Disclaimer:
FX: the Series and its characters are not mine. I'm just borrowing them
for fun--no profit involved. They belong to Winterset Productions, Rysher
Entertainment, and Hallmark Entertainment. The series is based on the
characters created by Robert T. Magginson and Gary Fleeman.
DREAM A LITTLE DREAM--PART 1
What IS that SOUND? Angie's brain screamed at her. Through the fog
and the haze of too much sleep after too little sleep, an annoying
Brrriiinnnng sound kept interrupting her dream. Her shoulder length blond
hair was tangled around her face, and she brushed it back with her hand
before pulling the covers up over her head.
Too late; the machine picked up the message. She lazily stretched,
a good cat stretch, knowing that the call could wait now. In the
background she heard Rollie's voice talking to her machine. She picked up
the bedside phone just in time to hear a click as he hung up, then silence.
"Damn," she muttered, petting her cat, Chiops, that appeared out of
nowhere, as usual. I wonder what he wants. She pictured her boss/partner
in the special effects firm of Tyler FX. He was probably red-eyed from
working all night on some crazy idea that would once again confirm his
position as "the best in the business." His dark hair would be wild and
the five o'clock shadow that he had recently started neglecting would be
approaching a thick stubble. Somehow, he would probably have his 6'2''
frame wound into some impossibly tight place while he tightened this screw
or adjusted that knob. She smiled as she remembered his frantic
speaker-phone call last week telling her that he needed her right away,
only to find him hanging from the ceiling by a steel cable, too far up to
drop down, not high enough to grab the rafters. A glitch in the software
had stranded him as he tested his newest version of the Descender winch
system.
Without putting on a robe over her silky nightshirt, she padded on
bare feet across the hardwood floor to her answering machine, in the living
space of her apartment. The light flashed annoyingly. Technically, it
wasn't her machine. It was one of those archaic bits of solder and
circuitry that Lucinda had insisted on loaning her while she was working on
her computer system at home. Electronic guts were strewn about the table
where she'd left them in frustration the night before. Hardware glitches
were such a pain. Angie mentally made a note to repair the computer
before she went to the workshop. Let him wait. That would teach him to
play with the equipment without her.
She pressed the insistent red flashing light that would activate
the answering machine.
"Ang," Rollie's voice cracked, sounding tight and strange, "take a
few days off and don't come into the workshop. I need some time to sort
things out. Don't ask me to explain now or ever, just trust me, Ok? I'll
call later."
Angie blinked and pulled back as if she had been slapped, then she
pressed rewind and played the message again. It didn't change.
"What the Hell is going on?" she asked her cat.
****
Rollie was drowning, not in water, but in slime. Blood-red, foamy
slime. He felt it lapping at his mouth, coming ever nearer to engulfing
him. He couldn't swim in it, it would not support his weight. He sank
into the gooey stuff, clawing for something to hold on to. His head buzzed
with a strange, low-level sound that he could not make out. How had he
miscalculated so badly that he had filled the workshop with the "Blood of
the Slime Monster"(Part 3). The frothy, gelatinous stuff was everywhere.
He tried to wade through it, but slipped and went under. The material
filled his mouth and nose. He fought to regain his feet, but felt himself
growing dizzy from lack of air. The goo burned his eyes and fogged his
vision blood red. He struggled to clear an air pocket but failed as he
involuntarily inhaled the stuff. The Australian choked, coughing. When he
gasped, trying to get air into his lungs, but none was to be had. The red
foam disappeared in the blackness as he felt himself floating...
****
This had to be about Taia, Angie brooded as she soldered and
reconnected parts. He hadn't said a word about it, but it had been a year
ago this week that she had died. He had just brooded and been chippy. Damn
him and his male pride. He needed his friends more than ever now. Why had
he just shut her out like that? Hadn't she been there when he'd cried like
a baby after Leo died? No one else held him and let him grieve for his
friend. He had trusted her then, what was wrong now that he couldn't come
to her. They were friends, more, they were two halves of a whole. There
hadn't ever been anything sexual between them, there couldn't have been.
It would have been like incest. But they were partners in more than
business.
As she snapped the case shut on the computer she slammed the
soldering gun down a little harder than necessary. The Hell with Mr.
Rollie Tyler, let him have his time. She absently started running
diagnostics . Playing the tape from the machine, she ran the digital voice
analyzer, knowing that Rollie's voice was on file, using that as an excuse.
In reality, she hoped through some miracle, the words would change. They
didn't , though, the same flat, tight, strange inflection came through on
the analyzer.
Wait, there was something... a break...the pattern wasn't
continuous. She played it back again, seeing the same thing.
****
"Angie, are you sure that you're not just imagining something is
wrong?"Francis Gatti asked his cell phone. He stood in an alley, his back
to the biting New York wind. The beat cop was glaring at him, telling him
with body language to get off the phone and get back to the dead body in
the dumpster. "Look, He's been a little stressed lately, we all have
been..." he didn't finish the sentence 'since Leo died' but Angie knew that
was what he meant.
"It wasn't his voice on the machine, Francis." Angie said,
frustrated that they were wasting time while something could be wrong. She
was almost, but not quite, breathless, skating as hard as she could for the
workshop while talking to Francis on the cell phone. Distracted a moment,
she barely missed colliding with a cab.
"Look, Francis, something is really wrong. He doesn't pick up his
pages, and Bluey doesn't kick on the voice mail." she pleaded, trying to
convince him. "I gotta go before I kill myself. Just meet me there as
soon as you can." She clicked the phone off and concentrated on skating.
"God, I hope Rollie is ok," she spoke softly to herself, "I'll never
forgive myself for not just dropping everything and going to the workshop
if..." She would not let herself complete the sentence, even in her most
private thoughts.
****
Rollie was far from ok, but he was alive. There was a ringing in his ears
that was familiar and yet foreign. It was more static than tintinitis. It
began to fade as he drew closer to waking. The room wobbled back into
focus, his eyes still burned from contact with the red goo. He gagged and
retched, bringing up what seemed gallons of the stuff from deep within
himself. Gasping for air, he rolled over on his back, discovered that was
a mistake, and coughed violently. More scarlet ooze emerged from his
lungs.
"I must have almost drowned in it before it dissolved," he thought to
himself, too weak to even whisper the words. Every fiber of his being
ached, and his heart pounded, still not slowed down from the panic of
moments before. He just lay on his side, trying to breathe.
"Into the lungs", his brain told his body, "out of the lungs" Some
time later, perhaps one millennium, maybe an eon, or what seemed like a
comparable length of time, a thought hit his brain like a shock after
accidentally touching a short in bad wiring. The "blood" wasn't supposed
to dissolve!!. Anytime they used it on the set, they could depend on a
couple of hours, at least, for the grips to get the mess wiped up or hosed
down and washed away.
"What the Bloody Hell is going on?" the Aussie croaked, finding his
voice finally. His heart continued to pump furiously in his chest. Panic
washed over him as it had when the red foam rose over his head and
"drowned" him.
"Get a grip, Rollie, " his own voice echoed in his ears. He knew
that if he only got his racing heart under control then the fear would
lessen.
"Right!," he almost shouted, berating himself for not thinking of
it sooner, "Fight or flight response, adrenaline." What he was feeling was
his body's biological response to a bad situation. It was normal, and even
better, there was no way he could control it. Breaking down what was going
on helped him relax. If he could understand it, he could deal with it. It
was just like an f/x problem.
There wasn't much that Rollie Tyler couldn't understand, so he had
trouble dealing with very little in life. He might not have enjoyed all of
the curves the process of living threw him, but he dealt with them. Being
out of control, and not knowing why, was his worst nightmare.
Feeling more relaxed, he attempted to push up from the floor into a
sitting position, only to find that his arms rebelled. They shook from the
aftermath of the adrenaline, threatening to give out on him. He finally
managed to sit, however, and took a moment to get his breath back. Damn,
he felt weak, he cursed to himself. He hadn't felt this beat up since he'd
first met Lucinda and had been framed for murder.
His breathing back to normal and his heart rate near its usual
rhythm, he looked around the room to see what sort of mess he'd have to
clean up before Angie got there. She'd be livid if she knew he was messing
around with dangerous stuff alone and almost got himself killed, again.
His jaw dropped open when he saw the room clearly for the first time. It
was absolutely normal! There was not a drop of slime monster blood to be
seen. He stared down at his clothes. He was completely dry and clean. He
felt a slight wetness near the hairline on his forehead, however, and upon
manual exploration, his fingers came away scarlet. The texture was wrong,
though, to be slime monster blood. The pain of his head told him that the
fluid was Australian f/x man blood, alien to the U.S., but not Earth. He
dabbed at it absently, then realized he must have cut his head when he went
from upright to lying on the floor. He remembered nothing of the trip.
"I've got to be going crazy, or I screwed up when I grabbed the chemicals off the shelf. I must have mixed up something that produced a
toxic gas of some kind or another." he spoke to himself again, finding the
sound of his voice soothing. After a moment, he struggled to his feet
feeling a bit dizzy. Taking four awkward steps to the computer desk, he
let himself drop into the chair, then reached to pick up his PDA to
activate Bluey. The electronic gizmo that he considered a part of himself
was no where to be found on the desktop. Looking around, he spied Bluey
advancing toward him. It was unusual that he could not "bark"
electronically. That was embedded in his programming. What was more
unusual was that the mechanical "dog" was moving at all. Rollie was sure
that he had put Bluey in rest mode to conserve his batteries. All he had
to do to make him active was to press a button on the PDA, but there was no
PDA, so he could not have pressed the button. Things were getting more
confusing by the second.
Rollie grabbed a napkin from the last take out meal that he had
gotten and had not yet thrown away. Pressing the napkin against his head,
he found that the bleeding had almost stopped. Bluey drew nearer, almost
within reach. Rollie bent down to pick him up, planning on dissecting the
little insect to find out what went wrong when something did... Go wrong,
that is. The second he touched Bluey, his hand jerked back compulsively.
He had been shocked! Last week he had installed a feature in Bluey to keep
anyone from just picking his little doggie up and carrying him off. If
anyone not in Bluey's video recognition program touched him, the
electronic dog released a shock from a large capacitor that Rollie had
added.
"Bloody wonderful," Rollie grumbled, "Now you're turning against
me, too." He stepped back from his former friend and tried to figure how
to shut his little buddy off so he could repair it. The insect-like
contraption continued to advance toward him. Finally it emitted a
bark--only the bark was not Bluey's bark, rather it sounded deep and
hostile, like that from an agitated Rottweiler. Rollie jumped back,
stumbling on something on the floor. Looking down he saw Angie's prone
body, bright red leaking from what looked like bullet holes in too many
places to count. His vision blurred with shock and he started to fall,
catching himself on the corner of the desk. She hadn't been there a moment
earlier, she couldn't have been. He walked across that very spot when he
moved from where he had awakened to the desk.
Rollie quickly kneeled down at Angie's side, reaching out, afraid
to touch her. He could see that she was breathing, barely, but there was
so much blood. Just as he turned to grab his cell phone to call 911, he
caught a glimpse of something coming at the side of his head at a high rate
of speed, then blackness, as he felt himself falling again.
Chapter Two
Shylo
Email: irvinnd@michiana.org
