The Electric Kingdom

by David Arnold

  Echo had lowered the deer carcass from the tree, roasted a large chunk over the firepit. As he did this, he’d explained how his mother had taught him to carry the carcass at least a mile downriver, dress and clean the animal there, before hauling it back here. “Don’t bleed where you eat, she used to say.”

  Echo ate like an animal.

  Like it was his first and last meal.

  Kit was a little scared of Echo. But when he thought of the bones under the tree, and the little grave, mostly, Kit felt sad for him.

  “What do you do when a swarm comes?” asked Monty. “It’s one thing, walking through the woods with nowhere to hide. Can’t imagine living every day like that.”

  Echo calmly walked to the pantry, opened the door, got down on his knees, and began pulling up planks in the floorboards. They crowded around, looked over his shoulder to find a hole in the ground. Lined with tarp, it was maybe four feet deep, and about as wide as Kit’s beanbag chair in the Taft library.

  “I always wanted to live in a big house.” Staring into this hole, Echo’s voice seemed to take on the qualities of his name. “A house with many rooms. I tried to convince Mom that we should move. She always said, ‘We can’t evade Flies. But we can evade people.’”

  Kit tried to imagine Echo in this hole with his mom and brother, cramped and scared, waiting out a swarm. And it occurred to him then that there might be more than one kind of grave.

  sleeping arrangements

  One thing that was good: there had been no mention of Nico and Harry leaving. Kit wasn’t sure what to make of that, or how long it would last, but he wasn’t going to ask questions.

  When they were done with dinner, Nico took Harry outside to pee, while everyone started claiming spots around the cabin, spreading out sleeping pads and settling in. Monty set up a mattress for Loretta beside the woodstove. “Thanks again for letting us stay,” he said. “Lifesaver, no joke.”

  Echo lay down on a mattress in the corner, St. John curled by his feet. “If you say so.”

  Eyes on the cat, Kit wondered, “Don’t you get lonely out here?” and only when he heard the room’s collective inhale, as everyone paused the unfurling of sleeping bags and bedrolls, did he realize he’d said it out loud.

  “My mom used to keep a journal,” said Echo. As he spoke, he stared at the ceiling. “Not a diary, nothing too personal. Just a daily log. Our lives here in the cabin. Maintaining the Cormorant. Dumb shit like that. I read it after she did what she did. The last entry was from weeks ago, just as she was starting to lose it. You know what it said?” Echo paused, though no one was about to venture a guess. “‘We started as make-believe, but now we’re very real.’”

  The line sounded familiar, like it was close to something Kit had read before, only not quite right.

  “I don’t blame Mom for pretending the Cormorant was part of some grand adventure,” said Echo. “It gave us purpose. I guess I miss that. But you stop feeling lonely once you realize the truth.”

  “Which is what?” asked Monty.

  “We’re all alone to begin with.”

  Slowly, quietly, the room began to breathe again, and everyone went back to preparing bedrolls.

  Nico and Harry returned and, looping her arms through her backpack, she announced that she and Harry were going to sleep by the river.

  “Really?” asked Lennon.

  “Is that okay with you?”

  “Of course. I just meant—there’s room here. It’s warmer. And safer.”

  Kit thought he saw her eyes flit to Echo. “Maybe,” she said. “But Harry gets up in the night, he’d step all over you guys. If a swarm comes, we’re close.”

  As Kit worked on his own backpack, loosening the cord around his bedroll, his eyes landed on the stick-figure drawing of Mommy and Me and Elefint, and in his head, he saw the woman with the huge eyeglasses leaning over one of the mattresses, telling bedtime stories to her kids while the little one snuggled Elefint, and just as Kit was thinking how little he wanted to sleep here—

  “You can join us if you want,” said Nico.

  Please be talking to me, please be talking to me . . .

  He looked up.

  She was looking at him. “Unless you’d rather keep near the woodstove, which I totally unders—”

  “No.” Kit rerolled his bedding, tucked it under one arm, and stood. “I’ll come with you. To sleep by the Cormorant. With you and Harry.”

  revelation, a bedtime story

  It was cold by the river, but Kit didn’t care. He sprinkled cinnamon, which he no longer believed in, but he didn’t care about that either.

  He’d been invited.

  Dale Carnegie and those sixteen million brains were coming through in a big way. Maybe they weren’t full of s-h-i-t, as he’d originally suspected.

  He sprinkled the pointless cinnamon, and watched Nico, who was supposed to be gathering kindling and firewood, but had gotten distracted. From here, he saw her outline in the light of the moon: hood up, wrapped in that long black coat, standing on the train tracks by the river, staring up at the Cormorant. Whatever piece of Kit compulsively painted the same thing over and over again knew that he would follow her anywhere. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even friendship, though he was glad to have her as a friend. It was the same feeling he’d had back in that synthetic town, before the wave of Flies had washed over everything, when he’d stood in the middle of a road and known beyond all doubt, I’ve been here before.

  What was troubling—what stirred the very depths of his psyche—was that this feeling, when applied to Nico, felt like fate. As if she and his Dakota stood at opposite ends of the same path. And while Kit couldn’t see the path, he knew very well where his Dakota stood: at his beginning, the start of all things.

  He continued shaking the stupid cinnamon, trying not to think about the logical conclusion of his little path analogy.

  NICO

  Words

  "Meta,” said Kit. “That’s a good one. You know it?”

  On her hands and knees, Nico blew into the tiny flame, watched it become a slightly bigger flame. “Refresh my memory?”

  “Meta is something that refers to itself, but also feels sort of like an inside joke. Also, there’s irony, which is a word I always think I understand until I don’t. Like how you think you know yourself until you don’t, like when my Dakota puts mushrooms in the primavera, seeing as how they’re Lakie’s favorite, and I always think I won’t like them, but then they’re delicious.”

  Dakota. Nico had heard the name once, though the last time Kit mentioned it, he’d quickly changed the subject.

  Lakie. This was a new one.

  Nico continued working on the fire as Kit discussed his favorite words—ancient, doohickey, cerulean, balsamic, midwifery—and she smiled and listened and did not ask about Dakota and Lakie, knowing there had been six in this group, that only four had survived, and how important it was to keep those you loved alive, even if only in your head.

  Language was the giveaway: he’d used their names in the present tense.

  He kept talking, and she kept working on the fire, her mind wandering. It probably said a lot that she found a night outdoors, under threat of Fly and stranger, as potentially safer than an overnight in a cabin with Echo. The kid was next-level sad, there was no doubt. Clearly, the Cormorant had once been a point of pride for him and for his family (as the Bell was for Nico and hers), and while she didn’t envy his sadness, she did envy the liveliness she’d noticed in his eyes and voice earlier tonight.

  Because she knew now what that liveliness was: certainty.

  Echo had no questions. His family was gone, and that was horrible, but it was done. Whatever faith he’d had in the Cormorant, and his mother’s stories, was gone too, and while also horrible, it was also done. If there were many versions of Nico, based on various forks in the road ah
ead, Echo was one of those versions played out to the end. She certainly did not want to end up like him, but part of her did envy that finality.

  Regardless, she couldn’t leave yet. Too many questions needed answering, and for now too many ears were around to hear. In the morning, she would find a way to get Echo alone.

  “Hi.” She looked up to find Lennon standing there, bedroll, sleeping bag, and backpack in his arms. “Yes, hello. I am here to protect the women and children, seeing as how they’re so helpless and frail and whatnot.” He smiled, looked at his feet, then back up. “That was a joke.”

  “Hilarious.” Nico smiled a little and couldn’t help wondering about his motives for wanting to sleep out here with them. “Well, come on, then.”

  Once the fire was going, they settled into their sleeping bags and took turns telling stories. Harry padded over to Kit, and rolled onto his back to participate in this most ancient and sacred of rituals: kid rubs dog’s belly; dog gives kid joy; all is right in the world.

  To be a dog.

  Lennon told a story about a planet where it’s never night because there are six suns—until one day, the moon eclipses them all, and nighttime falls, and the civilization, driven mad by the darkness, burns itself to the ground.

  Kit told a story about a kind alien with healing powers who, being abandoned on Earth, forms a close friendship with a lonely boy.

  As Voyager in the Water had gone through quite the transformation these past few days—from childhood favorite to her mission’s supposed blueprint to an absolute enigma—she told a few stories from the oral collection her father had always called Tales from Faraway Frozen Places. As they spoke, St. John the cat—apparently too curious about the newcomers to stay inside the cabin—joined their circle, strutting around the fire, tail up. Harry held his position, but with ears perked, a low-key growl, and while Nico had no experience with cats, she was reasonably certain St. John knew exactly what she was doing to her poor dog.

  Up on the hill, the cabin was silent. Smoke from the woodstove rose into the air, dissolving into the cold sky.

  “Hey, Kit,” said Nico.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s a cat’s favorite color?”

  Kit sat up on his elbows. “I don’t know.”

  “Purrrrrple.”

  Only when it appeared—that pure, little kid smile—did Nico realize it was exactly what she’d been trying to uncover.

  She went for it again. “Where do generals keep their armies?”

  “Where?”

  “In their sleevies.”

  The smile broke into full-on laughter, and when Lennon asked what a corn on the cob calls its dad, Kit was primed for takeoff. “What does corn call its dad?” he asked.

  “Popcorn,” said Lennon.

  Ultimate, life-giving laughter.

  The three of them went on like this, until eventually Kit fell asleep midsentence. And for the second night in a row, Nico found herself beside a fire with Lennon.

  She pulled out her pen, added the fifth tally to her hand.

  “I really am sorry,” Lennon said. “About earlier. I wasn’t trying to suggest you couldn’t take care of yourself.”

  Nico opened her mouth to say it was fine, that she knew she could take care of herself, and when you know something as truth, it takes a lot more than a suggestion of untruth to make it false—but instead what came out was, “Who’s Dakota?”

  Lennon looked over at Kit, his little sleeping bag slowly rising and falling. “That was his mother. I never met her. She died before our groups combined.”

  “And Lakie?”

  A beat, a shadow across his eyes. “Monty’s sister.”

  “But you knew her?”

  “Yeah. Not for very long.”

  “‘They took two. And I watched it happen.’”

  “What?”

  “That day I saw you,” said Nico. “Outside the station. You said you were a group of six. But the Flies took two.”

  Quietly, Lennon told her a story that took place on a baseball field, and Nico remembered what Kit had said about swarms, how they operated like giant octopuses, and all around her she felt the weight of the wild woods: trees that took a hundred years or more to shape, a river whose birth shared the same breath as the formation of the skies and mountains, and in the spirit of that ancient gasp, Nico uttered the most human of phrases: “I’m so sorry.”

  The fire popped; Kit rustled, turned on his side, snored.

  “He’s just a kid,” said Lennon. “I hate that he had to see something like that.”

  “We’re all kids.” Even as she said it, she knew it was one of those things that should be true, and maybe once was. But in a world consumed by Flies, kids were adults and adults were nowhere. How long you’d been alive only meant something when life itself wasn’t a luxury.

  “Jean used to say, ‘The Age of the Fly is the Age of no ages.’”

  “Geez, Jean.”

  Lennon laughed. “Yeah, she was a thinker.”

  “I like it, though. The Age of the Fly.”

  Lennon smiled and Nico felt like someone had built a little fire in her face.

  Later, the last one awake, she thought about what Lennon had said: The Age of the Fly is the Age of no ages. Listening to the nearby river, feeling her own presence among the mountains and trees, it was comforting to think that all these ancient things had been here long before the Flies. They’d been here before technology, before the countless Electronics, before basic inventions and wars and even further back, to drawings on cave walls and first fire, and before the birth of the first human, whatever that looked like. Surely these things would be here long after the Flies too.

  Surely.

  Voices

  In a dream, Nico stood in Kairos Castle by the fountain of spinning water, and she asked what she’d come to ask: How can I fight this darkness? A voice, both close by and out of reach, answered in muted words, and Nico tried to pull herself from sleep, that panicky sense of a nearby stranger, but she slept on, and by morning had no memory of the voice, or the four words it spoke: “We’ve been here before.”

  PART FIVE

  IN

  THE

  WORLD

  CONSUMED

  NICO

  Nephologies

  She’d always had a strong affection for clouds. From the attic deck, they seemed exotic, free. So many kinds of clouds, so many names and behaviors, some drifting endlessly, never changing, some blanketing the earth as if the sky were a cloud. Some moved fast, emptying themselves before disappearing into thin air, and these were the ones Nico was most interested in, the ones that revealed the true foundation of her affection: that even the biggest, darkest cloud had once been small and bright.

  Fogs

  The following morning, Echo had disappeared into thin air.

  No one saw him leave, or if they had, they weren’t saying so. There was some attempt at a search. They spread out around the cabin, called his name, and while they didn’t find him, their search did turn up two unexpected things: a real shovel and a fresh grave.

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” said Lennon.

  They stood in a circle around the small grave, only now, there was a second mound of snow and dirt beside it, with a second homemade cross. After checking under the bloodied-up tree, Lennon confirmed that the hollow skull (and bony, gun-clutching hand) of Mrs. Leibowitz had disappeared too. “Still a few of her teeth, though.”

  “So in the middle of the night, Echo decides, Hey, perfect time to bury Mom.” Monty held the shovel in his hands, as if asking it for answers. “And then he takes off?”

  “Could he have gone hunting?” asked Lennon.

  “Again,” said Monty. “In the middle of the night?”

  Loretta said all the rifles were present and accounted for, not to menti
on Lennon had confiscated the bullets. Nico watched her as she talked, thought she looked a little better in the light of day, more refreshed, some color in her cheeks. “He came out of the woods,” said Nico, feeling completely deflated, frustrated, mad at herself for not asking him questions when she’d had the chance. “Maybe he just went back in.”

  It was early still, a gunky fog hovered over the river, coating everything in dream-haze. This morning, Nico had been the first to rise, shaking the frost from her sleeping bag, refilling her filter bottle in the Merrimack. She’d dipped her hands in the ice-cold water, allowed herself a moment to feel its chill run up her arms and neck, closed her eyes, and thought, I’d murder for a bath. And when she’d turned around, Harry was right beside her, his eyes full of things to say.

  He had that look now, here, by this new grave.

  Whatever happened last night, you saw it, didn’t you, bud?

  Harry’s eyes were too busy tracking a nearby squirrel to answer.

  KIT

  oh, wood’s forgotten glory!

  Kit sat on the dirty floor of the dead woman’s cabin.

  He listened to the others talk, feeling positive they’d forgotten he was even there, and so, becoming fixated on a knot in the floorboard.

  Dark and circular, spiraling into itself, this knot had been part of the cabin from day one, had witnessed the rise and fall of the Leibowitz family, the birth and death of the Elefint-lover, the madness of Echo, the sadness of Echo’s mother. I know it hurts! the knot had tried to tell them all. I know you are sick or sad or both, and you want to go sit by that tree and put a gun under your chin, but that gun will only shatter your teeth and give you a weird flap on the top of your head, and the Flies will make off with what’s left, and then you’ll have nothing, no rivers of life. You’ll be like me, a pitiful little knot in the floorboard that no one even knows exists.