by J. S. Volpe
27
Lauren had thought she was running for her life. With that swift, steady, somewhat hoof-like clop following her down the aisle, she envisioned the leucrota galloping after her with its Joker grin and its Gollum eyes. And so, when she heard Brandon shouting at her, she assumed it was the leucrota mimicking his voice in a clever attempt to lure her into its clutches, and she just kept on running.
Then she remembered that the leucrota could only mimic things it had already heard, and she couldn’t recall Brandon having said anything like “It’s not after us,” and “It went the other way” during the whole time they’d been in the warehouse.
Then again, how smart was the leucrota supposed to be? Perhaps it had figured out how to string together bits and pieces from different utterances into coherent sentences.
“Lauren!” the Brandon-voice called again. “Where’re you going?”
The tone of baffled frustration in that last sentence was something she was sure she hadn’t heard in Brandon’s voice tonight. The leucrota couldn’t invent emotional tones, could it?
And then she realized two things: The voice had been farther behind her this time, and she no longer heard the heavy clop of steps.
Clopping steps! Like hooves! Of course. That meant it couldn’t be Brandon behind her. This had to be a trick. It…
No, wait. Brandon had been wearing those big, hard-soled Docs, hadn’t he? Crap. Maybe it was him.
She stopped and listened hard over the sound of her own gulping, wheezing breaths. She half expected to hear the clopping steps start up again, faster than ever, too fast for her to outrun. Instead she heard nothing. At least not nearby. There was a real ruckus coming from the far end of the warehouse.
“Lauren?” said the Brandon-voice again.
Lauren pointed the flashlight toward the voice. She saw nothing except the gewgaw-lined shelves stretching away into darkness. The speaker—whether Brandon or the leucrota—was beyond the reach of the flashlight’s beam.
The steps began to advance toward her. Now that she listened closely, it did sound kind of like two feet rather than four, but with all the noise from across the warehouse, and with her fear muddling up her mind, it was hard to be sure. She backed away in synch with the figure’s approach, maintaining a steady distance between them.
“How do I know it’s you?” she said.
“Uh…because it is?”
Lauren gasped in frustration. “No, I mean, if you’re really Brandon, say something you’ve never said before, something I know the leucrota couldn’t be mimicking.”
The steps stopped. After a brief pause Brandon’s voice said, “The lavender marmalade quivered repugnantly when Ashlee Simpson’s pet orangutan defenestrated the sixteen navel-gazing stevedores. How’s that?”
“That’s good.”
The footsteps resumed their approach. This time Lauren walked forward to meet them. Soon Brandon emerged from the darkness. He was out of breath and sweaty from his run.
“I’m such a moron,” Lauren said.
“What? Why?”
“I thought you were the leucrota. All I could hear were your boots clopping on the floor, and I thought they were hooves, and…” She shook her head. “And all this time it was going after Donovan and Violet.”
“Yeah, well, it’s an understandable mistake. I thought it was behind me, too, even though I didn’t hear any hoof-clops at all. So if you’re a moron, I’m an even bigger one.”
“I won’t argue with that. But if we don’t get over there and help them, we’ll both end up being the biggest morons ever.”
“I hear ya.”
Brandon stepped aside to let Lauren squeeze past; since she had the flashlight, she ought to be in the lead. She went, but she wasn’t happy about it. Being in the lead meant she’d come to the leucrota first. And yet…
And yet despite her fear there was a part of her that was marveling at how utterly fucking fantastic this all was. Sure, she might get killed, sure all of them might get killed, but they were doing something momentous, something historic, something no one had ever done before. She had pulled her face out of the history books she’d always loved and found herself actually participating in something that might well one day be in history books itself. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Columbus sighting America. And Lauren O’Donohue confronting the leucrota.
Lauren grinned. Sure, she was scared so bad her hands were shaking, and she really, really didn’t want to be in the lead if and when they came upon the leucrota, but fuck it, if some future historian (like, say, Lauren O’Donohue) was going to write about this, she’d better act with dignity and bravery and grace lest unborn generations think she was an utter wuss.
Still grinning, flashlight showing the way, she started to run toward the distant din, Brandon’s boots clip-clopping close behind.
