DAWN ON THE INFINITY
A Young Adult Urban Fantasy by Jeff Provine
Chapter 2
Dawn wandered the halls of Wilson Middle School with a lunch tray in her arms. She had never had lunch detention before. After school detention once for a prank she helped plan involving the fetal pigs from the biology lab, and a couple of study hall detentions for making up homework assignments she hadn’t finished, but never lunch detention. Overall, she was a good student: mostly A’s, a few medals in debate and on the fencing team, no real trouble-making, generally on her way to put her in the running for valedictorian three years down the road.
Even so, arriving in homeroom twenty minutes late with no excuse better than she had overslept and took the long way to school to avoid a guy trying to involve her in an extraterrestrial heist left her no option other than a detention. Part of her thought about bursting into tears and telling a tale of a mentally disturbed attacker, which was at least mostly true, but she imagined it would get her into even more trouble. Sure, she’d miss out a lunch talking with her friends, but what was so bad about a half hour eating lunch and reading a book?
The bad part was, it felt awful. After a morning of disappointing her mom’s trust, running into a maniac on the street, and spending hours working on assignments in trigonometry and English, this was the last thing she needed. A few minutes to unwind and joke would have done her a lot of good. Now she was wandering back and forth between rooms 2A and 2E. It was Pizza Pocket Day, so at least something was going right.
At last she found it: Room 2C. Some clever person had stuck a sign over the door reading, “Not 2B,” with an arrow pointing down the hall to 2B.
Dawn puffed frustrated air over her braces. “2B or not 2B. Nice.”
She suddenly heard a mechanical buzz, like the sound of a camera zooming. Her skin prickled and heart seemed to slow down. Sidestepping, she looked over her shoulder.
The hallway was normal, empty other than a few lockers and hand-drawn signs wishing the basketball team victory over the Gators, whoever they were. One of the light panels was blinking, casting shadows that flickered over the wall. Dawn took another step back and peered at the darkness, wondering if she saw an actual shape or just some illusion. Finally, she decided it was her fried nerves.
Moving made her feel better, so she juggled the lunch tray and opened the door. Mrs. Herrington, the ladies’ tennis coach, sat at a desk. She set down her newspaper and glared up at Dawn.
“Name?”
Dawn wondered if she were checking into a prison-camp. “Dawn McCurtain.”
Mrs. Herrington looked at a list on a clipboard and scanned down the page. “McCurtain. Late this morning?”
Dawn felt her cheeks grow hot. “Um, yeah.”
“Any particular reason?”
Part of Dawn wanted to launch into a tale of the blonde guy and her heroic escape. The rest didn’t want to bother trying to explain something so crazy. “I just overslept. You know how it is.”
The coach did not reply.
Dawn’s throat went dry, and she tried to swallow to loosen it.
After an excruciating pair of seconds, the coach said, “Pick a seat. No talking.”
Dawn turned away from the prison-keeper and looked over the classroom. It was the coach’s room with posters about American history and various tennis players hanging on the walls. Most of the desks were empty, except for a few clusters of fellow inmates. In the front, there were the good kids, students who’d slipped up like her and were shocked in punishment. One boy looked mournful, while the others merely ate their lunches and flipped through books. Behind them, the snobby kids sat, reapplying makeup, rolling their eyes, and generally considering themselves too good to be there. And in the back of the room, there were the professional ne’er-do-wells, all clad in black to assert their individuality.
She slid into an empty seat at the edge of the classroom near the front. Her pizza pocket was probably cold by now, but her stomach was growling for any kind of food. She broke off a corner, then caught a flash of light out of the corner of her eye.
Dawn looked up, and the light flickered again. It was the fluorescent lights in the hall just beyond the door. They looked fine before. Through the window in the door, partially masked by a placard reading “Mrs. Herrington,” a shadow slowly shifted as if it were scanning the room.
Something was out there. Dawn slowly blew air over her braces.
Without a word, she stood and slipped to the back of the room, getting as far away from the door as she could. She sat next to a girl with nightmarishly black hair and a matching spiked jewelry set.
The girl tilted her head up in a quick salute.
Dawn nodded in return. Watching the door carefully with her peripheral vision, she bit into her pizza pocket and ate hurriedly to cover her panic.
“That stuff’ll kill you, you know,” a low voice suddenly told her.
Dawn choked and dropped the pizza pocket. She forced herself to swallow rather than spit in shock and looked for the voice.
It was the girl next to her. She rolled an oversized spiked ring between her fingers. “All those chemicals and preservatives… you might as well be drinking the reject bucket from the chem lab.”
Taking a few breaths to clear her throat, she looked over at the girl. “For a second, I thought you were telling me it was poisoned.”
The girl scrunched her face. “I just did.”
“No,” Dawn whispered, “I meant really poisoned.”
“Quiet down there!” Mrs. Herrington called.
Dawn ducked from the conversation and finished her pizza pocket. She looked back at the window in the door. The lights still flickered, but the shadow was gone. Dawn decided it was her imagination after a strange morning and began on her peaches.
The girl next to her whispered again. “So, who’s trying to poison you?”
Dawn turned slowly. “What?”
“You seem very suspicious about poisoning. Paranoid about something? CIA maybe?”
“No,” Dawn replied, shaking her head. “It’s just that I’ve just had a weird day.”
“Weird? Like what?”
Dawn shook her head more and clenched her lips.
The girl frowned. “Come on, you can’t start a conversation with ‘weird day,’ then quit.”
Dawn lowered her head and took a quick glance at the door again. The light had stopped flickering as suddenly as it had started.
“A guy practically kidnapped me on the way to school to have me help him steal a power generator for some reason.”
The girl’s black-outlined eyes went wide. “That is weird. What’s up with that?”
Mrs. Herrington’s voice called out again. “Miss McCurtain, Miss Valdez. If I have hear you talking again, you’ll have detention after school as well as—”
The fire alarm suddenly began to ring. A cry of excitement went out from the students around them.
“Saved by the bell, eh?” the girl, apparently Valdez, said. She smirked at Dawn and pulled a black canvas bag from under her desk.
Dawn smiled, but the memory of the shadow outside made her stop. She shook her head and looked at the window again. It was clear. There was nothing to worry about.
Still, Dawn decided she would stay with the crowd, just in case. She abandoned her lunch tray with the salad and milk box still untouched despite her half-empty stomach. On a whim, she grabbed the Italian salad dressing packet and tucked it into her pocket. She could use it on some chips from the vending machine later. Dawn wondered if she had weird taste, but decided that chips with Italian dressing was more normal than dressing as a Napoleon from the future.
Mrs. Herrington stood grumpily at the front of the class, waving an arm and shooing the students out into the hallway. Dawn tucked herself behind the snobby kids, crossing her arms and gritting her teeth as she crossed into the hallway.
Valdez followed closely behind her, hopping two steps to keep up. Her voice was raised over the ringing of the fire alarm. “Anyway, what’s this about a power generator?”
Dawn stuck as close to the middle of the group as she could and scanned the hallway for shadows. The lights seemed fine ahead.
“I don’t know,” Dawn said, still scanning. “He said he’d give me details when I got back to his ship.”
“Ship? What kind of guy was this?”
“A weird guy,” Dawn told her, wrinkling her nose. “He wore some kind of crazy military suit with aluminum foil on it.”
Valdez grinned. “A hottie?”
Dawn blinked. “What?”
“You got to like a guy in uniform.”
Dawn shrugged. “I guess. At the time the time I was thinking of ways to escape.”
“Hot guy with his own ship?” Valdez mumbled. “Dude, I would’ve gone with him.”
Despite Dawn’s best effort at staying cynical, a laugh slipped out. She let it slide and felt better after laughing at the weirdness of it all.
They turned a corner into the next hallway, where a section of lights was flickering again. Dawn stopped laughing.
The hallway was short, just a few classes and a pair of restrooms before wide glass doors at the exit. She just had to make it several seconds before escaping into the open outside. Dawn tucked herself closer to Valdez and counted the steps.
Dawn’s skin prickled again. Valdez’s eyes suddenly went wide, and she squeezed her legs together.
“Whoa,” Valdez said, her voice hollow. “I got to use the restroom.”
Dawn pointed up at the dull siren. “Are you crazy? There’s a fire alarm!”
Valdez stopped and shook her head. “I’m not peeing my pants over some fire drill. Come on.”
“What?”
Valdez grabbed Dawn’s belt loop. “Come on. I want to hear more about your mysterious suitor and his ship.”
“There’s nothing more to say,” Dawn told her. She tried to plant her feet, but Valdez pulled her forward, ducking out of the crowd and into the women’s bathroom. Dawn stretched backward, watching the open exit doors as long as she could before they disappeared behind the tile wall.
Valdez shut the door behind them and hurried toward the stalls. She ducked into the first one. “So? What’d you do with Captain Military?”
Dawn crossed her arms and backed against the wall. Something felt wrong, aside from breaking school rules as well as common sense of staying in a building with the fire alarm going off.
Still, conversation might drown that out. “He said his name was Captain Stare, actually. Captain Lex-something-something Stare.”
“This is awfully detailed just to be made up.”
“I wish it were just made up,” Dawn said. She turned and looked toward the door again, wondering how
It was then that she saw the assassin lowering himself from the top of the narrow corridor above the closed door.
He was tall and thin, covered in black from heavy boots to a body-glove to what looked like a welder’s helmet. Bandoliers crossed his chest, buckling into an enormous belt covered with pouches. A snub-nosed gun was in one hand, and two Uzi-shaped weapons were clipped to the bandoliers. He had been hiding next to the ceiling all along, holding himself in place with his hands and feet against the walls. Now he slipped downward, hand over foot. The fire alarm drowned out his every movement, making him as silent as a snake.
Not knowing what else to do, Dawn screamed. She threw herself backward along the row of stalls, retreating to the back wall.
The man in black dropped the last few feet to the floor and readied his gun.
Valdez burst out of her stall, hands scrambling over her spiked belt. “What are you screaming about?”
Dawn pointed past her, and Valdez turned. Her body went stiff, and she shouted, “Sweet monkeys!”
The man’s gun made a thudding sound, and the air went hazy. Dawn’s ears popped. In front of her, Valdez dropped to the floor. She slumped lifelessly along the tile, rolling onto her side with her arms splayed.
Dawn dove to her knees and cradled Valdez’s head. The girl didn’t move.
Looking up at the assassin, Dawn screamed, “You killed her!”
“Chugk gor norraoth,” the man replied, his voice low and slithering, muffled by the mask. He stepped forward and raised his gun again.
Dawn clenched her teeth against her braces and lunged forward. The man seemed to dodge backward with a stilted step, as if he were surprised. Throwing up her hands, she knocked the gun from his gloves. It clattered onto the bathroom countertop, then slid into a sink. The infrared faucet clicked on, drowning the gun in water.
The man made a guttural cry of disbelief.
Dawn decided to count it as a victory. She ducked around him, making a break for the door. Just as she felt the cool metal of the handle graze her fingertips, her shirt jerked her backward.
Dawn lost her balance and tumbled to the floor tiles. Scrambling, she got to her knees, readying to bolt again. Instead, she found two thin legs standing in her way.
The man in black grabbed her collar with a lanky arm and lifted. She tried to wriggle free, but his grip was like a rock. Finally, she grabbed onto his wrist to relieve the tension on the seams digging into her arms as he hoisted her off her feet. Dawn couldn’t breathe hanging like that.
“Morrgah tuh worrathi,” the man growled behind his mask.
“Leave me alone!” Dawn replied with the last of her air. She kicked, planting a tennis shoe firmly in the man’s stomach.
Her shoe bounced back. It was like kicking a brick wall.
Dawn hung for a second, wondering what kind of abs the guy must have. He held her off the ground with his left hand and walked with an eerie calm to the sink, picking up his gun from under the running faucet. The man shook it, then made a rumbling grunt.
Kicking had done no good, so Dawn decided on a slap. She threw her hand against the side of the man’s helmet, clanging it as hard as she could. Shocks of pain ran up her palm and fingers, but she didn’t care.
The man jerked and turned back toward her. “Haveth yaggoth!”
He didn’t seem to like it, so Dawn slapped again, knocking the helmet into an awkward angle. A black strap was tucked under his chin, partially hanging loose. Dawn’s hand was beginning to tingle with pinpricks.
The man shook her, throwing Dawn’s legs in several directions. He reached up his right hand to correct his helmet.
Dawn didn’t give him the chance. She grabbed the loosened strap with her left hand and pulled, hitting again at the same time. The strap popped open with a swishing sound, and the helmet popped off. It hit the tile and made a hollow clatter.
The man shrieked and dropped Dawn. He threw his hands over his eyes, gasping and rocking.
Dawn hit the floor with a heavy thump. The man seemed in pain. If he hadn’t been trying to kill her a moment ago, Dawn might have felt sorry for him.
Pulling herself up slowly, she looked at the man. His skin was pale to the point it was translucent, with blue veins and red capillaries shining through. He was bald, and his ears were huge and pointed like blades. Worst, his gaping mouth held a pair of cobra fangs. He was some kind of monster.
Dawn fell backward. She scooted across the bathroom floor until she bumped into the splayed body of Valdez. The girl moved slowly, breathing.
“You’re alive,” Dawn whispered. Valdez was simply knocked out.
The monstrous gasps ended in a guttural growl. Dawn turned back to see the man-thing marching toward her with his hands raised. His eyes were yellow, and he squinted in the bathroom light.
Dawn scrambled to her feet. She threw her hands out for a weapon: a baseball bat, a machine gun, anything. All she could find was Valdez’s spiked necklace, her own shoe, and the Italian dressing packet in her pocket.
Fear made Dawn’s mind race. The man had pointed ears, an obvious aversion to light, and fangs. If it looked like a vampire, acted like a vampire, and hissed like a vampire, then it just might be one. Why there was a vampire attacking her in the girls’ bathroom was a question for another time. What mattered now was that Italian dressing had garlic in it.
She pulled out the packet and tore the corner as the man approached, baring his teeth and stretching his gloved hands toward her. His tongue was forked.
Hoping desperately that it would work, Dawn jumped suddenly at him and squeezed the packet with both hands. The dressing sprayed out, making a neat line across the man’s face. He sputtered backward, clenching his eyes and wiping his face with his hand. Then he turned back to Dawn.
Her stomach seemed to plummet into a bottomless pit inside her. Dawn prepared for her inevitable death.
The man stopped. He twitched, then winced. His eyes squeezed tightly and every muscle in his face flexed, creating a network of deep, pain-filled crevices. He slapped his gloves against his face and began to scream.
The scream was shrill and inhuman, echoing itself inside the man’s fanged mouth like something out of Ghostbusters. Dawn looked up at the man, gaping in horror. She wondered if she had killed him.
He threw his head from side to side and continued to scream. Finally, he made a sideways dive for the sinks. His hands moved blindly around the basin, but the infrared faucets didn’t seem to pick him up. Frustration seemed to send his screaming into a new pitch, and he punched the faucet. The metal bent, and the porcelain cracked, bleeding a wave of water.
As the man washed his face, Dawn made her escape. She hit the door and threw it open, jumping into the hall before she could see where she was going.
A man in a red helmet and yellow coat suddenly grabbed her. Dawn shrieked.
“Easy!” the man shouted. He held her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”
Dawn looked up and finally recognized the man as a firefighter. She let out several long gasps of relief. She was safe.
“Listen, you need to get out of this building,” the firefighter told her.
Dawn shook her head, throwing dusty blonde hair in front of her eyes. Her throat was too clogged to speak. All she could do was point to the bathroom.
The firefighter looked at her and blinked. Finally, he turned and called, “Hey, Mike! Something’s up.”
Another firefighter appeared behind him, carrying an ax. Dawn smiled when she saw it and hoped it would be enough to dismember the vampire until they could find a wooden stake.
The firefighter with the ax hurried to the bathroom and pushed open the door. Dawn winced, wishing she could explain what was in there to give him some warning. Instead, she just held close to the firefighter next to her.
The door flipped closed, then burst open again. Dawn jumped, expecting the vampire to burst out. Instead, it was just the firefighter with the ax.
“We’ve got a girl unconscious in here,” he said. “Call for a stretcher!”
“Stretcher,” the firefighter with Dawn said. He began hurrying toward the exit, dragging Dawn with him.
Dawn blinked, wondering how the man with the ax had missed the vampire washing the garlic out of his eyes. She pulled back and peered through the open door. Valdez was still slumped on the ground, but the vampire was gone. Not even his black helmet was where it had fallen.
The firefighter tugged on Dawn’s arm. “What’s the matter?”
Dawn turned back. He wouldn’t believe the truth, and she wouldn’t blame him. She swallowed and said weakly, “Will she be all right?”
The firefighter nodded. “She’ll be fine. Right now, we just need to get you safe.”
That was the best idea Dawn had heard all day. She followed him through the glass doors and out into the blazing afternoon sun. The weird morning had given way to an even weirder lunch. She had a feeling this was only the beginning and there was no telling what would happen to her next.
Dawn wondered if the firemen would mind lending her one of their axes.