by Chloe Garner
“Yeah.”
He dropped her off at the tow company’s lot about ten minutes later, rolling down the window as she got out to shout at her.
“Mom says I have to wait until you’re actually in your car and it runs,” he said, and she grinned and waved, going in and giving the receptionist her driver’s license.
“You were close,” the woman said. “We don’t normally keep cars much longer than yours.”
Lizzie frowned, keeping her thoughts to herself, and the woman handed her the ID back.
“You have your keys?” the woman asked.
“I do,” Lizzie said. The woman pointed out the door.
“I’ll buzz the gate when you get there.”
Lizzie nodded and went out, finding her car in the lot and sitting in the driver’s seat for a full minute, just breathing the scent of what her life used to smell like. She finally started the engine and turned on the heat, then put the car in gear and rolled up to the front gate, where the receptionist opened it electronically and let her out. She waved at Paul and pulled onto the road.
There was an urge, just in that moment, to flee. To not go back. Anywhere but back.
Zee was going to kill her.
No one else wanted her there.
She sighed.
There wasn’t anywhere else to go, either. She’d go through her things and see if she had anything that would get her in contact with Robbie, but he was hardly on social media. Without his cell phone number, there wasn’t a lot she could do.
She drove to the apartment building directly and went in, almost so eager that she couldn’t sign the lease, but she managed, getting her key and going out to the car to get her bag and running up the stairs and opening the door.
It wasn’t much.
Her apartment in California had been palatial, by comparison, with high ceilings and big rooms, but the carpet was soft and clean, and it was warm. She took her shoes and socks off at the door, then she took the rest of her clothes off, too, going back to the bathroom and taking a long, hot shower, and then getting dressed in clean clothes.
She brushed her hair and she did her makeup and she stood in front of the mirror for long, long minutes, finally feeling like she owned herself again.
And she still had money.
She called the utilities to get them transferred to her, and then she walked downstairs and got in her car and drove to a grocery store, where she bought staples enough to fill the pantry and the fridge, going back and unloading them with a sense of extravagance, going up to the apartment and putting them away.
From there, she walked back to the building.
This was where her bubble burst.
No one was there.
She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, then went back downstairs and outside, setting off.
If she was lucky.
If she was very lucky.
She might be able to track them down by glow.
But she wasn’t going to just abandon them.
Whatever else she did, she wasn’t going to do that.
***
For a long time, she had no idea if she was going the right direction.
She was headed out of town, the tall buildings downtown at her back, past barber shops and strip malls. The sun was going down. There was no way she would be back at the building by dark, not to mention her cozy new apartment. She pushed her coat up around her ears, grateful for clean socks.
She couldn’t turn back.
She had no better guess than this, and she wasn’t going to give up.
And then she saw what her mind was reacting to.
The dark.
It had been gradual, something she’d missed as she’d been walking past it for the last hour or so, but it was dark, all around her. Nothing looked well-ordered or clean. Windows were grimed, newspaper drifted past her on the cold breeze, dead leaves piled against this or that without regard for where the trees were.
She was chasing a herd of furlings.
The thought made her shudder, but she kept on, at least knowing that she would probably find what she was looking for, when she got there.
She had an apartment.
She had a job, as it were.
She could make it from here.
Did she really have to do this?
She thought of the hooligans hiding in the trees, trying to stay out of the way, of the hooligan she’d pulled out of the pile of furlings that would have killed him, of a dozen other similar events, and she sped up.
No one else was going to be there for them.
Not to mention the people who accidentally got in the way of the furlings because the hooligans couldn’t stop them. The children at the park.
She couldn’t stop him, but she wasn’t going to go hide.
Robbie could have just as easily ended up in a place like this, and she would have wanted someone to try.
So she would try.
She got to the campus of a pair of schools, segregated from the local community by a wide expanse of trees and parking lot, and she started up the main drive, hearing the hooligans as they tried to get the furlings’ attention. She felt the ground shake and heard the furlings as they fought.
She wasn’t too late.
She was late, but she wasn’t too late.
Like putting on a glove, she found her spot, a shaft of light that she felt rather than saw, and she discovered the mayhem going on in and around the schools. The furlings were destroying classrooms with their battles, and the hooligans were only picking around the edges, avoiding the worst of it by mistake or design: Lizzie couldn’t tell anymore.
She tried to split the ground, to make some kind of play for power against Zee, but it didn’t come to her. The furlings continued to fight and merge, casting a narrower and narrower range of destruction as they converged toward the center of the building, probably a library from the feel of it.
The hooligans gave chase.
She was proud.
They were completely over their heads, but they went for it, anyway.
Something about that inspired her, and she stopped trying to rip open the ground between here and there, and instead sent shafts of power up through the floor below them, one by one, blocking and guarding and fueling them as they went, flicking her hand open time and again and finding that she could get to them from here without having to cover everything between here.
Zee didn’t like it.
He tried to shake them back closed, but she was dense enough in her power and far enough from the furlings that he couldn’t do it. He drove the furlings mad, actually distracting them from their fights for a moment as they scrambled and tried to regain some sense of what was going on, but then they were at it again.
The hooligans advanced, and Lizzie let the furthest holes drop and opened new ones.
She was with them.
They weren’t alone.
It only lasted a few minutes, but it was such a huge step forward for Lizzie that it felt like hours. After that, the furlings finished blowing up and they set fire to the library, the hooligans fleeing before a hot blaze of paper and, oddly, carpet that burnt like dead leaves.
It was over.
The roof collapsed over the room as the last furling vanished, and the hooligans fled the building. Somewhere behind her, Lizzie heard sirens. She drew a breath and sighed, looking up at the sky. It was overcast and dark, no stars, though she thought it might snow again. The hooligans came drifting past her. She had no idea where Zee had gone, but she didn’t care. She turned as they got close and started walking. They caught up to her before long, moving fast to get away before the sirens showed up, and Lizzie looked around.
“Where’s Slug?” she asked. No one answered her.
“Where is he?” she asked.
There was still no answer.
She looked harder, but in the dark, it was hard to be sure who was there and who wasn’t.
She’d figure it out later.
In the light.
***
When they got back to the building, she told them that she had shelter, and anyone who wanted it was welcome to come stay out of the cold, but no one took her up on it. She ended up going back to the apartment by herself, cold to the bone, depressed, and alone.
Every victory from the whole day was hollow, but at least there was hot water.
At least there was that.
***
She walked to the building the next morning and found Rat sitting on the ground outside of the door. Lizzie knelt next to her.
“I thought you were dead.”
Rat shook her head.
“No.”
Lizzie looked at her hard. It was well below freezing, but the girl was wearing a short-sleeved tee shirt, and her arms were bruised from wrist to shoulder.
“What happened to you?”
Rat looked over at her with a sense of resignation.
“I tried,” she said. “I tried to go, but I couldn’t.”
Lizzie had questions, but she didn’t think now was the time to ask them.
“Come on,” she said, pulling Rat to her feet. “It’s freezing out, and you aren’t dressed.”
“So?” Rat asked.
“So,” Lizzie said, “I may not be able to beat Zee, but I can at least get you cleaned up and warm. Come on.”
Rat looked like she would have fought it if she were in any better shape, but she wasn’t, so she didn’t. Lizzie walked her back to the apartment and up the stairs, sitting her on the floor in the front room and getting food out of the kitchen.
“Take your shoes off,” she said as she pulled fruit out of a drawer and a loaf of bread out of the pantry. Peanut butter was next. Protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Enough to live on.
She went back to the front room and sat down on the carpet next to Rat. The girl was looking at her shoes.
“What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked.
“I haven’t taken my shoes off since…” Rat started, then shook her head. “I don’t remember what my feet look like.
Lizzie winced at the idea of what the smell would be, but she left the food next to Rat and scooted down to her feet, pulling off her thin boots one at a time and tossing them toward the door. She had had socks on, but at this point they were just black threads that went around the arch of her foot. Her skin wasn’t much better off, and the smell was just as bad as Lizzie had expected, though more sour.
“Eat,” Lizzie said, looking at the girl’s toes and the way her nails had been coping with the confined space. There were blood stains on one to where the nail had broken short. “Eat, and then you’re getting clean.”
“What’s the point?” Rat asked.
“That it makes you feel human,” Lizzie said. Rat grabbed the food and held it in her lap as Lizzie went to the bathroom and ran the tub hot. She would have offered the shower - it was a faster way to get clean - but soaking in clean, hot water was just such a change from their life at the abandoned building. She wouldn’t steal that from Rat.
The bathroom was full of steam when Lizzie shut off the faucet and lay out the towel Robbie had packed in her bag for her - she’d wash it after Rat was done - and she went out into the front room to check on Rat.
“You don’t have any furniture,” the woman observed.
“I don’t have any money,” Lizzie answered. “But I’m working on it.”
Rat nodded.
“I’m going to wash your clothes,” Lizzie said. “Leave them here and go get in the bath.”
“Why are you doing this?” Rat asked. “We’ve been terrible to you.”
“You haven’t,” Lizzie said. “You just assume I’m going to die. You don’t want to get close to someone who’s going to die any day.”
“You are,” Rat said, and Lizzie shrugged.
“Then at least I’ll have washed your clothes, first. Come on. Go get in the bath. You can eat more when you get out.”
She took more pieces of bread and scooped them full of peanut butter, then left for the bathroom. A minute later, a wad of fabric that bore a resemblance to a wild animal came flying out, and the door closed. Lizzie gathered them up and went down to the laundry room to put them in, coming back up and reorganizing the pantry to have something to do while she waited. Thirty minutes later, she went down and moved them to the dryer, and when she came back, the shower was running. She went to the bedroom and got a set of clothes out of her bag and lay them on the floor just inside the bathroom door, going to sit against the wall in the front room.
Rat came out wearing Lizzie’s clothes about ten minutes later. She looked like a woman Lizzie might have met at the gym or the beach, or on a Saturday at work.
“Feel better?” she asked, smiling. Rat sat down on the wall across from her and looked away.
“Your clothes are in the dryer,” Lizzie told her. “Probably another thirty minutes, and I’ll go get them for you. After that, you can do whatever you want, but you’re welcome to stay here.”
“Zee won’t like it,” Rat said, and Lizzie shrugged.
“He’s going to have to get used to it, for as long as I make it.”
“Where did you get the money?” Rat asked.
“I have skills that have a market value,” Lizzie said, and Rat turned to look at her with a mild curiosity. “Nothing nefarious.”
Rat shrugged.
“Where did you go?” Lizzie asked.
“I tried to run away,” Rat answered, her voice distant. “They don’t like that, but that’s not the worst part. I hate not being here. I hate being here so much, but I can’t not be here.”
Lizzie listened to that carefully, thinking about what she would have heard Robbie say, if he’d said the same words.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You must feel trapped.”
Rat rolled her eyes toward Lizzie.
“You think it’s bad for you. You can go, even if it’s just for a little while, and you only come back because the furlings will kill you if you don’t. We can’t even go. We can’t.”
“Then why did you try?” Lizzie asked.
“We all do,” Rat said. “Maybe it would be better to just die.”
Lizzie shook her head, but she didn’t have an argument for that.
“Not tonight,” she said finally. “Tonight you eat your fill of fresh food, and you sleep in clean clothes with clean hair. Here in the warm, if you want to.”
“I have lice,” Rat said.
Ew.
Okay.
“And fleas,” Rat followed up.
“Okay,” Lizzie said.
“So my hair isn’t clean. You need a special shampoo for lice. One of the angels a couple of years ago got it.”
“Well, you don’t have fleas now,” Lizzie said. “Because those live in your clothes, and your clothes are about to be clean. The lice, we can deal with another day.”
“You probably do, too,” Rat said. It wasn’t intended to be antagonistic. That was maybe the most shocking thing about it. She didn’t say it to be mean. It was just a fact of life.
“You’re probably right,” Lizzie said. “What else have the other angels done to try to help?”
Rat looked around the empty room.
“Sometimes, they come with money. They get a place to live, maybe they have a car, and they think they can stay above us. But Zee doesn’t let you work. You can’t keep a job, with him around. So they all run out of money, or they die. Sometimes they’re nice, but usually they aren’t. We aren’t very nice, back, so we don’t deserve it.”
“You deserve to live like people,” Lizzie said. She kept the ‘rather than animals’ part to herself, because Robbie had taken offense at that a few times, but she thought it quite loudly. “I understand why you don’t want to welcome me. That’s not your fault, either.”
Rat tipped her head, then shrugged, and settled deeper against the wall. Lizzie thought about trying to find something else to do, but it was facetious. She didn
’t have anything to do until she went down to the dryer. In a few hours, she would go meet with Han, and then she would go back to the building and see if anyone else wanted to get out of the snow. Tomorrow and the next day, her agenda was to check her mailbox and see if she had a bill yet to go open a bank account with, and then after that, she was going to find a library and a consignment store, and she was going to do some shopping and some internet searching, to try to find a way to get in touch with Robbie and Trevor.
She at least had to say goodbye.
She’d been gone a long time, now, and it was possible they thought she was dead. The fact that she soon would be was something that she was coming to terms with, but she wanted to talk to Trevor once more, and to tell Robbie that she loved him and she was proud of him and what he’d overcome.
And that she understood.
She understood why he had worked so hard to keep her out of his life.
In the meantime, though, there was nothing to do but sit here across the room from Rat, not talking, and wait for the time to pass.
It took.
A long.
Time.
Rat did end up spending the night. She got up the next morning and took another shower, and sat on the floor and ate, then she stole a pair of Lizzie’s socks, put on her shoes, and she left. Lizzie let her go without an argument. She would go down to the building, herself, soon, to make sure that Zee hadn’t summoned everyone and to make another plea for some of them to come get cleaned up and fed. She took a long shower in the meantime, braiding her hair and painting her fingernails because it felt so out of place to be that civilized, and she was headed down the stairs to check to see if the mail had come when she heard the sound of footsteps.
Lots of them.
And whispering.
Rat was the first one to come into view.
Lizzie stopped as hooligan after hooligan rounded the corner and followed Rat up the stairs toward Lizzie’s apartment.
She turned after the last one passed her - still no sign of Slug - and she followed them back up. Rat helped herself to the pantry, laying out most of the food Lizzie had in the middle of the front room and going to sit against the wall.
“What’s going on?” Lizzie asked.
“He won’t call,” Rat answered. Lizzie didn’t understand, and Rat sighed.
