by Ike Hamill
“Was that our world?” Tim asked.
Ashley raised her eyebrows and turned to look at him again.
“If we went back there, would we see the same things—the same places?”
“I think so,” Ashley said. I think it’s just as much a part of our world as what we see around us.
“But why?” Tim asked. “The language, the buildings, the plants, and the animals were all different. Even the geography was off. Why would that be so if it was all part of the normal world?”
Lisa laughed.
“What?” Tim asked.
“The normal world, Tim? What has been normal in our lifetimes? Are you talking about the few decades you lived before everyone vanished and the snow began to fall?”
“Yes,” Tim said. “We have recorded history that goes back thousands and thousands of years that tells us what normal means. I’m talking about that. Rivers don’t change course and we don’t find a flooded, foreign civilization where there used to be Texas. Is that where we were?”
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “I don’t think there’s a way of knowing. I think it might be right to say that we’re the foreign part.”
“Yes,” Lisa said. “That’s how I think of it. This little patch of land that we inhabit, from Gladstone to Donnelly to the Outpost, that circle of reality got transplanted into this place. Maybe it was during the initial invasion or maybe it was part of the churn. Regardless, something whooshed us away and here we are.”
Ashley looked through her window again. The world around them was all she had ever known. Somewhere, up in the sky, there were satellites. Maybe they were all dead now—finally worn out during the accelerated time. Those had shown her father something different from what Ashley had seen on the ground. In her bag, she had the evidence to prove it. She had the map that they had found beyond the Outpost and the satellite images that disagreed.
Once the thought crossed her mind, panic descended. What if the map wasn’t there? What if it had changed now that they had returned.
“Stop!” she said. “Stop the truck.”
Lisa looked at her like she was crazy. It wasn’t the first time.
Ashley tumbled through the door as soon as the vehicle came to a stop. She pulled her way frantically toward the bed of the truck, and then threw herself over the side to reach for her pack. It was half trapped under one of the bicycles. She grunted and tugged at it, trying to get the zipper close enough to open it.
Behind her, Tim was taking Penny out for a break. Lisa came around the truck.
“Hold on. Settle down,” Lisa said. “You’re going to rip it.”
“What if it’s not there?” Ashley asked, glancing up at Lisa. She must have seen the panic in Ashley’s eyes.
“Calm down, honey. Let me help.”
Lisa lowered the tailgate of the truck and pulled on the back wheel of the offending bike. It slid forward enough to free Ashley’s pack and she jerked it from the bed. With it on the ground, Ashley attacked the zipper and then dug for the papers that were loaded against the frame of the pack. Everything was sealed up in a plastic bag. It appeared to be all there, but Ashley wasn’t satisfied. She lowered herself to the road and pulled the bag into her lap, unsealing it carefully even though the need for waterproof plastic might be over.
It was all there—the map, the original satellite photos, and the journals. She had samples from the abandoned monkey kennel and she had notes from the extinct astronomers. It was all there. She could still understand some of the writing, too, so that meant that her knowledge was still intact as well.
Ashley sighed with relief. Lisa leaned over and put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, either way,” Lisa said.
“No, it’s okay because it’s all here. All the stuff that I learned and the stuff that I haven’t even figured out yet. I bet Dad can help me figure out the rest.”
“It’s okay, either way,” Lisa said again. “That was what we went to find out.”
“Aunt Lisa, what are you even talking about?”
She smiled down at Ashley and then put out a hand to help her up. Across a patch of high grass, Tim and Penny were at the edge of the woods. He had his back turned and was probably relieving himself against a tree. Penny was sniffing at something a dozen paces away.
“What happened to the people of the observatory?” Lisa asked.
Ashley shook her head. They had never found out.
Lisa smiled at her and raised her eyebrows. Ashley hadn’t even answered the question aloud, but Lisa had still rejected what Ashley would have said.
Ashley sighed and let herself give another answer. “In a different turn of the spool, we found them. They were underground a little ways away from the monkey house.”
“How were they?”
“Crazy,” Ashley said. “They had gone insane or something. They weren’t completely rabid, like the ones who stayed aboveground, but they were crazy nonetheless. They had been exposed too long before they found shelter. They killed…”
Ashley didn’t want to finish the sentence and Lisa didn’t make her. Instead, Lisa asked another question.
“Were they better off from hiding?”
“I guess that remains to be seen,” Ashley said.
“No!”
Ashley was startled by the force of that reply.
“You have seen it. Were they better off?”
Ashley looked off toward the horizon and thought about it. She thought about the best moments in her life. When she was a little kid, before her brother and sister were old enough to have their own opinions, her father would offer her the decision of what they would do in the afternoon. He would almost always give her two choices—something she loved and something new.
“Do you want to go fishing in the stream behind the bridge, or see if we can wade out to Turtle Island?” he might ask. On a hot summer day, nothing was better than spreading a blanket in the shadows on the bank of the stream and casting down into the deep pool near the bridge. Pulling a wriggling fish from the water and then bringing it home for dinner was one of the best feelings in the world. On the other hand, they had never waded out to Turtle Island before. Brad wouldn’t guide his boat close enough for them to explore—wading was going to be the only way out there.
Ashley tried to contrast those happy moments with the idea of hiding underground, waiting for the threat of madness to pass. That was not a life that she could endure for long.
Lisa was still waiting for an answer.
“No,” Ashley said. “I don’t think they were better off.”
“So, under no circumstance would you hide underground?”
Ashley looked away for a moment. It didn’t take her long to find her answer.
“I would, but only briefly,” Ashley said. “If a storm hits, of course we take shelter, but not indefinitely.”
“So, you would set a deadline?”
“Yes. Exactly,” Ashley said.
“So, you see?” Lisa asked. She gestured at the papers. “It’s okay, either way.”
Ashley looked down at the journal and then back up. She still couldn’t put together what Lisa was trying to say.
Lisa saw her confusion.
“You don’t need proof about what they found. You don’t need to convince anyone that the sun was dangerous and they needed to hide underground. Your decision should be based on how you want to live. Just because they did or didn’t survive, it doesn’t dictate the way that you should live.”
Ashley gripped the journal tighter. Lisa wasn’t seeing the whole picture. She wasn’t seeing that Ashley needed the evidence they had collected because it validated the whole trip. They had taken a giant risk by going out into the jungle, and the evidence that she was bringing back showed that there had been a purpose. Ashley needed it.
“Is he…” Lisa started to ask. She was looking toward Tim. Before she could finish her question, Tim turned and started to come back toward the truck. Penny saw him walking
and ran ahead, climbing in through the open door.
“What did you see out there?” Lisa asked.
“Nothing,” Tim said, shrugging. “Just trees. So many trees. Did you find your papers?”
Ashley nodded. She hugged them to her chest with one arm while she tossed her pack in back with the other.
When the truck finally ran dry of fuel, they were still making their way through Pennsylvania. The bicycles, decked out with saddle bags and racks to hold their packs, looked needlessly complex and cumbersome. Ashley looked at the hill ahead and thought about how difficult it was going to be to climb with the burdened bike. Riding from the Outpost to the cave had been difficult enough.
Lisa groaned as she tilted her bicycle and put her leg over it.
They all seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“What are our options?” Tim asked. “Maybe we can find some fuel that’s not totally sludge and strain it or something? Seems a shame to leave this perfectly good truck here.”
Ashley’s bike had the trailer attached. She had volunteered for the first shift at hauling Penny.
“I guess we could camp here and make the decision in the morning,” Ashley said. “Maybe we could do some scouting?”
Lisa didn’t even bother to weigh in. This was one time that Lisa didn’t allow their democracy to follow its process. She pushed her bike forward to get it rolling and then stood up on a wobbly pedal and began moving. Tim glanced at Ashley, shrugged, and then straddled his own bicycle. Ashley brought up the rear.
Weighed down, Ashley was going so slowly that Penny jumped out of the carrier and walked alongside as they climbed. The hill seemed to stretch forever. The afternoon sun was forming heatwaves on the pavement ahead. The insects and birds held their breath, barely making a sound, as Ashley started to pant and sweat. She reminded herself that Romie did this for fun. As old as she was, Romie would ride around Gladstone for hours, gravitating toward the biggest hills and only stopping if she found a house with an open front door. Romie couldn’t abide an open front door, even if the house was practically falling down. She said that they looked “untidy,” but the cautious way that she approached when she went to close them suggested that it was a phobia that made her want them closed.
Ashley paused at the top of the hill and caught her breath.
“Penny!” Tim said, pointing to the trailer. The dog obediently climbed back in. Ashley planned to take it easy on the first downhill so she could get a feel for how the trailer affected her braking. Instead, she ducked her head low to make herself aerodynamic, gathering as much speed as she could to carry her up the next slope.
By the second hill, Ashley already felt like she was finding her groove.
“I used to live west of here,” Tim said, pulling alongside her as they climbed.
“Oh yeah?”
“I had an apartment in Pittsburgh. It was a nice city before. Tornadoes took down a lot of it, and the rest always felt odd afterwards. All that heavy stone architecture seemed spooky with nobody around.”
Ashley nodded. Outside of Gladstone, there was a neighborhood of big houses made of heavy gray stone. They always felt cold and dead inside, even if the summer sun had been pouring in through the windows all day. Romie had always wanted to move into one, saying that places like that would be the last houses standing in a thousand years. Brad had disagreed, suggesting that just because they looked like castles didn’t mean they were built like them.
“I used to really enjoy living alone,” Tim said. “Until everyone else disappeared, I imagined that I would be perfectly happy in a solitary existence. Then, as soon as I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, I figured out that I pretty much had to go looking for others. Cedric and I were compelled to it.”
“Yeah?”
Ashley wanted him to keep talking. It was easier to listen to him than to her own breathing.
“Wait, then why did you move to the Outpost? Weren’t you the first one to go down there, like, all by yourself?” Ashley asked. She thought that maybe she was remembering it incorrectly. Someone had told her the story when she was little and she thought maybe she had confused the facts.
Tim didn’t answer for a minute.
“I thought…” Tim started. He collected himself and began again. “Have you ever had to settle for something and thought that you wouldn’t be able to do it?”
“I guess?”
“I had half of what I wanted,” Tim said. “Maybe a little more than half, but less than what I thought I could live with.”
He paused long enough that Ashley thought he might be done. Ahead of them, with less weight attached to her bike, Lisa was pulling ahead. On the downhill, Ashley had passed them both, racing ahead. Then, as soon as Ashley’s momentum had run out, Lisa had gone right by, slow and steady.
“Between you and me,” Tim said, “I thought I was in love, and I thought that he would never love me back in the same way. What I didn’t realize was that I could have been perfectly happy if I had stayed put and accepted what he could give, you know? I didn’t have to move away just because I wanted more. I could have just settled for what I had.”
“Yeah?” Ashley asked. She had never been good at settling either. It was easier for her to understand why Tim had fled in the face of that.
“I’m not sad that I moved to the Outpost. The community that we had there was important and I think we contributed a lot. If nothing else, it was a good place for people who didn’t feel like they could fulfill the mandate. Some were too old, and others just weren’t built that way—like me. I think it was good to have a place where people who weren’t equipped to have families could go without feeling ostracized by the mandate.”
“They could have stayed put. Corinna never had a family. Liam never did. Mike decided not to have kids, right?”
Tim thought about that. “You’re right. There were others, though, too. For every Mike and Corinna, there were some people who couldn’t handle the pressure of trying to rebuild our society. I’m sad to say that a lot of them took a different way out. I think that if the Outpost hadn’t existed, there would have been more.”
People didn’t talk about it much, but Ashley had heard stories. Before she was born, if someone had a bad injury or had come down with an illness that couldn’t be diagnosed, they often went off on their own. In school, one of the younger kids had claimed that there was one place, up in New Hampshire, where all the people who wandered off had gone. Supposedly, there was a big barn out back. Instead of being packed with hay for the winter, the barn was filled with nooses hanging from the big timbers. Each noose held a person who felt like they couldn’t cope with the burden of living in the world after the churn.
“You realized that you didn’t have to stay away though?” Ashley asked.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “I know what you’re thinking—after I had my big epiphany about being able to settle for what I had, why didn’t I return to Donnelly?”
“Yeah.”
“The simplest answer is that I didn’t really come to that conclusion—I mean, really believe it deep down—until I was alone out there in the jungle. Before you and Penny and Lisa came along, I was going a little crazy. I thought I would never see a human face again. That’s when I realized that I should have been treasuring as much as I had and not pining for more.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a strange thing,” Tim said. “You can tell yourself something over and over and still not believe it. Then, when you’ve finally eliminated all the other noise, you realize that you’ve been able to hear it all along. I’m mixing metaphors. Do you have any idea what I’m trying to say?”
“There’s a difference between knowing and believing?”
“Exactly. That’s very succinct.”
Up ahead, Lisa had stopped at the top of the hill.
Ashley’s bike wobbled a little and she bore down hard on the pedals to get a tiny bit more speed.
“We can switch bikes for the next hill,�
� Tim said.
“That’s okay. I can manage.”
Ashley woke up to the gentle sound of a brook. They had camped next to the stream and feasted on bread made in a cave, hundreds of miles south. Ashley had fallen asleep while translating the parts of the journal. It was getting easier and easier as her brain put together connections between the strange symbols and the things that she had seen. The journal’s sketches guided her understanding.
Lisa began to push herself up, groaned and then began her second effort.
“All that walking,” Lisa said. “You would think that some of those muscles would be useful in biking, but I’m sore in places I didn’t know that I…”
Lisa froze and her eyes went wide. She turned slowly to look at Ashley.
It wasn’t until she lifted her head off her arm that she heard what had spooked Lisa. There was a soft scratching sound, like fingernails on nylon.
“They’re here, too,” Lisa whispered.
They heard the low whine of Penny.
Ashly wriggled out of her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent while Lisa grabbed her hands and tried to hold her back. Ashley’s head was already out of the tent. She didn’t see anything out there, so she pulled free from Lisa’s grip and climbed out.
“Penny?” Ashley whispered.
Tim’s tent shook and the dog scrabbled her claws against the nylon again. Penny yipped once.
Ashley moved quickly to Tim’s tent and hesitated a fraction of a second before she unzipped it. She tried to brace herself for what she might find inside. An image of Tim’s lifeless body flashed in her imagination. With that expectation, she opened the flap.
Penny’s nose slipped into her hand. Aside from the dog and a sleeping bag, the tent was empty.
Ashley let out a relieved sigh and then opened the flap the rest of the way so Penny could get out. Lisa was still framed in the door of their own tent, watching nervously.