Mara Lantern: Broken Realms Part 17

"Hey, do you guys have a phone here? I need to call my mom to come and get me," Sam said.

The guard tensed but did not raise the weapon slung over his shoulder. Rain dripped from the brim of his cap. "You need to get out of here. I don't have a phone you can use." He looked past Sam's shoulder and stepped back, raising his rifle.

Ping and Mara ran toward them.

"You don't need to worry about my friends. You should let us into the hangar," Sam prompted.

The guard lowered the gun and turned toward the hangar. "Right this way."

Sam and the guard arrived at the door thirty seconds before Ping and Mara. After keying a code into a pad mounted on the wall, the guard pushed open the door for them. All three walked into the dimly lit building. Sam turned back to the guard.

"You want to stay here until the other guard shows up. Ask him for a cigarette, then the two of you take a ten-minute break out here."

Mara shook the rain off her coat and looked at Ping. "Why is that guard being so cooperative? Is he someone you know?"

"Later," Ping said. "We have less than thirty minutes to get out of here. Come on." He took Mara by the wrist and walked toward the airplane.

"What about Sam?" she said.

"I'm staying here to keep an eye on the guards. I'll meet you guys at the side door in twenty minutes," he said. Turning to Ping, he added, "Remember, prompting doesn't last very long. Don't take all night."

"Okay, we'll be there," he said, pulling Mara into the shadows.

She turned her attention in the direction Ping led her and noticed for the first time that the airplane was a wreck. Though she had been aware of the large jet when she had first walked through the door, she had not given it much thought. A plane in a hangar was not exactly unexpected.

"Whoa. What happened to..." Then it dawned on her, and her pace slowed as she looked at the gaping hole in the rear fuselage.

"Our plane," Ping said. "We don't have time for a tour. This is not what we came to see. Come on." He motioned her toward the tail of the plane, veering around it.

Mara allowed Ping to guide her while she stared back at the airliner, not noticing the series of tents beyond as they cleared the wreckage.

"Mara, I need you to step it up a bit."

She s.h.i.+fted her gaze forward, noticed the tents. Their trajectory pointed them to a plastic door.

"Did you bring some gloves like I suggested?" Ping asked.

"Yes, but, like I said, it's not that cold." She pulled the gloves from her pocket.

"Put them on." He took a flashlight from his pocket and opened the door.

Once the door closed behind them, Ping turned on the flashlight. He walked straight for the clipboard hanging on a nail directly inside the door. s.h.i.+ning the light on the clipboard, he said, "I forgot my gla.s.ses. Come here and look at this list for me."

He handed it to Mara.

"What am I looking for?"

"My name."

"Okay, Ping comma Aristotle. Found it. Aristotle? That's your first name? What were your parents thinking?"

"Long story. I will tell you sometime. What's the number beside my name?"

"Thirty-three."

"Let's go."

Ping pointed the light to the left and pulled Mara in that direction.

"It's freezing in here," Mara said, blowing clouds of vapor. "What is this place, a meat locker?"

As they walked past table after table, Ping occasionally stopped to lift a sheet, revealing each had a numbered label, which he examined with the light. The first table was fifteen. The next, nineteen. On the third one, number twenty-two, he lifted the sheet a little too high and it failed to fall back over the edge of the table. He leaned into the darkness to straighten it out and the flashlight illuminated a human foot.

Mara gasped.

"These are people. Dead people."

"Stay with me, Mara. This is important."

Ping covered the foot and kept going, reading numbered labels as he went. After a few minutes, he stopped at a table and pointed the light at the label. Number thirty-three. He looked at Mara in the ambient light.

"I need you to stand over there," he said, pointing to the head of the table.

"What for?"

"We're going to look at this person's face to see who it is."

"No, no way."

"Mara, I need you to do this. We're running out of time."

"I'm freezing. Let's get out of here. I don't want to do this."

"We'll go once we do this."

Mara moved to the head of the table. Ping walked up on the other side.

"Lift the sheet," Ping said.

"You lift the sheet," Mara said, defiant.

"I think it might be a problem if I do it."

She stood staring at him, with a pleading look. He pointed his jaw at the body below them and nodded.

Vapor stopped clouding around her head. She held her breath and leaned forward over the body, tried to pinch the sheet on the corner opposite from where she stood but her glove was too slick. She pulled back her hand, removed the glove, reached out to the corner again, pinched and lifted the sheet with her bare fingers. She drew it back.

Ping stared up vacantly from the table.

"A twin brother! That's ridiculous," Ping said, standing at the end of his counterpart's table, spewing steam from his mouth.

"It's a more logical explanation than people from an alternate reality."

"Mara, these are the pa.s.sengers from our flight. They died at the same time that, somehow, the Chronicle pulled their counterparts into this realm."

"Okay, show me mine."

"Your what?"

"Show me the dead Mara."

"There isn't one. If the other Mara was killed, she was sent back when you touched her. That's why I can't touch him." He pointed at the man on the table they had just uncovered. "I would be thrown back into my own reality. Touching one hair, even one cell, and, poof, I'm gone."

"I'm still not convinced."

Ping looked at the clipboard he held, glanced up and said, "Did you know anyone else on the flight?"

"No. Well, I met this woman and her grandson. They sat next to me."

He handed the clipboard to her. "Find her. What was her name?"

"Sarah something, I think." Mara ran her finger down the list while Ping held the light. "Gamble, that's it. Number eighty-three, and her grandson, Jeremy, eighty-four."

"They are probably on the far side. Come on."

They walked past dozens of tables, occasionally stopping to check number labels. The fourth time they stopped, Ping pointed to the head of the table.

"Go ahead. Hurry, we are running out of time. It just occurred to me there's one more I want to check before we go."

Mara hesitated, walked up to the head of the table. Ping again stood on the opposite side, holding the light. She pulled off her glove and lifted the sheet. The trim grandma from the flight lay on the table. Mara dropped the sheet and looked over her shoulder at the next table. A child lay under the sheet, his body more than a foot shorter than the table. She nodded to Ping.

"So the world thinks these people survived the crash, but they are all here. Except for me. No wonder the cops think I had something to do with it," she said, putting her glove back on. "Can we go now?"

"Let's confirm Bert Reilly, the slug man," Ping said, handing her the clipboard. "Then we have to go."

CHAPTER 28.

THE MORNING LIGHT spread dull shadows as Mara approached Ping's car in front of the bakery. Sam and Ping were getting out. Ping noticed her as she approached, a brief smile spreading across his plump face. Sam avoided looking at Mara.

"I have questions," she said. "Lots of them."

She carried the DVD case with her.

"Oh, by the way, your guys did a great job cleaning up the bug juice. Thanks."

"Come on in. We'll put on some coffee," Ping said while unlocking the front door of the bakery. "We'll have the place to ourselves today. I think we've got one more day before construction can proceed."

Mara sat down at a little break table in the now-completed kitchen while Ping put on coffee. She sat the DVD case on the floor next to her chair. Sam placed a plate of doughnuts on the table and grabbed a chair.

"Have one," he said.

"No thanks. I don't really care for fried doughnuts. Occasionally I'll eat the baked kind." She smiled at him. "Tell me how you got that guard to let us into the hangar last night," she said.

Sam looked at Ping, who nodded.

"I can put thoughts or ideas into people's minds. It only lasts for a few minutes. It's not permanent. I can't change the way they think. Eventually they just dismiss it as a random thought or a bad idea," he said.

Mara laughed. "Right. Everyone from where you come from, from your realm, can do this?"

"No. I'm a prompter."

Ping sat down. "Sam's gift is a unique metaphysical ability. It isn't an evolutionary or hereditary trait of people from his realm."

"And you believe he can do this?" Mara picked up a doughnut and bit into it.

"You saw the guard let us in last night. That was his doing," Ping said. He frowned at her. "I thought you didn't like fried doughnuts."

"I don't." She spit out the rest into a napkin, grimacing and wiping her tongue. "I don't understand why I picked up that doughnut. I really can't stand them."

Sam smiled, blus.h.i.+ng.

"You didn't do that, did you?" she said. She glared at him sideways, turned her attention back to Ping. "The slug man who showed up at the shop, was that some kind of metaphysical ability as well?"

"No. That was most likely a characteristic of people from his realm. I suspect they evolved to have some kind of symbiotic relations.h.i.+p with those insectlike creatures. It would not surprise me if the slugs actually gestated in his digestive track or another part of his body."

"That is so cool," Sam said wide-eyed, grabbing a doughnut and stuffing it into his mouth in one bite.

Mara rolled her eyes. "So all of his people have these slugs."

"I would think."

"What about you? You're from a different reality. What's your deal?" She raised an eyebrow at Ping. "Let me guess. You can make yourself invisible and reappear at will."

"No. Nothing as impressive as that, I'm afraid. In the shop yesterday, you saw my body rea.s.semble after it had dispersed."

"Your body dispersed." She looked doubtful. "And then rea.s.sembled."

"You saw me rea.s.semble with your own eyes."

"I wasn't exactly in a stable frame of mind at the time. I had been completely slimed by an old man from G.o.d-knows-where. So why do you disperse?"