Strange Days

by Constantine J. Singer

  His single harmonic fades to soundlessness.

  There’s nothing left for me to do in here. I stand up, shaking, dizzy, and walk slowly to Richard, still holding the scissors.

  He’s not breathing. His sheet is missing from my drawer. I kneel next to him, unwrap his fingers from around his screen. It’s locked, but I know his code. The camera is still on, still recording. I rewind it to where it begins, a few seconds after I asked him for the favor.

  The video is shaky—won’t ever work for solid projection—but the sound is clear.

  It’s all there.

  “Thank you, Richard,” I whisper when I stand up. “I’m sorry.”

  The Long Hall is empty. I look at the wall across from me and imagine stairs.

  A single panel slides back to reveal a staircase that goes down into darkness. I take it on faith that I’ll find my way in the dark, and head down, two stairs at a time. By the time I get to the bottom, I can’t see a thing. I feel along the walls for a switch. There’s a button at switch height. I press it.

  A door slides open and there’s a flicker of fluorescents overhead. I’m in a huge room. It seems to go on forever under the compound.

  It’s lined with body-shaped boxes. Coffins.

  There are dozens of them. Looking at them all slows me to a stop. My hand goes to my waistband, where I re-tucked Sybil’s gift when I changed into these clothes. I don’t know what it does, but I’m sure that if I use it, all the people in these boxes will die.

  Paul, Calvin, Damon, Cassandra. All of them.

  I stand there for what feels like forever, frozen, confused.

  I step over to the closest one. There’s no window or anything, but I can hear who’s inside. I place a hand on it and wish for it to open, but nothing happens. I examine it more closely.

  There’s Live-Tech leather under the metal shell. I look for a seam and find one.

  I run the scissors along it and the Live-Tech turns gray. When I finish cutting the seam, the lid lifts slightly.

  Cassandra’s music erupts as I open the lid. She’s desperate and afraid—she thinks she’s drowning or dying.

  I pull the lid up. There’s a Live-Tech mask of some sort over her face. I cut the edge seam on that, too. It grays and falls away.

  “Holy hell,” she says when I get her face clear. “What the—”

  “You’ve been frozen.” I free both of her arms. “I’m getting us out of here.”

  She grunts as she peels back more of the material around her, sits up. “Sabazios?”

  “I think I killed him.”

  She looks at me, takes a breath, nods, then looks at the other boxes. “Jesus.”

  I turn. There are twenty-seven of them, not including the one that held Cassandra. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven kids like us.

  I look back at Cassandra, who’s now on her feet. I’m used to her looking like nothing’s ever the matter, but that’s not what I see now. She’s scared. She’s eyeing the coffins like I am. Then she turns to me. “What are we doing?”

  I don’t say anything, don’t move. I close my eyes. Dive.

  Corina?!

  But she’s not there anymore. I can sense the kids in the coffins, though, music like insects or mice, barely audible, but alive.

  And then I know.

  You’ve already done it.

  “We save as many as we can.” I open my eyes.

  “How the hell are we gonna do that?” She stops. “You’ve been planning for this. That’s why we got the Jeep, isn’t it?” But she’s not really arguing with me.

  I walk the line of coffins, listening for a particular one and when I find it, I slice the Live-Tech seam and listen as the lid lifts and his music swells.

  Paul watches me while I rescue him, pinned in the machine with the Live-Tech over his mouth and nose. I cut it off, pull the material from his face so he can breathe. When he breathes, his relief is deafening.

  “Alex?” he says when he sits up. “What are you doing here?” And then: “Where are we? What the hell is wrong with me? You hit me—you knocked me cold. You’re covered in blood!”

  “Sorry, man—I didn’t have a choice.” I try and look apologetic, but right now I’m more worried about time than feelings. “You’ve been frozen.”

  Paul’s full of questions, but I don’t have time to answer them—“When we get out of here,” I keep telling him.

  I turn to give the scissors to Cassandra to start on another coffin, but then I hear them. People are coming. More than one. Lots. I look to Cassandra. “Company.”

  She looks at the row of coffins, shakes her head. “Jesus, now what?”

  I look at Paul, at the other coffins, but there’s no answers here.

  I already know what to do. I’ve already done it. Corina told me, made me take the gift. I reach for the package, tearing it open. It’s not a Live-Tech patch—more like regular technology, a flat piece of flexible plastic with two metal tines that fold out to become a household plug. There’s a little slip of paper with it. I unfold it, read it.

  It’s in my handwriting. This is what you did. Plug it in.

  I don’t know what the little machine is going to do, but I suspect it won’t end well for anybody in the compound if I use it.

  The people are getting closer. I look back at the rows of coffins filled with frozen kids.

  I want them to live. I want them all to live, but that’s not what’s going to happen. That’s not what I’m going to have done.

  Sorry . . . It’s nothing more than a word, but it’s all I have.

  “You’re going to use it?” Cassandra asks.

  I hold it up to show her, start to say what it is, but I don’t have any idea. Doohickey. The word floats up, reminds me of Corina. “A doohickey. I need to plug it in.” I scan the room for an outlet.

  “There!” Cassandra points to one. “What’s it going to do?”

  “No idea,” I tell her as I plug it in. “But we gotta go.”

  Paul looks around. “What the heck are you all doing? What about the others? If one of these was me, then one of them’s Calvin—one of them’s Marcus. Sal, too . . .” He gestures behind him. “Even Damon doesn’t deserve this.”

  Cassandra grabs him by the shirt and tugs him toward the stairs. “We’ve got to go. You’re gonna be special—the boy who lived.”

  “Who’re you?” he asks.

  “Later,” I remind him, already easing toward the door. We don’t have much more time.

  He waves me off. “What about the others? The ones who aren’t in here?”

  I think I hear it, but I can’t be sure. “We’ve got to leave now!” I growl it, grab Paul’s shirt, and start moving.

  We run. Up the stairs, out into the hall, where we run right into two guards.

  “Dive!” Cassandra yells as they run toward us.

  I do. They’re easy to find, but only one is easy to shift. He’s not into the idea of hurting us. I rewrite him fast, erasing and changing more than I should.

  He pulls his gun, levels it at his partner, and shoots him dead. The noise is deafening in the narrow hallway, and the smoke from the gun makes the world hazy.

  The psychic wallpaper shifts, is plastered with the dead man’s final sight—us watching him die.

  “Run!” the guard yells to us. “I’ve got your back.”

  We run. More guards find us on the driveway, but they aren’t expecting to face armed resistance. Our friend shoots at them and they scatter.

  “The gate!” Cassandra yells to me. It’s closed and we’re approaching fast, but it starts to open before I dive.

  “See you soon!” Nick calls from the guard shack at the gate. He’s still overwritten from when we came.

  None of us bother to say thanks.

  We’re nearly across the street to th
e Cherokee when the air is sucked from around us, an enormous ear-shattering thud, pressure, then wind that throws us to the ground.

  Cassandra and Paul bring themselves up to their knees at the same time I do. The ringing in my ears drowns out the guitars, but I can still hear Paul when he says:

  “Oh shit.”

  I turn to look. The compound is an inferno.

  “What did you do?” Paul whispers.

  That little plug . . . I shake my head. “I . . .” I murdered them.

  He stands up, turns to the compound.

  I grab him. “We have to run, man—there’s nothing we can do.”

  He shakes me off, starts walking. “They’re all gonna die.”

  Cassandra grabs at his shirt. “They’re already dead, man. We all died the day we got those letters.”

  “Not all of us,” Paul says, still looking at the fire.

  “All of us,” she tells him. “Some of us just not yet.”

  He lets out his breath. I close my eyes, dive, fill in some faded spots on his sheet.

  He turns away from the fire, smiles a little bit. “Where’s the car?”

  We’re back in the Cherokee heading east on the highway through the mountains before anybody speaks again.

  “So, now that we’re away, can y’all tell me what’s going on?” Paul asks.

  I don’t know how to answer him. My mind is crowded with music and remembrances. My family. Corina. Jordan, Richard, and the rest.

  Corina. I dip down deep to listen for her. There’s no trace now. If she’s still in the Silly Juice, I can’t find her. CORINA! Nothing. She saved my life.

  But I heard her, after she died, underneath.

  She saved me with Sabazios.

  She’s still somewhere. Somewhere I can find her.

  “Alex?” Paul tries again.

  I look at Cassandra but she’s focused on the road.

  I muster up the strength to speak, tell him as best I can the things he didn’t know. Cassandra adds pieces, too, and between the two of us, we make sure he knows everything.

  When we’re done, he thinks for a moment. “You’re sure?” he says.

  I pull out Richard’s phone, play him the video. “Yeah, man,” I tell him. “I’m sure.”

  He doesn’t respond. I can sense him in the backseat and see his reflection in the side-view mirror. When he does talk again, it’s only to ask another question.

  “Hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So . . . it’s like . . . over now?”

  I look at Cassandra. She looks at me. “You sure you killed Sabazios?” she asks.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “What does your Voice say?”

  I shake my head, look out the window. When I can talk, I just say, “She’s gone.”

  “Gone? Since when?”

  “Since they killed her.” I’m crying now, but I don’t even care.

  Paul puts his hand on my shoulder from the backseat, squeezes, waits.

  When I can, I tell them. “It disappeared when they killed Corina.” Then: “Corina was my Voice.”

  Epilogue

  The explosion at Sabazios’s Compound is big news. The fire is so intense that they haven’t even begun to assess the number of dead, but there are at least twelve household employees unaccounted for.

  There’s no mention of children.

  Sabazios hasn’t been seen or heard from since. He was known to be at the compound earlier in the day, so speculation is that he’s dead.

  It won’t be speculation for long.

  We’re stopped at a Holiday Inn Express in Salem, Oregon. The clerk has generously offered to let us use the computer and his personal pod connector.

  He also fired up the waffle maker just for us.

  Paul and Cassandra are eating—they promise to bring me a waffle before finishing them all. I’m back in my email.

  Sarah Campbell replied to my last one, just a short note asking me to tell her a little more about what I thought was happening.

  She asked for it.

  Sarah,

  I wasn’t lying about any of it and I can prove it now. I was at Sabazios’s compound when it exploded and the video I attached to this email is of Sabazios confessing everything. He set up Jordan Castle. He had my parents killed. He controls the Locusts and if we don’t get all the Live-Tech away from people, the Locusts will kill us all.

  I’ll tell you more when I get to LA.

  Alex

  When I’ve attached the file, I send the email. I wait, watching the screen to make sure no new email from the future shows up.

  None does, which is the best sign yet that we’ve won.

  I open a message window and dial a number from memory, but I have to try a few times because my fingers keep hitting the wrong buttons. When I told the others I’d do this back before we left the trailer, I thought it was a fantasy, but it’s not.

  It’s real.

  She answers on the third ring.

  “Hello?” she asks.

  “Hi, Auntie,” I say. “I’m coming home.”

  Acknowledgments

  So, there are a ton of people who helped make this thing possible.

  First and foremost are my wife, Ariadne Shaffer, and my daughter, Kizziah Singer. Not only did they offer love and support, they also endured hours-long car trips to far-flung regions of California while listening to endless lectures on tape about theoretical physics as I was working out details for the story. Not only that, but Ariadne has always been the first to read my drafts, and that’s no fun at all.

  Deep gratitude for my agent, Jason Anthony, at MMQ Lit. He pulled my query out of the slush pile and then spent the next six months of his life guiding me as I polished a very rough diamond into one that shined.

  The same gratitude for my editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Arianne Lewin. She, too, saw something in my manuscript that others didn’t see, and helped me make it even greater. I am forever indebted to both of them.

  Also at Penguin, thank you to Amalia Frick for being so helpful, to Charis Tsevis for the brilliant cover art, to Maggie Edkins for the cover design, to Robert Farren for his copyediting, and to the other readers, authenticity and otherwise, whose names I never learned, but whose feedback and ideas made the story better and stronger.

  Further, deep appreciation to the people who read the manuscript at various stages and had the time and willingness to offer their thoughts, encouragement, and feedback as to why it wasn’t ready yet. Specifically, thanks to Ariel Pineda-Luna, Teryn Henderson, Mariana Lui, and Lacey Pizzato.

  A special thank-you to my mother, Thalia Syracopoulos, for her endless belief through multiple less-than-stellar manuscripts that eventually people would see my amazing talent as clearly as she did.

  And another special and especially sad thank-you to my stepfather, Dr. J. Michael Gallagher, who advised me through the psychology and pathology of early sections of this story but did not live to see it come to fruition.

  To my father, Jack Singer, my stepmother, Tia Higano, my sisters, Anna and Emily—thank you for your encouragement.

  To my former teachers, especially Tom Williams, Donna Dunning, Rick Nagel, and John Livingstone, and Mr. H.—half of my belief in myself I borrowed from you.

  To the kind people at Stories of Echo Park and Woodcat—thank you for letting me sit for hours while I wrote this thing.

  Finally, I would like to thank all of my students, both current and former, who have inspired me over the years and without whom I would likely never have set pen to paper.

  If I screwed up and didn’t mention you or your absolutely essential contribution to making all this happen, then email me and let me know. I am prophylactically sorry and I promise to handwrite you in on every copy I see.

  About the Au
thor

  Constantine Singer grew up in Seattle and earned his BA from Earlham College and his Masters from Seattle University. He currently lives in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles with his family and teaches history at a high school in South LA. He is of the opinion that all foods are better eaten as a sandwich or a taco. This is his first novel.

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