by Ike Hamill
“Lisa better come back soon, that’s all I’m saying,” Romie muttered. “She thinks that all we have to do is water every day and keep the weeds down? She’s forgetting that in a couple of months she would be pulling up all the plants and laying down something else. If she comes back…”
Her little tirade faded to nothing and she shook the map again.
“I wouldn’t count on her getting back this year, Romie,” Brad said.
He cut a glance at her face, but just for a moment. The road that Mike had them on required constant attention. Romie didn’t react.
“She won’t stay away for long. Lisa takes her responsibilities very seriously, and she has responsibilities in Gladstone. When she gets back, we’re going to have a long conversation about everything that happened and then we’re going to settle back into our normal routine.”
“It has been a good routine.”
Against the turmoil of the world, they had created stability. Robby, Romie, Lisa, and Brad had come to a silent agreement about how things would run around the house. They talked about decisions, had dinner together, and always lived up to their commitments. Aside from uncontrollable tragedy, they knew a life of consistency.
“Yes. You’d think that you and Robby would be able to see that.”
“It’s not that we don’t want everything to go back to the way it was,” Brad said. “There’s a storm coming, Romie. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel some of the old strange nonsense stirring around.”
“No,” she practically shouted. Romie folded the map angrily. “No, I don’t. Nobody is disappearing. There’s no snow in the sky. We don’t have a cult forming or plants carrying people away. No. I think you people have grown bored with stability and you’re looking for anything you can to spice things up. If there isn’t a major calamity at the gates, you guys will make one up.”
Brad stabbed the brakes and jerked the wheel. Ahead, the road narrowed down to a little strip. On their left, a sinkhole had claimed a major portion of the path. Brad followed the tire tracks. Someone else had navigated around this hole, so he could too.
“We’re making it up? You think this road will be passable next year, Romie?”
“No,” she waved her hand. “Who cares? There are other roads.”
“From where though?”
“What do you mean? From Donnelly, or from Gladstone. There are roads from everywhere.”
“I mean, who made them?”
“People did. We did. Don’t be stupid, Brad.”
“Yes, people did, but it wasn’t us. We’re using more than we’re creating. That is not sustainable. At one point, people were creating way more than we needed. We created roads, food, toys, books, and gadgets. People created more than the world could use and we threw things away because we had too much. Now, we’re always operating at a deficit. Some roads are repaired occasionally, but we’re losing more than we’re fixing, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe we don’t need so many roads.”
“That’s true,” Brad said. “But it’s not true for everything. We will always need food and shelter. We will always need medicine.”
“Maybe.”
“Come on, Romie. You can’t be that stubborn that you won’t admit that you need these basic things to survive. You like your comfort. You enjoy your air conditioning in the summer…”
“It dries out the air.”
“And your heat in the winter. You’re always turning up the heat.”
“You people are polar bears.”
“So why would you deny that we have to keep these things going? We have to take steps to make sure those things don’t go away.”
Romie shook her head.
“No, Brad, that’s silly. You described the things that I like, but I’m nearly an old woman. The things that I like don’t matter. What are you doing with these kids? Robby raised them with computers, and solar panels, and wind turbines, and hydroponic food. You think that his kids are going to be able to keep that up when he passes? What about their kids? At some point, it’s going to be impossible. Why do you want to set them up to be dependent on things they can’t have? You’re promising a Christmas but you haven’t told them that Santa is already dead.”
“Whoa, Romie, I hope you don’t say that kind of stuff around Janelle.”
“She doesn’t believe in Santa anymore.”
“Still,” Brad said.
Romie folded the map again. When she saw a crossroad with a sign on it, she peered down at the map and then put her finger on that spot. Most of the signs were gone. They had been toppled by rust and wind, or overtaken by trees and shrubs. Romie’s point was evident in the world around them. Even in the places where they had roads to get from point A to B, it could be hard to get there because there was no efficient way to navigate. Just keeping the maps up to date was a chore.
“Robby wants to live down in Gladstone, but if there’s an imaginary crisis, he moves up to Donnelly? What is that teaching the kids? If he seriously believes that he might not be able to get back home, then it wasn’t really his home in the first place.”
Brad thought for a moment.
“I wouldn’t have believed it to be possible, Romie, but you almost have a cogent point.”
She backhanded his arm.
“Are you as tired as you look?” Romie asked.
Brad snapped back awake.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
He slowed down and let the vehicle drift over to the side of the road.
“So why are you stopping?”
“I have to pee, okay?” Brad asked, rolling his eyes. He left his cane next to the seat and angled himself as the door swung open. He couldn’t admit to Romie how close he had come to completely falling asleep. She would probably never ride with him again. “If you want to drive for a bit, it wouldn’t break my heart.”
“You know I won’t do that. I get so stiff that…”
As he walked from the car, he heard her muttered answer fading away.
Brad felt better as he moved around. The blood began to flow in his legs again. He leaned against a tree and started to relieve himself on another. Through the trees he saw the long pink light of the sunset. They had seen beautiful sunsets lately. Brad remembered how soft the light would get near sunset at his house in Maine. The sunlight took on a strange, almost orange, glow and it softened to the point that even trees and rocks would look fuzzy. Brad wondered if the light up there still did that, now that most of the state had been rinsed free of everything by the glacier that had arisen and then melted.
“Brad!” Romie yelled.
“Just a sec,” he said.
He shuffled back quickly. Romie had lowered the window and was leaning across his seat.
“What?”
“Is that normal?” she asked. Her finger was pointing over his shoulder.
When he looked up, Brad’s first instinct was to rub his eyes. The light was flaring in a weird way. It looked almost like…
Brad squinted and looked down. He held his hand straight out in front of himself. There was a shadow on the ground in front of him. It had a blurry outline, but it was a shadow, even though the sun was already falling behind the trees.
“No,” he said. “Not normal.”
“Let’s get going. Take us back to Gladstone. Hell, take us to Donnelly. I don’t care, just get us out of here.”
“Yeah.”
He climbed in behind the wheel again. The thing that he had seen in the sky had left a trail on his eyes. It was so bright that it had been like looking into the sun itself. Romie was still hunched down, looking through the windshield at the sky.
“Don’t,” Brad said. He pushed her back toward her own seat and reached for the keys hanging from the ignition. “You’ll burn you eyes.”
“It’s fine if I squint. It looks like fire. Why would there be fire across the sky?”
“I don’t know. Must be some celestial…”
Brad turned the key and nothi
ng happened. He didn’t even hear a click.
“Some celestial what?”
Brad barely heard her. His attention was focused on the dashboard. When he turned the key, none of the lights came on. They had plenty of problems finding working car batteries after all these years, but he had never seen one go completely bad in the space of two minutes.
“What the hell is going on?” Romie asked. She finally seemed to realize that something was wrong. While he puzzled over the ignition switch, Romie was reaching up to try the lights over the seats. She clicked them on and off, but nothing happened.
“I have no idea,” Brad said, as he slumped back in the driver’s seat.
Chapter 44: Ashley
Ashley held perfectly still, trying to stay in her dream. It was actually only partly a dream. Most of the image was pulled directly from her memory. She had been a teenager—just barely, but a teenager. Across the hall, the morning sun was coming through Jim’s window and shooting a straight line through Ashley’s doorway and lighting up the head of her bed.
On a normal day, Jim would already be up. This morning was different. He had been out the day before, making snowmen with his friends. Then, since it was Saturday, it had been movie night. At first, it seemed like Jim was going to fall asleep on the couch, between Romie and Lisa. The movie had been too good for that. For his turn, Brad had chosen Raiders of the Lost Ark. Janelle had hidden behind a pillow for the scary parts, but Jim had been riveted by the movie.
Honestly, Ashley couldn’t remember that much about the movie. If she didn’t force herself to pay attention for the first ten or fifteen minutes, her mind would wander and she would daydream during movie night. It was fun to squeeze her way into the corner of the couch, eat whatever snack was being passed around, and daydream while the movie played.
So, because he had been playing all day in the snow, and then stayed up to watch the whole movie, Jim was still sound asleep when the sun came up. Janelle usually slept until Jim started knocking around in the bathroom. Ashley liked to stay in bed as long as she possibly could.
She was just about to roll over, away from the sun, when she heard footsteps in the hall. It was Janelle, carrying her stuffed bear and rubbing a fist into her eye.
Without a word, Ashley lifted the blanket to let her little sister climb in.
Janelle was hot, except her feet. They were ice cold and she pressed them back into Ashley’s legs.
“It’s the shortest day,” Janelle whispered.
“Shhh!” Ashley said. “Go to sleep.”
She put an arm around Janelle and the bear and squeezed them in tight.
“Soon, they will get longer.”
Ashley didn’t respond, hoping that her sister would go to sleep if she didn’t say anything.
“Ash?” Janelle whispered.
“Yeah.”
“What happens if the sun explodes?”
“What?” Ashley mumbled. “Go back to sleep, Janelle. You’re not making sense.”
Ashley was almost asleep again when Janelle asked, “Shouldn’t we be getting ready?”
Ashley was starting to get annoyed.
“For what?”
“For when the sun explodes.”
“Shut up,” Ashley said.
She squeezed her sister tight, hoping that it would comfort her and help her shut up. Ashley wanted nothing more than another fifteen minutes.
“Ashley?”
She ignored the voice. The sun danced against her eyelids. It was warm in her bed—warm, and strangely humid for the middle of winter.
“Ashley?”
“Shut up,” Ashley said.
Somehow, Janelle put her hand on Ashley’s shoulder and shook.
Ashley sat up, ready to kick her sister out of bed and send her back to her own room.
It wasn’t Janelle shaking her shoulder. It was Lisa.
“Ashley, come on. We should get going,” Lisa said.
They shook everything out, sending the last droplets of water flying, and packed up their bags. The sun was out and the air was heavy with humidity. The jungle had soaked up the water. Aside from the thick air, there was no sign of all the rain they had endured the night before.
Tim and Lisa were both moving slowly at first. Tim’s foot bothered him until he warmed it up. Lisa had woken up with all kinds of aches and pains from the day before.
“Don’t worry about me until tomorrow,” Lisa said. “If I’m still moving, then I’m still in good shape.”
Ashley led the way, remembering the route from the previous day. She had to pause several times to get her bearings—in a few places the rain had cut temporary streams through the landscape and they made the jungle look different.
When she heard the roar of the river through the trees, she knew they were on the right track.
“We’re not going to be able to raft again,” Tim said. “That sounds pretty turbulent.”
“I went through it last night,” Ashley said. “When I went to tie the raft back up and I was swept downstream, I actually went through the rapids that we kept seeing on the pictures. They were pretty bad, but the raft survived. The good news is that we won’t have to traverse them with everyone on the raft.”
She wasn’t worried about the people. It was mostly Penny that Ashley had been concerned about. She kept imagining the dog being swept off the raft and having to watch her being dragged downriver with no way to save her.
“This is the swamp,” Lisa said, pointing to the left.
“Yeah. We can navigate around it,” Ashley said.
It turned out to be easier said than done. The rain had increased the perimeter of the swamp substantially and it took a long time to circumnavigate. Ashley kept moving with confidence. If Tim sensed that she was making up the route as they went, he would start agitating for a different plan.
“I think it’s time to give up the search,” he said. “Let’s go uphill until we find an elevation where it’s easier to hike and then we can come back to the river and make a new raft.”
Ashley sighed. She was too late. He had already given up.
“But it’s right there,” Lisa said. She was pointing across the marsh again.
Ashley squinted. She finally saw the raft’s blue ropes, tied to a tree in the distance.
At the edge, where the raft was tied, the water was deep and calm. Tim and Lisa worked on lashing their gear to the raft while Ashley poled them out, through the flooded area. Some bushes were completely submerged. In the clear water, she could see the leaves below the surface, like they were trapped in amber.
A little farther ahead, the water turned in deep swirls. The turbulence spoke of swift current.
“We should push upstream a little and see these rapids,” Tim said.
“Why?” Lisa asked.
“If we can get a definitive place on the aerial imagery, then we’ll know what to expect. The rapids could be the clue.”
“I told you,” Ashley said. “This is the spot we were looking at. Just downstream from here, it will open up into a big lake.”
Tim was silent. He looked like he didn’t want to call her a liar, but he was definitely thinking it.
“We should check, just to see it in the daylight,” Lisa said. “It was pretty close to dark when you went down.”
“Not really,” Ashley said. She sensed that she wasn’t going to get her way. “But fine. If you guys want to backtrack, then that’s fine.”
Tim and Ashley worked the poles. They pushed themselves along the edge of the flooded bank. If they pushed too far, the water was too deep for the poles to reach the bottom. Plus, the current was too swift to fight. It was slow going, staying right at the edge. Each time the raft’s outriggers snagged on a tree, Lisa, had to reach out and try to pull them around it. Every foot of progress required hard work.
In the distance, growing closer all the time, they heard a low rumble from the falls. In Ashley’s opinion, that alone should have been enough to convince them, but the
y wanted to see it with their own eyes.
“Rocks,” Lisa called.
Up ahead, they wouldn’t be able to stay in the still water at the edge. They would have to circle right around the rocks and that would put them in the fast current.
“Can you guys see enough from here?” Ashley asked. She raised up on her tiptoes. She could see the whitewater spilling over the ledge. It was hard to believe that she had survived when she looked at it from the lower part of the river. Clutching the raft, Ashley had closed her eyes and braced herself when the world fell away. The raft tipped one way and then the other, she was nearly washed away with a wave that came over her, and then she had immediately tried to paddle the raft toward the shore. Everything had happened so fast. There hadn’t been time to panic, let alone make any careful observations about the falls.
“You’re certain that’s the falls? The river definitely curved right?” Lisa asked, shouting to be heard over the water.
Ashley considered the last thing that had just gone through her mind—everything had happened so quickly that she hadn’t made any careful observation about the falls.
“No,” she said, looking down and shaking her head. “Honestly, I’m pretty sure, but I can’t be certain.”
Lisa nodded.
“Let’s climb up these rocks if we can. I’ll tie off the raft. Tim, will you stay here with Penny?”
“Yeah,” Tim said.
Ashley passed Lisa quickly and then turned back to help her. They climbed the rocks until they were at the level of the water above the falls.
It had been difficult to hear down on the raft. At the top, the water was so loud that she practically had to shout in Lisa’s ear.
“See? This is the drop, and that’s where it curves right.”
“I thought it was supposed to narrow down to a canyon?” Lisa asked.
“It does, normally. I think it has just flooded too much. Maybe the walls weren’t that high and the canyon has flooded out to this.”
Lisa considered that for a bit. Eventually, she shrugged.
They climbed back down to the raft. Ashley steadied it and gave Lisa a hand getting back on without tipping it too much.
