The Chaos (12 page)

The owner said, “Miss, we didn’t find anyone in the hole. Thank God, or my insurance would go through the roof.” My gunmetal gray bomber jacket was hanging on the back of his chair. I took it and put it on.

Suddenly, to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” someone started bellowing, “Stock markets fell/The volcano smells/Everything’s gone to hell.” It was the singing Santa. It lit up from the inside as it sang, its suit glowing a cheery red. It rocked back and forth
and shook its tambourine. Then it went silent and dark again.

“What in the world?” I said.

The owner shrugged. “It used to be one of the bar televisions. I think it’s still trying to report the news, only it comes out in song. I can’t make it stop.” He sighed. “All the others turned into giant clown faces and just rolled out the door. I ask you, how do you write that up on an insurance claim? Fifteen years I’ve been running this place, nothing like this has ever happened. It’s those bloody terrorists.”

The two cops glanced out the broken picture window, to where an active volcano was spewing lava. The male cop shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t know about terrorists, but I don’t think anything like this has ever happened anywhere in Toronto.” His voice shook a little. The quaver made him sound a little bit young, and a little bit scared.

The woman cop said, “Miss, I think you’d better start checking the local hospitals. It’s going to take you a while, I’m afraid. Does your brother have a cell phone?”

I nodded. What I wanted was to cry.

“Try giving him a call. Maybe he’s just fine.”

The cops gave the bar owner their cards, shook hands with him, and went out the door. In the gloom, it looked as though there was a small, sexless face in the back of the woman cop’s neck. A pretty face, and young, like a baby’s. It smiled at me. I took a couple of steps backward, and then her head was in the shadows again, and I wasn’t sure what I’d seen.

I called Rich’s number. The phone rang and rang. Just as I was about to hang up, there was a click and it went silent. But not the disconnected silent. This was that kind of hollow silence that you sometimes get before the person on the other end speaks.

“Rich? Hello?”

The sound that came out of the receiver made the little hairs
on my arms stand up. It sounded big, as though it were way huger than the phone could contain, so only a little portion of it squeezed through. If there were words in it, I couldn’t tell. It sounded like a million people screaming in pain.

I dropped the phone. With shaking fingers, I picked it up again. I put it to my ear. The sound hadn’t changed. “Rich?” I said, my voice cracking.

The phone went dead. I called the number again, but only got a recorded voice saying that the caller was out of range.

Punum came over. “Hey. You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay.” I sounded whiny and scared, like a little kid who’d gotten lost in the mall. “He’s supposed to check in with his parole officer this morning, and something really weird is going on with his phone, and—”

“Come,” she said. “Let’s go get some breakfast. I’m starving.”

“Are you insane? I have to find my brother. Plus I don’t have a lot of money.”

“I’ll treat you,” she said gently. “You’ll do a better job of searching for him if you’re not hungry.”

I thought about it. She was right. “Okay, then. Hey; did you have golden lashes last night?”

“What? No, I don’t do that kind of foofy stuff.”

“Huh. ’Cause you have them this morning.”

“You’re messing with me.”

“Nope. You have them, for real. And they don’t look fake. They look really good on you.”

She swore under her breath. She went over to the mirror above the bar. Or to what was left of it, anyway. Looked as though something heavy had crashed into it last night; it was mostly spiderwebs of broken glass, some of them falling out of the frame. Punum peered at her own reflection. She tugged gently at the lashes on one eyelid. “Wow.”

The bartender stopped sweeping up broken glass long enough to say, “They look really cool.”

I shoved gently at Punum’s shoulder. “Told you so. It goes with your guitar case.”

“Not,” the bartender continued, “the kind of look I’d usually expect to see on a butch. But on you, it so works.”

OMG, was she
flirting
with Punum? I’d never seen anyone come on to someone in a wheelchair before.

“Ho-ho-ho,” chortled the Santa Claus. He was lit up and rocking again. “The hospitals/Are overflowing/Only emergencies, please.” It didn’t really fit into the rhythm of “Jingle Bells,” but he did his best. Then he started bellowing “Oh Carolina.” The rude version; “Oh, Carolina/Kiss mih rass/Bumboclaat.”

Punum stared at it. “It’s like I did too many tabs of acid.”

The bartender said, “More like the world did.”

Punum shook her head. “Well, I’m outta here. Catch you later, Kathy.” She turned a full-strength devilish grin on the bartender, who twinkled back.

“See ya,” she said. “Call me, okay? When things get back to normal?”

Punum said, “Coming, Scotch? Eggs are on me.”

I went with her. When we got outside, she said, “Her name’s Kathy. Isn’t she cute? I think she likes me.”

“I guess she’s cute. Kinda chunky, though.” I stepped over another dead salmon.

Punum smiled a little. “You jealous?”

“Me? No!”

Her smirk got even broader. “Sorry to disappoint you. It’s just that I don’t do jailbait.”

“I’m not a little girl!” The street wasn’t just wet; it was flooding in places.

She laughed, shook her head. “Caked-on foundation, remember?”

Absentmindedly, I said, “She seems to be really digging on you.” Was that
algae
festooning that stop sign?

“Uh-huh. And just exactly why do you sound so surprised about that?”

Busted again. I blew out a breath. “I guess I just have a lot to learn,” I replied. My ankle was kinda itchy now. I needed to get to somewhere private so I could look at it.

“You bet you do.”

The number of people hanging around the streetcar stop had grown bigger than the shelter could hold. They spilled out of it, filling the sidewalk. They were watching five guys wrestling some kind of animal into an animal rescue truck. It really didn’t want to go, whatever it was. I glimpsed it between the bodies of the men. A beautiful iridescent pattern in green and yellow slithered along the length of it. A snake? It’d have to be massive.

The smart car I’d passed on the way here was squeezed in the middle. Maybe that hadn’t been a fire hose I’d seen wrapped around it. I shuddered. Whatever was going into that truck, I didn’t want to know.

Punum tried to check out her eyelashes again in the clear Lucite of the stop’s shelter. Great. She comes back with gold eyelashes, but I come back with a skin condition.

I asked her, “What’s with all the dead fish?”

“Beats me.”

Everywhere we walked, things were a mess. People were sweeping debris out of their businesses and homes. Ambulances, cop cars, and fire trucks were dashing about. There were telephone poles cracked in half; we had to pick our way around the fallen electricity lines. Cars piled up in the street. Some of them had crashed and were busted up so badly that I didn’t see how anyone in them could have survived. And there were Horseless Head Men; hundreds more than I’d seen before. I pointed at one. “Can you see that?” I asked Punum.

“Yeah, why? What is it?”

“I don’t know, but I was seeing them for a few weeks before all this started.”

“Really?”

“The difference is, now other people can see them, too.”

“So,” said Punum, “what’d you come back with from our little jaunt?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Are you limping?”

“Little bit. Stone in my shoe.”

She stopped. “Stop and take it out, then.”

“Uh, no. It’s a boot, see? All those laces, it’d be a pain. I’ll do it when we get to the restaurant.”

“Suit yourself.”

A thought pulled me up short. “Hey; in your dream, did you see what happened to the baby? The one I gave birth to?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way! Tiny kind of octopus kid?”

“Yeah, out of my leg. It had a beak.”

Softly, she said, “You pregnant?”

I felt a lurch of fright for a second. But . . . “No, I just had my period. I can’t be pregnant if I had a period, can I?”

“Don’t ask me. I only date chicks. It’s not the kind of thing I ever have to worry about.”

“Oh. Right.”

I called Rich’s cell a few times. Kept getting the message that his phone was out of range.

We had to dodge around pieces of buildings that were lying in the street. The fire department was trying to put out a blaze in a row of three two-story buildings. Punum whistled. “That must have been some earthquake.”

“This was more than just an earthquake.”

Her face got serious. “I know. I’m trying to deal with one thing at a time.”

I nodded. “Okay, gotcha.”

“I just hope my place is okay.”

She and I compared notes about our dreams as we went. Some of the things we’d dreamt were the same, and some were so not. She asked, “And were we sitting inside some kind of giant snake thing, only it was also a subway car? With, like, spirochetes or something along the sides?”

“Spiracles.”

The more we talked, the more freaked out I got. Punum was, too, but she also seemed excited about it. “Whaddya figure put us both to sleep like that? And how did we get outside the bar?”

I dunno. I’m not so sure we were unconscious.”

She considered that. “Whoa. Too weird. Give me a hand here, will ya?”

I pushed her chair over a tree branch that was lying on the sidewalk. She asked me, “So where do you think we were?”

“I don’t know! I just know there was an earthquake and my brother fell into a big hole in the ground.” The sick fear feeling washed over me again. “Oh, God.” I sat down right there on the cold ground rather than fall down. Now that I’d said it, it was like it had suddenly become real. “I can’t,” I said, my breath coming in gasps as I found it harder and harder to breathe. “I can’t . . .” I didn’t know what I couldn’t, just that everything was finally too much.

Punum leaned over me. “Whoa. Take it easy, Scotch. Deep breaths, okay? But slow ones. Come on, breathe with me, now.”

And I did, imitating the rhythm and depth of her breathing until the light-headedness had faded a little. “My parents aren’t coming home,” I told her. “I mean, not until Sunday night. And I can’t find my brother. He isn’t answering his cell, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who can help me.”

“Stand up. You can’t stay on the pavement like that. You’re getting your ass wet.”

A homeless guy sitting on a milk carton with his back against the wall of the bank said, “Tell me about it.” He looked like he was about my age. “I don’t suppose you ladies have the price of a cup of coffee on you?”

Punum said, “Hang on a bit.” She fished around in a pocket kind of thing slung under one arm of her chair. She took
some change out and handed it to me. “Give this to him, please.”

I raised an eyebrow, but only said, “Okay.” I went over to the homeless guy and put the money into the used coffee cup he was using to collect change from passersby.

“Right on,” he said, smiling at Punum.

“Yeah. You take care, okay?”

He tipped his cap to her. “Doing my best.”

Then, no lie, a Sasquatch pushed between us. The homeless guy yelped and dragged his dog out of the way. But the dog went apeshit, snarling and barking at the Sasquatch while the homeless guy struggled to keep hold of the dog’s collar. “Farley, down!” he yelled.

The Sasquatch stopped, turned, and eyed Farley. It was maybe six feet tall, but wider than two people. Its eyes were huge. I could see the little bloodshot veins in them. And it smelled. Sweat-stink, really strong, like, I-haven’t-bathed-for-a-thousand-days strong. There was a wildness to the smell, like fermented cat piss. That smell was almost strong enough to be a sound. The Sasquatch smiled or snarled, and I came out all over goose bumps. Its fangs were yellowed at the tips, and there was food caught in between them. Farley bravely kept on barking, but a more tentative bark than before. Even he was thinking better of tackling something like that.

The Sasquatch scratched its flank with a black-clawed paw. Dandruff flaked out of its heavy black fur. Then it just stumped away. Passersby skipped out of its way. Some of them squeaked in alarm. Some of them just looked irritated.

Punum’s mouth was still hanging open. The guy with the dog looked at us and said, “Interesting times, huh?”

“Tell me that was a costume,” said Punum.

I shook my head. “If you’re standing close enough, you know when someone’s wearing a costume. That thing blinked. Gorilla
suits don’t blink. That thing was real. Oh, God. It was real.” And all the weirdness I was trying to hold back came crashing down on me again: the glowing bubble in the bar; Richard disappearing; riding inside a giant worm, not to mention being stuck with barely five bucks in my purse in a downtown Toronto that looked like someone had picked it up and shaken it. And then there was that volcano, filling the sky with ash and muffling the warmth and light of the sun. I tried to flip my cell phone open, but my hands were trembling so much that it took me three tries. “Gotta call someone,” I said. “Gloria. Ben. Someone has to come and get me out of here.” Before I thought about what I was doing, I punched the first number on my call list. Shit. My parents. But you know, right then, I didn’t care how much shit I was in, didn’t care that they would ground me forever, didn’t care how angry they would be. I just wanted them to come and get me out of this mess.

There was only static on the line. “Something’s wrong,” I said.

“Maybe with your phone,” Punum replied. “I’ve been texting with my friends just fine.”

“Try another number,” suggested the homeless guy.

“Okay. Maybe that’s it.”

“You take care, dude,” Punum said to him as we moved on. We went in silence for about a minute. Then Punum said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

“It’s okay.” It really wasn’t, but she probably knew that.