by C. T. Aaron
He adjusts his pack. “Seemed appropriate somehow. Sometimes I wonder if I can hear them all talking and having their parties and shit, like I’m a ghost or something. Or they are. But I never hear them, not really.”
“You had a lot of money,” I say, because I can’t help myself. A house like his in the regular world would easily run a few million bucks.
“My family had a lot of money. I had toys. Cars, stuff like that. And nothing else.”
“They weren’t around?” I say, thinking of Dad. Sometimes I get birthday cards and some cash.
Sometimes.
“Who, Walt and Sherry? That would be my mom and dad. No, not so’s you’d notice.”
“So you live here all by yourself.”
“I have Betty.”
“Betty’s a giant spider, dude.”
Spark gives me sideways glance. “You mean to tell me you don’t hang out with your Fam as often as you can? Like there’s something special between you?”
I don’t have an answer, because he’s right. And for as risky as it might be when I bring Ezzy to the school field at night, it’s still a lot simpler than trying to explain a giant spider or gargoyle if someone ever saw us. My Familiar is huge, but sort of acceptable. A huge dog can at least be understood. Some of the creatures I’ve seen in the distance here go way past anything ever dreamed of in my world.
“It just sounds sort of sad,” I say finally.
“It’s okay. I see people. Don’t worry about little old me.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
Spark laughs. “Asking stuff doesn’t seem to be a problem for you. Go ahead.”
“We can talk to our Fams and they understand us, but can they talk to each other?”
“I don’t think so. Never seen anything to make it seem so, anyway. I think to each other, they’re just, you know. Animals. Working off instinct. Some of them do travel in packs, to a degree, or flocks like birds. They can probably communicate in those groups the way birds or insects do. But no, I don’t think they can hear each other.”
“How does Ezzy know you?”
“He doesn’t. Not personally, not that I can remember. Not a lot of people actually living their lives here. I’m just one of those guys that people have heard of. For better or worse.”
“Ezzy’s not a ‘people.’”
“No, but he’s got a Counterpart, so he’s pretty smart.”
This backpack is already killing my shoulders. I rearrange it. “How do you figure?”
“All right, lookit. It’s not scientific, but near as I can tell, the more a Counterpart is able to spend time with their Fam, the more the Fam is going to learn. To understand the language, for example. Since most Fams don’t have Counterparts on Earth, they just stay stupid, in the animal sense of the word. That’s all. The more time you get to spend with your dog, the smarter he’s going to be.”
I take a wild guess. “That’s how he knew something happened to Mae. Like he heard something, maybe.”
“Overheard, or saw something, yeah. Hard to say, but it’s a good guess. Alexander’s guy like to ride motorcycles here, it’s about as complex a machine as this place allows. He might have heard all the engines running, gone to check it out. Who knows.”
“But if—”
Spark pulls up short. His expression is intense.
“Lookit. It’s all fascinating stuff, I get it, but it’s also weird as hell. This place isn’t natural, Briar. It shouldn’t be here, it breaks every natural law we know. And the more you think about it, the more you try to wrap your head around it, the more likely you are to go absolutely insane. I’ve seen it. There was a Counterpart a year or so ago, some scientist, wanted to write a book about this place and show it to everyone on Earth. He went crazy. And then he disappeared. So please, I’m asking you nicely, stop thinking about this place and let’s just get this thing done.”
I nod, fast, and we keep walking. I press my lips together, trying to keep all my questions inside.
Except I can’t.
Interestingly, Spark doesn’t tell me to shut up when I ask, “Did anyone ever give you a hard time back home?”
He snorts. “Not to my face. Or, not usually, anyway. But yeah. Sure.”
“Did you ever call Betty? To like, scare them?”
“To Earth? Hell, no! Are you crazy? That’s not the kind of Internet fame I’m looking for. One video post about a big-ass white spider going balls-out at the country club would be the end. That wouldn’t be easy to cover up. Can you imagine what regular people would do to this place?”
Spark waves his arm in a wide circle.
“Portals to places all over the world, unbound Familiars they’d want to capture and study . . . no. You don’t call your Fam to that world. Do it at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and everything falls apart. In this world and that.”
I nod, because I don’t want to tell him that I do call Ezzy. The good news is, Spark doesn’t ask me about it.
The bad news is, he might not ask because ahead of us, between two fairly intact houses, a pair of shadows dart across the street and Spark stops, raising a hand.
“Hold up. You see that?”
“Uh-huh,” I say, and Ezzy growls. “Know what it was?”
“Here? Could be anything. And I could not mean that more literally.”
I think about Betty, hidden away somewhere ahead of us, allegedly “scouting” to keep us safe. I think about how spiders build traps to snare their prey. How spiders liquify their victim’s guts and slurp out the insides.
I turn in a slow circle to look all around us. “Do Familiars eat here? I’ve never seen Ezzy eat.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Okay. So, we should be safe from anything wanting to eat us then, yeah?”
Spark draws his gun, letting it hang from his hand. “Not really. Unbound Fams are more animalistic than the ones with Counterparts. Our Fams learn about humanity with us and from us. The rest are just out here in the wild doing whatever they want. So it’s kind of a temperament thing.”
Great. “You’ve still got Betty up there somewhere, right?”
Spark nods. He raises his gun, reminding me of a movie cop. He looks cool and in control.
Right up until something flies out from behind one of the houses and attaches itself to his face.
I yelp in surprise as Spark falls to the ground. The gun drops from his hand, and a second creature skitters over to it. While he wrestles with the thing on his head, the other one picks up the weapon in long, segmented mandibles and runs off with it.
That all happens in the span of about one second. In the next second, Spark yanks the thing off his face with a howl and throws it further down the dirt road we’ve been following. I get my first good look at it.
It’s roughly the size and shape of a pit bull, but thick black hair sticks up all over its body like a porcupine. Six legs give it mobility, while a long tail whips back and forth behind it, a cross between an excited puppy and a bullwhip. All of that is jarring enough, but it’s the jaws that really freak me out: long and curved, they remind me of some kind of beetle. They clack together a few times as the creature dodges to the left and right, trying to get a good angle on Spark again.
Spark gets to this hands and knees, swiping his hand along the dirt, trying to find the gun. Whatever the second creature was—it was similar, I think, but not exactly the same as this one—it’s gotten away clean.
I rush to Spark and help him to his feet. We stagger backward away from the thing while Ezzy barks, creeping forward to take point while we take refuge behind him.
The beetle-dog spins to face my Familiar, but seems to think the better of taking on something as large as Ezzy. It emits a hissing sound from somewhere approximating where a face should be, then scurries back the way it had come.
Spark and I stand still, breathing hard while Ezzy lowers his head and glares in the direction the creature ran off to.
“Spark, yo
u okay?”
He spits. “I guess. Ugh. That thing tasted terrible. Where’s my gun?”
“There was another one, or something like it, anyway. It took it and ran off that way.”
Spark cusses and casts a look back the way we’d come. We can still see his big house on the mountain, a small white speck against the purple rock. It hasn’t even been thirty minutes and already we’ve been jumped by monsters and lost a weapon.
I can see him reconsidering coming any farther. He did make it clear he’d turn back any time he wanted.
“Please,” I say quickly. “Don’t give up on me.”
Spark scowls. I squeeze my brain, trying to come up with anything at all that could convince him to stick with us.
But he speaks first. “Let me find Betty. She should have felt those things coming. Come on.”
I breathe a silent thanks and fall into step beside him. Ezzy leads the way now, sniffing the ground and swinging his head in search of other foes.
“Betty,” Spark says, not shouting—more of a bark. “Betty, where are you?”
We plod along, keeping our eyes open. The skeletal houses here stare back at us with vacant eyes.
“Betty, come on,” Spark says, as if calling out to a lost dog. “Betty!”
“Why don’t you just pop her over to you?”
“Because then I won’t know where she got to and why we haven’t seen her.”
“I don’t understand, how far ahead was she?” I say, sticking close to Ezzy’s flank.
“Not sure. Not too far, I don’t think. She’d want to—”
I see her. “There!”
We stop, and I point to the roof of a house about thirty yards away. Spark takes off for it, and Ezzy and I follow.
“Betty! Come on down, where’d you go, what happened? I just got face-hugged by some kind of—”
I grab his arm. “Wait, look. Look at her leg.”
Betty is sitting still on the roof, but instead of the splayed stance she had at Spark’s house, now her legs are drawn up close to her body like a fence. One of Betty’s legs oozes greenish-red slime at the second joint; one of her knees, I suppose. Below that, the leg is gone.
“Whoa, what happened?” Spark says, either to Betty or himself. He waves at her. “Betty, come on, come down here, what’s up?”
But the Fam won’t move. I suddenly get the distinct feeling she is shaking.
That she’s scared.
What the hell can scare a—
Ezzy growls, his head swaying side to side.
“Spark, something’s wrong.” I start scanning all around us again as panic burns in my spinal cord. “Something did that to her.”
Spark matches my scan of the area. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, you got a point.”
“You can always pop her to us. But whatever did that to her, it can’t be far.”
“Right. Okay. This way.”
We move away from the house, leaving Betty behind. Within just a few yards, Spark breaks into a trot, and I follow. Then he pushes us to a jog, and I struggle to keep up, not because I can’t run, but because usually I run in trail shoes after a good night’s sleep and proper fueling and hydration. Plus my legs are still a bit shaky from my run to the preschool. The ground wobbles as I catch up with Spark.
Except then Spark skids to a stop and I crash into him. “Thank you. Can we slow down a bit?”
“You feel that?” Spark says.
I have no idea what he’s talking about. All I can think about at the moment is my legs quaking and feeling weak and that it makes the ground underneath me unsteady.
Only . . .
“Yes,” I whisper back to Spark, because now I do feel it. It’s not my legs at all. The ground really is vibrating, tiny quakes that happen one after another, like a drumbeat.
Or—footsteps. Very, very big footsteps.
“Are you sure he can’t carry us?” Spark whispers back. “Because I think this is gonna be real bad.”
My voice squeaks. “Ezzy?”
He drops to his belly immediately. He must feel the quakes, too.
Spark and I clamber onto my Familiar. He gets up with a small sidestep under our weight, but then gets his bearings and begins to run past the houses.
“Veer right!” Sparks calls. “Let’s get away from the houses, into the open, so we can see if anything’s coming.”
Ezzy follows his direction, taking a slow, looping turn to the right toward an area with fewer structures.
I look back over my shoulder in time to see a massive, slumped form rising from the desert floor where the houses are. I can’t see much other than it looks like a three-story tall mound of living dirt. It arches itself upright, and I see two red flashes where a face might be; its eyes, I think. Then it dives down against the ground and disappears with a quake.
Ezzy skips and stumbles a bit, but regains his footing. “I don’t know how long he can keep this up.”
“As far as he can,” Spark says. “Come on, buddy. As far as you can.”
NINE
Ezzy does his best, which is impressive. He runs with me and Spark on top of him for about an hour before glancing over his shoulder at me as if asking me for a break.
Asking me.
Like if I said, No, Ezzy, keep running! he’ll do it.
What I say is, “Let’s stop here.”
Ezzy slows and stops. He drops his hindquarters, and Spark and I slide off. Neither of us had spoken during the run. We were too busy looking all around us, watching for creatures, monsters, and beasties.
“Where are all the Familiars?” I say to Spark as we unsling our packs. He was smart enough to pack food and water—another reminder that I really should have thought things out before racing to the doorway.
Spark gazes at the sky in all directions. “You don’t see them?”
I do. In the red, cloudless sky at different distances from us, creatures large and small circle around. Sometimes they dive, sometimes they cruise not far overhead. Some, close enough to see clearly, look like slightly larger versions of normal birds. Others . . . others are hard to comprehend, like the thing with four pairs of wings sprouting from its back.
After I get Maebry home, I’m going to need to get a part-time job to save up for all the therapy I’m going to need after spending too long in this world. Nothing in my rare nightmares has prepared me for this.
I try hard to resist a shudder. “I see them. What I mean is, shouldn’t there be more? There’s like seven billion people on the planet, there should be seven billion Familiars out here.”
“They’re here,” Spark says. “Believe me, they’re here. A lot of the smaller ones hide. So do a lot of the bigger ones for that matter.”
“Do you know why more people can’t pop them?”
“No idea. It’s magic, kid. Who knows what the rules are.”
I won’t argue. “What would happen if every familiar came to Earth, like, right now? All at once?” This has never really occurred to me before.
“It would be hell,” Spark answers instantly. “Familiars come into the world connected to their Counterparts. They learn the language and the customs. I guess the Fams are like a younger siblings in that sense. But imagine a Fam showing up to its Counterpart on Earth who is thirty, or sixty, or eighty years old. They’d have no concept of Earth, no idea where they were or what was happening. They’d probably tear the place apart, and us with it.”
“Could it happen? All of them showing up at once, I mean?”
Spark doesn’t answer at first, thinking it over. “I don’t see how. It hasn’t happened in the millennia that mankind has existed, so I don’t see how it could happen now.”
“But were the meets always happening?”
“No. I don’t think so. Those only started a couple hundred years ago, when someone realized there was money to be made.” He chuckles. “Like Ayn Rand said, it was Americans who first used the term ‘make money.’ No other culture had that phrase until
we invented it.”
I take a loud swig of water. “No matter who gets hurt.”
“Yeah. No matter who gets hurt. While we’re on the subject, those are the kinds of people you’re dealing with here. It’s best if you keep that in mind. Money is all they care about.”
Ezzy flops to the ground, panting. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him do that before.
“Do you need water?” I ask him.
He drops his chin as if to show me he’s closing his mouth. I’ve never seen him eat or drink, and Spark makes it sound like they don’t, ever. I wave the bottle in front of his nose, but Ezzy keeps his mouth shut.
“Okay. Just checking, Big Dog.”
I swear he grins at me. I spend a good couple minutes scratching behind his ears with both hands.
“How far away are we?” I say to Spark.
He’s standing in that broad stance he had at the house, chowing on a protein bar and scanning all around. “Your Fam made good time. I’d say another hour thataway.”
I pull a bar from my pack. “You’d say? You don’t know?”
“You’re welcome to do this on your own, kid.”
Fair point. “I don’t remember if I said thank you. So, if I didn’t, thank you.”
Spark gives me a nod, but that’s it. Mostly he looks paranoid, like he’s waiting for something else to attack us. He’s probably got the right idea. I sip my water and copy his scan—up, around, down, up again, in a circle . . .
We’ve stopped in a somewhat clear area, like maybe it’s a park or something back home. A few trees poke out of the desert floor, and I see several benches further away, but the nearest building is probably a hundred yards from us. Further out, tall buildings loom high, maybe ten or fifteen stories. I wonder what’s inside them, then decide I don’t really want to find out.
Spark finishes a bottle of water. “When we get closer, I’m done. Just want to let you know.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“I don’t mean to be all cowardly or anything. Except that, I kind of do. I don’t even know you. I spend a lot of time in this world specifically to not get to know people, see what I’m saying? So I don’t feel like getting myself killed today. That’s all.”
