Read Online Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead - Free Book Online Page A

“Just keep driving.”
    “Whatever.”
    Later on they were parked under the monorail tracks eating submarine sandwiches. Kylie couldn’t get over how great everything was, the food, the coffee, the damn air . All of it the way things used to be. She could hardly believe how great it had been, how much had been lost.
    “Okay,” she said, kind of talking to herself, “so they know I’m here and they’re guarding the Core.”
    “Those bastards,” Toby said.
    “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what they really were.”
    “They looked like used-car salesmen.”
    “They’re Tourists,” Kylie said.
    “Oh my God! More tourists!”
    Kylie chewed a mouthful of sub. She’d taken too big a bite. Every flavor was like a drug. Onions, provolone, turkey, mustard, pepper.
    “So where are the evil tourists from,” Toby asked. “California?”
    “Another dimensional reality.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    Kylie’s chronometer toned softly. Ten hours.
    Inside the yellow car there were many smells and one of them was Toby.
    “Do you have any more tattoos?” she asked.
    “One. It’s—”
    “Don’t tell me,” she said.
    “Okay.”
    “I want you to show me. But not here. At the place where you live.”
    “You want to come to my apartment?”
    “Your apartment, yes.”
    “Okay, spooky.” He grinned. So did she.
    Some precious time later the chronometer toned again. It wasn’t on her wrist anymore. It was on the hardwood floor tangled up in her clothes.
    Toby, who was standing naked by the refrigerator holding a bottle of grape juice, said, “Why’s your watch keep doing that?”
    “It’s a countdown,” Kylie said, looking at him.
    “A countdown to what?”
    “To the end of the current cycle. The end of the loop.”
    He drank from the bottle, his throat working. She liked to watch him now, whatever he did. He finished drinking and screwed the cap back on.
    “The loop,” he said, shaking his head.
    When he turned to put the bottle back in the refrigerator, she saw his other tattoo again: a cross throwing off light. It was inked into the skin on his left shoulder blade.
    “You can’t even see your own cross,” she said.
    He came back to the bed.
    “I don’t have to see it,” he said. “I just like to know it’s there, watching my back.”
    “Are you Catholic?”
    “No.”
    “My mother is.”
    “I just like the idea of Jesus,” he said.
    “You’re spookier than I am,” Kylie said.
    “Not by a mile.”
    She kissed his mouth, but when he tried to caress her she pushed him gently back.
    “Take me someplace.”
    “Where?”
    “My grandparent’s house.” She meant “great” grandparents, but didn’t feel like explaining to him how so many decades had passed outside the loop of the Preservation.
    “Right now?”
    “Yes.”
    It was a white frame house on Queen Anne Hill, sitting comfortably among its prosperous neighbors on a street lined with live oaks. Kylie pressed her nose to the window on the passenger side of the Vee Dub, as Toby called his vehicle.
    “Stop,” she said. “That’s it.”
    He tucked the little car into the curb and turned the engine off. Kylie looked from the faded photo in her hand to the house. Her mother’s mother had taken the photo just weeks before the world ended. In it, Kylie’s great grandparents stood on the front porch of the house, their arms around each other, waving and smiling. There was no one standing on the front porch now.
    “It’s real,” Kylie said. “I’ve been looking at this picture my whole life.”
    “Haven’t you ever been here before?”
    She shook her head. At the same time her chronometer toned.
    “How we doing on the countdown,” Toby asked.
    She glanced at the digital display.
    “Eight hours.”
    “So what happens at midnight?”
    “It starts up again. The end is the beginning.”
    He laughed. She didn’t.
    “So then it’s Sunday, right? Then do you countdown to Monday?”
    “At the end of the