by Eric Ellert
"But when I turn twenty, I might."
"Who told you that?"
"Corpsman in town."
"Then I expect it might be true. That thing that came down must have been crazy and on its last legs from the silver water."
"What's silver water?" Faudron asked, but before Rau could answer, and he didn't look like he wanted to answer, Moren backed up, crookedly.
"Hey, hey, hey," Faudron yelled, smacking the car that had almost smacked her.
"Hey," Moren yelled. "I'll have to stay here six years."
Rau stared at her for along moment, then brushed her hair out of her face. "Town's not going to be here that long. And before they drown it, you'll be far away."
They looked so much alike, so tall and lean, like drawings of people in a fashion magazine, people she did not know. Faudron got in the SUV wondering how Moren could charm people the way she did, by being awful most of the time.
She waited for them to get on the road before she spoke. "Did you say Cylons? I only ask, because I heard about this cloud, it's just like the cloud they found in Sardinia, which is just like the Turkish cloud, which oddly enough is like the one they found way up the Mississippi inside one of those piles of rocks they call mounds so they can claim mound builder's from Atlantis built them."
"It wasn't just the beer talking," Rau said.
"Ah, hell Moren. Did you have to?"
Faudron had thought those talks were just between the two of them, not that it really mattered but the road seemed longer than she'd remembered, like you'd only move out here so it'd be too much of a nuisance to go to town. She sped up, promising herself any oncoming headlight would have to pull over. She wouldn't. "Can we leave tonight, Rau?"
He stared straight ahead.
Chapter 6
No one had anything to say when they got home so Rau parked the SUV in their driveway, left the keys under the sun-visor and headed home. He looked over at Moren when he got to his door and shook his head as if Faudron had failed a test. "You want to fill big sis in? It would be helpful." He shut the door.
Faudron waited politely for Moren to say something but she just turned and walked away. Faudron grabbed her by the elbow, just to spin her around, but the plastic lawn gave way again and they ended up on the ground.
Moren flicked water at Faudron. "You shouldn't be here, I'm sorry."
"Why shouldn't I be here and you should?"
"Dad told people, and they told people. He had it fixed. You didn't have to come here, but now you can't leave."
"Now who told you that?"
"No one can leave here. Why would they stay? All they do is attack each other every night and spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Some of these people have been here thirty years, and they haven't been out. They don't even know what it's like out there."
She flicked water at Faudron again. Faudron did it back, then back and forth as they spoke.
"Why did you come?" Moren asked. "You don't even like us. You haven't even spoken to us in a year."
"I called."
"You have to call on holidays, it's a law."
"We spoke," Faudron said.
"I called you. We spoke for five minutes. You might have been a recording. Mom's a Cylon, which makes you a Cylon because I hope I'm adopted."
Faudron looked down. She'd lose Moren if she giggled now. "If I let you drink whiskey, will you stop stealing the car? Just until mom comes home. And no more with the pills."
"OK, but they're just like Silver Bullets. But OK, OK, till mom comes home or the three days are up."
"Now how do you know that?" Faudron asked.
"Corpsmen Splinter told me. I'm nice to people, Faudron. You should try it more often."
Later, Faudron stared out the kitchen window at the horse and the lama in Rau's backyard. The horse moved about as if it didn't like something in the air and the lama stayed quite still as if stuffed, though it did its business and stood in it, so at least it was still alive. Faudron tapped and tapped the window, but couldn't get its attention.
She found herself crying but got the presents ready and wrapped them all in paper from the wrong holiday she'd found in the cupboard. Presents for mom dad forgot, presents from dad mom forgot, like every year. It was kind of fun, or it had been.
Moren came down a few minutes later, red-eyed herself.
"You crying?" Faudron asked.
"No, nothing. The horse's name is Mr. Ed."
"Ed? Can't be. How well you know him?"
"Rau was always over here. Dad knows him from way back. Dad was here when Rau was a kid."
Impossible Faudron thought; he would have told her. "You like him. I like him," she said.
"Yeah."
"How do you like him?"
"Get out of the way," Moren said. "I have to cook."
"Don't worry, I'm not hungry. What do wolves eat anyway? Remember that Disney movie where the scientist guy said they ate mice? I don't believe that, really."
"It's for the lady next door. She's playing the record again."
Faudron hadn't been listening, the sound was so constant, but a scratchy copy of La Vi En Rose played through the neighbor's open window. "Tell her to stop. And tell her to close the window; it's always raining."
"Two days and a wake up," Moren said.
"Don't use dad's excuse. And don't fool around with the neighbors."
Moren made a face. "Telescope girl." She pulled the dish out of the microwave and put it on a tray.
"You're infected like Piper Piraldo in Carriers."
"You think I look Amy from Everwood, Emily, what's her name?" Moren asked.
"I just told you what I thought. You're like Emile de Raven from Lost, shooting at people, far too much trouble to rescue from yourself. You'll probably join a cult with the smoke monster next door."
"Rau?"
"No the one with the record. Tell her you're not cooking any more. You can shop for her once a week. I mean she can microwave if she can make it to the phone. And stop going over there too."
"You tell her. I cook her dinner all the time."
Faudron was about to say she meant the other neighbor, stop going over there, but had a feeling Moren would never speak to her again if she did, which would be acceptable, as long as she didn't wrack up a car until one parent came home and took over. Aunts and uncles would bolt as soon as they got the secret life of Moren Falkirk out of her. As for Rau, she didn't really think there was anything going on, but there was something in the air when they were together. He was too old for her, but time would change that, and they were alike, and she'd already decided she'd seen him first and she was already trying to wreck it. Faudron couldn't keep both of them. Maybe she didn't care. Moren would have endless chances. Faudron might just have three days. Even if they let her out of here, what if there was something in her blood, something she had to tell people about? What if she ended up all alone? That's how she imagined the further five minutes after the ending of Carriers would have been like if she'd made it. The last guy on earth Emily Van Camp's character was with would die from bad mayonnaise, having survived a world wide plague, and she'd be stuck inside the spooky, old hotel they'd safely made it to, hiding out from Road Warrior extras the rest of her life.
She'd have to ask people, "Did I ever tell you the story about Aunti werewolf?" She ought to choose Rau. She and Moren would probably not see each other again if the parents were gone, and they just might be, if she was foolish enough to think about it. No, there had been no black car, no man in a dress uniform knocking on the door. They could not die without that happening.
Three beers and dad turned into Art Bell, two whiskeys and Moren turned into a guest on the show or one of those chilling callers who must call from lonely highways in the desert having just killed a family they found changing a flat tire. Faudron hadn't done anything and in three days she'd be the subject of a show. Rau or Mor, she'd have to think about it.
She pulled out her Sea Crane,
nice and waterproof, smash-proof. She had fallen off a roof with it. Sea Crane radio, roof-proof, werewolf-proof, Cylon-proof and rechargeable in case you were ever hiding out from the Chicoms, which was possible. New York was a smoldering ruin, still burning after three years. Two weeks of coverage, and the news just stopped talking about it. Except Art.
She tapped into last night's show.
"And so, Jim," Art said. "You think this cloud is our friend? How can that be?"
"Well, Art, if NASA is involved, it just might be a demonic cloud sent to destroy us all.
Chapter 7
Moren always thought that Mrs. Rochambeaus' house smelled like a home permanent and an old dog all mixed together, which shouldn't be because the kitchen window had been opened, rain or shine, since May, when Moren and her mother had moved in next door, though, as far as she could tell, Mrs. Rochambeau hadn't been out, not once. She didn't like mom. When mom had brought a crumb cake, Mrs. Ro begged her diabetes and shut the door. Dad had brought a bottle of whiskey the first of the few days he'd been home and had left it outside the door. Moren took it back before it made it inside.
"Did I ever tell you about the winter of Forty-eight, the winter they came?" Mrs. Rochambeau asked as she laid out the meal Moren had brought her on green and white French China with pictures of Louis the Fifteenth around the edges. The oversized-silverware had that pre-machine, off-center look about them, and were really heavy, from a time when people bought silverware as a rainy day investment.
"No, you haven't. Do you think I look like Emily Van Camp?"
"I would not know who that is, but if it makes you happy, you go ahead and believe it and I'll swear I believe it too. How's that?"
"Yeah. But she don't act as good as she used to?"
"I'm taking it she had been a child actress of some renown?"
"Yeah."
"It's been my experience that child acting and grown up acting are often two separate skills and that the perfection of the former often hinders the learning of the latter. Except Lillian Gish, who's the exception that proves the rule as she only had continued success playing youngsters when she was pushing thirty. You could blame the talkies for her eventual theatrical demise, but I beg to differ. She was a ham of the highest order, fit for bad fill stock, but not the clearer film of the next decade. But you do have a way of getting me off the subject. You think you are like them in the woods?"
"Please."
"Most people hereabouts are like them in the woods. It goes with the territory, but the mother was different for some strange reason. Perhaps you are different."
"And Faudron?"
"Never met her. Don't think I'd care to. Why'nt you join the Navy? Stay away from the men, but join the Navy, do you some good."
"Airforce, I told you."
"Don't interrupt me, child. It's unbecoming of you." She fumbled in the purse next to her chair without looking up. "Would you like a cigarette?"
"Yeah."
She lit first her own, then Moren's. "Just not in public. God bless that Indian fella who sends me my cigarettes. He's a great man and though we have never met, in my small way I love him." She blew three smoke rings then inhaled them. "That's how you tell if your lungs are still good. But as I was saying, when they first came, I had my nice house on the island. Though it hadn't always been an island. Back before they came with the silver mines and before the strange ones came."
Moren pointed in the direction of Rau's house. "The Cylons."
"Now what the hell is that?"
"Sorry, the strange ones, go one."
"Got to get you a damn, stinking book of manners."
"Would that be in there?"
"What's the difference? You'll never read it. Strange ones, stranger than you. But I don't like to talk about them." She leaned forward in a conspiratorial way. "They might be listening."
"Nineteen-forty-eight."
"Ah, no child. Eighteen-forty-eight. That's when the silver miner's came. Nineteen-forty was when the bomb makers came. Nineteen-forty-eight was when the (&(*&(*&(* aliens came, and that's when all my troubles began."
Mrs. Rochambeau had long, red hair, most likely dyed; she was probably in her seventies. It ran down her shoulders and along her green, silk dress, the kind of dress they buried dead people in cowboy movies in. With the heavy makeup, she might have been Lotte Lenya on the cover of her album. Dad had a few, maybe they'd been grandpa's, Moren wasn't sure when she'd sold them on E-bay.
"Rau takin' care of you and your sister?" Mrs. Rochambeau asked in her heavy, French accent. "Rau's good people; I'd stick with 'em."
"She likes him."
"In that way?"
"I think. You know him well?"
"Don't know him at all. We've never met. But I observe and I think I approve of what I observe." Mrs. Rochambeau tried to get up, then remembered the slim chain around her ankle. She stared at it a moment then pulled a key from around her neck, opened the lock and set herself free. "I suppose it's all right for just a spell."
Moren didn't ask about the chain. Mrs. Rochambeau was spooky, but not in a bad way. "Mrs. R, where's Rau go every night?"
"Go? He goes to the island."
"But he goes that way" Moren said, pointing behind her. "He goes into the woods."
"Throwin' the scent off in case any of the townspeople come up this way at night, but they rarely do. Ain't too smart that way, even round midnight, though go tell that to them. But they all think the island is poisoned somehow. That's why they think it's abandoned. But it's not. Though it doesn't have quite the activity upon it now that it once had then."
She went to the mantle and showed Moren a photograph from the days when she worked at the atom project, as she always called the military style base on the island. "We had some good times, then. Though they didn't tell us what the work was about, actually. Most of us just turned a dial this way, when the little needle moved too much into the red, or we turned a dial that way when it went too much into the green on these long banks of machinery on either wall and stacked in the middle like bookcases. That was for the war effort we later learned. We was helping to make little bity drops of plutonium...drip, drip, drip. And you couldn't wear no jewelry there. Suck you up against the wall if you went too close to the machinery and you'd get docked a day's pay for that."
"I thought you were mad at them for taking your house?"
"I was. But this was the very best place to hide wasn't it?" She smiled as if she thought herself very clever and they shared a secret. Then a clock went off in the living room and she tensed-up as if she'd done something dangerous by straying too far from the chair. She shuffled back to it and though it was heavy and overstuffed, she leaned back until she balanced it on two legs. Something about sitting in the center of the room calmed her and she pointed to the window as if at the very sound of the sprinklers spraying across her lawn and against her house, one after another as if winding up the house like a water wheel. "Listen to that."
"They can help you with that now."
"What?"
"Agoraphobia."
"I ain't afraid of going out and I'm happy to fear the water. Nasty, dirty water, from the silver mines. It'd burn me bad. And the word is Hydrophobia and there's no such thing."
"But you said."
"I said I haven't been out. I didn't say I was afraid to go out."
"But where does Rau go?" Moren asked.
"He goes to hunt the wolf, the werewolf, the king of the wolves of men."
Moren wanted to giggle but Mrs. Rochambeau was dead serious. Moving here had seemed like the start of a new life, in some ways it was. She accepted what the people in town were. They were afraid to come up here, as long as Rau was around and if you didn't wander around town or the woods at night and get bitten, they were really pretty stupid, like dogs and even dumber in the daytime. But the way Mrs. Rochambeau had said king of wolves, she was talking about something else entirely and before Moren could ask, she tilted her head into her chest a
nd spoke in some strange language, Moren was sure no one else still spoke.
Mrs. Rochambeau looked up darkly. Somehow Moren understood the words and they painted a picture in her mind. Tall wolves in old-fashioned evening wear and ladies in gowns with wired-scoop skirts sat at a supper table over candlelight. There must have been a hundred of them, and after they finished eating and the plates were cleared away the clock struck midnight. The king of wolves came to the door carrying a basket of long knives, which he placed in front of each diner. When the clock was finished striking, they ran out into the woods and killed everything they could find and if they couldn't find anything, they killed one of their own.
The clock struck again and Mrs. Rochambeau stopped. "I'm sorry, Moren. I misspoke. Your mind's too weak to hear."
"It's just a story, and a trick of the mind. That's all."
"I thought you'd doubt me so I got the projector out. I'll show you. In the living room; bring your dish while I set it up."
Ms. Rochambeau looked out the window then lowered the blinds. She bent down to plug the large, old movie projector into the wall, then got up and went to the window as if the closed-blinds were unbearable. She scrunched them together and peered out. "Ah, hell. Someone shut my sprinkler off on that side."
"I did; it's raining."
"It's always raining here. Please go put it on now, please, and put your coat on."
Mrs. Rochambeau grabbed Moren by the arm when she got to the door. "And put some fire under the still. It's in the car shed and bring me half a jug of gin."
"I can't."
"I didn't ask you to drink any. I just asked you to bring it here and help me drink it. Are you going to refuse an old lady under a doctors care?"
She said that a lot, every time she wanted a favor. "OK."
Moren went out to the garage at the far end of the lawn and found a bucket of Gin by the still. She didn't want to touch it, because of the little flame that burned underneath. Let someone else get blamed for burning the place down, which Mrs. Rochambeau would surely do one day.
She got to the door when she noticed an artist's folder among all the gardening junk and old lawnmowers. She gingerly climbed over one of the lawnmowers, looked around just in case Mr. Rochambeau came in and flipped through the paintings. They were all old oil paintings, dusty and moldy; portraits of people long-forgotten, sitting in grand houses in lace-colored dresses, or posing proudly with their hunting dogs. The last one was sticky and brighter and though Moren stared at it upside down, it was her mother, standing in front of their house, which wasn't possible because as far as she knew. it took months and months to do a painting like that...even if you pretended to be a witch lady like Mrs. Rochambeau. She felt so nervous, she almost went home and locked her door but when she thought about it, maybe Mrs. Rochambeau was telling her something.
