[EternalPen]

Synopsis: Trey is diagnosed with a deadly virus that is believed to have wiped out the Roanoak colony back in the 1500's. The virus was dubbed "The Croatoan" and there is but one cure. The cure only has a small chance of success but, as Trey is about to find out, the Indian roots of the cure go farther back than even the doctors knew. He must face his fears in his own mind to survive, and ultimately cure, the virus.


***A Door And It’s Victim***

There was one bullet left in Kyle’s, gun, and Trey struggled for nearly three straight hours with himself, tossing around the idea that he could join Tracy, where ever she was now.

He had just killed someone, he had just killed someone he promised to protect, he just broke that promise to protect, and he also had no other way to get that door open. He was in emotional and physical pain, and he would likely bleed to death anyway. He just didn’t see enough reason to move on.

Still, though… he had to try.

He started to see the magic of better days, better outcomes, and possible solutions.

First off, Trey needed to take care of his bleeding leg and arm. He took Tracy’s green sweater, and used his previous weapon, the sharp piece of metal, to cut strips out of it. He then proceeded to tie them, tightly, around the bullet wound in his calf and shoulder. He chose Tracy’s sweater as a reminder of how he failed, and how he just needed to try harder next time.

If there was one…

He tried over and over to open the door, but it would not budge. There was no food in the ship, other than the meat off of Kyle and Tracy’s bones, but he knew he would do no such thing. He was starting to get very hungry, and he thought this might have been the third consecutive day without food or water. In those terms, he should be really sick or in the hospital, if there was one around here.

He began to miss the simplicities of life, like napping, cooling off in front of the television, or eating. He smiled at the last one. He missed it a lot.

He began to miss his family, too. His sister, away on a trip, his father, back at their old house, and even his step-mother, who married his father with no concern over what happened to his children. He missed them all, and could only remember the nice things they had done for him.

Then he did something he tried so hard not to do anymore. He wished his real mother, Marie, was there for him. He wondered where she was right now, and if she was well.

He knew it wouldn’t happen, but he tried to fool himself into thinking she would come back from wherever she went off to if he wished hard enough. If he thought of the lessons he learned from that beautiful, young woman, she would come back. He remembered the things she had taught him and how they affected his life.

He glanced over at Tracy’s grave. Trey made it out of scrap metal lying around, to continue protecting her dignity. Her clothes were shredded and ripped and no longer sufficiently covered her unclothed body, so he did what he could with what he had.

Trey’s mother had told him that if he ever made a promise to anyone, especially a woman, that he was to keep it no matter what. He still struggled with the morality of his decision. Had he kept his promise to protect, or had he broken it with his own two hands?

He also remembered how far he had come, or fallen, from where he stood as a child.

Trey and his mother watched old horror flicks all the time, and they made it a tradition every year. On New Year’s Eve, they would spend the entire day and night watching all of that years most horribly rated scary films. Only the ones that had a star, or less if possible, made it into their marathon. Films like those never quite made it far enough to get any star-centered rating, but they found and viewed them anyway.

Trey’s mind flew back to his last, and most fond, memory of her. The week they had together before she left his dad and him, all alone.

“I don’t get it!” Marie stated to Trey the last year she stayed with him, when he was only thirteen. The year their tradition had to start four weeks before New Year’s Eve. “Why is the woman the one who gets killed every time? When a woman sees a man holding a knife coming for her, why can’t she just turn around and sock ‘em one? It makes no sense!”

“Yes it does!” Trey countered, “Women don’t have it in them to fight back, much less kill someone!”

“Bullshit!” she blurted.

“Momma!” Trey gasped, horrified. “You aren’t supposed to say that! Daddy said if I curse, I get grounded!”

“Well, then!” She told him back, “I’ll just have to get grounded. Hmm… what for?” She paused for a moment before she answered him back. “I’ll get grounded from work. I’m not allowed to go until next week.”

Trey’s face lit up; time away from work with his mother was valuable. He still had school, though.

“What was the word I used again?” She asked him, “For the record.”

“Bullshit.” He repeated her, smiling. He thought, in his young mind, that this was funny.

She gasped and put the index finger of her right hand on his nose. His smile vanished.

“You said it, too! You’re grounded from school!”

The smile returned, instantly.

They finished their movies that day. There were four about vampires, one about a killer car, one about creatures from the deep, two about werewolves, and they had one that had vampires AND werewolves, but they were out of time. They had spent a consecutive twelve hours, each film being about an hour and a half, and this last one was two. They had grown tired of the movies, and decided to quit early.

They stayed up late, still. The night was filled with dozens of sodas, a mountain of snack mix and chips, and an endless onslaught of Uno games.

Trey’s father came in around four that morning, as he had jus returned from a business trip. He was tired, and barely mumbled “Hello.” Before lying on the couch and falling asleep.

They stayed up until six, when Marie called her work and got the next week off for a “Family Emergency”. She was the best worker there, so they asked no questions and gave her a week right away. Trey had fallen asleep while she was calling, and she took him back to his bedroom, where she fell asleep with him.

They both woke up around three that afternoon and started off the week that they spent “grounded”.

She took him for ice cream at one of the most expensive places Trey had ever seen, La Crème Crémaillère, and spent nearly thirty dollars on each of them. It was the best thing Trey ever had.

The entire week they did things Trey never usually got to do. He skipped out on school, it was just him and his mother, they ate at the “restaurant’ that Trey wouldn’t seem to pronounce, she let Trey drive the car after telling him how to work the basic functions, and many other different things. Trey, put simply, had the best week of his life.

And the worst.

The last day, Marie decided to prove her statement at the beginning of the week. She knew that a woman could kill if necessary, and she had some experience hunting before. She took Trey hunting, just the two of them.

“You ever done this before?” Trey asked her.

“Naw,” She answered him, lying. “I just want to see if I’ve got it in me to kill.”

She had killed deer before, but she knew this might impress him.

“So why didn’t dad come?” He asked her. “You know, just so we have someone with gun safety?”

“I know a thing or two about that.” Marie told him reassuringly. She smiled to herself.

“So,” Trey asked, “Nothing bad will happen?”

“Nothing.” She said.

“You promise?” He asked, sincerely.

“Yes, honey. I promise.”

***

Trey shook his head. He loved remembering that week with his mom, but tried to refrain from it as most as he could. He didn’t love how it ended. How she left them both and traveled far away.

He turned his attention to the door because he needed to get through, no matter what. He wondered to himself what made the first one open when Wallace commanded it. He began to wonder if it was alive.

A thought blew through his head; a loose leaf among a forest in the fall. More followed until he thought of it more a tree of falling leaves than a single one of itself.

If the door was alive, could it think? If it could think, could it hear? If it could hear, should he tell it the story of Wallace? Thinking of Wallace, he wondered if it was at all possible he was still alive. Wondering if Wallace was alive, he wondered if Wallace was the Captain, therefore the only one who could open the door, even if it was from a different world.

This sprouted another tree. Was this another world, or a dream? Was it a side-affect of the medicine, or the main affect? Was the cure working, or worsening? Was he alive, or working through purgatory?

He did not know the answer to any of these questions, but knew how to answer a few of them. He told Wallace’s story to the door.

When he tried it, nothing happened. The doors were not alive, could not think, and didn’t need entertainment. They only worked off of keys and Captains who had them.

He imagined if the doors were alive, they would be snickering and giggling.

He spent a long time just thinking again, but his mind did not return to his mother.

Out of simple frustration and anger, Trey wasted the bullet in Kyle’s gun. All in one motion, he swept it off the floor, aimed it at the door knob, and fired. The doorknob exploded off the door in a small shower of wood. It bounced once or twice off of the metal floor and Trey though, for a fleeting moment, that he had opened the door.

It stayed shut, but did not laugh. If anything at all, it was crying.

A hole remained where Trey had put the bullet and the doorknob had been “removed”. He thought that the door would be invincible, or heal itself in an instant, but it did no such thing. It was a normal door, and was injured just as normal as the gun he used to wound it.

He took a single, shaking step towards it. it still did not heal. HE took another, and it remained damaged. He jumped towards it and fell to his knees, peering through the hole. The room was on the other side, still empty.

“Hello?!” He called out. “Is anyone there? Can you open this door?”

After a long pause, he confirmed to himself that this was no help.

He leaned back and sighed. He coughed once, and tears welled up inside him. He eyes did not sting, nor did his tears pool in them, he just felt the want to cry, and coughed twice more.

He knew he was crying, but told himself that there were no tears, so he was really only coughing. He had cried enough, and should know better by now that it didn’t help.

He calmed himself and, on the verge of going insane, whispered to the door.

“Please, open for me.”

It did no such thing.

He began to aggressively beat on the door. He tore Tracy’s grave apart, dumping her lifeless body on the ground. He slammed the pieces of metal against the door, but it remained strong.

Sweat mixed with tears and his world went dark for a little while. Just seconds later, it was all back, and Trey knew not how much time had passed. It could have only been those few seconds, but he knew better.

He was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, with Tracy’s head in his lap. His heart pounded in his chest, and he saw that he had not defiled it in anyway. No marks or scratches or anything else had appeared on her body other than what was already there.

He thought, for a fleeting second, he should check her for signs of current rape. He knew no matter what happened, lunatic or not, he would do no such thing and quickly dismissed the idea.

She was still unclothed, and Trey knew he needed to fix this at once. It was shameful to him and, most of all, to her. He entered the room Kyle had shown him back when everything was “fine” and selected one of the dead bodies.

The room stank of death, and Trey wondered how long these men had stayed here rotting in this room before Kyle’s body had been added.

He removed the clothing from one of the dead crew members and took it back to Tracy. He realized he did not want to touch her unclothed body, for a reason he couldn’t quite understand, and simply laid the clothes over her.

He had calmed down quite a bit, and realized now that the feelings were back. The doors seemed, once again, alive. They also seemed to be mocking him. They were speaking.

“I let you have it easy.” The first one said, its voice floating through the hole where the doorknob used to rest on the second door. “I let you open me, and then I let the Captain. But you know what? I felt sorry for you.”

Its voice was bland and sounded like an insurance salesman.

The second door voiced its opinion.

“I open for him and only him!” Its voice was feminine, yet deep, and reached a high pitch every other word. It sounded almost like Trey had imagined a gaudy, old, and rich Englishwoman would sound like. He was sure if it had a neck and head, its chin would be up and it would have donned a purple, fuzzy scarf-like object.

“But you see?” It asked as it continued, “You see what I have done? Mmm YESss!” The last word was so high pitched, Trey wondered if it had a whistle. “I have not decided to reopen and he shot me, the poor boy! He went lunatic CRAZY over the prospect of shooting a prosperous young door! My love life is finished, my acting career is over, my life nearly ENDED, and-”

It continued to whine until Trey began to ignore it. A deep, menacing voice then filled his head.

“Shut up.” It half moaned, as if it were in pain, and half complained, as if the pain emanated from the second door. “Neither of you know what’s to come, do you?”

The voice no longer came from the hole in the second door, but from all around Trey. It didn’t come from a single point, but many. It did not flow through the halls, but just in his head. He dropped to one knee and felt his stomach twist. It was too much to take and his mind was spinning, spinning, spinning…

“I contain a BEAST.” The voice shouted, and that was enough to make Trey fall to the floor. It continued to explain.

“I contain DEATH-” Trey curled into a ball. “I contain FEAR-” He whimpered and gripped his stomach. “I contain CONSCIOUSNESS-” Spittle snaked its way out of his mouth, “a MIND-” it pooled on the floor. “a SOUL-” His eyes rolled into the back of his head. “And I can protect NONE of this!” His senses dulled and vanished, yet he could still hear. “Open, doors! Open and let these things I contain poison Trey!” He could no longer feel his body, but knew it was convulsing. “Open and let him face death, alone!” Trey could barely hear the voice, as if it were a whisper. It did not echo, but repeated itself until he passed out.

“All alone… all alone… all alone.”