“Are those women you came with still following us?”
“They’re here now.”
“Here in this parking garage? Where?” Edie said, going pale.
The little girl pointed to the cartoon octopus on her shirt and smiled. “They just want to know why.”
“Know why?”
“Why it didn’t happen like it was supposed to happen.”
Octavia returned and gently took the rabbit from Aila.
“Miss Edie, where’s my aunt Gabrielle going?”
“I don’t know. I think we should go downstairs and wait for her.”
Edie took both children by the hand and walked toward the stairwell. The ceiling spread out in an endless concrete grid, countless compartments, as if they were inside a beehive that had turned to stone. Octavia counted the squares, motioning to each above them with her finger.
“Just keep walking. Keep walking,” Edie said to herself under her breath, watching Gabrielle’s shape staggering on the opposite end of the echoing garage. A psychotic break of some kind? Septic shock? Delirium from the wound in her side? A wave of empathy washed over Edie, and she stopped and watched Gabrielle.
“Let’s get Gabrielle back in the truck.”
“I thought we were gonna wait for her downstairs,” Octavia said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, but we should get her to a hospital.”
The door to the stairwell opened. Inside, Edie could make out a shape, female, elongated, a shape that didn’t make sense. It stood within the stairwell, framed by the doorway. Octavia screamed, and Aila began methodically petting the rabbit, as if she knew she would be forced to leave it at any second.
“Don’t worry,” the little girl said. “They just want to see.”
Edie moved away from the little girl, pulling Octavia and the rabbit with her.
The lights strobed violently and then turned off, the parking garage illuminated only by an enor-mous full moon outside. The moon appeared nearly to touch the garage, the intricate cratering fully dis-cernable. Like a large toy, a lamp, an illuminated model of the moon.
Edie could make out two small figures, at first stickmen, like dolls. She reached through the barred concrete void and could almost make contact. She recognized Abram and Kenner walking on this moon, talking, small footprints in the regolith. She reached for Abram, yelled for him, but no sound came out. She felt as if she were underwater. The air moved slowly, clouded with suspended particles glinting and picking up the light. Edie began to cry. Her tears floated up and away from her eyes.
A tug on her hand, and she turned, finding Octavia and the rabbit crouching on the concrete, sus-pended sharply in a moonbeam. All things moved slowly, barely at all, even Edie’s thoughts. She felt no fear, only awe and wonder, a strange peace. Time crept back in like a record under the needle, coming to life on Edie’s record player. Awake. She was awake.
She scooped Octavia and the rabbit into her arms and ran toward the truck, her silver mylar headpiece casting flickering reflections all around them. She started the truck, grinding the gears, and violently reversed out of the parking space. Where is the little red-haired girl? Aila. Where did she go? she thought as the truck lurched and died. The lights came on. Parking garage concrete, eve-rything as it had been before. Edie breathed heavily in the silence. She looked at Octavia, whose face was streaked with tears as she clutched the rabbit and crouched on the floorboard, eyes closed. Edie started the truck again and began circling the level, searching for Gabrielle and Aila.
Edie slammed on the brakes as Gabrielle stumbled out in front of the truck. She jumped out and gently helped Gabrielle into the passenger side. Octavia hugged her, crying, carefully avoiding Gabriel-le’s bloody, sticky right side. Edie climbed back into the driver’s side, and after grinding and stalling out, she drove down the ramp.
“Hey, Gabrielle? We’re going to take you to a hospital, okay?” Edie said, involuntarily ducking as the truck barely cleared a ceiling beam.
“No hospital. I’m alright.”
“You don’t look alright,” Edie said, carefully rolling down the parking garage ramp, riding the brake. “Did either of you see that giant full moon with the little people walking on it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Edie.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what I’m talking about, either,” Edie said, pulling down the final ramp. She could see the black pavement, sparkling like stars in the moonlight, just outside the garage entrance.
“Shit, should we go back for that kid? Aila. I don’t know. No, we shouldn’t. Octavia, wake up your aunt. Let’s try and keep her awake. Gabrielle, can you hear me? Talk to me.”
“I’m awake.”
“Miss Edie! Miss Edie!”
The black luxury autonomous vehicle pulled smoothly, silently to a stop in front of the exit. Both women stepped from the vehicle, guns drawn, followed by Aila, who picked at her fingernails.
“Edie, we’re here to help you. Your friend is hurt,” the older blonde woman said, completely calm, removed, disarming. She lowered her weapon and smiled as she approached the truck. The younger blonde woman stood behind her, gun centered on Edie.
A high mechanical whine and a silver orb the size of a basketball appeared above them, bobbing like a balloon. It pitched wildly and slammed to the pavement, exploding into countless pieces. Another slammed into the roof of the autonomous luxury vehicle, shattering its windows and sending a concus-sive blast of mirrored black glass into the street. Another dropped, narrowly missing the younger blonde but still throwing her to the ground with its force. A deafening, steady barrage of autonomous police surveillance drones, half mirrored dome and half mini copter, rained like one-hundred-pound hail-stones, demolishing everything on the street, plastic and metal shards flying in all directions.
Edie stomped on the gas and jerked the wheel, narrowly missing the older blonde woman. Drones continued raining in the hundreds, with more arriving, a silver sheet of destruction. Four drones pelted the truck simultaneously like rocks falling from a volcano and busted the windshield, which peeled off in a sheet like a glass Band-Aid. After they had cleared the edge of the barrage, Edie stopped the truck. Even at a distance, the sound was thunderous, like a series of car crashes. I hope that little girl is okay. Shit. Where are the police?
“Everybody alright?”
The artificial rabbit huddled serenely on the floorboard. Octavia huddled next to it, wide-eyed. Gabrielle sat, head back, limp and unconscious.
“I don’t care what she says. I’m taking your aunt to a hospital right now,” Edie said, fumbling with the gears and pressing the gas. Edie drove with one hand on her head to keep the silver mylar headwrap from blowing off in the wind. She shot quick side glances at Gabrielle, who looked as if she were dead. She wanted to ask Octavia to check her aunt’s breathing but thought better of it. If her aunt died, she shouldn’t find out that way.
“Where the hell’s the hospital?” Edie said, taking a route of convoluted side roads in case the CIA women followed. She wished the phone in her purse were charged and wasn’t even sure what city she was in. Palo Alto, maybe? All of the cities down the peninsula looked the same and were all equally eco-nomically depressed and mostly abandoned. I’ll find a hospital, and someone there will have a charger, and then I’ll call Abram and drop off Gabrielle, and then I’ll take Octavia with me until this whole thing blows over. The full moon dropped into view, filtered yellow through the hazy night sky. What am I doing? I’m not Octavia’s mother. This is kidnapping. She’d be safer with me than back with her mom in the shelter. If anything, we need to get further from the city. There may be more people looking for us in the city. Waiting at the apartment or the shelter. I’ve got to call Abram.
Gabrielle woke with a gasp and clutched at the seat.
“Mother of the world! Chaos! Chaos!”
Octavia took her aunt’s hand.
“I dreamed I saw her,” Gabrielle sai
d.
“Saw who?” Edie said, driving and scanning distractedly for a hospital.
“You saw the Blue Lady, didn’t you?” Octavia said, unsurprised, a hint of relief in her voice.
“She was there. The Mother of the World. She held me like a little baby,” Gabrielle said, opening her cloudy eyes, still dreaming and seeing. “I was a little pig, just a piglet, and she held me.”
“What did she tell you, Aunt Gabrielle?”
Gabrielle was silent for several minutes, grasping for consciousness. She scratched her head with a weak, shaking hand. She suddenly regained cognizance and looked around the cab of the vehicle as if she had just arrived there.
“I used to work for the Blue Lady. For the group. My first bio job. CRISPR synthesis. I also played the VR game every second I wasn’t in the lab. We all did. Turned over my life way back in Blue Lady al-pha, when it was just getting started. Things changed. I moved on, got scared. Hadn’t seen the Blue La-dy in ten years. Blocked it on my VR. She found me, though. She didn’t forget.”
“She doesn’t forget nobody. That’s good,” Octavia said, overjoyed. “What did she tell you?”
“She said . . . She said that her world is death. Death and chaos. But she is the salvation, the res-urrection for us. All of us will live through her in a new, perfect world. We are imperfect containers, she said, but she loves us anyway. This world has to end first for a new, better world to begin. She will carry us all there inside her.”
“You sound a little better. Are you feeling better?” Edie asked.
“I told you before that I was fine. I just need to rest a second.”
“I’m still taking you to an emergency room to have them look at that gash in your side.”
“Don’t be stupid. No hospitals.”
“You’re in no position to—”
“You want us to get arrested? As far as they’re concerned, you’re a terrorist, too. Most notorious cell in the world. The CIA will bump us all off on the way to the police station and make it look like a malfunctioning drone. Looks like they already tried.”
“You really think that’s what that was back there? Those CIA women seemed as surprised as we were. I don’t know what that was. There are easier ways to kill people and make it look like an accident. Maybe someone is after them? Maybe someone is on our side?”
“The Blue Lady,” Octavia said, petting and fully engrossed in the rabbit.
“Who knows who those women and that kid are. They’re after you about that memory card, and me and Octavia are caught up in your nightmare. They killed my friends. Brilliant people. You brought that down on our heads. Led them to us. That blood is on your hands.”
“Blood on my hands? You people are trying to end the human race. If anything, I’m the hero of this story.”
The sound of a siren approached from behind, red and blue tinting the cab. Edie pulled over to the shoulder. The ambulance roared past and then stopped abruptly and killed the lights and siren. The back doors of the ambulance flung open and a shot rang out with an instant metallic ping near Edie’s shoulder. Before she could react, milliseconds, another shot rang out, catching Gabrielle in the chest with a wet thud.
Octavia screamed and Edie ducked, shoving her down onto the floorboard. Edie slammed her foot on the accelerator, and the box truck jumped and careened blindly, catching the side of the ambulance, taking out its tire and ripping off its rearview mirror. The truck stalled and choked, and in the momen-tary pause, the door swung open, and the younger blonde woman ripped Edie from the vehicle, pulling her to the pavement and kicking her once with precision in the ribs. She shoved the barrel of her gun into the nape of Edie’s neck, at the tender point where she had developed a small horn-like protuber-ance from her phone posture.
The older blonde woman approached slowly, the sound of her heels on the pavement. Edie could feel her steps near her face. She wondered if these were the last things she would ever experience. She thought of the silver mylar balloons on the ceiling of her apartment, could hear them scratching in the dark on the ceiling.
“Hello, little girl. Your aunt is hurt and we’re here to help. Why don’t you step out of the car? That’s right. You can come out on this side,” Edie could hear the older blonde woman saying above her.
“There’s more people hiding in the back of the truck. My aunt told me not to tell. You won’t hurt them, will you?” Octavia said through heavy sobbing.
There was a silent pause, and Edie could only hear herself breathing, feel her hot breath on the pavement. She could hear Octavia’s soft crying above, a low, pitiful moan. The older blonde woman’s footsteps passed near Edie’s head again and moved slowly away, toward the back of the truck. Edie could feel the silver foil headwrap beginning to slide off, and she marveled that it had managed to stay on at all. She thought of silver. She thought of mercury. A puddle of silver-mirrored mercury in the palm of her hand. Heavier than she had expected. A memory from her childhood. Are these the kinds of things people think about before they die? She heard the lifting of a heavy latching mechanism at the back of the truck.
“Hey, do you want to hold my bunny?” Edie heard Octavia say to the younger blonde woman with the gun pressed into her neck. She felt the gun shift and move and she turned to see the woman just catching the rabbit with her other hand. At that moment, a deafening sound came from the back of the truck, like a thunderclap, a popping that left the air blue and so full of static that the hair on the back of Edie’s neck stood up.
Edie stood, and in one motion, she quickly punched the younger blonde woman twice in the face and then slammed her forehead into the woman’s nose with the entirety of her body weight. The blonde woman stumbled and fell onto her back. She raised the gun, and Edie leaped onto her arm, standing on the woman’s wrist like it was the branch of a tree, and stomped her face repeatedly with her other foot. The woman let go of the gun. Edie leveled the gun at the blonde woman on the ground, her face now shiny and red with blood. Edie’s hands shook violently, the gun barrel bobbing wildly.
“Miss Edie! We have to go. We have to get out of here.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
“No, Miss Edie. If you kill a devil, you turn into a devil. We just have to go now. We just have to go,” Octavia said, her face covered in a glistening sheen of tears.
The woman sat up and looked at Edie, her eyes blazing white in the red pool of her face. Other-wise, the woman looked completely calm, more puzzled than anything else.
“I swear to God, I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch,” Edie said, her voice cracking with emotion.
Edie backed toward the truck, keeping the gun trained on the woman.
She carefully stepped into the truck and, with one hand, started the ignition and began slowly rolling away. Octavia sat next to her, holding the lifeless hand of her aunt.
“Wait!” came a child’s voice came from outside.
Edie brought the barely moving vehicle to a stop, and with the motor still running, she cautiously stepped out. The blonde woman still sat unmoving, staring. Edie could see the body of the older blonde woman lying prone on the pavement where the back of the truck had been, rivulets of smoke rising from her body. Aila ran toward Edie, holding the artificial rabbit.
“Stop! Stop right there. Don’t come any closer,” Edie said, training the gun on the little girl.
Aila sat the rabbit gently on the pavement and it hopped the short distance to Edie, who scooped it up with her free hand.
“Go back over there with the others,” Edie said, motioning with the gun. “Go!”
“The big telescope,” the little girl said.
“Why? What’s at the telescope?”
“The big telescope at the top of the mountain. That’s the end.”
Edie backed her way to the truck, gun still raised, but less precisely, climbed in, and drove. Aila watched, expressionless.
***
Edie continued south on the highway. She began mindlessly count
ing out loud the number of autonomous semis they passed, and Octavia joined in a quavering, broken voice, still holding her dead aunt’s hand.
“Your aunt was very brave, Octavia. I’m sorry,” Edie said.
“The Blue Lady is helping my aunt Gabrielle on the other side. Blue Lady said in my dream these bodies are just containers anyway.”
“You were very brave back there, too. We’d probably be dead right now if you didn’t come up with that plan.”
“My aunt told me not to touch the back handle of the truck because it had a trap on it. So I just tricked that devil. You beat that other devil up, though, Miss Edie!”
They both laughed, Edie choking back confused, cathartic tears. “Yeah, well, I grew up with two brothers.”
They recounted the details of their escape from Edie’s apartment building and then their escape from the Mechanic’s Institute Library, somehow already piecing together humorous bits, creating a nar-rative.
“I’m taking the next off-ramp, and we’re going to the police. I’m done. Your aunt was murdered. We need help, Octavia. I feel like I’m trapped in a nightmare.”
“You know that if we go to the police, the devils will get us. We stopped those devils back there, but they have more, and they’ll get us if we stop. We have to keep going.”
“Keep going where?”
The sound of a bird chirping filled the cab, and Edie and Octavia froze and then examined the cab blankly.
“I found it. It’s my aunt Gabrielle’s phone. It’s in her pocket.” Octavia carefully reached behind her aunt and delicately pulled the phone, half coated in sticky blood, from her back pocket. The light from the phone lit their astonished faces. “It’s the map. Here, look, Miss Edie.”
“It’s driving directions to Lick Observatory.”
“That’s the big telescope? That’s what the Blue Lady told me in my dream last night. We have to go there.”
“This isn’t a game, Octavia. Your aunt is dead. We need to find help.”
“If we stop, we’re dead.”
“How do you know that?”
The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 23