At first the windows look blacked out, but then I understand. The trailer’s buried.
We’re still underground.
We’re not alone, either. The two other instruments I sensed from down below are sitting on the couch, and they aren’t making it look any prettier.
They both look like gutter punks. The guy smiles up at me. “Hey,” he says. “You’re the picture guy.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He laughs and so does the girl. “Weird. I’ve been looking at a picture of you looking pretty much like you do right now for nearly a year.” He looks over my shoulder and his expression changes to a big round O of surprise. “Oh my God.” He jumps up. “Corina?!”
I hear Corina laugh behind me. “You look like hell, boy!” she says as she pushes past me and hugs him in a big dancing lovefest. He swings her around, which is hard because the place is so narrow. They manage not to break anything.
When he puts her down, Corina looks at me, thrilled. “This is Sal! He was with us at the compound.”
“It was before his time,” Sal says. Then he sticks out his hand to me. “Salvador Pena.”
I shake hands with him. “Alex Mata.”
He turns to the girl who’s still sitting on the couch. “This is Erica. Erica, this is Corina, and this is Alex Mata, the guy we’ve all been waiting for.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?”
Sal smiles. “Help us, Alex Mata, you’re our only hope!”
Cassandra rolls her eyes. Corina giggles.
My ears start to burn.
He holds up his hands like he’s surrendering. “I don’t mean anything by it, man—it’s just that you’re supposed to be like our Obi-Wan Kenobi.” He lowers his hands and looks at my eyes. “You’re supposed to be a Jedi of the Syllogos . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
Sal looks confused by my question, which doesn’t help me feel better. He tries again. “Well, it’s kinda like the Force from Star Wars, except it’s real and you can’t use it to move stuff around or make people do things.”
“Except that supposedly you have such amazing access to it that you can do all sorts of stuff that the rest of us can’t even imagine,” Erica adds.
I don’t know these people and I’m not ready to tell them that, as a matter of fact, I can make people do things. “Who says?”
He gestures at Cassandra. “She does.” He shrugs. “But that doesn’t mean as much as the other person who keeps saying it.”
“Who?”
“Sybil,” he says. “She says you’re our best hope to save the planet.”
“Don’t swell his head.” Cassandra ignores my question and so do the others.
I flush.
“You all need some rest,” Sal says. “Erica and me bunk in the back room and Cassandra’s usually on the couch here, but we got some bedrolls we can toss out on the floor for you.”
I nod, not sure what else to do. “Alright . . .”
When we’re settled, the lights go out and the darkness is entirely complete and there’s nothing left between me and the vision of Jordan’s broken body at the foot of the Locust.
Nothing between me and my time in her mind. By the time I was done gliding her, I felt more at home there than I do in my own mind. Jordan wasn’t afraid to let someone know who she was, to show them what she felt.
I spent my life afraid of people seeing who I was, how I feel, and Jordan . . .
Jordan was stronger than me.
Jordan should have been the Jedi.
“Alex?” Corina is pressed up next to me even though it’s hot and stuffy in here—there’s no room to be separated.
“Yeah?” Even though my thoughts are making me miserable, having them interrupted irritates me.
“It really isn’t your fault.”
I don’t respond as fast as I think she wants me to. I can feel her turning around to try and look at me, but it’s too dark for her to see me crying.
She puts her arms around me. She kisses my cheek, then the other one, then my lips. “It’s really not, and Jordan wouldn’t want us to give up. She’d want us to finish the job. We’re gonna get the assholes who’re doing this to us, alright?”
I nod, my face brushing hers as I do.
When I can talk again, I tell her, “Yeah. We will.” When I say it, it feels like a promise.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep because I don’t know how I’m going to keep it.
Sixty-One
“I don’t remember you from the compound,” Corina says to Erica over breakfast. We’re eating LIFE cereal, stale, out of the box. Sal and Erica are sharing a pack of Hostess donuts. Cassandra isn’t eating. She’s sitting on the stairs to the tunnel, ignoring us.
“I was at the other one,” Erica says.
I’m startled. “There’s more than one?”
Erica nods. She points a donut at Cassandra. “I was with her.”
“Who were your targets?”
Erica looks at Cassandra, who gets up off the stairs and walks to the fridge. “We witnessed witnesses,” she says as she pulls out a bottle of beer.
“You were in my head?” Corina sounds ready to explode.
Cassandra shakes her head. “You weren’t mine.”
“Who was?” I ask, before Corina can respond.
Cassandra knocks the lid off her beer on the counter before she answers. “I had dozens, man.” She tips the bottle and chases down a handful of cereal. “They go through a shit-ton of witnesses.”
“There were only five of us at the compound.” I’m honestly confused.
Erica points at me with her donut. “There were five of you now. But there have been five or so there for years. This has been going on awhile, and witnesses are only good for a few targets before they stop being useful.” She takes a bite. “Gotta keep fresh meat coming or . . .”
We all ponder that for a moment. Then Corina breaks the silence. “So, the evil Gentry are about to unleash living terror on Earth and this is, like, all there is of the counterrevolution?”
Cassandra takes another swig from the bottle. “Yup.” She sets her beer on the counter.
“So why do you think we got a chance at all?”
“Sybil,” she says.
“You keep saying that name.” Corina shakes her head. “Who’s Sybil?”
“There’s a rebel Gentry,” Erica offers, rolling her eyes at how cryptic the other two are being. “Sybil’s working with it against the rest, trying to save us.”
“I was told I need to meet her,” I say.
Cassandra’s beer stops halfway to her mouth. “Who told you that?”
“You did.” I tell her about my self-glide.
She nods when I tell her. “Yeah. I had one of those, too. Sybil arranged those for us.”
“Why?” Corina doesn’t even bother to try to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “Why is a Gentry trying to save us?”
“Because it wants to.” Cassandra drains the rest of her beer before going on. “Sybil says this other Gentry wants us to live.”
Corina asks: “Why?”
“Because it does.”
Corina sets the cereal box down and shakes her head. “You’re a weirdo.”
Cassandra shrugs. “You don’t have to take my word for it. Sybil’s coming through this afternoon and you two are going to meet her.”
Sixty-Two
I follow Corina through the tunnel. The jungle crashes in with the heat and the sunlight as soon as I start up the exit stairs, and it takes all my concentration to get it back in the music drawers. We gather outside the school-bus door.
During the daylight, the whole area looks different. There’s no artillery falling—which is better—and I can see that there’s actually a big hill between us and th
e range with a huge barbed-wire fence at the top of it.
But if coming in after dark was a nightmare, leaving during the day shows us a landscape filled with despair—shacks, busted RVs, lean-tos, and people that look just as broken as the places they live.
“What is this place?” I ask Erica as we walk.
“Slab City,” she says.
It looks a lot like a homeless encampment.
“Everybody here’s just trying to escape,” Erica continues.
“Escape what?”
Erica smiles up at me. “Everything that’s not Slab City.”
We walk down the road past the painted mountain and down the long slow hill to the town with the gas station, but instead of going all the way, we stop at the railroad tracks that run through town.
“This way,” Cassandra tells us, and begins to walk down the tracks.
We follow her to an abandoned train station. It looks like it hasn’t seen a train for a hundred years. It’s a small brick building, but the bricks are loose and there’s graffiti covering it inside and out.
It doesn’t seem like a meeting place. “Here?”
“Yeah.” Cassandra sits down in the shade of the building and leans against the wall. “She’ll be by.”
I look at Corina, who looks at Sal, who nods and sits down, too.
I sit next to Corina and lean against her. Even though it’s hot out, touching her feels good. She leans into me and puts her head on my shoulder and it suddenly feels like Los Angeles never happened. “I love you,” I whisper in her ear.
She looks up at me and smiles. “I love you, too.”
I close my eyes and listen. Everything is good.
I’m nearly asleep when I feel the ground begin to vibrate. There’s a train coming. I crane my neck to look down the track. A big freight engine is moving our way. It blows its horn when the engineer sees us with our legs out near the tracks, so we pull them back and wait.
Sal puts a quarter on the track.
The train is long, with two engines in front, and it’s moving so slowly that I’m sure I could hop it if I wanted to. I’m just about to say that to Corina when I catch movement in one of the cars.
Somebody’s hanging off the side. He’s joined by someone else. They jump off the train twenty feet down the track from us, both landing on their feet. The bigger one—a guy—jogs after the train, catching up to the car they jumped from. He reaches in and retrieves two big packs, which he hefts onto a shoulder.
He looks at us, sees Cassandra, and smiles.
“Hey, Brett,” she yells.
“Hey,” he replies, though I can only read his lips because the sound is drowned out by the train. He starts walking toward us. The girl jogs to catch up with him.
The train passes at the same time they reach us. Brett is white, head shaved, wearing a cabbie hat. The two of them watch the train recede into the distance before turning their attention to us.
“This is Alex,” Cassandra says, pointing at me.
“Hey. I’m Brett.” He extends a hand toward me and I take it. He’s muscular, covered in tattoos. He turns to the woman who’s standing behind him. “This is Sybil.”
Up close, Sybil is strange-looking. She’s small and thin, and looks older than my mom, because her face is messy with wrinkles and sunspots. She wears guys’ pants and a big shirt that make her look like a little boy. Her hair is under a baseball cap that she’s wearing backward.
Stranger than her face and clothes, though, is her music. Instead of being a messy tangle of notes like everybody else, Sybil reads like a single harmonic, varying only in intensity.
It’s inhuman.
“Hey,” I manage to say, trying hard to keep my reaction to myself. “I’m Alex.”
Sybil smiles. Her teeth are perfect and straight. “Hey. Nice to meet ya.” She sets her bag down and tugs open the ties, then digs around inside for a water bottle, which she opens and drinks. When she’s done, she spends a minute scrutinizing me. I start to get uncomfortable. “Yeah.” She reaches out for me. “Let’s go talk.”
“Okay, sure.” I go to follow her. She catches Brett’s eye and shakes her head.
“Guess I’m staying with y’all,” he says, dropping his bag at his feet.
Sybil walks us across the tracks and back toward town. I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to begin, so I just start asking them. “What are you? Why me?” I don’t wait for answers. “Why me? What’s the Jungle? What am I supposed to do?” She doesn’t say anything. “What are you? Who’s my Voice?” She doesn’t even give any indication that she hears me.
She slows to a stop and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. It’s a short pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes, nearly completely crunched. She fishes in it for a cigarette and tweezes one out with her thumb and forefinger. It comes out bent and wrinkled, but she seems to think it’s fine, since she sticks it in her mouth and lights up.
I’m getting so agitated that the sheet music is starting to fly out of the drawers, crowding my brain with sound. “Answer me!” Then I shake my head, close my eyes, and try to get it under control.
“Breathe in, Alex,” she says. “You hear it like I do. The Syllogos is loud, filled with life. You can’t be its master, but you can be its partner.” She reaches for my arm. Her hand is cool and dry against my skin, her grip startlingly strong. “Breathe,” she commands.
And as she speaks, I feel her whole self. She’s not human. “What are you?”
“You know what I am,” she says. “Listen. In the Syllogos.”
I dive. Underneath, that single harmonic I hear is a wire-thin filament, vibrating but barely audible. I follow the thread into the distance to where it starts, and I am overwhelmed. A massive rope of life. A cacophony of jumbled notes plucked in rhythms beyond my comprehension, playing melodies I can’t begin to understand.
She is Gentry. She reaches for me in the Syllogos. I don’t feel fear.
Her music overwhelms me. It drowns out the rest of the Jungle along with my own scattered mind, and I surrender.
Sybil’s music washes through me, filling every crack in my soul. She gives me an image: The scene I remembered on my self-witness. I watch the woman hollowed out, sucked up by Locusts again.
And then I return. I’m just me again and the Jungle is back to the sound of crashing waves coming from distant drawers.
Sybil has read me, knows me now like I knew Corina, but even more. I feel dirty, like I need to wash her out, scrub away the residue she’s left on my mind.
But I’m unwashable, and completely naked to her.
“You don’t work for a Gentry—you are Gentry.”
She nods. “The Syllogos, Alex. The Silly Juice, as your Voice calls it. You call it the Jungle, which I like because it is like a Jungle, so tangled and full of life. It’s not something that intrudes. It’s not a sickness.”
“I don’t . . .”
“But you will.” She grins. “You’re not crazy—you’re not flawed or broken.” She shakes her head, steps up to me, puts her hand on my arm. I stare at her, waiting for her to say something that doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a hippie. “The Syllogos? The sounds it makes? What you’re hearing is the sound of reality. This?” She takes her hand from me and waves it at everything around us. “This place where we live is a projection—a way for us to make sense of things, but it’s not why we’re here. We’re here to create the truth, and seen time is the only truth. Once something is done, there is a truth even if people may argue about it. There is a thing that happened and it happened in a particular way.” She looks at me. “You’ve traveled back along your path. You’ve seen that truth, witnessed things that you could not change because they were fixed and true, and you also know what fixes things, binds them, collapses them.”
“Witnessing.”
She
nods. “Witnessing is our reason for existing, Alex—all of us. All life. To make choices, to see and experience, to remember. We fix time in place. Time created life to transform itself from possibility to actuality. We are the stuff that tames time, binds it in place, gives it structure.”
“So why do you need us as witnesses?”
She looks back at the abandoned station, then up at me before stepping up onto a rail, balancing carefully. Her voice is quiet. “There is no us, Alex. Just you. Corina, Cassandra, the others are here because of you. For you.” She taps my chest with a finger. “You are the one we need.”
I back away from her, stepping backward over the other rail so there’s space between us. “What do you mean, me? What makes me different?”
She sighs, takes a drag. “Pete,” she says through a cloud of smoke before turning to face me. “He was eight years older than you.”
Hearing her say Pete’s name puts me back on edge. “What does my brother have to do with anything?”
“You asked why you.” She looks at her cigarette and then at me. “It has to do with your brother.”
“How?” I push the breath through the word to make it loud enough to hear.
“Your mom used to tell you about how hard it was to have you, right? How there wasn’t supposed to be an eight-year gap. Your mom was pregnant three times between Pete and you.” She spits a fleck of tobacco off her lip. “None of them came to term, so she got help.”
I dip my chin just a little so she’ll know I hear what she’s telling me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her inspect her cigarette, take another drag. “They went to a clinic where I helped create you, Alex. I built you at the clinic, modified your DNA to make it possible for you to be the witness I needed, and then seeded you back into your mom. The Gentry manage to enhance most of the witnesses in one way or another—fertility clinics, altered booster shots—there are a lot of ways, but you were special. All witnesses are designed for witnessing, but you . . .” She exhales more smoke and smiles at me, the tenderness and warmth from her should feel motherly, but it’s wrong because it’s coming from her, which just makes it feel weird and threatening. “Your genes were already ripe for witnessing, so with you I pushed the limits to see how far a human can go . . . and you are glorious!”
Strange Days Page 29