Whitelodge 1.3

The night desk had been unusually quiet. Dale had this weird theory about how people who find themselves in the same circumstances often get their bodily cycles to line up. It was the reason the lodge sometimes had a inexplicably jam-packed, later-than-usual dinner shift, or why on some nights everyone slept like babies and no house phones rang until well into morning. The lodge tapped into some kind of collective biorhythm; that was his thought, anyway. It was funny how this uber-rhythm idea didn't seem to extend to him, though. He was always the one who would talk your ear off the most when things were quietest, the one up late when everyone else was snoozing away.

Standing at her post at the front desk, Glenda repeatedly blew her bangs up in frustration. She really needed a haircut, because they were periodically getting tangled up in her eyebrows. She could either cut the bangs or shave the eyebrows, and these seemed like equally viable options at this point. She should call home, she thought, because despite what Dale said, she imagined the lull at the front desk wouldn't last for much longer. She'd check in with Darryl, make sure the boys had gotten to bed at a reasonable hour, and then she could finish her shift with a clear conscience.

She looked at the sets of walkie-talkies Velcroed to the edge of the counter in front of her. If their black carapaces hadn't been there with their intruding modernity, she would have been able to look out across the lobby and imagine that she was looking into a space that was fifty years old. Even a hundred, maybe. At times like this, late at night, she could forget that there was a flat screen monitor posted on the overhang directly above her, cycling through the lodge's amenities and the current weather conditions, and fantasize that she was witnessing the opening season of the Deertail Lodge. The wood, of which almost everything in her view was comprised, still gleamed with polish, the upholstery relatively new but still adorned with the original, faux-Native American patterns in cool blues and greens.

She had used to be able to recall when the lodge had been built; hadn't they covered that in orientation? But even that had been years ago. All the little minutiae and theories about how the place was supposed to run had been overturned by the practical knowledge she had since learned on how to keep the desk working smoothly. Still, that half-forgotten knowledge lay over everything like a waxy film, until knowing that the ruts in the floor -- caused by wear from some of the overstuffed lobby chairs, also preventing the rearranging of the furniture for fear of exposing them -- made it less of a historical building and more a wooden arrangement of Stuff She Had To Deal With.

Sometimes if seemed her entire life was similarly constructed out of an elaborate, precarious arrangement of Stuff She Had To Deal With. Her job, Darryl, the boys, they were all parts of this vast network. She wouldn't give up any part of it, of course, but secretly she longed for a day when she could allow herself the luxury of kicking back and becoming part of Stuff Someone Else Had to Deal With. And an even deeper part, a set of dark twins, secretly acknowledged both how she would never allow that to happen, and how much she enjoyed her self-sacrifice, all in the name of making life even a little easier for those she loved.

Dale, of course, might have seen some of Glenda's secret levels if she let him. He overthought everything, and after all their night shifts together, she often wondered what would happen if she suddenly told him everything she thought, everything she dreamed. Would he be able to apply his particular brand of logic and attention to the untangling of her psyche? She kind of wanted to see if he could. Of course, she would never think of letting herself develop feelings for Dale (and true to form, that deepest part of her enjoyed the knowledge that she was actively withholding that from herself), but if there were anyone she knew who would be able to fully understand her, it would be him. He would probably be able to tell her things about herself that even she didn't know yet, but would immediately recognize.

Because she had been thinking about him, she almost jumped when he came through the lobby doors from the main entrance. Both inner and outer sets were closed at night to keep out the worst of the mountainside chill, but there was always a pocket of frigid air that drifted in alongside anyone who entered. Then Dale was scraping the snow off his boots on the wide swaths of carpet (which were replaced/cleaned three times a day, per regulations).

He looked up at her, smiling. She loved that smile. Dale dressed all in official blues when he was running perimeter checks, and seeing his face, wearing a smile that seemed different than the ones he gave anyone else, always made her night. He couldn't have been more different from Darryl, which was probably why she didn't even think to admit to herself that she had more than a passing fancy for the security guard. Tall where Darryl was almost exactly her height, strongly wide where Darryl had been farmer-scrawny his entire life, dark brown where Darryl was one of those pasty fellows who bleaches in sunlight. How could she have been attracted to this capable, confident man who was everything the one she had chosen as life partner was not?

Dale flipped his arm up, clicking his flashlight and zapping her accurately in the eyes with a double-flash, which was the sign for all-clear. Glenda half-heartedly threw up a hand to block the light. "I got it, Dale. No wolves, no storms. You've scared them all away. Good job."

He paused to scrape the snow off his boots a few more times as he crossed diagonally against the rug patterns to reach her at the desk. "No Harmon, either. Did he call in?"

Glenda shook her head. "Nope. I've been here with the walkies all along. Not a squawk."

"So we're guessing he made it down all right?" Dale had been in the lobby when Harmon had come out of the restaurant, a distracted, disturbed look on his face and his ski boots on. The racket of plastic on wood had drawn Dale's attention, because Harmon had happened to pass by in the brief interval when the rugs had been taken up, but the fresh ones hadn't been laid down yet. When it became clear that the old ski pro was intending to grab his coat and head out the front door, Dale had stopped him.

"Hey, Harmon, it's getting late, you know," the security guard had said.

Harmon had nodded without looking at Dale. His gaze was already outside with the snow. "I know, I just... I was thinking I'll go down into town, that's all."

Dale sighed in half-feigned exasperation. "Well, you won't have time to come back up tonight. You want me to call Mrs. Handy at the boarding house and let her know to expect you?" This scenario had played out enough times for Dale to know the folly of offering the elderly man a ride.

This comment actually drew Harmon's attention enough to get him to look at Dale. The ski pro was almost a full foot shorter. "Sure," he said, and tried to smile, but it looked thoroughly unconvincing.

Dale engulfed one of Harmon's shoulders with his hand. "Now, Harmon, we're not going to get reports of you trying to ski the backwoods down into town, are we?"

Harmon's brow furrowed, and he shook his head. Only a little less unconvincing, but it had been enough for Dale. It had been enough for Glenda, too, who had been watching the scene from her perpetual perch behind the front desk.

"Good," Dale said. "Enjoy your evening. But here." Dale pressed one of his walkie-talkies, which he always kept with him, into the ski pro's hand. "If you run into any trouble or need a hand, I'm right on the other end. Okay?"

This time Harmon's smile seemed genuine, if not still a little distracted. "All right, Dale. Thank you."

Dale clapped the older man on the shoulder. "No problem. Don't forget to fuck off, now."

Salty talk was guaranteed to get a chuckle out of the old man, Glenda knew, and Harmon didn't disappoint this time, laughing and shrugging as he turned to go out into the elements. Secretly, she loved hearing Dale say things like that, too.

Harmon picked up his coat -- which he must have left in one of the lobby chairs before taking care of whatever business he had in the restaurant -- and shrugged into it as he headed for the door. Neither Dale nor Glenda were really concerned about him; the man had spent the last seven years hanging around, holding his liquor admirably and bringing local character to the place. The owner had even kept a permanent room open for him. It was really just a converted maintenance closet under the massive main staircase, but it was free of charge, and this was the place Harmon seemed to want to be. The arrangement was due to the shared history the two of them had, although no one seemed to know exactly what that was.

Now, almost an hour later, Glenda said to Dale, "Yeah, he must have made it down. I tried to hail, but got nothing. He might have turned it off."

"I'll call Mrs. Handy and see if he checked in," Dale said. "I bet he just didn't want what Carlos and Benny were serving tonight. Decided to maybe have a slice of Mrs. Handy's pie instead."

Glenda couldn't help but giggle and blush, even though she knew no double entendre was intended. Mrs. Handy sold pies as a side business, along with running the town's boarding house. But something about the way Dale said it... She knew he was offering to track the old man down because he thought Glenda was overworked. He often commented about how dedicated and underappreciated she was. It was one of the many things she liked about him. "No, it's fine," she said. "I'll call down. He's probably had dinner and is all wrapped up in her warmest bed by now."

It was a half-hearted lobbing back of the innuendo, implying that Mrs. Handy and Harmon had some kind of geriatric romance going on, but Dale looked like he wanted to pounce on the desk phone, to keep her from dialing. "No, no, I'll... don't worry about..."

They had known each other far too long for her to play like she couldn't tell something was wrong. "Come on, Dale."

The big man licked his lips a bit, as if debating whether he was going to tell her, then gave up when he saw the steely look in her eye. "Okay. He didn't take the car down. I saw some boot tracks, so I followed them back to the equipment shed. He took his skis. Probably about ten minutes ago."

Glenda didn't get it right away. "He... he skied down into town? After he said he wouldn't?"

Dale nodded, leaning heavily against the front desk now that the charade was over. "Looks that way. I don't know why he did that. But then again, he was acting strangely before he left too, wasn't he?"

The thought that anyone, not to mention an elderly man, would start a trek down the mountain, away from the roads, at this late hour sent a chill through her, even if that person were as experienced as Harmon. Her only solace was that it was clear and the moon bright tonight, so it would be a relatively easy journey for a seasoned pro. "What do you think would possess him to do something like that?"

Dale shook his head. "Don't know. But I'm thinking I should hop in the car and start down the driveway, just to see." ("Driveway" was what they called the winding seven-mile long downhill road from the lodge to the tiny town below.)

"Good idea," Glenda said, too concerned about Harmon to consider that would mean she would be deprived of Dale's company during the midnight hours. It was almost eleven-thirty already, wasn't it? She had sort of hoped that it would be one of those quiet nights when they could just hang around the desk chatting for hours.

She turned to glance at the grandfather clock, whose solid presence she always turned to, even when she was constantly working on a computer that had a digital clock right in the bottom corner. In some way, the time never seemed truly defined to her if it wasn't shown on the thick, filigreed hands of the ancient upright timepiece. Now, as she looked at it, she could see that the silently sweeping second hand looked... strange. She narrowed her eyes a little, and Dale followed her confused gaze to the clock facing them from the side of the main staircase.

That second hand... it was if it had widened to double its usual thickness. It wasn't until it overtook the minute hand that she realized what was happening; it was vibrating, being shaken into buzzing back and forth so quickly that it could barely be registered by the eye. And then she heard the chandelier overhead start to rattle. The sound of crystals clattering against each other, and the metal frame of the chandelier itself, almost formed a chord so complex that her stunned ear registered it as beautiful.

She and Dale looked at each other in comprehension for just a moment before the lights went out.

Whitelodge 1.2

Bruce hadn't really needed ice; he just had to get out of his room. He feared he was not going to be able to breathe if he had stayed in there a minute longer, so he left behind his notebook and meticulously lined-up pens and moved slowly along the hall, relishing the feel of the cool, thin lodge carpet on his feet. He glided down the long space toward the end of the hall, the only sound the pieces of half-melted ice sloshing in the bucket under his arm. The sudden hush of this old-fashioned world should have been welcome relief.

He reached the little alcove, wondered obliquely if anybody in the nearby rooms was going to be awakened by the ice machine if he thumbed it on. Oh well, he reasoned, if you don't spring the few extra bucks for a suite on the highest floor, that's the risk you run. Besides, he had very faintly heard a few of the fevered sounds through the walls of his room before he left, so he doubted that the people next to him were overly concerned about getting a lot of sleep anyway.

As the ice chunked out into the bucket, amid the roar of the titanic dynamo that must have been necessary to create such a wonder, he wondered if he was going to get to sleep at all that night, and whether it would matter if he did. So far this trip had yielded zero dreams that were of any use to him, anyway. Where was Theda when he needed her? He allowed himself only a few seconds to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life like this, always chasing after her elusive inspiration, but never having it pay off.

He wouldn't be able to face his editor at the end of the week without something to show for it, he was certain of that much. Ger had been so accommodating and so understanding of Bruce's writer's block (even if the younger man didn't quite believe such a phenomenon existed), springing for half the tab to get Bruce up here, into the uncluttered air where, supposedly, the great writer would be able to think and get back in touch with his muse. But now the only thing that comforted him amid this wonderland of snow, wooden rafter beams, and down pillows was the white noise the ice made as it filled his dented, wooden bucket.

If Bruce hadn't been trying to work in this environment, he would really be enjoying himself. As the taxi had brought him up the long, winding ride over the foothills, the uphill slopes outweighing the downhill ones until he was high above the world, he had felt the air around him grow lighter. He could hear Ger's voice in his head -- "The best thing about writers is their capacity for self-delusion" -- and up at the Deertail Lodge, he hoped, he could find the quiet and lack of distraction he needed to get back into that self-deluding frame of mind, and back into contact with Theda. The lodge's promotional material promised a place free of connectivity of every kind, where a person could untether themselves from the computers and communication that burdened them in the world down below. It had sounded like exactly what he needed.

Bruce let the bucket overflow and the trough underneath fill a little bit with the crystalline cubes, so that the next patron likely wouldn't have to run the machine to get all they needed. It wasn't that he was an inherently thoughtful person, just that he wanted to stand in the wash of aural static for a little while longer... Contrary to the propaganda, he had found no solace in this place's silence. In fact, he found the random rush and thump of the ice machine preferable to the vast, hollow wind that had blown through that last dream. It had been horrible, a wind that he could feel slicing through him, chilling his insides as it passed. He knew that he should stop his mind from recalling it in this middle-of-the-night, half-awake trance he was still in, but could not resist...

---

It had been the same ring of towering stones he always stood inside. But now they were dull and gray, draped in dying vines, whose heart-shaped leaves withered where before they had been lush, almost bursting with greenness. The landscape outside the ring had changed, too. The first time he had come, he had been able to see a sun-sparkled, magical forest outside the ring of thirteen Sounding Stones (he had always known that was what they were called, even though he had never been told). But tonight, there was hardly a world beyond at all. It was as if whatever planet he stood on had shrunk to the size of a small city. The ground curved away on all sides from where he stood, so sharply that all he could see beyond a few hundred yards was that omnipresent atmosphere that iridesced for what seemed like light-years in all directions. He was standing on a wide pedestal in the middle of a vast nothing.

The horror of it all would have been diminished if he had appeared someplace entirely different, instead of this corrupted version of a place he had never tired of visiting in his younger years. Back then, not only had the place been beautiful, *she* had been beautiful, making his breath catch every time she stepped out of the forest; without fanfare, but commanding the attention of every living thing within it, even the plants, which all seemed to wave toward her at the direction of some unfelt wind, probably the same one that made her robes flutter and swirl in slow motion, as if she were underwater.

Theda, she had told him her name was on their heady first meeting. His mind immediately noted that this was an anagram of "death", which didn't surprise him because it was his mind that had made up her name in the first place. Or so he had thought in the beginning. Now he wasn't so sure. The name might have come from Somewhere Else, just as he grew to think that the things she told him -- the stories he would later write down in waking life and be hailed as a genius for -- all came from the same Somewhere Else. There was just no way he could have been personally responsible for them all.

But night after night he had come, and night after night she had emerged to weave tales for him, speaking into his willingly receptive ears, and almost dictated for him articles, stories, possible avenues of research... an endless font of thoughts and ideas. It was like he had been asked to write a wish list of things that a writer/blogger/journalist wants but hardly ever gets in terms of inspiration, and she was sent into his dreams to tick them off for him every night of the week. She had asked nothing in return, only a receptacle for her brilliance, which he was more than willing to provide (and benefit from).

He had loved to go to sleep back then, looked forward to that drowsy feeling that told him he was about to really start getting things done, but now it had been months since Theda had come to him among the Sounding Stones, striding out of the forest like a mystical story-telling nymph. He was starting to think she might never come back, and as he did, the surroundings seemed to be more and more infected with that attitude as well. The forest was drying up, the world it stood upon folding in on itself, and he didn't know if it was he or she that was making it happen. Would he one day close his eyes on the waking world to find himself floating alone in that limitless sky, which was no color and every color all at once? And if he did, would he ever be able to wake himself up? Would he want to?

---

Maybe he had done something to offend her. He never understood why he deserved her gifts in the first place. Now he wondered over and over what could cause her to pick up stakes and -- here he shuddered to think it -- perhaps decide to grace some other writer with her brilliance. Maybe all this decay was a symptom that she had walked away, leaving their shared dreamworld to shrink and collapse on itself. Or even worse, maybe that *thing* that had appeared the last time he saw her -- whatever it had been that came riding in on that unspeakable storm -- had frightened her away for good. Regardless, two things kept him from trying to stay awake for the rest of his life, undoubtedly driving himself crazy in the process.

First, as a writer, he still needed to produce. He had known since he was a little child that his job, his place in the world, was to take ideas from his head and shape them into words for others to read, no matter what form those words took. When he was a kid, it seemed the only avenue would be to write books, but as he got older, the world expanded and more and more forms or written art were created. He tried to follow them all. His ideas, at first his own and then more and more supplanted by Theda's (which, he could somehow argue with himself even now, were his too), grew into pieces of art, reams of factual investigation, reportage on the strange corners of existence, deep rabbit-hole dives into his own psyche that left him shivering at his own unknowability, interviews with other souls that could have gone on forever if he hadn't had a deadline to meet. He didn't care what the subject was, or what form would eventually serve them best, the main thing was the words, and the idea driving those words.

Secondly -- and this was rapidly becoming the only thing he could take solace from now -- was that while his dreamworld was shrinking, the thirteen Sounding Stones were unchanged. They still stood taller than his head, thicker than his body, in their perfect, uniform ring, dark rock veined with minerals of different colors, all pointing up toward the sky. Those veins were dark now, whereas once they had pulsed with light and life, and the vines that clung to them protectively were dying, but the Stones themselves were still whole. Lately, the world had shrunk enough that those stones weren't all pointing straight up anymore. They were starting to tip back, away from each other, like the imperceptibly slow decay of a blossom cursed with an unlucky number of petals.

This was why he still overcame his fears of what he might find and lay his head on his pillow every night. The Stones persisted, and in some unknowable way that dream-logic often worked by, Bruce knew on the most fundamental level that the Stones were *him*. Even if there were eventually not be enough real estate left for them all to stand without touching, they would still exist, as would he, and that must mean something.

The clatter of ice on the floor brought him back to the real world. In his mental absence, he had filled the trough almost to its edge with a roughly pyramidal mound of cubes. A few of them were randomly bouncing over the edge and hitting the floor, making a sound reminiscent of chattering teeth. He let go of the button that kept the machine running. It rumbled to a stop... but the trembling sensation he felt in his feet continued. The ice cubes that had fallen on the floor were vibrating, skittering around as if alive.

Whitelodge 1.1

“The mountains have personalities. They're alive, in a way. But the valleys? Once you've been up here a while, you find that they're really all the same."

Sheryl had been sitting at the circular bar, listening to the grizzled, windburned ski pro talking from his place in front of the fireplace on the far side for over twenty minutes, and that was the first thing of any substance that had come from his mouth. He had amassed a sizeable retinue of fellow skiers, all of them apple-cheeked where he was leathery, limber in their youth while he sat stiffly upright on his stool. She knew that his impeccable posture was the result of the multiple pins in his back, the origin of every last one having been outlined by him in surgical detail. Sheryl wasn't impressed, not only because she still didn't really consider herself a skier, but because she was still wondering where the hell Kerren was.

The phone call, her girlfriend had insisted, would last no more than twenty minutes, and then she would be down to meet Sheryl at the bar, they'd have a celebratory cocktail and head into the restaurant for dinner. But almost twice that amount of time had elapsed, and she had yet to see Kerren's overpriced boots coming down the rustic lacquered-logs stairway.

So Sheryl patiently kicked her crossed legs up and down, nursing her mojito and trying to soothe herself into nonchlance. There wasn't a TV nearby -- the first time she'd ever been in a bar without one -- so she had no choice but to overhear the old pro outline the times he had nearly been buried in sinkholes, menaced by black bears, and indulged in reckless downhill therapy off the marked slopes and trails, always late at night, with only the moonlight to keep him from barreling straight into trees that were huddled before him like stoic, needly monks, conspiring to step into his path and end his life.

She had to admit, it sounded a lot too much like her own experience on this trip for comfort. Every moment with Kerren these days was fraught with peril. Emotional branches could reach out and snag her at any moment. Was she really calling her mother up there? Sheryl actually shook her head a little to fling the thought off, to keep it from sinking its passive-aggressive little talons into her brain. It was her part of their bargain, after all; she would let go of her suspicions and start to trust Kerren again, and Kerren would do everything she could to start to earn it back.

The fact that this phone call was taking so long didn't do much to set her mind at ease. But there was no way that Sheryl was going to give Kerren any reason to think that she had been even the least bit suspicious. She motioned to the bartender and ordered a second mojito. If Kerren came down and saw that Sheryl had already ordered a drink for her, wouldn't that indicate a modicum of trust?

Almost as soon as the drink arrived, Sheryl saw the recognizable black-and-purple of Kerren's boots clomping down the stairs on the far side of the lodge bar. Good. Let her see just how trusting Sheryl had been that she would arrive soon, ice not even the slightest bit melted in her glass.

"Hey," Kerren said, sitting down on the stool next to her. Craning her neck to see the plate-glass view they were missing behind them, she asked, "Don't you want to sit where we can look out on the mountain?"

Sheryl only slightly forced the smile that she flashed at her wife. "I was hoping to, but..." She gestured with her half-empty glass toward the group occupying the seats with the best view, the one that had gathered around the ski pro. Dressed in an almost unbearably loud sweater, he was still letting people buy him drinks, feeding him fuel to even more deeply slur his tales of high adventures on the peaks around them.

"Eech," Kerren said, hearing just a fragment of the latest gruesome tale. "How long has that been going on?"

"Since before I got here," Sheryl responded. She hoped her voice was jovial enough. Was it?

"Thanks for ordering," Kerren breathed, getting more comfortable on her seat. She held it up, swiveled a little toward Sheryl. "Is it too late for me to make a toast?"

Sheryl shrugged a little. "Sure." She mirrored the position of Kerren's glass, suspended in the air between them. "I mean, of course not. Toast away."

"To eight wonderful years," Kerren said, cocking her elbow to lift the glass to the height of her forehead. "And I'm promising here and now to make the next eight even more wonderful."

"Me too," Sheryl said, hoping it sounded authentic, and was surprised to find that -- at least to her -- it really did. Their glasses clinked.

They sipped a moment in silence, the alcohol giving that familiar illusion of warmth to their bodies. Sheryl had heard that what booze really did was pull the heat from one's extremities, which was exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do out in the cold. It was why the myth of St. Bernards with brandy kegs around their necks was just that. She would have related this anecdote to Kerren, but it seemed completely the wrong note to strike at what was supposed to be not just their anniversary dinner, but a celebration of their reconnection as a couple.

She had meant to steer clear from the subject -- all the better to demonstrate her complete state of trust -- but it came out anyway. "How's Brandy?" Sheryl asked.

"She's good," Kerren said, averting her eyes. "Jay's being an ass, but what's new about that? They're having some big to-do about building that deck again. She's wants to contract someone, he insists he can do it himself, even though he's almost sixty... the usual."

"He means well," Sheryl said, and immediately thought that maybe she shouldn't come to Kerren's step-father's defense quite so quickly. She had just wanted to keep the negativity out of this evening so badly, she couldn't help it.

Fortunately, Kerren didn't take the bait. "I know he does, but then she overreacts, and I end up giving her a sympathetic ear, when what I really want to get downstairs to have a lovely evening with my lady."

Sheryl's smile came easily at that one. She was so stupid, even entertaining the thought that Kerren was up to something shady. On their anniversary trip! How heartless could she be? Meanwhile, across from them, the ski pro said, "Listen! You can still hear my elbow pop when I turn it this way!"

---

"I'd kind of like to be like him, I think," Kerren mused when they were both halfway through their bacon-wrapped venison medallions.

“Him who?" Sheryl asked. They had each had a full glass of wine already, and their conversation was flowing much more easily.

"That mangled old skier in the bar," Kerren said. "Not just like that, I mean, not actually scarred, but I'd like to -- I don't want to go through my life and have no wear and tear, you know what I mean?"

Sheryl grinned. "Well, in the morning we're going to run a good risk of getting some scars, aren't we?"

Kerren giggled, and Sheryl marveled, much as she had the first time, at how lovely she was, lit mostly by the lazy fire that formed the centerpiece of the restaurant. Even lovelier now than the night they had met, in some ineffable way. Sheryl had been struck dumb even then. "No," Kerren continued, "I just want to have something to show for it all. I don't want to be unblemished, like I'd breezed through life, like it didn't take anything out of me."

"Sure," Sheryl answered. "I get it. We should have some kind of physical evidence that we fought the fight and won."

"Mm-hm," Kerren said, her mouth full of the wine she had sipped while Sheryl had been talking. "I guess maybe that's why I thought about this place. When I was looking for places for us to go, I mean. It's so outside our real lives and a little dangerous. As much as I we want it to be, I guess."

"Which begs the question," Sheryl said, "how early do you want to get up in the morning to hit those slopes?"

Kerren traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass, making the liquid inside slosh slightly from side to side. "Well, it is our anniversary after all... Who knows? We might find some reason we want to sleep in late."

Sheryl arched an eyebrow at her. "Now, since when did you become a mind reader?"

They laughed together at that, and just for a moment all the uncertainty Sheryl had felt -- and wondered if Kerren was feeling -- seemed to have been shed, peeled off like ill-fitting costumes, to be discarded and left to slide down the mountain into the village below.

Someone had approached their table. Sheryl didn't notice until he was standing right there, blocking the firelight. She looked up, expecting it to be their waiter asking them about dessert, which was sure to instigate another round of double-entendre hilarity, but it wasn't him. It was the grizzled ski pro, looking as if he had just left his post in the hotel bar to walk directly over to them.

"Good evening, ladies," he said quietly, tilting his head to both Sheryl and Kerren in turn. He was leaning forward, his hands raised slightly in a don't-mind-me sort of way.

Neither of them responded immediately, because they assumed that if he were to approach them, it would be because he had something he was ready to say. But for a long moment, they all just looked at each other. After flicking her eyes at Sheryl and measuring no sense of comprehension there, Kerren said, "Hi yourself. How are you doing tonight?"

He seemed unable to speak for a moment, and Sheryl found herself returning to the thought she had about him before Kerren had joined her: how such a man could be through so many harrowing experiences and still have no visible damage. For just a moment, he seemed to have been struck mute.

"I..." he began, "I'm going to suggest that you two might want to make your way back down the mountain tonight."

Kerren, always the more defensive of the two, almost stood up, immediately assuming that she knew exactly what the old man was insinuating. "Now hold on just a damn minute--" she started.

Sheryl put out a hand, but couldn't stop her in time. Kerren was able to turn on the fury at the drop of a hat, something that had always both awed and frightened Sheryl.

"I don't know what business you think it is of yours," Kerren began, her voice starting to smolder, "but the two of us are here for a perfectly legitimate--"

The ski pro was already stepping back, his raised hands now turning their palms to the women in surrender. "No, no," he pleaded, "it's nothing like that! Believe me!"

Sheryl couldn't help but snicker at that, which was enough to stay Kerren's righteous anger; she quieted down after only getting halfway up from her seat. “Yeah, I bet you are,” she huffed.

"I just thought... look, I'm telling only so as not to cause a panic, but sometimes... Spend enough time on a mountain and sometimes you think you can hear it talking to you."

Kerren landed back in her seat, fury defused for the moment, but still holding a sarcastic knife-edge in her voice. "And exactly what is it telling you on this lovely evening?"

The old man's brow furrowed. "I don't exactly know. She's... confused somehow. There's something strange happening. I just thought you should know."

"Something strange," Kerren repeated.

"Yes," the pro said.

"So says the mountain," she said.

"Mm-hm," he nodded.

"And you think we need to leave."

"That's right."

"It has something to do with the two of us," Kerren said, both index fingers switching between pointing to herself and Sheryl.

"I can't exactly say how I know, but I think that might be right."

Kerren sat back in her seat, crossing her arms and letting out something like a "hmph". Oh God, Sheryl thought, she's only been biding her time. She's going to let him have it now. She'd start with how convenient it is that he's singled us out in the midst all the heterosexual pheromones being tossed around in this place, and move on to how if he thinks we should leave, then why is he not announcing it at the top of his lungs to the entire restaurant...

But Kerren didn't do that. Instead, she shrugged, "Well, sir, we'll have to take that under advisement, now won't we?"

The ski pro could tell that he wasn't being taken seriously. He already seemed defeated. "I'm only saying... my instincts haven't been much wrong in the past." He shrugged, then, seeing no sense of urgency from either of the women, turned to leave. Kerren's eyes burned a hole in his back all the way to the restaurant’s double doors, which opened onto the lobby.

When he was out of sight, Kerren's eyes rolled, and Sheryl was at least thankful that the source of their scorn wasn't her. "Boy," she said. "Can you believe that?"

Sheryl shook her head, but she was already distracted by the fact that she could hear the man clunking through the lobby. In exiting the restaurant, he had transitioned from carpeted floor to hard wood. And he had his ski boots on.

"It's weird," Sheryl said. "He seemed so lucid before, in the bar."

"You must have caught him at the start of his night. It didn't look like he was having any trouble funding his binge."

Sheryl didn't recall a telltale smell of alcohol on his breath, though. She reached for the small note holder against the dark-paneled wall to change the subject, assisted by a devilish wink. "Now, how about a pre-dessert dessert?"

---

True to her word, Kerren did her best to make sure their anniversary was a memorable one, even when they got back to their room, and by the time the pair were finally settling into each other's arms and nodding off to sleep, the moon had just risen over the enormous bulk of the mountain, which stood outside their room's windows, behind the lodge. The white rays just happened to hit the face of Kerren's phone, which in turn fell across one of Sheryl's eyelids, waking her.

When coincidences like this happened, her mind was always quick to run off into the wilds, contemplating the trajectory of a light particle that originated in the heart of the sun, worked its way to the boiling surface over millions of years, then escaped into space, only to ricochet off a stray moon rock, to the phone screen and thus into her eye. As if that had been its destiny all along. Then, inevitably, she began thinking of all the physical interactions of things going on around them all the time, and how they occurred even if there wasn't anyone there to notice them. The sheer volume of physics the real world was cranking out every second. By this time, she was hopelessly awake.

Rolling onto her side, then noticed how beautiful the packed snow looked outside. Kerren's arm had draped across her in their sleep; she tenderly lifted it away before getting up to take a better look out the window. Even though the room was warm, standing in front of their balcony window made her conscious of how cold a night it was. Cool air fell in invisible cascades off the face of the glass to pool around her feet. She wrapped her arms around herself protectively.

The scene outside was devastatingly still, stark, and lovely. The moonlight glanced off the snow at a low angle thanks to the upward slope, causing every tree and rock to throw exaggerated shadows. Even the slightest depressions in the snow looked like craters, black void in the midst of all that pitiless illumination.

Slowly, the events of the evening started coming back to her, and what it had all meant at the time collided with what it semeed to mean now. The overall feel of it was that she and Kerren were a fine facsimile of a relationship with no troubles. She had been very aware that if, at any point, she had really opened her mouth and talked to Kerren about how she felt, things would have gone very differently.

She sighed. She hadn't forgiven Kerren yet. There it was. She might have even convinced herself of it in the midst of the alcohol and warm fires, but here, in the small hours of the night, there was no reason to hide it, even from herself.

She knew that she should go back to bed. Standing here, turning everything over in her head would lead to nothing good, no matter how beautiful the view. And it certainly wouldn't help her get back to sleep. From somewhere beyond the room's door, she could hear the ice maker down the hall whirring to life. It gave her a small amount of comfort; at least she wasn't the only one who was having a hard time sleeping tonight. She hoped their reason was better than hers.

She looked back up at the moon, turning her mind back to the light that it was reflecting off it from the sun, currently blazing on the other the side of the world. The shadows had shortened even in the brief amount of time that she had been standing there. The moon was continuing to rise, slowly erasing the shadows that it had caused as it rose higher above the top ridge of the mountain.

And then, strangely, in a matter of moments, it had set again.

Upstream - Part 4

An hour later, after the populous had been calmed and quieted, and went back to their evening rituals of procuring dinner from the various restaurant storehouses, Kettering led Collins, Cordova, and Munoz up the long flights of stairs of the tallest building the city.

"I didn't know you were married," Cordova said over his shoulder to Marie, who was following closely behind him.

"It never came up," she said.

"Fair enough," Cordova said. he paused a while before asking, "How long does your husband think our expedition will be? I only ask because he may be able to send help sooner than expected if he thinks we're overdue."

Marie sighed. "I told him three weeks," she said, although they both had expected a two-week trip. "I didn't want him to worry. I know how these things can run longer than expected. Are you married?"

Cordova paused before shaking his head, and then kept climbing.

Collins, who they thought wouldn't be able to overhear their conversation over the echoing of footsteps in the stairwell, suddenly said, "Any chance that he'll get worried? Are you supposed to contact him regularly?" He seemed to forget that, despite their distance from the boat, Marie and Cordova were no farther from civilization than they would be if they had never seen the city.

"No," Marie said. "When I'm home, I'm home, and when I'm away... I'm away." There was something measured about her tone that Collins might have asked about, but Kettering had reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the door to the roof. The sunlight that poured in blasted their retinas, and Collins put away the flashlight he had been sweeping about to light their way. At the base of the stairs, Marie and Cordova had marveled at the way he had powered up its cool, white light by pumping a sheath of plastic around its handle a few times.

They stepped out into the stifling jungle heat again, but this time there was a little breeze, since they were above the tree canopy. The sun was lowering toward the western horizon ahead of them, just beginning to turn the vegtation below into a feverish, orange sea.

Kettering walked right up to the edge of the roof, not even looking down but knowing just where to stop, the toes of his boots less than two inches from the edge of the building. "Over there," he said before the others could fully catch up, pointing to the south. "We headed for the highest hill, see it there? And from there, we could see the second city chunk far to the south-southwest..." He swung his arm to the left a few degrees. "That would make it somewhere over there."

"Should be easy enough to find," Marie said. "We have rather detailed maps on the boat. We should go back and get them. Who knows how many people are there? And they may not be in as good a state as you all are here."

Kettering turned, looked at her, then addressed Collins. "That's exactly why we shouldn't wait any longer to send me and some of my men back, run a reconnaisance mission to see exactly what's going on over there. If they are in worse straits, they may be desperate and try something foolish when they learn we have resources."

Cordova stepped forward, closer to the edge than anyone save Kettering. "Hold on, Mr. Kettering. Let's not start out by assuming that these people are going to be a threat of any sort. From what we know at this moment, all we can infer is they're in exactly the same circumstances as you are here."

"That's my point," Kettering said, staring into the distance. "No offense to how you've been running things, Gary--" he must have been referring to Collins, " -- but we really fell ass-backward into the decent situation we have here. We just happened to have an unusual amount of tall buildings and restaurants in our chunk. From what I could see, their buildings weren't nearly as tall. Probably from a little farther out of whatever city it came from, more residential. That means less businesses, and more people who have to divide up what resources they do have. That's why I came back right away without finding out more... I knew that we had to prepare."

"Prepare for what?" Collins asked, straining his eyes out to where Kettering had been pointing.

"Whatever they're prepared to do," Kettering said. "And right now, I don't think any of us can make a more accurate guess of what that is than any other."

Collins considered this, looking from Marie to Kettering and back again, in full diplomat mode. "So what are each of your plans? I can't think of a reason we can't gather the information we need in two different ways."

Marie spoke first. "Like I said, we can get some information from the boat. We have survey and geological maps. There might be some sort of common characteristics about where these -- chunks, as you say -- have appeared. Now that we have two to compare, we might be able to figure out what those are."

Kettering pivoted and raised his finger in Marie's direction. "I think you just want to get back to your boat and get out of here." Before he had finished his statement, Cordova had stepped forward and taken hold of the big man's wrist, making him lower his hand. Kettering didn't fight against it, but his glare lost none of his intensity.

"I plan to do no such thing!" Marie snarled at him.

"She won't," Cordova told Kettering, who was still staring down Marie. "Because she wouldn't leave me behind. And I'm going to the new city with you."

"You are?" Collins asked.

"That's right," Cordova said. "What I propose is that she and one or two of your expeditionary force --" he had clearly decided upon this term carefully, " -- go to the boat to inform them of what is happening and make sure they're ready to start transporting people back to the coast. Meanwhile, you and I will take a look at this new... situation." He nodded toward the invisible city beyond the horizon.

"Someone needs to get to the boat before nightfall," Marie said. "It would be too dangerous to leave the city after that. Also, my men will be worried and might leave."

Kettering squinted at her again, as if scanning for deceit. Cordova considered affirming that she was right, but decided against it. The man was just going to have to learn to trust her on his own, sooner better than later.

Thankfully, Collins didn't step in either. Marie and Kettering just stared at each other, unblinking, for a long moment. Then Kettering said, "That's what we'll do," as if he were the one who had come up with the idea, or had the power to veto it.

"We'd better get going, then," Marie said. "I'll be waiting when your men are ready." Marie turned without waiting for a reaction and went down the stairs, leaving the remaining three to stare at each other in the reddening light.

Collins clapped his hands together enthusiastically. "God, it feels good to have a plan!" and followed her.

"You and I will leave first thing in the morning," Kettering told Cordova, who nodded solemnly. By the time the sun returned to its low position in the sky the next day, one of them would be dead by the other's hand.

Upstream - Part 3

The gathering came together faster than they thought it would. When no one lives more than four and a half blocks from where you're standing, things can happen very quickly. In fact, by the time Collins had gotten the nervously lounging circus performers to lug the bleachers out through the wide tent flaps and into the small square in the plaza, there was a big enough crowd to fill them both.

Cordova and Marie watched the people as they filed up to take their seats. Cordova had worried about what state these people would be in, having been excised from their home (along with the home itself) and transplanted to some foreign, hostile territory, but they seemed calm and orderly. Marie thought that it must have been the fact that they were being organized now. They were being given a place to go, and instructions to receive. They were implicitly being promised a solution to their predicament, and she hoped that together she, Cordova, and Collins could come up with one. They had discussed a plan of action, and hoped that the crowd would agree it was the best course.

Once the crowd had arranged themselves, Cordova could see that they looked better off than one would expect. No one was filthy or in rags. If anything, they looked like no more than tourists who had underpacked for a long trip. Their clothes weren't necessarily the first ones they would have chosen to step out in, but they were still clean and presentable. Things would change in a few days, when the rooftop cisterns began to run dry and the laundry began to pile up. The noise of the crowd grew as their numbers did, people coming to assemble from all parts of the diminished city, but once they were in place, they quieted down, their eyes becoming expectant.

The three had decided that Collins should do most of the talking, since his was the voice of authority the people already knew. If they had questions he couldn't answer, however, he would defer to the scientists, and they would answer as best they could. They held no illusions; these people were going to want to know things that were simply unknown at this point, and would have issues that had no likelihood of receiving solutions soon. But it would be a start.

Once it seemed like everyone had been rounded up, Collins stepped out into the empty space the bleachers had been angled toward. "Good afternoon, everyone," he said with his patented smile, "as many of you already heard, we have actually made contact with the outside world, in the form of these two people you see behind me." There must have been at least a few who hadn't heard this news yet, because a murmur broke out through certain sections of the crowd. Cordova and Marie tried to look upon the crowd with hopefulness.

Collins raised his hands for a return to silence. "Now, I know you all have questions for them, but we've been talking since they arrived an hour ago, and I thought there were some things you all are entitled to know." He took a deep breath; this was going to the hardest sell of the day. "We all know that we've been relocated somehow. While we still don't know the cause of this predicament, we at least now know where we've ended up." The crowd had fallen into rapt attention. "We are currently about seventy miles inland from the coast of Colombia, South America." He followed up quickly, so that the gasp of the crowd wouldn't have time to settle into conversation. "In the year 1952."

The crowd's reaction was hard to gauge at first. Some just continued to look at the trio expectantly, as if to say "Is that all?" Others were stunned, still more turned their heads and murmured excitedly at their neighbors; a few broke down entirely. One man, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index knuckle, croaked that his kids had been away at school that day, and how was he going to get back to them? What didn't happen, however, was widespread panic, the thing that Marie had been fearing most.

Collins again put his hands up to bring attention back to himself. "Now, I know there are many things that we're all wondering, and we’re working on answers to them... but for the moment, our main focus is to stay the course we have set. We'll continue to gather food and water, and investigate how best we can sustain our current state."

A voice came suddenly from somewhere in the crowd. "What about Kettering?"

Collins winced at this, as if he had been hoping no one would mention it. Marie and Cordova traded concerned looks just before Collins turned back to them, as if to see how they were reacting to this new development. Cordova raised an eyebrow at him. Collins, noting this expression, turned back to the crowd.

"Now, as some of us have discussed, we have no evidence that Kettering is coming back. As he stated when he left, his intention was not to find where we are, but to find a way to live in the jungle." The de facto mayor looked back at Cordova again, clearly more concerned with what the scientists were going to think about this previously-omitted information. Marie made sure not to give him anything from her face that he could read.

"Now, here's what Mr. Cordova and Miss Munoz propose... They came in a small boat that is waiting for them at a river that runs by about a mile to the north." He gestured toward the drop-off at the end of the street that Marie and Cordova had scaled when they arrived. "By their estimate, they will be able to take approximately a dozen passengers at a time back to their station at the mouth of the river. We're currently in the process of deciding who should be on this limited passenger list... Clearly, although we are all anxious to get back to your families, chances are we will have to wait a little longer. As I said..." Collins paused here, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, "... it's currently the early 1950's, so things are different. Many of you, as hard as it is to believe, have not been born yet. Your parents might not have, either. What we need to determine is who will be most influential in terms of informing the world about what has happened here. When we arrive at our decision, we will let you know."

A woman called out from the edge of the bleachers. "This is crazy! How can we believe what they say? Do they even speak English?" A murmur went up from the crowd. Cordova stepped forward.

"Let me allay your fears, ma'am. My name is Michel Cordova, and I currently live in Boston, Massachusetts. I came to Colombia to study weather variance in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean climates. If you'll remember your geography, Colombia is one of the few countries that are both part of the mainland and have access to both major world oceans. My associate, Marie Munoz--"

Marie cut him off by stepping forward and speaking confidently, her accent perhaps carrying an extra air of authenticity to American ears. "Mrs. Marie Munoz,” she said first, without any intonation that she was intending to correct either of the men who spoke before her. “I am from Bogota, and study marine biology at the National University. Because Dr. Cordova required river transport as part of his assignment, my ship and crew volunteered to take him to the weather station on the Atlantic side of the coast. We agreed to take him up this particular tributary when he got the call five days ago from the United States government, asking him to investigate anomalous weather and atmospheric conditions in this area. We now understand that those were most likely caused by whatever effect has brought you here."

The crowd listened more attentively to Marie than they had to either of the men. "And it's really 1952?" the same woman in the crowd asked, voice quavering the slightest bit.

"I'm afraid so," Marie said, nodding. "We want to help you all get to wherever you need to get to, but the issue right now is that my boat just isn’t big enough to carry you all. Like Mr. Collins said, a dozen is all we'll be able to handle at a time. And it looks like it would take about twenty trips, with an eight-day round trip time, to get you all out. So without outside help, it would take about five months to get you all back to the U.S. weather station. But as he also said, we're trying to figure out which of you would be best in helping us get our message of your --" she picked her words carefully here '' --unusual circumstances to a world that will have no reason to believe that what we say is actually true.

“Right now, we're thinking that maybe some of the older people here, maybe ones that were already alive in 1952, might be useful. Perhaps there is one of you with some kind of government connection that we can use as proof of what has happened." People in the crowd were looking among themselves, the older members looking nervously around. "But as we said, that's to be decided. What we ask of you all now is to maintain the plan Mr. Collins has helped you all put in place in terms of safety, food, water and shelter, because we believe it is a sound plan."

She had said all she had meant to, and a long silence followed. But the crowd was still looking to her, so she added, "Are there any questions we can answer for you? And keep in mind, this situation is new to myself and Dr. Cordova, even more so than for you."

“I have a question!” a voice rang out from somewhere slightly farther away than the bleachers. The heads of nearly the entire crowd whipped over to the left. A figure emerged from the scant shadow they cast on the asphalt. The muscles of his arms bulged as he stepped into the light, the barrel of a shotgun resting casually across the back of his neck, the stock held firmly in his hand. He was followed by a group of four others, each one looking like extras out of a Vietnam-era action movie, sleeves ripped off and converted into bandanas that were tied around their foreheads,.

Collins let the name out on a breath that sounded chilled, even in the steamy air. "Hello, Mr. Kettering..."

The man with the gun nodded the brim of his cowboy hat to the de facto mayor. "Mr. Collins," he said cordially. "Now, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation," he said flatly. "Are we really to believe that this is 1950-something or other?"

"That's right," Marie said, not about to let herself be stared down.

Kettering walked out in front of the throng, putting himself between them and the leadership. "That's a fine story, a fine story," he said, sounding amused. "But like the wise lady in the crowd said, how do we even know that it's the truth?"

Collins stepped toward the man, putting up a hand. "Now, look, James, we've all decided what our best course of action is--"

Kettering cut him off. "All I heard was you telling all of us to just stay put. But I think I've got something to say now, something that most people would be very interested to hear about what me and my men found out *there*." He dramatically thrust a beefy finger authoritatively in the opposite direction that Marie and Cordova had come from.

"Now hold on just a minute..." Collins said, but then the shotgun was suddenly unslung, its stock resting on Kettering's hip. It wasn't pointed at Collins, but it was tipping in that direction, and it was clear that it wouldn't take much more than a wrist flick to take it the rest of the way.

"Now, here's a thought," Kettering said into the silence that ensued, "Your people have had their say. How about I have mine now, and then we -- as a democratic people -- decide what the best thing to do is?"

Collins shot a look back over his shoulders first at Marie, and then at Cordova. The latter was the one who broke the silence. "Of course, Mr. Kettering. If you have any new information that could be of use to us all, then by all means..." He gestured expansively to the crowd, ceding the floor to the newcomer.

Kettering gave Cordova a long, hard stare, as if waiting for the scientist to flinch. When he didn't, Kettering stepped forward, the muzzle of the shotgun weaving back in forth in the air like a cobra’s head as the stock rolled against his hip with each step. He didn't lower the weapon to point at the ground until he was standing right in front of Collins, who looked like he wished he were anywhere other than there at that moment.

Kettering spun and turned around, facing the crowd. "The brave souls who ventured out in the jungle with me five days ago--" he gestured to the rough-looking individuals who were still standing where the adventurer had first made his appearance, "-- have made an interesting discovery. We thought when we arrived here that it was some kind of freak accident, something that must have been caused by something inside our boundaries. That was part of the reason why some of us decided to leave... The threat seemed to be coming from somewhere among us. But I can tell you definitively, here and now, that we were wrong. That's why we've returned."

"What are you saying?" Marie asked, impatient to get through all this bluster.

Kettering looked over at her for the first time, as if surprised that she could speak. He cocked an eyebrow, and when he spoke again, it was to her. "Because there's another city like ours two days from here, just as dislocated and out of place."

The crowd really gasped at this one, and this time the noise swelled, rising and rising and not falling until everyone was shouting to be heard over the others, shifting in their seats until the crowd was down off the bleachers, gathering around Kettering and his men with myriads of questions. He did not answer any, just smiled across their clustered forms at Marie, Collins, and Cordova, now standing alone in front of the circus tent.

FAST FICTION #25: Upstream - part 2

For a moment, neither Cordova nor Marie moved. "Should we go?" Marie asked under her breath, her voice clearly conveying that she did not want to.

Cordova looked at the guns trained on them. "I think we must, for now." He reached for Marie's hand, and she reluctantly took it.

Hand in hand, they walked toward the dangling end of the rope ladder, which was not even swaying in the still air now that it had reached its full length. Cordova kept one eye trained on the spectators above, noting which ones lowered their weapons or averted their aim, and which didn't.

At the base of the dislocated city, while they were out of sight of all but the sentry and two others standing on the very crumbling edge of the street above, Marie whispered, "We don't have to do this. We can skirt around the side to where they can't see us, and make a break back into the jungle."

Cordova wrinkled his forehead and shook her request away. "This is an amazing scientific find. Don't you want to know who these people are, where they came from?"

Marie frowned at him. "They already said they were American."

"More reason to learn all we can," Cordova said. "They're in the middle of a jungle and scared. We might be able to help them. Also..." he looked back at the smashed cars they had passed on their way to the ladder, "I may not have been in the States for several years, but I don't recall seeing cars like that."

Marie could tell by the look in his eyes that any counter argument would be lost on him. It was the same fiercely inquisitive look he had the morning they had started up the river. He hadn’t grown up on the outskirts of the jungle; to him, it was not full of wonders to be respected, but mysteries to be solved. She reached out and took hold of the ladder.

She didn't ask for a boost to get her feet up onto the bottommost rung, and none came. However, hands reached down to help her over the ragged edge of the macadam to lift her up once she reached the top. She meant to thank her aides as her head came up over the level of the street, but all thoughts of anything other than the scene before her immediately flew away.

In the span of thirty seconds, she had gone from the world's wildest jungle to the downtown street of a major American city. She had never been in one before, which made seeing one that had been through a subtle cataclysm all the more disturbing. The street was pockmarked and pitted like a normal street, but there were also long, rolling grades and inch-wide cracks that she was sure hadn't been there before the relocation. Cars, shiny and rounded and mostly unharmed, lined both sides of the street. The street itself was awash in sparkling drifts of broken glass – nearly every visible window had been shattered -- and she could see where effort had been made to sweep aside dozens of stories of accumulated detritus to make safe paths. Other than that, the tall buildings seemed to be mostly unaffected.

"Dios mio," she heard Cordova breathe as he came up behind her, beholding the same scene. The sentry was immediately trying to ask him questions, but for a moment, the two scientists just stood there together, marveling at their sudden immersion in a landscape that, by all rights, should not have been there.

Marie looked at the small team that had escorted them up the ladder, trying to apply the same eye that Cordova had applied to the cars. She tried to see if there was anything about their fashion or hairstyles that looked wildly out of place to her, given that she didn’t quite know the state of casual American dress. She found that she couldn't determine anything beyond their general disheveled appearance, but that could all be written off by the fact that they had all been literally dropped into a foreign environment and forced to spend at least four days there, without power or (most likely) water.

"There was just this huge sound," the sentry was saying rapidly, most likely because they were the first people they had seen that had been unaffected by the tragedy, "and the rest of the world just... went away. Some people say that a white light surrounded everything outside the boundary, and then everything shifted. When the light died away there was nothing but jungle.”

Cordova continued scanning the street as he asked, "What time of day was it when you arrived?"

The sentry, puzzled why he was asking this, finally replied, "Evening. It was mid-morning before, and then evening."

Cordova nodded. "So it would seem that not only have you been greatly displaced in space, you have also been displaced in time."

One of the members of the crowd, an especially stern-looking man in what might have been a business suit when they first arrived, and who was the only one who hadn't yet lowered his weapon, said, "We should take him to see Collins."

"That's what I was thinking," the sentry said. "Come on," he said to Cordova and Marie, "I'll show you the way." He started walking out in front of them, then turned and motioned when they didn't immediately follow. "Collins will know what to do," he said.

The small group began moving down the street. Every minute or two, a deep, disquieting creak would come from one of the buildings, a sound almost impossibly slow and grinding. Marie absently realized that, in their original placement, these buildings would be built on pylons driven at least half their height into bedrock. Now, they all were poised on nothing more than fifteen feet of stabilizing material. Sooner or later, they were all going to fall like the partial buildings they had seen along the almost surgically-precise edge. The whole city would eventually wilt like a flower, petals dying in the jungle heat and falling outward.

The sentry, still taking the lead, picked a path down the street, and then turned a corner where a gap in the buildings held what was once a wide plaza. The frozen waves of broken safety glass, arranged in a trillion tiny cubes that reflected the morning sun like a vast pile of diamonds, were thicker here; more effort had been made to push them to the edges. In the center of the plaza stood a large tent, painted with bright stripes. It looked like it had been designed for circus use.

"Pretty lucky they were in town, wasn't it?" The sentry was saying. "It seems to be more stable than anything other structure, so Collins has his command center in here." The small group around Cordova and Marie shepherded them toward the large flaps that had been pulled aside to form an entryway. The sentry passed into the dark shadows inside the tent.

If they had been hoping for a respite from the oppressive jungle morning air inside the tent, they did not find it. The heat, if anything, was even worse, the air stale and sluggish. The acidic smell of animals hung in the air, making their lack of visible presence all the more disturbing. Marie and Cordova’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, and they could see that the tent material was illuminated, unable to block all of the sun. The diffused light made everything inside shadowless and flat.

They passed between two large stacks of bleachers, which held sparse groups of people, sitting and talking in low tones. Some of them were clearly the circus’s performers; Cordova saw one man whose face was incomplete with clown makeup, caught in preparation for a morning show and now half-melted off with sweat: outlines of black and red, white streaks down his neck, one greasepaint eyebrow raised in permanent surprise. The bleachers faced a ring of fat tentpoles that circumscribed a foot-high, circular wall at the very center of the tent. Inside it, the ground was covered with a thin layer of sawdust. It had been spread evenly for the start of the show, but now it had been kicked and shuffled through until it formed tall, abstract patterns on the thin padding underneath. Near the rear, several tables had been pushed together so that maps, blueprints, and other materials could be laid out. Between them, a well-worn path had been made in the sawdust. A man walked back and forth among the tables incessantly, tracing the route over and over again, clearing it to a width of over three feet. His skin was dark against his buttoned white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

The sentry stopped just before stepping over the low wall and into the ring. “Mr. Collins?” he called.

The pacing man looked up immediately. Sweat stood out on his brow. “Yes?”

The sentry suddenly seemed to lose his sense of authority. “We… Some people…” he stammered.

Collins narrowed his eyes, then smiled and waved the man forward. His grin was wide and charming. “Come over, Allway,” he said. He certainly could be an actual mayor, Cordova thought.

The sentry, breathing a sigh of relief, stepped over the wall and walked to Collins. They talked in low tones for a moment, some of the attending personnel looking up from their tables to listen in. More and more glances were thrown in Marie and Cordova’s direction the longer the Allway spoke.

Finally, Collins seemed to have heard enough. He put his hand on Allway's shoulder, and turned back to the place where Marie and Cordova stood. "Come on over!" the man called, his teeth shining.

Leaving the rest of the sentry group behind, they stepped over the wall and crossed to the group of tables, their feet rustling erratically through the small waves of sawdust. Allway backed away respectfully as they approached, absolving responsibility for them. Collins spoke in conversational tones as soon as they were within earshot. "So, I hear you're from outside," he said.

Cordova nodded. "We were on the coast originally, but there were seismic reports and weather phenomena, so we were asked to investigate."

"Wonderful!" Collins said. "That's been our biggest fear, you know, that no one realizes we're here, wherever that is. Where are we, exactly?"

Cordova spoke as if he had been mentally rehearsing for some time. "Not far from the northern coast of Colombia," he said. "A little over four days' trip by boat up the river."

Collins seemed genuinely fascinated. "Amazing..." he mused. “And how much information does the government have?"

"Which one?" Marie asked.

Collins seemed to have not thought of this distinction. "Ah... well, yours and ours both, I suppose."

"Nothing yet," Cordova said. "We're too far out of radio range to relay our information back."

Collins squinted at them, puzzled. "Radio range? So, no one's taken any satellite imagery yet?"

Cordova shrugged. "I don't know what you mean. Are you talking about radar?"

Collins looked between the two of them for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was low, conspiratorial. "What year is this, anyway?"

Cordova answered quickly, matching his hushed tone. "1952."

Collins' face went a little gray. "I see," he said. "Could you two... follow me, please?" He turned and walked toward the smaller back flaps of the tent without checking to see if they were following. The two explorers exchanged a wary look, then followed. They left behind a few staff members to pore over the maps and schematics on their own.

Marie and Cordova exited the tent the way the performers did, at the back of the ring. In the back, there were a few narrow switchbacks between walls of canvas. It was darker back here, the smell of animals more intense. They followed the shadow of Collins as he constantly turning corners ahead on them in the canvas warren, and finally came out in a sheltered area that was full of movement. They clasped hands instinctively as they realized that they had found the source of the animal smells. Cages of all sizes ranged around. Here, a pair of tigers paced back and forth, flashing orange and black between the bars. A small stable along the back held a half-dozen horses, all nodding acknowledgement at the new people. Back in the corner, the largest cage held a small elephant family, all of which flapped their ears and regarded them stoically. Collins turned to face the two scientists, his countenance dour, miles away from the cheerful politician that had originally greeted them.

"I take it my answer was not what you suspected?" Cordova asked.

"When we left, it was..." Collins paused for an unusually long time, as if not wanting to manifest the answer in the physical world, and then uttered a time that lay some sixty years in the future. Cordova nodded, remembering the strange car models lying at the edges of the excised city. "Of course," Collins said, his voice subdued, looking around him at the trapped animals, "... there's no way for us to get back, is there?" He turned back to them, his bark of a laugh holding the slightest hysterical edge. "We're stuck here."

"There are things we can do..." Cordova began.

"Yeah?" Collins said, his eyes wide. "Because if it’s anything other than telling those people out there that they can't go home again, that they're trapped forever in the past..." He ran his hands over the sides of his face. Marie took a half-step back. "I'm not even a real leader, you know," Collins was saying, starting to jabber. "For the first few hours, everyone was just running around, trying to figure out what the hell happened. I just started giving people tasks to do, you know... Sweep the glass out of the street, start taking inventory of the stores and restaurants, things like that." He began pacing anew, this time a sense of urgency in his steps that wasn't there before. He wheeled on them, his tone equal parts incredulity and panic. "I'm an elementary school teacher! I didn't ask for this! I made suggestions, and all of a sudden everyone was looking to me to save them! I can't go out there and tell them that we're not even in our own *time* anymore, and that no one is coming to save us! This city is going to collapse entirely before too long!"

He lunged forward, grabbing Cordova by the lapels. Marie tried to step forward, put herself between the two men to keep them apart, but didn't quite make it. "What are we going to do?" Collins asked, launching flecks of spit toward the other man in the ammoniac heat.

Cordova's calm didn't break. "The best thing you can do for these people right now is to get hold of yourself," he said. "One thing at a time. Securing their survival is the number one job, and it looks like you've managed to do that, at least for now."

Collins looked almost disappointed that Cordova wasn't retaliating, hitting him to the ground, kicking him, anything. Marie considered that maybe that's what the de facto mayor wanted, to sustain some physical wounds to detract from the psychic ones he had been hiding since this emergency started.

Collins looked into Cordova's eyes, first one, then the other, and slumped against him. Because the men were almost identically sized, it was nearly impossible to tell which of them was holding up the other. Marie went into one of the darker corners of the tent and returned with a folding chair. She slid it under Collins, and Cordova lowered him into it. Collins, his hands still crabbed even after relinquishing his tight hold on Cordova's lapels, ran over his sweating face and scalp.

Cordova crouched down next to the chair, looking up at Collins. The weather scientist spoke. "Now, granted, I know next to nothing about these things, but I think the fact that Marie and I didn’t arrive in a city full of savages bashing each other’s brains out in fear means that you've done something right. Can you accept responsibility for that much?"

Collins, staring straight ahead into the gloom, nodded.

"Good," Cordova continued. "Now, you said that you were taking inventory of food and water stores, correct?"

Collins nodded again, but this time flicked a wary glance over at Cordova.

"So you've secured sustenance and shelter for these people. For the moment, the situation is stable. Can you admit that?"

Another nod.

"Okay, so no one's going to starve or start fighting for food. How long can that status be maintained?"

Collins' mind began to work again. "We haven't looked everywhere, but I think we have two weeks of food if we ration it correctly. There are seven restaurants in this section of the city, which has nine complete blocks in it. There are teams still scouting the partial buildings out around the edge, because they’re the least stable and careful progress is slow, but we figure we'll find other hidden survivors at about the same rate as we find food. We're trying to fill six of the restaurants' freezers with everything perishable and keep the doors closed. They're mostly deep inside buildings, so we're hoping the food will last longer."

"Wonderful," Cordova said. "And how many people are accounted for as of now?"

Collins searched his memory. "Four hundred sixty-three," he said. "We lost another hundred in various accidents. Those that didn’t make it… we put in the seventh freezer." His voice was not robotic, but had a statistician’s detachment. Marie thought this was probably necessary for someone in this situation.

Cordova shared a grim look with Marie. "And what is the focus of your efforts right now?" Cordova asked.

“Water," Collins said, more like his original self than he had been since they entered the back of the tent. A tiger growled nearby as if it understood what he was saying. "Any buildings over six stories have rooftop tanks, so we’re making sure they’re full."

"That's wonderful," Cordova said. "I thought sixty years from now they'd have moved on to better plumbing technology."

Collins actually smiled a little at that. "No, it's still done with the old wooden tanks. Don't mess with perfection, as they say." Cordova chuckled, prompting Collins to continue, "I'm having the roof taken off one of them," he said. "They're draining it, moving the water to other buildings. We need to see if the rainwater we catch will be usable."

Marie saw a moment for her own expertise to be useful, so she jumped in. "I'd think so. Your people can't drink water from the streams down in the jungle without getting sick, but the only bacteria in the tanks are the ones you brought with you. So far, anyway. It might be such a gradual transition that your people won’t feel it much."

Cordova nodded toward her. "Marie's our native biochemist," he said. "If you're going to get through this, you'll have her to thank more than anyone else." The look on Marie's face betrayed how deeply she now realized the responsibility on her shoulders.

"What about you?" Collins said. "What's your line of work?"

Cordova shrugged. "I'm a meteorologist," he said. "But I'm an American, so there's that. I'm guessing you're from the East Coast, is that right?"

Collins nodded, and volunteered the name of the city they had been excised from.

"Were there any warning signs before this happened to you?" Cordova asked. “Was there any kind of precedent for it?”

Collins shook his head. "There's been news, I guess, but nothing out of ordinary. Threats of terror attacks, that sort of thing."

"Russians?" Cordova asked, already nodding. Collins laughed out loud.

"No! We're not worried about them anymore. It’s more religious extremists that we're concerned with now. There have been other attacks, but nothing like this."

Cordova looked at Marie. "How do you feel about speaking to the people?" he asked her. "This is your nation, but this turf is more mine. I think we need to talk to as many of these people as we can, and tell them what we understand so far."

Marie nodded. "Promise me one thing, though," she said. "We won't sugar-coat this. The situation is dire, and they should know that." She turned to Collins. "You know them best. Is this information something they can handle?"

Collins nodded, his resolve clearly coming back. He even sat forward in his seat a little bit. "I've seen these people pull together in ways that I've never even considered before. They can take it."

"Sooner is best, I think," Cordova said. "How quickly can we gather them together?"

FAST FICTION #23: Upstream - part 1

The river turned sluggish on the fourth day, becoming choked with debris, logs and clumps of biomass that had gotten tangled into mats further up in the rapids, and were now hurtling toward the small research boat. Cordova, standing on the cabin roof, got out his binoculars and turned them upriver, trying to see if the way got clearer up ahead. As far as he could see, it didn't. Marie came up next to him, watching the crew -- most of them hired hands from the port -- standing at the prow of the boat. They used big poles to push aside the floating chunks of forest as they came. The boat kept pushing through this semi-cleared channel, but the pilot had dialed down the throttle to prevent running into anything at a damaging speed.

"Terrazas says that he's never seen anything like this," Marie said.

"Well, he ought to know," Cordova said, taking his binoculars down, but still looking ahead. He didn't want to look at her. If Terrazas was concerned, with more than twenty years navigation experience than anyone else on the boat, then he supposed they should be too.

"How far away do you think we are?" Marie said. "And is the way going to get harder the closer we get?"

Cordova answered with a terse, "Two more days, at this rate. And probably."

Marie crossed her arms, and he could feel her stern look without turning to her. "Are we even sure that we're going to know what we're looking for when we find it?"

"We'll know. Something that causes this much damage will be obvious." There were other signs, too. The jungle sounds that usually filled the air had started to fade, which meant that they were getting closer to the center of -- whatever this was. And maybe he was imagining it, but the trees seemed to be leaning the slightest bit downstream, opposite the direction the boat was traveling.

"I'm going to say it again," Marie said, "but we're really not equipped for this kind of thing. All our equipment was designed for weather data, and this--" she swept a hand at the thickening river ahead of them, "--definitely isn't weather related."

Cordova sighed, finally turned to her. "I agree with you. The only advantage we have is that we'll be able to get to the site before any other military presence can get feet on the ground. And to the bosses, that means something."

"Well, I don't like it," she muttered. "We have no idea what we're getting into. We could be heading toward a radiation-heavy site, or a volcano that could go off again..."

Cordova interrupted her. "No evidence points to that. That's the reason why the government called us to check it out first. We've got our radiation detectors running, and if this is some sort of missile attack gone astray, that's important information to have."

Marie just looked at him for a moment, then swatted at a persistent, noisy fly that was circling her ponytail. "I'm going to take a shift on the prow," she finally huffed, and went down to relieve one of the tired men on the bow.

Cordova watched her as she stepped up beside one, put her hand on his shoulder, and took the pole he was using to push debris out of their path. He wondered when -- and if -- he should tell her, what he suspected, and what the commander he had spoken to had suggested to him when they were taken away from their weather station monitoring to undertake this mission.

He raised his binoculars up again, and was stunned with what he saw when he scanned the horizon. There, clearly rising out of the mist in the distance, was a small clump of tall buildings. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and checked again. Yes, there they were. They had to be some kind of mirage in this green wilderness. But they didn't shimmer, didn't move, just became steadily clearer the closer they crept toward it.

He waited until he was absolutely sure that his eyes hadn't deceived him before calling Marie up to verify what he was looking at. They were the highest personnel on the boat, so no one could see it from the lower deck, even if they hadn't been preoccupied with clearing away the junk below that threatened to impede their progress. He didn't speak when she responded to his call, did nothing to allay the sense of annoyance in her eyes when she came up from her work to stand beside him. He just handed her the binoculars. He waited patiently while she held them to her eyes, followed his pointing finger, lowered the lenses, raised them again, lowered them again.

"What the hell is that?" she finally asked.

"It's the impact site," he said.

Marie stood silent for a few moments. "I thought this kind of debris was most likely caused by a volcanic eruption, but since there was no ash, I thought it might have been a meteorite."

"That's what I thought too," Cordova said flatly. "But this is... something different".

"How soon until we get to it?" Marie asked.

"The river hasn't stopped flowing, so it's not blocking the river."

"Wait," Marie said, "you think this thing just appeared there?"

"I don't know," Cordova said. "I think anything we guess is going to be proven wrong tomorrow." Marie nodded. At the rate they were moving upstream, they wouldn't get to those distant man-made peaks until the next day.

By nightfall, the whole crew knew about what was ahead of them. Cordova had spoken to each of them separately, slowly and calmly, and as night fell, he was glad he had. There were sounds and a few lights from over there, some of which might have been shouts. Cordova also thought he might have heard gunfire. Some of the buildings had fires burning on their roofs, and a bigger fire he couldn't see the source of underneath that might be a whole small building going up. Engines could be heard, and even the blat of a few truck horns. As fascinating as it was to watch and listen to the steadily-growing incongruity, he forced himself to bed early. He suspected he would need all the energy he had.

They arrived at the point of the river closest to the city the next morning before noon. They knew they were getting closer because the trees' tilt -- which he hadn't imagined after all -- grew progressively more pronounced, until they found they had to hug the right bank of the river to avoid the low-hanging branches from their left. He ordered the crew to continue upstream, drawing abreast of the city, until he perceived the trees to be leaning upstream along with them, figuring that that would mean that they had just passed the closest point they were going to get to the city. He ordered the captain to park as close to the left bank as they could, once they found a spot relatively clear of bent trees.

He and Marie, carrying their packs full of supplies, jumped off onto solid ground and began to pick their way forward, now able to see several of the tallest buildings over the lowering treetops. They proceeded without speaking, both excited and frightened in equal measure. Periodically, he would close his eyes as they reached a relatively clear stretch of ground, and the closer he got, the more he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a city. It was subtly different, though; more human voices, less traffic.

It was during one of these periods of self-imposed blindness that Marie caught his arm, holding him back. He stopped and opened his eyes. They had finally reached the point where the forest had been flattened enough that their heads were sticking out over the top of the foliage. In front of them lay about a hundred yards of utterly flattened ground, and beyond that, a city on a pedestal. It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. Being a scientist above all other things, two words stood out in his head like neon: “core sample”.

He was looking at an excised section of a city, a cylindrical piece that started at about fifteen feet below street level and ended somewhere above the top of the highest building, as if it had been and dropped there. The force of such a weight being landing on a swath of virgin forest, he imagined, would force so much air out from under it that it would cause the arboreal devastation in all directions, smothering trees and clogging river with blown debris. The most amazing part of the excision -- if he was thinking about this correctly -- was how it failed to take human geometry into account. The edge of the sample was a perfect circle, judging by the smooth way it curved away from him and Marie in both directions, one that sliced through buildings regardless of how they were arranged. In fact, he could see at least two places around the half of the circle visible to him where buildings had been clipped so thinly that they had collapsed, falling away from the center and off the elevated disc, crushing even more jungle floor. He imagined there were just as many that had fallen inward, which might account for the random firelight he had seen the night before.

The several yards of underground that was exposed were riddled with pipes of all sizes, huge mouth-like storm drains and smaller utility pipes as well. Many had thin streams of brackish water still flowing out of them, turning the ground surrounding the base into a swampy morass. There were more than a few overturned cars in this mire below spots where surface streets ended, implying that the displacement had happened so quickly that they did not have time to realize that the street before them didn't continue, but ended in a sheer drop to the jungle floor.

"Hey!" a voice called. It had a strange tone to it, both echoing and muffled at the same time.

Marie pointed up to the edge of the street that ended closest to where they stood. A man was standing up there, holding an imposing-looking rifle against his hip.

Cordova raised a hand and waved it over his head. Marie grabbed for it, as if to prevent the gesture, but either thought better of it or realized the damage had been done, and let him do it. "Hello!" he called as he waved.

The man with the rifle placed his other hand on the butt of it, but still didn't point it in his direction. "Where are you from?"

Cordova stepped forward, far enough that the flattened trees and undergrowth only came up to his knees. "We're scientists. We were exploring the river when we spotted you in the distance." If Marie minded that he was bending the truth, she didn't seem to mind. "How long have you been here?"

The man with the rifle looked behind him, but from this low angle Cordova couldn't tell what he was looking at. "This is the third day," he said. "None of us knows what happened. We just appeared here."

"You were carried and dropped?" Marie asked, addressing the sentry for the first time.

"Not carried, just dropped. We estimate we appeared about ten feet off the ground, then fell. We're shaken up pretty bad, but we're trying to pool resources and keep order."

"Is there a leader we can talk to?" Cordova asked.

The sentry considered his answer for a moment, then said, "The mayor's residence was outside the circle, so we're trying to figure out that part too."

"Is there a way for us to come up?" Cordova asked. "We'd like to help, if we can."

The sentry looked behind himself again, nervously this time, and looked back down at them. "We haven't really left the circle yet, but we know we'll have to eventually. Hang on a minute." The man disappeared without waiting for an answer from either of them.

When he left, Marie began to wonder. "What city *is* this?" she asked.

"I don't recognize any of the buildings." Cordova shook his head. "I'm just glad they speak English. But look at the cars."

She followed his pointing finger at the smashed cars that had fallen off the edge of the city circle. She didn't know cars very well, but there were a few that bore strange design elements that she hadn't seen before. They were sleek, curved in ways she wasn't used to seeing. "What does that mean?" she asked.

Cordova shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But this looks like an American city to me. The only trouble is, I don't know any of these car models. They look somewhat... futuristic, don't you think?"

Marie squinted at them, wishing she had paid more attention to car design. Or that they had a chance to look at specimens that were more intact. When she looked too close, she began to realize that the cars she was looking at were gruesomely occupied. Those who had been driving the cars when they plummeted and crashed were, for the most part, still visible inside the vehicles. She turned away. "God," she muttered.

The man with the rifle reappeared, this time flanked by a half-dozen more people. They were unarmed, and their dress ran the gamut from t-shirt and cutoffs to business suits, all similarly scuffed and askew. "Hey!" the sentry called again. Cordova and Marie looked up to him. "We're working on a ladder for you," he said. "Do you have a radio down there? We have a few intact towers, but don't seem to be getting any bars up here."

Cordova had no idea what the man was talking about. "We have a radio in our boat, but we're too far inland to call anyone. We'd have to travel at least two days downstream before we can call the coast."

The man looked perplexed. "Which coast?" he asked.

When Cordova said, “Columbian, of course," a murmur went through the elevated crowd. Clearly, this was not an answer they had expected.

They turned and talked to each other in hushed tones, although they needn't have; nothing less than a hailing call could be heard over the distance between them and Cordova and Marie.

"Are you saying," the sentry called, making sure to speak over the rising voices behind him, "that we're in Columbia?"

"That's right," Cordova answered. "Where were you expecting?" He wasn't mocking him, he just wanted to know.

Marie jumped in, fearing they would misunderstand his tone, "We're guessing that you're American, yes?"

The sentry seemed a little reluctant to talk to Marie, noting her accent. "Yes. That's right."

"What city?" she asked.

The sentry turned and spoke to his cohorts behind her, and in lieu of an answer, he called down, "Hold on," he said. "We're getting the ladder now." The group moved away from the edge, at least far enough that Cordova and Marie couldn't see them anymore.

“You're going to spook them," Marie said. "Please be careful. You can't convey tone across this distance."

"Don't worry," Cordova said. "These are my countrymen. We understand each other."

At that moment, the group reappeared at the edge of the city. Now they were all armed, the barrels of rifles, shotguns and pistols alike trained on them. The sentry kicked a bundle off the edge of the street, and it unfurled into a chain-and-plank safety ladder on the way down, its end snapping just two feet off the ground and waving in the still air. "Come up, please,” he said. “The woman first."