Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  Across from Mindy, Web wasn’t dreaming about the past. He was squarely focused on the future. He had a machine to build. He was piecing the project together in his mind, gathering tools, collecting components . . . copper wire—there should be enough on the spool in the lab, but if not, he’s pretty sure there was another roll in that tall metal cabinet. The entire lab was contained in Web’s memory. At this rate, he would have the whole thing sketched out before they reached Home.

  Web was excited to share in Mindy’s first arrival at Home. It was always a big deal when someone arrived at the Limestone Deposit Survey Group’s headquarters for the first time. At least Web thought so. Web had been there when it was first built, and he was proud to show it off to newcomers, especially since it was a top secret location that rarely got visitors. He delighted in Stewart’s involvement in the project. It was Stewart who suggested the location. Originally, it was slated to be in an apple orchard. But Stewart protested. As a mere field agent at the time, it wasn’t his place to protest, but he made his feelings known. Stewart recalled taking his nine-year-old niece to an apple orchard, and he remembered how much she enjoyed it. A stroll through the rows of trees found birds sitting in nests, caterpillars crawling up bark, wildflowers, spiderwebs, butterflies, and so much more to discover . . . not to mention the apples themselves. Stewart thought it was a bad idea to have a secret headquarters in such an inviting place. So, Stewart took it upon himself to scout out his own locations. He came across a limestone quarry, which almost failed to catch his eye. This observation met with overwhelming approval and caused the agency to rethink its whole strategy. The agency commissioned extensive tests. The limestone quarry performed marvelously, having no appeal whatsoever. Everything about it chased away curiosity.

  This monumental concept didn’t make Stewart the rising star that one might expect. It was treated more like an anonymous comment dropped in a suggestion box, but it fascinated Web, and his pride showed as he imparted the story to Mindy in the back seat of the SUV.

  “So it’s like Stewart created the whole thing, even the name Limestone Deposit Survey Group,” Web added.

  “Oh, I think that’s enough.” Stewart interrupted from the front seat, pretending to be modest. But Mindy noticed how he allowed Web to finish the whole story before cutting him off.

  15

  All is Quiet in Juniper

  Upstairs, Jin was sitting in a wooden chair that he had dragged from the hall into the bathroom. He stared down at the electronic components in his hands. A man’s face had never looked more bewildered.

  “There is no round metal ring,” Jin insisted. He sounded as if he had been asked to search the Gobi Desert for a Starbucks—he just wasn’t going to find it, and he was tired of being asked.

  Tobi—still soaking in the tub—grinned beneath the towel that still covered his face. Listening to Jin stumble his way through this operation was like classic radio comedy.

  “Do you see a blue wire?” Tobi asked.

  “Yeah! I see that, because that’s actually here.”

  “Do you see it leading to—” Tobi continued.

  “Oh, okay, here it is. I see it. I see the ring. Yep, it’s a round metal ring.”

  This was proving to be even more fun than Tobi expected. He could see the device more clearly in his mind than Jin could with his own eyes. The design was basic electronics. Tobi had seen it ten thousand times.

  “What’s next?” Jin asked, with all the renewed confidence of a man sipping iced cappuccino in the Gobi Desert.

  “How’s the progress?” Lyntic said, her voice entering the bathroom a step ahead of her.

  “I wouldn’t call it progress, yet,” Jin groaned.

  “We’re getting there,” Tobi said.

  “Good.” Lyntic collected Jin’s glass from the counter and Tobi’s from the edge of the tub. “Dexim and I are going to take a trip into town. So you two will be on your own for a few minutes. And Tobi, you could adjust your towel.”

  Tobi lifted his hands out of the water and felt the towel on his head, making sure it was still snug.

  “Not that one,” Lyntic said, with a playful tone.

  Tobi’s hands shot back in the water to find the washcloth resting on his thigh.

  With Lyntic in the passenger’s seat, Dexim drove a Ford Edge toward town. It had been parked next to the farmhouse, and Dexim had found the keys in the kitchen drawer. Their purpose on this trip to town was to search for anything out of the ordinary, any signs of being pursued. They found nothing of the sort—no search parties forming or military convoys trolling for aliens.

  “It looks like they have tornadoes here,” Lyntic said, as she pointed out a twisted and mangled water tower that bore the name JUNIPER.

  “The least of our worries,” Dexim said. But he had to admit the town looked calm and quiet. As he eased to a stop at a red light, he saw shoppers strolling the sidewalks, children playing in the park, and vehicles flowing in all directions.

  One of these vehicles was Jeremy’s pickup. He was still circling the city, trying to make sense of the date he had just been on.

  “Something’s not right,” he said to himself. “If she’s crazy, why am I still . . .” driving around the city . . . thinking about her . . . trying to find a reason to go back?

  The hardware store was approaching. Half of him wanted to stop and—well, he wasn’t sure what. The other half wanted to pass right by for the fourth time. Suddenly the words of his uncle sprang to mind. If you spend fifteen minutes looking for a reason not to do something and can’t come up with anything, you might as well just go ahead and do it. Of course, his uncle always applied this logic to mindless stunts, like diving off the roof of the Best Western into the swimming pool—which resulted in a trip to the emergency room and nine stitches in his uncle’s left foot. But Jeremy figured the same logic could be applied here, and probably with fewer stitches. But what was it Jeremy wanted to do?

  See her again.

  16

  Take Two

  Sara was wiping down display cases inside Nathan’s Hardware. Business was light—only one customer was in the store, fishing through PVC couplers, and he had already said that he didn’t need any help.

  Sara had sensed Mr. Nathan watching her for some time now, as if he wanted to say something. Finally, he did.

  “How did it go?” he asked, obviously referring to her date.

  “Good.”

  His eyes asked for more. Mr. Nathan had been her only father figure for the past eight months. She held his opinion in high esteem. But she didn’t want to cry on his shoulder about her date going up in flames.

  “We had a good time,” she said.

  “In twenty minutes?”

  “Yeah, he had somewhere to go.”

  “He probably just got scared,” he offered, having seen the pathetic way in which Jeremy had dropped her off. “Young boys get scared of girls . . . I mean young men. They get scared of young women.”

  She shrugged it off, hoping it would end there. She didn’t want to relive getting ditched. She took solace in knowing that the date was going well before she opened her mouth about the whole amnesia thing. Why did I have to blurt it out like that? Wasn’t there a gentler way to ease into it? No, perhaps there wasn’t. As she continued to Windex the countertops, she could feel Mr. Nathan’s curiosity waning. Maybe he would let her off without any further—

  “How would you feel about seeing him again?” Mr. Nathan asked. Apparently she was wrong.

  “We didn’t make any plans,” she said. Mr. Nathan wore an uncontrollable grin that seemed out of place. He looked to the front of the store and back to her. When she didn’t react, he looked again. She turned to see Jeremy standing on the sidewalk, looking through the front window.

  “I can hold down the fort,” Mr. Nathan said, “unless you think he’s here to buy a hammer.”

  Jeremy wasn’t there to buy a hammer. He had spent the last forty-five minutes driving around town an
d mulling over her words. He was looking for a third option. If she wasn’t crazy and if she wasn’t toying with him, what was it? It took him more than three laps around town to consider the possibility that she was telling the truth. What if she did wake up alone, with nothing but a note? That’s possible, isn’t it? He must have decided it was possible, because when he came to a stop, he was parked out front of Nathan’s Hardware.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, as soon as she stepped onto the sidewalk—the bottle of Windex still in her hand.

  “About?” she asked.

  “About you—I mean about what you said. About your story.”

  She held her tongue to hear him out.

  “I’d like to hear more of it,” he said, “ . . . if you want to . . . you know . . . if you want to talk about it.” He was on pins and needles, waiting for her reply. Finally, she smiled and turned for the door.

  “Just let me grab my bag.” She disappeared into the hardware store. Jeremy caught a glimpse of Mr. Nathan, who wore a smile of approval—pleased to see Sara finally making a friend.

  Upstairs, Sara dashed to her room, changed into better shoes, checked her hair in the mirror, and collected her backpack from the closet. She was quickly down the stairs with the backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m going out. I’ll be back,” she said to Mr. Nathan, avoiding eye contact. She didn’t want to contend with the big grin that she knew he would be wearing.

  Jeremy led the way to his truck, opening the passenger’s door for her. As they rode through town, Jeremy got right to it.

  “That note you were talking about, do you still have it?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You always keep a note that says destroy this note immediately.”

  He wondered whether she was being facetious, but when she pulled the note from her bag, he saw that she wasn’t.

  “So that’s it, huh?” he said.

  “Yep, this is my entire life history.”

  “When you put it that way, it does seem like something you’d hold on to.” Jeremy was teetering on the brink of believing her story, but he wasn’t convinced, yet. The best way for him to determine whether it was real would be to treat it as real. “So, you’ve been eight months without any memory, correct?”

  “No,” she clarified, “my memory has been working fine for the last eight months. I just can’t remember anything before that time.”

  “Right,” he said. “That’s what I meant. . . . Can I see it?” He held out his hand, and she passed him the note. He stretched the paper across the steering wheel to examine it as he drove. It was college ruled notebook paper. And it was as she said.

  “That’s my handwriting, but why would I write myself a note like that?” It seemed as though she had been asking herself that question for eight months.

  He thought, and he drove. The paper stared up at him, trying to tell him something. And he was trying to listen. “So, when you wrote this, you knew you were going to lose your memory.”

  She nodded. “But how did I know that? How do you know you’re going to lose your memory? I mean, could it be some condition that repeats over and over again?”

  “No, this isn’t a natural condition,” Jeremy said. The note was finally speaking to him:

  They think you’re from Nova Scotia. Just go along with it. If anyone detains you and asks you strange questions, stick with that story. But don’t mention this note to anyone!

  “There’s a lot more here than just memory loss,” he said. “This sounds like some sort of project—an experiment or something. Maybe the government is involved.”

  Somebody will return in about a week and contact you to fill you in on everything and let you know where to go from there.

  “What about this person who’s supposed to contact you?”

  She shook her head with a shrug, “No one. I haven’t heard from anyone.”

  Jeremy was perched on the fence again, and he was eager to jump down on her side. He was looking for any excuse to believe her. He didn’t want her to be nuts.

  “I want to show you something,” she said, reaching into her backpack. She pulled out a finely crafted wooden box—a reddish wood that appeared to be cedar. She opened the lid to reveal square compartments inside, lined with felt and each holding a single wooden cube, like ABC blocks without the letters.

  Oh, great, he thought, she’s nuts.

  “This was under my bed,” she explained. “But the weird thing was that I didn’t expect it to be there.”

  Jeremy nodded, but didn’t understand.

  “When I first got back to the Nathans' home,” she said, “I began to recognize things. Everything seemed familiar. The surroundings were coming back to me, the layout of the house, everything. And when I went into my room, I knew what was in each drawer. I knew where my socks were. I knew where my shoes were. I knew where my underwear was . . .”

  That word underwear stuck in Jeremy’s mind. He imagined her in her underwear: maybe pink with white stripes . . . maybe green silk with lace. He pictured her standing at a drawer full of underwear, holding up one at a time, deciding which to wear. If he was going to have any chance of getting back in this conversation, he would have to put some pants on her and shut that drawer.

  “ . . . looking around to make sure. But I had no memory of it,” she continued. Jeremy knew he had missed some words, but he figured he could catch up.

  Sara gestured to the box. “So, I opened it. And I had no idea what it was. It was completely unfamiliar.”

  She waited for this to soak in. It didn’t.

  “I had recognized everything else,” she explained. “Why didn’t I recognize this?”

  Jeremy began to see the intrigue.

  “It was like this box was being blocked from my memory.”

  Now Sara saw his eyes brighten. He finally got it.

  “Yeah.” She nodded.

  Jeremy looked down at the box to inspect it more closely. Half of him was gripped by the mystery of it all; the other half didn’t want to dive in with both feet, just yet.

  “Is there somewhere private we can go,” she asked, “so I can show you what these things do?”

  “Do?”

  “Yeah,” she said, returning the case to her backpack. “If I try to explain it, you’ll probably think I’m . . . I don’t know . . . you’ll probably take me back to the hardware store again.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have . . . I was—I probably just got a little scared.”

  “That’s what Mr. Nathan said.”

  “He knows about all this stuff?”

  “No,” she replied. “Actually, what he said was . . . boys get scared of girls.”

  The awkward silence that followed was quickly broken when Sara dragged a green bag from her backpack. It clinked as if filled with coins.

  “What do you think’s in here?” she asked.

  Jeremy wasn’t sure whether he was expected to guess or just wait for the answer.

  “It’s filled with gold cubes,” she said, “twenty-four karat gold. I took one to a jewelry store in the mall and had it tested. They said it was worth about two thousand dollars. So that’s how I’ve been getting money—selling them whenever I need to.”

  Jeremy’s truck sat on a patch of hard-packed dirt covered in fallen leaves that was the driveway of the rustic farmhouse where he lived with his parents. The house was surrounded by tall, thick sycamore trees on all sides. It used to be an apple orchard many years ago. Jeremy’s parents inherited it long after the last apple tree died off. His father had a plan to turn the land into a summer camp. He had spoken to investors and had drawn up several layouts for the grounds. However, time refused to wait for Jeremy’s father, and the plan withered like the apple trees before it. He was a dreamer who never moved past the dreaming phase. He moved from one great plan to the next, fully committed at the start, but never following through.

  His dreaming was so infectious that Jeremy and his
mother were unable to see the failures. They just saw the dreams. It was a different experience for a newcomer like Sara. Where Sara saw stacks of lumber wasting away under wrinkled tarps, Jeremy saw his father’s new porch waiting to be built. Where she saw paint cans stacked against a half-sanded wall, he saw the vibrant sheen of Autumn Plum that his father had so vividly described for the past three years. And where Sara saw a pallet of shingles under Visqueen, Jeremy saw a brand new roof. The house was a monument to all things incomplete—and all things dreamed.

  Jeremy and his mother had that same selective vision when they looked at Jeremy’s father. Where others might see a failure, they chose to see the half-finished dreams as part of his charm.

  As Jeremy showed Sara inside, he explained that his parents were out of town. They had gone to the Farm Expo.

  “Yeah, everybody’s out of town for that,” Sara said. “Business has been real slow at the store.”

  She quickly got down to it, pulling the case from her backpack and setting it on the coffee table in the living room. She carefully extracted one of the wooden cubes, as if it were filled with dynamite. This little device was known as a quoret (pronounced KWOR-it), but there was no way for Jeremy or Sara to know that. Quorets usually came in a set, and each quoret had a specific purpose.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Ready for what?”

  Her three fingers and thumb fit into a slight indention on each side of the cube, and the edges illuminated. “Just watch.” She pointed the quoret, and a broad circle of light appeared on the wall, about eight feet in diameter, making Jeremy think this was some type of powerful flashlight. That in itself was pretty neat. But it was about to get a lot neater.