by Lynda Engler
The old man’s joy was one reason that the airlock seemed to cycle slower on the way out. She would miss him. Isabella was eager to resume their travels, satisfied that she had finally done something important by giving the scientist the means to continue his research, but she felt the heaviness of the old man’s loneliness as they walked out the door.
Outside the complex, Isabella and her traveling companions headed for the open gate that had forbidden them entry only yesterday. Once out, Malcolm immediately turned left but Isabella turned right and faced east.
“Where are you going? Telemark’s this way,” said Malcolm, pointing westward to the road they had previously traveled.
“Aren’t we going on? Up the Hudson like Dr. Rosario suggested?” asked Isabella, almost whining. Her shoulders pulled back and she straightened as she spoke.
“He hardly suggested it. He called it preposterous.” An edge of impatience crept into Malcolm’s voice and he dropped his backpack at his feet, almost throwing it to the ground.
“But what about warning the other tribes? You said yourself that if he succeeds and the shelter folk emerge from hiding soon, my goal – I think your words were ‘is that much more urgent.’ So why the change of heart? You said we’d go!” Now she was whining.
“I said we’d find the crazy old man and help him if we could. And, unbelievably, we actually did. But we also said we’d get back to Telemark before winter!” Malcolm spit out the words in frustration.
She shot him a look. “But it’s only August!” The sweat dripped from her brow in the already sweltering morning heat and dense wet air, but she would not let go of her passion to go on with her mission to warn everyone she could about the impending danger. The idea blazed inside her, and she was consumed.
The others in the group stood silently watching the argument. Isabella glanced to Clay and Kalla for some kind of support, but they shook their heads.
“Uh nuh,” said Kalla. “When Malcolm makes up his mind, it would take a brick over his head to change it. I’m not getting involved.”
Isabella could be even more stubborn than her new husband could. She had never given up easily in the past and she was not going to start now.
“It gets cold by the end of September, down right icy in October and completely unbearable by November. You’ve never experienced a winter Outside. Blizzards blow snow into man-sized drifts. Animals that haven’t burrowed in for the season freeze in their tracks. People stock up and prepare the entire month of October. So that only gives us till the end of September to get back. It’s not enough time,” reasoned Malcolm.
“That’s six weeks!”
“Three. Wherever we go we need to get back too.”
“Okay, three then. We travel three weeks, warn whomever we can and then head back. Three weeks, that’s all I ask.” She grinned wickedly.
“We should wait till spring…” Malcolm said, leaving the statement hanging in the air like a spider from a line. He fixed his eyes on Clay and Kalla, seemingly asking for their input, but by their ambivalent shrugs, it was obvious he would get no help there. This was his decision alone and the younger couple was wise enough not to take sides in their leader’s argument with Isabella.
“Three weeks. But that’s it. No matter where we are we turn back,” he acquiesced, but his green eyes smiled.
Isabella squeaked and gave him a bear hug.
They turned east.
* * *
Luke
The growling sound disappeared, replaced by absolute silence. Luke had grown accustomed to seeing the cattails swaying in the summer breeze or hearing insects munching on vegetation, but it was as if he had suddenly gone deaf. The air around him was still and completely silent. His eyes didn’t register even a tiny bit of movement of the leaves or bushes.
Someone had turned off the wind.
When a stick crunched beneath his left foot, he jumped at the deafening sound. He could hear his own heartbeat inside his chest, louder than the stick breaking.
Calm down, he told himself. The weed-choked parking lots on either side of the road contained nothing but derelict cars. That’s the problem, he thought, suddenly realizing the absence of squirrels, birds and even the bugs that constantly tormented him. What would make the wildlife disappear?
A piercing shriek broke the unnatural silence. An eagle or some type of hawk soared high above him. Araddea! Was she watching him? Could she see him on the deserted highway? More importantly, could the bird warn him of danger?
After making two wide circles high above him, the bird of prey flew away and the sounds of Outside returned with an onslaught of volume. Small birds chirped in the trees, flies buzzed around him and a squirrel ran across his path. It had two tails. His lifetime of living indoors, guaranteed that Luke found all animals intriguing, but seeing one that did not match the pictures in the books from his library was hard to get used to.
Luke sat down to check on his ankle. More blood had soaked through the bandage, so he removed it and applied additional glue to re-seal the wound. He tossed aside the old bandage and once again put on a fresh one. Infection was a real danger and there were not that many gauze bandages left in the kit. He hoped the bleeding would stop now.
He limped on his injured ankle past warehouses, offices, and eerily empty stores, wondering what everyday life was like in a world where cars transported people down the roads, off to work or school or shopping. Lost in fantastic flights of imagination about a long dead civilization, Luke hobbled past a complex of glass-and-metal buildings, secured behind a tall, barbed wire fence.
The eagle’s call broke the silence with an urgent shriek as it swooped towards Luke. He hoped it was Araddea’s eagle, but just in case, he ran ahead to get away from it. The eagle was swift, however, and upon him in a flash. Luke covered his head with his arms and continued hobbling as fast as his injured ankle could move him, but he could not outrun the bird. He dropped to his knees and cowered, his arms solidly covering his head.
The eagle landed on a fallen light post and glared at Luke. Its golden eyes watched the boy, unblinking. Cautiously, Luke lowered his arms and stared at the giant bird. Black feathers covered its body, all the way down to its broad feet. Its head was white. Even though Luke knew next to nothing about birds, he recognized the bald eagle, the old symbol of his nation. Why had it attacked him, and why was it now perched peacefully on the lamppost?
If Araddea’s spirit was indeed in the bird, perhaps the bird was not trying to hurt him but instead warn him of some threat ahead. There certainly had not been any hazards behind him, other than his own clumsiness that got him a torn ankle for his ineptitude. So far, he had seen nothing frightening, except this damned giant bird.
Luke regarded the eagle with curiosity. What was it trying to tell him? Luke stood up and slowly… slowly… began walking down the highway again. The bird rose from its perch, extending to its full wingspan of more than ten feet. It flew upwards, then circled back and swooped down at him. The boy ran forward as fast as he could on his injured ankle, down the cracked and broken road until the eagle was upon him again.
“Damn!” he shouted and fell to a crouch, once again protecting his head with his arms. He remained hunkered down that way, waiting for the bird to attack.
But the eagle did not hurt him. It backed off, landed on the weed-covered pavement and stood about two yards away from him, its taloned feet as broad as a man’s hand. The bird’s golden-eyed stare bored into his brain.
“What do you want?” he shouted at the animal.
He ran his hand through his hair, and realization suddenly dawned on him. The bird was not warning him of danger; it was preventing him from traveling any farther down this road. For some reason, the eagle, or Araddea if it was the seer looking through its eyes, wanted him to turn back.
Luke stood upright again and turned around. Cautiously he took a step forward. Two steps. Three. Then he began to walk faster, away from the bird. The eagle did not follow; instea
d, it rose from the road and flew upward, swiftly rising in the air on a thermal.
The giant bird of prey had lost interest in him.
He had not believed the Wiccan priestess’ claim that her spirit could soar with eagles until now. Eagles might be incredibly intelligent animals, but they could not take the initiative to change a person’s travel plans. This eagle had been possessed and then released from her control… at least he hoped it had been Araddea.
He wondered if there were others like Telemark’s Wiccan seer.
Chapter Nine
Isabella
The Yellow Zone did not look significantly different than any other part of Outside that Isabella had seen so far, except that it was more urban. There were fewer trees and more weeds. Even after fifty years of trying, the jungle had not yet reclaimed this built-up part of the world. Isabella marveled at how many more buildings there were here than they had seen before in their travels from Telemark. However, it was not just the buildings that were plentiful. Burned or rusted vehicles lined the road everywhere: cars, trucks, and vans, even school buses, their once bright colors faded from decades of weather corroding their bodies. Fallen traffic lights and power line poles blocked the road and the travelers climbed over them or walk around when they were not able to. Luckily, there was no electricity flowing through the downed electrical wires. Maybe not all those wires carried electricity. Isabella knew that overhead lines had also once carried telephone and television signals.
Regardless of how far they walked into the deadly Yellow Zone, they still saw no one. This area had once been home to hundreds of thousands of people, but today no one wandered its streets, except Isabella and her new family.
Progress through the devastated urban part of New Jersey was difficult. Amidst the rusty vehicles, collapsed buildings, fallen poles, thickly tangled wires, and all manner of debris, it took them two days to walk the ten miles to the George Washington Bridge. It would take them into the heart of the Yellow Zone, New York City… if they crossed it. Who could say for sure what was in that city? Growing up in Ewr, Malcolm had heard rumors of mutations too horrible to contemplate and told her those stories of people there who were only barely human. In a world riddled with the legacy of wars, destruction, radiation, and poison, even in the wasteland there were borders that sane people did not cross. The heart of the Yellow Zone should have been abandoned, but it was not. There were always those who for a myriad of reasons, chose to venture deep into the Zones.
Malcolm and his family would not be one of those groups. They would not cross the bridge. Instead, they would follow Dr. Rosario’s advice and head north beside the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. They hoped to find other new human communities or tribes of people to whom they could spread their warning. The desire drove Isabella, pushed her onward, day after day, to accomplish something worthwhile. Anything. Everything.
Her new husband, her lover, her best friend, Malcolm apparently knew it too. He took her hand in his as they walked. “I love you Belle. I’m sorry I got angry about going forward. I just want to protect you. Protect all of us.”
She knew that too, without him ever having to say it. She smiled sweetly at him, basking in his love and protection. “Thank you for agreeing to go on, even if it’s only for a little while.”
“Belle, I know we can do some good if we keep going. I know it to the core of my soul. Understand, I want to do this. But if saving the world ever meant losing you, well, the world can go to hell.” Malcolm’s expression radiated both love and deep concern for her, and she adored him for everything that he was.
But so far they had not seen anyone, mutants, Eaters, or otherwise.
Isabella shuddered as she remembered the Eaters that had attacked them in Dover. Her group had learned to be extremely vigilant as they traveled the edges of the Yellow Zone. They never stopped watching for the monstrous creatures with their thick, gray skin, their eyes white with blindness, creatures that ate anything they could rip apart, including each other. None of them knew if the Yellow Zone – the most heavily poisoned and irradiated areas during the Final War – housed Eaters. Malcolm told her he only knew there had not been any in Ewr, but those stories Malcolm’s tribe had heard had to have been about Eaters.
They would need to be careful.
They neared the New Jersey side of the bridge and arrived at the boating museum that Dr. Rosario had told them about. The strange old man had not exactly urged them to continue their journey but Isabella took his suggestions as encouragement to keep going. The museum should give them the means to get up the river easier. If Dr. Rosario did find a way to protect humans from the ravages of chemical poisoning and maybe even the radiation surrounding their largest cities, someone had to warn the people Outside. Isabella could not let the government just kill them off! There was plenty of room for both shelter folk and Outside people to live side by side. Why didn’t the government see it that way? The self-centered, narrow-minded view they held against mutated people was too much for Isabella to bear. Her heart raced a staccato beat every time she thought of how the government – her own people! – thought of those who had survived Outside.
The boat museum was a low structure, made of red brick. It looked old, like it had lived many lifetimes. It may have started life as a factory or warehouse and then later revamped for its final purpose as a museum.
A large metal object, with one glass side, lay sprawled on the concrete, blocking the entrance. Andra immediately went up to investigate.
“What is that?” asked Isabella, as they neared the front entrance.
“Food machine,” answered Malcolm, as if that explained everything.
“What?” she asked again. A machine that made food? Isabella had no idea that kind of marvel had existed in the old world!
“Big metal box, with slots in it for food. They are all empty; have been for decades. What looters didn’t get right after the War, mice and rats chewed apart. The food was in plastic bags with writing and pictures on it. Rats always left that stuff behind. Quite a few of these things in Ewr. My father used to find the wrappers when he was a kid, but I only saw empty machines,” explained her husband.
“And this one is in our way,” supplied Clay, completing Malcolm’s sentence. Together, Malcolm and Clay put all their effort into moving it and finally shouldered it out of the way. Its metal hulk scraped and grated along the concrete walkway as the two pushed it with all their might. Clay brushed the sweat from his brow and the hair from his eyes after winning their battle of man versus machine.
Once upon a time, the museum’s glass doors had been locked, but looters had remedied that problem by smashing it into deadly shards of glass, probably when they knocked over and emptied the vending machine.
Over time, the sharp glass had weathered and dulled, leaving it – now fifty years later – as a pile of almost rounded flat pebbles. Isabella carefully picked her way through the broken glass, careful not to slip and fall. “I wonder what it was like in the last days of civilization, just after the dirty bombs dropped on the cities,” Isabella asked as they entered the building.
Clay pinched his nose and closed his eyes, as if deep in thought. “Survivors would have been starving and looking for food anywhere they could find it.” The boy opened his eyes and stared at the entrance. “But why break into a boat museum?”
The broken glass did not offer up an answer.
“Dunno,” replied Malcolm. “There couldn’a been much in the way of food inside, maybe just a cafeteria at most. My papa said restaurants and grocery stores were better targets for looters. By the time my ancestors settled in Ewr, all the stores were empty.”
“Unless they were looking for a way to get out of the Yellow Zone,” suggested Kalla, looking at the great empty cavern of a room.
“Even if they wanted a boat to get away, there must have been zillions of them tied up on the docks,” replied Isabella, shaking her head and wondering why anyone, even desperate survivors, would choose
to break into a museum and lug boats all the way down to the river. Outside the large picture window, the Hudson River laid not that far away, but boats were big and heavy. Even the most frantic looters could not just pick one up and drag it to the water.
“There were bunches of boats,” said Malcolm, “but most of them wouldn’t have functioned after the EMP made their electronics fail. The boats here are older. They didn’t have computer chips in them.” Malcolm stood next to Isabella and looked out the window at the river. Its waters were brown and placid. The summer heat floated over the water, making the air shimmer in the haze.
“You’re right, Malcolm,” said Isabella, turning back from the window to look into his face. “I should have thought of that. Once their electronic ignition systems failed, they would have been useless. They wouldn’t have been able to start those boats. How did you know that?” Sometimes the bits of useful information floating around inside her husband’s head amazed her. He was so much smarter than he gave himself credit for.
“My papa told me stories that he heard from his ancestors. He didn’t really know what a chip was – and I don’t either – but he knew that lots of stuff had them, and the Terror War made them not work anymore.”
Isabella nodded. “My grandfather told us about computers too. I’m not sure exactly what those chips were either, but you’re right. Modern stuff didn’t work without it.”
“Check that out,” said Malcolm, pointing to the rightmost edge of the view outside the window. There was an ancient yacht in dry dock outside. “Only a boat like that would have been useful. Guess the survivors took all the sailboats from the docks. I don’t know how anyone could have moved that one down to the river without machinery.”