“Attention, Anomaly Flats,” the voice droned. “A family of rabbits has escaped from the Anomaly Flats Zoo. The rabbits were in transit from the laboratories at Complexxus Industries, where they were undergoing specialized isotope injection testing. A gender-indeterminate spokesperson from Complexxus released the following statement: Quote, ‘We urge the inhabitants of Anomaly Flats to remain calm. We are determined to find, imprison, and execute the escaped rabbits before Wednesday. The search team would like to remind us that we should be grateful that the rabbits did not escape on a Wednesday.’
“‘The effects of the gentle, organic, non-violent, non-GMO, gluten-free tests Complexxus ran on the rabbits will not be known for another three to seven hours. The possible effects of the tests include, but are in no way limited to: severe pet dander; erratic behavior; foaming at the mouth; bleeding from the tips of the fur; hunger for human tissue; shocking and exponential levels of growth; flight; a complex mastery of the English language; time travel; and a penchant for baking complicated French pastries. If you come into contact with one of these rabbits, do what you do when you come into contact with any rabbit: Lie down and wait for the end, because rabbits are superior to humans in almost every conceivable way, and your death is assured. Complexxus Industries has worked hard to make it so.’ End quote.
“The Walmart would like to remind you of its sale on canned tuna this week, three cans for $2.49. The Walmart would like to add that canned tuna is a natural rabbit deterrent, which we all know is not true. Attention, Anomaly Flats: If you go into the Walmart, you will be drawn into aisle 8. Do not go into the Walmart. Do not approach the escaped rabbits. Do not approach any rabbits at all.”
The speaker squeaked off, leaving Mallory alone with her reeling thoughts, the thick brush of the woods, and a town filled with escaped, mutant, murderous rabbits. She promised herself that if she ever made it out of Anomaly Flats, she was never, ever, ever coming back to Missouri.
She peeked out from behind a tree and saw that Lewis hadn’t skipped a beat in his examination of the traffic light. As she watched, he plucked a penlight from the chest pocket of his lab coat and clicked it on, shining the light directly into the glowing green bulb. He moved the light slowly from one side to the other, apparently giving the stoplight a vision test.
Mallory shook her head and continued her rugged climb to the top of the hill. She couldn’t see the sun through the canopy of leaves above, and as she drew nearer the top of the ridge, the sky behind it began to take on an orange-ish glow. No way is it sunset already, she thought, checking her watch. This, of course, was pointless, because her watch had ceased its usefulness, and she didn’t even know why she was still wearing it. Old habits die hard, she reasoned. She shook the broken watch anyway, and the hour hand spun wildly around, making six full turns of the dial in the span of two seconds. “Perfect,” she murmured.
Watch or no watch, she knew it was nowhere near dusk.
A hard wind blew up on the far side of the ridge, and a storm of red sand whipped up behind the hill, spitting grit down on Mallory as it dusted the woods.
A forest butting up against a desert? she thought. This place is so fucking weird.
She reached the top of the ridge and found that the land fell away sharply after the forest rocks. She crouched above a sheer cliff that dropped straight down for at least 300 feet before opening up to a wide, desert plain. “Oh my God,” she whispered. Her heart seized up in her chest, and a sickly whirlpool spun itself out of control in the pit of her stomach. Her head swam with the lightness of vertigo. If the swoon made her faint, she would pitch forward into the hellish landscape below. So she pulled herself back from the edge, gripping her fingers into the divots of the forest rocks.
The desert that stretched as far as the horizon was a deep, reddish orange. Mallory had never seen sand quite that color before. It was as if an entire empire of iron had rusted over, crumbled to dust, and coated the Midwestern plain with its red ashes. A fierce dust storm had brewed up in the center of the desert, over an outcropping of angry orange rocks that jutted up from the sands. It whipped the red-orange dust into furious dirt devils that blasted across the desert floor and spiraled up into a swirling mass of rust-red clouds above. Mallory shuttered her eyes against the blowing sand that shot over the ridge, but despite the onslaught and her dizzying fear of heights, she found she couldn’t look away from the desolate landscape. The desert below was so raw; so uncivilized; so primal. The sun blazed down from above, pale, but still hot behind the roiling red clouds. Mallory couldn’t help but notice that something looked off about that sun.
It was too small.
The wind down in the wide canyon whipped and whorled; the desert was devoid of any sound other than its frantic scream. This was a wild place, untamed, so undeniably natural and brutal that it mesmerized the woman hunkered down in the forest it bordered. She squinted in awe against the blowing sand. Her hand reached up, almost of its own will. Something about the nature of this strange plain made her want to reach out and touch the air, brush her fingers along the violent blast of sand, let this desert wind course over her skin. She reached her fingers forward, closer to the red-orange glow in the air…and closer… and closer…
“Mallory!” Lewis bounded up to her right and slapped her hand down. He was panting hard after sprinting up the ridge.
“Ow!” Mallory whined, shaking the sting out of her hand. “What was that for?”
Lewis doubled over, sucking air into his lungs with his hands on his knees. “What—did I—tell you?” he wheezed.
Mallory narrowed her eyes. “That I’m sturdy.”
Lewis shook his head. “No—I said—don’t—go up—the ridge.”
“Because God forbid I get to the top and see the incredible view of a gorgeous desert,” she sniped. “Holy shit, Lewis…you saved me from death by natural beauty. How can I ever repay you?”
“It’s not—” Lewis panted. “It’s—Mallory, that’s—”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Lewis, breathe. It’s what?”
Lewis straightened up and squeezed his eyes shut as he put his hands above his head and took deeper breaths. “It’s Mars,” he said.
Mallory stared blankly up at him. “It’s what?”
“It’s not a desert; it’s Mars,” he repeated. His breath was coming back to him, and he put his hands on his hips. His lab coat billowed in the blowing wind. “The planet Mars. I mean, not like the whole thing. Just two square miles of it.”
Mallory’s mouth fell open. Sand blew in and coated her tongue, but she didn’t notice. She turned and looked out over the red plain. “That’s...Mars?”
“Utopia Planitia,” Lewis nodded, panting. “It starts—at this cliff and ends—way over there, just before—the bowling alley.”
“There’s two square miles of another planet between here and a bowling alley?”
“We take our cosmic bowling—very seriously.”
Mallory shook her head slowly, taking in the bizarre majesty of the neighboring planet. “How did it…get here?”
Lewis shrugged. “I have no earthly idea. Heh…earthly.” Mallory groaned. “But reach past the cliff here, and your hand goes into Mars’ atmosphere. Goodbye, fingers.”
Mallory instinctively crawled back a few feet from the edge of the ridge. “Lewis, how can that be Mars?”
Lewis shrugged. “How can anything be anything? It’s Anomaly Flats…welcome to the weird. One of these days I’m going to make an extravehicular space suit from scratch and be the first human to explore it,” he beamed.
“You’re going to make a space suit?” Mallory asked doubtfully.
Lewis chose to ignore this particular question. “Until then, let’s stay on this side of the ridge, huh?”
Mallory nodded. She slipped back down the hill into the surprising comfort of the tangled
underbrush. She might get poison ivy, and she might get Lyme disease, but at least she wouldn’t have her eyeballs sucked out of her skull and deposited somewhere on Mars, and that was something.
They were halfway down the hill before she realized she was shaking. She held her trembling hand up to her face and inspected it numbly. “Huh,” she said.
Lewis frowned. He stopped and turned Mallory to face him. He pulled down at her eyelids with his thumbs and inspected her pupils. Then he put two fingers on the underside of her wrist. “Your pulse is racing, and your skin’s going clammy. You’re either in shock, or you’re hungry. Possibly both. Sometimes people go into shock if they get hungry enough, though I’m not sure if shock can cause hunger. It’s undocumented, as far as I know, but that doesn’t mean there’s no correlation. Which is probably neither here nor there.”
“Probably not.”
“Look, let’s leave the traffic light for now, all right? Go get some lunch, boost your blood sugar a bit?” Mallory nodded. She felt like someone had snuck into her brain and placed pieces of gauze behind her eyes. Her brain felt detached, blocked, and her thoughts were fuzzy, if they were anything at all.
“Yeah,” she said, trudging down the hill toward the Winnebago. “Lunch is good. No waffles, though.”
“No waffles,” Lewis agreed, taking her hand and helping her down the forest path. “Trudy may have a monopoly on breakfast, but there’s plenty more for lunch.”
“No Chick-fil-A, either,” she added as she stumbled along.
Lewis smiled at that. “Not for lunch, no,” he chuckled. “Never for lunch. But we’ll go to Chick-fil-A eventually.” He gave her a kind smile. “Everyone goes to Chick-fil-A eventually.”
Chapter 10
“How’d it go with the traffic light?” Mallory asked as they rumbled farther north. She gnawed on a granola bar Lewis had dug out from the glove compartment, trying not to break her teeth. It was a very old bar.
“It didn’t go at all; I was interrupted,” he said pointedly. Mallory made a sour face at him, but he didn’t turn his head to see it. “I’ll go back sometime when there are fewer distractions.”
“I’m not a distraction,” Mallory insisted. “I’m a delight.” She gazed out at the forest, which seemed to stretch eternally in all directions. “How big is Anomaly Flats?” she asked.
“Oh, it depends,” Lewis said as he struggled with the Winnebago’s steering wheel. “Usually about 20 miles across, end-to-end. Bigger on Wednesdays.”
Mallory raised an eyebrow. “How much bigger?”
Lewis shrugged. “I don’t really know. No one’s ever made it to the city limits on a Wednesday. They’re too far away.”
“What day is it today?”
Lewis reached down and turned on the radio. Their ears were assaulted by a storm of static. He fiddled with the buttons, and the radio cycled through a handful of stations; banjo music turned to a classical orchestra turned to a wailing sitar turned to a rasping voice spitting out evil-sounding epithets in Latin. One more turn of the dial, and a woman’s voice crackled to life, the same voice that had been sounding over the town’s speakers. “…inconsequential. This is the day, weather, and time broadcast. The day is: Friday. The weather is: As it should be. The time is: Inconsequential. This is the day, weather, and time—” Lewis shut off the radio.
“Compelling stuff,” Mallory snorted. She took some comfort in the fact that the day of the week, if nothing else, was the same here. “You need a radio station to tell you what day it is?”
Lewis nodded. “The radio station makes all the important decisions,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Mallory dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and rubbed. “This is the most lucid fever dream anyone’s ever had,” she decided.
“A fever dream?” Lewis asked with a shrewd little grin. He was clearly proud of himself for something, though Mallory had no idea what it might be.
As they rounded a corner, Mallory saw a gathering of Anomalians milling about in a gravel parking lot.
“Would a fever dream have food trucks?” he asked.
Half a dozen food trucks lined the far end of the gravel lot. Lewis pulled the RV off the road and turned into the gravel lot, narrowly avoiding three pedestrians. “Sorry!” he hollered through the closed window.
“My fever dream would have food trucks,” Mallory said. “All of my dreams have food trucks, actually…fever or otherwise.”
She tossed the petrified granola bar over her shoulder and got out of the cab. She stretched like a cat in the warm sun. Here, at last, was a part of Anomaly Flats she could get behind. Food trucks, she thought with a smile. Mankind’s finest invention.
Of course, there was something a little off about these particular trucks. They were white, for one thing—pure, gleaming white, as if they’d each been freshly painted that morning, with no colorful logos, no oversized photos of food, no caricatures of short Mexicans in huge sombreros sinking their square teeth into overstuffed tacos. Just pure, sterile whiteness, except for their names, which were painted on in dull, black letters. And they weren’t even fun names; there was no Neat-o Burrito or Thrilled Cheese or Moo-Moo Barbecue. Instead, all the trucks were marked with stenciled words that were more descriptors than names, and clinical ones at that. They read: PEELED SHRIMP, ENCASED MEATS, HARD-SHELL PORK PRODUCT TACOS, CHOCOLATE PUDDING FROM POWDER, RICE BOWLS WITH VARIOUS CANNED VEGETABLES, and SPECIAL.
“They need new marketing directors,” Mallory decided.
Lewis shrugged. “They’re government-sponsored trucks,” he said, joining her on the gravel. “What do you expect?”
The Encased Meats and the Chocolate Pudding trucks seemed to be most popular among the assembled crowd, though every truck had at least one person in its line—every truck, that was, except for the Special truck. “What’s the special?” Mallory asked.
“It changes every day. But don’t do it, Mallory,” Lewis warned. “Sure, sometimes it’s lobster, and sometimes it’s cheeseburgers. But I got the special once.” His voice went quiet, and he cast his eyes down at his hands, which found themselves nervously rubbing the sides of his pants. “You don’t want to do it. Okay? You don’t want to take the chance.”
“What was it? Napalm cups?” she snorted.
Lewis shook his head sadly. “I wish,” he whispered.
Mallory’s face dropped. Lewis wasn’t joking. Something terrible had come out of that food truck; the drained, pallid look on his face was proof enough of that. There was no way she couldn’t know now. “What was it, Lewis?” she asked, touching his shoulder lightly. The scientist flinched, and she drew her hand back. “What did they serve you?”
“It’s not just that they served it,” Lewis said quietly. “It’s that I ate it. Mallory…I had to eat it. If you buy lunch from the Special truck, you have no choice but to eat it. Do you understand? They…they force you. I didn’t want to eat it, but…” Tears streamed from his eyes, and his words choked off in his throat.
Mallory turned to face him directly and put both hands squarely on his shoulders. She lowered her head so that he had no choice but to look her in the eye. “Oh my God…Lewis…what was it?”
Lewis tried to shrug out of her grip, but Mallory held firm. The tears stung his eyes red. He shook his head, and with all the courage he could muster, he whispered, “Pâté, Mallory. They made me eat pâté.”
Mallory blinked. She didn’t realize her fingers were digging into his shoulders until he whimpered a little in pain. “Are you kidding me?”
“It was horrible,” Lewis insisted, wiping away a tear. “Duck liver, Mallory. Duck liver.”
Mallory released her grip on his shoulders. She took a deep breath and had to struggle like she’d never struggled before against the urge to punch Lewis in the mouth.
S
he succeeded, sort of.
She didn’t punch his face. But she did slug his arm as hard as she could.
“Ow!” he whined. He rubbed at the pain as she turned and headed toward the Special truck.
“You are such a delicate little pansy,” she said over her shoulder.
“Mallory, don’t do it!” he called out after her. “It might be something even worse this time! It might be haggis! Do you hear me, Mallory? They might make you eat haggis!”
A tall, strapping man in a reflective yellow work vest approached the Special truck as Mallory made her way over. He had a dirty white hardhat tucked under his arm, and his thick leather boots were caked with mud. A small group of his fellow construction workers stood what they seemed to consider a safe distance away from the line of trucks, hollering and hooting and egging him on. He grinned dumbly back at them and waved them off. As Mallory approached, his cheeks suddenly burned red, and he shifted his weight awkwardly, toeing at the gravel with his boots. “Your first time getting the special?” he asked bashfully.
“Yep. You?”
“Nah. I’ve had it a few times already. This is lucky number four…fingers crossed.” He crossed the fingers on both his hands and held them up in the air. “Ha ha!” His laughter was undeniably nervous. He absently rubbed his brow with the back of his greasy, meaty arm as he laughed. Mallory noticed a long, white scar streaking across his forehead. She was about to ask what the specials had been on his previous visits when the service window on the side of the truck flew open with a loud SLAM, and a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit and dark sunglasses poked his head out. He wore an earpiece with a clear, coiled wire attached to it that disappeared into his collar. “One?” he asked, his voice cold.
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