by Edward Aubry
"That's a plan," she said.
Harrison followed the procedure for detaching cars, still marveling, even now, at how simple the train was to operate. He would normally have thought that piloting a futuristic underground magnetic bullet was the sort of thing people needed schooling to do right. The bulkhead to the lounge shut with a pronounced clank, then they heard distant squealing. "It's away," said Harrison, trying to sound triumphant. He checked their speed. Down to 112 meters per second. He brought up a diagnostic cutaway of the train, trying to get a sense of whether the plan was working.
It wasn't.
The front half of the train was indeed severed from the back half, but it was still in contact. Harrison pressed the system to determine why, but there was no way to tell. The cars were reading as detached but touching.
"We need to push it off," he said. His fragile calm was finally starting to stretch.
"How?" the pixie asked. Harrison looked to her hopefully. "Hey, I can't even carry your pack," she said preemptively.
He slammed the counter. "Dammit! We're so close to solving this I can feel it." He grabbed bunches of hair with both hands. "Think! Think! God, what I wouldn't give for a box of dynamite right now!"
"What's a box of dynamite?"
He looked up, still shocked by her ingenuousness. "You blow stuff up with it," he said. "If I had enough, I could set it off in the joint, and it would push the front end of the train away from us. It might even slow us down some, like a rocket firing in reverse." As he said it, it somehow started to seem like a good idea. "My God, that would work! We have to find something on this train we can explode." He looked at the map, and the speed gauge, and his face sank. "In twenty minutes."
There was a horrible pause. Harrison could not imagine that there were explosives on the train, and even if there were materials from which to fashion a bomb, neither he nor the pixie had the expertise to do so. He tried to find a way not to say that, but couldn't think of one. "Glimmer," he began.
"I know a trick," she said.
Exhausted, nearly defeated, imagining that Glimmer was trying to cheer him up, he decided to let her. "What kind of trick?"
"A pixie kind of trick," she said. Her face was blank. This was not a joke. "I can blow stuff up."
"What?" he shouted. "How? No. Never mind. Can you make a big enough explosion to do what I'm talking about?"
"I think so," she said in a very quiet voice. She was afraid, they were both afraid, that this might be it, their last chance. If it wasn't good enough, well, it wouldn't be good enough.
"Do it," he said. "What have we got to lose?"
Her tiny eyes lingered on his, longer than he expected them to. She flew to his face, kissed his nose, and dropped something in his shirt pocket. Then she was gone, leaving behind her little trail of sparks.
Harrison went back to the lounge and curled up next to Mitchell, who stirred in his sleep. In a few minutes, they would know. He wouldn't wake the boy until they were safe. Better that way, he thought. As he leaned into the seat, he felt a small scrape on his chest, and absently reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a tiny plastic replica of an Olympic gold medal on a ribbon.
"Oh, fuck!"
He jumped up just as the middle of the train detonated. This time, he could hear it. It was louder than he expected, and seeing the flaming wreckage streaking past the lounge windows, larger as well. He fell over. He knew immediately that it had worked. The rear of the train was decelerating again, and the front had, no doubt, just jumped ahead of them into certain oblivion.
A few minutes later, there was another explosion. It was like nothing he could have predicted. It sounded like a hundred grand pianos being dropped onto a tower of glass. Light of every conceivable color streaked past the windows, and the air in the sealed compartment suddenly smelled of burning leaves. Mitchell was awake now. The first explosion had frightened him. This one had him captivated.
Shortly thereafter, they collided with the remains of the other half of the train and the door. By then, they were cruising at a pokey 23 meters per second, and they were well protected by the hastily erected mountain of cushions they had piled against the wall. It took them two hours to get into the station through a service hatchway in the tunnel. Neither of them sustained any injuries beyond the capacity of the first aid kit.
Four days later, they gave up looking for Glimmer and headed south.
Chapter Eleven
Population: At Least Five
While Mitchell slept, Harrison listened to his new radio. It was an excellent replacement for the discarded Walkman, with crisper sound. He could still only hear Claudia's broadcasts after dark, but lately she had been working the night shift, so he was able to hear her for longer stretches of time. A song ended.
"That was 'Just What I Needed,' by the Cars," she said to him over his headphones. "For those of you just tuning in, this is Claudia, coming to you from Chicago with an open invitation to anyone who can hear it. Tell your friends. Come to Chicago. I'll be here." Harrison heard the opening chords to a song he did not recognize.
For some time, it had been bothering him that Claudia said so little when she spoke. At first, it had seemed natural. He had imagined that she was all alone, running a radio station, and that it was more important to her to stay on the air than to ramble on. Some people just weren't comfortable talking to themselves, which is what it would feel like if she couldn't get a response from her listeners. By this time, though, there must have been other people there. Harrison had been on the road for weeks. Surely in all that time someone closer to Chicago would have been able to finish the journey. Yet he never heard any voice on the radio other than Claudia's. She had never spoken of survivors who had accepted her invitation, nor had she ever described what Harrison could expect to see once he got there.
All of this should have made it difficult to trust her, and yet his faith endured. Ironically, it was the attempt on his life in the Worm tunnel that had strengthened his belief in her. He reasoned that if someone wanted him dead, then that someone didn't want him to make it to Chicago. He had been spied on, after all, so whoever his nemesis was probably knew where he was going. Since his enemy wanted to keep him away from Chicago, then Chicago must be the right place for him to go. It was wafer thin logic, but he found it sturdy enough to support his optimism.
Harrison yawned. Admitting to himself that he couldn't stay awake much longer, he put away the radio. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and used it to check on Mitchell before going to sleep. The boy was sleeping soundly, with a peaceful look on his face. Harrison smiled. Mitchell's days had been anything but peaceful. He had walked a great distance, and it had been wearing him out. They both had their fair share of scratches and insect bites, but it had been harder on the boy. Harrison hoped he wouldn't have to put him through much more of this, but he had no idea how much farther they had to go. Traveling with Mitchell had slowed him down, and he had already been finding it difficult to gauge distances.
Absently, he rubbed the plastic medal resting on his chest. Fearing he might lose it, he had put it on a chain. He checked once more to be sure Mitchell was completely asleep, then quietly pulled a small device from his pack and touched a button on it.
"Like I would know?" Glimmer asked. He offered her image a melancholy smile and reached out, almost touching it. "Like I would know?" she asked again. He switched the recorder off and gently replaced it in his pack.
Then, yawning again, he stretched out on the tarp they had been using as a bed. He started to think about how excited Claudia would be to meet them, and halfway through rehearsing how he would introduce Mitchell, he fell asleep.
* * *
"Let me see your arm."
Mitchell held his left arm out obediently, looking in the other direction. A strip of white cloth was taped around it, halfway between the wrist and elbow. There was an orange stain on it. Harrison frowned as he examined it, grateful that Mitchell wasn't looking at his fa
ce. "We should change this again," he said.
Mitchell whimpered, but did not object. Harrison pulled another strip of cloth from his backpack. He had been quite pleased with himself to have brought a little first aid kit until Mitchell fell and gashed his arm on a tree root. His wound was not deep, but it was long. Harrison had been able to get the bleeding to stop fairly quickly, but none of the bandages were big enough to cover it. He used up his largest bandages right away, and then tried using several smaller ones, but realized how quickly that would consume them. He chose to improvise by tearing a white T-shirt into strips and attaching them with adhesive tape.
He peeled back the dressing. He was hoping to see some signs of progress. Instead, he saw that the cut was raised, with an angry yellow scab and reddened edges. He winced. The wound had not yet progressed to red streaks, but it was still trouble. He was going to have to open it and drain it. Performing that procedure on a child, in the woods, was not going to be pleasant. He had anti-bacterial ointment in his kit, but what he really needed was a proper sink, and soap, and a large sterile bandage.
He removed the cloth and dabbed at the wound with a clean corner. He was rough about it, hoping he could get some of the pus out without making too big a deal out of it. "Ow!" Mitchell cried, jerking his arm away. He looked at his own injury. Cleaning it was definitely going to be a challenge, but if Mitchell struggled and got dirt in it, it was going to get worse. Harrison sighed and dropped the soiled strip of cloth on the ground. He hated the thought of littering this pristine world, but he also knew that carrying the tainted bandage around would be unsanitary.
"Hold it up," he said gently. "I won't touch it." As Mitchell looked at him suspiciously, Harrison produced a bottle of water from his pack, opened it, and held it out to him. Mitchell held his arm up. Harrison poured some water over the wound. He knew that the water would do little good through that scab, but it soothed Mitchell, and that would be enough for the moment. He handed the boy a paper towel, which he used to dab his arm dry. Harrison smeared some of the ointment on the new bandage, wrapped the arm, and taped it securely. He hoped that would be a sufficient stopgap. They would have to find a building soon.
"What's that?" Mitchell suddenly asked.
For a moment, Harrison thought the boy had read his mind and spotted a building. He looked hopefully in the direction Mitchell was pointing. Nothing. Then he saw something.
"It's a shoe," he said. As he heard himself say it, he wondered what a shoe was doing on the ground in the middle of a forest. Then he saw the pants leg, and he realized he wasn't looking at just a shoe. "Stay here," he said. Mitchell said nothing.
Most of the body was concealed by brush. If they hadn't stopped to redress Mitchell's arm, they would have walked right past it without seeing it. Harrison wondered for the first time how many corpses he might already have passed in his journey. He pushed aside some of the overgrowth to have a better look. It was the body of a man, a little bit smaller than Harrison, he guessed, but it was impossible to say with any certainty because the body had been stripped of much of its flesh. Crawling over it were about a dozen of what Harrison at first thought were large bugs. They looked a bit like scorpions, but each one was about the size of Mitchell's hand, and they had far too many legs. He studied one. It was black, with indigo spots and lines, and its back ended in a fan shape, like a lobster, but with a longer tail emerging from underneath. It had a knob at the end, like a scorpion's tail, but it laid flat on the ground. Each bug had at least four pincers that he could see, their shape again more reminiscent of a crustacean. To his horror, he saw that the bugs were not biting the flesh from the corpse; they were pulling it loose with those claws and stuffing it into their mouths. He started to back away slowly, hoping they hadn't noticed him. They weren't moving very quickly, but he didn't want to test that observation.
"Arthropods from Hell," he whispered. He backed into Mitchell, and gasped all over again. "I thought I told you to stay put!" he hissed.
Mitchell was gawking at the dead man and the scavengers. Harrison didn't even want to guess what was going through the boy's head at that moment. This was the first human they had found since leaving the Worm station. He wanted to tell Mitchell something reassuring, that not everyone they found would be dead and scavenged. He couldn't find the words.
"Come on," he said, and he escorted Mitchell back into the woods.
* * *
It was late afternoon before they finally came across a building. They had been following Harrison's compass for almost two days. The first sign of civilization they saw as they emerged from the forest was a vast windowless wall and a row of widely spaced Dumpsters.
"Strip mall," Harrison said. He was very pleased. Not only would he be able to find a bathroom, but probably the supplies he needed, too. A mall was bound to have a drug store or a grocery store. Some of the shops here had signs, even though this was clearly the rear of the mall. The sign closest to them read Hallmark. Harrison quickly ruled it out as a source of bandages.
As they came closer, Harrison was struck by a familiar stench. He tried to place it. It was akin to the smell of kitchen garbage, but stronger and more serious. He scanned up and down the mall, looking for the source of the odor, but it quickly became obvious that the smell was coming from the nearest Dumpster, the one belonging to the Hallmark store. It was full. It seemed odd to him that a card and gift store would have waste capable of rotting so effusively. He tried to imagine what they would ever have to throw away that wasn't made of paper, cardboard, or plastic. Then the familiarity of the noxious smell kicked in.
It was the same smell as the Dumpster at the motel where he had once lived.
"I think someone lives here," he said to Mitchell. He tried to keep his voice even. He wasn't sure if this insight would excite the boy or frighten him.
"What should we do?" Mitchell asked.
Harrison wasn't sure. He doubted the door was locked. Locks didn't seem to work anymore. Still, he wasn't sure if they should just barge in. This person could perceive them as a threat. Or be a threat himself. The safe thing would probably be to find a bathroom somewhere else, clean up, and cut out before they were discovered. He sighed. He had begun this journey to find people, not avoid them.
Harrison and Mitchell walked to the door and knocked.
After almost a minute, they heard someone ask, "Who is it?" It sounded like a woman's voice. Harrison quickly rejected the idea that he had found Claudia. It didn't sound like her, and, besides, they were still many miles from Chicago.
"What the hell kind of a question is that?" he whispered to Mitchell, who giggled. Obviously, he was a random stranger. Was she expecting someone? He decided to go with simple and direct. "My name is Harrison," he called through the door. "I have a friend here with me named Mitchell. He's eight years old." He added the last bit to make himself seem less dangerous.
"Hello," Mitchell said loudly. He seemed glad to participate.
After a short pause, the voice asked, "What do you want?"
Again, how was he supposed to answer that? "Can I borrow a cup of sugar?" he said quietly. Mitchell cracked up. Harrison cleared his throat. "You're the first person we've found in a very long time," he said. "We just wanted to say hello."
He expected another pause, as the voice's owner evaluated his statement, but to his surprise, the door opened immediately. The voice belonged to a girl. Harrison guessed she was about thirteen. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail and she had large glasses on her face which slightly magnified her eyes. She was wearing a white sweatshirt and blue jeans. On her feet were multicolored toe socks.
"Is Harrison your first name or your last name?" she asked.
Harrison laughed. "My first name."
She held out her hand. "I'm pleased to meet you, Harrison. My name is Dorothy O'Neill. Is that a Barbie medal around your neck?"
* * *
"By the time it got here, we'd already seen it on the news. My mom kept telling us it
wouldn't get this far, but she made us stay in the house. Lorraine and I were pretty scared, but Fiona was way too young to really get how bad it was. Mom told us both not to talk about it, so we tried not to. I'm twelve, so ever since Dad's been gone, Mom counts on me to help take care of my little sisters. Anyway, all of a sudden Fiona just ran for it. For no reason at all. I think she was just bored. Mom didn't even see her until she was out the door, and then she started yelling, 'Fiona! Get back here!' So I said I'd go get her, and Mom just started yelling louder and told me to stay in the house and take care of Lorraine. Then she went outside."
Dorothy paused. Harrison could see her pain, but he said nothing.
"Then," she continued, "I heard a sound like a big drum beating, and Lorraine just disappeared. I didn't get what was happening at first, but then the house fell down, like it was made out of water, and then it was gone, too. All that was left was grass." She stopped.
Harrison let the silence linger a little longer. Dorothy had been alone at this shopping center for months. He and Mitchell were the first people to whom she had told her tale, although he suspected from her delivery that she had rehearsed the story many, many times.
"Come with us," he said suddenly.
"To Chicago? On foot?" Dorothy laughed. "No, I don't think so."
Harrison learned that she had been living in the Hallmark store in a nest she had meticulously constructed from throw pillows and stuffed animals. She had found a comfortable corner of a world in chaos, and apparently saw no reason to abandon it. He had been hoping this would be an easier sell. There was no way he was going to drag her across the country against her will, and there was no way he was going to leave her here. Mitchell had been far more receptive.