by Ike Hamill
Robby looked down at his daughter. Her eyes were wide open.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered.
She opened her mouth and snapped her tongue against her teeth. “I forgot to brush. My mouth tastes terrible.”
“You can brush them in the morning.”
“I want to do it now,” she said. Before he could object, she was up. Robby sighed as the bed jostled. Jim began to stir.
“What’s going on?” he moaned.
“Nothing,” Robby said. “Your sister is in the bathroom. It’s the middle of the night—go back to sleep.”
He flopped over on his back, pushing the covers down from his shoulders. “It doesn’t feel like the middle of the night.”
Janelle hadn’t closed the bathroom door. They could hear her humming to herself as she brushed her teeth.
Robby closed his eyes and tried to ignore the sound.
She spat in the sink and then rinsed her mouth. He could hear every move.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Ummm?”
Robby buried his face in a pillow.
“I think I’m too awake now to go back to sleep. Brushing my teeth made me feel like it’s time to get up.”
“No.”
Jim slipped from under the covers and seemed to be stomping as he walked around the bed. Robby could feel every footfall.
Robby almost knew how the argument would go before it even started.
“I have to use the bathroom.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“You just did.”
“No, the toothpaste tasted wrong. I’m going to try Dad’s tube. How old is this?”
“Then do it out there. I have to use the bathroom.”
“Kids?” Robby said, raising his voice. He waited for them to quiet down. “You’re both going to have to be quiet. I need rest.”
He heard Janelle come toward him and he opened an eye.
“You should rest,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and looking at him sympathetically, like it was her idea. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“But first, can you tell us about Mom?”
Robby sighed. She didn’t ask for it often, but when she did, Robby was obligated to tell the story. He had always told his kids that whenever they needed it, he would tell it.
“I know you’re tired,” she said. “You can tell the quick version.”
The door opened. Jim seemed to immediately know what they were talking about.
“Ashley’s not here,” Jim said. “We’re all supposed to be here when he tells it.”
“She wouldn’t mind,” Janelle said. “She’s here in spirit.”
“If I tell it, will you two promise to give me a couple hours of sleep?”
“Yes,” they both said immediately.
“Even if you wake up, you’ll read quietly and not make a single peep?”
“Yes.”
Robby sighed. He didn’t believe them.
Robby yawed and adjusted the pillow that was propping up his head. It would be a miracle if he made it even halfway through the story before he passed out. He had moved to the middle of the bed and the kids were on either side of him. Janelle had moved the lamp to the floor, so she could read after the story. It gave the walls a strange glow, like the bed was a little island of darkness in a luminescent sea.
“A long time ago, in a parallel universe, there was a very unhappy man named Charlie,” Robby said. He felt the kids settle in at his sides. “Very near here, he lost his family to a nuclear explosion.”
It was Ashley’s fault that he had to back up this far to tell the story. She was a stickler for context. Robby knew he couldn’t skip this part of the story even though his oldest daughter wasn’t there. Either one of his kids could have recited the story from memory and they weren’t going to let him skip a single word.
“Through Charlie’s sadness and anger, he managed to create the Churn,” Robby said. He felt Janelle’s head move against his arm and knew that she was shaking her head. She hated Charlie and the Churn.
“Our friend Carrie had to give up something that was very precious to her in order to stop Charlie from collapsing everything,” Robby said. Not very many people seemed to know this detail of the story, so Robby always kept it vague, even when Ashley had pressed for more detail.
“After the Churn, we thought that we knew everyone in the whole world. We were wrong. There were a few pockets of people, living in what we came to call nodes. Those people weren’t part of the Churn and we didn’t even discover them until later. Your mom was one of those people.”
Robby glanced at his son. Jim smiled and closed his eyes.
“Your Uncle Brad and I were traveling between the settlements, setting up the communication network between all the Post Offices. The world was a very lonely place then. We would pull into a town, mark down the roads that were in the best shape, and start unloading our equipment. Brad always set up the solar panels while I worked on the radios, computers, and batteries. On the day we hit the trap, we were near the border of New Hampshire and Maine.”
Robby closed his eyes, remembering the day.
“This one is at a much higher elevation,” Brad had said, pointing at the map. “We’re going to get signal all the way to the coast from here.”
“I don’t know,” Robby said. Something about the map gave him a bad feeling about the building that Brad was pointing to. It was on top of a hill, so it wouldn’t have been flooded out. Still, he had the feeling that they weren’t going to end up using the building. Regardless, he turned left when Brad pointed and drove the truck up the winding hill.
“This almost reminds me of home,” Brad said.
“Yeah?”
“Maine feels different, even now,” Brad said. “There’s something different about the air. When I was a kid, we had a store that sold all kinds of touristy stuff. They sold cans of Maine air.”
Robby laughed.
“We were living in the far corner of the country, you know? It felt like we were just barely United States citizens,” Brad said.
Robby shook his head. “On the island, it seemed like most of our neighbors were only slightly aligned with the rest of Maine. I guess we were the outsiders of the outsiders.”
“Huh,” Brad said. “Turn right here.”
“This is a remote post office,” Robby said. They could see the building at the top of the hill. A huge tree was down across the access road. They had a chain saw in the back of the truck, but Robby thought that he could cut across the overgrown lawn.
“Careful,” Brad said.
Robby didn’t see what he was referring to until it was too late. The nose of the truck dropped into the ditch and pitched them forward. Robby slammed against his seatbelt and heard the equipment in the back of the truck bang into the cab. He cringed, hoping that nothing was broken.
“I’ll get the winch,” Brad said.
When he opened the door, they heard another voice.
“Hold it!”
Brad froze. The shout had come from the woods to their right.
“Stay right there.”
Robby jumped when someone appeared at his window. He turned to see a young woman with narrowed eyes and a stern mouth.
“Put your window down,” she said, knocking.
He did as he was told.
“We come in peace,” he said, immediately blushing. The words had just flown from his mouth before he could stop them.
A flash of confusion passed over her face and then she was back to narrowed eyes and a hard expression.
“Put your truck in reverse and get off our hill. There’s nothing here for you.”
“We’re not here to take anything,” Brad said. “We just wanted to set…”
She was already gone.
“Get going,” another shout came from the woods.
Brad slowly shut his door.
“Where are they?” Brad whispered from the corner of his
mouth.
Robby put the truck into four-wheel drive and tried to back up. The wheels spun in the mud and Robby cursed under his breath. He tried again, this time letting the truck rock forward before he let the clutch out slowly.
“The question is who,” Robby said.
“Good point,” Brad said. “I thought we knew everyone. The Churn was supposed to have brought everyone together.”
“Apparently not,” Robby said.
This time, he managed to put together some momentum. One of the tires caught a rock and the truck shifted left a little and then sprang free from the ditch.
“They dug this as a trap. It’s like a moat across the lawn,” Brad said, pointing with his chin. “See that excavator over there? They can drag the tree out of the way to use the road when they want.”
Robby kept his head pointed forward but scanned the woods with his eyes. He could still barely believe that the other people even existed. The notion shocked his understanding of the world.
“And that was the first time I ever saw your mother,” Robby said quietly. Both kids had their eyes closed and he thought that there was a chance that…
“You didn’t even tell the part where she hit you with a fish,” Janelle said, her eyes slowly opening. “That’s not even a third of the story.”
Robby sighed.
“You’re right,” he said. “Uncle Brad and I went back down the hill and we crossed all the way over to the other side of town so we could find the old post office. They had both been operational, but the old one was in pretty bad shape."
“Maybe we should backtrack?” Brad had asked, looking over his shoulder up the road.
“You think?” Robby asked. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“It’s a ramshackle, one-story building at a low elevation, surrounded by marsh. The signal here is going to be lousy and the first time one of the culverts gets clogged, the whole place is going to flood.”
“Yeah,” Robby said, his shoulders falling. “You know I hate to backtrack.”
“We don’t have much of a choice,” Brad said. “If we keep going, we’re going to be too far to get a signal.”
“They thought that we were going to try to steal their stuff,” Robby said. “That’s the only reason they chased us off. Maybe if we convinced them that we didn’t need their stuff, they would let us put up a communication console in their building.”
“Robby,” Brad said, shaking his head, “you’re not going to convince anyone that you’re not trying to invade their space by invading their space again. We showed up uninvited and they chased us off. Our best bet is to leave a note in town where they might find it. If we explain who we are and how to contact us, we can let them make the next move. Trust me, it’s the only way.”
“You’re right. I would like to accelerate the process though. I’m really curious how they managed to survive the Churn.”
“Maybe it didn’t even happen here,” Brad said.
Robby tilted his head and wrinkled his forehead. “How so?”
“The things that we don’t know about the Churn far outweigh what we do know. Sure, it seemed that any human presence would have been an anchor point, but maybe there were geographic locations that shielded people from the madness. If there were, it might explain why they were so defensive.”
Robby thought about it for a minute.
They got back in the truck and drove to the center of town. It was a small enough village that it didn’t have a Hannaford or a Shaw’s supermarket. There was only an overgrown convenience store with a couple of gas pumps out front. Robby pulled up there while Brad composed a note.
“I’m going to tell them to go to the post office outside Manchester,” Brad said. “The way that place is set up, it’s pretty clear that it’s not an ambush. They can go over whenever they want and use the system to get in touch with us. It’s a lot safer than giving them our address and hoping they don’t show up in the middle of the night to slit our throats.”
Robby was staring through the truck window at the convenience store. A clear picture was beginning to come together in his head. Then, all at once, the last of the pieces snapped into place.
“They won’t come,” Robby said.
“To Manchester? How do you know?”
Robby didn’t answer—he was already getting out of the truck.
Brad called after him and jumped out to follow as Robby walked to the door of the convenience store. On the porch, Robby toed a sandwich board sign that was standing askew. The message in chalk had been wiped away by the elements. The sign was at a weird angle because half of the base had been eaten away by something.
Inside the place, the shelves were still stocked. In Donnelly, Gladstone, and Northam—all the places where people had settled—the stores had been cleaned out. Cans and dry goods had been moved to rodent-proof storage. This store was still stocked. The perishables had rotted and the cans still stood on the shelves.
“Why didn’t they loot this place?” Brad asked.
Robby had pieced together a story in his head.
“They tried,” Robby said. “One or both were injured when they tried. They must have come while the cleanup liquid was still pushing through this area. Did you see how gaunt she was? They’re probably starving. Maybe they’ve only been living off the land and what they could find in neighboring houses.”
Robby grabbed a basket. He opened the door and stepped inside.
“Just put it in the note, Robby,” Brad said. “We’ll just take the note closer to them, telling them it’s safe.”
Robby shook his head. “They won’t believe us. If they don’t know what attacked them in the first place, why would they?”
Brad stood in the doorway while Robby filled his basket with cans and boxes. Anything sealed that wouldn’t go bad, and anything high in calories, went in his basket. On the way back out, he grabbed some bags.
“I need a cart,” Robby said.
Brad pointed across the street. The hardware store had a big wheelbarrow in the window.
Robby got out a mile away and pushed the wheelbarrow up the hill. He was hoping that it was far enough away that they wouldn’t be frightened by his approach. A big truck might seem threatening. He hoped that a young man pushing a wheelbarrow wouldn’t be.
While he walked, he tried to think of what he could say. There were too many variables. He decided to react to them instead of reciting a rehearsed speech.
She spotted him way sooner than he expected. When he heard the crunch of leaves from the woods to his left, Robby dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow and put his hands up.
“I told you, there’s nothing here for you.”
“I brought food from Hilliard’s, down in town,” Robby said.
She moved behind him. Robby didn’t turn to watch her. He was hoping that she would take this as a sign of trust. He tried not to imagine her raising a gun at the back of his head.
“We don’t need it.”
“It’s safe to eat. Pick something and I’ll eat it.”
“Take the whole thing and leave.”
“Nobody is going to try to hurt you. I don’t know what happened to you before, but I can guess a couple of things based on what happened to me. There was this strange liquid in the streets of Portsmouth, consuming anything organic. It almost got me a couple of times. It looks to me like the same thing might have been down in Hilliard’s store.”
She was silent.
Robby really wanted to turn and look her in the eyes, but she was staying directly behind him. There was a good chance that he was being flanked as well, although he didn’t hear anything.
“Was your friend injured by the liquid?”
There was no response.
“I’ll just leave this here,” Robby said. “If you don’t want it, that’s fine, but it looks like you could use some food. There are a bunch of us, still alive. We have a settlement in upstate New York, and one down on the coast of Connecticut. There’s a r
adio in Manchester at the post office if you want to get in touch with us. It’s not actually a radio, but it…”
“Shut up,” she said. She sounded like she was barely holding onto her emotions.
“I didn’t mean to…”
Robby didn’t know how to finish. He had no idea why she was upset, so he couldn’t think of what to say.
“I’m sorry. I’ll leave you.”
Robby turned toward her so he could go back the way he had come. She wasn’t holding a gun, like he had pictured. There was a hunting knife in her hand, but it was down at her waist. She wasn’t even trying to threaten him with it. Her eyes were distant, unfocused, and welling with tears that she didn’t seem capable of shedding.
“Please eat something.”
He moved in a wide circle around her. When he was a dozen paces away, he glanced back. She had moved a step closer to the wheelbarrow.
“My name is Robby, by the way,” he called. She glanced back at him but didn’t respond.
“How did it go?” Brad asked when Robby came back to the idling truck.
“Terrible,” Robby said. “Listen—how would you feel about finishing this up without me?”
“Nope,” Brad said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Well, then leave me the equipment and I’ll finish it up on my own when I’m done here. You can go back to Gladstone.”
“No,” Brad said, shaking his head. “I’m not leaving you out here alone with people who clearly don’t want us around. Do you know anything about them? Have they murdered anyone? How desperate are they? How many of them are up on the hill? Were they insane before the collapse? Are they insane now?”
“You’re right,” Robby said. “But I have the feeling that I need to help them.”
“Think about what we just went through, Robby. The Churn affected everyone we know. People became obsessed with an alternate vision of how life should be, and then they became dangerously suicidal. We were only rescued by the collapse of the Churn, right? So, where does that leave these people?”