There was suddenly a lot of shooting and commotion in the shoe department, and the terrorist leader left our counter to investigate.
"Now!" the manager whispered.
Crawling on our hands and knees, the two of us reached the escalator. Like the lights, it was shut off. We crawled up the serrated metal steps, keeping our heads below the rails. We reached the second floor and—
We were on the ledge of a cliff, overlooking the beach. Below us, our people were playing happily in the sun and sand, frolicking in the water. We were watching them. "They don't care if they ever leave the beach," the manager said disgustedly. "Look at them. They really don't care."
And they didn't. Although the small strip of sand was surrounded on three sides by the large cliff on whose ledge we were standing, and on the other side by the ocean, the people did not feel trapped in the least. They were just happy to be alive.
"Well, we can't just sit around and play," the manager said. "We've got to get out of here."
The prospect frightened me. I had never been away from the beach, and even climbing this high up on the cliff had been a major departure for me.
But I knew he was right.
We started up.
The cliff was mostly sand and several thousand feet high. We had to be very careful how we climbed. One slip and we'd fall to our deaths. Several times, in fact, one of us made a wrong move and slid down a couple of feet in the sand before again finding purchase.
It was dark when we reached the top.
We crawled the last few feet over the edge and found ourselves in the parking lot of a huge mansion. All of the lights were on in the gigantic house, and we could smell the scent of a multitude of gourmet foods wafting toward us.
We hid next to a bush. "It's the boss's house," I whispered.
"Yeah," the manager whispered back. "Which one of us is going to ask?"
"You," I told him. "I'm afraid."
"Okay." The manager glanced around to make sure no one had seen us, then ran across the driveway toward the door. Lights and bells went on in the trees around us and a burst of gunfire mowed down the manager. I was suddenly grabbed around my neck and—
I was sitting in my car. In my garage.
I had never left.
I could never leave.
To be honest, I do not know how long I've been here in the house. I don't know why Kathy and I moved here to begin with, and I cannot recall how all this started. I do not even know how many days or weeks or months or years or decades ago Kathy left me. For now I just exist. Every day is like every other and I cannot tell them apart. My routine is established and I seldom vary from it.
It was different when Kathy was here. We performed our duties, of course, but we also got on with our lives. We had friends. And we had each other, corny and trite as that may sound.
But they grew stronger even then. Our nights, more and more, were taken up with this ... combat. Our dreams became less our own. Our time together became more difficult.
Finally Kathy had to leave. She too realized what our position was, where this house was located, what it would mean if we left, but in the end she didn't care. The responsibility was too much for her.
I could not leave, however.
So here I am—isolated, partly by choice, partly by circumstance, in this house. Alone. And here I stay, trying to figure out what to do next, trying to stay on top of what is real and what isn't. There is no one to help me, and with these latest developments I don't know how much longer I can make it by myself.
I need Kathy.
But Kathy is gone.
And I am here, fighting with ghosts.
The Baby
It was the late 1980s, and I was driving with some friends through a dilapidated industrial section of Los Angeles on the way to a concert, when I looked out the window and saw three dirty young boys kneeling before a cardboard box in an empty lot. They were clearly looking at something in the box, and I thought: a dead baby. I don't know why that thought occurred to me, but the next day I sat down and wrote this story.
***
"You go in first."
"No, you."
"No, you."
Steve, always the bravest, stuck his head through the open doorway and peered into the dark interior of the abandoned warehouse. "Hello-o-o-o!" he called, hoping for an echo. His voice died flatly, as though it had been absorbed by the blackness, by the walls. Someone—Bill or Jimmy or Seun—pushed him from behind, and he almost lost his balance and fell through the door into the building, but he waved his arms to maintain his equilibrium and jumped quickly back out to the safety of the open air. He whirled on them, his face seething with the heat of his anger, ready to beat the hell out of whoever had done it, but all three of them looked at him innocently. He stared back at them for a moment, then laughed. "Wimps," he said.
Jimmy turned toward Steve. Nervously flipping the switch of his flashlight off and on, he asked, "Are we really going in?"
Steve looked at him scornfully. "Of course," he said. But he was far from sure himself. Back home, sitting on the cement driveway, surrounded by houses filled with grownups, the idea had sounded good. They would bring lights and ropes and Bill's metal detector and explore the old abandoned warehouse. None of them had the guts to go near the warehouse by themselves—not even in the daytime. But together they would be able to explore the old building to their hearts' content, to plumb its unplumbed depths and bring forth what treasures they could find.
Now, however, standing in front of the multistory structure, looking into the darkened doorway, the idea did not sound nearly so good or nearly so feasible. Theoretically, they should be braver in a group than they were individually. There was safety in numbers. But it turned out that they were just as scared together as apart. Steve looked up toward the top of the building, where the bare concrete wall was blackened by soot, where flames had once leaped up through the night stillness toward the moon, and he silently hoped that one of them would chicken out. Maybe Seun, the youngest of them, would start crying and want to go home.
But all three of them stared silently at him, waiting for him to make the decision.
"Let's go," he said, turning on his flashlight.
They walked slowly, softly, cautiously, through the open doorway of the warehouse, Steve leading, Jimmy and Bill following, Seun bringing up the rear. Gravel and charred rubble crunched beneath their feet.
"I don't want to be last!" Seun said suddenly. "I want to be in the middle!"
"Jimmy! Trade!" Steve hissed. He didn't want any of them to talk, but if they did talk he wanted them to whisper. He wasn't quite sure why.
"Why me?" Jimmy hissed back.
" 'Cause I said so!" Steve told him.
Jimmy and Seun switched places, and all of them moved a little closer together.
They walked farther into the darkness. Soon the doorway was little more than a patch of square white light behind them, no longer offering any illumination. The gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked, and their flashlights played nervously upon the walls and floor. The thin yellowish beams piercing the blackness made the surrounding dark seem that much darker.
"I don't think we're supposed to be in here," Bill whispered.
"Of course we're not," Steve whispered back. "But no one cares. The place is abandoned."
"I mean, I think the other half of it's across the border."
They all stopped. None of them had thought of that. Despite the way it looked on the maps, the border between California and Mexico was not a straight line, they all knew. Several stores and homes throughout the city straddled the boundary, and many of them had rooms which were technically in both nations.