The Klaatu Terminus

by Pete Hautman

  Kosh was behind the bar, scraping the grill clean.

  “I suppose he’s gonna make you one of his goat burgers,” Red said. “Four days I’ve had that thing on the menu. You know how many I’ve sold? Five. Four of them to Henry.”

  “Your best customer,” Emily said.

  “Oh yeah? You know how long he’s been nursing that beer?”

  Emily laughed and managed to get a rare smile out of Red. She hiked up onto a stool and leaned her elbows on the bar.

  “Can I get you something?” Red asked.

  “What do you have that goes with arugula and goat cheese?”

  “You twenty-one yet, honey?”

  “You know I’m not, Red.”

  “How about a lemon soda? It’ll cut goatiness.”

  While Red searched under the bar for a soda, Emily watched Kosh cooking, fascinated by the way he moved. Normally, Kosh was tentative and awkward — unless he was on his motorcycle. Now his movements were efficient, precise, almost graceful. His long fingers formed the meat patties and skipped them onto the hot grill. As the meat sizzled, he sliced disks from a log of soft white cheese using a thin knife. He used the same knife to cut open two buns, then fetched a bag of greens from the cooler.

  Red set a bottle of Sprite on the bar in front of Emily. “I gotta say, for a shiftless reprobate, the kid knows his way around a grill.”

  “I heard that,” Kosh said as he picked through the arugula.

  “Has good ears, too,” Red said.

  Kosh put the split buns facedown on the hot grill. He salted and peppered the burgers, flipped them, then placed a thick disk of cheese atop each patty. He watched the burgers sizzle for half a minute, then grabbed a handful of arugula and arranged it on the grill in two hissing piles. He was moving quickly now — it seemed everything was happening at once.

  “How about you grab me a couple baskets, Red?” Kosh said.

  “What, am I your galley slave?” Red grumbled, but he took two red plastic serving baskets from a shelf. He laid a square of parchment over each one and set the baskets on the prep table next to the grill. Kosh piled the slightly wilted arugula leaves on top of the cheese and turned off the grill. Seconds later, Emily was looking at a perfectly prepared hamburger, skewered with a jaunty cellophane-tipped wooden pick.

  “Voilà,” said Kosh.

  “Thinks he’s French now,” Red said sourly. But Emily could hear the pride in his voice.

  “Thank you,” Emily said. “That was delicious.”

  “I sort of have Ronnie Becker to thank for it.”

  “Ronnie?”

  “Yeah. He took me to this burger joint in Mankato. I stole the idea from them.”

  “What happened to Ronnie, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s back home now. He has a court date next month. He got caught selling weed. Or trying to sell it. Funny thing was, it was just ditchweed. About as likely to get you high as corn silk.”

  “You were with him?”

  “I was along for the ride.”

  “Told you he was a reprobate,” Red said. There were only the three of them still in the bar. Henry had stumbled out after Red refused to refill his beer. The pool player and the Andersons had left as well.

  “I told him it was a dumb idea,” Kosh said. “Not that Ronnie ever listens.” He stood up. “I suppose I should get you home.”

  Outside, the temperature had dropped several degrees. Main Street was dead quiet. Red’s Roost was the only nightlife in downtown Hopewell, and Red usually closed up by eleven. Kosh and Emily stood on the sidewalk, enjoying the feeling that they had the town to themselves. Across the street, the shuttered Hopewell House loomed.

  “Sad that the old hotel isn’t open anymore,” Emily said.

  “The freeway bypass killed it,” Kosh said. “It closed the year I was born. I suppose they’ll tear it down eventually.”

  “Such a nice building. I wonder if — what was that?”

  A thumping sound echoed across the empty street.

  “Sounds like it’s coming from the hotel,” Kosh said. “Maybe a bird or something got trapped in there.”

  The thumping came again, followed by what sounded like muffled curses.

  “That doesn’t sound like a bird,” Emily said.

  Kosh started across the street. Emily followed.

  The front entrance to the hotel had been boarded up with sheets of painted plywood. The sound seemed to be coming from there. They stopped a few yards away. Someone inside the hotel was hammering on the door and shouting. It didn’t sound like English. Kosh could see the plywood flexing, chips of paint flying from its surface.

  “Sounds like somebody’s stuck in there.” Kosh raised his voice. “Hello?”

  The banging stopped for a moment, then resumed at a more frantic tempo. Kosh tried to think where he could find a crowbar at that time of night.

  “Why doesn’t whoever it is come out the same way he got in?” Emily said.

  “I don’t know.” He moved closer to the door and yelled, “Just hang on. I’ll get a crowbar or something!”

  The response from inside was a guttural roar of unfamiliar words and more banging. After a moment, it stopped.

  “Maybe you should go back inside the Roost,” Kosh said. “Tell Red to call the sheriff, just in case.”

  “You come too,” Emily said, grabbing his arm.

  Before they could move there was a tremendous crash. The plywood split and a man wearing a long black coat blasted through the opening and tumbled face-first onto the sidewalk. His black hat flew off and landed in the gutter. The man lay still for a few seconds, then groaned and pushed himself up. He crawled over to his hat, put it on his head, and stood.

  The man was normal height, but he looked bigger with the black coat hanging off his wide shoulders, the black, wide-brimmed hat perched upon his head, and the long black beard reaching halfway down his chest. He shook himself like a wet dog. His dark eyes cast about wildly, then locked onto Kosh and Emily. He flung his arms wide and shouted, “Vaht shtot? Vaht jahr?”

  Kosh said, “Are you okay?”

  The man tipped his head. His brow furrowed. “Vaht?”

  Kosh took a cautious step toward the man and said, “What?”

  “Da! Vaht!” the man said, stamping his right foot.

  Kosh looked back at Emily. “Can you understand him?”

  Emily’s face had gone dead pale. Her mouth was working, but no sound was coming out.

  The man stamped his foot again and tugged at his beard. “Vaht jahr! Vaht jahr?”

  Kosh shrugged and turned his hands palms up. “I don’t know what you’re saying!”

  The man shook his head in frustration and started toward them.

  Emily, backing away, looked utterly terrified. Kosh put himself directly between them. If he had to hit the guy, he would.

  The man stopped a few paces short of Kosh. He looked at Kosh’s balled fists.

  “Ach!” He threw up his hands, turned his back, and went running off down the street. He cut through Friedman’s parking lot and headed toward Engleman’s soybean field.

  “Just some crazy Amish dude,” Kosh said, forcing a laugh. He turned back to Emily. She looked as if she was about to collapse. He rushed over and put his arm around her just as her legs failed. Her eyes had rolled up, showing only the whites.

  “Emily!” Kosh shouted. She blinked and her eyes regained focus.

  “Kosh?” Her legs found the ground. She stood. “I’m okay,” she said.

  Kosh realized he still had his arms around her and quickly let go.

  “Are you sure? You fainted or something.”

  “I just . . .” She drew a shaky breath. “That man. You know that story I told you, about the men sticking the rod in my mouth?”

  Kosh nodded. He knew what she was going to say.

  “He was one of them.”

  ROMELAS, ca. 3000 CE

  “THEY ATTACK ONLY PEOPLE WHO ARE ALONE,” LIA SAID, gripping Tuck
er’s arm. “At least, that’s what the Lait Pike told me.”

  The jaguar was sitting on a tier halfway up the pyramid, staring at them fixedly.

  “Maybe this one can’t count,” Tucker said. He stood up and waved his arms. “Go away!”

  The big cat blinked, but made no move to depart.

  “We have you outnumbered!” Tucker yelled.

  The jaguar yawned.

  Tucker picked up a shard of black stone from the broken altar.

  “What are you doing?” Lia asked.

  Tucker remembered throwing a rock all the way across Aamold’s cornfield back in Hopewell. It had sailed the length of two football fields. The jaguar was a lot closer than that. If he could hit it, he figured it would hurt enough to scare it away. If he hit it.

  “Don’t make him mad,” Lia said.

  The jaguar’s ears perked up. It stood, its tail twitching.

  Tucker focused on the cat’s center of mass. He drew back his arm and hurled the chunk of obsidian with all his strength. The rock streaked down the side of the pyramid. He could hear the slap of stone on flesh. The jaguar let out a screech and jumped straight up. It twisted in midair, its legs churning, and landed running, descending three tiers with each stride. It reached the plaza and disappeared into the urban forest.

  Tucker grinned, pleased with himself. Lia was giving him an uncertain look, as if she didn’t know him.

  “The Medicants did something to me,” he said. “I can throw really hard.”

  Lia nodded thoughtfully. “I noticed.”

  Tucker had hoped she would be more impressed. He sat down beside her. “I suppose we can’t stay up here forever,” he said.

  “We should try to sleep. You first. I will keep watch.”

  “I don’t think I can sleep.” The way he felt at the moment, he didn’t think he would ever sleep again.

  “Then I’ll rest, and you watch for beasts.” She lay back on the hard stone surface and curled on her side, using her forearm as a pillow.

  Tucker wrapped his arms around his knees and gazed out over the lightless city. After a time, he stood and walked around the perimeter of the frustum. Returning to where he had started, he stopped a few feet away and looked down at Lia, a dark comma on the crumbling limestone.

  Why do I feel so tied to her? he wondered.

  Other than the few days she had stayed with him and his parents — days when she had hardly said a word — they had spent only a few hours in each other’s company: that night at the rope swing, the day he had entered the disko on his parents’ house, and those few horrific minutes in the green tent at Hopewell County Park.

  Lia muttered and shifted. He had an urge to lie down beside her, to nestle his body around her like a spoon and hold her. But he didn’t want to wake her, and she might not like it. There was a tension in her, he sensed. A coiled spring of fear and anger. He thought of all the things he did not know about her. Did she have parents? Did she miss being a Pure Girl — whatever that was? Was she homesick for the old Romelas? What had happened to her between the time she first left Hopewell and the time she showed up to save him from Master Gheen and his father? Would she tell him?

  Soon his thoughts were circling back on themselves. He had achieved his goals, in a sense. He had found his father, then lost him. He had found his mother, but she was not the mother he knew. He had met his uncle, Kosh, then abandoned him to his fate. And he had found Lahlia. Now they were alone in this strange place, hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years in the future. Images of Hopewell flickered through his mind: his parents, the old hotel, the rope swing, Tom and Will Krause. He wondered if Tom had made it back to Hopewell. But most of all he wondered what had happened to Kosh.

  He looked at Lia, at the moonlight reflecting from her scarred cheek, and he thought how beautiful she was; and for a moment none of the rest of it mattered. So far as he knew, they were alone in this world.

  No matter what happened, he would not let himself be separated from her again.

  Chayhim, representing the Klaatu faction known as the Gnomon, noticed a number of disturbing anomalies in the collective memory of the Cluster. He brought his concerns to the artist Iyl Rayn.

  “The timelines are splitting,” said Chayhim. “Hopewell is fragmenting. This is your doing.”

  Iyl Rayn dismissed Chayhim’s statement with a vaporous shrug. “People adapt; the beasts notice nothing.”

  “Not all are able to adapt. The Lah Sept seek to alter their own history. Tucker Feye is running rampant through time. I fear for my own continued existence.”

  “Tucker Feye is the through line,” said Iyl Rayn. “All else will fall into place.”

  “This I doubt.”

  “You must have faith, Chayhim.”

  — E3

  HOPEWELL TIME STUB, OCTOBER, 2012 CE

  TOM KRAUSE VISITED HARDY LAKE NEARLY EVERY DAY, even if it was cold and raining. He sat by the cottonwood and stared up at the limb where Tucker had tied the rope. There was no rope. He walked the narrow beach, searching in vain for signs of exploded fireworks. He looked out over the lake, and at the empty air above the water.

  He remembered. But he could find no evidence to support his memories.

  On the few days when he did not visit the lake, he could sense his memories fading, becoming less real. That frightened him. It was like losing part of his life.

  The day Tom had returned from . . . from wherever he had been, Father September had vanished from the jail. His empty cell was locked, and according to the police, the door had not been opened.

  The other man who had been arrested, the one called Master Gheen, had escaped from his cell within hours of being locked up, but Gheen’s escape was not so much of a mystery. One of his associates had entered the county lockup pretending to be his lawyer, disabled the two policemen on duty with some sort of stun gun, and the two had driven off in a black SUV.

  There was much talk of Father September being a charlatan magician, a master of stage tricks. That would explain how he had vanished from his cell, and how he had faked stabbing Tom in the heart. The search for him was perfunctory and soon over. Immediately following Tom’s reappearance, the district attorney had dropped the charges against Father September, and so there was no compelling reason to pursue him.

  Tom sat on the bank above the lake and rubbed his chest. He could still feel a faint ache where the blade had sliced through his rib cage.

  He had tried to get Will to remember.

  “Don’t you remember when you and me and Tucker hauled that rope out to the lake? And Tucker climbed up the tree and tied it?”

  “Who is Tucker?” Will had said, giving him a suspicious, nervous look. As if he thought Tom had gone completely insane.

  Maybe he was insane.

  But he remembered.

  HOPEWELL, SEPTEMBER, 2012 CE

  KOSH FEYE THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD.

  He had imagined his own death many times — crushed beneath a semi, or flattened against a bridge abutment, or being T-boned by a drunk running a stop sign. There were many ways to die, but he had always assumed that for him, it would be on his bike. There were worse ways to go. Better to die violently at seventy miles per hour than on a bed in a nursing home plugged into a catheter and an oxygen mask.

  He remembered the truck that had hit him. The grille in his rearview mirror was the last image he carried in his brain.

  It was a very odd feeling, being dead. The main sensation was that of no sensation. He did not seem to have a body. Except for his ears. There was a sound, a sort of frantic, unintelligible chatter coming from far away. Other dead people? As he became more awake, he discovered another sensation. He seemed to be breathing. Dead people breathed?

  It occurred to him to open his eyes, just to find out whether he still had them. With that thought, his eyelids popped open and sunlight came crashing in. He was looking up at the branches of a tree, and beyond it blue sky, and he wondered whether it was possible that he was n
ot dead after all. He tried to turn his head, but that didn’t work. Except for breathing, hearing, and looking at the tree, he had nothing.

  The voices got louder. A woman’s voice, and a man’s. They were speaking a language that sounded like a mishmash of Spanish and English, with some Asian-sounding words thrown in just to make it more confusing. One thing for sure, they were arguing.

  Kosh summoned his will and made another unsuccessful attempt to move. He could not feel his body at all. Was he paralyzed? Oh my god, he thought. I’ve broken my neck! Severed my spinal cord. His worst fear. Far worse than death. He’d been ready to embrace being dead, but not this.

  Now he could feel his heart pounding.

  The woman was yelling at the man. The man was shouting back at her. How could they be arguing when Kosh was laid out on the ground, his life over? What could be more important than that?

  “Váyase!” the woman shouted. “Go!”

  Seconds later, Kosh heard the roar of an engine and the sound of spinning tires. The leaves on the tree stirred; Kosh felt a cool breeze on his face. A shadow fell across him and his view of the sky was eclipsed by a woman’s face. He tried to speak, but he could not.

  Emily.

  “He is gone,” she said.

  Kosh would have nodded if he could, though he did not know whom she was talking about. He moved his eyes from her wide mouth to her eyes — that blue-green color was seared into his memory. He remembered Emily smiling, the way her mouth would stretch and her eyes would almost disappear. She was not smiling now.

  Her hair was different. Shorter, and maybe a shade lighter. Her brow was furrowed more deeply than he had ever seen it. Still, impossibly, this was Emily.

  “I am Emma,” she said. “You have been injured.”

  He wanted to ask her why she was speaking with an accent and why she called herself Emma, but he could only stare back at her, waiting to hear the next thing she said.

  “I know you cannot speak. I have applied a pain blocker to your spine. Tamm was very upset with me. He believes the devices we took from the Medicants should be used only by the priests, and only to save Lambs. He would have let you die. He wanted you to die.”