Madelyn's Nephew

by Ike Hamill

  He was pointing—not to the marsh, but straight up.

  She finally followed the direction of his finger. The stars lit up the sky in their familiar pattern, but there was more to see. Moving against the bright smear of the Milky Way, she saw dark cutouts obscuring patches of the sky. They moved fast, like darting hummingbirds. These were too big to be birds though.

  Madelyn blinked and tracked a few of them. She looked back to David for an explanation. He motioned her forward and she moved closer until his lips were tickling her ear. He spoke with barely a breath. She felt like she was interpreting only the movement of his lips.

  “I can’t move fast. Need help.”

  She raised her arms—what did he expect her to do?

  He leaned in again.

  “Lead them towards stream. I’ll go to the cabin.”

  Madelyn pulled back. She wished she could see his eyes. Was he really that desperate? Of course her first reaction was to shake her head and walk away. What he was asking was pure insanity. A person in their right mind wouldn’t have even come out in the presence of Roamers. To purposefully try to lead them away was suicide.

  It was impossible to believe that David was asking her to do it. A thousand times, he had made it clear that they were all on their own. People lived and died by their own wits and their own survival instinct. Still, she had always believed that he would lay down his own life for her if the time came. Was it unreasonable that he was asking her to do the same?

  “Yes,” she whispered. She meant to say, “Yes, of course it’s unreasonable for him to ask her to risk her life. This was his fault. He was the one who went out hunting and got stuck outside as night came. He was the one who had stayed away more than twenty-four hours on some fool’s mission for ego nourishment. He was stupid and wrong to ask her to lead the Roamers away from her cabin so that he would have a chance to live.” But only the single word came out: “Yes.” He grabbed one of her hands in both of his and shook it with his thanks. She imagined that he was crying in the dark.

  David began to limp towards the dark part of the woods. There were certainly Roamers in there. He was depending on her.

  Madelyn tilted her head back and let out a slow breath. People were trouble. Even when they seemed to come with no attachments, they wormed their way into her life and caused her pain. She opened her eyes and looked at the things in the sky. They were new. She had no idea what they were. Maybe David had some information. Maybe this new phenomenon was somehow responsible for his predicament. It might be useful information to have.

  She was talking herself into this crazy idea.

  Was this the person she wanted to be?

  She whispered a resigned answer.

  “Yes.”

  # # # # #

  Madelyn moved fast, with no attempt to disguise her noise. She waited until she was back on the path and a few hundred meters east of David before she turned on her light. It took almost of a minute of jogging before she heard the first clicks.

  They were masked by the noise of her feet.

  She kept the light on and listened. It felt like looking down the barrel of a gun. She couldn’t do it long before her nerves made her hand shake the light. The clicking ramped up fast. It sounded like someone was running their thumbnail down the teeth of a comb.

  Madelyn ran.

  She knew every centimeter of the path. It was her standard route every time she wanted to go fishing. She knew how to move down that path without leaving a trail or making a sound. She didn’t bother with any of that. Madelyn needed them to follow her.

  Behind her, she could hear them gathering.

  They locked-in to a single clicking siren behind her.

  They were coming fast.

  In the woods or out in the marsh, they would have already caught her. As far as she knew, it was the exposed rocks on the path that slowed them down. She had no idea why, and had no intention of slowing down to ask.

  The path swept by the stream. She kept running.

  She didn’t need the shallow, bubbling part. She needed the place under the spill of the big rocks. That’s where the pool was.

  Madelyn slowed a little to catch her breath. She willed her heart to slow down. It wouldn’t obey.

  The clicking grew to a crescendo. It was joined by a new source from up over the hill. She hadn’t expected that. They were cutting off her turn to the north. She wasn’t going to make it.

  Madelyn heard the sound rise. The frequency of the clicks increased, until it was almost a low hum. There were almost the fingerprints of a song in there. It was nearly hypnotic.

  Madelyn was cooked—they were coming on the path ahead of her, and closing from behind. She did the only thing she could think of. She veered to her right and jumped off the rock.

  After brief freedom in the air, she fell.

  Madelyn hit the water and felt her heart race. It was freezing cold. Even in the middle of the day, the water would chill her to the bone. At night, the cold felt like daggers, piercing her skin. She dove under the water. It was deepest near the big rock. Madelyn dove to the bottom and reached for something to grab ahold of. Her hands found a heavy stone. By lifting it, she was forced down. She sat underwater on the rocks and lifted the stone into her lap.

  She pulled it tight to her stomach. It was her drowning baby. She looked up at blackness.

  In the rainy season, water crashed over the top of the big boulder. This time of year, the water fell politely around the side of the rock. Still, the noise was enough that it blotted out the clicking of the Roamers. She had no idea what they were doing.

  Madelyn tried to play it out in her head.

  They would sweep the area with their clicks and scan for her heat. With no sign of her, they would each begin searching. At first, their search would be small. Gradually, their radius would become larger and more chaotic. Eventually, they would spread out and it would be safe for her to come up.

  How long would that take? Ten minutes? An hour?

  However long the process, it was definitely too long for Madelyn. Her drowning baby was already starting to kick. Madelyn let the rock slip between her legs. She eased it back down. She let the running water carry her downstream as she surfaced. Her head breached first. She took in a breath as she listened.

  The clicking had calmed. She could hear the gaps between the sounds and it seemed more faint. Still, she held her body down in the freezing water and shivered as she took in another breath. They weren’t smart, but there was a better than even chance that they would find her. Her heat would wash downstream and lead them back to her hiding place. She couldn’t stay put.

  David should have arranged for a signal. Upon making it safely back, he could have made his way up to Sacrifice Rock to fire off a gun. Then she would know it was safe to come home. Maybe it was better this way. Since they didn’t have a signal, she could assume she was clear to return.

  Madelyn kicked against the stream until she was touching the big boulder. She worked her way to the east side before she climbed. The Roamers were often slowed by running water. She might be right to assume that there were fewer on the far side.

  When she climbed up, she paused with her head just above the boulder. Madelyn peered at the dark woods for a minute before she trusted the silence. She climbed up, cursing the sound of the dripping water.

  Chapter 6

  {Nephew}

  “Wait,” Jacob said, interrupting her, “you got away from Roamers by hiding under water?”

  Madelyn blinked. She hadn’t meant to tell him the story. She looked back to the skull. Looking into the sockets where David’s eyes had been, she had just started talking. She wasn’t even pointing the gun at the kid anymore.

  She sighed and motioned to him.

  “Come on outside,” she said. If this was to be done, it had to be quick. Apparently, she couldn’t trust herself.

  Jacob swallowed. He obeyed her order.

  She set the dusty skull down a
nd followed him out. He didn’t even try to run.

  “Sit,” she said.

  Her nephew sat on the edge of the porch. His legs dangled over the place where here grandmother had always tried to grow roses. Every year she would plant the things. Every year they would die. Madelyn sat down next to him. She looked at the scattergun. It would all be so much easier if she could just pull the trigger.

  She set it down.

  Jacob let his shoulders relax a little.

  Madelyn pulled her long knife from the sheath clipped to her belt. She felt the edge with her thumb. She reached down with one hand and pulled her ankle up on top of her other knee.

  “It has been years since I had to incinerate David. I’ll tell you how this works,” she said. She pushed up her pant leg, revealing her calf. She had a series of horizontal scars up the side of her leg. The one on top—David’s scar—was a lumpy mess of shiny skin.

  She put the blade against her leg, a centimeter higher than David’s scar. She slapped the back of the blade, cutting herself.

  Madelyn didn’t react. Jacob sucked in a surprised breath.

  “You make a cut when you lose someone you love,” she said. “I loved my brother once.” She handed the knife to Jacob. He looked at her blood.

  “While the cut is healing, you’re not allowed to think of him. If you do, you cut again in the same place. Once the scab falls off on its own, you’re allowed to think of your father again. Got it?”

  She looked at Jacob. He was staring at her bleeding leg.

  “How many is that?” Jacob asked. He pointed the knife at her leg.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She put her leg down and the blood ran towards her sock. She pulled up her other leg and pushed up her pants. “There’s more on this one.”

  Jacob’s eyes went wide as he looked at her other leg. She had dozens of scars there. Maybe there were a hundred—she had never counted.

  Eventually, he nodded and crossed his own legs. He held the knife against his flesh. Her blood mixed with his as he copied her gesture and slapped the back of the knife. It cut deep. Madelyn looked at her nephew and saw the tears in his eyes. When he blinked, they spilled down his cheeks. He put the knife down on the porch.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re going to want to spray some helpers on that before it gets infected.”

  She rolled down her pants and stood. She extended a hand and helped him up.

  “You didn’t finish your story about David,” he said. “What happened after you climbed out of the stream.”

  She began to walk towards the door.

  “I’ll tell you another time,” she said.

  She turned back and saw him pick up the scattergun. He held it by the stock with it pointing towards the ground. She opened the door and waved him inside.

  # # # # #

  After they were bandaged, Madelyn took her nephew down the stairs and then into the tight compartment. The elevator lowered them down to the storage and utility chambers.

  “I don’t have a lot of need to come down here anymore,” she said. “It’s a little creepy, if you ask me.”

  When they reached the bottom, the doors slid apart. The lights were automatic. The air was perfectly dry. It still smelled like mildew. She walked over to the panel.

  “Have you seen a second generation Q-bat before?”

  “In old books,” he said.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” she said. She motioned towards the control panel. She would give him the basics and then let him go through the controls on his own.

  Madelyn didn’t get the chance. Without permission, he reached up and began paging through the controls.

  He mumbled to himself as he examined the setup. “Water, heat, waste, compost, air, and food. Why do you have all that wood stacked outside?”

  “Several reasons,” she said.

  He looked at her. She realized that he was waiting for her to elaborate.

  “For one, it’s important to keep the woods clear. You can’t just leave everything to grow together all tangled. It makes it impossible to get around. Second, it’s good exercise. Chopping and splitting works a ton of different muscles.”

  He was still looking at her like he wasn’t convinced.

  “My grandmother always burned wood and I like it. I like the smell.”

  “This thing could probably generate the smell,” he said.

  “I don’t use the organic production. It’s not natural,” she said.

  Jacob didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He had gone past the controls and was working his way through the reporting.

  “How is this thing only at eighty-percent? Don’t you ever update it?”

  His finger hovered over the button. Madelyn pushed him out of the way.

  “No!” she yelled. “Don’t you dare.”

  She had shoved him too hard. He caught himself at the expense of putting too much pressure on his cut leg. He grimaced and bent over to put his hand against the bandage.

  Madelyn refused to apologize.

  “Don’t ever update. Everything is working just fine and I don’t need it screwed up by something pulled down from the ether.”

  “It’s all regression-tested,” he said. “It wouldn’t mess it up—even a dinosaur like this one.”

  “As long as I’m alive, we operate by my rules. When you inherit this place, you can mess it up to your heart’s content.”

  Jacob didn’t answer.

  She waited a minute. It looked like he had something to say.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll show you the external controls. I don’t have them labelled. The incinerator out in the yard is hooked up to the gamma loop. You set the duration here. Fifteen minutes is plenty. This time of year, I’ll loop the energy back into the water pump here. If it were winter, I might run it through environmental, but we’ve still got some warm days ahead. Engage here and we’re done.”

  Jacob nodded. He probably could have figured it out by himself.

  A warning indicated that there was insufficient organic material to warrant incineration. Madelyn told the panel to ignore the warning. The organic sensor was flaky at best.

  “I prefer to stay underground while it runs. It’s safer. Come in here.”

  She showed him into the sitting room. At one point, she had spent a lot of time down there. She took one chair and Jacob eased down into the other. She turned on the screen. The movie started playing. Madelyn remembered the girl’s face.

  “You’ve got dead pixels,” Jacob said as the girl laughed.

  He was right, of course. There was a whole block of blackness. As the girl moved, she passed behind the black part of the screen. It obscured her mouth as she smiled.

  “You can self-repair that. It doesn’t even have to pull from the ether.”

  “I know,” Madelyn said, “but you can only do it so many times.”

  His voice was flat as he contradicted her. “It’s a million-hour screen. You could literally watch that thing six hours a day for the next four hundred years. Running a pixel repair would maybe take an hour off of the life.”

  “Fine. Run the repair.”

  Jacob stood and used the controls on the side of the machine. He sat back down as colors flashed.

  “You could have waited until we were about to leave,” she said. “Now we can’t watch the movie while we wait.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Tell me about Oslo.”

  Jacob didn’t seem like he was going to answer. He only stared at the flashing colors. They were hypnotic as they danced by. She wasn’t sure, but it looked like part of the dead block was already starting to respond again. She tried to remember how long the thing had been broken. The last time she had watched anything was right after David died. The pixels had been gone since well before that.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Jacob said.

  “Tell me about your family.”

  Chapter 7

&nbs
p; {Oslo}

  “My mother died when she was having my sister. I was mad at my dad because he didn’t seem upset. He told me about his mother—your mother. He said that she died when she was giving birth to his sister. I guess that was you,” Jacob said.

  Madelyn nodded. Their father had never told them as much. It had to be. Madelyn was younger, therefore she was the one who had killed their mother.

  “I was very young. My father raised us in a little room at the back of the high rise. It was less than two-hundred meters from the Civi, so it was very safe before the collapse. We were almost never evacuated. In fact, ever since I turned eight, my sister and I walked to school by ourselves. Our school was down on the third floor.”

  Madelyn smiled at the idea that places still had school. At least they did at one point—she didn’t know what the “collapse” was, but Jacob’s face darkened when he said that word.

  “Dad worked on the food crew. I was an apprentice with Engineering. My sister was studying medicine.”

  Jacob stopped talking. Talking about his family seemed to be a roadblock for him. Madelyn refocused his thoughts.

  “How was the city set up?”

  “We used Cosgrow’s plan,” he said. His smile faded when he saw that she didn’t understand. “It came to us on the ether. It was all theory—nobody had successfully implemented it until Oslo. You have a series of bases for sleeping and nesting. You make no attempt to disguise yourself while you’re there, but you make sure that everything is elevated. We never ventured below the third floor at night. During the day, we would pass through in groups. It was all on a timer. Once you hit the button on three, you had only twenty-four seconds to clear into one of four exits. The exit was strictly chosen at random. Even if you had business to the north, if the south exit came up, you were required to use that exit.”

  Madelyn eased back into her chair and looked up at the ceiling. It was an interesting idea. She had heard theories, years before, that intentions were a vulnerability. Perhaps the randomness removed the spread of intention.

  “Food, equipment, and textiles were all stored separately, at least one kilometer away from a base. One base would replenish a store that another base would use. That eliminates the linear supply flow and confuses any tracking.”

  “I don’t understand why that’s important,” Madelyn said. “I collect and bring back supplies. Nothing seems to be tracked.”