned silence.

Then the Whispers replied.

Tsk. I had high hopes in you, soldier.

As Wells responded to the Whispers, his voice cracked midway through the sentence, “I just want the world to return back to normal, to where it was before all this shit.”

“That’s impossible,” Collins said.

The FBI director’s expression twisted again, now to a pained one.

One of genuine sympathy.

Aria said, “You never turn back on the roads we travel. Even if you try to forget the roads, the roads remember you.”

She rested a slender hand on Wells’ shoulder. Though she partially used it help herself stand straight as she wobbled, it even shed an ounce of comfort to the FBI agent. The sense of vertigo subsided, the dizziness washed away while tension flushed from his body, and he rolled his shoulders, almost throwing Aria off; and with the motion, tears welled in the corners of Wells’ eyes.

Something he hadn’t allowed to happen in a long, long time. Now, he was ready to let them flow. It had been a long time coming.

They blurred the vision of his shadow growing.

The Shadow, growing. The Whispers grew into imposing Growls.

A SHAME TO WASTE MY TIME ON YOU.

Minerals glittered in the body of Shadow like tiny stars—or a multitude of eyes, blinking, winking, and sadistic. Sharp edges of rocks, and slices in the sand formed mouths, some vertical some horizontal, all opening, and smiling, and sinister.

They all saw it.

Not just Wells.

All the people present witnessed its manifestation.

The Shadow was taking shape. Solidifying. It grew to horrendous size, as large as a car, then a truck, until its monstrous tendrils shaped into arms, and sharp fingers, kissing the gravel and dust of the dirt road they had crashed from.

All four people looked upon the Shadow in horror.

GUESS IT’S DOWN TO MY TWO STAR PLAYERS IN THIS GAME. BYE-BYE, DUCKY.

Barry—a grown man and trained bodyguard who had just dropped several bodies with trained shots, and a discipline to match Agent Wells’—trembled. He aimed his gun at the growing Shadow but his meaty hands gripping the tiny pistol trembled.

They all heard the Shadow now.

And then it was gone.

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