Anomaly Flats (6 page)

Chapter 8

Eventually, the onslaught of deadly rain subsided, and Mallory peeked out through the Winnebago’s window. The parking lot was covered by almost a full inch of little bits of nickel.

“It does this every time?” she asked. “How do you get rid of it?” She pictured a small army of masked men storming in on Hummers, sweeping the metal away, giving all onlookers a threatening hand gesture and swooping out just as quickly and mysteriously as they’d come.

“It melts. Then it washes away and runs into the storm drains, like any other rain would. It eventually makes its way to the town’s treatment plant.” He paused. “You…might not want to drink the water while you’re here.”

“The water is made of nickel, the coffee makes you sterile…”

“Only the regular,” Lewis quickly pointed out. “Not the decaf.”

An awkward silence fell between them. Mallory checked her watch. Unless it was somehow really 1:37 in the morning, the stupid thing had completely stopped working.

“Listen,” said Lewis, fiddling with one of the Bunsen burners. “It usually takes Rufus a day or two to work out a new alternator…and I don’t know if you…I mean…do you want to…maybe…” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Mallory, would you like to come with me on my rounds today?” He nodded toward the notebook with the holographic cover. “Help me cross a few things off the list? Just tag along? Not in a romantic way,” he blurted, a little too quickly.

Mallory grimaced. “Why would I think it was romantic?”

“You wouldn’t! And
I
wouldn’t! I
don’t
! It’s not! It’s just…science!” His hand slipped, and it knocked into the starter mechanism for the burner. A blue flame whooshed to life out of the pipe, nearly singeing Lewis’ lab coat.

Mallory sighed. She did have time to kill…lots of it. And if her choices were to spend it with the locals or spend it with another outsider, she should probably stick with the outsider. “All right,” she said, throwing up her hands in defeat. “Where to?”

“Excellent!” Lewis beamed, jumping into the driver’s seat. “First stop: Plasma Creek!”

X

The lime green creek of plasma ran along the western edge of town, about ten miles beyond the downtown strip. “It curves down to the south after Rubber Rock,” Lewis told her with a weirdly high level of enthusiasm. “That’s this huge outcropping of rock, and the tests all say that it actually is rock…but guess what it’s really made of, primarily?”

“Uh…rubber?” Mallory guessed.

“Yes!” he squealed. “It’s a rock that is
also
rubber! My tests show that it’s both things at once! Isn’t that
bizarre
?”

Mallory blinked far too many times. “I had a tentacle in my drain last night, and this morning I saw a woman exhale a swarm of flies, just before the sky rained metal…but yeah. Sure. That’s bizarre, too.”

Lewis beamed. “
So
bizarre!”

He pulled up alongside the creek and took the Winnebago off the highway, through a drainage ditch, and into a grassy meadow. As they bumped and bounced along, Mallory held on for her life. “I think you missed the road!” she shouted.

“Less walking this way,” Lewis said, holding tightly to the wheel and jerking it to maneuver the RV around the larger rocks. “It’s best to spend as little time outside the lab as possible, generally speaking. There are all
sorts
of neat things that can kill you out here.”

Soon, they came upon a few dozen circular burn marks in the grass. Lewis slammed his foot on the brake and threw the RV into park. “This is really exciting stuff,” he informed her, squeezing into the back of the truck and gathering an armful of supplies. “Now, be careful out there, okay? Step where I step, and
don’t go wandering
.”

He opened the back door and stepped out of the RV, holding a small plastic wand in front of his face. Mallory glanced nervously over at the Jansport. It was still tucked safely next to the milk crate, but the thought of leaving it behind made her palms itch. She wasn’t sure that taking it along was such a good idea either, though; as a rule, burn marks and things you didn’t want to burn weren’t a great combination. She chewed indecisively at her bottom lip.

“Are you coming?” Lewis called.

Mallory picked up the milk crate and dumped out the flasks inside. A few of them cracked. One of them even shattered. She didn’t care. She flipped the crate over and set it down on top of the backpack, so it was caught safely inside Jansport jail.

“There. Camouflage.”

She squeezed out of the RV after the scientist. “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the wand.

“It’s a thermometer. Highly sensitive.”

Mallory squinted over his shoulder and read the digital dial near the base. “It’s broken,” she observed.

“It isn’t!” Lewis said excitedly.

“Yes it is. It’s not 109 degrees out here.”

“Oh, yes it is. It just doesn’t
feel
like 109 degrees. But it’s definitely 109 degrees. The thermometer says so.” Then he cried, “Science!”

Mallory rolled her eyes.

Lewis continued. “The sun may feel temperate here, but it’s actually surprisingly strong. Haven’t you noticed how tan everyone is in Anomaly Flats?”

“Oh, come on,” Mallory said. “That’s absurd.”

“You want proof?” Lewis turned and stuck the tip of the thermometer into his mouth. He bobbed his head a little as he waited for it to read the temperature. After about twenty seconds, he pulled it out and showed Mallory the display.

It read 97.9 degrees.

Mallory shook her head. “How can it be 109 degrees but feel like 70?” she demanded.

Lewis shrugged. “Who knows? It’s an—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mallory interrupted. “It’s an anomaly. You know, for a scientist, you don’t seem to know too much about science.”

“Hey, come on,” Lewis said, clearly hurt. “Cut me some slack. I’m the first scientist in the field of anomalogy. There’s bound to be a learning curve.” He cut in front of the RV and headed away from the creek.

Mallory stopped. “Hey, the creek’s this way.”

Lewis turned, confused. “Yes, I know.”

“Why are you going that way?”

“Because that’s where the science is happening.”

“Okay, first of all, I’ve taken biology, okay? Science happens everywhere. And second, are we not here to study the plasma?”

Lewis frowned. “Why would we study the plasma?”

“Because it’s
plasma
. In a
creek
.”

“But I’ve already studied it.”

“All right,” she said, taking a few deep breaths and crossing her arms. “Unravel for me the mysteries of Plasma Creek.”

“It’s a creek,” he said, nodding toward the slowly flowing, neon green channel. “And it’s full of plasma.”

Mallory ran her fingers into her hair and pulled, just a little.
Maybe I was wrong about going with the other outsider
. “Are you
really
a scientist?” she asked suspiciously.

“Of course.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Look, do you really want to hear the minutiae about the plasma in the creek—that it’s an electrically neutral semi-solid medium of unbound positive and negative particles? That its density is 10
32
m
-3
in particles per cubic meter? That its average daily temperature is 273.16 Kelvin? That its velocity distribution is non-Maxwellian? Is that the kind of thing you want to know?”

Mallory blinked and thought for a second. “Science is boring.”

Lewis rolled his eyes. “Fine. How about this: Any organic material immersed in the plasma turns into a completely different collection of organic materials.”

“Well, yeah, obviously,” Mallory said.

“Obviously,” Lewis agreed.

They stood in their shared obvious knowledge for a while before Mallory finally asked, “And that means…what, exactly?”

Lewis smirked. “Here, look.” He plucked a long blade of grass from the meadow and cautiously approached Plasma Creek. He leaned over the edge and beckoned Mallory forward. They squatted on the bank as the plasma bubbled and gurgled below them. Lewis held the grass by one end and dipped the other end into the creek. When he drew it back out, the grass that had been submerged was no longer grass, but had become a flopping, silver-scaled fish tail instead.

Mallory’s eyes popped open wide. “Holy shit!”

Lewis nodded. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“It turns things into
fish
?” Mallory cried.

“Well, not
always
fish. Other things, too; eggplants, worms, cedar trees, gasoline, bark. You name it. One time, Emily Bainsbridge dipped her feet in, and they turned into a pair of miniature dachshunds.” The color drained from Mallory’s face as the neon green creek burbled happily along. “Oh, and it’s hard to see in this sunlight, but the plasma also makes the matter glow. Which is pretty neat. Still, though…best not to get any on you.”

“Don’t touch the plasma,” she said, backing away from the bank. “Got it.”

“Now are you ready to do some
new
science?”

Mallory nodded. The idea of putting some distance between herself and the glow-inducing mutation juice seemed pretty solid. “What are we here to study?”

“Those.” Lewis pointed at the cluster of burn marks in the grass. The singed circles were scattered all across the meadow without any discernible pattern, each about two feet in diameter. “Stay close. Step only where I step.”

Mallory crept into the field on the scientist’s heels. Lewis held the thermometer aloft like a magic wand, ready to defeat any unexpected forces of evil with the magic of his digital display. “What are they?” she asked.

“I’ve been hearing reports of people spontaneously evaporating. Isn’t that curious?”

Mallory raised her hands in defeat. “I’m out,” she said. “Walk me back to the Winnebago. I’m locking myself in my hotel room and not coming out ‘til my car’s ready.”

Lewis put a finger to his lips. “Shhh…it may be triggered by decibel level. You should keep your voice down.”

He reached the first burn mark and squatted before it, staring down in wonder. Mallory stood helplessly behind him, flapping her arms like a frustrated bird. “
Lewis
,” she hissed, but he was too rapt in science to hear. She was stranded in a spontaneous-evaporation minefield, with only two sure paths through: the one back to the creek, and the one forward to Lewis. She cursed under her breath and approached him slowly…carefully. Quietly.

“Look here,” Lewis said excitedly as she drew near. He kept his hand where it was and tilted the thermometer, lowering the tip toward the burn mark without breaking the plane of air directly above it. The digital display went haywire, flickering like a zoetrope as the numbers climbed at an alarming rate, to alarming heights: 109; 829; 1,480; 4,902; 12,373; 28,937; 110,873; 874,441. And then the display reached its limit of 999,999 degrees, and a little plus sign appeared in the top right hand corner.

The air at the edge of the circle was over one million degrees Fahrenheit.

“Now it’s
definitely
broken,” Mallory murmured.

“Maybe,” Lewis said. “The thermometer’s not melting. So that’s strange.”

“Yes…
that’s
the strange part.”

“This was definitely a person at one point,” he said. “Look there.” On the far side of the charred circle, right at the edge, a sliver of black foam lay in the green grass, right at the edge of the burned area. A tan, semi-circular
something
rested atop the foam.

“What is that?” Mallory asked, squinting. “Is it…?”

“The edge of a big toe; yes.” Lewis nodded. “And a flip-flop. Just that much of whoever this was stood outside the circle, and it didn’t even burn, much less evaporate.” He shook his head in wonder. “What an incredibly localized event.”

Mallory’s stomach barrel-rolled into her throat. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she decided.

“Do it into the creek!” Lewis said excitedly. “Let’s see what it turns into!”

Mallory heaved and pushed her nausea down. “What’s the deal, here? Someone was walking along, and all of a sudden—
poof
…he evaporated in a beam of light?”

“Light, yes, and heat.
Extreme
heat. Possibly in the tens of millions of degrees! Instantaneous incineration and evaporation. But so perfectly
localized
,” he murmured in awe. He rubbed his chin as he contemplated the invisible column of energy. “We need to trigger it.”

Mallory cocked her eyebrows. “Trigger it?”

“Yes…trigger it; the light, the heat. Given the perfection of the circles, the beam must come down
directly
from overhead.” His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose in his excitement, so he pushed them back up. “I hypothesize that when a being walks into one of these zones, the beam is triggered, and an unbelievably concentrated pillar of light and heat flashes down from above and obliterates everything in its path.”

“You hypothesize?” Mallory asked. “We’ve been here for eight seconds, you already have a hypothesis?”

“A scientist
always
has a hypothesis,” Lewis said proudly.

“A second ago, you thought it was caused by loud noises.”

“New second; new hypothesis. We could learn so much, if we could only trigger the event…” He trailed off as he looked down at the burned circle. Then he looked up at Mallory. Then he looked down at the burned circle…then back up at Mallory again. “How fast can you run?” he asked.

“Uh-uh! No way.” She crossed her arms defiantly. “You want to see the light so badly?
You
run through the kill zone.”

“But I have to hold the thermometer,” he explained.

“Men are all the same,” she muttered with no small amount of irritation.

“You’ll get to be part of science!” he insisted.

“No science for me, thanks,” she said. “I’m full.”

Lewis harrumphed. “Well, we need
something
to use as a trigger.”

She glanced around the empty field and over at the creek. Her eyes lit up as she hit upon an idea. She turned and retreated toward the plasma. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?” Lewis called.

Mallory ignored him. She retraced her steps all the way back to the glowing green creek. She plucked a blade of grass from the bank and dipped it into the viscous plasma. The far end came back up as a writhing, hissing snake. She held the grass end of the abomination tightly between two fingers and gingerly carried it back to the scientist.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s your stupid trigger.” Then she hurled it through the air, above the charred circle. As it broke the plane, a brilliant white flash seared the air. It was gone in an instant…and so was the half-snake.

Mallory looked down at Lewis. Lewis looked up at Mallory.

“Do it again,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I wasn’t ready.”