Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I sat cross-legged on the mattress facing her, leaned forward and rested my head on her shoulder. She stroked my hair, and the warmth of her hand pointed up the cold that was still inside me. I wrapped her in my arms, and she said, "What's that smell?" She touched my thigh, drew back her fingers. "You pissed your pants! Get off my bed!"

  "Euliss is dead," I said.

  "What?" She peered at me. "What happened?"

  As I told her, as I described the event, what I wanted to do became clearer and clearer, until finally it was solid in me, the rightness of its shape discernible, like a ruby in a glass of water. "I'm going over the Wall," I said. "Today."

  Annie had been listening with her head down; she looked at me now in her steady way and said, "It's a horrible thing … Euliss. But you're overreacting."

  "Come with me," I said.

  She shook her head. "I can't."

  "Annie … for God's sake! We can't just sit here and wait to die."

  "What else is there to do? It was the same back in the world. And if there's a world other side of the Wall, it'll be the same there. It's what folks do."

  "That's true," I said. "But it don't make it right."

  A couple of people passed by outside, talking, and for no good reason, as if we had a secret to keep, we remained silent until the voices receded.

  "I'm going," I said. "I want you to go with me."

  She wouldn't look at me.

  "Goddamn it!" I smacked the mattress with my fist. "If you were back home, living in a country that lost twenty-five percent of its population, you'd do more than just sit."

  "The hell I would! I'd stay right where I was, and I'd try to build up what was knocked down. It's what any reasonable person would do."

  "All right," I said. "But this ain't the world. Every year the fritters come … and things like whatever it was took Euliss. Every year you got 'bout a one-in-four chance of dying."

  "So you're gonna leave me?"

  "I asked you to come along. You stay, it's you leavin' me."

  "You ain't changed a bit!" she said. "You're still …"

  "Yes, I have! We both of us changed. And we don't have to act like the people we used to be. Like a coupla fucked-up drunks can't agree what kinda wine to kill themselves with." I put my hands on her shoulders. "You know I'm right about this, Annie. You're all the time hangin' out there with the trains 'cause you know what I know. It's death to stay here." I thought of Josiah Tobin. "And it'll come sooner than later."

  She refused to budge, and I said, "Anybody ever seen a fish like the one ate Euliss?"

  Sullenly, she said, "Way you describe it, how can I tell?"

  "A big brown fuckin' bass with big yellow teeth," I said. "It looked like a picture out of a children's book more'n a real fish. Like the kind of monster a child might make up. That's plain enough."

  "I don't think so," she said. "'Least I can't remember if anyone ever said anything to be me about it."

  "See what's happenin'? This place keeps comin' up with new ways to kill you. It's gonna get worse."

  "I don't care what you say, I'm not leavin'!"

  A silence wedged between us.

  "Well, I guess that's it, then," I said.

  "I guess so." After a couple of ticks, she said, "I don't want you to go."

  I was tired of arguing, but I couldn't think of a response.

  "Maybe if you wait a while," she said. "We got a year 'fore the fritters come again. Maybe if you let me build up to it …"

  "I could do that. A couple hours ago, I was sittin' with Euliss with our lines in green water, and then somethin' tore up from hell and took him. It don't seem anybody could change my mind on leavin' after seeing that, but bein' here with you now, all the comfort you are, I believe I could fall back into the way it was. But that doesn't mean it's what I should do." I tapped my head. "This here's tellin' me to leave. I never listened to my brain before, I always went with my heart, and all that did was bury me in deeper shit."

  "Oh, I see! That's what I am. Deeper shit!"

  "I ain't gonna argue. You know that's not what I mean. You gotta listen to your brain, too. You do, and we'll be catchin' out of this goddamn place in a hour."

  She stared at me for a second, then lay down on her side, facing toward the leafy wall.

  "Annie?"

  "Just go," she said in a small voice.

  I dropped down beisde her, but she said, "Don't! I want you to go if you're goin'."

  I made to warm her up by rubbing her shoulder. She snapped at me and curled into a fetal position. It felt as if a hundred pounds of wet cement had been poured into my skull, but that wasn't nearly enough to extinguish the bright point of certainty that was urging me to leave. I got up from the bed and started stuffing clothes into my pack. Several times I stopped packing and tried again to convince Annie to join me, but she wasn't hearing me. My movements grew slower—I didn't want to abandon her. But I kept at it until my goods were all tucked away. I shouldered the pack and stood looking down at her.

  "This how you want to do it?" I asked.

  "It's how you want it. I'm just lyin' here."

  I waited a few seconds, thinking she might relent. Finally said, "I love you, Annie."

  The words caused her to flinch, but she kept silent.

  It was a lot harder leaving Annie than it had been to leave Eileen—I had no whiskey to ease my path. Tears cut down my cheeks, and I must have decided a dozen times to turn back. But something kept me going and I climbed down from the tree and walked out onto the stony section of the bank and stood scanning the wall of jungle on the far side of the river. Bobby Forstadt and his punky blond girlfriend were sitting crosslegged on the rocks. They shaded their eyes against the sun, which had broken through the overcast, and stared at me.

  "Where you goin'?" Bobby asked.

  "East," I said. I didn't feel like talking to him, but I knew I'd have to.

  "No shit!" He scrambled up to his feet. "How come?"

  "Bobby, I don't feel much like talkin', all right. Go talk to Annie and she'll tell you. She's up in her room."

  "Naw, she ain't." His girfriend pointed back toward the tree. "She's right there."

  Annie was coming out from under the shadow of tree, dragging her pack along the ground—she must have stuffed it in record time. She was wearing faded jeans and an old sweatshirt. I grinned at her, but as she approached she dialed down my pleasure by saying, "You better be right about this, you son-of-a-bitch."

  Bobby cupped his hands and shouted, "Annie and Billy Long Gone … catchin' out over the Wall!" Then he repeated it, except instead of "catchin' out over the Wall" he said, "… movin' to the next level." People filtered out of the jungle, dropped from the tree, and before long we had a crowd of maybe twenty, twenty-five gathered around, asking why we were leaving and what they could do. Annie stood mute, and I fielded the questions as best I could. The news about Euliss sobered the mood, but even so nobody appeared to grasp why we were leaving. Except maybe for Pie. He shouldered his way to me and handed me a packet of dried fish wrapped in leaves and a can of red spray paint.

  "I kinda figgered I'd be the one going over the Wall," he said. "But I guess it ain't in me. Hope you make it, Billy. When you get where you goin', paint me a message on the train."

  "I'll do 'er," I said, and we shook on it.

  More people came, bringing so much food, we couldn't have carried half of it. Annie got to hugging her friends, and some folks started singing, and everybody was sharing food, and I could see it was turning into a party and was afraid if we stayed much longer we'd get caught up in it. I shouted "Hey!" and kept shouting it until; I had everyone's attention. Then I said, "Thank y'all for comin' down to see us off! We appreciate it! But we're gon' be leavin' now!"

  "What's the hurry?" somebody shouted, and several people laughed.

  "I tell you what the hurry is," I said. "This place kills somethin' in us. It makes us settle for half-a-life. Maybe one reason we settle for it is that
's more'n most of us ever had. But there's somethin' else goin' on, though I couldn't put a name on it. Somethin' that makes us just set around waitin' to die. It'd be easy for me'n Annie to hang out and party. Hell, after a good party, we might change our minds. But I ain't gon' let that happen."

  Some people broke off from the edge of the crowd and walked away.

  "This ain't nothin' to celebrate," I went on. "We ain't happy to be leavin'. We're rollin' the dice. But this way we get to do the rollin' ourselves. Staying here's the same as not even pickin' 'em up. And all that gets you is what you already know. What Euliss Brooks knew. What Josiah Tobin and Nancy Savarese knew. And the rest of 'em who ain't here to party, what they knew. We're leavin' 'cause it's our only chance of breakin' through to somethin' better. Yonder ain't no place to build a life. It's a place where you get your shit together 'fore you move on again. It's a goddamn homeless shelter with a view. We ain't s'posed to live here, we're s'posed to stop over for a while and then be gone. That's why we're leavin'. We want to find us a home."

  More of the crowd had drifted away as I spoke—it appeared there were no more than ten people left. Pie, Bobby Forstadt and his girlfriend, and some others.

  I adjusted the weight of my pack and said, "Thanks for the send-off. Maybe we'll see you down the road." Then I picked my way down the bank and set out to ford the river. I didn't look back, but I heard Anne splashing after me and somebody called out, "Safe rails!" By the time we reached the other side of the river, everybody except Bobby Forstadt and his girlfriend had gone, and they were back to sitting as they'd been before they saw me, talking and gesturing—Annie and I were already a closed entry in Bobby's notebooks. To tell the truth, I felt the same way about Yonder. The people I'd met there had been turned into memories, and in my mind I was already going over the Wall. The tree, with its multi-leveled canopies and chambers, its dark gleaming branches, once again had the look of a ruin, and I supposed that was all it had truly ever been.

  · · · · ·

  I half-expected the jungle to try and thwart our departure, to send legions of bugs and snakes and whatever else it could muster against us; but we reached the tracks without incident. A black train was waiting, bending around the curve of the green hill. A young one, unscarred and gleaming. I'd been hoping for the train Santa Claus had ridden—at least I knew that one could make the trip. We crawled into one of the cars and settled in, and less than five minutes later we started to roll.

  I wish I had thunder and lightning in my words to tell you of that trip, because it deserves to be written large and luminous and noisy; but the world doesn't sing that song through me, and I'm stuck with speaking in a plainer voice. It began ordinarily enough. Annie was still angry at me for forcing her hand, but she was more scared than angry, and she sat with her knees drawn up, picking at frays in the knees of her jeans. I watched the hills passing out the door of the car, thinking maybe I shouldn't have pulled Annie into this, that it might have been kinder just to go without a word. I was glad to be on the move once again. It may be that the universe has no rhyme or reason, but I couldn't accept that a bunch of hobos had been brought to Yonder merely because they fell down the same crack, and so while I was scared, too, I was excited in a way I'd never been before. I wasn't just looking for a new place to take a leak in, a new town where I could run hustles and sell emergency food stamps for crank; I had a sense of myself as an adventurer, an explorer, a penetrator of the unknown. Maybe this notion was bogus, overblown, but it had been a long time since I had perceived myself in such a clean light, and I wasn't about to spoil the feeling this gave me by overanalyzing the situation.

  I tried to talking to Annie, but she wasn't up for it. However, after we'd gone about a mile, she scooted over and tucked herself under my arm, and we sat like that for the better part of an hour, until the train started winding down out of the hills. Through cuts between the hills we could see that yellowy green plain laid out under a high sun, and the blue dazzles of the lakes scattered across it. The windy rush of the train and the brilliant light made it all seem hopeful, as did the rich decaying smell of the marshlands as we swept out onto the plain. It resembled the plain I'd crossed with Pie after leaving Klamath Falls, with little islands of solid ground here and there that supported trees whose twisted trunks reminded me of Monterey pines, but whose leaves were ribbony and fluttered in the wind like streamers. Not a sign of life, though I assumed there were fish in the lakes and the waterways that fed into them. It was exhilarating to see, but soon it grew boring, this interminable passage of reeds and lakes and twisted trees. The train appeared to be flying past the same scene repeated over and over. Our initial excitement dissipated, and we sat against the side wall of the car, eating dried fish and jungleberries, talking but not saying much, just "Pass me the fish," and "Want some water?" and "You feelin' okay?" Comforting noises more than conversation.

  The sun baked the car at noon, and the heat worked to bring out a lazy heat in us. We made love on our stretched-out sleeping bags, a far different experience from the sport-fucking I'd done on trains in the past, when the rattle of the cars and the noise off the rails drowned out every human sound, causing it to seem that the racket was somehow related to the messy, intemperate character of the act. The winded quiet of our train was like a bed of gentle noise supporting us, enabling sweetness. We fell asleep afterward, and when we woke it had come twilight, and the mountains ahead looked to be considerably closer, their peaks shrouded in a cloudy darkness like battle smoke. We'd be into them by morning, I figured, if the train kept its current pace, and then, maybe, we'd discover if this had been a good idea or merely an ornate form of suicide. The heat faded, the air grew chill, but the car, warmed by its golden blood, kept us relatively cozy. We draped blankets over our shoulders and held hands and watched out the door.

  As dusk settled, far out on the plain, what appeared to be a flock of large ungainly birds flapped up from the reeds, their numbers swelling until it covered a considerable expanse of the sky. I noticed the train had picked up speed, and as the flock drew closer, I understood why. Hundreds of black blanket-like objects, their surfaces fattening with wind, their flights unsteady, erratic, making swoops and glides that were more crumpled collapses, but moving inexorably toward us nonetheless. "Oh, shit!" Annie said, and heaved at the door, sliding it shut. I cracked it back open a couple of inches so I could see, and she said, "Are you crazy!" and struggled to push it all the way closed again.

  "We need to be able to see what's goin' on," I told her. "'Case we have to jump."

  "Jump out into this hellhole!" she said. "That ain't gon' happen! Now shut the fuckin' door!"

  When I continued to hold the door open, she shouted, "Goddamn it, Billy! You keep it open, one of 'em's liable to pry at it and get inside with us! That what you want?"

  "I'll take the chance. I don't wanna be trapped inside."

  "Oh, and I ain't got no say. That it?" She got right up into my face. "You think I come on this ride just so you can boss me around? You better think twice!" She hauled off and punched at me, her fist glancing off my cheekbone, and I fell back a couple of steps, stunned by her ferocity.

  "I ain't scared of you!" she said, her shoulders hunched. "I ain't taking no shit off you or anybody!"

  Her eyes darted to the side, the muscles in her cheeks were bunched. Seeing how frightened she was acted to muffle my own fear, and I said, "You want it closed, then close it. All I'm sayin' is, if the car starts gettin' tore up, maybe we oughta know what's goin' on so we can make a reasonable decision."

  "Reasonable? What the fuck are you talkin' about? If we was reasonable, we'd be back over Yonder and not fixin' to die out here in the middle of nowhere!"

  The car gave a heave, a kind of twitching movement, and then gave another, more pronounced heave, and I knew a beardsley had settled on the roof and was tearing at it. An instant later the door was shoved open a foot or so, and another beardsley began squeezing through the gap, like a towel draw
n through a wringer, its mottled, bald old man's head pushing in first. Annie shrieked, and I ran to my pack and plucked out my ax handle. When I turned, I saw the beardsley was halfway inside the car, its leathery black sail flapping feebly, the hooks on the underside proving to be talons three and four inches long, a dirty yellow in color. It was such a horrible sight, that parody of an ancient human face, utterly savage with its glittery black eyes and fanged snapping mouth, I froze for a second. Annie was plastered up against the edge of the door, her eyes big, and as the sail flapped at her, the talons whipping past her face, she screamed again.

  I didn't have a strategy in mind when I charged the beardsley; I simply reacted to the scream and went forward, swinging the ax handle. I took a whack at the head, but the sail got in the way, folding about the ax handle and nearly ripping it from my grasp. I started to take another swing, but the sail gloved me and yanked me toward the creature's head with such force that my feet were lifted off the floor. The thing smelled like a century of rotten socks. Talons ripped my shoulders, my buttocks, and I saw the end of reason in those strange light-stung black eyes … and then I saw something else, a recognition that jolted me. But almost instantly it was gone, and I was back fighting for life. I had no way to swing at the beardsley, being almost immobilized by the grip of the sail; but I poked the end of the ax handle at it as it hauled me hard forward again, and by chance, the handle jammed into its mouth. My fear changed to fury, and I pushed the handle deeper until I felt a crunching, the giving way of some internal structure. I rammed the handle in and out, as if rooting out a post hole, trying to punch through to the other side, and suddenly the head sagged, the sail relaxed, and I fell to the floor.

  I was fully conscious, but focused in an odd way. I heard Annie's voice distantly, and saw the roof of the car bulging inward, but I was mostly recalling the beardsley's eyes, like caves full of black moonlit water, and the fleeting sense I'd had as I'd been snatched close that it was somehow a man, or maybe that it once had been a man. And if that was so, if I could trust the feeling, how did it fit into all the theories of this place, this world. What determined that some men were punished in this way and others sent over Yonder? Maybe if you died in Yonder you became a beardsley, or maybe that's what happened if you died out on the plain. My suppositions grew wilder and wilder, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I did lose consciousness. But even then I had the idea that I was looking into those eyes, that I was falling into them, joining another flock under some mental sky and becoming a flapping, dirty animal without grace or virtue, sheltering from the sun in the cool shadows of the reeds, and by night rousing myself to take the wind and go hunting for golden blood.