Anomaly Flats

by Clayton Smith

  “What does it say?” she asked.

  “It’s Coptic.” Lewis cleared his throat a little and said, “Should I assume you learned how to read it in a museum?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Lewis allowed himself a little, self-satisfied smile. “The Coptic language is sort of a mix of the Greek alphabet and the Egyptian Demotic. It came to prominence sometime after the first century C.E. It doesn’t translate perfectly, but this bit here says, roughly, ‘Welcome to Anomaly Flats: City of Evil.’ And there’s a year here, too: 2098.”

  Mallory furrowed her eyebrows as hard as she possibly could as she looked at another one. “Welcome to Anomaly Flats,” she said, her tone flat and dry. “City of Evil. 2098.”

  Lewis nodded. “Roughly.”

  Mallory looked down at the paper. She looked back up at Lewis. She looked back down at the paper. Then she looked back up at Lewis. “Welcome to Anomaly Flats, City of Evil, 2098.”

  “Yes.”

  Mallory held her hands up in confusion. “Are these postcards?”

  Lewis shrugged. “More or less. Someone—or something—not only predicted an evil future for Anomaly Flats, but started marketing for it! Isn’t that fascinating?”

  “You know, you keep saying things are fascinating when they’re really just terrifying and horrific,” Mallory pointed out.

  “Horrific things are almost always fascinating,” Lewis insisted. “And look here!” He stubbed his finger against the page, just below the man without a face. Mallory leaned down and squinted hard. There were small letters below him, too. “This appears to be a formal title. It translates into ‘Celestial Anathema,’ or ‘Abomination of the Heavens.’ He’s given the same title on every carving.”

  “So this guy—this thing—he’s…what? A demon?”

  “Or maybe even the great fallen one himself!” Lewis beamed, sounding entirely too excited, given the circumstances. “Not that that’s a good thing,” he said, catching himself. “But you have to admit, it is fas—”

  “I know, I know. It’s fascinating.” Mallory flipped through the binder. “You know, the year 2098 isn’t that far away. In the big picture.”

  “No, it’s not,” Lewis agreed. “We don’t know who made the carvings, so it’s hard to say why that particular year was chosen; if it’s a prophecy, or a guess, or arbitrary, or what. Regardless, this is the future under the reign of the ancient evil. Ultimately, the year is unimportant.”

  Mallory screwed up her face in disgusted fascination as she turned the pages. Each engraving was more disturbing than the last. “This…I mean, this is pretty gross, Lewis.”

  Lewis nodded his agreement. He pulled the binder back, closed it, and slid it across to the far end of the table. “I know. I wouldn’t have shown it to you, except I think it’s vital that you understand the gravity of the danger we’re in. We have to stop my clone, Mallory. We have to.”

  Mallory sighed and rested her head in her hands. “I just want to get my bag and go to Canada,” she murmured.

  Lewis raised an eyebrow. “What’s in Canada?” he asked.

  “Lonely, muscular men in Mountie hats who are just aching for American women, if there’s any justice in the world.” She rubbed her eyes and shook some life into her brain. “This all seems very…strange. And awful. And maybe like you’re drawing a few too many conclusions based on these carvings.”

  “How so?”

  “Subject R said there was an ancient evil. You have these pictures that you think represent an evil. So, great. But who’s to say they’re actually related?”

  “Subject R is, I’m afraid. I played you the second portion of the tape just now. Let me play you the beginning.” He picked up the recorder and rewound the tape until the machine clicked. “This is what we heard immediately after the subject was thrown from the Walmart; this is what he said to us as we approached.” He clicked the play button, and the speakers crackled to life once more. Mallory heard the same male voice from earlier, but now it was speaking gibberish. The sounds hurled out of his mouth as if he were spitting venom, snarling and growling and hissing as he spoke. It was the voice of a man perfectly enraged.

  “What’s he saying?” Mallory whispered.

  Lewis exhaled deeply. “I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “It’s Coptic. And I can translate it on paper okay, but I can’t speak it.” He clicked off the recorder and set it back down on the table. “The subject doesn’t remember any of that. And even before, when he was a surgeon, he certainly was not fluent in a language that’s been dead for centuries. The ancient evil touched him…even spoke for him, I’m guessing, for a little while, anyway. Then it left him broken beyond repair. A brilliant surgeon turned into a slow, mumbling halfwit who can’t even remember how to swallow.”

  Mallory’s ears perked up. Her breath caught in her throat. “No…” she whispered, faltering.

  Lewis gave a slow nod. “Subject R. One of the most intelligent minds Anomaly Flats had ever seen. He still lives here, all these years later. He’s not a surgeon anymore, but he does still get to work with his hands.”

  “Rufus,” Mallory said. “The mechanic.”

  She didn’t need to see Lewis’ nod to know that she was right. “Laid low by a sale on beets. That’s how the Walmart tries to lure us in…with especially good savings on our favorite canned goods. It worked with Rufus. It’s almost worked with several others.”

  Mallory closed her eyes and shook her head. “Wait, so…Walmart is doing this? On purpose?”

  Lewis shrugged. “My guess is, Walmart just wants to get rid of the ancient evil and will keep offering steep discounts until they can get someone to let it out of the canned goods aisle.”

  “When all they had to do is wait for some idiot to come along and make an evil clone,” Mallory sighed.

  Lewis took her hand in both of his own and gave it a good squeeze. “You see? This is why we need to stop him.”

  “And how do we do that, exactly?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask,” Lewis said, giving her a wry little smile. “Believe it or not, I have a plan.”

  Chapter 16

  “That’s your plan? Get to Walmart first and shoot the clone?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Lewis asked, his face falling.

  “I wouldn’t call it a plan,” Mallory said. “More like a ‘plan.’” She used air quotes to make sure the not-really-a-plan-ness of it came through. “Something really obvious that someone with no plan whatsoever just decides to do one day.”

  “It’s elegant in its simplicity,” Lewis said, trying not to let his hurt feelings show.

  “It’s stupid in its stupidity,” Mallory countered.

  “A plan doesn’t have to involve code names and secret weapons and hand-drawn maps and needlessly complex pulley systems to be a good plan!” Lewis insisted.

  “No, but there should be some sort of planning involved. And what the hell sort of plan has a needlessly complex pulley system?”

  “I’m sorry it doesn’t strike the perfect balance between sparkling ingenuity and detailed machinations. But it will work.” Lewis crossed his arms and set his face into a stern scowl.

  Mallory rolled her eyes. “Fine. You’re right. It’s fine. It’s simple, and it’ll work. It’s a great plan.”

  Lewis nodded primly. “Thank you.” Then he added, “There’s also a back-up plan.”

  “What is it, lie down and hope he trips over us?”

  “Mallory!”

  “I’m sorry...I’m sorry. Okay. What is the back-up plan, and why is it not the primary plan, and do we actually need a back-up plan if the most crucial element of the primary plan is ‘get there a few minutes early’?”

  Lewis clamped his mouth shut and took several big, labored breaths. His face was splotchy an
d strained with emotion. “I don’t anticipate needing a back-up plan. But if we fail—not that I think we will, given the elegant simplicity of our primary plan—and if the clone sets the ancient evil free, we’ll need a plan to stop it from escaping aisle 8. We need to be prepared to kill it.”

  “The back-up plan is a plan to kill an ancient, all-powerful demon?” Mallory asked. Lewis nodded. Mallory rubbed her hands together. “Now we’re talking. Lay it on me, Hannibal Smith.” Lewis gave her a questioning look. “What? Hannibal Smith. ‘I love it when a plan comes together’? The A-Team?” The scientist only shrugged. “Jesus, Lewis, turn on TV Land once in a while.”

  “We don’t really get television out here,” he said simply. He hopped off the stool and rummaged through a different pile of books and papers, stacked up beneath the hayloft. “Now where is that…?” he mumbled to himself.

  “How does one even kill an ancient evil?” Mallory called. “Smother it with love?”

  Lewis found what he was looking for in the pile and held it above his head triumphantly. “Nope! You kill an ancient evil with this.” He jogged back to the table and slapped the piece of paper down in front of Mallory. It was a crude drawing of some sort of long, thin metal tool.

  “A crowbar?” Mallory asked, confused. “You kill an ancient evil with a crowbar?”

  “A crow—? What? No, it’s a spear,” Lewis said, stabbing his finger at the drawing. “Look. There’s the tip, there, and the rest of this is…you know…spear. The shaft.”

  “But it’s split at the end,” Mallory pointed out, tracing the back end of the tool with her finger. “And it curves. It’s definitely a crowbar.”

  “It’s a spear!” Lewis insisted. “And a spear of great power, I might add.”

  “Crowbar,” Mallory said, crossing her arms.

  “It’s not a great drawing,” Lewis explained, getting a little huffy.

  “I think it’s a very good drawing,” Mallory said. “Of a crowbar.”

  Lewis sighed with frustration. “Fine. It’s a crowbar. A crowbar that’s actually a spear of great power. It’s called the Spear of Rad, and it might just be the only thing that can destroy the ancient evil.”

  Mallory raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “The Spear of Rad?”

  Lewis shrugged. “It was discovered in the ’80s.”

  “What does it do, play David Bowie’s greatest hits while riding a BMX?”

  “Ha, ha,” Lewis said dryly. “It’s actually very powerful.”

  “Let me guess. You dug it up outside a RadioShack.”

  “Close. Circuit City.”

  Mallory leaned back and rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

  “As far as anyone can tell, the spear seems to have arrived as a comet, encased in ice. It crashed into the Earth several centuries ago.”

  Mallory crossed her arms. Her skepticism was palpable. “So this comet crashes into town, and instead of destroying all life and sending Anomaly Flats the way of the dinosaurs, it just sort of sits there quietly and melts?”

  “It did leave a crater. But yes.”

  “And you’re sure that’s what happened.”

  “Fairly certain. See these markings on the shaft?” he asked, tapping the drawing of the spear. “Definitely an alien language.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Mallory agreed, nodding. “And now we’re going to use this to kill an ancient evil.”

  “If we have to,” Lewis said grimly.

  “One question: Why don’t we just use, like, a knife?”

  Lewis laughed out loud. The sound surprised Mallory so much, she had to grab the bottom of her seat just to keep from sliding off it. “You can’t kill an all-powerful ancient evil with something as crude and unremarkable as a knife, Mallory. Everybody knows that.” He chuckled as he took off his glasses and wiped them on his coat. “You have to use an archaic weapon with great, mystical powers.”

  “Oh, of course,” she said, setting a new record for the most eye rolls in a 24-hour period. “And the Spear of Rad is that archaic weapon with great, mystical powers, and it can kill the ancient evil.”

  “It is, and it can,” Lewis said. Mallory had to admit, he did sound impressively confident.

  “How can you be sure?” she asked.

  “Because it says so in the manual.”

  Mallory stared at the scientist. It took a few tries to get her mouth to work. “The manual?”

  “Yes,” Lewis nodded.

  Mallory paused. “Okay, so…wait. The Spear of Rad, a great, mystical weapon that arrived in a comet from an alien world, came with a manual?”

  “Written in English and everything! Isn’t it fasc—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know,” Mallory said, waving him off. “It’s fascinating.” She wondered, not for the first time, if she were having the world’s longest, most drawn-out embolism.

  “According to the manual,” Lewis continued, admiring the little drawing, “the spear can vanquish demons, archdemons, reapers, wraiths, shape shifters, succubae, incubi, and ancient evils. The manual also gives detailed instructions on proper care for the spear and an address to contact about returns and exchanges, though it’s in a nebula I daresay we won’t be able to reach with manmade spacecraft for at least another millennium or two.”

  “How stupidly bizarre,” Mallory muttered. “Okay, so we get to Walmart early tomorrow and shoot the evil clone dead. In case that fails, because we forget how to tell time or how bullets work, we use this conveniently-super-powered crowbar to destroy the ancient evil as he emerges through the canned goods. Yes?”

  But Lewis frowned. “Technically, yes, that is the plan. Though I wouldn’t call it convenient. Obtaining the spear is going to be…tricky.”

  Mallory sighed. Of course it was going to be tricky. “How tricky?”

  Lewis rubbed the palm of his right hand nervously. “When the Spear of Rad was discovered, the mayor wanted it housed in the town museum, where it could be both admired by the public and guarded by the highly-trained special forces team that for whatever reason volunteers as museum docents on the weekdays. But the woman who found the spear…she opted to keep it in her…private collection.”

  Mallory was confused. She wasn’t terribly political, but she had a working knowledge of how the government operated. “If the town mayor and SEAL Team Six wanted the spear, why didn’t they just, like, take it?”

  Lewis inhaled sharply through his teeth. “Well…you see, Colleen’s not exactly the type of person you just go take things from.”

  “But we’re going to go take it,” Mallory said, for personal clarification.

  “We’re…going to try.”

  “You don’t sound very confident.”

  “I’m not very confident.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen? She says no?”

  “Yes. The worst that could happen is that she could say no,” Lewis said, swallowing hard.

  “So what?”

  “So Colleen likes to say no with her shotgun collection.”

  Mallory started. “She has a collection of shotguns?”

  “Thirty of them, at least.”

  Mallory dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Doesn’t matter. She could have a hundred shotguns, she can only shoot one at a time, right? As long as we stay spread out, she can only take out one of us before the other runs away, and I’m pretty sure she’ll shoot you first. She’s known you for years; I’ve only known you for a day, and I’d definitely shoot you before me.”

  “Actually…I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  “You think she’d shoot me first?” Mallory asked, trying not to sound offended.

  “No. I mean there’s a reasonably good chance she could fire her entire collection of guns at once.”

  Mallory snort
ed. “How is that possible?”

  “She’s resourceful.”

  “Well, shit, with a pep talk like that, how can we go wrong?” Mallory scowled. She slapped the table with the palms of her hands, and the plywood wobbled and bounced and threatened to collapse completely. Mallory didn’t care. “Let’s do it. Let’s go get that Spear of Rad and stab a primeval demon to death, or else get riddled with holes trying.”

  Lewis tapped his teeth together nervously. His eyes darted out toward one of the windows, and he considered the full darkness of the world outside. “I think we’ll hold off until tomorrow.”

  “Why? No time like the present, right? Seize the day, up and at ’em, eyes on the prize, all that shit.”

  “It’s too dark,” Lewis insisted.

  “It’s just dark enough,” Mallory countered. “If we’re going to get shot at by an army’s worth of bullets, I’d rather not see them coming.”

  But Lewis held firm. “Trust me. You don’t want to approach Colleen’s place at night. We wouldn’t make it past the gate. We’ll get some sleep, then head over in the morning. If she doesn’t shoot us and stuff us on sight, we might actually have a chance at the spear. Then we can worry about the clone and aisle 8.”

  “You know, it sure sounds like we’re putting ourselves in an awful lot of danger just so we can go somewhere else and put ourselves in an awful lot of danger,” Mallory pointed out.

  Lewis smiled grimly. “Welcome to Anomaly Flats.” He stood up from his stool and stretched. His back popped, and he winced. “Come on. We should get you back.”

  “Back where?” Mallory said miserably. “The Hellmouth Bed and Breakfast?” She planted her forehead on the plywood and muttered, “I can’t handle any more tentacles.”

  Lewis straightened up a bit. He cleared his throat nervously. “Well, ah…you’re…ah…you’re welcome to…stay here tonight,” he offered.

  “I’m not sleeping with you,” she reminded him, her voice muffled by the tabletop. Lewis blushed so hard, he couldn’t speak. Instead, he coughed out a series of syllables so clogged and haphazard that they made Mallory roll her head over so she could get a look at the scientist and determine whether or not he was actually choking to death on his embarrassment. His face looked like it had been dipped in cranberry juice, and his mouth was opening and closing at an alarming rate, but he was taking shallow gasps of air, so she decided he’d probably live. “Good lord, Lewis. You have got to get laid,” Mallory said, pushing herself up to a full seat. “Not by me, obviously. But, you know. By someone.” She hopped off the stool and looked around the miserable-looking barn. “Which way to the guest room?” she asked.