Authors: Aaron Starmer
“How do you know where you’re going?” Martin asked.
“ ’Cause I live here,” she said.
“How long have you lived here?”
“My whole entire life.”
“That’s impossible,” Henry said. “I woulda seen you before.”
She stopped and turned around. She pointed an accusatory finger at Henry. “I woulda seen you too. Where you been all this time?”
Henry snorted in response. She shrugged him off, turned back, and surged forward.
“Not too far,” Henry commanded.
“Jeez,” she said. “Worst field trip ever.”
Martin stopped Henry for a moment. “Now, what I’m going to say might sound dumb.”
“Shocker.”
“Do you think she might be a ghost?” Martin whispered.
“Dumb, all right. Know any ghosts who can choke a person? No, this lady is a psycho. With a capital ‘S.’ And that’s why we gotta knock her out.” As Henry said that, he bent over and unearthed a hunk of rock the size of an apple.
Martin grabbed Henry by the wrist. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“It’s a great idea,” Henry snapped back. “I seen it in movies all the time. And trust me, this loony is gonna go all strangle-hands on us at any minute. It’s better if we send her to sleepytime.”
“It’s probably harder to knock someone out than you think.” Martin didn’t know a lot about anatomy or about concussions, but he did know that Henry was not nearly as strong as he believed himself to be.
“So what’s your plan, genius?” Henry asked.
The forest was full of felled trees, each one infested with ferns and fungus. “Well,” Martin said, “I’ve read that certain plants and mushrooms have toxins that if you get them in the bloodstream, then they can knock a person unconscious.”
“What about this sucker?” Henry asked as he chucked
the rock to the side and grabbed a red-capped, white-gilled mushroom.
“I think that’s an amanita,” Martin told him. “It’s certainly toxic. But if she ate it, it might take hours to kick in, and even then I’m not sure what it would do to her.”
“Gotta get it into the bloodstream, right?” Henry asked, reaching into his pockets.
“Well, yes, but like I said, even if you could get her to eat it—”
Henry interrupted him by whipping out a red-finned dart that had been holstered to his belt. “McNally’s Pub. Been using it to kill squirrels.”
“Okay,” Martin said, “but what does that have to do with anything?”
Henry showed him by dipping the tip of the dart into the stem of the mushroom. “Like an Amazon man. Magic toads and all that voodoo.”
“The toxins are actually in the cap of the mushroom,” Martin tried to tell him, but Henry wasn’t listening.
Instead, he was lining up his shot. “Right for the throat,” he said, and in a blink he was letting loose the dart. Martin might have had a chance to stop him, but he hardly thought it was possible that someone, even Henry, would do something so stupid.
The dart flew straight and true and hit the woman in the back of the skull, where it stuck, dead center. Rather than yelping, she turned around and shot them a confused look. Running her hand up the back of her neck, she found it. She tried to pull the dart out with a quick tug, but it didn’t come.
“What did you do?” she asked. A shiver of rage raced up her torso and caused her shoulders to convulse.
“How long until she passes out?” Henry asked.
“Never,” Martin said. “You weren’t listening.”
And that was when she came bolting at them.
Martin couldn’t really blame her. If someone had thrown a dart into his head, he would have done the same.
Both boys spun off to their sides and began sprinting away, but she didn’t follow either of them. She simply kept running.
Martin watched over his shoulder as she sped back toward the mine. She didn’t get very far. As she attempted to duck under a branch, her foot caught a root. Her body sailed forward. Her head struck a rock. She lay still.
They approached slowly—Henry from the left, knife held high; Martin from the right, wielding a stick like a club. When they had her flanked, they waited. Only her back moved, and only ever so slightly, as she drew breaths in and let them out. Henry used his foot to flip her onto her side.
“See?” Henry said. “Shoulda done it my way.”
An earthy bruise adorned her forehead, and her eyes were mostly whites.
They carried her to the movie theater, Martin holding her shoulders, Henry her ankles. Thanks to its brick exterior, the building had survived the fire. Its marquee had been updated since Martin had last been in town. It had always read
CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS
.
Now it read
LIFE. STARRING DARLA
.
Henry pushed open the doors with his back and led the way inside. The lobby had been redone too. During Martin and Darla’s date, it had been decorated with candy advertisements and synthetic plants. It was now arranged as a giant
deck, with cushioned lawn chairs, wicker sofas, picnic tables, and gas grills.
They lay the woman facedown on one of the sofas.
“Lookie here. Brand-new BFFs come to visit the only person who still loves them.” Darla stood at the top of the stairway to the theater’s balcony. She winked, then descended slowly and theatrically, with one hand on the rail and the other swaying behind her back.
“Hello, Darla,” Henry said.
“What’d you weirdos bring to my beach club? Mannequin or something?” she asked as she made her way toward the sofa.
“Not exactly,” Martin said.
A couple of steps away, she stopped dead in her tracks. “Hold the phone. Are you kidding me?”
Martin shook his head.
“Who is she?” Darla asked. She reached forward to touch the woman’s face and then thought better of it. She drew her hand back to her chest.
“She’s a woman who lost her kitten,” Martin explained.
“And her mind,” Henry added.
“And why is she napping on my wicker?” Darla asked.
“We would actually prefer somewhere safer,” Martin said. “Do you have a room that can be locked?”
“How about the projection booth?” Darla suggested.
“That should work,” Martin said.
Darla squinted, and her face twisted up in confusion. “Guys,” she said. “There’s a dart in her head.”
A line of lanterns revealed the aisles, and Darla ushered all the kids into the theater with the promise of a surprise. In front of the screen, behind the drawn velvet curtains, Martin
and Henry sat on spools of film. “We’ll give you a dramatic entrance,” Darla had assured them. Through the crack between the two curtains, they could see that almost everyone was there. Only Lane was absent.
“Good evening, gang,” Darla said as she stood on a seat in the front row. “I’m guessing most of you thought I was gonna announce that I got the projector running again and we were gonna have the long-promised movie night. Sad to say, but it ain’t so.”
A volley of good-natured boos were lobbed her way.
“Fair enough, fair enough,” she went on. “What I do have, however, is far more exciting. Two of Xibalba’s finest, back with intriguing news. Fellas.”
That was their cue. Together, they stood, pushed open the curtains, and stepped forward. Strange as it was, having Henry there with him made it much easier for Martin. Pariahs couldn’t be pariahs if they came in a pair.
The boos burst forth again, and there was nothing good-natured about them now. Martin could accept that. He had earned it. He wasn’t sure about Henry, though. Henry resorted to giving the crowd a meager wave, and they responded with hisses.
“Hear them out,” Darla said. “You’ll be very interested. Trust me.”
When the racket finally lowered to a mild clamor, Martin coughed away his anxiety and got right to it. “There’s a woman,” he said. “An adult. Still left in the world.”
“Sure there is,” Tiberia said, her voice soaked in snark. “Teaches home ec at the school, right? Bakes brownies and directs the school play. Can you believe this moron?”
“He’s not messin’ with ya,” Henry said. “I seen her too.”
“Where is she, then?” Tiberia asked.
“She’s locked away at the moment,” Martin offered. “For safety reasons.”
“Is that right?” Sigrid responded. “To make sure everything is clear, let me go through it, then, yeah? Martin Maple, the boy who builds giant, dangerous toys. Henry Dodd, the boy who plays with guns and fire. They come to tell us there is a woman, only they have locked her away from us. For our safety.”
“Yes,” Darla said. “That’s the gist of it.”
“Prove it,” Tiberia said.
A violent thumping sound filled the theater. Everyone turned around. The face of the woman was pressed against the glass of the projection booth. She pounded at it with her fists. It was supposed to be soundproof, but it barely muffled her scream.
“Where! Is! Kitten!”
A
bonfire was ruled out. Too many bad memories. They opted for tiki torches, planting them in a circle in Town Square. The chairs and table were configured as they had been during the trials, but it was yet to be decided whether they would hold a trial for Martin. A more pressing matter was at hand. This meeting was about making a decision about the woman, away from the woman.
“Who is she?” Gabe asked.
“We think she was living in the hospital,” Martin said. “She believes she’s been here her whole life.”
“I never saw her in the hospital,” Sigrid said. “It does not mean she was not there. I never felt … correct in that place.”
“What’s her name?” Trent asked.
“Pudding something, I think,” Martin said without a hint of sarcasm.
“So stupid,” Henry grumbled. “She was jokin’. An old person’s idea of a joke.”
Stupid perhaps, but Martin couldn’t help it. He was hardly comfortable with kids his own age. Now he had an adult to decipher. And apparently, this one was insane.
Insane or not, the woman was surely someone, from somewhere, and the kids decided the only way to know her identity was the obvious one: ask her. If her answers were incomprehensible or illogical, then they’d lock her back up and go on with their lives. Martin didn’t necessarily think this was the best course of action, but his opinion was hardly valued anymore.
Tiberia was sent to fetch her. While they were waiting, the kids said very little. No one seemed to care what Martin or Henry had been doing during their weeks away. If anything, they were annoyed by the boys’ return and the introduction of this new problem.
The woman arrived with a bandage wrapped around her head and her arms tied behind her back. She appeared calm, pacing deliberately as Tiberia guided her to the table and sat her down at the end. Tiberia untied her wrists, whispered something in her ear, and backed away.
“The nurse said that if I answer your questions, then you’ll bring me Kitten,” the woman said firmly.
They had a kitten. They had six, actually. On the night of the fire, a litter of newborns had been nursing in an aluminum shed behind Nigel’s house. They were some of the only animals to survive. A boy named Vernon had taken them in, and the potpourri of tabbies were now waiting in large aquariums in the front window of the Smash Factory. If all went as planned, the woman would spot one that
looked like her kitten and cease with her wild accusations. It didn’t matter really, though, because they would get answers first. Kittens were just bargaining chips.
“You got it,” Darla told her. “Answer our questions and we’ll bring you to your kitten. Easy peasy.” Darla had appointed herself lead inquisitor, and there had been no objections. History had told the kids that leadership came with few benefits.
“What do you want to know?” the woman said in a perfectly pleasant voice.
“Who are you?” Darla asked.
“Marjorie,” she said plainly.
“Where are you from, Marjorie?”
“I’m from here.”
“From Xibalba?”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“You’re in it, lady,” Darla said. “But we haven’t ever met you. So what have you been doing since the Day?”
“Which day?”
“The day everyone left us.”
“The day they emptied the rooms, you mean?” The woman’s eyes narrowed on Darla, then moved to the crowd.
“Yes,” Darla said. “That day.”
“There are only children here,” Marjorie said suspiciously.
“Nice of you to notice,” Darla said. “Many of us would actually be considered adults in certain cultures, but yes, compared to you, we’re a bunch of toddlers.”
“It’s odd,” Marjorie said. “They empty the rooms and leave children in charge. But not even a place for my kitten, so smart and kind.”
“I’m sure your kitten is a prodigy,” Darla said, “and you
can hear his clever purr once you tell us what you’ve been doing since that day they ‘emptied the rooms.’ ’Cause, you know, that’s all we really care about here. It was ages ago, Marjorie. Over two years.”
“More like a few weeks,” Marjorie said with a contemptuous snort. “Children have no concept of time.”
Martin didn’t like the tone of Marjorie’s voice. It was confident. When she had attacked him, her voice was a muddle of confusion and fear. Now it was sharp, sure. She truly believed what she was saying.
“Where were you a few weeks ago,” Martin asked, “when they left?”
Marjorie turned her gaze to Martin and she placed her fists on the table. He feared she might make a move for him, and he cocked his chin at Tiberia, who nodded in acknowledgment and stepped closer. But Marjorie didn’t budge. She simply said, “Martin Maple. You are one persistent boy. Do you know things that I don’t?”
“I believe it’s the other way around,” Martin said, fighting through the fear that was choking him almost as savagely as her hands had.
“On the day they all left, I woke up in a cage,” she said. Then she raised one fist, extended a finger, and pointed through the flicker of the tiki torches to the machine. “That cage.”
The machine, poised in the same spot as it had been on the day of its failed launch, did indeed look like a rocket ship, but it also resembled a metal-shelled birdcage.
“No one ever put you in there,” Martin said defiantly.