Life on the Preservation, US Edition (23 page)

She wandered through the library, trying not to spend too much time in one spot. Periodically, she stepped outside, walked around the block, then came back in by a different door. She was hungry but had no money. She was also very tired. The library felt safe. She was afraid of another encounter with the aliens. What she really needed was a full night’s sleep, for a change. She decided to get it in the library.

It was a matter of playing hide-and-seek, for a while, with security and staff. Only
they
didn’t realize the game was on. Before closing time at six o’clock she ducked into a janitor closet on the second floor. After a while, someone approached the door, keys jingling, and she knew she’d made a mistake. Kylie stood in the floor sink, where they dumped old mop water, and pressed herself against the wall. The door opened, and she stopped breathing. The janitor switched the light on but did not come in. He went key-jingling to the restrooms on either side of the closet. First the men’s. She heard the door bang against the wall. “Library’s closed. Anybody in here?” Then at the women’s room. The key man rapped his knuckles and spoke loudly, “Hello, anybody in there? Library’s closing.” The jingling keys sounded different when he entered the women’s room. Kylie quickly slipped out of the closet and ran lightly into the periodical section, where she managed to stay out of sight until security completed its final sweep.

Eventually the library emptied even of janitorial staff, and Kylie came out of hiding. On the fourth floor she dragged a padded bench into the stacks and stretched out on it. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. The tension in her body gradually unwound, and she lapsed into a dreamy doze. Some time later, when she opened her eyes, it was dark.

She sat up, groggy, rubbing her eyes. Not exactly a full night’s sleep, but a decent nap. Her stomach grumbled and her mouth tasted bad. She found a water fountain, rinsed her mouth, and then she found an employee break room and raided the refrigerator. The big hand on an institutional-looking wall clock twitched within a couple of minutes of midnight.

Beyond the windows back in the reading room, the night city was lit up. Rain fell but not hard. Droplets beaded the tall windows, trembling with captured street light. Kylie didn’t get too close, not wanting to risk being seen by someone outside.

She sat on the edge of a study table, gnawing on somebody’s leftover deli chicken. A strange sensation came over her, unwinding in her stomach. She stopped chewing. Was the meat bad? Her head began to throb. She scooted off the table, an intense feeling of dislocation overcoming her. She dropped the chicken leg, stumbled forward on weak legs. Her vision grew hazy, and shadows began to spin out of the windows. She squinted, frightened and not understanding. Black, windless tornados spun out of every corner of the reading room, devouring space. She sank to her knees, head throbbing like a migraine, then tipped onto her side, whimpering. She pressed her hands over her eyes, pressed hard. The pain grew intense.

Then stopped.

Abruptly, the sick, twirly sensation in her stomach ceased. Pink light seeped between her fingers.

She brought her hands down slowly.

Morning.

That didn’t begin to make sense. Only seconds ago it was the middle of the night. She stood up, barely breathing, and turned in a slow circle. Rosy morning light threw long shadows over the carpet. No fucking way was this really happening. She jerked when the elevator started, and she couldn’t remember if she was on the third or fourth floor. For a moment she froze, facing the elevator doors, then ran for the stairs.

I
AN
P
ALMER FLOATED
over his own dead body. It was like seeing it through crystalline water, as if he were a snorkeler noticing an interesting artifact sunk below him. He could flipper off, exploring, or he could drift down and have a closer look at the human wreckage. For a moment it really was a choice – one he failed to make. At which point the gravity of indecision drew him down. And the closer he approached the body, the muddier his thoughts became, until they were silted black and he felt the immense heaviness of his inert being.

He opened gummy eyelids, worked his mouth, almost tasting the stale air of his apartment.
Welcome to the Advent of a new day
. Whatever that was, some stupid commercial tag line for laundry detergent. He turned his head on the pillow. The red numerals on the digital clock said: 7:05AM.

Sleeping pill bottles crowded around the clock.

He sat up, suddenly frightened. Had he taken those? Vaguely, he recalled feeling depressed last night... desperately wanting to sleep...

Ian closed his eyes, held himself still, taking inventory of his body. He felt sleepy, but that was reasonable at seven am. If he had taken the powerful sleeping pills he wouldn’t be sitting up in bed right now asking himself if he’d taken the powerful sleeping pills. One or two out of any of those bottles would have knocked him cold till noon.

He opened his eyes and the pill bottles were gone. He looked around the bed, on the floor. They were
gone
. Had he imagined seeing them? He stumped into the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet. All the bottles were there. His escape kit. He closed the mirrored door. His face mugged back at him, haggard and pale, chin peppered with two days’ beard.

He peed, returned to bed, and pulled the sheet over his head. He had awakened out of a pleasant, floating dream, the details of which totally eluded him. But it would be nice to go back.

The phone went off before he got the chance. Startled, he flung himself over and fumbled the thing into his hand. ZACH, the little window said. Jesus Christ. Ian muted the phone and tried to go back to sleep. After a couple of hours of fitful tossing on the borderland, he gave it up.

The day stretched before him. He had every other Saturday off, so he didn’t have to worry about work. A vague sense of gotta-be-somewhere niggled at him, but failing to retrieve the ‘somewhere’ from his sluggish brain, he dismissed it. Dirty dishes overflowed the sink. A Gino’s pizza box lay on the floor. A fly trundled up the smudgy cabinet door over the microwave. Ian’s stomach grumbled. He picked up the last banana. The skin was black, and what was inside felt like pulp. He dropped the banana in the trash and got dressed.

The inside of the apartment door was covered with graffiti. What the fuck? Between blinks, the tangle of WHOs vanished. Ian traced his fingertips over the wood, got up close, his nose practically touching the door. Nothing. Like the pill bottles, the graffiti was a memory so strong he could see it with his eyes, at least for a moment. But how did he even have the memory in the first place?

Seriously freaked, he got out of there, rode the Chief down to the waterfront, hoping to blow the ghosts out of his head.

H
E PARKED HIS
bike under the viaduct and started walking, the day loose about him like a shirt three sizes too large. He felt lonely, but no more so than usual. Certainly he wasn’t lonely enough to return Zach’s call. But that might change as the day progressed.

It was warm for October, almost summer-warm. There was even a vendor selling ice cream cones. Ian bought one, a late breakfast, and walked with it along the waterfront. People thronged the sidewalk, touristy types, a lot of them. A few horse-drawn carriages were parked at the curbside, waiting for suckers.

Ian stopped outside the Seattle Aquarium, something catching his eye. A jellyfish drifted in a silent world behind thick glass – a teaser to entice passersby to part with eight bucks. As a teaser, the jellyfish fell short. Ian stood watching it, while strawberry ice cream dripped on his shoe.

The jellyfish bothered him.

He watched it from a safe distance for a while, then asked himself,
Safe from what?
and approached the glass. Ian always felt vaguely afraid, or vaguely estranged, or vaguely lonely. But while The Great And Powerful Vague mostly ruled the day, a part of him rebelled and wanted to push back, to challenge his anxieties.

And, anyway, it was easy to challenge a jellyfish trapped in a tank.

As Ian started to step closer, an old guy in a blue ‘Gilligan’ hat walked in front of him. Ian pictured how the hat would look if somebody stuck it on a giant jellyfish. Okay, that was a weird thing to picture.

Ian moved closer to the tank.

The jellyfish drifted serenely through Ian’s reflection. A ripple of irrational fear passed through him. Of
course
it was irrational. Ian had a touch of arachnophobia, yeah, but was there even a word to describe ‘fear of jellyfish’? Probably. There was a word to describe almost every neurotic quirk he or anybody else could come up with. Ian knew that much from his on-and-off-again therapy and all the psychology books he’d read. Not to mention an intense biography of Phillip K. Dick.

He pressed his fingertips against the cool glass of the tank.

The jellyfish drifted.

A girl walked behind Ian on the sidewalk. He saw her reflection and turned. A teenager, twenty at
most
, wearing black jeans and a leather coat too heavy for the weather. Something like a clunky inventory scanner or giant TV remote stuck out of the pocket of her jacket. Kind of a biker girl with a bad haircut and a geek fetish. A really bad haircut. It looked like somebody had hacked at it with dull garden shears.

Ian recognized her.

Okay, that wasn’t true; he didn’t recognize her in the sense that he knew who she was. It was more like one tribe member in a strange land recognizing another member of the same tribe. Not that Ian
had
a tribe. But it used to be he could spot a fellow tagger or artist, even if he’d never seen them before. For a while, Ian’s tribe had been the loose underground affiliation of graffiti artists. Not that this girl with the chopped hair was a bomber. But she was
something
to him. They were alike, the truth of it communicated instantly to him, like a pheromonal cannon blast. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he had ditched his ice cream cone and started walking after her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

K
YLIE WAS ALONE.
Oh, the city was jammed with people, or at least with things that looked and acted like people. But that just made her feeling of isolation worse. She was alone and she was hungry and scared.

She had been wandering the streets for hours, ever since the unexpected dawn forced her out of the library. With one eye open for alien tourists, she drank in the reality of the city. Everything about it was perfect – a perfect imitation of Seattle. Yesterday (if that word meant anything) this had thrilled her, like a dream of coming home to the restored world. But the illusion shattered when the day suddenly started over, like a DVD on replay. Would that happen every night, forever? It was a nightmare, not a dream. And now she was trapped in it with a bunch of dead doll-people.

Yeah, she was trapped – unless
she
did something about it.

She stopped walking and leaned on a rail, facing the bay. Twenty feet down, oil-sheened water slopped against the pilings. Beyond the waterfront a big green and white ferry churned toward a far shore – Winslow, or maybe even Bremerton. She thought of the real Bremerton, blasted and poisoned, a handful of people dying in the stifling lower decks of a crippled aircraft carrier, while skin-and-bone zombies shuffled around the ruins. Her anger began to rise. Anger at whoever
did
that to the world.

“Are you all right?”

Kylie started. A lean young man in a black hoodie and baseball cap loomed over her. Kylie’s heart began beating faster. Her anger dropped away immediately. This wasn’t another fake person or an alien; he was different. She sensed it immediately. He was different – like her. He was a real human being with fair skin, eyebrows like charcoal sketch marks, a small white scar on the bridge of his nose, and a trace of strawberry ice cream smeared on the corner of his mouth. She was tempted to wipe it away.

W
HEN
I
AN NOTICED
he was following the girl he almost made himself stop. Almost. After another block
she
paused, leaned on a rail, and stared into the distance. He pretended to be interested in the crap displayed in the window of a souvenir shop, but he kept looking over at the girl with the bad haircut. He could almost feel her unhappiness – unless he was imagining it, which he might have been. Soon she would resume walking. He couldn’t just follow her around all day. Maybe he’d go over and lean on the rail, too. Maybe they could talk.

He never got to the casual-leaning-on-the-rail part, though. Instead he walked up awkwardly behind her and blurted, “Are you all right?”

It startled her. She turned on him – not unhappy but angry. The anger quickly dropped away, and a range of emotions passed over her face like the shadows of clouds. While this went on, Ian absorbed the fact that she was a stone fox, her skin pale, almost translucent, her eyes big and vivid, purplish blue in the sun.

“What?” she said. “Why did you ask that?”

“I… no reason. I don’t know. You looked. I don’t know. My name’s Ian.”

She stared at him, started to reply, but didn’t. There was some kind of intense chemistry going on between them. Ian groped for words to describe the experiment, or at least to prolong the moment, but his mind was suddenly blank. If only he could touch her, that would be enough. He urgently
wanted
to touch her.

Maybe she picked up on that, because all of a sudden she was backing off, saying, “Look, uh, Ian? I have to go.” And she walked away. He didn’t think he could stand it, but since there was no alternative, he did stand it.

Still walking, she looked back at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to stop. But she didn’t, and soon she was lost in the crowd.

“What the fuck was that all about,” Ian mumbled. He felt a sense of being badly let down. The light seemed to dim, and loneliness enclosed him like a black wing. More than ever he felt estranged from the people around him. All he wanted to do was retreat, ride the Chief back to his crappy apartment and lock himself away.