by Geoff Jones
He looked down. Pieces of wall had fallen and stuck in the mud along the edge of the building. The ground looked solid enough, but the café was the only thing that remained of Denver. It was the only thing that felt real. He was afraid to step down. William returned to the center of the sidewalk and steadied himself on a parking meter, looking downstream again. The sky looked lighter over the tree tops.
Someone took his arm. He jumped and turned to see the young woman who had been flirting with him while she made his latte. “What’s happening?” she whispered. She sounded close to tears.
“I don’t know.” He looked at the girl, wishing he could think of something to say that might make her feel better.
“Where the hell are we? Are we even on Earth? Look at the stars. They don’t look right.”
William looked up. “They’re brighter, that’s for sure. All I know is the big dipper, and I can’t find it.” He put his arm around her. “But it still feels like Earth. It feels like the Florida panhandle to me. The humidity, the insect noises.”
“What happened to Lisa?” she asked. “My boss.”
“The guy who jumped in the water was catching up to her, right before they disappeared around that bend.” William pointed. “The other guy ran off in the woods, in the same direction. I think he went looking for them. I been kicking myself for not going after him, to help.”
The young woman blew out a long, slow breath. “He has a crush on her. The one who jumped in the river, I mean. He comes in almost every day. He’ll save her.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“What about the other guy?”
She shook her head. “Never seen him before.” She paused. “I’m Beth, by the way.”
“William.”
William nodded toward the woods. “I think the sun is coming up. Once it gets a little brighter, we can go looking for them. If they aren’t back by then.”
“They’ll be back.” Tears welled in Beth’s eyes. She walked along the sidewalk toward the shore. Like William, she stopped right at the edge.
They were joined by a woman wearing a tailored blazer. Her boots crunched the broken glass on the sidewalk. “Have you figured out what happened to us?” It sounded more like a demand than a question.
Beth spun to look at the woman, who stood with her hands on her hips, as if she was posing for something. “Well,” Beth began, “While you were inside, a television crew planted a forest around us. It’s all a big prank.” She put a finger to her lips. “You can’t see them, but there are cameras watching right now. Don’t do anything embarrassing.”
The woman gave Beth a curt smile and looked around. She bent over and picked up a piece of broken glass. “This must be how that young man’s face got cut up, when the window broke.”
Beth gasped. “Are you a detective?” The woman did not respond.
“How is everyone doing inside?” William asked.
The woman in the blazer met him eye to eye. She had to look up, but she managed it without seeming small. “I think everyone will be okay. The redhead is patching up the old woman. She’s a bit of a bleeder.”
“What about the guy with the cuts on his face?”
“She tried to look at him too, but he wouldn’t have it. He’s pacing back and forth and freaking out. I think he’s okay, though. The cuts aren’t very deep.” She dropped the glass shard and stuck out her hand. “I’m Patricia Hayman.”
William gripped her hand with a firm shake. “William Crockett. And this is Beth.” Beth kept her arms folded but offered a small smile.
Patricia walked out to the end of the jutting sidewalk and crouched, looking down at something. “Come see what I found over here.”
[ 5 ]
Al Stevens had been hoping the café might be quiet today, that he might spend a few extra minutes chatting with Lisa after she made his coffee. He kicked his feet and swam downstream in the dark, trying to catch up to her.
Ahead, Lisa flailed and flapped like an injured bird. Al kicked harder, closing in on her. He couldn’t understand what was happening. His mind jumped to terrorism, but that didn’t explain why it was dark out. Or why he was swimming in a fucking river. A small voice whispered in the back of Al’s mind. This is perfect. He didn’t need to think of something clever to say. He didn’t need to worry about his hair or his teeth or his breath. He just needed to save Lisa.
The river swept them along. Al caught up to Lisa and hooked an arm around her. She shrieked. He tried to tell her to calm down but sucked in a mouthful of river water instead.
Al coughed and paddled toward the shore. Lisa slapped at the water with both hands, hindering more than helping. As they moved from the center, the current slackened into small eddies. “It’s okay,” Al said. Lisa gripped his arm.
A voice came from the dark shore. “Over here! I gotcha.”
Al saw the dim shape of a man and swam toward him. When he felt the gritty bottom, he pushed Lisa out ahead of him and she stumbled to her feet.
The man held onto a sapling with one hand and lifted Lisa onto the peaty bank. He turned back to Al. “Hey, look! What is that?”
Al spun around. “What? Where?” The river rushed by endlessly in the dark.
“Something slid down the bank on the other side.”
Al squinted but saw only frothy bubbles swirling in the starlight. “It’s pretty dark, buddy.” He coughed and spat as the young man helped him onto solid ground.
“It’s Tim.”
“I’m Al. How did you find us, Tim? We were in a coffee house. Where did you come from?” He pulled at his wet shirt, trying to stop it from clinging to his body.
“Same place. I was standing right behind you in line.
“Great.”
Al moved over to Lisa, who leaned forward on both hands and spat on the ground. He knelt and patted her back as she coughed. “It’s okay. You’re okay now.”
Tim held his phone overhead for light. Lisa’s dark hair hung down the sides of her face in sloppy wet strings. She wrapped her arms around her wet blouse and shivered, despite the muggy heat. “Why are we…? Where did we…? Wh- what’s happening?”
Al pulled her to her feet. One hand landed on the side of her breast and he awkwardly slid it up under her armpit. “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, Al gave her a gentle shake and repeated, “Lisa, are you okay?” She finally responded with a small nod.
Al looked at Tim. “She might be in shock. Can you get us back to the coffee house?”
“Yeah. I think so.” Tim started off through the brush. Al moved his arm around Lisa’s waist and they followed him back upriver.
Al had visited The Daily Edition Café almost every day for three years, and now, because of some kind of crazy-ass disaster, he had his arm around Lisa Danser. He normally considered himself lucky if his hand brushed hers when she gave him his change. He could feel her inhale and exhale in sharp, hitching breaths. He felt the hard bone at the top of her hip and the soft flesh on the side of her belly.
He tried to look at her face, but she stared down at her feet as she walked across the uneven ground. She had lost one of her shoes in the river. Al wanted to say something clever, but he couldn’t think of anything. He pulled her close, trying to stop the shivers.
As they followed the light from Tim’s phone back through the woods, Lisa put her arm around Al to steady herself. He smiled. He didn’t know where he was, or how he had gotten here, but he knew one thing. This was a good day.
[ 6 ]
Inside the café, Callie Grey tended to the old woman’s shin while her fiancé held his phone overhead to provide extra light. Callie knew that Hank wanted to be outside with the others, trying to figure out what was going on, but she needed him. The sight of blood made her want to vomit.
While cleaning the wound, Callie had asked her normal set of introductory questions. They helped distract her from all the blood.
“What is your name?”
“Helen. Helen Davies.�
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“And where are you from, Helen?”
“I was born on the island of Crete, in Greece, seventy-six years ago.”
The questions came automatically to Callie, who practiced psychiatry in a downtown office. She earned twice what Hank made as a prosecutor, thanks to the medical degree which allowed her to write prescriptions for all the anxieties brought on by affluence. The medical degree also meant that Callie was the most qualified to patch up the old lady.
“Greece. How did you find your way to the United States?”
“An Englishman named Lawrence Davies met me on holiday and brought me over here when I was nineteen. My mother was so angry about that.”
From the tone, Callie detected that Helen wasn’t too sure about it either. She noted that discussions about this subject could probably be drawn out over several months of sessions.
The young man with the cuts on his face paced to the front door and then back to the side wall. He leaned over the sloped floor where one of the baristas had fallen into the river. “I don’t believe it.”
Hank took a slow, deep breath. Callie sensed that his fuse had run out. The irony never failed to amuse her. She was the redhead. She was supposed to be the one with the temper.
The man with the cuts on his face had repeated “I don’t believe it” non-stop since coming inside.
“Hey kid, come over here,” Hank said. The young man looked up with a vacant expression. Hank nodded. “Yeah, you.” He walked over and looked down at the operation.
The falling espresso machine had peeled away an inch-wide strip of skin from the front of the woman’s shin, starting just below her knee and running all the way down to the top of her foot, where it was still connected. Blood flowed freely from the exposed flesh. Callie held the tissue-thin flap between her finger and thumb. It looked like a piece of used packing tape. Callie reached for a fresh napkin and dabbed at the skin flap to remove the last few bits of dirt. Then she stretched it across the front of the woman’s leg, hoping it would help stop the bleeding.
“What’s your name, son?” Hank asked the young man, who stared with his mouth hanging open.
“Morgan.” A dozen shallow slices covered his face.
“Morgan, I know you don’t believe it. None of us can.” Hank said. He is so proud of himself for not losing his cool, Callie thought. She almost always knew what Hank was thinking.
Hank continued, “But when you repeat yourself over and over again, it just makes a bad situation worse. You’re freaking people out.”
Morgan showed an expression of disbelief. “Dude, shut the fuck up! This is some kind of end-of-the-world catastrophic shit. I’ll say whatever the fuck I want.”
Hank’s face turned red and Callie thought for a minute that he was going to hurl his cell phone at Morgan. “God-dammit, don’t you speak that way in front of -”
Before Hank could finish, Morgan turned and wandered out the door to join the group outside.
“Count your blessings, honey,” Callie said. “At least he’s gone.” She had finally aligned the flap of skin with its original location on Helen’s shin.
Hank grunted and glared toward the front.
Callie dabbed the edges of the cut with a paper towel, soaking up fresh blood. She dropped the towel into a trash can Hank had found for her. It landed with a splat. She forced herself to stop and look outside, through the missing wall. It had grown bright enough to see the clearing on the opposite riverbank, with a dark forest beyond.
Hank checked the screen on his mobile device.
“Still nothing?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “No bars, no service. The map says, ‘Satellites not found’.”
Callie dabbed up the remaining blood. Helen winced and moaned. “Why did this happen?” Her voice sounded almost childlike with fear.
Callie stopped. “I don’t think anybody knows yet.” She gave the woman a sympathetic smile. “I don’t suppose you have any Advil or Tylenol?”
Helen clutched her purse, which looked large enough to hold a pharmacy. “I always carry a bottle of aspirin. They say it’s good for the heart, you know. Larry died of a heart attack.”
“Aspirin is a blood thinner. We need yours to thicken right now.” Callie tried to press the napkins against Helen’s leg more gently. Blood seeped out the sides of the skin flap. “How bad does it hurt?”
“I can barely feel it. I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss.” She smiled, showing teeth that were too perfect to be the originals.
“I just wanted to stop the bleeding. You were making quite a mess in here.” She turned to her fiancé. “Hank, let’s see if we can prop up this nice lady’s leg.”
Hank pulled a small table over to the orange couch and they got Helen to sit back with her leg across the tabletop, higher than her head. Callie swapped the bloody napkins for a fresh set and nodded, satisfied that the bleeding had finally begun to slow down. She stood by the table, holding the napkins in place and allowed herself to look around.
The café looked like the scene of an explosion. The emergency lights made a pair of bright cones as they shone through the concrete dust hanging in the air. We probably shouldn’t be breathing that. All of the other lights were off and the back corner of the room had caved in. The river rushing by below the missing wall created the sensation of movement. After looking at all of the blood, the continuous motion was almost too much. Callie sat down on the couch next to Helen and closed her eyes.
“It’s real, babe,” Hank said. “We have been teleported into a goddamn forest.”
Teleported. Callie rattled off other possibilities in her mind: a dream, a hallucination, a drug. Someone might have drugged her at a night club. Hank had told her about a case like that once. Maybe she was lying unconscious and defenseless somewhere. The idea seemed almost preferable. At least it made sense. Teleportation did not make sense.
A pair of large bugs flew in the open wall and spiraled around in the light cones in the front of the building. They looked like wasps and buzzed like toy helicopters.
“Hey gramps,” called Morgan from the front of the building. “We found something.”
Callie looked up at her fiancé. Even in the lousy light, she could see in his eyes that he needed to go out there.
Hank held up his hand as if swearing an oath. “I promise not to murder that dumbass. I just want to go outside and scope things out.”
She gave him a small grin. Hank always knew what she was thinking, too. It helped make up for the age difference. “Don’t go out of sight, okay?”
Hank responded with his biggest courtroom smile, showing wide rows of perfect teeth that were still the originals. “You got it, babe. I’ll be right over there.”
[ 7 ]
Hank stepped out onto the front sidewalk. Four parking meters stood in a row and a green metal trash can sat bolted to the concrete. The executive lady hunched down in her designer jeans and held her own mobile device over an object near the end of the sidewalk.
Hank wasn’t sure who he disliked more, Morgan or the woman in the slick business casual outfit. She had come around poking her nose in everyone’s business, as if it was her job to check on them all. She probably thought her blazer and jeans ensemble looked hip and cool. He thought she looked lazy. Nobody dressed up any more, especially in a cowboy town like Denver.
Not that you look any better yourself right now, counselor, he thought, looking down at his flimsy jogging shorts and art museum t-shirt. He squatted next to the woman.
The light shone on a severed hand, with a few inches of forearm still attached. It looked like a woman’s hand. The diagonal slice was perfectly smooth. Two grey circles of bone were visible in the center. A small puddle of blood pooled on the concrete.
“Morgan here thinks he saw her earlier on the sidewalk,” explained the business woman. “He was right outside when all this began.”
On some days, Hank and Callie stopped at the café after their morning run. Cal
lie would enjoy her latte and gossip about her patients. She would eventually notice the time and they would run back to their tiny penthouse and scramble to get ready for work. On other days, when they ran straight home, they usually had time for a hot wet fuck in the shower. Why couldn’t today have been one of those days? Hank thought.
He pointed at the hand on the sidewalk. “Did she fall in the river too? Whoever this was?”
“I didn’t actually see her when it happened,” Morgan said. “I was looking in the window.” He pointed to his slashed face and grinned. “That was lucky, huh?”
“So what happened to her?”
“Think about it, man. She was right at the edge. Most of her was on the outside, but her arm was on the inside. She was walking along, perfectly fine, when all of a sudden, whammo!” Morgan brought his hand down in an axe-chopping motion. “No arm!”
Hank pressed his lips together and breathed through his nose. Callie called this his “bull snort.” He looked around and realized that he was still as clueless as when he first stepped outside. He had learned nothing. That’s not completely true, Hank thought. He had been able to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that he disliked Morgan even more than Ms. Business Casual.
“Is this a goddamn adventure to you? That woman might be bleeding to death in the street back in Denver.”
“At least she’s still in Denver.”
[ 8 ]
Patricia Hayman stepped down from the sidewalk onto the riverbank mud and studied the lone footsteps of the man who had run off downstream. She noticed with annoyance that thick mud clung to the sides of her Lucchese boots.
Whatever was happening required a plan of action. The first step toward taking action was assessing the situation. Assessing was one of Patricia’s strong points.
She walked out onto the mudflat, deliberately not looking down at her boots, and turned back to the building. The coffee shop sat on the inside curve of a wide bend in the river. It appeared alien, out of place and alone. More than half of the building sat on solid ground, but a decent chunk extended out over the water’s surface. The river itself stretched about thirty feet across. On each side, the tree line pushed back a hundred feet from the water.