White Space

They hit: a sudden, jarring blow. Both girls slammed forward. Tania managed to hang on to the shotgun but lost her grip on the hammer, which clanked off the windshield and went spinning to the floor somewhere behind them, in the passenger cab. With a gasp, Rima threw up her arms as she catapulted forward and saw the wheel rushing for her face. At the last second, her shoulder harness caught and held, jerking her back like a hooked fish. Above the cat’s stuttering clank and roar, she heard a long, bubbling, unearthly wail. Beneath them, the snowblower seemed to stagger and mutter a stuttering, muted gargle, like a person simultaneously trying to breathe and talk with his mouth full.

“No no no no no.” Rima stiff-armed the cat’s balky controls. “Don’t you quit, don’t you quit!”

With a choked bellow, the cat coughed a mucky jet of macerated flesh and bone from its discharge chute. Blowback splatted against the windscreen, but instead of the moist red and purple and pink of a man’s blood and tissues, what hit that glass was viscous and black as oil and no longer human.

Choking again, the cat lurched and clanked to a shuddering halt. In the cab, the sudden stop catapulted the girls forward once more, and this time, Rima’s shoulder harness failed. Pain exploded in her right cheek as she slammed into the steering wheel, and her vision sheeted red.

“Rima?” Tania’s voice was tight and breathless. “R-Rima?”

“I’m … I’m okay. I’m fine,” she lied. Her cheek felt like a bomb had detonated and blown a hole through the roof of her mouth. She felt the warm spurt of blood on her cheek and down her neck, and there was more blood on the steering wheel.

“N-no,” Tania said in that same cramped voice. “That’s n-not what I meant. Look, Rima.” She pointed. “L-look at the windshield.”

Rima did—and then wished she hadn’t.

The windscreen was a nightmare of steaming flesh and ropy streamers of black blood.

And all of it was moving.

EMMA Whatever They Make Will Be Real

1

“KIND OF?” EMMA’S chest imploded. This was insane; she might be nuts, but she was real, she did things, she could feel. “Is that kind of no, I’m not a character in a book, or is that kind of yes?”

“I mean, kind of.” Lizzie’s face was a tiny white oval. Her cobalt eyes were dark as India ink, the shadows that ghosted through before somehow even more pronounced than before. That birthmark glittered as brightly as a finely cut yellow diamond. “It’s sort of like that—”

“Sort of? Kind of? What are you talking about? I have a life!” Her hands flashed out to grab the little girl’s shoulders. Crying out, Lizzie tried backing away, but Emma wouldn’t let go and shook the kid, hard, like a floppy rag doll she was suddenly very tired of playing with. “Stop this shit! I have a past! I go to school! I watch X-Files and Lost and write stupid papers about crazy dead writers! I drink goddamned mocha Frappuccinos!”

“I kn-know! I’ve v-v-visited!” Mouth sagging open, Lizzie was bawling her head off, sobbing the way only little kids do. “The words are al-all th-there!”

“Stop saying that! I’m not just words on a page!” Her chest was going like a bellows, the air scouring her throat. She felt the prick of furious tears. Of all the things her mind could light on, this is what she thought: Kramer would just love this. This is so Philip K. Dickilicious; I write this up, and I’ll get a damned A for sure.

Then she thought about that fragment of a sentence penned in red ink, a sentence that refused to resolve: Wait a second. There’s no period. Nothing comes after.

“What about all the rest of my life? Is Kramer in your dad’s story?” Her voice came out sounding as dry and raspy as shriveled cornstalks stirred by an October wind. Her fingers dug until she felt the girl’s bones. “Is Holten Prep? Is Starbucks?” Is Eric?

“No. That’s one of the reasons you’re so special, Emma.” Tears gleamed on Lizzie’s cheeks. “You did all that by yourself.”

2

“I …” SHE COULD feel the kid’s words like something physical, a slap, hard enough that she let go of the little girl and actually took a staggering step back. “I … I what? I did what?”

“You heard me.” Lizzie’s eyes glimmered again with those odd, curling, smoky, X-Files shadows. “You got loose and wrote yourself. You’re still writing yourself.”

“That’s crazy.” The words came out raspy and harsh, as if they were glass ground on a Dremel or abrasive stone. Her eyes dropped to that limp tangle of parchment. That had been blank, but she’d pulled McDermott’s words, what Lizzie said was a story that he never finished, from nothing. “This isn’t The Matrix. I’m not Neo. I’m a real person.”

“And what’s that?” Lizzie said. “Maybe you’re only real because you think you are.”