Délon City: Book Two of the Oz Chronicles Read online

  R.W. Ridley

  Délon City

  Book Two of The Oz Chronicles

  Single ‘R’ Imprint

  Middlebury House Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 R.W Ridley All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 0-9792067-0-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Délon City

  DEDICATION:

  As always For Mom, Dad, and Marianna

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  No one writes in a vacuum. I truly appreciate the support and input from all my friends, family, the good people of Tullahoma, TN, and the fans of Book One. I hope Book Two lives up to your expectations.

  PROLOGUE

  The man in the white coat thinks I’m crazy. Then again he’s paid to think I’m crazy. He asks me for the millionth time if I’ve taken my medication. I ignore the question because I haven’t. It’s none of his business. I didn’t ask to be here.

  He chews on the end of a Bic pen. His black-rimmed glasses have slipped down to the end of his nose. His brown eyes peer down at me. He asks me if I want to get better. Better than what, I wonder.

  The man in the white coat tries to look indifferent about my indifference, but he is frustrated. Indifferent people don’t chew on the end of Bic pens. His mind is racing. He’s trying to trick me into talking. He wants me to reveal myself. Get inside my head. I can’t let him. I don’t know who he is. I know who he says he is, but nothing is as it seems anymore.

  I am the last one. Only I know where the Storytellers are. “The Takers,” he grunts. “Tell me about them again.” I look at him.

  “That’s right,” he says. “I’m not supposed to say their name,am I?”

  I smile. He knows he can say their name. Their queen is dead. I killed her. He’s heard that story. He’s trying to get me to talk.

  “Wait, I remember now. You took out the leader. Yes, yes... how did you do that again?”

  He’s a bad actor.

  I’m looking at him. This makes him uncomfortable. He shifts in his chair. He clears his throat. “These Takers... they ate people?”

  He shifts again.

  “They ate your parents? The whole town...” He flips through a notebook on his desk. “No, no, not just the town, was it... It was...”

  I can’t take his senseless rambling anymore. “The end,” I say, “of the world.”

  He seems almost startled by the sound of my voice. “The end,” he says hiding a smile. “That’s right. I remember now, and you brought everybody back. You’re a hero, Oz.”

  This makes me angry, and he knows it. He’s pushing me. “I’m not a hero.”

  “Really?” He’s back to chewing the end of his Bic. “You saved the world. You killed the Taker Queen. You saved the baby... what was his name?”

  Nate is his name, but I won’t tell the man in the white coat. I look at my hands. They are not my hands. They are too old to be my hands. I try to rub the hair off my knuckles.

  “Stop that,” the man shouts. “You rubbed the skin off last time.”

  I continue to rub.

  “This is why we have to put you in restraints.”

  This catches my attention. I hate the restraints. I stop.

  There is a moment of silence, but just a moment. The man in the white coat speaks. “Tell me why you do that.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Why do you do that to your hands, Oz?”

  I laugh. “They’re not my hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I hold them up and show the man in the white coat. “I’m thirteen. I can’t have hands like this.”

  He gives me a baffled look. “What year is this, Oz?”

  This is the strangest question he has asked me. “I’m not a calendar.”

  He picks up his small desk calendar and throws it to me.

  I don’t look at it.

  “What year is it, Oz?”

  I look down. 2033. The man in the white coat has a smug expression on his face. I throw the calendar back to him. “It’s a fake.”

  “Look at your hands,” he says. “Do those look like the hands of a 13-year-old boy?”

  “Shut up!” I stand. “My name is Oz Griffin. I live in Tullahoma, Tennessee. I’m a warrior...” I pound the palm of my hand against my forehead. “We all are...”

  “We?”

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t know.” I grit my teeth. “What have you done with the others?”

  The man in the white coat looks through his notebook again. “You mean Wes and Lou...”

  “Where are they?”

  “According to you the... Délons killed them.”

  I collapse in the chair. “The Délons.” I shut my eyes. I remember now. My mother... My bedroom... I killed the Taker Queen, and the Délons took over. But... how am I here? This is not where I am supposed to be.

  The man in the white coat clears his throat again. “Perhaps that’s enough for today.”

  With my eyes still closed I say, “Send me back.” I hear the door behind me open. I turn and see a large man dressed in a ridiculously bright white uniform enter the room. His acne-scarred face is pulled taught as he flashes a phony reassuring grin.

  “Chester will escort you back to your room.”

  I repeat my demand. “Send me back.”

  “As I said, Chester will escort you back...”

  “Not to my room,” I scream. “Send me back!”

  The man in the white coat hesitates. He stands and motions to Chester to leave the room. “Oz, I want you to listen to me.” He moves around the desk and stands in front of me. “There is no way back.”

  I hold my temper. “You know that’s not true.”

  “It’s all gone. There’s nothing to go back to.”

  “The past is never gone,” I say. “It’s always there.”

  “What makes you think I can send you back?” he asks.

  “You’ve done it before.” I motion towards the couch in his room.

  A moment of clarity washes over his face. “Hypnosis.” He folds his arms over his chest and sighs heavily. “That didn’t go well last time.”

  “I have to get back there.” I am pleading now. I don’t like the sound of it, but I am desperate.

  “It’s not real, Oz. You know that, right?”

  If I tell him the truth, that he’s not real. That this room we’re sitting in resides only in fantasy. That the truth is in my head, back in my bedroom at home, he will never agree to send me back. “I know,” I say. “But it helps me think clearly when you put me under.”

  He gives the matter some thought. “All right, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  I jump up and run to the couch. “Yes, sir.”

  “You may be a little too wound up for it to work. You have to relax.” He follows me.

  I lie down and take a deep breath.

  “Relax, Oz. Just relax...” He turns down the lights. By the time he says relax again I am already slipping into a deep sleep. I have to get back.

  I hear him say, “I want you to tell me what’s happening, Oz. Not as if you’re there, but as if it’s a memory. It’s very important to keep your distance.”

  I breathe deeply.

  “A memory, Oz.
That’s all it is.”

  My eyelids are like lead.

  “It’s in the past.”

  His voice sounds farther away.

  “You’re on the couch in my office. You are simply telling me a story from your childhood.”

  Farther away.

  “Do you understand?”

  I think I nod in agreement, but I can’t be sure.

  “Where does your story begin?”

  I smile. “My bedroom.”

  ONE

  I survived the end of the world only to see it end again. At least that’s the way it felt. I heard the words jump from my mother’s lips. They cut as deep as any knife. Part of me believes she knew it, too. That she enjoyed seeing me sit dumbstruck, paralyzed by fear. I think she smiled. She lingered in the doorway of my bedroom, breathing in my despair. I sat on my bed, hopeless. The fight in me was gone.

  After my Mom left my room, I rifled through my memory banks. Just a few minutes before, the world was done. It was gone. Deserted, except for a band of survivors made up of my dog, a handful of kids, a middle-aged mechanic, a talking gorilla, a shrink, and one of the greatest linebackers to ever play the game of professional football. We all fought side-by-side against a race of slobbering, greasy beasts called the Takers that consumed the entire population of the planet one-by-one. They swallowed everybody whole and transported them to some charred universe ruled over by their queen, a bigger, greasier version of the drones that had eaten the planet. And, I killed her... or it... or whatever you want to call it. It was dead. And now? Now I was here, in my bedroom, turning my Mom’s words over words in my head, “Délon City.”

  The Délons were purple-skinned dead-eyed freaks with spider legs growing out of their heads and razor sharp mandibles that shot out of their mouths which they used to obliterate the brains of their victims. They were fierce, cold, and calculating. They turned humans into their kind. I had witnessed the transformation on the artificial turf of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. I watched like a whimpering baby as one of my warriors, a kid not much older than me, was betrayed by my cowardice. The Délons made him one of their own.

  I moved to the window of my bedroom and peered outside. The sky was an intense shade of violet. That told me everything I needed to know. I wasn’t back home. Not the home I knew. The Délons ruled this world. The fight wasn’t over. We had defeated the Takers only to be left with another enemy to battle, but now there was no we. It was just me.

  Kimball! If I could just see his canine mug, I would feel better. I would know that I wasn’t alone; that all hope was not lost.

  I burst through my bedroom door. “Kimball, come here, boy!”

  Nothing.

  “Kimball!”

  My Mom stepped out of the kitchen, a perplexed look on her thin pale face. “What are you doing, Oz? I thought I told you to get ready for school.”

  “I am... I mean I will. I just... I want to see Kimball.”

  Her confusion intensified. “Kimball, honey?”

  “Yeah, Kimball. Where is he?” I was searching all of his favorite hiding places in our living room.

  She walked over to me and gently placed the back of her hand on my forehead to see if I had a temperature. “Maybe you are sick, sweetie.”

  “What are you talking about? Where’s Kimball?” I knocked her hand away. It was done out of reflex not disrespect. I had just been through a war. I wasn’t in the mood to be babied.

  “Oz, you know very well where Kimball is. He’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t want to hear that name in this house again.” She wasn’t angry. She was sad, sadder than I had ever seen her.

  “Gone?” I backed away in a daze. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Enough!” she yelled.

  “Sharon.” Pop’s voice carried from the other room. Seconds later he appeared half-dressed for work. His pants open. His work boots untied, and his shirt unbuttoned, exposing an unimpressive chest and potbelly. “What is all the yelling about?”

  “Your son refuses to obey his mother,” Mom said.

  “Is that right, Oz?” Pop asked.

  “I just want to know where Kimball is.”

  Mom and Pop shared a glance. Pop cleared his throat and approached me. “I thought you understood, Oz.”

  “Understood what?”

  “We didn’t have a choice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I spotted a flaky purple rash on Pop’s neck. He unconsciously scratched it with black fingernails as he spoke.

  “We had to put him down, son.”

  The words hit me like a fist to the throat. I found myself not being able to swallow. My eyes burned from holding back the tears. I wanted to punch my father for even thinking such a thing. Kimball was a part of the family. He was a warrior. A tear escaped, and I quickly wiped it away.

  Pop put his hand on my shoulder. His touch chilled me. I could see the purple rash was on his wrist, too. “It was the law, Oz. We had to.”

  I couldn’t speak. Mom and Pop seemed to struggle with what to say as well. I could see the guilt on their faces, but I could also see the futility. They didn’t want to kill my dog, but they had to. I ran to my room and slammed the door behind me.

  I paced. All hope was gone. I couldn’t start over again without Kimball. He was truly fearless. I was a coward pretending to be brave. I was beginning to doubt my own recollection of the events of the past few days. Maybe I didn’t fight as gallantly as I remembered. Maybe I had been the recipient of dumb luck. Maybe I survived because of circumstance and not skill. I had fooled myself into believing I was a leader, but I was nothing more than some scrawny kid who wanted to get home.

  I looked at my bed and thought about crawling back under the covers and wishing myself back to the Takers’ universe. At least there I was a fighter. Or was I? I didn’t know anymore.

  I surveyed my room. It was... normal. My Tennessee Titans pendant hung above my bed. My autographed Titans football was in its case on my desk. My Titans screensaver zoomed across my computer screen. Everything was as it should be. It was too perfect. I ran my hand across the top of my desk. A sticky almost invisible residue stuck to my fingertips. That wasn’t right. My Mom was the cleanest woman on the planet. She kept the house spotless. With the exception of Pop’s office, you couldn’t find a speck of dust with a microscope. Something was definitely wrong.

  I thought about Pop’s purple rash and black fingernails. He was a contractor. He was prone to smashed fingers and various other injuries. He had had plenty of black thumbnails from accidentally pounding his thumbs with a hammer at work, but I had never seen all his fingernails turn black before. And the rash? I didn’t want to think what I thought, but I couldn’t help it. It was almost like he was turning into a Délon .

  Suddenly, I wanted out of the house. I showered and dressed as quickly as I could. My heart was pounding the whole time. I rushed to the back door to make my escape, but Mom called out just as I was stepping outside.

  “Don’t forget your cocoon, Oz.”

  I stopped and looked back. My what?

  She rounded the corner carrying a red, basketball-sized, pulsating blob that emitted a katydid-like chirping. “Your Pop picked it up after change therapy last night,” she said with a strange sense of pride.

  I didn’t know how to react. “Change therapy?”

  “It just came out of the incubation center a couple of days ago.” She reached behind the door and pulled my backpack off a hook.

  “But...”

  “I know. I know. It’s a little scary, but we got a notice last week that we weren’t complying fast enough with the general’s transformation orders.” She gently stuffed the cocoon in the backpack. “Turn around.” I did as she asked and she slipped the backpack on me. I could feel the cocoon gesticulating between my shoulder blades.

  “It may take two or three days, but it should hatch soon. You need to keep it close by.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I�
��m hoping mine will hatch today.” She looked at the darkest corner of the room. A bigger cocoon expanded and contracted. It emitted the same katydid chirping. “Poor thing’s just too scared to come out.”

  I was dumfounded. I had no idea what was in the cocoons, and I had no desire to find out. I was sickened that my Mom was so excited about having the disgusting blobs in the house.

  “Oh, goodness, where’s my head today?” Mom said. “I almost forgot.” She sped back toward the kitchen and quickly reappeared carrying a small brown paper bag. “Your father’s transformation therapist suggested you eat some of these today at lunch. He said it will help your system prepare for the change. You might as well have a couple for breakfast since you didn’t get a chance to eat this morning.”

  I reluctantly looked inside. Eight fat, juicy white insect larvae slowly wriggled inside the lunch bag. I gulped and nearly passed out from disgust. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

  “Oz, please,” Mom said. “Don’t be such a baby.” She reached inside the bag and pulled one of the larva out. “They’re not that bad.” She popped the plump worm in her mouth and bit down. The ugly little maggot screamed. It actually screamed. Mom chewed it quickly and swallowed. “They don’t taste that bad, and once you get used to the screaming, you’re home free.”

  I held the bag of maggots in my hand and stared at my mother while a big chirping cocoon squirmed in the backpack I was wearing. I definitely wasn’t home. The woman standing in front of me with larva remains on the corners of her mouth was most certainly not my mother, and the guy inside with a purple flaky rash and black fingernails was not my father.

  I slowly descended the steps backwards, keeping a disbelieving eye on my mother as I went. Once I reached the ground I turned to run as fast and as far away as I could, but my Pop’s voice rang out.

  “Oz, hold up!” He kissed my mom and bounded down the steps. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “That’s okay...”

  “It wasn’t a question, son. It was a statement. Learn the difference.” That at least sounded like something my Pop would say.