“I’m from Klamath Falls,” Kara said. I think she could tell that I really didn’t want to talk about what had happened to my parents. “My family was from there. Half of the town is gone now. It looks like a very odd forest made of trees that walk and move very slowly, hugging along the river and running right up to the lake. I suppose I should count myself lucky that I didn’t live in that part. Those trees, I think they might be carnivorous.”
“I saw a town that seemed as though it had turned into a swamp,” I offered, not surprised by Kara’s revelation. “Nothing left of the houses and businesses. Just swamp. With something funny living in it. Something with three toes. I didn’t see anything but its tracks. And I heard a really, weird call.”
“One of the mountains has disappeared,” Zach said contemplatively. “Brave new world. And do we need to talk about the new additions? Griffins, big animals in the woods that you hear but never see, I think maybe I saw a centaur but I never got close enough to tell for sure.”
“I’ve got a notepad with my stuff,” I said, feeling a little stiff. Talking to the two was distinctly strange. “I tried to write down what I saw, and where, and how dangerous it seemed. I tried to sketch the animals, too.”
“Have you had a chance to add our little friends?” Kara said from where she still lay in bed.
“Our little friends?”
“The little pixie things,” she said. “They led us right to you. If they hadn’t done something to that guy, then you would have been as dead as that poor other bastard. A pile of bones with cut marks all over…”
“Kara!” Zach said fiercely.
“What? She doesn’t need to know?”
“She’s still weak,” he insisted. “Give her a chance to get some strength back.” He straightened and shot me another look that I couldn’t decipher. It seemed like Zach was full of looks like that. I was uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure how to act. I went back to the soup, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish any more. Besides that what I really wanted was to go to the bathroom and then back to bed. I wiggled uneasily.
Kara sat up in bed, dressed in a Go Army t-shirt and gray sweats. She shrugged at Zach and then looked at me sharply. “She’s pooped anyway. Sophie, do you need to go to the bathroom?”
Zach started to say something and Kara interrupted, “Kid, she doesn’t want you in the bathroom with her.”
He glared at her before spinning and leaving the room.
I said, “I do need to go to the bathroom. I feel like I haven’t gone for days.”
“Oh, you’ve gone, just not in the bathroom.”
I blushed, self-conscious.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Kara said, rising up to her entire height. I hadn’t realized it before but she was tall for a woman, almost as tall as Zach. She was a solid, middle-aged lady with a lot of short gray hair and steel blue eyes. If I hadn’t known she had been in the Army I would have guessed a Marine drill sergeant. She was in her forties, not much younger than my parents, and I suddenly wondered about her family. I think she could read it in my eyes.
“My parents died a long time ago,” she said quietly. “I had a partner in Klamath Falls. When I woke up, the only thing that was left was this.” She held up her left arm and showed me a thick silver cuff bracelet that she was wearing. It was a pretty thing set with amber stones.
My hand went to my neck and I jerked in shock. The necklace with my parents’ wedding rings was gone. Kara saw the movement and lifted her eyes questioningly.
“My parents’ wedding rings,” I explained. “They were on a chain around my neck. I had them on yesterday.”
“There wasn’t a chain or rings on you,” Kara said gently. “It must have broken off when…the psycho jerk decided to play games. I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat and then added, “But that wasn’t yesterday, hon. It was about a week ago.”
“A week,” I repeated dumbly. “I’ve been sick for a full seven days?”
Kara nodded. “Let me help you to the bathroom.”
“Yeah,” I agreed because I didn’t know what else to say. Oh, my conversational skills had definitely improved since the change, to be sure.
♦
A day later I was moving from the bed to the bathroom by myself. Slowly but surely. I had lost the I.V. and I was keeping all the food and water down. I had a pile of library books, at my request, and my notebook. I had kept busy upgrading my entries. To be certain I wasn’t exactly sure to say about the fireflies. Kara called them pixies and said they looked like teeny-weeny human beings with wings if you looked closely. Their bodies radiated a bioluminescence that made me think of the little bugs. They had warned me as best they could that danger was about. Furthermore, they had located Kara and Zach and managed to get them to come help me. Kara said they had buzzed around them and then opened a path in the direction they wanted them to go. Only a mile or two away they had heard the screams as they had gotten closer and they could see the bonfire as well.
The fact that fireflies slash pixies slash new creatures had gone out of their way to save me made me wonder endlessly. Why me? Why not the other one the man had gotten hold of? How had they known to find Kara and Zach? And the questions kept leading to other questions. How had Kara and Zach found each other? What was Zach’s story?
“How do you feel?” Zach asked from the doorway. Dark and forbidding, the clouds outside had chased the pair inside. He lingered near the door and kept glancing at me while I pretended not to notice. Kara was reading in the chair by the window while I was propped in the bed.
“I’m okay,” I said. I was okay. The antibiotics were working well on me. I was taking some painkillers for the aches but it wasn’t as bad as I would have thought. The bruises on my flesh were already turning yellow. The wound on my shoulder was a healthy, healing pink. Kara told me my back looked the same. She was happy with my progress.
“You don’t talk much,” Zach commented. I lifted my eyes to his and caught that extraordinary expression again. He looked at me as though, as though…what?
“It doesn’t seem…real,” I said, aware that it sounded lame. Kara put her book down and gave me her undivided attention. “All this. You. Kara. I feel like I’m going to wake up again and I’ll be alone again.” Aware that my tone sounded pregnant with despair, I glanced at my notepad and the little drawing of the firefly pixies that Kara had done.
“If it’s too good to be true,” Kara ventured delicately. “Then it must be not true?”
“It wasn’t good to lose my father,” I said. “I woke up in a sleeping bag, and he was gone. I don’t know how long it was before I realized his clothing was still inside his sleeping bag and his boots were still sitting beside the bag. I searched the mountain side for hours before I gave up to go find help. I kept thinking that I would run into someone who would help me.” I kept looking at the notepad. My knuckles were turning white from clasping the paper pages together. “I never did find anyone. But I walked off the mountain and down the mountain, and I kept looking. I looked until the moment I walked into my house and found my mother’s wedding rings on the kitchen floor next to her nightgown and a broken glass of milk. That wasn’t good, either.”
Kara and Zach didn’t say anything.
“No, it doesn’t seem real,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry. I guess I want to know what’s going to happen next.”
Zach was suddenly standing next to the bed. He hunkered down and took my hand in his. His flesh felt warm and I wanted to cling to it eagerly, like a lifeline. “We won’t leave you, will we, Kara?”
“No, hon,” Kara answered and her tone was open honesty. “I always wanted to have children, you know. Now I’ve got two to mother. I hope you don’t mind. I’m an awful pain to live with, too. Maggie always did say so.”
“Maggie was your partner,” I said. That was sad, infinitely sad to lose the person you loved most in the world, the one you had committed yourself to being with. Pain was pain no matter who had been lost.
/> “Oh, yes. An artist. She did the most wonderful landscapes. She did pretty well in the galleries,” Kara’s voice dangled reflectively. I glanced up to see her wipe an errant tear away from her eye and I wished I hadn’t said anything.
Zach was still looking at me, holding my hand. I wanted to pull away but I didn’t know how to do it without making it seem as though I thought it was distasteful. (It wasn’t but boy, was I confused about my feelings.) “How did you find each other?” I asked, meaning Zach and Kara, but Kara seemed to understand.
“Once I couldn’t find anyone else, I left Klamath Falls,” Kara said, and her tone was mild again. “I thought I’d head to I-5 and go south. I walked across the mountains toward the interstate, and found that my knees weren’t doing so great. I tried a bicycle, which is better for me, but I decided I was going to have to find a hospital with a physical therapy section for my knees. Well, that, and I had the strangest inkling to go north. Kind of weird that. I kept smelling the strongest scent of cinnamon. Instead of going south I followed the smell up to Medford and stopped at the library to read up on physical therapy options for knees.” She waved her hand placidly at Zach. “And I found him instead of Cinnabon. What were you reading?”
“A thesis on apocalyptical theology,” Zach muttered. He rubbed my fingers once more and let go. He stood up and retreated to the door. My fingers tingled oddly.
“Theories on how the world is going to end?” I asked. Well, it wasn’t so far off from what I thought for a few minutes, about being in hell. The devil would know, too. My idea of hell had changed. Hell would be being alone again, without any hope of seeing anyone else.
Zach nodded. “I was trying some different trains of thought in order to get my head around what happened.”
“He had a pile this big,” Kara laughed, indicating about three feet in the air with her hand. “Books that I couldn’t pronounce the names of the titles. ‘Psychosocial Anthologies of the Archetypal Indicators of the Apocalypse.’”
“You made that up,” Zach accused genially.
“Well,” Kara said. “Maybe a little. I was so shocked to see him sitting there I forgot to say anything. For a minute I didn’t know what to do. I think he was so engrossed in his reading that he didn’t hear me come up. He looked up after that and dropped the book on the floor, and then knocked the rest on the floor in his surprise.” She smiled a little. “Would you believe I just ran over to him and hugged him?”
I believed it. I think I would have done the same if I had seen either of them in a ‘normal’ fashion. What was normal, btw? I might have done the same to the other man, too, if he hadn’t been acting like a psychopath. I would have walked right up to him and let him do his worst in my excitement over seeing another living, breathing, walking human being.
“Embarrassed the heck of him,” Kara went on, oblivious to my wool gathering. “I think I held onto him for five full minutes. He had to pry me off.”
I looked at Zach and saw that he was staring at me again. I wanted to say, ‘What?’ but I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. I just let my gaze drop to the notepad again.
“That was the first night either one of us got a full night’s sleep,” Kara said. “I was so relieved that I wasn’t the only one.” She paused and then said, “I bet you felt the same way, huh, Sophie?”
“Yes,” I said, simply.
♦
Hours later, Zach had made some kind of stew from freeze dried beef and canned vegetables. It was tasty enough that I forgot that it came out of cans and packages. I even licked the spoon when it was all gone.
Kara said, “We’re going to have to start growing things. Not next year. But maybe in a couple. A garden. A big one. And we’ll have to can things.”
The future. It frightened me. Kara saw a future where we set up as some kind of family. I wasn’t even used to being in the same room with them. What if I got accustomed to them? What if I started to love them? What if something happened to them? What if I was alone again?
The fear must have shown in my face because Zach made a noise and reached a hand toward me as I sat in the bed. I put the bowl and spoon quickly down on the night stand. I had changed into loose jeans and a looser baseball jersey they had procured from someone’s house. So I stood up and offered to clean up.
Kara scoffed inelegantly and gathered up dishes herself. She was using the apartment that the hotel manager had lived in. She put them on a tray and said curiously, “Why does the water still work?”
“It won’t for long,” Zach said, his expression intent on mine. “The electricity that allowed the reservoirs to fill up is off. Once the levels drop the water will stop. There’s about a dozen other things that can happen, too, to make it stop. We’re lucky right now.”
“Lucky,” I repeated. I went to the door and inched around Zach to stand on the walkway. Was it that obvious that I didn’t want to touch him? The previous black clouds had blown clean away and left the skies clear. The sun was starting its descent and it was another brilliant orange red, Oregon sunset.
“Maybe you should go back to bed,” Zach said softly.
I watched Kara walk down the stairs. “A little exercise won’t kill me,” I said, just as softly. I put my feet into flip flops that they had provided as well and shuffled to the stairs. I just wanted to walk around a little to get my heart pumping. I was weak but I didn’t want to baby myself. Babying myself didn’t seem to do anything productive. Zach followed along, after a disapproving grunt.
Pausing at the top of the steps, I thought about my strength level. We were on the second floor, and I thought I could get down the stairs but I wasn’t certain if I would get back up by myself.
Zach seemed to be a mind reader. He said gruffly, “If you want to go down, go ahead. If you can’t make it back up, I’ll carry you.”
My face wrinkled in a frown that he couldn’t see from behind me. “Thank you,” I said faintly. I would make it up the stairs by myself, even if I had to crawl.
So I went down, slowly and carefully, minding the pull of healing flesh from both my shoulder and my back. Neither wounds were incapacitating; the prolonged fever had sapped my strength to nothingness. I came to the bottom and resisted the effort to wipe the beads of sweat that had appeared away from my upper lip. “I just want to walk around the motel, okay?” I said to Zach. “Build me back up.”
“Okay,” he said and even I could tell that the word contained the resistance he felt in it. He didn’t approve and he didn’t like it. That was okay. He didn’t have to.
I meandered around the motel’s parking lot on the side and passed the office/apartment where Kara was merrily banging pots and pans together. She looked out the window and waved cheerfully at us. Zach kept behind me and didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything to him because I was beyond uncomfortable. He kept…looking…at me. I mean, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t a raving beauty. I didn’t have boogers hanging from my nose. I had checked in the mirror. My hair was still shoulder length and my eyes were still gray. I was a little skinnier than I had been. I didn’t get it.
Climbing up a half flight of stairs to the back of the motel had me breathing a little heavy. I stopped and sat on a brick wall. Zach crossed his arms over his chest and looked off to the north.
Finally, he said, “We want to go south for the winter. Kara and I want you to come with us.”
Again I was at a loss for words. He’d said they wouldn’t leave me. Of course, I hadn’t said I would come with them. Finally, I nodded shortly. It had been my plan to head south anyway. It would be better to go with them. Frankly, I wasn’t sure if I could go without them.
“Good,” he said.
I rose to my feet and continued my trek around the motel. Oh, I was determined to make it. I could almost feel waves of censure emanating from Zach. It made me all the more dogged. (Sounded like a challenge to me.) We got closer to the fire pit that he had told me about. It was a large thing, ringed by
the bricks, covered with a grill. It looked as though the motel would light fires there on those windy nights that required their guests to enjoy all the aspects of the Oregon coastline.
The fire was a pile of glowing red coals that radiated heat even to where I stood. There was a large, covered pot there with what must have been the remains of the stew Zach had made. Sitting on the grill, right next to the pot, was a blackened skull. Its dark eyes stared endlessly.
I saw it and recognized it for what it meant. Immediately I couldn’t move.
Zach muttered something about stubbornness before he realized that I was frozen in place. He looked at the fire pit and cursed. Then he gathered me up in his arms and ran for the other side of the motel. Calling to Kara, he hesitated at the office door.
We both sighed with relief when she stuck her head out the door.
“Time to go,” Zach said. “We can’t stay here.”
Kara didn’t question his tone. She only nodded.
And I trembled in Zach’s arms, knowing that the other man was still alive, still about. Perhaps he was watching us at that very moment. I made Zach put me down and I threw up the entire contents of my stomach.
Chapter Six – Running…
“We’re going to ride out of here?” I whispered, after I was finished vomiting. The pain in my shoulder had been vigorously renewed with extra torment. The excessive heaving had made my back and shoulder move in ways that I was convinced I shouldn’t have done. The throbbing combined with the fear that I had of the man who was delighting in our terror was making me helpless. I didn’t like the sensation. It made me feel like less of a human being and more like a victim with a bull’s eye painted on her. “In the dark?”
Zach methodically scanned the area. “We have to. We don’t know where he is or what he’s capable of doing.”
Kara said, “What happened?”
“He left a…present,” Zach said hesitantly, peering at me. I was on my knees, still shaking, trying not to fall over on my face. I bit back a moan because of the pain slicing through my shoulder. The flesh had torn when I had been hurling. Lovely thought. “A skull on the grill,” he finished reluctantly. “Sometime between dinner and now.”
Sea of Dreams Page 5
