the

First Chapter

of

Sharing a Joke with Nothingness

by

Allen May Carpenter

It was night outside, the sky covered by heavy, low clouds that obscured the stars and the narrow sliver of a moon. Peter didn't think anything of it except to be aware that it could rain on him as he walked home quickly from his job as a clerk at the town produce store. He was always left to lock up late at night. He didn't fear being alone, per say, he was no woman, but with all the turmoil still left from the war (1), there was an abundance of thugs that prowled the streets at night and wouldn't hesitate to pounce on one, lonely man; especially one that wasn't exactly intimidating.

The streets were quiet, fathers had long since returned home from jobs and mothers had ushered children off to bed, the animals were quiet, even the guard dogs, and the wind was calm. He attributed it to the coming storm, which he knew drove animals to silence. He heard a quiet scuffle in a side street but thought nothing of it until it was followed by a low snarl, like an angry dog. His heart raced, startled.

Something shifted in the dark of the street, swaying from side to side, lurching as if dragging something. Peter took several steps away, legs shaking in fear that stopped him after the third step. The thing in the side street appeared on the quiet main street beneath a flickering street lamp. Peter's breath caught in his frozen throat as he watched a man step out, one hand pressed to the joint between his leg and pelvis. The man dropped a body he had been dragging behind him; it was headless, the missing part clutched by the hair in his other hand.

"Oh my god," Peter whispered. Still, he could not move.

The man dropped the head and brushed his hand on his pant leg, the part of it that was intact. He looked like he had been in a fight with a pack of ferocious dogs but there was no blood and no gouges in his flesh. Slowly, he crept forward, slinking through the darkness between the lamps, skirting the light they shed.

Peter cast his eyes frantically on the ground on as the man slipped closer, thinking like a child to make it disappear if he couldn't see it, until the man was close enough for Peter to touch the tattered shirt that barely hung on. He kept his eyes down and watched as a long fingered hand rose from beside a lean muscled body and he winced as the fingers threaded into his hair and pulled his head sharply to the side, baring his throat.

He looked up and saw a handsome face, on that, in a heartbeat, changed what he thought was beautiful. But the perfect face was marred by light, half circle marks and brilliant, red eyes. Peter watched in blank amazement as the face dropped suddenly out of his sight and lips brushed his throat, followed by a sharp, sudden pain.

In a moment, the sudden pain turned into something much more intense. The gentle sweep of a warm tongue over his throat confused his already agony-fogged brain. It was his one comfort as the burn overwhelmed him: at least the lick had felt like an apologetic one.

It wasn't until much later that he realized exactly what that had meant.

– – –

When Peter woke up it was like instant relief from the pain that had held his body captive for who knows how long. He took a bath and, instead of it filling his lungs comfortably, it felt like an unnatural expansion, one he was very willing to be rid of in a heavy exhalation until his lungs were empty, comfortably so. He felt no desire to fill them again.

He sat up and found himself in an old warehouse with sun dripping in through a barred window. The place was dull and grey, mostly bare except for a few scattered boxes. The ceiling, which filled most of his vision as he lay on his back, was as boring as the rest of the room that he could see from his vantage point. In a sudden urge to see if the rest of the building was the same way, he sat up. The movement was far faster than he had expected and required much less effort than he had put into it. It pulled him all the way up and flopped him over onto his hands and knees.

"What?" he whispered.

"I'd take it easy if I were you," a deep voice said.

He was on his feet in an instant, overshooting his balance just a little bit. He whirled on the speaker, instinctively crouching low to the ground in a position that he had never taken before and one that should not have felt so natural. A growl wrenched his way out of his throat, surprising him and his eyes widened as he cut if off in shock. The speaker chuckled lightly and moved just enough for Peter to separate his massive frame from the shadows along the walls. The stranger was huge.

"Who are you?" Peter snarled. The way his face moved when he spoke felt strange to him, his lips curling back like a predator and his brows snapped low over his eyes. He couldn't recall ever making a face like that but then, he couldn't recall much for some reason. Everything past his moment of waking was fuzzy and distant feeling.

The speaker tilted his head slightly. "You should be less concerned with who I am and more concerned with where you're at. Couldn't you have at least had the sense to wake up at night?" He sounded cross and annoyed but not angry enough for Peter to feel threatened, at least, he didn't feel like he should be threatened. His body had other plans though, tensing and coiling like a snake ready to spring.

"Where am I?" he humored.

"A warehouse in Monterrey," the big man answered. He never went into the light, as if afraid that it touching his skin would harm him but Peter could see that he was dark skinned. He attributed being able to see that to his eyes adjusting to the darkness.

Slowly, he managed to get some of his muscles to relax. He crouched on the floor still but it was looser than it had been. "Why?" he asked.

The man shifted almost nervously. "You sure ask a lot of questions and I don't know what all I'm allowed to tell you other than where you're at."

Deciding that asking another "why" question would be fruitless, Peter retreated from the man into the corners of the opposite wall, watching him with a mix of curiosity and the strange instincts that were keeping him on guard. He nestled himself into the corner of a large back and the wall, every once in a while glancing up at the sunlit window. They passed the remainder of the day that way, Peter fidgeting in his corner, every once in a while getting up to prowl the length of his wall, reveling in the curious way his body was more fluid and graceful than it had ever been, and the unknown man just leaning around the opposite wall, never once moving or speaking. Finally, the sun went down completely, leaving the warehouse in complete darkness.

The man pushed off from the wall and Peter instantly tensed, half on top of one of the boxes. "Come on, we're not gonna keep you here for the rest of your existence," he said, waving Peter toward the wide double doors. He pushed one open easily and Peter followed him because he just didn't now what else to do.

"Where are we going?" he asked as he stepped out into the moonlight street. Now that he had the light of the moon he could see clearly that his companion was a very large, barrel chested black man with a shaved head.

"Again with the questions," the man muttered. "We're going to meet everyone else so just hush your mouth and run."

Run. That one word triggered Peter's latest discovery about his body. He ran faster than he had ever run before and didn't feel the immediate backlash of discomfort that had always accompanied his attempts to seriously exercise heretofore. He passed his guide in a moment and had to turn around when the man hissed for him to slow down and pay attention to where he was going. Peter felt like he had never been able to pay as much attention to his surroundings as he did on that first run. It was like the whole world was just pouring in through his eyes, ears, and nose. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever felt. He did, of course, eventually turn around to follow the other man since he had no idea where they were going, but for those few moments when he just ran as fast as he could, he felt more freedom than he ever had before.

"Stop," the man hissed eventually. Peter came to an abrupt halt that didn't threaten to make him face plant into the dirt (something he was very proud of). The man waved a hand at a dilapidated old mansion, the kind of rich rancher's house left over after the Civil War. "See that?" he asked.

"Yes," Peter answered, wondering how anyone could miss it.

The man smiled poisonously at him. "That's your new home."

– – –

After Peter was smacked to the ground for the fifth time in less than an hour he decided that he didn't much like his new home. It was filled was thugs and angry man who took more joy in putting him on his back than in doing anything constructive. He rolled away when a man came at him, teeth snapping. Peter hadn't quite gotten the hang of fighting with teeth. Hell, he hadn't quite gotten the hang of fighting.

His guide, who he later learned was named Eli, had taken him to an old, giant barn behind the house which Peter had guessed was not abandoned after he heard the sounds coming from it a mile away. Eli had then pushed him through the doors and told him not to get himself killed. His sudden presence had put a pause to whatever activities were going on in the room for a whole second before he was set upon but a collection of ragtag, impressively built men. A smaller collection of dazzling women stood in a corner, every once in a while snapping irritably at each other.

For the three days since then, Peter had been thrown around, beaten up, tossed like a bale of hay, mocked, jeered at, and spat on (not to mention bitten and all the strange, burning saliva that comes with that). The men had begun to ignore him once they realized that he was not that much of a threat to their manhood. The women ignored him altogether.

The doors to the barn burst open for the first time since Peter had been thrust through them and everyone stopped, Peter only pausing because everyone else did. There, in the waning light of the moon, were several figures, the first of which was a very prominent looking figure that Peter now recognized, Eli, someone who he felt like he should remember, and a tiny, female figure that was entirely dwarfed by the width of Eli and the height of the second man.

"Line up!" Eli commanded loudly.

As the men and women around him scrambled to get themselves into some semblance of a line without biting and clawing one another, Peter hung back, determined to place himself on the end furthest from Eli. He almost managed it too, had not he taken just a moment too long.

"You, on the end." The voice was certainly not Eli's. It was a woman's voice for starters, cool and calculatingly beautiful. He realized belatedly that it came from the small woman who had taken prominence in front of the collected beings in the room. She was looking straight at him, pointing one dainty finger in his direction. "I don't know you."

"And I don't know you," he answered, wondering why on earth she would know him when he had never lived in Monterrey in his life.

When all movement in the barn stilled, he knew that he had said something wrong. There was a long tense moment in which Peter was sure that Eli would launch himself at him until it was broken by a low chuckle. The woman was laughing quietly to herself. The tense people relaxed instantly.

"You don't know who I am?" she asked. When Peter shook his head she held out her arms questioningly to the people around her. "Who had been teaching this newborn? No one? Of course not, you are all idiots and I have to think of everything myself." She said it with the ease and calmness of one who was not really angry, just repeating something one had said a million times before.

She stepped over to him, as graceful as the ballerinas that Peter remembered his sister looking at longingly in a magazine. The memory faded as suddenly as it had come up, leaving Peter confused and disoriented. The willowy man behind her took a single, long stride behind her, close enough to be near her and far enough away to keep an eye on all of the people in the building. She reached up and brushed the hair out of Peter's face, muttering quietly to herself.

"Certainly not someone that I would a picked. Still, has potential. I should have expected that." She grabbed his chin in a tiny hand and yanked him down so that she could see comfortably into his face. She barely reached his shoulder. "You're no fighter," she said absently as she let him go.

He straightened. "I've never fought before in my life," he answered, suddenly unsure if that was the truth. He barely remembered this "life."

The woman turned and cast a meaningful glance at the shadowed man behind her. Peter had grown used to being able to see things in dark shadows but even now he seemed to be unable to pierce them with his strange new eyes. The figure shrugged apologetically and she looked back at Peter thoughtfully. She wrapped one arm beneath her breasts and propped her elbow up on it, stroking her tiny, pointed chin.

"I suppose you'll do. God knows if Jasper picked you then you must be able to do something." The name "Jasper" meant nothing to him and neither did the reference to being "picked." He settled for the safe option of no reaction at all.

A sudden, coy smirk lit the woman's face and she spread her arms out wide to the sides, still tiny despite the gesture. "Welcome to Monterrey, newborn, I am Maria and I am your new Master."

– – –

(1)A bit of math for you. Jasper was born in 1860 and was changed around 1880, he was with Maria for 60 years, or thereabouts, before Peter was created. So, that means that the year in this story would be 1940. As the US has not entered World War II yet and Hitler has only just overtaken Poland, the thugs would be left over from World War I.

Edit: 1/09/2011