“I’m waiting,” I said, and pulled another page from the newspaper. The lighter flicked, the flame jumped up, and another soul broke free.
“Waiting for what?” she asked.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
The sun was slowly setting, making bright bands of color across the horizon—red and orange and pink and yellow, shining in the sky and painted on the clouds. Overhead the sky was dark—not the deep blue we saw in the country, because we were still close enough to the city that the lights drowned it out. Just a dark, matte black. Maybe later we’d see the blue, when night fell for real. We sat now in a kind of half-light, where everything was visible and dark at the same time.
“That building is ugly,” said Regina, “But the sky is beautiful.”
We were hiding out in the lee of a small ridgeline outside of the city, across a field from what I assumed was an oil refinery. Did they have oil refineries in Dallas? Maybe it was something else, I don’t know. Squat metal buildings and round welded tanks and giant chimneys reaching up into the darkness, every surface covered with pipes and gantries and bright yellow warning signs. Most of the chimneys were belching out giant clouds of steam, but one of the smaller ones shot a pillar of fire into the sky, at least twelve feet tall, brilliant even in the fading daylight.
We’d walked at least a half a mile from the nearest road, and the small copse of trees nearby showed none of the litter that came with a common camping spot for the homeless. No one ever came here, and no one was likely to find us or even see us, even with my little fires.
I lit another one and watched it burn.
“You should have seen my baby,” said Regina. “We named him Anton, like his father, and he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
“I’m sure he was.” I pulled out another piece of paper and, on a whim, I rolled it this time into a loose cone, to see if the flames would travel through the middle before the whole thing lit on fire.
“His hair was dark,” said Regina. “Most babies have so little hair, bald, like little old men, but my Anton was hairy as an ox, and strong as one, too. I’m sure he grew up to be a good man, maybe a soldier.”
Boy Dog whined, and I looked up. We were still alone, as far as I could see. I looked at Regina and saw her cradling something imaginary in her arms, a tiny baby made of memory and air. She was feeling better now, as amazed by the fast-acting ibuprofen as she had been by the horseless bus, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers, and the constant stream of airplanes that flew over us, to and from the airport. She had no idea what an oil refinery was, and I’d eventually given up trying to explain it; she just called it “that ugly thing,” and I couldn’t argue with the description. Now that we weren’t running, her cramps had subsided, and she’d been able to figure out well enough how the pads worked when it was time to change them. She’d been convinced that they would never hold enough, but it looked like absorbency technology had improved in five hundred years.
Regina took the time gap pretty well, all things considered. I figured some of Brooke’s memories were coming through, or Marci’s. Enough to make Regina feel that her current situation, if not “right,” was at least normal.
That put us on a pretty ridiculous scale of normality, didn’t it? Maybe “understandable” was a better word, but no. “Tolerable?”
“Endurable.” We’d push through it and survive and hope it got better.
I lit my little cone of paper and watched the flames swell and surge and flicker and die.
“What is she like?” asked Regina. I looked over at her again and saw that her face was half obscured by darkness now; night was falling in earnest, and soon we’d be lost in the black. I looked up at the pillar of fire, fierce and deadly even in the distance.
“Who?” I asked.
“Brooke Watson,” she said. “The girl whose body I’m … sharing, I guess. Borrowing.”
“She’s … kind,” I said. How could I encapsulate an entire person? “She’s a lot of things, but that’s the one I feel like I ought to say first. Kind. She’s my friend now, because she has to be—we’re the only people in each other’s lives—but she was my friend before, too. She saw something…” I stopped. “I don’t know.”
“Was it the monster?” asked Regina. She scooted an inch or two closer, across the weeds. “Did she save you from it?”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
Regina sighed. “I would have liked to have been a hero, even if it was only in another hero’s body.”
“She is a hero,” I said, and laid down on the ground, my head on my backpack. The stiff, dry grass scratched my neck. The sky was half clouded and starless, like a lid over the world. “I didn’t mean to say that she saw a monster, but I guess she did. She saw me, first as a good person, and then as a bad person, and then … as whatever I really am, I guess.”
“A good person again,” said Regina.