by Ike Hamill
“That tree…” Tim said.
Ashley and Lisa followed him as he rushed to the fence and climbed over one of the downed sections. He didn’t stop until he laid his hand on the bark of a tree.
“How long?” he asked, turning back to them.
Ashley and Lisa glanced at each other, not knowing how to answer.
“How long would it take for a sapling to grow into this?” he asked.
Ashley tilted her head and regarded the tree with fresh eyes.
“Three or four years?” she eventually said.
“Impossible,” Tim said. “This spot was planted right before we left. How could we have been gone that long?”
Lisa circled where the two of them stood. She looked down at what Penny was sniffing at.
“It’s worse than that,” Lisa said.
“How so?” Tim asked.
Lisa pointed at a log several feet behind Tim.
“The tree you’re looking at wasn’t planted. That one was though.”
The rotted log was a part of a tree that had grown, matured, and fallen. The tree that Tim thought was planted was likely from fruit that had dropped.
“No,” Tim said.
Once Lisa saw that first clue, she began to see the remnants of other trees around. The garden looked like it had been abandoned for at least a decade, not just a year or two. Tim struggled to deal with what he was seeing. Ashley’s eyes lost focus. She began to talk quietly to herself.
“Everything must have moved faster back here,” Ashley whispered. “Or just slower for us. Does it matter which? Pick one as a reference and they moved at different speeds.”
“What do we do?” Tim asked. “What do we do now? Do we go back into the jungle? Would that make it right again?”
Ashley shook her head. “Doubtful. Everything moves forward. Apparently, it moves forward at different rates. I don’t think there’s anything to do about it. Where is that cellar?”
Tim pointed and he and Ashley began to head that direction. Lisa was slow to follow. She could picture what they might find. If the madness had really gone through the Outpost, the people could have figured out to hide underground, but what would that mean now? By now, they must have either fled or run out of supplies. In the best scenario, they would find the place empty. In the worst…
“Hey, guys?” Lisa called. She jogged after them to catch up.
“What’s up?” Ashley asked.
“Let’s not check the cellar, okay?”
“Why not? It will give us the best picture of what happened to everyone,” Tim said.
Lisa didn’t say anything, hoping he would come to the same conclusion on his own.
He still looked perplexed.
“Maybe we just leave this mystery as a mystery?” Lisa suggested.
“Then what?” Ashley asked.
Lisa didn’t know what to say, but Ashley pressed on.
“Let’s say we find out that ten years have passed, maybe twenty. Will any of the vehicles still work? Probably not, right? Will anyone still be alive?”
“So we keep moving,” Lisa suggested.
“And what are the odds that the Outpost has died but the other settlements are fine?” Ashley asked.
Lisa’s heart sank in her chest. She honestly hadn’t thought of that. The Outpost was remote. She honestly hadn’t connected the fate of it to what must have happened back at home. Suddenly, she needed to sit down. She pictured Romie as an old woman and then quickly updated the mental image. It was more likely that Romie was dead. That was too much for her.
Tim grabbed her elbow to steady her.
“We need to figure this out,” Ashley said.
Lisa waited, slumped against the wall of the building in the shade. Penny came to sit next to her. The dog had tried to follow Tim inside, but he had ordered her to stay out. Apparently, there was too much damage inside the building and Tim had feared that her paws might be cut by the glass and metal.
Lisa almost renewed her objections, but kept her mouth shut. Ashley was coming to grips with what was happening and needed to see things with her own eyes. That much was clear.
Their footsteps preceded them. Tim and Ashley didn’t say a word until they were back out in the sunlight.
“Bad news and good,” Ashley said. She held up a jar with a metal top.
Lisa took it. The color of the fruit inside still looked okay, but the lid was bulging a little. With any spring to a metal lid, the contents were not going to be any good.
“This has gone bad. What’s the good news?” Lisa asked.
“There weren’t very many down there,” Ashley said.
“And no empties,” Tim added.
“So, nobody took shelter here. They must have loaded up the supplies and headed somewhere else,” Ashley said.
Lisa shook her head. “I’m still not hearing the good part.”
Ashley pointed to the jar. “Those preserves are bad, but they’re not very bad. I wouldn’t say that they’ve been spoiled more than a few months.”
“So someone has been here?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t think so,” Tim said, putting up his finger. “My theory is that the reason that jar was left behind was because it was already bad when people evacuated.”
“I have no idea how that’s possible,” Lisa said. “How can this place have been abandoned for so long but this jar was only left behind months ago?”
Tim and Ashley looked at each other.
“We don’t have a theory for that, but it seems like good news,” Ashley said.
Lisa sighed. A true optimist could only be disappointed. Ashley was forever an optimist.
“In the morning, we’re going to head north,” Ashley said. “Tim knows about a place.”
“It’s an old cave that we talked about stocking as a shelter,” he said.
“Why don’t we leave now?” Lisa asked. She glanced around the abandoned garden and thought about how the place would look at night. This was a ghost town. They might find a soft bed somewhere in one of the buildings, but all she would be thinking about would be the mummified skeletons they had found in the town hall. The worst part was the skeleton hand that had found its way through the door. That hand might have been trying to escape the building for years. What if it found new energy now that they were in town?
“I want to check out the network,” Ashley said. “If the solar panels are still intact, I want to leave this place in working order.”
Tim read the concern on Lisa’s face. He added, “One night, Lisa. We can stay together in the old lab.”
Lisa regarded them and realized that they wouldn’t be talked out of it.
“Fine.”
Chapter 103: Robby
Robby looked to his kids. As bored as they were, they were behaving quite well. Janelle had her book and Jim had invented a game where he tossed an old coin toward a wall to see how close he could get it. At least he claimed to have invented it. Brad said that he had seen it in an old movie.
They were waiting at Robby’s insistence for the voice to speak again. Since it mentioned the Center, the voice hadn’t spoken a word.
Robby tried again. “Can you tell us why you’re afraid of her?”
Brad repeated the question, whispering it. He looked half asleep, leaning against the wall. They didn’t have any evidence that the hissing voice would respond any better to Brad, but it was worth a shot.
After a full minute of silence, Robby sighed, turning the problem over in his head. He was approaching the thing wrong. It had information that he needed, but it had no interest in sharing that information. He had to find something that interested the voice so he could start a conversation.
“Science is gone above. Do you realize that?” Robby asked.
Brad gave him a funny look, wondering what he was up to.
“Causality, the bedrock of science, doesn’t seem to be operative anymore.”
Robby wasn’t certain, but thought he heard a brief whisper of sou
nd. Janelle looked up from her book and Robby knew that he must have gotten the thing’s attention.
“Electrons don’t flow like they should,” Robby said. “In some areas, at least. Water molecules don’t bounce off of each other like they should. It’s possible that some of these strange phenomena will work their way underground eventually, depending on what they’re caused by.”
Robby laughed at himself.
“I’m still doing it,” he said, looking up at the winding staircases. “It’s so entrenched in my head that I’m still looking for a cause to all this. As I said, it’s pretty clear above that causality is over, but it’s so burned into my head that I still think of the world that way.”
The rush of sound came faster and louder this time. It almost sounded like it was going to form into a word and then it faded away. Jim stopped throwing his coin. He looked between Brad and Robby.
“There are other paradigms we might view the world through in the future. Maybe we have to go back to magic,” Robby said. “Although, I would still tend to think of that in terms of cause and effect, if I’m honest. Spells, incantations, and potions were all supposed to work on the mystical forces that control the world, right? Or am I merely putting a modern spin on it?”
Robby looked too Brad.
“I don’t think so,” Brad said. “I mean, you took a potion or recited a spell in order to achieve some goal, right? That’s the same thing as science, except nobody was all that concerned about the underlying mechanism, it seems.”
“So, maybe that’s not the right paradigm,” Robby said. “Maybe we just have to accept that nothing will make sense from here on out. Just because something worked yesterday, or even an hour ago, doesn’t mean that it will ever work again. We’ll just have to play everything by ear.”
The hissing swelled.
This time, it shaped into a single word.
“No.”
Brad sat up straight, shaking off his fatigue. There was a smile in the corners of his eyes even though his voice sounded perfectly serious.
“I think you’re right, Robby. Fortunately, as adaptable as people are, we’re going to be fine. I suppose we’ll have to cast off all the technology from the past century. Nothing more advanced than a water wheel to grind wheat, you know?”
“Even that might be questionable,” Robby said. “The laws of physics are currently broken.”
“Huh,” Brad said, putting a hand to his chin.
“No,” the voice said, a little more forcefully this time. The whispering almost sounded like it was coming on a wind. “Physical laws are a constant. She can’t change those.”
Robby replied to the voice directly.
“She doesn’t have anything to do with it. Her place, deeper underground, is likely going to remain safe. This area will probably be affected, but that’s no concern of hers.”
“No,” the voice whispered. “I’ll take her place if that’s true.”
“I don’t know,” Robby said. “The change might happen so quickly that you don’t have the opportunity to try to trade places. And, like you said, you’re afraid to be alone with her.”
“I’m not afraid,” the voice said. To Robby, it sounded like a whispering child, scared of the dark. He remembered what that felt like. Sometimes, waking up to a dark room, the fear still gripped him.
“Tell us why you don’t want to be alone with her,” Robby said.
“Why?”
“Maybe it’s something we can help with.”
The voice went silent again. Robby was afraid for a moment that he had scared it away. Or, his offer had been too forward and the voice was punishing him for it.
The hissing came back.
“She talks all the time to fill the silence. Without any other voices, she talks to keep herself from going mad. But she is already mad. Alone with her, I’ll go crazy before too long as well.”
“So she wants us to stay here? Forever?” Robby asked.
“Forever,” the whispering voice agreed.
“What happened to the people who were here before?” Robby asked.
There was no response.
“There were people here that Merle took outside on the elevator. What happened to them? How did they die?”
He had given up on getting an answer when the hissing finally started again.
Reluctantly, the voice said, “They tried to deactivate her, so she deactivated them.”
Robby went and sat next to Brad.
Chapter 104: Lisa
While Ashley worked, Tim and Lisa collected food. In a fallow field behind the big house, they found a patch of potatoes that had seeded and reseeded itself over the years. The plants had expanded to cover a manure pit and were fighting against an explosion of weeds that had claimed the rest of the garden.
In the old orchard, they found grapes and pears. Waiting for them below their ladders, Penny managed to surprise a gang of turkeys and returned with a limp hen in her smiling mouth. Lisa plucked it and Tim told Penny that she would have to wait for it to be cooked before she could have her share of the meat.
They returned to the roof of the post office to find Ashley still pulling fresh wires.
“The batteries are cooked, of course,” she said. “This station is only going to work during sunlight, but it’s set up to gather messages and hold onto them for as long as there is power.”
Lisa had no knowledge of the machines, and didn’t care to learn. Tim took time to at least listen closely to what Ashley was talking about. In the end, they agreed that the setup was better than nothing.
“I still have a couple of hours of work here,” Ashley said. “I’ll meet you guys back at the lab when I’m done?”
They had agreed that they would sleep in the lab overnight. Without saying why he thought it was important, Tim had mentioned that it had a big, windowless room with heavy doors. Lisa had agreed immediately that it was the right place to camp.
“No,” Lisa said, looking at the setting sun. “We’ll all stay here. We can make a cook fire below and bring you up dinner.”
“Yes,” Tim agreed.
Ashley only shrugged and returned to her work. She was too preoccupied to read any of the subtext. Lisa and Tim went below to begin collecting wood for the fire. Lisa had an armload of sticks. She dropped them onto the pile. The big maple trees near the library had shed all kinds of brittle branches that were easy to gather.
“She’s going to try to talk you out of leaving right away,” Tim said.
“Oh?”
“She thinks that she can conjure up a decent battery from the supplies in the lab. I bet she brings that up tonight or in the morning.”
“We can’t stay here,” Lisa said. “This place is dead. I don’t like it.”
Tim didn’t reply. He knelt to make a ball of some dried grass and stuffed it under the kindling.
“What about you?” Lisa asked.
He looked up. “I think it might be safe and it might not. We have to find out what happened to the rest of the people before we’ll know.”
Lisa took a long look around. The windows of the buildings were black, hiding deep secrets in their shadows. They had been in several that afternoon and hadn’t found any more mummies, but that was worse than if they had found them. At least she was pretty sure that the mummies had been in the same positions for years and years, instead of walking around restlessly. She had seen the dead rise up and walk before, and it wasn’t something that she wanted to see again.
“Lisa?” Tim asked.
“Huh?”
“Do you need to hum again?”
“Sorry?”
“You’re staring off at nothing again. The humming always seems to bring you back. Do you want to hum again.”
He was looking up at her and holding his hands over the flames as they started to catch the bigger sticks. Usually, the fire was a comfort. It brought a little circle of safety to the darkness. Tonight, Lisa was afraid that it might be more of a beacon, announci
ng their presence and calling something in from the woods.
“Maybe it was a mistake to build the fire here, out in the open.”
“No,” Tim said. “Fire scares the bad things away. It has always been true.”
“I suppose.”
Lisa jumped at the sound of Ashley’s voice behind her.
“Dinner ready yet? I’m starved.”
They walked back to the lab with the aid of their flashlights. The moon was still a thin curve and it had set soon after the sun. Tim and Ashley kept their lights pointed straight ahead. Lisa let her beam roam, reflecting off of windows and probing the shadows whenever she could.
“Running water at the lab,” Tim said.
“Oh yeah?” Ashley asked.
“Should be. It’s fed from a tank on the roof. Actually, two tanks. One of them has a system to circulate the water to be heated by the sun. It might still be working.”
“That’s right,” Ashley said. “I read the paper about that. It has a mechanical thermostat, right? Keeps the water to within a few degrees?”
“No idea,” Tim said, laughing. “I never tried to really understand it.”
“If it still works, I’m taking a shower,” Ashley said.
Tim reached the door first. When they had dropped off their packs earlier, the building had immediately won Lisa over. Everything was perfectly in order inside. There were no broken windows or unexplained stains on the floor. The rushed evacuation had not impacted the building whatsoever. In the dark, the sterile neatness of the place wasn’t quite as charming. She darted her flashlight around, trying to see into every dark corner.
Between two counters, Lisa and Ashley unrolled their sleeping bags. Tim and Penny set up on the other side of the room.
Lisa sat down on the floor, lowering herself with one hand on the sturdy counter.
“You want me to find you a cot?” Ashley said. “Tim said that they stashed some at the middle school. It’s a short walk.”
“No,” Lisa said. “We’ve been sleeping on roots and rocks for all this time. I think I can handle one night on tile. At least it’s flat.”
“At least take this blanket. I don’t need it. I’ll probably be hot.”