All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 42: Along Came A Spider ~ Carrie Cutforth

I wake up with a jolt from a bad dream. I look down at the hand grasping mine across a table, and see myself sitting across from me, gripping my hand as if about to arm wrestle. But it is not me, it is him. Cop Shades.

A waitress walks by and places a turkey sandwich beside us.

“Fight you for it,” he grins at me.

I look at his shades, and see myself in the reflection. But not just me. Many of me. The refraction grows like a crystal. I am many heads. Many one. I begin to feel …omnipotent.

“Don’t let the God Complex get to you,” he grins. “The feeling will pass, and you are better off without it.”

“I feel different,” I say, “I feel…”

“Bodiless? Immortal,” Cop Shades teases. “You are lucky I was here. Well, we are lucky. We can’t afford to lose you.”

“Why, what’s so important about me?” I ask.

“You are Prime,” they say. All of them in the shades. “You don’t exist, then we don’t exist.”

“Where are we,” I ask, looking around the diner. It keeps shifting, the walls move like I’m on the worst acid trip. I look down at the turkey sandwich. It looks so…tantalizing.

“I’m famished, may I?” I ask nodding to the sandwich.

“Sure,” Cop Shades says. “But you are going to need a body. You can have mine.”

“Aren’t you using it?” I ask, confused.

“Nah,” he grins. “Think of it as musical chairs. There is just one left, and the owner…well has no reason to return. He’s lost all will.”

I frown unsure what he means but then a numbness spreads from his palm into mine and I feel my soul sucked into his body, while the ice pick stabs my eye.

I raise my head and look across at the empty seat. What was left is now right and what was right has now left. Or something like that.

My arm is still raised in a fist, as if poised for an empty arm wrestle. I loosen my grip with the air. A small piece of paper floats from my hand and onto the table where the turkey sandwich had just been only moments prior.

At first I think it is a fortune from a cookie, but then I pick it up and see the numbers. The one’s I had seen so long ago: 319-555-8709.

What had Cop Shades told me about this number back in the diner?

“Is there a pay phone around here,” I mumbled to the waitress as she walked by. She nodded to the back of the restaurant. I strained in my seat to turn around.

And there she was. Emma, only not Emma. An Emma I had never seen before. The type of Emma who would use pay phones, if you get my drift.

She saw me and smiled and I felt like I was losing my footing. I rose from table and neared her, and the closer I got I could not shake the feeling that this Emma was not “herself”.

She smiled warmly at me with thin jaunty cheek. Her eyes were morose with dark circles, her hair in disarray, her teeth thin and fragile. But something else, something else was different.

“Hey sailor,” she said in a reedy voice, “Care to buy a lady a drink?”

And that is when I noticed a flick of red in the pupil of her eye, and the closer I got to her weary smiling face, I could see the shape of a red hourglass in it, riding the body of a black widow that clutched the blue sphere of her iris.

And I felt my body swing towards hers.

END OF BOOK TWO.

A/N

Hey guys, so I did a full push of writing today. For those who kept up, you were reading chapters as I was writing them.

I am planning to do an epilogue but do me a favor. Obviously there are still a lot of lose ends, some of them are intentional as this was intended as only the prequel to what had been concieved as a  TV series. Some secrets are meant to be kept. But, put your questions below and I will incorporate what I can into the epilogue: things that are safte to answer, but that I might have neglected to flesh out as I raced to write this draft.

I'll write the epilogue and release it next week, so get your burning questions in fast! :) ~ C