Melissa Marr - The Arrivals

All she could move was her head. From her neck down, her body was tingling. She tried to move her legs, to sit, but all that happened was a weird jerking, as if her body was trying but couldn’t complete the movements. She could feel the trickle of sweat rolling off her skin like small insects crawling all over her, but she couldn’t move to wipe it away.

She tried to stave off panic by studying what she could see around her. To her right was a barren stretch of desert surrounded by a sturdy but peculiar-looking metal fence. A rutted road of dirt and sand cut between the desert and the field. The cotton plants had tufts of white on them, but they didn’t look nearly as prickly as real cotton plants.

Above her, the sky looked . . . wrong. It was mostly blue like skies were supposed to be, but the sun was high above her as if it were midday even though sunset streaks of reds and purples were painted across the blue. She frowned as she looked to her left: there were two moons visible in the sky.

The more she looked, the more she suspected that she had to be hallucinating—except it had been a long time since she’d even smoked a joint much less taken anything that would result in full-color hallucinations. She’d broken her sobriety last night, but that seemed unlikely to have led to something this severe. It wasn’t like she’d been sipping some sort of potentially toxic moonshine. She’d been in a bar where even the well liquors were high end.

The ability to move seemed to be slowly creeping downward. Chloe wiggled her fingers and stretched her arms. The pins-and-needles feeling was a welcome sensation. She fingered the pendant she wore on a chain around her neck. Her aunt had given it to her for five years’ sobriety—which she had ended last night.

The last thing she remembered was having an obscenely overpriced drink in a suit-filled bar. It wasn’t her usual sort of digs, but it was the first place she’d seen after she’d found her fiancé, Andrew, and her boss humping like feral bunnies. She’d walked out of her apartment, the apartment he had moved into only a month ago. She hadn’t even slammed the door. She’d left them there fucking in her home and wandered for a few hours until the warm light of a bar beckoned. It had been a long time since she’d even come close to breaking her sobriety, but it was either that or go home to a bed she couldn’t sleep in now. The images of walking into the bar, of ordering several drinks, of ignoring Andrew’s calls: those were all clear. After that, it was all a blank until she woke up wherever she was now.

“I told you she was bound to be out here,” a man’s voice said.

Chloe turned her head to see a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a western TV show, dressed in patched brown trousers and a plain button-up shirt.

“Don’t be smug, Jack.” The woman who came to stand beside him was wearing a strange skirt that was hitched up above her knees in the front but hung to her ankles in the back. The strange cut of it exposed a pair of what looked like battered red leather boots that laced up to the knee. The peculiar skirt was topped with a snug, low-cut blouse that exposed far more bosom than even the most daring swimsuit Chloe owned.

The woman held out a hand to Chloe. “Name’s Kitty.”

“This is a very vivid hallucination,” Chloe told her.

“And that’s Jack . . . short for jackass,” Kitty continued as if Chloe hadn’t spoken. She kept her hand outstretched. “Come on now. Standing’s going to hurt no matter when you do it.”

When Chloe didn’t respond, the woman reached down, gripped Chloe’s hand, and hauled her to her feet.

Chloe’s legs weren’t quite as reliable as her arms were. She wobbled and had to close her eyes against a wave of dizziness that was followed instantly by the pressing need to vomit. Kitty held her steady as she did just that.

“Hush,” Kitty murmured. “It passes soon enough. What are you called?”

“Chloe.” She kept her eyes closed as she marshaled the strength to stay upright. After a few moments she opened one eye tentatively to see the two strangers watching her.

The man held out a neatly folded square of cloth.

“It’s clean,” Kitty said.

After Chloe took it and wiped her mouth and chin, Jack bowed his head slightly. “I’m Jackson, but everyone calls me Jack.”

The woman holding her upright interjected, “Except when we’re calling you—”

“This is my sister, Katherine,” Jack continued. “She’s not nearly as vulgar as she appears.”

“ Kitty, not Katherine,” the woman corrected. She smiled and cajoled, “Come on, Chloe. You’ll get your bearings soon enough, or you’ll succumb to madness. Either way, it’ll be easier after you get past the travel sickness and rest awhile.”

“Travel sickness . . .” Chloe echoed. “I’m just hungover, and you’re a hallucination . . . or a coma dream.” She glanced toward the pasture, where she saw what looked like an elephant-size iguana. “This is all a coma dream.”

“Of course it is, sweetie.” Kitty’s arm tightened around Chloe’s waist. “Why don’t we head back to the camp? You can catch some sleep, and then we’ll talk about everything.”

After a moment’s pause, Chloe decided that there weren’t a whole lot of options before her. She could go along with the people in her dream/hallucination, or she could stand around staring at the giant lizard while she waited for reality to right itself.

“I’m not dead, right?” Chloe asked.

Jack flashed her a grin before saying, “Well, no one’s ever accused Katherine of being an angel.”

“And jackass here isn’t as much a devil as he’d like everyone to think,” Kitty added in a soft, consoling voice. “It’ll all be all right, Chloe. We’ll go back to camp and rest a bit, and soon enough you’ll feel right as rain.”

They were only a mile outside camp when Jack noticed the unfamiliar tracks and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to carry the disoriented woman. She’d been chattier than most, rambling about concussions and brain tumors affecting her perceptions and then explaining that she must be in a hospital filled with drugs that were creating elaborate hallucinations. She finally fell quiet when Jack lifted her into his arms and walked faster.

Katherine picked up her pace without question.

Jack did his best to think about getting them to camp safely—without thinking about the last woman he’d carried into camp. Mary was truly dead. Thinking about her didn’t change anything. The new one— Chloe, he reminded himself—was lighter than Mary. It was harder each time to remind himself that they were all individuals, people, not simply replacements for the Arrivals who’d died.

He knew that this one— Chloe —was from a later year than most of them, possibly around Mary’s time period. Her clothes were different. She wore the tightest pair of denim trousers, of jeans, that he’d ever seen. A blouse of some sort of delicate material was covered by a soft leather jacket that narrowed at the waist like a woman’s dress would. With such revealing clothes, any man would’ve noticed her. Jack was neither a saint nor a preacher; he definitely noticed her charms—and immediately felt guilty for it.

As Jack, Katherine, and Chloe reached the perimeter of the camp, Jack saw Edgar leaning against the barrel that served as a stool at the guard point. He looked at them with his usual methodical assessment.

“Kit,” Edgar said with no obvious inflection. Then the taciturn man glanced at Chloe, who rested half asleep in Jack’s arms. “Jack . . . and . . . ?”