Just Plain Weird (30 page)

    
    
Doc and Eliza stood over me, staring down at me.

    
    
“The artifact?” Eliza asked.

    
    
I nodded by head, which ached badly-- I wasn’t sure whether it was from hitting the wall or from the intensity of the message I’d received.

    
    
“Shopping for what?” Doc demanded.

    
    
“Bunch of things,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead.

    
    
“Things for what?”

    
    
“I’m not sure,” I said.

    
    
“You’re not sure?”

    
    
“I have a list of things in my mind. I think it wants me to build something.”

    
    
“Build something!” Doc cried, and turned abruptly away, as if he were stricken by the sudden need to pace. He turned back, and asked, “Build what?”

    
    
“I don’t know yet.”

    
    
Doc paused, frowning. “This isn’t good,” he said. “How do you even know you can trust this thing, anymore? How do you know it doesn’t want you to build a bomb or something?”

    
    
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

    
    
“Look around-- nothing makes much sense does it?”

    
    
“All I know is that it put a shopping list in my head. That and a sense of urgency.”

    
    
Doc paused to consider the matter carefully, and then wagging his head, said, “I don’t know…. What kind of things are on this list.”

    
    
“Circuit boards, transistors, resistors, capacitors, walkie-talkies, software… a lot of things.”

    
    
“It’s going to take you hours to get all that,” he noted. “No telling how many stores you’ll have to go to. No telling if you’ll even be able to find it all.”

    
    
“I know a place that will have most of it,” I said. “It’s a big warehouse place, just outside of down-- just outside of where downtown was.”

    
    
“Maybe you should wait till tomorrow,” Doc suggested. “The temperature is dropping pretty fast out there.”

    
    
“We have snowsuits,” Eliza said, and Doc glared at her.

    
    
“Snowsuits won’t do you much good if the temperature drops abnormally low, and you don’t know it won’t. What if it drops to a hundred below zero? It’s possible, you know-- we just can’t tell how much damage has been done to the atmosphere. And you hear that noise outside?” he asked. It was true, now and then as we spoke, there was a distant roaring, muffled so that you could barely hear it within the living room. It didn’t sound exactly like thunder-- not the crackling booming thunder I had known-- but rather a dull edgeless low rumble, as though the atmospheric conditions on the planet were now completely changed. When the thunder sounded again, deep vibrations ran through the floor, and Doc said, “There, see? Sounds like a storm coming, doesn’t it?-- but what kind of storm? How can you know for sure? Maybe you’ll get caught in a blizzard-- the sky can drop twenty, thirty inches of snow on you, and then what? You’re stuck; you’re dead. You have to start viewing this as an alien world, literally, because, really, it is.”

    
    
“I’ll go outside and bring the snowsuits in,” Eliza said, heading for the front door.

    
    
Doc gawked after her in amazement. “She just doesn’t listen, does she?” he said to me. “It’s incredible how natural it is for her, too. And you probably won’t listen either.”

    
    
“Doc, I think this is really important that we do this, and do it right now.”

    
    
“You don’t know what it wants you to build, but it has to be done right this minute?”

    
    
“I think it will all make more sense after the thing is assembled,” I said.

    
    
Doc sighed. “And I probably couldn’t talk you out of this, could I?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Well, at least leave Eliza here, with me.” The moment the words came out of his mouth, he appeared to realize how futile it would be to keep Eliza pent up at home. Misery poured over his face. “Well, I guess that’s a dumb idea. She always has been pretty spirited. Since she met you, she’s bolder than ever. I’d probably have to bind and gag her and lock her in the closet to get her to stay home.” He wagged his head, defeated, and added, “This isn’t a good idea.”

    
    
He dropped his head and turned away, then, headed back down to his office.

    
    
When Eliza rushed back into the house, she slammed the door after her and cried, “Burrrrrrr!” Her usually pallid checks were rosy from the cold. She carried the bulky bundle the snowsuits made over to the sofa, and threw them down.

    
    
“Gotta be about twenty degrees out there,” she said, putting her hands to her mouth so that she could blow hot air into them. “That thunder-- if that’s what it is-- sounds really nasty, too. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from any one place; it just rumbles across the whole sky, from east to west.” She lowered her hands from her face. “Where’s Doc?”

    
    
“He went back downstairs,” I said.

    
    
“Huh,” she said, as though expecting Doc to put up a fight about her going out. She kicked off her deck shoes, then, and picked up one of the snowsuits. It was purple, jumpsuit style. She balanced to step into the suit, pulling it up over her bare legs, which were pretty pink from the cold. She reared back a little to slip her hands into the arms of the suit and pulled it on. After she zipped up the zipper, she sat on the sofa. She pulled out a pair of black winter boots from under the other snowsuits, and put them on. She looked down at the boots appraisingly, nodded as though satisfied, and then looked up at me. “Well, aren’t you getting dressed?”

    
    
“Which suit is mine?”

    
    
She reached over, grabbed a suit and tossed it to me. The bottom half of the suit was blue and the top half-red with wide white strips that formed X’s on the front and back of the suit. On the white strips were series of small blue stars. I held the suit by the shoulders out in front of me; though I’d never been big on fashion-- seldom gave a second thought to any of my clothing-- I realized that this could possibly be the gaudiest piece of outerwear in the cosmos. As I pulled on the thing, I hoped that the zipper wouldn’t get caught, trapping me inside. The fit was pretty good, though, and for the moment-- as there was no mirror in the room-- I could go on unaware of how much a looked like Evil Knievel.

    
    
Before we left, Eliza insisted on going to the kitchen and filling a couple thermoses with hot coffee from the food dispenser. She also retrieved a paper bag filled with ham and cheese sandwiches. We walked out the front door, then, and I saw that she seemed giddy with excitement, as if we were going out on a picnic or something. As she bounded down the front stairs, heading for the four by four, I felt uneasy though I couldn’t understand why. Maybe because the thrill she seemed to be experiencing was entirely inappropriate. This little outing probably wouldn’t develop into anything resembling fun. But that was just the thing about Eliza: no matter whether the unknown was good or bad, still she rushed forward to meet it, totally trusting in fate. I wished I, too, could do that.

    
    
As I walked down the stairs, it began to snow. I saw the first fluffy flakes by the porch light, fluttering down. I reached out a hand and one of the flakes landed in my palm. The flake was black, and melted quickly from the heat of my hand, leaving a dark smudge on my skin.

    
    
“I think I see how everything got covered with this black junk,” Eliza commented as she drove along. “It snows like this at night, and during the day, when the temperature rises, the snow melts, and all that is left is the black junk that was in the snow.” The streets were pitch-black by now, and the headlights of the four by four did not throw much light onto the pavement. Even the high beams seemed to be weakened by the darkness, as though it had the secret ability to drain the energy out of any light source that attempted to penetrate it. It began to snow for real now, the black flakes invisible in the dark. When they dotted the windshield enough, Eliza turned on the wipers, and dark smears formed on the glass. She had to repeatedly hit the washer button to spray the glass so that the sooty stuff could be cleared away. “This isn’t working too well, Trav,” she said, then. “We’re going to run out of windshield washer soon, and we’ll be flying blind.”

    
    
“Maybe we should just break the glass out,” I suggested.

    
    
She glanced at me, and though it was too dark to see her face clearly, I knew she had a horrified expression.

    
    
“Just break it out?” she cried. “Are you kidding? Doc’ll kill us for sure-- besides, we’ll freeze our butts off.”

    
    
So we stopped at the next gas station we came across, and I went inside and grabbed a couple gallons of windshield wiper fluid and a half dozen road flares. I went outside and popped the hood of the four by four, and started to fill the reservoir that held the wiper fluid. Wind whipped the dark snow around, and by the time the plastic container was full, I had snow in my hair and sticking to my face. I jumped back into the passenger seat, and threw the rest of the wiper fluid and flares on the floor, next to the shotgun and bag of shells.

    
    
“You don’t have any napkins or anything, do you?” I asked Eliza, who watched as I settled in my seat.

    
    
“Check the glove compartment.”

    
    
I found some moist towelettes, individually wrapped. I opened one, and wiped my forehead. The towelette came away black, as though I’d used it to try to clean a leaky oil pan.

    
    
Eliza wrinkled her nose in disgust when she noticed the filthy towelette.

    
    
“What is that stuff, anyway?” she asked, as she pulled out of the station and back onto the street.

    
    
“A mixture of things,” I told her, and suddenly I knew. “The invaders-- these beings had extractor beams. Their ships would remain in orbit and they would target these beams on whatever they wanted to salvage. Say it was a building, a big office building. The beam would hit the structure, and reduce it to its basic components at a molecular level. The molecules would travel up to the ship, where it would enter a chamber where the molecules could be separated-- and the steel molecules could be separated from the aluminum and copper and silver and so on. The individual elements would then be routed to different storage containers in the ship’s enormous holds. All the junk in the atmosphere is the stuff thrown off, discarded by the extractor beams. Apparently they could program the beams to exclude substances they weren’t interested in salvaging-- things like oil, grease, dirt, clay, etc. The molecules from those unwanted things are all mixed together and lingering in the atmosphere.”

    
    
“How do you know all that?” she asked.