by Ike Hamill
She fell in beside him and they ran again.
The door to the barracks was open and they sprinted down the length. In places, partitions were drawn. In others, Ashley could see the beds. A couple of people lounged, looking up with surprise at the two of them. Down at the end, a dog with a brown face and white chest jumped up. It stood in their path, wagging furiously.
Ashley ran right by the dog when she saw her father’s back. She would have recognized him from any distance.
“Dad!” she yelled, throwing her arms around him from behind.
“Ashley?”
At the sound of his voice, the strength went out of her. She slumped and he spun to hold her up.
“Oh, Ashley! I can’t believe it’s you.”
Vaguely, she heard a mechanical sound and then more people were joining the hug. Ashley saw Brad and Romie. They looked older but they were still the same. It was her sister and brother who were the biggest surprise. They emerged from behind partitions and rushed to the cluster. Jim was as tall as Ashley and Janelle wasn’t far behind. They looked so different—she wouldn’t have believed it was really them except they were still there when she wiped the tears from her eyes.
“Where have you been?” Romie asked.
“Everywhere,” Ashley said. “We went everywhere.”
With that thought, she remembered her priorities. “Oh! We have to go open the door for Lisa and Tim and Corinna and Penny.”
Romie took her face gently with both hands.
“Lisa?”
The conference with her father was fast. Ashley explained that she had come through the hatch alone and was supposed to let the others in near the overpass. He understood immediately but told her that access to that area was blocked.
“I might be able to get access. I have codes,” she said. “They’re in the journal.”
She explained where she had dropped the journal and her father came up with a quick plan.
“We’ll get the journal, and then see if we can open the hatch. If we can’t, we’ll head toward the exit.”
Ashley nodded. She didn’t care what approach they took, as long as they stayed together. She didn’t have to argue the point. Everyone moved as a group down the length of the barracks. People waved and told her that it was good to see her. Ashley smiled and waved, taking none of it in. She felt like she was one step away from finally finishing her mission, and she wanted it done.
They were met in the hallway by Liam, and he joined their group.
“Mike said you left your post,” Liam said to Merle. “I never figured that it would be because of this.”
Merle smiled and put an arm around him.
Ashley wished they could run—she was full of nervous energy—but Romie and Brad were barely keeping up as it was.
They went through the passage, were encouraged by more applause in the cafeteria, and then Merle let them into the control room once more. Ashley saw her papers and maps. She gathered them as she explained.
“We found the observatory, and that’s where I found the journal. I dropped it in the pit,” she said.
Her father nodded. Even though she hadn’t shared all the details with him yet, she could tell that he had already figured out the most important parts. At least it seemed like he had. When she was a little kid, she used to believe that her father could read people’s minds. It wasn’t until she was a teenager, and had a few insights of her own, that she found out that his skill was actually more profound than that. Her father had the ability to put himself in someone else’s place with such precision that he could actually think like the other person. He didn’t have to read their minds—he could figure out even the thoughts that they wouldn’t admit to themselves.
Later, she decided that he wasn’t quite as omniscient as she had thought. He was definitely easy to communicate with though because he really listened. Other people might pick up half of what she intended. Her father never got less than a hundred percent of her meaning.
“You’re going to have to open this door,” Merle said to her. “It has been locked for us for a year.”
He demonstrated by reaching out to try to swipe the door to the side. It didn’t budge.
Ashley smiled and went forward. She knocked near the seam to the door and put up a hand to ask everyone to be quiet so she could listen for the response.
Their eyes went wide at the mechanical response from inside the wall. She counted off the answering knocks and calculated her reply.
Taking a deep breath, she hoped that the formula was the same for this door. There had been mention of other patterns in the journal, but that journal was locked on the other side.
Everyone smiled as the door slid to the side.
Janelle clapped for her.
Ashley turned to the side and gestured. They all moved through.
Merle went first and seemed to remember exactly where he was going, even after being restricted from those halls for so long. Ashley was surprised when he took a right and led them out to an easier way to the big room with the slitted walls. The trapdoor was on the other side, but it had reset itself.
“There’s a trapdoor there and I dropped the journal in the pit,” she said.
Merle was already headed toward it. Inching along the wall, he triggered the door with his foot and then dropped to the edge.
“Careful,” Ashley said. She imagined that there might be something waiting down there for any unfortunate people who might fall in.
Merle ignored her and dropped to the floor. Her journal flew up from inside the pit and then Merle’s fingers appeared over the edge. He wasn’t graceful about it, but a moment later he was able to pull himself up and throw a leg over the edge and roll up onto the floor. Jim moved forward, craning his neck and looking like he wanted to try. Their father put an arm on his shoulder, restraining him.
“We just have to squeeze around the edge to get to the ramp,” Merle said. With a light hop, he was over. He reached his hand back and helped them around the corner one by one.
“I’ve done worse,” Romie said, but she took his hand anyway.
They waited for Merle to take the lead again and walk them up the ramp.
Ashley flipped the journal to the appropriate page and showed her father.
“That’s the same symbology as the menus on the control system,” he said. “But you must have noticed that.”
Ashley nodded. “This is the part where it talks about how to authenticate. This is the pattern that I used to open the door back there.”
“You’re going to have to read it to me,” her father said. “I only know some of those characters. Wait, does this one mean knock?”
She smiled—it was easy to see that he was already picking it up. Together, they would be able to figure out the whole thing in time. Ashley’s heart flooded with warmth again. It still seemed beyond possible that she was back with her family. As soon as Lisa was there, they would be complete.
“It’s a good thing we came this direction,” her father said. “It looks like the process might be different on the other side.”
He was pointing to another passage of the journal. Ashley figured it out as soon as she saw it again. It did look like the instructions were different for the exit.
“I’ll show you the panel,” Merle said. “But the last time we were here, it wouldn’t let us out.”
He put his hand against the wall and a display lit up.
Romie had put herself in charge of watching the clock. It always happened that way at home, too. Together, Ashley and her father could spend hours and hours working on a problem. They would lose track of time and keep each other going. Whenever she got frustrated and wanted to quit, her father would offer another perspective that made her think about things differently. She liked to think that she had the ability to do the same for him.
When they added Brad into the mix, a problem could consume them for days. Brad was always tenacious about trying every combination of an idea and returning t
o things that hadn’t worked earlier. Sometimes, Ashley and her father would be convinced that a path was a dead end, but Brad would find a way to resurrect the idea to make it work.
Romie was the timekeeper. She was the one who made sure that they didn’t lose themselves.
“Ashley, how long did you say that Lisa was going to wait for you?”
“We… Uh… We didn’t talk about it,” Ashley said.
“You didn’t talk about how long they were going to wait for you to move through the entire bunker?”
Ashley shook her head.
“How could they let you go in without a plan?” Romie asked.
“Tim said they were going to force the door open after a minute if I didn’t come out.”
“Ha!” Merle laughed. He rolled his eyes and said, “You couldn’t force these doors open if you tried. Believe me, we’ve tried.”
“Well,” Romie said, “this isn’t working. And, like Merle said, you can’t force it to work. Let’s move to the other side and see if you can get us to the stairwell. If you can do that, maybe our whispering friend will help us.”
Ashley wanted to ask what she meant, but she was too distracted by what her father was doing on the display. The journal was somewhat clear about what they should expect for controls, but the item they needed to press was missing. Her father kept saying that it wasn’t the right time.
“Dad? Can you explain what you mean about time?” Ashley asked.
Janelle was sitting against the wall, reading a folded-over paperback. She had grown, but apparently some things hadn’t changed.
“Imagine the hands of a clock,” Janelle said. “The things they obscure are still there, but you won’t know it at the time.”
Ashley tilted her head, trying to figure it out.
Jim smiled, like he was pleased by her confusion. “The Center is not transparent.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Ashley asked.
Merle waved his hands dismissively. “Don’t ask. Even when they try to explain it, nothing makes sense.”
Ashley turned to her father.
“It’s somewhat of a mystery,” he said. “The menus change over time. Options are subtracted but sometimes they come back in different ways. If I had to guess, I would say that this hatch is not going to be accessible at this time. Later, we might have more luck, but the definition of access might also shift.”
“That doesn’t clear anything up,” Ashley said.
Brad nodded sympathetically.
Romie began to herd them back down the ramp. Ashley hated to leave the puzzle unsolved.
As they walked, her father had his nose in the journal. He moved with the group even though his attention was focused. She wanted to confer with him over the symbols, but Brad put a question to her.
“What happened with the moon?”
“When we got to the observatory and found the research there, we discovered that the people of that… realm, I guess? The people of that realm had been studying the phenomena of the red spots on the moon and planets. The red spots weren’t a property of the light that was being cast on them, but a response of the matter of those objects to that light. You know what I mean?”
Brad paused as he thought about it. The rest of the group had already moved back into the control room. Romie was holding the door for them, looking impatient, so Ashley guided Brad forward while he thought.
“Like it was making the matter phosphoresce?” Brad asked.
“Yes, I think so. I think that if you had been able to go there, you would have seen that the dust on the moon had physically changed in response to the light that the sun was casting. That change was making it appear red. But, by the same token, if you had moved some distance away from Earth…”
“We would have been red too,” Brad said, completing her thought.
“Right, but not entirely, and only from that other frame of reference.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding.
“Ashley?” her father called.
She patted Brad’s arm and rushed ahead to catch up with her father. He was holding the journal upside down, reading a note there.
“Does this mean what I think it means?”
She blinked and tried to figure out what it said. It came to her in a flash.
“Oh! Yes. There were violent incidents and they set up an experiment in order to monitor if the violence was still happening.”
He nodded. “There were problems in Gladstone, too. Fortunately, we managed to get people underground here before anything broke out. So, then this section talks about the exit?”
Ashley read it again to confirm and then she nodded.
“I hope it’s not complicated by our friend,” her father said.
Ashley wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but she knew that he would tell her when the time was right.
“Merle,” her father said. “Can you go grab Liam and meet us at the door to the utility room?”
Merle nodded and ran off as he went through the door to the cafeteria. The smell of cooking food made Ashley’s stomach rumble. It smelled better than anything she had eaten in a long time. There would be time to eat later though. She pictured sitting down at a big table, like the one from their dining room in Gladstone. The last time they had all been together, she had wanted nothing more than to have the freedom to leave and go off on her own. Now, she couldn’t imagine anything better than being back at that place.
Jim was in the lead now, walking confidently down the corridor. Janelle was walking with Romie.
A stray thought occurred to Ashley. “Dad? How come you’re all here? What did you say happened in Gladstone?”
He shook his head and sadness flashed across his eyes.
“Most people are okay. We lost a few. There’s time to talk about it later.”
“Are we going back there though? Are we going home after this?”
“Maybe,” he said. She saw his eyes move between Jim and Janelle. “Probably, now that you’re back. We’re going to have to rebuild. There is going to be a lot of damage.”
“And the house blew up,” Brad said.
“It blew up?” Ashley asked, blinking.
Brad nodded. “A bit. The kitchen blew up. It didn’t burn down or anything though—not that we know of.”
“I guess it wouldn’t be realistic to assume that everything would be the same after so many decades,” Ashley said.
“Decades?” her father asked.
“Yeah,” Ashley said. It occurred to her that she couldn’t remember exactly how much she had told them. “The sun stopped and a lot of years passed while I was out beyond the Outpost. You guys had a couple of years? Is that right? But out in the sun it was decades.”
Her father stopped in his tracks.
“But… Corinna? You said she’s okay?”
Ashley swallowed, looking at the sorrow in his eyes.
“She’s okay. She’s old, but she’s… She’s okay.”
“She was alone all that time?”
Ashley nodded.
Her father dropped his head.
Brad moved to his side and put a hand on his shoulder.
“She volunteered, Robby,” he said. “Don’t forget that. She wanted to help and she insisted that it was the best way that she could help.”
“She did help,” Ashley said. “She showed the people of the Outpost how to get around so that they could get supplies. They said that without her help, they might not have survived.”
Her father began to move again, but slowly. Eventually collecting himself, he raised his head again.
“It’s okay, Dad. She’s okay,” Ashley said.
He nodded.
Up ahead, Jim reached the end of the hallway first. He stopped at the door and tried to swipe it repeatedly before looking back to his father.
“Can I try the knock?” he asked.
“Let your sister do it. It’s different on this side.”
Her father handed the journal back
to Ashley. She noticed that he had it open to the section that talked about the exit. Documented in the journal was the tale of how some of the scientists had gone off to find shelter. At the time, none of them had known if it was going to protect them from the madness that seemed to be coming from the sun. They had gone into the bunker near the monkey house and scouted out everything before returning to the observatory. Those people had possessed some sort of documentation that they referred to. Ashley didn’t have the bunker manual—it was probably down in the bunker with the rest of the scientists. All she had was the part that had been transcribed and left in the journal.
“Ashley?” her father asked. She was going to tell him about how her brain still had memories of things that hadn’t happened. In one version of the past, she had gone back to the monkey house and then discovered the bunker where the people from the observatory had fled. She could almost remember what had happened next.
They all turned at the sound of running feet.
Merle was coming around the corner. Close on his heels, Liam came too. When they reached the group, Liam doubled over and panted to catch his breath. Ashley hadn’t seen him in a long time—he actually looked better than he had before. He was more fit and his eyes didn’t have that hollow, sad look that she remembered.
“Ashley!” he said when he noticed here.
She smiled at him.
“You’re here to get us out?”
“I hope so.”
She turned back to the door.
Chapter 114: Lisa
“The road will be faster, now that we know where we’re going,” Tim said.
Lisa looked to Corinna to make sure that she concurred. Tim’s idea made sense, but they would be foolish to not consult Corinna. She might be a little disconnected from reality, but she had lived for years in this world and she was still alive.
Corinna only shrugged when she saw that they were both looking at her.
Penny was looking off at the woods. She wasn’t growling yet, but the hair was beginning to rise on her back. There was something over there that Penny didn’t like. That opinion was as good as Corinna’s, as far as Lisa was concerned.