Distinct

by Hamill, Ike

  “It still could have been a prank, right?” Tim asked.

  “I don’t know how,” Ty said. “I was sitting on the floor and Herbie passed within inches. I could feel the air stir. Then, when they put all the data together on a map, you could see the route. Our positions had been randomized and none of us knew who was where, but we had reported in order, like Herbie was making rounds.”

  “Still,” Tim said.

  “Which side are you arguing? You and Cedric heard him too.”

  Tim had to nod. Ty was absolutely right.

  “So everyone heard Herbie, but nobody saw a thing?”

  “Good question,” Ty said. “There was one girl. I don’t remember her name. It began with an S. I never worked very closely with her. She said that she saw him that night, but never before or after. She said something like, ‘You’re wrong to give him a name, and think of him as a man. He’s no more a man than a lightning strike.’ I don’t know. The way she said it was much more poetic.”

  “Wait. I don’t understand. Did she mean that he was like a lightning strike, or that a lightning strike is more like a man than Herbie?”

  “I have no idea,” Ty said. “I was terrified that night. I went home, got some sleep, got up and went back to work. It was all just another impossible thing in the string. We dealt with them all the time.”

  “Back to my original question—what do you think it was?”

  “Herbie,” Ty said. “Herbie is Herbie. What I think about it is completely arbitrary and unimportant. My understanding of it doesn’t change its nature.”

  “Sure. Of course, but it could easily change the way you react to it. Did you ever think that Herbie was dangerous even though it never did you harm?”

  “No,” Ty said. “I try not to give the unknown that much power.”

  “Unless it’s the unknown of how crazy a fringe group is.”

  “That’s not an unknown for me. I know precisely how crazy fringe groups can be.”

  CHAPTER 10: NORTHAM

  “HEY, CARRIE? GOT A minute?” he called from the end of her walkway.

  She smiled despite her disappointment. She had been mere seconds away from being behind her closed door, where she could have enjoyed a moment of peace and quiet.

  “Sure, Abe, come on in.”

  He followed her inside and she closed the door behind him.

  “I hope you like cold macaroni. That’s what I’m having for dinner.”

  “Thanks, but I ate already,” Abe said.

  “Then you can watch me eat,” she said. She didn’t have enough patience left to be polite. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to ask if you’ve given any more thought to the idea of moving,” Abe said. “Now that the storage facility is gone, we’re going to be starting over in a lot of ways. I know that the subject is going to come up tomorrow and I was hoping to get a sense of…”

  She stopped him by putting her hand up.

  Waving him to a stool, she bent over and pulled her dinner from the cooler behind the counter. Everything was getting warm, but it didn’t matter. She intended to finish her leftover mac and cheese even if she found a colony of rabid ants swarming on it. That’s how hungry she was.

  She took one of the other stools and pulled it up to the counter. Once she was seated, and had taken a bite of her dinner, she pointed her plastic fork at Abe.

  “It’s too easy,” she said. “Everything is too easy.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s what my aunt’s boyfriend used to say before everything went to shit. He used to complain that shelter, food, and disease had all been conquered and that left everyone too soft. With all the hard problems gone, people were left to focus on what words we were allowed to say and what we could be recreationally offended by. He would have hated this community.”

  “Why’s that?” Abe asked.

  “Because we have legitimate, hard problems ahead, but we’re all focused on nonsense.”

  Abe sat a little straighter. She could tell that she had offended him.

  “Not you. You’re doing good work. You’re looking to the future. We need more people like you. But I was at a gathering a few days ago where someone was complaining that the power and water wasn’t going to service the houses up on Logan’s Heights.”

  Abe nodded. “Yeah. Several people have expressed interest in the development at the top of the hill.”

  “Have you seen those places? They have ten bedrooms, a ballroom, two kitchens, and cathedral ceilings throughout.”

  Abe nodded. He still looked confused.

  “What’s the point? Is all that square footage going to make it easier to survive? You know how much wood you would have to burn to heat a place like that. There’s no good topsoil up on that hill. You would have to commute down to the valley to do any gardening. What’s the point? Those people aren’t focused on how to make their lives livable. They’re still chasing the old standards of wealth. Grocery stores aren’t going to last forever. We should be living like pioneers, not like investment bankers.”

  “We should tell people where they can live?” Abe asked.

  “No,” Carrie said through a mouthful of pasta. She covered her mouth and finished swallowing. “I mean, look at me. I talk a big game, but I’m still living on processed food that was scavenged. Obviously, we should use up what’s left of the old world. I’m just saying that the eventual adjustment will be a lot easier if we start preparing for it now. We should be learning how to be self sufficient before it’s a do-or-die situation.”

  “So, about moving…”

  “I’ll certainly entertain the notion, but only if the right voices are part of the debate. I’m speaking just for myself, obviously. The community owes me no allegiance. I’m just a figurehead who speaks the consensus. This place has decent fishing, good groundwater, and a bitchy wind that cuts to the bone in the winter. Any farther south and it’s all concrete and asphalt. Beyond that is wasteland.”

  “We want to stay together,” Abe said. “People recognize the advantages of neighbors.”

  “And if they don’t, they can move on.”

  “Exactly,” Abe said. “But I think it’s inevitable that we take a step back and really look at the suitability of this area. Many of us moved down here because we thought those other four knew something that we didn’t. I think we’re only now coming to the realization that they landed here randomly.”

  “I’ve talked to Romie a good number of times. I’m not under the impression that she does anything randomly.”

  Abe nodded. “Sure. So you would vote to stay?”

  “I won’t vote at all. I will surrender to the consensus,” Carrie said as she scraped the container with the side of her fork.

  “Tomorrow then?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Abe showed himself out.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  She had described herself as a figurehead. That was no lie. The people had elected her to speak for the will of the majority. Carrie never attempted to sway them to her way of thinking, and she rarely spoke her opinions. She did have one duty that she considered to be crucial to the group—she acted as a filter.

  Ideas sprang up at meetings. People speculated how the burned area down south was recovering. Someone wondered if they could trust the soil and water. Another resident questioned the safety of eating the fish caught from the ocean. To answer these concerns, Carrie coordinated the collection and distribution of information.

  She spread a couple of reports in front of her.

  The people who volunteered to go out into the world and collect the information came back with files on computers and pictures on cameras. Carrie printed everything out. She liked to spread the papers on her table and take it all in before she dove down into the details.

  Her stomach rumbled again.

  Some nights, her appetite was a bottomless pit. She wasn’t going to be able to focus until she attempted to stop the rumbling. Carrie wandered into the ki
tchen and came back with a can of pears. She punctured the lid and dribbled the sweet juice into her mouth.

  “Still okay with this?” she asked, looking down at her belly.

  For a moment, the question hung unanswered. From day to day, there was no telling what would set off a sudden flush of nausea. The scent of mulled cider had cost her breakfast one day, vomited into the grass. Her old soap was now packed away in a plastic tub. Even the thought of it’s flowery smell made her uneasy.

  The pears sat. Her stomach felt okay. She drank another sip of the liquid and then cranked open the rest of the lid. She wiped her plastic fork on a napkin before she speared one of the slices.

  “Okay,” Carrie said as she sank back down to the couch. She moved her lantern so she could examine the pictures of the burned area. The written account was from a guy named Bob.

  He wrote, “It’s strange the way the plants have come back. Some of the soil doesn’t seem to support life. Right next to that, a swath of every plant you can imagine is growing with abandon. I took some photos of this from a bridge.”

  Carrie flipped through the stack until she found them. A river of green cut through a black landscape. Trees, bushes, and grass grew tall along a winding ribbon. On either side, the scorched land was barren.

  Bob wrote, “I followed one of these verdant paths for a day. Taking my cue from the plants, I didn’t set foot on the black area. I don’t know if it would have poisoned me or not, but I didn’t want to find out. The farther I went, the wider the path of plants became. At first, I could have crossed the green area in ten paces. After a day of hiking, the thing measured more than a hundred paces. In the distance on either side, I saw similar trails of plants. From a high point, I took some more pictures.”

  Carrie studied the photos, holding them up to the light. She looked at the leaves of the plants. She examined every image for vines, or anything foreign. At the mere mention of strange plants, most people would run screaming. Carrie couldn’t blame them. She had been trapped and transported by vines. She knew the helpless terror of being held and hypnotized.

  “I watched carefully for any movement I couldn’t explain, and I kept an eye out for any vines or flowers,” Bob wrote. He had been thinking the same thing as Carrie. “Everything looked perfectly normal. I found poplar, oak, pine, and maple saplings. Nothing looked like it was more than a year old. It’s hard to imagine how all the seeds and shoots found their way into the ravaged area, but maybe they were simply able to withstand the fire.”

  Bob was making a leap there. Carrie tapped the paper with the butt of her fork and then dipped back into the pears. Most people had described the blackened area as burned, but some of the more cautious had warned that it might be premature to make that determination. Consumed might be a better word for what had happened to that land, and it wasn’t necessarily consumed by fire.

  Bob was an explorer. A woman named Rose had taken a scientific approach. Carrie dug through the stack until she found Rose’s account.

  “After taking soil samples, I checked for organisms and radiation and found nothing unusual. Lining the bottom of an aquarium tank with the blackened dirt, I created a habitat for three mice. They stayed there for a week, showing no adverse effects. I was not able to sprout any seeds in the soil, but seedlings transplanted to the soil seemed to grow normally,” Rose wrote.

  “Where did she get the mice?” Carrie whispered to herself. The idea of those little mice with their pink noses and twitching whiskers threatened to unsettle her stomach. She shook the thought away and looked at a third report.

  “Tim warned that we wouldn’t see anything over the wasteland, but he was wrong. There were spots and trails of greenery. We couldn’t see any reason why things would grow in one spot and not in another, but it would be impossible to tell from the air. He wasn’t willing to put his plane down in the burned area. I don’t blame him—the land is so black that it’s really difficult to tell which parts are flat.”

  The person who had gone up with Tim in the airplane hadn’t signed their work. A few aerial photos were blurry and hard to understand. She saw Bob’s “rivers” of plant life. She saw the fuzzy margin where normal land faded and the scorched area took over. Aside from those details, it was tough to make out any real information.

  “Who cares?” Carrie asked, stacking up the reports.

  That was one question she could answer. The people cared. Last winter had been tough, and people were starting to agitate for a move. They wanted to find somewhere without snow and cold. They wanted to move to Florida, or Mexico, or maybe even Central America. Some wanted to jump in a boat and try to navigate down to the islands. Hurricanes were rare compared the snow they had suffered through. The only thing stopping them was the idea that the planet might be uninhabitable down there. As far as they knew, nobody had been farther south of Virginia, or farther west than Ohio. They all turned back. The black, burned ground scared them away.

  The pears were gone.

  Carrie’s stomach was already rumbling again.

  She licked her plastic fork, wiped it on the napkin, and stood up to return to the kitchen.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  Carrie woke up to a tapping. She blinked and tried to unkink her neck. The lantern was still on. As she sat up, a stack of papers fell from her shirt. She tried to collect herself as she crossed to the door.

  “Mike? What time is it?”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She held the door open. He came in followed by Terry. Carrie had only met her once.

  “I spent the last day trying to convince Terry that she was crazy. Now I’m starting to think that we both are,” Mike said. They came to the counter in the kitchen. At least half of Carrie’s brain was thinking about the mac and cheese that she had eaten earlier at the same counter. Blinking, she tried to focus.

  “You’re both crazy? Good thing you’re coming to visit me in the middle of the night,” Carrie said.

  “We would have waited until morning, but we think that the timing is crucial here,” Terry said. “They took out the batteries and water tower last night. They’re probably going to hit the food tonight. That means either garden or larder. We figured that you would be able to get a group together quickly.”

  Carrie nodded. It wasn’t precisely true, but she nodded. If someone wanted to round up help, they went to Abe. They came to Carrie if they needed someone to convince Abe of the mission first.

  “So tell me what made you crazy.”

  Mike took over. “You heard about the sightings before the storage house went up, right?”

  “Apparitions,” Carrie said. “Mostly younger people saw them. Accounts varied.”

  Mike leaned forward. “I withheld judgement. I figured either one of the cells went rogue and burned down the others, or we had a saboteur. No sense in getting riled up until we could figure out which. Then Terry showed me evidence.”

  Carrie took care to keep her face neutral. People’s definition of “evidence” covered a large territory.

  Terry produced a small tablet. She stared a choppy video and put it on the counter so Carrie could watch.

  Mike spoke while the video played.

  “In some frames, this looks like a man. In others, it’s just a smear of color. Here’s a good one coming up. This was taken during the rain last night and this morning Terry discovered a leak in the bottom of the water tower. It could be a coincidence, but we found three people who identified the figure.”

  “Luke,” Carrie said.

  “Exactly,” Mike said. “We repaired the tank, verified that it could hold water again, and found a pair of volunteers to babysit the water tower tonight.”

  “Great,” Carrie said. She stood up. She didn’t know what she would eat, but it was going to be something, and it was going to have to be soon.

  Terry picked up the narrative. “So then, we started really debating the situation. We couldn’t find any direct witnesses for the batteries.”

 
“It was all hearsay,” Mike said. “People talked about someone else seeing a figure. When we tracked down that person, they would always point to another. Rumors were being picked up and spread like they were first-hand accounts. As soon as they were challenged, people would admit that they had stretched the truth.”

  Carrie nodded. She had witnessed the same phenomenon. A lot of people seemed desperate to possess useful information. If they heard a rumor, they would start passing it off as their own account.

  “We chased it all the way back to that guy everyone calls the Pilgrim,” Mike said. “He was the one person who would actually claim to have seen a ghost go into the storage house last night.”

  “And he also claimed to know who it was,” Terry said.

  “Bear in mind, we hadn’t yet tried to corroborate the identity of the video we showed you. The only person who had seen it besides us was Romie. So nobody knew who we were considering a suspect for the water tower.”

  “But the Pilgrim came up with the name immediately,” Terry said.

  “He said it was Luke’s ghost, come back to take revenge,” Mike said.

  Carrie shrugged. In the short time she had known him, Mike had always seemed perfectly logical. Terry was an unknown, but Mike trusted her. It was a shame that they had gotten all wound up, but they would come back to reality on their own. Fighting them would only inspire resentment.

  “That was when I broke,” Mike said. “Before that, I was perfectly willing to entertain some half-baked theories in order to get to the bottom of what happened at the water tower. As soon as we found ourselves taking the testimony of the Pilgrim and considering it to be a viable theory, I couldn’t track anymore.”

  He was trying to convince her by presenting himself as a skeptic. Carrie knew the tactic. She kept her face neutral.