Eleanor (37 page)

She thinks about the rift, and wonders if it has done something to her. What if it was radioactive? What if it
mutated
her, like the dogs near Chernobyl?

The bathroom door opens, and Eleanor hears the old man’s voice, low. The toilet lid clanks as the woman gets up and goes to the doorway, and Eleanor leans close to the shower curtain to listen to them talk.
 

“Three in the goddamn morning,” the old man says. “What was she doing in our back yard at three in the goddamn morning?”

“That’s what I asked,” the woman says.
 

“Paramedics are here,” he says. “I told them to wait in the living room. She doing okay?”

“Didn’t want me to help her shower, but I think so.”

The old man is quiet for a moment. “Three in the goddamn morning,” he says again. “Well, send her out when she’s warmed over. They want to look her over. Oh, and—did you get her name?”

The woman shuffles over to the shower curtain. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Uh—Jennifer,” Eleanor says.
 

“Jennifer,” the old woman relays to her husband.
 

The bathroom door closes, and the woman says, “Almost finished, dear?”
 

Eleanor looks down at her legs and then her armpits, and eyes a pink razor hanging from the shower caddy. “Two minutes more,” she says. “Can I have a little privacy?”

The woman hesitates, then agrees. “I’ve left the clothes on the counter,” she says.
 

“Thank you,” Eleanor says. “I’ll be right out.”

When the door closes, Eleanor steps out of the shower and onto a gray shag rug. She leaves the water running, and dries herself with a rough towel. The old couple’s granddaughter is a little smaller than Eleanor. The jeans are snug and too short, and the T-shirt has a printed image of a unicorn on it. There’s no underwear, or socks, or shoes, but Eleanor decides she will make do, and dresses in the borrowed clothing.
 

Then she opens the bathroom window and steps onto the toilet lid and hoists herself up onto the sill. She tucks her knees and pivots, and eyes the dark ground below the window. It looks near enough, and she doesn’t see any unexpected thorn bushes or garden stakes.
 

She drops down, her feet squishing in the cold mud, and then breaks into a run across the black lawn and into the night.

The old couple must own a large lot, because she runs for two or three minutes before she encounters a fence that seems to stretch off into infinity. She dances from one foot to the other, keeping them off the wet ground as long as she can. They’re throbbing from the cold already. The shower’s effects have worn off. She’s freezing.
 

She runs to the right, and a moment later comes upon a rickety gate. She fumbles the latch open, runs through, and almost yelps when the lawn gives way to a gravel driveway, the stones sharp beneath her numb feet. She jumps sideways into more grass, then squints into the darkness. The rain blurs her vision, but she can see the faint blue asphalt of a street.

To the right, she can see the ambulance’s revolving light. It paints the dark trees blue and red. In her neighborhood, she knows, people would be coming out of their houses to investigate. Here she can’t see anybody, which means that the old folks live in one of the mostly dead districts, or the neighbors out here are a long way away from each other.
 

She skips the street and cuts left, crossing another lawn. She dodges some decorative bushes that look like little shadowy trolls, and then the ground drops away beneath her, and she thuds into a drainage ditch. The black water soaks her borrowed clothes, and she scrambles up the other side in the mud. She emerges on pavement. Her arms are covered with goose bumps.

Still she runs, her lungs smoldering, her bare feet scraped raw by the gravel and the hard asphalt. She trips once, stubbing her toe on the road, and goes skidding. The fall knocks her breath out, and she sucks in a dozen deep breaths before she gets up again. She looks down and sees a surprising amount of blood on her left foot, and pavement rash on her right arm, and the too-small jeans are torn at the knee.
 

Eleanor runs, limping a little now, looking for any landmark in the cold night. She finds one after fifteen minutes of running and stopping and gasping for breath, fifteen minutes of ignoring the little telegrams of pain that her foot is sending to her brain.
 

She pauses for breath at an intersection. It looks familiar—except, she realizes, there should be a tree in the median, and there isn’t. There’s a scoop of missing earth, grown over with grass, and filling with water, which means that the intersection is the one she thinks it is—which means that Jack’s house is just a block north.
 

A little dagger of pain in her side slows her down, a stitch that won’t go away, and she walks as quickly as she can in the rain. She glances down at her foot. There’s still a lot of blood, and it looks as if she’s torn open her big toe. Her shirt is dark with mud and water, and her knee is bleeding through the ripped jeans.
 

She hopes Jack hears her at the door.

She turns down his street, passes the first few houses, and then pauses at his driveway. She’s been to his house only a couple of times, but never to go inside. She has waited at the curb for him, perched on her bicycle. The house reminds her of Jack’s father—bulky and square and dark and foreboding. There’s no light over the front door, none by the garage door. All the windows are dark. A pickup truck sits in the driveway, facing the street. There’s a large dent in the driver’s door, and the front bumper is bent at an unusual angle.
 

Eleanor tries to guess which window might belong to Jack. She slogs across the lawn, its grass high and uncut. She stops at the second window, takes a deep breath and holds it, and then raps on the glass with her knuckles.
 

Nothing.
 

Please, Jack
, she thinks, and knocks again, louder.
 

A light goes on, illuminating a dark curtain. A second later the curtain is yanked back, and she lets her breath out in a rush when she sees Jack inside. He peers out into the dark, blinded by the bedroom light. He leans close to the window and cups his hand over the glass. She waves, and Jack’s face turns white, as if he’s seen a ghost. He vanishes from the window and the curtain falls back into place.
 

Eleanor stands in the rain, shivering, and then Jack flies across the lawn and throws his arms around her, scaring her half to death. He grips her tightly, and her ribs scream, but she only grunts. He says something in her ear, and she feels her body turn to ice at his words.
 

“I thought you were dead,” he says. “I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead.”

He’s sobbing.

She has lost track of the days. She has wandered through the valley—perhaps for weeks, perhaps for years—shell-shocked by the audacity of the invasion. The small breaches were unpleasant, but tolerable—a few trees toppled, nothing more—and the airplane had been a serious injustice, tearing a hole not only in her sky, but in the earth itself.

But the—the… she doesn’t even know what to call the event.

The
meteor?
The
bomb?

There were no words for such a violation. It had been both a declaration of war and victory at once, an attack that the keeper had no hope of warding off. How could she? The attack had been so—
enormous
. The red-haired girl had been only a scout, she now believes. Whoever—
whatever
—had followed behind the girl had exterminated the keeper’s hope. Her cabin had been obliterated in the battle—

No. It is wrong to call it a battle.

It was an ambush.
 

She is homeless, and so she wanders, picking her way through the fallen forest. The earth for as far as she can see is sooty and black, and as she trudges through the devastation she cannot help but scrape the dark muck from her mouth and compare it to the soil. The scorched ground is not so different. She wonders if the voracious fire in her belly is anything like the fire that she witnessed, the fire that came from the sky and destroyed her valley so completely.
 

She walks slowly, heavily, gripping her belly. The pain is blinding now. She feels like a star at its end, collapsing inward.
 

“When stars die, they explode,” she says to her shadow.
 

It hears, but does not answer. It follows her at a distance, skirting the edges of the ruined forest, moving among the charred stumps of vanquished trees.

Dead stars explode
, she thinks.
They destroy everything
.

If she explodes, what will happen to her valley? This worries her more than her own death—the idea that her valley might simply cease to exist when she does.
 

For, she is certain, that day is coming.

The keeper is dying.

She beds down beneath a slab of rock that was once part of the mountains, but is now the largest piece of rubble in a vast wasteland of boulders and dust. The clouds steamroll overhead, aggressive and horribly black. Strings of lightning flicker within them, stitching them all together. The rain that falls now is acrid and dark as night. It stings her skin, and she is covered all over with burns.
 

She lies still and thinks, as she often does, of that day when her valley was murdered before her.
 

She had banished the wrecked plane from her valley, and had discovered the darkness inside her mouth and throat. She had struggled into the center of the clearing. Her shawl felt like a noose, and she had stripped it off, and then, in a fit, had torn away her sweater and her boots and her hiking dungarees. The buttons on her blouse would not rip, and her hands had been shaking too powerfully to unfasten them, so she had gripped it by the hem and pulled it over her head and arms. She yanked her long wool socks down and cast them aside.
 

She fell to her knees on the damp earth and teetered unsteadily, fighting to catch her breath.
 

Her shadow detached itself from her and retreated a few feet.
 

She said, “Where are you going?”

It did not answer. It watched her, circling her slowly, curiously.
 

She fell onto her back on the wet ground, naked, the rain cold on her skin. An itch in her throat forced another cough, and she hacked up a stone-sized wet mass of the black dust. She scooped it out with her fingers. It smeared across her skin like damp sand. She rubbed her hands on her bare arms, trying to remove the sludge, but succeeded only in turning her arms black as well.

She leaned up on her elbows, searching the ground for a piece of bark, a leaf, anything to scrape her hands clean of the black stuff.
 

Her shadow saw it before she did, and flew away from her quickly—twenty, forty yards.
 

Peculiar
.

Then she looked down and saw it herself, and her breath caught.