by J. C. Geiger
He couldn’t climb out.
Ladders, all pulled. Part of his plan. Paths branched left and right, forked again, confusing. He made a curve and remembered the switchback for vehicles. He banked right and crashed into a booth’s sharp corner, but the wave had forked with the paths—muddy freshet churning toward him, snapping, swallowing. It tumbled closer and the crowd shrieked.
WHOOMP!
He set his eyes to the Encore.
Sprinting, he stumbled on something sharp and his foot screamed—these strange new objects on the ground—paper, coins, and fabric coming down like snowfall. People tossing objects into the Paths. A giant wishing well. A big goodbye. They were burying him.
A blast of rotten air on his neck.
Colors rippled on the Encore’s surface.
He could hear their voices before he heard the words, or recognized his name in the noise. His friends, calling for him. A signal. And slender cords dangling like spider silk, the black only visible when it brushed against the white, and although they looked delicate, Griff knew they held 500 pounds dead weight and 200 swinging.
He could not make out their faces. He tangled his hands in the lines. He used his knees. He pulled and kicked and climbed and fought through hot streaks of pain and sound. They pulled him onto higher ground and he rolled himself over. Shut his eyes, curled on his side. His lungs rose. Fell.
Breathing. Alive.
His friends saved his life with the lines he gave them.
SEVENTY-SIX
THE LOST COAST PREPPERS HAD TRACKED THEM TO DEATH VALLEY. They’d contacted the Nevada authorities, then showed up in person. Dunbar, Scruggs, and Griff’s dad. Ultimately, the Clade City team took the lead on crisis response and flood mitigation.
They were pretty proud about it.
By dawn the next morning a low, sad feeling hung thick in the camps, but the air tasted clean. Dust tamped down to clay for hundreds of miles. Without the low mist of loose alkali, blue sky met the desert floor in a bright line.
The Paths were destroyed.
Canvas and poles, lean-tos and huts, shanties and so many small fine things all smashed. But a stir of wonder hung in the air. All across the plateau, above the Paths in every camp—a sweet and unexpected melody. Zippering zippers, clapping car doors. The cadence of planning, seeking.
That hopeful song—Where to? What next?
No one knew, except maybe Simon.
He played the disaster site and its visitors like a perfect ringmaster. His whole face changing, depending on the audience. With police, a very straight-backed, dour-eyed look. With the old hippie couple in expensive sandals, he leapt around, wild-eyed, shaking his hair and making them laugh. To the cleanup crew, he employed a bashful aw-shucks, y’all, and when he spotted Griff his eyes were wide and boyish and full of wonder, the way they’d been the night they met.
“You, my friend,” Simon said, “are the best security captain this festival ever had.”
They hugged. Griff let the words sink in.
“Thank you,” Griff said. “Do you plan to rebuild?”
Simon gave a wild peal of laughter that struck the mountains and ricocheted around them.
“Ah, this whole thing was a wash,” he said. “No, no. It’s time for some other bit of foolishness. I can feel the wings sprouting from my back. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” Griff said. “We might get arrested.”
“Always a possibility.”
“Otherwise—back to the real world, I guess,” Griff said.
“Same world as the rest of us,” Simon said. “Pick the real you want.”
“Zero casualties,” Dunbar said in Recovery Hut #2. He looked disappointed.
Griff’s dad did not have much to say. He’d lost weight. Dry skin and something with his lips. Thin and gray, like he’d chewed all the color out of them. So Griff had to try. He had to sit down with his father on a crooked bench in the desert and try to explain a shuttle launch to a golden retriever.
“I don’t know,” Griff said, at the end. “It felt like life or death.”
“To be out here?” his father asked.
Griff nodded. His father stared back.
“Was it worth it?” he asked.
“I got to play a Steinway grand,” Griff said. “Twice.”
“Oh,” his father said, perking up. “How was that?”
“Well,” Griff said. “It’s a damn fine instrument.”
His dad smiled and nodded. Griff wiped his eyes. His father held him and it was good to be held. They didn’t say much more. He didn’t even mention the false alarm.
After the Hydras packed up their site, the crew gathered at Rendezvous Point #5—the Far Side Parking Lot where they’d stashed the ThunderChicken. Rumblefish, Moondog, Alea, Stitch, Charity, and Thomas. The Shady Lane crew set up mist tents for the afternoon heat. Police and travelers and media huddled, everyone wondering—what’s next?
Rumblefish started playing first.
Just a sweet, low slide guitar desert hymn that sounded like goodbye. Moondog hopped on his cajón and Alea took up the fiddle. Even Stitch picked up a pair of shakers. Charity hummed and sang low, sweet sounds.
Friends drifted away. Dandelion seeds, out to the wind.
The core held. The Cuddlenappers and piano seekers. They played as the sky bled out its last colors, giving up day to dusk. Civil, marine, astronomical. A first shiver.
“Time to go,” his dad said.
The words like a cold gust through a crack in the door. What waited for him, out there?
This Aching Life.
Was this all you could hope for? A couple of perfect days in the desert? Griff walked quickly. He approached the song circle. They stopped playing.
Malachi, Alea, Rumblefish, Moondog. His friends.
“It doesn’t have to end,” Griff said. “We can keep it going.”
They looked at him.
“What’s your plan, prepper?” Malachi asked.
Rumblefish stopped, put his guitar away. Snapped it into its case.
“You don’t have to stop playing,” Griff said. “I just—”
“I do, though,” Rumblefish said. He wiped his eyes. “That was the best time of my life.”
The rest of them held their instruments, not sure what to do. Rumblefish looked them over and walked back to his truck. Griff had to stop him. It was key, somehow, to keeping the whole thing alive. Rumblefish had been the first to welcome them in. He’d brought them to the piano, led the charge to the lagoon—he was the engine!
“Rumblefish!” Griff shouted.
His friend climbed into his truck. Rolled down the window.
“We have a radio station,” Griff said. “Where I live. Maybe we can work something out. You could come up and stay with friends, probably Thomas—”
Rumblefish shook his head.
“Don’t bother with all that, brother.” He smiled, put a key in the ignition. “No recording. No preserving.”
His truck started up. A low, rumbling chug. He drove the length of the parking lot. Turning onto the road, he reached his hand out the window. A gentle wave.
The song was over.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
IN THE CAB OF HIS FATHER’S TRUCK, THE PRESSURE WAS ATMOSPHERIC. The crushing old smells of upholstery and WD-40. Same songs on the radio. Same profile of sad dad. The truck’s interior insisting:
It never happened.
Griff grabbed the passenger-side sunshade and flipped down the mirror.
Just him. His own eyes. Own nose. Lips that had kissed Charity’s lips. Sand in his hair. Grit, clotted under his fingernails.
He’d carry the desert home with him. A flash of light in the mirror and Griff gasped.
Flickering red and blue.
“Dunbar?” his dad said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Oops,” Griff said.
They pulled over.
The lights weren’t quite right. Red, blue, gold, purple, green. Wild surges and
flickers.
Griff’s father rolled down the window, leaned out.
“Hey there!” called a familiar man in a wide-brimmed hat.
“Can I help you?” his dad asked.
“Yes, sir,” Cowboy said. “We’ve got a problem. A big, one-thousand-pound problem.”
His father sighed. “We’ve had a really long day—”
“See,” Cowboy interrupted. “We’ve got a 1924 Steinway grand piano. Little dusty. But a nice little instrument. It’s packed up on a trailer, currently homeless. Simon advised you’ve got a hitch and plenty of horsepower.”
His father stared back.
“We’d love to give it to you,” Cowboy said. Big, toothy smile.
“A Steinway grand?” his father asked.
“The whole thing?” Griff said. “I—”
“Absolutely,” his father said.
“Well, good,” Cowboy said. “Y’all sit tight. We got this.”
Cowboy gave a loud whistle. Feet crushed onto the grit.
Griff smiled. “We get to keep the piano?”
“Well,” his dad said. “It is a damn fine instrument.”
CLADE CITY FINALLY HAD ENOUGH. THEY CAME FOR THE SIREN.
It went down the night after the second false alarm, right after Dunbar left town. First one man tried to shoot it, the way they’d gotten the lighthouse, but the bullets just ricocheted all over. Broke every window in the K-NOW studio, one window at the Drift Inn, and went through Scruggs’s favorite leather jacket. The siren didn’t flinch. Plan B—as captured on security camera—required teamwork. Four people showed up with a cherry-picking ladder, a pickup, and a chain saw. When the siren dropped, it left an impact crater. Like ripples fanning out from a stone dropped in a dark pond.
The group loaded up the siren in the bed of a pickup with a duct-taped license plate and drove away. Conventional wisdom says the siren took a trip to Swan Dive Peak that night and ended up in the ocean. They’d find it when the Great Big One finally hit. Eventually, it would wash right back up on Main Street.
“Will probably still work,” Scruggs said. “Can’t kill them things.”
“Sons of bitches,” Dunbar said.
Like most crimes in Clade City, everyone knew who did it. They also knew two false alarms was one too many, and the lighthouse had been a step too far. When the city council voted on funding to restore K-NOW’s windows, Griff’s father introduced a measure to repair what could be fixed in the lighthouse and restore the half-shell amphitheater for a summer concert series. The Tripp family contributed the piano, as an in-kind donation. It was worth over 80,000 dollars.
That spring, Mr. Tripp gained back some weight. Bizarre projects slowly resurfaced in the basement—grinding lenses for his own telescope, befriending a Tsunami Sister City in Japan. The most shocking moment happened in the kitchen, and began with a mechanical roar so loud it pulled Griff from piano practice, through the French doors, down the hall.
His parents were wearing giant parrot hats.
“Why are you blending margaritas?” he said.
“You wouldn’t understand,” his dad said. “Music is a big part of our lives.”
His mother cackled. Turned up the radio.
“Jimmy Buffett?”
“I hope we’re not late,” his mom said, looking at her phone.
“Are you going to a show?” Griff asked. He couldn’t imagine a venue within 200 miles.
“Oh, shoot. It’s in Vegas,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll make it.”
They nuzzled their parrot hats in a disquieting manner.
“We never make the show,” Griff’s dad said, being sly.
His father was supposed to be done drinking. Now they were drinking together. Griff didn’t know. They seemed happy right now.
“You’d better make at least one show this year,” Griff said.
This May they were finally going to give Leo the show they’d promised him.
Over the last six months, he, Thomas, and Charity had worked off the bulk of their community service in the Ruins. Their concert was the first in the summer series. Scruggs had agreed to broadcast the full show on K-NOW, and was helping with promotion:
“This Saturday, folks. Circle your calendars. A local trio. Survivors of the Great Desert Rescue and our first summer show at the restored half shell. You can catch them there and right here at the end of the dial at the end of the world—”
They’d struggled with a band name. Thunderbirds, Touchdown Jesus.
They settled on the False Alarms.
By late April, the school hallways were buzzing the way they had about the Urchin, and Griff was increasingly uneasy. There hadn’t been a show in the Ruins in decades. People might not even know how to find them. Griff expected about fifty friends and family. Thomas estimated between one and three thousand.
On the morning of the show, Griff peeled down through the layers of coats in the hallway and found his dad’s camo jacket. Tight in the shoulders. Riding too far up on the wrists, but it was the only thing to wear today. And it looked all right in the mirror.
Three hours before showtime, Griff drove his dad’s truck to the venue for sound check. Overcast. Mid-fifties. Maybe no one would come, but there was a police officer stationed at the floodgates. Griff had never seen them open before. The officer grinned and waved him through. When Griff arrived at the half shell, their designated city employee had come early, waiting in his white truck.
“This is happening,” Griff told himself.
On stage, the Steinway. Even the grand piano looked small in the heart of the wide arched structure they’d cleaned and swept and scrubbed and scraped and painted. One microphone. A sound board. Set like a banquet. Griff’s hands ached to play.
First—he left the parking lot and walked toward the ocean. Crossed the grass they’d weeded and replanted. Went to the ribbon of beach where breakers pounded sand flat and foam popped and whipped around like flimsy kites.
“Thank you,” Griff said.
He’d been saying thank you since the desert. Thank you to his lungs for breathing, his heart for beating. The sun and moon. This time, who was he thankful for? Leo? The ocean? The whole world? He looked back at the piano.
“I wish you could see it, bro.”
A muffled sound drew his eyes. Charity, closing her car door.
She walked toward him. Windblown hair, long skirt. He hadn’t seen her outside of practices in weeks. The desert hadn’t changed anyone as much as Charity Simms. New friends in Portland. She’d been to LA three times this year. Two bands. Side projects. Every time she left, she came back stronger in herself. Like she’d slowly turned from straw to wood to steel. She still called late at night. Texted short bursts, like Morse code. He felt like he still saw Charity through the small, shrinking window of Clade City, and she was an expanding universe.
He wondered how long she’d stay in his orbit once school got out.
He was grateful for however long he had.
“Making peace with the sea gods?” Charity asked. She hugged him. A good, long hug.
“Gotta buy this town one more night,” he said.
“What did you offer?” Charity asked.
“Stale chocolate? What do we got?” He thrust his hands into the pockets of the coat, reaching deep. In the low fold of the right pocket, something jabbed his finger.
“Ah!”
“What’s wrong?” Charity asked.
He wrapped his fingers around it. Stopped breathing. Wind blew damp on his cheeks.
He pulled it out slowly.
A puzzle piece.
Cardboard backing. On the other side, water, and a white glimmer.
Griff held it up to the sea.
“Leo, you motherfucker,” he said. It felt good to say it. Leo could be a motherfucker. It was so precisely him. Clever and bold and a little mean. Something like she’s mine. Something like I love you.
Charity gasped. “Unreal,” she said.
It wa
s an artifact from another life.
“His, I guess.” Griff moved to throw it. Charity grabbed his wrist.
“You keep that,” she said. “That’s yours.”
They held hands, walking back across the grass toward the stage. He walked as slow as she’d let him.
“Look what we made,” Griff said. “Aren’t you so glad you live here?”
“I’m glad right now,” Charity said.
cchhirChirChirChhheeeeeeepCHEEEP!
The ThunderChicken careened into the parking lot—Thomas double-parked beside the stage. Removed large orange cones from his trunk, labeled VIP PARKING.
“Seriously,” Griff said.
He unspooled yellow caution tape. Put on his sunglasses. Pink cowboy hat.
“Hello, Clade City!”
The city employee, who had been lingering beside his truck, climbed back inside. Thomas unsnapped a card table. Set a box on top.
“C’mon. Check it out. Merch. Get a whiff.”
He opened the box to the benzine tang of permanent maker—it smelled just like Thomas Mortimer. Thomas pulled out T-shirts—stick figures playing under the shadow of a crushing tidal wave, wild-haired punk rockers straddling a fault-line fissure, a three-part harmony sung within the stem of a mushroom-cloud explosion. Each T-shirt with giant, hand-drawn letters:
THE FALSE ALARMS
“My god,” Charity said. “How many did you make?”
“A hundred?” he said.
Charity looked across the empty parking lot.
“There are a few more boxes, in back.”
“Is this your big mystery project with my dad?” Griff asked. “T-shirts?”
“No,” Thomas said. “You insult me, Tripp. Get on stage.”
Thomas rigged up the microphones. Griff sat at the piano. Stood and adjusted the bench. Sat again. The view from the stage was stunning. Right there ahead of him, the ocean slipped off the horizon and wrapped around the whole wide world. Could they make it beautiful enough? He looked at his fingers. Nervous. Excited.