I’m not sure why I wasn’t more surprised. It sat on the P for a while, then it crouched and dove, taking a heart-wrenching amount of time to catch the air currents again before it flew away to the south.
I stared for a very long time, knowing that I had just seen something incredible. I couldn’t have said what it was or why it was important, but I couldn’t dismiss it no matter how shell-shocked my mind had become.
It was then that I heard a bell ringing. It was distant at first, probably a few blocks away, but it grew stronger. When I saw the man walking down Steiner Street ringing the handbell, I thought I was delusional again. (The man in the sailboat had to be some wishful delusion I had decided. If he had been real, he would have stopped for the cute blonde in the blue silk maxi dress, wasn’t that right?)
I was so grateful that I ran to the man, which was another mistake I made. I even told him my nickname in addition to my name, and I didn’t even like my nickname. “My name is Louise,” I said to him as he grinned at me. “I mean it’s Lulu,” I repeated. “I thought I was all alone.”
And I wasn’t alone, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
The funniest part was that when I told my name to the stranger with the bell, I abruptly remembered the housekeeper’s name. It had been Stella. I was Lulu, and she had been Stella, and I don’t know what happened to her.
But, as I discovered, I wasn’t really Lulu then. No, I was still Louise, and I would be Louise for quite some time to come.
Chapter 2
Lulu and What She Encounters
The Present - Colorado
Binoculars good, I thought. I would have thumped my chest for emphasis but didn’t feel like putting forth the effort. Even after a bizarre apocalyptic event and the sudden absence of all things electrical, the binoculars still worked just fine. From a secluded position on the side of a mountain and well within a copse of trees, I looked through them and sighted the entrance to the underground facility. Once upon a time it was part of the headquarters of NORAD. That’s what the little brass historical marker down the road had helpfully informed me. The whole area was also a place of heavy technology and was well known as part of Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, the movies portrayed it as the end all of nuclear command stations. Big mountain. Deep tunnels. Giant metal doors that would protect people until the sun came out again. I can see the doors slowly closing in my mind’s eye. I could hear the deafening clank as the mechanisms slid shut their bolts.
But that was the other part of Cheyenne Mountain. This place was a few miles away and was its less famous cousin. Cheyenne Jr. was what it had been nicknamed, and that part wasn’t on any brass plaque.
When they constructed the whole facility, I don’t think the American government ever counted on 99.99% of the population disappearing and fairy tale animals appearing. Earlier in the day, I saw a herd of centaurs that didn’t really care if the North American Aerospace Defense Command previously hung out in their neighborhood. (The top half of the centaurs might look human, but I can assure you they didn’t act human. They didn’t act like horses, either. Their mouth open and reveal multiple rows of teeth that would make a Megalodon envious. Furthermore, the jaws detached like a snake’s, so they can swallow a larger mouthful. Apparently, they’re carnivores and meat is meat. Fortunately for me, they didn’t like to chase down humans. I liked to think of it as the bee principle. If you can outrun a mass of pissed-off bees for a half mile, then you’re okay. Same exact thing with centaurs.)
I tapped the side of the binoculars. I had a list of places to look at, and this was number 62. Sure I had looked at Cheyenne Mountain first, but then last year, one of the researchers had found some references to this place in a magazine for skeptics. (Cheyenne Jr.: The Secret Secret of Cheyenne Mountain!) It was really a shame that we didn’t have the Internet anymore because this kind of work would have been diminished greatly. Just check a couple specialty websites. Problem solved. Too bad. I missed Facebook. (Today’s status: Almost eaten by centaurs, but daily running has sculpted my bod into a centaur-escaping machine. Exercise win! Alternatively, I could have posted: The Centaur Run: Ways to trim those extra pesky pounds. Though the selfie might have been tricky.)
I felt a weight settle on my shoulder and a little puff of air that brushed against my hair as wings stopped moving. The words that followed weren’t unexpected. “Magic place,” the firefly pixie said. “Bad magic place.”
“Light,” I said to the pixie. Her full name was Flies-Like-a-Bird-in-First-Morning-Light. As that was an excessive mouthful, it had been immediately been changed to Light for the sake of my memory. They were little more than the size of large dragonflies, and their color was typically a pale leaf green. Their wings were iridescent and brilliant in the sunlight. I don’t think I ever got tired of watching them. “You and the girls didn’t get too close, did you?” I asked.
“The sisters know better,” Light said, and her tone was full of arrogance. For their diminutive size, the firefly pixies were chockablock with fire and brimstone. Give them silver toothpicks, and they fought like demons. Tiny demons, but demons all the same. I knew they had been underestimated many times before.
“Anyone around?” I asked.
“There are signs of humans,” Light said in my ear.
I grunted. This was a tech bubble. This was a place where technology still worked in a world where most of it was long gone. Tech bubbles were a valuable commodity. People could operate a factory there. They could produce items that otherwise would never be seen again. Not everything was doable, of course. There wasn’t much point in making radios, for example, when as soon as you took them away from the edges of the bubble, they no longer worked. But tools, weapons, and foodstuffs could be produced. It was a matter of getting a person with the right kind of creative juices to take over.
I couldn’t charge in and take possession because, well, I didn’t want to get my head blown off by someone with a shotgun that still very much worked there. Also, whatever we were, we weren’t thieves. Someone, or several someones, had discovered that the place still worked, and I’m sure they were taking advantage of it.
It was time to be a diplomat. I hated being a diplomat. Diplomacy blew chunks.
Humans saw the cute powder-puff girl with the short blonde hair and the big blue eyes and thought, “Isn’t she cute?” A few of them decided that I needed to stay with them on a permanent basis as their girlfriend. I had a few knives that said otherwise. (My favorite was my KA-BAR, which was nicknamed Mr. Stabby for a very good reason.)
“Do I look like a powder puff?” I asked Light.
Light cursed in Japanese. She’d been learning words from one of the people at the bubble. One of them was a Japanese American with a considerable vocabulary and a love for gardening that really pleased the firefly pixies. (Gardens with flowers = butterflies. Butterflies = firefly pixie delicacy on the wing.) “That is not a word the sisters use,” she finally admitted.
“A cream puff, a marshmallow, something all soft and gooey on the inside,” I explained. Half of the time I sang to her in a mix of English and pixiese. I knew some of the firefly pixies’ language, but I was far from fluent. The pixies usually taught me phrases like, “I’m a dumb blonde” and “Pixies rule and humans drool” for pure amusement. They also took the time to learn English because that was what most of the humans spoke.
“Man-Stealing-Knife Girl is soft and gooey on the inside,” Light said. “All humans are. Not as gooey as butterflies, however. The sisters love the goo that comes out of butterflies when they are bitten into.” She made a yummy sound.
“Did the sisters see any weapons?” I asked, making a mental note to stop at the nearest meadow for pixie fast food. Sorry in advance, butterflies.
“The sisters did not cross the barrier,” Light answered. “Bad magic place, remember?” She pointed with her little silver toothpick. The makeshift weapon was something Sophie had found in bulk in an antique store. Many of the girls had them now,
and some of the group still actively looked for items that would suit the firefly pixies. Oh, one could laugh at a firefly pixie with a silver toothpick until she stabbed it into one’s eye. Then there was no more laughing.
“Do the sisters have a reason for that?”
Enigmatic and vague could have been the firefly pixies’ catchphrases.
Light made a noncommittal noise, and I felt her shrug. She put the toothpick away, and I turned my head slightly so I could see her out of the corner of my eye. “You didn’t see anyone or any weapons?”
Light shook her head. “There were signs of humans. The doors are not dusty. The trail has been used. Weeds do not grow in the cracks where feet constantly tread.”
No billboards with warnings on them, either saying to keep out, either. Not only was I not a diplomat, but I disliked dealing with people I didn’t know. The isolated ones were the worst. Even when they knew they weren’t alone, they had stayed secluded so long that their brains were broken. I sympathized. Really I did, but not enough to risk my life.
Enough things had happened since the world twinkled off in the space of a microsecond.
No one knows how the change happened. I always liked the way Sophie put it. Sophie was the girl I once saw as competition. She was also the girl I followed across the country and back. Finally, she was the girl I admired beyond belief. I often wished that when I grew up, I would turn out to be Sophie, never mind that she was seven years younger than I was, and I should mention that I would have never told her that. In any case, Sophie said that the change was like a sea of dreams washed over the land and took almost everyone away. It also washed things in, such as creatures that most people would have never dreamed about. Like the creature that glimmered in the sunlight with golden-green intensity and tremendous bat-like wings stretching endlessly, a marvelous creation straight out of Anne McCaffrey’s wildest imaginings. (Or George R.R. Martin if that was the inclination.)
Regardless, it was, it had always been meant to be, and it didn’t seem to be changing back. Millions, no billions of people vanished in an instant. I say an instant, but the truth is that I don’t know how long it took them to vanish. The clothing and belongings seem to indicate that it happened quickly. They fell to the ground where the people were last. It wasn’t as if they moved about as they disappeared.
I’ve never found a person who was a survivor and was awake at the time it happened, much less a witness to seeing what happened to the ones who went before us. Many of the ones who stayed behind often wonder. I’m not any different from them in that fashion. I wondered. I asked. When I meet people we often share where-were-you stories; it seems a rite of passage now. Asleep is the common answer. Unconscious. Unknowing. Unaware. Oblivious until we woke up. It became as it is today all while we were insensible.
My story is about what it would be for most of us. Some are more terrifying. The first soul Sophie encountered was a lunatic, a madman who wanted to kill Sophie and eat her flesh. More terrifying was the fact that Sophie wasn’t the first human the deranged individual had encountered; the others hadn’t survived the meeting. Sophie had been rescued by some of the new animals. The little firefly pixies had swarmed the man and forced him into the fire he had built. He’d become the Burned Man instead of the crazed soul. And like many things to come, the world had changed him again. He’d developed an affinity with another species of new animals and then betrayed them. The last we knew of him, he was bloody and ruined, running for his life, not just from those he tried to burn into nonexistence, but from the new animals who had attached themselves to him. (Payback, I suspected, was a bitch.)
The odd affinity that occurred wasn’t a fluke. It had happened for Sophie and the firefly pixies. There were others that we encountered as we traveled. The man and his horse that wasn’t really a horse. A boy and a gryphon. A girl and a catlike creature. But not everyone had this connection.
The firefly pixies liked me a lot, too, but they never marked my cheek with a glow-in-the-dark pattern that was a lot like a very cool tattoo. I never held it against them. I wouldn’t have picked me for the basketball team, either.
The other interesting thing about the after humans was that a majority of them seemed to have some kind of extrasensory perception. Sophie had “feelings” about people she cared about. She had once saved my life by providing a bulletproof vest at just the right time. There was a man who could speak telepathically to people he’d met, no matter how extreme the distance between them. Gideon was the leader of a group I’d joined not long after the change, and he saw things that hadn’t yet happened. (The Redwoods Group was the common name for them.) Other ones were more interesting still. A man who belonged to Gideon’s group saw dates. From what Sophie had let slip, once he touched someone, he knew the date of their death, too. That was one I kept to myself, and I tried not to touch him. The man Sophie loved, and who loved her in return, was Zach, and he had dreamed about Sophie long before the change happened, well before he had ever laid eyes on her.
Me? I had to have something. I don’t know what my ticket to this world was. I knew what I had been. I had been a terrible bitch before, and I had learned something about not being that person. I made a mistake, and the group temporarily exiled me. Then the Burned Man happened, and they yielded because no one should be alone. The mistake I made hadn’t been a deal breaker. I hadn’t murdered people like the Burned Man, but I did something untrustworthy. I couldn’t look the people in the face.
Sophie decided to go east to see the new President of the United States, to represent the Redwoods Group. I decided to go with her because, well, no one should be alone. Somewhere along our trip, our adventure, I learned how to be a different person, and somehow Sophie and I became friends.
We did meet the President, and we found that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. His name was Corbin Maston. He’d been the last surviving member of Congress, so the head honcho spot was his by default, however, he wasn’t a good person. He’d only survived because he’d been inside a tech bubble, an area that still allowed technology to work inside its perimeters. He’d known that if he left, he would likely vanish like many of the others. Sophie had an idea about that, too. When she’d thrown him out of the bubble, there was nothing left but clothes and a fancy watch. Maston’s head military guy, a Naval lieutenant named McCurdy, hadn’t taken that well. He’d used all the steam technology they’d resurrected to chase us all the way to Colorado.
McCurdy was about to execute Sophie when the weight of the new world dropped upon his broad but stupid shoulders. Learning lesson for the Annapolis grad: never underestimate what you don’t understand.
McCurdy had been led down the wrong path. I think if he had had guidance, he wouldn’t have gone there, but it was the bed he’d made, and he was going to have to sleep in it. The new world wasn’t being kind to him or his little army of idiots who’d chosen to follow him. The last I’d heard of him he was trying to recreate the United States of America one little patch of land at a time. The problem was that the new animals didn’t know diddly about the U.S. of A., and if they had, they wouldn’t have cared.
And me? I chose to stay with the tech bubble at Sunshine. The people who settled there had a working factory. They’d carved a niche out of the world and made it work. They were trading more with the ones who didn’t have tech.
Part of the reason I stayed was that the people there didn’t know my ugly secret. I’m sure that some of them knew because there was active movement from California to Colorado and back. Gideon set up a nominal government. One of their priorities was to seek out tech bubbles and take advantage of them, not to mention, to save the people who had been trapped there. Enough time had passed that there weren’t many tech bubble survivors left. I only knew of one, and he’d had assistance from someone on the outside. Unless the bubble had a water source and plenty of canned goods, they were probably a historical note of little consequence.
There was also Clora, who
shouldn’t have survived at all. She had been traveling to Montana when she was detoured to Washington, D.C. She was pregnant and the truth of the matter was that she wasn’t a survivor. The fetus inside her abdomen was, and when the child was born, Clora would have vanished like Corbin Maston. But Sophie had been warned. She managed to get Clora into the tech bubble just in time. Well, almost all of her. One hand had been outside.
In any case, the baby was fine. We were just about 100% certain that the child, a girl named Delphine, would be able to traipse back and forth between the inside and outside of the bubble, but Clora wouldn’t allow it. Delphine was probably going to be inside until she turned thirty-five.
Others settled there to make a life with an interesting attachment to the past. So I chose to make a life there myself. And one of my jobs was to look for more tech bubbles. I had a nose for it. Plus I had a troupe of firefly pixies who also had the noses for it. They stuck with me even when Sophie went back to California with Zach.
Gideon wanted to lock down all the tech bubbles. He had a nightmare about whether nuclear weapons would still work. The deceased President of the United States had discovered that weapons worked inside the bubble and would also make an impact outside the expanse. He’d essentially burned down most of the greater D.C. area when he’d figured out that interesting tidbit, all to show that he had the power. What a waste. All he’d really done was emphasize to the new animals that some humans were complete dicks.
“Should I just go knock on the door?” I asked Light.
Light said, “Beats waiting outside here. The sisters are hot. We need a cool pool and a few butterflies.”
Forest of Dreams Page 2