1963

Outside the girl’s bedroom, the night was still. The nine o’clock Concorde was still an hour away, and the buzz of mail rockets wouldn’t kick in until the wee hours of the morning. A hifi set (smaller, this year, almost down to a breadbox) played a heady mix of psychedelic pop, Sinatra and Miles Davis.

The girl wasn’t listening. Her mother had just finished reading her a story, quite a long one in fact. She had been paying rapt attention to that, and she was too young to have a real ear for music. But the story was over, now, and her brow was scrunched in concentration, mop of red hair falling over her eyes as she glared over spectacles and freckles at her mother. “Moooommmmm,” she whined. “That can’t be how the story ends!”

“Sure it can,” her mother said. They looked very much alike. Her mother was taller, of course, and fuller, but the only real difference was the color of their hair. In her mother’s case it was a dark brown, almost black – a sharp contrast, then, to Charlie’s fire-red. But such sharp contrasts (and the nightly debates they engendered) were the motivating force of the family Foxtrot. “All good stories end with a question, I think.”

“But of course she wouldn’t do anything different in the end!” Charlie was frantic, now, clutching her stuffed beetle, whose name was Atlas, after the Mercury launch vehicle. “She got everyone to work together, and she stopped the apo–” Charlie now found herself having difficulty sounding out the Greek, here. “Apo-co-lipse?”

Tango Foxtrot reached down and wrapped one arm around her daughter. “Apocalypse. And dear, it doesn’t matter what she would have done differently. It really doesn’t. Her story is over. Now it matters what the people who came after her do.” She kissed Charlie twice on the forehead.

“I'm going to do better than that girl,” Charlie thought. She would not have slept that night, but Mr B (for Bultitude, perhaps, to hear her mother tell it, or Bear, or Bentley, or a hundred other things as need arose and shifted in her childlike imagination) seemed to glance at her sternly, and she knew that she was expected in Dreamland. And so she was able to, at last, find enough sand to stick her eyes shut, and away she went –

1969

And she forgot the next morning what business had been so important. This was one of those cases where nothing was better than something – she could, for example, have remembered unimportant parts of the dream, and forgotten only the important parts. She could have come away, awake, with an impression that she was the only dreamer. Dreams are, really, solipsistic things, and Charlie had put effort into not being a solipsistic person.

But a long time had passed since she was eight, and she was now fourteen going on sixteen. She felt that she was too old for Mr B, and Atlas was long tattered and scrapped and threadbare. The beetle had, in the manner of the best stories, become real, and his physical body had been disposed of years ago. But the thing was: she only felt that she was too old for Mr B. It could not be, she told herself, that some gravity pulled her dreamward, in the dead of night. She’d forgotten such things a long time ago. No. Charlie, nigh-adult, independent and ready to move on from bears to boys, cars, and lipstick, knew that what compelled her to keep Mr B on her pillow when she slept was sentiment. Just sentiment – not love, or obligation, or anything weird and mushy like that, for sure.

Well, that, and her mother simply would not allow her to throw the bear out or even to place it in a closet. “He’ll keep you safe,” her mother had said, when she was ten.

“From what?” A sensible question, after all. Mom worked for the FBI, or something similarly swinging, and she spoke of it just enough to make it clear to Charlie that it was not to be spoken of. The point was, Charlie had been to the shooting range with her mother, and Charlie had tried some of her mother’s tools (they were tools, her mother insisted, and they were tools for killing only, and paper was just practice for killing) – Charlie felt safe, with her mother and no one else, and had for a long time.

“When you’re old enough to know, you won’t need to ask,” her mother had said, and this had not unsettled ten-year-old Charlie quite as much as perhaps it should have.

That had been four years ago. John F Kennedy was no longer the president. It was Nixon now, which seemed to annoy and unnerve her mother for some reason Charlie quite frankly didn’t care about. Politics were dumb. The Doors were about to premiere a new album, Apollo 4 was racing for the moon, and Star Trek’s fourth season promised a visit to the Klingon homeworld, of all things! She had much to look forward to.

Mom had been away on more business than usual this year. She still didn’t know what her mother did for a living, just that the fridge was always well-stocked, the large house always warm, and the lights always on. Every time she’d guessed – she was keen and assertive, she didn’t ask, she guessed – she was answered with a light laugh, a flick of the head, and “I guess that’s close enough for government work!” On balance, the evidence did not point towards the elder Ms Foxtrot working for the government.

This made other things worse. Charlie did not attend, as her mother had, an exclusive private school for girls. St Dymphna, her mother always said, was a terrible patron for a proper education. After a brief jaunt through the library shelves, Charlie had agreed. But at John Glenn Public School, being raised by a single mother was enough to make Charlie a target. For derision, yes, and for rumors, but also for worse. After her last fight (she’d had them three to one, and the one had prevailed, a capital offense in schoolyard politics of any era), she’d overheard her mother in heated “discussion” through the thin walls of the principal’s office. She’d heard three key points: expulsion, homeschool, and St Dymphna. One of these, and one only, had driven her mother into a white-hot fury. At the mention of the mad saint, her mother had come out, grabbed her roughly by the arm, hissed “we’re leaving”, and they’d been in the drive in for a funny movie and root beer floats in ten minutes.

She’d done good, she guessed?

That had been a year ago. This is all presented as summary, not to convince you that things were going well for our girl, or that they were going badly, but to give some context for what came next: Charlie stopped sleeping through the night. She stopped remembering any dreams, except for the nightmares. Screaming, mostly at her mother, but at whoever her father might have been as well. Talking in her sleep, waking in cold sweats. Her mother tried to blame hormones at first, but after a while all she had to do was wake with a feral yawp and a jab to empty air, pad down the stairs, and mint tea would be steaming on the kitchen table.

They didn’t talk about it. There was tea. Her mother cared. Talking was secondary.

Besides, what would she say? When I scream myself raw at my father (who I’ve never met, and you don’t speak of, and I wish you might), there are yellow eyes in the brush behind the kitchen cabinets? It wouldn’t do. It was the werewolf effluvium of a girlhood on the brink of becoming something else, nothing more. Or perhaps she could try: I think there’s someone else in the dream with me, sitting on my chest, I think she hates me –

Yeah. No. She’d rather die. It was bonkers! So she turned up the radio and continued doodling, listening to her headphones. They were a very large model that fit clumsily over her ears and pinched, but even so she found their firm grasp comforting somehow. She bopped along to the Beach Boys and to Led Zeppelin’s heavier and more recent numbers, and gave a raucous yell for Blue Cheer, but a sharp twist in her gut and a coldness in the air stilled her enthusiasm as “You’re Lost Little Girl” came on. She hated this song. She changed the channel, and was interrupted –

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“To bring you a very special announcement from Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston. The Apollo 4 astronauts are in grave danger. There has been a disastrous explosion aboard their spacecraft. The Moon landing, scheduled for later this week on May 25th, may have to be scrubbed entirely. The first priority of NASA is now returning all three men safely to Earth. We’ll bring you further updates as we have them, with CBS News….I’m Jules Bergman.”

Charlie let out a breath. Could 1969 get any worse, for anyone? The beady eyes of Mr Bultitude glared at her with blatant button disapproval. “You’re right,” she said. “That was a stupid question.”

Well, she was overdue for lunch anyway. She’d usually gotten somewhere when things like this happened by talking to her Mom about it – they’d had many productive talks after Vice President Johnson had been killed, for example. It made her feel foolish and weak, though, to need comfort over the World News – as if she was still a child. She looked away from Mr Bultitude, and toward her bookshelves (and the model Saturn V that sat atop them) and then toward the door. Mom would understand, right? Mom would have something useful to say about the way things were being handled in Houston. She usually knew.

But as Charlie strode into the kitchen, elbowing the door to the upstairs aside and grabbing a Coke bottle from the fridge, she realized: her mother was gone. There was no note on the table. She could smell her mother’s perfume, hanging in the air. That meant she’d just left.

Hmmmmm.

Whatever conclusions this pointed to, Charlie was too emotionally exhausted to make them. She made a sandwich, washed it down with her Coke, and headed to the living room with the remnants of a bag of chips. There, on the couch, she watched game shows and reruns and waited for the phone to ring. At last, around six, she did something she hadn’t done in many years; something that would turn out to be the biggest mistake she’d made in a while: Charlie fell asleep on the couch.

She’d been in the Great Library before. She’d spent many hours reading, here, hiding from the angry dreams, under Mr Bultitude’s watchful eyes. She even had vague memories (were they a dream? no, wait, dumb question) of gyros in a riverfront cafe, below the library, with her mother and – had there been someone else?

She’d never been this far into the City before. She’d never trod so close to Dread Carcosa’s black heart, to the lakes, to the inner palaces and the Tatters of the King. She’d never dared. Mr Bultitude had never dared.

And Mr Bultitude was not here. Mr Bultitude was gone. Bullets whistled past her ears, and she crouched low to the cobblestone, driven by some mad reflex she hadn’t been aware she possessed. Who was shooting at her? No, scratch that. She needed a weapon. But there weren’t any here she knew how to use.

How did she know that? Why did she know that? What was going on?

“Aw, hell.” A girl with honey-brown hair and blue eyes stood over her, shaking her head. “I told you I needed backup, and you got me a rook. Not even that! A null. Seriously, Scooter?”

“I’m sorry, Robin,” the velociraptor said.

“Excuse me, but what the fuck,” replied Charlie hotly.

Everything twisted, again, and there was that same coldness in the air, sharp and acrid this time. She could smell it.

I’M SORRY, ROBIN, THE VELOCIRAPTOR SAID. “After all, had I known, I think I would have brought her over anyway. Her potential is off the charts, and she’s better than no help at all, isn’t she?”

“A talking velociraptor? What?” Charlie was not amused, and was taking her time adjusting. She had not pinched herself, yet, though. It seemed too trite, likely useless. “Whose name is Scooter.”

“Yeah,” Robin said. “And a ginger. With a bag of chips in her hand. A null, no less. Named –” Robin wiggled her hand impatiently, crouching low toward cover.

“Charlie. Charlie Foxtrot.” Should she give her name to this strange girl? Oh well. It was already done.

“That is not your real name.”

Oh, another one of these. That was fine by her, then. “My mother says it is.”

Robin snorted. “I suppose that means something?”

Charlie nodded. “Does to me.”

“I have a data file on the Foxtrots, including operational parameters and contract information.” Scooter’s diction was alarmingly precise for something with so many teeth.

“Stow it,” Robin said, making a chopping motion with her hand. Then she reached into a satchel slung over her shoulder, and tossed Charlie something shiny and heavy. “Catch.”

Charlie caught, and turned the pistol over in her hand. “Smith and Wesson Model 19 Combat, chambered in .357 Magnum.” She popped the cylinder, swung it open, checked all six cartridges to make sure they were seated, and then closed the cylinder again. She held the gun pointed toward the floor, away from everyone, finger off the trigger.

“God fucking damn it.”

“What,” Charlie said flatly.

“I rest my case,” the velociraptor said.

Robin just snorted again. Meanwhile, bullets continued to spang off the adobe-like walls around them.

“Why,” Charlie hazarded, “is there a talking velociraptor? What’s going on there?”

Robin shook her head. “I cannot believe you don’t know already. Better question: why are you walking around Dread fuckin’ Carcosa unaccompanied?”

“Unaccompanied?”

Scooter chuckled. Charlie was having a hard time assigning a gender to a talking velociraptor, but she was leaning toward female. “It’s like the old joke about talking nulls,” Scooter said.

“Scooter,” Robin said in a light but warning tone, shaking her head.

There was a mischievous grin on the dinosaur’s face, Charlie could have sworn to it. “The remarkable thing is not that they don’t have anything to say, it’s that they talk at all.”

Robin tutted. “That is not as funny as you think it is.”

“I just get tired of the prejudice, frankly. It’s asinine. She knows so little, and the file says –”

Robin made a chopping motion again, this time with one finger in particular. “Scooter, later. Stuff it. I swear to God.” Then she turned to Charlie. “Sorry. She can be a lot. Listen, you shouldn’t be here, all right? It was my fuckup. I’m just kinda getting shot at here, and it’s a whole thing, y’know?”

Charlie did not know. Charlie had less idea than when she’d found herself here. She said as much.

“Yeah.” Robin sighed, tight-lipped. “Do you even know who’s shooting at us?”

Charlie shook her head, affected by a sudden and curious muteness. There was a tightness in her chest, and she fidgeted restlessly as she lay prone on the ground.

There was someone else here. She didn’t know how she knew. They were everywhere at once, and behind her. She could not breathe.

“Scoots. Send the null home, stat.”

The last thing she heard before she woke up was a roar, a male voice calling her name.

Her eyes flickered slowly open, like the hatch on a spacecraft. Weightless, she drifted, at last coming to a stop on the couch. She sat up, rubbing her eyes blearily. “What in the world was that?”

Mr Bultitude placed a stuffed paw on her hand. She looked at him, suddenly extremely awake. He was only a foot tall, and reaching her hand as it dangled over the couch was some effort for him. All the more, she supposed, given that he was stuffed.

“We have much to discuss, Charlie Foxtrot,” the bear growled.