by A. G. Riddle
Muffled footsteps. A large door swings open, revealing faint light. I hold my hand up, squinting, but I can’t make out who it is. The person closes the door quickly, without a word, then stands there a moment, unmoving.
A match strike. The light from the flame lights my captor’s face from beneath. Not captor, rescuer . . . I think.
Grayson Shaw.
His face is bruised and caked with dried blood. Dirt and debris from the forest litters his long blond hair. There’s no hint of a smile. He touches the match to a candle in his other hand and sets it on the floor beside me.
We’re in a supply closet—in a store, I would guess. Shampoo and dish detergent line the shelves. Guess those weren’t in demand when humanity fell.
“How do you feel?” Grayson asks. It’s a question I never thought I’d hear come out of his lips.
I pause. Could this be a charade? A ploy to get me to talk? Could we both have been captured by the suited figures, who have enlisted him to facilitate their interrogation? It’s possible. There’s a fine line between paranoia and brilliance. I’m not sure which side I’m on right now.
I’m sure of only two things. One: I’m extremely lucky to be alive and in reasonably good shape. Very lucky indeed. Two: I need to find Harper. There were over a hundred survivors when I left for Stonehenge, and some are probably still out there somewhere, but she’s the one I’m after, the one I have . . . what were Sabrina’s words? An emotional connection to. Sabrina certainly has a way with words, a very clinical, unsentimental way, but if I’m being honest, she’s okay. She and Yul hid things from me, but I see why now. Messages from the future? Nah, wouldn’t have believed that five days ago.
Grayson fidgets as he waits for my response, and I realize his question must have felt awkward to him, too, given our history: snarky comments escalating to casual threats culminating in a punch to the face—his face, two punches, in fact—and subsequent, more serious threats.
“I’m all right.” I sit up. “Just a little banged up.”
He sets a bottle of water on the floor and holds out his hand, waiting to hand me something. I extend a cupped hand, half expecting him to yell “Psych!” and punch me in the face. I suppose it would make us even—or closer to even, at least.
To my surprise, two small pills drop into my hand. “Aspirin,” he says.
I wash them down with the water. Figure it’s a fifty-fifty chance they’re cyanide. Given the full-body pain right now, I’ll roll the dice. “The others?”
“They have Harper for sure—saw them carrying her off after the first ship came down. Not sure about Yul or Sabrina.”
Harper’s alive . . . but captured. Elation and nausea.
“Where are we?”
“The back room of a small pharmacy across the street from Titan Hall.”
He reads the shock on my face. “Only option. I couldn’t carry you far. Between the smoke, the battle, and the darkness, I don’t think they saw us slip away. They probably think we’re under the rubble somewhere.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Four hours. Figured they would have found us by now, but there’ve been no signs of them. A few ships flying over—that’s it.”
What to do now? To me, there’s only one play.
“Listen, Nick,” Grayson says, his voice quieter. “On the plane . . . I was in a state. My dad had just told me he was giving away his fortune and cutting me out of his will, leaving me with nothing. He was putting me out on the street so I could finally, in his words, ‘learn to fend for myself.’”
Harper told me as much, but I stay silent. It feels like this is something Grayson needs to say.
“Imagine every assumption you lived your life under instantly changing, your whole life upside down, uncertain, for the first time. It felt like a total betrayal, the rug pulled out from under me just like that. I was scared. I felt double-crossed by the person I had depended on my entire life. It seemed like just a whim, a little game he wanted to play: see if his coddled son could cut it in the real world, starting from scratch at age thirty-one. I thought it was cruel not to tell me when I was in school, or just after, when I could have changed my life and taken a different path, before I developed all my . . . habits.”
He waits, but I’m not quite sure what to say. The awkwardness builds. Finally I say, “It’s never too late to change your life.”
“That shit might sell T-shirts, but it doesn’t help me.” His voice is bitter, a brief flashback to the Grayson I met on the plane. He pauses. “Sorry. It’s just that . . . changing is a hell of a lot harder when you’re older, especially after you’ve come to expect and . . . depend on certain things.”
“That’s true.”
“I should have snapped out of it after the crash, but I was still so . . . upside down.”
Incredible. He really has changed this quickly. I have to admit, when he first started up with his story and explanation—apology?—I half expected it to end with a joke on me, accompanied by that classic Grayson Shaw sneer and nasty laugh. But I don’t see either now, just humility and a longing for understanding and forgiveness.
I don’t think it’s the battle outside Titan Hall that changed Grayson, but what he saw inside: that panel that detailed the Grayson Shaw affair. I think seeing what his decision in 2015 led to, what he became, has given him some perspective. I wonder what the world would be like if we could all glimpse our future before every major decision. Maybe that’s what stories are for: so we can learn from people living similar lives, with similar troubles.
“Don’t worry about it. Look, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of at some point. Just part of being human. What counts is what we do right now.”
The air slowly flows out of Grayson, and he glances around at the candlelit storage room. “What are we going to do right now?”
“Now we’re going to go on the offensive.”
TO HIS CREDIT, GRAYSON JUST nods after hearing my plan. Skepticism and worry are clear on his face, but his only question is, “How do we get there?”
We agree that the Podway would be unsafe. I have an idea, but I wonder if this particular transportation technology is still in use, over three hundred years after it was invented. It requires no fuel, has no electronics, and can do about thirty miles an hour, depending on the operator and terrain. It can operate in urban, rural, or off-road environments with no preexisting infrastructure, which Planet Earth happens to be fresh out of at the moment. It’s perfect . . . if we can find it.
It’s still dark when we make our way out of the narrow pharmacy. We hurry down the street, away from the charred, smoldering remains of Titan Hall.
We don’t spot what we seek on the next street, nor the one after that. Finally I see a shop that might suffice. Grayson and I climb in through a shattered plate-glass window. The technology has changed a bit, but it’s still basically the same. And there’s no learning curve.
Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget.
WE RODE UNTIL THE FIRST rays of sunrise, stopping only to duck out of cover when we heard an airship in the distance and to gather food. We spotted an apple orchard a short ways outside London, and now we sit in an interior office of a large, dilapidated warehouse, eating apples and trying to stay warm.
Our plan is to rest the entire day and strike under cover of night. It’s about our only chance.
The cramped room is dark save for a narrow sliver of light that seeps in between the bottom of the closed door and the floor. Grayson and I lean against opposite walls, an old oak desk between us. I can just make out half of his bruised, haggard face, one of his exhausted eyes staring at the floor.
“In the video, you said your dad was a diplomat.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say between bites of apple, wishing we had something more.
“You didn’t follow in his footsteps?”
“Nah.”
“You’re what, an investor?”
“Venture capitalist. Early-stage
companies, technology, mostly IT.”
“I’ve had ideas for companies. Tons of them. Figured, what’s the use, though? It’s not like I needed the money. And any company I started would be measured against my father’s empire. I’d always come up short. No-win situation. Plus, once you’ve been to a few parties and heard the way the gossip machine feeds on the failures of the rich and famous, once you’ve . . . joined in on the feeding, it becomes nearly impossible to put yourself through the grinder. Who wants to try and fail, when you can drink and laugh with no consequences?” He takes a bite of apple. “I bet that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard.”
“It’s not. Not even close. I grew up with people just like you, Grayson, in boarding schools all over the world. It sounds crazy from the outside, but everybody’s scared of failure and being seen as a disappointment. The longer the shadow is, the farther you have to walk.”
“You made it out, though. You did all right for yourself.”
“I guess.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Changed the scorecard. I opted for a career different from my father’s. No comparisons that way. After college, I got on a plane to San Francisco, got lucky, won the IPO lottery, and have been placing calculated bets ever since. Still getting lucky.”
“Being in a plane crash wasn’t lucky. And it wasn’t luck that got the people out of the lake or kept the camp out of chaos. That was skill: strategy, leadership, real-life action-hero stuff.”
“Yeah? You want to hear the crazy part?”
Grayson waits.
“Until six days ago, I had no idea I had it in me.”
JUST AFTER SUNSET, WE SET out again, pedaling harder this time. If we can’t make it there tonight, we’ll lose a lot of the element of surprise.
People who’ve never been to this place don’t realize how far outside of London it is. It’s our only play, the only place I have reason to believe there may be people—verified humans—who actually want to help the passengers of Flight 305.
The second day at camp, after Bob and Mike got the cockpit door open, the pilot said something I didn’t realize was so important until now. After the first bout of turbulence, the plane lost all outside connectivity: satellites, Internet, communications. The pilots were flying blind on their preprogrammed course. When they got closer to Heathrow, however, they received radio contact again. The controllers at Heathrow said a global event had affected communications. They told the pilots to maintain their course, and that the controllers would guide them in.
My working theory is that the device Yul created in 2015 allowed the plane to travel into the future—that the turbulence and radio blackout happened when the plane jumped forward in time. Whoever brought us here must have intended for us to land as planned at Heathrow. But something went wrong. Maybe the suited figures intervened. Or maybe there was a technical problem with the device Yul built, or an issue on their end.
Either way, someone was at Heathrow, a human voice at least, and it was trying to get us there six days ago. That’s really the only clue I have. In fact, it’s the only place on the planet where I have reason to believe there are still any people left.
But as Grayson and I pedal past the road signs for London Heathrow, I feel my nerves winding up. We’ve expended the better part of twenty-four hours on this little adventure. What if I’m wrong?
I draw the binoculars and scan the sprawling airport, looking for a sign, a literal light in the darkness that proves someone’s there, waiting for us. The view isn’t promising. The side closest to us is dark. But on the other side of the sprawling airport, a dim glow lightens the night sky.
Someone or something is here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Nick
HALF AN HOUR LATER I DO A CLOSER scan of Heathrow—or what’s left of it—and then hand Grayson the binoculars.
The airport buildings lie in ruins, caved-in heaps of concrete, steel, and glass. Here and there shards of the color-coded signs that once directed passengers around Europe’s busiest airport stick out, fragments of red, blue, and green dotting the gray mounds. A different shade of green predominates, though. Vegetation is slowly retaking the land. Grass, weeds, and moss creep across the lumpy ruins, but trees have yet to take hold. Perhaps they’ll rise in the coming years, when the wind, rain, and snow have pulverized Heathrow’s remains into something more like soil.
Beyond the buildings we spot the source of the light—three long white tents, apparitions glowing in a sea of tall grass. It’s hard to tell from here, but I’d guess that, put together, they’d be about the size of a football field. A halo of light rises softly above them, giving them a hazy look in the night.
They’ve cut the grass on one long runway—I’m guessing because they expected Flight 305 to land here. I count that as a positive sign at first, but then the optimism that has been rising steadily since I saw the light and the tents fades. Beside the tents, at the end of the mowed runway, loom three airships, their silver skin hatched with long, dark marks—the scars of the two previous battles I’ve witnessed, and who knows how many others. Each is about a hundred feet long, I would guess, and maybe twenty feet tall. I still wonder how they fly. More important, I wonder if the things inside are friend or foe. Here in the darkness, across the sea of grass and the crumbling ruins of Heathrow, there’s not a single clue.
For a long moment Grayson and I just stand here, the rusted remnants of a barbed-wire-topped fence collapsed on the ground at our feet. Finally we step carefully across it toward the tents, committing to our course.
“What do you want to do?” Grayson’s voice is low.
Though there’s little chance they can hear us from here, I answer quietly and quickly. “Find cover and wait. Watch for signs about what’s going on.”
Ten minutes later we’ve taken up position on the other side of a broken-down wide-body aircraft of a make unfamiliar to me. Time is slowly dragging it—like the airport, and London itself—into the ground. Grayson and I take turns peering over the mangled hulk at the camp, our bodies huddled close together, trying to trap any warmth between us.
I’d love to catch some sleep, but it won’t come. I’m too nervous, too cold, too sore.
Sitting with my back against the metal of the aircraft, I look up as it starts to rain. It’s just a drizzle, not near as bad as the frigid, pounding downpour we endured on the ride here. But still, I could do without it.
AN HOUR LATER WE’VE SEEN nothing, not a single indication about how to infiltrate this place. Two hours to sunrise. We’ll have to decide soon: go back or make a move. Neither option appeals.
We’ve made a little shelter under an overhang in the wrecked plane to keep out the cold and the rain. During this time, I’ve made a decision:
If I live through this ordeal, I’m moving to Arizona and never going out after sunset again.
MOVEMENT. A FIGURE IN A glass-tiled suit just came out of an airship. It walks quickly to the closest tent, slipping through flaps I hadn’t been able to make out before. I watch intently, waiting for it to emerge again. I wave Grayson off when he reaches for the binoculars, ready for his shift. I need to see this.
Thirty minutes later my arms are cramped, my eyes are tired, and there hasn’t been another movement. Time to roll the dice.
THE JOG TO THE GLOWING white tents seems endless. Through the haze and drizzle, the three round-topped structures loom above the grass horizon like rising suns.
This is a crazy move. Desperate. But it comes down to this: try to find help elsewhere or see what’s behind the curtain—or tent flaps, literally. I’m freezing, waterlogged, and hungry, and the flaps are a hundred feet away now. Turning back, going for help elsewhere doesn’t seem like an option. I’m not even sure anybody is out there. I know someone is here. And the odds are good that the passengers are, too, one in particular, if the battered airship extracted her from the Titan Hall battlefield. As Grayson and I reach the flaps, guns drawn, I tell myself this
is our only play.
Neither of us hesitates at the threshold. He pulls the flap back and stands aside, allowing me to enter.
The room is small and empty, its walls made of white sheet-plastic.
Warm, misty air engulfs us from above and the sides.
Must be a decontamination chamber of some sort.
A glass door dead ahead clicks. I pull the metal handle.
Another room. White walls again, hard plastic this time. Glass-tiled suits hang on the right side, white suits made of a rubbery material on the left. Helmets with only a horizontal slit for the eyes sit on a shelf above.
Without a word, Grayson and I begin pulling the rubber suits on over our wet clothes. Leaving those here would quickly give us away.
The suit has a small tank on the back, on the interior, and when I seal the helmet, it pressurizes. For a second I panic, wondering if . . . but I can breathe.
The transparent eye slit is the only thing that might give us away. Speed is the key now.
With my eyes, I try to communicate that to Grayson.
We leave the suit room via a sliding glass door. Unlike the hinged door behind us, it makes a tight seal. Another chamber, another spray of mist from all sides, and a metal door ahead slides open, revealing a long corridor with ten doors on each side. Wide windows are set into the wall between the doors, stretching from waist height to the ceiling, about twelve feet above us, giving us a glimpse into each room. They’re . . . labs. Ten labs on each side, each containing a long metal table, open shelving on one wall, and some kind of platform at the back, which I can’t make out from here.
From our vantage point in the chamber I can see movement in the closest few labs, figures wearing containment suits like ours. No one has looked up at us yet. They’re hunched over their work, which I can’t quite make out.
Grayson turns awkwardly in the suit. Through the slit in the helmet, I see fear in his eyes. We’re like two turkeys in a shooting gallery: ten firing stalls, shooters on each side, any one of whom could recognize us. The labs are each about twenty feet wide. Two hundred feet to the sliding glass doors at the end. Might as well be two hundred miles. We’ll never make it without someone realizing we don’t belong, but we can’t turn back—that could draw even more attention.