Kind of Like Life

by McMullen, Christina

  “How did you do that?” Blake asked, staring at her in wonder.

  “A potion,” Renee muttered, waving her arms distractedly. “Don’t worry about that. We need to think fast. You were right. We need a place we can both survive.”

  “Nothing supernatural,” Blake grumbled as he got to his feet.

  “But!”

  “I don’t know the rules!” said Blake, cutting off her protests.

  “You’re a dude! Don’t you play video games?” Renee asked with an exasperated huff.

  “Well yeah, some,” Blake shot back in a sulky tone. “But not fantasy games. I like war games. Some of those have zombies. I can do zombies,” he added hopefully.

  “Ugh! Fine.” Renee hung her head in disgust. She hated zombies, but at least she was familiar with the genre. “But shamblers only. I’m not about to try to outrun Kung Fu zombies.” As she spoke, an idea formed in her head. The trees began to melt into brightly colored storefronts and the sky morphed into a canopy of steel beams and skylights.

  “Where are we?” Blake asked, turning slowly.

  “The Mall of America,” Renee said smugly. If she was going to do zombies, she was going to do the shopping mall scenario, and she wasn’t going to take just any old shopping mall. “We should probably find a safe place to set up base. Oh yeah, and you need to teach me how to shoot a gun.”

  “I can do that,” Blake said, narrowing his eyes at her. “You might want to pick a more practical outfit though, before we begin.”

  “Huh? Oh.”

  Renee hadn’t realized she was still dressed like a Seelie warrior. Blake had already changed into an all-black, military style ensemble, complete with an ammo belt and several weapons. She copied his look, tucking her hair up into a cap. No sense in giving the zombies something to grab onto as they ate her brains.

  “Just so you know, I’m still mad at you,” Renee informed him crossly as they walked through the deserted corridors of the mall.

  “For something I had no control over?” Blake asked shortly. “You didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”

  “What’s there to explain?” Renee asked in a high-pitched shriek. “You know everything I do. Every last embarrassing detail of my life is in your head. That’s like the biggest invasion of privacy ever!”

  “It’s not like that,” he sighed. “Look, do you remember every single thing that’s ever happened to you in vivid detail? No, you don’t. If you think back on your life, all you’re going to see is impressions of things that were important. That’s all I saw. Fuzzy memories with a few clear spots. It’s not like you have vivid memories of getting dressed or taking a shower, so don’t worry, I haven’t seen you naked or anything like that.”

  Renee’s cheeks turned such a bright shade of red that she wouldn’t have been surprised if steam started billowing from her ears. She hadn’t even thought about that.

  “Come on, Renee,” Blake pleaded. “I’m serious. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be. From what I could tell, you’ve had a good life. Your parents love you, you’re pretty well off, and you’re not half as weird as you think you are. You just went to school with a few jackasses who did a number on your self-esteem. Besides, none of that matters right now because we kind of have bigger issues to deal with. Like surviving zombies.”

  “Okay fine,” she said, glaring at him. “Prove it. Prove it isn’t as bad as you think. Take me into your head. Fair is fair.”

  “I… I’m not sure if I can,” he said hesitantly. She was right, it would only be fair, but she was also wrong in that it would just make everything worse for the both of them.

  “Why not?” Renee huffed. “You just said that other guy followed you into your head. If he could get in, why can’t I?”

  “Well, for one thing, the door’s gone.”

  That was an unnerving development that Blake noticed back in the fairy world. When Renee disappeared and the fairy soldiers began chasing him, he had planned to escape back into his own world, but found that he was stuck in Renee’s. This had only happened one other time before, and it hadn’t ended well.

  “What do you mean? You’re stuck here?”

  “Until one of us tries to kill the other off,” Blake said ominously. “That’s what I was trying to tell you before you ran off. I got stuck in Steve’s mind because they wanted us to fight. They wanted to see which of us was stronger. Besides Steve, you are the only other person who’s been able to manipulate your surroundings. And now that you’re mad at me, the door is gone. Don’t you see what’s going on here? They want us to fight, but I don’t want to fight with you, Renee.”

  “I don’t want to fight either,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry I got mad. I felt… violated. I still do and I don’t like it, but you’re right, it’s not your fault, it’s theirs, whoever they are.”

  “Truce?” Blake asked, holding out his hand with a hopeful smile.

  “Truce.” Renee shook his hand and smiled shyly back.

  They found a massive furniture store that had an entire back wall stacked with mattresses and decided that this would make the safest place for target practice. After a quick demonstration, Blake showed Renee how to properly handle a firearm, including how to work the safety.

  “You see, the thing television and movies always get wrong is…”

  “Don’t!” Renee cut him off.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t finish that sentence. I’ve only ever seen people shoot guns in movies, so as far as I know, that’s how it’s done. If you tell me it isn’t, we’re going to need a whole lot more practice, and I don’t think we’re going to have that kind of time.”

  Already, the zombies had begun making their way into the mall. Blake had taken care of them while Renee built a makeshift wall out of overturned cell phone kiosks and photo booths. They were safe for the moment, but neither held any illusions that the barrier would hold forever.

  “What kind of messed up logic is that?” Blake asked.

  “It’s not messed up,” said Renee defensively. “It makes perfect sense. Real world physics don’t apply because this isn’t the real world. Iron weakened the fairies because most books I’ve read had that listed as their weakness. If I didn’t know that, it wouldn’t have been true. It’s also the reason I couldn’t use a gun before. I knew guns had a safety that prevented them from accidental discharge, but I didn’t know what a safety was. Because I’d never seen one before, I had no way of disengaging it, so my gun was useless.”

  “Renee,” Blake said with a sigh, “It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just make up rules and expect them to apply.”

  “I’m not making up rules!” she shouted with a frustrated huff. “I’m simply drawing from my own knowledge. Whether or not that knowledge is true or false in the real world has no bearing here. Look, I’ll prove it,” she said, pointing to one of the mannequins that they had set up as targets in front of the mattress stacks. “Tell me where you want the bullet.”

  “Head shot,” Blake said, crossing his arms and stepping back. At that range and with no prior experience, Renee would be lucky if she managed to hit anywhere close to the target. He silently bet that she would hit the wall above the mattresses. Aiming too high and not taking recoil into account was a typical first time mistake.

  Without even taking any time to line up her shot, Renee lifted her arm and squeezed the trigger, casually lowering her arm as she turned back to Blake with a smug smile. The mannequin’s head had been blown completely off.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Blake said airily, but truthfully, he was in total shock. What she had done was completely impossible. “Same thing, but on that one,” he said, pointing to the mannequin that was farthest from them. Without a laser guided sight and a career assassin’s skill, there was no way she was making that shot.

  Renee lifted the gun and repeated her previous actions with the same results.

  “No way,” Blake gasped. “That’s a one in a mil
lion shot!”

  “Thanks,” Renee said, giving him a dirty look before taking aim at the same mannequin. This time, the shot went wild, hitting several stacks over. “You just ruined it!”

  “What did I ruin?”

  “I just told you! If I don’t know something is impossible, then it’s possible! I hit the target because I’ve seen plenty of movies where it was done. By telling me it’s not possible, the logical part of my brain just processed all of the reasons why I shouldn’t have been able to do that, not the least of which is the fact that I’ve had five minutes of lessons, so now I can’t do it anymore!”

  It took Blake a second to process exactly what it was Renee was trying to tell him. In a roundabout way, it made sense.

  “Stand back,” he said and lined up two mannequins, one in front of the other. Swinging his arm in an arc, Blake fired his weapon. “Yes!” he shouted and fist pumped the air as the bullet arced around the first mannequin and hit the second. “Wanna try?”

  “I can’t,” Renee said with a sour look.

  “Why not?”

  She rolled her eyes. “If I told you, you wouldn’t be able to do it anymore,” she explained, suddenly mad that she had seen the Mythbusters episode that debunked that particular move. It could have been useful.

  “Oh, yeah. I guess you’re right. Wow,” Blake said, running his hand through his hair. “I can’t believe I never figured this out. Do you realize how useful this is?”

  “Well yeah,” Renee said with a shrug. “But it can really screw us up as well. Anything that we know to be physically impossible is.”

  “Not necessarily,” Blake countered. “I’m pretty sure being invisible is physically impossible, but you did that.”

  “Here, yes,” Renee replied. “But magic is a pretty big part of fairy lore, so it was possible there. Just like some things that would work here wouldn’t there.”

  “I think I follow you,” Blake said with a frown of concentration. “We just need to be careful of what we tell each other. Like, if I believed it was possible to fly and you knew that was dumb, I could fly until you told me otherwise.”

  “That’s it exactly. But on the other hand, if you had a good reason why we could fly. Say, we were in a super hero world, you could tell me flying was acceptable and I would be able to do it as well.”

  Blake was impressed. He didn’t want to get his hopes up just yet, but as quickly as Renee was picking up on things, it seemed likely that she was going to survive a lot longer than the others had.

  “With this knowledge, I think we can make a pretty formidable team,” he told her with a smile.

  “We better,” Renee replied with a nervous glance out into the mall. A horrific screeching noise filled the air as one of the overturned kiosks was pushed out of the way. “Because it looks like it’s show time.”

  Chapter 11

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I am so sick of eating soft pretzels and cookies.”

  Blake tossed a frosted chocolate chip cookie to Renee and grabbed one for himself. After three days of living on nothing but sugar and carbs, his craving for a good, solid burger was beginning to drive him nuts.

  “Well you shouldn’t have blown up the food court,” Renee snapped irritably. She too was craving a balanced meal and it wasn’t doing either of their moods any good.

  “It was that or get eaten by an army of the undead. Which one did you want me to choose?” Blake snapped back.

  It hadn’t been completely Blake’s fault. No matter how many zombies they killed, there were always twice as many ready to take their place. The zombie hoard had taken over much of the mall, leaving only a single corridor for the two teens to hide out in. As much as they complained about having only a cookie shop and pretzel stand as their dining options, they were grateful to at least have something to eat. It was only a matter of time before they didn’t even have that.

  “We’re doing it again,” Renee warned, softening her voice. It wasn’t the first time that they had begun to get on each other’s nerves, nor would it be the last. They were mindful of this and tried to diffuse the situation every time it looked as if they were going to turn on each other, but both had to admit that the bickering and irritation was happening more frequently as each day passed.

  “Sorry. Do you want to try to find another area?” Blake asked. “We could try going through the air vents like in the movies.”

  “I think we need to find another place entirely,” Renee said with a grimace. “How long do you normally stay in one place?”

  “Depends,” he replied with a shrug. “I can usually spend a solid month in the old west, but other places, like war zones, I tend to jump out of in a matter of days. I thought we could hold out here a little longer, but I guess, technically, this is a war zone.”

  “All I know about the Wild West is that it wasn’t a great place to be a woman,” Renee muttered, but brightened suddenly. “I’ve got it! How do you feel about science fiction? A lot of sci-fi is just westerns in outer space.”

  “As long as we’re not stuck eating astronaut food, I’m willing to give it a go.”

  “I’ll make sure we have computers that can replicate anything we want. Except pretzels,” Renee said and stuck out her tongue. “I never want another pretzel again.”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated. After a moment, the air began to shift and the new world materialized. Red and gold cliffs sprung up from the cracked and dry land, creating deep gullies and ravines. In the valley below them, a ramshackle boomtown sprawled into the distance. Aside from the twin suns in the reddish purple sky and the giant spaceship parked behind them, the landscape was nearly identical to that of the nineteenth century American southwest.

  Renee had changed her outfit as well. She wore a long brown duster and boots that were similar to Blake’s old west outfit, but instead of a Stetson and pistol, a pair of high-powered binoculars sat on her head and a sleek, silver ray gun hung at her hip. She hooked her thumbs through her belt loops and winked at Blake.

  “I kind of feel like a bad ass. I think we’re rogues.”

  “Works for me,” said Blake, modifying his usual old west outfit with the same space age accessories that Renee wore. “I always end up becoming an outlaw in Denver anyway, so I’m used to it. What’s down there?” he asked, pointing to the city.

  Renee pulled her binoculars down over her eyes and adjusted the straps. “Looks like a mining town. Mostly poor folks who got roped into coming here by the allure of working off world. Couple of natives who were lied to by the mining corporation, and of course, a handful of corporate enforcers. Those are the ones we have to watch out for.”

  “Because we stole one of their ships, didn’t we?” Blake observed. The silver and red ship had the words, ‘Property of The State Mining Corp, USA, EARTH’ written on the side. The logo was barely readable as it had been spray painted over with anti-government and anti-corporate graffiti.

  “Of course. We may be outlaws, but we’re still the good guys,” Renee said with a sense of pride. “Come on, we’ve got a job to do.”

  Their job, according to Renee, was to scout the town for supplies that they could steal from the corporation. They were members of a resistance group whose camp was hidden on the other side of the planet. As they snuck through the town, they came across a tiny storage shed being guarded by a corporate enforcer.

  “That’s it,” Renee whispered, pointing the shed out to Blake.

  “What, that thing?” Blake asked, swinging his binoculars down over his head. “That’s too small to be holding supplies.”

  “They’re underground,” Renee pointed out. “The shed probably has a trap door. Why else would it have a guard?”

  “Good point. So what are we going to do, stun him?”

  “We’ll wait until after dark and then stun the guard. Then we’ll load up the ship and fly out under the cover of darkness.”

  “Can’t we just use a teleportation device and bypass the guard?�
�� Blake asked.

  Renee gave him a blank stare. “Do you really want to take your chances with a teleportation device in a world that is actively trying to kill us?”

  “Good point.”

  They decided to go back to the ship and find a safe place to hide out until dark, but as they approached, they saw that it was swarming with corporate enforcers.

  “Hey! Get away from our ship!” Blake called out unexpectedly, blasting at the enforcers with his ray gun.

  “Blake! Are you crazy?” Renee dove for cover behind a boulder as the enforcers began shooting back.

  “Kinda,” Blake called back with a war whoop. Now he was in his element. He was no stranger to desert shootouts, but the fact that he was shooting at mindless corporate enforcers on an unfamiliar planet gave him a decidedly unfair advantage. “Try to get to the ship!”

  Renee wasn’t about to try her hand at dodging blaster rays, so instead she pulled a small device that looked a little like a video game controller from her utility belt. With the press of a button, the ship roared to life and lifted from the ground. The searing blast knocked away the enemies who were trying to board. Using the joystick controller, Renee guided the ship until it hovered overhead and then pressed a button that opened the hatch, allowing the docking ramp to lower.

  “Blake! Come on!” she yelled, jumping for the platform. Once inside, she threw herself into the pilot’s seat and checked the controls. There was a loud thump and the ship dipped slightly as Blake jumped for the platform.

  “Get a little higher!” he called out, blasting at enforcers who tried to throw themselves onto the ship.

  “Hold your fire, I’m closing the hatch!” she called back, slamming her fist down on the button that would seal the door. A second later, Blake fell into the copilot’s seat, out of breath, but grinning madly.

  “That was awesome!” he shouted, holding up his hand for a high five.

  “You’re lucky you weren’t shot!” Renee admonished.

  “Science fiction rulebook, Renee,” he said, giving her a wink. “Rule number one: Mindless drones working for the evil overlords never hit their target.”