Chapter Nineteen
Sarah came into the bedroom and told us that her dad had gone to bed. Then she snuck into the diner’s storage building and stuffed Lily’s backpack with food in case we ended up heading farther east than Black Rock. She asked for one thing in return. If we did come back this way, she wanted us to take her to the Territory. We said ‘yes.’
We were out of Sarah’s trailer and under a triple tank truck before the cool night air had turned to dew. The driver was sleeping in the cab and the parking lot was silent. We’d picked a truck whose rigging was packed with supplies so, on the road, those supplies would keep us hidden from the eyes of other truckers.
An hour later, we heard the trucker step out of the cab and a few minutes after that, he came back and pulled out of the parking lot. Lily and I braced ourselves for the short trip to Black Rock.
Two hours later, the truck slowed down and turned onto the Black Rock lakebed. There was no road here, just an endless mud surface. And as the truck picked up speed, it began to kick up massive amounts of dried mud. We had to shut our eyes to protect them. Every time I opened my eyes, I caught glimpses of dozens of other dust clouds. The trucks crossing the flats with us.
It wasn’t long before every breath we took was packed with grainy particles of dirt. The lakebed was roughly four hundred square miles, so if our truck was headed all the way across it, we’d choke on these particles. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth to act as a filter and Lily did the same. But the particles were so fine and so relentless that they still made it through, and we both began to cough and wheeze.
Fifteen minutes later, all of it spent wheezing, our truck stopped. I figured we were somewhere near the middle of the lakebed, and I saw other trucks pulling in. But ‘pulling in’ was the wrong term. They weren’t pulling into anything. The trucks were stopping in the middle of the most barren surface on Earth.
I looked over the wide expanse. The mud flats were covered with cracks, and the rising sun, low on the horizon, raked the cracks, turning the lakebed into a coppery mosaic of geometric shapes. Beautiful.
I shifted my focus back to the trucks. Some of the truckers had climbed out of their cabs, and the trucker closest to us was under his truck, prepping a discharge valve, as if he were getting ready to unload the water.
Unload it into what?
I heard our own trucker slam his door shut and realized that he, too, was headed for the discharge valves. The ones under our truck. If we didn’t scramble out, he’d spot us. I saw him move past our tank, toward the back tanks. He was going to unload them first.
“We have to get out,” I said, “before he gets to our tank.”
“Where to?” Lily said, “There’s no place to hide.”
Talk about an understatement. We were on the flattest surface on Earth and surrounded by truckers. I looked around, trying to gauge whether we could run to another truck without being spotted, and that was when I saw the oddest thing yet. Under that nearby truck, a thick metal ‘arm’ was rising out of the dry lakebed. I looked over to another truck and saw the same thing, a metal arm rising from the lakebed. I glanced from truck to truck and saw the same bizarre scene playing out all over Black Rock and I realized that the trucks had pulled in to something. They’d pulled in to a water storage facility. Sarah’s father had been right. Water was being stored here.
But why here? Why make this the transfer point?
I watched the truckers position the arms using controls attached to the arms themselves. They fastened the arms to the discharge valves on their tanks, tightened the couplings, opened the valves, and sent the water down through the arms. Under the flats, there must’ve been storage tanks as big and as numerous as those in Yachats.
Lily was riveted by the metallic arms. “Looks like trucks do come in from the east,” she said. “Someone’s got to haul all this inland.”
“There’s only one way to find out. We have to stay for the night.” I turned my attention back to the nearby trucker. While the water was draining from his truck, he’d moved away to talk to another driver. “Those arms come out of hollows under the flats,” I said. “The opening might be big enough for us to hide in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lily said, like she had no second thoughts about the danger.
But I wondered if the marauder whom Sarah had met had come up with the same plan, then been crushed when the arms retracted into their hollows. Luckily, I didn’t have much time to dwell on this scenario because we had to get out of the rigging before our trucker got to our tank.
I scanned the flats. Truckers were everywhere. So even though we only had to sprint about twenty yards, it was still likely that one of them would spot us. But we didn’t have any other options.
“You ready?” I said.
Lily didn’t hesitate. She grabbed her backpack and started to scramble out of the rigging. I followed and we raced across the flats aiming for the nearby truck and the arm underneath.
“A goddamn marauder!” someone shouted.
We ducked under the truck and the hollow came into view. Even with the arm protruding from it, the opening was large enough to dive into. We both jumped and I immediately felt panic. I didn’t hit the ground.
I was in a freefall.
Finally, I hit and tumbled over. I scrambled to my feet, ready to run, my heart pumping furiously, and I eyed my surroundings.
Chapter Twenty
We were in a giant cavern. The floor beneath us was made of some kind of metal (steel?) and the arms rose from that metal and jutted out through rectangular openings above. From down here, I could see that the arms were aligned in an array. I was sure that we were standing on top of one massive storage tank and each arm fed into it.
The light streaming down through the openings created a checkered pattern on the floor, but the cavern stretched way past this pattern, into darkness, and I couldn’t see where it ended.
“You going after ‘em?” a trucker shouted. The voice was above us and it sounded harsh.
“Let’s go,” I said to Lily, expecting a trucker to drop down into the cavern.
Lily and I took off, running past the array of arms, toward the darkness. As we ran, I noticed that where the arms were connected to the floor, there weren’t any seams or rivets. It was as if the floor and the arms were one huge piece of metal. That seemed impossible.
A shot rang out and the bullet clanged off the metal surfaces. I glanced up and saw a trucker leaning down through one of the openings, clutching a gun. He shot at us again and Lily and I both ducked behind an arm, but I wanted to get away from the openings, so I grabbed Lily’s hand, waited a second or two, then took off again. We tried to keep the metal arms between the trucker and us.
Another shot rang out, echoing through the chamber.
Lily and I raced forward, weaving past several more arms.
A shot exploded off the metal floor as we hit the end of the array and ran into the darkness. Here, the trucker couldn’t see us anymore but we couldn’t see anything either. We raced forward and I expected to run into a wall any second. The cavern couldn’t be too much bigger.
But we didn’t come to a wall. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that the checkered pattern was now fifty yards away. The trucker had stopped firing so we stopped running. We waited in the dark and didn’t say a word. We wanted to make sure the trucker had given up.
While we waited I thought about the metal arms. I’d noticed that even though they were bent in four places, I hadn’t seen any hinges, flanges, nuts, bolts, or screws. Not one piece of hardware usually associated with a joint. I’d also noticed something odd about the openings above us. There weren’t any panels ready to slide over them and close them up, and I was sure the openings were closed when the trucks had pulled in.
After thirty minutes of silence, Lily and I began to talk again and we laid out our next move.
Truckers would be arriving all day and unloading water. When night fell, we’d see if trucks came
in from the east to load up. If they did, we’d climb up one of the arms and hide in the rigging of one of those trucks and see where it took us. And if no trucks came tonight, we’d wait two or three more nights and see if they came then. We had enough food to last about that long, but then we’d have to leave.
We had plenty of time before nightfall so we started to explore the cavern. First, we wanted to find out how large it was. We walked forward, farther into the dark, expecting to hit a wall any second, but we didn’t. Our only landmark was the checkerboard of light behind us and it became smaller and smaller as we marched on.
“This place is huge,” Lily said.
It was hard to believe that we hadn’t hit a wall yet, and I added the enormity of the place to the list of oddities I was cataloguing.
Five minutes later, we finally hit a wall, and I ran my hand along it. “It’s made of metal,” I said and knelt down to feel where the wall met the floor. The bottom of the wall curved smoothly into the floor. “There isn’t a seam here. It’s like the entire cavern is one piece of steel.”
“That’s not possible, right?” Lily said.
I didn’t answer. I looked back to the array, which was now just a tiny dot of light in the distance. How could this place be this big and still be machined from one piece of metal?
“Let’s look for that equipment,” I said. We had already concluded that somewhere down here there had to be machinery that pumped all this water back up from the storage tank below.
We headed back toward the array, the only area where there was enough light to examine the chamber. “Who do you think runs this thing?” Lily said. “It doesn’t just take care of itself.”
“Maybe there’s a town near the flats,” I said, but even though I’d volunteered that, for some reason, I didn’t believe it myself.
Back at the array, we walked up and down the rows of arms and didn’t come across any equipment. We saw nothing but the smooth, unblemished surface of the metal floor rising into the arms.
We were also on the lookout for any truckers taking potshots at us from above, but the only things we saw up there were the bellies of trucks. Periodically, those bellies moved as truckers moved their second and third tanks over the arms. Then we’d hear the soft hums of the arms being repositioned. Those hums were as clean and elegant as the smooth surfaces around us.
After we finished exploring the lit area of the cavern, we debated whether to explore the dark outer reaches. We’d have to do it by feel because we wouldn’t be able to see anything. In the end, we decided to hold off. So we hid in the dark, just out of sight of the openings, and listened to the trucks. Our wave of trucks left and the next wave pulled in, and that’s how it went all day long. One wave after another, washing on shore, then retreating. We had plenty of time to talk and late in the afternoon, Lily finally told me the truth about her travels.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lily grew up learning biology. Her grandfather taught it to her and Lily had wanted to learn as much as possible. But her mother insisted that the tutoring stop and eventually her mother won that battle. That’s when Lily started to pursue biology on her own. And it was during that time that she became interested in the Virus.
She started to research it, trying to hide her work from her mom, knowing that her mom wouldn’t approve. Well, she was right. Her mom found her research, then tried to stop her from doing any more, and so began a series of bitter arguments. During one of those arguments, her mom let it slip that Lily’s grandfather had studied the Virus and had abandoned his research because it was far too dangerous. By now Lily’s grandfather had passed away, so Lily couldn’t ask him about it, but she badly wanted to find his research. She tried to dig it up, practically taking apart the house, and she even searched other places in town where her grandfather had spent time. She couldn’t find even one shred of his research, so she accused her mom of destroying it and that led to more bitter arguments.
If only Lily had connected the disappearance of that research to the disappearance of scientific knowledge in the Territory, she might’ve forgiven her mom. But like me, and everyone else in the Territory, she didn’t connect the missing pieces of her own puzzle to the missing pieces of the larger puzzle. Neither of us suspected that much more than ignorance was working to destroy knowledge.
Lily ended up wanting to develop a vaccine for the Virus. A vaccine that would allow people to travel anywhere, anytime. To do this, she needed sophisticated equipment and specific drugs and that was why she’d begun taking trips to other towns. It wasn’t to explore the Territory.
She traveled to dead towns that were once home to hospitals or medical labs or biotech research firms. There, she’d search for the equipment or drugs she needed. Her mom was furious about the trips, but Lily went anyway. And every once in a while, she’d find the right piece of equipment or a drug or even some relevant study that could help with her research. None of this mattered to her mom. After Lily’s first trip, her mom stopped talking to her.
Lily made another dozen trips over the years and most of them were failures. Many of the hospitals and medical labs had already been looted clean. The biotech firms were usually better targets, and she ended up finding enough equipment and drugs to continue her research. (On this trip, the one that had led through Yachats, she’d been headed to a biotech lab in Cutler.)
When I asked if she was getting closer to finding a vaccine, she said that she needed more information about the Virus itself. At one point, she thought she’d caught a lucky break when she came across an old epidemiological study. It’d been started right after the outbreak, but was never finished. And what it found was confusing.
Lily explained that there are two ways a virus spreads. Vertical transmission, mother to child, and horizontal transmission, person to person, like through air, saliva, or contaminated food. The Passim Virus was horizontal and that made sense. That’s how pandemics usually spread. But what wasn’t normal was the pattern of transmission. The Virus popped up in so many places at the same time that it didn’t seem possible that transmissions between those places could’ve already occurred. Especially when you took into account another anomaly. The incubation period. If you became infected, you died within a few hours. From what Lily had been able to learn through the scant information she’d managed to dig up about other viruses, that was practically unheard of.
Lily also told me about her attempts to locate a good sample of the Virus. First, she had focused on samples stored in abandoned labs. It was a long shot that the samples would be still living, but a sample was a sample. She ventured out on four of these expeditions and each was a failure. The samples weren’t where they were supposed to be. She said it was like following a fake treasure map.
So for the last few years, she had changed tactics. She’d decided to collect a sample from a recent victim, and that meant flirting with Mateo Ford, the guy who ran the Line in Klamath. Mateo was the key to finding out what towns were reporting new victims. When Mateo gave her information that she thought might lead to a victim, she’d head out.
But when she arrived in a town that had reported a death, the people there would always stonewall her. Sometimes they denied that there’d been a victim at all. She didn’t know if the information Mateo had gleaned from the Line was just plain wrong, or if these people were lying because they didn’t want outsiders to think the Virus had infected their town. Other times, she’d make it to a town and find that the victim had been cremated or already buried.
On one trip, where the body had already been buried, she asked the victim’s family if she could exhume the body and take a tissue sample. They refused. And who could blame them? She was a stranger who’d snuck into town and for all they knew she was a marauder looking to spread the Virus. But the second time she rolled into a town and a family refused to let her exhume the body, she decided to do it anyway. It seemed wrong and macabre, but she was tired of failure. So she dug up the victim’s grave, opened his makeshift cof
fin, and got a tissue sample. But when she got back to Klamath, she found that the sample had dissolved into the preserving solution.
So she tried again with another victim. And this time, she took a bunch of samples from the exhumed body, and some of those samples didn’t dissolve. She tested them, focusing on a few biochemical processes based on what she’d learned about healthy tissue. She didn’t have much to go on, but this was a start. She didn’t expect a miracle, but she’d hoped to find at least a sign that the Virus had invaded healthy tissue.
She didn’t. She worked on the samples for months and found nothing. She ended up more confused than ever.
Up above us, the daylight dimmed and the number of trucks dwindled down. On the cavern floor, the checkerboard of light softened. Night was falling and the temperature was dropping.
Just before sunset, the last of the trucks roared off and the arms began to retract into the cavern. They stopped just below the surface of the mud flats, then panels slid closed over the openings. These panels seemed to grow out of the ceiling itself and they left no seams when they locked into place, as if the ceiling had never had any openings at all.
The cavern was sealed tight, in silence and darkness, and we began our wait for the trucks from the east.
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