Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  “Okay,”I say. “Talk to me like a third grader. What’s string theory, and what’s it got to do with everything we saw?”

  “B-basically it has to do with energy and dimensions,”Selby says, licking her lips.

  I suddenly wish I’d thought to wash her face while she was asleep; God only knows what kind of grossness is on her skin. Come to think of it, none of us have cleaned up yet. I move that item to the top of our to-do list for when Selby’s settled down.

  “There are our four dimensions,”Selby goes on, as if reminding herself. “Three plus time. There’s an idea that there’s as many as eleven different, um . . . different dimensions. Ten plus time.”

  “Okay. Keep going.”

  Charlie cuts in. “Blacktop. We’re on the highway.”Then he mutters, “Thank you, God.”

  “Keep talking about the strings,”I tell Selby. “Just keep talking. I’ll get you some water and something to eat. You’ve got to be dehydrated.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,”Selby says, but not in response to me. Her expression shows the strain of a student facing a tough test question.

  I get her a bottle of water, which she takes and starts sipping. I grab a washcloth from the bathroom, wet it under the faucet, and add some hand soap. Glancing into the mirror, I barely recognize myself.

  Selby’s mumbling now, scientific stuff I can only barely grasp, things like “nonlocal”and “bosons.”I give her the washcloth, gently urge her to clean up, then go back to the bathroom to wash my own face. The water falls down black into the tiny sink.

  Just as I’m drying my face and feeling a little more human, Charlie swears and the RV slows down.

  I move to the front and hunker beside his seat, about to ask him what is happening—except I see it for myself out the windshield.

  On our left, to the east, runs a set of train tracks. They lie parallel to Interstate 10, the highway we’re on, the same one we drove in on from Vegas. And on the tracks—or rather, near the tracks—lie the remains of a long train of shipping containers, mostly, and at least one engine car. They’re scattered around the desert like Lincoln Logs. The train cars are bashed in, giving their sides the appearance of crumpled tinfoil. At first I wonder what kind of tornado or windstorm could have caused that kind of damage, because as Charlie continues slowly down the highway, the destruction just keeps on going. I try to imagine the train going along, and what could possibly have knocked every car off the rails and scattered them dozens of yards away from the tracks.

  Then I remember the giant horn I’d seen in the cave, like a mammoth rhino’s horn, and how it had crashed up from the pit. Something like that could have bashed in the sides of those train cars. Whatever god-awful head or body that horn was attached to . . .

  I pull out my phone, ready to call the police, except surely someone else has done that by now. Other cars heading in either direction have slowed too. Someone’s got to be calling. I see lots of people with their cell phones held out of windows, filming the wreckage. I wonder if having a record of all this will really matter.

  Instead of calling the police, I call Dad again—and practically scream when he answers.

  “Dad!”

  “Abigail? Are you okay?”

  The desperation in his voice chokes me for a moment. “It’s me. I’m fine.”

  “Did they get you out of Phoenix?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Yes, I’m not in Phoenix.”

  “Good. Did you get out before the accident?”

  “What accident?”

  “The reactor. The Palo Verde nuclear plant. Are you sure you’re okay? Haven’t you heard?”

  I can’t decide what to do. The fact that I’d lied a few days ago about going to Phoenix definitely doesn’t seem to matter, but I’m not exactly ready to tell Dad everything that’s happened either.

  “Heard what? Tell me.”

  “The power plant blew up,”Dad says. “There’s a cloud of radiation headed into Phoenix. Where are you?”

  “We’re going to Tucson.”At least it’s not a lie.

  “That’s good,”Dad says. “Okay, that’s good. You’ll be safe there.”

  I smother the phone against my shoulder. “We need to see the news,”I whisper to Charlie, and put the phone back to my ear.

  Charlie pulls the RV off to the side of the road and gets his phone out.

  “Dad? How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Dad, I have to tell you . . .”

  I shut my eyes against the image of my mother’s face. Try to find the words to tell Dad not what had happened for real, but enough that he could let Mom go.

  No, I decide. Now just isn’t the time. Too much has happened, and too much is currently happening. I need to get home safe and sound, collect my thoughts, and tell him when the time is right.

  I start feeling dizzy with it all. “Dad, listen. I don’t know when I’ll get home exactly, but I will get there as soon as I can, okay? Will you be all right?”

  “Mrs. Brower brought blueberry muffins,”Dad says. “That should hold me.”

  “Good, that’s great. Tell her I said hi, and not to worry. I’ll be home soon. Okay?”

  “Okay, Abigail. Please be careful.”

  “Okay. Bye, Daddy. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  We hang up. Charlie stares down at his phone screen, eyes wide.

  “This isn’t going to get better any time soon.”He hands me the phone.

  I almost drop it when I see the footage. Now I know what that mammoth rhino horn belonged to.

  10

  Then

  * * *

  At nine thirty Thursday morning, I borrowed Mrs. Brower’s old Chevy pickup to make the drive to the MGM Grand. Mrs. Brower still drove the truck from time to time, but not often. According to an agreement we’d made when I’d gotten my license a few months ago—she’d taken me to the DMV because Dad wouldn’t get out of bed—I could use the truck as long as I asked her first, which made sense since she had the keys. I also agreed to run errands for her every so often. Groceries, dry cleaning, things like that. Not a bad deal for not having to make car payments or pay insurance. I did have to fill the gas tank before returning it, which was no big deal, since I never drove very far anyway. I gave myself an allowance from my paychecks when I could, and most of it went to gas. Which, again, was not much.

  People of all makes and models wandered around MGM, about as busy as normal for a weekday morning. It wasn’t packed like on the weekends, when Mom and Dad had taken short “staycation”trips here years ago. I self-parked and walked through the lower-level entrance, past enormous banners shouting about graying, elderly rock bands who’d be playing there soon. Is that commitment on their part, or just stupidity? Or maybe they had debts to pay off from their heyday and would take any gig they could. I could understand that. One minute there’s steady income, the next you’re working at Arby’s.

  The glass doors swooshed open automatically, letting me into a snaking, windowless hallway. I rounded the only corner, and there he was.

  Charlie leaned against a wall, gazing dispassionately at a magic shop. He saw me coming and straightened up, smiling.

  “Hi, Abby.”

  I swore he hadn’t changed, though of course he must have. I’d turn seventeen next month, so that made him eighteen now. Spiral-curl black hair hung off his head in tight, crazy ringlets. His brown eyes had gotten deeper, more thoughtful.

  Other than that . . . Charlie had grown up, and grown up well. He’d kept his adolescent-boy slenderness but had added some heft to his shoulders: the kind of body a swimmer might have. I could check out Charlie Prinn for a good long while.

  I shouldn’t have been totally surprised, since I’d been spying on him online for years now. He hadn’t been difficult to track down with Google, and the photos I’d uncovered were flattering to say the least. Charlie Prinn had become quite the “catch,”as Mrs. Brower might say.

  “Hi,�
��I said, reeling suddenly from seeing not merely Charlie, but someone so closely associated with Mom. My guts got heavy and a bit nauseated. It was one thing to keep occasional tabs on him online. Seeing him in person was another thing altogether, apparently. I hadn’t expected this reaction.

  He stepped closer to me. His arms rose, then lowered quickly.

  “So, I don’t know if we hug here, or what.”

  “Um . . . yeah, we can hug,”I said, feeling stupid.

  We sort of closed the distance toward each other and embraced awkwardly. It was over before I wanted it to be. I took a step back and crossed my arms, imagining an October chill tickling through my shirt from outside.

  Charlie, I kept thinking, repeating his name over and over like a mantra. Charlie Prinn. Charles Prinn. Charlie.

  “How are you?”I said.

  Charlie put his hands into his back pockets, rocking back and forth on suede Chelsea boots. “Good, I guess. Overall. What about you?”

  “Same,”I said, not sure if I was lying or not. “How’s your mom?”

  “I don’t know. She took off a few years ago, ran away with a DP from North Hollywood. I’ve been living with Stephen outside LA.”

  Stephen was his older brother. “What’s a DP?”

  “Director of photography. Sorry.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks, it’s okay.”Charlie pointed to a pizza place nearby called Project Pie. “Hungry?”

  “Sure.”

  Charlie led the way into the restaurant. “Ever eaten here?”

  “No.”

  “It’s pretty tasty,”Charlie said, easily dodging a crowd of family tourists. “I’ve already been here twice since we got in last night. It’s like the Chipotle of pizza.”

  “So, your two . . . um, friends? They’re here?”

  “Yep. Alex, I think, is gambling away his life savings on roulette, and Selby’s up in our room.”

  Our room. I didn’t like the sound of it at all, even knowing—rather, especially knowing she was his girlfriend. Good God, I came here to talk about our parents, but I had time enough to spend being petty and jealous over some girl? Nice, Abigail, very nice.

  I followed Charlie into the restaurant, which sat empty except for the employees, who had only just finished opening up for the day. We both ordered, and I took out my wallet, but Charlie waved a hand over it and muttered something too low to catch. So I let him pay. Why not.

  We took seats at a table facing each other. Absurdly, I felt like I was on a first date and that Charlie might work his way into a kiss. I couldn’t be so lucky.

  “So what’ve you been up to?”Charlie said.

  “What, the last five years? Honestly . . . not much. I sort of have to take care of Dad a lot. You know?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s because of your mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Truly.”

  Then that was it. We stopped talking for at least a minute. I tried forming some chitchatty question that wouldn’t give away that I’d been keeping tabs on him. I didn’t need to go sounding like a creeper.

  “So, um . . . you’ve been making movies, huh?”

  “More or less. Not like action films or anything. I’m not much of a writer. I’ve tried it, and I kind of suck. But I’m really good at finding stories. And then putting them on-screen. I made this one last year about American Indians on the reservations—”

  “And it won a best film award, yeah.”

  “You heard about that?”

  Nice job, Abigail. “I . . . came across it. Somewhere.”

  I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. I know I wouldn’t have.

  “Cool,”Charlie said. “Yeah, it won best film at a festival down in Phoenix. Last thing I ever expected. But I was able to get some more gigs off it, so that’s cool.”

  “Good for you.”I meant it, but also became momentarily maddened with jealousy. His dad goes missing, his mom bails on him, and life’s good? Girlfriend and all?

  Where the hell had I gone so wrong? When would I get my break?

  “Well, enough of that catching up stuff, huh?”Charlie said, smiling again just before taking a bite of his pizza—chicken, pesto, red and yellow peppers. He might have done it deliberately, to stall, but I wasn’t sure.

  When he’d finished the bite, he said, “What do you think happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here eating pizza with you.”

  “You haven’t tried it yet. You have to try it. Take a bite.”

  Trying to regain my patience, if I ever had it to begin with, I took a bite.

  “Okay,”I said after a minute, “so you’re right about this: It’s awesome.”

  “I know. I hope that means you’ll trust me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Charlie folded his hands on the table. “Tell me what you think happened. Then I’ll tell you everything I’ve got. See, after you called, I started poking around a bit. But I need to know where you’re coming from first.”

  I used his tactic—I took a big bite and chewed it slowly. Holy cow, it was good. Maybe it was just a year of roast beef and Horsey Sauce being cleansed from my palate. When I’d swallowed and chased it with a drink of water, I folded my hands on the table and looked into Charlie’s eyes, trying to figure out how much I trusted him. I mean, it had been five years.

  The question was, did I care?

  11

  Now

  * * *

  I max the volume on Charlie’s phone, which I’ve browsed to a local news channel stream. Grainy footage plays while a newscaster, a guy, speaks over it.

  “. . . made available just a few moments ago,”the newsman is saying, confusion and stress evident in his voice. “It was taken by a smartphone camera just moments after the initial explosion that rocked the Palo Verde nuclear power plant . . . uh . . . we’re tracking down some zoological experts right now to aid us in identifying the, uh . . . the animal we’re seeing here . . .”

  “That’s one of them, isn’t it,”I say to Charlie.

  The footage, which the broadcast replays over and over, shows a massive four-legged creature rushing away from an explosion behind it, something straight out of an action movie. I say “massive”because the animal ran past a tanker truck, and this thing stood twice as tall and twice as long. Nothing on this earth—nothing anymore—gets that big. It did look like a rhinoceros for the most part, except it had a long, powerful neck ending in an enormous head. Jaws that could easily wrap around the cab of a trailer truck jutted from the skull, and its snout was topped by a thick horn that must have stretched six feet into the air and tapered to a sharp, black point. It looked to me like some cross between a rhino and a tyrannosaurus.

  “We are unsure at this point . . . We are not able to confirm that the animal you see in this amateur video is connected to the explosion at the power plant,”the newsman says. “Or that this footage is even necessarily real . . .”

  “How many do you think are out there?”I ask Charlie. My throat dries as I think about the train cars tossed around. The thing on the news footage could have done that damage. Easily.

  “Lots,”Charlie says. “A whole lot.”

  “How’d we not get trampled? In the cave.”

  “Luck of the draw,”Charlie says, staring at his screen. “We came close. But they didn’t notice us. We were off to one side, in a divot, this little crater. I think they just wanted out. Or else someone wanted them out.”

  His expression reveals he’s as shocked to hear himself say it as I am to hear it. Someone?

  A screech of tires makes us both look up. Outside, on the 10, cars come barreling north. There’s normal highway speeding, and then there’s this: absolute disregard for anyone else. Such disregard that of course it doesn’t take long for something to go wrong. A little red car tries to take the shoulder to pass
a bigger truck, but the truck has the same idea at the same time to get around a medium gray sedan, and sends the red car squealing into the desert. The truck slams on its brakes, which the driver behind him—rushing to fill the void left by the red car—doesn’t see in time. The car behind the truck smashes headlong into the truck’s rear bumper, crumpling the car into a flattened mass of steel.

  “Whoa,”Charlie says “What’s—”

  I think we see them at the same time: a swarm of enormous flying creatures the likes of which this world had never seen, or which we had never been meant to see.

  Two pairs of long iridescent wings, like those of a dragonfly, extend from the backs of the animals. Their bodies have mantis-like angles and joints, their forelimbs bending and flexing as they fly. The sound of their wings hits us, and I recognize it instantly: the deep, bass buzz I heard coming from the pit in the cave. Their drone vibrates the ground beneath us, rattling the windows of the RV.

  Charlie leans forward, phone forgotten. I do the opposite, walking slowly backward, deeper into the RV, but keeping my eyes glued to the windshield.

  “What’s that noise?”I hear Selby asking.

  We don’t answer. I reach out to steady myself against a cabinet as one of the dragonfly-mantis creatures swoops down toward the escaping vehicles and unleashes a jet of green, gaseous flame. It hits the car full-on. The car swerves left and right, taking out neighboring vehicles before exploding into a ball of emerald fire.

  Tires screech behind us. Other cars had been going in our direction too this whole time, but fewer than what was coming north from the direction of Tucson. That trend now comes to a tire-squealing halt as the drivers see the dragonfly monsters up ahead.

  “What did I do?”I say. “Charlie? What the hell did I do?”

  “We’re outta here,”he growls, jamming the gear into drive and swerving the big van back onto the freeway. The sudden maneuver sends me to my butt and Selby to her back on the bed. She lets out a howl and grabs at her belly.