Authors: Zachary Rawlins
“And you ended up here by accident?”
“I doubt it.”
“That is pretty vague,” Yael said, yawning and taking
her own sleeping bag from her duffel.
“You didn’t exactly write a novel yourself, Princess.”
“Fine. I’m tired, anyway,” Yael said, scarcely able to
believe it herself as the lids of her eyes grew heavy despite her alarming companion
and her own anxieties. “Is it okay to sleep outside?”
“You kidding? Oh, I keep forgetting you just got here.
In the Waste you wanna be undercover when the moon is full. Damndest thing, but
I would swear that it gets bigger as the month goes on. Anyway, no. We sleep
under there.”
Jenny pointed, and Yael could barely see what appeared
to be an outcropping. The fire provided inconsistent light, so it took a moment
to make out the small tent made from a drab plastic roughly the same color as
the ground. The narrow end of the tent was wedged into a small space covered by
an angular ledge, hardly enough room to fit, so low she would have to crawl.
“Might as well turn in,” Jenny grumbled, kicking dirt
over the ashes of the fire. “God I hate this place. So boring.”
“Miss Frost, why do we have to sleep in there? It
seems warm enough, and I have my sleeping bag...”
“You’ll see,” Jenny said grimly. “I couldn’t describe it if I tried.”
The night is very long and the dawn phosphorous bright,
like taking a bite from a lemon. Warm and fragrant darkness in the bedroom,
hands moving as if disembodied, driven by their own volition. The smallest kind
of betrayal, the wind that dries her cheeks and stings her eyes.
Jenny’s cigarette
lighter gave Yael enough light to crawl through the door of the concealed tent.
Yael fumbled with zippers for a moment, then climbed inside a small, warm space
with a blanket lining the bottom. The air inside was stuffy and it smelled
like dust and Jenny. Yael remembered the little battery lantern they had looted
and pulled it from her duffel. After a brief search, she found the nub that
activated the power supply. The LED flickered to a brilliant blue-white glow.
Jenny’s eyes glittered strangely in that light, her pupils shrinking to
compensate for the unexpected brilliance.
Yael stretched out her sleeping bag as far from Jenny
as possible, which wasn’t very far. The tent was too low to stand in, and barely
long enough to allow her to lay flat. She killed the lantern before she changed
into her nightshirt, unable to shake the feeling that Jenny could see, though it
was too dark to tell which direction Jenny was facing. Yael wrapped herself in
the fabric of her sleeping bag though it was too warm. Only the ghost of a
breeze limping in from the front door of the tent kept it from being
suffocating.
“This is horrible,” Yael moaned. “It is so hot in
here!”
“It pretty much sucks, yeah.”
“Do we really have to stay inside all night?”
Jenny sighed and Yael heard a rustling as she rolled
over in her sleeping bag.
“If
I
think it isn’t safe then you know it’s
gotta be bad, right?”
Yael pressed her face into the blanket beneath her.
The logic was inescapable.
The night crawled by.
Yael’s sinuses were dry and her throat was sore from
the dust. Jenny couldn’t hold still; Yael felt her tossing and turning, her
sleeping bag whistling as it brushed the tent wall. The ground was hard and
Yael could feel the rocks beneath her despite the blanket.
Yael tried to remember how tired she had been a few
moments before, next to the fire, barely able to keep her eyes open, but it
didn’t change a thing. The harder she tried to fall asleep, the more her mind
spun in circles and her heart pounded in her chest.
She wondered if Jenny was right – if her family, or
anyone for that matter, had noticed her absence. Yael’s mind rejected the idea.
She could only picture herself disappearing as seamlessly as her brother had;
falling through cracks, turning the corner and evaporating into dust motes in
the sunlight, a tragic sleight of hand. Yael tried to picture her stepmother
crying, sitting beside a telephone, anxious for word on her stepdaughter, but her
mind rejected the scenario as implausible.
Yael wondered what her parents would do with her room.
Yael worried about Tobi, though she had promised
herself that she wouldn’t. The cat had been so brave and kind – she could not
imagine a world in which such inherent nobility could fall to darkness. Every
time the thought came bubbling to the surface of her turbulent mind, she forced
herself to think of other things.
A guest room?
No. Her parents already had a guest room on the second
floor.
Maybe a sewing room for her stepmother?
That seemed more likely.
Her father smoked, so Yael recognized the distinctive
sound of a lighter striking. Jenny’s features glowed momentarily, harsh and
tired in the transient glow of the lighter. She leaned forward to blow the
smoke out the tent door, but Yael caught the scent – a combination of mint, synthetic
rose, and bug spray.
Mainly bug spray.
Jenny leaned against the wall of the tent and sighed,
invisible in the darkness of the tent. The lighter snapped again, followed by a
coughing fit that was impossible to ignore. Yael rolled to face Jenny.
“Can’t sleep? What are you doing?”
There was a brief pause.
“Smoking.”
“Smoking what?”
“Dust.”
“You mean – ”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Um.”
Another brief pause.
“You want some? It’s from that stash we found. They
sprayed it on mint leaves, I think. It’s... not bad.”
Yael shook her head emphatically, her heart pounding
at the suggestion.
“No, thank you,” she said, her voice shrill and prim.
Jenny laughed and the lighter snapped to life, briefly
illuminating the cramped interior of the tent. The breeze picked up, and while
Yael was thankful for the cool air drying the sweat on her skin, it also blew
the acrid smoke back into the tent. The air tasted of chemicals and Yael
started searching automatically for her mask, then stopped herself in
embarrassment.
“I was wondering...”
“Yeah?”
Jenny’s voice was dreamy, her response slow and deliberate.
“What’s it... what’s it like?”
Jenny’s laughter spilled out of her like a deck of
cards scattered across the floor. Yael’s eyes were confused by the multicolored
echoes from the flare of the lighter.
“I don’t know. You ever get high?”
“No,” Yael said, shaking her head out of habit. “That
isn’t... it’s just not my thing, I suppose.”
“Some help you are. I don’t know how to explain this
shit to someone who hasn’t tripped. You sure you don’t want to try?”
“I‘m sure,” Yael said firmly. “And you should get some
sleep.”
Jenny snorted with laughter.
“Not gonna happen.”
“Suit yourself.”
Yael rolled over and screwed her eyes shut. She heard
the flint strike, smelled the bug spray odor, and felt jittery and sick to her
stomach. She worked her way further into the suffocating folds of her sleeping
bag despite the heat, her damp nightshirt clinging to her body.
In the silence that followed, Yael worked her way
doggedly toward sleep, breathing deeply and counting backward.
“Hey Yael?”
Yael stiffened in her sleeping bag and felt a greater
sense of accomplishment than she ever would have admitted. Yael couldn’t
remember ever having been happy to hear her own name, and decided to be brave.
“Yes, Jenny?”
“Wanna fool around?”
“You can’t be serious!”
Jenny wrapped her arm around Yael’s sleeping bag and
whispered in rough proximity to her ear.
“I could be.”
“But... we’re both
girls
!”
“Is that against the rules where you come from?”
“No! Well, yes! I mean... I guess it’s complicated.”
“I like complicated. Tell me all about it.”
“I don’t want to,” Yael said, more harshly than she
meant. “Please stop.”
Yael heard Jenny flop back down on her side of the
tent.
“Oh, fine,” she grumbled. “You are so dull.”
“I didn’t mean...”
“Don’t bother. I’m just bored. Go to sleep or
whatever.”
Sleep seemed unlikely, but Yael was willing to settle
for quiet broken only by the crinkling sounds as Jenny shifted and tossed
restlessly. Yael’s eyes twitched in their sockets and her heart pounded in her
chest. She fell back on the practiced routine of her breathing exercises, but
her thoughts returned relentlessly to the misery of the coming morning, the
circular anxiety of sleeplessness. Time seemed to stretch out indeterminately,
minutes or hours measured by counting her heartbeat.
She was startled from this relative state of reverie
by Jenny, as she crawled past her head, freezing partway out of the entrance
flap. Yael rose to follow, motivated by a mixture of annoyance and curiosity.
The opening was hardly big enough to fit both of their shoulders.
“Don’t scream,” Jenny warned, with uncharacteristic
gentleness.
Yael immediately wished she hadn’t looked.
“Keep quiet,” Jenny whispered gravely. “I don’t think
they would hear, but I don’t wanna find out I’m wrong.”
Yael couldn’t think of anything she would have wanted
to say. It was like watching a car crash, hideous and impossible to look away.
The moon was huge, almost as bright as the early-morning
sun. Yael didn’t understand, but whatever the rationale, it gave the scene a
cerulean tint. The Waste looked as if it were underwater beneath that strange
moon.
This was not night, Yael decided. This was something
far worse.
They were gelatinous, flowing as much as they walked,
hunting amongst rock and cracked dirt with eyeless heads. The color of their
skin, if it was skin, was difficult to pin down – Yael would have described it
as white, but like no white she had ever seen before. There was no way to
associate this color with the purity of fresh snow, for example, or the sterile
comfort of a hospital. The hue was somehow dirty, as if befouled by something
she couldn’t imagine, though their skin was in fact gleaming and unblemished.
Yael could not imagine that they had skeletons because their whole body
structure was amorphous and fluid, morphing dreadfully from one shape to the
next. Their mouths were roughly circular and lined with hooked teeth like leeches.
Some wore long robes and ornate veils reminiscent of
the clothing worn by the Visitors. Others held sinister brass machinery, the
shape reminding her simultaneously of a staff and a trumpet – though the way they
were held made it clear they were weapons. Every so often, two of them would
move close to each other, almost touching, and their skin would glow in a
fluctuating mass of unnamable colors, pulsing like jellyfish. They travelled on
a combination of varied limbs, though they seemed to favor powerful, jointed
hind legs that caused them to move with an odd, hopping gait.
“What – what are they?”
“Dunno. Guy who warned me about them called them
Toads. I thought maybe they were your Visitors.”
“I don’t think so,” Yael said hesitantly, studying the
Toads. “The Visitors can pass for human, or so I’ve been told. There are
similarities, though, in the design of their clothes, and those tools they’re
holding...”
Yael heard repressed anger in Jenny’s voice as she
whispered, and it occurred to her that Jenny wasn’t afraid of the Toads – she
was furious with them. She resented the necessity of hiding, even as she
recognized it.
“The locals claim they come from the moon in black
ships, to take slaves and do unspeakable things to them in the service of some
kind of tentacle-god-thing. They show up when the moon is close...”
“Full.”
“That look like a full moon? You really don’t want to
get caught, that much is for sure.”
“Why?”
“Be glad you don’t know.”
“What does that...”
“You’re still missing the worst part, princess.”
“Am I? Well, then, please, Miss Frost, enlighten me.”
“Look at the sky. Just not for too long. Those clouds
are a goddamn blessing.”
Mercifully, Yael’s viewing angle under the fractured
overpass spared her from seeing their vessels directly. All Yael could see was
the wake they left behind them, the clouds parting to reveal a narrow strip of
clear sky. Sky that was absolutely
choked
with stars – millions, maybe
more, in every variety of hue and intensity. Even in the small portion of the
sky she could see, Yael counted half a dozen galaxies the size of the Milky
Way, all elongated as they stretched toward some central point.