The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst

Author:Carl Fuerst [Carl Fuerst]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Planet Bizarro
Published: 2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Rough Shaft

The sky over the quarry heaved and convulsed. The wind flung chunks of mud and sod and pebbles into the air. The ground trembled, and Brittany and Tory were pummeled by fists of hail.

Tory felt herself falling. She flailed her arms and found herself hugging the rough shaft of a wind turbine, its metal pockmarked by weather and wind.

The wind picked up. Tornado sirens wailed. The rain fell at impossible angles. The second Tory released the windmill, a bolt of lightning struck its topmost blade.

Tory and Brittany fell forward into the muck. It became impossible to tell up from down. The storm morphed into a vicious gale. The ground shook. Quarry blasts and demolitions burst all around them. It was impossible to see through the rain and water—the mud and debris flung by the wind—the strobes of explosions, burning particulate, ball lighting, cascades of falling stars.

“Come on,” yelled Brittany, holding Tory by the waist. She dragged her to the front door of a trailer home. She fell against it, and the two women tumbled inside the trailer.

The door automatically shut behind them.

From inside, the only suggestion of the tornado outside was a constant low whistle of wind through a flimsy window pane.

Otherwise, Tory and Brittany were in a calm, quiet place.

The trailer’s interior had been converted into a single, cramped room. A low drop ceiling housed flickering banks of fluorescent tubes. Peel-and-stick wallpaper clung in bubbled strips to the flexed, bowed walls. A row of folding chairs leaned against a preacher’s pulpit. One side of the pulpit was splintered and broken as if it’d been smashed with a crowbar. A card table with curved steel legs and a blown polyethylene top sagged beneath tall heaps of topographical maps, employee rosters, weather reports, mineral samples, and other detritus of middle management work in a mining operation.

Shortly after Tory and Brittany got inside, some kind of secret entrance—a contraption in the form of a small door flush with the wall and made from the same thin paneling-- opened outward and slid aside. Dr. Kyndrup crawled out from a brightly lit room. The door closed behind her on its own.

“Oh, hey,” she said. She held her arms forward, with her palms flat; it was the posture typically reserved for slowly backing away from a dangerous wild animal.

“My name is Tory Stebbins,” said Tory. “We’re working for your phlebotomist friend, Dawn. She asked us to talk to you on her behalf. She says you might be experiencing some issues with your identity. Do you remember me?”

“I wasn't expecting you so soon,” said Dr. Kyndrup.

“Are we safe here?” asked Brittany.

Dr. Kyndrup was silent.

Brittany pushed aside a lemon-yellow curtain, revealing a framed photograph of a chimpanzee sitting in a beach chair. The chimp wore human clothes—a white T-shirt with a German phrase in black block lettering, and checkered red and white shorts. It made a kissing face at the camera. A half-smoked cigar smoldered on the ground near its feet.

Its shirt said: Liebe Mich, Füttere Mich, Verlasse Mich Nie.

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