Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  I don’t say any of that to Charlie. What I said about my dad and wanting to be with him, that was all still one hundred percent truth. The rest of it I’d keep to myself.

  Charlie drives the Wrangler carefully. Both of us try to keep an eye out in every possible direction, waiting for mutated dragonflies or clouds of black possession or goddamn Godzilla, for all we know. But the immediate world around us is quiet until we reach the freeway.

  That’s when things get tougher.

  Everyone with access to a vehicle seems to be out on that road and along the sides of it. There’s a fleet’s worth of SUVs and trucks taking off through the desert, roughly following the direction of the I-10, but staying well clear of it. Fancy sports cars give it a shot too, but end up stuck or worse. There are no commercial planes in the sky, but several times we see serious-looking military helicopters cutting through the air overhead. Not long after that, we also see jets screaming past, low in the sky.

  Charlie guides the Jeep beside a fairly steady flow of other cars like ours. Strangely, to me at least, they seemed welcoming, as if the drivers are saying, Hey, here’s a guy who knows what kinda car to drive during an apocalypse! C’mon in, son!

  “Why don’t you try the CB, see if we can raise somebody,”Charlie says.

  “Like who?”

  “Like anybody. I’d ask these guys, but I don’t think anyone’s in the mood to stop and talk.”

  I turn on the CB radio, utterly unsure how to use the thing. I try holding down the button on the side of the microphone.

  “Hello? Is anybody there? Hello?”

  “Ten-four,”a male voice says.

  I look at Charlie. He gestures for me to talk. I hold the mic up again.

  “Um, hi. Hello? My name’s Abby, who is this?”

  “Name’s Orson. Abby, how you doin’ out there?”

  “Not great. Where are you?”

  “I’m passing Marana right now. Things’re jammed up all to hell, though. Where you headed?”

  “We’re north of Tucson . . . um, I think south of you. But we’re trying to get to Las Vegas. Do you know what’s going on that way?”

  “Boy, Abby, I tell ya, this country shit the bed somethin’ fierce,”Orson says. “Guv’mint projects, secret stuff t’ use against the Middle East, who knows. But they jacked us up real good.”

  This was not the type of hard-hitting reporting I needed.

  “Sir, can you tell me about the 95? Is that still clear? Do you know?”

  “Got a buddy headed that direction right now,”Orson says. “I could check in and give you a call back.”

  “Would you? I’d appreciate it.”

  “This your first time on a radio, Abby?”

  “Um . . . yes, sir.”

  Orson chuckles. “No ‘sirs,’ thank you. I was just curious. You in a four-wheeler?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You go ahead ’n follow ten up. Most of the worst of it’s gettin’ focused on the cities now. Best make good time while you can. Hey, Abby.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know if we lose Hoover, Vegas is gonna get itself emptied real quick. No power in Sin City, see what I’m sayin’? Things’re liable to get ugly. Might want to find another place to hole up.”

  “My dad’s there.”

  “Well, that’s bein’ a good girl and I appreciate that, but just be careful. I’ll get back to you. Don’t change the channel or turn off the radio, copy?”

  “Um . . . copy.”

  “Atta girl. Ten-four.”

  I almost say it back, but feel a little silly, then feel even sillier that something so stupid would make me feel silly in the first place.

  “He’s got a point,”Charlie says. “About Vegas. It’s not like that’s a big self-sustaining agricultural community. If they lose power, that’s it.”

  “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if.’ ”

  “I need to ask you something.”Charlie grips the top of the steering wheel with both hands, staring straight ahead. A tan Chevy pickup drives in front of us, its bed piled high with camping gear.

  “Okay.”

  “What would you be willing to do to make it stop?”

  “All this?”I say. “Are you crazy? Anything!”

  “Anything.”

  “Yes! Charlie, what is it, did you find something at Riley’s?”

  “How far could you really go, Abby?”

  My excitement pivots to suspicion. “What do you mean, how far?”

  “I mean how far, Abby?”

  “Charlie—”

  “Could you kill?”

  I stare at his profile. His jaw is set.

  “Who?”

  “So you could,”he says right away.

  “No, I—”

  “You didn’t say no,”Charlie insists. “You went immediately to ‘who.’ To a subjective judgment call. You’re implying that some person’s death would be okay but another’s might not be.”

  “All I said was who, Charlie. What did you find, goddammit? And why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “I’m not saying I found anything. But the word ‘sacrifice’ did keep showing up. Which makes sense, since nearly every world religion ever known is based on sacrifice in one way or another. Sacrificing the self to service, or sacrificing a person to a god, whatever. It’s a common theme.”

  “So you think—”

  “I don’t think,”Charlie says. “I said I don’t know. I’m just trying to sort through what I read last night, and that’s a word that kept cropping up, that’s all. It worries me.”

  I shift in my seat to look out the side window. “I’m not getting into a morality debate. If you don’t have anything helpful to say, then don’t bring it up.”

  I feel him eyeing me, but ignore it. We drive for a long time in silence, right up until Orson crackles to life on the CB.

  “Abby, you there? Come back.”

  “Here I am. Yes. I’m here.”

  “All right, here’s what I got,”Orson says. “95 is not free and clear, but it’s currently doing better than anything else that way. That could all change by the time you get there. You got a map?”

  “We have a paper map and a GPS.”

  “Don’t know how much longer that’ll be any good. Use your paper map. Take all the back roads you can. The major arteries are clogging up. People are running like hell. It’s a great big mess out there.”

  “Yeah. We’ve seen it.”

  “All right, then. You stay in touch you need anything else, hear?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, yes.”

  “Good. And, hey, Abby?”

  “Yes?”

  “You into prayin’ much?”

  I don’t know how long I hesitate, only that I do. “Not much, no.”

  “Well, you might wanna reconsider, the way things’re going,”Orson says. “Not to throw no Bibles at you or nothin’. You take care now. Orson out.”

  I cradle the mic. The CB stays dead. We stay quiet. When the Wrangler finally coughs itself out of gas, Charlie dumps the two cans of extra into it and we’re off again.

  Selby, as far as I can tell, sleeps through all of this until Charlie starts the Jeep up again. When she speaks, I jump.

  “There’re no planes,”she says.

  I whip around. “Hey. You all right?”

  “Stop asking me that. There’re no planes.”

  I don’t roll down the window, but scan the sky as best I can. “No, you’re right. A couple army helicopters went by an hour ago or so, but—”

  “And jets,”Charlie grumbled. “We’ve seen three so far.”

  “How much are you guys not telling me?”

  Her question surprises me. Charlie, too, I think.

  “I’m not an idiot, remember? You’re hiding shit. What is it? Just tell me.”

  Charlie grits his teeth. “Riley’s dead. He shot himself in the head. But then he came back. Or something got in him and made him come back.”

/>   “I see.”

  “It’s bad,”I tell her. “The things out there, they’re just . . . they’re tearing everything apart.”

  “I see.”

  “Any theories?”I ask, only partly kidding.

  Selby lets her head shake slowly back and forth. “Not at this juncture. I think I’ll be taking another pill now.”

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “No. I choose to medicate.”Selby pulls the bottle from her jeans carefully, so as not to move her belly any more than necessary. She swallows one of the pills and wipes her mouth. I struggle to see if she’s more pale than usual, but can’t tell.

  Another jet streaks past, gone by the time we hear it.

  “How am I going to explain this?”I say, half to Selby and half to myself, watching the jet disappear. “My dad will never—”

  “You don’t know how to explain because you can’t explain it.”Selby’s eyes have closed again. “We don’t have language for it. I’m not stupid. Maybe you missed that memo.”

  “No. I didn’t miss it.”

  “There’s no language for it because the language doesn’t exist on this level,”Selby goes on, speaking in one long breath. “When we talk about subatomic or cosmic levels, which is what we’re talking about, then language gets superfluous. Things are either too small or too big to even talk about. You can only use math.”

  “Okay,”I say cautiously, giving Charlie a worried glance. He returns it. I don’t know where this sudden lecture is coming from, and it sinks hard into my stomach. If Selby’s blathering, talking nonsense, that’s definitely a bad sign. But who can tell if she is? Her science is way beyond my English.

  Selby coughs out a weak chuckle. “Jesus, Abby. I’m trying to help you here. I’m not crazy.”

  It sounds like she’s read my mind. I don’t answer.

  “The problem is that there are places in the universe where even math doesn’t work anymore. Can you imagine that? Now, that sounds like hell to me. No logic, no systems. Nothing you can count on. That’s hell.”

  “What kind of places?”Charlie says.

  “Black holes. Singularities. Places like that. Did you know that, Charlie? Did you know that there are things we don’t even have a theoretical basis to observe? It’s that weird out there. When we talk about things so big or so small that talking means nothing, well, then what’s there to talk about?”

  Out ahead of us, a jet screams past. I watch it fly over thick plumes of smoke, which seem to rise from every direction. I wonder where it’s going, what good it can do.

  “I don’t understand,”I say.

  Selby takes a slow breath before answering. “Physics is eternal.”

  Then her eyes flutter to a close, and she takes another breath and falls asleep.

  “Did you get any of that?”I say to Charlie.

  “No. But now I’m glad she’s still with us. When she’s feeling better, maybe she’ll come up with a way out of this.”

  “Besides killing someone.”

  “Yeah. Besides that.”

  We drive on.

  26

  Then

  * * *

  The cave mouth yawned in a vertical slit right in one side of the base of a mountain, only wide enough for one of us at a time. For some reason it reminded me of ice, like a giant cube of it had cracked under pressure. As I followed behind Charlie—unsure how I got elected to go second, or why it would even matter—I also became aware of a strange aspect to the cave: There was no smell.

  We’d spent the night in a cheap motel not far from Tucson, three rooms total. I made sure Alex got the middle room, because on the chance the walls were thin—and they almost certainly were—I didn’t want to risk hearing anything Charlie and Selby might be doing overnight.

  The trip to the cave went uneventfully, though it took us a solid hour on the freeway, and another hour bumping through the desert in a vehicle never designed to go off-road. But following Charlie’s notes and map, at last we’d pulled up beside the entrance. When we did, I got struck with a peculiar déjà vu, even though I’d never been there before.

  Having not spent an extraordinary amount of time in any caves, anywhere, ever, I don’t know what I’d been expecting. An odor of bat crap, if nothing else. Maybe something musty or moldy or damp. But the cave had no discernible scent at all. I could detect the faint odor of Selby’s cigarettes on her clothes, and the pleasant scent of desert plants, but that was it.

  Charlie removed a few nylon bags from the RV, and slung the largest over his shoulders. He lifted one of the others, a plain black Jansport.

  “This one’s food and water,”he said, handing it to Selby. She took it without complaint. Alex and I took the others.

  “What’s all in here?”I asked.

  “Camera, infrared, EMF detector, triangulation mics, stuff like that,”Charlie said.

  “You know this gear is all pseudo,”Selby said as she shrugged into her backpack.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why you’re not carrying it.”

  “We’re a pretty gosh-darn bright group of kids,”Alex said, grinning. “Looking to capture good footage of real ghosts. I think we’re gonna be famous!”

  Charlie pulled out flashlights and handed them to us—two heavy-duty police-style ones, a couple cheap plastic types stamped with EVEREADY on the side, and two headlamps on elastic headbands. Alex pulled on one, Charlie the other. Selby and I took flashlights.

  Following Charlie, we went in.

  Our flashlights pierced the gloom like needles through black leather. For one fraction of a second, I had the absurd impulse to douse everyone’s lights and just be plunged into this darkness, an emptiness I had never experienced before in my life. There’s not a lot of literal darkness in Henderson, Nevada, so close to Vegas. Metaphorical darkness, maybe, but not the real thing.

  And back home, we had noise. Maybe not New York City noise, at least as I imagined it, but residual noise—or maybe it’s just imaginary sounds wafting over the suburbs from the casinos. In any case, this cave was silent. I had nothing to compare it to. Quiet so deep I almost lost my balance.

  We pushed about ten yards through the narrow crevice opening and into a massive first chamber. A couple school buses stacked bumper to bumper vertically could fit inside. I expected stalactites and stalagmites, but again my expectations came to nothing: the ceiling appeared quite smooth, dimpled only by occasional holes and bumps of rock. The floor felt slippery from hard stone coated in fine gravel and dirt.

  “This isn’t so bad,”Alex said. “You want me to shoot any of this?”

  “Not yet,”Charlie said. “Let’s just stroll along and we’ll shoot if we find something.”

  “Something like this, you mean?”I said.

  They came over to where I stood beside one wall. On it, several glyphs had been etched into the stone. Barely visible.

  Charlie ran his fingers over one of them. “That’s . . .”

  “Yeah,”I said.

  Selby shot us both suspicious looks. “What? What are you two talking about?”

  Charlie dug in his bag and produced Dr. Prinn’s book. He flipped through it for a moment before stopping on a page and pointing at a symbol sketched in ink.

  “That’s it,”Charlie said. “They match. Holy shit.”

  “X marks the spot?”I said.

  “Looks like it,”Charlie said. He raised an index finger, lifting it toward the painting, but did not touch it. “These markings may be thirty thousand years old or more,”he said with wonder in his voice.

  “Your dad had been here before?”Alex asked, squinting from the page to the cave wall.

  “I don’t think so, at least not to my knowledge,”Charlie said. “I think these are symbols he found during his research.”

  “There’re more of them in the book,”I said. “All over the place. I wonder if . . .”

  Charlie glanced at me. Even in the darkness I could see the agreement in his eyes.

&n
bsp; “Only one way to find out,”he said.

  “What?”Selby demanded. “What is it?”

  Charlie led the way again, deeper into the labyrinth, while Selby scrambled to keep up. “Goddammit, what are you two talking about?”

  “There will be more symbols,”I said. “I mean, there might be more symbols, the deeper we go. They’ll point us to . . . to something.”

  “That’s insane,”Selby said.

  “Yeah, probably,”I said, because I didn’t want to get into it with her. She wasn’t going to change my mind, and I wasn’t going to change hers.

  At first the cave offered only one long, tunneled route, so we followed it. The floor continued to slope downward, and I tried not to dwell on the mountain overhead. As we went deeper, the mountain went higher; who knew how deep this could go?

  The tunnel finally emptied into another cavern, about the size of the first. Several branches snaked out from the cavern, as if a colossal squid had once stretched out its tentacles and bored through the solid rock. I counted ten options of where to go next, and those were just the ones we could walk through easily; besides them were six more crevices we’d have to crawl through. I suddenly thought about the entrance again, how narrow it had been . . . and compared it to how big and broad this passage had been so far, as if we were in the broad end of a funnel, with the entrance a tight spout.

  “There’s more markings,”Alex said.

  I hadn’t seen them at first, but as we stopped and looked around, I saw another symbol carved into the rock beside one of the branch tunnels. I flashed my light around and checked out a couple of the other caves. They, too, had symbols beside them: a figure or design had been etched beside each opening, like prehistoric address numbers. Even at a distance, I thought I could recognize animals like wolves painted in dim reds and yellows and faded blacks, while others seemed to look like repeating patterns of diamonds chipped into the rock itself.

  “Which one?”Alex asked as we flashed our beams at the passages.

  “There,”Charlie said, pointing.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second,”Selby said, taking a step back from Charlie.