God's Junk Drawer, page 39
Parker looked at Noah. Noah looked at Monique, back at Olivia. “It’s been almost a week. Five days.”
Her eyes went wide. She looked at Parker with desperation in her eyes, and Parker nodded in confirmation. “Whereabouts mystery location group clue area.”
Noah crossed his arms and stared at Olivia. “Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like there’s a pattern to what she’s saying?”
Josh cleared his throat. “I think she’s asking where we are.”
Parker shook her head. “No. I mean, yeah, that’s what she’s asking, but Noah’s right. There’s a . . . a rhythm? Something about the words.” She sifted through them in her head, trying to remember the nonsense sentences Olivia had blurted out over the past few minutes.
Sam had his eyes closed. Brow furrowed. He turned his head slightly toward the hall. “Ross?”
“Yes, Sam?”
“Have you been able to hear Olivia talking?”
“I have.”
Olivia raised her head, tried to look through everyone crowded into the little room.
Sam’s fingers danced back and forth against his thumb. “Is she always saying six words at a time?”
“Yes. Since she first showed signs of consciousness earlier this morning.”
Sam opened his eyes and smiled.
Parker straightened up. She looked past Sam’s shoulder, saw the hooded android out in the hallway. “Is she also saying all the words in alphabetical order? Or reverse-alphabetical?”
“That’s correct, Parker.”
Olivia gave up trying to see into the hall and let her head flop back on the pillow. “Whereabouts mystery location group clue area.”
Sam pointed a finger. “Same words.”
Monique nodded. “A good sign. She may have no actual damage, merely some confusion.”
Parker crouched down next to the bed again. “We’re still in the valley. Noah’s weird dinosaur valley.”
Olivia’s gaze flitted around the room of bamboo and rough planks, paused on the bedsheets covering her, on Monique, and then back to Parker’s face.
“Yeah, we . . . we’ve found some friends. It turns out Noah and his family weren’t the only people who got pulled into this place.”
“Substructure region negative mobile location group.”
“This is the doctor’s office. Clinic?” She looked at Monique. “Apothecary?”
“I am comfortable with either.”
Olivia’s head thrashed side to side. “Substructure region negative mobile location group.”
“I’m not sure that’s what she’s asking about,” said Noah.
“Ummm, question, sorry.” Josh had two fingers up again. “How much should we be telling her? Y’know, what she’s missed?”
Olivia’s eyes went wide. She looked from one face to the next. She twisted her head to look out into the hall. “State pending partner location former being.”
Parker didn’t need to put too many of those words together to figure out what Olivia had asked. She looked up at Sam. At Noah.
“We probably shouldn’t strain her . . .” Sam stopped, looked Olivia in the eyes. “We probably shouldn’t overwhelm you with things right now.”
“It is probably for the best,” said Monique. “Right now what she needs most is some peace and quiet to organize her thoughts.”
“State pending partner location former being.”
“I’m sorry, Olivia,” said Noah. “Logan’s dead.”
Parker glared at him. So did Sam. Monique put a hand to her mouth.
Noah ignored them. “He died in the same . . . the same accident that put you in a coma. He died, but he saved your life.”
Olivia’s head thrashed again and she rolled toward Parker, twisting up the sheets. Parker caught her. Tried to keep her on the bed. Olivia fought like a tired little kid, moving her arms back and forth more than actually doing anything with them. She sagged against Parker, then flopped back onto the bed.
It randomly occurred to Parker it was the most physical contact she’d had with Olivia in, well, years.
Monique clapped her hands. Three firm taps of her fingers against the other palm. “Everyone out. All of you. Go. You have seen her, she has seen you, she needs to rest.” She shooed them out of the room as if she was waving away flies.
Noah left. Ross moved in the hall, following him out of the apothecary. Sam lingered for a moment, traded looks with Parker, and stepped out.
“You as well,” Monique said to Josh. “You have been most helpful, and you have my thanks, but for now . . .” She flicked at the air in front of him, pointed toward the door.
Parker beat him out to the hallway. She hadn’t even reached the front door when she heard Sam’s raised voice.
“What’s your—what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Sam stood outside Monique’s flowerbed. Noah and Ross stood a few yards past the obelisk, clearly already off to do something more important. Probably involving Noah’s sister.
Noah looked at Parker. Over at Josh. “She needed to know.”
“Did she need to know right now?” snapped Sam. “She’s been in a coma for a week and ten minutes after she wakes up you tell her her boyfriend’s dead?”
Parker stepped closer. “It was an asshole thing to do.”
Noah sighed. “I know it seems like it, but I’m willing to bet I’ve gone through more trauma counseling than all of you put together. Trust me.”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t have—I’m running real low on trust.”
“As soon as the idea was in her head, as soon as she realized he wasn’t there, we had to tell her. If we didn’t, she’d spend every bit of energy trying to find him. She wouldn’t rest, she’d just be worried nonstop until she got answers. It’s human nature. This way she can get over it, move on, and start healing.”
“Like you have?”
Parker glanced at Sam. He sounded tired again. Then she realized they’d formed a loose line across from Noah and the android, like two groups of old-timey gunfighters squaring off.
“I’m sorry,” Noah said. “I know you don’t believe me. But it’s Beau.”
Parker tried to break the silence that followed. “Noah . . .”
He held up a hand. “I don’t know how she could’ve lived this long. How she—how the whole valley ended up like this. But everything we’ve heard and seen tells me that woman we saw out there is Beau.”
Sam sighed. “It’s not.”
“It’s her, Sam. She’s alive and I’m going to get her home. Just like the Castaway said.”
“You can’t even get us home.”
They stared at each other for a few more moments. Then Noah walked away. Ross bowed his head politely to Parker and the others, adjusted his skeletal fingers on his walking stick, and followed Noah down the dirt-and-weed path.
Something sank in Parker’s gut as they walked away.
Josh stuck his hands in his pockets. Prodded the dirt with the toe of his shoe. “So,” he said, “why do you think your friend’s talking backward?”
“What?”
“I figured everybody’d want to avoid all the emotional stuff that just went down. It’s what I’d do. So I thought I’d get us back on science-talk.”
Sam shook his head. “We’re not—you know we’re astronomers, right? Not neurologists.”
“I’m not even sure we’re astronomers anymore,” said Parker. “I think our boss may have just fired us.”
Josh gestured back at the doctor’s house. “You want to know what I think’s going on with her? Olivia?”
“Sure. But walk while you do.”
“Where to?”
Parker waved at the path. “Show me where the empty houses are. The ones up for grabs.”
“Moving out after all?”
“Maybe. Just walk.”
Josh gave a last hopeful look back at the apothecary’s door and led them deeper into Roanoke. Parker still didn’t know half the village. Most of it she’d only seen while walking the walls, where every building was thatch roofs and the occasional wooden planks.
“So, you know how sometimes a person might have a bad experience with pharmaceuticals and it’ll take them a little time to readjust back to normal once the chemicals wear off?”
Parker let out a sigh. “For someone who’s not a drug dealer, it’s amazing how often talking with you circles back to drugs.”
“Designer pharmaceuticals.”
“I had a roommate junior year who went through something like that,” Sam said. “He didn’t deal well with magic mushrooms. Spent most of the night talking about fingers coming out of the walls and floor, trying to hide in his bed. He was over it by morning, but it was so vivid he still spent a lot of the next day stumbling around, watching everything, not sure if the fingers were going to come back or not.”
Josh pointed two fingers at Sam. “Exactly. Your friend’s mind had to recalibrate. Sort everything out, get it all back where it’s supposed to be.”
Parker thought about her little shared office back at the university. In a near-constant state of chaos as grad students moved in and out. “Like rearranging a bookshelf. You’ve got to pull a lot of it off to organize things by a new method.”
“Oh, good analogy. Yeah, I think when Olivia got zapped, it basically dumped her bookshelf out on the floor. Her brain’s got everything back up on the shelves, so it’s all there, but she still needs to put them all in the right order. So right now she’s got this sort of Tourette’s thing going on.”
A dinosaur screeched up above them as they walked through Roanoke’s more or less central intersection. One of the big pterodactyls, or maybe something else. Parker shaded her eyes and watched it do a slow circle. Wondered how high up it was. Wondered if the dinosaurs flew higher than halfway up the cliffs?
“The other possibility,” she said, “is she got brain damage from a massive electrical shock and this is how she talks now.”
Sam kicked at a tuft of grass. “Yeah. That’s more likely, isn’t it?”
Josh stopped walking and turned to them with a shrug. “Is it? She got struck by lightning that came out of a mysterious crystal obelisk in the valley at the dawn of time.”
“We’re not at the dawn of time,” said Parker, tugging at the collar of her shirt with a finger. Something about the cut made it feel tight. Constricting.
“My point still stands. This whole place is really weird and I don’t think we should be taking anything for granted here. Even cosmic lightning strikes to the brain. What do you think?”
“I think it’s not a very scientific way to approach things, but you might be right.”
“No, I mean this.” Josh looked at Parker, gestured up at the building. “What do you think? Pretty much everything back here’s empty. I took the one over there.”
Parker looked at the building. Another cottagey house that looked like a small barn. Stone chimney. A small platform had been built over the thatch roof, something between a watchtower and a rooftop deck.
“Ross said a guy lived here years ago and built the platform so he could look at the stars. A navigator from the fifteen hundreds.”
“Fifteenth century.” Parker shook her wrists and let the cuffs settle again. Pictured putting a table up there, mapping out the sky at night. It was an astronomer’s fantasy resort house. The kind of house a grad student could only dream of owning.
It didn’t feel like a dream.
36
SAM
Sam stood on the wall and stared up at one particular star.
It was a little odd seeing it like this, but he was 99 percent sure it was Miaplacidus. He could fit the width of two fingers between the star and the top edge of the cliffs behind Roanoke. Almost four degrees. A lot of folks used the trick for sunsets. Sam had been thirteen when he figured out it would work for star movement, too. You just couldn’t look away. It was a lot easier to lose track of a random star than a sunset.
Miaplacidus had been four degrees above the cliff top for a while now. Since he started looking, he’d counted off three hundred seconds, five whole minutes, and then lost interest. It didn’t move. Nothing up there moved. Nothing had moved since their first night here. Well, since he’d first started actively looking. The exact same sky, all night, from the moment the sun vanished until it reappeared again.
After almost two decades of studying the night sky his brain struggled with seeing it frozen like a photograph.
A low rumble echoed out of the forest and across the fields. He let his gaze drop. Stared across at the forest. Something big moved among the trees, a ripple in the dark shadows.
“Burn,” said a voice off to his left. The Japanese woman, Shino. She held a spear loosely upright in one hand, like a walking stick carried for show more than need.
“Sorry?”
She pointed out toward the forest. “Burn. One of the allosauruses. He has red on his face. Like a sunburn.”
“You can see that? At night?”
She tapped her ear. “Burn’s growl is smooth. Gnash’s rattles, like an old woman breathing.”
“Okay.”
“If you hear Gnash, stay alert. Every few months she tests the walls, and she’s tall enough to reach us up here.” She tilted her head toward the ground below. “Jump if you have to. Better a broken leg than end up between her teeth.”
He looked down at the ground below.
“You have a spear?”
He nodded at the wooden shaft behind him, leaning up against the walkway’s railing. He’d been told if he wanted to hang out on the wall, it could serve as a rotation on warden duty.
Their free ride as newcomers was definitely coming to an end.
Shino gave him an approving nod, making her topknot sway. “Keep it close.” She turned and moved off toward the far corner of the walkway.
As far as Sam could tell, there were two full-time wardens up here on the walkway at night, plus two or three regular citizens doing their mandatory duty for the village. At the moment that was Shino, Warwick, ’70s hippie Marissa, and a scruffy man named John.
And him.
He looked back up at Miaplacidus. Found it easily. It hadn’t moved.
The creak and rattle of bamboo pulled his attention. A figure came down the walkway toward him. Parker. Back in the clothes she’d had on when they arrived. Also carrying a spear, although she had it across her shoulders, her wrists hooked over it. “Thought I saw you over here. You taking measurements, too?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t sleep. Wanted to do something familiar. But the sky’s just—it’s too odd.”
“Yeah, I get that.” She leaned her head back to look up at the sky. She’d redone her braid, rope-tight again.
They both stared up at the unmoving stars.
“You got rid of your new shirt?”
“Yeah. I don’t . . . it wasn’t my style. Just needed something while I washed these.”
He nodded without looking at her.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when these clothes wear out.”
“You can patch them. And they’ve got more clothes.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” She let the spear swing down and leaned it next to his.
“Are we—do you think we’re stuck here? Forever?”
She sighed. “Noah spent thirty years figuring out how to get back here, and he had a lot more resources than we do. I don’t know if we can solve it from this side. Especially without his help.”
“Assuming there’s even a solution.”
“There’s got to be something. He had enough of it right to predict where and when he needed to be to get us here.”
“Could’ve been sheer luck.”
“Fuck, I hope not. I’m not going to be able to deal with a lifetime of Josh’s sci-fi nonsense.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“I can’t put up with it. I’m like Carl Sagan that way.”
“That and the modesty.”
“Hah.”
“Plus, he put up with some of it. His son was a writer on one of the old Star Trek shows.”
“Lies.”
“Pretty sure.”
She waved him away.
Sam decided what the hell and felt his breath quicken. “I avoid conflict. Run away from it. From everything.”
“Could’ve fooled me, the way you ripped into Noah.”
“Yeah. That was—it takes a lot, y’know?”
She gave him a little nod. “I get it.”
“I’ve been—I was seeing someone for the past year. Long enough we got a place together. First time I’ve ever lived with someone.”
“Really?”
“Well, I mean, romantically. Got close a couple times but it never felt like the right move until Gabe.”
He tried not to blurt the rest out, to find the right words with the right weight, and Parker beat him to it again.
“He dumped you.”
Sam stumbled. Relived it was out there, depressed it sounded so . . . basic. “Yeah. He’d been cheating on me. Like, full-on dating someone else. He was going to move out as soon as he found a place, but it was taking too long, so he just told me.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. And I—I ran away. Again. Even though it was technically my apartment. I didn’t want to be there with him. Didn’t want to watch him packing up his stuff. I remembered that email Noah sent around. Bodies needed. Found out there was—I had two hours before the bus left.” He sighed. “Thirty-one and I still deal with breakups like I’m in high school.”
“That’s why you didn’t pack anything useful.”
“I don’t have anything useful. I hate camping.”
“I thought you wanted to live here.”
“Yeah. In the well-furnished cave with the loving family and the robot butler. Not in a tent five miles from the closest toilet. And now I . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Now I just want to go home.”
A throat cleared.
The scruffy man. John. Looked and dressed like a background character from The Witcher, or maybe House of the Dragon. From what Sam had picked up, John turned trees into planks, a job that sounded incredibly labor-intensive without power tools.
