Olivia (2 page)

It relieved her.  She hoped it was true.  She glanced up, another question on her lips, and felt it die there.  The indifferent scrutiny in his eyes as he studied her naked body made her want to curl up under the water and live there forever.  She drew up her knees and tried to cover herself with the bath sponge.  “Will you tell me what you want with us?” she whispered.

He thought about it a very long time, but she waited without moving, certain that she could still choose.  That she could always fall back into the water and take a quick snort, if she had to. 

At length, he shook his head, more with dry frustration than cruelty.  “I do not have the words,” he said, but she did not quite believe him. He spoke English slowly, carefully, but well.  His only accent was due, she was sure, to the snoutish shape of his mouth.  There might be some things he didn’t know how to say…but she thought he could make his point if he really wanted to.  And looking into his dark, wary gaze, it was clear to Olivia that he meant not to.

She felt her chin tremble and looked down at her reflection in the water.  It was distorted, monstrous.  She didn’t know what else to do, so she continued to bathe.

He watched in silence a little while longer, and then asked, “May I touch you?”

What a baffling question.  He had caught her.  She was taken.  She was his.

That sunk in a little past the pleasant numbness which had gripped her ever since she had first opened her eyes and seen his monstrous face above her in the dark bedroom, felt the points of his claws as he lifted her out of bed.  “Are you taking us away?” she asked, and her voice shook for the first time.

He stood there in her bathroom, this winged, horned, fur-covered creature next to nice, sane white tiles and a tube of toothpaste.  “Yes,” he said.

She waited again to be afraid, but there was only horror inside her, horror and sadness. 

“May I touch you?” he asked again, this creature who had caught her, who owned her, who was taking her away.

“Yes,” she replied, and tensed.

He knelt next to the bathtub, plucked the bath sponge out of her hands, hesitated, then picked a spot on her back and scrubbed her.  The only part of his flesh that came into contact with hers was the ball of this thumb.

She forced calm into her limbs, forced her breath to slow and her body to relax.  She closed her eyes and opened her fists, and concentrated on breathing in and out.  He had a smell, not entirely unpleasant, of musk and dark places.  She breathed it, trying to convince herself that she was dreaming.

He dipped water out of the tub with his hands and poured it over her back.  “It is cold,” he observed.

“Do you have baths?” she asked, feeling ludicrous.

“Yes.  They are warm.”  She felt him handling her hair, which hung limp and damp between her shoulder blades.  “Does this need washing?”

She pulled out of his grasp.  “No.”  She stood up, and he stood also and stepped back as she came out of the tub.  She dried herself briskly and climbed into her clothes.  She hadn’t noticed which they were while she was picking them out, but now realized she was wearing a pair of her black office slacks with the tie-dyed T-shirt she wore to wash the car.

She felt like laughing, but knew that if she started, she might never stop.  Instead, she padded back into the bedroom for a clean pair of socks and put them on.  She sat on the bed, put on her running shoes, and tied the laces in a double knot, extra safe, extra secure.  The creature watched her from the doorway.  She looked at him and dug her fingers into the sheets where she had been sleeping just one hour ago, and it was still real and still happening to her.

He moved to the door and stopped, waiting.  “Is there more?” he asked.

She looked around despairingly and saw artifacts out of time, objects without meaning.  The computer which had been the center of her universe all of her adult life sat in front of her with her tropical fish screen saver swimming contentedly back and forth across the monitor, now junk.  Her grandmother’s hand-sewn quilt, an embarrassing ragtag bundle she kept packed away under the bed unless temperatures dropped below the level of her pride, suddenly brimmed with sentiment.  The porcelain tea set treasure she hadn’t been able to live without when she’d spied it at the flea market last summer never crossed her mind; the outrageously tacky oversized coffee cup with the octopus painted on the side became a priceless relic of the last family vacation she would ever take.  Is there more?  Toothbrushes and pop cans and her mix CDs and books and little plastic panda bears and her state quarter collection and that stupid English Lit textbook which she’d been meaning for four stupid years to send back and how was she supposed to know what would hurt the most to leave behind when she had to leave it all?

Olivia went to the closet.  On the top shelf, in the far back, was a box with her photo album in it.  She fished it out and turned back towards him.  “May I have this?” she asked.

He studied it from the doorway.  “What is it?”

“A book.”

He held out his hand.  She gave it to him, certain he would either tear it apart or put it firmly to one side in refusal.  Instead, he turned it over, then opened it up and flipped through it, fingering the plastic pages and peering at the photos.  “Yes,” he said at last, putting the book under his arm.  “Is there more?”

“No.”  Again, she fought tears and won.

He took her arm again and put her before him, following her out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the parking lot.  They were being paired up out there, the women holding whatever souvenirs they had chosen from the tattered shreds of their lives, the creatures shadowing them and growling back and forth at each other.

The woman who had tried to run away was standing and shivering, clutching a saucepan in both hands.  Another had nothing but a teddy bear.  Others had packed paper bags or backpacks.

The rain was coming down harder now, and the moon was entirely hidden by the clouds.  Olivia’s captor patted her arm, then went to talk with another group of creatures.  Olivia stood and waited, watching the overpass.  A cop car drove by, lights flashing, but it was alone.  It didn’t stop and come back to save them.  It didn’t do anything and then it was gone.

Olivia’s creature came back, and took her arm.  He led her out of the parking lot, around the buildings, and over to the steep embankment that dropped away behind the complex.  It stank when it rained because the dumpster was over here and people had a way of throwing their garbage down the embankment when the dumpster was full and the apartment manager refused to clean it up.  There was a fence, but it had mostly fallen in.  The monster took her right to the edge of a good fifty-foot drop into a fetid pit and stopped.  “Turn around,” he said.

Olivia looked down at the rocky, trash-strewn swamp below them. 
I could jump
, she thought without much conviction.  She was beginning to shiver in the rain, or maybe she hadn’t dried off enough after her bath.  Being cold and uncomfortable reminded her that she was alive.  Her story, whatever that story was, wasn’t going to end here.  As awful as it was to think that all the nice, normal things that had come before—hamburgers and Christmases and trips to the store and oil changes for the car—were over, she was going on.

The creature’s inhuman hand gave her arm a careful squeeze.  “Turn around, please,” he said again.

She turned and faced him.  He tucked the photo album into the broad belt of his loincloth and looked at her, fanning his wings. He beat them twice, stretched them fully, then glanced back at the parking lot where every eye, captor and captive, was on him.  He looked back at her. 

“Please, don’t,” she said.  She only said it once.

He put his hands around her waist and lifted her off the ground.  “Hold on to me,” he said.

She did, her arms trembling as they slid around his neck.

He bent his head.  She could feel the breath heaving in his body, the soft spikes of his fur everywhere it touched her skin, his claws digging at her back and the edges of the photo album pressing at her chest. 

She was not dreaming.

He jumped.

3

She didn’t scream.  They didn’t fall.  She felt the strangest sensation (she had been on an airplane twice before, so it wasn’t exactly unknown) of the precise moment when gravity lost its grip and the sky took them.  The wind of their passage howled into her ears.  The rain pelted her back like stones. They were flying.

She peered around his arm and saw only the dark shape of his wings beating against the air.  She tried to tell herself it couldn’t be.  Scientifically speaking, there was no way he could be lifting himself off the ground, much less be carrying her added weight.  Of course, the same could be said of bumblebees, too large to fly, but who flew all the same.

This is horror
, she thought. 
When something impossible exists and refuses to explain itself
.

She tried to squirm up enough to see over his shoulder, but he dipped his head in close to her ear and murmured, “Do not move.”

She turned to see the ground and found herself several hundred feet up, soaring away from the still sleeping town and into the foothills.

She heard a scream and turned to see another creature on their left, struggling to hold onto his hysterical woman.  She could see his mouth moving, but couldn’t make out what he said to her.  In any event, it wasn’t helping to calm his captive, so he pulled back as far as he could and butted her in the head.  She went instantly limp and he gathered her up, tossing Olivia’s captor a wincing sort of glance before he dropped back in the formation, out of sight.

Olivia suddenly felt very loosely confined, and tried to scramble further into her captor’s grip, at the same time looking back over her shoulder at the distant ground.

“Do not move,” he murmured again.

“You’ll drop me,” she whimpered.

“Never,” he promised, and flexed his claws.  The tiny pricks of pain steadied her nerves, but she clung to him all the same, locking her ankles and her thighs around his waist.  He lifted his wings and swooped higher, heading towards the peaks of the mountains that had stayed safely on the horizon all the years of Olivia’s life. 

“Where?” she stammered.  “Where are we going?”

“Soon,” he said soothingly.  It was not exactly the correct answer, but she found it strangely reassuring nonetheless.

It wasn’t soon, not really.  She couldn’t hold on to her fear enough to keep her awake for the whole flight, and every time she opened her eyes, the shock of the nightmare slapped home.  High Hill Apartments was gone.  So were the lights of town, not just her town, but Sugartree, Poho, Sanctum…every town.  The roads went next, or maybe there just weren’t any cars moving on them for her to see.  She dozed and woke over snapshots of trees and lakes and mountains, and it was a very long time before she realized there was a destination at the end of this journey after all.  There was a single mountain, no different from any other, all dark rock and jagged pines, growing bigger with every passing moment.  If it had a name, she didn’t know it, but the sight of it filled her with drugged dread.

Olivia pulled on the creature’s neck until he ducked his head closer to her.  “Is that it?” she asked, her heart hammering.  “Is that the place?  Is it alive like you are?  Is it…Is it real?”

“Do not move,” he told her.  “Soon, this is ended.  Do not move.”

They were right over the top of the mountain now, not even a hundred feet off the ground, close enough to hear the treetops whistling by beneath them.  The creature carrying her banked suddenly, then performed an aerial feat that nearly stopped her heart in her chest: executing a loop and flying upside-down over the lip of a craggy mountain top and underneath a ledge, into a narrow cavern.  Without slowing, he maneuvered through rocky outcroppings she could scarcely see, aiming for what appeared to be a flat wall dead ahead.  In the last instant before impact, he snapped his wings fully open, then eased his grip on Olivia’s waist and put one arm and both legs straight out.

He struck the wall, his blunt claws sinking into the stone like a warm knife into butter.  His limbs bent to absorb the shock, but Olivia’s back smacked into the stone, and the full length of his hard body crashed into her, pressing the air from her lungs in a harsh, hacking cough.

He immediately drew back, folding his wings small and passing his hand over her several times, less to console her than to check for injuries, she thought.

While he did this, two other creatures landed on the wall, slamming their captives into stone.  Sobbing wails and the leathery slap of wings surrounded her until the fear came back and she had to clap her hands over her ears to keep from screaming herself.  Olivia’s captor tucked his arm back around her waist at once, pressing his strange mouth against her neck.  It was comforting; she wanted to think that was just the drug they’d used, but didn’t quite believe it.

“Hold on to me,” he murmured, close against her ear.  “Do not move.”

And then he started moving again, hand over hand, climbing down.  What she had first taken for a wall was in fact the mouth of a wide shaft dropping deep into the mountain.  At first, she could see the holes made by the passage of many claws, but what little light there was didn’t last.  In seconds, she could see nothing, and hear only her captor’s breath in her ear, the wails and moans of women, and the scraping sounds as the creatures hunted out handholds in the dark. 

She only knew when they were coming to the bottom because the echoes changed, and because he gave her another of his distracted little pats.  Then he hopped off the wall, pulled her all the way up into his arms like a small child, and set off down a passage.  He did not move as though he could see, but rather like a man so familiar with his surroundings that he did not need to see.  It was very cold down here, and her damp skin crawled so that she pressed herself further into his fur in a vain effort to share his warmth.

Miserable, shivering, Olivia listened as the sounds of other captives being carried away dwindled into the distance.  Soon, they were alone, moving rapidly through a maze of passages, climbing up and down walls as he encountered them, until he came to a short tunnel with a low ceiling.  He crouched, walking along the brief length of it until he came to the end, then straightened.  There was a narrow passage straight up, like a chimney.  He climbed it, sucking in his breath to avoid scraping her against the sides.