The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “No, we’re not!”

  “We are. We can rely on Feather. She will get down to the river. Or she’s there already. Dylan will be there, and he’s a big macho bundle of testosterone who will get right on to turning himself into the hero of the day—which involves saving us. You met the guy. He’s going to be all over that. No save, no hero, no parade. Don’t you think?”

  She mumbled something.

  “And you know what else?” I said. “Even if he has bugged out or sunk the raft or gotten abducted by aliens, I trust Feather to swim it. I trust her to get to the beach and wait until she sees someone and shout her head off. Someone will come, Molly. Today or tomorrow or soon. Depend on it. All we have to do is keep our shit together until it happens. It will not be easy and it will not be fun, but we will do it. And step one of that is getting out of this crevice. Because it sucks in here. This is the place and point and time from which the rest of our lives start. There is a path from here. And so we need to move along it. We have to go on, and keep going. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, very quietly. Then, a little more strongly, “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You’re amazing. In your position I would have exploded by now. Literally exploded. It could still happen. Which would be gross. I’m not enjoying this process either, and that’s because it’s shit. So let’s go.”

  I started to shuffle forward. After a moment, I felt her follow, still holding on to my shirt.

  We kept moving. Slow yard after slow yard.

  And then somebody screamed.

  Chapter

  32

  The sound wasn’t loud or close but it was sudden and very penetrating. We froze in the blackness. A second later we heard it again.

  “Fuck was that?” Ken said.

  “Gemma,” I said.

  I told myself to keep it slow but it was impossible. Not when you’d heard something like that. And so I scraped and banged my way down the remaining yards of the confined section, hearing my breath start to become ragged and constrained, trying not to panic. Then I reached above my head and found we were back in the section where we had to go sideways but could straighten up. The smell was back, too.

  “We’re nearly there.”

  The scooting-sideways section was longer than I remembered but at least I could stand upright. I nearly turned my ankle on the cracked floor and had to keep forcing myself not to start running, recalling only at the last minute that we’d had to step up into the fissure—and so there’d be a drop into the room when we finally got there.

  And there it was. “I’m out,” I said.

  My stomach rolled over, and I gagged. The smell was even stronger than I remembered. I took a couple of steps into the room, mouth firmly shut and hand over my nose, trying to picture the direction we’d need to aim in. Molly and Ken dropped down behind me.

  “You worked out the angle?” he asked.

  “I think so.” I reached out with both arms and gathered one of them on each side.

  We hurried together into the blackness. Within a couple of steps I noticed something was different, but Molly was faster to articulate it. “Are your feet sticking?”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “That black stuff on the floor—it’s tacky. It wasn’t earlier.”

  “We must be walking on a different part,” I said. “Whatever—just keep moving.”

  We missed the door but only by a couple of feet. We shuffled sideways until we found it. Then we were out into the corridor and could see a glimmer of light from the main room. I’ve never been so pleased to see something so basic.

  I let go of the others and we ran.

  When we made it into the main room Gemma and Pierre were together in the middle. Each had a lamp. They were standing back to back, panning beams of light around the space.

  “What happened?”

  Gemma was whirling in circles, slashing her light around, high and low. Molly walked toward her slowly, holding out her hands in a calming way. Given that ten minutes previously she’d been on the brink of losing it, I thought her powers of recovery were pretty remarkable.

  Pierre hurried over to us. “Gemma. She…”

  “I felt something!” she shouted. “Something brushed against my leg.”

  I looked at Pierre. He shrugged.

  “Did you see what it was?”

  “We were sitting in the dark,” Pierre said. “I thought, only the two of us here, we should conserve power.”

  “Good thinking,” I said. “Our light just died on us. In fact, you might want to turn yours off now.”

  “Oh, right.” He did so, leaving Gemma’s, which she was still waving around like a light saber. Molly placed her hand on her arm and said something to her quietly.

  “So, we were sitting back to back,” Pierre said. “On the floor in the middle of the room. Talking. We’ve been waiting there, except for going down to the stone ball and shouting out once in a while. Nothing. And you’d been kind of a long time and it was a little bit of a struggle for us to not, you know, freak out. Anyway, Gemma was telling me about other stuff she’s written about, and suddenly she leaps up and she’s screaming that she felt something brush against her in the dark.”

  “Did you feel anything? Or hear anything?”

  He shook his head. “No, but we were facing opposite directions. Did you guys find anything in that room? Like rats or something? Could it be that?”

  “No,” I said. “We found stuff, but nothing living.”

  “So what the heck?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I left Ken with Pierre and went over to where Molly had now managed to calm Gemma down a little.

  “I felt it,” she said. “I did. Don’t tell me I didn’t. I felt something brush against my leg.”

  “You’re sure it couldn’t have been a breeze?” I said. “Or…and I’m only being thorough…it couldn’t have been Pierre’s hand? Accidentally? Or…otherwise?”

  “No,” she said indignantly. “We had our backs to each other. And he’s not like that. And, come on, seriously, fuck off, Nolan. I’m not dumb. I know what I felt.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So…Okay. Did you get a sense of how big it was? Or what kind of thing?”

  “No. But it wasn’t small. Definitely not a mouse or something. I was sitting…” She dropped down to the floor and sat, knees up, arms folded. “Like this. And it brushed against my shin. It had, like, fur. Not soft fur like a cat, but bristly. Like a dog. Or maybe a raccoon.”

  “I don’t think there are raccoons in the desert.”

  “A coyote, then. How big are coyotes?”

  “Not huge,” Molly said. “When I was a kid we got them in our yard all the time. They’re the size of a small to medium dog. Though skinnier. But I really do not see how a coyote is going to get all the way down here. Or up.”

  “No. There’s no way,” I said. “They’re smart and they’re decent jumpers but I just don’t see it.”

  “Well, something did,” Gemma insisted, standing up again. “Something’s trapped in here with us, Nolan. Seriously. You have to believe me.”

  “I do. I just don’t know what to do about it. We could go looking and maybe we will, because however it got in here could be a way out. But for now we have to chill about it. If it wanted to bite you, it would have.”

  “But what if it fetches more of them? Coyotes do that, don’t they? Separate to explore, and then get the pack if one of them finds something worth attacking?”

  “That is kind of their MO,” Molly admitted.

  “That’s not what’s happening here,” I said. “I don’t know what is, but I don’t believe it’s that.”

  Gemma shrugged angrily and walked off. Molly and I looked at each other.

  “What do you think?”

  “There’s an eighty percent chance it was just a disorientation effect,” I said. “From dehydration. They were sitting in total darkness. We know what that’s like. You lose perspective. Feel things you’re
not really feeling.”

  “But that leaves a twenty percent chance.”

  “She seemed…very convinced.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “It means I’d really like Feather to come back with the news that everything’s going to be okay. Soon.”

  “Or now,” Molly said.

  “Yeah. Now would be good.”

  We all sat together in the middle of the room, one of the smaller lights in the center. Everybody took a little of their sandwich. Ken held his out and looked at me until I took a bite. I took my time chewing it. The bread was dry and stale. The processed cheese was very hard. This left everyone with a single bite remaining. After that there would be a few nuts and half a granola bar each. And then, nothing.

  My headache had settled into a sharp horizontal line between my temples. I saw some of the others screwing up their eyes, or rubbing them, and knew I wasn’t the only one suffering.

  Ken and I shared another cigarette. After that, there were only seven left.

  Pierre said he wanted to go shout out for Feather again. Gemma and Molly went with him. Gemma lurched as she stood, as if dizzy. All walked slowly. Listlessly.

  Ken and I looked at each other, and Ken nodded.

  Chapter

  33

  When the others had gone down the main passage, we poured the remaining couple of inches of water from my bottle into Ken’s, left it with the backpacks, and set off with one of the small lights. When we were halfway along the passage to the pool—and out of hearing range—Ken turned to me.

  “So how are we going to do this?”

  “I’ll be the guinea pig,” I said. “My stomach’s tough.”

  “I doubt it’s seen the action that mine has.”

  “I doubt anybody’s has. But I mean specifically when it comes to bugs. Years ago Kristy and I went on a cheap vacation in Ensenada. Too cheap. She lost eight pounds and spent three days in the bathroom, even though the motel and the nearest restaurant—both owned by the same guy—provided bottles of mineral water for guests. They made a huge deal about it. Then one evening I caught him filling them up from the rusty tap around the back of the motel. That I had previously seen being licked by a goat.”

  “Arsehole. Not the goat. The guy.”

  “I thought so, too. So on the last morning we stole the ice bucket, two blankets, a lamp, and every towel we could find. I’ve still got the lamp. But my point is my stomach was fine, though Kristy and I were literally sharing the same bottles. So I’ll have a few mouthfuls now. If there’s a problem, it generally takes a couple hours to show. Hopefully Feather will be back by then. If not, I’ll ask Gemma which room she used. And hope I don’t end up crapping my actual brains out.”

  “There is that risk. But we’ve got to try it, right?”

  “You saw how everyone’s looking. Hunger is uncomfortable. But like I said yesterday, lack of water will fuck us up fast. And not only physically. This situation is bad enough without people losing it or starting to imagine things.”

  “You think that’s what happened with Gemma?”

  “I don’t know. But it’ll start happening to all of us if we don’t find something to drink.”

  Ken nodded. “Speaking of Kristy, how are things?”

  Ken and I became acquainted when I was still married, in the year after I said farewell to the movie business. Like many farewells it wasn’t a clean break, and once in a while I got sucked back. One instance of this was an uncredited rewrite on a pilot for HBO, as a favor for a friend. Ken was being paid a consultancy fee to keep an eye on its young showrunner during preproduction, as a favor to a different friend, because the showrunner’s sole claim to expertise was being related by marriage to a senior exec. Ken’s role in the show was summarily curtailed after he punched out the showrunner one afternoon (and by God the entitled little prick deserved it), but by that point we’d started to grab an occasional beer together in the afternoon—and this eventually led to The Anomaly Files.

  “There are no things,” I said.

  “At all?”

  “Brief email exchange a couple months ago.”

  “Still a mystery to me,” Ken said.

  “You know what happened.”

  “I do. But you two were tight, Nolan. And it’s not like it was that big a deal in the general scheme of the shambling chaos of human relationships. I’m surprised you couldn’t bull through it, come out the other side battered and scarred but still on the same journey, all that New Age bollocks.”

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t.”

  “Sorry. Shouldn’t have brought it up. Still, makes a change from talking about diarrhea.”

  “True. By the way—do you really hate this shirt?”

  “’Course not. I’ve got a semi on, just looking at you.”

  “How about you stop saying things, and we go find some water?”

  “Right you are, squire.”

  I’d had enough of being the leader for one morning, so I gave the light to Ken and he led the way down the narrower side passage. I’d had enough of being in darkness, too. After twenty-four hours—and it felt like a hell of a lot longer—it had ceased to be surprising. For better or worse, I adapt fast. If a ceiling light goes out, then within a day or two I live in a world where there was never a lightbulb there in the first place, to the utter exasperation of the few people who’ve tried to live with me. This felt different, not least because in here darkness was not merely a state of affairs but a statement. Light meant being out in the world. Dark meant we were not. The darkness said we were trapped.

  We got to the end of the passage and squatted down at the lip over the pool. Ken held up the light so I could fill the bottle, but I didn’t even begin the process.

  “Okay,” Ken said. He sounded very tired. “What the hell is going on now?”

  The water was no longer even remotely clear. Where you could see it at all, it was brown and murky and looked like the kind of pestilential crap you would be drinking at your peril.

  But stranger still was the fact that two-thirds of the surface was now covered in some kind of algae. It was predominantly green, iridescent, like the back of a fly or pool of gasoline seen in low light, shot with blues and dark purples.

  I took the light and lowered it down near the surface. The algae was a quarter of an inch thick in places. The water also had tiny motes within it, sparkling in the light.

  Then, raising the lamp, I spotted something a long way into the pool, down on the bottom. One of the metal balls.

  “And what the fuck is that doing there?”

  I held the light up and out as far as I could, moving my arm in a slow semicircle. On the right-hand side, a little farther from us, I caught sight of another of the balls.

  “This morning,” Ken said. “Pierre. Didn’t he say he’d woken in the night—thought he’d heard something?”

  “Yeah. Some thuds. But how?”

  “Those things were up on pedestals, those cubes. Like the huge stone ball in the main room. We’ve seen how that could drop, and what happens afterward. And there was kind of a slope on that platform down the other end, wasn’t there?”

  “Yep.”

  “So the cubes were lowered, and now all the balls are in the water.”

  “I assume. I’m disinclined to go check. I think you were right earlier—that itching was because Molly and I were in here last night. And whatever is now growing in there, we got some of it on our skin.”

  “Still itching?”

  “No.”

  “Could you have touched something down at the end when the two of you were here, stood on something to trigger this?”

  “I don’t think so. Nothing that I’m aware of, anyway. We looked at the spheres, and that thing in the middle. But the water was already clouding. So I’m thinking the process had started before Moll and I even got in the water. Maybe when you, me, and Gemma found it in the afternoon.”

  “What process?”

  I sho
ok my head. There was no point in continually repeating that I didn’t have an answer.

  “Something’s happening here, Nolan. And not only this. Do you really think we happened to come along a different path in that room that stinks? Or could it be that the black crap on the floor is melting, loosening up?”

  “But how would that work? It’s not like it’s getting warmer. It’s pretty cold in here.”

  “I don’t know. But if I lift the hood of the Kenmobile and look at what’s inside I don’t know how any of that mechanical crap occurs, either. I don’t have a clue how my phone works. Shit still happens on it. Endlessly.”

  “We need to stop doing stuff,” I said. “Stop exploring, stop touching things. Something’s happening. Something that wasn’t happening before we got here. We need to stop making it worse.”

  “I think it’s too late, mate.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “For once, me too.”

  We took a last look out over the pool and then walked back to the main room. When we got there everyone was standing together in the middle.

  Molly turned when she heard us coming. “Gemma’s found something,” she said. “It’s…a little weird.”

  Chapter

  34

  Gemma was holding a phone. A white iPhone in a teal case, to be precise. I recognized it.

  “So,” she said. She sounded tired but fired up. “We went down the passage to the big ball and shouted. No response, still. So we came back in here and Molly was talking about how your lamp had run out. And it struck us maybe we should try to get a sense of exactly how much light we have left.”

  “Good idea. And?”

  “We’ve got a lanyard and another of the small lights still working. One of the bigger ones. Only one headlamp, and it’s really dim.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. And there’s no way of telling how much juice is left in any of the batteries. Could be a couple hours, could be ten minutes. There’s the more powerful light on the camera, too, and Pierre reckons he’s got like maybe two hours of batteries for that. Which is cool. But we’re being thorough, so we decide to check how much power is left on everybody’s phone, too. Which is…not much, unfortunately.”