The Diver couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d seen Lucas. He couldn’t remember the number of days anymore, and that bothered him although he didn’t know why it bothered him.
“Where is your son now?” the nurse asked.
The Diver stepped back out of the room and looked up and down the hallway again, but it was still empty.
“I’ll tell someone on the other side. They’ll send help. You’re better off staying with the babies until then.”
“Why are you here if not to help?” the nurse asked, following him out into the hall.
“I’m a diver,” he said. “People hire me to look for things in The Drift.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that can’t be replaced. Keepsakes they left behind in their apartments when they fled after the crash. Cremation urns. Jewelry. Maybe pets if their owners think they’re somehow still alive. Sometimes they just want me to bring the bodies back.”
“Do they ever hire you to find missing people?”
The Diver looked back at the floating babies in the nursery. He already knew the next question the nurse would ask.
“Can you find someone for me?” she said.
The Diver didn’t say anything, so she went on. She looked back at the babies now, too. “I’ve been trying to reach my daughter. But she’s not answering her phone.”
“None of that stuff works in the Drift,” the Diver said. “No one knows why.”
“I want to know that she’s all right.” The nurse closed her eyes. “I just want to see her again.”
The Diver didn’t say anything for a moment but he knew he couldn’t refuse her. He’d never refused anyone who’d asked him to find someone in the Drift.
“She’s a nurse, too,” the nurse said, like she knew what the Diver was thinking. “She worked downtown, in a walk-in clinic.”
“Which one?” the Diver asked, but the nurse just shook her head.
“I’ve never been there,” she said. “Why would I go to a clinic?”
The Diver nodded and turned back to the stairs. “I’ll look for her but I never make any promises.”
“What about you?” the nurse asked.
“What about me?”
“Who are you looking for?”
He left the nurse alone with the babies and went back down the stairs. By the time he found his way out onto the street again, the ghosts were gone.
The Diver had never told anyone he’d started diving the Drift because he was looking for Lucas. His son had disappeared in the crash, as well, although he’d been lost to the Diver for long before that. They’d fallen out over the Diver’s previous life as an assets fund manager for a firm that broke apart distressed companies. Something that didn’t mean anything at all now. It was a life the Diver could barely remember. Lucas had worked for a credit counselling firm in one of those office towers downtown, as if to atone for his father’s sins. The Diver had gone to the office after the crash to look for Lucas, but it had been as empty of signs of life as Lucas’s apartment. Broken windows and overturned desks and chairs, but no bodies. The Diver didn’t know if Lucas was alive or dead. He thought maybe if he kept searching the Drift he would find some sign of his son. He would at least know.
The Drift had never given him any signs of Lucas, but it did give him a sign of something now. When he left the hospital, the mist of the Drift swirled past him, like a current heading in one direction. Down the street, toward the centre of the city. It was green and red and blue and a dozen other colours now.
The Diver noticed all the cars had been moved while he was in the hospital, too. Where before they had been scattered around the street facing in all directions, left where their panicked drivers had abandoned them after the crash, now they all pointed in the same direction the Drift flowed. The Diver wasn’t sure what was happening, but he figured he may as well go along with the Drift, too.
The Drift was always moving, but never like this. It slowly shifted across several dozen blocks of the city around the crash site, moving this way and that way. Sometimes it left the streets at its edges uncovered, but it always came back, like a tide, and covered them up again. That was how it earned its name. That was why the barricades and caution tape never came down. It was a gradual process, though, and not something you could see happening. The Diver had never seen the Drift flow like this before.
He checked his oxygen level on the air tank and saw he had maybe an hour left. Enough to reach the city centre and explore for a few minutes and still get back. The longer he stayed downtown, the greater the chance he’d run out of air before he could make it out of the Drift. But he figured he’d have to chance it. There weren’t many divers that went as deep into the Drift as he did. If he didn’t look for the nurse’s daughter, no one probably would.
He reached the next block and now all the cars on the street were filled with water, even though there was no water to be seen anywhere in the street itself. Dark shapes moved within the cars, pressing up against the glass as if to look at him. The Diver kept walking. He’d learned not to look closely at the strange things that happened in the Drift.
He couldn’t ignore the sounds, though.
He was looking up at a billboard over the street at the next intersection when he heard the shots. The billboard showed white clouds in a blue sky with the words You Can’t Put a Price On. The Diver didn’t know what he couldn’t put a price on because the rest of the sign was burned away. The shots were the jackhammer sound of automatic weapons fire. They went on for a couple of seconds and then stopped at the same time the Diver did. It sounded like they were a few blocks distant. The Diver didn’t know what they meant. He wasn’t sure if the sound meant the ghosts were ahead of him or if it was just another strange element of the Drift.
He waited for a minute but he didn’t hear any other sounds, so he kept on walking. He came across the other diver a few minutes later, coming down the street toward him. The Drift parted around him like it was a river flowing around debris. They met in front of a clothing store that held a jumble of fallen mannequins in its broken window.
The man wore a tank and regulator like the Diver’s. He was dressed in an urban camouflage uniform with a black backpack. He also wore goggles that looked like they were meant for skiing or some similar sport. He held an assault rifle in one hand but he didn’t aim it at the Diver because he was leaning on it instead, using the weapon to keep himself standing. His stomach and legs were wet with blood.
“I think the ghosts are actually real ghosts,” the other man said, like he knew the Diver. “Because they don’t die when you shoot them. The bullets just go right through them.” He didn’t seem to notice that the Diver didn’t have a gun or that there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.
The Diver looked around for someplace for them to hide and saw the pharmacy across the street. The windows had shattered and fallen away but the shelves inside looked untouched.
“There might be something ...” he said, stepping over the broken glass and into the pharmacy. He didn’t know how to finish because he wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t sure what the other man needed.
“We need to get out of here,” the man in the camouflage gear said but followed him inside anyway. He staggered down one of the aisles and sat in a chair by the pharmacists’ station. He looked back outside and shook his head. “This is like a dream.”
The Diver had thought that many times himself but didn’t say anything. He grabbed a bottle of Advil off a shelf and tossed it to the other man. “Take some of these while I try to find something to stop the bleeding.” He looked up at the signs hanging from the ceiling, but he wasn’t sure which one applied to this situation. He finally decided on First Aid and headed for that aisle. “Are they following you?” he asked.
“We scattered in all directions when they attacked,” the other man said around a mouthful of Advil. “They went after the others. But they’ll come back for me.”
The Di
ver collected all the boxes of bandages he could find. The regular ones for small cuts and scrapes, the long ones used to treat athletic injuries and the others. He went back to the other diver, who laughed and then winced at the pain it caused him.
“I’ve got better in my backpack,” he said.
The Diver dropped the boxes of bandages on the floor and leaned over the man to open his backpack. There was a roll of garbage bags inside and a box of latex gloves on top of a bundle of dust masks. There was also a crowbar and hacksaw, and underneath those a roll of surgical tape.
“You don’t usually see divers so deep in the Drift,” the Diver said. He was trying to ask a question without asking any questions.
“We were trying to reach the ship,” the other man said. “The alien ship.” Like there were any other kinds.
The Diver gently pushed the man back so he could unzip his jacket. The man’s white shirt underneath had turned nearly black with blood in its lower half. The holes in the shirt were small but the Diver knew by the amount of blood that the bullets had hit something significant. The Diver wiped his hand on his pant leg.
“We weren’t going to do anything that mattered,” the man said. “Not anymore. We were just trying to find things to sell.”
The Diver wrapped the tape around the man’s stomach even though he didn’t think it would do any good. “Things to sell.” He wound the tape around and around until he couldn’t see any of the blood on the shirt anymore.
“Artifacts. People’s valuables. Whatever,” the man said.
“The crash wiped out the financial district and now everything is in ruins,” the Diver said. “And you’re looking for things to sell.”
“None of us have worked since the crash,” the man said, but his words were a whisper now. His eyelids fluttered several times as he tried to take in the blue cloud that was coalescing around his head.
“What is that?” he asked. “Am I seeing things?”
The Diver didn’t say anything. He knew it was a sign the other man was dying. The cloud that was taking shape was the manifestation of grief, the grief of the people that loved and cared about the other diver. He’d seen it countless times before, sometimes around bodies, like the babies in the hospital, sometimes around things people had left behind in the Drift. Usually photos and pieces of clothing and that sort of thing. The grief was always a different colour. As if there were infinite shades of grief.
That was when the Diver heard the crunch of boots on broken glass outside the pharmacy. He moved fast, heading for the far end of the store. He didn’t bother trying to save the other diver. He left the roll of surgical tape hanging from him. He knew the other diver couldn’t be saved.
He hit the last aisle and turned up it. He walked as fast as he could past rows of greeting cards while still remaining silent. If it was the ghosts again and they had spread out, he was trapped. He wouldn’t get out of the pharmacy alive. But he could hear the other man muttering where he’d left him in the chair, and he hoped that the sound would draw the ghosts.
The Diver paused at the end of the aisle and looked around the corner of the shelves. Rows of cash registers were in between him and the broken windows that led to the street beyond. The cash register nearest him had a box of condoms and some mouthwash on the conveyor belt, but the others were empty. The Diver didn’t see ghosts in the front of the store or in the street outside. That could only mean they were in the store, most likely moving down the aisles toward the other diver.
The Diver walked past the cash register in front of him and toward the empty window. He had almost reached it when a burst of gunfire erupted behind him. He threw himself through the window, expecting to feel the shots hit him any second. But nobody was firing at him. He got to his feet outside, brushing pieces of broken glass from his shirt and pants, and looked back into the store. He still didn’t see anyone. They must have been shooting the other diver.
The Diver knew he wouldn’t be able to outrun the ghosts or whoever it was in the pharmacy. The street was too open to get very far. He had to hide and hope for the best. So he went over to the clothing store and stepped up into the window, careful not to cut himself on the shards of glass that remained in the window frame. He lay down on the floor of the display, which featured a mock miniature cityscape that had been largely crushed by the mannequins. He pulled a couple of the mannequins over him and waited like he was just another body, holding his breath so the regulator wouldn’t make any sounds.
He lay there for less than a minute before he heard the boots crunching on glass again, this time outside the window of the clothing store. Something white moved at the edge of his vision. A ghost. He waited for the sounds to pause, for someone to start pulling the mannequins off of him, but none of that happened. The ghosts, for it sounded like there were several of them, kept walking. The sounds faded away and then the Diver couldn’t hear anything at all, not even his own breathing.
He wanted to wait there longer, to make sure the ghosts had moved on, but he didn’t have enough air left in his tank. He needed to get moving.
He pushed the mannequins off him and looked out into the street. It was empty again. He climbed out of the window and down onto the sidewalk. The glass underfoot was all broken into tiny shards now, as if countless people had walked upon it. The Drift swirled around him in a rainbow of colours as it kept flowing toward the city centre. He followed it once more.
He came across an ATM in the side of a building that was spitting out money. It didn’t resemble any money the Diver had ever seen before. It was made of paper and plastic and what looked like glass. Some of the pieces were square while others were triangular. Like the Drift, it was all different colours, blue and green and red and everything else. Some of it fell to the ground while other pieces floated past the Diver.
He stopped at the ATM and stared at it because he remembered it. He’d stood here once before with Lucas, the last time he had seen him. Before the crash. They’d met for lunch at a restaurant down the block. The Diver looked that way and sure enough, there it was. He could see the tables through the window. They were set with plates and cutlery as if the dinner service was about to begin, even though the place was dark and empty.
After they had eaten, the Diver and Lucas had walked along the same sidewalk the Diver walked now, until they had reached the ATM. The Diver had taken out money, although he didn’t remember how much. There had been a homeless man standing by the ATM. He had asked for money and the Diver had said no without really looking at him. The homeless man had walked out into the street cursing and held up his hands to stop the traffic. The Diver couldn’t remember what he’d said. Maybe something about the homeless man needing a job. Or maybe he’d said something about how the homeless man should stop bothering those with jobs. But he remembered what Lucas had said.
“Maybe he had a job,” his son had said, watching the homeless man sit down in the middle of the street. “Maybe he lost it when you took apart his company looking for loose change.”
The Diver looked into the street now. It was clogged with abandoned cars, the doors on some of them hanging open like the owners had known they were never going to come back. He could see bags of groceries piled up in the back of a van, and an empty child seat in another car. There was an open space in the street where the Diver thought the homeless man may have sat. He wondered what had happened to him.
The Diver thought maybe the fact he had stumbled across the ATM was another sign, so he kept following the Drift.
It led him to the strangest scene he had witnessed yet, and he had witnessed many strange things in the Drift. He turned a corner at an intersection and saw all the cars on the new street were floating in the air, like the babies had been back at the hospital. They moved like garbage caught in the water, some spinning slowly end over end, while others bobbed in place. There was more debris among them: a couple of baby strollers, a woman’s long black jacket, a half-opened umbrella, bits and pieces of food that looked
as if they hadn’t aged any in the Drift.
The Diver stopped and stared. He wasn’t sure if he should walk this way or not. He didn’t know what he would do if he lifted off the ground and started floating, too. It took him a moment to notice the walk-in clinic beside an Apple store in the ground floor of one of the buildings, a modern glass-and-metal tower that bent this way and that as it climbed through the air. He thought its odd shape had more to do with the architect than the Drift, though. The building across the street looked normal enough. It was older, raised in a time when they still adorned towers with gargoyles and style. The gargoyles were all facing different directions, but the head of one on the third floor was turned his way, as if it were looking at him. The Diver wished he had more than a knife. It wasn’t the first time he’d wished that.
The Drift seemed to have stopped flowing now. The Diver figured if it had been a sign, this must have been the place it was leading him toward. He looked around the street and saw a Starbucks, a dry cleaner’s, a convenience store and a sushi place. He went over to the walk-in clinic and looked through the window, because he couldn’t see why the Drift would have led him to any of the other places.
An empty coffee cup and a magazine floated around the inside of the clinic, but there were no signs of life. The windows were still intact so he opened the door and went inside. The seats were all empty, not even a piece of clothing left behind. The Diver checked each of the examination rooms, but they were empty, too, other than an anatomy poster floating over the examination table in one.
It was only when he reached the nurses’ station at the rear of the clinic that he saw why he had been drawn here. A bulletin board on the wall held a few charts and memos and several photos. Among them was a picture of two women in scrubs standing in front of the ER at the hospital. The Diver didn’t recognize the younger woman in the picture, but he recognized the older woman who had her arm around the younger one. The nurse with the babies.
He took the photo from the bulletin board and studied it for a moment. Then he put it in his pocket and went back outside. He had only so much air.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 8