Behind the Mask

by Link, Kelly; Rambo, Cat; Vaughn, Carrie

  Crimson Reign nodded. “When I fell pregnant, the extra speed and strength felt amazing. The changes to our physiology are permanent, Helen. We’re never the same again. When he dumped me, I guess I went off the rails. I’ve been raging against that sonofabitch so long now I don’t know how to live any other way. But you know what? I’m gonna take some time out.”

  “Hey,” cried the waitress, coffee in hand. “I do know you. You’re Crimson Reign!”

  “Not anymore,” Laura replied, slinging her handbag over her shoulder and standing to go. “I’m taking a long overdue holiday, and when I return, I’ll be a new woman.”

  The waitress looked from Laura to me.

  “You can thank Helen, here,” Laura said. “Vanquished me over morning coffee.” She winked at me. “See ya ’round, Blue.”

  Laura turned and sauntered away, her long, beautiful hair lifting in the morning breeze.

  “Holy cow!” the waitress cried. “You’re Salt City Blue? You know everyone’s talking about you, right?”

  I wrested the coffee from her trembling fingers and took a sip. “My name’s Helen,” I said. “This is good coffee.”

  “Best in town,” said the waitress as she watched Laura walk away. “So, whatcha gonna do now?”

  It was a fair question. “Me? I’m going to have a baby.” The words had a warm feel. I couldn’t help but smile.

  The waitress looked at me as though I was some kind of simpleton. Disappointed, perhaps, that her exciting new super wanted nothing so much as to become a parent.

  “Really?” she said. “That’s all? You’re not going to be . . . awesome?”

  I took another sip of coffee. “Oh, I’m gonna be awesome,” I replied, and Salt City air had never smelled so good. “You can count on that.”

  Chris Large writes regularly for Aurealis Magazine and has had fiction published in Australian speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. He’s a single parent who enjoys writing stories for middle-graders and young adults, and about family life in all its forms. He lives in Tasmania, a small island at the bottom of Australia, where everyone rides Kangaroos and says “G’day mate!” to utter strangers.

  Birthright

  Stuart Suffel

  The bombs weren’t strictly neutron bombs, but they were built upon a similar idea. They were nicknamed the Darwin bombs because they only targeted women, changing their DNA, rendering them infertile. The idea was to wipe out a nation by stealth. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Some women became infertile, some didn’t. Some became different. Some gave birth to the different.

  Sara’s difference was “a kiss from the sun,” her mother had once told her. “Bite” was probably a more accurate word. Two thin shining rivulets sprang upwards and outwards from the dip above her breast bone and curved over her shoulders before expanding across her back into a wide burbling lake—enraged waves of discordant frenzy set loose upon her soft flesh. The lake began at the base of her neck and ran all the way down to the tip of her pelvis, stretching wide to each side of her back. Lupus Ammorsa, the doctors told her. Named after the wolf.

  The doctors hadn’t mentioned the true cause of the bite. Sara’s mother was well-known, and even so, Sara was hardly the first birth-wrong—the name the tabloids used to christen those changed by the radiation poisoning inherited from the corrupted genes of their mothers.

  • • •

  Sara pulled back the heavy curtain and peered out of her bedroom window. There was no sign of the flash flood from last night, not here in the soft ground of the lowlands. But up higher where the ground was harder, the rain would fill the playas, creating small desert pools—a brief and welcome relief from the arid air.

  She washed at the sink in her bedroom rather than use the main bathroom—the noise of the electric shower would only wake her father. She told herself it was a kindness, not to rob him of his much-needed sleep. But the truth was, she did not want to see him.

  It was clear the anti-radiation therapy hadn’t worked. They both knew that meant a return to the treatment unit at Ridgecrest, but neither of them could broach the subject.

  She toweled herself off then sank down onto her bed. Her head slumped into her hands.

  The nightmares were getting worse. She had awoken earlier, sure that the wings of a giant insect were mashed across her back. She had even run naked to the hallway mirror, sure she would find a piece of matted wing crushed into her skin—but there was nothing.

  The desert and its fucking insects. Black stiletto-limbed monsters.

  Sara rubbed her temple, took a deep breath, then another. She pulled on her jeans and a crumpled T-shirt then reached under the bed for her tennis chucks, but her hand met something else—the satchel she’d specially packed sometime ago. She pulled it out from under the bed and opened it. The bright new rock chisel gleamed up at her. She snapped the satchel shut and flung it with force against her bedroom wall. The world had given her nothing. She owed it nothing.

  • • •

  Sara lifted the sash window up and a gust of heat met her face. The day was as hot as ever, the street as empty as ever. Some people used to call Randsburg a ghost town. She’d never liked the description, but maybe they were right.

  As a young girl, Sara had liked the quietness. A lot of the dwellings in Randsburg had been empty back then, and she had visited most of them. Just a “howdy” to the walls. To the ghosts.

  Not anymore, now that the army had requisitioned every empty building for a hundred square miles. After the last bombings, short land attacks had followed. Brief sorties, assessing damage, adding confusion and despair to an already disoriented population. The army hadn’t managed to stop the bombs last time. But they “sure as hell” would respond to any more ground assaults.

  Sara pulled on some tennis chucks, grabbed her bike jacket, and hopped out her bedroom window. The yard was the same as always: bits of broken vehicles, her father’s half-finished mechanical gizmos strewn about the place. She picked up a piece of chrome fender and looked at her face. Her eyebrows were disappearing gradually—the wolf bite on her back sending invisible tendrils to the rest of her body. She had, on occasion, rubbed a little black oil across them with her thumb. The result was not so good—two dark streaks above her pale blue eyes, like some freaky cartoon character. It had made her grin. Someone who carried a giant boil on their back had no truck with beauty.

  As she lifted the helmet off the handlebar of her bike, the cabin door swung open. Her dad filled the door frame.

  “Breakfast?” he asked.

  Sara shook her head no. “I didn’t wake you, did I?” she asked.

  “Nah. Been awake an hour or so.” He glanced at her for a moment. “No satchel today?”

  Sara gestured another no.

  “You be back for supper?” he asked.

  “I guess,” Sara answered, but her eyes flickered to the ground. She mounted her bike and waited until she heard the door swing closed before sliding her helmet on and starting the ignition. The bike purred to life.

  • • •

  Sara traveled down the highway for ten miles then exited off onto a track for another five. When she reached the playa, she eased the bike to a halt.

  The bajadas had fed the dry lake bed well. Joe’s place was a half hour south, but there was no rush. She would take a quick swim, then ride over. She hadn’t been there for three months. A while longer would do no harm.

  She’d found the playa some years ago and had told no one of its existence. It was all hers, until the sun claimed it back later in the day. As Sara stripped off her clothes, the memory of her first, and final, swim in her high school pool came to mind.

  The PE teacher had insisted she join the others. And for some unknown reason—maybe because it was a new school and she’d made a few friends and felt at ease—she conceded. Her sense of ease and her friendships all ended as soon as she had entered the pool area. For the following four years, until the day she graduated, she’d been kno
wn as “Scabby Sara.”

  She winced. Where had that come from? She shrugged the memory away and walked to the edge of the playa. Working with her dad the five years after high school had fine-tuned her arm and leg muscles. She dove gracefully into the water and swam to the far side. There she glanced at her watch—she’d reached it in record time. Flipping over onto her back, she powered back the way she had come. Again in record time. Sara toweled off her hair and sat at the edge of the natural pool, taking in its serene tranquility, allowing her body to dry in the sun.

  Finally dry, she put her clothes back on. Mounting her bike, she glanced back at the pool and another memory came. She and her mother watching Sara’s father swim in a local creek, his strong laughter echoing back from the nearby rocks as he reached the far edge with impressive speed. Sara would have been around seven or eight. She remembered laughing back at her father, then looking expectantly at her mother. Her mother didn’t laugh. Instead, she was looking at the glistening expanse of water with an aching sadness.

  Birds don’t swim.

  • • •

  Sara continued up the track. Sometimes Joe stayed out in the desert for days. Sometimes for weeks. A growl sounded to her left. Two quad bikes roared into view, cutting across her path. She dropped her speed just in time. The soldiers were dressed in shiny neon shell-suits, indicating they were nuclear specialists. One of them waved an apology as they sped off-road again, scattering the desert dirt like a mini-Moses parting an insolent sea.

  Sara watched them go. The new Conquistadors. The inhabitants of Randsburg and most of the villages around it had depended on tourists when the gold ran out. Now they fed off the army’s largesse, such as it was. Even she had succumbed. The pieces of volcanic glass she chiseled out of Copper Mountain were sold to the Curious Curios shop for pocket money. The glass was almost as sharp as a surgical knife, so the shop in turn added a handle to each one and sold them for a hefty mark-up to the many new recruits who had been pouring into the San Bernardino Valley since the bombs.

  As she rode, she thought about that first day she had met Joe and watched his crazy tomahawk ritual—the tomahawk adorned with feathers almost as colorful as the soldiers’ shell-suits. She’d seen it as she drove by, a flurry of color dancing into the air, then turned back, pulled right up to his shack, and sat there on her bike, watching.

  Joe had been standing on open ground, eyes closed. He hurled the two-headed tomahawk straight up into the air. It came tumbling down at a goodly speed, straight for his head. With his eyes still closed, he caught the weapon by the shaft, the blades inches away from splitting his skull in two. “What happens if you miss?” she’d shouted out.

  Joe answered without opening his eyes or turning his head. “Then my prayers will have been answered.” Then he threw the axe up in the air again.

  Sara thought about this as she watched. “Can’t you just miss on purpose then?”

  He turned toward her, eyes a sparkling greenish-brown sheen. The axe came tumbling down. He caught it deftly in one hand. “Can’t never deny the gifts we’re given, little one.”

  • • •

  When she got home later that day and told her dad about the crazy Indian, her father’s face turned dark. It wasn’t until much later that she found out why.

  Joe’s wife had been one of the early victims of poisoning when the first bombs had landed. It was through his wife that Joe had met Sara’s mother at the Ridgecrest Treatment Center. But unlike her mother, Joe’s wife died soon after the radiation exposure.

  When Sara’s mother became the first Bird, Joe left his job in the local mining company and followed her around day and night. Her father reckoned if it hadn’t been for Joe, her mother might not have gained the notoriety she did, might not have sacrificed herself so selflessly. Sara doubted this—Joe wasn’t the only worshiper who followed her mother and the other Birds around like drug-crazed lapdogs.

  Joe’s parents were both Cahuilla Indian. Though he was born and raised in a suburb of Bakersfield. When Sara’s mother died, folks said Joe went crazy. He went into the desert to return to his roots and lived there as a hermit in a makeshift hut. Everyone pitied him. Strange thing was, within a few years folks from all around went to see him. Turned out Joe had become a medicine man of sorts. For a time at least—then he’d stopped making his concoctions, as abruptly as he had started.

  That first day, when Sara asked her father if it was okay to visit Joe again, her father didn’t answer. She took that to mean it was her choice.

  • • •

  Sara glanced at the fresh rattlesnake skins adorning the frame of Joe’s hut. Beside them were a few skins from ground squirrels—Joe was still paying no heed to the government warning about killing them. He appeared in the doorway, grinning as usual. “Flood brings out all the wildlife,” he said. “Even the lizards.”

  Sara grinned. Joe called her Tikka, meaning “little lizard”—or at least, that’s what he’d told her. “Even the lizards need to bathe now and then,” she laughed.

  “You want some stew?” Joe asked.

  Sara glanced over Joe’s shoulder to see steam rising out of a small cooking pot. She shook her head no. She had tried Joe’s squirrel stew only once. It was delicious—but now the thoughts of the once-living ingredients turned her stomach. Funny, really. Snake soup she could eat forever. Sara guessed snakes were too far removed from humans to see a connection. Joe saw no difference between the two, except maybe taste-wise. “Some water’d be good,” Sara said, and Joe beckoned her inside his hut.

  Joe’s hut had holes everywhere. A mishmash of desert goods were hung along the walls: drying bean pods, bundles of bark, stripped creosote bush, herbs, bits of cactus, sharpened stones, bird feathers. Interwoven with these were a range of store bought goods, gaudy and loud, but somehow fitting right in with the desert stuff. Sara found something comforting in that. The walls were of deadwood and salvaged logs. Joe liked to hang things up—there was nothing on the ground but a bed roll and a stool. The stool was for visitors, the few there were. Joe squatted on the bedroll. Sara sat on the stool.

  “How’s your Pa?” he asked.

  “He’s . . . the same.”

  “You still having visions?” Joe asked.

  He meant her nightmares. Sara laughed. “Visions? Guess that’s one word for ’em.”

  Joe frowned a little. “The only word.”

  Sara flushed. A feather came loose from the wall, floated toward her, landing at her feet. She picked it up, twirled it in her hand. “Joe, why did you stop helping people? I mean, the medicines. Folks say you helped a lot of people.”

  The hermit looked to the ground for a minute, then he looked at Sara. “You remember the first day we met?”

  Sara nodded. “Your prayers are still not answered,” she joked. Joe grinned. “My prayers were answered the day you stepped into my world.” His expression became more somber. “That was the same day I laid aside my medicine bowl.”

  Sara got to her feet. “I’m not my mother!” she snapped. “My mother . . .” Sara said, then stopped.

  “I thought she was the one,” Joe said. “But she was only the first.”

  “The first to die.”

  “The first to live, Tikka. The first to live.”

  Sara frowned, looked to the ground. She suddenly felt tired and sat back down. Neither spoke for a time, but then Joe noticed something. “You don’t have your satchel? You stopped breaking off God’s fingers?”

  God’s fingers was the local name for obsidian rock, the volcanic glass she dug out of Copper Mountain. Sara had convinced herself she had harvested the glass to make some extra income. Now she knew differently. She had to tell him about the rock she had found—and left behind. That’s why she was here. She had to tell him. Maybe then the nightmares would stop.

  “I found a piece Joe. Sliver of sparkling gold through it. I think it’s . . . the best I’ve seen.”

  Joe shifted in his stance. “Sharp?”


  Sara nodded. “Have to pry it out fully yet, but I can tell. Sharpest so far.”

  “When did you find it?”

  “A while back.”

  His eyes flickered around the cabin, then settled on her. “You thinking maybe this one should stay in the cave?” Sara heard the quiver in his voice. She looked out through a gap in the hut, eyes drifting off into the distance. “You afraid, Tikka?” Joe asked.

  “I ain’t afraid, Joe. I just don’t see why my mother . . . died. For a bunch of—” She stopped.

  Joe held his gaze on her as he took a slow spoonful of the piping hot stew, grimacing a little as it touched his lips. “You ever see her?”

  Sara didn’t understand for a moment. Then she realized Joe meant in her visions. Her nightmares. She shook her head.

  “Your Pa does,” Joe said. “Every night.”

  Sara dug her fingers into her knees. “She shouldn’t have left us.”

  Joe nodded. “Maybe.” He swirled his spoon around the bowl to cool the stew. Quick as a flash Joe’s hand hit the ground. Sara jumped. When Joe slowly lifted his hand away, a small scorpion lay dead on the hardened dirt. Joe deftly lifted it up by the middle of its tail and flicked it outside. Joe grinned. “I don’t like killing the little ’uns. But I don’t like getting sick, neither.”

  Sara nodded. She looked out to where the scorpion lay on the desert ground. A couple of ants were already running across the scorpion’s soft translucent corpse. Soon there were more.

  “Breakfast,” Joe quipped. Sara gave an absentminded nod as she continued to watch the ants swarm over the dead scorpion.

  “Life and death, Tikka. Life and death.”

  • • •

  Sara stalled her bike and parked on the side of the road some miles away from Joe’s place. She took a slim book from inside her jacket and opened it to a photo, which acted as a bookmark. It was the only photo she had of her mother.

  In the photo, her mother was wearing dungarees and had her hair tied back. She was half-concealed under a cottonwood tree, her face and neck speckled with the blotches of shadow from the tree’s many leaves. She was smiling, but without showing any teeth.