Rodrigo Beltran was leaning against a cold steel column, focusing intently on the train tracks below. A pair of rats were having a tug of war over a half-eaten slice of pizza, though from the fat on them, neither was hurting for food. Amusing as the sight might have been, it only served as a welcome distraction from what he was seeing out of the corner of his eye. A man dressed like he was ready to go on a killing spree. And from the way his gaze lingered on Rodrigo, he was on the top of the hit list.
The weirdo was as tall as an NBA player, and wearing a slim-fitting Gothic trench coat, the hem inches from reaching the filthy concrete of the subway. Beneath his hood, he concealed his face behind a gold mask that resembled a beast baring its fangs. He had to be using contact lenses because his eyes were blood-red with vertical slit pupils. It was December, so Halloween was out, though maybe the man was cosplaying as an obscure character, and on his way to a comic book convention.
But by the end of the second rock song blasting from Rodrigo’s earbuds since he’d first seen the man, his stomach was in knots. It was early afternoon, and they were in the back of a near-deserted station. The only other person on this side of the platform was a dazed-looking homeless man, slumped forward in his seat on a wooden bench. He raised a brown glass bottle wrapped in a paper bag to his chapped lips, oblivious to Rodrigo’s growing anxiety.
As Rodrigo felt the slight rumble of an approaching train, he fought the urge to stare right at the masked man, in case he intended to shove him in front of it. When the F train pulled to its familiar screeching halt, he nearly slammed into the parting doors in his rush to get on.
Now in the last car with at least a dozen people, he blew out the held breath threatening to suffocate him, and took a seat opposite the open doors. As he looked around, he was relieved the man must have been waiting for a different train.
But as the doors closed, and the train began its slow departure from the station, through the windows, he glimpsed a black shape looming over the homeless man. He was pinned by a gloved hand to the bench beneath him. Eyes widening, Rodrigo shot forward in his seat just as there was a gleam of steel and a streak of red. Then the train left the surreal scene behind, replacing it with the placid white tile wall.
As the train entered the tunnel and the windows darkened, Rodrigo glanced around at the other passengers. Most people’s faces were lost in their phones or had their headphones plugged in like him. Jaded New Yorkers determined to mind their own business. Still, what was more likely? Being the sole witness to an assault that occurred inside a split-second, or that it had been a hallucination drummed up out of sleep deprivation? After a few more minutes of paranoia, he convinced himself of the latter and became re-immersed in his music.
Half an hour later, after crossing from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn, the train came to his stop. Still tuning the world out in a haze of guitar riffs and rebellious lyrics, he rose and got off. He went past the dozing token booth clerk and up the subway steps to the surface. Despite the sun’s rays beaming down on him, the chill in the air forced him to button his black denim jacket.
Rodrigo’s suburban neighborhood, Lunar Peak, was no Park Slope, but it was relatively safe. The worst thing within a mile was an old observation tower with a grim past. Over the years, several people had climbed it and committed suicide by diving off. Supposedly the most recent was a girl, who multiple people witnessed falling from the top of the tower. They never found her body.
Of course, the local conspiracy theorists and religious nuts had a field day with that one. Even now, crazy rumors about her having been swallowed up by the earth and taken straight to Hell persisted. That earned the tower the nickname “Hell’s Spiral.” Ludicrous as it sounded, it still gave off an eerie vibe which kept almost everyone away. And that isolation made it Rodrigo’s favorite place to go.
His little brother, Carlito, stayed home sick today, so Rodrigo figured he’d surprise him with a decent lunch from Happy’s Chinese restaurant. After racing against Rodrigo to see who could finish their Buffalo wings first, the poor kid’s consolation prize was heartburn. He pulled an all-nighter, watching a smorgasbord of television from cartoons to deep sci-fi shows, while Rodrigo slipped in and out of consciousness in an effort to keep him company.
He went into the small takeout joint and ordered chicken with black bean sauce for himself, and a mild chicken with snow peas for Carlito. As he took a seat at one of two tables to wait, his phone vibrated in the pocket of his faded gray jeans.
He pulled it out to see a text from an unknown number. “The end is nigh. You must come accept the urn if you wish to live. Time and location will be disclosed through other means.”
Snickering, Rodrigo deleted the message, and put his phone away. Whatever they were selling, he wasn’t interested.
“Your order is ready,” the frail Chinese man said from behind the counter.
But if it was a con, that might have been one of the worst sales pitches in history. What urn? What other means? What was that message trying to encourage?
“The food you ordered is ready,” the man repeated, shoving the bag out in front of him.
“Oh, sorry. Thanks,” Rodrigo said as he handed the man the money. He grabbed the bag off the counter and left.
After walking a few blocks, he reached his single-family detached home. The three-story house was over a hundred years old and looked it. The light blue bricks were spalling in places and the metal rails on either side of the short flight of steps leading up to the porch were rusting.
“I’m home!” Rodrigo shouted as he entered the hallway, locking the door behind him.
Carlito ambled down the stairs, aged enough they squeaked even under his meager weight, and hugged him.
“Hey, how you feeling?” Rodrigo asked.
“Better. Bigger news, though. Your school called about you cutting class. I told them I’d let Mom know,” Carlito said, his brow creased in a frown. Then his disapproving expression turned into a triumphant grin. “Not.”
Rodrigo gave him a high five. “Nice save. Hopefully that keeps them off my back until winter break’s—” One of the steps gave a delayed squeak. He stared at them over his brother’s mop of curly black hair, fearing he’d find the living storm cloud that was their mother, Miriam, or her little stool pigeon, delighted to have something to report. “No one else is home yet, right?”
“Course not. So, what’d you get?” Carlito asked, pointing at the bag of Chinese food. He trailed behind Rodrigo into the living room, where he put the food on the glass coffee table. Carlito tore the stapled paper bag open, and the excitement melted off his face as if he’d missed the lottery by a single number. “I wanted General Tso’s.”
“Yeah? Well, General Tso’s didn’t want you,” Rodrigo said as he passed Carlito a plastic fork. His brother turned on the TV, pulled up the newest episode of his favorite pirate anime, and bobbed his head as the upbeat Japanese theme song about dreams and friendship began.
After finishing their food and the show, they were flicking through channels when the front door opened.
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“I’m back, loser.” Their thirteen-year-old sister stomped into the room with her high, shoulder-length pigtails swaying.
“Hey, Raquel. I didn’t sleep too well earlier. Going to take a nap,” Carlito said, fleeing back upstairs to the room he and Rodrigo shared.
Raquel’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you doing home this early?”
“I was sick, so they let me skip my last two periods,” Rodrigo lied. In reality, Mr. Nichols had tried to take his phone because he glanced at it to check the time. With history being the one subject he was acing, Rodrigo figured he could apologize, put the phone away, and pay extra attention to the mind-numbing lesson on the Industrial Revolution. But in the end, he was kicked out of class for refusing to have his phone confiscated, until his mother deigned to go pick it up. Then, not at all in the mood for yet another follow-up lecture from the condescending Principal Verona, he had sneaked past the security guards and left the building.
“Uh-huh. Looks real life-threatening. I’m sure Mom will want to take you to the emergency room when I tell her,” Raquel said.
“Feel free, but do that, and I might let it slip about how you’ve been video chatting with that emo kid she hates. What’s his name again? Johnny? Jimmy?” Then, with a snap of his fingers, Rodrigo said, “Jamie.”
The blood drained from Raquel’s round face. “You wouldn’t.”
“Mind your business, I’ll mind mine.”
“Fine,” Raquel snarled.
“Glad that’s settled.” He stretched and loosed an exaggerated yawn. “Think I’ll take a nap myself.”
“You’re sixteen. Shouldn’t you be out job-hunting or chasing after girls who are allergic to you?” Raquel asked, trying to bounce back by getting the last word.
“Whatever.” Rodrigo went up to his room. He wasn’t tired, he just wanted to get away from his obnoxious sister. Carlito was already snoring, so he had to be quiet. He took a seat at his computer desk, cluttered with incomplete homework assignments, textbooks on military history throughout the ages, and odds and ends he was selling online. Hanging off a pair of nails in the pine green wall above it, were two gold fencing medals from the Y10 and Y12 saber national championships. They hung there surrounded by open space, as if in mockery of what could have been, but even years later, he didn’t have the heart to take them down. Enrolling him in the sport when he was seven was probably the most interest his father had ever taken in him.
Returning his attention to the monitor, out of curiosity, he googled news stories about an assault in the subway. It had been over an hour, so if what he thought he saw actually happened, word should have gotten out by now. Unless it was a murder and the masked man somehow hid the homeless guy’s body. But moving a corpse in the middle of the day...that was ridiculous. Right?
Next, he searched for what the text message had said. There were no exact or even close matches, so that ruled out it being some pointless chain letter. What it led to was funeral talk and the latest doomsday theories. Everything he came across sounded absurd. On the many forums he visited, they talked about the machines taking over, a zombie apocalypse, and even perishing in hellfire. The only one that ever held any water to Rodrigo was volatile world leaders destroying them all in nuclear warfare. Still, there had been doomsayers since the beginning of time, yet the earth continued to spin.
Raquel barged into the room after a while.
Not for the first time, Rodrigo cursed his door’s lack of a lock. “What do you want?”
“It’s dinnertime. You idiots have been doing a whole lotta nothing up here for hours.”
In disbelief, he pulled back his window shade and glanced outside. It was already as dark as midnight. He had lost track of time as he sifted through information.
Raquel snatched a blue handball off Rodrigo’s dresser, used more by him as a stress ball than for play recently, and lobbed it across the room at the back of Carlito’s head.
He shot up in his bed with a cry, then rubbed the spot where the ball had struck him. “What’s wrong with you? Do you get your kicks from bullying kids smaller than you?”
“Nope. That’s a treat reserved just for you,” Raquel said in her fake sweet voice. “Can we head downstairs now? Unlike you truants, I ate cafeteria food, not a nice Chinese meal.”
After making their way down the steps, the three of them entered the dining room. As he did daily for the last five-and-a-half years, the first thing Rodrigo noticed was his father’s empty chair at the head of the rectangular table. Edward’s mysterious job as a researcher had kept him away from home a lot, but brought in enough cash it supported the entire family. He left suddenly and without explanation a day in June when Rodrigo was eleven. They only discussed the remaining chair once, shortly after it became vacant.
“Mom, why are we still using five chairs?” Rodrigo had asked.
“I’m keeping it there until Edward comes back.”
“I thought Dad ditched us.”
“Daddy wouldn’t do that, dum-dum!” a seven-year-old Raquel yelled.
“Ignore your brother, honey. He’ll be back soon,” Miriam said.
That was when Rodrigo made the grave mistake of striding over to his father’s chair and plopping himself down in it. “Until then, I guess that makes me the man of the—”
A stainless steel ladle, still wet with chunky salsa, lashed out, smacking him hard across the face. Miriam had it raised over his head, ready to hit him again. “Get out of that seat, you little parasite. Now!”
Being the first time either parent struck him, Rodrigo had been stunned as sauce and blood trickled down his forehead. Future occurrences would teach him if not for Carlito’s well-timed bawling, his mother would have happily continued.
“Boy, will you quit standing there looking stupid and sit down?” Miriam asked now. With her dark hair disheveled and the deep bags under her eyes, she looked more worn out than usual. Ever since Edward’s disappearance, she had worked a string of dead-end jobs, which she inevitably quit or got fired from for various reasons.
He took his place at the table next to Carlito and across from Raquel. The farthest seat from his mother.
The bland yellow rice with broiled chicken she had prepared was eaten quietly, except for Raquel babbling on about her day, which Rodrigo was only half-listening to. “I got a weird text telling me to go to that creepy tower tomorrow at noon for the answer, but I never asked a question.”
Rodrigo’s fork missed the chicken he was stabbing for, clinking against his plate. He raised his eyes from the soulless food he was staring at to meet hers. “What? Who from?”
“It was an unknown number. What’s got you so pumped up, anyway?”
For once, there was no benefit in lying to her. “I got a strange text from an unknown number, too.”
“Probably one of your moron friends trying to be funny. They’ll get bored after we don’t respond.”
That theory didn’t add up. Rodrigo could count his friends on one hand, and none of them had his sister’s number. It could have been one of his cousins, but neither of them had the temperament for a subtle gag like this. Still, the Spiral was nearby and tomorrow was Saturday. “Maybe I’ll check it out, just to make sure it’s a joke.”
“Sounds interesting,” Carlito said. “I’m coming, too.”
“We all know Rodrigo’s headed nowhere in life, but aren’t you supposed to be the brains?” Raquel asked. “Ever hear of stranger danger?”
“It’ll be two of us and daytime.”
“Yeah, that’ll stop ‘em,” Raquel muttered, rolling her eyes.
Raquel’s shooting holes in their plans was all to provoke Miriam into joining the conversation. “Rodrigo, I couldn’t care less what you do, but you’re not taking Carlito anywhere near that tower.”
“Mom, all that stuff about the disappearing bodies is an urban legend. I’ve been there hundreds of times. Nothing’s gonna happen to him.”
“Keep pushing me, boy, and you won’t leave this house for the entire break,” Miriam said, her voice hard. She shoved away from the table, the legs of her chair scraping across the floor, and rose. Then she left the room, the matter settled as far as she was concerned.
Raquel had that slight look of regret she always got whenever her instigation escalated things further than anticipated, yet as usual, her guilt would be short-lived.
Rodrigo said nothing as he took his mother’s half-eaten plate and his empty one into the kitchen to get started on the dishes.
After everyone finished eating, Rodrigo and Carlito remained in the living room.
The instant Raquel’s door slammed shut on the second floor, Carlito asked, “So, when are we sneaking out?”