by William Hawk
“Well, no,” he admitted, “this is the first time. But we’ve always held on to the stories.”
“Cy, William and I were able just to walk back into the graveyard,” said Arthur. “Does that mean that it’s open now?”
Cy looked sad and closed his eyes. I sensed that he was communing with something unseen. Then he opened his eyes. “My ancestors tell me that Roivas has polluted this place. It isn’t protected anymore.”
“So we can’t escape Roivas here,” I said.
“We never really did,” said Julia. “He broke right through it.”
“And my little trick won’t work again,” said Grace.
“So what can we do to defeat this guy?” I asked. “What in the world do we possess that can defeat Roivas?”
“Little Horn cannot be defeated in this realm,” said Cy. “That’s what we’ve always been told.”
“Then where can we defeat him?” Arthur asked.
That’s when the answer hit me. I stared at Arthur, trying to get him to understand. “Why are you looking at me, dude?”
“Think about it, Arthur.”
“Think about what?”
I grew impatient. “What did I ask you to help me with last week?”
My friend looked confused. “The helmets.”
“Exactly.”
Recognition dawned in his eyes. “It’s the helmets.”
I turned and spoke to the others. “You remember how I asked Arthur to help me build helmets? And how they appeared to me in a dream?”
“It was the L.E. who showed you,” said Grace.
“Who’s the L.E.?” asked Julia.
It would take too long to explain. “I’ll tell you later. But I think they were trying to tell me something.”
“The L.E. were trying to tell you how to defeat Little Horn,” said Arthur.
“Exactly.”
We stood, still unsure of where to go, or what to do. “So you built them?” asked Cy.
“Yes, but they don’t work. We’re missing something, and I don’t know what to do.”
Arthur scratched his head with his good arm, then pinched his nose. “I mean we don’t have much choice. The helmets seem like the best way to go forward.”
“It does,” said Grace.
I turned around and left the group. The drizzle started again, and I kicked a small stone with the toe of my shoe, and it skittered forward and landed inside a ring of bigger stones. They weren’t covered by dirt and looked like they’d been placed there recently.
Then something came back to me. Inside the Hall of Knowledge had been a row of three images—a human skull, a circle of stones, and a small rectangle.
I was in a graveyard. That was a circle of stones. All that was missing was something rectangular.
That was the sign I needed, and I understood. The skull represented the native graveyard. The circle was the circle of stones. And the rectangle was something that I would find in the center.
I dropped to my knees, knowing full well how stupid I was going to look, and began pulling the dirt out from the center of stones. The others saw what I was doing and rushed over.
“William, that’s sacred earth,” said Cy.
“I’m treating it respectfully.”
“Have you lost your mind?” asked Arthur.
“Trust me. I think this could be something.”
To my surprise, Julia dropped to her knees beside me and started digging too. Then Grace did the same.
“What are we looking for?” Julia asked.
“Something rectangular, but I don’t know exactly what,” I said. I explained the symbols that I’d seen on the wall of the Hall of Knowledge.
“I remember those,” she said. “The skull, the circle, the rectangle.”
“Hey, I found something,” said Grace. Her fingers were running along the edge of something linear. “It feels like maybe a box.”
The three of us gently removed the dirt from atop the object, and indeed it turned out to be a small box, maybe four inches by three inches wide. Our fingers worked quickly to excavate the dirt around the side of the item, and soon we’d lifted it out of the ground. I grew excited to look at it.
I turned to Cy, who was watching the whole pursuit with skepticism written across his craggy face. “Could this be a grave, Cy? Maybe the ashes of somebody?”
The old native thought carefully before he replied. “No, I don’t think so. Burning the corpses isn’t part of our tradition.”
“Something’s embossed on the top of the lid,” said Grace. She wiped off the last remaining bits of dirt, and I saw something that startled me.
It was a cross. The same cross that had appeared on my left hand. I looked down at the mark on my hand, and it was pulsing.
Grace’s eyes grew wide as she grabbed my hand and held it next to the lid. “Oh my gosh, William—you were right.”
“Who’s going to open it?” said Arthur.
“I’m kind of scared,” said Julia. “A demon could fly out.”
“We’ve already seen one of those today,” I said. “But remember that the Hall of Knowledge gave me this clue. And they’re on our side.”
“Who is they?” said Julia.
“The L.E.,” said Grace. “They were the first civilization to reach Final Ignition. They’re trying to help us.”
I reached for the box and opened the lid and looked down. My eyes widened, and I reached down and produced a small rectangular piece of blue plastic, no bigger than a thumbnail. I knew immediately what it was, and so did Arthur.
Our eyes met.
“It’s a flash drive!” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I examined the thing. It looked like a normal thumb drive, except it didn’t have any brand markings. And the casing didn’t feel like plastic—it felt more durable, appeared to be more light absorbent, something the likes of which I’d never seen, probably from some place I’d never heard of.
“This is a gift to humanity,” I said.
“Maybe someone just dropped it,” said Arthur.
I looked up at him. “Are you a complete idiot?”
“I’m just saying that…”
“Someone dropped it?”
With a shrug, he said, “Yeah, I guess not.”
“Anyway, nobody gets into this graveyard. Right, Cy?”
“That’s right,” the old man agreed. “That was placed there by something more powerful than even my ancestors.”
“We need a computer to access it. I don’t have one here. Julia?”
She shook her head. “I left mine at home yesterday.”
“Grace?”
“Now who is the idiot?”
“Yeah—coma, hospital—sorry. Arthur?”
He pinched his lips tightly together and didn’t speak.
“Did you bring your computer?” I said.
Pointing at the flash drive, he said, “I’m not putting that thing in my computer! It could, like, detonate or something.”
“Arthur! Are you freaking kidding me? You’re gonna save your computer and get us and maybe the whole world killed? You have some kind of hidden head injury?”
Staring at his shoes, Arthur mumbled, “Just that, I paid a lot for that computer. Have all my stuff in there…”
He looked up at us, all staring at him like he had lost his mind. “All right, all right! I’ll try it, and we’ll see what happens.”
An hour later, we’d marched back up from the valley to Cy’s cabin. We gathered around the fireplace while Cy put some logs into it but kept an eye outside for any nasty visitors. Grace put some hot water in a teapot, and Julia hid herself under a heavy blanket. We were all too stunned to talk much.
Arthur reached into his backpack and pulled out his laptop. He sat down on a tree stump that Cy liked to use for a stool, and put the computer on a side table. He opened the lid and pushed the power button.
I took a seat on a folding chair at his side. He looked at me, still stupidly worri
ed about his computer. But I didn’t want to lose Arthur’s friendship, no matter how much this experience changed us.
He opened up his laptop, and when the background came up, he put his hand out. I gingerly put the flash drive in his palm. He loaded it into the side of his computer and crossed his fingers.
“This could be the end of all my work,” he said.
“Or the salvation of civilization,” I said.
The notice came up that a device had been found in the :E drive. Arthur clicked “open file.”
We both leaned forward. A folder appeared on the screen. I held my breath, waiting for the file name to appear.
There was only one file in the folder. It was labeled with a single word.
Helmets.
“I can’t believe it,” I nearly shouted. I stood up and punched my fist into the air. “It wasn’t a random dream. Someone was trying to contact me.”
The others crowded around the screen. Cy stroked his chin and murmured something I couldn’t understand. Julia and Grace were rapt. “Open it!” said Julia.
“I’m scared,” said Arthur. “Like, what if that Roivas put it there? What if it’s a trick, huh, and this opens a virus that somehow blows up the earth? Who’s the idiot then?”
The rest of us exchanged glances. Hadn’t considered that scenario.
Finally, I said, “Do it. It’s all we got.”
Arthur looked around at the others and double-clicked on the icon. A message on the screen said the program used to open the file wasn’t detected, and asked which program should be used.
“Just click on any one,” I said, impatiently.
“This is important,” said Arthur.
“We have no idea what’s inside, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Fine,” he said, annoyed, “let’s use Notepad.”
“Nobody uses Notepad,” said Julia.
“Developers do. It’s as close to empty as you can get.”
The file popped up, and it turned out to be nothing more than a long string of numbers. It didn’t make any sense to my eyes, but I could see Arthur scanning the numbers.
“It a code,” he said.
“Do you think you can crack it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. I mean, I’ve done some basic programming, but this could be using a language we’ve never seen before.”
We continued standing around him. I was practically breathing down his neck.
He turned around, and his eyes scanned ours. “Can you give me a little bit of room here?”
“Sorry,” I said.
We all backed away. Later that night, the last thing I saw as I fell asleep on the mattress was Arthur hunched over, laboring on the code.
I woke up at seven o’clock the next morning to the feeling of a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw Arthur’s goofy face staring down at me. He looked maniacal but exhilarated.
“I did it,” he said.
He was whispering so as not to disturb the others. I rubbed the sleep out of my face.
“Where is your computer?”
“Outside. I was working on the porch.”
I hauled myself to my feet. Outside, I saw a heavy blanket on the porch rocking chair and the laptop on the tree stump. “You’ve been sitting out here all night?”
“Yeah, I kind of like the way that it feels out here. It’s like working in nature. Though a few times I thought the crazy bastard was coming to kill us. Turned out to be rabbits. Let me show you what I got.”
We looked at his screen together. “The files on this little flash drive are blowing my mind.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They’re written in a programming language that I’ve never seen before. It’s like an alien script.”
I muttered agreement with that. Everything I’d experienced had felt nearly supernatural, yet scientific at the same time. At a certain point, the two lines converge. I remembered reading a famous science fiction writer who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
“So anyway, I used portions of this code and compared it to some of the programming that I had in a file on my hard drive.” He paused and looked at me. “William, how technical do you want me to get?”
“I don’t understand any of it,” I said truthfully. “Could you just summarize?”
He nodded. “The code is assembled from letters in every language in the world.”
“That’s incredible.”
“It’s like, what’s the name of that global language that somebody invented in the nineteenth century? The one nobody uses?”
I thought about it. “Esperanto?”
“It’s like Esperanto, except for programming.”
“But what does it say, Arthur? About the helmets?”
He drew a deep breath. “I’m not done entirely with translating everything, but I think these are instructions for construction.”
“Of the helmets?”
“Yes.”
I whistled low through my teeth and stared at the long string of characters on the page. They looked like gobbledygook to me, but to problem solvers like Arthur they represented a delicious challenge.
“When do you think it’ll be finished?”
“Maybe a few more hours. It depends on whether or not I get breakfast.”
I could take a hint and got to my feet again. “I’ll handle that. You keep working.”
He grinned, and we high-fived. Then Arthur winced and clutched the side of his chest. “Ow, that really hurts.”
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” I said.
“I’d love a Tylenol.”
“I’d love to get you one,” I said, “but it’s too dangerous for us to leave this reservation right now. We’ve got a dead deputy and a missing sheriff.”
I went to the kitchen and found the box of our food supplies on Cy’s counter. I pulled out the pancake mix and poured it into a chipped mixing bowl and then looked for milk and eggs in Cy’s refrigerator. I found them, and soon I was dripping the batter into a hot oiled pan. In the back of the refrigerator, I found some bacon that looked all right, and I had that sizzling too.
I could see Julia starting to stir nearby. Bacon was nature’s alarm clock. “Breakfast,” I said.
“I don’t know if I can eat,” she said sadly, and I knew she was thinking of her father, and I thought of mine.
Finally, I said, “Where’s Grace?
“Right here.” Julia rolled over. The other side of the mattress was empty.
“Um, I thought she was right here.”
I stared at her. “Did she get up and leave in the middle of the night?”
“Don’t know.”
That was alarming. “Breakfast!” I hollered to Arthur. I knew that would get him inside, and it did. As I laid the first stack of hotcakes on a plate, he came rumbling in. I had something else on my mind.
“Arthur, have you seen Grace?”
“Yeah,” he said, wolfing the pancakes into his mouth.
“When?”
“She went outside in the middle of the night.”
I heard alarm bells starting to sound in my head.
“Did she tell you anything about where she was going?”
He looked up, chewing, and thought about it. “She said something, but I wasn’t really listening.”
Arthur was very smart, in his own way, but often clueless, and no more so than now.
“You let her go? Are you frickin’ crazy?”
He looked up at me, guilty faced. “I thought she had to pee!”
“But when she didn’t come back? What did you think then?”
“I—I’m sorry! I got caught up in the computer!”
I nodded and sighed, put a hand on his shoulder. “I know. Eat.”
We all sat around the small dining table, eating. Well, I wasn’t. My thoughts were preoccupied with Grace.
Cy entered. He had a dirty canvas bag over his shoulder that he threw onto the floor
with a thump.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Cy, we can’t find Grace.”
His face fell. “She went out somewhere?”
“Maybe. She left in the middle of the night, and nobody knows where she is.”
“Oh boy,” he said.
“Have some pancakes,” I said.
He headed over to the kitchen, washed his hands, put some pancakes on his plate, and came and sat down with us. All four of us sat in silence, nothing but the sounds of silverware scraping against plates.
Then Cy slowed down. His eyes had fixed on something distant.
“What is that?” he said.
I followed his gaze. His finger went up and pointed toward a piece of paper on the mantle above the fire. It had been propped vertically, in a conspicuous way, so that we would see it.
“That’s not mine,” he said.
“Or mine,” I said.
Arthur echoed it, and Julia shook her head no. I stood up and went over to the paper. My name was written on the front. William.
I turned it over. Three sentences.
I’m sorry but now that Roivas knows that I’m here he’s going to be back and I don’t want to put any of you in danger. I’m returning to the spiritual realm until we can sort all this out. Don’t look for me. —Grace
I stood there looking at the paper. Grace was gone. Seemed like I had just found her, and she was gone. Gone to save our butts. My heart sank. She and I were one, somehow. I didn’t know if that meant as friends or something more, but we were interconnected, emotionally inseparable. I focused, trying to tune her in. But it was clear that she was shutting me out.
“What does it say?” Julia asked.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“Where?”
I crossed the floor back to the table and handed the note to her. Julia read it, and a look of surprise passed over her face. “What’s the spiritual realm?”
Cy and Arthur took turns reading it, and soon a pall had descended upon the room. “It’s where we found her,” said Cy. “She was communicating with William from the other side.”
Julia still didn’t understand. “But what about her body? Is she dead?”
“She was in a coma,” I explained. “She was communicating with me telepathically.”