The dying neon light of the gas station sign flickered uncertainly, casting a ghoulish green tint across his wan face. In the passenger’s seat of the pickup, he leaned on his hand with icy blue eyes drooping. To the imperceptive eye, it might have appeared that David Martin was incredibly bored, but in actuality, he was keenly aware of his surroundings – one ear pressed against the window to listen to the sounds of the quiet early evening. Most “normal” people are naturally afraid of the dark – it is a human instinct to fear the unknown; what you cannot see can probably see you. It’s all about remaining alert. Your eyes can fail you, but when have all your senses in collaboration simultaneously failed?

The branches of the trees acted as tiny filters to the on-and-off flickering of the green light. Like tiny arms reaching out of an oblivion, the shadows clawed at the interior of the truck’s cab, playing tricks on his eyes, ergo his bored countenance: it defeated the tricksters and their illusions. The world would play no folly to him tonight. Far too much was at stake. This was to become ground zero. He could see it now before his glossy, film-covered eyes: hellfire; chemical smoke burning the lungs, slowly melting them into a frothy mixture of blood and pus; the men in white coats gagging and stumbling through the haze of the night, one hand clutching their throats, the other reaching out into a motherless, empty aether in an orgy of helplessness and cries for mother. The music of screams fluttering out alongside the ashes of what once had been something with a purpose – out into the endless abyss of this reality.

Inside the gas station, Zahra Nassar’s large, almond eyes flicked back and forth between the drink cooler and the front counter. She could feel the teenage clerk’s turbulent, hormonal eyes on her. Her breath rose to narrow intakes, followed by one massive release from her lungs. She knew he was examining her, and her mind danced along the possibilities as to why. He could smell her anxiety; no! He was a boy in a man’s world, and he just spotted a healthy specimen. It’s all in the genetic code – humanity’s natural instinct to kill and fuck.

She ran a hand nervously down the side of her face, feeling for any split ends. She wasn’t out to impress this acne-scarred work slave, but her insecurities bit at her like a swarm of mosquitoes nevertheless. The pink highlights in her hair had grown out, revealing the coffee-brown roots that stuck out like highlighted passages in a textbook, revealing all too much. Those hairs, she figured, must come from somewhere inside; what is hair but a root to the tree of the brain? That silly little boy at the front counter was just that: a boy. And here she was, nearing her twenty-fourth birthday, worrying over being judged by someone who had yet to finish high school. But, she reminded herself, isn’t that what society expected of her? To be pretty; to cater to the whims of some unseen but all-powerful patriarchy.

“God is always depicted as a man,” she muttered sorely under her breath.

Luckily, she was just out of earshot of the prickly-looking clerk, but not nearly far enough out of eyeshot. Those eyes were on her, scanning up and down, marking her every physical feature like a beauty report card. There was no need to impress him, but there is always the need to be reassured of one’s desirability. To be wanted is to have purpose on this green earth – to know that, to someone, even at the basest of values, you mean something.

Shifting in the balance of reassurance and insecurity, she paid her fee to escape the moment. Handing the five-dollar bill to the clerk, Zahra felt his sweat-laden palm run along the edge of her delicate fingertips – a disgusting sensation, yet oddly comforting at the same time. Contact with another human being. How rare it had become in these dire days. For a moment, the young man’s dull blue eyes met with hers, and she became quite lost, as though the boy radiated a frequency that disrupted her radio signal. There was static in her head, bristling at her temples and sweeping down to the tips of her toes. He was not intriguing, but the acknowledgment of her existence was enough to send lightning through her circuits. This was all part of the job – for him and for her. But that moment was enough to break the fantasy they were living; he, with his clouded head and dreams of leaving the dead life of the Arkham outskirts, and she, with no dreams to speak of whatsoever. That instant meant something, to someone, somewhere.

“You seem anxious,” Mystica noted with a dull tone as Zahra slipped into the driver’s seat and closed the truck door behind her. With eyes wide and breath a bit too heavy, she opened her bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. Her hands couldn’t find the strength to even reach inside. All she could do was sit there and breathe in the aroma as Mystica fiddled with the rear-view mirror. He adjusted it just perfectly, finally giving him the view he had wanted to see all week. In the bleak reflection of the mirror, his eyes settled on a ghastly white sign, illuminated by two small lights beneath, whose raised gold letters on a dark green background read, “Arkham Asylum.”

“I’m fine,” Zahra replied, her dark lips thinly parted to let the words seep through. Truth be told, she wasn’t even sure why she was so nervous. It had never been like her to worry, let alone worry over something she could not define. Why then, did her stomach feel like it had been defeated in a duel? Why had the colour drained from her already-pale face, in sheer defiance of her Northern African ancestry?

“I don’t have time for you to lie to me,” Mystica replied, bold-faced. “T-minus 3 hours until zero hour.”

“Oh, we’re getting technical?” Zahra shot back with a hint of the snark Mystica secretly found rather amusing. On the outside, however, he returned her wit with a slight scowl that hid the smirk. But she could see right through his façade. It was a skill she kept tightly wound beneath her skin and broke out from time to time when the situation presented itself.

After what felt like an eternity of comfortable silence, Mystica shifted in the passenger’s seat and bent over the seat to retrieve something from the tiny backseat space that divided them from the bed of the truck. Zahra waited patiently, deciding to let the bag of chips rest in her lap and drum her fingertips across the steering wheel in an attempt to appear inconspicuous to Mystica. This was a strange sort of partnership. He could read her like a book, and she could very much do the same to him – a quality that greatly disturbed The Sleeping God. He had been rambling on and on about “this body” and “meshing” – subjects which came out in blurred meaning to Zahra, who would usually nod and agree with whatever he was saying. She owed him that much.

Her loyalty had been won months prior, when Mystica had offered her a deal she couldn’t refuse: quid pro quo. She had helped him obtain an object he desired to possess (or in this case, repossess), and he had given her a livelihood – a glowing recommendation from one of the literary world’s most respected columnists opened up doors to career opportunities she had never imagined. And yet, she didn’t take any employer up on their offer of a job. It wasn’t the success that meant anything to her; it was the option of doing so that satisfied the hunger welled up deep inside her soul --simply to know that she could claim a place at the top of her world, if she so chose to.

Mystica slumped back over into his seat, now bearing a small, red messenger’s bag across his lap. He first unzipped the front pocket and, before Zahra could object, lit a long, thin cigarette. The smoke quickly overtook the cab of the pickup, spreading like a deadly cloud over the two. She coughed dramatically in objection, but he did not cease. Rather, he unzipped the larger compartment and removed a glaringly white bit of fabric.

“People have such faith in doctors,” he mused, holding up the snow-white lab coat as though it were a newborn child. “But the funny thing is, you can easily purchase a doctor’s jacket online.”

“Yeah, I’m sure no one will trace that back to you,” Zahra replied, sarcasm dripping from her verbal fangs.

“Which is why it’s just as easy to commit credit fraud,” he chuckled. “First numbers are simple: 4 for Visa, 5 for MasterCard, 6 for American Express…”

“Don’t I know it,” Zahra commented with a wistful sigh. It had been a questionable life prior to her higher education.

“So what’s the plan, then?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Don’t steal my catchphrases,” Mysica grumbled. “The madness begins the moment the sun peeks its face over the hills to the east. A giant ball of flame to witness a lesser, albeit much more destructive, ball of flame. But by then, you’ll be long gone.”

“Sorry?” Zahra questioned, a slight tint of fear in the colour of her voice, reflecting the inner hope that Mystica didn’t mean her systematic execution.

“I’ll admit, Miss Nassar, that I’ve made a mistake. It was all in my approach to this; I was far too desperate to bisect my mind.”

There was that vague rambling that so greatly intrigued her. It was like he was speaking in tongues about a secret he could never tell. No priest could scrape the truth off of his tongue in confession. As much as she could understand him, these words always slipped past her sensors, as though the secret were paper passing through a metal detector. This was a book she could not read, for it was written in a dead language, which only Mystica, or whoever he truly was, could decipher.

“Too hasty; far too hasty. The key to the perfect crime is to leave no trace that you were ever there. No fingerprints, no evidence, no witnesses. I have the first two covered. But the latter… it is a footprint that has been left in the mud of this sin. Amateur. If the fruit of my labours does not prove to be worth the blood and sweat, this won’t be much of an issue. But if it should succeed in its design, I must ensure that there are no voices left to echo deeds done in the dark.”

“Jesus,” Zahra scoffed. “No one else fucking talks the way you do. It’s like talking to a textbook.”

He ignored her interjection.

“So as the sun rises, you’ll close the blinds on a man’s eyes so that he’ll never again see the sun climb over the horizon. You see, Zahra, a country farmer in Cornwall once told me…if the sheep will not stop bleating, you have no choice. To taste sleep’s sweet nectar, you must cut out the sheep’s tongue.”

Achievements

• 1x Tag Team Champion
  
• August 2013 Superstar of the Month (Thank you all so much!)
  
• 1x US Champion
  
• 1x X-treme Champion