Robbie had his torch in his left hand. When he turned, his right arm swept through the space behind him and contacted something solid. Soft, clothed in fabric, but solid.
Surprised to have even accomplished this much (as this was a plan he entirely expected to fail) he next used the torch like a club, aimed at about where a person’s head might be.
It landed again on . . . something. A solid something under the fabric for the torch to bounce off of. Sparks flew everywhere.
No question someone was there, but even though his quarry was clearly standing within the radius of light cast by the fire, Robbie could hardly see the intruder at all.
Robbie punched the spot where he thought the face was. To his surprise, his fist connected; he heard and felt a metallic crunch. It marked the first time Robbie had ever punched a person—or whatever the intruder was—and decided based on how much it hurt his hand that he would try not to do this again.
For about two seconds after the blow, Robbie saw the creature’s face.
It had a bulbous head that tapered to a pointed chin, with enormous black eyes and a tiny mouth. There was no visible nose; just a horizonal strip of silvery metal across the middle of the face where the nose ought to be.
It was an alien. There was simply no other explanation.
Robbie coldcocking it appeared to have come as a major surprise to it. It took three steps back, and Robbie couldn’t see its face any longer.
“Geez, Robbie,” it said, in a deep and somewhat familiar voice, “that hurt.”
Then it made a gesture with its right hand and disappeared from the tunnel.
Robbie charged through the empty space, hoping the intruder had just receded into the shadows instead of vanishing outright. But it was gone.
“Tell me you saw that!” Robbie said, swinging his torch around like a baseball bat.
“Dude, he called you by name,” Touré said.
“Yeah,” Robbie said. “I heard that too. I think he’s gone.”
He looked at Touré, and Touré looked back at him, and then they both started laughing.
“I cannot believe this!” Touré said. “We’re being stalked by an alien!”
“I know,” Robbie said. “Now comes the hard part.”
“Convincing the others?”
“No, not that,” Touré said with a laugh. “Or, not yet. First, we have to figure out how to catch it.”
Thirteen
Ananda
“So, you don’t know what it is,” Bethany said.
Ananda didn’t need to see what the girl was looking at to understand the question. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what it does. I have some ideas I’d like to test, but not until the weather turns.”
“You think it doesn’t like snow?”
“I don’t believe it has an opinion on snow, but it’s currently beneath a quantity of it, and I don’t want to risk doing something to it by accident while cleaning it off.”
“Do you think you’d hurt it?”
Ananda put down the notes. “Come here,” she said. “Have a look at this.”
Bethany came over, reluctantly—dragging herself along in a way so reminiscent of Jakob that Ananda felt like she was being jabbed with something sharp.
Ananda spread out a series of printouts showing reams of numbers, with almost no detail attached to the numbers that could explain what they were.
“What’s this?” Bethany asked.
“You tell me. This came from the meteorological department.”
They were standing in the same lab Ananda first camped out in, which was also the first one in the building to have heat and electricity. Since then, with the help of the others, they’d managed to power three floors and install hard barriers that kept the wolves out of the entire building.
This involved clearing the halls of the wolves in the first place, a task that was helped greatly by the generous use of Paul’s very loud guns—but not Paul himself, who could barely stand when he first arrived. Win and Robbie didn’t use the guns to shoot any of the wolves; just to frighten them off. It made for an afternoon of gunshots and shouting throughout the building, as if the place were under siege.
That had been a tumultuous week. First, Win and Touré had arrived, proving to Ananda that she was not the last person left on the planet—and also that horses, too, continued to exist. Then, after getting them situated—and after looking at Touré’s leg and misapplying her PhD (which had nothing to do with medicine) to tell him she thought it looked fine—Ananda explained all that she’d learned about the apocalypse.
She enjoyed talking to Win, because she came off like a combination of time traveler and field expedition head. Ananda had remained in and around the MIT campus from the start, relying on scavenged reports—like the one Bethany was looking at—and what she could see from her window. She was also decently well versed in the various worst-case scenarios pertaining to climate change, knew what kind of disasters to expect if things remained unchanged for a century, and what to expect in under a century but beyond a certain average temperature. What she didn’t know—what nobody could know, really—was what the world might look like if a hundred years passed but humanity went extinct before that century had elapsed.
Win’s frontline reporting—on the weather, and the flooding downtown, and the countryside—was incredibly helpful. It allowed Ananda to hope that, at least for now, they were living in a world that had retained some measure of equilibrium.
Touré’s experiences were less helpful, but he inadvertently proved his worth in a different way when, unannounced, he took off with Elton to search for his friends. He did leave a note, and in the end it all worked out, but Win had still been furious. She was certain, right up until he returned with Robbie, that Touré and the horse had inadvertently galloped into the Charles and drowned.
When Robbie arrived and explained he had three other people holed up in a home at the other end of Broadway, their first imperative became getting all of them to MIT, where there might be enough power to survive the coming winter.
The most wonderful surprise, though, was learning that Paul was one of them.
After they’d all been gathered together, the rest of that first month was spent working out logistics. They had to find bedrolls for everyone and arrange privacy where needed. Then there was a question of food: how much they had, how much more they needed, and where they were going to get it. An electric stove was retrieved from one of the kitchens and carried upstairs, and then hot water was available to all of them for the first time in a long time.
It was glorious.
The stove led to one or two mishaps, such as when Bethany and Carol tried to fry a slice of Noot bar to see if that made it more palatable somehow. It emphatically did not. It also emitted an odor that might have been toxic and definitely ruined the pan. Thankfully, they hardly had to eat Noot bars any longer, thanks to the arrival of their two hunters. (Ananda was pretty sure the source of protein in the bars was insects, so she certainly wasn’t disappointed to have it minimized from her diet.)
Another two months later, they had a whole system in place for food, and living quarters, and now springtime was on its way.
“This column looks like dates,” Bethany said, running her finger along the left side of the grid.
“Yes. Very good.”
“But it goes past Judgment Day. 2055?”
“Correct. I tried to talk myself out of that very conclusion. But then I realized what this was. What else do you see?”
“Um . . . these look like temperatures?”
“Yes.”
“Where is this, the Arctic?”
“It’s global average temperature, only it’s in Celsius. This is from a weather satellite. It was sending data down to one of the stack printers in the meteorological department. Take a look at what happened in 2044.”
“I don’t understand what I’m looking at.�
�
Ananda took the sheet back.
“From here, to here, you can see the average global temperature went up two degrees. At the same time—you see this column here? It’s showing carbon levels in the atmosphere—at the same time, it goes up as well. When it reaches 2044? It levels off.”
Bethany looked at the numbers and shook her head. “I’m not seeing what you’re seeing.”
“The carbon footprint for the entire human race went to zero there. Or nearly zero. There was carbon in the bodies, so even when reduced to ashes—”
“Yeah, I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Bethany said.
She put down the sheaf of papers and walked back to the other side of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Ananda said. She wasn’t positive what she was sorry for precisely, but she’d obviously done something wrong.
“It’s cool,” Bethany said.
“No, it probably isn’t. You’re just a—”
“Don’t. Do not call me a child. Even if I’m the only one left on the planet, let’s just not.”
“All right,” Ananda said.
Ananda sighed. She was never very good with adolescents. Even her own. And this didn’t seem like the time to figure out how to get better at it, especially since she had exactly one adolescent—as Bethany said, in the world—to practice on.
Resolved to bridge the awkward silence she appeared to have created, Ananda walked across the room and took the photograph of the curious object down from the bulletin board.
“To answer your question from earlier,” Ananda said, “no, I don’t know what this is or what it does. But it’s very interesting. Have you seen it up close?”
“No,” Bethany said. “I don’t even know where it is.”
“I can show it to you. We don’t even have to go near it if you don’t want to. We can use the telescope. It’s bright, most evenings.”
“Because of the shimmer, yeah. That creeps me out too.”
All of them had, at one time or another over the past few months, had close encounters with the traveling light show they called the shimmer. It seemed to appear and disappear at random, any time of day, for any length of time. It didn’t care whether it was indoors or out, and had no personal preferences that they could discern about who it was visiting.
On more than one occasion, it appeared to be humanoid. Ananda hadn’t seen this herself, but both Robbie and Touré claimed to have jointly witnessed this, and Win had as well, on two separate occasions. Paul had too, but asserted that he thought he was looking at an angel (he didn’t sound interested in relinquishing this opinion), which to Ananda sounded like a hallucination.
She didn’t know what to make of these “humanoid” claims. If it was just a cloud of lights, hovering around the object, she might conclude—as she had, when she first witnessed it—that it was either emitted by or attracted to the white canister. The idea that some of the others were seeing a person implied an intelligence behind the lights. Not an intelligence that arrived in the form of a being with two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso; it could take any shape and chose that one. That could mean it was attempting to communicate.
It could also mean that the three or possibly four witnesses saw a shape that wasn’t there.
That was the direction she should be leaning. It was one thing to argue that an unexplained phenomenon related to the unexplained object was manifesting around other planetary life-forms. That wasn’t a leap, given the available facts. Asserting that the manifestation was an alien intelligence attempting to open lines of communication, on the other hand, was an extraordinary claim. It needed extraordinary evidence, and they just didn’t have that.
“Well,” Ananda said, “we don’t have to see it to make this point. If you look at this picture, you’ll notice differences between it and the object in the lot. Do you see these dents?”
Bethany looked at the photo. “On the top? Yeah.”
“There are the vertical ones on the top, and there are pockmarks on the side as well. This was how the anomaly was found when they unearthed it.”
“When was that? Do we know?”
“We don’t. Robbie found this photo posted on a bulletin board in the oceanographic lab of all places. It’s undated. We’re still looking for the research. If it’s even here. I’ve never been a part of a possible alien artifact investigation before, but I imagine a great deal of the work ends up classified.”
“Sorry, did you say alien?”
Ananda sighed. “I said possible. My point about the marks on the top cap: They’re not there now.”
Bethany laughed and handed back the photo. “It got better, you’re saying.”
“I’m not sure what I’m saying, yet. I told you all that I saw that young man, right? Raymond, he said his name was.”
“The vampire.”
“Yes. I saw him here, by the device, hitting it. He made these marks.”
“Wait, when did you see him hitting it?”
“A few months ago.”
“This picture’s from, what, seventy-five, eighty years ago? You’re not making any sense.”
“I agree. See this mark here? I made that one, with a piece of rebar. It’s also not there now. I undid it when I hit the object.”
“Well, sure, that sounds alien to me,” Bethany said. “I don’t get it. You can’t undo a dent you made by hitting the dent.”
She returned the photo to the bulletin board and stared at it for a few seconds. “There is one way,” Ananda said.
Bethany stood motionless for a few seconds, staring at the photo as if it might reveal the answer through extended viewing.
“Nope,” she said. “I’m stumped. What’s the one way?”
Ananda smiled. “Think about it and come back when you’ve figured it out. Maybe we’ll have the same guess. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Carol
It was beginning to look as if Carol would have to change her major.
This was based entirely on the selection of texts in Braille in the Hayden Library. They were mostly the newer books, which was fine; stale scientific texts weren’t going to be all that helpful to anybody. Though a new definition of stale might be needed. They were all a solid fifty to seventy-five years old, but no new research had been taking place in the interim due to the cessation of humanity, so there was nothing more recent out there to replace them.
She had spent much of the prior week reading about cost-effective energy infrastructure scenarios for developing nations. It was dry reading to say the least. This week, she was trying to choose between biological engineering and the ethics of cloning, and something about neuroscience and dreams.
It wasn’t a fantastic selection, but since she had no librarians to pester about a fiction shelf, it was all she was going to get until a larger resource could be identified. Boston had a library that was probably not underwater and hadn’t been set on fire by anybody yet, so perhaps after the streets had been cleared she could check there. Harvard’s libraries were likewise untapped, and there was a well-known school for the blind in Watertown that surely had a library of its own.
She could hope. The world had already been trending in the direction of audio recordings before everyone died, and now that electrical power was at a premium, Carol had no way to absorb all of that prerecorded knowledge.
This wasn’t just a problem for her. The trend of digitizing everything meant there were fewer low-tech books to find, whether they were in Braille or not. There was also an enormous quantity of scientific discoveries archived on the MIT servers, entirely unobtainable by Ananda or anyone in the group, because somehow nobody considered a future without power.
Carol sighed and heard her sigh echo back. The library space sounded vast and was of course unheated. Nobody was around to say she couldn’t take a book from the library and to the heated rooms half a campus away. She didn’t, in part because she’d begun to enjoy the solitude of a library space, and in part be
cause of the degree of independence her being there alone validated.
Learning the way to the library had taken a while to work out. She used Robbie’s assistance the first few times, and Bethany’s a few other times until she was confident about the possible routes. It helped enormously that the signs in the hallways all had Braille translations, so if on occasion she became lost she could reorient herself before long.
Being lost would be very bad for her. The campus was enormous; it might take the group days to find her.
She decided to skip past both the cloning book and the neuroscience book in favor of a volume on something called bioinformatics. It seemed perfectly daunting. She pulled it off the shelf.
Settling at one of the many long tables that took up the middle floor space of the library, Carol was a good distance from the door and in front of a window. She could feel the heat from the sun, which helped make the experience more comfortable, though she was dressed in anticipation of a cold room.
All aspects of their lives had been improved since the move from the dorm. Nearly every improvement had to do with the existence of electricity—a point not lost to her last week when reading about developing nations and access to energy. All seven seemed more capable of reasoned thought, because they were getting more sleep and were less concerned, in general, with whether or not they were going to survive until the next day.
It could have also given Touré and Robbie more opportunities to do what they wanted to do in the first place: head farther out of town to see if there were any other survivors. But Paul and Win came from out of town and could confirm there wasn’t a large pool of living humans camping out on the other side of Route 128 or anywhere else that they’d seen. There was also Ananda’s regular use of a shortwave radio, which went a long way toward proving the rest of the world was, if not dead, suffering from the same power shortage as they were locally.
With the question of survivors deemed unanswerable by current means, they were left with more time to do some of what Carol had been suggesting for a while—gathering a large collection of clothing.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 30
