Lola Part 3: Underwater

I haven't written anything about Lola lately.  I do apologize to the few people who follow that short story.  My son was born this week, and I've been spending all of my time adoring him and my wife.

I've written some more this evening, letting my mind take me deeper into the life of Lola.  I haven't plotted anything out still, just letting my mind take over and write what it feels.  I find it so much easier to just write and write and write and not bog myself down with outlines.  I find that the outcome is more real and a lot more personal, as things that happen are in some way significant to me.

Enjoy.

~KGB

“Stay away from me!” Lola snapped as she walked away from Gregoire at a furious pace.
    She crossed the forest floor, leaving her cave behind and leading Gregoire away, ready to snatch the life from him if need be.  
    “Please.  I need answers.”  Gregoire pleaded, sounding more like an upset child than a frustrated man.  “I’m lost here.  I‘m... no one.”
    Lola began to run, using her gifts to leave Gregoire miles behind in less than a minute.  She hit several trees as she crossed the forest, not caring about the destruction, listening to the aftermath as the large trunks tipped into other trees and finally onto the ground.
    It was obvious to her that her current “job,” to take Gregoire’s life, was not going to happen.  Not today, tomorrow, or this week, anyway.  Over ten thousand years on earth and she had never once failed to complete a job given to her.  
    Of course, she had often wondered who provided the names and locations of those that she was to take.  Granted, she didn’t receive letters, emails, or text messages as to who was her next target.  All of the information just came to her, mentally, and she followed the unspoken cues and directions until she came across the person, or persons, that she saw in her mind’s eye.  Once she found the person, she took their life in any way that she possibly could.
    She wasn’t a fan of conventional weapons, such as guns and bombs.  Her canvas was the up-close and personal kind, using hand-to-hand combat, knives, or other various blades.  Normally, she used the element of surprise while the person slept, arriving in front of them and bringing them from life in to death in as quick a way as she could.  She was fast, cunning, and lethally accurate.
    Lately, though, as she approached her targets, a feeling of gloom and dread passed over her for long minutes.  She wondered why she did what she did.  Why did she have to kill people?  Why did she, a girl seemingly no older than eighteen years old, have to be the person who took the lives of countless humans over thousands of years?  Why was she the blade of death?  
    Lola ended up on the shore again.  She was standing in a secluded area past all of the hotels and bars that dotted the shoreline here.  The sun warmed her body as it shone down on her, interrupted only shortly by a few small, white clouds.  Her toes were on the edge of the water, where the dry sand and wet sand met, the tiny waves breaking onto her feet and wetting the bottom of her dress, changing it from a light teal to a dark blue.  
    Peering out into the water, she watched as a white sailboat skipped by sluggishly on the horizon.  The whites and grays of the waves broke over the light blue of the water as Lola pondered her existence in this challenging world of death.
    Meeting Gregoire and hearing what he had to say had spun her life upside down, inside out, and every other way possible.  Was she approaching the end of this life?
    She always knew that when her time came, at a point that was best for her to die, she would be allowed to choose how it would happen.  As it was, each night she died the same deaths that she had given to those whom she had killed.  She was well versed in how to die, and what ways would be noble and effortless.  But it would be different, and feel different.  She would be taking her own life, not that of another.  She would be passionate, gentle, and swifter than any other time in her life.
    Lola stepped forward into the water, wading up to her waste and letting her body adjust to the water temperature.  When she was soaked through and through, she went farther out, this time up to her shoulders.  The water washed over her long dark hair, causing it to flat around her like a cloud of silk.
    The water splashed into her mouth, leaving a salty metallic taste in it‘s wake.  She coughed once, clearing the water that she had swallowed, then took a final, long step forward, fully engulfing her head and face.
    She noticed that her vision was foggy as she peered around her, the sandy floor of the sea a grainy yellowish-brown below her.  She braced herself, closed her eyes tight, and took the largest breath that she could muster up.
    Her lungs filled with the salty and stale taste as the water filled her lungs up.  She involuntarily coughed, forcefully expelling most of what she had taken in.  She breathed in again, letting even more water in, her chest and diaphragm burning as the water took over her chest.
    Within thirty seconds, she was feeling dizzy and lightheaded as her head swam with drowning.  Her peripheral vision was pulsating in purple, red, and black colors, mixing and separating as her mind fought to stay alive.  She let all of the remaining oxygen bubble out of her nose.  She was now, as far as she could tell, empty of oxygen and full of seawater.
    One full minute passed and Lola thought that she was ready to pass out.  She let her arms come up to her sides and above her, sending her body floating a few feet below the surface.  She felt death coming, a familiar tap on her shoulder.
    “Hello again, Lola,” a deep voice said to her.
    She snapped her eyes open, looking all around her and  bringing her arms down into a protective pose.  No one was there, as far as she could see.  She spun her body around beneath the water, using her arms as propellers, searching for the source of the voice.  Still, she saw no one.
    She closed her eyes again, chalking the situation up to nothing more than a dying mind that was playing tricks on it‘s owner.  When she finally convinced herself that the voice was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, the voice sounded off once more, this time louder and more forceful.
    “Come ashore, love, and we shall speak.”
    Lola’s eyes snapped open again, and once more, no one was near her.  Despite the impossibility of hearing a voice relatively clearly while floating beneath ten feet of water, she still believed that it was real.  She swam upward, breaking the surface of the water and letting the oxygen flow over her like a welcome friend to her drowned lungs.  She had been beneath the sea for nearly five minutes and deprived of oxygen, but she wasn’t dead, she wasn’t hurt, and she wasn’t scared.  
    When her head was clearly above water, she coughed one time, as hard as she could, and cleared a large amount of water from her chest.  She rubbed at her eyes with her closed and balled up fists, feeling the stale water on her eyeballs.  She bobbed where she was, floating for a few moments before she made her way to shore.  Turning to look at the sand where she was going to end up, she saw the person who was speaking to her, patiently waiting for her while leaning on a palm tree.
    Dressed in white cotton drawer string pants and a white cotton shirt, an outfit common in tropical regions, was a man with the palest of skin.  A simple straw hat topped his head, covering his slicked black hair.  Despite his choice of head covering, Lola could see that his hair ended in a loose knot at the nape of his neck.  Sunglasses of the aviator style wrapped around his eyes, blocking the sun for him.
    With no more than a thought, Lola appeared on the shore in front of the man.  He looked so familiar, but she had never met him in her entire existence.  It felt like déjà vu, or a dream within a dream.  She was seeing someone that she didn’t know, but someone whom she felt a strong connection with.  Throughout her whole life, she had made no significant connection to anyone for fear of having to take their life herself, so she lived as a beautiful hermit crab, apart from society, living on the outskirts of all things normal and human, biding her time.
    Lola stood toe to toe with this man.  He was much taller than her, standing approximately six feet tall, almost a full foot taller than her five feet.  His arms were solid and sleek with rippling muscles beneath.  His skin was so pale and smooth, as though he were brushed with the finest of talcum powder.  
    On his face was a faint scar, barely visible, running down the left side of his face from above his eyebrow and all the way down to his jaw.  His eyes bore into Lola’s in an all-knowing way, like he was peering directly into her soul.
    “Who are you?” she asked the man.
    “My name is Marien,” he responded, though his mouth didn’t move.
    “What do you want from me?”
    “We need to talk.” Marien said, this time aloud, rather than telepathically.
    Her mind was racing, despite her cool demeanor.  Lola was stuck between staying where she was and talking to a strange man whom she had never met, or racing off and leaving him behind and never seeing him again.  She chose the latter.
    Turning on her heel, Lola sped off, running east as fast as she could on the shore.  Sand flew up behind her until she suddenly turned, crossed a small road, and entered a wooded area.  She blazed through that and came out in an open orange grove.  On and on she ran, her mind racing as fast as her legs.
    After fifteen minutes of running, she came to a sudden halt, stopping a hundred miles inland.  The salty smell of the ocean was gone, replaced by the smells of cow manure and earth.  She was standing beside a tree in the country, crops raising upward all around her, masking her from any on-looking eyes from the farmhouse standing strong just a few hundreds yards away on a small sloping hill.
    “You are fast.” Marien’s voice said to her.
    She spun toward the voice, watching in awe as Marien came walking toward her from behind several tall stalks of crops.  His clothing was wind blown, and his hat was gone, but his sunglasses remained.
    Lola ran at him, throwing her hardest punch into his face.  Marien ducked the punch, then spun as another punch hooked at him.  Lola threw punch after punch, putting more and more force behind each punch.
    The two beings moved back and forth with each other, Marien always blocking and ducking but never striking, Lola always throwing more and more punches and kicked.  Any onlookers may have seen two powerful people dancing rather than fighting.
    When Lola decided that she would never manage to hit this man, if he even was a man, she stopped altogether and stared at him.
    “I can help you, if you ever stop playing these childish games.”
    
   
   

Lola continued: When sleeping is dying.

    I received a few comments about the short story that I posted last night.  I must admit that I too was enthralled with the character of Lola.  To be frozen in time at one age for thousands of years, fighting what you are but not being able to resist it is a crazy nightmare.  I related to her in a roundabout kind of way, not with the killing of humans as a messenger of death, but as a person who constantly fights who he is and not able to resist what he does.  (read the entry about OCD)

    I thought about Lola before I slept last night, and also all day today while I worked.  I thought of a million different routes that I could take her, building a back story to her life and how I could form her into a character that people would like, or at least relate to.  I decided to post small portions of this story on a regular basis, adding to the short story for the entertainment or myself and others in an attempt to keep myself and others guessing as we progress along, together, on a confusing and dark ride through life, death, and relationships with those who are like us, and those who are unlike us.

    Please comment if you enjoyed it or if you would like to give constructive feedback.

Lola continued:

Lola felt the sand squishing between her pale toes.  The jetty she stood beside looked treacherous in the blue moonlight coming down from the heavens.  The ocean shushed from twenty feet away but sounded far off as the noise echoed off of the large gray rocks.
    “I don’t know who I am,” Gregoire responded.  “But I know who you are.”
    “And who do you think I am?” she asked.
    “You are the one who takes life swiftly and quietly.  You are Death.”
    Lola pondered that last statement quietly for a moment, then lifted her head upward to peer at the far off stars that she had seen change patterns several times in her life.  The formation of the stars now was almost the best arrangement she had seen yet.  Five thousand years ago there were a set of ten stars that she had fallen in love with.  One by one they faded, the constellation that they made losing parts slowly over centuries of killing.  One remained, and she looked to it for guidance each night.
    Without warning, Lola took off at a sprint, leaving Gregoire, the rocks, and the dead man behind.  She was faster than Gregoire, of that she had no doubt, so she didn’t worry about him catching up to her.
    When she moved at this fast of a speed everything around her changed from a solid object into a blur.  Trees were darkened shapes, street lights were shooting stars, and buildings were shadows.  People were nearly invisible to her, and she was invisible to them.  She felt free when she ran, but that freedom always ended.
    She came to a stop deep in a forested area about forty miles from the shore.  Hidden amongst overgrown ferns, wedged between an old and very tall tree and a mound of dirt was a cave.  She had once taken the life of a woman here, a murderous coward of a woman hiding behind supposed witchcraft that turned out to be nothing more than harsh hallucinogenic herbs and saltwater.
    Her footsteps echoed against the damp walls of the cave as she crossed through the entrance and toward the deepest sections.  Within five minutes, she came to the end of this particular chamber of the cave and saw her belongings waiting for her, still packed neatly in her backpack beside her shoes and a small burlap sack of dried grass a twigs.
    A circle of fist sized rocks formed a fire pit a few feet from the wall.  She closed her eyes, whispered a thank-you to Mother Nature, and a dull fire sparked to life in the center of the rocks.  She grabbed a clump of grass from her sack and sprinkled it onto the flames, causing them to shoot upward in gratitude of the fuel.  She placed a few small sticks on top of the fire, and soon she had a crackling and raging fire made of nothing more than her own will and a few pieces of earth.  The fire would last her until morning.
    Her sleeping bag, a new purchase that she made just a week ago, was dark red and reversible.  Underneath the sleeping bag was a five inch thick mat that she could roll up and tie together with her sleeping bag if she needed.
    Lola climbed into her sleeping bag and zipped the side all the way up to her chin.  She felt woozy, overly exhausted, and ready to drift off.  This was the part that she hated.
    Each night, when she laid down for sleep, she didn’t actually sleep.  First, the cold started in, hence the fire.  Her feet and hands became chilly before any other part of her.  It was more like a dull aching like one would get in the Fall months.  But it quickly turned to chill, and finally, full on frost bite.
    After the cold spread from her hands and feet to her legs, arms, and her body’s core, the shakes began.  She vibrated like a roaring motor, shaking so violently that her teeth chattered together until they felt like they would break.  This part was easy compared to what came next.
    When the cold threatened her heartbeat and her skin was numb, her eyes became heavy.  She always fought it, trying not to let them close, but she always lost that battle.  Well over three million nights, and never once could she fight off what was about to happen.
    When most people would now fall peacefully into sleep, she replayed the horrors of what she had seen.  The deaths of each person that she killed flashed before her eyes, the pain that they felt overtaking her own body.  Choking, stabbing, bodily trauma the likes of which the average person could never imagine.  She died million of times, in a thousand different ways, by her own hands.
    Finally, after the most agonizing of minutes, she passed on into death.  There was no light, there was no heaven of hell, only darkness.  A darkness so all consuming that she feared fear itself that stalked her from any number of invisible areas.
    Hours passed while she slept, but she was dead to the world, just barely conscious of what happened to her.
    Lola woke the next morning in a cold sweat, her hair slicked against her forehead and tangled at the nape of her neck.  Her clothes were soaked in perspiration.  Her sleeping bag reeked of sweat and fear.
    “Thank you for another day.” Lola said to her creator, someone or something that she did not know even existed.
    She rose from her sleeping back, careful not to step into the glowing orange cinders that sat in the circle of rocks. 
    The change of clothing in her bag was a welcome sight.  She walked over and removed her dress and sweater, placing them in the backpack.  She removed a pair of white linen pants and a baby blue top accented by white stitching.  She dressed quickly, packed her bag again, rolled up her sleeping bag and mat, and placed them in a neat pile at the back wall of the cave. 
    Lola walked toward the sunlight that shone through the mist and dust at the mouth of the cave.  She felt the warmth of the suns rays as they first touched her feet, then her legs, and finally her chest and face.  She rose to her full height after ducking low to exit the small opening to the cave, then closed her eyes and basked in the glory of warm sunlight.
    A few minutes passed as she let the previous night’s events pass into the past and open the path for the future.  She took in a deep breath, held it for as long as she could, and then released it.  She did it again, laughing softly at being given another day to live in this world.
    She suddenly became aware of a presence around her, a sensation of intelligence hovering nearby.  Lola had felt this only one other time in her life, and that was the night prior.
    “Do you die each night, as well?” Gregoire asked in his gruff accent.
   

Lola: The creation of an imagination.

  Well, I have finished my very first novel, and I'm waiting for some feedback on the query letter for it.  I've begun working on the sequel already, but I've found myself thirsting for something new lately, something really different from the premise of my completed novel and it's sequel.

    I had an idea while making coffee this evening, and I began writing it almost immediately after thinking up the idea of the main character.  I get these ideas in my head a lot, just small details of an unwritten character or a scene from a yet to be written book.  Then I start writing and following different pathways in my mind.  I don't know where these ideas will go in the beginning stages.  I just write, and I let my imagination take me to places that I never knew existed.  Sometimes, I end up in a really twisted and scary place, and I have to drag myself back to reality and out of that frightening world.  Other times, I end up in the greatest of places that are full of my own hopes and desires, which is also a place that I have to drag myself out of so I can return to reality.

    I can't write a story or novel with an actual outline.  I spend a lot of time in my head, thinking over fight sequences, reunion scenes, intense dialogues, and general plots.  I then write, and I keep writing, and eventually I have something amazing that is pieced together in the deepest parts of my imagination.  It's exciting and really quite scary to go back afterward and reread what I have created simply from a small corner of my own mind.

    So, without furhter ado, here is the short story that I created not two hours ago.  Please remember that this piece of writing belongs to me, as I thought it up and created it.  Now that I am posting it to my blog, there is an offical time stamp attached to it.  It is copyrighted to me and only me, so please be respectful.  I only corrected spelling errors and some of the larger mistakes, so don't be too critical of the errors that you may find.  Enjoy!

Lola

   The bringer of demise.  The dimmer of human life.  The sharpened dark sword.  Death.
    So many names and descriptions have been given to her over the years that she could no longer remember them all.  Depending on the geographical area and the time period, she was known as any number of names.  She preferred Lola, or just Lo.
    Lola didn’t choose this job.  She had no choice in the matter at all.  One couldn’t say that she was born into it.  She was just IT.  As though created from nothing more than the elements themselves, she came into existence one evening approximately ten thousand years ago.  One moment, darkness and the vast nothingness of nonexistence made Lola deaf and blind to the realities of human life.  The next moment, she was laying in a grove of orange trees in what is now Sicily.
    The ocean breeze came sauntering to her off of the Mediterranean.  The salty sweetness of the ocean mist tickled her nose and stung her eyes, but the feeling, her first feeling ever, was unlike anything that she had ever felt and like nothing she would ever feel again.
    Appearing to be no older than eighteen has it’s advantages.  She beautiful, and she voluptuous.  She’s never aged one bit in her entire existence, and she sees no reason why she would now.  Her long black hair gleams in the moonlight, small beacons of pale white in the dark tangles.  Men lust for her in all continents.  Women would kill for her beauty, and a few have tried on several occasions.  She was a girl on the brink of womanhood, despite being older than anyone she has ever known.
    She has always accepted what she is.  She hates what she has to do, and she has yet to find a way out of her duties.  But she is good at what she does, really good.
    Lola shook her head side to side a few times, clearing out the long day dream that she was having.  She had to focus so she could complete her task and be done with it once and for all.  In ten thousand years, she had never had so much trouble taking a man.  He seemed to be untouchable.  More than likely, he was just very, VERY lucky.
    Following the man’s shadow down the darkened beach, she stepped quietly on the sand.  Her bare feet sunk into the cold and damp post-tide sand just beyond the lapping of waves.  The wind took her hair up and around her head, snapping back against her cottony white shirt.
    The man, Gregoire, had no idea that she was there, waiting to strike.  He was so caught up in his own thoughts that she could probably run at him and tear his head off without him noticing.  But she was cunning, her killing style the definition of stealth itself.  She needed to bide her time and wait to take him.
    Gregoire stopped suddenly when the bar came into view just over a hundred yards away.  The music thumped heavily from a distance, pounding inside Lola’s chest as she watched the man staring off at the people within, those lucky individuals enjoying their holiday.
    “Life would be nothing without death.  Life…would be nothing…without death.” Gregoire spoke his words as a poet would read his prose.  He paused at all the correct spots, accentuated the most important words.  He was beautiful to Lola.
    A young woman who looked to be in her late twenties came stumbling out of the small bar and onto the sand.  Her white dress dragged in the sand behind her as she half-walked and half-stumbled toward the water.  Behind her, a man who was no older than twenty-one walked ambitiously in her wake.  She giggled as she made her way to the calm water that seemed, in day time, to be a lighter mirror image of the sky. It’s light blue and green colors drew the attention of all who passed by.
    And now, just before midnight, the water was again a mirror image of the sky.  It was black, impenetrable, and deadly.
    “Mila, come back!” the man laughed.
    The woman called over her shoulder to the man as she let her toes make contact with the water.
    “The water is so warm!”  she yelled.  “Let’s go swimming!”  The woman named Mila lifted her white dress over her head, revealing a baby blue brassiere and matching panties.  She turned in as sexy a fashion as she could in her drunken state and looked seductively at the man who had just reached her.
    “Are you following me Blane?” She teased.
    Mila reached out and placed her hands on his hips, drawing him near.  She kissed him long and deep, pushing her tongue passed his lips and into his mouth.  Blane followed suit, taking care in his kissing technique.  He seemed nervous to be with her.  If Lola didn’t know any better, she would have thought he was a virgin.
    The kiss halted, the couple backing away from each other just a few inches.  Mila said something in a whisper, causing Blane to smile and laugh nervously at her comment.
    She reached down and unbuckled his belt as he unzipped his cargo shorts.  He pulled his t-shirt over his head while his shorts dropped down into the sand, leaving him standing there in nothing more than his boxer shorts.
    “Now what do we do?” Mila asked in a raspy voice, her eyes squinted closed halfway.  A gust of wind rose again, muting Blane’s response.
    Lola watched as Gregoire began walking toward the couple, moving faster and faster until he was almost at a run.  She began running also, trying her hardest to not use her inhuman abilities and seemingly zip from one location to the next in the blink of an eye.  Even after all these years, she had trouble controlling her strength.
    The couple were now laying in the sand, Mila on top of Blane, her legs straddling his pelvic area.  She kept her hands pressed into his chest as she began to rub forward and back on his lower regions, grinding into him forcefully.  Blane reached out, his left hand grabbing into the sand with pleasure while his right hand reached back toward his shorts.  After a bit of fumbling, he grabbed at a blade that was in his front pocket and brought his closed fist over the handle.
    Bringing the blade forward in an attempt to make contact with the center of Mila’s chest, time seemingly froze.  Things happened so fast, yet they also halted for a beat.
    Gregoire, running toward the couple but still fifty feet away, changed into a transparent blur as he sprinted at them and arrived between the couple on the sand.  The blade curved forward hit Gregoire in the lower part of his stomach, just below his navel.  His eyes grew wide as the blade made contact and broke on his skin as though he were made of marble.
    Blane, still in the sand with his eyes closed as he attempted to sink the blade into the woman’s tan flesh, felt the odd sensation of his knife breaking.  He threw his eyes open wide and saw Gregoire looking down at him.  In a rush of panic, he bucked Mila off of his midsection and stood.  Gregoire kept his ground, keeping Mila behind him in a protective position.
    Blane grabbed his clothes and took off, leaving the remnants on the broken knife behind.  Gregoire turned and looked at Mila, her own eyes wide in the confusion and panic of what had happened.  She was in shock, unable to speak.  Most of all, she felt stupid.  Stupid for having almost had sex with a man she had only known for a few hours, a man who would have killed her if not for this stranger.
    “Oh my god. . . Thank you for.. .” she choked on a sob, seemed to recover, then broke out in a hysterical fit of crying.
    “Sshhh. . . You’re fine now.” Gregoire had a thick Italian accent.  His black collar length hair fell over Mila’s face.  “It’s over.”
    He stepped away from Mila and started to walk away.  Mila dropped her face into her hands and Gregoire disappeared in a sprint that was nearly as fast as Lola’s.
    Lola watched as a spectator while Gregoire saved this woman.  Gregoire, the man she was supposed to take, to kill, had just done the ultimate good deed.  He saved someone from certain death.
    But he was stabbed in the stomach.  She saw it with her own fine tuned eyes.  The knife broke against his skin.  He ran like an immortal, just as Lola could.  Her mission was to take him.  She couldn’t take anyone else until she took him. How could she kill someone that couldn’t be killed?  She thought of the old conundrum of an unstoppable force colliding with in immovable object.
    Lola followed easily enough behind Gregoire, her need for answers driving her toward him more than her need to take his life.  She had questions, and he had the answers that she momentarily thirsted for.
    When she came upon Gregoire just a few miles away, he was just laying Blane’s limp body down on the ground, the young man’s neck twisted in the oddest of positions.  Gregoire looked down sullenly at the dead body.  He seemed to hate himself at that moment.
    With her deepened voice, she spoke from the shadows she was hiding in just a handful of feet from Gregoire.
    “Who are you?” Lola asked.