by Phil Maxey
“Seems to be,” said Zach.
“And we have no idea what the whole Arclight thing was about?”
“No.”
Michael looked between Abbey and Zach. “But it’s got to be connected to Abbey in some way right? I mean it’s too much of a coincidence, her hacker name being the same.”
“Right now, we have to get our shit together, and be ready to leave this place. Whatever is going on with Cal, we will figure out on the road.”
“You sure it’s wise for him to travel with us? What if that ailment he had returns? He’s a highly trained individual.” said Jacob.
Abbey joined everyone else looking at Zach.
“If it does we’ll deal with it.”
CHAPTER 15
Fiona kept looking over her shoulder at the trees forty-feet from her as she and Cal walked into the remains of the gas station store. There were empty shelves but many still held their items.
Cal picked up a candy bar. “There’s still a fair bit of food here we could use.”
“I’m more interested in what’s left in the fuel tanks below the forecourt. Problem is getting access to it. We need to find a way to get the pumps working. A lot of these more out of the way stations have backup generators, incase they lose connection to the grid. See if you can find the key to the tanks, if I can’t find a backup generator maybe we can use a hand pump.”
She walked to the back of the store, pausing before moving into the back office. “If you see any maps, grab them as well,” she shouted.
Cal stuffed a few bars of candy and soda cans into this backpack and looked behind the counter. A few key’s hung from rusted hooks. He put them in his pocket, then looked back to the walls of the store. “Top trails in Mt. Hood” and “Roads and highways of Oregon and Idaho.” Sat on a small shelf. The latter he put in his pack.
He felt his forehead. Fiona had washed it for him, but the wounds still stung. What was going on inside his head had healed, and that’s what mattered to him. He knew now, that he needed to pass on his dream message to Abbey, but he had no idea why.
Fiona reappeared from the back office, as he picked up a blue and white baseball cap from the floor, placing it on his head.
“Suits you,” she said with a smile. “They have a generator, with a full tank of gas to run it, when everyone left no one thought to do anything with the generator so it’s just sat out there all this time, waiting to be turned on. Found any keys?”
“Yeah, a few.”
“Hopefully we won’t need them. When I turn that thing on, it’s going to create a lot of noise. I know it’s daylight but I want to fill a few canisters up from the pumps and turn it off all within a few minutes. Let’s use those canisters there,” she pointed to shiny plastic fuel containers in a heap in the front corner of the store. “You’re probably right about this sugary crap as well, let’s get it all packed up before Zach returns.”
“Presuming he does.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” she looked at items on the shelves, hiding her own doubts.
“Just a sense I got from him this morning. Maybe he thinks I’m damaged goods.”
“Aren’t we all.”
His expression darkened, like the sun had suddenly been eclipsed. “I could have killed the kid, he was only doing his job.”
“We learned the world ended on the back of being locked up in a tiny room for years, we are all capable of doing fucked up things, and we are going to need you if we are to make it back to Bravo.”
“But what I said to Abbey, and how I suddenly felt better? It makes no sense.”
“When any of this makes sense, I’ll let you know.”
Over the next hour they managed to fill up eight moderately sized fuel tanks from the pumps, running the generator in short bursts. They had also piled all the food into five large fabric bags they found hanging on the store’s walls. Just as they were finishing up, the sound of vehicles echoed around the forest.
Back in the fort, roughly half of the new arrivals were aboard the patched up vehicles at the open east gate. Only Brandon was there from the town’s people.
“I’m sorry it had to be this way, Zach,” said Brandon standing next to the Humvee while Zach was in the drivers seat.
“You have a good thing here, I hope for all your sakes it lasts.”
“We will fight to keep it going.”
They both shook hands through the Humvee’s open window. “Stay safe,” said Zach driving out onto the snow-encrusted road.
It wasn’t long before the small convoy of bus and Humvee, was pulling up outside the ski lodge. Mary had been quiet as they moved along the snow-padded roads. She expected Morgan to leave with her. Sadness and anger inside her, mixed with a reluctant admiration for her sister doing what she felt was right. All the years growing up in Seattle, Morgan was the one that great things were expected of. Their parents had earmarked her to either be a doctor or a lawyer, she chose the medical profession so Mary, got the law, whether she found it interesting or not. Luckily she did and more than that, found she was rather good at it. As she sat looking out the buses windows into the bleak wall of trees around her, she wondered if she would ever see Morgan again. The children in front of her were also uncharacteristically quiet, most had grown to like being in the wooden castle, even within the short amount of time they were there.
Sam and Isaiah didn’t take much convincing to leave the fort. As Isaiah put it ”I’m done with this hillbilly monster bullshit.” And as Zach and Bass walked over to Cal and Fiona who were walking from the house, they discussed all the mischief they were going to get into in the camp near Austin.
“I heard that there’s like a ten to one ratio of women to men. That’s some good odds,” said Sam enthusiastically.
Isaiah laughed. “You’re right about that, if it’s a choice between a five legged, hairy ape thing, or you? Well actually…”
Sam playfully grabbed Isaiah prosthetic hand, causing him to try and grab Sam’s leg. They both caught Addison looking at them over her shoulder giggling. They both sat up, looking serious.
“Yeah, well I just want an apartment I can call my own and a good meal each day,” said Isaiah.
Sam looked down at his camouflaged pants and top. “Never thought I’d be back in these.”
“We keep them on until we get to that camp, then we are back to being civilians. I’m not spending my life fighting those fucked up creatures, I’ll leave that to the people who haven’t already sacrificed their shit.”
“Amen to that brother.”
Zach sat in the Humvee with Abbey to his right and Cal, Fiona and Michael behind. All but Cal looked down at the maps of the area and examined their route out. Zach’s instinct was to head south as quickly as they could but that would just keep them in the forests for longer, so the route which was south and then east seemed a safer bet. It would also get them back on the plains, which from their experience of the past few weeks was fairly safe.
“South, and then east seems the quickest route back to the plains,” said Fiona.
Zach opened up a larger fold out map. “I was thinking the same. And then keep heading south and east.”
“That’s taking us towards Idaho,” said Michael.
“That’s the idea. By time the sun goes down we will be about two hours from the border. We’ll find a place to hold out for the night, then head towards Idaho at first light.”
Zach closed the maps, and told Bass on the bus they are moving out.
After thirty minutes the trees started thinning out and the thick white compact snow that clogged the road began to give way to tarmac. After forty, the forests were a hundred yards back and only a smattering of white powder lay on their route. Luckily there were no sign of E.L.F’s.
An awkward silence had set in within the cabin of the Humvee. Zach and Bass had given Cal the news about Jason soon after they arrived at the lodge, and in response he offered them his weapons, but they refused, saying they trusted him. But what h
ad happened to Cal was still a mystery to the inhabitants of the Humvee, including Cal himself. The guilt for the death of the young guy back at the fort kept trying to invade his thoughts, but he was damned if he was going to let one deep rooted psychosis be replaced by another, especially now that he was able to string two thoughts together. There would be a time for paying for what he had done, but this wasn’t it.
He looked across to Fiona who seemed lost in the world passing them by, and then to Michael who was sleeping. Both had become friends, and in Fiona’s case maybe something more, he had to stay right for them.
Abbey, like Fiona was watching the forests recede, and the hills and plains grow around them. But she wasn’t able to appreciate leaving Portland or the fort behind her because ever since Cal leaned forward in his wretched state and mentioned her hacker name she was not able to think of anything else. What was more troubling to her, was the fact that she never used it as part of her official job, hacking for the government. For that she used other names. Arclight was her personal hacker name, for stuff she did ‘off-book’. And the last time she did that was when she made the entire DOD’s satellite network go crazy and spin out into space. She kept trying to tell herself that she must have said the word Arclight at some point over the previous few weeks, or that it was just an amazing coincidence, but she knew the truth. That name had not left her lips, not even to Zach, and she didn’t believe in coincidences.
As they followed a winding road which flowed between hills, a river came into view, a few miles to the north. On the hills beyond, hundreds of silver skinned entities glistened in the early afternoon sun.
Zach clicked on his radio. “Stay alert. We need to move through this small town and over it’s bridge. We see the things on the hills a few miles off. Keep a constant speed, but if they start to move in this direction, we will increase our speed. Over.”
Jacob looked at them through a small pair of binoculars he found under a seat on the bus. Each creature had silver fish like scales, which caught the sun above, illuminating them with a brief flash of light as the convoy progressed.
A few seats in front of him a young boy looked on at the strange reflective creatures as they moved down to the river. “Are they thirsty?” he said to Mary who was sitting behind him.
She went to tell him to not look at them, but then realized that this child and the others in her care were growing up in a world where these sights would be normal. She leaned towards him slightly and they both watched the creatures sinking into the rushing waters and swimming away. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
The young boy then told her his theory on what they were doing, and for a moment, she saw them as he did, not as creatures of death, but as the nature of a of a new world.
The convoy moved onto the main street, with the bridge in their sights a few hundred yards ahead. Stopping at a junction, five yellow school buses sat parked opposite. Zach paused, with the Humvee’s engine idling.
Abbey looked at Zach, realizing they were not moving. “What’s wrong?” she then looked to where Zach was looking.
Zach clicked on his radio. “Rob, you see those buses. Over.”
“Yup…Over.”
“Could you get one of them started, even without the keys. Over.”
“The older ones, yeah.”
“Bass. Come in. We’re going to need some cover. Over.”
Bass acknowledged, and Zach drove the Humvee with Rob following alongside the buses. Rob and Bass jumped down from the bus and two soldiers ran to the side, pulling open the storage department and grabbing some canisters. Rob then ran down the line of buses, and pulled the door open on a dusty looking one, disappearing inside, the soldiers ran with him. Bass walked over to the Humvee, looking at the surrounding buildings. Only the light wind added any noise to the surroundings.
Zach opened the driver’s door and looked around. “Apart from those E.L.F’s a few miles off, it looks pretty quiet here. We could do with another bus, if Rob can get it started.”
Bass continued looking at the stores, paying special to the roofs, as he did an American flag fluttered on a bent flagstaff. “Agreed.”
As Bass and Zach talked, Cal looked out the back window of the Humvee at a mural across the street. It was a historic scene of construction of a road. Men and women in late nineteenth century attire with tools were working hard, but looking happy. He went to look away, when something caught his eye. Dark disc shapes were in the sky above the workers. Cal strained his eyes to see more detail, but not being able to, he opened the door and got out. Zach and Bass’s conversation stopped.
“Cal, what do you see?” said Zach. Cal ignored the question and walked towards the mural.
“Fuck.” Zach was about to get out when Fiona beat him to it.
“I got this.”
Cal looked up at the sixteen-foot high painting. The dark shapes in the clouds seemed wet and unformed with small drips of glossy black liquid creeping downwards. He got closer and stretched out his hand to touch them. If he could only touch them.
“Cal?”
Fiona’s voice jolted through his brain.
“What are you doing?”
“I…I don’t know, there’s something about this mural.”
She put her hand on his arm, pulling it down. “We need to get back in the Humvee.”
“Yes.”
He walked back to the car slowly, looking over his shoulder as he did.
Jacob sat watching.
CHAPTER 16
“Wait here, I’ll see if there’s a way through,” said Zach getting out.
The twisted metal beams and girders of the bridge hung low over the road. Bass and a soldier jumped off the bus and ran up to him. They all looked down at the muddy water of the river below, its flow gently passing from north to south.
“Look’s pretty clear down there, not seeing any dark shapes in the water,” said Bass. Zach nodded.
Zach ducked under a large rusted beam that stretched from it’s mooring at the side of the bridge across and then down towards the left side lane. It was one of many.
He reached up and touched the flakey red, cold surface of the beam. “The Humvee will be fine, and we should be able to push through with the buses but it’s going to be tight.”
Bass nodded, and they returned to their vehicles.
“How’s it look?” said Abbey.
Zach slowly moved the Humvee forward. “We’ll be fine.”
They moved onto the bridge and it shuddered in response. The first beam approached them and cleared the roof by a few feet. Plotting a winding path across both lanes, they were quickly on the other side.
Corporal Gregg’s drove the old bus forward. The kids and everyone else went quiet as the rust metal fingers approached the roof of the vehicle. The first one hit the roof and the sound of crumpling and sheering rang out across the valley as the bus slowly crept forward. Mary told the kids to put their hands over their ears.
Bass was sitting at the front near Gregg’s, he clicked on his radio. “How we looking, Zach. Over.”
“Keep going. Lots of movement from the beams but nothing drastic, they seem to be holding. Over.”
Towards the end a gap opened up in the forest of beams, and Gregg’s picked up speed, leaving the bridge, and driving up behind the Humvee.
Rob then pulled forward in the newly acquired bus. Behind him sat Tyler and a number of their supplies, which they had quickly moved from the other vehicle.
With his binoculars, Jacob looked at Rob on the bridge and then swept up the river, his focus stopping on a large amount of ripples. Watching intently the ripples dissipated, and then started up again a few yards closer. He then looked back at the bus, which was now halfway across with a number of beams scraping along its side. Switching back to where the ripples were, only calm water resided.
As Rob drove off the bridge, Jacob pulled the binoculars away from his eyes. At least now there was a lot more space available, and the young woman t
hat was sitting next to him with her child on her lap had vacated to sit side by side with her daughter. He stretched out, picking up his backpack from beneath his feet and placed it to his left. Then looked back out at the hills and rocky outcrops that were passing by. His mind turned to Cal. Abbey had told him and Michael what had happened and that Cal had scratched a strange word into his forehead. Michael took it as Cal losing his mind, but in the early afternoon sun Jacob wondered if there was something else going on. He could tell Abbey wasn’t telling him the whole story, and after seeing Cal become seemingly hypnotized by an old mural, a theory started to take shape in his mind, but he would need more information, more data.
Sandy orange hills made up of rocky crevices and covered in a smattering of frost covered trees slid past as the convoy made its way eastwards.
Abbey felt acutely aware of the man with a scarred forehead behind her. What other things did he know relating to her and her previous life? Her mind started to run away with disconnected thoughts that made no sense. She sighed and thought about how far they had come from the New Mexico desert and that they had survived this far. Just as the thought of their survival comforted her, the doubts and questions seeped up from the darkest parts of her mind once more. How could he have known? She was sure she had not mentioned the name Arclight to anyone. Perhaps there was a chance she had mentioned it in her sleep, but it was unlikely. Then there was the crazy dream Cal had mentioned, and the ‘dark figure’ that wanted him to relay the message. ‘Tell the Arclight we accepted,’ relay to whom? Herself? Could it be possible that someone was trying to communicate to her via Cal? She sighed once again, this time sliding her hand over her face to ease the tension. She had begun to make sense of this new world, but now a sense of unreality had started to raise its head again.
Zach watched the peaks and hills uneasily the closer the road got to them. He also wasn’t sure exactly of their route east accept that he needed to make up ground on Tinley. What he would do when he met up with him again he had no idea, the man was protected by a small army of acolytes. He clicked on his radio and told those in the vehicles behind to stay watchful of the slopes around them as he picked up the pace on the dusty frost covered road.