by Logan Jacobs
I scanned through the rest of the text to see if it mentioned what would happen if the experiment failed, but the article veered into a list of statistics about how many buildings were wired for electricity. I pulled the other newspapers out of the wooden rack and scanned each one for more information, but none of their articles on Tesla’s new invention had much more information than the Detroit Free Press had. I did read an editorial in the Detroit News-Tribute that bemoaned the loss of future revenue to coal-powered electricity plants, but that was the only other perspective on the event I could find. I couldn’t even find a newspaper that was dated past September 13th, 1900.
“I guess that’s it.” I dropped the newspapers back into the rack. “Nikola Tesla built the Wardenclyffe Tower, didn’t add the Faraday cage, and electrocuted the entire world a hundred and twenty years ago.”
Humanity had perished over a century ago thanks to one inventor’s bad decision, and the Earth had been taken over by self-propelling lawnmowers and electric wildlife.
“Curiosity satisfied,” I called over my shoulder. “How are you doing, Fela?”
“I think I found some useful books!” Fela was crouched in the middle of a half-circle of stacked books while Floppy enthusiastically shoved more volumes off the shelves. The cat-woman gestured to the small pile she’d stacked in front of her. “Come see!”
“Yeah, that should be a lot more fun than reading about humanity’s certain doom.” I walked over to Fela and sat down cross-legged in front of her pile of books. “Let’s see what you got.”
“Here is a book on building a house.” Fela handed me a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“Great work of fiction, but not a manual on house-building.” I set the book aside. “Excellent try, though.”
“Fine,” Fela said. She handed me a copy of Leaves of Grass. “This is a book on grass, since you keep talking about eating it.”
“That’s actually poetry,” I said. “Are you looking inside these books, Fela?”
“We do not have time to read through every single book,” Fela huffed. “I am just looking at the words on the side of the books, like you said.”
“I get it, that’s what I told you to do.” I held up my hands as Floppy snorted. “I just think we’re in the fiction section right now. You’re looking at those made-up stories I told you about.”
“Then help me look at these books.” Fela’s ears stuck out straight to the side and her tail swished behind her. “I think I understand survival better than you do, but I do not understand your words or your books very well.”
“No, totally, that was my fault,” I admitted. “I didn’t give you much direction. Let’s find the nonfiction section and see if they’ve invented the Dewey Decimal system yet.”
The nonfiction section started just a few shelves away, and I scanned along the titles until I started to see books about farming. Unfortunately, there were so many books about farming that finding a single book that explained it all was nearly impossible.
“A Treatise on Rare Apple Grafting in Sandy to Rocky Soil,” I read, “Dairy Cows and their Intestinal Diseases, A Special Report on the Use of Peruvian Guano... I don’t think we can use any of these.”
“What about books on building things?” Fela ran one of her long claws down the spines of the books she squatted in front of as she read their titles out loud to me. “A Series of Design Suggestions for Modern Cottage Villas. A Collection of Edifying Crafts Suitable for the Home and Garden. A Builder’s Practical Guide to the Principles of Neo-Classical Architecture. Do any of these sound like something we can use, Dave?”
“Not really,” I sighed. “I guess the farmers all have their practical reference books handy already. Want to grab some of that classic literature you were looking through in case we get bored?”
“I think we should be careful about what we decide to carry, especially if you want to look for tools in that collection of abandoned caves you call a town,” Fela said. She straightened up and glanced at Floppy, who was still merrily shoving books off of the shelves with his tusks. “I do not know what we may find there, and I want to save my strength for things that will help us survive instead of made-up stories from a hundred years ago.”
I gazed longingly at the fiction section for a moment. Half of me knew that Fela was absolutely right. I knew how heavy books could be when you piled them up, and I didn’t relish trying to stagger through the forest back to Honest Abe with an armful of Jules Verne hardbacks on top of everything else we could find in town. On the other hand, I didn’t have access to my DVD collection, my game library, or the collection of podcasts I kept on my iPod, and I knew that my brain would be itching to escape from the real world soon the way it did when I’d had a particularly rough day of deliveries. I’d dealt with a lot of danger and fear over the past couple of days, so I figured I should probably have something on hand that would help me forget my own pathetic, stressful existence.
Except that I’d already escaped my own existence.
I squatted down and sifted through the pile of fiction Fela had discarded on the floor. I could see Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, and A Study in Scarlet lying on the floor, and I realized that more than escapism I wanted something familiar from my home to hold onto. I didn’t feel the need to bury my head in a book or a screen anymore, not when the worlds around me held so many eerie wonders and so much infinite possibilities. I just needed proof that the world I’d come from had existed outside of Honest Abe, Sol’s Steely Dan tape, and my own memories.
“I’ll just pick one, and I’ll carry it the whole way back,” I conceded. “And I’ll try to make sure it’s one you’ll understand.”
“Carry your own books, and I have no objection,” Fela agreed. She patted Floppy on the side of his face. “We are leaving, Floppy.”
I grabbed a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, straightened up as I turned toward the door, and then froze. I could see the silhouette of a person with huge shoulders and upper arms through the smoked glass door of the library, and I knew that shadow hadn’t been there before. As I watched, the silhouette raised their right arm and splayed their fingers across the glass of the door.
“I think we have company,” I whispered as I pointed toward the door.
My whisper must have carried, or maybe the person spying on us saw me point at them, because the silhouette turned and fled.
“No you don’t!” I dropped the copy of Alice and raced toward the door. I made it there in just a few seconds, flung the door open, and glanced around in all directions to see if I could spot the fleeing silhouette, but the street looked just as empty as it had when we’d entered the library.
The town might have looked deserted, but there was at least one human living in it.
Or something that looked like a human.
Chapter 9
“Hello?” I called out to the empty street. “Come on out, whoever you are. We won’t hurt you.”
“Do not give yourself away,” Fela hissed from behind me. She slipped one finger into my jacket collar and pulled me backward. “Come back inside the cave with the books where it is safe.”
“Whoever it is, they know we’re here already,” I pointed out, but I let Fela tug me back into the library anyway.
“That does not mean we should go out immediately and expose ourselves,” Fela said, “or shout about how we won’t hurt them.”
“Did you want me to threaten them?” I protested as the smoked glass door swung closed in my face.
“You may not want to hurt them, but they may want to hurt us.” Fela brushed the back of my neck with her finger when she let go of my collar. “You’re telling them exactly where we are, and you’re also suggesting that we’re defenseless. Or at least unwilling to fight.”
“But we’re not,” I whispered. I pointed at my gun and then at Fela’s borrowed knife to emphasize what I meant. “We have weapons. And just because humans don’t like fighting doesn’t mean we won�
��t do it when we need to.”
“If they think we will not hurt them, that means we are easy prey.” Fela glanced over her shoulder toward the closed library doors, where Floppy hunkered down with his head toward the door and his trunk slung over his tusks. “Now they will attack us. If they can get through Floppy, we could be easy prey.”
“If we bunker down in the library and they try to get in and attack us, we’re sitting ducks,” I pointed out. “Whoever it is has probably been here a lot longer than we have and probably knows the terrain a lot better than we do. But I honestly don’t think they’re going to attack us, Fela. I think they were just curious.”
“You have lived in your town of caves so long that you have forgotten the laws of the wild,” Fela said. “This is not your home full of monkey-folk, Dave. You’ve been talking about the differences since we got here. Even if there are humans like you living in this town, they are not going to act the same way that the humans in your troupe did. They will be fearful, aggressive, desperate...”
“Look, I know you’re used to monkey-folk, but humans aren’t the same thing.” I held up my hands. “I went along with the monkey-man thing because I felt like it made more sense for you, but I’m not really a monkey-man. I don’t have a tail.”
“But the human-folk here might,” Fela said.
“You don’t need to call them human-folk,” I said. “Just humans. One word. And we might have evolved from monkeys a long time ago, but we’re kind of our own thing now.”
“If you say so,” Fela smirked. “We have been discussing this long enough. We need to hide or leave.”
“Okay, okay, look at it this way,” I began. “If we hide in here, they know where we are, and they’ll attack us. If we try to just leave town, they’ll probably follow us and track us, too. The best thing we can do is try to look for whoever made that shadow. Hopefully we’ll find them first, maybe they’ll find us, but at least we’ll be prepared and we won’t lead them directly to our cave.”
“You make a good argument,” Fela admitted. Her hand hovered above the handle of the knife. “This knife is sharp, but I do not wish to use it against a creature that can throw lightning at me.”
“Well, lightning can’t travel through wood,” I said. “So even if an animal throws lightning at you and sets your spear on fire, you should be fine.”
“I want to make myself another spear, in case your human friend can throw lightning, too,” Fela said. “I saw plenty of branches that will do.”
“Do we have time for that?” I asked. “I know you said it takes less than a day to make a spear, but if we’re going to find this person--”
“I promise it will not take as long as you think, especially not with this blade.” Fela patted the handle of the knife. “Floppy knows how to keep a look-out for enemies, and you have your loud weapon. I need a weapon I can use against a lightning-creature that I will also not be afraid to lose.”
“Okay, as long as you make it quickly.” I headed toward the door. “Hey, Floppy, you want to cover Fela from behind? That way I can watch for enemies.”
“Back up, Floppy,” Fela said. She walked over and patted Floppy’s hindquarters. “Thank you, Dave. I will be able to protect us both more easily with a spear.”
Floppy took a few careful steps back, Fela ducked under his tusks and took up her position in front of his legs, and I wedged myself between Fela and the door.
“Ready?” I drew my Glock.
“Whenever you are,” Fela whispered.
Floppy snorted in what sounded like agreement.
I pushed the door open with my left hand, took a few steps out onto the front porch of the library, and brandished the Glock while I slowly scanned the street from left to right.
The street looked just as empty as it had before.
“I think we’re clear,” I told Fela. I started to take the steps one at a time. I wasn’t planning to shoot the other person if I saw them, whoever it was, but I also didn’t want to be easy prey, so I lowered the Glock to my waist, but I kept my finger on the trigger guard while I crept down the steps.
“Keep looking,” Fela hissed as we made our way down the steps. “You know this area better than I do. Find us a place that will be easy to defend while I make us weapons.”
The Masonic Lodge was right across the street, but angled at a slant along with the road so that we could see its entire south wall. Its trapezoid tower, arched windows, and white pillars made it look a lot like the Addams Family mansion done over in cheery red brick, and the wooden Masonic symbols that hung lopsidedly off the walls didn’t make it look any less haunted or creepy. The important thing about the building wasn’t that it was a great example of Gothic Revival architecture, but that it was built in the shape of a capital T, with the pillared front entrance on the bottom of the T and the back wing as the top crossbar.
“We’re going over there.” I pointed at the crook of the T. “That way, we’ll have our backs to two walls. That should be easy to defend, right?”
“From one human, perhaps,” Fela said. “If they come back with their whole troupe, we will be backed into a corner with no way out.”
“It’s only been a few minutes,” I said. “And we haven’t seen anyone else since we’ve been here, so I don’t think there’s a whole bunch of humans just hanging out in this particular abandoned area. Even if the person we saw is going to get their friends to come hunt us or something, they’re going to have to make it all the way there, tell everyone, get organized, and get all the way back. I don’t know how long you’re planning to take with that spear, but--”
“I still do not like it,” Fela growled. “We need a high point.”
“Like where?” I glanced around the streetscape, but the highest point I could see was the tower on the front of the Masonic hall. “We could go inside and hunker down in that tower like snipers.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of that tree.” Fela pointed at a tall oak with spreading limbs behind the hall. “Do your people climb well?”
“Maybe not as well as a cat-folk or a monkey-folk, but we can climb.” My palms still itched a little with the scrapes I’d suffered from the pine tree I’d climbed to look for water. “My gun can shoot little pellets of metal really fast and really far, so if they have guns, then they’ll be able to hit us if we’re in that tree.”
“I do not like not knowing how many of them there are,” Fela growled. “I feel as though they could be hidden and watching us on all sides.”
“Okay, why don’t you and Floppy just go back into the library?” I sighed. “I’ll just go find a stick for you, and you can make your spear in the nice stone cave. Does that work?”
“And let you go out into the ghost town on your own?” Fela replied. “That is too dangerous. Anyway, you do not know exactly what kind of stick I am looking for. I would rather find my own.”
“Alright, then where are we going?” I asked Fela. “I’m sorry you can’t find the perfect place to make your spear, but we need to make a decision.”
“I suppose that corner will be enough if you are right about how long it will take the human to come back,” Fela said. “And if you believe you can defend it.”
I silently counted the shots I’d taken since I’d first grabbed the Glock. I had killed the sloth, killed the two bear-men, fired off a hopeful shot at the remaining bear-men, then shot at Fela and missed. I had taken six shots, and that meant that I only had nine bullets left in the Glock now. Unless, ofcourse, I miscounted somewhere. As long as we didn’t run into too many more wild creatures I was pretty sure I could make those bullets stretch through the two days we had left in this world so I wouldn’t have to break into the extra mags, since I had no idea when I’d be able to get more ammo. I just hoped I was right, and that the shadowy human we’d seen through the glass door wouldn’t bring back any friends on the hunt.
“Between my gun and Floppy’s tusks, I think we’ll be fine.” I glanced back at Floppy. “Ri
ght, boy?”
The little mammoth raised his trunk and tossed his head back to show off the sharp points of his long, curled tusks.
I glanced left, right, and left again before we crossed the street, even though it wasn't like there were any cars on the road to watch for. I had seen that unmanned mower fly right past my nose, though, so it wasn’t totally ridiculous to think that there might be some Tesla-made electric carriages or a rogue Model T prototype roaming the streets around Detroit. I didn’t see any rusted jalopies or kicked-up clouds of dust in the road on either side, so I led Fela and Floppy across the street.
“Ah, that's better,” Fela sighed as we made it onto the soft, overgrown grass that surrounded the Masonic Lodge. “Why do your people make their paths out of such uncomfortable stuff to walk on?”
“I’m pretty sure these weren't really meant for foot traffic,” I said. “Even back in 1900, people mostly took carriages and stuff. Um, those are boxes with wheels on the bottom so animals like Floppy can pull them along.”
“I don’t know what a wheel is.” Fela glanced at the corner I’d indicated, then headed off at an angle toward the oak tree.
“I am not following you up there,” I huffed as I jogged toward Fela with Floppy at my side.
“I am just getting a stick, do not worry.” Fela crouched down, scooped up a small armful of fallen oak branches, and turned on her heels toward the corner. “One of those should be dry enough to use.”
Floppy and I flanked Fela while she carried her bundle of sticks to the brick corner I’d picked. Floppy turned around so that he faced the Grand River, and then backed up so that his body stood like a wall between Fela and the rest of the world. He really was super smart.
I took up my watch in the opposite direction, but kept an eye on Fela while she worked, just to see how she was making the spears.
The gorgeous cat-woman sat with her legs splayed out as she bent her head over the pile of sticks. She pulled the knife out of its holster, cut a slice of wood off the end of each branch, and peered at the end of the piece of wood before she tossed the unworthy sticks to the side. She went through four or five branches before she grinned, set one down in her lap, and started to peel the bark off the stick in long, unbroken swipes. Her blade moved so quickly that I could barely see her hands as she worked, just a blur of flashing steel and tan fingers. In just a couple of minutes, she had the whole branch stripped of everything including its leafy twigs, and her lap was full of bark shavings.