PROLOGUE
The sky had taken on that sickly olive drab tinge he had known so well a lifetime from now. The hurried crowds coursed through the streets of the city, always passing through, never stopping, never noticing the ugly tilt of the night sky, the way the light from stars millions of light years away seemed to be magnetized toward a pinprick of swirling darkness. They'd never seen it as he had, never had to battle it, never had to watch it swallow their worlds.
He was tired. Despite the polish on his patent shoes, despite the natty press to his suit, an ache resonated from his bones. The moonlight cooling the day away from the tarred rooftop, was unable to ease the exhaustion and resignation out of his body. It felt as though he'd stood here a thousand times, more than he could hope to count, staring up at the budding disaster opening its maw an intergalactic stone's throw from the home he could never abandon. And yet he had no concrete memory of ever before doing what he knew he was going to do.
An intense wave of déjà vu swept through him, originating in the depths of his stomach, echoing until he felt a twinge of nausea. Though tonight was the first that he had physically climbed the stairs to the top of this building, the first time he had stared up at the inky sky with an eye toward disaster, every cell in his body was groaning with recognition.
A vibration from his belt pulled him to the present, his monitor calling him to duty. He sighed and clicked the pager off, ready to carry out his daily existence until he was forced to act against the coldness above him.
He opened the door to the stairwell, giving one last hard look to the first inkling of the black hole that would consume his planet, knowing that his every attempt to deflect it had failed.
CHAPTER 1
It wasn't easy to lose an entire world. Oh, sure, a red sandal or a hair tie every once in a while. Some people even managed to lose their cars in parking lots and their homes in freak accidents of nature. But your entire planet? An object almost 8000 miles in diameter wasn't likely to be found in a beat up cardboard lost-and-found box under some receptionist's desk. Tacking posters to telephone poles with photocopied images of the blue and green swirl's likeness probably wouldn't do a whole lot of good, either.
It started on a Sunday. Sundays, Gloria decided, were definitely the bloodiest day of the week. Sure, Mondays were depressing, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays mind-numbingly boring. Fridays were just experiments in exhaustion and disappointment. She couldn't recall the last Saturday she hadn't slept through. But Sundays, O Holy Days, Sundays were the worst of all.
Sundays, she went home for dinner with the family.
"I don't know why this is such torture for you every freaking week," Benny sighed. "It's not like they throw knives at you."
Gloria mashed the radio preset buttons in sequence. Nothing but synchronized commercials. She and Benny lived ten miles from her mother's house, but the trip was never long enough to provide her with enough escapist tunes.
"They throw knives, it's just you can't see them. They looooove you." She flopped back in her seat, giving up on the radio and knocking a week-old coffee cup out of the console. "Well, crap," she commented.
Benny laughed and fished the empty cup from under the brake pedal. "They love you, too. It's just normal family stuff, okay? Like when my family teases me. Your mom doesn't really think you have a bad job and a diseased uterus."
"Shriveled," Gloria reminded him. "I said shriveled, not diseased."
He patted her thigh, smiling his sweet, boyish smile at her, the one with crinkles and blue eyes and those little bitty sexy freckles. She wiggled her almost-too-tall-for-compact-cars frame around in the passenger seat and kissed his cheek. "I'm glad I have you, anyway. I can't wait till we get married and move at least 500 miles away."
His hand squeezed her leg reassuringly, but his smile faded. A public service announcement from the electric company filled the little car.
"So hey," Benny said loudly, covering the awkward silence, "I saw your dad yesterday, grabbing coffee at the Frontier."
"What, no heart-attack-on-a-plate cinnamon roll?"
"Nah, looks like he's trimmed down some."
"Did he remember who you were?" She attempted a derogatory chuckle, but it was painful. "Hell, did he remember who I was?"
"Christ." Benny exhaled in frustration. "Your entire family is not made up of monsters."
"True. There's my sister."
"Okay, your mom's kind of bossy and your dad can't concentrate for two seconds on anything or anyone outside a laboratory, but you're their kid. They love you."
Gloria refused to respond, tired of how this conversation always went. She went through the radio dial again, a futile effort. Thankfully, Benny let it drop.
Before the commercials ended, they pulled into her mother's driveway, chugged up the steep slope to the top of the drive and stepped out. Her mother's house, evidence of the benefits of multiple divorces, was a sprawling hacienda in the Albuquerque foothills, its solar windows glinting gold in the setting sun. It was not home to Gloria, much as the five childhood interval houses had not been homes, merely places to rest her head and stay out of a stepfather's way.
She settled her Sunday skirt awkwardly on her hips, knowing it showed her knobby knees, and let Benny take her hand to drag her bodily to the front door.
"There you are!" her sister hollered from the front door, a trio of children winding around her feet like hungry cats. "We were starting to get worried you'd gotten lost."
"I tried," Gloria said, pulling her face into what she hoped was a happy smile as an ever-plumping Annie pulled her into a bear hug.
"I'm so glad you managed to drag Benny here this week," Annie gushed, sucking Benny into her gravity of warmth. "Mom got this idea into her head you two had broken it off and Glor' was just making it all up -- stop licking your sister, Matty -- so we wouldn't fix her up with any more lawyers."
Annie's laughter echoed around the large foyer, bouncing off the sautillo tiles and cavorting to the viga-beamed ceiling. Gloria couldn't help but laugh back. Where she'd gotten all the bitterness and insecurities, her older sister had developed into the personification of a hug.
"Well, if it isn't Miss Gloria." Her mother's voice wafted through the foyer, seeming to gain in reverberation and recrimination as the words fell over all of them. "Late again to the family dinner."
Evelyn propped herself regally on the back of her white sofa, for which four dozen bathed and pampered baby goats must have given their lives. Her pink silk robe, her "day dress," fluttered about her spinning-class shaped skeleton like day-old butterflies.
Even Annie's kids –- 4-year-old Matty approaching the world by taste, 6-year-old Allie with her nose permanently stuck in a book, and 2-year-old Jack who held the world record for drool volume in an hour –- fell utterly silent and stared at their grandmother in awe, peasants caught in the light of a fearsome fallen goddess.
Gloria started to stammer out her weekly apology, and in her stumbling somehow toppled the vase on the hall table.
Benny, his reflexes honed by months of practice, deftly caught the pottery. He smiled his woman-melting smile, directed its full heat on Evelyn, and actually had the gall to hug her. No evil befell him.
"It was my fault, Ev. I just couldn't get my mascara straight." He winked his long black lashes at her.
Evelyn waited a moment for the power in the room to shift back to her realm. Annie held her breath, Gloria rolled her eyes, and finally, thankfully, Evelyn laughed, sharp as breaking glass.
She patted Benny on his beloved cheek and swished her stilt-like legs to the dining room. "Well, let's not waste the caterer's efforts. It may be cold, but it likely won't kill us."
"Can't say the same for her," Gloria muttered to Annie, who stifled a giggle.
"Gloria," Evelyn snapped, and though her back was turned, Gloria could see her blood red lips thin and her hawkish eyes narrow. "How are your applications going?"
Gloria closed her eyes and let her head drop. Annie gave her a pat on the back. "Buck up, soldier."
A childish murmur rose from around her feet, and Gloria opened her eyes to find Allie staring owlishly up at her.
"I know Peter Pan, Aunt Glory," Allie whispered urgently. "If you want, you can sleep over at my house, and when he flies over tonight we can run away to Neverland and be little kids forever. Grammy Evlin can't come," she added, pushing her pink glasses solemnly up her nose.
Gloria laughed for the first time in a month of Sundays. She folded up her towering frame to child's size and hugged her niece. "I might take you up on that, Al. Just don't let Grammy hear you call her that, 'kay?"
"Gloria!"
"Coming, Mother," Gloria sighed.
"I can't keep telling you this every time I see you, Gloria," her mother began, taking her seat at the head of the heavy, ornate, Mexican-style dining table. "If you don't get that advanced degree, you'll never be anything more than a secretary."
"She's a social worker," Benny said gently.
"Social worker, secretary." Evelyn waved her manicured nails. "It's all paperwork. Do you want to fill out other people's forms the rest of your life?"
Gloria gritted her teeth, and girded herself for her weekly three-hour lambasting, the motherly storm that somehow spared everyone but her.
***
Later, lying in their queen size bed, her head throbbing, the familiar frustrated tears fighting to emerge, she buried her face in Benny's chest and whispered, "I swear, you're the only reason I don't stab her in the eye before turning a fork on my own soft parts."
For once, Benny failed to laugh.
***
Five days later, Gloria stared down at three piles of paper sitting menacingly atop her government-issue gray monster of a desk. The first was a large stack of other people's paperwork: processing documents for foster children, reports of possible domestic abuse, in-home evaluations. The second was more colorful, with better spelling: various applications to local colleges in anthropology, psychology, and history, all subjects she'd expressed interest in at one time or another, all applications her mother had requested on her behalf.
The third stack wasn't really a stack, just one final paycheck and a formally apologetic letter. Budget cutbacks, they had to reduce the workforce, she didn't have enough seniority, clout, degrees, experience, yada yada yada. What it really boiled down to was she was just a paperpusher earning virtually no money, but if they "let go" of her and everyone else like her, the city could afford to build a spaceport or downtown canal system.
Gloria let her head drop to the desk. The government had even taken an extra chunk off her last payment because she'd been in the hole on vacation days. The grand total came to $103.42. It wouldn't even pay her half of the bills for a week.
Too tired for tears, she gathered the handbag's worth of personal items from her desk and trudged out of the office five hours earlier than normal. She briefly stopped by her friend Terry's cubicle, only to discover the normally effervescently cheerful butterball staring at the same form letter she herself had received.
"You too, huh?"
Terry looked up with a start, mascara-streaked tears rolling down her face. She swiped them away. "Happy Friday, right?"
"Want to go get a drink?"
"Who's buying?" Terry joked wetly, waving her own stunted paycheck.
"We can order water."
Luckily, the Up All Night Café was open even in the middle of the day. Not so luckily, Sean was behind the counter.
"Late for lunch or early for tea?" he belted as soon as he saw them. "Haven't seen you ladies in a while. Did you miss me?"
"If I promise to, will you leave us alone?" Terry jabbed.
"'Cause I haven't heard that one before." Sean grinned, running a clammy hand through his shaggy red hair. "Nonfat lattes again today? Or are we feeling adventurous?"
"Two waters," Gloria replied before he could start the drip. She sat down heavily at a table.
Sean glanced from one to the other, back and forth, attempting to glean the problem telepathically before finally resorting to old-fashioned, unreliable speech. "What's going on?"
"Got any job openings?" Terry asked. Even her bleached-blond kinky curls drooped.
"Oh, wow." Without another word, Sean set two large mugs under the espresso machine and set them flowing. He emerged from behind the counter, setting the two foamy full-fat lattes on the table. "On me."
Gloria offered a genuine smile of thanks, which she was sure she would later regret in the form of a dozen deflected date requests. For the moment, however, Sean went quietly back behind his counter, leaving them to mope in peace.
Four free lattes and half a dozen pee breaks later, Gloria staggered up from the table. "I think my head is going to pop off," she commented, her words tumbling out quicker than her brain could process.
"Can you OD on caffeine?" Terry groaned.
"If you can, I have. I'm going home. Will you be okay?"
"Honey, I'm married." Terry glanced slyly at her. "After the apocalypse, it'll be the roaches and the married folk. We survive."
Gloria gave her a fortifying hug, waved at Sean before he could corner her, and went home. It was close enough to quitting time, maybe Benny would be home already.
She trudged home to their super modern, brand new downtown loft, whose only benefit as far as she was concerned was that it offered her a walking commute to work. Otherwise, it was completely Benny's baby -- she'd wanted a quiet old adobe in the valley, where they could have a dog, or maybe a goat. But today, she was just glad it afforded her the opportunity to avoid the broken down car she was sure the universe would have inflicted upon her.
She climbed the three flights of stairs, wary of getting on an elevator should it get stuck while she had to pee so badly yet again.
She unlocked the bright white front door, calling out, "Benny, you home, baby?"
She heard a thump and a groan from the bedroom.
"Sorry, didn't mean to surprise you. I just have to pee, then I'll explain ever...y...thing."
Despite the cries of her bladder, she ground to a halt in the bedroom doorway.
Benny was home, but he wasn't the only one. The thump she'd heard hadn't been a surprised Benny stumbling or dropping something. It had been the top of the girl's over-dyed head thumping Gloria's headboard.
They were having such a good time under the sheets they hadn't even noticed her. Either that or they were using teamwork -- and their belly buttons -- to open a jar whose lid was stuck tight.
"This isn't tragic," Gloria said out loud. "It's just so...so...cliché."
Forgetting her biological urges, she backed out of the apartment. She went back down the stairs and outside into the end of the week as the traffic flowed out of downtown to the neighborhoods and suburbs, as the pool halls and pubs began to collect their patrons for the evening.
She counted all she had lost that day, and when the total was whittled down, she found she had only $103.42 to her name. No car, no job, no home, no bed, no warm lover. Just one last paycheck -- and her family.
She reluctantly dialed out collect on the payphone, then slumped on the curb to wait for her mother. She knew only that it couldn't possibly get any worse, and at least the world still turned beneath her feet.
Before morning, she would have lost even that.
CHAPTER 2
Gloria rubbed her eyes open, her fingers scrunching through the dried tears that had clotted in her lashes. She reached over to her left, beginning the Saturday morning cuddle ritual that began with her burrowing under Benny's warmth and ended with--
Her hand hit something soft and small, but definitely not warm. She squinted in the midmorning sun beams that managed to poke through the closed blinds. One of her mother's spare pillows, fluffy and wrapped in a 300-thread count case, stared blankly back at her.
She rolled on her back and examined the pristine white ceiling of her mother's guest bedroom. Tendrils of fresh brewed coffee wafted up her nose, and the crushing grind of a blender hummed through the closed door. Her mother would be in the kitchen, her makeup already on, her hair already coifed, drinking coffee, whirring up juice, pouring tiny bowls of granola and grapefruit. Gloria should feel homey, she should want to wander down the hall in her socks, she should love to sleepily inhale a mug of coffee just like those old Taster's Choice commercials.
But granola wasn't pancakes, steamy coffee wasn't herbal tea, and her mother certainly wasn't a source of warmth and comfort. She whined at the pillow and buried herself under the covers.
"What are you still doing here? I thought you were out with your running group."
"What?" Gloria groaned. "Mom, I haven't been running in five years."
"Don't 'Mom' me. You're the one who bitches about missing runs, not me. Anyway, I made breakfast, but if you want any you have to get it now before I have to go to work."
Frowning, Gloria peered over the top of her bedsheets. Her mother didn't work, and she hadn't made anyone else breakfast since 1983.
Instead of her mother's pursed features, however, it was Annie's face smiling wanly at her. Yet it wasn't Annie at all. Annie was plump, round, joyful, happy, caring. This mockup of her sister was pale, drawn, tired. An element of sweetness was still there, but it lay weakly underneath a patina of premature age.
Gloria rushed out of bed, stubbing her toe on the nightstand and noisily brushing a decorative kokopelli figurine to the hardwood floor.
"Annie, what are you doing here? Are you all right? Do you need me to take you to a doctor?" Gloria reached out to touch her sister, her heart stopping as she saw Annie's frame seemed to have dropped thirty pounds overnight.
"I live here, dummy," Annie replied, pushing Gloria's hand away. "Now come on. If your lazy butt wants the car today, you have to take me to work."
"What work? Since when do you work?"
Annie rolled her eyes and turned down the hall toward the kitchen. "Since the last rat stopped making child support payments. Jeez, Glor', it must've been some crazy dream you were having."
Gloria stumbled down the hall behind her sister, trying to figure out what dream could mess with real life like this. Did she dream her mother was a cranky old matriarch living it up on alimony payments? Did she fantasize a happily married stay-at-home-mom of a sister?
Finally, awareness trickled into her brain. The real world hadn't gotten messed up -- well, not any more than it already had been. She was dreaming right now. That was all. It wasn't a nice dream, though, that was for sure. Hopefully, getting fired and finding Benny playing wild stallion for some other woman was all part of the mad, mad, mad, mad nightmare she was having.
Relief flooded through her. Soon she would wake up at home, Benny snoring next to her, a transvestite hollering drunkenly on the downtown street below, and she would know that all was right and good and just in the world. She'd trudge through her normal weekend routine and bemoan the alarm clock come Monday morning.
"Where's Mom?" she asked as she plopped into a chair at the breakfast table. She was interested to see how her subconscious would twist the all-powerful Evelyn Walker.
"In her room, as always." Annie tossed a bowl, spoon, a box of cereal and a jug of milk in front of her. Not quite the homemade breakfast she was expecting. "Which reminds me, could you go to the drugstore today? Her meds are about out, and I don't think I'll be able to get out of the cafe before the pharmacy closes."
Interesting. "Sure. Which meds does she need?"
"The pain meds and anti-nausea. I can't ever remember what they're called." Annie piled several glasses of juice, a mug of coffee, and a handful of pills on a tray. "Just don't let them tell you the insurance isn't covering it. Doesn't seem to matter how many times I tell them, they always want to get cash. Bastards."
Gloria nodded, and Annie carried the loaded tray down the hall. Pain and nausea, Gloria thought. That could be anything.
She went through the motions of pouring her bowl of cereal, chomping through it.
She heard the TV in the sitting room click on loudly, and the furiously paced music of a Saturday morning cartoon blared briefly.
"Shhh!" someone whispered urgently, and the volume quickly receded.
Gloria padded over to the doorway, peering through the shuttered gloom. Three half-sized bodies crowded around the set, two of them struggling for the remote.
"I said give it to me!" the one she recognized as Allie said through clenched teeth. "You'll wake up Grammy."
"She’s already awake," the smaller, who must be Matty, replied. "Mommy went in there, I saw her."
Gloria realized the tiny drooling body must be Jack, but it was only their ages, genders, and resemblance to Annie that allowed her to come to any sort of conclusion. Allie was no longer a studious, mousy little thing -- instead, her lovely green eyes had a distinct tilt, her mouth was full, her hair was not brown but a curly black. Matty had red hair now, and little Jack...well, all babies looked alike to Gloria. None of them looked anything like their father Mateo any longer.
Annie had said something about the "last rat." Gloria supposed that in this bizarro dream world of hers, Annie's beloved kids all came from different sources.
Bizarro-Jack pushed himself upright and tottered over to her, a gnawed teddy bear dangling from his hands. She smiled at him as he grinned with all his pearly little milk teeth. Gloria crouched, holding her arms open to him.
"Hey, there, kiddo. How're you doing this morning?"
The older kids turned at the sound of her voice, and Bizarro-Allie cried, "Don't!" while Bizarro-Matty snickered.
Before she could gather the toddler into her arms, his maw gaped wide and his chubby sausage legs launched him at her. Those pretty little beads of teeth chomped firmly on the soft flesh of her thigh, and even through her pajama bottoms Gloria could feel her skin tearing.
She shrieked, fighting the instinct to whack at the kid like he was a rabid squirrel. She tumbled over backward, hitting her butt hard on the floor, and crab- scrambled away.
Bizarro-Jack plunked onto his bottom, his diaper making squishing sounds. He blinked angelically.
"What the hell was that?" Gloria shouted.
Bizarro-Allie shook her head. "He likes to bite."
Bizarro-Matty chortled. "Hell!" he repeated, picking up on Gloria's slip. He leapt to his feet and ran a tight circle, muttering "hell" over and over with glee.
"Matthew, sit down! I'll get Mom," Bizarro-Allie warned.
Gloria rubbed at her leg, frowning. This dream was not only weird, it hurt.
Stomping footsteps echoed toward them, and Gloria stood up quickly, hoping to remind her red-faced sister that she was the adult and surely far too old for a spanking. Who knew what could happen.
"What are you all doing?" Annie asked through clenched teeth. "Do none of you care a damn about your poor grandmother? Your mother?" She glared pointedly at Gloria.
"He bit me," Gloria said. She immediately regretted her tone, as it sent her maturity back to grade school, in the age-old "he started it" defense.
"Don't give me that," Annie snapped. "He's bitten you three times a day since you moved back here. I'm sick of hearing about it, and I can't do anything about it. Matty, dammit, shut your mouth or I'll wash it out with soap, I swear to God!"
Bizarro-Matty wound down, breathing heavily and whispering one final "hell" as his eyes spun dizzily.
"Gloria, is that you I hear?" her mother's voice called. It trembled and cracked as it made its way down the long tiled hallway.
"Go," Annie said, nodding toward the bedroom. "She's having a good day."
Wondering what a bad day was, Gloria slowly made her way down the hall, leaving Annie to sedate her children.
She paused in the doorway. The room was inky black, and it took her eyes a moment to realize the windows were covered with heavy drapes to suffocate the sun. The air was stale, tainted with disinfectant and an underlying cologne of sickness.
Evelyn lay in the middle of her huge bed, barely making an ant-sized tent in the heavy duvet. But as she drew closer, Gloria could see her mother's slight shape was not brought on by hours on an exercise bike or a life of fat- and sugar-free living. This Evelyn was eaten away from the inside, as though a creature lived within who was desperately hungry and sucking her body inward, devouring first the fat, then the muscles and tissues, the organs, liver, gall bladder, intestines. Her blood was nowhere to be seen, leaving her a pale wraith, consisting only of bones and skin that would soon be consumed.
This was no flu, no recovering surgery or accidental injury. Death hovered over this room.
Her mother's hand reached out, wavering and trembling. Reluctantly, Gloria grasped the paper-thin fingers.
"Hey, there, sweetheart," Evelyn smiled. "Are you staying with me today?"
"I-I think so," Gloria stuttered.
"Good. I've missed you. We were only halfway through The Wizard of Oz. I love the way you read it."
Gloria's heart thumped. The novel had been the first -- and only -- book her mother had ever given her, when she was nine years old. She'd read the tale over and over, until the covers fell apart and she'd had to keep the pages together with a large rubber band. When she was fifteen she'd come home from school to find Evelyn had thrown the beloved tome out in the garbage while preparing to move house yet again.
She felt tears running down her face as she spied the book lying on the bed table, its old worn covers held in place by a strip of duct tape.
Throat closed, unable to speak or even swallow, Gloria pulled away, dropping her mother's frail hand.
"This isn't happening," she whispered. "I need to wake up."
"What was that, sweetheart?" Evelyn said faintly, even as Gloria backed out of the room. Her eyes fluttered and she drifted away on medication and disease.
Gloria raced back to the guest bedroom, flinging her pajamas off and hurriedly tugging on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She hopped into her tennis shoes and fled back to the kitchen, stuffing her hair into a ponytail.
Annie was loading the dishwasher, and the urchins all had their heads buried in breakfast bowls. "We need to leave in about five min-- Gloria, where are you going?"
Gloria paused with her hand on the back door knob. "I don't want to be here anymore. I have to wake up."
Bizarro-Matty giggled, and his older sister looked at her solemnly, as if she completely understood but had accepted her strange world long ago.
"Gloria, I need you to stay with the kids and Mom today," Annie insisted. "If I miss one more day down at the shop, that a-hole Abrego will fire me. Mom's insurance only goes so far."
"I'm sorry," Gloria said, shaking her head in denial. "I have to go."
Annie started toward her, but Gloria pushed through the door, banging her hip -- that was going to leave a mark. With her shoes untied, she ran down the street, feeling the blood pumping in her long legs.
She closed her eyes as she ran, telling herself it couldn't hurt, she was only dreaming, the worst that could happen was she'd fall out of bed. At least she'd wake herself up doing that.
And then she fell out of bed. Onto hot asphalt.
She opened her eyes. Nope, still on the street, the hot New Mexico sun beating down into her, reflecting off the macadam like a convection oven. Sweat streamed from her pores, soaking her flimsy T-shirt -- where had she gotten a Rainbow Brite shirt? -- and her jeans were torn and bloody from the curb that had tripped her and rammed itself through the flesh over her knee.
She peered at the wound, picking bits of gravel out of it, her tears blurring her vision and heating her face to near melting. Wanting to wake up had never seemed so important before, nor nearly as impossible. She sobbed, letting the sun bake the back of her neck, letting her tears dribble endlessly onto her clothes, merging with the panicked sweat. Sitting in the gutter, she huddled and did her best to wish herself back to her calm, sane, world, where she could brush her teeth, throw on a Ross Dress For Less suit, and go off to do other people's paperwork. She longed to march tiredly home at six o'clock sharp and watch TV for a few hours before engaging in hanky-panky-by-rote and dropping off to bored and exhausted sleep.
A cool breeze danced over her back, raising goose bumps in her flesh. She pulled back, and stared blinkingly upward, wondering if the world had mustered up a thunderstorm just to further ruin her life.
But when she looked up, it wasn't a fat olive thundercloud hanging over her. Instead, she saw a man who could have been Indiana Jones, Aragorn, and Dracula all rolled into one. The sun behind his head cast him into complete silhouette. He brought shadows around him, darkening his face even further until she wasn't even sure he had one. His hair was so black it didn't even reflect the white morning sunlight. He wore a dark suit, dull and bureaucratic, and wild thoughts of the sun frying him like a burrito scampered across her mind. Gravity pulled her gaze downward, all the way to the wingtip shoes, polished and shiny just like a 1930s gangster's, parked inches away from her.
Unable to see his eyes, she still felt them boring into her. She thought they might be black, too, so dark the pupils wouldn't even show up.
"Uh, can I help you?" she offered, feeling confined, trapped, like a poor defenseless, weeping, sweaty beetle about to be squished 'neath a descending shoe.
A shadowy hand hovered before her. From the area of the silhouetted face, the man asked a question in a language so unfamiliar it sounded unearthly.
Startled, Gloria considered her position. His voice wasn't a booming god-like menace, didn't reverberate to her bones like a bass drum beaten in the middle of the night. Instead, it was young, a little scratchy, like the lead singer in a hot new rock band the morning after a concert. It disarmed her, and she felt the early tension of terror ebb away, replaced by a new pile of confusion.
She tentatively took his hand, and he smoothly pulled her to her feet.
From her new angle, she studied the face revealed by sunlight. He was more attractive than Dracula, less rugged than Indiana Jones, his bones refined, his face granite. His eyes weren't black pits, but sparked with the green of fresh spring shoots. Despite that, she figured he wasn't very old. Maybe college age. At nearly thirty years old, it had been a long time since she'd looked at a man that young and thought anything other than "Is that guy even old enough to drive?" Sharing airspace with this particular guy, however, only made her wonder how long she'd have to live to see the things he'd seen.
He asked another question in a lilting tongue, the words sounding like a digital meshing of French and Hindu. One black eyebrow raised in the inkling of a smile.
Gloria cast her gaze about uneasily. Few families living in her mother's neighborhood spoke anything other than English and a smattering of Spanish. Oh, and the couple on the corner who usually spoke to one another in Arabic. This guy was definitely not Middle Eastern.
He asked his question again, his brow knitting in concern.
"I'm sorry," Gloria stuttered, cutting him off mid-question. "I can't understand you. Do you speak English? ¿Habla Ingles?"
An expression of pure shock dashed over his stern features, and then a brief hint of a startled laugh rumbled from his throat. He held a finger up and fished something out of his pocket that would have been at home in any Radio Shack-stocked tinkerer's basement.
Clicking a button on the device, he again spoke his question.
Gloria began shaking her head, still not understanding, but before she could speak, a tinny reproduction of the man's voice burst from the device in his hand. Only this time, the question was in English: "Are you Gloria Walker?"
"Who wants to know?" she blurted, then winced at the pseudo-bluster implied in her De Niro inspired performance.
He flashed what might have been a badge at her, might also have been a tin can lid. Speaking through the translator-recorder, he replied, "Sullivan Oscar Timon, Special Traveler Unit. I'm sorry about the language barrier -- travelers aren't usually without a form of translator. Here, if you will put this in your ear, it will be easier for us to communicate." He held out a tiny ear bud in his palm, its bright blue light flashing intermittently. It resembled a blue tooth hands free earpiece more than anything, and Gloria wondered if it was linked to brain cancer just like cell phones, radar guns, and MTV.
The man shoved the bud at her. "Trust me," he insisted. "It won't hurt you."
Reluctantly, she took the bud and stuck it in her hear. When he spoke again, she learned that while the translation was not instantaneous, and she could still hear the strange combination of guttural noises and lilting melodies that made up his natural tongue, she could more clearly hear his words in English.
"I'd like to know why you didn't check into the station on Atlantis before traveling," he said.
Gloria stared at him, unable to so much as begin crafting a lie or denial as a response. Her eyes cast about for the large men in white coats who should definitely be tracking this person down and locking him back up in the rubber room he'd obviously escaped from. It was too bad, him being kind of cute with those shoes and all. Or perhaps, given that he seemed aware and in control of his own situation while she was running madly from hers, the men in white coats were far more likely to dogpile her.
"The flipping station," he clarified. "You're required to check in at one of the stations on Atlantis within 24 hours before traveling."
Gloria slowly started to back away from him, feeling herself sinking deeper and deeper into the insanity of the world she had awakened into, fearing that this man was here to drag her bodily into the quicksand. "Unless you're talking about basketball, I haven't done any traveling since last Christmas." She also hadn't done any serious running since her cross-country days in college, but she figured she could outlast the man in black long enough to get help.
"Look, I think I know who you are, and I don't want you to get into any trouble." He closed the gap between them, and the fear she'd first felt in his presence returned. "You're lucky I was the one who found you."
"Did Annie send you?" Gloria asked, grasping for anything to keep him from getting close enough to grab her.
"No one sent me. I'm just doing my job." He sighed and stopped following her retreat. "Miss Walker, let me ask you something. Do you know where you are?"
"Albuquerque, about three blocks from my mother's house. I grew up here, I live here, I know where I am, this is my home." She backpedaled furiously down the street, until she was shouting. "Where the hell are you, you crazy bastard?"
He laughed, his face breaking open into something handsome and intriguing, boyish. "You really have no idea. Sweetheart, you are worlds away from home. Or do you still think you're going to wake up like Dorothy, and be happily back in Kaxas?"
Gloria froze. "Kansas!" she yelled inanely. "Dorothy lived in Kansas."
"Fine, Kansas, then. Is that where you think you are? Home?"
No, it sure wasn't. It smelled like home, and it looked like home, it may have even tasted like home, but it wasn't. It was the Twilight Zone, it was the X-Files, it was the umpteenth dimension.
Gloria stood there, hands on her hips, frowning while he laughed. He wasn't Dracula, or a loon, she knew, but he was something mysterious. And slowly she realized he was the only strange thing in this weird world that was making any sense at all.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"It's better if I show you," he said, his laughter dying down to a crooked little pirate smile. "You're going to have to come with me anyway."
"Come with you where?"
He approached her, his slick shoes sliding over the shimmering blacktop. She flinched as he reached for her, but he only brushed the damp clumps of hair away from her left ear, looking for something and not finding it. Goose bumps peaked on her flesh underneath his fingertips, racing down her skin.
"No stamp, see?"
She didn't see.
He offered her his hand. "Take my hand. Come on, I won't bite," he coaxed. "It'll clear everything up. The worlds have been waiting for you for a very long time."
Gloria stared at his hand. His fingers were strong and tanned. She peered behind him toward her mother's house, yearning for one saving glimpse of normality, or maybe just a final hint that this really was a dream, but the heat rose off the asphalt, clouding the structure in waves of distortion.
She met his eyes. Green as a newly cut emerald, open wide. She took his hand.
He smiled and reached his free hand to a beeper-sized box on his belt. It had several dials on the side, and one large green button in the center.
"Wait," Gloria whispered.
"It's all right," he said. "You're safe."
"Who are you?"
"I told you, I'm Oscar. Pleased to meet you."
He slowly bent over and kissed the back of her hand. She didn't know whether to laugh or swoon.
Then he pressed the green button on his belt, and a giant, invisible hand thumped into her and knocked her on her butt. The shadows around Oscar the Shadow-Man crowded around her, and the world fell into a black hole.
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