My Black Beast (14 page)

Emily smiled down at him. “Well, you look
fine. Relatively.” She laughed and Lowell smiled.

“
Yeah, I’ll be okay, I
think.”

“
Good. Running the shop by myself
is a pain in the ass.” She walked over and grabbed her messenger
bag off the chair. “Speaking of, I’ve got to get back to it. I
wasn’t exactly expecting you to be awake. I’ll come back after I
close up.”

After Emily left it was a parade of questions.
His mother, doctors, police, local news people, national news
people.

He learned more from their questions than he’d
known the entire time he was there. The language that they were
speaking had been some corruption of an old European language,
Frankish or something. There were other Elders. The city was a few
hundred years old and was similar to one that had been excavated in
New Mexico sometime in the fifties. Each of them in turned treated
him like something different. A case study, a liar, a spectacle, a
crazy person who was just on a boat when the city came
up.

He couldn’t think of a good reason to lie
about any of it, whatever the reactions might’ve been. It seemed
like the police really wanted a reason to arrest him for something,
but nothing ever materialized. It was weeks after he left the
hospital when everyone finally started to get distracted by other
things. The government had locked down the island and quarantined
everyone who lived there. It wasn’t every day that a group of
displaced weirdoes comes floating up on a two mile stretch of
land.

After a month or so, he found his way back to
work at the flower shop. His muscles were a wreck for a good long
time and he had more than a few broken bones, but he couldn’t stand
being idle anymore. He couldn’t really say why. Something about
sitting around the apartment just felt uncomfortable. He’d tried to
get a pass to visit the island, but he was denied. The government
lady seemed really kind of torn up about it.

It was winter now. It was too cold to want to
go outside but not quite cold enough for anything fun like snow.
The sun had been down for hours and Lowell was taking flowers into
the back of the shop to put the ones that needed it under lights.
Emily was at the counter going over the day’s receipts. She’d taken
to working with him when he came back, insisting that he was
probably going to get himself killed if there wasn’t someone
around. It was probably true enough for the first month or so, but
she’d just never stopped coming in. She’d spent a lot of time
helping, even at his apartment.

“
You changed, you know,” she said
as he came back into the main part of the shop.

He chuckled. “It happens, I guess.”

She was quiet for a minute, looking down at
the receipts and tapping her pen.

“
That girl you helped. What
happened to her?”

“
She left.” He put on sad sort of
smile.

“
Oh… sorry, I didn’t…”

“
It’s fine,” he said, waving away
the apology. He picked up another pair of flowers and headed toward
the back of the shop. “She wanted me to stay.”