Threnody (023).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

I don’t think this is the real world, Ryan continued. It looks like it and smells like it, but it ain’t it. I think these guys’ houses are copied right down to the last bent nail, but I think that the real places are sitting right where they were. These places are just copies that don’t work like the real thing. He paused, examining what he had said. Like echoes, he decided. This one time I tried swapping out the battery for a brand-new one in some car we found and it still didn’t work. But it was because the wires didn’t hook up to nothing. It was like one of those little cars kids play with, it was fake. It’s all fake.

He walked past her out to the road, taking in a deep, long breath.

If you wanna come with me, that’s cool, was all he said, and started walking. And since she did, she followed.

*

By the time they left town, exiting at the opposite end of town from where Jesse had arrived, the snow had vanished completely, exposing the dead grass and muddy earth that made everything even more desolate. They followed the road that remained blacktop for several miles out of town and then began to crumble, riddled with cracks and missing pieces, and then disintegrating completely into gravel with raggedy weeds growing everywhere. Eventually it stabilized into cleared twin dirt tracks, but then began to rain – watching the scattered drops turn into a solid downpour, Ryan sighed, retied his hair, and told Jesse that they just could not catch a break.

She was grateful for his company – he had no answers, but just by having been here longer was able to warn her away from things that might have killed her. Watch, he said, squatting down next to a hole the size of a coffee can dug into the dampening clay earth that bordered the road. See those five notches around the hole? That’s how you know to stay away from them. He whistled a long, single note, waiting, and then did it again – there was an echo, the same note played back to him. What – she started to say, but he shushed her and pointed at what was coming up from the ground; spindly legs emerged from the hole, slipping into the notches around its lair, and then a shining black body with a triangle wedge of red eyes blinking in the rain darted out, the fifth leg emerging from its mouth and stabbing at the ground furiously; when it realized there was no prey to be had it retreated, sliding back into place silently, the legs retreating from view. Jesse noticed several similar holes, all of them aimed at the roadway like loaded cannons. Ryan told her not to worry – he’d never seen them chase after anything they couldn’t grab.

Maddy called ‘em starspiders. Ryan hawked and spat. I guess maybe she got that from her good buddy Dr. fucking Tom.