WARNING: This is NOT the BEGINNING of “EVEREST & THE EXCEPTIONS.” To start at the beginning, go HERE.
The crowd echoes down hails of “Bravo!” within earshot of the dressing room door as Chuck slams it shut behind him. Not again. This is insane. So what if the kid is getting a consistently better reaction from audiences than he is? That snot fetus has a lot to learn and even he admits that Chuck is his mentor, his Broadway mensch. Chuck’s debut on the Great White Way is still surprising them all. No one saw this coming, not the crowds or the critics, not even Chuck’s agent who protested the choice quite emphatically.
“Why would you make the move to theater? You’re the number five box office draw in the nation for the men-over-thirty and women-slightly-older demographic. That’s your sweet spot.”
“That spot doesn’t sound sweet. It sounds like car chases with hookers dressed as nuns.”
“Sure, but for laughs. Big money there - sometimes.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Chuck’s agent Byron had pushed hard for sequeling, Chuck milking every slight hit into a lesser follow-up with a distinct bump in pay.
“I don’t know, Byron. They’re just glorified TV movies.”
“Blasphemy, Chuck. They paid for this house and that pool and all the cocaine.”
“The cocaine doesn’t last. They don’t tell you when you get addicted to cocaine that you’ll keep wanting more.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the one thing they do tell you.”
“And the pool gets green. How do I ungreen my pool?”
“Listen, Quiv. It’s 1981 and you aren’t getting any younger. You have to cash up - take every lucrative offer, and that does NOT include Broadway. You’ll crash.”
“I won’t crash. I’ll show what I can actually do. The art, you know.”
“Well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean - art. Okay. Not really what you do. Not what you’ve ever done. You were discovered at the rodeo pre-show.”
“Don’t judge me because I want to push the boundaries of my craft.”
“Craft? You’re not a thespian. You’re a stuntman. You’ve got an amazing mustache and ladies want to explore it. That’s the top and bottom of your appeal. Ride it, great. Get loaded. I’ll take the trip with you - but don’t mistake any of that for talent, Quiv.”
“I just want to push myself - find that dream role.”
“It doesn’t exist. And you couldn’t pull it off even if it did.”
The conversation had bounced around Chuck McQuiver’s memory for months. He had fired Byron soon after. Well, actually, he had gotten coked up, Harleyed down to Byron’s condo in the Hills and beat his car in with a baseball bat. It landed Chuck a night in jail, a month in drug rehab, and a supporting bit on Broadway. It’s what he thought he had wanted - but what his new agent calls “damage control.”
When he considered his theater debut, he imagined performing Miller or Ibsen. Instead, he is second-banana to the singing orphan boy. Sure, Chuck gets a near-standing ovation each night after he performs his character’s signature tune Murder the Motherless Child. That song gets consistent laughs. The director says it is because Chuck is so committed, but Chuck thinks it is because he didn’t realize the song was supposed to be funny. But, the response to the kid is on another level. The applause out there just keeps going. Chuck buries his ears into his palms, elbows propped on his desk, staring at the near-empty bottle of bourbon he plans to consider his companion for the evening.
There is a rap on the dressing room door. The sound of a ring around a thin knuckle. So velvet, Chuck McQuiver almost doesn’t hear it.
“I’ll hang it up myself in wardrobe on the way out, Gene.”
“Who’s Gene?” It is a wondrous voice, like the lilt of wind. A rich, thick low rumble for a woman. Soul-pleasing. Tender and coaxing its way through the cracks and crevices, but without forcing its way with too much flirtiness.
“Oh,” Chuck retorts, jarred. He pulls open the door enough to see her. Her green eyes the first revelation, Chuck McQuiver gasps just a little as he discovers her there. Sandy blonde hair tightened behind her head in a bun with the exception of one lock that dangles and curls in the front without reason. Like a broken violin string amid an otherwise perfectly-tuned orchestra. That lock of hair undoes him, “You - uh, you looking for the, um - the kid or the director?”
“I’m looking for Chuck McQuiver.”
“I’m Chuck McQuiver.”
“Yes. I know. That’s why I’m standing here.”
She sidles into the room, seizing the lone empty chair in the corner and crossing her legs just slowly enough to reinforce that she is not the least bit star-struck.
“Did you - enjoy the show?”
“I didn’t see the show.”
“You didn’t see the show?”
“Am I going to need to repeat everything I say tonight, Chuck? Because I can leave if this is a bit too much after a matinee day.”
“I’m sorry. Who are you?”
“Who I am is not nearly as important as who I am bringing to your attention.”
“Oh - so this isn’t - a fan call?”
“Do I look like a fan, Chuck McQuiver? Do I appear to be the sort of woman who wastes her time craving a stranger and then embarrassing herself to get a disappointing taste of him? Do I give that sort of impression?”
Chuck swallows hard.
“Correct. I do not. I am not your fan. But, I am an admirer. You have - qualities and skills - but most importantly, I believe that you have needs. And that is why you and I are going to be such a sublime match.”
“Needs? We’ve all got needs.”
“Not the way that you do,” the blonde urges, “You have stumbled your way accidentally into every success that has led you to this point in your life, and yet you cannot comprehend why you are so intrinsically unhappy. So unsatisfied. You have multiple needs that you cannot even identify, because you have not built up a tenacity of character that could inform you on the precise nature of those needs.”
What is happening here? Is this a burgeoning date? Is this a prank? It doesn’t dawn on Chuck until now to wonder how this woman made her way backstage and who even knows she is having a direct sit down with the one and only Chuck McQuiver. But, that stray curled hair.
“I’m sorry. You do realize that I am the Chuck McQuiver. Four-time People’s Choice Award winner for tastiest mustache. Honorary Stuntman Hall of Fame. June Centerfold for Popular Mechanics. Defensive end for Notre Dame. Box-office behemoth and star of the “Electric Keg” franchise? Exactly what needs do you assume that I have?”
“Purpose,” she barely pauses, “Brightness. Vision. Exhale.”
Chuck feels the corners of his lips and eyes droop downward. Time for a drink.
“A reason to exist,” she adds.
“Did you not hear my resumé?
“I don’t need to hear your resumé. It’s wax paper. Your resumé is thingamajigs. Far too many men crave what you have, Chuck McQuiver, but everyone who achieves it is left with a hollow draft. Your life is as useless as your pool that you cannot seem to ungreen. That’s why I am here. I offer a gift.” She reaches into the inside pocket of her blazer, about to reveal something hidden within.
“Hup hup,” Chuck halts her, “Pouring a drink first.” He reaches for the bourbon and for two coffee mugs scattered across the dressing table, “Do you have a name?”
She offers her hand, “Betty.” He reaches to kiss her fingers, but her fist goes taut, “The drink?”
Chuck pours two fingers of bourbon into the mug and hands it to her, his palm grazing hers. It is colder than he expects. She downs the drink in a single gulp and removes a photograph from her blazer, pushing it along the table toward Chuck.
“Who’s that schlub?”
“That - “ Betty whispers with precision, “...is the role of a lifetime.”
The corners of Chuck’s eyes upturn, “Film or stage?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. How are you for submersing yourself into a role?”
“The Method? Eh. Can’t even have lunch with Brando anymore. Stanislavsky turned him into a real prick.”
“That’s not what I said. How deeply are you capable of preparing? How entrenched in the life are you willing to bury yourself?”
“Okay,” Chuck’s interest is peaked now, “So, you’re what? With a studio? Rival agency? Independent producer? Who are you with?”
“I am only Betty, Mr. McQuiver. And I am eternally independent. But, I do share vital common interests with those who would extend you a generous offer.”
Chuck glances down at the photograph, studying the man. He seems average. Kind eyes. A little lost. Propensity to wear tartan plaid. The photo is detective-grade, quick and dirty and captured without the subject aware, “Who is this?”
“He’s nothing special. It’s not who he is, but to whom he is connected.”
“All right, I’ll bite. To whom is he connected?”
Betty slides another photograph slowly across the dressing table. This time, she keeps the image face down.
“Rubber meeting the road now, Chuck.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re asking larger questions.”
“I only asked who this wet bag of cement knows who is so important?”
“Indeed. But, you need to realize that what is happening right now is called an all-in moment.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t okay. You are asking to see this next photograph. That is your choice. You don’t ever have to turn it over and look at it. You can simply walk away now.”
“This is my dressing room.”
Betty doesn’t wait for Chuck’s stupidity to wane, “Or, you can let that tug at your curiosity have its way. You can touch this photograph for yourself, flip it over, and find out exactly how your life is about to change. But, once you’ve seen the contents of this five-by-seven black-and-white, I can promise you without a doubt, Chuck McQuiver, that there will be no going back.”
Chuck wriggles his nose in thought so hard that he almost goes cross-eyed. He rubs his temples with his thumbs and glances down at the back of the photograph. He breathes in his nose and out his mouth, glances back up to Betty’s beautiful greens, and snatches the photo out of her hand - lifting it, studying it, perplexed, “It’s just a couple of boys.”
“Twin boys. Eleven years old in about a month. That will be the day.”
“The day of what?”
“The day you replace their father.”
Chuck McQuiver stares. Two identical little boys. Freckles, mop-tops - the whole bit. Another detective-grade image of them laughing with the man who was in the first photograph. They seem, well - they seem like a family.
“What are we talking about now?”
“You. Chuck McQuiver. You are going to replace that man - and those boys are going to be your mission.”
“These boys?”
“Those boys.”
“My mission?”
“Our mission.”
“I don’t - wait. What?! What are you saying? Is this not about an acting gig?”
“Of course this is about an acting gig - but not just any gig. The final gig. The greatest role you could ever possibly play.”
“How on earth am I supposed to do that?”
“The details are already in motion.”
“I just have to say yes?”
“You already did.”
“What?”
“You said yes when you flipped over that photograph. You said yes when you laid eyes on those two boys.” Betty taps the photo gingerly with her finger.
“What’s so special about these boys?”
“They’re - exceptions.”
“I - I don’t look anything like their father.”
“You will by the time they turn eleven. And I will look like their mother.”
“How - why would we do that? What would happen to the parents?”
“Oh - I buried the lead. On the boys’ eleventh birthday, the parents are going to die.”
Chuck stands abruptly without intention. His eyes wide now, he gleans an unsettled coldness from Betty’s greens. Beginning to understand that this is nefarious ilk, Chuck reaches for the doorknob only to find two thugs he has never seen before standing guard outside of his dressing room. Chuck closes the door and slowly eases back into his dressing chair, drawing a slug from the rapidly emptying bourbon.
“We will simply replace them.”
“I DON’T LOOK LIKE THOSE BOYS’ FATHER! I am CHUCK McQUIVER and the whole world knows my face!”
“Now, we get to the best part. Chuck, there is worldwide fame - and then there is becoming an icon. Do you know the difference?”
Chuck’s slack-jawed silence betrays the truth that he is struggling to keep up.
“James Dean. Marilyn Monroe. Elvis Presley. You are about to join an elite rank - only you will have a front-row seat to watch it all play out.”
“What?”
“Chuck McQuiver is going to disappear tonight.”
“Now - wait just one second...”
Betty presses on without reserve, “Into absolute oblivion. No one will ever see you again. No one will find you - and in the process, you will become the enigma of early-eighties cinema. Your name, your filmography, your estate - your very legend - it will all skyrocket to infinity as millions who honestly merely abided you on their screens reassess who you are in your mysterious absence and make the determination that your legacy be declared that of an icon. One of the greatest of the greats. No body will be found. Only mystery. Only legend. Only myth. Isn’t it absolutely delicious?”
What little oxygen exists in Chuck’s brain vacates, the train of this thought abandoning him. He screws up his face as he stares again at the photograph of the two boys. A million questions attempt to burrow out of his psyche, but only one turns into an actual ask, “Why me?”
“Because you do your own stunts.”
Chuck finishes the bourbon, leans back into his dressing chair and allows all of this information to slowly wash over him. To stop being Chuck McQuiver. He has never really thought it through with Betty’s clarity, but the reality compels. All of this. The grueling film shoots. The muscle aches that keep him on the pills just to sleep. The emasculating meetings with executives and publicists. The way the public-at-large misunderstands all of it. The audience doesn’t want Chuck to have what Chuck wants and needs. They want him to be an army toy, a laughing stock, an amusement to bide time and a face to decorate the grocery aisle mags. Every time he thinks the next thing might be the thing that makes him feel a thing, it turns out to be a lower rung, further away from clarity and peace. Betty lights a cigarette while she waits for his gears to finish turning.
“We would do this together?”
“Husband and wife - or that’s the story.”
“With benefits?”
“Aren’t you adorable?” she smiles for the first time tonight, “Consistently majoring on the minors.”
Chuck McQuiver leans all the way back and smiles at Betty. A knowing smile. One of assent, though he couldn’t say no at this point anyway. Betty gives a pleasant nod, acknowledging the beginning of this partnership, then she opens the door and gives an instruction to the two hulking guards in Latin.
Eighteen hours later, Chuck McQuiver is startled awake. He cannot see anything, but he can hear the road passing briskly underneath him. He feels around and realizes he is blindfolded and spread out on a cushy bed in the back of a tour bus - on swift move to a destination unknown. The space is posh and smells like weed, of that Chuck is certain - but he cannot leave the room. He has made every attempt, luxurious as it might be. Probably a loaner from a rock tour. Chuck has been in the company of enough Aerosmith groupies to identify the scent. He cannot even seem to budge the blindfold. It is as if it is magnetized to the top half of his face. After hours of calling out to no answer and attempting to poke at every corner of the room for an exit, Chuck decides to embrace the decadence, alternating naps and indulging on whatever snacks he discovers blindly in the mini-fridge. He eats what he hopes is a Jell-o Pudding Pop. The rhythm of the road rolling beneath him is a breezy, easy feeling.
Chuck wonders how they’ll do it. How will they forge his mysterious disappearance to his audience? It truly is a captivating thought. The chance to observe the world grieving over him, perplexed at his disappearance. To sit invisibly at his own funeral, in a manner of speaking. To be finally, ultimately loved for something he never even has to genuinely earn.
Then, somewhere around the 522nd mile, Chuck McQuiver, for the first time, really starts to think about those twin boys.
As random and inconsequential as that photograph was, there was something pure and heartbreaking in the eyes of those two near-eleven-year-olds. The smile just barely peeking on the smaller one - a glint sideways toward his brother insinuating innocent mischief was afoot. It seemed as if their happiness was effortless, enjoying their family dynamic and the complete oblivion that anyone else was out there looking to change all of that. Why did this need to happen? Chuck had been given very little true information within this last whirlwind of an overnight and a hangover. Betty said the boys were exceptions. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Exceptions to what? And what is so wrong about the father that he needs to be replaced? Replaced with, of all people, stuntman-actor Chuck McQuiver?
Chuck drifts back to sleep, dreaming of roping steers and turning a Camaro intentionally into a fiery flip and the rogue dangling hair strand of a green-eyed blonde, only rousing when he realizes the bus has eased to a stop. It has been over twenty hours. He isn’t actually awakened by the idle of the bus. It is the startling suck-pop of the technology-laden blindfold, releasing Chuck’s face from the vacuum seal and giving him pause to regain his vision.
The door of his suite unlocks automatically and swings ajar. Chuck staggers up, realizing he lost his shirt in the scrum of his siesta and scrambling to ball it up and tuck it under his armpit. His eyes are slowly refocusing as he feels his way down the thin hall of this luxury bus, the small evenly-paced air-conditioning vents refreshing his graying chest hair as he passes. He reaches the front of the vehicle. There is no driver visible. Only a mirrored and enclosed vestibule where the driver must be. No other sign of life. The door to the outside world swings open and Chuck is taken aback by the chill of the night air.
Chuck’s eyes reach consensus as he yanks on his crumpled ball of a snap-on denim collared shirt. The one he wore when Sarah Purcell interviewed him on Real People. He steps out of the bus and stands on a paved road in front of a lone sign that reads Catoosa, Oklahoma.
Chuck hears the inimitable hiss of the bus door closing behind him. The overloud run-up of the motor as it pulls away, leaving the cowboy stranded or exactly where he is supposed to be. Who the hell knows. As the tail lights of the bus clear over the horizon, Chuck scans the distance for a next step. There is only one structure illuminated on this strange stretch of Route 66. About a hundred yards away, lit like a beacon in the center of a waterfront: a structure shaped like an enormous and smiling blue whale, mouth wide open as if to invite Chuck McQuiver to Jonah his way inside.
Chuck slips his hands in his jeans pockets and pivots in the center of Route 66. He glances about for any other sign of humanity. Tree branches surrender to the typically harsh Oklahoma wind. The surroundings smell of pine and distant bonfires. No sound or sign of another person. Only Chuck McQuiver. The whale it is.
Approaching the structure, Chuck is thoroughly confused. The gaping maw of the smiling beast is large enough for Chuck to enter with ease, but this place feels like an amateur playground. Crude and frivolous, it is a discount roadside attraction at best. For the kids. To swim and eat a packed sandwich and maybe purchase a refrigerator magnet to cement the memory. But, Chuck persists. What else is he going to do? He feels his way further back, deeper into the colder corners, treading through an inch of water at his boots. He must be approaching the tail now. He feels a corner. With it, another light. A small square glowing blue inside the tip of the farthest fin. As Chuck approaches the panel, he can sense a red laser grid assessing his form and movements. A low hum invades the space and an image appears on the panel: a lone fingerprint. Chuck leans in and studies it, assuming it is making a request. Chuck extends his forefinger, pressing it against the mark.
Chuck hears an affirmative beep. Chuck considers how peculiar it is that one knows from the sound of a beep whether one did the right thing or the wrong thing. As if there was once a rule book signifying the difference between an affirmative and negative beep.
The room seals. A flush. The water drains. And the floor glows and swirls into a beacon of light, a standing circle two feet in diameter beckoning Chuck to position himself at its center. Hesitant but now quite intrigued, Chuck wanders to the vibrant blue sphere and stands directly in the center. The room growls with reverb and a larger laser grid scans floor-to-ceiling, detecting every square inch of Chuck and, he assumes, confirming there is no other living thing in this room. A beep. A beep. A beep.
ZIP. A man-sized pneumatic tube surrounds Chuck on all sides with lightning speed and Chuck McQuiver is suddenly hurtled with tremendous velocity, dropping with the force of a hurricane wind down, down, a pivot, a slide. The underground path visible outside the translucent entrapment Chuck finds himself in seems something otherworldly. Technologies and lights and images that Chuck could not possibly explain. This must be government. Or intelligence. Or of some other plane of existence than the one with which he is familiar. Either way, Chuck smells money.
He can see the floor rushing toward him now. A high-tech surgeon’s theater. A cavalcade of shadowed figures seated without their faces illuminated, preparing to witness whatever is about to happen. And just as quickly and unexpectedly as Chuck McQuiver was ushered into the tube, his body is spit out onto a strange hybrid of dentist chair and autopsy table. Clamps pop out from every angle, locking him down at wrists, elbows, ankles, throat - Chuck finds himself unable to wriggle out in the slightest. His eyes go wide and before he can eke out a profanity of protest, Chuck feels a syringe on a robotic arm plunge deep into the left side of his neck, rendering him physically immobile and incapable of sound. His eyelids, however, will not seem to close - an intentional side effect. For hundreds of projected screens throughout the room begin playing moments and ideas at lightning pace: a history of the man he will be playing, of the life of the twin boys up to now. An instilling of values and ideals, a reprogramming. The information tumbles into his brain far more rapidly than Chuck can make sense of it and yet he understands that he is somehow gleaning it all. He is thankful for the distraction. For he can also see a laser hot blade on the robotic arm spinning, arcing to carve, approaching the face of Chuck McQuiver, about to remove it forever.
“Good morning, sunshine.”
Startled, Chuck reaches up instinctively to discover his mustache is gone. Damn it. That whole face removal thing was seriously intense. He begins to cry.
“This is not the best way to start.”
Chuck looks up at the woman seated at his bedside. Brunette, harsh. Matronly. Not much to take home. Mousy. Tender. Mean streak. Clutches a Hermes Birkin handbag as well as his right hand, not out of tenderness. But, those green eyes, “Betty?”
“Not any more. Best get used to that right now.”
“What do we call each other.”
“The boys will call us Mother and Father. Structure is paramount, so we can’t seem too loose with tenderness, even with one another.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that from now on, we are the Mannings. Antiseptic like that. Not so much individuals as a collective. Mannings.”
“But, I have a first name, right?”
She breaks his finger.
“Shit!”
“Get used to the hierarchy. My instructions followed by your skills. You do, say, and go as I determine. You do not protest. You do not have an opinion to weigh.”
“You think the boys will believe that?”
“Well - that’s not the way we’re going to make it appear to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, this is the eighties. You are going to parent those boys the same broken way every father does. You aren’t going to try and discover what makes them unique and come alive and chase that. You are going to instead expect them to rise to chase what makes you unique and come alive. You will be the center of the universe of the household and, in so being, will keep those boys in a perpetual state of inadequacy and insecurity. You will raise a voice or a fist or a drink and I will cower and urge them to keep it all secret for my sake. You know the drill. Feeds the shame. It’s the easiest thing in the world to crush a boy’s spirit. You just need to make him need to be something other than he actually is. It’s all in your programming now.”
“I - I don’t want to crush those boys’ spirits.”
“Well, no one wants to crush anyone. But, this is a necessary evil. For those boys can never discover who they truly are. It would be far too dangerous.”
“I feel nauseated.”
“Probably because I broke your finger. Try to move it now.”
He does. It pops and crackles. Snaps back into place of its own accord. Fixed.
“How did I do that?”
“You didn’t do that. They did. We’re upgraded. You and I are really going to go through the shit for the next four years, so the least they could do was give us some fairly beneficial modifications. Aggressive healing for one.”
“That’s great - but could they also do something about the pain?”
“Don’t be an infant. Pain makes you sharp. You need to know the precision of it if you are going to inflict it on a regular basis. The healing prompt is necessary - primarily because it is speeding up the reparations from the cosmetic surgery. But, you will also need it time and again. And we haven’t many days before we need to look and act exactly like the Mannings.“
“What are the other modifications?”
“Again - we are not the same. You and I have been given different upgrades. I haven’t thoroughly scoured your list, but I believe there is something there about precision of memory as well as psychological profiling and tech savvy.”
“Oh,” he replies blankly.
“Which means you will remember everything you see, be able to read people based on facial cues and small gestures, and pretty much be able to break into or out of anything.”
“And the self-healing. Just how far does that one go?”
“No idea. I could test it.”
“I’m good.”
“But, there is one thing they need to make crystal clear before you and I complete our preparation and head out into the real world once again. One rule.”
“And that is?”
“You will never. Never. Never tell another soul that you were once Chuck McQuiver. You can observe and enjoy the parade of his remembrance, but he is no longer you. Never speak of it again. If that were to ever happen, the moment the words are uttered out of your sickly little mouth, you will cease to exist. Of that, they will make certain.”
“They?”
Mother Manning leans in softly as if to kiss her new husband on the cheek, but she stops short of contact, instead pursing her fuchsia lips just shy of his left ear and whispering, almost imperceptibly, Melior Quam. She then drops a tabloid on his chest and saunters out of the recuperation room.
The hell? What is Melior Quam? Is that the they? Chuck clutches the publication and curls its pages toward his tired eyes. There it all is. Just as she prophesied. The whole Chuck McQuiver disappearance. The confusion. The police search. The Broadway cast in mourning, even the kid. Damn. The fans coming out of the woodwork. His former co-stars and directors and publicists in tears and repentance, including the nun hookers. Crowds singing Murder the Motherless Child in unison. The theorists crafting conspiracies about the stuntman secretly aiding the Feds in tracking Russian spies. The protests for the truth. God, how long have I been unconscious? The fan shrines. The vigils outside his home where the pool has recently been ungreened. Tributes of his face spray-painted in graffiti on a concrete wall above a throughway in Cuba. Viva la McQuiver!
He crumples the page into a heap in his lap. He got it all. Everything he could have imagined or dreamed. He’s a legend. Five minutes in, he’s already kind of over it.
One week of intensive training later, Father Manning is strapped in for safety as gravity pulls him against the doorless gape of a helicopter roaring above the plains of Arizona. Mother (nee’ Betty) is wearing an identical headset to his, buckled into the next seat. They are being rushed to the scene of the tragic accident that will play out momentarily.
“Are we square?” she clarifies, “Everything changes in minutes.”
“I could use some Big Red.”
“No one on this helicopter has any chewing gum. You need to take care of that sort of thing before we are on a helicopter.”
“You asked if I was square and that’s the one thing.”
“I do not have any Big Red.”
“Your loss. It’s really cinnamony.”
“I didn’t say I’ve never had Big Red.”
Silence for a few miles. A dot in motion on an undulating, endless hot sea of road emerges near the horizon. A Chevy Malibu on a family vacation that will never see fruition. Four people in a station wagon and they simply have no idea.
“Why do we need to actually kill them?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, if we are meant to replace them, could they not simply be taken? Imprisoned? Do we really need to…”
“I never said we were going to kill the parents. I said the parents are going to die today.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We are not going to be the cause of their death. We are going to intercept the death. Make it so the boys are never aware that it happens.”
Amid all the information that has been pumped into the former Chuck McQuiver’s psyche lately, nowhere is he able to access any detail that makes sense of what former Betty has just clarified.
“Wait. We aren’t killing them?”
“Of course not. That is murder.”
“I know it’s murder. It’s why all of this has been what most would call morally dubious. I’ve had diarrhea for a week. You don’t think you could have spelled out that there would be no murder?”
“I don’t know all the nonsense you assume. They didn’t give me that upgrade!”
“How do you KNOW the parents are going to die?!”
“Because this is when it happens,” she screams above the sound of the rotor.
“What?!”
“This. This is when it happens. This is when they die. This was always going to be when they die because this has always been when they die.”
“Always been?! It hasn’t happened yet!”
“In a manner of speaking, no - and in a truer manner of speaking, yes.”
“Are you - are - are you - is this - from the future?”
“Honestly. You are too simple. We have so much work to do. No, Manning. You don’t get it. Just hold on and take the ride as it comes.”
“But, I don’t UNDERSTAND!”
“It’s too late to understand.”
“WHY?!”
“Because it’s FIVE TWENTY-TWO!”
A bolt of lightning emerges from the heavens - striking the Chevy Malibu on the road below and causing the car to burst into flames. It abruptly swerves toward a nearby cliff overshadowing a lake. The former Chuck McQuiver finds himself pushed, repelled out of the side helicopter door, rapidly approaching the flaming station wagon. He is flanked on either side by wordless masked special force ops with a logo in Latin on their chests. Former Betty is in the same formation falling a few yards from him. The man on Chuck’s left pings a sonar toward the rear window of the car, shattering it as the flaming Malibu veers off the edge of the cliff. He can, for the first time, hear the voices of the two boys, eleven-years-old today, screaming for dear life. He and Betty are hurled legs first into the rear window as Chuck sees the automobile collide with the surface of the water, tumbling into the wet dark, screams muted into silence. He can see the boys have both been rendered unconscious from the impact. His instinct is to panic. Shouldn’t he be drowning? But, he isn’t. He is startled to discover both he and Betty can breathe - and in the dreary shadows of the depth of the lake, he can make out the special ops forces lifting out the bodies of the parents he and former Betty are now replacing.
Former Chuck understands now. He is not here to destroy the parents. He is here to save the boys. He yanks each by the crook of their arm, and with an adrenaline rush, shoves his way out of the jettisoned back window, both boys in tow. His legs screaming, he burrows hard, utilizing every stuntman muscle he has ever invested time developing to propel their way to the surface - rising, breaking through, and rolling the boys’ limp bodies onto the opposite shore.
Staring down at their non-breathing and innocent faces, a different sort of adrenaline and awareness sets in and former Chuck discovers strategic instinct in how to revive the boys precisely. Former Betty joins the effort urgently and - after a dire moment, the sputter and cries of one twin sound out - and then the other.
“There there, Harrison. Cough it out. Cough it up,” Mother urges.
The younger sits up, blue lips trembling as he sees the dark black smoke rise from the surface of the water, “Father?”
Hearing the name out loud startles the man who was once McQuiver. He leans toward the boy, considers placing his palm on the child’s face to console him. Mother gives an imperceptible nod of no, but Chuck persists, “What is it, Everest?”
Bursting into tears, eleven-year-old Everest Manning pleads, “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry!”
Taking a swift exhale to keep the surprising tear from emerging out of his own eye, Father declines a hug and instead gives the boy an emotionless stare, “Of course you are, son.” Everest, of his own accord, burrows his head slowly into his father’s knees and weeps as Harrison lays quietly on the ground beside them.
The former Chuck McQuiver simply replies, “Just don’t ever do that again.”
Next: Read "EVEREST & THE EXCEPTIONS" Chapter Six PREVIEW: the horrific and thrilling continuation of Mark Steele’s upcoming fictional novel coming in October 2024.