They didn’t look at each other, or if they did, they spoke briefly and then parted, as if embarrassed by the one metaphor that had occurred to them all.
In front of one of the old blast bunkers, a young woman and a middle-aged man sat feeding a milling band of cats from a small bag of treats.
“Had this party once,” the man said. “We catered this six-foot sandwich with everything, nobody there keeping kosher, you know, and the only place to put it was on this table that had to be illuminated by this one spotlight recessed into the ceiling, no other lamps nearby. And just as I’m thinking, jeez this is creepy, somebody says, hey, everybody, come look at the spread. So they come in, and just naturally form a line and walk past. The viewing of the sandwich. No flowers, please, donations can be made to Subway.”
“Well, it is a funeral, of course,” the woman said.
She looked down quickly, as if searching for a distraction.
A huge black cat batted and hissed to either side, and jumped for the bag.
“Hey, greedy gut, there’s enough for everybody.”
She looked at the assembly of cats. “Well, maybe not.” There were at least two dozen cats converging on them from all directions, some circling warily around the rocket; black, white, orange, gray, calico, tortoiseshell, long hairs, short hairs. They strutted with great aplomb, and there was no telling the long-feral from those who were only recently lost or abandoned.
“Where do you think they all came from?” the man asked.
She shook her blond head. “Nobody really knows. Dogs are just wolves that’ve got used to cadging meals, but cats were obviously developed, deliberately and carefully bred. But from what, we don’t know. Or why.” She handed the bag of treats to the man and pulled the big tomcat onto her lap. The cat made it clear he would have preferred to follow the treats.
“The Egyptians did it, that’s the old story, though it’s doubtful it happened recently. There’s something knowing about cats, and something—lost, exiled.” She stroked the black cat’s muzzle, to approving purrs.
“As if they remember who created them, and why, and only people have forgotten.”
The man leaned a bit too far forward during this, listed just a bit too raptly. “I meant these cats in particular,” he said, smiling.
She laughed in embarrassment. “From ship’s cats, if you’re to believe the locals. Unwanted kittens tossed out onto the docks after voyages, no more cats needed here, thank you. Spread out and went to work on the rats amid the docks. Moved into the gantries when they started launching rockets here. They seem to know the routine. You never find dead cats around the launch pads after the takeoffs.”
“They’ll be even safer from now on,” the man said quietly. “And lots of rats to eat. It’ll look like some damned J. G. Ballard story, with the jungle growing in over the wreck of the space age.”
“Might have been different if the space age hadn’t been run by governments. Leave the risks to anyone willing to take them, the rewards to anyone—”
“Couldn’t have that, my dear.” He was smiling, rather bitterly. “Daddy knows best. Daddy blows up cities, Daddy culls our paycheck. If we didn’t fight for our liberty to explore, we didn’t deserve it.” He looked out over the water. “You can’t get home by the old highway. It’s falling into the ocean. There isn’t a major infrastructure that isn’t rotting. All our money gets taken to build weapons with nobody to use them against. Money to keep people from working. To keep farmers from growing cheap food. To keep kids from learning how to read.” There was now fear in his voice. “Tens of millions of people are waiting for their welfare checks, and soon some of those checks aren’t going to get written.”
They watched the rocket slowly inch into the enormous hangar where it would be scrapped, though the price of metal wouldn’t pay for the disposal procedures currently required to dispose of the fuel.
“We still have our own space station on the drawing boards,” the woman said.
“Where it’ll stay,” the man said, emphatically. “We’ve got the old, worn-out shuttles, not practical to repair. We’ve got the Clipper Ship, the most expensive of all those cases of the wrong design getting chosen. The Russians used up all their big rockets rescuing the crew when their station fell apart, and our space program for years was based on running back and forth to that one foreign station. All the deep solar system manned probes were canceled because they were plutonium powered. There’s nothing left.”
They watched a little boy feeding the cats, part of the small crowd of civilians who had showed up. He soon used the empty bag to gather mementos from the tarmac. Odd bits of metal that might have come from one of the ships that sailed the moon. Someone shooed him off with the last of the ground crew and the cameramen who were packing it in anyway, an overcast evening, no dramatic shots left.
“Come on,” she croaked. “Maybe our great grandchildren won’t just wait around for some asteroid or ice age to wipe us out.” She walked away, her steps uneven, as if she were drunk.
The man stood, then reached down to pat a big orange cat. “Did you want to be the ship’s cat, Pixie?” he said softly. “See what it’s like to be weightless? Goodbye, boy,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be back.”
The last of the watchmen disappeared in the distance.
There were offices where they could sit out their watch; no one wanted to wander the ruins of Cape Canaveral in the dark. The cats, though, all came out at night.
On most nights, the majority of the cats would be sleeping, but tonight, the desolate plain of the Cape was alive with cats; there couldn’t be a single feral cat asleep and not present within ten miles. They were all here. The whole Cape seemed to move in a solid, furry, elegant mass. The great feline tide slowly converged on the center of the Cape and swirled in pools around the abandoned gantries, around the bare launchpads.
Suddenly they were still. Ten thousand small heads turned upward, twenty thousand slit eyes stared at the sky. Ten thousand fanged mouths opened.
Few people within five miles of the Cape remained asleep. Many called the police at the howling, convinced that the space program had not been canceled soon enough and that the great sound they were hearing was the shriek of some plutonium-bearing deathstar bearing in on their homes.
But one person somehow knew. A young boy, in a trailer home parked in a cheap lot with a view of the launch site, left off crying himself to sleep and sat bolt upright. He went to the little dingy window, kicking aside the catfood bag full of rocket scraps, and stared out the window through the jungle of spaceship models on his scratched up dresser. His sharp mind, used to fractioning some massive impossibility into its individual components, gauged the tone and pitch of the sound and divided its volume into the likely volume of its individual contributors. And he wondered.
Ten thousand cats howled, disconsolate, at the unreachable stars.
LIGHTHOUSE SURFER
Daniel M. Hoyt
“LIGHTHOUSE, shmighthouse,” Ten-Speed said one night after the three of us’d gotten a few beers in us and weren’t thinking much. “It’s probably the safest place to go if there’s a freakin’ tsunami. Hell, if the wave knocks it over, you can surf the freakin’ lighthouse to land!” Ten-Speed drained his beer can and tossed the empty into the dark, away from the blazing car headlights. “But there won’t be no tsunami. Hasn’t been one anywhere around here since my freakin’ mom was born. Before, even. Sixtyfour, I think. Freakin’ forty-some-years ago.”
We nodded and gulped our own beers. Hell, what did we know? A trio of country boys from Carolina—
Charlotte, that is—vacationing on the wrong coast. An ocean’s an ocean, right? The waves at Myrtle Beach can get pretty nasty, too. How much different could it be out here? Ten-Speed’d been coming to Orygun (that’s how the locals say it) every damn year since he was a kid. And he knew how to surf better’n anyone.
My beer was empty, too, so I flung it toward the sound of the surf and hopped u
p to grab another. The beer was cheap and tasted a bit rancid, but there was lots of it, so why not? Ten-Speed always said that part of the fun of vacations in Oregon was that you could drive out onto the beach and get drunk off your ass.
Maybe not at every beach, but at least at Sea Cove, you could. And Ten-Speed was the Oregon guy, right?
So there we were, three good ole boys getting drunk off their asses.
The beach was empty except for us, ’cause it was two, three in the damn morning, and nobody else with a lick of sense was out there. The shore was a good hundred feet away—or at least Ten-Speed said it was.
The moon went missing, so I couldn’t see shit out that way. Something big and black loomed there, slinging enough salt into the air that it stung my throat and made me thirsty just taking a deep breath. Whether it was the damn ocean or Bigfoot, I had no idea.
Ten-Speed’s daddy’s ’74 Ford Bronco with the cutoff top idled nearby, spitting sparks out the tailpipe every five minutes like clockwork, just after it made a weird choking sound, stalled and sputtered for a few seconds before catching again all by itself. Like a damn possessed car.
As I snagged another cold one off the ice chest on the open tailgate, the Bronco started to stall again, right on time, and the lights flickered off, throwing the homeys into the dark—again—and then the headlights blazed, blinding everyone but me, and the Bronco idled normally—again. Burning oil wafted along behind me as I trudged back to the group, dripping freezing water on my salt-sticky legs as I went.
We sat on a couple of huge, rough logs, each one about four feet thick and filled with enough chewedup sharp edges to make a guy start singing like a choir boy. They were stuck in the damn beach javelin-like, angled up into the air like huge tent stakes that’d been left behind after the Jolly Green Giant got done camping here. If we’d been thinking, we’d’ve wondered how they got there.
“Shit,” Jimmy Teeth said, spitting in the sand and flashing his famous overbite. “Ain’t no lighthouse, Speed.”
Jimmy Teeth wore denim cut-offs and sandals, nothing else. His high school varsity letter days still showed in his muscles, which he took every opportunity to flex, so nobody’d notice his teeth. He had short blond hair and beady little blue eyes—and these huge front teeth, like a damn rabbit, about as white as you could get without glowing in the dark, and the worst overbite his dentist’d ever seen. Even after two tries at correcting it, Teeth still had an overbite any rabbit’d envy.
Ten-Speed launched a half-full can of beer at Jimmy’s head. “It’s freakin’ there,” he yelled, beer spewing out the back to soak Ten-Speed’s throwing arm, but barely spattering Jimmy as the can sailed over his ducked head and plonked into the sand behind us.
Ten-Speed looked mad, which in the dimming lights from the Bronco, was damn scary. Speed was already going bald at nineteen, and his forehead was looking bigger than ever. His dark red hair started way up at the top of his head—well above his hard, green eyes— and continued way down the back, past his shoulders.
He always wore a muscle shirt everywhere, even at home, always in the water (he claimed he burned crispy in the sun), even though he didn’t have the damn muscles to fill it out. We were on the beach, so he had on long swim trunks, the kind the California boys wore when they weren’t surfing. Black and white high tops dangled from his bare toes as he swung his legs from his perch on the log, his heels pulled free of the shoes.
“Wanna go?” Ten-Speed said, kicking his high tops off accidentally while hopping down off the log. “I’ll show you the freakin’ lighthouse right now.” He jammed his feet into the fallen high tops, kicking gritty sand on me.
Teeth and I looked at each other. Searching for a lighthouse in the damn dark seemed pretty easy, but I still didn’t see anything but black out there.
“Teeth?” Ten-Speed said, “you coming, man?”
Speed stalked over to the Bronco, flung open the door and jumped in the driver’s seat.
“Shit,” Jimmy Teeth muttered, shaking his head and slipping unharmed off the monster log. He kept muttering and shaking his head all the way to the truck.
“Hook!” Ten-Speed barked. “You coming or not, you freakin’ wuss?”
“Coming,” I yelled and climbed down carefully to preserve my jewels. Damn, damn, damn. Why did something like this always happen after we’d had a few beers?
* * *
The worst thing about being called Hook in high school is that the girls expected me to have a big hook instead of one of my hands. It was that damn movie that did it. Made the girls run away faster’n a jackrabbit grazed with birdshot.
No, Ten-Speed came up with the name, on account of my tendency to miss the rim in basketball. Kind of short for a basketball guy, 5’6” on a good day with my lucky red high tops—which I wore everywhere, even the beach—but I was fast on the court. See the little white streak with flying black hair steal your ball, that was me. Some guy ran under your giraffe legs and wound up with the ball at the other end of the court in five seconds flat, I was that man.
But I couldn’t hit the damn basket to save my life.
No, that’s not true. I could hit it, I just couldn’t seem to get it to stay there and drop through the net. Always bounced off, usually on the left side. After my first game, Speed said I hooked it like a golf ball and the name stuck.
The Bronco bounced around on the pavement, swerving like a son of a bitch, tossing me around and pounding my ass sore on the hard back seat. Teeth had a white-knuckled grip on an aluminum handle Speed’d screwed into the dashboard, so I guess the front seat ride wasn’t much better.
Ten-Speed screeched to a halt without warning, slamming Teeth and me forward. My head whacked the front seat and I tasted blood. Speed threw the Bronco into neutral and stood up on the driver’s seat, right in the middle of the road. He thrust out an arm dramatically and yelled, “There. Freakin’ there. See?”
Speed looked down at us, his eyes wild and feral.
The truck’s burned oil smoke blew past, choking me, making my eyes water.
I followed his outstretched hand to the horizon over the sea and saw a faint light flickering—somewhere.
Clearly, Ten-Speed thought it was a damn lighthouse.
As for me, I couldn’t swear it wasn’t a Bigfoot eye. I squinted, but it didn’t help. It still could’ve been the Big guy. “So what, Speed?” I said, sucking on my cut lip. “Probably a boat.”
“Nope,” Ten-Speed said, real calm, and that worried me.
Speed is pretty excitable most of the time. Seeing him calm like that was just plain creepy.
“It’s the freakin’ lighthouse, Hook.” He thumbed off the ignition, leaving the keys dangling, and killed the lights on the Bronco. Swinging the door open with a rusty screech, Ten-Speed hopped out, slamming the door behind him. “C’mon,” he called. “We’re going.”
Teeth looked at me sideways, more scared’n a dog that knows he’s getting his ’nads cut off. I shrugged.
What could we do? It was Ten-Speed, right? If we didn’t go after him, he’d kill himself for sure. And you had to watch your homey’s backs, or what was the point?
“I’m going after him, Teeth. He’s gone bonkers, yeah, but I don’t want him hurt. He’s our homey, you know?”
“His life, man,” Jimmy said, hugging his arms to his chest, that scared rabbit look still jumping around his eyes. “What you gonna do? Shit.” He looked away, staring after Speed, who was about to disappear into Bigfoot’s big mouth.
“Yeah,” I said, and climbed out without using the door.
I hadn’t gotten more’n a few steps before I heard Speed whooping and splashing in the damn water. I stepped up my pace and scanned the surf frantically, trying to figure out where he went, but I just couldn’t see, even though my eyes were starting to get used to the dark. I ran on, heading for the biggest splashing I could hear. Sure enough, I ran right into the ocean, getting myself sprayed with salt water from head to toe, stinging my bleed
ing lip and drenching my lucky red high tops. Damn. They’d be a bitch to clean after they dried stiff with the salt soaked into them.
“Speed!” I yelled between gagging gulps of water, and waded in up to my waist, trying to ignore the numbingly cold water. Each time a damn wave came in, I bowled over, scraping the sand below and taking in another mouthful of salt water that stung my wound. I choked and snorted the seawater back out my nose and tried again. After maybe two minutes in the water (although it felt like two hours), I was beat. My gut twisted with about a gallon of damn salt water, and I thought I was going to spew. I was scratched and scraped raw, and my eyeballs felt like they’d been sandpapered.
Double-zero fine, maybe, but still sandpaper.
I tried once more. “Speed!”
There was nothing.
I waded back to shore and dragged my soggy, beaten self back to the Bronco. Teeth was still there.
He looked my sorry, soggy ass up and down and grinned.
“Lost him,” I said. “Damn.”
“Shit,” Jimmy said. Sometimes Teeth really had a way with words.
Sirens went off, up, down, up, down, up, down. They sounded like air-raid sirens, but the damn cold war was over back when I was born, wasn’t it?
I had no idea what was going on with those sirens.
Neither did Teeth. It was Ten-Speed that was the Oregon guy, see? Not us. And he was off swimming to that lighthouse or boat or whatever was stuck in Bigfoot’s eye.
Lights switched on all in houses all around. Surprisingly, the houses were so close, we could see people running around inside through their windows. I’d thought we were out in the middle of nowhere, not in the middle of a damn neighborhood. They streamed out of those houses faster’n salmon, looking terrified as shit, and some of them weren’t even wearing all their clothes! It was like someone’d lit their asses with a fuse, and they needed to take to the hills before they’d blow up.
Something Magic This Way Comes Page 6
