Analeigh VS The Beam (excerpt)

“C’mon — I can see him from here, I think. Looks like a camp fire, too,” said Analeigh, hand shielding her eyes from the light of the Beam. It rose into the night, a column of hard white light that waned and shone seemingly of its own volition, sometimes sweeping the bizarre geography of Coopersville slowly, and at others darting across the landscape like an insect from flower to flower. The ship jutted out from the earth; an errant tooth, a finger accusing the sky.

“Where?” Holly asked, shaking her head. “The ship must be a mile long. I can’t see anything.” Funny how even in the altered reality of Cooper’s mind Holly’s eyesight was crap. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and peered at the ship, pockmarked and holed, whole sections of the underbelly missing, girders and rotten conduits hanging like the guts of a slaughtered animal. From the angle of its tilt, the structure almost looked more like a skyscraper that had been pushed aside than it did a spacecraft, but what kind of building looked like that? Its surface bristled with jagged towers, splintered like wood. Just when she was about to give up, she spotted the glimmer of the fire, just a speck against the silhouette of the ship, but it was there. “I see it,” she said. “Near the top, right by the edge. The front?”

William spoke up. “The bow. If that’s a ship, then the front’s the bow.” Both Analeigh and Holly turned and shot him annoyed looks. “What? Like you girls know nautical terms.” He screwed up his face and shrugged, clearing his throat before leaning over and spitting onto the street.

Holly sighed.

“You know,” Analeigh, “I can’t tell which is the better deal: you, staying the ageless, eternal jackass, or Cooper not sticking with you longer in the real world, just so we could have the pleasure of seeing you, William Andrews, a few years older, a few more pounds and a lot less hair, finally realized as the loser you are no doubt going to be. Cause I gotta say, I actually feel bad for Cooper — me, the girl he kicked in the ribs whenever he saw fit. You’re so charming, William. Makes me wonder what Cooper did in a past life to deserve such a friend as you.” She met eyes with Holly, and for a horrifying moment, Holly saw everything that Cooper loved in the other girl, all caught in her tight-lipped smile, eyebrows arched above eyes filled with laughter.

***

The Beam held to the center of what Holly had come to call Coopertown, though William’s words nagged her as well. “Coopervania,” he had said, a name far more appropriate, though she’d never admit it to that callous buffoon’s face. But Cooper’s mind was a haunted house, that was for certain. From here she could see the entire city, stretching to the horizon. The neighborhoods butted up against the bases of snow-dusted mountains, tapered off into docks and ports at water’s edge, grew sparse out by the wastes where those alien hulks lay rotting. The Beam held solid, an upturned column thickening at each end, splashing waves of what like luminous paint where it connected to sky and ground. To Holly, it looked like an impossibly tall waterfall made mobile, flitting along the city’s surface. Danny led them around another husk of a building, keeping his eyes out for the Paper Men, listening for the telltale signs of their movement, legs like kindling in the fire. Something in the distance caught his attention, something in the movement of the hillside. A darkening along the knoll.

“Wait,” he said, holding out his hand. “You need to see this.”

Holly squinted off into she hillside. The buildings rode the wave of the hill, packed tight and pointing in all directions, as if they had blossomed like flowers. Some were upright skeletons, blackened in some long ago fire, others stood perfect and pristine as cut crystal. They all stood under the forever dark sky, the world lit only by the prowling, silent Beam, a tear in the sky. Holly frowned, dark eyebrows wrinkling behind her glasses. “What am I looking at?”

Analeigh stepped close behind, looking over Holly’s left shoulder while raising the other girl’s hand with her own, sighting down the length of Holly’s arm with her head cocked to the side. “Mindquake. Look for the sinkhole.”

“Sinkhole?”

“Watch,” Analeigh said. Holly did so, and she first felt, then heard a low rumbling, what sounded like a massive door being dragged to a close across stony ground. A section of the neighborhood trembled, then shook, the building’s charred spires quivering like blades of grass, and then they were gone, as if yanked from below by a giant hand. In one silvery moment the neighborhood had ceased to exist.

“Oh my God,” Holly said, “What just happened?”

“Careful,” said William, still holding up a hand even as he stepped forward towards the ledge. Not so much as swirling, airborne dust remained in place of the buildings, just an empty void. The landscape rippled from the sinkhole, like the waves from a single raindrop falling into a pond. The ring rocketed outwards, sending the three travelers swaying along the cliff side. Holly threw her hands out to the side, pitching forward, then stumbling backwards to the demolished building, and then William was there, keeping her from cracking her head against a broken wall. Analeigh wasn’t so lucky, letting out a yelp as she felt hard, landing square on her bottom, a silvery sense of numbness shooting along her spine, shoulders, even in her hands, and then the wave was gone as if it had never been.

Holly clenched her hands across her chest, her fingers working their way into the scarf tied around her neck. Her shoulders rocked up and down — she was having a hard time catching her breath. She swung her bag around, holding it open with her left while rummaging with her right.

“It’s okay. We’re okay,” William said, stooping down to look Holly in the eyes. “You okay? Holly?”

She shook her head, eyes clamped shut. “Can’t breathe,” she just barely managed to squeak out, and her voice was a whisper. Growing frantic, she unslung the bag from her shoulders and spilled its contents onto the pavement. Two books, one by Brautigan, the other a Murakami. Cigarettes — American Spirits. A leather bound journal. Flashcards, bound by rubber band. A one-hitter and its case, God only knows if the weed had crossed over to Coopertown as well. Her clothes, her glasses, even her cigarettes had made it across, so why couldn’t she find…? Then Holly saw her inhaler, saw it lying disused on a shelf in their bathroom, one shelf below Cooper’s electric razor, one shelf above the caddy filled with Q-tips. She never took the inhaler with her, because she hadn’t had an asthma attack since she was a teenager. The inhaler was gone, and Holly couldn’t breathe, and then Analeigh was there. She crouched beside Holly, hands on the other girl’s heaving back. Holly kneeled with her palms to the pavement, head hung between her shoulders. Her ponytail had come loose, and the her hair spilled out in a dark mass of curls. It dragged against the loose gravel on the pavement, and Analeigh gathered it up in her hands as Holly fought to breathe.

“She’s having an asthma attack” William said, having suffered through the condition as a child. He slapped his hands against his jeans, searching for an inhaler, but of course he didn’t have. He shook his head and sighed, looking back in the direction from which they’d come. “No good. I’ve got an inhaler in my house, I know it, but we’ve gone a lot further than I thought. And the Beam’s in the way.”

Analeigh exhaled and rubbed her gloved hand along Holly’s waifish backside, listening as the girl’s breathing slowed and grew calm. Her shoulder blades were sharp ridges even through the girl’s leather jacket. “I’m not sure it’d been of much help anyway,” Analeigh said, “her being real and all.” William pondered the point, and said nothing. He watched Analeigh tend to Holly, thinking how funny it was that the one had come to kill the other, and that was when he noticed what Analeigh herself was just realizing. He stared at her with his mouth agape.

Analeigh was wearing gloves. She flinched and her fingers spread, dropping Holly’s hair as she sprang to her feet, back-pedaling from her companions. Holly looked up, a dark curl hanging from her glasses and across her eyes, still breathing shallow, halting breaths.

“What the fuck am I wearing?” she shouted at no one. She whirled around and screamed at the sky, at the Beam itself, her heels clattering across the ashen pavement. “COOPER!” Her voice broke, crackled. “WHAT THE FUCK AM I WEARING?” But the answer seemed obvious enough to all of them, even Holly, who fell to her side, her hip slamming against the pavement. She pulled herself up, dazed and bedraggled, while Analeigh stopped and stared at herself, her hands, her arms, everything, covered in some sort of leather bondage outfit, stiletto boots that came up to her thighs, strapped both above and below the knee. A single zipper ran up the suit’s front, undone to right between her breasts, both of which threatened to burst forth with each and every movement she made. She fumbled with the zipper, but the gloves were thicker than they looked, and the pull tab evaded her fingers for a frustrating moment. “FUCK YOU, COOPER! FUCK YOU!”

“Holy shit! You’re like a super-sexy spy or something! A fucking superhero!” William giggled, but his eyes remained locked on her in a way that made her feel cheap and exposed. Being in this ridiculous suit was like being a stripper. She flushed and breathed hard, catching the tab between her fingers and pulling, but it didn’t budge, no matter how hard or in what direction she yanked.

“How the hell am I supposed to get out of this thing?” Analeigh said, dropping her hands to her sides. The leather cat-suit squeaked with the movement, and she turned her torso left and right. There were pleated vents in the suit, by the armpits, at the waist, like the fireproof suits that motorcyclists wear in professional races. But the boots, the heels, the high collar and the zipper and the cleavage — the suit clung to her, made her every gesture and movement an obscene showcase in gleaming black leather. She groaned. “How do I get out of this?”

“You picked a hell of a time to change clothes,” Holly muttered. She sounded weak but appeared to be regaining her composure. She sat with one arm propped up her knee, the other hand supporting her weight. “Can we slow down, maybe take things one at a time? Because I’m still trying to process what just happened over there with the houses, why and how they got sucked into the ground, you know? I can’t figure it out without–” she regarded Analeigh with a nod. “–Without Cooper’s dream girl going all Buffy the Vampire Slayer on us?” She plopped her chin down onto her arm.

“I didn’t do this!” Analeigh said. She kicked at the pavement and stumbled — the heels were outrageous. While she hadn’t been thrilled about Holly dragging her from her happy home, kicking and screaming, wearing nothing but a t-shirt, sweatpants and flip-flops, at the very least she’d been comfortable. At least she’d been able to walk. Each step was a hammer strike in her ears, followed by a terrifying moment where here ankles trembled and she was sure she’d go careening back to the pavement.

“So?”

“So what?” Analeigh said.

“So what’s going on?” Holly yelled.

“I don’t know, okay?” Analeigh shouted back, and William chuckled. He clapped his hand over his mouth and continued sniggering into his armpit, tears practically streaming from his eyes. Analeigh ignored him. “I don’t know, Holly! I’m sorry! But I’m just as confused as you are! Before you dragged me out of my house, you know, I was pretty happy. Things stayed the same, and I never thought about what was going on around me. Just reliving that same day when Cooper came over my house, before he kissed me for the first time. I was that girl. And now I’m out here with you and I’ve seen them with my own eyes. How many now? Five? Six? Have I lost count? All these Analeighs, all of them, most of them from sometime later, and I’ve seen things that I’ve got no business seeing, or knowing! I didn’t want to know what Cooper did to me! I didn’t ask to know, because I wasn’t that person who got hurt, not yet!”

Holly’s retort had dried up on her lips, but Analeigh wasn’t done, jabbing a finger just inches from Holly’s chest. “You came here to kill me, Holly. You were going to murder me because Cooper — your precious fiancé — is obsessed with me! Is that my problem? Ask yourself, is it? Because it had never occurred to me to step outside my yard before, Holly, not before you came and showed me what was outside, but I wasn’t supposed to know! I’m not even real! I’m a construct, Holly, a different approach to the blow-up doll.” She let out her breath and brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t do this to you, not any of it. If you’re in a blaming mood, I’d start with Cooper.”

Analeigh looked to William. “It’s your turn, guy. You’ve been here longer, so you tell the story.” She waited for him to respond, but he said nothing. Both girls turned to him, standing silent with his mouth hanging slightly open, hand brought to his cheek, eyes locked on Analeigh. “Trying to figure out a complicated math problem, William?” When he said nothing in reply, she swallowed and said, “You know, we don’t have a whole lot of time, and besides, this deer-in-headlights thing is kind of creepy, don’t you think?

Holly let out an impatient sigh. “Oh, come on, man. It’s not like they’re the first pair you’ve ever seen, are they?”

William laughed louder then, a chuckle that started somewhere low in his chest. “So,” he said. “Who’re your friends?”

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