by T Paulin
The clock next to him indicated it was only four o’clock, yet the room was bright and the curtains were open. That wasn’t right. It was still spring, and the sun shouldn’t be up already.
He grabbed his phone from the dresser for a second opinion. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and he’d slept through most of the day.
What a crazy night he’d had, with the hallucinations in the tub. It was a miracle he’d gotten himself into bed. As soon as he saw Brenda, she was going to be in dire trouble for buying those evil sleeping pills.
He rolled out of bed and stepped into a pile of crunchy herbs. He gasped. There was catnip everywhere. It looked like a Disney cartoon about kittens had happened in the bedroom.
Well, this was basically Brenda’s fault for buying those sleeping pills, so she could deal with it whenever she decided to return home from her overnight at an unspecified friend’s house.
Eli cleaned up, got dressed, and ate a quick bowl of cereal standing over the sink. He checked a few messages, then left the apartment to do his planned errands. He would visit his favorite places before they closed for the day, then take the microwave to its new owner.
Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
On the drive out to Mr. Quentin’s farmhouse, Eli turned up the music and sang along with an old Bruce Springsteen song. After two rough nights, Eli felt like he finally got Bruce Springsteen. He got it in every cell of his body.
Eli pulled up to the farmhouse at dusk.
He worried for a moment that Mr. Quentin wasn’t home. The lights were all off, after all. Then he made the connection that blind people wouldn’t turn on lights. He felt smart for figuring this out, but stupid that he had to first go through the thought process.
With the microwave box held against his hip with one arm, he knocked on the farmhouse door. The latch on the door was loose, so the door creaked open.
The house was quiet, and a smell wafted out. The dank air smelled not unlike the lizard terrarium from Eli’s fifth grade classroom.
“Hello? It’s me, Eli. I was here yesterday, with the other guy. Khan.” Eli was very careful to pronounce Khan’s name with a breathy K-H at the beginning, so it didn’t sound exactly like con.
“Come in,” came the weak reply.
Eli stepped into the darkness. His skin prickled, and he reconsidered the intelligence of stepping into an allegedly haunted house.
“Do you mind if I turn on the lights?” he asked the darkness.
The old man chuckled. “Not at all,” he said.
Eli found the light switch in the second-most-logical place and flicked it on, flooding the front living room in light.
The furnishings were what you’d expect—a mismatch of styles from several decades, none of it high end, covered in an assortment of quilts and throws.
Mr. Quentin sat in a recliner, a hardcover novel in his hands.
Eli’s blood ran cold, and his eyes widened at the sight of a white-eyed man holding a novel. It was the creepiest thing he’d seen in a long time. He nearly ran back out the front door, except he quickly concluded the pages must be braille. He felt smart for figuring out the bit about the braille, but wished he’d gotten there sooner.
“I brought you a new microwave,” he said.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I just wanted to do something nice for you,” Eli said, and it was the plain and simple truth.
Something dark moved at the corner of his vision. He snapped his head, but nothing was there. A dark feeling reached into his chest and tugged him toward the kitchen.
“I guess I’ll set the new one up for you,” he said.
“I’ll pay you for it. Just send me the bill. My housekeeper opens my mail.”
Eli was already in the kitchen. “I could do that,” he called over his shoulder. He could, but he wouldn’t.
Eli approached the allegedly-haunted microwave. It flashed 12:00 over and over. Real scary. He reached behind it to yank out the cord. The plug wouldn’t come out easily. He wondered if Khan’s power surges had fused the plug and wiring together. He wished he knew something about electricity.
The plug still wouldn’t come out, so Eli cursed it verbally. The plug came loose at once. So, that was it, he mused. You had to talk nasty to it. Dirty little microwave.
He hoisted it off the counter, groaning from the effort. The appliance was heavy. Supernaturally heavy.
Again, something moved at the edge of his vision. It seemed to pause, waiting to get his attention, before darting away down the hallway.
He dumped the old microwave on the kitchen table, then began unboxing the new one. When he slid it into place, the gleaming white surface put the rest of the kitchen to shame.
Mr. Quentin shuffled in, and Eli gave him a quick tutorial on the two dials. The top one was the intensity, and the lower was the timer.
They ran it a few times for practice.
“That’s a nice ding,” Mr. Quentin said after the third test run.
“Can I heat you up anything? Have you had dinner?”
Mr. Quentin gazed through him and ignored Eli’s offer. “What will you do with the other one?”
“I’ll take it away.”
The old man stepped back over to the table, keeping his thin body between Eli and the old microwave.
“You don’t have to do that.” His voice stretched low and thin, like a weathered elastic band on the verge of disintegrating.
“But I can’t leave it here, in your way.”
“You can put it in—” He stopped talking.
“In storage?” Eli offered. This was a farm, after all, so he imagined there were some barns or other buildings where he could stow the thing. He hated the idea of lugging the heavy microwave further than the van, but he did come out here to be nice.
Mr. Quentin’s lips moved without words for a moment before he said, “There’s a room down the hall.”
Eli’s ears began to ring. A room down the hall. The shape darted through the kitchen again, and down the hall.
The ringing in his ears rose up like a wave about to crash.
“Sure,” Eli said, crossing over to the table. He placed his hands either side of the machine. One side felt hot, the other cool. He yanked his hands away and wiped them on his jeans.
“Do you need a hand?” Mr. Quentin asked.
“Just a glass of water maybe. It was a long drive.” He coughed into his fist and turned to avoid looking at the hallway.
Mr. Quentin went to the cupboards and grabbed two glasses easily, then filled them with tap water. He knew his kitchen layout well, and only the angle of his chin gave away the fact he couldn’t see.
Eli wanted to ask how long the man had been blind, but it seemed impolite to inquire directly. He sipped his water and took a side road: “So, braille, huh? I would think you’d listen to audiobooks.”
“I started learning braille twenty years ago, when my sight started to go. I do like my TV shows, especially the cops and robbers ones with the scientists, but when it comes to books, I don’t like having those voices in my head. I prefer the quiet at night.”
The dark shape at the edge of Eli’s vision skittered by again. This time, he chased after it with his eyes in a curious manner. Standing in the kitchen like this, talking over a glass of water with Mr. Quentin, had put him at ease.
Eli asked about the book Mr. Quentin was reading, and they began to talk about their favorite authors.
He was reminded of those casual late-night chats with his father. In hindsight, there hadn’t been enough of those chats.
Whenever Eli returned home from school and was asked about his day, no stories sprang to mind ready to tell. But at night, when his ears picked up sounds better, and the world didn’t feel so large around him, Eli would open up. The stories about his day would flow. Typically, he was stalling for time before going to bed, but that didn’t make those midnight chats any less enjoyable at the time, or any less precious now.
&
nbsp; Eli often thought about vacations, and how they weren’t what people really wanted. Getting on a plane and flying to a tropical island had its appeal, sure, but what he really wanted was to fly back through time and revisit one of those moments in the past. Not a birthday or special event, but a regular evening, maybe a Wednesday.
Sometimes Eli became aware of these special ordinary moments while they were happening. He would feel a pulling inside himself, the psychic tickle of being observed. It was him, in the future, looking back at this ordinary moment with so much longing, it created a bond that stretched through time, between those points.
He felt these moments less and less as he aged, but he felt one now, in this old farmhouse kitchen, which didn’t smell so bad once you got used to it.
If he could go back, he would ask his father’s forgiveness for what happened in the Zone.
The group’s leader, Falcon, kept turning and looking back from his seat at the wheel. He glared at Eli with deep, dark eyes, daring him to speak up and protest their plan to drive around the fenced-off Zone until dawn.
Eli crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders together, trying to take up less width in the back set of Falcon’s car, where he was crammed between two other teenagers.
Eli was about sixteen, and in the middle of a growth spurt that had lengthened his bones, but had not yet given him enough muscle. At night, his legs ached and kept him awake, but he was glad for it, because he wanted to be tall. Pain was good. Pain was growth.
Falcon got bored of glaring at Eli and started shoulder-punching the boy up front with him. “What are you waiting for? Get out the party favors, Crasher lover. Crasher baby.”
“Shut up,” said the other boy, an amiable, athletic blond named Mike. According to gossip at the high school, Mike’s mother had disappeared a year earlier. She left a note, to say she hadn’t been kidnapped, and that they shouldn’t look for her. She said she was sorry.
People did that sometimes.
Before the Crashdown, people used to step in front of commuter trains, or take that big belly flop off a bridge—the kind that splits your clothes and skin on impact so your body disgorges its organs the way a woman dumps out the contents of her purse.
Everyone knew about Mike’s mother, even though they never talked about it with him. She had made a list and gone to run her final errands. She returned some clothes she hadn’t worn, dropped off the mail, and then took the car to the garage for an oil change. The garage was near the Zone, and Mike’s mother finished her day’s errands by entering the Zone on foot. If she hadn’t been eaten within the first month, as many were, surely now she was one of them.
Eli had almost forgotten about Mike’s mother—he liked Mike, and didn’t want to think about such an awful thing.
But now he couldn’t stop thinking about Mike’s mother, making smalltalk with the mechanics at the garage, letting them be the last humans she spoke to, and not her family.
Eli felt claustrophobic in the back of the car. Falcon turned left and then right with purpose. They weren’t cruising aimlessly, but heading for a planned destination.
Silently, Eli came to the horrifying realization that tonight, the darkness would run deep.
Either Mike didn’t know yet, or he was good at hiding it. He kept grinning, and shoulder-punched Falcon right back. He insulted Falcon’s face, his lineage, and even his car.
As the two of them tousled, the car wandered crookedly along a garbage-strewn street, and the boys on either side of Eli joined in the fray, throwing insults and messing with each other’s hair.
Mike opened the backpack he’d brought and handed out warm bottles of beer and leftover Halloween candy. Then he took out a single egg salad sandwich and ate it while everyone complained about the smell.
Falcon didn’t say a word as he pulled up in front of a three-story building. He yanked the keys from the ignition dramatically, and the car coughed and bucked itself to sleep. Falcon liked to pretend the car itself was possessed, when in fact it had a faulty carburetor. That mechanical fact didn’t take away the excitement of the trick.
“What are we doing here?” Eli asked. “You guys said we were just going to keep driving all night. Are you low on gas? I’ve got a few bucks on me.”
Falcon ran his hand through his glossy black hair and eyed Eli through the rearview mirror. “Shut up, tattletale.”
Eli replied, “If you don’t want a person to know you did something, you shouldn’t do it.”
“A person?” Falcon spat. “You’re not a person, Eli Carter. You’re one of those vegetables they grow under glass. You’re a pumpkin. You’re not even real.”
Mike, who was the closest thing to a friend that Eli had, turned back and sneered at Eli. “Pumpkin.” He laughed. “Good one.”
Eli leaned forward to get a better look at the building they were parked in front of. It was an old one.
At one time, this area had been the financial district, the business center of the city. Before that, it had been a residential district for the working class. Many of the stone apartment blocks that were the city’s oldest structures had been demolished to make way for office towers. The workers had to move further and further from the city.
Ironically, the towers hadn’t lasted long at all, not compared to the buildings they’d replaced.
Most of the towers were completely gone now, dismantled for parts or demolished because of liability issues. What remained along these once-great blocks were square holes in the earth where underground parking had been collapsed, plus a few tall buildings in rapid deterioration due to lack of maintenance, and stone or wood-frame structures like this one. These old buildings would sometimes burn, but they were spaced apart enough that fires remained isolated.
The Zone wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t as awful as Eli had imagined.
He’d never been inside the boundary before, because of the promise he’d made. Now, as the seconds ticked by, he felt the insanity of the Zone sinking in, and he felt worse and worse about breaking his promise.
“Hey, why are we stopped?” Mike asked.
“You’ll see,” Falcon said.
Eli knew why they were stopped. He didn’t have any first-hand experience, but he wasn’t stupid. The building was, for lack of a better term, a bordello. Business had likely slowed since the fences went up and restricted visitors to foot traffic only, but the place seemed to be doing some business. The generators were running and the lights were on. Red lights.
“I want to go home,” Eli said.
Falcon pushed open his door, letting a damp chill rush into the vehicle.
“Too bad, pumpkin,” Falcon said.
Everyone else jumped out of the car. They huddled together at the building’s entrance, formulating their plan. Eli stayed where he was, in the car. They couldn’t make him go in there. He checked that the windows were closed, and locked all the doors.
Through the glass, he heard Falcon yell, “Good idea, Eli! You stay with the car and keep an eye on the party favors.” He used rude hand gestures to make some suggestions for passing the time.
Eli crossed his arms against the chill and slid down in the seat. He yawned theatrically and closed his eyes halfway, pretending to be on the way to a nap.
He tilted up his chin and watched through his eyelashes as a female Crasher came out of the front door and approached the four boys. Their bravado seemed to disappear in her presence.
To Eli, she looked like a half-dressed schoolteacher, surprised by a fire alarm on her way to her job. She wore a pencil skirt, mis-matched shoes, and no shirt over her black bra. He couldn’t hear her from inside the car, but she probably wasn’t saying much. Most Crashers didn’t speak. Their vocal cords remained intact, but the desire or ability to talk simply disappeared over time as they drifted away.
She dug through a grocery bag Falcon handed her, then waved them into the building.
For the next hour, Eli tried to sleep and tried to think about anything other than w
hat was going on right in front of him. A few Crashers wandered by the car and looked in at the boy curiously, fondling the door’s handles before shuffling on.
Eli did manage to fall asleep. He awoke with a start when the car’s door rattled. He swore at Falcon, sleepily assuming the boys were surrounding the car, but it was just another Crasher, who ran off at the sound of Eli cursing.
Now Eli’s bladder was full, and the urge to return home was overwhelming. Still cursing Falcon, he swung open the car door and stomped up to the building’s door. It wasn’t locked, so he went right in.
The foyer was full of garbage, but the stairs were clear enough to reveal swirling red carpet. He heard voices, and followed them up, all the way to the third floor. As he walked down the third floor hallway, he tried not to notice the way the entire building shook under his feet and swayed from side to side.
One thing the Crashers liked to do was dismantle things, including walls. Structural walls.
Eli walked slowly past closed doors, listening. One door opened just as he approached. Falcon appeared in the doorway. He wore jeans, but no shirt, and his torso gleamed with sweat. His body was wiry, his chest slightly concave, and dotted with hairs even blacker than the ones on his head.
“Go get Mike for me,” Falcon ordered. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see Eli standing there.
“I thought he was with you,” Eli replied.
Falcon jerked his chin at the door across the hall. “He’s in there. Get him and haul him over here, or else.”
“Or what?”
Falcon glanced down meaningfully at something on his hip—the hilt of a knife protruding from a leather holster fixed to his belt.
“Or I’ll open you up, pumpkin.” Falcon grinned maliciously. “I’ll yank out your pumpkin guts and turn you into something real.”
Eli looked over Falcon’s gleaming biceps. He wasn’t scared so much as he was generally uneasy, and wanting to go home. Every hour in the Zone diminished brain function, and already his will to argue was slipping away.
So, he knocked and then opened the door across the hall. Mike and the other two guys sat huddled together on a sofa with no feet, watching TV.
