Lost Signals (16 page)

I was across the room before I even realized I was moving. I pulled the mask from her face. Her mouth jabbered soundlessly, spittle flying. Her breath came out in ragged cold puffs, no noise. I fumbled for my phone to take a video. The screen wouldn’t unlock, wouldn’t register any of my touches. But the speakers came on, and I could hear her then, faintly, a cacophony of words and sounds coming too fast to comprehend.

There were words that got repeated more than others, but nothing I’ll ever be able to make sense of.

Sands. Yuma. White Sands. Delta six five . . . Breathe. Fire. Cross. The gate, the gate, the gate . . .

I let out a tiny scream when she seized my hand. My eyes snapped up to meet hers. She’d pulled her mask back on. In the fading light, her eyes looked all-pupil, harsh black against the whites.

“What’s wrong, Dee
 
?” she whispered. This wasn’t a question, more that she was begging for an explanation.

“Let’s get outside. Are you okay to walk
 
? This has gotten a little too big for us, I think.”

“ . . . are we okay
 
?” she asked. The way her eyes searched mine. Like she was out to sea, like I was the thin lifeline tying her to a rescue boat in a black tide.

“Come downstairs.” I took her hand, and it felt like I was pulling a balloon behind me.

The lights in the building were a flickering yellow that barely allowed us to see each other.

“You feel it
 
?” I asked, extending my fingers and slowly waving my hand around below my knee, like trawling through still water. That gritty sand feeling returned, tingling every nerve up to my wrist. Something was off. My mind raced backward to what we’d had to drink the previous night, the lunch Doreen packed us. Was something spiked
 
? Was I about to lose my shit with her
 
? Was I already
 
?

Sharon waved her hand and nodded. “Tickles my feet. Did you see it open
 
?”

Every breath I took felt like I was inhaling liquid sand, tickling my tongue on the way in and rasping my throat on each exhale. The breathing noise started again, this time in reverse, a great exhalation of static that reduced to a bare whisper. I descended the stairs slowly and carefully, making sure Sharon wasn’t going to stumble. By the time we reached the bottom, the sound grew quieter, the lights dimmed. Eventually, we were left in darkness. I felt Sharon’s hand tug twice, then her fingers slipped through mine.

“Sharon
 
?” I whispered, marveling at the electric charge it brought between my teeth.

“Dee
 
?” Her voice came back from the flashlight
 
/
 
radio that was clenched in my other hand. I didn’t remember turning it back on. I only saw her silhouette, standing still. Looking, I think, in my direction.

The radio crackled twice. “Are you tired yet
 
?”

“Just come over here and talk to me. We’re gonna get outside to the parking lot. I think we need to call it a night. Sleep it off in the car and get home. Okay
 
? Sharon
 
?”

“I’m almost there. It’s opening,” She took two steps in my direction and there was a
crack
from the floor. “We can’t do this anymore. This is it—” Another
crack
, this one twice as hard, like someone had sledgehammered the floor from beneath us. I tried to shine the flashlight in her direction, but the bulb dimmed. I grabbed for my phone and fumbled it, watching the screen dim as it bounced away into the blackness.

“Dee
 
?”

Another crack. And another. Her head tottered back and forth. She hunched suddenly and came forward, like she was trying to run.

“Dee
 
? Dee
 
!”

What happened next
 
? The car crash. That’s the only way I can describe it. Impact. Pure force that knocked me onto my butt, and when I found my bearings, she was gone. I couldn’t move. I thought maybe there was a hole in the floor. Maybe she’d fallen through. Maybe she was out cold in the basement, bleeding to death. But this place wouldn’t have a basement. I crawled, slapping at the floor with my free hand, clutching the flashlight
 
/
 
radio in the other like it was my lifeline, screaming her name. Twice my hands splattered into some unidentified mess that I hoped was only bird shit or wet paper. There was no hole in the floor. I couldn’t see, but I was certain of it.

“Sharon
 
? Sharon, please say something.”

The static crested for a second, and there was an exchange, two men’s voices, nasally, brief, curt. Sounded like mission control. I couldn’t make out any of the words.

There was the faintest delineation ahead, the night sky in the seam of the great plywood front doors. I don’t know how I’d made my way so close to them, but it was part of a solution. I pushed forward until I felt the warped wood and gave it a push. The door swung open easily. What little difference it made in the light ended about three feet into the building.

That Cohen lyric Sharon said earlier echoed in my mind, unmistakably painted above me. The sky . . . was cracked.

A crack in everything
,
that’s how the light gets in . . .

It was a razor thin tear that originated somewhere over the horizon and bent at impossible angles, backtracking against itself until it looped down somewhere behind the sea, like some manic god had slashed the sky with a knife in a fit of jealous rage. It bled light out into the purple sky, an inky flow of indigo-black. There were no stars in the sky. No moon. I stumbled out and looked for the car, banging my knee on the tripod we’d set up earlier. I slapped at my pockets for the keys. If I could shine the headlights into the doorway, maybe . . . but Sharon had the keys.

I had to get help. I looked around for any sign of movement in nearby buildings, on the road, anything. There was no life out here.

But in the sea
 
!

In the Salton Sea, the placid sea, all of the stars shone, and the moon. I looked up again to a black sky, then back at the water.

I didn’t realize I’d taken off my shoes until I felt the cold mud between my toes. My left foot still had a sock on. I ignored every prick and cut from the bone shards on the beach until I felt my legs enter the water. Knee-deep, I turned to the yacht club. A dark silhouette up in one of the windows, a person, maybe. I hoped it was Sharon. Had to be. She hadn’t fallen through the floor, that was just an overactive imagination.
Scare-Dee Cat
, Sharon used to tease me in situations like this.

I started to call out to her, but the thought left my mind as quickly as it came. I was standing in the sky, swimming in the stars and the moon and the endless black. I wanted her to see.

Sharon.

I shouted her name until her voice came over the radio still clutched in my hand.

“Where did you go, Dee
 
?”

“I’m outside
 
! Can you make it
 
? Are you okay
 
? I want you to see this. Come out
 
! Look at the sky
 
! Look
 
!”

“I’m okay. If you knew this was the last thing I’d ever tell you, what would you want me to say
 
?”

“Why
 
? No, Sharon. Just come outside and see this
 
!”

“They need something. It’s why the gate opens. They’ll show us everything, but we have to pay first. We have to give them—
zzzxxxzzz . . .
” Static swallowed her voice.

Then the voices came. First there were only two. They were children. Shouting and playing. Speaking a language I’d never heard, something ancient and guttural. There was an undercurrent of that same static-breath noise, but this time much more organic. Alive, pulsating, breathing at regular intervals. It pulled on me. Every time it exhaled, I could feel it sliding through the hairs on my arms, tugging my wrist toward the sea.

When I was thigh-deep in the water, a chill rushed through my skull, poured over my spine, and spread out into the water. I stripped down to my bra and underwear, convinced the heat from the stars in the water would keep me safe. I should have been freezing, but I was fine. Warm. Relaxed. I was in my body and in the water at the same time.

There were things in the sea. Beyond the curling, sun-dried remains of thousands of Tilapia stirred up by my footsteps, long, leathery, undulating things moved past my legs. Not seaweed, not here. When I looked down, I could only see my naked legs plunging down into an impossibly starry night sky. When I moved my feet, the stars drifted as if floating. Waves of vertigo washed over me, the feeling that I would become unrooted and fall into the sky. I had to look away toward the yacht club.

There she was, on the shore. She was glowing. Her skin pale and radiant in the light that rose from the water.

“I don’t want to get my shoes muddy, Dee. Come over here.” She extended a hand. “I figured it out. You just have to stop talking so that they can start. You just—”

Her voice trailed off as a steady stream of blood flowed from her mouth. Her eyes wide in panic, she kept trying to talk. Blood and spittle sprayed from her mouth, spattering down onto the muddy ground between us. It was only then that I noticed her sinking. The muck around the shore slowly swallowing her up. I rushed to her, nightmare-slow slogging through the silt. She was thigh-deep by the time I fought my way back to shallow water. Something clutched at my ankles as I moved, the water turned jello-thick. I stumbled twice, falling to my knees the first time and onto my face the second. My face slapped through the foul water and cracked against a rock. I inhaled a mouthful of thick, rancid water and then the ground parted. I shouldn’t have been able to see in the brackish mess, but there was a hole in the sea bed. There was another night sky below. Not a sky.
Lights.
Southern California, all of it, so dazzling, spinning dizzily beneath me.

I pushed hard, afraid of drowning, afraid of falling, afraid of losing Sharon forever. I punched through the muck into that sub-sky. Clumps of mud and filthy water spun away to crash on the ground below me. It was such an odd sensation, still feeling the current of the water around me, rushing over me, none of it pouring through the hole beneath me. The sea bed under my fingers reminded me of where I actually was, so I kept my eyes closed and pumped my legs until my face slid and scraped against the grit of the mud near the shore. I squirmed and writhed and pushed until cold air stung my back. I don’t know how long it took to get out, but Sharon was gone when I did.

There was a disturbance in the mud at the shoreline, bloodstained spots that spattered across the ground like demented graffiti. Sharon’s hiking shoe lay a few feet away, caked in dirt, a sun-dried tilapia carcass glued to the muck on the sole. Her headband stuck half-out of the mud, surrounded by small puddles of brown-red water.

I dragged myself, dizzy and reeling, back toward the yacht club. A chorus sang in the sky, endless voices and static, screams and songs and sounds I’d never heard before or since. A shape passed by the window upstairs, a silhouette surrounded by strange fractals of light. It was a man. The building bled cyan and magenta and indigo light from every open crack and window.

The lobby was empty. The remaining light fixtures cast painful shades of reds and blues. I wondered what would happen if I had those old-style 3D glasses. There was no hole in the floor. No Sharon. I made my way upstairs, treading carefully across the splintered floor, trying to avoid the debris from the broken walls and windows. I should have plucked my shoes out of the mud before coming inside. When I reached the top of the landing, the radio crackled from down the hall. A whisper scraped by my ear.

“Don’t come closer. Don’t come. Don’t.”

A hum rose from the wall, pitches ranged in perfect fifths, a brassy, brutal harmony. I pushed on, ignoring the broken glass stabbing into my feet, the chill in my bones. My skin had become numb. I pounded my arms against my chest to try to get my blood flowing. My bra and underwear looked like sand carvings etched into my skin. I ran my fingers through my hair and found it soaked, caked in mud. My face was covered in gritty silt and dust.

“Help,” I whispered. “Sharon. I’m sorry. We have to go, baby. We have to leave.”

The doorway to the radio room bled dull orange light into the hallway like a fog, obscuring more than it revealed. I stopped by the doorframe and leaned my head in. The radio in the corner was lit up like Christmas, the antenna lines that spread across the wall glowing with strange energy. The mural painted on the floor glowed harsh white. It had changed from a starry sky to a thin, weaving line that ran a circuit around the length of the room and spiraled inward to form a circle in front of the radio.

Sharon was on her knees in the center of the circle, facing away from me toward the radio. She looked like a religious icon, surrounded by an aura of twisted wires.

“We should have talked,” her voice came through the radio. “We should have talked.”

Her shoulders heaved. I started limping toward her until she snapped an arm out to her side.

“Don’t come closer. It’s too late now. Just leave. I don’t want you to see.”

“See what, baby
 
?” I asked, my voice a raspy whisper. “See what
 
? Sharon, what’s happening right now
 
?”

“Everything they wanted,” the radio said. “Everything they ever wanted. They opened the door without thinking about what was on the other side. They don’t want to come through. They just want it to close and go away and they are very, very angry with us . . . ”

“Sharon, look at me. Please.”

A wet slap in the dirt near my feet. Something small and damp bounced off of the floor and ricocheted across the top of my foot, painting a streak across the muddy brown. Dark. Near the edge of my big toe, a small lump of meat rested on the floor.