Aliens on Aventine Hill

Creatures of Static [Part 7]

The sirens screamed overhead, but for Gray the noise came in and out of focus. His skin was cold with sweat. His mind raced faster than White's cruiser as every worst-case scenario played out on the backs of his eyelids.

First you get drunk while they're breaking into the house, and now they're gonna get Roman because you had a tantrum... He stared blankly down at his hands. One moment he could see the color glistening on his palms, thick and dark—then White drove over a pothole and it was gone again.

It was coming back to him—that terrible fabricated dream haunted his every blink. He saw again the dark, shiny car and the man with his hand laid over the top of the trunk as if to suggest something horrible within.

No, they hadn't had him then. Gray bit down hard on his lip, trying to keep the sob in his stomach. No, they hadn't had him then.

They had him now.

He imagined standing beside the man, imagined him opening that trunk with comic flourish and chicanery. Gray felt the rough fabric of an army-issue duffel bag beneath his fingertips, a hitched and clunky zipper. The insides were bony, limbs all knotted up together, trussed up like a cow.

The face—he scrunched his eyes shut but he could still see it, pale and bloodless with marble eyes unblinking. Gray didn't have choke back the scream; there wasn't enough air in his lungs to give it sound.

He could only pray that they'd taken Roman alive. They couldn't have killed him yet, Gray thought. Not yet. He would've felt it, like a disturbance in the television signal.

The nightmares came for another assault, this time with dull and tired eyes and tortured screams. He smelled isopropyl alcohol and chloroform mingling with rust and blood. He could feel the water rushing over his face, stinging his eyes and nostrils, and he could taste the terry cloth against his teeth.

No, it was better that they kill Roman straight away than he... than they...

"God," he clutched his head between his hands as his nerves crackled through his body like rupturing circuits. All the little white lines weighed on him like rivers of mercury, and the gash in his side burned like fire.

White grabbed him by the shoulder, "Keep it together."

Gray lifted his face from his hands, staring at the officer as he thrust the gearshift in park and gestured at the house in front of them, "Your little brother's gonna need you lucid."

"Right," Gray stammered, nodding determinedly. The little yellow bungalow didn't look any worse for wear. The grass was still its verdant green against the clean black asphalt of the street. The sidewalk sparkled in the sunlight, populated with children's pastel chalk drawings.

He lingered with them, staring down at a collection of stick figures: two with pigtails and triangle legs, two without. Blues and pinks and big happy smiles—Gray felt some twisted, perverted version of the expression seize his face, but his chest ached.

Longing, he supposed, and grief.

Moore thumped him encouragingly on the back and jerked his head towards the door, "C'mon, Kid. No time to waste."

He nodded numbly and trailed after the officer. One step his body felt ten feet tall, his toes impossibly far away. The next step, it was as if he'd been shrunk to an inch the house loomed so high above him. His eyes paused on White's hand, hovering apprehensively above the grip of his pistol. What're you waiting for?

Moore thrust open the unlocked door and swept into the room, handgun in hand. Lola let out a frightened shriek, and Gray burst forward and shoved the barrel away.