“Not killing,” said Jennifer. “He allowed it himself. There’s a difference.”
Blood rushed from Trellis’s face. He swayed, and for a second he wondered what would happen if he fainted. “You’re monsters.”
Jennifer’s eyes teared up. “Yes, I suppose we are. It’s hard to live with. I won’t have to for long. There’s a bomb with my name written on it in my future.” She still held his wrist. “There may be no forgiveness for us, what we do here, but we’re small monsters stopping giant ones, and the victims here are volunteers.”
Chastity’s voice came down the stairs. “Are you ready for the next?” She sounded profoundly tired.
Trellis twisted his wrist away, covered his nose and mouth as if the air were poisonous, a contagion to be blocked. Half way up the stairs, he nearly knocked over an old man wearing a bathrobe holding Chastity’s hand. In a blink Trellis stood inside the mall, gasping for breath. Soft music washed over him. A young mom balancing a toddler on her hip put a dollar in quarters into the rent-a-stroller display. Three teenager girls wearing ear phones talked animatedly as they looked into each others’ bags from The Gap. “That color would look so good on me,” said one. “Oh, you can borrow it whenever,” said her friend.
Trying not to stagger, Trellis found an empty table in Café Court. Shoppers came and went carrying trays filled with pizza or hamburgers or rice bowls. Conversations babbled around him. After he’d sat for over an hour, his breathing settled but his muscles hung without an ounce of strength. The mall music played an instrumental version of Barry McGuire’s “The Eve of Destruction.” A string and piano rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” followed.
In the music he could hear the stone chamber breathing before the man with the Marine Corps patch pitched backward, the solid thud the knife made when it connected, like a fist hitting a watermelon. But he also heard air raid sirens and the chant of “duck and cover.” And for a long time his thinking locked into a droning mantra, the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns (It was murder, wasn’t it, what he saw? Surely murder!). He caught himself sobbing. Seek safety now, he longed to shout to the patrons around him. SEEK … SAFETY … NOW, and he wondered how he could have gone day to day for all his years with such denial, such forgetfulness.
How would he go on from today?
Time passed. He knew it did. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he should do. All that mattered waited in a silver Airstream sitting on the edge of the parking lot, ten feet from passing traffic, a block from a Starbucks to the north, a block from Barnes and Noble to the south, and directly above the throat of the world, a deep, dry and hungry well.
The night guy sat in the chair opposite Trellis. “Mall’s closing in twenty minutes, bud, and you haven’t started the evening check list. You all right?”
Trellis leaned back. His vertebrae crackled. How long had he been hunched at the table? He looked around. A couple of the restaurants had pulled their security gates part way from the ceiling, even though they weren’t supposed to close up before the end of the day. The dark blue of twilight filled the skylights above.
“I’ll be there in a minute.” His voice didn’t quiver, which surprised him.
The night guy’s expression turned concerned.
Trellis forced a smile. “Really, give me a minute.”
Soon after the night guy left, Jennifer filled his seat. In the mall’s light her hair was more silver than gray and the age rays around her eyes were more pronounced.
“I would have thought you would pull up stakes when I left.”
Jennifer shook her head. “You wouldn’t call the police. Only people willing to come our way find us.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but it occurred to him that the night guy wouldn’t have known what Trellis was talking about if he had asked him about the trailer.
She wrapped her hands over his. “You didn’t answer me earlier. You do have nuclear nightmares, don’t you? You wake up at night so sick with fear you can hardly move? That’s why you came to us.”
Trellis tried to remember. Did he have those dreams often? Were his dreams so horrible that he blocked them from his memory every night? With Jennifer’s warm hands covering his own, he was suddenly sure that he did. He’d always had the dreams. They truly were ghastly, and now that he knew, he doubted he would ever fall asleep again with peace in his heart.
He thought Jennifer saw what he was thinking in his eyes. Maybe she’d said this very thing to other souls who quit denying what they’d known all along, who looked up and saw Damocles’s dangling sword. She said, “There’s magic in the world, Trellis. It’s not the magic you think about from fairytales, but it’s there just the same trying to protect you. There’s magic out there trying to save us all.”
She squeezed his hands once. “There will be a place for you in line, Trellis. There will always be a place for you, when you’re ready.” She stood to leave. “I have to get back. Midnight’s coming.”
OF LATE I DREAMT OF VENUS
Like a shiny pie plate, Venus hung high in the observation alcove’s window, a full globe afire with sunlight. Elizabeth Audrey contemplated its placid surface. Many would say it was gorgeous. Alexander Pope called the bright light “the torch of Venus,” and some ancient astronomer, besotted with the winkless glimmer, named the planet after the goddess of love and beauty. At this distance, clouded bands swirled across the shimmering lamp, illuminating the dark room. She held her hands behind her back, feet apart, watching the flowing weather patterns. Henry Harrison, her young assistant, sat at a console to the window’s side.
“Soon,” he said.
“Shhh.” She sniffed. The air smelled of cold machinery and air scrubbers, a tainted chemical breath with no organic trace about it.
Beyond Venus’s wet light, a mantle of stars shown with measured steadiness. One slipped behind the planet’s fully lit edge. Elizabeth could measure their orbit’s progress by the swallowing and spitting out of stars.
Elizabeth said, “Did you talk to the surgeon about your scar?”
Henry touched the side of his face, tracing a line from the corner of his eye to his ear.
“No. It didn’t seem important.”
“You don’t need to live with it. A little surgery. You heal in deep sleep. Two hundred years from now when we wake, you’ll be… improved.” She lifted her foot from the floor with a magnetic click and then snapped down hard a few inches away. “I hate free fall. How long?”
“Final countdown. We’ll be back in the carousel soon and you can have your weight again.”
The scene from the window cast a mellow light. Silent. Grand. A poet would write about it if one were here.
“Ahh,” said Elizabeth. A red pustule rose in the planet’s swirling atmosphere. She leaned forward, put her palms against the window. Orange light boiled in the clouds, spreading away from the bloody center, disrupting the bands. “It’s begun.”
Henry read data on his screens. Input numbers. Checked other monitors. Tapped keys quickly. “A clean hit, on target.” He didn’t look at the actual show beyond, but watched his sensitive devices instead. “Beta should strike… now.”
A second convulsion colored the disk, this one a brilliant white at its center which settled into a deep red, overlapping the first burst’s color. A third flash, duller, erupted on the globe.