Life on the Preservation, US Edition (16 page)

“Yeah, yeah. I’m taking it easy.”

Ian reached across the table and touched his friend’s arm. It required an effort of will to do so, make that contact. “Hey, I know you’re not bullshitting.”

“But you don’t believe me, either.”

“Well–”

Zach wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and stood up. “I’m going to surrender to the Boogeyman.”

Ian regarded him warily. “Yeah?”

“I think it’s a fucking excellent idea. Except I don’t think I’ll surrender; I think I’ll punch his lights out. See you around.”

“How are you even going to find this guy?”

“Are you kidding? He’s right outside. He’s always fucking hanging around us.”

Ian followed Zach outside. “Hey, let’s get some breakfast,” he said.

“There,” Zach said, pointing. “I told you.”

A chubby man wearing an Indiana Jones fedora stood in front of Dick’s Drive-In, picking French fries out of a little paper bag and pushing them into his mouth, a thoughtful, almost analytical expression on his face. Where he got the fries was a mystery, since the place was closed at that hour of the morning. Really there was only one place he
could
have gotten them.

“That guy eating out of the God damn trash is your Boogeyman?”

“Yeah.”

Zach walked up to the garbage-eating Boogeyman and threw his arms out, hands open, palms up, like he was going to belt out a song. “I surrender.”

The man looked at him impassively.

“Take me to your leader,” Zach said.

Ian stepped up and pulled on his friend’s sleeve. “Come on, knock it off.”

“No. This fuck is going to tell me what’s going on.”

The man looked down at his French fry bag. Water sluiced off the brim of his hat and pattered on the ground. Ian stared but the water was gone between blinks, the hat dry again.
Dry Indian, wet Indian?
“Hey, did you see that?”

“See what?” Zach said.

Indiana Jones looked at Ian and said, “I like hats.”

“Uh, good,” Ian said.

“Hats,” Zach said. “Jesus Christ.”

Still addressing Ian, the man said, “You’re the one.”

“The one what?”

Zach pushed between them and got in the man’s face. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re up to. Why are you torturing us?”

The man loaded another cold French fry into his mouth then dropped the bag. “Quite the reverse. It’s you who are troubling me,” he said to Zach. Then, looking past him to Ian, “And you’re the source.” He started to turn away.

Zach pushed forward. “Hey, I’m
talking
to you!”

Ian held onto Zach’s arm. “Let him go.”

“Yeah, whatever. You heard him, though. He said you were ‘the one’. So what’s that supposed to mean? How come I’m not the one? I always remember more than you do.”

“I have no idea,” Ian said, “but I’ll tell you this. He was at the accident. If there was an accident.”

Zach had been watching the hat man. Now he turned his attention back to Ian. “You remember the accident?”

“I remember lying in the street at night with rain falling on my face and blood in my mouth, and I remember that guy standing over me. The rain was running off the brim of his hat.”

“God
damn
. I told you, man, I told you.”

Ian rubbed his forehead. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Let’s get the car and check out Triple Ex Girlz”

“I’ll pass on that.”

“No, you can’t. It’s the place, some kind of focal point. We’ve been there before. It’s at the center of it all, I
know
it is. You don’t understand because your memory is fucked up. But if we don’t do something we might both of us forget by the next cycle. You know what I think? I think they’ve been screwing with us, trying to disable our ability to remember. Eventually we’ll go back to being zombies like everybody else. What I’m saying,
today
might be our last chance.”

“I think I want to talk to my sister.”

Zach squinted. “For Christ’s sake, what for?”

“Come with me,” Ian said. “Okay?”

“I’ll come with you, but you gotta promise to come with
me
after that. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Wait, where’s your sister? We can’t leave the city.”

“Why not?”

“Ian!”

“Oh. The bubble, or whatever, right?”

“Right. Listen, you’ve just got to trust me.”

“I trust you,” Ian said. “I don’t totally believe you, but I trust you.”

“Thanks. I think.”

Ian dragged out his cell and hunted up Vanessa’s number. It went to voicemail.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ON THE ROAD, 2013

"I
T’S
BONES
,”
THE
man’s voice said, words carried on the wind. The voice hadn’t been that close, maybe on the hillside, somebody coming down from the road. It was pitch dark. Kylie was afraid to wake Billy, because what if he woke up loud? But she was terrified of
not
waking him. Terror won, and she shook him, her face close to his. The heat of fever radiated from him. He started to mumble, and she
shushed
right in his ear then whispered, “There’s somebody out there.”

Billy went still, then very quietly said, “Okay.”

Okay what? Kylie wanted to know. What were they going to
do?
Billy moved around, doing something she couldn’t see. She waited. There were no more voices. Kylie began to doubt there ever had been. After all, she’d been falling asleep. Maybe the man saying “It’s bones” had been part of a dream starting. Maybe.

After a long while Kylie noticed she could see. Pre-dawn light had just barely come up. That meant she was wrong and she had been fully asleep, maybe for hours, and then the voice or the dream of the voice woke her.

Billy was a dim figure visible against the pale screen of tent fabric. He was holding the Magnum. “I’m going out,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Anybody could see this tent pretty soon. Take this.” He handed her the rifle, which she had no idea how to use, then he unzipped the tent flap, slowly, as if that would make less noise. He threw the flap aside and crawled out fast, gun first.

Kylie bit her lip, waiting for shots, or yelling, or
something
. But after a few moments there was just Billy saying, in a normal tone of voice, “It’s all right, Kylie.”

She pulled on her pants and boots and crawled out into the raw morning. Billy stood in his boxers and black wool socks facing the hillside, the big revolver pointed at the ground. The Goldwing was plainly visible against the overcast sky. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Yeah. Are you sure you heard somebody?”

“I don’t know.”

“I doubt anybody from town would leave shelter during a rain storm. Maybe it was a SAB from the Dome. They wander up this way, sometimes. But they don’t generally talk much after they’ve been out a while, and it would have taken it days to get here.”

“I’m just saying what I thought I heard,” Kylie said.

In the burgeoning daylight clouds obscured the Olympic Mountains. It was probably Oakdale’s proximity to the mountains that spared it from the more devastating effects of the shockwave. The bones imbedded in this hillside suggested what they had missed.

Billy dressed and hiked up to the bike and came back with a knapsack. He looked ashen. The bandaged lump on his forehead was seeping, the bandage soaked dark.

“You don’t look so good,” Kylie said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

“I’m not a morning person. Here’s food.” He handed her the knapsack.

They ate in the tent, out of the biting wind. In less than a week the weather had turned to autumn. The knapsack was full of junk food, some of it well past its expiration date. “Doesn’t matter with this crap,” Billy said. For breakfast he ate two Snickers bars and half a bag of ranch style Doritos. Kylie had a couple handfuls of corn chips. The salt made her thirsty. She washed the chips down with a bottle of Father Jim’s holy water.

After eating, Billy just lay there with his eyes closed. Kylie waited a while then said, “Are you sleeping?”

“No.”

After another ten minutes, she said, “Billy, I don’t know what to do by myself.” She was scared but didn’t want to come right out and say so.

Billy opened his eyes, which were full of headache. A crust had formed in the corners. First there was fever then discharge from the eyes, and your body ached all the time and then it stopped aching because you were
dead
. “You’re not alone,” Billy said. “Come on. We have to get moving.”

I
N LESS THAN
a mile they came to a large metal sign in the middle of the road. It had stood on a pair of thirty-foot poles but now lay flat. The sign said: EATS GAS BAIT. Fuel pumps stood in front of the low-slung building, a combination café, gas-station and bait shop. The shockwave had taken the roof off, leaving a few jagged remnants and most of the lower part of the structure. Kylie remembered stopping at EATS GAS BAIT on car trips; they weren’t that far from Dyes Inlet and Kitsap Lake. She remembered the cheerful blue checkered table cloths in the café. She patted Billy’s shoulder. “Can we stop?”

Billy rolled the Goldwing off the road and killed the engine. “What’s wrong?” Billy’s words slurred like slippery things trying to grip the edge of the well before falling in.

“I don’t know. I used to come here. I just want to look.”

“Thing could fall on your head.”

“I’ll be careful.” She nimbly dismounted. Billy stayed on the bike. When she saw his face she felt bad for making him stop. He looked awful, his face drawn down in pain and exhaustion, eyes red and crusty and unfocused.

“You
really
don’t look good,” Kylie said.

“I wish you’d quit saying that.”

“What about another pill?”

“I’ve had too many already.”

“Maybe we should just keep moving?”

“A break’s good.”

“Okay.”

“But I wouldn’t go inside that place. Seriously.”

“I won’t, Billy.”

All the windows were blown out. She stood on the porch and looked into the café. It was full of debris, the ceiling having dropped after the shockwave had ripped the roof away. In the midst of it all a table, its blue-checked oilcloth still draped over it, lay on its side. Kylie had once sat at that table, or one just like it, with a boy named Kevin Hathaway. She had been fifteen and he had been seventeen. They weren’t exactly dating, but they liked each other and had held hands and all that. It had been
normal
, unlike what she later had with Father Jim. One time Kevin drove them to Seattle to see a Shins concert – an adventure mostly out of favor with Kylie’s mother, but allowed. The concert had been great. Seattle had been great. On the way there, Kevin stopped at EATS GAS BAIT and bought her a grilled cheese sandwich. Kevin had been what passed for a rebel in Oakdale. He skipped school a lot but couldn’t actually bring himself to drop out; he wasn’t a total dipshit like Ray Preston. While Kylie ate her grilled cheese sandwich he had folded back the table cloth and used his pen knife to carve, K + K = Cheese. The waitress caught him at it and made them leave; Kylie dropped half the sandwich in her purse, and they laughed for ten miles. She liked the bad boy aspect.

Kylie wondered if that
was
the same table. She glanced at Billy. His head was down, not looking in her direction. She quickly stepped through the window frame. Glass crunched under her shoes. She moved carefully over the debris, pulled the blue-checked oilcloth off the table, and Ray Preston grabbed her from behind. He locked his arm around her waist and his hand over her mouth. He must have walked all night. Was that him she had heard, the voice that woke her? She screamed into his smothering palm. When she reached back to rake his eyes with her fingernails, he jerked her head over so hard pain spiked at the base of her skull, and for an instant she thought he had broken her neck.

“Just don’t you try it,” he said, his breath thick with whiskey. He pinched her nose closed with thumb and knuckle and clamped down harder over her mouth. Kylie stopped struggling. She couldn’t breathe. “I should cut you right now. But we’ll wait for Father Jim.”

Kylie made her eyes big. She whimpered, not because she was afraid of Jim (though she was), but because she couldn’t
breathe
.

A figure lurched out of the kitchen. It was a skin-and-bone person. This was the worst one Kylie had ever seen. Its tattered clothes hung from its body like a peeling layer of old skin. Its eyes swiveled in deep sockets, as if they lived independently and were nesting in the skull.

“
Fuck
,” Preston said. He shoved Kylie at the thing and ran.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

“I
CKY
!”

Vanessa stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and gaped at him as though he had risen from the dead. If you believed Zach, that was approximately correct. She had been digging keys out of her handbag.

“Hi, Ness.”

“
Your
hi Ness,” she said, completing an ancient family joke. “What are you doing here?”

He hadn’t seen or even talked to her in over a year. Or had he?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I tried to call but you weren’t answering.”

“I never turned it on today. Sometimes it’s more peaceful that way. Of course I had no idea you might want to talk. It’s not exactly the expected thing, is it?”

“I guess not. Ness, I feel bad.”

Vanessa hesitated, then hugged him awkwardly, patting his back with the hand holding her keys. They jangled with every pat. Ian swallowed his emotions. He didn’t like being touched, even by his sister, perhaps
especially
by his sister; it seemed to require a conditioned response, which he was uncomfortable providing. In most cases he
couldn’t
provide it. And in this case, merely seeing Ness had upset him.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said, standing back but keeping one hand on his arm. “You look dreadful.”

“Thanks.”