“Stop.” Hieronymus said it softly, but another strange quality to the far side of the Moon was the amplifcation of sound. Even whispers seemed incredibly loud.
The Pacer paused at what appeared to be an entrance. A gate. Beyond it, the remains of a paved road overrun with dead weeds. The frame of the gate remained in its foreboding stature, a terrible structure, and its hinges on the ground, covered with a strange ochre-colored silt just like the hundreds of poles that went of in two directions on either side of it.
“What is that?” Hieronymus asked, pointing out a large white spherical object at the foot of the gate. Bruegel drove the Pacer closer, and what it appeared to be was an old plastic ball, about a meter in diameter. It had holes in it, and its interior was a hollow metal wire mesh. It sat on the Moon with more wires protruding from it. From the faded paint of its exterior, it was clear this had been a large eyeball, and many of the wires draped down from the top of the gate, as if this giant eyeball had at one time served as an ornament above the entrance, suspended by wires.
“How odd,” Slue said. “This must have been a strange town if they had that big floating eyeball hovering over the front gate like that.”
“I’m not sure if this was an actual town,” Hieronymus said grimly.
Bruegel drove the Pacer farther in the direction of a few abandoned concrete buildings that appeared once they drove past the main gate. These first few buildings were all very uniform—all were constructed on a grid, and they all had the same rectangular shapes, all made from cinderblocks, none had a second floor, and from what the teenagers could see, all the roofs appeared to have been blown of long ago. Every window in every building had been shattered. Thousands of bright white hummingbirds flew in and out of the ruins or crawled on walls or descended into holes on the ground. They populated the ghost town with darting movements and eerie buzzing silence.
“Could this have been an old military base?” Slue whispered, slightly frightened.
“I don’t know. There has never been a Lunar military as far as I know. And it does not look old enough to be an ancient Earth base. Perhaps it was a training center for the police? Housing for construction workers when they made the highway?”
“We’re almost out of gas…” Bruegel said.
They scanned the surroundings for a structure they could hide the Pacer in. Directly ahead were a number of taller buildings—one of them had been partially caved in, leaving just enough room to put the car away for a few days.
“I’m not too keen on leaving my mother’s car here,” Bruegel grumbled as they drove toward the ruin.
“We have to,” Hieronymus replied. “We won’t make it to a gas station, and then you’ll really be in trouble. You’ll be stuck on the highway. The cops will find it, then find you, and we’ll have a repeat of that sweet little scene of a couple of hours ago. We’ll find someone who will drive us back with some extra fuel. Do you think your mother will be too upset if she sees you returning without her car?”
Bruegel shrugged his shoulders as he turned the steering wheel.
“She has no idea I even took her car out tonight. She was already passed out when I took the keys from the kitchen cabinet. She never uses it.”
They found an old plastic sheet covered in silt and dust and they tossed it over Bruegel’s car, which had been safely hidden inside the collapsed building.
The ground crunched below their feet as they walked between the abandoned cinder block buildings. A hundred years of long-ago broken glass. Pebbles everywhere. The sky was a dull purple. Large hummingbirds darted past them, or hovered from safe distances. They were all that same brutal, blank white. Lunar white. The absence of color in their feathers and on their long beaks. Thick and thin cables covered the ground and draped many of the buildings. In one spot, at the corner of a tall building with an enormous antenna, they came upon a sad sight. Tangled among a large cluster of cables lay the mummified corpse of a moon moose, its normally white fur now gray and yellow with lifeless age, its face a strange fattened pulp. It must have wandered into the abandoned town decades ago, got tangled and trapped in the pile of cables, and starved to death.
“This is a dreadful place,” Slue said.
But as they walked away from the corpse of the animal, they came upon something even stranger. Parked in front of the large shell of a circular building with a cracked dome for a roof were seven or eight vehicles. Two of them looked like they had been there as long as the moose, for they were covered in silt and dust. The rest sat in their spots as still as stones, but one of them must have just parked there. Its red tail lights were still on.
Strange mumblings sounded from inside the circular building.
Human voices, suffering.
chapter thirteen
The first thing that came to their minds was run.
But to Slue and Hieronymus, there was a terrible familiarity to the voices they heard moaning.
It was unmistakable.
There must have been another One Hundred Percent Lunar Person inside that building, and whoever it was, they had just shown their eyes to someone.
Then another voice joined in. The usual mumbling, prayer-like chanting, Jesus and Pixie, obscure references to confused childhood imagery, sadness, confusion…
Slue took the Omni-Tracker from her bag and handed it to Bruegel.
“Take this, and run down about three blocks. Hide in that building on the corner, the one with the crack on its side. Keep this machine on because Pete and Clellen are going to be here really soon, and this Omni-Tracker is sending out a signal for them to find us.”
“Pete and Clellen?” Bruegel asked with an utterly clueless expression on his face.
“Yes. You don’t remember our plan? Pete and Clellen are coming here to pick us up. We thought that there was going to be a party here
tonight, but now we have to tell them that it’s been moved.”
“What are you doing? Where are you and Hieronymus going?”
“We are going to find out what is going on in that building over there. You can’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Because we think that something is going on in that building that might be dangerous for people with normal eyes. Hieronymus and I don’t have normal eyes. That’s why we have to wear these goggles. There could be others like us in that building who aren’t wearing goggles, and if they look at you in the eye, you can get hurt.”
“I thought you were supposed to be my date tonight?”
“I am your date tonight.”
“But you kissed Hieronymus.”
“Sometimes that sort of thing happens.”
She pressed the Omni-Tracker into Bruegel’s hand. Then she kissed him on the cheek. ”Run! Run like the wind and wait for us! Wait till Pete and Clellen arrive. We’ll be back in a few minutes, but if you see someone other than ourselves leave that building, keep the OmniTracker on and meet Pete and Clellen at the highway, go back to Sun King Towers, and never tell anyone what happened tonight!”
Still hiding, they watched the shadowy form of Bruegel as he ran, hopping over cables and crumbling cinder blocks, still wearing his purple suede tuxedo and alligator skin stovetop hat.
They had no idea what to expect. They ran between some parked cars in the lot just before the domed building where the voices were coming from. Judging by the amount of dust on each car, it was easy to see that they had all arrived at different periods of time. Who would leave their cars here? Hieronymus wondered. Here, of all places…
They approached the front wall of the structure. The door had long ago fallen of, and it lay before the entrance like a cracked plastic doormat. There were no lights inside, but the interior of the building appeared to have enough light from the large dome of its roof, which, on closer observation, was another white translucent plastic formation, not unlike the big, strange eyeball they encountered on the way in.
Inside, they found themselves in a lobby full of shredded couches.
None of this made any sense to the boy and the girl except that the moaning of the human voices became slightly louder from the building’s interior. To Hieronymus, he figured that there must have been at least six or seven people chanting and crying at once.
Then they saw him. A man. Exceptionally skinny. Sitting on the floor right in front of them just under the mysterious words. He looked half-dead, sleep deprived, and drunk. He had a shaggy blond beard and long, filthy hair. He did not look as if he had washed himself in weeks. He wore a light green wool sweater, and his corduroy slacks had holes at the knees. His eyes were so bloodshot that the whites were bright red, and his pupils were extremely dilated. He looked up and smiled when he saw Hieronymus and Slue. Then he began to chant…
Jesus and Pixie, how your hour is bright.
Oh Pixie, Fairy of the Lord, I tunnel in my tracks
through fire, and food and smashed automobile
He sees the colors of salt and blood
through his eyes, the demon portholes
witness him and his eyes that slay the normal light…
Hieronymus knelt beside him.
“Who are you? What the Hell is this place?”
The bearded man tried to utter a few words, but nothing came out.
“Those voices!” Slue said, also kneeling down close to him. ”Are there One Hundred Percent Lunar People here? Has anyone shown you their eyes without their goggles on?”
The strange fellow looked at her for a long time, then laughed while exhaling. He then very slowly brought himself up. He was utterly filthy.
“Follow me,” he grinned. ”I’m ready for more anyway…”
Slue and Hieronymus cautiously followed him into a dark corridor that curved around the back of the circular building’s interior. Then the teenagers gasped as their weary host stepped over three mummified
skeletons sprawled out on the floor.
“Don’t worry about them…” He grinned as they continued to follow him. ”They’ve been dead for a long time. They were dead when I got here. Sometimes, it is very hard to leave. I’m not even sure I could leave, I love it here so much…”
“You look like you’re starving!” Slue declared. ”When was the last time you had anything to eat?”
The skinny guy turned and grinned at her.
“Nobody eats here.” He smiled.
He pushed open the door to a large circular room where Hieronymus and Slue were confronted with the most unexpected sight they could possibly imagine.
The entire wall of the circular room was covered in the fourth primary color.
On the floor, sitting or lying on thin mattresses, were dozens of people, staring at the forbidden color, their faces in a trance. They were moaning, they were on their knees, some were sleeping, and more than a few were obviously dead.
The odor was beyond repugnant. Rot. Sweat. Decomposition. Feces. Urine. Some of these people were as emaciated as the bearded one, and others appeared to have just arrived.
The sound was deafening and horrifying. They mumbled incoherently, and they were all staring at the walls surrounding them, all looking into the incomprehensible pigment that their minds refused to accept.
Where did they get this color? wondered Hieronymus. Did someone manage to find it in pigment form? Perhaps on another planet?
He walked up to investigate and discovered the true horror of it all. And then he understood what Joytown 8 must have been. And its secret, awful place in history. And why some people fock to it…
He grabbed Slue by the hand.
“We have to go,” he shouted. “NOW!” Slue, stunned by the scene around them herself, broke free from his hand and went to look at the wall up close, and once she realized what the entire wall was made from, that it was not paint, but a gruesome mosaic, preserved under a clear protective varnish, she covered her face in her hands and screamed, her voice just another of the hysterical human chorus that ebbed and flowed from that awful, awful place.
Hieronymus fell into a pile of glass that must have shattered over a century ago. Luckily, he did not cut himself as the cracked edges of the broken shards had been dulled by time and the elements. Slue grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him up, and within seconds they were blindly running from building to building in Joytown 8. Hummingbirds flew next to them and crisscrossed just before them like strange, silent phantoms. The complicated dead cityscape unfolded before their terrified eyes. It was an endless jungle of concrete and wires and broken and bashed electrical parts. And junk—machinery that made no sense to them. Rubber objects tossed about. The farther they ran, the more they felt trapped and suffocated. They were trying to find Bruegel, but they were not sure which direction they had charged into as they left the horrible domed building.
They passed through one caved-in structure. They guessed it must have been a guardhouse of some sort, because there appeared to be old and crude weapons on the concrete floor, along with a strange metal bowl that Hieronymus deducted must have been an ancient helmet. They were not anxious to stay and examine anything. The entire complex was unbearably sinister. There was nothing written. No letters, no typography. If there had at one time been words printed in ink on the walls, they had long since vanished. If the people from those days used paper to write information on, that was gone as well. The only thing remaining was that circular wall of fourth primary color—preserved, and now an illegal and forgotten attraction for a very special group of thrillseekers—or addicts.
“Bruegel!” Hieronymus shouted, suddenly panicking. ”Bruegel! Where are you?”
All he heard was the echo of his own voice.
He shouted his friend’s name again, and from another concrete ruin of a building a line of gigantic hummingbirds swarmed from one of the collapsed windows. They avoided the strange swarm of futtering creatures, and ducked into an alley where they viewed, on an avenue, a herd of white-furred moose all heading in the same direction on the boulevard. The beasts were moving below a gigantic radar dish that hung suspended between two brick towers—long ago it must have fallen into this position when its own structure began to crumble.
In the alley, they found an open doorway and ducked inside. The herd of moose continued to pass on the outside avenue, all of them making strange, deep bellows with their open mouths. Exhausted and frightened, Slue and Hieronymus sat on the concrete floor against a metallic wall. In the center of the floor was a drain. There were endless lines of old pipe running across and hanging from the ceiling, all of it covered in a strange copper-and-tan crystallized silt. Some formations were so old stalactites formed out of it and hung down among the ancient plumbing.
They were cold, and Slue began to shiver under her velvet poncho. Hieronymus put his arm around her. He was cold as well.
“This place…” she said, staring at the drain. ”You know what this place is…”
He nodded.
He had an idea when they first passed that dilapidated gate with the ancient eyeball. This was never a town. This was, at one time, a true horror.
How long could humanity live on the Moon and remain human? There was no percentage below One Hundred. Either you were human or you were something else entirely. The Moon was a stone in space. The air they breathed was artificial. The water they drank came from melted comets.
She dyed her hair blue.
The endless clacking of a thousand moose hooves continued just outside. Then two or three of the gigantic animals sauntered into the alleyway from where they entered, one poking his head into the room where the two teenagers sat huddled on the floor. It casually walked inside, wandered over to the drain in the middle of the floor, bent down, and with an incredibly long snakelike tongue, began to lick the interior of the dr
ain.
“What the Hell is it doing?” Hieronymus asked in an urgent half-whisper.
“Shut up!” hissed Slue.
The beast looked up and stared at the two directly in the eye. Its eyes were a bland pink. Its teeth were crooked, and its lips were coated in a strange green material. A large black beetle crawled on its side, disappearing into its fur, reappearing, disappearing again.
The staring contest did not last very long—after a few seconds, the creature went back to licking whatever moist horrors it could find in the drain. Its tongue was wet. Awful. Its hooves were huge, caked with unknown matter accumulated from a lifetime of wandering around the far side of the Moon.
The teenagers held each other tight, and somewhere under the poncho, one of his hands met one of her hands and their fingers intertwined in a way that only frightened lovers’ could.
The moose looked up again as seven or eight huge hummingbirds entered the chamber, flying in circles. The white-furred beast let out a strange howl, jumped up on its hind legs, and tried to bite the fast birds. They flew through the doorway and the mammal followed in confused, shadowy pursuit, barking and howling.
Their hands stayed together.
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 25