Schism

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

The apartment was too large.

Harold sat at the dining room table and stared at the large glass windows across the open room.  Too many people could see him through those windows. 

There weren't even curtains.

People would see him.  They would would think about him, talk about him, neither of which he liked.  He looked again at the door and hunched closer to the table top.

The man on the other side of the table thumbed three cards off the stack in his hand and turned them over, placed one down and looked over the cards.  Harold had forgotten his name.  It was the same man that had shaken his hand at the garage before he'd burned Nadine.  He was a babysitter.  Jared thought he needed a babysitter, even though he had said they were meant for great things.  At least the card playing man was better than Nadine.  Her perfume had stuck in his room for days whenever Jared had brought her over.  This man didn’t smell like much of anything.

He watched the man play cards and let his mind go slack.  He began to feel the pull and opened himself to it.  The fire was there, inside the cards.  It was small, an uncountable number of small fires, but he could bring them together.  He could burn the cards right out of the man's hand, or make the fire spread through his arms, his chest, into the floor, through the whole building.  It would be a beautiful fire.

The man put the cards down and rubbed his palms on his jeans, then picked them up and kept playing.  Harold took in a sharp breath and pulled away from the fires.  He stared at the man's head.  "You have hair."

The man looked up at him.  Harold couldn't read the expression.

"Aren't you supposed to be bald?" Harold asked.

The man grunted and put the cards down.  "No, sir.  I'm not a skinhead."

Harold just stared back.

"I'm not in one of those other groups.  They're most all from other cities, other states.  They're soldiers in the cause.  They came when they heard Jared was coming here, when they heard that he was going to clean this city."

"You're from here?"

"No, sir," the man said.  "I came here with Jared.  I've known him for years."

The man kept calling him sir.  Jared had introduced Harold to the man and said that Harold was one of them, an important leader in their fight.  The mad nodded and while he said the word 'sir', Harold knew he probably didn't mean it.  Harold knew nobody meant that when they said it to him.

"This place is supposed to be mine?"  Harold still didn't want to get out of the chair.  He'd been in the kitchen.  It was too large.  Before, in his own place, he had always made his sandwiches while sitting on the bed. 

"Yes, sir."

"You'll be here all the time?"

"No, sir," the man said.  "I'm just here to help you get settled in.  Jared said he'd be by later to visit."

Jared had also said that he'd get Jessica for him.  That hadn't happened.  Instead, he was with this man who called him sir.

Harold didn't want to be here.

"Can I go get some of my things?"

He watched as the man froze, but didn't look up from the cards.  "We have everything you could need here."

They weren't going to let him leave.  What Jared had said about being meant for great things had been a lie.  They wanted him as a prisoner.

Jared thought he was stupid.  Stupid and crazy.

"There are things there.  My tools, my supplies," Harold said.

"We can get you more."

"The tools I use to build the bombs for you."  He wasn't sure what would sound best.  "Someone might find them."

The man looked up.  He pulled out a phone and Harold watched as he made a call.  "Jared?  Martins.  Your...friend...needs to pick up some things."  Harold couldn't hear Jared's answer.  "He said he needs to pick up some important items that he's used for...construction.  Yeah.  Right.  See you then."

Harold stayed in his seat as the man, Martins, stood and pocketed the phone.  He had to have permission to leave this too large, exposed apartment.  This wasn't what he had told Jared he wanted.

He watched Martins put on his coat.  "Jared said he'd meet us here for dinner.  Let's go get your stuff."

Harold followed him out.

*

Martins followed him into the basement room.  Harold had repeated the man's name to himself several times after the phone call.  He'd heard somewhere that doing that worked.  "Okay.  What do you want?"  The drive over had been silent and the man's voice startled Harold.

What did he want?  He didn't want to be Jared's prisoner, Jared's tool.  At first he had thought he agreed with what Jared had said about the other races, that Jared had been like him, isolated.  But he knew now that Jared was wrong.  People weren't against him because they were a different color.  They were against him because Harold was different. 

He knew he was alone.

"Under the bed.  There are several cases there."

He watched Martins kneel and reach under the bed.  Martins' head stuck up as he searched for boxes that weren't there.

Harold watched the man's head.  He let his eyes lose focus, and then he felt the tiny fires all around him.  They were everywhere, just waiting to grow.  He reached out, inside Martins, inside his head.  All he needed were a few little fires in there.

He felt them, in the base of the man's brain.  They were ready to burn, as everything was.  Harold pushed them, let them burn the way he knew they were meant to.

He saw Martins' head jerk upward once, and then the man dropped to the floor.

Jared and his babysitter weren’t going to help Harold get what he wanted.  He would have to do that for himself.

He locked his room and started up the stairs.  As he rounded the corner in the stairwell, he looked up and stopped.

The detective, the man he'd hated for years, came in the door and started down the hall toward Jessica's room.

*

(Author’s note:  I’ve got to tell you…it’s all about to hit the fan.  In the next chapter…one little action is all it takes to spark the final battles of the story.  So, take a deep breath, get your popcorn and dive in.  And thank you all for the votes and comments!!  They are much appreciated!  If you get a chance, please tell your friends about Schism and leave a quick review on Amazon.com.  Thanks!)