by Ike Hamill
“I suppose. I want to find out what’s over there though.”
“Yeah, but what if the effect is even worse over there? We can’t take that chance.”
“You sound exactly like the rest of them.”
Corinna frowned. She didn’t know how to respond to that. Jackson loved to pick sides. Once he took up a position, arguing with him would only put her on the opposite side.
“You want to go?”
“You want to?”
Corinna shrugged.
The current was moving fast.
“I’ll just get us across before it has a chance to burn up,” he said. Jackson pushed them off from shore and then turned to try to pull the starter rope of the outboard. The river was already sweeping them down toward one of the concrete pillars that used to support the bridge. Flooding had taken out most of the bridges in the area. Although the river wasn’t particularly flooded at the moment, it was still dangerous as hell. All the debris in the water was a minefield. Even if the engine ran fine, they would be lucky to make it across without hitting a snag.
Jackson fired up the engine and then immediately began to work the throttle and choke. Jackson didn’t have the patience for construction or farming, but he was a magician when it came to making engines work. He steered them a little upstream and sent up a rooster tail of foam behind them.
In no time, they were coasting in at the opposite bank. Jackson killed the engine and let them drift as Corinna grabbed for a tree branch. She held on as the current pushed them closer to shore. Jackson grabbed a bush and managed to get a rope around the trunk of a tree.
They climbed the bank and stood on the other side of the bridge, looking across at where their motorcycles were parked.
“We should have brought paint,” Corinna said. “To mark our path.”
“Maybe we stick to roads,” Jackson said.
Corinna nodded.
He set off at a fast pace, more like he was intending to get somewhere specific instead of simply exploring. Corinna tried to take it all in. The weeds and brush had grown in on either side of the road. In places, the pavement was split and buckled. They had to leave the road at one point to navigate around a washout. A culvert must have gotten clogged and a stream took out a major section.
“Worse over here than on the other side,” Jackson said. “Roads, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“How come you weren’t afraid of the water?” Jackson asked. “Everyone else thought it must have been contaminated. They wouldn’t go near it.”
“How come you weren’t?”
“What do I have to be afraid of? I should have died a thousand times by now. I figure that something is keeping me alive for a purpose. If that purpose is to be poisoned by water that refuses to heat up, then so be it.”
“Huh,” Corinna said. “I figured that if it’s contaminated, then I’m already exposed.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I tried to boil water last night, you know, to kill the germs. When it didn’t boil, I drank it anyway.”
“When we go back, don’t tell the others. They’ll quarantine you.”
Corinna nodded. She didn’t bother to point out that they would likely both be quarantined if anyone heard about their trip across the river.
“We’re not going to make it far on foot. We need bikes.”
“Where are you going to get fuel over here?”
“No, not bikes,” he said. “Bicycles.”
“Oh.”
It was like he could smell machines. One minute, they were walking up the overgrown remnants of a highway. The next, Jackson was forcing his way through some brush and over a little hill. He said that he had seen the reflection off a window, but Corinna hadn’t seen a thing. She doubted that he could have either. Still, when they climbed down the other side of the hill, Jackson climbed a chainlink fence and then made his way through an overgrown yard to the back of a house. A few minutes later, he was pulling old bicycles from a garage. There were a ton of them in there.
He found two that had intact tires and he pumped them up with a hand pump he found in the garage. Corinna took hers for a quick spin while he worked on the other one. It had been a long time since she pedaled a bike. The skill came back quickly.
“Where to?” she asked from the end of the driveway. “Keep going northeast?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. He seemed to have his nose to the wind. She wondered what he was smelling now.
Jackson was pretty good at jumping his bike up over the curbs to steer around obstacles. He had to be forty-something, but he rode his bike like a kid would—standing up on the pedals and leaning out over the handlebars. Corinna kept having to dismount and walk her bike around things. At one point, he ranged ahead while she lifted her bike over the trunk of a fallen tree. She hadn’t even seen how he had negotiated the situation.
“Hey!” he shouted.
Corinna climbed back aboard and began to pedal. She could only hope that he had a sense of where they were. Her sense of direction had thrown in the towel an hour earlier.
“There are some people over here,” he said.
Corinna picked up her pace, eager to find out what he was talking about.
Jackson was standing in the middle of the road. His bicycle was cast to the side, forgotten, as he stood with his hands on his hips, looking down.
“I think crows got him. Who knows,” Jackson said. He bent down, nearly touched the thing on the ground, and then jerked back. When he turned to look at her, he could have been thirteen years old from the wonder written on his face. It was like he had never seen a dead body before and he was marveling at the novelty of it.
Almost all of the people had been sucked into an alternate dimension decades before. Corinna had never really followed the explanation of those events. As far as she knew, nobody really knew what had happened. It was all just speculation. Of course, some of the bodies had been left behind, to act as food for the embryos that had tried to take root in Maine and then Upstate New York. So it wasn’t outlandish to still stumble upon a pocket of scattered bones. At this point, they had mostly been picked over by scavengers and completely rotted away.
This one was different though. Corinna approached, understanding why it had given Jackson pause. This looked like something out of a movie. The hair was still intact. The clothes still dressed the body. The skin was black and shrunken tight over the bones. The person’s teeth were white tombstones exposed by the pulled-back lips.
“What do you mean the crows got him? Doesn’t look like it was touched to me,” Corinna said.
“Huh?” Jackson asked. He looked up from the corpse.
“Never mind.”
“You said, ‘some people,’” Corinna said. Jackson was standing over only one dead body.
He raised a finger. The rest of the bodies were stretched out along a low wall. The person in the road was wearing khaki pants and a button down shirt. The skeletons along the wall had a lot more exposed black skin. They wore shorts and t-shirts. All the fabric had been bleached out by the weather, but Corinna could see some sort of pattern in the shirt of the person in the road.
“I don’t like this place,” Corinna said. “You want to head back now?”
“Yeah. I think so,” Jackson said.
“Wait,” Corinna said. She tried to anticipate the questions that would come. Every time she returned to Donnelly with information, there were always a million questions. The people just wanted information, but all their questions always made Corinna feel inadequate, like she was a terrible observer.
She thought of one thing they might ask.
“Flip him,” she said.
“What?” Jackson asked. He looked thirteen again, and horror was clear in his eyes.
“They’re going to ask us what the back of his shirt looked like. We have to flip him.”
Jackson stood up and hunted around. He came back with a long stick. He wedged the end of it under the skeleton’s shoulder. The b
ones shifted and scraped as he gently angled the stick upwards.
Corinna kept a safe distance and ducked down.
She nodded at what she saw.
“Can we go now?” Jackson asked.
He had been so eager to cross the river and explore. Now, he was even more eager to go back.
“Wait. Let me get a picture.”
When she was done, Jackson asked again.
“Can we go?”
“Yeah. We should test the water on the way though.”
Jackson nodded. They picked up their bicycles and rode.
Chapter 18: Brad
Brad set down his book when he heard the knock on his door.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” he asked.
The door opened and he saw the devilishly bright eye of Jim peeking in.
“There’s a message for you coming through,” Jim said.
Brad sighed.
“It’s not on the emergency channel, so I’m sure it can wait until morning. And, I think I just mentioned this, but shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“I’m waiting for word,” Jim said.
He had been waiting for word all day. His father had said that he would get back to them tomorrow, but still Jim had been “waiting for word.”
“What was our agreement?”
Brad’s door shut.
Brad got up from his bed and pushed his feet into his slippers. In truth, he should have been in bed as well, not sitting on top of his covers, reading a book. On the other side of the door, he heard Jim’s feet retreat down the hall before Brad could admonish him again.
“You better run,” Brad muttered. Using his cane, he headed for the stairs.
The communications room was down on the first floor of the center house. Their houses formed a compound. Romie hadn’t wanted to invest a lot of time customizing the houses after their other houses had all been burned down. Eventually, she had relented, and they had spent the better part of a decade building the maze of connected houses. The second floors were all connected with walkways. The enclosed yard in back had been turned into a giant greenhouse. There was even a tunnel between the basement of Robby’s house and the cellar of Romie and Lisa’s.
Until the kids had come along, they lived with some unwritten rules of privacy. The kids changed everything. They were always sneaking between the houses, exploring and making their own “secret passages.” Brad didn’t regret any of it. He knew it was the closest he would ever get to having kids of his own.
The low lights in the kitchen came on when he stepped around the corner. At one point, Robby had installed automatic lights for one of his old dogs.
Brad paused in the doorway of the communications room. Before he sat down, he checked the corners to make sure that Jim wasn’t hiding, ready to read the message over his shoulder.
When he was sure that he was alone, he shut the door.
It wasn’t a text message. It was a video that wasn’t marked as an emergency. If it had been an emergency, the message would have sounded up in his room as well.
“Huh,” Brad said.
He put in his password and opened the request.
The window opened with Corinna’s face.
“Oh!” Brad said. He hadn’t been expecting a live person, but the light on his own camera told him that this was a call, not a message.
“Corinna?”
“Hi, Brad, sorry to call so late.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Brad said. “What’s going on?”
“We’re here discussing what we found, and I thought you might be able to add some perspective,” Corinna said.
Her hand came forward and the camera swept left. It revealed a room with several people around the table. Right next to Corinna, Jackson was sitting. He was looking straight down.
“Hi,” Brad said to the room. Several people muttered back or raised a hand in greeting. Around the table, Brad saw Corinna, Jackson, Mike, and Carrie.
In the remote room, all eyes seemed to turn to Carrie. When she realized that everyone was looking to her to start, she began speaking.
“As I’m sure you know,” Carrie said, “we had a couple of teams probing north and east to find out which areas are still accessible and inhabitable. We’re just trying to increase our knowledge about our surroundings.”
Brad knew they were doing more than that. Jackson’s own son, Merle, was an inveterate explorer. He was always off trying to discover the secrets of the old world. More often than not, he came back with interesting discoveries. The work that Carrie’s team did was a little more careful and rigorous, but it was essentially the same thing.
“Well, we found something disturbing. It’s not quite as disturbing as the phenomenon beyond the southern Outpost, but it’s in the same realm.”
“Oh?” Brad asked. He glanced at the faces on the monitor and wondered if he was seeing everyone who was in the room.
“It’s the water,” Mike said. “It’s not operating like water should.”
“What’s that mean?” Brad asked.
Brad leaned forward and wondered what they were doing wrong. The experiment was as simple as it could be. There was a beaker of clear liquid over a blue flame. From what they told him, the flame had been heating the liquid for at least twenty minutes. The thermometer in the beaker reported that the liquid was over two-hundred-and-seventy degrees.
“There’s something in the water? A contaminant that prevents it from boiling?” Brad asked.
“Not that we know of,” Carrie said.
“We ran it through every filter we have,” Mike said.
Brad sat back. He thought about Robby back when he first met the kid. Robby had been obsessed with water quality after his run-in with the sentient liquid in New Hampshire.
“Wait,” Brad said, “doesn’t Sariah have some water quality equipment that she runs.”
On the other side of the camera, they all looked to Mike.
“She did,” Mike said. “She is bowing out of this investigation.”
“Huh?” Brad asked. “What does that mean?”
Mike exhaled audibly and then rubbed his forehead with his hand before he explained. “She was, you know, down south at the Outpost when that strangeness started to happen with the electricity. Now, she’s up here when this weirdness with the water is going on. I think she just doesn’t want to, you know…”
Carrie took over. “Let’s get everything on the table. Corinna?”
“Yeah,” Corinna said. “So, Jackson and I were on the other side of the…” she turned to consult with Jackson and then turned back toward the camera. “The Flynn River.”
“That’s where this water is from,” Carrie said.
“Right. So, anyway, we were over there and we found this dead person. Dead people, actually. They weren’t rotten or scavenged or anything. Instead, they were, like, mummified.”
Another memory popped into Brad’s head. They had found a mummy in the woods in New Hampshire, if he was remembering correctly. But that had been decades before. Back then, a mummy almost made sense, given the number of dead bodies around. By now, they should have all been gone.
“The reason we thought of you was because of the way he was dressed,” Corinna said. “I remember reading your story from before. You remember the casually dressed government guys?”
A chill went through Brad. For a moment, he was back there in his house in Kingston. The men had made him a prisoner of his own house and he had only escaped when the entire world was turned upside down by feet and feet of falling snow.
“Brad?” Corinna asked.
His response came out harsher than he intended. “Of course I remember them.”
“Sorry. Anyway, that’s how these guys were dressed. The leader was wearing khakis and a long sleeve Hawaiian shirt. The others were wearing, like, board shorts and beach t-shirts. Some had sunglasses on tethers and things. They had flip flops.
Brad nodded and looked down.
“That does sound lik
e them. Listen, is this near to one of the underground bases that Merle found, by any chance?”
“No. None that he has written down,” Jackson said, shaking his head. The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him back into silence.
“Good,” Brad said. “So there’s no chance that they were recently deceased?”
Corinna shook her head with wide eyes. “I didn’t think of that, but, no, I don’t think so. It seemed like they had been dead a long time. We can take you there and you can see for yourself.”
“No!” Brad practically shouted. It was impossible, he knew, but he was filled with the idea that somehow the mummified men would find a way to trap him and hold him hostage again. He couldn’t take that risk. “I’m, uh… I have to stay here. I promised Robby that Romie and I would stay and look after the kids while he’s down at the Outpost.”
“He’s the first one we called,” Mike said. “He’s headed back your way, I believe.”
“Huh,” Brad said.
The door burst open and Brad nearly jumped out of his chair.
“Dad’s coming back?” Jim asked.
Brad chased after him, waving his cane at the boy.
“Jim, you know how I feel about eavesdropping, and you know how Romie feels about staying up after your bedtime.”
“I’m thirteen,” Jim said, dancing backwards away from the cane. “Why do I even have a bedtime anymore? When he was my age, my father was on his own.”
“Not quite,” Brad said. “And I would think that you would understand that circumstances were a little different back then.”
Jim folded his arms and gave Brad a skeptical look. Jim didn’t need to say that Brad had no idea what it was like growing up in such a strange world.
Brad stabbed his cane down to the floor.
“Even if you were on your own, it still wouldn’t be okay to eavesdrop.”
“Fair,” Jim said. “When is he coming back?”
“I have just as little information as you do. We all need a good night’s sleep. Could you at least pretend to be asleep so I can get some rest? I’m old. I need my rest.”