Page 7 of The Pale Rider
“In time. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”
“Well, you have all the ingredients for the end of the world. Pestilence, famine, war, and conquest. How exactly do you plan to end all that by going to Washington, D.C.?”
Aeron just gave me this wicked grin.
“Because I have all the ingredients to stop all that.”
“How, when you didn’t find what you were looking for at that clinic?”
“Think, Speedy. Where is it written that the world will end with pestilence, famine, war, and conquest?”
“Every movie about the end of the world?”
“Think older.”
My body broke into goosebumps, and I got another flash. I saw my tattooed arms on a table reading a book. No, I was reading specific passages in the bible, and I was studying it hard.
“A company named after the son of Satan and the Book of Revelations? How are you going to stop something biblical?”
“We will kill the President of the United States.”
Chapter 4
W
as my life before this as fucked up as before I woke up in that clinic? I mean, I had pink hair, Alice in Wonderland tattoos all over my arms, and I named a blue baseball bat Smurfette. I still had no idea why everyone called me Speedy, but it had to be a lot more reasonable than killing the president for biblical reasons for some end of the world conspiracy theory.
“Are you some whack job, Aeron? How is killing the President of the United States going to stop any of this?”
“Remember Armilus, Speedy? Care to guess who was secretly the majority shareholder in that company? Isaiah Nahum. They planned all this.”
“You’ve told me stories. Do you actually have any proof?”
Aeron bolted to his feet.
“Stay here.”
When he came back out, he had a rucksack with him. I watched him pull a laptop out. I would have thought laptops would be obsolete, considering almost nothing had power unless there were backup generators. He powered it on and opened a file. A photo of a man pulled up. He was totally bald with bright blue eyes. There was something off about him.
“This is Isaiah. He didn’t use to be bald. He started shaving his head after he inserted himself as president.”
“He looks like an asshole. He looks like the kind of guy who would try to run a country during the end of the world, but how is killing him going to stop anything?”
Aeron looked totally irritated with me. Was this supposed to trigger some sort of memory? I was pretty sure I’d never met that guy before, but if he said I had, was I an awful person, and that was why I was in that clinic?
“Was I a wicked person, Aeron? Did you show me this photo because I knew this man and helped him? Do you want to get us together so you can kill us both?”
Aeron finally gave me this soft look like he might be a friendly person underneath all the gruff.
“You know him in a way, but you aren’t like him. You are nothing like him. We don’t plan on killing you. I really do wish you remembered something.”
“Why can’t you just tell me about myself? What’s the big deal about telling me?”
“Because of the way your memories were taken, Speedy. If I trigger them in the wrong way, you will go insane.”
Way to totally shit in my memory loss cornflakes. I guess I would have to deal with not knowing a damned thing about myself until it slowly came back to me. I guess I was just going to have to deal with it because I certainly didn’t want to lose my mind when the apocalypse was going on.
“Can you at least tell me why they call me Speedy, and I have a blue bat named Smurfette?”
