by Anthology
“You don’t even know what we are doing. Why we exist.”
“I have a good idea. After all, I worked for you two years.”
Time passed. Rethrick moistened his lips again and again, rubbing his cheek. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. At last he looked up.
“No,” he said. “It’s no deal. No one will ever run the Company but me. If I die, it dies with me. It’s my property.”
Jennings became instantly alert. “Then the papers go to the Police.”
Rethrick said nothing, but a peculiar expression moved across his face, an expression that gave Jennings a sudden chill.
“Kelly,” Jennings said. “Do you have the papers with you?”
Kelly stirred, standing up. She put out her cigarette, her face pale. “No.”
“Where are they? Where did you put them?”
“Sorry,” Kelly said softly. “I’m not going to tell you.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” Kelly said again. Her voice was small and faint. “They’re safe. The SP won’t ever get them. But neither will you. When it’s convenient, I’ll turn them back to my father.”
“Your father!”
“Kelly is my daughter,” Rethrick said. “That was one thing you didn’t count on, Jennings. He didn’t count on it, either. No one knew that but the two of us. I wanted to keep all positions of trust in the family. I see now that it was a good idea. But it had to be kept secret. If the SP had guessed they would have picked her up at once. Her life wouldn’t have been safe.”
Jennings let his breath out slowly. “I see.”
“It seemed like a good idea to go along with you,” Kelly said. “Otherwise you’d have done it alone, anyhow. And you would have had the papers on you. As you said, if the SP caught you with the papers it would be the end of us. So I went along with you. As soon as you gave me the papers I put them in a good safe place.” She smiled a little. “No one will find them but me. I’m sorry.”
“Jennings, you can come in with us,” Rethrick said. “You can work for us forever, if you want. You can have anything you want. Anything except—”
“Except that no one runs the Company but you.”
“That’s right. Jennings, the Company is old. Older than I am. I didn’t bring it into existence. It was—you might say, willed to me. I took the burden on. The job of managing it, making it grow, moving it toward the day. The day of revolution, as you put it.
“My grandfather founded the Company, back in the twentieth century. The Company has always been in the family. And it will always be. Someday, when Kelly marries, there’ll be an heir to carry it on after me. So that’s taken care of. The Company was founded up in Maine, in a small New England town. My grandfather was a little old New Englander, frugal, honest, passionately independent. He had a little repair business of some sort, a little tool and fix-it place. And plenty of knack.
“When he saw government and big business closing in on everyone, he went underground. Rethrick Construction disappeared from the map. It took government quite a while to organize Maine, longer than most places. When the rest of the world had been divided up between international cartels and world-states, there was New England, still alive. Still free. And my grandfather and Rethrick Construction.
“He brought in a few men, mechanics, doctors, lawyers, little once-a-week newspapermen from the Middle West. The Company grew. Weapons appeared, weapons and knowledge. The time scoop and mirror! The Plant was built, secretly, at great cost, over a long period of time. The Plant is big. Big and deep. It goes down many more levels than you saw. He saw them, your alter ego. There’s a lot of power there. Power, and men who’ve disappeared, purged all over the world, in fact. We got them first, the best of them.
“Someday, Jennings, we’re going to break out. You see, conditions like this can’t go on. People can’t live this way, tossed back and forth by political and economic powers. Masses of people shoved this way and that according to the needs of this government or that cartel. There’s going to be resistance, someday. A strong, desperate resistance. Not by big people, powerful people, but by little people. Bus drivers. Grocers. Vidscreen operators. Waiters. And that’s where the Company comes in.
“We’re going to provide them with the help they’ll need, the tools, weapons, the knowledge. We’re going to ‘sell’ them our services. They’ll be able to hire us. And they’ll need someone they can hire. They’ll have a lot lined up against them. A lot of wealth and power.”
There was silence.
“Do you see?” Kelly said. “That’s why you mustn’t interfere. It’s Dad’s Company. It’s always been that way. That’s the way Maine people are. It’s part of the family. The Company belongs to the family. It’s ours.”
“Come in with us,” Rethrick said. “As a mechanic. I’m sorry, but that’s our limited outlook showing through. Maybe it’s narrow, but we’ve always done things this way.”
Jennings said nothing. He walked slowly across the office, his hands in his pockets. After a time he raised the blind and stared out at the street, far below.
Down below, like a tiny black bug, a Security cruiser moved along, drifting silently with the traffic that flowed up and down the street. It joined a second cruiser, already parked. Four SP men were standing by it in their green uniforms, and even as he watched some more could be seen coming from across the street. He let the blind down.
“It’s a hard decision to make,” he said.
“If you go out there they’ll get you,” Rethrick said. “They’re out there all the time. You haven’t got a chance.”
“Please—” Kelly said, looking up at him.
Suddenly Jennings smiled. “So you won’t tell me where the papers are. Where you put them.”
Kelly shook her head.
“Wait.” Jennings reached into his pocket. He brought out a small piece of paper. He unfolded it slowly, scanning it. “By any chance did you deposit it with the Dunne National Bank, about three o’clock yesterday afternoon? For safekeeping in their storage vaults?”
Kelly gasped. She grabbed her handbag, unsnapping it. Jennings put the slip of paper, the parcel receipt, back in his pocket. “So he saw even that,” he murmured. “The last of the trinkets. I wondered what it was for.”
Kelly groped frantically in her purse, her face wild. She brought out a slip of paper, waving it.
“You’re wrong! Here it is! It’s still here.” She relaxed a little. “I don’t know what you have, but this is—”
In the air above them something moved. A dark space formed, a circle. The space stirred. Kelly and Rethrick stared up, frozen.
From the dark circle a claw appeared, a metal claw, joined to a shimmering rod. The claw dropped, swinging in a wide arc. The claw swept the paper from Kelly’s fingers. It hesitated for a second. Then it drew itself up again, disappearing with the paper, into the circle of black. Then, silently, the claw and the rod and the circle blinked out. There was nothing. Nothing at all.
“Where—where did it go?” Kelly whispered. “The paper. What was that?”
Jennings patted his pocket. “It’s safe. It’s safe, right here. I wondered when he would show up. I was beginning to worry.”
Rethrick and his daughter stood, shocked into silence.
“Don’t look so unhappy,” Jennings said. He folded his arms. “The paper’s safe—and the Company’s safe. When the time comes it’ll be there, strong and very glad to help out the revolution. We’ll see to that, all of us, you, me and your daughter.”
He glanced at Kelly, his eyes twinkling. “All three of us. And maybe by that time there’ll be even more members to the family!”
PERPETUAL MOTION BLUES
Harper Hull
The Last Trip, Day 2
The taller old man in the group opened his backpack, pulled out a ragged, yellow rain slicker and quickly pulled it over his arms, up onto his shoulders. Behind him, his three equally elderly comrades followed sui
t and wriggled their weary bodies into their own waterproof clothing of different fabrics and colors.
“I hope Howard found new coats this time,” said one of the women, pulling her hood over her yellow-grey hair and tightening the cords below her neck.
“He’ll never find new coats, Jenna! Surely you realize this by now.” The yellow-clad man snorted, throwing a withering look back across his shoulder towards his elderly wife. “Like he’ll never find that part.”
The second woman in the group shook her head slowly and slipped her thin arm through that of the man beside her. He was leaning heavily on a thick, slightly curved stick of weathered wood. He was breathing raggedly and every step seemed to cause a grimace across his leathery, sun-beaten face. He stopped a moment and stared into the sunny blue skies above and beyond, the woman beside him smiling at him in a mournful way and rubbing his elbow with bony fingers.
“This is our last time, Eric.” She projected her voice to reach the man in yellow.
“You always say that,” said Eric, turning around to face her. “It’s never the last time. You’ll travel again. Both of you! If he makes it, that is.” Eric waggled a derisive finger at the wheezing man.
A short way off along the dusty road where the sun-scorched hills dipped to meet a narrow, dirty river a baton of lightning arrowed from the sky; a solitary black cloud was rumbling over the near horizon, a dismal blot in a canvas of blue.
“Why, it looks like a flash storm! How unexpected!” Eric said in a sarcastic tone, rolling his eyes.
The rain began to fall, heavily. The four elderly people slowly made their way along the road that was becoming slick and muddy beneath their feet. No one spoke as they reached the low-humped hills, followed the trail across them, and stopped on a slope overlooking the splashing river. On the near bank lay an upturned wooden row-boat. One edge sat off the wet dirt upon a small rock, and there were two oars lying on the ground beside it.
“Whose turn is it? Does anyone even care?” asked the sick old man, whose name was Jason. “You should do it, Eric, we’re all tired and it is for your benefit.”
“Let’s just go another way this time!” said the woman arm-in-arm with Jason, “if it doesn’t work out and we don’t get there, well, I don’t think I—we—really care anymore.”
Beside her Jason sighed and nodded his head. “I’m with Molly. I’ll happily risk it all ending in a week at the chance of a few extra days that are just different. This isn’t living anymore, is it? Was it ever?”
“Shut it, you two!” shouted Eric, “I’m sick to death of this. Go, if you want, I don’t care. Enjoy the light show. We’re going on as usual. Wait here, Jenna.”
Eric strode over-confidently down the path to the riverside, barely keeping his balance on the slick ground as the rain pelted off his coat. As he approached the upturned boat he slipped his backpack off and pulled a large knife from a side pouch. Grunting, he bent down and grabbed one of the wet oars from the ground and thwacked it against the side of the boat. A brown-and-yellow diamond-striped snake came wriggling quickly from beneath the boat, skirting the small rock. Eric leaned forward and chopped down with his knife, decapitating the snake in one well-practiced swipe.
“Us one thousand, five hundred and sixty, snake one!” said Eric loudly, with little joy in his voice, gesturing to Jenna at the top of the slope to come join him.
The First Trip, Day 1
Molly shouted to Jason as she twisted a key uselessly in the car ignition.
“Completely dead! Not a thing. You get anything else on the TV?”
Jason ran back inside the cabin before reappearing a moment later, shaking his head.
“Nothing, it’s kaput too! Everything electrical has died.”
Molly rushed back to the cabin, finding herself glancing up at the sky as she did, and pulled Jason inside with her. In the main, spacious room Eric and Jenna were fiddling with the dead television and a small, silent weather radio.
“Okay, kid, let’s think it through here. This is crazy,” said Molly, pulling her loosened red hair away from her face with both hands. “They said we had one week. They said there are transports leaving Centralia up to and including the seventh day. They expected all communications to be lost quickly—and they were right. They didn’t mention everything with electrical power going down.”
“This is freaking insane,” yelled Eric, punching the top of the television, “we get an emergency broadcast out of nowhere telling us we all die in a week and we’re supposed to just accept it as fact? I want some goddamn proof!”
“Look around!” shouted Jenna. “Nothing works! You think a power outage took out everything with batteries, and the car?” She dropped her face into her hands and became silent.
A huge boom rocked the cabin, sending plates and cups falling from shelves in the kitchen and smashing on the floor. Jason ran outside and headed towards the back of the cabin where he thought the explosion had come from. Looking out across the forest he saw a thick chimney of black smoke trailing up into the grey sky. Thinking fast, he took off running towards the tree line. Behind him, the others watched from a window, faces ashen. Eric slipped an arm around his wife and pulled her close. Molly crossed herself as she watched her husband disappear amongst the trees.
Forty minutes later Jason returned, dirty and out of breath. The others saw him coming and met him at the door.
“Start packing,” he said, huffing. “That was a commercial passenger ‘plane. No survivors.”
“Who is doing this?” asked Jenna. “Who is trying to kill us?”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it? We have one week to get to Centralia, of all places, without any transport. Let’s get some shit together, fast, and head out.” Jason moved towards the bedrooms to collect backpacks.
Within the hour the four were on their way and heading in a direction away from the crashed airplane, much to the relief of Jenna. Each wore the backpacks they had brought along for the weekend in the cabin, stuffed full of processed food, water and a minimum of extra clothing.
“Look on the bright side,” said Eric, his dark hair blowing in the breeze as he looked back and saw the cabin fading in the distance behind them. “We’re not in a city. Imagine the freaking chaos there right now, all those people trying to get out on foot. They’re probably killing each other. If I’m going to go down, I’m glad it’s with you guys.”
The Last Trip, Day 4
Molly approached a green SUV on the side of the highway and opened the rear doors, pulling them wide before reaching inside and unstrapping a wheelchair that lay folded in the cargo hold. Without a moment of hesitation or thought, she pulled and clicked the chair into place and wheeled it to the center of the highway where her three friends waited. Jason was being held up by Eric and Jenna, his face towards the ground.
“OK honey, sit down. It’s relaxing time again.” Molly looked at Eric with pleading eyes and the old man sighed.
“I’ll push you first, buddy. The girls can do the goody run.”
Molly and Jenna started walking briskly along the vehicle-strewn highway. They stopped occasionally and opened a door on a particular car or truck. They clambered inside and came out with some kind of swag, be it half a bottle of juice, an unopened packet of cookies or a bag of deli chips. The women each covered one side of the highway, and never came out of a vehicle empty-handed. Every treasure-point was deeply ingrained in their minds, a map of refreshments and snacks plotted out over many runs. As Eric slowly pushed Jason along the asphalt towards the women, Jenna called back to him.
“Do you want the boots from the white Jeep?”
“Not this time, these are still good.”
Jenna shrugged and moved on to a metallic-blue Lexus, pulling a straw hat from the passenger side. She put it on, struck a silly pose and smiled back at the men that trailed behind.
“Gotta have my lucky hat!”
Eric leaned down and whispered into Jason’s ear. “That freaking thing’l
l never work,” he said.
Jason laughed, coughed, and spat onto the ground. Eric pushed forward, wondering if they could find a wheelbarrow or something before they reached the wheelchair next time. It was getting harder and harder to get Jason to that point; this time had about killed them all. He made a mental note to ask Howard to find something. It was a miracle that they had managed to carry him all that way on the first trip.
He watched his wife skip between the abandoned cars in her silly hat that she would later throw off a bridge with a silent wish and wondered how she stayed cheerful. They’d never had the chance to do all those things they’d planned when they first married. No trip to Venice. No renovating an old house. No children. They’d honestly had nothing, for 30 years, except each other. Eric knew that Jenna was the only reason he did this. In this world, with no hope and no deviation, she was the only thing on the entire doomed planet that stopped him from climbing to the highest point he could find and throwing himself off with one final middle-fingered salute to the heavens. At least they had been able to grow old together; noone could take that away from them.
The ransacking of abandoned vehicles came to an end as they reached what they had dubbed Death Mile. A huge pile-up of traffic, mostly vehicles containing corpses of fractured and burned people spread ahead of them as far as they could see. No one looked into the vehicles if they could help it, picking their way around the wreckage with eyes to the ground. The first time had scarred them all for life.
The First Trip, Day 2
“How on earth can it be raining?” laughed Jason, pulling his backpack up over his head as a hard rain began to fall from a rogue storm cloud in the otherwise clear blue sky.
Jenna squealed and fell to her knees, rummaging in her own backpack for some kind of protective wear. She pulled out a battered leather jacket and slipped it on as fast as she could, turning up the stiff collar around her neck and tucking her blonde ponytail inside it. Eric pulled out a baseball cap, which he immediately gave to Jenna. Molly had nothing but underwear, socks and t-shirts in her backpack so did as Jason had done, balancing her backpack on her head with both hands.