Chapter 12: Automaton

...And the 12th chapter:

Alicia knew.

            The moment I walked in the door, I could tell that somehow my roommate knew everything.

            She’d been pacing a groove in the oak floorboards.

            It was her thing. Pacing. Nervous, sad, excited: pacing.

            She immediately pulled me into her arms.

            “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

            I took a deep breath. It shook on the way out, like a sob threatened.

            No tears. Not yet.

            “Your mom called me. She was worried. She tried to get a hold of you all morning.”

            “I–I went running.”

            “To Coronado?”

            I nodded, not looking at her.

            “I was late.”

            “Oh, sweetie,” she sighed, bemusement and gentle exasperation in her voice. She didn’t bother telling me not to go running so far without proper preparation, like water. I knew it already.

            “How about you take a long, hot shower? Then I’ll make you some lunch and we’ll talk.”

            I nodded again.

            I moved mechanically, jerkily. Like an automaton.

            It was easier, not to think.

            Objective: shower, wash hair, wash body, dry body, dress.

            No thought required. No emotions.

            When I reappeared in the living room, Alicia took one look at me and shook her head. Picked out something else. Apparently matching wasn’t a concern in the straightforward dressing objective of an automaton.

            Alicia put a bowl of lobster bisque in front of me. My favorite. Trying to bribe me into eating.

            I pushed it away.

            Blinked up at her.

            So tired. In my very soul. Wanted to crawl into bed and never come out.

            “I’m going to pack you a bag,” Alicia told me, her voice imminently reasonable and slow and loud, as if I were a child. Not that I could blame her. There was some sort of disconnect between my emotions and my thoughts and my body. I felt like two people. Or more.

            “The funeral’s on Friday.”

            Funeral. It felt like a slap. I winced.

            “Dad pulled some strings. We’re catching a military transport out of Coronado to Hill Air Force Base.”

            “The admiral knows?”

            “Yeah. He called me when his men found you passed out.”

            “Oh.”

            “It’ll be okay, sweetie.”

            I nodded, a meaningless gesture. A mere head bob, a mechanical glitch in an automaton.

We went back to Coronado.

            Wasn’t that the definition of madness? Repeating something over and over again hoping for different results? Like life. Waking up. Running. Writing. Eating. Sleeping. Rinse. Repeat. Same results. Madness. Pointless. Mechanical.

            The admiral greeted us when we arrived. Pulled me into his arms, all gruff and comforting. It almost made me smile.

            He escorted us to the plane. I didn’t really look around. It was big. Seats placed along the sides and two long columns of seats back to back in the middle. There were some people already on board, most dressed in military BDUs, a few in civies. One of the crew buckled me in gently, calling me ma’am and telling me something that I ignored.

            Soon the engines rumbled to life, a roar of sound that seemed to move from the floor into my feet and the rest of my body. It felt like Jonah in the whale, trapped in the belly of the beast, a living machine. Stirring to life beneath me, stretching.

            The sound grew, deafening me, a roar that filled my outside and my inside. It sounded like me, the part of me screaming on the inside. The silence shouting on the outside.

            It picked up speed, lifted into the sky, carried me away. One machine inside another. Like automaton nesting dolls.

Inside of a military transport aircraft

Chapter 11: Dandelion Fluff

As requested (by my only reader, Amy) here is a chapter I just wrote today. You should know, however, that this chick lit/suspense novel isn't really your regular bucket of soup judging from your blog. Enjoy.

Chapter 11

I floated in oblivion, a nothingness so deep and profound that it seemed to coat my entire being, wrapping it in cotton and coolness. The burning and pain and explosion of colors and noises belonged to a different me.

            A me that I didn’t even know anymore.

            Voices danced through the darkness to me, elongated and distorted as if transmitting through water, then sliding away.

            Concern. Palpable.

            Voices louder, more insistent. An order.

            My eyelids flickered, part of my body wanting to obey that order. The rest of me wanting to stay right here.

            “Malory.”

            Annoying. Leave me alone.

            “Malory!”

            A voice making me restless. An urgency, striking a familiar chord, a mournful knell.

            “Call her parents.”

            Discordance, loud within my head, shaking me awake.

            A call in the night…

            “No,” I tried to scream, my limbs no longer floating. They felt heavy, laden. With weariness and sorrow. “No!” I jerked away from the hands all around me. Grasping hands, dragging at me.

            Hands on my shoulders. Strong, insistent.

            Green eyes.

Nondescript surroundings. Uniform, utilitarian. Hospital. Military.

Green eyes?

“Look at me, Malory.”

I obeyed, looked up into green eyes so close that I realized they had flecks of gold in them, like the first touches of autumn.

“Jack,” I croaked in a rough voice. I swallowed. A straw appeared before me, and I drank.

“Easy now,” and the straw disappeared, replaced again by those green eyes. “You’re safe here.”

“Here?”

“At the base. In sick bay.”

“Oh.” I really looked at him. Standard working uniform: fatigues, combat boots. “How did I get here?”

He exchanged a look with somebody I couldn’t see.

“Judging by your clothes, I assume you ran here.” His voice held a frown. “Without water.”

Things started coming back. Memories. Pain. Numbness.

I swallowed, trying to swallow back everything that had happened, all the bad in the last few hours. “Don’t call my parents. I’m fine.” I couldn’t burden them right now. Not after everything. Not after Zach. “I just ran too far.”

“You were supposed to be here three hours ago.”

Right. Going through the O-Course. The admiral’s condition for allowing the on-base book signing.

“I forgot.” That was true enough. At about one in the morning I forgot about everything not critical to my immediate survival.

He didn’t believe me. At least not entirely. I couldn’t blame him. Fainting outside the gates of a naval base didn’t exactly spell normal behavior. He excused everybody else, including a corpsman.

Jack helped me sit up, which tugged at an IV in my hand. I frowned; I hadn’t noticed it.

“Dehydration,” he said, not looking pleased. “What really happened?”

I looked down. I couldn’t meet eyes the color of summer, spring, and autumn—and a little winter, if you included the ice in them—and lie. “Nothing. I’m good. I just, uh, you know, ran a little farther than I intended. The weather was really nice this morning and I kept going and…” I shrugged, trying to cut off the string of nonsense that belied my claims.

I couldn’t tell him though. Not if I wanted to keep it together. If I let it out now, if I fell apart, I would never be whole again. I’d be little pieces, scattered in the air like dandelion fluff.

“At least let me drive you home. Where do you live?”

“Sunset Cliffs.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You ran here from Sunset Cliffs?”

Hard core, Mal. Hard core.

His voice, his words. Gone like him.

“Hey!” Jack hitched an arm around me as I swayed to the side. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

A nod. Another lie.

Another bad lie from the disbelief on his face.

“I didn’t get much” or any “sleep last night,” I told him. “I’m just tired.”

“After practically running a marathon? I’d say so,” but those eyes said differently. Said he knew something was wrong, really wrong.

“I’m fine,” I repeated, trying to muster some of my fire, resurrect a few of the scathing conversations we had just yesterday. It didn’t work.

I wasn’t fine. I didn’t think I’d ever be fine again.

Chapter 10: Counting

I've been working feverishly on a book, tentatively titled "Don't Hide". This book is neither young adult nor fantasy. It's chick lit, for lack of a better word—don't mock it. Chapter 10 was particularly hard to write because my main character, Malory, finds out that somebody she's close to has just died. Luckily—or unluckily—I have extensive insight into this feeling. So here's chapter 10, a little taste of what I'm working on:

Just like that my world changed.

            I hid under my covers. Counted every breath until the sun rose: 4,615 breaths. Breaths he would never take. Breaths separating us.

            On breath 2,389 my little sister called. We didn’t talk, just breathed together, the phone connecting us—a tenuous connection for the tenuousness of life.

            And then on breath 5,000, with the sun a nebulous blob on the horizon and my eyes gritty from weariness and the tears that wouldn’t fall, I went running.

            I didn’t really care where I went or how far. Or if I could get back. I never turned around. Not once. Turning around meant facing it, facing that great blank wall, that huge hole in my life.

            I stumbled across the San Diego Bay. Found a running path.

            I didn’t hear the boats in the bay, or the cries of the seabirds, or the sounds of cars. I didn’t hear people. I didn’t see them. I didn’t feel my legs moving, or my breath sawing in and out of my lungs, or the burning thirst for water. My whole world had gone numb and gray. Flat.

            I counted my steps, an unrelenting rhythm in my ears, like a drumbeat, or a heartbeat.

            Or the lack of a heartbeat. The sound of a void.

            I ran with the curve of the bay, ignoring the ring of the phone in my pocket. Ignoring the persistence that told me somebody was annoyed.

            I ran until the buildings ran out, until it was me, a road, and beaches on either side. Until it was 16,405 steps.

            And when my exhaustion clamored to be felt, when I realized I had no water, no way home, I realized where I was, where I’d run to. Where 21,250 steps had taken me.

I stopped, looked around.

Noises and people and colors suddenly assaulted me, my gray world being resuscitated before my eyes back to the Technicolor, messy one I’d tried to leave behind.

I gasped, staggered, realized in a soft, fuzzy way that something was wrong. I couldn’t get enough air. My legs wouldn’t work.

A uniformed man rushed towards me.

I gasped out a name.

And then my world was neither gray nor colorful. It was nothing and neither was I.

             

What this run would look like.