Life on the Preservation, US Edition (15 page)

“Triple X GIRLZ,” Zach said.

“Yeah.”

“God
damn
. I told you I don’t always remember important stuff.”

“Let’s go.”

“There’s no time left.”

“We have to try.”

Zach threw money on the table.

They ran to Zach’s place and piled into the VW, adrenalin pumping illusions of sobriety. Backing out of the garage, Zach ran up on the curb and struck a parking sign, shattering the bug’s left taillight. “Damn it.”

They jolted off the curb and into the street. The windshield became blurry with rain.

“Turn your lights on,” Ian said.

They were racing down the hill in the rain with no wipers or lights. Zach fumbled the lights on just in time to illuminate a tree swinging in front of them. Ian started to yell. They smashed head-on into the tree. Ian found himself lying on his back in the wet street. Blood filled his mouth. Searing pain burned in his thigh. He coughed and choked. Something loose moved under his heart. He tried to sit up and a broken rib pierced the loose thing. Ian screamed and fell back.

He turned his head and saw the VW almost cut in half by the tree. The passenger door hung open like a broken wing. Zach wasn’t visible. Ian closed his eyes. He became all the broken, leaking, aching things of his body. A great weight settled upon his chest.

Footsteps approached. The footsteps came close and stopped. Ian opened his eyes. A chubby man stood over him with his hands in the pockets of his long tan overcoat. He wore a hat with a brim, which in combination with the overcoat made him look like a character out of a Bogart movie. Water ran off the down-tilted brim. The man’s face was in shadow. He said, “We’re going to have to do something about you.”

Now there were voices approaching, people running, a siren. As the crowd pressed around Ian, the man in the overcoat faded back.

Ian closed his eyes again and floated in his pain. Later, while the EMTs were trying to stabilize him, Ian died.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ON THE ROAD, 2013

T
HEY RODE OUT
of Oakdale with no functioning headlight, Ralph DeVris having smashed it with his bat. Amber running lights produced a fuzzy glow around the bike. The Honda jolted along at slow speed, encountering buckled paving and sudden gaps. Kylie shivered. The rain continued without let-up. Billy said something, turning his head. Kylie couldn’t hear him. She pulled herself up by his shoulders, getting her face close to his. “What?” she said.

“I said this is bad. We’re going to have to stop before I run into or off of something.”

“We’re not very far from town yet.”

“I know.”

He eased the bike off the road, traveled a very short, blind distance, then stopped and killed the engine but left the key on ALT to maintain the running lights, which weren’t much but something. Kylie swung off the saddle and immediately caught her shoe on a root. She tried to pull her foot back, slipped in the mud and went down to her knees. “
Fuck
.”

“Are you all right?”

“I can’t
see
anything.” Kylie was so frustrated and worried about her mother that she wanted to cry again but wouldn’t let herself.

“Stay where you are. I’ve got some chemsticks in the storage compartment.”

She could see him, a bearish figure in the amber, rain-blown aura of the Goldwing’s running lights. He opened one of the storage compartments, rummaged around in it, then turned to her with something in his hand, a stick about twelve inches long. He twisted it then shook it hard and it lit up green, much brighter than the running lights. “Here.” He tossed it to her. Kylie caught it – and saw what had tripped her up: not a root but a human ribcage, half buried. “Oh,
shit
.” She threw herself back, lost the chemstick. It bounced down the hillside, revealing a bas-relief of partially exposed human bones. Then Billy was at her side, helping her stand.

“God,” Kylie said.

Billy held her. “There’s a lot of crap like this outside of Oakdale.”

“Thanks a ton for warning me.”

The chemstick had come to rest at the bottom of the hillside. There was a clear, mostly flat space down there.

Billy said, “Come on. We’re going to put the tent up and get out of this fucking rain.”

The two-man tent was a small blue nylon Dome. Erecting the supporting structure out of flexible rods proved, in the rain and dark, frustratingly difficult. When it was finally up, they crawled inside with their chemstick and Billy pulled the flap closed. They had brought the rifle to get it out of the rain but forgot the food. Neither of them wanted to go back out to retrieve it. Rain crackled on the nylon shell. The tent shuddered in a fresh gust of wind.

“I need my medicine,” Billy said, toeing off his shoes. He shoved his stiff, wet jeans down, kicked them off, and pulled the sleeping bag around him. “My head feels like somebody brained me with a baseball bat.”

“Somebody did.” Kylie dug his Oxy out of her pocket. She passed him a couple of pills and he swallowed them dry then fell back on a pillow he’d made from rolling up his jacket. “Lights out,” he muttered. “You can probably see this tent from a mile away.” He barely got the words out before passing into sleep.

Kylie observed his face in the green chemstick light. Billy’s jaw hung slack, his breath was sour. Fillings gleamed in the back of his mouth.
I love Billy,
Kylie told herself, but didn’t think it was
true
love. It was closer to what she used to feel for her best friend, before the Judgment, or even for her mother. She tried,
I like Billy
, but it sounded stupid and lame, even in her mind.

Kylie removed her leather coat and rolled it up like Billy had done, dry side out. She didn’t know how to turn the glowing stick-thing off, or even if you
could
turn it off, so she stuck it under her sleeping bag. In the dark, she removed her boots, pants and shirt. Kylie’s body was damp and clammy from the drenching she’d taken. Were exotic toxins even now seeping into her bloodstream? Jim said God poisoned the sky as a trial for those who remained after the initial scouring of the Earth. Billy said the high altitude glitter was some kind of alien weapon designed to filter down and kill the survivors. Either way, Kylie tried not to worry about it. But despite her seeming immunity, she couldn’t help it. She snuggled down in the bag, shivering, hands clamped between her thighs. After a while, she became warm.

The rain subsided. It popped randomly on the tent. Kylie began to feel drifty. She entered a fragile zone between waking and sleeping, a place where she became unaware of the hard ground upon which she lay. Were those bones poking into her back? It began to not matter.

Then she was immediately wide awake. She sat up, listening, not sure
what
she had heard, only that it had been... something. She sensed Billy sleeping beside her, his breaths labored and deep. She wanted to wake him but decided to wait, in case it was nothing.

She strained to hear. Were those voices up on the road, or just the wind playing tricks with her imagination?

She waited, barely breathing.

Nothing. Wind, rain blowing against the tent.

After a while, she lay back down. But she couldn’t sleep. Her body was tense, anticipating. She put her hand on Billy’s shoulder, resting it there, not shaking him awake. The contact made her feel better.

After a while the tenseness retreated and she began to drift again, to the random pop of rain on the tent. She was almost gone when she heard, very distinctly, a man’s voice.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

I
AN STOOD IN
the tiny kitchen of his studio apartment. On the stove top the kettle began to issue wisps of steam. He stood in the kitchen, but he also drifted somewhere as if he himself were a little wisp of steam that might evaporate and be gone. Then the kettle whistled, and Ian came forward. He lifted the kettle off the burner and poured boiling water through a Melitta coffee filter, listening to it trickle into the cup. He was bare-chested and barefoot and bone tired. The wispy feeling was over but he was not yet fully present. He seemed to observe his body performing the routine task of making coffee. When the body brought the cup to its mouth and sipped,
Ian
tasted the coffee and came fully into himself, yawning, his mind more or less tabula rasa. Immediately some secret cache began to fill up the tabula with assorted details and the name:
Sarah
.

He stumbled into the living room, saw the open sleeping pill bottles, and looked away.

The Indian stood wheel-cocked in the alley. Here was the point of ultimate disconnect. He had to go see Sarah today but he couldn’t go see Sarah today. Yet, he couldn’t
not
go see Sarah today. Ian, as gloomy as he ever got, stared down at his bike.

Then the phone rang.

He slid it open and said, “Hello?”

“Triple Ex Girlz, buddy. Triple Ex fucking
Girlz
.”

Ian held the phone out and looked at it. Then he brought it back to his face and said, “Zach?”

The voice on the other end of the line went silent. Then: “Yes. It’s me, Zach. Blah blah fucking blah.”

The connection broke. Suddenly Ian tasted blood. He brought his fingertips to his mouth, touched his lips, the tip of his tongue. His fingers came away stained. He frowned. Then his mouth
flooded
with blood. He gagged, dropping the phone and his coffee cup. His leg twisted under him, pain flaming up his thigh. He collapsed, more blood erupting into his mouth. Something stabbed at his insides, just under his heart. Ian writhed on the floor. Then, just as suddenly, he was back to normal. No pain. No blood. Spilled coffee but no blood. “What the
fuck?
”

He stood slowly, afraid to trust his body. But there was no pain, no searing agony in his chest, his thigh. But gravity dragged at him and he wanted to go back to bed. He
yearned
to go back to bed.

Instead he picked up the phone and hit return call. “Zach?”

“Did you remember?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to remember.”

Zach sighed. Ian sensed he was about to hang up again. But Zach said, “Meet me at Vivace’s. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“All right.”

Ian bought a double tall latte from Cyndi, the barista with the Peter Pan hairdo.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she asked him. Normally Ian saw her at the end of her shift around one in the afternoon – which was the time he usually tumbled out of bed. “I mean, you look
catatonic
.”

“Yeah.” He took his latte and sat at a table with a yellow Formica top and warmed his hands around the cup. Zach walked through the door on time, and he looked wide awake. In fact, he looked
extra
wide awake. Like hot-wire-up-the-ass awake. He dropped into the chair opposite Ian and said:

“You ever read
Slaughterhouse-Five?”

“Vonnegut. Sure.”

“I’m like that guy.”

“You’re like Yossarian?”

“No, numbnuts, that’s
Catch -22
. I’m like Billy Pilgrim. I’ve come unstuck in time. But it’s not normal time. It’s a time loop. You’re unstuck, too, by the way.”

“What’s this, a game idea you’re working on?”

“You always ask me that in your snide little way. For the millionth time: no. It’s not a game idea; it’s a nightmare idea. Something to keep me on my toes until I go completely insane.”

“It’s too late,” Ian said.

“You can joke.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“Like I keep telling you: it’s a fucking time loop.”

Ian sipped his coffee.

Zach took a deep breath and said, “The day starts over and over again. It stops at midnight, then starts up again early in the morning.”

“You mean, the same day?”

“Yeah. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a time loop, would it?”

“I guess not. You’re the sci-fi guy. So that’s it?”

“No, there’s more.” Zach told him all of it, but with flagging energy in the face of Ian’s incredulity. Ian couldn’t help it. He could see his friend wasn’t screwing around. But what he was saying was insane. When he got to the part about killing himself, Ian winced and almost interrupted. After a while, Zach trailed off, losing focus, his voice going kind of dead. He was no longer even looking at Ian, almost talking to himself. “That’s all of it, all I remember.”

“Right. So how did the last one end?” Ian wanted to draw him back. He’d never seen Zach this way. It couldn’t be that he was stoned. Dope made him
happy
. And despite the ridiculous premise of the story, it discovered a resonate vibe in some non-rational part of Ian’s mind.

“I’m not sure how it ended,” Zach said, “but I think I crashed the car and killed us both. Myself, anyway. Not on purpose. I wouldn’t do
that
again.”

“I got hurt bad,” Ian said, the words out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say them.

Zach sat up straight, suddenly focused again. “You remember?”

“No. But right after you hung up on me I had some kind of hallucination. It felt real. I was banged up pretty bad, even fell down in my apartment when the hallucination hit me. But I didn’t associate it with a car wreck until you mentioned one just now.”

“Try to remember the car wreck.”

Ian closed his eyes and concentrated. His imagination offered various accident scenes but none possessed any heat or felt particularly real.

“Well?” Zach said.

“Nothing.”

Zach slapped his hand down on the table hard enough to make the sugar spoon jump. A girl dressed all in black reading a book at the next table looked over.

“Take it easy,” Ian said.

“I can’t. I keep
telling
you. But you don’t believe me. Eventually you will, but you don’t right now. It goes on and on. Maybe I won’t believe it myself next time. Maybe you’ll be the one who remembers. You started the whole fucking thing, you know.”

“Take it
easy
.”