Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night

Smog

JournalStone’s DoubleDown Series,
Book II

By

Lisa Morton

JournalStone

San
Francisco

Copyright
© 2013 by Lisa Morton

All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping,
or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission
of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews.

This
is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations,
and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.

JournalStone
books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

JournalStone

www.journalstone.com

www.journal-store.com

The
views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any
responsibility for them.

ISBN:
     978-1-940161-01-3 (sc)

ISBN:      978-1-940161-17-4 (hc
– limited edition)

ISBN:      978-1-940161-02-0 (ebook)

Library
of Congress Control Number:   2013941614

Printed
in the United States of America

JournalStone
rev. date:  September 6, 2013

Cover
Design:         Denise Daniel

Cover
Art:              Alan M. Clark

Edited
by:                Norman Rubenstein

Dedication

To all of the 1960s denizens of 9th
Avenue in Arcadia, who all share my reduced lung capacity thanks to the smog.

At least we only came out a
little crazy.

Endorsements

“With
Smog
, Lisa Morton has created the perfect coming-of-age story. This is a
tale of a magical time, with wonderful characters and a gripping plot that just
won't let go. This is Morton at her very best, and you don't want to miss this
one.” – 
John R. Little
, Author of THE MEMORY TREE, MIRANDA, and URSA
MAJOR

"I'm
sure SMOG by Lisa Morton is a true tale of terrifying horror. Or maybe she's
just that fabulous of a writer. Evocative, provocative, and TOTALLY FREAKY.
More!" -
Nancy Holder
, 5-time Bram Stoker Award winner and NYT
bestselling author, DEAD IN THE WATER

Prologue

I
was twelve years old in 1965. It was a year when the world felt like it was
changing: Walter Cronkite reported on civil rights every night; we were sending
troops to a country called Vietnam; men were walking in space, and the Rolling
Stones were making rock and roll music sound
nasty
. Computers filled up
entire buildings at NASA; the internet was decades away; our biggest war was
cold, and telephones were still things that were wired into walls.

I had the perfect family, living the American
dream: Mom and Dad, two kids, a three-bedroom house in a little suburb of Los
Angeles called San Diablo, located out at the eastern end of the San Gabriel
Valley. Fifteen years ago, the whole area had been orange groves; now it was a
middle-class neighborhood that centered on families supported by the local
aerospace industry. The houses all had nice front lawns and pools in the
backyards; there were cocktail parties for the parents and birthday parties for
the kids, and the most successful fathers bought brand-new color console
television sets that weighed as much as refrigerators.

It was all perfect…until something went wrong with
the smog. It was so thick that on most days we couldn’t see the foothills at
the end of our street. A lot of us kids were no good at running because of the
smog—it would make your lungs burn and seize up after half a lap.

Breathing problems, however, were the least of
what the smog was doing to us.

Of course we didn’t know that when it all started
to fall apart…

Chapter 1

“The
moon just blew up!” That was what CJ said when he came running into the house
that day in June 1965. It was almost eight in the evening.

CJ was my older brother. His real name was Charles
Robert Donohue, Jr., but he hated Charles, Charlie, Chuck, Bob, and Junior; CJ
was the only iteration he didn’t hate from a young age. Of course I shouldn’t
say anything—I go by Joey even though my birth name is Michaela Jo Donohue, but
come on,
Michaela
? Back when they’d both been young and growing up in
West Virginia, my parents had known someone who’d named her little girl
Michaela, and for some inexplicable reason they’d been smitten by the name. I,
sadly, have never been able to say the same. Fortunately I was a tomboy from
birth, so “Joey” suited me just fine.

CJ was pretty decent, as older brothers go. He was
four years older than me, but he’d never bullied me or been otherwise mean.
When we were both little, he’d let me tag along on his expeditions. True, he’d
once put a Jerusalem cricket—possibly the biggest, ugliest, worst-smelling
insect found in all of Southern California—in my bed and laughed like crazy
when I’d screamed. But he’d apologized afterward, and I frankly sort of thought
Jerusalem crickets were cool—they reminded me of the big plastic bug in my
Cootie game. I’d made him take the cricket back out to the dirt trail that ran
between our backyard and the fenced-in, concrete-lined runoff channel we all
called “the wash.”

I also liked CJ because he was always popular at
school. He’d been elected class president at San Diablo High when he was still
a freshman. I liked his friends and girlfriends, and (much to our scientist
father’s horror) he wanted to go into politics someday. He planned on majoring
in political science at college, and he was smart enough that his counselors at
school figured he’d land a scholarship with no problem. CJ’s popularity was
good for me, too; because people liked him, they automatically liked me. Well,
at least a few did—I’ve never been as good at the handshaking and glad-handing
thing. I had Debbie Curtis, who’d been my best friend since before either of us
could even talk, and sometimes we hung out with Matthew Visser, who lived
halfway down our block and was weird enough to be both intriguing and kind of
scary…but otherwise I didn’t have a lot of friends. Not like CJ did, anyway.

1965 didn’t start off seeming so different. I was
in my last year of elementary school and was looking forward to starting junior
high in the fall; CJ was a high school sophomore. By June, all of the kids were
out of school, with three glorious months of summer freedom before us. CJ was
usually off with his friends, Mom had all of her social activities, and as for Dad…well,
we never saw Dad anyway, so I’d have the house all to myself for most of the
summer.

That summer had started with two events I most
especially remember: On June 3
^rd
, Ed White became the first American
astronaut to step outside the safety of his Gemini capsule and into outer
space, and we watched the event on our brand-new color Magnavox television
while my mother glowed with pride (and a few martinis) and told us, “That fellow
wouldn’t be out there if it weren’t for your father.” What exactly Dad had to
do with the space walk, I don’t think Mom had the vaguest idea. We only knew
that he worked in the aerospace industry, often spending weeks out at Edwards
Air Force Base in the middle of the Mojave desert.

The second big deal was the Rolling Stones. “(I
Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was released in that same month, and suddenly the
rock and roll music that all our parents had decided they could live with
because it wasn’t going away got
dirty
. Every night, as the sun went
down on another hot Southern California summer day, all the teenagers would
saunter out to plop down on their front lawns with transistor radios tuned to
station KHJ, waiting for the next play of “Satisfaction.” You could walk along
the street, the sky still barely light overhead, and hear that guitar riff
echoing out of dozens of tinny little handheld radios. I wasn’t quite old
enough yet to hang out with the rest of them, but I liked the song (which I
somehow guessed had something to do with—
gasp!
—sex), and I liked being
able to hear it all up and down my street.

What I didn’t know then was how those two
things—space stuff and teenagers—were about to intersect. Nobody knew, not even
my father…and he was responsible for it.

This particular June evening, Mom and Dad and I
were inside; it was one of those rare nights when Dad was not only home but was
home early. Mom was washing up after dinner; Dad was scanning the newspaper,
and I was rereading a
Fantastic Four
comic (featuring the Sub-Mariner, whom
my pre-adolescent self had developed kind of a crush on). CJ had been outside
with all the other teens, but he suddenly came rushing in through the front
door, breathless.

“The moon just blew up!”

We all kind of stopped and looked up at him,
waiting for the punch line or something; but instead he kept going. “I swear,
something’s going on—there’s a huge part of the sky where the moon should be
that’s all lit up and full of smoke and stuff!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Dad said, putting his paper
down.

“Dad, you gotta come and see!”

I didn’t wait for Dad—I got up, went to the
sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard, and ran out.

Sure enough, a big section of the sky overhead was
glowing, way brighter than the surrounding areas shading toward dusk, and there
seemed to be a sort of roiling rim around the glow. A few seconds later Dad
joined me, and I heard him whisper, “I’ll be goddamned.”

That was weird for two reasons: first of all,
nothing ever surprised my Dad; and secondly, he never used curse words.

“What is it, Dad? Is it the moon? Did the Russians
blow up the moon?” We were all obsessed with the Russians, who we were
convinced were determined to nuke every last American.

“No, of course not. The moon’s fine. It’s a rocket
test. One of ours.”

We’d seen rocket tests before, of course, living
in the cradle of America’s aerospace industry…but they were usually just tiny
white trails in the sky, not huge white splotches like this.

I looked from the sky to my dad and asked, “Did
you work on it?”

My dad stared at the sky for a few more seconds
before turning away. I thought I heard him murmur, “This shouldn’t have
happened.”

He left to go back to work right away. He didn’t
even answer when Mom asked him if he wanted to take a thermos of coffee.

The next day, the smog had taken on a strange,
yellow tone that I’d never seen before. It blotted out the sun and erased any
blue. It made all of our eyes burn.

It was just the beginning.