City of Ruins by Mark London Williams

it rolled up to the Moonglow’s front door,
I discovered the alarm was distressingly operative. Apparently
whoever this was in the truck knew how to turn the security
apparatus off and on.
    The tip of my tail caught in the monitoring
field originally installed by Mr. Howe and set off several loud
alarms.
    The soldier was no longer asleep behind me
and the new arrivals hadn’t stepped out of their trucks yet. I ran
into the Moonglow, unwilling to be discovered in such an
ignominious way after such an arduous journey.
    I had never been inside before. I had been on
the roof once but never in the very nest where Eli’s sire raised
him, after his egg ma’am, Margarite, disappeared into the time
stream itself.
    But there was no time to stop, to appreciate,
to smell the scents, since I was already being pursued.
    Inside, I passed what must have been the
preparation area for edibles and potables, and farther on, what
must have been Sandusky’s lab, though it appeared to have been gra-bakked by a series of explosions, or perhaps,
uncontrolled multidimensional interactions.
    My hopes of finding another time portal here
were severely reduced.
    Moving further into the structure, hearing
the inevitable yelling of mammals behind me, I turned to see some
inviting tunnels, cavelike, but artificially made, filled with
round containers, “barrels,” in which I could plausibly hide.
    Yes, something told me. Almost as if a
creature was whispering to me from the barrels themselves.
    But before I could investigate, I heard the
much more concrete sound of shattering glass, not from my pursuers,
not in the barrel cave — but ahead of me.
    A window lay ahead, and past that, above the
tunnels, a slope of grasses and plants that led toward the wooded
area beyond.
    I could just glimpse the curly-headed boy
from the car, running into the trees.
    And near me, was a rock. With a paper tied to
it. A letter.
    The letter said ELI on the front. Who else was trying to convey messages to my friend?
And why was he similarly trying to avoid the security
apparatus?
    I bent down to pick it up. That turned out to
be my error in judgment. I smelled the smoke first — later I would
learn this came from the “cigars” that Rocket puffed on — and
before I could move, a small jabberstick hit me in the leg (the
same leg!) where I was wounded twice before.
    This jabberstick made me realize immediately
just how weary I was, and I felt myself slipping to the floor,
barely getting the letter into my suit before dreams overtook
me.
    The last thing I saw was Rocket’s shiny,
baggy face peering at me, and heard him say, “Grandfather told me I
might see somebody like you.”
    And then, after that, I dreamt I was home on
Saurius Prime.
    And when I woke up, I found I had joined the
Odd-Lots Carnival, where I met Silver Eye, and where I now find
myself in the settlement of Visalia, with a man reading a paper and
staring at me, and Rocket’s mysterious grandsire still several
days’ journey away.
    Meanwhile, the man with the Truth paper keeps staring at me. He’s here early, just as the town’s
market is getting set up. Fewer people use or trust the currency
anymore, and in most settlements, they trade food and goods and
services directly with each other. This sometimes makes it harder
to obtain fuel. But the market areas are usually the best places
for shows. Unless there’s a slow pox quarantine in effect. Then we
stay on the main highway until we reach the next town.
    We are still some time segments away from
actually performing. The man with the paper rolls it into a small
cylinder.
    “I think that’s why they finally outlawed
Barnstormers in public. Kids were making up all sorts of video
projections to scare regular, decent people with.” As he speaks, he
starts poking me through the bars with the cylinder. “Though you
seem real enough.”
    Another poke. “Maybe it’s a mask.” And he
grabs my skin and gives it a hard zrrrk and suddenly his
eyes widen