The Anomaly(55)

When we made it into the main room Gemma and Pierre were together in the middle. Each had a lamp. They were standing back to back, panning beams of light around the space.

“What happened?”

Gemma was whirling in circles, slashing her light around, high and low. Molly walked toward her slowly, holding out her hands in a calming way. Given that ten minutes previously she’d been on the brink of losing it, I thought her powers of recovery were pretty remarkable.

Pierre hurried over to us. “Gemma. She…”

“I felt something!” she shouted. “Something brushed against my leg.”

I looked at Pierre. He shrugged.

“Did you see what it was?”

“We were sitting in the dark,” Pierre said. “I thought, only the two of us here, we should conserve power.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Our light just died on us. In fact, you might want to turn yours off now.”

“Oh, right.” He did so, leaving Gemma’s, which she was still waving around like a light saber. Molly placed her hand on her arm and said something to her quietly.

“So, we were sitting back to back,” Pierre said. “On the floor in the middle of the room. Talking. We’ve been waiting there, except for going down to the stone ball and shouting out once in a while. Nothing. And you’d been kind of a long time and it was a little bit of a struggle for us to not, you know, freak out. Anyway, Gemma was telling me about other stuff she’s written about, and suddenly she leaps up and she’s screaming that she felt something brush against her in the dark.”

“Did you feel anything? Or hear anything?”

He shook his head. “No, but we were facing opposite directions. Did you guys find anything in that room? Like rats or something? Could it be that?”

“No,” I said. “We found stuff, but nothing living.”

“So what the heck?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I left Ken with Pierre and went over to where Molly had now managed to calm Gemma down a little.

“I felt it,” she said. “I did. Don’t tell me I didn’t. I felt something brush against my leg.”

“You’re sure it couldn’t have been a breeze?” I said. “Or…and I’m only being thorough…it couldn’t have been Pierre’s hand? Accidentally? Or…otherwise?”

“No,” she said indignantly. “We had our backs to each other. And he’s not like that. And, come on, seriously, fuck off, Nolan. I’m not dumb. I know what I felt.”

“Okay,” I said. “So…Okay. Did you get a sense of how big it was? Or what kind of thing?”

“No. But it wasn’t small. Definitely not a mouse or something. I was sitting…” She dropped down to the floor and sat, knees up, arms folded. “Like this. And it brushed against my shin. It had, like, fur. Not soft fur like a cat, but bristly. Like a dog. Or maybe a raccoon.”

“I don’t think there are raccoons in the desert.”

“A coyote, then. How big are coyotes?”

“Not huge,” Molly said. “When I was a kid we got them in our yard all the time. They’re the size of a small to medium dog. Though skinnier. But I really do not see how a coyote is going to get all the way down here. Or up.”

“No. There’s no way,” I said. “They’re smart and they’re decent jumpers but I just don’t see it.”

“Well, something did,” Gemma insisted, standing up again. “Something’s trapped in here with us, Nolan. Seriously. You have to believe me.”

“I do. I just don’t know what to do about it. We could go looking and maybe we will, because however it got in here could be a way out. But for now we have to chill about it. If it wanted to bite you, it would have.”

“But what if it fetches more of them? Coyotes do that, don’t they? Separate to explore, and then get the pack if one of them finds something worth attacking?”

“That is kind of their MO,” Molly admitted.

“That’s not what’s happening here,” I said. “I don’t know what is, but I don’t believe it’s that.”

Gemma shrugged angrily and walked off. Molly and I looked at each other.

“What do you think?”

“There’s an eighty percent chance it was just a disorientation effect,” I said. “From dehydration. They were sitting in total darkness. We know what that’s like. You lose perspective. Feel things you’re not really feeling.”

“But that leaves a twenty percent chance.”

“She seemed…very convinced.”

“But what does that mean?”

“It means I’d really like Feather to come back with the news that everything’s going to be okay. Soon.”

“Or now,” Molly said.

“Yeah. Now would be good.”



We all sat together in the middle of the room, one of the smaller lights in the center. Everybody took a little of their sandwich. Ken held his out and looked at me until I took a bite. I took my time chewing it. The bread was dry and stale. The processed cheese was very hard. This left everyone with a single bite remaining. After that there would be a few nuts and half a granola bar each. And then, nothing.