Blind Date

Ellen approached the bar cautiously and ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio. She was there to meet some guy named Ralph on a blind date arranged by Mandy, a friend from work. Ellen hated blind dates as they usually didn't work out. The last three almost put her off men completely.

Mandy had assured her that Ralph was special, a real gentleman. Her last date Larry "forgot" his wallet and she ended up paying for everything. The guy before Larry didn't bathe because he was between jobs and was trying to save money. And Andrew was boorish, rude with the wait staff at the restaurant, dissatisfied with her clothes and makeup, and generally loud and obnoxious when spending time on his cell phone.

Mandy had given her a perfume to wear. It smelled of lilacs and orange oil. "Wear this," Mandy smiled as she handed over the bottle, "he'll find you." Ellen had dabbed it on quite generously before leaving her apartment for the bar.

She sipped her wine and fidgeted with the glass, tapping her freshly painted nails against the stem. The more she thought about the earlier dates, the more she wanted to flee this one.

She dug around in her purse for her phone and dialed.

"Hello?" the party at the other end of the call answered.

"He's late," Ellen whispered loudly into the phone.

"You’re early," Mandy hissed back. "Take a chill pill and give him time. You won't be sorry."

"I'm already through my first glass.  I don't want to be drunk when he gets here."

"Then don't be," Mandy replied.

"You're no help."

"Just relax. Enjoy yourself. And whatever you do, don't embarrass me."

Ellen clicked shut her cell phone and slipped it back into her purse. She turned her attention back to her glass of wine and slowly scanned the room while she took a sip.

Several sips later a blind man entered and slowly made his way to the bar. He was sniffing the air as he slowly walked towards her. He stopped beside her and sniffed her shoulder and smiled. "Your name wouldn't happen to be Ellen, would it?" he asked with a sheepish grin.

Before Ellen could answer, he introduced himself. "I'm Ralph Jones, your blind date for the evening and I get the feeling that Mandy didn't tell you much about me."

"She certainly never said anything about you being blind!" Ellen gasped. "Now I see why she insisted on the perfume."

"Do you still want to go through with this date?" Ralph asked. "I'll understand if you don't."

"I've never dated a blind man before," she smiled at him.  "Sure, what have I got to lose?"

"I was thinking we'd start the evening with dinner followed by a movie," he paused briefly. "Unless you'd rather see a show?"

"How about we go dancing after dinner?" she countered, "But only as long as you let me lead."

She escorted him out the door to his limo. They drove to a five-star restaurant for dinner. Ellen was suitably impressed by the ride, the dinner and the conversation.

After leaving the restaurant, a vile beast set upon the duo, tossing her companion aside with ease and crushing Ellen's back against a brick wall. He licked her throat and sniffed at her neck. Before he could sink his fangs into her, Ralph was there pulling him off and tossing him aside.

The vampire rose up to attack again, but Ralph was ready for it and drove its head into the wall. Ellen stared in disbelief at the sudden change from man to beast as Ralph grew teeth and claws.

The vampire found itself facing a large angry cat that did not hesitate to rip out its throat before severing its head.

With the threat gone, Ralph resumed his human form, naked and panting on the alleyway pavement. Ellen quickly gathered his clothes and helped him cover himself while they slipped quickly into the limo.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," he said while hurriedly buttoning a clean shirt.

"It's OK. It saved me the trouble of having to deal with the blood-sucker." She smiled at him.

"Come again?" He straightened his tie and pulled another pair of dark glasses out of a drawer. "How exactly would you have dealt with him?"

"It's the perfume, you know; it's quite strong, good at masking scents as well as marking potential prey." Ellen waited for a response.

"You were never prey. What would you know about prey anyway?"

"Quite a lot actually," she said as she bared her fangs and launched herself at him.

Ralph quickly reacted, driving a stake into her heart. He tapped on the glass between the compartments and the driver lowered the window. "Mandy, it looks like you'll have to find a new friend. This one turned out to be a vamp."

 

Ex Librus: The Sleeper

 

“I’m not going there wearing jeans and a tee-shirt,” Logan protested.

“Yes, you are,” Random insisted. “I checked the place out and that is what they wear.”

“Not on the top floor. Not in the Executive offices. And not in that time period.” Logan looked through the wardrobe for something more appropriate to the task. Her face fell when she discovered that it was exactly what someone doing her cover job would be wearing. The white tee shirt was oversized. The rolled-up legs of the pale blue jeans ended above her ankles. She wore bobby socks and saddle shoes. But she drew the line at wearing the kerchief on her head.

Random needed Logan to keep watch outside. There were no surveillance cameras to tap into and the risk of leaving behind something as high tech as a monitor pod was just too dangerous. Especially during that time period. Random didn’t trust humans like she used to. At times, she regretted having saved them from oblivion.

Logan tied back her long black hair. Although the offices would be empty, there would be security guards patrolling. Her job was to watch for them. It was as much trust as Librus was willing to place in her – a menial job until she certified as glitch free. She rolled the bucket and mop out of the utility closet and went about mopping the floor.

Random searched through the files in the outer office. She didn’t need to take them, she just needed to see them. The file she was looking for wasn’t there. She entered the inner office and sat at the desk to search through the drawers. Again, with no luck, she strolled around the office looking for where someone could have hidden the file. Inside a closet, she found an iron box safe.

Standing outside the outer office door, Logan paused to admire the gold paint on the frost glass. She traced each letter with her left index finger until interrupted by a hand on her shoulder. “Miss,” the guard said, “you’re working late tonight, aren’t you?”

“It couldn’t be helped,” she replied. “My husband was late getting home from work and I needed to feed him his supper before I left.”

“Well, a man’s gotta eat after a hard day’s work. My missus won’t let me out of the house without a good meal under the belt. You be careful on the way home. The roads are getting slick.” He tipped his cap and sauntered off to check the rest of the office doors before heading down the stairs.

Logan sighed. “Great,” she thought, “I could have blown the mission. Good thing that Random was in the inner office. I need to regain my focus.”

Inside the inner office, Random was busy unlocking the old safe. After a few random attempts, she was able to work out the combination and open the box. Inside were some banded wads of cash and a few notebooks and ledgers. She thumbed through the notebooks and ledgers before examining the few folders inside the safe. The blue courier envelope that she was looking for wasn’t there.

Logan rolled the mop and bucket back to the closet. She poured the dirty water into the sink before rolling the bucket against the wall and hanging up the mop. As she turned to leave, she noticed a blue envelope tucked under a box on a top storage shelf. She pulled the envelope out of its hiding place and examined the outside. The contents of the blue envelope came from a hospital. The addressee was her father – Peyton Arsenal.

Random found Logan sitting on the floor inside the Utility closet with the x-rays and medical documents spread out around her. Librus had warned her not to let Logan near the envelope. Logan hadn’t died in the car crash, but now she was worried about – she couldn’t remember. Random helped Logan gather up the documents and put them back in the envelope. “I’m a copy,” Logan asked, “aren’t I?”

“Yes,” Random replied, “we all are. In my previous existence, I was a cat. Your run of the mill stray kitten, adopted by a little girl, who died in a building collapse. The little girl was fine. Me, not so much.” She pulled Logan up off the floor. “Now that we have the envelope, we need to get out of here.”

---

Two Librus agents walked down the hallway to Room 617. Their crisp while coatdresses adorned with nurse’s pins. On their heads were the caps to match. White stockings covered their legs down to their comfortable white nurse’s shoes. Over their faces, they wore white surgical masks.

Inside Room 617, a woman lay in a coma surrounded by equipment that monitored her heartbeat and brainwaves. The apparatus the helped her breathe covered half of her face while the pump whooshed air into her lungs. A central line pushed fluids and nutrients into her. Logan stared at the remains of her former self, still alive beneath all that medical equipment.

Random removed a small spidery gadget from her pocket and fitted it against the sleeper’s forehead. She pulled out a black rectangle from another pocket and plugged in the wire tail from the spider and began the process of digitizing the sleeper’s mind. Behind her, Logan started to glitch. She wobbled and sat abruptly in a nearby chair.

“What’s wrong?” Random asked.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Logan replied, burying her face in her hands. “I did this to myself. I was so angry at my father. I wasn’t paying attention.” She paused. “No, that’s a lie. I drove off the road. There was no truck, no storm, I made that up to hide the truth from myself. I created the virus.”

“What has changed?” Random took Logan’s chin in her hand and turned her face upward.

“I don’t want to die. I don’t want that other me, the real me, the original me to want to die. I want her to fight and have a life past this point. She doesn’t have to know about me. It can be a dream, a nightmare, something she made up. Is that possible?” Logan walked over to her other self and stared for a few minutes with her arms crossed. Then she bent down and whispered into her ear. “You are stronger than you know.” Grasping and gently squeezing her left hand, she said, “It’s time for you to live the rest of your life.”

After Random and Logan slipped forward in time, the sleeper opened her eyes. The two agents were still wearing their white nurse’s uniforms when they appeared in the room sixty years in the future. The old woman in the bed put down the book that she was reading and remarked, “Oh, you’ve come back!” She patted the bed. “Please have a seat.” She cleared her throat and coughed. “I’m not dead yet, but the doctors say it’s only a matter of time. I suppose you’ve come to save me again. Well, don’t bother. I’ve had a good life.” She coughed again. “The chemo has been rough, but it’s not enough. I’ve asked them to stop the treatment.”

Logan sat down on the bed and smiled at the old woman. “We’re here to save you, but not the way you think.” She pulled the spider set from her pocket. “This will allow us to make a recording of everything you’ve learned, of who you are. It rests on your forehead. And this little black box records everything.”

“And then what do you with it?”

“We save it.” Logan hoped that the answer would suffice. But she had always been curious about things.

“Like a book in a library? Only one that can talk and tell stories, yes?”

“Exactly,” Logan replied.

“Well, then let’s get this over with.”

Ex Librus: Empty-Headed

Logan Arsenal stared out the window watching the clouds pass by. A leaf blew off a nearby tree and her hazel eyes followed it as it danced across the classroom windows. “Logan!” The teacher’s shout startled her out of her reverie. Before he could repeat the question, Logan answered. “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle.” “That’s correct,” he turned back to the chalkboard and wrote out the formula while Logan went back to staring out the window for the rest of the class period.

At the end of class, Logan stuffed her notebook into her tote bag and followed the rest of the students out of the classroom. Nikolai Bellicose, who had been a friend since the beginning of the school year, was waiting for her. “I don’t suppose you can give me all the answers to the eighth period history test. I mean, seeing that you can see the future and all.” Logan shrugged. “It’s only going to be a quiz and you don’t need my help to pass it. And I can’t exactly see the future. I get this bad case of déjà vu, like I’ve done it all before, like...”

“Like that movie where this guy wakes up and it’s the same day?”

“No, Nikki. It’s like I’m remembering things that haven’t happened yet. But I can’t remember that far ahead.” Nikolai passed his quiz without Logan’s help just as she said he would. After class they walked to the buses and said their goodbyes.

Logan sat in the front seat of the bus away from all the troublemakers. Logan always left the bus before the turnaround. Her grandparent’s house embarrassed her. Wearing used clothes embarrassed her. But the woods she walked through to go home didn’t care about her clothes or the house that she lived in. She felt at home among the trees and bushes that sheltered the wildlife that flourished hidden from the prying eyes of others. It was the one place where she felt safe and free to be herself.

She has spent every summer since losing her parents running through the woods. She climbed every tree that she could shimmy up. She spent time splashing through the small stream that ran through it to the nearby creek. She hunted for frogs and pollywogs in a nearby swamp. She chased butterflies and dragonflies with equal zeal.

But the most she could garner during the school year was a safe path home, well clear of the neighborhood bullies who teased her. She would make bows and arrows from fallen branches and broken vines and take aim at the scoundrels who tormented her at school. It released the anger, but failed to relieve the pain.

Nikolai Bellicose was doing his best to atone for his sins. When he first met Logan, he had tried to trip her in the cafeteria. It didn’t work. He tried several times to catch her off guard, but she always seemed to know his plans. Gradually, his new friends told him stories about the girl who knew things. And eventually, he decided that he wanted to learn everything that she knew. But every so often, he would try to trip her. Every day, he waited until Logan was safely on her bus before walking slowly to the back of the line and crawling into the back seat of the waiting limousine. “One of these days,” he told himself, “I will follow her home.”

Logan rarely came out of the woods except to pick up the mail or to go to school. And no one came to visit her grandparent’s home to check on her. It was just as well. When she was at school, there was no one home. She kept a garden in the clearing behind the old house. Every Easter she collected the peeps from the elementary school and took them home to raise. Her grandmother had taught her to sew and cook. And every year someone left a box of old clothes by the mailbox.

Logan Arsenal stood at the checkout station running items through the scanner. She smiled wanly at the customer who seemed agitated that it was taking so long. He looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t place the face. Suddenly, she stopped scanning and held up the item she had grabbed. A thousand words for the same piece of fruit flashed through her mind as she examined its weight. She scanned the tag attached to the fruit and bagged it before resuming her task. As the last item fell into the bag, the scenery changed.

Logan was back home. Nikki sat at the crude wooden table cradling a coffee mug in his hands. “I don’t want you to be alone for Christmas. Please, come stay with me.”

“I can’t. I have to take care of the house.” Logan brought two plates of freshly wilted dandelion greens to the table. A heavy dressing of bacon fat, sugar, and cider vinegar coated the greens with crumbled bits on bacon scattered on top. Nikki stared at the food on the plate. A thick slice of homemade bread slathered in butter accompanied the greens. On the back of the stove was a large stewpot filled with simmering broth. Earlier, she had dropped some homemade noodles into the broth.

When they finished the greens, Logan dropped the plates and forks into the cast iron sink. She picked up the two bowls resting on the drainboard and filled them with the noodles from the broth. Bits of chicken floated among the noodles along with some diced carrots and onions. Nikki wondered if Logan had ever tasted steak or shrimp or lobster, all foods that he took for granted.

Nikki and Logan watched as the sudden squall turned into a full-blown blizzard obscuring the road in front of them. They were late and the weather wasn’t helping them any. Suddenly, a large semi hauler loomed in front of them, brushing them over the embankment. It was a long fall before they woke up again.

Prep school graduation required suits and ties for the men and long white gowns for the ladies. Public schools were renting gowns at the time, but not their alma mater. Logan joked about the “wedding dress” she had on. Nikki smiled. “Keep it,” he replied. “You’ll need it in four or five years.” She blushed. She couldn’t imagine herself being married. She lost touch with Nikolai after graduation. College was out of the question for her. She was having trouble sleeping, remembering things, and being social.

Nikolai hadn’t seen Logan for nine years since graduation. He had stopped to buy a few things on his way home from work. She looked exhausted. He offered to take her out to dinner when she got off work. She didn’t seem to recognize him. He waited in his car for close to an hour before going back inside the store. Logan wasn’t there. The store manager told him that Logan didn’t work there and had never worked there.

Logan was busy digging up the onions in her garden when the sound of a motorcycle cutting through the brush attracted her attention. “Ain’t got no money, if that’s what you are after.”

The rider took off his helmet and shook out his long hair. “I’m looking for Logan Arsenal. Her book is overdue at the library.”

“Ain’t got no books here. Just my garden and some old rags.” Logan placed her trowel in the basket with the onions. She stood up and dusted off her knees. She picked up her basket and walked toward the house.

“Nikolai is in trouble. The library wants you to save him.”

“Who is Nikolai?” she stepped up onto her back porch. “And what am I supposed to save him from?”

Before the stranger could answer, the surrounding scenery glitched and a younger version of Logan stood upon the porch wearing a worn-out pair of jeans and a hand me down shirt tied at the waist. She jumped down to the dirt patch and approached the motorcycle with wide eyes. “How fast can it go? Can I have a ride?”

“Sure,” he replied. “Hop on behind me and hold on tight.” He strapped on his helmet and revved the engine, raising some dust, as he rushed down the path to the highway. Seconds before hitting the pavement, a sudden shift in the scenery occurred. Logan found herself sitting in the back seat of a helicopter. The man up front landed on the top of a skyscraper. “They are waiting for us inside,” he said as he helped her out of the back of the helicopter.

“I’ve never been in one of those before. What’s it called?” she asked.

He ignored her question. “Hurry,” he chided. “We are running out of time.”

The bright morning sunlight coming through the window nearly blinded Logan as she opened her eyes. She rolled over in bed away from the window and stretched her arms and legs. A moment later the door opened and Nikolai brought in a tray of food. “How are you feeling?”

“Hungry. What’s for breakfast?”

“Your favorite,” he said as he sat the tray on the rolling table.

She sat up and reached for the table, pulling it toward her. “Not so fast,” he scolded. “First, you have to tell me what your favorite breakfast is.”

Logan frowned. “Seriously?” she asked. Nikolai nodded, holding the metal plate cover firmly in place. “Fine. A mushroom and cheese omelet with a side of scrapple and some fried potatoes. Now, can I eat?”

Nikki sighed. “Close enough. I didn’t have any mushrooms for the omelet.”

“I’ll live. But why the third degree about breakfast?”

“We almost lost you. We had to reload all your memories. It took us a while to figure out there was a virus erasing them all.”

“Well, that explains the feelings of déjà vu and being empty-headed.”

We Were Here First

The object glided silently over the tops of the forest before settling down in a field of wildflowers. The area was sparsely populated, but not off the grid. Cell phone cameras recorded the object as it passed overhead. Police received calls about a possible plane crash. Emergency medical techs rushed to the area to assist. But no planes were missing from the radar or had radioed an emergency. The EMTs stopped on the way at the local tavern for a beer after the recall. And everyone laughed at the incident. It was 2020 after all.

The occupants of the ship slowly filtered out onto the surface and scouted the immediate area before venturing away from their craft. They never questioned the existence of the small clearing in the woods where they landed. They followed the beaten path through the woods. It ended in the back yard of an old three-story house. After scanning the house, they drew their weapons and prepared for an incursion. The occupants offered little resistance, even laughing at the intruders who were disturbing their evening meal. The invaders didn’t understand their chatter at first. What was this Covid-19? What was this Bingo Card?

The residents of the house invited the visitors to join in their repast. Their lack of hostility bewildered the travelers. But the visitors were hungry and the prepared food seemed harmless enough. They could breathe the air, but the lowest ranking intruder removed his helmet first as a test. He nodded confidently to the others. “You picked a bad time to come visiting,” the grey-haired man said. “but there’s plenty of room in the house for guests.” The highest-ranking alien let out an earsplitting shrill whistle. The grey-haired man took out his hearing aid and checked the volume control and replaced the battery. “Dang thing is acting up again.”

The rest of the visitors replied with an equally shrill whistle before drawing their weapons and aiming them at the archway between the dining room and the kitchen. Three large armored beasts stood staring intently at the intruders. The hounds, for lack of a better word, looked very much like a cross between a Bernese Mountain dog and an armadillo. A tough leathery hide covered the tops of their head and most of their backs. “Heh,” the old man laughed. “I was wondering where they were. Those critters showed up a couple of weeks ago. We think they ran off from some secret government lab. Pretty tame as long as you keep ‘em fed. Of course, they ain’t been fed yet.”

The old man laughed. The home invaders backed up into the far corner of the room while keeping the hounds in their sights. The sound of breaking glass soon followed. They made their way out of the house through the shattered pane. The old man gave them a head start back up the path into the clearing before releasing the hounds from his control. As the hounds caught up with the visitors, they stopped abruptly and rose up on their hind legs. The largest of the hounds spoke to the intruders as they climbed back aboard their small ship. “Tell your masters not to land here. This world belongs to us.” A shotgun blast from behind to the head felled the hound. The visitors inside the ship killed the other two. “On the contrary,” the old man smiled smugly from behind the felled hound, “this world belongs to us. We were here first.”