by Ike Hamill
“I think I’m going to go out to sea,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“What do you think is across the ocean?”
The premise to his idea was absurd. Jim didn’t get as seasick as their father, but he wasn’t very comfortable on boats at all. Brad liked to take them out, but none of the kids really liked boating as much as Brad. And even Brad never went very far. It was too dangerous out on the open ocean because they didn’t have a good way to predict the weather. Back when there had been satellites and people everywhere, lots of people had made solo crossings of the ocean. It probably wouldn’t happen again in their lifetime—somebody would probably say that it was against the mandate.
“Hey. I know you’re not asleep,” Jim said. “What do you think is over there?”
“Where? Europe? Africa? Greenland? Over where?”
“Anywhere. What do you think Ashley has found?”
Janelle didn’t say what she really thought Ashley had found. In the back of her head, Janelle was pretty sure that Ashley and Aunt Lisa had likely died, or we’re going to die soon. There was a reason that nobody had ventured out beyond the Outpost, and it wasn’t just because electricity didn’t work out there. They hadn’t gone because, deep down, everyone could tell that it was a terrible idea.
“I don’t know. What do you think?” Ashley asked. She closed her eyes again and turned away from him, hoping that he would get the point.
“She had satellite pictures,” Jim said.
“Yeah?”
“I saw them. She stole them from Dad. There were satellite pictures that showed that there were some buildings out there that survived.”
This was all new to Janelle. In school, they taught her that everything beyond the Outpost had been completely wiped out, as far as anyone knew. Expeditions hadn’t gone very far, but as far as airplanes could fly, they didn’t see anything but new growth of plants and trees. It was like a giant eraser had been dragged over the whole world except their circle.
“When I turn eighteen, I’m going to sail across the Atlantic and see if anything is over there. I bet there are still people.”
“Can’t you just get satellite pictures from over there and see?”
“I don’t think so,” her brother said. “Even Dad was only able to get a few pictures. I guess a lot of the satellites stopped working or the information is too heavily encrypted.”
“I thought you were better at computers than Dad.”
“I am, but he’s better at satellites. Besides, if I go there in person, I’ll be able to talk to people. I don’t want to just know that they’re there—I want to have a conversation. What if they’re more advanced than we are? What if they have a lot more of their infrastructure intact?”
“Then wouldn’t it be more likely that they would come visit us?”
Jim didn’t answer.
Janelle wasn’t interested in people across the ocean, or even what was beyond the Outpost. As far as she was concerned, pictures would suffice. She would rather have everyone at home, safe and sound, then go on some big adventure. Ashley and Jim always wanted to go see things in person, or experience things for the first time. Janelle wanted nothing more than to have everything in its place. While Jim was sailing off across the Atlantic, she would stay with Romie, Lisa, Brad, and her father. She would work in the gardens or help with one of the engineering projects during the day, and then read a book at night.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Jim said.
Jim was always defiant and optimistic. His suddenly resigned tone made Janelle open her eyes again.
“Why?”
He turned up his hands and glanced around.
“You think Dad is going to keep us in this room forever?”
“Not this room—this bunker, though. He’s doing everything he can to make this place sustainable, right? When is it going to be okay to go out into the world again? It’s not just the water or the air. Now we have to worry about crazy animals as well.”
“That can’t last forever.”
“How do you know?”
“It can’t,” Janelle said. She wormed her way deeper into the chair’s embrace and tried to go to sleep.
Janelle was dreaming of standing on the deck of a long wooden boat. Jim was there, but so were the mutineers. They were helping Jim sail across to Europe when her father’s voice interrupted the dream and woke her.
“How long has it been?” Jim asked.
“Ten hours. You’re halfway home,” their father said.
Their father exchanged the old tray with a new one. Steam was still rising off the food.
“We’re nowhere near home,” Janelle said. As the dream faded, her memory of what Jim had said crept back into her brain.
“I meant you’re halfway done with your incarceration,” her father said, tilting his head with a sad smile.
Janelle nodded.
“Turkey dinner, if you’re hungry,” he said, holding out a plate. “They cooked some of the birds from Eric’s farm so they wouldn’t have to freeze all of them.”
“What else is happening out there?” Jim asked. He grabbed one of the plates and returned to his spot on the bed so he could dig in.
“Mike has a whole team figuring out how the environmental systems work. There’s a whole waste treatment facility that turned itself on automatically. There is a bunch of equipment dedicated to producing a fertilizing liquid that looks to be a lot like what we use for our hydroponics. Sariah is setting up some experiments.”
“What about the water and everything? Does it act correctly?” Jim asked.
Their father nodded. “So far, yes. Boiling points, freezing points, and all the physical properties check out. The experiments that they’ve run up near the loading doors are sketchy, but everything down here looks good.”
Her father brought her one of the other plates. She saw that he had one for himself as well. He sat in the other chair and the three of them ate in silence until Jim finished and practically threw his plate back on the tray. Flopping down on the bed, Jim let out a big sigh.
“I understand this punishment,” Jim said. “And I’m glad you gave it to us. We’re too accustomed to getting our own way. I guess we didn’t fully grasp what’s going on.”
Their father shook his head. “I’m not even going to dignify that attempt with a response, Jim. I find it insulting that you would think such a transparent ploy would work on me.”
“No, not at all,” Jim said.
Janelle focused on her meal. She wanted to tell Jim to shut up, but it wouldn’t matter. He had come up with some scheme to reduce their sentence and he was going to see it through.
“I wouldn’t bother to try to trick you, Dad. If anything, I would assume at any attempt to get a reduction in punishment would only lead to a longer term.”
“You’re not wrong,” their father said. “Are you sure you don’t want to quit while you’re ahead? Insincerity is just going to convince me that you need more time to process your boredom.”
Jim pressed on. “I was talking with Janelle while you were out. I was mentioning to her that I intend to eventually sail across the Atlantic to see what’s on the other side. Has Tim ever flown over the ocean?”
Their father thought for a moment. “Not far, I don’t think. You’d have to ask him to be sure. He flew me out over the island where I grew up one time, but I don’t know if he ever went any farther east than that.”
“And not since the electrical problems beyond the Outpost.”
“No, I doubt it,” their father said. “Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking about a story you told us once. You mentioned that you were lost in a fog when you tried to cross from the island back to the mainland, right?”
“Sure,” their father said. He took another bite of his dinner and eyed Jim while he chewed.
“You lost power then, correct?”
“Power, GPS, everything, even the compass wouldn’t work. The iss
ue seemed to come and go with the fog. Later, I found out that it was one of the phenomena listed by the government guys who took over Brad’s property. We had to assume that it came with the invasion.”
“But nobody thinks that the invasion was the cause of the loss of electricity beyond the Outpost,” Jim said.
Janelle wondered what her brother was up to. He seemed to be laying the groundwork for some thesis, but his line of conversation was mystifying to her, and based on the expression on their father’s face, he couldn’t seem to figure it out either.
“We turned back the second embryo,” their father said. “The first one was up in Maine. The second was near the old high school in Donnelly. If there was going to be a third, it would have come decades ago, according to the research that we pieced together.”
“During that whole thing, animals attacked you?” Jim asked.
Their father shrugged. “A couple of times, sure. It’s hard to believe even to this day, but some animals actually regenerated from nothing more than their fur.”
“From their fur? What do you mean?” Janelle asked.
“You know that taxidermy deer that your Uncle Brad found in that house on Pleasant Point?”
“Yeah,” Jim said.
“They were like those. There were a bunch of those in a store in Maine. We stopped on our way north and a bunch of taxidermy animals came to life and attacked us. When we killed them, they came back again. It was like they were being reformed from the DNA available. It was amazing and still somewhat unbelievable. I think that the…”
He trailed off.
“The what?” Janelle asked. “What were you going to say?”
With a sigh, he continued. “At that distance from the light, animals were regenerated by the force that was trying to impregnate the planet. If those animals had been alive, or even full corpses, during the first wave, I believe they would have been snatched up into the sky like everyone else. But because they were just skin, they weren’t snatched and they were reformed by the invading force.”
“Why did you stop so suddenly?” Janelle asked. “You thought of something that you had never thought of before, didn’t you?”
He looked sad when he finally nodded. “Yes. For the first time, I was thinking about the people who were buried in the cemeteries around Freeport at that time. I was wondering if maybe they came back as well. They could have been trapped underground.”
Janelle was sorry she had asked. Her father was conjuring a horrible image.
“But, maybe not. The people we were hauling north never really came back. They marched toward the light when they got close enough, but they never seemed to have any real consciousness. They weren’t like the bear or the wolves in the store.”
“So,” Jim said, “back to my point. It sounds like you already experienced lots of things that were really, really similar to what’s happening now.”
“Not really,” their father said immediately. “It was clear that the cause of those things came from some external source that needed to be dealt with. In fact, we surmised and eventually proved that the ability to deal with that invasion was already baked into our instincts.”
“You were younger than I am now when you dealt with all that.”
“For some of it.”
“But nobody stopped you from trying to fight it?”
“There wasn’t anyone to stop me,” their father said.
“In fact, they even followed your lead, right? Aunt Lisa said that you were almost like their unelected leader the whole time. You took over and had an idea of how to fix the problems when nobody else did, and then they all followed you.”
“No,” their father said. “Very few followed me, in fact. By the time we headed north, we barely had enough people to drive the sleds. There was me, Brad, Lisa, Romie, Ted, Sheila, Nate, Brynn, Pete, and Christine.”
“They all followed you?” Jim asked.
“Sure,” their father said. “If you want to think of it that way, then sure. It was my idea to take the dead mass north. I thought that if we could infuse the embryo before it was ready, then we might turn it away.”
“Like an ectopic pregnancy?” Janelle asked.
Her father glanced at her and then shook his head with the hint of a smile. “Sure.”
“Why do you think that people were willing to follow you?” Jim asked.
“We were simply a loose band of individuals, trying to figure out an impossible world, Jim. Everything changed all at once. Any one of us could have come up with those ideas and we would have considered them and maybe followed. I had established myself as trustworthy with a couple of people, notably Ted, and that trust grew.”
Jim smiled and nodded.
“I’m trustworthy, right?”
“You can be, Jim, sure. There are things that I would certainly trust you with.”
“And I’m old enough to have insights? I’m as old as you were when people depended on your insights.”
With a deep breath, it was clear that their father was going to cut him off. Jim’s ploy was now more than obvious.
“The difference is that you have a parent. I lost my parents so I was forced to go out on my own.”
“You’re saying that you didn’t have any insights—nothing to contribute—before my grandparents were taken?” Jim asked.
Janelle already knew the answer to that. She had heard the story from Brad at the same time that Jim had. Their Uncle Brad had told them once about how Robby had been shown the symbols in the cellar of their neighbor’s house so that he could figure out the code. It was clear from the story that their father’s intellect had been trusted even as the events of the apocalypse were unfolding.
Their father considered the direction of Jim’s argument and raised his eyebrows.
“You have a point. During that crisis, any good idea—even one from a thirteen year old—was considered. I will make more of an effort to listen to you and your sister.”
Jim was already smiling.
“However,” their father said, raising his voice. “Can you identify an important distinction between the interaction between me and your grandfather and what happened today?”
Jim thought about it. He wasn’t coming up with anything.
Janelle raised her hand and waited for her father’s gesture before she answered.
“Your ideas were solicited, but you didn’t act until you had agreement with your father,” she said.
Jim rolled his eyes. He clearly thought that she had sold him out.
“Exactly,” their father said. “Ideas are one thing. Actions are another. Had you come to me with the notion of fetching the inverter, we could have put together a team prepared to deal with what might be waiting above. You two imagined an artificial urgency and then used that to justify going out on your own. That’s why you’re going to finish your sentence of seclusion in this room.”
Jim sighed and flopped back on the bed. The weight of the next ten hours was pressing him down.
“I’m going to take a shower and a nap,” their father said. “If anyone needs to use the bathroom, do it now.”
Both of the kids shook their heads.
“Can you at least tell us how you locked the door?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” their father said. “In ten hours.”
Chapter 97: Brad
Brad was up on the hill when he heard the scream. Wesley heard it too and he jogged off across the field and then down the road. He came back a couple of minutes later.
“What did you find?” Brad asked while Wesley caught his breath.
The man shook his head. “Nothing. I heard the scream again, but I couldn’t tell which direction it came from precisely. Somewhere through that stand of trees over there. I don’t think it was a person.”
“Then what?”
Wesley shrugged. “Maybe a big cat? I don’t know.”
“Hey, guys?” a woman called from below.
Wesley helped Brad down the grassy hill. Once
he was back on flat ground, Brad was moving around fine with his cane. Everyone was congregating near the cement wall that held back the embankment. Sandy was pointing down at the ground while Hulk sniffed at the concrete.
“Yup, I can see them here, too,” Trish said. She was using a small flashlight to probe the shadows. The sun was setting. The urgency of the search was starting to feel panicked.
Brad approached while Dave got down on his hands and knees.
Romie turned and explained. “There are some footprints over there in the sand and it looks like the dirt here was rolled through by something on wheels. The tracks go right to the concrete wall and then mysteriously stop.”
“Here,” Trish said. She was pointing her flashlight at the wall. “There’s something shiny down in this crack. I think there’s metal in there.”
When Brad glanced over, Trish was moving the beam of her light over a big rectangular section of the wall, following a seam.
“This whole thing could be a door,” Trish said.
“It has to be,” Wesley said. “Right? Otherwise, where do the tracks go?”
Everyone took a step back to look at the concrete wall. Brad tried to imagine how it would open. The only thing he could figure was that it must lower down into the ground.
“Should we knock?” Romie asked.
The question broke the tension. Several people laughed and Linda rapped her knuckles against the concrete.
“Hello?” Linda called. Hulk tilted his head, as if he expected someone to answer.
“Okay, let’s get serious,” Trish said. “We have a lot of people and kids and it’s going to get dark soon. Anyone have a good idea of how we alert them to our presence?”
“They got in, right? Doesn’t that mean that we should be able to get in?” Romie asked.
“Not necessarily,” Wesley said.
Most everyone turned their attention to him.
“I’m just saying—it’s like when weird stuff started to happen to us. We barricaded ourselves into that storeroom. There’s a chance that the same thing went on here, right? Maybe they barricaded the door so we wouldn’t get in.”