“I got it!” Dan grinned, holding up a jar of blackcurrant jam as Freya climbed into her seat. At once, she was relieved. He must have gone down to Jericho Market after class. But, in his face, there was more. She was certain he wasn’t telling her everything. Freya wanted to know, but she was afraid to find out.
She would know soon enough. There was an imminence in the air, a spark on every moment this might be the first and last time for everything.
“There’s so much to say,” Freya said.
Dan bent over and kissed her.
“Let’s start there,” he smiled, and she couldn’t help but do the same. Still, she couldn’t help but glance around the car, looking for Malcolm. She felt like they were being watched.
They drove towards Nading Hill park to see if the snow had melted on the running track, and she spilled everything about Lassa’s research, Radomir’s warning, and Lynn Harris. When she spoke about Lassa’s idea that the Starball might be a kind of culling device for intelligent life, Dan took a deep breath, bracing both hands on the wheel as if he were about to be lashed.
“Jesus,” he breathed. “What an idea. I spent a lot of today trying to feel what’s me and what’s it. Trying to figure out if I could break free, or if I’d even want to.”
“All we’d have to do is put it in a locker, or seal it back in the meteorite,” Freya said. “Whatever spectrum it’s using to control us, metal blocks the transmission. We could stop this whole thing if we wanted.”
“Do you want to do that?” Dan asked, and she shook her head.
“I did it once, and I felt absolute despair. I never want to feel that way again. I think that’s why I can talk about this without being pacified. The Starball knows it has me.”
“Can we do anything to help your mother?” Freya shook her head again.
“She’s only there for a short period. It’s voluntary. I’m pretty much the worst daughter possible.”
“You’re not—” Dan began, and her expression stopped him.
“I told her about the river,” Freya said.
For a long moment, Dan held her hand, and she felt she was sliding down a chute, shooting towards a terrible crash. He caught her eyes and looked back with complete understanding. He’d been there.
They were alone in the parking lot. Behind Dan, the shirking sun was giving up the day, combing thin fingers of light through the empty branches of the black willow trees. It was only 4:12 PM.
“Let’s run,” Dan offered.
* * *
There had been Unity on this track before. With every step they sniffed for it, like dogs that had once discovered something good to eat and never forgot. Unspoken between them was the fear that was over, the magic had fled, never to return. Freya pushed as hard as she could. There was so much to run from.
The snow had melted along the inner track but there were still clumps on the outer lanes, the whole track was damp. Their shoes made wet, peeling sounds as they ran and, for the first twenty laps, the only conversation was between their sneakers and the synthetic rubber underfoot.
Gradually, Freya broke free from her pack of worries, finding a place in her stride where they didn’t matter so much. She caught Dan looking at her and pushed harder. It wasn’t Unity, but it was something.
Pain knocked her out of the hard-won peace. It came from the Starball not her body. The orb suddenly pulsed the most intense heat Freya had ever felt from it. Freya came to an abrupt stop, breathing heavily. It had never done that before.
Dan had stopped a few strides past her. He turned back around, putting his hand on his hip. She was about to shake it off and start to run again when the Starball pulsed a second time. It would not be ignored. Freya wondered if he felt it, too. Something was wrong, and she scanned the darkness for the source.
“There,” Freya said, motioning with a slight incline of her head. There was a black Tahoe parked next to Dan’s Toyota. She wondered if the CIA had tracked them down, but the lights were off. Someone sat out there in the dark waiting for them.
“I didn’t see headlights driving up, did you?”
“No,” Freya said. “I think that’s Malcolm.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Everything was in the Toyota, their backpacks, their phones, their keys. Dan’s eyes darted around, looking for a weapon. Freya’s mind leapt to the rifle in the foyer, the gun in the ottoman, but they were all so far away. She was a fool to come here without any way to defend herself.
“Let’s just run away,” Freya said, remembering the first thing Vitko ever taught her. Dan squinted in confusion. What an awful time to have to explain herself!
“Let’s go through the woods,” she insisted. “Come on!” Freya was suddenly very aware they stood in the middle of the track with no cover.
“I didn’t lock my car,” Dan protested, standing still. She could tell he was still not quite there. He was always a little loose after running.
“Dan, he has a gun!” Freya hissed, and the intensity from her voice finally reached him. They sprinted towards the woods where the snow seemed to get deeper with every step. They reached a chain link fence and vaulted over, taking cover behind a white pine. They peeked out, but it was too dark to see if they were being pursued.
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“Let’s keep going,” Freya insisted.
The air was full of snow crunching underfoot and gasping breaths. There was a loud pop in the distance, then another. At the second, Freya dragged Dan down onto the ground with her. With the snow burning against her face, she remained motionless, straining her ears against the thunder of her pulse, trying to tell which direction the shots came from.
She felt a weight on her back, Dan covering her body with his own. For a few long moments, she was pressed against the ground, struggling to breathe. Two more pops rang out in the night, but it was impossible to tell how far away they were in the winter air.
They had to get up, had to keep moving. Freya was sure if they got caught here on the ground, they would be executed. An image flashed into her mind of their bodies sprawled face-down on the snow, red fanned around their heads like halos.
“We have to move!” she hissed.
Dan rose and helped her up, and they ran in what they hoped was the opposite direction from the shots. Their hands throbbed, wet from cowering in the snow. They struggled through the woods for what felt like forever, and then ran for the first lights they saw, the windows of a brick house with white trim.
A long driveway led up to the brick house and piled on either side were ramparts of snow. At the end of the line was an ancient Dodge pickup with a plow blade attached. Parked behind it was a short tanker truck. In hand-painted letters on the back of the tank it read: “EARL MOSBY SEPTIC SERVICE. WERE #1 @ PICKIN UP #2!” The lights they’d seen were from the windows. Inside, a television flickered against wood-paneled walls.
Freya ran up to the door and banged on it, her hand was so numb she could barely feel it. There was a commotion inside. They saw a man’s face peering out at them through the bay window. A moment later, they were blinded as the man inside the house turned on the floodlights.
The front door opened inward, and Earl Mosby was peering out at them from the entryway. He was a short, hirsute man in boxers and a ratty undershirt. In his left hand he held a shotgun, the barrel nearly scraping the floor. There was just dumb silence, and then two large cats seized their chance and shot out the door between his legs. Behind him, the hockey game still blared, the Bears had just scored a goal. Mosby’s eyes shot down, tracking the cats as they fled into the night.
“Ah, hell,” he said, his reactions had been slowed by drink. “What’s the matter?”
“Someone’s chasing us! He has a gun!” Freya said out of breath and half-panicked. “We need the police!”
The words shot through Earl Mosby like a jolt of current. His jowls flapped as he quickly shook his head, trying to slough off the five tallboys lined in a neat row on the table beside his recliner.
“Come in!” he said at once, and they gratefully accepted. He bolted the door behind them. There was a wood burning stove blazing. It was sweltering inside the house.
“Cut off that TV. Get low,” Mosby instructed. He turned on more exterior lights, and his yard was suddenly lit up. He peered out the window with his back to the wall. Dan shut the television off.
“Phone’s by the Lay-Z Boy,” he said, moving window to window and peeking out at the dark. Somewhere in Earl Mosby’s life, there had been trouble.
Hunched over, Freya duck-walked to the table with the beer cans and grabbed the phone. It was an ancient Nokia brick that had seen so much use the letters were completely worn off the buttons. She dialed 911 and explained what had happened. She had to call out to Earl Mosby for his address.
As Freya held for the police dispatch, there was terse silence in the house. Earl stole glances out the window, and then covering behind the wall. Soon, there was insistent meowing from the front door. Earl walked over and cracked the door wide enough for the cats to get in, but they only stood outside, looking in. He shut the door, waited a few moments, and then opened it again. At last, the cats deigned to come back inside. It had the feeling of a scene that had played out many, many times.
“She says the police will be here in ten minutes,” Freya announced.
“I don’t figure these knuckle-heads would come back if there was some maniac out there. You said Jokela on the phone, right? You’re Randy’s little girl?”
Freya could only nod, the tension in her stomach twisting another turn. She couldn’t handle this right now.
“I’m sorry as hell. He was a good man, great shooter,” Earl looked down at the gun in his hands. “Oh. At pool, I mean. I must have faced him twenty times in the weekly nine ball thing at Quay’s. Never won. This related?”
Freya shook her head, overcome.
“A guy is stalking her, Malcolm Lewis,” Dan said, seeing Freya’s look.
“I read about that in the Sentinel. That’s the basketball player who beat up the ballerina, right?”
“Yeah, that guy. He’s a real piece of shit. Thank you for letting us in, and sorry to bring this on you.”
“No trouble a’tall.”
Ten minutes passed, and another ten with no police in sight. Freya and Dan clustered close to the wood stove, practically baking themselves to get the throbbing out of their fingers and toes.
There were cobwebs in all the corners of the house, the floors hadn’t seen a mop in quite some time. Earl was filled with a kind of nervous, talkative energy as he made the circuit of his windows with the shotgun.
He asked lots of questions and offered them some of the chili bubbling in the crock pot in the kitchen. Freya thanked him but said she didn’t think she could keep anything down, and he offered them a slug of whiskey to settle things. They begged off.
The cats decided to investigate the strangers in their midst and came up to butt their heads against Dan’s legs, then they sniffed at Freya when she held her hand to them.
Even cats like him better.
One was black, the other was calico, with black rings around his eyes that made him look mischievous.
“He’s Han, and she’s Dink.” Earl pointed from one to the other. “You’ve never seen a dumber pair of creatures on God’s green Earth.”
At the sound of his voice, the cats each tilted their heads as if they rolled their eyes at him, then they resumed trying to untie Dan’s shoes.
“Cut it out you two, Christ,” Earl said, and the cats scattered to the kitchen and began meowing again. “I already fed you!”
The cats were quiet before starting up again.
“Can’t stand ‘em,” Earl groused unconvincingly. “They were my wife’s.”
He gestured to a shelf on the far wall. On it were a dozen framed photographs of a woman who favored wearing green. Freya walked over to take a look. At once, she noticed there wasn’t a single smudge or fingerprint on any picture, nor a speck of dust or hair of cat anywhere on the shelf.
The photographs lined up chronologically, starting with one that must have been their senior prom. The top of Earl’s head just barely reached the woman’s corsage. With a full head of hair, Earl beamed like he’d just won the Stanley Cup. They progressed down the row, the two of them on a fishing boat, one in front of the Eiffel Tower, another somewhere tropical.
In the last picture, the woman was terribly thin, and there was a green silk scarf wrapped around her missing hair like a turban. They were inside of a cathedral Freya felt sure she’d visited. She struggled to place it until she noticed the Tom Otterness sculptures hiding in the niches.
“St. John the Divine,” Freya said, and Earl nodded.
“Always liked that church. That’s my Maureen. Cancer got her.”
“I’m sorry,” Freya said.
“Ain’t we all,” Earl replied.
The police took another fifteen minutes to arrive.