“Shit, I’m awake! I think we lost them! We don’t have rearview mirrors. I don’t know if they’re still behind us or not, but I think we lost them.”
“Where are you driving, Aunt Gabrielle?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to get you safe.”
“I think we need to go to the hospital. You’re hurt, and Miss Edie is hurt, too.”
“We can’t go to a hospital right now. I’m not hurt that bad. Don’t worry. I have medicine with me.”
Gabrielle swallowed a loose pill from her pocket and wiped the sweat from her face with her sleeve. She eyed the red-haired little girl, who sat quietly, hands in her lap, staring out the window at the passing night. Octavia sat up straight and nervous, mechanically petting the rabbit in her lap. Ga-brielle took another pill and then uncapped and sniffed hard from a small glass vile.
“Okay, we can do this. We can do this,” she said, wild-eyed.
Edie coughed and rose from the floorboard, flinching at the sight of the red-haired child. The child handed Edie her purse, and Edie clumsily fished through it with half-closed, tear-filled eyes, taking out the silver mylar headwrap and putting it on. She crouched on the floorboard, breathing heavy, as if she had been running, and then sat dazed between Octavia and the red-haired child, her hand on her head to steady the silver mylar against the highway wind. The four of them sat in silence, the little red-haired girl in peaceful reverie and the other three in shock and exhaustion. An hour passed.
“Is your name Aila?” Octavia asked the red-haired little girl. “The Blue Lady told me a long time ago that I would meet a red-haired girl named Aila that would help me.”
“Yes . . . my name’s Aila,” the little girl said hesitantly, as if very carefully choosing her words. She idly chewed at her small, dirty fingernails.
“Who were those two women back there, Aila?” Gabrielle said, choking back rage. “What did you do to Ash and Luci? How did you get in?”
“She’s not bad, Gabrielle. I promise,” Octavia said.
“You didn’t see what I saw, Octavia. Who were those women, Aila? Are they still coming?”
“They’re still coming.”
“Well, from this point on, you can consider yourself a hostage.”
“They’re behind us. Watching.” Aila laughed and reached over Edie to pet the rabbit in Octavia’s lap. “There’s no hurry.”
Gabrielle wanted to stop and toss the little girl out onto the side of the highway, but it took all of her strength just to keep her eyes open and her foot pressed against the accelerator. She thought that this was how a wounded deer must feel being lazily followed into the deep woods by a pack of wolves. She saw a wolf once in the San Francisco Zoo as a child. The wolf’s eyes were more empathic than the eyes of the little girl. Her eyes betrayed nothing remotely human, something large and dark and un-knowable. Larger than death or evil or any other human circumstance. They communicated this. The effect of an alien and unknowable God communicating through a lifelike child doll. An observer.
37
Abram awoke to a large, crackling fire. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and saw Betty and Laura crouched over a laptop, their backs to the fire. Night had fallen outside.
“You finally awake?” Abram heard someone whisper from behind him.
He turned to find Kenner lying in a fetal position, face flushed and covered in a sheen of sweat.
“Kenner? What happened? Are you okay?” Abram whispered.
“My ankle is fucked. I’m alive, though. You’re alive,” Kenner said, smiling and then grimacing in pain. “They have the card. They’ve been over there for hours, reading it. Haven’t said a word.”
“We have to get out of here. They have the card now, so maybe they’ll just let us go,” Abram said.
They sat in the silence of the crackling fire, Abram completely exhausted, terrified, but also out of adrenaline. Kenner sat next to him, shivering and sweating, adjusting every few minutes in an attempt to lessen the blinding, radiating pain in his ankle. He looked as if he would vomit.
“We have to do something about your ankle. It looks like shit. What happened, exactly?” Abram asked, as if learning the details of the incident would somehow give him a degree of control over the present situation.
“I jumped off the fucking roof of the motel, man. That kid was coming at me. It got Annie right in front of me. Right in front of me,” Kenner said, choking up.
They watched the two women huddled over the laptop on the other side of the fire. Neither of the women moved, weren’t even discernibly breathing. The fire began to die. Trembling and guts churning, Abram stood up.
“Fuck it. Wait here.”
Abram warily approached the women, consciously shuffling his feet so they wouldn’t be caught off guard.
“Hey, um, I don’t know what’s going on, but Kenner’s ankle is broken. I think we need to get him to a hospital or something. You have the memory card. That’s all you wanted, right?”
The women didn’t respond. It was as if he weren’t there. He came closer and could see both of their eyes scanning the text on the screen. Abram backed his way around the fire and returned to Ken-ner.
“Maybe we should just leave,” he said to Kenner, who looked as if he were about to lose con-sciousness.
“How? I can’t walk. We’re going to steal their car? I think the red-haired kid is out there.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I—”
Laura stood and walked outside, walked back in for a moment in seeming indecision, and walked out again. Abram and Kenner froze and then jumped at the deafening sound of a gunshot. Betty had no reaction and sat holding the laptop on her knees. Minutes passed as the sound of the gunshot reverber-ated in the memory of the rusted tin building. The fire had passed into a glowing orange ember, and the hangar was lit by the blue light from the laptop screen and the silvery moonlight reflecting off the desert outside. Betty closed the laptop and stood, setting it gently on the concrete floor. She walked outside.
“What in the hell was that? We have to get out of here before we get shot,” Abram said, crouched above Kenner as if he were about to break into a run.
“Wait, wait, help me up,” Kenner said, pulling at Abram’s arm.
Betty walked back into the hangar, a dark shape with heels clicking on the concrete. She walked to Abram and Kenner and placed her purse and a bottle of water at their feet. She stood and presumably looked at them in the dark; to Abram and Kenner, she was just a featureless silhouette. She reached out and took Abram’s hand and shook it. Her hand was ice cold and trembling. She then turned abruptly and walked out of the hangar. A heavy silence and then another gunshot.
Minutes passed until Abram and Kenner jumped at the sound of a voice from the darkness.
“Do you have any candy?” the child said.
“Hey, kid, where did your mom go?” Abram asked, voice cracking.
“The ladies are gone,” she said.
“Where did they go?”
“They’re dead.”
Abram stood, shaking, and then sat again. He swallowed hard.
“Can you help us? What’s your name again? Amy?”
“My name is Aila.”
“Can you help us, Aila?” Abram asked. “My friend is hurt.”
“Do you have any candy?”
“I can get you candy, as much candy as you want, if you help us.”
“That’s not a kid, man. That’s not a kid,” Kenner whispered from the floor.
Abram could just make out the shape of the child in front of him. She was crouching and poking at the logs in the fire. She took one of the smoldering boards and walked out of the hangar, dragging it on the floor behind her, leaving a trail of dying red embers.
“I’m going to lift you up, okay?” Abram said to Kenner.
“Shit. My ankle,” Kenner said, emitting the pained sound of a dying animal as Abram hoisted him up.
“Just put your weight on me. That’s good. One step. Okay,
another.”
Outside in the light of the crescent moon, they saw the luxury autonomous car, large side door open. Inside, under the soft light of the instrument panel, Betty and Laura sat together, holding hands. Laura slumped forward. Betty, head slung back, mouth open, held a gun in her hand, which rested on the seat beside her.
“Where’d the kid go?” Kenner said.
“I don’t know. Let me grab that purse and water bottle and stuff they left in the hangar. Wait here.”
“Don’t leave me alone. What if the kid comes back?”
“Take that gun and wait. I’ll be right back. Betty probably has the keys in her purse.”
Kenner took the gun and hobbled to the seats on the other side of the cabin, staring at the two dead women. He looked at Laura, crawled over, touched her still-warm cheek, and began to quietly cry.
“Did the kid come back?” Abram said as he approached the car.
“No. No kid. Nothing.”
“We can’t just leave the kid out here. Right?” Abram said.
“That’s not a kid. It just looks like a kid. Believe me. Let’s just please get the fuck out of here, okay?”
“I’ve never activated a car this nice. How do you even enter a destination address?”
Abram pressed a large orange icon, and the door slid closed.
“Let’s drink this water,” Abram said, shakily opening the bottle of water.
“What if the water is drugged?” Kenner said.
“Again? Is everything drugged? Who’s trying to drug us now? Seems to me everyone is dead. It’s over.”
“It’s not over. There’ll be more motherfuckers looking for us. Believe me. Hell, these two probably aren’t even really dead. Like the fake corpses from before, you know.”
“No, I think they’re dead.”
Abram crouched, fumbling with the touchscreen as Kenner lay on his side, holding the gun be-tween his knees and staring at the two dead women. The car lurched forward, and Abram stumbled to the floor. The sound of sticks and sand and dead grass crunched under the wheels as they moved slowly up the broken road to the highway. After a few minutes, they reached the open cattle gate and lurched off the shoulder and onto the highway. The car died.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Abram said.
“Was it almost out of juice? Remember, this is the same shit that happened to my truck.”
Abram pulled open the door with the emergency lever marked below the display panel and helped Kenner out of the vehicle. Kenner still held the gun and looked around nervously, balancing on one leg while Abram stood with a glazed expression, slowly drinking from the large bottle of water.
“Look,” Abram said.
“What?”
“Look up there. See it?”
Above them, two points of light among the vast sea of stars moved together in tandem, doubled back, paused, and then shot steadily toward the horizon.
Another light appeared where the highway met the horizon. The blinking white strobing roof lights of an autonomous semi.
“Let’s try and flag it down. We can light something and put it in the road,” Abram said, digging through Betty’s purse for a lighter.
“It’ll probably stop anyway if there’s a car blocking the road like this,” Kenner said.
“Or it’ll just go around. I’m not taking that chance. We have to block the road and force it to stop,” Abram said, still digging in the purse. “Hey, I found our phones.”
“Really?” Kenner said. “Are they still charged?”
“Dead.”
“Maybe I could shoot at the truck to stop it,” Kenner said, lifting the gun in that general direction.
“I don’t think you could stop it with that thing. But it would maybe alert the cops to come if you shot out a window.”
“I just thought of something,” Kenner said. “If the cops come, there are two dead bodies in that car and this gun with my fingerprints all over it. Shit, help me clean off this gun and put it back in the car. I shouldn’t have touched it in the first place.”
“That semi is coming fast. I’m not finding a lighter.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Kenner said, holding the gun with one corner of his black spandex shirt and furi-ously wiping it with another corner, balancing on one leg.
“Maybe if we stand in the road. The navigation system will detect humans and trip the brakes.”
“Yeah, right. I’m not standing out there. That thing is going two hundred miles an hour,” Kenner said, hopping on one leg, wincing in pain, and tossing the gun back into the car.
They heard the faint whistle of the oncoming semi cutting through the thin darkness.
“It’ll stop. It’ll stop,” Abram said while moving away from the road.
“It’s not slowing down, man,” Kenner said, hopping toward Abram. “It’s not slowing—”
Like a missile, the white autonomous semi collided with the stalled car, which vaporized into a deafening fireball that continued fifty feet down the highway, terminating in black smoke in the black night and clattering debris. Abram and Kenner both lay on their backs, scrambling away from the high-way and into the desert margin.
“Are you okay?” Abram yelled.
“Yeah, I think so. I told you it wouldn’t stop,” Kenner said, sitting up, dazed, a few feet from Abram. They both watched the complete, obliterating inferno. Nothing was visible in the flames.
“Come on. Let’s get back further in case something else explodes,” Abram said, lifting Kenner to his feet.
38
Gabrielle continued driving south on the empty highway, passing San Mateo and then Palo Alto, empty strip malls and large empty houses, the North American tech sector long since having relo-cated overseas. The moon was large and full and directly ahead of them as if pulling them forward. Alt-hough she had become a pale gray color and was still covered in a sheen of sweat, a tranquil expression passed over Gabrielle’s face.
“It’s going to be fine, Octavia. It’s going to be fine.”
“Are you okay, Aunt Gabrielle?”
“I’m fine. I took some medicine, and now I’m finally starting to feel better.”
“Why don’t you let me drive for a while, Gabrielle?” Edie said in a hoarse voice, dried blood from her earlier nosebleed smeared over the lower half of her face.
“I said I’m fine. I just need time to think. Make a plan. I gotta get back downtown by tomorrow af-ternoon. I have to drop those two off and lose these people following us. Gotta get Octavia someplace safe. Set this off downtown.” Her speech was manic, delirious. Her eyes were yellow, jaundiced.
Gabrielle took the off-ramp for Palo Alto and cut sharp into a large, immaculately brutalist park-ing garage, barely making the eight-foot height clearance and snapping the plastic security gate arm. She revved the box truck up the ramp but slowed at each speed bump to protect the precious, weapon-ized electronic cargo. They stopped on the eighth level, where Gabrielle abruptly and arbitrarily pulled into a spot and killed the engine.
“I just need to think. I need to think. I have to go back, but we can hide here for a while. I can’t . . . I can’t believe . . . Did that really even happen?” Gabrielle said and then touched her side and winced. “Shit . . . Are you okay, Octavia?”
“I’m okay.”
The parking garage was empty, a dimly lit, cavernous gray cathedral that seemed to stretch into infinity. Edie could make out the edge of the full moon through the bars over openings that revealed the smoky night air. The metal railings were like bars on a jail, she thought. They were caged animals now. Red lights flashed, and a weak, broken siren sounded up the ramp far behind them. A security bot plod-ded toward them, a cart really, originally white but caked in black soot. Gabrielle lifted her phone, tapped out a quick sequence, and the bot lost power. The lights in the garage dimmed and strobed.
Gabrielle exited the vehicle, followed by Edie, who had since gathered her senses and considered making an escape. She thought of Octavia
, that her aunt was erratic, injured, bleeding. She had no gun, no way of stopping her. A plan formed. A lightwell, fifty feet away. Down eight stories and onto the street, she could find a police station, find something. Were the two women still following them? What to do with the little red-haired girl?
“They’re here, watching us,” Gabrielle said, standing near Edie but with the air of someone alone, completely alone, and in the dark. Her bloody shirt stuck to her. Edie could smell the blood, could smell the pungent odor of sweat and fear emanating from both of them. Edie felt alive again, awake, a second wind. She thought of Abram, thought of her life before this giant mistake, this confusion, and it seemed far away, a dream.
“Do you hear that? That buzzing sound?” Gabrielle said, her eyes wild with fear.
“I don’t hear anything.”
The two children exited the truck, holding hands, Octavia holding the rabbit under her arm.
“You two should get back in the truck,” Edie said.
“I have to use the bathroom,” Octavia said.
“Pee?”
“Yeah.”
“Just squat behind the truck.”
“On the ground?”
“I don’t think there’s a bathroom in here,” Edie said.
“Okay.”
Octavia handed the rabbit to Aila and went behind the truck. Gabrielle deliriously walked away from the group, the lights around her flickering and pulsing erratically. Edie looked down and met Aila’s eyes. Her strange eyes and the eyes of the artificial rabbit, both watching. Edie thought of the Blue Lady game, the rabbit sitting on the small moon.
“How do I get out of this?” Edie asked the child, the words leaving her mouth involuntarily, her own words surprising her.
“You have to go to the big telescope. That’s where it ends. Gabrielle wants to go back to San Fran-cisco, but you will drive to the big telescope instead.”
The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 22