by Chloe Garner
“Take a step back,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“Please,” Robbie said, taking several steps away, himself.
“Now,” Trevor said. “Quickly.”
“It’s fine,” she said, starting for Lara’s car. She would disconnect it and shut it off and put it away, and then she’d get the cables picked up and put away and she’d go. Good thing she had coworkers who routinely forgot to turn off their headlights.
A car was passing on the street behind her with a trailer, and she heard a strange noise. She turned before she got into Lara’s car to watch a tire come rolling at speed across the front yard and smack into the side of her car. The door collapsed in, forming a shallow cup where the tire bounced off, rolling slower now, still toward her car, and coming to rest under her back tire. She straightened.
“Okay, Trevor. I’ll give you that that’s a huge coincidence. But that’s all it is. I’m going to go make sure they’re okay.”
She walked down the driveway, looking back at her car. It was going to be expensive to get the door panel fixed, but it wasn’t exactly like she couldn’t drive it home, still. From the bottom of the driveway, she could see that the car and trailer had gone off the road and pulverized a mailbox two doors down. She started to call out to see if the driver was okay, but the homeowner had also heard the crash and was out in the front yard, yelling. The driver yelled back, and the argument grew more heated over the space of just a few moments. Robbie put his hands up through Lizzie’s armpits and dragged her back toward the house.
“Did he have a gun?” Lizzie asked.
“Bad neighborhood,” Trevor said as she went past him backwards. There was the sound of a gunshot.
Her car stopped running again.
Lizzie fell still.
The car down the street screeched away and she heard a door slam.
Her car was stopped. She eased away from Robbie, who let her go, and she went to get in. She turned the key and there was nothing. Her dash didn’t have any lights on it: her radio was silent.
She looked over at Trevor and Robbie, a cold feeling in her hands.
Trevor approached slowly, reading her. Robbie’s head was up as he watched everything else. Trevor leaned on the roof of the car and looked down at her as she sat in the driver’s seat.
“I know a little bit about cars,” he said. “One of those things you can do here and there and they’ll let you. There aren’t many ways that a bullet will stop a car dead like that. What are the odds, do you think, if I lifted the hood and showed you that that bullet hit your key switch?”
“Is that what happened?” she asked.
“Battery wire would do it,” he said. “But only the hot.”
She swallowed.
“And if I threaten to take Lara’s car to go home and send someone to tow mine?”
“I wouldn’t,” Trevor said gently. “Lara loved that car and Robbie knows it.”
She nodded slowly.
“He shot my car,” she said. He nodded. “I was standing behind it,” she said. He nodded again. “Bad things… just happen around you.”
“They do.”
She was running.
She saw it now.
Running away.
Again.
She’d known.
She’d always known.
Robbie was watching her, now, his face sad.
She’d always known, but she hadn’t wanted to. The game had always been too real, the pretend not pretend enough, but where Robbie had to drink it to the dregs, she’d pushed it away and gotten on with her life. She didn’t have to, and she hadn’t wanted to.
“I forgot,” she whispered.
“I thought it would be something like that,” Trevor said, offering her a hand. She wasn’t sure a hand was going to be enough to get her out of the car. Her knees didn’t feel like they were connected to her, any more. He hefted her to her feet, anyway, putting an arm around her waist and walking her to the shade of the trees. Robbie stepped away and she didn’t see him anymore.
“I forgot,” she said again and Trevor nodded. He was close, the length of his body along hers, and for a moment she was watching his eyes. He was nervous, looking from one eye to the other, frozen. He shook his head.
“The angel,” he said and she nodded.
“I think so.”
“This is bad,” he said and she tipped her head, confused again. He grinned, laughed, very self-aware. “I’m in love with the angel.”
“Ah,” she said and nodded. “I bet that’s hard on demons.”
“You have no idea,” he said. His hand was in her hair and he shook his other hand loose of her shirt, still alert, still nervous. She was calm. Fizzy, deadly, calm. He put long fingers across her eyes, covering them with his palm, and she stood in darkness for just a moment, listening, then his mouth met hers and the world exploded in noise and scent and feel. She couldn’t remember the last man she’d kissed. Now, she couldn’t remember ever being kissed before. She put her arms around his shoulders and grabbed a hold of his hair, kissing him harder, sensation radiating from everywhere and bouncing, off her toes, off her fingers, chaos and heat. He kissed her hard, like the distinction between himself and her didn’t matter, and she lost her sense of space, of time. She might have been laying on the ground or in a bed, she wouldn’t have remembered or known how she got there.
He broke away, his hand still across her eyes, and once more she stood in darkness, but the silence didn’t come back. Everything around her was alive with agitated motion, like being in the middle of a thick wood.
He moved his hand.
And she saw.
***
Trevor and Robbie had taken her back into the house. Robbie had looked heartbroken, but he hadn’t fought it, hadn’t argued. Trevor had been intense, next to her, not letting her move far enough away that he couldn’t touch her. She sat down on the couch, sucking on her lower lip and watching the corners.
They were everywhere.
Trevor and Robbie watched her, waiting.
“They’re Fur Babies,” she finally said, and Trevor’s face went from concern to bright humor like a lightswitch.
“I have no doubt that the man who invented those things could see furlings,” he agreed. “None at all.”
All of her friends had had them, when she was young. Small, stuffed toys that blinked and waddled and talked, friendly but foreign, a cross between a lemur and a duck with anime-big eyes.
These were not cheerful kids toys, though the body construct was the same. They had gold eyes and solid black bodies that had to either be close or in very good light for her to see the contours of their fur. The worst was the mouths. They had wide, pointed mouths that split to reveal dripping, wet throats and rows of rat-like pointed teeth.
She remembered them like a recurring dream, one that she knew all the rules to the moment it started, but never remembered after it was over. She stood, Trevor standing with her and Robbie scrambling away. As she watched them skitter behind the television and sit on the arm of a couch, one climbed up Trevor’s arm and sat on his shoulder, tipping its head at her with a sort of curious menace.
“You’ll do,” she said, reaching out. It put an arm out toward her, drawn by a force of will inside of her that she knew like a friend, and her finger touched its paw. It was warm and soft, with a sort of greasy feel that she associated with a feral cat.
“You’ve made a wreck of my home,” she said. “That’s not going to happen anymore. Is that clear?”
She grabbed the paw the furling had extended to her and she squeezed it, not cruelly, but with control. The furling dematerialized like she had turned its bones to water, slumping down Trevor’s arm and rolling, a shrinking ball of pelt and flesh, toward the floor. By the time it got to his elbow, it was nothing but fur, exploding with a slight poof and then even the fur disappearing as it drifted toward the carpet.
She looked up.
The rules were di
fferent. They weren’t alarmed by her destroying one of them any more than the one she’d destroyed had been alarmed by it. He had never fought her, never resisted, and while she had adequate proof that they were chatty, verbal creatures, he’d never complained.
They did, though, move differently, now. She was an authority to them and both they and she knew it.
“Get out,” she said, and one by one, they did, like a dissipating swarm of flies, drifting through the doors and the windows. She didn’t pay any more attention to them.
Trevor was watching her.
“What?” she asked, and then she felt it. He had her arm and Robbie was behind her when she fell. They got her back onto the couch and she blinked, not sure what had happened.
She tried to ask, but her tongue was as confused as the rest of her, and she shook her head, looking at Trevor.
“Not easy,” he said with a nod. “Impressive, but not easy.” He glanced at Robbie. “Go get her something to drink.”
Robbie left - she heard his feet, though she couldn’t turn her head to watch - and came back, putting two glasses on the table. Trevor took one and put it to her lips, tipping it back slowly enough that at least she didn’t drown. She was shaking, everything twitching sort of helplessly as she tried to remember who she was.
It wasn’t possible.
Cold water. Ice cold, cubes bumping against her lip as she slurped, and then he took that one away and there was burning heat from whiskey. She only took a few sips of that and it was gone. She felt caged, nervous like she hadn’t been since she was a child, or in a dream. Trevor’s grip on her elbow was firm, and she felt Robbie sit beside her again, up against her where her weight rolled against his side.
She’d had a mental break.
That had to be what this was. Too much stress, worrying over Robbie, and just enough information about the mass delusion to replicate it.
But they were Fur Babies. She recognized their faces.
Simple substitution.
She knew they had to look like something strange and foreign, and she’d picked something that suited her. Trevor had gone along with it.
Would that make him evil?
She wasn’t sure. It could be his idea of supportive.
None of them had had normal childhoods.
She’d destroyed one of them. Just by touching it. With her mind.
Wasn’t that the dream? To have something personify bad things that you could kill by force of will?
It was easy to explain. She knew the traditional treatments, most of the medications. She knew that some people never really got rid of the delusions, but that they learned to work around them.
The problem was, she knew this was real.
In a way that she’d always known.
“I forgot,” she whispered and Trevor nodded.
“Take your time. The first absorb isn’t easy. Your system is going to have to learn how to do it.”
She shook her head.
“What did I do?”
“You destroyed him,” Robbie said.
“How?”
“You absorbed him,” Trevor said. “It’s what you’re built to do, and you know it and they know it.”
“Why wasn’t he afraid of me?”
Trevor shook his head.
“The second one of them tells you the answer to that, you’ve actually lost it. They don’t talk. They don’t communicate at all. They’ll push you around, sometimes, and that feels like communication, but it isn’t.”
“Am I going to get visions, too?” she asked.
“Angels don’t flip,” Trevor said. “They can’t touch you.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” Robbie said, sad. She drew a deep breath, still shaky down deep in her core, and she let herself tip onto Trevor’s shoulder.
“It can’t be real,” she said. “It can’t be.”
“And yet,” he answered, putting his hand on her head and holding her firm and still against his side. She closed her eyes.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“Lara liked to take a bath after,” Robbie told her.
“The water is gross,” she said.
Trevor laughed, and she felt a bit bad, but she still felt that way. A shower was one thing, but bathing in water that ran black to start felt unhygienic.
“It might be for a little while,” Trevor said, “but you ran them off. Like a boss. They’re gone, now.”
She shuddered, her eyes still closed. Black furry things that could climb the walls and that peered down at her from everywhere.
Robbie had lived with them his whole life.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?” Trevor asked.
“It’s okay,” Robbie answered and she nodded into Trevor’s shoulder.
She was here.
And she understood.
What more had she wanted, really?
She found her hands were sore, they were gripping Trevor’s jacket so tightly.
“You want more to drink?” he asked. She nodded and forced herself upright, motioning for him to let her do it, when he reached for the table. She tipped the first time she tried to lean out, but she pushed Trevor’s hand away and tried again, holding herself up on the table for long enough to get the glass of whiskey with two fingers, then pushing herself upright again and downing it.
It was hot all the way to her stomach, and made her feel gelatinous in a more familiar way. She handed the glass back to Trevor and collapsed back against the couch.
It wasn’t real. She wanted to argue with them that it wasn’t happening, but it was. Trevor put his hand on her forehead for just a moment, then stood.
“I’m going to go,” he said. “You’re in the best hands you’re going to get. I’ll be back tonight.”
She looked up at him, desperate and afraid, but she knew he was right. He kissed her forehead and nodded.
“We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
She didn’t move, just watched as he walked out the door and closed it after him.
“I’m going to make a sandwich,” Robbie said, standing and walking away. She wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to do something about that, so she didn’t.
She couldn’t.
She sat up and got the water, then leaned back against the couch again, cuddling it against her chest and sipping at it.
She could feel the oily fur against her skin, like they were rubbing against her, and she could feel the energy of them, the one that she’d absorbed and the rest of them by extension. All of them everywhere, this overwhelming mass that she couldn’t escape and that she couldn’t negotiate with or change… Like she’d suddenly woken up and she was underwater and didn’t know which way was up.
Robbie was on the other couch, now, with a plate and a sandwich, not watching her.
“They’re everywhere,” she whispered, and he nodded.
“Yeah.”
She drank more of the water. Cold. Real.
He scratched his nose.
“You remember when we were little and we used to play?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“That was the voice you used with them. They always listened to you. They couldn’t do anything bad while you were there.”
“I don’t remember that,” she said.
“You were just pretending,” he said, “but they knew and I knew.”
She curled deeper into herself.
“How did you do it?”
He laughed, dark.
“I didn’t,” he said. “They started me on drugs.”
She nodded. The glass was empty.
He got up and took it from her, bringing it back full of orange juice. That felt good on her throat, sunny in its tangy, happy way, and she drank all of it, sitting up.
“I’m going to go start the water in your room,” Robbie said. “You should take a bath. And then go out and take a walk before the sun goes down. Tonight is going to be bad.”
She swallowed.<
br />
“Why?”
“Dark,” he answered, as if that were the whole of it. She understood, though, deep in her primordial mind. She knew, not exactly, but in spirit what was going to come for her tonight.
They were afraid of her during the day, and they were afraid of her while she could see them, but they were going to get a lot more bold in the dark.
She shuddered a sigh, and Robbie stood and left.
His lack of panic - sadness, sure, but no panic - was calming to her. There was no mania to him at all, after all of the things she’d seen him go through and how badly he’d reacted to many of them, this was just… normal. He’d wanted to keep her out of it, and he’d failed - she hadn’t let him - but what had happened wasn’t so far from what he was used to. No one was going to come running in the door and drag her away and put her into a locked room. He understood.
It was so much more than he’d gotten.
She cried, quietly, just for a minute until he got back, then she wiped her eyes and let him help her stand up.
“I’m not helping you get undressed,” he said. “I’d help Lara, but you’re my sister. You have to figure it out on your own. And don’t drown.”
“Got it,” she answered, trying to feel humor. It wasn’t there, but she appreciated the effort.
Had he been trying to be funny?
And then she wasn’t sure.
He got her to the bathroom, then took the glass of orange juice she mysteriously still had in her hand and closed the door behind him. She sat on the floor, leaning on the edge of the tub for a while, just breathing hot, humid air, then carefully got herself undressed and slid into the water.
It was too hot. Undeniably too hot. Her skin hurt from it, but if it had been any cooler, she’d have been shivering. As it was, the heat was enough to make it hard to breathe, and she sat with the water a fraction of an inch below her nose, just sucking in that heat, hiding from everything else. The rest of it would come when she was ready.
Robbie had been right.
She stayed there for a long time, then finally got up and let the water out of the tub, standing in a towel until her skin was nearly dry, then going through the agonizingly slow process of getting dressed when she couldn’t lean over without collapsing onto the floor. She felt more energized, but her body was still in shock.
