Death of a Pharaoh Read online

  The small cubicle had a chair in front of the video monitor, a box of Kleenex and a waste disposal basket in the corner. It overflowed with used tissues. It was disgusting but the perfect place to start a small fire. I knew if I didn’t sit down the camera wouldn’t record my face but I forgot all about my backpack.

  I’d gone online and learned how to make a smoke bomb with ordinary household stuff. All I needed was a few feet of PVC pipe, some sparklers like the ones for birthday cakes, a roll of masking tape and a package of aluminum foil. Just to be certain, I manufactured two. They were small enough to stuff behind the wooden box housing the video screen. I stood back to survey my work and noticed the action for the first time. Some dude with a massive dong was giving it to a blonde woman up the ass. It looked painful but she didn’t seem to mind. The scene distracted me for a moment until I heard a knock on the door.

  “Hurry up in there,” a young male voice insisted, “I got class in fifteen minutes.”

  I fumbled for the lighter in my pocket. The first of the sparklers ignited just when the actor did. I opened the door and found Errol McKinley standing with his hands in his pockets looking frustrated. I told him the video screen had gone blank and I could smell smoke. The bombs worked even better than they had in the instructional video and before I made it to the front door, everyone was yelling fire and the manager picked up the phone to dial 911. I tried to look innocent as I blended into the crowd gathered outside. Errol seemed real pissed. Black smoke poured out the windows when the fire truck pulled up.

  As I’d hoped, the fire inspector found the camera and the sophisticated peephole for filming. He called the police and they seized the manager’s computer, raided his home then arrested him for child pornography. They also salvaged the last tape and identified my backpack. That along with the school blazer and the black skin of the arsonist narrowed down the potential pool of suspects.

  I remember the call to go to the Headmaster’s office and the detective waiting to speak to me. They went to my home and discovered the cut up pieces of pipe and the empty boxes for the sparklers. It was my first arrest. By some miracle, they didn’t expel me from school. My parents managed to hire an expensive lawyer and since it was my first offense, I got probation that consisted of three months of supervised detention at school.

  The police charged the video store manager with numerous counts of manufacturing and possession of child pornography and a judge convicted him to five years in prison. He’d have gone down for a lot longer, but since he never touched any of the kids or even induced them to masturbate, he got off easy. The video store shut down right after the fire and the owner of the building quickly turned it into a fancy coffee place. The infamous private booth lived on as one of those urban legends that never seemed to die. All sorts of people swore that at least two famous Hollywood actors had been filmed there as teenagers with their peckers in their hands, even though neither of them ever lived in the area and at the time they would have been the right age it was a Mexican restaurant, not a video store.

  My most recent escapade disappointed my parents; they had hoped that the change of schools would keep me out of problems. They threatened to send me to a boot camp for troubled teenagers that summer, so I promised to make more of an effort. I ditched my vigilante persona and settled into a draconian study routine to fill up the time in detention. Several of the school’s more colorful characters shared my shelf-lined prison. Those of us doing hard time, meaning a detention of more than a month, tended to sit every afternoon at the same table in the Humanities section away from the prying eyes of the Head Librarian, Mrs. Robinson. Everyone called us the Folsom Four.

  Susan was the oldest of the group, born and raised in White Plains and WASPY to the core! She bounced from one private school to another a whisper ahead of a litany of crimes ranging from seducing a male teacher to getting caught with a large bag of marijuana in her locker. Her parents invented wealthy and her father simply wrote large checks to get her into a new school every time. The family called themselves Republican since the days of Lincoln and her father even went so far as to resign from his country club when the Clinton’s joined.

  Susan was attractive but styled her hair a bit weird and dressed in a kind of ancient Egyptian gothic that made her look vaguely like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Cleopatra, except with green cat-like eyes. She wore a large cross-like, symbol called an ankh on a chain around her neck and preferred her men dead and, if possible, mummified.

  Barely a month after Susan transferred in, Brittany the head cheerleader and the most popular girl in the school, called her a freak in front of everyone in the cafeteria when she sat at the ‘cool’ table by mistake. Brittany and her minions made Susan’s life miserable for a month. Susan sucked it up and made a plan.

  One day she patiently waited for her nemesis to finish cheerleading practice. Since everyone ignored her anyway, she had no problem slipping a dose of Rohypnol, a date rape drug, into Brittany’s personal water bottle. Susan knew the route she took every day after school. She followed her through the park and pulled her into the bushes after she collapsed. Susan had enough time to retrieve the stray dog she had befriended two weeks earlier. A mutt she called Jasper. He started to jump up and down on his leash, with his long tongue slobbering all over, when she showed up where she had left him tied that morning.

  Jasper loved to nuzzle warm damp places, a habit Susan had discouraged up until today. He also adored yoghurt, especially peach flavor! The resulting ninety-second video starred Jasper giving a spaced out Brittany what appeared to be sloppy canine cunnilingus, even if it wasn’t real. She woke up hours later on the grass with a severe headache but no memory of how she got there. She dragged her bike home and slept for twelve hours.

  The next morning, she stopped in to see the school nurse before homeroom, who for some strange reason insisted she receive a rabies shot. None of her friends would even look at her in class and her bubble-butt boyfriend, the star quarterback of the football team, broke off with her via a text message calling her a ‘crazy bitch’. By lunch, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had never experienced life as a social outcast. Someone finally took pity on her and showed her the video. She changed schools the next day.

  Tony Zamora emigrated from Mexico as a kid. He became involved in Latin gangs in his early teens and supposedly reliable sources suggested he had several tattoos depicting the faces of his murder victims on his back. He denied it but no one remembered ever seeing him without a shirt.

  By some miracle, he managed to leave that life behind to get an education. A year ago, walking home from school, a gunman stepped out of a car and shot him in the right knee. Tony refused to rat on the shooter. He understood that it was revenge for abandoning the gang. He was grateful they hadn’t killed him. He recovered but still walked with a slight limp.

  His other claim to fame came from his legendary ability to escape from custody on the numerous occasions the police arrested him as a juvenile; twice after being cuffed in the back of a police cruiser, once from county lockup and another time from the courthouse right before his scheduled arraignment.

  One day he was at his locker, minding his own business, when a senior started a fight with a much smaller student in the hallway. The bully slapped the kid a few times, challenging him to strike back. The little guy cowered in fear. It probably would have ended in nothing but Tony suddenly slammed his locker shut, walked over to the aggressor and clocked him with a solid right hook. Two teachers had to drag him off the guy. The loser had a shiner for a week. He was smart enough not to press charges, saying it was all a misunderstanding. Tony still got detention.

  Alexander dressed like Justin Bieber in drag, which didn’t look that different to be honest. He wallpapered the door of his locker with pictures of the cherubic teen heartthrob, but on the outside. Alex used to get beat up a lot. Despite the abuse, he refused to stop wearing nail polish to class. Some of the jocks gave him a real hard time. He dre
amed of becoming a makeup artist and nobody even spoke to him except just before Halloween. His costumes rocked.

  After an important football game, he showed up at the team’s victory house party in a spectacular drag outfit that could have fooled a gynecologist. No one recognized him under the wig and makeup. In one of the bedrooms, he performed oral sex on six members of the team while they all laughed and snapped pictures of each other with their phones. Alex told them she was a reward from a grateful alumnus. Hardly the first time anyone had sent a whore to a team party. Within an hour, the event was all over Facebook racking up an impressive number of likes from jealous classmates.

  Later that night, the mystery blonde bombshell performed a live striptease in front of a webcam, all the way down to his hairy butt and everything else. The football team lost every game for the rest of the season. Several of the players transferred out of the school district. A few remained in denial and swore it had been a real chick all along. The principal didn’t have a clue what to do with Alex. If he expelled every student who went down on star athletes, there wouldn’t be a cheerleading squad. Three months’ worth of detention might at least protect him from revenge seekers.

  We couldn’t have been more different as a group and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some tension between us at first. Still we faced almost three months together in the library every afternoon for two hours. We needed each other not to go crazy with boredom. By the end of four weeks, we bonded and for the first time in my life, I found a group of friends. All of us had gotten into trouble for taking justice into our own hands, some of us with more or less imagination. We were outcasts from the rest of the student body and by the time our sentences finished we were best buddies. I think Tony and I grew the closest. I knew all of his terrible secrets and the real meaning behind the tattoos. If I ever found myself in a desperate situation, I’d want him to have my back.

  Chapter Five

  Thoth took a break from his reading. It created a complex picture of a strong-willed teenager who sometimes exhibited a lack of judgment. His respect and compassion for those in a weaker position were commendable and it would engender sympathy on the Council. There was still no word from Timbuktu regarding the transfer of powers, so Lord Thoth went back to his review of Nkosana’s dream file.

  After I turned sixteen, I became more comfortable with my powers and was even able to block out some of the traffic to make life more manageable. I was super conscious of the need to respect the privacy of my friends since they had no idea I had access to their most intimate memories. It didn’t seem fair to intrude uninvited, especially in Tony’s case. He had suffered unspeakable horrors as a small boy. His stepfather used to beat him with a stick and put cigarettes out on his skin. When the creep needed money to pay off a debt, he sold Tony to a syndicate that organized illegal brawls between young boys; fights that often resulted in the death of the loser.

  Only eight years old at the time, he was big for his age and he fought well. His tattoos actually immortalized the faces of champions he managed to beat; most of them in battles to the death or irreparable brain damage. He had nine faces across his back and shoulders, all boys eleven and twelve years old. Tony didn’t feel bad when they died. It was either them or him. Strange as it sounded, Tony never cried. He lost his virginity at twelve; a gift from his promoter. He spent his time between bouts living in cheap hotels with booze, drugs and prostitutes as his only company.

  One night they arrived in a small town near Zacatecas for a big fight. He entered the makeshift ring first. When his opponent walked in, Tony almost fell over in shock. He couldn’t have been more than 9 years old and had the face of an angel. So skinny, he knew they had kidnapped him off the street with the promise of some food and money. Tony couldn’t fight him and the boy was too scared to defend himself. They danced around while he cuffed his opponent lightly a few times until the crowd became impatient.

  “Mátele,” his promoter yelled, “kill him!” He wanted blood.

  But Tony had had enough; the carnage was over for him. The crowd almost rioted and his promoter gave him a beating with a metal rod before he locked both of them in a shed behind the hotel while he decided what to do with them. The boy’s name was Manuel and he was an orphan. He had survived until now stealing food and robbing tourists. He couldn’t stop whimpering after the fight and Tony wrapped his arms around him and comforted him until he slept. That night Tony cried for the first time he could remember.

  He waited for everyone in the hotel to go to sleep then whispered his plan to Manuel. They coated his slim body with some old axle grease they found in a rusty tin can. Tony held Manuel on his shoulders and he managed to wiggle through the bars of the only small window. The same tire iron the promoter used to punish Tony now blocked the door. Manuel struggled but eventually pried it open. They were long gone by dawn.

  They hitched rides, slept under the stars and snatched food whenever they could. Tony became fiercely protective of his young ward and never let him out of his sight. It took a month to make their way to the border near Ciudad Juarez. A week later, they crossed over into the United States.

  At thirteen, Tony ended up in juvenile detention and joined the Border Brothers, part of the Gran Familia gang. The next year, they sent him to New York to help smuggle chemicals for Meth super labs. He left Manuel with a Mexican family in Fort Worth who promised to take care of him. He wired money every month. Tony proved his worth in no time. They found that his fighting skills made him perfect for collecting drug debts. Only problem, he wouldn’t kill and he knew that eventually they would give him no choice. So he quit. He showed up at the doorstep of a distant relative who took him in and gave him the stability he had never known.

  Tony’s horrific experiences made me feel ashamed that I often complained about my powers. Sure, I had to see terrible things but unlike Tony, they hadn’t happened to me. I found that if I concentrated on other things, like when you want a woody to go away while daydreaming at school, I could block out some visions. Still, I couldn’t walk around without getting close to someone and picking up shocking details about people kids trusted like teachers, coaches, doctors and especially priests. Why didn’t they just let them get married already? Some days, I’d become saturated by the sheer volume of evil. I suspected cops and social workers got to the same point where they had to disconnect emotionally or they’d go nuts. My new friends saved me.

  Everything was down for once in my life and I even looked forward to college or university; my GPA was actually decent despite my problems. That was until the day I bumped into Mr. Slomkowski. I had my earphones in and was busy selecting the next track when I should have been watching where I was going. When I turned the corner, I barreled right into him and he dropped a bag of groceries.

  “Watch where you’re going!” he yelled his face flush with anger. He softened visibly when he looked at me.

  Our hands touched when we both reached for the same frozen pizza that had tumbled out of the bag. I recognized the young boy in his thoughts; his picture was everywhere in the neighborhood and even on the local news after someone snatched him two days earlier. Volunteers plastered missing posters everywhere with a number to call. His name was Samuel.

  In the vision, I saw him tied to a bedpost and he looked terrified. The man was on his way home to rape and murder him. He stopped to watch a bunch of the junior kids playing a game of soccer in the schoolyard across the street. I suddenly realized that he was shopping, just as he had done in the supermarket a few minutes earlier. Except this time, he was looking for his next victim. I had to stop him but I was at a loss for what to do? I didn’t know the man’s name or even where he had the boy.

  On the spot, I decided to follow him and I’d improvise the rest. He was on foot so he couldn’t live very far. Seven blocks later, he took a smaller residential street. I held back and watched him stroll half way up the block then turn into a semi-detached with a one car garage and blue siding.

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sp; A taxi had just dropped off an elderly lady ten yards in front and the driver got out to help her to the door with her groceries. The engine was idling and I didn’t hesitate. In a flash, I was behind the wheel, put the motor in gear and gunned it before the cabbie even knew what happened. It was my first time driving except in video games! He started to run after the taxi yelling in a language that sounded like Russian. I kept my eye on his progress in the rearview mirror, he sure was fast for his size, and I almost missed the driveway. I took a hard right, bounced over the curb then smashed into the garage door doing about forty. I heard a loud crash as the wood splintered and the sound of the airbag exploding. Then I blacked out.

  When I came to a man in a uniform was leaning through the window calling to me. I looked around at all the commotion. I counted two police cars, an ambulance, the Rescue Squad from the fire station and a crowd of curious onlookers. The paramedic warned me not to move. He wrapped a brace around my neck then two firemen helped me out and put me on a stretcher. Just then, another team brought someone out of the garage in a body bag. I felt sick to my stomach. I vaguely recalled jumping into the taxi but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember why. A little boy was sitting in the back of a police car. He cried while a lady cop comforted him. Everyone turned as a car screeched to a halt and a woman jumped out. She ran to the boy.

  “Samuel, Mommy’s here!” she assured him, “Everything is going to be alright.”

  She wrapped her son in a hug neither of them would ever forget and I assumed he was the reason I found myself on a stretcher waiting to go to the hospital. I knew I was in a shitload of trouble but happy that nothing happened to the kid. This time, there were no regrets.

  They wheeled me to the ambulance and past the taxi driver standing on the sidewalk cussing out some cop. He looked pissed. They took me to emergency to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. My parents arrived shortly after; they looked more worried than angry. The doctor told them I would need to stay in observation for a few hours. I had a nasty bump on my head and a few bruised ribs. A uniformed stood about ten feet away with his hands crossed in front. He kept looking at me.