by Scott Jarol
“How did I get over here?”
“I don’t know.”
He staggered toward the door as Schrödinger took up a protective stance in front of Margaux.
Zeke tugged at the huge door. “It’s stuck. Help me.”
She didn’t move.
He turned to look at her. She hadn’t come any closer. “Are you afraid of me, Margaux?”
“No.”
It was hard to believe her when she was scooting as far away from him as possible within the confines of the long, narrow room.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, then clapped his mouth shut before he could say anything further. Oh, great—now she probably thought he was an insensitive jerk for making fun of the way she identified herself as a ghost. “Sorry. I mean, you’re acting really weird.”
She continued to look at him with an expression he couldn’t begin to interpret.
Finally, she gathered herself and addressed him. “Do you know where you are?”
“At Doc’s?”
“Do you remember coming here?”
“Sure. We walked here from school.”
“Together?”
What could be wrong with this girl? “Yes, don’t you remember? Are you okay?”
“Do you remember shoving me down to the ground?” she asked.
“Wha-aat? Did I do that?” He frowned. “If I did, I’m really sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
When she failed to reply, he looked around the empty freight car for some clue about what might have happened to them. Something wasn’t quite right—but that didn’t matter. They needed to get out of there.
“We should probably get going, Margaux.”
“Doc’s coming back for us,” she said. “That’s what he said. I think.”
* * *
Liberated from his prison when Zeke knocked over the jar, New Fly conducted aerial surveillance of the caboose’s interior, taking a closer look at the interesting features he had observed only through the distorting glass of his erstwhile home. Tempted by the intriguing stenches he’d detected during his brief captivity, he looped confusedly in figure-eights.
A buzzing behind him caught his attention. It was Old Fly, entering the area like a fly on a mission. Suspecting that Old Fly would lead him to the delicacies they both craved, New Fly circled his way toward his companion, who appeared to have located some deliciously ripe delicacies clinging to the popped tops of canned rations and Doc’s unwashed tin pan and plate.
This was his lucky day.
* * *
“Quiet,” Zeke said. “What’s that? Who’s shouting?”
“Must be Doc,” said Margaux.
“Shhh.”
“But you asked—”
“I think it’s Doc!”
“That’s what I just said,” Margaux said.
“You did? Sorry.”
Together they worked the reluctant door back on its worn rollers and looked out into the darkness for signs of movement. Schrödinger studied them, and once he was convinced they could take care of each other, he jumped off the edge of the doorway, rolled back to his feet, shook off the snow, and took off in Doc’s direction.
“We should see what’s happening,” said Zeke.
“Doc told me we had to wait here.”
“What if he needs help?” Zeke sat on the edge of the threshold and inched off the edge to the ground. He turned and offered a hand to Margaux.
She hesitated. “If you’re going, then I’m going, too.” She accepted Zeke’s assistance with a rather businesslike expression.
Schrödinger had already scouted ahead. They followed his barking. Zeke brushed aside dry stalks of grass and stepped over dwarfed saplings as Margaux trailed behind, stumbling whenever her coat snagged a twig. They tore through a clump of high brush for about five minutes before they spotted Doc running in the distance.
“Stop!” Doc shouted, waving them away. “Don’t come any closer.” His breathless voice barely carried across the meadow.
Margaux looked at Zeke, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. “I think he’s telling us to stay back.”
“Who’s he chasing?” Zeke took a few steps forward. “We could maybe help him.”
* * *
The twin flies prepared to share a delectable meal of rotting rations. As New Fly approached, they both began to radiate with a brilliant blue haze that stretched like a ribbon between them, intensifying as their distance closed.
Their antennae met.
Billions of atoms within Old Fly’s cells, the protons and neutrons within those atoms, and the quarks within those protons and neutrons found their counterparts in New Fly. They merged and then disintegrated, releasing their trapped energy in less than a trillionth of a second.
Not such a lucky day afterall.
* * *
A blinding flash flooded Zeke’s retinas, wiping out any image projected by his pinhole pupils. A split second later, the shock wave heaved him seven feet into a snowdrift, stunning his ears and plunging him into silence. It flattened stalks of dry grass in a radial pattern and stripped the sparse leaves from the trees edging the meadow. It shot through the windows of Doc’s ancient, rusting van in a spray of pebbled glass.
Double-edged steel train wheels weighing a thousand pounds each saucered through the air. Debris rained down: windmill blades, candle wax and books, splintered planks, beans and rags, the stringy fragments of a shattered guitar. The twisted skeletons of the shattered caboose and freight cars cratered back into the Earth. Doc’s sleeping chair arced across the sky like a comet. A semi-molten axle rod speared a tree trunk.
The larger debris was followed by a lingering rain of rust, dust, and drifting orange embers. A tangle of wire tumbled past Zeke as he slipped into unconsciousness.
He dreamed he was gliding over the sun-drenched ground far below, cut off from the blue-black sky by the curved rim of the earth. He darted through billowing clouds that stretched into curls that spiraled off the tips of his toes. White clouds thickened to murky gray. Thunder rumbled. Lightning ripped past. Stinging hail pelted his cheeks, arms, body. He fled the storm, plummeting out of the gray-green clouds. In free fall, he spread his arms and legs to slow his dive.
A moment before he hit the ground, its surface rippled. He plunged into clear water, his speed whisked away by streaks of foaming bubbles. With powerful dolphin kicks, he curved his dive back into a climb, bursting into the air and splashing down to float face up on the water’s undulating surface.
Someone was shouting, but he couldn’t recognize the words. Water splashed his cheeks. He inhaled deeply, but the air smelled of smoke, chemicals, and dog breath.
Zeke awoke eye to eye with a furry face and the touch of a cold, wet nose. Seemingly satisfied that he finally had Zeke’s attention, Schrödinger stopped licking his cheek and took a few stubby steps backward. He barked, urging Zeke to escape the flames and falling debris.
Suddenly aware of the danger, Zeke grabbed his legs behind his knees and sat up, pulling his torso up from the sucking slush. He rose shakily to his feet in near silence among the raging flames and falling debris. It seemed entirely possible that he was still dreaming. Thousands of orange-rimmed embers peeled away from Doc’s withered notebooks and flitted into the air like phoenix butterflies. The ringing in his ears muffled Schrödinger’s barking, and he fought to clear his head before attempting interspecies communication.
“Schrödinger, where’s Margaux? We better find her, quick.”
Schrödinger darted away through the smoke to the edge of the clearing. There she was, beneath a blanket of debris. Schrödinger barked as loudly as he could until Zeke caught up.
Zeke swept the splintered wood chips and other junk off Margaux’s face. Schrödinger sniffed her breath while Zeke tapped her hand to wake her up. As soon as she could move, he supported her to stagger out of the clearing to the meager shelter of the trees.
Schrödinger scouted the way, barking in exc
itement at something he’d encountered ahead.
“Hey, it’s Doc!” said Zeke.
Schrödinger was in Doc’s arms, licking his face in delight.
“Are you two okay?” asked Doc. He scanned them up and down. “Arms, legs, fingers?”
“We’re great,” said Zeke enthusiastically, despite his lingering grogginess and muffled hearing. “Sorry about the mess.”
Doc studied Zeke’s face for a moment, without blinking, as if trying to read his mind, and then turned his attention to Margaux. “Margaux I need you to do something. You need to take Zeke to your hiding place at the school and stay there until you hear from me. You dig?”
Hiding place? Zeke had no clue what they were talking about, but it figured that a strange girl like Margaux would have some sort of weird hideout. Of course Doc knew about it—after all, he was the janitor. He knew more about the school than anyone else.
Doc was holding Margaux’s arm to make sure he had her attention. “This is the most important thing. If you see the other Zeke, don’t even get close. Run the other way.”
Zeke was beginning to feel he’d missed something vital yet again.
Doc lifted Schrödinger so they were eye to eye. “Professor, you go with Margaux and let her know if he’s getting too close.” He placed Schrödinger back on the ground and looked up to find Zeke and Margaux both staring at him, dumbfounded.
“I can see this whole scene is making your craniums throb,” said Doc. “Dig this: There was an accident. The low-down is, I goofed. Snared the wrong cat. Now Zeke has a double Zeke, a doppelgänger—more like a quantum doppelgänger—who calls himself Ezekiel.”
“Whaa-at?” Zeke said, checking his arms and legs, as if they might have been divided between himself and the replica. “You mean there are two of me, like clones?”
“More like two parts of the same Zeke, ’cause the two are really the same boy. It’s like a split personality, only each one gets its own body. Can’t tell which is which is what yet.” He gestured around the field of debris. “This explosion is what happens when two quantum doppelgängers have an unexpected reunion. You dig?”
“But I didn’t get blown up.”
“Nope—not yet, anyway.”
Doc tugged a piece of blanket from under a pile of smoldering boards and spread it flat on the driest patch of ground he could find. He and Schrödinger went snooping around the area, with Schrödinger sniffing at each object Doc examined and rejecting it in kind.
“It’s like this: All that oppositeness cancels out, and their total mass turns into pure energy like Einstein style, E = mc to the power of crazy. What blew my pad into a pile of toothpicks was nothing but the mass of one pair of unlucky houseflies—may they rest in peace. Magnify that to two normal-sized Zekes, and that’s enough energy to crack open the planet like an egg. You dig?”
Schrödinger pawed at something buried in the half-frozen mud.
Doc probed the outline of Schrödinger’s discovery with the toe of his shoe, then pressed against it with his heel.
“Right size. Right weight. Nice work, Professor.”
He bent down and uprooted a half-buried chunk of steel. It was a clasp from one of the railroad car couplings. He dropped it onto the blanket with a thud they felt in their feet and then gathered the edges to form a makeshift sack, which he heaved over his shoulder.
“This Zeke and the other Zeke haven’t run into each other yet. And we need to keep it that way.”
Zeke followed Doc’s explanation, but he couldn’t decide if he believed it. Maybe Doc actually was crazy, as most of the school believed. He kept a lot of strange and probably dangerous stuff around. This explosion could have been caused by any combination of dripping or oozing goop. The fact that Doc had just bundled a piece of junk in a blanket didn’t do much to boost Zeke’s confidence in his sanity.
He decided to focus on more concrete goals for now.
“Can we get my mom? I think I left her outside. She’s probably freezing by now.”
“Yeah, yeah. Go get Zeke’s mom, then get inside.”
“Where are you going?” Margaux asked Doc.
“When the other Zeke sees me carrying this bundle, he’ll follow me. I’ll take him to a spot where we can get them back together.”
“But you said I would explode!” said Zeke.
“It’s all about the right time and the right place—and that gadget of yours.”
“The QuARC? But I don’t have it anymore.”
“We’ll get it back soon enough. Right now, you better get going.” He took Margaux’s arm again. “Can you do it?” He looked deep into her eyes and wouldn’t let go until she answered.
“Sure,” said Margaux. “We get Zeke’s mom. We hide. We don’t come out until we hear from you. We stay far away from Ezekiel. The other Zeke.”
“No matter what.”
“No matter what,” she said.
“With any luck, I’ll find the other one before he finds you.”
As Doc headed away, he raised his voice loud enough to be heard by anyone nearby. “It’s a good thing Zeke’s QuARC survived the explosion. I need to get it working again. I’m taking it with me.”
Ah, he must be using the heavy sack as a decoy to lure the other Zeke away. Unable to come up with a better idea than staying out of the way so he didn’t turn himself into a living bomb, Zeke led Margaux and Schrödinger back to find his mother.
The cold seeped into their damp clothes, penetrating their flesh and clenching their bones, as they left behind the dying fires of Doc’s wrecked home. They found Zeke’s mother shivering in the moonlight, still wrapped in Thomas’s coat and both their blankets, with Lucy’s head poking out from one flap. She was sitting on the one chair Thomas had left them in front of the little alcohol stove on an overturned crate. The flame had gone out.
“Zekie,” she said, shivering. “H-h-h-how w-was s-s-school to-d-day?”
Zeke hugged her, rubbing her back and arms briskly to bring back circulation and warmth. “It was okay. Mom, this is Margaux. She’s taking us someplace safe. And warm.”
Mom smiled wanly. “That’s very nice of you, Margaux. It’s nice to meet you. Zekie doesn’t usually bring friends home.”
Zeke and Margaux helped her to her feet, one at each arm.
“What about all our th-th-things?”
“I’ll take the important stuff,” Zeke said. “You carry Lucy.”
“We should leave a note for your father so he’ll know where we’ve gone.”
“Okay, Mom.”
Margaux produced a piece of paper and a pencil stub from one of her deep pockets and handed them to Zeke. Zeke used the top of a box as a desk and scratched out a note:
Dear Dad,
Just in case you come back today, you can find us at the school.
Love,
Zeke
He handed it to his mother, who smiled and placed it on top of the box under a heavy round stone Margaux had found.
She was happy now and ready to leave.
“Do you think those men will bring back our house tomorrow? That Thomas was such a nice man. Maybe we could ask him?”
“Sure, Mom. I can ask him.”
Zeke and Margaux gathered the most valuable possessions, including his mother’s salt and pepper shakers, along with their kettle and some beans, dried vegetable cakes, and buckwheat groats. Margaux stuffed the smaller items in her satchel. Zeke bundled everything else he could carry into a towel.
Other than the chair, his small supply of parts, and the leather pouch of hand tools his father had left behind, Zeke realized, the family had very little of value. He was heartbroken at having lost his father’s notebook in the explosion.
“We’ll come back for the other stuff tomorrow,” he said.
His mother fell into step beside him as they followed Margaux away from what had been his home. Despite the dense, frigid air, he could smell mouthwatering aromas of spices and oils simmering with onions, peppers, a
nd potatoes in the kitchens of the walled Cogs community of Harmony Village. Fading daylight slipped from snow-glazed plains, and the chill clamped down with spiked jaws as they slogged forward under the weight of their burdens. It was going to be a long walk.
Chapter 10
Outside Doc’s Workshop
Already shocked by Doc’s machine and then battered by the explosion, Ezekiel’s body felt triple-weight. He sucked in icy air, which tasted and smelled bitter from the heavy load of choking black smoke. Falling ash coated his clothing and face. Slush soaked through the back of his clothes, numbing his skin.
He rolled over, heaved himself to his feet, and slung his backpack over one shoulder.
Too light. The QuARC.
“Where is it?” he asked himself aloud. It must have been thrown clear by the blast. He paced an expanding spiral, scanning the ground, stopping to kick over piles of debris.
The shockwave from the explosion had left him dizzy, fuzzy-headed, and nearly deaf. Other than finding the QuARC inside Doc’s workshop, he couldn’t seem to remember little else. He held still until his muddled mind began to recognize the shapes tracing images across his retinas. Neurons flickered to life, relaying messages until recognition returned.
“Hands.” He looked at his outstretched arms.
“Trees.” He looked up.
There was Doc, crossing through billowing smoke at the edge of the meadow, his back arched under the weight of a sack slung over his shoulder. The QuARC—Ezekiel’s brain recognized that much. He could run after Doc, but his head was pounding painfully, and even if he caught up, it would be too difficult to overpower Doc to get it back. He decided to follow Doc furtively and grab the QuARC when he wasn’t looking.
Ezekiel centered himself between the rusting rails and followed Doc along the old railroad tracks. Despite decades of decay, they had remained parallel, an orderly symmetry that helped him keep his bearings despite the uniform cover of snow. From behind, occasional flares burst from Doc’s chemical-laced stockpiles, casting phantom shadows across the snow in front of him. The heat soothed his back and melted his trailing footprints.