by C.L. Bevill
* * *
We spent the remainder of the afternoon on a slow ride to Brookings. There were more hills and more dramatic views of the ocean. Twice we saw something large out in the ocean that could have been the large eel-like, green fish/serpent thing or its brother. Of course, it might have been a stupefied whale wondering what the dealio had happened to his world. Incidentally, I added the green fishy thing to the last page of my notebook and didn’t bother to give it a name besides Big Green. Someday, someone who knew something about such creatures would name it something suitable. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be during the course of the thing eating him or her.
I had to admit that I was the only one getting the best looks. I stared out to sea with occasional glances behind us to ensure that nothing or no one was following us. We stopped at a steel bridge overlooking a cove far below, and Zach wondered aloud how long it would be before the infrastructure started to collapse.
Kara looked thoughtful. She pointed at the asphalt. Weeds were springing up in cracks on the road. “Before too long, there won’t be much road left. We won’t be able to ride bikes here in a few years. These bridges could last ten years, or they could get washed away in a storm next winter. A hundred years from now, there won’t be much left of our world.”
Who would repair any of this anymore? I didn’t think of it before. All the things we took for granted were going to be gone, or they would be gone soon. The lack of food wasn’t going to be the only issue we would be facing in the future. The three of us were very solemn as we continued our journey.
We reached Brookings before nightfall, and passed through the town, and crossed the Chetco River. By mutual agreement, none of us wanted to spend the night in a place where the man who had attacked me might be able to burn us down. We found a house in the low hills east of the populace and set up for the night. It was another nice house, although not as expensive as the one with the broad window views that I had woken up in yesterday.
Again I was tired, even though I hadn’t done anything particularly taxing except for keeping a sharp lookout. I hadn’t even fallen asleep. Kara and Zach could both tell I was exhausted, so they let me sleep. Kara woke me up for a dinner of vegetable and pasta soup she had made from the last of Gigi’s vegetables. The pasta had come from the previous occupant’s kitchen, along with the canned chicken stock for the base. Not that I was complaining. We had cloth napkins and tea from bottles in the pantry. It was quite civilized.
Afterwards, I took a blanket out to the deck and cuddled up in a white spindle rocker placed strategically in the corner. Someone had put it where they could see through the V of twin hills to the beaches and ocean to the west. The sun had disappeared and only a little purplish-pink remained to indicate that it was ever there. Far above me, the stars were beginning to appear in astonishing rapidity. Soon enough I couldn’t see the sea at all. It was a sheet of blackness that extended into infinity.
Kara brought me a glass of white wine and placed it on the banister near my right arm. I blinked as she moved back into the house, a silent form, a mom-like being that wasn’t motherly at all. I took a sip and smiled. My mother and father let me have a glass of wine at dinners on weekends. Most of the time I didn’t like it anyway. The wine that Kara had given me was sweetish and wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t finish it.
I was still sad from seeing J’s note. It was not dissimilar to being in Gigi and Eddy’s house, but it was worse. J had been alive after the change. He’d been alone. Then he couldn’t abide it for a second longer. That made five people who had made it. Five out of how many? The population of the United States had been around three hundred million. (The figure that came to my mind was another benefit of a social sciences class.) The population of the state of Oregon had been around three million. Five out of three million? And that was only the ones we had encountered. Perhaps if I found a formula to figure the percentage of survivors to the areas we came from, then I could calculate how many people were still out there.
There were others. They weren’t all insane. Of that I was certain.
And there were the firefly pixies. I saw the greenish glow coming up the valley and I smiled. My smile faded just a little as I realized they could be coming to warn us as well as to see how I was doing. I hoped it was the latter because I didn’t want to know more danger was lying in wait for us around the next bend.
It took them a few minutes to make their way up to where I was sitting. They came over the deck railing in a wave of pulsating light. They circled me once and then twice. Many landed on the wood balustrade as they gathered closely to me. One of them landed on my hand, and I stopped the motion of the rocking chair with my foot. The little firefly pixie chattered at me questioningly. When it paused, I said, “I’m all right.”
It tilted its head as it considered me. The little thing was so delicate and so beautiful that it almost hurt my eyes to look upon her. Her? When had I decided that? It was an odd feeling that came to me. The firefly pixies were all hers. Each and every one of them was a female. I didn’t know how I knew this, but it was in my head and it stuck firm. She chirped again longingly; it was a question that I didn’t comprehend.
“What is it?” I asked. From behind me I heard the soft footsteps of someone and knew Zach had joined us. A few of the firefly pixies launched themselves into the air and headed for him. Well, he was pretty enough to be one of them; that was for certain. I heard him chuckle quietly as they buzzed his face with avid eagerness.
“Hi guys,” he said softly. “Nice to see you again.”
“Hi, girls,” I corrected. He snorted and then amended his words, “Girls then.”
A few more of the pixies landed in my lap and held a little conference of animated chirruping. A few buzzed about in animated concert. It was a marvel they didn’t fly into each other.
“Are they following us?” Zach asked wonderingly.
I smiled. “It doesn’t bother me.”
The group in my lap finally decided on an action and turned to me en masse. I was silent as they looked up at me expectantly. Finally, they began to sing to me. It came to me a moment later that they were trying to sing Jingle Bells. They had the tune correct, but the words didn’t sound right. They abruptly stopped, and one of them jabbed my stomach in a hopeful manner.
“They want you to sing,” Zach said, sotto voce.
I carefully took a drink of the wine and replaced the glass on the railing, trying to avoid the pixies gathered there. Then I began to sing. Jingle Bells was first, of course. Over the last two days I had been wondering what else to sing to the little things if I was to be given the chance again. I had thought of quite a few. I didn’t know all the words, but it didn’t stop me. “California Dreaming” was next, followed by On Top of Spaghetti, and Bingo. Once I started down the children’s songs path, there was no going back. Zach threw in, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Kara came out a little while later and suggested Frere Jaques in both French and English, and Clementine. She also helped to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, “Kokomo”, “Help Me, Rhonda”, and “Good Vibrations.” Apparently, she was a Beach Boys fan. We finished with “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, and another encore of Jingle Bells.
I hadn’t known that I knew so many songs. When it was obvious that I was pooped, they gathered into a tight-knit group and headed back over the railing down the hill.
One of the little pixies flew close to my cheek and nuzzled me. I stayed perfectly still as a touch as soft and light as a butterfly’s wing brushed over my skin. The contact was so fleeting that it didn’t seem real. Then my skin tingled, and I kept myself from twitching her away from my flesh. I couldn’t quite see what she was doing, but after a moment, she chattered approvingly at me and zipped off after her group.
“That was weird,” Kara said in an awed voice. We were all watching the greenish glow move west.
“What isn’t?” Zach muttered. Then I felt, rather than saw, him look at me. He t
ensed up and stepped closer to me. “There’s something on your face,” he said. “Let me…”
“No,” I said. “It’s from the pixies. One of them touched me. It’s probably just a little of their bioluminescence.”
Zach’s posture changed. I couldn’t see his face, but his broad shoulders were rigid and then they relaxed minutely. “Yeah,” he agreed reluctantly. “You should probably wash it off.”
I didn’t touch my cheek. I didn’t want to wash it off.
But the next morning I looked into the mirror and saw that it was a mark. It wasn’t readily visible except that the interior bathroom was dark enough to see that the mark glowed like the firefly pixie’s illumination. It looked like an outline of the pixie’s form, about three-quarters of an inch long with the wings extended to the side. I closed the bathroom door to shut out the light coming down the skylights in the hallway. The bathroom became almost as dark as night.
My cheek glowed in the dark. The figure with attached wings was obvious. And no, it wouldn’t wash off. It appeared as though I was marked. I suppose I should have been bothered, but it didn’t matter to me.
I knew I wasn’t up to riding a bicycle yet, so I submitted to the trailer again. I said determinedly, “I’m getting a bike in Crescent City.”
It wasn’t a question, but Zach only eyed me with subjective consideration. “We’ll see,” was all he said. I didn’t think he noticed the pixie’s mark in the bright morning sun, but I caught Kara looking at it curiously.
I shrugged and she shrugged. They would see it soon enough when the sun went down. I was hoping that Zach didn’t make a big deal out of it. It wasn’t like he was my father.
It was another leisurely ride. Not a half-hour after we started, we crossed the state line into California. I’ve been there before, once to Disneyland when I was about ten years old, but I didn’t remember much about the trip. I had been only interested in the end product. I still had the Mickey Mouse ears at home.
Well, I amended the statement to myself. The Mickey Mouse ears were sitting in my former bedroom. I doubted I would ever see them again, or my room for that matter. Blinking back tears that sprang to my eyes, I held back a sniffle. Of course, Zach heard me and turned his head questioningly back at me.
I shook my head trying to indicate that everything was all right. Although he kept looking back at me, I didn’t let anything else show. We stopped for lunch just after we crossed the Smith River. The highway had veered away from alongside the beaches and roamed through pastureland. We even found a small herd of buffalo. There were five all told, grazing on the land as if nothing was out of place.
Zach stared at them for a long time. “I’ve never seen a buffalo before,” he said at last. “How are they going to survive?”
“The same way we will,” Kara said definitely. They both looked at me strangely when I deliberately opened the gate to the pasture that the buffalo were in and blocked it so that it would stay open.
I shrugged. “They can’t stay in there forever.”
After we resumed our travels, I can honestly say we didn’t see anything else strange. There had been a lot of pastures along that stretch of highway between the road and the ocean, but it slowly changed back into pine and scrub, stunted by the fierce Pacific winds. We passed a prison, a large sprawling place with warnings placed strategically along the highway, but hey, I didn’t know where we were going to pick up a hitchhiker. There was the occasional building interspersed by the occasional sign, but it seemed as empty as the rest of the world.
I suppose I should have known that was a cue for something different to happen. That was beginning to be a pattern. Just when everything calmed down, surprise!
My legs were beginning to cramp from being bent over, and I couldn’t shift enough to make them comfortable in the little trailer that was never meant to carry a full grown adult. So I said to Zach, “Can we please stop before my legs rot and fall off?”
Surprisingly, he let the bike glide to a stop without argument. I jerked frantically as one leg came back awake. I was trying not to embarrass myself overly. Unfortunately, I did fall out of the trailer onto a grassy shoulder and laid there groaning until the pins and needles in the leg stopped being painful. I looked up and grasped that Zach and Kara weren’t paying attention to me at all.
Then I turned toward the outskirts of what I assumed was Crescent City. The road had split into a four lane, two lanes going in each direction. The skies were blue with a sporadic cloud to liven things up. A wind was blowing from the north, and the temperature was around seventy-five degrees. Other than being cramped in the back of our little convoy, I was relatively happy. The term “relative” being relative, of course.
Then I saw what they were looking at with awe-stricken eyes. There was a bulletin board. It was a big one facing the southbound highway. Whatever it had on it before was indeterminable. Now it was painted white. The paint cans were still on the little walkway at the base of the sign. As a matter of fact, there was a ladder still propped against the billboard supports. But the really interesting part was that over the white paint was a set of large handpainted red letters. It announced in block lettering: YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
“Well, there you go,” I said inanely. That familiar bad feeling washed over me, and I nearly bent over to be sick because of it. This time it wasn’t merely a bad feeling. A wave of images appeared in my head and nearly overwhelmed me. I blinked them away and almost groaned with the pain.
Zach and Kara turned to me as if they were both performing the movement in complete synchronization. Mindlessly rubbing my leg, I stared at the sign and then at them, swallowing to contain the instant nausea I felt. I motioned at the sign. Below the huge red letters was another message: Mile marker 47.
“See, what were we worried about?” I supposed contemplatively. “We’re not alone.” Then I giggled, and it sounded half hysterical even to me.