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It’s funny how the background noise of a city settles into the bones. A quiet hum in the subconscious that becomes part of the experience living there. Keith never really got used to it. The desert taught him silence at a young age and it was a lesson he couldn’t shake.
Which was why the darkened street laid out before him, like it had been so many times before, always rattle him. There was no distant chatter of people from a main street, no hum of the utilities overhead or of cars navigating the small side streets. No fluttering of shop banners or the click of people’s shoes walking on the distressed brick. It was just silent. The street a dim emptiness illuminated by the glow of hanging lanterns and fluorescent signs.
Political posters clung to the walls of buildings at intersections next to seemingly abandoned bicycles and well-loved potted plants. Walls of homes and small businesses caged him on either side as he walked unwillingly forward. The shadow he cast down the road stretched far beyond him, undulating oddly from the various points of light illuminating the space.
His body made a turn down a smaller side street, the glow of the overhead lights dimming slightly by the closeness, and his heart clenched.
Ahead, silhouetted by the red glow of lanterns, a woman walked away from him. Her long coat gently wafting in her wake, a messenger bag thudding softly against her hip. There was no sound. There never was.
He so badly wanted to call out to her. He tried to make his voice work. Just like he always did and managed nothing but to accelerate his own heart. The woman advanced, unphased. Like she had no idea he was even there.
She turned a corner ahead and his feet yearned to keep up – to get her back in his sight. He tried to move faster, like he always did, but failed to move any quicker than a brisk walk. He turned the corner and was met with the scent of wisteria blooming atop of the concrete fence surrounding an old, gated temple complex.
He’d walked by the temple so many times.
At the far end of the street, the woman continued to walk, past the temple down into the historic district with its low wooden houses, lantern adorned buildings and water features. He knew the spot well. It was every bit preservation as much as it was tourist trap.
He could feel his heart thudding harder in his ribs.
He needed to catch her.
He had to.
But no matter what he tried his feet would not obey his mind.
In the distance, the looming shadow of the imperial complex was beginning to come into view.
The street dipped before making its climb to the complex proper and the street went dark, darker than it should have. He was sweating now. His breathing sharp and hard.
He crested the rise to face the square, the ancient stone lined streets and historic structures squeezing in on him on either side.
At first, he wasn’t sure. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe this time the dream would let him be. This part of the dream was never as firm as the rest. It wavered in its execution, giving him hope that he could influence its ending.
Then he saw her. A shadow against the massive structure beyond. Her chin tilted upwards as if to admire the building. Hope gutted him for a moment, before leaving him at the nightmare’s mercy.
Like it always did, a man (if one could call it that) emerged from the shadow of a nearby building. He approached the woman calmly. If there had been sound, he would have been able to hear their gentle conversation.
But there wasn’t. So he didn’t. And he knew what came next was anything but gentle.
He tried. He tried to will himself forward in the dream, to move faster, to scream – anything! To get her attention. Nothing worked. He was bound to move at this agonizing pace.
Forced to watch the man, seemingly so calm and demure, remove a knife from behind his back and without hesitation, run the blade through the bottom of the woman’s chin and out the front of her face.
He lifted her off the ground before pulling the blade free, her arms and legs moving frantically in pained panic. She crumpled to the ground at the man’s feet, still alive, clawing at her face. The man turned towards him, still shadowed by looming buildings overhead and the soft glow of the lanterns. He twisted the blade in his hand, his gaze not leaving him, as he thrust the blade downward at the woman –
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Keith woke up screaming.
“-- ey! Hey! It’s me! It—e!”
“You’re okay. You’re okay. Keith, look at me!”
“Shhh, shhh…”
She wished she could say she wasn’t used to this. No one should be used to having their partner wake from a dead sleep by screaming. But it had happened often enough now that she almost could predict what nights he’d have an episode.
They were usually nights after they’d spent the day planning something. Something for the shop expansion or Altea’s new facility or, and these stung the most, the days they’d dare to talk about their own, more personal, future plans. Plans to travel together, plans to visit each other’s families, plans to build a home together that wasn’t sitting atop cinder blocks and dry rotted tires.
Cosmo whined at Keith’s elbow, trying to push his giant head under his distraught owner’s arm.
“Breath…just breath.” Katie repeated, rubbing slow circles with the palm of her hand between Keith’s shoulder blades.
He looked ashen. Dripping with sweat and his heart thumping so loud she thought she could hear it from where she sat.
“I’m. Fine.” He managed between shuttered breaths. “I’m sorry. Sorry…”
“Shhh…don’t be sorry. I’m here. I’m here.” Katie laid her forehead on his shoulder, trying to steady her own breathing. “Do – Do you want to talk about it?”
She hesitated. It was happening so often now that she felt obligated to ask. Whether that was what was best or if it was just to satisfy her own curiosity, she wasn’t sure yet.
“No.” He lifted his head from between his knees and craned his chin skyward, rolling it from side to side, stretching. “No, I’ll be fine. Just a nightmare.”
Katie stared at the scar on his cheek, chewing at her bottom lip, while she weighed the pros and cons of pushing for answers.
Before she could decide, he lifted one clammy hand to the small of her back.
“I promise, Space Bird, I’m okay.” He looked at her from the corner of his eye before twisting himself back under the sheet, his other arm guiding her back down to the bed with him. “Go back to sleep.”
She let herself be cuddled back into the bed, tucking his head gently against her chest, one hand absentmindedly playing with his hair.
A few minutes passed and somehow (it had to be his military training, she was sure of it) Keith was fast asleep. His breathing coming soft and even and his heart calm.
Katie did not have the same training. Nor had she deduce how he accomplished the feat of falling asleep so quickly. Though there were many times she wished she had. Being able to fall asleep anywhere didn’t mean she could do it at the drop of a hat. Especially not after being woken up like she had.
Her mind raced as she stared off into the dark of the room. Cosmo appraised her from his spot on the floor, yellow eyes bright even in the dim light.
“Go to bed.” She whispered and the wolf snorted, turning his head away and flopping back to the floor.
She continued to twirl the strands of Keith’s hair around her fingers, her mind wild with rampant thoughts, until her heavy eyelids began to drift shut, just about the time the rays of unforgiving desert sun began to peak through the paper blinds.
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Keith untangled himself from Katie’s arms and the bedsheets once the sun had started to burn a hole through the dust on the blinds and through his eyelids. He wasn’t a big sleeper and what little he got the night before was fine enough for him.
He did his best to tip-toe over Cosmo and inch his way out the folding door to the remainder of the trailer. He hated that he woke like he had. Hated that it was happening so often and nothing he did seemed to change it. In fact, it felt like it was getting worse.
It made him angry. And when he was angry, the best thing for him was to do something productive with his hands. He flexed his battered knuckles in the light from the window over the small table. He wanted to punch something but he’d taken down his punching bag three weeks ago for the install of the new paint booth and just never found the time or need to put it back up again. Maybe now was the time.
Grabbing enough clothes to be considered decent from his dirty pile near the bathroom door (he really needed to make a run to town), Keith quietly snuck his way out of the trailer and down towards the shop.
It was hard to imagine what the shop had looked like just less than a year ago. The once faded paint and broken sign, now replaced. The one garage bay that had been full of his family’s collective junk cleared out and a bright white paint booth installed in its wake.
Not everything had changed. The mishmash of garage scrap furniture and the shoddy fridge still sat in the middle, now with remarkably less space as more and more things had been moved from other bays to accommodate Keith’s growing enterprise.
The punching bag sat against the bench seat, half toppled over and as dirt stained as ever. His dad had always said the bag had started out a beige color but Keith had never seen it anything but dirt red. Some stains seeming more red than others. He chose to not think about those as much. Anger issues ran in the family.
Looking at the bag and then looking around him at the space he’d spent more time in then he’d care to think about, he dawned on him that making room for a human sized bag to swing around would probably require even more ‘reorganizing’.
His face skewed at the thought. He was actually fairly fond of his clutter. Or maybe it could be better labeled as nostalgia. Very little of it was actually his. It had been his dad’s or his grandfather’s or a great uncles. It was years of his family history laid out on a workbench.
The hungry pit in his stomach, the one that needed something to do before it imploded, ate him and without any better plan, he moved to start shifting the tangle pile of scrap steel and parts from one corner of the bay. He’d been meaning to go through it anyway.
He’d been sorting parts of bumpers, fenders and steel for chassis for almost an hour when he heard a knock from the front of the open garage bay.
“Hello?” A decidedly British accent called out.
“One second!” Keith called back, throwing the wheel hub in his hands down in the ‘junk he should have gotten rid of much sooner’ pile.
He dusted his hands off on his coveralls, pushing the hair that had fallen away from his face as he rounded the side of a hot rod in progress.
“How can I help…you?”
He didn’t mean for the falter in his question but the sight of a man dressed in a tailored suit standing beside two blacked out SUVs was not what he’d expected to find outside his garage that morning.
“Sorry to be a bother,” the man waved a flawless hand in apology, “we seem to be a bit lost I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” Keith adjusted the coveralls, slipping his hand over the spot where he kept his knife tucked away. Just to make sure it was there. “Where ya heading?”
“County road 18 south?” The man said, checking the address again on his phone.
The Altean Complex.
“You’re looking for that new space center that Californian company is building?” Keith laced disdain into his words.
“Yes! I guess it's a little…different…than what you’re used to out here.”
“You can say that.” Keith stepped out of the garage just enough to point down the road, his eyes never leaving the man and the SUVs. “Follow this road until you get to the old church – can’t miss it, burned out years ago, sits right on that corner, – then take a left and follow that until you see the construction entrance signs.”
“Thank you, Mr.--?” The man extended a hand, waiting for Keith to introduce himself.
It was probably just pleasantries. The niceness of upper society rubbing his lower class the wrong way.
“Call me Red.” He gave the man a firm handshake and the man smiled back at him. It felt like looking a rattlesnake in the face.
“Nice to meet you, Red. Have a wonderful day.” The man kept smiling as he got back into the backseat of the rear SUV.
Keith didn’t look down at his hand until the SUV’s were out of sight. He didn’t need to look to know what the business card in his hand said.
Lotor Maschovitch – COO – Galran United.
Keith’s mind flashed to the shadow man in his nightmare. To the shadow’s dignified nature. Its long hair pulled back in a sleek, low tail down its back.
His blood ran cold. He crumpled the card and let it fall to the dirt.
He pivoted as calmly as he could manage, closing the garage bay behind him. Then he made his way to the back bathroom, shut the door, took the steel toe of his boot and kicked a block loose from the wall.
Wiggling the block fear, he reached in and found the burner phone he’d hope to never use. He didn’t have to look at the numbers. The other number was burned into his memory. He sent the text, waited and when the reply came a few minutes later, he smashed the phone against the wall.