Sacred Alarm Clock

by John T. Biggs

  Every bird in that tree takes flight at once. Hundreds of wings send shockwaves through the air, as if the spirits of the forest are shouting, “Jump some more!”

  Mary leaps from tree to tree, like a girl-size squirrel with a backpack and a pistol running from a predator who can kill with magic.

  Faster than possible, until she has time to think. To realize things like this can’t go on. Until she stops in a red cedar tree she knows is the perfect hiding place because a cat is there already. It’s huddled against the tree, so full of fear that everything looks like a coyote.

  After a few tender strokes the cat remembers. She purrs. She bumps her face against Mary’s. Recoils a little at the rotten apple smell, but then goes at it again. Mary doesn’t really think the bad man can hear a cat purring in a cedar tree, but she tries to shush her anyway.

  The cat climbs onto the backpack and settles in. Mary edges around the sticky cedar branches looking to see if the danger is gone. No one could follow her through the trees, not even a Native American with magic tracking skills.

  The branches are full of sap and needles. They bend but don’t break, so Mary’s descent is quiet. She steps onto the forest floor, with her cat passenger on her backpack ready to run. Ready to draw the pistol again, maybe even ready enough to pull the trigger this time—if the bad man is far enough away to give her time to draw, take aim and fire.

  But he’s not that far away. He stands just beyond the branches of the cedar tree, so quiet he hasn’t scared the cat on her backpack until now.

  Claws bury in her shoulder, piercing M’s shirt from L.L. Bean. The claws go deeper when the bad man takes a step closer, smiling the way a coyote smiles at an injured rabbit when he knows it will be over in a minute.

  Cat claws keep her from freezing. They hurt too much to ignore, even if she might be hurting a lot more in a minute or two. When the bad man takes another step she knows what to do. She grips the cat by the loose skin on the knap of her neck—the way a mother cat carries her kittens. The cat remembers and lets go.

  She flings the cat in the bad man’s face, like a mother cat would never do. The claws come out again. They take hold of the first thing they find. While they scratch the smile off of the bad man’s face Mary runs back toward the highway.

  Toward the rusty cars. Toward the dead coyote and the dead man. No destination but away, until she sees the Appaloosa.

  The horse is easy to untie. It’s easy to get into the saddle. Not so easy to make him go.

  “Geddiyup!” Isn’t that what you say? Mary kicks her heels against the horse’s sides. She smacks it on the rump, once, twice. Hard enough to hurt her hand. The bad man is out of the forest now, twenty feet in front of her. Cat scratches haven’t changed his plans.

  She pulls her pistol. Lines the bad man up in front of the sights. Closes her eyes so she won’t have the image of a murder in her mind.

  Now she squeezes, slow and sure, even if she can’t see, even if she’s almost sure to miss.

  Gunshots are always a surprise. The pistol jumps. Hot particles sting her shooting hand. The Appaloosa lunges forward. Almost too fast to hold on. Way too fast for the bad man to get out of the way.

  The pistol clatters to the ground behind her as she grabs hold of the saddle horn and presses her knees against the horse. There’s no stopping him. No steering either. Just leaning against the horse’s neck. Holding on and looking backward over the horse’s rump. Mary didn’t feel anything when the Appaloosa ran the bad man down, but there he is, lying on I-35 beside her mirror-finish pistol. Getting smaller and less dangerous every bouncing second.

  • • •

  Mary’s stomach clenches like a fist. Nothing inside her but more rotten apple taste. Her eyes ache with tears that are stuck just below the surface. Lots of bouncing on the back of an Appaloosa that won’t stop even when she says, “Whoa!”

  Maybe this horse only hears thought commands from bad men who track girls by magic. She wants to close her eyes but it’s even scarier to be on the back of a wild horse in the dark.

  Her legs burn from trying to stretch all the way around the horse. Her arms ache from trying to hold onto the saddle horn. Her brain hurts from trying to erase images she picked up from the bad man, but the images hang on like burs in cat fur. She’ll pick them out later one at a time after she’s made it to Ardmore and found enough Augmentin to save Raj’s life.

  If the Appaloosa doesn’t run forever.

  If the bad man doesn’t catch her.

  Will he track her all the way back to the cabin now that he has her scent? Will Raj be able to save her? Is Raj still alive?

  The throbbing in her head synchronizes with the Appaloosa’s gallop. In the olden days men raced horses this way. Ran them around tracks for. . . How long?

  One mile. Two miles. She sits up in the saddle like the cowboys used to do. Her knees clamp against the Appaloosa’s sides like a vice—so tight it sends a splitting pain to the middle of her belly. Her head throbs in rhythm with the galloping horse so perfectly she will never fall off.

  Never, ever. Even though the Appaloosa has run so far and so fast his body is covered with sweat slick as olive oil. Foam gathers around his mouth and flies into her face like snow. Colored snow, tinged in blood. The horse runs so fast it makes everything else in the world slow down—the pulsing in Mary’s head, the seconds that used to last exactly long enough to say, “One Mississippi.”

  Slower and slower, like someone pulled a cosmic emergency brake. Everything slows down and stops, as if time catches on a snag.

  Everything stops but Mary. She flies over the Appaloosa’s head, defying gravity, the way she does in dreams sometimes.

  Ballistics. The word comes to her all at once as I-35 rises up to smack her so hard it doesn’t hurt. She bounces. You have to hit the bottom before you bounce like that.

  She flips, bounces again, and lands on her feet, like an olden days girl gymnast doing a gold medal floor exercise.

  A girl’s voice tells her, “Don’t look behind you,” but she looks anyway. The Appaloosa lies dying on I-35. No cars or bad men anywhere around, but there are coyotes. There are always coyotes.

  The girl’s voice says, “The horse is not your fault.” Mary knows it’s M, because the words are accompanied by bright red looping subtitles written on the backs of her eyelids. M talks to Mary the only way ghosts can talk to people. Using Mary’s lips. Using air pulled in backwards by Mary’s empty lungs. The way ghosts talked to Raj as he was getting worse before he could get better.

  Inhaling deeply hurts almost as much as the throbbing in her head. A slow burn spreads from her face to her shoulders, running down like a stream of blood pulled by the force of gravity.

  She wipes moisture from her face. Not blood. Not the trail an animal leaves behind when she goes looking for her dying place. Mary’s face is dripping sweat, like the Appaloosa before he fell.

  M says, “Horses and people fall at exactly the same rate. So does civilization, but you can’t worry about things like that.”

  Mary has other worries, like Raj’s fever. Like his conversation with ghosts, the rotten apples on his breath, his seizure. Fevers kill you. Fevers are contagious.

  “Augmentin fixes everything. Keep walking.” M gives Mary a gentle push in Ardmore’s direction. “Not much farther now. The bad man is following, but you have a good head start.”

  “Best friends forever,” Mary says.

  “Fever friends.” M gives her another gentle push and sings a song about bridges over troubled waters. The kind a mother might have sung to her baby in the olden days.

  • • •

  Lives are only a little like the books left in the cabin by the Cimarron Girls. The end is never satisfying. How can Mary die with pastel colors cutting through her head like kitchen knives with loose handles and chipped blades? How can things go bad so fast after she escaped from the big bad wolf? After she walked all the way from a dead Appaloosa to a dead town?


  Maybe Ardmore would look better if her eyes weren’t filled with ground glass and blurry images. If her head didn’t throb, and her ears didn’t ring, and a ghost wasn’t prodding her along.

  “Fever friend,” M tells her. “Walk around the cars. Stay in the middle of the street. Feral dogs own everything now.”

  M makes perfect sense, or she would make perfect sense if she weren’t dead. A figment of Mary’s imagination like Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, and boys who bring you corsages and take you to the prom.

  Are there any boys left in the world, except for bad ones who want to kill you? Mary has a lot of questions but her tongue has turned to cotton and there are lumps of concentrated pain in her throat that would make it hard to swallow if she had any saliva.

  She finds her reflection in a store window the looters overlooked back in the olden days when they tore Ardmore apart. She’s still pretty in a used up, dying sort of way. She tries to smile but can’t get it exactly right, and she doesn’t want to smile when she sees the reflection of people and cars in an orderly city all around her.

  When she turns around to check it out, everything is gone. Ardmore is rusted hulks of cars and burned out buildings and scattered bones that used to be people. Augmentin won’t fix that, but maybe it will make her fever go away, and maybe it will save Raj’s life.

  The ringing in her ears turns into voices. “Not so bad. Not so bad to be a ghost.”

  “Whistle them away.” M nudges her around a corner toward a Walgreens that advertises twenty-four hour service on a rusty sign over the door.

  She can’t whistle, but the effort makes the voices stop. The pastel colors intensify into primaries that change with every passing second.

  One one-thousand, two one-thousand. This is what it’s like to die.

  M shoves her into the store, past the skeletal remains of looters, past the sounds of animals rustling through the aisles, until she can’t walk another step. She sits on the floor in the back of a twenty-four hour Walgreens that stays open, true to its pledge, even after the world has come to an end.

  She closes her eyes and when she opens them again a bottle of water is in one hand. A bottle of pills is in the other.

  Augmentin. Does it really fix everything? How many of the 875 milligrams are still working? She swallows two just in case and waits to see what happens after intermission.

  • • •

  There’s a wet spot between Mary’s legs. Her eyes won’t open right away—stuck closed with a glue that feels like sticky sand when she rubs it. Her skin burns every place it’s touched by clothing, or grime, or even a stray breeze, but the ringing in her ears is gone.

  So are the voices and the colors.

  M is still around, prodding her to wake up. “Take another Augmentin.”

  Everybody knows it takes three days for antibiotics to work, but she feels better. She remembers things from the olden days. Her mother, her father, an RV trip to see dinosaur footprints.

  And things from yesterday. Was it yesterday when she killed a mother coyote and a horse and threw a cat into a bad man’s face and saw a city full of ghosts in the reflection of the last unbroken window in Ardmore?

  M says, “Take another Augmentin. Sometimes you get better right before you die.”

  So many ways to die. She swallows the pill and thinks about how far it is back to the cabin where there is running water, and clean clothes, and Raj.

  Rats poke their twitching noses out of dark places under shelves and sample the air to see if she is weak enough to eat.

  Not yet. Maybe never. Augmentin fixes everything. She is almost strong enough to stand on her own now, to walk away from the smell of sweat and urine and a fever that has almost burned itself out.

  A flash of heat followed by a chill reminds her the antibiotics have only started.

  Another flash of heat accompanied by the sound of footsteps in the front of the store. So many ways to die. Ways much worse than fevers.

  Rats scatter when the bad man finds her.

  He tips his hat to her, polite to the very end. He doesn’t hate her any more than a hunter hates the animals he kills. He needs her. Has to have a girl like her every now and then and there are so few. Surely she understands.

  He tells her everything about himself with a twitch of his lips, a tilt of his head, a subtle shift in posture. No point in talking, because there is no one left to listen—except Mary, and she won’t be around for long.

  M says, “Men like this want a certain kind of girl—young, powerless, afraid.” Filth and foul odors won’t matter if he’s hungry, and Mary knows he’s hungry.

  The bad man’s eyes sample her body through her clothes. He’s not worried about the fever that is coming back so fast it’s making the world spin into nausea. He’s not worried about the taste of rotten apples coming up in hot surges. He doesn’t hear the ringing in her ears, or M telling her things are about to happen really fast. She’s about to get a present from her fever friend.

  The bad man kneels beside her, puts his hand where her breasts have barely gotten started. He leans in close, as if he’s about to tell her something she has to hear before she dies.

  “Now!” M shouts.

  Bright red letters explode though Mary’s mind retelling every passage in M’s diary. There’s a shriek from the back of her throat, filling the world with rotten apple mist. Her arms and legs and head and body thrash and flail like a marionette in an earthquake.

  For a few ticks of the cosmic clock she isn’t there—but then she’s back. Looking into the wide eyes of a bad man who’s seen his first seizure. He wants to step back, but his mind is running in a circle trying to figure out what happens next.

  “Let me help you make up your mind.” She puts her arms around the killer and kisses him on the lips. A French kiss. The kind of kiss M’s diary said would drive men wild. Lots of tongue and her salivary glands are working again. Hot and deadly, because Augmentin hasn’t had time to fix everything.

  The killer pushes her away. Backs out of the room where the miracle drugs are stacked safe and dry on shelves.

  “It won’t take long,” she tells him. “Better start looking for your dying place.” Then all she can hear are his footsteps running off to join the ghosts of Ardmore.

  “Take another Augmentin,” M tells her.

  And Mary does. She always listens to her fever friend.

  • • •

  M isn’t talking anymore, but she hasn’t gone away. She never will, not completely, now that Mary got as bad as she could get and then got better.

  “Is it too late for Raj?” She knows M isn’t real enough to answer. Ghosts don’t talk to you unless you’re dying. But she talks to M anyway, because there’s nobody else. Not even one of the six cats who followed her as far as I-35, but couldn’t run as fast as a wild horse.

  So many cats have disappeared since Raj brought her to the Cimarron Girls’ cabin. They evaporate, like puddles of water you can’t find anymore. You don’t have to cry for evaporated cats because they might come back. The way she is coming back to the cabin with a backpack full of Augmentin and a 9mm Glock looted from the glove compartment of an abandoned car, and a magazine full of bullets. Enough to kill ten coyotes. Enough to kill ten bad men that Raj never told her about.

  She weaves through the trees stepping on rocks and bare stretches of dirt, almost floating above the forest floor. Without leaving tracks. Quiet enough to sneak up on a ghost.

  Mary circles the cabin, because she’s careful now. She heard voices deep in the woods not ten miles away. Male voices—maybe something left over from the fever, but they sounded real enough. Loud and cheerful. Young men making too much noise because no one’s tried to kill them yet. She will check that out after she makes Raj well again. After she saves him the way he saved her when the olden days came to an end and not quite everybody died.

  Three cats run out of the cabin when she opens the front door.

  “Raj!” She can feel t
he emptiness inside. Nothing here except the space left behind by the three frightened cats.

  “Anybody home?” Raj’s impression remains in his chair. His Halliburton coffee cup sits on the floor, a crust of chicken soup dried at the bottom.

  She sits in the chair hoping to feel warmth, but that evaporated along with the chicken soup and Raj. She waits for tears, but they don’t come, because you can’t cry for a cat that might come back.

  And if Raj doesn’t come back, what then?

  “I’ll bounce,” Mary removes the 9mm Glock from her waistband and sets it on the floor beside the Halliburton cup.

  “Got to hit bottom before you bounce.”

  Who’d have thought there’d be so many wrecked cars on the Oklahoma River Bridge? Rusted out hulks, left over from the riots when people didn’t know which way to run. Mary makes the sign of the cross, the way old time Catholics did when things might go terribly wrong.

  “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” She synchronizes the words with the motion of her hand—exactly like Raj showed her before he went away.

  It feels good to be in control of something, even if the something is a ritual from the olden times. There’ll be so many things she can’t control when she starts across the bridge. Every wreck is a hiding place for something deadly—a wild dog, a coyote, a man left over from the olden times.

  A bad man. Is there any other kind, now that Raj is gone? She crosses herself one more time, sucking up to God just in case he’s real. She whispers a silent prayer that there are men like Raj on the other side of the bridge. Exactly like him, only less dad-like. Men the right age for her. Good looking men who aren’t solitary killers or members of misogynist boy-gangs who give a whole new meaning to the idea of one-night stands.

  Misogynist. She likes to say that word. It sounds smart—college educated, sophisticated. It’s a library word. There’ll be libraries in Oklahoma City. There’ll be bullets too, and maybe something special, like the 9mm Glock she found in Ardmore, or the switchblade knife she found in Seminole. Everything in the world is finders-keepers now.