“I’m thinking the population crashed,” Paul said, pointing up the road. “The deer, I mean to say. Not us. Well. Us, too. But one of the things I expected to see more of, in the future, was deer. Their population was exploding back before you and I left the region for a while. At least it was around my edge of the world. Only way to control it was by hunting them down to a level the forest could support. Without that, you figure all we’d see around here is deer.”
“We have seen a lot of them.”
“Should be a lot more, though. That’s why I’m thinking their population must have crashed.”
“Maybe I will have that beer,” Robbie said.
Paul handed him one from under the table. “Here you go.”
Robbie opened the can, which hissed gently. He took a quick sip and wondered if cigar smoke was the secret to enjoying it.
“What about predators?” Robbie asked, regarding the deer.
“Predators could help keep them down, sure,” Paul said. “But—and again, I’m talking about a hundred years back—even with the coyotes and wolves and whatnot, even with an explosion in pack hunting, the deer were making baby deer faster than the four-legged hunters could keep up with. No, I think they ran out of food.”
“Nothing stopping the plants from growing,” Robbie said. “Isn’t that what they eat?”
“Sure. But not every kind of plant; just certain kinds. I’m not a botanist, but I knew my share of farmers, and they’d talk your ear off about invasive species.”
“You mean, like Noah?”
Paul laughed. “No, but that’s funny. He’s a different kind of invasive. I mean plants that don’t belong to this region, brought here by people who should have known better. Plants that thrive in the new climate rules around here, that can overwhelm the native species, and that may not be edible for deer. You wouldn’t even know it to look at it, especially around a city.”
He leaned back and puffed on his cigar. The five deer Robbie could see from his chair got spooked by something upriver and ran off.
“So are you going to ask me?” Paul asked.
“Ask you what?”
“You know. Ask me to join your merry band of survivors. It’s why you’re here—let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“Oh, that,” Robbie said. He took a sip of his own beer and continued to dislike it. “I don’t know yet.”
“Okay. Well, we can sit here all afternoon. Weather’s nice.”
Robbie was ad-libbing this whole conversation. He meant to have some talking points—either actually written down and in his hand, like this was a moderated debate, or memorized—but when he sat down to try to work them out, he came up with nothing.
“I actually had a bigger question for you,” Robbie said.
“Shoot.”
“I was wondering if you still had faith.”
Paul nearly choked on his cigar. He coughed, took a sip of his beer to clear his throat, and shook his head.
“Sorry, that was unexpected,” he said. “Do you mean that, or are you just trying to get a rise out of me?”
“Why would I try to get a rise out of you?” Robbie asked. “You’re bigger than I am, and you’re armed. If anything, I should be afraid of you.”
“Ahh, come on. I’m not a scary person. I’ve just led a weathered existence. You really want to talk about God right now? Because the impression I’ve been getting from you and the rest of your team is that nobody wants a part of that.”
“It’s a bad time to believe in a higher power,” Robbie said. “Look, I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from, your perspective. You’re also the only preacher we have, so I figured maybe that’s where I should start. But they’re not my team. Nobody’s in charge here; I think that’s obvious by now.”
Paul laughed. “Just because you don’t want to be the leader doesn’t mean you’re not. Besides, who else is there? Nanda’s too far in her own head, Touré doesn’t seem to live in reality half the time, Carol’s always gonna be more interested in problems than solutions . . . Who’s that leave? Bethany? She’s just a kid. Win maybe could do it. Not sure she has the temperament.”
“How about you?” Robbie asked.
Paul nodded. “Yeah, I think our current predicament takes me pretty much out of the running,” he said. “Not that I was ever really in. Look, better or worse, you’ve been the last word around here for a while. I know it doesn’t seem that way to you, and I know you don’t like it, but that’s how it is. Congratulations.”
“Well, I’m going to keep on pretending none of that’s true,” Robbie said. “At least until I can figure out how to prove you wrong.”
“Pretty sure that’s not the hill you want to die on in this conversation. You asked me about my faith.”
“Yeah, I did.”
Paul leaned back and puffed on his cigar for a bit. Robbie tried leaning back and pretending he was enjoying something as much as that cigar.
“I used to be a sinner,” Paul said. “I mean, we’re all sinners, but I was one of the better ones. I drank too much, smoked too many of the wrong things . . . got a girl pregnant, married her, and then abandoned her . . . you know. Just me being selfish. Maybe listening to the wrong body part too many times. Broke the law often enough to end up in prison for a few years, all before I was even thirty.”
“What’d you do?”
“Lots of stuff, but the one the state was most interested in was that I shot a guy. It’s a dumb story. I’ll tell you if you want, but I promise you it’s dumb. He didn’t die, but he never walked right after. Attempted murder was the charge, and I did earn it. The Lord rescued me from that cell, though, and I mean that both ways. I converted in prison, so first He rescued me with His word and later with His actions.”
“Are you saying God busted you out of prison?”
“I call it as I saw it. There was an open door, and I walked through,” Paul said. “I never looked back. Truth, one reason for my living up on the mountain like I did was to stay off the grid. Figure I was still wanted for failing to serve my full term.”
“I think you’re in the clear now,” Robbie said.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Thing is, when all this happened . . . when I was found unworthy, I was upset. But a part of me understood. I made choices, on my own, to do bad things to good people. Whatever penalty the Lord saw fit to try me with, I was willing to accept, because these were my decisions and I earned the consequences.”
“And now?”
Paul smiled.
“Now I think the Rapture is more compelling than what that space alien had to say, which is pretty messed up. But I don’t know. Could be this was the way it had to happen for His will to be expressed. But that seems awfully extreme, doesn’t it?”
“It does seem like an overreaction, yes,” Robbie said.
“So, to answer your question, I do still have my faith. It’s shaky, but I still have it. But here’s what I need you to understand, in case you get around to asking me what you came here to ask. Without free will, we aren’t anything. We’re neither sinners nor saints, and we’re also not people. I would rather be damned to literal hell for my self-chosen sins than to be told they weren’t choices at all. Destiny, fate, preordination—these are all excuses to explain away the choices we’ve made freely. Even when we’re agents of the Lord’s will, we are the authors of our own futures. Someone had to make a choice somewhere. Aside from the Almighty.”
“Yeah,” Robbie said. “I see it. I’m just not ready to say that the situation we’ve got going on right now runs contrary to all that. But we’re in the right place for that kind of discussion, I guess.”
“How so?”
“At a college, drinking beer, talking about the nature of free will. It’s too early and we’re not drunk enough, but other than that.”
Paul laughed. “I think we need to get our hands on some weed, too, but I hear you. Bet there’s a marijuana patch around here somewhere t
hat’s thriving.”
They fell silent, and drank their beer for a little while. Paul continued to puff his cigar, which was somewhat annoying when the wind shifted and carried the smoke into Robbie’s face. A fox scurried across Mass Ave., scattering a half-dozen bunnies that had been hidden a minute earlier, and another couple of deer returned to the banks of the Charles.
“Look,” Robbie said, “talking about this stuff is fun. I really could do it all day. But this isn’t an abstract idea. Noah said if we’re not all there, we could all die. And that’s it—that’s the end of the human race. You have the free will to decide for yourself what you want to do, but this isn’t a choice that’s just for you. It’s for all of us.”
“Son, if that’s what you think, you still don’t understand what I’ve been saying. I’m saying, if the facts that have been presented to us run contrary to what I know to be the case, then those facts are wrong. I’m saying, this is a false decision and your buddy Noah isn’t giving us the whole story.”
“Paul, we need you aboard,” Robbie said. “You’re gambling with everyone’s future. You must see that.”
Paul took a sip, and a puff, and for a second, Robbie thought he had him.
“I’m sorry, Rob. I just can’t do that.”
3
That was the last time any of them tried to talk to Paul about his decision.
Everyone agreed that Robbie—for reasons that didn’t make any sense to Robbie—was their last, best chance at swaying their resident itinerant preacher. If he couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done.
That created some tension, which was essentially unavoidable given that they remained the last seven people on the planet; avoiding each other was simply not possible as long as they all relied on one another to survive.
To that end, Paul remained helpful, and useful, and plenty cheerful. He continued to hunt, and tend to Elton when Elton needed tending to and Win wasn’t able. But Paul also spent less and less idle time with the others. He still slept in the same space with them sometimes, and still ate meals with them sometimes. Just not every time.
Meanwhile, the shimmer kept getting worse. One night, Bethany woke up to find herself being probed by the Tachyonite, screamed, and woke up everyone else. This prompted a meeting the following morning to discuss whether, should this happen again, it was the responsibility of whoever noticed it was happening to wake up everyone else. The discussion was pointless, because after that night none of them got any proper sleep anyway. This made all of them a lot more irritable, and some of that irritability was directed at Paul.
It was no coincidence that when spring turned to . . . if not summer, then a hotter spring, Paul was hardly spending any time in the castle. He’d take Elton out on long rides—Paul didn’t say where to, and neither did Elton—ostensibly to hunt, although he didn’t usually come back with any game. Some of these trips spanned three or four days.
Nobody openly speculated that maybe it would be better if Paul simply didn’t come back one of these times, but that didn’t mean nobody thought it.
Then came the day when their very hot late spring or early summer went from somewhat pleasant to possibly life-threatening.
Seventeen
Ananda
“I’m sorry, did you just say hurricane?” Touré asked.
They were in the part of the building Ananda had claimed as her research lab. It was mainly a bunch of desks with useless computers on them. About half the surfaces were covered with retrieved discoveries from other parts of the castle, and the other half with her handwritten calculations. Touré was there because he’d just delivered a new trove of documents.
“Yes, I did,” Ananda said.
“Like, an actual hurricane?”
“A storm in which the wind blows very hard and lots of rain falls. I can’t formalize the prediction without a satellite image, and we haven’t been able to establish contact with the satellites yet, so I don’t know if it’s an actual hurricane. But something like it.”
Their miniature solar power grid had been growing steadily since the weather turned. They were on three rooftops now and had begun to lay power cords to the castle’s computer mainframe room in an effort to recover the local computer memory. It was a far cry from the Internet, but it would be a good beginning. Among other things, they could start to access data saved by the university before the great extinction.
They were also trying to get a satellite dish up and running. Ananda reasoned that the weather satellites overhead didn’t rely on ground-based power to continue operating, so they were likely still up there, transmitting data that wasn’t being received any longer. She hoped to change that.
In the meantime, what she did have was barometric pressure readings from different elevations throughout the campus.
Getting that done, and then finding a way to return to the locations to take regular readings, meant further reducing or isolating the castle’s wolf population. Through a series of careful tactical maneuvers, they managed to reduce the percentage of the MIT campus in which one might come across a wolf by about ninety percent. It required closing off part of the Infinite Corridor on two sides—making sure everyone was clear on which doors they absolutely could either not open, or if they did open, not leaveopen—and persuading Carol to find another place to hang out with her pet wolf.
So far, it was working. Long term, Ananda hoped to drive the wolves out entirely, but that might involve a degree of violence the others weren’t currently comfortable with.
“No way,” Touré said. “Unless I’m counting wrong, it’s only May. Hurricane season’s not till the end of summer. And this is New England, not the Florida panhandle.”
“We can’t rely on what we think we know about the weather,” Ananda said. “You know this already.”
“Fine. Sure. When?”
“Soon,” she said. “We may have only a few hours.”
“So we have to get everyone inside,” Touré said, “before the winds kick in.”
“It’s more than that. We’ll need to close windows and doors, and the solar panels should come down. Just off the array, unless you think you can get them inside without burning yourselves. Use gloves. You and Robbie.”
“We kind of need the power,” he said.
“Those panels are currently irreplaceable, and I have no idea if they’re heavy enough to withstand this wind. The array isn’t bolted down, I can tell you that. I know because I put it up myself.”
“All right.”
Touré took off to find Robbie while Ananda headed down one flight to the living quarters. Paul was there and so was Win; both were pretending the other wasn’t.
“We’re getting a hurricane,” Ananda said. “We need to secure everything. Win, we have open outer doors and windows all over the castle. You’re fastest. Paul?”
Paul looked at Win. “Elton,” he said.
“I should go out with you,” she said.
“Can’t be in two places at once,” he said.
Win looked like she was in pain. “You’re right. Find him. Please.”
“You know I will.”
“Do either of you know where Bethany and Carol are?” Ananda asked.
“Carol’s with Nolan,” Win said. “Not sure about Bethany. You want me to find her?”
“I’ll go to Carol,” Ananda said. “If you find Bethany, make sure she gets inside. We’ll be losing power shortly.”
Bethany
“You have to give him a treat the first few times,” Carol said.
She and Bethany were on the lawn outside of the library with Nolan, who was learning some new tricks. Carol only knew how to get him to sit, stay, and lie down. She wanted to see what else Nolan could learn, but she needed the assistance of someone with eyesight to accomplish that.
Bethany was available and willing. She was also a little terrified.
“What about kill, and stop trying to kill?” Bethany asked. “Have you tried teaching him tha
t yet?”
Carol laughed. “I tried it on Noah. It worked, but the don’t kill command required I hit Nolan on the back first. I don’t know who else to practice on.”
“Yeah, forget I asked,” Bethany said. “Come on, Nolan, roll over.”
It was easy to forget this was a wild animal who’d just as soon rip out their throats as not, especially once they started playing. Bethany was able to get him to flip onto his back for a treat, but he wouldn’t flip over again on command and thus complete the roll-over portion of the trick. (He was also, evidently, not a he. Bethany didn’t know if she should tell Carol this.)
“Roll over, Nolan,” she said. “Here’s the treat, come on.”
A powerful gust blew across the lawn from the river, rustling the newly arrived leaves on the trees. It was enough to rock Bethany to the side. Nolan completed his roll then, but only to get his feet under him so as to look around and see what in the heck that was.
“Wow, that came out of nowhere,” Bethany said.
“Are there clouds?” Carol asked.
There were. Newly arrived, from the west, looking like they were late for something.
“Yup.”
Nolan turned, walked behind Carol, and started growling. Ananda was on the library steps.
“Hello!” Ananda shouted. “Is it safe to come over?”
Nolan barked.
“Nolan,” Carol chided. “Be nice. Ananda is a friend.”
Carol got up and put her hand on Nolan’s head. “Run on home now,” she said. She patted him twice on the rear. He whined. She did it again and off he went.
“He knows more tricks than sit, stay, and lie down,” Bethany said.
“That? That was just being polite. There’s no trick to that.”
“Come inside,” Ananda said.
“Is there a storm coming?” Carol asked. She reached out for Bethany, who guided them to the steps.
“I’m afraid my forecasting skills are wanting, as it appears it may already be here,” Ananda said.
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