Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (31 page)

Skwurl exchanged a look with Oma. “We'll talk about
that
later,” she said cryptically. They jogged around a corner of the building and skirted a brick wall that had been painted with a small white spot inside a large black one.

“What's that?” said Patrick, stopping to get his breath back as much as because he was curious.

“Yin wins,” said Oma.

“What?”

“You know Yin and Yang?”

“Like that Chinese symbol thing?”

“Buddhist,” explained Oma.

“You know about Buddhism?” asked Patrick.

“Yeah, I've been doing some extracurricular reading here and there,” Oma replied. “Anyhow, so this is what it looks like when Yin beats Yang's butt.”

“Huh?”

“It's from
The Book of Commonplace
. That's what that BCP thing is, and then the section and paragraph.”

Patrick walked up close to the circle. The paint was fairly fresh. “Who made it?”

“An agent. Skwurl, do you know who painted it?”

“A pretty senior one,” said Skwurl.

“Why do you say that?” Oma asked.

Skwurl ignored the questions and kept on walking.

“And what about the other graffiti I've seen?” asked Patrick. “What was the point of those messages?”

“What others have you seen?” asked Oma.

“He means the one I left on the bathroom mirror,” said Skwurl.

“Something about how the Seer does well because she listens,” said Patrick. “But the Hearer didn't listen, so he's dead, right?”

“Yeah, something like that,” said Skwurl.

“So there was a Hearer?” asked Patrick. “And he was on Earth?”

“Well, an important thing with that one is to know where it came from. I didn't have time to write that part out.”

“Where'd it come from?” asked Oma.

“One of Rex's communications experts,” said Skwurl. “An otherwise anonymous stooge named Franklin Shone.”

“Why would you quote one of Rex's people?” asked Patrick.

“
The
Book of Commonplace
recognizes all useful contributions. It doesn't matter if you're an evil warlord, a carpenter, or a friendless clerk. If it helps a reader understand the world, it goes in.”

“And what about the message on the side of the school?” asked Patrick. “The one about not trusting people with two first names.”

“I know about that one!” said Oma. “You see, last names are often so abstract, right? But first names are generally familiar. So if you have a first name as a last name, it most always seems recognizable to people. So basically Rex
Abraham
and all his henchmen always have a second name that can be a first name because they've discovered it makes them even a tiny degree more popular and recognizable than they would be otherwise.”

“Rex sounds like a weird dude,” said Patrick.

“You don't know weird till you know Rex,” said Skwurl.

“Wait,” said Patrick. “You're talking about Rex like he's alive? But the story about the girl and the vaccine—”

“Didn't she tell you not to believe every wikimentary you see?” said Oma.

“So, but, where is he?” asked Patrick.

“Umm, on
Earth
,” said Skwurl.

“Wait,” said Patrick, stopping in his tracks. “He's there right now?”

“He's been there all your life.”

“But—” said Patrick, trying to figure out if that was remotely possible.

“We'll get into it later,” she said. “Here, we're almost to the overlook.”

Skwurl led them across the field to an old stone bench in the middle of a patch of bare rock. It was still too dark to see but he had the impression they were up pretty high.

“Where are we—the top of a mountain?” asked Patrick, gesturing toward the darkness ahead of them. The brightening predawn sky began lower than where he'd have expected the horizon to be, and he had a sense of emptiness before, and below, them.

“Cliffs, actually,” said Skwurl. “We're above the Palisades.”

“Wait—like the ones along the Hudson River?” asked Patrick.

“That's what people
used
to call it,” Oma replied.

“What's going on?” Patrick asked, not doing a very good job of disguising his uneasiness.

“Watch right there,” said Skwurl.

“Oh my God,” said Patrick as a cloud moved off the horizon and the predawn sky illuminated a broken, crooked, but instantly recognizable landscape. “But, they said—”

 

CHAPTER 51

Sibling Relations

Monday morning the Twins got up at the crack of dawn.

Being just four years old of course they had been less impacted by the traumas and dramas of the past two days. They were aware that their brother Patrick was missing but it wasn't something keenly disturbing to them. The rest of their family had explained he was just on a trip and would be back.

And as for their own brief disappearance Saturday morning (they'd been found by Laura Tondorf-Schnittman shortly before one o'clock on the golf course, not far from the ninth hole), there were no lingering aftereffects other than an obsession with a character named Dear Rabbit.

Indeed, as Lucie—herself wakened early by a strange dream—came down from her room, she found them in the third floor hallway talking to Neil about the creature.

“No,” Paul was correcting Neil, holding a plastic allosaurus in front of his older brother's face. “THIS ONE is DEAR RABBIT.”

“Mom and Dad banish you to Jurassic Park?” Lucie asked.

“Nah,” said Neil, clearly a little embarrassed to be seen playing dinosaurs-and-mammoths with his youngest siblings. “Just seemed like, you know—”

He broke off, entirely disconcerted that his big sister was smiling at him without a trace of sarcasm or irony. This was not the Lucie he was used to seeing first thing in the morning. He knew it was not right to think that Patrick's disappearance was a good thing, but it sure was interesting how it seemed to be changing all the members of his family.

Lucie sat down on the stair. Cassie backed up against her leg.

“You think he ran away?” Neil asked his older sister.

“He's being Dear Rabbit!” the little girl said, pointing at the plastic allosaurus.

“Ah,” said Lucie.

“I don't think he's the sort of kid who would run away,” said Neil, answering his own question. “Now
I
might run away. In fact I was thinking of doing it next weekend. So I could go see that squid since there's no way Mom and Dad would ever let me otherwise. But, Patrick?”

“I don't know,” said Lucie. “Whatever happened, clearly he's capable of surprises. He's always been a still-waters-run-deep kinda kid, you know?”

“What am I, a puddle?”

“Of Mountain Dew,” said Lucie.

“Well,
awl
right then,” said Neil. “As long as we have that straight.”

“Dear Rabbit buried a squirrel,” interrupted Paul.

“A dinosaur buried a squirrel?” asked Lucie, smiling.

“No,
Dear Rabbit
buried a squirrel,” said Cassie.

“Ah,” said Lucie indulgently.

“How big was it—this rabbit?” asked Neil, strangely serious all of a sudden.

Lucie looked at her brother curiously. Maybe he just spent so little time with the kids that he didn't understand the line between whimsy and downright weird.

“Big!” said Cassie.

“Like a big dog?” asked Neil.

Both children nodded.

“Holy
crap
,” said Neil. “It's not Dear Rabbit, is it? It's
Deer
Rabbit. Where'd you see it?!”

“At Phoebe and Chloe's pond,” said Paul.

“The other morning when you guys went out on the golf course, right? And it had antlers like this?” he said, putting his fingers up on his forehead.

“Neil, what are you doing?” asked Lucie.

“I saw it, too,” he said.

“Neil, you shouldn't mess with their minds like that—”

“I'm not messing. I
saw
it. It's why Dad and I had an accident on Saturday—it ran across the road—
hopped
across the road, actually—and we almost hit it! I knew I hadn't gone crazy!”

“Wait. Wait. What?”

“I kid you not. It was like this big rabbit with antlers—like one of them whatchamacallits—jackalopes. Only big. Dad said it was a dog but he didn't get a good look, he was too busy freaking out because I was trying to look up about the giant squid on his iPhone.”

“And he smells like church,” said Cassie.

Here Lucie sat up, remembering the smell of incense in the house the morning Patrick disappeared.

“Where'd the Deer Rabbit go?” asked Neil.

“To see the dinosaurs,” said Paul.

“And mammoths,” said Cassie.

“And you say he buried a squirrel at the golf course?”

The twins nodded.

“If we go there, can you show us where you saw him?” Neil stood.

“Umm, we are
not
taking the Twins over to the golf course,” said Lucie.

“Why not? It's, like, not even seven yet. And Mom and Dad said yesterday we weren't going to school today with Patrick still missing. Just like we didn't have to go to church yesterday. Plus, Mom and Dad will appreciate it if we take the kids for a walk, get them out of their hair. Come on.”

“Are you serious?”

“Patrick disappears and there's a weird animal wandering around town? Don't you think there might be a connection? Don't you think we should at least check it out?”

“But what will there be to see? If there is a big rabbit deer, it's probably not even there anymore.”

“I don't know. Maybe it left footprints? Maybe we can track it. Let's bring your phone so we can take pictures, okay?”

Lucie looked down at the kids.

“You guys want to go look for the big rabbit?”

“And dinosaurs!” said Paul.

“And mammoths!” said Cassie.

“And griffins!” said Paul.

Lucie had been smiling at them but the corners of her mouth fell into a line at her littlest brother's saying this.

“Griffins like our last name you mean?” she asked.

Paul shook his head. “Griffins that fly!” he said.

“Sure, why not?” said Neil.

“Let's go,” said Lucie. The dream that she'd just had this morning—she'd been running through turnstiles, like for a subway or the entrance to an amusement park. They seemed to go on forever, and she didn't know what they were for, but she just kept going through them. But then a voice had come to her, telling her to stop. A deep voice from overhead. Circling high above was a griffin. He'd told her to wake up and go help her family. And that Patrick was just fine.

 

CHAPTER 52

Site Seeing

Patrick recalled the scene at the end of the original
Planet of the Apes
movie—one of Neil's and his father's favorites—in which the astronaut hero sees the Statue of Liberty's torch sticking up above the sand and realizes that—rather than being a different world—the chimp-ruled planet he's landed on is actually a future Earth. (The astronaut had gone through a time rift up in space, Dad had explained, like it was perfectly normal.) “You maniacs!” the man yells, condemning his fellow humans for presumably destroying the world as it was.

There was no sign of the Statue of Liberty from here but the smoldering skyline on the other side of the river sure looked like New York City. His eyes locked on the Empire State Building. It was missing its antenna mast—and the light of the eastern horizon was shining through its left side like it had been gutted by fire—but he'd done a fifth-grade project on the construction of what had once been the world's tallest building, and he knew he wasn't mistaken. There was no sign of the Nordstrom Tower to the north, nor the Freedom Tower beyond to the south, and it seemed like a lot of other buildings had been knocked down—there were big gaps in the skyline like missing teeth in a giant's jawbone—but from the shape of the river to the nearby steel towers of the George Washington Bridge, there was no question that he was looking at New York City … a
ruined
New York City.