PRL Serials

“You trust him?” Sandra asks. 

She and Paul sit on the covered front porch of Paul’s house; Sandra at a square card table with an open book and notebook that she takes notes into as she reads, and Paul slowly rocking back and forth in a rocking chair. It is early and Sandra is reviewing her work before her school day starts. 

“I trust him as much as I can,” Paul says. “I don’t trust him around Sabine, but he know his drugs.”

“But you said Yuri the reason that blue meth was even out there,” Sandra says. She isn’t studying anymore, she looks at Paul curiously.  

“He ain’t make it. That’s what I want to know, who making this stuff that can change men into monsters, and why.”

“And Yuri ready to tell you that just cause you ain’t a detective no more?”

“Not exactly. If them boys are in trouble, Sandra, I got to help them.”

Sandra shakes her head slowly. 

“You right. I know it, but you been chasing Yuri for a while and he worse than he used to be right?”

“Enemies close and all that,” Paul says and then he stops rocking in his chair and stares at Sandra intently. “Last night, I got a vision. It was a dream, but it felt like more than that. I saw this girl, a young lady that I’ve met before but haven’t seen in a long time, and she told me where they are. She told me that Ivan and Clay are in trouble and they need help.”

“Paul,” Sandra says skeptically. “You worked up cause Yuri put that story in your head. That’s all a dream is, just you working out unresolved stuff from the day.”

“If that’s true, then I can compare the details. The young woman told me where they are. She said they are being held in Durham, at a secret hospital type place called the CZS. She showed me how to get to them, I could drive it right now.”

Sandra looks at him strangely. He doesn’t sound crazy, but the idea of receiving messages from visions definitely sounds crazy.

“Yuri didn’t give me that much information yesterday. When he comes, I can compare the details. And if it lines up, that’s all the confirmation I need and I’m gonna get them and I’m gonna burn that place to the ground.”

“What was the dream like?” Sandra asks. “What happened in it?”

Paul shrugs. “It was strange. I was dreaming about fishing I think, I was out on the water. Then she appeared in the sky, like she was interrupting my real dream and she told me her name, that she was far away but had spoken with Ivan in his dreams and learned that him and his boyfriend was being tortured. Then she showed me stuff in the sky, the building where they were, and the man who took them there. A doctor that we tried to stop the first time I had to deal with zombies. Worthington. When she left, I was dreaming again, but I woke up.”

Sandra doesn’t think that Paul is crazy and there is real certainty in his eyes.

“If it don’t line up, I won’t go, I won’t trust it,” he says to reassure her, and something about the way he says it gives her confidence.

She goes back to her reading and Young rocks slowly until Yuri parks on the curb in front of his house. He gets out of the driver side and a young woman that he recognizes gets out of the passengers side. 

They walk up to stand on the porch. Sandra recognizes the young woman and she glares at both of them.

“What’s up with you and black women?” Yuri asks Paul after he introduces himself to Sandra. 

“That is a good man,” Sandra says sternly, “show him some respect.”

Yuri nods quickly at her.

“This is Falon,” he says to Paul. “Y’all met before?”

Falon smiles at Paul and he glares at her.

“You got the nerve to come here after that mess you pulled at the restaurant?”

“I wasn’t myself,” Falon says. About a year ago, she’d run into Paul when she was helping a spider steal the powers of Ivan and Clay. It involved magic that neither of them fully understood and she was happy to move past it.

“I’m myself now,” Falon continues. She looks to Sandra. “I’m really sorry for what happened, but dealing with that magic stuff made me different.” Sandra nods with a mean look on her face. “Yuri tell me we got a common enemy,” she says to Paul.

“Chau’s watching him now,” Yuri chimes in with a big smile on his face.

“You find your daddy yet?” Paul asks Falon, sounding like his old detective-self. 

“No, but Yuri promised to help me. That’s why I’m here.”

“You know who cleaned up the crime scene from the blue meth thing?” Yuri asks.

“The team at KPD, I imagine,” Paul says. 

Yuri shakes his head. “You gotta know by now that the police is in on them zombies you been chasing. They ain’t making them, but they ain’t trying to figure it out after all this time either. It’s getting worse ain’t it?”

Sandra and Paul look at one another, and he lifts an eyebrow to indicate a point of overlap with the truth that Paul knows and that Yuri says.

“I had my hands on some crazy shit,” Yuri continues, “the blue meth was the last of it, but that was child’s play compared to what this other nigga been up to. The stuff we sold, we used that weird stuff to get the power we got. My doctor connect out of Georgia cooked that up. The zombies you keep running up on, the doctor I know helped with that, that’s why the blue stuff did what it did, but all that other stuff is somebody else. Dr. Worthington came to see me and Chau bled the truth out of him. He wants me to push more of that zombie making shit so he can turn some people and use them for something. He passed out before she got to that part.”

Paul shakes his head at Sandra whose eyes are wide with disbelief. It seems that Paul and Yuri are very much on the same page. 

“How her daddy figure into all this?” Paul asks.

“I’m still surprised you was ever a detective,” Yuri says shaking his head at Paul and when he catches a glimpse of Sandra’s disapproval, he adds, “I guess it’s easier to connect the dots from the inside. Her daddy turned up missing from that crime scene. She don’t want to believe it, but everybody in that house died, but his remains wasn’t in that mess, not according to nothing official. You know who else disappeared after they died? That bitch nigga Darker that killed my uncle,” Yuri says convincingly to maintain the lie that covered up the reality that he killed both his uncle Fire and the man Darker. “And I hear some people in Durham brought him back to life. Like I said yesterday, they do some crazy shit out there.”

“My daddy died,” Falon says, “but they brought him back to life. That’s what Worthington say. That’s the only reason he still alive, he promised to take me to him.”

Paul stands.

“I’m gonna grab my weapon and then we need to get on the road,” he says to Yuri.

“I wish I could go fight some monsters, I got the power for it, but if I did that, then I wouldn’t need to tell you about it, I could do it by myself. I got to work this from another angle. Chau wants to know who this man is and how he found her. She says they’re too smart to be CIA or the Feds. If you going to Durham, though, I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“What you want from all this?” Paul asks.

“I want to go into space,” Yuri says. “I want to find Alia and show her that I can be good. I’m helping you, old man, I’m on the side of the dumb, slow angels, no offense ma’am. Just trust that, because after today, I don’t know any of y’all. If we run into each other, we strangers. If you don’t like what I’m doing, you can do what you feel is best, but know that I’m not a friend of Worthington’s, even if I let him believe I am.”

When they return to Yuri’s house, Falon refuses Worthington’s offer for him to take her to her father. She leaves him with Chau and Yuri and she arrives back at Paul’s house just as he is loading a bag into the backseat. Sandra stands on the front porch with her books in her hand. 

“Get in!” he yells when he sees her, “I just gotta stop and see about something before we head to North Carolina.”