Chapter 7

“Lena,” she called. The house was dark but filled with loud TV noises. K entered, recognizing the heavy irony in her sudden need to talk to her mother (after all hadn’t she just run out of the house to escape Lena?) But the opinionated, insensitive, many-times-dumped woman in a neo-Mohawk might be the most help to her right now.

Competing TV sounds blasted from the living room and the den, and a stereo played sticky electropop from upstairs. “Lena?” Glancing out the front window, K realized Lena had left her electronic cocoon and driven off in her taupe-colored hybrid—probably for a tryst with her tentacled beau.

K threw herself suicidally onto the couch, flipping down her sunglasses, and crossing her arms tightly across her chest. She remembered sitting on the front porch years ago, waiting. Waiting until after the sun went down and Lena made her come inside. She tried to thrust that memory away, and clutched it close at the same time. Zachary, the awkward dumpling in a canoe, made her feel like that? Softly, she mimicked Zachary’s parting words, giving them an ugly sing song: “You must have got the wrong idea. You should get in out of the sun.” His parting words were a cheesy quote lifted from Hamlet? What self-inflated gall!

“Argh!” she cried out loud above the TV. She felt like a self-pitying bourgeois cow, a character from one of Lena’s novels. Zachary, after all, was only a pumped up pseudo-intellectual in ill-fitting corduroy, who misquoted great philosophers while he paddled around in a toy boat. . She touched her cheek and was embarrassed to find her fingers came away sopping wet.

How Lena-like! But even Lena at least had her monster boyfriend.

Speaking of monster boyfriends! She had punched the mute button on the plasma rectangle that loomed over the couch, nonetheless it was attempting to show what she thought was a science fiction movie (sans audio). Three earthlings in business suits sat at a conference table listening to a bear-sized alien who greatly resembled Braxton. But Braxton on TV? That couldn’t be good. K fumbled with the remote, unable to make the sound come back. Meanwhile the alien mouthed things to the humans, tiny wormish filaments waving beneath its lipless mouth.

There! The sound came back just in time for a station break for the local public broadcast station. Marimba music. Dancing oranges. Stills of the Santa Ana courthouse.

“Now for more of our guests on “What’s Up OC?”

The Braxton creature waved its tentacles at a map of Orange County. “You can see from the population pattern we need a much greater source of power generation here.” It pointed to what must be Sunset Beach.

Where K was sitting.

“But a quantum fusion plant? What about the risks” a skinny human in glasses complained. “I don’t want my kids to have three heads and a tail.”

“Or glow in the dark!” said another.

“The risks are absolutely nil,” said the Braxton thing, in a forceful yet mellifluous voice, its lipless maw curving in a winning smile. “My staff has studied it.”

“Oh. Okay then,” said the humans.

What? Okay then to a fusion plant?

Amazingly all the humans looked happily reassured and nodded to one another like children on a sugar high. Even K felt reassured despite herself. Quantum fusion, why not?

“The senator’s right. We need the power,” said one grinning human, clapping another on the shoulder.

K shook herself. Senator? she thought. Now Braxton is a senator? She lowered her glasses to see Braxton’s human form again. And was re-horrified. The HDD screen allowed her to see the nameplate at the table that identified the creature as State Senator John H. Carmichael of South Orange County. And K could see the human form was not Braxton, but an older, still-muscular man with great easy charm, a thatch of chestnut brown hair, and gleaming smile. The kind of man who sailed, played football, and told jokes easily. A power player, an election winner.

She sank back in the chair stunned. How many of them were there? There was a flash of silver at the window that immediately was gone.

But K knew some form of the Braxton-things were after her.

She knew she had to flee. And there was only one place they would never think to look for her.

Chapter 8

K sat, disguised, at South Coast Plaza, sipping a snappuccino and watching crowds pass on the three levels below her. She had disguised herself as best she could from Lena’s considerable stash, trying to get herself to look as much as possible like one of the three iPod girls she had seen across the canal.

There was another silvery flash of light down there on the mall’s first level!

She had seen several as she had fled across Orange County. One before she had boarded the bus, another as she stood outside the art house theatre, tempted to go inside and hide herself in the darkness to plot her next move, and incidentally catch Audrey Hepburn’s famous beatnik dance with Fred Astaire in “Daddy Longlegs.”

The problem with fleeing or flight, really big time flight, like to Mexico (where presumably the tentacled creatures did not hand out sipping margaritas) was that it required more than the few cash dollars she had found around the house.

She had been spooked by another flash near the Bank of America where she attempted to write a check on the account her father set aside for her—and discovered all that was available were ATMS and a robo-loan officer in a glass box like a fortune telling machine. “A check? A paper check” asked the lone human attendant, a senior in a maroon blazer and sandals. “I haven’t seen a check in five years.” Lena had tried to give K a variety of plastic cards many times, but she had refused. “You gotta give in a little bit kid, or you’ll starve,” Lena had clucked.

K had scurried on, hoping to stay one jump ahead of the flash, hoping Lena’s designer gear, vinyl greatcoat and paisley do-rag, made her blend into the crowd. She suspected not.

Another series of flashes, when she slipped through the glass entrance to South Coast Plaza, maybe only the sun glinting from the windshields of Mercedes entering the parking structure. She went from shop to shop, looking past her own rather weird looking reflection for who or what might be following. She was down to only a few crumpled bills of currency. She needed to regroup.

And now she sat up here, nursing a sweet coffee drink, looking down at the crowds on South Coast Plaza’s storied multi-levels, Lena’s .22 handgun nestled in the pocket of the copper-colored greatcoat. Lena would never admit to any of her friends that she owned anything so outré as a loaded pistol, but K knew where she kept it, in a hollowed out copy of Madame Bovary.

Down on the second level she saw a hand-holding couple looking in the shop windows. Was it Botham the shrink and Connie the remedial computer teacher?[1] The couple was sauntering, laughing as though goosing each other? No. They were 500 miles away! An illusion.

But more important, marching past them moved a diamond-faceted creature, a myriad-colored wraith, a shimmering moving mirror surface striding along, reflecting back the haute couture of trendy shops. The thing stopped, looked around hound-like, and searched on.

K decided to wait on the top level. Nowhere else to go. She wondered what kind of a hole a .22 would make in other-dimensional flesh. Her hope was that it would simply pop and disappear. Or more likely it would lie there in a strangely-shaped heap, spilling emerald green blood from the small caliber hole in its lipless face. While security rushed up, seizing the gun, demanding to know why she had killed what they perceived to be an innocent middle-aged man,

Here, try these glasses she would tell them before they whisked her away.

She slurped the last of the sweet caffinated syrup for courage. Maybe the thing had lost her.

Oh crumb! That was it on the escalator, immediately behind a pair of septuagenarian twins in tank tops and tie-dyed jeans.

It stepped off the escalator, hesitating as though it were a little afraid the metal grate would eat its toes. Funny, she always wondered the same thing. Its glimmering head rotated left and right, then honed in on her. So much for the disguise. She gripped the .22 in her pocket, in the meantime holding up a fake cell phone trying to hide her face. Did the gun have a safety? She felt with her thumb as the thing strode toward her. Oh poop! She was going to have to do this.

She pulled the pistol from her greatcoat and leveled it.

“K?” the thing asked. Its adolescent voice issuing from the silvery face.

“G-Gunther!”

Chapter 9

Gunther bought her another cappuccino while she sat there collecting her breath, the reflective hood of his outfit thrown back revealing his tangle of mouse brown hair that always looked as though it had been slept on funny.

“Gunther! What is that thing you’re wearing?” she asked, accepting the warm cup from him.

“It’s a future suit. It makes me look like I’m from the 23^rd Century. My cousin got it last weekend at the Sci-Con in Anaheim. Cool, huh?”

”Gunther, I almost shot you.”

“What?”

She let him peek into her pocket at Lena’s .22.

“Jeez, K. What’s going on? When I came up you were holding a juice box to your head, and now you show me Lena’s gun?”

The foil-covered cranberry juice box lay on the table. “I was using it to pretend I had a cell phone. Part of my disguise.”

“Well why didn’t you use your real cell phone?”

“Gunther. You know I won’t use one, carry one, have one.”

“Well you must have one. That’s what I’ve been tracking with this.” He showed her a small black device with an amber screen. “Even my cousin’s not supposed to have this, but I can use it to locate the chip in any cell. Look.” He held it toward her watching the screen and she drew back instinctively.

“There, in the inside breast pocket on your coat. Feel.”

She felt and drew out the little cell Lena had tried to give her earlier. The thing followed her. Jumped in her pocket and rode along.

“Sorry, I know you hate that kind of stuff, but it was the only way I knew to follow you when you left the house. I saw there was a signal. Without it we would have lost you on the freeway.”

“We?”

“My cousin and I. He’s either downstairs at the Appleshop or in the parking garage. Look I’m sorry I followed you.”

“It’s okay, Gunther. I’m really glad to see you.”

“So K. What are you trying to do? Where are you going?”

“I don’t know Gunther. I really don’t.”

South Coast Place was vast. They walked from level to level, floating up and down escalators, No one in the trendy hypercrowd of middle-aged women, many of them whispering to cell phones, paid them any notice. Gunther’s “future suit” was tucked in a silvery roll under his arm, revealing his usual outfit of short sleeve white rayon shirt and shapeless gray gym pants. K had thrown the coppery great coat over her shoulder, pulled off the do-rag, and now loped along in her regulation black leotards, processing her next move as she sipped a take-away latté. Yes she could consume a large amount of caffeine, no doubt bollixing her 16-year-old estrogen cycle, but it hardly seemed the greatest of her worries at the moment.

If Gunther was the shimmering silvery light source that had pursued her—it had in fact been him watching her stalker-style from the Venetian bridge—that meant that perhaps no one was following her.

But that left her alone in a world inhabited by at least two malicious goblin things—and perhaps thousands more she had not seen yet. She sipped the latté as Gunther paused to marvel at an 85” plasma screen in the Radio Shack window. At least, she thought, the goblin things did not seem to be aware of her. The Braxton creature only thought of her as an irritating earth-brat, who stood in the way of his working his other worldly wiles on Lena. But nonetheless she was alone.

She noticed what was on the big screen Gunther was watching and suddenly had an idea. “Gunther, what do you see?”

“Huh?”

“That plasma screen. Tell me what you see.”

He looked and grinned. “A really cool giant monitor. I didn’t think you cared about that kind of stuff. But it would be great with a Z-Box attached to it.”

“But what’s on it?”

“A dumb PBS talking heads show.”

“It’s a replay of ‘What’s Up OC.’ Tell me about the people.”

“Well there’s a big guy talking. He looks like old newsreels of JFK. And then a bunch of political hacks.” He paused for a moment and listened to the sound booming through the glass. “He’s talking about putting a fission fusion reactor right in Sunset Beach. That’s radical.”

“Now use these and tell me what you see.” She took off the green Marlon Brando-style aviator sunglasses that once belonged to her uncle and handed them to him.

He gave her a questioning look that turned to excitement, as he understood.

“Wow! Okay. Let me see.”

He put the glasses in place and looked up at the screen. She stood so that his tangled mouse nest of hair didn’t interfere with her view. She looked intently at his pale, good-natured, intent face to see his first impression of a creature from the other side, of the green-gray loathsome thing with the aura of a dank, weird, and stinking alien world. Dear old Gunther could become her true co-rebel, she thought. They could split the glasses like monocles, each armed with secret vision, ready to protect the other. She wouldn’t be alone.

“Gunther. What do you see?" She held her breath, fingernails cutting her palms.

He shook his head and removed the glasses. “Not a damn thing.”

“Then I must be crazy.”

Chapter 10

She approached the house slowly; something was strange. It had been late afternoon by the time Gunther’s cousin dropped her at the entrance to the canal. Gunther had offered to walk her the rest of the way.

“No,” she told him. “I just need to be alone to figure this out.”

“It’s still possible you’re not crazy,” he said. “Maybe it’s just my eyesight. You know, like being color blind.”

“Maybe you’re Goblin-blind?” she said with a wry smile.

“Could be.”

“Thanks for trying, Gunther.”

“I hope I can see you later. Would that be okay? If I call you?”

“Gunther!” She shook her head in exasperation.

“Then we’re still broken up as far as you’re concerned?”

She was about to say yes and walk away but his open wide-eyed Gunther expression, his head hanging out of his cousin’s beach wagon, a surf board strapped to the top, while his cousin gunned the engine impatiently made her pause.

“Probably,” she said.

His face fell.

“Let’s go,” moaned the cousin from the driver’s seat, giving the engine an extra smog spewing roar.

“But, Gunther. I’ll think about it, okay? I just have a lot to figure out.”

“Great.” He beamed. “I’ll keep track of you on the GPS.” He held up the black device that had followed her cell. “Don’t Gunther, please. That’s the kind of thing that made us break up in the first place.”

BIO: John Stacy enjoys both writing and visual arts. In addition to Unwired Girl he is working on a graphic autobiography focusing on his childhood in Long Beach and the interplay of an Anglo-Hispanic family in Mid-Century California. John teaches English Literature online for Barstow College where he enjoys emeritus status. His collection of short stories and poems, 21 Nets That Once Contained Butterflies, may be found in the CSULB Library. He and his wife Joyce live across from Whaley Park in Long Beach where they enjoy walking their two dogs Archie and Sheila.