Anomaly Flats (23 page)

“No,” she agreed with a nod. “I definitely won’t.”

Then she turned, hurried down the aisle, and left Lewis alone in the Walmart with a half-dozen employees and a primeval demon that would someday rise up and swallow the world.

Chapter 21

Evil Lewis snorted as Mallory ran toward the exit. “Good riddance,” he said, spitting on the floor.

He looked down into the blank, staring eyes of Lewis Burnish, a mediocre scientist in life and a useless lump in death. “Sorry about how this played out for you,” Evil Lewis said, nudging Lewis in the ribs with the toe of his shoe. “I mean, not
very
sorry, but
sort of
sorry.” He reached down and grabbed Lewis’ cheeks. They were already turning cold. He squeezed his hand to make the dead man’s jaw work. “I forgive you, Evil Lewis,” he made the scientist’s mouth say in a squeaky voice. Then he stood up and gave Lewis’ body a good, solid kick. “I don’t need your forgiveness,” he spat.

Evil Lewis limped his way over to the doorway and peered inside. He couldn’t hear the ancient evil below, but he could
sense
it. He could feel its energy radiating up the stairwell. It was still alive, then. Everything had gone quite nicely to plan.

“I was worried for a minute,” Evil Lewis called down as he descended the stone steps. “I thought she might actually kill you.” He hopped down off the last step and gave the ancient evil a wide grin.

“And she might very well have,” Chad agreed. His features—his
true
features—were slowly shifting into their proper positions on his face…if one could really call it a face. His skin blistered, and little boils popped and hissed and spat streams of yellow goo onto the dungeon floor. His flickering nose sank into its cavity, and his eyes crusted over with sulfur. His ears dropped away from the sides of his head and melted onto the stone below, leaving nothing but vapors trailing into the air. His hair grew long and ragged beneath his hat, and then it fell out altogether, and that, too, vanished in a sour-smelling puff of smoke. He continued to rotate his newly-freed shoulder, working the feeling back into it after the long years of restraint. The fingers on his hands melted themselves into a cloven flesh hoof. “But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that greed makes people foolish, and almost everyone is a slave to it.”

“Must we have let her get away?” Evil Lewis asked. “I wish you’d let me kill her as soon as she resurfaced.”

“Death is rarely the best punishment,” Chad said.

Evil Lewis nodded. He approached the demon and bowed low. “You know best,” he said.

Chad reached out and placed his free hoof tenderly on the back of Evil Lewis’ head. “You’ve done well.”

Evil Lewis raised his head, and his eyes burned with shame. “You only have one bond loosed,” he said, his voice small.

“We don’t write the rules,” Chad said simply, giving a little shrug. “Only outsiders may loose the stakes, and only one each, at that. It is writ in the fabric of the universe. There’s no sense upsetting oneself over it.”

“But we could have used the scientist,” Evil Lewis said bitterly. “I’m…I’m sorry he was killed before he could be put to use.”

But Chad shook his head. “I have a sense that Dr. Burnish was one of the incorruptible sort. I don’t think he could have been persuaded, and then I might be dead, or fixed to all four chains yet. No; things worked out as they should have, I think.”

Evil Lewis sighed. Perhaps it was true; maybe it all
had
worked out for the best. Everything certainly went much better than it could have. “I wish the process wasn’t so long.”

“Time hands down its own justice,” Chad said simply.

Evil Lewis nodded. That much was true; time would eventually set the evil free, and it would punish the arrogance of the natural citizens of the world. He had no doubts about that. He, a simple clone, had played a large part in that, and he had played it well. There was much pride to be taken in that. “Still,” he sighed, “I wish I could be there with you for your reign.”

Here, Chad’s bubbling, popping lips twisted themselves into a sly grin. “The rules of time in Anomaly Flats are quite unique, my friend. I think together we will discover how to properly use them to our advantage.”

“We may,” Evil Lewis said. Then he brightened considerably. “We
will
!
I
know
we will. One day, I’ll write the letter that leads Lewis Burnish here.”

Chad nodded. “Indeed. The secrets of time will allow us much freedom...eventually. So don’t fret. You’ve done well, and you’ll be rewarded.”

Evil Lewis smiled.

“Now listen carefully, my friend,” Chad continued, “for we have much work to do, and I am eager to begin…”

Chapter 22

Facing Lewis had been harder than Mallory expected. She scrubbed at the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks as she hurried to the Impala in the parking lot. “It doesn’t matter,” she muttered sternly to herself. “He’ll be long dead by the time the demonic shit hits the fan.”

She popped open the door to the car and tossed the diamond onto the passenger seat. Even here, in the darkness of the Anomaly Flats night, it glittered and sent sparkles of light around the interior of the car. It was almost as if it was being lit from the inside.

The purple Jansport was still tucked safely beneath the driver’s seat. One quick pat of the bag was enough to reassure her that the money was still inside, although it hardly mattered anymore. Still,
more
was always better than
enough
.

“Please start,” she prayed, slipping the key into the ignition. “Please, please,
please
just start.” She turned the key.

The engine started.

“Yesssss,” she whispered. She threw the car into drive and hit the gas.

The roads were quiet, of course, and the highway out of Anomaly Flats took her away from downtown, so she was spared the sight of the citizens whose descendants she’d doomed to an excruciating fate. But then, the people in Anomaly Flats were all sterilized, weren’t they? There would
be
no descendants to kill off. That made Mallory feel better about her recent decisions. “Keep drinking that coffee,” she said.

She rolled down her window and let the cool, humid night air whip her hair into a frenzy. The further she got from the Walmart, the lighter she felt. She smiled out over the headlights, and then she actually laughed. She was headed out, and she had the net worth of an oil well, and she was
alive.
She’d survived an ancient evil and plasma and flies and waffles and roaches and tentacles and corn and clones and Mars and portals and a predatory lender and vaporization and magnetism and an honest-to-goodness cross-dimensional nexus, and she’d been justly rewarded. She had no more fear of running into the police; surely a five-figure bribe would encourage any patrolman to look the other way.
And here, a few thousand more, to buy your wife something nice,
she saw herself saying, flinging a bundle of bills into the air as she peeled out into the night, up toward the Canadian border.

Even the city limits of Anomaly Flats couldn’t stop her. As she neared the peeling wooden billboard that read
WE’RE SURPRISED THAT YOU’RE LEAVING
, she felt a little tug in the pit of her stomach that said,
There’s no way they’ll let you go.
But she stomped her foot on the pedal, the engine roared, and the Impala rocketed past the boundary of town and kept going strong. The radio sprang to life as she tore down the road, and a familiar female voice came through the speakers.
Attention, Anomaly Flats
, it crackled. But the signal was weak, and the rest of the message was lost in a flurry of static, and then the station went dead altogether.

Mallory laughed out loud. She was free.

She squealed at the top of her lungs and beat her hands against the steering wheel in sweet, unadulterated triumph. “Too bad about the future!” she screamed gleefully into the woods that blurred past her open window. “Sorry, year 10,000!” She screamed again and did a jerking little dance of celebration in her seat.

It was going to be a good life.

By the time she was a few miles down the road, any remaining heaviness about what she’d just done in Anomaly Flats had completely melted away. She put the town, and its people, out of her mind, and she was shocked—and delighted—at just how easily they faded. Like the radio station, the strange town of Anomaly Flats was already becoming static, and soon the air would clear, and there would be nothing left.

Nothing but the world’s biggest diamond.

She wondered for a brief moment if perhaps one of the other three spikes had been bigger, and she felt a pang of regret for not making a more careful choice. Maybe she could have squeezed out an extra few million dollars if she’d just taken a minute to gauge their sizes. She cursed herself for being so hasty. A strange sadness settled over her then, but she figured it would evaporate as soon as she converted her diamond to cash.

She kept one hand on the steering wheel and reached over to the passenger seat with the other. She picked up the stake and held it up to the moonlight that filtered in through the windshield. It was positively entrancing. Dazzling
.
Sparkling. Gleaming.

Glowing.

The diamond was
actually
glowing.

Mallory screwed up her face and peered into the depths of the stone, keeping the road in her periphery. There was a brilliant white light breathing itself to life in the center of the diamond, growing brighter and brighter until the blinding glow filled the entire spike, and little rays of light shot out in all directions. And the diamond was growing warm, too. No, not warm;
hot
. Suddenly, it was burning her hands. Mallory cried out and tossed it from one hand to the other, fighting to keep the car straight with her knees. The stone emitted an angry hum, and the light took on a dark shade of red. It was actually smoking now, its heat intense and unbearable. Mallory screamed; it felt like her hands had been plunged into a lava pit. She looked up and saw that she had veered over into the wrong lane. She gave her legs a jerk, and the car squealed across the road. It skidded across the shoulder and slammed into the guardrail. Metal squealed on metal, leaving a long gash along the passenger door. Mallory dropped the diamond and grabbed for the wheel. The stone clattered off the window ledge and fell onto the street, where it shattered into a million glowing red pieces.

She yanked the car back onto the road and tried to brake, but something was stuck under the pedal, and the car continuing barreling down the road. She fumbled beneath her feet with shaking hands, trying to keep the car on the road. She found the thing that was stopping her from braking.

It was the purple Jansport.

She clawed it out from beneath the pedal and hurled it across the car. It fell down onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. Mallory slammed on the brakes, and the car squealed to a halt, but there was really no point in going back. She had seen the diamond—or
whatever
it was—shatter against the pavement. There was no sense in going back for it. She’d been tricked by the demon; the shattered pieces of glass were worthless. She seethed behind the wheel, feeling the blood course angrily through her veins like acid. Then she stomped on the gas, squealing farther away from Anomaly Flats.

“
Fuck
!” she screamed. Then she screamed it again. Then she screamed it a third time, because how could life be so goddamn unfair?

She stabbed at the button that rolled up the window. She’d had enough Missouri air to last her a lifetime. She took deep breaths, trying to calm the roiling ocean in her veins. She still had the backpack. She still had the cash, and she still had the small diamonds. The
real
diamonds. She still had Lenore’s safe house, and she still had her car. She would be fine.

Everything would be okay.

She drove on through the night, and slowly, her disgust began to dissipate. She was back on the road, and she had broken even, and that was no small thing. Before long, she had convinced herself that she was better off without a giant diamond anyway, because it could only draw nothing but unwanted attention, and as she neared the next river crossing—the whole reason for going through Anomaly Flats in the first place—she had already forgotten all about it. The farther she got from the city limits, the less of it she seemed to be able to hold in her mind, and that was just fine with her. A few more miles on, and she couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where she’d spent the night before.

Or was it two nights?

Maybe she hadn’t spent a night there at all. No, how could she have? She’d just left St. Louis earlier that morning.

Hadn’t she?

She glanced over at the passenger side of the car, at the purple backpack that held her future—a future she’d stolen from a man who’d abused her one too many times.

“Karma really is a bitch, isn’t it?” Mallory scoffed.

“The bitchiest,” mirror Mallory scoffed back.

Then she grew calm. Everything was fine. No one was looking for her. In all likelihood, it would be Monday at the earliest before anyone at the office realized the safe had been broken into, and that gave her plenty of time. Soon, she’d cross the Missouri River, and then it wasn’t far until she was out of the state. In a couple of hours, she’d be in Nebraska, and she doubted they’d be looking for her there.

But fate seemed to be making other plans as Mallory drove.

She came to the river crossing to find that the bridge had collapsed. The local sheriff’s department was there, so she sank down in her seat and draped her hair over her face and prayed the deputy wouldn’t recognize her. “What’s the problem, officer?” she asked, wondering why the words sounded so familiar.

The deputy leaned down and spat a stream of brown liquid onto the highway. “Bridge’s out,” he explained, his mouth full of tobacco. “Gotta turn around.”

The officer directed her to head back the way she’d come, and she was only too happy to oblige.

A new road opened up on the left, and she pulled the wheel. The Impala squealed against the pavement and cut off down the backwoods highway. The road wound deeper and deeper into the heart of nowhere, and the trees loomed high above and crowded her in, blotting out what little sunlight was left. For the hundredth time since leaving Ladue, her fingers itched to turn on her phone and check the Google map. But phones could be tracked, and she didn’t know if anyone was keeping an eye on her signal, but she didn’t want to find out. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure that turning the phone off made it untraceable.
NCIS
had been mixed on that point. “Thanks for nothing, Mark Harmon,” she grumbled.

The highway twisted through the woods, and Mallory started to feel uneasy, passing through what felt like two solid walls of trees. “This is the Midwest,” she said aloud, frowning at the tall, dark shapes spread out on either side of the road. “Where the hell are all the fields?”

A vague sense of déjà vu whirled in Mallory’s head as she gazed at the stars ahead. Millions of stars…
hundreds
of millions of stars...

Almost more stars than Mallory had ever seen before in her life.

She rounded a curve and saw a sign at the edge of the highway that read ANOMALY FLATS – 2 MI with an arrow pointing to the left.

Flats
, she thought.
Flats sounds fieldish, right? Flats sounds good.

S
he turned on her blinker, slowed down the car, and pulled onto the road that led to Anomaly Flats.