Talen

by Shay Savage

  “How far have we come?” I ask. My legs are beginning to fatigue, and I’ve lost all track of time. It must be getting late.

  “We aren’t far from where I want to stop for the night,” Aerin says. “Once we get some sleep, we should make it to the exit in a couple of hours.”

  True to her word, we soon turn down a short hallway and enter a room.

  “No electricity here or food,” she says, “but there are bunk beds and water.”

  Using her flashlight, I set myself up on the bottom bunk, glad to be off my feet. Aerin settles on another lower bunk across from me. The plastic mats on the bed are thin and musty but certainly more comfortable than the floor. I can’t pretend that I’m happy about the arrangements. Awkwardness be dammed—I much prefer sharing a bed with her.

  I feel like I only just fell asleep when I wake to Aerin shaking my shoulder.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  I stumble sleepily after her. When my eyes are able to focus, I see that she has a long coil of nylon rope wrapped around her shoulder, and I wonder how long she’s been awake.

  “Where did you get that?” I ask.

  “There’s a supply room off the barracks,” Aerin says. “I found it the last time I was here.”

  “What’s the rope for?”

  “Maybe nothing,” she mutters. “We’ll see. You just have to wait.”

  “I’m getting tired of hearing that.” I frown and follow after her.

  I’m annoyed with the lack of answers and the monotony of the main corridor under the mountain, but Aerin is right—it doesn’t take much longer to get to the end of it. One moment, we’re in the corridor with only the meager, crank flashlight to guide our way, and the next we’re in a large, open room with a high ceiling.

  “This is it,” Aerin says. “We’re here.”

  I follow her through the empty room to a huge set of doors. Aerin has me hold the flashlight as she turns a crank in the middle of the doors and then pulls one of them to the side. I blink as daylight penetrates the room, and Aerin leans against the door to give it a good shove. It opens a bit more, making enough space for us to pass.

  Outside is a small, obviously manmade plateau leading up to the door. A hundred feet away, it drops sharply, and I take a few steps to look over the eastern cliff. Just below, I see a rut-filled dirt road leading down the hill. To the northwest, a stone lookout tower with a rusted metal staircase sits on the mountain summit, surrounded by tall, spindly evergreens. I gaze up at the trees. All of their branches are pointed eastward.

  “Over here,” Aerin says, pointing toward the tower.

  “Where are we?” I ask as I follow her.

  “Spruce Knob,” she says, “the highest point of the Allegheny Mountains.”

  We head up a small incline off the northwest side of the plateau and go around a group of rocks. As we reach the other side, the wind hits me hard in the face, stinging my eyes.

  “It’s so windy here all the time,” Aerin says. She points to the trees. “Those are red spruce trees. It’s the wind that makes all their branches point east.”

  We approach the east side of the lookout tower and then head around it. As we crest the summit, the view opens up to reveal the grey sky. I tilt my head to look out over the mountains, and my mouth drops open as I gasp.

  The west side of the mountain is a sheer, impassible cliff. At the bottom of the cliff, where West Virginia should be, there is nothing but deep, grey water as far as I can see. Waves crash into the cliff below, and as I stare down, several boulders break away from the cliff and crash into the water.

  “Where’s the land?” I whisper into the cold wind.

  “There isn’t any land,” Aerin says. “That’s the whole point. I told you—the West is gone!”

  Chapter 12

  I sit on top of the stone lookout tower on the summit of the mountain and stare out at the sea that shouldn’t be there. Cold wind continues to whip around, hurling dust into my face though there is little ash in the air. I squint into the distance, positive that if I just look long enough, the clouds will part and show me some evidence of land. It never happens.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally say. “What…what am I looking at?”

  “What used to be the West,” she says.

  “Is it an ocean? I mean, is it that deep, or is it shallow?”

  “My guess is that it’s fairly shallow by comparison to the ocean in the east, but I don’t know if it’s fresh water or salt. I need to take some samples, but I have no idea how to get there. I thought maybe I could use the rope to rappel down, but I don’t think it’s long enough to get me to the water.”

  “Take samples? Take them where?”

  “I can do some basic analysis here,” she says. “I found some functioning equipment on the lower level of the complex, but ultimately I need to get them back to the capital. My mom has the knowledge and the tools to draw better conclusions.”

  Shock has turned my brain to mush, and I’m having trouble comprehending what Aerin is telling me. I have no idea what difference it makes whether or not there is salt in the water or what she might be able to gather from the composition of the silt.

  “How far does it go?” I ask.

  “As far as I know, this is it,” Aerin says.

  “What do you mean, ‘This is it’?”

  “I mean, the sea before you goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean and that this mountain range is as far west as the continent goes. The remainder of what used to be North America is under water. Based on all the geological evidence from before the Great Eruption, this is what it looked like hundreds of millions of years ago during the Paleozoic Era, right before the tectonic plates collided…”

  She continues on about plate boundaries, subduction zones, and North American Taconic orogeny, but I’m quickly lost in the terminology. I get the general idea that half a billion years ago, there was an ocean here, but then these mountains formed and the ocean subsided. Now, after millions of years, the tectonic plates have shifted, and the sea is back.

  “Considering the erosion from the sea and the continuous activity from the plate boundary,” Aerin says, “it might be just a matter of time before the rest of this mountain breaks apart.”

  As if in response, the ground begins to shake. The quake isn’t strong and only lasts a few seconds, not even giving us enough time to move to better shelter. As it subsides, more rocks break free from the mountainside and tumble to the water below.

  Though the geology lesson is somewhat interesting, I’m more concerned about another matter. Unless human beings rapidly evolve into water-dwellers, there is no place for them to live past the mountain range.

  “Where did the people go?” I whisper.

  “I don’t think there have been any people out there for a long time,” Aerin says softly. “This didn’t happen overnight. It’s been like this for years, maybe since the very beginning of the quakes.”

  A hard knot forms in my stomach.

  “But…but we were relocating people out West.” I turn to her and grab her arm. “All the Naughts surrounding the capital were relocated to the West where there was supposed to be fertile land!”

  “I know.” She looks away from me.

  “We moved thousands of people!” I yell. “I watched them get loaded onto carts by the hundreds! We gave them everything they would need to get a life started out there, and they can’t have just disappeared! Where are they?”

  I glare at her, demanding answers I know she can’t provide. The reality is right in front of me, but I can’t bring myself to acknowledge it.

  “I helped him.” I take a step closer to her and grab her elbow. “I helped my father arrange for their relocation. I organized the farming equipment!” I grip her arm a little tighter, forcing her to look at me and screaming, “Where are they? Where did they all go?”

  “I don’t know, Talen!” She wrestles her arm away and takes a step back. “I don’t know wher
e they went, but I think you can probably figure out what happened to them!”

  “No.” I shake my head violently and look out at the water, waiting for an ark to show up, full of smiling families, complete with animals in cute little cages, arranged in sets of two. I see nothing but unending water as the grey waves crash against the mountainside.

  “They’re all dead,” Aerin says gently. “Talen, you know they have to be dead.”

  I shake my head, unable to speak as my pulse pounds in my ears. My stomach churns, and I have to sit back down again.

  A grey-haired woman toting two grandchildren behind her looked up at me with worry and concern in her eyes.

  “It’s going to be great!” I said with a smile. “The land will still be harsh, but there will be room for everyone. We’re sending all the farming equipment you’ll need. It’s not going to be easy, but soon you’ll be growing your own food. You won’t have to fight for scraps here at the capital anymore.”

  She held my hand and cried as she thanked me. The children looked up at me in awe, like I was their savior or something. I reached out and ruffled the hair of each of them in turn, telling them everything was going to be all right.

  “God bless you, son!” The grey-haired woman placed her hands on either side of my face, and I felt like I was on top of the world.

  “I helped.” I have to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

  “He lied, Talen,” Aerin says softly as she sits down beside me. “My mother says the government knew about the West years ago but never told anyone. They needed a way to reduce the population without causing panic.”

  “He ended the program.” Bile fills my throat again. “That’s when I started the protests—when Dad stopped the funding for the relocation program.”

  “Why did he do that, Talen? Why did he stop the program?”

  “I thought he just didn’t want to pay for it,” I say. “He didn’t want all the funds and equipment going to Naughts. I thought…I thought…”

  I can’t hold it back any longer. I get up on my hands and knees and retch over the edge of the lookout tower, gripping the cold, rusted metal railing as tightly as I can as my eyes water. When my stomach is empty, I feel Aerin’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Take this,” Aerin says as she hands me some water. “You’re going to get dehydrated.”

  I take a sip and hand it back to her. My throat still feels as if I’d been screaming for hours, but my stomach has settled a little. I stare back out at the endless water and try to process what’s in front of me.

  How many people did I send to their deaths? How could I not have known?

  “Do you really think he knew?” I finally ask. “Do you think my father knew what was happening to them and still used me to help?”

  “I don’t know,” Aerin says, “but my mother thinks so.”

  “Just in case I need another reason to hate him,” I mutter under my breath.

  I stomp over to the stairs and make my way back down to the ground. Aerin stays close to the shelter of the lookout tower while I walk over to the edge and stare down at the sheer cliffs and try to collect my thoughts. If my father knew and kept it from me, I feel like a complete idiot. I should have known that he had no interest in helping anyone outside the community, but I was too excited to be helping the Naughts to consider what he might have really been planning.

  What did he do with them all? Take them somewhere else, maybe north, and let them starve in the cold? Or did he actually line them up and have them all killed so he didn’t have to pay the transportation costs?

  “That’s about the time they stopped funding the ICTs, like Hilltop,” I say as I turn back to address Aerin. “The construct towns project wasn’t working out, and they were going to try Naught relocation instead. What did they do with all those resources if they didn’t use them for the Naughts and weren’t using them for the ICTs?”

  “I don’t know,” Aerin says.

  “They have to be using that equipment somewhere,” I say.

  Aerin shrugs.

  I’m grasping, and I know it. I need to come up with some reasonable explanation that doesn’t involve the deaths of all those people, but nothing comes to mind. The sheer amount of farming equipment, livestock, and seed collected for the project had to end up somewhere. It was far too valuable to waste, and I’m sure it didn’t come back to the capital city.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “I need to get a sample of the water,” Aerin says. “Knowing what’s in it—is it fresh or salt—will go a long way in explaining what’s happening. If it’s fresh, there should be land surrounding it. If it’s brackish, it’s all ocean. Silt samples will provide information as well. That’s why I need to get down there.”

  The wind picks up, making me shiver, and we move to the inside of the lookout tower’s base for shelter. Aerin sits with her back to the stone wall while I stand at the opening, letting the wind blow past my face.

  “I don’t smell salt,” I tell her. “I’ve been to the East Coast, and I know what the ocean smells like.”

  “That’s only if there is a high concentration of salt,” she tells me. “I need to know how much salt there is, if any.”

  “Why?” I leave the tower’s opening and sit beside her against the stone wall.

  “If this water is ultimately connected to the rest of the oceans around the world, then it will have a higher concentration of salt, even if we can’t smell it or taste it.”

  Even though she’s explained it a couple of different ways, I’m not quite comprehending what she means. I can’t wrap my head around it. Once again, I leave the shelter and go to the edge of the sheer cliff, looking out over the edge. I come back inside and steer the conversation to something more basic.

  “That rope isn’t going to get you down there.”

  “Yeah, I see that now.” She sighs as she places her hand on top of her pack.

  “We can’t get down these cliffs, not without proper climbing equipment. They’re too steep.”

  “I think we’re going to have to keep moving until we find a place where we can get down.” Aerin looks north.

  “But you said the mountain could break apart,” I say. “If we’re on top of it, near the cliffs, we could be caught up in it without warning.”

  “What if we go along the back side of the mountains?” Aerin says. “We could travel north or south…keep in the eastern valley until we get to the end.”

  “That’s hundreds of miles.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” She folds her arms over her chest.

  “No. I can’t even cope with what I’m seeing.”

  What she’s proposing isn’t quite at the impossible level, but it’s close. Scaling those cliffs isn’t going to happen unless we stumble upon a group of rock climbing experts with their gear. Walking around the mountains to find the sea could take a month or more, and we’d probably freeze or starve to death along the way.

  I’d spent the last two days in a relatively warm, secure place with an actual bed. Inside there is food, water, and Plastictown isn’t all that far away if something else is needed. The idea of leaving such a place where I could shower and sleep in a bed with Aerin seems completely ridiculous to me. The only logical course of action is to get her to go back inside.