"There's a meaning for each of us," Bruce had said, "a reason why we've been detained here." That phrase had stuck in Kelly's head since it had been spoken. Her mind had started roiling with the implications of it. A reason? To what end? And determined by whom? As much as she tried to find logical explanations for what was going on here, she seemed confounded every way. She couldn't accept as Manoj had -- too easily, she thought -- that the laws of time and space had suddenly decided to take exception to themselves, nor could she come up with a way that all these strange occurrences could take place in a universe she thought she understood.
It was the ambiguity that she hated most of all. In athletics, it was easy. It was pure physics. Action A becomes Result B, and the only thing of importance was executing Action A as perfectly as possible. In this lodge tonight, nothing made sense or added up correctly. It what hard to deal with, when she had never seen a moment in her life where it hadn't. She was totally out of her depth. At least, she decided looking around the room, she wasn't the only one.
Even though he was speaking the most and seeming to steer the conversation, Bruce was the one she was most concerned about. Granted, she had spent the most time with him since this whole experience started, so that made her more fluent in the quickness with which he could transition from one emotional state to another. This was what bothered her the most, and also caused her to spend a lot of time rationalizing that this was just the way his writer's personality worked: a focused laser-beam attention to detail that could swing wildly between subjects without taking any break in between. She certainly could identify with that, but there was something acutely unsettling about the way he was doing it...
She wished Manoj would pay more attention to what was going on, but he seemed distracted by the walkie's clicking. It was a sharp reminder that one of their group was in real danger somewhere else, but then again it was starting to seem like they all were. This was something her boyfriend did sometimes, focus on the thing that wasn't really relevant or even important -- hadn't their argument at dinner been another example? -- but over the time they had been together she had learned how to grab his ears and get his mind to come back from whatever corner it had run to. He even had started to do this himself, which she appreciated.
Kelly looked down at the woman lying on the couch. No one else seemed to be doing this; if they did, they would see what she was seeing, a look of dawning horror in her fellow blonde's eyes. And those eyes -- an intriguing hazel -- were focused squarely on Bruce Casey. Kelly kept hoping that Kerren's eyes would swing her way, so they could connect in some wordless way and share their growing anxiety.
Dale and Bruce were currently having an escalating conflict of words about whether the group should stay, leave, or split up. She had to admit, right now she wanted to be anyplace other than where the author was. She doubted the security guard could see it, but there was a patch of skin on the back of the writer's neck that was ripening to deep scarlet. She noticed he also reached back from time to time, absently scratching just above and behind his right hip. He tugged his t-shirt down after he was done, even though it wasn't riding up.
Kelly noticed that Kerren's hands were still entwined with those of her wife, suspended in a knot between their bodies. There was some vibration there, which at first she couldn't explain. Sheryl seemed not to notice because she was looking up at the progressing argument -- Bruce was getting louder, Dale more reserved -- but Kerren's gaze remained laser-focused on the author.
All of a sudden, Kelly got it; Kerren was pointing. Her entire body remained motionless, but one of the index fingers in that ball of knuckles was straightening, almost imperceptibly and twitching, in the direction of the ranting author. It all came together in Kelly's mind at once: the pointing, the fear in Kerren's eyes, the hesitant scratch Bruce had made above his hip.
When she looked back at the author, he was taking his second step toward Dale, and his hand was sliding around his back again, but this time it wasn't to scratch. As he turned further away from her, the barely visible lump just above the waistband of his pajama pants solidified under the stretching fabric, transformed into an unmistakable handle.
No. A hilt.
Kelly lunged forward without any kind of forethought. All she could manage was "He's got a--!" before she slammed into him. Her hands reflexively came down on the pajama fabric bunched just over his tailbone. Bruce's hand had come down on the rounded hilt, his fingers had closed around it, and he was just starting to draw it when she struck. Kelly's hands pressed hard against him, but his hand was unable to stop the upward motion of his hand. He slid the knife up and out of his waistband, but with Kelly's hands pressing it against him, he ended up making a long slash up the base of his spine as he drew it out.
Kelly had meant to grab his wrist, to restrain him from fully pulling the blade out, but as she leapt forward her hands became too low to do this; she ended up pressing her hands against the back of his pants, with the blade underneath. Bruce didn't cry out as he raised his hand, and Kelly didn't know how badly either had been cut until the blood almost immediately started to soak through the thin fabric of his pajama pants, staining her hands. Bruce was still moving forward, and her recoil from the blossoming red spot on his lower back sent her sprawling to the floor. As she fell, she managed to get a look at the blade he was drawing as he brought it around to threaten Dale.
It was a hunting knife, at least five inches long. It had been drawn up so quickly that Bruce's blood did not have time to touch it, and the metal caught the feeble moonlight in a way nothing else in the lobby did. Kelly kept looking at it as she fell, watching the way it swept cleanly through the air, unaffected by the long cut it had left behind. Then it was out of sight, eclipsed by Bruce as he brought it around to his front, toward where Dale and Glenda were advancing on him.
Kelly had meant to stop him, but instead she had imparted more force into him forward motion. The author was stumbling forward, straight toward Dale and Glenda, the gleaming blade coming between them, it and their frail bodies lining up like planets moving toward an eclipse.
-8.6-
Bruce had felt his mind slipping. His first sign had been when the wind swishing along the outer edges of the lodge had started to sound like Theda's screams. It brought last night -- that was the appropriate term, because in a very real way, he felt like he hadn't really slept in all the months since -- back to him, slipping under his skin, as real a presence as Theda herself still felt to him. It made him realize that he felt much like a parent whose child has wandered off in a vast department store, stricken with paralyzing fear but knowing that he had to move, had to search, and nothing would be right again until he regained what he had lost.
He tried to remain calm as he explained to everyone present what he knew, and what he thought they should do next, but they refused to behave like the characters in his fiction stories. They made their own decisions, had their own outside allegiances and interior fears, none of which he had any power to make them ignore.
And then there was the horned thing. Waves of chill went through his blood every time his mind turned toward it, almost as if it were an invading force, letting him know that it was sweeping its forces of detection across him, and soon it would find him. If it were just some physical presence that were coming after him, he thought he could stand a chance against its encroaching darkness; however, he knew it was much more than that.
He could hear his voice rising in pitch and volume, despite his best attempts to modulate it. The people around him just weren't *getting* it, this motley crew he had been thrown in with. They were unfathomable to him in their ordinariness. At the same time, he had no choice but to believe that they were there for a reason, some unifying theme that he couldn't get them to stand still long enough for him to understand. If only he could pin them in place somehow, so he could fully examine them and give his creative mind a chance to work, he was sure he could suss out the reason they all were still here.
He was the center of this drama, of that he was sure. Whatever cataclysm had been called down on them all, it was because of him. His current working theory was that the horned thing was coming to take back all the ideas he had received from Theda. It didn't seem to understand that she had given them to him freely, nor was it particularly interested in bargaining with him. What would happen when it finally tracked him down, he didn't know, but he had never been more terrified of any oncoming event in his life.
Thus the increasingly frantic voice and the wilder gesticulations, as he tried to rally these random troops to stand along with him; thus his motivation for tucking the hunting knife into the back of his pajama bottoms. It had been in the first aid kit, Velcroed into the lid above the gauze and bandages that its usage might necessitate. He had taken the healing equipment for use on Kerren, and kept the defensive piece for himself. He had originally meant it only to do whatever damage he could to the horned thing, but he felt it tugging at his back whenever he turned, as he was beginning to lose control of those around him. They were starting to move away from him, saying they were going to go down the hill to get Harmon, and then on to the town.
The knife felt like it were gaining mass and gravity, until he thought he could begin to feel how the vast lobby was starting to rotate around it. He could bring it out, take control back with it, present everyone with concrete evidence that *he* was the center of all this, and if they didn't understand that, then he was perfectly willing to use threat of force to set them back into their proper orbits.
He had put off drawing it out as long as he could, until Dale started moving toward him. He was being tested; he had been in enough physical altercations to know that. Dale's half-steps forward were prelude to attack, and Bruce would have no chance if the larger man really decided to put him down. He waited for his moment, making a prior feint out of scratching his hip so that no one would think twice when he finally reached to pull the weapon out...
But as fate would have it, someone did. He had made the mistake of turning too far away from Manoj and Kelly. The Indian fellow was messing with that infernal walkie-talkie, but the woman must have been watching him more closely. He didn't even see her coming, only heard her blurting out the front end of a warning, and then the pressure on his lower back as he lost the race to pull the knife free before she could reach him. He had gone too far and pulled it anyway, as he did feeling a stinging sensation that spread like ignited primer cord up his tailbone. It didn't immediately dawn on him that what he was sensing was his own skin splitting open as Kelly pressed the sharp side of the blade against him, but soon the blade was out in the open, undeniable and known to all.
Everything in his mind was telling him to stop, to take a moment to assess the damage that the blonde had done to him, but there was no time. A show of force had to be just that, brandishing the weapon between himself and his biggest threat as soon as possible. His teeth gritted as the severed nerve endings began to cry out and he felt an odd warmth begin to spread across his lower back, but his hand still obeyed its original instructions and came front and center. The satisfaction he felt as he saw Dale's eyes widen in fear and surprise was almost worth the tear-inducing pain.
Bruce pushed the weapon a little closer to Dale, not really intending to harm him, just to give him a better look at this little shiny piece of reality as it shifted the room's balance of power. He moved it forward, tipping the blade away from vertical, and for just an instant it caught the faint moonlight sifting through the front windows. His eyes glanced down in appreciation of this moment of beauty, and when his eyes came back up, Dale's body had completely changed position.
The security guard's arm, which before had been protectively draped across Glenda's shoulders, in the interim had dropped behind her and come up again between the couple's bodies, so quickly that Bruce couldn't quite understand how it had been done. That darting hand clapped around his wrist, as tight and as strong as a bullwhip. Dale's other hand was close behind it, slamming into Bruce's elbow, forcing his arm straight and locking it in place.
Bruce's pain was suddenly doubled, a hot circuit running between his brain, arm, and lower back, skewing his vision out of focus. If Kelly hadn't just pushed and hurt him, his balance would have been better, but as it was, the force of the heel of Dale's palm hitting his elbow caused him to stumble. The two men begin to rotate as if dancing, Dale twisting Bruce's arm upward and at the same time starting the rest of him on an arc that would bring the author down to the floor. But the severed muscle in Bruce's back caused miscalculation in both men's trajectories, and Bruce stepped closer to Dale. The blade swung up... and Bruce felt it sink home.
He had already felt the sensation in his hand that resulted when blade met flesh -- his own. This feeling, however, even though he was half-bent over and couldn't see it, was different. It was completely obvious that this wasn't a slice, but a stab. The blade sank into something totally, and blood that wasn't Bruce's own immediately flowed hot down over his hand.
For the first time in many minutes, the lobby was totally silent.
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