Halifax (2 page)

“Please come in,” Mother said. “Have a seat. I’ll make you some tea.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need any tea,” Mrs. Kahn said as she entered the house and took a seat on the sofa. “I just need to talk with you about your kids.”

Mother dusted off the seat Izzy had been sitting in and took her place across from the social worker. She folded her hands in her lap and beamed her perfect smile across the coffee table. “What seems to be the problem?” she asked.

The woman looked down at her file. “The problem is that your children have missed over thirty-six days of school in the last three months alone.”

“What seems to be the problem?” the mother asked again, her smile never fading.

“Well, that is the problem,” Mrs. Kahn said, already a little exasperated. “Regular attendance at school is a requirement. It’s the law.”

Mother just smiled. “What seems to be the problem?” she said yet again in the exact same way.

In the dining room, Farrell, Izzy and Rom all looked dismayed. “Mother’s wigging out,” Izzy whispered.

“What’s wrong with her, Rom?” Farrell asked.

Rom seemed reluctant to answer. He didn’t want to say it, but he finally blurted it out. “It’s a fatal error,” he said.

“Fatal?” Farrell asked.

“Fatal,” Rom replied with a sigh.

Back in the living room, the social worker was shifting in her seat. Her frustration and annoyance were growing. She wasn’t a woman to be toyed with. She’d seen a thousand dysfunctional families in her time with the school district and this Stepford housewife wasn’t going to ruin yet another one of her long days.

“This is a very serious matter, Mrs. Jones,” the woman said as she closed her file. “I don’t have time to…”

And then she saw it—whatever it was next to the potpourri on the coffee table. The Thing’s arm. She looked up at the mother and she saw something else for the first time.

Rom’s blood on her apron. Mrs. Kahn slowly got up out of her seat.

“You know, I believe I have all the information I need,” she said as she made her way to the front door, never taking her eyes off of the mother. “I’ll just…I’ll report a file. I mean, I’ll file a report. I’ll be in touch.”

The social worker ran out the front door as fast as her sensible heels would take her. She was already in her car and driving away when the kids ran back into the living room.

“Excellent job, Rom,” Farrell said as he watched the woman’s car through the window. Its tires squealed as it rounded the cul-de-sac and disappeared from view.

“I wasn’t the one who left a bloody arm next to the candy dish on the coffee table,” Rom protested.

“How long do we have?” Izzy asked.

“She’s probably already called the police,” Farrell said. “Pack up. Say goodbye to Mother, Rom.
And don’t forget the ball
.”

Farrell and Izzy scurried around the house. They began stuffing things into bags, tucking whatever useful items they needed, whether they looked useful or not, into whatever they could carry. Rom, meanwhile, turned his attention to the mother. She still had a smile on her face. She beamed at Rom and he looked away. He couldn’t take it.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked him. He just shook his head sadly.

“Goodbye, Mother,” he said as he hugged her, wrapping himself around her waist. “I’ll miss you.”

“What seems to be the problem?” she said yet again.

“Let’s go!” Farrell yelled at Rom as he ran back into the room, bags on each shoulder.

Rom reluctantly pulled himself away from the mother. He opened a drawer on the bureau in the hallway and pulled out a Magic Eight Ball. It was a children’s toy. It was like a large plastic eight ball from a pool table with a small window at its base. You asked it a question and it displayed an answer in the window, as if it had some kind of magical, eight-ballish psychic powers.

“Will I ever see Mother again?” Rom asked the Magic Eight Ball as he shook it. He turned it over to reveal the answer printed on a triangle floating behind the small window on the ball. The message read
Don’t Count On It
.

Rom put the ball in his backpack, which was black and white and shaped like a penguin. It had a friendly, smiling penguin face and a nose that squeaked when you pressed it. He headed for the back door, pausing for a moment to take one last, longing look back. Mother stood in the hallway, her arms on her hips and her head cocked slightly. She was still smiling. Smiling at her little boy. She looked like the perfect mother. Rom averted his eyes, keeping his head down, as he rushed out the back door and slammed it behind him.

Farrell and Izzy and Rom scrambled up the hillside behind their house, climbing up above the cul-de-sac. They pushed aside dried scrub brush and slid through the dirt, finally making their way to a fire road overlooking the neighborhood. From this vantage point they could see all the cloned houses and the network of roads that wound around and around, connecting identical street to identical street, past identical mailboxes in suburban bliss. Roaring through the neighborhood, though, overtaking sensible mini-vans and screaming at top speed, were a squadron of police cars, sirens blaring. From every direction they converged on the cul-de-sac.

Police officers climbed out of their cars, guns raised, and slowly began to surround the house as the kids looked on from their perch on the dry hillside.

“It’s time to go, Rom,” Farrell said.

“Do we really have to?” Rom asked as he reluctantly removed the Magic Eight Ball from his backpack. He looked down at it and rolled it across his palm. “I like it here. It’s a good place to raise a family. Nice and wholesome and…leafy…”

“Now, Rom!” Farrell yelled at him, right into his face.

“Fine!” Rom yelled back. He held up the Magic Eight Ball and looked down at its small screen. The message on it read
Outlook Not So Good
. Rom reluctantly pushed his thumb down onto the screen. It gave way like a button being pressed and suddenly their house EXPLODED! It exploded into a giant fireball. The police officers hit the ground and covered their heads as burning pieces of wood and insulation and, yes, pieces of the mother, fell around them.

Smoke drifted up the hillside as Farrell turned to Izzy and Rom. He hadn’t even flinched when the house exploded and he wasn’t at all concerned about the chaos below—the burning house, the panicked officers and the approaching fire trucks.

“Izzy, we need a new house,” Farrell said to them. “Rom, we need a new mom.”

Time had passed. Many freeways had been traveled. New files were created and a new life for Farrell, Izzy and Rom was beginning in another part of Los Angeles. It was in the Valley, a suburban section of the city trapped along with smog between two mountain ranges. It was a place with no discernable center and no real beginning or end. It wasn’t glamorous or cool, either in temperament or temperature, but such things didn’t matter to them. All they needed was a base camp and this place would do.

A strange car moved down Main Street in Cahuenga Village, the closest thing to charming the area had. Old buildings, some dating back all of fifty years, lined either side of the street. Local businesses, ranging from a coffee shop to an ice cream parlor to small restaurants and a dry cleaner, advertised their wares with colorful signs and potted flowers gave a small town feel to the big city. Adding an extra measure of festiveness were Halloween decorations, pumpkins and hay bales and scarecrows and skeletons, placed in preparation for the upcoming Halloween Carnival. A banner stretched across the street inviting all to the event.

The car, the strange one, passed beneath the banner and moved slowly down the street. The car was called a Citroen. It was a French car, pool blue and bug like, with a front end larger than the rear. It had slanting double headlights that stared out at the road ahead making it look like an alien from a 1950’s sci-fi movie.

Behind the large steering wheel, driving the car, was Farrell. His arm was resting out the open window and a breeze tousled his hair. If it was possible to look cool in the very odd car, he managed it. Riding shotgun was Izzy. She looked out at the neighborhood. She was taking their new surroundings in and getting a sense of this part of the city. Rom rode in the back and watched the people along the sidewalks. He took special interest in a family, a mother and father and two small children. They were walking, hand in hand in hand in hand, and were laughing and smiling. Rom smiled too for a moment, but his smile disappeared as quickly as it came. He looked away, out the other window, looking at nothing, as they continued to drive along.

Farrell drove a few more miles, as houses gave way to warehouses, and the Citroen turned onto a side street and came to idle in front of an abandoned garage. An old electric sign was atop a pole above the garage. It was cracked and fading and its bulbs had long ago burnt out, but you could still make out the writing on it.
Houx Citroen Repair
.

“Houx?” Izzy asked as she looked up at the sign. It came out of her mouth sounding like
hoax
.

“It’s French,” Rom told her. “Like how-X.”

“If it was French wouldn’t it be pronounced
who
?” Farrell said as he glanced back in the rearview mirror at Rom.

Rom thought for a moment and either didn’t know the answer or didn’t want to admit he was wrong. “I don’t care what you call it,” he said with a huff. “I call it the Garage.”

“Original,” Izzy told him.

The Halifax siblings sat in their idling Citroen car outside the chain-linked fence of this Citroen repair shop. It was an old building with a double garage bay and a small office and was on a seldom-travelled street between some other industrial buildings that looked equally old and equally abandoned. In fact, a car had not been repaired at Houx Citroen Repair in more than ten years and the building’s peeling paint and broken windows bore testament to that.

“It’s perfect,” Farrell said to Rom. He was actually pleased with his young brother. That was a rare thing.

“It’s gross,” Izzy protested.

“It’s amazing,” Rom said. “Just wait.” Rom held up a second set of Citroen keys. They dangled off the end of a purple rabbit’s foot keychain. Rom twisted the metal end of the keychain and the electronic gate along the chain-link fence began to pull back. Farrell drove the car through the gate and one of the garage bay doors in front of them began to lift up.

“Just pull onto the ramp,” Rom instructed Farrell. “You’ll see.” He leaned over the front seat and looked at Izzy. “And
you’ll
see, too.”

Farrell slowly moved the Citroen up onto two metal slats in the middle of the repair bay. Back in the days when there were Citroen repairmen—who were probably French—working there, this is where they would have put the cars so they could work on them. A mechanic would hit a switch and the car would rise up on the metal slats so it could be worked on from below. As Farrell finished pulling their Citroen up onto the slats, however, instead of lifting towards the ceiling, the floor opened up below them and the car descended into a hole in the bottom of the garage.

The car came to rest three stories below street level in a cavernous room that resembled a space station. Steaming pipes and glowing wires snaked up and down metal walls and under hanging walkways. All manner of electrical equipment, beeping and buzzing and blinking, filled the room. It was the kind of place astronauts dreamed of when they dared to dream big.

“I like it, Rom,” Farrell said as they all climbed out of the Citroen. Rom looked across the hood of the car at Farrell. He was shocked. Another compliment? “Well done,” Farrell continued. “You should have your own interior design show on cable.”

“Finally. Praise. It’s been so long,” Rom said. He began to lead Farrell and Izzy around their new tricked out Batcave. “As you can see, we have all the standard equipment.” He stopped before a massive bank of hard drives. They were all connected to each other, a hundred high, two hundred wide, and generated enough heat to cause Izzy to step back and wipe her brow.

“This is our master computer,” Rom said. “It’s linked to every government main frame and has a NASA interface that bypasses security clearance.”

He moved on to a large screen displaying a map of the world with an overlay of grid marks. “Our barge tracking system,” Rom told them. “So simple even Izzy can understand it.”

Izzy pursed her lips disapprovingly, something that only seemed to cause Rom pleasure. He brushed her off and continued his tour, pointing out a pod-like structure at one end of the room that he called “the penthouse” and a laboratory, gleaming white and filled with all known and unknown types of medical equipment, behind double glass doors along the back wall of the massive room.

At the center of the room, rising all three stories above and disappearing somewhere deep into the ground below was a radiating orange tube filled with some kind of swirling thick liquid that periodically pulsated with bursts of light.

“Our core power source,” Rom told them as he stood beside the tube. All the pipes and cables surrounding them could be traced back to its super-heated center.

“Nuclear?” Farrell asked.

Rom scoffed at such a suggestion. “Volcanic,” he declared. “Much more friendly to the environment. I’m trying to embrace the whole
green
thing. I was thinking we should recycle. Maybe even compost.”

“I was thinking you should finish showing us around before I recycle
you
,” Izzy warned Rom.

“Fine,” Rom said as he led them to a vending machine at the bottom of a circular staircase that twisted up towards the street above. The machine was filled with every kind of candy bar, from the classic Charleston Chew to the wildly popular Snickers bar to the little known or understood Zagnut.

“What is that?” Izzy asked.

“It’s a candy machine,” Rom said.

“And why do we need a candy machine?”

“Because sometimes I get hungry,” Rom said. Sometimes he did. “And because I’ve always wanted one.”

Izzy looked to Farrell, pleadingly, asking with her eyes if she really had to put up with Rom’s antics, but Farrell just shrugged his shoulders. Unfortunately, battling aliens was often the easiest part of the job. Getting along with one another sometimes proved to be their biggest challenge.