She rolled down her window and let the cool, humid night air whip her hair into a frenzy. The further she got from the Walmart, the lighter she felt. She smiled out over the headlights, and then she actually laughed. She was headed out, and she had the net worth of an oil well, and she was alive. She’d survived an ancient evil and plasma and flies and waffles and roaches and tentacles and corn and clones and Mars and portals and a predatory lender and vaporization and magnetism and an honest-to-goodness cross-dimensional nexus, and she’d been justly rewarded. She had no more fear of running into the police; surely a five-figure bribe would encourage any patrolman to look the other way. And here, a few thousand more, to buy your wife something nice, she saw herself saying, flinging a bundle of bills into the air as she peeled out into the night, up toward the Canadian border.
Even the city limits of Anomaly Flats couldn’t stop her. As she neared the peeling wooden billboard that read WE’RE SURPRISED THAT YOU’RE LEAVING, she felt a little tug in the pit of her stomach that said, There’s no way they’ll let you go. But she stomped her foot on the pedal, the engine roared, and the Impala rocketed past the boundary of town and kept going strong. The radio sprang to life as she tore down the road, and a familiar female voice came through the speakers. Attention, Anomaly Flats, it crackled. But the signal was weak, and the rest of the message was lost in a flurry of static, and then the station went dead altogether.
Mallory laughed out loud. She was free.
She squealed at the top of her lungs and beat her hands against the steering wheel in sweet, unadulterated triumph. “Too bad about the future!” she screamed gleefully into the woods that blurred past her open window. “Sorry, year 10,000!” She screamed again and did a jerking little dance of celebration in her seat.
It was going to be a good life.
By the time she was a few miles down the road, any remaining heaviness about what she’d just done in Anomaly Flats had completely melted away. She put the town, and its people, out of her mind, and she was shocked—and delighted—at just how easily they faded. Like the radio station, the strange town of Anomaly Flats was already becoming static, and soon the air would clear, and there would be nothing left.
Nothing but the world’s biggest diamond.
She wondered for a brief moment if perhaps one of the other three spikes had been bigger, and she felt a pang of regret for not making a more careful choice. Maybe she could have squeezed out an extra few million dollars if she’d just taken a minute to gauge their sizes. She cursed herself for being so hasty. A strange sadness settled over her then, but she figured it would evaporate as soon as she converted her diamond to cash.
She kept one hand on the steering wheel and reached over to the passenger seat with the other. She picked up the stake and held it up to the moonlight that filtered in through the windshield. It was positively entrancing. Dazzling. Sparkling. Gleaming.
Glowing.
The diamond was actually glowing.
Mallory screwed up her face and peered into the depths of the stone, keeping the road in her periphery. There was a brilliant white light breathing itself to life in the center of the diamond, growing brighter and brighter until the blinding glow filled the entire spike, and little rays of light shot out in all directions. And the diamond was growing warm, too. No, not warm; hot. Suddenly, it was burning her hands. Mallory cried out and tossed it from one hand to the other, fighting to keep the car straight with her knees. The stone emitted an angry hum, and the light took on a dark shade of red. It was actually smoking now, its heat intense and unbearable. Mallory screamed; it felt like her hands had been plunged into a lava pit. She looked up and saw that she had veered over into the wrong lane. She gave her legs a jerk, and the car squealed across the road. It skidded across the shoulder and slammed into the guardrail. Metal squealed on metal, leaving a long gash along the passenger door. Mallory dropped the diamond and grabbed for the wheel. The stone clattered off the window ledge and fell onto the street, where it shattered into a million glowing red pieces.
She yanked the car back onto the road and tried to brake, but something was stuck under the pedal, and the car continuing barreling down the road. She fumbled beneath her feet with shaking hands, trying to keep the car on the road. She found the thing that was stopping her from braking.
It was the purple Jansport.
She clawed it out from beneath the pedal and hurled it across the car. It fell down onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. Mallory slammed on the brakes, and the car squealed to a halt, but there was really no point in going back. She had seen the diamond—or whatever it was—shatter against the pavement. There was no sense in going back for it. She’d been tricked by the demon; the shattered pieces of glass were worthless. She seethed behind the wheel, feeling the blood course angrily through her veins like acid. Then she stomped on the gas, squealing farther away from Anomaly Flats.
“Fuck!” she screamed. Then she screamed it again. Then she screamed it a third time, because how could life be so goddamn unfair?
She stabbed at the button that rolled up the window. She’d had enough Missouri air to last her a lifetime. She took deep breaths, trying to calm the roiling ocean in her veins. She still had the backpack. She still had the cash, and she still had the small diamonds. The real diamonds. She still had Lenore’s safe house, and she still had her car. She would be fine.
Everything would be okay.
She drove on through the night, and slowly, her disgust began to dissipate. She was back on the road, and she had broken even, and that was no small thing. Before long, she had convinced herself that she was better off without a giant diamond anyway, because it could only draw nothing but unwanted attention, and as she neared the next river crossing—the whole reason for going through Anomaly Flats in the first place—she had already forgotten all about it. The farther she got from the city limits, the less of it she seemed to be able to hold in her mind, and that was just fine with her. A few more miles on, and she couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where she’d spent the night before.
Or was it two nights?
Maybe she hadn’t spent a night there at all. No, how could she have? She’d just left St. Louis earlier that morning.
Hadn’t she?
She glanced over at the passenger side of the car, at the purple backpack that held her future—a future she’d stolen from a man who’d abused her one too many times.
“Karma really is a bitch, isn’t it?” Mallory scoffed.
“The bitchiest,” mirror Mallory scoffed back.
Then she grew calm. Everything was fine. No one was looking for her. In all likelihood, it would be Monday at the earliest before anyone at the office realized the safe had been broken into, and that gave her plenty of time. Soon, she’d cross the Missouri River, and then it wasn’t far until she was out of the state. In a couple of hours, she’d be in Nebraska, and she doubted they’d be looking for her there.
But fate seemed to be making other plans as Mallory drove.
She came to the river crossing to find that the bridge had collapsed. The local sheriff’s department was there, so she sank down in her seat and draped her hair over her face and prayed the deputy wouldn’t recognize her. “What’s the problem, officer?” she asked, wondering why the words sounded so familiar.
The deputy leaned down and spat a stream of brown liquid onto the highway. “Bridge’s out,” he explained, his mouth full of tobacco. “Gotta turn around.”
The officer directed her to head back the way she’d come, and she was only too happy to oblige.
A new road opened up on the left, and she pulled the wheel. The Impala squealed against the pavement and cut off down the backwoods highway. The road wound deeper and deeper into the heart of nowhere, and the trees loomed high above and crowded her in, blotting out what little sunlight was left. F
or the hundredth time since leaving Ladue, her fingers itched to turn on her phone and check the Google map. But phones could be tracked, and she didn’t know if anyone was keeping an eye on her signal, but she didn’t want to find out. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure that turning the phone off made it untraceable. NCIS had been mixed on that point. “Thanks for nothing, Mark Harmon,” she grumbled.
The highway twisted through the woods, and Mallory started to feel uneasy, passing through what felt like two solid walls of trees. “This is the Midwest,” she said aloud, frowning at the tall, dark shapes spread out on either side of the road. “Where the hell are all the fields?”
A vague sense of déjà vu whirled in Mallory’s head as she gazed at the stars ahead. Millions of stars…hundreds of millions of stars...
Almost more stars than Mallory had ever seen before in her life.
She rounded a curve and saw a sign at the edge of the highway that read ANOMALY FLATS – 2 MI with an arrow pointing to the left.
Flats, she thought. Flats sounds fieldish, right? Flats sounds good.
She turned on her blinker, slowed down the car, and pulled onto the road that led to Anomaly Flats.
About the Author
Clayton Smith is a writer of speculative fiction living in Chicago, where he has become exceedingly good at cursing the winters. His work includes Apocalypticon, Death and McCootie, Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies, and Mabel Gray and the Wizard Who Swallowed the Sun. Some of his nonsense has been featured on such popular Internet sites as Write City Magazine and Dumb White Husband, and his plays have been produced rather mercilessly all over the country.
He would like very much to hear from you. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as @claytonsaurus.
And if your computer hasn’t succumbed to the terrible powers of magnetism, you should join his email newsletter! It’s fun there. There’s cake! (There’s no cake.) Find more information at StateOfClayton.com.
Anomaly Flats is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Clayton Smith
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015916082
Dapper Press
www.DapperPress.com
Anomaly Flats Page 26
