Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  “Fumes,” he said. “Take a deep breath first.”

  She nodded and did as he suggested. She had the second can out as Lisa pulled in.

  “Runs like a dream,” she said. “How much gas do we have?”

  “I’m guessing, twenty gallons, maybe?” Ashley said, counting the cans.

  “Better than nothing,” Lisa said.

  “We should bring the raft,” Tim said. “For when we run out.”

  “Maybe,” Ashley said. She pointed to the far wall, where supplies were hung on hooks. “It might make more sense to bring that rope and build another raft when we run out of gas. That way we’re not dragging a big load. The raft is getting loose anyway, and there are better trees here.”

  They were silent for a moment as Tim and Lisa considered this. They both nodded at the same time.

  “Makes sense,” Tim said.

  “And we can drift downstream in the current,” Lisa said. “There’s no reason to use all of our gas up right away.”

  Loading the boat didn’t take much time. Penny was wary of the thing at first. Once Tim went aboard, they managed to coax her through the gap between the seats. She quickly settled on one of the benches so she could put her head on the back and watch their progress. Tim found that one of the benches in the rear could be unfolded into a bed of sorts. They decided to take shifts—two would drive while one person rested.

  Ashley took the first shift at navigating. She folded the map into a manageable square and sat at the bow of the boat so she could align the hills on either side with the contours of the map. Knowing where they had started, it was easy enough for her to follow along with the silhouettes of the terrain on either side. Lisa kept the engine low. They decided to use it sparingly until they could determine how quickly the thing burned through gas.

  Ashley peeked ahead on the map, tracing the river west. There were some other buildings marked. She tried to compare the map to her pictures. There wasn’t enough in common for her to line them up.

  “I hope I’m reading these gauges right,” Lisa said. “Come take a look.”

  Ashley put down her things and moved back to where Lisa was perched behind the wheel. The big gauge looked like speed, but the scale was in triple digits. It was barely registering their current speed. Another needle probably showed their amount of fuel. Instead of letters or numbers, it had three circles. The one on the bottom was unfilled, midway up the circle was half and half, and the one on top was solid. Other gauges could have been oil or temperature. Ashley didn’t have a guess for them, but they were all in the center so they were probably fine.

  “I think we’re good. You’re watching this one for fuel, right?”

  “Yeah,” Lisa said. “We’re going to have to find the fill pipe at some point. Maybe it will be daylight by then.”

  Ashley leaned back against the side of the other seat.

  “You think there’s someone back there?”

  “In the lab?”

  “Yeah. Or around. Maybe the person lived in Tim’s cabin and used the boat to commute to the lab?”

  “Too far,” Lisa said, shaking her head. “There would be a road from the cabin down to the river, right? There’s nothing like that on the map.”

  “True. Maybe there’s another cabin. Or maybe there was more to the lab that we didn’t see. There could have been a residence behind the place .”

  “Too much dust,” Lisa said. “Nobody had been there in a while, and certainly nobody had cleaned up all those animal corpses. That’s the first thing I would have done.”

  Ashley nodded.

  “Are there any markers for depth on that map. I would hate to run this thing into a rock,” Lisa said.

  Ashley shook her head. “Oh. Wait. There are the contour lines, though. They’re not just on the hills, they’re also in the water. That’s probably for depth, right?”

  “Yeah, Ashley,” Lisa said, barely keeping the sarcasm out of her voice.

  “Sorry,” Ashley said. She went back to the map and glanced around until she had a pretty good notion of where they were. “You’re fine if you stay in the center here. After a bend that points us north, you want to stick to the left third of the water.”

  “Good,” Lisa said. “You’ll have to point out the North Star when you get a chance.”

  “Or, you could use that,” Ashley said. There was a gimbal mounted compass on the dash, above the instruments. Ashley realized that it could be a good key to the letters for north, south, east, and west.

  “Oh? That’s a compass?”

  “Yeah, Lisa,” Ashley said, mimicking her aunt’s tone from before.

  Lisa smiled and shook her head.

  “You want to steer for a bit?” Tim said.

  “Sure,” Ashley said. She had been staring at the map, and sitting down. She hoped that Lisa would get up soon. Ashley could barely keep her eyes open. It seemed like forever since she had a chance to stretch out on the bed and take a break. Tim said that it was the most comfortable that he had slept in a month—he said that it was even better than the bunk in the cabin.

  She took the wheel of the boat and stood up behind the console. At the speed they were going, they were barely using any fuel at all.

  “Have you lined these up?” Tim asked, holding up the map and the satellite images.

  “I tried. They’re a bit off. If you take that one—I wrote ‘boathouse’ in the corner—you can see where I think they were aligned. Then, you can follow along with the two.”

  Tim flipped back and forth for a minute and then looked up at the terrain. It was a lot easier now that the sun had come up.

  “Okay, I gotcha,” Tim said. “Yeah, you’re right. So we’re about here?”

  She looked down and saw where Tim’s finger was pointing.

  “Yeah. We should know for sure in less than an hour. Those buildings marked on the map should be visible.”

  “Assuming they’re still there,” Tim said.

  “I don’t see why not,” Ashley said. “We’ve found everything else marked on the map—the lab and the boathouse.”

  Tim nodded as he looked down at the papers.

  Ashley yawned.

  Back at home, Brad was the one who always went out on the water. He was the person who liked to fish and even cross the Sound to the docks on the other side. Every time Ashley joined him, the engines and the rocking of the boat always put her to sleep. Her father hated going out on the boat. He said he only had so much boating left in his life and he was saving it up in case of an emergency.

  With a slight turn, the sun was in Ashley’s eyes. She squinted until her eyes were almost shut.

  “Ashley?” Tim asked.

  Her eyes sprang back open.

  “If this is this, then wouldn’t your thing be just, what, a few miles downstream?”

  “Sorry?” she asked. The lack of sleep was making her cranky. She wanted to lash out at Tim and tell him to communicate more clearly.

  “This,” he said, pointing to the satellite.

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find, yes,” she said.

  “But if all these images line up the way you said, and it looks like they do, then your observatory is just a few miles downstream of the group of buildings, right?”

  Ashley moved the throttle to neutral so she could focus her attention on what he was saying. He couldn’t be right. If that were true, then they could get to their destination that same day.

  “Wait,” she said to herself. She looked at the way that Tim had strung the images together on the floor of the boat. They looked like they aligned, but she figured that he must have skipped over a bunch. The path of the river in the images did seem to match the map pretty well.

  “This is right, yeah?” Tim asked.

  “Hold on.”

  From the back of the boat, Lisa began to stir. “Who’s steering this thing? Why are we drifting?”

  Ashley ignored her. She got down on her knees to look at the index numbers on the satell
ite images. Her tired brain struggled with the math, but she couldn’t see that he had skipped any images.

  From the rear of the boat, there was a splash.

  Ashley and Tim both turned to look.

  “What?” Lisa asked. She walked forward and shut off the key. “I dropped anchor. If you two have to figure out the map situation, then there’s no reason to let us drift into a rock or whatever.”

  The boat lurched a little and spun as the anchor dragged them to a stop.

  “You see?” Tim asked, pulling her attention back to the map. “You see this shape here. I almost want to say that it matches this shape on the image.”

  Ashley squinted and leaned down. She saw the thing that Tim was pointing at. It wasn’t clear enough to say definitively. I could have just as easily been a glitch in the satellite sensor, or an artifact from printing.

  “Hey,” Lisa said. “This isn’t gas.”

  Ashley bent over the red can one more time and took a sniff. The odor was sharp and slightly sweet. The liquid was viscous enough that it made a GLOOP sound when the can was shifted.

  “Some kind of syrup?” Tim asked.

  “It’s definitely not gas,” Lisa said again. “What do you think, Ashley?”

  “We need to see what’s in the tank. Maybe it’s the same stuff.”

  “Good luck,” Lisa said. “We’re running pretty low.”

  After hunting around the boat, they settled on the end of Tim’s fishing pole. It was thin, flexible, and clean. Tim used some line to bind a tiny piece of cloth to the end of the pole and then he fed it down the fill tube into the fuel tank.

  When it hit resistance, he pulled it back up. The cloth was soaked with fluid that looked slightly green.

  Tim sniffed at it.

  “Well?” Lisa asked.

  “I can’t tell,” he said.

  Ashley sniffed it when he held it toward her. The scent of the liquid was barely discernible over that of the cloth and pole and just the air around them. She picked up the sweet smell again, but not the initial sharp smell.

  Ashley shrugged.

  “I think it’s the same,” Lisa said. “Has to be, right?”

  “We can’t just assume,” Tim said. “We should find a way to get more from the tank so we can be sure. We can also dip another piece of cloth into the red can and see if it looks the same that way. It’s impossible to see any color in that red can.”

  “Does it matter?” Ashley asked. “We’re almost out of fuel. Does it matter if we put this stuff in and it breaks the boat? Either way, the boat isn’t going to function.”

  “It could blow up,” Tim said. “What if this is, like, some explosive or something? Or, what if we find the right fuel in one of those buildings downstream but we’ve already gummed up the engine with the wrong stuff.”

  For a moment, they all considered both sides.

  Lisa came up with the plan that they all were able to agree with.

  “We’re close to these buildings, right? We check them out, see if we have a refill, and then try this stuff if we don’t. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ashley said.

  “Good. Now, Ashley, take a break and try to sleep for a few minutes. We’ll wake you up.”

  The idea was incredibly alluring, but Ashley doubted that she would be able to even keep her eyes closed. They were so close to where the buildings should be visible and she had the best eyes. She sat on the bench at the stern of the boat while Lisa started the engine again. The river lapped at the stern as Tim pulled them back upriver with the anchor line. The rumble of the engine was right below her and made a soothing vibration that hummed in the bench. As Ashley stretched out, she thought of how terrible it would be if they motored right by the buildings because neither Tim nor Lisa had good enough vision to spot them.

  Her worries floated away, untethered, as soon as she shut her eyes. She was out instantly.

  The sun was warm and a bird sang. Ashley rolled away from the light and listened to Penny panting on the floor next to her. For a few minutes, the idea of the boat, the river, and buildings on the horizon were all inconsequential. All she wanted to do was nap for a few more hours in the sun.

  She remembered the observatory and sat up.

  Aside from Penny, she was alone on the boat. She put her hand over her eyes and looked every direction. They were at the shore. A rope, tied to a tree, was limp. They were beached.

  “Where’d they go?” Ashley asked Penny.

  They couldn’t have gone far—Lisa wouldn’t have left her and Tim would never leave Penny behind.

  “Lisa? Tim?” she called.

  The bird singing and the dog panting were the only answers she heard.

  Ashley stood up to look. The maps and the imagery were gone. They keys for the boat were still there. Where the boat was moored, the trees were right down to the shore. She couldn’t see much through the foliage.

  “They must have hiked in a little to see what they could see?” she asked Penny as she sat down again. The dog pushed her nose up under Ashley’s hand and she pet Penny while she considered it. Her instincts told her to jump to shore and strike out after them. They wouldn’t have gone far without her and the dog, and she wanted to see firsthand what they were seeing.

  “Maybe they’re hurt?” she asked. The bank was pretty steep behind the trees. “But you would have heard that. You wouldn’t still be here if something had happened.”

  Ashley moved to the captain’s chair and dug around in the bag that was stashed under the console. They still had some smoked fish that smelled good. She ate that and some of Tim’s hard cheese from the cabin. Soon, they were going to have to forage for more food. The last time they had sat down for a proper meal felt like days before. Ashley tried to work out the timeline when she heard a noise from the woods.

  Penny’s ears were pricked and she stopped panting. She heard it too.

  Ashley opened her mouth to call and then thought better of it. She heard a stick snap—someone or something was moving quietly through the woods. It wasn’t necessarily Lisa or Tim.

  Ashley slipped from the captain’s chair and ducked behind the console. She heard a couple of soft footfalls approaching. Penny lowered herself to her haunches. The dog wasn’t wagging her tail or growling. It seemed like she had the same thought that Ashley had—it was best to stay hidden until they knew what they were facing.

  She whipped her head to the left at another sound. Something else was flanking from downstream. Ashley looked at the rope, regretting that she hadn’t moved faster. The smart thing to do was untie the boat and move it to the center of the river until she knew what was coming. She jumped up and darted for the back of the boat. Pulling the rope, she got close enough to the tree to untie, and then tried to push off. She didn’t get much of a shove. Fortunately, it was enough for the current to start to turn the boat. Ashley ran for the key and flipped the switch that activated the blower.

  The engine rumbled to life just as the leaves began to shake. Whatever it was, it was almost upon her. She pulled the throttle to reverse and the prop sprayed water everywhere behind them. The breeze blew it back onto Ashley as she realized that Lisa had tilted the prop up when she parked it.

  She was panicked, trying to figure out how to fix it when Lisa burst through the trees.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Kill it! Kill the engine.”

  Ashley was so flustered, that for a second she couldn’t figure it out.

  Lisa splashed down into the shallows. The boat had already started to drift into the current.

  “Kill it!”

  Ashley gave up and simply turned the key.

  Quiet settled around her as Lisa pulled the rope back toward the tree.

  “I’m soaked now. Thanks,” Lisa said.

  “I didn’t know where you were. Where did you go?”

  They both looked up as Tim appeared through the trees, slightly downstream. Penny wagged her tail.

  “You can’t run the engine with the p
rop out of the water like that,” Lisa said. “It’s bad for it.”

  “Fine, but where did you go?” Ashley asked. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You had been up for a million hours. You needed sleep,” Lisa said. She pointed over her shoulder. “We passed the buildings, but there was no way to get to them directly—too much debris in the water. We had to come around this bend and then we climbed this little hill to see them. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Ashley moved to the edge of the boat and waited for Lisa to pull it close enough to the bank so she could jump. Before they left, they held the boat steady so Tim could get aboard. Ashley followed Lisa up the slope through the trees.

  “We couldn’t really see that much from the water, but we saw enough to know that it was the spot marked on the map. We think there was some kind of flood down through here that wiped out a lot of the structures. It also washed all sorts of debris into the shallow water. The boat couldn’t get very close. I can’t believe you didn’t wake up while we were cursing and bouncing off of things, but you were just as peaceful as a lamb on your bench.”

  Ashley’s response froze in her throat as they peaked the little hill. Through the trees she could see the remnants of what must have been a town on the bank of the river.

  Lisa’s voice was hushed as she pointed and said, “I think that building over there might have been the fire station. See all those big doors? I’m guessing that one was a restaurant. Those were houses and maybe the brick one was the town hall or something.”

  “I never expected…” Ashley started to say.

  “If Tim’s right, then this whole area was underwater when the satellite imagery was taken. The map shows a tributary through here and then a lake upstream of that. It could be that a levee or dam gave way.”

  “But all these trees,” Ashley said.

  “Yeah,” Lisa said, nodding. “Based on the growth, it looks like years have passed since the flood.”

  “Those images were taken just a week or two before we left,” Ashley said. “So that means…”

  “We’ve been out here for years.”