Black Moon (27 page)

At the center, Lee had said, “That sensation is just our imagination, like a phantom limb.” He said he sometimes thought he felt it too, but he didn’t let himself believe it.

“I can’t control what I believe,” Felicia said. She often found herself uttering this little mantra these days.

Another glance at the clock. A decision. She was definitely not going to make it home tonight, not taking these dark surface streets. Time to pull over.

She turned down a dirt fire road, a rocky passage through the chaparral. But she was going too fast and the car began bouncing around, the wheel pulling as the rocks and rutted lanes bullied her course. To compensate, she jerked hard to the right. The car dropped into a hidden ravine, slamming hard. She yelped as the air bag exploded before her. The engine stalled with a whine and the cape of dust moved past her, drifting like a ghost into the beams of her headlights and onward.

A stillness rose around her, though her heart was thrashing as if it wanted to be let out. The car was severely listing to the right. She was hanging in her seat, unhurt, her necklace reaching for the passenger door.

Then she felt a purr along her neck and slumped against her seatbelt, asleep.

Her shift had started.

SHE
woke up at seven
A.M
., the world at a tilt. Her driver’s-side window faced up at the pale sky, cut into strips by power lines. It was a dreamless sleep that Lee had given them, but it succeeded in resting the body and allowing for the nightly restoration of the mind, the conversion of experience into memory.

Gravity had pulled at her all night so that she was hanging over the passenger seat but held in place by the seatbelt. The air-bag was semideflated before her.

She was slipping out from under the strap when the light changed. Something moved above her, blocking the sun. She turned and was jolted by what she saw. Out the window, looking down at her.

Eyes.

She released a short scream before clamping her hand over her mouth.

A set of massive cartoon eyes in the window. A kind of monster. A giant owl head on a human body.

“Jesus!”

Just a stupid costume, she could now see. One of those school mascots, or something escaped from an amusement park. Who is this creep?

The person inside was small. Dirty shirt and ripped jeans. Skinny, scabby arms pulling at the door.

It opened like a hatch and the owl person reached in, held out a hand. A small voice muffled inside the mask asked, “Can you get out?”

Felicia could tell that it was a girl in there.

She climbed out, avoiding the filthy hand, then reached back into the car for her backpack. It held a change of clothes, power
bars, some ramen. It was all that she had brought, thinking she would be out in the field for no more than two days.

The owl stood back and stared as Felicia surveyed the damage. The car was almost on its side in the ditch that ran along the dirt road—a deep, flood-cut trench, toothy with boulders. She looked at the mountains—crisply visible, since the epidemic had done wonders for air quality—and concluded that she was probably ten miles from her parents’ house. Fifteen at the most.

She was surrounded by sage, all of it going brittle and brown as the California fall advanced. The shadows were long, bugs only starting to buzz. The sad call of meadowlarks fluted from the brush.

In the near distance, she saw a row of houses, a cul-de-sac reaching out into the scrubland. A massive loop of concrete overpass loomed above the neighborhood. Its distended shadow looked like an overlay of dark river.

This girl with the owl head scratched at her elbow and continued to stare—at least that was what the frozen-open eyes communicated.

“I like your hair,” she said.

Felicia’s hand went to her head. Short as a skinhead, she thought. It was just starting to grow back after it was shaved—when the implant was inserted. Porter had said he could just shave the site of the incision, but she insisted that he cut all of it so it would come back the same. The doctors both appreciated the gesture. A vote of confidence in their ability to get it right.

“I like your mask,” she told the girl. The anger at being startled was now faded, replaced by curiosity. The eyes were weirding her out, though. She leaned in, trying to see through the mesh, but it was dark in there.

“Did you crash?” the girl asked.

“Yep.”

“So did I,” she said. “Up there.” She pointed to the overpass in the distance.

“There’s like fifty cars up there, filled with dead people,” she told Felicia. “It’s super gross but that’s a good place to find dogs.”

Felicia looked at the overpass wondering about the dogs comment when she was struck with a realization. This kid was talking just fine, not staggering around. None of that sleepless shambling that they do.

The girl must have been thinking the same thing because she said, “You can sleep. I can totally tell. People around here will want to kill you.”

NOW
they kicked through the furrows of dust, the owl-headed girl leading the way. The dead vines were like little rotting alien arms, curled and blackened as if by flames.

The vineyards had died long before the crisis, and developers had folded the groves up along the dotted lines and laid out neighborhoods of origami houses. It had been the fastest-growing community in the world during the eighties.

Felicia liked this skinny miracle girl who was now her guide.

Her name was Lila.

“Lila, hold up,” she said.

When she gave her a power bar, the girl tore at the wrapper, her hands shaking. She lifted her mask high enough to get her hand under it. The bar was gone in seconds.

Felicia gave her another one.

“I should save this,” the girl said.

“Go ahead and eat it,” Felicia told her, patting the backpack. “We have more.” She wanted the girl to stick with her. Maybe this will keep her close, she thought. “What’s in your pack?” she asked the girl. “Any food?”

“No, just noisy things.”

Felicia didn’t know what to make of this, but the girl had moved on down the trail that cut through dried mustard stalk.

“I need a car,” she called after her. “Know where I can get one?

“Probably,” Lila said with a shrug. “When we get to those houses.”

There was a wall of homes ahead of them. The first of what seemed like thousands of rows covering the valley floor and spreading up into the foothills. Just houses and supermarket strip malls, schools, and churches. She recalled a term that was sometimes used to describe such places. Bedroom community.

“Let’s see what’s in the garage,” Lila said, heading toward the closest house.

There was a naked man standing in the front yard, kicking a mound of trash on the lawn. Felicia held back. The girl sensed her fear, turned and beckoned.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re not dangerous unless they catch you sleeping.”

She was right. The man glanced in their direction but turned away muttering to himself. Felicia could see that the front yard was filled with junk. Everything from inside the house had migrated to the dead lawn. Furniture, bunches of DVDs and video games scattered everywhere, plates and pans, hangers, tangles of clothes.

Felicia followed Lila around the side of the house and saw that every house was the same, the front yards cluttered with middle-class detritus.

“What a mess, right?” Lila said.

“Why?” Felicia asked, bending down to pick up a framed picture of a family. Smiling like they’re safe forever.

“Okay,” Lila said, “what happens is this. I’ve seen it so I know.
Sleepless people get lost and they just walk into any house thinking it’s their house. Then they start looking for stuff that they remember having and they end up tearing the whole house up looking for it, throwing all the things they don’t recognize out the windows and doors. Then they look through that stuff again when they come outside and it gets even more messed up. They’re so clueless it’s unbelievable.”

“Wow, you’ve been paying attention,” Felicia said, thinking, Lee has to meet this kid. “How long have you been out here?”

“I don’t know. Feels like forever, but probably, what, a month?”

“You must be a pretty tough kid to live out here that long.”

The girl shrugged.

Felicia asked if she would take off the mask.

The kid seemed to freeze, looking back at her with those massive fake eyes.

“You can’t tell,” she said, “but I’m shaking my head.”

THERE
was a car in the garage—an SUV. Felicia thought it would be perfect, if there was a key. They waded through the clutter of trashed belongings that surrounded the vehicle and Felicia got behind the wheel. She was hoping a solution would present itself.

“Hot-wire it,” Lila said.

“I don’t know how to do that, do you?”

“No. I know HTML though. And a little CSS.”

They checked under the seats and behind the sun visors. Felicia emptied the glove compartment as Lila looked on, snatching up a flashlight and stuffing it in her pack.

“Yay,” she said. “Light.”

“Good idea.”

“I used to sleep in the car,” Lila said. “When it first started happening to my parents. I’d lock myself in there and it was safe. For a while.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Out in the desert.”

Felicia waited for more, but the mask was silent and she was reluctant to prod. That could wait for the right moment.

They entered the house in search of the car keys. Light flooded in the window, revealing the cluttered floors. Couch ripped open, TV facedown in the debris. Glass crunched under every step. Holes had been kicked in the walls.

This could be my house, she thought. She had been carrying around the image of home as she had left it. Meticulous, the way her mother liked it, needed it to be. Both parents sitting on the couch in front of the TV, or out on the patio, tending to something on the grill. Even the bizarre picture Chase had painted—the walls of the house filled with bees that produce a sleep-inducing drone—was better than what she was seeing now. And that was just a hallucination, she reminded herself.

“If we had the Internet,” Lila said, “we could look up how to hot-wire a car. We could look up anything.”

“Not anything,” Felicia said.

There’s so much they couldn’t tell us, she thought. Still can’t tell us. The answers aren’t out there. At the center, all Kitov and his team of geniuses could do is come up with a sad workaround. Hot-wiring our heads, since they can’t find the keys.

THE
smell came in stinging little hints at first, then got overwhelming as they approached the interstate on foot. Felicia pulled her shirt up over her mouth.

“Where is it coming from?”

“It’s a dead thing,” Lila said.

They started across an overpass where the sunken freeway cut through the developments, embedded four stories down. Halfway across, Felicia looked east and west. Not a car was moving on the eight lanes of grooved concrete.

The smell rising up around her was like a physical presence. She retched and ran to the railing, intending to vomit over the side. That was when she saw them. Piled across the lanes below, a barricade of bodies. A broken tangle of limbs and torsos, heads at the heart of dried eruptions. She staggered to the other side: more.

Suicides. Even at the center they had seen it begin. Annika throwing herself off the bluff onto the rocks below. That was a sure thing. This didn’t seem high enough and spoke to the desperation of the dead below.

Blocks up she saw another overpass and the dark low pile beneath it. Barricades of bodies all the way into the city.

Lila was running to the far end, crossing over, her pack jangling loudly. Felicia watched as she tore off the owl mask and vomited onto the sidewalk. She saw the side of the girl’s face, her long hair, before she herself was doubled over, the contents of her stomach splashing over her dusty shoes.

By the time she reached Lila, the girl was wearing the mask again.

AS
evening approached, Felicia started to regret wasting so much time looking for car keys in abandoned homes. She recognized that they still had a few miles to go, that they wouldn’t make it before downtime hit unless they ran.

“Where’s a safe place to spend the night?” she asked Lila.

“In a house,” the owl-head said, “since there’s two of us. Someone can keep watch.”

They had seen about a dozen living people all day, most of them just shambling along. Some had called out to them, or headed their way, but most just looked past them. Eyes blinking, mumbling. Seeing visions only the sleepless see.

“People actually seem pretty harmless out here,” Felicia said.

“They wouldn’t be if they caught us sleeping. They would seriously try to kill us.” Lila said she had seen it happen to a girl who was found sleeping in a tree house, killed by a bunch of kids looking for firewood.

“They hit her with hammers and axes,” she said, “and rocks. Even when she fell out of the tree and was dead on the ground I bet they kept doing it. I don’t know really because I ran away but I bet. They go bonkers when they see sleepers.”