Mallory nodded. The idea of putting some distance between herself and the glow-inducing mutation juice seemed pretty solid. “What are we here to study?”
“Those.” Lewis pointed at the cluster of burn marks in the grass. The singed circles were scattered all across the meadow without any discernible pattern, each about two feet in diameter. “Stay close. Step only where I step.”
Mallory crept into the field on the scientist’s heels. Lewis held the thermometer aloft like a magic wand, ready to defeat any unexpected forces of evil with the magic of his digital display. “What are they?” she asked.
“I’ve been hearing reports of people spontaneously evaporating. Isn’t that curious?”
Mallory raised her hands in defeat. “I’m out,” she said. “Walk me back to the Winnebago. I’m locking myself in my hotel room and not coming out ‘til my car’s ready.”
Lewis put a finger to his lips. “Shhh…it may be triggered by decibel level. You should keep your voice down.”
He reached the first burn mark and squatted before it, staring down in wonder. Mallory stood helplessly behind him, flapping her arms like a frustrated bird. “Lewis,” she hissed, but he was too rapt in science to hear. She was stranded in a spontaneous-evaporation minefield, with only two sure paths through: the one back to the creek, and the one forward to Lewis. She cursed under her breath and approached him slowly…carefully. Quietly.
“Look here,” Lewis said excitedly as she drew near. He kept his hand where it was and tilted the thermometer, lowering the tip toward the burn mark without breaking the plane of air directly above it. The digital display went haywire, flickering like a zoetrope as the numbers climbed at an alarming rate, to alarming heights: 109; 829; 1,480; 4,902; 12,373; 28,937; 110,873; 874,441. And then the display reached its limit of 999,999 degrees, and a little plus sign appeared in the top right hand corner.
The air at the edge of the circle was over one million degrees Fahrenheit.
“Now it’s definitely broken,” Mallory murmured.
“Maybe,” Lewis said. “The thermometer’s not melting. So that’s strange.”
“Yes…that’s the strange part.”
“This was definitely a person at one point,” he said. “Look there.” On the far side of the charred circle, right at the edge, a sliver of black foam lay in the green grass, right at the edge of the burned area. A tan, semi-circular something rested atop the foam.
“What is that?” Mallory asked, squinting. “Is it…?”
“The edge of a big toe; yes.” Lewis nodded. “And a flip-flop. Just that much of whoever this was stood outside the circle, and it didn’t even burn, much less evaporate.” He shook his head in wonder. “What an incredibly localized event.”
Mallory’s stomach barrel-rolled into her throat. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she decided.
“Do it into the creek!” Lewis said excitedly. “Let’s see what it turns into!”
Mallory heaved and pushed her nausea down. “What’s the deal, here? Someone was walking along, and all of a sudden—poof…he evaporated in a beam of light?”
“Light, yes, and heat. Extreme heat. Possibly in the tens of millions of degrees! Instantaneous incineration and evaporation. But so perfectly localized,” he murmured in awe. He rubbed his chin as he contemplated the invisible column of energy. “We need to trigger it.”
Mallory cocked her eyebrows. “Trigger it?”
“Yes…trigger it; the light, the heat. Given the perfection of the circles, the beam must come down directly from overhead.” His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose in his excitement, so he pushed them back up. “I hypothesize that when a being walks into one of these zones, the beam is triggered, and an unbelievably concentrated pillar of light and heat flashes down from above and obliterates everything in its path.”
“You hypothesize?” Mallory asked. “We’ve been here for eight seconds, you already have a hypothesis?”
“A scientist always has a hypothesis,” Lewis said proudly.
“A second ago, you thought it was caused by loud noises.”
“New second; new hypothesis. We could learn so much, if we could only trigger the event…” He trailed off as he looked down at the burned circle. Then he looked up at Mallory. Then he looked down at the burned circle…then back up at Mallory again. “How fast can you run?” he asked.
“Uh-uh! No way.” She crossed her arms defiantly. “You want to see the light so badly? You run through the kill zone.”
“But I have to hold the thermometer,” he explained.
“Men are all the same,” she muttered with no small amount of irritation.
“You’ll get to be part of science!” he insisted.
“No science for me, thanks,” she said. “I’m full.”
Lewis harrumphed. “Well, we need something to use as a trigger.”
She glanced around the empty field and over at the creek. Her eyes lit up as she hit upon an idea. She turned and retreated toward the plasma. “Wait here.”
“Where are you going?” Lewis called.
Mallory ignored him. She retraced her steps all the way back to the glowing green creek. She plucked a blade of grass from the bank and dipped it into the viscous plasma. The far end came back up as a writhing, hissing snake. She held the grass end of the abomination tightly between two fingers and gingerly carried it back to the scientist.
“Here,” she said. “Here’s your stupid trigger.” Then she hurled it through the air, above the charred circle. As it broke the plane, a brilliant white flash seared the air. It was gone in an instant…and so was the half-snake.
Mallory looked down at Lewis. Lewis looked up at Mallory.
“Do it again,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I wasn’t ready.”
Chapter 9
“Every single thing in this town is trying to kill me,” Mallory lamented an hour later as they buckled themselves into the Winnebago.
“Once you make peace with that, it’s really quite charming,” Lewis said.
“How have you lived here for 12 years and not gone insane? Or dead?”
“How have I not gone dead?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Shut up.”
The scientist smiled and shrugged. “I just keep my head down and do my experiments. And safety first, always.”
Mallory rested her head against the window. “I just want to get my car and go,” she sighed. “Is that too much to ask?”
But Lewis waved this off as if it were nonsense. “Once you go back to real life, nothing will ever be exciting anymore! Everything you do from now on will be routine and boring and not-at-all baffling or mysterious compared to Anomaly Flats!”
“Routine and boring and not-at-all mysterious sounds like the perfect life.”
Of course, that wasn’t true. If it were, she wouldn’t be in Anomaly Flats right now; she’d be sitting at her routine and boring desk in the routine and boring Wainwright Building in routine and boring St. Louis, responding to asinine emails and going blind from staring at spreadsheets and being verbally abused by whichever manager happened to be within shouting distance. She had rejected routine and boring and not-at-all-mysterious. That’s what had gotten her and her little purple Jansport into this mess in the first place.
And she wouldn’t go back for all the money in the world.
Though she certainly wouldn’t mind actually getting back to the world. Lenore’s people were expecting her later that night, but it’d be at least another 48 hours until Mallory made it out of the Flats and up to Canada—and that was barring any more trouble along the way. Lenore wasn’t exactly painted as a patient person; Mallory desperately hoped she’d keep her promise and welcome Mallory with open, if somewhat annoyed, arms. “This isn’t where I’m supposed to
be,” she sighed aloud, mostly to herself.
Lewis frowned over at her from the driver’s seat. “Where are you supposed to be?” he asked.
Canada, she wanted to tell him. A safe house. A place to lie low. A place where the past is dead and the future is waiting and bad decisions are wiped clean. She wanted to tell him this, not necessarily because she wanted him to know, but because she needed to tell someone. She’d always been a loner, but for the first time in her life, she was truly—and, she now feared, irrevocably—on her own. But that was part of the deal. Take the backpack, and live the life. So instead of opening up to the nerdy but kind scientist, she just shook her head and asked, “Where are we headed to now?”
“To see something very curious,” Lewis said happily, guiding the RV over the field and up onto the road.
“Oh, wonderful,” she said, her voice oozing sarcasm. “I was just starting to wonder when we’d stop with all this mildly curious bullshit and start seeing something very curious.”
Lewis smiled over at Mallory and gave her a little wink. “Perfect!”
They drove back toward town, then hooked north on a faded asphalt road that gave way to washed-out gravel a few miles in. The RV bumped and banged over the deep tire ruts, and even with her seatbelt, Mallory had to hold onto the handle above the window to keep from falling out of her chair. “Your Public Works Department sucks,” she pointed out.
They drove into a thicket of trees that loomed high above a forest floor overgrown with weeds and bushes and God knew what other biological horrors. Just seeing the tangled mess of growth made Mallory’s ankles itch with the phantom prickling of imaginary ticks crawling up her leg and burying their nonexistent heads beneath her skin.
Lewis pulled the Winnebago to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “Well, here we are.”
Mallory peered out the windshield, but saw nothing but trees. “Here we are where?”
Lewis grinned. He straightened his bow tie and said, “Come on. I’ll show you.”
“Are you going to lock it?” she asked as they climbed out of the Winnebago.
“Why would I lock it?” he replied, pulling out a small bag of research equipment.
“Because my backpack’s in there.”
“We’re ten miles from the nearest house and three miles from a paved road. Who’s going to break in?”
Mallory gazed around the densely wooded forest. Little light filtered in through the treetops, and the whole area was eerily quiet. It did seem rather remote. “I don’t know. Bigfoot?”
“In Missouri, we call him Momo,” Lewis informed her.
“I know that,” she lied.
They left the RV and the gravel road behind and ventured out into the woods in search of the mysterious singularity. Mallory was about to point out that Lyme disease wasn’t an anomaly at all, and that she’d go wait in the truck while he made the proud discovery of tick-administered nerve damage. But just as she opened her mouth, Lewis pushed aside a low-hanging collection of branches, and she saw what they had really come to examine: a fully functional traffic light sitting atop a shiny metal pole jutting up among the trees. The whole thing seemed to have sprouted up from a family of ferns, its yellow metal casing gleaming in the shaded forest.
The light was green.
“What the hell is a traffic light doing in the middle of the woods?” Mallory asked, bewildered.
“It just appeared three days ago. Fully functional,” Lewis said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Isn’t it fascinating?”
They crept through the brush to get a better look at the contraption, and as they approached, the light flickered to amber, then to red. Mallory froze. “Is it…telling us to stop?”
“Umm…it might be,” Lewis admitted. Then he shrugged and waved her forward. “Come on.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Mallory grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. “Lewis. Seriously? When a demonic stoplight that mysteriously appears in the middle of the forest tells you not to go closer, you don’t go closer.”
Lewis rolled his eyes. “It’s not demonic, Mallory. It’s from Ameren.” He pointed to the base of the stoplight. The words AMEREN MISSOURI were stamped into the metal plating.
“Same thing,” Mallory hissed. She was about to shoulder-tackle him into a tree to get him to stop walking when the light suddenly turned green.
“There,” Lewis said, gesturing up toward the light. “Happy?”
“Generally, no,” she mumbled.
They approached the traffic signal, which continued to cycle through its color scheme without seeming to give them any notice. Lewis set his bag on the ground and made a wide circle of the post. It was fixed to the earth with four large bolts, but the ground was soft and wet, and spongy underfoot. “That hardly seems stable,” he said. He looked at Mallory. He gave her a good look up and down. “See if you can tip it over.”
“What? No! You see if you can tip it over!”
“It’s probably safe to touch,” he pointed out. “Go on.”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
Lewis frowned. “I lost my last pair of leather gloves in the lava pits out on Route 109.”
“So what?”
“So I have scientist’s hands! They’re soft,” he cried, holding them up to show how smooth and pink and unused to manual labor they were. “They’re not made for inter-dimensional contact.”
Mallory put her hands on her hips. “And mine are?” she asked in a tone that clearly communicated that there was a right answer to this question, and an almost-infinite number of wrong ones.
But Lewis’ intuition failed him. “It’s not that. It’s just that you’re…sturdier than I am,” he explained.
Mallory gasped. “I’m sturdier?”
“It’s a compliment!” he insisted.
“Sturdier?!”
“You’re bigger than me!”
“You’re practically a midget!”
“I’m almost average!” he said defensively. “I’m just saying you’re tall!”
“And sturdy!”
“It’s a good thing!”
“You know what I think would be a good thing? If I punched your stupid face off.”
“See?” he said. “That’s a very sturdy way of thinking.”
Mallory’s vision exploded with little black stars, and she decided she was having an aneurism. This is how I die, she thought. And I don’t even care. But after a few breaths, her eyesight cleared, and she was staring once again into the hapless, square-rimmed eyes of her dopey scientist companion. “Tell you what,” she said. “You examine the demonic traffic light; I’m going to go be sturdy back in the truck.”
Lewis frowned. “I could really use your help.”
“Trust me. Removing myself from striking distance of your head is helping.”
“All right,” he sighed. “But I might be a while.”
“I do not care.”
“Okay. Here, take the keys.”
“It’s not locked,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but you’ll need them if you want to listen to the radio. And also to get the hell out of the woods if I get eaten by a demonic traffic light.”
“Good point.” She swiped the keys from his hand and headed back toward the Winnebago.
“Oh, Mallory!” he called after her. She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “If you get out to stretch your legs, don’t wander too far. And do not go up that ridge.” She glanced to her right and saw that the woods rose to an uneven cliff high up the hill.
If there was one thing she hated more than putting herself in inter-dimensional danger, it was being told what to do. Especially by a nerd.
“Why not?”
“It’s not safe.”
“What is it?”
/>
“Not safe,” he repeated firmly.
“Now you’re just making me want to go.”
“Don’t. I’m not joking. Promise me you won’t go up to the ridge.”
“But—”
“Mallory! Promise me!”
“Fine, fine,” she said, irritated. “I promise I won’t go up to the ridge.”
As she headed back to the RV, she wondered what would be the fastest way to get to the top of the ridge.
X
Mallory was many things: a decent chef; a practiced eye-roller; a connoisseur of flavored martinis. But she was not an accomplished hiker.
An expert in the art of stealth was also not on the list.
As she panted her way up the hill, the underbrush snapped and crunched beneath her shoes like she had elephant feet. Jesus, maybe I am sturdy, she thought. With every rustle and crack, she stopped and held her breath, certain that Lewis would hear her plodding up toward the ridge. But he was wholly immersed in his stupid anomaly and didn’t seem to hear. Besides, what was he going to do – restrain her? Sturdy or not, she could definitely trample the little scientist if push came to shove.
“Though someone should definitely try to stop you,” she muttered to herself as she huffed up the hillside. “This is the stupidest thing you’ve done all day.”
She wheezed and moaned her way up the hill, struggling hard even though it wasn’t terribly steep. The underbrush makes it impossible to walk, she told herself as she trudged through downed branches and snarling vines, though in truth, it probably had more to do with the fact that she hadn’t so much as laid eyes on a treadmill since she was 26. “Exercise is stupid,” she spat.
A hissing pop sounded just to her left, and she screeched in surprise. She clamped a hand over her mouth as her brain fought itself over which threat to hide from first: the sudden sound, or the scientist’s awareness. Fortunately, both threats resolved themselves almost instantly as the pop was followed by a loud static buzz that was cut with the female voice that had fizzled out of the loudspeaker back in town. Mallory was somehow not terribly surprised to see that one of the boulders sticking out of the mossy earth was actually a fake rock with a speaker built into it. Judging by the repeating squeal reverberating through the woods, the forest was full of hidden speakers. The all-enveloping hissing and popping masked Mallory’s cry from the scientist’s ears.
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