She pulled into the pebble driveway, parking beside an ancient brown and white Winnebago with a crumpled fender. She checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror, catching one of the busybodies in the reflection before they disappeared behind the hedge.
“Guess if they see their shadow, they gotta stay in their trailer for another six weeks,” she mused.
She buttoned her coat and popped her collar, tiptoeing up the icy sidewalk to the front door. A sign warning peddlers and solicitors to stay away gave her pause to continue, but she rang the trailer’s door bell, anyway.
Principal Hoyt eased the door open wearing pants pulled up so high they looked like they were only halfway done eating him. “Hello, Blondie.”
“What happened?” she asked.
The foam neck brace forced him to turn his entire body toward the Winnebago in disgust. “Whiplash.”
She could tell he wasn’t used to visitors by the way they stood in awkward silence before he finally invited her in.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” she said.
Bean bag chairs and green-shag carpeting restricted movement within the wood-paneled crypt, but she knew the kitschy treasures amassed within would help future archaeologists reconstruct the mythical epoch known as the Seventies.
“You said something about Dick Frost on the phone,” he grunted.
Molly sank between the cushions of the overstuffed couch. Peppermint oil perfumed the soft corduroy fabric, reminding her of visits to her grandmother’s house. “How much do you know about him?”
“Not much,” Hoyt admitted. “But I didn’t hire him, the district did.” The truth was he’d been duped, like the rest of them. What was less obvious was how much the betrayal still stung.
She handed him a folder from inside her bag. “You may know even less than you think.”
He scanned the document, shifting his eyes between the lines of his bifocals. “Looks like his resume.”
“It is, more or less,” Molly said. “I can’t blame you for not being suspicious. Annapolis graduate, doctorate in biology from Harvard, astronaut with over two hundred days logged in…”
“I can read…”
He’d kept the bristling crew-cut into retirement and the prickly attitude that went with it, but Molly continued. “I found out that Frost was at each of these schools for a brief time during the last few years.”
Hoyt waited for more. “So?”
“So each of these schools blew-up during the last few days.”
“Blew up? What does that mean?”
“Just what I said,” Molly explained. “Boom!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” Molly said. “I’m still piecing everything together.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“Don’t know,” Molly said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” he growled, “Why isn’t this all over the news?”
“Don’t know,” she admitted. “We’re relying on traffic camera footage we got from the internet.”
“Terrorists?”
She opened her laptop and showed him the Alabama footage. “Not sure. There’s some kind of media blackout being enforced. But these accidents seem to be following a pattern…”
“Everywhere Frost was,” Hoyt muttered.
CHAPTER 12
They took the Winnebago, because he insisted on driving. But turning the RV into traffic meant starting the turn well before coming to an intersection.
Molly slid from one side of the seat to the other, bracing herself against the dashboard. “This thing come with lifejackets? In case we hit an iceberg or something?”
Old Man Hoyt cranked up the heat, freezing despite his wool top coat. “What I don’t get is what you think is gonna happen?”
“Don’t know,” Molly said, “but those schools blowing-up like that…and all of them on Frost’s resume. Something is going on.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe she was digging for a story that wasn’t there. But after spending so many years at Bixby, his sense of duty remained even into retirement.
Molly watched the red, yellow and green traffic lights reflected off the sleek asphalt. “Lotta traffic for this late in the rush hour.”
He switched lanes and turned left on Cartwright Road. Bixby Elementary was dead ahead, but he dropped anchor well short.
She leaned over to the driver’s side for a better look. “Who are those guys?”
“Sanitation department,” Hoyt said. “They like to schedule repairs during the Christmas and spring breaks.”
“Hmm…”
“It’s an old building,” he said. “It was a constant battle just to keep it standing.”
Safety cones running the length of the block slowed traffic to a crawl, but something about the set-up felt set-up. Workers positioned throughout the school grounds watched them with unwarranted intensity. Their walkie-talkies crackled with chatter, triggering the foreman’s long, slow walk toward the Winnebago.
Molly’s stomach tightened in response to the tangible sense of foreboding settling on the scene. “They’re all standing around…Like they’re waiting for something to happen. Maybe we should get outta here.”
The rangy foreman’s orange vest and yellow hardhat were standard issue, but his skin seemed pale for someone who worked outdoors and his proletarian flannel shirt looked brand new.
“Think I know that guy,” Molly whispered.
“What?”
“Think he was on that footage I showed you,” she explained. “Think he’s one of those Blue Berets.”
Hoyt rolled down the window. “What’s the problem?”
The pointy-nosed foreman flashed a disarming grin before answering. “No need to be concerned…there’s a leak. There might be some dangerous gas build up, so we’re gonna check it out.”
Hoyt waved his expired teacher’s union card. “I’m headed out for vacation and I left my briefcase inside. Any chance I can get back in?”
The foreman didn’t hear him. Instead, he slid his tongue from cheek to cheek, looking Molly over like she was on the menu.
“Any chance I can get back in?”
“Sorry,” the foreman said. “This is for your own safety.”
Hoyt rolled the window up and put the RV into drive.
“What now?” Molly asked. “Everything’s blocked off, we can’t get in.”
Hoyt turned right onto Wilson Avenue. “I know a back way in.”
***
Molly didn’t believe the business about the leak, and the foreman’s incongruous appearance heightened her suspicions. Getting a first hand look was the only way to figure out what was really going on, and Principal Hoyt was just as eager as she was.
Old Man Hoyt tapped at the dim light bulb inside the protective cage attached to the tunnel ceiling. “Lights are out.”
“They must have cut the power off up top,” Molly decided.
Hoyt flicked his lighter open, enveloping them both in its protective halo. He sloshed through the pitch black sewer, dragging his leg behind him. “These passages run for miles but I know my way around.”
Molly followed, breathing through her mouth to avoid the stench and timing her sentences accordingly. “How often did you have to come down here?”
“Not that much,” he said, “any time there was a heavy rain or any kind of flooding. And then back when all this Crypto-Punk nonsense started.”
He should have gone down more often. If he had, Harley, Donovan and Ramone might still be...He couldn’t help them, but he could stop what happened at Bixby from happening anywhere else.
His pace quickened.
Molly fought to keep her balance while tiptoeing through the sludge. She’d already ruined her best sneakers and felt her pant cuffs getting heavy with the malodorous gunk coating the tunnel’s sides. “What is that?”
“What’s what?” Hoyt asked.
She aimed her cell phone at the graffiti an
d snapped a picture. “That…on the wall. That smiley face keeps showing up.”
“Graffiti…It’s everywhere.”
She pointed to the word painted across it. “Not like this.”
“Rise? What’s that mean?”
“It was on the footage I showed you,” she said.
“So?”
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, because you see it all over…the smiley-face, anyway.”
“Yeah, all over,” he agreed.
“But seeing ‘Rise’ written over the smiley-face again seems really…strange somehow,” she said, though she wasn’t sure that’s what she meant.
He didn’t see the significance. “It’s just…”
“Wait…did you hear that?” Molly asked.
He strained his ears to listen. “Rats?”
Hoyt started forward again but Molly grabbed him by the arm.
“We’re not alone,” she whispered.
The tunnel forked ahead. Hoyt knew one branch opened up beneath the school’s antiquated bomb shelter, but wasn’t sure where the other one led.
Molly sensed the shadow creeping across the tunnel’s sides before she saw it, a blurry silhouette growing larger with each step through the mire. “There…”
“Could be that foreman we ran into up top,” Hoyt whispered. “Could be he followed us down.”
“Or it could be something else,” Molly said.
“Like what?”
She threw her arms up in exasperation. “Zombie goldfish…mutant alligators…romantically disfigured opera singers.”
“You’ve got a hell of an imagination, blondie.”
“You know what kind of experiments Frost was running in the bomb shelter,” she said, “who knows what didn’t make the grade and got flushed down the toilet.”
He didn’t buy her theory, but someone else was down there with them. “Nowhere to hide in here and we’re too far from where we climbed down to make a break for it.”
“Wait…”
Hoyt paused. “What?”
“That’s a different shadow than the one I saw before,” Molly said.
Hoyt looked for himself, but didn’t see the difference. “You’re imagining things.”
“There’s more than one of ‘em down here,” she insisted. “Maybe some kind of pack.”
The shadow grew longer and the sloshing got louder, heavy steps following a syncopated rhythm steady as a metronome.
Molly snapped a pic with her phone. “Oh my God! They’re hunting us!”
“Don’t panic!” he said, but it was his heart pounding like a drum.
He grabbed her by the hand and dragged her toward the bomb shelter’s hatch. “This way.”
Their pursuer made the same turn they did, a single eye glowing red in the darkness getting bigger with each stride toward them.
“Hurry!” she said.
Hoyt climbed the ladder and gave the hatch a turn.
“What’s wrong?” Molly asked.
“Stuck,” he grunted.
Red Eye sloshed through the muck, closing the gap between them.
“Put your back into it!” Molly snapped.
He spit into his hands, rubbing them back and forth before grabbing the hatch for another try.
“Hurry!” Molly begged.
He strained so hard he thought his truss would explode, but the hatch relented. He popped the lid and climbed up through the opening.
Red Eye got closer…
Molly put her foot on the ladder’s first rung, but her gunk-coated sneaker slipped.
Hoyt reached down to pull her up but his arm wasn’t long enough. “Come on…”
Red Eye got closer…
She started up the rungs again, getting the traction she needed the second time.
“Stretch!” Hoyt shouted.
She was close enough to touch his fingertips when she felt a tug on her ankle.
“Don’t let go!” she screamed.
He let go.
She hit every rung on the way down before splashing into the gunk.
Red Eye’s shadow stretched across the tunnel’s sides.
She scooted backward, afraid on some primal level that if the creeping darkness enveloped her, she’d disappear for good.
Molly grabbed for anything she could use as a weapon but a mossy stick was the best she could do. “Stay back!”
Ivan switched his camera off and the red power light faded. He reached out his hand to help her up. “Looks like I’m working the same story as you.”
***
They sliced through the hallucinogenic imagery dissolving into a colorful smear around them. Drew tried not to stare, certain he’d drive himself insane. Instead, he tightened his grip and kept his eyes forward, peering through the blister emanating from the Stinger’s nosecone, a window cutting through the distortion that let him keep his eyes on the road.
“We’ll be alright long as we don’t run outta straightaway!” Deneese said.
Drew’s focus shifted from the view through the blister to the view through the tunnel and back again. The highway ahead appeared straight and true through the window while the same stretch branched and forked at impossible angles when seen through the distortion.
Not being able to reconcile their trajectory with what he saw terrified him. He unfolded his fingers to squeeze the brake lever when the monocycle came to an immediate and abrupt stop all by itself.
“Do you hear it?” she asked.
Hear it? There was no way to ignore it. The eerie notes filtered through the Stinger’s audio system, the same alien score haunting his dreams.
The highway telescoped back toward the Stinger, collapsing into the antenna beneath the monocycle’s fork.
“Where are we?” she asked.
It took him a second to clear his head, but there was no mistaking the crumbling brick cathedral he’d spent so many days at. The highway parked them in the empty teacher’s lot, leaving the Stinger idling in the shadow of the school’s water tower.
She spelled out the letters on the tower. “Where’s Bixby?”
“Ohio,” Drew said.
“Ohio’s a long way from New Mexico.”
“If we’re movin’ like normal,” he agreed, “but we ain’t movin’ like normal.”
“What do ya mean?”
“You saw all those ghosts flying around all at once?”
“Those ghosts were us,” she said, “at least they looked like us.”
“But they…we were places I been and other places I never been before,” he said. “Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Maybe we ain’t movin’ forward…”
“Maybe we ain’t movin’ at all,” he said
“What?”
“Maybe all those places are all the places we can ever be,” he said, “the Stinger just picks the place it needs to be and don’t worry about the when.”
He wasn’t sure what he’d said was what he’d meant, but he’d come as close as his vocabulary allowed him.
The Stinger’s nosecone dilated, extending a thorny stylus glowing at the tip from within the cavity.
The song’s volume increased in response.
He scanned the control panel for some kind of volume knob but wasn’t even sure the sound was coming from inside.
“What are ya doing?” she shouted.
The monocycle spun ninety degrees on its center axis, aiming itself at the school.
“Ain’t doing nothing!” he insisted. “Doing it all by itself!”
The song died.
“What’d you touch?” she whispered.
The stylus fired with a pneumatic whoosh before either of them could react. The refractive ring cut through the air in slow-motion headed for the school.
“Oh no,” Drew muttered, but by then it was already too late.
***
“Police arrived at the residence in the forty-four hundred block of Goodale Avenue to find the house in flames.
Still missing is Susan Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerkraft, age…”
Lazy-Eye Susan switched the radio off. “Something ‘bout hearing my own obituary sets my teeth on edge.”
Clementine peeked out from beneath her blanket, her eyelids still heavy from sleep. She slid the navigator’s chair up to the command console and stretched. “We there yet?”
Susan balanced her steaming mug with one hand while keeping the other on the pilot’s yoke. “Good morning, sunshine. You’re just in time.”
“In time for what?”
Susan turned toward the Moonclipper’s starboard window. “To see the sunshine.”
The morning sun broke across the rugged Southwestern scenery, buttery light chasing purple shadows back into their crevices. Clementine pressed her face against the glass and felt the radiant warmth against her cheek.
“Beautiful, hain’t it?” Susan said.
Clementine basked in the ambient light’s glory a little while longer before responding. “Where we at?”
Susan unfolded her gas station map to check their position. “Just crossed into Utah.”
Grady cracked the cockpit door. “Any chance we can stop for some burgers or something?”
Susan glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “What are you wearing?”
Grady was about Ronco’s size and though the lapels were wider in the seventies, the tux fit like it was tailored. “What do ya think?”
“You can go undercover if we have to rescue Drew from somebody’s prom,” Clementine said.
“Dude, I kinda like it,” he said. “Makes me feel like a secret agent or something.”
Susan raised her mug in salute. “Looks better on you than it did on Ronco. May he rest in peace.”
“Kinda itchy, though.” He reached up his sleeve to scratch but a deck of cards fell out.
“Looks like the tricks are built into the suit,” Clementine said.
Susan unbuckled her seatbelt. “All Ronco’s tricks was.”
“What are ya doing?” Clementine asked.
“Take the yoke,” Susan said.
“But I don’t know how to fly!” Clementine protested.
“Well, neither do I,” Susan revealed, “this thing kinda flies itself.”
Clementine slid into the pilot’s seat and grabbed the yoke with uncertain hands.
Grady jumped into the vacant navigator’s seat next to her. “Looks like I been promoted.”
***
Susan felt the arctic wind blasting through the cabin when she opened the cockpit door. They’d fit the Umbraprojector into the bomb bay, but gaps on all sides let in enough air to lower the temperature to almost freezing.