“Ah, you know—the same,” she said. “Ananda’s still assembling answers to the great mysteries. Robbie and Touré bring her new material all the time, now that Touré can move around on that leg. I think they’re working on some secret project—it’s hard to tell with them.”
“Secret project?”
“Or something. Touré won’t talk about it, which for him is . . . I mean, you know how he is. He’s excited about it, I can tell you that. I’m not going to press him on it. I think those two just need this to be an adventure in order to keep moving. Touré does, anyway.”
Paul nodded. He didn’t quite get Touré. The kid came off as weirdly juvenile at times that didn’t call for that kind of attitude, which Paul just found off-putting. But Paul had enormous respect for Win, and she talked about Touré as if describing a different person entirely.
He had a higher opinion of Robbie, who was the closest this odd little collection of survivors had to a leader. What was interesting was that everybody seemed to know this except for Robbie.
“So they’re off keeping each other sane,” Win said, “and that’s fine. Carol’s doing her own thing a lot of the time too. She found a library with books in Braille. I don’t know what she’s teaching herself. Bethany, we don’t see her for days sometimes.”
“She can take care of herself, that one,” Paul said.
“Well, you let her keep a gun. I’m sure she thinksshe can.”
Bethany had asked to keep it, and Paul had agreed on the condition that he give her some training first. Not everyone liked this decision; Bethany had already fired the gun once when she’d gotten spooked by something that wasn’t there. Nobody wanted to be nearby the next time that happened, especially if it was one of them instead of a shadow.
Let the moody teen be the one to carry around the deadly weapon just seemed like bad company policy. Paul could see that. But nobody really felt comfortable telling Paul he couldn’t do it—their governing structure consisted of the occasional vote during the occasional meeting, and gun distribution was never brought up—so Bethany got to keep the handgun.
He wasn’t worried. He’d trained many kids her age and younger on proper gun use. Some of them were too eager and not interested in paying attention to the part about safety. Those kids got sent home with advice to the parents to give their child another year or two to mature. Bethany wasn’t one of those.
“She’ll be fine,” Paul said. “I’d be more worried if Touré was the one who wandered off on his own for a spell.”
Win laughed. “Yeah, so would I. How’s Elton?”
“Well, speaking of wandering off on his own, that horse doesn’t care for fences or barns. He seems to forage for himself okay, and he comes back at a whistle if he’s in earshot. Everybody leaves him be out here. He’s closed up in a barn down that way, just for the night. Didn’t feel like spending another couple of days out here waiting for him to show up again. Although now you’re here; he’d probably turn up for you.”
“I think he’s sweet on me,” she said. “You ready to come back?”
“I enjoy the solitude as much as the next guy, but I think I’ve had my fill for a while, yeah.”
It was a month before Paul could walk around well enough for them to seriously consider the plan that was now in play: sending him back off into the wilderness for the winter to hunt game and keep an eye on Elton. During that time, Win was the only human Paul interacted with. It wasn’t all that different from when he lived on the mountain, except back then his isolation was easy enough to break whenever he felt like it. And there was always Sunday. This felt more like exile.
He also no longer knew when Sunday was. Once he realized he’d lost track of that, he just designated one particular day as Sunday, celebrated it as such (albeit alone, as nobody else seemed interested) every seven days, and was mostly okay with that. It troubled him a little that he might be honoring the Lord’s Day on a Tuesday, but since the Lord was being pissy with him anyway, he figured it didn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme.
“Oh, hey,” Win said, pointing to the window to the backyard. “Looks like the shimmer is back.”
She was referring to the collection of lights that had formed on the deck. Win got up for a better look. Paul checked over his shoulder just in case it was different this time. It wasn’t.
“Yeah, I’ve seen ’em around here,” he said. “First time they’ve stopped by this house, but, you know. Another thirty seconds, they’ll be gone.”
“This one looks like it wants to be human-shaped,” she said.
“Yeah, they do that.”
She watched until it dissipated. “Still think it’s an angel?” she asked.
He laughed. “Don’t make it sound like we got a bunch of other guesses as good as that,” he said.
“That’s fair. First time I saw it, I thought it was a ghost.”
“A glowing one?”
“Sure, why not? Anyway.” She put her empty glass down on an end table and checked the venison. “This looks ready,” she said. “We should get some rest. Long couple of days ahead.”
Robbie
1
“We have to cut left at this junction,” Touré said, waving his torch to emphasize his preferred vector. “We went right last week and ended up going nowhere.”
“That wasn’t nowhere,” Robbie said. “Everything here goes somewhere.”
“You know what I mean.”
“The right led to an upstairs full of wolves. That’s your definition of nowhere.”
“Okay, it led us into one of the dens, and I don’t have enough hit points to make it through there,” Touré said. “Neither do you.”
“It’s not a dungeon. It’s a school.”
“You keep saying that. You’ll think differently after we come across a dragon.”
They were on a quest—Touré’s word, but in this case, a reasonable choice—to locate as much handwritten material as possible across the entire MIT campus. Or rather, the entire part of the campus they could access, which was very nearly all of it. A great wizard—Ananda—charged them with this quest. This idea came not long after their initial meeting, in that first week in which all seven of them were together.
In that same meeting, the group pooled together all that they’d discovered, whether it made any sense at all, to see if any of it fit together.
Some of it sort of did, and some of it sort of did not.
For example, Robbie thought it was 2019, and both Carol and Win thought it was 2016. It was Bethany’s opinion that it was 2013, Touré said 2014, Paul believed it was 2018, and for Ananda it was 2020.
This made everything complicated, because while Ananda could assert—correctly—that it was about a hundred years from when she thought it was, that already meant it was about 107 years from when Bethany thought it was, and so on. Since Ananda’s calculations couldn’t get her any closer than the roughly one-century difference, basically nobody knew what year it was, but they did know it wasn’t exactly the year they thought it was.
The gap in the timeline went a long way toward explaining where everyone had gone. Cambridge had been evacuated—they didn’t know why, but they had plenty of evidence that it had been—so the lack of bodies was explicable, locally. What made less sense were the piles of dusted human remains they’d encountered outside of the city.
Win had showed them all the partial jawbone she was carrying around. It was, so far, the only human bone any of them had encountered. Everything else was piles of dust.
Everyone agreed that a dead human body, if exposed to the elements, could disintegrate completely, given long enough. But nobody knew how long that might be, and everyone agreed that there should still be a lot more bones lying around. Paul brought home this point by describing a scene in a barn in which he found the remains of a cow. The bones were still there, even if nothing else was. So what happened differently with the dead humans than with that dead cow?
They later worked out the best available estimate, that there were people on the planet up until around 2044. They got to this number not by one of Ananda’s calculations, but because it was the date on a chemical engineering class syllabus Robbie and Touré discovered. They had been turning up artifacts with progressively later dates for a month, transforming the exercise into a perverse kind of inverted archeology study: the newer the better.
This particular discovery meant the Apocalypse Seven (as they’d taken to calling themselves) didn’t wake up right after the extinction of the human race: It was more like fifty or sixty years later. It also meant whatever explained that extinction would also have to explain what happened to the bones.
Another topic on which they only partly agreed was the shimmer. Everyone had reported having seen it at least once except for Bethany (and, technically, Carol, although she didn’t count); Touré, Robbie, and Win claimed to have seen it take human form, and Paul thought it was an angel. Ananda had only seen what she described as a swarm and dismissed everyone’s humanoid sighting as an optical illusion. They didn’t challenge her, but after the meeting, Robbie wished he’d asked her to elaborate on why she held that opinion. The idea that it was humanoid seemed no more outlandish than anything else, certainly.
Other parts of that meeting didn’t add up quite so neatly. The dying words of Raymond the erstwhile vampire, the yellow splotch in Bethany’s driveway, Carol’s man who wasn’t there, and Robbie’s door that unlocked itself didn’t all add up into a common understanding of, well . . . anything.
Robbie knew for a fact that not everyone shared all they knew, or suspected, in that meeting. Paul believed the Rapture had happened, but didn’t say that out loud. Bethany thought this was some secular version of purgatory, but kept that to herself. And critically, Robbie and Touré thought aliens were involved, but didn’t say so to anyone but each other. And there were probably more ideas that he didn’t know about.
They all had their reasons.
2
Ananda was convinced there were answers out there still; they just had to find them. For Robbie and Touré, getting answers always meant taking the bikes farther and farther from the city, but that was because they thought they were answering Where are all the people hiding? and not How did all the people die?
“At least twenty-five years’ worth of data is out there,” she’d said, at that same first meeting. “Find it and maybe we’ll figure out why we’re the only ones left.”
Win rightfully pointed out that even back in ye olden days of 2016 most things were recorded in computerized form, and that this was likely even truer in Ananda’s distant future of 2020, and that therefore it was more likely still in 2044.
“And we can’t get the computers running,” Win said.
“For now,” Ananda said. “But there will be notes. There are always notes. Diaries, field notes, pages and pages of numbers that don’t mean anything to anyone except whoever wrote them down. We can do something with those; we just have to find them.”
“Where?” Robbie asked.
“If I knew, it wouldn’t be a long search,” Ananda said.
They were all still getting used to one another at that stage. Paul was weird and gruff, clearly in a lot of pain, and prone to long speeches that prominently featured God. Ananda came off as clinical and dismissive, and was probably on some kind of spectrum. Win drifted between happy to meet you and I’m remembering the time I killed a guy. It was impossible to tell how much any of that had to do with what they all had gone through alone before the seven of them joined up, and how much was just a part of who they’d always been.
It made Robbie wonder how he, Touré, Carol, and Bethany would have ended up if they hadn’t been relying on one another from day one. Like Raymond, probably.
“What I mean is, where do you expect us to search?” Robbie asked.
“On the campus,” she said. “I’ve searched these rooms, and parts of some other buildings, but I’ve been limited by time, by too many places to check, and by my study of the object.”
“On the campus with wolves roaming the halls?” Touré asked.
“The wolves don’t go into the tunnels,” Ananda said. “You can use those to get around.”
“What tunnels?” Robbie asked.
“There’s a network of tunnels connecting most of the buildings.”
“Hold on,” Touré said, “are you telling me MIT has a secret dungeon level?”
“I guess you could call it that,” she said. “It’s not really a secret.”
“I didn’t know about it,” Touré said. “Robbie, did you know about it?”
“Nope,” Robbie said.
“Anyone else?” Touré asked.
“Stop being a nerd,” Bethany said.
“Then it’s a secret,” Touré said, ignoring Bethany.
Ananda looked at Win, as if Win were responsible for Touré. She shrugged.
“I’ll find you a map,” Ananda said.
3
Robbie pulled out his copy of the map and held it up under the torchlight.
“So you want to go left,” he said.
“Because going right leads to wolves.”
The issue was probably that Touré still couldn’t run. He got along on his leg really well these days—they could only explore nearby buildings in short trips at first—but when it came to running, he mostly hopped a lot.
“That’s only because of where we went upstairs,” Robbie said. “We could keep going, and then turn left.”
“Where would that get us?” Touré asked.
“Um . . . Buildings One, Three, and Five.”
“What’s special about them, aside from being prime numbers?”
“Nothing, except we haven’t been in them yet,” Robbie said. “And one isn’t a prime number.”
“You can only divide it by itself and by one. That makes it a prime number.”
“You’re wrong, and is the plan okay?”
“Going right? Yeah, okay, I guess. But we’re going to have words about prime numbers later.”
“I’m sure we are.”
The tunnels really did feel dungeon-like, especially when illuminated by torchlight. They were also incredibly cold. This could have been due to the time of year, but Robbie thought probably not. The ground surrounding them was cold, and there was no sunlight getting in, so he imagined this was how it would always be. A positive: They could probably store meat in the tunnels during the summer.
The ceiling had fluorescent lights built into it. Ananda seemed to think they would eventually be able to restore power to the entire building, using only the hypothetical extra solar panels that were hypothetically stored somewhere on the premises in a room they had yet to discover. Robbie wondered if when that happened, he would find the tunnels more pleasant.
He and Touré passed under the stairwell leading to Building 10. That was where they’d left off last time, and as Touré said, it had been a mistake. The main wolf den (or technically coyote den, but nobody called it that) was up there, in and around the Great Dome. This time, they kept going to the stairwell on the other side, which, according to the map, led to Building 3.
“You sure about this?” Touré asked, now whispering, out of respect for the collective ton of murderous canines just above.
“I’m not sure at all,” Robbie said. “I’m just checking off buildings we haven’t seen yet.”
This was actually a modest overstatement of their accomplishments. They’d visited about half of the buildings at least once, but every one of them consisted of several floors, each with several offices, only some of which were locked. They’d been marking the doors to the rooms already searched in order to keep them straight. At some point, they were going to have to circle around, hit the floors they’d never made it to, and get into the unmarked rooms. But that wasn’t as fun as getting acquainted with a new place every few days.
“Right,” Touré said. “I guess that’s
fair. Okay, let’s go have a look.”
Touré climbed the first two steps, then hesitated.
Robbie caught a whiff of something both familiar and not. It was something they’d been smelling a lot lately.
Touré turned and looked at Robbie. I smell it too, he was saying.
Their shadow visitor had returned.
4
One of the things Robbie had never shared with anyone, aside from Touré, was what happened that day near the parking garage when he had become convinced the darkness was staring back at him.
Aside from quoting Nietzsche, Touré had taken it well, but not seriously, even when Robbie tried to connect that moment to another thing he hadn’t shared with anyone else: that he thought they’d been abducted by aliens.
Then they started going through the tunnels regularly and Touré began to believe. Because every now and again, he’d have the same sense, that someone or something was behind them, or ahead of them, or just to the side of them. Sometimes Robbie was the only one to feel it, sometimes Touré was the only one, but every time, it was accompanied by the same bad body odor smell.
They’d been using the tunnels for almost two months, and had thirteen distinct encounters, in thirteen different parts of the dungeon.
They called it the intruder.
After the last time they encountered the intruder, they decided to put together a plan.
It consisted of this: Step one—charge.
There was no step two.
5
“All right,” Touré said. “I’m going.”
This was for the intruder’s benefit. Meanwhile, on his hand—from a position only Robbie could see—he counted down, Three . . . two . . . one . . .
On one, they both spun around and ran down the stairs, Robbie running right and Touré hopping left.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 29