Shifting

Ten

The old medical center looked more like a makeshift internment camp than a fortress, and it was only about a quarter of the way finished at that. The Redmoor Medical Center itself had never been much to look at. It was built in the sixties with that cheap cinderblock construction they were so fond of back then. The roof was nearly flat and covered with white gravel and the pinkish-brown trim needed a paintjob. The trees in the parking lot had outgrown their small squares of earth long ago and now their roots lifted up large sections of asphalt like tentacles heaving beneath a frozen black sea. I supposed the place had all looked cool decades ago, but now it was just plain ugly. But for all that, the walls were thick and strong and the few windows it had were high and small and full of reinforcing wire. It was big and probably the sturdiest structure in town, making it a good choice for defensive purposes.

I noted as I walked through the abandoned parking lot that they were planning to make the parking lot and the grassy areas in front of the center all part of the compound. They had made it about a third of the way around with chain link fencing. The fence had been strapped to the line of lampposts and trees that bordered Hagen Street. Big spools of barbed wire lay about the place, I’m sure they planned to decorate the top of the chain links with a generous spiral of wire.

I made it about half-way across the parking lot before a sentry challenged me. It was Erik Foti, he had been sitting in a police cruiser with a shotgun. He wasn’t a real cop, but I think he liked being in the cruiser.

“Hold it!” he shouted, seeing me and scrambling to yank his ear buds off. I wondered if he would go bats when the last cassette player in town died on him. All the digital music players had already died, of course, but the cassettes still worked, I guess because they were simpler. I’d spent years in school with Erik and he’d never been without portable sound of some kind. He had the cruiser door open and his shotgun out before he realized who I was.

“Ah, hello Gannon,” he said relaxing somewhat. He still held his shotgun to his chest, watching me. Good boy, I thought, no wonder you lasted this long.

“Hello Erik, you got guard duty eh?”

Erik made a face. “Yeah. Go on in, they are expecting you.”

I made my way into the large waiting room, which was full of neglected potted ficus plants, torn up magazines and vinyl furniture. The fish in the aquarium were all dead but for one feisty-looking tiger barb. I was sorry to see the fish go. I had spent a lot of hours poking at that glass when I was a kid.

There were three different nurses stations, one for the dentist, one for the doctor and one for the optometrist. The dentist and the doctor were dead, so I headed for the optometrist’s office. I found from Carlene Mitts, who was playing receptionist, that the optometrist was dead as well, and our pharmacist Beatrice Wilton had taken over the office. Lots of people were in the center and each family was bedding down in a different examination room. It was only about 10 o’clock but most people were quiet and trying to sleep on sleeping bags and cots.

As I walked around the offices, it felt good to see so many people. I hadn’t seen more than a handful of people in one place in a long time. It felt right to form a community like this. I suppose it’s only natural for humans to do so. I hoped with all my heart it wasn’t a big mistake.

“Gannon!” said Vance, coming out of a door marked private. “You made it, buddy.”

“So you finally got the Durango to start, huh?”

“Yep,” said Vance, still talking in a breezy way, but looking a bit guilty. We both knew he’d run out on me back there. “I bet Doc Wilton is going to want to talk to you.”

“Is she in there?” I asked him, indicating the private room with a nod.

“Yeah, that’s her office and kind of a conference area. Guess all the medical types used to share it-back when we had them. Hey, listen, before you go in, did you find anything out there?”

I nodded.

Vance lit up, but looked apprehensive. “Anything really freaky?”

“Yeah, something new.”

“Oooo,” said Vance, licking his lips. “You’re in once piece though, right? Cool, cool.”

He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper and scratched at his neck nervously, “Sorry man, to run out on you I mean-but you’ve got the real balls here. I mean it, man, I’m just not like you.”

I nodded without feeling. Vance often complimented people after pulling a fast one. It was pretty effective. Still, I couldn’t really blame anyone for not wanting to wander into a known area that made changelings.

“Where’s Monika?”

“Sharon Hatchell is giving her the whole psych-trauma thing she likes to give everyone after something goes bad. You know.”

I nodded. I knew. Mrs. Hatchell was our town counselor. She had been the counselor at the local school. She was one of those types that volunteered for every community service job the town had and when she ran out of those, she made up some more of them. I’d always thought she was a bit spooky herself, but her heart was in the right place.

“Talk to the Doc and I’ll catch you later,” said Vance, slipping by me. I had an unpleasant thought that he was off to make some quick time with Monika. I tried to shake off the idea, but I couldn’t.

I had never needed glasses or much teeth drilling, but my parents had dragged me in here at least twice a year just in case. In all that time, I’d never been into the back offices. I pushed past the door marked private and walked inside.

“Gannon! Excellent of you to come, take a seat,” said Doc Wilton when she recognized me. She was surrounded by a mass of graph paper and a ruler and a lot of pencils and erasers. All of that old stuff office people used to work with before computers.

“Sure thing, Doc,” I said walking in and sitting down.

Doc Wilton was a squat woman with a gut that ballooned out over her pants. Her hair was cut short, the way a lot of older professional women like to style it, but maybe a bit shorter even than that. She had a quick laugh and an even quicker smile. I’d always liked her.

“So, what’s the word up there from the Reverend?”

I looked over the papers she was working on. There were colorful lines on them and landmarks. “Working on new maps? I’ve got some information in that area.”

That got her attention. She listened to my story about what the Reverend had said and about the changeling I’d found and talked to. That, of course, is what interested her the most.

“So you are sure you heard the voice? It wasn’t just in your head, but in your ears?”

“I’m pretty sure about that.”

“And you think she was trying to get you to come to her, to where she walked?”

“It seemed like that is what she wanted.”

She nodded and sat back. She knitted her knuckles together over her beach-ball stomach and concentrated. “Hmm. What worries me the most is that she knew things about us, like about your parents. That means one of two things, either she has been watching us from the woods, or she has walked among us.”

I poured myself some coffee. I was feeling the long day of hiking. “Or maybe she is a recent convert, and she remembers all this from when she was on our side.”

She nodded, admitting the possibility. “In any case, she is definitely a free agent and one of the new sort of creatures we have been seeing.”

I looked at her, and felt an urge to get some answers. “Look, Doc, do you think you have a handle on all this now? I mean, not that you are about to fix it, but that you get what is going on? Where did our world go wrong?”

“No,” she said simply. “Well, I know some things. I do think I have clues now, and what you’ve told me fits with the pattern. You already know about the fissures, the fault lines if you will, in the world, where things go mad.”

I nodded, gulping some hot brown liquid. It tasted like it had spent a few days in the pot, but exploded warmly in my belly, feeling good.

“I think all of us and everything around us is being affected, not just the few who go all the way and turn bestial. You see, even your flashlight was affected when it got too close. It seems electrical devices fail first. They can’t take much variance and still operate. Look at a car for example. Have you ever put new sparkplugs in an old car?”

I nodded, only half following her.

“You have to set the gap on the sparks to just the right distance with a fine tool, right? If the gap is too short or too wide they don’t fire right, it’s a very delicate system. Computer chips are even more precise, they require an absolutely stable voltage level and the circuitry has to all be formed exactly right down the millionths of an inch per contact. If anything is wrong, they don’t work. That’s why we are seeing more failures in digital equipment than we are even in humans.”

“But not all this equipment has been moved next to one of these lines on the map,” I argued. “Computers are dead everywhere, it didn’t matter how close the shifting was.”

“Right, which brings me to our next conclusion.”

She eyed me for a while, as if deciding if she should really tell me.

“What then?” I demanded.

She nodded and looked down at her hands while she spoke then, seemingly wishing she didn’t have to bear this news.

“Gannon, we are all changing. Getting close to these lines on the map speeds it up, and some of us resist better than others, but we are all changing. The world is changing too. People and animals are much more resilient systems than complex machines are. People can get cancer, get pregnant, lose a limb, get fat or old or whatever and still function. Computers can’t change shape and still operate.”

“But we still look the same,” I argued, not liking her idea at all. It was like being told you were terminally ill.

Wilton slowly closed her eyes, and then opened them again. “Do you realize Gannon, that the largest and most age-resistant organ in the human body is the skin? We think of it as the classic way to detect age, but really, a doctor can tell you that inside your body your other organs are getting worn out even faster. They show more wear and tear than you would ever see on the outside of a person. In a like fashion, we are all changing in small, subtle ways. They hide at first. The way a person riddled with cancer might notice nothing and go on for years before the truth shows up as a backache or an odd cough that won’t go away.

“Some of us are already learning the inner truth. There are spurs on the backs of hands. Tiny tails sprout, hidden in underwear. Extra teeth in the back of mouths. People will hide it at first, terrified, hoping against hope in natural denial. This is how the last of us are going. We are the resistant ones, or the ones lucky enough to have been far from the fissures all this time. As the population is reduced down to those who are most resistant, we won’t change all at once, it takes a while longer.”

“What kind of proof do you have?” I demanded. I was having trouble buying all this. I’m sure, at least partly, it was because I didn’t like what I was hearing.

She chuckled, “I’m not running a government certified medical lab here with a crack research team, if that’s what you mean. But, I will tell you a few things: For one, our normal internal body temperature in this town is not 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit any longer. The average is now 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit and it seems to be rising. For another, I know of two people in the community right now who have deformities, minor ones that you would never find unless you stripped them down and examined them inch by inch. And you can bet there are others.”

I opened my mouth at this point and raised my index finger.

“And no,” she went on, waving my finger back down again, “I won’t tell you who they are. They seem stable and there is no reason for me to believe they are any more dangerous than anyone else in the group.”

I chewed my lip, thinking I still wanted to know. I wanted to know who to watch.

“Lastly, I’ve observed an increasing number of minor changes in the plant and animal wild life. It is my belief that they will pose our next major threat.”

“How so?”

She sighed. “So far, mostly humans have been affected. But what if a migrating flocks of birds turn into winged snakes-”

“I’ve seen a few of those,” I interrupted.

“I know you have, and what if the trees themselves-changed?”

I thought of the articles in the newspapers I’d read. Hadn’t trees come to life somewhere?

“There are a lot of trees in this forest,” I muttered.

She nodded, clearly feeling she was victorious over my objections.

“There’s something else,” I said finally. I showed her the stone in my pocket. With the lights turned down, it was easy to see it still glowed.

Wilton touched it and spun it around gently, examining the impression. She looked at me sharply.

“The thing had hooves?”

I nodded, “I guess so. I’ve been seeing such prints quite a bit lately. I think this creature was leaving those prints.”

Wilton suddenly shoved the stone away from her, sending it skittering across the table. I snatched it up and put it back in my pocket. I gave her a frown of annoyance, but she didn’t seem to notice. She wrung her fingers one by one and stared at the desk.

“She’s one of the powerful ones, then,” she said quietly.

I asked her what she meant, but she didn’t tell me.