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It would be heedless to say that what I saw in front of me as the moths fluttered about the dock light and the moon shone blue through the trees was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen; of course it was. How else should I describe the nude, spare figure bowed dutifully in the moonlight (i.e., with her forehead touched to the wooden dock, like a monk) or the lean behemoth across the pond from her that watched the dark waters like a hawk before stabbing its snout in and coming up with a tuna—or something like it—at which the figure rose and splayed its hands even as the great beast swung its head away and was gone.
“You’re playing with fire,” I said—I guess I couldn’t help it—even as she whipped around and glared at me. “But then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
And we stared at each other: me and the nude, spare girl at the end of the dock, in the fog, in the night. There behind the Frank Lloyd Wright-styled house with its jade-green solar panels and the impossible light seeping from its windows (a house that wasn’t mine—and probably wasn’t hers). There in an overcast, wooded area of Marin County, California, near Lagunitas-Forest Knolls, after the Apocalypse. Until she stepped forward and snatched a robe from the back of a chair and shook the hair from her eyes, and snapped, “Did you get a good look?”
I guess I must have recoiled.
“No. Yes; I mean—I saw lights on and thought maybe there was help here; like, government help.” I looked back at the house and the resplendent back yard: the covered pool, the greenhouse full of plants. “A rescue station—like the kind they’d started setting up during the Flashback. But now ...” I trailed off, thinking of all the dead zones I’d visited, the haunted buildings, the empty places. “I’m just lost. Lost and hungry.”
I added: “I’m David, by the way. David Hodge Lambert.”
She cinched the robe briskly, aggressively. “David,” she repeated. “David Hodge Lambert.” She laughed without discernible humor. “So tell me, David. Do you make a habit of watching women in their most private moments—or am I the exception?”
“Look. It’s just—” I peered beyond her at the small lake, to where the gaunt creature had been standing only a moment before. “I’ve never seen such a thing, that’s all. It’s like—it’s like you were praying to it. Worshipping.”
She started walking toward me, toward the Frank Lloyd Wright-styled house. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s not a wise thing, that’s for sure.” I gave her a wide birth as she passed completely by me and entered the house. “I mean, you saw its ribs. That animal is starv—”
“Allosauruses don’t swim, normally,” she called.
“Yeah? Well.” I heard something splash and refocused on the water. “I don’t normally watch women in their private moments, either. Regardless: showing yourself to it like that is—” I started to turn, “It’s like putting up a giant billboard that says ‘Free—’”
She looked at me over the pistol and arched an eyebrow.
“... buffet.” I raised my hands slowly. “Now look. I don’t want any—”
“I’ll give you food and water—enough to last several days, even a week, if you’re lucky, and then you go. Am I clear?”
I moved to speak but paused: She was too focused, too single-minded. Too hair-trigger. Saying the wrong thing simply wouldn’t do. “Sure,” I said, although only after some length—lightly, breezily, and took a step back. “That’d be great. I mean—if it wouldn’t put you out.”
She scowled and cocked the pistol. “Don’t even—”
I shook my head briskly. Not even. I’m not even.
And then she just relaxed—suddenly, inexplicably—lowering the hammer like a pro, like Marshal fucking Dillon, letting her arm drop to her side.
“You’re not exactly ‘Danger Man,’ are you?” she said.
“No, ma’am. No, I’m not.”
“More like John-Boy Walton. Or Richie Cunningham.” She soured suddenly. “What good are you, then?” She disappeared into the house. “I’ll put something together—something high in protein; that you don’t have to cook. Well, don’t just stand there. Come in.”
She added: “I’m Naomi.”
I stepped into the home but paused immediately: taken aback by all the canvases and easels—the drop cloths and oozing paints, the tables covered with palettes and sketchbooks and small wooden manikins. “You’ve been busy during the apocalypse.”
She called from the kitchen: “Do you like them?”
I paced next to a wall covered in portraits. “I confess that I do. Your use of color is striking. And your subject matter,” I scanned the oversized works—the politicians and dictators, the bikers and rockstars; the powerful, majestic animals poised on tree branches and cliffs. “It’s incredibly consistent. They’re all of a piece.”
I stopped in front of one that was exceptional for its lack of color. “Except this one. The one with the muted blues and grays. ‘In the Forests of the Night.’” I looked up to find her busying herself in the kitchen. “William Blake?”
“Elisa Lam,” she said, and joined me—or at least came to within about 10 feet of me, the gun still in her hand. “Are you familiar with it? The case, I mean.”
“Sure, I guess,” I said, having read about it before the Flashback. “She was the girl found in the water tank, at the Cecil Hotel. The one in the viral video—where she’s behaving oddly outside the elevator, contorting her hands.”
“The Cecil Hotel, that’s right,” said Naomi. “Just motioning and gesticulating—as if someone were in the hallway with her, although we never see anything. And then, weeks later—”
“They fish her out of the tank.”
“On the roof,” said Naomi. “It’s just such a weird story; so tragic, so surreal. And I guess when they ruled it an ‘accidental drowning’ stemming from a manic episode—she hid in the tank because she thought she was being followed and then couldn’t climb out—I got inspired. And this was the result. Such as it is.”
We looked at the oversized canvas and the muted blues and grays; at the moonlight filtering through the water and the girl’s hovering, ink-black hair. “Personally, I think it’s one of your best,” I said. “The others are all looking out, looking up, at gods and demi-gods. But this one—this one looks in; in and down, curiously. At the drowned girl—who’s isolated and alone. Into the darkness; which seems almost to be beckoning her. It really is my favorite.”
She laughed aloud at all that. “And here I wasn’t even going to finish it! Ha. And ha, again. But, no. No. It’s missing that one special element; that special something that all the others have. A thing that, without it, it can’t really be mine.” She glanced at me alluringly, almost seductively. “And do you know what that is?”
I looked at the other paintings. “Fire engine red,” I said.
“Primal instinct,” she said, ignoring me, and indicated the biker. “Take David here—yes, that’s why I laughed when you told me your name. David was my sometimes lover before—and for a brief time after, the Flashback.” She tilted her head and studied him—appreciatively, coldly. “What do you see in his eyes?”
I suppose I must have squinted. “Dead children.”
“Seriously—what do you see there in between the darks and the lights?”
I examined the painting carefully, fastidiously.
“A shadow,” I said—although only after some length. “Like a dark cloud, or a kind of stain, only—” I hesitated. “No. No, that’s not it. More of a ... an undertow.”
“‘A demonic sublime,’ as Yvonne Jacquette put it,” she said; and looked at me. “Something lurid, carnivalesque, frenetic—almost noirish. Something primal and unrestrained. He had it.” She laughed, suddenly. “Until he didn’t. But then, we all do; to a greater or lesser degree.” Her greenish-brown eyes flicked up and down my face (for she’d moved closer; a lot closer). “Even you.”
My brow must have furrowed even as I smiled. “I’m not sure how to take that.”
“I’m not sure how I meant it.”
Now it was my turn to do the sizing up. “Precisely none of which explains why you were bowing to a predatory dinosaur in the middle of the night in the heart of California wine country while quite possibly squatting in someone else’s home—considering there’s a Harley out back with two helmets on the seat, and Michigan plates.”
“Mysteries within mysteries,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
“Mysteries I can live with,” I responded, flatly. “Food and water, on the other hand ...”
I indicated the kitchen.
And then we just stared at each other—we who were possibly the last two people on earth—there in the Frank Lloyd Wright-styled house with its jade-green solar panels and impossible, welcoming light. There in an overcast, wooded area of Marin County, California, near Lagunitas-Forest Knolls, after the time-storm, after the Flashback. After the anomaly that had vanished probably three-quarters of the human population and reverted the world to primordia.
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“What happened to him, anyway? My doppelganger, that is. David One.”
Naomi poured herself another glass of wine and sat back in her deck chair, which was angled toward the lake, as was mine.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just really don’t. I’m having too good a time. Too nice an evening. I mean, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed basic conversation—basic human interaction. It’s like a high I don’t ever want to come down from.”
She tittered slightly as though remembering something funny before slowly coming down, slowly becoming reflective. “He just lost the instinct, I think. That’s all. He was always such a giant of a man, such a larger-than-life figure; so jovial, so combustible, but then the Flashback came and it just—it just sort of ate him alive. It ate his mind. I mean long before he decided to just wander into the night.” She took a draft of her wine and seemed to savor it, to relish it to her very core. “It’s not a good memory.”
And then she fell silent, too silent, and we just stared into the dark, into the abyss of the lake, nursing our glasses of Avalon Cabernet Sauvignon over the remains of the meal, listening to the fish jump.
“Okay, so you’ve told me about art school and your sojourns as first a groupie and then an escort; you’ve told me about the liaisons—the bad boys and married men and power brokers and political figures; all of whom shall remain nameless; but what you haven’t told me—what you haven’t even come close to telling me—is the one thing I actually want to know, which is a simple, clean, economically-unpacked: why?”
She looked at me pensively, thoughtfully, before shifting her focus to the sky and the Aurora Borealis-like lights, which had been omnipresent since the Flashback. “The short answer is, I don’t know—not really. I mean, I really don’t. I know that I’ve always sensed a ... a ...” I shifted my focus to the dock light—I’m not sure why, perhaps I’d heard a sound. “A kind of pulse; which runs through everything and everyone—like an undertow, as you said so yourself, like a current in a great, black river.” I watched the insects as they ticked off the glass. “A sort of dark animus whose methods are inscrutable but whose power is undeniable, and, also, that I’m attracted to—drawn to, like light to a black hole.” She appeared to follow my gaze. “And I guess sometimes I get sucked in—just completely absorbed—as with the oxycodone. Or with the married doctor. Just utterly overwhelmed.” She turned back to me and we looked at each other. “And I drown. I cease to exist.”
“Which is all the more reason to come with me to San Rafael,” I said. “Look, I know you don’t believe me—but I’m telling you: the encampment is there; or at least it was as of June, which is when I caught the broadcast. And we’re not talking some tent city full of human waste and dysentery, either, but a goddamn stronghold; one full of military people and first responders, hospital facilities, food stores—”
“Uh, hello? The aftershocks?” She grabbed the bottle (our second) and took a swig, having already depleted her glass. “I mean, do you really think those people are still there—all of them? You’ve seen just one small county—from Petaluma to here, by foot—try crossing the entire country on a motorcycle; and then tell me how many people you think there are. Besides, I’ve got everything I need right—”
“Until, when? Until the pantry runs out? Until you’ve got an abscess tooth—or even a whole mouthful—and you want to stick that gun upside your head; or—say, your appendix fails? I mean, this isn’t sustainable—it never has been. It’s sheer, undiluted madness to think that; and pass me the bottle.”
And she passed me the bottle, after which I took a swig and poured the rest into her glass, then went to the cellar for more—returning with a Woodbridge Mondavi Red Blend to find her swaying to “Upside Down” by Diana Ross (playing from a battered little CD player I hadn’t even noticed she had) and letting a white strap of her halter slip—like a linguini, I thought, and sat down.
“Don’t thing I haven’t noticed it,” she said, slurring slightly, and added, “I see the way you look at me.”
I uncorked the bottle and filled my glass. “You’re a very beautiful woman,” I said—and sat the bottle between us—too hard, I think. “And a talented one. What would you expect?” I watched as she shimmied and did a little pirouette. “And I’m enjoying the conversation—more than you could know. You move beautifully, by the way. Like a cat.”
And then she attempted to spin again but only stumbled suddenly and fell smack into my arms; at which we just looked at each other, she with her boozy, breezy smile and me with an apparent moral dilemma: i.e., should I make a pass at her, like I wanted to, or should I just put her into bed and tuck her away safe (as though she were a simpleton, perhaps, or even a child) like, say, John-Boy Walton might. A dilemma I answered by taking her head in my hands and kissing her—heatedly, hot-bloodedly, restlessly—what a friend of mine used to call a “come fuck me” kiss; because she was no child. And I was no John-Boy.
And then we went to her room and lay together; drunkenly, sloppily, unspectacularly, and after a while, I dreamed: of lightning permeating everything and rain pounding the roof like nails, like hail; of wives and friends and girlfriends and my father—most of whom I hadn’t seen in years; of small, predatory dinosaurs, deinonychuses, with dark skin and wet backs—who held vigil around our bed like cultists, like priests, and who trilled, softly, faintly, as though they were meditating. As though they were communing.
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“What I can’t figure is, how they even got in,” I was saying, as I stared at the muddy prints. “I mean. I know they opened doors in Jurassic Park, but, come on.”
Naomi blushed and shrunk, noticeably. “Yeah— well. That would be me. I’d been trying to air the house out, see, before you showed up, and had propped open a side door—and I guess I forgot all about it. Sorry.”
“It’s all right, no one got hurt. It’s just ...” I tilted my chin, still studying the tracks. “But look how close they got—they had us completely surrounded.” I shook my head. “I could have sworn it was a dream. Whatever. It’s not quite daylight. If we leave now we can reach San—”
“Leave, now?” She looked at me as though I’d slapped her. “What are you talking about?”
I must have just stared at her. “San Rafael. I’m talking about San Rafael. I mean, we can’t very well—”
“I’m not going to San Rafael,” she laughed—and turned to leave before whipping back around. “Why would you even say that? I’m staying right here, where—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—”
“Sorry ...”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, you’re kidding, I know you are. Those were deinonychuses, Naomi. Fucking ‘terrible claws.’ Smart, fast, pack-hunting wolverines that could bring down that allosaurus if they put their minds to it. And you want to be neighbors?”
She moved to speak but paused, blushing with anger. “Look; I’m not telling you what to do—all right? So don’t try and tell me. You want to tuck tail and run—fine. But I’m not going anywhere. Do I make myself clear?”
“As pus,” I growled. “Look, the only reason we’re alive is because those things caught scent of that allosaur and didn’t want to challenge its territory—all right? It sure as hell isn’t because you’ve been—because you’ve been praying to these things; if that’s what you’re thinking.” I watched as her expression changed and finally threw up my arms. “Jesus Christ, that’s what she’s thinking. That’s actually what she’s thinking. Probably wants us more in tune—”
“Dammit, just listen to me! It’s because we were in tune with this place that we were spared—okay? Because we weren’t fighting or running or resisting, but were instead in harmony with it—all of it, with the animals, with the Flashback, everything. What’s more, it’s like, talking to us now, trying to tell us something. And I don’t know about you, David Hodge Lambert, but I want to know what that something is.” She shoved against me suddenly, violently. “I have to know what it’s saying, what this great darkness is whispering—don’t you see, I have to!”
And then she tore away from me even as I tried to calm her and bolted out the back door, into the fog, into a primordial soup, at which I quickly pursued and cornered her at the end of the dock, where she turned to face me before stripping off her shirt.
“Ah, Jesus,” I exhaled, loudly. “Okay—fine. Why not. So ... Here goes. What are you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She shimmied out of her Levis and kicked them off—hopping on one foot as she did so. “I’m going in, David—going in to them. To whatever’s behind all this.” She stepped out of her panties and gave me her best come-hither look. “Wanna come?”
I think I just glared at her—unable to find the right words, stunned entirely speechless.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said, and inched a little closer, conscientiously, deliberately. “We don’t know what’s in there. No, no, what I think you need to do just now is to—”
“That’s far enough,” she snapped.
“Or—what? Your gun’s in the house.”
“Or I jump—right now. Or ... or I call them down on you.” She nodded at the sky—into the churning gloom—where a single pterodactyl wheeled and the strange lights shimmered. “Because—because we’re not the same, see. I’m not like you. Like, not even. I run with wolves. I always have. And I was born for this.”
“No,” I said—and inched still closer. “No one was.”
“Just go. Now—”
And then I leapt.
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It would be pointless to say that I doubted my own sanity, or at least my convictions, once she was in the water: of course I did. It was hard not to as she just swam safely away—side stroking and floating on her back—like an otter, like a thing born to the water; dipping and resurfacing and shaking the drops from her hair, like a swan. Indeed, it didn’t seem to be as though there was anything to worry about; at least, until the allosaurus emerged with the swamp water up to its nostrils and its dark, little eyes focused on her—at which I called out to her hoarsely, desperately, before dropping to the platform and extending an arm (for it was a good several feet from it to the surface).
“Okay, babe. It’s okay. Just—just stay calm and swim for me—all right? Don’t look at it. Don’t even look back. Just, just head for the dock. You can do it.”
And she did do it, focusing straight ahead, focusing on her strokes; closing the gap swiftly, deftly, until she reached the dock and sought for my hand—and realized she couldn’t make it. Realized the reach was simply too great; and that she’d have to climb for it—have to climb the pilings—which she began to do, grunting and groaning, struggling, coming close enough almost to touch my hand, or for me to take hers—before slipping and falling back down.
“It’s—the ropes are too slick. I—I can’t get a grip.”
I glanced at the allosaurus, or rather the top of its head—like a crocodile, I thought, or an alligator—creeping closer, sealing the gap. “You’ve got to try, hon—just keep trying. Come on ...” I hung over the platform precariously—reaching and groping. “Climb, dammit!”
And our fingertips touched, briefly, fleetingly, even as the thing’s head swooped in and she was jerked beneath the surface—brutally, completely. Even as she looked at me and seemed almost to have an epiphany, a kind of spiritual revelation, before vanishing into the murk and exploding back up again, grunting and hyperventilating, unable to get any air, bleeding from her nose and mouth. At which the animal swung its head away and she bobbed over like a top, like a buoy, her face half-submerged, her visible eye blinking, once, twice, before glazing over and just staring, blankly. Devoid.
And then I stood but did not leave, looking at her head and shoulders—at her hovering, ink-black hair—as the allosaurus consumed something and the strange lights shone down—eerily, subliminally, stoically. As the deinonychuses trilled somewhere in the fog and the muted, blue-gray morning became day.
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It would be hard to say for how long I sat on that Harley, just looking at the house. Could have been 30 seconds; could have been 30 minutes. Probably it was 30 minutes. All I know is that it was another one of those moments in which I seriously doubted my ability to go on; to just continue down the road and try to survive—not because I’d loved her but because I feared, on some level, that she’d been right: that the world of the Flashback was, indeed, talking to us, trying to tell us something—although what that might have been was anyone’s guess; and trying to figure it out was a good way to go mad—like, epically mad, cosmically mad. Lovecraftian mad. And so I let it go; just as I’d always let things go, even before the time-shift; even before the Collapse and the Vanishing and this demon-haunted world with its demonic sublime.
And then I started the Harley and kicked it down into gear, hoping to make San Rafael by nightfall—maybe even by late afternoon. Hoping it was there and that I hadn’t just imagined it. Hoping there were people there and that they might find it in themselves to show me a kindness. Even though we were lost—every one of us—in the forests of the night.