End Times (6 page)

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AFTER the guys had ratcheted their bikes back into their pickups and let the night breeze cool the sweat from their foreheads, they divvied up another of Doug’s twelve-packs and hung around the parking lot, speculating about the trumpets and bragging about their escapades on the track.

Exhausted from the effort of dodging questions, Daphne wandered away from the lot, taking the trail to the track on foot. They’d turned off the floodlights, but the moon was almost full, and the sky was blanketed in stars.

She stood in the middle of the track and raised her face to the heavens, taking in great deep lungfuls of air. Her feet felt planted in the ground, like they could take root right there and reach all the way to the center of the earth. So this was why she’d felt pulled to Carbon County, Wyoming: the space and silence, the feeling of finally being exactly where she belonged. She let out a long, whistling breath and stretched her arms out to the sides. “Home,” she mouthed. The word felt round and full, unusual but not unwelcome on her tongue.

“’Sup, Daffy!”

Her gaze snapped forward and caught a figure lumbering toward her. She saw the glint of a Coors can, heard the whoosh of boots tamping dust, and squinted as Doug’s big head came into view.

“Daphne,” she corrected. She hated phony-sounding nicknames. “Is it time to get going?”

“What?” Doug looked confused. “No, I just, uh . . . happened to be comin’ out here anyway.”

“Really?” She’d known Doug for only a few hours, but it was hard to imagine anything important enough to tear him away from his drinking buddies.

“Want a beer?” he offered. “I got an extra in my pocket.”

“No thanks.” Her shoulders went tight with the same uneasiness she’d always felt when her mom went to work the night shift, leaving her alone with Jim. “Where’s Janie?”

“Back up at the lot. Sure about that beer? We could hang out here and get a little buzz on away from all a’those idiots.” He was standing close to her, close enough that the cloud of cologne wafting off his neck nearly choked her. It smelled like being trapped inside a mall.

“How ’bout it?” He jiggled the can invitingly. “Just you and me.”

“Really, no. I should get back. Janie’s probably wondering where I am.” She ducked around him and started walking toward the parking lot.

“Well, hey, I’ll walk you back.” Doug tossed the beer can over his shoulder and hurried to catch up. He walked close, hovering like he wanted to say something, and the silence between them felt strained and uncomfortable. Daphne picked up the pace but he met it, practically trampling her heels.

When they were just short of the parking lot, he grasped her arm and spun her so she was facing him, his meaty chin and beery breath just inches away.

“Hey,” he said.

Daphne’s heartbeat thudded through her veins, the pressure of panic roaring in her ears. She tried to squirm away but his grip was strong, his fingers sinking deep into her flesh.

“What?” she whispered, her throat sandpaper-dry.

“You know you’re really hot, right?” Doug’s voice was gruff and low. He pulled her into his chest, so she could feel the heat from his body and smell the alcohol sweat on his shirt, and pressed himself against her. A bitter bubble of nausea rose from her stomach.

“You’re my cousin’s boyfriend!” she hissed. She raised her other arm to push him away, but he caught it easily. His nose was almost touching hers, and she could see the dark caverns between his teeth as his lips spread in a hungry smile.

“She doesn’t have to know.” Hands still clamped like steel around her wrists, he raised her arms so they were wrapped around his shoulders in a gross parody of an embrace. “I know you want me, too. I could tell from the moment I saw you. It’s okay.”

His lips puckered, zeroing in on hers, and bile surged in her stomach. The smell of beer, the unwanted touch of a body she found repulsive: It was too much like all the times Jim had pressed into her in the kitchen, trapping her against the counter while her mom stared stubbornly at the TV or slept in the other room. She twisted and squirmed against the memory and his grip until finally, just as the first flake of skin from his chapped lips brushed hers, she brought her knee up hard and fast.

“Guuuuuuh!” Doug cried, stumbling back. His hands released her wrists and flew to his crotch as he doubled over, groaning.

Daphne’s heart pounded in her ears. Her arms had broken out in goose bumps so hard they hurt, and her wrists were red and tender from Doug’s tugging. She was shaking, but she managed to turn to Doug, who had staggered back like a wounded animal, still clutching his groin and moaning.

“Don’t. You. Ever. Touch. Me. Again.” She spat each word like a bullet, clear and silver and aimed straight at his head.

He looked up at her, eyes cloudy with confusion and anger.

“You frigid bitch . . .” he began.

Daphne didn’t stay to hear the rest. She turned, still trembling, and ran back to the parking lot, back to Janie and the noise and the light.

OWEN pushed his way through the crowd gathered at the gate of the Radical Roots festival, wondering how he was going to identify a girl whose face he’d never seen. In the sea of tie-dye and patchwork, his dark hair and clothes stood out like a storm cloud obscuring a rainbow.

The sun had sunk beneath the mountains, and the sky was a deep lavender as he let the throngs of people pull him along, past stalls hawking hemp energy bars and devil sticks and batik sarongs. Fragments of conversation (
hitched a ride in Boise
 . . .
Sparklegirl kind of had a freak-out
 . . .
String Cheese Incident was off the chain . . .
) drifted in and out of his ears.

It was the kind of scene his younger sister Cass would probably enjoy: The walls of her room were covered in posters of obscure bands, and she was the only one in her eighth-grade class who wore plum-colored lipstick to school every day. But he’d always preferred the company of machines to the crush of humanity. It was why he spent hours alone in the garage tinkering with his bike, or practicing by himself at the track long after his friends had packed up and gone home.

The merch stalls dead-ended at the peak of a gentle hill, which sloped down to an amphitheater draped in a psychedelic backdrop glowing under a black light. Neon fairies perched in fluorescent trees, and butterflies with human faces hovered over garish pink flowers. A giant statue of a mushroom hunkered at the side of the stage, where Ariel Crow and the Fine Feathered Family were about to go on.

The lead singer took his place at the mic and picked up a guitar, flashing a smile that was half gold teeth. Behind him, a parade of musicians clad in neon patchwork and fishnet, with dreadlocks like gnarled tree branches growing from their heads, carried tambourines and banjos onto the stage. Owen craned his neck, trying to get a look at them through the sea of people, but none of their faces sparked recognition. If Luna was among them, she was good at hiding in plain sight.

“I’m Ariel Crow, and this is the Fine Feathered Family,” the lead singer said in a voice like worn, scarred leather. “We’re here to play a couple songs for you—”

His words drowned in a tidal wave of cheers. The shuffling zombies who had surrounded Owen at the gate sprang to life, teeth bared with delight, arms waving like tentacles in the air.

Ariel Crow struck a note on his guitar, and the crowd began to dance, keeping time with the Fine Feathered Family’s raucous, squawking vocals. Owen stood still among them, focused on the one thing he’d come for: finding Luna. The rambling jam-band tune did nothing for him; he liked his music strong and fast, with a driving beat.

Midway through the band’s first song, a trapdoor opened in the top of the mushroom statue and a girl appeared, brandishing a hula hoop that shimmered with LED lights, giving off a rainbow of colors. Her neon patchwork bikini glowed under the ultraviolet lights, and her hair stood out in a riot of dreadlocks, some wrapped in neon yarn so she looked like a modern-day Medusa with a nest of vipers writhing on her head. She eased the trapdoor shut with her toes and stood with her arms stretched to the sky, the hoop framing a body that was all ropy muscle and coiled feline energy, the stage lights dancing on the glitter that dusted her limbs.

The breath left Owen’s lungs in a sudden, painful rush, like he had been kicked in the chest.

It was her. Luna.

Ariel Crow let out a wail, and Luna whipped the hoop over her head and spun it onto her body, twitching her hips and tossing her head and laughing into the stage lights.

It was unmistakably her, the flashes of a face from his dreams now pieced together into a whole. Even from way up on the hill, he could trace her features with his eyes: her sharp cheekbones and the arrowhead of her chin, the taut muscles in her legs and a giant tattoo of a tree that sprouted from her lower back and grew into an ancient, wizened wonder with branches snaking down her arms. But mostly, he recognized her eyes. They slanted toward her forehead and blazed with a cold seafoam green, like the tail of a mermaid trapped and frozen under layers of ice.

He recognized those eyes from more than just his dreams. He saw them whenever he looked in the mirror, and they gleamed coldly back at him when he caught his reflection in the window of a passing car. They were his eyes, too.

He watched her, transfixed, for the rest of the Fine Feathered Family’s set. She could do a million and one things with the hoop, rotating it around her waist and shoulders and knees, snaking it across her body and tossing it nearly into the rafters before catching it with a flourish behind her back. He saw his own punished and triumphant body in the way she moved, knew that she was driven by the same relentless energy that pushed him to make something impossible look easy. They may have expressed the burning drive within them in different ways—she with a hula hoop, he with a dirt bike—but the engine powering them through life was the same. They were unlike everyone around them. They were cut from the same cloth.

Atop the mushroom, in the luminous circle of her hoop, Luna seemed barely human—more like an animal forced into a human body by a spell in a fairy tale, like at any moment she could sprout fur or fangs or feathers and go bounding away into the darkness. And maybe it was just Owen’s imagination, but it seemed like she was watching him, too.

As Ariel Crow introduced the band’s encore, Owen started pushing his way through the crowd. Sweat and incense and sticky-sweet pot smoke clung to him as he pressed past bare limbs and snarls of dry hair and steamy puffs of breath mouthing the words to the Fine Feathered Family’s final song.

He was right up front when the tune reached its frenetic finale, the audience practically apoplectic with appreciation, his eyes locked on Luna’s. And then the Fine Feathered Family was making its exit and Luna was sliding down the side of the mushroom, landing on the stage crouched like a cat and then swinging her legs over the side and onto the ground, the glowing hoop still in her hand.

She shook off the arms that reached for her, the mouths floating close to her ear to tell her she was great, could they play with her hoop, could she teach them to do that, could she introduce them to the band? And then she was in front of him, her face mere inches from his identical eyes.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey.” He felt the heat radiating off her body and sensed that relentless buzz roaring through her veins, the same as in his.

“Luna?” he asked, although he already knew.

“Of course.”

His throat contracted like he’d eaten a mouthful of dust at the track. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Here I am.”

The crowd rubbed up against them as he reached for his next words. “Can we go somewhere we can talk?” he asked.

She took his hand, sinewy fingers lacing through his, her hoop glowing like a beacon leading them behind the stage, down a path that ran through a scraggly forest and out into a clearing filled with tents and camper vans. Dew sparkled on the grass, and the late spring night wrapped Owen in a bear hug, the sudden space and silence a welcome relief after the crush and jam around the concert stage.

“This one’s me.” Luna stopped in front of a purple tent no bigger than the bed of his pickup. A dozen hula hoops, in every color of the rainbow, leaned against the side. Unzipping the opening, she shrugged into a soft moss-colored dress with a pointed hood and unfurled a faded Navajo blanket onto the ground.

“Sit.” She crossed her legs and sank down across from him, pressing a hidden button on the inside of her hoop that shut off the LEDs, leaving them with only the moonlight and the muted thump of music in the distance. “We can talk now.”

“You grew up on that commune,” Owen said. “Children of the Earth.”

“I was born there. And so were you, Earth Brother.”

The glow of her eyes was barely visible in the darkness. Owen sat back, hands in the damp, spongy grass. “How did you know that?”

Her laugh was silver, hard. “From my dreams. I’ve seen you there.”

The blood rushed to his skin in a sudden, molten burst. “You’ve been having them, too?”