The Chaos (11 page)

Something else about me felt wrong. Yeah, I know; understatement. I looked down at my legs. “Oh, God,” I whimpered.

My seatmate, a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk, twitched. “Scotch?” it said. “Holy crap, is that you?”

“Punum?”

“Am I in a coma?” the triangle replied. She sounded miserable. “Am I dying?”

“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I said. “What was that thing coming out of the lake? Did you see that?”

“Yeah. It exploded. That was freaky.”

“No, that was just weird,” I replied. “This right here is freaky. Where are we?”

She was all outlined in gold. Me, I was . . . I stared down at my legs, all eleven of them. Or maybe only nine, since two of them seemed to be Punum’s as well. “Wait; are you holding my hand?”

“I grabbed your wrist when shit started to go weird. Now, I don’t know what part of you I’m holding. Feels like your ankle. Both ankles.”

“Let go of me,” I said. “You’re not my type.”

“I can’t,” wailed the purple triangle. “I’m stuck.”

“Oh, goody.” My ear stung. I knew that was bad for some reason. Nine legs or eleven, all of my legs looked like half-melted black rubber. They were some busy legs, too. I was sharing two of them with some mouthy punk chick I didn’t like, and two more of them were intertwined with each other, with puffy-looking bulges where they touched. Where had I seen something like that before? Oh, crap. Earthworms. In that video we saw in bio class. Were my legs trying to
mate
with each other? Probably explained why I’d been feeling this tickling sensation, well, in places I didn’t want to think about right then. Could give Punum the wrong idea.

“Whatever I’m tripping on,” said Punum, “I don’t like it.”

I didn’t answer her, though, because right then, one of the puffy places on my mating legs bulged a little more—it felt as though my leg was yawning—and spat out a tiny version of the floppy-legged thing I’d become. “Holy shit!” I said. I managed to catch the baby before it rolled off me onto the floor of the train, or whatever we were in. It immediately wound sticky legs around the place on my wrist where that weird patch of skin had appeared the last time.

Some of the other beings in there with us started clapping; those that had hands, that is.

Punum the purple triangle looked at the baby; don’t ask me how I could tell she was looking. Not like she had eyes, or anything. She went all jangly around her gold-lined edges. “Jesus. What is that thing?”

“I think I just gave myself a baby.” The kid kind of had my
face, only with a beak. The irises of its eyes were yellow, shading inward to bright green pupils. It stared calmly at me with them. It only had nine floppy little legs. I guess the two mating ones came in when it got its first period, or had its first wet dream, or both, or something. It’d need to be a hermaphrodite to fertilize itself, right? I think maybe. Its legs weren’t as sticky as mine. And not black, either. Kind of a tortoiseshell brown, almost see-through.

The baby whipped some of its scary legs toward my face. I yelped and ducked my head, but I was too slow. The baby didn’t hurt me, though. It just started tapping on my chin.

“What’s it doing that for?” asked Punum.

I felt like I was going to upchuck. I felt like I was
supposed
to upchuck. “I think it’s hungry,” I said. And I was supposed to feed it my own stomach contents, like birds did. But there was no way I was going to hurl in public, even if this was really a coma, with people—well, things—watching me, much less spit it all into a baby’s mouth. But the feeling was getting stronger, moving upward into my chest. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. It could starve for all I cared, or learn to drink formula. I clamped my mouth tightly shut and held my breath, willing the upchuck feeling to go away. It didn’t work, and I was going to spit up any second. In panic, I reached deep inside myself and
pushed
. That’s the only way I could describe it.

We began to fade out. Thank heaven. Anywhere but here. But as we were leaving the dream, I heard, in a really big voice but weak and from far away, “Scotch! Oh, God, you gotta help me! It hurts so bad!”

Richard! He was here! I didn’t dare open my mouth to answer, for fear of spewing. Instead I tried to, I dunno, unfade us back into the dream.
Richard!

. . . but Punum and I were sprawled on the ground on Lake Shore Boulevard now, outside Bar None with its torn-open front. Punum’s chair was on its side. Its wheels were spinning, as though it’d only just fallen over. Her crutches were lying nearby. We were in a puddle. “You okay?” I asked her.

Her face was blank with confusion, but she replied, “Yeah. Damn, I get tired of people asking me that. Fix my chair, would you?”

I did. She pulled herself over to it and clambered into it. “Hey,” I said, “were we in . . . Did we just . . . Was I out just now? How’d we get outside? How come it’s light out?”

It wasn’t all that light. More like early morning. Kinda dark, and the world was a mess. Buildings with smashed windows. An ambulance careening the wrong way up the street, its siren blaring. People standing outside buildings, clutching injured arms and legs. People crying. Shit lying in the road; desks, a smashed-up refrigerator that looked as though it’d fallen from an upper story. Power lines torn loose and lying on the sidewalk and the road. Way too many people huddled at the nearest streetcar stop, like the streetcar hadn’t shown up in ages. Punum took it all in, then turned to me. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “That was seriously weird. Do you remember anything at all?”

Someone had stretched yellow police tape in an “
X
” across what used to be the glass front of the bar. We hadn’t been lying in a puddle. The whole street was wet. “You were a purple triangle.”

“For real? I could have sworn I was a hat stand.”

“Did you see me?”

“Yeah. You were a big bowl of licorice Jell-O.”

“Gross.”

“And you had a baby.”

“Well, at least you got that part right.”

Punum was looking all around, her mouth open in amazement, her eyelashes golden.

Wait. What?

She said, “Scotch, I don’t think it was just the bar.”

“Uh-huh, I figured that. Wow. Some crazy shit must have gone down last night.” There were cops everywhere. People sitting on curbs crying. Crashed cars. One of those half-pint smart cars was in the middle of the street with some kind of thick hose wrapped around it. Hard to make stuff out with all this smog everywhere, sucking in the daylight and making my eyes water. Above us was the sound of helicopters, though how they were flying in this smog, who knew? I coughed as acrid air hit the back of my throat. “What smells like that? Like burning brick? And why’s it so foggy?” I’d been close enough to hear my brother calling my name, asking for my help, and I’d left him behind. And it had felt like more than a dream. My ear was still burning, but I didn’t reach to touch it. I wasn’t ready yet. Too much else to deal with right here, right now.

“Scotch,” said Punum, pointing to the lake.

Her voice was quiet, the kind of quiet you get when you’re trying to tell someone that the guy with the knives for hands who comes for you in your dreams is standing right behind you, grinning.

I turned to see what she was pointing at. I gasped. “No way!”

There was a volcano in Lake Ontario. I could see it through the billows of gray cloud. In fact, it was the reason for the gray clouds. A full-on freaking volcano, complete with spouting flame, glowing orange lava flowing down its sides, and steam rising in dirty gouts when the hot lava hit the water. It was pumping out a thick, boiling mushroom cloud that was getting bigger every second. Punum stared up at it as though she were
seeing God. “That’s why it’s so dark,” she said. “All that smoke.”

“But how’d it get there?”

“You saw it last night, same as me.”

The scared little rabbit inside of me cowered at the memory of the massive cone, blacker than blackness, that I’d half-glimpsed thrusting forth from Lake Ontario last night, just before the world blew up. “No,” I said, “that’s not right. Volcanoes don’t just shoot up in seconds.”

A woman’s voice said, “They’re calling it Animikika.” She said it like Ah-nee-mee-KAY-ka. “On the news, I mean. That woman on Citytv’s been calling it Animikika. She says it’s Algonquin for ‘It is thundering.’ I think that’s what she’s saying, anyway. Sometimes her lips are forming different sounds than the words that’re coming out of the TV.”

Punum asked her, “Come again?”

She looked surprised. “Haven’t you noticed? Though I guess TV’s the least of everyone’s worries right now. I’m looking for my son. He was hanging out with friends last night, and I haven’t heard from him.” She was already looking past us, wanting to continue her search.

“Uh, okay,” I said. “Good luck or whatever.” Then I felt like a dork. Who says “whatever” after wishing somebody good luck finding their son?

“Thanks,” she replied. “You girls take care.”

“I gotta find my bro,” I told Punum. Though I had the awful feeling I knew where he was. Not where, exactly. He wasn’t here, you know? Not in this world, insane as that seemed.

“Do you know where he was last night?” Punum asked.

“You talked to him. He was the guy who had the mike after you. The other guy at our table was my . . . brother’s friend, Tafari. Shit. My folks will be calling any minute to check up on us. And Rich has to check in with his parole officer today.”

Punum raised an eyebrow, but only said, “Maybe someone in the bar saw him. I’ll come with you.” Then she gasped and felt around the back of her chair. “My axe! Where’s my axe?”

“Your what?”

“My guitar! Oh my god, I can’t lose that! I’ll never be able to replace it.”

“Maybe it’s in the bar?”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

There was such panic on her face. “It’s probably fine,” I reassured her. “Let’s go over there. We can check for my bro and get your guitar.”

“Okay.”

“Want me to push?”

But she was way ahead of me, practically halfway across the street already. I made to follow her. I felt it as soon as I took a step forward; that tightness pulling at my skin. That’s how new blemishes felt when they came in! It was my right calf. And did the boot on that foot feel just a little bit tighter? Oh my God, not my whole lower leg all at once. I’d never had one that big before. And I could have sworn that while I’d been dreaming last night, or whatever it was I’d been doing, the one I’d felt show up was on my ear.

Fear welled up in the back of my throat. The burning on my ear had faded to a tingling. I touched that ear. Oh, crap. Right there on the top edge of the ear was another blemish. I could feel its slightly raised edges, the tiny hint of stickiness. My ear
and
my leg? I couldn’t have gotten two at the same time, I just couldn’t. That had never happened before.

Punum was across the street. She whipped her chair around. “Hey! You coming, or what?”

I waited for an ambulance to rush, keening, past me. Then
I ran across the road. I had to sidestep smashed concrete and broken glass. And at least five dead salmon. WTF? As I ran, I untied my hair, which I’d bound up on top of my head. I didn’t know for sure that I had new blemishes. I hadn’t seen them, right? I’d felt the one on my ear, but that was probably the only one. My hair would cover it.

I caught up with Punum. Inside the bar, the older man I figured was the owner was sitting at one of his tables. He was the one who’d tried to get everyone down into the basement when the front window of the bar blew out. His plaid shirt had a long rip in one sleeve and the front of his white apron was smeared with what looked like soot. He had his chin in one hand, propping sorrow. He was rubbing his other hand in fretful circles over his balding head. A Horseless Head Man floated just above him, watching his circling hand in fascination. A couple of cops, a woman and a man, sat with him, asking him questions and taking notes. Okay, so I’d ask them about Rich. If I had to, I would make up some story to cover up that I’d been in there last night even though I was underage; tell the police I’d been at the movies with Gloria, tell them I’d heard what happened from Tafari . . .

Punum and I made our way past overturned tables and chairs, and for some reason, one of those almost life-sized singing Santas. I went over to the hole that’d been blown into the floor, hoping in a crazy way that I’d find Rich in there, whole and healthy.

The hole was like it had been last night; a jagged gash in the ground. Dirt and broken bricks lined its edges. Bits of rusty rebar poked through here and there. If one of those had stabbed Rich—

“Something I can do for you two young ladies?” said the woman cop, in a tone that let you know she wasn’t
asking, that she wanted an answer from you and she wanted it now.

I rushed over there, ignoring the pulling in my leg. “Did you find him? My brother? He fell into that hole there last night.”

Wheeling up behind me, Punum said, “I’m just here looking for my guitar. I left it behind the bar.”

Great. My world was falling apart, and all she could think about was her stupid guitar.

“It’s over here,” said the bartender with the bear claw tattoos. “I grabbed it and put it under the bar for you.”

The worry lifted from Punum’s brow. “Hey, great!” The bartender brought the guitar over. It was in a black and gold soft case with a sturdy carry strap. The bartender went back to sweeping up broken bottles and mopping booze up off the floor. The place smelled like Mr. Lane’s breath in ten a.m. geography class. Euw.

The woman cop said to me, “What’s your name, Miss?”

“Sojourner Carol Smith.” I was so dang obedient, I answered without thinking. But then, was I going to refuse to answer a cop’s question? I didn’t want trouble.

“Address?” As she wrote, she fanned a Horseless Head Man away from her face. I guess everyone could see them now.

I said, “I just want to know if anyone’s seen Rich. My brother. He fell in that hole over there last night. Did he get taken to a hospital, maybe?”