Terminal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Sign up for Michaelbrent’s Minions

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: watcher

  PART ONE: Six Hours Left

  1. Monitors

  2. BOLO

  3. MS-13

  4. Phones

  6. Isolated

  7. Lockers

  8. Reunion

  Interlude

  PART TWO: The Other

  1. Chaos

  2. Nerves

  3. Going Places

  4. Crutch

  5. What now?

  6. Itch

  7. Scars

  8. Bullies

  9. Going out

  10. Why bother?

  11. Ghost

  12. How… does… it… feel…

  13. Pop goes the weasel

  Interlude

  PART THREE: Caucusing

  1. Cycles

  2. Cut strings, whole strings

  3. Monster among them

  4. Little J

  5. All the little ants

  6. Because they could

  7. The sense of things

  8. Peaceful lies

  9. No more ants

  10. I’m going to do it for you

  Interlude

  PART FOUR: All In Favor

  1. Eres tú

  2. No more than she deserved

  3. Small starts

  4. Fewer is good

  5. I tried

  6. Into the fog

  7. On the other side of the glass

  Interlude

  PART FIVE: End of Cycle

  1. Into the mist

  2. The shadows kept pace

  3. And the darkness surged

  EPILOGUE: the other

  Author’s note

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOVELS BY MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF

  Copyright © 2019 by Michaelbrent Collings

  Terminal

  By

  Michaelbrent Collings

  Written Insomnia Press

  WrittenInsomnia.com

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  DEDICATION

  To...

  My readers, who make this

  continuing journey possible…

  And to Laura, FTAAE.

  PROLOGUE: watcher

  The terminal.

  An appropriate name for the place, which is a squat, concrete box that hunches just this side of Hell and just the other side of Nowhere.

  A Shit County Sheriff’s Dept. squad car sits near the terminal. It does not occupy any of the spots closest to the front door, or even to the small exit that leads to the sheriff’s satellite station in the terminal itself. The sign of an officer who wishes others to have the better placing. Or the sign of an officer who wants to get a few extra steps of exercise. Or, last of all, the sign of an officer who is incompetent and who doesn’t want anyone looking when he sneaks out to take a nap during his “rounds.”

  The Watcher notes all this. That is the Watcher’s job.

  There are other Watchers, of course, but this one is here now. This Watcher has been charged to take note of these things. To prepare the way for what will come next.

  As though bidden – for bidden it was, and is, and shall continue to be – a thick fog rolls in. It eats the night as it crawls forward, otherworldly and strange.

  That is as it should be. That is as it was designed to be.

  This fog is thicker than any fog that has ever been seen in this part of the world. It catches the light cast by the metal-halide bulbs that jut from the cracked asphalt like iron sprouts trying to survive in a concrete jungle. It swallows most of the illumination cast by the bulbs, but that does not matter, because the fog itself gleams with a wan, sickly light. The glow is disquieting for most who look upon it. The Watcher knows this, for that, too, is part of the fog’s design.

  Every moment that has come to pass has been part of the design.

  Every Cycle has played out as expected.

  But an expectation met does not necessarily equate to boredom. Every Cycle has played out as expected, but the myriad routes the players have taken to reach their destinations has thrilled the Watcher.

  A Watcher who does not love its job – its purpose – should not be a Watcher.

  The fog engulfs the Watcher. But the Watcher still sees. Three eyes are better than the two. The Watcher’s three eyes glow, and the glow casts strange shadows in the mist – but also allow the Watcher to see through the fog as though it has disappeared.

  The Watcher sees the people in the concrete box.

  Most of them will never leave.

  The Watcher has seen the outcome. The expectation of the one who will survive.

  Lights blink around the Watcher as more Watchers arrive. All of them gaze on the old bus terminal, which has now been converted to a new prison, though the people inside do not know this.

  Not yet.

  One side of the terminal is a featureless wall of cinder block and concrete. The other side consists of long, tall panes of glass that allow travelers to view the bus parking spaces, as well as the general-use parking lot beyond. A pair of automatic doors, also glass, sit in the middle, ready to allow entry and exit for those who will use this place.

  The bus slips are empty. They jut out from the curb at forty-five-degree angles, long yellow lines that seem to glow with their own light. The glow fades as the fog encroaches.

  The Watchers gaze upon the box through the bright green, triple light of their eyes.

  And still the fog thickens. It pushes toward the terminal, the leading edges forming an almost perfectly vertical wall. Perpendicular to the ground, rising high enough that the top of it – if there is a top, which the Watcher does not know because it is not a Watcher’s job to know such things – disappears into the night.

  The fog stops moving, halting fifty feet away from the terminal. It has eaten the squad car and all but one of the parking lot light poles. It does not consume the terminal, because the order has not been given. The last Cycle has ended, but the bridge between the one that ended and the one about to begin has not yet completed his passage.

  The Watcher waits. They all wait.

  The people inside wait, too. They wait for work shifts to end or for the next leg of their journeys to begin. They wait for things that will never come.

  That is part of the Cycle.

  That is part of the fun.

  Inside the terminal, hard metal benches shine dully under the migraine-inducing fluorescent lights, one-third of which do not work. Soon, none of the lights will work.

  That, too, is part of the Cycle.

  The Watcher can see it all. Even the electronic sign to one side of the terminal lobby, next to the ticket counter. The sign reads:

  Current Time: 1:22 A.M.

  LA to SLC arrive 1:38 – ON TIME

  BOISE to LOS ANG. arrive 3:20 A.M.

  The current time is correct as listed. The rest of the sign is a lie. Co-opted by the Cycle.

  To the back of the lobby is a small locker area, a vestibule with an open door frame. A row of lockers in the middle, and a few more affixed to the back wall, are more than enough to service the needs of the passengers who wait here, or who choose for some unknowable reason to stay for a while in this place. The light in this tiny space is even worse than in the rest of the termin
al: a pair of fluorescent bars hanging on the wall in the very back cast a grim, grimy kind of glow that makes the vestibule a thing more of shadow than light.

  The Watcher presses a control, and one of the bulbs in the locker room sputters and dies, pushing the vestibule into twilight. Soon darkness will fall.

  Beside the lockers, a small baggage carousel waits, motionless, for bags to be slung through a plastic-sheeted door on the outer wall. That door, the Watcher knows, is sealed from the inside. The Watcher knows, too, that other Watchers will soon seal the small egress from the outside, as well – in ways far more permanent than the simple lock and key that now shut the baggage claim area off from the rest of the world.

  Baggage claim. Lockers. Two bathrooms. The ticket window and office. The sheriff’s satellite station.

  A small terminal. But large enough for a Cycle. Large enough indeed. In fact, the terminal contains six passengers, two employees, a prisoner, and a hidden child. Eleven in all: the largest group of any Cycle so far.

  The Engineers begin to arrive. The Watchers do not turn to look. They have all seen this before. And the fun part is not what happens out here, but what is about to happen inside.

  The fog pushes forward again. The final light pole disappears in the mist. The parking lot lights extinguish. The mist, however, continues to glow.

  A moment later, the lights of the bus terminal flicker. Off, on.

  Off.

  On.

  They stay on. For now.

  The Watchers move forward with the fog. The Engineers remain behind.

  It is time to begin.

  Soon, it will be time to end. The watched will bleed, and die. And that will be the most fun of all.

  PART ONE: Six Hours Left

  1. Monitors

  Meriweather “Mary to my friends” Holiday rarely hated her life. It was a hard life, sure, but what life wasn’t? She was working a low-pay job in a low-traffic bus terminal, pretty much the least exciting job in existence. But it came with benefits for the family, and she got enough extra shifts that the double-time added up to a tidy sum. She didn’t like it that she often doubled as the janitorial staff, and her one regular coworker was a creep, but even with all that… nothing to hate.

  Not really.

  It beat dark alleys and the constant threat of gang rapes whenever she had to go get cigarettes for her dad. He wanted cigarettes, he got cigarettes; that was a lesson that Mary had learned early, and learned hard.

  She could not remember the first time he shook her awake, the first time she looked up at his unshaven face, his wild eyes, and heard him whisper, “Out of smokes.” It had been part of her life since she was old enough to walk, to hold the bills he shoved into her small hands, and to make the three-block trip to the nearest place that would serve a child because that child was “Big J’s kid.”

  That was all she ever had to say: “I’m Big J’s kid.” The man behind the counter – always a man in that place – took the money. He never gave back change. He would instead fill her palms with a carton of the Kools that were all her daddy would smoke, and she’d walk back home where Big J himself would be waiting. Often, he waited asleep since the reason he sent her was generally because he was having trouble walking any distance longer than the ones from couch to toilet to fridge and back again.

  When he was asleep it was better. She could put the Kools on the floor beside him, and creep back to play, or perhaps even dare to sleep a bit herself.

  When Big J was awake, he insisted she “smoke” with him. That meant she had to sit on the floor beside him while he smoked and yelled at sports on TV. If she fell asleep, he beat her.

  If she didn’t fall asleep… he usually beat her then, too. For looking bored. For staring at him. For not staring at him. For making a sound that his booze-sodden brain would somehow convince him had led to a bad snap by the quarterback, or a fumble caused by the overly-loud breathing of a five-year-old girl in a Compton hood hundreds of miles away from the game.

  Big J died when Mary was twelve. A twofer, because after the autopsy one of the less-than-sympathetic social workers who processed her let her know that if the lead poisoning occasioned by the drive-by hadn’t killed him, the golf ball-sized tumor in his lungs would have done him in within the year anyway.

  Mary thought, for about ten seconds, that Big J’s death would get her out of the hood. She was going into The System, which she had heard terrible things about, but even The System couldn’t be as bad as home, could it?

  Yeah. It could.

  She made it through, though. Eventually, she got out. She escaped. She worked one low-paying job after another, but each paid a few pennies more than the last. Each was a little better, a little farther from danger, than the one before.

  Each was a step up. And that was all she wanted: to step up a bit each day. That, she determined, was the secret to happiness. You couldn’t control the universe, but you could constantly try to step a bit higher, and make a bit more of yourself no matter where you landed.

  So she was happy, by and large. No more Big J, no more late-night smokeathons. After she fled the last foster home – six months shy of eighteen years old, so though she was technically a minor on the run, no one looked too hard for her – no more beatings, no more rapes. Just her. Just stepping up.

  Those facts were enough to keep her happy. Usually.

  But once in a while, there still came a day when she hated the universe. Since she was a part of that universe, it meant she hated herself as well.

  Today was one of those days. Yet another absence notification popped up on her phone, which she’d only seen five minutes ago because her carrier stank and the message popped up well into her shift, rather than during school hours as it was supposed to do.

  Then she still didn’t see it for a good long time, because of the no phones policy in place for terminal employees. She’d already been written up twice for personal calls during work hours, and a third might mean the end of this job. So she’d stopped keeping her phone anywhere but the small locker she had in the back of the ticket office.

  She pulled it out at the end of her last break, and by the time it processed – really processed – what the message waiting for her meant, she was already through her break and supposed to be back at the desk.

  The other girl who worked nights with her occasionally was out tonight, “sick,” which meant she was probably banging away at whatever poor sap she’d recently met at the low-rent bar she frequented. Mary was the only employee of the bus line on duty, so there was technically no one to report on her should she get back to her station a few minutes late. But there was still Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Kingsley to deal with. He didn’t work for the bus company, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t rat her out given the chance.

  He had never actually done that, to her knowledge, but… no, she wouldn’t put it past him at all.

  She glanced into the terminal. The passengers waiting for the next bus were still waiting, and still mostly looked half-bored or half-asleep. The two exceptions to that rule were the guy playing some kind of handheld – too intense to sleep – and the creepy guy with the tats. They both looked fully awake and aware, but neither was looking her way, and she doubted either would care if she did anything short of setting herself on fire and then asking for hugs.

  She glanced at her phone. Still in her hand, which by itself violated the no-phones policy – cells were to be left in the lockers at the back of the ticket office unless on break or off duty.

  She looked at the passengers again. Still half-bored, half-asleep, or otherwise uninterested in her.

  She looked around for Kingsley. Old bastard was nowhere to be seen.

  She hunched over. There was nowhere to hide in the ticket office – a few file cabinets, the lockers, a desk and circa-1980 computer at each of the ticket windows, and another desk with a quartet of security monitors cycling through the closed-circuit feeds that showed everything inside and outside the terminal. H
unching over just meant she looked like a whale that had somehow beached itself in the middle of Idaho, but she couldn’t help doing it.

  Part of it was that she didn’t want anyone to see what she was doing. She didn’t want to lose her job. That was what she told herself.

  But she knew, too, that part of it was her hiding not just from the possibility of someone reporting her cell usage, but someone seeing her shame. She had worked so hard to get herself out of a certain kind of life. And now the person she loved most of all in the world seemed determined to run right back into that world as fast as possible.

  Mary dialed her phone. The line rang a few times, then her daughter’s voice spoke. “This is Taylor. And if you’re leaving a message instead of a text like a normal person, it means you’re either a telemarketer or my mom. Either way, please go –”

  Beeeep.

  Mary felt her mouth stretch into a thin line at the message. It was a new one, but always the same motif: Hi, I’m Taylor. I’m so cynical and worldly. Now I’m going to end with what should be a cuss word so you know how edgy and cool I am.

  “Ha, ha,” said Mary. “I just got a message from the school. You and I have to talk.”

  She said more, but the words felt like bees buzzing around her head. And as with bees, the noise sounded irritable, angry, but mostly incomprehensible even to her ears. The opening salvo in an argument that would play out when she got home in the morning, but would resolve nothing. She and Taylor would fight, and there would be a new level of hurt feelings and emotional scar tissue to deal with, but other than that nothing would change.

  Buzz, buzz, buzz.

  She droned on for several seconds, making all the right angry noises to prove she was a good mother, tamping back the despair in her heart that whispered the truth:

  You’re a failure.

  Just a used-up old woman who failed her way out of one world, and now is failing her daughter back into that same horrible place.

  For a moment, she thought she smelled the Kools again. The feeling made her sick as it always did, but now it was worse because the image in her mind wasn’t that of Big J. It was Taylor, sitting in the easy chair, pulling the belt out one-handed, ready to inflict pain on someone.