by Jon Skovron
Finally, I asked. “Why do you like it? Country music.”
“It’s about loss.”
“A lost truck?”
“Sure, there’s the obvious layer. Lost money, lost possessions, lost love. But it’s more than just that. This guy is thinking, ‘Everything would be okay if I could just get this bloody truck working again.’ Of course, deep down, he knows that it actually wouldn’t help all that much. But that’s all he can handle thinking about. The rest is too big. Too complicated. If he looked directly at the gigantic pit that swallowed his life, he’d probably just go mad. Country music is about when life isn’t simple anymore. It’s about innocence taken away too early, too harshly. It’s about losing the things you can’t get back.”
I hadn’t been expecting a response like that from her. Something that open. I was thinking of telling her that, when the waitress came over. She was a middle-aged human in an apron, a little heavyset, her brown hair streaked with gray and pulled back in a bun. She looked tired. But she smiled as she looked at Claire and said, “What can I get you, sweetie?”
“I’ll have the chicken-fried steak, please,” said Claire. Her politeness surprised me, too.
“You’ve got one pretty accent, there, miss,” said the waitress, her eyes lighting up.
“Er, thanks,” said Claire.
“Where you from?”
“London.”
“In England, right?”
“Yeah,” said Claire.
The waitress frowned for a moment, then said, “Sorry, darlin’, we ain’t got any hot tea.”
Claire smiled slightly at that. “I like coffee just fine.”
“Oh, well, we got plenty of that. So what brings you all the way out here?”
“I like it here,” Claire said. “Lot more space than back home.” Her accent was getting a little thicker and I realized she was playing it up for the waitress. She seemed to enjoy being seen as exotic.
“Well, bless your heart,” said the waitress. “You got that right, we got plenty of space. I love that Downtown Abbey show, don’t you?”
“Sorry, haven’t seen it,” said Claire. “I don’t watch the telly much.”
“Wish more kids were like that,” said the waitress. “My kids, seems like that’s all they do.”
Then she turned to me and I braced myself for the inevitable look of surprise or shock or disgust when she took in my stitches. But it didn’t come. In fact, I was the one who probably looked surprised. I couldn’t see it before because she’d been turned toward Claire, but now that I was looking at her dead on, I saw that she had a huge burn mark on the side of her face.
“And what about you?” she asked me.
“Uh, I’m not from England,” I said.
She turned back to Claire and smirked. “Fine-lookin’ fella you got here, but he ain’t too bright, is he?”
“Not especially, no,” said Claire, also smirking.
The waitress turned back to me. “Sweetie, I meant what do you want to eat?”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I’ll have the same thing.”
“Good choice.” She winked at me. Then she went back to the kitchen.
“I like her,” said Claire.
“Because she said I was dumb,” I said.
“That too.” She smiled again briefly. “But also, she didn’t even flinch at your stitches.”
“You noticed that?” I asked.
“Of course.”
A moment later, the waitress was back with coffee. A muted peal of thunder made her glance out the window at the purple clouds flickering with lightening. “Bad-lookin’ storm out there. Good thing you’re in here where it’s safe.” Then she was gone again.
Claire curled her long fingers around her coffee cup and brought it up to her face. She inhaled deeply. Then she put it down, ripped open three packets of sugar, and poured them in.
“Not so bad here, is it,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s nice, actually. Good call.”
We sat and drank coffee and watched the storm for a while. The sky was as dark as night and when the sheets of rain came down, they blew almost horizontal. I’d seen storms before, but this was something different. All that space with nothing to stop the winds. This was tornado country, after all.
“I guess there’s probably something you should know,” said Claire.
“What?” I said.
“You asked earlier about Sophie and my parents.”
“Yeah, Sophie really didn’t want to talk about it. That’s what got us sidetracked to the mall.”
“There’s no easy way to say this. So I’m just going to lay it all out. Do you know much about my family?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Probably for the best. You don’t have a lot of assumptions. So Henry Jekyll was Sophie’s granddad. He was tired of being a goody-goody all the time. He wanted to be a bad arse. Cause some trouble, you know? But he still wanted to go to heaven and all that. So he created a potion that split his positive and negative sides into two different people in the same body: Dr. Jekyll and my granddad, Mr. Edward Hyde. Initially, Jekyll thought it was just a way to cheat. To have his cake and eat it, too. And he thought he could control my granddad. He’d let him go on a bender, get pissed, shag a prostitute. My granddad basically screwed as many slags as he could afford. Which, with Jekyll’s money, was a lot. Spread their messed-up split personality seed all over London. But he didn’t want any grandkids to haunt him, so he made sure there weren’t any. Usually, by kicking the pregnant moms in the belly to make them miscarry.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. Exactly. He was a bastard. So Jekyll, being a fine, upstanding English gentleman, was like, ‘Right, that’s enough of that!’ And he vowed never to take the potion again. But what he didn’t realize was that he’d used the potion so many times, it had altered him permanently. He didn’t need it to change anymore. He would fall asleep as Jekyll and wake up as Hyde. And that’s when he started to lose control. When Hyde really started to run amuck.”
She took a slow sip of her coffee, her eyes on the distant storm.
“Fortunately, Jekyll decided to man up and kill them both before Hyde got a chance to kick our grandmum in her pregnant belly. So our mums were born, but without fathers. Maybe it would have helped to have someone around who understood what it was like to be two people sharing the same body. Maybe then our mums wouldn’t have been so messed up. As it was, they were in and out of mental hospitals all through childhood. At one point, my mum went into a serious depression. She just hid inside and left everything for Sophie’s mum to deal with. And for a while that actually worked out. Sophie’s mum met our dad. He was a really nice, normal bloke. A banker. Made a decent amount of money. They had their first baby, our older brothers, Robert and Stephen. And it was weird, of course, what with having a baby that changed between two people at random, but they made it work. My mum would show up now and then, but mostly she just let Sophie’s mum play homemaker and pretend they were normal humans.”
Claire stared out the window for a while as the storm continued to lash the plains, her expression unreadable. I wondered if maybe Sophie was telling her to shut up. Finally, she said, “But once Sophie and I were born, everything changed. Sophie’s mum went into some kind of postpartum depression, and suddenly, it was my mum who was in charge all the time. But my mum didn’t get along with our dad. They fought all the time. Sophie’s mum eventually got over her depression and tried to patch things up all around. But it was too late by then. Dad was sick to death of all the dual-personality crap, and especially sick of my mum. Things continued to get worse until one night they were fighting and my mum just lost it.”
Her face was tense as she stirred her coffee, the spoon clinking against the side of the mug.
“She killed our dad.”
She carefully placed the spoon on the table and took a sip of her coffee.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I
’m not done.” She looked up at me. “That was just for context. This is the part you need to know. Our mums are back in a mental hospital. But that’s as much for their protection as anything else. Because Sophie’s brother, Robert, wants to kill my mum.”
“But wouldn’t that kill his mom, too?”
“No, he thinks he’s found a way to kill only one side.”
“Has he?”
“It looks like it. I haven’t seen or heard from Stephen in over five years. None of us can go that long without a switch.”
“He killed his other half?”
“Yeah, and he wants to kill all the Hydes. Including me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s out there somewhere looking for you, isn’t he?”
“Yep.”
“So…we’re both running.”
“Seems so.”
The waitress appeared, sliding two plates of chicken-fried steak in gravy onto the table.
“There you go, folks. Enjoy,” she said.
“Cheers,” said Claire quietly.
We ate in silence, but it wasn’t an angry silence anymore. I didn’t know what kind of silence it was now. Maybe the scared kind.
Eventually, the storm died down and the sun broke through the thick cloud bank to shine on the glittering wet grass.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe we’ll be able to figure something out once we get to New Mexico. Mozart said the Sphinx is, like, the wisest creature on the planet. I’m hoping he can help me out with VI. Maybe he’ll have some idea about what to do about Robert.”
“Sure, Scarecrow!” Claire said in a goofy, American accent. “And maybe while we’re there, he’ll give Sophie some courage, me a heart, and you a brain!”
“Aaaand moment ruined,” I said. “Well done.”
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s a talent of mine.”
17
Bad Lands
I WASN’T READY for the heat. As we moved from the plains into the desert, sunlight no longer felt like the gentle, life-giving rarity I’d come to love. Instead, it was relentless, hard, and mean. Sophie had spent so much of our money on clothes that we were in danger of running out of gas money before we got to The Commune. Claire said we’d use less gas if we didn’t run the air-conditioning, so we kept it off. We started to get grumpy. We argued a lot about stupid things, like who would pick the radio station or who was drinking more water. Then we stopped talking altogether and the only sound was the hot wind as it whipped through the open windows.
But finally, with less than a quarter tank of gas and almost zero patience between us, we got to the place Mozart had marked on the map. Except there was nothing there.
Claire was behind the wheel again. She pulled the car over onto the dusty shoulder and cut the engine. We both stared through the dirty windshield at the rugged, dry land dotted with scrub brush.
“That daft old wolf,” she muttered.
“Maybe it’s just off the road a bit.” I climbed out of the car.
“Or maybe the local humans got wise, killed them all, and burned the place to the ground.” Claire climbed out, too.
I looked around at the miles of barren wasteland around us.
“What local humans?” I asked.
The wind pushed the hot, dry air in our faces and tugged at our clothes.
“Unbelievable,” Claire muttered under her breath, then sat on the hood of the car. “Ah, shite that’s hot!” She stood up immediately, rubbing her butt. “Great, just fucking great.” She shaded her eyes with her hand as she scanned the desert horizon. “Stranded in the bloody desert with a scorned, AI stalker chick about to descend on us with a horde of brainwashed humans.”
“Would you chill?” I said. “This is the perfect place to hide from her. I bet there’s not even a cell signal out here. No tech, no VI.”
“So this is your plan, then?” she said. “Avoid computers and cell phones? Just how long do you think you can keep that up?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want to ask the Sphinx for advice. Maybe we can stay here for a while….”
“We can’t even find here!” she said. “It probably doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“Let’s just walk for a little bit.” I grabbed the big jug of water we’d been sharing. “Maybe it’s all underground, and they have a hidden entrance or something.”
“Oh, right,” she said and rolled her eyes.
“You got a better idea? I’m pretty sure we don’t have enough gas to get us to the next town, so we’d better hope we can find something out here.” I slung the jug over my shoulder and started walking. A minute later I heard her heavy footsteps crunching behind me.
We walked for a while, Claire grumbling quietly to herself. Eventually, we saw what looked like a small mountain up ahead.
“Maybe there’s a cave or something there,” I said.
Claire looked over to where the sun was beginning to slip down below the horizon. “It’s starting to get late. Maybe we should head back to the car, catch some sleep, and come back in the morning.”
“And walk this whole thing all over again? Come on, we’re already more than halfway there.”
“I don’t know…I think it’s farther than it looks. And anyway, once the sun sets it’s going to get cold.”
“That’s a bad thing? I’m dying in this heat.”
She didn’t say anything, just chewed her lip and continued to stare at the slowly setting sun. Her anger from earlier seemed to have disappeared, replaced by something I hadn’t seen in her before.
“What is it?” I asked. “You’re getting a little weird on me.”
She shrugged. “I guess I just feel out of my element. I’m not really a nature person.”
“I thought you loved country stuff.”
“I love to enjoy the ambiance from a comfortable booth, preferably with a coffee.”
“Well, I’m not exactly a nature person, either. But really, the last thing I want to do right now is get back in the car.”
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked. “We’ve still got plenty of water, so we’re not going to die of thirst. So we sleep out on the ground under the stars for a night. That actually sounds kind of cool.”
“I guess so.”
“Plus, once it gets dark, we’ll know for sure if there are people out there because we’ll probably be able to see lights.”
“Fine,” she said. “But if I hear something that sounds even remotely like a rattlesnake, I’m out.”
The sun turned an angry blood red as it began to drop behind the horizon. We walked on for a while longer, but the mountain didn’t seem to get any closer. Night fell fast, the sky shifting from red to a dark purple. There were no streetlights or business signs out here. Nothing but faint starlight and a sickly sliver of moon. I started to get the sense of just how dark it would be once the sun set completely, and I wondered if sleeping out in the open desert wasn’t such a great idea after all.
Suddenly, Claire stopped.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“What?”
“Shhh!”
At first, I didn’t hear anything except the wind whistling through the scrub brush. Then, I picked out something else underneath. At first, it was so faint that I thought I might be imagining it. But as the last light of the sun disappeared and the sky went completely black, it got louder.
“Is that…” I whispered. “Is that someone crying?”
The darkness was so thick that I could only see a few feet in any direction. The crying gradually got more intense until it drowned out the hissing night wind.
“Boy!” Claire hissed, and stabbed her finger at the air in front of us.
About ten feet ahead I saw a shape that I knew hadn’t been there a moment before. It looked like a woman. She stood with her head bowed so that her long, dark hair fell in her face. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. It was impossible to t
ell in the darkness, but her hands appeared to be covered with something like dark paint. And she was crying. Not a gentle weeping but thick, choking sobs that shook her whole body.
I looked at Claire for some idea what we should do, but she just stared at the crying woman, her eyes wide.
I turned back to the woman. “Are you okay?” My voice sounded higher than normal.
Her sobs quieted somewhat, but her head was still bowed and her shoulders shook even harder, like she was fighting to keep it inside.
“Miss?” I tried again. “Do…you need help?”
Slowly, her head began to rise. Her long, dark hair parted to reveal a pale, beautiful face streaked with tears of blood. Her luminous white eyes quivered in their sockets, showing only pinpoint black pupils.
“H-h-h-h…” she choked between sobs. “He-he-he-he…”
She lifted her hands up in front of her and I could tell now it wasn’t paint on them. They were covered in blood.
“Boy…” said Claire, her voice on the edge of panic.
“Hel-hel-hel-hel,” said the woman. Then her face shifted suddenly from misery to fury and she screamed, “HEEEEEEEEELLLLLP!”
The sound ripped through me like electricity. Every muscle in my body seized up. I couldn’t move, or speak, or even breathe. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Claire tip over like a plank of wood. Then my vision narrowed and spots floated in front of my eyes. I saw, more than felt, my own body begin to tip forward. The last thing I remembered was the weeping woman’s blood-drenched hands reaching out for me. Then there was only darkness.
I WOKE UP. That was a surprise right there. I really thought this was it.
Although when I tried to move, for a moment I wished I was dead. My entire body felt like one giant sore muscle.
“Oh, shit,” I wheezed.
“No, you did that already,” came a clear, piercing voice.
I tried to open my eyes, then realized they were already open.
“I can’t see!” I shouted.
“Your sight will return soon,” said the same voice, sounding a little bored.
It felt like I was lying in a cot, those metal-framed canvas ones you see in old movies with scenes in military hospitals. A thin, wool blanket covered me, which was good because I was completely naked.