11 Probably a Duck
Probably a Duck
Turns out it’s a lot easier to corner a wolf pack when you have a werewolf on your side.
We don’t run across any more infected wolves, but the normal ones still come running when Calvin howls in the moonlight.
Eldi joins him, yipping and yowling and racing around the same clearing we were at a mere twenty-four hours ago.
It’s surreal how much has changed in those few hours.
I redeem myself a bit from last night’s debacle. I really am a decent shot when my target isn’t wrestling with my toddler or Calvin. Speaking of Calvin, it seems he is a natural at the shape-shifting business—somewhat surprising, considering he was a skeptic barely a day ago.
“Listen, I’m a scientist. If you give me evidence, I have no problem adjusting my conclusions and admitting I was wrong,” he says on our return from the forest when I call him out on his change of heart.
In the face of Calvin’s new shape-shifting proclivities, Eldi’s unmasking as the bloodsucking creature of legend, and Doug and Dave’s crop-circle-carving prowess, I suppose this is a fair reaction. What else is Calvin supposed to do, after all? Stay in denial in the face of overwhelming evidence?
Doug (I think) has cooked breakfast this morning. He politely holds the door open for us while flipping slightly scorched pancakes with a spatula-shaped appendage and pouring us orange juice with yet another limb, having abandoned any remaining pretense of being a normal vacuum.
I insist we move camp as soon as we finish breakfast, bullying Calvin into driving right away despite the long night.
The dark Jeep hasn’t made an appearance since Colorado, but I’ll take no chances.
Neither of us has a destination planned, but from the buzz I overhear in the gas station line as I restock driving snacks, we will find something interesting wherever we stop.
So we head south for Utah amid reports of nightly light shows in the sky near Salt Lake.
More emails packed with news articles and personal encounters with UFOs and strange phenomena filter into my inbox, my phone buzzing frenetically with notifications.
I don’t need to scour the messages to see the evidence of elevated activity.
It’s obvious. Videos and pictures are making their way into mainstream social media sites as well.
It’s weird caravanning with Calvin in such a formal fashion. We might end up in the same place often, but this intentional traveling, checking in at every rest stop and gas station, is unfamiliar. Not bad, just different, less lonely.
Calvin even joins us for lunch. “Are you sure it’s safe to have sushi this far from the ocean?”
“Eldi loves sushi.”
“We’re in the desert.”
“Sushi is flash frozen before consumption even if it’s served on the coast.”
“Can toddlers eat sushi?”
“Toddlers eat boogers and dirt. Plus, Eldi isn’t an ordinary toddler. She eats goats. Raw tuna isn’t going to be the thing that makes her puke.”
Calvin wrinkles his nose. “That’s Eldi. I prefer my food less raw.”
“For a werewolf, you’re kind of being a big baby about this. Order a curry or some noodles if you’re that worried, you snob.”
Eldi eats with enthusiasm an expensive entrée of sashimi, earning a grudging look of admiration from Calvin.
“She can really pack it away,” he says as she reaches to take the tobiko off the top of the sushi roll on my plate.
“You just ate enough salmon to feed a grizzly bear,” I tell Eldi. “Can’t you leave my food alone?”
She ignores me and scoops up the remaining ikura from my plate for good measure, moving it to her own with a triumphant wiggle and a gleeful chant of “Mine, mine, mine.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Calvin says. “About what we do next, where we go.”
I grudgingly let Eldi steal yet more food from my plate. I’ve been thinking too.
“Eldi seems connected to all these electronics that aren’t electronics, right?” he says when I don’t answer right away. “And you’ve been watching the skies lately, yeah? Dave and Doug are making crop circles. UFOs everywhere. Maybe it’s all connected.”
“Are you saying Eldi is an alien?”
“I’m saying that seems like a very logical possibility. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”
“Quack,” Eldi says.
It’s not like this theory has never occurred to me.
Of course, I’ve considered the possibility.
I’ve been putting the pieces together long before Calvin even realized Eldi was a puzzle.
But I feel . . . something. A twist in my gut when I consider solving the riddle that is Eldi. That little nudging voice in my head.
Yes, think, think.
“Life somewhere else in the universe seems likely to me,” I say without really answering.
“Even before I followed you and your bloodsucking toddler into a pack of werewolves and you locked me in your magical Winnebago, I believed in some legends. I’ve always thought that aliens were out there.
Statistically speaking, there’s no way we’re alone in the universe on our little space rock.
It’s the sightings, the encounters, and abductions I’m skeptical about. But now . . .” He shrugs.
Out there, not alone.
The little voice creates an echo chamber out of Calvin’s words, rattling around concepts that unsettle me. Eldi might be a little different. But it doesn’t matter. She’s doing fine, quietly living life with me.
“Why now? Eldi has been with me for years. If she is an alien, she’s been happily living on this planet for the last seven years, at a minimum.”
“Maybe she was the first sent here, a scout.”
Visitors, travelers from so far.
Great, first Calvin changes his tune, and now even the voice in my head is a conspiracy theorist.
“For what? An invasion? Does she look like she has grand schemes of colonization?” I scoff, and gesture at Eldi, who is drawing the constellation Orion amid other scribbles with crayons on her kids’ menu.
“No, of course not. I’m not saying Eldi is up to anything nefarious. But”—he nods at Eldi’s artwork—“I don’t think we should ignore the connection either.”
I recognize the shapes amid the stars when I look closer.
Not scribbles after all, but the same shapes carved into carpets and cornfields.
The same shapes shared across the internet.
I’ve read a dozen different analyses by amateurs and professionals, code breakers, and linguists, and no one has figured out the message yet.
“Eldi, what does this mean?” I say, snatching the paper up to look at it more closely.
Eldi scowls at the interruption. “Quack. Duck.”
“Truly remarkable,” I say sarcastically.
“Duck. Quack,” Eldi says with emphasis, hand outstretched for her paper.
“Maybe she lost her way and got stuck here. Maybe someone is looking for her. Maybe she had engine problems, I don’t know. That’s the point. We owe it to her to find out.” He’s speaking quietly, eyes on our surroundings.
“Quack, duck, quack, duck, quack!” Eldi is nearly shouting now, but I don’t care to shush her. The restaurant is quiet; there are not many people around to overhear. It’s all toddler babble anyway.
“Intergalactic traveler, huh?” I scoff. “She barely even speaks, and you think she flew a spaceship here?” I immediately want to swallow those ugly words back down, but it’s too late.
“Fuck. Duck. Quack,” Eldi snaps again, her eyes narrowing at me as she snatches her paper back from my hands and darts under the table to crawl up into Calvin’s lap instead.
“Eldi, I didn’t mean it that way—”
She hums loudly over me, as if she can’t hear me. The tune is from a morbid little nursery rhyme. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone.
My blood curdles. I don’t know how she knows that tune. She can’t know what hearing it does to me.
“Reggie,” Calvin says. I hate his disappointed, chastising tone.
To my horror, there’s a lump forming in my throat.
“I’ve had enough food,” I declare, my voice cracking around the syllables.
Eldi looks up at me as I dig in my pockets for cash and toss it on the table.
“I’ll meet you in the Winnebago,” I tell Eldi without meeting her gaze.
“Unless you want to ride in the Airstream with Calvin.”
Eldi mutters indistinguishable curses under her breath, but scrambles out of Calvin’s lap and stalks toward the door.
Calvin lets out a sigh and follows her.
At this point, camping remotely is a given.
When you’re trying to keep off everyone’s radar a new werewolf, a slew of sentient vacuums determined to carve nightly crop circles into any available foliage, and a toddler Chupacabra, the crowded KOA tends not to be the best choice.
We’re in a dispersed camping spot in the salt flats in Utah, far enough from towns that Eldi can go out hunting on her own.
She’s got a fondness for the challenge of hunting predators if there are no goats available and there are cougars about.
The late-afternoon sun is shining through the Winnebago windows, and Eldi still hasn’t forgiven me for the things I said at lunch.
She sits across from me at the table, noisily chewing on one of Goat’s ears, resolutely refusing to look up from her tablet.
I try to catch up on emails, though it’s impossible to concentrate given the guilt churning in my stomach, plus the distraction that is Dave as he putters about the kitchen, digging through the cabinets and tossing things around.
His clicking and whirring sound angry, and he pauses his destruction every few minutes to zoom frantically across the floor, running over my toes in a way that feels personal.
I could swear he’s picking up on Eldi’s mood.
I can’t take it anymore. I’ll apologize. I can be an adult about this. But an apology is not what leaves my mouth.
“Do you want to leave?” I finally blurt out, looking up from my computer at Eldi. “Is that what’s happening with all the UFOs and crop circles? Is someone coming here for you?”
Eldi’s eyes momentarily flick up from her tablet.
“No. All alone,” she mutters before returning her gaze to her tablet.
Alone, alone, alone. The voice in my head echoes a melancholy refrain. I know alone. “You aren’t alone. You have me. You’d miss me, if you left?” I ask. Pathetic. I’m not being an adult about this at all. “I’d miss you,” I croak.
Eldi looks at me disdainfully, eyebrow arched. But I see the moment her eyes soften.
“Maybe miss Goat,” she says, a smug grin spreading across her face.
The knot in my stomach finally loosens. I snort and shake my head before returning to my work.
But we both know I’m forgiven.
Darkness. So dark I can’t see. So dark, yet I know instantly where I am.
The only place I can be, the only place that’s this dark, far underground.
I can hear a child crying quietly. Soft, hiccupping, exhausted sobs.
A little hand holds tight to mine, fingernails digging in hard enough to hurt, but I gently squeeze back.
I’m here.
Heavy, warm weight in my arms, a heartbeat fluttering against my chest, faster than my own. The sweet smell of cheap fruity kids’ shampoo hangs in the air.
Ladybird, Ladybird
The sound of my own voice repeating the snippets of the eerie song starts a stream of tears that silently drip down my face.
Fly away home
But the quiet sobs around me fade away.
Your house is on fire
I barely remember the lyrics, only what I’ve seen on the TV once or twice. I’m so tired.
Ladybird, ladybird, your children are gone
When I run out of words, I hum.
Then scratching, like claws, at the door. A child whimpers, and the hand clutches even more desperately to me. A breathy laugh crackles through the air like a bolt of lightning. The temperature plummets.
I try to run, but ice grows like frost on a window, freezing my legs to the floor. The weight on my chest is smothering me. The grip on my hand stings as nails grow like claws. Dig in so tight I think they might pierce me. My tears are freezing solid on my face.
Regina. Regina. Regina.
A mocking, singsong voice tickles my ear. Someone is behind me. I can’t run—I can’t scream—I’m being crushed—
Reggie!