“One learns to respect sudden barometric changes in Florida,” she said. “Or at least I did.”
The torch caught.
“Okay, we’re good,” he said. “Where to first? I take it you’re looking for a section of books in Braille.”
“Unless you think books on tape is a viable alternative, yes.”
“Okay, I’ll bring you there, and then give the place a once-over. I was going to see about finding a current newspaper.”
“Are you concerned that Bethany is right?”
“What she said didn’t make sense, so I don’t know how she could be, but I’m not going to dismiss it completely.”
The Books in Braille section was halfway down the center corridor of what was a two-level library, with little bullpen areas segregating fiction and non-, and subgenre by subgenre.
The idea of picking up something to read recreationally—which was surely what Bethany was doing, and probably Carol—seemed utterly alien to him. He was far too hung up on what was wrong with the actual world to concern himself with the tribulations of fictional people.
He made sure Carol was all set, then started wandering around, trying very hard to keep the flame from his torch away from the books.
“We definitely should have done this on a sunny day,” he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard from halfway across the library, which felt strange, given it was a library.
“It makes no difference to me,” she said.
“Yeah, true. Finding anything good?”
“One of my favorite romance authors has a new book. So yes.”
“Romance? I didn’t peg you for that.”
“And what do you read? Manly tales of misogyny?”
“Don’t knock manly tales of misogyny until you’ve read one.”
He found a section on medicine, but a quick look made it clear that if he wanted to turn himself into a doctor, this wasn’t the place to begin. He didn’t want to turn himself into a doctor, but the others were right in pointing out that someone was going to have to learn how to do some of this, and they didn’t have a lot of candidates.
There really weren’t a lot of books anywhere, medical or otherwise. It was kind of bothersome. Cambridge was a big city, with lots of educated people who must have been invested in their local library on some level. Yet the pickings in this place were pretty thin. Even when he went upstairs, he found a lot more sitting space than books.
Maybe they archived the rest, he thought, and Bethany had the right idea going to the stacks.
He returned to the first floor and walked up to the front desk, near the entrance with the lock Bethany hadn’t been able to pick.
There was a sign on the counter that explained a lot. It said that due to a government paper reduction act, “ninety percent of all new media will be available in electronic form only.” Then it listed the library’s online resources. A second sign suggested visitors talk to a librarian about free public resources for those in need of Internet access.
That was disappointing, because not only did he not have Internet access, but there was no librarian available to take that up with.
There was one detail about the sign that made him go cold. The date of the United States government’s Paper Reduction Act was May 7, 2035.
“Hey, Carol? What year is this?”
“That depends,” she said. “Do you imagine we’ve made it through December yet?”
“Let’s say no.”
“Then it’s still 2016. Why do you ask?”
“Because it’s 2019,” he said.
“Well, that’s ridiculous. Whatever you’re looking at, someone wrote the date wrong.”
“That’s not the problem. What I mean is that I went to sleep on a Tuesday night in 2019, and until a few seconds ago, I thought you did too.”
“That isn’t funny, Robert,” she said.
“I’m not joking. And I think we both might be wrong.”
“Well, I’m not playing this game, whatever it is. Are you in the science fiction section?”
It had always been in the back of his mind how weird it was that everyone had a different understanding of what month they were in. He figured it was going to be one of those things that stayed in the pile of unknowns, along with What happened to everyone?
It didn’t even occur to him to check the year.
“Carol, do me a favor,” he said. “That new romance book you were talking about? Flip to the copyright page.”
His eyes drifted to other messages on the front desk. All of them were saying the same thing: This is not the year you thought it was. You’re in the future.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Carol said.
“What’s it say?”
“Twenty thirty-one.”
“I’m looking at a desk calendar that’s telling me that that book is thirteen years old.”
Bethany
Age ten was around when the nanny started looking for places to drop Bethany off for extended periods, for free, without getting into trouble for neglecting her charge.
One of her favorite stunts was to stick Bethany in the library while she went and got her hair done at one of the Harvard Square salons. This was a special event reserved for days in which Bethany’s little brother was occupied—at a friend’s house or the like—for the day.
Bethany didn’t have any friends she was that close to, as she was pathologically antisocial, although that wasn’t how ten-year-old Bethany thought of it. She just figured some people made friends and others didn’t and that was how it was.
Her antisocial instinct started to become obvious around twelve, at approximately the same time Bethany learned to pretend to be social with the people in her neighborhood, just so she could hear them complaining about the cat burglar, and to maybe get introduced to their new watchdogs. Pretending meant learning how to mimic people who were sociable; in that mimicry, she realized how far away she was from the minimum necessary standard.
It was for the same reason—at least at first—that she gravitated away from the new library wing and toward the stacks.
For one, it was cooler in the stacks. The new library wing was all windows. Those windows were treated to keep out the “you vee” radiation (whatever that was), but even with air-conditioning it felt sticky on the hotter days.
There were no windows in the stacks. Just four floors of metal catwalks and a bunch of books that nobody wanted. (Or so it seemed. Bethany was told otherwise by a librarian who explained once that most of the books in the stacks were one of a kind and couldn’t be checked out. Bethany preferred her Island of Misfit Toys interpretation.)
Now thirteen, and on the other side of the end of the world, Bethany stood alone in the stacks, wondering if the ten-year-old her felt a kinship to these books.
The child nobody wanted.
This wasn’t at all fair to her parents, who’d built her that nice shrine. But the nanny—the substitute parent they’d hired—had certainly made her feelings clear.
Secondly, the books in the stacks were more interesting.
This wasn’t true of all of them, of course. There was an entire floor of encyclopedias, which were definitely not interesting, and another half floor of law library indexes.
But then there was Pogo.
There was a section in the stacks where anthology collections of old comic strips were left to die. These were strips that hadn’t run in a newspaper since the 1930s. Their creators were long dead, and probably so were nearly all the people who remembered reading them as one-per-day episodes.
The first time Bethany found this section, she didn’t understand what she was looking at. She didn’t even know there were comic strips in the newspaper, because she almost never got to see the newspaper at home. (And when she did, it was a paper that didn’t have comics.)
She didn’t know what they were, in other words. She went to the stacks initially because there weren’t any kids in that part of the library, and she
’d found a section nobody—adults or children—was interested in, full of books with pictures and word balloons, and (in some) developing story lines. That was the appeal. She read something called Prince Valiant, something else called Terry and the Pirates, and . . . well, all of them. Whatever she could find. She didn’t even leave the stacks. She just sat down on the metal grate and read them where she was.
Pogo was her favorite. She couldn’t explain why. There were talking animals who lived in a swamp, and that was it. She had no clue what they were talking about most of the time, which mattered not at all. She read every word anyway.
It was her secret kids’ section.
There was no need to go back and find Pogo again, and yet she was doing exactly that. She’d already been through all the available volumes, and there were never going to be new ones added to the shelf. That was true even before the end of the world. It was still going to be reassuring to see it there, waiting for the ten-year-old version of Bethany to show up.
She didn’t count on the stacks being quite so dark and cold on this trip. It was always cold, but if she was there in the winter, she would be in winter clothing, and if it was summer, she would be enjoying a break from the heat. Now, she was soaked through from an unseasonably warm downpour and a damn tornado. The stacks got downright chilly, really fast.
“You cannot afford to be sick,” she said to herself.
Her voice echoed a ton. She remembered footfalls echoing, but nobody ever spoke when in the stacks, so she had no idea how bad it was.
The darkness was somehow worse. There were enormous fluorescent lights in the ceiling of each level, but of course they didn’t work anymore. All she had was her torch.
She went down the spiral staircase to her right, one level, which was where she remembered the secret kids’ section being located. It was three-quarters of the way down, on the left, in a position she used to think was entirely random but probably wasn’t. Roughly halfway down, she decided this was a dumb idea.
That came with the creeping sense she wasn’t alone.
No, it was more than that. It wasn’t just a sense; it was legit. Someone else was in the stacks.
And they were crying.
The sound was muffled, like whoever was doing it was trying not to by putting a hand over their mouth.
“Hello?” she said. “I can hear you.”
She heard more crying, then, somewhat more restrained. Higher pitched now, like a whine.
This is some kind of haunted house business, she thought.
Admittedly, a ghost would be someone new to talk to, and that wasn’t something to be discarded outright.
It’s not a ghost, she told herself. Grow up.
“If you’re hurt, we can help you,” she said. “We’re really cool like that.”
She heard running on the catwalk above. Clang-clang-clang. It was impossible to move silently in this place, because you were always standing on a metal grate. But this person wasn’t even trying.
The sound was leading away from her . . . and away from the door.
There was another spiral staircase at the halfway point of the catwalk. Bethany ran to it. A chain was over the entry, with a sign that read DO NOT ENTER. She hopped the chain—maybe the stairs were unsafe, but it was an unsafe world—and scampered up. Now she was on the same level as the exit . . . and possibly also the same level as the ghost.
Not a ghost, she reminded herself. Not. A. Ghost.
She stood at the edge of the staircase and listened. She heard heavy breathing. One more level up, but it was close.
“Come on,” she said. “What are you afraid of?”
“Not my fault.”
It was a male voice. A young man. Maybe just a kid.
She remembered Robbie and Touré chasing someone around town a week or two back. She had assumed that whoever they’d seen—or thought they had—would have been long dead from exposure, given all the exciting weather that had happened since. But maybe not.
“Sure, man,” she said. “Not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“I tried to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“It knows about the machine.”
His voice was almost directly above her now. The grates were see-through, and sound traveled right through as well, which was why it echoed so much.
“What machine?” she asked.
He hissed. Whoever this kid was, he was long past gone.
“It’s going to happen again,” he said. “The shadows said so.”
“Right.”
Bethany was beginning to feel really uncomfortable about sharing a room with this guy.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’m gonna go and tell my friends what you said. It sounds really important.”
Clang-clang-clang. He was running again . . . straight for the exit.
“Noooo, no, no,” she said, breaking into a run.
Center aisle, left turn, straight on till morning, she thought. Her misspent childhood in the stacks was coming in handy, because she knew exactly how to get around this place.
She was almost to the door when he jumped down from the last step of the staircase to land directly in front of her.
He didn’t look . . . human. He was a gasping skeleton in baggy, torn clothes, with blood around his mouth.
They both screamed. She was probably louder. She also fell backwards about five feet, nearly went under the railing that was there to prevent people from falling down a level, and dropped her torch.
She heard the door engage and watched as her torch skittered along the catwalk.
“A vampire,” she said. “I just saw a vampire.”
It was heading for Carol and Robbie. She retrieved her torch and ran to the door.
She had to save them.
Robbie
1
Robbie heard a lot happen at once, and none of it made any sense.
First, he heard Carol get pushed over. This was a loud oof and a thump, and then she gasped in surprise and called Robbie’s name.
“What happened?” he asked.
Next came Bethany’s voice, and the secondary lighting from her torch. She was coming down the tunnel that connected the old library to the new.
“Vampire, vampire!” she screamed. “There’s a vampire in here!”
“Carol?” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Someone knocked me over,” she said. She was using that too-calm voice that meant she was actually in the middle of a serious panic.
“Bethany, check on her,” he said.
Robbie ran from the front desk to the main corridor, stopped, and listened. He heard the women to his left, and . . .
“Hey, you,” he said. Someone was in the A–M Fantasy Fiction section on his immediate right. “I can hear you. It’s all right—we’re friends.”
“We are not friends with the undead, Robbie!” Bethany shouted.
“You aren’t helping,” he said.
He turned the corner with his torch in one hand and the axe in the other. This probably didn’t come off as all that friendly.
What he was confronted with was a starving teenager. He looked manic, and from the blood on his clothes and face, his diet probably had something to do with it.
“What have you been eating? Squirrels?” Robbie asked.
“It’s coming back,” he said. “The shadows told me.”
His breathing was coming out in ragged gasps. Robbie thought he could see the kid’s heart beating, he was so thin.
“Come on now,” Robbie said. “There’s no need to freak out. You recognize me, don’t you? You and I, we saw each other before, outside of the hardware store. My friend Touré, he tried to catch up with you. We’re okay people. We have . . . We can feed you better than what you’ve been getting by on. And we have shelter. Here.”
Robbie put the axe down and extended his left hand.
“Take my
hand. It’ll be okay.”
The kid looked confused.
“What’s your name?” Robbie asked.
He was trembling, and blinking slowly, as if he had to tell his eyes to do that because they’d stopped doing it on their own. And he was having trouble thinking of his name.
“Ray,” the kid said, quietly. “Raymond.”
“Raymond, I’m Robbie. You already met Bethany and Carol. Well, you kind of ran down Carol, but that’s okay. I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”
Raymond rubbed his forehead, like there was a treasure hiding under the skin of his brow.
“It hurts so much,” he said.
“Look, you must have followed us here, right?” Robbie said. “You broke the window to get inside. You came here so we can help you. Let us help you.”
Raymond was crying. He seemed to want to agree that this was indeed how they’d ended up in this situation, but something wouldn’t let him relax.
“When is this?” Raymond asked. “Do you know? Do you know when this is?”
“I don’t. I thought it was 2019. When do you think it is?”
“No, no, no.”
“Raymond . . .”
“Just another future man, future man, no, no, no.”
Robbie took a couple of steps forward, meaning to comfort the kid, who was reverting back to psychotic break mode. It was a bad idea. He didn’t think there was any kind of strength left in Raymond, because it looked as if a light breeze was all it would take to knock him over.
He was wrong.
Ray barreled into Robbie, shoving him backwards and sending the torch into the air. It landed in Mystery and Suspense, the flame touching books that were twenty or thirty years old.
And very, very dry.
The fire spread immediately, jumping from Mysteries to True Crime in an instant.
“Carol!” Robbie shouted. “Bethany! Where are you?”
If they answered, he didn’t hear it, because of how loud Raymond was.
Somehow, Ray was on fire . . . and screaming.
The reaction of his body was to start running, but his legs didn’t seem to know where to take him first, so he just bounced around from row to row, spreading the fire as he went.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 25
