by Chloe Garner
She hesitated, then picked up her purse.
“That’s your rule,” she said. “Not mine. I’m going to accept the consequences of anything that happens.”
He grinned.
“You know that part of being a teacher is establishing trust,” Lizzie said. He shook his head.
“Not the way I do it.”
He stuck his thumb over his shoulder.
“I’m going to go look at your car. If it’s a simple fix, I’ll do it now. We’ve got some time.”
“You leave without me, I will hunt you down,” she said and he grinned.
“Counting on it.”
Robbie was leaning against a wall in the hallway. She went to lean her back against the opposite wall.
“You can’t trust him,” Robbie said.
“I know.”
“Lara liked him,” Robbie said and she frowned. That wasn’t what she’d expected. She waited. “She liked him and she knew when to trust him. But she never would have slept with him.”
“What are you telling me?” she asked, and he shrugged, looking at the floor where he was working at it with his toe.
“I don’t want you here,” he said. “But if anyone is going to take care of you, he isn’t the worst person in the world.”
She wanted to resent the idea that she needed someone to take care of her, but considering last night she had a hard time saying it out loud.
“I want to do this,” she said. “I’ve wanted to help you my whole life, and now I actually can. You aren’t going to run me off now.”
“What about your job?” he asked. She shrugged. She couldn’t even possibly think about that, yet.
“I’ll e-mail him… later,” she said, not sure what she was ready to commit to. Robbie watched her close.
“You liked your job.”
“It was like being a nature commentator at a zoo,” she said. “And now I’m actually in the wilderness. How do you expect me to go back?”
He rubbed his face with both hands and shook his head.
“I should have made you leave,” he said.
“Like you could have,” she said with a smile. The door opened.
“Car’s running,” Trevor said. “Let’s go.”
She glanced at Robbie and he twisted his face away.
“Lara counted on you,” she said softly. “Can I count on you?”
“Not until I know you can handle it,” he said and she nodded.
“I can live with that.”
Trevor waved her over and she followed him, making sure that Robbie was with them. He was, albeit grudgingly. She got into the running car and looked at Trevor.
“Where to?” she asked. He waited as Robbie got in, and then he nodded.
“We don’t know,” he said.
“What?”
“We just follow the furlings,” Robbie said from the back. “It’s like pouring downhill.”
***
She couldn’t see what they saw.
Both of them seemed attracted like they were being drawn by a magnet, but to her it just felt like a series of random turns.
“They’re that way,” Trevor said, pointing out the window as they came up to an intersection.
“I don’t see anything,” she complained.
“Lara could,” Robbie said from the back seat, with a sort of absent distance.
“It will either come, or it won’t,” Trevor said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Matters to me,” Lizzie said. “How am I supposed to do this if I can’t see what you do?”
“Lara said that what’s supposed to happen was what would happen,” Robbie said, but Trevor blew air through his lips.
“She would,” he said. “The angel has to believe in order like that. Doesn’t make it true.”
“Doesn’t make it not true,” Robbie said, indignant now. Trevor laughed.
“We were friends, but we never came to an agreement on anything that sounded like philosophy.”
“She called you a heathen,” Robbie said, and Trevor laughed again. Lizzie liked the sound of his laugh, the way his face lit up when he found something genuinely funny. Robbie seemed to take it more personally, that Trevor refused to take anything seriously.
“Which way?” she asked.
“Just ahead,” Trevor said, pointing. “There’s Dennis.”
She spotted the bald, tattooed man leaning against a stair at the bottom of the staircase that lead up to the courthouse.
“No,” she said.
Trevor leaned forward, grinning as he scanned. Here, Lizzie could see, could see furlings as they crept and peered around things, scattering from in front of her car as she found a place to park. She turned to look at Trevor.
“No,” she said again. “We aren’t doing this here. Everyone is going to get in trouble.”
Robbie was already out, not staying for the fight.
“Oh, I like this one,” Trevor said. “Look at the trash cans. And you know Dennis brought his spray paint. Sybil throws the best fits in public.”
“She’s going to get arrested.”
“Add it to her long history of doing just that,” Trevor said, opening his door with a sense of impatience.
“Pick somewhere else.”
He looked back at her, ducking slightly to be able to see her under the car roof.
“You think we choose?” he asked, play, a dare, and then got out. She gripped the steering wheel, not liking it at all. The police were going to be all over a public building like this. There would actually be armed security in there.
Trevor ducked back down.
“You don’t need to be here,” he said with a tempting smile, knowing that this would only make the whole thing worse for her. “It’s still early. No one is expecting you to do this kind of thing, yet.”
“Does it get any better?” she asked. He laughed, dropping to a knee and looking around as more of the hooligans showed themselves. The furlings were coming out of cover, beginning to get into things, starting to fight with each other.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
He winked and got back up again, slamming the car door behind him. She cursed under her breath and got out to chase him.
Halfway up the stairs, something happened.
She wasn’t sure what it was; like someone had dropped a flag, furlings came pouring out of everywhere, tangling with each other, jumping up onto trash cans, banking off of handrails and walls and chittering and screaming at each other. Lizzie jumped sideways as one of them came careening past her, and Trevor pushed her back away from him.
“Nothing personal,” he said. “But you’ve got to learn that no one else can see them.”
She tried not to skitter to the side as a pair of wrestling furlings came rolling down the stairs in between them, but she didn’t have any luck. They were going to tangle in her legs if she didn’t get out of the way.
“You’re making a scene,” Trevor said conversationally.
“They’re avoiding you,” she said and he grinned.
“No. They’re messing with you. Stand straight and they’ll quit.”
Another launched himself off of a handrail right next to her, and she ducked as it went flying overhead, banking off of Trevor and careening away.
She stood.
Just stopped walking.
“No better,” Trevor said, coming back and taking her elbow. “Keep moving.”
“I can’t do this,” she said.
“You can,” he said, calm. “You will. It’s just going to be an awful lot of fun watching you fail for a while. For all of us.”
“Aren’t you going to do anything?” she asked.
“Me?” he asked. “I’m trying not to stir them up any more than you already are. If I get all excited, I’m just going to make it worse.”
“Then why are you here?” she asked.
“Because I’m the middle of it,” he said. “They were coming here on their own, anyway,
but once I get here, I keep the whole thing from roving.”
“Roving.”
“Roving battles are a lot worse than stationary ones,” he said. “We trash everything in its path and we just pick up more and more furlings.”
She shook her head, feeling even more helpless and lost - knowing that it was all real - than she had felt even when she thought that it wasn’t and there was nothing she could do.
It was so big and so complicated, and she was going to have to learn this language, this sport.
“What happens if I touch one?” she asked.
“You get fur on your socks?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
“Last time I vaporized him,” she said.
“You have to do that on purpose, I assume,” he said. “But that’s for you to figure out on your own.”
She tucked her face against his shoulder, trying to just move the way that he did, but the furlings redoubled their efforts, trying to make her shy away as they grew increasingly violent toward each other, and then the things around the stairs, trash cans and landscaping.
And then Sybil came streaking down the sidewalk at the top of the stairs, screaming gibberish at the top of her lungs and tearing pages out of a phone book and throwing them in the air.
“A classic,” Trevor said, stopping to watch. People on the sidewalk split to either side, watching her and whispering to each other, and someone went into the courthouse. Lizzie stiffened, knowing that they were on a very short clock, now.
Sybil kept running, then landed on her knees, skidding across the concrete on her boots as she kept screaming.
It was like stirring a pond full of leaves with a stick. They swirled and spun around her, following and chasing, nipping at each other and chittering. Another of the hooligans came running past Sybil from the other direction carrying a flare, and the crowd of furlings split, some of them circulating around Sybil and the rest chasing after the flare. Behind her, Lizzie heard a shout as someone complained that Dennis was spray painting the stairs. She couldn’t turn to look.
Didn’t dare.
“Come here,” Trevor said, pulling her to the side of the stairs. “Sit up there.”
He helped her up onto the wide concrete rail and tucked her feet up against her, then nodded.
“Be still and just watch. I wouldn’t go after any of them, if I were you.”
He gave her a quick shrug and a grin, then darted up the stairs to go stand next to a flagpole.
He didn’t disappear, but something about the shape of him altered, and she had a hard time seeing him. She didn’t understand what happened, but she didn’t have much time to think about it, either. The war was raging on the stairs now, as hooligans threw trashcans rolling down the stairs at each other, and a pair of them wrestled on the first landing. The furlings formed a ring around them, nudging and nipping at each other, but moving less and less as they watched. Up on the top landing, a woman went by doing cartwheels and flinging red paint at people.
Some of the furlings chased, and some of them became more and more mesmerized, and gradually, Lizzie began to recognize the patterns of what the hooligans were accomplishing. She had no idea how they were doing it, but they were drawing the furlings into doing less and less independent things.
When one of the more chaotic hooligans went past, the furlings stirred up again, chasing and fighting and…
She thought she’d gotten the hang of it, but then she saw a pair of them merge into each other the way she’d seen them merge through doors and windows, before. The resulting furling was larger and more aggressive, and it started chasing the other furlings with a sort of predatory instinct. One of the hooligans came past dragging a crowbar noisily across the sidewalk and the furling lost focus for a second, sniffing along after the noise, but it wasn’t enough for long. Another pair of furlings merged, elsewhere, and the two bigger furlings started circling to fight. The littler ones came pouring in to watch - the ones that weren’t watching or chasing hooligans. One of the bigger furlings grabbed one of the spectating ones and smashed it between front paws, growing larger, and then the two big ones were just consuming the small ones, getting bigger and bigger and clashing against each other when they weren’t growing.
Lizzie was ready to get down, to try to communicate with some of the hooligans, Trevor, anyone to try to figure out how to deal with the furlings, but that was when the police showed up. Hooligans were running around yelling and throwing things, hitting each other, tackling pedestrians, and the police started chasing, yelling and stirring the furlings even more thoroughly than the hooligans had. The big furlings stopped fighting each other and turned to watch as a pair of officers came to pull Sybil up off the ground. Lizzie could see from where she sat that Sybil did, indeed, bite one of them. The furlings hopped toward the two officers as they wrestled Sybil to the ground again and started to handcuff her, but it wasn’t enough to distract them. Someone came running past Lizzie.
“Stay,” Trevor said. “That’s a good spot, and you haven’t done anything wrong. If the furlings start to mess with you again, just get down and walk to your car. We’ll see you at home.”
He slapped her shoulder with a sort of euphoric giddiness and kept running. She would have argued with him, but she didn’t know what she’d say, or that she even thought he was wrong, and he was gone much too quickly.
She turned back with a sort of horror as the two furlings turned back at each other, clawing and biting and wrestling, tipping through the remaining bystanders without managing to touch any of them, but close enough that Lizzie had to tuck her hands behind her thighs to keep from waving at people and trying to get them out of the way.
One of the furlings, now the size of a tiger, tipped his head back and plunged at the other, and then the two of them merged into a great black furling the size of an elephant. It looked around dumbly for a moment, not sure who to fight or what to do, black coat rippling over a lean, muscular body, then it ambled up to the front of the courthouse and started climbing. There were no more furlings left. Lizzie wasn’t sure what had happened to all of them, but it was just the one giant one, climbing toward the top of the courthouse.
“Ma’am?” someone said. She was staring. Couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“Ma’am,” the voice said again. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to move along. The show is over.”
She glanced to find a police officer standing next to her, looking strained but not angry specifically at her.
“What?” she asked, not entirely certain what he’d told her to do. He pointed away from the courthouse.
“Time to go home, ma’am. Please. We’re clearing everyone out so that we can get everything cleaned back up.”
She nodded, trying not to look at the furling who was almost up to the top of the courthouse, now. She couldn’t do it. Had to look.
It grabbed a hold of a huge section of roof and pried it loose, then lifted it over its head, Godzilla style, and vanished.
The roof came plunging down and smashed onto the sidewalk just outside of the courthouse doors. Lizzie screamed, and people came running, and for a horrible, selfish instant, she thought they were coming to see what was wrong with her, but no one paid any attention to her at all. There were other screams, and people ran toward, people ran away, but no one so much as looked at her. She jumped down and ran up the stairs, scanning.
There were no furlings.
A woman was holding her arm and a man’s head was bleeding, but no one was on the ground. It was just the shrapnel from the roof flying to pieces. No one would die. The officer saw her again and waved her away and she nodded, backing away a few steps, and then turning, mind numb, and walking back to her car.
She remembered virtually nothing about the drive home, after that.
***
The house was empty when she got home, so she went to get herself a beer and sat on the floor in front of the couch, trying not to shake.
That was wh
at Robbie had experienced his entire life.
His whole, entire life.
Unable to touch it, unable to change it, barely able to understand it.
And they’d medicated him because of it.
She wondered, briefly, if she would unsee it, if she could. Would she go back to believing none of it was real?
She wouldn’t, and she knew it even as she considered it, but there was this vain little promise that she could, if she really, really wanted to. That it was real for Robbie and Trevor because they couldn’t get away from it, but for her… She could just go get her bags and put them back into her car and drive away like nothing ever happened.
She wondered where they’d gone. The bus? Walking? How long would it take them to get back? How many of them would come here? Just Trevor and Robbie?
She got up and forced herself into motion, working on lunch for lack of a better idea. When she looked up again, Trevor was standing in the doorway, light streaming in around him. She blinked.
“Where’s Robbie?” she asked.
“Buying a bunch of his guys lunch,” Trevor answered, coming in and closing the door. “I asked for some time alone with you.”
“And he agreed to it?”
Trevor grinned, coming to lean on the counter across from her.
“I know,” he said. “Surprised me, too.”
“What happened?” she asked, putting down the ball of meat she was working on and going to wash her hands. He shrugged.
“It blew up,” he said. “Happens a lot, these days.”
“What blew up?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
“The war,” he said. “We couldn’t keep them spread out and they blew up.”
“And dropped the courthouse roof on the front walkway,” she said. He tipped his head to the side.
“Is that the big thump?” he asked. “How bad?”
“Stop enjoying this,” she said. “People could have died.”
He flashed teeth again.
“Ah, but they didn’t. Did they?”
“Stop it,” she said. “You lost control.”
He scratched the back of his neck as he stood up.
“It’s what I do. You’re the one who’s about control.”