Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  She sat up. Toby was at his desk under a framed movie poster, bent over something illuminated by a very bright and tightly directed light. He was wearing his jeans but no shirt or socks.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He turned sharply, then smiled. “Oh, hey Kylie. Have a nice rest?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  He got up and fetched her a half depleted bottle of water from the refrigerator. While he was doing that she noticed her locator in pieces on the desk.

  “We don’t need that anymore,” she said, pointing.

  “I was just curious. I can put it back together, no problem.”

  “I don’t care about it.” She lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes.

  “Kylie?”

  “Hmmm?” She kept her eyes closed.

  “Who are you? Really.”

  “I’m your spooky girl.”

  “Besides that.”

  She opened her eyes. “Don’t spoil it. Please don’t.”

  “Spoil what?”

  “This. Us. Now. It’s all that matters.”

  Rain ticked against the window. It would continue all night, a long, cleansing rain. Water that anybody could catch in a cup and drink if they wanted to—water out of the sky.

  Toby took his pants down and slipped under the sheet next to her, his body heat like a magnetic field that drew her against him. She pressed her cheek to his chest. His heart beat calmly.

  “Everything’s perfect,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound that certain.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Only—this is all pretty fast. Don’t you think we should know more about each other?”

  “Why? Now is what matters.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, what do you do? Where do you live? Basic stuff. Big stuff, too, like do you believe in God or who’d you vote for president?”

  “I want to go for a long walk in the rain. I want to feel it on my face and not be afraid or sick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re spoiling it. Please, let’s make every second happy. Make it a day we’d want to relive a thousand times.”

  “I don’t want to live any day a thousand times.”

  “Let’s walk now.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  She got out of bed and started dressing, her back to him.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said.

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You are.”

  She turned to him, buttoning her shirt. “Don’t tell me what I am.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You practically sleep walk through the most important day of your life.”

  “I’m not sleep-walking.”

  “Don’t you even want to fall in love with me?”

  He laughed uncertainly. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “You know it. Kylie.”

  “I mean your last name.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” Toby said. “You matter to me.”

  Finished with her shirt, she sat on the edge of the bed to lace her shoes. “No you don’t,” she said. “You only care about me if you can know all about my past and our future. You can’t live one day well and be happy.”

  “Now you sound like Hemingway.”

  “I don’t know what that means and I don’t care.” She shrugged into her parka.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. I told you what I wanted.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was too ignorant to absorb it.”

  She slammed the door on her way out.

  She stood under the pumpkin-colored light of the street lamp, confused, face tilted up to be anointed by the rain. Was he watching her from the apartment window, his heart about to break? She waited and waited. This is the part where he would run to her and embrace her and kiss her and tell her that he loved, loved, loved her.

  He didn’t come out.

  She stared at the brick building checkered with light and dark apartment windows, not certain which one was his.

  He didn’t come out, and it was spoiled.

  A bus rumbled between her and the building, pale indifferent faces inside.

  Kylie walked in the rain. It was not poison but it was cold and after a while unpleasant. She pulled her hood up and walked with her head down. The wet sidewalk was a pallet of neon smears. Her fingers touched the shape of the explosive in her pocket. She could find the building with the papered windows. Even if the Tourists tried to stop her she might still get inside and destroy the Eternity Core. It’s what her mother wanted, what the Old Men wanted. But what if they caught her? If she remained in the loop through an entire cycle she would become a permanent part of it. She couldn’t stand that, not the way she hurt right now. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t know the time. She had to reach her scutter and get out.

  A horn went off practically at her elbow. Startled, she looked up. A low and wide vehicle, a boy leaning out the passenger window, smirking.

  “Hey, you wanna go for a ride?”

  “No.”

  “Then fuck you, bitch!” He cackled, and the vehicle accelerated away, ripping the air into jagged splinters.

  She walked faster. The streets were confusing. She was lost. Her panic intensified. Why couldn’t he have come after her and be sorry and love her? But it wasn’t like the best parts of the movies. Some of it was good, but a lot of it wasn’t. Maybe her mother had been right. But Kylie didn’t believe in souls, so wasn’t it better to have one day forever than no days? Wasn’t it?

  Fuck you, bitch.

  She turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come. At first she didn’t think she could find it, but there it was, the apartment building! And Toby was coming out the lobby door, pulling his jacket closed. He saw her, and she ran to him. He didn’t mean it and she didn’t mean it, and this was the part where they made up, and then all the rest of the loop would be good—the good time after making up. You had to mix the good and bad. The bad made the good better. She ran to him and hugged him, the smell of the wet leather so strong.

  “You were coming after me,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You were,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  Something clutched at her heart. “It’s the best day ever,” she said.

  “I give it a seven point five.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said. “You got your spooky girl and you had an adventure and you saved the whole world.”

  “When you put it that way it’s a nine. So come on. I’ll buy you a hot drink and you can tell me about the tourists from the fifth dimension.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Five of eleven.”

  “I don’t want a hot drink,” she said. “Can you take us some place with a nice view where we can sit in the Vee Dub?”

  “You bet.”

  The city spread out before them. The water of Elliot Bay was black. Rain whispered against the car and the cooling engine ticked down like a slow timer. It was awkward with the separate seats, but they snuggled together, Kylie’s head pillowed on his chest. He turned the radio on—not to his loud noise music but a jazz station, like a compliment to the rain. They talked, intimately. Kylie invented a life and gave it to him, borrowing from stories her mother and grandmother had told her. He called her spooky, his term of endearment, and he talked about what they would do tomorrow. She accepted the gift of the future he was giving her, but she lived in this moment, now, this sweet inhalation of the present, this happy, happy ending. Then the lights of Seattle seemed to haze over. Kylie closed her eyes, her hand on the explosive sphere, and her mind slumbered briefly in a dark spun cocoon.

  *

  Kylie punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her.

  Double Occupancy

  Cab Macarron left his patrol c
ar at the state barracks but he didn’t bother to change out of his trooper’s uniform. He picked up Joe Rodriguez at the Penny Diner in Goldbar and they headed straight to the Soams’s place as dusk was descending on the North Cascades. If there was going to be trouble Cab wanted backup. He had played football with Joe in high school. Back then, only five years ago, they had called Rodriguez “The Monster.” He was still a big son of a bitch. Cab and Joe had always stuck together, pulling a three-year hitch in the Marines and then going for troopers.

  Cab’s Jeep Cherokee handily negotiated the county road. The snow was like wedding cake frosting marred once by somebody’s fingers—the narrow tire tracks left behind Nancy’s snappy little Honda Civic. The Honda tracks slewed around pretty good. That car was light, and Nancy had no business coming up here anyway.

  “She called you?” Joe Rodgriguez said.

  “I already said she did.”

  Cab parked behind the Civic. He reached into the Cherokee’s glove compartment for his flashlight, a rugged, four-cell job with a steel cast barrel.

  Their boots made a crumping noise in the snow. Cab pointed his flashlight through the ice-encrusted window of the Honda. It was like peering through clear water, everything appeared wavy, the suitcases and brown grocery bags. Cab could plainly see the AGA logo on the bags.

  “Looks like she’s moving in,” Joe said.

  Cab shot him a glance, measured his friend’s innocent observation, and shook his head.

  “Nancy’s seventeen,” Cab said.

  “She’s got a mind of her own, though.”

  Only Joe Rodriguez, whom Cab had known since boyhood, could get away with telling Cab anything about his kid sister Nancy.

  “I seen it in her before she was twelve,” Joe said, pushing it.

  “Seen what?”

  “That she wasn’t going to stay put,” Joe said. “Not for you or anybody else, not after your mother passed.” Cab’s mother had held the three of them together after Cab’s father was killed in the Panama invasion. A military funeral and a posthumous Medal of Honor didn’t mean a thing to Nancy; she had barely been out of diapers. But for Cab, being handed his father’s Medal of Honor was like being presented with the burden of his own premature manhood. A few years later their mother collapsed on the kitchen floor in front of Nancy, hammered by a stroke at the age of forty-five. By then Cab had already enlisted, and Nancy endured life in foster care until he mustered out of the Marines and managed to talk the Department of Social and Health Services into giving him guardianship over his sister for the remaining years of her adolescence. Nancy, who’d run away four times from the foster home, took Cab’s guardianship as a ticket to freedom. But Cab regarded his responsibility seriously and let her know it.

  “She’s a minor and I’m bringing her home,” Cab said to Joe Rodriguez.

  “Because she called you.”

  “Yeah, because she called me.”

  A weird call. The dispatcher had relayed the message to Cab. He was at the end of his shift. He called Nancy from the barracks. She had sounded near hysterics. “Peter’s brought something through. I thought he was just talking, but God, Cab, he really did it. The thing bit him. I don’t know where it is now. Out in the woods. I’m afraid to leave the cabin, but Peter’s bleeding. I’m scared, Cab.” Then there was some angry shouting in the background and Nancy said she had to go, that she shouldn’t have called. A moment later the line had gone dead.

  I’m scared, Cab.

  Now, standing in the deepening twilight beside Nancy’s Honda, Cab looked up the hill to old Neal Soams’s fancy cabin. Neal had leased the place out to the wrong guy this time. Naturally Cab had done a background check on Peter Goetz as soon as Nancy mentioned the name. This was no local kid. Cab could scare the town boys off easily enough. What he didn’t understand was that if Goetz was such a hot-shot genius then what was he doing out here by himself about as far away from MIT as you could go without getting your feet wet?

  “Let’s go, if you’re with me,” Cab said.

  “Course I’m with you, old son.”

  The switch-back path to the cabin was buried. They cut straight up the hillside, and Cab felt it in his knees. He drove himself, his breath fogging out in icy clouds.

  “What’s this?” Joe had stopped. He was bent over, breathing hard, big shoulders moving up and down in his black and red Pendelton jacket. He pointed at what looked like a thick, black snake lying in the snow. Cab didn’t want to waste time but he slogged back and hunkered next to Joe.

  “Looks like a power cable,” Cab said. He put his hand on it. “Sucker’s warm, too.”

  Joe pointed his chin at the cabin, now about fifty yards farther up the hill. “You think he’s tied into the underground line?”

  “Cable this thick would handle a lot of juice.” Cab almost smiled. “Illegal as hell.”

  Joe stood upright and stretched his back. He moved up the hill a couple of strides, but Cab stayed where he was. In the last few seconds the cable had grown perceptibly warmer. Hell, it was practically too hot to touch. The snow was melting around it.

  Suddenly white light burst over them. An explosion, utterly silent. Being down low probably saved Cab. A force drove him onto his back, sliding him down the slope with his head toward the road.

  Joe Rodriguez screamed.

  A bizarre pattern of silvery shimmers fanned out above Cab, as if the air were filled with irregular sheets of tin foil. Joe was right in the middle of it, arms flailing, his upper body actually glowing.

  Cab whipped around in the snow, galvanized by a sensation like a million ants crawling over his body. He squeezed his eyes shut against the painfully bright tin foil air. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The crawling sensation ceased, and the shimmers faded, leaving deep purple twilight.

  Cab pushed himself to his feet and looked around. Rodriguez was gone. A trail of boot prints led into the trees. From the cabin to the bottom of the hill the black cable lay exposed in a trench of melted snow.

  “God damn.”

  Cab had expected to see the cabin blown to flinders, maybe the fieldstone chimney and a few smoking cross beams standing in the dimness. But the cabin appeared unchanged, except it was dark, when moments ago the porch light had been on.

  Cab picked up his flashlight, brushed off the lens, and tried it out. The bulb worked fine. He turned to the tracks in the snow. As much as he wanted to get up to the cabin and see about Nancy, he couldn’t leave his friend. Joe Rodriguez’s scream shrilled through his mind as if it had never stopped.

  He didn’t have to follow the tracks far. Joe’s legs stuck out from under the shaggy, snow-laden bough of a blue spruce. Cab knelt beside him, barking Joe’s name. Rodriguez did not respond, and Cab hooked his fingers in a belt loop at Joe’s hip, reached under the spruce bough to find his shoulder and roll him onto his back. What he touched in the concealing shadow under the tree made him jerk his hand back—a reflex, as if he’d inadvertently put his hand into something nasty.

  Without conscious volition, Cab stood up and backed away. He caught himself and stopped. That was his friend. Whatever had happened to him, it was still Joe.

  Cab tucked the flashlight under his armpit, took hold of his partner’s boots and dragged him clear of the tree. “God!” He dropped Joe’s legs and the flashlight and staggered back, his hand covering his mouth. After a minute he forced himself to pick up the flashlight and point it at the thing that had been his friend. From the waist up it was a nightmare of tapering gray tentacles limply attached to a trunk of the same rubbery flesh. Joe’s red and black Pendelton jacket hung in tatters. Only one of his arms remained, and it was twisted, shrunken, a mere vestige.

  Cab didn’t even try to fit his mind around the impossibility of what he was seeing. His pragmatic nature took over, as it always did, and he hunkered beside the Rodriguez-thing and rolled it onto its back.

  Joe was still there—a piece of him. His face rose out of the neckless gray tru
nk like a death mask of minutely sculpted clay.

  Something shifted in the air above Cab. He looked up sharply and saw a clump of snow falling toward him. The branch from which it had shaken loose was still moving. Cab swung his flashlight up. At first he saw nothing. It wasn’t until he began to move the light away that it happened to glint on a silver thread. He glimpsed it then it was gone. He had to move the light again, angle it slightly this way and that before he was able to discern an intricate network of silver threads stretching from the blue spruce to the next nearest tree. It was strange, almost as if the network really wasn’t there. Even the barest shifting of his light caused the threads to disappear. After only a moment or two he looked away from it, necessarily dismissing it from his thoughts so he could concentrate on the problems at hand.

  He fought an almost overpowering urge to charge up the hill to the cabin. But his partner was down, and God only knew what was happening up there. This was more than he could handle by himself.

  Cab half fell, half slid to the bottom of the hill, and then he was yanking open the passenger door of the Cherokee. He grabbed the CB’s mike, but when he switched the unit on a storm of static burst from the speaker. It was the same on every channel.

  Cab racked the mike and started up the hill again, driving his boots into the deep snow, feeling the fire in his knees. He could have taken the Jeep, maybe out-distanced the interference. Then again he might have had to drive all the way to Goldbar, waste as much as an hour.

  Cab, I’m scared.

  Ten yards from the cabin’s front porch the air felt charged with electricity, reminding him of the crawling sensation he’d experienced during the silent explosion.

  He pounded on the door but no one responded. At the back of the cabin he shined his light in the kitchen window. Rustic pine cabinets. Dishes piled in the sink. Something moved on the floor near the doorway to the dining area. He caught it in his light. A hand groping out of an unbuttoned flannel sleeve.