The Royal Expectation Read online

Jason the horse wrangler jumped to attention and gingerly stepped through the poop bombs to calm down the clearly distressed Penelope, who attempted to push the poop-filled socks off of her hooves. Donna didn’t blame her; she wouldn’t want to have poop-filled socks on either.

  This begged the question: was Socks for Horses really an important cause? Donna chuckled. Of course not. But no cause the Royals supported was truly an important cause. It was all about appearance, visibility, and sexiness, and what on this earth could possibly be sexier than a wondrous four-legged creature, large enough to crush any human to death, sporting an entire array of multi-patterned socks and pooping just off of camera? Donna watched Jason slip in some of the waste and land on his hands, while Penelope danced around him anxiously. Yes, this was certainly the sexiest cause she had ever supported.

  Truth be told, she needed some sexiness after the long dry spell of Belgian mind-control prison. She had laid all her cards on the table and done her absolute best to gain control of the country that was rightfully hers—the country that her ancestor, Benjamin Franklin, had rightfully won in a late-night game of poker, and then been cruelly denied. Belgium: the land of Donna. Donna had been scheming ever since she knew what scheming was (around age seven) in order to win back this land, which had led her on an espionage mission following her husband’s demise. But those tricky waffle-eaters had fooled her, and she had failed. She had lost Lexington Adams in the process, which was less of a loss and more of a relief, but still—she was angry, and she was vengeful.

  What better way to mask her thirst for blood than pretending as if she truly cared about these eternally pooping horses? It would keep her publicly relevant, it would give her goodwill with the peasants, and most importantly, it would give her access to all of the Royal Horses. And she desperately needed access to the Royal Horses, especially if she was going to sabotage the Royal HorseGolf Tournament in just a few weeks’ time.

  “Thank you everyone, that’s a wrap on today!” Steven called from behind the bright lights. Donna shot a half-hearted smile in his direction, but her mind was already securely fixed on how she would get the time alone she needed with these horses. Donna’s eyes darted around the hectic workplace until she settled on Sweaty Intern. He looked different. Maybe he was wearing a sweat guard, or maybe he had changed his deodorant, but he had been carrying all of his body moisture in a much healthier manner these days. Donna narrowed her eyes. Yes, the Sweaty Intern would be an excellent foray into getting some much-needed alone time with the fleet of Royal Horses.

  “Sweaty!” she barked in his direction. He jerked to attention, and his red face flushed. He was at Donna’s side in a matter of mere moments.

  “Yes, m’lady?” he sputtered.

  “I need a diversion,” Donna said calmly. She would finally be able to see if the Sweaty Intern could possibly have a future in this industry, or if he would go the way of all the other failed interns and end up managing a Chuck-E-Cheese on the outskirts of town.

  “Give me something that distracts everyone for at least fifteen minutes and lets me go to the stables alone,” Donna said. Sweaty Intern looked back at Donna with a gaze of pure terror. But as she stared into those peasant depths of subservience, she saw his terror harden and transform into something stronger. Something darker. If he could take hold of the terror and use it, he might just have a shot at something great—terror and salt were Donna’s two secret ingredients to everything.

  “Give me thirty seconds,” Sweaty Intern said.

  Donna walked over to her snack cart and grabbed a rice cake and glass of wine. She suspected Chuck-E-Cheese would not be graced with Sweaty Intern’s talents. Jason continued to slide through horse waste with Penelope, and Donna watched as Sweaty Intern took a deep breath with his gaze firmly set on the chestnut mare. She felt her heart beat faster in her chest. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do, but she was absolutely sure it would be infinitely interesting. Suddenly and without warning, Sweaty Intern started to sprint as fast as he could toward the retreating figure of Jason and Penelope. He closed the distance between them with a series of rapid leaps, culminating in one gymnastic vault onto Penelope’s back. For a moment, the world hung in shocked stasis.

  Then the horse reared up wildly, neighed, and pooped just a little bit more. Jason the horse wrangler screamed, which caused Steven to scream, which led to an entire chain of screaming throughout the studio. Penelope pranced around madly in a wild circle, while Sweaty Intern held on for his dear peasant life. Steven jumped backward and ushered his assistants forward, but nobody was too keen on attempting to conquer the wild beast known as Penelope. Donna sipped a glass of wine, took a bite of a rice cake, and smiled. She would remember this moment when she ruled the world, and if Sweaty Intern had to be sacrificed in the making of her Kingdom, she would definitely make sure there were at least one or two statues erected in his honor. It was the most she could do, as the Royals say.

  She downed the rest of her wine in one gulp and leapt out the side door to the cool summer evening that awaited her. The sun had just begun its descent, but a few rays of light still warmed Donna’s skin as she walked quickly across the lawn toward the Royal fleet of horses. As she walked, DeMarcus emerged from behind her to match her, step for step.

  “Took you long enough,” she said.

  “I got held up with your daughter,” DeMarcus answered.

  “Stepdaughter,” Donna corrected.

  DeMarcus had always been there for Donna, and always would be. He was her partner in crime—quite literally, as they had committed many acts of treason together and were about to commit many more. They would be planting the beta mind control device from Dawn®Glass™ on Emma’s Royal Horse, Gowanus. The GlassEye™ had recently destroyed six lead engineers’ corneas, and color-blinded eighteen others—which meant that it was in prime condition for animal testing. This was not just a mere audio and video recording device; this was a device that would be able to control the movements of any creature at the touch of a button.

  The Royal HorseGolf Tournament loomed on the horizon, in which the Royal Dukes would challenge their newest King to an unparalleled feat of human and horse athleticism. Donna would nudge Emma’s horse at exactly the right moment to cause the Royal accident that would enable Donna to bring her secret weapon into play, the man no one knew existed—the man who would change everything.

  “You go ahead,” she panted to DeMarcus in the doorway of the Royal Stables. This smelly enclosure housed the most Royal of the Royal Steeds. Soothing sounds of wind brushing through trees played at all hours of every day, and each horse could change their level of light through a simple neigh. Dawn® Glass™ herself had spent years living amongst the horses to decode their language, and as such, the RoyalGlassHorseTechnology™ was amongst the most sophisticated in the world.

  But Donna did not really care much for horses. She found them far too large and honestly, a bit terrifying. They masqueraded like they were large dumb creatures that would follow a human anywhere, but then they would pull tricky maneuvers like throwing their human and sprinting away to freedom. That had happened to Donna six times throughout her adolescence, and she considered herself lucky to still have a working collarbone. So she was more than happy to let DeMarcus slither his way through the various stables, cooing to the horses in search of the massive beast that Emma called her own.

  Donna huffed and heaved and wondered if this fall would kill her stepdaughter, or just gravely wound her. Either way would be fine.

  “Are you almost done?” she whisper-yelled through the stables. A few horses neighed and the lights dimmed.

  “Almost,” DeMarcus responded.

  “Make sure you place it like Dawn® Glass™ showed us,” Donna said. “Directly in the eye,” she said grimly. DeMarcus did not respond. If they were caught, they would certainly face the worst kind of Royal punishment: up to seven days in the Royal Stocks.

  “Hurry up!” Donna whisper-yelled again. She checke
d her watch and adjusted her pearl necklace, and then turned back toward the stable doors. She had to choke back a scream—in the doorway stood a plain man with a tiny trumpet and the kind of tired eyes that only peasants possessed. He glanced rapidly between Donna, DeMarcus, and the horses, and then turned to walk away.

  “Hey there!” Donna said in a bright voice. “Why don’t you come back here?”

  The man stopped in his tracks and slowly turned around.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said in a deep baritone, a very surprising feat from this compact man.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. His answer would determine the course of his life, undoubtedly.

  “I—they—uh. The horses . . . they like when I play,” he said, gesturing to his tiny trumpet. “It soothes them.”

  Well that was certainly odd.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Leo MacDonald,” the man answered. “I’m the Royal Trumpeter.”

  Ah. So making him disappear would be harder than anticipated. She glanced over to DeMarcus in the stables, and then back to the tiny trumpeter. She had more important matters to attend to than this odd little man’s eccentricities.

  “Well, Mr. MacDonald, I’m sure you understand the need for Royal Horse inspections, and I am also sure that you will not tell anyone about this if you want to keep your job,” Donna said sweetly.

  “Of course, your highness, of course,” Leo nodded. There was something so innocent and pure in his eyes, something that stirred the humanity buried deep within her soul. Perhaps he reminded her of the passionate peasant she had made love with in her twenty-third year, the year of reckless personal exploration. Or perhaps she just really liked the sound of the trumpet. Whatever the reason, she decided she would let him live.

  “You should probably go home to your family, shouldn’t you?” Donna suggested. Leo nodded, but he seemed trapped by her gaze.

  “That means that you can leave,” she prodded. He sprinted away without looking back. Donna found DeMarcus staring at her with his eyebrows sitting skeptically high on his head.

  “He’s a loose end,” DeMarcus said flatly. Donna scoffed.

  “Well there are going to be more loose ends if you don’t put that GlassEye™ on that goddamn horse!” Donna said.

  “Working on it, Donna,” DeMarcus said through gritted teeth. In a few moments’ time, DeMarcus was at her side and the two were sprint walking once more across the lawn, heatedly arguing as they walked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it any further,” Donna said. “I decided to let him live, so he’s alive. If you want him dead so badly, you can handle the chemical dissolution of his bones. That’ll be really fun for you, I bet.”

  DeMarcus did not answer, but she could feel his disapproval emanating from his skin. She pushed it away. She had more important things to worry about, including a seamless transition back into the Royal Studio, and what would likely be a trampled intern awaiting her. As she neared the studio door, DeMarcus veered off to . . . wherever he went when he wasn’t by her side, a reality of his existence she had never truly considered. She slowly opened the studio door, grimly expecting a medical disaster to await her on the floor, but found Sweaty Intern very much alive and well. He calmly rested on top of his now-tamed steed, Penelope, as she danced through cone markers to the delight of the camera crew. They cheered and clapped as Sweaty Intern nudged Penelope into quite the impressive rearing onto her hind legs.

  Donna slowly slid into the back of the crowd without notice. She clapped with the rest of the poor fools as Penelope performed a particularly spectacular leap over a camera, landing securely in her previously trampled pile of feces and sending it splattering across all of their faces. Donna wiped a tiny speck of waste off of her cheek. She surely had to be the only Royal who had ever had to deal with this much feces. Belgium was calling her name, and soon she would answer.

  Trevor slowly regained consciousness much like a baby bird opening its eyes for the first time—squawking, desperately craving attention, and very hungry.

  “Hello?” he squeaked. He felt his eyes and realized he had been blindfolded. He ripped off the blindfold and found himself utterly alone on a rock outcropping in the middle of the night.

  “Sardine?” he croaked out tentatively. “Miguel?”

  There was no answer. He felt aches and bruises throb into existence across his body. He looked up above and found the sky illuminated with speckles he had never seen before; it was as if there were millions of tiny space houses gazing down at him, each with their evening porch lights on to battle the onslaught of darkness.

  “Space aliens?” he screeched. “Do you have any food?”

  The space aliens did not respond. He slowly rose to his feet and craned his neck upward, spinning in a circle to try to determine where the stars started, or ended—he may never know. Maybe this was what those pesky environmentalist groups meant when they yelled things about light pollution destroying our view of the stars. Trevor had always assumed that people were throwing away their desk lamps too often, and they just couldn’t see Trevor’s face in the RoyalChatterStream.

  He looked back down to the earth and found that gnarled trees arched and snaked through the air as far as he could see in every direction. He was completely and utterly surrounded by landscape that consumed him in its uniformity. He walked over to one of the trees and tentatively reached out a hand to stroke the bark. It felt like riveted sandpaper left out in the sun for far too long. Trevor stood beneath the tree and experienced the distinct discomfort of someone watching him. Were these trees alive? As he looked across the vast expanse, each tree swayed slowly, but there wasn’t any breeze.

  Were these the drugs? Had he even taken any drugs? A sharp chill ran up his spine, and Trevor grabbed his arms as goose bumps rippled across his skin. The realization that he was deeply and utterly alone spread through him like a wave of nausea, but not the fun kind from drinking too much whiskey or eating too much pizza. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. He was going to party through the desert on some crazy drugs with his new brothers, not wake up alone at night in a place he had never seen before. He would absolutely die out here, and he was way too famous to die this young. He spun around wildly, and the panic threatened to overwhelm him.

  “Hello?!” he screamed as loudly as he could. “This isn’t funny!” If this were some sort of elaborate prank, he would be so pissed when all his friends jumped out from behind those dumb trees. But then they would shower him with whiskey and drugs and he would pretend like he had thought it was funny so that they still thought he was cool.

  “You can come out now!” he said, struggling to keep the terror from coloring his voice, but hearing his pitch spike unnaturally high. “I know you’re out there!”

  But did he know? By now his eyes had adjusted to the deceivingly bright starlight, and he could see into the expanse of emptiness. He could find no evidence of humanity anywhere. He looked down at the dusty ground and saw his footprints spreading out in a circle around him. He checked behind him and found three sets of tracks and the thick dusty line of what must have been his body.

  He reached into his pockets and found that his GlassPhone™ was gone. In its stead was a crumpled piece of paper. He drew it out of his pocket and unfurled it.

  “Find the Lighthouse.”

  “Well, shit,” he said, to nobody in particular. This was pretty messed up, even for the Freemasons. How the hell was he supposed to achieve true artistic expression and freedom all by himself? How the hell was he supposed to grow as a person when there weren’t even any of his fun friends around to party with him? Now he was just going to walk, probably for hours, and then finally find his way out of the desert and go home unhappy.

  He heaved a huge and heavy sigh, just in case anyone was listening, and then started the journey to follow the path of his dragged body back to its origin. He walked six steps and groaned. Every muscle in his body ache
d, and every fiber of his being was unhappy. He slowly trudged forward, following the line of footprints and mentally abusing the Freemasons, Sardine, and his entire family with every step he took. How dare they make him drink that stupid tea and then not even give him the good drugs? That tea didn’t even work. All it did was make him say some stuff that definitely wasn’t true.

  As he put one foot in front of the other and snaked his way through the maze of creepy-as-hell trees, he determinedly shut his mind off to any and every sort of mental exploration. If the Freemasons expected him to come out of this journey with a new and fresh perspective on the world, as well as a multitude of insights about who he was as a person, they were sorely, sorely mistaken. No, he would absolutely come out of this trek exactly the same as when he started, and then he would make sure that all the Freemasons were exiled from the Royal Village forever.

  But before he could get very far, a gust of wind swept across the entire horizon. It screamed through the tree branches and threatened to knock Trevor off his feet. He shielded his eyes and mouth as spitting speckles of dust swirled around him. He coughed wildly. This was like the time he had accidentally inhaled several chunks of weed, but even worse. The wind protested loudly in his ears and he dropped to his knees and covered his head. After a few moments of peril, the wind died down and Trevor could breathe once more. He slowly rose to his feet and struggled to rub the dirt out of his ears and eyes. Then he opened his eyes and his heart dropped.

  The entire trail of footprints had been erased. Trevor was truly, utterly alone for the first time in his entire life. And he was petrified.

  Kyle had never imagined that one day he would scrub human waste from the walls of the bathroom, but then again, he supposed it had never been out of the question. He dutifully wiped the linoleum tile under the maddeningly flickering fluorescent lights. He wore his pool cape—a towel tied around his neck to denote his self-appointed status as King of the Pool. He desperately wanted to prove himself as a valuable employee, and as such, he would scrub every last inch of this travesty splayed across the blue and white walls. He wiped glob after glob of putrid waste from the wall, wondering what sort of animal or madman had committed this crime. Whoever they were, they really needed some medical attention, because these trash-in-the-rain colors and that rotting-tuna-salad smell did not seem to be healthy.