by J. C. Geiger
“Oh shoot,” Malachi said.
He noticed the lights first. On a road a dozen or so miles away, a cluster of cars. Griff zoomed in.
“Police,” he said.
A half dozen vehicles. Two marked cars, black-and-white with lights up top. The rest were trucks, SUVs. They were turning, moving out.
“They’re coming,” Griff said. He slowed the drone to a hover.
“Not that way, they aren’t,” Malachi said.
He was right. The cars were moving away from them. Retreating. Like the rats.
Griff adjusted the camera.
“Why are they leaving?” Griff asked.
He banked the drone left and descended into the farthest reaches of the Paths.
He flew 30, 40, 50 miles per hour. The presence of humans slowly vanished, like a time-lapse video. Man-made structures grew sparse, then decomposed, rotting down to driftwood bones, scrub, vast leagues of decay stretching mountainward. The drone’s glass eye raced closer. Ahead, a pall of gray clouds smeared like charcoal.
Rain.
“Careful,” Malachi said. “That wind will grab you.”
Turbulence. The drone shook, up-down jerks. The monolithic black smudge sharpened to rainfall. Clarified droplets in torrents—sheeting out like square sails. Clouds’ open throats pouring hard into natural grooves, worn by centuries. Water fell like a river from the sky and the word emerged with its slippery vowels:
“Arroyo,” Griff said.
Because the desert had once been underwater. And it would be again.
“Shitballs,” Thomas exhaled. “The Paths.”
“What’s an arroyo?” Malachi asked.
“A dry river,” Charity said.
“Not for long,” Griff said.
Clouds trembled with light. Griff amplified the camera’s volume. A new signal, thrumming under the rain. Through the viewfinder, shadows leapt on low walls.
HhhhhssSKKKRRAKKKKSSSHHH
The sound of a waterfall, chewing.
“Pull up,” Thomas said.
It rounded the corner with the shape of water, but it was not water.
“Pull up!”
A dead forest, tipped on its size. Crackling logs. Trunks. And the galloping wave swallowed everything. Behind wooden jaws, a muddy tail rushed and lashed. Overtook a boulder. It tumbled in the current like a buoy.
“How much time?” Thomas asked.
Griff lifted the drone. Pulled it even with the leading edge of debris.
It moved at 5 miles an hour, 10.3 miles away.
And they finally knew what the rats knew.
In two hours, everyone in the Paths would be dead.
SEVENTY-TWO
THEY HAD NO PHONES, NO SIRENS, NO MAPS, NO SIGNS, NO DRILLS, no flares, no protocol.
They only had two hours.
People gathered around Griff. Maybe because of what he was wearing. In a disaster, camouflage had the opposite of its intended effect. Everyone found you right away.
“Crisis statement,” Thomas said, prompting him.
“Thousands die if we can’t get them to higher ground,” Griff said.
“Communication assets?”
“None,” Griff said.
“We got walkie-talkies,” Malachi said. “Simon. And the SandDogs. The ones in the buggies.”
“You tell Simon what’s up,” Griff said. “Let me know what he says.”
“Gotcha.”
“So it’s a flood?” Rumblefish said. “Can people swim it?”
“It’s barely water,” Griff said.
“We’ve got crews,” Alea said. “They’re organized. Hydras, SandDogs, Electrolytes—they’ll take orders. We can use the lodestar routes for our gear—”
“I got Simon,” Malachi said, handing him the walkie-talkie.
“Hey, team,” Simon said, crackling through. “We’ve got to evacuate the Paths.”
“Right,” Griff said. “How?”
“Just tell them,” Rumblefish said. “We just spread the word, right? Like with the shows.”
Thomas grabbed his forehead, squeezed.
How could Griff explain? Clade City had a siren. Dozens of posted evacuation signs, wall-sized calling trees, portable shortwave radio cupboards, scores of volunteers, a Knock-for-a-Neighbor Program, and Mandatory Evacuation Squads, all because human beings could not, in any scenario, be trusted to move with the simple efficiency of rats.
“Maybe we offer them something,” Malachi said. “An incentive.”
“Food?” Rumblefish said. “Drugs?”
“Could that work?” Simon asked, crackling over the speaker.
“Pizza?” someone said. “Sex?”
They giggled. Losing seconds. Entire minutes. Griff froze, staring ahead.
A boy with dark hair wandered off, threw a green light-up toy in the air. These people had no idea. They would die. Screaming. Drowned. Bludgeoned to death by wood and stone. There would be funerals and heartbreak and lifetimes of aching and they could not conceive of it. A siren would sound like a party favor. Shouting Flood! under clear desert skies would get you a protein bar and a cot in the chillout tent.
“We need the SandDogs,” Griff said. “Can we get them here?”
“Got it,” Malachi said.
“What’s the plan?” Thomas asked.
Two plans. Only one would work. An awful thought:
You won’t save them all.
Griff pinched the skin on his wrist. Plan one: Scare them into survival. Post guards at all ladders. Use headlights and horns and water if you need to. Do a sweep. Link arms, check every nook, every table, every corner and crevasse, and the ones who don’t come, you drag out. Beat them out. Because to scare them is the way to save them.
“Captain Tripp?” Simon asked on the walkie-talkie.
The SandDogs came quickly, screaming engines and dust and diesel. They clambered out of their buggies in a plume of alkali. The crowd covered their mouths, coughing, and Cowboy arrived with his crew.
“Didja see all those rats?” Cowboy asked.
Plan two: Something Rumblefish said. Find something everyone in the desert wanted.
“Simon,” Griff asked. He took the walkie-talkie. “Can you gather up the Band?”
“The Band?” Cowboy asked.
“The theater is on high enough ground,” Griff said.
“Theater’s cleared out for the night,” Simon said.
“Can you just gather up a few members?”
He had no idea how many people were in the Band. No one would even tell Griff their name. Simon’s voice hissed in the walkie-talkie—a sigh like, how do I explain?
“A show,” Thomas said. “That could work.”
“The shows take a while to get going,” Malachi said.
“What if we play?” Charity said, grabbing Griff’s arm. “You and me.”
Others stepped back. They looked at her. Looked at Griff.
“I’ll run sound,” Thomas said.
“Everyone out here loves a show,” Rumblefish said.
“Captain, my captain,” Simon barked through the walkie-talkie. “Do we have a plan?”
No waiting.
“We need every crew leader to the lagoon,” Griff said. “This will be Crisis Command. We stage assignments from here.”
“Rock and roll,” Simon said. “Let’s follow Griff’s lead.”
One hour and forty minutes.
“What can I do?” Cowboy asked.
“I need you to bring the piano to Main Stage. Right now.”
“Giddyup.”
SEVENTY-THREE
THE VENUE WAS STUNNING. A NATURAL STONE-WALLED AMPHITHEATER in an elevated pocket canyon. The only way in was a stone access tunnel no wider than 10 feet across. Delicate work to trailer the piano through, and it took seven of them to lift the Steinway onto the stage. The audience capacity was in the thousands, but only a few dozen milled beneath the stars in loose groups, talking, laughing.
Another engine boomed from the tunnel.
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Headlights flickered, then emerged. The MoleMobile. It rolled in fast, stopped sharp just short of the stage. Marilyn flung herself out, cables crisscrossing her shoulders like bandoliers. She lit up the sound boards, shoved cables into jacks. The Mole dropped his stone feet onto dust and said:
“Thomas, we got your speaker rigged up.”
“Great,” Thomas said from the stage. “Marilyn, could you light up microphone one?”
“It’s hot,” she said, thumbs up.
Thomas clapped his hands three times.
Beyond the tunnel, green light blazed.
The Eternal Encore. The cheer in the Paths was immediate—a full-throated roar. It rolled around the amphitheater walls like a wild boulder.
“People might come,” Thomas said softly.
Toward the back of the stage, Marilyn yanked coverings from racks of instruments: guitars, mandolins, banjos, a corner of cajónes, bongos, bata drums, a towering fiddle shelf on wheels, rows of brass, woodwinds—how many of them were there?
Would the Band come?
Griff desperately hoped they would.
The Mole said it right before they started:
“No recording. No preserving.”
His voice bounced around them. The crowd did not come suddenly, in a single great wave. They came steadily. Persistently. Poured into the amphitheater the way they described the flooding of Clade City in ’64. Like a bathtub, slowly filling up with water.
Playing music with Charity, it felt like it was still their dance.
Their sacred place in the stone cave. Charity had never stopped singing. Never stopped building her gift bigger and brighter. Her voice rang clear against the tall stone walls of the amphitheater like it belonged there, mingling with the steady chirp of the incoming crowd:
Chi-chi-chirrup! Chi-chi-chirrup!
Griff let her drive the songs. She could hold the whole space. A giddy, nauseous adrenaline, trying to keep up. He punched through the false floor of how deep he could go. He talked out the last ten months of anguish through the keys and pedals of this glorious instrument—such power, like it might buck him off. He sounded better than he was.
The audience came running. Then someone leapt on stage. Griff froze and two more came—bolting for the instruments. Adrenaline made his legs shake. What to do? Charity just kept singing. More came up! Marilyn was not rushing them off.
When the song concluded, he hissed:
“Is that the Band?”
She shrugged.
“What do we do?” Griff asked.
They kept playing. The song they’d played at the Urchin, in which Charity sang like the wind. A prickling in his guts when they started, but her voice smoothed it all out. Beautiful. Better than before. Whole and rolling through the space, held aloft by the crowd’s eyes and upturned faces and then a small group rushed the stage. Griff would not let this be ruined—he stood to defend the space but Thomas was on it. Leaping up. Going for—what? Their feet? Gently? He was setting up footer mics. Marilyn plowed up with a silver condenser mic on a stand and the couple peeled hair back from their faces. The group joined Charity’s song.
Their song.
Their voices slipped in, a haunting counterpoint to the gale in Charity’s voice, and Griff found himself bending along to the new voices. The sound of strings slipped in along with the soft brass of a horn, a cello. Charity carried them all, lifting her voice like wings, and the audience stopped chirping and began to roar. Their gathering had become a crowd and the song did not stop. It grew. Swelled around them until they were playing with ten or more. Maybe a dozen, and when Charity gave him the right look, Griff brought them to a thundering climax and the crowd made his ears ring.
“Amazing,” Griff said to Charity. He was breathless. “We’d better go.”
“Why?” she asked.
He looked around. Real musicians. Cocked hats and swagger. Their experience written firmly in their posture and the flash of their eyes.
“To make room for the Band,” Griff said.
“Griff,” she said. “We are the Band.”
The crowd applauded. A Black man with a peacock-feathered hat winked at him, played a lick like—c’mon then. A girl with a shaved head rapped on her tom-toms, waiting for his cue. The sudden explanation for rotating singers and impossible ensembles. Every work song in the Paths had been a rehearsal. Lyrics painted on lean-tos and lofts, their sheet music. Like the piano, the stage here belonged to everyone. But beneath the audience, Griff heard the old song echo:
You don’t belong.
He’d just wanted it so badly.
He looked at his hands on the keys. Bare wrist. His dim reflection in the fall board.
He’d rushed ahead again. Who would have to die this time, so he could be first?
Griff stood, and dropped down the front of the stage.
Still time to fix it. He kicked his way out, shouldering through the crowd. What had he gotten wrong this time? He’d put Rumblefish at the ladders, Moondog patrolling the Paths, Simon wrangling crews—PooperScoopers to guard bathrooms and Electrolytes to keep the Encore fed with energy, Malachi on the final sweep. So what had he missed?
The access tunnel was packed. Air thick, like breathing through a washcloth. The Encore pulsed color from singing voices—a psychedelic chapel of song and bodies—then he was back in the air, sweat cooling to a prickle on his skin.
The edges of the plateau were mobbed.
A buggy boomed down in the Paths, sound pulsing up the canyon’s sides. A final few clambered up from ladders. The chi-chi-chirrup had given way to a low murmur, like they knew what was coming. Malachi stood at his post near the tallest ladder, as promised.
On the surface, it all looked good.
But Griff had trained eyes. He knew better. Strangers tried to stop him.
“Hey, brother, Paths are closed—”
“Yo, bro—”
“Bro!”
Griff shoved and twisted his way to Malachi, who looked surprised.
“Hey,” Griff said. “What’s the status?”
“Handled,” Malachi said. “Just did a final sweep.”
Malachi looked confident. Like nothing could go wrong. Griff tapped his monocular in his pocket. He twisted past Malachi and grabbed the ladder.
“Whoa, what are you doing?”
“Making sure.” Griff knew. He could feel it.
“Bro,” Malachi said. “I can’t let you go down.”
“There’s still time,” Griff said. “It’s not too late.”
Malachi gave him a strange, steady look.
“Can I see your scanner?” Griff asked.
“We did what you said. We’ve gone down there with six full crews,” Malachi said, pulling out his Bug Detector. “I’ve run this thing three times. I’m telling you. There’s no one down there.”
Griff took the scanner from Malachi. He pointed it down one dark corridor of the Paths. Another. A slight flutter. An underwater shiver. Because it took a practiced hand to find it. A well-trained eye to see. To tune in, you had to live every day knowing you should’ve been down there. It should’ve been you.
A tiny light.
The signal he’d chased all the way to the desert.
“No—” Malachi began.
Malachi got in his way. Shouted, and tried to stop him, but Griff moved fast. Stumbled and leapt, and threw himself down into the Paths.
SEVENTY-FOUR
GRIFF KNOCKED AGAINST THE GULLY WALL. LANDED WITH A screaming, aching twist deep in the meat of his foot. But this had been the deal all along. It had to hurt. He had to know he’d done everything he could.
“Move,” he told his throbbing foot.
Malachi, shouting. On his transmitter, the green light remained faint. When Griff turned the transmitter left, it vanished. He ran to the right. Hard to focus, with the crowd roaring at him to get out, GET OUT but—
You’ve got to find them.
Who would leave themselves down h
ere to die?
“Hello!” Griff screamed.
Empty booths, lofts, nooks. Griff turned down the right fork of a path, the beacon in his hand glowed green—the right way. He ran toward a dark enclosure in the Paths. Something flashed inside. The sky blocked with ragged tenting.
Griff ran. Not tenting. Clothing.
Gossamer lines strung with armless shirts, legless pants, faceless masks. Lidless barrels and tables jammed the space and he leapt, tripping over a heap of discarded pants, shirts—his injured foot screamed, pulsed in his ankle.
On the table to his left, a flat burlap face.
A crouching figure, straight ahead.
He raced toward it, and the figure sprang and came running.
The detector screamed green and Griff dropped his shoulder into a charge. He would fight. Drag them out. Force them to live. The crowd screamed at a new pitch—like the moment a band takes the stage.
Behind him, the Encore blazed white light.
WHOOMP
The figure he was chasing was Leo.
WHOOMP
The figure was faceless.
WHOOMP
Griff met a stranger in the glass. A boy who had outgrown his camouflage clothing. Pants, short. Shirt, tight. Skin tanned and budding stubble on his cheeks. Intensity in the eyes. Too skinny. And Leo was gone.
“Bro?” Griff asked.
And Leo was gone.
“Leo?” Griff said.
Bring him back. God, please bring him back.
Leo was gone and sound drummed in his ears. Snapping wood. Tearing canvas. Explosive, like a car being dropped from a bridge. Griff’s held breath burst into a wet, ragged sob as water reached the curtains. The glass-and-thatch overstory caved with a buckling roar. The expression in the mirror changed. Panicked. And a familiar voice said:
Run, brother. RUN.
SEVENTY-FIVE
TOO LATE TO MAKE IT OUT ALONE.
The enclosure collapsed around the mirror. Curtains jerked from supports, clotheslines whip-snapping like power cables. Avalanche of clothing, stumbling, tripping and pedaling dirt—he could not fall.
Over his shoulder, the Paths were gone.
With jaws of water and wood, the wave had claimed the horizon. Ahead of itself, it pushed a cool breeze of decay—mud, clay, rot. The pain in Griff’s foot ballooned. He twisted, grabbed a clot of earth to climb—dust in his fist. Handholds evaporated like mouths snapping shut.