Chapter VI (Part II)

Locating the pair was less difficult than I had worried, I found the two sprawled out across two couches, fixated on a shockingly too-high-volume wall of televisions. News reports on the night's massacre peppered all but the lowest right screen, where I noticed a Real Madrid uniform, briefly amused before the cacophony of a half dozen reporters talking over one another overwhelmed me to such a degree that I couldn't fathom how Jet or Alex could follow the conversations.

Alex noticed me first, noticed the embarrassed blush I must have been wearing and nodded, meaningfully, to Jet.

Whatever meaning the nod was meant to carry was entirely lost on Jet. His face lit up and he gestured for me to come sit.

"Come. You feeling better?"

I paused waiting for recognition. It didn't come. Alex shook his head, gave me an apologetic smile and got up, to presumably search for something for me to wear. Jet gave him a confused look and resumed grinning at me.

Jet softly mocked, "You look like you might have scrubbed a bit hard though."

"You've got me in just a towel and that's the best you have for me." I refused to sit.

Jet furrowed his brow deciding on the appropriate complement, "You do look clean."

"Clean?" My eyes smoldered, not a sexy smolder, a steady, angry burn.

His hand ran through his own hair sheepishly, while ducking my gaze, "Clean, and soft, and like a vision?"

"Good enough I guess, " I smiled and let him wrap himself gently around me. I don't know how long we sat tangled, but aware that we had a lot to talk about, and he would do his absolute best to postpone it, I disentangled all but our fingers.

I squared off on the couch next to him, "Before you say anything, just listen, okay?" He nodded and offered his other hand.

I left it there and continued, "I want to know everything about her. And I want to be involved from now on. I know I can't fight and, well, I'm not brilliant like Alex, but I can still help." The words came clumsily, but his eyes remained soft yet serious, and I knew he took my resolve seriously, well, semi-seriously.

Alex returned with a slightly too large pair of pajamas, lay them next to me, and dropped a folded blanket onto Jet, which he in turn, taking the hint, wrapped around my naked shoulders. Alex teased, "Not that I minded the look, Allie."

I shot him a harsh look jokingly and he cowered appropriately. Jet chimed in, "And you smell like donuts."

"No, vanilla. The crap by your tub was vanilla and lavender scented." Jet shrugged and I continued, "Why do you have bath soap anyways? Take a lot of bubble baths?" I grinned ear to ear.

"Nah, I'm not sure how that got there. Probably, Alex." Jet ducked the thrown pillow, but in an instant grew serious, "Allie, we can talk about this stuff in the morning."

Alex shot me a look and I reflected it upon Jet. "No." And realizing that it would be easier to just start talking than fight about it, I began.

I told them how I found the hall empty and how I was caught and taken upstairs, ignoring the details of my capture, how I snuck out and saw Mania kill the conductor, and "After she killed him, well, she, " I hesitated for only a split second but Alex cut me off.

Softly, he interjected, "Belmont chair playing violin."

"So you know?"

Of course they knew. The TV screamed details of the massacre, but more than the killings, somehow I also knew that, despite no mention of it on the televisions, the singing and the blindness wouldn't be a shock. I continued on, telling them of the sounds, of how she killed the audience, and of her interactions with the young man, and finally of her interactions with myself. They listened without much reaction, eyes showing little emotion or surprise until I talked about the conversation between me and Mania.

Alex broke the silence, "Um, that --"

Jet cut him off "made no sense."

I was immediately angry and pushed myself out of Jet's renewed embrace. "What?"

Alex, realizing, assuaged me, "No, I believe you. Entirely. It just doesn't fit with how we normally think of Mania."

"Why's that?"

Alex stood up, "Mania doesn't work with others. Yet, you say she had a group of heavies working for her. I didn't think she was, human, enough for that. And this kid, this boy, you say she was interested in him, just him?"

"She seemed to be. Donovan. Donovan, that was the name." Their blank stares indicated no knowledge of the name.

Jet remained silent and Alex continued, "And this boy was unafraid of her? You say that he escaped, and if anything, she feared him?"

My mind replayed the look on her face when she warned me that the boy would be coming back, "I don't know about fear, but, he definitely wasn't afraid of her, or wasn't afraid to die at least, and she went out of her way to not kill him."

We talked for a while longer, I filled in some details I forgot on my first pass, and after recounting detail after detail with surgical precision, I grew sick of answering questions and wanted some answers for myself. Alex was mid-sentence when I cut him off, "Stop." He stopped. "Look, this needs to go both ways. Who is she?"

Alex looked at Jet, expecting him to answer the question, but he remained silent. After a while, he spoke, picking his words very carefully, "I knew her a long time ago. She wasn't normal then, but more normal. It's a long story, and I promise to tell it to you, but she's the reason both mine and Alex's families are dead."

"I'm sorry."

Jet smiled, "No, it's bigger than that. Not to me, really, but she's caught up in something bigger. I don't really understand it. Alex knows better than me."

I asked the wrong question next, "Why doesn't anyone stop her? I mean she did something like this only a few months ago, right?"

Alex paced, not answering immediately, maybe unsure how to answer, but the breath he took before he began braced me for a long response, "If you're asking why we haven't, we've tried, but we're also interested in understanding who's responsible for Mania. I don't think, " he glanced at Jet and I could tell this was a point of contention between the two, he resumed a bit differently, "Well, she comes from somewhere. Someone made her the way she is and we'd like to find out who and why.

Jet chimed in, "I don't really care about all that."

Alex, ignoring him, "As for why law enforcement has taken such a laiz en fair approach, that is something we know pretty well. Do you remember, about five years back, pukers?"

I did remember. "Yeah, those green pics that made you sick." They were pictures, just a bunch of shades of green and yellow in some sort of pattern, but when you saw the image, you felt nauseous, extremely nauseous. I was pretty young when the epidemic hit the web, but it caused a huge panic. Monitors were even hard-coded to avoid displaying that particular arrangement of pixels.

"Yeah, just one picture really. It was just embedded in others." Alex hesitated. "Well, you probably recall what happened in the aftermath of that."

Everyone knew what happened. "Crow?"

"Yeah," he sat back down.

Vincent Crow was truly a monstrous sicko. I was just starting high school when the abductions began. He would kidnap young girls, high schoolers usually and he'd release videos, terrible videos. Short videos of dismembering the kidnapped girls horrifically. At my all girls' high, security was particularly elevated. Armed guards rode our buses, accompanied us to sports meets, and roamed our halls.

I had never seen a Crow video, though my imagination had poisoned me with many nightmares of what they might include. His message was common knowledge. He wanted to prove he could sicken and outrage us without any tricks. His murders escalated in grotesqueness until finally he progressed suddenly from high school girls to the president's wife.

I shuddered in Jet's arms. He stroked my hair gently, which might normally provide some relaxation, but not this night. Alex was filling me in with more backstory on Crow, but it was information I already knew. Most of it was common knowledge. Rumors abounded back then that he was freakishly strong, fast, that he was somehow abusing Stutter and surviving it, but while I didn't believe much of it, there was no doubt that he transcended what a normal human should be able to do.

The video of the president's wife was only shown once to my knowledge and there were no copies. Alex was getting to this part of the story.

"-- in Times Square. I don't know if you know what was shown, but, "he turned to Jet for approval to continue.

I swallowed, remembering the acidic taste from earlier in the night, "I know. Just skip it." The video was horrific. The clip was short, but supposedly depicted the first lady being violated, tortured, and involved a meat grinder.

Alex's tone changed, "Officially, Vincent Crow was killed in a shootout with federal agents three and a half years ago." Pausing to mute the televisions, "Vincent Crow was killed by Mania four years ago."

"Why? What did she care?"

Jet shrugged, "We don't know. Figure she probably cut a deal with the feds."

"How do you know all this?"

Jet let go of my hands, his face hard, distant, his tone flat as a flatlined EKG, "She told me. And gave me proof."

"What?"

In Alex's hand was a disc, "A video. We're the only two people who've seen this."

I was terrified by what might be on it. I didn't have the stomach for gory movies, let alone this kind of stuff. Still, "I need to see it."

Alex stood up and inserted the disc into a player on the wall. I was very right to fear its contents.