by Hamill, Ike
They had created a hole in the wall. It was too high to let any sunlight into the basement room that sheltered the creatures, but that wasn’t the point.
Amber crossed her fingers and watched as the water swirled and foamed where the bricks had fallen.
“We just need it to… Oh!” George said.
A big branch—the one with the rope attached—had torn free from the tree and it was floating down into the pile. It was sideways in the current and it hit the foundation and stalled. The water was already submerging the branch. Amber looked at the columns and realized that the level was climbing fast.
“We should get to higher ground,” Alan said.
“Yeah,” Amber agreed. They gathered their stakes and climbed the hill.
“My father is going to kill me,” George said. He looked back over his shoulder. “That’s his favorite saw.”
George had dropped the saw in his haste to run for safety and it was clear that if the river kept rising, it would be underwater. Before Amber realized what he was doing, George had dropped his stake and was running back towards the tree stump.
Amber put her hand up to cover her eyes.
“He has time,” Alan whispered. It sounded more like a prayer than a statement of fact. “He has time.”
George grabbed the saw and reversed direction like he was running a relay race. The river was already consuming the tracks that he had just left in the snow. George veered a bit and still ended up splashing through a few inches of river water. When he got back to where they were standing, he was wheezing and trying to smile.
“Got it,” he said.
“We saw,” Amber said.
“Come on,” Alan said. “Higher ground.”
They reached some rocks. Amber found her way up first and George passed the saw up to her. She sat down just as they heard a deep rumble from the mill.
“Is everything okay?” a voice asked.
Amber was so startled that she nearly fell off of her perch.
Ricky was standing behind Alan.
“I heard some terrible sounds and you guys didn’t respond to my message,” Ricky said.
“Sorry,” Alan said. “We’ve been preoccupied.”
Ricky nodded.
“There,” George said. “That side is blocked now—look.”
He was pointing to the right side of the foundation. The water was completely stagnant on that side and Amber saw the turbulence where it tried to join back in with the stream. Another bunch of bricks shook loose from above and dropped in. Part of the river bank shifted and a few rocks rolled down the slope.
“Are we far enough away?” George asked.
“For the moment,” Alan said. “I just want to be sure that…”
He trailed off as one of the columns shifted. The current was being forced through a small gap in and the pressure of it was taking its toll on the structure.
“Maybe one more tree,” George said. “To really put a nail in the coffin.”
“No need,” Ricky said.
The rising water liberated the tree that George had just cut down. It took another few minutes, but eventually it was pulled downstream and it joined the pile. When it hit, the water immediately rose to the lap against the side of the mill. The surface flattened out, disguising all the chaos underneath.
“It won’t be long,” Alan said. “All that flow is going to undermine everything.”
“Like the West Road,” George said. He sounded almost like a kid when he said it.
They watched in silence. They could only guess as to what was happening beneath. The river didn’t seem to be rising anymore. Amber concentrated on the bricks, watching the mortar lines like they were a graph of the depth. The river sometimes swelled and ebbed, but it wasn’t getting deeper.
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes,” she said.
“What?” Ricky asked.
She looked at him, confused. “Huh?”
“What did you say about mirrors?”
It took her a second to figure out what he was talking about. The words had slipped from her like someone else had spoken them through her lips.
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes,” she said. “It’s something I read in the mill.”
She turned to Alan. “There was graffiti. We just didn’t see it last time, but I saw it when I was in there, tying the rope. That was written on one of the walls. The mirrors try to eat my eyes. It was present tense, like something that’s still happening.”
“What a strange thing to write,” Alan said.
“Here we go,” George said. “It’s going to go.”
Amber looked at him and then back to the mill. It all looked completely solid to her. It was like when he was cutting down the tree. Somehow he was sensing some movement that was totally invisible to her. And he was right. The lines of mortar began to sag in a way that didn’t seem possible. She would have bet anything that nothing could bend a brick wall like that. It didn’t take long for the bonds to snap. Suddenly, a crack raced through the wall and chunks of it were tumbling into the water below. The extra debris only exacerbated the problem. The water rose fast, precipitating even more decay. When one of the columns crumbled, an entire second of floor was exposed and upended.
Ricky cheered.
Amber reached behind herself until her hand found the spear. She pulled it into her lap.
The hole that was opened in the side of the mill showed her the second-to-lowest floor. The creatures were even deeper. They saw the hole get bigger and then the sunlight probed into the structure when part of the roof collapsed.
Amber watched the lower floor begin to collapse.
“They’re beneath that,” Alan said, pointing.
The water spilled over the bottom of the wall, into the deepest parts of the mill. The left wall started to fold over. When it crashed down, it took out another big section of floor.
“I can’t believe this worked,” George said.
“Maybe,” Alan said.
George turned to face Alan. “Is that your favorite word?”
Alan’s stoic expression didn’t change.
“Maybe.”
# # #
They climbed up and found a better vantage point from just east of the mill. The water had found another way around the base, so it didn’t look like any more significant erosion would happen. The flood was already receding.
“You should go back to the car,” Alan said to Ricky. “Just in case.”
Ricky didn’t answer.
“I should have brought Joe’s drone,” Alan said. “It has a camera. I could have flown it in close to see.”
“We don’t do drones,” George said without any further explanation.
Amber studied the wreckage, trying to line it up with the mental map she had of the place. The ground floor—where they had gone in through the hole in the wall—was definitely destroyed. The walls had tumbled, taking large sections of the roof, and a big part of it had collapsed downstream where the water rolled over it. Part of their rope was visible. It was tangled up in the branches. The stumps were submerged by the flood. There was very little evidence of their vandalism except for the tracks in the snow, and those would be melted away soon enough.
What she couldn’t see was whether or not the destruction had been successful. The bottom floor had to be flooded. Or, at least, it was flooded at one point. When Amber and Alan had explored those depths, the water had been up to their ankles. Since then, the level of the river had to have risen at least ten feet, if only temporarily. She couldn’t imagine anything surviving that.
“Are we done here?” Ricky asked.
“I would prefer to know that the whole lower room is exposed before we leave,” Alan said.
“Why? What are we going to do about it?” Ricky asked.
“I suppose we would know if we had to come back and think of another possible solution,” Alan said.
“The longer we stay here, the more we risk that someone catches us here. We�
�re not going to do anything more today, right? I say we leave and possibly check back tomorrow to see the condition of everything. We can brainstorm on other solutions anywhere.”
Amber stared at the mill. She wanted to stay, but understood Ricky’s point. They didn’t have another move.
“Yeah,” Alan said. “What you’re saying makes sense. I guess I hoped for a conclusion.”
“We weren’t going to get one either way,” Amber said. “There are stragglers.”
“True,” Alan said.
George was already retracing their steps, lugging the chainsaw back towards the cars.
“The scope of this problem is unknowable,” Alan said. “I hate that.”
“How so?” Ricky asked.
“We found one straggler, and one colony. There could be more of each. How are we supposed to know when we’re finished?”
“I think it’s time to revisit the beginning,” Amber said.
“You’re talking about Romeo Libby?” Ricky asked.
“No. SE Prescott,” she said.
Twenty: Alan
“By the time we left, there really wasn’t all that much left of the building. Someone is going to spot the fact that it fell down, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t make that much of an impression on the locals. Just one more derelict building that is returning to dust,” Alan said.
“As long as the river doesn’t back up and flood the road,” Liz said.
He shook his head. “It won’t. Even at its height, it was nowhere near that.”
They heard Joe call from upstairs. It was unclear who he was yelling to.
Alan and Liz just sat in the light from the wall-mounted lamp over their kitchen table. Liz liked to joke that they were re-Ferberizing Joe—getting him accustomed to the idea that people wouldn’t automatically answer his shouted demands. If he wanted them to do something, he should know how to ask politely.
“What’s next?” Liz asked.
Alan sighed. “If I was calling the shots, I would keep us on the same path. We would continue to check all the structures and caves we can find in that space until we were sure that we had exterminated all of them. Start with the big places so we can see if there are any more colonies and then work our way down to the smaller ones.”
Liz nodded.
“But?”
“Well, Amber brought up a good point. Maybe we just took out the largest cluster of them, maybe we didn’t. There’s no way to answer that question for sure. We only have so much time before the last of the snow melts and we can’t easily trek into the woods like that. Further, there is some evidence that they’ve already woken up for the season, which would make the process of hunting them magnitudes more dangerous.”
“Okay?”
“So there are two different proposals on the table. Amber thinks we should backtrack to the first evidence of these things. We have a handwritten journal written by a person who lived in the same area as the mill, and it seems like from his notes that he was around when this infection first evolved.”
“We’re thinking of it as an infection?” Liz asked.
“It’s a useful enough model. Anyway, the idea is that if we can retrace his steps and find the same origins then maybe that knowledge will lead us to a way to finish this.”
“That’s a lot like when you and Robert found that diary and… you know,” Liz said.
“Yes, great point. I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Alan said, looking up at the ceiling.
“And the other?” Liz asked.
“Sorry?”
“You said there were two proposals on the table.”
“Oh, right. I’m not really considering what Ricky and George want to do.”
Liz just stared at him like she was trying to get him to confess to a crime. It worked.
“They want to use George as bait and set a trap.”
“What?”
“Their idea has a valid thought behind it. We know that they don’t hibernate all together, but we’re pretty sure that they hunt as one big pack. If we let them congregate to come after George, then we have a decent shot of knowing where they will all be at the same time.”
“Wow. That’s a huge gamble.”
Alan nodded. “They’re so young. They claim to understand the risks, but how can they? They don’t really believe that they’re mortal.”
“I suppose,” Liz said.
“I know what you’re going to say—Ricky has always seemed like an extremely thoughtful, responsible person. But he also throws himself into things that he feels strongly about. He’s not above risking his skin for what he thinks is the right thing to do.”
“True,” Liz said. “Very true.”
“So I’m leaning heavily towards Amber’s approach, since I can’t sell my idea of exhaustively searching for every place they might be hiding,” Alan said.
“What can I do to support that effort?” Liz asked.
He chewed his lip absentmindedly as he thought. “I guess I just need time to make it work. I suppose I don’t really need anything at the moment.”
“Okay,” Liz said.
Both of their phones lit up at the same time.
They had identical messages from their son.
Alan smiled. “This is very polite. I think our new rules are working.”
# # #
Amber knocked on the door and then put a polite smile on her face. She elbowed Alan and he remembered to smile as well. An older woman came to the door and looked between them through the window before she cracked it open enough to greet them.
“Yes?”
Amber spoke, holding out a picture of the bound journal, like it was their ticket to enter.
“We’re looking for information about SE Prescott? Do you happen to know if he lived here at one time?”
“Who?” the woman asked.
Alan leaned forward, “This would have been at the end of the eighteen-hundreds.”
“Oh,” the woman said. She swung the door in several more inches. “You mean Samuel Prescott?”
“I guess,” Amber said. “He didn’t sign his full name on the journal.”
“Journal?”
Alan stepped in again. “We have copies from a journal he wrote and that’s how we were able to track down this address. Yours is the only house on the road that looks like it could date back to his time.”
“So he did live here in this house?” Amber asked.
“If we’re talking about the same person.”
“Sure,” Amber said.
The woman let the door open another inch or so and then she turned to disappear into the house. Amber and Alan glanced at each other and then decided that they were supposed to follow her in. Alan closed the door behind himself. Amber stood next to a roll-top desk and they both watched the woman disappear through a doorway at the back of the living room.
Her face appeared around the corner a second later.
“Are you coming in or not?”
Amber nudged Alan again—urging him to lead the way.
He did.
By the time they got to the kitchen, she was already seated at the end of the table. Alan took the farther seat, leaving Amber to take the chair next to the woman. Alan thought it would be presumptuous to take off his coat, like he was assuming they were invited to stay for a bit, so he kept it on. It was so hot in the little kitchen that he found it difficult to sit still.
“He was somewhat of a biologist, from what we can gather,” Amber said. “In his journal, he described what he thought might be new species that were maybe unique to this area.”
“From what I heard,” the woman said, “he was somewhat of a monster. Do you two have names?”
They introduced themselves. The woman regarded them almost like she didn’t believe that their names were Alan and Amber.
“Related?”
“No,” they said at the same time.
“I wouldn’t have figured,” she said.
“And you a
re…” Alan said.
“You came here without knowing who you were coming to see?” She laughed and Alan felt the room grow even warmer with the sound.
“Sorry,” he said. “We tracked down your house only by the age and approximate location.”
“Like it says on the mailbox, I’m Jan.”
“Nice to meet you,” Amber and Alan said at the same time. This made Jan laugh again.
“What were you saying about SE Prescott being a monster?” Amber asked.
Jan shook her head and let out a slow breath.
“Samuel Prescott. His extended family had to move away after he was departed. They all feared him, but once he was gone that fear turned into spite. His children received the full brunt of what everyone was afraid to do to Samuel. The sins of the father were visited two-fold to each of his sons.”
“Sins?” Alan asked.
“Cruelty, mostly,” Jan said. “Theft, if you want to think of it that way. He ran through his own animals, sacrificing them to what he called science, and then he started taking any animal he could get a rope around. Cats, dogs, horses, goats, and cattle—he would steal them in the night. People found tracks from their dooryards and barns that led right to what he called his laboratory. The last owners of this place turned his lab into a greenhouse. I use it only to store my lawnmower and bicycles.”
“What was he doing to the animals?” Amber asked.
Jan turned up her hands. “I guess nobody really knows why, but he was taking parts from them. People would track their animal to his lab, burst in, and they would find most of their animal still alive. The poor things would be wild-eyed with terror and they would have stitched up incisions and huge chunks of missing flesh. He was like a reverse Dr. Frankenstein, I guess.”
Amber looked at Alan. They had both read the journal and tried to understand everything there. No experiments on local animals were described. It seemed like the most he did, according to the journal, was capture some salamanders and expose them to sunlight.
“Where did you hear this?” Amber asked.
The woman’s expression turned sour.
“I don’t know where you’re from, but around here families talk with one another. We pass things down. If you cross one Libby, you’re going to have an issue with the next Libby you meet, I can guarantee you that much.”