‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
‘I mean, the kids are our future, Dan—only it’s like nobody cares,’ he went on, ignoring the fact I had so obviously quit listening to him months ago.
‘Yeah. Fuck those kids, Eric.’
‘I just don’t understand it, you know? And don’t even get me started on global warming...’
I stole a quick glance around the bar for Abby. Last I’d seen her, she’d been heading off to grab drinks. That had been decades ago. Where the hell had she gotten to? Should I have gone looking for her? Exactly what kind of name was the Quivering Lips for a bar, anyway?
Just as I was thinking this, a hand fell on my arm.
I looked back.
Abby.
So you know how all parents think their baby is the cutest, even though in most cases said baby looks more like a battered cabbage somebody has for some reason kicked repeatedly up against a garage door? Well, that was how I felt about Abby. Not that she was a baby, of course. Or a cabbage, for that matter. Christ, that would have been weird. But there was no denying that—to my eye, at least—Abby was without a doubt the most attractive girl in the room. Granted, the fact that she occasionally let me do things to her lady parts may have left me slightly biased.
Hey—it was what it was.
‘Here. I brought beer,’ she said, holding out a glass to me.
I’d decided against telling her of my meeting with my new, sweaty friend, Wesley Chang—not because I thought she couldn’t handle it, or anything. I’m not a misogynist. Truthfully, I was worried she might go kill the guy if I did—and I don’t mean “kill” like “have a stern talking-to”, like how when your girlfriend says it about so-and-so having stood her up again or whatever. I mean literally kill him, like with a knife, in the head. And I just wasn’t sure having another dead body on our hands would have helped our current situation any.
‘Can you believe Sandra’s pregnant?’ she said, as I quickly took the beer from her. ‘Isn’t that crazy?’ Tonight she was dressed in a jeans and jacket combination that, despite how little effort it had taken her to put on, still left her looking the most dazzling woman here. Or maybe it was just that bias at work again. Never underestimate the power of the vagina, folks.
‘Sure is.’
She eyed me curiously. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You left me,’ I said. ‘With Eric.’
‘So? What’s wrong with Eric?’
‘There’s just something not right about that guy. Nobody’s that dreamy. He’s definitely up to something.’
She grinned. ‘Is somebody jealous?’
I let out a long sigh. ‘He’s a Phony, Abby.’
‘He is not a Phony, Dan.’
‘He could be a Phony. We should probably take care of him. Just to be safe.’
She laughed and kissed me, even though I was being serious. Around us, well-dressed strangers grinded furiously against one another like they didn’t know what discretion was.
‘You’re adorable, you know that?’
‘No, I’m not. I’m very manly.’
She put her arms around my waist and squeezed, pinning my arms to my sides. If we’d been boxing, I’d have been fucking screwed.
In case I haven’t mentioned it already, Abby is my girlfriend. We had met during the whole Belmont Grove fiasco three months ago. I’d like to say it was love at first sight, but if I’m honest there had been far too much dick-punching for that. Yeah, turns out she’s kind of a ninja. And a spy.
But, just like a tumour, I had eventually grown on her. Now I guessed she was stuck with me.
I fought my way free and took her by the hand. ‘Hey, you want to get out of here?’
She looked at me sideways a moment. ‘Somebody’s feeling pretty sure of themselves.’
‘Come on. Let’s take a walk.’
I led Abby out onto the sidewalk, where the final vestiges of last night’s snowfall still lay in evidence on the ground.
Now, I’m not exactly the most proactive of guys when it comes to romance, but there’s no denying the fact there’s something magical about freshly fallen snow. And from where we were walking along the sidewalk, the streetlights above us burning fierce amber down on our heads like fallout and painting everything it touched a warm orange, it was almost beautiful. I thought it would have made for a great postcard.
‘So...’ I said, boots crunching as they fought their way through thick ice and snow. Despite the cold, I was dripping with sweat. It was seriously ball-soup down there. I didn’t think I’d ever been so sweaty in my whole life.
‘So?’
‘We’ve been together a while now, wouldn’t you say?’
She grabbed my arm, stopping me. God, she was so strong. ‘What’s this all about, Dan? You’re acting all weird again. I hate it when you act weird.’
I took a deep breath.
Well. Now or never.
I reached a hand into my pocket, began to bend down—
‘Oh, wait, my phone’s ringing,’ said Abby.
I watched as she turned away from me to answer it, leaving me half-mast and feeling like literally the biggest asshole in the world.
Good job, Danny boy. Fucking great work there. Way to seal the deal.
‘What the hell?’
I looked up to see Abby frowning.
‘Who is it?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. But this area code—it’s from Fort Larsen.’
Fort Larsen: the small, no-nothing farming town in Texas where Abby had grown up—that was, before a certain “incident” there had seen her run out of town faster than Frankenstein’s monster on a jet ski. And by “incident” I mean she had killed her boyfriend at the time, Jeff, who was meant to have been a pretty big deal. Something about football, yadda yadda. In her defence, though, the guy had been a Phony at the time, so “killed” was probably stretching it a little. But whatever.
From what I knew, it had been years since she had last spoken to anybody from her hometown.
I waited for her to answer, then when she didn’t, I said, ‘You going to answer it?’
She hesitated a moment longer, then slowly raised the phone to her ear.
After only a short moment, she lowered it again.
‘Well?’ I said, not wanting to be an ass, but unable to help myself. I was freezing, and I still had yet to recover from looking like a complete jackass a moment ago. It’s not often said, but a man’s pride is like his life force. What the East (possibly) refer to as “Chi”. It’s what fuels us, gives us the strength and wilful ignorance to continue on doing the stupid shit we’re so renowned for, because we’re men, and that’s just what we do. Women have their sex appeal. Men have their pride. Take that away, and you might as well put a bullet through our brains. It’s biology, really. Christ, it was a miracle I was still alive. ‘You going to tell me who it was, or not?’
Nothing. Just silence.
‘Abby?’
‘That... that was my Aunt Cassie,’ she said. ‘I think my dad’s dying.’
Shit.
I stood very still for a moment. Across the street, late night revelers stumbled drunkenly through the snow. ‘Are... you okay?’
Abby and her father had always had a complicated relationship—even more so after he had let the townsfolk effectively shun her from the community. She never really talked about him, but on the odd occasions that she did, it was never in a, shall we say, “positive” manner.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I just honestly don’t know.’
‘Are you going to go see him?’
‘Do you think I should?’
‘Well... he’s still your dad, right?’
Even if he is a steaming pile of rhino diarrhea.
‘This... this is all just—I need to go home, Dan. Right now.’
And so we left the Quivering Lips, marching through the snow back the way we’d come as drunkards and late-evening Christmas shoppers encumbered with store bags battled not to fal
l down.
Merry fucking Christmas.
***
Six hours later, and I was standing in the check-in aisle inside Amerstow International Airport, an anxious Abby on one side, several hundred irrelevant other people on the other.
‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ I said, having to shout a little to be heard over the white-noise hiss of chatter around us.
I’ve never liked airports. I’m not sure why. I suspect it’s something to do with the nature of them—how they’re never the place you’re trying to go, only the place you have to go through to get to your destination. There’s just something so dishonest about that, I find.
From beside me, Abby nodded. There were tears in her eyes and her make-up was smudged. I’d never seen her look so frail and un-ninja-like before. It was fucking terrifying.
‘Because you know you don’t have to go,’ I said. ‘You can stay here. With me. You don’t have to go, Abby.’
It was the first time since becoming a couple that we had ever been apart, and I was feeling insecure. But it was more than that. Though I didn’t often like to admit it, Abby was in a lot of ways my protector. For whatever reason, God had seen fit to put me under her protection. I was the frail duckling, unfit for life on my own, an easy target for any nearby foraging animals looking for a quick and easy meal. She was the caring mother duck, bravely warding off the riff-raff looking to put me kicking and screaming into their bellies. Really, what it came down to was trust; the trust between mother and child, of not letting that child get fucking eaten to death. Her getting on that plane broke that trust. As far as I was concerned, now she was just being a terrible mother.
She took a deep breath and sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
I nodded. She did.
We watched the line jostle along for a while, every shoe-squeak like knives in my ears.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ she asked, when we were finally nearing the front.
I thought again of my new friend, Wesley Chang. I should have told her about him, of course. It was the only responsible thing to do. But I had put a lot of energy into Abby’s “rehabilitation”. I didn’t want to jeopardise all the progress she’d made, simply because some sweaty, overweight dude in a Ramones T-shirt had decided now was a good time to try and blackmail me.
It had been hard, in the beginning. Having spent the majority of her life as a lethal killing machine, reassimilating into a normal way of living had proved no easy task. There had been incidents. Fights. Some sneaking out at night. More than the one shouted expletive. As it turns out, one does not just simply quit hunting extra-terrestrials. You have to wean yourself off these sorts of things.
Six weeks ago she’d landed her first real job at Juice Bar, and so far things had been going great.
I wasn’t about to ruin that for anything.
‘Of course,’ I lied.
‘You’ll call me, won’t you? If something weird should happen, like with that thing the other day that I know you don’t like to talk about, but that you really need to—’
I put a finger to her lips.
‘Shush. Relax. I’ll be fine. I’m very brave, Abby.’
‘No, Dan. No, you’re not.’
I stood aside and waited whilst the attendant checked Abby in, wondering if I looked overly like a terrorist, if there was a way to tell.
When she was done, Abby and I turned to each other.
Some things were said. Mushy things. I don’t want to go into it. It was like that one scene they always have in movies where the happy couple are forced to part ways for some stupid reason or another. The guy gets drafted and has to go to war, leaving his beloved to sit at home pining for him whilst he tries his best to dodge bullets like some kind of limber, death-shy acrobat—which is kind of sexist, actually, if you think about it. I didn’t want to go to war.
‘And remember to take Frankie out,’ she went on. ‘You know how he gets when he doesn’t go out.’
Ugh.
After a final hug, she grabbed her little suitcase-thing by the handle and sighed. ‘Okay. Here I go. Wish me luck!’
‘Good luck!’
PLEASE DON’T GO.
I watched as she dragged her little suitcase-thing across the foyer towards departures, listening to its wheels squeaking and wishing there was a baby somewhere close-by crying its fucking eyes out, because it felt like one of those moments. But there wasn’t—which was a shame, but not exactly a surprise.
At the barrier, she turned back.
I saw her lips move.
Hate your face.
Then she was gone.
Of course, if I could have known what was about to happen, I probably would have gone with her—I certainly would have worn better shoes.
But that’s the thing about hindsight, isn’t it?
Man, hindsight’s a bitch.
THREE
BELIEFS ARE A FRAGILE thing. It’s something we never really think about. They’re like those little china dolls you always find at yard sales—sure, they may feel solid to the touch, but you know that any real bit of pressure and they’d crack and fall to pieces like Oscar Pistorius’ defence case, and then you’d have all those little fucking flakes of china everywhere and a dead girlfriend. And nobody wants that.
It had been my belief, for example, that all the craziness of the last few months was finally behind me, that I was done with conspiracies and spies and things of an extra-terrestrial nature.
But as I was soon to discover, just like the mankini, I was very, very wrong.
I found Frankie on the couch, head pressed so close to the laptop screen in front of him it was like he was trying to meld with it.
It was the day after taking Abby to the airport. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand, a crumpled sheet of photocopy paper that looked to have started life as an origami swan in the other, but that in all honesty now looked more like something a child molester might show to small children in an attempt to frighten them into keeping quiet. On the TV before me, a man with an unconvincing toupee and what I assumed to be some sort of vitamin deficiency assured me of the value of life insurance.
Frankie saw me enter and his eyes widened. ‘Oh, Dan, you’re back! Finally! Check it out!’
Frankie was my best friend, and what some might consider a lodger, only this lodger didn’t pay rent. A bad lodger, then. Today he was wearing an amalgamation of different clothing, none of which matched. I don’t want to go into it. Let’s just say he looked like someone who required constant monitoring by a qualified adult and leave it at that.
He turned the laptop to face me.
It was then I noticed all the open textbooks lying spread out on the carpet around him. Covers with titles like Demonology For Dummies and Stargazing: The Hunt For Extra-Terrestrial Life.
Following the events of three months ago, Frankie had convinced himself that the whole fiasco with the Phonies was just the tip of the iceberg, that there were other things out there. And up until the incident with that “thing of which we do not speak”, I thought it was all just hogwash—fantasies from basement-dwelling MMO players with no girlfriends and nothing better to do.
Now, though... now I wasn’t so sure.
Not that I’d tell Frankie that, of course.
What was more, in an effort to connect with other people across the globe and “share their collective knowledge”, he had even started up a blog. He called it THE WATCHPOST. I, on the other hand, called it by its actual name—a GIANT WASTE OF TIME. Which it was.
Still, the emails kept on coming.
So that was awesome.
I peered at the screen. ‘What’s that?’
‘Email from an old acquaintance of mine. Says some “thing” crashed in the field next to where the old steelworks used to be. He thinks it might be alien.’
‘Sounds serious,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Uh-huh. He even took pictures. Look—’
I shot up my hands. ‘Uh-uh. Nope. I’m n
ot doing this with you again, Frankie.’
He frowned. ‘Do what?’
‘This. This... obsession of yours, or whatever it is. I’m not getting sucked into another one of your flights of fancy. Count me out.’
He looked crestfallen. ‘But... what if there’s something really cool out there nobody’s ever seen before?’ he went on, completely disregarding everything I’d just said. ‘Like maybe some kind of weird, gross thing that shoots fire out of its ass or whatever. Imagine it, Dan. It’d be awesome.’
‘Why would it shoot fire out of its ass?’
He sighed. ‘It’s a defence mechanism, Dan? You know, like how when an octopus—’
He caught the look on my face and frowned. ‘Wait, hold on—this is about Abby again, isn’t it?’
I blinked. ‘What? Abby?’
‘Come on, Dan. Since she dumped you, all you’ve done is mope around the apartment like a little lost puppy.’
‘She didn’t dump me. Her dad’s sick. I told you.’
‘Whatever. I’m just saying, you need to snap out of it is all. Get back on the, uh...’
I waited. ‘Horse?’
He grinned. ‘That’s the spirit, Dan! You need to mount that bitch, homie. Seabiscuit that shit.’
‘I’m not mounting anything. I’m grabbing some water and going to bed.’
Frankie nodded as if that was just the answer he’d been expecting. ‘Sure thing, Dan—whatever you say.’ He turned back to the laptop.
It was then I noted the sudden, mischievous look in his eye.
Looking back now, this is probably the part where I should have realised Frankie was up to something. Frankie would never be so easily deterred from an adventure, especially when the prospect of something alien or ridiculous was involved.
But like the asshole that I was, I didn’t.
And nothing was ever the same again.
***
They say that inside of every man is a small child just waiting to get out.
I’m pretty sure it’s a metaphor—some faux-cute narrative on our secret, inherent desire to go grab a pack of bubblegum and roll around naked on the front yard for all the neighbours to see. Jesus, that was a crazy weekend. Unless, that is, they mean it literally, which—let’s be honest here—is a logistical nightmare if I’ve ever heard one, but also very creepy.
Dan and Frankie and the End of Everything Page 3
