Free Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix

them. No one was bowling. “Okay.”
    Getting his gear together, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Getting up to leave, he noticed that the bowling alley now looked far more tawdry than surreal. Mike thought he must be coming down from the KL the driver had given him—a realization that brought him much relief, but also a little regret.
    He had trusted to the kindness of strangers and it had gotten him a night out bowling with Death. Are we having an adventure in moving yet? Mike asked himself with a smirk. He’d had enough adventure for one trip, and enough trip for one adventure. Before he walked out of Reno Lanes, he asked the waitress for directions to the nearest bus station. She was only too happy to provide them.
    * * * * * * *
    A Shadow on Her Present
    Catching Marty blissfully slow-convulsing on some perverse mix of alphanumeric chemicals—“delta nine and 5-MeO DMT,” as his trip-sitting derelict buddy Rick explained—had scared and infuriated Lydia at first. Now, however, with Mary okay and Rick ushered out of the apartment, Marty’s secret drug escapade and Lydia’s own unexpected return from a weekend out of town had combined to provide her with a pretext for something she should have done weeks before.
    “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Marty said, pleading with her.
    “I don’t want you to do whatever I want you to do!” Lydia said, shaking her curly dark hair vigorously about her head, letting him hear the frustration rising in her voice.
    She looked at Marty and saw his eyes filling and reddening to a very different color than his full head of red hair. Oh God, he was starting to cry on her. Obviously, their sleeping together for the last month and a half had meant considerably more to him than it had to her.
    “Look, Marty,” she said, taking him into her arms to comfort him and also so she wouldn’t have to see the tears that were beginning to trickle down his face. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve had together, but your drugging out and hanging around with Rick just confirms what I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now. Your life’s just too chaotic. I’m afraid it could never work. I need stability in my life right now. We can’t keep going on this way. I hope we can still be friends, but we just aren’t compatible in the long run. You can see that too, can’t you?”
    He blubbered something that sounded affirmative. She gave a slight sigh of relief. This might turn out to be easier than she’d expected. She hugged Marty and comforted him for a while longer, thinking that she would never have gotten involved with a man nearly half a dozen years her junior—a second year graduate student in comparative literature, at that—if she hadn’t been on the rebound from breaking up with Tarik.
    Not that breaking up with Tarik had been a bad thing. Lydia had lived with him for nine years, after all. It had been because of Tarik that she’d moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.
    Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically generated high-amplitude electromagnetic disturbances. The concomitant electromagnetic energy bursts had affected the interpretative cortex in the temporal lobes of hundreds of thousands of individuals—Lydia and