A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 1
—but Omar jerked awake, flinging Zoe’s arms aside.
He rolled over and spewed a hiccup of vomit; ejecta like toast popping out of a toaster. A single hurk flexed through him and it was over. He panted two ragged breaths and threw himself over onto his other side, grabbing for pen and pad.
Catching her own breath, Zoe asked, “Are you okay?”
“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Omar hushed, scribbling notes.
Zoe sat on the floor, weight buttressed up on one arm. She caught her breath, waiting.
Movement and multi-lingual conversation filtered down from upstairs. Footsteps ran the foyer and muffled into distance. More tracked toward the back porch. Zoe’s breathing steadied. Omar scribbled and scrawled. He tore a page loose and threw it aside, already onto the next.
“The man behind the curtain is magic,” Omar whispered. “The man behind the curtain is magic…”
Sung-ho descended the stairs. “He okay?”
“I think so…”
Sung-ho regarded Omar’s rapid auto-writing coolly. “Hyun-jung is fetching my shooting practice targets from the attic. We’ll need weed and whiskey at least.”
“The Hunter S. cover up?”
Sung-ho gave a single, curt bob of the head.
Zoe grinned. “It’s fun to have fun. It’s better to have a convenient excuse for gunfire.”
Sung-ho replied with a smirk of his own.
Omar stopped writing. He stared at the page in front of him.
“Omar?” Zoe asked.
“Where…where am I?” Omar sank back on his knees, genuflective. “Who—what?”
“Tell me about your mother,” Zoe said.
“What?” Omar echoed. “Who?”
“Your mom, Omar. Tell me about your mom.”
“What about her?”
“What was your favorite Christmas present?” Sung-ho prompted.
Omar laughed. “It’s so lame.”
“Tell us,” Zoe said.
“It’s just…” Omar licked his lips, chuckled. Shook his head. “When I was a kid, my mom got me a Sega Saturn and a copy of this game called Panzer Dragoon Saga. I must’ve played that shit twenty or thirty times—and it wasn’t a short game.”
Sung-ho and Zoe exchanged a glance. “Uh…how long was it?” Zoe asked.
“Four disks?” Omar estimated. “I think. Four. And you know the worst part? I scratched the last disk before I finished my first play-through. I scratched it just exactly right so I couldn’t watch the last cinematic. So I went into the game like twenty times, beat the last boss twenty times, and saw the beginning of the final cinematic twenty times. And then the system would restart. I’d be watching this villager chilling in a pottery shop and this huge shadow would pass over him—my dragon—and before the camera cut to…whatever came next, I dunno…I guess I always assumed the next shot would be me like flying the dragon to…wherever. I think I was rescuing some alien chick? And…”
Zoe and Sung-ho stared, eyebrows raised.
“Well, that’s embarrassing,” Omar muttered.
“At least you’re out of the vision state,” Zoe offered.
“Oh, cool, yeah, I just didn’t know that embarrassing the hell out of somebody was a good magical defense system, I guess.”
Sung-ho coughed gruffly. “Zoe. Weed and whiskey, very quickly.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Omar, you rest,” Sung-ho said. “It looks like your first dreamer vision was… intense.”
Omar nodded, rubbing sweat away from his nose and eyes.
###############
Outside, floodlights blaring down on target practice caricatures and broad green lawn and the dim, farthest reaches of the adjacent property, Zoe and Sung-ho sat in Adirondack chairs with their discharged sidearms cooling on a table between them. They drank Macallan, four fingers, one rock each. Their joint stood in the ashtray like a grave marker.
No sirens had ever arrived.
Sung-ho had lived in Oceanrest, barring assignment transit, for twenty-six years. Most of the neighbors had already hated him, met him, and forgiven him. He had the easy humor and glinting grin of an easily likable man. More importantly: once somebody participated in the fun, themselves, they tended to make allowances for it. Maybe nobody had called the police or maybe the police just hadn’t come. Either way.
“He attacked my house,” Sung-ho said, breaking a seconds-long silence.
“He did,” Zoe agreed.
“He knows where we live.”
“He does.”
Sung-ho refilled his drink. He took a sip, settled the glass on the broad arm of the Adirondack, and peered out to where the floodlights revealed shot-up caricatures. “We move as soon as we find him.”
Puffing back the cherry on her clove, Zoe snapped her Zippo shut and replaced it with her Scotch.
(every story — in the long run — ends the)
(you’ll never be free of this)
(never)
She stood, flicking ash. “What is he trying to do?”
Sung-ho shifted in his seat, shrugging. “Pull curtain, every story.” He paused, face wrinkling quizzically.
A steel Mickey Mouse caricature plugged with a dozen thumb-sized holes tipped a hat at the edge of the light. Zoe stared beyond. “He wants people to see it. Whatever he’s doing, he wants witnesses.” She puffed. “Why witnesses? When so few people can bear witness to begin with, why?”
Night wind breezed softly, answerless.
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