Our War with Molly Nayfack

by Chris Capps

  “This town is small,” Felix said, “I get the feeling you can’t pull a thread without touching other fibers. Four bodies are in there telling me the laws of physics as we understand them are being broken. I think we could stand to look into that some more.”

  “And we will,” Jessica said sighing heavily and turning to pastor Ritzer, “We will. Not you. And not anyone else in town. It’s our job. We can do it. You just need to find some sedatives.”

  “Sedatives?” Pastor Ritzer asked, “Felix, you never said anything about sedatives.”

  “I’ve been drafted to buy some, Pastor,” Felix said, “Apparently someone has a bootleg supply, and that’s a problem. I don’t suppose you have any for sale, do you?”

  ***

  Andrea’s dreams were bad enough to nearly cause her to cry out, but she didn’t. By the time she was awake she was already biting deep into the heel of her hand. That’s how she woke up at 4:50 that morning. Except for the fact that she was in an unfamiliar place, it was exactly how she woke up around that time every morning. With her dream still fleeing from her mind, she caught sight of an image - her daughter - swinging at the old park next to the school.

  There had been shadows in the fog flitting around.

  Realizing it had just been another one of her dreams - those dreams mourning parents get, she got up from the old leather sofa.

  I’m safe here.

  Lifting Mark’s hand off her waist where they had both fallen asleep, she looked back down at him. The experiment hadn’t worked. Bad dreams followed her wherever she slept, and they would no doubt follow Mark too. But for now there was no reason to wake him.

  "Hayds," Mark whispered.

  He talked in his sleep sometimes. It was always the same one sided conversation, arguing with someone. She had never asked him about it. Mark wasn't one to remember dreams. But tonight he was silent after that word. They rarely slept together anymore, so she listened to him breathe - tried to remember the things she had heard him say that had scared her so much. But it had been cast out long ago. She couldn't remember the words, or even the idea behind them now. Not in this safe place.

  She stretched. It was odd how quickly she could recover from the sudden loss of a child every time she woke. And it always happened just an hour or two before she was scheduled to wake up, sustaining a never ending cycle of insomnia.

  Realizing she would never be able to confront those illusions before the sun came up, she wandered down the hallway to the break room. Though it hadn’t been used in years, she wondered if the coffee maker there could still choke out one last cup before being rendered obsolete by time.

  But then she had a thought.

  It had been years since she had seen the tunnel projection room, the room that once upon a time had allowed her and all the other inhabitants from Cairo to enter into this strange and forgotten world. And though it had been shut down nearly ten years prior, she still wondered at the possibilities in her quiet moments. That too had been a recurring dream, years ago.

  She would stand on the platform in the wrecked drop chamber, staring at the stone wall that - once upon a time - opened into the tunnel back to DC. Cracks would form in the wall, ultimately giving way to a spider's web of lights. And then, in a rush of sound, space would tilt sideways, eliminate the barrier that stood between the long gone town of Cairo and that place she once called Home. Family members, friends, old pets, everyone would be there waiting to embrace her - somehow knowing fully that she would be there right in time. She would be raptured away, taken back home - maybe the only one to be taken back. Maybe she’d be helplessly dragged back to Earth, forced to find comfort in new friends, new lovers, a new life.

  “It’s only open for a few seconds, Andrea. You’ve got to make a decision,” Andrea whispered to herself through a smile as she padded with bare feet down the hallway back to the elevator shaft, “Everyone’s here. What do you choose?”

  Or maybe she wouldn’t go. She let her fantasy change direction as she reached the elevator and felt around the door in pitch black for the ladder down. Maybe it would open, and she’d see everyone in her fantasy. There would have to be someone dedicated to reopening the tunnel. A handsome scientist. He would have read her file, seen her picture, and fallen madly in love with her. Tirelessly he would have strained over calculations with his prodigious intellect, driving the whole project by himself, dedicated to that one chance that he might see her. She blushed at the thought, thinking what she would say as she grasped the iron bars of the elevator and descended into the pitch black toward the lower floor.

  “Andrea,” she said to herself, in her best impersonation of an educated British scientist, “I’m afraid I grew older trying to reach you. And yet here you stand, you haven’t aged a day. Please step through before the tunnel closes. I must be with you.”

  And as she descended the ladder, back to the first floor where she would find the drop chamber, she paused. What would she say?

  “I’d say no,” she whispered as she found her way to the first floor. She hopped - still in near pitch darkness - down from the ladder onto the floor. Wouldn’t that be noble, to say no? It would be. She congratulated herself for making the right choice, abandoning this new life of adventure so that her husband would have the woman he needed, so that the town would have the surrogate butcher they couldn’t live without. She would do more good here, in the small world that couldn’t live without her.

  She fished out a candle from her pocket, taking care to not look directly into it or the cigarette lighter she used to light it. With the dull glow of the candle casting a long shadow in her wake, Andrea made the journey through the labyrinth of hallways to the drop chamber. The door opened with a squeak.

  With the flick of a switch, she was able to turn the power on to this room - a fact that some visitors had overlooked long ago. The lights here were still all functioning, still tapped into the emergency line leading back to the windmill array plant at the edge of town.

  The rows of mysterious machines on this side were mostly gone, but as she understood it, they had served little purpose anyway. The true key to activating the tunnel was a complex device on the other side, back in a massive facility in DC.

  At least that’s what it was the last time she had seen it. In truth, the device could have been destroyed, mothballed, demolished in a thousand pieces and melted and buried. After all, no one had tried turning it back on to send more supplies.

  Or ask how they were doing.

  Of course, that’s not how it was in her version of events. In her fantasy, even now the roguish scientist was feverishly pointing to an equation covered chalkboard, pausing only to make corrections. He would slam his fist on the desk in passion, demanding that they ‘run the numbers’ again. And then, in a moment of inspiration as he looked at her photo, he would have it.

  “Recalibrate the seismic field modulators,” she said, smiling at her own casual nonsense as she opened her arms, spinning, and turning her eyes from a checkered floor up to the wall, “And open her up.”

  Six years prior a group of teenagers had broken into the facility after a football game, convinced they had the secret to getting back to DC. With sledge hammers they had pounded against the wall repeatedly, smashing the cinder blocks where the gate had once stood.

  She tried to imagine it now, shaking her head. Had no one explained to them how the tunnel worked? She could almost hear it. Sledge hammers thudding, cracking against the wall, excited laughter and drunken cheering as they whittled away at a section of wall. And finally, the aborted cheer as the concrete blocks tumbled and fell inward.

  She looked now at the small mound of sediment that had poured through the broken wall, pouring in on itself like a small pyramid. There was nothing beyond the wall now, only sand. She grabbed a handful and embraced the sound she was certain followed that final crack through the wall.

  The music of an hourglass.

  “What’s your name?” she said to herself, reac
hing out to the cinder block wall as she pictured the scientist that would come to rescue her. As her fingers explored the rough ridges of the wall, that too faded. Soon she was just alone in a big room of things she didn’t care to understand. In her hand, sand was pouring out onto the floor.

  That’s when the metal service door she had come through suddenly clicked and swung open. Instinctively, Andrea knew she would have to hide - if only for a moment.

  It could very well be Mark, her husband, who had wandered down to the tunnel, driven to seek her out by troubled dreams. Maybe he had fantasies about returning home as well. She thought about this as she knelt curiously beneath one of the dozens of smashed control terminals at the far end of the room, and peeked between them, out toward the door.

  It wasn’t Mark. It was Willard Nayfack, younger brother of that girl who had disappeared ten years ago. Andrea had spoken with him a number of times casually from behind the counter at the butcher’s shop. Her blood froze when she realized how out of place he was here - maybe even more out of place than her. At least she had her fantasies and her connection to the past here. Willard had nothing.

  Except a cardboard box.

  As he shuffled into the room and let the door clang shut behind him, Andrea watched him look around conspicuously, sniffing the air like an animal. It was much unlike the Willard she had met on a number of occasions. He seemed strange, almost desperate. He hoisted the box onto a desk nearby and called out into the room,

  “Who turned the damned lights on in here?”

  It was aggressive, that voice. More than aggressive. It was the tone of murderers in films. Gangsters would often use it to intimidate protection money out of shop keepers. It was the tone used by angry facsimiles of men, ready to kill to get what they wanted. Ready to make a victim out of whoever got in their way.

  Only when she had heard it before, it had been coming from actors playing as villains. Then it was always theoretical violence behind a silver screen. As her heart suddenly started thumping in her chest, she realized that this was no actor. It was a real man in the midst of committing a crime. He wasn’t playing at being intimidating. He meant it. And he was alone with her in this room.

  As if to punctuate the direction her thoughts had taken, Willard reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a pistol. He scanned the room, pointing it in a wide arc. His hand paused as it passed by the desk she was hiding behind. Did he see her?

  Apparently satisfied, Willard nodded once and slammed the gun on a metal table nearby as his lips curled into a snarl beneath his nose,

  “Idiots.”

  Andrea considered standing up at that moment and revealing herself. Would he actually turn, pick up the gun, and shoot her? Impossible, she thought to herself. How could someone as unassuming as Willard Nayfack have turned to a life of violent crime in such a small town? She almost chuckled to herself at the thought, but something inside her had frozen. She wasn't moving a muscle, save for her pounding heart.

  Willard walked carefully across the room to a shelving unit resting against the far side of the wall. With thin arms, he grasped the corners of a dull grey metal shelf. He strained, pulling it slowly outward with a deafening screech as metal scratched against concrete. And as she nudged her head out from beneath the desk she could see a cinder block missing in the wall.

  Willard picked up the box and began grabbing fistfuls of orange, plunging his hand into the hole. He was filling the hole up with something, but she couldn't determine what. All she could hear was the ominous sound of clattering. It was a familiar sound. A rattling that reminded her of Delia's illness.

  Slowly, as Willard labored on the far side of the room, Andrea’s hands crept up the sides of her face and her fingers plunged into her ears to shut out the sound. She was staring at that pile of sand, that impromptu dune that had been summoned by misguided teens and a sledgehammer. That too started filling her mind, so she clenched her eyes shut.

  As the seconds grew into minutes, Andrea realized she had been sitting in that position for a long time. When she finally broke from her fugue, she darted her head over the desk. And she realized she was mercifully alone.

  Terrifyingly alone. What had he been doing here?

  She considered running to get Mark, but in silence she ran to the shelving unit to pull it out. With the same maddening screech the metal pulled backward and she saw the hole in the wall that Willard had uncovered. It was little more than a shadow, but held the same ominous promise all shadows do when you're alone. Even as her hand reached out, guided by some automatic curiosity, her mind filled in the blanks of what she would find in that darkness. She pushed her fingertips into the shadow at the edge of the wall and grimaced as she brushed against a cobweb.

  Andrea didn't understand the difference between spider webs and long abandoned cobwebs covered with dust and grit, having never encountered the situation where eventually someone explains the truth of the matter to you. As such, she anticipated a massive bright green spider to crawl across her hand having fed for years on creatures unknown within the recesses of the space between walls. If someone had been there to comfort her, to tell her that cobwebs are a sign that no spiders are likely to exist in the immediate vicinity, it probably would have comforted her in that brief moment. If, however, they had started describing the nation of rats crawling over one another, breeding, and clawing disease everywhere they walked, it would have been another matter entirely. Her hand grasped a small cylindrical object just in time to miss one such rat that was crawling swiftly toward her intruding hand with murder in its tiny unnaturally red eyes.

  When she removed her hand, she finally saw what had been hidden in the wall. It was a bottle of 60 pills, each marked with an illegible signature. The patient's name was scratched out in red ink. 5 milligrams of Diazepam. Willard was hiding a stockpile of Valium.

  Chapter 6

  It was the beginning of a perfect day. At 6:15 AM the last of the wreckage from the airfield crash had been hauled away by Harry Tanhauser's truck. It had been dumped at a partition set aside for evidence near the town's junkyard. From there it was another three hours before the farmer's market would open, so Harry urged the dump crew to hurry along from the corner of his mouth not holding a cigarette.

  By 8:10 Ray Scott would arrive at the refueling station across from his house with heavy lidded eyes and a casual wave at old lady MacReady. She chided him for never taking a day off. With a chuckle he said something about her sounding like his wife, but she didn't hear him. She was already running inside to make sure her grandchildren were getting ready for school. There was a gentle breeze running right down the compass needle toward the south with wind temperatures gradually rising with the sun from 71 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit. If the weather held and the fog didn't descend, it may have been a visibility record breaker for a town so used to being inundated year round with heavy mist.

  Artie Wilcox woke early that morning and was immediately startled to find that there didn't seem to be very much fog at all outside his window. He was equally startled to see that the Forbins next door had neglected to install curtains in their windows.

  Bobby Francis, having offered to deliver newspapers for a full dollar less than his predecessor and arch rival, scooted his bike down the street casually tossing papers over his shoulder, beaning one of Artie's yard flamingos and knocking the thing's cracked plastic head off. As the flamingo's head lay on the grass, a small field mouse discovered the long tubular hollow neck and decided it would be the perfect place to hide from the now fully visible sun.

  Pop Thomas, morning jockey for KOIF radio opened his broadcast that Monday morning with a gentle reminder that services for Chance Cooper and Rob Howell would be on the following day. Occasionally, as he went through the news of the day he'd add in his zesty rock 'n roll colloquialisms, but toned it down for Chance and Rob's sake. He closed that morning by reminding them that he only had eyes for them - an odd flub considering he immediately followed that by playing "The Jav
a Jive" by the Ink Spots. He was two sentences into a profane tirade before he finally turned off his microphone, which coincidentally 'hit the post' with perfect timing.

  It was this final point that made Jack Thorn nearly choke on his coffee as he tried to stifle his laughter. The gesture was noticed by his wife Cherry, who shook her head, herself smiling as she said,

  "You're awful."

  "Pop Thomas does not know what he's doing in the morning. By midday he's bearable, but I swear..." looking down at his sausage, eggs, and toast, he shrugged, "Of course I suppose that's the only job he can do so I shouldn't make fun."

  "That's a little more like it," Cherry said reaching out and pinching his nose, "I can't believe how clear it is this morning."

  "Record breaking," Jack said stifling a furrowed brow as she tweaked his nose. Rather than make an issue out of it, he continued cutting up a link of sausage, "Hell of a morning. I wonder if-"

  Something dancing.

  And then he stopped. He glanced suddenly out the window with the corner of his eye. He felt something. A knot in his stomach. It was like thunder, the ghost of a vibration somewhere deep inside him - but the only sound that reached him was the upbeat music gently skipping the same guitar riff over and over.

  It was out the window. Beyond a waving Artie Wilcox who had just walked outside and was in the midst of picking up his paper. It was beyond a broken flamingo, beyond old lady MacReady who was pushing her grandkids out the front door. She noticed it too. And she must have felt it - that sinister wave that bled down the hill toward their homes. She must have felt it and known that Jack could feel it. She looked back at him, saw him through the window, and shook her head slowly with a withered, pained look on her face.

  The music on the radio continued skipping. Jack dropped his fork onto the plate and slowly stood up as he looked further out, toward the source of the sensation. It was on the hill. Further than he would normally be able to see, only this was the perfect morning. There was no fog today.