Life on the Preservation, US Edition (22 page)

She didn’t know how to control the parachute. The air currents carried her back towards Elliott Bay. Gradually, the ground came up. She would hit the jagged tumble of rocks bordering a waterfront park and the bay. Kylie tugged at the shroud lines, trying to steer away from the rocks. It worked. She sailed back, a hundred feet above the park. Women pushed strollers along a winding, paved pathway. Three guys spun a Frisbee back and forth while a yellow dog bounded tirelessly between them, trying to catch the thing. A guy jogging in a blue workout suit stopped and pointed.

The wind pulled Kylie toward a wooded hillside. Trees swung beneath her. She drew her legs up, trying to protect herself moments before she crashed through the branches. Bristly swags roughed her up, slapped her face. There was a thick pine scent. The chute snagged in the branch tangle and Kylie came up short, dangling ten feet off the ground like a broken marionette.

She groped for the quick release that the P.O. had shown her, couldn’t remember what it looked like, started yanking and pawing at every buckle and hook. She needed to get
down
. To her left a well-maintained nature trail wound out to the park.

Voices approached, people climbing the trail to find her.

Kylie twisted a latch, expecting nothing, and fell clear of the shroud lines, hit the sloping ground at an angle, and pitched face-first into the bushes.

She hurt, but nothing was broken. Her face stung where the pine swags had slapped her. She unstrapped her helmet, pulled it off.

A woman said, “Are you all right?”

Kylie didn’t move.

Somebody else, a man, said, “Call 911.” Already a siren was rising in the distance. Was it for her, or the crashed jet, or a more usual emergency?

Before anybody else arrived, before anybody touched her, before she had to answer questions – Kylie dropped her helmet, bolted to her feet and ran like hell.

I
AN LOCKED HIMSELF
in his apartment. He checked the windows to make sure they were securely latched.

He turned off his phone.

His fear didn’t seem to be
attached
to anything. He was used to living in a private bubble of formless anxieties. But this was far worse. Unrecovered memories, like shadowy beasts, humped back and forth behind his mind.

The apartment smelled stale, his dirty socks and underwear mixed up with the last of his clean stuff, scattered on the floor. Mundane chores, like going to the basement to wash clothes – Ian hated them, hated the necessary routines, the dullness. He avoided them as long as he could. The garbage needed to go out, too. He had cooked a Gino’s pepperoni pizza a couple of nights ago and left the crusts on the kitchen counter. That stale pizza smell lingered.

He gathered his set of Marks-A-Lot pens out of his backpack and sat on the floor, his back to the wall. He held the pens loose in his open hands. Green, red, blue, purple. Black. It was a cheap set. He dropped the four colored ones and pulled the cap off the black one.

The ink mixed with whatever chemical they used to saturate the tips – it smelled like home. The only home Ian ever trusted. That home, like all his others, had ultimately failed him. But maybe there was some magic left, something to ward off the Bad Stuff now stalking him, from either inside or outside his head.

Voices spoke in the next apartment, muffled by the thick plaster walls. They didn’t even sound human. What if they
weren’t
human? He pictured Body Snatcher pod people, blank-faced, discussing the big takeover. He pictured animals, upright bears with vaguely human light in their red eyes. Worse: he pictured his dad’s ancient turntable, the one on which he used to play Beatle records when he got loaded and fucked around with the basket-case Indian. The turntable and old-school amp in a blank room, two speakers attached and aimed at the common wall between the empty apartment and Ian’s living room – faking human occupation for Ian’s benefit. Trying to trick him into believing he wasn’t alone, the last man alive. That shit wasn’t going to work.

He held the pen close to his face, touched the tip of his tongue to the stiff fiber point, then twisted around and pressed the marker to the wall, pressed hard, making a tight scribble. The mark looked like a bullet hole, the way a comic book artist would ink it. He rolled onto his knees to continue – to make something out of the comic book bullet hole – but hesitated.

They weren’t going to come through the fucking
wall
. Whatever ‘they’ were. Whatever crazy shit was taking over his mind now.

But really, start at the door.

He crawled across the room, knelt in front of the door. Someone walked by in the corridor outside his apartment, heavy footsteps, no voice. Ian held his breath. After the footsteps passed, he began. The marker squeaked against the door frame. He made rudimentary block letters, vertically climbing the frame:

W

H

O

He made more, and more – shaping letters between the letters, interlinking them, covering the door frame in a voodoo chain. But that seemed inadequate, so he filled in the door’s three panels, as well, working close up, fingers crabbed around the thick barrel of the pen, inhaling the drug-home-scent of marker ink. By the time he finished the door, the pen was dead, dried up, the tip mashed to pulp. He tossed it and grabbed the rest of the set off the floor. There was also a half-empty Sabotaz can of primary red. Together, was it enough for the whole apartment? He doubted it. But he could do the windows then retreat to the bathroom. That would work.

Hours later, Ian slumped in the empty bathtub, surrounded by WHO tags in a variety of marker colors. He had used the spray can on the shower enclosure itself, and the letters ran like blood down damp blue tiles, channeled into the mildewed grout lines.

The stink of paint and ink was overpowering. His head throbbed. But he remained in the tub, behind the locked door and magic tags, stayed there while the hours ran out.

K
YLIE FLED.
B
EHIND
her, a man shouted, “Hey, hey!” She ran harder. No one tried to stop her. She sprinted out of the park, pounded along the waterfront of tourist bars, import shops, long piers pointing into the bay. Everything was so
normal
; a world wholly intact, even if it was some kind of illusion. Emotion kept swelling her throat. The restored world clobbered her senses.

A policeman mounted on a brown horse looked in her direction. She slowed to a jog that tapered into a normal walk, like she was just trying to get somewhere and was tired of running – not like she was running
from
something. She crammed her hands in her jean pockets and kept her head down, half expecting the cop to say something. He didn’t.

Kylie walked for a while then stopped and looked into the sky of broken clouds, clouds that weren’t full of poison, hanging over a world that at least
appeared
unchanged since before The Judgment. She wiped her eyes, swallowed down her emotions. The end of the world wasn’t a Judgment of God, which was what everyone back in Oakdale believed. It wasn’t ‘The Judgment’ at all; it was
the Invasion
.

Footsteps clocked on the pavement behind her. Kylie glanced over her shoulder. Two giants strode toward her. They wore rust-colored coats, like ribbed cones slipped over their bodies. Kylie stumbled on the curb, found her footing, turned again. Somehow, the giants had reduced to the size of men. Their heads were still bald and pink as baby skin, though. And the air above their heads and shoulders wavered slightly, like a heat mirage on a desert road. And like a mirage, the rising heat appeared to veil a secret image: the giants Kylie had first glimpsed. Even in the seconds she watched, the heat waver smoothed out, became invisible.

A trick.

Kylie didn’t question the reality of what she saw. She simply reacted to it, jogging ahead of the bald men, into a more populated stretch of waterfront. When she looked back, they were gone.

The sky was rapidly clearing. Dazzling sunlight shone over everything, souvenir shops, fish restaurants with sidewalk access, tourist vendors selling balloons, hotdogs, ice cream. Big white seagulls sailed with the wind or hovered against it. Multitudes of healthy people, young and old, even children, even the very old, thronged the sidewalks And there were animals, dogs on leashes, horses harnessed to open carriages. Motorized vehicles, cars and buses and motorcycles. A blizzard of life and motion (if it
was
life), crashing Kylie’s hungry senses. She was really here, in the
Sleepless
city, the
Say Anything
city. She closed her eyes a moment.

The World continued to invade her other senses. The salty smell of Elliott Bay, instead of the sour brackish stink of black water outside the Dome. Birds screeched, human voices gabbled, engines revved. The touch of moving air against her face. A ferry’s horn sounded a great, shuddering blast, as the boat pulled away from the dock. Kylie remembered the
Elwha
in the soupy green space between the outside and the inside of the Dome.

She opened her eyes. It had only been a couple of seconds. But one of the bald men was standing right in front of her. In his palm was some device, like a joke shop joy buzzer with a red laser-bright dot winking in the center. And he was dressed differently, his long rust-colored cone-coat gone, replaced by a short-sleeved shirt, jeans and tennis shoes – his whole body wavering slightly in another heat-mirage trick, automatically blending in with the crowd. The only thing he got wrong was his arms, which appeared too long.

Kylie threw herself back, and another pair of apishly long arms wrapped around her, and a baby-pink head pressed over her shoulder, as if she were in a lover’s embrace. At the same time she sensed the
other
, the secret giant looming over her, enfolding her against its alien body.

The laser-dot joy buzzer came toward her forehead.

Kylie made herself skinny. It was a trick she’d learned early on with Father Jim, before he had gone too far but still farther than they both knew he should have been going.
How’s my little co-pilot,
he said one day, when she arrived at the airstrip and he had been nowhere in sight but had suddenly come up behind her, pulling her against him with his big arms. Kylie was little. She brought her arms in tight, bending her shoulders, narrowing her already narrow body, then going dead-weight and dropping, not caring about falling down and looking stupid, just needing to get
out
of Jim’s arms, at least that first time.

It worked now, too.

She slipped through the bald man’s long arms. Her ass hit the sidewalk between a forest of limbs. The joy buzzer came towards her face. She twisted away, scrambled to her feet, and bolted at a dead run into traffic. Horns blared. Kylie put her arm out as a yellow cab screamed to a halt on its front tires. And then she was across the road, leaping over a set of trolley rails, running full-out under the immense shadow of an elevated highway, massive gray columns of concrete and the rhythmic thud-thud of traffic hitting the spacers directly over her head.

She stole a backward look. The aliens weren’t following. Or they might have been, only further disguised.

Kylie poured on a final burst of speed, pumping her legs up the hill to First Avenue. She swung right, tried to blend in with other pedestrians, then slipped into the lobby of the Alexis Hotel. A man in a sport coat and red tie looked up from a computer screen at the front desk. Kylie avoided his eyes and acted like she was waiting for someone. There were chairs and upholstered benches, and the lobby opened into a bar on one side and some kind of gift shop on the other. Kylie sat on one of the benches. Plenty of people circulated through the lobby, and no one took any particular notice of her.

But Kylie noticed them.

What if these
weren’t
people? What if they were like Wolcott had said, some kind of biological robots – well fed and functional SABs, no different, fundamentally, than the skin-and-bone horrors she had seen out in the real world? But Wolcott could have been wrong. These could be real people, the real population of Seattle, trapped under an alien Dome without even knowing it, with the aliens acting as zoo keepers. Either way, how could Kylie tell? They all appeared so real and normal. She wanted to believe they
were
real.

She slipped her hand into the deep pocket of her leather coat. Wolcott’s EMF detector was there, and a square of stiff paper. She withdrew the paper. It was the picture of her grandparents, the one she had taken from her mother’s photo album the night she and Billy escaped from Oakdale. Kylie had forgotten all about it. Looking at the picture, the whole ‘biological robot’ idea retreated a little.

She replaced the photograph and took out the locator. It wouldn’t hurt to see if the device worked. She held it in her lap. It was like an over-sized TV remote with a two-inch LED screen at the top. She thumbed the ON button. A grid came up. The screen glowed cold blue. She waited. Nothing else happened. She looked over at the front desk. The red tie man appeared busy talking to a fat guy with about ten bags piled around him. Kylie held the locator up and moved it around, trying to catch a signal. Nothing. The screen glowed blue and the grid remained empty. She got up and walked with it. Maybe outside...

As she approached the lobby door, a man pushed through it. He looked perfectly normal, kind of like a tourist, in tan pants and a loud yellow shirt, but the door’s glass panel reflected a stooping giant.

Kylie ran into the gift shop, cut through it and out a side door. She halted on the sidewalk. Now what? She turned the EMF detector off and dropped it back in her pocket. What she needed was a safe place with plenty of people around. The library might work, and it was just a few blocks away, if she remembered correctly from the last time she was in Seattle – the real Seattle. Kevin, the boy-who-wasn’t-a-boyfriend, had pointed out the weird glass and aluminum building that time they came for the Shins concert.

She grabbed a random book and installed herself at one end of a blond wood study table on the library’s main floor. She shared the table with an intense guy in rimless glasses and a mop of curly black hair. He hunched over a book of poems, a couple more near at hand, waiting to be cracked. Kylie read the spines. Rimbaud. There had been a Rimbaud book at Billy’s house, but Kylie had never gotten around to it. Thinking of Billy made her sad, so she stopped.