Seed

by Michael Edelson

  “Is it around that bend, maybe?” Alex asked Barbara. “The one with the mountain right by the water?”

  “I don’t think that’s a mountain,” Tom said. “I think that’s Diamond Head.”

  “What’s Diamond Head?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Barbara said. “This is it…the map says we’re here.” She pulled back on the throttle and the boat sank into the water and slowed.

  “Diamond Head is a crater,” Tom explained. “Or at least it looks like a crater, it’s actually a volcanic cone. It’s right on the eastern edge of Honolulu. I, um, watch a lot of travel channel.”

  “But if that’s Diamond Head,” Alex asked. “Then where’s the city? Are you sure it’s not on the western tip? Maybe around that bend…”

  “Alex,” Barbara said. “Look at the map. It’s a GPS for crying out loud. We’re here. This is Honolulu.” Alex looked, and the map showed their position just off the shore of the city. He looked at Yael, who was staring out at the volcanic cone, her fists clenched and knuckles white.

  “So…” Alex started to say, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “I mean what we’re saying then is…Honolulu is gone? The whole city? I mean let’s think about that for a second. It’s fucking nuts.” He knew it was true, knew it deep in the pit of his stomach, but he wanted to argue that knowing away, wanted someone to agree that it was crazy.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Barbara said, refusing to take her eyes off the chartplotter. “I’ve been watching this map for three hours, I’ve based our course on it. Every feature of the shore was correct. Every depth reading was confirmed by the sounder. If this map were wrong god knows where we would be right now. There’s no two ways about it. That…” She pointed towards shore. “Is Honolulu.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sandi said, then turned away and started to cry, cupping her face in her hands.

  “Come on now,” Ryan said, reaching out to her. She pulled away and went to the bow, away from the others.

  “This is bullshit,” Alex said. “We’re going ashore, and we’re gonna find out what the hell is going on here. A major US city can’t just be gone. For all we know someone reprogrammed this GPS to fuck with us. Barbara, take us in. It was a little too convenient finding this boat.”

  She nodded, and pushed the throttle slightly. They started to move faster, though not fast enough for the boat to climb out of the water. The rubble strewn beach approached ominously.

  “What could wipe out a city?” Yael asked, still staring at the shoreline. “I mean completely.” She was eerily calm, so much so it frightened him a bit.

  “Tsunami?” Alex ventured. “Earthquake of unprecedented strength? But we can’t really be sure this is Honolulu…”

  “And the trees? Do you see a single overturned tree? I don’t. It’s as if God reached down and scooped up all the buildings and left everything else alone.”

  “Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t go there, come on.”

  She turned to him. “You have a better idea?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean we should start making things up.”

  “That doesn’t stop you from denying it’s Honolulu.”

  He glared at her a moment. “Touché,” he said finally. “But whatever happened here, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. And however bizarre it may seem, when we figure it out, it will be rooted in logic and reality.”

  She sighed, and seemed to deflate. “Funny thing is, I know that, though maybe I shouldn’t. It’s just so tempting to believe that this is the work of God, at least that way it’s all part of his plan.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “And for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re not getting too religious on me, especially now.” She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read, then turned away.

  “I don’t know why I’m not,” she said softly, and he wasn’t sure if he was meant to hear it.

  As they neared the beach, the boat slowed and started to zigzag. Barbara looked from one instrument to another as she turned the wheel back and forth and adjusted the throttle.

  “What is it?” Alex asked. “Something wrong?”

  “A lot of rocks here,” she said. “Just under the surface. I wish I knew how current this map was, or what the tide level is right now. A lot of floating debris too. There!” She pointed to two smaller buoys, one green and one red. “Those are channel markers. This close to shore they usually lead to a marina.”

  She guided the boat towards the floating cans and when they were roughly between them she turned sharply towards the shore and took them straight in and around a bunch of barnacle encrusted poles that stuck out of the water. They touched bottom on a rubble strewn beach at the base of some tall trees. Alex decided to leave Sandi and Ryan on the boat.

  “Take it out,” he said, after having Barbara show them how to work the controls. “Far enough that you can’t see us on the beach. Keep your radio on.”

  “Sure thing,” Ryan said. Tom and Alex pushed the boat back into the water and watched as Ryan reversed the motors, got the boat turned about and sped away between the two buoys, straight out to sea. A sense of morbidity made Alex wonder if he would ever see them again.

  The tree line wasn’t very thick, and when they crossed onto a flat open plane, they stood in silence, awed by what they saw.

  “God in heaven,” Barbara said, crossing herself.

  “Barukh ata Adonai,” Yael whispered. “Eloheinu melekh ha'olam, dayan ha-emet.”

  “What does that mean?” Alex asked without taking his eyes off the scene before him.

  “It’s the opening verse of a prayer for the dead,” she said softly.

  “I think you should finish it.”

  Chapter 14

  Honolulu was gone—not demolished, not burned, just gone. Asphalt streets crisscrossed like ribbons across an empty canvas where a great painting once cast its reflected colors onto the sparkling waters of Mamala Bay. Concrete fragments littered the empty lots, not quite filling the naked holes left by foundations that used to hold up massive towers whose shadows reached the ocean. Everything was caked in dust that blew from mounds scattered across the ruins in places where the tallest buildings had once stood.

  Alex started to walk along the nearest street, its yellow divider barely visible above a layer of dust and garbage. The stench was everywhere, but it was not the smell of death he had expected. It reeked like a trash can left too long in the sun, of rotting food and decomposing feces.

  A mirage glimmered ahead, then another. Buildings? He squinted, but they didn’t vanish. There were a few, five or six that he could see, though perhaps there were more behind the dust mounds. His eyes fixed on one in the distance and he started towards it. He picked it for no specific reason, perhaps because it was closest to the street he was walking on. None of the buildings were particularly tall, or large, and all looked as though they were of another age, a style far older than the monotonous rectangles of modern architecture. The one he was heading towards was a cathedral. The others followed in silence.

  By far the most noticeable type of garbage was clothing, some of it dusty, some bloody or otherwise soiled. Sometimes there were pieces of something in a shirt, or a dress. He knew Barbara would want to examine them, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Something about that cathedral was calling him. Not god, but a sense of order, of normality. Something he needed to overcome the desperate instability that was crawling up from the depths to take the reins of his consciousness.

  The passage of time became a blur, a repetition of a melancholy song fragment, like an exaggerated rendition of Adagio for Strings where the ascending melody was the buildup of grief at the sight of every infant sized shirt or dress. Blue ducks on yellow or pink daffodils on white. Just like the music it teased with a crescendo of anguish that dropped off in a balancing wave of numbness, then resumed its climb towards an intensifying rage that Alex knew he had to get under control
before he lost himself to it.

  Through it all there was an undeniable truth laying its foundations in the dust caked holes between the desolate streets. This was no act of nature. Someone did this.

  The cathedral was not as intact as he had thought when viewing it from a distance. Neatly trimmed hedges surrounded a shell of stone walls, roofless and with holes where beautiful stained glass windows once glowed with all the hues of the rainbow, an infusion of metallic oxides into molten silica by the hands of an artist creating something greater than the sum of its parts. When he was sixteen his parents had taken him to see the cathedral at Wells in the UK, and he remembered staring up into the vaulted ceilings with undisguised awe, wondering what a thirteenth century peasant must have felt when he saw the same thing over seven hundred years before. He wondered if that cathedral was also like this one, an empty shell of lost history and culture. Surely not, but, what if it was? How could such a thing happen?

  “What do we do?” he asked, not sure who would hear him.

  There was silence, save for the shuffling of feet. He turned, and saw the pain in their faces, but also the need. They were looking to him for strength, but he had none to give.

  “I’m just a soldier,” he said, apologizing. “This is…this is too much. I don’t know what to do.” His voice trembled, but he managed to contain tears that were all too ready to flow as he looked into the faces of his friends. Were they his friends? He decided that they had to be, for he had no one else. Perhaps there was no one else, anywhere.

  “I think we all need some time,” Barbara said. He nodded, and turned away. He heard Yael sobbing. He looked at her, but she had her back to him and was staring across the wasteland. He wanted to comfort her, but how? He had no words that could soothe her pain, no profound insights that would give her reason to cast aside her grief. Only her god could help her now, and wasn’t that the point of believing?

  He found a smooth spot of grass, freshly cut, and sat cross legged, staring at the rifle that he laid across his lap. Safe, semi, auto—glyphs of sanity in a disordered reality. The lever pointed to semi, and he moved it to safe, wishing that was all it took to make his pain go away. He ran his fingers along the coated aluminum receiver, gliding gently over the bumps and ridges. He resisted thinking about his parents as long as he could, until his father’s spectacled face stared at him from the patterns in the textured pistol grip, his mother’s eyes glimmered in the red glass of the holographic sight.

  “I love you,” she had said on the parade field at Ft. Benning after they pinned the jump wings to his chest. “And we’re both so proud.”

  “Even dad?” His father had never liked the idea of him giving his life in service of a country he thought had turned its back on its people. He had called the army a tool of the wealthy elite, enforcing their financial agendas at the expense of young lives.

  “Even me,” the old man had said. “It’s not about politics, son, it’s about you. I don’t agree with your decision, but you made it, and you’re sticking to it, doing the best you can. I’m proud of you.”

  His body trembled as he fought to hold back tears. It wasn’t just grief that threatened to overwhelm him, but also an overpowering urge to hit something, to break it, destroy it. His hands itched at the thought of unleashing his carbine on the stones of the ruined cathedral, or pulling the pin on his fragmentation grenades, all at once, tossing them into the shell of god’s house to punish the negligent deity for the evil he had by his absence permitted.

  One of the others sat next to him, reached out for him, and he flinched away, furious that someone dared to intrude on his solitude. He turned, his face a snarl, and saw Yael. She put a hand behind his head and pulled him to her. All the anger flowed out of him, leaving only anguish, and something else. Gratitude. He allowed her to guide his face to her shoulder and he wrapped his arms around her, letting his weapon slide onto the grass. He was silent, he was still, and he wept. He wasn’t sure how long she held him, but her shirt was soaked all the way through at the shoulder when he finally lifted his head.

  He looked into her eyes, and she into his, and in that moment, something changed between them.

  *

  “Let’s go,” Alex said, climbing to his feet. He held out his hand and helped Yael up.

  “Where?” Barbara asked. She had done her share of crying. They all had.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” he explained. “We can’t count on finding more gas, so we only get to make this trip once. I told Max we would be gone three days, and I plan to use them all.”

  “But what do you hope to find?” Tom asked. He looked upbeat, perhaps because Alex was back on his game. Campbell had shared some of the finer points of leadership he had been taught at officer candidate school, and while some of it had sounded ridiculous, there was a lot that made sense. What had interested Alex the most were the psychological aspects, which essentially held that the average human being was most content when being controlled and guided by others, and that the absence of such control often resulted in depression and aberrant behavior. His own experiences seemed to support the idea.

  “Maybe nothing,” Alex continued, trying to sound as confident as he could. “Maybe some clues, maybe even some answers.” He saw them all perk up. These people were his friends and he didn’t like to manipulate them, but they needed him, and they had a job to do.

  “Where do we start?” Yael asked.

  “In this cathedral. Then the other buildings that are standing.”

  “First question is,” Tom said. “Why are they standing?”

  “Indeed. But there will be plenty of time for thinking when we get back,” Alex said. “Right now let’s focus on gathering as much information as we can. Barbara, did you bring sample bags?”

  “Got ‘em,” she said, patting her backpack. “I’m going to take samples of everything. Rocks, concrete, clothing…” She trailed off, but he knew what she had been about to say. Bodies, or more accurately, small pieces of people. “Tom, I have plenty for you too. I’m sure you’ll want to take your own samples, I have only the faintest idea of what kind of tests you’ll be running.”

  “Um, yeah,” Tom said, nervously. “Right. I’ll take some.” Alex gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. Tom mouthed a silent “thank you” when no one else was looking.

  “I’ll go in and clear the building,” Alex said. “Wait for me before going inside.”

  “Got it,” Tom said.

  Alex entered the cathedral, rifle at the ready. Wooden pews stood in even rows amidst thick stone columns that divided the knave into a main hall and two aisles. Arches rose from the top of the columns and ascended to what had once been the ceiling, now a gaping wound in a once beautiful edifice.

  There were some clothes and footwear scattered among the pews and in the walkway between them. He wondered if whatever caused the destruction of the city had somehow killed all the people where they stood in an instant, leaving nothing but clothes. He imagined them fleeing to the cathedral to seek shelter from whatever horror was waging its war against the city beyond the sheltering stone walls. Had they cried out to god, begging him to spare their lives? Had they promised to be better people, to believe more, to sin less? Fat lot of good it did them.

  Banishing the fantasy, he decided it was far more likely that the clothes had been blown inside by the wind. That didn’t explain where the bodies were, though perhaps there were no bodies, perhaps the people had been evacuated. Most of them, anyway. There had been some remains after all.

  He realized that they had thus far failed to search the highlands, sticking only to the coastal areas that were at or near sea level. If the source of the destruction was a tsunami or related to the sea in some other way, and if people had any sort of advance warning, then they would have fled to higher elevations. They had two more days, and that gave them plenty of time to go up to one of the mountains and look for survivors and get back to the landing point in time to make the four hour
trip back home, assuming they didn’t find anything.

  Home? Had he really come to think of the complex as home? He wasn’t sure, but he did look forward to getting back, relaxing on the beach or in his bed, munching on a rehydrated steak while sipping cool water from a cup. If only the government had left them some beer, assuming of course it was the government that had kidnapped them—or perhaps saved them?

  He was about to call the others when he thought he caught some movement out of the corner of his eye. He lifted his rifle and walked forward warily. He saw it again, between the pews towards the front of the cathedral. Circling around, he positioned himself so that he could identify its source. Perhaps it was a dog or other animal, maybe even a rat. As he turned the corner of that row of pews, he stopped and blinked in surprise.

  It was a woman. She was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bench, rocking slightly back and forth. His heart began to pound and he stared for a couple of seconds, unable to react.

  “I found someone!” he finally shouted. “Barbara, get your gear!” The pounding of boots on stone signaled the approach of the others, though he dared not take his eyes off of the woman, afraid that she would disappear. It wasn’t a rational thought, but after searching for people so long in vain he couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

  “Oh my god!” Barbara shouted as she flung her pack off her shoulders and held it up with her left hand as she navigated between the pews.

  “Wait!” Alex ordered, circling around the front to get to the other side.

  “She could be hurt!” Barbara shouted, slowing down just a bit.

  “She could be dangerous!” he said.