Anomaly Flats (12 page)

Chapter 13

“This is bad, Mallory,” Lewis frowned, plunging his nugget into a cup of honey mustard. “This is really, really bad.”

“Yeah…my sandwich isn’t so great either,” she said, peeling back the bun on her spicy chicken. Two sad, defeated pickle disks stared back up at her.

Lewis jammed the nugget into his mouth and chewed. “I don’t mean the food,” he said crossly.

“I know, Lewis,” she said with a heavy sigh. “It was a joke.” She felt a weariness that could have been made of concrete for all its weight. Everything that had happened since she’d arrived at Anomaly Flats—and even the events
before
she arrived, ever since she’d woken up in St. Louis the previous morning for what she knew would be the last time—it all made her tired, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and every other –ally in the book. And now, to have lost her backpack? That was to lose
everything
. She liked to think she was a fighter by nature, but now she felt the undeniable and uncontrollable urge to slide off her chair, curl up into a ball beneath the table, and die right there in the Chick-fil-A. She nibbled at the edge of her spicy chicken. “Actually, this is really pretty good,” she admitted. And that was the last straw. It sent her into tears. “I hate my life,” she sniffled into her napkin.

Lewis stared down at his hands. Emotions made him uncomfortable. So they ate in silence as the Chick-fil-A filled with the citizens of Anomaly Flats.

Maude Roach arrived, looking prim and sour and generally mean. She gave Mallory a hard stare, but did not say hello. The tourism director came in not long after, a trio of agitated flies buzzing in tight circles around her head. She didn’t need to open her mouth to order; the restaurant employees had her sack of food ready and waiting. At some point, they’d probably learned the hard way that a swarm of flies didn’t exactly make for successful health inspections.

Trudy shuffled in, too, carrying two waffles wrapped in a napkin. She didn’t look terribly pleased to be there. When her order came up, she removed the flimsy bun from her sandwich and placed the chicken patty and its trimmings between the two waffles. This seemed to brighten her up some. She saw Mallory watching her and passed her a little wink.

More and more folks filtered in, until the tables were all taken and there was barely any standing room left. The line went out the door and around the corner. Finally, Lewis crammed the last chicken nugget into his mouth and wiped his hands on his lab coat. “We should get going,” he said, snapping Mallory back to reality. “Give up the table for someone else.” Several impatient diners edged eagerly toward them, shooting each other threatening, violent looks.

“All right,” Mallory agreed.

She finished off her fries and stood. The second she was up, a small woman with bony hips slammed into her, knocking her out of the way and skidding into her seat. “Mine!” the woman snapped at every person in earshot.

“Geez, these people…”

As they squeezed past the line of people and out the door, Mallory noticed Rufus the mechanic standing in the queue. He hadn’t changed out of his sweaty, greasy coveralls, but he’d added some oil smudges to both cheeks and to his forehead. His mouth hung open, of course, and his saliva dribbled out and spattered on the shoulder of the suit jacket of the man standing in front of him. Neither man seemed to mind.

“How’s the car?” Mallory pleaded, grabbing the mechanic’s sleeve as she passed. “Is it fixed? Please tell me it’s fixed.”

Rufus turned to her and titled his head a bit, as if trying to remember how he knew this particularly disheveled woman.

Mallory’s heart sank. “It’s not fixed, is it?”

Something in the man’s brain clicked then, though his expression kept it mostly to itself. “Impala,” he said.

Mallory waited for more, but there
was
no more. “Yes, Impala,” she said impatiently. “The alternator. Any chance you built it fast?”

“The alternator,” Rufus agreed, letting his saliva spill onto the increasingly dirty Chick-fil-A linoleum. “’Bout half done.”

Mallory sighed. It wasn’t exactly great news, but it wasn’t bad news, either. “Probably done tomorrow,” he added, and that brightened her up a bit.

“I know you’re doing the best you can, but…the faster the better.” She patted his arm and let herself get caught up in the eddy of diners pushing their way out of the restaurant.

“I’ll fix the dent in the door,” he called out as she was swept away.

She gave him a thumbs up without turning her head. “So. What do we do now?” she asked Lewis as they stalked back toward the Winnebago.

Lewis sighed. Between the drawn look of his cheeks and the two dark pouches that were growing larger and larger under his eyes, he looked about as exhausted as Mallory felt. She wondered if she had pouches under her eyes, too. “Well, he’s up to something big, there’s no doubt about that. He made a dynamite vest
and
put together an impenetrable disguise. I think he’s showing us that he has something complex in the works.”

Mallory wanted to point out that the disguise was nowhere near impenetrable, but thought better of it. Now probably wasn’t the time. “You don’t think he just picked up the vest somewhere? Doesn’t this weird-ass town have a Bombs ‘R’ Us or something?”

Lewis shook his head. “No. I mean, we
did
. Obviously. But the night manager’s smoking habit sort of took care of that. And that was years ago. Now we have to make our own bombs.”

Mallory squinted at him, sizing him up for a joke. “Why do I think you’re being serious?” she asked.

“Why would you not?” he asked, honestly confused. “Anyway, it’s not just that he built a dynamite vest; it’s that he built a dynamite vest when he had any number of threatening devices and serums to carry around. I mean, the cold fusion cream is one of my
least
explosive inventions. But he went ahead and made a dynamite vest anyway. I mean, where did he even
get
dynamite? The TNT trees pretty much all withered away last summer.”

Mallory’s head lolled back on her shoulders. “TNT trees.
Obviously
.”

Lewis nodded. “The TNT trees are how the townspeople were able to blast out the quarry a few decades back. Until they hit that underground civilization and had to stop. After that, the dynamite was mostly used for parties. And for fishing. But the trees all got some sort of root disease last year. They got all weak and brittle. The TNT snapped off the branches, and, well…now the old TNT tree grove is the new barren crater.”

Mallory looked at Lewis. She blinked. She blinked again.

Lewis gave her a tired little smile. “Okay, I made that up.”

“Well, holy shit, Lewis. You
do
have a sense of humor,” Mallory said, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s a painfully lame sense of humor, but…hey. Points for trying.”

“The fact remains that I don’t know where he would have gotten the dynamite, though. He went to pretty great lengths to make that vest. There’s a bit of theatre there that scares me, Mallory. If he put that together in a couple of hours just to go to dinner, what do you think he’ll do with a few days under his belt? A week?” Lewis pulled off his glasses and wiped them nervously on the hem of his lab coat. “I fear we’re in grave danger.”

“Well, I’ve got news for Evil Lewis: I don’t
have
a week. I need to be out of here
tomorrow.
We need to get my bag back.”

“And stop him from wreaking destruction on the town,” Lewis added.

“Well,” Mallory said, rolling her head and cracking her neck, “mostly the bag. Saving the town is great and all, but it’s sort of Priority B.”

Lewis frowned. “This is my home, Mallory. It’s a
lot
of people’s home. We can’t just let him destroy it.”

“Sure, right, I know,” she said. “It’s fine, it’s whatever. I’m just saying, on the to-do list, it’s like, one: bag, two: town.”

Lewis planted his fists on his hips. “Nice attitude from the woman who created the evil clone in the first place,” he challenged.

“My attitude is my strongest trait,” Mallory insisted. “Everyone says so.”

Lewis set his lips into a hard line. “Hmph,” he said.

Mallory sighed. “Look. We find the clone, we find my bag. We find my bag, we can use it to bludgeon the clone to death. Happy?”

Lewis considered this. “It’s not a very
elegant
solution…”

“Oh my God, Lewis, I’m going to bludgeon
you
with it. The point is, we’ll stop the clone. I’ll help you stop Evil Lewis. Okay?”

“Okay.” Lewis stuck out his hand for Mallory to shake. Mallory just looked at it. Shaking represented a commitment, and commitment made her feel queasy. “Okay,” he said again, more tensely.

“Oh, fine.” Mallory gripped his hand hard enough for some of his small scientist bones to pop. “Okay.”

“Great,” Lewis grunted, pulling his hand back and putting it into his coat pocket so Mallory wouldn’t see how red and mangled it was from her grip. But she did see it, and it brought her joy. “Then it’s settled.”

“It is,” Mallory agreed. “We’re going to save the freaking day. Just one question: Evil Lewis is gone, and we don’t know where to find him, and we don’t know what he’s planning. So. What do we do now?”

Lewis took a deep breath. “I think there’s only one thing we
can
do now,” he said, exhaling slowly and shaking his head. “We need to go visit the oracle.”

Chapter 14

“You have an
oracle
?” Mallory asked. She hated to admit it, but she was impressed. Having an oracle in town was the psychic equivalent of living next door to Mick Jagger. “Like, a vapor-breathing, future-seeing, riddle-rambling, Delphi-style oracle?”

Lewis’ eyebrows lifted themselves and knitted together in surprise. “Yes, actually. Something very much like that.”

“Look, don’t sound so surprised. It’s insulting,” Mallory said, slumping down in her seat and putting her feet up on the Winnebago’s dashboard. “You’re not the only one who can read a book, Lewis.”

“Sorry,” he said, focusing back on the road. “You just don’t strike me as the Greek history type.”

“Women can learn about all
sorts
of things these days,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “History, biology, math, even chemistry. We’re not just for kitchens anymore. It’s a brave new world out there.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Yes, a real oracle. She should be able to tell us what my clone is planning.”

As they drove on, Mallory tilted her head against the window and fixed her gaze on the western horizon. The sun was setting now, and the sky was streaked with reds and oranges and purples and deep, dark blues. Something shivered inside her chest. She wouldn’t miss much about Missouri, but she sure would miss the sunsets.

The sky directly above the road was already dark, and the constellations were just beginning to twinkle to life. “Look at that,” Mallory said, a slow, lazy smile spreading easily across her face. “There’s so much beauty in the stars.”

“
Don’t look at them!
” Lewis screeched. He slammed on the brakes, and the RV skidded to a stop on the shoulder of the road, throwing loose gravel into the field that ran alongside it.

Mallory flew forward, and her seatbelt caught her hard in the chest. “Fuck!” she cried.

“Don’t look at the stars!” Lewis screamed. He threw his hand over her eyes and poked his index finger directly into her pupil in the process.

Mallory cried out and swatted at his offending hand, and he reached over and covered her eyes with his other hand. “Lewis!” she shouted, slapping at both of his arms. “Stop it!”

“Close your eyes!” he insisted, struggling against her assault. “Don’t look at them!”

“Okay, okay! Christ!” Mallory straightened up in her seat and readjusted her belt. “What is the
matter
with you?”

“I’m sorry,” Lewis said, breathing heavily and trying to regain his composure. “I’m sorry. It’s just…dangerous to stargaze around here.”

“No shit. You get a scientist’s finger jammed in your eye when you do,” Mallory said irritably.

Lewis turned to face her. “Look. The sky here is…different. Different than the sky in most places. Not the daytime sky, I mean. That’s the same. Or close to the same. It has a little more blue on the ultraviolet scale than this part of the globe should have, and—”

Mallory cleared her throat, annoyed, signaling for him to get on with it.

Lewis coughed. “Right. It’s basically the same sky, except at
night,
it’s a
different
sky. As the sun sets, the sky over Anomaly Flats is slowly replaced by a…well…I guess you’d call it a…a void.”

Mallory crossed her arms and eyed the scientist. “A void?”

Lewis nodded. “An all-consuming void. Basically, as soon as night starts falling, the sky starts trying to swallow you up. Not really physically. Though
sometimes
physically. More like…mentally. And psychically. The stars you see when you look up there—Mallory,
don’t look up there!
”

“I’m sorry!” she cried, shading her eyes as best she could. “It’s a habit! You said the stars up there, so I looked up there…leave me alone!”

Lewis covered his mouth as he exhaled sharply. “The stars that you
would
see up there if you
did
look, which you should very much
not
do,
ever
, aren’t really stars at all. They’re…well, I guess you’d call them projections.”

“Projections?”

“The void is projecting those images onto itself to trick you into looking up. Once you look, it starts showing you
new
projections—
shinier
stars, spinning constellations, swirling galaxies—and all of a sudden, you’re falling into them, and you’re surrounded by darkness and pinpoints of light, and you’re swimming through the galaxy, and your whole spirit is suddenly gone, sucked away by the void. That sky up there,” he said, pointing up through the roof of the cabin, “wants to feed on you.”

So many thoughts and questions occurred to Mallory at once, but one managed to elbow its way to the surface above all the others. And it was somewhat an odd question, given all the other, much better questions she could have asked, but out it came just the same: “What does it do during the
day
time?”

Lewis shrugged. “What am I, an astronomer?” He put the Winnebago into gear, but he didn’t pull away from the shoulder quite yet. “Here’s the point: Remember when you said that every single thing in this town was trying to kill you?” Mallory nodded. “You were right.” He cleared his throat awkwardly as Mallory’s face drained a little of its color. “We’re going to get up to some pretty dangerous stuff here, with the evil clone and all, so I think you should be prepared. The void, the creek, the clone, the flies, the weird, glowing light out in the woods behind the Del Taco…they’re all…I mean, yeah, every single thing is pretty much trying to kill you. So just…be ready. I guess…I guess that’s the lesson here.”

They sat in silence for a few moments.

“We should probably go see the oracle now,” he said.

Mallory coughed. “Is
she
going to try to kill me?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” Then he checked his mirrors, pulled back onto the road, and drove them to the oracle of Anomaly Flats.

X

“The oracle lives in a roller rink. Of course she does.”

Lewis pulled the RV into the dark, deserted parking lot and rumbled to a stop beneath the only working light. The other three had all been either burned out or knocked out. There was so much glass in so many various colors on the asphalt, it was hard to tell how much of it might have started life as a light fixture.

“Well, it’s a bit more accurate to say she
is
the roller rink,” Lewis said, peering into the gulf of darkness between themselves and the cinder block building in the center of the lot. The roller rink had once been painted in sunrise colors, yellows and oranges fading up into pinks and purples, but so much of the paint had peeled away, revealing little spots of bare gray blocks beneath, and the building looked old, tired, and stricken with a particularly ashen brand of chicken pox. He turned off the engine but left the headlights on. They illuminated the front door and showed a path that was mostly clear of glass and debris. “It’s sort of a…symbiotic relationship.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Mallory murmured, not entirely sure she was interested in the answer.

“The oracle is a person, but she’s also
more
than a person.” He flipped off the headlights and popped open his door. “Just try not to touch anything, okay?”

They crunched their way toward the entrance, little pieces of glass and plastic popping underfoot. “Not a very happening spot for a Friday night,” Mallory observed.

“No one really comes here anymore,” Lewis confirmed. “The skating was fun, but every time you made a lap, the oracle would chatter on about how this skater was going to die, or how that skater was about to get cancer, and it sort of dampened the mood.”

“I bet,” Mallory snorted. She looked up at the unassuming, long-neglected building. “So she’s the real deal, huh?”

“Oh, yes,” Lewis said, nodding vigorously. “She’s never been wrong. Not once.”

“Does she get her Chick-fil-A delivered?”

Lewis cleared his throat. “She…doesn’t care for fast food.”

“But I thought everyone—” Mallory began.

Lewis stopped her with a wave of his hands. “She and the mayor had their disagreements about it. The mayor sent a security team after the oracle, and the oracle prophesied that the mayor would die at the oracle’s own hands by drowning in a dumpster full of chicken grease.”

Mallory blinked. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” said Lewis. “That pretty much ended that. She’s allowed to keep to herself now. In fact, it’s encouraged.” He reached for the door handle, then he paused and added, “I wouldn’t bring it up.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mallory wasn’t sure what she expected the inside of the roller rink to look like. But as they stepped into the strangely-lit space, there was no denying that the oracle’s home was exactly as it should have been.

They entered into a small anteroom with posters from the 1980s advertising a drug-free life in startling neon colors. The fluorescent lighting was dim, since only two of the four tubes worked, and even those flickered like they were gasping for air. On the far side of the room, a Plexiglas window separated the foyer from a ticketing counter. There was a little, round speaker set into the center of the window, and a Post-It taped up beneath it from the inside read “GO ON IN.”

Lewis glanced at Mallory. “I guess we go on in.”

“Go on, then,” Mallory said, ushering him toward the pair of swinging doors that led to the main room of the rink. “In.”

There was no way she was going first.

Lewis nodded stoically, as if he considered it his sacred duty to go through first and act as a human shield for whatever unnatural horrors the oracle might have in store for them. He paused before the doors, took a deep breath, and tightened his bow tie. Then he pushed through the entryway, and Mallory followed close behind.

The first thing Mallory noticed was the carpet. It was the kind one might expect to find on the floor of a 1970s rape van. It was threadbare, and pea green, and it had all the wrong sorts of stains in the wrong sorts of places, and it was not at all pasted to the floor like a good carpet should be. Instead, it was tacked to the walls, where it could safely muffle sound, while also providing skaters with an opportunity to cringe with disgust any time they accidentally put a hand on it for support.

The rink was surrounded by a four-foot wall, both sides of which were covered in the same awful green carpeting as the rest of the walls…and hidden somewhere behind it all was a historic set of speakers pumping out loud disco. A thin congregation of colored lights spun lazily from racks bolted into the ceiling, covering the whole roller rink in sickly rainbow spots, made dull and watery by the harsh glare of fluorescent lights overhead.

Across the tile floor and off to the left stood a snack counter that Mallory was gratified to see somehow advertised both Coke and Bud Light in the same flickering neon sign. The thin, twisted pretzel racks stood naked in the air, and the giant popcorn machine on the back shelf was dark and powered down, but not quite empty: half-popped kernels lay strewn about the bottom tray, and some had managed to escape over the edge and onto the counter. The ICEE machine chugged proudly along, though, mixing-mixing-mixing its red and blue drinks under the beaming smile of a cartoon polar bear in a blue knit sweater.

To Mallory’s right ran the skate rental counter. Legions of skates stood quietly in the cubbies stacked on the back wall, all the way to the ceiling. Most of them were uninspiring brown leather with dirty, streaked orange wheels, but every now and again, hidden within the army of drab brown, were pairs of vanity skates. Here was a white pair with pink wheels and pink laces; there was a black pair with lime green wheels and dirty white laces. And up there, way up in the top row, sat the king of all roller rink skates: a pair of gold-painted leather with clear wheels and bright, sparkly red laces.

“Hoity-toity,” Mallory muttered under her breath.

Beyond the rental counter stood a line of quarter-operated lockers. They were sky blue, mostly, which stood out in stark contrast to the pea green wall cover, though the paint was so nicked and dented, the lockers could have given any Jackson Pollack a run for its money. The rest of the sizeable room, of course, was dedicated to the skating surface itself. Three cutouts let skaters onto and off of the polished wooden floor…or, at least, they would have, if there had been any skaters to
go
onto or off of the floor.

As it stood, though, Mallory and Lewis were the only human beings in the room.

“Where’s your fortune teller?” Mallory asked, looking doubtfully around the rink.

“I told you,” Lewis said, his voice quiet and careful. “She’s all around us.”

Just then, the fluorescent lights went out, plunging the entire building into near darkness. The only light came from the manic, colored party lights that spun their brightly colored spots across the floors and up the walls in dizzying patterns. Then Mallory heard a sound she hadn’t heard since grade school.

Even so, it was unmistakable.

It was the sound of roller skate wheels skimming over a wooden floor.

“Welcome, Scientist Lewis,” called a bright, mellow female voice from the oval rink. It glided around the room, following closely on the heels of the sound of the skates. Mallory just barely caught quick glimpses of her as she sailed through the swirling mass of bright circles. “And welcome to you, Stranger with Unkempt Hair.”

“Hey!” Mallory said. She reached up and smoothed down her hair as best she could. “I didn’t shower today,” she grumbled, though she immediately realized that this explanation didn’t really help defend an attack on her personal hygiene all that much.

“It is wild and natural,” the soothing voice sang. “You are most welcome here. And your name is…Juanita. Yes? Welcome, Juanita!”

“Juanita?” Mallory soured. She elbowed Lewis in the side. “Juanita?”

“You look like a Juanita,” the voice confirmed as it skated laps around the rink.

“She’s not portending yet,” Lewis explained in a whisper. “When she portends, she’s always right. Always. She just has to…you know…warm up first.”

The skates skidded to a halt on the other side of the wall where Mallory and Lewis stood. The fluorescent lights flickered back to life. The woman standing before them was tall and willowy, strong and beautiful. She had long, honey-brown hair held down by a wide cloth headband with an intricate pattern of interlocking elephants printed on it. Her eyes were green and bright, and her pale skin was dotted with freckles. She wore a pair of brown hemp capris and a sleeveless white linen blouse that allowed her powerful arms to move freely. She smiled at Mallory in the newly restored light, looked her up and down, and said, “You look much more like a Juanita with the lights on.”

Mallory, who was wholly uncertain how to respond to such a remark, simply said, “Thanks.”

“Scientist Lewis,” the oracle gushed, taking one of his hands on both of hers. “How wonderful to see you. How have you been?”

“Troubled,” Lewis admitted.

But as he said it, the oracle closed her eyes, shook her head, and said, “Shh-shh-shh-shh-shh. You do not have to say it. I can see it in your eyes. You have been troubled.”

Mallory scoffed. “This is our best hope for saving the town?”

“Is the town in danger?” the oracle asked with a dreamy smile.

Lewis nodded. “I think so. That’s why we’re here, we need your help.”

“Ah.” The oracle’s face fell, and she released Lewis’ hand. She pushed back from the wall and skated slowly away, her legs weaving in and out gracefully, propelling her backward. “I had hoped you were here for Disco Night,” she sighed.

“Maybe next time. We need a prophecy.”

The oracle brightened a bit. “Yes, of course! How wonderful. It’s been ages since anyone’s come to call.” She skated around the rink, her legs pumping powerfully, her arms swaying with the motion. “People stopped coming because I kept telling them how they would die,” she called out, explaining to Mallory from across the rink. She made the turn and spun to a stop near her guests once more. She smiled sweetly and placed her hands on Mallory’s shoulders. “Would you like to know how you’ll die?” she asked.

“Uh…” Mallory stared doubtfully at the oracle. Then she looked over at Lewis. “I think I’ll wait outside,” she decided. She turned back toward the doors, but the oracle snatched her hand and held it tightly.

“Wait! You must have an ICEE first!” She leaned in and whispered with a wink, “They’re free.”

“Well, holy shit…if they’re
free
,” she said. But the oracle smiled pleasantly, and Mallory realized just how exhausted she was. Her misadventures had taken their toll, both physically and mentally, and she decided that a nearly-lethal injection of cold sugar might actually help a bit.

“Wonderful,” the oracle decided. “And you, Lewis. You should
not
have an ICEE, because you are a very small person, and the sugar might overpower you to a dangerous degree.”

“That’s fine,” Lewis said, waving her off. “Listen, I really do enjoy our visits—you know I do—but—”

“Of course!” the oracle gasped. “The prophecy! Wait here, scientist, I’ll fetch the vapors.” She skated over to one of the other cutouts and hopped up from the rink onto the old tile floor. She glided over to the row of sort-of-blue lockers, popped one open, and began rummaging around inside.