City of the Dead.01: Chapter One, Part Two.
the Park City series
City of the Dead, Book One
{PREVIOUS: 1.01 | 1.02 | NEXT: 2.01}
Rating: PG-13.
Word Count: 1843
Workshop?: Sure, though I think it will be more productive to come back to it after the rest of the book is written, to flesh it out/fix it up once I have a better handle on what I'm doing later.
Also, I've updated Chapter One Part One to the latest draft.
Diary & Teenage Dissolution
Quincy was a tired little town in a tired little state in a tired little country, and at the age of eighteen, Raine told her mother she was tired of her life, that her savings should be spent on experiences. After a gap year-and-a-second of working in service and engaging in less travel than she'd imagined, Raine was left with the impression that she ought to plan the entirety of her life in the following six months, to integrate back into the set trajectory of expected education, despite not having any inclination on how to find fiscal payoff in a stagnant economy.
Droplets dressed the borrowed car, whose windows lay uncharacteristically splayed open. Over the hood of its neighbor, Raine could see the stars and the ugly half-moon. Clouds crowded the illuminated grin in patches, a sudden burst of weak moonlight dusting the old tree that stood like a sentinel at the entrance to the old high school, its fat green leaves only a slightly different shade of dark than the sky. She clasped her knees with laced fingertips, bracing her shoulder against the door frame and the thoughts threatening to take her composure.
Around the parking lot, the thinned deciduous forest rattled its percussive leaves like a muffled rain stick. After a day of I-love-yous and hand-holding, Raine's gentleman love broke her heart. She had known him well. Probably the well-est she'd known anyone, other than her mother. Now, it seemed like a monstrous distortion; she had ultimately come to find she'd barely ventured past his shallow end. Two years of intimacy in a teenage life are especially nothing to scoff at.
True to the downpour, the day was not done with her yet. The wave of mail that contained the recruitment documents had come without warning and so, seemingly to her uncle, had her angry phone call. It was silly to feel annoyed at a complex human being, at someone who had a whole history and experience unique from her own, she knew. She knew this, but she still wished she could meld with the seat and disappear the outside world from existence. Thoughts hung in an unspoken stutter on the cell line.
“I didn’t ask them to, Raine,” Timothy repeated.
“Stop. You’ve been dangling this over me since-”
“I didn’t- sh, sh- since the last time you asked me to stop, have I said a word about it?”
From her silence he intuited the face she was making: bottom lip dimpled by upper teeth, nose wrinkled at the bridge. An ugly face. She was self-aware about all the wrong things, he felt. At least she genuinely seemed to be considering and listening to him. For the moment.
“No."
“Then, they picked you on their lonesome. Not that I’m at all surprised-”
“Stop.” She attempted to exhale his words from her mind. “The ‘Carnival Program’?”
“Can’t you just read the brochures for yourself?”
“No, not if you want me to really consider this. I don’t want the bullshit in the brochure, I want your truth- the whole first page was an ad. Did you really think that’d draw me in?”
“Sorry, we don't create our brochures with you in mind. R and D was reshuffled; we got sectioned off for marketing purposes-”
“What?”
Timothy returned her sigh. He watched the magnetic toy on his desk gyre, wishing he didn’t have to go through the humiliation of explaining this to his niece. “We were coming in over budget, but doing brilliant things, so the governors decided we needed to make ourselves useful. Research and Development is officially a city guild, but the money goes faster now that there are extra taxes-”
“Do you get to write your own scenes or are the sponsors doing that now? Are we paid by the game point? ‘A city of magic, dreams and technology - brought to you in part by: the highest bidders.’” she panned.
“You’re being very ungrateful.”
Raine pulled her sweater over her fists, eyes locked out the window. The chill seeped in, a diffused light spreading its cool fingers over the beams of the car. “Am I? I’m sorry.”
In his youth, they'd called him the Great Dane. Now, his fingers shook from the billowing worry that she would not respond well to his dropping of pretenses. Another sting to his ego. “What do you want to do?” She was quiet, so he carried on. “Your father is long dead, chicklet - I know it’s not what any of us wanted, but you’re being given the key to a certain freedom you’ve never known. Whatever promise you made to him to stay away, well, he won't know the difference now. Do you still have no mirrors in your home?” He gave her no quarter to sound displeasure at the question. “I know you keep your hair up because of it, so you don’t have to notice. We have scientists, talented beyond comprehension and traditional methods. My project is on the cutting edge of humanity, Raine, we needed the funding, and you know I wouldn’t have agreed to anything less than a highly preserved state of Research and Development.”
“But why me? Is it you? How I see?” Hair devoid of light fell in front of her face and she deftly weaved it back out of eyesight. She did not notice her own movements.
“It’s an acknowledgment that it may be a first symptom. I honestly don't know yet. Your father did incredible things; I'm sick of dancing around them. He had talents. I don't.”
The dream. Raine's mind struggled to stay in the moment, resisting the undertow of its association. “He would never talk about it, before-” she whispered.
“Johnny didn’t want to tangle your family up in the infamy that could go with his life. Oh, I know he kept you at arm’s length on the subject, but he hid himself from this city, and you have no idea what it took out of him. He gave up all contact with his family. You were his present, but mom, dad, me… we were his life.” Over the receiver rang a muffled tinkling. “It was the only way to give everyone the lives they deserved, in his eyes. Father felt the same way.”
Raine nodded, compelled by the silence on cell. She realized only moments later that her uncle wouldn’t see her response. “He'd like the free education. Getting paid, too. Not just in gas.”
Her uncle realized she had at least glanced over more than just the first page of the literature. “Yes.”
“And if I hate it?"
“Then quit. You don’t have to sign anything until-”
“Like what?”
“-after orientation. Like a work agreement. Park City will employ you while you get your education with us. We work it like a business agreement. You work, that pays for your time here, and a little spending change.” Timothy paused. “The rest you should read from the brochures -we did a good job putting them together. I wrote most of it myself. I know if I say more you’ll just fall off the earth again-”
“I needed a break from-”
“I know. You gotta get out - restless like Johnny.”
“I guess. I can’t do the things he could.”
Timothy was having a problem deciding just what to say, “I wish you’d had more time with him, kiddo. He was my best friend.”
“Mm.”
“Look it over, think it over. Call me when you get in to town.”
Headlights from the highway flashed deep shadows in light of their arrival. Raine pressed her cheek against the head rest and sunk into the shadows. After the car had turned onto the street in a spit of tirewater, the book in her lap could no longer be ignored - not by the earbuds playing a quiet song into her ear, the half-finished text to her last remaining friend, nor the smell and sigh of the elements outside. She activated the flashlight on her phone, and so resumed her place. The best way to combat trepidation was to pretend it did not exist.
“'-left me no closer. In my twilight, I see that any conclusion about this place can be contradictory: It is and it is not,'” her lips moved slightly as she breathed the last words of her grandmother's diary to herself. “'It is nine and none.'” Indecipherable as ever. She placed her hands on the handwriting, wondering whether the whole world was mad. Wondered what she had been like, again. What the Park City was like, again.
Unspooled clouds finally rewound around the moon. In the dark, she could not see her sooty hair, she could not think about her first relationship unravelling into piles large enough to be buried in, could not feel anything but the cold and the pull to the words lining the discursive journal in her lap. The pores in the sky grew, and the hollow pattering evolved to a full-blown rhythm. She wished she could see the stars without straining. Were the frame of the vehicle to be removed, nothing would remain between her eyes and the scene, shielded within the car-shaped, droplet-devoid space around her. From the side, it would appear as an oscillating audio compression, the high and low thresholds of the empty-car-sound-wave an unseen fortress against the droplets. Would they bounce from the invisible surface, puddle, or simply dissolve and cease? She could not say. The journal was making her think strangely and it was midnight on a work night - a night when she was usually curled in bed long ago - and-
In a way it was her own fault, having willed herself into such a fearless state: Raine became so comfortable that she fell asleep. Had she thought about it, she could have guessed that, in some world where events could be followed with a Weatherwax-like sense of narrative, the midnight winter downpour would lead to her strange dreams. Darkness spread and ran its insect leg against the suddenly spinning spheres of concentrated code. It felt, languidly, sensing the tones of them: eternal little chimed loops emitted off the top of stellar drinking glasses, each unique, filled to varying depths, giving off a scaled tone. The anomaly languished in it. It knew the unique patterns completing their functions, intersecting with its infected fellows, now part of a complex dance too big for each sphere to comprehend. The anomaly took the tones as its own, one by one, warping the sound into discord.
Disconnected rollercoaster tracks, birds flying by balloon, half-eaten fairies in monstrous mouths with dusted lips. The dreams she remembered more coherently were of her mother and father: young and too stubborn with Tim. Chaos smoked around them and a small body on the table. In an instant, she was the one dying on her back, staring into the ceiling, experiencing the bullet afresh. Raine awoke, adrift in the expanse of the parking lot, to campus security telling her to move out. With shaking hands she drove, once again resigning herself to the futility of family.
{PREVIOUS: 1.01 | 1.02 | NEXT: 2.01}
City of the Dead, Book One
{PREVIOUS: 1.01 | 1.02 | NEXT: 2.01}
Rating: PG-13.
Word Count: 1843
Workshop?: Sure, though I think it will be more productive to come back to it after the rest of the book is written, to flesh it out/fix it up once I have a better handle on what I'm doing later.
Also, I've updated Chapter One Part One to the latest draft.
Diary & Teenage Dissolution
Quincy was a tired little town in a tired little state in a tired little country, and at the age of eighteen, Raine told her mother she was tired of her life, that her savings should be spent on experiences. After a gap year-and-a-second of working in service and engaging in less travel than she'd imagined, Raine was left with the impression that she ought to plan the entirety of her life in the following six months, to integrate back into the set trajectory of expected education, despite not having any inclination on how to find fiscal payoff in a stagnant economy.
Droplets dressed the borrowed car, whose windows lay uncharacteristically splayed open. Over the hood of its neighbor, Raine could see the stars and the ugly half-moon. Clouds crowded the illuminated grin in patches, a sudden burst of weak moonlight dusting the old tree that stood like a sentinel at the entrance to the old high school, its fat green leaves only a slightly different shade of dark than the sky. She clasped her knees with laced fingertips, bracing her shoulder against the door frame and the thoughts threatening to take her composure.
Around the parking lot, the thinned deciduous forest rattled its percussive leaves like a muffled rain stick. After a day of I-love-yous and hand-holding, Raine's gentleman love broke her heart. She had known him well. Probably the well-est she'd known anyone, other than her mother. Now, it seemed like a monstrous distortion; she had ultimately come to find she'd barely ventured past his shallow end. Two years of intimacy in a teenage life are especially nothing to scoff at.
True to the downpour, the day was not done with her yet. The wave of mail that contained the recruitment documents had come without warning and so, seemingly to her uncle, had her angry phone call. It was silly to feel annoyed at a complex human being, at someone who had a whole history and experience unique from her own, she knew. She knew this, but she still wished she could meld with the seat and disappear the outside world from existence. Thoughts hung in an unspoken stutter on the cell line.
“I didn’t ask them to, Raine,” Timothy repeated.
“Stop. You’ve been dangling this over me since-”
“I didn’t- sh, sh- since the last time you asked me to stop, have I said a word about it?”
From her silence he intuited the face she was making: bottom lip dimpled by upper teeth, nose wrinkled at the bridge. An ugly face. She was self-aware about all the wrong things, he felt. At least she genuinely seemed to be considering and listening to him. For the moment.
“No."
“Then, they picked you on their lonesome. Not that I’m at all surprised-”
“Stop.” She attempted to exhale his words from her mind. “The ‘Carnival Program’?”
“Can’t you just read the brochures for yourself?”
“No, not if you want me to really consider this. I don’t want the bullshit in the brochure, I want your truth- the whole first page was an ad. Did you really think that’d draw me in?”
“Sorry, we don't create our brochures with you in mind. R and D was reshuffled; we got sectioned off for marketing purposes-”
“What?”
Timothy returned her sigh. He watched the magnetic toy on his desk gyre, wishing he didn’t have to go through the humiliation of explaining this to his niece. “We were coming in over budget, but doing brilliant things, so the governors decided we needed to make ourselves useful. Research and Development is officially a city guild, but the money goes faster now that there are extra taxes-”
“Do you get to write your own scenes or are the sponsors doing that now? Are we paid by the game point? ‘A city of magic, dreams and technology - brought to you in part by: the highest bidders.’” she panned.
“You’re being very ungrateful.”
Raine pulled her sweater over her fists, eyes locked out the window. The chill seeped in, a diffused light spreading its cool fingers over the beams of the car. “Am I? I’m sorry.”
In his youth, they'd called him the Great Dane. Now, his fingers shook from the billowing worry that she would not respond well to his dropping of pretenses. Another sting to his ego. “What do you want to do?” She was quiet, so he carried on. “Your father is long dead, chicklet - I know it’s not what any of us wanted, but you’re being given the key to a certain freedom you’ve never known. Whatever promise you made to him to stay away, well, he won't know the difference now. Do you still have no mirrors in your home?” He gave her no quarter to sound displeasure at the question. “I know you keep your hair up because of it, so you don’t have to notice. We have scientists, talented beyond comprehension and traditional methods. My project is on the cutting edge of humanity, Raine, we needed the funding, and you know I wouldn’t have agreed to anything less than a highly preserved state of Research and Development.”
“But why me? Is it you? How I see?” Hair devoid of light fell in front of her face and she deftly weaved it back out of eyesight. She did not notice her own movements.
“It’s an acknowledgment that it may be a first symptom. I honestly don't know yet. Your father did incredible things; I'm sick of dancing around them. He had talents. I don't.”
The dream. Raine's mind struggled to stay in the moment, resisting the undertow of its association. “He would never talk about it, before-” she whispered.
“Johnny didn’t want to tangle your family up in the infamy that could go with his life. Oh, I know he kept you at arm’s length on the subject, but he hid himself from this city, and you have no idea what it took out of him. He gave up all contact with his family. You were his present, but mom, dad, me… we were his life.” Over the receiver rang a muffled tinkling. “It was the only way to give everyone the lives they deserved, in his eyes. Father felt the same way.”
Raine nodded, compelled by the silence on cell. She realized only moments later that her uncle wouldn’t see her response. “He'd like the free education. Getting paid, too. Not just in gas.”
Her uncle realized she had at least glanced over more than just the first page of the literature. “Yes.”
“And if I hate it?"
“Then quit. You don’t have to sign anything until-”
“Like what?”
“-after orientation. Like a work agreement. Park City will employ you while you get your education with us. We work it like a business agreement. You work, that pays for your time here, and a little spending change.” Timothy paused. “The rest you should read from the brochures -we did a good job putting them together. I wrote most of it myself. I know if I say more you’ll just fall off the earth again-”
“I needed a break from-”
“I know. You gotta get out - restless like Johnny.”
“I guess. I can’t do the things he could.”
Timothy was having a problem deciding just what to say, “I wish you’d had more time with him, kiddo. He was my best friend.”
“Mm.”
“Look it over, think it over. Call me when you get in to town.”
Headlights from the highway flashed deep shadows in light of their arrival. Raine pressed her cheek against the head rest and sunk into the shadows. After the car had turned onto the street in a spit of tirewater, the book in her lap could no longer be ignored - not by the earbuds playing a quiet song into her ear, the half-finished text to her last remaining friend, nor the smell and sigh of the elements outside. She activated the flashlight on her phone, and so resumed her place. The best way to combat trepidation was to pretend it did not exist.
“'-left me no closer. In my twilight, I see that any conclusion about this place can be contradictory: It is and it is not,'” her lips moved slightly as she breathed the last words of her grandmother's diary to herself. “'It is nine and none.'” Indecipherable as ever. She placed her hands on the handwriting, wondering whether the whole world was mad. Wondered what she had been like, again. What the Park City was like, again.
Unspooled clouds finally rewound around the moon. In the dark, she could not see her sooty hair, she could not think about her first relationship unravelling into piles large enough to be buried in, could not feel anything but the cold and the pull to the words lining the discursive journal in her lap. The pores in the sky grew, and the hollow pattering evolved to a full-blown rhythm. She wished she could see the stars without straining. Were the frame of the vehicle to be removed, nothing would remain between her eyes and the scene, shielded within the car-shaped, droplet-devoid space around her. From the side, it would appear as an oscillating audio compression, the high and low thresholds of the empty-car-sound-wave an unseen fortress against the droplets. Would they bounce from the invisible surface, puddle, or simply dissolve and cease? She could not say. The journal was making her think strangely and it was midnight on a work night - a night when she was usually curled in bed long ago - and-
In a way it was her own fault, having willed herself into such a fearless state: Raine became so comfortable that she fell asleep. Had she thought about it, she could have guessed that, in some world where events could be followed with a Weatherwax-like sense of narrative, the midnight winter downpour would lead to her strange dreams. Darkness spread and ran its insect leg against the suddenly spinning spheres of concentrated code. It felt, languidly, sensing the tones of them: eternal little chimed loops emitted off the top of stellar drinking glasses, each unique, filled to varying depths, giving off a scaled tone. The anomaly languished in it. It knew the unique patterns completing their functions, intersecting with its infected fellows, now part of a complex dance too big for each sphere to comprehend. The anomaly took the tones as its own, one by one, warping the sound into discord.
Disconnected rollercoaster tracks, birds flying by balloon, half-eaten fairies in monstrous mouths with dusted lips. The dreams she remembered more coherently were of her mother and father: young and too stubborn with Tim. Chaos smoked around them and a small body on the table. In an instant, she was the one dying on her back, staring into the ceiling, experiencing the bullet afresh. Raine awoke, adrift in the expanse of the parking lot, to campus security telling her to move out. With shaking hands she drove, once again resigning herself to the futility of family.
{PREVIOUS: 1.01 | 1.02 | NEXT: 2.01}