The Vacuum

Part 2

The room was bright and drastically out of focus, moving in and out as people moved in and out of her field of vision. The stinging was almost unbearable: burning, itching, piercing, stinging. It rocketed and moved through every fiber of consciousness.

Legs, arms, fingers, toes. Skin, hair. Blood, veins. The only way to tell they were still there was because they were all in pain. Every organ. Every heartbeat was a vibrating reverberation reminding the mind that she was still awake and alive.

"Do you know your name?"

Alex opened her eyes lazily, blinking away the reminisce of sleep as the dark outside began to light with the first signs of daylight. She pushed the hair away from her face and sat up from the bed. She looked down at her arms and legs, testing the effectiveness in the early hours of the morning after being in the car for so long.

Trudging out of the room with small, stiff steps she made her way to the minuscule excuse for a kitchen and flipped on the one person coffee pot. She leaned against the glass of the sliding door and looked out over the beings of the canyon.

"I'm real!"

She turned her head sharply and looked around for the bellowing, angry voice but the house was silent and still. Squeezing her eyes closed, she leaned her head forward before going to grab a mug and rinsed it out in the sink. She poured herself a large cup and returned to the door, looking out over the landscape as the sun started to work its way through the stone formations.

Working her shoulder for a moment she turned to go and get dressed and ready.

She was an experienced hiker. She was good at it...always had been and she had hiked some of the most difficult terrains in the world. It was a brain numbed experience and she both loved and hated that at the same time.

She looked over one of the rocks she was on and the formations over the ledge. Taking a few steps back she adjusted the backpack style camera case on her shoulders and planted her feet. Springing into a sprint she thrust her legs hard to jump over the imposing gap in the rocks. Flailing her legs she slid to the stop on the other side, legs bending and boots pushing up rocks and gravel as she slid into a landing with her arms out.

She took a deep breath and looked back over the expanse she had just jumped. She let out a little smile and lowered the backpack, pulling the canteen from it to take a long satisfying sip while she looked around her.

Thousands of years of slow-moving glaciers had carved out this canyon, pushing and pulling to impose its will on the now dry terrain. It was an unfathomable force, undeniable, rock hard as a solid mans will. She lowered the canteen from her pink lips and pushed her hair back from where it had escaped from the ponytail her eyes catching something in the hot sun.

She moved over to a shallow crevasse in the earth where there had once been a fire burning. The red rocks around it were sun worn and aged. The red in them seemed to move through like pulsing veins filled with blood before leaking out into a pinker hue. She pulled her camera and got close, taking texture and color photos.

Veins leaking blood, broken vessels and columns running and spraying down tender sun stained skin.

She shook her head and looked around smiling when she saw a shrub with a beautiful, intricate web woven into the branches. Kneeling down she focused her eyes on its maker: a beautiful yellow gold and black spider with long, prickly legs and multiple beady eyes.

Alex smiled to herself and switched camera's, taking out the old Nikon FG and checking the 35 millimeter leans. She lifted the viewfinder to her eyes and ignored the bead of sweat that ran down the side of her nose, momentarily stringing her lips with its saltiness.

She smiled as she took the picture, focusing the lens in and out to gain clarity over the little godlike creator. Focusing it back out she frowned when a dark figure appeared in the periphery. By the time she twisted her sweating hand back to focus the image was gone.

She shook her head and cursed her shot mind as she lowered the instrument back down and sat back on her butt.

"Fucking therapy." She muttered as she searched her bag and pulled out an almost empty baggie. "What good did you really do?" It taught her to ignore, that was all.

She opened the bag and pulled out the little bag of papers. She slipped some of the once bright green herb into the center and rolled it together, licking along the crease with her already drying tongue. Sighing she pulled out her lighter again and lit, trying to forget and trying to engulf herself in the landscape.

___________________________

Mac slammed his hands onto the bar at the Luna Mesa, waiting impatiently for Walter to pay attention and come over to him. The old man raised an eyebrow as he did, watching Mac grab a bottle from behind what was meant to be an unspoken barricade and pour himself two shot.

Mac took the first with vigor, whipping off his mouth with the back of his hand as he stared at the old man coming over to him. "That little bitch from yesterday was in the canyon." He spat out, lip curling.

"Did she see the caves?" Walter asked in a low quiet voice.

Mac shook his head and slammed back the second. "No, don't think so but she was taking pictures. Gotta get rid of her."

Walter frowned and leaned forward. "Like you got rid of those hikers a few months back? And those kids?" Mac poured himself another shot and nodded with a ghost of a smirk appearing on his angular features. "We get any more dead body's or raped little girls turning up we're going to have a mess of questions."

Mac snarled. "So what?"

Walter considered. "So low profile means not drawing attention."

Mac gritted his teeth. There were two things he was good at in this world. Killing and fucking. His father didn't want him to do either. "What do ya fucking want than?" He asked waiting for orders from his father, the only man in this world that he actually feared.

Mac was frightening, pee your pants if you saw him in a dark alley frightening but Walter was the one who had taught him how to be violent and ruthless. Yet he could still stand behind the bar and play innocent wise bartender while figuring out ways to get you alone to gut you.

Walter shrugged, rubbing his lips together and making his white pointy beard move as one unified object. "She's just a little girl Mac. You can scare away a little girl." He looked over his son as he scolded. "Just keep it in your pants and done kill or rape her. Send her back to the city scared shitless and never coming back....but without a police report."

Mac frowned and leaned on the bar, clinking the two shot glasses in between his thick, rough fingers. He could do that. He could scare the little bitch away.

________________________

Alex sat on the corner of the white porcelain tub, her hands protected by the latex again. She had needed to use distilled water because of the mineral content and ph balance, but it was worth it.

She moved one of the pieces of paper over, turning it with the tongues as she watched formations appear in staggering stillness, just like they had been out in the desert.

Biting the inside of her lip she pulled the photograph up and hung it over the line draped over the shower rod. She smiled to herself as she transferred the next one and watched the images appear on that too. This would be a good one; the one with the beautiful little, probably deadly, weaver in it. She smiled as the image began to appear in the developer. Her lips curled higher as she watched the dark spots appear first, tracing out the dark body. She focused her eyes on it before they darkened to the corner of the page where another dark shadow was appearing. Shaking her head to herself she turned back to the light lines of webs, watching them grow and stretch. Little drops of morning moisture that she hadn't noticed in real life appeared and flicked the band of her gloves in satisfaction.

Turning her eyes back her smile dropped when the phantom that she was sure had been in her head appeared in the corner of the frame. She pulled it out and held the paper close to her face as she squinted her eyes. On the negative, it had just looked like a dark blob...maybe a man but it could have just as easily been a rock or a smug.

It was clearly a phantom man in this...complete with no face.