He nodded and handed me a semi-automatic. I looked a bit plain, but serviceable.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “It’s Russian or German I guess. It takes 9mm standard ammo. Found it in one of the houses down the block. We went on some scavenging missions. I think we’ve got plenty of guns for everyone in the center. But ammo is going to be low, and we don’t have enough of any one type to match up all the guns.”
I found the stamp on it, made in Jordan, it said. I hoped the sucker wouldn’t jam on me. “Just one clip?” I asked.
He tossed me a back up, and, right there, I almost blew it. My right hand had the pistol, so I automatically yanked my left out to catch the clip. I stopped myself just in time. The clip bounced off my gut and clattered to the ground. Monika dove for it, snatched up the clip and shoved it into my right coat pocket. I put the pistol in there with it. I wondered how the hell I was going to reload.
“You asleep?” asked Vance. We had often tossed balls back and forth in the living room for years, tennis balls, footballs, even while watching TV. Especially while watching TV. It used to drive our mom nuts. He knew I rarely dropped anything.
“You were aiming for my balls, weren’t you?” I accused and faked a smile.
He smiled back, but looked a bit confused. Still, it got him off the topic. He could be like a birddog if you let him get onto a scent.
Monika grabbed my arm then, the bad one, and tugged at me. “I’ve got something for you,” she said in a near-whisper. It was noisy enough in the room that no one else noticed her. Everyone was bustling about. We had lived through a storm before, and we would do it again. The center had walls now, and we were prepared. Or at least, we thought we were, I wasn’t so sure, but I wasn’t going to say anything about my doubts. I hadn’t told people about the things on the beach or the things at the bottom of the sea. They would see horrors enough on their own soon.
I let Monika drag me down a hallway and into a room with an X-ray machine in it. I wondered if I would ever get another X-ray during the rest of my life.
“Here,” she said, and she had a large, black leather glove. It was a left-handed glove. She had a strange look on her face, as if she were involved in a crime. It was the furtive expression people in her country must have worn when they hid contraband from the communists a generation before.
I looked at the glove. I blinked at it not knowing what to say, her trust in me was sweet-she was so sweet. She didn’t care if I was part monster, she just wanted to protect me from the others. I took the glove with my good hand and then I hugged her tightly. I jerked my head, indicating that she should leave while a put it on.
“Put it on,” she said, looking me in the eye. Her look told me that she wouldn’t retch, that she wouldn’t run screaming, that she wouldn’t tell on me, or leave me. But I knew that having lizard fingers, even in a glove, would be a turn off for any girl. I moved behind the X-ray shield, with its tiny window of leaded glass, to put it on. There was a sink back there, and I felt the dry chaffing of my leathery new hand when it came out of my pocket. I wondered if it was part sea turtle, it felt so dry and chapped. It was not at all happy to be away from the watery world it was created in. I turned on the tap water, wanting to wet my curled thick fingers just a moment before I cruelly shoved them into a rabbit skin glove. The sink stuttered and thumped. I’d forgotten, the power was out and the pumps hadn’t been on for days. Still, the faucet pissed out a dribble of cool water on my hand. I rubbed it over the whole thing, as far as it would go. It was like a teaspoon of butter spread over a mile of thirsty bread, but it felt good anyway.
“Do you need help?” called Monika delicately.
I shook my head and tried to jam my strange hand into the glove. The fingers were too thick, especially the knuckles. It was like putting on clothes two sizes too small. When I finally had it on, one of the glove fingers sagged and flopped emptily, of course. I only had three fingers and a short thumb now. Still, it looked pretty good if I kept it relaxed. If I clenched a fist, that one missing finger was obvious, but if I was careful, the whole thing would pass a lax inspection.
I managed to get a fake grin on my face when I turned back to face my faithful girlfriend. I held up the glove and wriggled my fingers a bit inside it. She smiled at first, but the wriggling was a mistake. The fingers move in an unnatural, clutching motion. I ignored her expression and kept the grin pasted on. I put the hand back down at my side.
“Thanks, Monika,” I told her.
In answer, she kissed me. We kept kissing for a bit, and then I noticed that it had grown quiet out in the hallway. I glanced at the door, and underneath, a faint kaleidoscope of lights flickered, as if there was a rainbow out there or maybe one of those disco balls doing a slow spin.
Someone had uncovered the lantern, I knew it in an instant.
I released Monika and strode to the door, throwing it open.
“Don’t look at it,” I told her over my shoulder.
She nodded in confusion.
Thirty-Five
Everyone was in the lobby. The lantern was still on the kid table, uncovered now. Wilton stood next to it, talking like a salesman doing a demo. The rest of the group was strangely silent. They stared at the lantern, and I knew what they were thinking and feeling. They were in its power, or soon would be. Would we fight to the death over it? I felt it tugging at me, even as I approached. A lime-green beam reached out and touched my eyes and my left hand clawed excitedly. I jammed it back into my pocket.
“What is it? What is it, you ask?” said Wilton, her eyes alight and almost as bright as the eye of the lantern itself. “It is the heart of the shifting, the end of any shift-line, like an anchor at the end of a chain. It is an artifact unlike the others you’ve seen. You’ve only seen shadows of the real thing, objects and beings altered from their original form by the creative chaotic power that sometimes glances randomly off of things that come too near. The Eye is a creation from whole cloth, there was nothing before it. With a single grunting thrust of power it came into being.”
No one said anything. I took two more steps forward, not quickly, not threatening, but closing the distance.
Wilton noted my approach, but kept talking to the people gathered around her.
“This is made of the very stuff of creation,” she said. She ran a caressing hand over it, and I saw she wore a glove of her own. Her hand was oddly shaped, and I thought of a beaver’s paw, or a dog’s. Inside that glove, I suspected there were furry pads and curved nails.
“Does everyone recall the old theory of Spontaneous Generation? From history class?”
No one responded. They just looked at her. No, I realized, they were staring at the lantern, not her.
“Centuries ago they noticed that frogs and fish and insects would appear if you created a pond artificially, or if you dried it up and refilled it. Wildlife would soon appear and flourish and thrive in a new pond far from any other water source, seemingly by magic. People took it as proof of the hand of a Creator hundreds of years ago, but it was all disproved by science since.”
She tore her eyes from the lantern to look at me. She smiled at me, and I knew it was the smile the cat gives the bird it’s brought in the house to play with and show off to the Master before killing it.
“But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t all disproved. Maybe there was a hint of this power left over back then, and in any case, we don’t need any theories here. We are faced now with hard evidence of this creative power. We are living with it, trying to survive it. One might as well develop theories debating the existence of volcanoes during an eruption. The power we face is in truth as destructive as it is creative. Better to call it the power of chaos, the power of heat when applied to candle wax. The wax takes a new, splattered form, but is this the creation of a new form or the destruction of the old? I’d say it is one and the same, but what matters is that we are the candles.”