Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  He planned his journey.

  Using a piece of the motel stationery and a pen from the nightstand drawer, he sketched a map of the continental United States. Even in his crude rendering, the distance looked imposing. One thousand miles. On foot. Through totally unknown terrain. Populated by hungry dinosaurs.

  His hands began to shake. Maybe a life here in New England wasn't so bad after all. He had his comforts. Now he had the radio, so he could fake human contact if he decided he needed it. But even as he ran through these arguments in his head, he knew he would not convince himself, no matter how much he wanted to do so. He did not feel safe here anymore. If he ever truly had. He would need other people, to make it. He could not sit on his hands in a comfy motel room while whatever was left of humanity congregated in Chicago.

  So, he thought, what kind of time could he expect to make? Given optimum walking conditions, he imagined he would be able to maintain a speed of four miles per hour. He next budgeted himself ten walking hours per day, giving him an advancement rate of forty miles per day. This was already sounding better. One thousand divided by forty was twenty-five. Twenty-five days. That sounded doable. If he left tomorrow, he would be there in just under a month.

  Then the fear came back. Travel time represented only one of his challenges. What about the dinosaurs? He tapped the pen against the paper several times, then put it down and stared at his map. He put it aside, then after a count of three, out loud, he grabbed it back and in an area roughly analogous to New York state, scrawled Here be Dragons.

  There. Enough of that. Back to work.

  What about his lack of survival skills? He had been surviving on snack foods and canned products and would either have to pack a month's provisions (he winced as he imagined the burden of seventy-five cans of Spaghetti-O's and a spoon for a thousand miles) or find some other food source along the way. This worried him most of all. At least, he hoped, water would not be a problem. There should be enough streams, and he expected to find more buildings intact, all with sinks that still worked. He wished he had taken more of an interest in camping when he was younger.

  His last thought before the stress of the day overtook his desire to stay awake was that he was grateful no one was here to watch him make this up as he went along.

  At some point before dawn, he woke just long enough to realize that he had fallen asleep with the light on and his map on the bed. He brushed the map to the floor and turned off the light. Then, in his half-awake state, he noticed the glow that emanated from outside his window. He found it pleasant and soothing, if unremarkable. He was halfway back to sleep, and it seemed like the sort of thing one might find as the backlight of a dream. He had, for that very reason, in fact, failed to attach any significance to this glow for several weeks.

  Had he been awake enough to notice the glow, even more than once, he might have dismissed it as a lightning bug, or as many lightning bugs. The glow was faint enough that its size would not have been obvious, and it was inconsistent enough that it might appear to have more than one source. To compound what could be illusion, the glow did not always hold still, but wove and bobbed at random intervals, though it always remained within the border of the window frame. Unlike any bug, though, it also put off sparks, not quite at random.

  And-perhaps most significantly-it did not buzz. It hummed.

  And sometimes whistled.

  Chapter Three

  Glimmer

  Harrison slept until almost eleven o'clock the next morning. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" he said to his clock.

  Looking at the floor, he saw the notes he had made in the middle of the night, but he did not move to pick them up. The crude map of his origin and destination looked back at him and mocked him. There was no way he could do this. It went right in the trash. Then he took the basket straight out to the dumpster.

  His waste disposal system was becoming pretty ripe, what with no pickups anymore, and he had to hold his breath just to get near it, let alone lift the Dumpster's lid. Gasping for air, he said, "That is one aroma I will not miss." From that moment, he admitted that he was Chicago-bound, bad plan or no plan.

  Inside, he served himself a breakfast of Coke and cold chicken noodle soup, then took a shower. By noon, he was ready to hit the shops. He got in his car, and as he pulled out of the motel parking lot, he turned on the radio.

  Nothing.

  He nudged the tuning in both directions. Faint static, but no more. Further adjustments made no difference.

  "All right," he said aloud. "That doesn't mean anything. There are plenty of reasons she could be off the air right now." He thought back to his brief and insignificant experience as a college DJ. His training had been a joke, and he remembered nothing that would give him a clue about why a station could be up one day and down the next. Maybe she was alone. Maybe a fuse had blown. Maybe she just hadn't found it yet. A drop of perspiration tickled his temple. He turned the radio off. Conjecture would serve no purpose. He would try again later. If Claudia never came back on, well, he would just have to get himself to Chicago and find out what had gone wrong.

  It took twenty minutes to reach the nearest working gas station that also had a convenience store. Early on, this shop had been home for a few days, and he already held a mild nostalgia for it. Filling his tank for the last time, he went inside to stock up. Provisions consisted of one of every map available, two flashlights, and an entire display box of Slim Jims.

  Harrison sat in his car for a while, eating Cheetos and counting rivers on the maps. If he could get himself across the Hudson, he wouldn't run into serious trouble until he got to the Ohio, by which time, with any luck, he would have traveling companions with brilliant ideas and resources. That earned a chuckle. Traveling companions, indeed!

  So far, his plan relied on finding things along the way without being certain they were there. For starters, he had been forced to accept that even his most optimistic estimations of his travel time ruled out the possibility of carrying enough food for the whole journey. If the distribution of food sources (random convenience stores, for example) was a constant, and given how many such sources he had found on the length of this one highway alone, he could expect to find food at least once every three or four days. That meant he would need only two weeks' worth of supplies. If he ever went longer than a week without finding something, he would turn back. Of course, since "turning back" was synonymous with "getting lost," he put little thought into that eventuality.

  Then it dawned on him, as so many things were dawning on him: "I need a compass!" He nodded. "I need a compass. Of course." He grinned in congratulation of his own ingenuity until realization crept in and overtook revelation. The smile wilted. "Dumb shit. Of course I need a compass. I should have thought of that before I thought of food." He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "Okay. I won't waste time or energy scolding myself. I didn't think of it before, but I've thought of it now." He gave himself a mental pat on the back. "Let's move on. I can do this." He stared out the windshield, organizing his thoughts. "Probably," he said, "I will not find a compass in that store." He stared. "Probably." He got out of the car.

  He found a dashboard compass in the automotive aisle. It consisted of a ball suspended in water in a spherical container. The back of the blister pack showed how to attach the compass to a dashboard with a small square of double-sided foam tape, included. Retail value, $2.97. There were two on the peg, so he took them both. "I guess this will do until I can find L.L.Bean," he mused, but this success was far more than he had expected. It rekindled his hope.

  Once outside, he held one of the compasses upright, then turned it left and right to test it. Sure enough, the ball inside remained stationary while the container rotated around it, the small painted arrow fixed. He rotated the compass until the arrow lined up with the little red hash mark just to the left of the N and was impressed that such a cheap tool would bother to make the distinction between true and magnetic north. Orienting himself in a northerly dire
ction, he looked up, and saw the front door of the convenience store. He shook his head. "That doesn't feel like north," he said. A moment's reflection told him why. When he had lived here, he slept late every day. The sun rose behind the building, so the window side always lay in shadow until high noon. Facing the store meant he was facing almost due east. He shook the compass, turned it upside-down, and spun himself in a complete circle. None of these actions affected the instrument's resolve to point at the store. "Crap," he said. "I admire your loyalty, little guy," he told it, "but I need something a little more objective."

  Testing the second compass yielded the same results.

  Harrison growled and rubbed his eyes. "Okay," he began in a reasonable tone of voice, "I now have two piece-of-crap compasses. Can I, in any way, count them as assets?" He considered this for a few moments, then said, "Let's try this on for size: both compasses point east. Maybe they're not broken. Maybe it's a design flaw. Maybe the factory screwed up and painted both arrows in the exact same wrong direction." This was not sounding too bad. "Maybe," he continued, "they work perfectly, but they're offset ninety degrees. This could still work." He looked at the compass in his hand, then at its brother, sitting on his car. It would not be enough for him to talk himself into this theory. He already felt stupid about not knowing what he was doing. If he were going to set out and rely on two defective compasses to guide him, he would need some experimental evidence that they would be up to the job.

  He rotated both compasses so that their arrows pointed to their respective E marks. A proper test would have to be conducted in motion, so he started to walk. That was when he discovered that his theory had a flaw.

  Both needles crept away from E. It was subtle at first, and he took it to mean that he wasn't holding them straight enough, but soon he recognized that he would have to keep turning them to keep them lined up. They continued to point parallel, though. His earlier theory now made no sense, but he did not have the tools to explain this new observation until he looked up. He had walked across the front of the building and was now close to the edge of the lot.

  Both compasses still pointed at the door.

  Running back to the door, he inspected it for magnets. Nothing. He took one compass and walked the whole way around the building. The ball performed a slow and graceful complete rotation as he walked. A repetition with the other compass produced the same effect. He walked away from the building, and shielded himself behind the gas pump. The arrow still pointed to the door.

  Finally, exasperated, he shouted, "This makes no sense!" He shook the compass. "You make no sense! What are you doing?" He sighed. "This is no good. I need to find a real compass."

  "That won't work," came a reply from behind him. In his current state, this surprised him far less than it pissed him off. He spun on the speaker, a vicious word already on his tongue, and during the split second required for the motion, he remembered to be shocked that he could snap at anyone. Scrambling to form a proper expectation, his brain begged for more time to prepare. It wouldn't have helped. When he turned around, he came upon some sort of prehistoric insect, about the size of a pigeon, hovering less than a foot in front of his face.

  "Aaaaaaahhh!" he said. And ran.

  "Shitshitshitshitshit. Shit!" he elaborated as he threw himself behind his car. He noticed that he had dropped the compass and had to explain to himself that going back for it was not a priority. His heart pounding, he crouched next to the rear wheel on the passenger side. He had no idea what kind of bug that was, but it had triggered a primal terror response. In his struggle to reconstruct his brief glimpse into a usable image, all that stood out were the huge wings. Huge, translucent, purple (maybe), in two parts like a butterfly (that can't be right) or a dragonfly. Yes. A dragonfly. A big, big dragonfly. That might be all right. His memory of dragonflies was not one of fear. They didn't bite (he thought), they didn't have stingers (he was pretty sure), and he didn't remember ever being afraid of them. When nothing happened for a full minute, he gathered the courage and peered over the top of the trunk.

  Which was right where the bug was patiently hovering.

  "Aaaaaaahhh!" he reiterated. This time he didn't stop until he had gone around the back of the building and thrown himself flat against the Dumpster. He scanned the yard for a big stick, but found nothing. He had gotten a better look at the bug this time, but not much. Definitely not a dragonfly, though. It didn't have the long tail, and the wings were much wider. Much more, in fact, like a butterfly, although it didn't move like one. And it wore a lab coat.

  A white lab coat. In a valiant battle against every sane, reasonable thing he knew about what an insect should look like, that image had managed to work its way to the surface. Once he got a grip on it, it was still there. And once it was still there, it was an anchor. The image he tried to assemble in his mind's eye resolved itself. He walked around the Dumpster, prepared for what he would see.

  "Are you done yet?" the bug asked. It had a feminine voice.

  He did not respond. The question had been posed by a woman with wide, translucent purple butterfly wings. She was about the size of a pigeon, and she was wearing a white lab coat.

  He remained detached from this impossibility long enough to perform one more experiment. He lunged out, not to grab, but to swat. Without effort or change of expression, the small hovering woman moved back, just beyond reach of his fingers, then moved forward again. "Huh," he said. He walked away.

  He had never experienced a hallucination before. He did not realize they could be so vivid. He had always imagined that hallucinations were somehow fuzzy, or only visible at the edges of one's periphery, or something. He didn't think it would be possible to stare right at one, like watching a movie. And yet, he couldn't touch it, so hallucination it was.

  Back in the parking lot, he found the compass he had dropped and took it back into the store. It turned out the compass did not point to the door from inside the store. This was not a possibility he had considered, and it made the problem more complicated. He assumed that there was something magnetic in the door that drew the compass, even from the back of the building, but once inside, it continued to point into the store. He wandered around the aisles until he noticed the sphere start to wobble, then he walked in the direction it pointed. Near the refrigerators, he found a spot where the sphere spun inside its housing. He backed off, and the pointer stabilized. He performed further experiments. No matter where he stood, the arrow pointed to this spot. He returned to it and the ball resumed spinning. He let it do so for a full minute and felt the compass grow warm in his hand. One step back again, and it halted. He inspected the spot on the floor where the compass went haywire, but could find nothing remarkable about it. On his way back out the door, he collected two magnets he found stuck to one of the cash registers.

  When he got outside, the small hovering woman was still there. He ignored her and went to his car, where he resumed his experiment with the compasses, this time using the magnets to try to drag the pointer off center.

  "That won't work, either," she said. Harrison hummed as he worked, which did not accomplish what he hoped. She flitted over to his car, and landed on the hood. "Aren't you at all curious why it won't work?" She offered him a provocative shrug.

  "No," Harrison said aloud to himself. "No. I am not. I have been holding on to my sanity too well and for too long to let this happen now. I will blink, and it will go away. Or I will find a pharmacy and a big book on drugs, and I will learn how make it go away." He looked straight at her, and she giggled. "I don't even want to guess what's causing you, he continued. I mean it. Maybe I'm sleep deprived, or something has gotten into the water. I don't care. I will fix it."

  She sat down and clicked her fingernails on his hood. "I can tell you why it won't work," she said.

  "Gah!" Harrison's facade of control cracked. As he shouted at her, he couldn't help but think for the first time that he was making eye contact. "What are you even supposed to be? The Apocalypse Fairy
?"

  She gasped, threw her hands over her face, and rocked for a moment. Then she stood up and shouted, "Fuck you!" Then she was gone. A thick trail of red sparks remained behind her. The trail faded, and when Harrison tried to see where it led, it vanished.

  He stood still, waiting for some sort of follow-up, but nothing happened. "Well," he said at last. "I certainly wasn't expecting that."

  * * *

  His experiments with the magnets yielded no new or helpful information. Until he could determine their usefulness, he decided to keep them. Once he had stowed them in his car, along with all the supplies he foraged from the store, he stayed for over an hour to study the maps. He would have been more comfortable doing this back in his motel room, but he felt compelled to stay at the gas station as long as daylight allowed.

  After some time, he got out to stretch his legs and went for a walk around the building. He found her immediately, perched on the Dumpster, sulking. He blinked. She sulked on.

  "Why won't it work?" he asked.

  She didn't look up. "Leave me alone."

  He didn't. He couldn't. He tried again. "What's the matter?"

  This got her attention. "You are!" she cried. She paused, and he strained to find an appropriate response. "Ugh!" she shouted. "I can't believe you called me that!" She waited again, and the pause got uglier.

  "I was joking," he offered. It sounded weak, even to him. He started to perspire.

  She leapt up, and zipped straight to his face, hovering inches from his nose. He could feel a slight tingle, like the static buildup on a TV screen. She threw her arms out, as if to give him a good view.

  "PICK!"

  He blinked.

  "SEE?" she asked.

  She waited again while Harrison's flight response made suggestions to his feet. He shrugged in what he hoped was a nonthreatening manner and said, "No?"