Shorts

Untitled Chapter 3 & Flash for Scottish Book Trust

Chapter 3

The damp basement of the police station, with its molding bricks and flickering lights, was far removed from the world above. A sense of timelessness, the universality of hope eroding, and the stone overhead seemed to compress the room. As though the space was ready to burst.

Emerging from the cell’s shadows, the woman moved silently, delicately. Her exhausted muscles were coiled and creaking. Every ounce of her focus locked on the next few seconds. Her bare feet were silent rasps over the cold concrete. Even still, every footfall sent shivers up her spine. Every neuron was heightened to a razor’s edge.

Drew, although lost in routine, felt the slightest chance in pressure, the approach of a storm. His intuition ducking him into a defensive stance before his consciousness registered danger. The woman lunged, her fingers splayed, aiming straight for his throat. Their bodies collided with a harsh thump and his palms and forearms hissed over the concrete. Instinct kicked in and he rolled, parried, deflected the woman’s incoming strikes. They grappled on the damp stone, each trying to roll the other, gouging out at every opening. But the ground slipped from under her arm, then his knee, they tumbled over and over.

The woman’s fingers found Drew’s hair, yanking his head backward and exposing his throat. Drew gasped, cold air slicing over vulnerable skin. But with a grunt of fear and effort, he twisted, planting a knee in the woman’s midriff. She wheezed, but retaliated with an elbow to his temple.

Drew’s vision blurred, reality exploding into sharp colors and vague shapes. He could taste blood, sharp and coppery. But the pain, rather than weaken him, unleashed a primal strength. With a roar, he pushed off, sending her sprawling backward.

The woman was relentless. She rolled, springing back to her feet, her eyes wild with desperation. She stood up, panting, and looked between Drew and the far stairs. He shifted to his feet and moved his body between her and the steps. Her next attack was a blur of strikes, each more wild and ferocious. Drew was fighting defensively now, parrying, dodging, slipped heated near-misses and the sting of grazed skin. They circled each other, as sweat and blood mixed into the stone between them. He threw an overhand right, trying to force her deeper into the basement. It barely missed her darting jaw. She responded with a lunge, racking his neck with dirty claws. Drew could hear the woman’s ragged breathing. He could see the determination and rage in her eyes. Her entire world had narrowed to this one fight.

With a desperate lunge, Drew managed to trap the woman’s right arm, twisting it behind her back until he heard the crack of joints. Using all his weight, he drove the woman forward and down into the ground, pinning her.

His chest heaved, his breath ragged. The woman, now cursing and spitting across the floor, had the haunted look of a trapped, wild animal. With a weary, final effort Drew dragged the woman back into her cell. The heavy door echoing shut behind her. In the cold, dim light of the basement, the remnants of their battle–the sweat, blood, and bruises–looked inhumane and oddly clinical.

The woman slammed into the cell door behind him and Drew jumped. She pressed her face through the bars, pulling back her face into a mask. She hissed at him, “Why are you doing this?”

But Drew didn’t even turn. He set to work cleaning up the space. Stacking, moving, he broke into a sweat and unbuttoned his collar. Rolling his sleeves, he knocked a heavy bookcase full of files back into its place against the far wall. He kicked a boot over the smudges in the dust where it had slid. She spoke to him, cursed at him. But he only worked on cleaning. Splashing bleach on bloodstains, wiping it off cold metal racks, tearing off pieces of cardboard that had splatter and tossing them in a burn bin. It was only when he brought the mop down from upstairs that the woman’s voice echoed out of her cell, desperation making her sound small and frightened, that he calmed enough to hear the person.

“Please, why are you doing this to me?”

Drew hesitated, “It is my duty–”

She scoffed and was back on her feet in a breath. “Your duty? Your duty to who?” Her voice was rabid.

Drew looked down and wrung out the mop, gray soapy water cascading in a splash, “There is a greater good. Bigger than you, or me, or anyone in this office.”

“What good is being served locking me in here, Andrew? Where is the good in this?”

Drew, rocked by hearing his name escape her mouth, could only mutter, “It’s not that simple.”

“Everything is that Simple, Andrew. It is people that make it complicated.”

His pride flared, “You could destroy everything. All of it, all we’ve worked for, decades of hard decisions and sacrifices. Everyone has sacrificed for this. It was only my own naivete to think I’d already paid in blood. You could erase all that sacrifice.”

For a moment, her fiery demeanor faded. She spat blood from a split lip and when she turned back to him, her eyes were more genuine, curious, “And if I promised to leave? I just leave and never come back.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Desperation, the begging of a frightened child, softened her words, “I could just go home, Sheriff. Please, just let me go home.” Tears dug rivulets into the dirt caked onto her cheeks.

Drew sighed, a little part of him eroding in his own resolve. He was a worse man than he even feared but his word was still sterling. “Your very presence, you being here… it has already disrupted the balance. ‘Harbinger’. You were prophesied.”

The woman strained against the bars again, her eyes searching his, “Then perhaps there needs to be a new balance, Sheriff. Perhaps your enemies aren’t all powerful agents of chaos.”

“The Harbinger’s tongue will be wickedness dipped in honey.” And Drew started to walk away. He wheeled the mop into the corner by the stairs, intent on draining the bucket in the city storm grate on his way home.

“Please, Andrew. I am just a person. A normal person. My name is Alice.”

Sheriff Drew took the stairs without looking at her. But he would forever hear the woman whispering, “My name is Alice,” over and over to herself as he locked the basement door.

Flash Fiction: (50 words or less)

I lost everything in a flash. Three months ago, the fallout consumed the world. Two months ago, radiation consumed my father. Last month, I started walking. But yet another charred sign read: “Burn Pit Full; Leave Them.” I shouldered my rucksack and carried him onward because there was nothing left. 

Notes:

I worked on this piece of flash to submit it for a journal, but more importantly to develop a cold open for this novel. I had an intense sense of anxiety about what the first and last words of this novel would be. And while I’m trying to quash the idea of writing the last three pages, now, as the story is barely finding its footing, I had to construct the cold open. My knowledge of flash fiction is fairly limited. I know of the quips and one-liners that are famous and infamous. But a full story, a full universe, in less than a hundred words, less than fifty, that wasn’t a skill I possessed. But after working through the above piece (and loathing that I use the word “flash” in a the first sentence of “flash fiction”) the Cold Open:

The roots of deceit are in the falsehoods hoped into existence. When a child is woken from a nightmare, words of comfort spoken against the dark are either the truth or lies.