Chasing the Moon (22 page)

He nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“How can a place like this exist at all? From what I’ve seen so far the universe is a big, ugly place. There has to be something I’m missing. Something bad about it. Doesn’t there?”

“Well, that’s just keen.”

She scooped up a handful of sand. It ran through her fingers.
Trying to hold on to the grains was impossible, just like trying to hold on to this beach.

A swarm of bugs blew past her face. She brushed them aside, only to have more appear. She felt more of the things crawling up her legs. They were in the sand. Thousands of them.

So much for paradise.

Diana jumped to her feet. The bugs seemed harmless. They hadn’t stung her yet, but she shooed them away, swatting at her arms and legs. She ran a few steps, and they stopped pursuing her.

She wiped the dead bugs from her hands and pajamas. Some had gotten in her mouth. She spat those out, rolled her tongue around to look for more.

A single gnat landed on her nose. She was about to crush it when she noticed that it wasn’t a bug at all.

It was a tiny, tiny person. No bigger than a gnat. Too small to make out in great detail, but if she squinted she could see its humanoid shape.

“Oh my God.”

The corpses of a few dozen of the tiny winged people stuck to the backs of her hands.

“Oh my God.”

The sand churned with life. Hundreds of thousands, millions of the creatures, had been brought to the surface. Clouds of the winged ones circled her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think…”

They couldn’t understand her. Even if they could, an apology wouldn’t do any good. West had told her she didn’t belong here, and now she knew why.

His legs were covered in the tiny people. He stood perfectly still, and she followed his example. If she didn’t move, she couldn’t do much damage.

“I warned you that you wouldn’t like the people of this world,” he said.

They were just bugs, she told herself. Weird bugs with human bodies, but bugs nonetheless. And it was just an accident. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t as if she’d asked to be here. It was all a cosmic mistake.

The people—damn it, that was the only way she could think of them now—crept up her feet and ankles while flocks of the flying ones hovered around her head.

“Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

But ld her shehad. Her slightest step, her most careless gesture could destroy thousands. Intent was irrelevant. The damage was done. She was become Diana Malone, destroyer of worlds.

The sickening realization punched her in the gut.

The people continued to swarm around her. She didn’t know if they were trying to defend themselves or merely confused. She couldn’t know. Just like they couldn’t fathom why she would attack them without provocation.

“What do I do?” she asked. “West?”

She turned her head slowly in his direction, but he was gone.

It took every ounce of willpower to stay still as the teeming millions crawled over her. She closed her eyes. That only made it worse. It allowed her to concentrate on the unpleasant sensation across her skin.

Diana broke. It was too much. She couldn’t take it. She had
to get away. Some place where she wouldn’t do any damage, where she could escape the hordes. She ran across the beach, every step crushing hundreds, swinging her arms in wild deadly arcs, slicing through the swarms with deadly grace.

She tripped, falling flat on her face.

She spat out sand and wiped the genocide from her face. There was a palpable snap throughout the universe. She heard the pop as she was ejected from the beach and onto Chuck’s kitchen floor.

She pushed to her knees. Most of the tiny people had been left behind. Only a few corpses remained on her pajamas and the tile. Not all had been killed, though. Some of the people skittered across the floor while others hovered in confusion. She’d dragged them from their paradise to a hostile place.

They flew off to explore their strange new universe. She hoped they had a better time of it than she had.

She carefully swept up the dead, collecting them all in a plastic bag she found. There had been billions of the creatures. Trillions of them. This handful of a few dozen souls, smashed by her carelessness, didn’t amount to much. But they hadn’t asked for this, didn’t deserve it.

In the morning she buried them in the park.

For her second date with Chuck, Diana had her self-control back. She still ended up sleeping with him. Once the genie was out of the bottle, she couldn’t think of a reason to go backward.

They lay in his bed. The previous night it’d been a water bed. Or something like a water bed. The liquid within hadn’t moved like water. There was a rhythm that reminded her more of something breathing. She decided not to overthink it, though, and just to pretend it was a water bed.

Tonight the bed had changed, as he had mentioned his furniture had a tendency to do, into an asymmetrical oval cored in yellow fuzz.

She’d been picking up a weird vibe from Chuck all night. She assumed at first that she’d been imagining it, but it remained. He was awkward, on edge. Something was bothering him. At first she didn’t assume it had anything to do with her.
They’d only been on one date at this point, and he must have had other things going on in his life. So she played it cool, and just enjoyed being in his arms. Cuddling was one of the few things that reminded her of what it was like to be human.

“I’ve had a great time,” he said.

She laughed. “I should hope so.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.” Chuck hugged her tighter. “You’re great. You really are.”

Diana let the statement sit there for a minute.

“Are you breaking up with me?”

“What? No.” He repeated himself, more emphatically. “What? No! No!”

She moved away from him.

“Are you sure? Because I’ve done this before. Seems awfully familiar. You get one last screw in and then you drop the hammer.”

Chuck put his hand on her cheek and looked into her eyes. “I’m not breaking up with you.”

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “We’ve only been on a couple of dates. Not like it’s serious yet. I’m not sure an official breakup is even necessary.”

He pulled her closer, gave her a kiss. She moved closer to his naked warmth.

“I’m just saying it’s okay if you’ve decided you’re sick of me.”

“Stop it.”

“We’re both adults.”

“Just stop.”

They made out, accompanied by some heavy petting. He
rested his hands on her butt, and she debated whether to wait for him to signal the start of something more serious or if she should just go for it herself.

“Drop the hammer?” He chuckled.

“Don’t laugh.” She playfully tousled his hair. “It’s happened to me. Twice.”

“Twice, huh?”

Diana mumbled. “Okay, once. The second time I did it.”

“You dropped the hammer?”

“Yes, I dropped it.” She said, “I was a bad girl, and took advantage of someone for one last sexual escapade even though I knew I was going to dump him at the end of the night.”

“I had no idea you were such a bad person.”

“Oh, I have a dark past.” She got up, threw on a robe, took a detour into the kitchen. She found a slice of carrot cake in the fridge, which she started eating.

Chuck, in sweatpants, stood in the archway.

“Sorry.” She sheared off a small portion with her fork and took a bite, being very careful not to eat the silverware. “Mind if I eat this?”

“All yours. Still having appetite problems?”

“Comes and goes, but it’s mostly under control.” She held out her fork to him. “Want some?”

“No thanks. I’m good.”

He sat across the table and watched her eat. She wasn’t uncomfortable with that, but it did keep her from really enjoying herself. When she was finished she picked off a few stray crumbs but resisted the urge to lick the plate for any cake residue invisible to the naked eye.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Live with it. With them. Those things that share your apartment.”

“It’s not so bad. At least they let me out whenever I want. Not like your little monster.” She regretted saying it almost immediately. “I’m sorry. That sounded kind of mean, didn’t it?”

“No. It’s true. I can’t control the damn thing. You manage three, and I can’t even figure out how to live with one.”

“Maybe yours is harder to control than mine are.”

“No, it’s not that. You come and go whenever you like to my place. It doesn’t bother you at all.”

“Maybe it’s because I don’t let him bother me,” she replied. “You have to be firm. You have to remember that he’s probably not any happier with the situation than you are. Empathy goes a long way.”

“You want me to empathize with that beast?”

“Couldn’t hurt.” She took his hand from across the table. “Having met a few of these…”

She hesitated to use the word
monster
to describe them. They were monstrous in appearance. They didn’t view the world as humans did. Yet
monster
seemed too harsh, too black-andwhite.

“They’re just trying to get by. In a perfect universe they’d be in their reality, and we’d be in ours, and everyone would be happy. But that’s not the way it works.”

“Well, why doesn’t it?”

She laughed. He didn’t.

“Don’t ask me,” she said. “But you just deal with it. Isn’t that what you told me on our first date?”

Chuck pulled his hand away from hers.

“How can you be so calm about it? Doesn’t it drive you nuts?” The edge was back in his voice. “Every day it’s out there, on the other side of that door. Just waiting. I used to wonder why it didn’t just kill me. After a while I wished it would. Anything to get out of here.”

She rose, put her arms around him. “Take it easy. It’ll be okay.”

“You really don’t get it, do you? We’re trapped here.” He laughed. A soft, bitter sound that unsettled her. “You should go.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just get dressed and go. Please.”

He went into the bathroom and she heard the lock click. There was no arguing with that.

Diana put on her clothes and went back to her place.

“You’re home early,” said Vom. “Trouble in paradise?”

“Give it a rest, Vom.”

She slammed her bedroom door shut.

Every apartment came with a price. West lived in Number One and was the keeper of the building’s many secrets. He was responsible not just for keeping the building happy but for safeguarding reality from all manner of bizarre, unknowable threats. Very few of these threats were in the destroy-the-world category. That would’ve been far too simple.

Reality was a flexible thing, easily bent, but not easily broken. It had its own ways of protecting itself from such ordinary threats as apocalypse. But that every day the human race woke up to discover the dinosaurs were still extinct, the speed of light hadn’t slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and the continents were indeed where they had left them when they went to sleep was due, in some small way, to an obscure, hairy landlord who never actually set foot in the universe he kept running properly.