“Gene,” Atlas says to the door handle, “does every walker travel where they wish?”
She purses her lips. “Not everyone.”
“Can they?”
“Most, yeah.”
He fingers an armband. “Then why—”
“Fences aren’t the only things that keep people from doing what they want or should, Atlas.”
He stares at the faces of passersby. They gaze out their windshields, eyes blank, and follow the line. His hand hovering over his horn, one older man scowls at the vehicle a meter from his front bumper.
Fingers curling into fists, Atlas narrows his eyes at the man.
Black steel fifteen persons high blocks the sun, hides the horizon, keeps them in laborhouses, casting steel blocks for steel fences. You wish to leave? they say. Confront the pyre with that request. The Absolute is building it now. With haste; you may meet him as he lights it.
Atlas leans into his seat. “I do not like these walkers.”
Gene laughs. “No one likes traffic.”
“Would they reconsider their dislike if blood was a necessary exchange for travel?”
Her smile falls. “Are you all right?”
He digs his fingers into his knees and locks his lips.
“Not all humans are the same.” Gene rests her hand on Atlas’s until his palm flattens against his leg. “I’m human, I think.”
His lungs constrict and eyes follow Gene’s hand as it returns to the steering wheel. Atlas unclenches his fingers.
“We need to stop to get gas. You got any cash there, Samuel?” Gene says.
Atlas glances over his shoulder; Samuel’s slouched, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He mumbles into them.
“Not for you.”
“Then we can’t get to Helena.” She sighs. “That’s just too bad. I hope you guys like rural Minnesota because we’re going to die here.”
Atlas perks up and stares across kilometers of plains and shrubbery and glimpses of irrigation ditches. His pulse accelerates.
Uncovering his face, Samuel rolls his eyes. “Don’t cry, Denim. You’ll get all wet and salty. That would be bad because you’re hand wash only.” He covers his face again. “Tumble dry optional but not preferable.”
“So, it’s a ‘yes’?”
“Gene, I don’t wish to die in this territory.”
Samuel groans.
Gene smiles and pulls off the highway. “That’s a yes.”
They stop at the nearest gas station, a large building with a larger parking lot, a half dozen long, white box vehicles lined along the pumps. Gene grabs some paper from Samuel and goes into the building.
Atlas twists around. “You are not touching the door handle.”
Samuel smirks. “If you say so.”
He twists forward. Atlas pinches the rearview mirror and turns it, angling it toward Samuel, who pats his jacket contents while glancing out the rear windshield.
“You and I both know,” Atlas peers into the rearview mirror, draws Samuel’s reflected pupils, and whispers, “that you’re completely and undeniably afraid of me. There’s nowhere you can go, no being, no force you can rely on to save you—”
Samuel scoffs.
“I’m not finished.” Atlas widens his eyes, speaks a breath. “You’re utterly alone, in spirit, in body, dimensions from Eden and your former sanctuary, battling illness that reduces you to an infant in a world that calls me Titan. Therefore, Samuel Covey, perhaps you should turn your back more cautiously because, oh,” he inhales, “how your spine brittles when it meets my sight. Now, if you do something as seemingly insignificant as grazing that handle without my authorization, I will dig my fists into your chest and, for the next earthly day, tear out the lives you’ve consumed, one by one, until you’re dust enough to be absorbed through my hands.”
Samuel raises an eyebrow. Atlas catches his breath and returns the stare in the rearview mirror. Cocking his jaw to one side, Samuel—
A bang rattles the vehicle. Samuel flinches and Atlas’s eyes gleam. Gene’s returned, filling her vehicle with gasoline.
“Whew,” Gene slips into the driver’s seat, “gas prices.”
Atlas and Samuel glare out the windshield, their hands on their laps, posture stiff. Gene glances at them and makes a face. She starts the engine.
She checks her rearview mirror, angled right, and does a double take. “Who—what. Okay.”
Adjusting her mirror, she turns for the highway. They exit the last civilization they’ll see in hours. A roadside pond here and there, a cloud to veil the sun for an instant, a vehicle to pass or a vehicle that passes them. All else dissolves behind the flattening plane traveled. No walls, no steel, no limits, the hum of Gene’s sedan increasing with speed that rocks them to the road’s eroded pebbles. Atlas breathes deeply. He leans against his headrest and closes his eyes to sunlight warming them.
When he opens them, the emptiness has expanded, not a tree in sight, and the sky has darkened. Sun hovers at horizon.
“It grows dark,” Atlas says.
Gene exhales. “I know.”
He looks at her, at the rings under her eyes, her frown.
“But I can’t stop.” Gene gestures to the road. “I’m going to keep driving through the night.”
“You will be exhausted. You must stop and rest.”
She shakes her head. “If I do, you and Samuel will kill each other while I’m sleeping and I’ll be sleeping in this car because there won’t be a hotel because I’ve got lots of money and no tired—” Gene makes a noise. “I mean, no money and lots of tired. I mean—never mind.”
Atlas looks in the back. Samuel’s cheek presses the window, his mouth open, eyes glazed. The rings under them droop darker than Gene’s; yet, twisting back to the windshield, Atlas recalls what Samuel expressed about not sleeping.
“I can pay for a hotel.”
Gene and Atlas stiffen and glance at Samuel.
“I can pay for your stupid hotel,” he mumbles. “Next town, pull over.”
“Really?” Gene says.
“Really?” Samuel pushes his face into the window, his nose bending from it. “No, I was joking because that’s such a funny joke.”
“I don’t believe it humorous.”
“Okay then.” Gene eyes her mirror. “Buy us a hotel once we get to Dickinson.”
Samuel groans. “Your voice is a grating commercial.”
Sky blends to black and the land disappears. Atlas squints past their lone headlights, to roadside green signs and metal bars reflecting them back every few seconds. The world through his window, past blinking mileposts doesn’t breathe or move or live because his eyes show him naught. He strains them. In his pupils dilating, darkness assumes a mutated modicum of life impossibly unmoving, their torpor vapors inhaling the horizon he knew so well into shapelessness exhaled, obliterating the asphalt behind and the asphalt ahead, the plains’ shallow dips and low hills. He stares and, in headlights’ outskirts, the blurred flash of a stray haybale, the dance of grass at the road’s edge—they remind him: there’s more, much more beyond sight; and that’s what bristles his neck.
The black morphs from claustrophobic to claustrophobically endless. Samuel’s, Gene’s, and Atlas’s hearts are the only that beat in the universe.
He draws his collar up his neck. Atlas flutters his eyelids until they tire and reclines until his back softens. He doesn’t remember yawning.
“Moths don’t like the dark.”
He jerks up straight, resumes blinking, and whips his head around. He looks at Gene, who looks back.
“What did you say?” Atlas asks.
“I said,” Gene lifts her eyebrows, “we’re here. We’re at Dickinson.”
“You woke the fascist baby with your grating commercial voice, you,” Samuel slaps his window, “fat idiot.”
Gene frowns. “I’m not fat.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
Muttering to her steering wheel, G
ene turns her vehicle off the highway and for the first three-story motel sign peeking above two other nearby lodges, a haven of artificial luminance. She parks the vehicle in its empty lot. The engine dies, the headlights with it, and a new silence blares. Atlas’s ears struggle to adjust.
Gene opens her door, Samuel next, and Atlas staggers when his feet meet motionless ground. His knees shake, his legs heavy. Shading his eyes, he blocks with his hand the nearest industrial streetlamp luring nocturnal insects and their manic, intoxicated flutters. He follows Gene’s and Samuel’s silhouettes against buzzing LEDs into the building.
The front doors swing closed and the warmer light that washes Atlas’s front drenches the room. He scans it.
At the lobby’s center stands a fireplace three meters wide, its flames tickling glazed, charcoal brick that accents mahogany in the flooring and walls. It smells of smoke. Around the snap of hearthfire, a young woman occupies a corner of the lounge. Gene and Samuel walk straight to the front desk and engage the man there stationed.
Atlas takes two steps toward Gene and Samuel. He stops. And rolls onto his heels and looks around the lobby, over lounge’s caramel leather sectional. The woman sits on a loveseat by the fireplace, her elbow on its armrest, forefinger brushing her bottom lip. Her nails reflect flames upon canvases of shade similar to her hair’s burgundy. One tucked behind the other, her pointy-heeled footwear stands taller than the fireplace’s base, her silk pants ridden up her ankles. Atlas yanks upward his eyes and finds hers; she’s staring back.
She stops her forefinger at the corner of her mouth.
He swallows and turns back to the hearth. Out of his periphery, the woman stands and walks toward him.
Centimeter by centimeter, he shifts toward the silhouette that doesn’t stop until her shoes shade his and floral scents entangle the smoke’s. Atlas stares at her.
“Traveling for business or pleasure?” the woman says.
Atlas stares.
“Sometimes,” she leans into him, “they get a little mixed. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
The woman laughs. “Are you going to tell me your name or do I have to guess it?”
“How,” Atlas presses his lips together, “can one accurately guess a name?”
She eyes him up and down. “Like thi—”
“My name is Atlas.”
“Sounds foreign.” The woman smiles. “Looks foreign too. I’m Lydia, by the way.”
He stares. “Hello.”
“Are you staying in Dickinson or heading somewhere less boring?”
“I’m traveling to the region of Montana to recover my gold token on the task of opening an interdimensional portal to Sidera and retrieving The Presage.”
“You’re Muslim?” Lydia’s eyes widen.
Atlas’s blur.
“That’s really cool.” She touches his arm. “Do you, like, read the Book of Mormon every day or what? Is that required?”
Atlas opens his mouth a centimeter.
“There’s this party I’m in town for—well, it’s more of a get-together with a couple college friends but, if you’re interested in going, I think I could—”
Atlas looks at the front desk, at Gene and Samuel. They communicate with the motel employee, their backs turned.
“. . . you’re from Turkey, so I bet it wouldn’t be at all weird for you, you know, with the reptiles.” Lydia bites her lip. “If you’re into that sort of thing. Are you?”
He glances at Gene and Samuel again. His breathing accelerates. Lydia follows his gaze over his shoulder.
“I’d love it if you could stay a couple days longer,” she steps toward his glancing side, “if you’re not set on being in Helena soon.”
Atlas blinks. “Helena?”
Lydia points to the front desk. “Your friends talk loudly—something about Helena. That’s in Montana, right?”
“We leave for Helena at dawn.”
“Too bad. We could always,” she slips her hand into her purse, pulls out a pen, a dollar bill, and writes something on it, “get together later, just you and me.”
Atlas stares. “I don’t—it is—I must—”
“Call me, handsome.” Looking past his shoulder, she smiles and hands him the green paper. She grazes the back of his hand with her thumb as she withdraws. “I’m up whenever.”
Lydia then strides past him, from lounge’s vermillion lacquer, and out the front doors. Atlas turns around. A grinning Gene and scowling Samuel walk toward him.
Atlas narrows his eyes at Gene. “Is something amusing?”
She points at the doors. “I saw that.”
“Imperium help me. That is comical in some way?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She persisted in undeviating, ruthless interrogation about large fowls and the like and demanded I call her handsome.”
“Pretty sure she was saying you should call her and that you’re handsome.”
“I’m positive you’re incorrect this time, Gene.”
Samuel exhales. “Attie, stop flirting. We don’t have any more time for Berlin’s greatest hits. Let’s go.”
“I don’t understand how this,” Atlas waves the scrawled-on dollar bill, “is comical.”
Gene’s mouth falls open. “Defaced currency. Not cool.”
Samuel grabs the dollar out of Atlas’s hand and stuffs it in his jacket. “Stop flirting. We need to go claim a room or two.”
“Claim,” brow furrowing, Gene faces him, “a room or two?”
“Denim, echoes are for big, empty spaces, like Attie’s head or the Grand Canyon.”
After a glance at the man behind the front desk, Samuel turns for the stairway and Gene and Atlas trail behind. They climb two sets of stairs, amble down a hall, around a corner, and stop between doors number 311 and 312. Samuel slides a key card from his pocket.
Gene eyes it. “Which is it—which room did you get?”
He lifts the card between his fore and middle fingers. “Denim, you were there the whole time while I was talking with Mr. Neglected-as-a-Child. Do you think I was interested in the manager’s new kitten named Orlando or the weather in Fargo?”
“Orlando is an interesting name.”
“No, I was taking his card off his desk. The master key. It unlocks any room in the place.”
Gene’s jaw drops. She grasps for the card; but Samuel flicks it into his palm and her hand glides over his.
“We are not,” she lurches forward, “stealing anything.”
Samuel steps back and she staggers past him. Stamping a wide stance before Samuel, Atlas holds out his hand.
He says, “Relinquish the unlocking rectang—”
“I am so sick,” Samuel clenches his trembling fists, sweat painting his forehead, “of your flirting. I told you we don’t have time for that.”
Bang. And three more. Atlas, Gene, Samuel turn their heads to the staircase and the footsteps, too quick for casual pace, reverberating up its shaft.
“No, we don’t,” Gene says.
Something snags the back of Atlas’s tunic—around one of his leather sashes—and he jerks backward. The light dims, a doorframe whooshes by his periphery, and Atlas stands in hotel room number 312, its door swinging closed. He straightens and spins around. In moonlight slithering between curtains, his black hair blending with shadow, Samuel lets his hands fall to his sides. To his right, Gene gapes at Samuel, at his hand, at Atlas, and smooths her shirt as Atlas realigns his leather sash. They listen to the employee’s steps thunder past their door and down the hall.
Samuel switches on a lamp. Light floods the room: the single bed, the vanity area, the refrigerator by the open closet.
Gene knots her fingers into her hair. “I can’t believe we just stole a room.”
“No, I stole a room. You didn’t help at all,” Samuel says.
She hyperventilates. “I can’t do this. Nope. Uh-uh. With the Lord as witness, no way, no sir, no how.” She snaps up her head and strides for the
door. “I’m going to—”
Samuel puts an arm in front of her. “Get us arrested? Going to sleep in your car while I watch all night? What’s done is done. While you’re here, take a nap.”
Gene’s eyes widen. “He’ll find out.”
“He’s a little senile.” Samuel cocks his head to the side. “And a little dumb. He’ll call security and they’ll recode all the locks until our key’s a piece of plastic. Then they’ll go to Taco Bell, then home, wait until morning, and come knocking when the boss’s up and we’re gone. As for the security cameras,” he points at her, “let’s hope you got your first criminal record, you spotless cherub.”
Gene stops breathing.
Samuel gestures to Atlas. “That one and I don’t have a scrap of real identification on Earth so you’ll eventually get stuck with the fine.” Pivoting, he bends down and opens the mini refrigerator. “You just paid for our hotel, Denim. Thanks. You’re the best.”
She stares. Her eyes water.
Atlas steps to Samuel, grabs a chunk of his hair, and yanks it out of his head. A couple dozen strands drift to the floor. Samuel squawks and flips around and hovers his hands over his scalp. He gapes at Atlas.
“You jack—”
“Are you well?” Atlas rests a hand on Gene’s shoulder and angles down. “No—there’s no need to weep.”
She slumps to the bed and hides her face from lamp’s meager spritz. Her back shudders in and out. She cries into her palms. Room’s shade compresses on Atlas’s compressing chest that, upon Gene’s next sob, crushes the jolt of its contents. He sits next to her and watches her bangs, burying her buried face, drape over her hands. Frowning, he tucks them behind her ear.
“The sun doesn’t rise in Sidera,” Atlas says. “However, it does here. We will remain for merely a night and then depart when we see dawn. Time will restore.” He drops his eyes to the carpeting, where bed’s shadow meets lamp’s light. “We’ll all be home soon.”
Gene stills. She sniffs, sits up straight, and lowers her hands.
“Hey,” Samuel lifts a sleek glass bottle and shuts the fridge, “we picked the right room.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 19