Extinction Point

by Paul Jones

  Looking south through the kitchen window of her parents double-wide, past the backyard towards Mount Charleston she could still see the cloud of smoke that had gathered in the sky over Las Vegas.

  The city of sin had been hit hard. McCarran International had been devastated and most of the hotels that lined the strip close by had been destroyed when an incoming jet had cart-wheeled through the main terminus and over into the nearest casino. The resulting fire had swept through the town taking most of the classic landmarks and reducing them to ashes and skeletal beams that jutted into the sky, the fire so voracious it had quickly overwhelmed the confused and lost L.V. Fire department.

  Then had come three days of her parents avoiding her questions.

  Now she pushed the question home, "Mom. Dad. Please? I need to know," she repeated. Her parents regarded each other across the breakfast table. Finally, after a long moment of speechless communication, a pale Kimberly Lacey nodded faintly to her husband and he turned and explained what had happened to his daughter.

  * * *

  As her father spoke, Rebecca confirmed most of what the cops had pieced together by themselves: the night out with friends, the club where she and her friends met for the evening, talking and laughing. And when the night was over, Rebecca had hailed a cab outside the bar and taken it home to her modest apartment. Her last memory before she found herself immersed in her nightmare had been pushing the key into the lock that would open the security gate that kept out unwanted visitors from the grounds of the apartment building. Everything after that was a confused mess of images and thoughts.

  The very last thing she remembered with any clarity was laying on her kitchen table … and the man. And the knife. She remembered the knife.

  Her Father filled in the blanks while her mother sat stone-faced, tears slipping down her pale cheeks.

  "The police think that he followed you home," her father said choking back a sob before continuing. "From the autopsy report they think that he hit you with something while you were trying to get through the security gate. They found some of your blood on the ground near the gate and you had a blunt-force trauma to the back of your head." He reached up and tapped the corresponding spot on the back of his own head.

  "The officer from LAPD said that whoever had done this to you had carried you to your room. They thought that he had been watching you for weeks, that it might even be somebody that you knew."

  "I didn't know him," Becky interjected, "I saw his face. I didn't recognize him."

  Becky watched her father take a deep gulp of air and hold it before continuing his account.

  "Somebody from the apartment called the police because ... because ... it was five days before anybody knew you were missing and ..." Mr. Lacey scrambled to find the right words, "There were complaints from your neighbors. They thought that maybe the sewers had backed up. When the apartment manager opened up your door, that’s when they found you and called the police.

  "That was ten years ago, sweetheart. Not one day has gone by that we haven't talked about you. We were, are so proud of you."

  "We missed you so much baby. And now you have been brought back," said Mrs. Lacey reaching out to touch her resurrected daughters cheek. "It’s a miracle," she added in a tight whisper. "A miracle."

  * * *

  Rebecca Lacey did not believe that her resurrection was a miracle. Her parents were good people; salt of the earth would have been a descriptive cliché if it were not for the fact that it applied to her parents one-hundred percent. Her father was a lineman for the local power company; her mom drove one of the school buses that ferried children from the north end of the valley to the high schools in the south. They led a below-average lifestyle on a below-average income.

  Bringing up a child was a hardship for anybody, it was doubly so in this small, poor town. But this hard-working couple soon learned that their young daughter was anything but below average.

  She had aced her aptitude tests from the first grade up and it wasn't long before her parents received a call from the school. Informed that their daughter was special, bright beyond her years; the school councilor had recommended that Becky be placed on the academic fast track. It was the councilor's recommendation that she move from the public school to one that would challenge her intellectually, a private school with personal educators. They recommended a school where her full potential could develop and where the very best teachers would coach her, allowing her nascent intelligence to flourish and grow. She would receive the best education that money could buy, the councilor had said with a smile.

  Her father had quietly informed the councilor that they could not afford to do that but the woman had looked at him sympathetically over the rims of her glasses and said don't worry about the funding, there were scholarships available for individuals in their financial situation and she would be happy to give them the forms. With their daughter's, test score averages they would have no problem. Money would not be a consideration.

  Rebecca had not wanted to leave her school and her friends. The other children liked her and, unlike most geniuses, she had the social graces to match her intelligence. She had spent many years being brilliant at not showing that she was brilliant. However, even at the age of ten she heard the call of something else: numbers, figures, formula.

  Mathematics.

  While other kids watched MTV and read the umpteenth Harry Potter, she was watching Nova on her local PBS channel and reading Sagan and Hawking, devouring anything by Gian-Carlo Rota and Julian Barbour.

  She appreciated mathematics as others loved poetry: she could hear the meter in a constant, feel the rhyme in an integer, and sense the prose hidden in quantum foam. It combined to create a stunning sense of wonder in her, a wonder that never diminished. With the wonder came an awareness of something intangible, of something beneath mathematics something just outside intelligibility that, just as a molecule consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons, made mathematics something more. Gave to it a rhythm and a meaning.

  To Rebecca, it was a sense of God.

  No formula could express what she was experiencing. Like a woman who lived in a two dimensional world trying to grasp a third new dimension of reality, she did not possess the senses needed to interpret the undercurrent that she felt rippling through each and every equation. Its ineffableness at once frustrated, terrified and excited her.

  And now, in this reconstituted world, here it was again, the same sense that something was at work behind the scenes of her life, an undercurrent pulling at her mind again, catching it in its tow and sweeping it out into a sea of uncertainty and mystery.

  No. She did not believe that this was a miracle at all.

  * * *

  Twenty

  If you didn't know the path was there, you could easily drive right past it. It was just a dirt track, not even a gravel road, which led through the forest to the lake. Simone had asked Jim several times to get the path paved, but he had steadfastly refused, he liked the fact that the place was off the beaten track - literally. Instead he had agreed to spread gravel the last hundred yards or so to the house so that they wouldn't track mud inside when the ground was wet.

  As Jim turned off the main road and onto the rough dirt track that led to the lakeside cabin, he truly felt that he was leaving his everyday life behind. It was a boundary between work and relaxation, a living fence of birch and oak that separated him from reality.

  Safe. Secluded.

  Of course, Simone was not with him this time. She most likely had been dead for the past year or so since the Slip - the event had finally gained its own sobriquet as civilization had re-exerted its hold. She and lark were undoubtedly one of the estimated five million people who had lost their lives in the U.S. alone on that day.

  As the days had passed with no word from his ex-wife or his daughter, Jim had volunteered for clean-up duty, in the hope that he might find some clue to whether Simone and Lark had survived. With each body that he pulled from the burne
d out shell of a vehicle, he wondered if it was maybe his Simone or his daughter.

  It took eight months to clear the freeways and streets of Los Angeles, to remove the bodies from the cars and trucks and bury them in mass graves. It fell to the operators of the mobile cranes and heavy-lifters to clear the tin-can-corpses of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles from the roads and freeways.

  The work had been soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and horrible ... but ... it was also a test of fire for Jim; a bridge from the old reality to the new and Jim had made his way through it and come out the other side more complete than when he entered.

  He pulled his truck in front of the log cabin, half expecting it to be occupied by some down and out or one of the many transients that the Slip had created in its wake.

  Instead, he found it empty and just as he remembered it, sitting on the shores of Shadow Lake, the water lapping at the supports of the old wooden dock, their paddleboat bobbing languidly on the waters ebb and flow, just as it always had.

  Surrounded by thick woods on all sides save for the lake, they had bought this colonial style log cabin within a year of getting married and escaped to its tranquility every chance they could.

  After Lark's death, it had become his hide-away for a year. It was also his bar and his confessional, but mostly Jim liked to think of it as his pupae where he had entered as a broken, disheartened, self-hating child-killer and emerged as an almost-whole human and critically acknowledged novelist.

  Right now, it was just somewhere to be.

  Its creosote stained logs looked welcoming and familiar after all the disquiet and horror he had experienced in the months after the Slip. With the smell of sap and dry leaves redolent in the air, he pushed the key into the lock and opened the front door. Finally, he felt at ease

  "Home," he said as he stepped over the threshold to the accompanying Brak-rak-rak of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the surrounding forest.

  * * *

  Dust sheets covered the furniture and the scent of undisturbed air hung heavy in every room. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed patiently. Well, at least the electricity is on, he thought as he carried his bags into the front room. Tomorrow, he'd need to take a trip down to the store and grab some supplies.

  There is an odd emptiness to a house that has been vacant for a long period of time, an echoic air that goes far beyond the empty rooms and silence. It's temporal, as though the very walls have gone into hibernation, waiting for the owners to return but at the same time, all events that have ever taken place seem frozen and available, as though one could reach out and pluck a single experience from the stillness. Jim felt that melancholia now as he moved from room to room checking the lights and windows, making sure all were working and intact. The place had a stillness that seemed more appropriate for a church than a home.

  "Welcome home," he said to himself.

  And at that moment, the phone in the hallway began to ring, demanding his attention.

  "Hello?" said Jim, into the phone’s receiver.

  "James Baston?" a man's voice questioned.

  "Who is this?"

  At the other end of the phone line, the voice paused for a second before continuing. "My name is Doctor Mitchell Lorentz, and I have an offer that, I hope, you will not want to refuse."

  THANK YOU FOR READING THIS EXTENDED VERSION OF TOWARDS YESTERDAY. I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT. THE FULL VERSION IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD FROM AMAZON.