The Smiley-Face Witches

  “The locals are a superstitious by nature,” he said. “They wonder why we’re keeping an old woman prisoner.”

  “Reckon they’ll be showing up with torches and pitchforks any day now,” she said. “Why not just let ‘em burn me at the stake?”

  Because we can’t do what you did,” he admitted, though not without visible discomfort. “The clones lived through the process, but they aren’t alive…they’re…”

  “Ya got the body, but ya still need the soul,” she said. “And that’s one trick I ain’t gonna show ya.”

  Frost’s polite smile disappeared. “You can be on a first class flight back to the states or riding in the back of a surplus army truck for the next six hours. Your choice.”

  ***

  The truck jerked from one side of the road to the other, bouncing Lazy-Eye Susan between the trailer’s steel walls. “Take it easy, Igor!” she said, but the partition between them let the driver ignore her.

  Her cuffs chaffed her wrists but the monobrowed guard sitting opposite her flashed an unsympathetic snaggletooth smile.

  “Guess you boys get medical, but not dental,” she said.

  “Shut-up,” Napoleon ordered.

  The other Blue Berets called him Napoleon because of his French accent and his diminutive stature. She made a joke about French paratroopers being trained to jump back into planes during WWII and they’d been enemies ever since.

  Susan watched the rugged scenery pass through the opening in the truck’s billowing cargo flap. Frost’s Cadillac trailed behind them, leading a convoy of trucks stretching across the crooked road for nearly half a mile. The locals carved the high mountain pass from the rock centuries ago and the route was treacherous under the best conditions, though traffic was nonexistent.

  She smiled. That wasn’t entirely true. She’d seen a fender bender between two donkey-driven carts through her cell window at the monastery the previous autumn. “What are the odds?”

  The truck jerked again. She pounded on the divider, but the driver cranked the radio up loud enough to drown her out.

  “If ya hain’t deaf, ya gonna be,” she sighed.

  “…with no explanation why reports from the Mt. Palomar observatory were being censored. Despite independent verification of the incident from amateur astronomers, NASA spokesman Dan Flavin issued a statement later in the day but…”

  “Sounds like the BBC,” Susan said. But the driver wasn’t interested in the news, and kept scanning for a song he knew.

  She closed her eyes, determined to get some sleep before they got to the air field. She wasn’t sure where Frost was moving her to, but anywhere was better than where she’d been.

  The radio faded in and out, the signal cut by bursts of intermittent static. The driver scanned for another station but got nothing.

  “Pick a channel,” she moaned, but to no avail. “And just when I was ‘bout to...”

  ***

  After the truck stopped rolling, Lazy-Eye Susan found herself laying face-down against the roof. Even in her woozy state she knew she didn’t have time to waste. She crawled over Napoleon’s unconscious body and slid out of the back of the inverted truck.

  She fought her way through the acrid smoke to get a better idea of her situation. Wreckage blocked the road leading back to the monastery, while fallen timber clogged the path forward.

  “We been ambushed,” Susan said.

  If Frost was still alive, he’d make finding her his priority. If he wasn’t, whoever hit the convoy would work her over until she told them what she knew.

  Bullets spraying across the icy asphalt forced her into action.

  She turned back toward the truck for cover, but fuel leaking from the ruptured gas tank ignited.

  She climbed over the edge of the road and stumbled down the jagged incline.

  Pines erupting out of the slope every few feet slowed her descent, adding cover from the bullets whistling by her. “If’n I can just make it to the valley down yonder…

  ***

  “…I knew I’d be safe,” Lazy-Eye Susan said, and collapsed into a chair from sheer exhaustion.

  They couldn’t blame her. It was quite a story, and some of it might have even been true.

  “What about Frost?” Spider asked. “They get ‘im?”

  “Can’t say for sure,” Susan answered, “but somebody will be coming after me.”

  “Think we just met ‘em” Spider said, “Buncha weird guys in suits with glasses. And they mighta got Drew.”

  “But we don’t know who they are,” Grady said.

  Newton pulled up an artist’s rendering of the subject in question on his laptop. “They call ‘em the Odd Botkins. Looks like they’re some kinda gang or something. Like the Mafia.”

  “That’s our boy,” Spider said, and the others agreed, though the picture looked like a police composite sketch of every suspect there’d ever been.

  Grady swapped his shades for the specs he recovered from the scene. “Must be the glasses.”

  Susan grabbed the glasses for a closer look. “Hain’t seen a pair of these in years.”

  “Glasses?” Newton asked.

  “These hain’t glasses,” Susan said.

  But Newton didn’t see anything special about them. “Then what are they?”

  “Used to sell ‘em outta the back of comic books,” Susan said, “called ‘em Hypno-Specs.”

  “Hypno-Specs,” Spider repeated. “They work?”

  “Of course not, they were just toys,” Susan said. “Least that’s what I always thought. But I do remember this narc who…”

  “Narc?” Clementine said.

  “Reckon ya call ‘em snitches these days,” Susan said, “anyway, this snitch told me Uncle Sam used to supply CIA agents with gear through the ads in the back of comic books back in the Fifties and Sixties. Course, he were stoned outta his head when he told me.”

  “There’s no such thing as Hypno-Specs,” Clementine said.

  “You remember what they look like?” Susan asked.

  “Of course I do,” Clementine said, “they got these big…and they had these…” Try as she might, she found herself grasping for bleary details, like she’d just woken from a fleeting dream.

  Newton sighed. “It’s called the Lois Lane effect…”

  “What’s she got to do with anything?” Clementine asked.

  “Ever wonder how come a reporter as smart as Lois Lane gets fooled by Clark Kent’s simple disguise?” Newton asked.

  “No,” Clementine said. “Never.”

  “Clark Kent’s glasses put out a refractive effect that distorts his appearance,” Newton said. “Same thing must happen when Clark Bent wears his glasses.”

  Grady took the specs back from Susan and tried them on. “Maybe these are for real…Well? How do I look?”

  “Like Malcolm Y,” Clementine said.

  Grady’s brow furrowed. “Ya mean Malcolm X?”

  “No, I mean Malcolm, why?” Clementine said, “As in, why did you go with those frames?”

  Spider squinted hard, but couldn’t see any difference in Grady’s appearance. “How come they don’t work on him?”

  “Might be ‘cause we already know what he looks like,” Susan said, “And you can fool your eyes but ya can’t fool your mind.”

  “But why’d they snatch Drew?” Spider asked.

  “Don’t know who sent ‘em. But they must think that snatching one of ya’ll will lead ‘em to me,” Susan said.

  “That explains why they came after us, but what about the Acolytes?” Newton asked.

  Susan’s face went blank. “What about ‘em?”

  “Nothing,” Clementine said. “We was just thinkin’ some of your pals might be able to help us out.”

  Susan scoffed at the notion. “Don’t know how much use they’d be.”

  The others played along with Clementine’s awkward attempt to steer the dialog. Either Lazy-Eye Susan didn’t know what the Aco
lytes were up to or she was lying. Either way, she’d been gone for years and appeared again when the latest trouble started.

  “What’s that beeping?” Newton asked.

  Clementine tapped at her phone’s screen. “Oh my God, I gotta go. I’m late.”

  “Where ya goin’?” Grady asked.

  “Work,” she said.

  “When’d you get a job?” Spider asked.

  “It’s an internship,” she said.

  Grady smirked. “So you ain’t getting paid? No remunerado.”

  Spider corrected him. “Unpaid is não remunerado.”

  “Its good experience,” she insisted. “And not all of us plan on hangin’ ‘round the block our whole lives.”

  “What about Drew?” Newton asked.

  “He’s probably on his way home by now,” she said.

  “And if he ain’t?” Spider said.

  “Then he stopped to get a sandwich,” she said.

  “And if he didn’t?” Spider said.

  “Let 5-0 deal with it,” she said.

  “The cops?” Newton said. “Like they helped Harley, and Donovan and Ramone last time?”

  Clementine stopped short of the door to compose herself. She’d been away for awhile and didn’t want to scrape at any raw nerves her return exposed. “And look what happened to Harley and ‘em when we stuck our noses where they didn’t belong.”

  She waited a moment longer for someone to challenge her, but nobody did, because nobody could. She grabbed her backpack and kicked the door open. “This ain’t us sitting around an Xbox playin’ Call of Duty or something. This is real life.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Molly’s smile faded when the elevator door opened and she saw the weather-bimbo’s publicity posters going up. “Look at those hips. She shouldn’t be posing on the beach. She outta be lying on a silver tray with an apple in her mouth surrounded by garnish.”

  She reached into her bag, ready to take a marker to the glossy print but the commotion down the hall distracted her. Most days they kept the doors to the editing bays closed, but a small crowd spilling into the hallway piqued her curiosity.

  Molly pushed through the traffic jam. “Doesn’t anybody around here have anything better to do?”

  Her not-so veiled threat cleared the room, leaving only her editor and intern behind. “Did you pick up my dry cleaning?”

  “Got ‘em last night. I put them in your dressing room,” Clementine answered.

  “Good,” Molly mumbled. “Now, what’s all this?”

  “We’re checking out some traffic cam footage we found on YouTube,” PBS explained. “Might be something the network missed.”

  What her owl-faced editor meant was it might be something the network ignored. His intentions were sincere, but his working class hero routine got tiresome.

  Molly watched the jittery camera pan across a pile of smoldering ruins. “Where is this?”

  PBS took his glasses off and huffed on the lenses, rubbing them against his sleeve until the smudge was gone. “Small town outside Abilene, Texas.”

  “Tornado scrubbed the place clean?” Molly said.

  “That’s what we thought,” PBS said, “but there’s nothing in that area on the Weather Channel.”

  “Maybe they just missed it,” Clementine said.

  He turned to her, eyebrows arched. “How do you miss a tornado?”

  “You know how reliable our gal is,” Molly said.

  PBS conceded the point. Cutting open a chicken and reading the entrails gave just as accurate a forecast as Debbi with an ‘I’ did.

  “How’d you find it?” Molly asked.

  “Clementine brought it in,” PBS said. “Along with another one in Alabama.”

  Molly winked at her protégé. “Knew there was a reason I hired you.”

  PBS rewound the footage. “There’s more…Right there…soldiers…”

  “So who are they?” Molly said. “National Guard?”

  “No,” PBS said.

  “How can you be sure?” she asked.

  “I’m in the guard,” he revealed.

  Having never seen him in anything besides a black turtleneck and skinny jeans, picturing him in uniform took some effort.

  “I am,” he insisted. “Helped me pay for college. Anyway, those aren’t Guard insignia.”

  “We Googled the patches on their shoulders,” Clementine said.

  Molly dropped her bag and pulled up a chair. “And?”

  “Blue Beret Security,” Clementine said, and brought up their webpage. “Some kind of contractor the feds use when they don’t wanna use the Army.”

  “But why are they there?” Molly asked.

  “Maybe this was like terrorists or something,” Clementine said.

  “In rural Texas?” PBS shot back. “There’s splashier targets I could think of.”

  “What do ya mean?” Molly asked.

  “Terrorists blow things up to get attention,” PBS said, “how much airtime do you think the networks will give this story?”

  Molly grabbed a candy bar from her bag, tearing open the plain white wrapper with her teeth. “Wait! Rewind a few frames.”

  PBS scrubbed through the footage.

  “There!” Molly said. “There. What is that?”

  PBS strained his eyes, trying to tease more details out of the frame. “It’s a bit blurry. But it looks almost like some kind of…”

  “Rainbow,” Molly said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Rainbow.”

  The ultraviolet color gradient was almost imperceptible, like the prismatic smear gasoline made when swirling across the pavement after a storm.

  “Look at the way that thing zagzigs through the sky,” Clementine said. “I ain’t never seen a rainbow do that.”

  “Me neither,” Molly said. “Wait…did you say zagzig?”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s never happened,” PBS said, “besides, if it isn’t a rainbow, what is it?”

  “Dunno,” Molly said, “maybe a weapon.”

  “A weapon?” PBS repeated.

  “Not a weapon, but the after effects of one,” Molly said, “like a contrail from a plane or exhaust from a missile or something.”

  Clementine opened a new browser window and ran a search. “Here…In Smiley-Face mythology…”

  Molly leaned in to read the Wikipedia description. “Smiley-Face Witches? Like the band?”

  “Like the band,” Clementine said, and dug deeper. “The highway is a metaphorical bridge connecting heaven and earth…”

  “This is good,” Molly said. “What else ya got?”

  “Take it easy,” PBS warned, “You’re connecting unconnected dots.”

  “That’s what journalism is about,” Molly said, “connecting unconnected dots.”

  PBS shook his head. “That’s not…”

  Clementine typed while they went back and forth. “Here… found this earlier…the Zero Album.”

  “Zero Album,” Molly repeated, “where have I heard that before?” And then she remembered; it was the name of the record the hippie chick tried to sell her at Cryptopalooza.

  Molly kept scooting over until Clementine got the hint and stood up, giving her the room she needed to read the screen. “The band’s last studio album was released without a title. None of their previous albums were titled either, though they were numbered in reverse, starting with their debut effort known as ‘Four.’ The Zero Album’s songs describe the twilight of the old world and the dawn of the new, a cosmic struggle between…”

  “Good job,” Molly said, and offered her hand for a high-five, which Clementine delivered with enthusiasm.

  “See what you can dig up on those schools,” Molly said.

  “Absolutely,” Clementine said. “Anything in particular I should be looking for?”

  “Anything that connects them beside the explosions,” Molly said.

  “I’m on it,” Clementine said.

  ***

&nb
sp; The Red Cross arrived at dawn, helping the paramedics tend to the wounded while the rest of the volunteers sifted through the rubble looking for survivors.

  “Don’t know what happened,” the sheriff shouted into his phone, “That’s what I’m trying to tell y’all.” That’s what he’d been trying to tell the Governor’s office all morning, but he still couldn’t make them understand.

  His gangly Deputy trailed behind him, shaking his head and muttering. “Seen tornadoes rip through the outskirts before, but never seen one tear through the middle of town like this.”

  Sheriff Griffith hung up his phone and pulled his pants up over his gut. “We still ain’t sure it was a tornado.”

  Deputy Barnes shuffled to a stop. “What else could it be?”

  Griffith’s face reddened in frustration, but then he remembered his deputy’s youthful inexperience. “Take a look around…There’s collateral damage, sure, but not much.”

  The charred bricks smoldered still and the faint smell of ammonia lingered, unexplained. The aftermath was nothing like any tornado they’d ever encountered.

  “Yeah, but if it weren’t no tornado…”

  Griffith added another stick of gum to the wad already in his mouth. “We’ll figure it out. Damn shame ‘bout the school, though.”

  It wasn’t a big town, an afterthought for those passing through the interstate on their way to Mobile. But he’d attended Bear Bryant Elementary, and seeing it in ruins saddened him.

  “Bet you seen a lotta this kinda thing when you was over there…overseas I mean.”

  The sheriff wasn’t even forty, but he’d done two tours in Iraq and wasn’t inexperienced. “I was an MP. Mostly we just checked ID’s.”

  “You think this might be some kinda military thing?” Barnes asked.

  “Now what makes ya say that?” the sheriff asked, before following the deputy’s bee-bee eyed gaze to the far end of Main Street.

  The convoy weaved through the sparse traffic, parting the sea of curious locals gathered on the scene. The nondescript black Humvees parked just beyond the cordon, deploying armed soldiers around the school’s perimeter.

  “National Guard,” the deputy said.

  But their black fatigues and unmarked vehicles suggested otherwise. “Don’t think so,” Griffith said.

  “Then what?”

  “Private contractors,” the sheriff said.

  Captain Bell stepped out of the lead vehicle with a cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth. The thick-necked soldier adjusted his crooked beret, scanning the crowd for whoever was in charge.

  “What do we do?” Barnes asked.

  “Stop waving your arms around,” Griffith said. “Ya look like one of those inflatable dancing men used car dealers use to promote their selves.”