by Ike Hamill
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. If I had to guess, I would say that progress ebbs and flows. Knowledge accumulates slowly and then disappears with a single disaster. How were the heads on Easter Island carved and moved into position? How were the pyramids built? Even without an outside force, I think it was likely that humanity was going to take another giant step backwards soon,” Robby said.
“That’s not true,” Ashley said.
They both looked at her. She recognized the look. People who were old enough to remember the world before always had the same look. Even her father did it sometimes. In their eyes, she couldn’t possibly have an opinion about the fate of the world because she had only known it after the collapse.
Robby raised his eyebrows.
“We didn’t lose any information, Dad. The other backwards steps you mentioned were accompanied by a massive loss of information. An invading force burned the Library of Alexandria, or a new religion outlawed the teachings of the old. Even in China, the changing emperors were just as likely to rewrite history and influence which lessons were passed along to future generations. Our storage now is indelible. Brad has his backups, and we have those archives that have been recovered from libraries. Every chance we get, we replicate the sum of our knowledge. We have no choice but to advance.”
For a moment, the only thing that broke the silence was the crackling of the fire.
“Where are you headed?” Robby asked.
She didn’t answer.
Her father continued his thought. “To a place where, inexplicably, electricity doesn’t work. And how is all that knowledge recorded?”
“It isn’t just electronic,” Ashley said. “There are paper records as well.”
“I’m sure many other cultures felt the same way. They believed that their wisdom would never be forgotten. Truth is, we’re just one small turn from losing everything. It’s not even clear that we’re still viable as a species. We have so few people that our genetic diversity is critically low,” Robby said.
Lisa smiled. “I remember when everyone was worried about giant pandas. There were still a thousand of them in the wild and it was a major crisis.”
“House cats used to be everywhere,” Robby said. “There were so many dogs and cats that everyone spayed and neutered their pets.”
“So, everything is terrible. Why even bother, right?” Ashley asked. She was tired of not being allowed an opinion just because she had been born after billions of people had disappeared.
“No,” Robby said, “that’s not what I’m saying. I just want to be cautious, that’s all. You’re so much more precious than you can imagine.”
Ashley shook her head. It always came down to the same thing—her life was so important that she was never going to be allowed to live it. Meanwhile, she felt like the only person in the world who actually cared about what was going on around them. As far as they knew, another attack was imminent and nobody was doing anything about it. The adults had been beaten down so hard that all they could do was huddle in a defensive crouch and wait for the next assault.
“Remember, Ashley,” Lisa said, “we’re not trying to stop you. Nobody is standing in your way and declaring that you can’t go off and do what you think is necessary.”
“Aren’t you, though?” she asked. “You’re telling me that you’re coming along, regardless of my wishes. Now I’m responsible for your safety as well as my own. The only reason you’re going into the jungle is because of me, so I have no choice but to make sure that nothing happens to you. So, no, you’re not stopping me. You’re just saddling me with a fifty kilogram weight strapped to my back.”
Lisa frowned. “I’m not good with kilograms. Did you just say that I’m fat?”
Ashley tried to keep a straight face, but the smile broke through. She was still irritated, but it was impossible to remain mad at Lisa.
“Okay,” Robby said. “No more lectures, I promise. Can we talk about your return plan though?”
“Fine,” Ashley said.
Chapter 13: Tim
Tim froze. As far as he knew, he was still walking in the direction that the power cables led. There was no way to be sure. They had disappeared under the black jungle soil several paces before. The compass didn’t work and he couldn’t see the sun through the dense growth. It would be easy to get turned around and start heading the wrong way.
He took a deep breath. There was no need to panic. His way back to the Outpost was clear enough from the bent leaves behind him, and there was no reason to get lost. He dug through his bag and pulled out a can of orange paint. He shook it up and sprayed the trunk of a tree. It stood out well against all the green.
Tim veered left, where the going was easier. Glancing back, he made his next mark on a tree with a clear view of the previous one. As he resumed his hike, Tim had another moment of panic when he saw orange up ahead.
“No way,” he whispered.
Angling to his left and right, he tried to get a better view of what he was seeing.
“Did I just make a loop?” he asked himself under his breath.
With another step, Tim was relieved to discover that he hadn’t. The orange mark up ahead wasn’t the one he had just made on the tree. Someone else had employed the same scheme. Advancing slowly, he kept looking back over his shoulder to make sure that his mark was still in view. He marked another tree, just to be on the safe side. When he reached the other mark, he saw what it was leading him toward. There was a tattered blue tent set up between some trees ahead.
Tim scanned the woods around him as he advanced. During his secret trips into the jungle, he had never discovered this tent. It looked too dirty and worn to be new.
Pausing a few paces away, Tim called.
“Hello?”
The zipper was up. The tent’s rain fly fluttered against the side. One of the tie downs had pulled loose.
Tim took another step forward.
He remembered the team that had gone out to find the team of researchers, years before.
Technically, the rest of them had only gone to support Sariah. She had been the one who was tasked with diagnosing the electrical problem between the jungle team and the Outpost. But Sariah’s concentration had been dedicated to her instrument. Adrian was the one leading the way, with Dianne right behind him. Tim had followed Sariah, listening to her mutter as she monitored the instruments that no longer seemed to work in the wasteland.
Up ahead, Adrian and Dianne quietly discussed the lack of movement at the camp. They were still a dozen or more paces away.
“Even this one,” Sariah had said.
“What’s that?” Tim asked.
“This is an analog meter. Even if my batteries don’t work over here, why wouldn’t I get some kind of signal on this. It’s just a magnet, some wires, and…”
She disappeared into her thoughts. Tim wanted to prompt her to find out what she was thinking. Just then, Dianne called out to the tents.
“Hello? Are you awake in there.”
For a moment, there had been no response.
The closest tent, a small yellow contraption, began to shake. Adrian adjusted his stance, ready for whatever was about to emerge from the nylon.
The zipper ran down and a familiar face emerged.
“What’s happening?” Jeremy had asked. His voice was slurred with sleep.
At the sound of his voice, one of the other tents had started to shake.
“Is that you?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Jeremy,” Dianne had said. “You weren’t responding to your radio. We came out to check up on you.”
“Couldn’t respond, probably,” Adrian said overtop of her.
“Is there an issue back at the post?” Jeremy asked.
“No,” Adrian said. “We came to find out if there is an issue here.”
“Yes,” Sariah said. “There is an issue. We should pack up and retreat.”
Jeremy raised his eyebrows. The woman from the ot
her tent emerged.
“Hey,” Tim said, just in case. “Come out or I’m coming in.”
He was deeper in the jungle than they had found the other tents. And, of course, Jeremy and Kyra had turned out to be just fine. They had all returned to quarantine and waited patiently for word of Sariah’s findings.
Before going for the zipper, Tim moved around the tent and lifted the rain fly. He was able to peer through one of the side vents and look in on the empty tent. A sleeping bag was stretched out inside next to a backpack. He didn’t see anything else in there. Tim moved around to the opening.
His hand stopped on its way to the zipper. He pulled it back.
“I’m not here to search for signs of life,” he mumbled. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on out here. There aren’t any answers inside an abandoned tent.”
With a sigh, he scolded himself silently. Tim reached forward and ran the zipper down. Even though the vents were open, the tent smelled musty inside. He ducked through the opening and got down on his knees so he could investigate the sleeping bag. The interior fabric of the sleeping bag was actually dirtier than the outside, like some filthy person had slithered into it for a nap. Tim opened up the backpack. He found bottled water, ibuprofen, some ancient granola bars, shirts, socks, and shorts.
Tim sat back on his heels.
He pushed aside the sleeping bag so he could see what was making a lump underneath it. The bottom of the tent was slit. Black dirt was smeared on the ragged edges of the cut. Peeling back the thick fabric, he saw what was making the lump. Someone had left a pair of shoes, still tied, in the dirt. From what he could see, both the inside and out were covered in the same soil.
Tim rubbed his forehead and tried to think of what it all meant.
Eventually, he shook his head and started to back out of the tent.
Finding the camping gear and the clothes didn’t bother him at all. Those things were pretty easy to get. Their group could live a hundred years before anyone would have to invest time in learning how to make shoes. They were everywhere. The same went for shorts, shirts, socks, and pretty much anything else a person needed to wear. Food, water, and medications were another subject. People were careful about conserving packaged foods that were still edible, and they hoarded pills even if they were decades past their expiration dates.
Tim stepped back out to the jungle air to regard the tent.
“Footprints,” he whispered. He cursed himself as he looked down. It should have been his first thought. Most of the jungle floor was covered in thick plants, but before approaching he should have looked for footprints. They would have told him that someone had been there recently.
He didn’t find anything except a smudged divot that had probably been made by his own foot.
Tim backed away from the tent.
They told him that the plants around him were not native to the area. Tim had no choice but to believe them. Jungles were not his area of expertise. He had grown up in South Carolina, but moved to Pittsburgh as soon as he had anything to say about it. When he was a kid, everything had been overgrown. Plants moved fast and had no respect for boundaries. In Pittsburgh, it felt like nature was a little more tame, at least the vegetation.
It would have made sense to move through the jungle with a machete, but Tim couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be a bad idea. These didn’t seem like the kind of plants that a person would want to piss off.
Everyone who was there remembered the vines from Donnelly. They were impossible to forget, even after the decades had faded his other memories. Tim would recognize those vines if he ever saw them again, but he knew that he would never get the chance. If they were around, they would be accompanied by one of the rock monsters, and that thing would hypnotize him until the vines could overtake him. If one of those was present, he figured he was doomed regardless.
So Tim wasn’t really concerned with looking for those constricting vines. He was worried about some new threat—something undocumented. Before he lost sight of the blue tent, he slowed to paint another tree with orange blazes. The blaze on the front side was for anyone who might try to follow his path. The one on the back was in case he got the chance to try to return to the Outpost. He wasn’t sure that either blaze was strictly necessary.
There was no way to tell which direction he was going, and no way to tell how long he had been walking. He figured that he had no reason to stop until it seemed like the sun was setting.
Back at the Outpost, Tim kept a four seat Cessna on a stretch of flat road. For a while, he had kept it at a local airstrip, but the pavement had proven hard to maintain. There was a stretch of dirt road out by an old quarry that was in precisely the same condition as when Tim had found it. It wasn’t perfect—there were two big potholes that reappeared every time Tim tried to fill them—but he knew it perfectly. From that dirt airstrip, he had flown countless missions in the Cessna. Some of the most frustrating were undertaken with the intention of learning more about the jungle.
Gloria had been his passenger in the airplane. The whole time she held a camera with a giant lens. Tim kept the altitude low and steady while Gloria took pictures through the window. With the naked eye, not much was visible after a mile or so.
A fog rose from the jungle. It was the same color as the haze on the distant mountains, but it was thicker and obscured the wasteland from the air. It prevented the Outpost from collecting any decent aerial intelligence.
Gloria had been willing to give up, but Tim had talked her into letting him go farther.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this airplane kinda need electricity to fly?” Gloria had asked.
In his headphones, Tim’s own laugh had sounded perfectly natural.
“Relax,” Tim had said. “I’ll get some altitude and we’ll glide over. I’ll turn around and start her back up. I can glide this thing almost a mile and only lose five-hundred feet of altitude.”
“There are lots of things one could do. But should we?”
“Come on,” Tim had said.
Reluctantly—probably just because she wanted a better photo—she had agreed. Tim’s stomach bunched up into knots as he steered the plane out over the wasteland and cut the engine. The first time he had flown over the jungle, he had been alone. The engine had stalled and refused to start. All the instruments had gone out, too. Once he had turned around, he had barely been able to get the thing to start again. He had probably flooded the engine by trying to start it too early.
This time, with Gloria waiting for a photo, he had cut the engine while they were still in normal airspace. Still, all the needles going flat at once was a shock. Gloria tried to say something. He didn’t hear her at first.
They both took off their headphones.
Even without the sound of the engine, the wind made it difficult to hear. The prop turned lazily.
Gloria shouted, “How will you know when to turn around?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll leave plenty of margin for error,” he had shouted back.
She snapped photos. Gloria always used film and a mechanical camera. This was one time that he wouldn’t make fun of her for it.
He had turned the airplane after a minute or so, pointing the airplane for the Outpost and hoping that he would be able to start the engine again. He could always put it down in a parking lot, or a stretch of road if he had to.
They had gotten lucky that day—at least as far as the airplane was concerned. It had started right up as soon as they crossed over the river. Gloria’s film wasn’t as lucky. She had developed it carefully, but the photos hadn’t revealed anything at all. Even the ones that they took well over the wasteland didn’t show anything at all about the jungle below.
“Didn’t it seem like we could see more the closer we got?” Gloria had asked. “These pictures don’t have any more detail than the ones I took right when we got into the air.”
“Honestly, I don’t remember,” he had said. It was true. He couldn’t seem
to remember much at all except for the worry that they were going to crash into that sea of green below.
“Next time, I should try some different filters. Maybe I can get ahold of some infrared film.”
Tim had barely listened. The fog had reminded him of something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
The memory of that trip faded as Tim realized that it was getting late—time to cut. Setting off from the Outpost, he had thought through his options. The only things he had come up with were cut, climb, or burn. The trees around him seemed too spindly to really climb. They weren’t solid maples or oaks with stout limbs to grasp. Some of these trees were tall, but they were lanky. They reached up on slender trunks, relying on the closely packed neighborhood for stability.
Tim found an area where the trees were spaced apart and he pulled the saw from his pack. It took forever to make it through the trunk. The pulpy wood kept clogging his blade. Trying to take it down with a hatchet was even worse. Each time the head hit the bark, the tree spat at him from the wound and the wood seemed to close up immediately.
Finally, as the sunlight faded into a soft glow, the tree fell. The sound was disturbing in the quiet jungle. The reward for his effort was a view at a tiny patch of sky. It would have to be enough.
Tim cleared enough space for his tiny tent. He stretched out on the mat to try it out. The temperature was so warm that he had only brought a sheet to pull over himself. He couldn’t sleep without at least a sheet to cover him.
When it was fully dark, Tim slipped quietly out of his tent and looked up. For several moments, he feared that the trees above had conspired to lean toward the hole he had created in the canopy. They didn’t want him to learn what was overhead.
Then, he saw it. There was a star above. Once he had seen one, more stars appeared to Tim. Blinking upwards, he realized that he could make out a whole patch of sky.
Tim smiled and nodded in the dark. He leaned back against the stump of his tree and dug in his backpack while he kept his eyes glued on the stars. Tim lifted his little telescope to his eye and found the stars again. They looked perfectly clear from his vantage point. There was no fog obscuring his view of the night sky.