Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon Read online

  “Someone is talking to the now young woman, but she is clearly a little distracted, trying to digest what has just happened to her. This is more than a memory. This is tangible; she has been transported back in time. Beside her, a man is gathering his belongings; he is dressed in the uniform of a porter, and he looks just as young as she is, perhaps one or two years older.

  He gives her a kiss on her cheek, reminds her that he’ll call as soon as they make first port, and then touches her cheek lovingly. ‘Open this when I’m gone,’ he then says with a smile. As he pulls away, tossing his bag over his shoulder, we see the young woman has a gift in her hand, the same one she opened in the attic only seconds earlier.

  We see recognition dawn in her features. And we know that when she finally fully realizes where and when she is, she is also realizing that this moment in time was pivotal. The man she once loved is about to board the ill-fated Titanic. This is the last time she will ever see him alive.”

  The body language in the conference room reflected the emotion of Annaleia’s pitch, and she hadn’t even come to the climax. The clincher had worked, and the room was hers.

  “There is no time to stop the ship,” she continued. “There is no time to warn the crew. And they wouldn’t believe her anyway. There is just time enough to do one thing.” It was very important that Annaleia emphasize the wording, “just time enough,” and she managed the feat with expert, practiced body language and the exact right tone, effectively italicizing them for her audience.

  “One thing that may change the course of her fate forever. And just like that – she decides to do it. Our young woman breaks into a run, pushing through the milling crowd to follow after the young man. She catches up to him just short of the bottom of the ship’s boarding plank. She grabs his arm to stop him, and when he turns around, she kisses him.”

  On the screen, the colored pen drawings kissed, and the air around them filled with animation fireworks. The music in the room crescendo'd, but not so loud as to drown out Annaleia.

  “She kisses him deep and long, with all of the love that she has felt inside for three-quarters of a century. She kisses him with all of the love that she’s missed for the better part of a hundred years. And what can he do, in the grips of such a kiss, but kiss her back?

  The music soars, the sunlight shimmers and streams between them, the crowd goes wild as behind the kissing couple, the ship begins to pull away from the dock – and the kiss goes on.

  Finally, our young man and woman slowly part and the young man blinks in both confusion and dawning, true love. But then he realizes what is happening behind him, and he gives the young woman the final squeeze of a desperate goodbye, backpedals, and makes a break for it toward the departing ship. He was supposed to be on it; the viewer can see that. He’s obviously got a job waiting for him on that ship.

  But this is not the first time he has tried to board that ship, not to her it isn’t, and this time he doesn’t make it. This time, the young man falls just short of making the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. He’s frustrated enough at the unexpected loss that he takes off his porter’s hat and throws it to the ground.”

  On the screen, the young man flung his small white cap onto the platform in front of him before bowing his head in defeat.

  “Then, with his hands on his hips and his head lowered, the young man slowly smiles. He begins laughing at his fortune. Still smiling and shaking his head in ambivalence, he turns to look over his shoulder at the place where his girl is still standing.

  The camera pans to his blue eyes, time slows, and everything changes again.”

  The room collectively held its breath, eyes wide, bodies utterly motionless.

  Gotcha, Anna thought.

  “As he peers across the distance at his first and only love and the camera pulls out once more, we find he is an old man, as weathered and wrinkled as the woman, who is now old once more. He does not peer at her across a crowded and celebratory pier filled with revelers, but an empty kitchen. We’ve seen this kitchen; it’s her kitchen.

  However, it is not as empty as it was the last time we saw it. The once gray walls are now cheery.” The walls in the animated drawing painted themselves a happy pattern of yellow and white stripes. “Their bare spaces are now decorated with lovingly framed photographs of people. Photographs of children, of grandchildren, of aunts and uncles and newborn babies, graduations and soccer games and soldiers returned from the war. These are lives lived, lives that had not been there before, a legacy – that was not there until that single, momentous, life-altering kiss.

  The old man’s eyes meet hers. She looks better now than when we first met her, the hair on her head white instead of gray, the bun exchanged for soft curls that cascade over her shoulders, the once drab clothing switched out for pastel hues. She smiles a very soft, very gentle smile. Their eyes speak unspoken volumes, stories of knowledge deep and true.

  In this new, not quite as empty silence, the old man has a newspaper in his hands. He places today’s paper on the table. It bears the very same headline we saw earlier, announcing the anniversary of the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic. We hear his shuffling footsteps as he crosses the kitchen and approaches his true love.

  He touches her cheek.

  They embrace.

  The music becomes lilting, its notes carrying us as the camera pans out to climb the stairs to the house’s second floor. On the way, we see more photographs on the walls and atop a piano, we pass taped-up children’s drawings hung proudly by second-graders, we witness vibrant color schemes that filled a once monochrome world.

  The camera takes us to the attic room at the end of the hall, where in a beam of light in a much brighter and happier place of memories, a now empty crystal perfume bottle sits, obviously used and loved. On the back of the bottle in scrawling etched letters are the words, ‘Time Enough.’

  And our commercial closes with a final, simple farewell message that can be either spoken or scripted across the bottom of the screen. ‘What would you change of fate… if there were just Time Enough?’”

  As the music ended and the screen faded to black, Annaleia scanned the faces of the people at the conference table. She managed to keep herself from jumping for joy, but their slow, silent nods and flushed expressions – not to mention the actual tears on the cheeks of more than one of them – made it damn hard to contain her excitement. She’d so badly wanted this sell. It was the last project she’d had to complete before beginning a long-awaited and hard-earned vacation. She’d wanted to leave on a high note because as everyone knew, employees were a lot easier to replace when they were on vacation. Anna wanted to be indispensable.

  Finally, the woman at the far end of the table, the director of advertising for the cosmetics company Anna was pitching to, began clapping enthusiastically. Her red-lipped grin spread to envelop the entire lower half of her face. The others at the table joined in right away, and Anna let out a breath of relief that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “Absolutely amazing, Miss Faith,” the director said. “I love it. And I know our buyers will too. We should be able to—“”

  But she never had a chance to finish what she was saying, as suddenly, a distant-sounding thump shook the floor beneath their feet and chairs. The unsettling reverberation stopped everyone still and caused the pencils to roll across the table.

  A second later the fire alarm blared to screeching life, but before the sprinklers overhead began spinning and spraying, Anna was moving for the door. She’d been in this situation before. She recognized the feel of that particular thump. Now she was on autopilot, even as her nerve endings crackled to terrified life and her mind screamed one sentence over and over again in a loop.

  Not again. Not again. Not again.

  Chapter Two – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Anna opened the door and turned to the room, holding the door wide with her back against it. The others had risen from their chairs and were trying to gather th
eir belongings.

  But Anna stopped them. “Leave everything where it is except your cell phones,” she told them in an authoritative tone. “Place your cell phones in your pockets or your waistbands so your hands are free and head calmly to the stairwell through those double doors,” she instructed, pointing in the direction of the fire exit.

  She kept her tone even but strong, her back straight, and her expression dead serious. “Do not run and do not push,” she added when they glanced at her uncertainly, clearly surprised that she had taken over.

  A second rumble moved through the building around them, and this time Annaleia heard voices elsewhere in the office raised in fear.

  No. Please not again.

  She didn’t look old enough to have been more than a toddler back then, but she was. She was a lot older than she looked. At this point, everyone and their dog claimed to have been somehow affected by those infamous attacks. It was cliché and it was considered bad form. Every person on the planet who was old enough desperately wanted to be associated with something so pivotal and important. They figured it would garner sympathy. Or make them seem somehow more wise.

  The way Vietnam Vets were now coveted national treasures rather than the soldier scum they were considered in the early seventies. Something like that.

  But where Anna was concerned, it was something she never talked about, not ever. For two reasons. One, as far as the world was concerned, she would have been a child in September of 2001. No older than five or six, for sure. And two, in all honesty she really just wanted to forget the entire ordeal. No matter what the tragedy’s motto said one should never do.

  On that particular Tuesday, Annaleia Faith genuinely just happened to be in Manhattan, New York. Vacationing, of all things. And she’d flown into Newark from Pennsylvania before hiring a car to take her to Times Square. Within the space of a few hours, Anna had been in two of the three locations where the attacks had taken gone down. She’d had the most amazing luck that day. Not good luck. Just amazing. And she had always sort of wondered whether that luck had somehow rubbed off on the world in a bad way.

  Annaleia leaned forward, grasping the closest person by the elbow to hurry them through the door. It happened to be her boss, and he gave her a strange wide-eyed look when she gently but firmly manhandled him out the door. “Let’s go,” she commanded. “All of you make your way to the stairwell right this very second. Once there, descend calmly and hold onto the railing – remember not to run.”

  It was ironic, now that Anna was thinking back on it and moving people through the door at the same time. That had been the last vacation she’d taken – until the one she’d planned to begin tomorrow. Two decades without a day off and two decades without any crash-boom-bangs. In another time and place, perhaps viewed from very far away, the coincidence might have seemed almost amusing.

  The vacation was going to have to wait. Whatever happened, the cosmetics company she’d pitched to probably wouldn’t go with her ad idea now, since it would likely only bring to mind for them bad things like fire alarms and people screaming in fear. Bad things. Which was also ironic, given that she’d pitched it to cover the Titanic disaster specifically to steer toward traumatic events of the long past rather than the more recent past.

  In any case, she knew that whatever this situation was, if it was bad, she was going to have to come up with something else and fast.

  In that case, Anna only hoped that the ad would be the worst of her concerns.

  “This is important,” she continued to give instructions even as mind internally spun. “Wait until you reach the bottom level and exit the building before you attempt to use your cell phones to call anyone.” Otherwise they would be too busy trying to think of what to say or finding the number in their contacts list to exit the building with utmost care and speed, and their hands wouldn’t be free for balance and reactions. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because the call wouldn’t connect. There was no signal in the stairwells.

  She raised her voice just a touch because she knew that at this point, blood was rushing through their ears and it would be more difficult to hear. Plus, they were moving away from her now. “If you find your way blocked on the way down by an obstruction, go back to the nearest floor. Let everyone on that floor know that the path down is blocked. Then go back through those offices to the second set of stairs on the other side of the building. Each office level has two sets of stairs.”

  But this probably wasn’t… that. Not again, not this time. Right? At least, whatever it was, the building she was in probably wasn’t at the epicenter of the commotion. The rumbles that trembled through the office were too soft, the explosive pulses too distant. And the fire alarm was probably set off by someone on purpose, someone acting out of fear. Even so, time was most likely of the essence.

  Anna followed them now, letting the door shut behind her as they made their way to the stairwell. She watched them leave following her instructions, then she broke into a run in the opposite direction. As quickly as possible, she ducked into each cubicle to make sure they were empty.

  Then she left through the inner office door to check the bathrooms. Each was also empty, but as she was leaving the men’s restroom a third small rumble shuddered through the building, and now she could hear distant, muffled screaming.

  She stopped in the center of the foyer and listened, paying close attention to the varying sounds, then she went the way her fellow employees had gone and headed to the stairwell fire exit. She leaned over the railing and gazed down the chute of empty space at the center of the stairwell. The squared spiral of stairs was empty below her, which was good; the advertising agency’s offices were on the top floor of the building, so if the stairwell was empty it probably meant everyone had gotten out safely.

  Within seconds, she’d made it to the final level of the building, and fortune seemed to be on her side this time. She hadn’t passed anyone on the way down, and there was nothing blocking the stairs at any level. Anna pushed open the fire exit door and blinked against the midday sun that speared her eyes. But even through the blurriness, she could see the familiar figures of her fellow employees. They’d gathered together a safe distance from the building and were pointing at and discussing something occurring at a building a few blocks away.

  A column of smoke rose from that area, and Anna could smell something nasty in the air. The wind was also hot; unnaturally warmed by an unexpected heat source.

  A slithering sensation unraveled in her stomach. Anna’s teeth tamped together; she found she was tempted to hug herself in comfort when she approached her boss and the circle of employees around him. She made certain they were all aware she was out of the building and safe, and then told them to wait until they received the go-ahead to return inside.

  But she was no longer worried about them now. It was clear even from this distance that whatever had gone down had done so far enough away that nothing inside her building would be directly affected – if you didn’t count all the water from the sprinkler system.

  The trouble was centered two blocks away, and whatever forces of fate had “gifted” Annaleia with her unnatural abilities were now humming to life in her veins. She was being drawn to the site. Not out of curiosity or morbid fascination, but necessity. Someone was either dead in that mess, or they were close.

  Annaleia always felt new death, the death that had just barely descended and turned off a beating heart. It was a part of what she was, and along with her red hair it was also one of the reasons her best friend tended to call her “Bruja.” Bruja was Spanish for witch. She was close to death, she supposed. She’d touched it, brushed against it, felt it grasp a tentative hold on her before it hesitantly let her go.

  Anna didn’t realize she was already running until she stopped behind two large blue trash bins in an alley adjacent to the smoking scene. She leaned around one of them and scanned the area, trying to decipher what had happened.

  The long, smooth white line of an airplane�
�s wing was like a bass beat in her guts. She blinked and looked again. Clouds of gray and black puffed and swayed, lifting from rubble past the core of the trauma. For a moment they parted again – and again, Anna gazed upon the wing of a plane.

  Chapter Three – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Randall Price brushed his sleeve over his forehead and cringed when another sharp spike rose from the base of his skull to his right eye. His head hurt. It always hurt. Every single day. The migraines were a part of him now, an unseen assailant that had attached itself to him like the ghost of a cookiecutter shark.

  He looked up to shuffle through the books on the shelf so he could find the empty space he needed. A black and white, flashing zigzag shape had begun to form at the bottom of the right side of his vision. On instinct, as he always did, he tried to focus on it to get a better look. As he re-focused, it moved. He looked up again toward his boss, who was waving him over at the end of the street. Again when he re-focused, the zigzag shape moved along with his line of sight, maintaining its position at the bottom right-hand side of his vision.

  Great, he thought as his patience dwindled. An aura. He rarely got them with the migraines; normally they came along separately, either the day before or the day after. This was new. But what if it wasn’t? What if it just meant that this migraine was going to last more than a day? Or go away and then come back tomorrow?

  He swore internally.

  Little bits of Randall were left behind every time, pieces that it grew more and more difficult to find and glue back together. His head felt like a mess of scars on the inside, its wounds invisible and exhausting. He waited and longed for the time when it would be scar tissue entirely, because scar tissue itself couldn’t transmit pain the same way undamaged tissue could. And he wished they were at least visible on the outside. Then people would empathize. He hated it when pain was invisible. It did nothing for the sufferer.