Windfall

by Tempe O'Kun

  About an hour after they’d started talking about giving up, Kylie sighed and wriggled a little closer against his warmth. “So…how’s your family?”

  Max had been on the verge of cracking and hauling her off to the nearest horizontal surface, research be damned. The question did more to douse his enthusiasm than a bucket of ice water to the crotch. Dreading the topic, he shrugged and waggled his phone, which he’d been keeping at the ready in case one of the skitters showed up. “Oh, they’re okay.”

  “No, seriously.”

  Despite the dark, his fingertips found his wristwatch, fiddling with the double time zone controls. “They want me home. Every time I finagle another few days here, Mom gets more worried it’ll be permanent.”

  A spark of what might have been hope in her eyes.

  He pretended not to notice.

  “Missing you is easy.” She kissed his cheek. “And really tough.”

  He settled an arm over her shoulder, still leaning over the back of the sofa.

  She nuzzled up against his shoulder, her paws tracing his broad back. “It’s really none of my business, but you are an adult.”

  “Barely. And not in her eyes.” He shuffled to get more comfortable, pressing a little closer to her. He laid a forlorn chin on the window sill. “You never seem to have these problems with your mom.”

  “Probably because all we ever had is each other.” A shrug telegraphed down her supple spine. “Only child, single parent; I guess we’re just lucky we don’t get too worked up about most things.” A giggle bubble through her. “Should I send a thank-you card for letting me borrow you?”

  He woofed a quiet laugh into the throw blanket, never taking his eyes from the open window. “Nah, it’s just idle howling. So long as I come home—” His ears shot up.

  Movement rattle against the plastic bin.

  A flat-bodied creature squiggled up the contours of the trash can, segmented body wriggling side to side. It hesitated on the lip of the open trash can, sniffing, or looking, it was hard to tell. Then it was over the edge and diving in with abandon. A beak munched on food scraps while at least half a dozen beady black eyes kept a quivering watch. A row of nasty-looking quills flittered along its back. Half a dozen jointed legs creaked as they sifted through the refuse. Alien as it was, it looked nothing like the monster they’d seen while searching the property.

  Holding their breath, the would-be researchers brought their phones to bear and snapped a few rapid shots apiece, the flashes blinding in the nighttime gloom.

  The creature hissed and scrabbled in panic on the smooth plastic. It leapt from the bin and rippled to nothing in midair.

  “What the halibut?” Kylie scampered to the front door and poked her head out. “Did it get away?”

  Close behind, the dog flipped through the photos he’d taken. “No, it…disappeared.”

  She brought her head back inside to glare at him. “The heck does that mean?”

  He gestured helplessly at his phone. “It sort of…wavered, and then it was just gone. Like a crossfade.” He held the final image up for her to see.

  She scowled at it. “Do you have some weird settings on? Those pictures look fake.”

  He turned it back around and inspected it, nodding as he considered. Apart from being see-through, the creature cast a shadow that didn’t match the direction of the light from the camera flash. The effect left it strangely illuminated, as though light hit it from every direction at once. The monster looked more like a bad overlay than part of the real world. “And not very good fakes, either. The CG on the show was more convincing.”

  Closing the door, she flicked through her own images. “Ugh! Mine are bad too. People really would think we’re just trying to drum up attention for the show.”

  Paw on her shoulder, he padded back to the living room. “And that we can’t be bothered to do it properly…”

  She flopped back down onto the sofa. “The journal said something about them being ‘not properly anchored’ and ‘capture not possible.’ Guess this is what it meant.”

  “It wasn’t a total waste.” Max shrugged. “We have a second data point now. If the skitters are real, it means your great-uncle’s journals are at least partly reliable.”

  “Oh that’s reassuring.” She flailed her arms in exasperation and wriggled against the cushions. “I really need every memory vampire and gorgon and hungry vapor from Strangeville showing up in my life.”

  “They’re not built like the thing we ran into in the woods. They’re too flat, too clumsy. Way too many legs.”

  “So we’ve got two kinds of monsters?” Her gaze cast out the window as she chittered with dismay. “How many more are we gonna find?”

  “I don’t know…” He sat next to her, careful not to land too hard on the sofa springs. “The other question is why no one else has evidence of them. Even we got some bad photos.”

  “Maybe they have! We could check online.” She tapped some search teams into her phone, then winced at the stupidity of the results.

  Max peeked groggily at his watch. “I don’t want to dive to that particular depth of the Internet right now.”

  “What about the monsters?” She pointed out the window at the disturbed trash bin.

  He patted her shoulder. “Assuming we’re not tripping from a gas leak or something, they’ll still exist in the morning.” The dog leaned back into a massive yawn, stretching to spread his fingers and toes. “We should go to bed.”

  She grumbled, but didn’t resist as he stood and pulled her to her feet. They padded back to the dark entryway.

  Just as he turned toward his room, she gripped him by the tail.

  The big husky looked back at her with quiet curiosity.

  Uncomfortable with the shadows around her, she squirmed. The silky warmth of his fluff brushed her finger webbing. “We just watched weird aliens eating our trash from the living room. You’re not leaving me alone.”

  In her grasp, the fluffy tail swayed gently. With a soft smile, he towed her upstairs and into her bedroom.

  She closed and locked the door behind them. Shedding their outer clothes, they crawled onto the bed together, pulling the blankets up for safety. His muscled frame sank a ways into the waterbed, propping her higher than she was used to. Very carefully, he held her close. His breathing settled into a steady rhythm. Time evaporated in the warm dark under the blankets, impossible to measure except against his calm, powerful heartbeats. It was pretty cool having him around, having a friend and, now, a lover she could rely on even when the world broke its own rules.

  Her fingers played over his thick hands as her paws and tail entwined with his. Under his arm, the otter watched the “Thanks, Maxie. For everything.”

  The dog snored.

  She squawked with outrage. How could he sleep after seeing monsters? It was completely unfair, her barely getting any sleep and the big oaf can conk out anytime, anywhere. She wrung her paws and fretted. Could the skitters get in the house? Had they always been? She muttered and grumbled, unhappy but unwilling to leave the safety of his arms to check. Would he wake up if they came in the room? Would she?

  A faint whine rose from Max’s broad chest. His paws twitched, pantomiming a run.

  Oh great, now he was going to keep her awake. Wasn’t sleeping with someone supposed to be romantic and peaceful? What was he even dreaming about? He didn’t seem to be enjoying it. Normally, he slept like a log—

  She flailed out from his embrace and bounded up, stiff as a board. Her palms bounced on his shoulder. “Max! Wake up!”

  “Mmf?” His sky-blue eyes struggled to focus on her. “Huh?”

  “What were you dreaming about?” She bit her lip.

  He blinked in the pale starlight, then shrugged. “I don’t know; something about stars, except I was in the sky with them.”

  “You just had a nightmare!” Her body wiggled up into a bounce, sending shockwaves across the waterbed. “That’s great!”

  Ears up, h
e tilted his head at her. “I guess?”

  “The nightmare, you fluffy fool.” She gave him a gentle shove. “The one I’ve been having.”

  He bounced a little on bed, patiently perplexed. “Okay?”

  “It’s gotta be something in this room.” She looked around. “Maybe the water in my new waterbed is psychically radioactive or something.” Her paw prodded the rubbery surface.

  He gave a wide yawn, blinking thoughtfully. “Hey, where are you keeping that disk?”

  “Of course!” She yanked open her nightstand drawer and seized the bone disk. “That has to be it! I bet it’s trying to take over our brains, like it did Leister.”

  He propped himself up on an elbow. “Well, it’s not very good at it if it only works when you’re asleep next to it.”

  Kylie contemplated the disk in her paws for a moment. It looked pretty flimsy; she could probably crush it with her teeth if she needed to, but the world probably wouldn’t take an otter-gnawed artifact seriously. She decided to hold it only with her claws. “What’d we do with it?”

  “I don’t know.” He sat up on the edge of the bed. “Sleep in my room for now?”

  “Good start.” She stuffed it into one of the journals and shoved it back into the drawer. “Well, tonight’s been a bullet train into and out of Crazy Town.”

  He lead her out of the bedroom. “I keep telling you: you’re probably not crazy.”

  “You keep saying ‘probably’ and you’ll drive me crazy.” Reaching back, she pulled the door shut as much to stop her mom saying anything as to block alien dream transmissions. “C’mon, aspiring writer: you should know this is the point in the story when you tell me I’m not insane.”

  He took her hand. “You’re not insane.”

  She squeezed his in return. “Thank you.”

  His big white paws creaked down the old stairs. He stayed closed to her. “We need to know what we’re doing with here.”

  The otter slipped into his bedroom, repeating her locking ritual from upstairs. “That would be nice.”

  “Other people must’ve seen some of this weird stuff.” He settled onto his second bed of the evening, this one all creaky with springs. “We could talk to Karl; he’s snooped around town for the show’s inspirations.”

  She shook her round little muzzle. “No, we want someone who won’t blab that we asked them. Don’t want it getting back to the big monster’s accomplice.” She paused. “Somebody who’s lived here long enough to know the lore, but who hasn’t bought into it.” Some of the slump left her shoulders and her faint smile lit up the dark. “I know just the person to ask.”

  — Chapter 16 —

  Chambers

  The next morning, Kylie puttered her Amphicar into the store parking lot and hopped out. With a quick look around to check for Cindy, she eeled in the back door and past the shelves of items yet to be sorted, tagged, and eventually destroyed by customers’ offspring.

  As she emerged from the back room, her feline coworker looked up from his phone at the till. He pulled his headphones off and slung them around his neck. “Weren’t you doing the tourist thing with your new bunk buddy? What’re you doing in here?”

  “Didn’t take us long to see the stuff worth seeing.” She wove through the shelves toward the storefront, pretending to examine the merchandise as she tried to think of a way to steer the conversation where it needed to go. In the end, she figured she might as well begin one awkward conversation with another. “The cave tour was kinda cool, though. I didn’t know you had a sister…” She let the unasked question hang.

  The cat slunk back on the stool, as his tail flicked back and forth with vague amusement. “Yes, my sister is a bunny, like my dad. Sarah was in vitro, before you ask. Egg donor. And I was sired by an old friend of Dad’s.”

  “I didn’t want to pry.” She shrugged up to the countertop. “You must get tired of answering that question.”

  “Eh.” The tabby shrugged, gesturing through his phone’s file tree. “Just one more way she complicates my life.” He reached to show her a photo of himself, Sarah, a male bunny, and a female cat. They stood in front of the local high school, with the rabbit in a graduation gown. “Senior year, some new kid saw we were close and asked if I was getting some tail. I explained to him that we’d come out of the same uterus.”

  The lutrine laughed. “Bet he wasn’t expecting that.”

  He flicked through the rest of his mom’s social media gallery: on vacation at some sunny beach, as babies covered in cake, dressed up as cacti for a grade school play.

  Her ears flicked up at a picture of him with a longboard. “You skateboard?”

  “Used to. We live at the lowest point in town.” He shrugged. “I gave up because it felt like those spiraling coin-funnels at the mall, always leading back to my house.” With a roll of his eyes, the cat withdrew to the music section and started alphabetizing. “So were the Crystal Caverns as enchanting as the advertising says?”

  She hesitated for a moment. “No, but we got her to take us down into the mines.”

  “Seriously?” He hissed, straightening. It was the closest to angry she’d ever seen him “I told her not to keep poking around in those mines. Dad’s as gung-ho about caves as anyone, and even he’s told us all our lives to stay out of those.” His thin arms crossed. “Don’t encourage her. Bad enough she still lets Cindy drag her around.”

  Kylie’s clawed grip on the countertop tightened. “What if she has a good reason to worry about those mines?”

  “Everybody does.” He ticked through the albums with his claws. “They’re all at least a hundred years old and no one looks after them anymore.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant.” She cornered her feline coworker at the vinyl shelves. “Shane, sit down for a second.”

  He blinked at her, confused by the change in the conversation. With a playful lash of his tail, he sprawled into a reading chair. “Is this an intervention? I swear, the catnip wasn’t mine.”

  “What? No. Focus.” She took a deep breath. “This may sound…crazy, but monsters live in the forest. Max and I saw one.”

  “Duh.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Yeah, you might’ve noticed nobody really goes in the forest.” His slitted green eyes rolled. “Except for the tourists.”

  “We saw this little skittering thing—” She stammered to a halt as her brain tried to backpedal and rejoin the conversation. “Wait, what?”

  “Lots of legs, lots of eyes, about the size of a breadbox?” He made little creeping gestures with his fingers. “Yeah, they’re around.”

  Her webbed paws tried to strangle him from a distance. “You’ve known what they are this whole time?”

  “I sometimes go to the Chamber of Commerce meetings for the free snacks.” He shrugged. “They talk about what they should leak to the paranormal crowd to encourage tourism.”

  The otter sputtered. “Are these things dangerous?”

  “Nah.” He brushed back a stray lock of hair. “They’re like, I dunno, seagulls. Show up, grab some scraps, then they’re gone again.”

  She sat down on a squeaky barstool. “And nobody’s ever captured one?”

  He shrugged. “If it were possible, I’m sure someone would’ve managed it by now.”

  “We tried to take some pictures, but…” On her phone, she flipped through the disappointing images for him.

  The cat smirked, sharp teeth glinting like slices of moonlight. “Yeah, they’re not photogenic.”

  “Where can I find them? They look like of like bugs, so we thought underground, but we didn’t seen any in the old mines.”

  “You went in the mines?” He crossed his arms, the stripes on them not quite lining up. “I wouldn’t go there.”

  “Why?”

  “The mines are dangerous.” The feline shrugged, sorting dusty records. “More than abandoned mines should be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Back
when they had actual silver, the workers got weird injuries, said they saw strange things down there. But the silver kept coming in, so nobody cared. Now, about once a generation, somebody wanders in and comes out…different. Hasn’t happened with my generation yet and I figure it shouldn’t be anybody I like, including me. Or even my little sister.”

  “Comes out different?”

  He groaned. “Yeah, they can’t stop talking about the shadows of other realities and stuff.”

  “Shane!” The otter tumbled from her barstool behind the counter. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  “Like I said, didn’t want that to happen to someone I liked. Pretty clear I can’t keep you out of this. I’d like at least to keep you safe.” He shrugged and fiddled with his headphone cord. “Besides, you wanted people to think you weren’t crazy, and dealing with this stuff has a tendency to make people go crazy. I thought you wanted to avoid that. Also, the new Tactical Love album came out.” One orange finger tapped his headphones. “You should borrow it.”

  She clawed up the counter and back to her feet. “Why haven’t you told the cops? The media? Anybody?”

  “Tourist trap town claims it has monsters? But for real this time?” He rolled his eyes, leaning back against a bin of vinyls. “Everybody who claims that sort of stuff gets labeled as crazy.” His eyebrow arced at her. “No offense.”

  Reeling from the revelation, she stammered for questions. “How’d you find out about them?”

  Another shrug. “It’s all just rumor. Even at the Chamber meetings people pretend they’re just kidding whenever they talk about this stuff, even though we all know better. You wanted facts.”

  “And you never followed up on any of this?”

  The cat groaned. “I work in this store because I’m one of the few people in this town who isn’t obsessed with supernatural junk.” A deep sigh weighed down his shoulders. “Please, don’t tell Karl about this.”

  Her ears popped up. “Why?”