by Chris Capps
Sugarhill sighed heavily, annoyed. Taking the old doctor would prove to be a mistake, he realized. But the alternative was leaving the old fool alone in the house to die with the others who didn't know when to quit. He paused at the fence and looked up,
"That supposed to mean something?"
"I just imagined there would be a lot of people willing to go down with the ship when it sank like this. I had always considered the town might just spiral out of control. But I remember thinking many times that you were one of the folks I might be able to stick with, to help organize it and bring it back from disaster. Maybe not even that much. Maybe I just thought you were a nobler sort. Like you might stay even if you knew it meant dying."
Sugarhill resumed clipping the fence, chuckling to himself,
"Then I suppose you had me wrong."
"There's got to be something we can do. Some way to get everyone organized again and fight her off."
"Dammit, Sam!" Sugarhill said rising to his feet and glaring into Rosario's face, "We don't have a chance here. Don't you understand that? Everyone's vanishing. There are only two ways to vanish left. Die here or come with me. Now if you're heading back just turn around right now. You know the way. Here," he fished in his pocket and produced the keys to his house, tossing them at Dr. Rosario, "Lock up when you get there."
"The worst part is, you're not going to suddenly become less of a king when you get out there," Rosario said as he reached down and picked up the keys.
"The hell?" Sugarhill said, snorting and picking up his wire cutters again.
"When you're out there in the woods by yourself, you're still going to be the same man. The only thing different is, you'll find something else to be mayor of. You'll find a small anthill or something. Maybe one or two people. You'll be their mayor. How do you think that's going to feel? King of nothing."
"Go to Hell, Rosario," Sugarhill said as he clipped the last wire on the small hole he had cut in the fence, "You had me wrong." He pushed the army green bag through the hole and crawled out on hands and knees, standing up and brushing himself off on the other side. With a tremendous weight leaving his shoulders as he crossed the threshold, he turned as Rosario started walking back toward town and called out after him, "Take care of yourself, though, Sam. Good luck."
"I'm gonna go feed my dog, Clayton," Sam Rosario said, "I'm going home."
Sam waved behind him as he vanished into the fog, and for the first time since the morning of his suicide note, Sugarhill felt uncertain. He reached into his pocket and felt the plastic bowling trophy.
He smirked at it, setting it on the ground next to the hole. But then as he started walking into the woods, he chanced a look back over his shoulder and saw it standing against the fence all alone. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small tin of pills, dropping one on his tongue. This was it. Time to leave town. He hadn't thought about it until now. Time to leave town forever.
He turned and paused again, reaching through the hole in the fence for his shotgun. It would be a long day, and he had a lot of ground to cover if he was going to survive. Out there in the wild, he might run into anyone. He walked down the pathless chaos of trees and thought about Jessica Myers and Sam Rosario. But most of all, he thought about the trophy.
***
When Jessica heard Pop Thomas' voice burst from the radio, it startled her enough to make her slam on the brakes of Sherriff Rind's patrol car. It wasn't a message being sent out directly to the people around town, but rather the ambient sound of Pop talking to someone else, calling over his shoulder possibly at someone in the hallway. The microphone had picked it up, apparently without Thomas knowing, and broadcast it all around town, including her dashboard radio. That's it. She might still be able to get everyone organized again. It was right then that hope started to brew in her chest - right when she heard Pop creaking his chair as he leaned back up at KOIF's studio.
She turned, the layout of the radio station forming a map in her mind. It was secure, surrounded in the back half by a ten foot tall fence lined with barbed wire around the radio tower itself. The building was made with large bricks, designed to withstand any storms Cairo might kick up, back when its builders thought the town might have storms. It was a small fortress with windows only in the front. And more importantly, she could broadcast to the rest of the town once she got there. Or Sugarhill could.
She zoomed across town in minutes, eyes straight ahead and focused on what she might need to avoid. But there was nothing now. Everyone was inside - or gone. And even the Mollys had vanished, so it seemed, until night fell. She reached 720 Flamingo road and got out, racing up to the front door with the car still idling in the driveway. She opened the door, calling in,
"Good news!" But there was no response.
She made her way through the cluttered living room over to the kitchen where she found the refrigerator open, spilling cold air into the room and a half empty beer on the counter. The cabinets were also open, and there were large gaps in the canned food supply. It was clear to her, almost immediately what had happened. Mayor Sugarhill and Sam Rosario had left. As she made her way to the living room, she banged her fist against the mantle piece over the fireplace and stared out the front door at her silent car.
After a moment of thinking, she pulled a sheet off the bed, and dragged it to the kitchen. Sugarhill had never mentioned how well stocked the kitchen at this place was, but then again she had never asked. Leaving the beer behind, she worked quickly to stack cans on the sheet to be dragged back to the patrol car. With Sugarhill and Rosario gone, the pantry was likely to go to waste or else be burned by the Mollys once they got to this street.
Then there was the water. With the town in disarray, it was likely that the water pressure would drop. She quickly plugged the bathtub and turned on the cold water. As the first few inches started filling up from the tub, she nodded, satisfied that the tub would hold around forty gallons.
Soon enough she could start filling bottles up for later. Given enough time, that might be the difference between life and death. With the tub filling noisily in the background, she wrapped the corners of the now heavy sheet over one another and tied them across like a bindle, dragging it out of the kitchen into the living room.
As she rounded the corner, she looked up just in time to see the butt of a shotgun smash into her face and knock her, dazed to the floor onto her back. She rolled to her side where a boot kicked her in the ribs, and a finger depressed the safety on the gun. She looked up and saw Sherriff Paul Rind standing over her.
"Hello, Jessica," he said tracing his eye down the barrel of the shotgun. It was a perfectly round hole in steel hanging beneath his eye, pointed directly at her head, "things don't seem to be going too well."
"Rind," she said, "how did you get out?"
"Shouldn't have left the rookie watching over me," he said coldly, cynically, "That's gonna cost you."
Chapter 19
When Chance Cooper saw the lake's shore, his hands started trembling. Beyond it he could hear nothing but waves lapping against one another in the soft breeze. But he saw the water, and that made him want to run. Beyond it, on a small island in the middle of the lake, he knew he had died, and worse. He'd come back.
"This is it," Molly said simply, her voice frail as she looked down at the mud and saw her own footprints mirrored in hundreds of rows emerging from just upstream before breaking away back toward the lumber mill, "This is where innocence dies."
Up ahead there was a small wooden dock shackled to the shore and bouncing nimbly in the rolling waves. Next to it was a small canoe. Had it been taken from town? Or could they have learned to craft it over the interim years? Or was it as old as the rest of the world? Felix wondered as he walked through Molly's footprints toward the dock.
Mike was looking over his shoulder back behind them. He could have sworn he saw someone standing there. But it was so still, so unashamed of being seen. It must be a tree. It was just a shadow on the fog, just b
arely visible. He looked back toward the others and followed them down to the dock.
"There's a house," Molly said pointing up toward a thin path of moss, "Up there. I passed by it, but I didn't go in because there was a man in front of it."
Felix pulled the hunting rifle from his shoulder and stepped past her. Someone was coming down the path. They couldn't hear it, but something deep inside him was shuddering, telling him to run. It was a small voice, and it was terrified. Soon everyone could see the approaching figure, could feel it as it passed toward them. Voices fell silent. Footsteps froze.
Behind them, in the vast distance they could hear something bleating its wild song loudly, back in the direction they had come from. It was a warning sound, unnatural and prescient as it was terrified.
A woman emerged from the fog holding a square bundle in her hands wrapped in a small white sheet. It was unmistakable who it was. This woman that now walked out from the fog toward them was older. An older Molly Nayfack, or else she had once been.
She was the original. The only one that had ever gotten the chance to age. She briefly held up a hand and began unwrapping the bundle. It was a book, wrapped in a red leather cover and bound at the edge with a small snapping buckle. She held it over her head once with a grin, and walked up onto the docks, untying the small canoe.
"Surprised to see you," she said in a voice much older than her, withered by experience more than years, "I'm the Icarin. The original."
"Impossible," the vagrant Molly said wrapping a hand through Felix's arm and clutching close to him, "You look nothing like me."
"You'd be surprised," the Icarin said without humor. And she pulled the rope off the dock and tossed it into the canoe, "You going to shoot me, handsome?"
Felix lowered the rifle at his side uncertainly, watching the Icarin pull one of her ancient muddy shoes over the edge of the boat and stand there with one foot on the dock and the other in the canoe, balancing with such confidence that Felix considered maybe she wasn't the same person as Molly at all. The Icarin raised the red book, waving it back and forth,
"Dreams. Lies. All of the things I really am."
Molly's hand moved down Felix's arm as her heart started thumping. And he felt her hand close around the rifle that he was holding. She looked up at him, and disarmed him with the gentlest of strange looks, pulling the rifle from his hand and dropping it to the ground. She stepped forward, toward her elder alter and reached the dock, her eyes transfixed on the book and the claim made by this dirty bog woman. Everything.
"The carousel," the Icarin said, "Someone understands how it made you feel. The white horse. Those dreams aren't mysteries anymore. You wouldn't believe what I had to do to unlock them. But I did it. Ten years and I did it."
"How?" Molly asked, an awe entering her voice that none of the others could understand.
"That's not all," the Icarin said, "You're not one of us. Parugola. The White Horse. Its heart is filled with hate at the sight of you. It looks to you in the field, its horns poised to your throat.."
Molly froze for a second, noticing as her legs became paralyzed and all life drained from her arms. Images of a white horse raced through Molly's mind, bursting off of a carousel and tearing long teeth into her throat. A balloon slipped from her hand in that moment, somewhere inside her, and she was devoured. All this in a flash. But it left her paralyzed.
"Gibberish," the Icarin said as she reached over and grabbed Molly by her shoulder, "lies from dreams you don't remember. There's so much more. Grandma's house. What are you doing?"
"Watching tv..."
"On the floor. Head in hands. Staring straight. The doorbell rings. Who is it?"
Molly's head ached. Memories tumbled through of a man dressed in a black robe. His face was so strange, caricatured. Massive teeth curled around his face in an impossible smile set under red eyes.
"Tell me you think he's wearing a mask," the Icarin said.
"How are you doing this?" Molly gasped as a pressure in her head swelled up, "No more."
"So much pain in that memory," the Icarin said, "But it is not for you. You are a thrall of the harvest. You didn't go through the bonding. You are dust."
Molly felt strange. It was like waking from a nightmare and wondering if it was all real. But she had been awake this whole time. It was just a sequence of words. But their nonsense, the images the nonsense conjured. It was driving her out of her mind. Her own nightmares were taking license from her. She felt invisible threads in her arms and legs, wrapping down her skeleton. Thick crawling worm silk, making her shudder.
The man was in her mind's eye. The one with the impossible face.
"Who was that?" Molly asked, looking up at the Icarin as the older woman sat down in the canoe and solemnly pulled one of the oars over to her lap, "Why do I remember it so strangely?"
"It's so real to you. The clearest picture ever in your head," the Icarin said grinning as she nudged the canoe into the lake with her oar, "And it never happened. It never even happened."
"Hey!" Felix called out as the Icarin began rowing away. The rope on the dock was pulling away, down into the water and trailing behind the boat. He called out again as he noticed it slide past the kneeling Molly, "Molly! Grab the rope!"
Molly dropped forward and lunged for the rope, but it slipped through her fingertips and splashed into the water. As she lay there on the wet dock, more memories started flooding her mind of the man with the impossible grin.
She remembered being buried alive, pulling herself out of a room of inflated plastic, smothering. She gasped, her eyes going wide. She couldn't breathe. Molly shook, and her hands grabbed weakly for the water over the edge of the dock. Shapes were in the water, though she didn't know if they were real or imagined. They were men, walking slowly across the floor of the lake under the water. She blinked and they were gone.
"So few words," the Icarin called out as Felix ran up alongside Molly, "And a million others in my mouth."
"What happened," Felix said pulling Molly up by the arm, "Are you okay?" Her eyes were rolling around in her head, looking at things projected from her mind. Finally she focused in on him and said,
"I don't know what happened. It's like she pushed over a domino in my mind. It just keeps falling and falling. And I don't know where it's going. What did she do?"
Felix looked up at the Icarin's boat disappearing into the mist toward the island.
"That book she's got," Mike called up to the dock from the shore, "She's taking it to the island."
"Felix," Molly said as she pulled herself back, "Don't follow her. She's not a god. She's something more."
"It's that way for you," Felix said, "But she doesn't know my dreams."
"If you go to that island she will. She'll get them out of you eventually. I think I understand how it works now. She does that to you. You wake up and she begins to unlock you. And then it happens. She knows what to do, what to say. She runs you along, plays you like a piano. She presses keys and music comes out. She'll open you up and she'll know everything. Not today, but some day. She's every monster we ever become."
"I don't care what she is," Felix said reaching down and grasping Molly's hand, "I know who you are. But if those words have that much power over you, it might be able to work on the others. It might be our only chance to live."
"Felix," Mike said running up, "What the hell was that all about? What just happened?"
"The Icarin has a book that knows the deepest thoughts and memories and symbols in Molly's mind. I think that's how she's been controlling them. She's got a system."
"She said it never happened. But I remember it. It's more real than any of this. And this is all the less real because of it."
"The Icarin," Felix said, grasping her by the shoulders and looking deep into her eyes, "She has learned the language of your soul."
"Like brain washing?" Mike said, his hand moving to his brow and massaging his temples, "That would explain it."
"Not exactly,"
Molly said, "I understand the impact of those first few seconds. But my god if she did that for days..."
"Mix that with sleep deprivation," Chance said distantly, "and she might find whole new methods of controlling the mind. Was that how she did it?"
"Molly, I'm going to bring that book back," Felix said.
"Felix," Molly said, "I'm so sorry."
"It wasn't you," Felix said. And he meant it. Whatever else might happen, he knew this girl for what she was, not for what she might become, "That thing on the island isn't you."
Molly nodded, but she knew it was a merciful lie. That thing rowing out to the island was the original. Everything now calling itself Molly Nayfack was only a copy, programmed or not.
Felix rose, turning to face his brother Mike. It was a long road behind them. They had come a long way now from the punch bowl spikers and gamblers they had started as. They were the McCarthy boys. The two brothers that had never wanted to grow up, had never seen the use of it all. And now they stood side by side. Felix said,
"I'll come back, but in an odd sort of way this might be a goodbye for us."
"Felix," Mike said, "We'll find another way. Get Chance to go."
"Not happening," Chance said from the mud beneath the dock, "I don't think anyone should head out there. But I'm definitely not going blind into that place."
"It's me, Mike," Felix said, "It's gonna be me. And we don't have time to argue about this."
Mike and Felix gave each other a long stare before Mike finally nodded and hugged his brother goodbye. Even if he came back, part of Felix would never return from that island. And Mike knew it. And he might not come back at all.
"Someone thought up Hell," Mike said, "And then they told someone else about it. Do you think this is what they imagined?"
But no one could hear him. He was speaking quietly, to himself.
Still wanting to stand and say goodbye to his friends, Felix watched himself automatically kicking off his boots. He was running on a sort of autopilot now, his mind trying not to think about what was ahead. Once he got out there, anything could happen. And unless that thing was a miracle, he was about to experience a thousand helpless resurrections in front of the Icarin as she punished him and unlocked the deepest recesses of his mind.
