The Echo Room

by Parker Peevyhouse

  Rett licked his dry lips. “There’s … There’s got to be some way…” There’s always something. Did he really believe that?

  “We already tried going out into the wasteland. There’s nothing out there for us.” When Rett frowned, Bryn added, “Trust me, we did.”

  Rett touched his throbbing head. “I must have hit my head hard. I don’t remember anything.”

  “Not anything? Here, let’s try something.” Bryn pointed at a row of devices laid out on the cabinet, trailing power cords. “What are these devices for?”

  “GPS?” It came out automatically.

  Bryn brightened. “And what’s in the room at the top of the ladder?”

  Rett squinted at the opening in the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  “Beds? Some place to sleep?”

  She smirked at him the way he did when he beat someone at checkers back at Walling. Did that mean he was getting this right or wrong?

  He hopped up on the ladder and looked into the room overhead. I was right. It’s a dorm room or something. He grinned down at Bryn.

  “I’ll give you a whole box of carabiners if you can answer my next question,” she said.

  “Make it a large Coke and you’re on.”

  “What secret place did I promise to take you to if we ever get out of here?”

  Rett searched his mind, watching the corners of Bryn’s mouth tremble. He came up blank. “I think I’ve had my fill of secrets, if I’m being honest.”

  Bryn’s smile fell. “Me too.”

  She made a show of searching the debris littering the floor, as if she might find something else they needed. But then she swiveled back toward him. “I know I said I’d be better waking up here alone, but—” She reached to touch the edge of his sleeve, and he let her. “Please remember. I need you to remember.”

  Rett took half a step closer and she wrapped her hand around his arm. Just below her knuckles, a line of freckles trailed. He traced them with a finger. I remember …

  He tensed. He’d just realized—“It’s too quiet.”

  Bryn cocked her head to one side, listening.

  No more pounding noises, Rett thought. Good or bad?

  Bryn ducked under the wall and Rett followed. All was eerily quiet. Then came a sudden pattering on the roof and they looked up to see rain falling through the skylight. Rett reached to catch the cold drops on his palm. Water, he thought, and then an image came to him: The metal contraption on the roof, open like a flower. Open to the rain.

  “There’s a rain trap on the roof,” he told Bryn. “I opened it earlier.”

  “What?” Bryn asked breathlessly. She craned her neck as if she’d get a view of the trap through the open skylight.

  “We just need to find where the water comes through.”

  “I already know.” Bryn moved to the couch and opened a panel on the wall to reveal a blue spigot. She pushed it with a finger but no water came out.

  “Maybe in a few minutes?” Rett said.

  Rain drummed harder and harder on the roof. In a minute, the floor beneath the skylight was slippery with it.

  “Get the water bottles,” Bryn said over the drumming of rain. “In the cabinet on the—”

  “—far left. I know.”

  They locked gazes. Remember, Rett urged himself. “And, swimming—that’s what we’re going to do after this, isn’t it?”

  He could tell he’d caught her by surprise, but she only said, “Sooner than you think.”

  He ducked into the supply room and yanked open a cabinet to pull out the box of empty water bottles along with an empty backpack. Then he stopped, pack in hand, when he noticed the GPS units. A tiny yellow light shone on each device, proof that they had gained some charge. Rett probed at the buttons on one until it turned on.

  An icon flashed under his fingertip, a stylized question mark. It opened a scrolling image of a hilly landscape.

  A game.

  Rett tapped on the screen to collect a smooth rock before it passed out of reach. +1000 points. He tapped on another rock, this one jagged. –500 points.

  Not sure what good a game does us, Rett thought. And it’s not even fun.

  Rett looked up from the screen and squinted around at the cabinets, the hiking gear. At the walls of rooms that held jumpsuits and boots and water and beds. All for workers sent to collect some kind of mineral. Could that be what this place was? A shelter of sorts, a depot for miners collecting rocks from the barren landscape outside?

  Was that what he and Bryn had been sent to find—rocks?

  A memory came to him then: the weight of something in his pocket, the feel of a smooth rock. He’d found it here somewhere—in a little room with boxes and switches. Where was that?

  He went out into the main room. Bryn was testing the spigot again. A thin stream of dirty water trickled out.

  “Pipes aren’t great, I guess,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Just dusty, probably.” Rett licked his dry lips. “It’ll clean out.”

  “Rett.” Bryn’s eyes darkened. “That guy is out there. If he climbs up on the roof…”

  “I’ll shut the skylight. I can climb up and—”

  “And then he’ll be trapped out there. But there’s something else coming this way. He’ll die if we leave him out there.”

  Rett’s stomach lurched. Die?

  What exactly is coming this way?

  “But if we go out there,” Bryn went on, “even to help him, I don’t think he’ll be happy to see us.”

  “Why not?”

  Bryn’s gaze went to Rett’s abdomen, where blood had stained Rett’s old jumpsuit.

  “What happened?” Rett asked.

  “He had the gun. He was going to hurt you.”

  Rett’s veins filled with ice water. “Okay, bad question. How about, who is he? What does he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then an answer popped into Rett’s head. “Is he … looking for rocks?”

  “What?”

  “Rocks. I saw one here. In a room with switches.”

  “The power supply?” Bryn gave him a baffled look.

  “Where’s that?”

  She pointed to the open doorway.

  Rett went through and found a bathroom to the left, and beyond that found another door marked with a lightning bolt in a triangle. A ping of familiarity went off in his brain.

  Beyond the door was the power supply he remembered: switches and boxes and—

  His foot hit something that clattered over the floor: a small, smooth rock.

  He picked it up. Yes, this is it. He’d found this rock before, somehow. He turned it over in his fingers. Veins of silver flashed in the low light. The effect was mesmerizing.

  An eerie song floated through his mind, though he couldn’t say where it had come from: One, change your jumpsuit. Two, find some water. Three, get the—

  Shovels.

  Rett had no idea where that last word had come from. Bryn didn’t say anything about shovels, did she?

  And yet the more he stared at the rock in his hand, the more he was sure he needed to find shovels.

  Bryn said we’re supposed to find something, but when we got to where that something was supposed to be, it wasn’t there. Could it have been buried? Hidden underground and we didn’t know it?

  But why had this little rock made him think of that? He could call to mind now a list he must have seen somewhere: 12 feet of rope, 9×9 plastic drop cloth, 6 nylon backpacks, 6 shovels …

  There hadn’t been any shovels in the supply room, though. That long metal pole had been the largest thing in the cabinets.

  A thought surfaced in Rett’s mind: Where there are rocks, there are shovels.

  But there was no room in this small space for hidden shovels. If they were here, they were behind the walls.

  He felt along the panels, looking for a handle or a button. All was smooth from ceiling to floor and along every wall. Doubt c
rept in. Why would someone want to hide shovels, anyway?

  Rett felt for the rock he had slipped into his pocket. They don’t want to hide the shovels. They want to hide the rocks. And the shovels are with the rocks.

  He ran his hands over the back wall again, but this time he pushed at the panels with sharp thrusts.

  Pop. A panel gave way and then clattered to the floor into a compartment beyond the wall.

  Rett peered into the compartment, but it was too dark to see anything. He stuck a hand in and groped around. His fingers found a metal basin that he guessed was for storing rocks. And beyond that—a handle.

  “Bryn!” he called as he pulled out a heavy shovel. He hefted it and maneuvered back to where Bryn waited. “Look what I—”

  He was interrupted by a shout from above: “Hey!”

  Rett looked up. A figure showed above the open skylight, dark against the gray sky. From the corner of Rett’s mind emerged a terrifying memory of a heavy black shape falling through the skylight—

  “Hey!” the figure called again in a gruff voice. It was the man Rett had seen sprawled on the ground near the door of the depot. Same hat, same dirty long-sleeved T-shirt and tattered jeans, now soaked with rain. “Stupid kid—you knock me out and leave me for the bugs?” the man called in his parched-throat voice.

  Rett looked to Bryn, who stood frozen near the couch, water bottle in hand. Her gaze traveled to the half-lifted wall behind Rett, and he knew what she was thinking: the gun.

  Another shout from above: “You know what I’m going to do to you when I get down there?” The rope twitched.

  Rett shifted his weight on his feet. He tightened his grip on the shovel. It’s not enough. I need the gun.

  Above, the man looked over his shoulder at something and let out a string of curses. “It’s coming.” His voice went high with panic. Rett’s scalp prickled at the sound.

  “Drop the shovel and back away,” the man called. “I’m closing this skylight and climbing down. Unless you want the bug that’s headed this direction to come crawling in to meet you?”

  Bug? Rett thought. What’s he talking about? The memory returned of a dark shape falling through the skylight. A high-pitched scream echoed through his mind. Rett’s mouth went drier than dry.

  “Hey!” the man called again, and the black talon dangling from his necklace swung violently. “You ain’t got time to think about this. Drop the shovel.”

  Rett shifted uneasily, watching the talon swing. He let the shovel clang to the floor.

  “That’s right,” the man said, lowering himself through the skylight. “Now back away.”

  Rett held up his empty hands. “Okay.” He gave Bryn a look and then directed his gaze at the spigot. She nodded and went back to filling the water bottle in her hand.

  Rett ducked into the supply room. The gun lay where Bryn had left it. Rett eyed it, his nerves buzzing. He slid the gun off the cabinet top and imagined pointing it at the man, ordering him into the closet and shutting the door. And then what? He and Bryn had to get out of this place.

  But something was out there.

  Rett slid the gun into his pocket. It pulled at his jumpsuit, weighed it down. He wiped his sweaty palm on his sleeves. The man was shouting again when Rett ducked in the main room.

  “What are you up to?” the man growled, struggling down the rope in his rain-wet clothes.

  “You can have whatever you want from this place,” Rett told him, trying to keep his voice steady. “But you’re going to let us take what we need and get out of here.”

  Bryn kicked a pair of boots toward Rett, and he jammed them on, his gaze still locked on the man.

  “‘Get out of here’?” the man said, grunting with the effort of climbing down the rope. “You might want to take that up with the bug crawling up the side of the building.”

  Rett tried to imagine what could be making its way onto the roof. He saw in his mind a creature sketched on the page of a notebook. A shadowed form baring hooked feet and jagged mandibles …

  “They’re used to hunting down dogs, but they’ll take anything with blood,” the man went on. He dropped to the floor and pressed his red-raw hands together. “Best hope you know what you’re doing out there. Doesn’t seem anyone has let loose any dogs for them in a while now.”

  In the light filtering through the skylight, Rett could see the man clearly for the first time. His skin was shrunken and ashy—under his jaw, along his collar. His eyes were dark and frantic beneath swollen eyelids. His hands were chapped, nails broken or missing altogether.

  Rett backed away. But the man only tipped his head back to regard Rett through slit eyes.

  “You give me this goose egg?” he growled, rubbing a hand over his head and eyeing Rett’s shovel. He turned to Bryn. “No … it must have been you.”

  Rett stepped between them. The man’s gaze traveled to Rett’s hip, where the grip of the gun was barely concealed.

  “Never mind,” the man growled. “I just want my things. Starting with the backpack I left in the other room. Then I’ll have that gun back.”

  Rett put his hand over the butt of the gun.

  “This is no place for junior treasure hunters,” the man said. He took a step closer so that he towered over Rett, all gnarled muscle under his rain-soaked clothes. “You’ve got no claim here.”

  He clamped a hand on Rett’s shoulder and shoved him onto the couch. “Stay there and don’t move. Shouldn’t take me long to get what I came for. And then we’ll figure out what to do about that bug.” He gave Rett a grin that was all teeth. “Maybe it’ll be satisfied with an offering.”

  Bryn caught Rett’s eye. He knew what she wanted him to do. His fingers twitched on the butt of the gun. Point it at him, Rett told himself. Tell him to get into the changing room.

  He thought of Garrick and his gang hurting him with whatever they could find, coming after him in the yard, trapping him in a box. He tried to use his memories to conjure enough anger to draw the gun and point it at the man.

  All he could manage was a sour, weighty dread.

  “You can take what you want,” he told the man, “but leave us some of the GPS units.”

  A gravelly sound erupted from the man’s throat. “For what?” he snarled. He kicked Rett’s discarded shovel so that it clattered against the wall loudly enough to shred Rett’s nerves. “Those rocks are all gone. This place is picked clean.” The man’s gaze darted around the depot, wild and hungry.

  Rett pressed his palm against his jumpsuit pocket and felt the round shape of the rock there.

  “Don’t tell me that’s why you came out here,” the man said. “For the meteorites?”

  Rett’s memory flashed back to a cobwebbed firewood box, the lid that closed over him, the meteor shower he never got see—

  The man’s laughter was like some bit of machinery grinding in his throat. “Those are long gone. Guys like me picked this wasteland clean, so don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about. Scatter stripped the rocks of that fancy alloy, gave us next to nothing for it.” He sneered at Rett. “Only way Scatter would pay you for meteorites is if you could get a whole pile of them.”

  He backed toward the office and peered inside, didn’t seem to see anything he wanted. He vanished into the medical room.

  Rett stood, thinking of going for the GPS units. But the man was back a moment later, empty-handed and even more agitated.

  “They didn’t tell us at the time how much that metal was worth.” The man’s gaze roved the depot. He found a pack Bryn had left on the floor and jerked it open. “Maybe you’ve noticed that the countries we just started wars with are all bursting with valuable metals?”

  Rett tried to make sense of the man’s jumbled ideas. “‘Just started wars’? What are you talking about?”

  The man rummaged through the pack. “Don’t you listen to the news?” He tossed aside compasses and bandages and foil medicine packets. “When half our farmland has gone sterile, and impo
rt taxes are sky-high, it ain’t hard to convince people to go to war. You tell them it’s someone else’s fault they’re all sick and hungry and poor…”

  He stood and kicked aside the empty backpack. “This place is worthless now except for the equipment. And it’s mine. I worked for Scatter for fourteen months. Long enough to earn more money than I’d ever been paid for a job, but not long enough to pay for my treatment. Scatter owes me. So I’m gonna get what I came for.”

  He lurched toward the supply room. But then he froze. Turned and narrowed his eyes at Rett, then Bryn. Rett felt the man’s suspicion like hot oil on his skin.

  “Then again,” the man said in a low voice that was almost a growl, “maybe you didn’t come for rocks. Maybe you came here for something else.”

  Yes, Rett thought, swiveling to face Bryn, but for what? Bryn kept her expression blank, but Rett saw her hands clench on the seat as she waited for the man to say more.

  “You think you can find what’s buried here?” The man toyed with the black talon that dangled against his chest. He pointed the talon at Rett. “You think I’m too stupid to know it’s worth a lot more than what’s in these depots?”

  Rett slowly shook his head.

  The man’s face twitched. “I know a guy on the inside. He told me all about it. He also says the government keeps tabs on this place. There’s a reason they’ve got it walled off all the way around, keeping people out. And they know when you go digging things up. Only way I got past their walls was because that solar storm knocked their system offline.”

  Rett exchanged another glance with Bryn. “What’s buried out here?” he asked the man.

  The man gave a throaty laugh. “If you manage to find it, you can tell me what it is.”

  In one quick motion, he turned from them and ducked into the supply room, out of sight.

  “The GPS units,” Bryn said in a fierce whisper.

  Rett looked to the supply room. The man would surely see the devices lined up on the cabinet top and would take them all for himself. “We’ll get them.”

  “How?” Bryn huffed. “He’s not going to let us have them.”

  Rett’s fingers twitched over the butt of the gun in his pocket but they refused to pull it out.