Fantasy Life (35 page)

“I’m not like her,” Emily whispered. “They made me evil, didn’t they?”

“They’re not evil, honey. They’re just different.”

“They’re going to kill people.”

“No.” Cassie pulled Emily closer, so that she could speak into her ear. “If they wanted to do that, they wouldn’t have warned us. No one’s going to die.”

“I think you’re wrong.” Emily’s shaking started all over again. “I think you’re really wrong.”

Highway 101
The Village of Anchor Bay

A line of cars extended for five blocks on 101 heading south. When Gabriel saw it, he debated turning on his siren and flashers, but decided that would make people even more nervous than they already were.

Instead, he turned east on NE Fifteenth, behind the McDonald’s, then went south on Quay until he reached the very center of town. In the illogic that dictated street signs in Oregon, the center street was not First Street or even Main Street, but McCool’s, even though no one knew who McCool had been.

Athena was feeding some calls through the radio unit. It would spit and cough, then a small voice—usually androgynous—would complain about the weird creatures running across the road.

Denne leaned forward, as if he were trying to hear the radio better. He brought the scents of antiseptic, sweat, and expensive cologne with him. He had offered to drive his own truck, but Athena had nixed that. She said there were already traffic problems on the highway; the last thing they needed was yet another vehicle.

Zeke followed at a safe distance. At first, it looked like he was going to turn on his siren and try to drive along the grass, but apparently he decided against it.

Which was a good thing, considering the grass disappeared into the sidewalks and the wayside farther down.

As Gabriel crested the hill, he saw the ocean sparkling out in the distance. Hard to believe the last time he had crested this hill, a little south of here, the winds had been so strong that the ocean frothed, and the night had been so dark he couldn’t see the froth if he tried.

“Holy crap,” Denne said.

He wasn’t looking at the ocean. He was looking at the side of the road.

Gabriel glanced to his left and saw the usual run-down houses, badly in need of paint after years in the salt air, a few overgrown rhododendron bushes, and too many for-sale signs that people had forgotten to take down when the summer tourist rush was over.

“What?”

“Next block over,” Denne said.

Gabriel slowed down—he didn’t want to hit anything while his eyes were off the road—and looked at the driveway linking two fenced yards.

And then he saw it, the stream of creatures that everyone was talking about. It was so consistent that it looked like a dirt mound by the side of the road. Only when Gabriel squinted at it, really looking at each individual piece, did he realize that mound was moving—and it was composed of things of different shapes and sizes, some of which he would wager he had never seen before.

The stream was thick and wide, and even though he couldn’t really get a good sense of perspective from here, he would wager that it covered the entire road.

Zeke slowed behind him and leaned out the window, as if
he was going to call to Gabriel. But Gabriel ignored him, moving forward, heading toward the bottom of the hill and the highway.

A different mess greeted him down there. Not only were the cars stopped southbound, but the drivers stood outside their vehicles. A few people were talking, but most had left the driver’s-side doors open, the cars running, and had walked toward the first car, standing beside it and staring at the creatures as they made their way across the highway.

“God,” Denne said. “They seem oblivious.”

Gabriel couldn’t tell if he was referring to the creatures or the drivers or both. Gabriel pulled his squad onto the highway and parked it across the empty northbound lane.

Zeke parked beside him.

Then Gabriel got out.

The wind was chillier than it had been that morning, and the air smelled of rotted fish. Usually he didn’t mind that smell—it was part of the ocean’s smorgasbord of scents—but this afternoon, it didn’t seem to be coming from the ocean.

It seemed to be coming from the stream of creatures.

Denne walked down the highway, passed the parked cars, and headed toward the mass of people. Zeke stopped beside Gabriel.

“What the hell is this?” Zeke asked.

“Yet another challenge in a job full of them,” Gabriel said dryly, and followed Denne toward the crowd.

The stream seemed to be going on forever. There didn’t seem to be a break in it at all. As Gabriel reached Azalea Road, he saw that the creatures had made their way into the school parking lot.

No wonder people from the school had called the sheriff’s department. The creatures weren’t going around the parked cars. They were going over them and under them, covering them as completely as a stream of mud would. The only difference was
that, so far, the creatures hadn’t moved the cars out of their parked positions.

The sound was eerie. In addition to the usual surf banging against the shore, there was the thudding of a million feet—if
feet
was what to label the appendages on the creatures that were passing him.

None of the creatures looked at the humans. Instead, the creatures appeared to be running, almost as if they were evacuating the ocean.

Gabriel turned to Zeke. “Call Athena. Tell her to put Suzette on dispatch and get down here.”

“Okay.” Zeke gave the stream one more look, then headed back to the squads.

No one else spoke. Everyone just watched the exodus. One teenage boy had a camcorder out and was filming the entire thing. Gabriel made a mental note to seize the disc when the time came. He might need the information.

Even if he didn’t, the news departments and the so-called reality shows didn’t need it.

Gabriel moved as close as he could to the stream without touching it. The creatures were all shapes, but not all sizes. None of them stretched higher than his knees. Unlike the water sprite that Zeke had found the night before, none of them had wings. But he would wager all were amphibious.

Denne was crouching beside the stream, not touching, but clearly studying. He was too close for Gabriel’s comfort, but Gabriel knew that he couldn’t do anything about Denne. Denne had always done what he wanted. If someone told him to behave otherwise, he would nod, agree, and continue with what he was doing.

Gabriel didn’t recognize any other faces. Most of these people seemed to be traveling through. Some locals had come out of the nearby shops, however, and stood in the doorways, arms crossed. It was a tribute to them and their entrepreneurial
spirit that they didn’t move too far away from their cash registers, in case one of the tourists decided to leave the stream and shop.

The hot dog vendor who had called them stood outside his illegal stand as well. No one was supposed to build on the beach, but that little shack had gone up overnight.

Gabriel hadn’t cited him—hoping the village council would do so—but they hadn’t so far. And now, after the guy had shown that he cared enough to do his civic duty, Gabriel wasn’t sure he should cite him either.

The stream was getting wider, and the creatures that struggled across the road seemed to be moving slower. Were these the old, the handicapped, the impossibly young? Was this exodus just like all the human exoduses of years past, dragging whatever they could to get out ahead of some disaster?

He had no way of knowing and no way to find out.

Gabriel sighed and backed away from the stream just as Zeke reached his side.

“Athena’s coming, although I don’t think she wanted to.” Zeke glanced at the stream, then looked away quickly, as if the sight burned his eyes. “What’s wrong with her today anyway? It’s like she’s upset or something.”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said, and he truly didn’t. He had his suspicions, but sometime during the day, he realized that even though he had known Athena most of his life, he really didn’t know her at all. She had seemed the same, an immutable force, always there, always wise, and always strong.

Maybe it was just a shock to realize how mortal she was.

Zeke nodded toward the stream. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know that either.” Gabriel shoved his hands in his pockets. “Stay here.”

He didn’t wait for Zeke’s answer. Gabriel walked toward the line of parked cars. As he approached, he heard the chatter
of soft rock from one radio station, and the brassy sound of a big band from another. On a third, Dr. Dean Edell talked about gallbladder surgery, and on a fourth, one of the Whale Rock DJs was reading an ad for Mo’s Restaurant.

Gabriel listened until the ad was done, knowing that the DJ would comment on the events in Anchor Bay if he knew about them. But after the ad, the DJ went into a discussion of the weather in his cheery voice, the one reserved for good days, when there weren’t life-threatening storms or accidental drownings by the sea.

Which meant that no one had reported this strange event to Whale Rock yet. Gabriel nodded to himself and pushed between the cars.

The heat from the exhausts rose around him, and the smell of gas overpowered the stench of dead fish, at least for a moment.

Then he left the lane and walked up the curb toward the Anchor Harbor Wayside.

Oddly enough, no one had pulled out of traffic and parked in the Wayside lot. Everyone seemed to think that the exodus would end soon—or soon enough that their cars wouldn’t run out of gas. When Gabriel got back to his own car, he’d get the megaphone out and make an announcement, telling everyone to shut off their engines as this might take a while.

Several gulls stood in the parking lot, their wings tucked against their sides. They all faced the stream as if it were an entertainment for their benefit. But they didn’t approach it, as they would if they thought they could get food. Instead they watched, the way they watched a storm blow in, and seemed to be waiting.

Gabriel had to walk right into their midst if he was going to avoid the stream altogether. The stream covered the entire south side of the Wayside, that part of the parking lot being hidden under hundreds of bodies, moving forward.

This entire sight unnerved him more than he could say. He had truly never seen anything like it, and it did unnerve him.

He walked to the edge of the Wayside where the metal rails separated the tourists from the beach and peered over.

The stream continued along the beach, although oddly enough, the stream narrowed as it reached the Wayside. The stream seemed to be coming from a block-long section of the ocean, and the creatures, without obvious direction, slimmed down so that they could walk by the Wayside.

Gabriel knew that was important somehow, but he wasn’t sure how. He’d learned long ago that when he ran into important things that he didn’t understand, he should let his subconscious work on them while his conscious worked on something else.

And what his conscious was working on was the extent of this stream. He had no idea how long this exodus had been going on, but he knew it had to be some time for people to notice it and call it in to him, and for him to arrive.

He shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the ocean. The stream looked like a blackness that went beneath the surface—and the blackness seemed even wider underwater than it did on the beach.

His squint became a frown. If there were that many more creatures—enough that they covered the bottom of the bay as they approached the shore—then this could go on for days.

Somehow, he was going to have to change that. Somehow he was going to have to get Anchor Bay back.

Gabriel leaned against the cold railing for a moment and tried to envision the map of Anchor Bay in his mind. If these creatures were determined to go east, there was no way to reroute them around Highway 101.

Anchor Bay didn’t have bridges over rivers, as Whale Rock and Lincoln City did, and no one had ever thought of building anything that covered the bay, like the famous bridge in Newport.

The highway was the main road here, and he couldn’t do anything about it. The creatures would have to go across it. He couldn’t even make a makeshift bridge, not one strong enough to handle cars for a couple of days.

Gabriel leaned toward his left. Leland Hill rose, blocking the rest of 101 from his sight. Then he tilted his head toward the hill.

At the base, years ago, the city engineers had built a concrete block that kept the hill’s sand base from eroding too badly in storms. For that block to work, they had had to route drainage systems through it.

Gabriel didn’t think much of the system through the summer months—during the dryness it became little more than a series of pipes—but in the winter months, the pipes poured a steady stream of water onto the beach, so steady that it had carved a tiny canal into the sand.

If he could get the creatures routed toward Leland Hill, he might be able to get them to use the drainage pipes instead of the highway.

Of course, he had no idea how to do that, since this group didn’t seem to want to go around anything. They just went over.

He turned and found himself face-to-face with a broad-shouldered, red-haired man he’d never seen before. The man had pale, freckled skin and light green eyes that looked like someone had taken tucks in the corners to eliminate bags. His cheeks had a smoothness that didn’t suit the rest of his skin.

“I understand you’re the person in charge here,” the man said, with that kind of clipped authority people had when they were used to getting what they wanted.

Gabriel leaned against the railing. The metal was ice-cold and rough against his back. “I don’t think anyone is in charge here today.”

“Look,” the man said. “I’ve already spent too much damn time in this godforsaken place. I have a flight out of Portland at eight o’clock tonight, and I need to be on it.”

“Matter of life and death?” Gabriel asked, trying not to sound as sarcastic as he felt.

“For me. I have a meeting in Los Angeles that I don’t dare miss. I built in two days for weather problems, but it seems that’s what this state is all about.”