A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe)

by Leicht, Martin

  His eyes flit to Cole beside me, who’s totally not pretending to ignore our fight (thanks, Cole), just standing staring with his mouth open as it all unfolds before him. “Yeah,” Ducky replies flatly, eyes fixed on Cole. “I got that.”

  “No,” I say, face-palming. “That’s not what I . . . Ducky, you’re just upset.”

  “Yeah,” he snaps again. “Of course I’m upset, Elvie. I’m like a frigging stick figure in a camp full of superheroes, and for what?” I try to grab the mop from him again, but he jerks it back once more. “I’m sick of being the sidekick in ‘The Amazing Adventures of Elvie Nara,’ ” he tells me. He stares at the mop handle for a second as though unsure what to do with it, then seems to make up his mind. “You know what?” he says, tossing the mop at me. I catch it awkwardly. “Maybe I will let you do the floors. I’m done.” He spins on his heel and marches to the door, tracking sudsy footprints as he goes.

  That’s it. Do I feel bad for the guy? Of course. But did I get him dragged here on purpose? Hardly. I will not be made to feel guilty.

  “If you’re so sick of being my sidekick,” I shout after him as he reaches the door, “then go have your own adventure, dumbass!”

  The door swings closed behind him, and I turn back to the sink, shoulders slumped. I lean the mop against the wall and do my best to shake off the argument as I begin to empty the clean dishes from the rack. Ducky’s just tired, I tell myself. He didn’t mean any of it.

  But my mood isn’t improved when I look at the dish rack.

  “Cole!” I screech, suddenly realizing the key to my boyfriend’s amazingly fast dishwashing skills. “Are you kidding me? These still have food all over them!”

  “Really?” Cole asks, totally nonplussed. “I wiped them all.”

  “With what, your feet? Did you even use soap?”

  Cole, of course, merely shrugs. “So they’re a little dirty,” he says. “So what? I’m not competing in the Olympics or anything.”

  I do my best to steady myself. No use fighting with Cole, too. “I’m pretty sure there’s no Olympic dishwashing even—” I stop talking when I feel Cole’s arm on my waist. I jump, startled. Thankfully, Livs continues to sleep soundly, still smacking her lips. “Cole,” I say quietly.

  He kisses the nape of my neck, wriggling his arm around the two of us—me and the baby both. “Hey,” he says. And I can just hear the warm smile in that one word. “You want to, um”—he raises his eyebrows—“do stuff?”

  So subtle, my Cole.

  My skin is tingly at his touch. How long has it been since Cole and I had an actual moment together? I look down at baby Olivia. Oh yeah. A little over nine months.

  “Cole,” I say again. I do not turn around. “Not now, all right?”

  “But . . .” He plants one on me. An epic Cole Archer kiss. It is wet and warm and wonderful.

  I’ve got to say, the guy sure makes a compelling argument. Still . . .

  “Cole.” I pull away.

  “You don’t want to do it,” he pouts.

  “I’d rather just . . . talk,” I tell him honestly.

  Cole scrunches up his nose. “Seriously?”

  Cole’s hand is back on my waist. His lips are back on mine. I’m goose-pimply all over.

  “See?” he says softly, in between pecks. His lips are soft and full and beautiful. “You do want to do stuff. I can tell.”

  My eyes dart open, and I catch a glance of the dirty dishes in the sink. Ducky’s mop against the wall. And our baby—our baby—who’s going to wake up not too long from now and need to be fed again. After which she will need to be changed. Again. And guess who’s going to end up doing all of that?

  “Not now, all right, Cole?”

  “But—”

  “I said not now!”

  Cole’s eyes go huge, like I just smacked him on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “It’s okay,” he says into the sink, taking up his terrible dishwashing again. “You’re just tired. I get it.”

  I try not to be offended by the notion that the only reason not to suck face with Cole Archer is because “I’m tired.” I’ve got other things to worry about. Like how right about now it’s finally occurring to me that the one person I need to be talking about Serious Life Issues with is the same guy who just spelled “Mommy” incorrectly on our daughter’s stomach in permanent marker.

  “Elvs?” Cole calls.

  But I’m already halfway out the kitchen door, almost without realizing that I’m walking. “I’m fine, just finish up without me, okay?” I shout over my shoulder.

  Cole says something else as the door closes behind me, but honestly, at this moment, whatever he has to say can wait. Because if I don’t get some air into my lungs, I think I might burst.

  • • •

  After I hand off Olivia to her doting grandfather, I make my way outside so that the pressure building up in my brain has somewhere to go. There are six dogs milling about outside their kennel when I exit the log-cabin exterior of the camp. The snow is light and dry underneath my damp shoes, and I laugh as one of the dogs starts lathering my face with a series of hard-core face-lickings. Yeah, maybe this was exactly what I needed right now.

  “Pontius!” comes Oates’s scolding voice behind me. “Down! Down, boy!”

  As soon as the dogs hear Oates, all of them immediately snap to attention—back on their haunches, tails wagging, ears relaxed. I turn and see Oates heading our way, one enormous bag of puppy chow loaded across each shoulder.

  “Miss Elvie,” he greets me cordially. “I see Pontius is still keen on you.” When he reaches the kennel, Oates unslings the food bags, which land with two heavy plops in the snow, and the dogs take that as their cue to go back to their regularly scheduled business. Two of the bigger huskies begin nuzzling the bags of food like if they’re nice enough, the bags will give up the food of their own accord. Meanwhile, Pontius returns to his Elvie love fest.

  I laugh. Nothing like doggie smooches to lift your spirits. “We’ve got a regular love affair going, Pontius and me,” I say, leaning down to rub Pontius’s muzzle. “Don’t we, boy?” He’s a beautiful tan husky, and other than Oates, I’m the only person that Pontius will play with. Unless you count when he stole Cole’s hat right off his head and buried it behind the cabin.

  “He’s a good judge of character,” Oates replies.

  The dogs whine and whimper as Oates tears into the first bag, but as soon as he pours the kibble into the trough, the canines go to town, shoving at each other for prime food-gobbling position. Pontius allows me one last nuzzle before leaving to join them.

  While the dogs chow down, I turn and stare out into the snow, which this afternoon is mostly masked by a heavy blanket of white fog. I can barely see more than a few hundred meters before the snow and the fog meld into one giant splotch of white. Out here, in the crisp air, my thoughts slow their frantic swirling and begin to settle at the surface of my brain.

  “It’s easy to find yourself a little stir-crazy at first,” Oates says, reading me like a book. “Tensions invariably flare between even dear friends. It will pass.”

  “What if it doesn’t?” I ask.

  Oates shrugs. “Then it doesn’t.”

  Great.

  “I’m fine, really,” I say. “Just some drama with Ducky and Cole.”

  Oates nods, the kind of polite nod that indicates that he’d rather be talking about just about anything besides my teenage girl feelings. He turns around holding the two empty bags and moves without saying a word toward the large incinerator unit that’s about thirty yards away from the cabin. He glances behind him when he’s about halfway there, and I realize he means for me to follow him. I leave the chomping dogs and rush to catch up.

  No one ever bothers to shovel out this stretch, and the snowdrifts are nearly a meter high, so I have to push hard to keep up. Oates, of course, cuts through the snow like it’s powder. I stop a few meters behind Oates as he opens the
chute to the incinerator feeder and tosses the empty bags in. Once he closes the chute, a sudden puff of black smoke shoots up into the air and quickly dissipates. Oates busies himself with something on the side of the incinerator.

  “You’re fortunate to have two men here who love you very dearly, Miss Elvie,” Oates says.

  “Love?” I practically choke on my own spit. How carefully has this guy been listening to my conversations? When did me and my buddies become the new Cape Crozier daytime soap? “Well, I don’t think it’s quite that drama—”

  “Your child’s father, and your own,” Oates clarifies.

  “Ah.” Clearly I’m the only one with the soap opera fantasies. “Er, yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s true.”

  “The lad Donald is quite protective of you as well,” Oates continues. “This is good.” He looks at me, and even though his mouth stays even, his eyes smile down on me warmly. “It’s good to have friends you can rely on to stay true.”

  “Oates, who was she?” I ask. “The woman who got you sent here.” The question’s been buzzing in my brain for weeks: What was she like, the mysterious woman so lovely that she could sway stoic, duty-bound Titus Oates away from the Code?

  If Oates is taken aback by my brashness, he doesn’t let on. “No woman, Miss,” he says quietly.

  “But I thought all you guys here had broken the Code and had, er . . . relations with an extra Earth girl or two.”

  “There are laws that govern us beyond the Code, child,” Oates replies, an old, lingering sadness in his voice.

  “So what are you here for, then?” Hell, if I’m already in this deep, I might as well keep digging. “Industrial espionage? Genocide? Were you one of the studio execs who green-lit Sucker Punch?”

  Oates bends down and resumes fiddling with the incinerator. “I’m here,” he says, “for staying true to my friends.”

  “Dude,” I say, feeling the ice starting to break ever so slightly, “I’m stuck in this place freezing my butt off for who knows how long, and all you can give me is—”

  “Freezing your butt off?” Oates interrupts, as if missing my point entirely. “You’re cold?”

  “Well, no,” I say, realizing it’s true. I’m not cold, though I should be. It’s most definitely below freezing out, and when I look down, I notice that I didn’t remember to zip my thermal up all the way when I came outside. “I guess I’m, I dunno, adapting to the cold, or whatever,” I say. Even my toes aren’t that chilly, despite the dirty mop water that’s icing up under my laces.

  Oates looks at me for a beat too long before he starts talking. “Adaptation is good, especially in a place like this. It means you’re strong.” He rises to his feet, gesturing toward the cabin, where the dogs have finished eating and are tumbling and tousling with one another. “Take the dog,” he says. “Long ago, when the dog was still a wolf, he was a rogue, and lived or died by what he could catch. Then the wolf came into camp, learned to live with humans, and he changed. Adapted. Soon the wolf was a dog, and the dog helped man, and the man helped dog. The two species learned to coexist. They even came to depend on each other.”

  “So you’re saying I should learn to fetch slippers?” I ask. I’m a little confused by this whole monologue.

  Oates merely pats his leg for Pontius, who comes leaping over to greet him. “That which remains still cannot survive,” he replies, scratching the husky’s head.

  I’m pondering Oates’s Yoda-like proclamation when I’m shaken from my reverie by that same Crack-BOOM! noise off in the distance that I heard when we first arrived two weeks ago.

  “Are you sure it never thunderstorms here?” I say to Oates, turning back around. “Because it seriously sounds like . . .” I trail off.

  Oates isn’t paying attention to me. He’s staring intently past me into the blanket of white fog, in this way that feels vaguely ominous.

  Crack-BOOM!

  “Uh, Oates?” I say. “What is that—”

  He puts up a hand to quiet me, and that’s when I pick it up. It’s not the thunder-crack that’s got him spooked. There’s another sound underneath it. A very quiet whirring that grows gradually louder. I do my own ominous staring-off-into-the-creepy-white-fog thing, but all my pitiful human eyes can make out is a giant heap of nada.

  Until . . .

  Several dark splotches begin to appear out of the fog. Five splotches, to be precise. As they get within a few hundred meters of us, I’m able to distinguish what they are: five large snowmobiles, cruising over the snow toward the camp.

  “More supplies?” I ask Oates. “Why is headquarters sending more stuff so soon after we got here? And why didn’t we get to cruise in on snowmobiles?”

  “Because,” Oates says solemnly. And when I look up at him, his stony face makes all of his previous stony faces look downright expressive. “We don’t use snowmobiles.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Get behind me, child.”

  A fierce chill hits me in the stomach. The Jin’Kai. They’ve found us.

  The snow instantly seems to grow a hundred times thicker than before. I feel like I’m stuck in one of those nightmares where you try to run but your legs won’t work as I try to push through the snow to hide behind Oates. Not that it will do much good. There’s at least four or five guys on each of the snowmobiles, and as tough as Oates is, I don’t think he’s going to stand much of a chance against twenty some Jin’Kai, who presumably are armed. Our only hope is if we can get back to the cabin and warn the others.

  Oates must have the same idea, because he’s slicing through the waist-deep snow to make a path for us away from the intruders. But instead of ducking inside the cabin, he suddenly shifts direction and heads to the dog kennel. A split second later he emerges brandishing a long pole, one of the snares he uses to corral the dogs when they’re overly rambunctious. Oates darts back in front of me just as the first two snowmobiles blast into camp.

  The riders are wearing black thermals with full ski masks covering their faces. Which is a little moustache-twirly-cliché, even for the Jin’Kai. Oates extends the snare out horizontally in front of him, and with a lightning-quick jump forward he manages to cross-check both of the drivers, knocking them off their vehicles before they can brake to a stop. They fall backward into the snow, forcing the other riders to bail out before the mobiles crash into the side of the cabin. The Jin’Kai roll away and crouch into attack positions, but they’re a bit clumsier than I would have expected. At least, compared to Oates, that is. Dude is a straight-up ninja.

  The Jin’Kai charge at him en masse, brandishing what look like batons. So apparently this ice-bound outfit thought they could capture me without the use of ray guns. Interesting. There’s ten attackers encircling Oates, while the last three snowmobiles whir in behind them, but Oates doesn’t seem fazed in the slightest. He bobs and weaves, avoiding each intended blow, using the momentum of his attackers against them as he whacks one in the back and trips another one up before lunging past.

  And then it happens. One of the Jin’Kai douchetards spots me and makes a move toward me. But before the dude can get two paces closer to me, Oates has caught him around the neck with the snare. He yanks him down hard into the snow.

  “Elvie, go!” he shouts.

  For serious, that is some badass shit.

  I’m busy thanking my lucky stars I somehow always seem to be sided with the buffest aliens, when Oates suddenly stumbles forward, tripping over the dude he’s just downed, and I realize he’s been smacked by a second Jin’Kai in the back. Despite his limp, Oates manages to spin on his attacker, landing a crunching smack with the butt of the pole against the dude’s jaw.

  I turn toward the door of the cabin, which is feeling a lot farther away than the six or so meters that it actually is. And I’m halfway there when one of the snowmobiles cuts in front of me, spraying me in the face with icy snow as it slices to a stop. My path is blocked. I raise my hands in the air—’cause, I don’t know, that’s what you do�
�and my eyes dart frantically, searching for Oates. But it’s all a mess of confusion and snow and fog and seriously loud barking, and I can’t find him anywhere.

  “It’s a girl!” one of the Jin’Kai shouts, leaping off his ride.

  “Grab her!” a second shouts. The first guy moves toward me. Given the snowdrifts and all, the number of available evasive maneuvers in my repertoire is slim, so the dude’s on me pretty quick. My only remaining move is one I haven’t stooped to since fourth grade.

  As the Jin’Kai grabs both my upraised arms, I knee him squarely where the sun don’t shine.

  His balls, I mean. The sun does not shine there.

  “Oof!” my attacker shouts, dropping me with a plop on my butt in the snow. “You little—”

  Before he can finish, a flash of tan fur comes to my rescue, tackling the Jin’Kai into the snow. As I scramble to my feet, Pontius is snarling and shredding the dude’s black thermal with his massive jaws.

  I knew that doggy liked me. The other dogs have all run away, or are taking in the scene semicuriously while licking themselves in unmentionable places. Not my buddy Pontius, though.

  “Pontius!” I shout, suddenly eyeing another intruder, smaller than the rest, who has snuck around from behind the snowmobile with his baton raised. “Pontius!” But the dog is too busy chewing on the guy underneath him to listen.

  Before the would-be PETA offender can strike the brave pup, I jump on the guy’s back. And to my surprise, the Jin’Kai topples over, burying us both in a drift. I wrestle the baton out of his hand without much effort and toss it away. He struggles underneath me, but I have him pinned.

  “No offense,” I say, panting. I wedge my knee farther into the guy’s stomach and glare at his ski-masked face. “But you’ve got to be the lamest, weakest Jin’Kai I’ve ever met.”

  “Jin what?” comes the high-pitched response. I do a double take. The person whose kidney I’m currently grinding to paste is . . . a woman.

  A baton blow to my noggin creates a rather unpleasant sensation, and I topple forward. I think I hear my female adversary call out “No!” as she pulls herself out from under me, but I can’t say. The sky above me is spinning round and round and round. A few hands grab me underneath my arms, and I am brusquely lifted to my feet.