Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds Page 3

  Horse made his decision with a nod. “You, personally, are indebted to me, Tom Curious.”

  “If you do what Mary says, yes,” Tom said.

  “And I don’t owe you money from that damn poker game any more.”

  Curious gritted his teeth. “Fine.”

  “Good,” Mary said before the agreement went sour. “Time for you to sleep, Curious. Do you need any help?”

  He shifted down to lie flat on his back. “I could sleep through the end of the world.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t have to,” Mary said.

  Curious closed his eyes. It didn’t take more than three breaths before he was out.

  “You know who this dreamer is?” Horse asked.

  “No.”

  “If you’re lying to me, Still...”

  “I’m not.”

  That was the one advantage to people not reading her well. She could get away with a lot of falsehood if necessary.

  “I always thought that boy was a little too unstable for the job,” Horse said.

  “He’s my partner, Horse. I’ll stand by him until the end.”

  “Of course you will, Mary. Of course you will.”

  The terrors arrived, slipping through the walls, oozing through the floor, dropping from the ceiling. They crawled out of Curious while he screamed.

  Mary pulled her gun.

  “Remember to cross the t’s and dot the i’s,” Horse said, drawing his own weapons.

  “I always do.”

  They waded into the terrors, brandishing crosses. It took faith or will power to banish the terrors, and while any religious or focusing symbol would do, Mary preferred the cross. The only thing that stopped the imaginings were silver-coated bullets, but the smallest bullet would do, therefore the term: dot the i’s.

  Solid creatures with strange assortments of limbs and skins and mouths, with too many eyes, or none at all, launched at them, hungry to destroy. They sizzled to dust and smoke at the slightest brush of a cross, and faded to screams when the silver bullets struck true.

  Mary wasn’t sure if Horse would be able to keep up, but the old guy worked tirelessly, shifting over edges and back to keep the outbreak contained in this one room and then holding here while Mary did the same.

  Dozens and dozens of beasts shuddered into existence. So many, she almost lost one on a simple shift. There were too many for her and Horse to handle. And the bosses would be here in minutes.

  She didn’t know when Curious had stopped screaming, but when he stood at her side, wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt, gun in his hand, she realized he’d been awake and on his feet for awhile. He shouldn’t be able to do that. No dreamer woke up until the terrors and imaginings were gone. But he wasn’t just a dreamer. He was a warden.

  It felt like it took them three sweaty hours to dispatch the remaining monsters, but only fifteen minutes passed. Then it was suddenly very, very quiet in the room.

  “That everything you got, boy?” Horse panted and wiped sweat off his face with his forearm. “Cause I could do this all day.”

  Nothing but the dark ichor and dust of the beasts remained. There was no time to clean it up now.

  Curious holstered his gun. “How long before the bosses arrive?”

  “About five minutes,” Mary said.

  “Bosses?” Horse said. “What are you two doing standing around? Curious, get dressed—a suit and tie. You too, Still. And a little lipstick wouldn’t hurt.”

  She’d punch him for that comment later.

  Mary ran to her room, scrubbed her hands, face, and arms, brushed the dust out of her hair, then slipped into a tailored dark green suit and fashionable boots. She pulled her hair up with pins. And yes, quickly applied lipstick and some mascara.

  It took her all of three minutes. By the time she was striding into the kitchen, Curious and Horse were there waiting.

  Horse had cleaned up and looked completely unfazed by today’s events as he made himself a sandwich.

  Curious wore a charcoal gray suit, and had shaved. His blue eyes no longer looked so tired, nor haunted, though there was still a slight glow of something like dreaming around him. It was faint enough, the bosses might overlook it. Especially since there just was no reason to suspect a warden of dreaming.

  “Do you think we can do this?” she asked.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said. “But you’d better do the talking.”

  Mary nodded. She made a cup of tea to keep busy.

  The leaves had steeped for less than a minute when the tink of scraping realities snapped in the kitchen.

  Mary would have known the bosses had arrived even without the sound. She always sensed them the way one does a predator hidden in the shadows. A cold chill slipped down her spine and her heartbeat picked up.

  She carefully hid her fear behind an unbreakable wall of calm, and turned.

  “Good day, sirs,” she said. “Welcome to post four thirteen, we are prepared for inspection.”

  Three bosses stood in the room—all men in their mid-sixties, and all in black suits and long black jackets. The man in the front was darker skinned than the rest and taller, while the man to his left was heavy, and finally, the man to his right was albino-pale. They wore sunglasses, which they removed in unison.

  She wondered if they practiced that move, or if they were just naturally creepy.

  Mary was careful not to allow any change in her expression. Everything was riding on this. Riding on her ability to lie straight to the boss’s faces—which she had never done before.

  Their eyes were hard, clever, and completely soulless. Somewhere in the fifty plus years of serving as wardens, these men had lost that irreparable thing that made them human.

  Mary was staring into her future, the future of every warden.

  Even Horse put his sandwich down and stood, straight and attentive. Curious at her left clasped his hands behind his back, breathing easily like he wasn’t still sporting injuries and hadn’t just had an army of terrors and imaginings use his head for a subway tunnel.

  “There were terrors and imaginings here,” the tall man in the front said.

  “Yes,” Mary said. Short answers meant less of an opportunity for them to sense the lie.

  “Explain.”

  “They followed Curious when he came back today.” Mostly true.

  “Where was warden Curious?” The heavier boss to the left asked in the same dead monotone as the first.

  “He was across edges.”

  “Why?”

  “He—”

  “No,” the first boss said. “Tell us, Warden Curious. Why were you gone six months across edges?”

  Oh God. This was it. Curious might be many things—amazing and frustrating things—but he was not a good liar.

  “I was looking for something,” he said. “Looking for a solution to a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  Mary stayed outwardly calm, but her mind was racing. Should they run? Wardens with souls are fast but the bosses without souls could cross edges even faster and had eyes everywhere.

  Fight? They couldn’t kill the bosses—well, technically, they could, but it would be immediately sensed by the other bosses down the link they shared, and then she, Curious, and Horse would all be dead.

  “I was looking for this.” Curious put his hand in his suit pocket and pulled out a beautiful steel music box comb.

  Mary gasped. “That’s the comb I need for the Regina I’m fixing.”

  “I know.” Curious chanced a glance away from the bosses to throw her a smile.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, it was a surprise.”

  “Enough,” the heavier boss said. “We do not condone such actions, but as it has caused no hardship across realities and provides a cover for operating the outpost, we will not discipline you for such.”

  “Thank you, sirs,” Curious said.

  “You have also returned in time to continue as warden of outpost four thir
teen,” the first boss said. “Do you accept your duty from this day onward?”

  Mary held her breath, waiting for his reply.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Curious said.

  “Then it shall be so.” The boss turned his drill-point gaze to Mary. “Are your records in order?”

  She nodded, trying not to show her relief. They weren’t out of the fire yet. “Yes, sir. Except for the recent job, which I will input after this inspection.”

  “Very well. Why are you here, Warden Horse?”

  “Ms. Still asked me over,” Horse said smoothly. “I stayed to settle a monetary debt between Mr. Curious and myself. And when the t’s and i’s showed up, I lent a hand, as is protocol.”

  None of that was a lie. None of it was the full truth either. But Horse delivered it with such easy authority that Mary made a note to pay more attention to what the old man said in the future.

  “We will inspect the outpost for stability,” the second boss said.

  The bosses spent the next half hour looking through the living areas, then the antique shop, and finally strode out to the garage where Mary had been working on the old music box just an hour ago.

  Curious handed her the steel comb and she set it carefully on a piece of soft cloth next to the box. The bosses’ sharp eyes missed no detail. They could see the comb was indeed the item she was missing.

  “Our inspection is complete,” the first boss said.

  Mary tried to dampen the hope that they might have made it through this safe, together, and still partners. Hope was dangerous and made a person sloppy.

  They followed the bosses out of the garage. Once they reached sunlight, the bosses paused.

  “Is there anything else?” Mary asked.

  “Everything is as it should be,” the first boss said.

  “I agree,” the second boss said.

  Mary waited for the third boss to speak. He hadn’t said anything this entire time. Now he studied them, and smiled enough to show teeth.

  It was a cold expression—a wolf baring fangs for the kill.

  “Why do you glow, warden Curious?” He said it softly, but it stopped them all as surely as an explosion.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Curious said.

  Mary lifted her hand toward her lodestone. She might be able to grab Curious and get them both off-reality faster than the bosses would follow. Might.

  “You glow as if you dream,” the third boss said again. “But a warden never dreams.”

  Curious shut his mouth and glared at the bosses.

  This wasn’t good. Wasn’t good at all. There was no half-truth to hide this, no way to deny what he had done.

  “It’s my fault,” Mary said.

  Three soulless gazes shifted to her.

  “Nonsense,” Horse said.

  “Horse,” Mary warned.

  The old guy was still behind them, and planted his hand on both of their shoulders. Mary was going to regret breaking his arms across edges when she slid out of here, but he should know better than to try and keep them pinned for the bosses to kill.

  “It’s not just your fault,” Horse said cheerfully.

  “Bad decision,” Curious said.

  “It is both of their fault,” Horse said a little louder, “because they refuse to admit it to each other.”

  Mary frowned. Curious didn’t take his eyes off the bosses, but she could tell he didn’t know where Horse was going with this either.

  “Explain,” the third boss said.

  “They’re in love,” Horse said. “Been dancing around it for months now. It’s what sent Tom out across edges for that music box bit, and what made Mary hold on until the last minute for him to come home.”

  “Love?” the third boss sneered.

  “You know how it messes with the sight, Glass,” Horse said. “Throws off light that looks like dreamer light. And, beg your pardon, but you bosses are color-blind when it comes to the subtleties between love and dream.”

  Had he seriously just insulted the bosses and called one of them by name?

  Mary held her breath, fingers poised to tap a sequence to get them out fast.

  “I see.” The third boss, Glass, seemed disappointed. “Is this true? You are in love?”

  “I—,” Curious started.

  “Yes,” Mary interrupted. She didn’t know if it were true or not, but it didn’t sound like a lie. Didn’t feel like one either.

  The bosses held her gaze for a long, painful moment. Then they put sunglasses over their eyes again, turned, and walked toward the highway.

  “We do not condone love,” the first boss said.

  “But as long as it does not interfere with your jobs, warden Curious, warden Still, we will not forbid it,” the second boss said.

  “Yet.” That was from Glass.

  The bosses tapped fingers, cracked reality, and were gone.

  Mary spun to face Horse. “How did you know they’d fall for that?”

  His eyebrows hitched up. “I am an old man, Mary. There’s very little in this world I don’t know. You ought to keep that in mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go finish my sandwich.”

  He strolled off to the house, whistling a show tune.

  Mary stared after Horse and waited for her heart to stop racing. They had survived.

  “So we don’t have another inspection for six months,” she said. “By then we should be able to figure out a long-term solution for this dream thing you have going.”

  “Mary?”

  She turned at Curious’s quiet tone.

  He was waiting, every line in his body tense with doubt. Maybe with hope too; dangerous, dangerous hope. “Were you telling the truth? About us being in love?”

  She could lie to him. It would make everything easier. But they were partners. They were in this together.

  “I think I was, yes.”

  He nodded and looked down at his boots. When he looked back up, he gave her that smile that turned her inside out. “So where do we go from here?”

  “Anywhere we want to,” she said. “Together.”

  “To the end.” He held his hand out to her.

  “To the end,” she agreed.

  She took his hand and held tightly to him as they walked beneath the antique shop sign above trans-dimensional outpost four thirteen, to start their life together again.

  Introduction to “Finally Family”

  Ray Vukcevich won’t say exactly what inspired “Finally Family,” but evidence points to the local crows. “I bet this story came from me looking out the big windows at the lawn below,” he writes, “and my crows scratching around for breakfast. When I walk out there on the way to the post office, they all look around like oh, it’s just him again. While I’m gone, they flutter up into the trees above my parking space and decorate my car. I know they do that on purpose just to demonstrate who is really in charge.”

  Whoever might be in charge, let’s hope they provide more inspiration for Ray, whose latest collection, Boarding Instructions, recently appeared from Fairwood Press. His other books include Meet Me in the Moon Room and The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces.

  Finally Family

  Ray Vukcevich

  1

  Bug Boy

  Bug Boy couldn’t tell them that he was really a Bulgarian and had been blown into Japan by the crows during the earthquake in Pernik last year. He didn’t speak a word of Japanese, and no one he met recognized the language he did speak, so he quit talking.

  Everyone did the best they could when it came to Bug Boy—a place to sleep, stuff to eat, even English lessons from that young woman, Kameko who was actually an orphan from America and had no more Japanese than Bug Boy had himself. Whenever she spotted him, she always turned a big smile on him like she was searching his face with a flashlight. That made him blink his big black eyes.

  The day the next big quake shook Japan, Bug Boy was riding a bicycle very early in the morning. Was he delivering newspapers? No, he was not. I
n fact, if the Newspaper Boy saw him, he would be in some trouble. There is no way Bug Boy could be mistaken for anyone else, and the Sisters would be very interested to hear that he had been out on Bicycle Number Two when the sun wasn’t even quite up yet. The Newspaper Boy rode Bicycle Number One, of course.

  Bug Boy was naturally nocturnal, and it was unusual for him to be out in the sharp, new air when there were so many black birds gathering and looking for something to eat.

  Not that the birds could make a meal of Bug Boy who was the size, if not exactly the shape and smell of a regular boy like oh, say, the Newspaper Boy who was not quite five feet tall but solidly built with serious eyes and a scar on his left cheek shaped like the letter I if the letter I were bowing at his nose. Bug Boy’s eyes were black, not exactly faceted, but you might say “reflective” in certain lights. Some Sister might flip on the cellar light and yikes there would be that gleam in the black eyes of Bug Boy who would be down there looking for tasty bits stunned stupid and slow from the stuff the Sisters sprayed around the baseboards which had almost no effect on someone as big as Bug Boy.

  Or another of those Sisters might be doing a bed check with a flashlight which was a different flashlight from the smile of the English teacher. Yes, that bed was occupied, check and check again for this one and for that one, and here we are coming up to Bug Boy’s nest pushed away from the others, and yes, he’s really in it tonight, but then the beam would cross his face and those black eyes would sparkle when they should have been closed and him sailing some dreamy sea in a little boat not much bigger than a rowboat but with a little sail like a pale blue triangle. Go to sleep, Bug Boy!

  Bug Boy hoped he would be back by the time the Sisters called them down to breakfast. He hoped he would have parked Bike Number Two and sneaked back up the side of the building and through the little window and into his place at the end of the line as the boys filed down (minus the Newspaper Boy who would eat later) for breakfast.

  You might think Bug Boy was wearing a leather jacket as he leaned over the handlebars and stood up on the pedals and pumped hard down the nearly dark street.

  Look at him go.