Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  “We still need a hospital!”I shout at Charlie as he shoves the pedal to the floor. In an RV, though, that doesn’t amount to much.

  “Working on it!”Charlie shouts back. “Just shut up for a sec!”

  I get to my feet and then kneel on the couch, splitting the blinds with my fingers to peer out at the wreckage around us. The dragonflies, for lack of a better term, seem indiscriminate in their attacks. Cars explode all around us like giant fireworks, which Charlie narrowly avoids. Any second now, we’ll be next. A green flash, and that will be it. Searing heat, agony, then—

  Then what?

  Nothing?

  Just darkness and un-ness? Like a dreamless sleep? Even with the carnage outside and the wholly surreal monsters beating the air like wicked helicopters, still I wonder what we unleashed in that cave. Still I have to ask what power did what it did to my mother and the others, condemning them to a mindless slavery. Is that Hell? Is that the price paid by skeptics and nonbelievers in . . . in anything? Is that what waits for us once the dragonfly monsters incinerate the RV?

  “Abby, stop it!”Charlie shouts.

  I suck in a breath and whirl toward the driver’s seat. “Huh?”

  “Stop screaming! I can’t think, goddammit!”

  I close my mouth with a snap, not realizing I’d been wailing since I’d knelt on the couch. I turn back to the window. The dragonfly monsters stay in more or less one place, hovering and swooping. They really can maneuver like hummingbirds, staying in one place or darting in any direction. Even backward. They do not appear to be following us, focusing instead on the cars immediately behind their previous victims.

  And somehow, maybe combined with the destruction of the power plant outside Phoenix, I realize what it is they’re doing.

  I rush to the front of the van. “Charlie, look. They’re jamming the road.”

  Charlie scowls and checks his rearview mirror. “Yeah,”he grunts. “Maybe.”

  “And the power plant. How many nuclear power plants like that are in the United States?”

  “Gee, Abby, I don’t know off the top of my head.”

  “Don’t you get it? They’re thinking. Look.”

  I run back to the bedroom. Selby still lies on her back, pressing her hands to her wound and breathing shallowly. I climb past her and look out the small back window. Black, cloudy smoke rises in great plumes behind us. Several cars have raced past the RV by now, and there are no more vehicles behind us. We’re the last. No one else is getting through one direction or the other. On the other side of us, in the northbound lanes, traffic has piled up. Some people try to jump the median and get stuck, while others head out into the desert, maybe aiming for the frontage roads.

  “They knew what they were doing,”I shout to Charlie. “They’re trapping us.”

  “Uh, excuse me,”Selby says to me, her eyes pinched shut. “But I am in a fair amount of fucking pain here. Can we maybe do something about that, please?”

  “I’m sorry,”I say. “Yes. Charlie’s getting us to a hospital.”

  Charlie suddenly cranks the wheel hard to the left, sending me and Selby tumbling over each other and making her cry out again.

  “Hang on,”he says, long after there was time to actually do so.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying another road.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re not getting through up there.”

  I pull myself up and look out the windshield. The road ahead is a mass of red tail lights and dust. I can’t see what caused the stop, but I don’t really want to. I sit back and put a hand on Selby’s shoulder.

  “We’ll get help,”I say, not sure if it’s true or not.

  Charlie had made his decision at a crossover, and just in time. He sends us bouncing over to the other side of the freeway, and then beyond it to a frontage road. How the big recreational vehicle is able to keep going after everything he’s put it through is beyond me.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?”I say.

  Charlie picks up his phone. He steers with one hand and keeps glancing into his lap. I get up and join him at the front, taking the phone away.

  “I’ll do this. You drive. What am I looking for?”

  “Maps,”Charlie says. His eyes dart nervously from side to side. “Find us another way out of here.”

  “Out of here to where? Selby needs help.”

  “We’re all gonna need help if we don’t find a way to avoid those things out there. So just get us somewhere else.”

  I slide my finger across the screen, opening up Charlie’s maps. “Okay. Got it. But I don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  “I—”Charlie says, then stops short. He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  I touch his arm. “Don’t lose it. Please, Charlie. We need you. I need you to be here. Okay?”

  He takes a couple deep breaths. “Okay.”

  “Okay,”I repeat. I scan the phone screen again. “All right, there’s a little highway not far from here. The 79. There’re some smaller towns along the way. There’s got to be a medical place there. Urgent care or something. Maybe we can get an ambulance for her.”

  I glance back at Selby. Her body is still, but I can see her stomach rising and falling as she breathes.

  “Sounds good,”Charlie says. “Get me there.”

  “No problem.”I feel a surge of strength. Amazing what taking action, what having a plan, can do for your spirit. “It’s going to be a while. How are we on gas?”

  Charlie looks down at his gauge. Back up at the disused road we’re traveling. Down again at the gauge.

  “Fuck,”he says.

  12

  Then

  * * *

  Studying Charlie’s face over the table as my pizza cooled, I tried to figure the best way to summarize what I thought had happened to our parents. The problem was it all sounded stupid and crazy and frantic, not smart and logical and calm the way Mom would want me to think.

  Mom had raised me a skeptic. I found Mrs. Brower’s brand of faith to be harmless, maybe even adorable on some level, but not reasonable. Many other people of faith I’d encountered were a far cry from reasonable. The world had shown many of them to be outright violent. So I’d never had any need for ESP, prayer, miracles, or eternal life.

  And yet.

  After reading through Prinn’s book that previous week, trying to decipher his crazier notes, scraping together some kind of theory as to why they’d gone to the cave in the first place and what might have happened to them, I didn’t feel there was an accident involved. I hated that I felt that way. Truthfully, the logical part of me utterly rejected the idea. The not-so-logical side, the side that couldn’t reduce every emotion to pure logic or reason—that side knew something else had happened.

  “Honestly?”I said to Charlie after a long hesitation. “What I think is that I’m losing my own mind. So if I tell you and you laugh, or you act like a jerk, you can take this albeit fantastic freaking pizza and shove it straight up your ass.”

  “Understood,”Charlie said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  I took a deep breath, and focused my gaze over Charlie’s shoulder, absently not-reading famous quotes painted on the far wall.

  “I think our parents . . . they found something. Or something found them.”

  Charlie straightened up in his seat.

  “I don’t know what that is,”I rushed on. “But it was something bad.”

  “What do you think it was?”Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know, Charlie. Seriously. It’s not something I can point to or explain, which, by the way, really pisses me off. It’s just a feeling, and I don’t like that it’s just a feeling. I got really used to the idea that there was an accident. A cave-in, probably. But the stuff in your dad’s book, it just—it creeps me out. I don’t know how else to put it.”

  Charlie’s expression didn’t change, not that I could see. After a p
ause, he nodded slowly. “Okay. That’s fine. That’s legitimate.”

  It was like he knew exactly what to say. I let out a breath and felt my shoulders relax.

  “So anyway,”I said, “I don’t know if they’re dead or what. Logically, I’m sure they must be. I don’t know if anyone can ever find them. But no matter what, my dad hasn’t been the same since they disappeared. He’s so sad, and even though it’s been so long, he still thinks one day she’ll come back. I think if we knew . . . if we could say for sure that she was gone, if we knew she was dead, he’d get better. You know?”

  “Sure,”Charlie said. “Of course.”

  “So then, regardless of my ‘feelings’ or using the Force or calling the Ghostbusters, I need to go and see for myself. That’s the important thing.”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay. That’s what I think. So now it’s your turn. What did you find out?”

  “That you’re absolutely right.”

  Charlie folded his pizza in half and chewed into it like a taco. I didn’t mind the pause this time, and took another bite of my own. I could barely believe I’d just said everything I had.

  “You know my dad was a skeptic, like your mom,”Charlie said at last. “Atheist, logical, scholarly. All that. He got into the show to prove that ghosts and all that stuff didn’t exist. It was all things he taught about before the show began.”

  “Right, yeah?”

  “Well, something happened. He changed his mind. Or was in the process of changing it. Before they left to shoot season three—I mean, for the few months leading up to it—something was wrong. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, of course. I was, like, thirteen. I don’t know if he ever told my mom. I probably would’ve just let it be, you know? Live my life and whatever. But then you found that copy of his book and . . . did you bring it with you?”

  I reached into my bag and pulled it out to show him. Charlie wiped his hands quickly on a napkin before taking it from me. He did not open it, not right away. He merely held it. For a moment, I thought he’d sniff it.

  “Do you want to know what’s in it?”I said softly, in case he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  Charlie didn’t look at me, but nodded.

  “Near as I can tell, your information is right. The stuff in here is about how wrong he was. A point-by-point refutation of his own research.”

  Charlie nodded again, and set the book down on our table. “That adds up. Or, adds up as much as anything else up to now does. I just found out he’s the one who insisted they go to that cave for the season-three premiere. No one ever mentioned it to me before. And it was supposed to be a two-parter, did you know that?”

  I shook my head, with a flash of anger. Why didn’t I know that? My anger cooled quickly; it wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering tidbit. Still. It bugged me to not know every detail.

  “Apparently, Dad was going around telling people it would change everything,”Charlie said. “Not just the show. He meant, like, everything everything. Everything the world knew, or thought it knew.”

  The born-and-raised skeptic in me gave me a slap. “You know how this all sounds, right? How we sound right now?”

  “Oh, of course I do. It’s absurd, at minimum.”He rested a hand on top of his father’s book. “But now I have to know what he was working on. And why they all disappeared. Sounds like you do too.”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Is this really the first time you’ve thought something besides an accident happened?”

  Five years apart or not, Charlie Prinn knew me too well. My skepticism faded as soon as he said it. Mom had raised me to ask questions, to think beyond the supernatural and spiritual. I wasn’t sure what Dad believed, but I knew he never contradicted her. I’d never needed church, horoscopes, Ouija boards, or anything like that.

  Despite all that, yes: From the first moment Dad had told me Mom hadn’t checked in, I felt something was wrong beyond a cave-in. Couldn’t shake it, even after all these years.

  “No,”I whispered. “It’s not the first time. I felt it from the start. I just didn’t want to . . .”

  “Admit it?”Charlie asked, matching my tone.

  “Yeah.”I started trembling, and couldn’t stop. I also couldn’t stop talking. To confide this in another human being instead of being locked in my brain was like a seductive, palatial bath, cleansing off years of grime and sludge. That it was Charlie, who had been through the same thing, so much the better.

  He sat back. “Well, Abigail, we’re going to try like hell to find out the truth. Sound good?”

  I nodded, fast. It definitely did sound good.

  “I found the address of this guy Dr. Riley,”Charlie said, with a down-to-business tone. “He was a friend of Dad’s and—”

  “He guest-hosted once.”

  “Right. Turns out he lives in Arizona. Not far from the cave, in fact.”

  My stomach shrank at the word “cave.”I tightened my arms around myself.

  “I couldn’t find a number or e-mail or anything on him, but I did find his house. Out in the freaking boonies. But what I’m thinking is, we drive out there, do a whole scenic-road-trip thing. Talk to Dr. Riley, maybe shoot a good interview with him if he’s up for it. Then we go to the cave, poke around, get some good footage . . .”

  “Are we really talking about this, Charlie?”

  His eyes glittered. “We sure as hell are. I mean, worst-case scenario, we find out absolutely nothing. Well, we know absolutely nothing right now, so no loss there.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was charming me, flirting with me, or if this was just his natural optimism. I also couldn’t tell which I wanted it to be.

  Charlie continued, “The important thing—the important things—are, one: What if we were able to find proof of how they really died? Maybe we’d find something everyone else missed. And two . . . I’m willing to bet that you get the dreams too.”

  All my internal organs froze to ice when he said it. How did he know about the dreams of that place? How could he know?

  I didn’t answer, but clearly, I didn’t need to. Charlie said, “That’s what I thought. Now, look, I know they might be dead. And probably are. If they are, then okay, I accept that. I’ve done my five stages of grief. I’m good. But if we could figure out what really happened, it’s worth finding out. I’ll admit, when you called last week, I was a little skeptical, but after doing my homework, I can’t tell you how on board I am.”

  Yet even as he said it, the spark of a thrill I’d felt when I saw Charlie standing in the hall vanished, extinguished by five years of empty pain. I loved my mom. Not in the past tense, but in the here and now. We’d been happy. Everything had been good, except maybe that Dad wanted another kid and Mom was too busy, or at least that was the reason she always used. I liked being an only child, because it meant I got their combined, full attention. Right up until TSS started production, anyway.

  Right up until she never returned another text or call. Right up until Dad broke down.

  “I mean, I’ve felt it too,”Charlie said. “That something else went on, but no one besides the nutjobs online would talk about it. But I did not want to sound like a nutjob, so I never brought it up to anyone either.”

  I twisted my lips around, trying to find words. They didn’t come.

  “It sounds to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, but in your gut, or heart, or soul, or wherever people feel things, you and I both know they didn’t just disappear.”

  A cold breeze dried my mouth, filling me again with autumn chills. Charlie seemed to pick up on it. His voice softened.

  “Look, Abby, I know it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. But you know this isn’t about kidnapping, or our parents running off together, or a cave-in. You know this is about something else. About that place. I kept telling myself all these years I was imagining stuff, or was just having trouble getting over losing bot
h of them so close together. But then you called, and . . . I don’t know. This seems right.”

  I tried to get spit back into my mouth and couldn’t. I hated Charlie Prinn right then.

  Because he was right. I did know. I had dreamed.

  “And, I mean, it does have a great angle,”Charlie added, mostly muttering it.

  “A what?”

  “The children of the disappeared going out in search of answers. Whatever else it might be, it’s good drama. It’s a good story.”

  That he could swing the conversation back around to filmmaking actually relaxed me. It made the whole adventure return to being a lot more innocuous. A road trip, like he said.

  “Okay,”I said. “Let’s do it. What’s next?”

  “That’s it. We’ll pick you up tomorrow, unless you need more time. I plan on being back Monday night—does that work?”

  “Sure.”

  “It won’t mess you up in school or anything?”

  “I take all online classes, so no big deal.”

  “Okay. Cool. If you have any questions, give me a call.”

  “Just one. What do you think happened?”

  Charlie hesitated. “Honestly, I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that I’m going to find out.”

  We’d somehow finished our pizzas without my noticing. Charlie asked if he could hold on to the book, and I said yes, of course. He walked me back to Mrs. Brower’s truck.

  “So, what’re your . . . friends like?”I asked, pulling out my keys.

  “Well,”Charlie said, leaning against the truck. “Alex is kind of like a puppy. Very excitable. Fortunately, he’s paper-trained, so that’s good.”

  I laughed, surprising myself. A cloud of dust may as well have come out of me.

  “What about Selby?”

  “Yeah, Selby. She’s what they call wicked smaht. Ivy League material, probably going to win a Nobel Prize before she can drink legally. I think you’ll like her.”

  That was a patent impossibility, but I wasn’t about to admit to it.

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “Texas State Science Fair last year. I was on a crew shooting a doc about it. She won. For the second time, in fact.”