by Ike Hamill
“Where am I headed?” Corinna asked.
Beth pointed the way.
While Corinna and Beth loaded the truck with supplies, Red sat watch outside. He was holding his side. The blood had started to leak around the bandages again, but it was little more than a trickle.
“I think I blew a gasket when I was holding my breath,” Red had said.
Beth and Corinna were pushing themselves hard to get everything into the truck as quickly as possible. The urgency wasn’t just because of Red. Corinna had seen footprints in the dust outside the big metal door. The coyotes had been nosing around the building at some point.
Rice, wheat, and potatoes were stored in big sacks. Beth and Corinna moved them from the larder to the truck using the fat wheeled dollies. The bed of the truck was half full when Corinna picked up a weird vibe from Red.
“What is it?” she asked him.
His eyes never left the horizon.
“Something is coming. Maybe grab one more load and we should get going,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” Corinna said. She tucked the dolly into the bed of the truck and cupped her hands around her mouth to call. “Beth, let’s go. We’re leaving.”
Corinna moved to help Red down the stairs and into the back seat. Beth got in the other side to sit next to him.
“We can fit a lot more,” Beth said.
“No,” Corinna said. “Red thinks he saw something and I have a bad feeling.”
Circling the truck, Corinna closed the bed. She ran for the driver’s door, slamming it behind her and immediately cranking the engine. Her eyes were locked on the horizon, although she still saw nothing.
“Where is it?” Beth asked.
Red coughed and his finger came up between the seats. He was pointing dead ahead. Corinna didn’t see anything except where the road crested a small hill. On the other side, they would have to pass the Death Line again.
“Is there another way out of here?” she asked over her shoulder.
“It’s rough,” Beth said. “And it would take longer. Our best bet is forward.”
“Maybe,” Corinna said.
Chapter 88: Lisa
Ashley cleared her throat. “My understanding of the journals is spotty, but this is what I’ve figured out. At first, it was just the animals. A whole flock of ducks veered off course and plowed into the west side of the building. Lots of different theories were proposed—everything from an illness in the birds to a disruption of the magnetic fields that the ducks employ during migration. The cause was only found when it was correlated with the sun activity.”
“The sun?” Lisa asked.
Ashley didn’t seem to hear the question.
“After birds, came deer. They didn’t show signs of rabies or other diseases, they just got extremely aggressive. One of the staff mentioned that it was a shame that the animals only seemed to come when all the scientists were busy studying the solar activity. That’s how the connection was made. They didn’t get to research it for long though. Soon, the people themselves began to go insane. They would shy away from windows and want to stay as deep in the building as possible. Violence came next.”
Lisa looked at Tim. It was possible that they were both thinking the same thing—more and more, Ashley had been reluctant to go outside for any stretch. She only seemed comfortable when she was surrounded by walls.
“Still fearing infection, they were fastidious about cleaning up the corpses and all the blood. It looks like some of the first murders were self-defense. They didn’t want to kill their colleagues, but when they were being attacked they didn’t feel that they had a choice. Then, after they got good at spotting the signs, they didn’t even wait for an attack. At the first sign that someone was going insane, they were eliminated,” Ashley said.
“Why?” Lisa asked.
“What else could they do?” Ashley asked.
“I don’t know—quarantine the sick? Maybe they could have just corralled them somewhere until they could figure out a cure?”
“There were efforts,” Ashley said. “But it wasn’t long before cases began to crop up in town, and then it apparently got out of hand very quickly.”
“And it was just here?” Tim asked. “Obviously, we didn’t have any of these problems at the Outpost, and you guys didn’t mention anything in Gladstone.”
Ashley shook her head. “You’re still thinking of this as a different geographical location in our same world. I’m afraid that it isn’t, Tim.”
Tim cocked his head. “What do you mean by that?”
“The language, the fuel, the geography,” Ashley said. “You don’t still think that this is a flooded version of our same world, do you?”
“We didn’t move to a different world,” Lisa said. “We just hiked through the jungle and floated down a river.”
“No, I understand,” Tim said. “She’s saying that our little patch of sanity—from the Outpost, up to Donnelly, and then down to Gladstone—that’s all that’s left of the world that we grew up in. Is that what you mean?”
“No,” Ashley said. “Again, it’s not geographical. We’re so accustomed to moving spatially from one place to another that it’s the only way we think of travel. This place belongs to a different set of rules. Our physics and our space don’t belong here. The difference is the sun.”
Lisa squeezed her temples. Her brain kept trying to latch onto what Ashley was talking about, but it was too slippery. Every notion ended in a contradiction.
“I can’t hope to follow what you’re saying,” Tim said. “Can you just tell us what it means? What do we do now?”
Ashley took a second to think. There was a brief moment when Lisa thought that it had worked—trying to explain it to them, Ashley had come to a deeper understanding and she would have a solution. A moment later, Lisa remembered. They already knew what was going to happen. There wasn’t going to be a solution.
“The best I can figure, there isn’t going to be a solution,” Ashley said.
Tim’s face revealed that he had already come to the same conclusion.
“There’s no guarantee that the laws of physics are constant throughout the universe. All we can say for sure is that from what we observe, it appears as though there are consistent rules. But, if we admit that the laws don’t have to be consistent, we also have to admit that they don’t have to be constant. There are no guarantees that light will always travel at the same speed or gravity will always exert the same force. All we can assert is that given the fossil record, it appears that the rules have been pretty consistent on what we consider Earth.”
Tim shook his head and cupped his hands around his face.
“If I had to guess, I would say it’s likely we can attribute the strange phenomenon to the sun, or something else in orbit with us. Given that, if we treat the oddities like they’re due to some kind of radiation, our best bet would be to put as much mass as we can between us and what’s causing us harm.”
“Underground?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “It’s a pretty useful instinct—to hide underground when there are dark forebodings in the skies. In our past, people have hidden from storms, comets, eclipses, bombs, and predators. It wasn’t always the right thing to do, but it was seldom the worst response.”
“So, we came all this way to find out that we should have dug a hole and stuck our heads underground?” Lisa asked.
Ashley shook her head. “No. We came all this way to find out what would happen if we didn’t.”
“Meanwhile,” Tim said, “as far as we know, people back at the Outpost, or up in Donnelly, are already dealing with the same kind of insanity that apparently struck this place, right?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said. It hurt her to admit it, but she had been thinking the same thing. The whole time that Ashley had been describing people attacking each other and then killing each other out of self defense, she had been picturing Brad and Romie, and worse, Robby and the kids.
“Maybe,” Ashley said. “A
nd I do want to get back as quickly as possible, but we have to backtrack a little first.”
“To where?”
Ashley screwed up her mouth and took a breath. Lisa knew what the expression meant. Ashley had made that same face since she had been a little kid. Whenever she had really bad news to deliver, Ashley had trouble spitting it out.
“Let’s say I was a scientist here when things started to go bad. Maybe I figured out that we should head underground. The question would be—for how long?” Ashley asked.
Lisa nodded. It made sense. They couldn’t really live out the rest of their lives in a cave, could they?
“You figure that they already made a correlation between species and how much the phenomenon affected the animal. Maybe they found a species that was affected about the same rate as people—like another primate.”
“The monkey lab,” Lisa said.
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “Put some animals in cages and check in on them periodically to see how they were doing.”
“But they all died,” Tim said. “They were nothing more than fur and bones and dust. How long did they wait underground while the monkeys proved that it was unsafe to come back out?”
“Let’s not jump to that conclusion,” Ashley said. “There could be other reasons why the monkey experiment didn’t work. Perhaps the keepers went insane.”
“They would have thought of that, wouldn’t they? What good does it do to leave monkeys in cages if the humans taking care of them were just as susceptible.”
“It could be that they found one or two individuals who were exposed but seemed to be unaffected by the phenomenon. Those people were left as the keepers, but something else happened to them? Maybe if we return to those journals, we can understand.”
“You want to go back to the monkey house?” Tim asked.
He looked at Lisa. She understood why—she didn’t have a memory of them going back to the monkey house. It fell out of the scope of her future life, at least as she could foresee it. It only made sense that if Ashley was going back to the monkey house, she was going alone.
“Yeah,” Ashley said. She looked back and forth between them.
“You’re sure there’s no other way?” Lisa asked.
Ashley shrugged. Some of her confidence seemed to evaporate as she looked at Lisa.
“I mean, sure there are other ways, but we want to get to the bottom of this, right?”
Lisa raised her eyebrows.
“I suppose."
Chapter 89: Brad
It didn’t matter how many times that Brad urged her to slow down—Romie drove like a crazy person until they caught up with a group headed north.
After they had come out of the school, they had just mounted their bikes when Sandy had waved them down. She dropped them off at the house before she took off for Donnelly. Romie and Brad didn’t bother with packing—they simply jumped in Brad’s SUV and took off.
Romie had taken the driver’s seat and Brad had silently slipped into the passenger’s. She had changed her mind about staying in Gladstone and he hadn’t wanted to do a single thing to jeopardize that.
Once they got out on the road, he began to regret letting her drive.
“Careful up here, Romie, there’s bad pavement.”
“I thought you drove this thing because it has such a good suspension?” she muttered while she rolled her eyes.
Just as she said it, the SUV banged across a horrific pothole. A big chunk of asphalt was gone and Romie hit it at about ninety.
Before he could say anything, Romie blamed him.
“Give me better roads, then. Tell me where to turn.”
He shook his head. “This is the best route we know about. This is the route that everyone else will be taking.”
A few minutes later, he was proven correct. They saw one of the other vehicles up ahead. Romie came up on them and veered to the side, like she was going to pass.
“What are you doing?” Brad asked, turning up his hands. He considered it a major accomplishment that he had refrained from shouting the question at her.
“They’re going too slow,” she said. “We have to get there before the ribbon comes out and knocks the snot out of this car, right? They don’t know that.”
“Romie, if something does happen, don’t we want to be in the rear so we can help? There are families in most of those vehicles. We should hang back to help them if they have trouble.”
She clenched her jaw and tightened her grip on the wheel, but she did slow down before they overtook the other vehicle.
Brad leaned forward.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“That’s what I was trying to figure out.”
From month to month, it seemed like people were changing vehicles all the time. When something would go wrong, they would abandon whatever they were driving and switch to another. Only a handful of people even bothered to properly maintain their cars, figuring it was easy enough to switch. Because of that, Brad rarely knew who was driving what.
When the dog’s face appeared in the rear window, they both figured it out.
“That’s Hulk,” Romie said. “That’s why Sandy was headed home. She must have gone back to switch cars and grab the dog.”
Brad nodded. He was glad that Hulk had been rescued. The kids loved that dog.
“Watch it,” Brad said. “Brake lights.”
“Where?”
He was looking around Sandy’s car to the one ahead.
They all slowed.
Sandy pulled ahead of the other vehicle. Romie pulled alongside. A man—it looked like Luther—jumped out of the passenger’s side and ran around the back. He tore open the driver’s door of the car just as Brad got out of his.
“What’s happening?”
“Help me,” Luther said.
Sandy was there and Brad stepped aside. She and Luther pulled Eve from behind the wheel while a kid yelled something from the back seat.
They lowered Eve to the pavement. She was shaking and trembling.
“What happened? Seizure?” Sandy asked.
“No,” Luther said, panting. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, she’s never had one before.”
“What was she doing?” Brad asked, trying to get closer. Eve’s eyes were closed and she was twisting on the road. Up ahead, a horn honked. Brad heard Romie yell something.
“Uh,” Luther said, glancing at Brad. His words came in staccato bursts. “She was. She was driving. Then she pulled over. I turned off the car because she started… I don’t know. She’s just…”
Sandy was taking her pulse and then put her ear down to Eve’s chest.
“Don’t!” Brad shouted at her. He had a horrible premonition of Eve’s eyes flying open and then her mouth opening to bite into Sandy’s exposed neck.
In the back of the car, Hulk’s bark was muffled by the glass.
“Her heart is racing,” Sandy said, oblivious to Brad’s panic. Sandy put a hand on Eve’s chest and told her to try to take a deep breath.
One of the kids rolled down the window.
“Dad, what’s wrong with mom?” Derek asked.
“Stay put, honey. Daddy will take care of Mommy.”
The kid was too old to be talked to like that, but Brad understood. He had seen Lisa do the same thing a hundred times. When she got stressed out, she started treating the kids like they were toddlers again. He imagined that it was born out of feeling overprotective again, in that moment.
But despite his reassurance to his son, Luther didn’t seem to have any idea what to do.
“You know the way?” Brad asked him.
“Yeah,” Luther said. “I think so. I have a map.”
Luther was the type of person who usually never left Gladstone. There were a number of people who just didn’t like to make the trip to Donnelly.
Sandy looked up at them. “Someone should monitor her.”
Brad nodded. “Yeah. Sandy—put Hulk in the back of my SUV. You, Eve, and Hulk will ride
with us. Luther, drive the kids and follow us.”
“That’s a good idea,” Romie said. “Let’s go. Sandy, get Hulk and your stuff. Luther, help me with Eve.”
Once she said it, people started to move. It wasn’t until Romie led Luther back to his own car that he really seemed to figure out what was going on and started to object.
“I should go with Eve. I need to be with her.”
Brad glanced back at the SUV. Eve was in the rear seat, stretched out, with Sandy kneeling beside her, trying to rouse her. Hulk had his head over the seat, looking back and forth between Eve and Sandy, like he was just as concerned. There was barely enough room for them. Luther couldn’t possibly fit as well. Brad opened his mouth to volunteer to drive the kids. Fortunately, Romie spoke up before he could.
“No, Luther, you need to be with your kids. Take care of them and we’ll take care of her. You’ll be right behind us.”
Brad was relieved when Luther finally agreed and let Romie guide him back to his car. Luther’s door opened to a flurry of whispered questions from the kids. Brad and Romie rushed back to the SUV to get underway. They had to veer around Sandy’s vehicle.
“Not too fast,” Brad said to Romie before he craned around to see how Sandy was doing with the patient. “How is she?”
“Breathing is fine,” Sandy said. “Her pulse has slowed down. It’s probably about normal. There’s some blood in her mouth—I think she bit her lip or her… Yeah, she bit her tongue. There was a lot of stress and no sleep last night. Nobody ate anything, and she was already skinny as a rail. I’m thinking maybe some kind of seizure. What do you have for sugar in here?”
“Back with Hulk,” Brad said. “There’s a green bag that I’ve been dragging around for years. It has my old emergency kit and I used to carry around some of that gel stuff.”
Sandy stood up, hunched over, and started to dig through all the stuff that was packed in with Hulk. In the back of Brad’s vehicle, he always carried equipment and supplies. Added to that was Sandy’s bag and the big dog. When Romie hit another pothole, Sandy banged into the ceiling and yelped.