The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (77 page)

OK
, I did what I had to, to make it this far.

Bottom line. I ratted out Alvin and Serena at dinner. Alvin left screaming, but tonight it’s boiled down to Roger and me.

Only two of us left, and if Roger won’t concede so we can be together, I’ll … Eeek, is this really me? Promotion means a lot more in this world than I thought when I wrote my very first story in first grade, and the world is bigger and a harder place for artists like me than I thought. When I won grad school prizes for
CREATIVE WRITING
I thought my dreams had come true. Then I got into Strickfield and I thought I had it made!

Yeah, right. After Pitch Day I
know
. It doesn’t matter how good you are, it’s how you sell it. The world is a harsh, judgmental place. If I can’t make it here, I won’t make it anywhere.

I love making words do what I say, and I love making things up, but if I have to win this to get them out there, then fine. Whatever it takes.

Dear Davy, Turn back. I mean it. There are some things you have to do alone.

Writers try to tell the truth, but some things are too terrible to tell. Fiction expresses what we know, but are reluctant to admit. Sooner or later the things too terrible to talk about, things we’re ashamed of and all the things that frighten us transform themselves, and surface in our work.

Davy, you can’t be here!

Barking dogs split the night. Sirens. Flashing strobe lights, proscriptions in place and threats carried out exactly as warned, inscribed, memorized and forgotten along with the crumpled green
RULES
sheet. Ivy LaMont, nearing the top of the Hartfield colony shortlist, is
BANG
:
awake
without knowing what woke her or what brings her to her feet in a single bound. She finds herself teetering in front of the bedroom window. Blinking, she leans out into the glare, afraid of what she will see.

She hears a tortured roar. Billy! Her boyfriend Billy is on the near wall of the enclosure, he came all this long way to rescue her. He really loves her; he does! Now he is suspended, halfway in, halfway out, caught on the razor wire, with the great jaws of the leaping Dobermans clashing all too close to his hands yet
in extremis
as he is, Billy isn’t yelling for help. He’s calling her name.

“Ivy!”

Oh, Billy, not now.

The boy Ivy loves and left behind has come this long, hard way to get her back. He’s risked everything to rescue her, signifying that this is true love. Ivy LaMont, methodically climbing the Hartfield colony shortlist, is up against it now.

“Ivy!”

What she says and does now determines whether she stays or goes and where she should be running downstairs and out into the garden to beg them to call off the dogs and save the boy she thought she loved. If she does, she loses. Miss Trefethen will keep the promise she made to the devil that keeps Hal Harter alive and for so many years, has kept the colony at Hartfield safe. She will feed Ivy, this year’s last remaining loser, to what’s left of her huge, mangled lover, the greedy, raging Thing in the Lake.

Poleaxed, Ivy thinks:
The Outside Event is nothing like I thought
.
It comes out of nowhere and it is, as it turns out, specific to me.

Not for the first time, she has to make a decision. If Ivy, who began colony life without guessing how much it would demand of her, pushes through to win the title, and she will or die in the attempt, she’ll make such decisions tonight and again and again every day for the rest of her working life.

—
Asimov’s
SF
, 2011

The Legend of Troop 13

The Lost Troop

In the mountains tonight, in the jagged hills below the observatory, the Girl Scouts’ voices ring—just not where you can hear, for the missing girls of Troop 13 are as wary as they are spirited.

“Beautiful,” Louie says. He paints the observatory dome, top to bottom on his revolving scaffold, so he’s in a position to know. He says, “It’s a little bit like angels singing.”

It would lift your heart to hear them, tourists claim, because tourists believe everything they hear, whether or not they actually heard it.

Although they’ve been missing for years, some people think the legendary lost Girl Scouts of Troop 13 are still out there on Palamountain, camping in the shadow of the great white dome. We don’t know how it happened or where our girls went when they went missing, but tourists come to the mountain in hopes, and business is booming.

They claim they came to see the cosmos through the world’s largest telescope, but the men’s wet mouths tell you different.

As for our girls, there have been signs, e.g.: surprise raids on picnic tables, although it could be bears. Outsiders swear the Last Incline is booby-trapped with broken glass and sharp objects, but they can’t prove it. They have to lug their ruined tires downhill to Elbow and by the time the wrecker brings these tourists back uphill with their new tires, the road is clear—no Scouts, no sign of Scouts, but their cars have been rifled.

So there’s a chance our girls are running through the woods in their green hats at this very minute, with their badge sashes thrown over items missing from our clotheslines. It’s like a party every night, twelve Girl Scouts on their Sit-Upons around the campfire—feasting on candy and s’mores, judging from supplies stolen in midnight break-ins at Piney’s Store. Our sheriff and the State Police looked for months; the
FBI
came, but the cold trail just got colder. It’s been so long that even their mothers have stopped looking.

Now, you may come to Palamountain expecting to find dead campfires, skeletal teepees, abandoned Sit-Upons; you may think you spotted little green hats bobbing up there on the West Slope, but don’t expect to catch up with
them. You won’t find our lost girls, no matter how hungry you are for love or adventure, so forget about easing whatever itch you thought you’d scratch here. They haven’t been seen or heard from since the day Tracie Marsters threw the gaudy Troop Leader Scarf around her throat and led them up the mountain.

What happened to the Scouts in Troop 13, really? Why did they not come back from that last patrol, when we patted their little green hats and kissed them goodbye so happily? Did they not love us, or are there things on Palamountain that we don’t know about? Were they wiped out in a rockfall or kidnapped by Persons Unknown, or are they just plain lost in the woods, and still trying to find their way back to us? Our Scouts couldn’t be carried off against their will, that’s unthinkable. Their motto is “Be Prepared,” and they’d know what to do. We would have found markers: bits of crumpled paper on the trail, blazes on the trees, to signify which way they were taken.

We’re afraid they went looking for someplace better than the settlement at Elbow, halfway up the East Grade on Palamountain, or our boring home town in the foothills. Prepared or not, we don’t want to think about them running around in some big city. Unless they were running away from home and us personally, which is even worse.

Better to think of them as still up there, somewhere on Palamountain.

Listen, there have been sightings!

A tourist staggers into Mike’s bar in the Elbow and he is all,
I alone am left to tell the tale, I alone am left to tell …
At this point words desert him; it was that intense. No, he can’t tell you where, or what, exactly, and that’s the least of it.

We need to shush him, so we shush him. That kind of talk is bad for business.

If they’re still up there, they’re too happy to hurt you. They’re probably fine, running along to: “Ash Grove” or “Daisy, Daisy, we honor your memory true,” that’s the Girl Scout version, “We are Girl Scouts, all because of you … ” wonderful songs. You won’t hear them singing as they bound along, because Scouts are trained to be careful, they’d be trilling.

It’s a pretty sound but it chills your blood, according to Louie, who has heard it. He says, “If you hear them coming,
run
.”

No, we think. Not our girls. How could those sweet things be dangerous?

Edwin Ebersole III

Five a.m., and we’ve been on this bus for so long that the babies are panicking, not all at once, but more or less sequentially. Yow, one cries. Wawww, goes the next; uuuck and aaah aaah aaaa; and the big ones erupt in counterpoint,
Are we there yet,
wawww,
are we there yet,
aaaah aaaah aaaa,
Are we there yet?
Bwaaaaaa,
Are we …
it’s like a class project on chain reaction. The racket
is exponential and we’re all too anxious and depressed to make it stop and the only thing that keeps me going on this excursion is the glittering secret in my pocket and the chance that I can get what I want out of this trip, up there at the top. It’s taking too long!

Fifty movers and shakers with wives and kids, riding into the experience of a lifetime in a stinking, overloaded repurposed Greyhound bus, and why? Evanescent Tours sold us on the trip of a lifetime. It was the card. Triple cream stock. Engraved. Gold ink.

EVANESCENT TOURS PRESENTS: THE TOP OF THE WORLD, VIA LUXURY COACH. PALAMOUNTAIN OBSERVATORY EXCLUSIVE

And the kicker?

by invitation only

Who wouldn’t bite? No riffraff, just us, the business elite, and, better? Every man on this tour is like me, tough, successful, rich. No ordinary guys on this bus. They can’t afford it, and for us, top of the world, with more T.K. See, these pretty little Girl Scouts vanished up there when they were small, nobody knows how. The lost little girls must be big girls by now. Every man on this bus has stated reasons for riding up the mountain, but at bottom, there are babes in those woods and they need us.

We’re going up the mountain to hunt. Like we can get back something we lost before we even knew it was missing.

The hell of it is, Serena’s on to me. I plugged this trip as our second honeymoon, that I’d booked especially for her, but she knows. Nowhere is it written but she knows we’ve never been happy. She jumped up in the middle of the night and dragged our girl Maggie off to sit in the back, and for what? All I did was move on my wife in the dark because she is after all my wife, and we’ve been traveling for so long that my want ran ahead of me.

Dammit, the bus was dark. They were all asleep.

I thought, 2 a.m.,
OK
, let’s make the time go by a little faster—you know. Serena slapped my hand away. “Back off, you horny fuck!” and I went, “I was just … ” which devolved into the usual.

Serena: You always …

Me: I never, and besides, you …

Her: I always, and you say you love me but you never …

This happens to couples in enclosed situations: the vacation house, the Carnival Cruise. This bus.

Thousands I spent to get us here, high-end launch party at a luxury hotel on the coast, with us done up like kings: for me, Gucci shoes, the Hugo Boss
tux with the Armani vest. I even bought Serena a Valentino gown. Champagne smashed across the prow of our private vehicle, full access to the Observatory, satisfaction guaranteed, I bought front row seats for the spectacle of the century, and where are we?

Nowhere.

We’ve been rolling for days, all the toilets are stopped up and the video player is kaput. We’re running out of food, probably because the driver got us lost back there. Worse yet, he isn’t speaking to us.

We don’t know if he’s sworn to secrecy by Evanescent Tours or if he’s pissed at us for bitching or just plain out of control.

I personally think the captain is mad. This Clyde Pritchard is one hostile hick. He drives without stopping except for gas, at which point, given the sticker price on this extravaganza, he should let us get out, relieve ourselves at the Roaming Mountains Dine and Dance that we whizzed past an hour ago instead of in one of his rolling cesspools, he should let us visit our luggage for necessaries and eat hot food for a change, instead of the freeze-dried dinners Evanescent Tours Incorporated vacuum-packed for the days or is it weeks we’ll be in this rat trap.