Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 06:40:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Richard Garcia <invertedbeast@yahoo.com>
Subject: Darkness Evolves chapter 6

DARKNESS EVOLVES
Chapter Six


"Get up, Daniel," I shook him.

It was well after dawn.  The noise from the highway was pretty loud, but
that wasn't what had woken me up.  The danger was back.  I could ken it
like the sound of a locomotive's whistle, far in the distance.  Sometime in
the night the track had been realigned and we were back on it again.  The
train was headed our way.

"Wha ... " Daniel's eyes fluttered, then abruptly snapped open.  "What the
fuck?"  He sat up.  "Where are we?"

"We're in a motel room.  What do you remember from yesterday?"

His brow furrowed.  "I was painting.  Your portrait told me to get out of
the house, so I did.  Then the house blew up.  Shit!  Did our house really
blow up?"

"It got hit by a plane."

"Plane!  A plane flew into our house?"

"Yeah, a commuter jet."

"Fuck.  So where are we?"

"We're in a motel, Daniel.  We need to leave."

"Why?  What's wrong?"

"It's found us again.  I don't know how, but it has."

"Whoa -- bro, slow down.  What's found us and why's it looking?"

"It's a demon, I think.  It changed the lights in the street.  And it sent
an email to your mother about us.  It froze your accounts, too.  I thought
we'd have some time here, but it found us again.  Something bad is coming.
We need to go."

"Right."  Daniel got out of bed and stood naked, peering around the room.
"Where're my clothes?"

"Your pants are in the bathroom.  Sorry, but they're still damp."  I'd had
only partial success washing the blood out of them.  Luckily they were so
paint-stained it didn't matter.  The t-shirt was too shredded and charred
to be wearable.

Daniel walked into the bathroom and flicked the light on.

"What the fuck!" he yelled.

Oops.  I should have warned him about that.  I got up and went to the
doorway.  Daniel was standing in front of the mirror, staring at himself.

"What the hell happened to me?"

"It's okay, Daniel."  I went up and hugged him.  The hair on his chest
tickled my check.

"You got hurt when the plane crashed," I explained.  "I talked your body
into healing itself, the way it does whenever there's a full moon.  I
thought it would be better if everyone thought you were killed in the
crash, so I also got it to make a disguise for you.  It's just a little bit
of your bear-wolf mixed in with your normal self."

Daniel examined himself in the mirror.  He was completely healed, but that
wasn't what he was looking at.  His skin and eyes were now much darker and
his hair was wiry and black.  He had more of it too, all over his body,
including a week's worth of beard.  He looked vaguely middle-eastern.  He
was still a hot man, but if you hadn't met him before you wouldn't
recognize him as Daniel.  For the first time in my life, my brother and I
looked like we might actually be related.

"Yeah," he grunted, "All right.  Am I going to look like this from now on?"

"Just until the next full moon.  When you change back you'll look like
yourself again."

"Okay." Daniel pulled on his boxers and pants.  He picked up his shirt and
regarded it with dismay.  "I can't wear this."

"I know.  Come on Daniel.  We have to go."

Daniel took a final look at himself in the mirror.  "This is just too
freaky," he muttered.

Outside the sun was up but the parking lot was mostly empty.  I don't think
the place did much over-night business.  No one saw us run to my car.

"Shoes," Daniel grimaced as he slipped into the driver's seat.  "You don't
have any of my shoes, do you?"

"No, Daniel.  Sorry."

"All right.  Where are we going?"

"I don't know.  I don't know how it found us so fast.  No one knows that
we're here."

Daniel reached down to pluck my cell phone out of the dashboard cup holder.

"Have you used this?"

"No.  It's been there all night."

Daniel was up out of the car and ten feet away, at the edge of the parking
lot before I knew it.  He dropped my cell phone onto ground, picked up a
chunk of asphalt that had broken off, and smashed it down on the phone.  He
pounded the phone to smithereens, then swept the fragments off into the
weeds encroaching onto the parking lot.

"Okay," he said, a few seconds later when he slipped back into the car,
"just point me whichever way feels safest."

We pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the street in the
direction Darkness whispered was off of the train track.

"Your cell phone was on," my brother said conversationally, "wasn't it?"

"Yes, Daniel," I said.  "But I didn't call anyone."

"You don't need to.  They can still be traced.  Maybe even when they're
off."

"Oh.  I didn't know that."

"Figured.  But that could answer the question of how it found us.  If the
demon can change traffic lights and cause an airplane malfunction, it can
probably track a cell phone."

He frowned.  "It's not your demon is it?"

"No, Daniel."

"Okay.  How are we doing?"

"Good."  The sense of danger was rapidly decreasing.  We'd cleared the
tracks.  "I think we're okay for now."

Daniel drove until we hit an intersection with a run-down looking strip
mall on one corner.  He pulled in and parked on the far side of the lot.

"Think you can get me a shirt there?" he asked, pointing to a store marquee
that said THRIFT-TOWN.

"Sure," I said.  "Maybe they have some shoes, too.  What size are you?"

"Eleven."

I grabbed my wallet and went into the store.  I found a worn denim
long-sleeve I thought would fit Daniel for $1.99.  There weren't any shoes,
but I saw some new sandals that looked okay, so I got them for $2.99.  The
total was five and some change.  That was good, because after using the
grocery money to pay for our motel room last night there wasn't much left.
I hoped Daniel could figure out what to do about that.

When I got back to the car Daniel was sitting with his hands on the
steering wheel, staring ahead.

I opened the driver's side door and handed him the shirt.  "Here, Daniel."

He got out of the car and slipped it on.  It fit fine.  I put the sandals
down on the ground and he stepped into them.  He stared down at his feet,
still silent.

"Daniel, what's wrong?  I'm sorry they didn't have any shoes, but I thought
these would work okay.  They aren't okay?"

"They're fine."

When he looked up Daniel's face was scrunched in pain.  His dark eyes were
shiny with unspilled tears.

"I heard on the radio," he whispered.  "Our house is gone, bro.  It's all
gone.  Everything.  My studio and all my paintings and your clarinet.  All
of Dad's and Mercedes' things.  Our home.  And my accounts have all been
frozen.  We don't have anything.  It's like our whole lives have been taken
from us."

I stepped in and put my arms around him.  Daniel pulled me in tight, like I
was the only thing keeping him from being swept away with the rest of his
life.

"The universe doesn't give a fuck," he muttered in my ear.

When Daniel's depressed that's his mantra: the universe doesn't give a
fuck.  It hadn't always been that way.  I don't know if he ever believed in
God, but I know that when he was young Daniel thought the universe loved
him.  Things happened over the years to strip that faith away.

The first was when he was in seventh grade.  I was only four at the time
and don't remember, but Mom does.  I'd found it in her memories.

A stranger had tried to grab him when he was skateboarding in a parking
garage.  Daniel got away, but his shirt was ripped and it scared the shit
out of him, `cause he knew what the man wanted.  It turned his life upside
down.  The possibility that a stranger would want to hurt him -- him
specifically -- was something that had never occurred to Daniel before.
Suddenly the universe wasn't so loving.

They never caught the guy.  Dad signed Daniel up for self-defense lessons.
That's when he started in martial arts.  Mom never told anyone, but she
threw a curse that probably killed the bastard.

After the attack Daniel started to pay more attention to how his looks
affected the way others treated him.  Most teenagers do some playing around
with their appearance, but he'd gone overboard.  He grew his hair long and
matted it in dreadlocks; he shaved it all off and went bald.  He wore
outfits like flannel shirts with seersucker pants and hand-stenciled
bowling shoes.

Doing all that just made him seem like a cool artist type and it always
looked great on him.  It really annoyed some people, as if he were
intentionally pointing out how he could look fantastic even dressed like
that.

In high school he went through a sullen phase and sort of shut down.  He
stopped talking much, which sometimes made others think maybe he wasn't
that smart.  It's not fair if someone so good-looking is also smart.  He'll
still do it sometimes: act spacey around people he doesn't think much of
because they haven't earned the right to know who he really is.

When Dad died and then Mom went crazy it was another huge shock to Daniel.
He lost his father and his stepmother, and was saddled with the raising of
his ten-year-old half-brother.  The universe didn't give a fuck about him.

I'd told Daniel's mother that I hadn't seduced him, and that was true.  But
there was something else that I hadn't said.  When Mom told Daniel to look
out for his baby brother -- just before she unleashed her vengeance on
Charolotta -- it wasn't just a mother's teary request.  It was a
Darkness-powered command.  She ordered him to take care of me.  For the
past eight years Daniel's been my satelles.  My brother's a good guy and he
loves me, so he would have seen to it that I was cared for even without her
command.  But Mom hadn't wanted anyone to come between Daniel and his
responsibilities to me.  That's why none of his relationships have ever
lasted.

Then the werewolf attacked him and gave my brother the moon gift.  And now
something that dwells in Darkness had reached out and destroyed his home.
The universe really doesn't give a fuck about Daniel Meltzer.

My brother's been so good about trying to give me choices.  That's not
something the pervert or the Estrellas or the Darkness ever did for him.  I
could probably give him some of his choices back.  Mom's shade could help
me find a way to convince his beast half that I'm not its mate.  Then he
would go back to feeling towards me the way he did before he became a
werewolf.  I could do that, but I won't.  I'm not as generous as he is.  My
darkfather taught me lots of things, but sharing wasn't one of them.
Daniel's mine and I'm not giving him up.

But because of me he'd lost a lot, so I owed him.  He was hurting and I
knew what would help: my big brother needed to feel needed.

"What do we do now, Daniel?"  I asked.

"Good question."  He gave me a final squeeze and stepped back.  I pretended
not to notice as he knuckle-wiped the tears away.

"Okay," he took a deep breath.  "I need to understand the big picture.  Why
are we hiding?"

"We're hiding from the demon.  It knows that I'm out here, but right now it
doesn't know were I am.  And it doesn't know that you're still alive."

"It can't just find us, like, psychically?"

"No.  I'm blocking that.  It has to use lightblind tools."

"Hmm," he started to rub his jaw, then stopped when he felt the stubble.
"How long did you plan on hiding?"

"Until we know where it is."

"You mean who it's possessed?"

I nodded.

"And that has to be someone close to us?"

"Yes."

"Could it be my mother, or is that too easy?"

"It wasn't in her when we talked to her."

"Walter?"

"Not him either, or Amber."

"Damn."  He thought.  "How quickly can it jump in and out of people?"

"I don't know.  But I don't think it would be jumping around a lot.  Also,
I could tell if it had ever possessed one of them."

"And it can't just hover somewhere outside of a body?"

"No.  Darkness is dwindling, Daniel.  Demons used to be spirits that could
exist all on their own, but they can't any more.  They need something
physical to hold onto, to keep them from fading."

Daniel's mind was racing.  He's good at figuring out puzzles.  I love
watching him think.  Sometimes his thoughts move incredibly fast: bing bing
bing, a lightening chain of deductive reasoning.  It's so different from
how I ken things.

My brother reached out to touch where the silver cross lay beneath my
shirt.  "But the physical anchor doesn't have to be a person, does it?"

"It doesn't have to be, but if it's not alive the demon gets weaker.
Demons feed off of us, our feelings and thoughts.  They can still feed off
a group, sometimes -- like at a church service or on a battlefield --
but usually it's just one person at a time."

Daniel nodded slowly.  "Okay, so they need human emotions and they need a
physical anchor.  Do those two have to be the same thing?"

"What do you mean?"

"The demon's messing with our computer networks.  Could it actually be
living there?"

"You mean inside a computer, Daniel?"

"Not just a computer, a computer network.  Hell, how `bout the whole
goddamn Internet?  Could a demon live inside the Internet?  It may not be
alive, but there's an awful lot of human feelings and thoughts flowing
through the Internet."

A shiver shot through me.  I thought back to my walk through the darkened
jungle and the something that had stirred overhead, blocking out the light.
Daniel had nailed it.  A demon had possessed the Internet.

"You're right, Daniel," I nodded.  "A demon could live inside the
Internet."

"Shit.  Do you think it is?"

"Yes."

"So that means it's everywhere."  He shook his head.  "That doesn't help
any, does it?"

"Yes, it does."  I felt Daniel's insight moving through me, realigning
things into a new pattern.  "I don't know how yet, but I know it does."

"All right."  He sighed.  "Now what?"

I shrugged.

"How much money do we have?"

"Nineteen dollars."  I'd counted it when I bought the clothes.

"We need more cash.  If the demon's in the Internet, we can't use credit
cards and we can't go to an ATM to get more money.  We need to stay away
from security cameras."

"I can fuzz cameras," I said, "if it's just one or two."

"Really?  That's cool.  But we still can't go to any banks.  We're going to
need some help.  What if we used an old-fashioned pay phone to call Amber?
Shit," he sighed, "forget it.  We can't even do that.  She'll answer on her
cell and it could listen in on the call.  If I were looking for us I'd be
monitoring the phones of everyone we know."

He was right.  We had to hide someplace no one would expect.  And we'd need
help, from someone no one would expect.  From the depths it floated up.

"Chris Berkman," I said.

"What?"  He stared at me.

"You know someone named Chris Berkman."

"Shit -- that's right.  How did you know?"

"I just do.  Call him, Daniel."

"Jesus, Joey, I don't know.  We've only talked once.  What do I say?"

I shrugged.  "Tell him there was an accident at our house and we need a
place to stay."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, Daniel.  It will work.  I'm sure of it."

Daniel scanned the strip mall.  "Over there," he pointed.  "It looks like
there's a pay phone over there.  Let's go try."

There was a phone and it was working.  Daniel put in two quarters.  He
closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and punched in a number.

After a few rings someone answered.

"Hello, Chris?  This is Daniel.  You may not remember me, but you tried to
give me your card outside the gym a few weeks ago."

The guy on the phone said something.

"Yeah, Daniel the swimmer."

The guy said something else.  Daniel grimaced; he cleared his throat.
"Well, actually, I'm calling to ask if you could do me a favor.  I just had
a bad fire at my house and my little brother and I need a place to crash
tonight.  Do you think you could put us up?  I know that's a lot to ask
from a stranger and I totally understand if -- what?  You will?  Really?
That's great!  When can we come over?  Okay, no problem.  What's the
address?  No, I'll remember it.  Great.  We'll see you at six.  Thanks,
man."

He hung up and looked at me.  "I can't believe he said yes."

I could.  Chris Berkman: I felt the pieces all lining up.  He was exactly
who we needed.


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