Black Moon (28 page)

She was quiet a long time. Felicia wanted to see her face, to know what was going on in that dark globe. She watched her—small shoulders and skinny arms, pants sagging in the seat—as they crossed the vast parking lot of a supermarket.

They peered in through the glassless windows. It was now just a dark cave, picked clean by looters. Rows of empty shelves disappearing in the black space. Someone was sniffling somewhere in the darkness and they moved away from it. They went into an abandoned ice cream store.

“I’ll take a triple,” Felicia said to the invisible worker. This was where she and Chase had spent a lot of her waitress money. Memories of those early days flashed through her. The two of them on her scooter, his arms around her.

“I’ll take a banana split!” Lila yelled.

They sat at the table and ate power bars instead. Lila got up and went around the counter. She turned on the faucet and water
rushed into the stainless steel sink. “See?” she said. “There’s still water here. We ran out at home so we had to scoop it from the aqueduct. It was so completely vile.”

They drank out of a plastic pitcher and sat looking out the window in silence.

“I think this was hers,” Lila said.

“This what?”

“This,” she said, pointing to the mask. She explained how she hid out in a girl’s room, wore some of her clothes. Found the mask in her closet. She was a cheerleader, Lila said. “I could tell we wouldn’t have been friends. But we could both sleep so maybe we would have found each other, like you found me.”

Felicia was confused. “Wait. Who are we talking about again?”

“The girl,” Lila said. “The one they killed.”

THEY
decided to find a house and try to lock themselves in it.

In a quiet cul-de-sac, they picked one that had a For Sale sign, the thin post hammered into the lawn. The uncut grass reached up for the sign, promising to eventually conceal it. Most of the windows along the front of the house were still intact. As with many of the other houses, dying orange trees stood in the front yard, which was littered with clothes, papers, and a weave of scattered belongings. There were For Sale signs all up and down the street.

Inside, they checked everywhere for sleepless people hiding in closets and showers. The task made them jittery. Lila took Felicia’s hand and squeezed it as they slowly pressed forward. They jumped at everything, especially upon glimpsing a long coat hanging from a hook on a door. They screamed, then laughed nervously.

Then Lila tore it off the hook and threw it to the ground. She kicked it around the room, saying, “Wake up! Come on, up and at ’em! Rise and shine!”

Now they really laughed, collapsing to the carpeted floor.

LILA
took a string of empty cans from her backpack and pulled it tight at the top of the stairs. She strung up an elaborate web of trip wires all the way down the stairs, hanging the bells, cans, and jangly ornaments she had collected for her pack of noisy things, as she called it. She did this with professional efficiency, admiring her work before retreating to the room, where she hung a wind chime on the doorknob as a final precaution.

“That’s what I do now,” she said.

As the darkness set in outside, they were camped out in the master bedroom behind the locked door. They lounged on mattresses that they had to drag up from the bottom of the stairs, where someone had tossed them. A Santa Ana was brewing outside and occasional gusts caused the house to shudder.

Felicia told Lila to sleep while she kept watch.

“Why don’t we both sleep?” she asked. “I think we’re safe in here.”

Felicia said, “I can only sleep at certain times. From exactly ten to seven, actually.”

“What?” Lila asked, like it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. “Why?”

“Well, I have an implant that makes me get to sleep.”

“An implant?”

She explained how it worked.

“There’s no way to wake me up, once I’m under. It’s not like normal sleep.”

“Whoa,” Lila said. “Do a lot of people have those?”

“Just about twenty of us. We’re all people who worked at a sleep research center at the university. We fixed ourselves. Lee did, anyway, with Porter. I was the first to volunteer.”

No reason to tell her about the disaster with Kitov, she figured.

“Everyone should get one,” the girl said.

Felicia agreed. “That’s why I came out here,” she explained. “To take my family to the center, if they’re still here.”

The mask stared at her for a long silence.

“Will you take me?” Lila finally asked.

“Of course.”

“Is there food?”

“Hope you like pasta,” Felicia said, smiling at the thought of all the pasta she had eaten at the center. The security team had found what appeared to a hundred years’ worth of the stuff in the university’s emergency stores.

“Cool,” Lila said. “Pasta’s awesome.”

“Then you’ll like the center,” Felicia said. “It’s down in San Diego, overlooking the ocean. It’s practically a resort.”

She winced. That was laying it on pretty thick.

The girl was quiet for a long time and Felicia thought maybe she had fallen asleep, until she asked, “So do you have a boyfriend?”

Felicia lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “I did,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“Chase.”

“I like that name. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We broke up just before all this started.”

“Why did you break up?”

“We had issues.”

“What kind of issues?”

Felicia paused, not sure she wanted to get into all this, especially with a kid. “It just wasn’t working out,” she finally said.

“Were you sad?”

“Yes. It was awful. We knew each other since we were kids. Even younger than you are right now.”

“Where is he now? Chase.”

“I don’t know,” Felicia said. “The last I heard from him was a voice mail, saying he and our friend Jordan were going away on a road trip, and that he would be back in time for my birthday. That was before we knew what was happening,” she added, going silent as her thoughts raced on.

Lila was silent too. Felicia sat up and studied her. The girl was sitting on the mattress, leaning against the wall. Her mask pushed forward, and those big eyes staring at her feet. “Are you asleep?” she said quietly.

“No,” a small voice said from inside the mask.

“Go ahead. It’s safe.”

“I believe you,” the girl said.

She decided to leave the girl alone, give her some space. Maybe she’s thinking too much. Maybe she thinks I’m going to attack her.

“I’ll be quiet,” she said.

For a while, she watched the girl’s foot move. It was wagging slowly. From behind the mask, she said, “I will never go home. I don’t want to see it.”

“See what?”

“Them,” the girl said.

“Your parents?”

“Yeah, but dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told me in a letter,” Lila said flatly. “They said they were going to do it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Felicia said.

The girl said nothing, but her silence seemed to send a message. Her silence and the big still eyes of the mask. Yours will be dead too, they seemed to say.

IN THE
morning, at exactly seven o’clock, Felicia awoke to find herself alone in the room. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. All the furniture they had used to barricade the door had been pushed aside. Felicia went to the door and saw that it was still locked, the wind chime still in place.

She must have gone out, locking the door behind her, Felicia thought. But why would she do that?

The girl’s backpack, she noticed, was gone.

She opened the door and called out for her. The house was quiet.

Felicia dressed and went downstairs, walking right into the trip wires Lila had set up the night before. The cans clanked and rattled like dull bells. She picked her way through them and entered the garage, squeezing between the cars parked there.

Oh no no no, she said, looking up and down the street. Why would she leave?

Then she was running down the street, calling out. The houses stared out at her, blank, empty. No sign of the girl.

Felicia returned to the garage of the house and waited, peering out at the street. Maybe she’ll come back, she thought. Maybe she went to find us something other than power bars to eat for breakfast. But the fact that she took her backpack said otherwise.

She stared out at the street, or watched flies zigzagging in the air, passing through dust-filled shafts of light. The sun moved over the houses, pushing shadows across the cluttered yards.

A few men passed by, stumbling along and talking to
themselves. She ducked low, watching them for any hints. It was clear they were lost, disoriented by their sleepless state. She could smell them though they were thirty feet away.

I can’t wait all day, she thought, but I will wait as long as I can.

Later, a woman came down the street and looked directly at the house.

Felicia put her age somewhere in the midthirties. She had a dirty face under a ratty tangle of hair and a slipper on one foot. Her simple flower-print dress was torn. She was wearing it backward.

The woman lingered in front of the house for a minute or so, staring up at it as if trying to remember something. Her mouth was moving. She was either chewing something or silently reciting some endless conversation.

Felicia let her wander off. But when the woman came by again, only minutes later, she decided to try to talk to her. She was kicking at a crack in the sidewalk when Felicia stepped out of the shadowy garage. When the woman saw her, she froze and stared with exhausted eyes.

As Felicia approached, the woman appeared to recognize her, but was then immediately devastated to realize that she didn’t. She wavered on her feet and Felicia went to her side and held her up, gagging at the sharp tang of urine.

“Have you seen a girl?” Felicia asked. “About this high? Wearing an owl mask?”

The woman just stared, her eyes moving over Felicia’s face. She was searching for something, her mouth frozen open. She said, “Dreams got so upsetting to him because he had to watch every one of them and they were so ugly and evil that no more sleeping and dreaming was allowed to happen in our heads.”

This was a new one to Felicia. Lee would be interested in
hearing it, but what about Lila? It was clear this woman was too far gone to help. Felicia lowered her to the curb as the woman’s face continued to flash between joy and despair. There was something electric about it, as if the different motor cells of her brain were being shocked with a probe, causing her face to open and close like a fist. Felicia could see the muscles working spastically under the skin as she backed away.

Two hours later, she decided she had to move on.

FELICIA
turned the corner and looked down the street of her childhood. She was having doubts about actually entering her house. It was easy to imagine how she would find them, after what she had seen yesterday.

Did she really need specifics to haunt her? Dreamless sleep was a blessing, she had already learned. No dreams, no nightmares.

She stopped and sat under a parkway tree, setting the backpack on the curb. The neighborhood was silent. No barking dogs, she observed. No hammering from construction sites, or airplanes flying over. No rumble of school buses. This kind of sunny September day would still bring the splash of neighbors doing cannonballs into their pool, the referee’s whistle from the soccer field. The pulse of bass from a car going by, the whine of the gardener’s blower.

What had happened was this, she realized: the world had been turned inside out. That was the only way to describe it. That was the result of a world without sleep. All outside things were now inside. Everything else that we kept in our heads, in our hearts, has flooded out into the open air.

But what about Lila? If she was still sleeping, there must be others. Maybe, and maybe was enough.

My mother, father. Maybe my sister. Maybe my brother. Maybe the walls filled with honey.

She said it out loud, “Maybe is enough.”

THE
house sat low in the shade of elms, the debris of their lives on display before it. Family pictures were strewn about the wild lawn, a garden of memories to pass through.

Felicia stood at the base of the driveway looking up at the shattered windows. The front door was partly open. She felt it like a wound. The darkness it revealed seemed impenetrable. Her body was trembling, teeth chattering. She decided she couldn’t do it, couldn’t take that first step up the driveway, and turned back. But the maybe was there to move her forward, until she was standing at the darkened doorway.

She stood there for a long time. The door and the space beyond were familiar, but filtered through all that had happened since she last stood there. At that remove, they felt like props for a dream she had once had—a dream of an entire lifetime now mostly forgotten. Familiar things, like the doorknob that they all touched but didn’t see or feel, now had an otherworldly aura. Their unique truth had resurfaced, wiping out for a moment the generic memories. She felt as though she was visiting this place for the first time, though she was also aware that she was intimately familiar with it.

Still, she couldn’t reach out to it now. She couldn’t even nudge the door wider with her foot because of the terror that now had her by the throat. She closed her eyes and listened at the opening. Then she called out hoarsely, “Hello? Mom? Dad? You there?”

Nothing came back.

“Hello? It’s me!”

Nothing.

That’s all I can do, she thought. She remained in the doorway for several minutes, just to be sure. Nothing changed.

She was backing away when she heard the voice. A low murmur. Coming from inside. Someone talking.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

The murmuring continued.

She was pulled forward by the possibility. She passed quickly through the living room, then the kitchen, stepping over the shards of dishes, the racks from the oven like the walls of a cage. In the dining room the table was on its side. A chain led out the shattered back door and she could see that it was locked around one of the patio pillars. The chain they once used to keep their dog, Zeto, tethered to the tree and out of the pool. She pulled on it and there was resistance, a tug like a fish on a line. She dropped it as if shocked, but followed the chain down the hall.