Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  Jackson waved at the camera and then turned his back to it. He advanced on the whelping box. The mother dog jumped out of the box. She hunched her back and bared her teeth. She put herself between the puppies and the intruder. Her tail was curled up under herself and her eyes were wild, shifting all around before they returned to Jackson.

  He kept his slow pace toward her, looking as menacing as he could.

  The mother backed up until her backside was at the side of the whelping box.

  “Come on,” Corinna whispered. “This is cruel.”

  The dog made a show of lunging forward and snapping her teeth as she barked. Jackson didn’t slow down. He was still a couple of paces away. The dog’s aggression didn’t last. As Jackson came forward, her hind end lowered a little more and she pinned back her ears. When he was only a couple of feet away, she began to tremble. The dog appeared terrified.

  “Oh!” Corinna said. She went for the door.

  “Corinna, no,” Brad said.

  On the monitor, Jackson had cracked as well. He knelt down. Brad heard him start to talk softly to the dog as he reached out his hand.

  “Come on,” Brad said to himself. He got to his feet as well. He stabbed his cane at the floor as he crossed the room.

  The dog sniffed Jackson’s hand and he pulled it back to remove his glove. Corinna approached right behind him.

  “Poor thing,” Corinna cooed. “It’s okay. Nobody is going to hurt you.”

  Brad paused in the doorway.

  “How is this helping?” Brad asked.

  “Bring the food and water,” Corinna said over her shoulder. “Maybe she’s hungry again.”

  Brad sighed. The portable stand had been shoved into the opposite corner. Most of the food was gone. Brad hooked the stand with his cane and started to drag it across the room.

  “Be quiet,” Corinna whispered. “She’s scared enough.”

  By the time Brad made it back across the room, Jackson was gently stroking the dog’s head with his bare hand.

  “How are we going to find out anything now?” Brad asked.

  “Maybe her welfare is more important than your experiment,” Corinna said. “Give her space, Jackson.”

  He backed up a little so that Corinna could move the stand closer to the mother dog. She sniffed at the food while looking between them. After a moment, she wolfed down the rest of the food. Her eyes stayed locked on Brad as she did.

  “There’s more in the fridge,” Jackson said. “Jar on the top shelf.”

  Brad shook his head as he went back to the kitchen. As he left the room he heard Jackson and Corinna both praising the dog for her courage and beauty. He found the jar of food on the top shelf of the refrigerator in a canning jar. Turning back, his eyes landed on the monitor again. The mother dog had rolled over onto her side and was letting Corinna stroke her. She had gone from a feral beast to a shy pet in the course of a few seconds.

  Behind her, Brad saw one of the puppies escape the confines of the whelping box. The little pup jumped up until its front feet were over the edge of the box and then it flipped over, like it had been boosted from behind. A moment later, another pup escaped on the other side of the box.

  “Hey,” Brad said, moving fast for the door. He repeated himself and Corinna and Jackson turned. Even the mother dog sat up.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “What?” Corinna asked.

  The puppies had found their mother.

  “The escapees? Did you see how they got out of the box?”

  “How cute!” Corinna said. The puppies were coming to their mother. She bent over to lick them as they crowded around her.

  Brad went back to the kitchen and watched the interaction on the TV. While he sat there, Mike came in.

  “How are they doing?” Mike asked.

  “Remarkably well. She was more than half tame, I imagine.”

  Mike nodded and they watched for a moment.

  “I just got off the radio. We should join Robby and Sariah,” Mike said.

  Brad sighed as he pushed up from his chair.

  Mike put his bicycle into the back of the truck and Brad climbed into the passenger’s seat.

  “They’re over at the lab?” Brad asked as Mike slipped in behind the wheel.

  Brad handed him the keys from the cupholder.

  “Nope,” Mike said. “Robby needed a vacuum pump. Sariah said that the best one was up at the high school.”

  Brad nodded.

  It wasn’t until Mike turned up Miller Street and began to climb the hill that he put it together. Brad hadn’t been back to Donnelly High School in decades. He had never wanted to see that place again. They had lost too many people there.

  It didn’t look the same, of course. The trees crowded the roads. Bushes had grown up around the sign. The parking lot was a ruin of broken asphalt and rusted out vehicles. Over in one corner of the lot, stacked shipping containers had once served as the field headquarters of the Beardos. Now, they were overgrown with a different sort of vine. Brad got out of the vehicle slowly taking it all in.

  “The science lab is in the wing,” Mike said, pointing.

  Brad looked up toward the roof.

  “What’s up?”

  “My friend jumped from that roof when the vines overtook it,” Brad said. “His name was Pete. From what we heard, he fought back the vines from up there and then tried to jump when he realized the fight was lost.”

  Mike looked up too. They squinted against the morning sun.

  “He didn’t survive the jump?”

  “He survived, initially. But the vines had him then. He was part of the thing.”

  “Sorry,” Mike said.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  Mike nodded and headed toward the doors. Brad followed. They went down a hall and around a corner. The building hadn’t fared well through the decades. It was slowly returning to nature. When they moved to the back hall, Brad could hear the generator in the distance and saw the power cables snaked along the floor. Mike turned into a room where the cables disappeared. He held the door open for Brad.

  Robby and Sariah were working over at one of the counters. Janelle was sitting at a bench, reading her book.

  “Good timing,” Robby said. “We can use another set of hands.”

  Mike approached to get instructions. Brad held back, looking at the experiment that they had set up. Everything was happening under a big glass dome. Rubber tubes attached to the dome ended at a compressor a few feet away. Every few seconds, the compressor puffed and chugged, maintaining the correct pressure inside the dome.

  Mike’s job was to control the dial on the cooling pad. They needed the temperature to stay steady. Several thermometers disagreed about the temperature of the samples. Robby and Sariah were free to monitor the other sensors inside the glass.

  “Okay—everyone ready?” Robby asked.

  They all nodded. Janelle put down her book and moved next to Brad to watch.

  “Safety googles, Janelle,” Robby said.

  The girl rolled her eyes and then donned the protective goggles.

  “Bring the temperature up a little. A little more. Right there.”

  Brad leaned forward to see.

  One of the samples had been ice. It began to jiggle and shake. Another sample, this one liquid, didn’t appear to change at all. A third sample of liquid bubbled furiously, spontaneously boiling.

  Robby and Sariah furiously wrote down observations even though cameras above seemed to be capturing it all.

  Droplets of water condensed on the inside of the glass dome and then disappeared. An ice sample cracked and then flipped over when gas exploded from the bottom. A flash of white steam rolled through the interior of the dome and then disappeared.

  “Yeah, okay,” Robby said eventually. He flipped a switch and the compressor turned off. Sariah reached past Mike and turned off the cooling pad.

  Inside the glass dome, condensation began to form. One of th
e chunks of ice cracked as it melted.

  Robby removed his face shield and backed away until he found a chair to slump into.

  Sariah continued writing her notes.

  Janelle went back to her book.

  “So, I’m guessing that some of those were water samples from up north and some were normal water from here?” Brad asked. “That would explain why it looked like you found the triple point of some but not others?”

  Robby only shook his head.

  Mike peered at the glass. He tapped his fingernail on the side, watching the condensed droplets join and then roll down.

  “No?” Brad asked.

  “Those were all samples from up north,” Janelle said without looking up from her book. “They should have all acted the same, but they didn’t.”

  Chapter 34: Robby

  Robby propped up his head with his hands and looked straight down at the black desk. He could hear Sariah’s pen scratching in her notebook. There was nothing to write down. None of what they had just witnessed made any sense. Recording the details of the failed experiment was useless.

  “There must be something different about the samples, right?” Mike asked.

  Nobody answered him.

  “Maybe there are defects in the container. You know the way that beer bubbles from a tiny imperfection in the side of a glass?” Brad asked.

  Robby didn’t bother to fill them in. He and Sariah had run the experiment four times, and each time the results were independent of container. Everything was simply random. There was no way to predict the behavior of the stuff. Their test had been calibrated on regular water, and everything was perfectly normal.

  Mike and Brad were both smart and capable. Maybe they would come up with an explanation that Robby couldn’t see. He stood up and walked out so he wouldn’t have to hear them cover the same mental territory that he had already exhausted.

  The halls of the high school were unfamiliar territory for Robby. He had never gone to high school—the concept had ended before he had the chance. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been in a building like this. On the island where he grew up, there was no such thing. There hadn’t been enough kids to warrant it.

  Robby paused at a locker that was ajar.

  Inside, a couple of pictures were taped to the door. There was a notebook on the top shelf and a couple of library books. Robby spun the dial on the lock and shut the door. Across the hall, he went through the door of the Spanish classroom. Most of the windows had been broken. Outside, beyond the cement patio, he saw the wreckage of what used to be the football field and bleachers.

  On the board in front, a cursive hand had written, “¡Feliz día de acción de gracias!”

  Robby sat down at one of the desks, covered in dust and pollen. He looked at the posters hung around the room, all in Spanish.

  Footsteps came down the hall.

  Mike’s face appeared in the doorway and the man came in. He sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk and looked at Robby.

  “You need to be alone?” Mike asked.

  “No,” Robby said. “Just didn’t want to be in there anymore.”

  Mike nodded.

  “¿Te gusta el español?”

  “I never really studied it,” Robby said. “I was studying Latin and hieroglyphics when my school career ended. How many languages do you think we lost?”

  Mike exhaled, puffing out his cheeks as the looked up toward the ceiling. “That is a tough one. Hundreds maybe?”

  “I read once that there were over six-thousand languages spoken, but a bunch of those were spoken by less than a thousand people.”

  “Heh,” Mike laughed with a sour smile. “Every language is spoken by less than a thousand people now.”

  “Do you think we lost anything when we lost those languages?” Robby asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “In movies, sometimes, a person will sometimes say something like, ‘There’s no good expression for this in English, but…’ and then they’ll say something that doesn’t quite make sense.”

  Mike nodded. “No direct translation.”

  “Right. So I was wondering if maybe there are concepts that exist in foreign languages that we simply can’t understand.”

  “Can’t or don’t?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t know,” Robby said. “If we didn’t have a word for zero, would we still understand the concept of it?”

  “Sure. Right?”

  “I’m beginning to think that we box ourselves in, with a narrow understanding of the world, just by the words we have to describe it. The world itself is boiled down to the simplicity of how we label it.”

  “Reality itself is changed?”

  Robby nodded.

  “Should I go get Sariah? It sounds like you’re straying into her typical territory.”

  “Maybe she’s not far off,” Robby said. “Maybe causality is deteriorating.”

  Mike laughed. Robby raised his eyebrows and looked at him.

  “You’re not joking?”

  Robby shook his head slowly.

  “Hold on,” Mike said. He pushed himself up until he was sitting on the teacher’s desk. He still had half of a smile on his face, like he was still convinced that Robby was joking. “If there’s no more causality, then how are we still living, breathing, and walking around. Wouldn’t you say that it’s kinda important in terms of, you know, life itself?”

  “How so?”

  “The heart squeezes, causing the blood to flow.”

  “Does it? I read a paper published back in 1995 that refuted that concept. But, even if it does, I’m not sure that the heart requires causality to function,” Robby said.

  “Of course it does,” Mike said. His voice rose into a laugh. “The squeezing causes the increased pressure, which makes the blood flow. The valves mean that the blood can only flow one direction. They cause the blood to not flow backwards. If you didn’t have causality, we wouldn’t be alive.”

  “Maybe the heart beats and the blood flows. Maybe both things happen but they’re not dependent on one another.”

  “That’s absurd,” Mike said with another laugh. “Our bodies have a reason for everything. We evolved this way.”

  “Perhaps,” Robby said. “Or maybe we perceive things that way because we need causality. We have established the rule so we make everything contort to it.”

  “Yes,” Sariah said. She had come to the doorway while they were talking.

  Robby and Mike both turned to see her there.

  “Yes, I think that’s a good way of explaining it.”

  “So you believe it now too?” Mike asked Robby. “We’ve lost another one to this weird cult of non-science.”

  “No, Mike,” Robby said. “I’m only trying to open my mind to other possibilities. When what you’re looking at doesn’t fit the way you understand the world, it would be foolish to not revise your understanding. We can’t change what we’re seeing, only how we perceive it.”

  Sariah nodded.

  “I’ve been through this a million times with Sariah,” Mike said. “I can’t help but think that if we adopt that attitude to our water quality, we’re all going to be dead inside of a year. Our bodies are machines. They can be remarkably adaptable, but we have to have a constant supply of air, food, and water. Take away any of those three, and we’re dead. And if we abandon science and start accepting bizarre things as perfectly normal, I’m afraid that we’re going to forget about how to keep ourselves alive. Feeling tired? Why not let some of that tired blood out of your system so you can get better. Is that the world you envision?”

  “That’s not at all the point,” Sariah said. “You have to admit that the majority of animals exist just fine without believing in science.”

  “Sure,” Mike said. “They also go extinct because they all eat the same poisoned whatever.”

  He was too flustered to go on.

  “What’s going on in here?” Brad asked.

  Sariah moved throu
gh the door so Brad and Janelle could join them in the Spanish classroom.

  “Robby and Sariah want to give up,” Mike said.

  “Not true,” Sariah said, shaking her head.

  “Robby?” Brad asked. “What’s the truth?”

  “I wouldn’t say, ‘give up.’ I think we should maybe consider giving in,” Robby said.

  Chapter 35: Lisa

  Tim braced his legs and pulled back on the fishing pole, gripping it with both hands. The giant fish was tugging and thrashing so hard that he was being pulled toward the edge of the raft. Lisa reached over him to grab the pole too, stabilizing him against the fish’s strength.

  “Let go,” Ashley said. “We don’t need the fishing pole. Let go!”

  Penny barked. Ashley reached over and grabbed the dog’s collar to hold her back from the fight.

  The end of the pole disappeared into the fish’s mouth. The pole bent over at such an angle that Lisa couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t broken yet. The fish adjusted its grip, gnashing its teeth, and the pole sprung free. For a moment, the fish was motionless on the deck of the their raft, looking at them with its terrible eye.

  Snatching up one of their navigation poles, Ashley shoved the thing toward the edge.

  “Wait,” Tim said. “Kill it. Maybe we can eat it.”

  It was too late. The fish balanced on the edge of the raft for moment and then flashed its tail. It fell over and disappeared into the water with a splash.

  Nobody said a word. Tim flipped around the fishing pole and examined the chewed end. He bent it, testing to see if it was still usable.

  “Let’s get off this river,” Lisa said.

  Ashley nodded and used her pole to push them toward shore.

  With a knife clipped to his belt, Tim cast his line out into the river again. The current took the lure downstream. Penny was at his feet, looking out over the water and panting.

  “We should have known there could be predators down in the water. We’re lucky it wasn’t alligators or something. We’re lucky we didn’t find out when we were all knee deep in the rapids, trying to get the raft dislodged from a rock,” Lisa said.