by Maxey, Phil
“That’s the idea. By time the sun goes down we will be about two hours from the border. We’ll find a place to hold out for the night, then head towards Idaho at first light.”
Zach closed the maps, and told Bass on the bus they are moving out.
After thirty minutes the trees started thinning out and the thick white compact snow that clogged the road began to give way to tarmac. After forty, the forests were a hundred yards back and only a smattering of white powder lay on their route. Luckily there were no sign of E.L.F’s.
An awkward silence had set in within the cabin of the Humvee. Zach and Bass had given Cal the news about Jason soon after they arrived at the lodge, and in response he offered them his weapons, but they refused, saying they trusted him. But what had happened to Cal was still a mystery to the inhabitants of the Humvee, including Cal himself. The guilt for the death of the young guy back at the fort kept trying to invade his thoughts, but he was damned if he was going to let one deep rooted psychosis be replaced by another, especially now that he was able to string two thoughts together. There would be a time for paying for what he had done, but this wasn’t it.
He looked across to Fiona who seemed lost in the world passing them by, and then to Michael who was sleeping. Both had become friends, and in Fiona’s case maybe something more, he had to stay right for them.
Abbey, like Fiona was watching the forests recede, and the hills and plains grow around them. But she wasn’t able to appreciate leaving Portland or the fort behind her because ever since Cal leaned forward in his wretched state and mentioned her hacker name she was not able to think of anything else. What was more troubling to her, was the fact that she never used it as part of her official job, hacking for the government. For that she used other names. Arclight was her personal hacker name, for stuff she did ‘off-book’. And the last time she did that was when she made the entire DOD’s satellite network go crazy and spin out into space. She kept trying to tell herself that she must have said the word Arclight at some point over the previous few weeks, or that it was just an amazing coincidence, but she knew the truth. That name had not left her lips, not even to Zach, and she didn’t believe in coincidences.
As they followed a winding road which flowed between hills, a river came into view, a few miles to the north. On the hills beyond, hundreds of silver skinned entities glistened in the early afternoon sun.
Zach clicked on his radio. “Stay alert. We need to move through this small town and over its bridge. We see the things on the hills a few miles off. Keep a constant speed, but if they start to move in this direction, we will increase our speed. Over.”
Jacob looked at them through a small pair of binoculars he found under a seat on the bus. Each creature had silver fish like scales, which caught the sun above, illuminating them with a brief flash of light as the convoy progressed.
A few seats in front of him a young boy looked on at the strange reflective creatures as they moved down to the river. “Are they thirsty?” he said to Mary who was sitting behind him.
She went to tell him to not look at them, but then realized that this child and the others in her care were growing up in a world where these sights would be normal. She leaned towards him slightly and they both watched the creatures sinking into the rushing waters and swimming away. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
The young boy then told her his theory on what they were doing, and for a moment, she saw them as he did, not as creatures of death, but as the nature of a of a new world.
The convoy moved onto the main street, with the bridge in their sights a few hundred yards ahead. Stopping at a junction, five yellow school buses sat parked opposite. Zach paused, with the Humvee’s engine idling.
Abbey looked at Zach, realizing they were not moving. “What’s wrong?” she then looked to where Zach was looking.
Zach clicked on his radio. “Rob, you see those buses? Over.”
“Yup… Over.”
“Could you get one of them started, even without the keys. Over.”
“The older ones, yeah.”
“Bass. Come in. We’re going to need some cover. Over.”
Bass acknowledged, and Zach drove the Humvee with Rob following alongside the buses. Rob and Bass jumped down from the bus and two soldiers ran to the side, pulling open the storage department and grabbing some canisters. Rob then ran down the line of buses, and pulled the door open on a dusty looking one, disappearing inside, the soldiers ran with him. Bass walked over to the Humvee, looking at the surrounding buildings. Only the light wind added any noise to the surroundings.
Zach opened the driver’s door and looked around. “Apart from those E.L.F’s a few miles off, it looks pretty quiet here. We could do with another bus, if Rob can get it started.”
Bass continued looking at the stores, paying special to the roofs, as he did an American flag fluttered on a bent flagstaff. “Agreed.”
As Bass and Zach talked, Cal looked out the back window of the Humvee at a mural across the street. It was a historic scene of construction of a road. Men and women in late nineteenth century attire with tools were working hard, but looking happy. He went to look away, when something caught his eye. Dark disc shapes were in the sky above the workers. Cal strained his eyes to see more detail, but not being able to, he opened the door and got out. Zach and Bass’s conversation stopped.
“Cal, what do you see?” said Zach. Cal ignored the question and walked towards the mural.
“Fuck.” Zach was about to get out when Fiona beat him to it.
“I got this.”
Cal looked up at the sixteen-foot high painting. The dark shapes in the clouds seemed wet and unformed with small drips of glossy black liquid creeping downwards. He got closer and stretched out his hand to touch them. If he could only touch them.
“Cal?”
Fiona’s voice jolted through his brain.
“What are you doing?”
“I… I don’t know, there’s something about this mural.”
She put her hand on his arm, pulling it down. “We need to get back in the Humvee.”
“Yes.”
He walked back to the car slowly, looking over his shoulder as he did.
Jacob sat watching.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Wait here, I’ll see if there’s a way through,” said Zach getting out.
The twisted metal beams and girders of the bridge hung low over the road. Bass and a soldier jumped off the bus and ran up to him. They all looked down at the muddy water of the river below, its flow gently passing from north to south.
“Looks pretty clear down there, not seeing any dark shapes in the water,” said Bass. Zach nodded.
Zach ducked under a large rusted beam that stretched from its mooring at the side of the bridge across and then down towards the left side lane. It was one of many.
He reached up and touched the flakey red, cold surface of the beam. “The Humvee will be fine, and we should be able to push through with the buses but it’s going to be tight.”
Bass nodded, and they returned to their vehicles.
“How’s it look?” said Abbey.
Zach slowly moved the Humvee forward. “We’ll be fine.”
They moved onto the bridge and it shuddered in response. The first beam approached them and cleared the roof by a few feet. Plotting a winding path across both lanes, they were quickly on the other side.
Corporal Greggs drove the old bus forward. The kids and everyone else went quiet as the rust metal fingers approached the roof of the vehicle. The first one hit the roof and the sound of crumpling and sheering rang out across the valley as the bus slowly crept forward. Mary told the kids to put their hands over their ears.
Bass was sitting at the front near Greggs, he clicked on his radio. “How we looking, Zach. Over.”
“Keep going. Lots of movement from the beams but nothing drastic, they seem to be holding. Over.”
Towards the end a gap opened up in the forest of
beams, and Greggs picked up speed, leaving the bridge, and driving up behind the Humvee.
Rob then pulled forward in the newly acquired bus. Behind him sat Tyler and a number of their supplies, which they had quickly moved from the other vehicle.
With his binoculars, Jacob looked at Rob on the bridge and then swept up the river, his focus stopping on a large amount of ripples. Watching intently the ripples dissipated, and then started up again a few yards closer. He then looked back at the bus, which was now halfway across with a number of beams scraping along its side. Switching back to where the ripples were, only calm water resided.
As Rob drove off the bridge, Jacob pulled the binoculars away from his eyes. At least now there was a lot more space available, and the young woman that was sitting next to him with her child on her lap had vacated to sit side by side with her daughter. He stretched out, picking up his backpack from beneath his feet and placed it to his left. Then looked back out at the hills and rocky outcrops that were passing by. His mind turned to Cal. Abbey had told him and Michael what had happened and that Cal had scratched a strange word into his forehead. Michael took it as Cal losing his mind, but in the early afternoon sun Jacob wondered if there was something else going on. He could tell Abbey wasn’t telling him the whole story, and after seeing Cal become seemingly hypnotized by an old mural, a theory started to take shape in his mind, but he would need more information, more data.
Sandy orange hills made up of rocky crevices and covered in a smattering of frost covered trees slid past as the convoy made its way eastwards.
Abbey felt acutely aware of the man with a scarred forehead behind her. What other things did he know relating to her and her previous life? Her mind started to run away with disconnected thoughts that made no sense. She sighed and thought about how far they had come from the New Mexico desert and that they had survived this far. Just as the thought of their survival comforted her, the doubts and questions seeped up from the darkest parts of her mind once more. How could he have known? She was sure she had not mentioned the name Arclight to anyone. Perhaps there was a chance she had mentioned it in her sleep, but it was unlikely. Then there was the crazy dream Cal had mentioned, and the ‘dark figure’ that wanted him to relay the message. ‘Tell the Arclight we accepted,’ relay to whom? Herself? Could it be possible that someone was trying to communicate to her via Cal? She sighed once again, this time sliding her hand over her face to ease the tension. She had begun to make sense of this new world, but now a sense of unreality had started to raise its head again.
Zach watched the peaks and hills uneasily the closer the road got to them. He also wasn’t sure exactly of their route east accept that he needed to make up ground on Tinley. What he would do when he met up with him again he had no idea, the man was protected by a small army of acolytes. He clicked on his radio and told those in the vehicles behind to stay watchful of the slopes around them as he picked up the pace on the dusty frost covered road.
After a short while they entered a small town with light colored single story homes. The day was still bright, but the sun was on its downward path to the horizon. Zach took a right, then after driving on for a hundred yards stopped alongside a large single story warehouse, which stretched for two hundred yards along the road. To the front and side of it sat a gravel parking area.
“Problem? Over.” said Bass through Zach’s radio.
Zach clicked on his radio. “We have maybe an hour of daylight left. The large building here doesn’t seem to have any windows and I can only see solid doors, which we could defend easily, and a loading bay. Might be good idea to stay here for the night. We can also park easily out front. Over.”
After a short silence, Bass agreed and they pulled up the vehicles near the loading bay, forming a small wall.
Zach and the others got out. Everyone looked anxiously at the nearby hills. He then jumped up onto the loading bay and tried the door next to it. It opened first time with a creak and the smell of dust and damp wood escaped into the late afternoon air. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his flashlight, which he held in one hand and his rifle in the other.
He walked inside, with Bass and two soldiers close behind. Along the walls sat sacks of some unknown material, together with barrels, and farming equipment. He swept his flashlight’s beam over the walls and at the end of the building, which was some fifty yards away, and then relaxed when it was obviously devoid of anything alive.
“Start moving everyone inside. Check all the exits, if they are not secure, make them so, move some of these sacks or barrels up against them.”
It wasn’t long before everyone was in the long plain building, and the sun was setting outside. Most were huddled around candles and the rest sat along the walls, eating food handed out by Mary who had taken charge of their supplies.
Hanna and her daughter Megan sat alone, ten or so feet from the fire. Michael noticed they had not grabbed anything from Mary’s handouts. Getting up he walked over to them, and held out a candy bar.
Pointing to the glossy loud plastic cover, he carefully annunciated “Choco… late.”
Hanna pushed her glasses up her nose and smiled. Taking the offering she opened it and gave some to her daughter whose eyes lit up. “Eat it slowly, don’t gulp it down, you’ll choke,” she said in a German accent.
Michael looked surprised. “Oh, I didn’t think you talked English.”
“That’s okay.”
“What’s her name?”
“Megan. You’re?”
“I’m Michael.”
“Thanks, for this Michael.”
“Why didn’t you get yourself some? There’s probably more if you want me to…”
“We don’t want to bother anyone.”
“Meh, it’s no bother.” Michael walked to Mary and after a short exchange, returned with a bread roll and another candy bar. This time he sat down next to Hanna.
“Here,” he handed her the food. She quickly put the roll in her backpack and opened the bar.
“You’re from Germany?” said Michael.
“Munich. Have you been to Germany?”
He smiled. “No. I visited Vancouver with parents as a kid, but never anywhere else. Were you on vacation over here when things went bad?”
“I was studying astrophysics at Berkley when it happened.”
“You couldn’t get back?”
“My daughter is an American, I wanted to stay here.”
Michael could see the line of conversation was making her feel uncomfortable, so changed the subject. “It’s a shame the Portland camp went the way it did, but you’ll like the other camp, it’s like the whole world living in one place.”
Megan finished her bar and was now covered in chocolate. Hanna looked disappointed at her and said something in German.
Michael looked around him, and then got up.
“I’ll be right back.”
Walking across the floor of the building to his backpack, he pulled out some serviettes and a bottle of water. Pouring a small amount on one of the serviettes he returned and handed it to Hanna. She smiled again, and proceeded to wipe the sticky substance from her daughter’s mouth and fingers.
Hanna went to hand the serviette back. “Sorry, do you want this back?”
Michael backed off slightly. “You can keep it. I’m just over there,” he pointed. “If there’s anything else, just let me know.”
Hanna smiled then turned her attention once again to her daughter.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fiona woke with a start, her eyes opening into such complete darkness, that she wasn’t sure they were open. Her sleep hadn’t been comfortable, with just one blanket separating her and the concrete floor below, but it had taken the edge of her drowsiness. She sat up and tried to see any details around her, but none were apparent. She did hear something though. A scuffling and scratching that came from about thirty-feet away to her left. In her dazed state her first thought was that it was a rat, but then she rea
lized that wasn’t possible. She then felt to her right and her gun was where she left it. Feeling along the cold metal her fingers located the grip, and she picked it up, placing her other hand below the barrel and pointed it in the direction of the sound. Can’t be an E.L.F she thought, as surely they would be all dead by now. Letting go of the barrel, she felt around for her backpack and pulled out her flashlight. Turning it on while pointing it down, she waved it in the direction where she knew Cal was sleeping a few feet to her left. In the lights beam only a blanket lay in a small heap could be seen. His gun and backpack were also there.
She slowly swept the beam across the space in front of her, and everyone was where they were when her eyes gave into sleep a few hours earlier. The only person who was missing was Cal. It was cold in the room, but much warmer than outside and she suddenly got goose bumps. Putting the gun down across her lap, she rubbed her arms with her hands, then pointed the light towards where the noise was coming from. It wasn’t possible to see to the end of the building from where she was sitting, so she got to her feet, and stepped forward, and pointed her light again. This time she could see further, but the gloom soon smothered the beam, turning details beyond fifteen feet into a monotone haze of shadows.
“Cal?” she half whispered, half shouted. No response came, just the continuous scraping noise. She lifted her gun to be parallel with her light and walked towards the noise. As she approached the source of the noise, the narrow illumination her flashlight provided, picked up a form moving in the shadows and she immediately kneeled and pointed the gun towards it. Whatever it was, it didn’t react to her making a noise just twenty-feet away.
“Cal?” this time her words came out with force and she heard rustling from behind her as a few people turned over in their makeshift beds. The thing in front continued its work though, without pause.
She got to her feet and walked forward, curiosity overcoming her fear. After another ten-feet she could see what was making the noise. Cal was doing something with the wall in front of him, creating some form of image. His hands were covered in oil, which was dripping from a nearby barrel. Furiously his fingers scrapped over the plaster wall, creating lines and form, which to Fiona had no meaning.
