The interior
of the cylinder was even colder than Maggie remembered. The air still sucked
away every sound, until her footfalls sounded like whispers and then stopped
making any sound whatsoever. The puddles on the floor still hadn’t dried up,
and there were birds roosting inside in silent, watchful flocks. The place
creeped her out, just as it had the first time she’d seen it.
This time
around she could observe more details, but very few of them made any sense to
her. The cylinder seemed very large inside. In fact, it seemed bigger on the
inside than it had looked from up in the ravine. Its interior was not smooth
at all but lined with pipes and tubes, some thicker across than her waist.
Many of them were broken open and she could see they were hollow inside.
Others were still intact. Some had water condensed on them, and when she
touched one of these she could feel a faint vibration travel up her arm.
Whatever had happened to the cylinder, whether it had crashed on Earth
thousands of years ago or if it had just rotted away over time, clearly parts
of it were still in perfect working order.
Like the well
full of green fire, for instance.
There was, she
supposed, a certain amount of danger involved in going back inside. She had
survived the green fire once, and in fact it had made her stronger. There was
no guarantee that it wouldn’t kill her though if she remained too long inside
the cylinder. It had killed her father without any trouble, after all.
She’d come to
find his body. As villainous as she may have become, regardless of how much
the darkness inside her had eroded the good little girl she’d once been, she
still owed Dad this much. He shouldn’t have to rot away inside some weird
alien artifact. Yet when she actually found the body—or rather, his
bones, which were all that remained of him—she found herself so repulsed
she had to turn away rather than be sick.
His remains
were curled around the well that was the home of the green fire. His hands
were still clenched around the manhole cover-sized lid as if he were still
trying, from beyond his own death, to close the well and save his children.
That meant
something to Maggie. It meant something so horrible she couldn’t stand it, and
this time she was sick, and had to pause to throw up on the floor. It meant he
hadn’t died instantly.
It meant there
had been a chance, even if it was just a small one, to save him. To pull him
out of there, just as she had dragged out Brent.
He could have
survived.
She could have
saved him.
She dropped
down beside him, unable to help herself. She pressed up against the bones as
if curling up with him on a couch back in their house, and put her arm around
his rib cage, just wanting to hold him. It was morbid of her, she supposed,
but in her head it was just a way to say goodbye to him.
While she lay
there green flames came peeking over the edge of the well like snakes looking
for something to bite. She didn’t run away. They came down and ran over her
skin for a while. She thought they were probing her, or maybe checking to see
if she’d already been changed. Eventually they withdrew once more into their
well and their green light flickered out of the dim space.
She didn’t
have a lot of time, Maggie decided. She needed to get moving. She got up and
brushed herself off, then set about picking up the bones, even the little
finger bones she had to pry away from the lid. There was no way to carry them
all in her arms, so she took off her hoodie and tied it into a kind of sack she
could use to hold the various pieces. The bones were scorched and covered with
a black residue that stained her hands, but the work didn’t make her feel ill.
This was her father. A man she had truly loved, even if she never really
showed it.
When she had
all of the bones she went back outside, stepping into desert heat that made
sweat stand out instantly on her skin. Dad had loved the desert, more than
anyplace else in the world. Maybe he would have wanted to be buried in the
cemetery next to Mom, but Maggie thought that the desert would make a perfectly
acceptable alternative resting place. She hiked out into the scrub trees and
creosote bushes a ways and then set down the bag of his bones. With her
fingernails she dug a hole in the ground deep enough that coyotes wouldn’t be
able to dig him back up, and then she placed the bones inside with much love
and care. She tried to arrange them in the right order, with the skull at the
top and the leg bones at bottom, but some of the bones were shapes she didn’t
recognize. She did the best she could.
When she’d
filled the hole back up, she looked around for a suitable large stone. She
found a flat broad piece of shale three feet long and two feet wide. With
another rock she carved his full name on the stone and underneath it she put
the years he was born and died. Then she put the stone across his grave and
knelt down beside it.
And had no
idea what to do next.
She supposed
she should say some words. Maybe make a vow to reform, or to not hurt Brent.
The darkness wouldn’t allow that, though. In the end all she could think to
say was goodbye.
She headed
back toward the cylinder then, feeling very calm and at peace. The darkness
inside her had settled down for a moment but she knew it wouldn’t last.
Something would happen. Some horrible thing would set her off again and the
anger would take control. But for the moment she could simply walk in the
desert and notice for once how sublimely beautiful it really was. How
unspoiled, how alive.
She realized
with a shock then that for these few fragile seconds, she wasn’t actively
unhappy. It was a weird feeling, and one she was unaccustomed to. She
actually cracked a smile, and reached down to pick a pink flower and put it in
her hair.
Then she heard
the sound of a car engine, very far away. Her ears had become as sensitive as
her eyes and she knew the car had to be miles away still. She knew as well
that Brent would be inside of it.
She had
expected him to follow when she kidnapped Lucy.
She had looked
forward to it. And now it had come to pass.
She just had
time to prepare for his arrival.
“Grandma,”
Brent said, peering out through the car windows at the desert, remembering
every landmark. “I’m calling to tell you that I’m about to go fight Maggie.
Probably for the last time.”
On Brent’s
cheap cell phone Grandma’s voice was very faint and kept breaking up. Some of
her words were lost to static. “You’re going to—
hiss
—finish off that little—
crackle
—now? That’s—
beep
—time.”
Brent frowned.
He could barely hear her. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.
But she has Lucy and she might… well, she might do something actually evil. I
can’t let that happen. I’m the only one in the world who can stop her,
and—”
“Boy,” Grandma
interrupted, “if you need to—
snap
—her—
sigh
—up, then you do it. If anyone—
rumble
—her, she broke my—
pop
.”
“I just wish
Dad was here,” he told her. “He would know what the right thing to do was.
All I know is what feels right to me, right now.” The phone beeped three times
in his hand and he realized he’d lost the connection. Dana’s car must have
passed beyond cell phone range. There would be no more parental advice.
It meant they
had almost arrived. “I really want to thank you for your help,” he told Dana,
sitting back in his seat and closing his eyes. “I suppose I could have just
run down here but I would have been exhausted when I arrived.”
“I would do a
lot of things for you, Brent,” Dana told him. “You rescued me. I owe you, big
time.”
He blushed and
looked out the window. “Here,” he said. “This is where I get out.” He
recognized a butte on the horizon and a stand of nopal cactus. This was where
they had set up their camp. It was where they’d started hiking into the
desert. The car couldn’t get him any closer. “I don’t know if I’m coming back
or not,” he told the popular girls. “Can you wait an hour? If I don’t show up
by then, just go home and—and tell the police. They won’t be able to
stop Maggie. But maybe they’ll find somebody who can.”
“Brent,” Dana
said, “just be careful. For me?”
He couldn’t
promise that. He smiled at her anyway and started to get out of the car.
“Wait,” Jill
said. She leaned over his seat and grabbed his hand. “Just one thing before
you go.”
“Yeah?”
“Something you
need to consider.”
“Alright,”
Brent said, wondering what she had in mind.
“If your
sister kills you, Dana won’t have a date for homecoming. Okay? So come back
to us in one piece. Otherwise it will be incredibly awkward if I have to find
her a replacement at the last minute.”
Brent closed
the door softly behind him and started off into the desert, moving as fast as
he could. Maggie had a considerable head start and he had no idea what she was
up to. He ran on the flat desert floor, then reached the head of the ravine
and started leaping from rock to rock, getting as much air as he could so he
could survey the destruction ahead of him. He didn’t need super-eyesight to
tell he’d come to the right place. The trailers and construction equipment
near the cylinder were trashed, torn apart or picked up and cast aside like
toys the day after Christmas. He didn’t see any sign of Lucy. Maggie, on the
other hand, was in plain view. She wasn’t trying to hide. She stood near the
cylinder, out in the sun. She was holding something big over her head. It
looked like a portable generator, though Brent was too far away to make out
much in the way of detail.
Then Maggie
threw it at him and he got a much closer look than he would have preferred.
The generator
came sailing through the air right at him. He jumped aside as it shattered on
the rocks, showering him in fuel oil and machine parts. He looked up just in
time to see a forklift following close behind. Then a half of a construction
trailer. The noise was incredibly loud as he leapt from rock to rock, never
more than half a second ahead of the incoming projectiles.
A backhoe hit
just behind him. Its digger arm snapped off on impact and went spinning
through the air. He tried to duck but it struck him in the arm, sending fiery
pain shooting up into his shoulder.
“Damn,” he
shouted, as he spun around and dropped into the ravine. Maggie must have known
he was coming. He moved as quickly as he could down the dried-up wash, keeping
his head down as more pieces of equipment came raining of the sky. A satellite
dish dug into the dirt in front of him, nearly tripping him. A Geiger counter
went whizzing past his head like a bullet, trailing its wand behind it. A
truck tire smacked him right in the chest. It was too soft to break any of his
bones but it had enough momentum enough to knock him over on his back and drive
the breath out of his lungs.
As he lay on
the dirt staring up at the sky, he saw a jeep come screaming out of the blue,
on a ballistic trajectory right for his head. It took every ounce of energy he
had to get his feet under him and throw himself to the left before it hit,
sending up enormous plumes of dirt and small rocks. He covered his face with
one arm as the ejecta came showering down all around him, stones the size of
softballs bouncing painfully off the back of his head.
When the dirt
settled he moved. He pushed himself, dug his feet into the ground and threw
himself forward, accelerating with every step until the wind was howling past
his ears. Maggie kept throwing things at him—a spotlight on a tripod,
surveying tools, the engine block of a jeep—but he was moving so fast he
blazed right past them. He didn’t even feel the ground shake with the impacts.
He came out of
the ravine so fast the world around him blurred. He shot right toward Maggie
as she picked up something else, a new weapon to use against him, but before
she could throw it he grabbed it away from her. Unable to shed his momentum he
ran right past her, skidding and plowing deep furrows in the ground as he tried
to slow himself by digging his heels into the ground.
It was only
when he’d stopped completely, when his dust cloud caught up with him, that he
looked down and saw what he’d grabbed out of Maggie’s hands.
It was a hand
grenade, and the pin had already been pulled.
“Oh,
sh—” he had time to say before it went off. His brain didn’t have time
to react. His arms moved anyway, throwing the grenade away from him as hard as
he could. It went off in mid-air, only a dozen yards from where he stood.
Fragments of metal and burning gunpowder spattered his face and chest and his
body screamed.
He dropped to
his knees and curled his arms around himself, trying to shake off the pain.
Eventually he could breathe again. Eventually he could think. He looked down
and saw that he was still intact, all his parts accounted for. The beautiful
costume Lucy had made for him, though, was ruined. Parts of it were burned, and
in some places it was still smoldering. The front was full of holes.
He stood up,
more angry than he’d ever felt before in his life. The wrath inside of him was
like white fire. He turned to look for his sister.
Maggie was
standing nearby, leaning against the side of a white construction trailer that
had been partially trashed. She was wearing her field hockey uniform—the
same costume she’d worn when she committed all of her crimes. It was fitting,
he thought. They were dressed for the part. They were supposed to be here,
supposed to fight. That was what was expected of them.