Detective Marcus Colston of the Knoxville Police Department was murdered yesterday. It won’t appear that way to the majority of investigators who find his body, save one very astute detective whose name is the antithesis of his birth certificate, and the murderer will never face justice for the crime.
The murderer is a slippery young man, with edges caked in butter to melt when warm hands take hold.
He is Yuri James, a former drug dealer, former apprentice to drug czars who used names that obscured their real selves like masks; simple names as big as they had to seem to be. Yuri is equal parts all of them, even the ones he knew only anecdotally. Yuri burns bright and hot, like Fire, disappears into shadows when necessary, like Darker, and can find his way into anything, like Smoke.
But Yuri is a new generation, very much the upgrade, gangster 2.0, and he is not happy to be just a drug dealer when he had made the acquaintance of very interesting people who were willing to introduce him to new avenues of life.
In killing his predecessors, Yuri had created chaos that he could capitalize on if he is smart. He knew that he had to fill the void of some scary men and he did it the way they had taught him; he killed brutally before audiences and he enlisted the aid of the enigmatic Dr. Thomas Eakran. The latter was a Faustian bargain that Yuri was happy to make, though he could not know how the doctor would change his life. Dr. Eakran had become the primary drug manufacturer for the drug ring that his uncle Fire had tried to wrestle from Darker before their deaths, and Yuri was excited to meet him and figure out how they would work together into the future.
Eakran was skeptical of Yuri at first and he has insisted that Yuri demonstrate his worthiness for cooperation in the absence of his former partners.
“You want me to do what?” Yuri asked incredulously.
“Is your objection moral or just general confusion as to why I would ask you to abduct someone for me when we have only just met?” Eakran asked.
“Just…” Yuri shook his head. He was confused. The two met for lunch in rural Georgia and their food got cold over the long, awkward pauses in their conversation. Yuri had trouble reading the doctor. Usually, he was good at reading people and determining what they wanted from him, people were easy that way, but Eakran said things like putting a thing between them on the table with no explanation and asking for a response, he was cryptic even if it was true that he didn’t mean to be as his eyes broadcast when they started at Yuri blankly waiting for a response.
“I must retrieve my Alia. She is off having adventures and I believe she has had enough. Can you bring her to my lab?”
Yuri shrugged, “If that’s what you need.”
Eakran sighed and looked away. “Fear is boring, young man. Infatuation was intriguing. Your uncle’s rage was unpredictable and honestly entertaining. Your sycophancy will wear thin quickly, and once I’m bored, your best case scenario is my indifference.”
“I’ll get Alia, email me some info and I’ll have her to you in a few weeks.” Yuri talked quickly as Eakran considered him closely.
He has potential, Eakran thought, but he missed Darker. He had enjoyed the years of their cooperation, and the years of their discord had been most entertaining as he undermined Darker’s efforts in order to remind him that he needed him. They were truly complex emotions for Eakran who hoped the Yuri proved to be more than an eager business partner. His and Darker’s friendship was very intimate, though Eakran had no idea of Darker’s romantic aspirations for them. Eakran, as a Druinte of the planet Druont, has never had an intimate relationship with anyone, and it is not common social practice on his home planet to mate or have intimate partners. But his partnership with Darker was the closest, most intense interaction that he had ever had with anyone.
Eakran missed Darker as he shooed Yuri away. But then it dawned on him, he could make things very interesting. Eakran had lost his Alia, but he had acquired a new, very interesting subject in his IBF basement laboratory, a young man named Kevin, who had a surprising connection to his past on his home planet. It seems that an old colleague of his, a Druinte called Belfrat, had perfected technology that allowed its user to make real their imagination, and it had found its way to Earth and into the brain of the young man Kevin. The young man has a death wish and he had only fallen into the doctor’s clutches because he hoped Eakran would kill him in order to remove the device from his brain, but Eakran chose to study it and reverse engineer it instead. And he had recently completed it. He had thought about using it himself, but Druintes do not experiment on themselves and the man Kevin was living proof that the technology was not fatal to humans. He thought about giving it to his new assistant, the woman Maria who was proving to be a great asset to his work, even if she had no advanced education. But Maria had extraordinary talents of her own that had been caused by Druinte technology and he was not only trying to understand how that had happened to her, but how her unique brain chemistry might react to the Belfrat device.
“Say, Yuri,” Eakran said rummaging through his pockets. Yuri eagerly walked back to the outside table at the restaurant. “I have something for you.” He produced what looked like a pocket-sized flashlight. Yuri looked at it curiously. “Quick exam. I suspect from your breathing that you may have a deviated septum.” Yuri was confused again and didn’t move. “Just look up, and I’ll shine this in your nose.” Eakran held the device out as Yuri slowly lifted his head. “It’s the benefit of working with a doctor, I can even correct it for you.” When he was close, Eakran shoved the device inside of Yuri’s nose, quicker than he could fight it, and before long, it was settling into the complex neural circuitry of his brain and Yuri could not properly control his own muscles. Eakran grabbed him like the two were hugging as people passed them, and before long, Yuri was back to himself, but confused as to what had transpired.
“Very well then, breathe easy my new friend.” Eakran patted him on the back. “I expect to see my Alia in two week.”
Yuri nodded. His brain was foggy, but it cleared.
“I have given you an amazing gift, and I can take it away,” Eakran said cryptically. “Whatever you imagine will appear. Serve me well, keep me entertained, you can be a god among men. But don’t cross me Yuri. It would be boring. See you soon.”
Yuri watches Eakran walk away and the man truly gives him the creeps. Yuri thinks about wrapping himself in a blanket when he feels the hairs on his arm stand up. It is a warm day, but Eakran leaves him with the shivers, and just as he imagines it, Yuri is wrapped in a blanket.
Whatever I imagine, he thinks to himself.
He decides to kill Detective Marcus Colton as a matter of diligence. He found out about his connection to Smoke through the new people who looked to him as their boss and he found Colston in his house completely unaware.
“Young is gonna find you and lock you under the jail,” Colston said defiantly when it was clear that he could not go for his gun as Yuri aimed at him.
Yuri laughed heartily. “I’m big league now. I ain’t got time for local shit no more. Andy Griffith need a new bad guy. But you a loose end I suppose. Get up on the table.”
Yuri doesn’t know this, but Eakran had made an adjustment to his Belfrat device. It is not an exact replica of the device in Kevin’s brain.
“Pull your pants down, underwear too.”
Kevin’s device can only bring his imagination into reality temporarily.
“Any last words?”
Yuri didn’t let him start to speak before he disappeared the table underneath the man’s feet while simultaneously creating a rope around his neck that was tied to a light fixture on the ceiling. He also created a bottle of lotion and paper towels to add to the veracity of the scene. Then he left.
Yuri’s device rearranged the atoms of an object of the user’s choosing into whatever the user imagined. It was a complex problem that Belfrat, the original designer, had avoided by using a dark matter conversion that Eakran could not replicate on Earth, making the man Kevin truly unique.
Yuri is an individual as well, his creations seems to be permanent, and his next target is this Alia that Eakran can’t shut up about.
Maria Moreno does have extraordinary abilities, and even the good doctor Eakran is not completely aware of them. Yes, Maria has the ability to control minds, but pretty soon, the alien chemicals in her brain, that she had been exposed to in her youth, will completely saturate her mind and Maria will become something new, something spectacular.
And it could not be coming at a more opportune time. Eakran might conjecture that her new position next to him at the IBF and the intense nature of the work they do together, has increased her stress level, which has affected her brain chemistry, which could definitely be the case. Maria has been forced to cope with extreme stress and things were only ratcheting up. Eakran sent her to Durham, North Carolina where she has been shadowing Dr. Roy Worthington as he finishes preparations on a gift that Maria will deliver to Eakran. It is truly disturbing work, but Maria has seen a lot working next to Eakran. Watching Dr. Worthington remove and reattach limbs, scoop out organs and perform procedures, is difficult, but Maria is there for all of it.
“Dr. Eakran will appreciate your summary, I’m sure,” Worthington insisted. “He was regretful that he could not join me. But you are an attentive assistant.”
Maria knew that Eakran would indeed love to hear her summary of the procedure that she witnesses. He is a strange man. But Maria has learned so much from him, and not yet what she truly seeks. Maria wants to go to Druont, she had been taken there as a child, and once she learns how to do that, she will kill Eakran and free all of his patients, including Dr. Cousins who was one of Eakran’s former assistants.
She is struggling. Maria works with men of questionable morals and one wonders what effect that has on a person.
PRL Serials 