The Wild Ba’Neesh Chapter Three ©2019 Fay Thompson All Rights Reserved

Mick tried to think his way out of his predicament but his basic logic couldn’t get past how he could reason with a hallucination inside his own brain. It wasn’t real, clearly. But, it still scared the crap out of him. How was that even possible? He glared down at the rotting sack of bones. Now she wanted him to pull out a finger bone. It was gross.

The bag didn’t smell, exactly. At least not how he’d heard the odor of corpses described in entertainment videos. It smelled like old dirt with a little bit of mildew and rot mixed in. He thought the odors were more from the bag than from the bones. The bag was done, even as he lifted it out of the hole a few smaller bones fell out of tears in the decayed fabric. She made him pick up the dropped bones. He wanted to throw up. Instead, he squatted there with a handful of bones trying to plan an escape. Maybe if he tossed the bag of bones and they scattered his hallucination would be too busy to ‘get’ him, whatever that might mean.

The only problem with that plan was the simple fact that she had been in his bedroom more than twenty times over the years with the creepy bones here, miles away. She could burn holes without the bones being nearby. That felt like a real flaw in his plan to ditch her, so he hesitated and stared down at the loose bones in his hands.

They looked odd. He leaned closer as the faded light was making seeing things much more difficult. Still, they didn’t look like the Science Class articulated skeleton that hung up like a suit of clothes from a wire rack.

“The small rounded one will do.” Her voice startled him because she was no longer favoring him with a physical apparition, now she was just a disembodied voice and every time she spoke it was from a different location, like she was sneaking around him in the dark.

“For what?” He looked around as if he could see her.

“Place the others on the flat stone so you don’t lose any.” She continued. “Now, get out your knife.”

Placing the bones on the stone was easy enough, he didn’t want to hold them anyway. He didn’t like the sound of a knife though.

“Hurry. No doubt they will soon be tracking your child locator implant.”

“My parents will find me.” He tried to sound convinced of this fact. “They no doubt have Mom’s Master Locator already dialed in.”

“Really? So, you believe that wave of electrical destruction left your parent’s personal devices untouched?”

He stared around wishing he could see her and not wanting her to be there all at the same time. He hated her logic. He had smelled the noxious odor of burnt electronics filling his house. Common sense told him nothing had been spared.

“I don’t know, you rushed me out of there in a hurry. Maybe I overreacted to my game malfunctioning.”

“And, the city lights?”

“It was some kind of event, for sure. But, I didn’t have a thing to do with it. Me running off is stupid.”

“Open your knife and use the sharpest tip to wiggle a hole in one end of that bone.”

“Eww. No. I am not going to play with these gross bones.”

“Carve!” Her word punched into his brain, just like the last time. He cried out and then decided to fake going along with her until he could come up with a better idea. He couldn’t imagine how his subconscious brain, or whatever, was making him do things he didn’t want to do. Maybe he should find a way to contact his psychiatrist. It had been more than six months. He was pretty sure he could find the office again, near downtown.

He twisted the knife tip into the bone, scraping and turning until it started to become a hole. He had to do the other side too before there was a tiny hole in the middle.

“There! Satisfied?”

“Do you have string?” She asked.

“No. Of course not. I have nutrient bars, water and mostly dirty clothing.” He said sarcastically. Talking about the food was making him hungry.

“Dump out your bag. We need to transfer the bones anyway.”

“Here? In the dirt? No way.” He shook his head. “I’m not putting these stinky bones into my bag.” He discovered he was waiting for that pointy word, that mental jab. It didn’t come. He was left to argue inside his own head and that made it his responsibility, totally unfair. It seemed easier to dump out his bag. So what. They were mostly dirty clothes anyway. With the bag empty he found a nutrient bar and tore it open. He expected her to object. The silence ate at him even as he finished eating the snack. Why wasn’t she talking now?

He nudged at his pile of clothing. The locator in his shoulder started to tingle. That tingle meant he was supposed to message home. He could do so by simply pressing on the device directly through his skin, three times in a row. He licked his lips. How much did she know about the device? If she was in his head she knew how it was triggered. Was she inside or outside his brain?

His shoulder tingled again. A non response would mean he was hurt or stuck. It would trigger a bigger alert with police services involved. That would totally piss off his parents.

Should he put the bones in his pack? Hell no. When they found him he would have to explain possessing some dead person’s corpse. Should he press his locator? When he did it would automatically signal boost and he would be able to hear his Mom telling him to come home. The best plan seemed to be to re-hide the bones in the rocks, stuff his crap back in his bag and head home. If they asked him about the locator, he could lie and say he was so upset he hadn’t noticed the alert.

“They are coming.” Her voice surprised him again, this time it seemed off to his right. “Eight human males.”

That didn’t make sense. He didn’t hear anything. She was lying. No one was hunting for him but his folks and if their Master Locator had been damaged then they weren’t toggling his locator. So who was? He discovered he was stuffing the rotting bone sack into his nearly new school class pack, jamming his dirty clothing on top and sprinkling the bones on the stone over the whole mess except for the one bone, the one with the hole. That bone got shoved into his pant’s pocket along with his knife then he was hurrying along a dim trail that led him back toward the cemetery where he’d found the bones so long ago. He refused to think his thoughts because they weren’t logical, he believed a disembodied voice. Men were looking for him, for them.

As the darkness closed in around him he discovered that his eyes adapted enough for him to keep stumbling forward. He knew a lot of these paths because his second favorite hobby was escaping into the green when his parents weren’t around. He liked to pretend there were all kinds of adventures to be found, if he looked hard enough. At some points he thought he heard distant sounds and even one of those night hovering aircraft that whooshed and whirred like a giant insect. It was rather cool in a frightening kind of way.

She didn’t say anything and after a while he forgot to listen for her, he was just trekking through the greenzone in the moonlight carrying a pack full of bones. Yeah, totally rational. He laughed and adjusted the strap on his pack so the pointy bone parts didn’t jab his back so much. In the process he located another nutrient bar and his mother’s jug. The night was full of noise, far more than he might have thought. He could hear birds, frogs, and sounds of creatures he couldn’t identify. They were comfortable sounds even when his crashing through their neighborhood silenced them as if he was plowing through their reality, an unwanted guest. That made him laugh too.

He had to turn back out of the greenzone toward the northern end of the city to reach the boundaries of the large cemetery. He’d read up on the cemetery for months before he snuck out with a shovel that night. It obsessed him. He couldn’t remember where he heard about it first, maybe a dream. He learned it was a receiver cemetery. That’s what they called a cemetery that city planners located far away from city boundaries once a city started to grow. This allowed developers to buy up old in-city cemeteries and relocate the dead well away from the city proper so they could use the land to build new structures. It made this cemetery grow in spurts, its original boundaries long forgotten. The newer sections were well maintained but out where the borders met the undeveloped reserves, that’s where he’d found the bones, forgotten and discarded. He sat down on someone’s fallen headstone and allowed the natural sounds around him to resume.

He drank the last of his water and just sat there. Nothing felt real. His shoulder was tingling again. It had done so off and on for the past several hours. Phone home, it seemed to say. But, through the gaps in the trees he could see the dark city. Why was his locator working when a whole city was out? The question tormented him. She hadn’t tried to persuade him or use her weird words on him. She’d left him with simple illogic. His tingling shoulder didn’t make sense. Worse, when he faced the direction he’d come from, he felt an increase in his boundary sensitivity. That’s what the doctor had called it when people he didn’t like got too close to him. He could feel it. In the darkness he thought he could feel them, hunters.

“Follow me.” She said, causing him to jerk upright. He’d almost fallen asleep.

A small light appeared in front of him, like a fiber-optic dandelion flower head. It was transparent blue and it bounced. He frowned. He was tired and nutrition bars weren’t nearly enough for his growling stomach. He looked back toward the path. The same sensation in the upper part of his spine warned him that something was coming. The dandelion light moved away. He pushed himself upright. If he went back, he would run into whatever was coming toward him. She was moving away at an angle, toward the newer sections of the cemetery. There were well maintained solar paths there. He could see their soft low glow in the distance, like rivers of dim light.

He knew that walking toward the city would eventually bring him to the transit road system and the open trams. Even if they were broken he could follow those roads back to civilization, find food and find a way to safely contact his Mom. He trailed the drifting dandelion trying to figure out how it worked. As a game feature it was rather nifty. If he thought of himself as an online avatar and the drifting light thing was his sidekick, he could rationalize the entire adventure into a comprehensive and potentially enjoyable gaming plot. The only thing that worried him about this fantasy was that in the online games he played, there were monsters that the player had to conquer at regular intervals to move from one area of the game to the next. He should be collecting abilities and developing skills and he should be learning what abilities and skills his cohort might have. So far, she could manifest into an upright biped form that looked somewhat human and she could manifest as a floating dandelion.

He could credit her with doing something to knock out the city’s electronics but that was what she said, he hadn’t actually seen her do anything but claim credit and every gamer knew that other gamers were braggarts and liars. There was that compelling voice thing. If he could master that in real life it would be like the coolest thing ever. He could imagine himself forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do. He grinned. But then, there was the burning of holes in his bedroom carpet. How did she do that?

He’d seen an arc of visible light, seen the holes, smelled the smoldering plastic burnt odor. And, he couldn’t forget the bone theft. It had felt like a fun thing at first, a personal challenge until he was actually at the grave digging. He remembered feeling trapped, as if he got too close to something and it snared him. He hadn’t been able to not dig up the bones, nor to carry them away and place them inside that stone pile. Had she made him dig up the bones? She claimed that too. He felt like she could lie to him as easily as she could appear to drift like an optical dandelion.

All of these things suggested impossible abilities, in the real world. In the gaming world they were a bit old hat. If he considered his real life avatar and abilities, it made him a sucky real life player. It made her light years better than him. Did that make her the player and him the sidekick cohort? He didn’t like that scenario because it meant he wasn’t in control and he would be the one to be sacrificed to the first monster that showed up. He frowned and then walked into the light and it hurt, sending shockwaves through his body.

“You could warn me.” He said, jumping back while brushing at his shirt and discovered a hole exactly where the ball of light had touched him. He pulled up his shirt to find a round burn on his skin. It hurt, but not as bad as it looked like it should hurt. He frowned, now more puzzled than hurt. He’d had his fair share of burns and usually they were quite painful. This one just looked bad and it felt like the pain was being sucked away even as he looked at it.

“Tasty.” She said at about the same moment the pain vanished completely.

“What did you do?” He asked, tentatively touching his stomach, probing for the hurt. His skin remained bumpy and damaged but if he hadn’t been staring at the burn he wouldn’t have known it was real. It looked like a rubber prosthetic piece, like the kind he had worn for Night of the Dead. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“I ate it.” She said. “Now, time to cut out your locator.”

“What?” He shook his head.

“Knife!” She ordered.

He shook his head again, fear blooming as he saw his knife in his hand, his dirty knife. “I can’t use this. I’ll get some terrible infection.” It was the first thing to come to mind.

She laughed again. “Hold the blade in my light.”

He scowled. It was a logical suggestion. If her light was hot enough to burn him, it was likely hot enough to sterilize his blade. He shook his head again. He wasn’t going to cut himself.

“Remove the locator.” She ordered.

“I hate you.” He yelled out even as he dropped his pack, his jacket and pulled off his t-shirt.

She drifted closer and grew stronger, giving him excellent light to see the small hump of skin covering the locator. “Cut under and push it out like a zit.” She suggested.

He shook his head, trying to fight the compulsion that continued to squeeze his brains. The longer he fought, the more painful it became. His hand started shaking from the conflict. Sweat made the knife grip slippery. “Don’t do this.” He tried to plead with her.

“Cut it now.” She continued, showing no audible signs of concern for his fear or potential pain.

He shoved the blade into her light, hearing it sizzle. He had no more water to cool it down. He shook his head, fighting with his hand as it inched toward his shoulder. “No. No. I won’t let you.” He cried out, aware his voice was rising to desperate panic levels. She did nothing. Said nothing. He could feel the earlier words latching onto his thoughts, telling his right hand to move closer and closer. He dragged the dull knife under the hump and screamed. His skin parted and blood gushed out.

The blue light darted at the blood, as if in frustration. He was gasping as the pain made him feel faint. He needed to get it out. That certainty roared to life on its own, as if the sight of his own blood was fueling a different perspective. It was a foreign object used to track him. He stopped gasping, pressing his thumb against the top of the hump to squirt the object out onto a nearby grave. His rush of instant pleasure shocked him in a new way. It was nearly ecstasy. As he watched the light danced along the wound, closing it even as he watched.

He added to her list of known abilities, pain reduction and wound closing. Did this make her an in-game Healer? It was hard to categorize her as a character that usually had the welfare of others as its focus. He had the distinct feeling that his welfare was predicated on other motives, she needed him. For what, he didn’t know. He had the strong idea that discovering her motives might be essential to his continued life. Without her prompting, he wiped the remaining blood with his holey shirt, then put that shirt back on, covering it’s stains with his jacket. He picked up the pack. The blue light was already moving and rather more quickly than before, toward another section of the cemetery. He was almost running to keep up with her when she said. “Stop here.”

He lurched to a stop beside a large old tree.

“Climb high.” She ordered.

He was clear now; she was currently in control. Once he got up the first limb it was easy to go higher. He climbed well into the top of the tree. It gave him an excellent view in all directions. He wedged himself into the hollow formed by two large branches and realized he would be hard to see from below. The blue light went out.

“They come.” She whispered so close to his ear he could feel the prickles of her energy.

He looked back in the direction they had come and there, in the first rays of early daylight, the shapes of moving men trotting along stilled him. He counted eight of them. Human. They were wearing military greens and seemed to possess some kind of tube weapons. He watched them stop and run a device that beeped. A Master Locator. One of them reached down to pick something up from the ground. His locator.

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