The Echo Room

by Parker Peevyhouse

  Rett’s left boot was a vise for his swollen ankle. Every step brought a flash of pain. He leaned on Bryn for support as he limped along, conscious of the dirt and sweat that covered him.

  “We should stop for a minute,” Bryn said, easing out from under Rett’s arm. She rummaged in the pack and brought out a tube of painkillers they’d discovered during their last break.

  Rett swallowed two of them dry while his gaze flicked toward the top of the ridge where he’d last spotted a scuttling shadow. “We’ve stopped too many times already.”

  He didn’t think Bryn had seen what he had. She seemed to believe they’d be okay if she just kept her voice low.

  “There’s no water left,” Rett went on. “We need to get to the depot.” The air hung heavy with dust and warmth. The rain had long ago stopped falling. The rush of the river below was maddening. Someone might have left the rain trap open at Scatter 2, Rett told himself. There’ll be more pouches of water anyway. He’d told himself that so many times that the words came automatically now.

  He scanned the horizon again.

  “You see something I don’t?” Bryn turned to peer in the direction he was looking.

  “I’ll feel better when we get inside the depot and close the door behind us.” He kept walking, even though Bryn had stopped, even though his left boot squeezed his swollen ankle.

  “You can hardly walk,” Bryn said. “We should rest, just for a minute.”

  A shadow moved at the edge of Rett’s vision, but it was gone before he could turn to look. “Maybe you don’t remember what those bugs can do.” The image was sharp in Rett’s mind: a mangled corpse with white, bloodless flesh. And another scene: a dark form lunging for Bryn with serrated mandibles.

  “It’s not just the bugs, is it?” Bryn said behind him. “They’re not the only reason we have to hurry.”

  Rett turned back to find her worrying at her sleeves, which were still damp from the rain.

  “We have to get to Scatter’s device before Garrick does,” she said. “He’s probably heading for it right now. He won’t even bother looting the rest of the depots. Scatter’s device is a thousand times more valuable than GPS units and meteorites.”

  “You’re sure it was marked on that map?”

  She frowned.

  “What?” Rett prompted.

  “It’s not exactly labeled on the map. It’s marked with a skull and crossbones. Not what you’d call tempting.”

  “Why a skull and crossbones?”

  Bryn shook her head. “I don’t know. But he might realize that it marks the spot where Scatter’s device is buried. The guy we met in the depot last time knew Scatter had buried something valuable in the wasteland, so Garrick probably knows, too.”

  “So he could already be out there digging it up.” Rett’s stomach twisted.

  “The alloy it’s made of is worth a fortune. Garrick will probably break the device apart and sell the metal to the highest bidder.”

  “And then we’ll be stuck here.”

  The sound of the churning river floated to them from the ravine below. The noise of it mixed with the roar of anxious thoughts in Rett’s head.

  “He had only his hydration backpack for water,” Rett said. “Maybe he waited for the rain so he could collect water from the rain trap. He might not even have started out yet. If we get to the other depot, we can get our supplies and beat him out there.”

  Bryn glanced at his ankle, and Rett bristled.

  “My ankle’s fine,” he lied. “We can do this. We just have to hurry.”

  Bryn pulled his arm over her shoulders again and they started off in silence. Rett was happy to concentrate on the dust in his throat, the pain in his ankle. It kept him from darker thoughts.

  Then another question came to mind, one that hardly seemed important, almost not worth asking. “Who drew the map in the depot?”

  Bryn squinted against the light reflecting on the pale dirt. “It must have been…” Her voice trailed off and Rett could feel her confusion in her bunching shoulders.

  “Do you think it was Scatter?” Rett said.

  Bryn shook her head. “They wouldn’t have wanted just anyone to find their device. It must have been one of the people they hired to find meteorites years ago. Those workers are the ones who lived in the depots.”

  “But how would they have known that Scatter’s device would be buried there?”

  His question hung in the air with the dust. Neither of them could answer it.

  Another shadow flicked at the edge of Rett’s vision. He turned his head. A bug hunkered on the nearest rise, not five hundred meters away.

  “Let’s go faster,” he told Bryn, his mouth dry.

  And then—

  A jagged shape came into view over the edge of the slope: the depot, Scatter 2.

  It was all wrong.

  Rett’s breath came in shuddering gasps. “No,” he choked out.

  The depot before him was a metal carcass. One wall wrenched outward. A ragged hole in the gaping roof. Rust-colored smears along the edge of the open door. Blood. Rett’s throat constricted.

  Bryn scrambled for the door, which hung open at an odd angle. Rett hobbled after her. The smell almost drove him back again. Metal and blood and rotting eggs. It filled Rett’s mouth, left a taste like death.

  He pushed himself into the cloying space, his heart flooding with dread. Shafts of sunlight showed the dust in the air, the rust-colored stains on the walls. The bones littering the floor.

  Rett nudged a broken rib cage with the toe of his boot. Knelt to inspect it, his legs shaking. Clumps of fur clung to the bones, matted with blood. “Dog.” His gaze met Bryn’s. She trembled.

  “They let them loose for the bugs,” she croaked.

  She helped Rett to his feet. They crept farther down the corridor, picking over broken skeletons. Rett winced at the snap of bones under his boots.

  “What is that?” Rett whispered.

  In the main room, a huge papery orb glowed in the sunlight. Not just one orb, Rett realized as he stepped out of the tilted hallway. A dozen thin brown paper shells towered, each almost as tall as he was and each cut open with some jagged tool—the mandibles of a bug. “Eggs,” he said into the quiet space. Some were dusty and ragged. A few, dark and oily. Fresh.

  Bryn made a noise behind him. Rett turned to find her gaping at the orbs in horror.

  “Something hatched here,” Rett said, nudging aside another dog skeleton with the toe of his boot as lead filled his veins.

  “Bugs.” It came out in a whisper. Bryn looked around, and Rett suddenly felt that the creatures that had hatched from the eggs might still be lurking. “We’re in their nest.”

  Rett turned and took in the sight of the bloodstained walls, the splintered furniture showing in the open lounge, the cabinets wrenched to pieces in the supply room.

  No supplies. No water. The rain trap long ago made useless.

  His muscles seemed made of stone. He crept between the eggshells to peer into what had once been the office, his senses alert for any sign of movement. The back wall had been peeled upward and lay curled to the sun. Open to the bugs that were headed their way even now.

  He turned back to find Bryn standing frozen in shock. The same thoughts going through her head as through his: There’s nothing here for us. No weapons, no water. And the bugs could be on us at any moment.

  “We have to go back,” Rett said. “We have to start over, back at Scatter 3. We have to—”

  Bryn fell against him and pressed her lips to his. Heat exploded under Rett’s skin, speared his heart. He put his arms around her but she was already pulling away, and his stomach sank with the realization of why—

  “It didn’t work,” she said.

  Rett prayed for the pull on his consciousness, the sweep of blackness that meant a return to safety.

  It didn’t come, even after Bryn’s adrenaline-inducing kiss.

  Rett touched his scar. Why isn’t the mechanism wor
king?

  “He dug up the device,” Bryn said, voice trembling. “He must have figured out a way to turn it off. He knows Scatter’s keeping tabs on this place. He doesn’t want to risk the device giving off some signal that it’s been moved.”

  Rett’s stomach threatened to send up what little water he’d drunk in the last two hours. Garrick has the device. “We have to get it from him.”

  “How? He has what he wants—we’ll never see him again.”

  Rett pictured Garrick trudging through the wasteland, hauling the device with him, heading toward whatever break in the perimeter wall had let him into Scatter’s pale desert. Gone forever, the device—and their codes—with him …

  “No,” Rett said. “He needs water. He must not have used the rain trap if he’s already hiked to the dig spot. He can’t make it all the way out of here without getting more water first.”

  “Do you think he’ll go back to Scatter 3?”

  “I don’t think we can make it back there to meet him if he does. We’re out of water. My ankle’s no good. And…” Should he tell her he had spotted bugs not far from here, that he was listening for them even now? Every scrape of their boots over the floor set his nerves aflame.

  “Then we have to make him come here.” Bryn fumbled with the backpack and pulled out a GPS unit.

  “How?”

  Bryn turned on the display and tapped at the screen. “I’ve used units like this one before. We can ping him with our location. And if we do it just right, we can use it like Morse code. We’ll tell him we have water.”

  Rett looked at the red light on the GPS unit. Low battery. His chest went tight. “Does he know Morse code?”

  “You didn’t hear it? When the other guy banged on the door to get us to let him inside Scatter 3?” She imitated the sound: “Bam-bam-bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam-bam-bam.”

  “SOS.” One of the many patterns Bryn had taught him while they’d been locked in Scatter Labs, using the light switches in their rooms to shine messages into the garden at night.

  “They probably all learned Morse code,” Bryn said. “Part of their training for defying death by bug and wasteland.”

  Rett didn’t tell her what he was thinking: Everybody knows SOS. It doesn’t mean the man knew Morse code. And it doesn’t mean Garrick knows it at all.

  He looked out through the curled back wall while Bryn tapped away. The sun beat down on the rocky slope, on the ridges that loomed beyond, ragged and sinister. “They’re coming. I’ve seen them—while we were hiking.”

  Bryn twitched toward the doorway. “There’s got to be something here that can help us. Some way to fight off a bug.”

  Like what? Rett thought. A row of cabinets still hung in the medical room, but nothing lay inside except the shattered glass that had once fronted the doors. This place is gutted.

  “We have one flare in the pack,” he said. “But no gun.”

  Bryn had gone to the supply room; he could hear her searching through the splintered remains of the cabinets on the floor. Rett turned to follow, gaze darting from the blood on the walls to the hole in the ceiling, watchful for any sign of danger. A glimmer of silver among the broken glass caught his eye: another of Scatter’s meteorites. Like a charm among the ruins. He pocketed it.

  “I found these, at least.” Bryn held up a pair of binoculars. “We can keep lookout.”

  “We’ll hide in one of the upper bedrooms and hope Garrick gets here with the gun before any bugs find us. At least if we can convince him we need to save the flares for the bugs, he won’t use the gun on us.”

  “But how are we going to get the device from him?”

  “We’ll offer a trade. We’ll give him the extra flare if he’ll let us turn on the device and get our codes from it. He’ll need the flare for the bugs if he’s going to get out of here alive.” He picked his way over the littered bones, heading for the ladder that led to an upper room.

  “Rett.”

  He turned. Bryn made a ghostly figure in the gloom, shrouded in white, standing amid the boneyard. “Do you remember?” she asked. “Living in Scatter Labs? Did it really happen?”

  Rett moved to put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Six years. We were trapped there for—” Bryn broke off, face lined with misery. Her gaze roved their shattered shelter. “And now—are we ever going to get out of here?”

  “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get home.”

  She winced at the word home. Neither of them said it: They didn’t have a home to go back to.

  Rett half closed his eyes, and for a moment, the sun flooding in through the broken back wall was the early morning light flooding the apartment he shared with his mother. He imagined green leaves brushing window glass, leaves that had eventually turned black on withered branches. He heard his mother’s chiming laugh, felt her fingers ruffle his hair.

  She left me, he thought. She left me, and now I’m here.

  The papery orbs looming over them gave off a putrid smell that made Rett clamp his sleeve over his mouth and nose.

  Bryn had gone for the ladder, and Rett followed her, eager to get away from the smell. Bryn started to climb, but then she turned. “Rett? I remember something. From Scatter Labs.” Her gaze traveled to his abdomen.

  He looked down, half expecting to find the red-brown stain of someone else’s blood.

  “Comics in your pocket,” Bryn said. “You used to draw them for me.”

  Rett’s hand wandered to the pocket of his jumpsuit. He almost thought he’d find Scatter stationery there, covered in sketches of his adventures with Bryn in a quarantine tank, in a haunted warehouse, in a zombie prison. “I remember, too.”

  “Is that why you dragged me back out here?” A smile played at the corners of her lips. “Trying to get new material?”

  He wondered if when she’d kissed him earlier she’d been thinking only of escape, of triggering the mechanism in his head. “See, that’s the problem. You make me want to draw a thousand comics.”

  She reached down and brushed her fingers over the side of his face.

  He thought, What a strange place to feel at home.

  “Come on,” she said. “We better find a spot to hunker down.”

  9:39 A.M.

  In the silence of the dim upper room, Rett listened for the sound of claws picking over rocks. Sunlight angled in through a gap in the damaged roof panels. Rett imagined bugs pouring in through the wide crack, scrabbling over the walls, mindless and bloodthirsty …

  He huddled farther into the recess of the bunk bed, the only stick of furniture left in the place. The room had been closed off when they’d found it, a panel shut tightly over the ladder. Except for the opening in the ceiling, it seemed a safe place to hide and wait for Garrick.

  No place is safe, Rett told himself. Not once those things realize we’re in here.

  The bed frame creaked as Bryn shifted on the top bunk, where she was keeping watch through the gap. “Anything?” Rett asked her, his voice tight.

  “No.”

  Rett pulled his collar away from his throat. “Garrick will come.” Secretly he feared that Garrick had encountered more bugs than he had flares for. We might be stuck here forever, he thought.

  Unless we go out there and find him.

  He shuddered.

  “I hope he makes it here before the bugs do,” Bryn said from above.

  Rett shifted, trying to get his injured ankle into a better position on the bed. His hand brushed something half covered by the pillow, and he looked down to find a photo there. He slipped it out and leaned into the light to get a look at it. It showed a woman holding a baby, a family snapshot left behind by one of Scatter’s workers.

  Rett stared at it without knowing why he should be interested. It was something new to think about, anyway. Something other than the bugs and his thirst. The woman’s gaze went off to the side, as if Rett didn’t concern her. The baby in her arms was an awkward bundle she seemed ready to shift.

  A c
reak of wood told him Bryn was looking down from the upper bunk. “Where’d you get that?”

  Rett flushed, suddenly self-conscious, as if it were his own family photo she was spying on. “It was here.”

  “Someone’s family, looks like. Wonder if the worker who left it behind ever made it back to them.”

  Rett wondered the same thing. The thought hollowed him out. “I left my mother on her own. Sick, no money, workhouse closing. If I don’t get back, I don’t know what will happen to her.”

  He waited for Bryn to say, You will get back. But there was only the creak of the bedframe again.

  Rett thought about the wasteland that separated him from his mother. And all the other things that separated them: sickness and poverty and time.

  But maybe even more than that had come between them: Maybe she didn’t want him. Didn’t need him the way he needed her. Could that be? Mothers didn’t need their children as much children needed their parents.

  Is that true? he asked the photo, silently.

  Or why else didn’t you come back for me?

  “Bryn?” he said, because she hadn’t spoken in so long. “Do you think there’s a way to prevent the awful things that happened to everyone—the crops dying and people getting sick?”

  “If there is, Scatter’s not interested. It’s giving their shadow government a nice excuse to invade other countries for the resources we don’t have.” Bryn was quiet again, maybe listening for the patter of bugs over rocky soil, like Rett was.

  “Wells said it’s not possible to go back to a time earlier than when they started implanting mechanisms in people’s heads.”

  After a moment, Bryn said, “But don’t you think there must be something Scatter can do to keep it all from getting worse? I bet there are groups out there who could help us come up with something if we shared what we know with them. Dark Window, for one.” Bryn’s voice dropped low. “If we get out of here.”

  Rett stood and leaned over the edge of the bunk to take Bryn’s hands. “We’re going to get back. We’re not going to be stuck here.”

  Bryn wouldn’t look at him. The light streaming through the broken roof illuminated her face, and still Rett couldn’t read her. He let go of her hands. “I shouldn’t have left those GPS units for Garrick,” he said.