by Ike Hamill
“We’re looking for food and fuel,” Lisa said.
“Oh. Did you look in the garage?”
“We just got here, Tim,” Lisa said. She resolved to keep her mouth shut, if possible. Only venom was coming out.
“Hello?” Ashley called as she slipped through the doorway.
“That’s creepy,” Tim said.
Lisa nodded. She tried not to shrink away as Tim climbed out of the cart and came to stand alongside her.
“Hey,” Tim whispered. “I know I’ve said it a dozen times, but I’m sorry for before. I can barely remember what happened. I was totally not in control of my own mind.”
“I know.”
“It was like there were these parasites inside my brain. I couldn’t fight them off.”
“I know.”
“I just feel so horrible that I put everyone in danger and I frightened you guys so much.”
“Tim…” Lisa said, hoping he would shut up.
Ashley leaned back through the door, shining her light up at her own smile. “Hey, guys? Come check this out.”
Tim and Lisa glanced at each other. After everything they had gone through, whatever Ashley had found inside the cottage was too much. Lisa didn’t want to have to deal with any more surprises. It appeared that Tim felt the same way. They might have stayed where they were, ignoring Ashley’s smile, if it hadn’t been for Penny. The dog was still optimistic. She trotted across the shaggy lawn and over to see what Ashley had found.
With a sigh, Tim followed. Lisa brought up the rear.
As soon as they both entered, Ashley led them deeper inside.
“At first I thought it was going to be the same as the rest of the buildings around here. But look at that.”
Ashley’s flashlight swung over to a photo on the wall. It looked unremarkable to Lisa.
“What’s the…” Tim started to ask.
He trailed off and Ashley explained to Lisa. “See? In the background? That’s a Croc and Shop, and the sign is in English.”
Lisa took a step forward. The photo was of a woman in a blue shirt. Sure enough, behind the woman, there was a Croc and Shop convenience store, open for business.
“The books are in that other language,” Ashley said, swinging her light around the place. “But that photo was taken somewhere they speak English. And there’s food.”
Lisa and Tim were left in the dark when Ashley practically ran for the kitchen. The young woman came back to the doorway holding a can. It held cream of mushroom soup—the label on the can said so.
“So, are we back?” Tim asked.
“Not quite, I don’t think, but I suspect that we’re in some transition area.”
Lisa felt dizzy and wanted to sit down. She had to settle for leaning against a wall.
“Aunt Lisa? Are you okay?”
“No,” Lisa managed to whisper. “No. None of this is okay. Can we just go home now? I’m tired of everything being so weird and nothing making sense. I’m tired of constant mysteries that need to be solved.”
She pushed away from the wall and shuffled back through the dark living room, toward the rectangle of dim light coming through the open front door. The cart was still parked where they had left it. Lisa went right to the back seat and flopped down. Her eyes were closed before she even leaned over to rest against the pillar. Before, she had been so worried about Tim reverting to his weird, violent trance, that she hadn’t dared to close her eyes. Now, she didn’t even care. He could tear her apart with his teeth if he wanted, as long as she got a little sleep.
Lisa barely stirred as they moved around her. She ignored them as they spoke in whispers and banged things around in the cart. When they were finally underway again, Lisa smiled as something warm curled up in the seat next to her. The jostling, rumbling cart sent her deeper into her dreams.
Sunlight flickering through trees woke her up. Lisa blinked until her eyes came into focus. Tim was driving the cart. Ashley’s head was tilted to the side in the passenger’s seat. Her lips were parted and her mouth hung open.
Lisa caught her breath and her heart nearly stopped beating as she realized what must have happened—while Lisa had slept, Tim must have killed Ashley.
Her hand shot forward and landed on Ashley’s shoulder.
Lisa was shocked again when Ashley stirred—eyes fluttering and mouth closing.
“Oh, thank heaven,” Lisa whispered.
“Go back to sleep,” Tim said. “I’m fine to drive for a while longer.”
“No, it’s okay,” Ashley said, pushing herself upright and stretching. “I’m up. I feel good. Where are we?”
Tim handed over a folded map that Lisa didn’t recognize. Ashley refolded it and looked at where Tim was pointing. The two of them conferred about a couple of hills in the distance and what those might correlate to on the paper.
Lisa wanted to close her eyes again and fought to keep them open.
“I have some good news, Aunt Lisa,” Ashley said, turning around to Lisa.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been tracking the red spot on the moon—just by eye—and it appears like the shrinking is accelerating. It looks like the solar disturbance is diminishing quickly.”
“Super,” Lisa said.
“And we’re very close,” Ashley said.
“Oh?”
“I mean, not extremely close, but much closer than I thought we could get. If we had known to come this direction on our trip out, we would have cut the trip to a third of the length.”
“More,” Tim said. “Maybe a quarter.”
“We’re certainly going to hit a band where electricity doesn’t work, and I’m sure that will knock out the cart, so we have some more hiking in our future.”
“Great,” Lisa said. Immediately, she wished she hadn’t said it. Obsessing about the hike in their future wouldn’t make it go any easier. When the time came, she would just put one foot in front of the other until they were through.
Ashley’s enthusiasm was unaffected.
“And it’s possible that this area marked on the map denotes where the electrical disturbance takes place. Although it could be that the phenomena has shifted since it was drawn.”
Ashley flashed the map back at Lisa for a second.
This time, Lisa kept her pessimism to herself.
“If we get over this hill here—do you see how steep the contours are?—I’m guessing that we might be able to coast all the way back down to the river.”
“The river?” Lisa asked.
Her shock made Ashley smile.
“Not that river. We’re way north of the river that we rafted on. This river is the one that divides the Outpost from the jungle.”
“We think,” Tim said.
“Yeah—we think,” Ashley said. “Beyond there, this map ends. It’s likely that they thought of the area around the Outpost the same way that we thought about the jungle, you know? They probably were cautious about exploring there because the physical properties of things didn’t make sense.”
Lisa blinked and tried to see the world as Ashley did. To the young woman, these possibilities were exciting. They offered fresh opportunities. Lisa felt exhausted by it all.
“There’s a lot of speculation in there,” Tim said.
The cart slowed to a stop.
“What’s wrong?” Ashley said.
Tim was looking down at the gauges. He shook his head. The cart was on a mild incline. After failing to get it started again, Tim told them to hold on. He let the cart roll backwards a little before he braked to a stop.
Lisa let her shoulders relax when the cart started again. Her celebration was too quick. As soon as Tim drove forward again, the cart stopped itself once more.
“I guess this is it,” Ashley said, sounding defeated for once. It only took a second for her enthusiasm to come back. “All right, let’s get our packs ready and start hiking. We’re in the final part of our journey.”
She wanted to tell them to hike on without
her. Her legs were tired, her neck hurt, and the straps of the backpack were digging into her shoulders. The thought of hiking until dark and then setting up the tent again was horrible. In just a short period of time, Lisa had once more grown accustomed to buildings and beds. Even sleeping in the cart as they drove was better than the idea of camping again, and yet here they were.
“I never would have imagined it,” Ashley said.
Tim and Penny were ranging ahead. Ashley had paused to wait for Lisa to catch up.
“Yeah?” Lisa asked.
“I mean, think about it. Our fate was sealed, you know? It was like our existence was approaching an asymptote. There was no way through that situation. And just by perseverance, just by refusing to let the inevitable happen, we were able to change our future. Now we can do whatever we want.”
An answer to Ashley’s cheery optimism rose to Lisa’s lips. She fought it back, keeping it inside. Their whole existence had come to a brick wall several times in the past. Long before Ashley was born, everyone had seen the end of everything within spitting distance. Calamity had been avoided, just to have it return. Sometimes it took months, and sometimes they got a couple more decades, but eventually a new horrible thing would come along to put everyone back on their heels again. It was the way it had always been, as far as Lisa was concerned. Her entire life before the end of everything was just a preamble designed to lull her into complacency. Then, when she thought she had a good sense of how the world worked, everything had been turned upside down.
Ashley still thought that winning a battle meant that the war could be won. She would learn differently over time. Nothing that Lisa could say would teach Ashley the lesson. It was something that Ashley was going to have to learn on her own, so Lisa kept her mouth shut.
“Do you need to stop?” Ashley asked.
“What? Why?”
“You’re walking so slowly. I thought maybe you might feel a little better if we stopped and had something to eat. The soup I opened at that last cottage smelled good. We saved it. I brought some other cans as well. Want to stop and heat one up?”
“No,” Lisa said. “Keep moving. I want to keep moving.”
Ashley nodded.
“Oh, and the book!” Ashley said. She started to pull her pack off her shoulder and then thought better of it. “I’ll show it to you when we stop. I wanted to wake you up when we found it, but Tim said that you needed sleep. I’m glad I didn’t. You did look really tired.”
“Book?” Lisa asked, trying to get her back on the subject.
“Yeah, right! I found a book at the cottage that’s all in that other language except for notes on the side. Those are in English. I think I can study that book and get enough context to really understand that other language. I mean, I have a decent sense of it, but this could really break it open and finish the picture, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe with that, I can really figure out Tim’s journal. Also, the notes that I grabbed from the observatory. It’s exciting, right? It’s like a Rosetta Stone maybe.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said.
Ashley smiled.
They hiked along in silence for a bit. Lisa could tell that her slow pace was difficult for Ashley to maintain. Ashley’s legs were too long and too filled with youthful energy to slog along at Lisa’s pace.
“I’m going to catch up with Tim real quick,” Ashley said. “I’ll be back.”
Lisa nodded.
To her left, the woods came right down to the edge of the road. The terrain sloped down and then the woods were so thick that she couldn’t see much of anything. Lisa imagined how easy it would be to wait for Tim and Ashley to disappear around the corner. Then, she could slip off into the woods and shed her pack. Without all that burden, she could disappear like a whisper in a blizzard. Ashley and Tim would be better off without her and she would be free to forget about all the crazy things she had seen and thought. It would be possible to uncomplicate everything until the sky was blue and the trees were green and nothing else mattered.
Lisa looked up and was frustrated to see that Tim and Ashley had stopped. They were consulting the unfolded map and glancing back at her every few seconds. There would be no escape if they kept such a close eye on her.
Lisa looked back the way they had come. Miles and miles behind them, the cart waited. It was a different kind of sanity back there, but it was so much more sane than hiking to nowhere. Ashley and Tim had no real idea where the Outpost was located. They were making guesses based on the curves of lines on a map that they had found. They had made ridiculous assumptions founded on nothing more than optimism.
“Aunt Lisa,” Ashley called, waving to her.
Lisa lowered a shoulder, letting one of the straps start to slip off. She held her ground and waited for Ashley to look back down at the map. When the young woman wasn’t staring right at her, Lisa dropped the pack and ran. She headed to the left of a big bush, hoping to slip behind the foliage before the others saw where she had gone. The dog began to bark immediately and Lisa regretted not taking care of that eventuality before. There had been hundreds or thousands of opportunities where she could have slit Penny’s throat or driven the dog away when nobody was looking. It was her own fault—she hadn’t been prescient enough to realize that the dog would eventually betray her.
She reached the edge of the bushes before Tim shouted.
“Lisa!”
Barreling down a little hill and taking a left, Lisa was sure that she would get away. Appearing like magic, Ashley sprinted from behind a stand of trees and leapt over a gully to land directly in front of Lisa. A notion sprang into Lisa’s head and her hand found the knife in her pocket. Lisa flipped it open and held the knife straight out as Ashley approached. The girl didn’t slow at the threat and Lisa knew that she was going to have to draw blood in order to be free.
“Watch out!” Tim shouted from behind Lisa.
Lisa cursed him silently as the realization spread across Ashley’s face.
Following Ashley’s gaze, Lisa looked down at the knife in her own hand and realized what she was about to do. She intended to cut Ashley’s throat in order to get around her. On the other side of Ashley was freedom, and it was the only thing that Lisa wanted.
“No,” she whispered to herself. Freedom wasn’t the only thing that she wanted. What she wanted was to get Ashley safely home. The knife wasn’t the solution—it was the problem. It fell from her hand as her fingers went numb.
“Aunt Lisa?”
She closed her eyes and brought her hands to her face as arms wrapped around her.
Lisa wept silently into her hands and struggled to stay upright as the strength drained from her legs.
“Sit down. You’re exhausted,” Tim said.
Lisa allowed herself to be guided toward the ground.
“Leave me,” Lisa said. “You can’t trust me. I can’t trust myself. You have to leave me here.”
“Never,” Ashley said. “You’ll be fine.”
“I know what you’re going through,” Tim said. “Trust me—you’ll recover from this.”
Lisa had no doubt that he was completely wrong.
They let her weep there for a minute, but wouldn’t leave her alone. Eventually, they helped her get back to her feet and led her along, stumbling, back up the slope and through the bushes. Ashley even folded her knife back up and slipped it into her pocket. The level of trust they had in her made her cry even harder.
Back up on the road, they walked slowly, following Penny as she ran ahead and then turned to wait for them, again and again. They walked until the sun began to turn golden at their backs and then they pitched the tents right on the edge of the road. Tim made a fire in the middle of the road. Ashley burned some nuts that she was trying to roast. They still had cans of food with strange labels. Tim tasted the contents before he shared them around.
Lisa didn’t care if the food killed her. Death would be a simple answer to the sorrow that had filled
her up. It would multiply all of her problems by zero and make them go away.
When Penny pressed her nose into Lisa’s hand, looking to be scratched, it made Lisa cry all over again. She remembered wishing that she had killed the dog—regretting that she had never done it. Penny seemed to know and forgave her anyway.
Lisa cried until Ashley pushed more food into her hands. Eating seemed to push away the desolation. Once Lisa realized that, she greedily took everything offered.
“Bicycles,” Ashley said. She said the word slowly. Her voice was filled with sadness.
“Yeah?” Tim asked.
“I bet we could have found bicycles. We would be there by now.”
Tim only shrugged.
“We’re here now,” Tim said. “Regret is a useless emotion. We have memory now. We should have outgrown regret when we learned to stand upright.”
Lisa couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. His ideas were making her head hurt so she hummed to herself to drown him out. For whatever reason, humming soothed her. She felt like herself again and looked up to see that they were both staring at her.
When she stopped humming, Ashley asked, “What song is that?”
“I don’t know. Something I heard when I was younger, I guess.”
“Hum some more,” Ashley said.
When Lisa started again, Ashley joined in. Lisa didn’t know if Ashley had heard the song before or was just imitating her. It didn’t matter. Their voices blended and eventually Tim joined in as well. The fire lit their grinning faces as they shared food and hummed like idiots.
Lisa hoped the moment would never end.
Chapter 99: Janelle
Jim drummed his fingers on the headboard, moving them around until he found the place where he could make the most noise. It didn’t work. Their father was a master of tuning such things out. Janelle watched him drifting off to sleep. The way his eyelids got heavier and heavier, opening just a crack to glance at her and then at Jim and then settling shut again, was contagious. Janelle saw Jim getting sleepy, and his drumming fingers slowed down. Janelle yawned and moved over to the bed so she could settle next to her father. The three of them shared the space efficiently.
