Kenner turned his face away, eyes narrowed and trembling. A bit of drool leaked out of the side of his mouth.
The lights went out.
“What is—” The sound of Dan walking back over to the door and opening it. Yelling into the hall-way.
“Phones are knocked out. Has to have been an EMP,” Abram heard a female voice say.
“Was it a strike? Was it a strike? Where’s COINTEL?” said another voice from farther off.
The lights flickered back on, now dim and orange, and Dan stood in the doorway, craning his neck out, yelling orders, but still pointing his gun blindly toward Abram and Kenner. People crowded the hallway, confused. A paranoid chorus. Dan peeled away his suit jacket and dropped it to the floor.
He turned and looked at Abram and Kenner, lifting his gun, moving it back and forth between the two, his face equal parts anger and bewilderment, the large vein still bulging on his red forehead. The lights went out again. A gunshot and a flash of light.
45
Edie took the Alum Rock exit and continued past nondescript single-level ranch houses. A few lights on in sooty windows. An autonomous garbage truck. An elderly man on a bike, wearing full cycling gear and a respirator. Edie noticed the smell of smoke and feared it was the truck’s engine, but she quickly recognized it as the ubiquitous summer-fire haze descending. A clot of blood in her clogged nose must have cleared.
She turned right onto the narrow two-lane country road that began the spiral up Mount Hamilton. The sky formed a pearlescent dome through the dusty trees. The tall yellow grass brushed the side of the truck, making a swishing sound. The air inexplicably smelled of a recent rain. Edie looked over at Octavia, who stared exhaustedly out the passenger window. Or possibly stared at her aunt, who lay dead between her and the window.
“You know, Miss Edie, you can’t figure everything out. Not everything. There’s too much. Infinity of things.”
“That’s true.”
“You make some ideas, you make some stories to figure it out, and all them stories just turn into bars. Like bars in a jail. The Blue Lady told me that one time.”
“I haven’t figured any of this out. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“That’s good, though, Miss Edie. That’s good.”
“Why is it good?”
“Because the world is just a big crazy painting, and when I don’t try to see the painting too good, when I look at it out the corner of my eye, not even thinking one thing about it, that’s when I see it the best. You think that’s true, Miss Edie?”
“Maybe it’s true.”
A blue light, like a spark, passed silently over them and over the sparse trees, heading down the mountain.
“Did you see that?” Edie said.
“Was it another one of them drones?”
“I don’t think so.”
Another followed along the same trajectory with blazing brilliance. Edie and Octavia shielded their eyes.
“It almost looks like some kind of lightning,” Edie said as they continued doggedly on, curve after curve.
“Look, Miss Edie, you can see that whole city down there. We’re really high up. I think I can see the ocean.”
“Yeah, I think that’s the ocean. It’s hard to tell.”
The lights of the waking city twinkled below them in the morning air. Edie stopped the truck.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Hold on. Just stay in the truck for a second.”
Edie took the gun from below the seat and exited the truck, motor still running. In the middle of the road lay a man in a black suit, his head partially blown away. A puddle of blood nearly as wide as the road. The man still held a gun in his hand. His remaining eye was open, lid half closed as if he were fall-ing asleep. Edie heard a noise in the grass and turned limply, forgetting she held a gun. A coyote stood in the grass, watching with gaunt black eyes. Edie walked backward and stepped up into the truck. She continued slowly, carefully driving over the dead man, with him passing between the tires, and stopped before the next curve. She leaned from the window and watched the coyote come out of the tall grass and approach the dead man, warily sniffing.
“What’s back there? What did you get out for?” Octavia asked.
“There was a dead body back there.”
“I didn’t see.”
“We almost ran over it,” Edie said.
“What do you think killed them? Maybe that lightning?”
“I don’t know.”
They continued on, passing a derelict guard station. Edie spotted another body. Barely visible slumped in the grass. It also wore a black suit and tie. Her heart pounded, but she also held a weari-ness, a resignation. They passed conspicuously abandoned collegiate dormitory-style buildings, as if they were a stage set, a thin cardboard facade. They arrived at the observatory, and Edie crept to a stop and cut the engine. A quartzite mineral smell hung heavy in the air. Edie felt strongly that she was be-ing observed.
“Okay, so we’re here, Octavia. Abram is supposed to be here somewhere. Goddammit, I wish I could call him. The Blue Lady in your dream told you we were supposed to come here, so what did she say we were supposed to do once we got here?”
“She just said we had to come here. That’s all.”
“Did the little red-haired girl tell you anything?”
“All she ever told me was that she was my friend and she was going to help us. And then she did help us.”
“God, where’s Abram? He said he was on his way here. Why would he want to meet here? I don’t see Kenner’s truck. Let’s get out and go in the building. Maybe he’s inside.”
Something moved in the tall grass on the far edge of the parking lot. Another coyote? Another sparking light in the air, this one blinking wildly as if spinning. It stopped and then disappeared again. In its brief appearance, it illuminated the animal moving slowly in the grass as something porcine, hair-less, pink, and delicate. It exited the grass and began lumbering awkwardly toward the truck. Edie and Octavia sat, dumbstruck, and then Edie clumsily groped under her seat and produced the gun. She shook it through the open windshield, training it on the pathetic beast.
“Do you see that, Octavia? What does that look like to you?”
“It’s like a baby pig. Or a pig costume. Little kid in a good costume.”
“Hey! Stop right where you are! I have a gun.”
The creature continued without acknowledgment, hobbling to the passenger side of the vehicle. Edie and Octavia crowded in front of the window, leaning over Gabrielle’s corpse. Edie could smell her corpse now. They stared in disbelief at the thing standing below.
The creature lifted its head with much difficulty and met their gaze. Its eyes were wet and large. They expressed something beatific, the eyes of a saint or a martyr.
“It is time . . . Seven . . . seven . . . zero . . .” the creature said, the words nearly unintelligible.
It then dropped onto all fours and continued on fleshy, malformed pink hooves back in the direc-tion it had come, into the tall grass.
“It had the same clothes as that little girl. Did you see, Miss Edie? It had a shirt with an octopus on it.”
Edie sat back, wild-eyed and silent.
“Did you see, Miss Edie?”
“I think I’m losing my mind,” Edie said, setting the gun on the seat beside her and then picking it up again and then setting it down. “That was a person in a costume, Octavia.”
“Listen, Miss Edie, I think we have to use the thing in the back of the truck. The thing my aunt was going to set off back in San Francisco. We have to do it here instead.”
“The EMP? Why set it off up here in the middle of nowhere?”
“I don’t know. But I have a feeling that’s what we have to do.”
“The truck door is booby-trapped. How are we going to get in there to set it off? I don’t have time for this. I need to go find Abram. I’m going in the building, and you’re coming with me.”
“Just
wait a second. Let’s look on my aunt’s phone. Maybe we can open the truck door with her phone.”
They huddled over the phone, both nervously looking over their shoulders every few seconds. A bird sang from a nearby tree. The wind picked up and then died away again, bringing a sweet smell of grass mixed with smoke.
Octavia dialed 770 on the phone as if placing a phone call, and a few seconds later, a low hum of machinery came to life behind them, nearly inaudible. Edie placed her hand against the aluminum be-hind the seat and felt a vibration.
“Feel this phone, Miss Edie. It feels real hot. It’s almost burning up.”
“Let’s get out of the truck.”
They fled the truck, Octavia carrying the rabbit.
“I’m going to get your aunt out of the truck and lay her down right here, okay?”
“Okay.”
Edie walked back to the truck and hesitated, looking back at Octavia, and then hefted Gabrielle’s body out of the truck. She could feel a warming, her silver mylar headpiece heating up, and she warily removed it, holding it under her arm. She braced for an instant migraine that didn’t arrive. Edie contin-ued dragging Gabrielle, her heels leaving a trail in the gravel parking lot, and laid her in front of Octavia. The reality of the lifeless, bloody body clutched both Octavia and Edie by the throat and they cried.
46
The sound of a body falling to the floor and a door slamming and being hastily locked from the outside with shaking keys. Silence except for the murmur of panic beyond the nearly soundproof door. The room was dark.
“Hey. Hey, are you okay? Kenner? Kenner?”
“I’m okay, I think. Are you okay?”
“I don’t think he shot me. I don’t feel anything.”
They blindly patted themselves down, Abram terrified he would feel a gaping bullet hole and fall dead upon finding it.
“I found it. There’s a bullet hole here in the wall, I think,” Kenner said, startling Abram with his proximity in the dark. “Must’ve went right between us. Pretty lucky.”
“He could march back in here and finish the job any second,” Abram said, fumbling through the velvet dark to test the doorknob. “We have to try and get out of here during this blackout, or whatever this is, while they’re all distracted. The door’s locked. Sounds like a bunch of people talking in the hall-way right outside.”
“You see that light?” Kenner said, again suddenly at Abram’s side.
“What is that?”
“That’s where I felt the bullet hole in the wall.”
“Is it light coming through from the room next door?” Abram asked.
“It didn’t feel like the bullet went all the way through the wall. Maybe it’s like a—”
The light intensified, fanning out and filling the room with rippling blue rays, like light through an aquarium. They careened to the opposite corner of the room when they heard the deadbolt rattling and unlocking.
“What is that light? Where is that light coming from?” A cacophony of frightened voices echoed in-to the room as the door opened. A man in a suit entered from the dark hallway, gun drawn. He turned the gun on Abram and Kenner cowering against the opposite wall.
“What is that light? Where is that light coming from?”
There was fear in his voice and the sound of an agitated crowd looming behind him like a wave being held back.
“We . . . I . . . I . . .” Abram stammered.
At that moment, the man’s head popped as if there had been a small explosive planted inside it. The sound of a firecracker. Small pieces of skull and brain sprayed the side of the open door. The sound of panic outside the door and more pops in quick succession. The door slammed shut, moved by a great invisible force, and the gray alien Lam levitated in the corner of the room as if held by strings. The room went dark again.
Abram heard a voice in his head, his voice but not his voice. A system built of dreams. The room filled again with light. The sensation of a ride slowly whirring back to life at an amusement park. With its long, thin hand, the alien motioned at the wall and the light from the bullet hole. The wall became transparent and Abram could see beyond to another room.
He saw himself seated in the black office chair, head back, mouth open, a black and red flower growing out of the center of his chest. A bullet hole in its center. Kenner crouched next to the chair, holding Abram’s hand, sobbing. There stood another gray alien being behind Kenner, a hand on his shoulder. The being turned and looked at Abram, watching. Only the other masks are real.
Abram turned to look away. He found himself alone in a room. A museum room, a Victorian por-trait gallery. A chandelier descended from the high arched ceiling, a chandelier made up of embers, embers suspended. Two doves flitted around the chandelier wildly. A pyramid of neatly stacked gold bars sat at the center of the room.
Abram closed and rubbed his eyes, and when he opened them, the gold bars had become a large pile of dense wet roses as tall as him. He was intoxicated by the smell; it stroked his cheek and gently kissed his eyelids. Wires began to spill out of the pile of roses in large black bundled bunches. Zip-tied wires of red or green. Innumerable slick black carcasses of dead mice worked their way through the writhing, growing floral accumulation and onto the floor at its base. A pig carcass slid through, eyes closed as if it were sleeping, with a wet thud. From the top of the mountain of roses bubbled an enor-mous, lifeless octopus, bleached white. It tumbled and slapped to the floor.
The room smelled of animal rot and computer ozone, ocean brine, and roses. The delicate sound of shifting rose petals stopped and a woman’s torso appeared, a woman with blue skin. She emerged from the top of the mass, naked from the waist up, the accumulated pile like an enormous hoop skirt below her. She looked at Abram with solid blue eyes, as if she had been cast in one piece from wax or plastic. She moved as if underwater. The embers shimmered and danced yellow and white above her.
“Draw into yourself that voice that cannot clear what is shut away. Left behind ideas of what con-stitutes your god matter womb. It’s the opposite of nothing. Time, desert, death.” She spoke in a deafen-ing chorus of voices that didn’t match the movement of her lips.
Abram fell to his knees, weeping uncontrollably. He clasped his hands together in prayer, mirror-ing perfectly a tapestry on the wall behind him. Abram wanted to beg for forgiveness, for mercy. He had never felt himself in the presence of something so exquisite, so infinite and holy. He tried to speak but could only make out sobs and gasps. He clumsily wiped his eyes, which were blinded with tears.
“A ghost science. A system made of dreams.”
47
Abram smelled sweet, dry grass. He’d once purchased artificial dry grass scent in a plastic tube, a cologne from a French company. He remembered placing it in his bathroom cabinet, next to the smell of soil and tomatoes and Earl Gray tea. He ordered it while stoned. It was before Edie. The tubes were dried up artifacts by the time he met Edie. She found them and laughed, and he threw them away. Artificial soil. Artificial grass. Chemicals in a plastic tube.
Abram opened his eyes and found himself on a hillside. A mountainside. The observatory. Tall golden grass flitted gently around his head. It was a miracle or a dream. He sat up and found Kenner lying in the grass, face-down, drooling and asleep. They were at a steep angle, and out beyond distant trees and hills, Abram made out a city and, beyond it, an ocean. A dark city in a mist, not a single light. Wisps of smoke rising. A deep quiet overcame him, penetrating his bones and blood and soft tissue. He shook Kenner gently by the shoulder to wake him.
“What? Huh? What?”
“Wake up. We’re outside.”
“We died?”
“What? No, I don’t think so.”
“Dead or alive, I forget which one is better.” Kenner said, rolling onto his back, blinking and pick-ing dirt and dead grass off his face and lips. “How did we get out here?”
“I don’t know.”
“We died?”
“No,
you just asked that.”
48
A great silence passed over Edie and Octavia. Edie could hear her heart beating, could hear Octavia’s heart beating. Each blade of golden grass danced. The wind slid gentle fingers over each one.
“Something happened. Can you feel it? Something’s different,” Edie said.
“It got real quiet, didn’t it?” Octavia said, crouching near her aunt’s body.
Edie felt a sting against her leg and reached into her purse. She pulled out Gabrielle’s phone and then dropped it on the ground, acrid smoke rising from it. The rabbit hopped away from Octavia and examined the phone.
“If that thing fried all the electronics up here, how is that artificial rabbit still working?”
“Maybe it was a real rabbit all along, Miss Edie. Pinocchio.”
“Uh . . . No . . . It was for sure not a real rabbit,” Edie said, looking down at the rabbit warily. “Maybe that thing didn’t work, or it did a half-assed job. All it did was fry the only working phone we had.”
Octavia picked up the rabbit and kissed it on the forehead. “A real rabbit.”
“I need you to stay with me. Hold my hand. We have to leave your aunt here for a minute while we look for Abram, okay?”
“Okay.”
Edie held the child’s hand, and in the other hand, the gun. The child held the rabbit under her arm. Edie had replaced the silver foil headwrap in case of another sudden neurological attack, and it flitted lightly with each step.
As Edie approached the double glass door, she saw a reflection of a figure approach the truck parked behind them, and she swung around with the gun raised.
“Edie?” Abram said, then began laughing wildly.
Edie ran to him, dropping the gun and purse on the ground. Kenner watched in a wobbly daze.
The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 27