by Ike Hamill
“Yeah. I get that,” she said.
“You know, in a lot of ways, it was impossible for me to see the world as anything except hopelessly damaged until you came along.”
Ashley waited, knowing that he would explain.
“I was younger than you when everything fell apart the first time. The second and third crisis happened and I was still younger than you. For years after that, even after I met your mother, I couldn’t help but think that the next disaster was on its way.”
“I guess it was,” Ashley said.
“How do you mean?”
“Mom died,” she said.
Her father smiled and kept his eyes glued on the road ahead of them.
“No. I’ll never think of that as a disaster. I was sad that you kids wouldn’t have her around while you grew up, but I can’t ever consider anything about your mother to be a disaster. Falling in love with her and having you kids was the biggest surprise of my life. I’m still in shock at how much joy it brought to me. I never would have imagined.”
He reached out and took her hand for a moment before returning his own to the steering wheel.
“Through your eyes, and then with your brother and sister, I got to see the world as a hopeful place again. Corinna and Brad had long discussions about making a fresh start. I didn’t understand what they meant until you came along. You were the fresh start for me. I know your mother felt the same way.”
“Huh,” Ashley said. It felt like her father had just put a weight on her shoulders.
There was an entrance to the highway up ahead. Instead of taking it, her father took a right, consulting his map before he steered onto another local road.
“It seems like you’re going slow on purpose,” she said. The realization popped out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“No,” he said. “Well, kinda, maybe. I want to spend as much time as I can with you before you go beyond the Outpost. Call me selfish.”
She nodded.
“What do you hope to find?” he asked.
“Answers.”
Her father pulled into the parking lot of a post office. They were surrounded by acres of cars. The post office had occupied a small space that was surrounded by a car dealership. They had a whole row of purple cars. Ashley walked over to take a photo for her sister. Janelle loved anything purple.
“I have a freezer in here if you want something to eat,” Robby called.
“That’s okay,” she said.
She took a couple more photos. The lines of cars were beautiful in the light of the setting sun. They almost looked like rows of flowers, arranged by size and color. If she looked closely, she could see the rust that was consuming the vehicles from the bottom up. On the far side of the lot, a tree had fallen, compressing several of the cars underneath. As a whole though, they were beautiful.
She wandered toward the post office after one last glance.
Her father was inside, checking something on the computer.
“Good thing you’re not hungry,” he said. “Two of the panels are malfunctioning. The freezer is not on the priority circuit, so it lost power. We’ll have to clean it out.”
Ashley nodded.
“You want to start on that, or check out the panel?”
“I’ll do the freezer,” she said.
“Bag the stuff up and put it in the back of the four wheeler,” he said. “I want to take it a decent distance away.”
“Of course,” she said.
Ashley watched her father put on a backpack before he climbed the ladder in the back of the place and then pushed up the hatch that led to the roof. She followed the power cables until she found the freezer. It was in a dark interior room. There was an electric lantern hanging from the doorknob. She held that up as she scanned the place. Someone—probably her father—had left a box of garbage bags on the shelf. Before she opened the freezer, she shook out a bag and took a deep breath.
It wasn’t too bad inside. Bracing herself for the black rot that she normally found inside freezers, she was surprised to see that some of the ice was still frozen. Her father always left a tub of ice cubes when he stashed food in freezers. That way, if anyone opened them and saw a solid block of ice, they would know that the freezer had been thawed and refrozen due to some power outage. It was his failsafe to know that the food might be inedible.
In this case, the melting ice told her that the power hadn’t been out for long.
She reached in and pulled out a vacuum-sealed bag of dehydrated meat. It was still solid and cold. Ashley put it back and closed the lid.
She climbed the ladder and found her father securing one of the panels.
“It’s not too bad,” he said. “Probably just the wind. These panels lifted from their brackets and unplugged themselves.”
“Recently,” she said. “Stuff is still frozen.”
“Great! We won’t have to forage.”
Ashley nodded. She walked to the edge of the roof and dug out her camera again. The view from up there was even better for photos.
“You stop here a lot?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. Robby finished with one panel and stood up. “Pretty much every time I go back and forth. Over on the other side of that building, there’s a place that sold ATVs. They have tons of parts if something needs replacing. Plus, there aren’t that many good bridges across the Susquehanna River, so I’m always passing through here. Why do you ask?”
“This isn’t what I pictured at all,” she said. “Every time you would leave to go to one of the other settlements, I always imagined you hiking through a forest or trekking across mountains.”
Her father smiled.
“I was always so frightened,” she said. “It’s strange to find out that I was afraid of the wrong things.”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a sad smile. “I never meant to frighten you. If I had known…”
“No, it’s good,” she said. “I mean, I was only afraid because I knew how much I would miss you if anything happened. In a way, that’s a good thing. It made me realize what’s important, you know?”
Robby nodded.
“You sure that nothing is wrong, Ashley? You’re not usually so melancholy.”
“I’m antsy,” she said. “That’s all. I’m antsy to figure things out. You know?”
He nodded.
Her eye caught a flash of light from the west. When he saw her glance, Robby turned and put a hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the light.
“There she is,” he said.
“Who?”
“It’s just a hunch,” he said. “But I’m guessing that we know that person very well."
Chapter 10: Tim
Tim felt awkward, leaving the house without Penny at his side. She went everywhere with him. It seemed like he was leaving a physical part of himself behind, and each step was a little more difficult to take. The pull wanted to snap him back. At least Gloria was keeping Penny occupied. The dog wouldn’t notice his absence until later.
Before he climbed onto his bike, he made sure that the straps of his pack were tight. A shifting load was enough to topple him over. Once he felt comfortable, Tim coasted down toward the intersection that marked the edge of their territory.
When he had first moved to town, there was nothing unexplainable on the other side of the river. The land had been wiped out when the Earth was nearly colonized by a dimension-folding massive alien force, but aside from that, nothing unexplainable. Tim smiled. Somehow, the destruction of all the vegetation and buildings in the distance seemed perfectly normal. It was the changes in the years afterwards that had made everyone so cautious.
In the beginning, he made trips over the jungle area in his little airplane. He mapped the ribbons of vegetation that had first colonized the wasteland. His hand-drawn maps nearly matched the documents left behind by the original scouts who went out into the wasteland on foot before the churn had pulled everyone back in.
When the convoy arrived,
people set out every day to document the vegetation and try to figure out the nature of the wasteland. That was before it had grown into a proper jungle.
Tim had loved that time of his life.
The Outpost had been a vibrant community of curious, optimistic people. Theories were presented and discussed. Lively debate filled their community meetings, but it never rose to anger. It seemed like the settlers to the Outpost respected differing opinions.
Everything changed when the power went out in the remote station.
An emergency meeting convened in the middle of a cool, fall night. Tim had noticed the lights in the greenhouse by accident, and he had walked over there out of nothing more than curiosity.
Everyone had been hunched around a set of displays. They didn’t even seem to notice him when he approached.
“What’s so exciting?” he had asked.
Sariah had been operating the computer while Adrian pointed at a different display.
“Hello?” Tim had asked.
Someone glanced back at him like he was intruding. Before that, Tim had never felt like he was a pest at any of the Outpost gatherings. He was the founder of their community. In some ways, he was treated as somewhat of a minor celebrity—their unofficial mayor.
Gloria had been the one who turned to him and really explained it.
“The alarms went off twenty minutes ago. All feeds from the remote station are now offline. We don’t have any communication with the people who are tenting over there. Even the radios aren’t working.”
“It’s a quick hike. I can go over and find out…”
Gloria cut him off quickly. “No. That’s not allowed. If you’ll remember, when we first decided to do overnights in the wasteland, we said that in the event of lost communication, we would conduct a visual search first. Since that can’t happen until morning, Sariah is trying to diagnose the problem from…”
“This is it,” Sariah said. People crowded closer to the display.
“Seventy-eight meters. That’s at the edge of the river,” Dianne said.
A few of them nodded and exhaled with relief.
Gloria turned to Tim to explain. “That’s good news. We hoped that it was simply a short in a cable, and it would make most sense if that happened at the river. This makes us a little less nervous.”
“But you said that the radio wasn’t working?”
“That could be a separate issue. Because we had the hard link, we weren’t relying on the radios much, and we weren’t diligent about checking them periodically,” Gloria said. “Could be a battery problem. Who knows. Either way, this probably isn’t a crisis.”
“So…” Tim wondered if he should even ask his next question. The people who had put themselves in charge of research liked to explain things very thoroughly. Tim was already beginning to think that it was time to go back to bed.
He couldn’t stop himself. “Why is it not allowed to go check on them? If something’s potentially wrong, wouldn’t it be better to get over there sooner rather than later?”
They had all experienced the same trauma. The end of the world had nearly come for them multiple times. Even with cheery dispositions, there was a fear inside them that most people didn’t do a thorough job of hiding.
Gloria shook her head. “We all take risks when we go explore the unknown. When something happens, the last thing we want to do is potentially throw more bodies at it.”
Tim nodded.
Unfortunately, the notion had driven a cold spike into his heart. He was thinking about the people who were camped in the wasteland. Tim went home, stretched out on his bed, and looked at the ceiling while a delightfully cool breeze leaked in through his window. It was a good night for sleeping, but sleep wasn’t an option for Tim.
As soon as the sun came up, he had gone back to the greenhouse to be a part of the group who would go look in on the campers.
In the intervening years, a lot had changed at the Outpost. They no longer called it a wasteland on the other side of the river. That name didn’t make any sense for the green expanse that stretched out to the horizon. It had all grown over with thick vegetation. A lot of the plants weren’t even native to their part of North America. The plants they found would have been much more familiar in a temperate jungle.
That’s what they called it now—the jungle.
Tim stopped his bike on the edge of the bridge. He leaned it against a tree that had sprouted in a crack from the sidewalk. Several cables snaked across the bridge to disappear into the lush growth on the other side. The cables were cracked and weathered. They probably went to the old remote station. He didn’t have a specific plan, so Tim adjusted his pack and decided to follow the cables to wherever they went.
As he crossed the bridge, he paused to look at the river below. When it flooded, it pressed up beyond the banks and lapped at the curb of Front Street. This time of year, it usually dwindled to a bubbling flow, tumbling over the rocks. If there had been any kids around, they would probably go down to the stepping stones and try to catch crayfish. But the kids had been sent away as soon as the wasteland had started to have a mysterious effect on the electricity.
Nobody wanted to gamble with the next generation.
Tim had been a part of the group that crossed the bridge into the wasteland at dawn. From the hill, they had spotted the tents and seen no obvious threat. Some people still wanted to believe that the problem was simply a bad connection because of the river. The number of people holding onto that opinion was decreasing rapidly as they crossed the bridge.
At the seventy-eight meter mark, Sariah knelt and inspected the cables. She clamped some kind of sensor around the insulation and nodded as she took readings. People stood around as she moved her sensor a little farther.
She sat back on her knees and shook her head.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it, but this is where the signal stops. I’m getting a reading here, but nothing here.”
She pointed to one spot and then the other.
Adrian took a few more steps across the bridge. The sun was beginning to climb past the trees. He put up a hand to shield his eyes.
“I think one of the tents is moving. Could be they’re getting up,” Adrian said.
Tim moved to join him.
“I guess it’s probably just a short in the cable,” Sariah said. “I have a million of them up at the house. I should have brought a replacement, but I figured we were going to see a break or something.”
While she talked, she continued to move her clamp up and down the wire.
She said, “Oh!” and everyone gathered around her.
“What is it?” Dianne asked.
“Look at this,” Sariah said. Instead of moving the clamp, she was moving the meter itself. In her hand, the display gave her a reading. When she moved it a little closer to the wasteland, the display went blank.
“That’s where the cable goes bad?” Tim asked.
“No,” Sariah said. “I have the clamp on the good part of the cable. What we’re seeing here is the instrument going bad. It works here, but not here.”
She refined her movement until she found a place where she only had to shift it an inch or so to make the display shut off.
“Bad instrument,” Adrian said.
Sariah nodded. She dug in her bag and pulled out a second device. It looked different from the first, but she plugged the same wires into it. A second later, she said, “Huh.”
Tim looked down. Sariah was repeating the same movement from before. One inch to the north, and the display worked. An inch south, and it went blank.
“That’s too weird,” Sariah said.
Adrian had pulled a radio off his belt. Tim watched the man turn it on, figuring that he was going to try to make contact with the campers again. Instead, Adrian clicked the device on. They heard a short burst of static and saw the red light on the top of the thing. When Adrian moved it a little farther south, the device shut off, just like Sariah’s instrument.
>
“Electrical interference,” Adrian said. “Something over there is disrupting power.”
“Something?” Dianne asked. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Adrian said. He moved a few more paces across the bridge.
“Feel anything?” Dianne asked.
Sariah got back to her feet.
“Nope,” Adrian said. “Whatever it is that’s blasting the electronics, I feel fine.”
Tim had moved to the railing and looked down at the water rippling in the pink morning sun while they debated.
He was looking at the same river, but everything on the other side had changed from that day. With all the vegetation over there, he couldn’t even see the spot where the people had been camped. The remote station was buried under a canopy of leaves.
The patch of jungle didn’t reach all the way to the bank of the river—at least not around the bridge where Tim was standing. There was a place upriver where the jungle actually encroached on their side.
At Tim’s spot, the riverbank was dirt for a good twenty feet before the jungle started. Then, in a crisp line, the greenery rose like a wall. It stayed on its side of an unchanging, invisible border.
Tim took a few more paces toward it. He didn’t take off his backpack to dig around and find his walkie talkie. He was certain that it wouldn’t work. The electrical interference didn’t stick to a constant border, but it always reached beyond the midpoint of the bridge.
From up on the hill, he heard a sharp sound. It might have been only been a slamming door. It got Tim’s feet moving. There was no reason to be hanging out on the bridge. Their rules weren’t supposed to impinge on anyone’s free will, but there was no reason to test that resolve. He moved toward the protection of the jungle before anyone could spot him and tell him to stop.
Before he ducked under the leaves, he took one more look over his shoulder.
Some people theorized that this jungle didn’t even belong to their world. They thought that maybe during the churn, the area beyond the Outpost had been transplanted from another version of Earth. Tim hadn’t bothered to form an opinion until that moment.