Chasing the Moon

by A. Lee Martinez

  “I know he likes me and appreciates what I do for him. But I’ll always just be a friend. That’s all I can be.”

  They gathered their candies, chips, and sodas.

  “I guess there are worse things to be,” said Diana.

  “I’m lucky to have known him. Luckier to have been so close to him before he leaves.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  Sharon hesitated.

  “Away. Just away.” She paused, then pasted on a smile. “It’s not important.”

  Diana wanted to ask more questions, but she didn’t know Sharon well enough to press.

  Vom pounced on them. “Oh, Butterfinger.”

  Diana held up her hand. “This is for everyone. So you have to share.”

  “But Zap is just going to vaporize his.”

  “Remember our discussion about sharing? Now you can have a soda and two candy bars.”

  He wasn’t happy about it, but he’d take what he could get. Zap picked out a pack of Skittles. He disintegrated the snack with tiny bolts of lightning. Whether or not that qualified as eating for him, Diana couldn’t guess.

  “Ah, I wanted a Mars bar,” said Calvin.

  “Here. You can have mine.” His fingers brushed her thumb as he took the candy from her.

  The universe exploded.

  Not literally, although it took her a few seconds to realize it hadn’t self-destructed. This was all a misfire of her senses, an overload in her perceptions. She lost sight of the ordinary world. In its place, dancing patterns and swirling vortexes. She could smell eternity and taste the color blue and hear the atoms as they crashed against the shores of uncertainty.

  Everything she knew and everything she didn’t know were little more than intangible knots of colors and shapes. Laid bare, they were too much for her to absorb, but her sanity was saved by a singular object that drew her attention away from the more unsavory, unfathomable secrets exposed to her.

  In this ethereal wasteland Calvin was the only thing with any weight. Tubes of color flowed up and out, and her eyes followed them skyward, although there was no sky anymore, so she was just guessing at that.

  The moon was the second thing she could really see. Like Calvin, it was a sparkling diamond, making everything else pale and immaterial by comparison. The third and final object was the shrieking, writhing form of Fenris.

  The moon god howled. Its pain was overwhelming.

  Diana’s instincts screamed, but she ignored them. She was getting used to this, and while this experience was beyond her ability to withstand for long, she knew panicking would only make it worse. She closed her eyes and covered her ears. Most importantly, she made no attempt to understand what was happening to her. To open herself up in any way was sure to destroy her mind. This would pass. She only needed to wait it out.

  Even with her eyes closed she could see the future unravel, the world come undone. Time was just another dimension, a flat plane spreading out before her. And on the horizon a storm was brewing, a moment inescapable and so overwhelming that it rippled through history written and unwritten, causing her universe to fold and bend on itself.

  The storm was the reason her reality was broken, the cause of all the glitches that allowed inhuman monsters and dangerous alien things to slip into realms they were never meant to touch.

  But it wasn’t just one storm. There were three. Three swirling vortexes of anarchy drawing closer with each day. The storm was coming to a head, and a universe that struggled daily to hold itself together against the thrashing tentacles of an unspeakable horror was in for a hell of a time. She had no idea what waited on the other side. Or even if there would be another side to see. It was possible that there was no future and that the storm would even undo the past, a tide of annihilation sweeping throughout the planes of time to swallow everything in perpetual stillness.

  Her vision cleared. Or was obscured, depending on how one chose to look at it. Either way, her perceptions of her universe fell into more human ranges.

  “Thanks,” said Calvin.

  Diana opened her eyes. What had seemed like twenty seconds of terror had been less than an instant. Nobody else had seemed to notice. Not even Calvin.

  “You’re looking a little pale,” said Sharon. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Diana sat down. Her head cleared, and the memories of what she’d seen were fading. In a few minutes she doubted she’d remember any of it.

  “It’s your frame,” said Vom.

  She gave him permission to bowl for her, and nobody minded. Diana sat beside Zap and waited for her head to clear. She almost convinced herself that it was all an illusion. The doom lurking over her portion of the universe was merely a misfire of her underdeveloped human brain trying to make sense of realities it had never been meant to contemplate, much less actually witness.

  “It’s doomsday,” said Zap.

  She looked into his giant eye. He’d seen it too.

  “Damn it.”

  She didn’t want to know this, but she didn’t want to know a lot of things she now knew. She decided to ignore the vision. It was easier to do than she had imagined. She didn’t see a destroyer of worlds in Calvin, who was an affable fellow. Or at least a realistic enough simulation that she couldn’t tell the difference, just as long as she didn’t touch him. A second touch might give her another revelation, but she had no interest. She could only gaze at the secrets of the universe so many times in a day before her sanity was forfeit.

  After the game was over, Sharon suggested getting something to eat.

  Diana’s first thought was to cut the evening short, but the best excuse she could think of was a fictional early doctor’s appointment in the morning. But it was barely eight o’clock, and she didn’t need to go to doctors now.

  She didn’t see the point anyway. Whatever Calvin was, the future, past, or present wouldn’t be shaped by whether she had a meal with him or not. And Vom was always up for a bite to eat.

  They picked a buffet place, which Vom liked even more.

  “Only ten trips,” said Diana.

  “But it says all you can eat.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think they had someone like you in mind with that rule.”

  He frowned. “And how is that my fault?”

  “Look at it this way. If you put all the buffets out of business, where will you go to stuff yourself?”

  He had to admit she had a point.

  They all got their food. Without planning it, Diana arrived back at the table with Zap. They stared at Calvin. It seemed to her that the universe revolved around him. Not just figuratively, either.

  Diana wolfed down a chicken wing, bones and all. The need to know overwhelmed her. That was Zap’s passion. Not just to witness and observe, but to know.

  He obliterated a slice of pizza and some French fries. “Do you think Sharon knows what he is?”

  Diana didn’t have the answer, but there was an obvious way to find out. She caught Sharon at the buffet line. Diana didn’t want to ask the question, but she needed to know. Vom gave her an appetite. Zap gave her an insatiable curiosity, an endless hunger to observe everything and to understand it all.

  “Do you know?”

  Sharon perked up.

  “Do you know what Calvin is?” pressed Diana. “Do you know what he really is?”

  Sharon’s lips tightened, and she used a pair of tongs to rearrange a bed of lettuce. It was all the answer Diana needed.

  “He’s a monster, Sharon.”

  “No, he’s a victim. He’s trapped, lost. You don’t know what it’s like for him.”

  “I don’t need to know what it’s like. All I know is that he’s the most dangerous thing in this universe.”

  A woman stuck behind Diana, waiting for a shot at the meatballs, caught enough of the conversation to wrinkle her brow.

  Sharon took Diana by the arm and pulled her aside. “You’re making a scene.”

  “I’m just trying to understand this. Why wo
uld you do it?”

  Sharon heaped some banana pudding on her plate, just to keep her hands busy. “I told you already, Diana. I wanted to touch something important.”

  “You’re damn right he is,” Diana said, “but he’s also going to destroy our world. You have to know that.”

  “Of course I do. But it’s not like it’s something he wants to do. It’s just something he has to do. It’s that thing in the sky, it’s that goddamn Fenris aspect.”

  “But that’s him, isn’t it?”

  “No,” said Sharon. “It’s a part of him, but it doesn’t reason. It doesn’t think. It functions. It just exists. He’s only a very small part of it.”

  They parted ways. Diana grabbed some pizza. Sharon added a few pieces of shrimp to her own plate.

  “He’s an anomaly,” said Sharon. “And one day, he’ll return to Fenris and… well, I don’t know what’ll happen to him then.”

  “Him? What about us? What about all these people?”

  “They’ll be taken care of. Greg has a plan to save as many as possible, but it’s complicated. I can’t explain it right now. Just promise me you won’t bother Calvin about this.”

  Diana glanced to Calvin, then to Sharon.

  “Promise me, please. There’s no point in talking about it now. I’m the wrong person to talk to anyway. You need to talk to Greg to understand what we’re doing. He’s a smarmy ass, but he has a gift. He sees the world in ways that, like it or not, are true. If you can get past his smarm, you’ll see that.”

  Diana didn’t relish the idea.

  Sharon said, “I’ll talk to Greg, and set something up for tomorrow evening. Give me that much time.”

  Diana sighed.

  “Just one more day can’t hurt, can it?” asked Sharon.

  “I guess not.”

  “Fantastic. You won’t regret it, Diana.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  They returned to the table. While Sharon forced chitchat, Diana devoured her food. She was too distracted by her thoughts to exercise the self-control to eat at a regular pace. She did her best not to stare at Calvin, and when she caught Zap staring she kicked his chair.

  Calvin didn’t look like something that would rip the universe to pieces one day. Knowing what he was, Diana hated to admit it, but she understood what Sharon had meant about touching something more incomprehensible than yourself.

  Something beautiful.

  Something horrible.

  The last few weeks had altered her perception, and Diana nd nothing contradictory about the notion.

  She pushed aside such thoughts. She was getting used to that, so even something like the end of the world was easy to ignore for an hour or two. She didn’t mention it, and it didn’t come up in conversation.

  She decided to enjoy her dinner and her friends. A storm might sweep through time and erase this moment forever. And when you couldn’t count on even yesterday to be there tomorrow, it only made every moment seem all the more precious and worth having.

  Vom carried a plate piled with every scrap of food he could manage to fit onto it. The mound teetered on the edge of collapse. He sat, shoveled the serving down in two bites, and got up for seconds. She decided against warning him to pace himself. She could only expect so much.

  She even let Vom have an eleventh plate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sharon drove on autopilot. She paid just enough attention to traffic to avoid getting into an accident, although there were several close calls. She slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a collision with the taxi in front of her.

  “C’mon, you ass.” She honked the horn twice.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Calvin.

  “Yes.” She let the horn blare for a good three seconds. “People need to learn to drive in this city. That’s the problem.”

  “Mmm-hmm. You do realize the light is red, right?”

  Sharon swore. She wrung the steering wheel in her whiteknuckled grip. She continued to glare alternately at the taxi and at the light for standing in her way, though if she’d reflected on it, she was in no rush.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “Why would anything be wrong?”

  “Okay.”

  “Everything is perfect.” Her voice was flat. “Everything’s wonderful. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “Okay.”

  The car behind her honked its horn. She stuck her arm out the window and flipped him off.

  “Light’s red, genius.”

  “Actually…”

  Calvin didn’t need to finish the sentence. The light had changed several seconds ago. The welcoming intersection beckoned. She pressed the gas pedal too roughly and their car lurched through with a screech.

  “So nothing’s wrong?” asked Calvin.

  “No. Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you almost ran over that guy in the last intersection.”

  “I had the light.”

  “He was blind.”

  Her jaw tightened. “So, he had a dog, didn’t he? If he got hit, don’t blame me. Blame the dog.”

  “Uh-huh. You should probably pull over before you kill somebody.”

  “Why bother?”

  She took a turn too sharply and bounced off the curb, nearly clipping a small gathering of pedestrians.

  “Pull over.” He spoke with quiet authority. He didn’t give orders often, and it got her attention. She pulled into a parking lot. He reached over, turned off the car, and took the keys.

  “Maybe I should drive.”

  “You don’t know how.”

  “You could teach me.”

  He smiled. She didn’t.

  “Maybe I have better things to do than take care of you,” she said.

  “Whoa. Where did that come from?”

  Sharon drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She kept her eyes straight ahead. If she looked at him, she couldn’t stay mad. She cared for him too much. Hell, she might’ve even loved him, and the ridiculousness of the idea made her smile humorlessly.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You. No. You never do anything wrong.”

  And he didn’t. He couldn’t do anything wrong because he wasn’t human. He was so far beyond human that you might as well call a hurricane wrong. Or label an asteroid malicious just for wiping out the dinosaurs. If he was to destroy the world, wasn’t that within his rights?

  Except he didn’t do that. He never hurt anyone. He was the gentlest soul she’d ever come across, and while some might think it easy to be kind when you had no needs or wants, when you were immortal, invulnerable, and so above the petty squabbles of this world, Sharon suspected the opposite was true. She’d imagined herself in his position before, and it always ended with her going mad at all the insignificant specks buzzing around her, crushing them and their cities in her rage.

  She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  He made the ill-defined noise he reserved for those moments when human behavior escaped him.

  “It’s my problem,” she said. “I just didn’t expect for it to come so soon. I thought we’d have more time.”

  If she’d admitted it, she hadn’t expected this moment to come at all. She’d known that Calvin would leave one day. But considering the miserably short life span of humans, she’d always assumed that the day would be long after she’d died. Greg had always said it would be soon, but she’d just attributed that to the necessity of running a cult. You couldn’t tell people the end of time was a thousand years away. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. People wanted front-row seats to the big show.

  She apologized again. “I’m just being stupid. I know you need to go, and I should just be glad to have known you. It’s more than I deserved.”

  “Hey, I won’t hear any of that,” he said. “This means something to me too. You’re more than just the lady wh
o takes care of my laundry.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  Calvin put a hand to her cheek and turned her face toward his.

  “You’re special.”

  “There are a million people out there just like me,” she said.

  “Maybe. But when the time comes, I won’t remember any of them.”

  “I bet you say that to all your laundry ladies.”

  She didn’t know if she believed him, but just that he’d said it made her feel better.

  * * *

  When they got home Sharon shut herself in the bathroom and called Greg. He answered the phone. He always answered, day or night, always him and not some underling. Greg, for all his faults, took the business of the Chosen as sacred and not to be shirked. He answered with his usual aplomb.

  “Yello.”

  Sharon sat on the toilet and explained the Diana situation.

  “I see. And how did she find out?”

  “I don’t know. She just did. She had this eyeball entity with her, and it couldn’t stop staring at Calvin. I think it can see things and gives her the power to see things.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I told her you’d talk to her. Tomorrow.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you recall, but I’ll be rather busy tomorrow.”

  “I know, but I did promise her.”

  “Promises won’t mean much in the future.”

  “Yes, but they mean something now.”

  “I have a lot on my plate.”

  Sharon said, “But what if she interferes? She is a warden. She has entities of her own.”

  “Now you’re just ing absurd. Fenris has nothing to fear from whatever influence she’s amassed. Nothing can stop the future.”

  “I know, but you can at least consider it. One last convert, one last soul to save.”

  “If she has her own link to the greater universe, she’s already saved.”

  Sharon swore. She despised that he was right.

  “I’d like her to understand better, once it’s all over.”

  “Her understanding won’t matter to you, once it’s all over.”

  “But it matters to me now.”